17954	----	CRITICAL MISCELLANIES BY JOHN MORLEY VOL. III. Essay 4: The Life of George Eliot London MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904 THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT On Literary Biography 93 As a mere letter-writer will not rank among the famous masters 96 Mr. Myers's Essay 100 Letter to Mr. Harrison 107 Hebrew her favourite study 112 Limitless persistency in application 113 Romola 114 Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_ 120 The period of her productions, 1856-1876 124 Mr. Browning 125 An æsthetic not a doctrinal teacher 126 Disliked vehemence 130 Conclusion 131 THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.[1] The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is it anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to reread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others--a condition, by the way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'I like,' she proceeds, 'that _He being dead yet speaketh_ should have quite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I have destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me,' she says, 'because they were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of persons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which is venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common temper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us in respect of such experience as that. [Footnote 1: _George Eliot's Life_. By J.W. Cross. Three volumes. Blackwood and Sons. 1885.] Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of that 'personal talk,' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the under-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,' leaving as little work to the literary executor, except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly let die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retort that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very very little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates. This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'that combines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: it is simple, modest, and effective. George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose; we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left out. As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a _salon_, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:--'Playing around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the effort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is the outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour to her head. It lacks simplicity and _verve_. Even in an invitation to dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar correspondence. As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in short notes. Here are one or two:-- 'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.' 'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.' 'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.' The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of her best manner:-- I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning. This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, that in her conversation, _elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait_--she seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be allowed that we are not always free from an impression of self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us. This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime tripod, he would have cried, _Elle s'écoute quand elle parle_. When everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core that in spite of a style that the French call _alambiqué_, in spite of tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the _précieuses_ of the Hôtel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with lofty thoughts. Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten its most imposing passage:-- I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,--the words _God_, _Immortality_, _Duty_,--pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. To many, the relation which was the most important event in George Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account to prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on their lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and mankind. A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothing but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of the tenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334). All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was touched in him. Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'The intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as he--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in Lewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character was implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his life a new birth. The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia Floriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the _Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance (ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head. The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she described. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliot appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ passed their days in one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable scenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day. In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George Eliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare chose the better part. The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one place, 'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in us.' George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that 'the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if he could have read Mr. Pollock's book upon him. But on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot's heresies may well be left. On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon Bulwer. 'I have a great respect,' she says, 'for the energetic industry which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. 322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the better, how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrate to him? 'Rubens,' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'gives me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere imitation of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption. Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drive in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the manufacture of an invalid. Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being that leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many for the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_ (ii. 325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could have described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter of _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo's mouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur._' As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the region of beauty she was never content with any but definite impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her mind. She has been reading Darwin's _Origin of Species_, on which she makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting in illustrative facts,' and that 'it is not impressive from want of luminous and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'the development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable. George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a word with him. All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross describes as 'limitless persistency in application.' This is an old account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration was part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important habit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of _Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because it was written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious contrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.' 'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one long and painful sermon on that text. Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_, instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the _work done_. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.' _Romola_ seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember my wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The writing of _Romola_ ploughed into her more than any of her other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). One day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?' On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_ to find any parallel to such wretchedness. Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life. That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the _Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, 'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.' She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness. * * * * * This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not last much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach in 1854):-- Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243). Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:-- All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of society by a conformity based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. _Not_, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about which you feel that 'necessity is laid upon you' to declare them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have the worse (iii. 215-217). These volumes contain many passages in the same sense--as, of course, her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible, and the _Imitatio_ was never far from her hand. 'She particularly enjoyed reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.' She once expressed to a younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family prayer. 'I hope,' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which the most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could sympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308). For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, for example, she was reading Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to systematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness,' which, as these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the _Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and that she had thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the _Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last novel:-- The human nature with which I felt That I belonged and reverenced with love, Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space, with aid derived Of evidence from monuments, erect, Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime_ _Of vanished nations_. Or this again, also from the _Prelude_ (see iii. 389):-- There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead. Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from the position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also 228). The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms. With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from _us_. As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you? For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her letters in 1860 (ii. 283):--'I have faith in the working out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls--their intellect, as well as their emotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and election is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' She would never accept the common optimism. As she says here:--'Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than they are.' Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this day:-- If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë--if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. 161). The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of her first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest star, her last novel of _Daniel Deronda_. During this time the great literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's _Sartor_ (1833-1834), and his _Miscellaneous Essays_ (collected, 1839), were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his Prussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had gone forth to all whom it concerned. _In Memoriam_, whose noble music and deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, was published in 1850. The second volume of _Modern Painters_, of which I have heard George Eliot say, as of _In Memoriam_ too, that she owed much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But Mr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currents of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers of the day. The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked English religion once more to human history, and which was itself one of the unexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its original force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the rising generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859 was published the _Origin of Species_, undoubtedly the most far-reaching agency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of new knowledge which came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw the important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two years after the _Origin of Species_ came Maine's _Ancient Law_, and that was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibiting order and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hitherto lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber. George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of this great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those ideas had called up. 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotions which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence in this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed inexorable law. This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings tend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; but we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak of Mazzini, takes a far higher place. It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the following reflection:--'My best consolation is that an example on so tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal thought' (ii. 335). In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):--'You and Carlyle (have you seen his article in last week's _Examiner?_) are the only two people who feel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that you lacked revolutionary ardour. But no--you are just as _sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence. 'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really great movement--that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing to the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men.' One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them, or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me from sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think the shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign much longer.' The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that undying hope is the secret of vision. There is a passage in Coleridge's _Friend_ which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers:--'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of the industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar.' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, when he adds the exhortation--'Far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.' George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The word 'crudity,' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious. Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would need when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the first time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as _Adam Bede_, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke in many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons,' says the fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass of men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering endeavour,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,--all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant soul.' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all right-judging men and women. 
12142	----	Proofreaders STERNE BY H.D. TRAILL 1882 PREFATORY NOTE. The materials for a biography of Sterne are by no means abundant. Of the earlier years of his life the only existing record is that preserved in the brief autobiographical memoir which, a few months before his death, he composed, in the usual quaint _staccato_ style of his familiar correspondence, for the benefit of his daughter. Of his childhood; of his school-days; of his life at Cambridge, and in his Yorkshire vicarage; of his whole history, in fact, up to the age of forty-six, we know nothing more than he has there jotted down. He attained that age in the year 1759; and at this date begins that series of his _Letters_, from which, for those who have the patience to sort them out of the chronological confusion in which his daughter and editress involved them, there is, no doubt, a good deal to be learnt. These letters, however, which extend down to 1768, the year of the writer's death, contain pretty nearly all the contemporary material that we have to depend on. Freely as Sterne mixed in the best literary society, there is singularly little to be gathered about him, even in the way of chance allusion and anecdote, from the memoirs and _ana_ of his time. Of the many friends who would have been competent to write his biography while the facts were yet fresh, but one, John Wilkes, ever entertained--if he did seriously entertain--the idea of performing this pious work; and he, in spite of the entreaties of Sterne's widow and daughter, then in straitened circumstances, left unredeemed his promise to do so. The brief memoir by Sir Walter Scott, which is prefixed to many popular editions of _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey,_ sets out the so-called autobiography in full, but for the rest is mainly critical; Thackeray's well-known lecture essay is almost wholly so; and nothing, worthy to be dignified by the name of a _Life of Sterne_, seems ever to have been published, until the appearance of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's two stout volumes, under this title, some eighteen years ago. Of this work it is hardly too much to say that it contains (no doubt with the admixture of a good deal of superfluous matter) nearly all the information as to the facts of Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be recovered. The evidence for certain of its statements of fact is not as thoroughly sifted as it might have been; and with some of its criticism I, at least, am unable to agree. But no one interested in the subject of this memoir can be insensible of his obligations to Mr. Fitzgerald for the fruitful diligence with which he has laboured in a too long neglected field. H.D.T. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. (1713-1724.) BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. CHAPTER II. (1724-1733.) SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY.--HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. CHAPTER III. (1738-1759.) LIFE AT SUTTON.--MARRIAGE.--THE PARISH PRIEST. CHAPTER IV. (1759-1760.) "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. CHAPTER V. (1760-1762.) LONDON TRIUMPHS.--FIRST SET OF SERMONS.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. III. AND IV.--COXWOLD.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. V. AND VI.--FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT.--PARIS.--TOULOUSE. CHAPTER VI. (1762-1765.) LIFE IN THE SOUTH.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. VII. AND VIII.--SECOND SET OF SERMONS CHAPTER VII. (1765-1768) FRANCE AND ITALY.--MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOL. IX.--"THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY" CHAPTER VIII. (1768.) LAST DAYS AND DEATH CHAPTER IX. STERNE AS A WRITER.--THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM.--DR. FERRIAR'S "ILLUSTRATIONS" CHAPTER X. STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT CHAPTER XI. CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE STERNE. CHAPTER I. BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. (1713-1724.) Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one of the last of the English regiments which had been detained in Flanders to supervise the execution of the treaty of Utrecht arrived at Clonmel from Dunkirk. The day after its arrival the regiment was disbanded; and yet a few days later, on the 24th of the month, the wife of one of its subalterns gave birth to a son. The child who thus early displayed the perversity of his humour by so inopportune an appearance was Laurence Sterne. "My birthday," he says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have "anticipated the labours" of the biographer--"my birthday was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children." Roger Sterne, however, now late ensign of the 34th, or Chudleigh's regiment of foot, was after all in less evil case than were many, probably, of his comrades. He had kinsmen to whom he could look for, at any rate, temporary assistance, and his mother was a wealthy widow. The Sternes, originally of a Suffolk stock, had passed from that county to Nottinghamshire, and thence into Yorkshire, and were at this time a family of position and substance in the last-named county. Roger's grandfather had been Archbishop of York, and a man of more note, if only through the accident of the times upon which he fell, than most of the incumbents of that see. He had played an exceptionally energetic part even for a Cavalier prelate in the great political struggle of the seventeenth century, and had suffered with fortitude and dignity in the royal cause. He had, moreover, a further claim to distinction in having been treated with common gratitude at the Restoration by the son of the monarch whom he had served. As Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, he had "been active in sending the University plate to his Majesty," and for this offence he was seized by Cromwell and carried in military custody to London, whence, after undergoing imprisonment in various goals, and experiencing other forms of hardship, he was at length permitted to retire to an obscure retreat in the country, there to commune with himself until that tyranny should be overpast. On the return of the exiled Stuarts Dr. Sterne was made Bishop of Carlisle, and a few years later was translated to the see of York. He lived to the age of eighty-six, and so far justified Burnet's accusation against him of "minding chiefly enriching himself," that he seems to have divided no fewer than four landed estates among his children. One of these, Simon Sterne, a younger son of the Archbishop, himself married an heiress, the daughter of Sir Roger Jaques of Elvington; and Roger, the father of Laurence Sterne, was the seventh and youngest of the issue of this marriage. At the time when the double misfortune above recorded befell him at the hands of Lucina and the War Office, his father had been some years dead; but Simon Sterne's widow was still mistress of the property which she had brought with her at her marriage, and to Elvington, accordingly, "as soon," writes Sterne, "as I was able to be carried," the compulsorily retired ensign betook himself with his wife and his two children. He was not, however, compelled to remain long dependent on his mother. The ways of the military authorities were as inscrutable to the army of that day as they are in our day to our own. Before a year had passed the regiment was ordered to be re-established, and "our household decamped with bag and baggage for Dublin." This was in the autumn of 1714, and from that time onward, for some eleven years, the movements and fortunes of the Sterne family, as detailed in the narrative of its most famous member, form a history in which the ludicrous struggles strangely with the pathetic. A husband, condemned to be the Ulysses-like plaything of adverse gods at the War Office; an indefatigably prolific wife; a succession of weak and ailing children; misfortune in the seasons of journeying; misfortune in the moods of the weather by sea and land--under all this combination of hostile chances and conditions was the struggle to be carried on. The little household was perpetually "on the move"--a little household which was always becoming and never remaining bigger--continually increased by births, only to be again reduced by deaths--until the contest between the deadly hardships of travel and the fatal fecundity of Mrs. Sterne was brought by events to a natural close. Almost might the unfortunate lady have exclaimed, _Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?_ She passes from Ireland to England, and from England to Ireland, from inland garrison to sea-port town and back again, incessantly bearing and incessantly burying children--until even her son in his narrative begins to speak of losing one infant at this place, and "leaving another behind" on that journey, almost as if they were so many overlooked or misdirected articles of luggage. The tragic side of the history, however, overshadows the grotesque. When we think how hard a business was travel even under the most favourable conditions in those days, and how serious even in our own times, when travel is easy, are the discomforts of the women and children of a regiment on the march--we may well pity these unresting followers of the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and she came moreover of a campaigning stock. Her father was a "noted suttler" of the name of Nuttle, and her first husband--for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married her--had been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served some years' apprenticeship to the military life before these wanderings began; and she herself was destined to live to a good old age. But somehow or other she failed to endow her offspring with her own robust constitution and powers of endurance. "My father's children were," as Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, "not made to last long;" but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hardships of those early years which carried them off in their infancy with such painful regularity and despatch, and that it was to the same cause that their surviving brother owed the beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life was cut short. The diary of their travels--for the early part of Sterne's memoirs amounts to scarcely more--is the more effective for its very brevity and abruptness. Save for one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than usual at Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of the traveller who never finds time to unpack his portmanteau. On the re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, "our household," says the narrative, "decamped from York with bag and baggage for Dublin. Within a month my father left us, being ordered to Exeter; where, in a sad winter, my mother and her two children followed him, travelling from Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth." At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne gave birth to a son, christened Joram; and, "in twelve months time we were all sent back to Dublin. My mother," with her three children, "took ship at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow escape from being cast away by a leak springing up in the vessel. At length, after many perils and struggles, we got to Dublin." Here intervenes the short breathing-space, of which mention has been made--an interval employed by Roger Sterne in "spending a great deal of money" on a "large house," which he hired and furnished; and then "in the year one thousand seven hundred and nineteen, all unhinged again." The regiment had been ordered off to the Isle of Wight, thence to embark for Spain, on "the Vigo Expedition," and "we," who accompanied it, "were driven into Milford Haven, but afterwards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to Plymouth again, and to the Isle of Wight;" losing on this expedition "poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of the smallpox." In the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Sterne and her family remained till the Vigo Expedition returned home; and during her stay there "poor Joram's loss was supplied by the birth of a girl, Anne," a "pretty blossom," but destined to fall "at the age of three years." On the return of the regiment to Wicklow, Roger Sterne again sent to collect his family around him. "We embarked for Dublin, and had all been cast away by a most violent storm; but, through the intercession of my mother, the captain was prevailed upon to turn back into Wales, where we stayed a month, and at length got into Dublin, and travelled by land to Wicklow, where my father had, for some weeks, given us over for lost." Here a year passed, and another child, Devijeher--so called after the colonel of the regiment--was born. "From thence we decamped to stay half a year with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, about seven miles from Wicklow, who, being a relative of my mother's, invited us to his parsonage at Animo.[1]" From thence, again, "we followed the regiment to Dublin," where again "we lay in the barracks a year." In 1722 the regiment was ordered to Carrickfergus. "We all decamped, but got no further than Drogheda; thence ordered to Mullingar, forty miles west, where, by Providence, we stumbled upon a kind relation, a collateral descendant from Archbishop Sterne, who took us all to his castle, and kindly entertained us for a year." Thence, by "a most rueful journey," to Carrickfergus, where "we arrived in six or seven days." Here, at the age of three, little Devijeher obtained a happy release from his name; and "another child, Susan, was sent to fill his place, who also left us behind in this weary journey." In the "autumn of this year, or the spring of the next"--Sterne's memory failing in exactitude at the very point where we should have expected it to be most precise--"my father obtained permission of his colonel to fix me at school;" and henceforth the boy's share in the family wanderings was at an end. But his father had yet to be ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry, where at last a permanent child, Catherine, was born; and thence to Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence of that famous Rock, where the much-enduring campaigner was run through the body in a duel, "about a goose" (a thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica, where, "with a constitution impaired" by the sword-thrust earned in his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the "country fever," and died. "His malady," writes his son, with a touch of feeling struggling through his dislocated grammar, "took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then in a month or two walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed his last." [Footnote 1: "It was in this parish," says Sterne, "that I had that wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known to all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people flocked to seeme." More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind to Sterne's great-grandfather, the Archbishop. "Playing near a mill, he fell within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in the whole wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void place came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.) But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above passage.] There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the comic and the pathetic in the life-history of this obscure father of a famous son. His life was clearly not a fortunate one, so far as external circumstances go; but its misfortunes had no sort of consoling dignity about them. Roger Sterne's lot in the world was not so much an unhappy as an uncomfortable one; and discomfort earns little sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its sufferers. He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish heroes--good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, shiftless--whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and half-contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray. He was obviously a typical specimen of that class of men who are destitute alike of the virtues and failings of the "respectable" and successful; whom many people love and no one respects; whom everybody pities in their struggles and difficulties, but whom few pity without a smile. It is evident, however, that he succeeded in winning the affection of one who had not too much affection of the deeper kind to spare for any one. The figure of Roger Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of Laurence Sterne's Memoir; and it is touched in with strokes so vivid and characteristic that critics have been tempted to find in it the original of the most famous portrait in the Shandy gallery. "My father," says Sterne, "was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose." This is a captivating little picture; and it no doubt presents traits which may have impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to "My Uncle Toby." The simplicity of nature and the "kindly, sweet disposition" are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's "rapid and hasty temper" in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably. And, on the whole, there seems no reason to believe that Sterne borrowed more from the character of his father than any writer must necessarily, and perhaps unconsciously, borrow from his observation of the moral and mental qualities of those with whom he has come into most frequent contact. That Laurence Sterne passed the first eleven years of his life with such an exemplar of these simple virtues of kindliness, guilelessness, and courage ever before him, is perhaps the best that can be said for the lot in which his early days were cast. In almost all other respects there could hardly have been--for a quick-witted, precocious, imitative boy--a worse bringing-up. No one, I should imagine, ever more needed discipline in his youth than Sterne; and the camp is a place of discipline for the soldier only. To all others whom necessity attaches to it, and to the young especially, it is rather a school of license and irregularity. It is fair to remember these disadvantages of Sterne's early training, in judging of the many defects as a man, and laxities as a writer, which marked his later life; though, on the other hand, there is no denying the reality and value of some of the countervailing advantages which came to him from his boyish surroundings. The conception of my Uncle Toby need not have been taken whole from Roger Sterne, or from any one actual captain of a marching regiment; but the constant sight of, and converse with, many captains and many corporals may undoubtedly have contributed much to the vigour and vitality of Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim. So far as the externals of portraiture were concerned, there can be no doubt that his art benefited much from his early military life. His soldiers have the true stamp of the soldier about them in air and language; and when his captain and corporal fight their Flemish battles over again we are thoroughly conscious that we are listening, under the dramatic form, to one who must himself have heard many a chapter of the same splendid story from the lips of the very men who had helped to break the pride of the Grand Monarque under Marlborough and Eugene. CHAPTER II. SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY.--HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. (1723-1738.) It was not--as we have seen from the Memoir--till the autumn of 1723, "or the spring of the following year," that Roger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to "fix" his son at school; and this would bring Laurence to the tolerably advanced age of ten before beginning his education in any systematic way. He records, under date of 1721, that "in this year I learned to write, &c.;" but it is not probable that the "&c."--that indolent symbol of which Sterne makes such irritating use in all his familiar writing--covers, in this case, any wide extent of educational advance. The boy, most likely, could just read and write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at school, "near Halifax, with an able master:" a judicious selection, no doubt, both of place as well as teacher. Mr. Fitzgerald, to whose researches we owe as much light as is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and probably not very interesting period of Sterne's life, has pointed out that Richard Sterne, eldest son of the late Simon Sterne, and uncle, therefore, of Laurence, was one of the governors of Halifax Grammar School, and that he may have used his interest to obtain his nephew's admission to the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax man, and so, constructively, a child of the parish. But, be this as it may, it is more than probable that from the time when he was sent to Halifax School the whole care and cost of the boy's education was borne by his Yorkshire relatives. The Memoir says that, "by God's care of me, my cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me to the University, &c., &c.;" and it is to be inferred from this that the benevolent guardianship of Sterne's uncle Richard (who died in 1732, the year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge) must have been taken up by his son. Of his school course--though it lasted for over seven years--the autobiographer has little to say; nothing, indeed, except that he "cannot omit mentioning" that anecdote with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come across the briefest notice of Sterne's life is familiar. The schoolmaster "had the ceiling of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital letters, LAU. STERNE for which the usher severely whipped me. My master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment. This expression made me forget the blows I had received." It is hardly to be supposed, of course, that this story is pure romance; but it is difficult, on the other hand, to believe that the incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it happened. That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest--or even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these prophetic moments sometimes)--is, of course, possible; but that Sterne's master was "very much hurt" at the boy's having been justly punished for an act of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been a delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; and that Sterne's vanity, either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the urchin's freak was only too unhappily characteristic of the man. The trick of befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) clung to him most tenaciously all his days; and many a fair white surface--of humour, of fancy, or of sentiment--was to be disfigured by him in after-years with stains and splotches in which we can all too plainly decipher the literary signature of Laurence Sterne. At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained for about eight years; that is, until he was nearly nineteen, and for some months after his father's death at Port Antonio, which occurred in March, 1731. "In the year '32," says the Memoir, "my cousin sent me to the University, where I stayed some time." In the course of his first year he read for and obtained a sizarship, to which the college records show that he was duly admitted on the 6th of July, 1733. The selection of Jesus College was a natural one: Sterne's great-grandfather, the afterwards Archbishop, had been its Master, and had founded scholarships there, to one of which the young sizar was, a year after his admission, elected. No inference can, of course, be drawn from this as to Sterne's proficiency, or even industry, in his academical studies: it is scarcely more than a testimony to the fact of decent and regular behaviour. He was _bene natus_, in the sense of being related to the right man, the founder; and in those days he need be only very _modicé doctus_ indeed in order to qualify himself for admission to the enjoyment of his kinsman's benefactions. Still he must have been orderly and well-conducted in his ways; and this he would also seem to have been, from the fact of his having passed through his University course without any apparent break or hitch, and having been admitted to his Bachelor's degree after no more than the normal period of residence. The only remark which, in the Memoir, he vouchsafes to bestow upon his academical career is, that "'twas there that I commenced a friendship with Mr. H----, which has been lasting on both sides;" and it may, perhaps, be said that this _was_, from one point of view, the most important event of his Cambridge life. For Mr. H---- was John Hall, afterwards John Hall Stevenson, the "Eugenius" of _Tristram Shandy_, the master of Skelton Castle, at which Sterne was, throughout life, to be a frequent and most familiar visitor; and, unfortunately, also a person whose later reputation, both as a man and a writer, became such as seriously to compromise the not very robust respectability of his clerical comrade. Sterne and Hall were distant cousins, and it may have been the tie of consanguinity which first drew them together. But there was evidently a thorough congeniality of the most unlucky sort between them; and from their first meeting, as undergraduates at Jesus, until the premature death of the elder, they continued to supply each other's minds with precisely that sort of occupation and stimulus of which each by the grace of nature stood least in need. That their close intimacy was ill-calculated to raise Sterne's reputation in later years may be inferred from the fact that Hall Stevenson afterwards obtained literary notoriety by the publication of _Crazy Tales_, a collection of comic but extremely broad ballads, in which his clerical friend was quite unjustly suspected of having had a hand. Mr. Hall was also reported, whether truly or falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's famous confraternity of Medmenham Abbey; and from this it was an easy step for gossip to advance to the assertion that the Rev. Mr. Sterne had himself been admitted to that unholy order. Among acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus might have more profitably made at Cambridge, but did not, was that of a student destined, like himself, to leave behind him a name famous in English letters. Gray, born three years later than Sterne, had entered a year after him at Cambridge as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and the two students went through their terms together, though the poet at the time took no degree. There was probably little enough in common between the shy, fastidious, slightly effeminate pensioner of Peterhouse, and a scholar of Jesus, whose chief friend and comrade was a man like Hall; and no close intimacy between the two men, if they had come across each other, would have been very likely to arise. But it does not appear that they could have ever met or heard of each other, for Gray writes of Sterne, after _Tristram Shandy_ had made him famous, in terms which clearly show that he did not recall his fellow-undergraduate. In January, 1736, Sterne took his B.A. degree, and quitted Cambridge for York, where another of his father's brothers now makes his appearance as his patron. Dr. Jacques Sterne was the second son of Simon Sterne, of Elvington, and a man apparently of more marked and vigorous character than any of his brothers. What induced him now to take notice of the nephew, whom in boyhood and early youth he had left to the unshared guardianship of his brother, and brother's son, does not appear; but the personal history of this energetic pluralist--Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon Residentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cum-Riston--suggests the surmise that he detected qualities in the young Cambridge graduate which would make him useful. For Dr. Sterne was a typical specimen of the Churchman-politician, in days when both components of the compound word meant a good deal more than they do now. The Archdeacon was a devoted Whig, a Hanoverian to the backbone; and he held it his duty to support the Protestant succession, not only by the spiritual but by the secular arm. He was a great electioneerer, as befitted times when the claims of two rival dynasties virtually met upon the hustings, and he took a prominent part in the great Yorkshire contest of the year 1734. His most vigorous display of energy, however, was made, as was natural, in "the '45." The Whig Archdeacon, not then Archdeacon of the East Riding, nor as yet quite buried under the mass of preferments which he afterwards accumulated, seems to have thought that this indeed was the crisis of his fortunes, and that, unless he was prepared to die a mere prebendary, canon, and rector of one or two benefices, now was the time to strike a blow for his advancement in the Church. His bustling activity at this trying time was indeed portentous, and at last took the form of arresting the unfortunate Dr. Burton (the original of Dr. Slop), on suspicion of holding communication with the invading army of the Pretender, then on its march southward from Edinburgh. The suspect, who was wholly innocent, was taken to London and kept in custody for nearly a year before being discharged, after which, by way of a slight redress, a letter of reprimand for his _trop de zèle_ was sent by direction of Lord Carteret to the militant dignitary. But the desired end was nevertheless attained, and Dr. Sterne succeeded in crowning the edifice of his ecclesiastical honours.[1] [Footnote 1: A once-familiar piece of humorous verse describes the upset of a coach containing a clerical pluralist: "When struggling on the ground was seen A Rector, Vicar, Canon, Dean; You might have thought the coach was full, But no! 'twas only Dr. Bull." Dr. Jacques Sterne, however, might have been thrown out of one of the more capacious vehicles of the London General Omnibus Company, with almost the same misleading effect upon those who only _heard_ of the mishap.] There can be little doubt that patronage extended by such an uncle to such a nephew received its full equivalent in some way or other, and indeed the Memoir gives us a clue to the mode in which payment was made. "My uncle," writes Sterne, describing their subsequent rupture, "quarrelled with me because I would not write paragraphs in the newspapers; though he was a party-man, I was not, and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath me. From that time he became my bitterest enemy." The date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed; but we gather from an autograph letter (now in the British Museum) from Sterne to Archdeacon Blackburne that by the year 1750 the two men had for some time ceased to be on friendly terms. Probably, however, the breach occurred subsequently to the rebellion of '45, and it may be that it arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which Dr. Sterne developed in that year, and which his nephew very likely did not, in his opinion, sufficiently share. But this is quite consistent with the younger man's having up to that time assisted the elder in his party polemics. He certainly speaks in his "Letters" of his having "employed his brains for an ungrateful person," and the remark is made in a way and in a connexion which seems to imply that the services rendered to his uncle were mainly _literary_. If so, his declaration that he "would not write paragraphs in the newspapers" can only mean that he would not go on writing them. Be this as it may, however, it is certain that the Archdeacon for some time found his account in maintaining friendly relations with his nephew, and that during that period he undoubtedly did a good deal for his advancement. Sterne was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Lincoln in March, 1736, only three months after taking his B.A. degree, and took priest's orders in August, 1738, whereupon his uncle immediately obtained for him the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, into which he was inducted a few days afterwards. Other preferments followed, to be noted hereafter; and it must be admitted that until the quarrel occurred about the "party paragraphs" the Archdeacon did his duty by his nephew after the peculiar fashion of that time. When that quarrel came, however, it seems to have snapped more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne speaks of his youngest sister Catherine as "still living, but most unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own folly." Of his elder sister Mary, who was born at Lille a year before himself, he records that "she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend's house in the country and died of a broken heart." Truly an unlucky family.[1] Only three to survive the hardships among which the years of their infancy were passed, and this to be the history of two out of the three survivors! [Footnote 1: The mother, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more for a moment in or about the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and after him Byron, accused Sterne of having "preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother," and the former went so far as to declare "on indubitable authority" that Mrs. Sterne, "who kept a school (in Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her." Even "the indubitable authority," however, does not positively assert--whatever may be meant to be insinuated--that Sterne himself did nothing to assist his mother, and Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out that to pay the _whole_ debts of a bankrupt school might well have been beyond a Yorkshire clergyman's means. Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date than this was actively concerning himself about his mother's interests. She afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; and he then writes to a friend: "I trust my poor mother's affair is by this time ended to _our_ comfort and hers."] CHAPTER III. LIFE AT SUTTON.--MARRIAGE.--THE PARISH PRIEST. (1738-1759.) Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fame and yet die early, must always form more or less perplexing subjects of literary biography. The processes of their intellectual and artistic growth lie hidden in nameless years; their genius is not revealed to the world until it has reached its full maturity, and many aspects of it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained themselves if the gradual development had gone on before men's eyes, remain often unexplained to the last. By few, if any, of the more celebrated English men of letters is this observation so forcibly illustrated as it is in the case of Sterne: the obscure period of his life so greatly exceeded in duration the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity was so exceptionally profound. He was forty-seven years of age when, at a bound, he achieved celebrity; he was not five-and-fifty when he died. And though it might be too much to say that the artist sprang, like the reputation, full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true that there are no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in the earliest public displays of his art. His work grows, indeed, most marvellously in vividness and symmetry as he proceeds, but there are no visible signs of growth in the workman's skill. Even when the highest point of finish is attained we cannot say that the hand is any more cunning than it was from the first. As well might we say that the last light touches of the sculptor's chisel upon the perfected statue are more skilful than its first vigorous strokes upon the shapeless block. It is certain, however, that Sterne must have been storing up his material of observation, secreting his reflections on life and character, and consciously or unconsciously maturing his powers of expression, during the whole of those silent twenty years which have now to be passed under brief review. With one exception, to be noted presently, the only known writings of his which belong to this period are sermons, and these--a mere "scratch" collection of pulpit discourses, which, as soon as he had gained the public ear, he hastened in characteristic fashion to rummage from his desk and carry to the book-market--throw no light upon the problem before us. There are sermons of Sterne which alike in manner and matter disclose the author of _Tristram Shandy_; but they are not among those which he preached or wrote before that work was given to the world. They are not its ancestors but its descendants. They belong to the post-Shandian period, and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian style; while in none of the earlier ones--not even in that famous homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr. Slop--can we trace either the trick of style or the turn of thought that give piquancy to the novel. Yet the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty of workmanship of which this turn of thought and trick of style were the product, must of course have been potentially present from the beginning. Men do not blossom forth as wits, humourists, masterly delineators of character, and skilful performers on a highly-strung and carefully-tuned sentimental instrument all at once, after entering their "forties;" and the only wonder is that a possessor of these powers--some of them of the kind which, as a rule, and in most men, seeks almost as irresistibly for exercise as even the poetic instinct itself--should have been held so long unemployed. There is, however, one very common stimulus to literary exertions which in Sterne's case was undoubtedly wanting--a superabundance of unoccupied time. We have little reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded and valetudinarian Yorkshire parson was at any period of his life an industrious "parish priest;" but it is probable, nevertheless, that time never hung very heavily upon his hands. In addition to the favourite amusements which he enumerates in the Memoir, he was all his days addicted to one which is, perhaps, the most absorbing of all--flirtation. Philandering, and especially philandering of the Platonic and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the one human pastime of which its votaries never seem to tire; and its constant ministrations to human vanity may serve, perhaps, to account for their unwearied absorption in its pursuit. Sterne's first love affair--an affair of which, unfortunately, the consequences were more lasting than the passion--took place immediately upon his leaving Cambridge. To relate it as he relates it to his daughter: "At York I became acquainted with your mother, and courted her for two years. She owned she liked me, but thought herself not rich enough or me too poor to be joined together. She went to her sister's in Staffordshire, and I wrote to her often. I believe then she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so. At her return she fell into a consumption, and one evening that I was sitting by her, with an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said: 'My dear Laury, I never can be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live! But I have left you every shilling of my fortune.' Upon that she showed me her will. This generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that she recovered, and we were married in 1741." The name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and it was to her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which his daughter included in the collection published by her some eight years after her father's death. They were added, the preface tells us, "in justice to Mr. Sterne's delicate feelings;" and in our modern usage of the word "delicate," as equivalent to infirm of health and probably short of life, they no doubt do full justice to the passion which they are supposed to express. It would be unfair, of course, to judge any love-letters of that period by the standard of sincerity applied in our own less artificial age. All such compositions seem frigid and formal enough to us of to-day; yet in most cases of genuine attachment we usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above the affected modulations of the style. But the letters of Sterne's courtship maintain the pseudo-poetic, shepherd-and-shepherdess strain throughout; or, if the lover ever abandons it, it is only to make somewhat maudlin record of those "tears" which flowed a little too easily at all times throughout his life. These letters, however, have a certain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensibilities which Sterne afterwards learned to cultivate in a forcing-frame, with a view to the application of their produce to the purposes of an art of pathetic writing which simulates nature with such admirable fidelity at its best, and descends to such singular bathos at its worst. The marriage preluded by this courtship did not take place till Sterne had already been three years Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, the benefice which had been procured for him by his uncle the Archdeacon; through whose interest also he was appointed successively to two prebends--preferments which were less valuable to him for their emolument than for the ecclesiastical status which they conferred upon him, for the excuse which they gave him for periodical visits to the cathedral city to fulfil the residential conditions of his offices, and for the opportunity thus afforded him of mixing in and studying the society of the Close. Upon his union with Miss Lumley, and, in a somewhat curious fashion, by her means, he obtained in addition the living of Stillington. "A friend of hers in the South had promised her that if she married a clergyman in Yorkshire, when the living became vacant he would make her a compliment of it;" and made accordingly this singular "compliment" was. At Sutton Sterne remained nearly twenty years, doing duty at both places, during which time "books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were," he says, "my chief amusements." With what success he shot, and with what skill he fiddled, we know not. His writings contain not a few musical metaphors and allusions to music, which seem to indicate a competent acquaintance with its technicalities; but the specimen of his powers as an artist, which Mr. Fitzgerald has reproduced from his illustrations of a volume of poems by Mr. Woodhull, does not dispose one to rate highly his proficiency in this accomplishment. We may expect that, after all, it was the first-mentioned of his amusements in which he took the greatest delight, and that neither the brush, the bow, nor the fowling-piece was nearly so often in his hand as the book. Within a few miles of Sutton, at Skelton Castle, an almost unique Roman stronghold, since modernized by Gothic hands, dwelt his college-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books--old French "ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors--books intentionally and books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the mode in which he used them: here it is enough to say generally that the materials for many a burlesque chapter of _Tristram Shandy_ must have been unconsciously storing themselves in his mind in many an amused hour passed by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle. But before finally quitting this part of my subject it may be as well, perhaps, to deal somewhat at length with a matter which will doubtless have to be many times incidentally referred to in the course of this study, but which I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of doing more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course to Sterne's perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a matter almost as impossible to omit from any biography of Sterne as it would be to omit it from any biography of Goethe. The English humourist did not, it is true, engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific, spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development; but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and work in more ways than one. That his marriage was an ill-assorted and unhappy union was hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its effect. It may well be, of course, that the "dear L.," whose moral and mental graces her lover had celebrated in such superfine, sentimental fashion, was a commonplace person enough. That she was really a woman of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her exasperating feats as an _assentatrix_ did, as has been suggested, supply the model for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between the philosopher and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant for believing. But it is quite possible that the daily companion of one of the most indefatigable jesters that ever lived may have been unable to see a joke; that she regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere horse-collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler humour escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it is, to say the least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all on this ground from the wounded feelings of the _mari incompris_, while it is next to certain that it does not need the sting of any such disappointment to account for his alienation. He must have had plenty of time and opportunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations during the two years of his courtship; and it is not likely that, even if they were as well marked as Mrs. Shandy's own, they would have done much of themselves to estrange the couple. Sympathy is not the necessity to the humourist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be to himself: the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract from the very absence of sympathy in those about him a keener relish for his reflections. With sentiment, indeed, and still more with sentimentalism, the case would of course be different; but as for Mr. Sterne's demands for sympathy in that department of his life and art, one may say without the least hesitation that they would have been beyond the power of any one woman, however distinguished a disciple of the "Laura Matilda" school, to satisfy. "I must ever," he frankly says in one of the "Yorick to Eliza" letters, "I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head: it harmonizes the soul;" and he might have added that he found it impossible to sustain the harmony without frequently changing the Dulcinea. One may suspect that Mrs. Sterne soon had cause for jealousy, and it is at least certain that several years before Sterne's emergence into notoriety their estrangement was complete. One daughter was born to them in 1745, but lived scarcely mare than long enough to be rescued from the _limbus infantium_ by the prompt rites of the Church. The child was christened Lydia, and died on the following day. Its place was filled in 1747 by a second daughter, also christened Lydia, who lived to become the wife of M. de Medalle, and the not very judicious editress of the posthumous "Letters." For her as she grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and truly fatherly affection, and it is in writing to her and of her that we see him at his best; or rather one might say it is almost only then that we can distinguish the true notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto of sentimentalism which distinguishes most of Sterne's communications with the other sex. There was no subsequent issue of the marriage, and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly included in Madame de Medalle's collection, it is to be ascertained that some four years or so after Lydia's birth the relations between Sterne and Mrs. Sterne ceased to be conjugal, and never again resumed that character. It is, however, probable, upon the husband's own confessions, that he had given his wife earlier cause for jealousy, and certainly from the time when he begins to reveal himself in correspondence there seems to be hardly a moment when some such cause was not in existence--in the person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical damsel or coquettish matron. From Miss Fourmantelle, the "dear, dear Kitty," to whom Sterne was making violent love in 1759, the year of the York publication of _Tristram Shandy_, down to Mrs. Draper, the heroine of the famous "Yorick to Eliza" letters, the list of ladies who seem to have kindled flames in that susceptible breast is almost as long and more real than the roll of mistresses immortalized by Horace. How Mrs. Sterne at first bore herself under her husband's ostentatious neglect there is no direct evidence to show. That she ultimately took refuge in indifference we can perceive, but it is to be feared that she was not always able to maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure. So, at least, we may suspect from the evidence of that Frenchman who met "le bon et agréable Tristram," and his wife, at Montpellier, and who, characteristically sympathizing with the inconstant husband, declared that his wife's incessant pursuit of him made him pass "d'assez mauvais moments," which he bore "with the patience of an angel." But, on the whole, Mrs. Sterne's conduct seems by her husband's own admissions to have been not wanting in dignity. As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have come, though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, Platonic. In saying this, however, I am by no means prepared to assert that they would all of them have passed muster before a prosaic and unsentimental British jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse. Sterne's relations with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed at last a profoundly compromising character, and it is far from improbable that the worst construction would have been put upon them by one of the plain-dealing tribunals aforesaid. Certainly a young woman who leaves her mother at York, and comes up to London to reside alone in lodgings, where she is constantly being visited by a lover who is himself living _en garçon_ in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way. But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally "innocent" is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate; and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the over-indulgence of another which stood in at least as much need of chastenment. If his love-affairs stopped short of the gratification of the senses, they involved a perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sensibilities of his into that condition of hyper-aesthesia which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in reality the weakness, of his art. Injurious, however, as was the effect which Sterne's philanderings exercised upon his personal and literary character, it is not likely that, at least at this period of his life at Sutton, they had in any degree compromised his reputation. For this he had provided in other ways, and principally by his exceedingly injudicious choice of associates. "As to the squire of the parish," he remarks in the Memoir, "I cannot say we were on a very friendly footing, but at Stillington the family of the C[rofts] showed us every kindness: 'twas most agreeable to be within a mile and a half of an amiable family who were ever cordial friends;" and who, it may be added, appear to have been Sterne's only reputable acquaintances. For the satisfaction of all other social needs he seems to have resorted to a companionship which it was hardly possible for a clergyman to frequent without scandal--that, namely, of John Hall Stevenson and the kindred spirits whom he delighted to collect around him at Skelton--familiarly known as "Crazy" Castle. The club of the "Demoniacs," of which Sterne makes mention in his letters, may have had nothing very diabolical about it except the name; but, headed as it was by the suspected ex-comrade of Wilkes and his brother monks of Medmenham, and recruited by gay militaires like Colonels Hall and Lee, and "fast" parsons like the Rev. "Panty" Lascelles (mock godson of Pantagruel), it was certainly a society in which the Vicar of Sutton could not expect to enroll himself without offence. We may fairly suppose, therefore, that it was to his association with these somewhat too "jolly companions" that Sterne owed that disfavour among decorous country circles, of which he shows resentful consciousness in the earlier chapters of _Tristram Shandy._ But before we finally cross the line which separates the life of the obscure country parson from the life of the famous author, a word or two must be said of that piece of writing which was alluded to a few pages back as the only known exception to the generally "professional" character of all Sterne's compositions of the pre-Shandian era. This was a piece in the allegoric-satirical style, which, though not very remarkable in itself, may not improbably have helped to determine its author's thoughts in the direction of more elaborate literary efforts. In the year 1758 a dispute had arisen between a certain Dr. Topham, an ecclesiastical lawyer in large local practice, and Dr. Fountayne, the then Dean of York. This dispute had originated in an attempt on the part of the learned civilian, who appears to have been a pluralist of an exceptionally insatiable order, to obtain the reversion of one of his numerous offices for his son, alleging a promise made to him on that behalf by the Archbishop. This promise--which had, in fact, been given--was legally impossible of performance, and upon the failure of his attempt the disappointed Topham turned upon the Dean, and maintained that by _him_, at any rate, he had been promised another place of the value of five guineas per annum, and appropriately known as the "Commissaryship of Pickering and Pocklington." This the Dean denied, and thereupon Dr. Topham fired off a pamphlet setting forth the circumstances of the alleged promise, and protesting against the wrong inflicted upon him by its non-performance. At this point Sterne came to Dr. Fountayne's assistance with a sarcastic apologue entitled the "History of a good Warm Watchcoat," which had "hung up many years in the parish vestry," and showing how this garment had so excited the cupidity of Trim, the sexton, that "nothing would serve him but he must take it home, to have it converted into a warm under-petticoat for his wife and a jerkin for himself against the winter." The symbolization of Dr. Topham's snug "patent place," which he wished to make hereditary, under the image of the good warm watchcoat, is of course plain enough; and there is some humour in the way in which the parson (the Archbishop) discovers that his incautious assent to Trim's request had been given _ultra vires._ Looking through the parish register, at the request of a labourer who wished to ascertain his age, the parson finds express words of bequest leaving the watch-coat "for the sole use of the sextons of the church for ever, to be worn by them respectively on winterly cold nights," and at the moment when he is exclaiming, "Just Heaven! what an escape have I had! Give this for a petticoat to Trim's wife!" he is interrupted by Trim himself entering the vestry with "the coat actually ript and cut out" ready for conversion into a petticoat for his wife. And we get a foretaste of the familiar Shandian impertinence in the remark which follows, that "there are many good similes subsisting in the world, but which I have neither time to recollect nor look for," which would give you an idea of the parson's astonishment at Trim's impudence. The emoluments of "Pickering and Pocklington" appear under the figure of a "pair of black velvet plush breeches" which ultimately "got into the possession of one Lorry Slim (Sterne himself, of course), an unlucky wight, by whom they are still worn: in truth, as you will guess, they are very thin by this time." The whole thing is the very slightest of "skits;" and the quarrel having been accommodated before it could be published, it was not given to the world until after its author's death. But it is interesting, as his first known attempt in this line of composition, and the grasping sexton deserves remembrance, if only as having handed down his name to a far more famous descendant. CHAPTER IV. "TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. I. AND II. (1759-1760.) Hitherto we have had to construct our conception of Sterne out of materials of more or less plausible conjecture. We are now at last approaching the region of positive evidence, and henceforward, down almost to the last scene of all, Sterne's doings will be chronicled, and his character revealed, by one who happens, in this case, to be the best of all possible biographers--the man himself. Not that such records are by any means always the most trustworthy of evidence. There are some men whose real character is never more effectually concealed than in their correspondence. But it is not so with Sterne. The careless, slipshod letters which Madame de Medalle "pitchforked" into the book-market, rather than edited, are highly valuable as pieces of autobiography. They are easy, naïve, and natural, rich in simple self-disclosure in almost every page; and if they have more to tell us about the man than the writer, they are yet not wanting in instructive hints as to Sterne's methods of composition and his theories of art. It was in the year 1759 that the Vicar of Sutton and Prebendary of York--already, no doubt, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to many worthy people in the county--conceived the idea of astonishing and scandalizing them still further after a new and original fashion. His impulses to literary production were probably various, and not all of them, or perhaps the strongest of them, of the artistic order. The first and most urgent was, it may be suspected, the simplest and most common of all such motive forces. Sterne, in all likelihood, was in want of money. He was not, perhaps, under the actual instruction of that _magister artium_ whom the Roman satirist has celebrated; for he declared, indeed, afterwards, that "he wrote not to be fed, but to be famous." But the context of the passage shows that he only meant to deny any absolute compulsion to write for mere subsistence. Between this sort of constraint and that gentler form of pressure which arises from the wish to increase an income sufficient for one's needs, but inadequate to one's desires, there is a considerable difference; and to repudiate the one is not to disclaim the other. It is, at any rate, certain that Sterne engaged at one time of his life in a rather speculative sort of farming, and we have it from himself in a passage in one of his letters, which may be jest, but reads more like earnest, that it was his losses in this business that first turned his attention to literature.[1] His thoughts once set in that direction, his peculiar choice of subject and method of treatment are easily comprehensible. Pantagruelic burlesque came to him, if not naturally, at any rate by "second nature." He had a strong and sedulously cultivated taste for Rabelaisian humour; his head was crammed with all sorts of out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling his comic sense by its very uselessness; he relished more keenly than any man the solemn futilities of mediaeval doctors, and the pedantic indecencies of casuist fathers; and, along with all these temptations to an enterprise of the kind upon which he entered, he had been experiencing a steady relaxation of deterrent restraints. He had fallen out with his uncle some years since,[2] and the quarrel had freed him from at least one influence making for clerical propriety of behaviour. His incorrigible levities had probably lost him the countenance of most of his more serious acquaintances; his satirical humour had as probably gained him personal enemies not a few, and it may be that he had gradually contracted something of that "naughty-boy" temper, as we may call it, for which the deliberate and ostentatious repetition of offences has an inexplicable charm. It seems clear, too, that, growth for growth with this spirit of bravado, there had sprung up--in somewhat incongruous companionship, perhaps--a certain sense of wrong. Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender. What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel in which he might give full play to his simious humour, startle more hideously than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure in the society around him might offer the most tempting butt for ridicule? [Footnote 1: "I was once such a puppy myself," he writes to a certain baronet whom he is attempting to discourage from speculative farming of this sort, "and had my labour for my pains and two hundred pounds out of pocket. Curse on farming! (I said). Let us see if the pen will not succeed better than the spade."] [Footnote 2: He himself, indeed, makes a particular point of this in explaining his literary venture. "Now for your desire," he writes to a correspondent in 1759, "of knowing the reason of my turning author? why, truly I am tired of employing my brains for other people's advantage. 'Tis a foolish sacrifice I have made for some years for an ungrateful person."--_Letters_, i. 82.] All the world knows how far he ultimately advanced beyond the simplicity of the conception, and into what far higher regions of art its execution led him. But I find no convincing reason for believing that _Tristram Shandy_ had at the outset any more seriously artistic purpose than this; and much indirect evidence that this, in fact, it was. The humorous figure of Mr. Shandy is, of course, the Cervantic centre of the whole; and it was out of him and his crotchets that Sterne, no doubt, intended from the first to draw the materials of that often unsavoury fun which was to amuse the light-minded and scandalize the demure. But it can hardly escape notice that the two most elaborate portraits in Vol. I.--the admirable but very flatteringly idealized sketch of the author himself in Yorick, and the Gilrayesque caricature of Dr. Slop--are drawn with a distinctly polemical purpose, defensive in the former case and offensive in the latter. On the other hand, with the disappearance of Dr. Slop caricature of living persons disappears also; while, after the famous description of Yorick's death-bed, we meet with no more attempts at self-vindication. It seems probable, therefore, that long before the first two volumes were completed Sterne had discovered the artistic possibilities of "My Uncle Toby" and "Corporal Trim," and had realized the full potentialities of humour contained in the contrast between the two brothers Shandy. The very work of sharpening and deepening the outlines of this humorous antithesis, while it made the crack-brained philosopher more and more of a burlesque unreality, continually added new touches of life and nature to the lineaments of the simple-minded soldier; and it was by this curious and half-accidental process that there came to be added to the gallery of English fiction one of the most perfect and delightful portraits that it possesses. We know from internal evidence that _Tristram Shandy_ was begun in the early days of 1759; and the first two volumes were probably completed by about the middle of the year. "In the year 1760," writes Sterne, "I went up to London to publish my two first volumes of _Shandy_." And it is stated in a note to this passage, as cited in Scott's memoir, that the first edition was published "the year before" in York. There is, however, no direct proof that it was in the hands of the public before the beginning of 1760, though it is possible that the date of its publication may just have fallen within the year. But, at all events, on the 1st of January, 1760, an advertisement in the _Public Advertiser_ informed the world that "this day" was "published, printed on superfine writing-paper, &c., _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_. York. Printed for and sold by John Hinxham, Bookseller in Stonegate." The great London publisher, Dodslecy, to whom the book had been offered, and who had declined the venture, figures in the advertisement as the principal London bookseller from whom it was to be obtained. It seems that only a few copies were in the first instance sent up to the London market; but they fell into good hands, for there is evidence that _Tristram Shandy_ had attracted the notice of at least one competent critic in the capital before the month of January was out. But though the metropolitan success of the book was destined to be delayed for still a month or two, in York it had already created a _furore_ in more senses than one. For, in fact, and no wonder, it had in many quarters given the deepest offence. Its Rabelaisian license of incident and allusion was calculated to offend the proprieties--the provincial proprieties especially--even in that free-spoken age; and there was that in the book, moreover, which a provincial society may be counted on to abominate, with a keener if less disinterested abhorrence than any sins against decency. It contained, or was supposed to contain, a broadly ludicrous caricature of one well-known local physician; and an allusion, brief, indeed, and covert, but highly scandalous, to a certain "droll foible" attributed to another personage of much wider celebrity in the scientific world. The victim in the latter case was no longer living; and this circumstance brought upon Sterne a remonstrance from a correspondent, to which he replied in a letter so characteristic in many respects as to be worth quoting. His correspondent was a Dr. * * * * * (asterisks for which it is now impossible to substitute letters); and the burden of what seem to have been several communications in speech and writing on the subject was the maxim, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." With such seriousness and severity had his correspondent dwelt upon this adage, that "at length," writes Sterne, "you have made me as serious and as severe as yourself; but, that the humours you have stirred up might not work too potently within me, I have waited four days to cool myself before I could set pen to paper to answer you." And thus he sets forth the results of his four days' deliberation: "'De mortuis nil nisi bonum.' I declare I have considered the wisdom and foundation of it over and over again as dispassionately and charitably as a good Christian can, and, after all, I can find nothing in it, or make more of it than a nonsensical lullaby of some nurse, put into Latin by some pedant, to be chanted by some hypocrite to the end of the world for the consolation of departing lechers. 'Tis, I own, Latin, and I think that is all the weight it has, for, in plain English, 'tis a loose and futile position below a dispute. 'You are not to speak anything of the dead but what is good.' Why so? Who says so? Neither reason nor Scripture. Inspired authors have done otherwise, and reason and common sense tell me that, if the characters of past ages and men are to be drawn at all, they are to be drawn like themselves, that is, with their excellences and their foibles; and it as much a piece of justice to the world, and to virtue, too, to do the one as the other. The ruling passion, _et les égarements du coeur_, are the very things which mark and distinguish a man's character, in which I would as soon leave out a man's head as his hobby-horse. However, if, like the poor devil of a painter, we must conform to the pious canon, 'De mortuis,' &c., which I own has a spice of piety in the _sound_ of it, and be obliged to paint both our angels and our devils out of the same pot, I then infer that our Sydenhams and our Sangrados, our Lucretias and our Messalinas, our Somersets and our Bolingbrokes, are alike entitled to statues, and all the historians or satirists who have said otherwise since they departed this life, from Sallust to S----e, are guilty of the crimes you charge me with, 'cowardice and injustice.' But why cowardice? 'Because 'tis not courage to attack a dead man who can't defend himself.' But why do you doctors attack such a one with your incision knife? Oh! for the good of the living. 'Tis my plea." And, having given this humorous twist to his argument, he glides off into extenuatory matter. He had not even, he protests, made as much as a surgical incision into his victim (Dr. Richard Mead, the friend of Bentley and of Newton, and a physician and physiologist of high repute in his day); he had but just scratched him, and that scarce skin-deep. As to the "droll foible" of Dr. Mead, which he had made merry with, "it was not first reported (even to the few who can understand the hint) by me, but known before by every chambermaid and footman within the bills of mortality"--a somewhat daring assertion, one would imagine, considering what the droll foible was; and Dr. Mead, continues Sterne, great man as he was, had, after all, not fared worse than "a man of twice his wisdom"--to wit Solomon, of whom the same remark had been made, that "they were both great men, and, like all mortal men, had each their ruling passion." The mixture of banter and sound reasoning in this reply is, no doubt, very skilful. But, unfortunately, neither the reasoning nor the banter happens to meet the case of this particular defiance of the "De mortuis" maxim, and as a serious defence against a serious charge (which was what the occasion required) Sterne's answer is altogether futile. For the plea of "the good of the living," upon which, after all, the whole defence, considered seriously, rests, was quite inapplicable as an excuse for the incriminated passage. The only living persons who could possibly be affected by it, for good or evil, were those surviving friends of the dead man, to whom Sterne's allusion to what he called Dr. Mead's "droll foible" was calculated to cause the deepest pain and shame. The other matter of offence to Sterne's Yorkshire readers was of a much more elaborate kind. In the person of Dr. Slop, the grotesque man-midwife, who was to have assisted, but missed assisting, at Tristram's entry into the world, the good people of York were not slow to recognize the physical peculiarities and professional antecedents of Dr. Burton, the local accoucheur, whom Archdeacon Sterne had arrested as a Jacobite. That the portrait was faithful to anything but the external traits of the original, or was intended to reproduce anything more than these, Sterne afterwards denied; and we have certainly no ground for thinking that Burton had invited ridicule on any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the curious ugliness of his face and figure. It is most unlikely that his success as a practitioner in a branch of the medical art in which imposture is the most easily detected, could have been earned by mere quackery; and he seems, moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds than one. The probability is that the worst that could be alleged against him was a tendency to scientific pedantry in his published writings, which was pretty sure to tickle the fancy of Mr. Sterne. Unscrupulously, however, as he was caricatured, the sensation which appears to have been excited in the county by the burlesque portrait could hardly have been due to any strong public sympathy with the involuntary sitter. Dr. Burton seems, as a suspected Jacobite, to have been no special favourite with the Yorkshire squirearchy in general, but rather the reverse thereof. Ucalegon, however, does not need to be popular to arouse his neighbour's interest in his misfortunes; and the caricature of Burton was doubtless resented on the _proximus ardet_ principle by many who feared that their turn was coming next. To all the complaints and protests which reached him on the subject Sterne would in any case, probably, have been indifferent; but he was soon to receive encouragement which would have more than repaid a man of his temper for twice the number of rebukes. For London cared nothing for Yorkshire susceptibilities and Yorkshire fears. Provincial notables might be libelled, and their friends might go in fear of similar treatment, but all that was nothing to "the town," and _Tristram Shandy_ had taken the town by storm. We gather from a passage in the letter above quoted that as early as January 30 the book had "gained the very favourable opinion" of Mr. Garrick, afterwards to become the author's intimate friend; and it is certain that by the time of Sterne's arrival in London, in March, 1760, _Tristram Shandy_ had become the rage. To say of this extraordinary work that it defies analysis would be the merest inadequacy of commonplace. It was meant to defy analysis; it is of the very essence of its scheme and purpose that it should do so; and the mere attempt to subject it systematically to any such process would argue an altogether mistaken conception of the author's intent. Its full "official" style and title is _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.,_ and it is difficult to say which it contains the less about--the opinions of Tristram Shandy or the events of his life. As a matter of fact, its proper description would be "The Opinions of Tristram Shandy's Father, with some Passages from the Life of his Uncle." Its claim to be regarded as a biography of its nominal hero is best illustrated by the fact that Tristram is not born till the third volume, and not breeched till the sixth; that it is not till the seventh that he begins to play any active part in the narrative, appearing then only as a completely colourless and unindividualized figure, a mere vehicle for the conveyance of Sterne's own Continental _impressions de voyage_; and that in the last two volumes, which are entirely taken up with the incident of his uncle's courtship, he disappears from the story altogether. It is to be presumed, perhaps, though not very confidently, that the reader would have seen more of him if the tale had been continued; but how much or how little is quite uncertain. The real hero of the book is at the outset Mr. Shandy, senior, who is, later on, succeeded in this place of dignity by my Uncle Toby. It not only served Sterne's purpose to confine himself mainly to these two characters, as the best whereon to display his powers, but it was part of his studied eccentricity to do so. It was a "point" to give as little as possible about Tristram Shandy in a life of Tristram Shandy; just as it was a point to keep the reader waiting throughout the year 1760 for their hero to be so much as born. In the first volume, therefore, the author does literally everything but make the slightest progress with his story. Starting off abruptly with a mock physiologic disquisition upon the importance of a proper ordering of their mental states on the part of the intending progenitors of children, he philosophizes gravely on this theme for two or three chapters; and then wanders away into an account of the local midwife, upon whose sole services Mrs. Shandy, in opposition to her husband, was inclined to rely. From the midwife it is an easy transition to her patron and protector, the incumbent of the parish, and this, in its turn, suggests a long excursus on the character, habits, appearance, home, friends, enemies, and finally death, burial, and epitaph of the Rev. Mr. Yorick. Thence we return to Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, and are made acquainted, in absurdly minute detail, with an agreement entered into between them with reference to the place of sojourn to be selected for the lady's accouchement, the burlesque deed which records this compact being actually set out at full length. Thence, again, we are beckoned away by the jester to join him in elaborate and not very edifying ridicule of the Catholic doctrine of ante-natal baptism; and thence--but it would be useless to follow further the windings and doublings of this literary hare. Yet though the book, as one thus summarizes it, may appear a mere farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after its peculiar fashion, advances. Such definite purpose as underlies the tricks and grimaces of its author is by degrees accomplished; and before we reach the end of the first volume the highly humorous, if extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition--as the study of a man "whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not "crack-brained learning" so much as "theory run mad." He is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever impelling him to push his premises to new conclusions without ever allowing him time to compare them with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest, but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his father's dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he owed nothing to the logic of the schools. "He was certainly," says his son, "irresistible both in his orations and disputations," but that was because "he was born an orator _([Greek: Theodidaktos])_. Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of logic and rhetoric were so blended in him, and withal he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, that Nature might have stood up and said, 'This man is eloquent.' And yet," continues the filial panegyric, "He had never read Cicero nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus among the ancients, nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby among the moderns: and what is more astonishing he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind by one single lecture upon Crackenthorpe or Burgersdicius or any Dutch commentator: he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument _ad ignorantiam_ and an argument _ad hominem_ consisted; and when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College, in * * * *, it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor and two or three Fellows of that learned society that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools should be able to work after that fashion with them." Surely we all know men of this kind, and the consternation--comparable only to that of M. Jourdain under the impromptu carte-and-tierce of his servant-maid--which their sturdy if informal dialectic will often spread among many kinds of "learned societies." But such men are certainly not of the class which Scott supposed to have been ridiculed in the character of Walter Shandy. Among the crotchets of this born dialectician was a theory as to the importance of Christian names in determining the future behaviour and destiny of the children to whom they are given; and, whatever admixture of jest there might have been in some of his other fancies, in this his son affirms he was absolutely serious. He solemnly maintained the opinion "that there was a strange kind of magic bias which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our character and conduct." How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of their names have been rendered worthy of them! And how many, he would add, are there who might have done exceeding well in the world had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into nothing! He was astonished at parents failing to perceive that "when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, 'twas not like a case of a man's character, which, when wronged, might afterwards be cleared; and possibly some time or other, if not in the man's life, at least after his death, be somehow or other set to rights with the world." This name-giving injury, he would say, "could never be undone; nay, he doubted whether an Act of Parliament could reach it; he knew, as well as you, that the Legislature assumed a power over surnames; but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step further." With all this extravagance, however, there was combined an admirable affectation of sobriety. Mr. Shandy would have us believe that he was no blind slave to his theory. He was quite willing to admit the existence of names which could not affect the character either for good or evil--Jack, Dick, and Tom, for instance; and such the philosopher styled "neutral names," affirming of them, "without a satire, that there had been as many knaves and fools at least as wise and good men since the world began, who had indifferently borne them, so that, like equal forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each other's effects; for which reason he would often declare he would not give a cherry-stone to choose among them. Bob, which was my brother's name, was another of these neutral kinds of Christian names which operated very little either way; and as my father happened to be at Epsom when it was given him, he would ofttimes thank Heaven it was no worse." Forewarned of this peculiarity of Mr. Shandy's, the reader is, of course, prepared to hear that of all the names in the universe the philosopher had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram, "the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world." He would break off in the midst of one of his frequent disputes on the subject of names, and "in a spirited epiphonema, or rather erotesis," demand of his antagonist "whether he would take upon him to say he had ever remembered, whether he had ever read, or whether he had ever heard tell of a man called Tristram performing anything great or worth recording. No, he would say. Tristram! the thing is impossible." It only remained that he should have published a book in defence of the belief, and sure enough "in the year sixteen," two years before the birth of his second son, "he was at the pains of writing an express dissertation simply upon the word Tristram, showing the world with great candour and modesty the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name." And with this idea Sterne continues to amuse himself at intervals till the end of the chapter. That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not substance enough--few of Sterne's jests have--to stand the process of continual attrition to which he subjects it. But the mere historic gravity with which the various turns of this monomania are recorded--to say nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style--prevents the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome. On the whole, however, one begins to grow impatient for more of the same sort as the three admirable chapters on the Rev. Mr. Yorick, and is not sorry to get to the opening of the second volume, with its half-tender, half-humorous, and wholly delightful account of Uncle Toby's difficulties in describing the siege operations before Namur, and of the happy chance by which these difficulties made him ultimately the fortunate possessor of a "hobby." Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of Sterne's unceasing interest in his own creations, and of his increasing consciousness of creative power. Captain Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in the first volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on the scene at all; but before the end of the second we know both of them thoroughly, within and without. Indeed, one might almost say that in the first half-dozen chapters which so excellently recount the origin of the corporal's fortification scheme, and the wounded officer's delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the simple characters--alike yet so different in their simplicity--of master and of man becomes definitely fixed in the reader's mind. And the total difference between the second and the first volume in point of fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor, the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from the humorous essayist, would almost seem to have started into being as we pass from the one volume to the other. There is nothing in the drolleries of the first volume--in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy's crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual collision between these crotchets and his brother's plain sense--to indicate the kind of power displayed in that remarkable colloquy _à quatre_, which begins with the arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim's recital of the Sermon on Conscience. Wit, humour, irony, quaint learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of these Sterne had displayed abundance already; but it is not in the earlier but in the later half of the first instalment of _Tristram Shandy_ that we first become conscious that he is something more than the possessor of all these things; that he is gifted with the genius of creation, and has sent forth new beings into that world of immortal shadows which to many of us is more real than our own. CHAPTER V. LONDON TRIUMPHS.--FIRST SET OF SERMONS.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOLS. III. AND IV.--COXWOLD.--VOLS. V. AND VI.--FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT.--PARIS.--TOULOUSE. (1760-1762.) Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron "awoke one morning," to "find himself famous." Seldom indeed has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued so eagerly and by such a distinguished crowd of hunters. The chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting impression on the spectators; for it was several years after (in 1773) that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his very just remark that "any man who has a name or who has the power of pleasing will be generally invited in London," observed gruffly that "the man Sterne," he was told, "had had engagements for three months." And truly it would appear from abundant evidence that "the man Sterne" gained such a social triumph as might well have turned a stronger head than his. Within twenty-four hours after his arrival his lodgings in Pall Mall were besieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors; and in a few weeks he had probably made the acquaintance of "everybody who was anybody" in the London society of that day. How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is revealed, with a simple vanity which almost disarms criticism, in many a passage of his correspondence. In one of his earliest letters to Miss Fourmantelle we find him proudly relating to her how already he "was engaged to ten noblemen and men of fashion." Of Garrick, who had warmly welcomed the humourist whose merits he had been the first to discover, Sterne says that he had "promised him at dinner to numbers of great people." Amongst these great people who sought him out for themselves was that discerning patron of ability in every shape, Lord Rockingham. In one of the many letters which Madame de Medalle flung dateless upon the world, but which from internal evidence we can assign to the early months of 1760, Sterne writes that he is about to "set off with a grand retinue of Lord Rockingham's (in whose suite I move) for Windsor" to witness, it should seem, an installation of a Knight of the Garter. It is in his letters to Miss Fourmantelle, however, that his almost boyish exultation at his London triumph discloses itself most frankly. "My rooms," he writes, "are filling every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour me." Never, he believes, had such homage been rendered to any man by devotees so distinguished. "The honours paid me were the greatest that were ever known from the great." The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, altogether an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous. But we must not judge Sterne in this matter by too severe a standard. He was by nature neither a dignified nor a self-contained man: he had a head particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation; and it must be allowed that few men's power of resisting giddiness at previously unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried. It was not only "the great" in the sense of the high in rank and social distinction by whom he was courted; he was welcomed also by the eminent in genius and learning; and it would be no very difficult task for him to flatter himself that it was the latter form of recognition which, he really valued most. Much, at any rate, in the way of undue elation may be forgiven to a country clergyman who suddenly found himself the centre of a court, which was regularly attended by statesmen, wits, and leaders of fashion, and with whom even bishops condescended to open gracious diplomatic communication. "Even all the bishops," he writes, "have sent their compliments;" and though this can hardly have been true of the whole Episcopal Bench, it is certain that Sterne received something more than a compliment from one bishop, who was a host in himself. He was introduced by Garrick to Warburton, and received high encouragement from that formidable prelate.[1] [Footnote 1: It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss Fourmantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold; and this strange present gave rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter.] The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the somewhat precarious money profits which depend on literary vogue. Only a few weeks after his arrival in town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of Coxwold, "a sweet retirement," as he describes it, "in comparison of Sutton," at which he was in future to pass most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire. What obtained him this piece of preferment is unknown. It may be that _Tristram Shandy_ drew the Yorkshire peer's attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman of genius living within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his lordship's gift, and that this was enough for him. But Sterne himself says--in writing a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance--"I hope I have been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me;" and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss idle tales about Sterne's having "black-mailed" the patron out of a presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70£ a year net. There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne and Warburton. Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect himself against the satiric humour of the author of the _Tristram Shandy_ by a substantial present of money. Coming to Garrick's ears, it was repeated by him--whether seriously or in jest--to Sterne, from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle's collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence of seven years later. "'Twas for all the world," he began, "like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood--gave it a suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it.... The story you told me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning"--(the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)--"this vile story, I say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air, usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for my Tristram--are we so run out of stock that there is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?" Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom the scandal had reached through a "society journal" of the time, he asks whether people would suppose he would be "such a fool as to fall foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy off the tutorship of Tristram--or that I should be fool enough to own that I had taken a purse for that purpose?" It will be remarked that Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton, but only his having received it by way of black-mail: and the most mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the strange present of a "purse of gold" from Warburton (whom at that time he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle. "I had a purse of guineas given me yesterday by a Bishop," he writes, triumphantly, but without volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. Sterne's letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him "the confutation of an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it." This, however, can hardly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne to abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious--and for much the same reasons--to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature. He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the bargain between them. The epithet of "irrevocable scoundrel," which he afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding from Warburton, than it would have been had it come from any one not habitually employing Warburton's peculiar vocabulary; but it at least argues no very cordial feeling on the Bishop's side. And, on the whole, one regrets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant story than could be wished. It is impossible to forget, however, that while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly less strict in those days than they are--or, at any rate, are recognized as being--in our own, there is nothing in Sterne's character to make us suppose him to have been at all in advance of the morality of his time. The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to take possession of his temporalities. His London triumph had not yet run its course. The first edition of Vols. I. and II. of _Tristram Shandy_ was exhausted in some three months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second; and, concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there appeared--in somewhat incongruous companionship--the announcement, "Speedily will be published, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick." The judicious Dodsley, or possibly the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would--they, no doubt, thought--be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in finding the kind of article required; and we may be tolerably sure that, even if Sterne did not perceive that fact for himself, his publisher hastened to inform him that "anything would do." Two of his pulpit discourses, the Assize Sermon and the Charity Sermon, had already been thought worthy of publication by their author in a separate form; and the latter of these found a place in the series; while the rest seem to have been simply the chance sweepings of the parson's sermon-drawer. The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, must be able--or so it seems to me--to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons are--with but few and partial exceptions--of the most commonplace character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the _crambe repetita_ of a hundred thousand homilies. A single extract will fully suffice for a specimen of Sterne's pre-Shandian homiletic style; his post-Shandian manner was very different, as we shall see. The preacher is discoursing upon the well-worn subject of the inconsistencies of human character: "If such a contrast was only observable in the different stages of a man's life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder or of just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may naturally enough be supposed to alter a man's sense of things, and so entirely to transform him that, not only in outward appearance but in the very cast and turn of his mind, he may be as unlike and different from the man he was twenty or thirty years ago as he ever was from anything of his own species. This, I say, is naturally to be accounted for, and in some cases might be praiseworthy too; but the observation is to be made of men in the same period of their lives that in the same day, sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly inconsistent and irreconcilable with themselves. Look at the man in one light, and he shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave; behold him in another point of view, and you see a creature all over folly and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice and indiscretion can make him. A man shall appear gentle, courteous, and benevolent to all mankind; follow him into his own house, maybe you see a tyrant morose and savage to all whose happiness depends upon his kindness. A third, in his general behaviour, is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue; shall have too much conscience and religion to cheat the man who trusts him, and perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor extends shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling of the party's reputation and good name, the dearest, the tenderest property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, and rob him there without measure or pity."--Sermon XI.--_On Evil Speaking_. There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, even conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose and careless, style; and it is no unfair sample of the whole. The calculation, however, of the author and his shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic merits or demerits of these sermons, they would "take" on the strength of the author's name; nor, it would seem, was their calculation disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons now lying before me is numbered the sixth, and its date is 1764; which represents a demand for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space of four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially reconciling a certain serious-minded portion of the public to the author. Sterne evidently hoped that they might; for we find him sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after the publication of the book, and receiving in return a letter of courteous thanks, and full of excellent advice as to the expediency of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a style of writing in the future. Sterne, in reply, protests that he would "willingly give no offence to mortal by anything which could look like the least violation of either decency or good manners;" but--and it is an important "but"--he cannot promise to "mutilate everything" in _Tristram_ "down to the prudish humour of every particular" (individual), though he will do his best; but, in any case, "laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as I can." And laugh he did, and in such Rabelaisian fashion that the Bishop (somewhat inconsistently for a critic who had welcomed Sterne on the appearance of the first two volumes expressly as the "English Rabelais") remarked of him afterwards with characteristic vigour, in a letter to a friend, that he fears the fellow is an "irrevocable scoundrel." The volumes, however, which earned "the fellow" this Episcopal benediction were not given to the world till the next year. At the end of May or beginning of June, 1760, Sterne went to his new home at Coxwold, and his letters soon begin to show him to us at work upon further records of Mr. Shandy's philosophical theory-spinning and the simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable that this year, 1760, was, on the whole, the happiest year of Sterne's life. His health, though always feeble, had not yet finally given way; and though the "vile cough" which was to bring him more than once to death's door, and at last to force it open, was already troubling him, he had that within him which made it easy to bear up against all such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at their highest. His worldly affairs were going at least as smoothly as they ever went. He was basking in that sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a temperament differing from that of the average Englishman, as does the physique of the Southern races from that of the hardier children of the North; and lastly, he was exulting in a new-born sense of creative power which no doubt made the composition of the earlier volumes of _Tristram_ a veritable labour of love. But the witty division of literary spinners into silkworms and spiders--those who spin because they are full, and those who do so because they are empty--is not exhaustive. There are human silk-worms who become gradually transformed into spiders--men who begin writing in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, long after that process has been completely performed, continue writing in order to fill an empty belly; and though Sterne did not live long enough to "write himself out," there are certain indications that he would not have left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were curiously combined with a distinct admixture of the "potboiler" spirit; and it was with something of the complacency of an annuitant that he looked forward to giving the public a couple of volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ every year as long as they would stand it. In these early days, however, there was no necessity even to discuss the probable period either of the writer's inspiration or of the reader's appetite. At present the public were as eager to consume more Shandyism as Sterne was ready to produce it: the demand was as active as the supply was easy. By the end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, and on January 27, 1761, they made their appearance. They had been disposed of in advance to Dodsley for 380_l._--no bad terms of remuneration in those days; but it is still likely enough that the publisher made a profitable bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. Their author's vogue in London, whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list was once more full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington, abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words: "You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.'s head; and for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first rank, as to fear no accident of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note the familiarity, as of an old _habitué_ of Ministerial antechambers, with which this country parson discusses the political changes of that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new Premier under the title B----e; and by a similar use of initials attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public, and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's retirement from office--"the pitched battle," as Sterne calls it, "wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet" in defence of his military policy. Thus he describes it: "There never was so full a House--the gallery full to the top--I was there all the day; when lo! a political fit of the gout seized the great combatant--he entered not the lists. Beckford got up and begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there, to put off the debate--it could not be done: so Beckford rose up and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly.... Legge answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord K. spoke long. Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious.... Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.'s character. This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the Hanover-score brought us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were the same as at the Peace of Utrecht--that the people behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly end in one." And then the letter, recurring to personal matters towards the close, records the success of Vols. III. and IV.: "One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry it up to the skies--the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible." This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition must have been exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed, another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and early in July he returned to Coxwold. From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne's life was little better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which, in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his. To him, with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights of Dr. Swishtail's; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor's pupils: "I rejoice you are in London--rest you there in peace; here 'tis the devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just now lay down and die." It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour's time "I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it all," but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much against the prevailing tone of discontented _ennui_ which pervades this letter. Apart, moreover, from Sterne's regrets of London, his country home was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode. His relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year. With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the _rôle_ of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband's triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of his six months' revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving so clearly that her husband preferred the world's society to hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his. Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so comfortable and so hopeless--secure alike against the risk of "scenes" and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from _amantium irae_ against all possibility of _redintegratio amoris._ To such perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his conjugal relations in this philosophic strain: "As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer it would have been a burning shame--else she declares herself happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense, built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe, and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit, though humorous;[2] a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you like the simile?" There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her husband's friends was wholly based upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband; but mutual indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty advanced stage before such a remark could, even half in jest, be possible. And with one more longing, lingering look at the scenes which he had quitted for a lot like that of the Duke of Buckingham's dog, upon whom his master pronounced the maledictory wish that "he were married and lived in the country," this characteristic letter concludes: "Oh, Lord! now are you going to Ranelagh to-night, and I am sitting sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him and said, 'What do'st thou here, Elijah?' 'Tis well that the spirit does not make the same at Coxwold, for unless for the few sheep left me to take care of in the wilderness, I might as well, nay, better, be at Mecca. When we find we can, by a shifting of places, run away from ourselves, what think you of a jaunt there before we finally pay a visit to the Vale of Jehoshaphat? As ill a fame as we have, I trust I shall one day or other see you face to face, so tell the two colonels if they love good company to live righteously and soberly, _as you do_, and then they will have no doubts or dangers within or without them. Present my best and warmest wishes to them, and advise the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager before the conclusion of the peace. Why will not the advice suit both, _par nobile fratrum?_" [Footnote 1: It is curious to note, as a point in the chronology of language, how exclusive is Sterne's employment of the words "humour," "humourists," in their older sense of "whimsicality," "an eccentric." The later change in its meaning gives to the word "though" in the above passage an almost comic effect.] In conclusion, he tells his friend that the next morning, if Heaven permit, he begins the fifth volume of _Shandy_, and adds, defiantly, that he "cares not a curse for the critics," but "will load my vehicle with what goods He sends me, and they may take 'em off my hands or let 'em alone." The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made with, something more than a jesting intent. Sterne had already begun to be seriously alarmed, and not without reason, about the condition of his health. He shrank from facing another English winter, and meditated a southward flight so soon as he should have finished his fifth and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the printer's hands. His publisher he had changed, for what reason is not known, and the firm of Becket & De Hondt had taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by the end of the year to be free to depart from England, and already he had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical superiors for the necessary leave of absence. He seems to have been treated with all consideration in the matter. His Archbishop, on being applied to, at once excused him from parochial work for a year, and promised, if it should be necessary, to double that term. Fortified with this permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and betook himself to London, with his now completed volumes, at the setting in of the winter. On the 21st of December they made their appearance, and in about three weeks from that date their author left England, with the intention of wintering in the South of France. There were difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be faced--a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20£., and a political difficulty, for the removal of which Sterne had to employ the good offices of new acquaintance later on. He reached Paris about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a reception which interposed, as might have been expected, the most effectual of obstacles to his further progress southward. He was received in Paris with open arms, and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the philosophic _salons_. Again was the old intoxicating cup presented to his lips--this time, too, with more dexterous than English hands--and again did he drink deeply of it. "My head is turned," he writes to Garrick, "with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met with here. _Tristram_ was almost as much known here as in London, at least among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced into so many circles ('tis _comme à Londres_) I have just now a fortnight's dinners and suppers on my hands." We may venture to doubt whether French politeness had not been in one respect taken somewhat too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and whether it was much more than the name and general reputation of _Tristram_, which was "almost as much known" in Paris as in London. The dinners and suppers, however, were, at any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself with all his usual unclerical _abandon_. "I Shandy it away," he writes in his boyish fashion to Garrick, "fifty times more than I was ever wont, talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your days, and to all sorts of people. 'Qui le diable est cet homme-là?' said Choiseul, t'other day, 'ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be listening to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] "You'll think me as vain as a devil was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were distinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the English author more important services than that of offering him hospitality and flattery. Peace had not been formally concluded between France and England, and the passport with which Sterne had been graciously furnished by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from making special application to the French Government for permission to remain in the country. In this request he was influentially backed. "My application," he writes, "to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly, for not only M. Pelletière (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my affair, but the Count de Limbourg. The Baron d'Holbach has offered any security for the inoffensiveness of my behaviour in France--'tis more, you rogue! than you will do." And then the orthodox, or professedly orthodox, English divine, goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange new friend: "This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the great protector of wits and of the _savans_ who are no wits; keeps open house three days a week--his house is now, as yours was to me, my own--he lives at great expense." Equally communicative is he as to his other great acquaintances. Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom by an "odd incident" (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) "I found reading _Tristram_ when I was introduced to him, which I was," he adds (without perceiving the connexion between this fact and the "incident"), "at his desire;" Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not yet �galité) himself, "who has suffered my portrait to be added to the number of some odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with him." Nor was it only in the delights of society that Sterne was now revelling. He was passionately fond of the theatre, and his letters to Garrick are full of eager criticism of the great French performers, intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than delicate, of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, in _Iphigénie_, he says "she is extremely great. Would to God you had one or two like her. What a luxury to see you with one of such power in the same interesting scene! But 'tis too much." Again he writes: "The French comedy I seldom visit; they act scarce anything but tragedies; and the Clairon is great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some parts still greater than her. Yet I cannot bear preaching--I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my younger days." And in a later letter: "After a vile suspension of three weeks, we are beginning with our comedies and operas. Yours I hear never flourished more; here the comic actors were never so low; the tragedians hold up their heads in all senses. I have known _one little man_ support the theatrical world like a David Atlas upon his shoulders, but Préville can't do half as much here, though Mad. Clairon stands by him and sets her back to his. She is very great, however, and highly improved since you saw her. She also supports her dignity at table, and has her public day every Thursday, when she gives to eat (as they say here) to all that are hungry and dry. You are much talked of here, and much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation at the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest problem in nature in this meridian that one and the same man should possess such tragic and comic powers, and in such an _equilibrio_ as to divide the world for which of the two Nature intended him." And while on this subject of the stage let us pause for a moment to glance at an incident which connects Sterne with one of the most famous of his French contemporaries. He has been asked "by a lady of talent," he tells Garrick, "to read a tragedy, and conjecture if it would do for you. 'Tis from the plan of Diderot; and, possibly, half a translation of it: _The Natural Son, or the Triumph of Virtue_, in five acts. It has too much sentiment in it (at least for me); the speeches too long, and savour too much of preaching. This may be a second reason it is not to my taste--'tis all love, love, love throughout, without much separation in the characters. So I fear it would not do for your stage, and perhaps for the very reason which recommends it to a French one." It is curious to see the "adaptator cerebrosuga" at work in those days as in these; though not, in this instance, as it seems, with as successful results. _The Natural Son, or the Triumph of Virtue_, is not known to have reached either English readers or English theatrical audiences. The French original, as we know, fared scarcely better. "It was not until 1771," says Diderot's latest English biographer, "that the directors of the French Comedy could be induced to place _Le Fils Naturel_ on the stage. The actors detested their task, and, as we can well believe, went sulkily through parts which they had not taken the trouble to master. The public felt as little interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after one or two representations, it was put aside.[1]" [Footnote 1: Morley: _Diderot and the Encyclopaedists_, ii. 305.] Another, and it is to be guessed a too congenial, acquaintance formed by Sterne in Paris was that of Crébillon; and with him he concluded "a convention," unedifying enough, whether in jest or earnest: "As soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of _T. Shandy_, which is to be answered by recrimination upon the liberties in his own works. These are to be printed together--Crébillon against Sterne, Sterne against Crébillon--the copy to be sold, and the money equally divided. This is good Swiss-policy," he adds; and the idea (which was never carried out) had certainly the merit of ingenuity, if no other. The words "as soon as I get to Toulouse," in a letter written from Paris on the 10th of April, might well have reminded Sterne of the strange way in which he had carried out his intention of "wintering in the South." He insists, however, upon the curative effects of his winter of gaiety in Paris. "I am recovered greatly," he says; "and if I could spend one whole winter at Toulouse, I should be fortified in my inner man beyond all danger of relapsing." There was another, too, for whom this change of climate had become imperatively necessary. For three winters past his daughter Lydia, now fourteen years old, had been suffering severely from asthma, and needed to try "the last remedy of a warmer and softer air." Her father, therefore, was about to solicit passports for his wife and daughter, with a view to their joining him at once in Paris, whence, after a month's stay, they were to depart together for the South. This application for passports he intended, he said, to make "this week:" and it would seem that the intention was carried out; but, for reasons explained in a letter which Mr. Fitzgerald was the first to publish, it was not till the middle of the next month that he was able to make preparation for their joining him. From this letter--written to his Archbishop, to request an extension of his leave--we learn that while applying for the passports he was attacked with a fever, "which has ended the worst way it could for me, in a _défluxion (de) poitrine_, as the French physicians call it. It is generally fatal to weak lungs, so that I have lost in ten days all I have gained since I came here; and from a relaxation of my lungs have lost my voice entirely, that 'twill be much if I ever quite recover it. This evil sends me directly to Toulouse, for which I set out from this place directly my family arrives." Evidently there was no time to be lost, and a week after the date of this letter we find him in communication with Mrs. and Miss Sterne, and making arrangements for what was, in those days, a somewhat formidable undertaking--the journey of two ladies from the North of England to the centre of France. The correspondence which ensued may be said to give us the last pleasant glimpse of Sterne's relations with his wife. One can hardly help suspecting, of course, that it was his solicitude for the safety and comfort of his much-loved daughter that mainly inspired the affectionate anxiety which pervades these letters to Mrs. Sterne; but their writer is, at the very least, entitled to credit for allowing no difference of tone to reveal itself in the terms in which he speaks of wife and child. And, whichever of the two he was mainly thinking of, there is something very engaging in the thoughtful minuteness of his instructions to the two women travellers, the earnestness of his attempts to inspire them with courage for their enterprise, and the sincere fervour of his many commendations of them to the Divine keeping. The mixture of "canny" counsel and pious invocation has frequently a droll effect: as when the advice to "give the custom-house officers what I told you, and at Calais more, if you have much Scotch snuff;" and "to drink small Rhenish to keep you cool, that is, if you like it," is rounded off by the ejaculation, "So God in Heaven prosper and go along with you!" Letter after letter did he send them, full of such reminders as that "they have bad pins and vile needles here," that it would be advisable to bring with them a strong bottle-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle; till at last, in the final words of preparation, his language assumes something of the solemnity of a general addressing his army on the eve of a well-nigh desperate enterprise: "Pluck up your spirits--trust in God, in me, and yourselves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter all these difficulties ten times told. Write instantly, and tell me you triumph over all fears--tell me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to you. You say she grows like me: let her show me she does so in her contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the apprehensions of them, which is better still." At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken; and, on Thursday, July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived in Paris. Their stay there was not long--not much extended, probably, beyond the proposed week. For Sterne's health had, some ten days before the arrival of his family, again given him warning to depart quickly. He had but a few weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke in his letter to the Archbishop, when he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs. It happened in the night, and "finding in the morning that I was likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately," he says, in a sentence which quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical treatment, "for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms. This saved me"--_i.e._ did not kill me--"and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon my back in bed: the breach healed, and in a week after I got out." But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent "hurrying about," no doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, "made me think it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about the 20th of the month, and "in the midst of such heats that the oldest Frenchman never remembers the like," the party set off by way of Lyons and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination. Their journey seems to have been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary discomfort, and incredible length; and it is not till the second week in August that we again take up the broken thread of his correspondence. Writing to Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks of its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse; and adds that "in our journey we suffered so much from the heats, it gives me pain to remember it. I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as broad as a twenty-four sols piece. Good God! we were toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed, carbonaded, on one side or other, all the way: and being all done through (_assez cuits_) in the day, we were eat up at night by bugs and other unswept-out vermin, the legal inhabitants, if length of possession give right, at every inn on the way." A few miles from Beaucaire he broke a hind wheel of his carriage, and was obliged in consequence "to sit five hours on a gravelly road without one drop of water, or possibility of getting any;" and here, to mend the matter, he was cursed with "two dough-hearted fools" for postilions, who "fell a-crying 'nothing was to be done!'" and could only be recalled to a worthier and more helpful mood by Sterne's "pulling off his coat and waistcoat," and "threatening to thrash them both within an inch of their lives." The longest journey, however, must come to an end; and the party found much to console them at Toulouse for the miseries of travel. They were fortunate enough to secure one of those large, old comfortable houses which were and, here and there, perhaps, still are to be hired on the outskirts of provincial towns, at a rent which would now be thought absurdly small; and Sterne writes in terms of high complacency of his temporary abode. "Excellent," "well furnished," "elegant beyond anything I ever looked for," are some of the expressions of praise which it draws from him. He observes with pride that the "very great _salle à compagnie_ is as large as Baron d'Holbach's;" and he records with great satisfaction--as well he might--that for the use of this and a country house two miles out of town, "besides the enjoyment of gardens, which the landlord engaged to keep in order," he was to pay no more than thirty pounds a year. "All things," he adds, "are cheap in proportion: so we shall live here for a very, very little." And this, no doubt, was to Sterne a matter of some moment at this time. The expenses of his long and tedious journey must have been heavy; and the gold-yielding vein of literary popularity, which he had for three years been working, had already begun to show signs of exhaustion. _Tristram Shandy_ had lost its first vogue; and the fifth and sixth volumes, the copyright of which he does not seem to have disposed of, were "going off" but slowly. CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN THE SOUTH.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--VOLS. VII. AND VIII.--SECOND SET OF SERMONS. (1762-1765.) The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from the true--in ridding Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham admirers. This is not to say, of course, that there might not have been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's peculiar methods must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited gain. The fifth and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere eccentricity had begun to pall. But if this were the sole explanation of the book's declining popularity, we should have to admit that the adverse judgment of the public had been delayed too long for justice, and had passed over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences. For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in its concluding chapters; and the fifth and sixth volumes may, at any rate, quite safely challenge favourable comparison with the fourth--the poorest, I venture to think, of the whole series. There is nothing in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome exercise in _double entendre_, Slawkenbergius's Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives animation to the volume almost from beginning to end. The arrival of the news of Bobby Shandy's death, and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic father and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable absurdity, and the "Tristrapaedia," with its ingenious project for opening up innumerable "tracks of inquiry" before the mind of the pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of the auxiliary verbs, is in the author's happiest vein. The sixth volume, again, which contains the irresistible dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great question of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if not wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully entitled to rank beside its predecessors. On the whole, therefore, it must be said that the colder reception accorded to this instalment of the novel, as compared with the previous one, can hardly be justified on sound critical grounds. But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact, the cause of _Tristram's_ declining popularity may be confidently inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its admirably vivid and spirited scenes of Continental travel, and the eighth and ninth, with their charming narrative of Captain Shandy's love affair, were but slightly more successful. The readers whom this, the third instalment of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine, those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for the former; who had been caught by the writer's eccentricity, without appreciating his insight into character and his graphic power, and who had seen no other aspects of his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities which, after first amusing, had begun, in the natural course of things, to weary them. Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the Southern warmth to that buoyancy which never long deserted them, Sterne had begun to set to work upon a new volume. His letters show that this was not the seventh but the eighth; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture, that the materials ultimately given to the world in the former volume were originally designed for another work, appears exceedingly probable. But for some time after his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it would seem, to resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable, through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies might anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to Hall Stevenson, "of an epidemic vile fever which killed hundreds about me. The physicians here," he adds, "are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most ignorant of all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature. She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become "stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am," he says, "busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over head and ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy's ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful Tristram. It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that he refers to, when speaking in this letter of "hints and projects for other works." Originally intended to form a part of the volume afterwards published as the _Sentimental Journey_, it was found necessary--under pressure, it is to be supposed, of insufficient matter--to work them up instead into an interpolated seventh volume of _Tristram Shandy_. At the moment, however, he no doubt as little foresaw this as he did the delay which was to take place before any continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contemplated no very long absence from England. "When I have reaped the benefit of the winter at Toulouse, I cannot see I have anything more to do with it. Therefore, after having gone with my wife and girl to Bagnères, I shall return from whence I came." Already, however, one can perceive signs of his having too presumptuously marked out his future. "My wife wants to stay another year, to save money; and this opposition of wishes, though it will not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twill not be as sweet as sugar." And again: "If the snows will suffer me, I propose to spend two or three months at Barége or Bagnères; but my dear wife is against all schemes of additional expense, which wicked propensity (though not of despotic power) yet I cannot suffer--though, by-the-bye, laudable enough. But she may talk; I will go my own way, and she will acquiesce without a word of debate on the subject. Who can say so much in praise of his wife? Few, I trow." The tone of contemptuous amiability shows pretty clearly that the relations between husband and wife had in nowise improved. But wives do not always lose all their influence over husbands' wills along with the power over their affections; and it will be seen that Sterne did _not_ make his projected winter trip to Bagnères, and that he did remain at Toulouse for a considerable part of the second year for which Mrs. Sterne desired to prolong their stay. The place, however, was not to his taste; and he was not the first traveller in France who, delighted with the gaiety of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his _ennui_ in "the eternal platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do not mind I shall grow most stupid and sententious." With such apprehensions it is not surprising that he should have eagerly welcomed any distraction that chance might offer, and in December we find him joyfully informing his chief correspondent of the period, Mr. Foley--who to his services as Sterne's banker seems to have added those of a most helpful and trusted friend--that "there are a company of English strollers arrived here who are to act comedies all the Christmas, and are now busy in making dresses and preparing some of our best comedies." These so-called strollers were, in fact, certain members of the English colony in Toulouse, and their performances were among the first of those "amateur theatrical" entertainments which now-a-days may be said to rival the famous "morning drum-beat" of Daniel Webster's oration, in marking the ubiquity of British boredom, as the _reveil_ does that of British power over all the terrestrial globe. "The next week," writes Sterne, "with a grand orchestra, we play _The Busybody_, and the _Journey to London_ the week after; but I have some thought of adapting it to our situation, and making it the _Journey to Toulouse_, which, with the change of half-a-dozen scenes, may be easily done. Thus, my dear Foley, for want of something better we have recourse to ourselves, and strike out the best amusements we can from such materials." "Recourse to ourselves," however, means, in strict accuracy, "recourse to each other;" and when the amateur players had played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of contributing to each others' amusement, it is probable that "recourse to ourselves," in the exact sense of the phrase, was found ineffective--in Sterne's case, at any rate--to stave off _ennui_. To him, with his copiously if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply the line of Persius, "Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex;" but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that numerous order of intellects which are the convivial associates, rather than the fireside companions, of their owners, and which, when deprived of the stimulus of external excitement, are apt to become very dull company indeed. Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of mind from his literary work--a form of intellectual enjoyment which, indeed, more often presupposes than begets good spirits in such temperaments as his. He declares, it is true, that he "sports much with my Uncle Toby" in the volume which he is now "fabricating for the laughing part of the world;" but if so he must have sported only after a very desultory and dilatory fashion. On the whole one cannot escape a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to "the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife," which he had left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone. His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course, before he changed his quarters. "The first week in June," he writes in April to Mr. Foley, "I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household, to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills at Bagnères, where I expect much health and much amusement from all corners of the earth." He talked too at this time of spending the winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the following April by way of Paris; "but this," he adds, "is a sketch only," and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he was in any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, be tempted to spend another winter there. It did not suit his health, as he had hoped: he complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagnères; whence after a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter quarters at Montpellier, where "my wife and daughter," he writes, "purpose to stay at least a year behind me." His own intention was to set out in February for England, "where my heart has been fled these six months." Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philosophy. "My wife," he writes in January, "returns to Toulouse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagnères. I, on the contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorkshire. We all live the longer, at least the happier, for having things our own way. This is my conjugal maxim. I own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain 'tis not the worst." It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate, should wish to turn his back on Montpellier. Again had the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness; the "sharp air" of the place disagreed with him, and his physicians, after having him under their hands more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed any longer in Montpellier it would be fatal to him. How soon after that somewhat late warning he took his departure there is no record to show; but it is not till the middle of May that we find him writing from Paris to his daughter. And since he there announces his intention of leaving for England in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that he had arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before. His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents--trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. The message was brought him, he writes, "when I was playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amusement to prepare myself for the business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my head." The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15--Hezekiah's admission of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded upon the _mal-à-propos_ text; but still it was unquestionably a fair subject for "chaff," and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less a person than David Hume. Gossip having magnified this into a dispute between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle story in a passage deriving an additional interest from its tribute to that sweet disposition which had an equal charm for two men so utterly unlike as the author of _Tristram Shandy_ and the author of the _Wealth of Nations_. "I should," he writes, "be exceedingly surprised to hear that David ever had an unpleasant contention with any man; and if I should ever be made to believe that such an event had happened, nothing would persuade me that his opponent was not in the wrong, for in my life did I never meet with a being of a more placid and gentle nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character which has given more consequence and force to his scepticism than all the arguments of his sophistry." The real truth of the matter was that, meeting Sterne at Lord Hertford's table on the day when he had preached at the Embassy Chapel, "David was disposed to make a little merry with the parson, and in return the parson was equally disposed to make a little merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and the company laughed with us both." It would be absurd, of course, to identify Sterne's latitudinarian _bonhomie_ with the higher order of tolerance; but many a more confirmed and notorious Gallio than the clerical humourist would have assumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a presence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate of Sterne's dignity, displays him to us as laudably free from hypocrisy. But the long holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its short last act of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In the third or fourth week of May Sterne quitted Paris; and after a stay of a few weeks in London he returned to the Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent some thirty months. Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed since the publication of the last instalment of _Tristram Shandy_, the new one was far from ready; and even in the "sweet retirement" of Coxwold he seems to have made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the "sweet retirement" itself became soon a little tedious to him. The month of September found him already bored with work and solitude; and the fine autumn weather of 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making at what was even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering-place. "I do not think," he writes, with characteristic incoherence, to Hall Stevenson--"I do not think a week or ten days' playing the good fellow (at this very time) so abominable a thing; but if a man could get there cleverly, and every soul in his house in the mind to try what could be done in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in these affairs. Therefore, as a man may do worse things, the plain English of all which is, that I am going to leave a few poor sheep in the wilderness for fourteen days, and from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see what is doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning afterwards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now, some folks say there is much company there, and some say not; and I believe there is neither the one nor the other, but will be both if the world will have patience for a month or so." Of his work he has not much to say: "I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle Toby's amours. There is no sitting and cudgelling one's brains whilst the sun shines bright. 'Twill be all over in six or seven weeks; and there are dismal weeks enow after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside." He was anxious that his boon companion should join him at Scarborough; but that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to content himself with the usual gay society of the place. Three weeks, it seems, were passed by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of bodily and mental relaxation--weeks which he spent, he afterwards writes, in "drinking the waters, and receiving from them marvellous strength, had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much." By the end of the month he was back again at Coxwold, "returned to my Philosophical Hut to finish _Tristram_, which I calculate will be ready for the world about Christmas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix my headquarters at London for the winter, unless my cough pushes me forward to your metropolis" (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), "or that I can persuade some _gros milord_ to make a trip to you." Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse at that thoroughly desentimentalized "domestic interior" which the sentimentalist's household had long presented to the view. Writing to request a remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban--a duty which, to do him justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed--Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Foley to "do something equally essential to rectify a mistake in the mind of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her a hint not long ago 'that she was separated from me for life.' Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives amongst, 'twould be unmerciful to let her or my daughter suffer by it. So do be so good as to undeceive him; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it with impatience from her) to rejoin me." Early in November the two new volumes of _Shandy_ began to approach completion; for by this time Sterne had already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of his French travels, which now do duty as Vol. VII. "You will read," he tells Foley, "as odd a tour through France as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel-writer since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good-tempered satire upon travelling--as _puppies_ travel." By the 16th of the month he had "finished my two volumes of _Tristram_," and looked to be in London at Christmas, "whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year. At least I shall not defer it above another." On the 26th of January, 1765, the two new volumes were given to the world. Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of what would now be called "book-making," this issue will yet bear comparison, I think, with the best of its predecessors. Its sketches of travel, though destined to be surpassed in vigour and freedom of draftsmanship by the _Sentimental Journey_, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want of connexion with the story--if story it can be called--is so little felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introduction of Mr. Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in apparent concession to the popular prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between the various parts of a narrative. The first seventeen chapters are, perhaps, as freshly delightful reading as anything in Sterne. They are literally filled and brimming over with the exhilaration of travel: written, or at least prepared for writing, we can clearly see, under the full intoxicant effect which a bewildering succession of new sights and sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest of us, and which would set a head like Sterne's in an absolute whirl. The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun--for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails--unsurpassed by anything of the same kind from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who has outgrown what may be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story which begins a few chapters afterwards--that of the Abbess and Novice of the Convent of Andouillets! The adult male person is not so much shocked at the coarseness of this story as astounded at the bathos of its introduction. It is as though some matchless connoisseur in wine, after having a hundred times demonstrated the unerring discrimination of his palate for the finest brands, should then produce some vile and loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with all the relish with which he seems to be swallowing it himself. This story of the Abbess and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters, or former volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler passages of humour to be found there--in downright apprehension lest we should turn out to have read these "good things," not "in," but "into," our author. The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering whether the finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate equally satisfied with both. But one should, of course, add that it is only in respect of its supposed humour that this story shakes its readers' faith in the gifts of the narrator. As a mere piece of story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure-painting, it is quite perversely skilful. There is something almost irritating, as a waste of powers on unworthy material, in the prettiness of the picture which Sterne draws of the preparations for the departure of the two _religieuses_--the stir in the simple village, the co-operating labours of the gardener and the tailor, the carpenter and the smith, and all those other little details which bring the whole scene before the eye so vividly that Sterne may, perhaps, in all seriousness, and not merely as a piece of his characteristic persiflage, have thrown in the exclamation, "I declare I am interested in this story, and wish I had been there." Nothing, again, could be better done than the sketch of the little good-natured, "broad-set" gardener, who acted as the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the indiscretions by which he was betrayed into temporary desertion of his duties. The whole scene is Chaucerian in its sharpness of outline and translucency of atmosphere: though there, unfortunately, the resemblance ends. Sterne's manner of saying what we now leave unsaid is as unlike Chaucer's, and as unlike for the worse, as it can possibly be. Still, a certain amount of this element of the _non nominandum_ must be compounded for, one regrets to say, in nearly every chapter that Sterne ever wrote; and there is certainly less than the average amount of it in the seventh volume. Then, again, this volume contains the famous scene with the ass--the live and genuinely touching, and not the dead and fictitiously pathetic, animal; and that perfect piece of comic dialogue--the interview between the puzzled English traveller and the French commissary of the posts. To have suggested this scene is, perhaps, the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system of the _Ancien régime_ upon the grateful remembrance of the world. A scheme of taxation which exacted posting-charges from a traveller who proposed to continue his journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of drollery infused into its mere vexatiousness; but a whole volume of satire could hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger light than is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the astonished Tristram and the officer of the fisc, who had just handed him a little bill for six livres four sous: "'Upon what account?' said I. "''Tis upon the part of the King,' said the commissary, heaving up his shoulders. "'My good friend,' quoth I, 'as sure as I am I, and you are you--' "'And who are you?' he said. "'Don't puzzle me,' said I. 'But it is an indubitable verity,' I continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the form of my asseveration,' that I owe the King of France nothing but my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health and pastime in the world.' "'Pardonnez-moi,' replied the commissary. 'You are indebted to him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, on your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more than three livres two sous.' "'But I don't go by land,' said I. "'You may if you please,' replied the commissary. "'Your most obedient servant,' said I, making him a low bow. "The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding, made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by a bow in my life. 'The devil take the serious character of these people,' said I, aside; 'they understand no more of irony than this.' The comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something sealed up my lips. I could not pronounce the name. "'Sir,' said I, collecting myself, 'it is not my intention to take post.' "'But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. 'You may if you choose.' "'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I do not choose.' "'But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.' "'Ay, for the salt,' said I, 'I know.' "'And for the post, too,' added he. "'Defend me!' cried I. 'I travel by water. I am going down the Rhone this very afternoon; my baggage is in the boat, and I have actually paid nine livres for my passage.' "'C'est tout égal--'tis all one,' said he. "'Bon Dieu! What! pay for the way I go and for the way I do not go?' "'C'est tout égal,' replied the commissary. "'The devil it is!' said I. 'But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles first. O, England! England! thou land of liberty and climate of good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!' cried I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe--when the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church. "'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making me pay for going by oil.'" [Footnote 1: It is the penalty--I suppose the just penalty--paid by habitually extravagant humourists, that _meaning_ not being always expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked. The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.] The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests that the treatment to which he is being subjected is "contrary to the law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:" "'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand. "'De par le Roi.' ''Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so read on.... 'By all which it appears,' quoth I, having read it over a little too rapidly, 'that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris, he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it.' "'Excuse me,' said the commissary, 'the spirit of the ordinance is this, that if you set out with an intention of running post from Paris to Avignon, &c., you shall not change that intention or mode of travelling without first satisfying the fermiers for two posts further than the place you repent at; and 'tis founded,' continued he, 'upon this, that the revenues are not to fall short through your fickleness.' "'O, by heavens!' cried I, 'if fickleness is taxable in France, we have nothing to do but to make the best peace we can.' "And so the peace was made." And the volume ends with the dance of villagers on "the road between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto wine in all France"--that charming little idyll which won the unwilling admiration of the least friendly of Sterne's critics.[1] With the close of this volume the shadowy Tristram disappears altogether from the scene; and even the clearly-sketched figures of Mr. and Mrs. Shandy recede somewhat into the background. The courtship of my Uncle Toby forms the whole _motif_ and indeed almost the entire substance, of the next volume. Of this famous episode in the novel a great deal has been said and written, and much of the praise bestowed upon it is certainly deserved. The artful coquetries of the fascinating widow, and the gradual capitulation of the Captain, are studied with admirable power of humorous insight, and described with infinite grace and skill. But there is, perhaps, no episode in the novel which brings out what may be called the perversity of Sterne's animalism in a more exasperating way. It is not so much the amount of this element as the time, place, and manner in which it makes its presence felt. The senses must, of course, play their part in all love affairs, except those of the angels--or the triangles; and such writers as Byron, for instance, are quite free from the charge of over-spiritualizing their description of the passion. Yet one might safely say that there is far less to repel a healthy mind in the poet's account of the amour of Juan and Haidee than is to be found in many a passage in this volume. It is not merely that one is the poetry and the other the prose of the sexual passion: the distinction goes deeper, and points to a fundamental difference of attitude towards their subject in the two writers' minds. The success of this instalment of _Tristram Shandy_ appears to have been slightly greater than that of the preceding one. Writing from London, where he was once more basking in the sunshine of social popularity, to Garrick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765): "I have had a lucrative campaign here. _Shandy_ sells well," and "I am taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which will more than double the gains of _Shandy_. It goes into the world with a prancing list _de toute la noblesse_, which will bring me in three hundred pounds, exclusive of the sale of the copy." The list was, indeed, extensive and distinguished enough to justify the curious epithet which he applies to it; but the cavalcade of noble names continued to "prance" for some considerable time without advancing. Yet he had good reasons, according to his own account, for wishing to push on their publication. His parsonage-house at Button had just been burnt down through the carelessness of one of his curate's household, with a loss to Sterne of some 350_l._ "As soon as I can," he says, "I must rebuild it, but I lack the means at present." Nevertheless, the new sermons continued to hang fire. Again, in April he describes the subscription list as "the most splendid list which ever pranced before a book since subscription came into fashion;" but though the volumes which it was to usher into the world were then spoken of as about to be printed "very soon," he has again in July to write of them only as "forthcoming in September, though I fear not in time to bring them with me" to Paris. And, as a matter of fact, they do not seem to have made their appearance until after Sterne had quitted England on his second and last Continental journey. The full subscription list may have had the effect of relaxing his energies; but the subscribers had no reason to complain when, in 1766, the volumes at last appeared. The reception given to the first batch of sermons which Sterne had published was quite favourable enough to encourage a repetition of the experiment. He was shrewd enough, however, to perceive that on this second occasion a somewhat different sort of article would be required. In the first flush of _Tristram Shandy's_ success, and in the first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession of the writer and the unbounded license of the book, he could safely reckon on as large and curious a public for _any_ sermons whatever from the pen of Mr. Yorick. There was no need that the humourist in his pulpit should at all resemble the humourist at his desk, or, indeed, that he should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure. The great desire of the world was to know what he _did_ resemble in this new and incongruous position. Men wished to see what the queer, sly face looked like over a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight would be a strange and interesting one, at any rate. Five years afterwards, however, the case was different. The public then had already had one set of sermons, and had discovered that the humorous Mr. Sterne was not a very different man in the pulpit from the dullest and most decorous of his brethren. Such discoveries as these are instructive to make, but not attractive to dwell upon; and Sterne was fully alive to the probability that there would be no great demand for a volume of sermons which should only illustrate for the second time the fact that he could be as commonplace as his neighbour. He saw that in future the Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author of _Tristram Shandy,_ and it is not improbable that from 1760 onwards he composed his parochial sermons with especial attention to this mode of qualifying them for republication. There is, at any rate, no slight critical difficulty in believing that the bulk of the sermons of 1766 can be assigned to the same literary period as the sermons of 1761. The one set seems as manifestly to belong to the post-Shandian as the other does to the pre-Shandian era; and in some, indeed, of the apparently later productions the daring quaintness of style and illustration is carried so far that, except for the fact that Sterne had no time to spare for the composition of sermons not intended for professional use, one would have been disposed to believe that they neither were nor were meant to be delivered from the pulpit at all.[1] Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power displays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illustration which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 considerably more entertaining reading than those of 1761. In the first of the latter series, for instance--the sermon on Shimei--a discourse in which there are no very noticeable sallies of unclerical humour, the quality of liveliness is very conspicuously present. The preacher's view of the character of Shimei, and of his behaviour to David, is hardly that, perhaps, of a competent historical critic, and in treating of the Benjamite's insults to the King of Israel he appears to take no account of the blood-feud between the house of David and the clan to which the railer belonged; just as in commenting on Shimei's subsequent and most abject submission to the victorious monarch, Sterne lays altogether too much stress upon conduct which is indicative, not so much of any exceptional meanness of disposition, as of the ordinary suppleness of the Oriental put in fear of his life. However, it makes a more piquant and dramatic picture to represent Shimei as a type of the wretch of insolence and servility compact, with a tongue ever ready to be loosed against the unfortunate, and a knee ever ready to be bent to the strong. And thus he moralizes on his conception: [Footnote 1: Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some at least of these sermons were actually composed in the capacity of _littérateur_ and not of divine--for the press and not for the pulpit.] "There is not a character in the world which has so bad an influence upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with honest checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world will never be undone; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both extremes: for thou corruptest prosperity, and 'tis thou who hast broken the heart of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits can be ambitious ones 'tis a character we never shall want. Oh! it infests the court, the camp, the cabinet; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, haste! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on heavily. Shimei doubles his speed; but 'tis the contrary way: he flies like the wind over a sandy desert.... Stay, Shimei! 'tis your patron, your friend, your benefactor, the man who has saved you from the dunghill. 'Tis all one to Shimei. Shimei is the barometer of every man's fortune; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the simile will admit of.[1] Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs over Shimei's brow! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the captain of the host without success? Look not into the Court Calendar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, though not to Shimei? No matter. The worst officer of the law shall not be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must rise up as one man to reproach it? When it lost everything, did it lose the right to pity too? Or did he who maketh poor as well as maketh rich strip it of its natural powers to mollify the heart and supple the temper of your race? Trust me you have much to answer for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from spirits like yours which has gradually taught the world to look upon it as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst disgrace. And what is it, I beseech you--what is it that men will not do to keep clear of so sore an imputation and punishment? Is it not to fly from this that he rises early, late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness? that he plots, contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes, tries all garments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as it may favour his escape?" And though the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with an assurance that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we are surrounded, it is in our power to "lay the foundation of our peace (where it ought to be) within our own hearts," yet the preacher can, in the midst of his earlier reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic outburst: "O Shimei! would to Heaven, when thou wast slain, that all thy family had been slain with thee, and not one of thy resemblance left! But ye have multiplied exceedingly, and replenished the earth; and if I prophesy rightly, ye will in the end subdue it." [Footnote 1: Which are not many in the case of a _barometer_.] Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal himself with more strangely comical effect under the gown of the divine than in the sermon on "The Prodigal Son." The repentant spendthrift has returned to his father's house, and is about to confess his follies. But-- "Alas! How shall he tell his story? "Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East; the costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them; the expenses of singing men and singing women; the flute, the harp, the sackbut, and all kinds of music; the dress of the Persian Court how magnificent! their slaves how numerous! their chariots, their homes, their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devoured! what expectations from strangers of condition! what exactions! How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated at Damascus by one of the best men in the world; that he had lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off with it to the Ganges; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead; that he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to a worker in graven images; that the images he had purchased produced him nothing, that they could not be transported across the wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan; that the apes and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his hands; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he had brought from Egypt; that all had gone wrong from the day he forsook his father's house?" All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a sermon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what may be called the "professional" moral of the parable, and glides off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections, suggested--or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested--by the text. "I know not," he says, "whether it would be a subject of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the Prodigal Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of the Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance; and that by the elder brother he intended manifestly the more forward of the Jews," &c. But, whether it would edify you or not, he goes on, in effect, to say, I do not propose to provide you with edification in that kind. "These uses have been so ably set forth in so many good sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall turn aside from them at present, and content myself with some reflections upon that fatal passion which led him--and so many thousands after the example--to gather all he had together and take his journey into a far country." In other words, "I propose to make the parable a peg whereon to hang a few observations on (what does the reader suppose?) the practice of sending young men upon the Grand Tour, accompanied by a 'bear-leader,' and herein of the various kinds of bear-leaders, and the services which they do, and do not, render to their charges; with a few words on society in Continental cities, and a true view of 'letters of introduction.'" That is literally the substance of the remainder of the sermon. And thus pleasantly does the preacher play with his curious subject: "But you will send an able pilot with your son--a scholar. If wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you do well; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or natural philosophy but teach him to make a bow, he may be of some service in introducing your son into good societies, and supporting him in them when he had done. But the upshot will be generally this, that on the most pressing occasions of addresses, if he is not a mere man of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry, and not the tutor to carry him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme; he shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not only from books but from his own experience; a man who has been employed on such services, and thrice 'made the tour of Europe with success'--that is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck; for if he is such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss _valet de chambre_, some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months, 'if God permit,' much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at least: he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from Calais to Rome; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where there is the best wine, and sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had been left to make the tour and the bargain himself. Look at our governor, I beseech you! See, he is an inch taller as he relates the advantages. And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use. But when your son gets abroad he will be taken out of his hand by his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will pass the greatest part of his time." So much for the bear-leader; and now a remark or two on the young man's chances of getting into good foreign society; and then--the benediction: "Let me observe, in the first place, that company which is really good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this difficulty, and procured him the best letters of recommendation to the most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I answer that he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly stands obliged to pay on such occasions, but no more. There is nothing in which we are so much deceived as in the advantages proposed from our connexions and discourse with the literati, &c., in foreign parts, especially if the experiment is made before we are matured by years or study. Conversation is a traffic; and if you enter it without some stock of knowledge to balance the account perpetually betwixt you, the trade drops at once; and this is the reason, however it may be boasted to the contrary, why travellers have so little (especially good) conversation with the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps conviction, that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation of young itinerants worth the trouble of their bad language, or the interruption of their visits." Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put; but we seem to have got some distance, in spirit at any rate, from Luke xv. 13; and it is with somewhat too visible effect, perhaps, that Sterne forces his way back into the orthodox routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth, disappointed with his reception by "the literati," &c., seeks "an easier society; and as bad company is always ready, and ever lying in wait, the career is soon finished, and the poor prodigal returns--the same object of pity with the prodigal in the Gospel." Hardly a good enough "tag," perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the "And now to," &c., as a fitting close to this pointed little essay in the style of the Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence to show that this so-called sermon was written either after Sterne's visit to or during his stay in France; and there is strong reason, I think, to suppose that it was in reality neither intended for a sermon nor actually delivered from the pulpit. No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as this. But in the famous discourse upon an unlucky text--the sermon preached at the chapel of the English Embassy, in Paris--there are touches of unclerical raillery not a few. Thus: "What a noise," he exclaims, "among the simulants of the various virtues!... Behold Humility, become so out of mere pride; Chastity, never once in harm's way; and Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an Italian stage--a bladder full of wind. Hush! the sound of that trumpet! Let not my soldier run!' tis some good Christian giving alms. O Pity, thou gentlest of human passions! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord they with so loud an instrument." Here, again, is a somewhat bold saying for a divine: "But, to avoid all commonplace cant as much as I can on this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, that 'tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion must follow the evidence," &c. And a little later on, commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan's question, "Does Job serve God for nought?" he says: "It is a bad picture, and done by a terrible master; and yet we are always copying it. Does a man from real conviction of heart forsake his vices? The position is not to be allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God, and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric? Does humility clothe and educate the unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. See! is he not the father of the child?" In another sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which he was certainly the last person in the world to understand--to wit, Methodism. He asks whether, "when a poor, disconsolated, drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a wonder that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what they are?" Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti-Catholic feeling which was characteristic even of indifferentism in those days--at any rate amongst Whig divines. But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne's sermons upon a reader that "you often see him tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience." CHAPTER VII. FRANCE AND ITALY.--MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOL. IX.--"THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY." (1765-1768.) In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous as the "Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." Not, of course, that all the materials for that celebrated piece of literary travel were collected on this occasion. From London as far as Lyons his way lay by a route which he had already traversed three years before, and there is reason to believe that at least some of the scenes in the _Sentimental Journey_ were drawn from observation made on his former visit. His stay in Paris was shorter this year than it had been on the previous occasion. A month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin, and by the middle of November he had reached Turin. From this city he writes, with his characteristic simplicity: "I am very happy, and have found my way into a dozen houses already. To-morrow I am to be presented to the King, and when that ceremony is over I shall have my hands full of engagements." From Turin he went on, by way of Milan, Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Florence, where, after three days' stay, "to dine with our Plenipo," he continued his journey to Rome. Here, and at Naples, he passed the winter of 1765-'66,[1] and prolonged his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well advanced. In the month of May he was again on his way home, through France, and had had a meeting, after two years' separation from them, with his wife and daughter. His account of it to Hall Stevenson is curious: "Never man," he writes, "has been such a wild-goose chase after his wife as I have been. After having sought her in five or six different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comté. Poor woman!" he adds, "she was very cordial, &c." The &c. is charming. But her cordiality had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more impassioned sentiment, for she "begged to stay another year or so." As to "my Lydia"--the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne's having turned out of his road--she, he says, "pleases me much. I found her greatly improved in everything I wished her." As to himself: "I am most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. 'Tis at least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these latter days, that I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony, notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy on that account." The "fears" and the melancholy were, alas! to be justified, rather than the "good spirits;" and the shears of Atropos were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty months, upon that fragile thread of life. [Footnote 1: It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the _Sentimental Journey_, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour (if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.] By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of _Tristram Shandy_. He was writing, however, as it should seem, under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her husband--who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for her material comfort--was busy making provision for her to change her quarters to Chalons. He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty pounds, and begging him to make her all further advances that might be necessary. "I have," he says, "such entire confidence in my wife that she spends as little as she can, though she is confined to no particular sum ... and you may rely--in case she should draw for fifty or a hundred pounds extraordinary--that it and every demand shall be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole Shandian family are ready to stand security." Later on, too, he writes that "a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me for six weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. Germain;" and he adds--in a tone the sincerity of which he would himself have probably found a difficulty in gauging--"if my wife should grow worse (having had a very poor account of her in my daughter's last), I cannot think of her being without me; and, however expensive the journey would be, I would fly to Avignon to administer consolation to her and my poor girl.[1]" [Footnote 1: There can be few admirers of Sterne's genius who would not gladly incline, whenever they find it possible, to Mr. Fitzgerald's very indulgent estimate of his disposition. But this is only one of many instances in which the charity of the biographer appears to me to be, if the expression may be permitted, unconscionable. I can, at any rate, find no warrant whatever in the above passage for the too kindly suggestion that "Sterne was actually negotiating a journey to Paris as 'bear-leader' to a young nobleman (an odious office, to which he had special aversion), _in order_ that he might with economy fly over to Avignon."] The necessity for this flight, however, did not arise. Better accounts of Mrs. Sterne arrived a few weeks later, and the husband's consolations were not required. Meanwhile the idyll of Captain Shandy's love-making was gradually approaching completion; and there are signs to be met with--in the author's correspondence, that is to say, and not in the work itself--that he was somewhat impatient to be done with it, at any rate for the time. "I shall publish," he says, "late in this year; and the next I shall begin a new work of four volumes, which, when finished, I shall continue _Tristram_ with fresh spirit." The new work in four volumes (not destined to get beyond one) was, of course, the _Sentimental Journey_. His ninth volume of _Tristram Shandy_ was finished by the end of the year, and at Christmas he came up to London, after his usual practice, to see to its publication and enjoy the honours of its reception. The book passed duly through the press, and in the last days of January was issued the announcement of its immediate appearance. Of the character of its welcome I can find no other evidence than that of Sterne himself, in a letter addressed to M. Panchaud some fortnight after the book appeared. "'Tis liked the best of all here;" but, with whatever accuracy this may have expressed the complimentary opinion of friends, or even the well-considered judgment of critics, one can hardly believe that it enjoyed anything like the vogue of the former volumes. Sterne, however, would be the less concerned for this, that his head was at the moment full of his new venture. "I am going," he writes, "to publish _A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy_. The undertaking is protected and highly encouraged by all our noblesse. 'Tis subscribed for at a great rate 'twill be an original, in large quarto, the subscription half a guinea. If you (Panchaud) can procure me the honour of a few names of men of science or fashion, I shall thank you: they will appear in good company, as all the nobility here have honoured me with their names." As was usual with him, however, he postponed commencing it until he should have returned to Coxwold; and, as was equally usual with him, he found it difficult to tear himself away from the delights of London. Moreover, there was in the present instance a special difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations with the history of Sterne's literary work, it would be impossible, even in the most strictly critical and least general of biographies, to observe complete silence. I refer, of course, to the famous and furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper--the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza Letters. Of the affair itself but little need be said. I have already stated my own views on the general subject of Sterne's love affairs; and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their innocence or otherwise in relation to this particular amourette. I will only say that were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean which must be found between Thackeray's somewhat too harsh and Mr. Fitzgerald's considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie, it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter's extreme. This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an Indian "grass widow" was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage in Sterne's life. On the best and most charitable view of it, the flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne's age and profession; and when it is added that Yorick's attentions to Eliza were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him, its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways. No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, than the sentimental lover began to feel so strongly the need of a female consoler, that his heart seems to have softened, insensibly, even towards his wife. "I am unhappy," he writes plaintively to Lydia Sterne. "Thy mother and thyself at a distance from me--and what can compensate for such a destitution? For God's sake persuade her to come and fix in England! for life is too short to waste in separation; and while she lives in one country and I in another, many people will suppose it proceeds from choice"--a supposition, he seems to imply, which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her absence scarcely suffices to refute. "Besides"--a word in which there is here almost as much virtue as in an "if"--"I want thee near me, thou child and darling of my heart. I am in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia's eyes will smart with weeping when I tell her the cause that just now affects me." And then his sensibilities brim over, and into his daughter's ear he pours forth his lamentations over the loss of her mother's rival. "I am apprehensive the dear friend I mentioned in my last letter is going into a decline. I was with her two days ago, and I never beheld a being so altered. She has a tender frame, and looks like a drooping lily, for the roses are fled from her cheeks. I can never see or talk to this incomparable woman without bursting into tears. I have a thousand obligations to her, and I love her more than her whole sex, if not all the world put together. She has a delicacy," &c., &c. And after reciting a frigid epitaph which he had written, "expressive of her modest worth," he winds up with--"Say all that is kind of me to thy mother; and believe me, my Lydia, that I love thee most truly." My excuse for quoting thus fully from this most characteristic letter, and, indeed, for dwelling at all upon these closing incidents of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains the sentimentalist in art. In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear himself away from London and its joys, and with painful slowness, for he was now in a wretched state of health, to make his way back to Yorkshire. "I have got conveyed," he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall Stevenson--"I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the bottom of my chaise most of the route, upon a large pillow which I had the _prévoyance_ to purchase before I set out. I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor to-night, and if possible to York the next. I know not what is the matter with me, but some derangement presses hard upon this machine. Still, I think it will not be overset this bout"--another of those utterances of a cheerful courage under the prostration of pain which reveal to us the manliest side of Sterne's nature. On reaching Coxwold his health appears to have temporarily mended, and in June we find him giving a far better account of himself to another of his friends. The fresh Yorkshire air seems to have temporarily revived him, and to his friend, Arthur Lee, a young American, he writes thus: "I am as happy as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you could see in how princely a manner I live. 'Tis a land of plenty. I sit down alone to dinner--fish and wild-fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with cream and all the simple plenty which a rich valley under Hamilton Hills can produce, with a clean cloth on my table, and a bottle of wine on my right hand to drink your health. I have a hundred hens and chickens about my yard; and not a parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout but he brings it as an offering to me." Another of his correspondents at this period was the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity I have been unable to trace, but who is addressed in a manner which seems to show Sterne's anxiety to expel the old flame of Eliza's kindling by a new one. There is little, indeed, of the sentimentalizing strain in which he was wont to sigh at the feet of Mrs. Draper, but in its place there is a freedom of a very prominent, and here and there of a highly unpleasant, kind. To his friends, Mr. and Mrs. James, too, he writes frequently during this year, chiefly to pour out his soul on the subject of Eliza; and Mrs. James, who is always addressed in company with her husband, enjoys the almost unique distinction of being the only woman outside his own family circle whom Sterne never approaches in the language of artificial gallantry, but always in that of simple friendship and respect.[1] Meanwhile, however, the _Sentimental Journey_ was advancing at a reasonable rate of speed towards completion. In July he writes of himself as "now beginning to be truly busy" on it, "the pain and sorrows of this life having retarded its progress." [Footnote 1: To this period of Sterne's life, it may here be remarked, is to be assigned the dog-Latin letter ("and very sad dog-Latin too") so justly animadverted upon by Thackeray, and containing a passage of which Madame de Medalle, it is to be charitably hoped, had no suspicion of the meaning. Mr. Fitzgerald, through an oversight in translation, and understanding Sterne to say that he himself, and not his correspondent, Hall Stevenson, was "quadraginta et plus annos natus," has referred it to an earlier date. The point, however, is of no great importance, as the untranslatable passage in the letter would be little less unseemly in 1754 or 1755 than in 1768, at the beginning of which year, since the letter is addressed from London to Hall Stevenson, then in Yorkshire, it must, in fact, have been written.] His wife and daughter were about to rejoin him in the autumn, and he looked forward to settling them at a hired house in York before going up to town to publish his new volumes. On the 1st of October the two ladies arrived at York, and the next day the reunited family went on to Coxwold. The meeting with the daughter gave Sterne one of the few quite innocent pleasures which he was capable of feeling; and he writes next day to Mr. and Mrs. James in terms of high pride and satisfaction of his recovered child. "My girl has returned," he writes, in the language of playful affection, "an elegant, accomplished little slut. My wife--but I hate," he adds, with remarkable presence of mind, "to praise my wife. 'Tis as much as decency will allow to praise my daughter. I suppose," he concludes, "they will return next summer to France. They leave me in a month to reside at York for the winter, and I stay at Coxwold till the 1st of January." This seems to indicate a little longer delay in the publication of the _Sentimental Journey_ than he had at first intended; for it seems that the book was finished by the end of November. On the 28th of that month he writes to the Earl of ---- (as his daughter's foolish mysteriousness has headed the letter), to thank him for his letter of inquiry about Yorick, and to say that Yorick "has worn out both his spirits and body with the _Sentimental Journey_. 'Tis true that an author must feel himself, or his reader will not" (how mistaken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian canon will be noted hereafter), "but I have torn my whole frame into pieces by my feelings. I believe the brain stands as much in need of recruiting as the body; therefore I shall set out for town the 20th of next month, after having recruited myself at York." Then he adds the strange observation, "I might, indeed, solace myself with my wife (who is come from France), but, in fact, I have long been a sentimental being, whatever your Lordship may think to the contrary. The world has imagined because I wrote _Tristram Shandy_ that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured world we live in, and we are often painted in divers colours, according to the ideas each one frames in his head." It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible for Sterne to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of life so concisely as in this naïve passage. The connubial affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions--as the lower to the higher. To indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste. Meanwhile, however, that fragile abode of sentimentalism--that frame which had just been "torn to pieces" by the feelings--was becoming weaker than its owner supposed. Much of the exhaustion which Sterne had attributed to the violence of his literary emotions was no doubt due to the rapid decline of bodily powers which, unknown to him, were already within a few months of their final collapse. He did not set out for London on the 20th of December, as he had promised himself, for on that day he was only just recovering from "an attack of fever and bleeding at the lungs," which had confined him to his room for nearly three weeks. "I am worn down to a shadow," he writes on the 23rd, "but as my fever has left me, I set off the latter end of next week with my friend, Mr. Hall, for town." His home affairs had already been settled. Early in December it had been arranged that his wife and daughter should only remain at York during the winter, and should return to the Continent in the spring. "Mrs. Sterne's health," he writes, "is insupportable in England. She must return to France, and justice and humanity forbid me to oppose it." But separation from his wife meant separation from his daughter; it was this, of course, which was the really painful parting, and it is to the credit of Sterne's disinterestedness of affection for Lydia, that in his then state of health he brought himself to consent to her leaving him. But he recognized that it was for the advantage of her prospect of settling herself in life that she should go with her mother, who seemed "inclined to establish her in France, where she has had many advantageous offers." Nevertheless "his heart bled," as he wrote to Lee, when he thought of parting with his child. "'Twill be like the separation of soul and body, and equal to nothing but what passes at that tremendous moment; and like it in one respect, for she will be in one kingdom while I am in another." Thus was this matter settled, and by the 1st of January Sterne had arrived in London for the last time, with the two volumes of the _Sentimental Journey_. He took up his quarters at the lodgings in Bond Street (No. 41), which he had occupied during his stay in town the previous year, and entered at once upon the arrangements for publication. These occupied two full months, and on the 27th of February the last work, as it was destined to be, of the Rev. Mr. Yorick was issued to the world. Its success would seem to have been immediate, and was certainly great and lasting. In one sense, indeed, it was far greater than had been, or than has since been, attained by _Tristram Shandy_. The compliments which courteous Frenchmen had paid the author upon his former work, and which his simple vanity had swallowed whole and unseasoned, without the much-needed grain of salt, might, no doubt, have been repeated to him with far greater sincerity as regards the _Sentimental Journey_, had he lived to receive them. Had any Frenchman told him a year or two afterwards that the latter work was "almost as much known in Paris as in London, at least among men of condition and learning," he would very likely have been telling him no more than the truth. The _Sentimental Journey_ certainly acquired what _Tristram Shandy_ never did--a European reputation. It has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and even Polish; and into French again and again. The French, indeed, have no doubt whatever of its being Sterne's _chef-d'oeuvre_; and one has only to compare a French translation of it with a rendering of _Tristram Shandy_ into the same language to understand, and from our neighbours' point of view even to admit, the justice of their preference. The charms of the _Journey_, its grace, wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to that most graceful of languages, and reproduce themselves readily enough therein; while, on the other hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate mystifications, the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear intolerably awkward and _bizzare_ in their French dress; and, what is much more strange, even the point of the _double entendres_ is sometimes unaccountably lost. Were it not that the genuine humour of _Tristram Shandy_ in a great measure evaporates in translation, one would be forced to admit that the work which is the more catholic in its appeal to appreciation is the better of the two. But, having regard to this disappearance of genuine and unquestionable excellences in the process of translation, I see no good reason why those Englishmen--the great majority, I imagine--who prefer _Tristram Shandy_ to the _Sentimental Journey_ should feel any misgivings as to the soundness of their taste. The humour which goes the deepest down beneath the surface of things is the most likely to become inextricably interwoven with those deeper fibres of associations which lie at the roots of a language; and it may well happen, therefore, though from the cosmopolitan point of view it is a melancholy reflection, that the merit of a book, to those who use the language in which it is written, bears a direct ratio to the persistence of its refusal to yield up its charm to men of another tongue. The favour, however, with which the _Sentimental Journey_ was received abroad, and which it still enjoys (the last French translation is very recent), is, as Mr. Fitzgerald says, "worthily merited, if grace, nature, true sentiment, and exquisite dramatic power be qualities that are to find a welcome. And apart," he adds, "from these attractions it has a unique charm of its own, a flavour, so to speak, a fragrance that belongs to that one book alone. Never was there such a charming series of complete little pictures, which for delicacy seem like the series of medallions done on Sèvres china which we sometimes see in old French cabinets.... The figures stand out brightly, and in what number and variety! Old Calais, with its old inn; M. Dessein, the monk, one of the most artistic figures on literary canvas; the charming French lady whom M. Dessein shut into the carriage with the traveller; the _débonnaire_ French captain, and the English travellers returning, touched in with only a couple of strokes; La Fleur, the valet; the pretty French glove-seller, whose pulse the Sentimental one felt; her husband, who passed through the shop and pulled off his hat to Monsieur for the honour he was doing him; the little maid in the bookseller's shop, who put her little present _à part_; the charming Greuze 'grisset,' who sold him the ruffles; the reduced chevalier selling _patés_; the groups of beggars at Montreuil; the _fade_ Count de Bissie, who read Shakespeare; and the crowd of minor _croquis_--postilions, landlords, notaries, soldiers, abbés, _précieuses_, maids--merely touched, but touched with wonderful art, make up a surprising collection of distinct and graphic characters." CHAPTER VIII. LAST DAYS AND DEATH. (1768.) The end was now fast approaching. Months before, Sterne had written doubtfully of his being able to stand another winter in England, and his doubts were to be fatally justified. One can easily see, however, how the unhappy experiment came to be tried. It is possible that he might have delayed the publication of his book for a while, and taken refuge abroad from the rigours of the two remaining winter months, had it not been in the nature of his malady to conceal its deadly approaches. Consumption sported with its victim in the cruel fashion that is its wont. "I continue to mend," Sterne writes from Bond Street on the first day of the new year, "and doubt not but this with all other evils and uncertainties of life will end for the best." And for the best perhaps it did end, in the sense in which the resigned Christian uses these pious words; but this, one fears, was not the sense intended by the dying man. All through January and February he was occupied not only with business, but as it would seem with a fair amount, though less, no doubt, than his usual share, of pleasure also. Vastly active was he, it seems, in the great undertaking of obtaining tickets for one of Mrs. Cornely's entertainments--the "thing" to go to at that particular time--for his friends the Jameses. He writes them on Monday that he has not been a moment at rest since writing the previous day about the Soho ticket. "I have been at a Secretary of State to get one, have been upon one knee to my friend Sir George Macartney, Mr. Lascelles, and Mr. Fitzmaurice, without mentioning five more. I believe I could as soon get you a place at Court, for everybody is going; but I will go out and try a new circle, and if you do not hear from me by a quarter to three, you may conclude I have been unfortunate in my supplications." Whether he was or was not unfortunate history does not record. A week or two later the old round of dissipation had apparently set in. "I am now tied down neck and heels by engagements every night this week, or most joyfully would have trod the old pleasing road from Bond to Gerrard Street. I am quite well, but exhausted with a roomful of company every morning till dinner." A little later, and this momentary flash of health had died out; and we find him writing what was his last letter to his daughter, full, evidently, of uneasy forebodings as to his approaching end. He speaks of "this vile influenza--be not alarmed. I think I shall get the better of it, and shall be with you both the 1st of May;" though, he adds, "if I escape, 'twill not be for a long period, my child--unless a quiet retreat and peace of mind can restore me." But the occasion of this letter was a curious one, and a little more must be extracted from it. Lydia Sterne's letter to her father had, he said, astonished him. "She (Mrs. Sterne) could know but little of my feelings to tell thee that under the supposition I should survive thy mother I should bequeath thee as a legacy to Mrs. Draper. No, my Lydia, 'tis a lady whose virtues I wish thee to imitate"--Mrs. James, in fact, whom he proceeds to praise with much and probably well-deserved warmth. "But," he adds, sadly, "I think, my Lydia, thy mother will survive me; do not deject her spirit with thy apprehensions on my account. I have sent you a necklace and buckles, and the same to your mother. My girl cannot form a wish that is in the power of her father that he will not gratify her in; and I cannot in justice be less kind to thy mother. I am never alone. The kindness of my friends is ever the same. I wish though I had thee to nurse me, but I am denied that. Write to me twice a week at least. God bless thee, my child, and believe me ever, ever, thy affectionate father." The despondent tone of this letter was to be only too soon justified. The "vile influenza" proved to be or became a pleurisy. On Thursday, March 10, he was bled three times, and blistered on the day after. And on the Tuesday following, in evident consciousness that his end was near, he penned that cry "for pity and pardon," as Thackeray calls it--the first as well as the last, and which sounds almost as strange as it does piteous from those mocking lips: "The physician says I am better.... God knows, for I feel myself sadly wrong, and shall, if I recover, be a long while of gaining strength. Before I have gone through half the letter I must stop to rest my weak hand a dozen times. Mr. James was so good as to call upon me yesterday. I felt emotions not to be described at the sight of him, and he overjoyed me by talking a great deal of you. Do, dear Mrs. James, entreat him to come to-morrow or next day, for perhaps I have not many days or hours to live. I want to ask a favour of him, if I find myself worse, that I shall beg of you if in this wrestling I come off conqueror. My spirits are fled. It is a bad omen; do not weep, my dear lady. Your tears are too precious to be shed for me. Bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn. Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids. If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so often condemned, which my heart, not my head, betrayed me into. Should my child, my Lydia, want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom? You are the only woman on earth I can depend upon for such a benevolent action. I wrote to her a fortnight ago, and told her what, I trust, she will find in you. Mr. James will be a father to her.... Commend me to him, as I now commend you to that Being who takes under his care the good and kind part of the world. Adieu, all grateful thanks to you and Mr. James. "From your affectionate friend, L. STERNE." This pathetic death-bed letter is superscribed "Tuesday." It seems to have been written on Tuesday, the 15th of March, and three days later the writer breathed his last. But two persons, strangers both, were present at his deathbed, and it is by a singularly fortunate chance, therefore, that one of these--and he not belonging to the class of people who usually leave behind them published records of the events of their lives--should have preserved for us an account of the closing scene. This, however, is to be found in the Memoirs of John Macdonald, "a cadet of the house of Keppoch," at that time footman to Mr. Crawford, a fashionable friend of Sterne's. His master had taken a house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768; and "about this time," he writes, "Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen. One day"--namely, on the aforesaid 18th of March--"my master had company to dinner who were speaking about him--the Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and a Mr. James." Many, if not most, of the party, therefore, were personal friends of the man who lay dying in the street hard by, and naturally enough the conversation turned on his condition. "'John,' said my master," the narrative continues, "'go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day.'" Macdonald did so; and, in language which seems to bear the stamp of truth upon it, he thus records the grim story which he had to report to the assembled guests on his return: "I went to Mr. Sterne's lodgings; the mistress opened the door. I enquired how he did; she told me to go up to the nurse. I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, 'Now it is come.' He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much." Thus, supported by a hired nurse, and under the curious eyes of a stranger, Sterne breathed his last. His wife and daughter were far away; the convivial associates "who were all very sorry and lamented him very much," were for the moment represented only by "John;" and the shocking tradition goes that the alien hands by which the "dying eyes were closed," and the "decent limbs composed," remunerated themselves for the pious office by abstracting the gold sleeve-links from the dead man's wrists. One may hope, indeed, that this last circumstance is to be rejected as sensational legend, but even without it the story of Sterne's death seems sad enough, no doubt. Yet it is, after all, only by contrast with the excited gaiety of his daily life in London that his end appears so forlorn. From many a "set of residential chambers," from many of the old and silent inns of the lawyers, departures as lonely, or lonelier, are being made around us in London every year: the departures of men not necessarily kinless or friendless, but living solitary lives, and dying before their friends or kindred can be summoned to their bedsides. Such deaths, no doubt, are often contrasted in conventional pathos with that of the husband and father surrounded by a weeping wife and children; but the more sensible among us construct no tragedy out of a mode of exit which must have many times entered as at least a possibility into the previous contemplation of the dying man. And except, as has been said, that Sterne associates himself in our minds with the perpetual excitements of lively companionship, there would be nothing particularly melancholy in his end. This is subject, of course, to the assumption that the story of his landlady having stolen the gold sleeve-links from his dead body may be treated as mythical; and, rejecting this story, there seems no good reason for making much ado about the manner of his death. Of friends, as distinguished from mere dinner-table acquaintances, he seems to have had but few in London: with the exception of the Jameses, one knows not with certainty of any; and the Jameses do not appear to have neglected him in the illness which neither they nor he suspected to be his last. Mr. James had paid him a visit but a day or two before the end came; and it may very likely have been upon his report of his friend's condition that the message of inquiry was sent from the dinner table at which he was a guest. No doubt Sterne's flourish in _Tristram Shandy_ about his preferring to die at an inn, untroubled by the spectacle of "the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and smoothing my pillow," was a mere piece of bravado; and the more probably so because the reflection is appropriated almost bodily from Bishop Burnet, who quotes it as a frequent observation of Archbishop Leighton. But, considering that Sterne was in the habit of passing nearly half of each year alone in London lodgings, the realization of his wish does not strike me, I confess, as so dramatically impressive a coincidence as it is sometimes represented. According, however, to one strange story the dramatic element gives place after Sterne's very burial to melodrama of the darkest kind. The funeral, which pointed, after all, a far sadder moral than the death, took place on Tuesday, March 22, attended by only two mourners, one of whom is said to have been his publisher Becket, and the other probably Mr. James; and, thus duly neglected by the whole crowd of boon companions, the remains of Yorick were consigned to the "new burying-ground near Tyburn" of the parish of St. George's, Hanover Square. In that now squalid and long-decayed grave-yard, within sight of the Marble Arch and over against the broad expanse of Hyde Park, is still to be found a tombstone inscribed with some inferior lines to the memory of the departed humourist, and with a statement, inaccurate by eight months, of the date of his death, and a year out as to his age. Dying, as has been seen, on the 18th of March, 1768, at the age of fifty-four, he is declared on this slab to have died on the 13th of November, aged fifty-three years. There is more excuse, however, for this want of veracity than sepulchral inscriptions can usually plead. The stone was erected by the pious hands of "two brother Masons," many years, it is said, after the event which it purports to record; and from the wording of the epitaph which commences, "Near this place lyes the body," &c., it obviously does not profess to indicate--what, doubtless, there was no longer any means of tracing--the exact spot in which Sterne's remains were laid. But, wherever the grave really was, the body interred in it, according to the strange story to which I have referred, is no longer there. That story goes: that two days after the burial, on the night of the 24th of March, the corpse was stolen by body-snatchers, and by them disposed of to M. Collignon, Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge; that the Professor invited a few scientific friends to witness a demonstration, and that among these was one who had been acquainted with Sterne, and who fainted with horror on recognizing in the already partially dissected "subject" the features of his friend. So, at least, this very gruesome and Poe-like legend runs; but it must be confessed that all the evidence which Mr. Fitzgerald has been able to collect in its favour is of the very loosest and vaguest description. On the other hand, it is, of course, only fair to recollect that, in days when respectable surgeons and grave scientific professors had to depend upon the assistance of law-breakers for the prosecution of their studies and teachings, every effort would naturally be made to hush up any such unfortunate affair. There is, moreover, independent evidence to the fact that similar desecrations of this grave-yard had of late been very common; and that at least one previous attempt to check the operations of the "resurrection-men" had been attended with peculiarly infelicitous results. In the _St. James's Chronicle_ for November 26, 1767, we find it recorded that "the Burying Ground in Oxford Road, belonging to the Parish of St. George's, Hanover Square, having been lately robbed of several dead bodies, a Watcher was placed there, attended by a large mastiff Dog; notwithstanding which, on Sunday night last, some Villains found means to steal out another dead Body, and carried off the very Dog." Body-snatchers so adroit and determined as to contrive to make additional profit out of the actual means taken to prevent their depredations, would certainly not have been deterred by any considerations of prudence from attempting the theft of Sterne's corpse. There was no such ceremony about his funeral as would lead them to suppose that the deceased was a person of any importance, or one whose body could not be stolen without a risk of creating undesirable excitement. On the whole, therefore, it is impossible to reject the body-snatching story as certainly fabulous, though its truth is far from being proved; and though I can scarcely myself subscribe to Mr. Fitzgerald's view, that there is a "grim and lurid Shandyism" about the scene of dissection, yet if others discover an appeal to their sense of humour in the idea of Sterne's body being dissected after death, I see nothing to prevent them from holding that hypothesis as a "pious opinion." CHAPTER IX. STERNE AS A WRITER.--THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM.--DR. FERRIAR'S "ILLUSTRATIONS." Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities which win enduring fame for books and for their authors are not always those to which they owe their first popularity. It may with the utmost probability be affirmed that this was the case with _Tristram Shandy_ and with Sterne. We cannot, it is true, altogether dissociate the permanent attractions of the novel from those characteristics of it which have long since ceased to attract at all; the two are united in a greater or less degree throughout the work; and this being so, it is, of course, impossible to prove to demonstration that it was the latter qualities, and not the former, which procured it its immediate vogue. But, as it happens, it is possible to show that what may be called its spurious attractions varied directly, and its real merits inversely, as its popularity with the public of its day. In the higher qualities of humour, in dramatic vigour, in skilful and subtle delineation of character, the novel showed no deterioration, but, in some instances, a marked improvement, as it proceeded; yet the second instalment was not more popular, and most of the succeeding ones were distinctly less popular, than the first. They had gained in many qualities, while they had lost in only the single one of novelty; and we may infer, therefore, with approximate certainty, that what "took the town" in the first instance was, that quality of the book which was strangest at its first appearance. The mass of the public read, and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digressions, the audacious impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine days' wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been prepared to pronounce _Tristram Shandy_ a work as original in scheme and conception as it was eccentric. Some there were, no doubt, who perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had "seen something like it before." But no single reader, no single critic of the time, appears to have combined the knowledge necessary for tracing these three characteristics of the novel to their respective sources; and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which the books and authors from whom they were imitated had been laid under contribution. No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own. Nay, it was not till full fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were detected, or, at any rate, revealed to the world; and, with an irony which Sterne himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective. In 1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his _Illustrations of Sterne_, and the prefatory sonnet, in which he solicits pardon for his too minute investigations, is sufficient proof of the curiously reverent spirit in which he set about his damaging task: "Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways Of antic wit, and quibbling mazes drear, Let not thy shade malignant censure fear, If aught of inward mirth my search betrays. Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days, Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear," &c. Thus commences Dr. Ferriar's apology, which, however, can hardly be held to cover his offence; for, as a matter of fact, Sterne's borrowings extend to a good deal besides "mirth;" and some of the most unscrupulous of these forced loans are raised from passages of a perfectly serious import in the originals from which they are taken. Here, however, is the list of authors to whom Dr. Ferriar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted: Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of "Gabriel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop Hall. The catalogue is a reasonably long one; but it is not, of course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally freely from every author named in it. His obligations to some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but slight. From Rabelais, besides his vagaries of narrative, Sterne took, no doubt, the idea of the _Tristra-paedia_ (by descent from the "education of Pantagruel," through "Martinus Scriblerus"); but though he has appropriated bodily the passage in which Friar John attributes the beauty of his nose to the pectoral conformation of his nurse, he may be said to have constructively acknowledged the debt in a reference to one of the characters in the Rabelaisian dialogue.[1] [Footnote 1: "There is no cause but one," said my Uncle Toby, "why one man's nose is longer than another, but because that God pleases to have it so." "That is Grangousier's solution," said my father. "'Tis He," continued my Uncle Toby, "who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms ... and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom."--_Tristram Shandy_, vol. iii. c. 41. "Par ce, répondit Grangousier, qu'ainsi Dieu l'a voulu, lequel nous fait en cette forme et cette fin selon divin arbitre."--_Rabelais_, book i. c. 41. In another place, however (vol. viii. c. 3), Sterne has borrowed a whole passage from this French humourist without any acknowledgment at all.] Upon Beroalde, again, upon D'Aubigné, and upon Bouchet he has made no direct and _verbatim_ depredations. From Bruscambille he seems to have taken little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious buffoonery of vol. iii. c. 30, _et sqq._; and to Scarron he, perhaps, owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the _Sentimental Journey_, an incident which, it must be owned, he vastly improved in the taking. All this, however, does not amount to very much, and it is only when we come to Dr. Ferriar's collations of _Tristram Shandy_ with the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ that we begin to understand what feats Sterne was capable of as a plagiarist. He must, to begin with, have relied with cynical confidence on the conviction that famous writers are talked about and not read, for he sets to work with the scissors upon Burton's first page: "Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world, the principal and mighty work of God; wonder of nature, as Zoroaster calls him; _audacis naturae miraculum_, the marvel of marvels, as Plato; the abridgment and epitome of the world, as Pliny," &c. Thus Burton; and, with a few additions of his own, and the substitution of Aristotle for Plato as the author of one of the descriptions, thus Sterne: "Who made MAN with powers which dart him from heaven to earth in a moment--that great, that most excellent and noble creature of the world, the miracle of nature, as Zoroaster, in his book [Greek: peri phuseos], called him--the Shekinah of the Divine Presence, as Chrysostom--the image of God, as Moses--the ray of Divinity, as Plato--the marvel of marvels, as Aristotle," &c.[1] And in the same chapter, in the "Fragment upon Whiskers," Sterne relates how a "decayed kinsman" of the Lady Baussiere "ran begging, bareheaded, on one side of her palfrey, conjuring her by the former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, &c.--cousin, aunt, sister, mother--for virtue's sake, for your own sake, for mine, for Christ's sake, remember me! pity me!" And again he tells how a "devout, venerable, hoary-headed man" thus beseeched her: "'I beg for the unfortunate. Good my lady, 'tis for a prison--for an hospital; 'tis for an old man--a poor man undone by shipwreck, by suretyship, by fire. I call God and all His angels to witness, 'tis to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry--'tis to comfort the sick and the brokenhearted.' The Lady Baussiere rode on.[2]" [Footnote 1: _Tristram Shandy_, vol. v.c. 1.] [Footnote 2: _Ibid._] But now compare this passage from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_: "A poor decayed kinsman of his sets upon him by the way, in all his jollity, and runs begging, bareheaded, by him, conjuring him by those former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, &c., 'uncle, cousin, brother, father, show some pity for Christ's sake, pity a sick man, an old man,' &c.; he cares not--ride on: pretend sickness, inevitable loss of limbs, plead suretyship or shipwreck, fire, common calamities, show thy wants and imperfections, take God and all His angels to witness ... put up a supplication to him in the name of a thousand orphans, an hospital, a spittle, a prison, as he goes by ... ride on."[1] [Footnote 1: Burton: _Anat. Mel._, p. 269.] Hardly a casual coincidence this. But it is yet more unpleasant to find that the mock philosophic reflections with which Mr. Shandy consoles himself on Bobby's death, in those delightful chapters on that event, are not taken, as they profess to be, direct from the sages of antiquity, but have been conveyed through, and "conveyed" from, Burton. "When Agrippina was told of her son's death," says Sterne, "Tacitus informs us that, not being able to moderate her passions, she abruptly broke off her work." Tacitus does, it is true, inform us of this. But it was undoubtedly Burton (_Anat. Mel._, p. 213) who informed Sterne of it. So, too, when Mr. Shandy goes on to remark upon death that "'Tis an inevitable chance--the first statute in Magna Charta--it is an everlasting Act of Parliament, my dear brother--all must die," the agreement of his views with those of Burton, who had himself said of death, "'Tis an inevitable chance--the first statute in Magna Charta--an everlasting Act of Parliament--all must die,[2]" is even textually exact. [Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 215.] In the next passage, however, the humourist gets the better of the plagiarist, and we are ready to forgive the theft for the happily comic turn which he gives to it. Burton: "Tully was much grieved for his daughter Tulliola's death at first, until such time that he had confirmed his mind by philosophical precepts; then he began to triumph over fortune and grief, and for her reception into heaven to be much more joyed than before he was troubled for her loss." Sterne: "When Tully was bereft of his daughter, at first he laid it to his heart, he listened to the voice of nature, and modulated his own unto it. O my Tullia! my daughter! my child!--Still, still, still--'twas O my Tullia, my Tullia! Me thinks I see my Tullia, I hear my Tullia, I talk with my Tullia. But as soon as he began to look into the stores of philosophy, and _consider how many excellent things might be said upon the occasion_, nobody on earth can conceive, says the great orator, how happy, how joyful it made me." "Kingdoms and provinces, cities and towns," continues Burton, "have their periods, and are consumed." "Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities," exclaims Mr. Shandy, throwing the sentence, like the "born orator" his son considered him, into the rhetorical interrogative, "have they not their periods?" "Where," he proceeds, "is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos, and Persepolis, and Agrigentum? What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mytilene? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon" (and all, with the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by Burton) "are now no more." And then the famous consolatory letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of Tullia is laid under contribution--Burton's rendering of the Latin being followed almost word for word. "Returning out of Asia," declaims Mr. Shandy, "when I sailed from Aegina towards Megara" (when can this have been? thought my Uncle Toby), "I began to view the country round about. Aegina was behind me, Megara before," &c., and so on, down to the final reflection of the philosopher, "Remember that thou art but a man;" at which point Sterne remarks coolly, "Now, my Uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius's consolatory letter to Tully"--the thing to be really known being that the paragraph was, in fact, Servius Sulpicius filtered through Burton. Again, and still quoting from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Mr. Shandy remarks how "the Thracians wept when a child was born, and feasted and made merry when a man went out of the world; and with reason." He then goes on to lay predatory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian, which Burton had quoted before him: "Is it not better not to hunger at all, than to eat? not to thirst, than to take physic to cure it?" (why not "than to drink to satisfy thirst?" as Lucian wrote and Burton translated). "Is it not better to be freed from cares and agues, love and melancholy, and the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled traveller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin his journey afresh?" Then, closing his Burton and opening his Bacon at the _Essay on Death_; he adds: "There is no terror, brother Toby, in its (Death's) looks but what it borrows from groans and convulsions, and" (here parody forces its way in) "the blowing of noses, and the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man's bed-room;" and with one more theft from Burton, after Seneca: "Consider, brother Toby, when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not," this extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes. Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaint old writer of whom he has here made such free use. Several other instances of word for word appropriation might be quoted from this and the succeeding volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The apostrophe to "blessed health," in c. xxxiii. of vol. v. is taken direct from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_; so is the phrase, "He has a gourd for his head and a pippin for his heart," in c. ix.; so is the jest about Franciscus Ribera's computation of the amount of cubic space required by the souls of the lost; so is Hilarion the hermit's comparison of his body with its unruly passions to a kicking ass. And there is a passage in the _Sentimental Journey_, the "Fragment in the Abderitans," which shows, Dr. Ferriar thinks--though it does not seem to me to show conclusively--that Sterne was unaware that what he was taking from Burton had been previously taken by Burton from Lucian. There is more excuse, in the opinion of the author of the _Illustrations_, for the literary thefts of the preacher than for those of the novelist; since in sermons, Dr. Ferriar observes drily, "the principal matter must consist of repetitions." But it can hardly, I think, be admitted that the kind of "repetitions" to which Sterne had recourse in the pulpit--or, at any rate, in compositions ostensibly prepared for the pulpit--are quite justifiable. Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of this series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisition, which so deeply moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on Conscience, was really the work of Bentley; but Sterne has pilfered more freely from a divine more famous as a preacher than the great scholar whose words he appropriated on that occasion. "Then shame and grief go with her," he exclaims in his singular sermon on "The Levite and his Concubine;" "and wherever she seeks a shelter may the hand of Justice shut the door against her!" an exclamation which is taken, as, no doubt, indeed, was the whole suggestion of the somewhat strange subject, from the _Contemplations_ of Bishop Hall. And so, again, we find in Sterne's sermon the following: "Mercy well becomes the heart of all Thy creatures! but most of Thy servant, a Levite, who offers up so many daily sacrifices to Thee for the transgressions of Thy people. But to little purpose, he would add, have I served at Thy altar, where my business was to sue for mercy, had I not learned to practise it." And in Hall's _Contemplations_ the following: "Mercy becomes well the heart of any man, but most of a Levite. He that had helped to offer so many sacrifices to God for the multitude of every Israelite's sins saw how proportionable it was that man should not hold one sin unpardonable. He had served at the altar to no purpose, if he (whose trade was to sue for mercy) had not at all learned to practise it." Sterne's twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, is merely a diluted commentary on the conclusion of Hall's "Contemplation of Joseph." In the sixteenth sermon, the one on Shimei, we find: "There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill will: a word, a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object aimed at." This, it is evident, is but slightly altered, and by no means for the better, from the more terse and vigorous language of the Bishop: "There is no small cruelty in the picking out of a time for mischief: that word would scarce gall at one season which at another killeth. The same shaft flying with the wind pierces deep, which against it can hardly find strength to stick upright." But enough of these _pièces de conviction_. Indictments for plagiarism are often too hastily laid; but there can be no doubt, I should imagine, in the mind of any reasonable being upon the evidence here cited, that the offence in this case is clearly proved. Nor, I think, can there be much question as to its moral complexion. For the pilferings from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow of excuse can, so far as I can see, be alleged. Sterne could not possibly plead any better justification for borrowing Hall's thoughts and phrases and passing them off upon his hearers or readers as original, than he could plead for claiming the authorship of one of the Bishop's benevolent actions and representing himself to the world as the doer of the good deed. In the actual as in the hypothetical case there is a dishonest appropriation by one man of the credit--in the former case the intellectual, in the latter the moral credit--belonging to another: the offence in the actual case being aggravated by the fact that it involves a fraud upon the purchaser of the sermon, who pays money for what he may already have in his library. The plagiarisms from Burton stand upon a slightly different though not, I think, a much more defensible footing. For in this case it has been urged that Sterne, being desirous of satirizing pedantry, was justified in resorting to the actually existent writings of an antique pedant of real life; and that since Mr. Shandy could not be made to talk more like himself than Burton talked like _him_, it was artistically lawful to put Burton's exact words into Mr. Shandy's mouth. It makes a difference, it may be said, that Sterne is not here speaking in his own person, as he is in his _Sermons_, but in the person of one of his characters. This casuistry, however, does not seem to me to be sound. Even as regards the passages from ancient authors, which, while quoting them from Burton, he tacitly represents to his readers as taken from his own stores of knowledge, the excuse is hardly sufficient; while as regards the original reflections of the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_ it obviously fails to apply at all. And in any case there could be no necessity for the omission to acknowledge the debt. Even admitting that no more characteristic reflections could have been composed for Mr. Shandy than were actually to be found in Burton, art is not so exacting a mistress as to compel the artist to plagiarize against his will. A scrupulous writer, being also as ingenious as Sterne, could have found some means of indicating the source from which he was borrowing without destroying the dramatic illusion of the scene. But it seems clear enough that Sterne himself was troubled by no conscientious qualms on this subject. Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of literary effrontery which was ever met with is the passage in vol. v.c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is startled into pronouncing "singular." Burton had complained that writers were like apothecaries, who "make new mixtures every day," by "pouring out of one vessel into another." "We weave," he said, "the same web still, twist the same rope again and again." And Sterne _incolumi gravitate_ asks: "Shall we forever make new books as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope, forever on the same track, forever at the same pace?" And this he writes with the scissors actually opened in his hand for the almost bodily abstraction of the passage beginning, "Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world!" Surely this denunciation of plagiarism by a plagiarist on the point of setting to work could only have been written by a man who looked upon plagiarism as a good joke. Apart, however, from the moralities of the matter, it must in fairness be admitted that in most cases Sterne is no servile copyist. He appropriates other men's thoughts and phrases, and with them, of course, the credit for the wit, the truth, the vigour, or the learning which characterizes them; but he is seldom found, in _Tristram Shandy_, at any rate, to have transferred them to his own pages out of a mere indolent inclination to save himself the trouble of composition. He takes them less as substitutes than as groundwork for his own invention--as so much material for his own inventive powers to work upon; and those powers do generally work upon them with conspicuous skill of elaboration. The series of cuttings, for instance, which he makes from Burton, on the occasion of Bobby Shandy's death, are woven into the main tissue of the dialogue with remarkable ingenuity and naturalness; and the bright strands of his own unborrowed humour fly flashing across the fabric at every transit of the shuttle. Or, to change the metaphor, we may say that in almost every instance the jewels that so glitter in their stolen setting were cut and set by Sterne himself. Let us allow that the most expert of lapidaries is not justified in stealing his settings; but let us still not forget that the _jewels_ are his, or permit our disapproval of his laxity of principle to make us unjust to his consummate skill. CHAPTER X. STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. To talk of "the style" of Sterne is almost to play one of those tricks with language of which he himself was so fond. For there is hardly any definition of the word which can make it possible to describe him as having any style at all. It is not only that he manifestly recognized no external canons whereto to conform the expression of his thoughts, but he had, apparently, no inclination to invent and observe--except, indeed, in the most negative of senses--any style of his own. The "style of Sterne," in short, is as though one should say "the form of Proteus." He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly irregular, and that was all. His digressions, his asides, and his fooleries in general would, of course, have in any case necessitated a certain general jerkiness of manner; but this need hardly have extended itself habitually to the structure of individual sentences, and as a matter of fact he can at times write, as he does for the most part in his _Sermons_, in a style which is not the less vigorous for being fairly correct. But as a rule his mode of expressing himself is destitute of any pretensions to precision; and in many instances it is a perfect marvel of literary slipshod. Nor is there any ground for believing that the slovenliness was invariably intentional. Sterne's truly hideous French--French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would have stood aghast--is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy. Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords confirmatory testimony to the same point. His punctuation is fearful and wonderful, even for an age in which the _rationale_ of punctuation was more imperfectly understood than it is at present; and this, though an apparently slight matter, is not without value as an indication of ways of thought. But if we can hardly describe Sterne's style as being in the literary sense a style at all, it has a very distinct _colloquial_ character of its own, and as such it is nearly as much deserving of praise as from the literary point of view it is open to exception. Chaotic as it is in the syntactical sense, it is a perfectly clear vehicle for the conveyance of thought: we are as rarely at a loss for the meaning of one of Sterne's sentences as we are, for very different reasons, for the meaning of one of Macaulay's. And his language is so full of life and colour, his tone so animated and vivacious, that we forget we are reading and not _listening_, and we are as little disposed to be exacting in respect to form as though we were listeners in actual fact. Sterne's manner, in short, may be that of a bad and careless writer, but it is the manner of a first-rate talker; and this, of course, enhances rather than detracts from the unwearying charm of his wit and humour. To attempt a precise and final distinction between these two last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else would be no very hopeful task, perhaps; but those who have a keen perception of either find no great difficulty in discriminating, as a matter of feeling, between the two. And what is true of the qualities themselves is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the men by whom they have been most conspicuously displayed. Some wits have been humourists also; nearly all humourists have been also wits; yet the two fall, on the whole, into tolerably well-marked classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would, probably, enable most men to state with sufficient certainty the class to which each famous name in the world's literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Molière, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Richter, Carlyle: widely as these writers differ from each other in style and genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be told that the list which includes them all is a catalogue of humourists. And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, Pope, Sheridan, Courier, Sydney Smith--this, I suppose, would be recognized at once as an enumeration of wits. Some of these humourists, like Fielding, like Richter, like Carlyle, are always, or almost always, humourists alone. Some of these wits, like Pascal, like Pope, like Courier, are wits with no, or but slight, admixture of humour; and in the classification of these there is of course no difficulty at all. But even with the wits who very often give us humour also, and with the humourists who as often delight us with their wit, we seldom find ourselves in any doubt as to the real and more essential affinities of each. It is not by the wit which he has infused into his talk, so much as by the humour with which he has delineated the character, that Shakspeare has given his Falstaff an abiding place in our memories. It is not the repartees of Benedick and Beatrice, but the immortal fatuity of Dogberry, that the name of _Much Ado About Nothing_ recalls. None of the verbal quips of Touchstone tickle us like his exquisite patronage of William and the fascination which he exercises over the melancholy Jaques. And it is the same throughout all Shakspeare. It is of the humours of Bottom, and Launce, and Shallow, and Sly, and Aguecheek; it is of the laughter that treads upon the heels of horror and pity and awe, as we listen to the Porter in _Macbeth_, to the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_, to the Fool in _Lear_--it is of these that we think when we think of Shakspeare in any other but his purely poetic mood. Whenever, that is to say, we think of him as anything but a poet, we think of him, not as a wit, but as a humourist. So, too, it is not the dagger-thrusts of the _Drapier's Letters_, but the broad ridicule of the _Voyage to Laputa_, the savage irony of the _Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_, that we associate with the name of Swift. And, conversely, it is the cold, epigrammatic glitter of Congreve's dialogue, the fizz and crackle of the fireworks which Sheridan serves out with undiscriminating hand to the most insignificant of his characters--it is this which stamps the work of these dramatists with characteristics far more marked than any which belong to them in right of humorous portraiture of human foibles or ingenious invention of comic incident. The place of Sterne is unmistakably among writers of the former class. It is by his humour--his humour of character, his dramatic as distinct from his critical descriptive _personal_ humour--though, of course, he possesses this also, as all humourists must--that he lives and will live. In _Tristram Shandy_, as in the _Sermons_, there is a sufficiency of wit, and considerably more than a sufficiency of humorous reflection, innuendo, and persiflage; but it is the actors in his almost plotless drama who have established their creator in his niche in the Temple of Fame. We cannot, indeed, be sure that what has given him his hold upon posterity is what gave him his popularity with his contemporaries. On the contrary, it is, perhaps, more probable that he owed his first success with the public of his day to those eccentricities which are for us a little too consciously eccentric--those artifices which fail a little too conspicuously in the _ars celandi artem_. But however these tricks may have pleased in days when such tricks were new, they much more often weary than divert us now; and I suspect that many a man whose delight in the Corporal and his master, in Bridget and her mistress, is as fresh as ever, declines to accompany their creator in those perpetual digressions into nonsense or semi-nonsense the fashion of which Sterne borrowed from Rabelais, without Rabelais's excuse for adopting it. To us of this day the real charm and distinction of the book is due to the marvellous combination of vigour and subtlety in its portrayal of character, and in the purity and delicacy of its humour. Those last two apparently paradoxical substantives are chosen advisedly, and employed as the most convenient way of introducing that disagreeable question which no commentator on Sterne can possibly shirk, but which every admirer of Sterne must approach with reluctance. There is, of course, a sense in which Sterne's humour--if, indeed, we may bestow that name on the form of jocularity to which I refer--is the very reverse of pure and delicate: a sense in which it is impure and indelicate in the highest degree. On this it is necessary, however briefly, to touch; and to the weighty and many-counted indictment which may be framed against Sterne on this head there is, of course, but one possible plea--the plea of guilty. Nay, the plea must go further than a mere admission of the offence; it must include an admission of the worst motive, the worst spirit as animating the offender. It is not necessary to my purpose, nor doubtless congenial to the taste of the reader, that I should enter upon any critical analysis of this quality in the author's work, or compare him in this respect with the two other great humourists who have been the worst offenders in the same way. In one of those highly interesting criticisms of English literature which, even when they most conspicuously miss the mark, are so instructive to Englishmen, M. Taine has instituted an elaborate comparison--very much, I need hardly say, to the advantage of the latter--between the indecency of Swift and that of Rabelais--that "good giant," as his countryman calls him, "who rolls himself joyously about on his dunghill, thinking no evil." And no doubt the world of literary moralists will always be divided upon the question--one mainly of national temperament--whether mere animal spirits or serious satiric purpose is the best justification for offences against cleanliness. It is, of course, only the former theory, if either, which could possibly avail Sterne, and it would need an unpleasantly minute analysis of this characteristic in his writings to ascertain how far M. Taine's eloquent defence of Rabelais could be made applicable to his case. But the inquiry, one is glad to think, is as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable; for, unfortunately for Sterne, he must be condemned on a _quantitative_ comparison of indecency, whatever may be his fate when compared with these other two great writers as regards the quality of their respective transgressions. There can be no denying, I mean, that Sterne is of all writers the most permeated and penetrated with impurity of thought and suggestion; that in no other writer is its latent presence more constantly felt, even if there be any in whom it is more often openly obtruded. The unclean spirit pursues him everywhere, disfiguring his scenes of humour, demoralizing his passages of serious reflection, debasing even his sentimental interludes. His coarseness is very often as great a blot on his art as on his morality--a thing which can very rarely be said of either Swift or Rabelais; and it is sometimes so distinctly fatal a blemish from the purely literary point of view, that one is amazed at the critical faculty which could have tolerated its presence. But when all this has been said of Sterne's humour it still remains true that, in another sense of the words "purity" and "delicacy," he possesses humour more pure and delicate than, perhaps, any other writer in the world can show. For if that humour is the purest and most delicate which is the freest from any admixture of farce, and produces its effects with the lightest touch, and the least obligations to ridiculous incident, or what may be called the "physical grotesque," in any shape--then one can point to passages from Sterne's pen which, for fulfilment of these conditions, it would be difficult to match elsewhere. Strange as it may seem to say this of the literary Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the literary Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot chestnut, it is nevertheless the fact that scene after scene may be cited from _Tristram Shandy_, and those the most delightful in the book, which are not only free from even the momentary intrusion of either the clown or the caricaturist, but even from the presence of "comic properties" (as actors would call them) of any kind: scenes of which the external setting is of the simplest possible character, while the humour is of that deepest and most penetrative kind which springs from the eternal incongruities of human nature, the ever-recurring cross-purposes of human lives. Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great humourists of the world; and from one, and that the most important, point of view the praise is not extravagant. By no other writer besides Sterne, perhaps, since the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast incongruities of human character been set forth with so masterly a hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his humour opens to us of the immensity and variety of man's life that Cervantes makes us feel that he is _great_: not delightful merely--not even eternally delightful only, and secure of immortality through the perennial human need of joy--but _great_, but immortal, in right of that which makes Shakspeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, namely, the power, not alone over the pleasure-loving part of man's nature, but over that equally universal but more enduring element in it, his emotions of wonder and of awe. It is to this greater power--this control over a greater instinct than the human love of joy, that Cervantes owes his greatness; and it will be found, though it may seem at first a hard saying, that Sterne shares this power with Cervantes. To pass from Quixote and Sancho to Walter and Toby Shandy involves, of course, a startling change of dramatic key--a notable lowering of dramatic tone. It is almost like passing from poetry to prose: it is certainly passing from the poetic in spirit and surroundings to the profoundly prosaic in fundamental conception and in every individual detail. But those who do not allow accidental and external dissimilarities to obscure for them the inward and essential resemblances of things, must often, I think, have experienced from one of the Shandy dialogues the same _sort_ of impression that they derive from some of the most nobly humorous colloquies between the knight and his squire, and must have been conscious through all outward differences of key and tone of a common element in each. It is, of course, a resemblance of _relations_ and not of personalities; for though there is something of the Knight of La Mancha in Mr. Shandy, there is nothing of Sancho about his brother. But the serio-comic game of cross-purposes is the same between both couples; and what one may call the irony of human intercourse is equally profound, and pointed with equal subtlety, in each. In the Spanish romance, of course, it is not likely to be missed. It is enough in itself that the deranged brain which takes windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho Panza--the crowning proof of its mania--as the fitting squire of a knight-errant. To him--to this compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature--to this creature with no more tincture of romantic idealism than a wine-skin, the knight addresses, without misgiving, his lofty dissertations on the glories and the duties of chivalry--the squire responding after his fashion. And thus these two hold converse, contentedly incomprehensible to each other, and with no suspicion that they are as incapable of interchanging ideas as the inhabitants of two different planets. With what heart-stirring mirth, and yet with what strangely deeper feeling of the infinite variety of human nature, do we follow their converse throughout! Yet Quixote and Sancho are not more life-like and human, nor nearer together at one point and farther apart at another, than are Walter Shandy and his brother. The squat little Spanish peasant is not more gloriously incapable of following the chivalric vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of grasping the philosophic crotchets of his brother. Both couples are in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one point; at another they are "poles asunder" both of them. And in both contrasts there is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and misunderstanding--that element of underlying pathos, in short, which so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite of resemblance--of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which all minor uniformities sink into insignificance. The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the humour is, of course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways. In both cases it is a picture of human simplicity--of a noble and artless nature out of harmony with its surroundings--which moves us; but whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of the _incompris_, in the English novel it is that of the man with whom the _incompris_ consorts. If there is pathos as well as humour, and deepening the humour, in the figure of the distraught knight-errant talking so hopelessly over the head of his attached squire's morality, so too there is pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric philosopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers. One's sympathy, perhaps, is even more strongly appealed to in the latter than in the former case, because the effort of the good Captain to understand is far greater than that of the Don to make himself understood, and the concern of the former at his failure is proportionately more marked than that of the latter at _his_. And the general _rapport_ between one of the two ill-assorted pairs is much closer than that of the other. It is, indeed, the tantalizing approach to a mutual understanding which gives so much more subtle a zest to the humour of the relations between the two brothers Shandy than to that which arises out of the relations between the philosopher and his wife. The broad comedy of the dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy is irresistible in its way: but it _is_ broad comedy. The philosopher knows that his wife does not comprehend him: she knows that she never will; and neither of them much cares. The husband snubs her openly for her mental defects, and she with perfect placidity accepts his rebukes. "Master," as he once complains, "of one of the finest chains of reasoning in the world, he is unable for the soul of him to get a single link of it into the head of his wife;" but we never hear him lamenting in this serio-comic fashion over his brother's inability to follow his processes of reasoning. That is too serious a matter with both of them; their mutual desire to share each other's ideas and tastes is too strong; and each time that the philosopher shows his impatience with the soldier's fortification-hobby, or the soldier breaks his honest shins over one of the philosopher's crotchets, the regret and remorse on either side is equally acute and sincere. It must be admitted, however, that Captain Shandy is the one who the more frequently subjects himself to pangs of this sort, and who is the more innocent sufferer of the two. From the broad and deep humour of this central conception of contrast flow as from a head-water innumerable rills of comedy through many and many a page of dialogue; but not, of course, from this source alone. Uncle Toby is ever delightful, even when his brother is not near him as his foil; the faithful Corporal brings out another side of his character, upon which we linger with equal pleasure of contemplation; the allurements of the Widow Wadman reveal him to us in yet another--but always in a captivating aspect. There is, too, one need hardly say, an abundance of humour, of a high, though not the highest, order in the minor characters of the story--in Mrs. Shandy, in the fascinating widow, and even, under the coarse lines of the physical caricature, in the keen little Catholic, Slop himself. But it is in Toby Shandy alone that humour reaches that supreme level which it is only capable of attaining when the collision of contrasted qualities in a human character produces a corresponding conflict of the emotions of mirth and tenderness in the minds of those who contemplate it. This, however, belongs more rightfully to the consideration of the creative and dramatic element in Sterne's genius; and an earlier place in the analysis is claimed by that power over the emotion of pity upon which Sterne, beyond question, prided himself more highly than upon any other of his gifts. He preferred, we can plainly see, to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the great sentimentalist; and though the word "sentiment" had something even in _his_ day of the depreciatory meaning which distinguishes it nowadays from "pathos," there can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Sterne to be, on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather admirable than the reverse. What, then, were his notions of true "sentiment" in literature? We have seen elsewhere that he repeats--it would appear unconsciously--and commends the canon which Horace propounds to the tragic poet in the words: "Si vis me flere, dolendum Primum ipsi tibi: tunc tua me infortunia laedent." And that canon is sound enough, no doubt, in the sense in which it was meant, and in its relation to the person to whom it was addressed. A tragic drama, peopled with heroes who set forth their woes in frigid and unimpassioned verse, will unquestionably leave its audience as cold as itself. Nor is this true of drama alone. All _poetry_, indeed, whether dramatic or other, presupposes a sympathetic unity of emotion between the poet and those whom he addresses; and to this extent it is obviously true that _he_ must feel before they can. Horace, who was (what every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an observer of human nature, did not, of course, mean that this capacity for feeling was all, or even the chief part, of the poetic faculty. He must have seen many an "intense" young Roman make that pathetic error of the young in all countries and of all periods--the error of mistaking the capacity of emotion for the gift of expression. He did, however, undoubtedly mean that a poet's power of affecting others presupposes passion in himself; and, as regards the poet, he was right. But his criticism takes no account whatever of one form of appeal to the emotions which has been brought by later art to a high pitch of perfection, but with which the personal feeling of the artist has not much more to do than the "passions" of an auctioneer's clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself, Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either the men or the method if he could have come across them. Had he done so, however, he would have been astonished to find his canon reversed, and to have perceived that the primary condition of the realist's success, and the distinctive note of those writers who have pressed genius into the service of realism, is that they do _not_ share--that they are unalterably and ostentatiously free from--the emotions to which they appeal in their readers. A fortunate accident has enabled us to compare the treatment which the world's greatest tragic poet and its greatest master of realistic tragedy have respectively applied to virtually the same subject; and the two methods are never likely to be again so impressively contrasted as in _King Lear_ and _Le Père Goriot_. But, in truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels Balzac's power not to feel also how it is heightened by Balzac's absolute calm--a calm entirely different from that stern composure which was merely a point of style and not an attitude of the heart with the old Greek tragedians--a calm which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, and is intended to insulate, the writer, to the end that his individuality, of which only the electric current of sympathy ever makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and the characters of the drama stand forth the more life-like from the complete concealment of the hand that moves them. Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew nothing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries. Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it is a form lower than the poetic--essentially a prosaic, and in many or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason, that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of art than any other. As to the question who _are_ its practitioners, it would, of course, be the merest dogmatism to commit one's self to any attempt at rigid classification in such a matter. There are few if any writers who can be described without qualification either as realists or as idealists. Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one moment and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in other moods. All that need be insisted on is that the methods of the two forms of art are essentially distinct, and that artistic failure must result from any attempt to combine them; for, whereas the primary condition of success in the one case is that the reader should feel the sympathetic presence of the writer, the primary condition of success in the other is that the writer should efface himself from the reader's consciousness altogether. And it is, I think, the defiance of these conditions which explains why so much of Sterne's deliberately pathetic writing is, from the artistic point of view, a failure. It is this which makes one feel so much of it to be strained and unnatural, and which brings it to pass that some of his most ambitious efforts leave the reader indifferent, or even now and then contemptuous. In those passages of pathos in which the effect is distinctly sought by realistic means Sterne is perpetually ignoring the "self-denying ordinance" of his adopted method--perpetually obtruding his own individuality, and begging us, as it were, to turn from the picture to the artist, to cease gazing for a moment at his touching creation, and to admire the fine feeling, the exquisitely sympathetic nature of the man who created it. No doubt, as we must in fairness remember, it was part of his "humour"--in Ancient Pistol's sense of the word--to do this; it is true, no doubt (and a truth which Sterne's most famous critic was too prone to ignore), that his sentiment is not always _meant_ for serious;[1] nay, the very word "sentimental" itself, though in Sterne's day, of course, it had acquired but a part of its present disparaging significance, is a sufficient proof of that. But there are, nevertheless, plenty of passages, both in _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_, where the intention is wholly and unmixedly pathetic--where the smile is not for a moment meant to compete with the tear--which are, nevertheless, it must be owned, complete failures, and failures traceable with much certainty, or so it seems to me, to the artistic error above-mentioned. [Footnote 1: Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage about the _desobligeante_, which had been "standing so many months unpitied in the corner of Monsieur Dessien's coach-yard. Much, indeed, was not to be said for it, but something might; and, when a few words will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them." "Does anybody," asks Thackeray in a strangely matter-of-fact fashion, "believe that this is a real sentiment? That this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of Misery--out of an old cab--is genuine feeling?" Nobody, we should say. But, on the other hand, does anybody--or did anybody before Thackeray--suggest that it was meant to pass for genuine feeling? Is it not an obvious piece of mock pathetic?] In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be described as other than ludicrous. The figure of the distraught Maria of Moulines is tenderly drawn; the accessories of the picture--her goat, her dog, her pipe, her song to the Virgin--though a little theatrical, perhaps, are skilfully touched in; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene prospers well enough. But, after having bidden us duly note how "the tears trickled down her cheeks," the Traveller continues: "I sat down close by her, and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own--and then in hers--and then in mine--and then I wiped hers again; and as I did it I felt such undescribable emotions within me as, I am sure, could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion." The reader of this may well ask himself in wonderment whether he is really expected to make a third in the lachrymose group. We look at the passage again, and more carefully, to see if, after all, we may not be intended to laugh, and not to cry at it; but on finding, as clearly appears, that we actually _are_ intended to cry at it the temptation to laugh becomes almost irresistible. We proceed, however, to the account of Maria's wanderings to Rome and back, and we come to the pretty passage which follows: "How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could not tell; but God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb. Shorn indeed! and to the quick, said I; and wast thou in my own land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter thee; thou shouldst eat of my own bread and drink of my own cup; I would be kind to thy Sylvio; in all thy weaknesses and wanderings I would seek after thee, and bring thee back. When the sun went down I would say my prayers; and when I had done thou shouldst play thy evening-song upon thy pipe; nor would the incense of my sacrifice be worse accepted for entering heaven along with that of a broken heart." But then follows more whimpering: "Nature melted within me [continues Sterne] as I said this; and Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped too much already to be of use, would needs go wash it in the stream. And where will you dry it, Maria? said I. I'll dry it in my bosom, said she; 'twill do me good. And is your heart still so warm, Maria? said I. I touched upon the string on which hung all her sorrows. She looked with wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying anything, took her pipe and played her service to the Virgin." Which are we meant to look at--the sorrows of Maria? or the sensibilities of the Sentimental Traveller? or the condition of the pocket-handkerchief? I think it doubtful whether any writer of the first rank has ever perpetrated so disastrous a literary failure as this scene; but the main cause of that failure appears to me not doubtful at all. The artist has no business within the frame of the picture, and his intrusion into it has spoilt it. The method adopted from the commencement is ostentatiously objective: we are taken straight into Maria's presence, and bidden to look at and to pity the unhappy maiden as _described_ by the Traveller who met her. No attempt is made to place us at the outset in sympathy with _him_; he, until he thrusts himself before us, with his streaming eyes, and his drenched pocket-handkerchief, is a mere reporter of the scene before him, and he and his tears are as much out of place as if he were the compositor who set up the type. It is not merely that we don't want to know how the scene affected him, and that we resent as an impertinence the elaborate account of his tender emotions; we don't wish to be reminded of his presence at all. For, as we can know nothing (effectively) of Maria's sorrows except as given in her appearance--the historical recital of them and their cause being too curt and bald to be able to move us--the best chance for moving our compassion for her is to make the illusion of her presence as dramatically real as possible; a chance which is, therefore, completely destroyed when the author of the illusion insists on thrusting himself between ourselves and the scene. But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines was, like more than one of Sterne's efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of its birth. These abortive efforts are no natural growth of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from certain morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which he forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command; but it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without. It came when he was in the dramatic and not in the introspective mood; when he was thinking honestly of his characters, and not of himself. But he was, unfortunately, too prone--and a long course of moral self-indulgence had confirmed him in it--to the habit of caressing his own sensibilities; and the result of this was always to set him upon one of those attempts to be pathetic of _malice prepense_ of which Maria of Moulines is one example, and the too celebrated dead donkey of Nampont another. "It is agreeably and skilfully done, that dead jackass," writes Thackeray; "like M. de Soubise's cook on the campaign, Sterne dresses it, and serves it up quite tender, and with a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine feelings, and a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and horses and feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with a dead donkey inside! Psha! Mountebank! I'll not give thee one penny-piece for that trick, donkey and all." That is vigorous ridicule, and not wholly undeserved; but, on the other hand, not entirely deserved. There is less of artistic trick, it seems to me, and more of natural foible, about Sterne's literary sentiment than Thackeray was ever willing to believe; and I can find nothing worse, though nothing better, in the dead ass of Nampont than in Maria of Moulines. I do not think there is any conscious simulation of feeling in this Nampont scene; it is that the feeling itself is overstrained--that Sterne, hugging, as usual, his own sensibilities, mistook their value in expression for the purposes of art. The Sentimental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the same extent as in the scene at Moulines; but a little consideration of the scene will show how much Sterne relied on the mere presentment of the fact that here was an unfortunate peasant who had lost his dumb companion, and here a tender-hearted gentleman looking on and pitying him. As for any attempts to bring out, by objective dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the bereavement or the grief of the mourner, such attempts as are made to do this are either commonplace or "one step in advance" of the sublime. Take this, for instance: "The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the door, with his ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, which he took up from time to time, then laid them down, looked at them, and shook his head. He then took the crust of bread out of his wallet again, as if to eat it; held it some time in his hand, then laid it upon the bit of his ass's bridle--looked wistfully at the little arrangement he had made--and then gave a sigh. The simplicity of his grief drew numbers about him," &c. Simplicity, indeed, of a marvellous sort which could show itself by so extraordinary a piece of acting as this! Is there any critic who candidly thinks it natural--I do not mean in the sense of mere every-day probability, but of conformity to the laws of human character? Is it true that in any country, among any people, however emotional, grief--real, unaffected, un-selfconscious grief--ever did or ever could display itself by such a trick as that of laying a piece of bread on the bit of a dead ass's bridle? Do we not feel that if we had been on the point of offering comfort or alms to the mourner, and saw him go through this extraordinary piece of pantomime, we should have buttoned up our hearts and pockets forthwith? Sentiment, again, sails very near the wind of the ludicrous in the reply to the Traveller's remark that the mourner had been a merciful master to the dead ass. "Alas!" the latter says, "I thought so when he was alive, but now that he is dead I think otherwise. I fear the weight of _myself and my afflictions_ have been too much for him." And the scene ends flatly enough with the scrap of morality: "'Shame on the world!' said I to myself. 'Did we love each other as this poor soul loved his ass, 'twould be something.'" The whole incident, in short, is one of those examples of the deliberate-pathetic with which Sterne's highly natural art had least, and his highly artificial nature most, to do. He is never so unsuccessful as when, after formally announcing, as it were, that he means to be touching, he proceeds to select his subject, to marshal his characters, to group his accessories, and with painful and painfully apparent elaboration to work up his scene to the weeping point. There is no obviousness of suggestion, no spontaneity of treatment about this "Dead Ass" episode; indeed, there is some reason to believe that it was one of those most hopeless of efforts--the attempt at the mechanical repetition of a former triumph. It is by no means improbable, at any rate, that the dead ass of Nampont owes its presence in the _Sentimental Journey_ to the reception met with by the live ass of Lyons in the seventh volume of _Tristram Shandy_. And yet what an astonishing difference between the two sketches! "'Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in, with a couple of large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops and cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well whether he would go in or no. Now, 'tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike. There is a patient endurance of sufferings wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him that it always disarms me, and to that degree that I do not like to speak unkindly to him; on the contrary, meet him where I will, in town or country, in cart or under panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and, as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I), I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance--and where those carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own heart into his, and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, as well as a man, upon the occasion.... Come, Honesty! said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the gate, art thou for coming in or going out? The ass twisted his head round, to look up the street. Well, replied I, we'll wait a minute for thy driver. He turned his head thoughtfully about, and looked wistfully the opposite way. I understand thee perfectly, answered I: if thou takest a wrong step in this affair he will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but a minute, and if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set down as ill spent. He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and, in the little peevish contentions of nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and picked it up again. God help thee, Jack! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on't, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for its wages--'tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to others. And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and thou hast not a friend, perhaps, in all this world that will give thee a macaroon. In saying this I pulled out a paper of 'em, which I had just purchased, and gave him one; and, at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act. When the ass had eaten his macaroon I pressed him to come in. The poor beast was heavy loaded, his legs seemed to tremble under him, he hung rather backwards, and as I pulled at his halter it broke short in my hand. He looked up pensive in my face. 'Don't thrash me with it; but if you will, you may.' 'If I do,' said I, 'I'll be d----d.'" Well might Thackeray say of this passage that, "the critic who refuses to see in it wit, humour, pathos, a kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard indeed to move and to please." It is, in truth, excellent; and its excellence is due to its possessing nearly every one of those qualities, positive and negative, which the two other scenes above quoted are without. The author does not here obtrude himself, does not importune us to admire his exquisitely compassionate nature; on the contrary, he at once amuses us and enlists our sympathies by that subtly humorous piece of self-analysis, in which he shows how large an admixture of curiosity was contained in his benevolence. The incident, too, is well chosen. No forced concurrence of circumstances brings it about: it is such as any man might have met with anywhere in his travels, and it is handled in a simple and manly fashion. The reader is _with_ the writer throughout; and their common mood of half-humorous pity is sustained, unforced, but unbroken, from first to last. One can hardly say as much for another of the much-quoted pieces from the _Sentimental Journey_--the description of the caged starling. The passage is ingeniously worked into its context; and if we were to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsiderate moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. But, regarded as a substantive appeal to one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms which apply to most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the pathetic. The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the very close of the story of Le Fevre's death--finely told though, as a whole, it is--there is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is breathing his last our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside, and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the literary ingenuities of the man who is describing his end: "There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him. The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back; the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon his boy--and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken." How excellent all that is! and how perfectly would the scene have ended had it closed with the tender and poetic image which thus describes the dying soldier's commendation of his orphan boy to the care of his brother-in-arms! But what of this, which closes the scene, in fact? "Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse fluttered--stopped--went on--throbbed--stopped again--moved, stopped. Shall I go on? No." Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery. The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself--the acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the springs of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost--when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating his own feelings instead of those of his personages, his cunning fails him altogether. He is at his best in pathos when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never good unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour. In this, of course, there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, that a man who was such a master of the humorous, in its highest and deepest sense, should seem to have so little understood how near together lie the sources of tears and laughter on the very way-side of man's mysterious life. CHAPTER XI. CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic honour--hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough forward through time--that the comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be exaggerated. There are so many "deathless ones" about--if I may put the matter familiarly--in conversation and in literature, that we get into the way of thinking that they are really a considerable body in actual fact, and that the works which have triumphed over death are far more numerous still. The real truth, however, is, that not only are "those who reach posterity a very select company indeed," but most of them have come much nearer missing their destiny than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or score of writers in one century whom their own contemporaries fondly decree immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a very much smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some fifty per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even upon _their_ brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay. A single poem, a solitary drama--nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dramatic--avails, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual creation. His imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt, considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous; but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed upon it; and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Captain Tobias Shandy which has graven itself indelibly on the memory of mankind. To have made this single addition to the imperishable types of human character embodied in the world's literature may seem, as has been said, but a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution, or Iago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred; and he contrives to preserve all the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, moreover, considered as an individual character in a specific story, is in complete, accord. If any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has commonly fared with those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to personify a virtue in a man. Take the work of another famous English humourist and sentimentalist, and compare Uncle Toby's manly and dignified gentleness of heart with the unreal "gush" of the Brothers Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter. But Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though we smile at his naïveté, and may even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his purposes as a sentimentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon affectation. It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in illustration of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized (as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly, caught and put out of the window with the words "Get thee gone, poor devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for thee and me." There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in the apostrophe. This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of Sterne's objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium of his own hypertrophied sensibilities. These lapses, however, are, fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only as he appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue--the man of simple mind and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely _naïf_, and delightfully _mal-à-propos_ in his observations, but always pardonably, never foolishly, so; inexhaustibly amiable, but with no weak amiability; homely in his ways, but a perfect gentleman withal; in a word, the most winning and lovable personality that is to be met with, surely, in the whole range of fiction. It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of character as it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of sentiment. He is never at his best and truest--as, indeed, no writer of fiction ever is or can be--save when he is allowing his dramatic imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking least about himself. This is curiously illustrated in his handling of what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncaricatured portraits in the Shandy gallery--the presentment of the Rev. Mr. Yorick. Nothing can be more perfect in its way than the picture of the "lively, witty, sensitive, and heedless parson," in chapter x. of the first volume of _Tristram Shandy_. We seem to see the thin, melancholy figure on the rawboned horse--the apparition which could "never present itself in the village but it caught the attention of old and young," so that "labour stood still as he passed, the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well, the spinning-wheel forgot its round; even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he was out of sight." Throughout this chapter Sterne, though describing himself, is projecting his personality to a distance, as it were, and contemplating it dramatically; and the result is excellent. When in the next chapter he becomes "lyrical," so to speak; when the reflection upon his (largely imaginary) wrongs impels him to look inward, the invariable consequence follows; and though Yorick's much bepraised death-scene, with Eugenius at his bed-side, is redeemed from entire failure by an admixture of the humorous with its attempted pathos, we ask ourselves with some wonder what the unhappiness--or the death itself, for that matter--is "all about." The wrongs which were supposed to have broken Yorick's heart are most imperfectly specified (a comic proof, by the way, of Sterne's entire absorption in himself, to the confusion of his own personal knowledge with that of the reader), and the first conditions of enlisting the reader's sympathies are left unfulfilled. But it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne obtrudes itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic parts of his work; and, next to the abiding charm and interest of his principal figure, it is by the admirable life and colour of his scenes that he exercises his strongest powers of fascination over a reader. Perpetual as are Sterne's affectations, and tiresome as is his eternal self-consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet when once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him there is no writer who ever makes us more completely forget him in the presence of his characters--none who can bring them and their surroundings, their looks and words, before us with such convincing force of reality. One wonders sometimes whether Sterne himself was aware of the high dramatic excellence of many of what actors would call his "carpenter's scenes"--the mere interludes introduced to amuse us while the stage is being prepared for one of those more elaborate and deliberate displays of pathos or humour, which do not always turn out to be unmixed successes when they come. Sterne prided himself vastly upon the incident of Le Fevre's death; but I dare say that there is many a modern reader who would rather have lost this highly-wrought piece of domestic drama, than that other exquisite little scene in the kitchen of the inn, when Corporal Trim toasts the bread which the sick lieutenant's son is preparing for his father's posset, while "Mr. Yorick's curate was smoking a pipe by the fire, but said not a word, good or bad, to comfort the youth." The whole scene is absolute life; and the dialogue between the Corporal and the parson, as related by the former to his master, with Captain Shandy's comments thereon, is almost Shakspearian in its excellence. Says the Corporal: "When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast he felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know that in about ten minutes he should be glad if I would step upstairs, I believe, said the landlord, he is going to say his prayers, for there was a book laid on the chair by the bed-side, and as I shut the door I saw him take up a cushion. I thought, said the curate, that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your prayers at all. I heard the poor gentleman say his prayers last night, said the landlady, very devoutly, and with my own ears, or I could not have believed it. Are you sure of it? replied the curate. A soldier, an' please your reverence, said I, prays as often (of his own accord) as a parson; and when he is fighting for his king, and for his own life, and for his honour too, he has the most reason to pray to God of any one in the whole world. 'Twas well said of thee, Trim, said my Uncle Toby. But when a soldier, said I, an' please your reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water--or engaged, said I, for months together in long and dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his rear today; harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded there; resting this night out upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the next; benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can. I believe, said I--for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation of the army--I believe, an't please your reverence, said I, that when a soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson--though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my Uncle Toby; for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly. I hope we shall, said Trim. It is in the Scripture, said my Uncle Toby, and I will show it thee in the morning. In the meantime, we may depend upon it, Trim, for our comfort, said my Uncle Toby, that God Almighty is so good and just a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, it will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat or a black one. I hope not, said the Corporal. But go on, said my Uncle Toby, with thy story." We might almost fancy ourselves listening to that noble prose colloquy between the disguised king and his soldiers on the night before Agincourt, in _Henry V._ And though Sterne does not, of course, often reach this level of dramatic dignity, there are passages in abundance in which his dialogue assumes, through sheer force of individualized character, if not all the dignity, at any rate all the impressive force and simplicity, of the "grand style." Taken altogether, however, his place in English letters is hard to fix, and his tenure in human memory hard to determine. Hitherto he has held his own, with the great writers of his era, but it has been in virtue, as I have attempted to show, of a contribution to the literary possessions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in amount as it is exceptionally perfect in quality. One cannot but feel that, as regards the sum of his titles to recollection, his name stands far below either of those other two which in the course of the last century added themselves to the highest rank among the classics of English humour. Sterne has not the abounding life and the varied human interest of Fielding; and, to say nothing of his vast intellectual inferiority to Swift, he never so much as approaches those problems of everlasting concernment to man which Swift handles with so terrible a fascination. Certainly no enthusiastic Gibbon of the future is ever likely to say of Sterne's "pictures of human manners" that they will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the House of Austria. Assuredly no one will ever find in _this_ so-called English antitype of the Curé of Meudon any of the deeper qualities of that gloomy and commanding spirit which has been finely compared to the "soul of Rabelais _habitans in sicco_." Nay, to descend even to minor aptitudes, Sterne cannot tell a story as Swift and Fielding can tell one; and his work is not assured of life as _Tom Jones_ and _Gulliver's Travels_, considered as stories alone, would be assured of it, even if the one were stripped of its cheerful humour, and the other disarmed of its savage allegory. And hence it might be rash to predict that Sterne's days will be as long in the land of literary memory as the two great writers aforesaid. Banked, as he still is, among "English classics," he undergoes, I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect. Among those who talk about him he has, I should imagine, fewer readers than Fielding, and very much fewer than Swift. Nor is he likely to increase their number as time goes on, but rather, perhaps, the contrary. Indeed, the only question is whether with the lapse of years he will not, like other writers as famous in their day, become yet more of a mere name. For there is still, of course, a further stage to which he may decline. That object of so much empty mouth-honour, the English classic of the last and earlier centuries, presents himself for classification under three distinct categories. There is the class who are still read in a certain measure, though in a much smaller measure than is pretended, by the great body of ordinarily well-educated men. Of this class, the two authors whose names I have already cited, Swift and Fielding, are typical examples; and it may be taken to include Goldsmith also. Then comes the class of those whom the ordinarily well-educated public, whatever they may pretend, read really very little or not at all; and in this class we may couple Sterne with Addison, with Smollett, and, except, of course, as to _Robinson Crusoe_--unless, indeed, our _blasé_ boys have outgrown him among other pleasures of boyhood--with Defoe. But below this there is yet a third class of writers, who are not only read by none but the critic, the connoisseur, or the historian of literature, but are scarcely read even by them, except from curiosity, or "in the way of business." The type of this class is Richardson; and one cannot, I say, help asking whether he will hereafter have Sterne as a companion of his dusty solitude. Are _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_ destined to descend from the second class into the third--from the region of partial into that of total neglect, and to have their portion with _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison?_ The unbounded vogue which they enjoyed in their time will not save them; for sane and sober critics compared Richardson in his day to Shakspeare, and Diderot broke forth into prophetic rhapsodies upon the immortality of his works which to us in these days have become absolutely pathetic in their felicity of falsified prediction. Seeing, too, that a good three-fourths of the attractions which won Sterne his contemporary popularity are now so much dead weight of dead matter, and that the vital residuum is in amount so small, the fate of Richardson might seem to be but too close behind him. Yet it is difficult to believe that this fate will ever quite overtake him. His sentiment may have mostly ceased--it probably has ceased--to stir any emotion at all in these days; but there is an imperishable element in his humour. And though the circle of his readers may have no tendency to increase, one can hardly suppose that a charm, which those who still feel it feel so keenly, will ever entirely cease to captivate; or that time can have any power over a perfume which so wonderfully retains the pungent freshness of its fragrance after the lapse of a hundred years. THE END. 
1700	----	The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Volume 2 by ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO CHAPTER I. Mr. Brontë afflicted with blindness, and relieved by a successful operation for cataract--Charlotte Brontë's first work of fiction, "The Professor"--She commences "Jane Eyre"--Circumstances attending its composition--Her ideas of a heroine--Her attachment to home--Haworth in December--A letter of confession and counsel. CHAPTER II. State of Charlotte Brontë's health at the commencement of 1847--Family trials--"Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" accepted by a publisher--"The Professor" rejected--Completion of "Jane Eyre", its reception and publication--The reviews of "Jane Eyre", and the author's comments on them--Her father's reception of the book--Public interest excited by "Jane Eyre"--Dedication of the second edition to Mr. Thackeray--Correspondence of Currer Bell with Mr. Lewes on "Jane Eyre"--Publication of "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey"--Miss Brontë's account of the authoress of "Wuthering Heights"--Domestic anxieties of the Brontë sisters--Currer Bell's correspondence with Mr. Lewes--Unhealthy state of Haworth--Charlotte Brontë on the revolutions of 1848--Her repudiation of authorship--Anne Brontë's second tale, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"--Misunderstanding as to the individuality of the three Bells, and its results--Currer and Acton Bell visit London--Charlotte Brontë's account of her visit--The Chapter Coffee House--The Clergy Daughters' School at Casterton--Death of Branwell Brontë--Illness and death of Emily Brontë. CHAPTER III. The Quarterly Review on "Jane Eyre"--Severe illness of Anne Brontë--Her last verses--She is removed to Scarborough--Her last hours, and death and burial there--Charlotte's return to Haworth, and her loneliness. CHAPTER IV. Commencement and completion of "Shirley"--Originals of the characters, and circumstances under which it was written--Loss on railway shares--Letters to Mr. Lewes and other friends on "Shirley," and the reviews of it--Miss Brontë visits London, meets Mr. Thackeray, and makes the acquaintance of Miss Martineau--Her impressions of literary men. CHAPTER V. "Currer Bell" identified as Miss Brontë at Haworth and the vicinity--Her letter to Mr. Lewes on his review of "Shirley"--Solitude and heavy mental sadness and anxiety--She visits Sir J. and Lady Kay Shuttleworth--Her comments on critics, and remarks on Thackeray's "Pendennis" and Scott's "Suggestions on Female Education"--Opinions of "Shirley" by Yorkshire readers. CHAPTER VI. An unhealthy spring at Haworth--Miss Brontë's proposed visit to London--Her remarks on "The Leader"--Associations of her walks on the moors--Letter to an unknown admirer of her works--Incidents of her visit to London--Her impressions of a visit to Scotland--Her portrait, by Richmond--Anxiety about her father. CHAPTER VII. Visit to Sir J. and Lady Kay Shuttleworth--The biographer's impressions of Miss Brontë--Miss Brontë's account of her visit to the Lakes of Westmoreland--Her disinclination for acquaintance and visiting--Remarks on "Woman's Mission," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," etc.--Impressions of her visit to Scotland--Remarks on a review in the "Palladium." CHAPTER VIII. Intended republication of "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey"--Reaction after her visit to Scotland--Her first meeting with Mr. Lewes--Her opinion of Balzac and George Sand--A characteristic incident--Account of a friendly visit to Haworth Parsonage--Remarks on "The Roman," by Sydney Dobell, and on the character of Dr. Arnold--Letter to Mr. Dobell. CHAPTER IX. Miss Brontë's visit to Miss Martineau, and estimate of her hostess--Remarks on Mr. Ruskin's "Stones of Venice"--Preparations for another visit to London--Letter to Mr. Sydney Dobell: the moors in autumn--Mr. Thackeray's second lecture at Willis's Rooms, and sensation produced by Currer Bell's appearance there--Her account of her visit to London--She breakfasts with Mr. Rogers, visits the Great Exhibition, and sees Lord Westminster's pictures--Return to Haworth and letter thence--Her comment on Mr. Thackeray's Lecture--Counsel on development of character. CHAPTER X. Remarks on friendship--Letter to Mrs. Gaskell on her and Miss Martineau's views of the Great Exhibition and Mr. Thackeray's lecture, and on the "Saint's Tragedy"--Miss Brontë's feelings towards children--Her comments on Mr. J. S. Mill's article on the Emancipation of Women--More illness at Haworth Parsonage--Letter on Emigration--Periodical returns of illness--Miss Wooler visits Haworth--Miss Brontë's impressions of her visit to London--Her account of the progress of Villette--Her increasing illness and sufferings during winter--Her letter on Mr. Thackeray's Esmond--Revival of sorrows and accessions of low spirits--Remarks on some recent books--Retrospect of the winter of 1851-2--Letter to Mrs. Gaskell on "Ruth." CHAPTER XI. Miss Brontë revisits Scarborough--Serious illness and ultimate convalescence of her father--Her own illness--"Villette" nearly completed--Further remarks on "Esmond" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--Letter respecting "Villette"--Another letter about "Villette"--Instance of extreme sensibility. CHAPTER XII. The biographer's difficulty--Deep and enduring attachment of Mr. Nicholls for Miss Brontë--Instance of her self-abnegation--She again visits London--Impressions of this visit--Letter to Mrs. Gaskell--Reception of the critiques on "Villette"--Misunderstanding with Miss Martineau--Letter on Mr. Thackeray's portrait--Visit of the Bishop of Ripon to Haworth Parsonage--Her wish to see the unfavourable critiques on her works--Her nervous shyness of strangers, and its cause--Letter on Mr. Thackeray's lectures. CHAPTER XIII. Letter to Mrs. Gaskell on writing fiction, etc.--The biographer's account of her visit to Haworth, and reminiscences of conversations with Miss Brontë--Letters from Miss Brontë to her friends--Her engagement to Mr. Nicholls, and preparations for the marriage--The marriage ceremony and wedding tour--Her happiness in the married state--New symptoms of illness, and their cause--The two last letters written by Mrs. Nicholls--An alarming change--Her death. CHAPTER XIV. Mourners at the funeral--Conclusion. CHAPTER I. During this summer of 1846, while her literary hopes were waning, an anxiety of another kind was increasing. Her father's eyesight had become seriously impaired by the progress of the cataract which was forming. He was nearly blind. He could grope his way about, and recognise the figures of those he knew well, when they were placed against a strong light; but he could no longer see to read; and thus his eager appetite for knowledge and information of all kinds was severely balked. He continued to preach. I have heard that he was led up into the pulpit, and that his sermons were never so effective as when he stood there, a grey sightless old man, his blind eyes looking out straight before him, while the words that came from his lips had all the vigour and force of his best days. Another fact has been mentioned to me, curious as showing the accurateness of his sensation of time. His sermons had always lasted exactly half an hour. With the clock right before him, and with his ready flow of words, this had been no difficult matter as long as he could see. But it was the same when he was blind; as the minute-hand came to the point, marking the expiration of the thirty minutes, he concluded his sermon. Under his great sorrow he was always patient. As in times of far greater affliction, he enforced a quiet endurance of his woe upon himself. But so many interests were quenched by this blindness that he was driven inwards, and must have dwelt much on what was painful and distressing in regard to his only son. No wonder that his spirits gave way, and were depressed. For some time before this autumn, his daughters had been collecting all the information they could respecting the probable success of operations for cataract performed on a person of their father's age. About the end of July, Emily and Charlotte had made a journey to Manchester for the purpose of searching out an operator; and there they heard of the fame of the late Mr. Wilson as an oculist. They went to him at once, but he could not tell, from description, whether the eyes were ready for being operated upon or not. It therefore became necessary for Mr. Brontë to visit him; and towards the end of August, Charlotte brought her father to him. He determined at once to undertake the operation, and recommended them to comfortable lodgings, kept by an old servant of his. These were in one of numerous similar streets of small monotonous-looking houses, in a suburb of the town. From thence the following letter is dated, on August 21st, 1846:-- "I just scribble a line to you to let you know where I am, in order that you may write to me here, for it seems to me that a letter from you would relieve me from the feeling of strangeness I have in this big town. Papa and I came here on Wednesday; we saw Mr. Wilson, the oculist, the same day; he pronounced papa's eyes quite ready for an operation, and has fixed next Monday for the performance of it. Think of us on that day! We got into our lodgings yesterday. I think we shall be comfortable; at least our rooms are very good, but there is no mistress of the house (she is very ill, and gone out into the country), and I am somewhat puzzled in managing about provisions; we board ourselves. I find myself excessively ignorant. I can't tell what to order in the way of meat. For ourselves I could contrive, papa's diet is so very simple; but there will be a nurse coming in a day or two, and I am afraid of not having things good enough for her. Papa requires nothing, you know, but plain beef and mutton, tea and bread and butter; but a nurse will probably expect to live much better; give me some hints if you can. Mr. Wilson says we shall have to stay here for a month at least. I wonder how Emily and Anne will get on at home with Branwell. They, too, will have their troubles. What would I not give to have you here! One is forced, step by step, to get experience in the world; but the learning is so disagreeable. One cheerful feature in the business is, that Mr. Wilson thinks most favourably of the case." "August 26th, 1846. "The operation is over; it took place yesterday Mr. Wilson performed it; two other surgeons assisted. Mr. Wilson says, he considers it quite successful; but papa cannot yet see anything. The affair lasted precisely a quarter of an hour; it was not the simple operation of couching Mr. C. described, but the more complicated one of extracting the cataract. Mr. Wilson entirely disapproves of couching. Papa displayed extraordinary patience and firmness; the surgeons seemed surprised. I was in the room all the time; as it was his wish that I should be there; of course, I neither spoke nor moved till the thing was done, and then I felt that the less I said, either to papa or the surgeons, the better. Papa is now confined to his bed in a dark room, and is not to be stirred for four days; he is to speak and be spoken to as little as possible. I am greatly obliged to you for your letter, and your kind advice, which gave me extreme satisfaction, because I found I had arranged most things in accordance with it, and, as your theory coincides with my practice, I feel assured the latter is right. I hope Mr. Wilson will soon allow me to dispense with the nurse; she is well enough, no doubt, but somewhat too obsequious; and not, I should think, to be much trusted; yet I was obliged to trust her in some things. . . . "Greatly was I amused by your account of ----'s flirtations; and yet something saddened also. I think Nature intended him for something better than to fritter away his time in making a set of poor, unoccupied spinsters unhappy. The girls, unfortunately, are forced to care for him, and such as him, because, while their minds are mostly unemployed, their sensations are all unworn, and, consequently, fresh and green; and he, on the contrary, has had his fill of pleasure, and can with impunity make a mere pastime of other people's torments. This is an unfair state of things; the match is not equal. I only wish I had the power to infuse into the souls of the persecuted a little of the quiet strength of pride--of the supporting consciousness of superiority (for they are superior to him because purer)--of the fortifying resolve of firmness to bear the present, and wait the end. Could all the virgin population of ---- receive and retain these sentiments, he would continually have to veil his crest before them. Perhaps, luckily, their feelings are not so acute as one would think, and the gentleman's shafts consequently don't wound so deeply as he might desire. I hope it is so." A few days later, she writes thus: "Papa is still lying in bed, in a dark room, with his eyes bandaged. No inflammation ensued, but still it appears the greatest care, perfect quiet, and utter privation of light are necessary to ensure a good result from the operation. He is very patient, but, of course, depressed and weary. He was allowed to try his sight for the first time yesterday. He could see dimly. Mr. Wilson seemed perfectly satisfied, and said all was right. I have had bad nights from the toothache since I came to Manchester." All this time, notwithstanding the domestic anxieties which were harassing them--notwithstanding the ill-success of their poems--the three sisters were trying that other literary venture, to which Charlotte made allusion in one of her letters to the Messrs. Aylott. Each of them had written a prose tale, hoping that the three might be published together. "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" are before the world. The third--Charlotte's contribution--is yet in manuscript, but will be published shortly after the appearance of this memoir. The plot in itself is of no great interest; but it is a poor kind of interest that depends upon startling incidents rather than upon dramatic development of character; and Charlotte Brontë never excelled one or two sketches of portraits which she had given in "The Professor", nor, in grace of womanhood, ever surpassed one of the female characters there described. By the time she wrote this tale, her taste and judgment had revolted against the exaggerated idealisms of her early girlhood, and she went to the extreme of reality, closely depicting characters as they had shown themselves to her in actual life: if there they were strong even to coarseness,--as was the case with some that she had met with in flesh and blood existence,--she "wrote them down an ass;" if the scenery of such life as she saw was for the most part wild and grotesque, instead of pleasant or picturesque, she described it line for line. The grace of the one or two scenes and characters, which are drawn rather from her own imagination than from absolute fact stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines of others, which call to mind some of the portraits of Rembrandt. The three tales had tried their fate in vain together, at length they were sent forth separately, and for many months with still-continued ill success. I have mentioned this here, because, among the dispiriting circumstances connected with her anxious visit to Manchester, Charlotte told me that her tale came back upon her hands, curtly rejected by some publisher, on the very day when her father was to submit to his operation. But she had the heart of Robert Bruce within her, and failure upon failure daunted her no more than him. Not only did "The Professor" return again to try his chance among the London publishers, but she began, in this time of care and depressing inquietude, in those grey, weary, uniform streets; where all faces, save that of her kind doctor, were strange and untouched with sunlight to her,--there and then, did the brave genius begin "Jane Eyre". Read what she herself says:--"Currer Bell's book found acceptance nowhere, nor any acknowledgment of merit, so that something like the chill of despair began to invade his heart." And, remember it was not the heart of a person who, disappointed in one hope, can turn with redoubled affection to the many certain blessings that remain. Think of her home, and the black shadow of remorse lying over one in it, till his very brain was mazed, and his gifts and his life were lost;--think of her father's sight hanging on a thread;--of her sister's delicate health, and dependence on her care;--and then admire as it deserves to be admired, the steady courage which could work away at "Jane Eyre", all the time "that the one-volume tale was plodding its weary round in London." I believe I have already mentioned that some of her surviving friends consider that an incident which she heard, when at school at Miss Wooler's, was the germ of the story of Jane Eyre. But of this nothing can be known, except by conjecture. Those to whom she spoke upon the subject of her writings are dead and silent; and the reader may probably have noticed, that in the correspondence from which I have quoted, there has been no allusion whatever to the publication of her poems, nor is there the least hint of the intention of the sisters to publish any tales. I remember, however, many little particulars which Miss Brontë gave me, in answer to my inquiries respecting her mode of composition, etc. She said, that it was not every day, that she could write. Sometimes weeks or even months elapsed before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written. Then, some morning, she would waken up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision, when this was the case, all her care was to discharge her household and filial duties, so as to obtain leisure to sit down and write out the incidents and consequent thoughts, which were, in fact, more present to her mind at such times than her actual life itself. Yet notwithstanding this "possession" (as it were), those who survive, of her daily and household companions, are clear in their testimony, that never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant. It had become necessary to give Tabby--now nearly eighty years of age--the assistance of a girl. Tabby relinquished any of her work with jealous reluctance, and could not bear to be reminded, though ever so delicately, that the acuteness of her senses was dulled by age. The other servant might not interfere with what she chose to consider her exclusive work. Among other things, she reserved to herself the right of peeling the potatoes for dinner; but as she was growing blind, she often left in those black specks, which we in the North call the "eyes" of the potato. Miss Brontë was too dainty a housekeeper to put up with this; yet she could not bear to hurt the faithful old servant, by bidding the younger maiden go over the potatoes again, and so reminding Tabby that her work was less effectual than formerly. Accordingly she would steal into the kitchen, and quietly carry off the bowl of vegetables, without Tabby's being aware, and breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing, carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes, and noiselessly carry them back to their place. This little proceeding may show how orderly and fully she accomplished her duties, even at those times when the "possession" was upon her. Any one who has studied her writings,--whether in print or in her letters; any one who has enjoyed the rare privilege of listening to her talk, must have noticed her singular felicity in the choice of words. She herself, in writing her books, was solicitous on this point. One set of words was the truthful mirror of her thoughts; no others, however apparently identical in meaning, would do. She had that strong practical regard for the simple holy truth of expression, which Mr. Trench has enforced, as a duty too often neglected. She would wait patiently searching for the right term, until it presented itself to her. It might be provincial, it might be derived from the Latin; so that it accurately represented her idea, she did not mind whence it came; but this care makes her style present the finish of a piece of mosaic. Each component part, however small, has been dropped into the right place. She never wrote down a sentence until she clearly understood what she wanted to say, had deliberately chosen the words, and arranged them in their right order. Hence it comes that, in the scraps of paper covered with her pencil writing which I have seen, there will occasionally be a sentence scored out, but seldom, if ever, a word or an expression. She wrote on these bits of paper in a minute hand, holding each against a piece of board, such as is used in binding books, for a desk. This plan was necessary for one so short-sighted as she was; and, besides, it enabled her to use pencil and paper, as she sat near the fire in the twilight hours, or if (as was too often the case) she was wakeful for hours in the night. Her finished manuscripts were copied from these pencil scraps, in clear, legible, delicate traced writing, almost as easy to read as print. The sisters retained the old habit, which was begun in their aunt's life-time, of putting away their work at nine o'clock, and beginning their study, pacing up and down the sitting room. At this time, they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and described their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the others what she had written, and heard what they had to say about it. Charlotte told me, that the remarks made had seldom any effect in inducing her to alter her work, so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality; but the readings were of great and stirring interest to all, taking them out of the gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cares, and setting them in a free place. It was on one of these occasions, that Charlotte determined to make her heroine plain, small, and unattractive, in defiance of the accepted canon. The writer of the beautiful obituary article on "the death of Currer Bell" most likely learnt from herself what is there stated, and which I will take the liberty of quoting, about Jane Eyre. "She once told her sisters that they were wrong--even morally wrong--in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, 'I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.' Hence 'Jane Eyre,' said she in telling the anecdote: 'but she is not myself, any further than that.' As the work went on, the interest deepened to the writer. When she came to 'Thornfield' she could not stop. Being short-sighted to excess, she wrote in little square paper-books, held close to her eyes, and (the first copy) in pencil. On she went, writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield, and was herself in a fever which compelled her to pause." This is all, I believe, which can now be told respecting the conception and composition of this wonderful book, which was, however, only at its commencement when Miss Brontë returned with her father to Haworth, after their anxious expedition to Manchester. They arrived at home about the end of September. Mr. Brontë was daily gaining strength, but he was still forbidden to exercise his sight much. Things had gone on more comfortably while she was away than Charlotte had dared to hope, and she expresses herself thankful for the good ensured and the evil spared during her absence. Soon after this some proposal, of which I have not been able to gain a clear account, was again mooted for Miss Brontë's opening a school at some place distant from Haworth. It elicited the following fragment of a characteristic reply:-- "Leave home!--I shall neither be able to find place nor employment, perhaps, too, I shall be quite past the prime of life, my faculties will be rusted, and my few acquirements in a great measure forgotten. These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but, whenever I consult my conscience, it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release. I could hardly expect success if I were to err against such warnings. I should like to hear from you again soon. Bring ---- to the point, and make him give you a clear, not a vague, account of what pupils he really could promise; people often think they can do great things in that way till they have tried; but getting pupils is unlike getting any other sort of goods." Whatever might be the nature and extent of this negotiation, the end of it was that Charlotte adhered to the decision of her conscience, which bade her remain at home, as long as her presence could cheer or comfort those who were in distress, or had the slightest influence over him who was the cause of it. The next extract gives us a glimpse into the cares of that home. It is from a letter dated December 15th. "I hope you are not frozen up; the cold here is dreadful. I do not remember such a series of North-Pole days. England might really have taken a slide up into the Arctic Zone; the sky looks like ice; the earth is frozen; the wind is as keen as a two-edged blade. We have all had severe colds and coughs in consequence of the weather. Poor Anne has suffered greatly from asthma, but is now, we are glad to say, rather better. She had two nights last week when her cough and difficulty of breathing were painful indeed to hear and witness, and must have been most distressing to suffer; she bore it, as she bears all affliction, without one complaint, only sighing now and then when nearly worn out. She has an extraordinary heroism of endurance. I admire, but I certainly could not imitate her." . . . "You say I am to 'tell you plenty.' What would you have me say? Nothing happens at Haworth; nothing, at least, of a pleasant kind. One little incident occurred about a week ago, to sting us to life; but if it gives no more pleasure for you to hear, than it did for us to witness, you will scarcely thank me for adverting to it. It was merely the arrival of a Sheriff's officer on a visit to B., inviting him either to pay his debts or take a trip to York. Of course his debts had to be paid. It is not agreeable to lose money, time after time, in this way; but where is the use of dwelling on such subjects? It will make him no better." "December 28th. "I feel as if it was almost a farce to sit down and write to you now, with nothing to say worth listening to; and, indeed, if it were not for two reasons, I should put off the business at least a fortnight hence. The first reason is, I want another letter from you, for your letters are interesting, they have something in them; some results of experience and observation; one receives them with pleasure, and reads them with relish; and these letters I cannot expect to get, unless I reply to them. I wish the correspondence could be managed so as to be all on one side. The second reason is derived from a remark in your last, that you felt lonely, something as I was at Brussels, and that consequently you had a peculiar desire to hear from old acquaintance. I can understand and sympathise with this. I remember the shortest note was a treat to me, when I was at the above-named place; therefore I write. I have also a third reason: it is a haunting terror lest you should imagine I forget you--that my regard cools with absence. It is not in my nature to forget your nature; though, I dare say, I should spit fire and explode sometimes if we lived together continually; and you, too, would get angry, and then we should get reconciled and jog on as before. Do you ever get dissatisfied with your own temper when you are long fixed to one place, in one scene, subject to one monotonous species of annoyance? I do: I am now in that unenviable frame of mind; my humour, I think, is too soon over-thrown, too sore, too demonstrative and vehement. I almost long for some of the uniform serenity you describe in Mrs. ----'s disposition; or, at least, I would fain have her power of self-control and concealment; but I would not take her artificial habits and ideas along with her composure. After all I should prefer being as I am. . . You do right not to be annoyed at any maxims of conventionality you meet with. Regard all new ways in the light of fresh experience for you: if you see any honey gather it." . . . "I don't, after all, consider that we ought to despise everything we see in the world, merely because it is not what we are accustomed to. I suspect, on the contrary, that there are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned. Indiscriminating irony and faultfinding are just sumphishness, and that is all. Anne is now much better, but papa has been for near a fortnight far from well with the influenza; he has at times a most distressing cough, and his spirits are much depressed." So ended the year 1846. CHAPTER II. The next year opened with a spell of cold dreary weather, which told severely on a constitution already tried by anxiety and care. Miss Brontë describes herself as having utterly lost her appetite, and as looking "grey, old, worn and sunk," from her sufferings during the inclement season. The cold brought on severe toothache; toothache was the cause of a succession of restless miserable nights; and long wakefulness told acutely upon her nerves, making them feel with redoubled sensitiveness all the harass of her oppressive life. Yet she would not allow herself to lay her bad health to the charge of an uneasy mind; "for after all," said she at this time, "I have many, many things to be thankful for." But the real state of things may be gathered from the following extracts from her letters. "March 1st. "Even at the risk of appearing very exacting, I can't help saying that I should like a letter as long as your last, every time you write. Short notes give one the feeling of a very small piece of a very good thing to eat,--they set the appetite on edge, and don't satisfy it,--a letter leaves you more contented; and yet, after all, I am very glad to get notes; so don't think, when you are pinched for time and materials, that it is useless to write a few lines; be assured, a few lines are very acceptable as far as they go; and though I like long letters, I would by no means have you to make a task of writing them. . . . I really should like you to come to Haworth, before I again go to B----. And it is natural and right that I should have this wish. To keep friendship in proper order, the balance of good offices must be preserved, otherwise a disquieting and anxious feeling creeps in, and destroys mutual comfort. In summer and in fine weather, your visit here might be much better managed than in winter. We could go out more, be more independent of the house and of our room. Branwell has been conducting himself very badly lately. I expect, from the extravagance of his behaviour, and from mysterious hints he drops (for he never will speak out plainly), that we shall be hearing news of fresh debts contracted by him soon. My health is better: I lay the blame of its feebleness on the cold weather, more than on an uneasy mind." "March 24th, 1847. "It is at Haworth, if all be well, that we must next see each other again. I owe you a grudge for giving Miss M---- some very exaggerated account about my not being well, and setting her on to urge my leaving home as quite a duty. I'll take care not to tell you next time, when I think I am looking specially old and ugly; as if people could not have that privilege, without being supposed to be at the last gasp! I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little." The quiet, sad year stole on. The sisters were contemplating near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused in the person of that brother, once their fond darling and dearest pride. They had to cheer the poor old father, into whose heart all trials sank the deeper, because of the silent stoicism of his endurance. They had to watch over his health, of which, whatever was its state, he seldom complained. They had to save, as much as they could, the precious remnants of his sight. They had to order the frugal household with increased care, so as to supply wants and expenditure utterly foreign to their self-denying natures. Though they shrank from overmuch contact with their fellow-beings, for all whom they met they had kind words, if few; and when kind actions were needed, they were not spared, if the sisters at the parsonage could render them. They visited the parish-schools duly; and often were Charlotte's rare and brief holidays of a visit from home shortened by her sense of the necessity of being in her place at the Sunday-school. In the intervals of such a life as this, "Jane Eyre" was making progress. "The Professor" was passing slowly and heavily from publisher to publisher. "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" had been accepted by another publisher, "on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors;" a bargain to be alluded to more fully hereafter. It was lying in his hands, awaiting his pleasure for its passage through the press, during all the months of early summer. The piece of external brightness to which the sisters looked during these same summer months, was the hope that the friend to whom so many of Charlotte's letters are addressed, and who was her chosen companion, whenever circumstances permitted them to be together, as well as a favourite with Emily and Anne, would be able to pay them a visit at Haworth. Fine weather had come in May, Charlotte writes, and they hoped to make their visitor decently comfortable. Their brother was tolerably well, having got to the end of a considerable sum of money which he became possessed of in the spring, and therefore under the wholesome restriction of poverty. But Charlotte warns her friend that she must expect to find a change in his appearance, and that he is broken in mind; and ends her note of entreating invitation by saying, "I pray for fine weather, that we may get out while you stay." At length the day was fixed. "Friday will suit us very well. I DO trust nothing will now arise to prevent your coming. I shall be anxious about the weather on that day; if it rains, I shall cry. Don't expect me to meet you; where would be the good of it? I neither like to meet, nor to be met. Unless, indeed, you had a box or a basket for me to carry; then there would be some sense in it. Come in black, blue, pink, white, or scarlet, as you like. Come shabby or smart, neither the colour nor the condition signifies; provided only the dress contain E----, all will be right." But there came the first of a series of disappointments to be borne. One feels how sharp it must have been to have wrung out the following words. "May 20th. "Your letter of yesterday did indeed give me a cruel chill of disappointment. I cannot blame you, for I know it was not your fault. I do not altogether exempt ---- from reproach. . . . This is bitter, but I feel bitter. As to going to B----, I will not go near the place till you have been to Haworth. My respects to all and sundry, accompanied with a large amount of wormwood and gall, from the effusion of which you and your mother are alone excepted.--C. B. "You are quite at liberty to tell what I think, if you judge proper. Though it is true I may be somewhat unjust, for I am deeply annoyed. I thought I had arranged your visit tolerably comfortable for you this time. I may find it more difficult on another occasion." I must give one sentence from a letter written about this time, as it shows distinctly the clear strong sense of the writer. "I was amused by what she says respecting her wish that, when she marries, her husband will, at least, have a will of his own, even should he be a tyrant. Tell her, when she forms that aspiration again, she must make it conditional if her husband has a strong will, he must also have strong sense, a kind heart, and a thoroughly correct notion of justice; because a man with a WEAK BRAIN and a STRONG WILL, is merely an intractable brute; you can have no hold of him; you can never lead him right. A TYRANT under any circumstances is a curse." Meanwhile, "The Professor" had met with many refusals from different publishers; some, I have reason to believe, not over-courteously worded in writing to an unknown author, and none alleging any distinct reasons for its rejection. Courtesy is always due; but it is, perhaps, hardly to be expected that, in the press of business in a great publishing house, they should find time to explain why they decline particular works. Yet, though one course of action is not to be wondered at, the opposite may fall upon a grieved and disappointed mind with all the graciousness of dew; and I can well sympathise with the published account which "Currer Bell" gives, of the feelings experienced on reading Messrs. Smith and Elder's letter containing the rejection of "The Professor". "As a forlorn hope, we tried one publishing house more. Ere long, in a much shorter space than that on which experience had taught him to calculate, there came a letter, which he opened in the dreary anticipation of finding two hard hopeless lines, intimating that 'Messrs. Smith and Elder were not disposed to publish the MS.,' and, instead, he took out of the envelope a letter of two pages. He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits, so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance would have done. It was added, that a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention." Mr. Smith has told me a little circumstance connected with the reception of this manuscript, which seems to me indicative of no ordinary character. It came (accompanied by the note given below) in a brown paper parcel, to 65 Cornhill. Besides the address to Messrs. Smith and Co., there were on it those of other publishers to whom the tale had been sent, not obliterated, but simply scored through, so that Messrs. Smith at once perceived the names of some of the houses in the trade to which the unlucky parcel had gone, without success. To MESSRS. SMITH AND ELDER. "July 15th, 1847. "Gentlemen--I beg to submit to your consideration the accompanying manuscript. I should be glad to learn whether it be such as you approve, and would undertake to publish at as early a period as possible. Address, Mr. Currer Bell, under cover to Miss Brontë, Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire." Some time elapsed before an answer was returned. A little circumstance may be mentioned here, though it belongs to a somewhat earlier period, as showing Miss Brontë's inexperience of the ways of the world, and willing deference to the opinion of others. She had written to a publisher about one of her manuscripts, which she had sent him, and, not receiving any reply, she consulted her brother as to what could be the reason for the prolonged silence. He at once set it down to her not having enclosed a postage-stamp in her letter. She accordingly wrote again, to repair her former omission, and apologise for it. To MESSRS. SMITH AND ELDER. "August 2nd, 1847. "Gentlemen,--About three weeks since, I sent for your consideration a MS. entitled "The Professor", a tale by Currer Bell. I should be glad to know whether it reached your hands safely, and likewise to learn, at your earliest convenience, whether it be such as you can undertake to publish.--I am, gentlemen, yours respectfully, "CURRER BELL. "I enclose a directed cover for your reply." This time her note met with a prompt answer; for, four days later, she writes (in reply to the letter which she afterwards characterised in the Preface to the second edition of "Wuthering Heights", as containing a refusal so delicate, reasonable, and courteous, as to be more cheering than some acceptances): "Your objection to the want of varied interest in the tale is, I am aware, not without grounds; yet it appears to me that it might be published without serious risk, if its appearance were speedily followed up by another work from the same pen, of a more striking and exciting character. The first work might serve as an introduction, and accustom the public to the author's the success of the second might thereby be rendered more probable. I have a second narrative in three volumes, now in progress, and nearly completed, to which I have endeavoured to impart a more vivid interest than belongs to "The Professor". In about a month I hope to finish it, so that if a publisher were found for "The Professor", the second narrative might follow as soon as was deemed advisable; and thus the interest of the public (if any interest was aroused) might not be suffered to cool. Will you be kind enough to favour me with your judgment on this plan?" While the minds of the three sisters were in this state of suspense, their long-expected friend came to pay her promised visit. She was with them at the beginning of the glowing August of that year. They were out on the moors for the greater part of the day basking in the golden sunshine, which was bringing on an unusual plenteousness of harvest, for which, somewhat later, Charlotte expressed her earnest desire that there should be a thanksgiving service in all the churches. August was the season of glory for the neighbourhood of Haworth. Even the smoke, lying in the valley between that village and Keighley, took beauty from the radiant colours on the moors above, the rich purple of the heather bloom calling out an harmonious contrast in the tawny golden light that, in the full heat of summer evenings, comes stealing everywhere through the dun atmosphere of the hollows. And up, on the moors, turning away from all habitations of men, the royal ground on which they stood would expand into long swells of amethyst-tinted hills, melting away into aerial tints; and the fresh and fragrant scent of the heather, and the "murmur of innumerable bees," would lend a poignancy to the relish with which they welcomed their friend to their own true home on the wild and open hills. There, too, they could escape from the Shadow in the house below. Throughout this time--during all these confidences--not a word was uttered to their friend of the three tales in London; two accepted and in the press--one trembling in the balance of a publisher's judgment; nor did she hear of that other story "nearly completed," lying in manuscript in the grey old parsonage down below. She might have her suspicions that they all wrote with an intention of publication some time; but she knew the bounds which they set to themselves in their communications; nor could she, nor can any one else, wonder at their reticence, when remembering how scheme after scheme had failed, just as it seemed close upon accomplishment. Mr. Brontë, too, had his suspicions of something going on; but, never being spoken to, he did not speak on the subject, and consequently his ideas were vague and uncertain, only just prophetic enough to keep him from being actually stunned when, later on, he heard of the success of "Jane Eyre"; to the progress of which we must now return. To MESSRS. SMITH AND ELDER. "August 24th. "I now send you per rail a MS. entitled 'Jane Eyre,' a novel in three volumes, by Currer Bell. I find I cannot prepay the carriage of the parcel, as money for that purpose is not received at the small station-house where it is left. If, when you acknowledge the receipt of the MS., you would have the goodness to mention the amount charged on delivery, I will immediately transmit it in postage stamps. It is better in future to address Mr. Currer Bell, under cover to Miss Brontë, Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire, as there is a risk of letters otherwise directed not reaching me at present. To save trouble, I enclose an envelope." "Jane Eyre" was accepted, and printed and published by October 16th. While it was in the press, Miss Brontë went to pay a short visit to her friend at B----. The proofs were forwarded to her there, and she occasionally sat at the same table with her friend, correcting them; but they did not exchange a word on the subject. Immediately on her return to the Parsonage, she wrote: "September. "I had a very wet, windy walk home from Keighley; but my fatigue quite disappeared when I reached home, and found all well. Thank God for it. "My boxes came safe this morning. I have distributed the presents. Papa says I am to remember him most kindly to you. The screen will be very useful, and he thanks you for it. Tabby was charmed with her cap. She said, 'she never thought o' naught o' t' sort as Miss sending her aught, and, she is sure, she can never thank her enough for it.' I was infuriated on finding a jar in my trunk. At first, I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to B----. However, the inscription A. B. softened me much. It was at once kind and villainous in you to send it. You ought first to be tenderly kissed, and then afterwards as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now on the floor of the bed-room where I am writing, looking at her apples. She smiled when I gave the collar to her as your present, with an expression at once well-pleased and slightly surprised. All send their love.--Yours, in a mixture of anger and love." When the manuscript of "Jane Eyre" had been received by the future publishers of that remarkable novel, it fell to the share of a gentleman connected with the firm to read it first. He was so powerfully struck by the character of the tale, that he reported his impression in very strong terms to Mr. Smith, who appears to have been much amused by the admiration excited. "You seem to have been so enchanted, that I do not know how to believe you," he laughingly said. But when a second reader, in the person of a clear-headed Scotchman, not given to enthusiasm, had taken the MS. home in the evening, and became so deeply interested in it, as to sit up half the night to finish it, Mr. Smith's curiosity was sufficiently excited to prompt him to read it for himself; and great as were the praises which had been bestowed upon it, he found that they had not exceeded the truth. On its publication, copies were presented to a few private literary friends. Their discernment had been rightly reckoned upon. They were of considerable standing in the world of letters; and one and all returned expressions of high praise along with their thanks for the book. Among them was the great writer of fiction for whom Miss Brontë felt so strong an admiration; he immediately appreciated, and, in a characteristic note to the publishers, acknowledged its extraordinary merits. The Reviews were more tardy, or more cautious. The Athenaeum and the Spectator gave short notices, containing qualified admissions of the power of the author. The Literary Gazette was uncertain as to whether it was safe to praise an unknown author. The Daily News declined accepting the copy which had been sent, on the score of a rule "never to review novels;" but a little later on, there appeared a notice of the Bachelor of the Albany in that paper; and Messrs. Smith and Elder again forwarded a copy of "Jane Eyre" to the Editor, with a request for a notice. This time the work was accepted; but I am not aware what was the character of the article upon it. The Examiner came forward to the rescue, as far as the opinions of professional critics were concerned. The literary articles in that paper were always remarkable for their genial and generous appreciation of merit nor was the notice of "Jane Eyre" an exception; it was full of hearty, yet delicate and discriminating praise. Otherwise, the press in general did little to promote the sale of the novel; the demand for it among librarians had begun before the appearance of the review in the Examiner; the power of fascination of the tale itself made its merits known to the public, without the kindly finger-posts of professional criticism; and, early in December, the rush began for copies. I will insert two or three of Miss Brontë's letters to her publishers, in order to show how timidly the idea of success was received by one so unaccustomed to adopt a sanguine view of any subject in which she was individually concerned. The occasions on which these notes were written, will explain themselves. "Oct. 19th, 1847. "Gentlemen,--The six copies of "Jane Eyre" reached me this morning. You have given the work every advantage which good paper, clear type, and a seemly outside can supply;--if it fails, the fault will lie with the author,--you are exempt. "I now await the judgment of the press and the public.--I am, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, C. BELL." MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. "Oct. 26th, 1847. "Gentlemen,--I have received the newspapers. They speak quite as favourably of "Jane Eyre" as I expected them to do. The notice in the Literary Gazette seems certainly to have been indited in rather a flat mood, and the Athenaeum has a style of its own, which I respect, but cannot exactly relish; still when one considers that journals of that standing have a dignity to maintain which would be deranged by a too cordial recognition of the claims of an obscure author, I suppose there is every reason to be satisfied. "Meantime a brisk sale would be effectual support under the hauteur of lofty critics.--I am, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, "C. BELL." MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. "Nov. 13th, 1847. "Gentlemen,--I have to acknowledge the receipt of yours of the 11th inst., and to thank you for the information it communicates. The notice from the People's Journal also duly reached me, and this morning I received the Spectator. The critique in the Spectator gives that view of the book which will naturally be taken by a certain class of minds; I shall expect it to be followed by other notices of a similar nature. The way to detraction has been pointed out, and will probably be pursued. Most future notices will in all likelihood have a reflection of the Spectator in them. I fear this turn of opinion will not improve the demand for the book--but time will show. If "Jane Eyre" has any solid worth in it, it ought to weather a gust of unfavourable wind.--I am, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, "C. BELL." MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. "Nov. 30th, 1847. "Gentlemen,--I have received the Economist, but not the Examiner; from some cause that paper has missed, as the Spectator did on a former occasion; I am glad, however, to learn through your letter, that its notice of "Jane Eyre" was favourable, and also that the prospects of the work appear to improve. "I am obliged to you for the information respecting "Wuthering Heights".--I am, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, "C. BELL." To MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. "Dec. 1st, 1847. "Gentlemen,--The Examiner reached me to-day; it had been missent on account of the direction, which was to Currer Bell, care of Miss Brontë. Allow me to intimate that it would be better in future not to put the name of Currer Bell on the outside of communications; if directed simply to Miss Brontë they will be more likely to reach their destination safely. Currer Bell is not known in the district, and I have no wish that he should become known. The notice in the Examiner gratified me very much; it appears to be from the pen of an able man who has understood what he undertakes to criticise; of course, approbation from such a quarter is encouraging to an author, and I trust it will prove beneficial to the work.--I am, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, C. BELL. "I received likewise seven other notices from provincial papers enclosed in an envelope. I thank you very sincerely for so punctually sending me all the various criticisms on "Jane Eyre"." TO MESSRS. SMITH, ELDER, AND CO. "Dec. 10th, 1847. "Gentlemen,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter inclosing a bank post bill, for which I thank you. Having already expressed my sense of your kind and upright conduct, I can now only say that I trust you will always have reason to be as well content with me as I am with you. If the result of any future exertions I may be able to make should prove agreeable and advantageous to you, I shall be well satisfied; and it would be a serious source of regret to me if I thought you ever had reason to repent being my publishers. "You need not apologise, Gentlemen, for having written to me so seldom; of course I am always glad to hear from you, but I am truly glad to hear from Mr. Williams likewise; he was my first favourable critic; he first gave me encouragement to persevere as an author, consequently I naturally respect him and feel grateful to him. "Excuse the informality of my letter, and believe me, Gentlemen, yours respectfully, CURRER BELL." There is little record remaining of the manner in which the first news of its wonderful success reached and affected the one heart of the three sisters. I once asked Charlotte--we were talking about the description of Lowood school, and she was saying that she was not sure whether she should have written it, if she had been aware how instantaneously it would have been identified with Cowan Bridge--whether the popularity to which the novel attained had taken her by surprise. She hesitated a little, and then said: "I believed that what had impressed me so forcibly when I wrote it, must make a strong impression on any one who read it. I was not surprised at those who read "Jane Eyre" being deeply interested in it; but I hardly expected that a book by an unknown author could find readers." The sisters had kept the knowledge of their literary ventures from their father, fearing to increase their own anxieties and disappointment by witnessing his; for he took an acute interest in all that befell his children, and his own tendency had been towards literature in the days when he was young and hopeful. It was true he did not much manifest his feelings in words; he would have thought that he was prepared for disappointment as the lot of man, and that he could have met it with stoicism; but words are poor and tardy interpreters of feelings to those who love one another, and his daughters knew how he would have borne ill-success worse for them than for himself. So they did not tell him what they were undertaking. He says now that he suspected it all along, but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing--and not writing letters. We have seen how the communications from their publishers were received "under cover to Miss Brontë." Once, Charlotte told me, they overheard the postman meeting Mr. Brontë, as the latter was leaving the house, and inquiring from the parson where one Currer Bell could be living, to which Mr. Brontë replied that there was no such person in the parish. This must have been the misadventure to which Miss Brontë alludes in the beginning of her correspondence with Mr. Aylott. Now, however, when the demand for the work had assured success to "Jane Eyre," her sisters urged Charlotte to tell their father of its publication. She accordingly went into his study one afternoon after his early dinner, carrying with her a copy of the book, and one or two reviews, taking care to include a notice adverse to it. She informed me that something like the following conversation took place between her and him. (I wrote down her words the day after I heard them; and I am pretty sure they are quite accurate.) "Papa, I've been writing a book." "Have you, my dear?" "Yes, and I want you to read it." "I am afraid it will try my eyes too much." "But it is not in manuscript: it is printed." "My dear! you've never thought of the expense it will be! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your name." "But, papa, I don't think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it." So she sate down and read some of the reviews to her father; and then, giving him the copy of "Jane Eyre" that she intended for him, she left him to read it. When he came in to tea, he said, "Girls, do you know Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely?" But while the existence of Currer Bell, the author, was like a piece of a dream to the quiet inhabitants of Haworth Parsonage, who went on with their uniform household life,--their cares for their brother being its only variety,--the whole reading-world of England was in a ferment to discover the unknown author. Even the publishers of "Jane Eyre" were ignorant whether Currer Bell was a real or an assumed name,--whether it belonged to a man or a woman. In every town people sought out the list of their friends and acquaintances, and turned away in disappointment. No one they knew had genius enough to be the author. Every little incident mentioned in the book was turned this way and that to answer, if possible, the much-vexed question of sex. All in vain. People were content to relax their exertions to satisfy their curiosity, and simply to sit down and greatly admire. I am not going to write an analysis of a book with which every one who reads this biography is sure to be acquainted; much less a criticism upon a work, which the great flood of public opinion has lifted up from the obscurity in which it first appeared, and laid high and safe on the everlasting hills of fame. Before me lies a packet of extracts from newspapers and periodicals, which Mr. Brontë has sent me. It is touching to look them over, and see how there is hardly any notice, however short and clumsily-worded, in any obscure provincial paper, but what has been cut out and carefully ticketed with its date by the poor, bereaved father,--so proud when he first read them--so desolate now. For one and all are full of praise of this great, unknown genius, which suddenly appeared amongst us. Conjecture as to the authorship ran about like wild-fire. People in London, smooth and polished as the Athenians of old, and like them "spending their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing," were astonished and delighted to find that a fresh sensation, a new pleasure, was in reserve for them in the uprising of an author, capable of depicting with accurate and Titanic power the strong, self-reliant, racy, and individual characters which were not, after all, extinct species, but lingered still in existence in the North. They thought that there was some exaggeration mixed with the peculiar force of delineation. Those nearer to the spot, where the scene of the story was apparently laid, were sure, from the very truth and accuracy of the writing, that the writer was no Southeron; for though "dark, and cold, and rugged is the North," the old strength of the Scandinavian races yet abides there, and glowed out in every character depicted in "Jane Eyre." Farther than this, curiosity, both honourable and dishonourable, was at fault. When the second edition appeared, in the January of the following year, with the dedication to Mr. Thackeray, people looked at each other and wondered afresh. But Currer Bell knew no more of William Makepeace Thackeray as an individual man--of his life, age, fortunes, or circumstances--than she did of those of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh. The one had placed his name as author upon the title-page of Vanity Fair, the other had not. She was thankful for the opportunity of expressing her high admiration of a writer, whom, as she says, she regarded "as the social regenerator of his day--as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped state of things. . . . His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing under the edge of the summer cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb." Anne Brontë had been more than usually delicate all the summer, and her sensitive spirit had been deeply affected by the great anxiety of her home. But now that "Jane Eyre" gave such indications of success, Charlotte began to plan schemes of future pleasure,--perhaps relaxation from care, would be the more correct expression,--for their darling younger sister, the "little one" of the household. But, although Anne was cheered for a time by Charlotte's success, the fact was, that neither her spirits nor her bodily strength were such as to incline her to much active exertion, and she led far too sedentary a life, continually stooping either over her book, or work, or at her desk. "It is with difficulty," writes her sister, "that we can prevail upon her to take a walk, or induce her to converse. I look forward to next summer with the confident intention that she shall, if possible, make at least a brief sojourn at the sea-side." In this same letter, is a sentence, telling how dearly home, even with its present terrible drawback, lay at the roots of her heart; but it is too much blended with reference to the affairs of others to bear quotation. Any author of a successful novel is liable to an inroad of letters from unknown readers, containing commendation--sometimes of so fulsome and indiscriminating a character as to remind the recipient of Dr. Johnson's famous speech to one who offered presumptuous and injudicious praise--sometimes saying merely a few words, which have power to stir the heart "as with the sound of a trumpet," and in the high humility they excite, to call forth strong resolutions to make all future efforts worthy of such praise; and occasionally containing that true appreciation of both merits and demerits, together with the sources of each, which forms the very criticism and help for which an inexperienced writer thirsts. Of each of these kinds of communication Currer Bell received her full share; and her warm heart, and true sense and high standard of what she aimed at, affixed to each its true value. Among other letters of hers, some to Mr. G. H. Lewes have been kindly placed by him at my service; and as I know Miss Brontë highly prized his letters of encouragement and advice, I shall give extracts from her replies, as their dates occur, because they will indicate the kind of criticism she valued, and also because throughout, in anger, as in agreement and harmony, they show her character unblinded by any self-flattery, full of clear-sighted modesty as to what she really did well, and what she failed in, grateful for friendly interest, and only sore and irritable when the question of sex in authorship was, as she thought, roughly or unfairly treated. As to the rest, the letters speak for themselves, to those who know how to listen, far better than I can interpret their meaning into my poorer and weaker words. Mr. Lewes has politely sent me the following explanation of that letter of his, to which the succeeding one of Miss Brontë is a reply. "When 'Jane Eyre' first appeared, the publishers courteously sent me a copy. The enthusiasm with which I read it, made me go down to Mr. Parker, and propose to write a review of it for Frazer's Magazine. He would not consent to an unknown novel--for the papers had not yet declared themselves--receiving such importance, but thought it might make one on 'Recent Novels: English and French'--which appeared in Frazer, December, 1847. Meanwhile I had written to Miss Brontë to tell her the delight with which her book filled me; and seem to have sermonised her, to judge from her reply." To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "Nov. 6th, 1847. "Dear Sir,--Your letter reached me yesterday; I beg to assure you, that I appreciate fully the intention with which it was written, and I thank you sincerely both for its cheering commendation and valuable advice. "You warn me to beware of melodrama, and you exhort me to adhere to the real. When I first began to write, so impressed was I with the truth of the principles you advocate, that I determined to take Nature and Truth as my sole guides, and to follow in their very footprints; I restrained imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement; over-bright colouring, too, I avoided, and sought to produce something which should be soft, grave, and true. "My work (a tale in one volume) being completed, I offered it to a publisher. He said it was original, faithful to nature, but he did not feel warranted in accepting it; such a work would not sell. I tried six publishers in succession; they all told me it was deficient in 'startling incident' and 'thrilling excitement,' that it would never suit the circulating libraries, and, as it was on those libraries the success of works of fiction mainly depended, they could not undertake to publish what would be overlooked there. "'Jane Eyre' was rather objected to at first, on the same grounds, but finally found acceptance. "I mention this to you, not with a view of pleading exemption from censure, but in order to direct your attention to the root of certain literary evils. If, in your forthcoming article in Frazer, you would bestow a few words of enlightenment on the public who support the circulating libraries, you might, with your powers, do some good. "You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is perennially interesting, and to all men.' "I feel that this also is true; but, dear Sir, is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation? "I shall anxiously search the next number of Fraser for your opinions on these points.--Believe me, dear Sir, yours gratefully, "C. BELL." But while gratified by appreciation as an author, she was cautious as to the person from whom she received it; for much of the value of the praise depended on the sincerity and capability of the person rendering it. Accordingly, she applied to Mr. Williams (a gentleman connected with her publishers' firm) for information as to who and what Mr. Lewes was. Her reply, after she had learnt something of the character of her future critic, and while awaiting his criticism, must not be omitted. Besides the reference to him, it contains some amusing allusions to the perplexity which began to be excited respecting the "identity of the brothers Bell," and some notice of the conduct of another publisher towards her sister, which I refrain from characterising, because I understand that truth is considered a libel in speaking of such people. To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "Nov. 10th, 1847. "Dear Sir,--I have received the Britannia and the Sun, but not the Spectator which I rather regret, as censure, though not pleasant, is often wholesome. "Thank you for your information regarding Mr. Lewes. I am glad to hear that he is a clever and sincere man: such being the case, I can await his critical sentence with fortitude; even if it goes against me, I shall not murmur; ability and honesty have a right to condemn, where they think condemnation is deserved. From what you say, however, I trust rather to obtain at least a modified approval. "Your account of the various surmises respecting the identity of the brothers Bell, amused me much: were the enigma solved, it would probably be found not worth the trouble of solution; but I will let it alone; it suits ourselves to remain quiet, and certainly injures no one else. "The reviewer who noticed the little book of poems, in the Dublin Magazine, conjectured that the soi-disant three personages were in reality but one, who, endowed with an unduly prominent organ of self-esteem, and consequently impressed with a somewhat weighty notion of his own merits, thought them too vast to be concentrated in a single individual, and accordingly divided himself into three, out of consideration, I suppose, for the nerves of the much-to-be-astounded public! This was an ingenious thought in the reviewer,--very original and striking, but not accurate. We are three. "A prose work, by Ellis and Acton, will soon appear: it should have been out, indeed, long since; for the first proof-sheets were already in the press at the commencement of last August, before Currer Bell had placed the MS. of "Jane Eyre" in your hands. Mr.----, however, does not do business like Messrs. Smith and Elder; a different spirit seems to preside at ---- Street, to that which guides the helm at 65, Cornhill. . . . My relations have suffered from exhausting delay and procrastination, while I have to acknowledge the benefits of a management at once business-like and gentleman-like, energetic and considerate. "I should like to know if Mr. ---- often acts as he has done to my relations, or whether this is an exceptional instance of his method. Do you know, and can you tell me anything about him? You must excuse me for going to the point at once, when I want to learn anything: if my questions are importunate, you are, of course, at liberty to decline answering them.--I am, yours respectfully, C. BELL." To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "Nov. 22nd, 1847. "Dear Sir,--I have now read 'Ranthorpe.' I could not get it till a day or two ago; but I have got it and read it at last; and in reading 'Ranthorpe,' I have read a new book,--not a reprint--not a reflection of any other book, but a NEW BOOK. "I did not know such books were written now. It is very different to any of the popular works of fiction: it fills the mind with fresh knowledge. Your experience and your convictions are made the reader's; and to an author, at least, they have a value and an interest quite unusual. I await your criticism on 'Jane Eyre' now with other sentiments than I entertained before the perusal of 'Ranthorpe.' "You were a stranger to me. I did not particularly respect you. I did not feel that your praise or blame would have any special weight. I knew little of your right to condemn or approve. NOW I am informed on these points. "You will be severe; your last letter taught me as much. Well! I shall try to extract good out of your severity: and besides, though I am now sure you are a just, discriminating man, yet, being mortal, you must be fallible; and if any part of your censure galls me too keenly to the quick--gives me deadly pain--I shall for the present disbelieve it, and put it quite aside, till such time as I feel able to receive it without torture.--I am, dear Sir, yours very respectfully, C. BELL." In December, 1847, "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" appeared. The first-named of these stories has revolted many readers by the power with which wicked and exceptional characters are depicted. Others, again, have felt the attraction of remarkable genius, even when displayed on grim and terrible criminals. Miss Brontë herself says, with regard to this tale, "Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country-people that pass her convent gates. My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious: circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though the feeling for the people around her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced and yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, and their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued, that what her mind has gathered of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits, of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny--more powerful than sportive--found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable--of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree--loftier, straighter, wider-spreading--and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work; to the influence of other intellects she was not amenable." Whether justly or unjustly, the productions of the two younger Miss Brontës were not received with much favour at the time of their publication. "Critics failed to do them justice. The immature, but very real, powers revealed in 'Wuthering Heights,' were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunderstood; the identity of its author was misrepresented: it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced 'Jane Eyre.'" . . . "Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now." Henceforward Charlotte Brontë's existence becomes divided into two parallel currents--her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character--not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled. When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other study or pursuit; he gives up something of the legal or medical profession, in which he has hitherto endeavoured to serve others, or relinquishes part of the trade or business by which he has been striving to gain a livelihood; and another merchant or lawyer, or doctor, steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman's principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. And yet she must not shrink from the extra responsibility implied by the very fact of her possessing such talents. She must not hide her gift in a napkin; it was meant for the use and service of others. In an humble and faithful spirit must she labour to do what is not impossible, or God would not have set her to do it. I put into words what Charlotte Brontë put into actions. The year 1848 opened with sad domestic distress. It is necessary, however painful, to remind the reader constantly of what was always present to the hearts of father and sisters at this time. It is well that the thoughtless critics, who spoke of the sad and gloomy views of life presented by the Brontës in their tales, should know how such words were wrung out of them by the living recollection of the long agony they suffered. It is well, too, that they who have objected to the representation of coarseness and shrank from it with repugnance, as if such conceptions arose out of the writers, should learn, that, not from the imagination--not from internal conception--but from the hard cruel facts, pressed down, by external life, upon their very senses, for long months and years together, did they write out what they saw, obeying the stern dictates of their consciences. They might be mistaken. They might err in writing at all, when their affections were so great that they could not write otherwise than they did of life. It is possible that it would have been better to have described only good and pleasant people, doing only good and pleasant things (in which case they could hardly have written at any time): all I say is, that never, I believe, did women, possessed of such wonderful gifts, exercise them with a fuller feeling of responsibility for their use. As to mistakes, stand now--as authors as well as women--before the judgment-seat of God. "Jan. 11th, 1848. "We have not been very comfortable here at home lately. Branwell has, by some means, contrived to get more money from the old quarter, and has led us a sad life. . . . Papa is harassed day and night; we have little peace, he is always sick; has two or three times fallen down in fits; what will be the ultimate end, God knows. But who is without their drawback, their scourge, their skeleton behind the curtain? It remains only to do one's best, and endure with patience what God sends." I suppose that she had read Mr. Lewes' review on "Recent Novels," when it appeared in the December of the last year, but I find no allusion to it till she writes to him on January 12th, 1848. "Dear Sir,--I thank you then sincerely for your generous review; and it is with the sense of double content I express my gratitude, because I am now sure the tribute is not superfluous or obtrusive. You were not severe on 'Jane Eyre;' you were very lenient. I am glad you told me my faults plainly in private, for in your public notice you touch on them so lightly, I should perhaps have passed them over thus indicated, with too little reflection. "I mean to observe your warning about being careful how I undertake new works; my stock of materials is not abundant, but very slender; and, besides, neither my experience, my acquirements, nor my powers, are sufficiently varied to justify my ever becoming a frequent writer. I tell you this, because your article in Frazer left in me an uneasy impression that you were disposed to think better of the author of 'Jane Eyre' than that individual deserved; and I would rather you had a correct than a flattering opinion of me, even though I should never see you. "If I ever DO write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call 'melodrama;' I think so, but I am not sure. I THINK, too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's 'mild eyes,' 'to finish more and be more subdued;' but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master--which will have its own way--putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. "Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it? "I am glad that another work of yours will soon appear; most curious shall I be to see whether you will write up to your own principles, and work out your own theories. You did not do it altogether in 'Ranthorpe'--at least not in the latter part; but the first portion was, I think, nearly without fault; then it had a pith, truth, significance in it, which gave the book sterling value; but to write so, one must have seen and known a great deal, and I have seen and known very little. "Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would have rather written "Pride and Prejudice,' or 'Tom Jones,' than any of the 'Waverley Novels'? "I had not seen 'Pride and Prejudice' till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk. "Now I can understand admiration of George Sand; for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even 'Consuelo,' which is the best, or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound;--Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. "Am I wrong--or, were you hasty in what you said? If you have time, I should be glad to hear further on this subject; if not, or if you think the questions frivolous, do not trouble yourself to reply.--I am, yours respectfully, C. BELL." To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "Jan. 18th, 1848. "Dear Sir,--I must write one more note, though I had not intended to trouble you again so soon. I have to agree with you, and to differ from you. "You correct my crude remarks on the subject of the 'influence'; well, I accept your definition of what the effects of that influence should be; I recognise the wisdom of your rules for its regulation. . . . "What a strange lecture comes next in your letter! You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact, that 'Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no "sentiment" (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry,'--and then you add, I MUST 'learn to acknowledge her as ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS, OF THE GREATEST PAINTERS OF HUMAN CHARACTER, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.' "The last point only will I ever acknowledge. "Can there be a great artist without poetry? "What I call--what I will bend to, as a great artist then--cannot be destitute of the divine gift. But by POETRY, I am sure, you understand something different to what I do, as you do by 'sentiment.' It is POETRY, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something Godlike. It is 'sentiment,' in my sense of the term--sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive poison into purifying elixir. "If Thackeray did not cherish in his large heart deep feeling for his kind, he would delight to exterminate; as it is, I believe, he wishes only to reform. Miss Austen being, as you say, without 'sentiment,' without Poetry, maybe IS sensible, real (more REAL than TRUE), but she cannot be great. "I submit to your anger, which I have now excited (for have I not questioned the perfection of your darling?); the storm may pass over me. Nevertheless, I will, when I can (I do not know when that will be, as I have no access to a circulating library), diligently peruse all Miss Austen's works, as you recommend. . . . You must forgive me for not always being able to think as you do, and still believe me, yours gratefully, C. BELL." I have hesitated a little, before inserting the following extract from a letter to Mr. Williams, but it is strikingly characteristic; and the criticism contained in it is, from that circumstance, so interesting (whether we agree with it or not), that I have determined to do so, though I thereby displace the chronological order of the letters, in order to complete this portion of a correspondence which is very valuable, as showing the purely intellectual side of her character. To W. S. WILLIAMS, BSQ. "April 26th, 1848. "My dear Sir,--I have now read 'Rose, Blanche, and Violet,' and I will tell you, as well as I can, what I think of it. Whether it is an improvement on 'Ranthorpe' I do not know, for I liked 'Ranthorpe' much; but, at any rate, it contains more of a good thing. I find in it the same power, but more fully developed. "The author's character is seen in every page, which makes the book interesting--far more interesting than any story could do; but it is what the writer himself says that attracts far more than what he puts into the mouths of his characters. G. H. Lewes is, to my perception, decidedly the most original character in the book. . . . The didactic passages seem to me the best--far the best--in the work; very acute, very profound, are some of the views there given, and very clearly they are offered to the reader. He is a just thinker; he is a sagacious observer; there is wisdom in his theory, and, I doubt not, energy in his practice. But why, then, are you often provoked with him while you read? How does he manage, while teaching, to make his hearer feel as if his business was, not quietly to receive the doctrines propounded, but to combat them? You acknowledge that he offers you gems of pure truth; why do you keep perpetually scrutinising them for flaws? "Mr. Lewes, I divine, with all his talents and honesty, must have some faults of manner; there must be a touch too much of dogmatism; a dash extra of confidence in him, sometimes. This you think while you are reading the book; but when you have closed it and laid it down, and sat a few minutes collecting your thoughts, and settling your impressions, you find the idea or feeling predominant in your mind to be pleasure at the fuller acquaintance you have made with a fine mind and a true heart, with high abilities and manly principles. I hope he will not be long ere he publishes another book. His emotional scenes are somewhat too uniformly vehement: would not a more subdued style of treatment often have produced a more masterly effect? Now and then Mr. Lewes takes a French pen into his hand, wherein he differs from Mr. Thackeray, who always uses an English quill. However, the French pen does not far mislead Mr. Lewes; he wields it with British muscles. All honour to him for the excellent general tendency of his book! "He gives no charming picture of London literary society, and especially the female part of it; but all coteries, whether they be literary, scientific, political, or religious, must, it seems to me, have a tendency to change truth into affectation. When people belong to a clique, they must, I suppose, in some measure, write, talk, think, and live for that clique; a harassing and narrowing necessity. I trust, the press and the public show themselves disposed to give the book the reception it merits, and that is a very cordial one, far beyond anything due to a Bulwer or D'Israeli production." Let us return from Currer Bell to Charlotte Brontë. The winter in Haworth had been a sickly season. Influenza had prevailed amongst the villagers, and where there was a real need for the presence of the clergyman's daughters, they were never found wanting, although they were shy of bestowing mere social visits on the parishioners. They had themselves suffered from the epidemic; Anne severely, as in her case it had been attended with cough and fever enough to make her elder sisters very anxious about her. There is no doubt that the proximity of the crowded church-yard rendered the Parsonage unhealthy, and occasioned much illness to its inmates. Mr. Brontë represented the unsanitary state at Haworth pretty forcibly to the Board of Health; and, after the requisite visits from their officers, obtained a recommendation that all future interments in the churchyard should be forbidden, a new graveyard opened on the hill-side, and means set on foot for obtaining a water-supply to each house, instead of the weary, hard-worked housewives having to carry every bucketful, from a distance of several hundred yards, up a steep street. But he was baffled by the rate-payers; as, in many a similar instance, quantity carried it against quality, numbers against intelligence. And thus we find that illness often assumed a low typhoid form in Haworth, and fevers of various kinds visited the place with sad frequency. In February, 1848, Louis Philippe was dethroned. The quick succession of events at that time called forth the following expression of Miss Brontë's thoughts on the subject, in a letter addressed to Miss Wooler, and dated March 31st. "I remember well wishing my lot had been cast in the troubled times of the late war, and seeing in its exciting incidents a kind of stimulating charm, which it made my pulses beat fast to think of I remember even, I think; being a little impatient, that you would not fully sympathise with my feelings on those subjects; that you heard my aspirations and speculations very tranquilly, and by no means seemed to think the flaming swords could be any pleasant addition to Paradise. I have now out-lived youth; and, though I dare not say that I have outlived all its illusions--that the romance is quite gone from life--the veil fallen from truth, and that I see both in naked reality--yet, certainly, many things are not what they were ten years ago: and, amongst the rest, the pomp and circumstance of war have quite lost in my eyes their fictitious glitter. I have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life, both in nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale, diverts men's minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and for the time gives them something like largeness of views; but, as little doubt have I, that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface; in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust, by their violence, the vital energies of the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps, and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent, and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray. With the French and Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and Italians I think the case is different; as different as the love of freedom is from the lust for license." Her birthday came round. She wrote to the friend whose birthday was within a week of hers; wrote the accustomed letter; but, reading it with our knowledge of what she had done, we perceive the difference between her thoughts and what they were a year or two ago, when she said "I have done nothing." There must have been a modest consciousness of having "done something" present in her mind, as she wrote this year:-- "I am now thirty-two. Youth is gone--gone,--and will never come back: can't help it. . . . It seems to me, that sorrow must come some time to everybody, and those who scarcely taste it in their youth, often have a more brimming and bitter cup to drain in after life; whereas, those who exhaust the dregs early, who drink the lees before the wine, may reasonably hope for more palatable draughts to succeed." The authorship of "Jane Eyre" was as yet a close secret in the Brontë family; not even this friend, who was all but a sister knew more about it than the rest of the world. She might conjecture, it is true, both from her knowledge of previous habits, and from the suspicious fact of the proofs having been corrected at B----, that some literary project was afoot; but she knew nothing, and wisely said nothing, until she heard a report from others, that Charlotte Brontë was an author--had published a novel! Then she wrote to her; and received the two following letters; confirmatory enough, as it seems to me now, in their very vehemence and agitation of intended denial, of the truth of the report. "April 28th, 1848. "Write another letter, and explain that last note of yours distinctly. If your allusions are to myself, which I suppose they are, understand this,--I have given no one a right to gossip about me, and am not to be judged by frivolous conjectures, emanating from any quarter whatever. Let me know what you heard, and from whom you heard it." "May 3rd, 1848. "All I can say to you about a certain matter is this: the report--if report there be--and if the lady, who seems to have been rather mystified, had not dreamt what she fancied had been told to her--must have had its origin in some absurd misunderstanding. I have given NO ONE a right either to affirm, or to hint, in the most distant manner, that I was 'publishing'--(humbug!) Whoever has said it--if any one has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and an ill-bred thing. The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety; and that notoriety I neither seek nor will have. If then any B--an, or G--an, should presume to bore you on the subject,--to ask you what 'novel' Miss Brontë has been 'publishing,' you can just say, with the distinct firmness of which you are perfect mistress when you choose, that you are authorised by Miss Brontë to say, that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if any one has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confessions to you on the subject. I am at a loss to conjecture from what source this rumour has come; and, I fear, it has far from a friendly origin. I am not certain, however, and I should be very glad if I could gain certainty. Should you hear anything more, please let me know. Your offer of 'Simeon's Life' is a very kind one, and I thank you for it. I dare say Papa would like to see the work very much, as he knew Mr. Simeon. Laugh or scold A---- out of the publishing notion; and believe me, through all chances and changes, whether calumniated or let alone,--Yours faithfully, C. BRONTË." The reason why Miss Brontë was so anxious to preserve her secret, was, I am told, that she had pledged her word to her sisters that it should not be revealed through her. The dilemmas attendant on the publication of the sisters' novels, under assumed names, were increasing upon them. Many critics insisted on believing, that all the fictions published as by three Bells were the works of one author, but written at different periods of his development and maturity. No doubt, this suspicion affected the reception of the books. Ever since the completion of Anne Brontë's tale of "Agnes Grey", she had been labouring at a second, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." It is little known; the subject--the deterioration of a character, whose profligacy and ruin took their rise in habits of intemperance, so slight as to be only considered "good fellowship"--was painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas. "She had" (says her sister of that gentle "little one"), "in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sunk very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations), as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften, or conceal. This well-meant resolution brought on her misconstruction, and some abuse, which she bore, as it was her custom to bear whatever was unpleasant with mild steady patience. She was a very sincere and practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy communicated a sad shade to her brief blameless life." In the June of this year, 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' was sufficiently near its completion to be submitted to the person who had previously published for Ellis and Acton Bell. In consequence of his mode of doing business, considerable annoyance was occasioned both to Miss Brontë and to them. The circumstances, as detailed in a letter of hers to a friend in New Zealand, were these:--One morning, at the beginning of July, a communication was received at the Parsonage from Messrs. Smith and Elder, which disturbed its quiet inmates not a little, as, though the matter brought under their notice was merely referred to as one which affected their literary reputation, they conceived it to have a bearing likewise upon their character. "Jane Eyre" had had a great run in America, and a publisher there had consequently bid high for early sheets of the next work by "Currer Bell." These Messrs. Smith and Elder had promised to let him have. He was therefore greatly astonished, and not well pleased, to learn that a similar agreement had been entered into with another American house, and that the new tale was very shortly to appear. It turned out, upon inquiry, that the mistake had originated in Acton and Ellis Bell's publisher having assured this American house that, to the best of his belief, "Jane Eyre", "Wuthering Heights", and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (which he pronounced superior to either of the other two) were all written by the same author. Though Messrs. Smith and Elder distinctly stated in their letter that they did not share in such "belief," the sisters were impatient till they had shown its utter groundlessness, and set themselves perfectly straight. With rapid decision, they resolved that Charlotte and Anne should start, for London, that very day, in order to prove their separate identity to Messrs. Smith and Elder, and demand from the credulous publisher his reasons for a "belief" so directly at variance with an assurance which had several times been given to him. Having arrived at this determination, they made their preparations with resolute promptness. There were many household duties to be performed that day; but they were all got through. The two sisters each packed up a change of dress in a small box, which they sent down to Keighley by an opportune cart; and after early tea they set off to walk thither--no doubt in some excitement; for, independently of the cause of their going to London, it was Anne's first visit there. A great thunderstorm overtook them on their way that summer evening to the station; but they had no time to seek shelter. They only just caught the train at Keighley, arrived at Leeds, and were whirled up by the night train to London. About eight o'clock on the Saturday morning, they arrived at the Chapter Coffee-house, Paternoster Row--a strange place, but they did not well know where else to go. They refreshed themselves by washing, and had some breakfast. Then they sat still for a few minutes, to consider what next should be done. When they had been discussing their project in the quiet of Haworth Parsonage the day before, and planning the mode of setting about the business on which they were going to London, they had resolved to take a cab, if they should find it desirable, from their inn to Cornhill; but that, amidst the bustle and "queer state of inward excitement" in which they found themselves, as they sat and considered their position on the Saturday morning, they quite forgot even the possibility of hiring a conveyance; and when they set forth, they became so dismayed by the crowded streets, and the impeded crossings, that they stood still repeatedly, in complete despair of making progress, and were nearly an hour in walking the half-mile they had to go. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew that they were coming; they were entirely unknown to the publishers of "Jane Eyre", who were not, in fact, aware whether the "Bells" were men or women, but had always written to them as to men. On reaching Mr. Smith's, Charlotte put his own letter into his hands; the same letter which had excited so much disturbance at Haworth Parsonage only twenty-four hours before. "Where did you get this?" said he,--as if he could not believe that the two young ladies dressed in black, of slight figures and diminutive stature, looking pleased yet agitated, could be the embodied Currer and Acton Bell, for whom curiosity had been hunting so eagerly in vain. An explanation ensued, and Mr. Smith at once began to form plans for their amusement and pleasure during their stay in London. He urged them to meet a few literary friends at his house; and this was a strong temptation to Charlotte, as amongst them were one or two of the writers whom she particularly wished to see; but her resolution to remain unknown induced her firmly to put it aside. The sisters were equally persevering in declining Mr. Smith's invitations to stay at his house. They refused to leave their quarters, saying they were not prepared for a long stay. When they returned back to their inn, poor Charlotte paid for the excitement of the interview, which had wound up the agitation and hurry of the last twenty-four hours, by a racking headache and harassing sickness. Towards evening, as she rather expected some of the ladies of Mr. Smith's family to call, she prepared herself for the chance, by taking a strong dose of sal-volatile, which roused her a little, but still, as she says, she was "in grievous bodily case," when their visitors were announced, in full evening costume. The sisters had not understood that it had been settled that they were to go to the Opera, and therefore were not ready. Moreover, they had no fine elegant dresses either with them, or in the world. But Miss Brontë resolved to raise no objections in the acceptance of kindness. So, in spite of headache and weariness, they made haste to dress themselves in their plain high-made country garments. Charlotte says, in an account which she gives to her friend of this visit to London, describing the entrance of her party into the Opera-house:-- "Fine ladies and gentlemen glanced at us, as we stood by the box-door, which was not yet opened, with a slight, graceful superciliousness, quite warranted by the circumstances. Still I felt pleasurably excited in spite of headache, sickness, and conscious clownishness; and I saw Anne was calm and gentle, which she always is. The performance was Rossini's 'Barber of Seville,'--very brilliant, though I fancy there are things I should like better. We got home after one o'clock. We had never been in bed the night before; had been in constant excitement for twenty-four hours; you may imagine we were tired. The next day, Sunday, Mr. Williams came early to take us to church; and in the afternoon Mr. Smith and his mother fetched us in a carriage, and took us to his house to dine. "On Monday we went to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, the National Gallery, dined again at Mr. Smith's, and then went home to tea with Mr. Williams at his house. "On Tuesday morning, we left London, laden with books Mr. Smith had given us, and got safely home. A more jaded wretch than I looked, it would be difficult to conceive. I was thin when I went, but I was meagre indeed when I returned, my face looking grey and very old, with strange deep lines ploughed in it--my eyes stared unnaturally. I was weak and yet restless. In a while, however, these bad effects of excitement went off, and I regained my normal condition." The impression Miss Brontë made upon those with whom she first became acquainted during this visit to London, was of a person with clear judgment and fine sense; and though reserved, possessing unconsciously the power of drawing out others in conversation. She never expressed an opinion without assigning a reason for it; she never put a question without a definite purpose; and yet people felt at their ease in talking with her. All conversation with her was genuine and stimulating; and when she launched forth in praise or reprobation of books, or deeds, or works of art, her eloquence was indeed burning. She was thorough in all that she said or did; yet so open and fair in dealing with a subject, or contending with an opponent, that instead of rousing resentment, she merely convinced her hearers of her earnest zeal for the truth and right. Not the least singular part of their proceedings was the place at which the sisters had chosen to stay. Paternoster Row was for many years sacred to publishers. It is a narrow flagged street, lying under the shadow of St. Paul's; at each end there are posts placed, so as to prevent the passage of carriages, and thus preserve a solemn silence for the deliberations of the "Fathers of the Row." The dull warehouses on each side are mostly occupied at present by wholesale stationers; if they be publishers' shops, they show no attractive front to the dark and narrow street. Half-way up, on the left-hand side, is the Chapter Coffee-house. I visited it last June. It was then unoccupied. It had the appearance of a dwelling-house, two hundred years old or so, such as one sometimes sees in ancient country towns; the ceilings of the small rooms were low, and had heavy beams running across them; the walls were wainscotted breast high; the staircase was shallow, broad, and dark, taking up much space in the centre of the house. This then was the Chapter Coffee-house, which, a century ago, was the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas or employment. This was the place about which Chatterton wrote, in those delusive letters he sent to his mother at Bristol, while he was starving in London. "I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there." Here he heard of chances of employment; here his letters were to be left. Years later, it became the tavern frequented by university men and country clergymen, who were up in London for a few days, and, having no private friends or access into society, were glad to learn what was going on in the world of letters, from the conversation which they were sure to hear in the Coffee-room. In Mr. Brontë's few and brief visits to town, during his residence at Cambridge, and the period of his curacy in Essex, he had stayed at this house; hither he had brought his daughters, when he was convoying them to Brussels; and here they came now, from very ignorance where else to go. It was a place solely frequented by men; I believe there was but one female servant in the house. Few people slept there; some of the stated meetings of the Trade were held in it, as they had been for more than a century; and, occasionally country booksellers, with now and then a clergyman, resorted to it; but it was a strange desolate place for the Miss Brontës to have gone to, from its purely business and masculine aspect. The old "grey-haired elderly man," who officiated as waiter seems to have been touched from the very first with the quiet simplicity of the two ladies, and he tried to make them feel comfortable and at home in the long, low, dingy room up-stairs, where the meetings of the Trade were held. The high narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row; the sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, (as Mr. Smith tells me he found them, when he came, that Saturday evening, to take them to the Opera,) could see nothing of motion, or of change, in the grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close, although the whole breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every footfall on the pavement below might be heard distinctly, in that unfrequented street. Such as it was, they preferred remaining at the Chapter Coffee-house, to accepting the invitation which Mr. Smith and his mother urged upon them, and, in after years, Charlotte says:-- "Since those days, I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares; but I love the City far better. The City seems so much more in earnest; its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds. The City is getting its living--the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused; but in the City you are deeply excited." (Villette, vol. i. p. 89.) Their wish had been to hear Dr. Croly on the Sunday morning, and Mr. Williams escorted them to St. Stephen's, Walbrook; but they were disappointed, as Dr. Croly did not preach. Mr. Williams also took them (as Miss Brontë has mentioned) to drink tea at his house. On the way thither, they had to pass through Kensington Gardens, and Miss Brontë was much "struck with the beauty of the scene, the fresh verdure of the turf, and the soft rich masses of foliage." From remarks on the different character of the landscape in the South to what it was in the North, she was led to speak of the softness and varied intonation of the voices of those with whom she conversed in London, which seem to have made a strong impression on both sisters. All this time those who came in contact with the "Miss Browns" (another pseudonym, also beginning with B), seem only to have regarded them as shy and reserved little country-women, with not much to say. Mr. Williams tells me that on the night when he accompanied the party to the Opera, as Charlotte ascended the flight of stairs leading from the grand entrance up to the lobby of the first tier of boxes, she was so much struck with the architectural effect of the splendid decorations of that vestibule and saloon, that involuntarily she slightly pressed his arm, and whispered, "You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing." Indeed, it must have formed a vivid contrast to what they were doing and seeing an hour or two earlier the night before, when they were trudging along, with beating hearts and high-strung courage, on the road between Haworth and Keighley, hardly thinking of the thunder-storm that beat about their heads, for the thoughts which filled them of how they would go straight away to London, and prove that they were really two people, and not one imposter. It was no wonder that they returned to Haworth utterly fagged and worn out, after the fatigue and excitement of this visit. The next notice I find of Charlotte's life at this time is of a different character to anything telling of enjoyment. "July 28th. "Branwell is the same in conduct as ever. His constitution seems much shattered. Papa, and sometimes all of us, have sad nights with him. He sleeps most of the day, and consequently will lie awake at night. But has not every house its trial?" While her most intimate friends were yet in ignorance of the fact of her authorship of "Jane Eyre," she received a letter from one of them, making inquiries about Casterton School. It is but right to give her answer, written on August 28th, 1848. "Since you wish to hear from me while you are from home, I will write without further delay. It often happens that when we linger at first in answering a friend's letter, obstacles occur to retard us to an inexcusably late period. In my last, I forgot to answer a question which you asked me, and was sorry afterwards for the omission. I will begin, therefore, by replying to it, though I fear what information I can give will come a little late. You said Mrs. ---- had some thoughts of sending ---- to school, and wished to know whether the Clergy Daughters' School at Casterton was an eligible place. My personal knowledge of that institution is very much out of date, being derived from the experience of twenty years ago. The establishment was at that time in its infancy, and a sad rickety infancy it was. Typhus fever decimated the school periodically; and consumption and scrofula, in every variety of form bad air and water, bad and insufficient diet can generate, preyed on the ill-fated pupils. It would not THEN have been a fit place for any of Mrs. ----'s children; but I understand it is very much altered for the better since those days. The school is removed from Cowan Bridge (a situation as unhealthy as it was picturesque--low, damp, beautiful with wood and water) to Casterton. The accommodations, the diet, the discipline, the system of tuition--all are, I believe, entirely altered and greatly improved. I was told that such pupils as behaved well, and remained at the school till their education was finished, were provided with situations as governesses, if they wished to adopt the vocation and much care was exercised in the selection, it was added, that they were also furnished with an excellent wardrobe on leaving Casterton. . . . The oldest family in Haworth failed lately, and have quitted the neighbourhood where their fathers resided before them for, it is said, thirteen generations. . . . Papa, I am most thankful to say, continues in very good health, considering his age; his sight, too, rather, I think, improves than deteriorates. My sisters likewise are pretty well." But the dark cloud was hanging over that doomed household, and gathering blackness every hour. On October the 9th, she thus writes:-- "The past three weeks have been a dark interval in our humble home. Branwell's constitution had been failing fast all the summer; but still, neither the doctors nor himself thought him so near his end as he was. He was entirely confined to his bed but for one single day, and was in the village two days before his death. He died, after twenty minutes' struggle, on Sunday morning, September 24th. He was perfectly conscious till the last agony came on. His mind had undergone the peculiar change which frequently precedes death, two days previously; the calm of better feelings filled it; a return of natural affection marked his last moments. He is in God's hands now; and the All-Powerful is likewise the All-Merciful. A deep conviction that he rests at last--rests well, after his brief, erring, suffering, feverish life--fills and quiets my mind now. The final separation, the spectacle of his pale corpse, gave me more acute bitter pain than I could have imagined. Till the last hour comes, we never how know much we can forgive, pity, regret a near relative. All his vices were and are nothing now. We remember only his woes. Papa was acutely distressed at first, but, on the whole, has borne the event well. Emily and Anne are pretty well, though Anne is always delicate, and Emily has a cold and cough at present. It was my fate to sink at the crisis, when I should have collected my strength. Headache and sickness came on first on the Sunday; I could not regain my appetite. Then internal pain attacked me. I became at once much reduced. It was impossible to touch a morsel. At last, bilious fever declared itself. I was confined to bed a week,--a dreary week. But, thank God! health seems now returning. I can sit up all day, and take moderate nourishment. The doctor said at first, I should be very slow in recovering, but I seem to get on faster than he anticipated. I am truly MUCH BETTER." I have heard, from one who attended Branwell in his last illness, that he resolved on standing up to die. He had repeatedly said, that as long as there was life there was strength of will to do what it chose; and when the last agony came on, he insisted on assuming the position just mentioned. I have previously stated, that when his fatal attack came on, his pockets were found filled with old letters from the woman to whom he was attached. He died! she lives still,--in May Fair. The Eumenides, I suppose, went out of existence at the time when the wail was heard, "Great Pan is dead." I think we could better have spared him than those awful Sisters who sting dead conscience into life. I turn from her for ever. Let us look once more into the Parsonage at Haworth. "Oct. 29th, 1848. "I think I have now nearly got over the effects of my late illness, and am almost restored to my normal condition of health. I sometimes wish that it was a little higher, but we ought to be content with such blessings as we have, and not pine after those that are out of our reach. I feel much more uneasy about my sister than myself just now. Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing, when she has moved at all quickly. She looks very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted. Nor can I shut my eyes to Anne's great delicacy of constitution. The late sad event has, I feel, made me more apprehensive than common. I cannot help feeling much depressed sometimes. I try to leave all in God's hands; to trust in His goodness; but faith and resignation are difficult to practise under some circumstances. The weather has been most unfavourable for invalids of late; sudden changes of temperature, and cold penetrating winds have been frequent here. Should the atmosphere become more settled, perhaps a favourable effect might be produced on the general health, and these harassing colds and coughs be removed. Papa has not quite escaped, but he has so far stood it better than any of us. You must not mention my going to ---- this winter. I could not, and would not, leave home on any account. Miss ---- has been for some years out of health now. These things make one FEEL, as well as KNOW, that this world is not our abiding-place. We should not knit human ties too close, or clasp human affections too fondly. They must leave us, or we must leave them, one day. God restore health and strength to all who need it!" I go on now with her own affecting words in the biographical notice of her sisters. "But a great change approached. Affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back on grief. In the very heat and burden of the day, the labourers failed over their work. My sister Emily first declined. . . . Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. . . . Day by day, when I, saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love: I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hands, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render." In fact, Emily never went out of doors after the Sunday succeeding Branwell's death. She made no complaint; she would not endure questioning; she rejected sympathy and help. Many a time did Charlotte and Anne drop their sewing, or cease from their writing, to listen with wrung hearts to the failing step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses, with which their sister climbed the short staircase; yet they dared not notice what they observed, with pangs of suffering even deeper than hers. They dared not notice it in words, far less by the caressing assistance of a helping arm or hand. They sat, still and silent. "Nov. 23rd, 1848. "I told you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not rallied yet. She is VERY ill. I believe, if you were to see her, your impression would be that there is no hope. A more hollow, wasted, pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep tight cough continues; the breathing after the least exertion is a rapid pant; and these symptoms are accompanied by pains in the chest and side. Her pulse, the only time she allowed it be to felt, was found to beat 115 per minute. In this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings, she will scarcely allow her feelings to be alluded to. Our position is, and has been for some weeks, exquisitely painful. God only knows how all this is to terminate. More than once, I have been forced boldly to regard the terrible event of her loss as possible, and even probable. But nature shrinks from such thoughts. I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my heart in the world." When a doctor had been sent for, and was in the very house, Emily refused to see him. Her sisters could only describe to him what symptoms they had observed; and the medicines which he sent she would not take, denying that she was ill. "Dec. 10th, 1848. "I hardly know what to say to you about the subject which now interests me the most keenly of anything in this world, for, in truth, I hardly know what to think myself. Hope and fear fluctuate daily. The pain in her side and chest is better; the cough, the shortness of breath, the extreme emaciation continue. I have endured, however, such tortures of uncertainty on this subject that, at length, I could endure it no longer; and as her repugnance to seeing a medical man continues immutable,--as she declares 'no poisoning doctor' shall come near her,--I have written unknown to her, to an eminent physician in London, giving as minute a statement of her case and symptoms as I could draw up, and requesting an opinion. I expect an answer in a day or two. I am thankful to say, that my own health at present is very tolerable. It is well such is the case; for Anne, with the best will in the world to be useful, is really too delicate to do or bear much. She, too, at present, has frequent pains in the side. Papa is also pretty well, though Emily's state renders him very anxious. "The ----s (Anne Brontë's former pupils) were here about a week ago. They are attractive and stylish-looking girls. They seemed overjoyed to see Anne: when I went into the room, they were clinging round her like two children--she, meantime, looking perfectly quiet and passive. . . . I. and H. took it into their heads to come here. I think it probable offence was taken on that occasion,--from what cause, I know not; and as, if such be the case, the grudge must rest upon purely imaginary grounds,--and since, besides, I have other things to think about, my mind rarely dwells upon the subject. If Emily were but well, I feel as if I should not care who neglected, misunderstood, or abused me. I would rather you were not of the number either. The crab-cheese arrived safely. Emily has just reminded me to thank you for it: it looks very nice. I wish she were well enough to eat it." But Emily was growing rapidly worse. I remember Miss Brontë's shiver at recalling the pang she felt when, after having searched in the little hollows and sheltered crevices of the moors for a lingering spray of heather--just one spray, however withered--to take in to Emily, she saw that the flower was not recognised by the dim and indifferent eyes. Yet, to the last, Emily adhered tenaciously to her habits of independence. She would suffer no one to assist her. Any effort to do so roused the old stern spirit. One Tuesday morning, in December, she arose and dressed herself as usual, making many a pause, but doing everything for herself, and even endeavouring to take up her employment of sewing: the servants looked on, and knew what the catching, rattling breath, and the glazing of the eye too surely foretold; but she kept at her work; and Charlotte and Anne, though full of unspeakable dread, had still the faintest spark of hope. On that morning Charlotte wrote thus--probably in the very presence of her dying sister:-- "Tuesday. "I should have written to you before, if I had had one word of hope to say; but I have not. She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use. He sent some medicine, which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known. I pray for God's support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it." The morning drew on to noon. Emily was worse: she could only whisper in gasps. Now, when it was too late, she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now." About two o'clock she died. "Dec. 21st, 1848. "Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. She never will suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard short conflict. She died on TUESDAY, the very day I wrote to you. I thought it very possible she might be with us still for weeks; and a few hours afterwards, she was in eternity. Yes; there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the church pavement. We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its prime. But it is God's will, and the place where she is gone is better than that she has left. "God has sustained me, in a way that I marvel at, through such agony as I had not conceived. I now look at Anne, and wish she were well and strong; but she is neither; nor is papa. Could you now come to us for a few days? I would not ask you to stay long. Write and tell me if you could come next week, and by what train. I would try to send a gig for you to Keighley. You will, I trust, find us tranquil. Try to come. I never so much needed the consolation of a friend's presence. Pleasure, of course, there would be none for you in the visit, except what your kind heart would teach you to find in doing good to others." As the old, bereaved father and his two surviving children followed the coffin to the grave, they were joined by Keeper, Emily's fierce, faithful bull-dog. He walked alongside of the mourners, and into the church, and stayed quietly there all the time that the burial service was being read. When he came home, he lay down at Emily's chamber door, and howled pitifully for many days. Anne Brontë drooped and sickened more rapidly from that time; and so ended the year 1848. CHAPTER III. An article on "Vanity Fair" and "Jane Eyre" had appeared in the Quarterly Review of December, 1848. Some weeks after, Miss Brontë wrote to her publishers, asking why it had not been sent to her; and conjecturing that it was unfavourable, she repeated her previous request, that whatever was done with the laudatory, all critiques adverse to the novel might be forwarded to her without fail. The Quarterly Review was accordingly sent. I am not aware that Miss Brontë took any greater notice of the article than to place a few sentences out of it in the mouth of a hard and vulgar woman in "Shirley," where they are so much in character, that few have recognised them as a quotation. The time when the article was read was good for Miss Brontë; she was numbed to all petty annoyances by the grand severity of Death. Otherwise she might have felt more keenly than they deserved the criticisms which, while striving to be severe, failed in logic, owing to the misuse of prepositions; and have smarted under conjectures as to the authorship of "Jane Eyre," which, intended to be acute, were merely flippant. But flippancy takes a graver name when directed against an author by an anonymous writer. We call it then cowardly insolence. Every one has a right to form his own conclusion respecting the merits and demerits of a book. I complain not of the judgment which the reviewer passes on "Jane Eyre." Opinions as to its tendency varied then, as they do now. While I write, I receive a letter from a clergyman in America in which he says: "We have in our sacred of sacreds a special shelf, highly adorned, as a place we delight to honour, of novels which we recognise as having had a good influence on character OUR character. Foremost is 'Jane Eyre.'" Nor do I deny the existence of a diametrically opposite judgment. And so (as I trouble not myself about the reviewer's style of composition) I leave his criticisms regarding the merits of the work on one side. But when--forgetting the chivalrous spirit of the good and noble Southey, who said: "In reviewing anonymous works myself, when I have known the authors I have never mentioned them, taking it for granted they had sufficient reasons for avoiding the publicity"--the Quarterly reviewer goes on into gossiping conjectures as to who Currer Bell really is, and pretends to decide on what the writer may be from the book, I protest with my whole soul against such want of Christian charity. Not even the desire to write a "smart article," which shall be talked about in London, when the faint mask of the anonymous can be dropped at pleasure if the cleverness of the review be admired--not even this temptation can excuse the stabbing cruelty of the judgment. Who is he that should say of an unknown woman: "She must be one who for some sufficient reason has long forfeited the society of her sex"? Is he one who has led a wild and struggling and isolated life,--seeing few but plain and outspoken Northerns, unskilled in the euphuisms which assist the polite world to skim over the mention of vice? Has he striven through long weeping years to find excuses for the lapse of an only brother; and through daily contact with a poor lost profligate, been compelled into a certain familiarity with the vices that his soul abhors? Has he, through trials, close following in dread march through his household, sweeping the hearthstone bare of life and love, still striven hard for strength to say, "It is the Lord! let Him do what seemeth to Him good"--and sometimes striven in vain, until the kindly Light returned? If through all these dark waters the scornful reviewer have passed clear, refined, free from stain,--with a soul that has never in all its agonies cried "lama sabachthani,"--still, even then let him pray with the Publican rather than judge with the Pharisee. "Jan. 10th, 1849. "Anne had a very tolerable day yesterday, and a pretty quiet night last night, though she did not sleep much. Mr. Wheelhouse ordered the blister to be put on again. She bore it without sickness. I have just dressed it, and she is risen and come down-stairs. She looks somewhat pale and sickly. She has had one dose of the cod-liver oil; it smells and tastes like train oil. I am trying to hope, but the day is windy, cloudy, and stormy. My spirits fall at intervals very low; then I look where you counsel me to look, beyond earthly tempests and sorrows. I seem to get strength, if not consolation. It will not do to anticipate. I feel that hourly. In the night, I awake and long for morning; then my heart is wrung. Papa continues much the same; he was very faint when he came down to breakfast. . . . Dear E----, your friendship is some comfort to me. I am thankful for it. I see few lights through the darkness of the present time, but amongst them the constancy of a kind heart attached to me is one of the most cheering and serene." "Jan. 15th, 1849. "I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I say she is better. She varies often in the course of a day, yet each day is passed pretty much the same. The morning is usually the best time; the afternoon and the evening the most feverish. Her cough is the most troublesome at night, but it is rarely violent. The pain in her arm still disturbs her. She takes the cod-liver oil and carbonate of iron regularly; she finds them both nauseous, but especially the oil. Her appetite is small indeed. Do not fear that I shall relax in my care of her. She is too precious not to be cherished with all the fostering strength I have. Papa, I am thankful to say, has been a good deal better this last day or two. "As to your queries about myself, I can only say, that if I continue as I am I shall do very well. I have not yet got rid of the pains in my chest and back. They oddly return with every change of weather; and are still sometimes accompanied with a little soreness and hoarseness, but I combat them steadily with pitch plasters and bran tea. I should think it silly and wrong indeed not to be regardful of my own health at present; it would not do to be ill NOW. "I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. This is not the time to regret, dread, or weep. What I have and ought to do is very distinctly laid out for me; what I want, and pray for, is strength to perform it. The days pass in a slow, dark march; the nights are the test; the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one lies in her grave, and another not at my side, but in a separate and sick bed. However, God is over all." "Jan. 22nd, 1849. "Anne really did seem to be a little better during some mild days last week, but to-day she looks very pale and languid again. She perseveres with the cod-liver oil, but still finds it very nauseous. "She is truly obliged to you for the soles for her shoes, and finds them extremely comfortable. I am to commission you to get her just such a respirator as Mrs. ---- had. She would not object to give a higher price, if you thought it better. If it is not too much trouble, you may likewise get me a pair of soles; you can send them and the respirator when you send the box. You must put down the price of all, and we will pay you in a Post Office order. "Wuthering Heights" was given to you. I have sent ---- neither letter nor parcel. I had nothing but dreary news to write, so preferred that others should tell her. I have not written to ---- either. I cannot write, except when I am quite obliged." "Feb. 11th, 1849. "We received the box and its contents quite safely to-day. The penwipers are very pretty, and we are very much obliged to you for them. I hope the respirator will be useful to Anne, in case she should ever be well enough to go out again. She continues very much in the same state--I trust not greatly worse, though she is becoming very thin. I fear it would be only self-delusion to fancy her better. What effect the advancing season may have on her, I know not; perhaps the return of really warm weather may give nature a happy stimulus. I tremble at the thought of any change to cold wind or frost. Would that March were well over! Her mind seems generally serene, and her sufferings hitherto are nothing like Emily's. The thought of what may be to come grows more familiar to my mind; but it is a sad, dreary guest." "March 16th, 1849. "We have found the past week a somewhat trying one; it has not been cold, but still there have been changes of temperature whose effect Anne has felt unfavourably. She is not, I trust, seriously worse, but her cough is at times very hard and painful, and her strength rather diminished than improved. I wish the month of March was well over. You are right in conjecturing that I am somewhat depressed; at times I certainly am. It was almost easier to bear up when the trial was at its crisis than now. The feeling of Emily's loss does not diminish as time wears on; it often makes itself most acutely recognised. It brings too an inexpressible sorrow with it; and then the future is dark. Yet I am well aware, it will not do either to complain, or sink, and I strive to do neither. Strength, I hope and trust, will yet be given in proportion to the burden; but the pain of my position is not one likely to lessen with habit. Its solitude and isolation are oppressive circumstances, yet I do not wish for any friends to stay with me; I could not do with any one--not even you--to share the sadness of the house; it would rack me intolerably. Meantime, judgment is still blent with mercy. Anne's sufferings still continue mild. It is my nature, when left alone, to struggle on with a certain perseverance, and I believe God will help me." Anne had been delicate all her life; a fact which perhaps made them less aware than they would otherwise have been of the true nature of those fatal first symptoms. Yet they seem to have lost but little time before they sent for the first advice that could be procured. She was examined with the stethoscope, and the dreadful fact was announced that her lungs were affected, and that tubercular consumption had already made considerable progress. A system of treatment was prescribed, which was afterwards ratified by the opinion of Dr. Forbes. For a short time they hoped that the disease was arrested. Charlotte--herself ill with a complaint that severely tried her spirits--was the ever-watchful nurse of this youngest, last sister. One comfort was that Anne was the patientest, gentlest invalid that could be. Still, there were hours, days, weeks of inexpressible anguish to be borne; under the pressure of which Charlotte could only pray and pray she did, right earnestly. Thus she writes on March 24th;-- "Anne's decline is gradual and fluctuating; but its nature is not doubtful. . . . In spirit she is resigned: at heart she is, I believe, a true Christian. . . . May God support her and all of us through the trial of lingering sickness, and aid her in the last hour when the struggle which separates soul from body must be gone through! We saw Emily torn from the midst of us when our hearts clung to her with intense attachment. . . She was scarce buried when Anne's health failed. . . . These things would be too much, if reason, unsupported by religion, were condemned to bear them alone. I have cause to be most thankful for the strength that has hitherto been vouchsafed both to my father and to myself. God, I think, is especially merciful to old age; and for my own part, trials, which in perspective would have seemed to me quite intolerable, when they actually came I endured without prostration. Yet I must confess that, in the time which has elapsed since Emily's death, there have been moments of solitary, deep, inert affliction, far harder to bear than those which immediately followed our loss. The crisis of bereavement has an acute pang which goads to exertion; the desolate after-feeling sometimes paralyses. I have learnt that we are not to find solace in our own strength; we must seek it in God's omnipotence. Fortitude is good; but fortitude itself must be shaken under us to teach us how weak we are!" All through this illness of Anne's, Charlotte had the comfort of being able to talk to her about her state; a comfort rendered inexpressibly great by the contrast which it presented to the recollection of Emily's rejection of all sympathy. If a proposal for Anne's benefit was made, Charlotte could speak to her about it, and the nursing and dying sister could consult with each other as to its desirability. I have seen but one of Anne's letters; it is the only time we seem to be brought into direct personal contact with this gentle, patient girl. In order to give the requisite preliminary explanation, I must state that the family of friends, to which E---- belonged, proposed that Anne should come to them; in order to try what change of air and diet, and the company of kindly people could do towards restoring her to health. In answer to this proposal, Charlotte writes:-- "March 24th. "I read your kind note to Anne, and she wishes me to thank you sincerely for your friendly proposal. She feels, of course, that it would not do to take advantage of it, by quartering an invalid upon the inhabitants of ----; but she intimates there is another way in which you might serve her, perhaps with some benefit to yourself as well as to her. Should it, a month or two hence, be deemed advisable that she should go either to the sea-side, or to some inland watering-place--and should papa be disinclined to move, and I consequently obliged to remain at home--she asks, could you be her companion? Of course I need not add that in the event of such an arrangement being made, you would be put to no expense. This, dear E., is Anne's proposal; I make it to comply with her wish; but for my own part, I must add that I see serious objections to your accepting it--objections I cannot name to her. She continues to vary; is sometimes worse, and sometimes better, as the weather changes; but, on the whole, I fear she loses strength. Papa says her state is most precarious; she may be spared for some time, or a sudden alteration might remove her before we are aware. Were such an alteration to take place while she was far from home, and alone with you, it would be terrible. The idea of it distresses me inexpressibly, and I tremble whenever she alludes to the project of a journey. In short, I wish we could gain time, and see how she gets on. If she leaves home it certainly should not be in the capricious month of May, which is proverbially trying to the weak. June would be a safer month. If we could reach June, I should have good hopes of her getting through the summer. Write such an answer to this note as I can show Anne. You can write any additional remarks to me on a separate piece of paper. Do not consider yourself as confined to discussing only our sad affairs. I am interested in all that interests you." FROM ANNE BRONTË "April 5th, 1849. "My dear Miss ----,--I thank you greatly for your kind letter, and your ready compliance with my proposal, as far as the WILL can go at least. I see, however, that your friends are unwilling that you should undertake the responsibility of accompanying me under present circumstances. But I do not think there would be any great responsibility in the matter. I know, and everybody knows, that you would be as kind and helpful as any one could possibly be, and I hope I should not be very troublesome. It would be as a companion, not as a nurse, that I should wish for your company; otherwise I should not venture to ask it. As for your kind and often-repeated invitation to ----, pray give my sincere thanks to your mother and sisters, but tell them I could not think of inflicting my presence upon them as I now am. It is very kind of them to make so light of the trouble, but still there must be more or less, and certainly no pleasure, from the society of a silent invalid stranger. I hope, however, that Charlotte will by some means make it possible to accompany me after all. She is certainly very delicate, and greatly needs a change of air and scene to renovate her constitution. And then your going with me before the end of May, is apparently out of the question, unless you are disappointed in your visitors; but I should be reluctant to wait till then, if the weather would at all permit an earlier departure. You say May is a trying month, and so say others. The earlier part is often cold enough, I acknowledge, but, according to my experience, we are almost certain of some fine warm days in the latter half, when the laburnums and lilacs are in bloom; whereas June is often cold, and July generally wet. But I have a more serious reason than this for my impatience of delay. The doctors say that change of air or removal to a better climate would hardly ever fail of success in consumptive cases, if the remedy were taken IN TIME; but the reason why there are so many disappointments is, that it is generally deferred till it is too late. Now I would not commit this error; and, to say the truth, though I suffer much less from pain and fever than I did when you were with us, I am decidedly weaker, and very much thinner. My cough still troubles me a good deal, especially in the night, and, what seems worse than all, I am subject to great shortness of breath on going up-stairs or any slight exertion. Under these circumstances, I think there is no time to be lost. I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable, I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect, in the hope that you, dear Miss ----, would give as much of your company as you possibly could to Charlotte, and be a sister to her in my stead. But I wish it would please God to spare me, not only for papa's and Charlotte's sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practice--humble and limited indeed--but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God's will be done. Remember me respectfully to your mother and sisters, and believe me, dear Miss ----, yours most affectionately, "ANNE BRONTË." It must have been about this time that Anne composed her last verses, before "the desk was closed, and the pen laid aside for ever." I. "I hoped that with the brave and strong My portioned task might lie; To toil amid the busy throng, With purpose pure and high. II. "But God has fixed another part, And He has fixed it well: I said so with my bleeding heart, When first the anguish fell. III. "Thou God, hast taken our delight, Our treasured hope, away; Thou bid'st us now weep through the night And sorrow through the day. IV. "These weary hours will not be lost, These days of misery,-- These nights of darkness, anguish-tost,-- Can I but turn to Thee. IV. "With secret labour to sustain In humble patience every blow; To gather fortitude from pain, And hope and holiness from woe. VI. "Thus let me serve Thee from my heart, Whate'er may be my written fate; Whether thus early to depart, Or yet a while to wait. VII. "If Thou should'st bring me back to life, More humbled I should be; More wise--more strengthened for the strife, More apt to lean on Thee. VIII. "Should death be standing at the gate, Thus should I keep my vow; But, Lord, whatever be my fate, Oh let me serve Thee now!" I take Charlotte's own words as the best record of her thoughts and feelings during all this terrible time. "April 12th. "I read Anne's letter to you; it was touching enough, as you say. If there were no hope beyond this world,--no eternity, no life to come,--Emily's fate, and that which threatens Anne, would be heart-breaking. I cannot forget Emily's death-day; it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life. But it WILL NOT do to dwell on these things. "I am glad your friends object to your going with Anne: it would never do. To speak truth, even if your mother and sisters had consented, I never could. It is not that there is any laborious attention to pay her; she requires, and will accept, but little nursing; but there would be hazard, and anxiety of mind, beyond what you ought to be subject to. If, a month or six weeks hence, she continues to wish for a change as much as she does now, I shall (D. V.) go with her myself. It will certainly be my paramount duty; other cares must be made subservient to that. I have consulted Mr. T----: he does not object, and recommends Scarborough, which was Anne's own choice. I trust affairs may be so ordered, that you may be able to be with us at least part of the time. . . . Whether in lodgings or not, I should wish to be boarded. Providing oneself is, I think, an insupportable nuisance. I don't like keeping provisions in a cupboard, locking up, being pillaged, and all that. It is a petty, wearing annoyance." The progress of Anne's illness was slower than that of Emily's had been; and she was too unselfish to refuse trying means, from which, if she herself had little hope of benefit, her friends might hereafter derive a mournful satisfaction. "I began to flatter myself she was getting strength. But the change to frost has told upon her; she suffers more of late. Still her illness has none of the fearful rapid symptoms which appalled in Emily's case. Could she only get over the spring, I hope summer may do much for her, and then early removal to a warmer locality for the winter might, at least, prolong her life. Could we only reckon upon another year, I should be thankful; but can we do this for the healthy? A few days ago I wrote to have Dr. Forbes' opinion. . . . He warned us against entertaining sanguine hopes of recovery. The cod-liver oil he considers a peculiarly efficacious medicine. He, too, disapproved of change of residence for the present. There is some feeble consolation in thinking we are doing the very best that can be done. The agony of forced, total neglect, is not now felt, as during Emily's illness. Never may we be doomed to feel such agony again. It was terrible. I have felt much less of the disagreeable pains in my chest lately, and much less also of the soreness and hoarseness. I tried an application of hot vinegar, which seemed to do good." "May 1st. "I was glad to hear that when we go to Scarborough, you will be at liberty to go with us, but the journey and its consequences still continue a source of great anxiety to me, I must try to put it off two or three weeks longer if I can; perhaps by that time the milder season may have given Anne more strength,perhaps it will be otherwise; I cannot tell. The change to fine weather has not proved beneficial to her so far. She has sometimes been so weak, and suffered so much from pain in the side, during the last few days, that I have not known what to think. . . . She may rally again, and be much better, but there must be SOME improvement before I can feel justified in taking her away from home. Yet to delay is painful; for, as is ALWAYS the case, I believe, under her circumstances, she seems herself not half conscious of the necessity for such delay. She wonders, I believe, why I don't talk more about the journey: it grieves me to think she may even be hurt by my seeming tardiness. She is very much emaciated,--far more than when you were with us; her arms are no thicker than a little child's. The least exertion brings a shortness of breath. She goes out a little every day, but we creep rather than walk. . . . Papa continues pretty well;--I hope I shall be enabled to bear up. So far, I have reason for thankfulness to God." May had come, and brought the milder weather longed for; but Anne was worse for the very change. A little later on it became colder, and she rallied, and poor Charlotte began to hope that, if May were once over, she might last for a long time. Miss Brontë wrote to engage the lodgings at Scarborough,--a place which Anne had formerly visited with the family to whom she was governess. They took a good-sized sitting-room, and an airy double-bedded room (both commanding a sea-view), in one of the best situations of the town. Money was as nothing in comparison with life; besides, Anne had a small legacy left to her by her godmother, and they felt that she could not better employ this than in obtaining what might prolong life, if not restore health. On May 16th, Charlotte writes: "It is with a heavy heart I prepare; and earnestly do I wish the fatigue of the journey were well over. It may be borne better than I expect; for temporary stimulus often does much; but when I see the daily increasing weakness, I know not what to think. I fear you will be shocked when you see Anne; but be on your guard, dear E----, not to express your feelings; indeed, I can trust both your self-possession and your kindness. I wish my judgment sanctioned the step of going to Scarborough, more fully than it does. You ask how I have arranged about leaving Papa. I could make no special arrangement. He wishes me to go with Anne, and would not hear of Mr. N----'s coming, or anything of that kind; so I do what I believe is for the best, and leave the result to Providence." They planned to rest and spend a night at York; and, at Anne's desire, arranged to make some purchases there. Charlotte ends the letter to her friend, in which she tells her all this, with-- "May 23rd. "I wish it seemed less like a dreary mockery in us to talk of buying bonnets, etc. Anne was very ill yesterday. She had difficulty of breathing all day, even when sitting perfectly still. To-day she seems better again. I long for the moment to come when the experiment of the sea-air will be tried. Will it do her good? I cannot tell; I can only wish. Oh! if it would please God to strengthen and revive Anne, how happy we might be together: His will, however, be done!" The two sisters left Haworth on Thursday, May 24th. They were to have done so the day before, and had made an appointment with their friend to meet them at the Leeds Station, in order that they might all proceed together. But on Wednesday morning Anne was so ill, that it was impossible for the sisters to set out; yet they had no means of letting their friend know of this, and she consequently arrived at Leeds station at the time specified. There she sate waiting for several hours. It struck her as strange at the time--and it almost seems ominous to her fancy now--that twice over, from two separate arrivals on the line by which she was expecting her friends, coffins were carried forth, and placed in hearses which were in waiting for their dead, as she was waiting for one in four days to become so. The next day she could bear suspense no longer, and set out for Haworth, reaching there just in time to carry the feeble, fainting invalid into the chaise which stood at the gate to take them down to Keighley. The servant who stood at the Parsonage gates, saw Death written on her face, and spoke of it. Charlotte saw it and did not speak of it,--it would have been giving the dread too distinct a form; and if this last darling yearned for the change to Scarborough, go she should, however Charlotte's heart might be wrung by impending fear. The lady who accompanied them, Charlotte's beloved friend of more than twenty years, has kindly written out for me the following account of the journey--and of the end. "She left her home May 24th, 1849--died May 28th. Her life was calm, quiet, spiritual: SUCH was her end. Through the trials and fatigues of the journey, she evinced the pious courage and fortitude of a martyr. Dependence and helplessness were ever with her a far sorer trial than hard, racking pain. "The first stage of our journey was to York; and here the dear invalid was so revived, so cheerful, and so happy, we drew consolation, and trusted that at least temporary improvement was to be derived from the change which SHE had so longed for, and her friends had so dreaded for her. "By her request we went to the Minster, and to her it was an overpowering pleasure; not for its own imposing and impressive grandeur only, but because it brought to her susceptible nature a vital and overwhelming sense of omnipotence. She said, while gazing at the structure, 'If finite power can do this, what is the . . . ?' and here emotion stayed her speech, and she was hastened to a less exciting scene. "Her weakness of body was great, but her gratitude for every mercy was greater. After such an exertion as walking to her bed-room, she would clasp her hands and raise her eyes in silent thanks, and she did this not to the exclusion of wonted prayer, for that too was performed on bended knee, ere she accepted the rest of her couch. "On the 25th we arrived at Scarborough; our dear invalid having, during the journey, directed our attention to every prospect worthy of notice. "On the 26th she drove on the sands for an hour; and lest the poor donkey should be urged by its driver to a greater speed than her tender heart thought right, she took the reins, and drove herself. When joined by her friend, she was charging the boy-master of the donkey to treat the poor animal well. She was ever fond of dumb things, and would give up her own comfort for them. "On Sunday, the 27th, she wished to go to church, and her eye brightened with the thought of once more worshipping her God amongst her fellow-creatures. We thought it prudent to dissuade her from the attempt, though it was evident her heart was longing to join in the public act of devotion and praise. "She walked a little in the afternoon, and meeting with a sheltered and comfortable seat near the beach, she begged we would leave her, and enjoy the various scenes near at hand, which were new to us but familiar to her. She loved the place, and wished us to share her preference. "The evening closed in with the most glorious sunset ever witnessed. The castle on the cliff stood in proud glory gilded by the rays of the declining sun. The distant ships glittered like burnished gold; the little boats near the beach heaved on the ebbing tide, inviting occupants. The view was grand beyond description. Anne was drawn in her easy chair to the window, to enjoy the scene with us. Her face became illumined almost as much as the glorious scene she gazed upon. Little was said, for it was plain that her thoughts were driven by the imposing view before her to penetrate forwards to the regions of unfading glory. She again thought of public worship, and wished us to leave her, and join those who were assembled at the House of God. We declined, gently urging the duty and pleasure of staying with her, who was now so dear and so feeble. On returning to her place near the fire, she conversed with her sister upon the propriety of returning to their home. She did not wish it for her own sake, she said she was fearing others might suffer more if her decease occurred where she was. She probably thought the task of accompanying her lifeless remains on a long journey was more than her sister could bear--more than the bereaved father could bear, were she borne home another, and a third tenant of the family-vault in the short space of nine months. "The night was passed without any apparent accession of illness. She rose at seven o'clock, and performed most of her toilet herself, by her expressed wish. Her sister always yielded such points, believing it was the truest kindness not to press inability when it was not acknowledged. Nothing occurred to excite alarm till about 11 A. M. She then spoke of feeling a change. She believed she had not long to live. Could she reach home alive, if we prepared immediately for departure? A physician was sent for. Her address to him was made with perfect composure. She begged him to say how long he thought she might live;--not to fear speaking the truth, for she was not afraid to die. The doctor reluctantly admitted that the angel of death was already arrived, and that life was ebbing fast. She thanked him for his truthfulness, and he departed to come again very soon. She still occupied her easy chair, looking so serene, so reliant there was no opening for grief as yet, though all knew the separation was at hand. She clasped her hands, and reverently invoked a blessing from on high; first upon her sister, then upon her friend, to whom she said, 'Be a sister in my stead. Give Charlotte as much of your company as you can.' She then thanked each for her kindness and attention. "Ere long the restlessness of approaching death appeared, and she was borne to the sofa; on being asked if she were easier, she looked gratefully at her questioner, and said, 'It is not YOU who can give me ease, but soon all will be well, through the merits of our Redeemer.' Shortly after this, seeing that her sister could hardly restrain her grief, she said, 'Take courage, Charlotte; take courage.' Her faith never failed, and her eye never dimmed till about two o'clock, when she calmly and without a sigh passed from the temporal to the eternal. So still, and so hallowed were her last hours and moments. There was no thought of assistance or of dread. The doctor came and went two or three times. The hostess knew that death was near, yet so little was the house disturbed by the presence of the dying, and the sorrow of those so nearly bereaved, that dinner was announced as ready, through the half-opened door, as the living sister was closing the eyes of the dead one. She could now no more stay the welled-up grief of her sister with her emphatic and dying 'Take courage,' and it burst forth in brief but agonising strength. Charlotte's affection, however, had another channel, and there it turned in thought, in care, and in tenderness. There was bereavement, but there was not solitude;--sympathy was at hand, and it was accepted. With calmness, came the consideration of the removal of the dear remains to their home resting-place. This melancholy task, however, was never performed; for the afflicted sister decided to lay the flower in the place where it had fallen. She believed that to do so would accord with the wishes of the departed. She had no preference for place. She thought not of the grave, for that is but the body's goal, but of all that is beyond it. "Her remains rest, 'Where the south sun warms the now dear sod, Where the ocean billows lave and strike the steep and turf-covered rock.'" Anne died on the Monday. On the Tuesday Charlotte wrote to her father; but, knowing that his presence was required for some annual Church solemnity at Haworth, she informed him that she had made all necessary arrangements for the interment and that the funeral would take place so soon, that he could hardly arrive in time for it. The surgeon who had visited Anne on the day of her death, offered his attendance, but it was respectfully declined. Mr. Brontë wrote to urge Charlotte's longer stay at the seaside. Her health and spirits were sorely shaken; and much as he naturally longed to see his only remaining child, he felt it right to persuade her to take, with her friend, a few more weeks' change of scene,--though even that could not bring change of thought. Late in June the friends returned homewards,--parting rather suddenly (it would seem) from each other, when their paths diverged. "July, 1849. "I intended to have written a line to you to-day, if I had not received yours. We did indeed part suddenly; it made my heart ache that we were severed without the time to exchange a word; and yet perhaps it was better. I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was clean and bright waiting for me. Papa and the servants were well; and all received me with an affection which should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others. The dumb creatures thought that as I was returned, those who had been so long absent were not far behind. "I left Papa soon, and went into the dining-room: I shut the door--I tried to be glad that I was come home. I have always been glad before--except once--even then I was cheered. But this time joy was not to be the sensation. I felt that the house was all silent--the rooms were all empty. I remembered where the three were laid--in what narrow dark dwellings--never more to reappear on earth. So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me. The agony that WAS to be undergone, and WAS NOT to be avoided, came on. I underwent it, and passed a dreary evening and night, and a mournful morrow; to-day I am better. "I do not know how life will pass, but I certainly do feel confidence in Him who has upheld me hitherto. Solitude may be cheered, and made endurable beyond what I can believe. The great trial is when evening closes and night approaches. At that hour, we used to assemble in the dining-room--we used to talk. Now I sit by myself--necessarily I am silent. I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction. Perhaps all this will become less poignant in time. "Let me thank you once more, dear E----, for your kindness to me, which I do not mean to forget. How did you think all looking at your home? Papa thought me a little stronger; he said my eyes were not so sunken." "July 14th, 1849. "I do not much like giving an account of myself. I like better to go out of myself, and talk of something more cheerful. My cold, wherever I got it, whether at Easton or elsewhere, is not vanished yet. It began in my head, then I had a sore throat, and then a sore chest, with a cough, but only a trifling cough, which I still have at times. The pain between my shoulders likewise amazed me much. Say nothing about it, for I confess I am too much disposed to be nervous. This nervousness is a horrid phantom. I dare communicate no ailment to Papa; his anxiety harasses me inexpressibly. "My life is what I expected it to be. Sometimes when I wake in the morning, and know that Solitude, Remembrance, and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through--that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless--that next morning I shall wake to them again,--sometimes, Nell, I have a heavy heart of it. But crushed I am not, yet; nor robbed of elasticity, nor of hope, nor quite of endeavour. I have some strength to fight the battle of life. I am aware, and can acknowledge, I have many comforts, many mercies. Still I can GET ON. But I do hope and pray, that never may you, or any one I love, be placed as I am. To sit in a lonely room--the clock ticking loud through a still house--and have open before the mind's eye the record of the last year, with its shocks, sufferings, losses--is a trial. "I write to you freely, because I believe you will hear me with moderation--that you will not take alarm or think me in any way worse off than I am." CHAPTER IV. The tale of "Shirley" had been begun soon after the publication of "Jane Eyre." If the reader will refer to the account I have given of Miss Brontë's schooldays at Roe Head, he will there see how every place surrounding that house was connected with the Luddite riots, and will learn how stories and anecdotes of that time were rife among the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages; how Miss Wooler herself, and the elder relations of most of her schoolfellows, must have known the actors in those grim disturbances. What Charlotte had heard there as a girl came up in her mind when, as a woman, she sought a subject for her next work; and she sent to Leeds for a file of the Mercuries of 1812, '13, and '14; in order to understand the spirit of those eventful times. She was anxious to write of things she had known and seen; and among the number was the West Yorkshire character, for which any tale laid among the Luddites would afford full scope. In "Shirley" she took the idea of most of her characters from life, although the incidents and situations were, of course, fictitious. She thought that if these last were purely imaginary, she might draw from the real without detection, but in this she was mistaken; her studies were too closely accurate. This occasionally led her into difficulties. People recognised themselves, or were recognised by others, in her graphic descriptions of their personal appearance, and modes of action and turns of thought; though they were placed in new positions, and figured away in scenes far different to those in which their actual life had been passed. Miss Brontë was struck by the force or peculiarity of the character of some one whom she knew; she studied it, and analysed it with subtle power; and having traced it to its germ, she took that germ as the nucleus of an imaginary character, and worked outwards;--thus reversing the process of analysation, and unconsciously reproducing the same external development. The "three curates" were real living men, haunting Haworth and the neighbouring district; and so obtuse in perception that, after the first burst of anger at having their ways and habits chronicled was over, they rather enjoyed the joke of calling each other by the names she had given them. "Mrs. Pryor" was well known to many who loved the original dearly. The whole family of the Yorkes were, I have been assured, almost daguerreotypes. Indeed Miss Brontë told me that, before publication, she had sent those parts of the novel in which these remarkable persons are introduced, to one of the sons; and his reply, after reading it, was simply that "she had not drawn them strong enough." From those many-sided sons, I suspect, she drew all that there was of truth in the characters of the heroes in her first two works. They, indeed, were almost the only young men she knew intimately, besides her brother. There was much friendship, and still more confidence between the Brontë family and them,--although their intercourse was often broken and irregular. There was never any warmer feeling on either side. The character of Shirley herself, is Charlotte's representation of Emily. I mention this, because all that I, a stranger, have been able to learn about her has not tended to give either me, or my readers, a pleasant impression of her. But we must remember how little we are acquainted with her, compared to that sister, who, out of her more intimate knowledge, says that she "was genuinely good, and truly great," and who tried to depict her character in Shirley Keeldar, as what Emily Brontë would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity. Miss Brontë took extreme pains with "Shirley." She felt that the fame she had acquired imposed upon her a double responsibility. She tried to make her novel like a piece of actual life,--feeling sure that, if she but represented the product of personal experience and observation truly, good would come out of it in the long run. She carefully studied the different reviews and criticisms that had appeared on "Jane Eyre," in hopes of extracting precepts and advice from which to profit. Down into the very midst of her writing came the bolts of death. She had nearly finished the second volume of her tale when Branwell died,--after him Emily,--after her Anne;--the pen, laid down when there were three sisters living and loving, was taken up when one alone remained. Well might she call the first chapter that she wrote after this, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." I knew in part what the unknown author of "Shirley" must have suffered, when I read those pathetic words which occur at the end of this and the beginning of the succeeding chapter:-- "Till break of day, she wrestled with God in earnest prayer. "Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. 'Spare my beloved,' it may implore. 'Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of Heaven--bend--hear--be clement!' And after this cry and strife, the sun may rise and see him worsted. That opening morn, which used to salute him with the whispers of zephyrs, the carol of skylarks, may breathe, as its first accents, from the dear lips which colour and heat have quitted,--'Oh! I have had a suffering night. This morning I am worse. I have tried to rise. I cannot. Dreams I am unused to have troubled me.' "Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God's will his idol should be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear. . . . "No piteous, unconscious moaning sound--which so wastes our strength that, even if we have sworn to be firm, a rush of unconquerable tears sweeps away the oath--preceded her waking. No space of deaf apathy followed. The first words spoken were not those of one becoming estranged from this world, and already permitted to stray at times into realms foreign to the living." She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without any one to listen to the progress of her tale,--to find fault or to sympathise,--while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this,--then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk,--and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,--and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound. But she wrote on, struggling against her own feelings of illness; "continually recurring feelings of slight cold; slight soreness in the throat and chest, of which, do what I will," she writes, "I cannot get rid." In August there arose a new cause for anxiety, happily but temporary. "Aug. 23rd, 1849. "Papa has not been well at all lately. He has had another attack of bronchitis. I felt very uneasy about him for some days--more wretched indeed than I care to tell you. After what has happened, one trembles at any appearance of sickness; and when anything ails Papa, I feel too keenly that he is the LAST--the only near and dear relative I have in the world. Yesterday and to-day he has seemed much better, for which I am truly thankful. . . . "From what you say of Mr. ----, I think I should like him very much. ---- wants shaking to be put out about his appearance. What does it matter whether her husband dines in a dress-coat, or a market-coat, provided there be worth, and honesty, and a clean shirt underneath?" "Sept. 10th, 1849. "My piece of work is at last finished, and despatched to its destination. You must now tell me when there is a chance of your being able to come here. I fear it will now be difficult to arrange, as it is so near the marriage-day. Note well, it would spoil all my pleasure, if you put yourself or any one else to inconvenience to come to Haworth. But when it is CONVENIENT, I shall be truly glad to see you. . . . Papa, I am thankful to say, is better, though not strong. He is often troubled with a sensation of nausea. My cold is very much less troublesome, I am sometimes quite free from it. A few days since, I had a severe bilious attack, the consequence of sitting too closely to my writing; but it is gone now. It is the first from which I have suffered since my return from the sea-side. I had them every month before." "Sept. 13th, 1849. "If duty and the well-being of others require that you should stay at home, I cannot permit myself to complain, still, I am very, VERY sorry that circumstances will not permit us to meet just now. I would without hesitation come to ----, if Papa were stronger; but uncertain as are both his health and spirits, I could not possibly prevail on myself to leave him now. Let us hope that when we do see each other our meeting will be all the more pleasurable for being delayed. Dear E----, you certainly have a heavy burden laid on your shoulders, but such burdens, if well borne, benefit the character; only we must take the GREATEST, CLOSEST, MOST WATCHFUL care not to grow proud of our strength, in case we should be enabled to bear up under the trial. That pride, indeed, would be sign of radical weakness. The strength, if strength we have, is certainly never in our own selves; it is given us." To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "Sept. 21st, 1849. "My dear Sir,--I am obliged to you for preserving my secret, being at least as anxious as ever (MORE anxious I cannot well be) to keep quiet. You asked me in one of your letters lately, whether I thought I should escape identification in Yorkshire. I am so little known, that I think I shall. Besides, the book is far less founded on the Real, than perhaps appears. It would be difficult to explain to you how little actual experience I have had of life, how few persons I have known, and how very few have known me. "As an instance how the characters have been managed, take that of Mr. Helstone. If this character had an original, it was in the person of a clergyman who died some years since at the advanced age of eighty. I never saw him except once--at the consecration of a church--when I was a child of ten years old. I was then struck with his appearance, and stern, martial air. At a subsequent period, I heard him talked about in the neighbourhood where he had resided: some mention him with enthusiasm--others with detestation. I listened to various anecdotes, balanced evidence against evidence, and drew an inference. The original of Mr. Hall I have seen; he knows me slightly; but he would as soon think I had closely observed him or taken him for a character--he would as soon, indeed, suspect me of writing a hook--a novel--as he would his dog, Prince. Margaret Hall called "Jane Eyre" a 'wicked book,' on the authority of the Quarterly; an expression which, coming from her, I will here confess, struck somewhat deep. It opened my eyes to the harm the Quarterly had done. Margaret would not have called it 'wicked,' if she had not been told so. "No matter,--whether known or unknown--misjudged, or the contrary,--I am resolved not to write otherwise. I shall bend as my powers tend. The two human beings who understood me, and whom I understood, are gone: I have some that love me yet, and whom I love, without expecting, or having a right to expect, that they shall perfectly understand me. I am satisfied; but I must have my own way in the matter of writing. The loss of what we possess nearest and dearest to us in this world, produces an effect upon the character we search out what we have yet left that can support, and, when found, we cling to it with a hold of new-strung tenacity. The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking, three months ago; its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession.--Yours sincerely, "CHARLOTTE BRONTË." At the time when this letter was written, both Tabby and the young servant whom they had to assist her were ill in bed; and, with the exception of occasional aid, Miss Brontë had all the household work to perform, as well as to nurse the two invalids. The serious illness of the younger servant was at its height, when a cry from Tabby called Miss Brontë into the kitchen, and she found the poor old woman of eighty laid on the floor, with her head under the kitchen-grate; she had fallen from her chair in attempting to rise. When I saw her, two years later, she described to me the tender care which Charlotte had taken of her at this time; and wound up her account of "how her own mother could not have had more thought for her nor Miss Brontë had," by saying, "Eh! she's a good one--she IS!" But there was one day when the strung nerves gave way--when, as she says, "I fairly broke down for ten minutes; sat and cried like a fool. Tabby could neither stand nor walk. Papa had just been declaring that Martha was in imminent danger. I was myself depressed with headache and sickness. That day I hardly knew what to do, or where to turn. Thank God! Martha is now convalescent: Tabby, I trust, will be better soon. Papa is pretty well. I have the satisfaction of knowing that my publishers are delighted with what I sent them. This supports me. But life is a battle. May we all be enabled to fight it well!" The kind friend, to whom she thus wrote, saw how the poor over-taxed system needed bracing, and accordingly sent her a shower-bath--a thing for which she had long been wishing. The receipt of it was acknowledged as follows:-- "Sept. 28th, 1849. ". . . Martha is now almost well, and Tabby much better. A huge monster-package, from 'Nelson, Leeds,' came yesterday. You want chastising roundly and soundly. Such are the thanks you get for all your trouble. . . . Whenever you come to Haworth, you shall certainly have a thorough drenching in your own shower-bath. I have not yet unpacked the wretch.--"Yours, as you deserve, C. B." There was misfortune of another kind impending over her. There were some railway shares, which, so early as 1846, she had told Miss Wooler she wished to sell, but had kept because she could not persuade her sisters to look upon the affair as she did, and so preferred running the risk of loss, to hurting Emily's feelings by acting in opposition to her opinion. The depreciation of these same shares was now verifying Charlotte's soundness of judgment. They were in the York and North-Midland Company, which was one of Mr. Hudson's pet lines, and had the full benefit of his peculiar system of management. She applied to her friend and publisher, Mr. Smith, for information on the subject; and the following letter is in answer to his reply:-- "Oct. 4th, 1849. "My dear Sir,--I must not THANK you for, but acknowledge the receipt of your letter. The business is certainly very bad; worse than I thought, and much worse than my father has any idea of. In fact, the little railway property I possessed, according to original prices, formed already a small competency for me, with my views and habits. Now, scarcely any portion of it can, with security, be calculated upon. I must open this view of the case to my father by degrees; and, meanwhile, wait patiently till I see how affairs are likely to turn. . . . However the matter may terminate, I ought perhaps to be rather thankful than dissatisfied. When I look at my own case, and compare it with that of thousands besides, I scarcely see room for a murmur. Many, very many, are by the late strange railway system deprived almost of their daily bread. Such then as have only lost provision laid up for the future, should take care how they complain. The thought that 'Shirley' has given pleasure at Cornhill, yields me much quiet comfort. No doubt, however, you are, as I am, prepared for critical severity; but I have good hopes that the vessel is sufficiently sound of construction to weather a gale or two, and to make a prosperous voyage for you in the end." Towards the close of October in this year, she went to pay a visit to her friend; but her enjoyment in the holiday, which she had so long promised herself when her work was completed, was deadened by a continual feeling of ill-health; either the change of air or the foggy weather produced constant irritation at the chest. Moreover, she was anxious about the impression which her second work would produce on the public mind. For obvious reasons an author is more susceptible to opinions pronounced on the book which follows a great success, than he has ever been before. Whatever be the value of fame, he has it in his possession, and is not willing to have it dimmed or lost. "Shirley" was published on October 26th. When it came out, but before reading it, Mr. Lewes wrote to tell her of his intention of reviewing it in the Edinburgh. Her correspondence with him had ceased for some time: much had occurred since. To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "Nov. 1st, 1849. "My dear Sir,--It is about a year and a half since you wrote to me; but it seems a longer period, because since then it has been my lot to pass some black milestones in the journey of life. Since then there have been intervals when I have ceased to care about literature and critics and fame; when I have lost sight of whatever was prominent in my thoughts at the first publication of 'Jane Eyre;' but now I want these things to come back vividly, if possible: consequently, it was a pleasure to receive your note. I wish you did not think me a woman. I wish all reviewers believed 'Currer Bell' to be a man; they would be more just to him. You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what you consider graceful, you will condemn me. All mouths will be open against that first chapter; and that first chapter is true as the Bible, nor is it exceptionable. Come what will, I cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on those terms, or with such ideas, I ever took pen in hand: and if it is only on such terms my writing will be tolerated, I shall pass away from the public and trouble it no more. Out of obscurity I came, to obscurity I can easily return. Standing afar off, I now watch to see what will become of 'Shirley.' My expectations are very low, and my anticipations somewhat sad and bitter; still, I earnestly conjure you to say honestly what you think; flattery would be worse than vain; there is no consolation in flattery. As for condemnation I cannot, on reflection, see why I should much fear it; there is no one but myself to suffer therefrom, and both happiness and suffering in this life soon pass away. Wishing you all success in your Scottish expedition,--I am, dear Sir, yours sincerely, C. BELL." Miss Brontë, as we have seen, had been as anxious as ever to preserve her incognito in "Shirley." She even fancied that there were fewer traces of a female pen in it than in "Jane Eyre"; and thus, when the earliest reviews were published, and asserted that the mysterious writer must be a woman, she was much disappointed. She especially disliked the lowering of the standard by which to judge a work of fiction, if it proceeded from a feminine pen; and praise mingled with pseudo-gallant allusions to her sex, mortified her far more than actual blame. But the secret, so jealously preserved, was oozing out at last. The publication of "Shirley" seemed to fix the conviction that the writer was an inhabitant of the district where the story was laid. And a clever Haworth man, who had somewhat risen in the world, and gone to settle in Liverpool, read the novel, and was struck with some of the names of places mentioned, and knew the dialect in which parts of it were written. He became convinced that it was the production of some one in Haworth. But he could not imagine who in that village could have written such a work except Miss Brontë. Proud of his conjecture, he divulged the suspicion (which was almost certainty) in the columns of a Liverpool paper; thus the heart of the mystery came slowly creeping out; and a visit to London, which Miss Brontë paid towards the end of the year 1849, made it distinctly known. She had been all along on most happy terms with her publishers; and their kindness had beguiled some of those weary, solitary hours which had so often occurred of late, by sending for her perusal boxes of books more suited to her tastes than any she could procure from the circulating library at Keighley. She often writes such sentences as the following, in her letters to Cornhill:-- "I was indeed very much interested in the books you sent 'Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe,' 'Guesses as Truth,' 'Friends in Council,' and the little work on English social life, pleased me particularly, and the last not least. We sometimes take a partiality to books as to characters, not on account of any brilliant intellect or striking peculiarity they boast, but for the sake of something good, delicate, and genuine. I thought that small book the production of a lady, and an amiable, sensible woman, and I liked it. You must not think of selecting any more works for me yet; my stock is still far from exhausted. "I accept your offer respecting the 'Athenaeum;' it is a paper I should like much to see, providing that you can send it without trouble. It shall be punctually returned." In a letter to her friend she complains of the feelings of illness from which she was seldom or never free. "Nov. 16th, 1849. You are not to suppose any of the characters in 'Shirley' intended as literal portraits. It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings; to write in that style. We only suffer reality to SUGGEST, never to DICTATE. The heroines are abstractions and the heroes also. Qualities I have seen, loved, and admired, are here and there put in as decorative gems, to be preserved in that sitting. Since you say you could recognise the originals of all except the heroines, pray whom did you suppose the two Moores to represent? I send you a couple of reviews; the one is in the Examiner, written by Albany Fonblanque, who is called the most brilliant political writer of the day, a man whose dictum is much thought of in London. The other, in the Standard of Freedom, is written by William Howitt, a Quaker! . . . I should be pretty well, if it were not for headaches and indigestion. My chest has been better lately." In consequence of this long-protracted state of languor, headache, and sickness, to which the slightest exposure to cold added sensations of hoarseness and soreness at the chest, she determined to take the evil in time, as much for her father's sake as for her own, and to go up to London and consult some physician there. It was not her first intention to visit anywhere; but the friendly urgency of her publishers prevailed, and it was decided that she was to become the guest of Mr. Smith. Before she went, she wrote two characteristic letters about "Shirley," from which I shall take a few extracts. "'Shirley' makes her way. The reviews shower in fast. . . . The best critique which has yet appeared is in the Revue des deux Mondes, a sort of European Cosmopolitan periodical, whose head-quarters are at Paris. Comparatively few reviewers, even in their praise, evince a just comprehension of the author's meaning. Eugene Forcarde, the reviewer in question, follows Currer Bell through every winding, discerns every point, discriminates every shade, proves himself master of the subject, and lord of the aim. With that man I would shake hands, if I saw him. I would say, 'You know me, Monsieur; I shall deem it an honour to know you.' I could not say so much of the mass of the London critics. Perhaps I could not say so much to five hundred men and women in all the millions of Great Britain. That matters little. My own conscience I satisfy first; and having done that, if I further content and delight a Forsarde, a Fonblanque, and a Thackeray, my ambition has had its ration, it is fed; it lies down for the present satisfied; my faculties have wrought a day's task, and earned a day's wages. I am no teacher; to look on me in that light is to mistake me. To teach is not my vocation. What I AM, it is useless to say. Those whom it concerns feel and find it out. To all others I wish only to be an obscure, steady-going, private character. To you, dear E ----, I wish to be a sincere friend. Give me your faithful regard; I willingly dispense with admiration." "Nov. 26th. "It is like you to pronounce the reviews not good enough, and belongs to that part of your character which will not permit you to bestow unqualified approbation on any dress, decoration, etc., belonging to you. Know that the reviews are superb; and were I dissatisfied with them, I should be a conceited ape. Nothing higher is ever said, FROM PERFECTLY DISINTERESTED MOTIVES, of any living authors. If all be well, I go to London this week; Wednesday, I think. The dress-maker has done my small matters pretty well, but I wish you could have looked them over, and given a dictum. I insisted on the dresses being made quite plainly." At the end of November she went up to the "big Babylon," and was immediately plunged into what appeared to her a whirl; for changes, and scenes, and stimulus which would have been a trifle to others, were much to her. As was always the case with strangers, she was a little afraid at first of the family into which she was now received, fancying that the ladies looked on her with a mixture of respect and alarm; but in a few days, if this state of feeling ever existed, her simple, shy, quiet manners, her dainty personal and household ways, had quite done away with it, and she says that she thinks they begin to like her, and that she likes them much, for "kindness is a potent heart-winner." She had stipulated that she should not be expected to see many people. The recluse life she had led, was the cause of a nervous shrinking from meeting any fresh face, which lasted all her life long. Still, she longed to have an idea of the personal appearance and manners of some of those whose writings or letters had interested her. Mr. Thackeray was accordingly invited to meet her, but it so happened that she had been out for the greater part of the morning, and, in consequence, missed the luncheon hour at her friend's house. This brought on a severe and depressing headache in one accustomed to the early, regular hours of a Yorkshire Parsonage; besides, the excitement of meeting, hearing, and sitting next a man to whom she looked up with such admiration as she did to the author of "Vanity Fair," was of itself overpowering to her frail nerves. She writes about this dinner as follows:-- "Dec. 10th, 1849. "As to being happy, I am under scenes and circumstances of excitement; but I suffer acute pain sometimes,--mental pain, I mean. At the moment Mr. Thackeray presented himself, I was thoroughly faint from inanition, having eaten nothing since a very slight breakfast, and it was then seven o'clock in the evening. Excitement and exhaustion made savage work of me that evening. What he thought of me I cannot tell." She told me how difficult she found it, this first time of meeting Mr. Thackeray, to decide whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest, and that she had (she believed) completely misunderstood an inquiry of his, made on the gentlemen's coming into the drawing-room. He asked her "if she had perceived the secret of their cigars;" to which she replied literally, discovering in a minute afterwards, by the smile on several faces, that he was alluding to a passage in "Jane Eyre". Her hosts took pleasure in showing her the sights of London. On one of the days which had been set apart for some of these pleasant excursions, a severe review of "Shirley" was published in the Times. She had heard that her book would be noticed by it, and guessed that there was some particular reason for the care with which her hosts mislaid it on that particular morning. She told them that she was aware why she might not see the paper. Mrs. Smith at once admitted that her conjecture was right, and said that they had wished her to go to the day's engagement before reading it. But she quietly persisted in her request to be allowed to have the paper. Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the countenance, which the other tried to hide between the large sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears stealing down the face and dropping on the lap. The first remark Miss Brontë made was to express her fear lest so severe a notice should check the sale of the book, and injuriously affect her publishers. Wounded as she was, her first thought was for others. Later on (I think that very afternoon) Mr. Thackeray called; she suspected (she said) that he came to see how she bore the attack on "Shirley;" but she had recovered her composure, and conversed very quietly with him: he only learnt from the answer to his direct inquiry that she had read the Times' article. She acquiesced in the recognition of herself as the authoress of "Jane Eyre," because she perceived that there were some advantages to be derived from dropping her pseudonym. One result was an acquaintance with Miss Martineau. She had sent her the novel just published, with a curious note, in which Currer Bell offered a copy of "Shirley" to Miss Martineau, as an acknowledgment of the gratification he had received from her works. From "Deerbrook" he had derived a new and keen pleasure, and experienced a genuine benefit. In HIS mind "Deerbrook," etc. Miss Martineau, in acknowledging this note and the copy of "Shirley," dated her letter from a friend's house in the neighbourhood of Mr. Smith's residence; and when, a week or two afterwards, Miss Brontë found how near she was to her correspondent, she wrote, in the name of Currer Bell, to propose a visit to her. Six o'clock, on a certain Sunday afternoon (Dec. 10th), was the time appointed. Miss Martineau's friends had invited the unknown Currer Bell to their early tea; they were ignorant whether the name was that of a man or a woman; and had had various conjectures as to sex, age, and appearance. Miss Martineau had, indeed, expressed her private opinion pretty distinctly by beginning her reply, to the professedly masculine note referred to above, with "Dear Madam;" but she had addressed it to "Currer Bell, Esq." At every ring the eyes of the party turned towards the door. Some stranger (a gentleman, I think) came in; for an instant they fancied he was Currer Bell, and indeed an Esq.; he stayed some time--went away. Another ring; "Miss Brontë was announced; and in came a young-looking lady, almost child-like in stature, in a deep mourning dress, neat as a Quaker's, with her beautiful hair smooth and brown, her fine eyes blazing with meaning and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control." She came,--hesitated one moment at finding four or five people assembled,--then went straight to Miss Martineau with intuitive recognition, and, with the free-masonry of good feeling and gentle breeding, she soon became as one of the family seated round the tea-table; and, before she left, she told them, in a simple, touching manner, of her sorrow and isolation, and a foundation was laid for her intimacy with Miss Martineau. After some discussion on the subject, and a stipulation that she should not be specially introduced to any one, some gentlemen were invited by Mr. Smith to meet her at dinner the evening before she left town. Her natural place would have been at the bottom of the table by her host; and the places of those who were to be her neighbours were arranged accordingly; but, on entering the dining-room, she quickly passed up so as to sit next to the lady of the house, anxious to shelter herself near some one of her own sex. This slight action arose out of the same womanly seeking after protection on every occasion, when there was no moral duty involved in asserting her independence, that made her about this time write as follows: "Mrs. ---- watches me very narrowly when surrounded by strangers. She never takes her eye from me. I like the surveillance; it seems to keep guard over me." Respecting this particular dinner-party she thus wrote to the Brussels schoolfellow of former days, whose friendship had been renewed during her present visit to London:-- "The evening after I left you passed better than I expected. Thanks to my substantial lunch and cheering cup of coffee, I was able to wait the eight o'clock dinner with complete resignation, and to endure its length quite courageously, nor was I too much exhausted to converse; and of this I was glad, for otherwise I know my kind host and hostess would have been much disappointed. There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed; morning came, and I rose without having known a moment's slumber. So utterly worn out was I when I got to Derby, that I was again obliged to stay there all night." "Dec. 17th. "Here I am at Haworth once more. I feel as if I had come out of an exciting whirl. Not that the hurry and stimulus would have seemed much to one accustomed to society and change, but to me they were very marked. My strength and spirits too often proved quite insufficient to the demand on their exertions. I used to bear up as long as I possibly could, for, when I flagged, I could see Mr. Smith became disturbed; he always thought that something had been said or done to annoy me--which never once happened, for I met with perfect good breeding even from antagonists--men who had done their best or worst to write me down. I explained to him over and over again, that my occasional silence was only failure of the power to talk, never of the will. . . . "Thackeray is a Titan of mind. His presence and powers impress one deeply in an intellectual sense; I do not see him or know him as a man. All the others are subordinate. I have esteem for some, and, I trust, courtesy for all. I do not, of course, know what they thought of me, but I believe most of them expected me to come out in a more marked, eccentric, striking light. I believe they desired more to admire and more to blame. I felt sufficiently at my ease with all but Thackeray; with him I was fearfully stupid." She returned to her quiet home, and her noiseless daily duties. Her father had quite enough of the spirit of hero-worship in him to make him take a vivid pleasure in the accounts of what she had heard and whom she had seen. It was on the occasion of one of her visits to London that he had desired her to obtain a sight of Prince Albert's armoury, if possible. I am not aware whether she managed to do this; but she went to one or two of the great national armouries in order that she might describe the stern steel harness and glittering swords to her father, whose imagination was forcibly struck by the idea of such things; and often afterwards, when his spirits flagged and the languor of old age for a time got the better of his indomitable nature, she would again strike on the measure wild, and speak about the armies of strange weapons she had seen in London, till he resumed his interest in the old subject, and was his own keen, warlike, intelligent self again. CHAPTER V. Her life at Haworth was so unvaried that the postman's call was the event of her day. Yet she dreaded the great temptation of centring all her thoughts upon this one time, and losing her interest in the smaller hopes and employments of the remaining hours. Thus she conscientiously denied herself the pleasure of writing letters too frequently, because the answers (when she received them) took the flavour out of the rest of her life; or the disappointment, when the replies did not arrive, lessened her energy for her home duties. The winter of this year in the north was hard and cold; it affected Miss Brontë's health less than usual, however, probably because the change and the medical advice she had taken in London had done her good; probably, also, because her friend had come to pay her a visit, and enforced that attention to bodily symptoms which Miss Brontë was too apt to neglect, from a fear of becoming nervous herself about her own state and thus infecting her father. But she could scarcely help feeling much depressed in spirits as the anniversary of her sister Emily's death came round; all the recollections connected with it were painful, yet there were no outward events to call off her attention, and prevent them from pressing hard upon her. At this time, as at many others, I find her alluding in her letters to the solace which she found in the books sent her from Cornhill. "What, I sometimes ask, could I do without them? I have recourse to them as to friends; they shorten and cheer many an hour that would be too long and too desolate otherwise; even when my tired sight will not permit me to continue reading, it is pleasant to see them on the shelf, or on the table. I am still very rich, for my stock is far from exhausted. Some other friends have sent me books lately. The perusal of Harriet Martineau's 'Eastern Life' has afforded me great pleasure; and I have found a deep and interesting subject of study in Newman's work on the Soul. Have you read this work? It is daring,--it may be mistaken,--but it is pure and elevated. Froude's 'Nemesis of Faith' I did not like; I thought it morbid; yet in its pages, too, are found sprinklings of truth." By this time, "Airedale, Wharfedale, Calderdale, and Ribblesdale" all knew the place of residence of Currer Bell. She compared herself to the ostrich hiding its head in the sand; and says that she still buries hers in the heath of Haworth moors; but "the concealment is but self-delusion." Indeed it was. Far and wide in the West Riding had spread the intelligence that Currer Bell was no other than a daughter of the venerable clergyman of Haworth; the village itself caught up the excitement. "Mr. ----, having finished 'Jane Eyre,' is now crying out for the 'other book;' he is to have it next week. . . . Mr. R ---- has finished 'Shirley;' he is delighted with it. John ----'s wife seriously thought him gone wrong in the head, as she heard him giving vent to roars of laughter as he sat alone, clapping and stamping on the floor. He would read all the scenes about the curates aloud to papa." . . . "Martha came in yesterday, puffing and blowing, and much excited. 'I've heard sich news!' she began. 'What about?' 'Please, ma'am, you've been and written two books--the grandest books that ever was seen. My father has heard it at Halifax, and Mr. G---- T---- and Mr. G---- and Mr. M---- at Bradford; and they are going to have a meeting at the Mechanics' Institute, and to settle about ordering them.' 'Hold your tongue, Martha, and be off.' I fell into a cold sweat. "Jane Eyre" will be read by J---- B----, by Mrs. T----, and B----. Heaven help, keep, and deliver me!" . . . "The Haworth people have been making great fools of themselves about Shirley; they have taken it in an enthusiastic light. When they got the volumes at the Mechanics' Institute, all the members wanted them. They cast lots for the whole three, and whoever got a volume was only allowed to keep it two days, and was to be fined a shilling per diem for longer detention. It would be mere nonsense and vanity to tell you what they say." The tone of these extracts is thoroughly consonant with the spirit of Yorkshire and Lancashire people, who try as long as they can to conceal their emotions of pleasure under a bantering exterior, almost as if making fun of themselves. Miss Brontë was extremely touched in the secret places of her warm heart by the way in which those who had known her from her childhood were proud and glad of her success. All round about the news had spread; strangers came "from beyond Burnley" to see her, as she went quietly and unconsciously into church and the sexton "gained many a half-crown" for pointing her out. But there were drawbacks to this hearty and kindly appreciation which was so much more valuable than fame. The January number of the Edinburgh Review had contained the article on Shirley, of which her correspondent, Mr. Lewes, was the writer. I have said that Miss Brontë was especially anxious to be criticised as a writer, without relation to her sex as a woman. Whether right or wrong, her feeling was strong on this point. Now in this review of Shirley, the heading of the first two pages ran thus: "Mental Equality of the Sexes?" "Female Literature," and through the whole article the fact of the author's sex is never forgotten. A few days after the review appeared, Mr. Lewes received the following note,--rather in the style of Anne Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery. To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends! CURRER BELL." In some explanatory notes on her letters to him, with which Mr. Lewes has favoured me, he says:-- "Seeing that she was unreasonable because angry, I wrote to remonstrate with her on quarrelling with the severity or frankness of a review, which certainly was dictated by real admiration and real friendship; even under its objections the friend's voice could be heard." The following letter is her reply:-- To G. H. LEWES, ESQ. "Jan. 19th, 1850. "My dear Sir,--I will tell you why I was so hurt by that review in the Edinburgh; not because its criticism was keen or its blame sometimes severe; not because its praise was stinted (for, indeed, I think you give me quite as much praise as I deserve), but because after I had said earnestly that I wished critics would judge me as an AUTHOR, not as a woman, you so roughly--I even thought so cruelly--handled the question of sex. I dare say you meant no harm, and perhaps you will not now be able to understand why I was so grieved at what you will probably deem such a trifle; but grieved I was, and indignant too. "There was a passage or two which you did quite wrong to write. "However, I will not bear malice against you for it; I know what your nature is: it is not a bad or unkind one, though you would often jar terribly on some feelings with whose recoil and quiver you could not possibly sympathise. I imagine you are both enthusiastic and implacable, as you are at once sagacious and careless; you know much and discover much, but you are in such a hurry to tell it all you never give yourself time to think how your reckless eloquence may affect others; and, what is more, if you knew how it did affect them, you would not much care. "However, I shake hands with you: you have excellent points; you can be generous. I still feel angry, and think I do well to be angry; but it is the anger one experiences for rough play rather than for foul play.--I am yours, with a certain respect, and more chagrin, CURRER BELL." As Mr. Lewes says, "the tone of this letter is cavalier." But I thank him for having allowed me to publish what is so characteristic of one phase of Miss Brontë's mind. Her health, too, was suffering at this time. "I don't know what heaviness of spirit has beset me of late" (she writes, in pathetic words, wrung out of the sadness of her heart), "made my faculties dull, made rest weariness, and occupation burdensome. Now and then, the silence of the house, the solitude of the room, has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather. Quicksilver invariably falls low in storms and high winds, and I have ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy mental sadness, such as some would call PRESENTIMENT,--presentiment indeed it is, but not at all super-natural. . . . I cannot help feeling something of the excitement of expectation till the post hour comes, and when, day after day, it brings nothing, I get low. This is a stupid, disgraceful, unmeaning state of things. I feel bitterly vexed at my own dependence and folly; but it is so bad for the mind to be quite alone, and to have none with whom to talk over little crosses and disappointments, and to laugh them away. If I could write, I dare say I should be better, but I cannot write a line. However (by God's help), I will contend against this folly. "I had rather a foolish letter the other day from ----. Some things in it nettled me, especially an unnecessarily earnest assurance that, in spite of all I had done in the writing line, I still retained a place in her esteem. My answer took strong and high ground at once. I said I had been troubled by no doubts on the subject; that I neither did her nor myself the injustice to suppose there was anything in what I had written to incur the just forfeiture of esteem. . . . "A few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers,--telling me that they were mamma's, and that I might read them. I did read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were yellow with time, all having been written before I was born it was strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. They were written to papa before they were married. There is a rectitude, a refinement a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable. I wished that she had lived, and that I had known her. . . . All through this month of February, I have had a crushing time of it. I could not escape from or rise above certain most mournful recollections,--the last days, the sufferings, the remembered words--most sorrowful to me, of those who, Faith assures me, are now happy. At evening and bed-time, such thoughts would haunt me, bringing a weary heartache." The reader may remember the strange prophetic vision, which dictated a few words, written on the occasion of the death of a pupil of hers in January, 1840: "Wherever I seek for her now in this world, she cannot be found; no more than a flower or a leaf which withered twenty years ago. A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have, who have seen all drop round them--friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone." Even in persons of naturally robust health, and with no "Ricordarsi di tempo felice Nella miseria--" to wear, with slow dropping but perpetual pain, upon their spirits, the nerves and appetite will give way in solitude. How much more must it have been so with Miss Brontë, delicate and frail in constitution, tried by much anxiety and sorrow in early life, and now left to face her life alone. Owing to Mr. Brontë's great age, and long-formed habits of solitary occupation when in the house, his daughter was left to herself for the greater part of the day. Ever since his serious attacks of illness, he had dined alone; a portion of her dinner, regulated by strict attention to the diet most suitable for him, being taken into his room by herself. After dinner she read to him for an hour or so, as his sight was too weak to allow of his reading long to himself. He was out of doors among his parishioners for a good part of each day; often for a longer time than his strength would permit. Yet he always liked to go alone, and consequently her affectionate care could be no check upon the length of his walks to the more distant hamlets which were in his cure. He would come back occasionally utterly fatigued; and be obliged to go to bed, questioning himself sadly as to where all his former strength of body had gone to. His strength of will was the same as ever. That which he resolved to do he did, at whatever cost of weariness; but his daughter was all the more anxious from seeing him so regardless of himself and his health. The hours of retiring for the night had always been early in the Parsonage; now family prayers were at eight o'clock; directly after which Mr. Brontë and old Tabby went to bed, and Martha was not long in following. But Charlotte could not have slept if she had gone,--could not have rested on her desolate couch. She stopped up,--it was very tempting,--late and later, striving to beguile the lonely night with some employment, till her weak eyes failed to read or to sew, and could only weep in solitude over the dead that were not. No one on earth can even imagine what those hours were to her. All the grim superstitions of the North had been implanted in her during her childhood by the servants, who believed in them. They recurred to her now,--with no shrinking from the spirits of the Dead, but with such an intense longing once more to stand face to face with the souls of her sisters, as no one but she could have felt. It seemed as if the very strength of her yearning should have compelled them to appear. On windy nights, cries, and sobs, and wailings seemed to go round the house, as of the dearly-beloved striving to force their way to her. Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of "Jane Eyre" in which she hears Rochester's voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë's recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, "But it is a true thing; it really happened." The reader, who has even faintly pictured to himself her life at this time,--the solitary days,--the waking, watching nights,--may imagine to what a sensitive pitch her nerves were strung, and how such a state was sure to affect her health. It was no bad thing for her that about this time various people began to go over to Haworth, curious to see the scenery described in "Shirley," if a sympathy with the writer, of a more generous kind than to be called mere curiosity, did not make them wish to know whether they could not in some way serve or cheer one who had suffered so deeply. Among this number were Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth. Their house lies over the crest of the moors which rise above Haworth, at about a dozen miles' distance as the crow flies, though much further by the road. But, according to the acceptation of the word in that uninhabited district, they were neighbours, if they so willed it. Accordingly, Sir James and his wife drove over one morning, at the beginning of March, to call upon Miss Brontë and her father. Before taking leave, they pressed her to visit them at Gawthorpe Hall, their residence on the borders of East Lancashire. After some hesitation, and at the urgency of her father, who was extremely anxious to procure for her any change of scene and society that was offered, she consented to go. On the whole, she enjoyed her visit very much, in spite of her shyness, and the difficulty she always experienced in meeting the advances of those strangers whose kindness she did not feel herself in a position to repay. She took great pleasure in the "quiet drives to old ruins and old halls, situated among older hills and woods; the dialogues by the old fireside in the antique oak-panneled drawing-room, while they suited him, did not too much oppress and exhaust me. The house, too, is much to my taste; near three centuries old, grey, stately, and picturesque. On the whole, now that the visit is over, I do not regret having paid it. The worst of it is, that there is now some menace hanging over my head of an invitation to go to them in London during the season. This, which would be a great enjoyment to some people, is a perfect terror to me. I should highly prize the advantages to be gained in an extended range of observation; but I tremble at the thought of the price I must necessarily pay in mental distress and physical wear and tear." On the same day on which she wrote the above, she sent the following letter to Mr. Smith. "March 16th, 1850. "I return Mr. H----'s note, after reading it carefully. I tried very hard to understand all he says about art; but, to speak truth, my efforts were crowned with incomplete success. There is a certain jargon in use amongst critics on this point through which it is physically and morally impossible to me to see daylight. One thing however, I see plainly enough, and that is, Mr. Currer Bell needs improvement, and ought to strive after it; and this (D. V.) he honestly intends to do--taking his time, however, and following as his guides Nature and Truth. If these lead to what the critics call art, it is all very well; but if not, that grand desideratum has no chance of being run after or caught. The puzzle is, that while the people of the South object to my delineation of Northern life and manners, the people of Yorkshire and Lancashire approve. They say it is precisely the contrast of rough nature with highly artificial cultivation which forms one of their main characteristics. Such, or something very similar, has been the observation made to me lately, whilst I have been from home, by members of some of the ancient East Lancashire families, whose mansions lie on the hilly border-land between the two counties. The question arises, whether do the London critics, or the old Northern squires, understand the matter best? "Any promise you require respecting the books shall be willingly given, provided only I am allowed the Jesuit's principle of a mental reservation, giving licence to forget and promise whenever oblivion shall appear expedient. The last two or three numbers of Pendennis will not, I dare say, be generally thought sufficiently exciting, yet I like them. Though the story lingers, (for me) the interest does not flag. Here and there we feel that the pen has been guided by a tired hand, that the mind of the writer has been somewhat chafed and depressed by his recent illness, or by some other cause; but Thackeray still proves himself greater when he is weary than other writers are when they are fresh. The public, of course, will have no compassion for his fatigue, and make no allowance for the ebb of inspiration; but some true-hearted readers here and there, while grieving that such a man should be obliged to write when he is not in the mood, will wonder that, under such circumstances, he should write so well. The parcel of books will come, I doubt not, at such time as it shall suit the good pleasure of the railway officials to send it on,--or rather to yield it up to the repeated and humble solicitations of Haworth carriers;--till when I wait in all reasonable patience and resignation, looking with docility to that model of active self-helpfulness Punch friendly offers the 'Women of England,' in his 'Unprotected Female.'" The books lent her by her publishers were, as I have before said, a great solace and pleasure to her. There was much interest in opening the Cornhill parcel. But there was pain too; for, as she untied the cords, and took out the volumes one by one, she could scarcely fail to be reminded of those who once, on similar occasions, looked on so eagerly. "I miss familiar voices, commenting mirthfully and pleasantly; the room seems very still--very empty; but yet there is consolation in remembering that Papa will take pleasure in some of the books. Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste." She goes on to make remarks upon the kind of books sent. "I wonder how you can choose so well; on no account would I forestall the choice. I am sure any selection I might make for myself would be less satisfactory than the selection others so kindly and judiciously make for me; besides, if I knew all that was coming, it would be comparatively flat. I would much rather not know. "Amongst the especially welcome works are 'Southey's Life', the 'Women of France,' Hazlitt's 'Essays,' Emerson's 'Representative Men;' but it seems invidious to particularise when all are good. . . . I took up a second small book, Scott's 'Suggestions on Female Education;' that, too, I read, and with unalloyed pleasure. It is very good; justly thought, and clearly and felicitously expressed. The girls of this generation have great advantages; it seems to me that they receive much encouragement in the acquisition of knowledge, and the cultivation of their minds; in these days, women may be thoughtful and well read, without being universally stigmatised as 'Blues' and 'Pedants.' Men begin to approve and aid, instead of ridiculing or checking them in their efforts to be wise. I must say that, for my own part, whenever I have been so happy as to share the conversation of a really intellectual man, my feeling has been, not that the little I knew was accounted a superfluity and impertinence, but that I did not know enough to satisfy just expectation. I have always to explain, 'In me you must not look for great attainments: what seems to you the result of reading and study is chiefly spontaneous and intuitive.' . . . Against the teaching of some (even clever) men, one instinctively revolts. They may possess attainments, they may boast varied knowledge of life and of the world; but if of the finer perceptions, of the more delicate phases of feeling, they be destitute and incapable, of what avail is the rest? Believe me, while hints well worth consideration may come from unpretending sources, from minds not highly cultured, but naturally fine and delicate, from hearts kindly, feeling, and unenvious, learned dictums delivered with pomp and sound may be perfectly empty, stupid, and contemptible. No man ever yet 'by aid of Greek climbed Parnassus,' or taught others to climb it. . . . I enclose for your perusal a scrap of paper which came into my hands without the knowledge of the writer. He is a poor working man of this village--a thoughtful, reading, feeling being, whose mind is too keen for his frame, and wears it out. I have not spoken to him above thrice in my life, for he is a Dissenter, and has rarely come in my way. The document is a sort of record of his feelings, after the perusal of "Jane Eyre;" it is artless and earnest; genuine and generous. You must return it to me, for I value it more than testimonies from higher sources. He said, 'Miss Brontë, if she knew he had written it, would scorn him;' but, indeed, Miss Brontë does not scorn him; she only grieves that a mind of which this is the emanation, should be kept crushed by the leaden hand of poverty--by the trials of uncertain health, and the claims of a large family. "As to the Times, as you say, the acrimony of its critique has proved, in some measure, its own antidote; to have been more effective, it should have been juster. I think it has had little weight up here in the North it may be that annoying remarks, if made, are not suffered to reach my ear; but certainly, while I have heard little condemnatory of Shirley, more than once have I been deeply moved by manifestations of even enthusiastic approbation. I deem it unwise to dwell much on these matters; but for once I must permit myself to remark, that the generous pride many of the Yorkshire people have taken in the matter, has been such as to awake and claim my gratitude--especially since it has afforded a source of reviving pleasure to my father in his old age. The very curates, poor fellows! show no resentment each characteristically finds solace for his own wounds in crowing over his brethren. Mr. Donne was at first a little disturbed; for a week or two he was in disquietude, but he is now soothed down; only yesterday I had the pleasure of making him a comfortable cup of tea, and seeing him sip it with revived complacency. It is a curious fact that, since he read 'Shirley,' he has come to the house oftener than ever, and been remarkably meek and assiduous to please. Some people's natures are veritable enigmas I quite expected to have had one good scene at least with him; but as yet nothing of the sort has occurred." CHAPTER VI. During the earlier months of this spring, Haworth was extremely unhealthy. The weather was damp, low fever was prevalent, and the household at the Parsonage suffered along with its neighbours. Charlotte says, "I have felt it (the fever) in frequent thirst and infrequent appetite; Papa too, and even Martha, have complained." This depression of health produced depression of spirits, and she grew more and more to dread the proposed journey to London with Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth. "I know what the effect and what the pain will be, how wretched I shall often feel, and how thin and haggard I shall get; but he who shuns suffering will never win victory. If I mean to improve, I must strive and endure. . . . Sir James has been a physician, and looks at me with a physician's eye: he saw at once that I could not stand much fatigue, nor bear the presence of many strangers. I believe he would partly understand how soon my stock of animal spirits was brought to a low ebb; but none--not the most skilful physician--can get at more than the outside of these things: the heart knows its own bitterness, and the frame its own poverty, and the mind its own struggles. Papa is eager and restless for me to go; the idea of a refusal quite hurts him." But the sensations of illness in the family increased; the symptoms were probably aggravated, if not caused, by the immediate vicinity of the church-yard, "paved with rain-blackened tomb-stones." On April 29th she writes:-- "We have had but a poor week of it at Haworth. Papa continues far from well; he is often very sickly in the morning, a symptom which I have remarked before in his aggravated attacks of bronchitis; unless he should get much better, I shall never think of leaving him to go to London. Martha has suffered from tic-douloureux, with sickness and fever, just like you. I have a bad cold, and a stubborn sore throat; in short, everybody but old Tabby is out of sorts. When ---- was here, he complained of a sudden headache, and the night after he was gone I had something similar, very bad, lasting about three hours." A fortnight later she writes:-- "I did not think Papa well enough to be left, and accordingly begged Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth to return to London without me. It was arranged that we were to stay at several of their friends' and relatives' houses on the way; a week or more would have been taken up on the journey. I cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal; I would as lief have walked among red-hot plough-shares; but I do regret one great treat, which I shall now miss. Next Wednesday is the anniversary dinner of the Royal Literary Fund Society, held in Freemasons' Hall. Octavian Blewitt, the secretary, offered me a ticket for the ladies' gallery. I should have seen all the great literati and artists gathered in the hall below, and heard them speak; Thackeray and Dickens are always present among the rest. This cannot now be. I don't think all London can afford another sight to me so interesting." It became requisite, however, before long, that she should go to London on business; and as Sir James Kay Shuttleworth was detained in the country by indisposition, she accepted Mrs. Smith's invitation to stay quietly at her house, while she transacted her affairs. In the interval between the relinquishment of the first plan and the adoption of the second, she wrote the following letter to one who was much valued among her literary friends:-- "May 22nd. "I had thought to bring the Leader and the Athenaeum myself this time, and not to have to send them by post, but it turns out otherwise; my journey to London is again postponed, and this time indefinitely. Sir James Kay Shuttleworth's state of health is the cause--a cause, I fear, not likely to be soon removed. . . . Once more, then, I settle myself down in the quietude of Haworth Parsonage, with books for my household companions, and an occasional letter for a visitor; a mute society, but neither quarrelsome, nor vulgarising, nor unimproving. "One of the pleasures I had promised myself consisted in asking you several questions about the Leader, which is really, in its way, an interesting paper. I wanted, amongst other things, to ask you the real names of some of the contributors, and also what Lewes writes besides his Apprenticeship of Life. I always think the article headed 'Literature' is his. Some of the communications in the 'Open Council' department are odd productions; but it seems to me very fair and right to admit them. Is not the system of the paper altogether a novel one? I do not remember seeing anything precisely like it before. "I have just received yours of this morning; thank you for the enclosed note. The longings for liberty and leisure which May sunshine wakens in you, stir my sympathy. I am afraid Cornhill is little better than a prison for its inmates on warm spring or summer days. It is a pity to think of you all toiling at your desks in such genial weather as this. For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency, but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness, nor witnessed their last moments: it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. At the end of all, however, exists the Great Hope. Eternal Life is theirs now." She had to write many letters, about this time, to authors who sent her their books, and strangers who expressed their admiration of her own. The following was in reply to one of the latter class, and was addressed to a young man at Cambridge:-- "May 23rd, 1850. "Apologies are indeed unnecessary for a 'reality of feeling, for a genuine unaffected impulse of the spirit,' such as prompted you to write the letter which I now briefly acknowledge. "Certainly it is 'something to me' that what I write should be acceptable to the feeling heart and refined intellect; undoubtedly it is much to me that my creations (such as they are) should find harbourage, appreciation, indulgence, at any friendly hand, or from any generous mind. You are very welcome to take Jane, Caroline, and Shirley for your sisters, and I trust they will often speak to their adopted brother when he is solitary, and soothe him when he is sad. If they cannot make themselves at home in a thoughtful, sympathetic mind, and diffuse through its twilight a cheering, domestic glow, it is their fault; they are not, in that case, so amiable, so benignant, not so real as they ought to be. If they CAN, and can find household altars in human hearts, they will fulfil the best design of their creation, in therein maintaining a genial flame, which shall warm but not scorch, light but not dazzle. "What does it matter that part of your pleasure in such beings has its source in the poetry of your own youth rather than in any magic of theirs? What, that perhaps, ten years hence, you may smile to remember your present recollections, and view under another light both 'Currer Bell' and his writings? To me this consideration does not detract from the value of what you now feel. Youth has its romance, and maturity its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, noon and summer their power, night and winter their repose. Each attribute is good in its own season. Your letter gave me pleasure, and I thank you for it. "CURRER BELL." Miss Brontë went up to town at the beginning of June, and much enjoyed her stay there; seeing very few persons, according to the agreement she made before she went; and limiting her visit to a fortnight, dreading the feverishness and exhaustion which were the inevitable consequences of the slightest excitement upon her susceptible frame. "June 12th. "Since I wrote to you last, I have not had many moments to myself, except such as it was absolutely necessary to give to rest. On the whole, however, I have thus far got on very well, suffering much less from exhaustion than I did last time. "Of course I cannot give you in a letter a regular chronicle of how my time has been spent. I can only--just notify. what I deem three of its chief incidents: a sight of the Duke of Wellington at the Chapel Royal (he is a real grand old man), a visit to the House of Commons (which I hope to describe to you some day when I see you), and last, not least, an interview with Mr. Thackeray. He made a morning call, and sat above two hours. Mr. Smith only was in the room the whole time. He described it afterwards as a 'queer scene,' and--I suppose it was. The giant sate before me; I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course); one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I brought them out, and sought some explanation or defence. He did defend himself, like a great Turk and heathen; that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity; if all be well, I am to dine at his house this evening. "I have seen Lewes too. . . . I could not feel otherwise to him than half-sadly, half-tenderly,--a queer word that last, but I use it because the aspect of Lewes's face almost moves me to tears; it is so wonderfully like Emily,--her eyes, her features, the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead, even, at moments, the expression: whatever Lewes says, I believe I cannot hate him. Another likeness I have seen, too, that touched me sorrowfully. You remember my speaking of a Miss K., a young authoress, who supported her mother by writing? Hearing that she had a longing to see me, I called on her yesterday. . . . She met me half-frankly, half-tremblingly; we sate down together, and when I had talked with her five minutes, her face was no longer strange, but mournfully familiar;--it was Martha in every lineament. I shall try to find a moment to see her again. . . . I do not intend to stay here, at the furthest, more than a week longer; but at the end of that time I cannot go home, for the house at Haworth is just now unroofed; repairs were become necessary." She soon followed her letter to the friend to whom it was written; but her visit was a very short one, for, in accordance with a plan made before leaving London, she went on to Edinburgh to join the friends with whom she had been staying in town. She remained only a few days in Scotland, and those were principally spent in Edinburgh, with which she was delighted, calling London a "dreary place" in comparison. "My stay in Scotland" (she wrote some weeks later) "was short, and what I saw was chiefly comprised in Edinburgh and the neighbourhood, in Abbotsford and in Melrose, for I was obliged to relinquish my first intention of going from Glasgow to Oban, and thence through a portion of the Highlands; but though the time was brief, and the view of objects limited, I found such a charm of situation, association, and circumstance, that I think the enjoyment experienced in that little space equalled in degree, and excelled in kind, all which London yielded during a month's sojourn. Edinburgh, compared to London, is like a vivid page of history compared to a large dull treatise on political economy; and as to Melrose and Abbotsford, the very names possess music and magic." And again, in a letter to a different correspondent, she says:-- "I would not write to you immediately on my arrival at home, because each return to this old house brings with it a phase of feeling which it is better to pass through quietly before beginning to indite letters. The six weeks of change and enjoyment are past, but they are not lost; memory took a sketch of each as it went by, and, especially, a distinct daguerreotype of the two days I spent in Scotland. Those were two very pleasant days. I always liked Scotland as an idea, but now, as a reality, I like it far better; it furnished me with some hours as happy almost as any I ever spent. Do not fear, however, that I am going to bore you with description; you will, before now, have received a pithy and pleasant report of all things, to which any addition of mine would be superfluous. My present endeavours are directed towards recalling my thoughts, cropping their wings, drilling them into correct discipline, and forcing them to settle to some useful work: they are idle, and keep taking the train down to London, or making a foray over the Border--especially are they prone to perpetrate that last excursion; and who, indeed, that has once seen Edinburgh, with its couchant crag-lion, but must see it again in dreams, waking or sleeping? My dear sir, I do not think I blaspheme, when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, 'mine own romantic town,' is as prose compared to poetry, or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy epic compared to a lyric, brief, bright, clear and vital as a flash of lightning. You have nothing like Scott's monument, or, if you had that, and all the glories of architecture assembled together, you have nothing like Arthur's Seat, and, above all, you have not the Scotch national character; and it is that grand character after all which gives the land its true charm, its true greatness. On her return from Scotland, she again spent a few days with her friends, and then made her way to Haworth. "July 15th. I got home very well, and full glad was I that no insuperable obstacle had deferred my return one single day longer. Just at the foot of Bridgehouse hill, I met John, staff in hand; he fortunately saw me in the cab, stopped, and informed me he was setting off to B----, by Mr. Brontë's orders, to see how I was, for that he had been quite miserable ever since he got Miss ----'s letter. I found, on my arrival, that Papa had worked himself up to a sad pitch of nervous excitement and alarm, in which Martha and Tabby were but too obviously joining him. . . . The house looks very clean, and, I think, is not damp; there is, however, still a great deal to do in the way of settling and arranging,--enough to keep me disagreeably busy for some time to come. I was truly thankful to find Papa pretty well, but I fear he is just beginning to show symptoms of a cold: my cold continues better. . . . An article in a newspaper I found awaiting me on my arrival, amused me; it was a paper published while I was in London. I enclose it to give you a laugh; it professes to be written by an Author jealous of Authoresses. I do not know who he is, but he must be one of those I met. . . . The 'ugly men,' giving themselves 'Rochester airs,' is no bad hit; some of those alluded to will not like it." While Miss Brontë was staying in London, she was induced to sit for her portrait to Richmond. It is a crayon drawing; in my judgment an admirable likeness, though of course there is some difference of opinion on the subject; and, as usual, those best acquainted with the original were least satisfied with the resemblance. Mr. Brontë thought that it looked older than Charlotte did, and that her features had not been flattered; but he acknowledged that the expression was wonderfully good and life-like. She sent the following amusing account of the arrival of the portrait to the donor:-- "Aug. 1st. "The little box for me came at the same time as the large one for Papa. When you first told me that you had had the Duke's picture framed, and had given it to me, I felt half provoked with you for performing such a work of supererogation, but now, when I see it again, I cannot but acknowledge that, in so doing, you were felicitously inspired. It is his very image, and, as Papa said when he saw it, scarcely in the least like the ordinary portraits; not only the expression, but even the form of the head is different, and of a far nobler character. I esteem it a treasure. The lady who left the parcel for me was, it seems, Mrs. Gore. The parcel contained one of her works, 'The Hamiltons,' and a very civil and friendly note, in which I find myself addressed as 'Dear Jane.' Papa seems much pleased with the portrait, as do the few other persons who have seen it, with one notable exception; viz., our old servant, who tenaciously maintains that it is not like--that it is too old-looking; but as she, with equal tenacity, asserts that the Duke of Wellington's picture is a portrait of 'the Master' (meaning Papa), I am afraid not much weight is to be ascribed to her opinion: doubtless she confuses her recollections of me as I was in childhood with present impressions. Requesting always to be very kindly remembered to your mother and sisters, I am, yours very thanklessly (according to desire), "C. BRONTË." It may easily be conceived that two people living together as Mr. Brontë and his daughter did, almost entirely dependent on each other for society, and loving each other deeply (although not demonstratively)--that these two last members of a family would have their moments of keen anxiety respecting each other's health. There is not one letter of hers which I have read, that does not contain some mention of her father's state in this respect. Either she thanks God with simple earnestness that he is well, or some infirmities of age beset him, and she mentions the fact, and then winces away from it, as from a sore that will not bear to be touched. He, in his turn, noted every indisposition of his one remaining child's, exaggerated its nature, and sometimes worked himself up into a miserable state of anxiety, as in the case she refers to, when, her friend having named in a letter to him that his daughter was suffering from a bad cold, he could not rest till he despatched a messenger, to go, "staff in hand" a distance of fourteen miles, and see with his own eyes what was her real state, and return and report. She evidently felt that this natural anxiety on the part of her father and friend increased the nervous depression of her own spirits, whenever she was ill; and in the following letter she expresses her strong wish that the subject of her health should be as little alluded to as possible. "Aug. 7th. "I am truly sorry that I allowed the words to which you refer to escape my lips, since their effect on you has been unpleasant; but try to chase every shadow of anxiety from your mind, and, unless the restraint be very disagreeable to you, permit me to add an earnest request that you will broach the subject to me no more. It is the undisguised and most harassing anxiety of others that has fixed in my mind thoughts and expectations which must canker wherever they take root; against which every effort of religion or philosophy must at times totally fail; and subjugation to which is a cruel terrible fate--the fate, indeed, of him whose life was passed under a sword suspended by a horse-hair. I have had to entreat Papa's consideration on this point. My nervous system is soon wrought on. I should wish to keep it in rational strength and coolness; but to do so I must determinedly resist the kindly-meant, but too irksome expression of an apprehension, for the realisation or defeat of which I have no possible power to be responsible. At present, I am pretty well. Thank God! Papa, I trust, is no worse, but he complains of weakness." CHAPTER VII. Her father was always anxious to procure every change that was possible for her, seeing, as he did, the benefit which she derived from it, however reluctant she might have been to leave her home and him beforehand. This August she was invited to go for a week to the neighbourhood of Bowness, where Sir James Kay Shuttleworth had taken a house; but she says, "I consented to go, with reluctance, chiefly to please Papa, whom a refusal on my part would much have annoyed; but I dislike to leave him. I trust he is not worse, but his complaint is still weakness. It is not right to anticipate evil, and to be always looking forward with an apprehensive spirit; but I think grief is a two-edged sword, it cuts both ways; the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another." It was during this visit at the Briery--Lady Kay Shuttleworth having kindly invited me to meet her there--that I first made acquaintance with Miss Brontë. If I copy out part of a letter, which I wrote soon after this to a friend, who was deeply interested in her writings, I shall probably convey my first impressions more truly and freshly than by amplifying what I then said into a longer description. "Dark when I got to Windermere station; a drive along the level road to Low-wood; then a stoppage at a pretty house, and then a pretty drawing-room, in which were Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth, and a little lady in a black-silk gown, whom I could not see at first for the dazzle in the room; she came up and shook hands with me at once. I went up to unbonnet, etc.; came down to tea; the little lady worked away and hardly spoke but I had time for a good look at her. She is (as she calls herself) UNDEVELOPED, thin, and more than half a head shorter than I am; soft brown hair, not very dark; eyes (very good and expressive, looking straight and open at you) of the same colour as her hair; a large mouth; the forehead square, broad and rather over-hanging. She has a very sweet voice; rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort admirable, and just befitting the occasion; there is nothing overstrained, but perfectly simple. . . . After breakfast, we four went out on the lake, and Miss Brontë agreed with me in liking Mr. Newman's Soul, and in liking Modern Painters, and the idea of the Seven Lamps; and she told me about Father Newman's lectures at the Oratory in a very quiet, concise, graphic way. . . . She is more like Miss ---- than any one in her ways--if you can fancy Miss ---- to have gone through suffering enough to have taken out every spark of merriment, and to be shy and silent from the habit of extreme, intense solitude. Such a life as Miss Brontë's I never heard of before. ---- described her home to me as in a village of grey stone houses, perched up on the north side of a bleak moor, looking over sweeps of bleak moors, etc., etc. "We were only three days together; the greater part of which was spent in driving about, in order to show Miss Brontë the Westmoreland scenery, as she had never been there before. We were both included in an invitation to drink tea quietly at Fox How; and I then saw how severely her nerves were taxed by the effort of going amongst strangers. We knew beforehand that the number of the party would not exceed twelve; but she suffered the whole day from an acute headache brought on by apprehension of the evening. "Brierly Close was situated high above Low-wood, and of course commanded an extensive view and wide horizon. I was struck by Miss Brontë's careful examination of the shape of the clouds and the signs of the heavens, in which she read, as from a book, what the coming weather would be. I told her that I saw she must have a view equal in extent at her own home. She said that I was right, but that the character of the prospect from Haworth was very different; that I had no idea what a companion the sky became to any one living in solitude,--more than any inanimate object on earth,--more than the moors themselves." The following extracts convey some of her own impressions and feelings respecting this visit:-- "You said I should stay longer than a week in Westmoreland; you ought by this time to know me better. Is it my habit to keep dawdling at a place long after the time I first fixed on for departing? I have got home, and I am thankful to say Papa seems,--to say the least,--no worse than when I left him, yet I wish he were stronger. My visit passed off very well; I am glad I went. The scenery is, of course, grand; could I have wandered about amongst those hills ALONE, I could have drank in all their beauty; even in a carriage with company, it was very well. Sir James was all the while as kind and friendly as he could be: he is in much better health. . . . Miss Martineau was from home; she always leaves her house at Ambleside during the Lake season, to avoid the influx of visitors to which she would otherwise be subject. "If I could only have dropped unseen out of the carriage, and gone away by myself in amongst those grand hills and sweet dales, I should have drank in the full power of this glorious scenery. In company this can hardly be. Sometimes, while ---- was warning me against the faults of the artist-class, all the while vagrant artist instincts were busy in the mind of his listener. "I forget to tell you that, about a week before I went to Westmoreland, there came an invitation to Harden Grange; which, of course, I declined. Two or three days after, a large party made their appearance here, consisting of Mrs. F---- and sundry other ladies and two gentlemen; one tall and stately, black haired and whiskered, who turned out to be Lord John Manners,--the other not so distinguished-looking, shy, and a little queer, who was Mr. Smythe, the son of Lord Strangford. I found Mrs. F. a true lady in manners and appearance, very gentle and unassuming. Lord John Manners brought in his hand a brace of grouse for Papa, which was a well-timed present: a day or two before Papa had been wishing for some." To these extracts I must add one other from a letter referring to this time. It is addressed to Miss Wooler, the kind friend of both her girlhood and womanhood, who had invited her to spend a fortnight with her at her cottage lodgings. "Haworth, Sept. 27th, 1850. "When I tell you that I have already been to the Lakes this season, and that it is scarcely more than a month since I returned, you will understand that it is no longer within my option to accept your kind invitation. I wish I could have gone to you. I have already had my excursion, and there is an end of it. Sir James Kay Shuttleworth is residing near Windermere, at a house called the 'Briery,' and it was there I was staying for a little time this August. He very kindly showed me the neighbourhood, as it can be seen from a carriage, and I discerned that the Lake country is a glorious region, of which I had only seen the similitude in dreams, waking or sleeping. Decidedly I find it does not agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage. A waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do; but the carriage upsets everything. I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control or rather suppress for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the 'lioness'--the authoress. "You say that you suspect I have formed a large circle of acquaintance by this time. No: I cannot say that I have. I doubt whether I possess either the wish or the power to do so. A few friends I should like to have, and these few I should like to know well; If such knowledge brought proportionate regard, I could not help concentrating my feelings; dissipation, I think, appears synonymous with dilution. However, I have, as yet, scarcely been tried. During the month I spent in London in the spring, I kept very quiet, having the fear of lionising before my eyes. I only went out once to dinner; and once was present at an evening party; and the only visits I have paid have been to Sir James Kay Shuttleworth's and my publisher's. From this system I should not like to depart; as far as I can see, Indiscriminate visiting tends only to a waste of time and a vulgarising of character. Besides, it would be wrong to leave Papa often; he is now in his seventy-fifth year, the infirmities of age begin to creep upon him; during the summer he has been much harassed by chronic bronchitis, but I am thankful to say that he is now somewhat better. I think my own health has derived benefit from change and exercise. "Somebody in D---- professes to have authority for saying, that 'when Miss Brontë was in London she neglected to attend Divine service on the Sabbath, and in the week spent her time in going about to balls, theatres, and operas.' On the other hand, the London quidnuncs make my seclusion a matter of wonder, and devise twenty romantic fictions to account for it. Formerly I used to listen to report with interest, and a certain credulity; but I am now grown deaf and sceptical: experience has taught me how absolutely devoid of foundation her stories may be." I must now quote from the first letter I had the privilege of receiving from Miss Brontë. It is dated August the 27th. "Papa and I have just had tea; he is sitting quietly in his room, and I in mine; 'storms of rain' are sweeping over the garden and churchyard: as to the moors, they are hidden in thick fog. Though alone, I am not unhappy; I have a thousand things to be thankful for, and, amongst the rest, that this morning I received a letter from you, and that this evening I have the privilege of answering it. "I do not know the 'Life of Sydney Taylor;' whenever I have the opportunity I will get it. The little French book you mention shall also take its place on the list of books to be procured as soon as possible. It treats a subject interesting to all women--perhaps, more especially to single women; though, indeed, mothers, like you, study it for the sake of their daughters. The Westminster Review is not a periodical I see regularly, but some time since I got hold of a number--for last January, I think--in which there was an article entitled 'Woman's Mission' (the phrase is hackneyed), containing a great deal that seemed to me just and sensible. Men begin to regard the position of woman in another light than they used to do; and a few men, whose sympathies are fine and whose sense of justice is strong, think and speak of it with a candour that commands my admiration. They say, however--and, to an extent, truly--that the amelioration of our condition depends on ourselves. Certainly there are evils which our own efforts will best reach; but as certainly there are other evils--deep-rooted in the foundation of the social system--which no efforts of ours can touch: of which we cannot complain; of which it is advisable not too often to think. "I have read Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' or rather part of it; I closed the book when I had got about half way. It is beautiful; it is mournful; it is monotonous. Many of the feelings expressed bear, in their utterance, the stamp of truth; yet, if Arthur Hallam had been somewhat nearer Alfred Tennyson, his brother instead of his friend,--I should have distrusted this rhymed, and measured, and printed monument of grief. What change the lapse of years may work I do not know; but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse. "I promised to send you Wordsworth's 'Prelude,' and, accordingly, despatch it by this post; the other little volume shall follow in a day or two. I shall be glad to hear from you whenever you have time to write to me, but you are never, on any account, to do this except when inclination prompts and leisure permits. I should never thank you for a letter which you had felt it a task to write." A short time after we had met at the Briery, she sent me the volume of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell's poems; and thus alludes to them in the note that accompanied the parcel:-- "The little book of rhymes was sent by way of fulfilling a rashly-made promise; and the promise was made to prevent you from throwing away four shillings in an injudicious purchase. I do not like my own share of the work, nor care that it should be read: Ellis Bell's I think good and vigorous, and Acton's have the merit of truth and simplicity. Mine are chiefly juvenile productions; the restless effervescence of a mind that would not be still. In those days, the sea too often 'wrought and was tempestuous,' and weed, sand, shingle--all turned up in the tumult. This image is much too magniloquent for the subject, but you will pardon it." Another letter of some interest was addressed, about this time, to a literary friend, on Sept. 5th:-- "The reappearance of the Athenaeum is very acceptable, not merely for its own sake,--though I esteem the opportunity of its perusal a privilege,--but because, as a weekly token of the remembrance of friends, it cheers and gives pleasure. I only fear that its regular transmission may become a task to you; in this case, discontinue it at once. "I did indeed enjoy my trip to Scotland, and yet I saw little of the face of the country; nothing of its grandeur or finer scenic features; but Edinburgh, Melrose, Abbotsford--these three in themselves sufficed to stir feelings of such deep interest and admiration, that neither at the time did I regret, nor have I since regretted, the want of wider space over which to diffuse the sense of enjoyment. There was room and variety enough to be very happy, and 'enough,' the proverb says, 'is as good as a feast.' The queen, indeed, was right to climb Arthur's Seat with her husband and children. I shall not soon forget how I felt when, having reached its summit, we all sat down and looked over the city--towards the sea and Leith, and the Pentland Hills. No doubt you are proud of being a native of Scotland,--proud of your country, her capital, her children, and her literature. You cannot be blamed. "The article in the Palladium is one of those notices over which an author rejoices trembling. He rejoices to find his work finely, fully, fervently appreciated, and trembles under the responsibility such appreciation seems to devolve upon him. I am counselled to wait and watch--D. V. I will do so; yet it is harder to wait with the hands bound, and the observant and reflective faculties at their silent and unseen work, than to labour mechanically. "I need not say how I felt the remarks on 'Wuthering Heights;' they woke the saddest yet most grateful feelings; they are true, they are discriminating, they are full of late justice, but it is very late--alas! in one sense, TOO late. Of this, however, and of the pang of regret for a light prematurely extinguished, it is not wise to speak much. Whoever the author of this article may be, I remain his debtor. "Yet, you see, even here, Shirley is disparaged in comparison with "Jane Eyre"; and yet I took great pains with Shirley. I did not hurry; I tried to do my best, and my own impression was that it was not inferior to the former work; indeed, I had bestowed on it more time, thought, and anxiety: but great part of it was written under the shadow of impending calamity; and the last volume, I cannot deny, was composed in the eager, restless endeavour to combat mental sufferings that were scarcely tolerable. "You sent the tragedy of 'Galileo Galilei,' by Samuel Brown, in one of the Cornhill parcels; it contained, I remember, passages of very great beauty. Whenever you send any more books (but that must not be till I return what I now have) I should be glad if you would include amongst them the 'Life of Dr. Arnold.' Do you know also the 'Life of Sydney Taylor?' I am not familiar even with the name, but it has been recommended to me as a work meriting perusal. Of course, when I name any book, it is always understood that it should be quite convenient to send it." CHAPTER VIII. It was thought desirable about this time, to republish "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey", the works of the two sisters, and Charlotte undertook the task of editing them. She wrote to Mr. Williams, September 29th, 1850, "It is my intention to write a few lines of remark on 'Wuthering Heights,' which, however, I propose to place apart as a brief preface before the tale. I am likewise compelling myself to read it over, for the first time of opening the book since my sister's death. Its power fills me with renewed admiration; but yet I am oppressed: the reader is scarcely ever permitted a taste of unalloyed pleasure; every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud; every page is surcharged with a sort of moral electricity; and the writer was unconscious of all this--nothing could make her conscious of it. "And this makes me reflect,--perhaps I am too incapable of perceiving the faults and peculiarities of my own style. "I should wish to revise the proofs, if it be not too great an inconvenience to send them. It seems to me advisable to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph's speeches; for though, as it stands, it exactly renders the Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear, yet, I am sure Southerns must find it unintelligible; and thus one of the most graphic characters in the book is lost on them. "I grieve to say that I possess no portrait of either of my sisters." To her own dear friend, as to one who had known and loved her sisters, she writes still more fully respecting the painfulness of her task. "There is nothing wrong, and I am writing you a line as you desire, merely to say that I AM busy just now. Mr. Smith wishes to reprint some of Emily's and Annie's works, with a few little additions from the papers they have left; and I have been closely engaged in revising, transcribing, preparing a preface, notice, etc. As the time for doing this is limited, I am obliged to be industrious. I found the task at first exquisitely painful and depressing; but regarding it in the light of a SACRED DUTY, I went on, and now can bear it better. It is work, however, that I cannot do in the evening, for if I did, I should have no sleep at night. Papa, I am thankful to say, is in improved health, and so, I think, am I; I trust you are the same. "I have just received a kind letter from Miss Martineau. She has got back to Ambleside, and had heard of my visit to the Lakes. She expressed her regret, etc., at not being at home. "I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the solitude and isolation of my lot. But my late occupation left a result for some days, and indeed still, very painful. The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrances brought back the pang of bereavement, and occasioned a depression of spirits well nigh intolerable. For one or two nights, I scarcely knew how to get on till morning; and when morning came, I was still haunted with a sense of sickening distress. I tell you these things, because it is absolutely necessary to me to have some relief. You will forgive me, and not trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say. It is quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now. I think so, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is at its worst. "I thought to find occupation and interest in writing, when alone at home, but hitherto my efforts have been vain; the deficiency of every stimulus is so complete. You will recommend me, I dare say, to go from home; but that does no good, even could I again leave Papa with an easy mind (thank God! he is better). I cannot describe what a time of it I had after my return from London, Scotland, etc. There was a reaction that sunk me to the earth; the deadly silence, solitude, desolation, were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessness of relief, were what I should dread to feel again. "Dear ----, when I think of you, it is with a compassion and tenderness that scarcely cheer me. Mentally, I fear, you also are too lonely and too little occupied. It seems our doom, for the present at least. May God in His mercy help us to bear it!" During her last visit to London, as mentioned in one of her letters, she had made the acquaintance of her correspondent, Mr. Lewes. That gentleman says:-- "Some months after" (the appearance of the review of "Shirley" in the Edinburgh), "Currer Bell came to London, and I was invited to meet her at your house. You may remember, she asked you not to point me out to her, but allow her to discover me if she could. She DID recognise me almost as soon as I came into the room. You tried me in the same way; I was less sagacious. However, I sat by her side a great part of the evening and was greatly interested by her conversation. On parting we shook hands, and she said, 'We are friends now, are we not?' 'Were we not always, then?' I asked. 'No! not always,' she said, significantly; and that was the only allusion she made to the offending article. I lent her some of Balzac's and George Sand's novels to take with her into the country; and the following letter was written when they were returned:"-- "I am sure you will have thought me very dilatory in returning the books you so kindly lent me. The fact is, having some other books to send, I retained yours to enclose them in the same parcel. "Accept my thanks for some hours of pleasant reading. Balzac was for me quite a new author; and in making big acquaintance, through the medium of 'Modeste Mignon,' and 'Illusions perdues,' you cannot doubt I have felt some interest. At first, I thought he was going to be painfully minute, and fearfully tedious; one grew impatient of his long parade of detail, his slow revelation of unimportant circumstances, as he assembled his personages on the stage; but by and bye I seemed to enter into the mystery of his craft, and to discover, with delight, where his force lay: is it not in the analysis of motive; and in a subtle perception of the most obscure and secret workings of the mind? Still, admire Balzac as we may, I think we do not like him; we rather feel towards him as towards an ungenial acquaintance who is for ever holding up in strong light our defects, and who rarely draws forth our better qualities. "Truly, I like George Sand better. "Fantastic, fanatical, unpractical enthusiast as she often is--far from truthful as are many of her views of life--misled, as she is apt to be, by her feelings--George Sand has a better nature than M. de Balzac; her brain is larger, her heart warmer than his. The 'Lettres d'un Voyageur' are full of the writer's self; and I never felt so strongly, as in the perusal of this work, that most of her very faults spring from the excess of her good qualities: it is this excess which has often hurried her into difficulty, which has prepared for her enduring regret. "But I believe her mind is of that order which disastrous experience teaches, without weakening or too much disheartening; and, in that case, the longer she lives the better she will grow. A hopeful point in all her writings is the scarcity of false French sentiment; I wish I could say its absence; but the weed flourishes here and there, even in the 'Lettres.'" I remember the good expression of disgust which Miss Brontë made use of in speaking to me of some of Balzac's novels: "They leave such a bad taste in my mouth." The reader will notice that most of the letters from which I now quote are devoted to critical and literary subjects. These were, indeed, her principal interests at this time; the revision of her sister's works, and writing a short memoir of them, was the painful employment of every day during the dreary autumn of 1850. Wearied out by the vividness of her sorrowful recollections, she sought relief in long walks on the moors. A friend of hers, who wrote to me on the appearance of the eloquent article in the Daily News upon the "Death of Currer Bell," gives an anecdote which may well come in here. "They are mistaken in saying she was too weak to roam the hills for the benefit of the air. I do not think any one, certainly not any woman, in this locality, went so much on the moors as she did, when the weather permitted. Indeed, she was so much in the habit of doing so, that people, who live quite away on the edge of the common, knew her perfectly well. I remember on one occasion an old woman saw her at a little distance, and she called out, 'How! Miss Brontë! Hey yah (have you) seen ought o' my cofe (calf)?' Miss Brontë told her she could not say, for she did not know it. 'Well!' she said, 'Yah know, it's getting up like nah (now), between a cah (cow) and a cofe--what we call a stirk, yah know, Miss Brontë; will yah turn it this way if yah happen to see't, as yah're going back, Miss Brontë; nah DO, Miss Brontë.'" It must have been about this time that a visit was paid to her by some neighbours, who were introduced to her by a mutual friend. This visit has been described in a letter from which I am permitted to give extracts, which will show the impression made upon strangers by the character of the country round her home, and other circumstances. "Though the weather was drizzly, we resolved to make our long-planned excursion to Haworth; so we packed ourselves into the buffalo-skin, and that into the gig, and set off about eleven. The rain ceased, and the day was just suited to the scenery,--wild and chill,--with great masses of cloud glooming over the moors, and here and there a ray of sunshine covertly stealing through, and resting with a dim magical light upon some high bleak village; or darting down into some deep glen, lighting up the tall chimney, or glistening on the windows and wet roof of the mill which lies couching in the bottom. The country got wilder and wilder as we approached Haworth; for the last four miles we were ascending a huge moor, at the very top of which lies the dreary black-looking village of Haworth. The village-street itself is one of the steepest hills I have ever seen, and the stones are so horribly jolting that I should have got out and walked with W----, if possible, but, having once begun the ascent, to stop was out of the question. At the top was the inn where we put up, close by the church; and the clergyman's house, we were told, was at the top of the churchyard. So through that we went,--a dreary, dreary place, literally PAVED with rain-blackened tombstones, and all on the slope, for at Haworth there is on the highest height a higher still, and Mr. Brontë's house stands considerably above the church. There was the house before us, a small oblong stone house, with not a tree to screen it from the cutting wind; but how were we to get at it from the churchyard we could not see! There was an old man in the churchyard, brooding like a Ghoul over the graves, with a sort of grim hilarity on his face. I thought he looked hardly human; however, he was human enough to tell us the way; and presently we found ourselves in the little bare parlour. Presently the door opened, and in came a superannuated mastiff, followed by an old gentleman very like Miss Brontë, who shook hands with us, and then went to call his daughter. A long interval, during which we coaxed the old dog, and looked at a picture of Miss Brontë, by Richmond, the solitary ornament of the room, looking strangely out of place on the bare walls, and at the books on the little shelves, most of them evidently the gift of the authors since Miss Brontë's celebrity. Presently she came in, and welcomed us very kindly, and took me upstairs to take off my bonnet, and herself brought me water and towels. The uncarpeted stone stairs and floors, the old drawers propped on wood, were all scrupulously clean and neat. When we went into the parlour again, we began talking very comfortably, when the door opened and Mr. Brontë looked in; seeing his daughter there, I suppose he thought it was all right, and he retreated to his study on the opposite side of the passage; presently emerging again to bring W---- a country newspaper. This was his last appearance till we went. Miss Brontë spoke with the greatest warmth of Miss Martineau, and of the good she had gained from her. Well! we talked about various things; the character of the people,--about her solitude, etc., till she left the room to help about dinner, I suppose, for she did not return for an age. The old dog had vanished; a fat curly-haired dog honoured us with his company for some time, but finally manifested a wish to get out, so we were left alone. At last she returned, followed by the maid and dinner, which made us all more comfortable; and we had some very pleasant conversation, in the midst of which time passed quicker than we supposed, for at last W---- found that it was half-past three, and we had fourteen or fifteen miles before us. So we hurried off, having obtained from her a promise to pay us a visit in the spring; and the old gentleman having issued once more from his study to say good-bye, we returned to the inn, and made the best of our way homewards. "Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own 'Jane Eyre.' She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly, and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her, barring that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was first built; and yet, perhaps, when that old man married, and took home his bride, and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate crowded grave-yard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope. Now there is something touching in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself like a spirit, especially when you think that the slight still frame encloses a force of strong fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or extinguish." In one of the preceding letters, Miss Brontë referred to am article in the Palladium, which had rendered what she considered the due meed of merit to "Wuthering Heights", her sister Emily's tale. Her own works were praised, and praised with discrimination, and she was grateful for this. But her warm heart was filled to the brim with kindly feelings towards him who had done justice to the dead. She anxiously sought out the name of the writer; and having discovered that it was Mr. Sydney Dobell he immediately became one of her "Peculiar people whom Death had made dear." She looked with interest upon everything he wrote; and before long we shall find that they corresponded. To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "Oct. 25th. "The box of books came last night, and, as usual, I have only gratefully to admire the selection made: 'Jeffrey's Essays,' 'Dr. Arnold's Life,' 'The Roman,' 'Alton Loche,' these were all wished for and welcome. "You say I keep no books; pardon me--I am ashamed of my own rapaciousness I have kept 'Macaulay's History,' and Wordsworth's 'Prelude', and Taylor's 'Philip Van Artevelde.' I soothe my conscience by saying that the two last,--being poetry--do not count. This is a convenient doctrine for me I meditate acting upon it with reference to the Roman, so I trust nobody in Cornhill will dispute its validity or affirm that 'poetry' has a value, except for trunk-makers. "I have already had 'Macaulay's Essays,' 'Sidney Smith's Lectures on Moral Philosophy,' and 'Knox on Race.' Pickering's work on the same subject I have not seen; nor all the volumes of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. However, I am now abundantly supplied for a long time to come. I liked Hazlitt's Essays much. "The autumn, as you say, has been very fine. I and solitude and memory have often profited by its sunshine on the moors. "I had felt some disappointment at the non-arrival of the proof-sheets of 'Wuthering Heights;' a feverish impatience to complete the revision is apt to beset me. The work of looking over papers, etc., could not be gone through with impunity, and with unaltered spirits; associations too tender, regrets too bitter, sprang out of it. Meantime, the Cornhill books now, as heretofore, are my best medicine,--affording a solace which could not be yielded by the very same books procured from a common library. "Already I have read the greatest part of the 'Roman;' passages in it possess a kindling virtue such as true poetry alone can boast; there are images of genuine grandeur; there are lines that at once stamp themselves on the memory. Can it be true that a new planet has risen on the heaven, whence all stars seemed fast fading? I believe it is; for this Sydney or Dobell speaks with a voice of his own, unborrowed, unmimicked. You hear Tennyson, indeed, sometimes, and Byron sometimes, in some passages of the Roman; but then again you have a new note,--nowhere clearer than in a certain brief lyric, sang in a meeting of minstrels, a sort of dirge over a dead brother;--THAT not only charmed the ear and brain, it soothed the heart." The following extract will be read with interest as conveying her thoughts after the perusal of Dr. Arnold's Life:-- "Nov. 6th. "I have just finished reading the 'Life of Dr. Arnold;' but now when I wish, according to your request, to express what I think of it, I do not find the task very easy; proper terms seem wanting. This is not a character to be dismissed with a few laudatory words; it is not a one-sided character; pure panegyric would be inappropriate. Dr. Arnold (it seems to me) was not quite saintly; his greatness was cast in a mortal mould; he was a little severe, almost a little hard; he was vehement and somewhat oppugnant. Himself the most indefatigable of workers, I know not whether he could have understood, or made allowance for, a temperament that required more rest; yet not to one man in twenty thousand is given his giant faculty of labour; by virtue of it he seems to me the greatest of working men. Exacting he might have been, then, on this point; and granting that he were so, and a little hasty, stern, and positive, those were his sole faults (if, indeed, that can be called a fault which in no shape degrades the individual's own character; but is only apt to oppress and overstrain the weaker nature of his neighbours). Afterwards come his good qualities. About these there is nothing dubious. Where can we find justice, firmness, independence, earnestness, sincerity, fuller and purer than in him? "But this is not all, and I am glad of it. Besides high intellect and stainless rectitude, his letters and his life attest his possession of the most true-hearted affection. WITHOUT this, however one might admire, we could not love him; but WITH it I think we love him much. A hundred such men--fifty--nay, ten or five such righteous men might save any country; might victoriously champion any cause. "I was struck, too, by the almost unbroken happiness of his life; a happiness resulting chiefly, no doubt, from the right use to which he put that health and strength which God had given him, but also owing partly to a singular exemption from those deep and bitter griefs which most human beings are called on to endure. His wife was what he wished; his children were healthy and promising; his own health was excellent; his undertakings were crowned with success; even death was kind,--for, however sharp the pains of his last hour, they were but brief. God's blessing seems to have accompanied him from the cradle to the grave. One feels thankful to know that it has been permitted to any man to live such a life. "When I was in Westmoreland last August, I spent an evening at Fox How, where Mrs. Arnold and her daughters still reside. It was twilight as I drove to the place, and almost dark ere I reached it; still I could perceive that the situation was lovely. The house looked like a nest half buried in flowers and creepers: and, dusk as it was, I could FEEL that the valley and the hills round were beautiful as imagination could dream." If I say again what I have said already before, it is only to impress and re-impress upon my readers the dreary monotony of her life at this time. The dark, bleak season of the year brought back the long evenings, which tried her severely: all the more so, because her weak eyesight rendered her incapable of following any occupation but knitting by candle-light. For her father's sake, as well as for her own, she found it necessary to make some exertion to ward off settled depression of spirits. She accordingly accepted an invitation to spend a week or ten days with Miss Martineau at Ambleside. She also proposed to come to Manchester and see me, on her way to Westmoreland. But, unfortunately, I was from home, and unable to receive her. The friends with whom I was staying in the South of England (hearing me express my regret that I could not accept her friendly proposal, and aware of the sad state of health and spirits which made some change necessary for her) wrote to desire that she would come and spend a week or two with me at their house. She acknowledged this invitation in a letter to me, dated-- "Dec. 13th, 1850. "My dear Mrs. Gaskell,--Miss ----'s kindness and yours is such that I am placed in the dilemma of not knowing how adequately to express my sense of it. THIS I know, however, very well-that if I COULD go and be with you for a week or two in such a quiet south-country house, and with such kind people as you describe, I should like it much. I find the proposal marvellously to my taste; it is the pleasantest, gentlest, sweetest, temptation possible; but, delectable as it is, its solicitations are by no means to be yielded to without the sanction of reason, and therefore I desire for the present to be silent, and to stand back till I have been to Miss Martineau's, and returned home, and considered well whether it is a scheme as right as agreeable. "Meantime, the mere thought does me good." On the 10th of December, the second edition of "Wuthering Heights" was published. She sent a copy of it to Mr. Dobell, with the following letter:-- To MR. DOBELL. "Haworth, near Keighley, Yorkshire, "Dec. 8th, 1850. "I offer this little book to my critic in the 'Palladium,' and he must believe it accompanied by a tribute of the sincerest gratitude; not so much for anything he has said of myself, as for the noble justice he has rendered to one dear to me as myself--perhaps dearer; and perhaps one kind word spoken for her awakens a deeper, tenderer, sentiment of thankfulness than eulogies heaped on my own head. As you will see when you have read the biographical notice, my sister cannot thank you herself; she is gone out of your sphere and mine, and human blame and praise are nothing to her now. But to me, for her sake, they are something still; it revived me for many a day to find that, dead as she was, the work of her genius had at last met with worthy appreciation. "Tell me, when you have read the introduction, whether any doubts still linger in your mind respecting the authorship of 'Wuthering Heights,' 'Wildfell Hall,' etc. Your mistrust did me some injustice; it proved a general conception of character such as I should be sorry to call mine; but these false ideas will naturally arise when we only judge an author from his works. In fairness, I must also disclaim the flattering side of the portrait. I am no 'young Penthesilea mediis in millibus,' but a plain country parson's daughter. "Once more I thank you, and that with a full heart. "C. BRONTË." CHAPTER IX. Immediately after the republication of her sisters' book she went to Miss Martineau's. "I can write to you now, dear E----, for I am away from home) and relieved, temporarily, at least, by change of air and scene, from the heavy burden of depression which, I confess, has for nearly three months been sinking me to the earth. I never shall forget last autumn! Some days and nights have been cruel; but now, having once told you this, I need say no more on the subject. My loathing of solitude grew extreme; my recollection of my sisters intolerably poignant. I am better now. I am at Miss Martineau's for a week. Her house is very pleasant, both within and without; arranged at; all points with admirable neatness and comfort. Her visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them. I rise at my own hour, breakfast alone (she is up at five, takes a cold bath, and a walk by starlight, and has finished breakfast and got to her work by seven o'clock). I pass the morning in the drawing-room--she, in her study. At two o'clock we meet--work, talk, and walk together till five, her dinner-hour, spend the evening together, when she converses fluently and abundantly, and with the most complete frankness. I go to my own room soon after ten,--she sits up writing letters till twelve. She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labour. She is a great and a good woman; of course not without peculiarities, but I have seen none as yet that annoy me. She is both hard and warm-hearted, abrupt and affectionate, liberal and despotic. I believe she is not at all conscious of her own absolutism. When I tell her of it, she denies the charge warmly; then I laugh at her. I believe she almost rules Ambleside. Some of the gentry dislike her, but the lower orders have a great regard for her. . . . I thought I should like to spend two or three days with you before going home, so, if it is not inconvenient to you, I will (D. V.) come on Monday and stay till Thursday. . . . I have truly enjoyed my visit here. I have seen a good many people, and all have been so marvellously kind; not the least so, the family of Dr. Arnold. Miss Martineau I relish inexpressibly." Miss Brontë paid the visit she here proposes to her friend, but only remained two or three days. She then returned home, and immediately began to suffer from her old enemy, sickly and depressing headache. This was all the more trying to bear, as she was obliged to take an active share in the household work,--one servant being ill in bed, and the other, Tabby, aged upwards of eighty. This visit to Ambleside did Miss Brontë much good, and gave her a stock of pleasant recollections, and fresh interests, to dwell upon in her solitary life. There are many references in her letters to Miss Martineau's character and kindness. "She is certainly a woman of wonderful endowments, both intellectual and physical; and though I share few of her opinions, and regard her as fallible on certain points of judgment, I must still award her my sincerest esteem. The manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration; while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude." "I think her good and noble qualities far outweigh her defects. It is my habit to consider the individual apart from his (or her) reputation, practice independent of theory, natural disposition isolated from acquired opinions. Harriet Martineau's person, practice, and character, inspire me with the truest affection and respect."You ask me whether Miss Martineau made me a convert to mesmerism? Scarcely; yet I heard miracles of its efficacy, and could hardly discredit the whole of what was told me. I even underwent a personal experiment; and though the result was not absolutely clear, it was inferred that in time I should prove an excellent subject. The question of mesmerism will be discussed with little reserve, I believe, in a forthcoming work of Miss Martineau's; and I have some painful anticipations of the manner in which other subjects, offering less legitimate ground for speculation, will be handled." "Your last letter evinced such a sincere and discriminating admiration for Dr. Arnold, that perhaps you will not be wholly uninterested in hearing that, during my late visit to Miss Martineau, I saw much more of Fox How and its inmates, and daily admired, in the widow and children of one of the greatest and best men of his time, the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing. Of my kind hostess herself, I cannot speak in terms too high. Without being able to share all her opinions, philosophical, political, or religious,--without adopting her theories,--I yet find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency, benevolence, perseverance in her practice, such as wins the sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. She seems to me the benefactress of Ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. The government of her household is admirably administered: all she does is well done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest female occupation. No sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under her rule, and yet she is not over-strict, nor too rigidly exacting: her servants and her poor neighbours love as well as respect her. "I must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much about her merely because my own mind is just now deeply impressed with what I have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth. Faults she has; but to me they appear very trivial weighed in the balance against her excellences." "Your account of Mr. A---- tallies exactly with Miss M----'s. She, too, said that placidity and mildness (rather than originality and power) were his external characteristics. She described him as a combination of the antique Greek sage with the European modern man of science. Perhaps it was mere perversity in me to get the notion that torpid veins, and a cold, slow-beating heart, lay under his marble outside. But he is a materialist: he serenely denies us our hope of immortality, and quietly blots from man's future Heaven and the Life to come. That is why a savour of bitterness seasoned my feeling towards him. "All you say of Mr. Thackeray is most graphic and characteristic. He stirs in me both sorrow and anger. Why should he lead so harassing a life? Why should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the better feelings of his better moods?" For some time, whenever she was well enough in health and spirits, she had been employing herself upon Villette; but she was frequently unable to write, and was both grieved and angry with herself for her inability. In February, she writes as follows to Mr. Smith:-- "Something you say about going to London; but the words are dreamy, and fortunately I am not obliged to hear or answer them. London and summer are many months away: our moors are all white with snow just now, and little redbreasts come every morning to the window for crumbs. One can lay no plans three or four months beforehand. Besides, I don't deserve to go to London; nobody merits a change or a treat less. I secretly think, on the contrary, I ought to be put in prison, and kept on bread and water in solitary confinement--without even a letter from Cornhill--till I had written a book. One of two things would certainly result from such a mode of treatment pursued for twelve months; either I should come out at the end of that time with a three-volume MS. in my hand, or else with a condition of intellect that would exempt me ever after from literary efforts and expectations." Meanwhile, she was disturbed and distressed by the publication of Miss Martineau's "Letters," etc.; they came down with a peculiar force and heaviness upon a heart that looked, with fond and earnest faith, to a future life as to the meeting-place with those who were "loved and lost awhile." "Feb. 11th, 1851. "My dear Sir,--Have you yet read Miss Martineau's and Mr. Atkinson's new work, 'Letters on the Nature and Development of Man'? If you have not, it would be worth your while to do so. "Of the impression this book has made on me, I will not now say much. It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read; the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life I have ever seen. In judging of such exposition and declaration, one would wish entirely to put aside the sort of instinctive horror they awaken, and to consider them in an impartial spirit and collected mood. This I find it difficult to do. The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank--to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain--to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who COULD do this if he would? Who WOULD do it if he could? "Sincerely, for my own part, do I wish to find and know the Truth; but if this be Truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries, and cover herself with a veil. If this be Truth, man or woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born. I said, however, I would not dwell on what I thought; I wish to hear, rather, what some other person thinks,--some one whose feelings are unapt to bias his judgment. Read the book, then, in an unprejudiced spirit, and candidly say what you think of it. I mean, of course, if you have time--NOT OTHERWISE." And yet she could not bear the contemptuous tone in which this work was spoken of by many critics; it made her more indignant than almost any other circumstance during my acquaintance with her. Much as she regretted the publication of the book, she could not see that it had given any one a right to sneer at an action, certainly prompted by no worldly motive, and which was but one error--the gravity of which she admitted--in the conduct of a person who had, all her life long, been striving, by deep thought and noble words, to serve her kind. "Your remarks on Miss Martineau and her book pleased me greatly, from their tone and spirit. I have even taken the liberty of transcribing for her benefit one or two phrases, because I know they will cheer her; she likes sympathy and appreciation (as all people do who deserve them); and most fully do I agree with you in the dislike you express of that hard, contemptuous tone in which her work is spoken of by many critics." Before I return from the literary opinions of the author to the domestic interests of the woman, I must copy out what she felt and thought about "The Stones of Venice". "'The Stones of Venice' seem nobly laid and chiselled. How grandly the quarry of vast marbles is disclosed! Mr. Ruskin seems to me one of the few genuine writers, as distinguished from book-makers, of this age. His earnestness even amuses me in certain passages; for I cannot help laughing to think how utilitarians will fume and fret over his deep, serious (and as THEY will think), fanatical reverence for Art. That pure and severe mind you ascribed to him speaks in every line. He writes like a consecrated Priest of the Abstract and Ideal. "I shall bring with me 'The Stones of Venice'; all the foundations of marble and of granite, together with the mighty quarry out of which they were hewn; and, into the bargain, a small assortment of crotchets and dicta--the private property of one John Ruskin, Esq." As spring drew on, the depression of spirits to which she was subject began to grasp her again, and "to crush her with a day- and night-mare." She became afraid of sinking as low as she had done in the autumn; and to avoid this, she prevailed on her old friend and schoolfellow to come and stay with her for a few weeks in March. She found great benefit from this companionship,--both from the congenial society in itself, and from the self-restraint of thought imposed by the necessity of entertaining her and looking after her comfort. On this occasion, Miss Brontë said, "It will not do to get into the habit offrom home, and thus temporarily evading an running away oppression instead of facing, wrestling with and conquering it or being conquered by it." I shall now make an extract from one of her letters, which is purposely displaced as to time. I quote it because it relates to a third offer of marriage which she had, and because I find that some are apt to imagine, from the extraordinary power with which she represented the passion of love in her novels, that she herself was easily susceptible of it. "Could I ever feel enough for ----, to accept of him as a husband? Friendship--gratitude--esteem--I have; but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently towards him, it is only close by that I grow rigid, stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger, which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner. I did not want to be proud, nor intend to be proud, but I was forced to be so. Most true it is, that we are over-ruled by One above us; that in His hands our very will is as clay in the hands of the potter." I have now named all the offers of marriage she ever received, until that was made which she finally accepted. The gentle-man referred to in this letter retained so much regard for her as to be her friend to the end of her life; a circumstance to his credit and to hers. Before her friend E---- took her departure, Mr. Brontë caught cold, and continued for some weeks much out of health, with an attack of bronchitis. His spirits, too, became much depressed; and all his daughter's efforts were directed towards cheering him. When he grew better, and had regained his previous strength, she resolved to avail herself of an invitation which she had received some time before, to pay a visit in London. This year, 1851, was, as every one remembers, the time of the great Exhibition; but even with that attraction in prospect, she did not intend to stay there long; and, as usual, she made an agreement with her friends, before finally accepting their offered hospitality, that her sojourn at their house was to be as quiet as ever, since any other way of proceeding disagreed with her both mentally and physically. She never looked excited except for a moment, when something in conversation called her out; but she often felt so, even about comparative trifles, and the exhaustion of reaction was sure to follow. Under such circumstances, she always became extremely thin and haggard; yet she averred that the change invariably did her good afterwards. Her preparations in the way of dress for this visit, in the gay time of that gay season, were singularly in accordance with her feminine taste; quietly anxious to satisfy her love for modest, dainty, neat attire, and not regardless of the becoming, yet remembering consistency, both with her general appearance and with her means, in every selection she made. "By the bye, I meant to ask you when you went to Leeds, to do a small errand for me, but fear your hands will be too full of business. It was merely this: in case you chanced to be in any shop where the lace cloaks, both black and white, of which I spoke, were sold, to ask their price. I suppose they would hardly like to send a few to Haworth to be looked at; indeed, if they cost very much, it would be useless, but if they are reasonable and they would send them, I should like to see them; and also some chemisettes of small size (the full woman's size don't fit me), both of simple style for every day and good quality for best.". . . ."It appears I could not rest satisfied when I was well off. I told you I had taken one of the black lace mantles, but when I came to try it with the black satin dress, with which I should chiefly want to wear it, I found the effect was far from good; the beauty of the lace was lost, and it looked somewhat brown and rusty; I wrote to Mr. ----, requesting him to change it for a WHITE mantle of the same price; he was extremely courteous, and sent to London for one, which I have got this morning. The price is less, being but 1 pound 14s.; it is pretty, neat and light, looks well on black; and upon reasoning the matter over, I came to the philosophic conclusion, that it would be no shame for a person of my means to wear a cheaper thing; so I think I shall take it, and if you ever see it and call it 'trumpery' so much the worse." "Do you know that I was in Leeds on the very same day with you--last Wednesday? I had thought of telling you where I was going, and having your help and company in buying a bonnet, etc., but then I reflected this would merely be making a selfish use of you, so I determined to manage or mismanage the matter alone. I went to Hurst and Hall's for the bonnet, and got one which seemed grave and quiet there amongst all the splendours; but now it looks infinitely too gay with its pink lining. I saw some beautiful silks of pale sweet colours, but had not the spirit nor the means to launch out at the rate of five shillings per yard, and went and bought a black silk at three shillings after all. I rather regret this, because papa says he would have lent me a sovereign if he had known. I believe, if you had been there, you would have forced me to get into debt. . . . I really can no more come to B---- before I go to London than I can fly. I have quantities of sewing to do, as well as household matters to arrange, before I leave, as they will clean, etc., in my absence. Besides, I am grievously afflicted with headache, which I trust to change of air for relieving; but meantime, as it proceeds from the stomach, it makes me very thin and grey; neither you nor anybody else would fatten me up or put me into good condition for the visit; it is fated otherwise. No matter. Calm your passion; yet I am glad to see it. Such spirit seems to prove health. Good-bye, in haste. "Your poor mother is like Tabby, Martha and Papa; all these fancy I am somehow, by some mysterious process, to be married in London, or to engage myself to matrimony. How I smile internally! How groundless and improbable is the idea! Papa seriously told me yesterday, that if I married and left him he should give up housekeeping and go into lodgings!" I copy the following, for the sake of the few words describing the appearance of the heathery moors in late summer. TO SYDNEY DOBELL, ESQ. "May 24th, 1851. "My dear Sir,--I hasten to send Mrs. Dobell the autograph. It was the word 'Album' that frightened me I thought she wished me to write a sonnet on purpose for it, which I could not do. "Your proposal respecting a journey to Switzerland is deeply kind; it draws me with the force of a mighty Temptation, but the stern Impossible holds me back. No! I cannot go to Switzerland this summer. "Why did the editor of the 'Eclectic' erase that most powerful and pictorial passage? He could not be insensible to its beauty; perhaps he thought it profane. Poor man! "I know nothing of such an orchard-country as you describe. I have never seen such a region. Our hills only confess the coming of summer by growing green with young fern and moss, in secret little hollows. Their bloom is reserved for autumn; then they burn with a kind of dark glow, different, doubtless, from the blush of garden blossoms. About the close of next month, I expect to go to London, to pay a brief and quiet visit. I fear chance will not be so propitious as to bring you to town while I am there; otherwise, how glad I should be if you would call. With kind regards to Mrs. Dobell,--Believe me, sincerely yours, C. BRONTË." Her next letter is dated from London. "June 2nd. "I came here on Wednesday, being summoned a day sooner than I expected, in order to be in time for Thackeray's second lecture, which was delivered on Thursday afternoon. This, as you may suppose, was a genuine treat to me, and I was glad not to miss it. It was given in Willis' Rooms, where the Almacks balls are held--a great painted and gilded saloon with long sofas for benches. The audience was said to be the cream of London society, and it looked so. I did not at all expect the great lecturer would know me or notice me under these circumstances, with admiring duchesses and countesses seated in rows before him; but he met me as I entered--shook hands--took me to his mother, whom I had not before seen, and introduced me. She is a fine, handsome, young-looking old lady; was very gracious, and called with one of her grand-daughters next day. "Thackeray called too, separately. I had a long talk with him, and I think he knows me now a little better than he did: but of this I cannot yet be sure; he is a great and strange man. There is quite a furor for his lectures. They are a sort of essays, characterised by his own peculiar originality and power, and delivered with a finished taste and ease, which is felt, but cannot be described. Just before the lecture began, somebody came behind me, leaned over and said, 'Permit me, as a Yorkshireman, to introduce myself.' I turned round--saw a strange, not handsome, face, which puzzled me for half a minute, and then I said, 'You are Lord Carlisle.' He nodded and smiled; he talked a few minutes very pleasantly and courteously. "Afterwards came another man with the same plea, that he was a Yorkshireman, and this turned out to be Mr. Monckton Milnes. Then came Dr. Forbes, whom I was sincerely glad to see. On Friday, I went to the Crystal Palace; it is a marvellous, stirring, bewildering sight--a mixture of a genii palace, and a mighty bazaar, but it is not much in my way; I liked the lecture better. On Saturday I saw the Exhibition at Somerset House; about half a dozen of the pictures are good and interesting, the rest of little worth. Sunday--yesterday--was a day to be marked with a white stone; through most of the day I was very happy, without being tired or over-excited. In the afternoon, I went to hear D'Aubigne, the great Protestant French preacher; it was pleasant--half sweet, half sad--and strangely suggestive to hear the French language once more. For health, I have so far got on very fairly, considering that I came here far from well." The lady, who accompanied Miss Brontë to the lecture at Thackeray's alluded to, says that, soon after they had taken their places, she was aware that he was pointing out her companion to several of his friends, but she hoped that Miss Brontë herself would not perceive it. After some time, however, during which many heads had been turned round, and many glasses put up, in order to look at the author of "Jane Eyre", Miss Brontë said, "I am afraid Mr. Thackeray has been playing me a trick;" but she soon became too much absorbed in the lecture to notice the attention which was being paid to her, except when it was directly offered, as in the case of Lord Carlisle and Mr. Monckton Milnes. When the lecture was ended, Mr. Thackeray came down from the platform, and making his way towards her, asked her for her opinion. This she mentioned to me not many days afterwards, adding remarks almost identical with those which I subsequently read in 'Villette,' where a similar action on the part of M. Paul Emanuel is related. "As our party left the Hall, he stood at the entrance; he saw and knew me, and lifted his hat; he offered his hand in passing, and uttered the words 'Qu'en dites-vous?'--question eminently characteristic, and reminding me, even in this his moment of triumph, of that inquisitive restlessness, that absence of what I considered desirable self-control, which were amongst his faults. He should not have cared just then to ask what I thought, or what anybody thought; but he DID care, and he was too natural to conceal, too impulsive to repress his wish. Well! if I blamed his over-eagerness, I liked his naivete. I would have praised him; I had plenty of praise in my heart; but alas I no words on my lips. Who HAS words at the right moment? I stammered some lame expressions; but was truly glad when other people, coming up with profuse congratulations, covered my deficiency by their redundancy." As they were preparing to leave the room, her companion saw with dismay that many of the audience were forming themselves into two lines, on each side of the aisle down which they had to pass before reaching the door. Aware that any delay would only make the ordeal more trying, her friend took Miss Brontë's arm in hers, and they went along the avenue of eager and admiring faces. During this passage through the "cream of society," Miss Brontë's hand trembled to such a degree, that her companion feared lest she should turn faint and be unable to proceed; and she dared not express her sympathy or try to give her strength by any touch or word, lest it might bring on the crisis she dreaded. Surely, such thoughtless manifestation of curiosity is a blot on the scutcheon of true politeness! The rest of the account of this, her longest visit to London, shall be told in her own words. "I sit down to write to you this morning in an inexpressibly flat state; having spent the whole of yesterday and the day before in a gradually increasing headache, which grew at last rampant and violent, ended with excessive sickness, and this morning I am quite weak and washy. I hoped to leave my headaches behind me at Haworth; but it seems I brought them carefully packed in my trunk, and very much have they been in my way since I came. . . . Since I wrote last, I have seen various things worth describing; Rachel, the great French actress, amongst the number. But to-day I really have no pith for the task. I can only wish you good-bye with all my heart." "I cannot boast that London has agreed with me well this time; the oppression of frequent headache, sickness, and a low tone of spirits, has poisoned many moments which might otherwise have been pleasant. Sometimes I have felt this hard, and been tempted to murmur at Fate, which compels me to comparative silence and solitude for eleven months in the year, and in the twelfth, while offering social enjoyment, takes away the vigour and cheerfulness which should turn it to account. But circumstances are ordered for us, and we must submit." "Your letter would have been answered yesterday, but I was already gone out before post time, and was out all day. People are very kind, and perhaps I shall be glad of what I have seen afterwards, but it is often a little trying at the time. On Thursday, the Marquis of Westminster asked me to a great party, to which I was to go with Mrs. D----, a beautiful, and, I think, a kind woman too; but this I resolutely declined. On Friday I dined at the ----'s, and met Mrs. D---- and Mr. Monckton Milnes. On Saturday I went to hear and see Rachel; a wonderful sight--terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet, and revealed a glimpse of hell. I shall never forget it. She made me shudder to the marrow of my bones; in her some fiend has certainly taken up an incarnate home. She is not a woman; she is a snake; she is the ----. On Sunday I went to the Spanish Ambassador's Chapel, where Cardinal Wiseman, in his archiepiscopal robes and mitre, held a confirmation. The whole scene was impiously theatrical. Yesterday (Monday) I was sent for at ten to breakfast with Mr. Rogers, the patriarch-poet. Mrs. D---- and Lord Glenelg were there; no one else:this certainly proved a most calm, refined, and intellectual treat. After breakfast, Sir David Brewster came to take us to the Crystal Palace. I had rather dreaded this, for Sir David is a man of profoundest science, and I feared it would be impossible to understand his explanations of the mechanism, etc.; indeed, I hardly knew how to ask him questions. I was spared all trouble without being questioned, he gave information in the kindest and simplest manner. After two hours spent at the Exhibition, and where, as you may suppose, I was VERY tired, we had to go to Lord Westminster's, and spend two hours more in looking at the collection of pictures in his splendid gallery." To another friend she writes:-- "----may have told you that I have spent a month in London this summer. When you come, you shall ask what questions you like on that point, and I will answer to the best of my stammering ability. Do not press me much on the subject of the 'Crystal Palace.' I went there five times, and certainly saw some interesting things, and the 'coup d'oeil' is striking and bewildering enough; but I never was able to get any raptures on the subject, and each renewed visit was made under coercion rather than my own free will. It is an excessively bustling place; and, after all, its wonders appeal too exclusively to the eye, and rarely touch the heart or head. I make an exception to the last assertion, in favour of those who possess a large range of scientific knowledge. Once I went with Sir David Brewster, and perceived that he looked on objects with other eyes than mine." Miss Brontë returned from London by Manchester, and paid us a visit of a couple of days at the end of June. The weather was so intensely hot, and she herself so much fatigued with her London sight-seeing, that we did little but sit in-doors, with open windows, and talk. The only thing she made a point of exerting herself to procure was a present for Tabby. It was to be a shawl, or rather a large handkerchief, such as she could pin across her neck and shoulders, in the old-fashioned country manner. Miss Brontë took great pains in seeking out one which she thought would please the old woman. On her arrival at home, she addressed the following letter to the friend with whom she had been staying in London:-- "Haworth, July 1st, 1851. "My dear Mrs. Smith,--Once more I am at home, where, I am thankful to say, I found my father very well. The journey to Manchester was a little hot and dusty, but otherwise pleasant enough. The two stout gentlemen, who filled a portion of the carriage when I got in, quitted it at Rugby, and two other ladies and myself had it to ourselves the rest of the way. The visit to Mrs. Gaskell formed a cheering break in the journey. Haworth Parsonage is rather a contrast, yet even Haworth Parsonage does not look gloomy in this bright summer weather; it is somewhat still, but with the windows open I can hear a bird or two singing on certain thorn-trees in the garden. My father and the servants think me looking better than when I felt home, and I certainly feel better myself for the change. You are too much like your son to render it advisable I should say much about your kindness during my visit. However, one cannot help (like Captain Cuttle) making a note of these matters. Papa says I am to thank you in his name, and offer you his respects, which I do accordingly.--With truest regards to all your circle, believe me very sincerely yours, C. BRONTË." "July 8th, 1851. "My dear Sir,--Thackeray's last lecture must, I think, have been his best. What he says about Sterne is true. His observations on literary men, and their social obligations and individual duties, seem to me also true and full of mental and moral vigour. . . . The International Copyright Meeting seems to have had but a barren result, judging from the report in the Literary Gazette. I cannot see that Sir E. Bulwer and the rest DID anything; nor can I well see what it is in their power to do. The argument brought forward about the damage accruing to American national literature from the present piratical system, is a good and sound argument; but I am afraid the publishers--honest men--are not yet mentally prepared to give such reasoning due weight. I should think, that which refers to the injury inflicted upon themselves, by an oppressive competition in piracy, would influence them more; but, I suppose, all established matters, be they good or evil, are difficult to change. About the 'Phrenological Character' I must not say a word. Of your own accord, you have found the safest point from which to view it: I will not say 'look higher!' I think you see the matter as it is desirable we should all see what relates to ourselves. If I had a right to whisper a word of counsel, it should be merely this: whatever your present self may be, resolve with all your strength of resolution, never to degenerate thence. Be jealous of a shadow of falling off. Determine rather to look above that standard, and to strive beyond it. Everybody appreciates certain social properties, and likes his neighbour for possessing them; but perhaps few dwell upon a friend's capacity for the intellectual, or care how this might expand, if there were but facilities allowed for cultivation, and space given for growth. It seems to me that, even should such space and facilities be denied by stringent circumstances and a rigid fate, still it should do you good fully to know, and tenaciously to remember, that you have such a capacity. When other people overwhelm you with acquired knowledge, such as you have not had opportunity, perhaps not application, to gain--derive not pride, but support from the thought. If no new books had ever been written, some of these minds would themselves have remained blank pages: they only take an impression; they were not born with a record of thought on the brain, or an instinct of sensation on the heart. If I had never seen a printed volume, Nature would have offered my perceptions a varying picture of a continuous narrative, which, without any other teacher than herself, would have schooled me to knowledge, unsophisticated, but genuine. "Before I received your last, I had made up my mind to tell you that I should expect no letter for three months to come (intending afterwards to extend this abstinence to six months, for I am jealous of becoming dependent on this indulgence: you doubtless cannot see why, because you do not live my life). Nor shall I now expect a letter; but since you say that you would like to write now and then, I cannot say 'never write,' without imposing on my real wishes a falsehood which they reject, and doing to them a violence, to which they entirely refuse to submit. I can only observe that when it pleases you to write, whether seriously or for a little amusement, your notes, if they come to me, will come where they are welcome. Tell----I will try to cultivate good spirits, as assiduously as she cultivates her geraniums." CHAPTER X. Soon after she returned home, her friend paid her a visit. While she stayed at Haworth, Miss Brontë wrote the letter from which the following extract is taken. The strong sense and right feeling displayed in it on the subject of friendship, sufficiently account for the constancy of affection which Miss Brontë earned from all those who once became her friends. To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "July 21th, 1851. ". . . I could not help wondering whether Cornhill will ever change for me, as Oxford has changed for you. I have some pleasant associations connected with it now--will these alter their character some day? "Perhaps they may--though I have faith to the contrary, because, I THINK, I do not exaggerate my partialities; I THINK I take faults along with excellences--blemishes together with beauties. And, besides, in the matter of friendship, I have observed that disappointment here arises chiefly, NOT from liking our friends too well, or thinking of them too highly, but rather from an over-estimate of THEIR liking for and opinion of US; and that if we guard ourselves with sufficient scrupulousness of care from error in this direction, and can be content, and even happy to give more affection than we receive--can make just comparison of circumstances, and be severely accurate in drawing inferences thence, and never let self-love blind our eyes--I think we may manage to get through life with consistency and constancy, unembittered by that misanthropy which springs from revulsions of feeling. All this sounds a little metaphysical, but it is good sense if you consider it. The moral of it is, that if we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for THEIR sakes rather than for OUR OWN; we must look at their truth to THEMSELVES, full as much as their truth to US. In the latter case, every wound to self-love would be a cause of coldness; in the former, only some painful change in the friend's character and disposition--some fearful breach in his allegiance to his better self--could alienate the heart. "How interesting your old maiden-cousin's gossip about your parents must have been to you; and how gratifying to find that the reminiscence turned on none but pleasant facts and characteristics! Life must, indeed, be slow in that little decaying hamlet amongst the chalk hills. After all, depend upon it, it is better to be worn out with work in a thronged community, than to perish of inaction in a stagnant solitude: take this truth into consideration whenever you get tired of work and bustle." I received a letter from her a little later than this; and though there is reference throughout to what I must have said in writing to her, all that it called forth in reply is so peculiarly characteristic, that I cannot prevail upon myself to pass it over without a few extracts:-- "Haworth, Aug. 6th, 1851. "My dear Mrs. Gaskell,--I was too much pleased with your letter, when I got it at last, to feel disposed to murmur now about the delay. "About a fortnight ago, I received a letter from Miss Martineau; also a long letter, and treating precisely the same subjects on which yours dwelt, viz., the Exhibition and Thackeray's last lecture. It was interesting mentally to place the two documents side by side--to study the two aspects of mind--to view, alternately, the same scene through two mediums. Full striking was the difference; and the more striking because it was not the rough contrast of good and evil, but the more subtle opposition, the more delicate diversity of different kinds of good. The excellences of one nature resembled (I thought) that of some sovereign medicine--harsh, perhaps, to the taste, but potent to invigorate; the good of the other seemed more akin to the nourishing efficacy of our daily bread. It is not bitter; it is not lusciously sweet: it pleases, without flattering the palate; it sustains, without forcing the strength. "I very much agree with you in all you say. For the sake of variety, I could almost wish that the concord of opinion were less complete. "To begin with Trafalgar Square. My taste goes with yours and Meta's completely on this point. I have always thought it a fine site (and SIGHT also). The view from the summit of those steps has ever struck me as grand and imposing--Nelson Column included the fountains I could dispense with. With respect, also, to the Crystal Palace, my thoughts are precisely yours. "Then I feel sure you speak justly of Thackeray's lecture. You do well to set aside odious comparisons, and to wax impatient of that trite twaddle about 'nothing newness'--a jargon which simply proves, in those who habitually use it, a coarse and feeble faculty of appreciation; an inability to discern the relative value of ORIGINALITY and NOVELTY; a lack of that refined perception which, dispensing with the stimulus of an ever-new subject, can derive sufficiency of pleasure from freshness of treatment. To such critics, the prime of a summer morning would bring no delight; wholly occupied with railing at their cook for not having provided a novel and piquant breakfast-dish, they would remain insensible to such influences as lie in sunrise, dew, and breeze: therein would be 'nothing new.' "Is it Mr. ----'s family experience which has influenced your feelings about the Catholics? I own, I cannot be sorry for this commencing change. Good people--VERY good people--I doubt not, there are amongst the Romanists, but the system is not one which would have such sympathy as YOURS. Look at Popery taking off the mask in Naples! "I have read the 'Saints' Tragedy.' As a 'work of art' it seems to me far superior to either 'Alton Locke' or 'Yeast.' Faulty it may be, crude and unequal, yet there are portions where some of the deep chords of human nature are swept with a hand which is strong even while it falters. We see throughout (I THINK) that Elizabeth has not, and never had, a mind perfectly sane. From the time that she was what she herself, in the exaggeration of her humility, calls 'an idiot girl,' to the hour when she lay moaning in visions on her dying bed, a slight craze runs through her whole existence. This is good: this is true. A sound mind, a healthy intellect, would have dashed the priest-power to the wall; would have defended her natural affections from his grasp, as a lioness defends her young; would have been as true to husband and children, as your leal-hearted little Maggie was to her Frank. Only a mind weak with some fatal flaw COULD have been influenced as was this poor saint's. But what anguish what struggles! Seldom do I cry over books; but here, my eyes rained as I read. When Elizabeth turns her face to the wall--I stopped--there needed no more. "Deep truths are touched on in this tragedy--touched on, not fully elicited; truths that stir a peculiar pity--a compassion hot with wrath, and bitter with pain. This is no poet's dream: we know that such things HAVE been done; that minds HAVE been thus subjugated, and lives thus laid waste. "Remember me kindly and respectfully to Mr. Gaskell, and though I have not seen Marianne, I must beg to include her in the love I send the others. Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear, but dangerous little person, Julia? She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing, ever since I saw her.--Believe me, sincerely and affectionately yours, C. BRONTË." The reference which she makes at the end of this letter is to my youngest little girl, between whom and her a strong mutual attraction existed. The child would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently unobserved caress. Yet once when I told Julia to take and show her the way to some room in the house, Miss Brontë shrunk back: "Do not BID her do anything for me," she said; "it has been so sweet hitherto to have her rendering her little kindnesses SPONTANEOUSLY." As illustrating her feelings with regard to children, I may give what she says ill another of her letters to me. "Whenever I see Florence and Julia again, I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a stranger;--and to what children am I not a stranger? They seem to me little wonders; their talk, their ways are all matter of half-admiring, half-puzzled speculation." The following is part of a long letter which I received from her, dated September 20th, 1851:-- ". . . Beautiful are those sentences out of James Martineau's sermons; some of them gems most pure and genuine; ideas deeply conceived, finely expressed. I should like much to see his review of his sister's book. Of all the articles respecting which you question me, I have seen none, except that notable one in the 'Westminster' on the Emancipation of Women. But why are you and I to think (perhaps I should rather say to FEEL) so exactly alike on some points that there can be no discussion between us? Your words on this paper express my thoughts. Well-argued it is,--clear, logical,--but vast is the hiatus of omission; harsh the consequent jar on every finer chord of the soul. What is this hiatus? I think I know; and, knowing, I will venture to say. I think the writer forgets there is such a thing as self-sacrificing love and disinterested devotion. When I first read the paper, I thought it was the work of a powerful-minded, clear-headed woman, who had a hard, jealous heart, muscles of iron, and nerves of bend[*] leather; of a woman who longed for power, and had never felt affection. To many women affection is sweet, and power conquered indifferent--though we all like influence won. I believe J. S. Mill would make a hard, dry, dismal world of it; and yet he speaks admirable sense through a great portion of his article--especially when he says, that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men's employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try; those who ought to succeed will succeed, or, at least, will have a fair chance--the incapable will fall back into their right place. He likewise disposes of the 'maternity' question very neatly. In short, J. S. Mill's head is, I dare say, very good, but I feel disposed to scorn his heart. You are right when you say that there is a large margin in human nature over which the logicians have no dominion; glad am I that it is so. [*] "Bend," in Yorkshire, is strong ox leather. "I send by this post Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice,' and I hope you and Meta will find passages in it that will please you. Some parts would be dry and technical were it not for the character, the marked individuality which pervades every page. I wish Marianne had come to speak to me at the lecture; it would have given me such pleasure. What you say of that small sprite Julia, amuses me much. I believe you don't know that she has a great deal of her mama's nature (modified) in her; yet I think you will find she has as she grows up. "Will it not be a great mistake, if Mr. Thackeray should deliver his lectures at Manchester under such circumstances and conditions as will exclude people like you and Mr. Gaskell from the number of his audience? I thought his London-plan too narrow. Charles Dickens would not thus limit his sphere of action. "You charge me to write about myself. What can I say on that precious topic? My health is pretty good. My spirits are not always alike. Nothing happens to me. I hope and expect little in this world, and am thankful that I do not despond and suffer more. Thank you for inquiring after our old servant; she is pretty well; the little shawl, etc., pleased her much. Papa likewise, I am glad to say, is pretty well; with his and my kindest regards to you and Mr. Gaskell--Believe me sincerely and affectionately yours, C. BRONTË." Before the autumn was far advanced, the usual effects of her solitary life, and of the unhealthy situation of Haworth Parsonage, began to appear in the form of sick headaches, and miserable, starting, wakeful nights. She does not dwell on this in her letters; but there is an absence of all cheerfulness of tone, and an occasional sentence forced out of her, which imply far more than many words could say. There was illness all through the Parsonage household--taking its accustomed forms of lingering influenza and low fever; she herself was outwardly the strongest of the family, and all domestic exertion fell for a time upon her shoulders. TO W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "Sept. 26th. "As I laid down your letter, after reading with interest the graphic account it gives of a very striking scene, I could not help feeling with renewed force a truth, trite enough, yet ever impressive; viz., that it is good to be attracted out of ourselves--to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others. If we ourselves live in fulness of content, it is well to be reminded that thousands of our fellow-creatures undergo a different lot; it is well to have sleepy sympathies excited, and lethargic selfishness shaken up. If, on the other hand, we be contending with the special grief,--the intimate trial,--the peculiar bitterness with which God has seen fit to mingle our own cup of existence,--it is very good to know that our overcast lot is not singular; it stills the repining word and thought,--it rouses the flagging strength, to have it vividly set before us that there are countless afflictions in the world, each perhaps rivalling--some surpassing--the private pain over which we are too prone exclusively to sorrow. "All those crowded emigrants had their troubles,--their untoward causes of banishment; you, the looker-on, had 'your wishes and regrets,'--your anxieties, alloying your home happiness and domestic bliss; and the parallel might be pursued further, and still it would be true,--still the same; a thorn in the flesh for each; some burden, some conflict for all. "How far this state of things is susceptible of amelioration from changes in public institutions,--alterations in national habits,--may and ought to be earnestly considered: but this is a problem not easily solved. The evils, as you point them out, are great, real, and most obvious; the remedy is obscure and vague; yet for such difficulties as spring from over-competition, emigration must be good; the new life in a new country must give a new lease of hope; the wider field, less thickly peopled, must open a new path for endeavour. But I always think great physical powers of exertion and endurance ought to accompany such a step. . . . I am truly glad to hear that an ORIGINAL writer has fallen in your way. Originality is the pearl of great price in literature,--the rarest, the most precious claim by which an author can be recommended. Are not your publishing prospects for the coming season tolerably rich and satisfactory? You inquire after 'Currer Bell.' It seems to me that the absence of his name from your list of announcements will leave no blank, and that he may at least spare himself the disquietude of thinking he is wanted when it is certainly not his lot to appear. "Perhaps Currer Bell has his secret moan about these matters; but if so, he will keep it to himself. It is an affair about which no words need be wasted, for no words can make a change: it is between him and his position, his faculties and his fate." My husband and I were anxious that she should pay us a visit before the winter had set completely in; and she thus wrote, declining our invitation:-- "Nov. 6th. "If anybody would tempt me from home, you would; but, just now, from home I must not, will not go. I feel greatly better at present than I did three weeks ago. For a month or six weeks about the equinox (autumnal or vernal) is a period of the year which, I have noticed, strangely tries me. Sometimes the strain falls on the mental, sometimes on the physical part of me; I am ill with neuralgic headache, or I am ground to the dust with deep dejection of spirits (not, however, such dejection but I can keep it to myself). That weary time has, I think and trust, got over for this year. It was the anniversary of my poor brother's death, and of my sister's failing health: I need say no more. "As to running away from home every time I have a battle of this sort to fight, it would not do besides, the 'weird' would follow. As to shaking it off, that cannot be. I have declined to go to Mrs. ----, to Miss Martineau, and now I decline to go to you. But listen do not think that I throw your kindness away; or that it fails of doing the good you desire. On the contrary, the feeling expressed in your letter,--proved by your invitation--goes RIGHT HOME where you would have it to go, and heals as you would have it to heal. "Your description of Frederika Bremer tallies exactly with one I read somewhere, in I know not what book. I laughed out when I got to the mention of Frederika's special accomplishment, given by you with a distinct simplicity that, to my taste, is what the French would call 'impayable.' Where do you find the foreigner who is without some little drawback of this description? It is a pity." A visit from Miss Wooler at this period did Miss Brontë much good for the time. She speaks of her guest's company as being very pleasant,"like good wine," both to her father and to herself. But Miss Wooler could not remain with her long; and then again the monotony of her life returned upon her in all its force; the only events of her days and weeks consisting in the small changes which occasional letters brought. It must be remembered that her health was often such as to prevent her stirring out of the house in inclement or wintry weather. She was liable to sore throat, and depressing pain at the chest, and difficulty of breathing, on the least exposure to cold. A letter from her late visitor touched and gratified her much; it was simply expressive of gratitude for attention and kindness shown to her, but it wound up by saying that she had not for many years experienced so much enjoyment as during the ten days passed at Haworth. This little sentence called out a wholesome sensation of modest pleasure in Miss Brontë's mind; and she says, "it did me good." I find, in a letter to a distant friend, written about this time, a retrospect of her visit to London. It is too ample to be considered as a mere repetition of what she had said before; and, besides, it shows that her first impressions of what she saw and heard were not crude and transitory, but stood the tests of time and after-thought. "I spent a few weeks in town last summer, as you have heard; and was much interested by many things I heard and saw there. What now chiefly dwells in my memory are Mr. Thackeray's lectures, Mademoiselle Rachel's acting, D'Aubigne's, Melville's, and Maurice's preaching, and the Crystal Palace. "Mr. Thackeray's lectures you will have seen mentioned and commented on in the papers; they were very interesting. I could not always coincide with the sentiments expressed, or the opinions broached; but I admired the gentlemanlike ease, the quiet humour, the taste, the talent, the simplicity, and the originality of the lecturer. "Rachel's acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest, and thrilled me with horror. The tremendous force with which she expresses the very worst passions in their strongest essence forms an exhibition as exciting as the bull fights of Spain, and the gladiatorial combats of old Rome, and (it seemed to me) not one whit more moral than these poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity. It is scarcely human nature that she shows you; it is something wilder and worse; the feelings and fury of a fiend. The great gift of genius she undoubtedly has; but, I fear, she rather abuses it than turns it to good account. "With all the three preachers I was greatly pleased. Melville seemed to me the most eloquent, Maurice the most in earnest; had I the choice, it is Maurice whose ministry I should frequent. "On the Crystal Palace I need not comment. You must already have heard too much of it. It struck me at the first with only a vague sort of wonder and admiration; but having one day the privilege of going over it in company with an eminent countryman of yours, Sir David Brewster, and hearing, in his friendly Scotch accent, his lucid explanation of many things that had been to me before a sealed book, I began a little better to comprehend it, or at least a small part of it: whether its final results will equal expectation, I know not." Her increasing indisposition subdued her at last, in spite of all her efforts of reason and will. She tried to forget oppressive recollections in writing. Her publishers were importunate for a new book from her pen. "Villette" was begun, but she lacked power to continue it. "It is not at all likely" (she says) "that my book will be ready at the time you mention. If my health is spared, I shall get on with it as fast as is consistent with its being done, if not WELL, yet as well as I can do it. NOT ONE WHIT FASTER. When the mood leaves me (it has left me now, without vouchsafing so much as a word or a message when it will return) I put by the MS. and wait till it comes back again. God knows, I sometimes have to wait long--VERY long it seems to me. Meantime, if I might make a request to you, it would be this. Please to say nothing about my book till it is written, and in your hands. You may not like it. I am not myself elated with it as far as it is gone, and authors, you need not be told, are always tenderly indulgent, even blindly partial to their own. Even if it should turn out reasonably well, still I regard it as ruin to the prosperity of an ephemeral book like a novel, to be much talked of beforehand, as if it were something great. People are apt to conceive, or at least to profess, exaggerated expectation, such as no performance can realise; then ensue disappointment and the due revenge, detraction, and failure. If when I write, I were to think of the critics who, I know, are waiting for Currer Bell, ready 'to break all his bones or ever he comes to the bottom of the den,' my hand would fall paralysed on my desk. However, I can but do my best, and then muffle my head in the mantle of Patience, and sit down at her feet and wait." The "mood" here spoken of did not go off; it had a physical origin. Indigestion, nausea, headache, sleeplessness,--all combined to produce miserable depression of spirits. A little event which occurred about this time, did not tend to cheer her. It was the death of poor old faithful Keeper, Emily's dog. He had come to the Parsonage in the fierce strength of his youth. Sullen and ferocious he had met with his master in the indomitable Emily. Like most dogs of his kind, he feared, respected, and deeply loved her who subdued him. He had mourned her with the pathetic fidelity of his nature, falling into old age after her death. And now, her surviving sister wrote: "Poor old Keeper died last Monday morning, after being ill one night; he went gently to sleep; we laid his old faithful head in the garden. Flossy (the 'fat curly-haired dog') is dull, and misses him. There was something very sad in losing the old dog; yet I am glad he met a natural fate. People kept hinting he ought to be put away, which neither papa nor I liked to think of." When Miss Brontë wrote this, on December 8th, she was suffering from a bad cold, and pain in her side. Her illness increased, and on December 17th, she--so patient, silent, and enduring of suffering--so afraid of any unselfish taxing of others--had to call to her friend for help: "I cannot at present go to see you, but I would be grateful if you could come and see me, even were it only for a few days. To speak truth, I have put on but a poor time of it during this month past. I kept hoping to be better, but was at last obliged to have recourse to a medical man. Sometimes I have felt very weak and low, and longed much for society, but could not persuade myself to commit the selfish act of asking you merely for my own relief. The doctor speaks encouragingly, but as yet I get no better. As the illness has been coming on for a long time, it cannot, I suppose, be expected to disappear all at once. I am not confined to bed, but I am weak,--have had no appetite for about three weeks--and my nights are very bad. I am well aware myself that extreme and continuous depression of spirits has had much to do with the origin of the illness; and I know a little cheerful society would do me more good than gallons of medicine. If you CAN come, come on Friday. Write to-morrow and say whether this be possible, and what time you will be at Keighley, that I may send the gig. I do not ask you to stay long; a few days is all I request." Of course, her friend went; and a certain amount of benefit was derived from her society, always so grateful to Miss Brontë. But the evil was now too deep-rooted to be more than palliated for a time by "the little cheerful society" for which she so touchingly besought. A relapse came on before long. She was very ill, and the remedies employed took an unusual effect on her peculiar sensitiveness of constitution. Mr. Brontë was miserably anxious about the state of his only remaining child, for she was reduced to the last degree of weakness, as she had been unable to swallow food for above a week before. She rallied, and derived her sole sustenance from half-a-tea-cup of liquid, administered by tea-spoonfuls, in the course of the day. Yet she kept out of bed, for her father's sake, and struggled in solitary patience through her worst hours. When she was recovering, her spirits needed support, and then she yielded to her friend's entreaty that she would visit her. All the time that Miss Brontë's illness had lasted, Miss ---- had been desirous of coming to her; but she refused to avail herself of this kindness, saying, that "it was enough to burden herself; that it would be misery to annoy another;" and, even at her worst time, she tells her friend, with humorous glee, how coolly she had managed to capture one of Miss ----'s letters to Mr. Brontë, which she suspected was of a kind to aggravate his alarm about his daughter's state, "and at once conjecturing its tenor, made its contents her own." Happily for all parties, Mr. Brontë was wonderfully well this winter; good sleep, good spirits, and an excellent steady appetite, all seemed to mark vigour; and in such a state of health, Charlotte could leave him to spend a week with her friend, without any great anxiety. She benefited greatly by the kind attentions and cheerful society of the family with whom she went to stay. They did not care for her in the least as "Currer Bell," but had known and loved her for years as Charlotte Brontë. To them her invalid weakness was only a fresh claim upon their tender regard, from the solitary woman, whom they had first known as a little, motherless school-girl. Miss Brontë wrote to me about this time, and told me something of what she had suffered. "Feb. 6th, 1852. "Certainly, the past winter has been to me a strange time; had I the prospect before me of living it over again, my prayer must necessarily be, 'Let this cup pass from me.' That depression of spirits, which I thought was gone by when I wrote last, came back again with a heavy recoil; internal congestion ensued, and then inflammation. I had severe pain in my right side, frequent burning and aching in my chest; sleep almost forsook me, or would never come, except accompanied by ghastly dreams; appetite vanished, and slow fever was my continual companion. It was some time before I could bring myself to have recourse to medical advice. I thought my lungs were affected, and could feel no confidence in the power of medicine. When, at last, however, a doctor was consulted, he declared my lungs and chest sound, and ascribed all my sufferings to derangement of the liver, on which organ it seems the inflammation had fallen. This information was a great relief to my dear father, as well as to myself; but I had subsequently rather sharp medical discipline to undergo, and was much reduced. Though not yet well, it is with deep thankfulness that I can say, I am GREATLY BETTER. My sleep, appetite, and strength seem all returning." It was a great interest to her to be allowed an early reading of Esmond; and she expressed her thoughts on the subject, in a criticising letter to Mr. Smith, who had given her this privilege. "Feb. 14th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--It has been a great delight to me to read Mr. Thackeray's work; and I so seldom now express my sense of kindness that, for once, you must permit me, without rebuke, to thank you for a pleasure so rare and special. Yet I am not going to praise either Mr. Thackeray or his book. I have read, enjoyed, been interested, and, after all, feel full as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and admiration. And still one can never lay down a book of his without the last two feelings having their part, be the subject or treatment what it may. In the first half of the book, what chiefly struck me was the wonderful manner in which the writer throws himself into the spirit and letters of the times whereof he treats; the allusions, the illustrations, the style, all seem to me so masterly in their exact keeping, their harmonious consistency, their nice, natural truth, their pure exemption from exaggeration. No second-rate imitator can write in that way; no coarse scene-painter can charm us with an allusion so delicate and perfect. But what bitter satire, what relentless dissection of diseased subjects! Well, and this, too, is right, or would be right, if the savage surgeon did not seem so fiercely pleased with his work. Thackeray likes to dissect an ulcer or an aneurism; he has pleasure in putting his cruel knife or probe into quivering, living flesh. Thackeray would not like all the world to be good; no great satirist would like society to be perfect. "As usual, he is unjust to women; quite unjust. There is hardly any punishment he does not deserve for making Lady Castlewood peep through a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid. Many other things I noticed that, for my part, grieved and exasperated me as I read; but then, again, came passages so true, so deeply thought, so tenderly felt, one could not help forgiving and admiring. * * * * * But I wish he could be told not to care much for dwelling on the political or religious intrigues of the times. Thackeray, in his heart, does not value political or religious intrigues of any age or date. He likes to show us human nature at home, as he himself daily sees it; his wonderful observant faculty likes to be in action. In him this faculty is a sort of captain and leader; and if ever any passage in his writings lacks interest, it is when this master-faculty is for a time thrust into a subordinate position. I think such is the case in the former half of the present volume. Towards the middle, he throws off restraint, becomes himself, and is strong to the close. Everything now depends on the second and third volumes. If, in pith and interest, they fall short of the first, a true success cannot ensue. If the continuation be an improvement upon the commencement, if the stream gather force as it rolls, Thackeray will triumph. Some people have been in the habit of terming him the second writer of the day; it just depends on himself whether or not these critics shall be justified in their award. He need not be the second. God made him second to no man. If I were he, I would show myself as I am, not as critics report me; at any rate, I would do my best. Mr. Thackeray is easy and indolent, and seldom cares to do his best. Thank you once more; and believe me yours sincerely, C. BRONTË." Miss Brontë's health continued such, that she could not apply herself to writing as she wished, for many weeks after the serious attack from which she had suffered. There was not very much to cheer her in the few events that touched her interests during this time. She heard in March of the death of a friend's relation in the Colonies; and we see something of what was the corroding dread at her heart. "The news of E----'s death came to me last week in a letter from M ----; a long letter, which wrung my heart so, in its simple, strong, truthful emotion, I have only ventured to read it once. It ripped up half-scarred wounds with terrible force. The death-bed was just the same,--breath failing, etc. She fears she shall now, in her dreary solitude, become a 'stern, harsh, selfish woman.' This fear struck home; again and again have I felt it for myself, and what is MY position to M----'s? May God help her, as God only can help!" Again and again, her friend urged her to leave home; nor were various invitations wanting to enable her to do this, when these constitutional accesses of low spirits preyed too much upon her in her solitude. But she would not allow herself any such indulgence, unless it became absolutely necessary from the state of her health. She dreaded the perpetual recourse to such stimulants as change of scene and society, because of the reaction that was sure to follow. As far as she could see, her life was ordained to be lonely, and she must subdue her nature to her life, and, if possible, bring the two into harmony. When she could employ herself in fiction, all was comparatively well. The characters were her companions in the quiet hours, which she spent utterly alone, unable often to stir out of doors for many days together. The interests of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her own life; and Memory and Imagination found their appropriate work, and ceased to prey upon her vitals. But too frequently she could not write, could not see her people, nor hear them speak; a great mist of head-ache had blotted them out; they were non-existent to her. This was the case all through the present spring; and anxious as her publishers were for its completion, Villette stood still. Even her letters to her friend are scarce and brief. Here and there I find a sentence in them which can be extracted, and which is worth preserving. "M----'s letter is very interesting; it shows a mind one cannot but truly admire. Compare its serene trusting strength, with poor ----'s vacillating dependence. When the latter was in her first burst of happiness, I never remember the feeling finding vent in expressions of gratitude to God. There was always a continued claim upon your sympathy in the mistrust and doubt she felt of her own bliss. M---- believes; her faith is grateful and at peace; yet while happy in herself, how thoughtful she is for others!" "March 23rd, 1852. "You say, dear E----, that you often wish I would chat on paper, as you do. How can I? Where are my materials? Is my life fertile in subjects of chat? What callers do I see? What visits do I pay? No, you must chat, and I must listen, and say 'Yes,' and 'No,' and 'Thank you!' for five minutes' recreation. * * * * * "I am amused at the interest you take in politics. Don't expect to rouse me; to me, all ministries and all oppositions seem to be pretty much alike. D'Israeli was factious as leader of the Opposition; Lord John Russell is going to be factious, now that he has stepped into D'Israeli's shoes. Lord Derby's 'Christian love and spirit,' is worth three half-pence farthing." To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "March 25th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--Mr. Smith intimated a short time since, that he had some thoughts of publishing a reprint of Shirley. Having revised the work, I now enclose the errata. I have likewise sent off to-day, per rail, a return-box of Cornhill books. "I have lately read with great pleasure, 'The Two Families.' This work, it seems, should have reached me in January; but owing to a mistake, it was detained at the Dead Letter Office, and lay there nearly two months. I liked the commencement very much; the close seemed to me scarcely equal to 'Rose Douglas.' I thought the authoress committed a mistake in shifting the main interest from the two personages on whom it first rests--viz., Ben Wilson and Mary--to other characters of quite inferior conception. Had she made Ben and Mary her hero and heroine, and continued the development of their fortunes and characters in the same truthful natural vein in which she commences it, an excellent, even an original, book might have been the result. As for Lilias and Ronald, they are mere romantic figments, with nothing of the genuine Scottish peasant about them; they do not even speak the Caledonian dialect; they palaver like a fine lady and gentleman. "I ought long since to have acknowledged the gratification with which I read Miss Kavanagh's 'Women of Christianity.' Her charity and (on the whole) her impartiality are very beautiful. She touches, indeed, with too gentle a hand the theme of Elizabeth of Hungary; and, in her own mind, she evidently misconstrues the fact of Protestant charities SEEMING to be fewer than Catholic. She forgets, or does not know, that Protestantism is a quieter creed than Romanism; as it does not clothe its priesthood in scarlet, so neither does it set up its good women for saints, canonise their names, and proclaim their good works. In the records of man, their almsgiving will not perhaps be found registered, but Heaven has its account as well as earth. "With kind regards to yourself and family, who, I trust, have all safely weathered the rough winter lately past, as well as the east winds, which are still nipping our spring in Yorkshire,--I am, my dear Sir, yours sincerely, C. BRONTË." "April 3rd, 1852. "My dear Sir,--The box arrived quite safely, and I very much thank you for the contents, which are most kindly selected. "As you wished me to say what I thought of 'The School for Fathers,' I hastened to read it. The book seems to me clever, interesting, very amusing, and likely to please generally. There is a merit in the choice of ground, which is not yet too hackneyed; the comparative freshness of subject, character, and epoch give the tale a certain attractiveness. There is also, I think, a graphic rendering of situations, and a lively talent for describing whatever is visible and tangible--what the eye meets on the surface of things. The humour appears to me such as would answer well on the stage; most of the scenes seem to demand dramatic accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dilettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, 'Jack' is not much better than a 'Tony Lumpkin,' and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he IS and the fop his father would have made him. The grossly material life of the old English fox-hunter, and the frivolous existence of the fine gentleman present extremes, each in its way so repugnant, that one feels half inclined to smile when called upon to sentimentalise over the lot of a youth forced to pass from one to the other; torn from the stables, to be ushered perhaps into the ball-room. Jack dies mournfully indeed, and you are sorry for the poor fellow's untimely end; but you cannot forget that, if he had not been thrust into the way of Colonel Penruddock's weapon, he might possibly have broken his neck in a fox-hunt. The character of Sir Thomas Warren is excellent; consistent throughout. That of Mr. Addison not bad, but sketchy, a mere outline--wanting colour and finish. The man's portrait is there, and his costume, and fragmentary anecdotes of his life; but where is the man's nature--soul and self? I say nothing about the female characters--not one word; only that Lydia seems to me like a pretty little actress, prettily dressed gracefully appearing and disappearing, and reappearing in a genteel comedy, assuming the proper sentiments of her part with all due tact and naivete, and--that is all. "Your description of the model man of business is true enough, I doubt not; but we will not fear that society will ever be brought quite to this standard; human nature (bad as it is) has, after all, elements that forbid it. But the very tendency to such a consummation--the marked tendency, I fear, of the day--produces, no doubt, cruel suffering. Yet, when the evil of competition passes a certain limit, must it not in time work its own cure? I suppose it will, but then through some convulsed crisis, shattering all around it like an earthquake. Meantime, for how many is life made a struggle; enjoyment and rest curtailed; labour terribly enhanced beyond almost what nature can bear I often think that this world would be the most terrible of enigmas, were it not for the firm belief that there is a world to come, where conscientious effort and patient pain will meet their reward.--Believe me, my dear Sir, sincerely yours, C. BRONTË." A letter to her old Brussels schoolfellow gives a short retrospect of the dreary winter she had passed through. "Haworth, April 12th, 1852. ". . . I struggled through the winter, and the early part of the spring, often with great difficulty. My friend stayed with me a few days in the early part of January; she could not be spared longer. I was better during her visit, but had a relapse soon after she left me, which reduced my strength very much. It cannot be denied that the solitude of my position fearfully aggravated its other evils. Some long stormy days and nights there were, when I felt such a craving for support and companionship as I cannot express. Sleepless, I lay awake night after night, weak and unable to occupy myself. I sat in my chair day after day, the saddest memories my only company. It was a time I shall never forget; but God sent it, and it must have been for the best. "I am better now; and very grateful do I feel for the restoration of tolerable health; but, as if there was always to be some affliction, papa, who enjoyed wonderful health during the whole winter, is ailing with his spring attack of bronchitis. I earnestly trust it may pass over in the comparatively ameliorated form in which it has hitherto shown itself. "Let me not forget to answer your question about the cataract. Tell your papa that MY father was seventy at the time he underwent an operation; he was most reluctant to try the experiment; could not believe that, at his age, and with his want of robust strength, it would succeed. I was obliged to be very decided in the matter, and to act entirely on my own responsibility. Nearly six years have now elapsed since the cataract was extracted (it was not merely depressed); he has never once during that time regretted the step, and a day seldom passes that he does not express gratitude and pleasure at the restoration of that inestimable privilege of vision whose loss he once knew." I had given Miss Brontë; in one of my letters, an outline of the story on which I was then engaged, and in reply she says:-- "The sketch you give of your work (respecting which I am, of course, dumb) seems to me very noble; and its purpose may be as useful in practical result as it is high and just in theoretical tendency. Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both; and open a clear course for honourable effort to some who deemed that they and all honour had parted company in this world. "Yet--hear my protest! "Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping? "My heart fails me already at the thought of the pang it will have to undergo. And yet you must follow the impulse of your own inspiration. If THAT commands the slaying of the victim, no bystander has a right to put out his hand to stay the sacrificial knife: but I hold you a stern priestess in these matters." As the milder weather came on, her health improved, and her power of writing increased. She set herself with redoubled vigour to the work before her; and denied herself pleasure for the purpose of steady labour. Hence she writes to her friend:-- "May 11th. "Dear E----, --I must adhere to my resolution of neither visiting nor being visited at present. Stay you quietly at B., till you go to S., as I shall stay at Haworth; as sincere a farewell can be taken with the heart as with the lips, and perhaps less painful. I am glad the weather is changed; the return of the south-west wind suits me; but I hope you have no cause to regret the departure of your favourite east wind. What you say about ---- does not surprise me; I have had many little notes (whereof I answer about one in three) breathing the same spirit,--self and child the sole all-absorbing topics, on which the changes are rung even to weariness. But I suppose one must not heed it, or think the case singular. Nor, I am afraid, must one expect her to improve. I read in a French book lately, a sentence to this effect, that 'marriage might be defined as the state of two-fold selfishness.' Let the single therefore take comfort. Thank you for Mary's letter. She DOES seem most happy; and I cannot tell you how much more real, lasting, and better-warranted her happiness seems than ever ----'s did. I think so much of it is in herself, and her own serene, pure, trusting, religious nature. ----'s always gives me the idea of a vacillating, unsteady rapture, entirely dependent on circumstances with all their fluctuations. If Mary lives to be a mother, you will then see a greater difference. "I wish you, dear E., all health and enjoyment in your visit; and, as far as one can judge at present, there seems a fair prospect of the wish being realised.--Yours sincerely, "C. BRONTË." CHAPTER XI. The reader will remember that Anne Brontë had been interred in the churchyard of the Old Church at Scarborough. Charlotte had left directions for a tombstone to be placed over her; but many a time during the solitude of the past winter, her sad, anxious thoughts had revisited the scene of that last great sorrow, and she had wondered whether all decent services had been rendered to the memory of the dead, until at last she came to a silent resolution to go and see for herself whether the stone and inscription were in a satisfactory state of preservation. "Cliffe House, Filey, June 6th, 1852. "Dear E----, --I am at Filey utterly alone. Do not be angry, the step is right. I considered it, and resolved on it with due deliberation. Change of air was necessary; there were reasons why I should NOT go to the south, and why I should come here. On Friday I went to Scarborough, visited the churchyard and stone. It must be refaced and relettered; there are five errors. I gave the necessary directions. THAT duty, then, is done; long has it lain heavy on my mind; and that was a pilgrimage I felt I could only make alone. "I am in our old lodgings at Mrs. Smith's; not, however, in the same rooms, but in less expensive apartments. They seemed glad to see me, remembered you and me very well, and, seemingly, with great good will. The daughter who used to wait on us is just married. Filey seems to me much altered; more lodging-houses--some of them very handsome--have been built; the sea has all its old grandeur. I walk on the sands a good deal, and try NOT to feel desolate and melancholy. How sorely my heart longs for you, I need not say. I have bathed once; it seemed to do me good. I may, perhaps, stay here a fortnight. There are as yet scarcely any visitors. A Lady Wenlock is staying at the large house of which you used so vigilantly to observe the inmates. One day I set out with intent to trudge to Filey Bridge, but was frightened back by two cows. I mean to try again some morning. I left papa well. I have been a good deal troubled with headache, and with some pain in the side since I came here, but I feel that this has been owing to the cold wind, for very cold has it been till lately; at present I feel better. Shall I send the papers to you as usual. Write again directly, and tell me this, and anything and everything else that comes into your mind.--Believe me, yours faithfully, "C. BRONTË." "Filey, June 16th, 1852. "Dear E----, --Be quite easy about me. I really think I am better for my stay at Filey; that I have derived more benefit from it than I dared to anticipate. I believe, could I stay here two months, and enjoy something like social cheerfulness as well as exercise and good air, my health would be quite renewed. This, however, cannot possibly be; but I am most thankful for the good received. I stay here another week. "I return ----'s letter. I am sorry for her: I believe she suffers; but I do not much like her style of expressing herself. . . . Grief as well as joy manifests itself in most different ways in different people; and I doubt not she is sincere and in earnest when she talks of her 'precious, sainted father;' but I could wish she used simpler language." Soon after her return from Filey, she was alarmed by a very serious and sharp attack of illness with which Mr. Brontë was seized. There was some fear, for a few days, that his sight was permanently lost, and his spirits sank painfully under this dread. "This prostration of spirits," writes his daughter, "which accompanies anything like a relapse is almost the most difficult point to manage. Dear E----, you are tenderly kind in offering your society; but rest very tranquil where you are; be fully assured that it is not now, nor under present circumstances, that I feel the lack either of society or occupation; my time is pretty well filled up, and my thoughts appropriated. . . . I cannot permit myself to comment much on the chief contents of your last; advice is not necessary: as far as I can judge, you seem hitherto enabled to take these trials in a good and wise spirit. I can only pray that such combined strength and resignation may be continued to you. Submission, courage, exertion, when practicable--these seem to be the weapons with which we must fight life's long battle." I suppose that, during the very time when her thoughts were thus fully occupied with anxiety for her father, she received some letter from her publishers, making inquiry as to the progress of the work which they knew she had in hand, as I find the following letter to Mr. Williams, bearing reference to some of Messrs. Smith and Elder's proposed arrangements. "To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "July 28th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--Is it in contemplation to publish the new edition of 'Shirley' soon? Would it not be better to defer it for a time? In reference to a part of your letter, permit me to express this wish,--and I trust in doing so, I shall not be regarded as stepping out of my position as an author, and encroaching on the arrangements of business,--viz.: that no announcement of a new work by the author of 'Jane Eyre' shall be made till the MS. of such work is actually in my publisher's hands. Perhaps we are none of us justified in speaking very decidedly where the future is concerned; but for some too much caution in such calculations can scarcely be observed: amongst this number I must class myself. Nor, in doing so, can I assume an apologetic tone. He does right who does his best. "Last autumn I got on for a time quickly. I ventured to look forward to spring as the period of publication: my health gave way; I passed such a winter as, having been once experienced, will never be forgotten. The spring proved little better than a protraction of trial. The warm weather and a visit to the sea have done me much good physically; but as yet I have recovered neither elasticity of animal spirits, nor flow of the power of composition. And if it were otherwise, the difference would be of no avail; my time and thoughts are at present taken up with close attendance on my father, whose health is just now in a very critical state, the heat of the weather having produced determination of blood to the head.--I am, yours sincerely, C. BRONTË." Before the end of August, Mr. Brontë's convalescence became quite established, and he was anxious to resume his duties for some time before his careful daughter would permit him. On September the 14th the "great duke" died. He had been, as we have seen, her hero from childhood; but I find no further reference to him at this time than what is given in the following extract from a letter to her friend:-- "I do hope and believe the changes you have been having this summer will do you permanent good, notwithstanding the pain with which they have been too often mingled. Yet I feel glad that you are soon coming home; and I really must not trust myself to say how much I wish the time were come when, without let or hindrance, I could once more welcome you to Haworth. But oh I don't get on; I feel fretted--incapable--sometimes very low. However, at present, the subject must not be dwelt upon; it presses me too hardly--nearly--and painfully. Less than ever can I taste or know pleasure till this work is wound up. And yet I often sit up in bed at night, thinking of and wishing for you. Thank you for the Times; what it said on the mighty and mournful subject was well said. All at once the whole nation seems to take a just view of that great character. There was a review too of an American book, which I was glad to see. Read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin': probably, though, you have read it. "Papa's health continues satisfactory, thank God! As for me, my wretched liver has been disordered again of late, but I hope it is now going to be on better behaviour; it hinders me in working--depresses both power and tone of feeling. I must expect this derangement from time to time." Haworth was in an unhealthy state, as usual; and both Miss Brontë and Tabby suffered severely from the prevailing epidemics. The former was long in shaking off the effects of this illness. In vain she resolved against allowing herself any society or change of scene until she had accomplished her labour. She was too ill to write; and with illness came on the old heaviness of heart, recollections of the past, and anticipations of the future. At last Mr. Brontë expressed so strong a wish that her friend should be asked to visit her, and she felt some little refreshment so absolutely necessary, that on October the 9th she begged her to come to Haworth, just for a single week. "I thought I would persist in denying myself till I had done my work, but I find it won't do; the matter refuses to progress, and this excessive solitude presses too heavily; so let me see your dear face, E., just for one reviving week." But she would only accept of the company of her friend for the exact time specified. She thus writes to Miss Wooler on October the 21st:-- "E---- has only been my companion one little week. I would not have her any longer, for I am disgusted with myself and my delays; and consider it was a weak yielding to temptation in me to send for her at all; but in truth, my spirits were getting low--prostrate sometimes--and she has done me inexpressible good. I wonder when I shall see you at Haworth again; both my father and the servants have again and again insinuated a distinct wish that you should be requested to come in the course of the summer and autumn, but I have always turned rather a deaf ear; 'not yet,' was my thought, 'I want first to be free;' work first, then pleasure." Miss ----'s visit had done her much good. Pleasant companionship during the day produced, for the time, the unusual blessing of calm repose at night; and after her friend's departure she was well enough to "fall to business," and write away, almost incessantly, at her story of Villette, now drawing to a conclusion. The following letter to Mr. Smith, seems to have accompanied the first part of the MS. "Oct. 30th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--You must notify honestly what you think of 'Villette' when you have read it. I can hardly tell you how I hunger to hear some opinion besides my own, and how I have sometimes desponded, and almost despaired, because there was no one to whom to read a line, or of whom to ask a counsel. 'Jane Eyre' was not written under such circumstances, nor were two-thirds of 'Shirley'. I got so miserable about it, I could bear no allusion to the book. It is not finished yet; but now I hope. As to the anonymous publication, I have this to say: If the withholding of the author's name should tend materially to injure the publisher's interest, to interfere with booksellers' orders, etc., I would not press the point; but if no such detriment is contingent, I should be most thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito. I seem to dread the advertisements--the large-lettered 'Currer Bell's New Novel,' or 'New Work, by the Author of Jane Eyre.' These, however, I feel well enough, are the transcendentalisms of a retired wretch; so you must speak frankly. . . . I shall be glad to see 'Colonel Esmond.' My objection to the second volume lay here: I thought it contained decidedly too much history--too little story." In another letter, referring to "Esmond," she uses the following words:-- "The third volume seemed to me to possess the most sparkle, impetus, and interest. Of the first and second my judgment was, that parts of them were admirable; but there was the fault of containing too much History--too little story. I hold that a work of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the REAL should be sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the IDEAL. Plain household bread is a far more wholesome and necessary thing than cake; yet who would like to see the brown loaf placed on the table for dessert? In the second volume, the author gives us an ample supply of excellent brown bread; in his third, only such a portion as gives substance, like the crumbs of bread in a well-made, not too rich, plum-pudding." Her letter to Mr. Smith, containing the allusion to 'Esmond,' which reminded me of the quotation just given continues:-- "You will see that 'Villette' touches on no matter of public interest. I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral. Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme, though I honour philanthropy; and voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe's work, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' To manage these great matters rightly, they must be long and practically studied--their bearings known intimately, and their evils felt genuinely; they must not be taken up as a business matter, and a trading speculation. I doubt not, Mrs. Stowe had felt the iron of slavery enter into her heart, from childhood upwards, long before she ever thought of writing books. The feeling throughout her work is sincere, and not got up. Remember to be an honest critic of 'Villette,' and tell Mr. Williams to be unsparing: not that I am likely to alter anything, but I want to know his impressions and yours." To G. SMITH, ESQ. "Nov. 3rd. "My dear Sir,--I feel very grateful for your letter; it relieved me much, for I was a good deal harassed by doubts as to how 'Villette' might appear in other eyes than my own. I feel in some degree authorised to rely on your favourable impressions, because you are quite right where you hint disapprobation. You have exactly hit two points at least where I was conscious of defect;--the discrepancy, the want of perfect harmony, between Graham's boyhood and manhood,--the angular abruptness of his change of sentiment towards Miss Fanshawe. You must remember, though, that in secret he had for some time appreciated that young lady at a somewhat depressed standard--held her a LITTLE lower than the angels. But still the reader ought to have been better made to feel this preparation towards a change of mood. As to the publishing arrangement, I leave them to Cornhill. There is, undoubtedly, a certain force in what you say about the inexpediency of affecting a mystery which cannot be sustained; so you must act as you think is for the best. I submit, also, to the advertisements in large letters, but under protest, and with a kind of ostrich-longing for concealment. Most of the third volume is given to the development of the 'crabbed Professor's' character. Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of Fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it must be the Professor--a man in whom there is much to forgive, much to 'put up with.' But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss FROST from the beginning, I never meant to appoint her lines in pleasant places. The conclusion of this third volume is still a matter of some anxiety: I can but do my best, however. It would speedily be finished, could I ward off certain obnoxious headaches, which, whenever I get into the spirit of my work, are apt to seize and prostrate me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Colonel Henry Esmond is just arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne's garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by the old 'Spectator' type." In reference to a sentence towards the close of this letter, I may mention what she told me; that Mr. Brontë was anxious that her new tale should end well, as he disliked novels which left a melancholy impression upon the mind; and he requested her to make her hero and heroine (like the heroes and heroines in fairy-tales) "marry, and live very happily ever after." But the idea of M. Paul Emanuel's death at sea was stamped on her imagination till it assumed the distinct force of reality; and she could no more alter her fictitious ending than if they had been facts which she was relating. All she could do in compliance with her father's wish was so to veil the fate in oracular words, as to leave it to the character and discernment of her readers to interpret her meaning. To W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "Nov. 6th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--I must not delay thanking you for your kind letter, with its candid and able commentary on 'Villette.' With many of your strictures I concur. The third volume may, perhaps, do away with some of the objections; others still remain in force. I do not think the interest culminates anywhere to the degree you would wish. What climax there is does not come on till near the conclusion; and even then, I doubt whether the regular novel-reader will consider the 'agony piled sufficiently high' (as the Americans say), or the colours dashed on to the canvas with the proper amount of daring. Still, I fear, they must be satisfied with what is offered: my palette affords no brighter tints; were I to attempt to deepen the reds, or burnish the yellows, I should but botch. "Unless I am mistaken, the emotion of the book will be found to be kept throughout in tolerable subjection. As to the name of the heroine, I can hardly express what subtlety of thought made me decide upon giving her a cold name; but, at first, I called her 'Lucy Snowe' (spelt with an 'e'); which Snowe I afterwards changed to 'Frost.' Subsequently, I rather regretted the change, and wished it 'Snowe' again. If not too late, I should like the alteration to be made now throughout the MS. A COLD name she must have; partly, perhaps, on the 'lucus a non lucendo' principle--partly on that of the 'fitness of things,' for she has about her an external coldness. "You say that she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance; it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness. If, however, the book does not express all this, there must be a great fault somewhere. I might explain away a few other points, but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented. We know what sort of a pencil that is which needs an ally in the pen. "Thanking you again for the clearness and fulness with which you have responded to my request for a statement of impressions, I am, my dear Sir, yours very sincerely, "C. BRONTË." "I trust the work will be seen in MS. by no one except Mr. Smith and yourself." "Nov. 10th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--I only wished the publication of 'Shirley' to be delayed till 'Villette' was nearly ready; so that there can now be no objection to its being issued whenever you think fit. About putting the MS. into type, I can only say that, should I be able to proceed with the third volume at my average rate of composition, and with no more than the average amount of interruptions, I should hope to have it ready in about three weeks. I leave it to you to decide whether it would be better to delay the printing that space of time, or to commence it immediately. It would certainly be more satisfactory if you were to see the third volume before printing the first and the second; yet, if delay is likely to prove injurious, I do not think it is indispensable. I have read the third volume of 'Esmond.' I found it both entertaining and exciting to me; it seems to possess an impetus and excitement beyond the other two,--that movement and brilliancy its predecessors sometimes wanted, never fails here. In certain passages, I thought Thackeray used all his powers; their grand, serious force yielded a profound satisfaction. 'At last he puts forth his strength,' I could not help saying to myself. No character in the book strikes me as more masterly than that of Beatrix; its conception is fresh, and its delineation vivid. It is peculiar; it has impressions of a new kind--new, at least, to me. Beatrix is not, in herself, all bad. So much does she sometimes reveal of what is good and great as to suggest this feeling--you would think she was urged by a fate. You would think that some antique doom presses on her house, and that once in so many generations its brightest ornament was to become its greatest disgrace. At times, what is good in her struggles against this terrible destiny, but the Fate conquers. Beatrix cannot be an honest woman and a good man's wife. She 'tries, and she CANNOT.' Proud, beautiful, and sullied, she was born what she becomes, a king's mistress. I know not whether you have seen the notice in the Leader; I read it just after concluding the book. Can I be wrong in deeming it a notice tame, cold, and insufficient? With all its professed friendliness, it produced on me a most disheartening impression. Surely, another sort of justice than this will be rendered to 'Esmond' from other quarters. One acute remark of the critic is to the effect that Blanche Amory and Beatrix are identical--sketched from the same original! To me they are about as identical as a weazel and a royal tigress of Bengal; both the latter are quadrupeds,--both the former, women. But I must not take up either your time or my own with further remarks. Believe me yours sincerely, "C. BRONTË." On a Saturday, a little later in this month, Miss Brontë completed 'Villette,' and sent it off to her publishers. "I said my prayers when I had done it. Whether it is well or ill done, I don't know; D. V., I will now try and wait the issue quietly. The book, I think, will not be considered pretentious; nor is it of a character to excite hostility." As her labour was ended, she felt at liberty to allow herself a little change. There were several friends anxious to see her and welcome her to their homes Miss Martineau, Mrs. Smith, and her own faithful E----. With the last, in the same letter as that in which she announced the completion of 'Villette,' she offered to spend a week. She began, also, to consider whether it might not be well to avail herself of Mrs. Smith's kind invitation, with a view to the convenience of being on the spot to correct the proofs. The following letter is given, not merely on account of her own criticisms on 'Villette,' but because it shows how she had learned to magnify the meaning of trifles, as all do who live a self-contained and solitary life. Mr. Smith had been unable to write by the same post as that which brought the money for 'Villette,' and she consequently received it without a line. The friend with whom she was staying says, that she immediately fancied there was some disappointment about 'Villette,' or that some word or act of hers had given offence; and had not the Sunday intervened, and so allowed time for Mr. Smith's letter to make its appearance, she would certainly have crossed it on her way to London. "Dec. 6th, 1852. "My dear Sir,--The receipts have reached me safely. I received the first on Saturday, enclosed in a cover without a line, and had made up my mind to take the train on Monday, and go up to London to see what was the matter, and what had struck my publisher mute. On Sunday morning your letter came, and you have thus been spared the visitation of the unannounced and unsummoned apparition of Currer Bell in Cornhill. Inexplicable delays should be avoided when possible, for they are apt to urge those subjected to their harassment to sudden and impulsive steps. I must pronounce you right again, in your complaint of the transfer of interest in the third volume, from one set of characters to another. It is not pleasant, and it will probably be found as unwelcome to the reader, as it was, in a sense, compulsory upon the writer. The spirit of romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting; it would have fashioned a paramount hero, kept faithfully with him, and made him supremely worshipful; he should have been an idol, and not a mute, unresponding idol either; but this would have been unlike real LIFE--inconsistent with truth--at variance with probability. I greatly apprehend, however, that the weakest character in the book is the one I aimed at making the most beautiful; and, if this be the case, the fault lies in its wanting the germ of the real--in its being purely imaginary. I felt that this character lacked substance; I fear that the reader will feel the same. Union with it resembles too much the fate of Ixion, who was mated with a cloud. The childhood of Paulina is, however, I think, pretty well imagined, but her. . ." (the remainder of this interesting sentence is torn off the letter). "A brief visit to London becomes thus more practicable, and if your mother will kindly write, when she has time, and name a day after Christmas which will suit her, I shall have pleasure, papa's health permitting, in availing myself of her invitation. I wish I could come in time to correct some at least of the proofs; it would save trouble." CHAPTER XII. The difficulty that presented itself most strongly to me, when I first had the honour of being requested to write this biography, was how I could show what a noble, true, and tender woman Charlotte Brontë really was, without mingling up with her life too much of the personal history of her nearest and most intimate friends. After much consideration of this point, I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others. One of the deepest interests of her life centres naturally round her marriage, and the preceding circumstances; but more than all other events (because of more recent date, and concerning another as intimately as herself), it requires delicate handling on my part, lest I intrude too roughly on what is most sacred to memory. Yet I have two reasons, which seem to me good and valid ones, for giving some particulars of the course of events which led to her few months of wedded life--that short spell of exceeding happiness. The first is my desire to call attention to the fact that Mr. Nicholls was one who had seen her almost daily for years; seen her as a daughter, a sister, a mistress and a friend. He was not a man to be attracted by any kind of literary fame. I imagine that this, by itself, would rather repel him when he saw it in the possession of a woman. He was a grave, reserved, conscientious man, with a deep sense of religion, and of his duties as one of its ministers. In silence he had watched her, and loved her long. The love of such a man--a daily spectator of her manner of life for years--is a great testimony to her character as a woman. How deep his affection was I scarcely dare to tell, even if I could in words. She did not know--she had hardly begun to suspect--that she was the object of any peculiar regard on his part, when, in this very December, he came one evening to tea. After tea, she returned from the study to her own sitting-room, as was her custom, leaving her father and his curate together. Presently she heard the study-door open, and expected to hear the succeeding clash of the front door. Instead, came a tap; and, "like lightning, it flashed upon me what was coming. He entered. He stood before me. What his words were you can imagine; his manner you can hardly realise, nor can I forget it. He made me, for the first time, feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response. . . . The spectacle of one, ordinarily so statue-like, thus trembling, stirred, and overcome, gave me a strange shock. I could only entreat him to leave me then, and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said he dared not. I think I half led, half put him out of the room." So deep, so fervent, and so enduring was the affection Miss Brontë had inspired in the heart of this good man! It is an honour to her; and, as such, I have thought it my duty to speak thus much, and quote thus fully from her letter about it. And now I pass to my second reason for dwelling on a subject which may possibly be considered by some, at first sight, of too private a nature for publication. When Mr. Nicholls had left her, Charlotte went immediately to her father and told him all. He always disapproved of marriages, and constantly talked against them. But he more than disapproved at this time; he could not bear the idea of this attachment of Mr. Nicholls to his daughter. Fearing the consequences of agitation to one so recently an invalid, she made haste to give her father a promise that, on the morrow, Mr. Nicholls should have a distinct refusal. Thus quietly and modestly did she, on whom such hard judgments had been passed by ignorant reviewers, receive this vehement, passionate declaration of love,--thus thoughtfully for her father, and unselfishly for herself, put aside all consideration of how she should reply, excepting as he wished! The immediate result of Mr. Nicholls' declaration of attachment was, that he sent in his resignation of the curacy of Haworth; and that Miss Brontë held herself simply passive, as far as words and actions went, while she suffered acute pain from the strong expressions which her father used in speaking of Mr. Nicholls, and from the too evident distress and failure of health on the part of the latter. Under these circumstances she, more gladly than ever, availed herself of Mrs. Smith's proposal, that she should again visit them in London; and thither she accordingly went in the first week of the year 1853. From thence I received the following letter. It is with a sad, proud pleasure I copy her words of friendship now. "January 12th, 1853. "It is with YOU the ball rests. I have not heard from you since I wrote last; but I thought I knew the reason of your silence, viz. application to work,--and therefore I accept it, not merely with resignation, but with satisfaction. "I am now in London, as the date above will show; staying very quietly at my publisher's, and correcting proofs, etc. Before receiving yours, I had felt, and expressed to Mr. Smith, reluctance to come in the way of 'Ruth;' not that I think SHE would suffer from contact with 'Villette'--we know not but that the damage might be the other way; but I have ever held comparisons to be odious, and would fain that neither I nor my friends should be made subjects for the same. Mr. Smith proposes, accordingly, to defer the publication of my book till the 24th inst.; he says that will give 'Ruth' the start in the papers daily and weekly, and also will leave free to her all the February magazines. Should this delay appear to you insufficient, speak! and it shall be protracted. "I dare say, arrange as we may, we shall not be able wholly to prevent comparisons; it is the nature of some critics to be invidious; but we need not care we can set them at defiance; they SHALL not make us foes, they SHALL not mingle with our mutual feelings one taint of jealousy there is my hand on that; I know you will give clasp for clasp. "'Villette' has indeed no right to push itself before 'Ruth.' There is a goodness, a philanthropic purpose, a social use in the latter to which the former cannot for an instant pretend; nor can it claim precedence on the ground of surpassing power I think it much quieter than 'Jane Eyre.' * * * * * "I wish to see YOU, probably at least as much as you can wish to see ME, and therefore shall consider your invitation for March as an engagement; about the close of that month, then, I hope to pay you a brief visit. With kindest remembrances to Mr. Gaskell and all your precious circle, I am," etc. This visit at Mrs. Smith's was passed more quietly than any previous one, and was consequently more in accordance with her own tastes. She saw things rather than persons; and being allowed to have her own choice of sights, she selected the "REAL in preference to the DECORATIVE side of life." She went over two prisons,--one ancient, the other modern,--Newgate and Pentonville; over two hospitals, the Foundling and Bethlehem. She was also taken, at her own request, to see several of the great City sights; the Bank, the Exchange, Rothschild's, etc. The power of vast yet minute organisation, always called out her respect and admiration. She appreciated it more fully than most women are able to do. All that she saw during this last visit to London impressed her deeply--so much so as to render her incapable of the immediate expression of her feelings, or of reasoning upon her impressions while they were so vivid. If she had lived, her deep heart would sooner or later have spoken out on these things. What she saw dwelt in her thoughts, and lay heavy on her spirits. She received the utmost kindness from her hosts, and had the old, warm, and grateful regard for them. But looking back, with the knowledge of what was then the future, which Time has given, one cannot but imagine that there was a toning-down in preparation for the final farewell to these kind friends, whom she saw for the last time on a Wednesday morning in February. She met her friend E---- at Keighley, on her return, and the two proceeded to Haworth together. "Villette"--which, if less interesting as a mere story than "Jane Eyre," displays yet more of the extraordinary genius of the author--was received with one burst of acclamation. Out of so small a circle of characters, dwelling in so dull and monotonous an area as a "pension," this wonderful tale was evolved! See how she receives the good tidings of her success! "Feb. 15th, 1853. "I got a budget of no less than seven papers yesterday and to-day. The import of all the notices is such as to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him, who takes note both of suffering, and work, and motives. Papa is pleased too. As to friends in general, I believe I can love them still, without expecting them to take any large share in this sort of gratification. The longer I live, the more plainly I see that gentle must be the strain on fragile human nature; it will not bear much." I suspect that the touch of slight disappointment, perceptible in the last few lines, arose from her great susceptibility to an opinion she valued much,--that of Miss Martineau, who, both in an article on 'Villette' in the Daily News, and in a private letter to Miss Brontë, wounded her to the quick by expressions of censure which she believed to be unjust and unfounded, but which, if correct and true, went deeper than any merely artistic fault. An author may bring himself to believe that he can bear blame with equanimity, from whatever quarter it comes; but its force is derived altogether from the character of this. To the public, one reviewer may be the same impersonal being as another; but an author has frequently a far deeper significance to attach to opinions. They are the verdicts of those whom he respects and admires, or the mere words of those for whose judgment he cares not a jot. It is this knowledge of the individual worth of the reviewer's opinion, which makes the censures of some sink so deep, and prey so heavily upon an author's heart. And thus, in proportion to her true, firm regard for Miss Martineau, did Miss Brontë suffer under what she considered her misjudgment not merely of writing, but of character. She had long before asked Miss Martineau to tell her whether she considered that any want of womanly delicacy or propriety was betrayed in "Jane Eyre". And on receiving Miss Martineau's assurance that she did not, Miss Brontë entreated her to declare it frankly if she thought there was any failure of this description in any future work of "Currer Bell's." The promise then given of faithful truth-speaking, Miss Martineau fulfilled when "Villette" appeared. Miss Brontë writhed under what she felt to be injustice. This seems a fitting place to state how utterly unconscious she was of what was, by some, esteemed coarse in her writings. One day, during that visit at the Briery when I first met her, the conversation turned upon the subject of women's writing fiction; and some one remarked on the fact that, in certain instances, authoresses had much outstepped the line which men felt to be proper in works of this kind. Miss Brontë said she wondered how far this was a natural consequence of allowing the imagination to work too constantly; Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth and I expressed our belief that such violations of propriety were altogether unconscious on the part of those to whom reference had been made. I remember her grave, earnest way of saying, "I trust God will take from me whatever power of invention or expression I may have, before He lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfitting to be said!" Again, she was invariably shocked and distressed when she heard of any disapproval of "Jane Eyre" on the ground above-mentioned. Some one said to her in London, "You know, you and I, Miss Brontë, have both written naughty books!" She dwelt much on this; and, as if it weighed on her mind, took an opportunity to ask Mrs. Smith, as she would have asked a mother--if she had not been motherless from earliest childhood--whether, indeed, there was anything so wrong in "Jane Eyre." I do not deny for myself the existence of coarseness here and there in her works, otherwise so entirely noble. I only ask those who read them to consider her life,--which has been openly laid bare before them,--and to say how it could be otherwise. She saw few men; and among these few were one or two with whom she had been acquainted since early girlhood,--who had shown her much friendliness and kindness,--through whose family she had received many pleasures,--for whose intellect she had a great respect,--but who talked before her, if not to her with as little reticence as Rochester talked to Jane Eyre. Take this in connection with her poor brother's sad life, and the out-spoken people among whom she lived,--remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be,--and then do her justice for all that she was, and all that she would have been (had God spared her), rather than censure her because circumstances forced her to touch pitch, as it were, and by it her hand was for a moment defiled. It was but skin-deep. Every change in her life was purifying her; it hardly could raise her. Again I cry, "If she had but lived!" The misunderstanding with Miss Martineau on account of "Villette," was the cause of bitter regret to Miss Brontë. Her woman's nature had been touched, as she thought, with insulting misconception; and she had dearly loved the person who had thus unconsciously wounded her. It was but in the January just past that she had written as follows, in reply to a friend, the tenor of whose letter we may guess from this answer:-- "I read attentively all you say about Miss Martineau; the sincerity and constancy of your solicitude touch me very much; I should grieve to neglect or oppose your advice, and yet I do not feel it would be right to give Miss Martineau up entirely. There is in her nature much that is very noble; hundreds have forsaken her, more, I fear, in the apprehension that their fair names may suffer, if seen in connection with hers, than from any pure convictions, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on her fatal tenets. With these fair-weather friends I cannot bear to rank; and for her sin, is it not one of those of which God and not man must judge? "To speak the truth, my dear Miss ----, I believe, if you were in my place, and knew Miss Martineau as I do,--if you had shared with me the proofs of her genuine kindliness, and had seen how she secretly suffers from abandonment,--you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the sin, and feel as if the right lay rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait, while that adherence is unfashionable and unpopular, than in turning on her your back when the world sets the example. I believe she is one of those whom opposition and desertion make obstinate in error; while patience and tolerance touch her deeply and keenly, and incline her to ask of her own heart whether the course she has been pursuing may not possibly be a faulty course." Kindly and faithful words! which Miss Martineau never knew of; to be repaid in words more grand and tender, when Charlotte lay deaf and cold by her dead sisters. In spite of their short sorrowful misunderstanding, they were a pair of noble women and faithful friends. I turn to a pleasanter subject. While she was in London, Miss Brontë had seen Lawrence's portrait of Mr. Thackeray, and admired it extremely. Her first words, after she had stood before it some time in silence, were, "And there came up a Lion out of Judah!" The likeness was by this time engraved, and Mr. Smith sent her a copy of it. To G. SMITH, ESQ. "Haworth, Feb. 26th, 1853. "My dear Sir,--At a late hour yesterday evening, I had the honour of receiving, at Haworth Parsonage, a distinguished guest, none other than W. M. Thackeray, Esq. Mindful of the rites of hospitality, I hung him up in state this morning. He looks superb in his beautiful, tasteful gilded gibbet. For companion he has the Duke of Wellington, (do you remember giving me that picture?) and for contrast and foil Richmond's portrait of an unworthy individual, who, in such society, must be name-less. Thackeray looks away from the latter character with a grand scorn, edifying to witness. I wonder if the giver of these gifts will ever see them on the walls where they now hang; it pleases me to fancy that one day he may. My father stood for a quarter of an hour this morning examining the great man's picture. The conclusion of his survey was, that he thought it a puzzling head; if he had known nothing previously of the original's character; he could not have read it in his features. I wonder at this. To me the broad brow seems to express intellect. Certain lines about the nose and cheek, betray the satirist and cynic; the mouth indicates a child-like simplicity--perhaps even a degree of irresoluteness, inconsistency--weakness in short, but a weakness not unamiable. The engraving seems to me very good. A certain not quite Christian expression--'not to put too fine a point upon it'--an expression of spite, most vividly marked in the original, is here softened, and perhaps a little--a very little--of the power has escaped in this ameliorating process. Did it strike you thus?" Miss Brontë was in much better health during this winter of 1852-3, than she had been the year before. "For my part," (she wrote to me in February) "I have thus far borne the cold weather well. I have taken long walks on the crackling snow, and felt the frosty air bracing. This winter has, for me, not been like last winter. December, January, February, '51-2, passed like a long stormy night, conscious of one painful dream) all solitary grief and sickness. The corresponding l in '52-3 have gone over my head quietly and not uncheerfully. Thank God for the change and the repose! How welcome it has been He only knows! My father too has borne the season well; and my book, and its reception thus far, have pleased and cheered him." In March the quiet Parsonage had the honour of receiving a visit from the then Bishop of Ripon. He remained one night with Mr. Brontë. In the evening, some of the neighbouring clergy were invited to meet him at tea and supper; and during the latter meal, some of the "curates" began merrily to upbraid Miss Brontë with "putting them into a book;" and she, shrinking from thus having her character as authoress thrust upon her at her own table, and in the presence of a stranger, pleasantly appealed to the bishop as to whether it was quite fair thus to drive her, into a corner. His Lordship, I have been told, was agreeably impressed with the gentle unassuming manners of his hostess, and with the perfect propriety and consistency of the arrangements in the modest household. So much for the Bishop's recollection of his visit. Now we will turn to hers. "March 4th. "The Bishop has been, and is gone. He is certainly a most charming Bishop; the most benignant gentleman that ever put on lawn sleeves; yet stately too, and quite competent to check encroachments. His visit passed capitally well; and at its close, as he was going away, he expressed himself thoroughly gratified with all he had seen. The Inspector has been also in the course of the past week; so that I have had a somewhat busy time of it. If you could have been at Haworth to share the pleasures of the company, without having been inconvenienced by the little bustle of the preparation, I should have been VERY glad. But the house was a good deal put out of its way, as you may suppose; all passed, however, orderly, quietly, and well. Martha waited very nicely, and I had a person to help her in the kitchen. Papa kept up, too, fully as well as I expected, though I doubt whether he could have borne another day of it. My penalty came on in a strong headache as soon as the Bishop was gone: how thankful I was that it had patiently waited his departure. I continue stupid to-day: of course, it is the reaction consequent on several days of extra exertion and excitement. It is very well to talk of receiving a Bishop without trouble, but you MUST prepare for him." By this time some of the Reviews had began to find fault with "Villette." Miss Brontë made her old request. TO W. S. WILLIAMS, ESQ. "My dear Sir,--Were a review to appear, inspired with treble their animus, PRAY do not withhold it from me. I like to see the satisfactory notices,--especially I like to carry them to my father; but I MUST see such as are UNsatisfactory and hostile; these are for my own especial edification;--it is in these I best read public feeling and opinion. To shun examination into the dangerous and disagreeable seems to me cowardly. I long always to know what really IS, and am only unnerved when kept in the dark. . . . . . . "As to the character of 'Lucy Snowe,' my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which 'Jane Eyre' was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her. "The note you sent this morning from Lady Harriette St. Clair, is precisely to the same purport as Miss Muloch's request,--an application for exact and authentic information respecting the fate of M. Paul Emanuel! You see how much the ladies think of this little man, whom you none of you like. I had a letter the other day; announcing that a lady of some note, who had always determined that whenever she married, her husband should be the counterpart of 'Mr. Knightly' in Miss Austen's 'Emma,' had now changed her mind, and vowed that she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel, or remain for ever single! I have sent Lady Harriette an answer so worded as to leave the matter pretty much where it was. Since the little puzzle amuses the ladies, it would be a pity to spoil their sport by giving them the key." When Easter, with its duties arising out of sermons to be preached by strange clergymen who had afterwards to be entertained at the Parsonage,--with Mechanics' Institute Meetings, and school tea-drinkings, was over and gone; she came, at the close of April, to visit us in Manchester. We had a friend, a young lady, staying with us. Miss Brontë had expected to find us alone; and although our friend was gentle and sensible after Miss Brontë's own heart, yet her presence was enough to create a nervous tremour. I was aware that both of our guests were unusually silent; and I saw a little shiver run from time to time over Miss Brontë's frame. I could account for the modest reserve of the young lady; and the next day Miss Brontë told me how the unexpected sight of a strange face had affected her. It was now two or three years since I had witnessed a similar effect produced on her; in anticipation of a quiet evening at Fox-How; and since then she had seen many and various people in London: but the physical sensations produced by shyness were still the same; and on the following day she laboured under severe headache. I had several opportunities of perceiving how this nervousness was ingrained in her constitution, and how acutely she suffered in striving to overcome it. One evening we had, among other guests, two sisters who sang Scottish ballads exquisitely. Miss Brontë had been sitting quiet and constrained till they began "The Bonnie House of Airlie," but the effect of that and "Carlisle Yetts," which followed, was as irresistible as the playing of the Piper of Hamelin. The beautiful clear light came into her eyes; her lips quivered with emotion; she forgot herself, rose, and crossed the room to the piano, where she asked eagerly for song after song. The sisters begged her to come and see them the next morning, when they would sing as long as ever she liked; and she promised gladly and thankfully. But on reaching the house her courage failed. We walked some time up and down the street; she upbraiding herself all the while for folly, and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory rather than on the thought of a third sister who would have to be faced if we went in. But it was of no use; and dreading lest this struggle with herself might bring on one of her trying headaches, I entered at last and made the best apology I could for her non-appearance. Much of this nervous dread of encountering strangers I ascribed to the idea of her personal ugliness, which had been strongly impressed upon her imagination early in life, and which she exaggerated to herself in a remarkable manner. "I notice," said she, "that after a stranger has once looked at my face, he is careful not to let his eyes wander to that part of the room again!" A more untrue idea never entered into any one's head. Two gentlemen who saw her during this visit, without knowing at the time who she was, were singularly attracted by her appearance; and this feeling of attraction towards a pleasant countenance, sweet voice, and gentle timid manners, was so strong in one as to conquer a dislike he had previously entertained to her works. There was another circumstance that came to my knowledge at this period which told secrets about the finely-strung frame. One night I was on the point of relating some dismal ghost story, just before bed-time. She shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious, and, prone at all times to the involuntary recurrence of any thoughts of ominous gloom which might have been suggested to her. She said that on first coming to us, she had found a letter on her dressing-table from a friend in Yorkshire, containing a story which had impressed her vividly ever since;--that it mingled with her dreams at night, and made her sleep restless and unrefreshing. One day we asked two gentlemen to meet her at dinner; expecting that she and they would have a mutual pleasure in making each other's acquaintance. To our disappointment she drew back with timid reserve from all their advances, replying to their questions and remarks in the briefest manner possible; till at last they gave up their efforts to draw her into conversation in despair, and talked to each other and my husband on subjects of recent local interest. Among these Thackeray's Lectures (which had lately been delivered in Manchester) were spoken of and that on Fielding especially dwelt upon. One gentleman objected to it strongly, as calculated to do moral harm, and regretted that a man having so great an influence over the tone of thought of the day, as Thackeray, should not more carefully weigh his words. The other took the opposite view. He said that Thackeray described men from the inside, as it were; through his strong power of dramatic sympathy, he identified himself with certain characters, felt their temptations, entered into their pleasures, etc. This roused Miss Brontë, who threw herself warmly into the discussion; the ice of her reserve was broken, and from that time she showed her interest in all that was said, and contributed her share to any conversation that was going on in the course of the evening. What she said, and which part she took, in the dispute about Thackeray's lecture, may be gathered from the following letter, referring to the same subject:-- "The Lectures arrived safely; I have read them through twice. They must be studied to be appreciated. I thought well of them when I heard them delivered, but now I see their real power; and it is great. The lecture on Swift was new to me; I thought it almost matchless. Not that by any means I always agree with Mr. Thackeray's opinions, but his force, his penetration, his pithy simplicity, his eloquence--his manly sonorous eloquence,--command entire admiration. . . . Against his errors I protest, were it treason to do so. I was present at the Fielding lecture: the hour spent in listening to it was a painful hour. That Thackeray was wrong in his way of treating Fielding's character and vices, my conscience told me. After reading that lecture, I trebly felt that he was wrong--dangerously wrong. Had Thackeray owned a son, grown, or growing up, and a son, brilliant but reckless--would he have spoken in that light way of courses that lead to disgrace and the grave? He speaks of it all as if he theorised; as if he had never been called on, in the course of his life, to witness the actual consequences of such failings; as if he had never stood by and seen the issue, the final result of it all. I believe, if only once the prospect of a promising life blasted on the outset by wild ways had passed close under his eyes, he never COULD have spoken with such levity of what led to its piteous destruction. Had I a brother yet living, I should tremble to let him read Thackeray's lecture on Fielding. I should hide it away from him. If, in spite of precaution, it should fall into his hands, I should earnestly pray him not to be misled by the voice of the charmer, let him charm never so wisely. Not that for a moment I would have had Thackeray to ABUSE Fielding, or even Pharisaically to condemn his life; but I do most deeply grieve that it never entered into his heart sadly and nearly to feel the peril of such a career, that he might have dedicated some of his great strength to a potent warning against its adoption by any young man. I believe temptation often assails the finest manly natures; as the pecking sparrow or destructive wasp attacks the sweetest and mellowest fruit, eschewing what is sour and crude. The true lover of his race ought to devote his vigour to guard and protect; he should sweep away every lure with a kind of rage at its treachery. You will think this far too serious, I dare say; but the subject is serious, and one cannot help feeling upon it earnestly." CHAPTER XIII. After her visit to Manchester, she had to return to a re-opening of the painful circumstances of the previous winter, as the time drew near for Mr. Nicholl's departure from Haworth. A testimonial of respect from the parishioners was presented, at a public meeting, to one who had faithfully served them for eight years: and he left the place, and she saw no chance of hearing a word about him in the future, unless it was some second-hand scrap of intelligence, dropped out accidentally by one of the neighbouring clergymen. I had promised to pay her a visit on my return from London in June; but, after the day was fixed, a letter came from Mr. Brontë, saying that she was suffering from so severe an attack of influenza, accompanied with such excruciating pain in the head, that he must request me to defer my visit until she was better. While sorry for the cause, I did not regret that my going was delayed till the season when the moors would be all glorious with the purple bloom of the heather; and thus present a scene about which she had often spoken to me. So we agreed that I should not come to her before August or September. Meanwhile, I received a letter from which I am tempted to take an extract, as it shows both her conception of what fictitious writing ought to be, and her always kindly interest in what I was doing. "July 9th, 1853. "Thank you for your letter; it was as pleasant as a quiet chat, as welcome as spring showers, as reviving as a friend's visit; in short, it was very like a page of 'Cranford.' . . . A thought strikes me. Do you, who have so many friends,--so large a circle of acquaintance,--find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your OWN WOMAN, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how your work may affect other minds; what blame or what sympathy it may call forth? Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? In a word, are you never tempted to make your characters more amiable than the Life, by the inclination to assimilate your thoughts to the thoughts of those who always FEEL kindly, but sometimes fail to SEE justly? Don't answer the question; it is not intended to be answered. . . . Your account of Mrs. Stowe was stimulatingly interesting. I long to see you, to get you to say it, and many other things, all over again. My father continues better. I am better too; but to-day I have a headache again, which will hardly let me write coherently. Give my dear love to M. and M., dear happy girls as they are. You cannot now transmit my message to F. and J. I prized the little wild-flower,--not that I think the sender cares for me; she DOES not, and CANNOT, for she does not know me;--but no matter. In my reminiscences she is a person of a certain distinction. I think hers a fine little nature, frank and of genuine promise. I often see her; as she appeared, stepping supreme from the portico towards the carriage, that evening we went to see 'Twelfth Night.' I believe in J.'s future; I like what speaks in her movements, and what is written upon her face." Towards the latter end of September I went to Haworth. At the risk of repeating something which I have previously said, I will copy out parts of a letter which I wrote at the time. "It was a dull, drizzly Indian-inky day, all the way on the railroad to Keighley, which is a rising wool-manufacturing town, lying in a hollow between hills--not a pretty hollow, but more what the Yorkshire people call a 'bottom,' or 'botham.' I left Keighley in a car for Haworth, four miles off--four tough, steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,--grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields;--stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. Haworth is a long, straggling village one steep narrow street--so steep that the flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, that the horses' feet may have something to cling to, and not slip down backwards; which if they did, they would soon reach Keighley. But if the horses had cats' feet and claws, they would do all the better. Well, we (the man, horse, car; and I) clambered up this street, and reached the church dedicated to St. Autest (who was he?); then we turned off into a lane on the left, past the curate's lodging at the Sexton's, past the school-house, up to the Parsonage yard-door. I went round the house to the front door, looking to the church;--moors everywhere beyond and above. The crowded grave-yard surrounds the house and small grass enclosure for drying clothes. "I don't know that I ever saw a spot more exquisitely clean; the most dainty place for that I ever saw. To be sure, the life is like clock-work. No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose; hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the kitchen, or the buzzing of a fly in the parlour, all over the house. Miss Brontë sits alone in her parlour; breakfasting with her father in his study at nine o'clock. She helps in the housework; for one of their servants, Tabby, is nearly ninety, and the other only a girl. Then I accompanied her in her walks on the sweeping moors the heather-bloom had been blighted by a thunder-storm a day or two before, and was all of a livid brown colour, instead of the blaze of purple glory it ought to have been. Oh those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence! Home to dinner at two. Mr. Brontë has his dinner sent into him. All the small table arrangements had the same dainty simplicity about them. Then we rested, and talked over the clear, bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires were a pretty warm dancing light all over the house. The parlour had been evidently refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Brontë's success has enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into, and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by people of very moderate means. The prevailing colour of the room is crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold grey landscape without. There is her likeness by Richmond, and an engraving from Lawrence's picture of Thackeray; and two recesses, on each side of the high, narrow, old-fashioned mantelpiece, filled with books,--books given to her; books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and tastes; NOT standard books. "She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied niminipimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals, ('stippling,' don't the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to DRAW stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time. "But now to return to our quiet hour of rest after dinner. I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation, if a chair was out of its place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity. We talked over the old times of her childhood; of her elder sister's (Maria's) death,--just like that of Helen Burns in 'Jane Eyre;' of those strange, starved days at school; of the desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way,--writing or drawing; of her weakened eyesight, which prevented her doing anything for two years, from the age of seventeen to nineteen; of her being a governess; of her going to Brussels; whereupon I said I disliked Lucy Snowe, and we discussed M. Paul Emanuel; and I told her of ----'s admiration of 'Shirley,' which pleased her; for the character of Shirley was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans,--great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth. One day, Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil-painting, done by her brother, of herself,--a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen,--and the two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes. . . . Emily had a great dog--half mastiff, half bull-dog--so savage, etc. . . . This dog went to her funeral, walking side by side with her father; and then, to the day of its death, it slept at her room door; snuffing under it, and whining every morning. "We have generally had another walk before tea, which is at six; at half-past eight, prayers; and by nine, all the household are in bed, except ourselves. We sit up together till ten, or past; and after I go, I hear Miss Brontë comedown and walk up and down the room for an hour or so." Copying this letter has brought the days of that pleasant visit very clear before me,--very sad in their clearness. We were so happy together; we were so full of interest in each other's subjects. The day seemed only too short for what we had to say and to hear. I understood her life the better for seeing the place where it had been spent--where she had loved and suffered. Mr. Brontë was a most courteous host; and when he was with us,--at breakfast in his study, or at tea in Charlotte's parlour,--he had a sort of grand and stately way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking appearance. He never seemed quite to have lost the feeling that Charlotte was a child to be guided and ruled, when she was present; and she herself submitted to this with a quiet docility that half amused, half astonished me. But when she had to leave the room, then all his pride in her genius and fame came out. He eagerly listened to everything I could tell him of the high admiration I had at any time heard expressed for her works. He would ask for certain speeches over and over again, as if he desired to impress them on his memory. I remember two or three subjects of the conversations which she and I held in the evenings, besides those alluded to in my letter. I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in "Villette" was so exactly like what I had experienced,--vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep,--wondering what it was like, or how it would be,--till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it. She made many inquiries as to Mrs. Stowe's personal appearance; and it evidently harmonised well with some theory of hers, to hear that the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin was small and slight. It was another theory of hers, that no mixtures of blood produced such fine characters, mentally and morally, as the Scottish and English. I recollect, too, her saying how acutely she dreaded a charge of plagiarism, when, after she had written "Jane Eyre;" she read the thrilling effect of the mysterious scream at midnight in Mrs. Marsh's story of the "Deformed." She also said that, when she read the "Neighbours," she thought every one would fancy that she must have taken her conception of Jane Eyre's character from that of "Francesca," the narrator of Miss Bremer's story. For my own part, I cannot see the slightest resemblance between the two characters, and so I told her; but she persisted in saying that Francesca was Jane Eyre married to a good-natured "Bear" of a Swedish surgeon. We went, not purposely, but accidentally, to see various poor people in our distant walks. From one we had borrowed an umbrella; in the house of another we had taken shelter from a rough September storm. In all these cottages, her quiet presence was known. At three miles from her home, the chair was dusted for her, with a kindly "Sit ye down, Miss Brontë;" and she knew what absent or ailing members of the family to inquire after. Her quiet, gentle words, few though they might be, were evidently grateful to those Yorkshire ears. Their welcome to her, though rough and curt, was sincere and hearty. We talked about the different courses through which life ran. She said, in her own composed manner, as if she had accepted the theory as a fact, that she believed some were appointed beforehand to sorrow and much disappointment; that it did not fall to the lot of all--as Scripture told us--to have their lines fall in pleasant places; that it was well for those who had rougher paths, to perceive that such was God's will concerning them, and try to moderate their expectations, leaving hope to those of a different doom, and seeking patience and resignation as the virtues they were to cultivate. I took a different view: I thought that human lots were more equal than she imagined; that to some happiness and sorrow came in strong patches of light and shadow, (so to speak), while in the lives of others they were pretty equally blended throughout. She smiled, and shook her head, and said she was trying to school herself against ever anticipating any pleasure; that it was better to be brave and submit faithfully; there was some good reason, which we should know in time, why sorrow and disappointment were to be the lot of some on earth. It was better to acknowledge this, and face out the truth in a religious faith. In connection with this conversation, she named a little abortive plan which I had not heard of till then; how, in the previous July, she had been tempted to join some friends (a married couple and their child) in an excursion to Scotland. They set out joyfully; she with especial gladness, for Scotland was a land which had its roots deep down in her imaginative affections, and the glimpse of two days at Edinburgh was all she had as yet seen of it. But, at the first stage after Carlisle, the little yearling child was taken with a slight indisposition; the anxious parents fancied that strange diet disagreed with it, and hurried back to their Yorkshire home as eagerly as, two or three days before, they had set their faces northward, in hopes of a month's pleasant ramble. We parted with many intentions, on both sides, of renewing very frequently the pleasure we had had in being together. We agreed that when she wanted bustle, or when I wanted quiet, we were to let each other know, and exchange visits as occasion required. I was aware that she had a great anxiety on her mind at this time; and being acquainted with its nature, I could not but deeply admire the patient docility which she displayed in her conduct towards her father. Soon after I left Haworth, she went on a visit to Miss Wooler, who was then staying at Hornsea. The time passed quietly and happily with this friend, whose society was endeared to her by every year. To Miss WOOLER "Dec. 12th, 1853. "I wonder how you are spending these long winter evenings. Alone, probably, like me. The thought often crosses me, as I sit by myself, how pleasant it would be if you lived within a walking distance, and I could go to you sometimes, or have you to come and spend a day and night with me. Yes; I did enjoy that week at Hornsea, and I look forward to spring as the period when you will fulfil your promise of coming to visit me. I fear you must be very solitary at Hornsea. How hard to some people of the world it would seem to live your life! how utterly impossible to live it with a serene spirit and an unsoured disposition! It seems wonderful to me, because you are not, like Mrs. ----, phlegmatic and impenetrable, but received from nature feelings of the very finest edge. Such feelings, when they are locked up, sometimes damage the mind and temper. They don't with you. It must be partly principle, partly self-discipline, which keeps you as you are." Of course, as I draw nearer to the years so recently closed, it becomes impossible for me to write with the same fulness of detail as I have hitherto not felt it wrong to use. Miss Brontë passed the winter of 1853-4 in a solitary and anxious manner. But the great conqueror Time was slowly achieving his victory over strong prejudice and human resolve. By degrees Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter's marriage. There is one other letter, addressed to Mr. Dobell, which developes the intellectual side of her character, before we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife, and in the too short, almost perfect, happiness of her nine months of wedded life. "Haworth, near Keighley, "Feb. 3rd, 1854. "My dear Sir,--I can hardly tell you how glad I am to have an opportunity of explaining that taciturnity to which you allude. Your letter came at a period of danger and care, when my father was very ill, and I could not leave his bedside. I answered no letters at that time, and yours was one of three or four that, when leisure returned to me, and I came to consider their purport, it seemed to me such that the time was past for answering them, and I laid them finally aside. If you remember, you asked me to go to London; it was too late either to go or to decline. I was sure you had left London. One circumstance you mentioned--your wife's illness--which I have thought of many a time, and wondered whether she is better. In your present note you do not refer to her, but I trust her health has long ere now been quite restored. "'Balder' arrived safely. I looked at him, before cutting his leaves with singular pleasure. Remembering well his elder brother, the potent 'Roman,' it was natural to give a cordial welcome to a fresh scion of the same house and race. I have read him. He impressed me thus he teems with power; I found in him a wild wealth of life, but I thought his favourite and favoured child would bring his sire trouble--would make his heart ache. It seemed to me, that his strength and beauty were not so much those of Joseph, the pillar of Jacob's age, as of the Prodigal Son, who troubled his father, though he always kept his love. "How is it that while the first-born of genius often brings honour, the second as almost often proves a source of depression and care? I could almost prophesy that your third will atone for any anxiety inflicted by this his immediate predecessor. "There is power in that character of 'Balder,' and to me a certain horror. Did you mean it to embody, along with force, any of the special defects of the artistic character? It seems to me that those defects were never thrown out in stronger lines. I did not and could not think you meant to offer him as your cherished ideal of the true, great poet; I regarded him as a vividly-coloured picture of inflated self-esteem, almost frantic aspiration; of a nature that has made a Moloch of intellect--offered up; in pagan fires, the natural affections--sacrificed the heart to the brain. Do we not all know that true greatness is simple, self-oblivious, prone to unambitious, unselfish attachments? I am certain you feel this truth in your heart of hearts. "But if the critics err now (as yet I have seen none of their lucubrations), you shall one day set them right in the second part of 'Balder.' You shall show them that you too know--better, perhaps, than they--that the truly great man is too sincere in his affections to grudge a sacrifice; too much absorbed in his work to talk loudly about it; too intent on finding the best way to accomplish what he undertakes to think great things of himself--the instrument. And if God places seeming impediments in his way--if his duties sometimes seem to hamper his powers--he feels keenly, perhaps writhes, under the slow torture of hindrance and delay; but if there be a true man's heart in his breast, he can bear, submit, wait patiently. "Whoever speaks to me of 'Balder'--though I live too retired a life to come often in the way of comment--shall be answered according to your suggestion and my own impression. Equity demands that you should be your own interpreter. Good-bye for the present, and believe me, "Faithfully and gratefully, "CHARLOTTE BRONTË. "Sydney Dobell, Esq." A letter to her Brussels schoolfellow gives an idea of the external course of things during this winter. "March 8th. "I was very glad to see your handwriting again. It is, I believe, a year since I heard from you. Again and again you have recurred to my thoughts lately, and I was beginning to have some sad presages as to the cause of your silence. Your letter happily does away with all these; it brings, on the whole, glad tidings both of your papa, mama, your sisters, and, last but not least, your dear respected English self. "My dear father has borne the severe winter very well, a circumstance for which I feel the more thankful as he had many weeks of very precarious health last summer, following an attack from which he suffered in June, and which for a few hours deprived him totally of sight, though neither his mind, speech, nor even his powers of motion were in the least affected. I can hardly tell you how thankful I was, when, after that dreary and almost despairing interval of utter darkness, some gleam of daylight became visible to him once more. I had feared that paralysis had seized the optic nerve. A sort of mist remained for a long time; and, indeed, his vision is not yet perfectly clear, but he can read, write, and walk about, and he preaches TWICE every Sunday, the curate only reading the prayers. YOU can well understand how earnestly I wish and pray that sight may be spared him to the end; he so dreads the privation of blindness. His mind is just as strong and active as ever, and politics interest him as they do YOUR papa. The Czar, the war, the alliance between France and England--into all these things he throws himself heart and soul; they seem to carry him back to his comparatively young days, and to renew the excitement of the last great European struggle. Of course my father's sympathies (and mine too) are all with Justice and Europe against Tyranny and Russia. "Circumstanced as I have been, you will comprehend that I have had neither the leisure nor the inclination to go from home much during the past year. I spent a week with Mrs. Gaskell in the spring, and a fortnight with some other friends more recently, and that includes the whole of my visiting since I saw you last. My life is, indeed, very uniform and retired--more so than is quite healthful either for mind or body; yet I find reason for often-renewed feelings of gratitude, in the sort of support which still comes and cheers me on from time to time. My health, though not unbroken, is, I sometimes fancy, rather stronger on the whole than it was three years ago: headache and dyspepsia are my worst ailments. Whether I shall come up to town this season for a few days I do not yet know; but if I do, I shall hope to call in P. Place." In April she communicated the fact of her engagement to Miss Wooler. "Haworth, April 12th. "My dear Miss Wooler,--The truly kind interest which you always taken in my affairs makes me feel that it is due to you to transmit an early communication on a subject respecting which I have already consulted you more than once. I must tell you then, that since I wrote last, papa's mind has gradually come round to a view very different to that which he once took; and that after some correspondence, and as the result of a visit Mr. Nicholls paid here about a week ago, it was agreed that he was to resume the curacy of Haworth, as soon as papa's present assistant is provided with a situation, and in due course of time he is to be received as an inmate into this house. "It gives me unspeakable content to see that now my father has once admitted this new view of the case, he dwells on it very complacently. In all arrangements, his convenience and seclusion will be scrupulously respected. Mr. Nicholls seems deeply to feel the wish to comfort and sustain his declining years. I think from Mr. Nicholls' character I may depend on this not being a mere transitory impulsive feeling, but rather that it will be accepted steadily as a duty, and discharged tenderly as an office of affection. The destiny which Providence in His goodness and wisdom seems to offer me will not, I am aware, be generally regarded as brilliant, but I trust I see in it some germs of real happiness. I trust the demands of both feeling and duty will be in some measure reconciled by the step in contemplation. It is Mr. Nicholls' wish that the marriage should take place this summer; he urges the month of July, but that seems very soon. "When you write to me, tell me how you are. . . . I have now decidedly declined the visit to London; the ensuing three months will bring me abundance of occupation; I could not afford to throw away a month. . . . Papa has just got a letter from the good and dear bishop, which has touched and pleased us much; it expresses so cordial an approbation of Mr. Nicholls' return to Haworth (respecting which he was consulted), and such kind gratification at the domestic arrangements which are to ensue. It seems his penetration discovered the state of things when he was here in June 1853." She expressed herself in other letters, as thankful to One who had guided her through much difficulty and much distress and perplexity of mind; and yet she felt what most thoughtful women do, who marry when the first flush of careless youth is over, that there was a strange half-sad feeling, in making announcements of an engagement--for cares and fears came mingled inextricably with hopes. One great relief to her mind at this time was derived from the conviction that her father took a positive pleasure in all the thoughts about and preparations for her wedding. He was anxious that things should be expedited, and was much interested in every preliminary arrangement for the reception of Mr. Nicholls into the Parsonage as his daughter's husband. This step was rendered necessary by Mr. Brontë's great age, and failing sight, which made it a paramount obligation on so dutiful a daughter as Charlotte, to devote as much time and assistance as ever in attending to his wants. Mr. Nicholls, too, hoped that he might be able to add some comfort and pleasure by his ready presence, on any occasion when the old clergyman might need his services. At the beginning of May, Miss Brontë left home to pay three visits before her marriage. The first was to us. She only remained three days, as she had to go to the neighbourhood of Leeds, there to make such purchases as were required for her marriage. Her preparations, as she said, could neither be expensive nor extensive; consisting chiefly in a modest replenishing of her wardrobe, some re-papering and re-painting in the Parsonage; and, above all, converting the small flagged passage-room, hitherto used only for stores (which was behind her sitting room), into a study for her husband. On this idea, and plans for his comfort, as well as her father's, her mind dwelt a good deal; and we talked them over with the same unwearying happiness which, I suppose, all women feel in such discussions--especially when money considerations call for that kind of contrivance which Charles Lamb speaks of in his Essay on Old China, as forming so great an addition to the pleasure of obtaining a thing at last. "Haworth, May 22nd. "Since I came home I have been very busy stitching; the little new room is got into order, and the green and white curtains are up; they exactly suit the papering, and look neat and clean enough. I had a letter a day or two since, announcing that Mr. Nicholls comes to-morrow. I feel anxious about him; more anxious on one point than I dare quite express to myself. It seems he has again been suffering sharply from his rheumatic affection. I hear this not from himself, but from another quarter. He was ill while I was in Manchester and B----. He uttered no complaint to me; dropped no hint on the subject. Alas he was hoping he had got the better of it, and I know how this contradiction of his hopes will sadden him. For unselfish reasons he did so earnestly wish this complaint might not become chronic. I fear--I fear; but if he is doomed to suffer, so much the more will he need care and help. Well! come what may, God help and strengthen both him and me! I look forward to to-morrow with a mixture of impatience and anxiety." Mr. Brontë had a slight illness which alarmed her much. Besides, all the weight of care involved in the household preparations pressed on the bride in this case--not unpleasantly, only to the full occupation of her time. She was too busy to unpack her wedding dresses for several days after they arrived from Halifax; yet not too busy to think of arrangements by which Miss Wooler's journey to be present at the marriage could be facilitated. "I write to Miss Wooler to-day. Would it not be better, dear, if you and she could arrange to come to Haworth on the same day, arrive at Keighley by the same train; then I could order the cab to meet you at the station, and bring you on with your luggage? In this hot weather walking would be quite out of the question, either for you or for her; and I know she would persist in doing it if left to herself, and arrive half killed. I thought it better to mention this arrangement to you first, and then, if you liked it, you could settle the time, etc., with Miss Wooler, and let me know. Be sure and give me timely information, that I may write to the Devonshire Arms about the cab. "Mr. Nicholls is a kind, considerate fellow. With all his masculine faults, he enters into my wishes about having the thing done quietly, in a way that makes me grateful; and if nobody interferes and spoils his arrangements, he will manage it so that not a soul in Haworth shall be aware of the day. He is so thoughtful, too, about 'the ladies,'--that is, you and Miss Wooler. Anticipating, too, the very arrangements I was going to propose to him about providing for your departure, etc. He and Mr. S---- come to ---- the evening before; write me a note to let me know they are there; precisely at eight in the morning they will be in the church, and there we are to meet them. Mr. and Mrs. Grant are asked to the breakfast, not to the ceremony. It was fixed that the marriage was to take place on the 29th of June. Her two friends arrived at Haworth Parsonage the day before; and the long summer afternoon and evening were spent by Charlotte in thoughtful arrangements for the morrow, and for her father's comfort during her absence from home. When all was finished--the trunk packed, the morning's breakfast arranged, the wedding-dress laid out,--just at bedtime, Mr. Brontë announced his intention of stopping at home while the others went to church. What was to be done? Who was to give the bride away? There were only to be the officiating clergyman, the bride and bridegroom, the bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler present. The Prayer-book was referred to; and there it was seen that the Rubric enjoins that the Minister shall receive "the woman from her father's or FRIEND'S hands," and that nothing is specified as to the sex of the "friend." So Miss Wooler, ever kind in emergency, volunteered to give her old pupil away. The news of the wedding had slipt abroad before the little party came out of church, and many old and humble friends were there, seeing her look "like a snow-drop," as they say. Her dress was white embroidered muslin, with a lace mantle, and white bonnet trimmed with green leaves, which perhaps might suggest the resemblance to the pale wintry flower. Mr. Nicholls and she went to visit his friends and relations in Ireland; and made a tour by Killarney, Glengariff, Tarbert, Tralee, and Cork, seeing scenery, of which she says, "some parts exceeded all I had ever imagined." . . . "I must say I like my new relations. My dear husband, too, appears in a new light in his own country. More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides. Some of the old servants and followers of the family tell me I am a most fortunate person; for that I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country. . . . I trust I feel thankful to God for having enabled me to make what seems a right choice; and I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable man." Henceforward the sacred doors of home are closed upon her married life. We, her loving friends, standing outside, caught occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling of the gladness within; and we looked at each other, and gently said, "After a hard and long struggle--after many cares and many bitter sorrows--she is tasting happiness now!" We thought of the slight astringencies of her character, and how they would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace. We remembered her trials, and were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. Those who saw her, saw an outward change in her look, telling of inward things. And we thought, and we hoped, and we prophesied, in our great love and reverence. But God's ways are not as our ways! Hear some of the low murmurs of happiness we, who listened, heard:-- "I really seem to have had scarcely a spare moment since that dim quiet June morning, when you, E----, and myself all walked down to Haworth Church. Not that I have been wearied or oppressed; but the fact is, my time is not my own now; somebody else wants a good portion of it, and says, 'we must do so and so.' We DO so and so, accordingly; and it generally seems the right thing. . . . We have had many callers from a distance, and latterly some little occupation in the way of preparing for a small village entertainment. Both Mr. Nicholls and myself wished much to make some response for the hearty welcome and general goodwill shown by the parishioners on his return; accordingly, the Sunday and day scholars and teachers, the church-ringers, singers, etc., to the number of five hundred, were asked to tea and supper in the School-room. They seemed to enjoy it much, and it was very pleasant to see their happiness. One of the villagers, in proposing my husband's health, described him as a 'consistent Christian and a kind gentleman.' I own the words touched me deeply, and I thought (as I know YOU would have thought had you been present) that to merit and win such a character was better than to earn either wealth, or fame, or power. I am disposed to echo that high but simple eulogium. . . . My dear father was not well when we returned from Ireland. I am, however, most thankful to say that he is better now. May God preserve him to us yet for some years! The wish for his continued life, together with a certain solicitude for his happiness and health, seems, I scarcely know why, even stronger in me now than before I was married. Papa has taken no duty since we returned; and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice, I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured papa good aid in his old age." "September 19th. "Yes! I am thankful to say my husband is in improved health and spirits. It makes me content and grateful to hear him from time to time avow his happiness in the brief, plain phrase of sincerity. My own life is more occupied than it used to be I have not so much time for thinking I am obliged to be more practical, for my dear Arthur is a very practical, as well as a very punctual and methodical man. Every morning he is in the National School by nine o'clock; he gives the children religious instruction till half-past ten. Almost every afternoon he pays visits amongst the poor parishioners. Of course, he often finds a little work for his wife to do, and I hope she is not sorry to help him. I believe it is not bad for me that his bent should be so wholly towards matters of life and active usefulness; so little inclined to the literary and contemplative. As to his continued affection and kind attentions it does not become me to say much of them; but they neither change nor diminish." Her friend and bridesmaid came to pay them a visit in October. I was to have gone also, but I allowed some little obstacle to intervene, to my lasting regret. "I say nothing about the war; but when I read of its horrors, I cannot help thinking that it is one of the greatest curses that ever fell upon mankind. I trust it may not last long, for it really seems to me that no glory to be gained can compensate for the sufferings which must be endured. This may seem a little ignoble and unpatriotic; but I think that as we advance towards middle age, nobleness and patriotism have a different signification to us to that which we accept while young." "You kindly inquire after Papa. He is better, and seems to gain strength as the weather gets colder; indeed, of late years health has always been better in winter than in summer. We are all indeed pretty well; and, for my own part, it is long since I have known such comparative immunity from headache, etc., as during the last three months. My life is different from what it used to be. May God make me thankful for it! I have a good, kind, attached husband; and every day my own attachment to him grows stronger." Late in the autumn, Sir James Kay Shuttleworth crossed the border-hills that separate Lancashire from Yorkshire, and spent two or three days with them. About this time, Mr. Nicholls was offered a living of much greater value than his curacy at Haworth, and in many ways the proposal was a very advantageous one; but he felt himself bound to Haworth as long as Mr. Brontë lived. Still, this offer gave his wife great and true pleasure, as a proof of the respect in which her husband was held. "Nov. 29. "I intended to have written a line yesterday, but just as I was sitting down for the purpose, Arthur called to me to take a walk. We set off, not intending to go far; but, though wild and cloudy, it was fair in the morning; when we had got about half a mile on the moors, Arthur suggested the idea of the waterfall; after the melted snow, he said, it would be fine. I had often wished to see it in its winter power,--so we walked on. It was fine indeed; a perfect torrent racing over the rocks, white and beautiful! It began to rain while we were watching it, and we returned home under a streaming sky. However, I enjoyed the walk inexpressibly, and would not have missed the spectacle on any account." She did not achieve this walk of seven or eight miles, in such weather, with impunity. She began to shiver soon after her return home, in spite of every precaution, and had a bad lingering sore throat and cold, which hung about her; and made her thin and weak. "Did I tell you that our poor little Flossy is dead? She drooped for a single day, and died quietly in the night without pain. The loss even of a dog was very saddening; yet, perhaps, no dog ever had a happier life, or an easier death." On Christmas-day she and her husband walked to the poor old woman (whose calf she had been set to seek in former and less happy days), carrying with them a great spice-cake to make glad her heart. On Christmas-day many a humble meal in Haworth was made more plentiful by her gifts. Early in the new year (1855), Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls went to visit Sir James Kay Shuttleworth at Gawthorpe. They only remained two or three days, but it so fell out that she increased her lingering cold, by a long walk over damp ground in thin shoes. Soon after her return, she was attacked by new sensations of perpetual nausea, and ever-recurring faintness. After this state of things had lasted for some time; she yielded to Mr. Nicholls' wish that a doctor should be sent for. He came, and assigned a natural cause for her miserable indisposition; a little patience, and all would go right. She, who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea. "A wren would have starved on what she ate during those last six weeks," says one. Tabby's health had suddenly and utterly given way, and she died in this time of distress and anxiety respecting the last daughter of the house she had served so long. Martha tenderly waited on her mistress, and from time to time tried to cheer her with the thought of the baby that was coming. "I dare say I shall be glad some time," she would say; "but I am so ill--so weary--" Then she took to her bed, too weak to sit up. From that last couch she wrote two notes--in pencil. The first, which has no date, is addressed to her own "Dear Nell." "I must write one line out of my weary bed. The news of M----'s probable recovery came like a ray of joy to me. I am not going to talk of my sufferings--it would be useless and painful. I want to give you an assurance, which I know will comfort you--and that is, that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights. Write and tell me about Mrs. ----'s case; how long was she ill, and in what way? Papa--thank God!--is better. Our poor old Tabby is DEAD and BURIED. Give my kind love to Miss Wooler. May God comfort and help you. "C. B. NICHOLLS." The other--also in faint, faint pencil marks--was to her Brussels schoolfellow. "Feb. 15th. "A few lines of acknowledgment your letter SHALL have, whether well or ill. At present I am confined to my bed with illness, and have been so for three weeks. Up to this period, since my marriage, I have had excellent health. My husband and I live at home with my father; of course, I could not leave HIM. He is pretty well, better than last summer. No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness. Deeply I sympathise in all you tell me about Dr. W. and your excellent mother's anxiety. I trust he will not risk another operation. I cannot write more now; for I am much reduced and very weak. God bless you all.--Yours affectionately, "C. B. NICHOLLS." I do not think she ever wrote a line again. Long days and longer nights went by; still the same relentless nausea and faintness, and still borne on in patient trust. About the third week in March there was a change; a low wandering delirium came on; and in it she begged constantly for food and even for stimulants. She swallowed eagerly now; but it was too late. Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. "Oh!" she whispered forth, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy." Early on Saturday morning, March 31st, the solemn tolling of Haworth church-bell spoke forth the fact of her death to the villagers who had known her from a child, and whose hearts shivered within them as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house. CHAPTER XIV. I have always been much struck with a passage in Mr. Forster's Life of Goldsmith. Speaking of the scene after his death, the writer says:-- "The staircase of Brick Court is said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic; women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable." This came into my mind when I heard of some of the circumstances attendant on Charlotte's funeral. Few beyond that circle of hills knew that she, whom the nations praised far off, lay dead that Easter mooring. Of kith and kin she had more in the grave to which she was soon to be borne, than among the living. The two mourners, stunned with their great grief, desired not the sympathy of strangers. One member out of most of the families in the parish was bidden to the funeral; and it became an act of self-denial in many a poor household to give up to another the privilege of paying their last homage to her; and those who were excluded from the formal train of mourners thronged the churchyard and church, to see carried forth, and laid beside her own people, her whom, not many months ago, they had looked at as a pale white bride, entering on a new life with trembling happy hope. Among those humble friends who passionately grieved over the dead, was a village girl who had been seduced some little time before, but who had found a holy sister in Charlotte. She had sheltered her with her help, her counsel, her strengthening words; had ministered to her needs in her time of trial. Bitter, bitter was the grief of this poor young woman, when she heard that her friend was sick unto death, and deep is her mourning until this day. A blind girl, living some four miles from Haworth, loved Mrs. Nicholls so dearly that, with many cries and entreaties, she implored those about her to lead her along the roads, and over the moor-paths, that she might hear the last solemn words, "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ." Such were the mourners over Charlotte Brontë's grave. I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debatable land. One who knew her long and well,--the "Mary" of this Life--writes thus of her dead friend:-- "She thought much of her duty, and had loftier and clearer notions of it than most people, and held fast to them with more success. It was done, it seems to me, with much more difficulty than people have of stronger nerves, and better fortunes. All her life was but labour and pain; and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure. I don't know what use you can make of all I have said. I have written it with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet, what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world's judgment for her use of some of the faculties she had,--not the best,--but still the only ones she could turn to strangers' benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for a judgment on her from such a world?" But I turn from the critical, unsympathetic public--inclined to judge harshly because they have only seen superficially and not thought deeply. I appeal to that larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence with warm, full hearts all noble virtue. To that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë. 
11680	----	GEORGE ELIOT: A CRITICAL STUDY OF HER LIFE, WRITINGS AND PHILOSOPHY. BY GEORGE WILLIS COOKE AUTHOR OF "RALPH WALDO EMERSON: HIS LIFE, WRITINGS AND PHILOSOPHY." 1884 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. The publication of a new edition of this work permits me to say that the essay on "The Lady Novelists," quoted in the seventh chapter, was written by George Henry Lewes. Its opinions, however, are substantially those of George Eliot, and they will be found in harmony with her own words. Confessing to the error, I yet venture to let the quotations, and the comments on them, stand as at first made. The three poems mentioned on page 75, were among the latest of the productions of George Eliot's pen. It has been suggested to me that I have not done perfect justice to George Henry Lewes, especially in what I say of his books on the Spanish drama and the life of Goethe. I have carefully reconsidered what I wrote of him, and find no occasion for any change of judgment, though two or three words might properly give place to others of a more appreciative meaning. My book has met with much greater praise than I could have expected. Its errors, I have no doubt, are quite numerous enough; and yet I venture to think the main thought of the book is correct. MARCH, 1884. CONTENTS. PREFACE I. EARLY LIFE II. TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR III. MARRIAGE IV. CAREER AS AN AUTHOR V. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS VI. LITERARY TRAITS AND TENDENCIES VII. THEORY OF THE NOVEL VIII. POETIC METHODS IX. PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE X. DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS XI. RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES XII. ETHICAL SPIRIT XIII. EARLIER NOVELS XIV. ROMOLA XV. FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH XVI. DANIEL DERONDA XVII. THE SPANISH GYPSY AND OTHER POEMS XVIII. LATER ESSAYS XIX. THE ANALYTIC METHOD XX. THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT XXI. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. EARLY LIFE. The poet and the novelist write largely out of personal experience, and must give expression to the effects of their own history. What they have seen and felt, gives shape and tone to what they write; that which is nearest their own hearts is poured forth in their books. To ignore these influences is to overlook a better part of what they write, and is often to lose the explanation of many features of their work. Shakspere is one of those who are of no time or place, whose words gain no added meaning in view of what he was and how he lived; but it is not so with a great number of the best and most inspiring writers. The era in which they lived, the intellectual surroundings afforded them by their country and generation, the subtle phases of sentiment and aspiration of their immediate time and place, are all essential to a true appreciation of their books. It is so of Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Wordsworth, Emerson, and how many more! As we must know the eighteenth century in its social spirit, literary tendencies, revolutionary aims, romantic aspirations, philosophy and science, to know Goethe, so must we know the nineteenth century in its scientific attainments, agnostic philosophy, realistic spirit and humanitarian aims, in order to know George Eliot. She is a product of her time, as Lessing, Goethe, Wordsworth and Byron were of theirs; a voice to utter its purpose and meaning, as well as a trumpet-call to lead it on. As Goethe came after Lessing, Herder and Kant, so George Eliot came after Comte, Mill and Spencer. Her books are to be read in the light of their speculations, and she embodied in literary forms what they uttered as science or philosophy. Not only is a poet's mind affected by the tone of thought about him, but his personal experiences and surroundings are likely to have a large influence on what he writes. Scott was deeply affected by the romantic atmosphere of his native land. Her birthplace and youthful surroundings had a like effect on George Eliot. The Midland home, the plain village life, the humble, toiling country folk, shaped for her the scenes and characters about which she was to write. Some knowledge of her early home and the influences amidst which her mind was formed, help largely to an appreciation of her books and the views of life which she presents in them. The Midland region of England she has pictured with something of that accuracy with which Scott described the Border. It is a country of historic memories. Near by her childhood home was the forest of Arden and Astly Castle, the home of Sir John Grey, whose widow, Elizabeth Woodville, became the queen of Edward IV. This was also one of the homes of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, who was found in a hollow tree near by after his rebellion; and the home, likewise, of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. In another direction was Bosworth Field; and within twenty miles was Stratford-upon-Avon. The ancient city of Coventry was not far distant. It was not these historic regions which attracted her, however, so much as the pleasant country, the common people, the quiet villages. With observant eyes she saw the world about her as it was and she entered into the heart of its life, and has painted it for us in a most sympathetic, appreciative spirit. The simple, homely, unromantic life of middle England she has made immortal with her wit, her satire, her fine description, and her keen love of all that is human. She herself recognized the importance of her early surroundings. In one of her letters she used these words: It is interesting, I think, to know whether a writer was born in a central or border district--a condition which always has a strongly determining influence. I was born in Warwickshire, but certain family traditions connected with more northerly districts made these districts a region of poetry to me in my early childhood. I was brought up in the Church of England, and have never joined any other religious society, but I have had close acquaintance with many Dissenters of various sects, from Calvinistic Anabaptists to Unitarians. The influence of the surroundings of childhood upon character she has more than once touched upon in her books. In the second chapter of _Theophrastus Such_, she says,-- I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged. In the same essay she says,-- Our Midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me. In _Daniel Deronda_ she most tenderly expresses the same deep conviction concerning the soul's need of anchorage in some familiar and inspiring scene, with which the memories of childhood may be delightfully associated. Her own fond recollections lent force to whatever philosophical significance such a theory may have had for her. A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge; a spot where the definiteness of early knowledge may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and monkeys, may spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. Mary Ann Evans was born at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of Colton, Warwickshire, England, November 22, 1819. In after years she adopted the abbreviated form of her name, and was known by her friends as Marian. When she was six months old the family moved to Griff House, which was situated half-way between Bedworth, a mining village, and the manufacturing town of Nuneaton. In approaching Griff from Nuneaton, a little valley, known as Griff Hollows, is passed, much resembling the "Red Deeps" of _The Mill on the Floss_. On the right, a little beyond, is Griff House, a comfortable and substantial dwelling surrounded by pleasant gardens and lawns. Robert Evans, her father, was born at Ellaston, Staffordshire, of a substantial family of mechanics and craftsmen. He was of massive build, tall, wide-shouldered and strong, and his features were of a marked, emphatic cast. He began life as a master carpenter, then became a forester, and finally a land agent. He was induced to settle in Warwickshire by Sir Roger Newdigate, his principal employer, and for the remainder of his life he had charge of five large estates in the neighborhood. In this employment he was successful, being respected and trusted to the fullest extent by his employers, his name becoming a synonym for trustworthiness. Marian many times sketched the main traits of her father's character, as in the love of perfect work in "Stradivarius." He had Adam Bede's stalwart figure and robust manhood. Caleb Garth, in _Middlemarch_, is in many ways a fine portrait of him as to the nature of his employment, his delight in the soil, and his honest, rugged character. Caleb was wont to say that "it's a fine thing to have the chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done--that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I'd sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most honorable work that is." Robert Evans, like Caleb Garth, "while faithfully serving his employers enjoyed great popularity among their tenants. He was gentle but of indomitable firmness; and while stern to the idle and unthrifty, he did not press heavily on those who might be behindhand with their rent, owing to ill luck or misfortune, on quarter days." While still living in Staffordshire, Robert Evans lost his first wife, by whom he had a son and a daughter. His second wife, the mother of Marian, was a Miss Pearson, a gentle, loving woman, and a notable housewife. She is described in the Mrs. Hackit of "Amos Barton," whose industry, sharp tongue, epigrammatic speech and marked character were taken from life. Something of Mrs. Poyser also entered into her nature. She had three children, Christiana, Isaac and Mary Ann. The house at Griff was situated in a rich landscape, and was a large, commodious farm-house of red brick, ivy-covered, and of two stories' height. At the back was a large garden, and a farm-yard with barns and sheds. In the series of sonnets entitled "Brother and Sister," Marian has given some account of her early life. She had the attachment there described for her brother Isaac, and followed him about with the same persistence and affection. The whole of that poem is autobiographical. The account of the mother gives a delightful glimpse into Marian's child-life: Our mother bade us keep the trodden ways, Stroked down my tippet, set my brother's frill, Then with the benediction of her gaze Clung to us lessening, and pursued us still Across the homestead to the rookery elms, Whose tall old trunks had each a grassy mound, So rich for us, we counted them as realms With varied products. The early life of Marian Evans has, in many features of it, been very fully described in the story of Maggie Tulliver. How far her own life is that of Maggie may be seen by comparing the earlier chapters in _The Mill on the Floss_ with the "Brother and Sister." The incident described in the poem, of her brother leaving her in charge of the fishing-rod, is repeated in all its main features in the experiences of Maggie. In the poem she describes an encounter with a gipsy, which again recalls Maggie's encounter with some persons of that race. The whole account of her childhood life with her brother, her trust in him, their delight in the common pleasures of childhood, and the impression made on her by the beauties of nature, reappears in striking similarity in the description of the child-life of Maggie and Tom. These elements of her early experience and observation of life have been well described by one who knew her personally. This person says that "Maggie Tulliver's childhood is clearly full of the most accurate personal recollections." Marian Evans very early became an enthusiastic reader of the best books. In an almanac she found a portion of one of the essays of Charles Lamb, and remembered reading it with great delight. In her seventh year a copy of _Waverley_ was loaned to her older sister. She became herself intensely fascinated by it, and when it was returned before she had completed it she was thrown into much distress. The story so possessed her that she began to complete it in writing, according to her own conception. When this was discovered, the book was again secured for her perusal. This incident she has described in a sonnet, which appears as the motto to the fifty-seventh chapter of _Middlemarch_. They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain, lake and scaur, And larger yet with wonder, love, belief, Toward Walter Scott, who living far away Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran, They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan. Not only was she a great reader, but she was also a diligent and even a precocious student, learning easily and rapidly whatever she undertook to acquire in the way of knowledge. She was first sent, with her brother Isaac, to a free school in the village of Griff. Among her mates was William Jacques, the original of Bob Jakins in _The Mill on the Floss_. When seven years old she went to a girls' school at Nuneaton. Her schoolmates describe her as being then a "quiet, reserved girl, with strongly lined, almost masculine features, and a profusion of light hair worn in curls round her head." The abundance of her curling hair caused her much trouble, and she once cut it off, as Maggie Tulliver did, because it would not "lie straight." "One of her school-fellows," we are told, "recalls that the first time she sat down to the piano she astonished her companions by the knowledge of music she had already acquired. She mastered her lessons with an ease which excited wonder. She read with avidity. She joined very rarely in the sports of her companions, and her diffidence and shrinking sensibility prevented her from forming any close friendship among her school-fellows. When she stood up in the class, her features, heavy in repose, were lighted by eager excitement, which found further vent in nervous movements of her hands. At this school Marian was well taught in English, with drawing, music, and some little French." Leaving this school at the age of twelve, she went to that of the Misses Franklin in Coventry, a large town a few miles distant. To the careful training received there she was much indebted, and in after years often spoke of it with the heartiest appreciation. One of her friends, Edith Simcox, has given an account of this school and of Marian's studies there. "Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, towards the railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an old-fashioned five-windowed, Queen Anne sort of dwelling, with a shell-shaped cornice over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining a quaint brick and timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the school, and the name of 'little mamma,' given by her school-fellows, is a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which characterized her in later years, and perhaps more especially in intercourse with her own sex. Prayer meetings were in vogue among the girls, following the example of their elders; and while taking, no doubt, a leading part in them, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as others. At the same time, nothing was farther from her nature than any sceptical inclination, and she used to pounce with avidity upon any approach to argumentative theology within her reach, carrying Paley's _Evidences_ up to her bedroom, and devouring it as she lay upon the floor alone." During the three years Marian attended this school she held aloof from the other pupils, was grave and womanly in her deportment. She acquired Miss Rebecca Franklin's slow and precise method of speaking, and to her diligent training owed her life-long habit of giving a finished completeness to all her sentences. It seems that her imagination was alive at this time, and being slowly cultivated. She was in the habit of scribbling verses in her books and elsewhere. A fellow-pupil during the time she was a member of this boarding-school has given these reminiscences of Marian's life there: "She learned everything with ease," says this person, "but was passionately devoted to music, and became thoroughly accomplished as a pianist. Her masters always brought the most difficult solos for her to play in public, and everywhere said she might make a performer equal to any then upon the concert stage. She was keenly susceptible to what she thought her lack of personal beauty, frequently saying that she was not pleased with a single feature of her face or figure. She was not especially noted as a writer, but so uncommon was her intellectual power that we all thought her capable of any effort; and so great was the charm of her conversation, that there was continual strife among the girls as to which of them should walk with her. The teachers had to settle it by making it depend upon alphabetical succession." Leaving the school in Coventry at the age of fifteen, Marian continued her studies at home. The year following, her mother died; and this event, as she afterwards said, first made her acquainted with "the unspeakable grief of a last parting." Soon after, her older sister and her brother were married and left home. She alone remained with her father, and was for several years his housekeeper. "He offered to get a housekeeper," says Miss Blind, "as not the house only, but farm matters had to be looked after, and he was always tenderly considerate of 'the little wench,' as he called her. But his daughter preferred taking the whole management of the place into her own hands, and she was as conscientious and diligent in the discharge of her domestic duties as in the prosecution of the studies she carried on at the same time." Her experiences at this period have been made use of in more than one of her characters. The dairy scenes in _Adam Bede_ are so perfectly realistic because she was familiar with all the processes of butter and cheese making. In 1841 her father gave up his business to his son and moved to Foleshill, one mile from Coventry. A pleasant house and surroundings made the new home, and her habits of thought and life became more exact and fastidious. The frequent absence of her father gave her much time for reading, which she eagerly improved. Books were more accessible, though her own library was a good one. She zealously began and carried on a systematic course of studies, such as gave her the most thorough results of culture. She took up Latin and Greek with the head master of the Coventry grammar-school, and became familiar with the classic literatures. French, German and Italian were read in all the master-pieces of those languages. The Old Testament was also studied in the original; at the same time she became a proficient player on the piano, and obtained a thorough knowledge of music. During several years of quiet and continuous study she laid the foundations of that accurate and wide-reaching knowledge which was so notable a feature of her life and work. It was a careful, systematic knowledge she acquired, such as entitled her to rank as an educated person in the fullest sense. Her painstaking thoroughness, and her energetic application, were as remarkable at this time as in later years. Her knowledge was mainly self-acquired, but it was in no sense superficial. It is difficult to see in what way it could have been improved, even if the universities had been open to her. Her life and her studies at Coventry have been well described by one who knew her. We are told that "in this somewhat more populous neighborhood she soon became known as a person of more than common interest, and, moreover, as a most devoted daughter and the excellent manager of her father's household. There was perhaps little at first sight which betokened genius in that quiet gentle-mannered girl, with pale grave face, naturally pensive in expression: and ordinary acquaintances regarded her chiefly for the kindness and sympathy that were never wanting to any. But to those with whom, by some unspoken affinity, her soul could expand, her expressive gray eyes would light up with intense meaning and humor, and the low, sweet voice, with its peculiar mannerism of speaking--which by the way wore off in after years--would give utterance to thoughts so rich and singular that converse with Miss Evans, even in those days, made speech with other people seem flat and common. Miss Evans was an exemplification of the fact that a great genius is not an exceptional, capricious product of nature, but a thing of slow, laborious growth, the fruit of industry and the general culture of the faculties. At Foleshill, with ample means and leisure, her real education began. She acquired French, German and Italian from Signor Brezzi. An acquaintance with Hebrew was the result of her own unaided efforts. From Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michaels, Coventry, she received lessons in music, although it was her own fine musical sense which made her in after years an admirable pianoforte player. Nothing once learned escaped her marvellous memory; and her keen sympathy with all human feelings, in which lay the secret of her power of discriminating character, caused a constant fund of knowledge to flow into her treasure-house from the social world about her." Marian Evans early showed an unusual interest in religious subjects. Her parents belonged to the Established Church, while other members of the family were zealous Methodists. Religion was a subject which occupied much of their attention, and several of them were engaged in one way and another in its inculcation. Marian was an attentive listener to the sermons preached in the parish church, and at the age of twelve was teaching in a Sunday school held in a cottage near her father's house. Up to the age of eighteen she was a most devoted believer in Christianity, and her zeal was so great that Evangelicalism came to represent her mode of thought and feeling. She was a somewhat rigid Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm. After her removal to Coventry, where her reading was of a wider range and her circle of friends increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind. In a letter written to Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her religious experiences at this period. In it she described an aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris in _Adam Bede_. There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far-between visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off native country, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a rich builder) in Staffordshire--but _not_ my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of things--are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood. But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married and I was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that _I_ should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament. I _was_ delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--about sixty--and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray--a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference--as you will believe--was not _simply_ physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners--very loving--and (what she must have been from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and the love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious Dissenters before; the only freshness I found, in our talk, came from the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and though _she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach_, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister, once greatly respected, who from the action of trouble upon him had taken to small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. "But I hope the good man's in heaven, for all that," said my uncle. "Oh, yes," said my aunt, with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, "Mr. A's in heaven--that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now! One who has been permitted to read the letters of Marian Evans written to this aunt, has given the following account of them, which throws much light on her religious attitude at this period: "Most of the epistles are addressed to my 'dear uncle and aunt,' and all reveal George Eliot's great talents. The style is elegant and graceful, and the letters abound in beautiful metaphor; but their most striking characteristic is the religious tinge that pervades them all. Nearly every line denotes that George Eliot was an earnest biblical student, and that she was, especially in the years 1839 and 1840, very anxious about her spiritual condition. In one of these letters, written from Griff to Elizabeth Evans, in 1839, she says she is living in a dry and thirsty land, and that she is looking forward with pleasure to a visit to Wirksworth, and likens her aunt's companionship and counsel to a spring of pure water, acceptable to her as is the well dug for the traveller in the desert. That the most affectionate and loving relationship existed between the eminent author and Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, is apparent from this correspondence. The inmost secrets of George Eliot's heart are laid bare in these letters to the famous Methodist preacher, who was at that time her dearest friend. She is ever asking for advice and spiritual guidance, and confesses her faults with a candor that is rendered additionally attractive by reason of the polished language in which it is clothed. When quite a girl, George Eliot was known as pious and clever; and in the letters she wrote in 1839, when she was twenty years old, the cleverness has grown and expanded, although she is not so sure about her piety. She says that 'unstable as water thou shalt not excel,' seems to be a description of her character, instead of the progress from strength to strength that should be experienced by those who wish to stand in the presence of God. In another letter she admits that she cannot give a good account of her spiritual state, says that she has been surrounded by worldly persons, and that love of human praise is one of her great stumbling-blocks. But in a letter written in 1840 the uncertainty has gone from her mind, and she writes that she has resolved in the strength of the Lord to serve him evermore. In a later communication, however, she does not appear so confident, and admits that she is obliged to strive against the ambition that fills her heart, and that her fondness of worldly praise is a great bar and hindrance to spiritual advancement. Still she thinks it is no use sitting inactive with folded hands; and believing that the love of God is the only thing to give real satisfaction to human beings, she hopes, with his help, to obtain it. One of the letters is chiefly devoted to the concern felt by Marian Evans at Elizabeth Evans' illness; and another, written at Foleshill, betrays some humor amid the trouble that afflicts her about her own future. Their outward circumstances, she writes, are all she can desire; but she is not so certain about her spiritual state, although she feels that it is the grace of God alone that can give the greatest satisfaction. Then she goes on to speak of the preacher at Foleshill, with whom she is not greatly pleased: 'We get the truth, but it is not recommended by the mode of its delivery,' is how she writes of this divine; yet she is charitable withal, and removes the sting by adding that more good may sometimes be obtained from humble instruments than from the highest privileges, and that she must examine her own heart rather than speak unkindly of the preacher. Up to this period it is evident that Marian Evans' views upon religion were orthodox, and that her life was passed in ceaseless striving for the 'peace that passeth understanding;' but in 1843 a letter was written to Elizabeth Evans by a relative in Griff, in which Marian Evans is spoken of, and the change in her religious opinions indicated. She writes that they are in great pain about Mary Ann; but the last portion of the letter, dealing more fully with the subject, has unfortunately got lost or destroyed. The close association of George Eliot with Derbyshire, as well as her love for the quaint village of Wirksworth, and its upright, honest, God-fearing people, breaks forth in more than one of these communications." Partly as the result of her studies and partly as the result of contact with other minds, Marian began to grow sceptical about the religious beliefs she had entertained. This took place probably during her twenty-third year, but the growth of the new ideas was slow at first. As one of her friends has suggested, it was her eagerness for positive knowledge which made her an unbeliever. She had no love of mere doubt, no desire to disagree with accepted doctrines, but she was not content unless she could get at the facts and reach what was just and reasonable. "It is seldom," says this person, "that a mind of so much power is so free from the impulse to dissent, and that not from too ready credulousness, but rather because the consideration of doubtful points was habitually crowded out, one may say, by the more ready and delighted acceptance of whatever accredited facts and doctrines might be received unquestioningly. We can imagine George Eliot in youth, burning to master all the wisdom and learning of the world; we cannot imagine her failing to acquire any kind of knowledge on the pretext that her teacher was in error about something else than the matter in hand; and it is undoubtedly to this natural preference for the positive side of things that we are indebted for the singular breadth and completeness of her knowledge and culture. A mind like hers must have preyed disastrously upon itself during the years of comparative solitude in which she lived at Foleshill, had it not been for that inexhaustible source of delight in every kind of intellectual acquisition. Languages, music, literature, science and philosophy interested her alike; it was early in this period that in the course of a walk with a friend she paused and clasped her hands with a wild aspiration that she might live 'to reconcile the philosophy of Locke and Kant!' Years afterward she remembered the very turn of the road where she had spoken it." The spiritual struggles of Maggie Tulliver give a good picture of Marian Evans' mental and spiritual experiences at this time. Her friends and relatives were scandalized by her scepticism. Her father could not at all sympathize with her changed religious attitude, and treated her harshly. She refused to attend church, and this made the separation so wide that it was proposed to break up the home. By the advice of friends she at last consented to outwardly conform to her father's wishes, and a partial reconciliation was effected. This alienation, however, had a profound effect upon her mind. She slowly grew away from the intellectual basis of her old beliefs, but, with Maggie, she found peace and strength in self-renunciation, and in the cultivation of that inward trust which makes the chief anchorage of strong natures. She bore this experience patiently, and without any diminution of her affection; but she also found various friends among the more cultivated people of Coventry, who could sympathize with her in her studies and with her radical views in religion. These persons gave her the encouragement she needed, the contact with other and more matured minds which was so necessary to her mental development, and that social contact with life which was so conducive to her health of mind. In one family especially, that of Mr. Charles Bray, did she find the true, and cordial, and appreciative friendship she desired. These friends softened the growing discord with her own family, and gave her that devoted regard and aid that would be of most service to her. "In Mr. Bray's family," we are told by one who has written of this trying period of her career, "she found sympathy with her ardent love of knowledge and with the more enlightened views that had begun to supplant those under which (as she described it) her spirit had been grievously burdened. Emerson, Froude, George Combe, Robert Mackay, and many other men of mark, were at various times guests at Mr. Bray's house at Rosehill while Miss Evans was there either as inmate or occasional visitor; and many a time might have been seen, pacing up and down the lawn or grouped under an old acacia, men of thought and research, discussing all things in heaven and earth, and listening with marked attention when one gentle woman's voice was heard to utter what they were quite sure had been well matured before the lips opened. Few, if any, could feel themselves her superior in general intelligence; and it was amusing one day to see the amazement of a certain doctor, who, venturing on a quotation from Epictetus to an unassuming young lady, was, with modest politeness, corrected in his Greek by his feminine auditor. One rare characteristic belonged to her which gave a peculiar charm to her conversation. She had no petty egotism, no spirit of contradiction; she never talked for effect. A happy thought well expressed filled her with delight; in a moment she would seize the thought and improve upon it--so that common people began to feel themselves wise in her presence; and perhaps years after she would remind them, to their pride and surprise, of the good things they had said." She was an ardent reader of Emerson and other thinkers of his cast of thought, and some traces of this early sympathy are to be seen in her books. On his second visit to England Emerson spent a day or two at the house of Charles Bray, with whose writings he had previously become acquainted. Emerson was much impressed with the personality of Marian Evans, and more than once said to Bray, "That young lady has a calm, serious soul." When Emerson asked her somewhat suddenly, "What one book do you like best?" she at once replied, "Rousseau's _Confessions_." She cherished this acquaintance with Emerson, and held him in grateful remembrance through life. The painful experiences of this period are undoubtedly reflected in another of her autobiographic poems, that entitled "Self and Life." She speaks of the profound influence the past had over her mind, and that her hands and feet were still tiny when she began to know the historic thrill of contact with other ages. She also makes Life say to Self, in regard to her pain and sorrow: But all thy anguish and thy discontent Was growth of mine, the elemental strife Towards feeling manifold with vision blent To wider thought: I was no vulgar life That like the water-mirrored ape, Not discerns the thing it sees, Nor knows its own in others' shape, Railing, scorning, at its ease. Half man's truth must hidden lie If unlit by sorrow's eye. I by sorrow wrought in thee Willing pain of ministry. The intellectual surroundings of Marian Evans at this time gave shape to her whole after-life. There were now laid the foundations of her mode of thinking, and her philosophic theories began to be formed. It was in the home of one of her friends she learned to think for herself, and it was there her positivist doctrines first appeared. Charles Bray was affected by the transcendental movement, and was an ardent admirer of Newman, Emerson and others among its leaders. This interest prepared him, as it has so many other minds, for the acceptance of those speculative views which were built up on the foundation of science when the transcendental movement began to wane. The transcendental doctrines of unity, the oneness of mind and matter, the evolution of all forms of life and being from the lowest, the universal dominion of law and necessity, and the profound significance of nature in its influence on man, as they were developed by Goethe, Schelling, Carlyle and Emerson, gave direction to a new order of speculation, which had its foundations in modern science. Bray was an ardent phrenologist, and in 1832 published a work on _The Education of the Feelings_, based on phrenological principles. In 1841 appeared his main work, _The Philosophy of Necessity_; this was followed several years later by a somewhat similar work, _On Force, its Mental and Moral Correlates_. His philosophy was summarized in a volume published in 1871, which was entitled _A Manual of Anthropology_. He also wrote pamphlets on "Illusion and Delusion," "The Reign of Law," "Toleration," and "Christianity." In his work on necessity he promulgated very many of those ideas which have formed so prominent a part of the philosophy of George Eliot. The dominion of law, the reign of necessity, experience as the foundation of knowledge, humanity as an organism that develops a larger life for man by the aid of experience and tradition,--these are among the doctrines of the book. There is every reason for believing that in the teachings of Charles Bray, Marian Evans found many of the main elements of her philosophy, and with his aid her opinions were largely shaped. Mrs. Bray was also a woman of large intelligence, and of a mind freely open to new theories. She wrote a _Physiology for Schools_ and a school-book on _Duties to Animals_, which have been well received by the public and used as text books in the schools of the Midland counties. In 1882 she published a little book on the _Elements of Morality_, consisting of a series of easy lessons for Unitarian Sunday schools and for home teaching. To the Brays, Marian Evans owed much in the way of sympathy, culture and direct influence. Perhaps more than any other persons they gave tone and direction to her mind. One who knew them has said, "Besides being a practical as well as theoretical philanthropist, Mr. Bray was also a courageous impugner of the dogmas which form the basis of the popular theology. Mrs. Bray shared in this general largeness of thought, while perhaps more in sympathy with the fairer aspects of Christianity." A brother and a sister of Mrs. Bray's, Charles C. Hennell and Sara S. Hennell, also had a large influence on Marian Evans during this period. It was Charles Hennell who induced her to translate Strauss, and it was Sara Hennell to whom she wrote about her aunt after the publication of _Adam Bede_. Hennell's _Inquiry concerning the origin of Christianity_ was published in 1838, and appeared in a second edition in 1841. In the latter year the book was read by Marian Evans, after a faithful perusal of the Bible as a preparation for it, and quickly re-read, and with great interest and delight. She then pronounced it "the most interesting book she had ever read," dating from it a new birth to her mind. The book was translated into German, Strauss writing a preface for it, and that interpreter of Christianity praised it highly. Hennell rejected all supernaturalism and the miraculous, regarding Christianity as a slow and natural development out of Judaism, aided by Platonism and other outside influences. He finds the sources of Jesus' teachings in the Jewish tendencies of the time, while the cause of the supremacy of the man Jesus was laid in a long course of events which had swelled to a crisis at the time of his appearance, and bore him aloft to a height whence his personal qualities told with a power derived from the accumulated force of many generations. Jesus was an enthusiast who believed himself the predicted king of the Jews, and he was a revolutionist expecting to establish an earthly kingdom for the supremacy of Judaism. Jesus was largely influenced by the Essenes, but he rejected their austerity. Hennell found a mixture of truth and error in the Gospels, and believed that many mythical elements entered into the accounts given of Jesus. A thorough rationalist, he claimed to accept the spiritual essence of Christianity, and to value highly the moral teachings of Jesus. In a later work on _Christian Theism_ he finds an argument for belief in God mainly in nature. In his conclusions he is not far from F.W. Newman and Theodore Parker; but he does not give the credit to intuition and the religious faculty they do, though he is an earnest believer in God, and inclined to accept Christianity as the highest expression of religion. Sara S. Hennell early published _An Essay on the Skeptical Tendency of Butler's Analogy_, and a Baillie prize essay on _Christianity and Infidelity: An Exposition of the Arguments on Both Sides_. A work of much merit and thought appeared from her pen in 1860, under the title of _Thoughts in Aid of Faith_. In this work she follows her brother, Strauss, Feuerbach and Spencer in an interpretation of religion, which constantly recalls the theories of George Eliot. In a series of more recent books she has continued the same line of thought. The early and intimate friendship of Marian Evans and Miss Hennell may explain this similarity of opinion, and the beliefs they held in common were doubtless developed to a greater or less extent even when the former lived in Coventry. Another friend of this period was a German scholar by the name of Brabant, resident in England, a friend of Strauss, Paulus, Coleridge and Grote. Grote described him as "a vigorous self-thinking intellect." A daughter of Dr. Brabant first undertook the translation of Strauss, and she it was who married Charles Hennell. After this marriage Miss Evans offered to take to Dr. Brabant the place of his daughter, and did act as his housekeeper for some months. Marian Evans was surrounded at the most impressible period of her life by this group of intellectual, free-thinking people, who seem to have fully indoctrinated her with their own opinions. None of them had rejected Christianity or theism, but they were rationalists in spirit, and eager students of philosophy and science. Here were laid the foundations of the doctrines she afterwards held so strongly, and even during this period very many of the theories presented in her books were fully developed. Here her mind was thoroughly prepared for the teachings of Comte, Spencer and Lewes; and her early instructors had gone so far in their lessons that the later teachers had little to do more than to give system to her thoughts. It was essential to George Eliot's novel-writing that she was educated amidst religious influences, and that she earnestly accepted the religious teaching of her childhood. Not less important was her humble home and her association with the common life of the people. Through all her work these influences appear, coloring her thought, shaping her views of life, and increasing her sympathies and affections. Her tender, enthusiastic love of humble life never lost any of its quickening power. The faith of childhood was lost, but its memory was left in a warm appreciation of all phases of religious life and a heartfelt sympathy with all the sorrows and aspirations of men. Her father's health becoming very poor, Marian spent the next two or three years in the care of him. She read to him most of Scott's novels, devoting several hours each day to this task. During this period she made a visit to the Isle of Wight, and there read the novels of Richardson. Her father died in 1849, and she was very much affected by this event. She grieved for him overmuch, and could find no consolation. Her friends, the Brays, to divert and relieve her mind, invited her to take a continental tour with them. They travelled extensively in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Her grief, however, was so excessive as to receive little relief, and her friends began to fear the results. On their return to England they left her at Geneva, where she remained for nearly a year. After some months in a boarding-house near Geneva she became an inmate of the family of M. d'Albert Durade, a Swiss water-color painter of some reputation, who afterwards became the translator of her works into French. She devoted the winter of 1849-50 to the study of French and its literature, to mathematics and to reading. Her teacher in mathematics soon told her that she was able to proceed without his aid. She read Rousseau and studied the French socialists. M. Durade painted her portrait, making a remarkable picture. The softness of the clear blue eyes, in which is expressed a profound depth of thought, is one of its characteristics. M. Durade accompanied her to England in the spring of 1850, and she went to live with her brother, where she remained for a few months. The old family differences about religion had alienated the brother and sister so far intellectually that she accepted an invitation from the Brays to find a home with them. Her sadness and grief continued, and her health was not good. Her fits of nervousness and of tears were frequent, but her studies continued to occupy her mind. She delighted to converse with Mr. Bray, and other persons of earnest thought had their influence on her mind. Among these was George Dawson, the famous preacher who cut himself loose from all denominations. II. TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR. It was while living at Foleshill, and amidst the intellectual influences of awakening radicalism, that Marian Evans undertook her first literary labor. This was the translation of the _Leben Jesu_ of David Strauss. A book so daring in its interpretations of the origin of Christianity excited much attention, and especially among those who had broken away from the old religious beliefs. The work of translation was at first undertaken by Miss Brabant, who soon married Charles Hennell. Then the task was taken up by Marian Evans, who gave three years to it, renewing her Hebrew studies for the purpose, and the book was published in 1846. The work was thoroughly done, so much so that Strauss complimented the translator on its accuracy and correctness of spirit. Concerning the translation the _Westminster Review_ had this word of praise to offer: "We can testify that the translator has achieved a very tough work with remarkable spirit and fidelity. The author, though indeed a good writer, could hardly have spoken better had his country and language been English. The work has evidently fallen into the hands of one who has not only effective command of both languages, but a familiarity with the subject-matter of theological criticism, and an initiation into its technical phraseology." Another critic said that "whoever reads these volumes without any reference to the German, must be pleased with the easy, perspicuous, idiomatic force of the English style. But he will be still more satisfied when, on turning to the original, he finds that the rendering is word for word, thought for thought and sentence for sentence. In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which impart to the volumes before us the air and the spirit of an original. A modest and kindly care for his reader's convenience has induced the translator often to supply the rendering into English of a Greek quotation when there was no corresponding rendering into German in the original. Indeed, Strauss may well say, as he does in the notice which he writes for this English edition, that, as far as he has examined it, the translation is _et accurata et perspicua_." The book had a successful sale, but Marian Evans received only twenty pounds, and twenty-five copies of the book, for her share of the translation. A little later she translated Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_, receiving fifty pounds for this labor. It was published in 1854, but the sale was small, and it proved a heavy loss to the publisher. While translating Strauss she aided a friend interested in philosophical studies (probably Charles Bray) by the translation, for his reading, of the _De Deo_ of Spinoza. Some years later she completed a translation of the more famous _Ethica_ of the same thinker. It was not published, probably because there was at that time so little interest in Spinoza. The execution of such work as this, and all of it done in the most creditable and accurate manner, indicates the thoroughness of Marian Evans' scholarship. Though she doubtless was somewhat inclined to accept the opinions she thus helped to diffuse, yet Miss Simcox tells us that "the translation of Strauss and the translation of Spinoza were undertaken, not by her own choice but at the call of friendship; in the first place to complete what some one else was unable to continue, and in the second to make the philosopher she admired accessible to a friendly phrenologist who did not read Latin. At all times she regarded translation as a work that should be undertaken as a duty, to make accessible any book that required to be read; and though undoubtedly she was satisfied that the _Leben Jesu_ required to be read in England, it would be difficult to imagine a temper more naturally antipathetic to her than that of its author; and critics who talk about the 'Strauss and Feuerbach period' should be careful to explain that the phrase covers no implication that she was at anytime an admirer or a disciple of Strauss. There are extremes not only too remote but too disparate to be included in the same life." Marian Evans did not become an admirer or disciple of Strauss, probably because she preferred Charles Hennell's interpretation of Christianity, It is certain, however, that she was greatly affected by Feuerbach, and that his influence was ever after strongly marked in her thinking. The teachings of Charles Bray and Charles Hennell had prepared her for the reception of those of Feuerbach, and he in turn made her mind responsive to the more systematic philosophy of Comte. Bray had taught her, along with Kant, to regard all knowledge as subjective, while Hennell and her other friends had shown her the objective falsity of Christianity. Thus her mind was made ready for Feuerbach's leading principle, that all religion is a product of the mind and has no outward reality corresponding to its doctrines. According to Feuerbach, the mind creates for itself objective images corresponding to its subjective states, reproduces its feelings in the outward world. In reality there is no objective fact corresponding to these subjective ideas, but what the mind conceives to exist is a necessary product of its own activity. The mind necessarily believes in God, which is man's way of conceiving his species and realizing to himself the perfect type of his own nature. God does not exist, and yet he is a true picture of man's soul, a necessary product of his feeling and consciousness. All religious ideas are true subjectively, and Christianity especially corresponds to the inward wants and aspirations of the soul. To Feuerbach it is true as a poetic interpretation of feeling and sentiment, and to him it gives the noblest and truest conception of what the soul needs for its inward satisfaction. The influence of Feuerbach is to be seen in the profound interest which Marian Evans ever took in the subject of religion. That influence alone explains how it was possible for one who did not accept any religious doctrines as true, who did not believe in God or immortality, and who rejected Christianity as a historic or dogmatic faith, to accept so much as she did of the better spirit of religion and to be so keenly in sympathy with it. It was from the general scepticism and rationalism of the times she learned to reject all religion as false to truth and as not giving a just interpretation of life and its facts. It was from Feuerbach she learned how great is the influence of religion, how necessary it is to man's welfare, and how profoundly it answers to the wants of the soul. Like so many keen minds of the century, she rejected, with a sweeping scepticism, all on which a spiritual religion rests, all its facts, arguments and reasons. She knew only nature and man; inspiration, revelation, a spiritual world, had no existence for her. Yet she believed most thoroughly in religion, accepted its phenomena, was deeply moved by its spiritual aims, yearned after its perfect self-renunciation. Religion was to her, however, a purely subjective experience; it gave her a larger realization of the wants of humanity, it revealed to her the true nature of feeling. To Feuerbach she owed this capacity to appreciate Christianity, to rejoice in its spiritual aims, and even to accept it as a true interpretation of the soul's wants, at the same time that she totally rejected it as fact and dogma. In the spring of 1851 she was invited to London by John Chapman, to assist him in the editorship of the _Westminster Review_, Chapman had been the publisher of her translations, and she had met him in London when on the way to the continent the year before. He was the publisher of a large number of idealistic and positivist works, representing the outspoken and radical sentiment of the time. The names of Fichte, Emerson, Parker, Francis Newnian, Cousin, Ewald, H. Martineau, and others of equal note, appeared on his list. The _Westminster Review_ was devoted to scientific and positivist views, and was the organ of such writers as Mill, Spencer, Lewes and Miss Martineau. It was carefully edited, had an able list of contributors, but its advanced philosophical position did not give it a wide circle of readers. It gave careful reviews of books, and had able departments devoted to the literature of each of the leading countries. Marian Evans did much of the labor in preparing these departments and in writing special book reviews. Her work was thoroughly done, and shows wide reading and patient effort. Her position brought her the acquaintance of a distinguished and brilliant company of men and women. Under this influence her powers widened, and she quickly showed herself the peer of the ablest among them. Herbert Spencer has said that at this time she was "distinguished by that breadth of culture and universality of power which have since made her known to all the world." We are told by another that "her strength of intellect, her scholarship and varied accomplishments, and the personal charm of her manner and conversation, made a deep impression on all who wore thrown into her society." Dr. Chapman then lived in the Strand, and Marian Evans became a member of his family, sharing in its interests as well as in its labors. She was extremely simple in her habits, went but very little into society, and gave herself almost exclusively to her duties and to metaphysical studies. A fortnightly gathering of the contributors to the _Review_ was held in Mr. Chapman's house, and on these occasions she came to know most of the scientific and positivist thinkers of England at that time. Harriet Martineau invited her to Ambleside, and she was a frequent guest at the London residence of Sir James and Lady Clarke. She visited George Combe and his wife at Edinburgh in October, 1852, going to Ambleside on her return. While assisting Mr. Chapman, Marian Evans contributed only one article, beyond her editorial work, to the pages of the _Westminster Review_. The work she did, almost wholly that of digesting and reviewing new books, could have been little to her taste. It must have been a drudgery, except in so far as it aided her in the pursuit of her studies. Occasionally, however, she must have found a task to her mind, as when, in the summary of current English literature for January, 1852. she had Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ in hand. Her notice of the book is highly appreciative of Carlyle's genius, and full of cordial praise. This passage gives her idea of a true biography: We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of the biographer,--that when some great or good personage dies, instead of the dreary three or five volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds of the reading public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have a real "Life," setting forth briefly and vividly the man's inward and outward struggles, aims and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives (chiefly, indeed, autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any other kind of reading. But the conditions required for the perfection of life writing,--personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with life-like effect,--are seldom found in combination. _The Life of Sterling_ is an instance of this rare conjunction. Its comparatively tame scenes and incidents gather picturesqueness and interest under the rich lights of Carlyle's mind. We are told neither too little nor too much; the facts noted, the letters selected, are all such as serve to give the liveliest conception of what Sterling was and what he did; and though the book speaks much of other persons, this collateral matter is all a kind of scene-painting, and is accessory to the main purpose. The earliest of the regular articles, and the only one printed while she was the associate editor of the _Review_, is on "The Lady Novelists." It appeared in the number for July, 1852, and contained a striking discussion of woman's place in literature, a defence of woman's right to occupy that field she can best cultivate, with a clear and just criticism of several of the most prominent among lady novelists. She was quite full in her treatment of Jane Austen and George Sand, praising as well as criticising with insight and fine discrimination. At the outset she defines literature as an expression of the emotions, and gives a remarkably clear and original description of its functions. Her editorial connection with the _Westminster Review_ continued for about two years, until the end of 1853. For the next three years she was a contributor to its pages, where there appeared "Woman in France: Madame de Sablé," in October, 1854; "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," October, 1855; "German Wit: Heinrich Heine," January, 1856; "The Natural History of German Life," July, 1856; "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," October, 1856; and "Worldliness and other-Worldliness: the Poet Young," January, 1857. Two other articles have been attributed to her pen, but they are of little value. These are "George Forster," October, 1856, and "Weimar and its Celebrities," April, 1859. The interest and value of nearly all these articles are still as great as when they were first published. This will justify the publication here of numerous extracts from their most salient and important paragraphs. As indicating her literary judgment, and her capacity for incisive characterization and clear, trenchant criticism, reference may be made to the essay on Heine, which is one of the finest pieces of critical writing the century has produced. Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age; no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art--who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and--in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false--a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly wrought sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale--that Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly been exceeded by the license of former days. Yet, when all coarseness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor and just thought. It is apparently too often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power.... In Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary, labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose. And Heine has proved that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management. He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belongs to Goethe's style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all those there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness and grandeur which reveals the poet. The introduction to this article contains a wise comparison of wit and humor, and makes a subtle discrimination between them. German wit she finds is heavy and lacking in nicety of perception; and the German is the only nation that "had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor" previous to the present century. In Heine she found both in a marked degree, so that he is unlike the other writers of Germany, having a flavor and a spirit quite his own. Her essays on Dr. Cumming and the poet Young were largely of a theological character. They are keen in their thrusts at dogmatic religion, sparkling with witty hits at a make-believe piety, and full of biting sarcasm. Her entire want of sympathy with the men she dissects, makes her sometimes unjust to them, and she makes them worse than they really were. The terrible vigor of her criticism may be seen in her description of Dr. Cumming and his teaching. She brings three charges against him, and defends each with ample quotation, wit, sarcasm, argument and eloquence. She finds in his books unscrupulosity of statement, absence of genuine charity, and a perverted moral judgment. These essays much resemble Thackeray's dissection of Swift for their terrible sarcasm, their unmerciful criticism, and their minute unveiling of human weakness and hypocrisy. It is possible that Thackeray was her model, as his lecture was first delivered in 1851 or 1852; but, at least, she is not at all his inferior in power to lay bare the character and tendencies of the men she selected for analysis. Her keen psychological insight was shown here in a manner as brilliant and as accurate as in any of her novels. She may have done injustice to the circumstances under which these men were placed, their religious education, the social conditions which aided them in the pursuit of the lives they lived; and she may not have been quite ready enough to deal charitably with those who were blinded, as these men were, by all their surroundings and by whatever of culture they received; but she did see into the secret places of their lives, and laid bare the inner motives of their conduct. It was because these men came before the world as its teachers, holding up before it a special ideal and motive for its guidance, that she criticised them. In reality they were selfish, narrow, worldly; their teaching came from no deep convictions, nor from a high moral purpose; and hence her criticism. She laid bare the shallowness of their thoughts, the selfishness of their purposes, and the spiritual unfruitfulness of their teachings. Criticism so unsparing and so just, because based on the most searching insight into character and conduct, it would be difficult to find elsewhere. Dr. Cumming's mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his Christianity--no indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with divine love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with vindications of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends to show how he abashed an "infidel;" it is a favorite exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, "Father, forgive them," of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth understanding--of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's discourses. Even more severe is her account of the poet Young. She speaks of him as "a remarkable individual of the species _divine_." This is her account of his life: He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist, a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuate between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending "a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in "taking orders," with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for "livings;" he has a vivid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing man's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for "an ornament of religion and virtue;" hopes courtiers will never forgot to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the King's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and the skies; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its "relation to the stalls," and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next; and by this double process you get the Christian--"the highest style of man." With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of _Night Thoughts_. She says, "One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his _radical insincerity as a poetic artist_." Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented, lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by moon and star light. There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for patronage, and "pays his court" to her.... He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars.... The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine emotion_. He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists and storms of earth: he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists--in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life. In these essays there are various indications of her religious opinions, and those of a decided character. In that on Dr. Cumming, she has this word to say of the rationalistic conception of the Bible: He seems to be ignorant, or he chooses to ignore the fact, that there is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as a series of historical documents, to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the scriptures, opposed to their profoundest moral convictions. This statement is suggestive of her position on religious subjects: The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system, believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men's souls, the creating within them of holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God--a will synonymous with goodness and truth--may be done on earth. But what relation to all this has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is the wild beast in the shape of a great red dragon, and two thirds of mankind the victims--the whole provided and got up by God for the edification of the saints? She calls Dr. Cumming's teachings "the natural crop of a human mind where the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs." Then she deals with that belief in this trenchant fashion: Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls around the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into activity by their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are strongly impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is compassion that speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the soothing or the succor be given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obedience, of self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in producing an action, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive; and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the actions of accessory motives will be excluded. In writing of Young she says,-- The God of the _Night Thoughts_ is simply Young himself "writ large"--a didactic poet, who "lectures" mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and expects the tribute of inexhaustible applause. Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it. She contrasts Young with Cowper, preferring the latter because he dwells more on the things of a common and simple life. In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety toward the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague and unknown: in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge. This warm human sympathy is all she cares for in religion. See how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the _Task_ in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence--in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation--in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference--in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most shortlived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the brutes, but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song-- not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town lodging with a "hint that nature lives;" and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large. Her contributions to the _Westminster Review_ indicate that Marian Evans had read much and well, and that she was possessed of a thoroughly cultivated mind and much learning. To their preparation she gave herself diligently, writing slowly, after a careful study of her subject and much thought devoted to a faithful thinking out of all its parts. It has been many times suggested that these articles gave indication only of learning and studious effort. They certainly give strong hint of these, but also of much more. That on human life shows how much she had thought, and how thoroughly and philosophically, on one of the largest problems; while the one on Heine indicates her penetrating literary judgment and her capacity for analysis and interpretation. These essays are not mere compilations, mere digests of learned information; they are studies of large subjects done in a large and inspiring manner. Her essays on the poet Young and Dr. Cumming, and the two on lady novelists, as well as that on Heine, show many indications of that subtle power and that true genius which were displayed in her later work. There was genius displayed in these articles, without doubt, and genius of a high order. It was genius not as yet aware of itself, and not yet at the height of its power and capable of its truest expression, but genius nevertheless. Many of the most striking characteristics of her novel-writing were shown in these essays. Here was the same love of common human life; the same interest in its humbler forms and expressions; the like penetrating analysis and subtle portrayal of character; a psychological method of the same probing and comprehensive nature. Her main philosophical ideas were indicated here, though not given that clear and incisive expression they afterwards received. When she wrote of the natural history of German life she indicated in the very title of her essay one of her main theories, and her conception of man as a social being was brought out in it. These essays fully indicate that her opinions were already formed, that the leading ideas she was to give expression to in her novels had been arrived at by diligent study and thought, and that she had equipped herself with ample reasons for the acceptance of the opinions she held. Their chief defect is in their occasional arrogance of expression, as if the writer had not yet wholly escaped the superior airs of the young woman elated with the greatness of her knowledge, and a certain rudeness and vehemence of statement not seen later. It is a defect that is not very prominent, but one that is apparent enough to mar some of the best of these pages. It was one she never wholly outgrew, though in her novels her large information was usually so managed and subordinated as to give little annoyance to the intelligent reader. It must be quite evident to any reader of her _Westminster Review_ contributions, that Marian Evans would never have attained to any such high literary eminence as an essayist as that which she has secured as a novelist. Readable as are her essays,--and the five just named are certainly worthy of a place in her complete works,--yet they are not of the highest order. She could attain the highest range of her power only when something far more subtile and intrinsic was concerned. That this is true may be seen in these essays; for even here she writes the best only when she has human motives, feelings and aspirations to weigh and explain. That she could dissect and explain the inner man they made apparent enough; but her genius demanded also the opportunity to create, to build up a life of high beauty and purpose from materials of its own construction. Her _Review_ articles gave her a high place in the eyes of her friends, and their chief value seems to have been, that they caused these friends to see that she could do other and better work, and led them to induce her to apply her genius in a direction more congenial to its capacity. III. MARRIAGE. In 1853 Marian Evans became the wife of George Henry Lewes. He had married at an early ago a woman possessed of many charms of person. They went to live in a large house at Kensington with five other young couples, keeping house on a co-operative arrangement, with many attractions of social entertainment therewith. One result was the desertion of her home by Mrs. Lewes in connection with one of the men into whose company she was constantly thrown by this manner of life. She soon repented, and Lewes forgave her, receiving her back to his home. A second time, however, she left him. His having condoned her fault made it impossible for him to secure a divorce according to the laws of England at that time. He seems to have done what he could to retain her faithful devotion to her marriage relations, so long as that seemed possible. When Lewes and Marian Evans met, on her going to live in London, and after his wife had deserted him, there sprang up a strong attachment between them, As they could not be legally married, she agreed to live with him without that formality. It is to be said of this affair that George Eliot was very far from looking at such a problem as Goethe or, George Sand would have looked at it, from the position of personal inclination. Yet we are told by Miss Blind that she early entertained liberal views in regard to divorce, believing that greater freedom in this respect is desirable. There could have been no passionate individualistic defiance of law in her case, however. No one has insisted more strongly than she on the importance and the sanctity of the social regulations in regard to the union of the sexes. That her marriage was a true one in all but the legal form, that she was faithful to its every social obligation, has been abundantly shown. She was a most faithful wife to Lewes, and the devoted mother of his three children by the previous marriage, while she found in him that strong, self-reliant helpmate she needed. Her marriage under these circumstances required no little individualism of purpose, and some defiance of social obligations. Her intimate friends were unable to comprehend her conduct, and she was alienated from most of them. Especially her friends in Coventry were annoyed at such a marriage, and were not reconciled with her for a long time, and not until they saw that she had acted with a conscientious purpose. She was excluded from society by this act, and her marriage was interpreted as a gross violation of social morality. To a sensitive nature, as hers assuredly was, and to one who so much valued the confidence of her friends as she did, such exclusion must have been a serious cross. She freely elected her own course in life, however, and she never seems to have complained at the results it brought her. That it saddened her mind seems probable, but there is no outward evidence that she accepted her lot in a bitter or complaining spirit. No one could have written of love and marriage in so high and pure a spirit as everywhere appears in her books with whom passion was in any degree a controlling influence. In _Adam Bede_ her own conception of wedded love is expressed out of the innermost convictions and impulses of her own heart, when she exclaims,-- What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting. In _Felix Holt_ there is a passage on this subject which must have come directly from her own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the spirit in which she accepted the distrust of friends and the coldness of the world which her marriage brought her. A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had when and how she will: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult. Throughout her novels she exalts marriage, never casts any slur upon it, treats it as one of the most sacred of all human relations. She makes it appear as a sacrament, not of the Church, but of the sublime fellowship of humanity. It is pure, holy, a binding tie, a sacred obligation, as it appears in her books. When Romola is leaving Florence and her husband, her love dead and all that made her life seem worthy gone with it, she meets Savonarola, who bids her return to her home and its duties. What the great prophet-priest says on this occasion we have every reason to believe expressed the true sentiments of George Eliot herself. He proclaims, what she doubtless thoroughly believed, that marriage is something far more than mere affection, more than love; that its obligation holds when all love is gone; that its obligation is so sacred and binding as to call for the fullest measure of renunciation and personal humiliation. As throwing light on George Eliot's manner of looking at this subject, the whole chapter which describes the meeting of Romola and Savonarola deserves to be read. That portion of it in which Savonarola gives his views of marriage may here be reproduced, not as giving the doctrine of the Church, but as presenting the positivist conception of marriage as interpreted by George Eliot. His arresting voice had brought a new condition into her life, which made it seem impossible toiler that she could go on her way as if she had not heard it; yet she shrank as one who sees the path she must take, but sees, too, that the hot lava lies there. And the instinctive shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts. She turned away her eyes from Fra Girolamo, and stood for a minute or two with her hands hanging clasped before her, like a statue. At last she spoke, as if the words were being wrung from her, still looking on the ground. "My husband--he is not--my love is gone!" "My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love. Marriage is not carnal only, made for selfish delight. See what that thought leads you to! It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the obligations of your place and name. That would not have been if you had learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be blown by the winds; it is as flesh and blood, that dies if it be sundered. Your husband is not a malefactor?" Romola flushed and started. "Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him of nothing." "I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant that if he were a malefactor your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter, if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You may say, 'I will forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a wife." "Yet if--oh, how could I bear--" Romola had involuntarily begun to say something which she sought to banish from her mind again. "Make your marriage sorrows an offering, too, my daughter: an offering to the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease. The end is sure, and is already beginning. Here in Florence it is beginning, and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our blessedness to die for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our selfish will--to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great inheritance. Live for Florence--for your own people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron is sharp--I know, I know--it rends the tender flesh. The draught is bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup--there is the vision which makes all life below it dross forever. Come, my daughter, come back to your place!" [Footnote: Chapter XL.] Again, when Dorothea goes to see Rosamond to intercede in Dr. Lydgate's behalf with his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage, and the renunciation it demands of all that is opposed to its trust and helpfulness. Dorothea says,-- "Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than--than those we were married to, it would be of no use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us like a murder--and everything else is gone. And then our husband--if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life--" If Marian Evans rejected the sanctions which society has imposed on the love of man and woman in the legal forms of marriage, it was not in a wilful and passionate spirit. There are reasons for believing that she was somewhat touched in her youth with the individualistic theories of the time, which made so many men and women of genius reject the restraints imposed by society, as in the case of Goethe, Heine, George Sand, Shelley and many another; yet she does not appear to have been to more than a very limited extent influenced by such considerations in regard to her own marriage. The matter for surprise is, that one who regarded all human traditions, ceremonies and social obligations as sacred, should have consented to act in so individualistic a manner. She makes Rufus Lyon say--and it is her own opinion--that "the right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness." Her marriage, after the initial act, had in it nothing whatever of lawlessness. She believed there exists a higher rule than that of Parliament, and to this higher law she submitted. To her this was not a law of self-will and personal inclination, but the law of nature and social obligation. That she was not overcome by the German individualistic and social tendencies may be seen in the article on "Weimar and its Celebrities," in the _Westminster Review_, where, in writing of Wieland as an educator, she says that the tone of his books was not "immaculate," and that it was "strangely at variance, with that sound and lofty morality which ought to form the basis of every education." She also speaks of the philosophy of that day as "the delusive though plausible theory that no license of tone, or warmth of coloring, could injure any really healthy and high-toned mind." In the article on "Woman in France," she touches on similar theories. As this article was written just at the time of her marriage, one passage in it may have a personal interest, and shows her conception of a marriage such as her own, based on intellectual interest rather than on passionate love. She is speaking of the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage tie. Heaven forbid [she adds] that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favorable to the manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or retaining its beloved object--to convert indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness into perspicuity. Her conception of marriage may have been affected by that presented by Feuerbach in his _Essence of Christianity_. In words translated into English by herself, Feuerbach says, "that alone is a religious marriage which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of marriage--love." Again, he says that marriage is only sacred when it is an inward attraction confirmed by social and personal obligations; "for a marriage the bond of which is merely an external restriction, not the voluntary, contented self-restriction of love--in short, a marriage which is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing--is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage." As a moral and social obligation, marriage is to be held sacred; its sacredness grows out of its profound human elements of helpfulness, nurture and emotional satisfaction, while its obligation rises from its primary social functions. It does not consist in any legal form, but in compliance with deep moral and social responsibilities. Some such conception of marriage as this she seems to have accepted, which found its obligation in the satisfaction it gives to the inner nature, and in the fulfilment of social responsibilities. The influence of Compte may also have been felt in the case of both Lewes and Marian Evans; they saw in the marriage form a fulfilment of human, not of legal, requirements. While there is no doubt they would both gladly have accepted the legal form had that been possible, yet they were sufficiently out of sympathy with the conventionalities of society to cause them to disregard that form when it could not be complied with. They regarded themselves, however, as married, and bound by all the ties and requirements which marriage imposes. They proclaimed themselves to their friends as husband and wife, and they were so accepted by those who knew them. In her letters to literary correspondents she always mentioned Lewes as "my husband." The laws of most civilized nations recognize these very conditions, and regard the acceptance of the marriage relation before the world as a sufficient form. Those who have written of this marriage, bear testimony to its devotion and beauty. The author of the account of her life and writings in the _Westminster Review_, an early and intimate friend, says the "union was from the first regarded by themselves as a true marriage, as an alliance of a sacred kind, having a binding and permanent character. When the fact of the union was first made known to a few intimate friends, it was accompanied with the assurance that its permanence was already irrevocably decreed. The marriage of true hearts for a quarter of a century has demonstrated the sincerity of the intention. 'The social sanction,' said Mr. Lewes once in our hearing, 'is always desirable.' There are cases in which it is not always to be had. Such a ratification of the sacrament of affection was regarded as a sufficient warrant, under the circumstances of the case, for entrance on the most sacred engagement of life. There was with her no misgiving, no hesitation, no looking back, no regret; but always the unostentatious assertion of quiet, matronly dignity, the most queenly expression and unconscious affirmation of the 'divine right' of the wedded wife. We have heard her own oral testimony to the enduring happiness of this union, and can, as privileged witnesses, corroborate it. As a necessary element in this happiness she practically included the enjoyment inseparable from the spontaneous reciprocation of home affection, meeting with an almost maternal love the filial devotion of Mr. Lewes's sons, proffering all tender service in illness, giving and receiving all friendly confidence in her own hour of sorrowful bereavement, and crowning with a final act of generous love and forethought the acceptance of parental responsibilities in the affectionate distribution of property, the visible result of years of the intellectual toil whose invisible issues are endless." Their marriage helped both to a more perfect work and to a truer life. She gave poise and purpose to the "versatile, high-strung, somewhat wayward nature" of her husband, and she "restrained, raised, ennobled, and purified" his life and thought. He stimulated and directed her genius life into its true channel, cared for her business interests with untiring faithfulness, made it possible for her to pursue her work without burdens and distractions, and gave her the inspiration of a noble affection and a cheerful home. Miss Edith Simcox speaks of "the perfect union between these two," which, she says, "lent half its charm to all the worship paid at the shrine of George Eliot." She herself, Miss Simcox proceeds to say, "has spoken somewhere of the element of almost natural tenderness in a man's protecting love: this patient, unwearying care for which no trifles are too small, watched over her own life; he stood between her and the world, her relieved her from all those minor cares which chafe and fret the artist's soul; he wrote her letters; in a word, he so smoothed the course of her outer life as to leave all her powers free to do what she alone could do for the world and for the many who looked to her for help and guidance. No doubt this devotion brought its own reward; but we are exacting for our idols and do not care to have even a generous error to condone, and therefore we are glad to know that, great as his reward was, it was no greater than was merited by the most perfect love that ever crowned a woman's life." Mr. Kegan Paul also writes of the mutual helpfulness and harmony of purpose which grew out of this marriage. "Mr. Lewes's character attained a stability and pose in which it had been somewhat lacking, and the quiet of an orderly and beautiful home enabled him to concentrate himself more and more on works demanding sustained intellectual effort, while Mrs. Lewes's intensely feminine nature found the strong man on whom to lean in the daily business of life, for which she was physically and intellectually unfitted. Her own somewhat sombre cast of thought was cheered, enlivened and diversified by the vivacity and versatility which characterized Mr. Lewes, and made him seem less like an Englishman than a very agreeable foreigner." This marriage presents one of the curious ethical problems of literature. In this case approval and condemnation are alike difficult. Her own teaching condemns it; her own life approves it. We could wish it had not been, for the sake of what is purest and best; and yet it is not difficult to see that its effects were in many ways beneficial to her. That it was ethically wrong there is no doubt. That it was condemned by her own teaching is so plain as to cause doubt about how she could herself approve it. Lewes had a brilliant and versatile mind. He was not a profound thinker, but he had keen literary tastes, a vigorous interest in science, and a remarkable alertness of intellect. His gifts were varied rather than deep; literary rather than philosophical. As a companion, he had a wonderful charm and magnetism; he was a graceful talker, a marvellous story-teller, and a wit seldom rivalled. His intimate friend, Anthony Trollope, says, "There was never a man so pleasant as he with whom to sit and talk vague literary gossip over a cup of coffee and a cigar." By the same friend we are told that no man related a story as he did. "No one could say that he was handsome. The long bushy hair, and the thin cheeks, and the heavy mustache, joined as they were, alas! almost always to a look of sickness, were not attributes of beauty. But there was a brilliance in his eye which was not to be tamed by any sickness, by any suffering, which overcame all other feeling on looking at him." George Henry Lewes was born in London, April 18, 1817. His grandfather was a well-known comedian. His education was received in a very desultory manner. He was at school for a time in Jersey, and also in Brittany, where he acquired a thorough command of French. Later he attended a famous school in Greenwich, kept by a Dr. Burney. After leaving school he went into a notary's office, and then he became a clerk to a Russia merchant. His mind was, however, attracted to scientific and philosophic studies, and he betrayed little interest either in the law or in commercial pursuits. Then he took up the study of medicine, giving thorough attention to anatomy and physiology. It is said that his horror of the dissecting-room was so great as to cause him to abandon the purpose to become a physician. All this time his mind was steadily drawn to philosophy, and he gave as much time to it as he could. The bent, of his mind was early developed, and in 1836, when only nineteen, he had projected a treatise on the philosophy of mind, in which he proposed to give a physiological interpretation to the doctrines of Reid, Stewart and Brown. At the age of twenty he gave a course of lectures on this subject; and to this line of thought he held ever after. One of the influences which led to his departure from a strict interpretation of the Scotch metaphysicians was the influence of Spinoza. As indicating the eagerness with which he pursued his studies in all directions, and the earnestness of his purpose at so early an age, his own account of a club he attended at this time [Footnote: Fortnightly Review, April 1,1866, introductory to the article on Spinoza.] may be mentioned. In this account he describes a Jew by the name of Cohen, who first introduced him to the study of Spinoza, and who has mistakenly been supposed to be the original of Mordecai in _Daniel Deronda_. The sixth member of this club, who "studied anatomy and many other things, with vast aspirations, and no very definite career before him," was Lewes himself, in all probability. His eager desire for knowledge took him to Germany in 1838, where he remained for two years in the same desultory study of many subjects. He became thoroughly acquainted with the German language and life, and gave much attention to German literature and philosophy. On his return to England, Lewes entered upon his literary career, which was remarkable for its versatility and productiveness. In 1841 he wrote "The Noble Heart," a three-act tragedy, published in 1852. His studies of Spinoza found expression in one of the first essays on the subject published in England. In 1843, he published in the _Westminster Review_ his conclusions on that thinker. His essay was reprinted in a separate form, attracting much attention, and in 1846 was incorporated into a larger work, the result of his studies in Germany and of his interest in philosophy. In 1845, at the age of twenty-nine, he published a history of philosophy, in which he undertook to criticise all metaphysical systems from the inductive and scientific point of view. This work was his _Biographical History of Philosophy_. It appeared in four small volumes in Knight's weekly series of popular books devoted to the diffusion of knowledge among the people. Lewes touched a popular demand in this book, reaching the wants of many readers. He continued through many years to elaborate his studies on these subjects and to re-work his materials. New and enlarged editions, each time making the book substantially a new one, were published in 1857, in 1867 and in 1871. No solid book of the century has sold better; and it has been translated into several continental languages. Lewes did not confine himself to philosophy. Other and very different subjects also attracted his attention. His mind ranged in many directions, and his flexible genius found subjects of interest on all sides. In 1846 he published a little book on _The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderon_, a slight affair, full of his peculiar prejudices, and devoted mainly to an unsympathetic criticism. The following year he gave to the world an ambitious novel, _Ranthorpe_. It seems to have been well read in its day, was translated into German and reprinted on the continent by Tauchnitz. The plot is well conceived, but the story is rapidly told, full of incident and tragedy, and there is a subtle air of unreality about it. The experiences of a poet are unfolded in a romantic form, and the attempt is made to show what is the true purpose and spirit in which literature can be successfully pursued. To this end there is a discussion running through the book on the various phases of the literary life, much in the manner of Fielding. _Ranthorpe_ would now be regarded as a very dull novel, and it is crude, full of the sensational, with little analysis of character and much action. It was read, however, by Charlotte Brontë with great interest, and she wrote of it to the author in these words: "In reading _Ranthorpe_ I have read a new book--not a reprint--not a reflection of any other book, but _a new book_. I did not know such books were written now. It is very different to any of the popular works of fiction; it fills the mind with fresh knowledge. Your experience and your convictions are made the reader's; and to an author, at least, they have a value and an interest quite unusual." In 1848, Lewes published another novel of a very different kind--_Rose, Blanche and Violet_. This was a society novel, intended to reach the minds of the ordinary novel-readers, but was not so successful as the first. It has little plot or incident, but has much freshness of thought and originality of style. The same year appeared his _Life of Robespierre_, the result of original investigations, and based largely on unpublished correspondence. Without any sympathy of opinion with Robespierre, and without any purpose of vindicating his character, Lewes told the true story of his life, and showed wherein he had been grossly misrepresented. The book was one of much interest, though it lacked in true historic insight and was clumsily written. While these works were appearing, Lewes was a voluminous contributor to the periodical literature of the day. He wrote, at this time and later, for the _Edinburgh Review_, the _Foreign Quarterly_, _British Quarterly_, _Westminster Review_, _Fraser's Magazine_, _Blackwood's Magazine_, _Cornhill Monthly_, _Saturday Review_, in the _Classical Museum_, the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Atlas_ and various other periodicals, and on a great variety of subjects. His work of this kind was increased when in 1849 he became the literary editor of _The Leader_ newspaper, a weekly journal of radical thought and politics. His versatility, freshness of thought and vigor of expression made this department of _The Leader_ of great interest. His reviews of books were always good, and his literary articles piquant and forcible. In the first volume he published a story called _The Apprenticeship of Life_. In April, 1852, he began in its columns a series of eighteen articles on Comte's Positive Philosophy. In connection with the second article of this series he asked for subscriptions in aid of Comte, and in the third reported that three workingmen had sent in money. These subscriptions were continued while the articles were in progress, and amounted to a considerable sum. In 1854 these essays were republished in Bohn's _Scientific Library_ under the title of _Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences_. The _Leader_ was ably conducted, but it was radical and outspoken, and did not receive the support it deserved. In 1854 his connection with it came to an end. While connected with _The Leader_, Lewes had turned his attention to Goethe, and made a thorough study of his life and opinions. After spending many months in Weimar, and as a result of his studies in Germany, he published in 1855 his _Life and Works of Goethe_. It was carefully re-written in 1873, and the substance of it was given in an abbreviated and more popular form a few years later. This has usually been accepted as the best book about Goethe written in English. Mr. Anthony Trollope expresses the usual opinion when he says, "As a critical biography of one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect. It is short, easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and altogether devoted to the subject." On the other hand, Bayard Taylor said that "Lewes's entertaining apology hardly deserves the name of a biography." It is an opinionated book, controversial, egotistic, and unnecessarily critical. It was written less with the purpose of interpreting Goethe to the English reader than of giving expression to Lewes's own views on many subjects. His chapters on Goethe's science and on his realism are marked by an extreme dogmatism. The poetic and religious side of Goethe's nature he was incapable of understanding, and always misrepresents, as he did that side of his nature which allied Goethe with Schiller and the other idealists. Lewes was always polemical, had some theory to champion, some battle to fight. He did not write for the sake of the subject, but because the subject afforded an arena of battle for the theories to the advocacy of which he gave his life. With the completion of his _Life of Goethe_, Lewes turned his attention more than ever to physiological studies, though he had continued to give them much attention in the midst of his other pursuits. In 1858 appeared his _Seaside Studies_, in which he recorded the results of his original investigations at Ilfracombe, Tenby, Scilly Isles and Jersey. This volume is written in a plain descriptive style, containing many interesting accounts of scenery and adventure, explanations of the methods of study of animal life at the seashore, how experiments are carried on, the results of these special studies, and much of controversy with other observers. It combines science and description in a happy manner. Another result of his physiological studies was a paper "On the Spinal Cord as a Centre of Sensation and Volition," read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1858. This was followed the next year by three published addresses on "The Nervous System," in which he presented those theories which were more carefully developed in his latest work, where he gave a systematic account of his philosophy. From this time on to his death the greater part of his energies were given to these studies, and to the building up of a philosophy based on physiology. A popular work, in which many of his theories are unfolded, and marked throughout by his peculiar ideas in regard to the relations of body and mind, was published in 1858. This was his _Physiology of Common Life_, a work of great value, and written in a simple, comprehensive style, suited to the wants of the general reader. In the first volume he wrote of hunger and thirst, food and drink, digestion, structure and uses of the blood, circulation of the blood, respiration and suffocation, and why we are warm and how we keep so. The second treats of feeling and thinking, the mind and the brain, our senses and sensations, sleep and dreams, the qualities we inherit from our parents, and life and death. In 1860 he printed in _The Cornhill Magazine_ a series of six papers on animal life. They were reprinted in book form in 1861, under the title of _Studies in Animal Life_. More strictly scientific than his _Seaside Studies_, they were even more popular in style, and intended for the general reader. While these books were being published he was at work on a more strictly scientific task, and one intended for the thoughtful and philosophic reader. This was his _Aristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science, including Analyses of Aristotle's Scientific Writings_, which was completed early in 1862, but not published until 1864. As in his previous works, Lewes is here mainly concerned with an exposition of his theories of the inductive method, and he judges Aristotle from this somewhat narrow position. He refuses Aristotle a place among scientific observers, but says he gave a great impulse towards scientific study, while in intellectual force he was a giant. The book contains no recognition of Aristotle's value as a philosopher; indeed his metaphysics are treated with entire distrust or indifference. His fame is pronounced to be justifiably colossal, but it is said he did not lay the basis of any physical science. It is a work of controversy rather than of unbiassed exposition, and its method is dry and difficult. Early in the year 1865, a few literary men in London conceived the project of a new review, which should avoid what they conceived to be the errors of the old ones. It was to be eclectic in its doctrinal position, contain only the best literature, all articles were to be signed by the author's name, and it was to be published by a joint-stock company. Lewes was invited to become the editor of this new periodical, and after much urging he consented. The first number of _The Fortnightly Review_ was published May 15,1865, It proved a financial failure, and was soon sold to a publishing firm. The eclectic theory was abandoned, and the _Review_ became an agnostic and radical organ under the management of its second editor, John Morley. Lewes edited six volumes, when, in 1867, he was obliged, on account of his health, to resign his position. He made the _Review_ an independent and able exponent of current thought, and he kept it up to a very high standard of literary excellence. His own contributions were among the best things it contained, and give a good indication of the wide range of his talent. In the first volume he published papers on "The Heart and the Brain," and on the poetry of Robert Buchanan, as well as a series of four very able and valuable papers on "The Principles of Success in Literature." In the second volume he wrote about "Mr. Grote's Plato." In the third he dealt with "Victor Hugo's Latest Poems," "Criticism in relation to Novels," and "Auguste Comte." In this volume he began a series of essays entitled "Causeries," in which he treated, in a light vein, of the passing topics of the day. He wrote of Spinoza in the fourth volume, and of "Comte and Mill" in the sixth, contributing nothing to the fifth. After Morley became the editor, in the ninth and tenth volumes, he published three papers on Darwin's hypothesis, and in 1878 there was a paper of his on the "Dread and Dislike of Science." He also had a criticism of Dickens in the July number of 1872, full of his subtle power of analysis and literary insight. Lewes in early life had a strong inclination to become an actor, and he did go on the stage for a short time. He wrote and translated several plays, one of his adaptations becoming very popular. He wrote dramatic criticisms for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and other journals, during many years. In 1875, a volume of these papers was published with the title, _On Actors and the Art of Acting_. It treated in a pleasant way, and with keen insight, of Edmund Kean, Charles Kean, Rachel, Macready, Fan-en, Charles Matthews, Frédéric Lemaitre, the two Keeleys, Shakspere as actor and critic, natural acting, foreign actors on our stage, the drama of Paris in 1865, Germany in 1867, and Spain in 1867, and of his first impressions of Salvini. Another piece of work done by him was the furnishing, in 1867, of an explanatory text to accompany Kaulbach's _Female Characters of Goethe_. The last years of Lewes's life were devoted to the preparation of a systematic exposition of his physiological philosophy. As early as the year 1858, he was at work on the nervous system, and, soon after, his studies took a systematic shape. In his series of volumes on the _Problems of Life and Mind_ he gave to the world a new theory of the mind and of knowledge. In the first two volumes, published in 1874, and entitled _The Foundations of a Creed_, he developed his views on the methods of philosophic research. These were followed in 1877 by a third volume, on _The Physical Basis of Life_. After his death his wife edited two small volumes on Psychology, which included all the writing he left in a form ready for publication. His work was left incomplete, but its publication had gone far enough to show the methods to be followed and the main conclusions to be reached. Concerning the work done by Lewes in philosophy, there will be much difference of opinion. He did much through his various expositions to make the public familiar with the inductive methods of inquiry and with the conclusions of positive thought. He made his books readable, and even popular, giving philosophy an exposition suited to the wants of the general reader. At the same time, he was polemical and dogmatic, and more concerned to be clever than to be exact in his interpretation. Into the meanings of some of the greatest thinkers he had little clear insight, and he is seldom to be implicitly trusted as an expositor of those whose systems were in any way opposed to his own. His limitations have been well defined by Ribot, in his _Contemporary English Psychology_. "Mr. Lewes lacks the vocation of the scholar, which, indeed, is generally wanting in original minds. His history resembles rather that of Hegel than that of Ritter. His review of the labors of philosophers is rather occupied with that which they have thought, than with their comparative importance. He judges rather than expounds; his history is fastidious and critical. It is the work of a clear, precise and elegant mind, always that of a writer, often witty, measured, possessing no taste for declamation, avoiding exclusive solutions, and making its interest profitable to the reader whom he forces to think." Ribot speaks of the work again as being original but dogmatic and critical. He says it belongs to that class of books which make history a pretext for conflict. "The author is less occupied with the exposition of facts than he is with his method of warfare; he thinks less of being exact than of being clever.... He has evidently no taste, or, if we prefer so to put it, he has not the virtue necessary to face these formidable folios, these undigested texts of scholastic learning, which the historian of philosophy ought to penetrate, however repulsive to his positive and lucid mind." On the other hand, Mr. Frederic Harrison has described the great success of the _Biographical History of Philosophy_, and made it apparent what are its chief merits. "This astonishing work was designed to be popular, to be readable, to be intelligible. It was all of these in a singular degree. It has proved to be the most popular account of philosophy of our time; it has been republished, enlarged, and almost re-written, and each re-issue has found new readers. It did what hardly any previous book on philosophy ever did--it made philosophy readable, reasonable, lively, almost as exciting as a good novel. Learners who had been tortured over dismal homilies on the pantheism of Spinoza, and yet more dismal expositions of the pan-nihilism of Hegel, seized with eagerness upon a little book which gave an intense reality to Spinoza and his thoughts, which threw Hegel's contradictories into epigrams, and made the course of philosophic thought unfold itself naturally with all the life and coherence of a well-considered plot.... There can be no possible doubt as to the success of this method. Men to whom philosophy has been a wearisome swaying backward and forward of meaningless phrases, found something which they could remember and understand.... For a generation this 'entirely popular' book saturated the minds of the younger readers. It has done as much as any book, perhaps-more than any, to give the key to the prevalent thought of our time about the metaphysical problems.... That such a book should have had such a triumph was a singular literary fact. The opinions frankly expressed as to theology, metaphysics, and many established orthodoxies; its conclusion, glowing in every page, that metaphysics, as Danton said of the Revolution, was devouring its own children, and led to self-annihilation; its proclamation of Comte as the legitimate issue of all previous philosophy and positive philosophy as its ultimate _irenicon_--all this, one might think, would have condemned such a book from its birth. The orthodoxies frowned; the professors sneered; the owls of metaphysic hooted from the gloom of their various jungles; but the public read, the younger students adopted it, the world learned from it the positive method; it held its ground because it made clear what no one else had made clear--what philosophy meant, and why philosophers differed so violently." This extravagant praise becomes even absurd when the writer gravely says that this book "had simply killed metaphysic." A popular style and method gave the book success, along with the fact that the temper of the time made such a statement acceptable. It cleverly indicated the weak places in the metaphysical methods, and it presented the advantages of the inductive method with great eloquence and ingenuity. Its satire, and its contempt for the more spiritualistic systems, also helped to make it readable. His later work, in which he develops his own positive conclusions, has the merit of being one of the best expositions yet made of the philosophy of evolution. In view, however, of his unqualified condemnation of the theories of metaphysicians, his system is one of singular audacity of speculation. Not even Schelling or Hegel has gone beyond him in theorizing, or exceeded him in the ground traversed beyond the limits of demonstration. He who had held up all speculative systems to scorn, distanced those he had condemned, and showed how easy it is to take theory for fact. Metaphysic has not had in its whole history a greater illustration of the daring of speculation than in the case of Lewes's theory of the relations of the subjective and objective. He interprets matter and mind, motion and feeling, objective and subjective, as simply the outer and inner, the concave and convex, sides of one and the same reality. Mind is the same as matter, except that it is viewed from a different aspect. In this opinion he resembles Schelling more than any other thinker, as he does in some other of his speculations. As a monist, his conclusions are similar to those of the leading German transcendentalists. Indeed, the evolution philosophy he expounds is, in some of its aspects, but a development of the identity philosophy of Schelling. In its monism, its theory of the development of mind out of matter, and its conception of law, they are one and the same. The evolution differs from the identity philosophy mainly in its more scientific interpretation of the influence of heredity and the social environment. The one is undoubtedly an outgrowth from the other, while the audacious nights of speculation indulged in by Lewes rival anything attempted even by Schelling. Lewes was one of the earliest English disciples of Auguste Comte, and he probably did more than any other person to introduce the opinions of that thinker to English students. He was a zealous and yet not a blind disciple, rejecting for the most part the later speculations of Comte. Comte's theories of social and religious construction were repugnant to Lewes's mind, but his positive methods and his entire rejection of theology were acceptable. Comte's positivism was the foundation of his own philosophy, and he did little more than to expand and more carefully work out the system of his predecessor. In psychology he went beyond Comte, through his physiological studies, and by the adoption of the methods and results of evolution. His discovery of the sociological factors of mind was a real advance on his master. George Eliot's connection with Lewes had much to do with the after-development of her mind. An affinity of intellectual purpose and conviction drew them together. She found her philosophical theories confirmed by his, and both together labored for the propagation of that positivism in which they so heartily believed. Their lives and influence are inseparably united. There was an almost entire unanimity of intellectual conviction between them, and his books are in many ways the best interpreters of the ethical and philosophical meanings of her novels. Her thorough interest in his studies, and her comprehension of them, is manifest on many of her pages. Her enthusiastic acceptance of positivism in that spirit in which it is presented by Lewes, is apparent throughout all her work. Their marriage was a companionship and a friendship. They lived in each other, were mutual helpers, and each depended much on--the advice and counsel of the other. Miss Mathilde Blind has pointed out how thoroughly identical are their views of realism in art, and on many other subjects they were as harmonious. They did not echo each other, but there was an intimate affinity of intellectual apprehension and purpose. Immediately after their marriage, Lewes and his wife went to Germany, and they spent a quiet year of study in Berlin, Munich and Weimar. Here he re-wrote and completed his _Life of Goethe_. On their return to England they took a house in Blandford Square, and began then to make that home which was soon destined to have so much interest and attraction. A good part of the year 1858 was also spent on the continent in study and travel. Three months were passed in Munich, six weeks in Dresden, while Salzburg, Vienna and Prague were also visited. The continent was again visited in the summer of 1865, and a trip was taken through Normandy, Brittany and Touraine. Other visits preceded and followed, including a study of Florence in preparation for the writing of _Romola_, and a tour in Spain in 1867 to secure local coloring for _The Spanish Gypsy_. In 1865, the house in Blandford Square was abandoned for "The Priory," a commodious and pleasant house on the North Bank, St. John's Wood. It was here Mr. and Mrs. Lewes lived until his death. IV. CAREER AS AN AUTHOR. Until she was thirty-six years old Mrs. Lewes had given no hint that she was likely to become a great novelist. She had shown evidence of large learning and critical ability, but not of decided capacity for imaginative or poetic creation. The critic and the creator are seldom combined in one person; and while she might have been expected to become a philosophical writer of large reputation, there was little promise that she would become a great novelist. Before she began the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, she had written but very little of an original character. She was not drawn irresistibly to the career for which she was best fitted, and others had to discover her gift and urge her to its use. Mr. Lewes saw that the person who could write so admirably of what a novel ought to be, and who could so skilfully point out the defects in the lady novelists of the day, was herself capable of writing much better ones than those she criticised. It was at his suggestion, and through his encouragement, she made her first attempt at novel-writing. Her love of learning, her relish for literary and philosophical studies, led her to believe that she could accomplish the largest results in the line of the work she had already begun. Yet Lewes had learned from her conversational powers, from her keen appreciation of the dramatic elements of daily life, and from her fine humor and sarcasm, that other work was within the range of her powers. Reluctantly she consented to turn aside from the results of scholarship she had hoped to accomplish, and with many doubts concerning her ability to become a writer of fiction. The history of the publication of her first work, _Scenes of Clerical Life_, has been fully told, and is helpful towards an understanding of her career as an author. In the autumn of 1856, William Blackwood received from Lewes a short story bearing--the title of "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," which he sent as the work of an anonymous friend. His nephew has described the results that followed on the reception of this novel by Blackwood, and its publication in _Blackwood's Magazine_. "The story was offered as the first instalment of a series; and though the editor pronounced that 'Amos' would 'do,' he wished to satisfy himself that it was no chance hit, and requested a sight of the other tales before coming to a decision. Criticisms on the plot and studies of character in 'Amos Barton' were frankly put forward, and the editor wound up his letter by saying,' If the author is a new writer, I beg to congratulate him on being worthy of the honors of print and pay. I shall be very glad to hear from him or you soon.' At this time the remaining _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were unwritten, and the criticisms upon 'Amos' had rather a disheartening effect upon the author, which the editor hastened to remove as soon as he became sensible of them, by offering to accept the tale. He wrote to Mr. Lewes, 'If you think it would stimulate the author to go on with the other tales, I shall publish 'Amos' at once;' expressing also his 'sanguineness' that he would be able to approve of the contributions to follow, as 'Amos' gave indications of great freshness of style. Some natural curiosity had been expressed as to the unknown writer, and a hint had been thrown out that he was 'a clergyman,'--a device which, since it has the great sanction of Sir Walter Scott, we must regard as perfectly consistent with the ethics of anonymous literature. "'Amos Barton' occupied the first place in the magazine for January, 1857, and was completed in the following number. By that time 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' was ready, and the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ appeared month by month, until they ended with 'Janet's Repentance' in November of that year. As fresh instalments of the manuscript were received, the editor's conviction of the power, and even genius, of his new contributor steadily increased. In his first letter to the author after the appearance of 'Amos Barton,' he wrote, 'It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh, so humorous and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so much in so few words.' In another letter, addressed 'My dear Amos,' for lack of any more distinct appellation, the editor remarks, 'I forgot whether I told you or Lewes that I had shown part of the MS. to Thackeray. He was staying with me, and having been out at dinner, came in about eleven o'clock, when I had just finished reading it. I said to him, 'Do you know that I think I have lighted upon a new author who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger?' I showed him a page or two--I think the passage where the curate returns home and Milly is first introduced. He would not pronounce whether it came up to my ideas, but remarked afterwards that he would have liked to have read more, which I thought a good sign.' "From the first the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ arrested public attention. Critics were, however, by no means unanimous as to their merits. They had so much individuality--stood so far apart from the standards of contemporary fiction--that there was considerable difficulty in applying the usual tests in their case. The terse, condensed style, the exactitude of expression, and the constant use of illustration, naturally suggested to some the notion that the new writer must be a man of science relaxing himself in the walks of fiction. The editor's own suspicions had once been directed towards Professor Owen by a similarity of handwriting. Guesses were freely hazarded as to the author's personality, and among other conjectures was one that Lord Lyttoll, whose 'Caxton' novels were about the same period delighting the readers of this magazine, had again struck a new vein of fiction. Probably Dickens was among the first to divine that the author must be a woman; but the reasons upon which he based this opinion might readily have been met by equally cogent deductions from the _Scenes_ that the writer must be of the male sex. Dickens, on the conclusion of the _Scenes_, wrote a letter of most generous appreciation, which, when sent through the editor, afforded the unknown author very hearty gratification. "While 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' was passing through the magazine, the editor was informed that he was to know the author as 'George Eliot.' It was at this time, then, that a name so famous in our literature was invented. We have no reason to suppose that it had been thought of when the series was commenced. It was probably assumed from the impossibility of a nameless shadow maintaining frequent communication with the editor of a magazine; possibly the recollection of George Sand entered into the idea; but the designation was euphonious and impressive. "Before the conclusion of the _Scenes_, Mr. Blackwood felt satisfied that he had to do with a master mind, and that a great career as a novelist lay open to George Eliot; and his frequent communications urged her warmly to persevere in her efforts. When 'Janet's Repentance' was drawing to a close, and arrangements were being made for re-issuing the sketches as a separate publication, he wrote to Mr. Lewes, 'George Eliot is too diffident of his own powers and prospects of success. Very few men, indeed, have more reason to be satisfied as far as the experiment has gone. The following should be a practical cheerer,'--and then he proceeded to say how the Messrs, Blackwood had seen reason to make a large increase in the forthcoming reprint of the _Scenes_. The volumes did not appear until after the New Year of 1858; and their success was such that the editor was able, before the end of the month, to write as follows to Lewes: 'George Eliot has fairly achieved a literary reputation among judges, and the public must follow, although it may take time. Dickens's letter was very handsome, and truly kind. I sent him an extract from George Eliot's letter to me, and I have a note from him, saying that 'he has been much interested by it,' and that 'it has given him the greatest pleasure.' Dickens adheres to his theory that the writer must be a woman.' To George Eliot herself he wrote in February, 1858, 'You will recollect, when we proposed to reprint, my impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the magazine to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often elapses between the two stages of reputation, the literary and the public. Your progress will be _sure_, if not so quick as we could wish.'" The success of the _Clerical Scenes_ determined the literary career of Mrs. Lewes. She began at once an elaborate novel, which was largely written in Germany. It was sent to Blackwood for publication, and his nephew has given a full account of the reception of the manuscript and the details of giving the work to the public. "_Adam Bede_ was begun almost as soon as the _Scenes_ were finished, and had already made considerable progress before their appearance in the reprint. In February, 1858, the editor, writing to Mr. Lewes, says, 'I am delighted to hear from George Eliot that I might soon hope to see something like a volume of the new tale. I am very sanguine.' In a few weeks after, the manuscript of the opening chapters of _Adam Bede_ was put into his hands, and he writes thus to Lewes after the first perusal: 'Tell George Eliot that I think _Adam Bede_ all right--most lifelike and real. I shall read the MS. quietly over again before writing in detail about it.... For the first reading it did not signify how many things I had to think of; I would have hurried through it with eager pleasure. I write this note to allay all anxiety on the part of George Eliot as to my appreciation of the merits of this most promising opening of a picture of life. In spite of all injunctions, I began _Adam Bede_ in the railway, and felt very savage when the waning light stopped me as we neared the Scottish border.' A few weeks later, when he had received further chapters, and had reperused the manuscript from the beginning, Mr. Blackwood wrote to George Eliot, 'The story is altogether very novel, and I cannot recollect anything at all like it. I find myself constantly thinking of the characters as real personages, which is a capital sign.' After he had read yet a little further he remarks, 'There is an atmosphere of genuine religion and purity that fears no evil, about the whole opening of the story.' George Eliot made an expedition to Germany in the spring of 1858, and the bulk of the second volume was sent home from Munich. Acknowledging the receipt of the manuscript, the editor wrote to Lewes, 'There can be no mistake about the merits, and I am not sure whether I expressed myself sufficiently warmly. But you know that I am not equal to the _abandon_ of expression which distinguishes the large-hearted school of critics.' Adam Bede was completed in the end of October, 1858, and Mr. Blackwood read the conclusion at once, and sent his opinions. He says, 'I am happy to tell you that I think it is capital.--I never saw such wonderful efforts worked out by such a succession of simple and yet delicate and minute touches. Hetty's night in the fields is marvellous. I positively shuddered for her, poor creature; and I do not think the most thoughtless lad could read that terrible picture of her feelings and hopeless misery without being deeply moved. Adam going to support her at the trial is a noble touch. You really make him a gentleman by that act. It is like giving him his spurs. The way poor Hetty leans upon and clings to Dinah is beautiful. Mr. Irwine is always good; so are the Poysers, lifelike as possible. Dinah is a very striking and original character, always perfectly supported, and never obtrusive in her piety. Very early in the book I took it into my head that it would be 'borne in upon her' to fall in love with Adam. Arthur is the least satisfactory character, but he is true too. The picture of his happy, complacent feelings before the bombshell bursts upon him is very good.' "_Adam Bede_ was published in the last week of January, 1859. The author was desirous on this occasion to test her strength by appealing directly to the public; and the editor, though quite prepared to accept _Adam Bede_ for the magazine, willingly gratified her. Sending George Eliot an early copy, before _Adam Bede_ had reached the public, he says, 'Whatever the subscription may be, I am confident of success--great success. The book is so novel and so true, that the whole story remains in my mind like a succession of incidents in the lives of people I know. _Adam Bede_ can certainly never come under the class of popular agreeable stories; but those who love power, real humor, and true natural description, will stand by the sturdy carpenter and the living groups you have painted in and about Hayslope.' "_Adam Bede_ did not immediately command that signal success which, looking back to it now, we might have expected for it. As the editor had warned the author, the Scenes had secured for her a reputation with the higher order of readers and with men of letters, but had not established her popularity with the public in general. The reviewers, too, were somewhat divided. Many of them recognized the merits of the work, but more committed the blunder of endeavoring to fix the position of the book by contrasting the author with the popular novelists of the time, and by endeavoring to determine from which of them she had drawn her inspiration. In 1859 a review of _Adam Bede_ from the pen of one of the oldest and ablest of our contributors was published in this magazine, and on its appearance George Eliot wrote the editor, 'I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer. I see well he is a man whose experience and study enabled him to relish parts of my book which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in London back drawing-rooms. He has gratified me keenly by laying his fingers on passages which I wrote either from strong feeling or from intimate knowledge, but which I had prepared myself to find passed over by reviewers.' Soon after, _The Times_ followed with an appreciative notice of the book which sounded its real merits, and did justice to the author's originality of genius; and by the month of April the book was steadily running through a second edition. Readers were beginning to realize that the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ was not a mere chance success, but the work of a writer capable of greater and better things." It was Mrs. Lewes's desire not to be known to the public in her own personality, hence her adoption of a _nom de plume_. She shrank from the consequences of a literary fame, had none of George Sand's love of notoriety or desire to impress herself upon the world. It was her hope that George Eliot and Mrs. Lewes would lead distinct lives so far as either was known outside her own household; that the two should not be joined together even in the minds of her most intimate friends. When her friend, the editor of the _Westminster Review_, detected the authorship of _Adam Bede_, and wrote to her in its praise, congratulating her on the success she had attained, Lewes wrote to him denying positively that Mrs. Lewes was the author. Charles Dickens also saw through the disguise, and wrote to the publisher declaring his opinion that _Adam Bede_ was written by a woman. When this was denied, he still persisted in his conviction, detecting the womanly insight into character, her failure adequately to portray men, while of women "she seemed to know their very hearts." The vividness with which scenes and persons about her childhood home were depicted, speedily led to the breaking of this disguise. One of her school-fellows, as soon as she had read _Adam Bede_, said, "George Eliot is Marian Evans;" but others were only confident that the author must be some Nuncaton resident, and began to look about them for the author. Some portions of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ had already been discovered to have a very strong local coloring, and now there was much curiosity as to the personality of the writer. A dilapidated gentleman of the neighborhood, who had run through with a fortune at Cambridge, was selected for the honor. While the _Scenes_ were being published, an Isle of Man newspaper attributed the authorship to this man, whose name was Liggins, but he at once repudiated it. On the appearance of _Adam Bede_ this claim was again put forward, and a local clergyman became the medium of its announcement to the public. The London _Times_ printed the following letter in its issue of April 15, 1859: "Sir,--The author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam Bede_ is Mr. Joseph Liggins, of Nuncaton, Warwickshire. You may easily satisfy yourself of my correctness by inquiring of any one in that neighborhood. Mr. Liggins himself and the characters whom he paints are as familiar there as the twin spires of Coventry.--Yours obediently, H. ANDERS, Rector of Kirkby." The next day the following was printed by the same paper:-- Sir,--The Rev. H. Anders has with questionable delicacy and unquestionable inaccuracy assured the world through your columns that the author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam Bede_ is Mr. Joseph Liggins, of Nuncaton. I beg distinctly to deny that statement. I declare on my honor that that gentleman never saw a line of those works until they were printed, nor had he any knowledge of them whatever. Allow me to ask whether the act of publishing a book deprives a man of all claim to the courtesies usual among gentlemen? If not, the attempt to pry into what is obviously meant to be withheld--my name--and to publish the rumors which such prying may give rise to, seems to me quite indefensible, still more so to state these rumors as ascertained facts. I am, sir. Yours, &c., GEORGE ELIOT. Liggins found his ardent supporters, and he explained the letter repudiating the authorship of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ as being written to further his own interests. He obtained money on the plea that he was being deprived of his rights, by showing portions of a manuscript which he had copied from the printed book. Neighboring clergymen zealously espoused his cause, and a warm controversy raged for a little time concerning his claim. Very curiously, it became a question of high and low church, his own fellow-believers defending Liggins with zeal, while the other party easily detected his imposition. Finally, Blackwood published a letter in _The Times_ denying his claims, accompanied by one from George Eliot expressing entire satisfaction with her publisher. A consequence of this discussion was, that the real name of the author was soon known to the public. The curiosity excited about the authorship of _Adam Bede_, the Liggins controversy, and the fresh, original character of the book itself, soon drew attention to its merits. It was referred to in a Parliamentary debate, and it became the general topic of literary conversation. Its success was soon assured, and it was not long before it was recognized that a new novelist of the first order had appeared. It is as amusing as interesting now to look back upon the reception given to _Adam Bede_ by the critics. It is not every critic who can detect a great writer in his first unheralded book, and some very stupid blunders were made in regard to this one. It was reviewed in _The Spectator_ for February 12, 1859, in this unappreciative manner: "George Eliot's three-volume novel of _Adam Bede_ is a story of humble life, where religious conscientiousness is the main characteristic of the hero and heroine, as well as of some of the other persons. Its literary feature partakes, we fear, too much of that Northern trait which, by minutely describing things and delineating individuals as matters of substantive importance in themselves, rather than as subordinate to general interest, has a tendency to induce a feeling of sluggishness in the reader." Not all the critics were so blundering as this one, however, and in the middle of April, _The Times_ said there was no mistake about the character of _Adam Bede_, that it was a first-rate novel, and that its author would take rank at once among the masters of the craft. In April, also, _Blackwood's Magazine_ gave the book a hearty welcome. The natural, genuine descriptions of village life were commended, and the boot was praised for its "hearty, manly sympathy with weakness, not inconsistent with hatred of vice." Throughout this notice the author is spoken of as "Mr. Eliot." The critic of the _Westminster Review_, in an appreciative and favorable notice, expressed a doubt if the author could be a man. He cited Hetty as proof that only a woman could have written the book, and said this character could "only be delineated as it is by an author combining the intense feelings and sympathies of a woman with the conceptive power of artistic genius." The woman theory was pronounced to be beset with serious difficulties, however, and the notice concluded with these words: "But while pronouncing no decisive opinion on this point, we may remark that the union of the best qualities of the masculine and feminine intellect is as rare as it is admirable; that it is a distinguishing characteristic of the most gifted artists and poets, and that to ascribe it to the author of _Adam Bede_ is to accord the highest praise we can bestow." With the writing of _Adam Bede_, George Eliot accepted her career as a novelist, and henceforth her life was devoted to literary creation. Even before _Adam Bede_ was completed, her attention was directed to Savonarola as the subject for a novel. Though this subject was in her mind, yet it was not made use of until later. As soon as _Adam Bede_ was completed, she at once began another novel of English life, and drawn even more fully than its predecessors from her own experience. Of this new work a greater portion of the manuscript was in the hands of the publishers with the beginning of 1860. She called it _Sister Maggie_, from the name of the leading character. This title did not please the publisher, and on the 6th of January, Blackwood wrote to her suggesting that it be called _The Mill on the Floss_. This title was accepted by George Eliot, and the new work appeared in three volumes at the beginning of April, 1860. In July, 1859, there appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ a short story from George Eliot bearing the title of "The Lifted Veil." This was followed by another, in 1864, called "Brother Jacob." Both were printed anonymously and are the only short stories she wrote after the _Clerical Scenes_. They attracted attention, but were not reprinted until 1880, when they appeared in the volume with _Silas Marner_, in Blackwood's "cabinet edition" of her works. In March, 1861, _Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe_, her only one-volume novel, was given to the public by Blackwood. Having carefully studied the life and surroundings of Savonarola, she now took up this subject, and embodied it in her _Romola_. This novel appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ from July, 1862, to July, 1863. It has been reported that it was offered to Blackwood for publication, who rejected it because it was not likely to be popular with the public. The probable reason of its publication in the _Cornhill Magazine_ was that a large sum was paid for its first appearance in that periodical. In a letter written July 5, 1862, Lewes gave the true explanation. "My main object in persuading her to consent to serial publication was not the unheard-of magnificence of the offer, but the advantage to such a work of being read slowly and deliberately, instead of being galloped through in three volumes. I think it quite unique, and so will the public when it gets over the first feeling of surprise and disappointment at the book not being English and like its predecessor." The success it met with while under way in the pages of the magazine may be seen from a letter written by Lewes on December 18. "Marian lives entirely in the fifteenth century, and is much cheered every now and then by hearing indirectly how her book is appreciated by the higher class of minds, and some of the highest, though it is not, and cannot be, popular. In Florence we hear they are wild with delight and surprise at such a work being executed by a foreigner, as if an Italian had ever done anything of the kind." _Romola_ was illustrated in the _Cornhill Magazine_, and on its completion was reprinted by Smith, Elder & Co., the publishers of that periodical. The success of _Romola_ was such as to lead George Eliot to begin on another historical subject, though she was probably induced to do this much more by its fitness to her purposes than by the public reception of the novel. This time she gave her work a poetical and dramatic form. _The Spanish Gypsy_ was written in the winter of 1864-5, but was laid aside for more thorough study of the subject and for careful revision. She had previously, in 1863, written a short story in verse, founded on the pages of Bocaccio, entitled "How Lisa Loved the King." Probably other poems had also been written, but poetry had not occupied much of her attention. As a school-girl, and even after she had gone to London, she had written verses. Among these earlier attempts, it may not be unsafe to conjecture, may have been the undated poems which she has published in connection with _The Legend of Jubal_. These are "Self and Life," "Sweet Evenings come and go, Love," and "The Death of Moses." After laying aside _The Spanish Gypsy_ she began on another novel of English life, and _Felix Holt: the Radical_ was printed in three volumes by Blackwood, in June, 1866. Shortly after, she printed in _Blackwood's Magazine_--an "Address to workmen, by Felix Holt," in which she gave some wholesome and admirable advice to the operative classes who had been enfranchised by the Reform Bill. In the same magazine, "How Lisa Loved the King" was printed in May, 1869. This was the last of her contributions to its pages. Its publisher gave her many encouragements in her literary career, and was devoted to her interests. After his death she gave expression to her appreciation of his valuable aid in reaching the public, through a letter addressed to his successor. I feel that his death was an irreparable loss to my mental life for nowhere else is it possible that I can find the same long-tried genuineness of sympathy and unmixed impartial gladness in anything I might happen to do well. To have had a publisher who was in the fullest sense of the word a gentleman, and at the same time a man of excellent moral judgment, has been an invaluable stimulus and comfort to me. Your uncle had retained that fruit of experience which makes a man of the world, as opposed to the narrow man of literature. He judged well of writing, because he had learned to judge well of men and things, not merely through quickness of observation and insight, but with the illumination of a heart in the right place--a thorough integrity and rare tenderness of feeling. After a visit to Spain in the summer of 1867, _The Spanish Gypsy_ was re-written and published by Blackwood, in June, 1868. During several years, at this period of her life, her pen was busy with poetical subjects. "A Minor Prophet" was written in 1865, "Two Lovers" in 1866, and "Oh may I join the Choir Invisible" in 1867. "Agatha" was written in 1868, and was published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for August, 1869. _The Legend of Jubal_ was written in 1869 and was printed in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for May, 1870. In 1869 were also written the series of sonnets entitled "Brother and Sister." "Armgart" was written in 1870, and appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ in July, 1871. "Arion" and "Stradivarius" were written in 1873. "A College Breakfast Party" was written in April, 1874, and was printed in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for July, 1878. _The Legend of Jubal and other Poems_ was published by Blackwood in 1874, and contained all the poems just named, except the last. A new edition was published in 1879 as _The Legend of Jubal and other Poems, Old and New_. The "new" poems in this edition are "The College Breakfast Party," "Self and Life," "Sweet Evenings come and go, Love," and "The Death of Moses." To the longer of these poetical studies succeeded another novel of English Life. _Middlemarch: a Study of Provincial Life_ was printed in twelve monthly parts by Blackwood, beginning in December, 1871. Five years later, _Daniel Deronda_ was printed in eight monthly parts by the same publisher, beginning with February, 1876. This method of publication was probably adopted for the same reason assigned by Lewes for the serial appearance of _Romola_. Both novels attracted much attention, and were eagerly devoured and discussed as the successive numbers appeared, the first because of its remarkable character as a study of English life, the other because of its peculiar ideas, and its defence of the Jewish race. Her last book, _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, a series of essays on moral and literary subjects, written the year before, was published by Blackwood in June, 1879. Its reception by the public was somewhat unfavorable, and it added nothing of immediate enlargement to her reputation. Of miscellaneous writing George Eliot did but very little. While Mr. Lewes was the editor of _The Leader_ newspaper, from 1849 to 1854, she was an occasional contributor of anonymous articles to its columns. When he founded _The Fortnightly Review_ she contributed to its first number, published in May, 1865, an article on "The Influence of Rationalism," in which she reviewed Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_. These occasional efforts of her pen, together with the two short stories and the poems already mentioned, constituted all her work outside her series of great novels. She concentrated her efforts as few authors have done; and having found, albeit slowly and reluctantly, what she could best accomplish, she seldom strayed aside. When her pen had found its proper place it was not often idle; and though she did not write rapidly, yet she continued steadily at her work and accomplished much. Within twenty years she wrote eight great works of fiction, including _The Spanish Gypsy_; works that are destined to an immortality of fame. From almost entire obscurity her name appeared, with the publication of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, to attract attention among a few most appreciative readers, and it was destined then to rise suddenly to the highest place of literary reputation with the publication of _Adam Bede_. Her genius blazed clearly out upon the world in the fulness of its powers, and each new work added to her fame, and revealed some new capacity in the delineation of character. Her literary career shows throughout the steady triumph of genius and of persistent labor. V. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. The home of Mrs. Lewes during the later years of her life was in one of the London suburbs, near Regent's Park, in what is known as St. John's Wood, at number 21, North Bank Street. This locality was not too far from the city for the enjoyment and the use of its advantages, while it was out of the noise and the smoke. The houses stand far apart, are surrounded with trees and lawns, while all is quiet and beautiful. The square, unpretentious house in which the Leweses lived was surrounded by a fine garden and green turf, while flowers were abundant. A high wall shut it out from the street. Within, all was refinement and good taste; there were flowers in the windows, the furniture was plain and substantial, while quiet simplicity reigned supreme. The house had two stories and a basement. On the first floor were two drawing-rooms, a small reception room, a dining-room and Mr. Lewes's study. These rooms were decorated by Owen Jones, their artist friend. The second floor contained the study of George Eliot, which was a plain room, not large. Its two front windows looked into the garden, and there were book-cases around the walls, and a neat writing-desk. All things about the house indicated simple tastes, moderate needs, and a plain method of life. Mrs. Lewes usually went into her study at eight o'clock in the morning, and remained there at work until one. If the weather was fine, she rode out in the afternoon, or she walked in Regent's Park with Mr. Lewes. In case the weather did not permit her going out, she returned again to her study in the afternoon. The affairs of her household were so arranged that she could give herself uninterruptedly to her work. The kitchen was in the basement, a housekeeper had entire charge of the management of the house, and Mrs. Lewes was carefully guarded from all outside interruptions. She very seldom went into society, and she received but few visitors, except on Sunday afternoons. Her letters were written by Mr. Lewes, with the exception of those to personal friends or an occasional outside correspondent; and all the details of the publication of her books and the management of her business affairs were in his hands. The immediate success of her novels made them profitable to the publisher, and she was paid comparatively large sums for them. Her evenings were spent by Mrs. Lewes at home, in reading and singing, unless she went to the theatre, as she often did. She walked much, often visiting the zoological gardens, and she had a great liking for all kinds of small animals. She greatly enjoyed travelling. Music was her passion, and art her delight. She preferred the realistic painters, and she never tired of the collections she often visited in London. The health of Mrs. Lewes was never good. She was a constant sufferer, was nervous, excitable and low-spirited. Only by the utmost care and husbanding of her powers was she enabled to accomplish her work. In a note to one of her correspondents she has given some hint of the almost chronic languor and bodily weakness from which she suffered. The weather, our ailments, and various other causes, have made us put off our flight from one week to another, but now we are really fluttering our wings and making a dust about us. I wish we had seen you oftener. I was placidly looking forward to your staying in England another year or more, and gave way to my general languor about seeing friends in these last months, which have been too full of small bodily miseries for me to feel that I had much space to give to pleasanter occupation. Only those who knew her long and well can fitly describe such a woman as Mrs. Lewes. Personal intimacy gives a color to the words used, and a meaning to the delicate shades of expression, that can be had in no other way. One of her friends has described her as being of "the middle height, the head large, the brow ample, the lower face massive; the eyes gray, lighting up from time to time with a sympathetic glow; the countenance sensitive, spiritual, with 'mind and music breathing' from it; the general demeanor composed and gracious; her utterance fluent and finished, but somewhat measured; her voice clear and melodious, moving evenly, as it were in a monotone, though now and then rising, with a sort of quiet eagerness, into a higher note." The same writer speaks of the close-fitting flow of her robe, and the luxuriant mass of light-brown hair hanging low on both sides of her head, as marked characteristics of her costume. Her features were very plain and large, too large for anything like beauty, but strongly impressive by their very massiveness. More than one of her friends has spoken of her resemblance to Savonarola, perhaps suggested by her description of that monk-prophet in _Romola_. Mr. Kegan Paul finds that she also resembled Dante and Cardinal Newman, and that these four were of the same spiritual family, with a curious interdependence of likeness. All these persons have "the same straight wall of brow; the droop of the powerful nose; mobile lips, touched with strong passion kept resolutely under control; a square jaw, which would make the face stern were it not counteracted by the sweet smile of lips and eye." Her friends say that no portrait does her justice, that her massive we features could not be portrayed. "The mere shape of the head," says Kegan Paul, "would be the despair of any painter. It was so grand and massive that it would scarcely be possible to represent it without giving the idea of disproportion to the frame, of which no one ever thought for a moment when they saw her, although it was a surprise, when she stood up, to see that, after all, she was but a little fragile woman who bore this weight of brow and brain." An account of her personal traits has been given by Mrs. Lippincott. "She impressed me," says this writer, "at first as exceedingly plain, with the massive character of her features, her aggressive jaw and evasive blue eyes. But as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable. But she seemed to me to the last lofty and cold. I felt that her head was among the stars--the stars of a wintry night." Another American, Miss Kate Field, in writing of the English authors to be seen in Florence half a dozen years after George Eliot began her career, was the first to give an account of this new literary star. "She is a woman of large frame and fair Saxon coloring. In heaviness of jaw and height of cheek-bone she greatly resembles a German; nor are her features unlike those of Wordsworth, judging from his pictures. The expression of her face is gentle and amiable, while her manner is particularly timid and retiring. In conversation Mrs. Lewes is most entertaining, and her interest in young writers is a trait which immediately takes captive all persons of this class. We shall not forget with what kindness and earnestness she addressed a young girl who had just begun to handle a pen, how frankly she related her own literary experience, and how gently she _suggested_ advice. True genius is always allied to humility; and in seeing Mrs. Lewes do the work of a good Samaritan so unobtrusively, we learned to respect the woman as much as we had ever admired the writer. 'For years,' said she to us, 'I wrote reviews because I knew too little of humanity.'" These sketches by persons who only met her casually have an interest in the illustration of her character; and they may be added to by still another account, written by Mrs. Annie Downs, also an American, in 1879, and describing a visit to George Eliot two years before her death. "Tall, slender, with a grace most un-English, her face, instead of beauty, possessed a sweet benignity, and at times flashed into absolute brilliancy. She was older than I had imagined, for her hair, once fair, was gray, and unmistakable lines of care and thought were on the low, broad brow. But although a pang pierced my heart as I recognized that most of her life was behind her, so intensely did I feel her personality that in a moment I lost sight of her age; it was like standing soul to soul, and beyond the reach of time. Dressed in black velvet, with point lace on her hair, and repeated at throat and wrists, she made me think at once of Romola and Dorothea Brooke. She talked of Agassiz, of his museum at Cambridge, of the great natural-history collections at Naples, of Sir Edwin Landseer's pictures, and with enthusiasm of Mr. Furnival's Shakspere and Chaucer classes at the Working Men's College... She had quaint etchings of some of the monkeys at the zoological gardens, and told me she was more interested in them than any of the other animals, they exhibit traits so distinctly human. She declared, while her husband and friends laughingly teased her for the assertion, that she had seen a sick monkey, parched with fever, absolutely refuse the water he longed for, until the keeper had handed it to a friend who was suffering more than he. As an illustration of their quickness, she told me, in a very dramatic manner, of a nurse who shook two of her little charges for some childish misdemeanor while in the monkey house. No one noticed the monkeys looking at her, but pretty soon every old monkey in the house began shaking her children, and kept up the process until the little monkeys had to be removed for fear their heads would be shaken off. I felt no incongruity between her conversation and her books. She talked as she wrote; in descriptive passages, with the same sort of humor, and the same manner of linking events by analogy and inference. The walls were covered with pictures. I remember Guido's Aurora, Michael Angelo's prophets, Raphael's sibyls, while all about were sketches, landscapes and crayon drawings, gifts from the most famous living painters, many of whom are friends of the house. A grand piano, opened and covered with music, indicated recent and continual use." One of her intimate friends says that "in every line of her face there was powder, and about her jaw and mouth a prodigious massiveness, which might well have inspired awe had it not been tempered by the most gracious smile which ever lighted up human features, and was ever ready to convert what otherwise might have been terror into fascination!" We are told that "an extraordinary delicacy pervaded her whole being. She seemed to live upon air, and the rest of her body was as light and fragile as her countenance and intellect were massive." One of the results of this large brain and fragile body was, that she was never vigorous in health. Only her quiet, simple life, and avoidance of all excitement in regular work, enabled her to accomplish so much as she did. Her conversation was rich and attractive. She talked much as she wrote, was a good listener, never obtruded her opinions, and always had a noble moral purpose in her words. An American lady has given an interesting account of her home and of her conversation. "No one," says Mrs. Field, "who had ever seen her could mistake the large head (her brain must be heavier than most men's) covered with a mass of rich auburn hair. At first I thought her tall; for one could not think that such a head could rest on an ordinary woman's shoulders. But, as she rose up, her figure appeared of but medium height. She received us very kindly. In seeing, for the first time, one to whom we owed so many happy hours, it was impossible to feel towards her as a stranger. All distance was removed by her courtesy. Her manners are very sweet, because very simple and free from affectation. To me her welcome was the more grateful as that of one woman to another. There is a sort of free-masonry among women, by which they understand at once those with whom they have any intellectual sympathy. A few words, and all reserve was gone. 'Come, sit by me on this sofa,' she said; and instantly, seated side by side, we were deep in conversation. It is in such intimacy one feels the magnetism of a large mind informed by a true woman's heart; then, as the soul shines through the face, one perceives its intellectual beauty. No portrait can give the full expression of the eye any more than of the voice. Looking into that clear, calm eye, one sees a transparent nature, a soul of goodness and truth, an impression which is deepened as you listen to her soft and gentle tones. A low voice is said to be an excellent thing in a woman. It is a special charm of the most finely cultured English ladies. But never did a sweeter voice fascinate a listener,--so soft and low that one must almost bend to hear. You can imagine what it was thus to sit for an hour beside this gifted woman and hear talk of questions interesting to the women of England and America. But I should do her great injustice if I gave the impression that there was in her conversation any attempt at display. There is no wish to shine. She is above that affectation of brilliancy which is often mere flippancy. Nor does she seek to attract homage and admiration. On the contrary, she is very averse to speak of herself, or even to hear the heartfelt praise of others. She does not engross the conversation, but is more eager to listen than to talk. She has that delicate tact--which is one of the fine arts among women--to make others talk, suggesting topics the most rich and fruitful, and by a word drawing the conversation into a channel where it may flow with broad, free current. Thus she makes you forget the celebrated author, and think only of the refined and highly cultivated woman. You do not feel awed by her genius, but only quickened by it, as something that calls out all that is better and truer. While there is no attempt to impress you with her intellectual superiority, you naturally feel elevated into a higher sphere. The conversation of itself floats upward into a region above the commonplace. The small-talk of ordinary society would seem an impertinence. There is a singular earnestness about her, as if those mild eyes looked deep into the great, sad, awful truths of existence. To her, life is a serious reality, and the gift of genius a grave responsibility." Mrs. Lewes was in the habit for many years of receiving her friends on Sunday afternoons from two to six o'clock. These gatherings came to be among the most memorable features of London literary life. A large number of persons, both men and women, attended her receptions, and among them many who were well known to the scientific or literary world. Especially were young men of aspiring minds drawn hither and given a larger comprehension of life. She had no political or fashionable connections, says Mr. F.W.H. Myers, "but nearly all who were most eminent in art, science, literature, philanthropy, might be met from time to time at her Sunday-afternoon receptions. There were many women, too, drawn often from among very different traditions of thought and belief, by the unfeigned goodness which they recognized in Mrs. Lewes's look and speech, and sometimes illumining with some fair young face a _salon_ whose grave talk needed the grace which they could bestow. And there was sure to be a considerable admixture of men not as yet famous,--probably never to be so,--but whom some indication of studies earnestly pursued, of sincere effort for the good of their fellow-men, had recommended to 'that hopeful interest which'--to quote a letter of her own--'the elder mind, dissatisfied with itself, delights to entertain with regard to those younger, whose years and powers hold a larger measure of unspoiled life.' It was Mr. Lewes who on these occasions contributed the cheerful _bonhomie_, the observant readiness, which are necessary for the facing of any social group. Mrs. Lewes's manner had a grave simplicity, which rose in closer converse into an almost pathetic anxiety to give of her best--to establish a genuine human relation between herself and her interlocutor--to utter words which should remain as an active influence for good in the hearts of those who heard them. To some of her literary admirers, this serious tone was distasteful; they were inclined to resent the prominence given to moral ideas in a quarter from which they preferred to look merely for intellectual refreshment. Mrs. Lewes's humor, though fed from a deep perception of the incongruities of human fates, had not, except in intimate moments, any buoyant or contagious quality, and in all her talk--full of matter and wisdom, and exquisitely worded as it was--there was the same pervading air of strenuous seriousness which was more welcome to those whose object was distinctively to _learn_ from her, than to those who merely wished to pass an idle and brilliant hour. To her, these mixed receptions were a great effort. Her mind did not move easily from one individuality to another, and when she afterward thought that she had failed to understand some difficulty which had been laid before her,--had spoken the wrong word to some expectant heart,--she would suffer from almost morbid accesses of self-reproach." A further idea of these conversations may be gathered from Mr. Kegan Paul's account. "When London was full," he says, "the little drawing-room in St. John's Wood was now and then crowded to overflowing with those who were glad to give their best of conversation, of information, and sometimes of music, always to listen with eager attention to whatever their hostess might say, when all that she said was worth hearing. Without a trace of pedantry, she led the conversation to some great and lofty strain. Of herself and her works she never spoke; of the works and thoughts of others she spoke with reverence, and sometimes even too great tolerance. But these afternoons had the highest pleasure when London was empty, or the day was wet, and only a few friends were present, so that her conversation assumed a more sustained tone than was possible when the rooms were full of shifting groups. It was then that, without any premeditation, her sentences fell as fully formed, as wise, as weighty, as epigrammatic, as any to be found in her books. Always ready, but never rapid, her talk was not only good in itself, but it encouraged the same in others, since she was an excellent listener, and eager to hear." At these gatherings the most noted of the English disciples of Comte were to be found, and among them Frederic Harrison, Prof. E.S. Beesley, Dr. Congrove, the director of the London Church of Humanity, and Prof. W.K. Clifford. The English positivists were represented by Herbert Spencer, Prof. T.H. Huxley and Moncure D. Conway. The realistic school of poets and artists came in the persons of its most representative men. Dante Rosetti and Millais, Tourguénief and Burne Jones, DuMaurier and Dr. Hueffner illustrated most of its phases. The great world of general literature sent Sir Arthur Helps, Sir Theodore Martin, Anthony Trollope, C.G. Leland, Justin McCarthy, Frederic Myers, Prof. Mark Pattison and many another. The rarer guests included Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. It was no inconsiderable influence which could draw together such a company and hold it together for many years. Of the part played in these gatherings by the hosts, Miss Mathilde Blind has given an account. Lewes acted "as a social cement. His vivacity, his ready tact, the fascination of his manners, diffused that general sense of ease and _abandon_ so requisite to foster an harmonious flow of conversation. He was inimitable as a _raconteur_, and Thackeray, Trollope and Arthur Helps were fond of quoting some of the stories which he would dramatize in the telling. One of the images which, on these occasions, recurs oftenest to George Eliot's friends is that of the frail-looking woman who would sit with her chair drawn close to the fire, and whose winning womanliness of bearing and manners struck every one who had the privilege of an introduction to her. Her long, pale face, with its strongly marked features, was less rugged in the mature prime of life than in youth, the inner meanings of her nature having worked themselves more and more to the surface, the mouth, with its benignant suavity of expression, especially softening the too prominent under lip and massive jaw. Her abundant hair, untinged with gray, whose smooth bands made a kind of frame to the face, was covered by a lace or muslin cap, with lappets of rich point or Valenciennes lace fastened under her chin. Her gray-blue eyes, under noticeable eyelashes, expressed the same acute sensitiveness as her long, thin, beautifully shaped hands. She had a pleasant laugh and smile, her voice being low, distinct, and intensely sympathetic in quality; it was contralto in singing, but she seldom sang or played before more than one or two friends. Though her conversation was perfectly easy, each sentence was as finished, as perfectly formed, as the style of her published works." Among the persons who gathered at The Priory on Sunday afternoons there came to be a considerable number of those who were Mrs. Lewes's devoted disciples. They hung upon her words, they accepted her views of life, her philosophy became theirs. That she would have admitted such discipleship existed there is no reason to believe, and it is certain she did not attempt to bring it about or even desire it. So great, however, was her power of intellect, so noble her personal influence, it was impossible that ardent young natures could refrain from devotion to such genius and speedy acceptance of its teachings. The richness of her moral and intellectual nature aided largely in this heroine worship, but she impressed herself on other minds because she was so much an individual, because her personality was of a kind to command reverence and devotion. It was not merely young and impulsive natures who were thus attracted and inspired, for Edith Simcox says that "men and women, old friends and new, persons of her own age and of another generation, the married and the single, impulsive lovers and hard-headed philosophers, nay, even some who elsewhere might have passed for cynics, all classes alike yielded to the attractive force of this rare character, in which tenderness and strength were blended together, and as it were transfused with something that was all her own--the genius of sweet goodness." Perhaps her influence was so great on those it reached because it demanded high and noble life and thought of her disciples. Her moral ideal was a high one, and she had literary and artistic standards that demanded all the effort of both genius and talent, while her culture was such as to be exacting in its requirements. So we find Miss Simcox saying that Mrs. Lewes, in her friendships, "had the unconscious exactingness of a full nature. She was intolerant of a vacuum in the mind or character, and she was indifferent to admiration that did not seem to have its root in fundamental agreement with those principles she held to be most 'necessary to salvation.' Where this sympathy existed, her generous affection was given to a fellow-believer, a fellow-laborer, with singularly little reference to the fact that such full sympathy was never unattended with profound love and reverence for herself as a living witness to the truth and power of the principles thus shared. To love her was a strenuous pleasure; for in spite of the tenderness for all human weakness that was natural to her, and the scrupulous charity of her overt judgments, the fact remained that her natural standard was ruthlessly out of reach, and it was a painful discipline for her friends to feel that she was compelled to lower it to suit their infirmities. The intense humility of her self-appreciation, and the unfeigned readiness with which she would even herself with any sinner who sought her counsel, had the same effect upon those who would compare what she condemned in herself with what she tolerated in them. And at the same time, no doubt, this total absence of self-sufficiency had something to do with the passionate tenderness with which commonplace people dared to cherish their immortal friend." As has already been suggested, her womanliness is a more prominent characteristic of Mrs. Lewes's mind than its great intellectual power. Her sympathy was keen and most sensitive, her modesty and humility were almost excessive, and her tenderness of nature was a woman's own. She gave her sympathy readily and freely to the humble and unfavored. She had no taint of intellectual aristocracy, says one of her friends. Faithful, devoted love; the sacredness of simple duties and plain work; earnest help of other souls,--these were among the daily lessons of her life and teaching. "How strong was the current of her sympathy in the direction of all humble effort," exclaims one of her friends, "how reluctantly she checked presumption! The most ordinary and uninteresting of her friends must feel that had they known nothing of her but her rapid insight into and quick response to their inmost feelings she would still have been a memorable personality to them. This sympathy was extended to the sorrows most unlike anything she could ever by any possibility have known--the failures of life obtained as large a share of her compassion as its sorrows. The wish to console and cheer was indeed rooted in the most vital part of her nature." Another of her friends has said that "she possessed to a marvellous degree the divine gifts of charity, and of attracting moral outcasts to herself, whose devils she cast out, if I may be permitted the expression, by shutting her eyes to their existence. In her presence you felt wrapped round by an all-embracing atmosphere of sympathy and readiness to make the least of all your short comings, and the most of any good which might be in you. But great as was her personality, she shrank with horror from intruding it upon you, and, in general society, her exquisitely melodious voice was, unhappily for the outside circles, too seldom raised beyond the pitch of something not much above a whisper. Of the rich vein of humor which runs through George Eliot's works there was comparatively little trace in her conversation, which seldom descended from the grave to the gay. But although she rarely indulged in conversational levity herself, she was most tolerant of it, and even encouraged its ebullition, in others, joining heartily in any mirth which might be going on." She made her younger admirers feel the deeper influence of her great personality by inspiring them with the largest moral purposes. To awaken and to arouse the moral nature seems always to have been her purpose, and to lead it to the highest attainable results. Earnest young minds never "failed to feel in her presence that they were for the time, at all events, raised into a higher moral level, and none ever left her without feeling inspired with a stronger sense of duty, and positively under the obligation of striving to live up to a higher standard of life." Hence her personal influence was considerable, though she led the close life of a student, and did not go into general society at all. This high moral earnestness made her a prophet to her friends, as in her books it made her a great moral teacher to the world at large. Those who had the privilege of an intimate acquaintance with Mrs. Lewes have pronounced the woman greater than her books. She was not only a great writer but a great woman. Human nature in its largest capacities was represented in her, for she rose above the limitations of sex; and she is thought of less as a great woman than as a large human personality. Hers was a massive nature, emphatic, individual, many-sided. Genius of a very high order, though not the highest, was hers, while she was possessed of a broad culture and great learning. Seldom does genius carry with it talents so varied and well-trained or a culture so full and thorough. And her culture was of that kind which entered into every fibre of her nature and became a part of her own personality. It was thoroughly digested and absorbed into good healthy red blood, and became a quickened, sustained motive to the largest efforts. How vital this love of culture was, may be seen when we are told that "she possessed in an eminent degree that power which has led to success in so many directions, of keeping her mind unceasingly at the stretch without conscious fatigue. She would cease to ponder or to read when other duties called her, but never because she herself felt tired. Even in so complex an effort as a visit to a picture gallery implies, she could continue for hours at the same pitch of earnest interest, and outweary strong men. Nor was this a mere habit of passive reception. In the intervals between her successive compositions her mind was always fusing and combining its fresh stores." She had culture, moral power and earnestness in a high degree, warmth of sympathy and sensitiveness to all beauty, but she had no saintliness. Profound as was her reverence for moral purity, and lofty as was her moral purpose, she was not a saint, and holiness was not a characteristic of her nature. This clear and high sense of moral truth everywhere appears in her life and thought. "For the lessons most imperatively needed by the mass of men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering endeavor,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing teacher than she. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,--all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant soul. But it was the voice which best revealed her, a voice whose subdued intensity and tremulous richness seemed to environ her uttered words with the mystery of a world that must remain untold. And then again, when in moments of more intimate converse some current of emotion would set strongly through her soul, when she would raise her head in unconscious absorption and look out into the unseen, her expression was not one to be soon forgotten. It has not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls to whose childlike confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Rather it was the look of a strenuous Demiurge, of a soul on which high tasks are laid, and which finds in their accomplishment its only imagination of joy." Another side of her influence on persons is expressed by the representative of that publishing house which gave her books to the world. "In addition to the spell which bound the world to her by her genius, she had a personal power of drawing to herself, in ties of sympathy and kindly feeling, all who came under her influence. She never oppressed any one by her talents; she never allowed any one to be sensible of the depth and variety of her scholarship; she knew, as few know, how to draw forth the views and feelings of her visitors, and to make their sympathies her own. There was a charm in her personal character which of itself was sufficient to conciliate deep and lasting regard. Every one who entered her society left it impressed with the conviction that they had been under the influence of a sympathy and tenderness not less remarkable than the force of her mental power.... Her deep and catholic love for humanity in its broadest and best sense, which was in itself the strongest quickening motive of her genius, will maintain her influence in the future as in the present." Hers was a somewhat sensitive, shrinking nature, with no self-assumption, and without the taint of egotism. She had a modest estimate of her own great literary creations, and shrank from all mention of them and from the homage paid to her as an author. After the publication of _Romola_ she was one day reading French to a girl companion in the garden of a Swiss hotel, when a lady drew near to listen to the silvery tones of her voice. Noticing this, she said, "Do you understand?" The lady answered, "I do not care for the matter; I only came to listen to your voice." "Do you like it?" was then inquired. When the lady expressed the pleasure it gave her, Mrs. Lewes took her hand and warmly said, "I thank you. I would rather you would compliment my voice than my _Romola_." [Footnote: This story is not authenticated; it may be taken for what it is worth, though it appears to be characteristic.] It has been truly said of her that above all novelists, with the exception of Goethe, she was supreme in culture. She had a passion for knowledge, and zeal in the pursuit of learning. She was a lover of books, but not a scholar in the technical and exact sense. Delighting in literature, art, music, and all that appeals to the imagination, rather than in mere information, yet she was a thinker of original powers, with a keen appreciation of philosophy, and ability to tread its most difficult paths with firm step. She had an intimate acquaintance with the literatures of Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and she was well read in the classics of Greece and Rome. She was "competently acquainted" with the different systems of philosophy, and she had mastered their problems while thinking out her own conclusions. Having no professional knowledge of the sciences, she was a diligent reader of scientific books, and was familiar with all the bearings of science on philosophy and religion. Her books show an intimate knowledge of modern thought in many of its phases, as it bears upon physical, economic, historical and intellectual science. With all her learning, however, she retained a woman's sympathy with life, beauty and poetry. Her knowledge was never dry and technical, but warm and imaginative with genius and poetry. [Footnote: Her scholarly habits, and her realistic tendencies, usually made George Eliot very painstaking and accurate, but an occasional slip of pen or memory is to be noted in her books. In Theophrastus Such she credited to the Apologia of Plato what is really contained in the Phaedo. The motto to chapter seventeen of Daniel Deronda was quoted, in the first edition, as from In Memoriam instead of Locksley Hall. In an early chapter of Felix Holt she made the parson preach from the words, "Break up the fallow ground of your hearts." The words of scripture are, "Break up your fallow ground." In Adam Bede a clergyman is made to take the words of the Prayer Book, "In the midst of life we are in death," for his text.] Her culture may be compared with Mrs. Browning's, who was also an extensive reader and widely informed. The poet as well as the novelist acquired her learning because of her thirst for knowledge, and mainly by her own efforts; but she preferred the classics to science, and literature to philosophy. Mrs. Browning was the wiser, George Eliot the more learned. The writings of Mrs. Browning are less affected by her information than George Eliot's; and this is true because she was of a more poetical temperament, because her imagination was more brilliant and creative. Mrs. Lewes was an enthusiastic lover of art, and especially of music. She never tired in her interest in beholding fine paintings, and music was the continual delight of her life. She was a tireless frequenter of picture galleries, and every fine musical entertainment in London was sure to find her, in company with Mr. Lewes, an enthusiastic listener. Good acting also claimed not a little of her interest, and she carefully studied even the details of the dramatic art, so that she was able to give a critical appreciation to the acting she enjoyed. Indeed, she had given to her mind that rounded fulness of attainment, and developed all her faculties with that due proportion, which Fichte so earnestly preached as the characteristic of true culture. "Her character," says Edith Simcox, "seemed to include every possibility of action and emotion; no human passion was wanting in her nature, there were no blanks or negations; and the marvellous thing was to see how, in this wealth of impulses and desires, there was no crash of internal discord, no painful collisions with other human interests outside; how, in all her life, passions of volcanic strength were harnessed in the service of those nearest her, and so inspired by the permanent instinct of devotion to her kind, that it seemed as if it were by her own choice they spent themselves there only where their force was welcome. Her very being was a protest against the opposing and yet cognate heresies that half the normal human passions must be strangled in the quest of virtue, and that the attainment of virtue is a dull and undesirable end, seeing that it implies the sacrifice of most that makes life interesting." She had her own temptations and her imperfections. With these she struggled bravely, and set herself to the hard task of correction and discipline. Her culture was not merely one of books, but it was also one of moral discipline and of strenuous spiritual subjection. It was one of stern moral requirements and duties, as well as one of large sympathy with all that is natural and beautiful. It was a quiet life of continuous study and authorship which Mrs. Lewes led in The Priory, and it was varied from year to year only by her visits to the continent and by her summer residence in Surrey. One of her summer retreats, at the village of Shotter Mill, has been described, as well as her life there. The most picturesque house in the place is known as Brookbank, and here she spent a summer, that of 1871. It is described as "an old two-storied cottage, the front of the house being half-covered with trailing rose-trees. The rooms are low but pleasant, and furnished in a simple, comfortable manner. We have often endeavored," says the writer of this account, "to glean some information regarding George Eliot's life at Shotter Mill, but she and Mr. Lewes lived in such seclusion that there was very little to be told. They seldom crossed their threshold during the day, but wandered over the commons and hills after sundown. They were very anxious to lodge at the picturesque old farm, ten minutes' walk beyond Brookbank, but all available room was then occupied. However, George Eliot would often visit the farmer's wife, and, sitting on a grassy bank just beside the kitchen door, would discuss the growth of fruit and the quality of butter in a manner so quiet and simple the good country folks were astonished, expecting very different conversation from the great novelist. The farmer was employed to drive them two or three times a week. They occasionally visited Tennyson, whose home is only three miles distant, though a rather tedious drive, since it is up hill nearly all the way. George Eliot did not enjoy the ride much, for the farmer told us that, 'withal her being such a mighty clever body,--she were very nervous in a carriage--allays wanted to go on a smooth road, and seemed dreadful feared of being thrown out.' George Eliot was writing _Middlemarch_ during her summer at Brookbank, and the term for which they had the cottage expired before they wished to return to London. The Squire was away at the time, so they procured permission to use his house during the remainder of the visit. In speaking of them he said, 'I visited Mr. and Mrs. Lewes several times before they went back to town, and found the authoress a very agreeable woman, both in manner and appearance; but her mind was evidently completely absorbed in her work; she seemed to have no time for anything but writing from morning till night. Her hand could hardly convey her thoughts to paper fast enough. It was an exceptionally hot summer, and yet through it all Mrs. Lewes would have artificial heat placed at her feet to keep up the circulation. Why, one broiling day I came home worn out, longing for a gray sky and a cool breeze, and on going into the garden I found her sitting there, her head just shaded by a deodara on the lawn, writing away as usual. I expostulated with her for letting the midday sun pour down on her like that. 'Oh,' she replied, 'I like it. To-day is the first time I have felt warm this summer.' So I said no more, and went my way.' And thus nearly all we could learn about George Eliot was that she loved to bask in the sun and liked green peas. She visited some of the cottagers, but only those living in secluded places, who knew nothing of her. Just such people as these she used in her graphic and realistic sketches of peasant life. With regard to the surrounding country, George Eliot said that it pleased her more than any she knew of in England." In these summer retreats she continued steadily at her work, and she greatly delighted in the quiet and rest. Other summers were spent at Witley, in the same county, where the fine scenery, lovely drives and wide-reaching views from the hill-tops were to her a perpetual delight. At this place a house was bought, and there was a project of giving up the London residence and of visiting the city only for occasional relaxation. This project was not carried out, for soon after their return from Witley in the autumn of 1878, Mr. Lewes was taken ill, and died in November. His death was a great blow to Mrs. Lewes, and he was deeply mourned, so much so as to seriously impair her health. The state of her mind at this trying period is well indicated in a letter written to Prof. David Kaufmann. THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, REGENT'S PARK, April 17, '79. MY DEAR SIR,--Your kind letter has touched me very deeply. I confess that my mind has more than once gone out to you as one from whom I should like to have some sign of sympathy with my loss. But you were rightly inspired in waiting till now, for during many weeks I was unable even to listen to the letters which my generous friends were continually sending me. Now, at last, I am eagerly interested in every communication that springs out of an acquaintance with my husband and taskworks. I thank you for telling me about the Hungarian translation of his History of Philosophy, but what would I not have given if the volumes could have come a few days before his death; for his mind was perfectly clear, and he would have felt some joy in that sign of his work being effective. I do not know whether you enter into the comfort I feel that he never knew he was dying, and fell gently asleep after ten days of illness in which the suffering was comparatively mild..... One of the last things he did at his desk was to despatch a manuscript of mine to the publishers. The book (not a story and not bulky) is to appear near the end of May, and as it contains some words I wanted to say about the Jews, I will order a copy to be sent to you. I hope that your labors have gone on uninterruptedly for the benefit of others, in spite of public troubles. The aspect of affairs with us is grevious--industry languishing, and the best part of our nation indignant at our having been betrayed into an unjustifiable war (in South Africa). I have been occupied in editing my husband's MSS., so far as they are left in sufficient completeness to be prepared for publication without the obtrusion of another mind instead of his. A brief volume on _The Study of Psychology_ will appear immediately, and a further volume of psychological studies will follow in the autumn. But his work was cut short while he still thought of it as the happy occupation of far-stretching months. Once more let me thank you for remembering me in my sorrow, and believe me Yours with high regard, M.E. LEWES. Writing to a friend soon after Lewes's death, who had also lost her husband, she said,-- There is but one refuge--the having much to do. Nothing can make the burden to be patiently borne, except the gradual adaptation of your soul to the new conditions. The much to do she partly found in editing the uncompleted _Problems of Life and Mind_, and in establishing a studentship for original investigation in physiology, known as "The George Henry Lewes Studentship." Its value is about two hundred pounds, and it is open to both sexes. These labors enabled her to do honor to one she had trusted through many years, whose name and fame she greatly revered, and to recover the even poise of her life. She carefully managed the business affairs he had left in her hands, and she provided for his children. A year and a half after the death of Lewes, May 6, 1880, she was married at the church of St. George's, Hanover Square, to John Walter Cross, the senior partner in a London banking firm, whom she had first met in 1867, and who had been a greatly valued friend both to herself and Lewes. Though much younger than herself, he had many qualities to recommend him to her regard. A visit to the continent after this ceremony lasted for several months, a considerable portion of the time being spent in Venice. On their return to London in the autumn after spending a happy summer in Surrey, they went to live in the house of Mr. Cross at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The old habits of her life were taken up, her studies were resumed, a new novel was begun, her friends came as usual on Sunday afternoons, and many years of work seemed before her, for her health had greatly improved. On Friday, December 17, 1880, she attended the presentation of the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus, in the original Greek, with the accompaniments of the ancient theatre, by the undergraduates of Balliol College, Oxford. She was very enthusiastic about this revival of ancient art, and planned to read anew all the Greek dramatists with her husband. The next day she attended a popular concert at St. James Hall, and listened with her usual intense interest. Sitting in a draught, she caught cold, but that evening she played through much of the music she had heard in the afternoon. The next day she was not so well as usual, yet she met her friends in the afternoon. On Monday her larynx was slightly affected, and a physician was called, but no danger was apprehended. Yet her malady gained rapidly. On Tuesday night she was in a dangerous condition, and on Wednesday the pericardium was found to be seriously diseased. Towards midnight of that day, December 22, after a period of unconsciousness, she quietly passed away. She was buried on the 29th, in the unconsecrated portion of Highgate Cemetery, by the side of George Henry Lewes. The funeral services were conducted by the Rev. Dr. Sadler, a radical Unitarian minister, who spoke of her great genius, and quoted her own words about a future life in the life of humanity. His address contained many references to her personal characteristics, such as could only come from an intimate friend. He said,-- "To those who are present it is given to think of the gentleness, and delicate womanly grace and charm, which were combined with 'that breadth of culture and universality of power which,' as one has expressed it, 'have made her known to all the world.' To those who are present it is given to know the diffidence and self-distrust which, notwithstanding all her public fame, needed individual sympathy and encouragement to prevent her from feeling too keenly how far the results of her labors fell below the standard she had set before her. To those who are present too it may be given--though there is so large a number to whom it is not given--to understand how a nature may be profoundly devout, and yet unable to accept a great deal of what is usually held as religious belief. No intellectual difficulties or uncertainties, no sense of mental incapacity to climb the heights of infinitude, could take from her the piety of the affections or 'the beliefs which were the mother-tongue of her soul.' I cannot doubt that she spoke out of the fulness of her own heart when she put into the lips of another the words, 'May not a man silence his awe or his love and take to finding reasons which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found!' How patiently she toiled to render her work in all its details as little imperfect as might be! How green she kept the remembrance of all those companions to whom she felt that she owed a moulding and elevating influence, especially in her old home, and of him who was its head, her father! How her heart glowed with a desire to help to make a heaven on earth, to be a 'cup of strength' to others, and when her own days on earth should have closed, to have a place among those "'Immortal dead who still live on In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude; in scorn For miserable aims that end with sell; In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.' "How she thus yearned 'to join the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world!' All this is known to those who had the privilege of being near her." The address was preceded by a simple burial service, and was followed by a prayer, all being given in the chapel of the cemetery. The coffin, covered with the finest floral tributes, was then borne to the grave, where the burial service was completed, and was followed by a prayer and the benediction. Although the day was a disagreeable one and rain was falling, the chapel was crowded, and many not being able to gain admittance stood about the open grave. Beside her personal friends and her family there were present many persons noted for their literary or scientific attainments, On the lid of the coffin was this inscription: MARY ANN CROSS. ("George Eliot") Born 22d Nov., 1819; died 22d Dec., 1880. Quilla fonte Che spande di parlay si largo flume. [Footnote: From Dante, and has been rendered into English thus: That fountain Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech.] The novel which had been begun was left a mere fragment, and in accordance with what it was thought would have been her wish, was destroyed by her family. Perhaps it was better that her dislike of unfinished work should be so respected. VI. LITERARY TRAITS AND TENDENCIES. George Eliot was a painstaking, laborious writer. She did not proceed rapidly, so carefully did she elaborate her pages. Her subjects were thoroughly studied before the pen was taken in hand, patiently thought out, planned with much care, and all available helps secured that could be had. She threw her whole life into her work, became a part of the scenes she was depicting; her life was absorbed until the work of writing became a painful process both to body and mind. "Her beautifully written manuscript," says her publisher, "free from blur or erasure, and with every letter delicately and distinctly finished, was only the outward and visible sign of the inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas. She never drew any of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the number and variety of her illustrations, she had rarely much to correct in her proof-sheets. She had all that love of doing her work well for the work's sake which she makes prominent characteristics of Adam Bede and Stradivarius." When a book was completed, so intense had been her application and the absorption of her life in her work, a period of despondency followed. When a correspondent praised _Middlemarch_, and expressed a hope that even a greater work might follow, she replied, "As to the 'great novel' which remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future books." Again, she wrote of the depression which succeeded the completion of each of her works,-- Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world. The responsibility of writing grows heavier and heavier--does it not?--as the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really needed contribution to the poetry of the world--I mean possible to one's self to do it. Owing probably somewhat to this tendency to take a despondent view concerning her own work, and to distrust of the leadings of her own genius, was her habit of never reading the criticisms made on her books. She adopted this rule, she tells one correspondent, "as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying her power of writing." To another, who had written her in appreciation of her books, she wrote this note, in which she alludes to the same habit of shunning criticism: MY DEAR MISS WELLINGTON,--The signs of your sympathy sent to me across the wide water have touched me with the more effect because you imply that you are young. I care supremely that my writing should be some help and stimulus to those who have probably a long life before them. Mr. Lewes does not let me read criticisms on my writings. He always reads them himself, and gives me occasional quotations, when be thinks that they show a spirit and mode of appreciation which will win my gratitude. He has carefully read through the articles which were accompanied by your kind letter, and he has a high opinion of the feeling and discernment exhibited in them. Some concluding passages which he read aloud to me are such as I register among the grounds of any encouragement in looking backward on what I have written, if not in looking forward to my future writing. Thank you, my dear young friend, whom I shall probably never know otherwise than in this spiritual way. And certainly, apart from those relations in life which bring daily duties and opportunities of lovingness, the most satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an elder mind with a younger. The quotation in your letter from Hawthorne's book offers an excellent type both for men and women in the value it assigns to that order of work which is called subordinate but becomes ennobling by being finely done. [Footnote: A reference to Hilda's ceasing to consider herself an original artist in the presence of the great masters. "Beholding the miracles of beauty which the old masters had achieved, the world seemed already rich enough in original designs and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse these selfsame beauties more widely among mankind.'--So Hilda became a copyist."] Yours, with sincere obligations, M.E. LEWES. By the way, Mr. Lewes tells me that you ascribe to me a hatred of blue eyes--which is amusing, since my own eyes are blue-gray. I am not in any sense one of the "good haters;" on the contrary, my weaknesses all verge toward an excessive tolerance and a tendency to melt off the outlines of things. THE PRIORY, 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, Jan. 16, '73. [Footnote: From The Critic of December 31, 1881. This letter was addressed to Miss Alice Wellington, now Mrs. Rollins.] Her sensitiveness was great, and contact with an unappreciative and unsympathetic public depressing to a large degree. It was a part of that shrinking away from the world which kept her out of society, and away from all but a select few whose tastes and sympathies were largely in accordance with her own. Besides, she distrusted that common form of criticism which presumes to tell an author how he ought to have written, and assumes to itself an insight and knowledge greater than that possessed by genius itself. Concerning the value of such criticism she wrote these pertinent words: I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest. To the same correspondent she used even stronger words concerning her dislike of ordinary criticism. Do not expect "criticism" from me. I hate "sitting in the seat of judgment," and I would rather try to impress the public generally with the sense that they may get the best result from a book without necessarily forming an "opinion" about it, than I would rush into stating opinions of my own. The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of our times--a chief obstacle to true culture. It is not to be forgotten, however, that George Eliot had done much critical work before she became a novelist, and that much of it was of a keen and cutting nature. Severely as she was handled by the critics, no one of them was more vigorous than was her treatment of Young and Cumming. Even in later years, when she took up the critical pen, the effect was felt. Mr. Lecky did not pass gently through her hands when she reviewed his _Rationalism in Europe_. Her criticisms in _Theophrastus Such_ were penetrating and severe. For the same reason, she read few works of contemporary fiction, that her mind might not be biassed and that she might not be discouraged in her own work. Always busy with some special subject which absorbed all her time and strength, she could give little attention to contemporary literature. To one correspondent she wrote,-- My constant groan is, that I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have sifted for me, unread for want of time. The style adopted by George Eliot is for the most part fresh, vital and energetic. It is pure in form, rich in illustrations, strong and expressive in manner. There are exceptions to this statement, it is true, and she is sometimes turgid and dry, again gaudy and verbose. Sententious in her didactic passages, she is pure and noble in her sentiment, poetical and impressive in her descriptions of nature. Her diction is choice, her range of expression large, and she admirably suits her words to the thought she would present. There is a rich, teeming fulness of life in her books, the canvas is crowded, there is movement and action. An abundance of passion, delicate feeling and fine sensibility is expressed. The critics have almost universally condemned the plots of George Eliot's novels for their want of unity. They tell us that the flow of events is often not orderly, while improbable scenes are introduced, superfluous incidents are common, the number of characters is too great, and the analysis of character impedes the unity of events. These objections are not always vital, and sometimes they are mere objections rather than genuine criticisms. Instances of failure to follow the best methods may be cited in abundance, one of which is seen in the first two chapters in _Daniel Deronda_ being placed out of their natural order. The opening scenes in _The Spanish Gypsy_ seem quite unnecessary to the development of the plot, while the last two scenes of the second book are so fragmentary and unconnected with the remainder of the story as to help it but little. In the middle of _Adam Bede_ are several chapters devoted to the birthday party, which are quite unnecessary to the development of the action. _Daniel Deronda_ contains two narratives which are in many respects almost entirely distinct from each other, and the reader is made to alternate between two worlds that have little in common. There is much of the improbable in the account of the Transome estate in _Felix Holt_, while the closing scenes in the life of Tito Melema in _Romola_ are more tragical than natural. Yet these defects are incidental to her method and art rather than actual blemishes on her work. For the most part, her work is thoroughly unitary, cause leads naturally into effect, and there is a moral development of character such as is found in life itself. Her plots are strongly constructed, in simple outlines, are easily comprehended and kept in mind, and the leading motive holds steadily through to the end. Her analytical method often makes an apparent interruption of the narrative, and the unity of purpose is frequently developed through the philosophic purport of the novel rather than in its literary form. Direct narrative is often hindered, it is true, by her habit of studying the remote causes and effects of character, but she never wanders far enough to forget the real purpose had in view. She holds the many elements of her story well under command, she concentrates them upon some one aim, and she gives to her story a tragic unity of great moral splendor and effect. Even the diverse elements, the minute side-studies and the profuse comments, are all woven into the organic structure, and are essential to the unfoldment of the plot. They seem to be quite irrelevant interruptions until we look back upon the completed whole and study the perfected intent of the story. Then we see how essential they are to the epic finish of the novel, and to that total effect which a work of genius creates. Then it is seen that a dramatic unity and well-studied intent hold together every part and make a completed structure of great beauty. Her dramatic skill is great, and her dialogues thoroughly good. Her characters are full of power and life, and stand out as distinct personalities. The conversation is sprightly, strong and wise. Probably no novelist has created so many clearly cut, positive, intensely personal characters as George Eliot, and this individualism is depicted as acting within social and hereditary limits; hence dramatic action is constantly arising. Shakspere and Browning only surpass her in dramatic power, as in the creation of character. Yet her method of producing character differs essentially from that of Shakspere, Homer and all the great creators. She describes character, while they present it. Homer gives no description of Helen; but of her beauty and her person we learn all the more because we are left to find them out from the influence they produce. We know Hamlet because he lives before us, and impresses his personality upon every feature of the great drama in which he appears. George Eliot's manner is to describe, to minutely portray, and to dissect to the last muscle and nerve. She has also a rich and racy humor, sensitive and sober, refined and delicate. She does not caricature folly with Dickens, or laugh at weakness with Thackeray; but she shows us the limitations of life in such a manner as to produce the finest humor. She is never repulsive, grotesque or vulgar; but wise, laughter-loving and sympathetic. Her humor is pure and homely as it is delicate and exquisite; and it is invariably human and noble. She has an intense love and a wonderful appreciation of the ludicrous, sees whatever is incongruous In life, and makes her laughter genial and joyous. Her humor is the very quintessence of human experience, strikes deadly blows at what is unjust and untrue. It is both intellectual and moral, as Professor Dowden suggests. "The grotesque in human character is reclaimed from the province of the humorous by her affections, when that is possible, and is shown to be a pathetic form of beauty. Her humor usually belongs to her entire conception of character, and cannot be separated from it." She laughs at all, but sneers at no one,--for she has keen sympathy with all. George Eliot is not so good a satirist as she is humorist. Her humor is as fresh and delightful as a morning in May, but her satire is nearly always labored. She is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its follies and its weaknesses. Its joys, its bubbling humor and delight she can appreciate, as well as all the pain and sorrow that come to men and women; and she can fully enter into the life of her characters of every kind, and portray their inmost motives and impulses; but the foibles of the world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist. In her earlier books she is said to have been under the influence of Thackeray, but her satire is heavy, and lacks his light touch and his tender undertone of compassion. Here is a good specimen of her earlier attempts to be satirical: When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool, he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats, which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set anything on them! And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious squares of crochet-work, which are useful for slipping down the moment you touch them? [Footnote: Janet's Repentance, chapter III.] Similar to this is the account of Mrs. Pullett's grief. It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity Introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization--the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings--what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves, too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward--a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at an angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. [Footnote: Mill on the Floss, chapter VII.] In her later books the strained efforts at satire are partially avoided, and though the satirical spirit is not withdrawn in any measure, yet it is more delicately managed. It is less open, less blunt, but hardly more subtle and penetrative. It is still a strained effort, and it is quite too hard and bare in statement. We are told in _Middlemarch_ that Mrs. Bulstrode's _naïve_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness. Such a turning of sentiment into satire as the following is rather jarring, and is a good specimen of that "laborious smartness," as Mr. R.H. Hutton justly calls it, which is found in all of George Eliot's books:-- Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtile interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure--in spite, too, of medicine and biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes presented in a dish (like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of scientific inquiry, are observed to be less incompatible with poetic love than a native dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXXVI.] This introduction of a scientific illustration will serve to bring another tendency of George Eliot's to our attention. She makes a frequent use of her large learning and culture in her novels. In the earlier ones a Greek quotation is to be found here and there, while in the later, German seems to have the preference. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she describes Bob Jakin's thumb as "a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey." Such references to recent scientific speculations are not unfrequent. If they serve to show the tendencies of her mind towards knowledge and large thought, they also indicate a too ready willingness to imbibe, and to use in a popular manner, what is not thoroughly assimilated truth. The force of such an illustration as the following must be lost on most novel-readers:-- Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some other feelings toward women than toward grouse and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the marriage tie. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter VI.] It is doubtful whether any reader will quite catch the meaning of this sentence: Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of prematrimonial acquaintanceship? [Footnote: Ibid, chapter II.] Many of her critics have asserted that this use of the language of science, and the adoption of the speculative ideas of the time, had largely increased upon George Eliot in her later books; but this is not true. In her _Westminster Review_ essays both tendencies are strongly developed. In one of them she says, "The very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band." Again, she says,-- The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to produce crystallization. It is not just to George Eliot, however, to refer to such mere casual blemishes, without insisting on the largeness of thought, the wealth of knowledge, and the comprehensive understanding of human experience with which her books abound. She often turns aside to discuss the problems suggested by the experiences of her characters, to point out how the effect of their own thoughts and deeds re-act upon them, and to inculcate the highest ethical lessons. In one of her "asides" she seems to reject this method, in referring to Fielding. A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I, at least, have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XV.] She does not ramble away from her subject, it is true; but she likes to pause often to discuss the doings of her personages, and to pour forth some tender or noble thought. To many of her readers these bits of wisdom and of sentiment are among the most valuable portions of her books, when taken in their true environment in her pages. She has a purpose larger than that of telling a story or of describing the loves of a few men and women. She seeks to penetrate into the motives of life, and to reveal the hidden springs of action; to show how people affect each other; how ideas mould the destinies of the individual. To do all this in that large, artistic spirit she has followed, requires that there shall be something more than narration and conversation. That she has now and then commented unnecessarily, and in a too-learned manner, is a very small detraction from the interest of her books. In _Adam Bede_ she turns aside for a whole chapter to defend her method of depicting accurately, minutely, in the simplest detail, the feelings, motives, actions and surroundings of very commonplace and uninteresting people. Her reasons for this method in novel-writing apply to all her works, and are worthy of the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_. I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields--on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice. So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility, which we mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that, even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings--much harder than to say something fine about them which is _not_ the exact truth. It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened, perhaps, by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her stone jug, and all those cheap, common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her: or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart pots in their hands, but with expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will. "Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! what clumsy, ugly people!" But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions, are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love among us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet, to my certain knowledge, tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures--flattering, but still not lovely--are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron who could never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth; it does not wait for beauty--it flows with resistless force, and brings beauty with it. All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children--in our gardens and in our houses; but let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the regions of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house--those rounded-backs and stupid, weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things--men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world--few sublimely beautiful women--few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common laborer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly, but creditably, with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is, perhaps, rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist. [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XVII.] In all her earlier novels George Eliot has shown the artistic possibilities of the humblest lives and situations. In the most ordinary lives, as in the case of the persons described in _Silas Marner_, and in the least picturesque incidents of human existence, there is an interest for us which, when properly brought out, will be sure to absorb our attention. She has abundantly proved that dramatic situations, historic surroundings and heroic attitudes are not necessary for the highest purposes of the novelist. Hers are heart tragedies and spiritual histories; for life has its tragic, pathetic and humorous elements of the keenest interest under every social condition. Her realism is relieved, as in actual life, by love, helpfulness and pathos; by deep sorrow, sufferings patiently borne, and tender sympathy for others' woes. And if she sometimes sketches with too free a hand the coarse and repulsive features of life, this fault is relieved by her tender sympathy with the sorrows and weaknesses of her characters. She asks her readers not to grudge Amos Barton his lovely wife, that "large, fair, gentle Madonna," with an imposing mildness and the unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood. He was a man of very middling qualities and a quite stupid sort of person, but he loved his wife and made the most he could of such talents as he had. She pleads in his behalf by saying,-- I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel ungainly dogs, who are nobody's pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the loveliest Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady's chair. Much the larger number of characters in these novels are of the same unpromising quality. Most of them are ignorant, uncouth and simple-minded; yet George Eliot gives them a warm place in our hearts, and we rejoice to have known them all. This ignorant rusticity is discovered to have charms and attractions of its own. Especially does the reader learn that what is most human and what is most lovely in personal character may be found within these rough exteriors and amid these unpromising circumstances. Even so fine a character as Adam Bede, one of the best in all her books, was a workman of limited education and little knowledge of the outside world. The author does "not pretend that his was an ordinary character among workmen." Yet such men as he are found among his class, and the noble qualities he possessed are not out of place among workingmen. Her warm sympathy with this class, the class in which she was born and reared, and her earnest desire to do it justice, is seen in what she says of Adam. He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans--with an inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful, courageous labor; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them. Their employers were richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men. They went about in their youth in flannel or paper caps, in coats black with coal-dust or streaked with lime and red paint; in old age their white hairs are seen in a place of honor at church and at market, and they tell their well-dressed sons and daughters seated round the bright hearth on winter evenings, how pleased they were when they first earned their twopence a day. Others there are who die poor, and never put off the workman's coat on week-days; they have not had the art of getting rich; but they are men of trust, and when they die before the work is all out of them, it is as if some main screw had got loose in a machine; the master who employed them says, "Where shall I find their like?" [Footnote: Chapter XIX.] In _Amos Barton_ she states her reasons for portraying characters of so little outward interest. Amos had none of the more manly and sturdy qualities of Adam Bede, and yet to George Eliot it was enough that he was human, that trouble and heartache could come to him, and that he must carry his share of the burdens and weaknesses of the world. The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think I hear a lady reader exclaim,--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a "character." But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance,--in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share? Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. In her hands the novel becomes the means of recording the history of those whom no history takes note of, and of bringing before the world its unnamed and unnoted heroes. Professor Dowden says her sympathy spreads with a powerful and even flow in every direction. In this effort she has been eminently successful; and her loving sympathy with all that is human; her warm-hearted faith in the weak and unfortunate; the graciousness of her love for the common souls who are faithful and true in their way and in their places, will excuse much greater literary faults than any into which she has fallen. The sincere and loving humanity of her books gives them a great charm, and an influence wide-reaching and noble. No one of her imitators and successors has gained anything of like power which is given to her novels by her intense sympathy with her characters. Others have described ignorant and coarse phases of life as something to look at and study, but not to bring into the heart and love. George Eliot loves her characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her motherliness upon them. Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion. There is no heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do justice to phases of life hitherto neglected. She has in this regard the genius of Scott and Hugo, who live in and with their characters, and so make them living and real. She identifies herself with the life she describes, and never looks at it from without, with curious and cold and critical gaze, simply for the sake of making a novel. She is more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual side of life. In all her books there is abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious desire to be truthful. She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it the local coloring. In writing _Romola_, she searched into every corner of Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local incident and manner. In _Daniel Deronda_, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination. She is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the geologist describes the strata of the earth. She feels with her characters; she has that form of insight or imagination which enables her to apprehend a mind totally unlike her own. This is what saves the history of Hetty from coarseness and repulsiveness. It is Hetty's own account of her life-woes. Its infinite pathos, and the tenderness and pity it awakens, destroys our concern for the other features of the narrative. Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied. She devotes more space to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives and conversations. She traces some of her characters through a long process of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life. Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the influence of thought or sorrow. Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the soul in the process of unfolding or expanding. None of her leading characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the warmest interest for the reader. And she describes such persons, because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of others. Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on. The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given surroundings. The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own, help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central purpose to each of her novels. The influence of opposite natures on each other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of psychologic analysis. Through page after page and chapter after chapter she traces the feelings and thoughts of her characters. How each decisive event appears to them is explained at length. Moreover, the most trivial trait of character, the most incidental impulse, is described in all its particularity. Through many pages Hetty's conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader, and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge. Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by ordinary intercourse with one so pretty and so bright; but George Eliot describes Hetty's taking out the earrings given her by Arthur, and we see what she is. The author seeks to open before us the inner life of that childish soul, and we see into its nature and realize all its capacities for good and evil. Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at the earrings! Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify whether she had any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women's natures if you are so excessively rational. Try rather to divest yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box. Ah! you think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them to her, and her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were put into her hands. No; else why should she have cared to have earrings rather than anything else? and I know that she had longed for earrings from among all the ornaments she could imagine. This faculty of soul interpretation may be illustrated by innumerable passages and from characters the most diverse in nature and capacity. As an instance of her ability to interpret uncommon minds, those affected in some peculiar manner, reference may be made to Baldassarre, in _Romola_. The descriptions of this man's sufferings, the giving way of his mind under them, and the purpose of revenge which took complete possession of him, form a study in character unsurpassed. For subtle insight into the action of a morbid mind, and for a majestic conception of human passion, the passage wherein Baldassarre finds he can again read his Greek book is most worthy of attention. Her ability to delineate a growing mind, and a mind at work under the influence of new and rare experiences, is shown in the case of Daniel Deronda. His quiet love of ease as a boy is described as he sits one day watching the falling rain, and meditates on the possibility which has been suggested to him, that his is not to be the life of a gentleman. He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by inheritance, and without thinking much about himself--for he was a boy of active perceptions, and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert Bruce--he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot, or have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted him... But Daniel's tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was one in which every-day scenes and habits beget not _ennui_ or rebellion but delight, affection, aptitudes; and now the lad had been stung to the quick by the idea that his uncle--perhaps his father--thought of a career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen. The mind of this lad expands; ideal desires awake in him; there is a yearning for a life of noble knight-errantry in some heroic cause. The reader is permitted to watch from step to step the growth of this longing, and to behold each new deed by which it is expressed. He craves for a broader life, but he is surrounded by such a social atmosphere as to make his longing futile. As a young man who is seeking to know what there is in the world for him to do, and who is eager for some task that is to end in a larger life for man, he is again described. It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early wakened sensibility and reflectiveness, had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story--with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentiments that no argument could lay dead... He was ceasing to care for knowledge--he had no ambition for practice--unless they could both be gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but everything else about everything--as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself, for which one had no nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?--the influence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself--an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague, social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little difference for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how make it? It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it. He rescues Mirah and sets out in search of her brother. He finds Mordecai, and gradually a way is opened to him along which his yearning is satisfied. Step by step the reader is permitted to trace the expansion of his mind. A window is opened into his soul, and we see its every movement as Daniel is led on to find the mission which was to be his. When that task is fully accepted he says to Mordecai,-- Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty, and not to be striven for as a personal prize. In her strong tendency to psychologic analysis George Eliot much resembles Robert Browning. It is the life of passion and ideas which both alike delight to describe. They greatly differ, however, in their methods of dissecting the inner life. Browning lays bare the soul in some startling experience, George Eliot by the slow development of the mind through all the stages of growth. He is impersonal, but she is always present to make comments and to expound the causes of growth. Yet her characters are as clear-cut, as individual, as his. His analysis is the more rapid, subtle and complete in immediate expression; hers is the more penetrating, vigorous and interesting. His lightning flash sees the soul through and through in the present moment; her calmer and intenser gaze penetrates the long succession of hidden causes by which the soul is shaped to its earthly destiny. Any account of George Eliot which dwells only on her humor and sarcasm, her realism and her powers of analysis, does her grave injustice. She has also in rare degree the power of artistic constructiveness, a strong and brilliant imagination and genius of almost the highest range. She can create character as well as analyze it, and with that brilliant command of resources which indicates a high order of genius. She had culture almost equal to Goethe's, and quite equal to Mrs. Browning's; and she had that wide sympathy with life which was his, with an equal capacity for their expression in an artistic reconstruction of human experience. While Mr. R. H. Hutton is justified in saying that "few minds at once so speculative and so creative have ever put their mark on literature," yet the critic needs to beware lest he give the speculative tendency in her mind a place too prominent compared with that assigned to her creative genius. The poet and the novelist are so seldom speculative, so seldom put into their creations the constant burden of great thoughts, that when one appears who does this, it is likely to be dwelt upon too largely by the critics. George Eliot speculates about life and its experiences, and it is evident she had a philosophy of life at her command; but it is quite as true that she soars on pinions free into the heavens of genius, and brings back the song which no other has sung, and which is a true song. She has created characters, she has described the histories of souls, in a manner which will cause some of her books to endure for all time. If she has allied her genius to current culture and speculation, it has in that way been given continuity of purpose and definiteness of aim. The genius is there and cannot be hidden or obscured; and those who love what is great and noble will be profoundly attracted by her books. If a great thinker, she is still more truly a great literary artist; and such is the largeness and gracious power of her genius that those who do not love her speculations will be drawn to her in spite of all objections. Her genius is generous, expansive, illuminative, profound. Her creativeness is an elemental power; new births are to be found in her books; life has grown under her moulding touch. VII. THEORY OF THE NOVEL. Before George Eliot began her career as a novelist she had already turned her attention to what is good and bad in fiction-writing, and had given expression to her own theory of the novel. What she wrote on this subject is excellent in itself, but it now has an additional interest in view of her success as a novelist, and as throwing light on her conception of the purposes to be followed in the writing of fiction. In what she wrote on this subject two ideas stand out distinctly, that women are to find in novel-writing a literary field peculiarly adapted to their capacities, and that the novel should be a true portraiture of life. She was a zealous advocate of woman's capacity to excel as a novelist, and she saw in this form of literature a field especially adapted to her greater powers of emotion and sympathy. Very generous and appreciative are her references to the lady novelists whom she defends, the excellence of whose work she maintains entitles them to the highest places as literary artists. In the article on "Lady Novelists" she has drawn attention both to those qualities in which woman may excel and to those in which she may fail. In writing later of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" she criticised unsparingly those women who write novels without comprehending life or any of its problems, and who write in a merely artificial manner. The width of her own culture, the vigor of her critical talent, the largeness of her conception of life and its interests, are well expressed in these essays. Only a large mind could have so truly conceived the real nature of woman's relations to literature, and expressed them in a spirit so intelligent and comprehensive. She would have the whole of life portrayed, and she believes only a woman can truly speak for women. But her faith in woman seems not to have been of the revolutionary character. She rather preferred that women should achieve a higher social condition by deeds than by words. A great intellectual career like her own, which places a woman in the front rank of literary creators, does more to elevate the position of women than any amount of agitation in favor of suffrage. That she sought for the highest intellectual achievement, and that she labored to attain the widest results of scholarship, is greatly to her credit; but more to her credit is it, that she made no claim upon the public as a woman, but only as a literary artist. She asked that her work should be judged on its literary merits, as the product of intellect, and not with reference to her sex. While believing that woman can do her work best by being true to the instincts, sympathies and capacities of her sex, yet she would have the same standard of literary judgment applied to women as to men. Its truthfulness, its reality, its power to widen our sympathies and enlarge our culture, its measure of genius and moral power, is the true test to be applied to any literary work. Such being her conception of the manner in which women should be judged when becoming literary creators, she had no excuses to offer for those who make use of prejudices and a false culture in their own behalf. She says that The most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the solid education of women. That she believed in the solid education of women is apparent in her own efforts towards obtaining it for herself, and her conception of what is to be done with it was large and generous. Mere learning she did not hold to be an adornment in a woman. The culture must be transmuted into life-power, and be poured forth, not as oracular wisdom in silly novels, but as sympathy and enlarged comprehension of the daily duties of life. When educated women "mistake vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality," she is not surprised that men regard rhodomontade as the native accent of woman's intellect, or that they come to the conclusion that "the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a soil to bear much tillage." It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion--we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself.... She does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight them, in conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you _can't_ understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence. After this estimate of the value of culture to women, it is interesting to turn to George Eliot's words concerning the legitimate work which women can perform in literature. What she says on this subject shows that she not only had culture, but also the wisdom which is its highest result. She saw that while a woman is to ask for no leniency towards her work because she is a woman, yet that she is not to imitate men or to ignore her sex. She is to portray life as a woman sees it, with a woman's sympathies and experiences. To interpret the feminine side of life is her legitimate province as a literary artist. If we regard literature as the expression of the emotions, the whims, the caprices, the enthusiasms, the fluctuating idealisms which move each epoch, we shall not be far wrong; and inasmuch as women necessarily take part in these things, they ought to give them _their_ expression. And this leads us to the heart of the question, what does the literature of women mean? It means this: while it is impossible for men to express life otherwise than as they know it--and they can only know it profoundly according to their own experience--the advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience; in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world, it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you must have both sides depicted. Let him paint what he knows. And if you limit woman's sphere to the domestic circle, you must still recognize the concurrent necessity of domestic life finding its homeliest and truest expression in the woman who lives it. Keeping to the abstract heights we have chosen, too abstract and general to be affected by exceptions, we may further say that the masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect, and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions. According to this rough division, the regions of philosophy would be assigned to men, those of literature to women. We need scarcely warn the reader against too rigorous an interpretation of this statement, which is purposely exaggerated the better to serve as a signpost. It is quite true that no such absolute distinction will be found in authorship. There is no man whose mind is shrivelled up into pure intellect; there is no woman whose intellect is completely absorbed by her emotions. But in most men the intellect does not move in such inseparable alliance with the emotions as in most women, and hence, although often not so great as in women, yet the intellect is more commonly dominant. In poets, artists, and men of letters, _par excellence_, we observe this feminine trait, that their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions; and one of the best descriptions of poetry was that given by Professor Wilson, as the "intellect colored by the feelings." Woman, by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life, and demands a place in literature corresponding to that she occupies in society; and that literature must be greatly benefited thereby, follows from the definition we have given of literature. But hitherto, in spite of illustrations, the literature of woman has fallen short of its function, owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness--it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women, is the real office they have to perform. Our definition of literature includes this necessity. If writers are bound to express what they have really known, felt and suffered, that very obligation imperiously declares they shall not quit their own point of view for the point of view of others. To imitate is to abdicate. We are in no need of more male writers; we are in need of genuine female experience. The prejudices, notions, passions and conventionalisms of men are amply illustrated; let us have the same fulness with respect to women. Unhappily the literature of women may be compared with that of Rome: no amount of graceful talent can disguise the internal defect. Virgil, Ovid and Catullus were assuredly gifted with delicate and poetic sensibility; but their light is, after all, the light of moons reflected from the Grecian suns, and such as brings little life with its rays, To speak in Greek, to think in Greek, was the ambition of all cultivated Romans, who could not see that it would be a grander thing to utter their pure Roman natures in sincere originality. So of women. The throne of intellect has so long been occupied by men, that women naturally deem themselves bound to attend the court. Greece domineered over Rome; its intellectual supremacy was recognized, and the only way of rivalling it seemed to be imitation. Yet not so did Rome vanquish Pyrrhus and his elephants; not by employing elephants to match his, but by Roman valor. Of all departments of literature, fiction is the one to which, by nature and by circumstance, women are best adapted. Exceptional women will of course be found competent to the highest success in other departments; but speaking generally, novels are their forte. The domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman's knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind. Love is the staple of fiction, for it "forms the story of a woman's life." The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of domestic life, the aspirations and fluctuations of emotional life, assume typical forms in the novel. Hence we may be prepared to find women succeeding better in _finesse_ of detail, in pathos and sentiment, while men generally succeed better in the construction of plots and the delineation of character. Such a novel as _Tom Jones_ or _Vanity Fair_ we shall not get from a woman, nor such an effort of imaginative history as _Ivanhoe_ or _Old Mortality_; but Fielding, Thackeray and Scott are equally excluded from such perfection in its kind as _Pride and Prejudice_, _Indiana_ or _Jane Eyre_. As an artist Jane Austen surpasses all the male novelists that ever lived; and for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand. We are here led to another curious point in our subject, viz., the influence of sorrow upon female literature. It may be said without exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote connection with suffering. "Speculation," said Novalis, "is disease." It certainly springs from a vague disquiet. Poetry is analogous to the pearl which the oyster secretes in its malady. "Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song." What Shelley says of poets, applies with greater force to women. If they turn their thoughts to literature, it is--when not purely an imitative act--always to solace by some intellectual activity the sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and by a withdrawal of the intellect from the contemplation of their pain, or by a transmutation of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from the pressure of that burden. If the accidents of her position make her solitary and inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her somewhat from that sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as to another sphere. We do not here simply refer to those notorious cases where literature was taken up with the avowed and conscious purpose of withdrawing thoughts from painful subjects; but to the unconscious, unavowed influence of domestic disquiet and unfulfilled expectations, in determining the sufferer to intellectual activity. The happy wife and busy mother are only forced into literature by some hereditary organic tendency, stronger even than the domestic; and hence it is that the cleverest women are not those who have written books. In the later essay on "Silly Novels" her powers of sarcasm were fully displayed. It showed keen critical powers, and a clear insight into the defects inherent in most novel-writing. She spared no faults, had no mercy for presumption, and condemned unsparingly the pretence of culture. She described four kinds of silly novels, classing them as being of the _mind-and-millinery_, the _oracular, the _white-neck-cloth_, and the _modern-antique_ varieties. All her powers of analysis and insight shown in her novels appeared in this article. Severe as her criticism is, it is always just. It aims at the presentation of a truer conception of the purpose of novel-writing, and women are judged simply as literary workers. This criticism is based on the clearest apprehension of why it is that women fail as novel-writers; that it is not because they are women, but because they are false to nature and to the simplest conditions of literary art. These women write poor novels because they aim at fine writing, and believe they must be learned and grandiloquent. They ignore what they see about them every day, and which, if they were to describe it in simple language, would give them real power. It is this falsity in thought, method and purpose which is so severely condemned. And it is the very justness of the criticism which makes it severe, which gives to a true description of these novels the nature of a stinging sarcasm. That these women are praised by the critics she justly regards as a sure indication of their incapacity, or a sign of man's chivalry towards the other sex, which does not permit him to speak the truth about what he knows to be so false and immature. She also sees that what women need is to be told the truth, and to be compelled to accept the just consequences of their work, The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society, like "matter" and her Majesty's Government, and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three who write from vanity; and besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances. "In all labor there is profit;" but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labor than of busy idleness. Happily we are not dependent on argument to prove that fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;--novels, too, that have a precious specialty, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements--genuine observation, humor and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute _technique_ is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine's ass, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute;"--a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of "silly novels by lady novelists." Her praise of the great novelists is as enthusiastic as her condemnation of the silly ones is severe. It is interesting to note that in the first of these papers she selects Jane Austen and George Sand as the chiefest among women novelists, and that she praises them for the truthfulness of their portraitures of life, nor is she any the less aware of the defects of these masters than of the deficiencies of silly women who write novels. She finds that Jane Austen never penetrates into the deeper spiritual experiences of life, and that George Sand lacks in that moral poise and purity which is so necessary to the finest literary effort. Her sketches of these women are as truthful as they are interesting. First and foremost let Jane Austen be named, the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end. There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never set foot; but although this is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not seen. Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb and vital. Life, as it appears to an English gentlewoman peacefully yet actively engaged in her quiet village, is mirrored in her works with a purity and fidelity that must endow them with interest for all time. To read one of her books is like an actual experience of life; you know the people as if you had lived with them, and you feel something of personal affection towards them. The marvellous reality and subtle distinctive traits noticeable in her portraits has led Macaulay to call her a prose Shakspere. If the whole force of the distinction which lies in that epithet _prose_ be fairly appreciated, no one, we think, will dispute the compliment; for out of Shakspere it would be difficult to find characters so typical yet so nicely demarcated within the limits of their kind. We do not find such profound psychological insight as may be found in George Sand (not to mention male writers), but taking the type to which the characters belong, we see the most intimate and accurate knowledge in all Miss Austen's creations. Only cultivated minds fairly appreciate the exquisite art of Miss Austen. Those who demand the stimulus of effects, those who can only see by strong lights and shadows, will find her tame and uninteresting. We may illustrate this by one detail. Lucy Steele's bad English, so delicately and truthfully indicated, would in the hands of another have been more obvious, more "effective" in its exaggeration, but the loss of this comic effect is more than replaced to the cultivated reader by his relish of the nice discrimination visible in its truthfulness. And so of the rest. _Strong_ lights are unnecessary, _true_ lights being at command. The incidents, the characters, the dialogue--all are of every-day life, and so truthfully presented that to appreciate the art we must try to imitate it, or carefully compare it with that of others. We are but echoing an universal note of praise in speaking thus highly of her works, and it is from no desire of simply swelling that chorus of praise that we name her here, but to call attention to the peculiar excellence, at once womanly and literary, which has earned this reputation. Of all imaginative writers she is the most _real_. Never does she transcend her own actual experience, never does her pen trace a line that does not touch the experience of others. Herein we recognize the first quality of literature. We recognize the second and more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view; they are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully (although unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her works are durable. There is nothing of the _doctrinaire_ in Jane Austen; not a trace of woman's "mission;" but as the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her. And this is her suggestive portrait of the other, drawn with that skill which is only displayed when one genius interprets another through community of feeling and purpose. Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand represents woman's literature more illustriously and more obviously. In her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a woman are everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say of this, as of all the other irregularities of her strange and exceptional life, that whatever unhappiness and error may be traceable thereto, its influence on her writings has been beneficial, by giving a greater range to her experience. It may be selfish to rejoice over the malady which secretes a pearl, but the possessor of the pearl may at least congratulate himself that at any rate the pearl has been produced; and so of the unhappiness of genius. Certainly few women have had such profound and varied experience as George Sand; none have turned it to more account. Her writings contain many passages that her warmest admirers would wish unwritten; but although severe criticism may detect the weak places, the severest criticism must conclude with the admission of her standing among the highest minds of literature. In the matter of eloquence, she surpasses everything France has yet produced. There has been no style at once so large, so harmonious, so expressive, and so unaffected: like a light shining through an alabaster vase, the ideas shine through her diction; while as regards rhythmic melody of phrase, it is a style such as Beethoven might have written had he uttered in words the melodious passion that was in him. But deeper than all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn splendor of a life of passionate experience painted in her works. There is no man so wise but he may learn from them, for they are the utterances of a soul in pain, a soul that has been tried. No man could have written her books, for no man could have had her experience, even with a genius equal to her own. The philosopher may smile sometimes at her philosophy, for _that_ is only the reflex of some man whose ideas she has adopted; the critic may smile sometimes--at her failure in delineating men; but both philosopher and critic must perceive that those writings of hers are _original_ and genuine, are transcripts of experience, and as such fulfil the primary condition of all literature. This clear, intellectual apprehension of what woman can effect in literature, had much to do with George Eliot's own success. Yet it is doubtful if she was so true, in some directions, to the instincts of her sex as was George Sand, Mrs. Browning or Charlotte Brontë. Hers was in large measure an intellect without sex; and though she was a woman in all the instincts of her heart, yet intellectually she occupied the human rather than the woman's point of view. With a marvellous insight into the heart of woman, and great skill in portraying womanly natures, she had a man's way, the logical and impersonal manner, of viewing, the greater problems of human existence. Charlotte Brontë more truly represents the woman's way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the conventional views of religion. She has given a corrector interpretation of the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present, and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think and live. Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment. Life played upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its every movement of joy and sorrow. George Eliot studied life, probed into it, cut it in pieces, constructed a theory of it, and then told us what it means. In this she was unlike other women who have made a deep impression on literature. Mrs. Browning had nearly as much culture, was as thoughtful as she, but more genuinely feminine at the heart-core. Love she painted in a purer and happier fashion than that adopted by George Eliot, and she had the warmer impulses of a woman's tenderness. Her account of life is the truer, because it is the more ideal; and this may be said for Charlotte Brontë also. George Eliot had the larger intellect, the keener mind, was a profounder thinker; but her realism held her back from that instinctive conception of life which realizes its larger ideal meanings. It is not enough to see what is; man desires to know what ought to be. The poet is the seer, the one who apprehends, who has that finer eye for facts by which he is able to behold what the facts give promise of. This ideal vision Mrs. Browning had, and in so far she was the superior of George Eliot. The same may be said for George Sand, who, with all her wildness and impurity, was a woman through and through. She was all heart, all impulse, lived in her instincts and emotions. She had the abandon, enthusiasm and spontaneity which George Eliot lacked. If the one represents the head, the other expresses the heart of woman. George Eliot, as a woman, thought, reasoned, philosophized; George Sand felt, gave every emotion reign, lived out all her impulses. What the one lacks the other had; where one was weak the other was strong. With somewhat of George Sand's idealism and emotional zeal for wider and freer life, George Eliot would have been a greater writer. Could she have moulded Dorothea with what is best in Consuelo, she would have been the rival of the greatest literary artists among men. Yet, with her limitations, it must be said that George Eliot is the superior of all other women in her literary accomplishments. If others are her superiors in some directions, in the totality of her powers she surpasses all. Even as an interpreter of woman's nature and the feminine side of life, she does not fail to keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers. She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred, looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating gaze. Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her sex. Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all its possibilities. The chief rule for novel-writing laid down by George Eliot in these essays is, that the novel shall be the result of experience and true to nature. She emphasizes the importance of this condition, and says that the novelist is bound to use actual experience as his material, and that alone, or else keep silent. Weak and silly novels are the result of an effort to break away from this rule; but the writer who ventures to disregard it never can be other than silly or weak. Novelists, she says, may either portray experience outwardly through observation, or inwardly through sentiment, or through a combination of both. Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity. The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the other is what is called sickly sentimentality. All true literature, she says, is based on fact, describes life as it is lived by men and women, touches and is fragrant with reality. This cardinal principle of literary art she has defined and illustrated in her own strong and expressive manner in this _Review_ article. All poetry, all fiction, all comedy, all _belles-lettres_, even to the playful caprices of fancy, are but the expression of experiences and emotions; and these expressions are the avenues through which we reach the sacred _adytum_ of humanity, and learn better to understand our fellows and ourselves. In proportion as these expressions are the forms of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good and true. Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere, Cervantes, Moliere. But in proportion as these expressions are the forms of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fashions or idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral. Hence tragedy never grows old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy soon ages, for it arises from peculiarities. Nevertheless, even idiosyncrasies are valuable as side glances; they are aberrations that bring the natural orbit into more prominent distinctness. It follows from what has been said, that literature, being essentially the expression of experience and emotion--of what we have seen, felt and thought--that only _that_ literature is effective, and to be prized accordingly, which has _reality for its basis_ (needless to say that emotion is as real as the three-per-cents), _and effective in proportion to the depth and breadth of that basis_. In writing? of the authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Mary Barton_, she shows how important to her mind it is that the novel should have its basis in actual experience, and that it should be an expression of reality. They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience--they have not invented, but reproduced; they have preferred the truth, such as their own experience testified, to the vague, false, conventional notions current in circulating libraries. Whatever of weakness may be pointed out in their works will, we are positive, be mostly in those parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling united to keen observation. Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only fashionable or learned people into novels. She says the silly novelists rarely make us acquainted with "any other than very lofty and fashionable society," and very often the authors know nothing of such society except from the reading of other such novels. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they _have_ seen and heard, and what they have _not_ seen and heard, with equal faithfulness. What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of fiction. How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism. This writer is "tame and feeble" because she attempts to depict a form of society with which she is not familiar. That the common phases of religious life are capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion of "Silly Novelists" is of great interest in view of her own success in this kind of portraiture. What she suggested as a fine field for the novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy. Her success proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how well she understood the character of the material with which the best results can be attained. It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism--and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it--lies among the middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical novelists show us the operation of their religious views among people (there really are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a brass-bound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of religious life among the negroes? Was this question a prophecy? It indicates that the writer's attention had already been directed to the richness of this material for the purposes of the novelist. After reading these words we see why she took up the common life of the English village as she had herself been familiar with it from childhood. In order to be true to her own conception of the novel, there was no other field she could occupy. That she understood the picturesqueness of this form of life no reader of her novels will doubt, or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation. The opening paragraphs of her _Westminster Review_ article on the "Natural History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written, and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her novels. How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles,-the slow utterance and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the camel, than of the sturdy countryman with striped stockings, red waist coat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers, when you see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps--slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think that these companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking time is a time of joking, especially it there are women among the laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your idyllic conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot. The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,--when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,--when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,--when Harnung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,--more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men,--should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one. This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character--their conceptions of life, and their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakspere's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for every one else, and no one for himself. If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations,--the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,--the aristocratic dilettantism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,--none of these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on different sections of the working-class, but unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans and peasantry,--the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or towards development,--and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer. The estimates given in these essays of the writings of Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray, show the soundness of George Eliot's critical judgment. She fully appreciated Jane Austen's artistic skill, as she did George Sand's impassioned love of liberty and naturalness. She also saw how tame are Miss Austen's scenes, how humanly imperfect are Thackeray's characters. Her own work is wanting in Jane Austen's artistic skill and finish, but there is far more of originality and character in her books, more of thought and purpose. Miss Austen tells her story wonderfully well, but her books are all on the same level of social mediocrity and flatness. No fresh, strong, natural, aspiring life is to be found in one of them. George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity and thought. Her theories concerning the novel place George Eliot fully in sympathy with what may very properly be called the British school of fiction. The natural history of man is the subject matter used by this school; and to describe accurately, minutely, some portion of the human race, some social community, is its main object. Richardson, Fielding, Miss Austen and Thackeray are the masters in this school, who have given direction to its aims and methods. They have sought to accomplish in novel-writing somewhat the same results as those aimed at by Wordsworth and Browning in poetry, to follow the natural, to make much of the common, to describe things as they are. They are realists both in method and philosophy, though differing widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguénief and Zola, in that they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real. This school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved and beastly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them, those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels, because common to humanity. To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential. Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson had preceded her along the way she was to follow. Their methods became hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit they had so ably illustrated. In one direction, however, she far surpassed any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors. George Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface. Not only from the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn much. Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast element in the thought of the present. Scott's power of reviving the past in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by George Eliot. Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the shaping power of the past over the present. For this reason, she endeavored to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone by. The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a prominent element in her novels. If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries. In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her co-workers, and brought philosophy and socialistic speculation to the aid of the naturalistic method. Indeed, she so far departed from that method, and from the soundest theories of art, as to become to some extent a _doctrinaire_. Her novels, like much of the poetry of the same period, are eclectic in spirit, combining with the naturalistic methods those of the historic, socialistic, culture and speculative schools. Art and culture for their own sake combined in her novels with the purpose to use history and social life obedient to a distinct conception of their meanings. To describe life accurately there must be a clear conception of what life means. Genius never works aimlessly; and in seeing life as it is, always sees that it has a tendency and direction. A mind so thoughtful as George Eliot's, with so strong a love of speculative interest in it, was likely to give to novel-writing done by her a large philosophic element. Yet her philosophy is nearly always subject to her imagination and to her naturalism. Her love of nature, her intimate interest in life and its elemental problems, her passionate sympathy with all human passions and experiences, saves her from becoming a mere _doctrinaire_, and gives to her speculations a pathetic, living interest. The poetic elements of her novels are so many as to subordinate the philosophic to the true purposes of art. In one direction George Eliot departed from the methods of her predecessors, and to so great an extent as to be herself the originator of a new school of fiction. She followed the bent of her time for analysis and psychologic interpretation. It is here more than anywhere else she differs from Charlotte Brontë and George Sand. These two great novelists create character by direct representation, by making their persons live and act. George Eliot shows her characters to the reader by analyzing their motives and by giving the history of their development. The disadvantages of the analytic method are apparent when George Eliot is compared with Scott. Unique, personal and human are his creations, instinct with all human emotions, and profoundly real. It is only the poetic side of life which he sees, not its philosophic. George Eliot wanted to know the meanings of things, and this very desire brings a largeness into her books which is not found in Scott's. She was much the more thoughtful of the two, the one who tried to realize to the intellect what life means. Yet her method of doing this is not always the best one for the poet or the novelist. Scott was no realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he. Indeed, he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as the body of life. The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory, and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the little round of man's earthly destiny. She did not accept the doctrine that art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, penetrative, aromatic and mystic power of the ideal which is most to be felt as lacking in the works of George Eliot. Much as we may praise her, we can but feel this limitation. Great as is our admiration, we can but feel that there is a higher range of poetic and artistic creation than any she reached. The quotations presented from her early writings prove that George Eliot began her career as a novelist with a fully elaborated conception of the purposes of the novel and of the methods to be followed in its production. She had thoroughly studied the subject, had read many of the best works of the best writers, and had formed a carefully digested theory of the novel. That she could do this is rather an indication of critical than of creative power. Her novels everywhere betray the greatness of her reasoning powers, that she was a thinker, that she had strong powers of intellectual analysis, and that she had a logical, accurate mind. Had her mind taken no other direction than this, however, she never could have become a great novelist. These essays indicated something beside powers of reasoning and psychological analysis. They also indicated her capacity for imaginative insight into the motives and impulses of human nature, and an intuitive comprehension of what is most natural to human thought and action. They showed appreciation of sympathy and feeling, and delicate perception of the finer cravings and tendencies of even the commonest souls. They gave promise of so much creative power, her friends saw that in novel-writing she was to find the true expression of her large qualities of mind and heart. The person who could so skilfully point out the faults in the poor novels rapidly issuing from the press, and realize the true indications of a master's power in the creations of the literary artists, might herself possess the genius necessary to original work of her own. Her early essays are now chiefly of value for this promise they give of larger powers than those which could be fully expressed in such work. They prophesied the future, and made her friends zealous to overcome her own reluctance to enter upon a larger work. She doubted her own genius, but it was not destined to remain unfruitful. VIII. POETIC METHODS. Had George Eliot written nothing else than the poems which bear her name, she would have been assigned a permanent place among the poets. Having first attained her rank in the highest order of novelists, however, her poetry suffers in comparison with her prose. The critics tell us that no person gifted with supreme excellence in one form of creative expression has ever been able to attain high rank in another. They forget that Goethe was great both in prose and poetry; that his _Wilhelm Meister_ is of scarcely inferior genius to his _Faust_. They also forget that Victor Hugo holds the first place among the French poets of the present century, at the same time that he is the greatest of all French novelists. It would be well for them also to remember that Scott held high rank as a poet before he began his wonderful career as a novelist. A contemporary of George Eliot's, to name a single instance of another kind, was equally excellent as poet and painter. Dante Rossetti made for himself a lasting place in both directions, and in both he did work of a high order. In reality, the novel much resembles the narrative or epic poem; and if a work of true genius, it is difficult to distinguish it from the poem except as they differ in external form. The novel has for its main elements those qualities of imagination, description, high-wrought purpose, which are also constituents of much of the best poetry. The novel is more expansive than the poem, one of the chief characteristics of which is condensation; its theme may take a wider range, and it may embrace those cruder and more common features of life which are inappropriate to the poem. The novelist can make a greater use of humor, he can give more detail to description, and portrayal of character can be carried to a much greater extent, than is usual with the poet. The poet requires a subject more sublime, inspiring and naturally beautiful than the novelist, who seeks what is the more human, nearer the level of daily social existence, and full of the affecting even if ruder interests and passions of life. The novel is so similar to the poem, and in so many ways requires such similar qualities of mind for its production, that there is no inherent reason why the same person cannot do equally good work in both. The supposition is that the poet may become a novelist, or the novelist a poet, in all cases except where there is some outward disqualification. The novelist may not have the sense of rhythmical form and of metrical expression; and the poet may not possess that constructive faculty which builds up plots, incidents and characters. In nearly all respects but these the two forms of creative genius so nearly assimilate each other, it is to be expected a novelist may turn poet if he have a large imagination and a stimulating capacity for metrical expression. Novelists of strong imagination and a ready command of expressive words, barely escape writing poetry when they only purpose to write prose. This is true of Hugo, Auerbach, Dickens and George Eliot, again and again. The glow of creation, the high-wrought impulse of imagination, the ideal conception of life, all move the novelist in the direction of poetry. With much effort he keeps meter and rhyme out of his prose, but simile and metaphor, condensed expression, unusual words, poetic compounds, alliteration, sublime and picturesque expression, will intrude themselves. Dickens even permits meter and rhyme to conquer him, and weakens his style in consequence. He grows sentimental, and the real strength of pure prose is lost. George Eliot is often poetical in expression, touches the very borders of poetry continually, but she seldom permits herself to lapse from the strong, energetic and impressive prose which she almost uniformly writes. Specimens of this noble poetic-prose may be found very often in her pages. While it would be difficult by any transposition of words to turn it into poetry, as may often be done in the case of Dickens's prose, yet it contains most of the elements of a high order of poetry. In the account of the death of Maggie and Tom is to be found a fine specimen of her style, the last words being good iambics. The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again, in one supreme moment, the days when they _had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together_. In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of _Adam Bede_ is a sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a single word. The woods behind the chase, And all the hedgerow trees, Took on a solemn splendor _then_ Under the dark low-hanging skies. It is very seldom, however, that George Eliot permits anything like meter in her prose, and she is usually very reticent of rhythm. There is fervor and enthusiasm, imagination and poetic insight, but all kept within the limits of robust and manly prose. This capacity of prose to serve most of the purposes of poetry may be seen in a marked degree in all of George Eliot's novels. In the account of Adam Bede's love for Hetty this subtle power of words and ideas to give the charm and impression of poetry without rhythm or rhyme is exhibited in a characteristic manner. I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music; what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a woman's eyes--it seems to be a far-off, mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XXXIII.] Love, music and beautiful landscapes continually inspire the poetic side of her nature; and these themes, which are constantly recurring in her chapters, draw forth her imagination and give fervor and enthusiasm to her expression. Her love of nature is deep and most appreciative of all its transformations and beauties. This sensitiveness to the changes of the outward world is a large element in her mind, and indicates the reality of her poetic gifts. This may be seen in a passage such as the following:-- The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood; the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys, with wondrous modulations of light and shadow, such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that made the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls--the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart, standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XII.] It is nature as affecting man, and man as transformed into a creature of feeling and passion by the mysterious conditions of his existence, which oftenest arouses the poetic fervor in her. The enthusiasm of high resolves, yearnings after the pure and beautiful, and love's regenerating power, give to her themes which kindle poetic expression to a glow. The vision of Mordecai on Blackfriars' bridge affords a fine example of her love of the ideal in moral purpose, and shows how stimulating it is to her imagination. It is a poetic picture of the finest quality she has given in this chapter, one that could easily have been made to find expression in verse of great beauty; but it is poetry in thought and spirit alone, not in form or structure. It is true prose in form, strong in its fulness of detail, knit together with words of the right texture, built up into a true prose image of beauty in thought. Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some one of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thought went on in wide spaces, and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars' bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were the signs of world-commerce, the on-coming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his imagination toward fuller detail he ceased to see the figure with its back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor, keeping a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart is awake"--when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chapter XXXVIII.] Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she knew its real nature. She makes Will Ladislaw say that-- To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXII.] She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and romance are absent from our own minds. If we have not awe and tenderness, wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she reasons about things too much. The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with emotion. George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of expression, and kept too close to the real. She had not that lightness of touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses. Her mind moved with a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true medium of expression. While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of poetic speech. She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought, her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense of rhythmic harmony. George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers. Her love of music, her keen perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave added attraction and impetus in the same direction. That she did not continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the result of her intense interest in severer studies. The speculative cast of her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate problems. Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of utterance. So far as can be judged from the dates of her poems, as appended to many of them, "How Lisa Loved the King" was the earliest written. This was written in the year of the publication of _Romola_, and was followed the next year by the first draft of _The Spanish Gypsy_. The poetical mottoes of _Felix Holt_, however, were the first to be published; and not until these appeared did the public know of her poetic gifts. _The Spanish Gypsy_ was not published until 1868, and "How Lisa Loved the King" appeared the following year. The original mottoes in _Felix Holt_ gave good hint of George Eliot's poetic gifts. They are solid with thought, pregnant with the ripe wisdom of daily experience, significant for dramatic expression, or notable for their humor. They are rather heavy and ponderous in style, though sonorous in expression. A stately tread, a largeness of expression, an air of weighty meaning, appear in nearly all these mottoes. As a specimen of the more philosophic, the following will indicate the truthfulness of this description:-- Truth is the precious harvest of the earth, But once, when harvest waved upon a land, The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar, Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods, Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws, And turned the harvest into pestilence, Until men said, What profits it to sow? Her capacity for dramatic expression, in which a rich comprehension of life is included, may be seen in these lines: 1ST CITIZEN. Sir, there's a hurry in the veins of youth That makes a vice of virtue by excess. 2D CITIZEN. What if the coolness of our tardier veins Be loss of virtue? 1ST CITIZEN. All things cool with time-- The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find A general level, nowhere in excess. 2D CITIZEN. 'Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought, That future middlingness. Wisdom alloyed with humor appears in another motto: "It is a good and soothfast saw; Half-roasted never will be raw; No dough is dried once more to meal. No crock new-shapen by the wheel; You can't turn curds to milk again Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then; And having tasted stolen honey, You can't buy innocence for money." Mr. Buxton Forman says, that "in the charming headings to the chapters of _Felix Holt_ it seemed as though the strong hand which had, up to that point, exercised masterly control over the restive tendency of high prose to rear up into verse, had relaxed itself just for the sake of a holiday, and no more. These headings did not bear the stamp of original poetry upon them. Forcible as were some, admirable in thought and applicability to the respective chapters as were all, none bore traces of that clearly defined individuality of style betrayed by all great and accomplished practitioners of verse, in even so small a compass as these headings. Some of them possess the great distinctive technical mark of poetry,--condensation; but this very condensation is compassed not in an original and individual method, but in the method of some pre-existent model; and it is hardly necessary to enforce that power of assimilation or reproduction, however large, is no infallible index of self-existent poetical faculty." This critic finds traces of Shakspere, Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning in these mottoes, and thinks they are all imitative, even when they are best. It is too easy, however, to dispose of a piece of literary work in this manner, and such criticism is very apt to have little meaning in it. George Eliot has proven herself far too original, both in prose and poetry, to make such a criticism of much value. Even if the charge of imitation is a valid one, it is far more probable that it was conscious and purposed, than that George Eliot's poetic gifts could only be exercised when impelled by the genius of some other. To give the impression of quotation may have been a part of George Eliot's purpose in writing these mottoes, which are original enough, and thoughtful enough, to have been attributed to any of the great poets. The real defects of her poetry lie in quite another direction than that of a lack of originality. She has enough to say that is fresh and interesting, she has no need to consult others for what she is to utter; but she has not the fervor of expression, the impressive touch, which separates poetry from prose. There is intellectual power enough, thought even in excess, but she does not soar and sing. She walks steadily, majestically along on the ground, she has no wings for the clear ether. Indeed, she is too much a realist to breathe in that upper air of pure song; it is too fine and delicate for one who loves the solid facts of earth so well as she. If George Eliot often wrote prose which is almost poetry, she also wrote poetry which is almost prose. The concentrated, image-bearing phrases of poetry are wanting oftentimes in her verse. There is meter but no other quality of poetry, and not a few passages could be printed as prose with scarce a suspicion to the reader that they were intended for poetry. Mr. Buxton Forman has given a passage from _The Spanish Gypsy_ in this way, adding only six insignificant words, and restoring _i_ to _is_ in two instances. He rightly says that the passage printed in prose "would surely be read by any one who saw it for the first time, without any suspicion that it merely required the excision of six little words and two letters to transform it to verse; no single expression betraying the secret that the passage is from a poem." _Do_ you hear the trumpet! There _is_ old Eamon's blast. No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his trumpeting as solemnly as _an_ angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and _that_ their great art _was_ made solely for themselves who understand it. His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when his trumpet _is either_ bagged or left at home he seems _like_ a chattel in a broker's booth, a spoutless watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular! George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression. This frequently appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought, but in the defects of the poetic form. Some lines are too short and others too long, some having four and some six feet. An instance of the former is to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one line: Strong reasons, father. Ay, but good? Of the latter: And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion. Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to complete the line. Lopez is made to say,-- Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please. I speak not for my own delighting, I. I can be silent, I. Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line: That was not what he drew his sword at--he! Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the tendency to look at the world on its surface only. In her poetry George Eliot is much more a _doctrinaire_ than in her novels. All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems. In fact, her novels, especially _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_, are much more poetical than much she did in verse. In her verse she tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and effective her own conceptions of the unseen and eternal. Yet she was burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret. The poets who win the homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation. They shun theories which must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared. It is here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be commended as a teacher and reformer. Perhaps the truest piece of poetic work she did was _Agatha_, in which, however, there is a greater reliance than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual beliefs. In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman, and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and simplicity, she was very effective. In such work as this she would have been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in verse. In her "Brother and Sister" she was also very successful, but especially so in the "Two Lovers." There is an exquisite charm and power in some of these minor poems. Where the heart was free, and the intellect was not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was secured a genuine poetic beauty. There is true poetry in these lines: Two lovers by a moss-grown spring: They lean soft cheeks together there, Mingled the dark and sunny hair, And heard the wooing thrushes sing. Oh budding time! Oh love's blest prime! Two wedded from the portal stept: The bells made happy carrollings, The air was soft as passing wings, White petals on the pathway slept. Oh pure-eyed bride! Oh tender pride! There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among all she wrote. There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which is attained but seldom in her other verses. The love of humanity, its passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls. In the more extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral. Difficult as it was for a successful novelist to secure applause as a poet, George Eliot overcame the distrust of her admirers and gained also a not unmerited place as a poet. Her verse has been a real addition to her work, and is likely to command an increasing interest in the future. That it is not always successful from the merely artistic point of view, that it is not to be placed by the side of the best poetry of the time, is no reason why it will not appeal to many minds and enlist its own company of admirers. Next after the universal poets are those who appeal to a select circle and charm a particular class of minds. Among these George Eliot will stand as one of the foremost and one of those most worthy of homage. As the poet of positivism, she will long delight those in sympathy with her teachings. It would be extravagant praise to call her a second Lucretius, and yet that which has given the Roman author his place among poets will also give George Eliot rank in the same company. With all his merits as a poet, it has not been his poetic power, or his love of nature, or his worth as an interpreter of human nature, which has given Lucretius his reputation as a poet. With real poetic power,--for he would have been a much smaller man without this,--he combined a philosophic mind and a daring genius for speculation. The poetry gave charm and ideal grandeur to the speculations, and the philosophy made the poetry full of meaning and earnest intellectual purpose. He read life and nature with a keener eye and a more profound penetration than others of his time; he tried to grasp the secret of the universe, and because of it he left behind the touch of a strong mind. In some such way as this, George Eliot's poetry is likely to be read in the future. As poetry merely, it cannot take high rank; but for the sake of its philosophy, which is conceived as a poet would conceive it, there is promise that its future is to be one that is lasting. Even for poetry there must be thought, and the larger, profounder it is the better for the poetry, if it is imaginatively conceived and expressed. It is not thought, or even philosophy, which annuls poetry, but want of ideal and creative insight. To Goethe, Wordsworth or Browning there was a gain by enlargement of intellectual materials, but these were suffused in true poetic fire, and came forth a new creation. In so far as George Eliot has attained this result is she a poet, and is she sure of the future suffrages of those who accept her philosophy. At the least, her admirers must rejoice at the enlarged range of expression she secured by the use of the poetic form. IX. PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE. George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of its positivist and scientific tendencies. What Comte and Spencer have taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of science, she has applied to life and its problems. Their aims, spirit and tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations. They have experimented, speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her creative insight. What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers. She is their interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover,--the effect of their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being. Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference to those of any other. The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy, live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all their weakness. She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret social existence in accordance with their theories of man and nature. Competent to grasp and to interpret the positive philosophy in all its details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory. Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out "the painful riddle of the earth," she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences. She not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism into a shaping influence of the past upon the present, but she made this law vital with meaning as she developed its consequences in the lives of her characters. To her it was not merely a theory, but a principle so pregnant with meaning as to have its applications in every phase of human experience. Life could not be explained without it; the thoughts, deeds and aspirations of men could be understood only with reference to it; much that enters into human life of weal and woe is to be comprehended only with reference to this law. In regard to all the other evolution problems and principles her knowledge was as great, her insight as clear, and her constructive use of them as original. A new theory of life and the universe may be intellectually accepted as soon as its teachings are comprehended; but the absorption of that theory into the moral tissues, so that it becomes an active and constant impulse and motive in feeling and conduct, is a long and difficult process. It takes generations before it can associate itself with the instinctive impulses of the mind. It is one thing to accept the theory of universal law as an intellectual explanation of the sequences of phenomena, but it is quite another to be guided by that theory in all the most spontaneous movements of feeling, conscience and thought. A few minds are able to make such a theory at once their own by virtue of genius of a very instinctive and subtle order; but for the great majority of mankind this result can only be reached after generations of instruction. The use made of such theories by the poets and novelists is a sure test of their popular acceptance. When the poets accept such a theory, and naturally express themselves in accordance with its spirit, the people may soon feel and think according to its meaning. The theory of evolution will not easily adjust the human mind to its conclusions and methods. It is therefore very remarkable that George Eliot, the contemporary of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, Lewes and Tyndall, should be able to give a true literary expression to their speculations. She has not only been able to follow these men, to accept their theories and to understand them in all their implications and tendencies, but she has so absorbed these theories into her mind, and so made them a part of all its processes, that she has painted life thoroughly in accordance with their spirit. Should the teachings of the evolutionists of to-day be finally accepted, and after a few generations become the universally received explanations of life and the universe, it is not likely any poet or novelist will more genuinely and entirely express their spirit than George Eliot has done. The evolutionary spirit and ways of looking at life became instinctive to her; she saw life and read its deepest experiences wholly in the light shed by this philosophy. For this reason her writings are of great value to those who would understand the evolution philosophy in its higher phases. George Eliot accepted the intellectual conclusions of evolution, and the outline thus afforded she filled in with feeling and poetry. She interpreted the pathos, the tragedy, the aspirations of life in the light of this philosophy. Accepting with a bold and undismayed intellect the implications and consequences of evolution, rejecting or abating no least portion of it, she found in it a place for art, poetry and religion; and she tried to show how it touches and moulds and uplifts man. She shrank from nothing which would enable her to reveal how man is to live in such a universe as she believed in; she saw all its hardness, cruelty, anguish and mystery, and resolutely endeavored to show how these enter into and help to form his destiny. In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man's inner life. The emotional life is made the essential life; and all its phases of manifestation in art, poetry and religion are regarded as of great importance. George Eliot viewed the higher problems of life from this point of view, giving to the forms in which the emotional side of man's nature is expressed a supreme importance. Religion, as the response of feeling to the mystery of existence, occupied a most important place in her philosophy. That her interpretation of the emotional elements of life is the true one, that she has discovered their source or their real ideal significance, may well be doubted; but there is every reason for believing that she realized their great value, and she certainly tried in an earnest spirit to make them helpful in the life of ideal beauty and truthfulness. All that agnostic science and the evolution philosophy had to teach, George Eliot accepted, its doctrine of descent, its new psychology, and its theories of society and human destiny. Its doctrine of experience, its ethical theories, were equally hers. Yet into her interpretation of existence went a woman's heart, the widest and tenderest sympathy, and a quick yearning purpose to do what good she could in the world. She saw with the lover's eyes, motherhood revealed itself in her soul, the child's trust was in her heart. The new philosophy she applied to life, revealed its relations to duty, love, sorrow, trial and death. To her it had a deep social meaning, a vital connection with the heart, its hopes and its burdens, and for her it touched the spiritual content of life with reality. It was in this way she became the truest interpreter of the evolution philosophy, the best apostle of the ethics taught by agnostic science. She not only speculated, she also felt and lived. Philosophy was to her more than an abstract theory of the universe; into it entered a tender sympathy for all human weakness, a profound sense of the mystery of existence, and a holy purpose to make life pure and true to all she could reach. This larger comprehension gives a new significance to her interpretation of evolution. It makes it impossible that this philosophy should be fully understood without a study of her books. It is because George Eliot was not a mere speculative thinker that her teachings become so important. The true novelist, who is gifted with genius, who creates character and situation with a master's hand, must have some theory of life. He must have some notion of what life means, what the significance of the pathos and tragedy of human experience, and why it is that good and evil in conduct do not produce the same results. Such a theory of life, if firmly grasped and worked out strongly, becomes a philosophy. Much depends with the novelist on that philosophy, what it places foremost, what it sees destiny to mean. It will affect his insight, give shape to his plots, decide his characters, guide his ethical interpretations, fix his spiritual apprehension. It was because George Eliot adopted a new and remarkable philosophy, one that teaches much which the instincts of the race have rejected, and repudiates much which the race has accepted as necessary to its welfare, that her teachings become so noteworthy. Genius first of all she had, and the artist's creative power; but the way she used these, and the limitations she put upon them by her philosophy, give her books an interest which not even her wonderful genius could alone produce. That philosophy is in debate; and it is not yet decided whether it is mainly false because growing out of wrong methods, or if it be in reality a true explanation of existence. Its revolutionary character, its negative spirit, its relations to ethics and religion, make it remarkable, and even startling. Profound thinkers, men of commanding philosophic apprehension and power of generalization, have accepted it; physical science has largely lent its aid to the support of its conclusions. Yet on its side genius, imagination, creative instinct, artistic apprehension, have not given their aid. Without them it is defective, and cannot command the ideal sentiments and hopes of the race. First to fill this gap came George Eliot, and she yet remains its only great literary ally and coadjutor. Tyndall, Haeckel and DuBois Raymond can give us science; but this is not enough. Comte, Mill and Spencer can give us philosophy; but that is inadequate. They have also essayed, one and all, to say some true word about morals, religion and the social ideals; but they have one and all failed. They are too speculative, too far away from the vital movements of life, know too little of human experience as it throbs out of the heart and sentiments. They can explain their theories in terms of science, ethics and philosophy; but George Eliot explains them in terms of life. They have speculated, she has felt; they have made philosophies, she has created ideal characters and given us poetry; they have studied nature, she has studied experience and life; they have tried to resolve the mind into its constituent elements; she has entered into the heart and read its secrets; they have looked on to see what history meant, she has lived all heart tragedies and known all spiritual aspirations. George Eliot was not a mere disciple of any of the great teachers of evolution. Though of their school, and largely in accord and sympathy with them, yet she often departed from the way they went, and took a position quite in opposition to theirs. Her standpoint in philosophy was arrived at quite independently of their influence, and in many of its main features her philosophy was developed before she had any acquaintance either with them or their books. She wrote concerning John Stuart Mill, [Footnote: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "Last words from George Eliot," is Harper Magazine for March 1882. The names of Mill and Spencer are not given in this article, but the words from her letters so plainly refer to them that they have been quoted here as illustrating her relations to these men.]-- I never had any personal acquaintance with him, never saw him to my knowledge except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his books, especially his _Logic_ and _Political Economy_ with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life. Concerning another leading positivist she has said,-- Of [Herbert Spencer's] friendship I have had the honor and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought. Not long previous to her death, in reading Bridges' version of _The General View of Positivism_, she expressed her dissent more often than her assent, and once she said,-- I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte. George Eliot did not take up her residence in London until her thirty-second year, and previous to that time her acquaintance with the positivist leaders must have been slight. Before that age the opinions of most persons are formed, and such was the case with George Eliot. It is likely her opinions underwent many changes after this date, but only in the direction of those already established and in modification of the philosophy already accepted. She became an evolutionist without the aid of those men who are supposed to be the originators of this theory. Every new idea or new way of interpreting nature and life grows into form gradually, and under the influence of many different minds. The evolution philosophy was long accepted before it became a doctrine or was formulated into a philosophy. The same influences worked in many quarters to produce the same conclusions. It was given to George Eliot to come under a set of influences which led her to accept all the leading ideas of evolution before she had any opportunity to know that philosophy as it has been elaborated by the men whose names are most often connected with it. A brief account of the successive philosophic influences which most directly and personally touched her mind will largely help towards the comprehension of her teachings. The most intimate friend of her youth, who gave her a home when trouble came with her family, and stimulated her mind to active inquiry after truth, was a philosopher of no mean ability. Charles Bray not only was the first philosopher she knew, but her opinions of after years were mainly in the direction he marked out for her. In his _Philosophy of Necessity_, published in 1841, he maintained that the only reality is the _Great Unknown_ which we name God, that all natural laws are actions of the first cause. He taught that the world is created in our own minds, the result of some unknown cause without us, which we call matter; but it is thus God mirrors himself to us. "All we see is but the vesture of God, and what we call laws of nature are but attributes of Deity." Matter is known to us only as the cause of sensations, while the soul is the principle of sensation, dependent upon the nervous system; the nervous system depending upon life, and life upon organization. All knowledge comes to man through the action of the external world upon the senses; all truth, all progress, come to us out of experience. "Reason is dependent for its exercise upon experience, and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the invariable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect." All acts of men are ruled by necessity. Pain produces our ideas of right and wrong, and happiness is the test of all moral action. There are no such things as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures. Evil is the natural and necessary limitation of our faculties, and our consequent liability to error; and pain, which we call evil, is its corrective. Nothing, under the circumstances, could have happened but that which did happen; and the actions of men, under precisely the same circumstances, must always issue in precisely the same results. Death, treated of in a separate chapter, is shown to be good, and a necessary aid to progress. Society is regarded as an organism, and man is to find his highest life in the life of others. "The great body of humanity (considered as an individual), with its soul, the principle of sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in enjoyment. Death and birth, the means of renewal and succession, bear the same relation to this body of society as the system of waste and reproduction do to the human body; the old and useless and decayed material is carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is renovated and rendered capable of ever-increasing happiness.... The minds, that is to say, the ideas and feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus forever in existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in individuals, but in the great body of humanity.... To the race, though not to individuals, all beautiful things are preserved forever; all that is really good and profitable is immortal." Nearly every idea here presented was accepted by George Eliot and re-appears in her writings. In Bray's later books much also is to be found which she embraced. He therein says that all outside of us is a delusion of the senses. [Footnote: This summary of Bray's philosophy is condensed from an article in the Westminster Review for April, 1879.] The senses conspire with the intellect to impose upon us. The constitution of our faculties forces us to believe in an external world, but it has no more reality than our dreams. Each creature is the creator of its own separate, different world. The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind. Matter is a creature of the imagination, and is a pure assumption. It is the centre of force, as immaterial as spirit, as ethereal and unsubstantial. As centres of force imply locality, and locality space, so space must have an extension of its own. Not so; it is a pure creation of the mind. The same holds true of time. The world of mind, the moral world as well, are our own creations. Man has no power over himself; nothing could have been otherwise than as it is. Repentance and remorse are foolish regrets over what could not have been otherwise. All actions and motives are indifferent; only in their consequences can any distinction be observed between them. Such as minister to man's pleasure he calls good; such as produce pain he calls evil. Thereis no good but pleasure, and no evil but pain. Hence there is no distinction between moral and physical evil. Morality is the chemistry of the mind, its attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes. God is an illusion, as are all moral conclusions based on his existence, Nor has man any reality; he is the greatest illusion and delusion of all. The faculty of individuality gives us all our ideas and feelings, and creates for us what we call our minds. A mind is an aggregate of a stream of consciousness. Ideas, feelings, states of consciousness, do not inhere in anything; each is a distinct entity. "Thinking is," is what we should say, not "I think." Here we are at the ground fact of what constitutes being, on solid footing; consciousness cannot deceive us. Thinking is, even if mind and matter, self and not-self, are illusory. It is, even if we deny both the external and internal causes of consciousness. We know our own consciousness, that alone. All is inference beside. When we consider what inferences are most probable, we are led to build up a constructive philosophy. Consciousness says we have a body, body a brain, and pressure on the brain stops consciousness; hence a close connection between the brain and consciousness. The two go together, and in the brain we must lay the foundation of our philosophy. The mental faculties create the world of individual consciousness, it the outside world. We know only what is revealed in consciousness. Matter and mind are one. Life and mind are correlates of physical force; they are the forms assumed by physical force when subjected to organic conditions. Yet there is no such thing as mere physical force. Every atom of matter acts intelligently; it has so acted always. The conscious intelligence of the universe has subsided into natural law, and acts automatically. This universal agent of life in all things is God. All consciousness and physical force are but "the varied God." There is in reality no agent but mind, conscious or unconscious. God is nature; matter is mind solidified. Matter is force as revealed by the senses. It is the body, force is the soul. In nature, as in man, body and soul are one and indivisible. Mind builds up organisms. There is a living will, conscious or unconscious, in all things. The One and All requires the resignation of the individual and personal, of all that is selfish, to the Infinite whole. The basis of Bray's philosophy was idealism and pantheism, assuming form under the influence of modern science. He quoted Emerson frequently, and the school of thought Emerson represents affected him greatly. On the other hand, he was then a strong phrenologist, had imbibed much of the teaching of Combe's _Constitution of Man_, and he eagerly embraced those notions of the relations of body and mind which have been propagated in the name of physical science. The same double influence is to be seen at work upon the next thinker who was destined to give direction to George Eliot's philosophy. Feuerbach was a disciple of Hegel, whose influence is deeply marked through all his earlier writings. He also was affected by physical science, and he found in sensationalism an element for his system. To him all thought is the product of experience; he founded his ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses. The external world affects the senses and generates feeling, feeling produces ideas. Feeling re-acts upon the external world, interprets it according to its own wants. Feeling is thus the source of all knowledge; feeling is the basis alike of religion and philosophy. Feuerbach, as well as Bray, finds that man creates the outward world in consciousness; all that is out of man which he can know, is but a reflection of what is in him. This conception of consciousness, this pure idealism, becomes the source of Feuerbach's philosophy of religion. He says that religion is based on the differences between man and the brute; man has consciousness, which is only present in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. Man thinks, converses with himself, is at once I and Thou, can put himself in the place of another. Religion is identical with self-consciousness, and expresses man's sense of the infinitude of his own faculties. Man learns about himself through what is objective to him, but the object only serves to bring out what is in him; his own nature becomes the absolute to him. Consciousness marks the self-satisfaction, self-perfection of man, that all truth is in him. As feeling is the cause of the outward world, or of that notion of it man has, it becomes the organ of religion. The nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling. As man lives mainly in feeling, finds there the sources of all his mental and moral life, he comes to regard feeling as the divinest part of his nature, the noblest and most excellent; so it becomes to him the organ of the divine. When man thinks what is infinite he in reality does nothing more than to perceive and affirm that to him feeling has an infinite power. If you feel the infinite, you feel and affirm the infinitude of the power of feeling. The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself; the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself. God is pure, unlimited, free feeling. In religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. The object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. God is like our thoughts and dispositions; consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. Religion is the unveiling of a man's hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love secrets. It is to the understanding Feuerbach attributes man's capacity for objectifying himself or of attributing to the outward world those qualities which really exist only within. Man's consciousness of God is nothing else than his consciousness of his species. "Man has his highest being, his God, in himself; not in himself as an individual, but in his essential nature, his species. No individual is an adequate representative of his species, but only the human individual is conscious of the distinction between the species and the individual. In the sense of this distinction lies the root of religion. The yearning of man after something above himself is nothing else than the longing after the perfect type of his nature, the yearning to be free from himself, _i.e._, from the limits and defects of his individuality. Individuality is the self-conditioning, the self-limitation of the species. Thus man has cognizance of nothing above himself, of nothing beyond the nature of humanity; but to the individual man this nature presents itself under the form of an individual man. All feelings which man experiences towards a superior man, nay, in general, all moral feelings which man has towards man, are of a religious nature. Man feels nothing towards God which he does not also feel towards man." The dogmas of Christianity are interpreted by Feuerbach from this standpoint of conceiving religion as a projection of feeling upon the outward world. So he explains the incarnation as man's love for man, man's yearning to help his fellows, the renunciation and suffering man undergoes for man. The passion of Christ represents freely accepted suffering for others in love of them. The trinity typifies the participated, social life of the species; it shows the father, mother and son as the symbols of the race. The _logos_ or son is the nature of the imagination made objective, the satisfaction of the need for mental images, the reflected splendor of the imagination. Faith in providence is faith in one's own worth; it indicates the divine reality and significance of our own being. Prayer is an expression of the power of feeling, a dialogue of man with his own heart. Faith is confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of nature and reason. Its specific object is miracle; faith and miracle are absolutely inseparable. That which is objectively miracle is subjectively faith. Faith is the miracle of feeling; it is nothing else than belief in the absolute reality of subjectivity. The power of miracle is the power of the imagination, for imagination corresponds to personal feeling; it sets aside all limits, all laws painful to the feelings, and thus makes objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his subjective wishes. The belief in miracle accepts wishes as realities. In fact, the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are simply realized wishes of the heart. This is true, because the highest law of feeling is the immediate unity of will and deed, of wishing and reality. To religion, what is felt or wished is regarded as real. In the Redeemer this is realized, wish becomes fact. All things are to be wrought, according to religion, by belief. Thus the future life is a life where feeling realizes every desire. Its whole import is that of the abolition of the discordance which exists between wish and reality. It is the realization of a state which corresponds to the feelings, in which man is in unison with himself. The other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish. "The sum of the future life is happiness, the everlasting bliss of personality, which is here limited and circumscribed by nature. Faith in the future life is therefore faith in the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of nature; it is faith in the eternity and infinitude of personality, and not of personality viewed in relation to the idea of the species, in which it forever unfolds itself in new individuals, but of personality as belonging to already existing individuals; consequently, it is the faith of man in himself. But faith in the kingdom of heaven is one with faith in God; the context of both ideas is the same; God is pure absolute subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and will be; faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in his absolute freedom and unlimitedness." It is not probable that George Eliot confined her philosophic studies to the writings of Charles Bray and Feuerbach, but it is quite certain that in their books which she did faithfully study, are to be found some of the leading principles of her philosophy. What gives greater confirmation to the supposition that her philosophy was largely shaped under their influence is the fact that her intimate friend, Sara Hennell, drew from the same sources for the presentation of theories quite identical with hers. Sara Hennell's _Thoughts in Aid of Faith_, published in 1860, is an attempt to show that the religious sentiments may be retained when the doctrines of theology are intellectually rejected, that a disposition of the heart akin to Paul's may be present though conviction be extinct. In securing this result, she too takes Feuerbach as her guide, and his teachings she claims are fully corroborated by the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Religion she regards as the result of the tendency of man's mind towards philosophy, the outgrowth of the activity of his mental faculties seeking satisfaction for themselves in explaining the world given for his contemplation and study. "The growth of religion in the human intelligence (thereby distinguished from mere blind emotion), is coincident with, or rather immediately consequent upon, the power of forming abstract ideas; that is to say, it is a generalization effected by the operation of the intellect upon the sentiments and emotions, when these have attained to so great extent and distinctness as to become self-conscious." Man early objectifies the qualities he finds in himself and his fellows, regards them as entities, is prostrated in awe and worship before them, conceives them to be gods. He attributes to outward objects his subjective states, and regards them as like himself, only infinitely more powerful. His emotions he believes are caused by these objective beings, and he thinks he is inspired, that the gods are at work within him. Feeling becomes the voice of God, the revelator of religions and theologies. Christianity Miss Hennell regards as "the form in which the religious affections, struggling against earthly limitations, have created for themselves the satisfaction they demand, and, therefore, in so far, real, just as the affections are real." Feeling, she says, is real as logic, and must equally have its real foundation. That is, feeling gives us the truth, actually answers to the realities of things as man can know them. She is here an ontologist, and she is convinced that feeling is a direct witness of the deeper knowledge and reality which man seeks in religion. The permanency and validity of religion she believes in, and she testifies to its wholesome and ennobling effect upon the race. "Christianity, having formed an actual portion of the composition both of our own individual experience and of the world's history, can no more be annihilated out of them than the sum of what we learned during a certain number of years of our childhood, from the one, or the effects of any notable occurrence, such as the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Norman invasion, from the other;--Christianity on every view, whether of its truth or falsity, and consequently of its good or bad effect, has undoubtedly contributed to make us what we are; without it we should have grown into something incalculably different from our present selves.... And how can it be otherwise than real to us, this belief that has nourished the souls of us all, and seems to have moulded actually anew their internal constitution, as well as stored them up with its infinite variety of external interests and associations? What other than a very real thing has it been in the life of the world, sprang out of, and again causing to spring forth, such volumes of human emotion? making a current, as it were, of feeling, that has drawn within its own sphere all the moral vitality of so many ages. In all this reality of influence there is indeed the testimony of Christianity having truly formed an integral portion of the organic life of humanity." Though Miss Hennell is so earnest a believer in Christianity, yet she totally rejects the idea of any objective reality corresponding to its dogmas. This conclusion is based on the philosophic notion, which she shares with Bray, Feuerbach, George Eliot, Spencer and Lewes, that man has no real knowledge whatever except that which is given in consciousness. This philosophy, shared in common by these persons, is called by Lewes "reasoned realism," and by Spencer "transfigured realism." It accepts the reality of an outward world, but says that all man knows of it is, that it produces impressions on his senses which are transmuted into sensations. Sensations produce feelings, and feelings become ideas. According to Spencer, the steps of knowledge are three: the co-ordinating of sensations in a living organism; the registering of impressions within the organism in such a way as to build up a store of experiences; the transmission of the organism and its susceptibilities to offspring. Miss Hennell accepts Spencer's theory that feeling is the source of all our knowledge. Not only, as she says, does it "constitute the essential and main vitality of our nature," but when it is stored up in the human organism and inherited, it becomes the vital source out of which all moral and religious truth is built up. Experience, transformed into inherited feeling, takes on the form of those intuitions which "are the only reliable ground of solid belief." "These sentiments which are born within us, slumbering as it were in our nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they are roused by hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of the whole of previous human existence. They constitute our treasured inheritance out of all the life that has been lived before us, to which no age, no human being who has trod the earth and laid himself to rest with all his mortal burden upon her maternal bosom, has failed to add his contribution. No generation has had its engrossing conflict, surely battling out the triumphs of mind over material force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with its birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual powers,--no single soul has borne itself through its personal trial,--without bequeathing to us of its fruit. There is not a religious thought that we take to ourselves for secret comfort in our time of grief, that has not been distilled out of the multiplicity of the hallowed tears of mankind; not an animating idea is there for our fainting courage that has not gathered its inspiration from the bravery of the myriad armies of the world's heroes. All this best of humanity's hard earnings has been hoarded with generous care by our _alma natura naturans_; so that at last, in our rich ages, the _mens naturafa_ opens its gaze with awful wonder upon its environment of spiritual possessions." The intimate sympathy of George Eliot and Miss Hennell indicates that they followed much the same studies, and it is certain they arrived at very similar conclusions. That the one was directly influenced or led by the other there seem to be no reasons for believing. All that is probable is, that there was a close affinity of thought and purpose between them, and that they arrived at similar philosophical conclusions. The same is to be said in regard to George Eliot's relations to George Henry Lewes. Her theories of life, as has been already clearly indicated, were firmly fixed before she knew him, and her philosophical opinions were formed. The similarity of their speculative opinions doubtless had something to do with bringing them together; and it is certain that the tenor of their thoughts, their views about life, and their spiritual aspirations, were very much alike, giving promise of a most thorough sympathy in all their intellectual and moral pursuits. If she was influenced by him, he was quite as much influenced by her. Lewes accepted the philosophical side of Comte's Positive Philosophy, but the religious side of it he rejected and strongly condemned. In his _History of Philosophy_, he says, "Antagonism to the method and certain conclusions of the _Politique positive_ led me for many years to regard that work as a deviation from the Positive Philosophy in every way unfortunate. My attitude has changed now that I have learned (from the remark of one very dear to me) to regard it as an Utopia, presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines, suggestions for inquirers rather than dogmas for adepts--hypotheses carrying more or less of truth, and serviceable as a provisional mode of colligating facts, to be confirmed or contradicted by experience." It is altogether probable, as in this case, that George Eliot gave Lewes the suggestive aid of her acute mind. If she was aided by him, it was only as one strong mind aids another, by collision and suggestion rather than by direct teaching. Lewes may have had the effect to deepen and establish firmly the conclusions already reached by George Eliot, and a consideration of his philosophy must confirm this conjecture. He, too, makes feeling the basis of all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and matter is the objective aspect of feeling. Feeling is not the cause of motion, as idealism would suggest; and motion does not cause or turn into feeling, as materialism teaches. The two are absolutely identical; there is no dualism or antithesis. In the same way, cause and effect are but two aspects of one phenomenon; there is no separation between them, but one and the same thing before and after. He applies this idea to the conception of natural law, and declares it to be only the persistence of phenomena; that is, the persistence of feeling. He denies that there is any absolute behind phenomena; the absolute is in the phenomena, which is the only reality. The phenomenal universe is simply a group of relations, nothing more; and what seems to be, really exists, because the relations are real. It is not necessary here to enter into a full presentation of Lewes's philosophy, but his theories about the functions of feeling are of importance, in view of George Eliot's acceptance of them. They have been summarized into the statement that "all truths are alike feelings, ideally distinguishable according to the aspects under which they are viewed. There is no motion apart from feeling, for the motion _is_ the feeling; there is no force apart from matter which compels it to moves for the force _is_ the matter, as matter is motion--differently viewed; there is no essence or substance which determines the properties, for the substance is the whole group of properties; there are no causes outside of effects, no laws outside the processes, no reality outside the phenomena, no absolute outside the relative, which determine things to be as they are and not otherwise, for all these are but different sides of one and the same thing." The central thought presented by Lewes is, that "for us there is nothing but feeling, whose subjective side is sensations, perceptions, memories, reasonings, the ideal constructions of science and philosophy, emotions, pleasures, pains; whose objective side is motion, matter, force, cause, the absolute." The outcome of this theory is, it enables Lewes to believe that the inner and outer practically agree, that our feelings give a sufficiently correct picture of the universe. In reality, the two do not agree, and even "science is in no respect a plain transcript of reality;" but so intimate are feeling and the outer world, that the inward report is to be regarded as practically a correct one. In many ways Lewes differed from his contemporaries, disagreeing again and again with Spencer, Bain and Huxley. He often seems much nearer Schelling than Haeckel. He differs from Schelling in his demand for verification and the inductive method, and in claiming that all his conclusions are the result of scientific experiments and deductions. He agrees with Schelling in his rejection of mechanical processes and in his acceptance of a vital, organic method in nature and in social development. He differs from many of the other leaders of speculative science in his rejection of reflex action, maintaining that the brain is not the only seat of sensation, and that all cerebral processes are mental processes. With equal vigor he rejects the theory of animal automatism, and the assertion that animal actions can be completely expressed and accounted for in terms of nervous matter and motion. The laws of the mind, he maintained, are not to be deduced from physiological processes, but with them must be joined the psychical processes of the individual and the social man. He separates man by an impassable barrier from the lower animals, this gulf between them being due to human society and to the social acquisition of language. In the social factor he finds an important element of psychology, and one that must always come in to overturn any mechanical theories of mental activity. It has been very truly said, that Lewes must be credited with the doctrine of the dependence of the human mind on the social medium. Others had hit upon this idea, and it had been very well developed by Spencer and Comte; but Lewes gave it a wider and profounder interpretation than any other. One of his critics says that Lewes "has the sort of claim to have originated this theory that Bacon has to be considered the discoverer of the inductive method." He not only held with Spencer and other evolutionists, that the human mind is the product of experience in contact with the outer world, that experience transmitted by heredity and built up into mental processes and conclusions; but he maintained that the social medium is a much greater and more important factor. The past makes the present; the social life develops the individual. Our language, our thought, as individuals, are the product of the collective life of the race. "We are to seek in the social organism for all the main conditions of the higher functions, and in the social medium of beliefs, opinions, institutions, &c., for the atmosphere breathed by the intellect. Man is no longer to be considered simply as an assemblage of organs, but also as an organ in a collective organism. From the former he derives his sensations, judgments, primary impulses; from the latter, his conceptions, theories and virtues. This is very clear when we learn how the intellect draws both its inspiration and its instrument from the social needs. All the materials of intellect are images and symbols, all its processes are operations on images and symbols. Language--which is wholly a social product for a social need--is the chief vehicle of symbolical operation, and the only means by which abstraction is affected.... Language is the creator and sustainer of that ideal world in which the noblest part of human activity finds a theatre, the world of thought and spiritual insight, of knowledge and duty, loftily elevated above that of sense and appetite. Into this ideal world man absorbs the universe as in a transfiguration. It is here that he shapes the programme of his existence; and to that programme he makes the real world conform. It is here he forms his highest rules of conduct. It is here he plants his hopes and joys. It is here he finds his dignity and power. The ideal world becomes to him the supreme reality." Lewes said that what a man thinks "is the necessary product of his organism and external conditions." The "organism itself is the product of its history; it is what it has become; it is a part of the history of the race." Because man is a creature of feeling he is susceptible to the influences of the outer world, and from the influences and experiences thus received the foundations of his mental life are laid. The structure erected on this foundation, however, is the product of man's social environment. As a social being, he inherits mental capacities, and all the instruments of mental, moral and social development, as these have been produced in the past. The social structure takes up and preserves the results of individual effort; and social capacity enlarges mental and moral power quite beyond what mere inheritance produces. Lewes assigned as high a value to introspection as to observation in psychology, and said that whatever place is assigned to the one in scientific method must be assigned to the other. He therefore accorded a high value to imagination and intuition, and to all ideal constructions of life and its meanings which are based on science. All knowledge grows out of feeling, and must be expressible again in feeling, if it is to have any value. Accordingly, man's life is of little value apart from sentiment, and the emotional nature must always be satisfied. As Lewes begins his philosophy in feeling, he holds that the final object of philosophy is to develop feeling into a perfect expression, in accordance with the ideal wants of man's nature. In other words, the final and supreme object of philosophy is the expression of religion and the founding of a moral and spiritual system of life. He believed that religion will continue to regulate the evolution of humanity, and in "a religion founded on science and expressing at each stage what is known of the world and of man." As much as any zealous Christian believer he accepted man's need of spiritual culture and religious development. At the same time, his philosophy rejected a substantive absolute, or any other spiritual realities or existences apart from the universe given in feeling and consciousness. Accordingly, man must find his ideal satisfactions, his spiritual realities and moral ideals, within the limits of the universe as known to philosophy, and in the organic life of the race. George Eliot was also largely influenced by the teachings of Auguste Comte. The place he assigned to positive knowledge and the inductive method, to feeling, to development and the influence of the past upon the present, were all accepted by her in an enthusiastic spirit. Altruism commanded her hearty belief, and to its principles she devoted her life. Comte's conceptions in regard to sentiment, and the vital importance of religion and social organization, had her entire assent. She differed from him in regard to spiritual and social organization, and she could not accept his arbitrary and artificial methods. One of the leaders of positivism in England [Footnote: Some Public Aspects of Positivism, the annual address before the Postivist Society, London, January 1, 1881, by Professor E.G. Beesley, of University College.] has given this account of her relations to its organized movements and to its founder: "Her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and she looked forward to the reorganization of belief on the lines which he had laid down. Her study of his two great works was diligent and constant. The last time I saw her--a few days before her death--I found that she had just been reading over again, with closest attention, that wonderful treatise, _The General View of Positivism_, a book which always seems full of fresh wisdom, however often one comes back to it. She had her reservations, no doubt. There were details in Comte's work which did not satisfy her. But all who knew her were aware--and I speak from an acquaintance of eighteen years--that she had not only cast away every shred of theology and metaphysics, but that she had found refuge from mere negativism in the system of Comte. She did not write her positivism in broad characters on her books. Like Shakspere, she was first an artist and then a philosopher; and I imagine she thought it to be her business as an artist rather to paint humanity as it is than as she would have it to be. But she could not conceal her intellectual conviction, and few competent persons read her books without detecting her standpoint. If any doubt could have existed, it was set at rest by that noble poem on 'Subjective Immortality,' the clearest, and at the same time the most beautiful, expression that has yet been given to one of the most distinctive doctrines of positivism; a composition of which we can already say with certainty that it will enter into the positivist liturgies of all countries and through all time. Towards positivism as an organization, a discipline,--in short, as a church,--her attitude must be plainly stated. She had much sympathy with it, as she showed by regularly subscribing to positivist objects, as, for instance, to the fund of the central organization in Paris presided over by M. Laffitte. But she sought membership neither in that nor any other church. Like most of the stronger and thoroughly emancipated minds in this period of transition and revolutionary disturbance, she looked not beyond her own conscience for guidance and authority, but judged for herself, appealing to no external tribunal from the solitary judgment-seat within. I do not for a moment suppose that she looked on the organization of a church as unattainable; but she did not regard it as attained." Another of her friends [Footnote: W.M.W. Call in the Westminster Review for July, 1881.] has indicated very clearly the nature and extent of her dissent from Comte. He remarks that "her apologetic representation of the _Politique_ as an _Utopia_ evinces that she did not admit the cogency of its reasoning, or regard the entire social reconstruction of Comte as demonstrably valid. Her dissatisfaction with some of his speculations, as expressed to ourselves in the spring of 1880, was very decided.... All membership with the positivist community she steadily rejected. That a philosophy originally so catholic as that of Comte should assume a sectarian character, was a contingency she foreboded and deprecated." In this last remark we doubtless have the explanation of George Eliot's dissent from Comte. She believed in an organic, vital development of a higher social structure, which will be brought about in the gradual evolution of humanity. Comte's social structure was artificial, the conception of one mind, and therefore as ill adapted to represent the wants of mankind as any other system devised by an individual thinker. His philosophy proper, his system of positive; thought, she accepted with but few reservations. Her views in this direction, as in many others, were substantially those presented by Lewes in his many works bearing on positivism. She was profoundly indebted to Comte, although in her later years she largely passed beyond his influence to the acceptance of the new evolution philosophy. In fact, she belonged to that school of English positivists which has only accepted the positive philosophy of Comte, and which has rejected his later work in the direction of social and religious construction. Lewes was the earliest of English thinkers to look at Comte in this way; but other representative members of the school are John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison and John Morley. Zealously accepting Comte's position that philosophy must limit itself to positive data and methods, they look upon the "Religion of Humanity," with Prof. Tyndall, as Catholicism minus Christianity, and reject it. She certainly came nearer to Comte in some directions than to Herbert Spencer, for the latter has not so fully recognized those elements of the mental and social life which most attracted her attention. Her theory of duty is one which he does not accept. He insists in his _Data of Ethics_ that duty will become less and less _obligatory_ and necessary in the future, because all action will be in harmony with the impulses of the inner man and with the conditions of the environment. This conclusion is entirely opposed to the moral-theory of George Eliot, and is but one instance of their wide divergence. He insists, in his _Study of Sociology_, that the religious consciousness will not change its lines of evolution. He distinctly rejects the conclusion arrived at by George Eliot, that there is no Infinite Reality knowable to man, and that the substance and reality of religion is purely subjective. "That the object-matter of religion," he says, "can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who think the 'religion of humanity' will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment alone properly called religious, awakened by that which is behind humanity and behind all other things." George Eliot was content with humanity, and believed that all religion arises out of the subjective elements of human life. At the same time that she made religion a development from feeling, she limited the moral law to emotional sanctions. On the contrary, Spencer is much more a rationalist, and insists on the intellectual basis both of morals and of religion. He makes less of feeling than she; and in this fact is to be found a wide gulf of separation between them. She could have been no more content with his philosophy than she was indebted to it in the construction of her own. As much one as they are in their philosophic basis and general methods, they are antagonistic in their conceptions about man and in the place assigned to nature in the development of religion. To George Eliot, religion is the development of feeling. To Spencer, it is the result of our "_thought_ of a power of which humanity is but a small and fugitive product." In these, as in other directions, they were not in sympathy. Her realism, her psychologic method, her philosophic theories, her scientific sympathies, she did not derive from him, diligently as she may have studied his books. George Eliot agreed with Comte and all other positivists in setting aside every inquiry into causes, and limiting philosophy to the search after laws. The idea of causes is idealistic, and a cause of any kind whatever is, according to these thinkers, not to be found. "The knowledge of laws," says Comte, "is henceforth to take the place of the search after causes." In other words, it is impossible for man to find out _why_ anything is, he can only know _how_ it is. George Eliot entirely agreed with Comte as to the universal dominion of law. She also followed him in his teachings about heredity, which he held to be the cause of social unity, morality, and the higher or subjective life. His conception of feeling as the highest expression of human life confirmed the conclusions to which she had already arrived from the study of Feuerbach. She was an enthusiastic believer in the Great Being, Humanity; she worshipped at that shrine. More to her than all other beliefs was her belief that we are to live for others. With Comte she said, "Altruism alone can enable us to live in the highest and truest sense." She would have all our doctrines about _rights_ eliminated from morality and politics. They are as absurd, says Comte, as they are immoral. George Eliot had a strong tendency towards philosophical speculations. While yet a student she expressed an ardent desire that she might live to reconcile the philosophy of Locke with that of Kant. In positivism, as developed and modified by Lewes, she found that reconciliation. She went far towards accepting the boldest speculations of the agnostic science of the time, but she modified it again and again to meet the needs of her own broader mind and heart. Yet it is related of her that in parting with one of the greatest English poets, probably Tennyson, when he said to her, "Well, good-by, you and your molecules," she replied, "I am quite content with my molecules." Her speculations led to the rejection of anything like a positive belief in God, to an entire rejection of faith in a personal immortality, and to a repudiation of all idealistic conceptions of knowledge derived from supersensuous sources. Her theories are best represented by the words environment, experience, heredity, development, altruism, solidarité, subjective immortality. These speculations confront the reader in nearly every chapter of her novels, and they gave existence to all but a very few of her poems. X. DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS. Science was accepted by George Eliot as furnishing the method and the proof for her philosophic and religious opinions. She was in hearty sympathy with Spencer and Darwin in regard to most of their speculations, and the doctrine of evolution was one which entirely approved itself to her mind. All her theories were based fundamentally on the hypothesis of universal law, which she probably interpreted with Lewes, in his _Foundations of a Creed_, as the uniformities of Infinite Activity. Not only in the physical world did she see law reigning, but also in every phase of the moral and spiritual life of man. In reviewing Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_, she used these suggestive words concerning the uniformity of sequences she believed to be universal in the fullest sense: The supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, and has its determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least he gives it no prominence. The great conception of uniform regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice--the conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments--could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science. [Footnote: Fortnightly Review, May, 1865.] The uniformities of nature have the effect upon man, through his nervous organization, of developing a responsive feeling and action. He learns to respond to that uniformity, to conform his actions to it. The habits thus acquired are inherited by his children, and moral conduct is developed. Heredity has as conspicuous a place in the novels of George Eliot as in the scientific treatises of Charles Darwin. She has attempted to indicate the moral and social influences of heredity, that it gives us the better part of our life in all directions. Heredity is but one phase of the uniformity of nature and the persistence of its forces. That uniformity never changes for man; his life it entirely ignores. He is crushed by its forces; he is given pain and sorrow through its unpitying disregard of his tender nature. Not only the physical world, but the moral world also, is unfailing in the development of the legitimate sequences of its forces. There is no cessation of activity, no turning aside of consequences, no delay in the transformation of causes into necessary effects. George Eliot never swerves from this conception of the universe, physical and moral; everywhere cause is but another name for effect. The unbending order adopts man into its processes, helps him when he conforms to them, and gives him pain when he disregards them. The whole secret of man's existence is to be found in the agreement of his life with the invariable sequences of nature and moral activity; harmony with them brings true development, discord brings pain and sorrow. The unbending nature of law, and man's relations to it, she has portrayed in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," when describing Tina's sorrows. While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too heavy for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was making brilliant day to busy nations oil the other side of the expectant earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships were laboring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest, and sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty. The effect of the uniformities of nature upon man, as George Eliot regarded them, is not quite that which would be inferred from these words alone. While she believed that nature is as unbending and pitiless as is here indicated, yet that unbending uniformity, which never changes its direction for man, is a large influence towards the development of his higher life. It has the effect on man to develop feeling which is the expression of all that is best and most human in his life. George Eliot believed that the better and nobler part of man's life is to be found in feeling. It is the first expression which he makes as a sentient being, to have emotions; and his emotions more truly represent him than the purely intellectual processes of the mind. She would have us believe that feeling is rather to be trusted than the intellect, that it is both a safer and a surer guide. In _Middlemarch_ she says that "our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions." Her conception of the comparative worth of feeling and logic is expressed in _Romola_ with a characteristic touch. After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope. In _Daniel Deronda_, when considering the causes which prevent men from desecrating their fathers' tombs for material gain, she says, "The only check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not hold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth." To the same effect is her saying in _Theophrastus Such_, that "our civilization, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings." She expresses the conviction in _Adam Bede_, that "it is possible to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings;" and she does not hesitate through all her writings to convey the idea, that sublime feelings are much to be preferred to profound thoughts or the most perfect philosophy. She makes Adam Bede say that "it isn't notions sets people doing the right thing--it's feelings," and that "feeling's a sort o' knowledge." Feeling gives us the only true knowledge we have of our fellow-men, a knowledge in every way more perfect than that which is to be derived from our intellectual inquiries into their natures and wants. In _Janet's Repentance_ this power of feeling to give us true knowledge of others, to awaken us to the deeper needs of our own souls, when we come in contact with those who are able to move and inspire us, is eloquently presented. Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasselled flower. Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapor, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath; they touch us with soft responsive hands; they look at us with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith and its love. Then their presence is a power; then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame. [Footnote: Chapter XIX.] She returns to the same subject when considering the intellectual theories of happiness and the proportion of crime there is likely to occur in the world. She shows her entire dissent from such a method of dealing with human woe, and she pleads for that sympathy and love which will enable us to feel the pain of others as our own. This fellow-feeling gives us the most adequate knowledge we can have. It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance." And certain ingenious philosophers of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of another--that has "learned pity through suffering"--is likely to find very imperfect satisfaction in the "balance of happiness," "doctrine of compensations," and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying will not be altogether dark. The emotions I have observed are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother--if you knew her pang and shared it--it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics. Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational; it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions maybe drawn from them--abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savor of a sacrifice in the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning which does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells him that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no water is; that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine. [Footnote: Chapter XXII.] Again, she says in the same story,-- Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analogies of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and-work the life-and-death struggles of separate human beings. George Eliot would have us believe, that until we can feel with man, enter sympathetically into his emotions and yearnings, we cannot know him. It is because we have common emotions, common experiences, common aspirations, that we are really able to understand man; and not because of statistics, natural history, sociology or psychology. The objective facts have their place and value, but the real knowledge we possess of mankind is subjective, grows out of fellow-feeling. The mental life of man, according to George Eliot, is simply an expansion of the emotional life. At first the mental life is unconscious, it is instinctive, simply the emotional response of man to the sequences of nature. This instinctive life of the emotions always remains a better part of our natures, and is to be trusted rather than the more formal activities of the intellectual faculties. In the most highly developed intellects even, there is a subconscious mental activity, an instinctive life of feeling, which is rather to be trusted than reason itself. This is a frequently recurring statement, which George Eliot makes in the firmest conviction of its truthfulness. It appears in such a sentence as this, in _The Mill on the Floss_: "Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes." In _Daniel Deronda_ it finds expression in the assertion that "there is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms." It is more explicitly presented in _Adam Bede_. Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulses by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us. George Eliot puts into the mouth of Mordecai the assertion that love lies deeper than any reasons which are to be found for its exercise. In the same way, she would have us believe that feeling is safer than reason. Daniel Deronda questions Mordecai's visions, and doubts if he is worth listening to, except for pity's sake. On this the author comments, in defence of the visions, as against reason. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners: do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dream-land where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be--the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. [Footnote: Chapter XLI.] As explicit is a passage in _Theophrastus Such_, wherein imagination is regarded as a means of knowledge, because it rests on a subconscious expression of experience. It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of probable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact, with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence. [Footnote: Chapter XIII.] Imagination, feeling and the whole inward life are being constantly shaped by our actions. Experience gives new character to the inward life, and at the same time determines its motives and its inclinations. The muscles develop as they are used; what has been once done it is easier to do again. In the same way, our deeds influence our lives, and compel us to repeat our actions. At least this is George Eliot's opinion, and one she is fond of re-affirming. After Arthur had wronged Hetty, his life was changed, and of this change wrought in his character by his conduct, George Eliot says,-- Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts which constitute a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may at first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterward with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe adjusts itself to a _fait accompli_, and so does an individual character--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution. [Footnote: Chapter XXIX.] What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to our wills. After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his foster-father, we have this observation of the author's: Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time. When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth: Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character. As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the sunlight, so man does again what he has once done. The impression of his act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct. His deed lives in memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor. What is done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the future. "A man can never separate himself from his past history," says George Eliot in one of the mottoes of _Felix Holt_. We cannot rid ourselves of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever. This truth takes shape in _Romola_ in these words: Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had now no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling. A motto in _Daniel Deronda_ reiterates this oft-repeated assertion. Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more. Feeling is to be preferred to logic, according to George Eliot, because it brings us the results of long-accumulating experiences, because it embodies the inherited experiences of the race. She was an earnest believer in "far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion," for she was convinced that the better part of all our knowledge is brought to us by inheritance. The deeds of the individual make the habits of his life, they remain in memory, they guide the purposes of the will, and they give motives to action. Deeds often repeated give impulse and direction to character, and these appear in the offspring as predispositions of body and mind. In this way our deeds "throb in after-throbs" of our children; and in the same manner the deeds of a people live in the life of the race and become guiding motives in its future deeds. As the deeds of a person develop into habits, so the deeds of a people develop into national tendencies and actions. George Eliot was a thorough believer in the Darwinian theories of heredity, and she has in all her books shown the effects of hereditary conditions on the individual and even upon a people. Family and race are made to play a very important part in her writings. Other novelists disregard the conditions and limitations imposed by heredity, and consider the individual as unrestricted by other laws than those of his own will; but George Eliot gives conspicuous prominence to the laws of heredity, both individual and social. Felix Holt never ceases in her pages to be the son of his mother, however enlarged his ideas may become and broad his culture. Rosamond Vincy also has a parentage, and so has Mary Garth. Daniel Deronda is a Jew by birth, the son of a visionary mother and a truth-seeking father. This parentage expresses itself throughout his life, even in boyhood, in all his thought and conduct. Heredity shapes the destiny of Tito Melema, Romola, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, Gwendolen Harleth and many another character in George Eliot's novels. It is even more strongly presented in her poems. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she describes Fedalma as a genuine daughter of her father, as inheriting his genius and tendencies, which are stronger than all the Spanish culture she had received. When Fedalma says she belongs to him she loves, and that love is nature too, Forming a fresher law than laws of birth,-- Zarca replies,-- Unmake yourself, then, from a Zincala-- Unmake yourself from being child of mine! Take holy water, cross your dark skin white; Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks; Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe: Unmake yourself--doff all the eagle plumes And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips Upon a Spaniard's thumb, at will of his That you should prattle o'er his words again! Fedalma cannot unmake herself; she has already danced in the plaza, and she is soon convinced that she is a Zincala, that her place is with her father and his tribe. The Prior had declared,-- That maiden's blood Is as unchristian as the leopard's, and it so proves. His statement of reasons for this conviction expresses the author's own belief. What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips Descend through generations, and the soul That moves within our frame like God in worlds-- Convulsing, urging, melting, withering-- Imprint no record, leave no documents, Of her great history? Shall men bequeath The fancies of their palates to their sons, And shall the shudder of restraining awe, The slow-wept tears of contrite memory, Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine Of fasts ecstatic--shall these pass away Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly? Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain, And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace Of tremors reverent? This larger or social heredity is that which claims much the larger share of George Eliot's attention, and it is far more clearly and distinctively presented in her writings. She gives a literary expression here to the teachings of the evolutionists, shows the application to life of what has been taught by Spencer, Haeckel and Lewes. In his _Foundations of a Creed_, Lewes has stated this theory in discussing "the limitations of knowledge." "It is indisputable," he says, "that every particular man comes into the world with a heritage of organized forms and definite tendencies, which will determine his feeling and thinking in certain definite ways, whenever the suitable conditions are present. And all who believe in evolution believe that these forms and tendencies represent ancestral experiences and adaptations; believe that not only is the pointer born with an organized tendency to point, the setter to set, the beaver to build, and the bird to fly, but that the man is born with a tendency to think in images and symbols according to given relations and sequences which constitute logical laws, that _what_ he thinks is the necessary product of his organism and the external conditions. This organism itself is a product of its history; it _is_ what it has _become_; it is a part of the history of the human race; it is also specially individualized by the particular personal conditions which have distinguished him from his fellow-men. Thus resembling all men in general characters, he will in general feel as they feel, think as they think; and differing from all men in special characters, he will have personal differences of feeling and shades of feeling, thought and combinations of thought.... The mind is built up out of assimilated experiences, its perceptions being shaped by its pre-perceptions, its conceptions by its pre-conceptions. Like the body, the mind is shaped through its history." In other words, experience is inherited and shapes the mental and social life. What some philosophers have called intuitions, and what Kant called the categories of the mind, Lewes regarded as the inherited results of human experience. By a slow process of evolution the mind has been produced and shaped into harmony with its environment; the results of inherited experience take the form of feelings, intuitions, laws of thought and social tendencies. Its intuitions are to be accepted as the highest knowledge, because the transmitted results of all human experience. As the body performs those muscular operations most easily to which it is most accustomed, so men as social beings perform those acts and think those thoughts most easily and naturally to which the race has been longest accustomed. Man lives and thinks as man has lived and thought; he inherits the past. In his social life he is as much the child of the past as he is individually the son of his father. If he inherits his father's physiognomy and habits of thought, so does he socially inherit the characteristics of his race, its social and moral life. George Eliot was profoundly convinced of the value of this fact, and she has presented it in her books in all its phases. In her _Fortnightly Review_ essay on "The Influence of Rationalism," she says all large minds have long had "a vague sense" "that tradition is really the basis of our best life." She says, "Our sentiments may be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather all their justification, all their attractions and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born." Tradition is the inherited experience of the race, the result of its long efforts, its many struggles, after a larger life. It lives in the tendencies of our emotions, in the intuitions and aspirations of our minds, as the wisdom which our minds hold dear, as the yearnings of our hearts after a wider social life. These things are not the results of our own reasonings, but they are the results of the life lived by those who have gone before us, and who, by their thoughts and deeds, have shaped our lives, our minds, to what they are. Tradition is the inherited experience, feeling, yearning, pain, sorrow and wisdom of the ages. It furnishes a great system of customs, laws, institutions, ideas, motives and feelings into which we are born, which we naturally adopt, which gives shape and strength to our growing life, which makes it possible for us to take up life at that stage it has reached after the experiences of many generations. George Eliot says in _Middlemarch_ that "a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition." We come into a world made ready for us, and find prepared for our immediate use a vast complex of customs and duties and ideas, the results of the world's experience. George Eliot believed, with Comte, that with each generation the influence of the past over the present becomes greater, and that men's lives are more and more shaped by what has been. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she makes Don Silva say that The only better is a Past that lives On through an added Present, stretching still In hope unchecked by shaming memories To life's last breath. This deep conviction of the blessed influence of the past upon us is well expressed in the little poem on "Self and Life," one of the most fully autobiographical of all her poems, where she makes Life bid Self remember How the solemn, splendid Past O'er thy early widened earth Made grandeur, as on sunset cast Dark elms near take mighty girth. Hands and feet were tiny still When we knew the historic thrill, Breathed deep breath in heroes dead, Tasted the immortals' bread. In expressive sentences, in the development of her characters, and in many other ways, she affirms this faith in tradition. In one of the mottoes in _Felix Holt_ she uses a fine sentence, which is repeated in "A Minor Prophet." Our finest hope is finest memory. The finest hope of the race is to be found in memory of its great deeds, as its saddest loss is to be found in forgetfulness of a noble past. In _The Mill on the Floss_, when describing St. Ogg's, she attributes its sordid and tedious life to its neglect of the past and its inspiring memories. The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets, Since the centuries when St. Ogg with his boat, and the Virgin Mother at the prow, had been seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had gradually vanished like the receding hill-tops! And the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it: the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. [Footnote: Chapter XII.] This faith in tradition, as giving the basis of all our best life, is perhaps nowhere so expressively set forth by George Eliot as in _The Spanish Gypsy_. It is distinctly taught by all the best characters in the words they speak, and it is emphatically taught in the whole purpose and spirit of the poem. Zarca says his tribe has no great life because it has no great national memories. He calls his people Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight Another race to make them ampler room; Who have no whence or whither in their souls, No dimmest lure of glorious ancestors To make a common breath for piety. As his people are weak because they have no traditional life, he proposes by his deeds to make them national memories and hopes and aims. No lure Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake The meagre wandering herd that lows for help-- And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will. Because our race has no great memories, I will so live, it shall remember me For deeds of such divine beneficence As rivers have, that teach, men what is good By blessing them. I have been schooled--have caught Lore from Hebrew, deftness from the Moor-- Know the rich heritage, the milder life, Of nations fathered by a mighty Past. The way in which such a past is made is suggested by Zarca, in answer to a question about the Gypsy's faith; it is made by a common life of faith and brotherhood, that gives origin to a common inheritance and memories. O, it is a faith Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts Faith to each other: the fidelity Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share The scanty water: the fidelity Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire, Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands, The speech that even in lying tells the truth Of heritage inevitable as birth, Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel The mystic stirring of a common life Which makes the many one: fidelity To that deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate Made through our infant breath when we were born The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life, Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers. Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear, But love it; for the sanctity of oaths Lies not in lightning that avenges them, But in the injury wrought by broken bonds And in the garnered good of human trust. And you have sworn--even with your infant breath You too were pledged. George Eliot's faith in tradition, as furnishing the basis of our best life, and the moral purpose and law which is to guide it, she has concentrated into one question asked by Maggie Tulliver. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment. Although this question is asked in regard to an individual's past, the answer to it holds quite as good for the race as for the individual. She repudiates all theories which give the individual authority to follow inclination, or even to follow some inner or personal guide. The true wisdom is always social, always grows out of the experiences of the race, and not out of any personal inspiration or enlightenment. Tradition furnishes the materials for reason to use, but reason does not penetrate into new regions, or bring to us wisdom apart from that we obtain through inherited experiences. George Eliot compares these two with each other in _The Spanish Gypsy_ in the words of Sephardo. I abide By that wise spirit of listening reverence Which marks the boldest doctors of our race. For Truth, to us, is like a living child Born of two parents: if the parents part And will divide the child, how shall it live? Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide The path of man, both aged and yet young, As angels are, ripening through endless years. On one he leans: some call her Memory, And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet, With deep mysterious accords: the other, Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams A light divine and searching on the earth, Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked But for Tradition; we walk evermore To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp. Man leans on tradition, it is the support of his life, by its strength he is able to move forward. Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support. Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and most powerful in its influence. On every hand man is touched by the invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go. He breathes this atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before. In an article in the _Westminster Review_ in July, 1856, on "The Natural History of German Life," in review of W.H. Riehl's books on the German peasant, and on land and climate, she presents the idea that a people can be understood only when we understand its history. Society, she says, has developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many memories and associations. To change it we must change its traditions. Nothing can be done _de novo_; a fresh beginning cannot be had. The dream of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality, was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is not in any sense to be realized. Tradition forever asserts itself, the past is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made before a new life can be had for society. These ideas are well expressed by George Eliot in her review of Riehl's books. He sees in European society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destruction of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and branch. The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the civilized world are only approximately intelligible to each other, and even that, only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty. Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms "familiar with forgotten years,"--a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express _life_, which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will have parted with its music and its passion, with its vital qualities as an expression of individual character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything that gives it power over the imagination; and the next step in simplification will be the invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A "melancholy language of the future!" The sensory and motor nerves that run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men's affections, imagination, wit and humor with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root.... It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of social science there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from mathematics to biology. To the laws of quantity comprised in mathematics and physics are superadded, in chemistry, laws of quality; to those again are added, in biology, laws of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out into its special conditions, or natural history, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by physics; biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialties produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So social science, while it has departments which in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity, what may be called its biology, carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to natural history. And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, molluscs and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skins; so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science but on the natural history of social bodies. Her conception of the corporate life of the nice has been clearly expressed by George Eliot in the concluding essay in _Theophrastus Such_. In that essay she writes of the powerful influence wrought upon national life by "the divine gift of memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute." The nations which lead the world on to a larger civilization are not merely those with most genius, originality, gift of invention or talent for scientific observation, but those which have the finest traditions. As a member of such a nation, the individual can be noble and great. We should almost be persuaded, reading George Eliot's eloquent rhetoric on this subject, that personal genius is of little moment in comparison with a rich inheritance of national memories. It is indeed true that Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and Shakspere have used the traditions of their people for the materials of their immortal works, but what would those traditions have been without the genius of the men who deal with the traditions in a fashion quite their own, giving them new meaning and vitality! The poet, however, needs materials for his song, and memories to inspire it. The influence of these George Eliot well understands in calling them "the deep suckers of healthy sentiment." The historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and for striving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not in an immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in the past--in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored.... Not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity. [Footnote: Theophrastus Such, chapter XVIII.] Zealous as is George Eliot's faith in tradition, she is broad-minded enough to see that it is limited in its influence by at least two causes,--by reason and by the spirit of universal brotherhood. We have already seen that she makes reason one of man's guides. In _Romola_ the right of the individual to make a new course for action is distinctly expressed. Romola had "the inspiring consciousness," we are told, "that her lot was vitally united with the general lot which exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion," and so "she was marching with a great army, she was feeling the stress of a common life." Yet she began to feel that she must not merely repeat the past; and the influence of Savonarola, in breaking with Rome for the sake of a pure and holy life, inspired her. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in face of a law which is not unarmed with divine lightnings--lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false. It is reason's lamp by which "we walk evermore to higher paths;" and by its aid, new deeds are to be done, new memories created, fresher traditions woven into feeling and hope. National memories are to be superseded by the spirit of brotherhood, for, as the race advances, nations are brought closer to each other, have more in common, and development is made of world-wide traditions. Theophrastus Such, in the last of his essays, tells us that "it is impossible to arrest the tendencies of things towards the quicker or slower fusion of races." The environment of her characters George Eliot makes of very great importance. She dwells upon the natural scenery which they love, but especially does she magnify the importance of the social environment, and the perpetual influence it has upon the whole of life. Mr. James Sully has clearly interpreted her thought on this subject, and pointed out its engrossing interest for her. "A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. A personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social. Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her characters. She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its special aspect and significance for those whom she sets in its midst. 'The bushy hedgerows,' 'the pool in the corner of the field where the grasses were dank,' 'the sudden slope of the old marl-pit, making a red background for the burdock'--these things are touched caressingly and lingered over because they are so much to the 'midland-bred souls' whose history is here recorded; so much because of cumulative recollection reaching back to the time when they 'toddled among' them, or perhaps 'learnt them by heart standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.' And what applies to the natural environment applies still more to those narrower surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence. The human interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle, shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually enclosing world." The larger influence in the environment of any person, according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition. Cut off from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the supports of his life. This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who had fled from his early home and all his life held dear. George Eliot describes the effect of such a change of environment. Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. [Footnote: Chapter II.] She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us by the environment of childhood. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she tells us how dear the earth becomes by such associations. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows--the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds," because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and _loved_ because it is known? The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at my feet--what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us, and transform our perception into love. [Footnote: Chapter V.] In the backward glance of _Theophrastus Such_ this anchorage of the life in familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations cannot be retained. The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves. In the evolution philosophy she found the reconciliation between Locke and Kant which she so earnestly desired to discover in girlhood. The old school of experimentalists did not satisfy her with their philosophy; she saw that the dictum that all knowledge is the result of sensation was not satisfactory, that it was shallow and untrue. On the other hand, the intellectual intuition of Schelling was not acceptable, nor even Kant's categories of the mind. She wished to know why the mind instinctively throws all experiences and thoughts under certain forms, and why it must think under certain general methods. She found what to her was a perfectly satisfactory answer to these questions in the theory of evolution as developed by Darwin and Spencer. Through the aid of these men she found the reconciliation between Locke and Kant, and discovered that both were wrong and both right. So familiar has this reconciliation become, and so wide is its acceptance, that no more than a mere hint of its meaning will be needed here. This philosophy asserts, with Locke, that all knowledge begins in sensation and experience; but with Kant, it affirms that knowledge passes beyond experience and becomes intuitional. It differs from Kant as to the source of the intuitions, pronouncing them the results of experience built up into legitimate factors of the mind by heredity. Experience is inherited and becomes intuitions. The intuitions are affirmed to be reliable, and, to a certain extent, sure indications of truth. They are the results, to use the phrase adopted by Lewes, of "organized experience;" experience verified in the most effective manner in the organism which it creates and modifies. According to this philosophy, man must trust the results of experience, but he can by no means be certain that those results correspond with actuality. They are actual for him, because it is impossible for him to go beyond their range. Within the little round created by "organized experience," which is also Lewes's definition of science, man may trust his knowledge, because it is consistent with itself; but beyond that strict limit he can obtain no knowledge, and even knows that what is without it does not correspond with what is within it. In truth, man knows only the relative, not the absolute; he must rely on experience, not on creative reason. George Eliot would have us believe that the sources of life are not inward, but outward; not dependent on the deep affirmations of individual reason, or on the soul's inherent capacity to see what is true, but on the effects of environment and the results of social experience. Man is not related to an infinite world of reason and spiritual truth, but only to a world of universal law, hereditary conditions and social traditions. Invariable law, heredity, feeling, tradition; these words indicate the trend of George Eliot's mind, and the narrow limitations of her philosophy. Man is not only the product of nature, but, according to this theory, nature limits his moral capacity and the range of his mental activity. Environment is regarded as all-powerful, and the material world as the _source_ of such truth as we can know. In her powerful presentation of this philosophy of life George Eliot indicates her great genius and her profound insight. At the same time, her work is limited, her genius cramped, and her imagination crippled, by a philosophy so narrow and a creed so inexpansive. XI. RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES. As a great literary creator, George Eliot holds a singular position in reference to religious beliefs. To most literary artists religion is a vital part of life, which enters as a profound element into their teachings or into their interpretations of character and incident. Religion deeply affects the writings of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin; its problems, its hopes, its elements of mystery and infinity touch all their pages. In an equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo. Even the pages of Voltaire, Shelley and Heine have been touched by its magic influence; their words glow with its great interests, and bloom into beauty through its inspiration. None of these is more affected by religion than George Eliot has been; nor does it form a greater element in their writings than in hers. What is singular about George Eliot's position is, that she both affirms and denies; she is deeply religious and yet rejects all religious doctrines. No writer of the century has given religion a more important relation to human interests or made it a larger element in his creative work; and yet no other literary artist has so completely rejected all positive belief in God and immortality. In her books she depicts every phase of religious belief and life, and with sympathy and appreciation. A very large proportion of her characters are clergymen or other religious persons, who are described with accuracy and sympathy. Her own faith, the theory of religion she accepts, is not given to any of her characters. What she believes, appears only in her comments, and in the general effect which life produces on the persons she describes. She believed Christianity is subjectively true, that it is a fit expression of the inner nature and of the spiritual wants of the soul. She did not propagate the pantheism of Spinoza or the theism of Francis Newman, because she did not regard them as so near the truth as the Christianity of Paul. As intellectual theories they may have been preferable to her, but from the outlook of feeling which she ever occupied, Paul was the truer teacher, and especially because his teachings are linked with the spiritual desires and outpourings of many generations. The spontaneous movements of the human mind, which have taken possession of vast numbers of people through long periods of time, have a depth of meaning which the speculations of no individual theorizer can ever possess. Especially did she regard Christianity as a pure and noble expression of the soul's inner wants and aspirations. It is an objective realization of feeling and sentiment, it gives purpose and meaning to man's cravings for a diviner life, it links generation to generation in a continued series of beautiful traditions and noble inspirations. Her intellectual view of the subject was expressed to a friend in these words: Deism seems to me the most incoherent of all systems, but to Christianity I feel no objection but its want of evidence. She also expressed more sympathy with the simple faith of the multitude than with the intellectual speculations of philosophers and theologians; and again, she said that she felt more sympathy with than divergence from the narrowest and least cultivated believer in Christianity. As a vehicle of the accumulated hopes and traditions of the world's feeling and sorrow she appreciated Christianity, saw its beauty, felt deeply in sympathy with its spirit of renunciation, accepted its ideal of a divine life. She learned from Feuerbach that religion, that Christianity, gives fit expression to the emotional life and spiritual aspirations of man, and that what it finds within in no degree corresponds with that which surrounds man without. Barren and lifeless as this view must seem to most persons, it was a source of great confidence and inspiration to George Eliot. It enabled her to appreciate the religious experiences of men, to portray most accurately and sympathetically a great variety of religious believers, and to give this side of life its place and proportion. At the same time, it was a personal satisfaction to her to be able to keep in unbroken sympathy with the religious experiences of her childhood and youth while intellectually unable to accept the beliefs on which these experiences rested. More than this, she believed that religion and spirituality of life are necessary elements of human existence, that man can never cast them off, and that man will lead a happy and harmonious life only when they have a true and fitting expression in his culture and civilization. She maintained, with Sara Hennell, that we may retain the religious sentiments in all their glow and in all their depth of influence, at the same time that the doctrines of theology and all those conceptions of nature and man on which they rest are rejected; that we may have a disposition of the heart akin to that of the prophets and saints of religion, while we intellectually cast aside all which gave meaning to their faith and devotion. According to George Eliot, religion rests upon feeling and the relations of man to humanity, as well as upon his irreversible relations to the universe. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she has given a definition of it, in speaking of Maggie's want of that knowledge of the irreversible laws within and without her, which, governing the habits, becomes morality, and developing the feelings of submission and dependence, becomes religion. [Footnote: Book IV., chapter III.] It is the human side of religion which interests George Eliot, its influence morally, its sympathetic impulse, its power to comfort and console. Its supernatural elements seem to have little influence over her mind, at least only so far as they serve the moral aims of life. It is humanity which attracts her mind, inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her enthusiasms. Religion, apart from human encouragement and elevation, the suppression of human sin and sorrow, and the increase of human sympathy and joy, has little attraction for her. She takes no ground of opposition to the beliefs of others, expresses no contempt for any form of belief in God; but she measures all beliefs by their moral influence and their power to enkindle the enthusiasm of humanity. The pantheistic theism defended by Lewes in his book on Comte, in 1853, seems to have been also accepted by George Eliot. We are told that her mind long wavered between the two, though pantheism was less acceptable than theism, on account of its moral indifference. It was undoubtedly the moral bearings of the subject which all the time had the greatest weight with her, and probably Kant's position had not a little effect on her opinions. She came, at least, to find final satisfaction in agnosticism, to believe that all intellectual speculations on the subject are in vain. At the same time, her moral convictions grew stronger, and she believed in the power of moral activity to work out a solution of life when no other can be found. At this point she stood with Kant rather than with Comte, in accepting the moral nature as a true guide. She very zealously believed with Fichte in a moral order of the world, approving of the truth which underlies the words of Fichte's English disciple, Matthew Arnold, when he discourses of "the Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." Her positive convictions and beliefs on the subject lie in this direction, and she firmly accepted the idea of a moral order and purpose. So much she thought we can know and rely on; beyond this she believed we can know nothing. Her later convictions on this subject have been expressed in a graphic manner by one of her friends. "I remember how," says this person, "at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden, of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man,--the words _God, Immortality, Duty_,--pronounced, with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates." [Footnote: F.W.H. Myers in The Century Magazine for November, 1881.] All her later writings, at least, confirm this testimony to her assertion of the inconceivableness of God, and her open denial of faith in theism. She cannot have gone so far as to assert the non-existence of God, affirming only that she could not conceive of such a being as actually existing. She could not believe in a personal God, but Lewes's conception of a dynamic life was doubtless acceptable. With as much emphasis she pronounced immortality unbelievable. She early accepted the theory of Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, that we live hereafter only in the life of the race. The moral bearings of the subject here also were most effective over her mind, for she felt that what we ought most of all to consider is our relations to our fellow-men, and that another world can have little real effect upon our present living. In her _Westminster Review_ article on "Evangelical Teaching" as presented in Young's _Night Thoughts_, she criticises the following declaration:-- "Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, What'er his boast, has told me he's a knave. His duty 'tis to love himself alone, Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles." Her comments on these lines of Young's are full of interest, in view of her subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind very helpful to those who would understand her fully. Her interest in all that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen. We may admit that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in "meditation of our own decease," and in "applause" of God in the style of a congratulatory address to Her Majesty--all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth--the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our neighbor's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others,--in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature,--we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality--that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men--lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that we should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits. The considerations here presented are very effective ones, and quite as truthful as effective. There are human supports for morality of the most important and far-reaching character, and such as are outside of any theological considerations. We ought, as George Eliot so well says, to rejoice that the reasons for being moral are manifold, that sympathy with others, as well as the central fires of personality, or the craving to be in harmony with the Eternal, is able to conduce to a righteous conduct. Her objections to Young's narrow and selfish defence of immortality are well presented and powerful, but they do not touch such high considerations as those offered by Kant. The craving for personal freedom and perfection is as strong and as helpful to the race as sympathy for others and yearning to lift up the weak and fallen. When the sense of personality is gone, man loses much of his character; and personality rests on a deep spiritual foundation which does not mean egotism merely, but which does mean for the majority a conviction of a continued existence. The tendency of the present time is to dwell less upon the theological and more upon the human motives to conduct; but it is to be doubted if the highest phases of morality can be retained without belief in God and a future life. The common virtues, the sympathetic motives to conduct, the spirit of helpfulness, may be retained intact, and even increased in power and efficiency, by those motives George Eliot presents; but the loftier virtues of personal heroism and devotion to truth in the face of martyrdom of one form or another, the saintly craving for purity and holiness, and the sturdy spirit of liberty which will suffer no bonds to exist, can be had in their full development only with belief that God calls us to seek for perfect harmony with himself. Kant's view that a divine law within, the living word of God, calls ever to us as personal beings to attain the perfection of our natures in the perfection of the race, and in conformity to the eternal law of righteousness, is far nobler and truer than that which George Eliot accepted. She was not a mere unbeliever, however, for she did not thrust aside the hope of immortality with a contemptuous hand. This problem she left where she left that concerning God, in the background of thought, among the questions which cannot be solved. She believed that the power to contribute to the future good of the race is hope and promise enough. At the same time, she was very tender of the positive beliefs of others, and especially of that yearning so many feel after personal recognition and development. Writing to one who passionately clung to such a hope, she said,-- I have no controversy with the faith that cries out and clings from the depths of man's need. I only long, if it were possible to me, to help in satisfying the need of those who want a reason for living in the absence of what has been called consolatory belief. But all the while I gather a sort of strength from the certainty that there must be limits or negations in my own moral powers and life experience which may screen from me many possibilities of blessedness for our suffering human nature. The most melancholy thought surely would be that we in our own persons had measured and exhausted the sources of spiritual good. But we know the poor help the poor. These words seem to be uttered in quite another tone than that in which she asserted the unbelievableness of immortality, though they do not indicate anything more than a tender yearning for human good and a belief that she could not herself measure all the possibilities of such good. The consolation of which she writes, comes only of human sympathy and helpfulness. In writing to a friend suffering under the anguish of a recent bereavement, she said,-- For the first sharp pangs there is no comfort;--whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain. But slowly the clinging companionship with the dead is linked with our living affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn initiation preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship with the fullest human lot which, I must think, no one who has tasted it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life. And especially to know what the last parting is, seems needful to give the utmost sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other. It is that above all which gives us new sensibilities to "the web of human things, birth and the grave, that are not as they were." And by that faith we come to find for ourselves the truth of the old declaration, that there is a difference between the ease of pleasure and blessedness, as the fullest good possible to us wondrously mixed mortals. In these words she suggests that sorrow for the dead is a solemn initiation into that full measure of human sympathy and tenderness which best fits us to be men. Looking upon all human experience through feeling, she regarded death as one of the most powerful of all the shaping agents of man's destiny in this world. She speaks of death, in _Adam Bede, as "the great reconciler" which unites us to those who have passed away from us. In the closing scenes of _The Mill on the Floss it is presented as such a reconciler, and as the only means of restoring Maggie to the affections of those she had wronged. It is in _The Legend of Jubal, however, that George Eliot has expressed her thought of what death has been in the individual and social evolution of mankind. The descendants of Cain in glad idlesse throve, Nor hunted prey, nor with each other strove; but all was peace and joy with them. There were no great aspirations, no noble achievements, no tending toward progress and a higher life. On an evil day, Lamech, when engaged in athletic sport, accidentally struck and killed his fairest boy. All was then changed, the old love and peace passed away; but good rather than evil came, for man began to lead a larger life. And a new spirit from that hour came o'er The race of Cain: soft idlesse was no more, But even the sunshine had a heart of care, Smiling with hidden dread--a mother fair Who folding to her breast a dying child Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild. Death was now lord of Life, and at his word Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred, With measured wing now audibly arose Throbbing through all things to some unknown close. Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn, And Work grew eager, and Devise was born. It seemed the light was never loved before, Now each man said, "'Twill go and come no more." No budding branch, no pebble from the brook, No form, no shadow, but new dearness took From the one thought that life must have an end; And the last parting now began to send Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss, Thrilling them into finer tenderness. Then Memory disclosed her face divine, That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves, And shows the presence that no sunlight craves, No space, no warmth, but moves among them all; Gone and yet here, and coming at each call, With ready voice and eyes that understand, And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand. Thus to Cain's race death was tear-watered seed Of various life and action-shaping need. But chief the sons of Lamech felt the stings Of new ambition, and the force that springs In passion beating on the shores of fate. They said, "There comes a night when all too late The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand, The eager thought behind closed portals stand, And the last wishes to the mute lips press Buried ere death in silent helplessness. Then while the soul its way with sound can cleave, And while the arm is strong to strike and heave, Let soul and arm give shape that will abide And rule above our graves, and power divide With that great god of day, whose rays must bend As we shall make the moving shadows tend. Come, let us fashion acts that are to be, When we shall lie in darkness silently, As our young brother doth, whom yet we see Fallen and slain, but reigning in our will By that one image of him pale and still." Death brings discord and sorrow into a world once happy and unaspiring, but it also brings a spiritual eagerness and a divine craving. Jabal began to tame the animals and to cultivate the soil, Tubal-Cain began to use fire and to work metals, while Jubal discovered song and invented musical instruments. Out of the longing and inner unrest which death brought, came the great gift of music. It had power to Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep Where the dark sources of new passion sleep. Jubal passes to other lands to teach them the gift of song, but at last returns an old man to share in the affections of his people. He finds them celebrating with great pomp the invention of music, but they will not accept him as the Jubal they did honor to and believed dead. Then the voice of his own past instructs him that he should not expect any praises or glory in his own person; it is enough to live in the joy of a world uplifted by music. Thus instructed, his broken life succumbs. Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave, The All-creating Presence for his grave. In this poem George Eliot regards death as a means of drawing men into a deeper and truer sympathy with each other. The same thought is more fully presented when she exultingly sings,-- O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self. In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues. Death teaches us to forget self, to live for others, to pour out unstinted sympathy and affection for those whose lives are short and difficult. It is the same thought as that given in reply to Young; mortal sorrows and pains should move us as hopes of immortality cannot. There accompanies this idea the larger one, that our future life is to be found in the better life we make for those who come after us. George Eliot believed with Comte, that we are to live again in minds made better by what we have done and been, that an influence goes out from every helpful and good life which makes the lives of those who come after us fairer and grander. She rests this belief on no sentimental or ideal grounds. Its justification is to be found in science, in the law of hereditary transmission. Darwin and Spencer base the great world-process of evolution on the two laws of transmission and variation. The fittest survives, and the world advances. The survival of every fit and positive form of life in the better forms which succeed it is in accordance with a process or a law which holds true up into all the highest and subtlest expressions of man's inner life. Heredity is as true morally and spiritually as physically, and our moral and spiritual offspring will partake of our own qualities; and, standing on the vantage ground of our lives, will rise higher than we. What George Eliot regards as the positive teaching of science becomes also an inspiring religious belief to her. George Eliot accepted the belief of an immortality in the race with a deep and earnest conviction. It gave a great impulse to her life, it satisfied her craving for closer harmony and sympathy with her fellows, it satisfied her longing for the power to assuage sorrow and to comfort pain. So to live is heaven; To make undying music in the world, and to have an influence for good result from our lives far down the future. Through the beneficent influences we can awake in the world All our rarer, better, truer self. That sobbed religiously in yearning song, That watched to ease the burthen of the world, ... shall live till human time Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb Unread forever. It was this belief, so satisfying to her and so ardently entertained, which inspired the best and noblest of her poems. With an almost exultant joy, with the enthusiasm of an old-time devotee, she sings of that immortality which consists in renouncing all which is personal. The diffusive good which sweetens life for others through all time is the real heaven she sought. This is life to come, Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow. May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty-- Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense. So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. Believing that humanity represents an organic life and development, it was easy for George Eliot to accept the idea of immortality in the race. She reverenced the voice of truth Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead. It was to her a divine voice, full of tenderness, sympathy and strength. She was fascinated by this thought of the solemn, ever-present and all-powerful influence of the dead over the living; there was mystery and inspiration in this belief for her. All phases of religious history, all religious experiences, were by her interpreted in the light of this conception. The power of Jesus's life is, that his trancendent beauty of soul lives in the "everlasting memories" of men, and that the cross of his shame has become The sign Of death that turned to more diffusive life His influence, his memory, has lifted up the world with a great effect, and made his life, spirit and ideas an inherent part of humanity. He has been engrafted into the organic life of the race, and lives there a mighty and an increasing influence. What has happened in his case happens in the case of all the gifted and great. According to what they were living they enter into the life of the world for weal or woe. To become an influence for good in the future, to leave behind an undying impulse of thought and sympathy, was the ambition of George Eliot; and this was all the immortality she desired. The religious tendencies of George Eliot's mind are rather to be noted in her conception of renunciation than in her beliefs about God and immortality. These latter beliefs were of a negative character as she entertained them, but her doctrine of renunciation was of a very positive nature. The central motive of that belief was not faith in God, but faith in man. It gained all its charm and power for her out of her conception of the organic life of the race. Her thought was, that we should live not for self, but for humanity. What so many ardent souls have been willing to do for the glory of God she was willing to do for the uplifting of man. The spirit of renunciation with her took the old theologic form of expression to a considerable extent, associated itself in her thought with the lofty spiritual consecration and self-abnegation of other ages. So ardently did she entertain this doctrine, so fully did she clothe it with the old forms of expression, that many have been deceived into believing her a devoted Christian. A little book was published in 1879 for the express purpose of showing that "the doctrine of the cross" is the main thought presented throughout all George Eliot's books. [Footnote: The Ethics of George Eliot's Works. By the late John Crombie Brown. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. 1879.] This book was read by George Eliot with much delight, and was regarded by her as the only criticism of her works which did full justice to her purpose in writing them. She is presented in that book as the writer of fiction who "stands out as the deepest, broadest and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than love of happiness." "Self-sacrifice as the divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure--such is the lesson" that is conveyed in all her books. George Eliot is presented as a true teacher of the doctrine which admonishes us to love not pleasure but God, to forsake all things else for the sake of obedience and devotion, to shun the world and to devote ourselves perpetually to God's service. The Christian doctrine of renunciation has always bidden men put their eyes on God, forget everything beside, and seek only for that divine life which is spiritual union with the Eternal. That doctrine was not George Eliot's. Christianity bids men renounce the world for the sake of a perfect union with God; George Eliot desires men to renounce selfishness for the sake of humanity. The Christian idea includes the renunciation of all self-seeking, it bids us give ourselves for others, it even teaches us that others are to be preferred to ourselves. Yet all this is to be done, not merely for the sake of the present, but in view of an eternal destiny, and because we can thus only fulfil God's will and attain to holy oneness with him. George Eliot did, however, throughout her writings, identify the altruist impulse to live for others with the Christian doctrine of the cross. To her, the life of devotion to humanity, which she has so beautifully presented in the poem, "O may I join the Choir Invisible," was the true interpretation of the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice. She accepted this world-old religious belief, consecrated with all the tears and sacrifices and martyrdoms of the world, as a true expression of a want of the soul, as the poetic expression of emotions and aspirations which ever live in man. It is a beautiful symbolism of that need of his fellows man ever has, of the conviction which is growing stronger, that man must live for the race and not for himself. The individual is nothing except as he identifies himself with the corporate body of humanity; the true fulfilment of life comes only to those who in some way recognize this fact, and give themselves for the good of the world. George Eliot even goes so far in her willingness to renounce self that she says in _Theophrastus Such_, "I am really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it?" The relations of the individual to the past and the present of the race make duties and burdens and woes for him which he has not created, but which are given him to bear. The sins of others bring pain and sorrow to us; we are a part of all the good and evil of the world. The present is determined by the past; we must accept the lot created for us by those who have gone before us. "He felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke of that mighty, resistless destiny laid upon us by the past of other men." says George Eliot of one of her characters. The past brings us burdens and sorrows difficult to bear; it also brings us duties. We owe to it many things; our debt to the race is an immense one. That debt can only be discharged by a life of devotion and loyalty, by doing what we can to make humanity better. The Christian idea of a debt owed to God, which we can only repay by perfect loyalty and self-abnegation, becomes to George Eliot a debt owed to humanity, which we can only repay in the purest altruistic spirit. The doctrine of renunciation has been presented again and again by George Eliot; her books are full of it. It is undoubtedly the central theme of all her teaching. In the conversation between Romola and Savonarola when she is escaping from her home and is met by him, it is vividly expressed. Savonarola speaks as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a monk; but the words he uses quite as well serve to express George Eliot's convictions. The Christian symbolism laid aside, and all was true to her; yet her feelings, her sense of corporate unity with the past, would not even suffer her to lay aside the symbolism in presenting her thoughts on this subject. Romola pleads that she would not have left Florence as long as she could fulfil a duty to her father: but Savonarola reminds her that there are other duties, other ties, other burdens. "If your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it, instead of struggling with them to lighten it? There is hunger and misery in our streets, yet you say, 'I care not; I have my own sorrows; I will go away, if peradventure I can ease them.' The servants of God are struggling after a law of justice, peace and charity, that the hundred thousand citizens among whom you were born may be governed righteously; but you think no more of that than if you were a bird, that may spread its wings and fly whither it will in search of food to its liking. And yet you have scorned the teaching of the Church, my daughter. As if you, a wilful wanderer, following your own blind choice, were not below the humblest Florentine woman who stretches forth her hands with her own people, and craves a blessing for them; and feels a close sisterhood with the neighbor who kneels beside her, and is not of her own blood; and thinks of the mighty purpose that God has for Florence; and waits and endures because the promised work is great, and she feels herself little." She then asserts her purpose not to go away to a life of ease and self-indulgence, but rather to one of hardship; but that plea is not suffered to pass. "You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You are seeking some good other than the law you are bound to obey. But how will you find good? It is not a thing of choice: it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience. I say again, man cannot choose his duties. You may choose to forsake your duties, and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth; and what will you find, my daughter? Sorrow without duty--bitter herbs, and no bread with them." Savonarola bids her draw the crucifix from her bosom, which she secretly carries, and appeals to her by that symbol of devotion and self-sacrifice to remain true to her duties, to accept willingly the burdens given her to bear, not to think of self, but only of others. He condemns the pagan teaching she had received, of individual self-seeking, and the spirit of culture, refinement and ease which accompanied that teaching. She looks on the image of a suffering life, a life offered willingly as a sacrifice for others' good, and he says,-- "Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make your sorrow an offering; and when the fire of divine charity burns within you, and you behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will not call your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly, as one who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you have been as one unborn to the true life of man. What! you say your love for your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence? Then, since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion; you are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her young. If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love, without obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do there. If you forsake your place, who will fill it? You ought to be in your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify Florence and raise it to be the guide of the nations. What! the earth is full of iniquity--full of groans--the light is still struggling with a mighty darkness, and you say, 'I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?' My daughter, every bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth; you will be wandering forever away from the right." Romola hesitates, she pleads that her brother Dino forsook his home to become a monk, and that possibly Savonarola may be wrong. He then appeals to her conscience, and assures her that she has assumed relations and duties which cannot be broken from on any plea. The human ties are forever sacred; there can exist no causes capable of annulling them. "You are a wife. You seek to break your ties in self-will and anger, not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them. The higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before you. That wisdom is the religion of the cross. And you stand aloof from it; you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, 'I am as the wise men who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth was crucified.' And that is your wisdom! To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose ear is deaf to the work of God that has been since their time. What has your dead wisdom done for you, my daughter? It has left you without a heart for the neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the world made holy; it has left you without a share in the Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering self in the ardors of an ever-growing love. And now, when the sword has pierced your soul, you say, 'I will go away; I cannot bear my sorrow.' And you think nothing of the sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of the city where you dwell; you would leave your place empty, when it ought to be filled with your pity and your labor. If there is wickedness in the streets, your steps should shine with the light of purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you, my daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry, should be there to still it. My beloved daughter, sorrow has come to teach you a new worship; the sign of it hangs before you." This teaching of renunciation is no less distinctly presented in _The Mill on the Floss_, the chief ethical aim of which is its inculcation. It is also there associated with the Catholic form of its expression, through Maggie's reading of _The Imitation of Christ_, a book which was George Eliot's constant companion, and was found by her bedside after her death. It was the spirit of that book which attracted George Eliot, not its doctrines. Its lofty spirit of submission and renunciation she admired; and she believed that altruism can be made real only through tradition, only as associated with past heroisms and strivings and ideals. As an embodiment of man's craving for perfect union with humanity, for full and joyous submission to his lot, the old forms of faith are sacred. They carry the hopes of ages; they are a pictured poem of man's inward strivings. To break away from these memories is to forsake one's home, is to repudiate one's mother. We cannot intellectually accept them, we cannot assent to the dogmas associated with them; but the forms are the spontaneous expressions of the heart, while the dogmas are an after-thought of the inquiring intellect. The real meaning of the cross of Christ is self-sacrifice for humanity's sake; that was its inspiration, that has ever been its true import. It was this view of the subject which made George Eliot so continuously associate her new teachings with the old expressions of faith. In altruism she believes is to be found the hope of the world, the cure of every private pain and grief. Altruism means living for and in the race, as a willing member of the social organic life of humanity, as desiring not one's own good but the welfare of others. That doctrine she applies to Maggie's case. This young girl was dissatisfied with her life, out of harmony with her surroundings, and could not accept the theories of life given her. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to _her_ more than to others--she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught "real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew," she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She know little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield. Into the darkness of Maggie's life a light suddenly comes in the shape of the immortal book of Thomas à Kempis. Why that book; why along such a way should the light come? The answer is, that George Eliot meant to teach certain ideas. It is this fact which justifies her reader in taking these scenes of her novels, these words spoken in the interludes, as genuine reflections and transcripts of her own mind. Maggie turns over a parcel of books brought her by Bob Jakin, to find little in them-- but _Thomas à Kempis_. The name had come across her in her reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the little old clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed. "Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world.... If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee.... Both above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the cross; and everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown.... If thou desire to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome; which evil being once overcome and subdued, there will presently ensue great peace and tranquillity.... It is but little thou sufferest in comparison of them that have suffered so much, were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof.... Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth which teacheth inwardly." A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading--seeming rather to listen while a low voice said,-- "Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away, and thou together with them. Beware thou cleave not unto them lest thou be entangled and perish.... If a man should give all his substance, yet it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances, yet are they but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off. And if he should be of great virtue and very fervent devotion, yet is there much wanting; to wit, one thing which is most necessary for him. What is that? That having left all, he leave himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of self-love.... I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the same. Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much inward peace.... Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die." Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets--here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things--here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard. It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength; returning to it after she had been called away, and reading until the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness, and, in the ardor of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived--how could she until she had lived longer?--the inmost truth of the old monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems--of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message. I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's promptings; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph,--not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt, and suffered, and renounced,--in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours,--but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. [Footnote: The Mill on the Floss, Book IV., chapter III.] Life now has a meaning for Maggie, its secret has been in some measure opened. Only by bitter experiences does she at last learn the full meaning of that word; but all her after-life is told for us in order that the depth and breadth and height of that meaning may be unfolded. Very soon Maggie is heard saying, "Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do." It is George Eliot who really speaks these words; hers is the thought which inspires them. Yet Maggie has not learned to give up wishing; and the sorrow, the tragedy of her life comes in consequence. She is pledged in love to Philip, the son of the bitter enemy of her family, and is attracted to Stephen, the lover of her cousin Lucy. A long contest is fought out in her life between attraction and duty; between individual preferences and moral obligations. The struggle is hard, as when Stephen avows his love, and she replies,-- "Oh, it is difficult--life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but, then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us--the ties that have made others dependent on us--and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in Paradise, and we could always see that one being first toward whom--I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign two people ought to belong to each other. But I see--I feel that it is not so now; there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly--that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely pity, and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned." Against her will she elopes with Stephen, or her departure with him is so understood; but us soon as she realizes what she has done, her better nature asserts itself, and she refuses to go on. Stephen pleads that the natural law which has drawn them together is greater than every other obligation; but Maggie replies,-- "If we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty. We should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth." He then asks what is outward faithfulness and constancy without love. Maggie pleads the better spirit. "That seems right--at first; but when I look further, I'm sure it is not right. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us--whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us. If we--if I had been better, nobler, those claims would have been so strongly present with me--I should have felt them pressing on my heart so continually, just as they do now in the moments when my conscience is awake, that the opposite feeling would never have grown in me as it has done: it would have been quenched at once. I should have prayed for help so earnestly--I should have rushed away as we rush from hideous danger. I feel no excuse for myself--none. I should never have failed toward Lucy and Philip as I have done, if I had not been weak, selfish and hard--able to think of their pain without a pain to myself that would have destroyed all temptation. Oh. what is Lucy feeling now? She believed in me--she loved me--she was so good to me! Think of her!" She can see no good for herself which is apart from the good of others, no joy which is the means of pain to those she holds dear. The past has made ties and; memories which no present love or future joy can take away; she must be true to past obligations as well as present inclinations. "There are memories and affections, and longing after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me, they would never quit me for long; they would come back and be pain to me--repentance. I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I have caused sorrow already--I know--I feel it; but I have never deliberately consented to it; I have never said, 'They shall suffer that I may have joy.'" And again, she says,-- "We can't choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can't tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us--for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have felt that if I let it go forever I should have no light through the darkness of this life." In these remarkable passages from _Romola_ and _The Mill on the Floss_, George Eliot presented her own theory of life. One of her friends, in giving an account of her moral influence, speaks of "the impression she produced, that one of the greatest duties of life was that of resignation. Nothing was more impressive as exhibiting the power of feelings to survive the convictions which gave them birth, than the earnestness with which she dwelt, on this as the great and real remedy for all the ills of life. On one occasion she appeared to apply it to herself in speaking of the short space of life that lay before her, and the large amount of achievement that must be laid aside as impossible to compress into it--and the sad, gentle tones in which the word _resignation_ was uttered, still vibrate on the ear." [Footnote: Contemporary Review, February, 1881.] Not only renunciation but resignation was by her held to be a prime requisite of a truly moral life. Man must renounce many things for the sake of humanity, but he must also resign himself to endure many things because the universe is under the dominion of invariable laws. Much of pain and sorrow must come to us which can in no way be avoided. A true resignation and renunciation will enable us to turn pain and sorrow into the means of a higher life. In _Adam Bede_ she says that "deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state." She teaches that man can attain true unity with the race only through renunciation, and renunciation always means suffering. Self-sacrifice means hardship, struggle and sorrow; but the true end of life can only be attained when self is renounced for that higher good which comes through devotion to humanity. Her noblest characters, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, Jubal, Fedalma, Armgart, attain peace only when they have found their lives taken up in the good of others. To her the highest happiness consists in being loyal to duty, and it "often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good." George Eliot's religion is without God, without immortality, without a transcendent spiritual aim and duty. It consists in a humble submission to the invariable laws of the universe, a profound love of humanity, a glorification of feeling and affection, and a renunciation of personal and selfish desires for an altruistic devotion to the good of the race. Piety without God, renunciation without immortality, mysticism without the supernatural, everywhere finds eloquent presentation in her pages. Offering that which she believes satisfies the spiritual wants of man, she yet rejects all the legitimate objects of spiritual desire. Even when her characters hold to the most fervent faith, and use with the greatest enthusiasm the old expressions of piety, it is the human elements in that faith which are made to appear most prominently. We are told that no radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for Romola in her moment of direst distress and need. Then we are told that many such see no angels; and we are made to realize that angelic voices are to George Eliot the voices of her fellows. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision--men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death. The same thought is expressed in _Silas Marner_, that man is to expect no help and consolation except from his fellow-man. In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may he a little child's. Even more explicit in its rejection of all sources of help, except the human, is the motto to "The Lifted Veil." Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers beyond the growing heritage That makes completer manhood. The purpose of this story is to show that supernatural knowledge is a curse to man. The narrator of the story is gifted with the power of divining even the most secret thoughts of those about him, and of beholding coming events. This knowledge brings him only evil and sorrow. His spiritual insight did not save him from folly, and he is led to say,-- "There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness, which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time." He also discourses of the gain which it is to man that the future is hidden from his knowledge, "So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment; we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the mean time might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition that had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles." All is hidden from man that does not grow out of human experience, and it is better so. Such is George Eliot's method of dealing with our craving for a higher wisdom and a direct revelation. Such wisdom and such revelation are not to be had, and they would not help man if he had them. The mystery of existence rouses his curiosity, stimulates his powers, develops art, religion, sympathy, and all that is best in human life. In her presentations of the men and women most affected by religious motives she adheres to this theory, and represents them as impelled, not by the sense of God's presence, but by purely human considerations. She makes Dorothea Brooke say,-- "I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it." Of the same character is the belief which comforts Dorothea, and takes the place to her of prayer. "That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." Mr. Tryan, in _Janet's Repentance_, is a most ardent disciple of Evangelicalism, and accepts all its doctrines; but George Eliot contrives to show throughout the book, that all the value of his work and religion consisted in the humanitarian spirit of renunciation he awakened. George Eliot does not entirely avoid the supernatural, but she treats it as unexplainable. Instances of her use of it are to be found in Adam Bede's experience while at work on his father's coffin, in the visions of Savonarola, and in Mordecai's strange faith in a coming successor to his own faith and work. For Adam Bede's experience there is no explanation given, nor for that curious power manifest in the "Lifted Veil." On the other hand, the spiritual power of Savonarola and Mordecai have their explanation, in George Eliot's philosophy, in that intuition which is inherited insight. In her treatment of such themes she manifests her appreciation of the great mystery which surrounds man's existence, but she shows no faith in a spiritual world which impinges on the material, and ever manifests itself in gleams and fore-tokenings. It is to be noted, however, that many traces of mysticism appear in her works. This might have been expected from her early love of the transcendentalists, as well as from her frequent perusal of Thomas à Kempis. More especially was this to be expected from her conception of feeling as the source of all that is best in man's life. The mystics always make feeling the source of truth, prefer emotion to reason. All thinkers who lay stress on the value of feeling are liable to become mystics, even if materialists in their philosophy. Here and there in her pages this tendency towards mysticism, which manifests itself in some of the more poetic of the scientists of the present time, is to be seen in George Eliot. Some of her words about love, music and nature partake of this character. Her sayings about altruism and renunciation touch the border of the mystical occasionally. Had she been less thoroughly a rationalist she would doubtless have become a mystic in fact. Her tendency in this direction hints at the close affinity between the evolutionists of to-day and the idealists of a century ago. They unite in making matter and mind identical, and in regarding feeling as a source of truth. These are the two essential thoughts on which all mysticism rests. As modern science becomes the basis of speculation about religion, and gives expression to these doctrines, it will develop mysticism. Indeed, it is difficult to know wherein much that George Eliot wrote differs from mysticism. Her subjective immortality derived much of its acceptableness and beauty from those poetic phases given to it by idealistic pantheism. Her altruism caught the glow of the older humanitarianism, Her conception of feeling and emotional sympathy is touched everywhere with that ideal glamour given it by the mystical teachings of an earlier generation. Had she lived half a century earlier she might have been one of Fichte's most ardent disciples, and found in his subjective idealism the incentive to a higher inspiration than that attained to under the leadership of Comte. Her religion would then have differed but little from what it did in fact, but there would have been a new sublimity and a loftier spirit at the heart of it. George Eliot retains the traditional life, piety and symbolism of Christianity, but she undertakes to show they have quite another meaning than that usually given them. Her peculiarity is that she should wish to retain the form after the substance is gone. Comte undertook to give a new outward expression to those needs of the soul which lead to worship and piety; but George Eliot accepted the traditional symbolisms as far better than anything which can be invented. If we would do no violence to feeling and the inner needs of life, we must not break with the past, we must not destroy the temple of the soul. The traditional worship, piety and consecration, the poetic expression of feeling and sentiment, must be kept until new traditions, a new symbolism, have developed themselves out of the experiences of the race. God is a symbol for the great mystery of the universe and of being, the eternity and universality of law. Immortality is a symbol for the transmitted impulse which the person communicates to the race. The life and death of Christ is a symbol of that altruistic spirit of renunciation and sorrow willingly borne, by which humanity is being lifted up and brought towards its true destiny. Feeling demands these symbols, the heart craves for them. The bare enunciation of principles is not enough; they must be clothed upon by sentiment and affection. The Christian symbols answer to this need, they most fitly express this craving of the soul for a higher and purer life. The spontaneous, creative life of humanity has developed them as a fit mode of voicing its great spiritual cravings, and only the same creative genius can replace them. The inquiring intellect cannot furnish substitutes for them; rationalism utterly fails in all its attempts to satisfy the spiritual nature. Such is George Eliot's religion. It is the "Religion of Humanity" as interpreted by a woman, a poet and a genius. It differs from Comte's as the work of a poet differs from that of a philosopher, as that of a woman differs from that of a man. His _positive religion_ gives the impression of being invented; it is artificial, unreal. Hers is, at least, living and beautiful and impressive; it is warm, tender and full of compassion, He invents a new symbolism, a new hierarchy, and a new worship; that is, he remodels Catholicism to fit the Religion of Humanity. She is too sensible, too wise, or rather too poetic and sympathetic, to undertake such a transformation, or to be satisfied with it when accomplished by another. She gives a new poetic and spiritual meaning to the old faith and worship; and in doing this makes no break with tradition, rejects nothing of the old symbolism. It was her conviction that nothing of the real meaning and power of religion escaped by the transformation she made in its spiritual contents. She believed that she had dropped only its speculative teachings, while all that had ever made it of value was retained. That she was entirely mistaken in this opinion scarcely needs to be said; or that her speculative interpretation, if generally accepted, would destroy for most persons even those elements of religion which she accepted. A large rich mind, gifted with genius and possessed of wide culture, as was hers, could doubtless find satisfaction in that attenuated substitute for piety and worship which she accepted. There certainly could be no Mr. Tryan, no Dinah Morris, no Savonarola, no Mordecai, if her theories were the common ones; and it would be even less possible for a Dorothea, a Felix Holt, a Daniel Deronda, or a Romola to develop in such an atmosphere. What her intellectual speculations would accomplish when accepted as the motives of life, is seen all too well in the case of those many radical thinkers whom this century has produced. Only the most highly cultivated, and those of an artistic or poetic temperament, could accept her substitute for the old religion. The motives she presents could affect but a few persons; only here and there are to be found those to whom altruism would be a motive large enough to become a religion. To march in the great human army towards a higher destiny for humanity may have a strong fascination for some, and is coming to affect and inspire a larger number with every century; but it is not enough to know that the race is growing better. What is the end of human progress? we have a right to ask. Does that progress go on in accordance with some universal purpose, which includes the whole universe? We must look not only for a perfect destiny for man, but for a perfect destiny for all worlds and beings throughout the infinitude of God's creative influence. A progressive, intellectual religion such as will answer to the larger needs of modern life, must give belief in a universal providence, and it must teach man to trust in the spiritual capacities of his own soul. Unless the universe means something which is intelligible, and unless it has a purpose and destiny progressive and eternal, it is impossible that religion will continue to inspire men. That is, only a philosophy which gives such an interpretation to the universe can be the basis of an enduring and progressive religion. If religion is to continue, it is also necessary that man should be able to believe in the soul as something more than the product of environment and heredity. It is not merely the belief in immortality which has inspired the greatest minds, but the inward impulse of creative activity, resting on the conviction that they were working with God for enduring results. Absorption into the life of humanity can be but a feeble motive compared with that which grows out of faith in the soul's spiritual eternity in co-operation with God. George Eliot's religion is highly interesting, and in many ways it is suggestive and profitable. Her insistence on feeling and sympathy as its main impulses is profoundly significant; but that teaching is as good for Theism or Christianity as for the Religion of Humanity, and needs everywhere to be accepted. In like manner, her altruistic spirit may be accepted and realized by those who can find no sympathy for her intellectual speculations. Love of man, self-sacrifice for human good, cannot be urged by too many teachers. The greater the number of motives leading to that result, the better for man. XII. ETHICAL SPIRIT. Whatever may be said of George Eliot's philosophy and theology, her moral purpose was sound and her ethical intent noble. She had a strong passion for the ethical life, her convictions regarding it were very deep and earnest, and she dwelt lovingly on all its higher accomplishments. Her books are saturated with moral teaching, and her own life was ordered after a lofty ethical standard. She seems to have yearned most eagerly after a life of moral helpfulness and goodness, and she has made her novels the teachers of a vigorous morality. Her friends bear enthusiastic testimony to the nobleness of her moral life and to her zeal for ethical culture. We are told by one of them that "she had upbuilt with strenuous pains a resolute virtue," conquering many faults, and gaining a lofty nobleness of spirit. Another has said, that "precious as the writings of George Eliot are and must always be, her life and character were yet more beautiful than they." Her zeal for morality was very great; she was an ethical prophet; the moral order of life roused her mind to a lofty inspiration. If she could not conceive of God, if she could not believe in immortality, yet she accepted duty as peremptory and absolute. Her faith in duty and charity seemed all the more vigorous and confident because her religion was so attenuated and imperfect. Love of man with her grew into something like that mighty and absorbing love of God which is to be seen in some of the greatest souls. Morality became to her a religion, not so intense as with saints and prophets, but more sympathetic and ardent than with most ethical teachers. She was no stoic, no teacher of moral precepts, no didactic debater about moral duties, no mere _dilettante_ advocate of human rights. She was a warm, tender, yearning, sympathetic, womanly friend of individuals, who hoped great things for humanity, and who believed that man can find happiness and true culture only in a moral life. She was distinctively a moral teacher in her books. The novel was never to her a work of art alone. The moral purpose was always present, always apparent, always clear and emphatic. There was something to teach for her whenever she took the pen in hand; some deep lesson of human experience, some profound truth of human conduct, some tender word of sympathy for human sorrow and suffering. She seems to have had no sympathy with that theory which says that the poet and the novelist are to picture life as it is, without regard to moral obligations and consequences. In this respect she was one of the most partisan of all partisans, an absolute dogmatist; for she never forgot for a moment the moral consequences of life. She was one of the most ardent of modern preachers, her books are crowded with teaching of the most positive character. In her way she was a great believer, and when she believed she never restrained her pen, but taught the full measure of her convictions. She did not look upon life as a scene to be sketched, but as an experience to be lived, and a moral order to be improved by sympathy and devotedness. Consequently the artist appears in the teacher's garb, the novelist has become an ethical preacher. She does not describe life as something outside of herself, nor does she regard human sorrows and sufferings and labors merely as materials for the artist's use; but she lives in and with all that men do and suffer and aspire to. Hers is not the manner of Homer and Scott, who hide their personality behind the wonderful distinctness of their personalities, making the reader forget the author in the strength and power of the characters described. It is not that of Shakspere, of whom we seem to get no glimpse in his marvellous readings of human nature, who paints other men as no one else has done, but who does not paint himself. Hers is rather the manner of Wordsworth and Goethe, who have a theory of life to give us, and whose personality appears on every page they wrote. She has a philosophy, a morality and a religion to inculcate. She had a vast subjective intensity of conviction, and a strong individualism of purpose, which would not hide itself behind the scenes. Her philosophy impregnates with a strong personality all her classic utterances; her ethics present a marked purpose in the development of her plots and in her presentation of the outcome of human experience; and her religion glows in the personal ardor and sympathy of her noblest characters, and in their passion for renunciation and altruism. Her ethical passion adds to the strength and purpose of George Eliot's genius. No supreme literary creator has been devoid of this characteristic, however objective and impersonal he may have been. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere, Scott, were all earnest ethical teachers. The moral problems of life impressed them profoundly, and they showed a strong personal preference for righteousness. The literary masters of all times and countries have loved virtue, praised purity, and admired ethical uprightness. Any other attitude than this argues something less than genius, though genius may be far from didactic and not given to preaching. The moral intent of life is so inwoven with all its experiences, that the failure of any mind to be impressed with it, and profoundly affected, proves it wanting in insight, poetic vision and genius. George Eliot is entirely in harmony, in this respect, with all the masters of the literary art. Her ethical passion is a clear sign of her genius, and proves the vigor of her intellectual vision. No one who rightly weighs the value of her books, and fairly estimates the nature of her teaching, can regret that she had so keen a love of ethical instruction. The vigor, enthusiasm and originality of her teaching compensate for many faults. Her teachings have a special interest because they afford a literary embodiment of the ethical theories of the evolution philosophy. They indicate the form which is likely to be given to ethics if theism and individualism are discarded, and the peculiar effects upon moral life which will be induced by agnosticism. She applied agnosticism to morals, by regarding good and evil as relative, and as the results, of man's environment. For her, ethics had no infinite sanctions, no intuitive promulgation of an eternal law; but she regarded morality as originating in and deriving its authority from the social relations of men to each other. Our intuitive doing of right, or sorrow for wrong, is the result of inherited conditions. In _Romola_ she speaks of Tito as affected by-- the inward shame, the reflex of that outward law which the great heart of mankind makes for every individual man, a reflex which will exist even in the absence of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the brute mother shields her young from the attack of the hereditary enemy. [Footnote: Chapter IX.] This teaching is often found in her pages, and in connection with the assertion of the relativity of morals. There is no absolute moral law for her, no eternal ideal standard; but what is right is determined by the environment. Instead of Kant's categorical imperative of the moral law, proclaimed as a divine command in every soul, George Eliot found in the conscience and in the moral intuitions simply inherited experiences. In _Daniel Deronda_ she says, "Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories." George Eliot's rejection of any absolute standard of moral conduct or of happiness continually asserts itself in her pages. We must look at the individual, his inherited moral power, his environment, his special motives, if we would judge him aright. In the last chapters of _The Mill on the Floss_, when writing of Maggie's repentance, this idea appears. Maggie is not to be tried by the moral ideal of Christianity, nor by any such standard of perfection as Kant proposed, but by all the circumstances of her place in life and her experience. We are accordingly told that-- Moral judgments must remain false and hollow unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. George Eliot says in one of the mottoes in _Felix Holt_ that moral happiness is "mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions." Even more explicit is her assertion, in one of the mottoes of _Daniel Deronda_, of the relativity of moral power. Looking at life in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled--like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp-- precipitate the mistaken soul on destruction? She does not teach, however, that man is a mere victim of circumstances, that he is a creature ruled by fate. His environment includes his own moral heredity, which may overcome the physical circumstances which surround him. In _Middlemarch_ she says, "It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstances would have been less strong against us." The same thought appears in Zarca's appeal to Fedalma to be his true daughter, in one of the most effective scenes of _The Spanish Gypsy_. Moral devotedness is the strongest of all forces, he argues, even when it fails of its immediate aim; and even in failure the inherited life of the race is enlarged. No great deed is done By falterers who ask for certainty. No good is certain, but the steadfast mind, The undivided will to seek the good: 'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings A human music from the indifferent air. The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!-- We feed the high tradition of the world, And leave our spirit in our children's breasts. George Eliot never goes so far as to say that man may, by virtue of his inward life, rise superior to all circumstances, and maintain the inviolable sanctity of his own moral nature. She does not forget that defeat is often the surest victory, that moral faithfulness may lead to disgrace and death; but even in these cases it is for the sake of the race we are to be faithful. The inward victory, the triumph of the soul in unsullied purity and serenity, she does not dwell upon; and it may be doubted if she fully recognized such a moral result. Her mind is so occupied with the social results of conduct as to overlook the individual victories which life ever brings to those who are faithful unto death. George Eliot has put her theory of morality into the mouth of Guildenstern, one of the characters in "A College Breakfast Party." Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned With thunder in its hand? I answer, there Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force Since human consciousness awaking owned An Outward, whose unconquerable sway Resisted first and then subdued desire By pressure of the dire impossible Urging to possible ends the active soul And shaping so its terror and its love. Why, you have said it--threats and promises Depend on each man's sentence for their force: All sacred rules, imagined or revealed, Can have no form or potency apart From the percipient and emotive mind. God, duty, love, submission, fellowship, Must first be framed in man, as music is, Before they live outside him as a law. And still they grow and shape themselves anew, With fuller concentration in their life Of inward and of outward energies Blending to make the last result called Man, Which means, not this or that philosopher Looking through beauty into blankness, not The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie By the last telegram: it means the tide Of needs reciprocal, toil, trust and love-- The surging multitude of human claims Which make "a presence not to be put by" Above the horizon of the general soul. Is inward reason shrunk to subtleties, And inward wisdom pining passion-starved?-- The outward reason has the world in store, Regenerates passion with the stress of want, Regenerates knowledge with discovery, Shows sly rapacious self a blunderer, Widens dependence, knits the social whole In sensible relation more defined. As these words would indicate, George Eliot's faith in the moral meaning and outcome of the world is very strong. All experience is moral, she would have us believe, and capable of teaching man the higher life. That is, all experience tends slowly to bring man into harmony with his environment, and to teach him that certain actions are helpful, while others are harmful. This teaching is very definite and emphatic in her pages, often rising into a lofty eloquence and a rich poetic diction, as her mind is wrought upon by the greatness and the impressiveness of the moral lessons of life. However effective the outward order of nature may be in creating morality, it is to be borne in mind that ethical rules can have no effect "apart from the percipient and emotive mind." It is, in reality, the social nature which gives morality its form and meaning. It is a creation of the social organism. Its basis is found, indeed, in the invariable order of nature, but the superstructure is erected out of and by society. "Man's individual functions," says Lewes, "arise in relations to the cosmos; his general functions arise in relations to the social medium; thence moral life emerges. All the animal impulses become blended with human emotions. In the process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness. The social instincts tend more and more to make sociality dominate animality, and thus subordinate personality to humanity.... The animal has sympathy, and is moved by sympathetic impulses, but these are never altruistic; the ends are never remote. Moral life is based on sympathy; it is feeling for others, working for others, aiding others, quite irrespective of any personal good beyond the satisfaction of the social impulse. Enlightened by the intuition of our community of weakness, we share ideally the universal sorrows. Suffering harmonizes. Feeling the need of mutual help, we are prompted by it to labor for others." [Footnote: Foundations of a Creed, vol. I., pp. 147, 153.] Morality is social, not personal; the result of those instincts which draw men together in community of interests, sympathies and sufferings. Its sanctions are all social; its motives are purely human; its law is created by the needs of humanity. There is no outward coercive law of the divine will or of invariable order which is to be supremely regarded; the moral law is human need as it changes from age to age. The increase of human sympathies in the process of social evolution gives the true moral ideal to be aspired after. What will increase the social efficiency of the race, what will promote altruism, is moral. Alike because of the invariable order of nature, and the social dependence of men on each other, are the effects of conduct wrought out in the individual. George Eliot believes in "the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind." All evil is injurious to man, destructive of the integrity of his life. She teaches the doctrine of Nemesis with as much conviction, thoroughness and eloquence as the old Greek dramatists, making sin to be punished, and wrong-doing to be destructive. Sometimes she presents this doctrine with all the stern, unpitying vigor of an Aeschylus, as a dire effect of wrong that comes upon men with an unrelenting mercilessness. In _Janet's Repentance_ she says,-- Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch. Her doctrine of Nemesis resembles that of the old Greeks more than that of the modern optimists and theists. Hers is not the idealistic conception of compensation, which measures out an exact proportion of punishment for every sin, and of happiness for every virtuous action. Wrong-doing injures others as well as those who commit the evil deed, and moral effects reach far beyond those who set them in operation. Very explicitly is this fact presented in _The Mill on the Floss_. So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. In _Adam Bede_, Parson Irwine says to Arthur,-- Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. Yet wrong-doing does not go unpunished, for the law of moral cause and effect ever holds good. This is the teaching of the first chapter of _Felix Holt_. There is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny--some tragic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world, for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer--committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. In the same novel we are told, that-- To the end of men's struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight and die. The same teaching is to be found in the motto of _Daniel Deronda_, where we are bidden to fear the evil tendencies of our own souls. Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. The manner in which George Eliot believes Nemesis works out her results has already been indicated. Her effects do not appear in any outward and palpable results, necessarily; her method is often unknown to men, hidden even from the keenest eyes. Evil causes produce evil results, that is all; and these are shown in the most subtle and secret results of what life is. One of her methods is indicated in _Adam Bede_. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences-- out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused; there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile; but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us. _The Mill on the Floss_ reflects this thought. Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, crudest most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it. More effective still is that punishment which comes of our own inward sense of wrong-doing. George Eliot makes Parson Irwine say that "the inward suffering is the worst form of Nemesis." This is well illustrated in the experience of Gwendolen, who, after the death of her husband at Geneva, is anxious to leave that place. For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet? Even before this, Gwendolen had come to realize the dire effects of selfish conduct in that dread and bitterness of spirit which subdued her and mocked all her hopes and joys. Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote: Chapter LIV.] The way in which wrong-doing affects us to our hurt is suggested also in _Romola_, where its results upon the inward life are explicitly revealed. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying effect of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity. In the same novel the effect of wrong-doing is regarded as an inward and subduing fear of the consequences of our conduct. This dread so commonly felt, and made a most effective motive by all religions, George Eliot regards as the soul's testimony to the great law of retribution. Experience that moral causes produce moral effects, as that law is every day taught us, takes hold of feeling, and becomes a nameless dread of the avenging powers. Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim, Tito's thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment. His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man's animal care for his own skin; that awe of the divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom--good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they learn to revere the light?" That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has become needless--only when duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force. [Footnote: Chapter XI.] Another form in which Nemesis punishes us is described in the essay on "A Half-Breed" in _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Mixtus was a man with noble aims, but he was fascinated by Scintilla, and realized none of his ideals. He was captivated by her prettiness, liveliness and music, and then he was captured on his worldly side. She did not believe in "notions" and reforms, and he succumbed to her wishes. As a result, his life was crippled, he was always unsatisfied with himself. Of this form of retribution George Eliot says,-- An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both. With a strong and eloquent energy, George Eliot teaches the natural consequences of conduct. Every feeling, thought and deed has its effect, comes to fruition. Desire modifies life, shapes our destiny, moulds us into the image of its own nature. Actions become habits, become controlling elements in our lives, and tend to work out their own legitimate results. The whole of George Eliot's doctrine of retribution is, that human causes, as much as any other, lead to their appropriate effects. Her frequent use of the word _Nemesis_ indicates the idea she had of the inevitableness of moral consequences, that a force once set in motion can never be recalled in its effects, which make a permanent modification of human life in its present and in its past. It was not the old doctrine of fate which she presented, not any arbitrary inflictment from supernatural powers. The inevitableness of moral consequences influenced her as a solemn and fearful reality which man must strictly regard if he would find true manhood. The doctrine of retribution is very clearly taught by George Eliot in her comments. With a still greater distinctness it is taught in the development of her characters. As we follow the careers of Hetty, Maggie, Tito, Fedalma, Lydgate and Gwendolen we see how wonderful was George Eliot's insight into the moral issues of life. Not only with these, but with all her characters, we see a righteous moral unfoldment of character into its effects. There is no compromise with evil in her pages; all selfishness, wrong and crime comes to its proper results. The vanity and selfishness of Hetty leads to what terrible crime and shame for her, and what misery for others! Tito's selfishness and want of resolute purpose carries him inevitably downward to a hideous end. What is so plain in the case of these characters is as true, though not so palpable, in that of many others in her books. Dorothea's conduct is clearly shown to develop into consequences (as did Lydgate's) which were the natural results of what she thought, did and was. Maggie's misery was the product of her conduct, the legitimate outcome of it. George Eliot goes beyond the conduct of any one person and its results, and attempts to show how it is affected by the person's environment. It was Maggie's family, education, social standing and personal qualities of mind and heart which helped to determine for her the consequences of her conduct. It was Dorothea's education and social environment which largely helped to shape her career and to leave her bereaved of the largest possibilities of which her life was capable. Gwendolen's life was largely determined by her early training and by her social surroundings. Yet with all these, life has its necessary issues, and Nemesis plays its part. Retribution is for all; it is ever stern, just and inevitable. Just, however, only in the sense that wrong-doing cannot escape its own effects, but not just in the sense that the guiltless must often share the fate of the guilty. Wrong-doing drags down to destruction many an innocent person. It is to be said of George Eliot, however, that she never presents any of her characters as doomed utterly by the past. However strong the memories of the ages lay upon them, they are capable of self-direction. Not one of her characters is wholly the victim of his environment. There is no hint in _Middlemarch_ that Dorothea was not capable of heroism and self-consecration. Her environment gave a wrong direction to her moral purpose; but that purpose remained, and the moral nobleness of her mind was not destroyed. Still, it is largely true, that in her books the individual is sacrificed to his social environment. He is to renounce his own personality for the sake of the race. Consequently his fate is linked with that of others, and he must suffer from other men's deeds. With all its limitations and defects, George Eliot's teaching concerning the moral effects of conduct is wholesome and healthy. It rests on a solid foundation of experience and scientific evidence. Her books are full of moral stimulus and strengthening, because of the profound conviction with which she has presented her conception of moral cause and effect. With her, we must believe that moral sequences are as inevitable as the physical. It would be very unjust to George Eliot to suppose that she left man in the hands of a relentless moral order which manifests no tenderness and which is incapable of pity and mercy. She did not believe in an Infinite Father, full of love and forgiveness; that faith was not for her. Yet she did believe in a providence which can assuage man's sorrows and deal tenderly with his wrong-doing. While nature is stern and the moral sequences of life unbending, man may be sympathetic and helpful. Man is to be the providence of man; humanity is to be his tender forgiving Friend. A substitute so poor for the old faith would seem to have little power of moral renovation or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot's mind with enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul, was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind. With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion, that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better and more orderly by our efforts. All her noblest characters find in altruism a substitute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage. She says very plainly in _Middlemarch_, that every doctrine is capable of "eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men." To the same effect is her saying in _Romola_, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In _Janet's Repentance_ she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all had been doubt and trial before. Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place in that sad chamber. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one:--here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt--the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued,--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow,--the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity: bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind. [Footnote: Chapter XXIV.] The basis of such sympathetic helpfulness she finds in the common sorrows and trials of the world. All find life hard, pain comes to all, none are to be found unacquainted with sorrow. These common experiences draw men together in sympathy, unite them in a common purpose of assuagement and help. The sorrow of Adam Bede made him more gentle and patient with his brother. It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him. For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow--had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet; there was still a great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as _her_ pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission; and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert. Armgart finds that "true vision comes only with sorrow." Sorrow and suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others. "Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion," we are told in _Middlemarch_. In the trying hours of Maggie Tulliver's life she came to know-- that new sense which is the gift of sorrow--that susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving fellowship. Again, she learns that "more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us." Man is in this way brought to live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and pitiful with him in his temptations and trials. Sympathy builds up the moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man's existence. Thus humanity becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows. Nemesis is stern, but man is pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic. Nature never relents, and there is no God who can so forgive us our sins as to remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct. All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all personal claims and motives are to be renounced. In the duties we owe to others, life is to find its rightful expression. In _Janet's Repentance_ she says,-- The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires and impulses. To live for self, George Eliot seems to regard as immoral; self is to be ignored except in so far as it can be made to serve humanity. As rights are individual they are repudiated, and the demand for them is regarded as revolutionary and destructive. That man is a moral being because he is a social being she carries to its farthest extreme in some of her teachings, as when she makes public opinion the great motive power to social improvement. Felix Holt pronounces public opinion--the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful--to be the greatest power under heaven. In the "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt," published in _Blackwood's Magazine_, Felix is made to say to his fellows,-- Any nation that had within it a majority of men--and we are the majority--possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and his-s before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans and factory hands and miners and laborers of all sorts had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober--and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities--we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is--to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us. The essay on "Moral Swindlers," in _Theophrastus Such_, clearly indicates George Eliot's point of view in ethics. She makes those moral traits which are social of greater importance than those which are personal. She complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good. To her, his relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations. She rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics. To her, the person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a community. She forgot that any large and noble moral life for a people must rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral nature in individuals. Nations cannot be moral, but persons can. Public corruption has its foundation in personal corruption. The nation cannot have a noble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are pure in character and noble in conduct. She complains that sexual purity is made identical with morality, while business integrity is not. Every social and moral bond we have, she says, "is a debt; the right lies in the payment of that debt; _it can lie nowhere else_." It is a debt owed, not to God, but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but by human sympathy and devotion. The higher social morality, that which inspires nations with great and heroic purposes, George Eliot believes is mainly due, as she says in the essay on "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" "to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute." The memories of the past lie mainly in the direction of national movements, and hence the higher moral life of the present must be associated with national memories. The glorious commonplaces of historic teaching, as well as of moral inspiration, are to be found in the fact "that the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, and that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword." To reject such memories, such social influences, she regards as "a blinding superstition," and says that the moral visions of a nation are an effective bond which must be accepted by all its members. Two of her most characteristic books are written to inculcate this teaching. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ we learn that there is no moral strength and purpose for a man like Don Silva, who repudiates his country, its memories and its religion. The main purpose of _Daniel Deronda_ is to show how binding and inspiring is the vision of moral truth and life which comes from association even with the national memories of an outcast and alien people. She wished to see individuals helped and good done in the present. She makes Theophrastus Such, in the essay on "Looking Backward," speak her own mind. "All reverence and gratitude for the worthy dead on whose labors we have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven." Again, she says that "the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries." And this was not merely the teaching of her books, it was the practice of her life. Miss Edith Simcox has made it clear that she was zealously anxious to help men and women by personal effort. She tells us that "George Eliot's sympathies went out more readily towards enthusiasm for the discharge of duties than for the assertion of rights. It belonged to the positive basis of her character to identify herself more with what people wished to do themselves than with what they thought somebody else ought to do for them. Her indignation was vehement enough against dishonest or malicious oppression, but the instinct to make allowance for the other side made her a bad hater in politics, and there may easily have been some personal sympathy in her description of Deronda's difficulty about the choice of a career. She was not an inviting auditor for those somewhat pachydermatous philanthropists who dwell complacently upon 'cases' and statistics which represent appalling depths of individual suffering. Her imagination realized these facts with a vividness that was physically unbearable, and unless she could give substantial help, she avoided the fruitless agitation. At the same time, her interest in all rational good works was of the warmest, and she was inclined to exaggerate rather than undervalue the merits of their promoters, with one qualification only. 'Help the millions, by all means,' she has written; 'I only want people not to scorn the narrower effect.' Charity that did not begin at home repelled her as much as she was attracted by the unpretentious kindness which overlooked no near opportunity; and perhaps we should not be far wrong in guessing that she thought for most people the scrupulous discharge of all present and unavoidable duties was nearly occupation enough. Not every one was called to the high but difficult vocation of setting the world to rights. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that her standard of exactingness was 'high, and some of the things that in her eyes it was merely culpable to leave undone might be counted by others among virtues of supererogation. Indeed, it is within the limits of possibility that a philanthropist wrapped in over-much conscious virtue might imagine her cold to the objects proposed, when she only failed to see uncommon merit in their pursuit. No one, however, could recognize with more generous fervor, more delighted admiration, any genuine unobtrusive devotion in either friends or strangers, whether it were spent in making life easier to individuals, or in mending the conditions among which the masses live and labor.' This writer gives us further insight into George Eliot's character when we are told that 'she came as a very angel of consolation to those persons of sufficiently impartial mind to find comfort in the hint that the world might be less to blame than they were as to those points on which they found themselves in chronic disagreement with it. But she had nothing welcome for those whose idea of consolation is the promise of a _deus ex machina_ by whose help they may gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. She thought there was much needed doing in the world, and criticism of our neighbors and the natural order might wait at all events until the critic's own character and conduct were free from blame.' She had faith in ordinary lives, and these she earnestly desired to help and encourage. Those who themselves struggle with difficulties are best capable, she thought, of helping others out of theirs. In _Daniel Deronda_ she said, 'Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless; as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.'" George Eliot's interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was strengthened by her faith in the future of the race. She expected no rapid improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions. This conviction was expressed when she said,-- What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling. She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see that all things are good or tending towards what is good. Yet her faith in the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful progress as the result of human struggles. When called an optimist, she responded, "I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name." She trusted in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result of the survival of the fittest in human life. In "A Minor Prophet" she has presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives. Bitterly I feel that every change upon this earth Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind, That strain upon my soul's too perfect wing Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall Into short-sighted pity for the men Who, living in those perfect future times, Will not know half the dear imperfect things That move my smiles and tears--will never know The fine old incongruities that raise My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits That like a needless eyeglass or black patch Give those who wear them harmless happiness; The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellowship (I am not myself the finest Parian) With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout, To whom raw onions give prospective zest, Consoling hours of dampest wintry work, Could hardly fancy any regal joys Quite unimpregnate with the onion's scent: Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear Of waftings from that energetic bulb: 'Tis well that onion is not heresy. Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout. A clinging flavor penetrates ray life-- My onion is imperfectness: I cleave To nature's blunders, evanescent types Which sages banish from Utopia. "Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend! I worship in the temple with the rest; But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves Who stitched and hammered for the weary man In days of old. And in that piety I clothe ungainly forms inherited From toiling generations, daily bent At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine, In pioneering labors for the world. Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox, And pity future men who will not know A keen experience with pity blent, The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms--not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest, So that men put their shoes off; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars; But having shown a little dimpled hand, Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls. A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox! For purest pity is the eye of love, Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love Warped from its truer nature, turned to love Of merest habit, like the miser's greed. But I am Colin still: my prejudice Is for the flavor of my daily food. Not that I doubt the world is growing still, As once it grew from chaos and from night; Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn, With earliest watchings of the rising light Chasing the darkness; and through many an age Has raised the vision of a future time That stands an angel, with a face all mild, Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith That man's perfection is the crowning flower Towards which the urgent sap in life's great tree Is pressing--seen in puny blossoms now, But in the world's great morrows to expand With broadest petal and with deepest glow. With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the concluding lines of the poem just quoted. The faith that life on earth is being shaped To glorious ends, that order, justice, love, Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure As roundness in the dewdrop--that great faith Is but the rushing and expanding stream Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past. Our finest hope is finest memory, As they who love in age think youth is blest Because it has a life to fill with love. Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before Repeating things behind: so faith is strong Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink. It comes when music stirs us, and the chords Moving on some grand climax shake our souls With influx new that makes new energies. It comes in swellings of the heart and tears That rise at noble and at gentle deeds-- At labors of the master-artist's hand Which, trembling, touches to a finer end, Trembling before an image seen within. It comes in moments of heroic love, Unjealous joy in love not made for us-- In conscious triumph of the good within, Making us worship goodness that rebukes. Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp; As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs, Presentiment of better things on earth Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls To admiration, self-renouncing love, Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one: Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night We hear the roll and dash of waves that break Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, Which rises to the level of the cliff Because the wide Atlantic roils behind, Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs. George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism. Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory of man's free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its ascetic and pessimistic tendencies. XIII. EARLIER NOVELS. The first four novels written by George Eliot form a group by themselves; and while all similar to each other in their main characteristics, are in important respects different from her later works. This group includes _Clerical Scenes, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_. With these may also be classed "Brother Jacob." They are all alike novels of memory, and they deal mainly with common life. Her own life and the surroundings of her childhood, the memories and associations and suggestions of her early life, are drawn upon. The simple surroundings and ideas of the midland village are seldom strayed away from, and most of the characters are farmers and their laborers, artisans or clergymen. _The Mill on the Floss_ offers a partial exception to this statement, for in that book we touch upon the border of a different form of society, but we scarcely enter into it, and the leading characters are from the same class as those in the other books of this group. "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" alone enters wholly within the circle of aristocratic society. There is more of the realism of actual life in these novels than in her later ones, greater spontaneity and insight, a deeper sympathy and a more tender pathos. They came more out of her heart and sympathies, are more impassioned and pathetic. Throughout the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are descriptions of actual scenes and incidents known to George Eliot in her girlhood. Mrs. Hackit is a portrait of her own mother. In the first chapter of "Amos Barton," Shepperton Church is that at Chilvers Colon, which she attended throughout her childhood. It is from memory, and with an accurate pen, she describes-- Shepperton Church as it was in the old days with its outer court of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's gallery. Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards' paws and Maltese crosses. There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout churchgoers sat during "lessons," trying to look everywhere else than into each others' eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the singing. Not only is this description of Shepperton Church accurate in every particular, but a subject of neighborhood gossip is made the basis of the story of "Amos Barton." When George Eliot was about a dozen years old a strange lady appeared at the Cotou parsonage, and became a subject of much discussion on the part of the parishioners. Much pity was felt for the wife of the curate, an intimate friend of Marian Evans's mother, whose poverty, seven children and poor health made her burdens far from easy. She died not long after, and her grave may be seen at Chilvers Coton. The Knebley Church of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is located only a short distance from Chilvers Coton, and is the chancel of the collegiate church founded by Sir Thomas de Astley in the time of Edward III. Its spire was very high, and served as a landmark to travellers through the forest of Arden, and was called "The lanthorn of Arden." The spire fell in the year 1600, but was rebuilt later. The present church was repaired by the patron of George Eliot's father, Sir Roger Newdigate. She describes it in the first chapter of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" as-- a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls. A delightful lane, overshadowed with noble trees, that ran by Griff House, the birthplace of George Eliot, led to the lodge of Arbury Hall, the home of Sir Roger Newdigate. Arbury Hall was situated in the midst of a fine old forest, and it was originally a large quadrangular brick house. Sir Roger rebuilt it, acting as his own architect, and made it into a modern dwelling of the commodious gothic Order. This house and its owner appear in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" as Cheverel Manor and Sir Christopher Cheverel. In the fourth chapter the reader is told that,-- For the next ten years Sir Christopher was occupied with the architectural metamorphosis of his old family mansion, thus anticipating through the prompting of his individual taste that general re-action from the insipid imitation of the Palladian style towards a restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness of determination which was regarded with not a little contempt by his fox-hunting neighbors.... "An obstinate, crotchety man," said his neighbors. But I, who have seen Cheverel Manor as he bequeathed it to his heirs, rather attribute that unswerving architectural purpose of his, conceived and carried out through long years of systematic personal exertion, to something of the fervor of genius. In this story an incident in the life of Sir Roger Newdigate may have been made use of by George Eliot. He was childless, and adopted a cottager's child he and his wife heard singing at its father's door one day. They educated the child, who proved to have a fine voice and a passionate love of music. _Janet's Repentance_ also has its scenes from actual life. Dr. Dempster was thought to be recognized by his neighbors as a well-known person in Nuneaton. Milby and its High street are no other than Nuneaton and its market-place. The character of the town and the manner of life there are all sketched from the Nuneaton of George Eliot's childhood. The school she attended was very near the vicarage. While she was attending this school, when about nine years old, a young curate from a neighboring hamlet was permitted by the Bishop to give Sunday-evening lectures in the Nuneaton church, with the results described in _Janet's Repentance_. In _Adam Bede_ there is also a considerable element of actual history. The heroine, Dinah Morris, is, in some slight particulars at least, sketched from Elizabeth Evans, an aunt of George Eliot's. Elizabeth Evans was born at Newbold, Lincolnshire, in 1776. [Footnote: This subject has been fully worked out in a book published by Blackwood, "George Eliot in Derbyshire: a volume of gossip about passages in the novels of George Eliot," by Guy Roslyn. Reprinted from London Society, with alterations and additions, and an introduction by George Barnett Smith. Its statements are mainly based on a small book published in London in 1859, by Talbot & Co., entitled "Seth Bede, the Methody: his Life and Labors." Guy Roslyn is a pseudonym for Joshua Hatton.] She was a beautiful woman when young, with soft gray eyes and a fine face, and had a very simple and gentle manner. She was a Methodist preacher, lived at Wirksworth, Derbyshire, and preached wherever an opportunity occurred. When it was forbidden that women should preach, she continued to exhort in the cottages, and to visit the poor and the sick in their homes. She married Samuel Evans, who was born in Boston, and was a carpenter. He had a brother William, who was a joiner and builder. Their father was a village carpenter and undertaker, honest and respectable, but who took to drink in his later years. He was at an ale-house very late one night, and the next morning was found dead in a brook near his house. Samuel became a Methodist and a preacher, but was teased about it by his brother, who criticised his blunders in prayer and preaching. He was gentle and very considerate at home, and was greatly attached to his brother, though they could not agree in matters of religion. While they were partners in business they prospered, but Samuel did not succeed when by himself. Samuel and Elizabeth were married at St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. In company with a Miss Richards, Elizabeth attended, in 1801 or 1802, a Mary Voce who had poisoned her child. They visited her in jail, and were with her when she was hung in Nottingham. Elizabeth wrote an account of her own life, especially of her conversion and her early work in the ministry. Concerning the execution of Mary Voce, she gives this account: "At seven o'clock [on the morning of the execution] we all knelt down in prayer, and at ten minutes before eight o'clock the Lord in mercy spoke peace to her soul. She cried out, 'Oh, how happy I am! the Lord has pardoned all my sins, and I am going to heaven.' She never lost the evidence for one moment, and always rejoiced in the hope of glory. Is it not by grace we are saved through faith? And is not the Saviour exalted at the Father's right hand to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins? If salvation were by works who would be saved? The vilest and worst may come unto Him. None need despair. None ought to presume. Miss Richards and I attended her to the place of execution. Our feelings on this occasion were very acute. We rode with her in the cart to the awful place. Our people sang with her all the way, which I think was a mile and a half. We were enabled to lift up our hearts unto the Lord in her behalf, and she was enabled to bear a public testimony that God in mercy had pardoned all her sins. When the cap was drawn over her face, and she was about to be turned off, she cried, 'Glory! glory! glory! the angels are waiting around me.' And she died almost without a struggle. At this awful spot I lost a great deal of the fear of man, which to me had been a great hindrance for a long time. I felt if God would send me to the uttermost parts of the earth I would go, and at intervals felt I could embrace a martyr's flame. Oh, this burning love of God, what will it not endure? I could not think I had an enemy in the world. I am certain I enjoyed that salvation that if they had smote me on one cheek, I could have turned to them the other also. I lived "'The life of heaven above, All the life of glorious love.' "I seemed myself to live between heaven and earth. I was not in heaven because of my body, nor upon earth because of my soul. Earth was a scale to heaven, and all I tasted was God. I could pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. I felt that the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. If I wanted to know anything I had only to ask, and it was given, generally in a moment. Whether I was in the public street, or at my work, or in my private room, I had continued intercourse with my God; and many, I think I may say hundreds of times, He shone upon His Word, and showed me the meaning thereof, that is, texts of scripture, so as to furnish me with sufficient matter to speak to poor sinners for a sufficient length of time." The life of Elizabeth Evans was only a hint to the mind of the author of _Adam Bede_. Dinah was not intended as a portrait, and the resemblances between the two were probably not the result of a conscious purpose on the part of George Eliot. Soon after the publication of _Adam Bede_, when gossip had begun to report that Dinah Morris was an accurate sketch of Elizabeth Evans, and even that her sermon and prayers had been copied from the writings of the aunt, George Eliot wrote a letter to her intimate friend, Miss Sara Hennell, in which she explained to what extent she was indebted to Elizabeth Evans for the portrait of Dinah Morris. HOLLY LODGE, Oct. 7, 1850. Dear Sara,--I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, _what_ I knew of my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years before he married my mother.... [Footnote: What is here omitted of this letter will be found on page 12.] As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed with her all night, and gone with her to execution, and one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed--among the rest, _the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass_. In her account of the prison scenes. I remember no word she uttered--I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe--or told me nothing--but that she was a common coarse girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for years on years as a dead germ, apparently, till time had made my mind a nisus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of _Adam Bede_. I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and a night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage, sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former time: I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my uncle to see me--when father and I were living at Foleshill; _then_ there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested Dinah; but it is not possible you should see as I do how her entire individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seems to me that people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers and speeches were _copied_--when they were written with hot tears as they surged up in my own mind! As to my indebtedness to facts of _locale_, and personal history of a small kind connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire--you may imagine of what kind that is when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts and have made use of for my picture were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times. As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they _did_ say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt--that is simply the vague, easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great public so accustomed to be delighted with _mis_-representations of life and character, which they accept as representations, that they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to the truth. Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to you, but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years _Adam Bede_ and all that concerns it may have become a dim portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of the truth as I have now told you. Once more, thanks, dear Sara. Ever your loving MARIAN. When, in 1876, a book was published to show the identity of Dinah Morris and Elizabeth Evans, George Eliot wrote to the author to protest against such a conclusion. She said to him that the one was not intended to represent the other, and that any identification of the two would be protested against as not only false in fact and tending to perpetuate false notions about art, but also as a gross breach of social decorum. Yet these declarations concerning Elizabeth Evans have been repeated, and to them has been added the assertion that she actually copied in _Adam Bede_ the history and sermons of Dinah Morris. [Footnote: "Dinah Morris and Elizabeth Evans," an article by L. Buckley in The Century for August, 1882.] During visits to her aunt in 1842 we are told they spent several hours together each day. "They used to go to the house of one of Mrs. Evans's married daughters, where they had the parlor to themselves and had long conversations. These secret conversations excited some curiosity in the family, and one day Mrs. Evans's daughter said, 'Mother, I can't think what thee and Mary Ann have got to talk about so much.' To which Mrs. Evans replied, 'Well, my dear, I don't know what she wants, but she gets me to tell her all about my life and my religious experience, and she puts it all down in a little book. I can't make out what she wants it for.' While at Wirksworth, Miss Evans made a note of everything people said in her hearing; no matter who was speaking, down it went into the note-book, which seemed never out of her hand. These notes she transcribed every night before going to rest. After her departure Mrs. Evans said to her daughter, 'Oh dear, Mary Ann has got one thing I did not mean her to take away, and that is the notes of the first sermon I preached on Ellaston Green.' The sermon preached by Dinah on Hayslope Green has been recognized as one of Mrs. Evans's." The purpose here seems to be to convey the impression that George Eliot actually carried away one of Mrs. Evans's sermons, and that she afterwards copied it into _Adam Bede_. George Eliot's own positive statement on this subject ought to be sufficient to convince any candid mind the sermon was not copied. The evidence brought forward so far in regard to the relations of Dinah Morris to Elizabeth Evans is not sufficient to prove the one was taken from the other. George Eliot's declarations, written soon after _Adam Bede_ was published, when all was perfectly fresh in her mind, and after her relatives had made their statements about Mrs. Evans, ought to settle the matter forever. Unless new and far more positive evidence is brought forward, Dinah Morris ought to be regarded as substantially an original creation. That some features of Elizabeth Evans's character were sketched into that of Dinah Morris seems certain. It is also said that the names of Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey were the names of actual persons, the latter being the schoolmaster of her father. As showing her power of local coloring, Miss Mathilde Blind relates this incident: "On its first appearance, _Adam Bede_ was read aloud to an old man, an intimate associate of Robert Evans in his Staffordshire days. This man knew nothing concerning either author or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognizing so many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring fidelity, he sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless excitement, now and then slapping his knees as he exclaimed, 'That's Robert, that's Robert, to the life.'" In _Adam Bede_, as well as in the _Clerical Scenes_ and _The Mill on the Floss_, she describes types of character instead of actual personages; and yet so much of the realistic is embodied that more than one of her characters has been identified as being in a considerable degree a sketch from life. This is true of _The Mill on the Floss_ even more fully than of her previous books. In Maggie she has portrayed one side of her own character, and made use of much of her early experience. Lucy is said to be her sister, and two of her aunts are sketched in the aunts of Maggie--Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullett. Her brother recognized the minute faithfulness of this story, as he did that of _Adam Bede_. The town of St. Ogg's is a good description of the tide-water town of Gainesborough in Lincolnshire. The Hayslope of _Adam Bede_ has been identified as the village of Ellaston, four miles from Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. It is near Wirksworth, the home of Elizabeth Evans. The local exactness of George Eliot's descriptions is another evidence of her realism. "It is not unlikely," suggests Mr. Kegan Paul, "that the time will come when with one or other of her books in their hand, people will wander among the scenes of George Eliot's early youth, and trace each allusion, as they are wont to do at Abbotsford or Newstead, and they will recognize the photographic minuteness and accuracy with which these scenes, so long unvisited, had stamped themselves on the mind of the observant girl." The historical setting of her novels is also faithful in even minute details. The time of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is at the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and it well describes the country customs of the earlier years of the present century. _Adam Bede_ describes the first decade of the present century, while _Silas Marner_ is a little later. With "Amos Barton," and _The Mill on the Floss_ we are in the second decade of the century, before hand-looms had gone out or railroads had come in. She has a fondness for these days of rustic simplicity, quiet habits and homely disingenuousness, and she more than once expresses a doubt if much has been gained by the introduction of machinery, suffrage and culture. She regrets that-- Human advancement has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to sick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections; but, alas! no picture. Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors. [Footnote: Amos Barton, chapter I.] In _Adam Bede_, when describing a leisurely walk home from church in the good old days, she bursts out again into enthusiastic praise of the time before there was so much advancement and culture. Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from "afternoon church"--as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown leather covers, and opened with a remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses and the slow wagons and the pedlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now--eager for amusement; prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that "periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion--of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing--liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port wine--not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure; he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoon? Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him and judge him by our modern standard; he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read _Tracts for the Times_ or _Sartor Resartus_." [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter LII.] Her faithfulness to the life she describes is seen in her skilful use of dialect. The sense of local coloring is greatly heightened by the dialogues which speak the language of the people portrayed. When Luke describes his rabbits as _nesh_ things, and Mrs. Jerome says little _gells_ should be seen and not heard, and Tommy Trounsom mentions his readiness to pick up a _chanch_ penny, we are brought closer to the homely life of these people. She has so well succeeded, in Mr. Carson's words, in portraying "what they call the dileck as is spoke hereabout," the reader is enabled to realize, as he could not so well do by any other method, the homeliness and rusticity of the life presented. George Eliot has not attempted a great variety in the use of dialect, for she has avoided unfamiliar words, and has made use of no expressions which would puzzle her readers in the attempt to understand them. The words not to be found in the dictionary are those which may in almost every instance be heard in the speech of the uncultured wherever the English language is spoken. Among others are these words: chapellin', chanch, coxy, corchey, dawnin', fettle, franzy, gell, megrim, nattering, nesh, overrun, queechy, plash. In a letter to Professor Skeats, published in the _Transactions of the English_ _Dialect Society_, she has explained her methods of using dialect. It must be borne in mind that my inclination to be as close as I could to the rendering of dialect, both in words and spelling, was constantly checked by the artistic duty of being generally intelligible. But for that check I should have given a stronger color to the dialogue in _Adam Sede_, which is modelled on the talk of North Staffordshire and the neighboring part of Derbyshire. The spelling, being determined by my own ear alone, was necessarily a matter of anxiety, for it would be as possible to quarrel about it as about the spelling of Oriental names. The district imagined as the scene of _Silas Marner_ is in North Warwickshire; but here, and in all my other presentations of English life except _Adam Bede_, it has been my intention to give the general physiognomy rather than a close portraiture of the provincial speech as I have heard it in the Midland or Mercian region. It is a just demand that art should keep clear of such specialties as would make it a puzzle for the larger part of its public; still, one is not bound to respect the lazy obtuseness or snobbish ignorance of people who do not care to know more of their native tongue than the vocabulary of the drawing-room and the newspaper. It may be said of George Eliot's realism that she did not borrow nearly so much from actual observation as was done by Charlotte Brontë, in whose novels, scenes, persons and events are described with great accuracy and fulness. In large measure Charlotte Brontë borrowed her materials from the life about her. Large as was her invention, original as her mind was, and unique in its thought, yet she seems to have been unable to create the plots of her novels without aid from real events and persons. Persons and scenes and events were so vividly portrayed in _Jane Eyre_ as to be at once recognized, subjecting the author to much annoyance and mortification. In _Shirley_ there is even a larger use of local traditions and manners, the locality of the story being described with great accuracy. George Eliot did not use such materials to nearly so great an extent, being far less dependent on them. Nor had she anything of Scott's need of local traditions. Accurate as she is, she creates her own story, not depending, as he did, on the suggestive help of the stories of the past. Few of his novels are the entire creations of his own mind; but he used every hint and suggestion he could find as the basis of his work. In this, George Eliot is no more a realist than either of her great predecessors. Even Goldsmith and Fielding were no more creative and original than she, for they depended as much as she on the occurrences of real life for their plots. All genuine novelists have drawn their materials from the life about them, and they could not attain success otherwise. All depends, however, on how the material thus used is made to bear its results. If Charlotte Brontë borrowed more from actual life of event and scenery, yet she was not more a realist; rather her power lies in something higher than realism, in that subtle insight and creative power which gives originality to her work. She was an idealist keeping close to the actual; and in this fact is to be found her superiority to George Eliot in certain directions. George Eliot studied life accurately and intimately, but she did not tie herself to any individual occurrences or persons. She had so absorbed the spirit of the life amidst which she lived, as to give a true expression to it under an almost purely fictitious garb. There is less of distinct teaching in the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ than in George Eliot's later novels. Yet even in these earlier stories there is to be found many a clear indication of her thought. In "Amos Barton" she has especially set forth her sympathy with humble life. This fundamental canon of her art is presented more distinctly in this story, and dwelt upon more fully, than in any of her subsequent novels. It would be difficult to discover any special teaching in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story;" and this is perhaps the only production of George Eliot's pen which has not some distinct object beyond the telling of the story itself. The religious motif is strong in _Janet's Repentance_, and not to be mistaken by any attentive reader who now for the first time takes up the story. The value of religion as a reforming force is plainly inculcated, as well as that the main and only value of that force is altruistic. It presents a fine picture of the Evangelical movement and its work, though mainly on its humanitarian side. Its deeper spirit of devotion, its loftier religious ideal, its craving after a more intimate realization of the divine presence, is not portrayed. The real purport of the story is contained in its closing words, where the reader is told that the true memorial left behind him by Edgar Tryan is to be found in a life saved to all noble thing's by his efforts. It is Janet Dempster, rescued from self-despair, strengthened with divine hopes, and now looking back on years of purity and helpful labor. The man who has left such a memorial behind him must have been one whose heart beat with true compassion, and whose lips were moved by fervent faith. These _Scenes of Clerical Life_ surpass all George Eliot's later novels in one respect--their pathos. _Adam Bede_ comes nearer them in this particular than any of the later works, but even that novel does not equal them in their power to lay hold of feeling and sympathy and in moving the reader to tears. They differ greatly in this respect from another short story, written only a few years later, entitled "Brother Jacob." This story has more of light banter in it than any other novel of George Eliot's, and less of tenderness and pathos. It is but another lesson on her great theme of _retribution_. The author says in the last sentence of the story that "we see in it an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis hides herself." The central thought of the story is, that even in the lives of the most ordinary persons, and in the case of even the smallest departures from the right, there is a power of retribution at work bringing us an unfailing punishment for the evil we do. The literary excellences of the _Scenes from Clerical Life_ are many. They are simple, charming stories, full of life, and delightful in tone. Their humor is rare and effective, never coarse, but racy and touching. Their tenderness of tone lays warm hold upon the reader's sympathies and brings him closer to the throbbing hearts of his fellow-men. There is a pure idyllic loveliness and homelikeness about these stories that is exquisite. They all evidently grew out of the tender memories and associations of George Eliot's girlhood. In _Adam Bede_ the author's purpose is concentrated on character and the moral unfoldment of the lives she describes, while the thorough dramatic unity is lacking which such a work demands. It is a delightful picture of country life, and for idyllic loveliness is scarcely equalled, never surpassed, in English literature. The charm of the narrative is only rivalled by the deep human interest the characters have for us. This exquisite picture of rural life is not merely a piece of fine painting; but the deepest problems, the largest human interests, ever appear as a perpetual background of spiritual reality, giving a sublimity to the whole that truly dignifies it. The thoughtful reader soon finds this inweaving of a larger purpose adding greatly to the idyllic loveliness of these scenes. The moral tone is clear and earnest, and the religious element gives a charm and nobility to this delightful picture of rustic simplicity. _Adam Bede_ has probably delighted a larger number of her readers than any other of George Eliot's books, and even a majority of her critics prefer it to any other. It at once arrests and fixes the attention of the reader. The first chapter has an immediate interest in its wonderful picture of Adam, and its most vivid description of the workshop. The second chapter, with its account of Dinah Morris and her preaching, leaves no possibility of doubt about the genius and power of the book. The reader is brought at once face to face with scenes and persons that act as enchantment on him; and this complete absorption of interest never flags to the end. The elements of this fascination, which is in itself so simple, natural and human, have been pointed out by various critics. They are to be found in the homeliness, pathos and naturalness of the whole story from beginning to end. Little as the critics have noted it, however, much of this fascination comes of the high and pure moral tone of the story, its grasp on the higher motives and interests of life, and its undertone of yearning after a religious motive and ideal adequate to all the problems of human destiny. This religious motive is indeed more than a yearning, for it is a fixed and self-contained confidence in altruism, expressed in sympathy and feeling and pathos most tender and passionate. This novel is full of an eager desire to realize to men their need of each other, and of longing to show them how much better and happier the world would be if we were more sympathetic and had more of fellow-feeling. Life is full of suffering, and this can be lessened only as we help and love each other, only as we can make our feelings so truly tender as to feel the sorrows of others as our own, causing us to live for the good of those who suffer. It is said of Adam Bede that-- He had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity toward our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it--by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error but their inward suffering. This compassion for human suffering is conspicuous throughout, and it is regarded as the most effective means of binding men together in common sympathy and helpfulness. Sorrow is regarded as the true means of man's elevation, as that purifying agent which is indispensable to his true development. This teaching is fully depicted in the chapter headed "The Hidden Dread," and in which Hetty's flight is described. We are told in that chapter that this looks like a very bright world on the surface, but that as we look closer within man's nature we find sorrow and pain untold. What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire: the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows--I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire--an image of a great agony--the agony of the Cross. It has stood, perhaps, by the clustering apple-blossoms, or in the broad sunshine by the cornfield, or at a turning by the wood where a clear brook was gurgling below; and surely, if there came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. He would not know that hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily with anguish--perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing shame; understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb, wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath, yet tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind the blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if you came close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for your ear with a despairing human sob. No wonder man's religion has much sorrow in it; no wonder he needs a Suffering God. The remedy for this sorrow, even in the pages of _Adam Bede_, is not the atoning love of Christ or the blessedness of a divine forgiveness, but the altruistic compassion of man for man. There is, however, a, deeper recognition in this novel of Christian belief than in any other by George Eliot. The prayer and sermon of Dinah Morris have a truly Christian tone and thought. This is not the case with the teachings of Savonarola, who is always much more an altruist than a Christian, and into whose mouth Christian phrases are put, while it is very evident the Christian spirit in its wholeness was not put into his heart. Sorrow and suffering are regarded in _Adam Bede_ as the means of baptism into a larger life of sympathy, as the means of purification from selfishness and individual aims. Along with this teaching goes the cognate one, that feeling is the true test of the religious life. A feeling that draws us close to others in helpfulness is worth more than knowledge, culture and refinement of taste. The doctrine of retribution is presented as distinctly and positively in _Adam Bede_ as in any subsequent book George Eliot wrote. It is given the form of distinct statement, and it is developed fully in the working out of the plot. Parson Irwine speaks the thought of the author in these words: "There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur's has caused to others; but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it." The tendency of selfishness and wrong to develop misery is fully unfolded. The terrible law of moral cause and effect is made apparent throughout the whole work. The folly of Arthur and the vanity of Hetty work them terrible consequences of evil and bitterness. Many others are made to suffer with them. The fatal Nemesis is unmasked in these revelations of human nature. If the critics are right in pronouncing _Adam Bede_ artistically defective, it is not difficult to see that there is still less of unity in _The Mill on the Floss_. Unconnected and unnecessary scenes and persons abound, while the Tulliver and Dodson families, and their stupidities, are described at a tedious length. Yet the picture of child-life given here compensates for all we might complain of in other directions. Maggie is an immortal child, wonderfully drawn, out of the very heart of nature herself. Her joy in life, her doubts and fears, her conflicts with self, are delineated with a master's hand, and justify--such is their faithfulness to child-life--the supposition that this is George Eliot's own childhood, so delicate and penetrating is the insight of this description, Swinburne has justly said that "no man or woman, outside the order of poets, has ever written of children with such adorable fidelity of affection as the spiritual mother of Totty, Eppie and of Lillo." Nor have the poets surpassed her in truthfulness to child-life and intuitive insight into child-nature. The child Maggie is unsurpassed, not as an ideal being, but as a living child that plays in the dirt, tears her frocks, and clips her hair in an hour of childish anger. In this novel we first come distinctly upon another element in the writings of George Eliot, and this is a yearning after a fuller, larger life. It does not appear as distinctly developed in _Adam Bede_, where there is more of poise and repose. Maggie represents the restless spirit of the nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly human passion for something higher and diviner. A passionate restlessness and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul's spiritual thirst. The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the religious cravings of her nature satisfied in Methodism, is abandoned for the inward yearning of Maggie, whose passionate search for spiritual truth ends in disaster. No other of George Eliot's books has been so severely criticised as this one, except _Daniel Deronda_, and mainly because of Maggie. The apparent fall of the heroine, and the crude tragedy of the ending, have been regarded as serious defects. The moral tone and purpose have been severely condemned. In his essays on foul and fair fiction, Ruskin puts _The Mill on the Floss_ into that class of novels which describe life's blotches, burrs and pimples, and calls it "the most striking instance extant of this study of cutaneous disease." He says the personages are picked up from behind the counter and out of the gutter, and he finds "there is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's type in their description." To the same effect is Swinburne's criticism of Maggie's relations to Stephen Guest. He calls it "the hideous transformation by which Maggie is debased." He says that most of George Eliot's admirers would regard this as "the highest and the purest and the fullest example of her magnificent and matchless powers. The first two thirds of the book suffice to compose perhaps the very noblest of tragic as well as of humorous prose idyls in the language; comprising one of the sweetest as well as saddest and tenderest, as well as subtlest examples of dramatic analysis--a study in that kind as soft and true as Rousseau's, as keen and true as Browning's, as full as either's of the fine and bitter sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity. But who can forget the horror of inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual re-action, the reluctant, incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which he came upon the thrice-unhappy third part? The two first volumes have all the intensity and all the perfection of George Sand's best work, tempered by all the simple purity and interfused with all the stainless pathos of Mrs. Gaskell's; they carry such affluent weight of thought, and shine with such warm radiance of humor, as invigorates and illuminates the work of no other famous woman; they have the fiery clarity of crystal or of lightning; they go near to prove a higher claim and attest a clearer right on the part of their author than that of George Sand herself to the crowning crown of praise conferred on her by the hand of a woman ever greater and more glorious than either in her sovereign gift of lyric genius, to the salutation given as by an angel indeed from heaven, of 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.'" In the momentary lapse of Maggie, Swinburne finds a fatal defect, which no subsequent repentance atones for. He says that "here is the patent flaw, here too plainly is the flagrant blemish, which defaces and degrades the very crown and flower of George Eliot's wonderful and most noble work; no rent or splash on the raiment, but a cancer in the very bosom, a gangrene in the very flesh. It is a radical and mortal plague-spot, corrosive and incurable." Such criticism has little if any value, because there is no point of sympathy between the critic and his author. That real life contains such errors as Maggie's cannot be doubted, and George Eliot wished to paint no ideal scenes or heroines. To portray a passionate, eager, yearning nature, full of poetry, longing for a diviner spiritual life, surrounded by dull and unpoetic conditions and persons, was her purpose. That the hunger of such a person for the expression of her inward cravings for joy, music and beauty should lead her astray and make a sudden lapse possible, is not to be doubted. The fault of the critics is in supposing that this lapse from moral conduct was that of a physical depravity. Maggie's passion grew wholly out of that inward yearning for a fuller life which made all her difficulties. It was not physical passion but spiritual craving; and in the purpose of the novelist she was as pure after as before. The cause of what must be regarded as the great defect in _The Mill on the Floss_ is not that George Eliot chose to paint life in a diseased state, but that she had not the power to make her characters act what they themselves were. While the delightful inward portraiture of Maggie is in process all are charmed with her, her soul is as pure and sweet as a rose new-blown; but when the time arrives for her to act as well as to meditate and to dream, she is not made equal to herself. Through all her books this is true, that George Eliot can describe a soul, but she cannot make her men and women act quite up to the facts of daily life. In this way Dinah and Adam are not equal to themselves, and settle down to a prosaic life such as is not in keeping with that larger action of which they were capable. George Eliot's characters are greater than their deeds; their inward life is truer and more rounded than their outward life is pure and noble. _The Mill on the Floss_ fully develops George Eliot's conception of the value of self-renunciation in the life of the individual, and gives a new emphasis to her ideas about the importance of the spiritual life as an element in true culture. It has been said that she intended to indicate the nature of physiological attraction between men and women, and how large an influence it has; but whether that was an aim of hers or not, she undoubtedly did attempt to indicate how altogether important is renunciation to a life of true development, how difficult it is to attain, and that it is the vital result of all human endeavor. She surrounded a tender, sensitive, musical and poetic soul, one quick to catch the tone of a higher spiritual faith, with the common conditions of ordinary social life, to show how such an "environment" cripples and retards a soul full of aspiration and capable of the best things. Maggie saw the way to the light, but the way was hard, beset with difficulties individual and social, and she could neither overcome herself nor the world. She was taken suddenly away, and the novel comes to a hasty conclusion, because the author desired to indicate the causes of spiritual danger to ardent souls, and not to inculcate a formula for their relief. Maggie had learned how difficult it is for the individual to make for himself a new way in life, how benumbing are the conditions of ordinary human existence; and through her death we are to learn that in such difficulties as hers there is no remedy for the individual. Only through the mediation of death could Maggie be reconciled to those she had offended; death alone could heal the social wounds she had made, and restore her as an accepted and ennobled member of the corporate existence of humanity. This seems to be the idea underlying the hurried conclusion of this novel, that the path of renunciation once truly entered on, brings necessarily such difficulties as only death can overcome; and death does overcome them when those we have loved and those we have helped, forget what seem to them our wrong deeds in the loving memories which follow the dead. Over the grave men forget all that separated them from others, and the living are reconciled to those who can offend them no more. All that was good and pure and loving is then made to appear, and memory glorifies the one who in life was neglected or hated. Through death Maggie was restored to her brother, and over her grave came perfect reconciliation with those others from whom she had been alienated. That renunciation may lead to cruel martyrdoms is what George Eliot means; but she would say it has its lofty recompense in that restoration which death brings, when the individual becomes a part of the spiritual influence which surrounds and guides us all. For those who can accept such a conclusion as this the unity of the novel may seem complete. The poetry of Maggie's nature found itself constantly dragged down to conditions of vulgar prose by the life about her. That life was prosy and hard because those ideal aims which come from a recognition of the past and its traditions were absent from it. Maggie tried to overcome them by renunciation, but by renunciation which did not rest on any genuine sorrow and pain. At last these came, and the real meaning of renunciation was made clear to her. Her bitter sorrow taught her the great lesson which George Eliot ever strives to inculcate, that what is hard, sorrowful and painful in the world should move us to more and more of compassion and help for our fellows who also find life sad and burdensome. At the last Maggie learned this greatest of all lessons which life can give us. She sat quite still far on into the night, with no impulse to, change her attitude, without active force enough even for the mental act of prayer--only waiting for the light that would surely come again. It came with the memories that no passion could long quench: the long past came back to her, and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve. The words that were marked by the quiet hand in the little old book that she had long ago learned by heart, rushed even to her lips, and found a vent for themselves in a low murmur that was quite lost in the loud driving of the rain against the window, and the loud moan and roar of the wind: "I have received the Cross, I have received it from Thy hand; I will bear it, and bear it till death, as Thou hast laid it upon me." But soon other words rose that could find no utterance but in a sob: "Forgive me, Stephen. It will pass away. You will come back to her." She took up the letter, held it to the candle, and let it burn slowly on the hearth. To-morrow she would write to him the last word of parting. "I will bear it, and bear it till death... But how long it will be before death comes! I am so young, so healthy. How shall I have patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall, and repent again? Has life other trials as hard for me still?" With that cry of self-despair Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried her sorrow-stricken face. Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end. Surely there was something being taught her by this experience of great need, and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering that the less erring could hardly know. "O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort--" Then the flood came, and death. Maggie could repent, she could acquire the true spirit of renunciation, she could even give herself to a life of altruism; but death only could restore her to the world. Death, says George Eliot, is the great reconciler. _Silas Marner_ is the only one of these earlier novels in which there is a continuous unity of purpose and action. Its several parts are thoroughly wrought into each other, the aim of the narrative is adhered to throughout, and there are no superfluous incidents. The plot is simple, cause and effect flow on steadily to the end in the unfoldment of character and action, and the design of the author is easily grasped. One of her critics, himself a novelist of a high order, has said that in its unity of purpose and dramatic expression _Silas Marner_ is more nearly a masterpiece than any other of George Eliot's novels; "it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which marks a classical work." [Footnote: Henry James, Jr.] In this novel, too, her humor flows out with a richer fulness, a racier delight and a more sparkling variety of expression than in any other book of hers, not excepting _Adam Bede_. She has here reached the very height of her qualities as a humorist, for in _Silas Marner_ her humor is constantly genial and delightful. Certain ethical ideas appear very distinctly in this novel. It illustrates man's need of social ties and connections. Silas forsook his old life, the life of his childhood and youth, and the world was a blank for him in consequence. With the sundering of the ties which bound him to the traditional environment amidst which he was reared, all the purpose and meaning of his life was gone. The old ties, obligations and associations gone, his life was without anchorage, its ideal aims perished, and he lived a selfish and worthless creature. When new social ties were formed by the young child he found then his life opened up to a larger meaning again, and he recovered the better things in his nature. He was then led back again into his relations to society, he became once more a man, a fresh life was opened to him. This brought a new confidence in religion, a new trust in the moral motives of life. In this way George Eliot presents the social basis of the higher life in man, and her theory that it cannot be broken off from its traditional surroundings without grave injury to the finer elements of our nature. The law of retribution manifests itself clearly in these pages. Godfrey deserts wife and child. In after years he would fain restore the child to its rightful place, but he finds it has grown up under conditions which alienate it from any sympathy with him. He pronounces his own condemnation: "There's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing--it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy--I shall pass for childless now against my wish." A pure moral tone, a keen ethical instinct, mark all these earlier novels by George Eliot. Quite as noticeable is their spiritual atmosphere and their high place assigned to the religious life. Their teaching in these directions has a conservative tendency, and it is based on the most vigorous convictions. XIV. ROMOLA. Whatever differences there may exist between George Eliot's earlier and later books are due rather to the materials used than to any change in purpose, methods or beliefs. In writing of the distinction drawn between her earlier and later books, she said,-- Though I trust there is some growth in my appreciation of others and in my self-distrust, there has been no change in the point of view from which I regard our life since I wrote my first fiction, the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. Any apparent change of spirit must be due to something of which I am unconscious. The principles which are at the root of my effort to paint Dinah Morris are equally at the root of my effort to paint Mordecai. Her later books grow more out of conscious effort and deliberate study than the earlier, are more carefully wrought out, and contain less of spontaneity. The spiritual and ethical purpose, however, is not more distinct and conscious in _Daniel Deronda_ than in _The Mill on the Floss_, in _Romola_ than in _Adam Bede_. The ethical purpose may be more apparent in _Daniel Deronda_ than in _Adam Bede_, more on the surface, and clearer to the view of the general reader, but this is because it takes an unusual form, rather than because it is really any more distinctly present. In _The Mill on the Floss_ her teaching first became known to her readers, and in _Romola_ this purpose to use the novel as the vehicle for propagating ideas became fully apparent. Her aim having once come clearly to view, it was not difficult to see how large an element it was in her earlier books, where it had not been seen before. If she had written nothing but _Adam Bede_ her teachings might not have come to light, though some of those she has most often insisted on are to be found clearly stated in that book. Her doctrinal aim, however, became more clear and pronounced as she went on in her career as a novelist, and became more thoroughly conscious of her own powers and of the purposes which she wished to work out in her novels. She gained courage to express her ideas, and their importance was more deeply impressed upon her mind and heart. In _Romola_ it was first made clear that George Eliot is to be judged as a moralist as well as a literary artist. That she is a great literary artist, surpassed only by a select few, is to be borne constantly in mind; but as a moralist she surpasses most others in the amount of her teaching, and teaching which is thoroughly incorporated into the literary fibre of her work. She much resembles Wordsworth in this, that while she is an original creator of artistic forms and ideas, her books will be sought for their views of life as well for their qualities as novels. Wordsworth is a poet of vast original powers, but the poetic fire in him often burns low and his verses become mere prose. Yet his ideas about nature, life and morals command for him a place higher than that occupied by any other poet of his time, and a school of thinkers and critics has been developed through his influence. In much the same way, George Eliot is likely to attract attention because of her teachings; and it is probable her books will be resorted to and interpreted largely with reference to her moral and philosophical ideas. Should such a movement as this ever spring up, _Romola_ will necessarily become one of the most important of all her books. Some of her principal ideas appear therein more distinctly, in clearer outline, and with a greater fulness of expression, than they obtain in any other of her books. The foreign setting of her story enabled her to give a larger utterance to her thoughts, while there was less of personal and pathetic interest to impede their expression. This is also true of _The Spanish Gypsy_, that it has more of teaching and less of merely literary attraction than any other of her longer poems. The purpose to do justice to the homely life of rustic England was no longer present, and she was free to give her intellectual powers a deliberate expression in the form of a thoughtful interpretation of a great historic period. Mr. Henry James, Jr., has recognized the importance of this effort, and says of _Romola_, that he regards it, "on the whole, as decidedly the most important of her works,--not the most entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped. The figure of Savonarola, subordinate though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken; and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller representation of the development of a character. Considerable as are our author's qualities as an artist, and largely as they are displayed in _Romola_, the book is less a work of art than a work of morals. Like all of George Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble; the story drags and halts,--the setting is too large for the picture." The book lacks in spontaneity, is too deliberate, contemplative and ethical. While its artistic elements are great, and even powerful, it is too consciously moral in its purpose to satisfy the literary requirements of a work of art. It wants the sensuous elements of life and the _abandon_ of poetic genius. There is little which is sensational about the book; too little, perhaps, of that vivid imaginative interest which impels the reader headlong through the pages of a novel to the end. It is, however, a high merit in George Eliot, that she does not resort to factitious elements of interest in her books, but works honestly, conscientiously, and with a pure purpose. If the reader is not drawn on by the sensational, he is amply repaid by the more deliberate and natural interest which gives a meaning to every chapter. George Eliot selected for her book one of the most striking and picturesque periods of modern history, in the great centre of culture and art in the fifteenth century. Florence was the intellectual capital of the world in the renaissance period, and the truest representative of its spirit. It was the time also of that remarkable monk-prophet, Savonarola, whose voice was raised so powerfully against the corruptions of that most corrupt age. This unique character, doubtless, had much to do in causing George Eliot to take this city and time for her story. No one of the reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was more in earnest, had a loftier purpose, worked in a nobler spirit, than this Dominican monk of Florence. His opposition to the Medici, his conflict with Rome, his visions and prophecies, his leadership of the politics of Florence, his powerful preaching, his untimely death, all give a romantic and a tragic interest to his life, and conspire to make him one of the most interesting figures in modern history. His moral purpose was conspicuous even when tainted by personal ambition. His political influence was supreme while it lasted, and was wielded in the interests of Florence, for its liberties and its moral regeneration. As a religious teacher he was profoundly in earnest; a prophet in his own belief as well as in the depth of his religious insight, he accepted with the most thorough intensity of conviction the spiritual truths he inculcated. In his own belief he was constantly in communion with the spiritual world, and was guided and taught by it. He swayed the people of Florence as the wind sways the branches of a tree, and they bowed utterly to his will for the moment, when he put forth all his moral and intellectual powers in the pulpit. A puritan in morals, he had a most vivid realization of the terrible evils of his time; and he could make his congregation look at the world with his own faith and moral purpose. His influence on literature and art was also great, and it was felt for many years after his death. Savonarola spoke in the pulpit with the authority of the profoundest personal conviction, and his hearers were impressed by his preaching with the feeling that they listened to one who knew whereof he spoke. Whenever he preached there was a crowd to hear; people came three or four hours before the time, and they came in throngs from the surrounding country. He held separate services for men, for women, for children, in order that all might hear. And this eagerness to listen to him was not for a few weeks, but it continued for years. The greatest enthusiasm was awakened by his influence, the people were melted into tears, every person listened with bated breath to his words. Thousands were converted, and among them many of the most learned of the poets, artists and statesmen of the time. The most remarkable changes in the modes of life took place, money was restored, and contributed freely to buy bread when famine threatened, and the confessional was daily crowded with penitents. One of his biographers says that "the most remarkable change that was apparent in the manners of the people, in their recreations and amusements, was the abandonment of demoralizing practices, of debauchery of all kinds, of profane songs of a licentious character which the lower grades of the people especially were greatly addicted to; and the growth of a new taste and passion for spiritual hymns and sacred poetry that had succeeded that depraved taste." On one side of his nature, Savonarola seems to have been of a remarkably pure and noble character, with high aims, noble ambitions and a clear moral insight. Looked at on its better side, his religious reformation was wholesome and salutary, and dictated by a genuine desire to elevate worship and to purify faith. There was a very different side to his life and work, however, and in some features of his character he seems to have been a fanatic and enthusiast of the most dangerous sort. He was credulous, superstitious and visionary. He had no clear, strong and well-reasoned purpose to which he could hold consistently to the end. An earnest Catholic, he only sought to reform the Church, not to supersede it; but his moral aims were not high enough to carry him to the logical results of his position. Involved by his visionary faith in claims of miraculous power and supernatural communication, he had not the intellectual honesty to carry those claims to their legitimate conclusion. Weakness, hesitation and inconsistency marked his character in his later years, and have made him a puzzle to modern students. These inconsistencies of character have led to widely divergent conclusions about the man, his sincerity of purpose and the outcome of his work. Another influence of the time, more powerful because more permanent, was the renaissance movement, which was at this period working its greatest changes and inspiring the most fervid enthusiasm. A new world had been disclosed to the people of the fifteenth century in the revival of knowledge concerning classic literature and art, and there came to be an absorbing, passionate interest in whatever pertained to the ancients. Manuscripts were eagerly sought after, translations were diligently made, literature was modelled after the classic writers, to quote and to imitate the ancients became the habit of the day. A change the most striking was produced in the modes of thought and of life. The love of nature was revived, and with it a graceful abandonment to the dominion of the senses. Paganism seemed likely to return upon the world again and to reconquer from Christianity all that it had once lost. The pagan spirit revived, its tastes and modes of life came back again. Plato was restored to his old place, and in the minds of the cultured seemed worthier of homage than Christ. With such as Lorenzo Medici and his literary friends, Platonism was regarded as a religion. The recovery of classic literature came to the men of this period as a revelation. It opened a new world to them, it operated upon them like a galvanic shock, it kindled the most fervid enthusiasms. It also had the effect to restore the natural side of life, to liberate men from a false spiritualism and an excessive idealism. From despising the human faculties, men came back to an acceptance of their dictation, and even to an animal delight in the senses and passions. The natural man was deified; but not in the manner of the Greeks, in simplicity and with a pure love of beauty. An artificial love of nature and the natural in man was the result of the renaissance; a hothouse culture and a corrupting moral development followed. Passion was given loose rein, the senses took every form of indulgence. Yet the Church was even worse, while many of the classic scholars were stoic in their moral purity and earnestness. This movement developed individualism in thought, a selfish moral aim, and intellectual arrogance. The men who came under its influence cared more for culture than for humanity, they were driven away from the common interests of their fellows by their new intellectual sympathies. It was the desire of Savonarola to restore the old Christian spirit of brotherhood and helpfulness. In this his movement was wide apart from that of the renaissance, which gave such tyrants as the Medici a justification for their deliberate attacks on the liberties of the people. He loved man, they loved personal development. George Eliot shows these two influences in antagonism with each other; on the one hand a reforming Christianity, on the other the renaissance movement. She admirably contrasts them in their spirit and influence, though she by no means indicates all of the tendencies of either. Her purpose is not that of the historical novelist, who wishes simply to give a correct and living picture of the time wherein he lays his plot. She vises this portion of history because it furnishes an excellent opportunity to unfold her ideas about life, rather than because it gives an abundance of picturesque material to the novelist. Her primary object is not the interpretation of Florentine life in the time of Savonarola; and this subordination of the historical material must be kept fully in mind by the reader or he will be misled in his judgment on the book. It has well been said that the historical characters in _Romola_ are not so well sketched as the original creations. Savonarola is not so lifelike as Tito. She seems to have been cramped by the details of history; and she has not thoroughly conquered and marshalled subordinate to her thought the mass of local incidents she introduces. Her account of Savonarola is inadequate, because it does not enter fully enough into his history, and because it omits much which is necessary to a full understanding of the man and his influence. So far as the book has an historical purpose it is that of describing the general life of the time rather than that of portraying Savonarola. Because of this purpose much is introduced into the story which is irrelevant to the plot itself. Not only did the author desire to contrast a man like Savonarola, led by the spirit of self-denial and renunciation, with one like Tito Melema led by the spirit of self-love and personal gratification; but she wished to contrast worldliness and spirituality, or individualism and altruism, as social forces. Lorenzo and the renaissance give one form of life, Savonarola and Christianity give another; and these two appear as affecting every class in society and every phase of the social order. To bring out this contrast requires a broad stage and many scenes. Much which seems quite irrelevant to the plot has its place in this larger purpose, and serves to bring out the final unity of impression which the author sought to produce. Nor is the purpose of the book merely that of contrasting two great phases of thought and of social influence, but rather to show them as permanent elements in human, nature and the nature of the effect which each produces. _Romola_ demands for its thorough appreciation that the reader shall have a considerable acquaintance with Italian history in the fifteenth century and with the social and literary changes of that period. Whether it is read with a keen interest and relish will much depend on this previous information. To the mere novel-reader it may seem dull and too much encumbered by uninteresting learning. To one who is somewhat familiar with the renaissance period, and who can appreciate the ethical intention of the book, it will be found to be a work of genius and profound insight. It will help such a reader to a clearer comprehension of this period than he could well obtain in any other manner, and the ethical purpose will add a new and living interest to the story of Florentine life. He will be greatly helped to comprehend the moral and intellectual life of the time, with its-- strange web of belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination toward a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was filling the air with strange prophecies and presentiments. [Footnote: _Proem to Romola_.] The artistic features of this period were many and striking, but George Eliot has not made so large a use of them as could have been wished; at least they appear in her book too much under the influence of historic information. She could not be content merely to absorb and reflect an historic period; but her active intellect, full of ideas concerning the causes of human changes, must give an explanation of what was before her. This philosophic tendency mars the artistic effect and blurs the picture which would otherwise have been given. Yet the critic must not be too sure of this, and he must be content simply to note that George Eliot was too energetic a thinker to be willing to portray the picturesque features of Florentine life in the fifteenth century and to do no more. She had at least three objects,--to give a picture of Florentine life in the fifteenth century, to show the influence of the renaissance in conflict with Christianity, and to inculcate certain ethical ideas about renunciation, tradition and moral retribution. While the book thus gains in breadth and in a certain massive impression which it produces, yet it loses in that concentration of effect which a more limited purpose would have secured. It gives the impression of having been written by a vigorous thinker rather than by a genius of the first order. The critic has no right to complain of this, however, or even to assume that genius might do other work than it has done. Had George Eliot been less thoughtful than she was, she would not have been George Eliot. _Romola_ grew out of a genius so large and original that it can well endure the criticisms caused by any defects it may have. The ideas of the time appear subtly expressed in the influence they produce on the persons who entertain them. Savonarola's mysticism and high moral purpose made him at once a prophet and a reformer, but he was not able to separate the spiritual realities of life from devotion to his party. His courage, purity and holiness cannot but be admired, while his fanaticism is to be deplored. George Eliot has well conceived and expressed the effect produced in all but the very greatest minds by the assumption of supernatural powers. Savonarola was strong and great as a preacher and a reformer, weak only on the side of his visions and his faith that his party represented the kingdom of God. Not that his visions were weak, nor are they assumed to be untrue; but his mysticism clouded his intellect, and his fanaticism led him to overlook the practical truths to be inculcated by a genuine reformer. He is a true type of the mystical churchman of the time, who saw the corruption about him and desired a better order of things, but who hoped to secure it by reviving the past in all its imagined supernatural features. He would have ruled the world by visions to be received by monks, and he would have made Jesus Christ the head of the republic. Yet his visions entangled his clear intellect and perverted his moral purpose. On the other hand, Tito Melema was intended to represent the renaissance movement on its Greek, or its aesthetic and social side. He was not a bad man at heart, but he had no moral purpose, no ethical convictions. He had the Greek love of ease, enjoyment and unconcern for the morrow; a spirit which the renaissance revived in many of its literary devotees. He lived for the day, for self, in the delight of music, art, social intercourse and sensual enjoyment. He had the renaissance quickness of assuming all parts, its love of wide and pretentious learning, its superficial scholarship, its social and political deftness and flexibility. The dry, minute, unprofitable spirit of criticism is well indicated by Bardo Bardi, which had no originality and no fresh vitality, but which loved to comment on the classic writers at tedious length, and to collate passages for purposes the most foreign from any practical aim life could possibly afford. In the conception of Tito, George Eliot has quite surpassed herself, and in all literature there is no delineation of a character surpassing this. One of her critics says there is no character in her novels "more subtly devised or more consistently developed. His serpentine beauty, his winning graciousness, his aesthetic refinement, his masculine energy of intellect, his insinuating affectionateness, with his selfish love of pleasure and his cowardly recoil from pain, his subdulous serenity and treacherous calm, as of a faithless summer sea, make up a being that at once fascinates and repels, that invites love, but turns our love into loathing almost before we have given it." [Footnote: Westminster Review, July, 1881.] Mr. R.H. Hutton has expressed his conviction that this is one of the most skilfully painted of all the characters in fictitious literature. He says, "A character essentially treacherous only because it is full of soft placid selfishness is one of the most difficult to paint;" but in sketching Tito's career, "the same wonderful power is maintained throughout, of stamping on our imagination with the full force of a master hand a character which seems naturally too fluent for the artist's purpose. There is not a more masterly piece of painting in English romance than this figure of Tito." Romola represents the divided interests of one who was affected by both the renaissance and Christianity. Brought up to know only what the renaissance had to teach, to delight in culture and to ignore religion, her contact with Savonarola opened a new world to her mind. Her experience in life led her to seek some deeper moral anchorage than was afforded by the culture of her father and husband, yet she could not follow Savonarola into the region of mystical visions and other-worldliness. Her life having broken loose from the ties of love through the faithlessness of Tito, and from the ties of tradition through the failure of culture to satisfy her heart, she drifts out into the world, to find, under the leadership of the great preacher, that life's highest duty is renunciation. His influence over the noblest souls of his time is indicated in Romola's trust in him, and in her acceptance of him as a master and a guide. When this guide failed, as all human guides must fail, she found peace in the service of others. In living for humanity, her sorrows were turned into strength, and her renunciation became a religion. It is Romola who represents George Eliot in this book, gives voice to her ideas, and who preaches the new gospel she would have the world learn. If Romola has her limitations as a conception of womanly character, is too "passionless and didactic," yet she does admirably represent the influence on a thoughtful woman of a contention between culture and religion, and how such a person may gradually attain to a self-poised life in loving service toward others. She is not an ideal woman. She was given a character which prevents her being quite attractive, because she was made to represent ideas and social tendencies. The altruistic doctrine of renunciation, and of living for others, is more fully developed in _Romola_ than in any other of George Eliot's books except _The Mill on the Floss_. That the truest satisfaction life can afford is to be found in work done for human good is conspicuously shown in the experiences of Romola. She finds no peace as a follower of Savonarola, she finds no abiding content in philosophy; but toil for others among the sick, suffering and dying, brings heavenly joy and a great calm. She had no special love for this work, her early education had even made it repulsive; but Savonarola had shown her that in this direction lay life's true aim. He communicated to her his own enthusiasm for humanity, and she retained this faith even after her loss of confidence in him had loosened her hold on his religious teachings. She went beyond her teacher and inspirer, learned his lessons better than he did himself, and came to see that a true religion is not of a sect or party, but humanitarian. When she warned him against his fanatical devotion to his party, he attempted to justify his narrow policy by identifying true Christianity with his own work, Romola replied,-- "Do you then know so well what will further the coming of God's kingdom, father, that you will dare to despise the plea of mercy--of justice--of faithfulness to your own teaching? Take care, father, lest your enemies have some reason when they say that, in your visions of what will further God's kingdom, you see only what will strengthen your own party." "And that is true!" said Savonarola, with flashing eyes. Romola's voice had seemed to him in that moment the voice of his enemies. "The cause of my party _is_ the cause of God's kingdom." "I do not believe it!" said Romola, her whole frame shaken with passionate repugnance. "God's kingdom is something wider--else let me stand outside it with the beings that I love." The two faces were lit up, each with an opposite emotion, each with an opposite certitude. Further words were impossible. Romola hastily covered her head and went out in silence. [Footnote: Chapter LIX.] Savonarola forgot the better spirit of his own teachings, he sought to become a political leader. It was his ruin, for his purpose was vitiated, and his influence waned. George Eliot well says that "no man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without suffering vitiation; his standard must be their lower needs, and not his own best insight." This was the sad fate of the great Florentine preacher and reformer. He lost his faith, and he spoke without the moment's conviction. When this result came about, all hope for Savonarola as a reformer was gone. He was then only the leader of a party. George Eliot has well painted the effect upon Romola of this fall, and given deep insight into the results of losing our trust in those great souls who have been our guides. All the ties of life had snapped for Romola; her marriage had proved a failure, her friend had become unworthy of her confidence; and she fled. Romola went away, found herself in the midst of a plague-stricken people, gave her life to an assuagement of suffering and sorrow. Then she could come back to her home purified, calm and noble. In the "Epilogue," we find her speaking the word which gives meaning to the whole book. Tessa's child, whom she had rescued, says to her that he would like to lead a life which would give him a good deal of pleasure. Romola says to him,-- "That is not easy, my Lille. It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world that no man can be great--he can hardly keep himself from wickedness--unless he gives up thinking much about pleasures or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo--you know why I keep to-morrow sacred; _he_ had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of, And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It would have been better for me if I had never been born.' I will tell you something, Lillo." Romola paused a moment. She had taken Lillo's cheeks between her hands, and his young eyes were meeting hers. "There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I believe when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds--such as make men infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him." Aside from this altruistic teaching which is developed in connection with the life of Romola, the doctrine of retribution is vigorously unfolded in the history of Tito Melema. The effects of selfishness and personal self-seeking have nowhere been so wonderfully studied by George Eliot as in this character. His career is minutely traced from step to step of his downfall, and with a remarkable faithfulness and courage. The effects of vice and sin are nowhere so finely presented and with such profound ethical insight. A careful study of this character alone will give a clear comprehension of George Eliot's conception of retribution, how the natural laws of life drag us down when we are untrue to ourselves and others. It is a great moral lesson presented in this character, a sermon of the most powerful kind. Nemesis follows Tito ever onward from the first false step, lowers the tone of his mind, corrupts his moral nature, drags him into an ever-widening circle of vice and crime, makes him a traitor, and causes him to be false to his wife. Step by step, as he gives way to evil, we see the degradation of his heart and mind, how the unfailing Nemesis is wreaking its vengeance upon him. He is surely punished, and his death is the fit end of his career. We are shown how his evil deeds affect others, how the great law of retribution involves the innocent in his downfall. Here George Eliot has unfolded for us how true it is that our lives are linked on every side with the lives of our fellows, and how the deeds of any one must affect for good or evil the lives of many others. Almost every leading thought of George Eliot's philosophy and ethics is unfolded in greater or less degree in this novel. It is full of brave, wholesome teaching, and of clear insight into the consequences of conduct. _Romola_ is the most thoughtful, the most ambitious, the most philosophical of George Eliot's works; and it is also the most lacking in spontaneity, and more than any other shows the evidences of the artist's labors. Yet by many persons it will be accepted as the greatest of her works, and not without the best of reasons. It contains some of her most original characters, gives a remarkable emphasis to great moral laws, and interprets the spiritual influence of the conflict which is ever waging between tradition and advancing culture as no other has done. It is a thought-provoking book, a book of the highest moral aims. XV. FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH. The scenes of George Eliot's later novels are laid in England, but for the most part among a town rather than a rural population. Instead of Hayslope and Raveloe, Mrs. Poyser and Silas Marner, we have Middlemarch and Treby Magna, Dorothea Brooke and Felix Holt. If Felix Holt is quite as much a working-man as Adam Bede, occupying a social position higher in no respect whatever, yet he is a workingman of a far different type. If Adam is the nobler character, the truer type of man, Felix represents a larger social purpose and has higher moral aims. In _Adam Bede_, we find rustic simplicity and contentment, but in _Felix Holt_ we touch social aspirations and political ambitions. The horizon has widened, the plane of social life has lifted, there are new motives and larger ideals. Very many of her readers and critics regard _Middlemarch_ as George Eliot's greatest novel. This is said to have been her own opinion. With great unanimity her readers pronounce _Felix Holt_ her weakest and least interesting work. So far as the dramatic and artistic execution are concerned, these judgments are not entirely correct. The machinery of _Middlemarch_ is clumsy, and the plot desultory in aim and method. On the other hand, _Felix Holt_ is strongly thought out and skilfully planned. It has much of passion and enthusiasm in it, and not a little of pure and noble sentiment, while _Middlemarch_ is never impassioned, but flows on calmly. The author evidently put herself into _Felix Holt_ with the purpose of teaching her own views about moral and social life. She lived in the characters, felt and hoped with them, and wrote out of a deep, spontaneous purpose. The sensational element has been more fully used, and the unity of the plot more thoroughly developed, than in any other of her works, while there is a living, breathing purpose in the story which is absent from her later works. _Felix Holt_ is one of the two or three novels by George Eliot which have an affirmative and thoroughly constructive purpose. It is this purpose which makes the chief interest of the work. It is a story of social reform, and is to be read as an embodiment of the author's political ideas. From this point of view it is a story full of interest, and it is the one of George Eliot's novels which will most strongly impress those who are fully in sympathy with her ideas of progress and social regeneration. The purpose of _Middlemarch_ is critical, to show how our modern social life cramps the individual, limits his energies, and destroys his power of helpful service to the world. This critical aim runs through the whole work and colors every feature of it. The impression made by the whole work is saddening; and the reader, while admiring the artistic power and the literary finish of the book, is depressed by the moral issue. In strength of imagination, intellectual insight, keen power of analysis, this novel surpasses anything else George Eliot has written. _Felix Holt_ is a novel with an ethical purpose. It aims to show how social and political reform can be brought about. Felix is George Eliot's ideal working-man, a man who remains true to his own class, seeks his own moral elevation, does not have much faith in the ballot, and who is zealous for the education of his fellows. He is a radical who believes in heredity, who is aware of our debt to the past, and who would use the laws of social inheritance for the elevation of mankind. The account Felix gives of his conversion contains George Eliot's conception of what is to be done by all workingmen who rightly understand what social reform is and how it can be most truly brought about. It is to be secured by each workingman living not for self and pleasure, but to do what good he can in the world. "I'm not speaking lightly," said Felix. "If I had not seen that I was making a hog of myself very fast, and that pig-wash, even if I could have got plenty of it, was a poor sort of thing, I should never have looked life fairly in the face to see what was to be done with it. I laughed out loud at last to think of a poor devil like me, in a Scotch garret, with my stockings out at heel and a shilling or two to be dissipated upon, with a smell of raw haggis mounting from below, and old women breathing gin as they passed me on the stairs--wanting to turn my life into easy pleasure. Then I began to see what else it could be turned into. Not much, perhaps. This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up my mind it shan't be the worse for me, if I can help it. They may tell me I can't alter the world--that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, And if I don't lie and filch, somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won't. That's the upshot of my conversion. Mr. Lyon, if you want to know it." When Felix gives Esther an account of his plans, and describes to her his purpose to do what he can to elevate his class, we have George Eliot's own views on the subject of social reform. Felix says,-- "I want to be a demagogue of a new sort: an honest one, if possible, who will tell the people they are blind and foolish, and neither flatter them nor batten on them. I have my heritage--an order I belong to. I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins, and I want to stand up for the lot of the handicraftsmen as a good lot, in which a man may be better trained to all the best functions of his nature, than if he belonged to the grimacing set who have visiting-cards, and are proud to be thought richer than their neighbors." That the leading aim of _Felix Holt_ is to show the nature of true social reform may be seen in the address made by Felix at the election, and even more distinctly in the address put into his mouth in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1868. In the election speech Felix gives it as his belief that if workingmen "go the right way to work they may get power sooner without votes" than with them, by the use of public opinion, "the greatest power under heaven." The novel points out the social complications of life, the influence of hereditary privileges and abuses, and how every attempt at reform is complicated by many interests, and is likely to fall into the hands of demagogues who use the workingmen for their own purposes. The address of Felix in _Blackwood's_ is really a commentary on the novel, or rather a fine and suggestive summary of the moral, social and political idea; it was meant to inculcate. In _Felix Holt_, George Eliot would teach the world that true social reform is not to be secured by act of Parliament, or by the possession of the ballot on the part of all workingmen. It is but another enforcement of the theory that it is not rights men are to seek after, but duties; that social and political reform is not to be secured by insistence on rights, but by the true and manly acceptance of altruism. Felix Holt is a social reformer who is not a demagogue, who does not seek office or personal advancement, but who wishes to show by his own conduct how a larger life is to be won. He would introduce universal education; he would teach the great principles of right living, physically and morally; he would inculcate the spirit of helpfulness and mutual service. As a brave, earnest, self-sacrificing, pure-minded lover of humanity, he is an inspiring character. George Eliot evidently wished to indicate in his creation what can be done by workingmen towards the uplifting of their own class. A better social order, she would have us believe, cannot be secured from external sources; but it must be had by an internal impulse moving those whose lives are degraded to seek for higher things because of their own intrinsic good. The demagogue seeks the elevation of workingmen because he can use them for his own advancement; but Felix desires their elevation for the good of the whole social structure. To this end he would inspire in his fellows a greater moral ambition and zeal for the common good. He is a Mazzini, Castelar or John Bright in his own social order; one who loves his own class, wishes to remain in it, and who desires above all things that it shall do its part in the work of national elevation. His aim is not to oppose the other classes in society, but to make his own necessary to the prosperity of his country. Felix is not an ideal character, for he is rough, uncultured and headstrong; but he is an inspiring personality, with gifts of intellectual fascination and moral courage. George Eliot has created no other character like him, for Deronda and Zarca, whose aims somewhat resemble his, are very different. He is no hero, he is not altogether an attractive person. He has, however, the power, which some of the noblest of George Eliot's characters possess, of attracting and uplifting other persons. He made Esther realize the wide gulf between self-pleasing and duty, he inspired her with moral courage and awakened her mind to the higher aims and satisfactions life has to give us. He was undoubtedly meant for a moral hero of the working class, a prophet to the laborers. With all his limitations he is one of the noblest and most helpful characters in George Eliot's books. Other distinctive ideas of George Eliot's appear throughout this book. Her theories of heredity, altruism and environment affect the whole development of the story. Perhaps no more striking illustration of the law of retribution is to be found in her books than in the case of Mrs. Transome. This woman's sin corrupted her own life, and helped to darken the lives of others. The aim had in view in _Middlemarch_ is to illustrate the impotence of modern life so far as it relates in moral heroism and spiritual attainment. High and noble action is hindered and baulked by the social conditions in the midst of which we live; and those who would live grandly and purely, and in a supreme unselfishness devote themselves to the world, find that their efforts are in vain. Dorothea has longings after a life of love and service; she would live for high purposes and give herself for others' good. Her hopes end in disaster almost; and she is cramped and baulked on every side. Lydgate would devote himself to science, to patient investigations for the sake of alleviating human misery and disease. His social environment cripples him, and his life comes to nothing compared with what he had aimed at, and what he was capable of attaining. Dorothea is presented as capable of becoming a saint, being of an ardent, heroic nature, a woman who yearned after some lofty conception of the world that was to be made, not merely poetry, but an actual fact about her; who was "enamoured of intensity and greatness," and "likely to seek martyrdom." The difficulties which most beset such a nature are presented in the very first chapter, where these saintly tendencies are considered as probable obstacles to her making a good marriage. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly, as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles--who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy, and the keeping of saddle-horses; a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. The social life of Tipton really had no room for such a woman, could not employ her rare gifts, knew not what to make of her yearnings and her charity. And Tipton is the world and modern life, which spurns the heroic, has no place for the poetry of existence, can make nothing of yearnings and longings for high heroism. Because the social order into which she was born could not use her gifts, because the vision of life in her soul was other and higher than that which society had marked out for such as she, her life was wasted in an unhappy marriage. In an earlier age she would have become a St. Theresa, for society then had a place for such souls. Now she bows in reverence to a man of learning, dreams great things of tender service to him; but this proves not to be the place in which she belongs. In the last paragraphs of the book the author gives her own account of Dorothea's failure to reach the good she sought. Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin--young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been "a nice woman," else she would not have married either the one or the other. Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age--on modes of education which make a woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance--on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea's life, where great feelings take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took place is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. The influence of social environment is also presented in _Felix Holt_ as a chief determining agent in the lives of individuals. However high the aims and noble the purposes of the individual, he must succumb to those social influences which are more powerful than he. In the third chapter we are told that-- This history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And the lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For if the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would not have been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills, more or less complimentary and retrospective--conditions in this case essential to the "where" and the "what," without which, as the learned know, there can be no event whatever. In the case of Lydgate, if the ambition was less noble and pure, the fall was greater, and the disaster sadder to contemplate. He, too, was hindered by his "environment," but it was much more of his own creating, the result of his own nature, than in the case of Dorothea. We are told that "he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception, and make a link in the chain of discovery." That he was fully capable of achieving such a result is made to appear by the author. The account given of the discovery he wished to make, abundantly confirms this opinion of him; it also shows how large was George Eliot's learning, and how well she could use it for the novelist's purposes. To show how a person capable of such work could be entangled in the ordinary affairs of life and lose sight of his youthful vision, or at least the power of realizing it, is the purpose developed in the career of Lydgate. There were "spots of commonness" in his nature. These-- lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. The egotism of his nature, his incapacity for hard, severe economy and the exclusion of luxury and refined pleasure, proved his destruction. Along with this egotism went a too susceptible impressiveness in the presence of beautiful women of soft, delicate ways. He meant to do great things in science, but he could not endure the discipline, the sacrifice, the long years of waiting, by which the great result was to be attained. Even if he could have done this, he lost the power of doing it through the social environment of marriage. How a man's love for a woman may corrupt the heroic purposes of his life is hinted at in one of the paragraphs in which George Eliot describes Lydgate, and the vision which enamoured his young life until the woman turned all his gold into dross. We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is wound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average, and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness for perhaps their ardor for generous, unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath toward infecting them when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came with the vibration from a woman's glance. The pathetic and saddening tragedy of a man's failure to realize the possibilities of his own nature was never more clearly and minutely told than in the case of Lydgate. We see all the steps of his fall, we know all the reasons why it came, we comprehend fully what he might have been and done. The bitterness of his own failure made him call his wife a basil plant--"a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains." His hair never became white, but having won a large practice in his profession, he had his life heavily insured, and died at the age of fifty. He regarded his own life as a failure, though he was outwardly successful and "his skill was relied on by many paying patients." Against his will, by ways and causes he could not foresee, through the tenderness and ease of his own nature, the vision of his youth did not come true. Perhaps _Middlemarch_ is the most perfect example among George Eliot's novels of her purpose to show how we are guided, controlled and modified in our thought and action by the whole society of which the individual forms a single atom. Many characters appear in _Middlemarch_, drawn with wonderful skill and finish, each having some part to perform in the complicated, play of life, and each some subtle, scarce-understood influence on all. Tragedy and comedy, selfishness and renunciation, greed and charity, love and jealousy, mingle here as in life. Many of these characters, such as Caleb Garth, Farebrother, Mrs. Cadwallader and Mr. Brooke, are remarkable portraitures, original and well conceived; but they all have their place in the social structure, and serve a purpose in the moral issue to be worked out. It has been said of _Felix Holt_, and justly, that its characters are too typical, too much representative of a class, and too little personal in their natures and individual in their actions. Yet this method of treating character is consistent with the purpose of the novel, which is quite as much ethical as literary. Here we have imbruted and ignorant workingmen, laborers who would elevate their class, pious Dissenters, typical clergymen of the Church of England, old hereditary families with the smouldering evils which accumulate about them, ambitious and unscrupulous adventurers, and all the other phases of character likely to be found in such a town as Treby Magna. Each person stands for a class; and the aim of the novel is to indicate how the relative position of the classes represented may be changed with as little as possible of disorder and disruption. It should be borne in mind, however, that the aim of George Eliot is not exclusively ethical. _Felix Holt_ and _Middlemarch_ are not ethical or socialistic treatises, and the whole purpose does not run in these directions. She ever keeps in mind, however, the great fact that on the ethical basis of right and wrong rests all the tragedy and comedy of the world. Her ideas are made alive with genius, and her ethical purposes take color in the glow of a brilliant imagination. She never did violence to the rule which she stated in her essay on the poet Young. On its theoretic and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its emotional side, art. Now the products of art are great in proportion as they result from that immediate prompting of innate power which we call genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius, or innate prompting, is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection _why_ it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, _i.e._, has affinity with art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, "I ought to love"--it loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"--it pities. Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"--it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this; we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic--which insist on a "lesson," and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion. The moral and social problems of life seem to fire her creative powers, kindle her imagination, and give rein to her genius. While the thoughtful reader may find in _Felix Holt_ and _Middlemarch_ more that interests his speculative faculties than of what will satisfy his sentiments and imagination, yet he must keep in mind the fact that these are works depending largely for their effect on the mind to their poetic qualities. There is in them both a large and thoughtful contemplation of life, but with a constant reference to its passion, sentiment and ideal aims. If they are realistic it is not to the exclusion of spiritual elements; and the poetic, sentimental phases of human existence are never ignored. XVI. DANIEL DERONDA. The purpose of George Eliot's last novel is distinctly constructive. While there is much of criticism in its pages, and criticism of the severest kind, its aim is that of spiritual renewal and upbuilding. It unfolds her conception of social growth, and of the influence of tradition and the national idea, much more completely than any other of her works. Moreover, it is all aglow with moral enthusiasm and spiritual ardor. It indicates a greater spontaneity than any of her books after _The Mill on the Floss_, and gives ample evidence that it possessed and absorbed the author's mind with its purpose and spirit. It is written from a great depth of conviction and moral earnestness. That it is her greatest book, artistically considered, there is no reason for believing; that it has its serious limitations as a literary creation all the critics have said. Yet it remains also to be said, that for largeness of aim, wealth of sentiment, and purity of moral teaching, no other book of George Eliot's surpasses _Daniel Deronda_. Indeed, in its realization of the spiritual basis of life, and in its portrayal of the religious sentiment, as these are understood by positivism, this book surpasses every other, by whomsoever written. _Daniel Deronda_ is a romance, and hence differs in kind, conception, scope, circumstance and form from her other works. It is less a study of character than most of her other works, has more of adventure and action; and while it is no less realistic, yet it has higher ideal aims, and seeks to interpret what ought to be. At least three distinct purposes may be seen running through the book, which blend into and confirm each other: to show the all-powerful influence of heredity, that blood will assert itself as more effective than any conditions of social environment or education; to indicate that ideals, subjective feelings and sentiments form the reality and the substance of religion, and that tradition affords the true medium of its expression; and to contrast a form of social life based on individualism with one based on tradition. The aim of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is many-sided, and cannot be expressed in a few phrases. It is too vital with life, touches the emotions and sentiments too often, has an ideal motive too large, to be dismissed with a quickly spoken word of contempt. Professor Dowden, one of her best and most sympathetic critics, has said that it is "an homage to the emotions rather than to the intellect of man. Her feeling finds expression not only in occasional gnomic utterances in which sentiments are declared to be the best part of the world's wealth, and love is spoken of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are baseless. The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect, an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude of science. The main forces which operate in it are sympathies, aspirations, ardors; and ideas chiefly as associated with these." The object aimed at is ideal and religious, much more than intellectual and scientific, to show how necessary is religion, how weak and imperfect is man when the ideal side of his nature is undeveloped. It makes clear the author's conviction concerning the importance of religion, that she prized its spiritual hopes, found satisfaction in its enthusiasms and aspirations. When Gwendolen was cast down in utter dejection, all of joy and delight the world had afforded her gone, and she felt the greatest need of something to comfort and sustain her in her distrust of self and the world, Deronda said to her, "The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities." The religion inculcated, to be sure, is not that of faith in a personal God and a personal immortality, but that which is based on the mystery of life and nature, impressed on the sensitive soul of man in fears, sorrows, hopes, aspirations, and built up into great ideals and institutions through tradition. _Daniel Deronda_ gives us the gospel of altruism, a new preaching of love to man. _Daniel Deronda_ proves as no other writing has ever done, what is the charm and the power of these ideas when dissociated from any spiritual hopes which extend beyond humanity. In order to give the most adequate expression to her ideas, and to show forth the power of the spiritual life as she conceived it, George Eliot made use of that race and religion which presents so remarkable an illustration of the influence of tradition and heredity. She saw in Judaism a striking confirmation of her theories, and a proof of what ideal interests can do to preserve a nation. To vindicate that race in the eyes of the world, to show what capacity there is in its national traditions, was also a part of her purpose. That this was her aim may be seen in what she said to a young Jew in whom she was much interested. I wrote about the Jews because I consider them a fine old race who have done great things for humanity. I feel the same admiration for them as I do for the Florentines. The same idea is to be seen very clearly in the last essay in the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. She regarded the great memories and traditions of this people as a priceless legacy which may and ought to draw all the scattered Israelites together and unite them again in a common national life. A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence, yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to suffice for social energy. This was one of the favorite ideas of George Eliot, which she has again and again expressed. She was impressed with the conviction that such a national life is necessary to the world's growth and welfare, that the era of a common brotherhood, dissociated from national traditions and hopes, has not yet come. Hence her belief that Judaism ought to speak the voice of a united race, occupying the old home of this people, and sending forth its ideas as a national inheritance and inspiration. This belief inspires the concluding words of her essay, as well as the last chapters of the novel. There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their fathers. There is a sense which the worthy child of a nation that has brought forth industrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the world, is bound by their visions. Is bound? Yes; for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation of his national family. Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the superstition that a theory of human well-being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human. The purpose of _Daniel Deronda_, however, is not merely to vindicate Judaism. This race and its religion are used as the vehicles for larger ideas, as an illustration of the supreme importance to mankind of spiritual aims concentrated into the form of national traditions and aspirations. Her own studies, and personal intercourse with the Jews, helped to attract her to this race; but the main cause of her use of them in this novel is their remarkable history. Their moral and spiritual persistence, their wonderful devotedness to their own race and its aims, admirably adapted them to develop for her the ideas she wished to express. What nation could she have taken that would have so clearly illustrated her theory of national memories and traditions? In the forty-second chapter of _Daniel Deronda_ she has put into the month of Mordecai her own theories on this subject. He vindicates his right to call himself a _rational_ Jew, one who accepts what is reasonable and true. "It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kinship; the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of man rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm?" He declares that each nation has its own work to do in the world, in the uplifting and maintenance of some special idea which is necessary to the welfare and development of humanity. The place he assigns to Judaism is precisely that which made it dear to George Eliot, because it embodied her conception of religion and its social functions. "Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us." Again, he utters words which are simply an expression of George Eliot's own sentiments. "Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth--where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a fable of the Roman that, swimming to save his life, he held the roll of his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes--yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung with the teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters, they said, 'The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation--lasting because movable--so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.' They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scared like the unowned dog, the Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed, and draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy." Then Mordecai unfolds his theory of national unity and of a regenerated national life; and it is impossible to read his words attentively without accepting them as an expression of George Eliot's own personal convictions. As an embodiment of her conception of the functions of national life they are full of interest aside from their place in the novel. "In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West--which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, us of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.... The effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfilment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people, whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar; they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jewelled breast-plate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political counsellors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which difficulty means new device--let them say, 'We will lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood.' They have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old--a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amidst the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin.... "What is needed is the leaven--what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the torch of visible community be lighted! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth, and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say, 'It cannot be'? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father's nakedness and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Home, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames.... "I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but wrong. The masters have said an offence against man is worse than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews who are children of the ignorant and oppressed--what wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?--only two centuries since a vessel earned over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting waters; they were various in habit and sect. There came a time, a century ago, when they needed a polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art and wisdom. So will a new Judea, poised between East and West--a covenant of reconciliation. Will any say the prophetic vision of your race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry; the angel of progress hag no message for Judaism--it is a half-buried city for the paid workers to lay open--the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have to choose, that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward; the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world--not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there: it will be fulfilled." These words put into the mouth of Mordecai, indicate how thoroughly George Eliot entered into the spirit of Judaism. She read Hebrew with ease, and had delved extensively in Jewish literature, besides being familiar with the monumental works in German devoted to Jewish history and opinions. The religious customs, the home life, the peculiar social habits of the race, she carefully studied. The accuracy of her information has been pointed out by her Jewish critics, by whom the book has been praised with the utmost enthusiasm. One of these, Prof. David Kaufmann, of Buda-Pesth, in an excellent notice of _Daniel Deronda_, bears testimony to the author's learning and to the faithfulness of her Jewish portraitures. He says that, "led by cordial and loving inclination to the profound study of Jewish national and family life, she has set herself to create Jewish characters, and to recognize and give presentment to the influences which Jewish education is wont to exercise--to prove by types that Judaism is an intellectual and spiritual force, still misapprehended and readily overlooked, but not the less an effective power, for the future of which it is good assurance that it possesses in the body of its adherents a noble, susceptible and pliant material which only awaits its final casting to appear in a glorious form." He also says of the author's learning, that it is loving and exact, that her descriptions of Jewish life are always faithful and her characters true to nature. "Leader of the present so-called realistic school, our author keeps up in this work the reputation she has won of possessing the most minute knowledge of the subjects she handles, by the manner in which she has described the Jews--the great unknown of humanity. She has penetrated into their history and literature affectionately and thoroughly; and her knowledge in a field where ignorance is still venial if not expressly authorized, has astonished even experts. In her selection of almost always unfamiliar quotations, she shows a taste and a facility of reference really amazing. When shall we see a German writer exhibiting the courteous kindliness of George Eliot, who makes Deronda study Zunz's _Synagogale Poesie_, and places the monumental words which open his chapter entitled 'Leiden,' at the head of the passage in which she introduces us to Ezra Cohen's family, and at the club-meeting at which Mordecai gives utterance to his ideas concerning the future of Israel? She is familiar with the views of Jehuda-ha-Levi as with the dreams and longings of the cabalists, and as conversant with the splendid names of our Hispano--Arabian epoch as with the moral aphorisms of the Talmud and the subtle meaning contained in Jewish legends.... It is by the piety and tenderness with which she treats Jewish customs that the author shows how supreme her cultivation and refinement are; and the small number of mistakes which can be detected in her descriptions of Jewish life and ritual may put to blush even writers who belong to that race." Again this critic says of the visionary Mordecai, who has been pronounced a mere dreamer and untrue to nature, that he is an altogether probable character and portrayed with a true realistic touch." Mordecai is carved of the wood from which prophets are made, and so far as the supersensuous can be rendered intelligible, it may even be said that in studying him we are introduced into a studio or workshop of the prophetic mind. He is one of the most difficult as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness features which are familiar to us all." Another Jew has borne equally hearty testimony to the faithfulness with which George Eliot has described Jewish life and the spirit of the Jewish religion. "She has acquired," this writer says, "an extended and profound knowledge of the rites, aspirations, hopes, fears and desires of the Israelites of the day. She has read their books, inquired into their modes of thought, searched their traditions, accompanied them to the synagogue; nay, she has taken their very words from their lips, and, like Asmodeus, has unroofed their houses. To say that some slight errors have crept into _Daniel Deronda_ is to say that no human work is perfect; and these inaccuracies are singularly few and unimportant." [Footnote: James Picciotto, author of "sketches of Anglo-Jewish History," in the Gentleman's Magazine for November, 1876.] Still another Jewish critic says that in her gallery of portraits she "gives in a marvellously full and accurate way all the many sides of the Jewish complex national character." He also says that Mordecai is a true successor of the prophets and moral leaders of the race, that the national spirit and temper are truly represented in him. [Footnote: Joseph Jacobs, in Macmillian's Magazine for 1877.] That the main purpose of _Daniel Deronda_ is not that of defending Judaism, must be apparent to every attentive reader. The Jewish race is made use of for purposes of illustration, as a notable example in proof of her theories. There is a deeper purpose conspicuous throughout the hook, which rests on her conceptions of the spiritual life as a development of tradition. This larger purpose also jests on her altruistic conception of the moral and spiritual life. As Professor Kaufmann has pointed out, the story falls into two widely separated portions, in one of which the Jewish element appears, in the other the English. Jewish life and its religious spirit are contrasted with English life and a common type of its religion. This is not a contrast, however, which is introduced for the purpose of disparaging Christianity or English social life, but with the object of comparing those whose life is anchored in the spiritual traditions of a great people, with those who find the centre of their life in egotism and an individualistic spirit. Grandcourt is a type of pure egotism; Gwendolen is a creature who lives for self and with no law outside of her own happiness. This is the spirit of the society in which they both move. On the other hand, Mordecai lives in his race, Deronda gives his life constantly away for others, and Mirah is unselfishness and simplicity itself. So distinctly is this contrast drawn, so clearly are these two phases of life brought over against each other, that the book seems to be divided in the middle, and to be two separate works joined by a slender thread. This artistic arrangement has been severely criticised, but its higher purpose is only understood when this comparison and antagonism is recognized. Then the true artistic arrangement vindicates itself, and the unity of the book becomes apparent. Deronda moves in both these worlds, and their influence on him is finely conceived. He finds no spiritual aim and motive for his life until he is led into the charmed circle of a traditional environment, and learns to live in and for his race. Living for self, the life of Gwendolen is blasted, her hopes crushed, and she finds no peace or promise except in the steadfast spiritual strength yielded her by Deronda. That such a contrasting of the two great phases of life was a part of George Eliot's purpose she has herself acknowledged. A comparison of the spiritual histories of Gwendolen and Deronda will show how earnest was this purpose of the author. Gwendolen is a type of those souls who have no spiritual anchorage in the religious life and traditions of their people. At the opening of chapter third we are told she had no home memories, that "this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen's life." At the end of the sixth chapter we are also told that she had no insight into spiritual realities, that the bonds of spiritual power and moral retribution had not been made apparent to her mind. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more spiritual restraints, having always disliked whatever was presented to her under the name of religion, in the same way that some people dislike arithmetic and accounts: it had raised no other emotion in her, no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it, had not occurred to her, any more than it had occurred to her to inquire into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she had had many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was dependent. All these facts about herself she would have been ready to admit, and even, more or less indirectly, to state. What she unwillingly recognized, and would have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread, though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her, or with any human relations. She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when, for example, she was walking without companionship and there came some rapid change in the light. Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her imagination at work in a way that made her tremble; but always when some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world, in which her will was of some avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to this world was no more identified for her with those uneasy impressions of awe than her uncle's surplices seen out of use at the rectory. With human ears and eyes about her, she had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire. Her difficulties all came out of this egoistic spirit, this want of spiritual anchorage and religious faith. Gradually her bitter experiences awakened in her a desire for a purer life, and the influence of Deronda worked powerfully in the same direction. She is to be regarded, however, as simply a representative of that social, moral and spiritual life bred in our century by the disintegrating forces everywhere at work. No moral ideal, no awe of the divine Nemesis, no spiritual sympathy with the larger life of the race, is to be found in her thought. The radicalism of the time, which neglects religious training, which scorns the life of the past, which lives for self and culture, is destroying all that is best in modern society. Gwendolen is one of the results of these processes, an example of that impoverished life which is so common, arising from religious rebellion and egotism. Another motive and spirit is represented in the character of Deronda. As a boy, his mind was full of ideal aspirations, he was chivalrous and eager to help and comfort others. He would take no mean advantages in his own behalf, he loved the comradeship of those whom he could help, he was always ready with his sympathy. He was early impassioned by ideas, and burned his fire on those heights. He would not regard his studies as instruments of success, but as the means whereby to feed motive and opinion. He had a strong craving for comprehensiveness of opinion, and was not content to store up knowledge that demanded a mere act of memory in its acquisition. He had a craving after a larger life, an ideal aim of the most winning attractiveness. Though Deronda was educated amidst surroundings almost identical with those which helped to form Gwendolen's character, yet a very different result was produced in him because of his _inherited_ tendencies of mind. After he had seen his mother, learned that he was a Jew, he said to Mordecai,-- "It is you who have given shape to what I believe was an inherited yearning--the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in my ancestors-- thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather. Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, and born blind--the ancestral life would be within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly wrought musical instrument never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music. Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some social captainship which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize. You have raised the image of such a task for me--to bind our race together in spite of heresy." This inherited sense of a larger life made Deronda what he was, and developed in him qualities absent in Gwendolen. This inherited power made him a new Mazzini, a born leader of men, a new saviour of society, a personal magnet to attract and inspire other souls. A magnetic power of influence drew Gwendolen to him from the first time they met, he shamed her narrow life by his silent presence, and he quickened to life in her a desire for a purer and nobler existence. George Eliot probably meant to indicate in his character her conception of the true social reformation which is needed to-day, and how it is to be brought about. The basis on which it is to be built is the traditional and inherited life of the past, inspired with new energies and meanings by the gifted souls who have inherited a large and pure personality, and who are inspired by a quickened sense of what life ought to be. On the one side a life of altruism, on the other a life of egotism, teach that the liner social and moral qualities come out of an inheritance in the national ideals and conquests of a worthy people, while the coarser qualities come of the neglect of this source of spiritual power and sustenance. Two letters written to Professor David Kaufmann indicate that this was the purpose of the hook. At the same time, they show George Eliot's mind on other sides, and give added insights into her character. As an indication of her attitude towards Judaism, and her faith in the work she had done in Daniel Deronda, they are of great value. THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, May 31, '77. MY DEAR SIR,--Hardly, since I became an author, have I had a deeper satisfaction, I may say a more heartfelt joy, than you have given me in your estimate of _Daniel Deronda_. [Footnote: George Eliot and Judaism: an Attempt to Appreciate Daniel Deronda. By Prof. David Kaufmann, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth.] I must tell you that it is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in me. For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion of good and evil in our work, is the painful impression that we write for a public which has no discernment of good and evil. My husband reads any notices of me that come before him, and reports to me (or else refrains from reporting) the general character of the notice, or something in particular which strikes him as showing either an exceptional insight or an obtuseness that is gross enough to be amusing. Very rarely, when he has read a critique of me, he has handed it to me, saying, "_You_ must read this." And your estimate of _Daniel Deronda_ made one of these rare instances. Certainly, if I had been asked to choose _what_ should be written about my book and _who_ should write it, I should have sketched--well, not anything so good as what you have written, but an article which must be written by a Jew who showed not merely sympathy with the best aspirations of his race, but a remarkable insight into the nature of art and the processes of the artistic mind. Believe me, I should not have cared to devour even ardent praise if it had not come from one who showed the discriminating sensibility, the perfect response to the artist's intention, which must make the fullest, rarest joy to one who works from inward conviction and not in compliance with current fashions. Such a response holds for an author not only what is best in "the life that now is," but the promise of "that which is to come." I mean that the usual approximative, narrow perception of what one has been intending and professedly feeling in one's work, impresses one with the sense that it must be poor perishable stuff without roots to hike any lasting hold in the minds of men; while any instance of complete comprehension encourages one to hope that the creative prompting has foreshadowed, and will continue to satisfy, a need in other minds. Excuse me that I write but imperfectly, and perhaps dimly, what I have felt in reading your article. It has affected me deeply, and though the prejudice and ignorant obtuseness which has met my effort to contribute something to the ennobling of Judaism in the conception of the Christian community and in the consciousness of the Jewish community, has never for a moment made me repent my choice, but rather has been added proof to me that the effort has been needed,--yet I confess that I had an unsatisfied hanger for certain signs of sympathetic discernment, which you only have given. I may mention as one instance your clear perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish element and those of English social life. I work under the pressure of small hurries; for we are just moving into the country for the summer, and all things are in a vagrant condition around me. But I wished not to defer answering your letter to an uncertain opportunity.... My husband has said more than once that he feels grateful to you. For he is more sensitive on my behalf than on his own. Hence he unites with me in the assurance of the high regard with which I remain Always yours faithfully, M.E. LEWES. This first letter was followed a few months later by a second. THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, REGENT'S PAKE, Oct. 12, '77. MY DEAR SIR,--I trust it will not be otherwise than gratifying to you to know that your stirring article on _Daniel Deronda_ is now translated into English by a son of Prof. Ferrier, who was a philosophical writer of considerable mark. It will be issued in a handsomer form than that of the pamphlet, and will appear within this autumnal publishing season, Messrs. Blackwood having already advertised it. Whenever a copy is ready we shall have the pleasure of sending it to you. There is often something to be borne with in reading one's own writing in a translation, but I hope that in this case you will not be made to wince severely. In waiting to send you this news I seem to have deferred too long the expression of my warm thanks for your kindness in sending me the Hebrew translations of Leasing and the collection of Hebrew poems, a kindness which I felt myself rather presumptuous in asking for, since your time must be well filled with more important demands. Yet I must further beg you, when you have an opportunity, to assure Herr Bacher that I was most gratefully touched by the sympathetic verses with which he enriched the gift of his work. I see by your last letter to my husband that your Theological Seminary was to open on the 4th of this month, so that this too retrospective letter of mine will reach you in the midst of your new duties. I trust that this new institution will be a great good to professor and students, and that your position is of a kind that you contemplate as permanent. To teach the young personally has always seemed to me the most satisfactory supplement to teaching the world through books, and I have often wished that I had such a means of having fresh, living, spiritual children within sight. One can hardly turn one's thought toward Eastern Europe just now without a mingling of pain and dread; but we mass together distant scenes and events in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that the present troubles will not at any time press on you in Hungary with more external misfortune than on us in England. Mr. Lewes is happily occupied in his psychological studies. We both look, forward to the reception of the work you kindly promised us, and he begs me to offer you his best regards. Believe me, my dear sir, Yours with much esteem, M.E. LEWES. It was a part of George Eliot's purpose in _Daniel Deronda_ to criticise the social life of England in the spirit in which she had criticised it in _Middlemarch_, as being deficient in spiritual power, moral purpose and noble sentiment. If she made it clear in _Middlemarch_ that the individual is crippled and betrayed by society, it was her purpose to make it quite as clear in _Daniel Deronda_ how society may become the true inspirer of the individual. We may quarrel with her theory of the origin and nature of the spiritual life in man, but she has somewhat truly conceived its vast importance and shown the character of that influence it everywhere has over man's life. As types of spiritual lifts, and as individual conceptions of human character, the personages of this novel are drawn with marvellous skill. Mr. E.P. Whipple says that Daniel Deronda is "one of the noblest and most original characters among the heroes imagined by poets, dramatists and novelists." With equal or even greater justice can it be said that Gwendolen Harleth is one of the most powerful and grandly conceived of imaginary creations in all literature. In the characters, the situations, and the whole working out of this novel, George Eliot shows herself one of the great masters of literary creation. When the prejudices aroused by the Jewish element in it are allayed, and _Daniel Deronda_ is read as a work of literary genius, it will be found not to be the least interesting and important of George Eliot's books. It has the religious interest and inspiration of _Adam Bede_, the historic value of _Romola_, and the critical elements of _Middlemarch_; and these are wrought into a work of lofty insight and imagination, along with a high spiritual ardor and a supreme ethical purpose. In this novel, for the first time, as Professor Dowden says, her poetical genius found adequate expression, and in complete association with the non-poetical elements of her nature. XVII. THE SPANISH GYPSY AND OTHER POEMS. It was _The Spanish Gypsy_, published in 1868, which brought the name of George Eliot before the public as a poet. This work is a novel written in blank verse, with enough of the heroic and tragic in it to make the story worthy of its poetic form. The story is an excellent one, well conceived and worked out, and had it been given the prose form would have made a powerful and original novel. While it would doubtless have gained in definiteness of detail and clearness of purpose by being presented in the prose form, yet its condensation into a poem is a gain, and the whole setting of the story has been made of greater interest by this method of expression. The poetic form is as original as are the theories of life which the poem is designed to inculcate. In structure it combines, with a method quite its own, the descriptive and dramatic forms of poetry. In this it nearly approaches the method followed in her novels of combining description and dialogue in a unitary structure of great strength and perfection. The descriptive passages in her prose works are strong and impressive, lofty in tone, and yet lovingly faithful in detail. Her conversations are often highly dramatic and add greatly to the whole outcome of these novels. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ the surroundings of the story are first described in verse which, if not always perfectly poetic, is yet imaginatively thought out and executed in a manner befitting the subject. Suddenly, however, the narrative and descriptive form ceases and the dramatic begins. By means also of full "stage directions" to the dramatic portions of the poem, the story is wrought out quite as much in detail as it needs to be; and much is gained of advantage over the length of her novels by this concentration of scene and narrative. While the narrative portion of the poem is much less in extent than the dramatic, yet it has in it some of the main elements of the plot, and those without which the action could not be worked out. The dramatic element gives it a real and living power. The characters are strongly conceived, and nearly all of them are individualities of an original type and of an action thoroughly distinct and human. As a work of art, the most serious defect in _The Spanish Gypsy_ is its doctrinal tone. It is speculative in its purpose quite as much as poetical, and the speculation is so large an element as to intrude upon the poetry. Thought overtops imagination, the fervor and enthusiasm of the poet are more than matched by the ethical aims of the teacher. This ethical purpose of unfolding in a dramatic form the author's theories of life has filled the book, as it has her novels, with epigrams which are original, splendid and instructive. Into a few lines she condenses some piece of wisdom, and in words full of meaning and purpose. Into the mouth of Sephardo, a character distinctive and noteworthy, she puts some of her choicest wisdom. He says,-- Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead. Again he utters the same idea, but in more expressive words. Our growing thought Makes growing revelation. Don Silva is made to use this highly poetic imagery. Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken. Zarca, that truest and most original character in the poem, says of the great work he purposes to accomplish, To my inward vision Things are achieved when they are well begun. Again, he says,-- New thoughts are urgent as the growth of wings. Expressive and original as _The Spanish Gypsy_ is, yet it gives the impression of lacking in some poetic quality which is necessary to the highest results. Difficult as it may be to define precisely what it is that is wanting, nearly every reader will feel that something which makes poetry has been somehow left out. Is it imagination, or is it a flexible poetic expression, which is absent? While George Eliot has imagination enough to make a charming prose style, and to adorn her prose with great beauty and an impressive manner, yet its finer quality of subtle expression is not to be found in her poetry. Those original and striking shades of meaning which the poet employs by using words in unique relations, she does not often attain to. It is the thought, the ethical meaning, in her poetry as in her prose, which is often of more importance than the manner of expression; and she is too intent on what is said to give full heed always to how it is said. She has, however, employed that form of verse which is best suited to her style, and one which does not demand those lyrical or those imaginative qualities in which she is deficient. The blank verse is well adapted to her realism, though it does not always answer well to the more dramatic and tragical and impassioned portions of the story. As a study of an historic period, _The Spanish Gypsy_ is not so great a success as _Romola_; yet it more perfectly unfolds a unitary moral purpose, and the various types of character are more originally developed. The conflict of motives, the contrasted and opposed national interests, are distinctly brought out, but the aroma of the time and place are wanting. To describe a poetic and heroic era she is never content to do. Her method is totally different from that of Scott, who reflects the spirit and life of the time he depicts with almost absolute faithfulness. No gypsy was ever such a character as Zarca, no gypsy girl ever had the conscience of Fedalma. As in the case of _Romola_, so here, an historic period is used, not so much for artistic as for philosophic purposes, because it is well designed to present her ideas about heredity and tradition. _The Spanish Gypsy_ is essentially a romance, and contains much of those more poetic and ideal elements which distinguish _Daniel Deronda_ from her other novels. This romantic element, if it does not develop poetry of the highest quality, does bring out in its most perfect form all the finest characteristics of her style. While _The Spanish Gypsy_ affords many points of attack for the critic, yet it cannot be dismissed by saying it is not a great poem. Its strong qualities are too many to permit of its being disposed of in haste. With all its defects it is a noble piece of work, and genuinely adds to the author's expression of genius. It is one of those poems which win, not popularity, but the heartiest admiration of a choice and elect few who find life and highest inspiration in it, because giving strength to their thoughts and purpose to their moral convictions. As a study of some of the deeper problems of the ethical and social life of man, it is unsurpassed, and the teaching imparted by it is singularly well and impressively conveyed by the whole make of the poem. It is also remarkable for its large and impressive style, its rich command of words, and the lofty beauty of its diction. One of its most striking qualities, as Mr. Henry James, Jr., suggests, "is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and eloquence," and "its splendid generosity of diction." The same writer says of the character of Don Silva, that "nowhere has her marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph." The critics have almost without exception dealt severely with the poem, but they have applied to it the canons of poetic art as interpreted by themselves. Genius creates its own laws, makes its own methods, reverses old decisions and triumphs against the whole brood of critics. The world accepts what is true and excellent, however defective in technical requirements. Imperfect meters, and poetic structures not orthodox, may disturb those who deal in criticism, but such limitations as these are not sufficient to fix the final acceptance of a poem. More than one of the greatest poems could not endure such tests. That _The Spanish Gypsy_ has vitality of purpose, enduring interest in treatment, and a lofty eloquence of diction, is doubtless enough to insure it an accepted place among the few greater poems in the language. Its profoundly thoughtful interpretation of some of the greater social problems mankind has to deal with, will necessarily give a permanent interest for the lovers of speculative poetry, while its genuine poetic merits will largely add to that interest, and add to it by its tragic power, its rich ethical wisdom, and its fine portrayal of character. No other book of George Eliot's is so filled and inspired by the spirit of her teachings as _The Spanish Gypsy_. Its inspiration and its interest lie mainly in the direction of its moral and spiritual inculcations. Verse did not stimulate her, but was a fetter; it clogged her highest powers. The rich eloquence of her prose, with its pathos and sentiment, its broad perspective and vigorous thought, was to her a continual stimulus and incentive. Her poems are more labored than her novels, and for this very reason they show the philosophy which gives them meaning more clearly. Their greater concentration and less varied elements also largely help to make apparent the teachings they contain. Her sympathy with the evolution philosophy of the day is conspicuous in _The Spanish Gypsy_. It is simply a dramatic interpretation of the higher phases of Darwinism. The doctrinal element does not intrude itself, however; it is not on the surface, it is well subordinated to the artistic elements of the poem. Even intelligent readers may not detect it, and the majority of those who read the poem without any preconceptions may not discover its philosophic bearings. Yet to the studious reader the philosophy must be the most conspicuous element which enters into the poem, and it gives character and meaning to the work far more fully than in the case of any of her novels. The aim of the poem is to show how hereditary race influences act as a tragic element in opposition to individual emotions and inclinations. The teaching of _Romola_ is much of it reproduced, at least that portion of it which inculcates renunciation and altruism. Its distinguishing features, however, more nearly resemble those of _Daniel Deronda_. The race element is introduced, and the effect of the past is shown as it forms character and gives direction to duties. One phase of its meaning has been very clearly described by Mr. R.H. Hutton, who says the poem teaches "how the inheritance of the definite streams of impulse and tradition stored up in what we call race, often puts a veto upon any attempt of spontaneous individual emotion or volitions to ignore or defy their Control, and to emancipate itself from the tyranny of their disputable and apparently cruel rule." "How the threads," he says again, "of hereditary capacity and hereditary sentiment control as with invisible chords the orbits of even the most powerful characters,--how the fracture of those threads, so far as can be accomplished by mere _will_, may have even a greater effect in wrecking character than moral degeneracy would itself produce,--how the man who trusts and uses the hereditary forces which natural descent has bestowed upon him, becomes a might and a centre in the world, while the man, intrinsically the nobler, who dissipates his strength by trying to swim against the stream of his past, is neutralized and paralyzed by the vain effort,--again, how a divided past, a past not really homogeneous, may weaken this kind of power, instead of strengthening it by the command of a larger experience--all this George Eliot's poem paints with tragical force." The main thought of _The Spanish Gypsy_ is, that the moral and spiritual in man is the result of social conditions which, if neglected, lead to the destruction of all that is best in human nature. In the description of Mine Host, in the opening pages of the poem, this evil result of a severing of life from tradition is described. He was educated in the Jewish faith, but was made a Christian at the age of ten. So he had to be converted with his sire, To doff the awe he learned as Ephriam, And suit his manners to a Christian name. The poet then delivers one of her doctrinal utterances, and one which is in this case the keynote of the whole poem. But infant awe, that unborn moving thing, Dies with what nourished it, can never rise From the dead womb and walk and seek new pasture. That awe which grows up in childhood, if destroyed later, brings anarchy into human life. All the characters of the poem exemplify this teaching, and each is but a product of his past, individual or social. Don Silva, Zarca, Fedalma, the Prior, Sephardo, illustrate this idea. The latter gives utterance to the thought of the poem, when Don Silva says to him that he has need of a friend who is not tied to sect or party, but who is capable of following his "naked manhood" into what is just and right, without regard to other considerations. My lord, I will be frank; there's no such thing As naked manhood. If the stars look down On any mortal of our shape, whose strength Is to judge all things without preference, He is a monster, not a faithful man. While my heart beats, it shall wear livery-- My people's livery, whose yellow badge Marks them for Christian scorn. I will not say Man is first man to me, then Jew or Gentile: That suits the rich _marranos_; but to me My father is first father and then man. So much for frankness' sake. But let that pass. 'Tis true at least, I am no Catholic But Salomo Sephardo, a born Jew, Willing to serve Don Silva. [Footnote: In a note George Eliot gives the following explanation of the word _marranos_: "The name given by the Spanish Jews to the multitudes of their race converted to Christianity at the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth. The lofty derivation from _Maran-atha_, the Lord cometh, seems hardly called for, seeing that _marrano_ is Spanish for _pig_. The 'old Christians' learned to use the word as a term of contempt for the 'new Christians,' or converted Jews and their descendants; but not too monotonously, for they often interchanged it with the fine old crusted opprobrium of the name _Jew_. Still, many Marranos held the highest secular and ecclesiastical prizes in Spain, and were respected accordingly."] In the conversation between Don Silva and this uncle, the Prior expresses in the strongest language his conviction that Fedalma will in time reveal her gypsy blood, and that any rejection on the part of Don Silva of the life assigned him by his birth will end in sorrow and misery. When Don Silva declares his intention of following his own inclinations the Prior answers,-- Your strength will turn to anguish, like the strength Of fallen angels. Can you change your blood? You are a Christian, with the Christian awe In every vein. A Spanish noble, born To serve your people and your people's faith. Strong, are you? Turn your back upon the Cross-- Its shadow is before you. Leave your place: Quit the great ranks of knighthood: you will walk Forever with a tortured double self, A self that will be hungry while you feast, Will blush with shame while you are glorified, Will feel the ache and chill of desolation Even in the very bosom of your love. This eloquent expostulation against rejection of any of those ties and obligations imposed by birth and race is repeated again in the plea of Zarca to his daughter, when he urges that there is no life and joy for Fedalma apart from that race to which she belongs and those social conditions which gave her mind its characteristics. Will you adopt a soul without its thoughts, Or grasp a life apart from flesh and blood? Till then you cannot wed a Spanish Duke And not wed shame at mention of your race, And not wed hardness to their miseries-- Nay, wed not murder. Zarca and the Prior are each faithful to race, religion and social tradition. Each knows his duty, is content with the opportunities given him by social inheritance, is thoroughly in harmony with his own past. Both are consequently strong, resolute, successful. Zarca is a grand character, and though a hero in a nation of vagabonds, he wholly identifies himself with his people and accepts their destiny as his own. The Prior is a haughty Spanish Churchman, who has inherited all the traits of a noble family, and is proud of his priestly functions. In the case of Don Silva and Fedalma there is a conflict between love and race. The one is a Spanish nobleman, the other the daughter of a Zincala chief. Yet they love, and feel that no outward circumstances are sufficient to separate them. This verdict of their hearts is the verdict of mankind in all ages; but it is not the one arrived at by George Eliot in obedience to her philosophy. The reasons why these two should not wed grew entirely out of the social circumstances of the time. An English nobleman of to-day could marry such a woman as Fedalma without social or other loss. The capacities of soul are superior to conditions of race. Virtue and genius do not depend on social circumstances. Yet _The Spanish Gypsy_ has for its motive the attempt to prove that the life of tradition and inheritance is the one which provides all our moral and social and religious obligations. In conformity with this theory the conflict of the poem arises, because Don Silva is not in intellectual harmony with his own character. A thoughtful, fastidious, sensitive soul was his, not resolute and concentrated in purpose, He was no bigot, could not be content with any narrow aim, saw good on many sides. A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious In his acceptance, dreading all delight That speedy dies and turns to carrion: His senses much exacting, deep instilled With keen imagination's airy needs;-- Like strong-limbed monsters studded o'er with eyes, Their hunger checked by overwhelming vision, Or that fierce lion in symbolic dream Snatched from the ground by wings and new-endowed With a man's thought-propelled relenting heart. Silva was both the lion and the man; First hesitating shrank, then fiercely sprang, Or having sprung, turned pallid at his deed And loosed the prize, paying his blood for naught. A nature half-transformed, with qualities That oft betrayed each other, elements Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects, Passing the reckoning of his friends or foes. Haughty and generous, grave and passionate; With tidal moments of devoutest awe, Sinking anon to furthest ebb of doubt; Deliberating ever, till the sting Of a recurrent ardor made him rush Right against reasons that himself had drilled And marshalled painfully. A spirit framed Too proudly special for obedience, Too subtly pondering for mastery: Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness And perilous heightening of the sentient soul. Too noble and generous to accept the narrow views of his uncle, Don Silva insisted on marrying Fedalma, because he loved her and because she was a pure and true woman. He had a poet's nature, was sensitive to all beauty, and his heart vibrated to all ideal excellence. His love became to him a thing apart, a sacred shrine; and Fedalma was made one with all joy and beauty. He thought all loveliness was lovelier, She crowning it; all goodness credible, Because of that great trust her goodness bred. His love gave a delicious content and melody to his day dreams. O, all comforters, All soothing things that bring mild ecstasy, Came with her coming, in her presence lived. Spring afternoons, when delicate shadows fall Pencilled upon the grass; high summer morns When white light rains upon the quiet sea And cornfields flush with ripeness; odors soft-- Dumb vagrant bliss that seems to seek a home And find it deep within 'mid stirrings vague Of far-off moments when our life was fresh; All sweetly tempered music, gentle change Of sound, form, color, as on wide lagoons At sunset when from black far-floating prows Comes a clear wafted song; all exquisite joy Of a subdued desire, like some strong stream Made placid in the fulness of a lake-- All came with her sweet presence, for she brought The love supreme which gathers to its realm All powers of loving. Subtle nature's hand Waked with a touch the far-linked harmonies In her own manifold work. Fedalma there, Fastidiousness became the prelude fine For full contentment; and young melancholy, Lost for its origin, seemed but the pain Of waiting for that perfect happiness. So strong was Don Silva's love, so ardent his passion for Fedalma, that he forsook all duties and social obligations and became a Zincala for her sake. Yet once awakened to the real consequences of his act, he killed Zarca and sought to regain by hard penances his lost knighthood. With Fedalma also love was an absorbing passion. The passionate devotion of a woman is in her words. No ills on earth, though you should count them up With grains to make a mountain, can outweigh For me his ill who is my supreme love. All sorrows else are but imagined flames, Making me shudder at an unfelt smart; But his imagined sorrow is a fire That scorches me. With great earnestness she says she will-- Never forsake that chief half of her soul Where lies her love. With what depth of love does she utter these words: I belong to him who loves me--whom I love-- Who chose me--whom I chose--to whom I pledged A woman's truth. And that is nature too, Issuing a fresher law than laws of birth. Though her love is deep and passionate and full of a woman's devotedness, the mark of race is set deep within her soul. The moment the claim of race is brought clearly before her as the claim of duty, as the claim of father and of kindred, she accepts it. Her love is not thrown hastily aside, for she loves deeply and truly, and it tears her heart in sunder to renounce it; but she is faithful to duty. Her love grows not less, loses none of its hold upon her heart. No other crown Is aught but thorns on my poor woman's brow. Hers is not a divided self, however; to see the way of duty with her, was to follow in it. Her father's invincible will, courage and patient purpose are her own by inheritance. Once realizing the claim of birth and race, she does not falter, love is resolutely put aside, all delight in culture and refinement becomes dross in her eyes. I will not count On aught but being faithful. I will take This yearning self of mine and strangle it. I will not be half-hearted: never yet Fedalma did aught with a wavering soul. Die, my young joy--die, all my hungry hopes! The milk you cry for from the breast of life Is thick with curses. O, all fatness here Snatches its meat from leanness--feeds on graves. I will seek nothing but to shun base joy. The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain-- The grandest death, to die in vain--for love Greater than sways the forces of the world! That death shall be my bridegroom. I will wed The curse that blights my people. Father, come! The poem distinctly teaches that Fedalma was strong, because the ties of blood were strongly marked upon her mind and willingly accepted by her intellect and conscience; while Don Silva was weak, because he did not acknowledge those ties and accept their law. In the end, however, both declare that the inherited life is the only one which gives joy or duty, and that all individual aims and wishes are to be renounced. The closing scene of this great poem is full of sadness, and yet is strong with moral purpose. Don Silva and Fedalma meet for the last time, she on her way to Africa with her tribe to find a home for it there, he on his way to Rome, to seek the privilege of again using his knightly sword. Both are sad, both feel that life has lost all its joy, both believe it is a bitter destiny which divides them from the fulfilment of their love, and yet both are convinced that love must be forsworn for a higher duty. Their last conversation, opened by Don Silva, is full of power, and concentrates into its last words the total meaning of the poem. I bring no puling prayer, Fedalma--ask No balm of pardon that may soothe my soul For others' bleeding wounds: I am not come To say, "Forgive me:" you must not forgive, For you must see me ever as I am-- Your father's... FEDALMA. Speak it not! Calamity Comes like a deluge and o'erfloods our crimes, Till sin is hidden in woe. You--I--we two, Grasping we knew not what, that seemed delight, Opened the sluices of that deep. DON SILVA. We two?-- Fedalma, you were blameless, helpless. FEDALMA. No! It shall not be that you did aught alone. For when we loved I willed to reign in you, And I was jealous even of the day If it could gladden you apart from me. And so, it must be that I shared each deed Our love was root of. DON SILVA. Dear! you share the woe-- Nay, the worst part of vengeance fell on you. FEDALMA. Vengeance! She does but sweep us with her skirts. She takes large space, and lies a baleful light Revolving with long years--sees children's children, Blights them in their prime. Oh, if two lovers leane To breathe one air and spread a pestilence, They would but lie two livid victims dead Amid the city of the dying. We With our poor petty lives have strangled one That ages watch for vainly. DON SILVA. Deep despair Fills all your tones as with slow agony. Speak words that narrow anguish to some shape: Tell me what dread is close before you? FEDALMA. None. No dread, but clear assurance of the end. My father held within his mighty frame A people's life: great futures died with him Never to rise, until the time shall ripe Some other hero with the will to save The outcast Zincali. DON SILVA. And yet their shout-- I heard it--sounded as the plenteous rush Of full-fed sources, shaking their wild souls With power that promised sway. FEDALMA. Ah yes, that shout Came from full hearts: they meant obedience. But they are orphaned: their poor childish feet Are vagabond in spite of love, and stray Forgetful after little lures. For me-- I am but as the funeral urn that bears The ashes of a leader. DON SILVA. O great God! What am I but a miserable brand Lit by mysterious wrath? I lie cast down A blackened branch upon the desolate ground. Where once I kindled ruin. I shall drink No cup of purest water but will taste Bitter with thy lone hopelessness, Fedalma. FEDALMA. Nay, Silva, think of me as one who sees A light serene and strong on one sole path Which she will tread till death... He trusted me, and I will keep his trust: My life shall be its temple. I will plant His sacred hope within the sanctuary And die its priestess--though I die alone, A hoary woman on the altar-step, Cold 'mid cold ashes. That is my chief good. The deepest hunger of a faithful heart Is faithfulness. Wish me naught else. And you-- You too will live.... DON SILVA. I go to Rome, to seek The right to use my knightly sword again; The right to fill my place and live or die So that all Spaniards shall not curse my name. I sate one hour upon the barren rock And longed to kill myself; but then I said, I will not leave my name in infamy, I will not be perpetual rottenness Upon the Spaniard's air. If I must sink At last to hell, I will not take my stand Among the coward crew who could not bear The harm themselves had done, which others bore. My young life yet may fill some fatal breach, And I will take no pardon, not my own, Not God's--no pardon idly on my knees; But it shall come to me upon my feet And in the thick of action, and each deed That carried shame and wrong shall be the sting That drives me higher up the steep of honor In deeds of duteous service to that Spain Who nourished me on her expectant breast, The heir of highest gifts. I will not fling My earthly being down for carrion To fill the air with loathing: I will be The living prey of some fierce noble death That leaps upon me while I move. Aloud I said, "I will redeem my name," and then-- I know not if aloud: I felt the words Drinking up all my senses--"She still lives. I would not quit the dear familiar earth Where both of us behold the self-same sun, Where there can be no strangeness 'twixt our thoughts So deep as their communion." Resolute I rose and walked.--Fedalma, think of me As one who will regain the only life Where he is other than apostate--one Who seeks but to renew and keep the vows Of Spanish knight and noble. But the breach-- Outside those vows--the fatal second breach-- Lies a dark gulf where I have naught to cast, Not even expiation--poor pretence, Which changes naught but what survives the past, And raises not the dead. That deep dark gulf Divide us. FEDALMA. Yes, forever. We must walk Apart unto the end. Our marriage rite Is our resolve that we will each be true To high allegiance, higher than our love. Our dear young love--its breath was happiness! But it had grown upon a larger life Which tore its roots asunder. We rebelled-- The larger life subdued us. Yet we are wed; For we shall carry each the pressure deep Of the other's soul. I soon shall leave the shore. The winds to-night will bear me far away. My lord, farewell! What has been said of _The Spanish Gypsy_ applies very nearly as well to all her other poems. They are thoughtful, philosophic, realistic; they are sonorous in expression, stately in style, and of a diction eloquent and beautiful. On the whole, the volume containing the shorter poems is a poetical advance on _The Spanish Gypsy_, containing more genuine poetry, more lyrical fire, and a greater proportion of humor, sympathy and passion. They are carefully polished and refined; and yet that indefinable something which marks the truest poetry is wanting. They are saturated with her ideas, the flavor of her thought impregnates them all, with but two or three exceptions. Her artistic conceptions are more fully developed in some of these poems than in any of her novels, especially in "Armgart" and "The Legend of Jubal." The special thought of "Armgart" is, that no artistic success is of so much worth as a loving sympathy with others. The longing of Armgart was to be-- a happy spiritual star Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose Of light in Paradise, whose only self Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused, Music, life, power--I moving in the midst With a sublime necessity of good. Her ambition runs very high. May the day be near when men Think much to let my horses draw me home, And new lands welcome me upon their beach, Loving me for my fame. That is the truth Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie? Pretend to seek obscurity--to sing In hope of disregard? A vile pretence! And blasphemy besides. For what is fame But the benignant strength of One, transformed To joy of Many? Tributes, plaudits come As necessary breathing of such joy; And may they come to me! Armgart is beloved of the Graf, and he tries to persuade her to abandon her artistic career and become his wife. He says to her,-- A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is loyal. Again he says to her,-- Pain had been saved, Nay, purer glory reached, had you been throned As woman only, holding all your art As attribute to that dear sovereignty-- Concentering your power in home delights Which penetrate and purify the world. Armgart will not listen; her whole heart is enlisted in music. She says to the Graf,-- I will live alone and pour my pain With passion into music, where it turns To what is best within my better self. A year later Armgart's throat has failed, and her career has ended in nothing. Then her servant and friend, Walpurga, who has devoted her life to Armgart, speaks that lesson George Eliot would convey in this little story, that a true life is a life of service. Walpurga chides Armgart's false ambition in these words: I but stand As a small symbol for the mighty sum Of claims unpaid to needy myriads; I think you never set your loss beside That mighty deficit. Is your work gone-- The prouder queenly work that paid itself And yet was overpaid with men's applause! Are you no longer chartered, privileged, But sunk to simple woman's penury, To ruthless Nature's chary average-- Where is the rebel's right for you alone? Noble rebellion lifts a common load; But what is he who flings his own load off And leaves his fellows toiling? Rebel's right? Say, rather, the deserter's. Armgart learns from her master, the old and noble Leo, that he had also been ambitious, that he had won only small success, and that he now lived for the sake of the good he could do to those about him. He says to her,-- We must bury our dead joys, And live above them with a living world. Then Armgart is brought to see that there is a noble privilege in living as her friend has lived, in making music a joy to others, and in doing what she can to make life better for humanity. There are two very distinct ideas running through the poem, that a life guided by altruism is better than--a merely artistic life, and that woman is to find in home and wedded joys that opportunity for the development of her soul, without which no artistic career can be complete. The words of the Graf speak George Eliot's own thought, that Armgart's life and her art would have been both more perfect and more noble had she held all her art as attribute to the dear sovereignty of affection. The same artistic conception pervades "The Legend of Jubal." That fame for which Jubal also yearns comes to him, he is taught, in the good which he leaves behind him for humanity to enjoy. He dies, and ceases to be as a personal being. At least this may be inferred from the concluding lines. Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave, The All-creating Presence for his grave. A _sun-wave_ while living, his being is now _quenched_. But he lives on in the life of the race, lives on in man's joy of music, in the deeper life which music awakens in all bosoms through all ages. He is told that he has no need of-- aught else for share Of mortal good, than in his soul to bear The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest Of the world's springtide in his conscious breast. His own loved Past says to him,-- This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, And that immeasurable life to know From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead, A seed primeval that has forests bred. This poem views death as positivism conceives it, and gives a poetic interpretation of that subjective immortality, or that immortality in the race, in which George Eliot so heartily believed. No other artistic presentation of this theory has ever been made which equals that given in this poem, and in the one beginning, "O may I join the choir invisible." This latter poem is not only beautiful in itself, but it has made altruism attractive and lovely. Its tone of thought is elevated, its spirit lofty and noble, and its ideal pure and gracious. All that can be said to make altruism lovely and winning, to inspire men with its spirit and motive, is here said. The thought presented in these two poems is repeated in "The Death of Moses." Here we have Moses living forever in the human influence he created. He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law. For her ideas about resignation we must turn to the pages of _The Mill on the Floss and Romola_, for those about heredity and the past to _The Spanish Gypsy_ and _Daniel Deronda_; but in these shorter poems she has completely unfolded the positivist conception, as she accepted it, of death and immortality. The degree to which she was moved and inspired by this belief in an immortality in humanity is seen in the greater ardor and poetic merit of these poems than any others she wrote. It is interesting to note that she introduces music into "The Legend of Jubal" and "Armgart". It was the art she most loved. She even said that if she could possess the power most satisfactory to her heart, it would be that of making music the instrument of the homage which the great performers secure. Yet she teaches in "Armgart" that there is a power higher than this, the power of affectionate service. Her books are full of the praise of music. She makes Maggie Tulliver express her own delight in it. "I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music." In _Adam Bede_ she becomes most poetic when extolling the power of exquisite music to work on the soul. To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life wherein memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy. In the "Minor Prophet" is to be found George Eliot's theory of progress. That poem also repeats her faith in common humanity, and gives new emphasis to her joy in the common toils and affections of men. In the "College Breakfast Party" and "Self and Life," her thoughts take a more truly philosophic form than in any of her other poems, but the first of these is the poorest piece of poetic work she gave to the public. Nothing new in the way of teaching appears in these or her other poems. George Eliot is the poet of positivism. What is beautiful, touching and inspiring in that conception of the world she has sung, and in as poetic a manner as that philosophy is ever likely to inspire. Her poetry is full of the thoughts and sentiments of the time. It reflects the mood of her generation. Prof. Sidney Colvin has truly said that "there is nothing in the literature of the day so rousing--to the mind of the day there is scarcely anything so rousing in all literature--as her writing is. What she writes is full of her time. It is full of observation, imagination, pathos, wit and humor, all of a high class in themselves; but what is more, all saturated with modern ideas poured into a language of which every word bites home with peculiar sharpness to the contemporary consciousness." This is true even more of her poetry than of her prose. That poetry lacks where the age lacks, in true poetic quality. The ideal, the breath of eternal spring, is not in it. XVIII. LATER ESSAYS. The later essays of George Eliot have the same characteristics as the earlier ones, and are mainly of interest because they furnish additional evidences of her philosophical, ethical and political opinions. While they indicate the profound thoughtfulness of her mind, her deep concern about the largest problems of human existence, and her rare ethical tone and purpose, they add little or nothing to her literary reputation. It is very plain that while George Eliot was not a poet in the largest, truest sense, she was still less an essayist in that genial, widely sympathetic sense which has adorned English literature with so many noble books of comment on the foibles and the virtues of man. Her manner is heavy, her thoughts philosophical, her purpose doctrinal: and the result is far from satisfactory to the lover of fine essay-writing. She needs the glow of her imagination, the depth of her emotions, to relieve and lighten the burden of her thoughts. But in her essays she is less wise, less racy and expressive, than in the didactic passages of her novels. She could best make her comment on the ways of life while describing a character or studying an action. These additions to her narrative and conversation are, to the thoughtful reader, among the best portions of her novels, for they give meaning to all the rest, and throw a flood of light on the hidden facts of life. She is never so great, so wise, so profoundly inspired by her theme, as in many of these passages. There is need, however, in her case, of the large surrounding life of her novels in order to draw out this wisdom and inspiration. Her essays lack in the fine sentiment and the fervid eloquence of the chorus-utterances in her novels. They give little evidence that she would have attained to great things had she followed the early purpose of her life. In view of what she has written in the shape of essays, no one can regret that she confined her chief efforts to her imaginative prose creations. Yet her essays have a special value on account of their subjects, and they will be read by many with a hearty appreciation, simply because they were George Eliot's. No one thoroughly interested in the work done by the great realistic novelist can afford to overlook her essays, even if they do not nearly touch the highest mark in their kind. After she began her career as a novelist George Eliot wrote about twenty essays, nearly all of which are included in her last book, _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Previous to this, however, she had published in the first number of the _Fortnightly Review_, issued May 15, 1865, and edited by Lewes, an article on "The Influence of Rationalism," in review of Mr. W.H. Lecky's book on that subject. A year after the appearance of _Felix Holt_ she wrote out her views on the subject of political reform, in the shape of an "Address to Workingmen by Felix Holt," which appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for January, 1868. These essays are significant, because of the light they afford concerning the author's views on religious and political subjects. The first is a piece of thorough reviewing, and shows what George Eliot might have done in that direction. She is a merciless critic, and yet one inclined to appreciate all that is best in an author. Her sympathies with positivism and with the "scientific method" in philosophy find expression in the pages of this essay. In it she gives a most expressive utterance to her ideas about the universality of law and the influence of tradition. Her point of view is so antagonistic to Mr, Lecky's that she does not do full justice to his work. His idealism is repugnant to her, and he does not give prominence enough to please her to those positivist influences in which she so strongly believed. Her dissatisfaction with his idealism appears in her very first words. There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not exquisite either in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of "the general reader." For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go "too far." Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said "that his errors are to be deplored." leaving it not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views--nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements. Say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply, "Exactly." He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought--a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is the utmost liberty of private haziness. But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are clever, fair-minded men who will write books for him--men very much above him in knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's _History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_ entitles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the history of Magic and Witchcraft, and to the two chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution. A further evidence of her wide culture and reading, and of her large critical ability, may also be found in the first number of the _Fortnightly Review_, for which she wrote the first of the "notices of new books" which it published. This was a review of Mr. Owen Jones's _Grammar of Ornament_. The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which her Sunday receptions were held. She praised the book very highly. The first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit. The moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed. The influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen. The largeness of her faith in the moral efficiency of material causes is nowhere so strongly expressed by her as in the words which follow. The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdröckh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and the inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests, and flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the responsible father--Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our intellectual discernment; and--more than that--as it is probable that fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of our systems, apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions? The address to workingmen which George Eliot put into the mouth of Felix Holt is a suggestive and valuable piece of political writing. Tradition is therein presented as a moral and political influence. The spiritual treasures mankind possesses she says are the products of tradition, and these must be preserved. This can be done only by keeping the old institutions and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others. All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all. This she says to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders above them, whose work is as important as their own. The organs of society are the various social classes of which it is composed, and society is to be improved by turning class interests into the functions by which Humanity is to be developed. The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are suicidal. Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands of the wisest. True principles must regulate society, and these George Eliot would have rest on science and altruism. Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most suggestive and instructive of all she wrote. The emphasis she laid on retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force. Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the characteristics of her mind. Her intense distrust of individualism does not permit her to say a single word of the _rights_ of the laboring classes. The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is not recognized that any rights whatever exist. The workingman is not to think of himself or his class, but of society and humanity; he is to become an altruistic worker for the common good. While this is fine in theory, yet history indicates that the aristocratic classes have yielded to the broader social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so. The concessions must come from above, not from beneath. George Eliot's political philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where they are, and strengthen the social power of the aristocratic classes. These words may indicate the drift of the essay: But I come back to this: that, in our old society there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop; these are the old channels, the old banks and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you have no machinery ready for a new one: it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of work or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way, the public judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them: and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character, and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests. But this end will not come by impatience. "Day will not break the sooner because we get up before the twilight." Still less will it come by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well-manned: the nature of the winds and the waves, of the timbers, the sails and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors. You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way and need not be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832, I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people's side. Now the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man; perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich--who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of a too-craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency and instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe; but wretched calamities would come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our generation--that we do not help to poison the nation's blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way--that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means more and more reasonably towards the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity and fortitude to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools. The eighteen essays published as the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ purport to have been the work of a bachelor of singular habits and tastes, who had written a book which proved a failure, and who left this volume to appear posthumously. He had been in the habit of giving an account to himself of the characters he met with, and he begins his book by describing his own weaknesses. He classes himself as one of the blunderers he would portray, as having the faults and foibles he finds in others. Expressively the author says, "If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being compromised." This may be taken as the sentiment of George Eliot herself; and it is she who really speaks in these words concerning the satirical criticisms of those she describes: If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. After the second essay Theophrastus disappears, and no further hint is given that it is he who is the reputed author. This slight fictitious machinery is too weak to carry the load put upon it. The reader soon feels that it is George Eliot who is talking, and the opinions put forth, the sentiments expressed, are recognized as her own. Indeed, it would have been better, so the reader may probably come to say to himself, if this attempted disguise had been entirely dispensed with. By the time he has reached the sixth essay, "Only Temper," the discerning reader, familiar with George Eliot's books, will be ready to affirm that this is no other than the author herself speaking very frankly and finely her own sentiments. In this essay the moral temper of her mind appears, and her strong inclination to subordinate the individual to the social requirements of life. These papers are modelled on those of the great essay-making period in English literature. Old-fashioned names are adopted, which have a greater or less significance in connection with the purpose of the essay. The man with the excitable temper is called Touchwood, while the man who slides into a deferential acceptance of opinions made for him is Mixtus. This method of the old essayists seems antiquated, cumbersome and unsuitable to the subjects discussed. The persons described lose their individuality by its use, and the reader forgets that they were meant to be creatures of flesh and blood. For the most part, they are mere abstractions, mere figures of straw, to be knocked over by the ingenious pen of the author. Some special fault or sin is given the name of a personality, but it is too much isolated from actual existence to produce the impression of a living thing. These essays much resemble occasional chapters in her novels, and might have been studies for a new work. They are studies simply, done with a fine skill and polish, but fragmentary. The large setting of her novels is needed to give them relief and proportion. They disappoint as they are, for the satire is too apparent, and we do not see these characters in action, where their follies would obtain for them a more living interest. They are studies of individual character, portraying types of social and literary weakness, such as may have come under George Eliot's observation. They are careful dissections of motives and conduct, and full of a minute analysis of the moral and intellectual nature of her characters. There is abundance of candid criticism, shrewd observation and compressed wisdom of statement. Occasionally she is at her very best; but she uses many long, cumbersome sentences, the satire is too harsh and the wisdom too unwieldy. Her sympathy, love, pathos and pity are not so apparent as in her novels; she takes less delight in these creations, and evidently created them for purposes of dissection. She is never so weak in her other writings as in these essays, so wanting in genius and large-heartedness. She scourges many of the intellectual follies of the time, the conceit of culture, the pride of literature, and the narrowness of politics; but in most of the essays this is all. The artistic conception of the book is too slight and fragmentary, and it gives the impression of being unfinished in execution and desultory in purpose. Yet there is in it much of fine feeling, pure sentiment, lively satire and apt wisdom. Sometimes the thought is labored; but there is a wealth of clear-cut conviction, strong thoughts and rich experience. There is force in the arguments, richness of ideas throughout, and a wonderful aptness of allusion and illustration. Her culture and learning are everywhere apparent in the fine perception of the most exact analogies and in the ease with which she brings science to the support of morals. Those of her admirers who come closest to her spirit, thoroughly appreciate her ideas, and delight in them, will read this book with satisfaction, and feel thankful that she wrote it. No one who would know the mind of George Eliot can afford to overlook it. When George Eliot writes on subjects involving a moral purpose or ideal, she is always wise and interesting. When, however, she attempts to satirize some weakness or laugh at some folly, she is not always successful. Rich as may be the satire and the wit of her novels, both are often heavy and dull in her essays. The greater number of essays in this volume are devoted to the analysis of special types of character, but a few are given to moral problems. These latter are of the more interest and value, and they present some new discussions of those problems with which George Eliot was so much fascinated. Her earnest faith in altruism, realism, tradition, natural retribution and the social value of morality, is as distinct here as in her novels or poems. In the essay on "False Testimonials" she gives a good realistic definition of imagination, which she says is "always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions." She is no realist, however, in the sense of confining poetry merely to a photographic picture of outward nature. She accepts Dante as a genuine realist, for "he is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations." She would have faithfulness to facts, but no limitation of vision; she would have the imagings exact and legitimate, but she would give our moral and intellectual insights no narrow bounds. Her realism is well defined when she criticises one of those persons who take mere fancy for imagination, to whom all facts are unworthy of recognition. In at least two of these essays, those on "Debasing the Moral Currency" and "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" she has newly expressed herself concerning tradition. In the first she protests against the too-common custom of satirizing what is noble and venerable. Our need of faith in the higher things of life is very great, and that faith is to be established only through our regard for what has been given us by those who have gone before us. Whatever lowers our trust in the results of human efforts is corrupting, for it breaks down our faith in the true sources of human authority. "This is what I call debasing the moral currency," she says; "lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive." With her conception of tradition, as the legitimate source of the moral and spiritual life in man, and as the influence which builds up all which is truest and purest in our civilization, she can endure to see no contempt put upon its products. This essay, more perhaps than anything else she wrote, gives an insight into her conception of the higher life and her total lack of faith in any idealistic sources of human motive or inspiration. Contempt for the traditional, with her, implies contempt for the spiritual and moral. To destroy the traditional is revolutionary, dangerous and immoral. She cannot reject tradition in the name of higher wisdom, in the name of higher truth and authority. It gone, and all is gone; hence her fear of all iconoclastic and revolutionary methods. So she would keep whole and pure the national memories of every people. In the last essay of the book she says, "The preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, and their revival a sign of reviving nationality." It is "the divine gift of memory" as it expresses itself in the life and purposes of a people, "which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the brutes." All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is debasing. The corrupting of this memory "is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity;" and this "new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments." That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth and reality, for something more than traditions and national memories, which displays itself in reforms and revolutions of every kind, had little of George Eliot's sympathy. Yet this spirit is stronger even than tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life. Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised and commended. What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import. Ideal aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of human nature as it now exists. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn what it is they summon us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own appetites.... On the whole, and in the vast majority of instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm. In another essay, that entitled "Only Temper," the social side of morality is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers." "Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true conditions of a moral life. Seeing that Morality and Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself' to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a classification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought. All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us clearly to comprehend an original mind. XIX. THE ANALYTIC METHOD. George Eliot's literary method was that of Fielding and Thackeray, both of whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of Dickens. Her moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art. It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he surpassed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past. Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where George Eliot succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth. Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not, bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior, as is abundantly shown in _Romola_. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a Scott to make living and real. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ there is very little of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have introduced _reality_ into such an historic picture. Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who could not have written _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_, or brought out what is best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done. Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of _Silas Marner_, there is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true, has its foundation in the realities of human experience: but those realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same field, as may be seen at once by comparing _The Spanish Gypsy_ with _Ivanhoe_, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the mediaeval and feudal ages, he took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more faithful to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory. In comparing George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous power, so that his characters appeared to his own mind as if real, and he describes them as if they actually stood before him, making them intensely real to his readers. Many of his persons never lived, never could have lived; yet they are types or certain traits of character made living and brought out into a distinctive existence. What those traits of character are he makes all the more apparent by this method. Dickens had not a fine literary taste, he had no clear insight into some of the purer human sentiments, he was grossly untrue and false in many of his pictures. Yet all in all, with his many faults, it is to be said that his idealism, which was not of a high type, made him a true interpreter of life. If his characters are less faithfully drawn than George Eliot's, his insight into some of the sentiments and emotions was truer. His pictures may be false in some particulars, but he has given them the true spirit with which they should be animated. In thoughtful fidelity to the facts of life, George Eliot surpasses Scott or Dickens. Scott by his insight, Dickens by his imagination, were able to do what she could not; but they put little thought into their work. They did not think about what life meant; she did. They worked instinctively, she thoughtfully. Her characters are more often to be met with than theirs; and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about them theirs do not have. She is more simple and refined than Fielding, more elevated in tone of thought, there is a deeper and a richer purpose in her work. None of the cynicism and hardness of Thackeray appear in her pages. She is fresher, more genuine, more poetic than he, with more of humanity. In her essay on "The Natural History of German Life" she said of Dickens that he was "gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population." City life Dickens and Thackeray most truly photographed in all its features of snobbishness and selfishness. Its better side, its nobler sentiments, its humanity, they did not succeed in so well; not so well as George Eliot did, and simply because they did not so much sympathize with it. Country life they did not understand, and could not have sketched. Where George Eliot best succeeded they would have failed. Her real advance upon Dickens and Thackeray, however, lay in another direction. She says in the essay just quoted, speaking of Diekens's portraitures of town populations, that "if he could give us their psychological character--their conception of life and their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies." In the two directions here indicated lay her superiority over other novelists,--her humanitarian sympathies and her psychologic insight. In reality, she did not contribute anything new to the realism of literary art. All which can be said for faithfulness to nature in art and poetry has been said by Ruskin, and George Eliot was early a reader of his books. Her predecessors, especially Thackeray, opened the way in the application of the realistic principles in its newer spirit. The enlargement of realism, however, was carried on to a much greater extent by the pre-Raphaelites in painting and poetry, and George Eliot was influenced by them as well. Their principle of loyal fidelity to the time and circumstances depicted was her own, at least in theory. It was in another direction her chief characteristic lay, that of describing "psychologic character." Here she was no imitator, but she made a way of her own, and developed a new method. The method of science she applied to literature. Science has adopted the method of analysis, of inductive inquiry, of search in all the facts of nature for the laws which underlie them. So magnificent have been the results obtained by this process in the study of the material world, that it has been applied with the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena presented by history, ethics and religion. Even here the method has justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man. The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result. The studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution, have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life. A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on literature. What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long be kept out of poetry and art. In painting and in music it has been largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic interpretation of nature and man. In literature the new method has been mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic studies of human life. To describe what is, to make a true word-picture, has been the chief aim. With George Eliot began a wider use of the new method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper problems of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist, she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life. In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an application of psychology to all the problems of man's nature. George Eliot's intimate association with the leaders of the scientific movement in England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science. In the special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his work. He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately dependent on its environment. Here was a new conception of man, which regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole. This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and character. She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a being who exists above circumstances and material conditions. "In the eyes of the psychologist," says Mr. James Sully, "the works of George Eliot must always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which enter so much into life. She lays much stress on the subconscious mental life, the domain of vague emotion and rapidly fugitive thought. The aim of the psychologic method is to interpret man from within, in his motives and impulses. It endeavors to show why he acts, and it unfolds the subtler elements of his character. This method George Eliot uses in connection with her evolutionary philosophy, and uses it for the purpose of showing that man is a product of hereditary conditions, that he has been shaped into his life of the emotions and sentiments by the influence of tradition. The psychologic method may be applied, however, without connection with the positive or evolutionary philosophy. The mind may be regarded as a distinct force and power, exercised within social and material limits, and capable of being studied in all its inner motives and impulses. Yet in her mental inquiries George Eliot did not regard man as an eternal soul in the process of development by divine methods, but as the inheritor of the past, moulded by every surrounding circumstance, and as the creature of the present. Instead of regarding man as _sub specie eternitatis_, she regarded him as an animal who has through feeling and social development come to know that he cannot exist beyond the present. This limitation of his nature affected her work throughout. The psychologic method in literature has also been that of Robert Browning, and he has been as faithful to it as any other. He, too, analyzes his characters, penetrates all the hidden causes of motive and deed, lays bare the soul. No other poet has surpassed him in power to unveil the inner workings of the mind, to discover all the influences affecting it or in revealing how motives are created and how motives lead up to deeds. In two important particulars Robert Browning differs from George Eliot. His characters speak for themselves, reveal the secrets of their own minds. He does not talk about them, does not criticise their words and conduct, does not stand off from them as a spectator. He differs from her also in his conception of man as a being who is here developing an eternal existence under the laws of an Infinite Spirit. He, too, believes in the natural, and believes that the highest law of the soul is, to be true to every pure impulse arising within us. To calculate, to philosophize, he holds to be always to man's injury, that nature when perfectly obeyed is the only guide. He studies man as affected by all the circumstances of his existence, and as wrought upon by the great social forces which have made him what he is. His analysis is as keen as George Eliot's; he makes the soul appear before us in all its reality. His is a more creative, a more dramatic method than hers; yet he is fully as subjective, as much an interpreter of the soul. Neither is content to record the deeds of men; both wish to know why men act. Browning has fittingly been called the poet of psychology. He is a dissecter, a prober, an analyzer in the full spirit of scientific research. He spares no pains to get at and to completely unfold the truth about man's nature, to show all the hidden causes of his action, all the secret motives of his life, using this method as thoroughly as George Eliot. It is interesting to note his attitude towards the great religious problems. His faith in God is intensely passionate and sublime in its conception. In words the most expressive in their meaning, and indicating a conviction the deepest, he reveals his faith. "He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours." The lifting and inspiring power of faith in an Infinite Being he has sung with a poet's purity of vision. Along with this faith goes his belief that man is being glowly perfected for a higher and nobler existence. "To whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round. "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but, each survives for the melodist When eternity confirms the conceptions of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by." He teaches that progress is the true mark and aim of man's being, a progress sure and glorious. "Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." Man yearns after more than he can gain here; that yearning is the mark of his higher nature and the means of progress. If he follows the better impulses of his nature, all experience will help to unfold his soul into higher attainments, and impulse will at last become, in clearer moments, revelation. "Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! But not quite so much that moments, Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from its false ones, And appraise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way To its triumph or undoing. There are flashes struck from midnights, There are fireflames noondays kindle, Whereby piled-up honors perish. Whereby swol'n ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse Which for once had play unstifled Seems the sole work of a lifetime, That away the rest have trifled." More impersonal and dramatic than George Eliot, Browning introduces his doctrines less often. It is not easy to discover what are his theories as distinguished from those of his characters, for he makes no comments, and is faithful in developing the unity and integrity of his _dramatis personae_, whether in his monologues or dramas. Great as his other faults maybe, he surpasses George Eliot in his power to reveal character, but not in his power to make his characters stand out distinctly and unprejudiced from his own mind. His obscurity of expression and his involved style are serious defects in much of his work; and to most readers his thoroughly dramatic manner is puzzling. He gives but faint clue to the situation in his monologues, little explanation of the person, time or place. All is to be discovered from the obscurest allusions and hints. Defective as this method is in Browning's treatment, it is the true psychologic method, wherein motive and character are developed dramatically and without labored discussion. It is a more vital and constructive process than that followed by George Eliot, because nothing of the meaning and fulness of life is lost in the process of analysis. That Browning can never be read by more than a few, indicates how great are his faults; but in lyric passion, dramatic power and psychologic analysis he is one of the greatest poets of the century. The value and range of the new method are well illustrated in its use by two such thinkers and poets. The analytic method as applied by George Eliot regards man as a social being, studies him as a member of society. All that he is, and all the influences working upon him, are understood only as affected by his connection with the life of the race. This fact gives the most distinguishing characteristic to her literary methods. Her imitators may not, and nearly all of them do not, follow her into positivism; but they all study man as a social being. They deal with him as affected by heredity, education, and social characteristics. Even here it is not her theories, but her artistic methods, which are imitated. The novel is no longer regarded as a story to be told dramatically and with moving effect, but as a study of character, as an analysis of situations and motives. The advocates of the new method say that "in one manner or another the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations." [Footnote: W.D. Howells in the Century for November, 1882.] This interpretation of the mission of the novelist well describes George Eliot's work, for she never hesitated to tell her reader what she thought about the situations and the persons of whom she wrote. The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the universe. The process which answers in the material world does not answer in the spiritual. The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close the avenues to the revelations of mind. The methods of experiment and demonstration which have brought the universe to man's knowledge, have not been sufficient to make the soul known to itself. Any literary methods imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power over the materials with which it has to deal. Literature has hitherto been made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements. Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness as a divine command, runs through all effective literature. However realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only _reality_. Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone, a dry-rot seizes upon it and eats away its finest portions. If Goethe and Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch. So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind. Great minds instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity for self-direction. An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be restrained by the momentary conditions of the present. Education or social environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work. He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world will listen in due time. This power of personality lies at the basis of all genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism and environment. This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines. The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts, and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To them the spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess. These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have been questioned; and yet he sings,-- "That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and passing all The skirts of self again, should fall, Remerging in the general soul,-- "Is faith as vague as all unsweet: Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet." His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty. "Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me." Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is religious to the best work in art. His own faith has been earnest and strong in the reality of the spiritual. Realist as he is in art, he believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his religious convictions. Writing in _Modern Painters_ of man as made in the image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect. "No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find,--nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. The flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know God. Through the glass, darkly; but except through the glass, in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground;--you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be bent down by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love your life. Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the Sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world." Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning. Their assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by the world, is one worthy of attention. The conviction of this truth has a literary power and incentive not to be found in "the scientific method" or any of its corollaries. To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did great and lasting work. Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit. Her conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot's, because she gave it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an eternal as well as a social significance. As a poet she lost nothing of charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with simple trust, what she has embodied in "A Child's Thought of God." "God is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across his face-- Like secrets kept, for love, untold. But still I feel that his embrace Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place." That art is to be nothing more than a copying and interpretation of nature Mrs. Browning did not believe. In _Aurora Leigh_ she says,-- "Art's the witness of what is Beyond this show. If this world's show were all, Mere imitation would be all in art." The glow of genius burns up out of all her pages, and there is an aroma and a subtle power in them which comes alone of this conception of art. She could not rest content with the little round of man's experience, but found that all the universe is bound together and all its parts filled with a God-spirit. "No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee But finds some coupling with, the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere; No chaffinch but implies the cherubim: ... Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God." That is a larger faith and a truer faith than appears anywhere in the pages of George Eliot, and it is one which impregnates most of the best literature the world posseses with light and life. It is a faith which gives hope and impulse where the other saddens and unnerves. There is wanting in George Eliot's books that freshness of spirit, that faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of soul which is to be found in the writings of Tennyson, Ruskin and Mrs. Browning. Even with all his constitutional cynicism and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more hopeful than hers. An air of fatigue and world-weariness is about all her work, even when it is most stimulating with its altruism. Though in theory not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain and sorrow grows out of the touch of each of her books. In this she missed one of the highest uses of literature, to quicken new hopes and to awaken nobler purposes. There is a tone of joy and exultation in the power life confers, an instinctive sense of might to conquer the world, in the best writing. To make men think, to move men to action, to confer finer feelings and motives, is the power of the true poet. When he does not accomplish this he has written to a lesser purpose. Literature aims either to please or to quicken the mind. It cannot please when it leaves the heart depressed and burdened with the failures and sadness of the world. If it is to please, it must make use of that goodness and joy which are in excess of evil and misery. It cannot quicken when it unnerves the mind and brings despair of moral purpose. If it is to inspire it must show that something great is to be done, and awaken the courage to do it. That life has its sad and painful elements is a terrible fact, and the novelist who would paint life as it is must recognize them. It is quite as true that the good and the hopeful are more than the sad and painful, that right is more powerful in human life than wrong. The novelist who would paint life with an exact and even-handed justice, must not make all his endings sorrowful, for very many in real life are not so. _The Mill on the Floss_ would have been a more powerful and effective book could Maggie have been made to conquer. It would have been quite as true to nature to have represented her as overcoming her defects, and as being purified through suffering. Is all suffering to conquer us, instead of our being able to conquer it, and gaining a more peaceful and a purer life through its aid? If Maggie is George Eliot in her youthful experiences, then the novel is untrue to fact in that Marian Evans conquered and Maggie failed. The same fault is to be found in _Middlemarch_, that Dorothea, great as she is, deserved a much better fate than that accorded to her. The elements of womanly greatness were in her character, and with all the barriers created by society she would have done better things had her creator been true to her capacities in unfolding her life-history. The effect of both these great novels is one of depression and disappointment. The reader always expects more as he goes on his way through these scenes, depicted with such genius, than is realized at the end. Disappointment is almost inevitable, for the promise is greater than the fulfilment. The like result is produced by those books which have the brightest closing scenes, as in _Adam Bede_ and _Daniel Deronda_, where the author's aim was evidently hopeful and constructive. _Silas Marner_ and _Felix Holt_ are the only exceptions to this pessimistic tone, and in which justice is done to the better side of life. In all her later books the ending is painful. In _The Mill on the Floss_, Maggie and Tom are drowned after Maggie had been led to a most bitter end of her love-affairs. In _Romola_ the heroine is left a widow, after her husband's treachery had brought him to a terrible death, and after Savonarola had suffered martyrdom. Dorothea marries into a life of ordinary drudgery, and Lydgate fails. Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen are separated from each other, and Deronda goes to the east in furtherance of a wild scheme of Jewish colonization. Fedalma loses her father by the treachery of her lover, and without hope conducts her tribe to Africa. Jubal dies dishonored, and Armgart loses her voice. Yet it is not merely that the conclusion does not lead to the expected result, but throughout there is a tone of doubt and failure. That George Eliot purposed to give life this tinge of sadness is not to be accepted as the true explanation of it. It is known that she did not have such a purpose, that she was surprised and disappointed that her books should produce such a result on her readers. The explanation is to be found in another direction. She was an agnostic; life had no wide horizon for her. The light of a genuinely ideal and spiritual conception of life was not hers. The world was bounded to her vision, rounded into the little capacity possessed by man. Where others would have cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance, promise of a brighter day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her novels, she could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly transmitted good. In this regard her books afford a most interesting contrast to those of the two other great women who have adorned English literature with their genius. The lot of Mrs. Browning and Charlotte Brontë was much sadder and more depressing than that of George Eliot; more of darkness and pain affected their lives. A subtle tone of sadness runs through their books, but it is not burdensome and depressing as is the case of George Eliot. There is hope with it, and a buoyant faith in the good, which lies above and beyond all pain and sorrow. With neither of them was this faith conventional, a mere reflection of the religion taught them in childhood. It was a thoughtful result of a large experience, and of hard contact with many of the severest facts of human experience. That wide horizon of spiritual reality which shone for them on every hand, lights all their work with a brilliance which almost puts out of sight the pain and sorrow of the world. The reader of their books is made to believe that life is an endless good; he is cheered and made stronger for what life offers him. Agnosticism may have its great and heroic incentives, it may impel men to a nobler activity, but its literary effect, as a motive towards a more inspiring life, has not been satisfactory in the hands of George Eliot. Shakspere is not a teacher of philosophy or ethics, he has no doctrines to preach, no theories to advocate. What he believed, it would be difficult to ascertain from his writings; yet he is an effective teacher of morals, he stimulates into activity all that is best in man, life widens and deepens under the touch of his genius. So is it with Milton, Schiller, Moliere, Calderon, Montaigne and Wordsworth. So is it with George Eliot in all that concerns our duties, and even with our human sympathies. In the one direction of trust she is wanting, and her books are devoid of it. Shakspere makes us realize that God rules over the world; George Eliot leaves us with the feeling that we know nothing, and can hope for but little. That her theories really cast a shadow over the world, may be seen in all her dealings with love. Love is with her a human passion, deep, pure, blessed. It crowns some of her characters with joy and peace and strength; it is never impure and base in her pages. Yet it is human, it is a social force, it is to be made altruistic. It never gains that high poetic influence and charm which glorifies it in the writings of Mrs. Browning, Browning and Tennyson. Browning conceives of it as an eternal passion, as one with all that is divinest in man, as a medium of his spiritual development. In his pages it glows with moral promise, it inspires and regenerates. The poet should deal with love, not as a thing base and susceptible of abuse, but as an influence capable of the most beneficent results in the uplifting of man's nature. If it degrades, it also sweetens; and only that is love which makes life richer and more worthy. The true artist can afford to deal with that which pleases, not with that which saddens and disgusts. The real love is the pure love, not the depraved. The natural is the noble, not the debased life. George Eliot's originality of method has given rise to a new school in fiction. Her imitators, even when at their best, are not her equals, and they have degraded her methods oftentimes to paltry uses. They have tried to take photographs of life, supposing that art has for its aim to copy nature. They have failed to see, what she did see, though not so clearly as could have been desired, that art must do much more than imitate some scene or fact out of nature. It must give beauty, meaning and expression to what it copies. And it must do more than imitate: it must go beyond mere description, and introduce unity, purpose and thought into its work. True art has a soul as well as a body, says something to the mind as well as to the eye, appeals to the soul as well as to sense. Had George Eliot done nothing more than to describe common English life there would have been small excuse for her work. She did more, touched that life with genius, made it blossom into beauty, and gave to it deep moral meanings. The defects of her method are to be seen in the fact that her imitators cannot get above life's surface, and deal mainly with shallow or degraded natures. Her methods do not inspire great work, while her own genius redeemed the false ways into which she was led by her philosophic theories. Science can dissect the human body, but it can do little towards an explanation of the subtler meanings of life and mind. Its methods are analytical; it has reached no truly synthetic results in the regions where knowledge is most to be desired. Its effects on literature are destructive. Science destroys poetry, dries up the poetic sense, closes the doors of imagination. The attempt to make science co-operate with poetry is in itself the promise of failure. The limitations of George Eliot's work are the limitations of poetry subdued by science. Could she have rid herself of that burden, been impelled by a faith and an ideal purpose commensurate with her genius, the result would have been much greater. This limitation suggests the fact that literature is synthetic and constructive in its purpose and spirit. It is this fact which has made the classic literatures so powerful in their effect on modern Europe. They have given unity, spiritual purpose and ideal aims to the whole modern world. The freshness as of an eternal spring was in the literature of Greece, the naturalness of a healthy manhood. That literature is organic, it is one with life, it is refreshing as nature itself. That literature lives and flames with power because it is synthetic, buoyant, touched with an eternal spiritual beauty, great with promise of a growing earth. Its poets do not dissect, but build; they do not analyze, but create. And this is the literary need of the present time. There is need of more poetry, a more poetic interpretation of life, a richer imagination and a finer sense of beauty. The common is everywhere, but it is not necessarily great or beautiful or noble. It may have its elements of pathos and tragedy, its touches of beauty and its motives of heroism. It has in it also the promise of better things to be. That is the true poetry, the true fiction, which brings out this promise so that we know it, so that it moves us to better deeds and enchants us with music of purer living. The world is bad enough without dragging to the light all its evils and discords; let us rather know what promise it contains of the better. In one word, the real oppresses and enthralls; the ideal liberates, and brings us to ourselves. Genius redeems every fault. It must be taken for what it is, must not be criticised, is to be used to the highest ends. Only when genius unites itself to false methods and checks itself by false theories, has the critic a right to complain. Genius, obedient to its own laws, accepts every fact life presents, and lifts each one to be an instrument for the enlargement of man's life. When it deliberately strikes out all that is not human, however, from man's experience, denies the realty of that impression and that conviction which comes from other than material sources, it cripples and denies itself. XX. THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT. It must be remembered that George Eliot does not use the novel merely for the purpose of inculcating certain doctrines, and that her genius for artistic creation is of a very high order. In dealing with her as a thinker and as a moral and religious teacher, she is to be regarded, first of all, as a poet and an artist. Her ethics are subordinate to her art; her religion is subsidiary to her genius. That she always deliberately set about the task of introducing her positivism into the substance of her novels is not to be supposed. This would be to imply a forgetfulness on her part of her own methods, and a prostration of art to purposes she would have scorned to adopt. This is evidently true, however, that certain features of the positive and the evolution philosophy had so thoroughly approved themselves to her mind as to cause them to be accepted as a completely satisfactory explanation of the world, so far as any explanation is possible. So heartily were they received, so fully did they become incorporated with the substance of her thinking, that she viewed all human experiences in their light. They had ceased to be theory and speculation with her. When she thought about the world, when she observed the acts of men, the positivist explanation was at once applied, and instinctively. That she did teach positivism is unfortunately true, so far as her literary touch and expression is concerned. That philosophy affects all her books with its subtly insinuating flavor, and it gives meaning and bias to most of them. They thus gain in definiteness of purpose, in moral vigor, in minutely faithful study of some phases of human experience, and in a massive impression of thoughtfulness which her work creates. At the same time, they undoubtedly lose in value as studies of life; in free range of expression for her genius, her poetry and her art; and in that spiritual vision which looks forward with keen gazing eyes of hope and confident inquiry. Her teaching, like most teaching, is a mingled good and evil. In more than one direction her ethical and religious influence was most wholesome and effective. She brought into clear light a few great facts, and made them the more conspicuous by the strong emphasis she gave them. This is, in the main, the method of all teaching and of all progress. Development seldom proceeds in a direct line, but rather, so far as man is concerned, by forcible emphasis laid on some great fact which has been previously neglected. The idealism of a previous age had shown the value of certain facts and tendencies in human nature, but it had exaggerated some faculties and capacities of man, as well as neglected others. In consequence, our own time swings to the other extreme, and cannot have too much of evolution and positivism. Idealism is in human nature, and will give itself expression. Positivism is also a result of our experience and of our study of the universe, both material and mental; it is a result of the desire for definite knowledge. As a re-action against the excesses of idealism it is a powerful leaven, and it brings into necessary prominence those facts which are neglected by the opposite philosophy. It takes account of facts, and scorns mysticism; and it thus appeals to a deep-seated bias of the time. George Eliot's books have an interest as an attempt at an interpretation of life from its more practical and realistic side, and not less as a re-action against the influences of very nearly all the great literary minds of the earlier half of the century in England. Under the lead of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and influenced by German thought and literature, a remarkable movement was then developed in English literature. The outcome of that movement has been surpassed only by that of the age of Shakspere. Freshness of thought, love of nature, profound humanitarian convictions, and spontaneity wedded to great largeness of ideas, characterize this period and its noble work. Such an age is almost invariably followed by an age of re-action, criticism, realism and analysis. An instinctive demand for a portrayal of the more positive side of life, and the influence of science, have developed a new literary school. For doctrine it teaches agnosticism, and in method it cares mainly for art and beauty of form. Towards the development of the new school George Eliot has been a leading influence, though her sympathies have not gone with all its tendencies and results. If Wordsworth exaggerated the importance of the intuitive and personal, George Eliot equally exaggerated the value of the historic and hereditary. It was desirable, however, that the relations of life to the past should be brought out more distinctly by a literary development of their relations to the present, and that the influence of social heredity should be seen as affecting life on all sides. Tradition is a large and persistent element in the better life of the race, while the past certainly has a powerful influence over the present. This fact was neglected by Wordsworth, and especially is it neglected by the intuitive philosophies. They ignore the lessons of the past, and assume that a new and perfect world is to be evolved from the depths of consciousness. That to think a better world is to create a better world, they seem to take for granted, while the fact is that the truer life is the result of a painful and long-continued struggle against adverse conditions. What has been, persists in remaining, and the past, with all its narrowness and prejudices, continues to influence men more powerfully than does clear thought or regard for the truth. Emotion and sentiment cling about what has become sacred with age. Channels for thought and activity having once been made, it is very difficult to abandon them for untried paths approved even by reason. The historic view is one of much importance, and is likely to be overlooked by the poets and novelists. It is also ignored by the radicals in morals and religion. Much which George Eliot says on this subject is of great value, and may be heeded with the utmost profit. Her words of wisdom, however, lose much of their value because they utterly ignore those spontaneous and supernatural elements of man's higher life which lift it quite out of the region of dependence on history. There is something to be said in behalf of George Eliot's attitude towards religion, which caused her to hold it in reverence, even when rejecting the objective validity of its dogmas. Yet much more is to be said for that other attitude, which is faithful to the law of reason, and believes that reason is competent to say some truer and larger word on a subject of such vital importance and such constant interest to man. That both reason and tradition are to be listened to reverently is true, but George Eliot so zealously espoused the cause of tradition as to give it an undue prominence. Her lesson was needed, however, and we may be all the better able to profit by it because she was so much an enthusiast in proclaiming its value. The even poise of perfect truth is no more to be had from her pages than from those of others. The emphasis she laid on feeling and sentiment was a needed one, as a counterpoise to the exaggerations of rationalism. Man does live in his feelings more than in his reason. He is a being of sentiment, a creature of impulse, his social life is one of the affections. In all the ranges of his moral, religious and social life he is guided mainly by his emotions and sentiments. It cannot be said, however, as George Eliot would have us say, that these are human born and have no higher meaning. They are the outgrowth of spiritual reality, as well as of human experience; they repeat the foregleams and foresights of a "far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves." Life is enriched and flooded with light by the emotions, and feeling, true and tender and pure, is as much the symbol of humanity as reason itself. It was therefore well that some one should attempt to justify the emotional life against the aspersions of those who have done it grave injustice. It is true that man is not a being who wholly arrives at his method of life through reason, but feeling lends quite as important aid. He does not only think, but he has emotions as well; he not only weighs evidence, but he acts by impulse. He is continually led by the emotions, sentiments and impulses created for him by the life of ages past. Without emotion there could be no art, no poetry and no music. Without emotion there would be no religion and no spiritual life. Sentiment sweetens, beautifies and endears all that is human and natural. Emotion and the affections, however, seem to be shorn of their highest beauty and glory when they are restricted to a merely earthly origin and compass of power. It is altogether impossible to believe that their own impulse to look beyond the human is a delusion, and that they really have nothing to report that is valid from beyond the little round which man treads. To believe in the human beauty and glory of the feelings, and to rejoice in their power to unite us to our kind, need imply no forgetfulness of their demand for a wider expression and a higher communion. Her theory of the origin of feeling is not to be accepted. It means something more than an inheritance of ancestral experience. It is the result rather than the cause of reason, for reason has an influence she did not acknowledge, and an original capacity which she never saw. Her view of feeling was mainly theoretical, for she was led in her attitude towards the facts of life, not by sentiment, but by reason. Hers was a thoughtful rather than an impulsive mind, and given to logic more than to emotion. Her enthusiasm for altruism, her zeal for humanity, lends a delightful feature to her books. It gives a glow and a consecration to her work, and makes her as great a prophet as positivism is capable of creating. And it is no idle power she awakens in her positivist faith in man. She shames those who claim a broader and better faith. Zeal for man is no mean gospel, as she gives life and meaning to it in her books. To live for others, too many are not likely to do. She made altruism beautiful, she made it a consecration and a religion. Those who cannot accept her agnosticism and her positivism may learn much from her faith in man and from her enthusiasm for humanity. No faith is worth much which does not lead to a truer and a more helpful love of man. Any faith is good in so far as it makes us more humane and sympathetic. In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century. She desired to build, not to destroy. She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men love and venerate. Her tendencies were all on the side of progress, good order and social growth. Her conception of the organic social life of the race is one of great value. It led her to believe in the possibility of a social organization in the future based on science, and better capable of meeting all the wants of mankind than the more personal and competitive methods have done. This belief in the organic unity of the race is not necessarily positivist in its character, for Hegel entertained it as fully as does Herbert Spencer. The larger social life will come, however, as individuals are moved to lead the way, and not alone as the result of a general evolutionary process. On its mental side, her social theory is to be regarded with grave suspicions, for it brings all minds to the same level. No mind of commanding influence is to be found in her books. No powerful intellect gives greatness to any of her plots. Her Felix Holt is not a man of original and positive thought. We accept, but do not enthusiastically admire him. Deronda is a noble character, but he in no sense represents the largest things of which a social leader is capable. He disappoints and is weak, and he has no power to create the highest kind of leadership. In other words, he is not a great man. The world's reformers have been of another temper and mettle. He is no Mazzini, no Luther. George Eliot's social theories loft no room for such men. They were superfluous in her social system. The man not to be explained by heredity and tradition had no place in her books; and no genius, no great man, can ever be explained by heredity and tradition alone. George Eliot evidently desired to destroy individualism as a social force. The individual, according to her teaching, is to renounce himself for the sake of the race. He is to live, not as a personal being, but as a member of the social organization; to develop his altruistic nature, not to perfect his personal character. The finer flavor of personality is brushed mercilessly away by this method. Reason needs to be justified in opposition to her excessive praise of feeling. Meanwhile, the capacity of man to live a life higher than that of his social state is to be asserted. He is indeed a member of humanity, but humanity does not absorb him to the cost of his personality. Life is strong in those ages in which the individual is able to assert his own personality, in opposition to what is imperfect and untrue in the life of his time. This failure to recognize the worth and capacity of the individual is a most serious defect in George Eliot's work, and mars it in many directions. A very competent critic has shown how serious is the limitation arising in this manner, and permeating her books with a false conception of life. "So far as George Eliot's life is concerned," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, "she was eager in her self-development, and as eager in her sympathies. But it was a different matter in the main drift of her work. She lowered the power of individualism. Nay, she did not believe in its having any self-caused or God-caused existence. Few have individualized their characters more than she did, and of these characters we have many distinct types. But she individualized them with, I may say, almost the set purpose of showing that their individualism was to be sacrificed to the general welfare of the race. The more her characters cling to their individuality the more they fail in reaching happiness or peace. If they are noble characters, they are finally obliged, through their very nobility, to surrender all their ideals, all their personal hopes, all the individual ends they hoped to develop; and they reach peace finally only through utter surrender of personality in humanity. The characters in her books who do not do this, who cling to their individuality and maintain it, succeed in life, for the most part, if they are strong; are broken to pieces if they are weak; but in all cases, save one, are not the noble but the ignoble characters. The whole of her books is a suppressed attack on individualism, and an exaltation of self-renunciation as the only force of progress, as the only ground of morality. I leave aside here, as apart from the moral side of the subject, the view that individual power or weakness of any kind is the consequence of the past, of race, of physical causes. What a man is found to do is not affected by that, in her view.... No one can deny that the morality is a lofty one, and, as far as it asserts self-renunciation, entirely useful; we have with all our hearts to thank George Eliot for that part of her work. But when sacrifice of self is made, in its last effort, equivalent to the sacrifice of individuality, the doctrine of self-renunciation is driven to a vicious extreme. It is not self-sacrifice which is then demanded, it is suicide ... Fully accepted, it would reduce the whole of the human race to hopelessness. That, indeed, is the last result. A sad and fatal hopelessness of life broods over all the nobler characters. All their early ideals are sacrificed, all their early joys depart, all the pictures they formed are blotted out. They gain peace through renunciation, after long failure; some happiness in yielding to the inevitable, and harmonizing life with it; and some blessedness in doing all they can for the progress of those who follow them, for the good of those that are with them. Their self is conquered, not through ennoblement of personality, but through annihilation of personality. And having surrendered their separate personality, they then attain the fitting end, silence forevermore. It is no wonder that no characters are so sad, that none steep the reader in such hopelessness of joy, as the noble characters of the later works of George Eliot. They want the mighty power, the enkindling hopes, the resurrection of life, the joy and rapture which deepens towards death and enables man to take up the ideals of youth again." If too severe in some directions, this criticism is substantially sound. It does not matter what theory of personality we adopt, in a philosophical sense, if that theory upholds personal confidence and force of will. If it does not do this, the whole result is evil. This lack of faith in personality saddened all the work done by George Eliot. In theory a believer in an ever-brightening future, and no pessimist, yet the outcome of her work is dark with despondency and grief. Life is sad, hard and ascetic in her treatment of it. An ascetic tone runs through all her work, the result of her theories of renunciation. The same sternness and cheerlessness is to be seen in the poetry and painting of the pre-Raphaelites. The joy, freshness and sunniness of Raphael is not to be found in their work. Life is painful, puritanic and depressing to them. Old age seems to be upon them, or the decadence of a people that has once been great. Human nature does not need that this strain be put upon it. Life is stronger when more assertive of itself. It has a right to assert itself in defiance of mere rules, and only when it does so is it true and great. The ascetic tone is one of the worst results of a scientific view of the world as applied to literature; for it is thoroughly false both in fact and in sentiment. The strong, hopeful, youthful look at life is the one which literature demands, and because it is the nearest the heart and spirit of life itself. The dead nation produces a dead literature. The age made doubtful by an excess of science produces a literature burdened with sadness and pain. Great and truthful as it may be, it lacks in power to conquer the world. It shows, not the power of Homer, but the power of Lucretius. Her altruism has its side of truth, but not all of the truth is in it. Any system of thought which sees nothing beyond man is not likely to find that which is most characteristic in man himself. He is to be fathomed, if fathomed at all, by some other line than that of his own experience. If he explains the universe, the universe is also necessary to explain him. Man apart from the supersensuous is as little to be understood as man apart from humanity. He belongs to a Universal Order quite as much as he belongs to the human order. Man may be explained by evolution, but evolution is not to be explained by anything in the nature of man. It requires some larger field of vision to take note of that elemental law. Not less true is it that mind does not come obediently under this method of explanation, that it demands account of how matter is transformed into thought. The law of thought needs to be solved after mind is evolved. There is occasion for surprise that a mind so acute and logical as George Eliot's did not perceive that the evolution philosophy has failed to settle any of the greater problems suggested by Kant. The studies of Darwin and Spencer have certainly made it impossible longer to accept Locke's theory of the origin of all knowledge in individual experience, but they have not in any degree explained the process of thought or the origin of ideas. The gulf between the physiological processes in the brain and thought has not been bridged even by a rope walk. The total disparity of mind and matter resists all efforts to reduce them to one. The utmost which the evolution philosophy has so far done, is to attempt to prove that mind is a function of matter or of the physiological process. This conclusion is as far as possible from being that of the unity of mind and matter. That man is very ignorant, and that this world ought to demand the greater share of his attention and energies, are propositions every reasonable person is ready to accept. Granted their truth, all that is necessarily true in agnosticism has been arrived at. It is a persistent refusal to see what lies behind outward facts which gives agnosticism all its practical justification. Art itself is a sufficient refutation of the assertion that we know nothing of what lies behind the apparent. That we know something of causes, every person who uses his own mind may be aware. At the same time, the rejection of the doctrine of rights argues obedience to a theory, rather than humble acceptance of the facts of history. That doctrine of rights, so scorned by George Eliot, has wrought most of the great and wholesome social changes of modern times. Her theory of duties can show no historic results whatever. To separate George Eliot's theories from her genius it seems impossible to do, but this it is necessary to do in order to give both their proper place. All praise, her work demands on its side where genius is active. It is as a thinker, as a theorizer, she is to be criticised and to be declared wanting. Her work was crippled by her philosophy, or if not crippled, then it was made less strong of limb and vigorous of body by that same philosophy. It is true of her as of Wordsworth, that she grew prosy because she tried to be philosophical. It is true of her as it is not true of him, that her work lacks in the breadth which a large view of the world gives. His was no provincial conception of nature or of man. Hers was so in a most emphatic sense. The philosophy she adopted is not and cannot become the philosophy of more than a small number of persons. In the nature of the case it is doomed to be the faith of a few students and cultured people. It can stir no common life, develop no historic movements, inaugurate no reforms, nor give to life a diviner meaning. Whether it be true or not,--and this need not here be asked,--this social and moral limitation of its power is enough to condemn it for the purposes of literature. In so far as George Eliot's work is artistic, poetic, moral and human, it is very great, and no word too strong can be said in its praise. It is not too excessive enthusiasm to call her, on the whole, the equal of any novelist. Her genius is commanding and elemental. She has originality, strength of purpose, and a profound insight into character. Yet her work is weakened by its attachment to a narrow theory of life. Her philosophy is transitory in its nature. It cannot hold its own, as developed by her, for any great length of time. It has the elements of its own destruction in itself. The curious may read her for her speculations; the many will read her for her realism, her humanity and her genius. In truth, then, it would have been better if her work had been inspired by great spiritual aims and convictions. XXI. BIBLIOGRAPHY. As an aid to those who may wish to carry further the preceding study of George Eliot, the following bibliography and lists of references have been compiled. In their preparation constant use has been made of _Poole's Index of Periodical Literature_, the bibliography contained in _The Manchester Literary Club Papers_ for 1881, and a list of references published in _The Literary World_ (Boston) for February 24, 1883. Numerous additions have been made to these bibliographies, while the references have been verified as far as possible. An occasional reference given in these lists has not been discoverable, as that of the Manchester Club to the _London Quarterly Review_ for January, 1874, for an article on "George Eliot and Comtism," and Poole's reference to the same article in the _London Quarterly_, 47:446. This will be found in the number for January 1877, volume ninety-four. 1. WRITINGS. 1846. _The Life of Jesus_, by Strauss. Translated from the fourth German edition, 3 vols. Chapman Brothers, London. 1852-3. Assistant editor of the Westminster Review. 1852. The Westminster Review for January contained her notice of Carlyle's Life of John Sterling. In the July number appeared her article on _The Lady Novelists_. 1854. _The Essence of Christianity_, by Feuerbach. Translated from the second German edition. John Chapman, London. The Westminster Review for October published her _Woman in France: Madame de Sablé_. She wrote, it is supposed, occasionally for The Leader newspaper, of which journal Lewes was the literary editor. None of her contributions have been identified. [Footnote: There is a nearly complete set of The Leader in the Boston Athenaeum Library.] 1855. Westminster Review, October, _Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming_. 1856. Westminster Review, January, _German Wit: Heinrich Heine_. July, _The Natural History of German Life_. October, _Silly Novels by Lady Novelists_. 1857. Westminster Review, January, _Worldliness and other-Worldliness: the Poet Young_. In Blackwood's Magazine for January and February appeared _The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton_; in March, April, May and June, _Mr. Gilfil's Love Story_; from July to December, _Janet's Repentance_. In December these stories were published in two volumes under the title of _Scenes of Clerical Life_, by George Eliot. Edinburgh, Blackwood & Sons. Reprinted in Living Age from April to December, 1857. 1859. In February, _Adam Bede_ appeared in three volumes, Blackwoods. Blackwood's Magazine for July contained _The Lifted Veil_. 1860. In April, _The Mill on the Floss_ was published in three volumes, Blackwoods. 1861. _Silas Marner_ in March, one volume, Blackwoods. 1863. _Romola_ appeared in the Cornhill Magazine from July, 1862, to July, 1863, and was illustrated. It was published in three volumes in July; Smith, Elder & Co., London. 1864. The Cornhill Magazine for July contained _Brother Jacob_, with illustrations. 1865. The Fortnightly Review for May 15 contained _The Influence of Rationalism_, and a review of Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament. 1866. In June, _Felix Holt_ was issued in three volumes, Blackwoods. 1868. Blackwood's Magazine, January, contained an _Address to Workingmen, by Felix Holt_. In June, _The Spanish Gypsy_ was published by Blackwoods. 1869. Blackwood's Magazine for May printed _How Lisa Loved the King_. The Atlantic Monthly for August contained _Agatha_. 1870. In Macmillan's Magazine for May, _The Legend of Jubal_. 1871. Macmillan's Magazine for July, _Armgart_. Middlemarch was issued in twelve monthly numbers, beginning with December, by Blackwoods. 1874. _The Legend of Jubal and other Poems_ was published by Blackwoods. It contained: _The Legend of Jubal_, _Agatha_, _Armgart_, _How Lisa Loved the King_, _A Minor Prophet_, _Brother and Sister_, _Stradivarius_, _Two Lovers_, _Arion_, _O May I Join the Choir Invisible_. 1876. _Daniel Deronda_ was issued in eight monthly parts, beginning in February, by Blackwoods. 1878. Macmillan's Magazine for July, _A College Breakfast Party_. 1879. _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ was published in June by Blackwoods. _The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New_, was issued by Blackwoods, containing, in addition to those in the first edition, _A College Breakfast Party_, _Self and Life_, _Sweet Evenings Come and Go_, _Love_, _The Death of Moses_. In Blackwood's cabinet edition of George Eliot's complete works, _The Lifted Veil_ and _Brother Jacob_ are reprinted with _Silas Marner_. After the death of Lewes she edited his _Study of Psychology_ and his _Mind as a Function of the Organism_. 1881. The Pall Mall Gazette of January 6 contained her letter to Sara Hennell concerning the origin of _Adam Bede_. Three letters to Professor David Kaufmann appeared in the Athenaeum of November 26, 1881. The following articles also contain sayings of George Eliot's, or extracts from her letters: In the Contemporary Review, by "One who knew her," on the Moral Influence of George Eliot; C. Kegan Paul in Harper's Magazine; F.W.H. Myers in The Century; W.M.W. Call in the Westminster Review, and a nephew of William Blackwood in Blackwood's Magazine. 1882. In Harper's Magazine for March, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps published numerous extracts from George Eliot's letters under the title of _Last Words from George Eliot_. 1883. George Eliot, by Mathilde Blind,--London, W.H. Allen, and Boston, Roberts Brothers,--contains extracts from several letters. The Essays of George Eliot, collected by Nathan Sheppard,--New York, Funk & Wagnalls,--contains _Carlyle's Life of Sterling_, _Woman in France_, _Evangelical Teaching_, _German Wit_, _Natural History of German Life_, _Silly Novels by Lady Novelists_, _Worldliness and other-Worldliness_, _The Influence of Rationalism_, _The Grammar of Ornament_, _Felix Holt's Address to Workingmen_. The Complete Essays of George Eliot, Boston, Estes & Lauriat, 1883, in addition to the above, contains _The Lady Novelists, George Foster, the German Naturalist, Weimar and its Celebrities_. 2. SELECTIONS, TRANSLATIONS AND PORTRAITS. Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, Selected by Alexander Main. Blackwoods, 1872. Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1878; enlarged and with a biographical memoir prefixed, 1881. George Eliot Birthday Book. Blackwoods, 1878. George Eliot: Fragments et Pensées, extraits et traduits des ses Oeuvres, par Ch. Ritter. Genève, Georges, 1879. Character Readings from George Eliot, selected and arranged by Nathan Sheppard. New York, Harpers, 1882. The following translations have been published:-- _French_.--Adam Bede, by A. Durade; Mill on the Floss, by A. Durade; Silas Marner, by Durade; Romola, by Durade; Mr. Gilfil's Love Story, by E. Pasquet; Dorlcote Mill, by E.D. Forques in Revue des Deux Mondes, June 15, 1860; The Lifted Veil, in Revue des Deux Mondes, September, 1880. _Dutch_.--Felix Holt, by Merv. Van Westrheeve, 1867, and by P. Bruyn, 1873; Middlemarch, by Merv. Van Westrheeve, 1873; Adam Bede, by P. Bruyn, 1870; Mill on the Floss, by P. Bruyn, 1870; Romola, by P. Bruyn, 1870, and by J.C. Van Deventer, 1864; Novelettes, by P. Bruyn, 1870. _German_.--Adam Bede, by J. Frese; Silas Marner, by J. Frese, 1861; Mill on the Floss, by J. Frese, 1861; Romola, by A.V. Metzsch, 1864; Middlemarch, by E. Lehmann, 1872-3; Daniel Deronda, by Strodtmann, 1876; Felix Holt (no translator's name given), 1867. Der Gelüftche Schleier, Bruder Jakob, by Lehmann. The portrait of George Eliot appearing as the frontispiece to this volume is from that published in The Century for November, 1881. Accompanying it was the following account of it and of other portraits:-- "We have the pleasure of presenting to our readers an authentic portrait of George Eliot, the only one by which it is likely that she will be known to posterity. We are indebted for this privilege, as we shall presently explain, to the kindness and courtesy of her husband, Mr. J.W. Cross, who has allowed us to be the first to usher this beautiful work of art to the world. In doing so, we believe it will interest readers of The Century Magazine to learn, for the first time, the exact truth regarding the portraits of George Eliot, and we have therefore obtained from the three artists to whom, at different times in her life, she sat, some particulars of those occasions. "Miss Evans passed the winter of 1849-50 at Geneva, in the house of M.F. d'Albert Durade, the well-known Swiss water-color painter, who is also the translator of the authorized French version of her works. At that time she had, however, written nothing original, and had attracted no general interest. While she stayed with M. Durade and his wife, the Swiss painter amused himself by making a small portrait of her in oils--a head and shoulders. This painting remains in the possession of M. Durade, who has not merely refused to sell it, but will not allow it to be photographed or reproduced in any form. He has, however, we understand, consented to make a replica of it for Mr. Cross. We have not seen this interesting work, but we hear that it is considered, by those who still remember the great writer as she looked in her thirtieth year, to be remarkably faithful. M. Durade recently exhibited this little picture for a few days at the Athénée in Geneva, but has refused to allow it to be brought to London. "Ten years after this, in 1859, as the distinguished portrait-painter, Mr. Samuel Laurence, was returning from America, he happened to meet with 'Adam Bede,' then just published. He was so delighted with the book that he was determined to know the author, and it was revealed to him that to do so he had but to renew his old acquaintance with Mr. George Henry Lewes, whom he had met years before at Leigh Hunt's. He made George Eliot's acquaintance, and was charmed with her, and before long he asked leave to make a study of her head. She assented without any affectation, and, in the early months of 1861, Mr. Lewes commissioned the painter to make a drawing of her. She gave him repeated sittings in his studio at 6 Wells Street, London, and Mr. Laurence looks back with great pleasure on the long conversations that those occasions gave him with his vivacious sitter. The drawing was taken front face, with the hair uncovered, worn in the fashion then prevalent, and it was made in chalks. While it was proceeding, Mr. Laurence asked her if he might exhibit it, when finished, at the Royal Academy, and she at once consented. But when the time for sending in drew near, the artist received a letter from Mr. Lewes absolutely withholding this consent, and a certain strain, of which this was the first symptom, began to embarrass the relations of the two gentlemen, until Mr. Lewes finally refused to take the drawing at all. But before the summer was out, Mr. Langford, the reader of Messrs. Blackwood of Edinburgh, who published George Eliot's works, called on Mr. Laurence, and asked if he would consent to make a copy of the drawing for the firm. The artist replied that he should be happy to sell them the original, and accordingly it passed from his studio, in June, 1861, into the back parlor of Mr. Blackwood's shop, where it now hangs. Like that of M. Durade, Mr. Laurence's portrait of George Eliot is not to be in any way reproduced. "The remaining portrait is that which we reproduce with this number. It is an elaborate chalk drawing, in black and white, with a slight touch of color in the eyes, and was executed in the latter part of 1868 and the early part of 1867, by Mr. Frederick W. Burton, at that time member of the Society of Painters in Watercolors, and now director of the National Gallery in London. George Eliot gave Mr. Burton many sittings in his studio at Kensington, and the picture was eventually exhibited in the Royal Academy, in 1867, as No. 735, 'The Author of "Adam Bede."' It passed into Mr. Lewes's possession, was retained at his death by George Eliot, and is now the property of Mr. J.W. Cross. In the spring of this year, Mr. Cross came to the conclusion that--as the shop windows were likely to become filled with spurious and hideous 'portraits' of George Eliot--it was necessary to overcome the dislike felt by the family of the great novelist to any publication of her features, to which in life she had been averse, and he thereupon determined to record in a monumental way what he felt to be the best existing likeness. Mr. Cross took the drawing over to M. Paul Rajon, who is acknowledged to be the prince of modern etchers, and in his retirement at Auvers-sur-Oise, the great French artist has produced the beautiful etching which we have been permitted to reproduce in engraving. For this permission, and for great courtesy and kindness under circumstances the peculiar nature of which it is not necessary here to specify, we have to tender our most sincere thanks to Mr. J.W. Cross and to Mr. Burton. "These are regarded by her friends to be the only important portraits of George Eliot which exist, but Mr. Cross possesses a very interesting black silhouette, cut with scissors, when she was sixteen. In this profile, the characteristics of the mature face are seen in the course of development. There is also a photograph, the only one ever taken, dating from about 1850, the eyes of which are said to be exceedingly fine. As an impression of later life, there should be mentioned a profile drawn in pencil by Mrs. Alma Tadema, in March, 1877. Of all the portraits here alluded to, the one we engrave is the only one at present destined for publication. It may be added that there exist one or two other profile sketches, which, however, are not approved by the friends of George Eliot." 3. BIOGRAPHICAL. Atlantic Monthly, 14:66, December, 1864, Kate Field on "English Authors in Florence." Louise M. Alcott in the Independent for Nov. 1,1866. The Galaxy, 7:801, June, 1869, Justin McCarthy on "George Eliot and George Lewes;" reprinted in "Modern Leaders," 1872 "Home Sketches in France and other Papers," by the late Mrs. Henry M. Field, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1875, p. 208, "The Author of Adam Bede in Her own Home." International Review, 10:447, 497, May and June, 1881, W. Fraser Rae. The Century. 23:55, with portrait, F.W.H. Myers, reprinted in Essays: Modern, London, 1883; 23:47, "The Portrait of George Eliot." The Nineteenth Century, 9:778, Edith Simcox. Blackwood's Magazine February, 1881. Harper's Magazine, May, 1881, C. Kegan Paul; reprinted in Biographical Sketches, London, 1883; March, 1882, E.S. Phelps. Westminster Review, 116:154, July, 1881, W.M.W. Call, "George Eliot: her Life and Writings." Le Livre, April 10, 1881, "Life in Geneva." London Daily Graphic, 23:27, January 8, 1851, "Reminiscences of George Eliot." Lippincott's Magazine, 31:510, May, 1883, J.A. Dickson, "An Afternoon at Ashbourne." Inquirer, January, 1881, Dr. Sadler's address. Pall Mall Gazette, December 30, 1880, "Early Life." London Daily News, December, 30, 1880, account of her funeral. Eclectic Magazine, March, 1881, account of her early life and of her funeral; April, A personal sketch. "George Eliot," Mathilde Blind, 1883, W.H. Allen, London. "Pen pictures of Modern Authors," Wm. Sheppard, 1882, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York. The Congregationalist, May 28, 1879, Mrs. Annie Downs, "A Visit to George Eliot." The Christian Leader, October 27,1881, Mrs. M.E. Bruce. 4. GENERAL CRITICISMS. Quarterly Review, 108:469. Macmillan's Magazine, 14:272, J. Morley; same, Eclectic Magazine, 67:488; reprinted in "Critical Miscellanies," first series. Atlantic Monthly, 18:479, H. James. Christian Examiner, 70:227, I.M. Luyster. North British Review, 45:141, 197. H.H. Lancaster; reprinted in "Essays and Reviews," Edinburgh, 1876. National Review, 11:191. Home and Foreign Review, 3:522, Richard Simpson. Fraser's Magazine, 103:263, February, 1881, T.E. Kebbel, "Village Life according to George Eliot;" same, Living Age, 148:608. National Quarterly, 1:455, E.L. Wentworth. Potter's American Monthly, 9:260, 334. British Quarterly Review, 45:141. Catholic World, 17:775, J. McCarthy, "Comparison between George Eliot and Fleurange." Canadian Monthly, 11:261, "Later Manner of George Eliot." Dublin Review, 88:371. Southern Review (new style), 13:205, Mrs. S.B. Herrick. R.H. Hutton, "Essays, Theological and Literary," 2d vol. 1871. Contemporary Review, 20:403; same, Living Age, 115:109, Eclectic Magazine, 79:562, Professor E. Dowden; reprinted in "Studies of Literature." Atlantic Monthly, 33:681, June, 1874, George P. Lathrop, "The Growth of the Novel." A.C. Swinburne, "A Note on Charlotte Brontë," 1877. International Review, 7:17, July, 1879, Francis Maguire, Jr. Cornhill Magazine, 43:152, Leslie Stephen, "Critical Study of George Eliot;" same, Living Age, 148:731, Eclectic Magazine, 96:443. Month, 42:272. Every Saturday, 10:186. North British Review, 33:165, "George Eliot and Hawthorne." Eclectic Magazine, 88:111, "George Eliot and George Sand." The Nation, 32:201, J. Bryce, "George Eliot and Carlyle;" 31:456, W.C. Brownell. London Quarterly, 57:154. Blackwood's Magazine, 129:255; same, Living Age, 148:664; Eclectic Magazine, 96:433. St. Paul's, 12:592, G.B. Smith. Living Age, 58:274; 148:318. Eclectic Magazine, 96:353. Southern Monthly, 14:65. Tinsley's Monthly, 3:565. Victoria, 31:56. The Century, 23:619, February, 1882, "George Eliot and Emerson." Library Magazine, 7:84, Nathan Sheppard, "George Eliot's Analysis of Motives;" reprinted as an introduction to George Eliot's Essays, Funk & Wagnalls, 1883. Macmillan's Magazine, 46:488, October, 1882, Annie Matheson, "George Eliot's Children;" same, Living Age, 155:211. The Critic, January, 1881, Edward Eggleston; reprinted in Essays from the Critic, 1881. Christian Union, February, 1881, Noah Porter. The Independent, February 17, 1881, Mrs. Lippincott, "Three Great Women." A History of English Prose Fiction from Sir Thomas Malory to George Eliot, Bayard Tuckerman, New York, 1882. The English Novel and the Principle of its Development, Sidney Lanier, New York, 1883. Modern Review, 2:399, April, 1881, George Sarson, "George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle." Literary World (London), January, 1881, Peter Bayne Athenaeum, January 1, 1881:20. The Academy, 19:27, January 8, 1881. Temps, December 26, 1880, Edmond Scherer. Le Roman Naturaliste, Ferdinand Brunetère, 1883, has a chapter on "English Naturalism: a Study of George Eliot." �tudes sur la Littérature Contemporaine, E. Scherer, Paris, 1878. The Pen, 1880, Robert E. Francillon. East and West: 1:203, June, 1881. Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 1881; Bibliography, Charles W. Sutton; "George Eliot as a Poet," George Milner; "George Eliot as a Novelist," John Mortimer; "George Eliot's Use of Dialect," William E.A. Axon. National Review, April, 1883, "New School of Fiction." Merry England, May, 1883, C. Kegan Paul, "The Rustic of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy." Blackwood's Magazine, April, 1883. Nineteenth Century, October, 1881, John Buskin on "Fiction: Fair and Foul." 5. DISCUSSIONS OF HER TEACHINGS. Penn Monthly, 10:579, "The Art of George Eliot." Dublin Review, 89:433, "Religion of George Eliot." Unitarian Review, 3:357, J.E. Carpenter, "Religious Influence of George Eliot." "The Ethics of George Eliot's Works," J.C. Brown, Wm. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1879. Mind, 6:378, July. 1881, "George Eliot's Art," James Sully. The Spectator, 52:751, "George Eliot's Ideal Ethics;" same, Littell's Living Age, 142:123, July 12, 1879. Scribner's Magazine. 8:685, Wm. C. Wilkinson; reprinted in "A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters," 1874. Westminster Review, 117:65, January, 1882, "George Eliot as a Moral Teacher." Contemporary Review, 39:173, February, 1881, "Moral Influence of George Eliot;" same, Living Age, 148:501. Unitarian Review, 16:125, 216, August and September, 1881, John A. Bellows, "Religious Tendency of George Eliot's Writings." Atlantic Monthly, 51:243, February, 1883, M.L. Henry, "The Morality of Thackeray and George Eliot." The Independent, March 24, 1883, Stopford A. Brooke, "George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle." "The Religion of Our Literature," George MacCrie, London, 1875. "George Eliot and Judaism," David Kaufmann, Blackwoods, 1878. 6. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE. Atlantic Monthly, 1:890. 7. ADAM BEDE. Blackwood's Magazine, 85:490, April, 1859. Dublin Review, 47:33, November, 1859. Edinburgh Review, 110:223, July, 1859. Westminster Review, 71:486, April, 1859. Athenaeum, February 26, 1859. Saturday Review, February 26, 1859:191 Atlantic Monthly, 4:521. Christian Examiner, 70:227, I.M. Luyster. "Seth Bede, the Methody: his Life and Labors," chiefly by Himself. London: Tallant & Co., 1859. "George Eliot in Derbyshire," London Society, 27:311, 439; 28:20, by Guy Roslyn (Joshua Hatton); reprinted in book form, London, 1876. 8. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Blackwood's Magazine, 87:611, May, 1860. Dublin University Review, 57:192. Macmillan's Magazine, 3:441. Westminster Review, 74:24, July, 1860. Christian Examiner, 69:145, L.G. Ware. 9. SILAS MARNER. Christian Examiner, 70:227, I.M. Luyster. Macmillan's Magazine, 4:305. Revue des Deux Mondes, September, 1861, C. Clarigny. 10. ROMOLA. Blackwood's Magazine, 116:72. Land We Love, 1:134. Westminster Review, 80:344, October, 1863. Christian Remembrancer, 52:445. Revue des Deux Mondes, December, 1863, E.D. Forques. 11. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Blackwood's Magazine, 100:94, July, 1866. Edinburgh Review, 124:435, October, 1866; same, Living Age, 91:432. North American Review, 103:557, July, 1866, A.G. Sedgwick. The Nation, 3:127, Henry James. Contemporary Review, 3:51. Eclectic Review, 124:34. Chambers's Journal, 43:508. Westminster Review, 86:200, July, 1866. 12. THE SPANISH GYPSY. Atlantic Monthly, 22:380, W.D. Howells. North American Review, 107:620, October, 1868, Henry James. The Nation, 7:13, July 2, 1868, Henry James. Edinburgh Review, 128:525. Westminster Review, 90:183, Macmillan's Magazine, 18:281, J. Morley; same, Eclectic Magazine, 71:1276. Blackwood's Magazine, 103:760. British Quarterly Review, 48:503, Fraser's Magazine, 78:468, J. Skelton. St. James's, 22:478. St. Paul's, 2:583. London Quarterly, 31:160. Southern Review (new Style), 4:383, W.H. Browne. Every Saturday, 6:1. 13. POEMS. Contemporary Review, 8:387, July 1868, Matthew Browne (W.B. Rands); same, Every Saturday, 6:79. Every Saturday, 16:667, G.A. Simcox. The Argosy, 2:437, November, 1866, Matthew Browne. Saturday Review, 37:75. Macmillan's Magazine, 22:1. North American Review, 119:484, Heary James. Atlantic Monthly, 34:102, July, 1874, W.D. Howells. Harper's Magazine, 49:887. Academy, 5:33, May 10, 1874, G.A. Simcox. Edinburgh Review, 128:523, October, 1868. Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 1881, p. 108, George Milner. The Nation, 19:124. "Our Living Poets: an Essay in Criticism," H. Buxton Forman, London, 1871. 14. MIDDLEMARCH. Quarterly Review, 134:336, April, 1873. Edinburgh Review, 137:246, January, 1873. Fortnightly Review, 19:142, Sidney Colvin. Blackwood's Magazine, 112:727; same, Living Age, 116:131; Eclectic Magazine, 80:215. The Nation, 16:60, 76, January, 1873, A.V. Dicey. North American Review, 116:432, April, 1873, T.S. Perry. British Quarterly Review, 57:407, April, 1883. London Quarterly Review, 40:99, April, 1873. Canadian Monthly, 3:549. Old and New, 7:352, H.G. Spaulding. Southern Monthly, 12:373, W.H. Browne. Atlantic Monthly, 31:490, A.G. Sedgwick. Catholic World, 17:775, September, 1873. Die Gegen-wart, 1874, Freidrich Speilhagen. 15. DANIEL DERONDA. Atlantic Monthly, 38:084, Henry James, December, 1876. North American Review, 124:31, E.P. Whippie, January, 1877. Edinburgh Review, 144:442, October, 1876. Fortnightly Review, 26:601, November, 1876, Sidney Colvin. The Nation, 23:230, 245, October 12, 19, 1876, A.V. Dicey. British Quarterly Review, 64:472. Eclectic Magazine, 87:657. International Review, 4:68, R.R. Bowker. The Western, 3:603, O.G. Garrison. Potter's American Monthly, 8:75. Gentleman's Magazine (new style), 17:593, November, 1876, J. Picciotto; 17:411, R.E. Francillon. Canadian Monthly, 9:250, 343; 10:362. Victoria, 28:227, A.S. Richardson. Temple Bar, 49:542, "Deronda's Mother;" same, Living Age, 133:248; same, Eclectic Magazine, 88:751. Macmillan's Magazine, 36:101, J. Jacobs, "Mordecai: a Protest against the Critics, by a Jew;" same, Living Age, 134:112. Athenacum, 1876:160, 327, 461, 593, 762. Westminster Review, 106:280,574. Appleton's Journal (new style), 3:274, September, 1877, Wirt Sikes. Deutsche Rundachau, February 7, 1877. Contemporary Review, 29:348, February, 1877, Edward Dowden, reprinted in "Studies of Literature." 16. IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. Edinburgh Review, 150:557. Fortnightly Review, 32:144, G. Allen. Westminster Review, 112:185, July, 1879. The Nation, 28:422, June 19, 1879, G.E. Woodberry. Fraser's Magazine, 100:103. Canadian Monthly, 16.333. Unitarian Review, 12:292, R.W. Boodle. INDEX A. Actions, _Actors and Acting_ _Adam Bede_ _Adam Bede_, quoted "Address to Workingmen," quoted Agnosticism Altruism Analytic Method _Animal Life, Studies in_ "Amos Barton," quoted _Aristotle_ "Armgart," quoted Art Art, love of Asceticism Austen, Jane B. Blackwood, William _Blackwood's Magazine_ Blind, Mathilde quoted Brabant Dr. Bray Charles Brontë Charlotte Brookbank "Brother and Sister" "Brother Jacob" Browning, Robert Browning, Mrs. C. Call, W.M.W., quoted Carlyle Causes "Choir Invisible" Chapman, John Characteristics, personal Childhood, influences surrounding Child Life Christianity "College Breakfast Party" Colvin, Sidney Combe, George Comte Conscience Conversation _Cornhill Magazine_ Cosmopolitanism Cowper Criticism Culture Cumming, Dr. D. _Daniel Deronda_ _Daniel Deronda_ quoted Darwin Death Deeds Dialect Dickens, Charles Dowden, Prof., quoted Downs, Annie, quoted Dramatic power Duty E. Emerson Environment Essays "Evangelical Teaching" Evans, Christiana Evans, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, Isaac Evans, Robert Evans, Mrs. Robert Evil Evolution Philosophy Experience F. Familiar, influence of the Feeling Feeling for others _Felix Holt_ _Felix Holt_, quoted Feuerbach Fichte Field, Kate, quoted Fielding, Henry Fields, Mrs., quoted Foleshill _Fortnightly Review_ G. Garth, Caleb "German life, natural history of" God Goethe _Goethe, Life of_ Griff House H. Harrison, Frederic Heine Hennell, Charles Hennell, Sara Heredity House Howells, W.D. Huge Humor Hutton, R.H., quoted I. Idealism Imagination Immortality Immortality, subjective Individuality "Influence of Rationalism" Inspiration Intuition J. James, Henry Jones, Owen "Janet's Repentance," quoted K. Kant Kaufmann, Prof. L. "Lady Novelists" Law _Leader_ newspaper _Legend of Jubal_ Letters, extracts from Lewes, George Henry born school days early studies in Germany _History of Philosophy_ _Spanish Drama_ _Ranthorpe_ writes for Reviews _Leader_ _Philosophy of the Sciences_ _Life of Goethe_, physiological studies _Fortnightly Review_ _Problems of Life and Mind_ characteristics death Lewes, influence on George Eliot Lewes, Marian Evans born parents early reading school in Nuneaton school In Coventry studying at home moves to Foleshill studies continued early religious views early scepticism troubles with her family finds friends the Brays the Hennells drawn towards positivism father dies goes to continent translates Strauss Feuerbach assistant editor of _Westminster Review_ _Review_ contributor marriage studies in Germany writes _Clerical Scenes_ adopts name of "George Eliot" again visits Germany _Adam Bede_ controversy about _Adam Bede_ novel-writing poems written house habits of study description of person receptions summers in country death of Lewes marriage to John Walter Cross death literary traits "Lifted Veil" Liggins, Joseph Lippincott, Mrs., quoted Literary Methods Literature defined Locke Love Lucretius M. Marriage Martineau, Harriet Matter Meliorism _Middlemarch_ _Middlemarch_, quoted Midland England Mill, J.S. _Mill on the Floss_, _Mill on the Floss_, quoted "Minor Prophet" Morality Mordecai Morley, John "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" Music, Love of Myers, F.W.H., quoted Mysticism N. Nemesis, Newdigate, Sir Roger Novel-writing P. Past, the Paul, Kegan, quoted Pessimism Philosophy, George Eliot's Philosophy, Lewes's _History of_ _Philosophy of the Sciences_ _Physiology of Common Life_ Plots Poetry Positivism Prayer Priory, The _Problems of Life and Mind_ Psychology R. _Ranthorpe_ Realism Reason Receptions Relativity, Moral Religion "Religion of Humanity" Renaissance Renunciation Resignation Retribution Romanticism _Romola_ _Romola_, quoted _Rose, Blanche and Violet_ Ruskin S. Sadler, Dr., quoted Sand, George Satire Savonarola _Scenes of Clerical Life_ Schelling Scientific illustration Scott _Seaside Studies_ "Self and Life" Sex in literature Shakspere Shelley _Silas Marner_ "Silly Novels" Simcox, Edith, quoted Society Social Organism Sorrow _Spanish Drama_ _Spanish Gypsy_ Speculation, Love of _Spectator_ Spencer, Herbert Spinoza Spiritual, the "Stradivarius" Strauss Sterling, John Sympathy Sully, James, quoted Supernatural Swinburne, quoted T. Tennyson Thackeray _Theophrastus Such_ _Theophrastus Such_, quoted Times Tradition W. _Waverley Novel_ _Westminster Review_ "Weimar and its Celebrities" Whipple, E.P., quoted Wieland "Woman in France" Woman, Literary Wordsworth Y. Young, Edward 
16787	----	Great Writers. Edited by Eric S. Robertson, M.A., Professor of English Literature and Philosophy in the University of the Punjab, Lahore. [Illustration: Portrait of Dickens] LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS by FRANK T. MARZIALS London Walter Scott 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row 1887 NOTE. That I should have to acknowledge a fairly heavy debt to Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens," and "The Letters of Charles Dickens," edited by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter, is almost a matter of course; for these are books from which every present and future biographer of Dickens must perforce borrow in a more or less degree. My work, too, has been much lightened by Mr. Kitton's excellent "Dickensiana." CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE The lottery of education; Charles Dickens born February 7, 1812; his pathetic feeling towards his own childhood; happy days at Chatham; family troubles; similarity between little Charles and David Copperfield; John Dickens taken to the Marshalsea; his character; Charles employed in blacking business; over-sensitive in after years about this episode in his career; isolation; is brought back into family and prison circle; family in comparative comfort at the Marshalsea; father released; Charles leaves the blacking business; his mother; he is sent to Wellington House Academy in 1824; character of that place of learning; Dickens masters its humours thoroughly. 11 CHAPTER II. Dickens becomes a solicitor's clerk in 1827; then a reporter; his experiences in that capacity; first story published in _The Old Monthly Magazine_ for January, 1834; writes more "Sketches"; power of minute observation thus early shown; masters the writer's art; is paid for his contributions to the _Chronicle_; marries Miss Hogarth on April 2, 1836; appearance at that date; power of physical endurance; admirable influence of his peculiar education; and its drawbacks 27 CHAPTER III. Origin of "Pickwick"; Seymour's part therein; first number published on April 1, 1836; early numbers not a success; suddenly the book becomes the rage; English literature just then in want of its novelist; Dickens' kingship acknowledged; causes of the book's popularity; its admirable humour, and other excellent qualities; Sam Weller; Mr. Pickwick himself; book read by everybody 40 CHAPTER IV. Dickens works "double tides" from 1836 to 1839; appointed editor of _Bentley's Miscellany_ at beginning of 1837, and commences "Oliver Twist"; _Quarterly Review_ predicts his speedy downfall; pecuniary position at this time; moves from Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street; death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth; his friendships; absence of all jealousy in his character; habits of work; riding and pedestrianizing; walking in London streets necessary to the exercise of his art 49 CHAPTER V. "Oliver Twist"; analysis of the book; doubtful probability of Oliver's character; "Nicholas Nickleby"; its wealth of character; _Master Humphrey's Clock_ projected and begun in April, 1840; the public disappointed in its expectations of a novel; "Old Curiosity Shop" commenced, and miscellaneous portion of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ dropped; Dickens' fondness for taking a child as his hero or heroine; Little Nell; tears shed over her sorrows; general admiration for the pathos of her story; is such admiration altogether deserved? Paul Dombey more natural; Little Nell's death too declamatory as a piece of writing; Dickens nevertheless a master of pathos; "Barnaby Rudge"; a historical novel dealing with times of the Gordon riots 57 CHAPTER VI. Dickens starts for United States in January, 1842; had been splendidly received a little before at Edinburgh; why he went to the United States; is enthusiastically welcomed; at first he is enchanted; then expresses the greatest disappointment; explanation of the change; what the Americans thought of _him_; "American Notes"; his views modified on his second visit to America in 1867-8; takes to fierce private theatricals for rest; delight of the children on his return to England; an admirable father 71 CHAPTER VII. Dickens again at work and play; publication of "Martin Chuzzlewit" begun in January, 1843; plot not Dickens' strong point; this not of any vital consequence; a novel not really remembered by its story; Dickens' books often have a higher unity than that of plot; selfishness the central idea of "Martin Chuzzlewit"; a great book, and yet not at the time successful; Dickens foresees money embarrassments; publishes the admirable "Christmas Carol" at Christmas, 1843; and determines to go for a space to Italy 84 CHAPTER VIII. Journey through France; Genoa; the Italy of 1844; Dickens charmed with its untidy picturesqueness; he is idle for a few weeks; his palace at Genoa; he sets to work upon "The Chimes"; gets passionately interested in the little book; travels through Italy to read it to his friends in London; reads it on December 2, 1844; is soon back again in Italy; returns to London in the summer of 1845; on January 21, 1846, starts _The Daily News_; holds the post of editor three weeks; "Pictures from Italy" first published in _Daily News_ 93 CHAPTER IX. Dickens as an amateur actor and stage-manager; he goes to Lausanne in May, 1846, and begins "Dombey"; has great difficulty in getting on without streets; the "Battle of Life" written; "Dombey"; its pathos; pride the subject of the book; reality of the characters; Dickens' treatment of partial insanity; M. Taine's false criticism thereon; Dickens in Paris in the winter of 1846-7; private theatricals again; the "Haunted Man"; "David Copperfield" begun in May, 1849; it marks the culminating point in Dickens' career as a writer; _Household Words_ started on March 30, 1850; character of that periodical and its successor, _All the Year Round_; domestic sorrows cloud the opening of the year 1851; Dickens moves in same year from Devonshire Terrace to Tavistock House, and begins "Bleak House"; story of the novel; its Chancery episodes; Dickens is overworked and ill, and finds pleasant quarters at Boulogne 102 CHAPTER X. Dickens gives his first public (not paid) readings in December, 1853; was it _infra dig._ that he should read for money? he begins his paid readings in April, 1858; reasons for their success; care bestowed on them by the reader; their dramatic character; Carlyle's opinion of them; how the tones of Dickens' voice linger in the memory of one who heard him 121 CHAPTER XI. "Hard Times" commenced in _Household Words_ for April 1, 1854; it is an attack on the "hard fact" school of philosophers; what Macaulay and Mr. Ruskin thought of it; the Russian war of 1854-5, and the cry for "Administrative Reform"; Dickens in the thick of the movement; "Little Dorrit" and the "Circumlocution Office"; character of Mr. Dorrit admirably drawn; Dickens is in Paris from December, 1855, to May, 1856; he buys Gad's Hill Place; it becomes his hobby; unfortunate relations with his wife; and separation in May 1858; lying rumours; how these stung Dickens through his honourable pride in the love which the public bore him; he publishes an indignant protest in _Household Words_; and writes an unjustifiable letter 126 CHAPTER XII. "The Tale of Two Cities," a story of the great French Revolution; Phiz's connection with Dickens' works comes to an end; his art and that of Cruikshank; both too essentially caricaturists of an old school to be permanently the illustrators of Dickens; other illustrators; "Great Expectations"; its story and characters; "Our Mutual Friend" begun in May, 1864; a complicated narrative; Dickens' extraordinary sympathy for Eugene Wrayburn; generally his sympathies are so entirely right; which explains why his books are not vulgar; he himself a man of great real refinement 139 CHAPTER XIII. Dickens' health begins to fail; he is much shaken by an accident in June, 1865; but bates no jot of his high courage, and works on at his readings; sails for America on a reading tour in November, 1867; is wretchedly ill, and yet continues to read day after day; comes back to England, and reads on; health failing more and more; reading has to be abandoned for a time; begins to write his last and unfinished book, "Edwin Drood"; except health all seems well with him; on June 8, 1870, he works at his book nearly all day; at dinner time is struck down; dies on the following day, June the 9th; is buried in Westminster Abbey among his peers; nor will his fame suffer eclipse 149 INDEX 163 LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER I. Education is a kind of lottery in which there are good and evil chances, and some men draw blanks and other men draw prizes. And in saying this I do not use the word education in any restricted sense, as applying exclusively to the course of study in school or college; nor certainly, when I speak of prizes, am I thinking of scholarships, exhibitions, fellowships. By education I mean the whole set of circumstances which go to mould a man's character during the apprentice years of his life; and I call that a prize when those circumstances have been such as to develop the man's powers to the utmost, and to fit him to do best that of which he is best capable. Looked at in this way, Charles Dickens' education, however untoward and unpromising it may often have seemed while in the process, must really be pronounced a prize of value quite inestimable. His father, John Dickens, held a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office, and was employed in the Portsmouth Dockyard when little Charles first came into the world, at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812. Wealth can never have been one of the familiar friends of the household, nor plenty have always sat at its board. Charles had one elder sister, and six other brothers and sisters were afterwards added to the family; and with eight children, and successive removals from Portsmouth to London, and London to Chatham, and no more than the pay of a Government clerk[1]--pay which not long afterwards dwindled to a pension,--even a better domestic financier than the elder Dickens might have found some difficulty in facing his liabilities. It was unquestionably into a tottering house that the child was born, and among its ruins that he was nurtured. But through all these early years I can do nothing better than take him for my guide, and walk as it were in his companionship. Perhaps no novelist ever had a keener feeling of the pathos of childhood than Dickens, or understood more fully how real and overwhelming are its sorrows. No one, too, has entered more sympathetically into its ways. And of the child and boy that he himself had once been, he was wont to think very tenderly and very often. Again and again in his writings he reverts to the scenes and incidents and emotions of his earlier days. Sometimes he goes back to his young life directly, speaking as of himself. More often he goes back to it indirectly, placing imaginary children and boys in the position he had once occupied. Thus it is almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life should convey a false impression. He was but two years old when his father left Portsea for London, and but four when a second migration took the family to Chatham. Here we catch our first glimpse of him, in his own word-painting, as a "very queer small boy," a small boy who was sickly and delicate, and could take but little part in the rougher sports of his school companions, but read much, as sickly boys will--read the novels of the older novelists in a "blessed little room," a kind of palace of enchantment, where "'Roderick Random,' 'Peregrine Pickle,' 'Humphrey Clinker,' 'Tom Jones,' 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Don Quixote, 'Gil Blas,' and 'Robinson Crusoe,' came out, a glorious host, to keep him company." And the queer small boy had read Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," too, and knew all about Falstaff's robbery of the travellers at Gad's Hill, on the rising ground between Rochester and Gravesend, and all about mad Prince Henry's pranks; and, what was more, he had determined that when he came to be a man, and had made his way in the world, he should own the house called Gad's Hill Place, with the old associations of its site, and its pleasant outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying levels by the Thames. Was that a child's dream? The man's tenacity and steadfast strength of purpose turned it into fact. The house became the home of his later life. It was there that he died. But death was a long way forward in those old Chatham days; nor, as the time slipped by, and his father's pecuniary embarrassments began to thicken, and make the forward ways of life more dark and difficult, could the purchase of Gad's Hill Place have seemed much less remote. There is one of Dickens' works which was his own special favourite, the most cherished, as he tells us, among the offspring of his brain. That work is "David Copperfield." Nor can there be much difficulty in discovering why it occupied such an exceptional position in "his heart of hearts;" for in its pages he had enshrined the deepest memories of his own childhood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he had known what it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work, with no more than a mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of shabby poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the interior of a debtor's prison. Poor lad, he was not much more than ten or eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that were ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,--the gay military pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shifting sailor life, the delightful walks in the surrounding country, the enchanted room, tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With what inimitable humour and pathos has he told the story of these darkest days! Substitute John Dickens for Mr. Micawber, and Mrs. Dickens for Mrs. Micawber, and make David Copperfield a son of Mr. Micawber, a kind of elder Wilkins, and let little Charles Dickens be that son--and then you will have a record, true in every essential respect, of the child's life at this period. "Poor Mrs. Micawber! she said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, on which was engraved 'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies;' but I never found that any young lady had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw or heard of were creditors. _They_ used to come at all hours, and some of them were quite ferocious." Even such a plate, bearing the inscription, _Mrs. Dickens's Establishment_, ornamented the door of a house in Gower Street North, where the family had hoped, by some desperate effort, to retrieve its ruined fortunes. Even so did the pupils refuse the educational advantages offered to them, though little Charles went from door to door in the neighbourhood, carrying hither and thither the most alluring circulars. Even thus was the place besieged by assiduous and angry duns. And when, in the ordinary course of such sad stories, Mr. Dickens is arrested for debt, and carried off to the Marshalsea prison,[2] he moralizes over the event in precisely the same strain as Mr. Micawber, using, indeed, the very same words, and calls on his son, with many tears, "to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched." The son was taking note of other things besides these moral apothegms, and reproduced, in after days, with a quite marvellous detail and fidelity, all the incidents of his father's incarceration. Probably, too, he was beginning, as children will, almost unconsciously, to form some estimate of his father's character. And a very queer study in human nature _that_ must have been, giving Dickens, when once he had mastered it, a most exceptional insight into the ways of impecuniosity. Charles Lamb, as we all remember, divided mankind into two races, the mighty race of the borrowers, and the mean race of the lenders; and expatiated, with a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon the greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king among those who by process of loan obtain possession of other people's money. Shift the line of division a little, so that instead of separating borrowers and lenders, it separates those who pay their debts from those who do not pay them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed to something of Bigod's kingship. He was of the great race of debtors, possessing especially that _ideal_ quality of mind on which Lamb laid such stress. Imagination played the very mischief with him. He had evidently little grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal. Sometimes--most often, perhaps--that haze would be irradiated with sanguine visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes it would be fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair. But whether in gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost. He never, certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean honourably to pay. But either he had never possessed the faculty of forming a just estimate of future possibilities, or else, through the indulgence of what may be called a vague habit of thought, he had lost the power of seeing things as they are. Thus all his excellencies and good gifts were neutralized at this time, so far as his family were concerned, and went for practically nothing. He was, according to his son's testimony, full of industry, most conscientious in the discharge of any business, unwearying in loving patience and solicitude when those bound to him by blood or friendship were ill or in trouble, "as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world." Yet as debts accumulated, and accommodation bills shed their baleful shadow on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he became altogether immersed in mean money troubles, and suffered the son who was to shed such lustre on his name to remain for a time without the means of learning, and to sink first into a little household drudge, and then into a mere warehouse boy. So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, first blacked boots, and minded the younger children, and ran messages, and effected the family purchases--which can have been no pleasant task in the then state of the family credit,--and made very close acquaintance with the inside of the pawnbrokers' shops, and with the purchasers of second-hand books, disposing, among other things, of the little store of books he loved so well; and then, when his father was imprisoned, ran more messages hither and thither, and shed many childish tears in his father's company--the father doubtless regarding the tears as a tribute to his eloquence, though, heaven knows, there were other things to cry over besides his sonorous periods. After which a connection, James Lamert by name, who had lived with the family before they moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a worm-eaten, rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market, offered to employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week, or thereabouts. The duties which commanded these high emoluments consisted of the tying up and labelling of blacking pots. At first Charles, in consideration probably of his relationship to the manager, was allowed to do his tying, clipping, and pasting in the counting-house. But soon this arrangement fell through, as it naturally would, and he descended to the companionship of the other lads, similarly employed, in the warehouse below. They were not bad boys, and one of them, who bore the name of Bob Fagin, was very kind to the poor little better-nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack of illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side with much tenderness. But, of course, they were rough and quite uncultured, and the sensitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there was something uncongenial and degrading in being compelled to associate with them. Nor, though he had already sufficient strength of character to learn to do his work well, did he ever regard the work itself as anything but unsuitable, and almost discreditable. Indeed it may be doubted whether the iron of that time did not unduly rankle and fester as it entered into his soul, and whether the scar caused by the wound was altogether quite honourable. He seems to have felt, in connection with his early employment in a warehouse, a sense of shame such as would be more fittingly associated with the commission of an unworthy act. That he should not have habitually referred to the subject in after life, may readily be understood. But why he should have kept unbroken silence about it for long years, even with his wife, even with so very close a friend as Forster, is less clear. And in the terms used, when the revelation was finally made to Forster, there has always, I confess, appeared to me to be a tone of exaggeration. "My whole nature," he says, "was so penetrated with grief and humiliation, ... that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that time of my life." And again: "From that hour until this, at which I write, no word of that part of my childhood, which I have now gladly brought to a close, has passed my lips to any human being.... I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God." Great part, perhaps the greatest part, of Dickens' success as a writer, came from the sympathy and power with which he showed how the lower walks of life no less than the higher are often fringed with beauty. I have never been able to entirely divest myself of a slight feeling of the incongruous in reading what he wrote about the warehouse episode in his career. At first, when he began his daily toil at the blacking business, some poor dregs of family life were left to the child. His father was at the Marshalsea. But his mother and brothers and sisters were, to use his own words, "still encamped, with a young servant girl from Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street North." And there he lived with them, in much "hugger-mugger," merely taking his humble midday meal in nomadic fashion, on his own account. Soon, however, his position became even more forlorn. The paternal creditors proved insatiable. The gipsy home in Gower Street had to be broken up. Mrs. Dickens and the children went to live at the Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed under the roof--it cannot be called under the care--of a "reduced old lady," dwelling in Camden Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind of indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the name of "Mrs. Pipchin," in "Dombey and Son." Here the boy seems to have been left almost entirely to his own devices. He spent his Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, his lodgings at "Mrs. Pipchin's" were paid for. Otherwise, he "found himself," in childish fashion, out of the six or seven weekly shillings, breakfasting on two pennyworth of bread and milk, and supping on a penny loaf and a bit of cheese, and dining hither and thither, as his boy's appetite dictated--now, sensibly enough, on _à la mode_ beef or a saveloy; then, less sensibly, on pudding; and anon not dining at all, the wherewithal having been expended on some morning treat of cheap stale pastry. But are not all these things, the lad's shifts and expedients, his sorrows and despair, his visits to the public-house, where the kindly publican's wife stoops down to kiss the pathetic little face--are they not all written in "David Copperfield"? And if so be that I have a reader unacquainted with that peerless book, can I do better than recommend him, or her, to study therein the story of Dickens' life at this particular time? At last the child's solitude and sorrows seem to have grown unbearable. His fortitude broke down. One Sunday night he appealed to his father, with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment, which he seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his forlornness and isolation. The father's kind, thoughtless heart was touched. A back attic was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at Lant Street, in the Borough--where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered, afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy moved into his new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he had been entering a palace. The change naturally brought him more fully into the prison circle. He used to breakfast there every morning, before going to the warehouse, and would spend the larger portion of his spare time among the inmates. Nor do Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who is to us the family's most important member, appear to have been relatively at all uncomfortable while under the shadow of the Marshalsea. There is in "David Copperfield" a passage of inimitable humour, where Mr. Micawber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprisonment for debt, apostrophizes the King's Bench Prison as being the place "where, for the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by importunate voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal service of process was not required, and detainers were lodged merely at the gate." There is a similar passage in "Little Dorrit," where the tipsy medical practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts Mr. Dorrit in his affliction by saying: "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here; there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors, and bring a man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at home, and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's freedom!" One smiles as one reads; and it adds a pathos, I think, to the smile, to find that these are records of actual experience. The Marshalsea prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of peace, and to his household a place of plenty. Not only could he pursue his career there untroubled by fears of arrest, but he exercised among the other "gentlemen gaol-birds" a supremacy, a kind of kingship, such as that to which Charles Lamb referred. They recognized in him the superior spirit, ready of pen, and affluent of speech, and with a certain grandeur in his conviviality. He it was who drew up their memorial to George of England on an occasion no less important than the royal birthday, when they, the monarch's "unfortunate subjects,"--so they were described in the memorial--besought the king's "gracious majesty," of his "well-known munificence," to grant them a something towards the drinking of the royal health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and penetrative genius did little Charles, from his corner, watch the strange sad stream of humanity that trickled through the room, and may be said to have _smeared_ its approval of that petition!) And while Mr. Dickens was enjoying his prison honours, he was also enjoying his Admiralty pension,[3] which was not forfeited by his imprisonment; and his wife and children were consequently enjoying a larger measure of the necessaries of life than had been theirs for many a month. So all went on merrily enough at the Marshalsea. But even under the old law, imprisonment for debt did not always last for ever. A legacy, and the Insolvent Debtors Act, enabled Mr. Dickens to march out of durance, in some sort with the honours of war, after a few months' incarceration--this would be early in 1824;--and he went with his family, including Charles, to lodge with the "Mrs. Pipchin" already mentioned. Charles meanwhile still toiled on in the blacking warehouse, now removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden; and had reached such skill in the tying, pasting, and labelling of the bottles, that small crowds used to collect at the window for the purpose of watching his deft fingers. There was pride in this, no doubt, but also humiliation; and release was at hand. His father and Lamert quarrelled about something--about _what_, Dickens seems never to have known--and he was sent home. Mrs. Dickens acted the part of the peacemaker on the next day, probably feeling that amid the shadowy expectations on which she and her husband had subsisted for so long, even six or seven shillings a week was something tangible, and not to be despised. Yet in spite of this, he did not return to the business. His father decided that he should go to school. "I do not write resentfully or angrily," said Dickens, in the confidential communication made long afterwards to Forster, and to which reference has already been made; "but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." The mothers of great men is a subject that has been handled often, and eloquently. How many of those who have achieved distinction can trace their inherited gifts to a mother's character, and their acquired gifts to a mother's teaching and influence. Mrs. Dickens seems not to have been a mother of this stamp. She scarcely, I fear, possessed those admirable qualities of mind and heart which one can clearly recognize as having borne fruit in the greatness and goodness of her famous son. So far as I can discover, she exercised no influence upon him at all. Her name hardly appears in his biographies. He never, that I can recollect, mentions her in his correspondence; only refers to her on the rarest occasions. And perhaps, on the whole, this is not to be wondered at, if we accept the constant tradition that she had, unknown to herself, sat to her son for the portrait of Mrs. Nickleby, and suggested to him the main traits in the character of that inconsequent and not very wise old lady. Mrs. Nickleby, I take it, was not the kind of person calculated to form the mind of a boy of genius. As well might one expect some very domestic bird to teach an eaglet how to fly. The school to which our callow eaglet was sent (in the spring or early summer of 1824), belonged emphatically to the old school of schools. It bore the goodly name of _Wellington House Academy_, and was situated in Mornington Place, near the Hampstead Road. A certain Mr. Jones held chief rule there; and as more than fifty years have now elapsed since Dickens' connection with the establishment ceased, I trust there may be nothing libellous in giving further currency to his statement, or rather, perhaps, to his recorded impression,[4] that the head master's one qualification for his office was dexterity in the use of the cane;--especially as another "old boy" corroborates that impression, and declares Mr. Jones to have been "a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant." Dickens, however, escaped with comparatively little beating, because he was a day-boy, and sound policy dictated that day-boys, who had facilities for carrying home their complaints, should be treated with some leniency. So he had to get his learning without tears, which was not at all considered the orthodox method in the good old days; and, indeed, I doubt if he finally took away from Wellington House Academy very much of the book knowledge that would tell in a modern competitive examination. For though in his own account of the school it is implied that he resumed his interrupted studies with Virgil, and was, before he left, head boy, and the possessor of many prizes, yet this is not corroborated by the evidence of his surviving fellow pupils; nor can we, of course, in the face of their direct counter evidence, treat statements made in a fictitious or half-fictitious narrative as if made in what professed to be a sober autobiography. Dickens, I repeat, seems to have acquired a very scant amount of classic lore while under the instruction of Mr. Jones, and not too much lore of any kind. But if he learned little, he observed much. He thoroughly mastered the humours of the place, just as he had mastered the humours of the Marshalsea. He had got to know all about the masters, and all about the boys, and all about the white mice--of which there were many in various stages of civilization. He acquired, in short, a fund of school knowledge that seemed inexhaustible, and on which he drew again and again, with the most excellent results, in "David Copperfield," in "Dombey," in such inimitable short papers as "Old Cheeseman." And while thus, half unconsciously perhaps, assimilating the very life of the school, he was himself a thorough schoolboy, bright, alert, intelligent; taking part in all fun and frolic; amply indemnifying himself for his enforced abstinence from childish games during the dreary warehouse days; good at recitations and mimic plays; and already possessed of a reputation among his peers as a writer of tales. FOOTNOTES: [1] £200 a year "without extras" from 1815 to 1820, and then £350. See "Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens," by Robert Langton, a very valuable monograph. [2] Mr. Langton appears to doubt whether John Dickens was not imprisoned in the King's Bench. But this seems scarcely a point on which Dickens himself can have been mistaken. [3] According to Mr. Langton's dates, he would still be drawing his pay. [4] See paper entitled "Our School." CHAPTER II. Dickens cannot have been very long at Wellington House Academy, for before May, 1827, he had been at another school near Brunswick Square, and had also obtained, and quitted, some employment in the office of a solicitor in New Square, Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems clear, therefore, that the whole of his school life might easily be computed in months; and in May, 1827, it will be remembered, he was still but a lad of fifteen. At that date he entered the office of a second solicitor, in Gray's Inn this time, on a salary of thirteen shillings and sixpence a week, afterwards increased to fifteen shillings. Here he remained till November, 1828, again picking up a good deal of information that cannot perhaps be regarded as strictly legal, but such as he was afterwards able to turn to admirable account. He would seem to have studied the profession exhaustively in all its branches, from the topmost Tulkinghorns and Perkers, to the lowest pettifoggers like Pell and Brass, and also to have given particular attention to the parasites of the law--the Guppys and Chucksters; and altogether to have stored his mind, as he had done at school, with a series of invaluable notes and observations. All very well, no doubt, as we look at the matter now. But then it must often have seemed to the ambitious, energetic lad, that he was wasting his time. Was he to remain for ever a lawyer's clerk who has not the means to be an articled clerk, and who can never, therefore, aspire to become a full-blown solicitor? Was he to spend the future obscurely in the dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in whose career "something," as Mr. Micawber would have said, had at last "turned up," was now a reporter for the press. The son determined to be a reporter too. He threw himself into this new career with characteristic energy. Of course a reporter is not made in a day. It takes many months of drudgery to obtain such skill in shorthand as shall enable the pen of the ready-writer to keep up with the winged words of speech, and make dots and lines that shall be readable. Dickens laboured hard to acquire the art. In the intervals of his work he made it a kind of holiday task to attend the Reading-room of the British Museum, and so remedy the defects in the literary part of his education. But the best powers of his mind were directed to "Gurney's system of shorthand." And in time he had his reward. He earned and justified the reputation of being one of the best reporters of his day. I shall not quote the autobiographical passages in "David Copperfield" which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter, a description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches of his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in May, 1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper Press Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle-yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once took, as we used to call it, an election speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery in the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep, kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses, and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew." What shall I add to this? That the papers on which he was engaged as a reporter, were _The True Sun_, _The Mirror of Parliament_, and _The Morning Chronicle_; that long afterwards, little more than two years before his death, when addressing the journalists of New York, he gave public expression to his "grateful remembrance of a calling that was once his own," and declared, "to the wholesome training of severe newspaper work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first success;" that his income as a reporter appears latterly to have been some five guineas a week, of course in addition to expenses and general breakages and damages; that there is independent testimony to his exceptional quickness in reporting and transcribing, and to his intelligence in condensing; that to an observer so keen and apt, the experiences of his business journeys in those more picturesque and eventful ante-railway days must have been invaluable; and, finally, that his connection with journalism lasted far into 1836, and so did not cease till some months after "Pickwick" had begun to add to the world's store of merriment and laughter. But I have not really reached "Pickwick" yet, nor anything like it. That master-work was not also a first work. With all Dickens' genius, he had to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before coming upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let us go back for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay, to the earliest streak upon the greyness of night, to his first original published composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to "Pickwick" too, has told us somewhat about that first paper of his; how it was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street;" how it was accepted, and "appeared in all the glory of print;" and how he was so filled with pleasure and pride on purchasing a copy of the magazine in which it was published, that he went into Westminster Hall to hide the tears of joy that would come into his eyes. The paper thus joyfully wept over was originally entitled "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," and now bears, among the "Sketches by Boz," the name of "Mr. Minns and his Cousin"; the periodical in which it was published was _The Old Monthly Magazine_, and the date of publication was January 1, 1834. "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" may be pronounced a very fairly told tale. It is, no doubt, always easy to be wise after the event, in criticism particularly easy, and when once a writer has achieved success, there is but too little difficulty in showing that his earlier productions were prophetic of his future greatness. At the risk, however, of incurring a charge of this kind, I repeat that Dickens' first story is well told, and that the editor of _The Old Monthly Magazine_ showed due discernment in accepting it and encouraging his unknown contributor to further efforts. Quite apart from the fact that the author was only a young fellow of some two or three and twenty, both this first story and the stories that followed it in _The Old Monthly Magazine_, during 1834 and the early part of 1835, possessed qualities of a very remarkable kind. So also did the humorous descriptive papers shortly afterwards published in _The Evening Chronicle_, papers that, with the stories, now compose the book known as "Sketches by Boz." Sir Arthur Helps, speaking of Dickens, just after Dickens' death,[5] said, "His powers of observation were almost unrivalled.... Indeed, I have said to myself when I have been with him, he sees and observes nine facts for any two that I see and observe." This particular faculty is, I think, almost as clearly discernible in the "Sketches" as in the author's later and greater works. London--its sins and sorrows, its gaieties and amusements, its suburban gentilities, and central squalor, the aspects of its streets, and the humours of the dingier classes among its inhabitants,--all this had certainly never been so seen and described before. The power of exact minute delineation lavished upon the picture is admirable. Again, the dialogue in the dramatic parts is natural, well-conducted, characteristic, and so used as to help, not impede, the narrative. The speech, for instance, of Mr. Bung, the broker's man, is a piece of very good Dickens. Of course there is humour, and very excellent fooling some of it is; and equally, of course, there is pathos, and some of that is not bad. Do I mean at all that this earlier work stands on the same level of excellence as the masterpieces of the writer? Clearly not. It were absurd to expect the stripling, half-furtively coming forward, first without a name at all, and then under the pseudonym of Boz,[6] to write with the superb practised ease and mastery of the Charles Dickens who penned "David Copperfield." By dint of doing blacksmith's work, says the French proverb, one becomes a blacksmith. The artist, like the handicraftsman, must learn his art. Much in the "Sketches" betrays inexperience; or, perhaps, it would be more just to say, comparative clumsiness of hand. The descriptions, graphic as they undoubtedly are, lack for the most part the final imaginative touch; the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual charm to Dickens' word-painting. The humour is more obvious, less delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married. The pathos is often spoilt by over-emphasis and declamation. It lacks simplicity. For the "Sketches" published in _The Old Monthly Magazine_, Dickens got nothing, beyond the pleasure of seeing himself in print. The _Chronicle_ treated him somewhat more liberally, and, on his application, increased his salary, giving him, in view of his original contributions, seven guineas a week, instead of the five guineas which he had been drawing as a reporter. Not a particularly brilliant augmentation, perhaps, and one at which he must often have smiled in after years, when his pen was dropping gold as well as ink. Still, the addition to his income was substantial, and the son of John Dickens must always, I imagine, have been in special need of money. Moreover the circumstances of the next few months would render any increased earnings doubly pleasant. For Dickens was shortly after this engaged to be married to Miss Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of one of his fellow-workers on the _Chronicle_. There had been, so Forster tells us, a previous very shadowy love affair in his career,--an affair so visionary indeed, and boyish, as scarcely to be worthy of mention in this history, save for three facts: first, that his devotion, dreamlike as it was, seems to have had love's highest practical effect in inducing him to throw his whole strength into the study of shorthand; secondly, that the lady of his love appears to have had some resemblance to Dora, the child-wife of David Copperfield; and thirdly, that he met her again long years afterwards, when time had worked its changes, and the glamour of love had left his eyes, and that to that meeting we owe the passages in "Little Dorrit" relating to poor Flora. This, however, is a parenthesis. The engagement to Miss Hogarth was neither shadowy nor unreal--an engagement only in dreamland. Better for both, perhaps--who knows?--if it had been. Ah me, if one could peer into the future, how many weddings there are at which tears would be more appropriate than smiles and laughter! Would Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth have foreborne to plight their troth, one wonders, if they could have foreseen how slowly and surely the coming years were to sunder their hearts and lives?--They were married on the 2nd of April, 1836. This date again leads me to a time subsequent to the publication of the first number of "Pickwick," which had appeared a day or two before;--and again I refrain from dealing with that great book. For before I do so, I wish to pause a brief space to consider what manner of man Charles Dickens was when he suddenly broke on the world in his full popularity; and also what were the influences, for good and evil, which his early career had exercised upon his character and intellect. What manner of man he was? In outward aspect all accounts agree that he was singularly, noticeably prepossessing--bright, animated, eager, with energy and talent written in every line of his face. Such he was when Forster saw him, on the occasion of their first meeting, when Dickens was acting as spokesman for the insurgent reporters engaged on the _Mirror_. So Carlyle, who met him at dinner shortly after this, and was no flatterer, sketches him for us with a pen of unwonted kindliness. "He is a fine little fellow--Boz, I think. Clear, blue, intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large protrusive rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme _mobility_, which he shuttles about--eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all--in a very singular manner while speaking. Surmount this with a loose coil of common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very small, and dressed _à la_ D'Orsay rather than well--this is Pickwick. For the rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he is and what others are."[7] Is not this a graphic little picture, and characteristic even to the touch about D'Orsay, the dandy French Count? For Dickens, like the young men of the time--Disraeli, Bulwer, and the rest--was a great fop. We, of these degenerate days, shall never see again that antique magnificence in coloured velvet waistcoats. But to return. Dickens, it need scarcely be said, had by this [time][8] long out-lived the sickliness of his earlier years. The hardships and trials of his childhood and boyhood had served but to brace his young manhood, knitting the frame and strengthening the nerves. Light and small, as Carlyle describes him, he was wiry and very active, and could bear without injury an amount of intellectual work and bodily fatigue that would have killed many men of seemingly stronger build. And as what might have seemed unfortunate in his youth had helped perchance to develop his physical powers, so had it assisted to strengthen his character and foster his genius. I go back here to the point from which I started. No doubt a weaker man would have been crushed by such a youth. He would have been indolently content to remain a warehouse drudge, would have listlessly fallen into his father's ways about money, would have had no ambition beyond his desk and salary as a lawyer's clerk, would have never cared to piece together and supplement the scattered scraps of his education, would have rested on his oars when he had once shot into the waters of ordinary journalism. With Dickens it was not so. The alchemy of a fine nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his favourite maxims--it was the rule of his life. And for what was to be his life work, what better preparation could there have been than that which he received? I am far from recommending warehouses, squalid solitary lodgings, pawnshops, debtors' prisons,--if such could now be found,--ill-conducted private schools,--which probably could be found,--attorneys' offices, and the hand-to-mouth of journalism, as constituting generally the highest ideal of a liberal education. I am equally far from asserting that the majority of men do not require more training of a purely scholastic kind than fell to Dickens' lot. But Dickens was not a bookish man. His genius did not lie in that direction. To have forced him unduly into the world of books would have made him, doubtless, an average scholar, but might have weakened his hold on life. Such a risk was certainly not worth the running. Fate arranged it otherwise. What he was above all was a student of the world of men, a passionately keen observer of the ways of humanity. Men were to be his books, his special branch of knowledge; and in order to graduate and take high honours in that school, I repeat, he could have had no better training. Not only had he passed through a range of most unwonted experiences, experiences calculated to quicken to the uttermost his superb faculties of observation and insight; but he had been placed in sympathetic communication with a strange assortment of characters, lying quite out of the usual ken of the literary classes. Knowledge and sympathy, the seeing eye and the feeling heart--were these nothing to have acquired? That so abnormal an education can have been entirely without drawbacks, it is no part of my purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may say, to sink or swim amid the waves of life, where those waves ran turbid and brackish, Dickens had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But that some little signs should not remain of the straining and effort with which he had won the land, was scarcely to be expected. He himself, in his more confidential communications with Forster, seems to avow a consciousness that this was so; and Forster, though he speaks guardedly, lovingly, appears to be of opinion that a certain self-assertiveness and fierce intolerance of advice or control[9] occasionally discernible in his friend, might justly be attributed to the harsh influence of early struggles and privations. But what then? That system of education has yet to be devised which shall mould this poor human clay of ours into flawless shapes of use and beauty. A man may be considered fortunate indeed, when his training has left in him only what the French call the "defects of his virtues," that is, the exaggeration of his good qualities till they turn into faults. Without his immense strength of purpose and iron will, Dickens might never have emerged from obscurity, and the world would have been very distinctly the poorer. One cannot be very sorry that he possessed these gifts in excess. And now, at last, having slightly sketched the history of his earlier years, and endeavoured to show, however perfectly, what influences had gone to the formation of his character, I proceed to consider the book that lifted him to fame and fortune. The years of apprenticeship are over, and the master-workman brings forth his finished work in its flower of perfection. Let us study "Pickwick." FOOTNOTES: [5] _Macmillan's Magazine_, July, 1870. [6] It was the pet name of one of his brothers; that was why he took it. [7] Froude's "Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London." [8] Transcriber's Note: The word "time" appears to be missing from the original text. [9] "I have heard Dickens described by those who knew him," says Mr. Edmund Yates, in his "Recollections," "as aggressive, imperious, and intolerant, and I can comprehend the accusation.... He was imperious in the sense that his life was conducted on the _sic volo sic jubeo_ principle, and that everything gave way before him. The society in which he mixed, the hours which he kept, the opinions which he held, his likes and dislikes, his ideas of what should or should not be, were all settled by himself, not merely for himself, but for all those brought into connection with him, and it was never imagined they could be called in question.... He had immense powers of will." CHAPTER III. Dickens has told us, in his preface to the later editions, much of how "Pickwick" came to be projected and published. It was in this wise: Seymour, a caricaturist of very considerable merit, though not, as we should now consider, in the first rank of the great caricaturists, had proposed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting on their career as publishers, a "series of Cockney sporting plates." Messrs. Chapman and Hall entertained the idea favourably, but opined that the plates would require illustrative letter-press; and casting about for some suitable author, bethought themselves of Dickens, whose tales and sketches had been exciting some little sensation in the world of journalism; and who had, indeed, already written for the firm a story, the "Tuggs at Ramsgate," which may be read among the "Sketches." Accordingly Mr. Hall called on Dickens for the purpose of proposing the scheme. This would be in 1835, towards the latter end of the year; and Dickens, who had apparently left the paternal roof for some little time, was living bachelorwise, in Furnival's Inn. What was his astonishment, when Mr. Hall came in, to find he was the same person who had sold him the copy of the magazine containing his first story--that memorable copy at which he had looked, in Westminster Hall, through eyes bedimmed with joyful tears. Such coincidences always had for Dickens a peculiar, almost a superstitious, interest. The circumstance seemed of happy augury to both the "high contracting parties." Publisher and author were for the nonce on the best of terms. The latter, no doubt, saw his opening; was more than ready to undertake the work, and had no quarrel with the remuneration offered. But even then he was not the man to play second fiddle to anybody. Before they parted, he had quite succeeded in turning the tables on Seymour. The original proposal had been that the artist should produce four caricatures on sporting subjects every month, and that the letter-press should be in illustration of the caricatures. Dickens got Mr. Hall to agree to reverse that position. _He_, Dickens, was to have the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate _him_. How far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his disastrous sporting proclivities, made part of the first conception of the book; and it is also very significant of the book's origin, that the design on the green wrapper in which the monthly parts made their appearance, should have had a purely sporting character, and exhibited Mr. Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. Winkle shooting at what looks like a cock-sparrow, the whole surrounded by a chaste arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. To Seymour, too, we owe the portrait of Mr. Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent old gentleman's face and figure upon all our memories. But to return to Dickens' interview with Mr. Hall. They seem to have parted in mutual satisfaction. At least it is certain Dickens was satisfied, for in a letter written, apparently on the same day, to "my dearest Kate," he thus sums up the proposals of the publishers: "They have made me an offer of fourteen pounds a month to write and edit a new publication they contemplate, entirely by myself, to be published monthly, and each number to contain four wood-cuts.... The work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist."[10] So, little thinking how soon he would begin to regard the "emolument" as ludicrously inadequate, he set to work on "Pickwick." The first part was published on the 31st of March or 1st of April, 1836. That part seems scarcely to have created any sensation. Mr James Grant, the novelist, says indeed, that the first five parts were "a dead failure," and that the publishers were even debating whether the enterprise had not better be abandoned altogether, when suddenly Sam Weller appeared upon the scene, and turned their gloom into laughter. Be that as it may, certain it is that before many months had passed, Messrs. Chapman and Hall must have been thoroughly confirmed in a policy of perseverance. "The first order for Part I.," that is, the first order for binding, "was," says the bookbinder who executed the work, "for four hundred copies only." The order for Part XV. had risen to forty thousand. All contemporary accounts agree that the success was sudden, immense. The author, like Lord Byron, some twenty-five years before, "awoke and found himself famous." Young as he was, not having yet numbered more than twenty-four summers, he at one stride reached the topmost height of popularity. Everybody read his book. Everybody laughed over it. Everybody talked about it. Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but very surely, that a new and vital force had arisen in English literature. And English literature just then was in one of its times of slackness, rather than full flow. The great tide of the beginning of the century had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had scarcely begun to do more than ripple and flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and Shelley and Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; Southey's life was on the decline; Wordsworth had long executed his best work; while of the coming men, Carlyle, though in the plenitude of his power, having published "Sartor Resartus," had not yet published his "French Revolution,"[11] or delivered his lectures on the "Heroes," and was not yet in the plenitude of his fame and influence; and Macaulay, then in India, was known only as the essayist and politician; and Lord Tennyson and the Brownings were more or less names of the future. Looking especially at fiction, the time may be said to have been waiting for its master-novelist. Five years had gone by since the good and great Sir Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep, as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer, more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of "Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" and Disraeli had written "Vivian Grey," and his earlier books; while Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Kingsley, George Eliot were all, of course, to come later. No, there was a vacant throne among the novelists. Here was the hour--and here, too, was the man. In virtue of natural kingship he took up his sceptre unquestioned. Still, it may not be superfluous to inquire into the why and wherefore of his success. All effects have a cause. What was the cause of this special phenomenon? In the first place, the admirable freshness of the book won its way into every heart. There is a fervour of youth and healthy good spirits about the whole thing. In a former generation, Byron had uttered his wail of despair over a worthless world. We, in our own time, have got back to the dreary point of considering whether life be worth living. Here was a writer who had no such misgivings. For him life was pleasant, useful, full of delight--to be not only tolerated, but enjoyed. He liked its sights, its play of character, its adventures--affected no superiority to its amusements and convivialities--thoroughly laid himself out to please and to be pleased. And his characters were in the same mood. Their fund of animal spirits seemed inexhaustible. For life's jollities they were never unprepared. No doubt there were "mighty mean moments" in their existence, as there have been in the existence of most of us. It cannot have been pleasant to Mr. Winkle to have his eye blackened by the obstreperous cabman. Mr. Tracy Tupman probably felt a passing pang when jilted by the maiden aunt in favour of the audacious Jingle. No man would elect to occupy the position of defendant in an action for breach of promise, or prefer to sojourn in a debtors' prison. But how jauntily do Mr. Pickwick and his friends shake off such discomforts! How buoyantly do they override the billows that beset their course! And what excellent digestions they have, and how slightly do they seem to suffer the next day from any little excesses in the matter of milk punch! Then besides the good spirits and good temper, there is Dickens' royal gift of humour. As some actors have only to show their face and utter a word or two, in order to convulse an audience with merriment, so here does almost every sentence hold good and honest laughter. Not, perhaps, objects the superfine and too dainty critic, humour of the most delicate sort--not humour that for its rare and exquisite quality can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of that special character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce--the humour that finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. How thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be at the same time merry and wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both. With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect. Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome, it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost. In brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly and helpfully. So much the first readers of "Pickwick" might note as the book unfolded itself to them, part by part; and they might also note one or two things besides. They might note--they could scarcely fail to do so--that though there was a touch of caricature in nearly all the characters, yet those characters were, one and all, wonderfully real, and very much alive. It was no world of shadows to which the author introduced them. Mr. Pickwick had a very distinct existence, and so had his three friends, and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and Mr. Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the swarm of minor characters. While as to Sam Weller, if it be really true that he averted impending ruin from the book, and turned defeat into victory, one can only say that it was like him. When did he ever "stint stroke" in "foughten field"? By what array of adverse circumstances was he ever taken at a disadvantage? To have created a character of this vitality, of this individual force, would be a feather in the cap of any novelist who ever lived. Something I think of Dickens' own blood passed into this special progeniture of his. It has been irreverently said that Falstaff might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just as Hamlet might represent him in his more sober moments. So I have always had a kind of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded as Dickens himself seen in a certain aspect--a sort of Dickens, shall I say?--in an humbler sphere of life, and who had never devoted himself to literature. There is in both the same energy, pluck, essential goodness of heart, fertility of resource, abundance of animal spirits, and also an imagination of a peculiar kind, in which wit enters as a main ingredient. And having noted how highly vitalized were the characters in "Pickwick," I think the first readers might also fairly be expected to note,--and, in fact, it is clear from Dickens' preface that they did note--how greatly the book increased in scope and power as it proceeded. The beginning was conceived almost in a spirit of farce. The incidents and adventures had scarcely any other object than to create amusement. Mr. Pickwick himself appeared on the scene with fantastic honours and the badge of absurdity, as "the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with the Theory of Tittlebats." But in all this there is a gradual change. Mr. Pickwick is presented to us latterly as an exceedingly sound-headed as well as sound-hearted old gentleman, whom we should never think of associating with the sources of Hampstead Ponds or any other folly. While in such scenes as those at the Fleet Prison, the author is clearly endeavouring to do much more than raise a laugh. He is sounding the deeper, more tragic chords in human feeling. Ah, if we add to all this--to the freshness, the "go," the good spirits, the keen observation, the graphic painting, the humour, the vitality of the characters, the gradual development of power--if we add to all this that something which is in all, and greater than all, viz., genius, and genius of a highly popular kind, then we shall have no difficulty in understanding why everybody read "Pickwick," and how it came to pass that its publishers made some £20,000 by a work that they had once thought of abandoning as worthless.[12] FOOTNOTES: [10] See the Letters published by Chapman and Hall. [11] It was finished in January, 1837, and not published till six months afterwards. [12] They acknowledged to Dickens that they had made £14,000 by the sale of the monthly parts alone. CHAPTER IV. Dickens was not at all the man to rest on his oars while "Pickwick" was giving such a magnificent impetus to the boat that contained his fortunes. The amount of work which he accomplished in the years 1836, 1837, 1838, and 1839 is, if we consider its quality, amazing. "Pickwick," as we have seen, was begun with the first of these years, and its publication continued till the November of 1837. Independently of his work on "Pickwick," he was, in the year 1836, engaged in the arduous profession of a reporter till the close of the parliamentary session, and also wrote a pamphlet on Sabbatarianism, a farce in two acts, "The Strange Gentleman," for the St. James's Theatre, and a comic opera, "The Village Coquettes," which was set to music by Hullah. With the very commencement of 1837--"Pickwick," it will be remembered, going on all the while--he entered upon the duties of editor of _Bentley's Miscellany_, and in the second number began the publication of "Oliver Twist," which was continued into the early months of 1839, when his connection with the magazine ceased. In the April of 1838, and simultaneously, of course, with "Oliver Twist," appeared the first part of "Nicholas Nickleby"--the last part appearing in the October of the following year. Three novels of more than full size and of first-rate importance, in less than four years, besides a good deal of other miscellaneous work--certainly that was "good going." The pace was decidedly fast. Small wonder that _The Quarterly Review_, even so early as October, 1837, was tempted to croak about "Mr. Dickens" as writing "too often and too fast, and putting forth in their crude, unfinished, undigested state, thoughts, feelings, observations, and plans which it required time and study to mature," and to warn him that as he had "risen like a rocket," so he was in danger of "coming down like the stick." Small wonder, I say, and yet to us now, how unjust the accusation appears, and how false the prophecy. Rapidly as those books were executed, Dickens, like the real artist that he was, had put into them his best work. There was no scamping. The critics of the time judged superficially, not making allowance for the ample fund of observations he had amassed, for the genuine fecundity of his genius, and for the admirable industry of an extremely industrious man. "The World's Workers"--there exists under that general designation a series of short biographies, for which Miss Dickens has written a sketch of her father's life. To no one could the description more fittingly apply. Throughout his life he worked desperately hard. He possessed, in a high degree, the "infinite faculty for taking pains," which is so great an adjunct to genius, though it is not, as the good Sir Joshua Reynolds held, genius itself. Thus what he had done rapidly was done well; and, for the rest, the writer, who had yet to give the world "Martin Chuzzlewit," "The Christmas Carol," "David Copperfield," and "Dombey," was not "coming down like a stick." There were many more stars, and of very brilliant colours, to be showered out by that rocket; and the stick has not even yet fallen to the ground.[13] Naturally, with the success of "Pickwick," came a great change in Dickens' pecuniary position. He had, as we have seen, been glad enough, before he began the book, to close with the offer of £14 for each monthly part. That sum was afterwards increased to £15, and the two first payments seem to have been made in advance for the purpose of helping him to defray the expenses of his marriage. But as the sale leapt up, the publishers themselves felt that such a rate of remuneration was altogether insufficient, and sent him, first and last, a goodly number of supplementary cheques, for sums amounting in the aggregate, as _they_ computed, to £3,000, and as Forster computes to about £2,500. This Dickens, who, to use his own words, "never undervalued his own work," considered a very inadequate percentage on their gains--forgetting a little, perhaps, that the risks had been wholly theirs, and that he had been more than content with the original bargain. Similarly he was soon utterly dissatisfied with his arrangements with Bentley about the editorship of the _Miscellany_ and "Oliver Twist,"--arrangements which had been entered into in August, 1836, while "Pickwick" was in progress; and he utterly refused to let that publisher have "Gabriel Varden, The Locksmith of London" ("Barnaby Rudge") on the terms originally agreed upon. With Macrone also, who had made some £4,000 by the "Sketches," and given him about £400, he was no better pleased, especially when that enterprising gentleman threatened a re-issue in monthly parts, and so compelled him to re-purchase the copyright for £2,000. But however much he might consider himself ill-treated by the publishing fraternity, he was, of course, rapidly getting far richer than he had been, and so able to enlarge his mode of life. He had begun, modestly enough, by taking his wife to live with him in his bachelor's quarters in Furnival's Inn,--much as Tommy Traddles, in "David Copperfield," took _his_ wife to live in chambers at Gray's Inn; and there, in Furnival's Inn, his first child, a boy, was born on the 6th of January, 1837. But in the March of that year he moved to a more commodious dwelling, at 48, Doughty Street, where he remained till the end of 1839, when still increasing means enabled him to move to a still better house at 1, Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. But the house in Doughty Street must have been endeared to him by many memories. It was there, on the 7th of May, 1837, that he lost, at the early age of seventeen, and quite suddenly, a sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, to whom he was greatly attached. The blow fell so heavily at the time as to incapacitate him from all work, and delayed the publication of one of the numbers of "Pickwick." Nor was the sorrow only sharp and transient. He speaks of her in the preface to the first edition of that book. Her spirit seemed to be hovering near as he stood looking at Niagara. He felt her hallowing influence when in danger of growing too much elated by his first reception in America. She came back to him in dreams in Italy. Her image remained in his heart, unchanged by time, as he declared, to the very end. She represented to his mind all that was pure and lovely in opening womanhood, and lives, in the world created by his art, as the Little Nell of "The Old Curiosity Shop." It was in Doughty Street, too, that he began to gather round him the circle of friends whose names seem almost like a muster-roll of the famous men and women in the first thirty years of Queen Victoria's reign. I shall not enumerate them. The list of writers, artists, actors, would be too long. But this at least it would be unjust not to note, that among his friends were included nearly all those who by any stretch of fancy could be regarded as his rivals in the fields of humour and fiction. With Washington Irving, Hood, Douglas Jerrold, Lord Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, and, save for a passing foolish quarrel, with Thackeray, the novelist who really was his peer, he maintained the kindliest and most cordial relations. Nor when George Eliot published her first books, "The Scenes of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede," did any one acknowledge their excellence more freely. Petty jealousies found no place in the nature of this great writer. It was also while living at Doughty Street that he seems, in great measure, to have formed those habits of work and relaxation which every artist fashions so as to suit his own special needs and idiosyncrasies. His favourite time for work was the morning, between the hours of breakfast and lunch; and though, at this particular period, the enormous pressure of his engagements compelled him to work "double tides," and often far into the night, yet he was essentially a day-worker, not a night-worker. Like the great German poet Goethe, he preferred to exercise his art in the fresh morning hours, when the dewdrops, as it were, lay bright upon his imagination and fancy. And for relaxation and sedative, when he had thoroughly worn himself out with mental toil, he would have recourse to the hardest bodily exercise. At first riding seems to have contented him--fifteen miles out and fifteen miles in, with a halt at some road-side inn for refreshment. But soon walking took the place of riding, and he became an indefatigable pedestrian. He would think nothing of a walk of twenty or thirty miles, and that not merely in the vigorous heyday of youth, but afterwards, to the very last. He was always on those alert, quick feet of his, perambulating London from end to end, and in every direction; perambulating the suburbs, perambulating the "greater London" that lies within a radius of twenty miles, round the central core of metropolitan houses. In short, he was everywhere, in all weathers, at all hours. Nor was London, smaller and greater, his only walking field. He would walk wherever he was--walked through and through Genoa, and all about Genoa, when he lived there; knew every inch of the Kent country round Broadstairs and round Gad's Hill--was, as I have said, always, always, always on his feet. But if he would pedestrianize everywhere, London remained the walking ground of his heart. As Dr. Johnson held that nothing equalled a stroll down Fleet Street, so did Dickens, sitting in full view of Genoa's perfect bay, and with the blue Mediterranean sparkling at his feet, turn in thought for inspiration to his old haunts. "Never," he writes to Forster, when about to begin "The Chimes," "never did I stagger so upon a threshold before. I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire Terrace, and could take root no more until I return to it.... Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West Middlesex Waterworks at Devonshire Terrace.... Put me down on Waterloo Bridge at eight o'clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on. I am sadly strange as it is, and can't settle." "Eight o'clock in the evening,"--that points to another of his peculiarities. As he liked best to walk in London, so he liked best to walk at night. The darkness of the great city had a strange fascination for him. He never grew tired of it, would find pleasure and refreshment, when most weary and jaded, in losing himself in it, in abandoning himself to its mysteries. Looked at with this knowledge, the opening of the "Old Curiosity Shop" becomes a passage of autobiography. And how all these wanderings must have served him in his art! Remember what a keen observer he was, perhaps one of the keenest that ever lived, and then think what food for observation he would thus be constantly collecting. To the eye that knows how to see, there is no stage where so many scenes from the drama of life are being always enacted as the streets of London. Dickens frequented that theatre very assiduously, and of his power of sight there can be no question. FOOTNOTES: [13] I think critics, and perhaps I myself, have been a little hard on this Quarterly Reviewer. He did not, after all, say that Dickens would come down like a stick, only that he might do so if he wrote too fast and furiously. CHAPTER V. "Pickwick" had been a novel without any plot. The story, if story it can be called, bore every trace of its hasty origin. Scene succeeded scene, and incident incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three friends were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal. But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him birth. He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of thieves. His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when he has escaped from their clutches. Now I would rather not say whether I consider it quite likely that a boy of this birth and nurture would fly at a boy much bigger than himself in vindication of the fair fame of a mother whom he had never known, or would freely risk his life to warn a sleeping household that they were being robbed, or would, on all occasions, exhibit the most excellent manners and morals, and a delicacy of feeling that is quite dainty. But this is the essence of the book. To show purity and goodness of disposition as self-sufficient in themselves to resist all adverse influences, is Dickens' main object. Take Oliver's sweet uncontaminated character away, and the story crumbles to pieces. With mere improbabilities of plot, I have no quarrel. Of course it is not likely that the boy, on the occasion of his first escape from the thieves, should be rescued by his father's oldest friend, and, on the second occasion, come across his aunt. But such coincidences must be accepted in any story; they violate no truth of character. I am afraid I can't say as much of Master Oliver's graces and virtues. With this reservation, however, how much there is in the book to which unstinted admiration can be given! As "Pickwick" first fully exhibited the humorous side of Dickens' genius, so "Oliver Twist" first fully exhibited its tragic side;--the pathetic side was to come somewhat later. The scenes at the workhouse; at the thieves' dens in London; the burglary; the murder of poor Nancy; the escape and death of the horror-haunted Sikes,--all are painted with a master's hand. And the book, like its predecessor, and like those that were to follow, contains characters that have passed into common knowledge as types,--characters of the keenest individuality, and that yet seem in themselves to sum up a whole class. Such are Bill Sikes, whose ruffianism has an almost epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of youth in the way they should _not_ go; and Master Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, is Mr. Bumble, greatest and most unhappy of beadles. Comedy had predominated in "Pickwick," tragedy in "Oliver Twist." The more complete fusion of the two was effected in "Nicholas Nickleby." But as the mighty actor Garrick, in the well-known picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is drawn towards the more mirthful of the two sisters, so, here again, I think that comedy decidedly bears away the palm,--though tragedy is not beaten altogether without a struggle either. Here is the story as it unfolds itself. The two heroes are Ralph Nickleby and his nephew Nicholas. They stand forth, almost from the beginning, as antagonists, in battle array the one against the other; and the story is, in the main, a history of the campaigns between them--cunning and greed being mustered on the one side, and young, generous courage on the other. At first Nicholas believes in his uncle, who promises to befriend Nicholas's mother and sister, and obtains for Nicholas himself a situation as usher in a Yorkshire school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having first beaten Mr. Squeers,--leaves it followed by a poor shattered creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender. Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and ultimately marries, a young lady who had been immeshed in one of them; and Ralph, at last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on finding that Smike, through whom he had been endeavouring all through to injure Nicholas, and who is now dead, was his own son. Such are the book's dry bones, its skeleton, which one is almost ashamed to expose thus nakedly. For the beauty of these novels lies not at all in the plot; it is in the incidents, situations, characters. And with beauty of this kind how richly dowered is "Nicholas Nickleby"! Take the characters alone. What lavish profusion of humour in the theatrical group that clusters round Mr. Vincent Crummles, the country manager; and in the Squeers family too; and in the little shop-world of Mrs. Mantalini, the fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheeryble Brothers, the golden-hearted old merchants who take Nicholas into their counting-house. Then for single characters commend me to Mrs. Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The high-life personages are far less successful. Dickens had small gift that way, and seldom succeeded in his society pictures. Nor, if the truth must be told, do I greatly care for the description of the duel between Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, though it was evidently very much admired at the time, and is quoted, as a favourable specimen of Dickens' style, in Charles Knight's "Half-hours with the Best Authors." The writing is a little too _tall_. It lacks simplicity, as is sometimes the case with Dickens, when he wants to be particularly impressive. And this leads me, by a kind of natural sequence, to what I have to say about his next book, "The Old Curiosity Shop;" for here, again, though in a very much more marked degree, I fear I shall have to run counter to a popular opinion. But first a word as to the circumstances under which the book was published. Casting about, after the conclusion of "Nicholas Nickleby," for further literary ventures, Dickens came to the conclusion that the public must be getting tired of his stories in monthly parts. It occurred to him that a weekly periodical, somewhat after the manner of Addison's _Spectator_ or Goldsmith's _Bee_, and containing essays, stories, and miscellaneous papers,--to be written mainly, but not entirely, by himself,--would be just the thing to revive interest, and give his popularity a spur. Accordingly an arrangement was entered into with Messrs. Chapman and Hall, by which they covenanted to give him £50 for each weekly number of such a periodical, and half profits;--and the first number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ made its appearance in the April of 1840. Unfortunately Dickens had reckoned altogether without his host. The public were not to be cajoled. What they expected from their favourite was novels, not essays, short stories, or sketches, however admirable. The orders for the first number had amounted to seventy thousand; but they fell off as soon as it was discovered that Master Humphrey, sitting by his clock, had no intention of beguiling the world with a continuous narrative,--that the title, in short, did not stand for the title of a novel. Either the times were not ripe for the _Household Words_, which, ten years afterwards, proved to be such a great and permanent success, or Dickens had laid his plans badly. Vainly did he put forth all his powers, vainly did he bring back upon the stage those old popular favourites, Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Tony Weller. All was of no avail. Clearly, in order to avoid defeat, a change of front had become necessary. The novel of "The Old Curiosity Shop" was accordingly commenced in the fourth number of the _Clock_, and very soon acted the cuckoo's part of thrusting Master Humphrey and all that belonged to him out of the nest. He disappeared pretty well from the periodical, and when the novel was republished, the whole machinery of the _Clock_ had gone;--and with it I may add, some very characteristic and admirable writing. Dickens himself confessed that he "winced a little," when the "opening paper, ... in which Master Humphrey described himself and his manner of life," "became the property of the trunkmaker and the butterman;" and most Dickens lovers will agree with me in rejoicing that the omitted parts have now at last been tardily rescued from unmerited neglect, and finds [Transcriber's Note: sic] a place in the recently issued "Charles Dickens" edition of the works. There is no hero in "The Old Curiosity Shop,"--unless Mr. Richard Swiveller, "perpetual grand-master of the Glorious Apollos," be the questionable hero; and the heroine is Little Nell, a child. Of Dickens' singular feeling for the pathos and humour of childhood, I have already spoken. Many novelists, perhaps one might even say, most novelists, have no freedom of utterance when they come to speak about children, do not know what to do with a child if it chances to stray into their pages. But how different with Dickens! He is never more thoroughly at home than with the little folk. Perhaps his best speech, and they all are good, is the one uttered at the dinner given on behalf of the Children's Hospital. Certainly there is no figure in "Dombey and Son" on which more loving care has been lavished than the figure of little Paul, and when the lad dies one quite feels that the light has gone out of the book. "David Copperfield" shorn of David's childhood and youth would be a far less admirable performance. The hero of "Oliver Twist" is a boy. Pip is a boy through a fair portion of "Great Expectations." The heroine of "The Old Curiosity Shop" is, as I have just said, a girl. And of all these children, the one who seems, from the first, to have stood highest in popular favour, and won most hearts, is Little Nell. Ay me, what tears have been shed over her weary wanderings with that absurd old gambling grandfather of hers; how many persons have sorrowed over her untimely end as if she had been a daughter or a sister. High and low, literate and illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her spell. Hood, he who sang the "Song of the Shirt," paid her the tribute of his admiration, and Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and editor of _The Edinburgh Review_, the tribute of his tears. Landor volleyed forth his thunderous praises over her grave, likening her to Juliet and Desdemona. Nay, Dickens himself sadly bewailed her fate, described himself as being the "wretchedest of the wretched" when it drew near, and shut himself from all society as if he had suffered a real bereavement. While as to the feeling which she has excited in the breasts of the illiterate, we may take Mr. Bret Harte's account of the haggard golddiggers by the roaring Californian camp fire, who throw down their cards to listen to her story, and, for the nonce, are softened and humanized.[14]--Such is the sympathy she has created. And for the description of her death and burial, as a superb piece of pathetic writing, there has been a perfect chorus of praise broken here and there no doubt by a discordant voice, but still of the loudest and most heartfelt. Did not Horne, a poet better known to the last generation than to this, point out that though printed as prose, these passages were, perhaps as "the result of harmonious accident," essentially poetry, and "written in blank verse of irregular metres and rhythms, which Southey and Shelley and some other poets have occasionally adopted"? Did he not print part of the passages in this form, substituting only, as a concession to the conventionalities of verse, the word "grandames" for "grandmothers"; and did he not declare of one of the extracts so printed that it was "worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth"? If it "argues an insensibility" to stand somewhat unmoved among all these tears and admiration, I am afraid I must be rather pebble-hearted. To tell the whole damaging truth, I am, and always have been, only slightly affected by the story of Little Nell; have never felt any particular inclination to shed a tear over it, and consider the closing chapters as failing of their due effect, on me at least, because they are pitched in a key that is altogether too high and unnatural. Of course one makes a confession of this kind with diffidence. It is no light thing to stem the current of a popular opinion. But one can only go with the stream when one thinks the stream is flowing in a right channel. And here I think the stream is meandering out of its course. For me, Little Nell is scarcely more than a figure in cloudland. Possibly part of the reason why I do not feel as much sympathy with her as I ought, is because I do not seem to know her very well. With Paul Dombey I am intimately acquainted. I should recognize the child anywhere, should be on the best of terms with him in five minutes. Few things would give me greater pleasure than an hour's saunter by the side of his little invalid's carriage along the Parade at Brighton. How we should laugh, to be sure, if we happened to come across Mr. Toots, and smile, too, if we met Feeder, B.A., and give a furtive glance of recognition at Glubb, the discarded charioteer. Then the classic Cornelia Blimber would pass, on her constitutional, and we should quail a little--at least I am certain _I_ should--as she bent upon us her scholastic spectacles; and a glimpse of Dr. Blimber would chill us even more; till--ah! what's this? Why does a flush of happiness mantle over my little friend's pale face? Why does he utter a faint cry of pleasure? Yes, there she is--he has caught sight of Floy running forward to meet him.--So am I led, almost instinctively, whenever the figure of Paul flashes into my mind, to think of him as a child I have actually known. But Nell--she has no such reality of existence. She has been etherealized, vapourized, rhapsodized about, till the flesh and blood have gone out of her. I recognize her attributes, unselfishness, sweetness of disposition, gentleness. But these don't constitute a human being. They don't make up a recognizable individuality. If I met her in the street, I am afraid I should not know her; and if I did, I am sure we should both find it difficult to keep up a conversation. Do the passages describing her death and burial really possess the rhythm of poetry? That would seem to me, I confess, to be as ill a compliment as to say of a piece of poetry that it was really prose. The music of prose and of poetry are essentially different. They do not affect the ear in the same way. The one is akin to song, the other to speech. Give to prose the recurring cadences, the measure, and the rhythmic march of verse, and it becomes bad prose without becoming good poetry.[15] So, in fairness to Dickens, one is bound, as far as one can, to forget Horne's misapplied praise. But even thus, and looking upon it as prose alone, can we say that the account of Nell's funeral is, in the high artistic sense, a piece of good work. Here is an extract: "And now the bell--the bell she had so often heard, by night and day, and listened to with solemn pleasure almost as a living voice--rang its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so beautiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth--on crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn of life--to gather round her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes were dim and senses failing--grandmothers, who might have died ten years ago, and still been old,--the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied, the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that earthly grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that which still could crawl and creep above it?" Such is the tone throughout, and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard? All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me--shall I say it?--as much out of place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister of state--with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over the grave. The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not much less incongruous and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject, above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most effective. There are some, indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos altogether. Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more obvious kind. But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious as to defeat their own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what I have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to acknowledge that Dickens occasionally lays himself open to it. But go one inch beyond this I cannot. Of course we may, if we like, take up a position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in art. We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall. We may hold that neither sorrow nor suffering call for any meed of sympathy. Such is mainly the attitude which the French novelist adopts towards the world of his creation.[16] But once admit that feeling is legitimate; once allow that tears are due to those who have been crushed and left bleeding by this great world of ours as it crashes blundering on its way; once grant that the writer's art can properly embrace what Shakespeare calls "the pity of it," the sorrows inwoven in all our human relationships; once acknowledge all this, and then I affirm, most confidently, that Dickens, working at his best, was one of the greatest masters of pathos who ever lived. I can myself see scarce a strained discordant note in the account of the short life and early death of Paul Dombey, and none in the description of the death of Paul Dombey's mother, or in the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of David Copperfield's childhood and boyhood. I consider the passage in "American Notes" describing the traits of gentle kindliness among the emigrants as being nobly, pathetically eloquent. Did space allow, I could support my position by quotations and example to any extent. And my conclusion is that, though he failed with Little Nell, yet he succeeded elsewhere, and superbly. The number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, containing the conclusion of "The Old Curiosity Shop," appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and "Barnaby Rudge" began its course in the ensuing week. The first had been essentially a tale of modern life. All the characters that made a kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the past some six and forty years ago. Quilp, the dwarf,--and a far finer specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in every respect, than that poor stage villain Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister Sally, a goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and plain of body, who so barely escapes from the plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to prove him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing of notaries' clerks; Mrs. Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the "Glorious Apollers,"--all these, making allowance perhaps for some idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time. But in "Barnaby Rudge," Dickens threw himself back into the last century. The book is a historical novel, one of the two which he wrote, the other being the "Tale of Two Cities," and its scenes are many of them laid among the No Popery Riots of 1780. A ghastly time, a time of aimless, brutal incendiarism and mad turbulence on the part of the mob; a time of weakness and ineptitude on the part of the Government; a time of wickedness, folly, and misrule. Dickens describes it admirably. His picture of the riots themselves seems painted in pigments of blood and fire; and yet, through all the hurry and confusion, he retains the clearness of arrangement and lucidity which characterize the pictures of such subjects when executed by the great masters of the art--as Carlyle, for example. His portrait of the poor, crazy-brained creature, Lord George Gordon, who sowed the wind which the country was to reap in whirlwind, is excellent. Nor is what may be called the private part of the story unskilfully woven with the historical part. The plot, though not good, rises perhaps above the average of Dickens' plots; for even we, his admirers, are scarcely bound to maintain that plot was his strong point. Beyond this, I think I may say that the book is, on the whole, the least characteristic of his books. It is the one which those who are most out of sympathy with his peculiar vein of humour and pathos will probably think the best, and the one which the true Dickens lovers will generally regard as bearing the greatest resemblance to an ordinary novel. FOOTNOTES: [14] "Dickens in Camp." [15] Dickens himself knew that he had a tendency to fall into blank verse in moments of excitement, and tried to guard against it. [16] M. Daudet, in many respects a follower of Dickens, is a fine and notable exception. CHAPTER VI. The last number of "Barnaby Rudge" appeared in November, 1841, and, on the 4th of the following January Dickens sailed with his wife for a six months' tour in the United States. What induced him to undertake this journey, more formidable then, of course, than now? Mainly, I think, that restless desire to see the world which is strong in a great many men, and was specially strong in Dickens. Ride as he might, and walk as he might, his abounding energies remained unsatisfied. In 1837 there had been trips to Belgium, Broadstairs, Brighton; in 1838 to Yorkshire, Broadstairs, North Wales, and a fairly long stay at Twickenham; in 1839 a similar stay at Petersham--where, as at Twickenham, frolic, gaiety and athletics had prevailed,--and trips to Broadstairs and Devonshire; in 1840 trips again to Bath, Birmingham, Shakespeare's country, Broadstairs, Devonshire; in 1841 more trips, and a very notable visit to Edinburgh, with which Little Nell had a great deal to do. For Lord Jeffrey was enamoured of that young lady, declaring to whomsoever would hear that there had been "nothing so good ... since Cordelia;" and inoculating the citizens of the northern capital with his enthusiasm, he had induced them to offer to Dickens a right royal banquet, and the freedom of their city. Accordingly to Edinburgh he repaired, and the dinner took place on the 26th of June, with three hundred of the chief notabilities for entertainers, and a reception such as kings might have envied. Jeffrey himself was ill and unable to take the chair, but Wilson, the leonine "Christopher North," editor of _Blackwood_, and author of those "Noctes Ambrosianæ" which were read so eagerly as they came out, and which some of us find so difficult to read now--Wilson presided most worthily. Of speechifying there was of course much, and compliments abounded. But the banquet itself, the whole reception at Edinburgh was the most magnificent of compliments. Never, I imagine, can such efforts have been made to turn any young man's brain, as were made, during this and the following year, to turn the head of Dickens, who was still, be it remembered, under thirty. Nevertheless he came unscathed through the ordeal. A kind of manly genuineness bore him through. Amid all the adulation and excitement, the public and private hospitalities, the semi-regal state appearance at the theatre, he could write, and write truly, to his friend Forster: "The moral of this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, please heaven. I wish the day were here." Yes, except during the few years when he and his wife lived unhappily together, he was greatly attached to his home, with its friendships and simple pleasures; but yet, as I have said, a desire to see more of the world, and to garner new experiences, was strong upon him. The two conflicting influences often warred in his life, so that it almost seemed sometimes as if he were being driven by relentless furies. Those furies pointed now with stern fingers towards America, though "how" he was "to get on" "for seven or eight months without" his friends, he could not upon his "soul conceive;" though he dreaded "to think of breaking up all" his "old happy habits for so long a time;" though "Kate," remembering doubtless her four little children, wept whenever the subject was "spoken of." Something made him feel that the going was "a matter of imperative necessity." Washington Irving beckoned from across the Atlantic, speaking, as Jeffrey had spoken from Edinburgh, of Little Nell and her far-extended influence. There was a great reception foreshadowed, and a new world to be seen, and a book to be written about it. While as to the strongest of the home ties--the children that brought the tears into Mrs. Dickens' eyes,--the separation, after all, would not be eternal, and the good Macready, tragic actor and true friend, would take charge of the little folk while their parents were away. So Dickens, who had some time before "begun counting the days between this and coming home again," set sail, as I have said, for America on the 4th of January, 1842. And a very rough experience he, and Mrs. Dickens, and Mrs. Dickens' maid seem to have had during that January passage from Liverpool to Halifax and Boston. Most of the time it blew horribly, and they were direfully ill. Then a storm supervened, which swept away the paddle-boxes and stove in the life-boats, and they seem to have been in real peril. Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But dangers and discomforts must have been forgotten, at any rate to begin with, in the glories of the reception that awaited the "inimitable,"--as Dickens whimsically called himself in those days,--when he landed in the New World. If he had been received with princely honours in Edinburgh, he was treated now as an emperor in some triumphant progress. Halifax sounded the first note of welcome, gave, as it were, the preliminary trumpet flourish. From that town he writes: "I wish you could have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable in the streets. I wish you could have seen judges, law-officers, bishops, and law-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could have seen the inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the Speaker's throne, and sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, the observed of all observers, listening with exemplary gravity to the queerest speaking possible, and breaking, in spite of himself, into a smile as he thought of this commencement to the thousand and one stories in reserve for home." At Boston the enthusiasm had swelled to even greater proportions. "How can I give you," he writes, "the faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to which I have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories, villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate, and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind." All was indeed going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not rightly say that the world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power? What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? Is it matter for surprise if he found the women "very beautiful," the "general breeding neither stiff nor forward," "the good nature universal"; if he expatiated, not without a backward look at unprogressive Old England, on the comparative comfort among the working classes, and the absence of beggars in the streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather. Before many weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very different spirit. On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect ovation of balls and dinners, he writes "with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow," that "there is no country on the face of the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in" the United States. On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready, who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent: "It is of no use, I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniment of Court circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast, excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children, it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison.... Freedom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew.... In the respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably." Extracts like these could be multiplied to any extent, and the question arises, why did such a change come over the spirit of Dickens? Washington Irving, at the great New York dinner, had called him "the guest of the nation." Why was the guest so quickly dissatisfied with his host, and quarrelling with the character of his entertainment? Sheer physical fatigue, I think, had a good deal to do with it. Even at Boston, before he had begun to travel over the unending railways, water-courses, and chaotic coach-roads of the great Republic, that key-note had been sounded. "We are already," he had written, "weary at times, past all expression." Few men can wander with impunity out of their own professional sphere, and undertake duties for which they have neither the training nor acquired tastes. Dickens was a writer, not a king; and here he was expected to hold a king's state, and live in a king's publicity, but without the formal etiquette that hedge a king from intruders, and make his position tolerable. He was hemmed in by curious eyes, mobbed in the streets, stared at in his own private rooms, interviewed by the hour, shaken by the hand till his arm must often have been ready to drop off, waylaid at every turn with formal addresses. If he went to church the people crowded into the adjacent pews, and the preacher preached at him. If he got into a public conveyance, every one inside insisted on an introduction, and the people outside--say before the train started--would pull down the windows and comment freely on his nose and eyes and personal appearance generally, some even touching him as if to see if he were real. He was safe from intrusion nowhere--no, not when he was washing and his wife in bed. Such attentions must have been exhausting to a degree that can scarcely be imagined. But there was more than mere physical weariness in his growing distaste for the United States. Perfectly outspoken at all times, and eager for the strife of tongues in any cause which he had at heart, it horrified him to find that he was expected not to express himself freely on such subjects as International Copyright, and that even in private, or semi-private intercourse, slavery was a topic to be avoided. Then I fear, too, that as he left cultured Boston behind, he was brought into close and habitual contact with natives whom he did not appreciate. Rightly or wrongly, he took a strong dislike for Brother Jonathan as Brother Jonathan existed, in the rough, five and forty years ago. He was angered by that young gentleman's brag, offended by the rough familiarity of his manners, indignant at his determination by all means to acquire dollars, incensed by his utter want of care for literature and art, sickened by his tobacco-chewing and expectorations. So when Dickens gets to "Niagara Falls, upon the _English_ side," he puts ten dashes under the word English; and, meeting two English officers, contrasts them in thought with the men whom he has just left, and seems, by note of exclamation and italics, to call upon the world to witness, "what _gentlemen_, what noblemen of nature they seemed!" And Brother Jonathan, how did _he_ regard his young guest? Well, Jonathan, great as he was, and greater as he was destined to be, did not possess the gift of prophecy, and could not of course foresee the scathing satire of "American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." But still, amid all his enthusiasm, I think there must have been a feeling of uneasiness and disappointment. Part, as there is no doubt, of the fervour with which he greeted Dickens, was due to his regarding Dickens as the representative of democratic feeling in aristocratic England, as the advocate of the poor and down-trodden against the wealthy and the strong; "and"--thus argued Jonathan--"because we are a democracy, therefore Dickens will admire and love us, and see how immeasurably superior we are to the retrograde Britishers of his native land." But unfortunately Dickens showed no signs of being impressed in that particular way. On the contrary, as we have seen, such comparison as he made in his own mind was infinitely to the disadvantage of the United States. "We must be cracked up," says Hannibal Chollop, in "Martin Chuzzlewit," speaking of his fellow countrymen. And Dickens, even while fêted and honoured, would not "crack up" the Americans. He lectured them almost with truculence on their sins in the matter of copyright; he could scarcely be restrained from testifying against slavery; he was not the man to say he liked manners and customs which he loathed. Jonathan must have been very doubtfully satisfied with his guest. It is no part of my purpose to follow Dickens lingeringly, and step by step, from the day when he landed at Halifax, to the 7th of June, when he re-embarked at New York for England. From Boston he went to New York, where the great dinner was given with Washington Irving in the chair, and thence to Philadelphia and Washington,--which was still the empty "city of magnificent distances," that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares it has now ceased to be;--and thence again westward, and by Niagara and Canada back to New York. And if any persons want to know what he thought about these and other places, and the railway travelling, and the coach travelling, and the steamboat travelling, and the prisons and other public institutions--aye, and many other things besides, they cannot do better than read the "American Notes for general circulation," which he wrote and published within the year after his return. Nor need such persons be deterred by the fact that Macaulay thought meanly of the book; for Macaulay, with all his great gifts, did not, as he himself knew full well, excel in purely literary criticism. So when he pronounces, that "what is meant to be easy and sprightly is vulgar and flippant," and "what is meant to be fine is a great deal too fine for me, as the description of the Falls of Niagara," one can venture to differ without too great a pang. The book, though not assuredly one of Dickens' best, contains admirable passages which none but he could have written, and the description of Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the subject being remembered, as a piece of impassioned prose. Whether satire so bitter and unfriendly as that in which he indulged, both here and in "Martin Chuzzlewit," was justifiable from what may be called an international point of view, is another question. Publicists do not always remember that a cut which would smart for a moment, and then be forgotten, if aimed at a countryman, rankles and festers if administered to a foreigner. And if this be true as regards the English publicist's comment on the foreigner who does not understand our language, it is, of course, true with tenfold force as regards the foreigner whose language is our own. _He_ understands only too well the jibe and the sneer, and the tone of superiority, more offensive perhaps than either. Looked at in this way, it can, I think, but be accounted a misfortune that the most popular of English writers penned two books containing so much calculated to wound American feeling, as the "Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." Nor are signs entirely wanting that, as the years went by, the mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some such suspicion. A quarter of a century later, he visited the United States a second time; and speaking at a public dinner given in his honour by the journalists of New York, he took occasion to comment on the enormous strides which the country had made in the interval, and then said, "Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first." And he added that, in all future editions of the two books just named, he would cause to be recorded, that, "wherever he had been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, he had been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature of his avocation there" (as a public reader), "and the state of his health." And now, with three observations, I will conclude what I have to say about the visit to America in 1842. The first is that the "Notes" are entirely void of all vulgarity of reference to the private life of the notable Americans whom Dickens had met. He seems to have known, more or less intimately, the chief writers of the time--Washington Irving, Channing, Dana, Bryant, Longfellow, Bancroft; but his intercourse with them he held sacred, and he made no literary capital out of it. Secondly, it is pleasant to note that there was, so far, no great "incompatibility of temper" between him and his wife. He speaks of her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as a "most admirable traveller," and expatiates on the good temper and equanimity with which she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most trying journey. And the third point to which I will call attention is the thoroughly characteristic form of rest to which he had recourse in the midst of all his toil and travel. Most men would have sought relaxation in being quiet. He found it in vigorously getting up private theatricals with the officers of the Coldstream Guards, at Montreal. Besides acting in all the three pieces played, he also accepted the part of stage manager; and "I am not," he says, "placarded as stage manager for nothing. Everybody was told that they would have to submit to the most iron despotism, and didn't I come Macready over them? Oh no, by no means; certainly not. The pains I have taken with them, and the perspiration I have expended, during the last ten days, exceed in amount anything you can imagine." What bright vitality, and what a singular charm of exuberant animal spirits! And who was glad one evening--which would be about the last evening in June, or the first of July--when a hackney coach rattled up to the door of the house in Devonshire Terrace, and four little folk, two girls and two boys, were hurried down, and kissed through the bars of the gate, because their father was too eager to wait till it was opened? Who were glad but the little folk aforementioned--I say nothing of the joy of father and mother; for children as they were, a sense of sorrowful loss had been theirs while their parents were away, and greater strictness seems to have reigned in the good Macready's household than in their own joyous home. It is Miss Dickens herself who tells us this, and in whose memory has lingered that pretty scene of the kiss through the bars in the summer gloaming. And she has much to tell us too of her father's tenderness and care,--of his sympathy with the children's terrors, so that, for instance, he would sit beside the cot of one of the little girls who had been startled, and hold her hand in his till she fell asleep; of his having them on his knees, and singing to them the merriest of comic songs; of his interest in all their small concerns; of the many pet names with which he invested them.[17] Then, as they grew older, there were Twelfth Night parties and magic lanterns. "Never such magic lanterns as those shown by him," she says. "Never such conjuring as his." There was dancing, too, and the little ones taught him his steps, which he practised with much assiduity, once even jumping out of bed in terror, lest he had forgotten the polka, and indulging in a solitary midnight rehearsal. Then, as the children grew older still, there were private theatricals. "He never," she says again, "was too busy to interest himself in his children's occupations, lessons, amusements, and general welfare." Clearly not one of those brilliant men, a numerous race, who when away from their homes, in general society, sparkle and scintillate, flash out their wit, and irradiate all with their humour, but who, when at home, are dull as rusted steel. Among the many tributes to his greatness, that of his own child has a place at once touching and beautiful. FOOTNOTES: [17] Miss Dickens evidently bears proudly still her pet name of "Mamie," and signs it to her book. CHAPTER VII. With the return from America began the old life of hard work and hard play. There was much industrious writing of "American Notes," at Broadstairs and elsewhere; and there were many dinners of welcome home, and strolls, doubtless, with Forster and Maclise, and other intimates, to old haunts, as Jack Straw's Castle on Hampstead Heath, and similar houses of public entertainment. And then in the autumn there was "such a trip ... into Cornwall," with Forster, and the painters Stanfield and Maclise for travelling companions. How they enjoyed themselves to be sure, and with what bubbling, bursting merriment. "I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey," writes Dickens, "... I was choking and gasping ... all the way. And Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him." Immediately on their return, refreshed and invigorated by this wholesome hilarity and enjoyment, he threw himself into the composition of his next book, and the first number of "Martin Chuzzlewit" appeared in January, 1843. "Martin Chuzzlewit" is unquestionably one of Dickens' great works. He himself held it to be "in a hundred points" and "immeasurably" superior to anything he had before written, and that verdict may, I think, be accepted freely. The plot, as plot is usually understood, can scarcely indeed be commended. But then plot was never his strong point. Later in life, and acting, as I have always surmised, under the influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, he endeavoured to construct ingenious stories that turned on mysterious disappearances, and the substitution of one person for another, and murders real or suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens had no real gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax. Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move forward at all, he was compelled to make his personages pursue a line of conduct preposterous and improbable, and even antagonistic to their nature. Take this very book. Old Martin Chuzzlewit is a man who has been accustomed, all through a long life, to have his own way, and to take it with a high hand. Yet he so far sets aside, during a course of months, every habit of his life, as to simulate the weakest subservience to Pecksniff--and that not for the purpose of unmasking Pecksniff, who wanted no unmasking, but only in order to disappoint him. Is it believable that old Martin should have thought Pecksniff worth so much trouble, personal inconvenience, and humiliation? Or take again Mr. Boffin in "Our Mutual Friend." Mr. Boffin is a simple, guileless, open-hearted, open-handed old man. Yet, in order to prove to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be mercenary, he, again, goes through a long course of dissimulation, and does some admirable comic business in the character of a miser. I say it boldly, I do not believe Mr. Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic talent. Plots requiring to be worked out by such means are ill-constructed plots; or, to put it in another way, a man who had any gift for the construction of plots would never have had recourse to such means. Nor would he, I think, have adopted, as Dickens did habitually and for all his stories, a mode of publication so destructive of unity of effect, as the publication in monthly or weekly parts. How could the reader see as a whole that which was presented to him at intervals of time more or less distant? How, and this is of infinitely greater importance, how could the writer produce it as a whole? For Dickens, it must be remembered, never finished a book before the commencement of publication. At first he scarcely did more than complete each monthly instalment as required; and though afterwards he was generally some little way in advance, yet always he wrote by parts, having the interest of each separate part in his mind, as well as the general interest of the whole novel. Thus, however desirable in the development of the story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame and uneventful number. Moreover, any portion once issued was unalterable and irrevocable. If, as sometimes happened, any modification seemed desirable as the book progressed, there was no possibility of changing anything in the chapters already in the hands of the public, and so making them harmonize better with the new. But of course, with all this, the question still remains how far Dickens' comparative failure as a constructor of plots really detracts from his fame and standing as a novelist. To my mind, I confess, not very much. Plot I regard as the least essential element in the novelist's art. A novel can take the very highest rank without it. There is not any plot to speak of in Lesage's "Gil Blas," and just as little in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," and only a very bad one in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield." Coleridge admired the plot of "Tom Jones," but though one naturally hesitates to differ from a critic of such superb mastery and power, I confess I have never been struck by that plot, any more than by the plots, such as they are, in "Joseph Andrews," or in Smollett's works. Nor, if I can judge of other people's memories by my own, is it by the mechanism of the story, or by the intrigue, however admirably woven and unravelled, that one remembers a work of fiction. These may exercise an intense passing interest of curiosity, especially during a first perusal. But afterwards they fade from the mind, while the characters, if highly vitalized and strong, will stand out in our thoughts, fresh and full coloured, for an indefinite time. Scott's "Guy Mannering" is a well-constructed story. The plot is deftly laid, the events are prepared for with a cunning hand; the coincidences are so arranged as to be made to look as probable as may be. Yet we remember and love the book, not for such excellences as these, but for Dandie Dinmont, the Border farmer, and Pleydell, the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg Merrilies, the gipsy. The book's life is in its flesh and blood, not in its plot. And the same is true of Dickens' novels. He crowds them so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving. If the incidents will do this for us we are satisfied. It is not necessary that those incidents should be made to go through cunning evolutions to a definite end. Each is admirable in itself, and admirably adapted to its immediate purpose. That should more than suffice. And Dickens sometimes succeeds in reaching a higher unity than that of mere plot. He takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul of his novel, animating and vivifying every part. That central idea in "Martin Chuzzlewit" is the influence of selfishness. The Chuzzlewits are a selfish race. Old Martin is selfish; and so, with many good qualities and possibilities of better things, is his grandson, young Martin. The other branch of the family, Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas, are much worse. The latter especially is a horrible creature. Brought up to think of nothing except his own interests and the main chance, he is only saved by an accident from the crime of parricide, and afterwards commits a murder and poisons himself. As his career is one of terrible descent, so young Martin's is one of gradual regeneration from his besetting weakness. He falls in love with his cousin Mary--the only unselfish member of the family, by the bye--and quarrels about this love affair with his grandfather, and so passes into the hard school of adversity. There he learns much. Specially valuable is the teaching which he gets as a settler in the swampy backwoods of the United States in company with Mark Tapley, jolliest and most helpful of men. On his return, he finds his grandfather seemingly under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, the English Tartuffe. But that, as I have already mentioned, is only a ruse. Old Martin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time receives the reward of his deeds, and all ends happily for those who deserve happiness. Such is something like a bare outline of the story, with the beauty eliminated. For what makes its interest, we must go further, to the household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, Charity and Mercy, and Tom Pinch, whose beautiful, unselfish character stands so in contrast to that of the grasping self-seekers by whom he is surrounded; we must study young Martin himself, whose character is admirably drawn, and without Dickens' usual tendency to caricature; we must laugh in sympathy with Mark Tapley; we must follow them both through the American scenes, which, intensely amusing as they are, must have bitterly envenomed the wounds inflicted on the national vanity by "American Notes," and, according to Dickens' own expression, "sent them all stark staring raving mad across the water;" we must frequent the boarding establishment for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs. Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great book, I say again, a very great book. Yet not at the time a successful book. Why Fortune, the fickle jade, should have taken it into her freakish head to frown, or half frown, on Dickens at this particular juncture, who shall tell? He was wooing her with his very best work, and she turned from him. The sale of "Pickwick" and "Nicholas Nickleby" had been from forty to fifty thousand copies of each part; the sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ had risen still higher; the sale of even the most popular parts of "Martin Chuzzlewit" fell to twenty-three thousand. This was, as may be supposed, a grievous disappointment. Dickens' personal expenditure had not perhaps been lavish in view of what he thought he could calculate on earning; but it had been freely based on that calculation. Demands, too, were being made upon his purse by relations,--probably by his father, and certainly by his brother Frederic, which were frequent, embarrassing, and made in a way which one may call worse than indelicate. Any permanent loss of popularity would have meant serious money entanglements. With his father's career in full view, such a prospect must have been anything but pleasant. He cast about what he should do, and determined to leave England for a space, live more economically on the Continent, and gather materials in Italy or Switzerland for a new travel book. But before carrying out this project, he would woo fortune once again, and in a different form. During the months of October and November, 1843, in the intervals of "Chuzzlewit," he wrote a short story that has taken its place, by almost universal consent, among his masterpieces, nay, among the masterpieces of English literature: "The Christmas Carol." All Dickens' great gifts seem reflected, sharp and distinct, in this little book, as in a convex mirror. His humour, his best pathos, which is not that of grandiloquence, but of simplicity, his bright poetic fancy, his kindliness, all here find a place. It is great painting in miniature, genius in its quintessence, a gem of perfect water. We may apply to it any simile that implies excellence in the smallest compass. None but a fine imagination would have conceived the supernatural agency that works old Scrooge's moral regeneration--the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood, warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude. Then the episodes: the scenes to which these ghostly visitants convey Scrooge; the story of his earlier years as shown in vision; the household of the Cratchits, and poor little crippled Tiny Tim; the party given by Scrooge's nephew; nay, before all these, the terrible interview with Marley's Ghost. All are admirably executed. Sacrilege would it be to suggest the alteration of a word. First of the Christmas books in the order of time, it is also the best of its own kind; it is in its own order perfect. Nor did the public of Christmas, 1843, fail to appreciate that something of very excellent quality had been brought forth for their benefit. "The first edition of six thousand copies," says Forster, "was sold" on the day of publication, and about as many more would seem to have been disposed of before the end of February, 1844. But, alas, Dickens had set his heart on a profit of £1,000, whereas in February he did not see his way to much more than £460,[18] and his unpaid bills for the previous year he described as "terrific." So something, as I have said, had to be done. A change of front became imperative. Messrs. Bradbury and Evans advanced him £2,800 "for a fourth share in whatever he might write during the ensuing eight years,"--he purchased at the Pantechnicon "a good old shabby devil of a coach," also described as "an English travelling carriage of considerable proportions"; engaged a courier who turned out to be the courier of couriers, a very conjurer among couriers; let his house in Devonshire Terrace; and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the dates, on the 1st of July, 1844. FOOTNOTES: [18] The profit at the end of 1844 was £726. CHAPTER VIII. Ah, those eventful, picturesque, uncomfortable old travelling days, when railways were unborn, or in their infancy; those interminable old dusty drives, in diligence or private carriage, along miles and miles of roads running straight to the low horizon, through a line of tall poplars, across the plains of France! What an old-world memory it seems, and yet, as the years go, not so very long since after all. The party that rumbled from Boulogne to Marseilles in the old "devil of a coach" aforesaid, "and another conveyance for luggage," and I know not what other conveyances besides, consisted of Dickens himself; Mrs. Dickens; her sister, Miss Georgina Hogarth, who had come to live with them on their return from America; five children, for another boy had been born some six months before; Roche, the prince of couriers; "Anne," apparently the same maid who had accompanied them across the Atlantic; and other dependents: a somewhat formidable troupe and cavalcade. Of their mode of travel, and what they saw on the way, or perhaps, more accurately, of what Dickens saw, with those specially keen eyes of his, at Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, and other places--one may read the master's own account in the "Pictures from Italy." Marseilles was reached on the 14th of July, and thence a steamer took them, coasting the fairy Mediterranean shores, to Genoa, their ultimate destination, where they landed on the 16th. The Italy of 1844 was like, and yet unlike the Italy of to-day. It was the old disunited Italy of several small kingdoms and principalities, the Italy over which lowered the shadow of despotic Austria, and of the Pope's temporal power, not the Italy which the genius of Cavour has welded into a nation. It was a land whose interest came altogether from the past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of time's sunset. How unlike the United States! The contrast has always, I confess, seemed to me a piquant one. It has often struck me with a feeling of quaintness that the two countries which Dickens specially visited and described, were, the one this lovely land of age and hoar antiquity, and the other that young giant land of the West, which is still in the garish strong light of morning, and whose great day is in the future. Nor, I think, before he had seen both, would Dickens himself have been able to tell on which side his sympathies would lie. Thoroughly popular in his convictions, thoroughly satisfied that to-day was in all respects better than yesterday, it is clear that he expected to find more pleasure in the brand new Republic than his actual experience warranted. The roughness of the strong, uncultured young life grated upon him. It jarred upon his sensibilities. But of Italy he wrote with very different feeling. What though the places were dirty, the people shiftless, idle, unpunctual, unbusinesslike, and the fleas as the sand which is upon the sea-shore for multitude? It mattered not while life was so picturesque and varied, and manners were so full of amenity. Your inn might be, and probably was, ill-appointed, untidy, the floors of brick, the doors agape, the windows banging--a contrast in every way to the palatial hotel in New York or Washington. But then how cheerful and amusing were mine host and hostess, and how smilingly determined all concerned to make things pleasant. So the artist in Dickens turned from the new to the old, and Italy, as she is wont, cast upon him her spell. First impressions, however, were not altogether satisfactory. Dickens owns to a pang when he was "set down" at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, "in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard, attached to a kind of pink jail, and told he lived there." But he immediately adds: "I little thought that day that I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the city with affection, as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet." In sooth, he enjoyed the place thoroughly. "Martin Chuzzlewit" had left his hands. He was fairly entitled for a few weeks to the luxury of idleness, and he threw himself into doing nothing, as he was accustomed to throw himself into his work, with all energy. And there was much to do, much especially to see. So Dickens bathed and walked; and strolled about the city hither and thither, and about the suburbs and about the surrounding country; and visited public buildings and private palaces; and noted the ways of the inhabitants; and saw Genoese life in its varied forms; and wrote light glancing letters about it all to friends at home; and learnt Italian; and, in the end of September, left his "pink jail," which had been taken for him at a disproportionate rent, and moved into the Palazzo Peschiere, in Genoa itself: a wonderful palace, with an entrance-hall fifty feet high, and larger than "the dining-room of the Academy," and bedrooms "in size and shape like those at Windsor Castle, but greatly higher," and a view from the windows over gardens where the many fountains sparkled, and the gold fish glinted, and into Genoa itself, with its "many churches, monasteries, and convents pointing to the sunny sky," and into the harbour, and over the sapphire sea, and up again to the encircling hills--a view, as Dickens declared, that "no custom could impair, and no description enhance." But with the beginning of October came again the time for work; and beautiful beyond all beauty as were his surroundings, the child of London turned to the home of his heart, and pined for the London streets. For some little space he seemed to be thinking in vain, and cudgelling his brains for naught, when suddenly the chimes of Genoa's many churches, that seemed to have been clashing and clanging nothing but distraction and madness, rang harmony into his mind. The subject and title of his new Christmas book were found. He threw himself into the composition of "The Chimes." Earnest at all times in what he wrote, living ever in intense and passionate sympathy with the world of his imagination, he seems specially to have put his whole heart into this book. "All my affections and passions got twined and knotted up in it, and I became as haggard as a murderer long before I wrote 'the end,'"--so he told Lady Blessington on the 20th of November; and to Forster he expressed the yearning that was in him to "leave" his "hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate." This was the keynote of "The Chimes." He intended in it to strike a great and memorable blow on behalf of the poor and down-trodden. His purpose, so far as I can make it out, was to show how much excuse there is for their shortcomings, and how in their errors, nay even in their crimes, there linger traces of goodness and kindly feeling. On this I shall have something to say when discussing "Hard Times," which is somewhat akin to "The Chimes" in scope and purpose. Meanwhile it cannot honestly be affirmed that the story justifies the passion that Dickens threw into its composition. The supernatural machinery is weak as compared with that of the "Carol." Little Trotty Veck, dreaming to the sound of the bells in the old church tower, is a bad substitute for Scrooge on his midnight rambles. Nor are his dreams at all equal, for humour or pathos, to Scrooge's visions and experiences. And the moral itself is not clearly brought out. I confess to being a little doubtful as to what it exactly is, and how it follows from the premises furnished. I wish, too, that it had been carried home to some one with more power than little Trotty to give it effect. What was the good of convincing that kindly old soul that the people of his own class had warm hearts? He knew it very well. Take from the book the fine imaginative description of the goblin music that leaps into life with the ringing of the bells, and there remain the most excellent intentions--and not much more. Such, however, was very far from being Dickens' view. He had "undergone," he said, "as much sorrow and agitation" in the writing "as if the thing were real," and on the 3rd of November, when the last page was written, had indulged "in what women call a good cry;" and, as usually happens, the child that had cost much sorrow was a child of special love.[19] So, when all was over, nothing would do but he must come to London to read his book to the choice literary spirits whom he specially loved. Accordingly he started from Genoa on the 6th of November, travelled by Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice--where, such was the enchantment of the place, that he felt it "cruel not to have brought Kate and Georgy, positively cruel and base";--and thence again by Verona, Mantua, Milan, the Simplon Pass, Strasbourg, Paris, and Calais, to Dover, and wintry England. Sharp work, considering all he had seen by the way, and how effectually he had seen it, for he was in London on the evening of the 30th of November, and, on the 2nd of December, reading his little book to the choice spirits aforesaid, all assembled for the purpose at Forster's house. There they are: they live for us still in Maclise's drawing, though Time has plied his scythe among them so effectually, during the forty-two years since flown, that each has passed into the silent land. There they sit: Carlyle, not the shaggy Scotch terrier with the melancholy eyes that we were wont to see in his later days, but close shaven and alert; and swift-witted Douglas Jerrold; and Laman Blanchard, whose name goes darkling in the literature of the last generation; and Forster himself, journalist and author of many books; and the painters Dyce, Maclise, and Stanfield; and Byron's friend and school companion, the clergyman Harness, who, like Dyce, pays to the story the tribute of his tears. Dickens can have been in London but the fewest of few days, for on the 13th of December he was leaving Paris for Genoa, and that after going to the theatre more than once. From Genoa he started again, on the 20th of January, 1845, with Mrs. Dickens, to see the Carnival at Rome. Thence he went to Naples, returning to Rome for the Holy Week; and thence again by Florence to Genoa. He finally left Italy in the beginning of June, and was back with his family in Devonshire Terrace at the end of that month. To what use of a literary kind should he turn his Italian observations and experiences? In what form should he publish the notes made by the way? Events soon answered that question. The year 1845 stands in the history of Queen Victoria's reign as a time of intense political excitement. The Corn Law agitation raged somewhat furiously. Dickens felt strongly impelled to throw himself into the strife. Why should he not influence his fellow-men, and "battle for the true, the just," as the able editor of a daily newspaper? Accordingly, after all the negotiations which enterprises of this kind necessitate, he made the due arrangements for starting a new paper, _The Daily News_. It was to be edited by himself, to "be kept free," the prospectus said, "from personal influence or party bias," and to be "devoted to the advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong may be redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of society promoted." His salary, so I have seen it stated, was to be £2,000 a year; and the first number came out on the morning of the 21st of January, 1846. He held the post of editor three weeks. The world may, I think, on the whole, be congratulated that he did not hold it longer. Able editors are more easily found than such writers as Dickens. There were higher claims upon his time. But to return to the Italian Notes: it was in the columns of _The Daily News_ that they first saw the light. They were among the baby attractions and charms, if I may so speak, of the nascent paper, which is now, as I need not remind my readers, enjoying a hale and vigorous manhood. And admirable sketches they are. Much, very much has been written about Italy. The subject has been done to death by every variety of pen, and in every civilized tongue. But amid all this writing, Dickens' "Pictures from Italy" still holds a high and distinctive position. That the descriptions, whether of places and works of art, or of life's pageantry, and what may be called the social picturesque, should be graphic, vivid, animated, was almost a matter of course. But _à priori_, I think one might have feared lest he should "chaff" the place and its inhabitants overmuch, and yield to the temptation of making merriment over matters which hoar age and old associations had hallowed. We can all imagine the kind of observation that would occur to Sam Weller in strolling through St. Mark's at Venice, or the Vatican; and, guessing beforehand, guessing before the "Pictures" were produced, one might, I repeat, have been afraid lest Dickens should go through Italy as a kind of educated Sam Weller. Such prophecies would have been falsified by the event. The book as a whole is very free from banter or _persiflage_. Once and again the comic side of some situation strikes him, of course. Thus, after the ceremony of the Pope washing the feet of thirteen poor men, in memory of our Lord washing the feet of the Apostles, Dickens says: "The whole thirteen sat down to dinner; grace said by the Pope; Peter in the chair." But these humorous touches are rare, and not in bad taste; while for the historic and artistic grandeurs of Italy he shows an enthusiasm which is _individual_ and discriminating. We feel, in what he says about painting, that we are getting the fresh impressions of a man not specially trained in the study of the old masters, but who yet succeeds, by sheer intuitive sympathy; in appreciating much of their greatness. His criticism of the paintings at Venice, for instance, is very decidedly superior to that of Macaulay. In brief the "Pictures," to give to the book the name which Dickens gave it, are painted with a brush at once kindly and brilliant. FOOTNOTES: [19] He read "The Chimes" at his first reading as a paid reader. CHAPTER IX. The publication of the "Pictures," though I have dealt with it as a sort of complement to Dickens' sojourn in Italy, carries us to the year 1846. But before going on with the history of that year, there are one or two points to be taken up in the history of 1845. The first is the performance, on the 21st of September, of Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour," by a select company of amateur actors, among whom Dickens held chief place. "He was the life and soul of the entire affair," says Forster. "I never seem till then to have known his business capabilities. He took everything on himself, and did the whole of it without an effort. He was stage director, very often stage carpenter, scene arranger, property man, prompter, and band-master. Without offending any one, he kept every one in order. For all he had useful suggestions.... He adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced, as well as exhibited in his own proper person, everything of which he urged the necessity on others." Dickens had once thought of the stage as a profession, and was, according to all accounts, an amateur actor of very unusual power. But of course he only acted for his amusement, and I don't know that I should have dwelt upon this performance, which was followed by others of a similar kind, if it did not, in Forster's description, afford such a signal instance of his efficiency as a practical man. The second event to be mentioned as happening in 1845, is the publication of another very pretty Christmas story, "The Cricket on the Hearth." Though Dickens had ceased to edit _The Daily News_ on the 9th of February, 1846, he contributed to the paper for some few weeks longer. But by the month of May his connection with it had entirely ceased; and on the 31st of that month, he started, by Belgium and the Rhine, for Lausanne in Switzerland, where he had determined to spend some time, and commence his next great book, and write his next Christmas story. A beautiful place is Lausanne, as many of my readers will know; and a beautiful house the house called Rosemont, situated on a hill that rises from the Lake of Geneva, with the lake's blue waters stretching below, and across, on the other side, a magnificent panorama of snowy mountains, the Simplon, St. Gothard, Mont Blanc, towering to the sky. This delightful place Dickens took at a rent of some £10 a month. Then he re-arranged all the furniture, as was his energetic wont. Then he spent a fortnight or so in looking about him, and writing a good deal for Lord John Russell on Ragged Schools, and for Miss Coutts about her various charities; and finally, on the 28th of June, as he announced to Forster in capital letters, BEGAN DOMBEY. But as the Swiss pine with home-sickness when away from their own dear land, so did this Londoner, amid all the glories of the Alps, pine for the London streets. It seemed almost as if they were essential to the exercise of his genius. The same strange mental phenomenon which he had observed in himself at Genoa was reproduced here. Everything else in his surroundings smiled most congenially. The place was fair beyond speech. The shifting, changing beauty of the mountains entranced him. The walks offered an endless variety of enjoyment. He liked the people. He liked the English colony. He had made several dear friends among them and among the natives. He was interested in the politics of the country, which happened, just then, to be in a state of peculiar excitement and revolution. Everything was charming;--"but," he writes, "the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic-lantern (of the London streets) is IMMENSE!" It literally knocked him up. He had "bad nights," was "sick and giddy," desponding over his book, more than half inclined to abandon the Christmas story altogether for that year. However, a short trip to Geneva, and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of what streets were like, and a week of "idleness" "rusting and devouring," "complete and unbroken," set him comparatively on his legs again, and before he left Lausanne for Paris on the 16th of November, he had finished three parts of "Dombey," and the "Battle of Life." Of the latter I don't know that I need say anything. It is decidedly the weakest of his Christmas books. But "Dombey" is very different work, and the first five numbers especially, which carry the story to the death of little Paul, contain passages of humour and pathos, and of humour and pathos mingled together and shot in warp and woof, like some daintiest silken fabric, that are scarcely to be matched in the language. As I go in my mind through the motherless child's short history--his birth, his christening, the engagement of the wet-nurse, the time when he is consigned to the loveless care of Mrs. Pipchin, his education in Dr. Blimber's Academy under the classic Cornelia, and his death--as I follow it all in thought, now smiling at each well-remembered touch of humour, and now saddened and solemnized as the shadow of death deepens over the frail little life, I confess to something more than critical admiration for the writer as an artist. I feel towards him as towards one who has touched my heart. Of course it is the misfortune of the book, regarding it as a whole, that the chapters relating to Paul, which are only an episode, should be of such absorbing interest, and come so early. Dickens really wrote them too well. They dwarf the rest of the story. We find a difficulty in resuming the thread of it with the same zest when the child is gone. But though the remainder of the book inevitably suffers in this way, it ought not to suffer unduly. Even apart from little Paul the novel is a fine one. Pride is its subject, as selfishness is that of "Martin Chuzzlewit." Mr. Dombey, the city merchant, has as much of the arrogance of caste and position as any blue-blooded hidalgo. He is as proud of his name as if he had inherited it from a race of princes. That he neglects and slights his daughter, and loves his son, is mainly because the latter will add a sort of completeness to the firm, and make it truly Dombey _and Son_, while the girl, for all commercial purposes, can be nothing but a cipher. And through his pride he is struck to the heart, and ruined. Mr. Carker, his confidential agent and manager, trades upon it for all vile ends, first to feather his own nest, and then to launch his patron into large and unsound business ventures. The second wife, whom he marries, certainly with no affection on either side, but purely because of her birth and connections, and because her great beauty will add to his social prestige--she, with ungovernable pride equal to his own, revolts against his authority, and, in order to humiliate him the more, pretends to elope with Carker, whom in turn she scorns and crushes. Broken thus in fortune and honour, Mr. Dombey yet falls not ignobly. His creditors he satisfies in full, reserving to himself nothing; and with a softened heart turns to the daughter he had slighted, and in her love finds comfort. Such is the main purport of the story, and round it, in graceful arabesques, are embroidered, after Dickens' manner, a whole world of subsidiary incidents thronged with all sorts of characters. What might not one say about Dr. Blimber's genteel academy at Brighton; and the Toodles family, so humble in station and intellect and so large of heart; and the contrast between Carker the manager and his brother, who for some early dishonest act, long since repented of, remains always Carker the junior; and about Captain Cuttle, and that poor, muddled nautical philosopher, Captain Bunsby, and the Game Chicken, and Mrs. Pipchin, and Miss Tox; and Cousin Feenix with wilful legs so little under control, and yet to the core of him a gentleman; and the apoplectic Major Bagstock, the Joey B. who claimed to be "rough and tough and devilish sly;" and Susan Nipper, as swift of tongue as a rapier, and as sharp? Reader, don't you know all these people? For myself, I have jostled against them constantly any time the last twenty years. They are as much part of my life as the people I meet every day. But there is one person whom I have left out of my enumeration, not certainly because I don't know him, for I know him very well, but because I want to speak about him more particularly. That person is my old friend, Mr. Toots; and the special point in his character which induces me to linger is the slight touch of craziness that sits so charmingly upon him. M. Taine, the French critic, in his chapters on Dickens, repeats the old remark that genius and madness are near akin.[20] He observes, and observes truly, that Dickens describes so well because an imagination of singular intensity enables him to _see_ the object presented, and at the same time to impart to it a kind of visionary life. "That imagination," says M. Taine, "is akin to the imagination of the monomaniac." And, starting from this point, he proceeds to show, here again quite truly, with what admirable sympathetic power and insight Dickens has described certain cases of madness, as in Mr. Dick. But here, having said some right things, M. Taine goes all wrong. According to him, these portraits of persons who have lost their wits, "however amusing they may seem at first sight," are "horrible." They could only have been painted by "an imagination such as that of Dickens, excessive, disordered, and capable of hallucination." He seems to be not far from thinking that only our splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary monsters. To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led Dickens to introduce these characters into his novels at all. It is perfectly true that he has done so several times. Barnaby Rudge, the hero of the book of the same name, is half-witted. Mr. Dick, in "David Copperfield," is decidedly crazy. Mr. Toots is at least simple. Little Miss Flite, in "Bleak House," haunting the Law Courts in expectation of a judgment on the Day of Judgment, is certainly not _compos mentis_. And one may concede to M. Taine that some element of sadness must always be present when we see a human creature imperfectly gifted with man's noblest attribute of reason. But, granting this to the full, is it possible to conceive of anything more kindly and gentle in the delineation of partial insanity than the portraits which the French critic finds horrible? Barnaby Rudge's lunatic symptoms are compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage. Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. Dick's flightiness is allied to an intense devotion and gratitude to the woman who had rescued him from confinement in an asylum; there lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor bewildered brains. Of Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper says truly, "he may not be a Solomon, nor do I say he is, but this I do say, a less selfish human creature human nature never knew." And to this one may add that he is entirely high-minded, generous, and honourable. Miss Flite's crazes do not prevent her from being full of all womanly sympathies. Here I think lies the charm these characters had for Dickens. As he was fond of showing a soul of goodness in the ill-favoured and uncouth, so he liked to make men feel that even in a disordered intellect all kindly virtues might find a home, and a happy one. M. Taine may call this "horrible" if he likes. I think myself it would be possible to find a better adjective. Dickens was at work on "Dombey and Son" during the latter part of the year 1846, and the whole of 1847, and the early part of 1848. We left him on the 16th of November, in the first of these years, starting from Lausanne for Paris, which he reached on the evening of the 20th. Here he took a house--a "preposterous" house, according to his own account, with only gleams of reason in it; and visited many theatres; and went very often to the Morgue, where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant friendly intercourse with the notable French authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the Great, most prolific of romance writers; and Scribe of the innumerable plays; and the poets Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateaubriand, then in his sad and somewhat morose old age. And in Paris too, with the help of streets and crowded ways, he wrote the great number of Dombey, the number in which little Paul dies. Three months did Dickens spend in the French capital, the incomparable city, and then was back in London, at the old life of hard work; but with even a stronger infusion than before of private theatricals--private theatricals on a grandiose scale, that were applauded by the Queen herself, and took him and his troupe starring about during the next three or four years, hither and thither, and here and there, in London and the provinces. "Splendid strolling" Forster calls it; and a period of unmixed jollity and enjoyment it seems to have been. Of course Dickens was the life and soul of it all. Mrs. Cowden Clarke, one of the few survivors, looking back to that happy time, says enthusiastically, "Charles Dickens, beaming in look, alert in manner, radiant with good humour, genial-voiced, gay, the very soul of enjoyment, fun, good taste, and good spirits, admirable in organizing details and suggesting novelty of entertainment, was of all beings the very man for a holiday season."[21] The proceeds of the performances were devoted to various objects, but chiefly to an impossible "Guild of Literature and Art," which, in the sanguine confidence of its projectors, and especially of Dickens, was to inaugurate a golden age for the author and the artist. But of all this, and of Dickens' speeches at the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, and Glasgow Athenæum, in the December of 1847, I don't know that I need say very much. The interest of a great writer's life is, after all, mainly in what he writes; and when I have said that "Dombey" proved to be a pecuniary success, the first six numbers realizing as much as £2,820, I think I may fairly pass on to Dickens' next book, the "Haunted Man." This was his Christmas story for 1848; the last, and not the worst of his Christmas stories. Both conception and treatment are thoroughly characteristic. Mr. Redlaw, a chemist, brooding over an ancient wrong, comes to the conclusion that it would be better for himself, better for all, if, in each of us, every memory of the past could be cancelled. A ghostly visitant, born of his own resentment and gloom, gives him the boon he seeks, and enables him to go about the world freezing all recollection in those he meets. And lo the boon turns out to be a curse. His presence blights those on whom it falls. For with the memory of past wrongs, goes the memory of past benefits, of all the mutual kindlinesses of life, and each unit of humanity becomes self-centred and selfish. Two beings alone resist his influence--one, a creature too selfishly nurtured for any of mankind's better recollections; and the other a woman so good as to resist the spell, and even, finally, to exorcise it in Mr. Redlaw's own breast. "David Copperfield" was published between May, 1849, and the autumn of 1850, and marks, I think, the culminating point in Dickens' career as a writer. So far there had been, not perhaps from book to book, but on the whole, decided progress, the gradual attainment of greater ease, and of the power of obtaining results of equal power by simpler means. Beyond this there was, if not absolute declension, for he never wrote anything that could properly be called careless and unworthy of himself, yet at least no advance. Of the interest that attaches to the book from the fact that so many portions are autobiographical, I have already spoken; nor need I go over the ground again. But quite apart from such adventitious attractions, the novel is an admirable one. All the scenes of little David's childhood in the Norfolk home--the Blunderstone rookery, where there were no rooks--are among the most beautiful pictures of childhood in existence. In what sunshine of love does the lad bask with his mother and Peggotty, till Mrs. Copperfield contracts her disastrous second marriage with Mr. Murdstone! Then how the scene changes. There come harshness and cruelty; banishment to Mr. Creakle's villainous school; the poor mother's death; the worse banishment to London, and descent into warehouse drudgery; the strange shabby-genteel, happy-go-lucky life with the Micawbers; the flight from intolerable ills in the forlorn hope that David's aunt will take pity on him. Here the scene changes again. Miss Betsy Trotwood, a fine old gnarled piece of womanhood, places the boy at school at Canterbury, where he makes acquaintance with Agnes, the woman whom he marries far, far on in the story; and with her father, Mr. Wickham, a somewhat port wine-loving lawyer; and with Uriah Heep, the fawning villain of the piece. How David is first articled to a proctor in Doctors' Commons, and then becomes a reporter, and then a successful author; and how he marries his first wife, the childish Dora, who dies; and how, meanwhile, Uriah is effecting the general ruin, and aspiring to the hand of Agnes, till his villanies are detected and his machinations defeated by Micawber--how all this comes about, would be a long story to tell. But, as is usual with Dickens, there are subsidiary rills of story running into the main stream, and by one of these I should like to linger a moment. The head-boy, and a kind of parlour-boarder, at Mr. Creakles' establishment, is one Steerforth, the spoilt only son of a widow. This Steerforth, David meets again when both are young men, and they go down together to Yarmouth, and there David is the means of making him known to a family of fisherfolk. He is rich, handsome, with an indescribable charm, according to his friends' testimony, and he induces the fisherman's niece, the pretty Em'ly, to desert her home, and the young boat-builder to whom she is engaged, and to fly to Italy. Now to this story, as Dickens tells it, French criticism objects that he dwells exclusively on the sin and sorrow, and sets aside that in which the French novelist would delight, viz., the mad force and irresistible sway of passion. To which English criticism may, I think, reply, that the "pity of it," the wide-working desolation, are as essentially part of such an event as the passion; and, therefore, even from an exclusively artistic point of view, just as fit subjects for the novelist. While "David Copperfield" was in progress, Dickens started on a new venture. He had often before projected a periodical, and twice, as we have seen,--once in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, and again as editor of _The Daily News_,--had attempted quasi-journalism or its reality. But now at last he had struck the right vein. He had discovered a means of utilizing his popularity, and imparting it to a paper, without being under the crushing necessity of writing the whole of that paper himself. The first number of _Household Words_ appeared on the 30th of March, 1850. The "preliminary word" heralds the paper in thoroughly characteristic fashion, and is, not unnaturally, far more personal in tone than the first leading article of the first number of _The Daily News_, though that, too, be it said in passing, bears traces, through all its officialism, of having come from the same pen.[22] In introducing _Household Words_ to his new readers, Dickens speaks feelingly, eloquently, of his own position as a writer, and the responsibilities attached to his popularity, and tells of his hope that a future of instruction, and amusement, and kindly playful fancy may be in store for the paper. Nor were his happy anticipations belied. All that he had promised, he gave. _Household Words_ found an entrance into innumerable homes, and was everywhere recognized as a friend. Never did editor more strongly impress his own personality upon his staff. The articles were sprightly, amusing, interesting, and instructive too--often very instructive, but always in an interesting way. That was one of the periodical's main features. The pill of knowledge was always presented gilt. Taking _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_ together--and for this purpose they may properly be regarded as one and the same paper, because the change of name and proprietorship in 1859[23] brought no change in form or character,--taking them together, I say, they contain a vast quantity of very pleasant, if not very profound, reading. Even apart from the stories, one can do very much worse than while away an hour, now and again, in gleaning here and there among their pages. Among Dickens' own contributions may be mentioned "The Child's History of England," and "Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices"--being the record of an excursion made by him in 1857, with Mr. Wilkie Collins; and "The Uncommercial Traveller" papers. While as to stories, "Hard Times" appeared in _Household Words_; and "The Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations," in _All the Year Round_. And to the Christmas numbers he gave some of his best and daintiest work. Nor were novels and tales by other competent hands wanting. Here it was that Mrs. Gaskell gave to the world those papers on "Cranford" that are so full of a dainty, delicate humour, and "My Lady Ludlow," and "North and South," and "A Dark Night's Work." Here, too, Mr. Wilkie Collins wove together his ingenious threads of plot and mystery in "The Moonstone," "The Woman in White," and "No Name." And here also Lord Lytton published "A Strange Story," and Charles Reade his "Very Hard Cash." The year 1851 opened sadly for Dickens. His wife, who had been confined of a daughter in the preceding August, was so seriously unwell that he had to take her to Malvern. His father, to whom, notwithstanding the latter's peculiarities and eccentricities, he was greatly attached, died on the 31st of March; and on the 14th of April his infant daughter died also. In connection with this latter death there occurred an incident of great pathos. Dickens had come up from Malvern on the 14th, to take the chair at the dinner on behalf of the Theatrical Fund, and looking in at Devonshire Terrace on his way, played with the children, as was his wont, and fondled the baby, and then went on to the London Tavern.[24] Shortly after he left the house, the child died, suddenly. The news was communicated to Forster, who was also at the dinner, and he decided that it would be better not to tell the poor father till the speech of the evening had been made. So Dickens made his speech, and a brilliant one it was--it is brilliant even as one reads it now, in the coldness of print, without the glamour of the speaker's voice, and presence, and yet brilliant with an undertone of sadness, which the recent death of the speaker's father would fully explain. And Forster, who knew of the yet later blow impending on his friend, had to sit by and listen as that dear friend, all unconscious of the dread application of the words, spoke of "the actor" having "sometimes to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, ay, even of death itself, to play his part;" and then went on to tell how "all of us, in our spheres, have as often to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in fighting this great battle of life, and in discharging our duties and responsibilities." In this same year, 1851, Dickens left the house in Devonshire Terrace, now grown too small for his enlarging household, and, after a long sojourn at Broadstairs, moved into Tavistock House, in Tavistock Square. Here "Bleak House" was begun at the end of November, the first number being published in the ensuing March. It is a fine work of art unquestionably, a very fine work of art--the canvas all crowded with living figures, and yet the main lines of the composition well-ordered and harmonious. Two threads of interest run through the story, one following the career of Lady Dedlock, and the other tracing the influence of a great Chancery suit on the victims immeshed in its toils. From the first these two threads are distinct, and yet happily interwoven. Let us take Lady Dedlock's thread first. She is the wife of Sir Leicester Dedlock, whose "family is as old as the hills, and a great deal more respectable," and she is still very beautiful, though no longer in the bloom of youth, and she is cold and haughty of manner, as a woman of highest fashion sometimes may be. But in her past there is an ugly hidden secret; and a girl of sweetest disposition walks her kindly course through the story, who might call Lady Dedlock "mother." This secret, or perhaps rather the fact that there is a secret at all, she reveals in a moment of surprise to the family lawyer; and she lays herself still further open to his suspicions by going, disguised in her maid's clothes, to the poor graveyard where her former lover lies buried. The lawyer worms the whole story out, and, just as he is going to reveal it, is murdered by the French maid aforesaid. But the murder comes too late to save my lady, nay, adds to her difficulties. She flies, in anticipation of the disclosure of her secret, and is found dead at the graveyard gate. To such end has the sin of her youth led her. So once again has Dickens dwelt, not on the passionate side of wrongful love, but on its sorrow. Now take the other thread--the Chancery suit--"Jarndyce _versus_ Jarndyce," a suit held in awful reverence by the profession as a "monument of Chancery practice"--a suit seemingly interminable, till, after long, long years of wrangling and litigation, the fortuitous discovery of a will settles it all, with the result that the whole estate has been swallowed up in the costs. And how about the litigants? How about poor Richard Carstone and his wife, whom we see, in the opening of the story, in all the heyday and happiness of their youth, strolling down to the court--they are its wards,--and wondering sadly over the "headache and heartache" of it all, and then saying, gleefully, "at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence on _us_"? "None of its bad influence on _us_!" poor lad, whose life is wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and who is killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the two intertwined stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping, and helping on the general development, there is a whole profusion of noticeable characters. In enumerating them, however baldly, one scarcely knows where to begin. The lawyer group--clerks and all--is excellent. Dickens' early experiences stood him in good stead here. Excellent too are those studies in the ways of impecuniosity and practical shiftlessness, Harold Skimpole, the airy, irresponsible, light-hearted epicurean, with his pretty tastes and dilettante accomplishments, and Mrs. Jellyby, the philanthropist, whose eyes "see nothing nearer" than Borrioboola-Gha, on the banks of the far Niger, and never dwell to any purpose on the utter discomfort of the home of her husband and children. Characters of this kind no one ever delineated better than Dickens. That Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who had sat for the portrait of Skimpole, was not altogether flattered by the likeness, is comprehensible enough; and in truth it is unfair, both to painter and model, that we should take such portraits too seriously. Landor, who sat for the thunderous and kindly Boythorn, had more reason to be satisfied. Besides these one may mention Joe, the outcast; and Mr. Turveydrop, the beau of the school of the Regency--how horrified he would have been at the juxtaposition--and George, the keeper of the rifle gallery, a fine soldierly figure; and Mr. Bucket, the detective--though Dickens had a tendency to idealize the abilities of the police force. As to Sir Leicester Dedlock, I think he is, on the whole, "mine author's" best study of the aristocracy, a direction in which Dickens' forte did not lie, for Sir Leicester _is_ a gentleman, and receives the terrible blow that falls upon him in a spirit at once chivalrous and human. What between "Bleak House," _Household Words_, and "The Child's History of England," Dickens, in the spring of 1853, was overworked and ill. Brighton failed to restore him; and he took his family over to Boulogne in June, occupying there a house belonging to a certain M. de Beaucourt. Town, dwelling, and landlord, all suited him exactly. Boulogne he declared to be admirable for its picturesqueness in buildings and life, and equal in some respects to Naples itself. The dwelling, "a doll's house of many rooms," embowered in roses, and with a terraced garden, was a place after his own heart. While as to the landlord--he was "wonderful." Dickens never tires of extolling his virtues, his generosity, his kindness, his anxiety to please, his pride in "the property." All the pleasant delicate quaint traits in the man's character are irradiated as if with French sunshine in his tenant's description. It is a dainty little picture and painted with the kindliest of brushes. Poor Beaucourt, he was "inconsolable" when he and Dickens finally parted three years afterwards--for twice again did the latter occupy a house, but not this same house, on "the property." Many were the tears that he shed, and even the garden, the loved garden, went forlorn and unweeded. But that was in 1856. The parting was not so final and terrible in the October of 1853, when Dickens, having finished "Bleak House," started with Mr. Wilkie Collins, and Augustus Egg, the artist, for a holiday tour in Switzerland and Italy. FOOTNOTES: [20] "History of English Literature," vol. v. [21] "Recollections of Writers," by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. [22] As, for instance, in such expressions as this: "The stamp on newspapers is not like the stamp on universal medicine bottles, which licenses anything, however false and monstrous." [23] The last number of _Household Words_ appeared on the 28th of May, 1859, and the first of _All the Year Round_ on the 30th of April, 1859. [24] There are one or two slight discrepancies between Forster's narrative and that of Miss Dickens and Miss Hogarth. The latter are clearly more likely to be right on such a matter. CHAPTER X. On his return to England, just after the Christmas of 1853, Dickens gave his first public readings. He had, as we have seen, read "The Chimes" some nine years before, to a select few among his literary friends; and at Lausanne he had similarly read portions of "Dombey and Son." But the three readings given at Birmingham, on the 27th, 29th, and 30th December, 1853, were, in every sense, public entertainments, and, except that the proceeds were devoted entirely to the local Institute, differed in no way from the famous readings by which he afterwards realized what may almost be called a fortune. The idea of coming before the world in this new character had long been in his mind. As early as 1846, after the private reading at Lausanne, he had written to Forster: "I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not _infra dig._) by one's having readings of one's own books. I think it would take immensely. What do you say?" Forster said then, and said consistently throughout, that he held the thing to _be_ "_infra dig._," and unworthy of Dickens' position; and in this I think one may venture to assert that Forster was wrong. There can surely be no reason why a popular writer, who happens also to be an excellent elocutionist, should not afford general pleasure by giving sound to his prose, and a voice to his imaginary characters. Nor is it opposed to the fitness of things that he should be paid for his skill. If, however, one goes further in Dickens' case, and asks whether the readings did not involve too great an expenditure of time, energy, and, as we shall see, ultimately of life, and whether he would not, in the highest sense, have been better employed over his books,--why then the question becomes more difficult of solution. But, after all, each man must answer such questions for himself. Dickens may have felt, as the years began to tell, that he required the excitement of the readings for mental stimulus, and that he would not even have written as much as he did without them. Be that as it may, the success at Birmingham, where a sum of from £400 to £500 was realized, the requests that poured in upon him to read at other places, the invariably renewed success whenever he did so, the clear evidence that a large sum was to be realized if he determined to come forward on his own account, all must have contributed to scatter Forster's objections to the winds. On the 29th of April, 1858, at St. Martin's Hall, in London, he started his career as a paid public reader, and he continued to read, with shorter or longer periods of intermission, till his death. But into the story of his professional tours it is not my intention just now to enter. I shall only stay to say a few words about the character and quality of his readings. That they were a success can readily be accounted for. The mere desire to see and hear Dickens, the great Dickens, the novelist who was more than popular, who was the object of real personal affection on the part of the English-speaking race,--this would have drawn a crowd at any time. But Dickens was not the man to rely upon such sources of attraction, any more than an actress who is really an actress will consent to rely exclusively on her good looks. "Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well," such as we have seen was one of the governing principles of his life; and he read very well. Of nervousness there was no trace in his composition. To some one who asked him whether he ever felt any shyness as a speaker, he answered, "Not in the least; the first time I took the chair (at a public dinner) I felt as much confidence as if I had done the thing a hundred times." This of course helped him much as a reader, and gave him full command over all his gifts. But the gifts were also assiduously cultivated. He laboured, one might almost say, agonized, to make himself a master of the art. Mr. Dolby, who acted as his "manager," during the tours undertaken from 1866 to 1870, tells us that before producing "Dr. Marigold," he not only gave a kind of semi-public rehearsal, but had rehearsed it to himself considerably over two hundred times. Writing to Forster Dickens says: "You have no idea how I have worked at them [the readings].... I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know, made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; ... I learnt 'Dombey' like the rest, and did it to myself often twice a day, with exactly the same pains as at night, over, and over, and over again." The results justified the care and effort bestowed. There are, speaking generally, two schools of readers: those who dramatize what they read, and those who read simply, audibly, with every attention to emphasis and point, but with no effort to do more than slightly indicate differences of personage or character. To the latter school Thackeray belonged. He read so as to be perfectly heard, and perfectly understood, and so that the innate beauty of his literary style might have full effect. Dickens read quite differently. He read not as a writer to whom style is everything, but as an actor throwing himself into the world he wished to bring before his hearers. He was so careless indeed of pure literature, in this particular matter, that he altered his books for the readings, eliminating much of the narrative, and emphasizing the dialogue. He was pre-eminently the dramatic reader. Carlyle, who had been dragged to "Hanover Rooms," to "the complete upsetting," as he says, "of my evening habitudes, and spiritual composure," was yet constrained to declare: "Dickens does it capitally, such as _it_ is; acts better than any Macready in the world; a whole tragic, comic, heroic, _theatre_ visible, performing under one _hat_, and keeping us laughing--in a sorry way, some of us thought--the whole night. He is a good creature, too, and makes fifty or sixty pounds by each of these readings." "A whole theatre"--that is just the right expression minted for us by the great coiner of phrases. Dickens, by mere play of voice, for the gestures were comparatively sober, placed before you, on his imaginary stage, the men and women he had created. There Dr. Marigold pattered his cheap-jack phrases; and Mrs. Gamp and Betsy Prig, with throats rendered husky by much gin, had their memorable quarrel; and Sergeant Buzfuz bamboozled that stupid jury; and Boots at the Swan told his pretty tale of child-elopement; and Fagin, in his hoarse Jew whisper, urged Bill Sikes to his last foul deed of murder. Ay me, in the great hush of the past there are tones of the reader's voice that still linger in my ears! I seem to hear once more the agonized quick utterance of poor Nancy, as she pleads for life, and the dread stillness after the ruffian's cruel blows have fallen on her upturned face. Again comes back to me the break in Bob Cratchit's voice, as he speaks of the death of Tiny Tim. As of old I listen to poor little Chops, the dwarf, declaring, very piteously, that his "fashionable friends" don't use him well, and put him on the mantel-piece when he refuses to "have in more champagne-wine," and lock him in the sideboard when he "won't give up his property." And I _see_--yes, I declare I _see_, as I saw when Dickens was reading, such was the illusion of voice and gesture--that dying flame of Scrooge's fire, which leaped up when Marley's ghost came in, and then fell again. Nor can I forbear to mention, among these reminiscences, that there is also a passage in one of Thackeray's lectures that is still in my ears as on the evening when I heard it. It is a passage in which he spoke of the love that children had for the works of his more popular rival, and told how his own children would come to him and ask, "Why don't you write books like Mr. Dickens?" CHAPTER XI. Chancery had occupied a prominent place in "Bleak House." Philosophical radicalism occupied the same kind of position in "Hard Times," which was commenced in the number of _Household Words_ for the 1st of April, 1854. The book, when afterwards published in a complete form, bore a dedication to Carlyle; and very fittingly so, for much of its philosophy is his. Dickens, like Kingsley, and like Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude, and so many other men of genius and ability, had come under the influence of the old Chelsea sage.[25] And what are the ideas which "Hard Times" is thus intended to popularize? These: that men are not merely intellectual calculating machines, with reason and self-interest for motive power, but creatures possessing also affections, feelings, fancy--a whole world of emotions that lie outside the ken of the older school of political economists. Therefore, to imagine that they can live and flourish on facts alone is a fallacy and pernicious; as is also the notion that any human relations can be permanently established on a basis of pure supply and demand. If we add to this an unlimited contempt for Parliament, as a place where the national dustmen are continually stirring the national dust to no purpose at all, why then we are pretty well advanced in the philosophy of Carlyle. And how does Dickens illustrate these points? We are at Coketown, a place, as its name implies, of smoke and manufacture. Here lives and flourishes Thomas Gradgrind, "a man of realities; a man of facts and calculations;" not essentially a bad man, but bound in an iron system as in a vice. He brings up his children on knowledge, and enlightened self-interest exclusively; and the boy becomes a cub and a mean thief, and the girl marries, quite without love, a certain blustering Mr. Bounderby, and is as nearly as possible led astray by the first person who approaches her with the language of gallantry and sentiment. Mr. Bounderby, her husband, is, one may add, a man who, in mere lying bounce, makes out his humble origin to be more humble than it is. On the other side of the picture are Mr. Sleary and his circus troupe; and Cissy Jupe, the daughter of the clown; and the almost saintly figures of Stephen Blackpool, and Rachel, a working man and a working woman. With these people facts are as naught, and self-interest as dust in the balance. Mr. Sleary has a heart which no brandy-and-water can harden, and he enables Mr. Gradgrind to send off the wretched cub to America, refusing any guerdon but a glass of his favourite beverage. The circus troupe are kindly, simple, loving folk. Cissy Jupe proves the angel of the Gradgrind household. Stephen is the victim of unjust persecution on the part of his own class, is suspected, by young Gradgrind's machinations, of the theft committed by that young scoundrel, falls into a disused pit as he is coming to vindicate his character, and only lives long enough to forgive his wrongs, and clasp in death the hand of Rachel--a hand which in life could not be his, as he had a wife alive who was a drunkard and worse. A marked contrast, is it not? On one side all darkness, and on the other all light. The demons of fact and self-interest opposed to the angels of fancy and unselfishness. A contrast too violent unquestionably. Exaggeration is the fault of the novel. One may at once allow, for instance, that Rachel and Stephen, though human nature in its infinite capacity may include such characters, are scarcely a typical working woman and working man. But then neither, heaven be praised, are Coupeau the sot, and Gervaise the drab, in M. Zola's "Drink"--and, for my part, I think Rachel and Stephen the better company. "Sullen socialism"--such is Macaulay's view of the political philosophy of "Hard Times." "Entirely right in main drift and purpose"--such is the verdict of Mr. Ruskin. Who shall decide between the two? or, if a decision be necessary, then I would venture to say, yes, entirely right in feeling. Dickens is right in sympathy for those who toil and suffer, right in desire to make their lives more human and beautiful, right in belief that the same human heart beats below all class distinctions. But, beyond this, a novelist only, not a philosopher, not fitted to grapple effectively with complex social and political problems, and to solve them to right conclusions. There are some things unfortunately which even the best and kindest instincts cannot accomplish. The last chapter of "Hard Times" appeared in the number of _Household Words_ for the 12th of August, 1854, and the first number of "Little Dorrit" came out at Christmas, 1855. Between those dates a great war had waxed and waned. The heart of England had been terribly moved by the story of the sufferings and privations which the army had had to undergo amid the snows of a Russian winter. From the trenches before Sebastopol the newspaper correspondents had sent terrible accounts of death and disease, and of ills which, as there seemed room for suspicion, might have been prevented by better management. Through long disuse the army had rusted in its scabbard, and everything seemed to go wrong but the courage of officers and men. A great demand arose for reform in the whole administration of the country. A movement, now much forgotten, though not fruitless at the time, was started for the purpose of making the civil service more efficient, and putting John Bull's house in order. "Administrative Reform," such was the cry of the moment, and Dickens uttered it with the full strength of his lungs. He attended a great meeting held at Drury Lane Theatre on the 27th of June, in furtherance of the cause, and made what he declared to be his first political speech. He spoke on the subject again at the dinner of the Theatrical Fund. He urged on his friends in the press to the attack. He was in the forefront of the battle. And when his next novel, "Little Dorrit," appeared, there was the Civil Service, like a sort of gibbeted Punch, executing the strangest antics. But the "Circumlocution Office," where the clerks sit lazily devising all day long "how _not_ to do" the business of the country, and devote their energies alternately to marmalade and general insolence,--the "Circumlocution Office" occupies after all only a secondary position in the book. The main interest of it circles round the place that had at one time been almost a home to Dickens. Again he drew upon his earlier experiences. We are once more introduced into a debtors' prison. Little Dorrit is the child of the Marshalsea, born and bred within its walls, the sole living thing about the place on which its taint does not fall. Her worthless brother, her sister, her father--who is not only her father, but the "father of the Marshalsea"--the prison blight is on all three. Her father especially is a piece of admirable character-drawing. Dickens has often been accused of only catching the surface peculiarities of his personages, their outward tricks, and obvious habits of speech and of mind. Such a study as Mr. Dorrit would alone be sufficient to rebut the charge. No novelist specially famed for dissecting character to its innermost recesses could exhibit a finer piece of mental analysis. We follow the poor weak creature's deterioration from the time when the helpless muddle in his affairs brings him into durance. We note how his sneaking pride seems to feed even on the garbage of his degradation. We see how little inward change there is in the man himself when there comes a transformation scene in his fortunes, and he leaves the Marshalsea wealthy and prosperous. It is all thoroughly worked out, perfect, a piece of really great art. No wonder that Mr. Clennam pities the child of such a father; indeed, considering what a really admirable woman she is, one only wonders that his pity does not sooner turn to love. "Little Dorrit" ran its course from December, 1855, to June, 1857, and within that space of time there occurred two or three incidents in Dickens' career which should not pass unnoticed. At the first of these dates he was in Paris, where he remained till the middle of May, 1856, greatly fêted by the French world of letters and art; dining hither and thither; now enjoying an Arabian Nights sort of banquet given by Emile de Girardin, the popular journalist; now meeting George Sand, the great novelist, whom he describes as "just the sort of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the queen's monthly nurse--chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed;" then studying French art, and contrasting it with English art, somewhat to the disadvantage of the latter; anon superintending the translation of his works into French, and working hard at "Little Dorrit;" and all the while frequenting the Paris theatres with great assiduity and admiration. Meanwhile, too, on the 14th of March, 1856, a Friday, his lucky day as he considered it, he had written a cheque for the purchase of Gad's Hill Place, at which he had so often looked when a little lad, living penuriously at Chatham--the house which it had been the object of his childish ambition to win for his own. So had merit proved to be not without its visible prize, literally a prize for good conduct. He took possession of the house in the following February, and turned workmen into it, and finished "Little Dorrit" there. At first the purchase was intended mainly as an investment, and he only purposed to spend some portion of his time at Gad's Hill, letting it at other periods, and so recouping himself for the interest on the £1,790 which it had cost, and for the further sums which he expended on improvements. But as time went on it became his hobby, the love of his advancing years. He beautified here and beautified there, built a new drawing-room, added bedrooms, constructed a tunnel under the road, erected in the "wilderness" on the other side of the road a Swiss châlet, which had been presented to him by Fechter, the French-English actor, and in short indulged in all the thousand and one vagaries of a proprietor who is enamoured of his property. The matter seems to have been one of the family jokes; and when, on the Sunday before his death, he showed the conservatory to his younger daughter, and said, "Well, Katey, now you see _positively_ the last improvement at Gad's Hill," there was a general laugh. But this is far on in the story; and very long before the building of the conservatory, long indeed before the main other changes had been made, the idea of an investment had been abandoned. In 1860 he sold Tavistock House, in London, and made Gad's Hill Place his final home. Even here, however, I am anticipating; for before getting to 1860 there is in Dickens' history a page which one would willingly turn over, if that were possible, in silence and sadness. But it is not possible. No account of his life would be complete, and what is of more importance, true, if it made no mention of his relations with his wife. For some time before 1858 Dickens had been in an over-excited, nervous, morbid state. During earlier manhood his animal spirits and fresh energy had been superb. Now, as the years advanced, and especially at this particular time, the energy was the same; but it was accompanied by something of feverishness and disease. He could not be quiet. In the autumn of 1857 he wrote to Forster, "I have now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die if I spared myself. Much better to die doing." And again, a little later, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish." It was the foreshadowing of such utterances as these, and the constant wanderings to and fro for readings and theatricals and what not, that led Harriet Martineau, who had known and greatly liked Dickens, to say after perusing the second volume of his life, "I am much struck by his hysterical restlessness. It must have been terribly wearing to his wife." On the other hand, there can be no manner of doubt that his wife wore _him_. "Why is it," he had said to Forster in one of the letters from which I have just quoted, "that, as with poor David (Copperfield), a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" And again: "I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one." Then come even sadder confidences: "Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too, and much more so. She is exactly what you know in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us.... Her temperament will not go with mine." And at last, in March, 1858, two months before the end: "It is not with me a matter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour, or making the best of it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is all despairingly over." So, after living together for twenty years, these two went their several ways in May, 1858. Dickens allowed to his wife an income of £600 a year, and the eldest son went to live with her. The other children and their aunt, Miss Hogarth, remained with Dickens himself. Scandal has not only a poisonous, but a busy tongue, and when a well-known public man and his wife agree to live apart, the beldame seldom neglects to give her special version of the affair. So it happened here. Some miserable rumour was whispered about to the detriment of Dickens' morals. He was at the time, as we have seen, in an utterly morbid, excited state, sore doubtless with himself, and altogether out of mental condition, and the lie stung him almost to madness. He published an article branding it as it deserved in the number of _Household Words_ for the 12th of June, 1858. So far his course of action was justifiable. Granted that it was judicious to notice the rumour at all, and to make his private affairs the matter of public comment, then there was nothing in the terms of the article to which objection could be taken. It contained no reflection of any kind on Mrs. Dickens. It was merely an honest man's indignant protest against an anonymous libel which implicated others as well as himself. Whether the publication, however, was judicious is a different matter. Forster thinks not. He holds that Dickens had altogether exaggerated the public importance of the rumour, and the extent of its circulation. And this, according to my own recollection, is entirely true. I was a lad at the time, but a great lover of Dickens' works, as most lads then were, and I well remember the feeling of surprise and regret which that article created among us of the general public. At the same time, it is only fair to Dickens to recollect that the lying story was, at least, so far fraught with danger to his reputation, that Mrs. Dickens would seem for a time to have believed it; and further, that Dickens occupied a very peculiar position towards the public, and a position that might well in his own estimation, and even in ours, give singular importance to the general belief in his personal character. This point will bear dwelling upon. Dickens claimed, and claimed truly, that the relation between himself and the public was one of exceptional sympathy and affection. Perhaps an illustration will best show what that kind of relationship was. Thackeray tells of two ladies with whom he had, at different times, discussed "The Christmas Carol," and how each had concluded by saying of the author, "God bless him!" God bless him!--that was the sort of feeling towards himself which Dickens had succeeded in producing in most English hearts. He had appealed from the first and so constantly to every kind and gentle emotion, had illustrated so often what is good and true in human character, had pleaded the cause of the weak and suffering with such assiduity, had been so scathingly indignant at all wrong; and he had moreover shown such a manly and chivalrous purity in all his utterance with regard to women, that his readers felt for him a kind of personal tenderness, quite distinct from their mere admiration for his genius as a writer. Nor was that feeling based on his books alone. So far as one could learn at the time, no great dissimilarity existed between the author and the man. We all remember Byron's corrosive remark on the sentimentalist Sterne, that he "whined over a dead ass, and allowed his mother to die of hunger." But Dickens' feelings were by no means confined to his pen. He was known to be a good father and a good friend, and of perfect truth and honesty. The kindly tolerance for the frailties of a father or brother which he admired in Little Dorrit, he was ready to extend to his own father and his own brother. He was most assiduous in the prosecution of his craft as a writer, and yet had time and leisure of heart at command for all kinds of good and charitable work. His private character had so far stood above all floating cloud of suspicion. That Dickens felt an honourable pride in the general affection he inspired, can readily be understood. He also felt, even more honourably, its great responsibility. He knew that his books and he himself were a power for good, and he foresaw how greatly his influence would suffer if a suspicion of hypocrisy--the vice at which he had always girded--were to taint his reputation. Here, for instance, in "Little Dorrit," the work written in the thick of his home troubles, he had written of Clennam as "a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without," and had shown how this belief had "saved Clennam still from the whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in appearance, to the basest elements." A touching utterance if it expressed the real feeling of a writer sorely disappointed and in great trouble; but an utterance moving rather to contempt if it came from a writer who had transferred his affections from his wife to some other woman. I do not wonder, therefore, that Dickens, excited and exasperated, spoke out, though I think it would have been better if he had kept silence. But he did other things that were not justifiable. He quarrelled with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, his publishers, because they did not use their influence to get _Punch_, a periodical in which Dickens had no interest, to publish the personal statement that had appeared in _Household Words_; and worse, much worse, he wrote a letter, which ought never to have been written, detailing the grounds on which he and his wife had separated. This letter, dated the 28th of May, 1858, was addressed to his secretary, Arthur Smith, and was to be shown to any one interested. Arthur Smith showed it to the London correspondent of _The New York Tribune_, who naturally caused it to be published in that paper. Then Dickens was horrified. He was a man of far too high and chivalrous feeling not to know that the letter contained statements with regard to his wife's failings which ought never to have been made public. He knew as well as any one, that a literary man ought not to take the world into his confidence on such a subject. Ever afterwards he referred to the letter as his "violated letter." But, in truth, the wrong went deeper than the publication. The letter should never have been written, certainly never sent to Arthur Smith for general perusal. Dickens' only excuse is the fact that he was clearly not himself at the time, and that he never fell into a like error again. It is, however, sad to notice how entirely his wife seems to have passed out of his affection. The reference to her in his will is almost unkind; and when death was on him she seems not to have been summoned to his bedside. FOOTNOTES: [25] Dickens did not accept the whole Carlyle creed. He retained a sort of belief in the collective wisdom of the people, which Carlyle certainly did not share. CHAPTER XII. Dickens' career as a reader reading for money commenced on the 29th of April, 1858, while the trouble about his wife was at the thickest; and, after reading in London on sixteen nights, he made a reading tour in the provinces, and in Scotland and Ireland. In the following year he read likewise. But meanwhile, which is more important to us than his readings, he was writing another book. On the 30th of April, 1859, in the first number of _All the Year Round_,[26] was begun "The Tale of Two Cities," a simultaneous publication in monthly parts being also commenced. "The Tale of Two Cities" is a tale of the great French Revolution of 1793, and the two cities in question are London and Paris,--London as it lay comparatively at peace in the days when George III. was king, and Paris running blood and writhing in the fierce fire of anarchy and mob rule. A powerful book, unquestionably. No doubt there is in its heat and glare a reflection from Carlyle's "French Revolution," a book for which Dickens had the greatest admiration. But that need not be regarded as a demerit. Dickens is no pale copyist, and adds fervour to what he borrows. His pictures of Paris in revolution are as fine as the London scenes in "Barnaby Rudge;" and the interweaving of the story with public events is even better managed in the later book than in the earlier story of the Gordon riots. And the story, what does it tell? It tells of a certain Dr. Manette, who, after long years of imprisonment in the Bastille, is restored to his daughter in London; and of a young French noble, who has assumed the name of Darnay, and left France in horror of the doings of his order, and who marries Dr. Manette's daughter; and of a young English barrister, able enough in his profession, but careless of personal success, and much addicted to port wine, and bearing a striking personal resemblance to the young French noble. These persons, and others, being drawn to Paris by various strong inducements, Darnay is condemned to death as a _ci-devant_ noble, and the ne'er-do-well barrister, out of the great pure love he bears to Darnay's wife, succeeds in dying for him. That is the tale's bare outline; and if any one says of the book that it is in parts melodramatic, one may fitly answer that never was any portion of the world's history such a thorough piece of melodrama as the French Revolution. With "The Tale of Two Cities" Hablôt K. Browne's connection with Dickens, as the illustrator of his books, came to an end. The "Sketches" had been illustrated by Cruikshank, who was the great popular illustrator of the time, and it is amusing to read, in the preface to the first edition of the first series, published in 1836, how the trembling young author placed himself, as it were, under the protection of the "well-known individual who had frequently contributed to the success of similar undertakings." Cruikshank also illustrated "Oliver Twist;" and indeed, with an arrogance which unfortunately is not incompatible with genius, afterwards set up a rather preposterous claim to have been the real originator of that book, declaring that he had worked out the story in a series of etchings, and that Dickens had illustrated _him_, and not he Dickens.[27] But apart from the drawings for the "Sketches" and "Oliver Twist," and the first few drawings by Seymour, and two drawings by Buss,[28] in "Pickwick," and some drawings by Cattermole in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, and by Samuel Palmer in the "Pictures from Italy," and by various hands in the Christmas stories--apart from these, Browne, or "Phiz," had executed the illustrations to Dickens' novels. Nor, with all my admiration for certain excellent qualities which his work undeniably possessed, do I think that this was altogether a good thing. Such, I know, is not a popular opinion. But I confess I am unable to agree with those critics who, from their remarks on the recent jubilee edition of "Pickwick," seem to think his illustrations so pre-eminently fine that they should be permanently associated with Dickens' stories. The editor of that edition was, in my view, quite right in treating Browne's illustrations as practically obsolete. The value of Dickens' works is perennial, and Browne's illustrations represent the art fashion of a time only. So, too, I am unable to see any great cause to regret that Cruikshank's artistic connection with Dickens came to an end so soon.[29] For both Browne and Cruikshank were pre-eminently caricaturists, and caricaturists of an old school. The latter had no idea of beauty. His art, very great art in its way, was that of grotesqueness and exaggeration. He never drew a lady or gentleman in his life. And though Browne, in my view much the lesser artist, was superior in these respects to Cruikshank, yet he too drew the most hideous Pecksniffs, and Tom Pinches, and Joey B.'s, and a whole host of characters quite unreal and absurd. The mischief of it is, too, that Dickens' humour will not bear caricaturing. The defect of his own art as a writer is that it verges itself too often on caricature. Exaggeration is its bane. When, for instance, he makes the rich alderman in "The Chimes" eat up poor Trotty Veck's little last tit-bit of tripe, we are clearly in the region of broad farce. When Mr. Pancks, in "Little Dorrit," so far abandons the ordinary ways of mature rent collectors as to ask a respectable old accountant to "give him a back," in the Marshalsea court, and leaps over his head, we are obviously in a world of pantomime. Dickens' comic effects are generally quite forced enough, and should never be further forced when translated into the sister art of drawing. Rather, if anything, should they be attenuated. But unfortunately exaggeration happened to be inherent in the draftsmanship of both Cruikshank and Browne. And, having said this, I may as well finish with the subject of the illustrations to Dickens' books. "Our Mutual Friend" was illustrated by Mr. Marcus Stone, R.A., then a rising young artist, and the son of Dickens' old friend, Frank Stone. Here the designs fall into the opposite defect. They are, some of them, pretty enough, but they want character. Mr. Fildes' pictures for "Edwin Drood" are a decided improvement. As to the illustrations for the later _Household Edition_, they are very inferior. The designs for a great many are clearly bad, and the mechanical execution almost uniformly so. Even Mr. Barnard's skill has had no fair chance against poor woodcutting, careless engraving, and inferior paper. And this is the more to be regretted, in that Mr. Barnard, by natural affinity of talent, has, to my thinking, done some of the best art work that has been done at all in connection with Dickens. His _Character Sketches_, especially the lithographed series, are admirable. The Jingle is a masterpiece; but all are good, and he even succeeds in making something pictorially acceptable of Little Nell and Little Dorrit. Just a year, almost to a day, elapsed between the conclusion of "The Tale of Two Cities," and the commencement of "Great Expectations." The last chapter of the former appeared in the number of _All the Year Round_ for the 26th of November, 1859, and the first chapter of the latter in the number of the same periodical for the 1st of December, 1860. Poor Pip--for such is the name of the hero of the book--poor Pip, I think he is to be pitied. Certainly he lays himself open to the charge of snobbishness, and is unduly ashamed of his connections. But then circumstances were decidedly against him. Through some occult means he is removed from his natural sphere, from the care of his "rampageous" sister and of her husband, the good, kind, honest Joe, and taken up to London, and brought up as a gentleman, and started in chambers in Barnard's Inn. All this is done through the instrumentality of Mr. Jaggers, a barrister in highest repute among the criminal brotherhood. But Pip not unnaturally thinks that his unknown benefactress is a certain Miss Havisham, who, having been bitterly wronged in her love affairs, lives in eccentric fashion near his native place, amid the mouldering mementoes of her wedding day. What is his horror when he finds that his education, comfort, and prospects have no more reputable foundation than the bounty of a murderous criminal called Magwitch, who has showered all these benefits upon him from the antipodes, in return for the gift of food and a file when he, Magwitch, was trying to escape from the hulks, and Pip was a little lad. Magwitch, the transported convict, comes back to England, at the peril of his life, to make himself known to Pip, and to have the pleasure of looking at that young gentleman. He is again tracked by the police, and caught, notwithstanding Pip's efforts to get him off, and dies in prison. Pip ultimately, very ultimately, marries a young lady oddly brought up by the queer Miss Havisham, and who turns out to be Magwitch's daughter. Such, as I have had occasion to say before in speaking of similar analyses, such are the dry bones of the story. Pip's character is well drawn. So is that of Joe. And Mr. Jaggers, the criminal's friend, and his clerk, Wemmick, are striking and full of a grim humour. Miss Havisham and her _protégée_, Estella, whom she educates to be the scourge of men, belong to what may be called the melodramatic side of Dickens' art. They take their place with Mrs. Dombey and with Miss Dartle in "David Copperfield," and Miss Wade in "Little Dorrit"--female characters of a fantastic and haughty type, and quite devoid, Miss Dartle and Miss Wade especially, of either verisimilitude or the milk of human kindness. "Great Expectations" was completed in August, 1861, and the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appeared in May, 1864. This was an unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty of invention was beginning to lose its fresh spring and spontaneity. And besides he had not been idle. Though writing no novel, he had been busy enough with readings, and his work on _All the Year Round_. He had also written a short, but very graceful paper[30] on Thackeray, whose death, on the Christmas Eve of 1863, had greatly affected him. Now, however, he again braced himself for one of his greater efforts. Scarcely, I think, as all will agree, with the old success. In "Our Mutual Friend" he is not at his best. It is a strange complicated story that seems to have some difficulty in unravelling itself: the story of a man who pretends to be dead in order that he may, under a changed name, investigate the character and eligibility of the young woman whom an erratic father has destined to be his bride. A golden-hearted old dust contractor, who hides a will that will give him all that erratic father's property, and disinherit the man aforesaid, and who, to crown his virtues, pretends to be a miser in order to teach the young woman, also aforesaid, how bad it is to be mercenary, and to induce her to marry the unrecognized and seemingly penniless son; their marriage accordingly, with ultimate result that the bridegroom turns out to be no poor clerk, but the original heir, who, of course, is not dead, and is the inheritor of thousands; subsidiary groups of characters, of course, one which I think rather uninteresting, of some brand-new people called the Veneerings and their acquaintances, for they have no friends; and some fine sketches of the river-side population; striking and amusing characters too--Silas Wegg, the scoundrelly vendor of songs, who ferrets among the dust for wills in order to confound the good dustman, his benefactor; and the little deformed dolls' dressmaker, with her sot of a father; and Betty Higden, the sturdy old woman who has determined neither in life nor death to suffer the pollution of the workhouse; such, with more added, are the ingredients of the story. One episode, however, deserves longer comment. It is briefly this: Eugene Wrayburn is a young barrister of good family and education, and of excellent abilities and address, all gifts that he has turned to no creditable purpose whatever. He falls in with a girl, Lizzie Hexham, of more than humble rank, but of great beauty and good character. She interests him, and in mere wanton carelessness, for he certainly has no idea of offering marriage, he gains her affection, neither meaning, in any definite way, to do anything good nor anything bad with it. There is another man who loves Lizzie, a schoolmaster, who, in his dull, plodding way, has made the best of his intellect, and risen in life. He naturally, and we may say properly, for no good can come of them, resents Wrayburn's attentions, as does the girl's brother. Wrayburn uses the superior advantages of his position to insult them in the most offensive and brutal manner, and to torture the schoolmaster, just as he has used those advantages to win the girl's heart. Whereupon, after being goaded to heart's desire for a considerable time, the schoolmaster as nearly as possible beats out Wrayburn's life, and commits suicide. Wrayburn is rescued by Lizzie as he lies by the river bank sweltering in blood, and tended by her, and they are married and live happy ever afterwards. Now the amazing part of this story is, that Dickens' sympathies throughout are with Wrayburn. How this comes to be so I confess I do not know. To me Wrayburn's conduct appears to be heartless, cruel, unmanly, and the use of his superior social position against the schoolmaster to be like a foul blow, and quite unworthy of a gentleman. Schoolmasters ought not to beat people about the head, decidedly. But if Wrayburn's thoughts took a right course during convalescence, I think he may have reflected that he deserved his beating, and also that the woman whose affection he had won was a great deal too good for him. Dickens' misplaced sympathy in this particular story has, I repeat, always struck me with amazement. Usually his sympathies are so entirely right. Nothing is more common than to hear the accusation of vulgarity made against his books. A certain class of people seem to think, most mistakenly, that because he so often wrote about vulgar people, uneducated people, people in the lower ranks of society, therefore his writing was vulgar, nay more, he himself vulgar too. Such an opinion can only be based on a strange confusion between subject and treatment. There is scarcely any subject not tainted by impurity, that cannot be treated with entire refinement. Washington Irving wrote to Dickens, most justly, of "that exquisite tact that enabled him to carry his reader through the veriest dens of vice and villainy without a breath to shock the ear or a stain to sully the robe of the most shrinking delicacy;" and added: "It is a rare gift to be able to paint low life without being low, and to be comic without the least taint of vulgarity." This is well said; and if we look for the main secret of the inherent refinement of Dickens' books, we shall find it, I think, in this: that he never intentionally paltered with right and wrong. He would make allowance for evil, would take pleasure in showing that there were streaks of lingering good in its blackness, would treat it kindly, gently, humanly. But it always stood for evil, and nothing else. He made no attempt by cunning jugglery to change its seeming. He had no sneaking affection for it. And therefore, I say again, his attachment to Eugene Wrayburn has always struck me with surprise. As regards Dickens' own refinement, I cannot perhaps do better than quote the words of Sir Arthur Helps, an excellent judge. "He was very refined in his conversation--at least, what I call refined--for he was one of those persons in whose society one is comfortable from the certainty that they will never say anything which can shock other people, or hurt their feelings, be they ever so fastidious or sensitive." FOOTNOTES: [26] His foolish quarrel with Bradbury and Evans had necessitated the abandonment of _Household Words_. [27] See his pamphlet, "The Artist and the Author." The matter is fully discussed in his life by Mr. Blanchard Jerrold. [28] Buss's illustrations were executed under great disadvantages, and are bad. Those of Seymour are excellent. [29] I am always sorry, however, that Cruikshank did not illustrate the Christmas stories. [30] See _Cornhill Magazine_ for February, 1864. CHAPTER XIII. But we are now, alas, nearing the point where the "rapid" of Dickens' life began to "shoot to its fall." The year 1865, during which he partly wrote "Our Mutual Friend," was a fatal one in his career. In the month of February he had been very ill, with an affection of the left foot, at first thought to be merely local, but which really pointed to serious mischief, and never afterwards wholly left him. Then, on June 9th, when returning from France, where he had gone to recruit, he as nearly as possible lost his life in a railway accident at Staplehurst. A bridge had broken in; some of the carriages fell through, and were smashed; that in which Dickens was, hung down the side of the chasm. Of courage and presence of mind he never showed any lack. They were evinced, on one occasion, at the readings, when an alarm of fire arose. They shone conspicuous here. He quieted two ladies who were in the same compartment of the carriage; helped to extricate them and others from their perilous position; gave such help as he could to the wounded and dying; probably was the means of saving the life of one man, whom he was the first to hear faintly groaning under a heap of wreckage; and then, as he tells in the "postscript" to the book, scrambled back into the carriage to find the crumpled MS. of a portion of "Our Mutual Friend."[31] But even pluck is powerless to prevent a ruinous shock to the nerves. Though Dickens had done so manfully what he had to do at the time, he never fully recovered from the blow. His daughter tells us how he would often, "when travelling home from London, suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the railway carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffer agonies of terror.... He had ... apparently no idea of our presence." And Mr. Dolby tells us also how in travelling it was often necessary for him to ward off such attacks by taking brandy. Dickens had been failing before only too surely; and this accident, like a coward's blow, struck him heavily as he fell. But whether failing or stricken, he bated no jot of energy or courage; nay, rather, as his health grew weaker, did he redouble the pressure of his work. I think there is a grandeur in the story of the last five years of his life, that dwarfs even the tale of his rapid and splendid rise. It reads like some antique myth of the Titans defying Jove's thunder. There is about the man something indomitable and heroic. He had, as we have seen, given a series of readings in 1858-59; and he gave another in the years 1861 to 1863--successful enough in a pecuniary sense, but through failure of business capacity on the part of the manager, entailing on the reader himself a great deal of anxiety and worry.[32] Now, in the spring of 1866, with his left foot giving him unceasing trouble, and his nerves shattered, and his heart in an abnormal state, he accepted an offer from Messrs. Chappell to read "in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Paris," for £1,500, and the payment of all expenses, and then to give forty-two more readings for £2,500. Mr. Dolby, who accompanied Dickens as business manager in this and the remaining tours, has told their story in an interesting volume.[33] Of course the wear was immense. The readings themselves involved enormous fatigue to one who so identified himself with what he read, and whose whole being seemed to vibrate not only with the emotions of the characters in his stories, but of the audience. Then there was the weariness of long railway journeys in all seasons and weathers--journeys that at first must have been rendered doubly tedious, as he could not bear to travel by express trains. Yet, notwithstanding failure of strength, notwithstanding fatigue, his native gaiety and good spirits smile like a gleam of winter sunlight over the narrative. As he had been the brightest and most genial of companions in the old holiday days when strolling about the country with his actor-troupe, so now he was occasionally as frolic as a boy, dancing a hornpipe in the train for the amusement of his companions, compounding bowls of punch in which he shared but sparingly--for he was really convivial only in idea--and always considerate and kindly towards his companions and dependents. And mingled pathetically with all this are confessions of pain, weariness, illness, faintness, sleeplessness, internal bleeding,--all bravely borne, and never for an instant suffered to interfere with any business arrangement. But if the strain of the readings was too heavy here at home, what was it likely to be during a winter in America? Nevertheless he determined, against all remonstrances, to go thither. It would almost seem as if he felt that the day of his life was waning, and that it was his duty to gather in a golden harvest for those he loved ere the night came on. So he sailed for Boston once more on the 9th of November, 1867. The Americans, it must be said, behaved nobly. All the old grudges connected with "The American Notes," and "Martin Chuzzlewit," sank into oblivion. The reception was everywhere enthusiastic, the success of the readings immense. Again and again people waited all night, amid the rigours of an almost arctic winter, in order to secure an opportunity of purchasing tickets as soon as the ticket office opened. There were enormous and intelligent audiences at Boston, New York, Washington, Philadelphia--everywhere. The sum which Dickens realized by the tour, amounted to the splendid total of nearly £19,000. Nor, in this money triumph, did he fail to excite his usual charm of personal fascination, though the public affection and admiration were manifested in forms less objectionable and offensive than of old. On his birthday, the 7th of February, 1868, he says, "I couldn't help laughing at myself ...; it was observed so much as though I were a little boy." Flowers, garlands were set about his room; there were presents on his dinner-table, and in the evening the hall where he read was decorated by kindly unknown hands. Of public and private entertainment he might have had just as much as he chose. But to this medal there was a terrible reverse. Travelling from New York to Boston just before Christmas, he took a most disastrous cold, which never left him so long as he remained in the country. He was constantly faint. He ate scarcely anything. He slept very little. Latterly he was so lame, as scarcely to be able to walk. Again and again it seemed impossible that he should fulfil his night's engagement. He was constantly so exhausted at the conclusion of the reading, that he had to lie down for twenty minutes or half an hour, "before he could undergo the fatigue even of dressing." Mr. Dolby lived in daily fear lest he should break down altogether. "I used to steal into his room," he says, "at all hours of the night and early morning, to see if he were awake, or in want of anything; always though to find him wide awake, and as cheerful and jovial as circumstances would admit--never in the least complaining, and only reproaching me for not taking my night's rest." "Only a man of iron will could have accomplished what he did," says Mr. Fields, who knew him well, and saw him often during the tour. In the first week of May, 1868, Dickens was back in England, and soon again in the thick of his work and play. Mr. Wills, the sub-editor of _All the Year Round_, had met with an accident. Dickens supplied his place. Chauncy Hare Townshend had asked him to edit a chaotic mass of religious lucubrations. He toilfully edited them. Then, with the autumn, the readings began again;--for it marks the indomitable energy of the man that, even amid the terrible physical trials incident to his tour in America, he had agreed with Messrs. Chappell, for a sum of £8,000, to give one hundred more readings after his return. So in October the old work began again, and he was here, there, and everywhere, now reading at Manchester and Liverpool, now at Edinburgh and Glasgow, anon coming back to read fitfully in London, then off again to Ireland, or the West of England. Nor is it necessary to say that he spared himself not one whit. In order to give novelty to these readings, which were to be positively the last, he had laboriously got up the scene of Nancy's murder, in "Oliver Twist," and persisted in giving it night after night, though of all his readings it was the one that exhausted him most terribly.[34] But of course this could not last. The pain in his foot "was always recurring at inconvenient and unexpected moments," says Mr. Dolby, and occasionally the American cold came back too. In February, in London, the foot was worse than it had ever been, so bad that Sir Henry Thompson, and Mr. Beard, his medical adviser, compelled him to postpone a reading. At Edinburgh, a few days afterwards, Mr. Syme, the eminent surgeon, strongly recommended perfect rest. Still he battled on, but "with great personal suffering such as few men could have endured." Sleeplessness was on him too. And still he fought on, determined, if it were physically possible, to fulfil his engagement with Messrs. Chappell, and complete the hundred nights. But it was not to be. Symptoms set in that pointed alarmingly towards paralysis of the left side. At Preston, on the 22nd of April, Mr. Beard, who had come post-haste from London, put a stop to the readings, and afterwards decided, in consultation with Sir Thomas Watson, that they ought to be suspended entirely for the time, and never resumed in connection with any railway travelling. Even this, however, was not quite the end; for a summer of comparative rest, or what Dickens considered rest, seemed so far to have set him up that he gave a final series of twelve readings in London between the 11th of January and 15th of March, 1870, thus bringing to its real conclusion an enterprise by which, at whatever cost to himself, he had made a sum of about £45,000. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1869, he had gone back to the old work, and was writing a novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." It is a good novel unquestionably. Without going so far as Longfellow, who had doubts whether it was not "the most beautiful of all" Dickens' works, one may admit that there is about it a singular freshness, and no sign at all of mental decay. As for the "mystery," I do not think _that_ need baffle us altogether. But then I see no particular reason to believe that Dickens had wished to baffle us, or specially to rival Edgar Allan Poe or Mr. Wilkie Collins in the construction of criminal puzzles. Even though only half the case is presented to us, and the book remains for ever unfinished, we need have, I think, no difficulty in working out its conclusion. The course pursued by Mr. Jasper, Lay Precentor of the Cathedral at Cloisterham, is really too suspicious. No intelligent British jury, seeing the facts as they are presented to us, the readers, could for a moment think of acquitting him of the murder of his nephew, Edwin Drood. Take those facts seriatim. First, we have the motive: he is passionately in love with the girl to whom his nephew is engaged. Then we have a terrible coil of compromising circumstances: his extravagant profession of devotion to his nephew, his attempts to establish a hidden influence over the girl's mind to his nephew's detriment and his own advantage, his gropings amid the dark recesses of the Cathedral and inquiries into the action of quicklime, his endeavours to foment a quarrel between Edwin Drood and a fiery young gentleman from Ceylon, on the night of the murder, and his undoubted doctoring of the latter's drink. Then, after the murder, how damaging is his conduct. He falls into a kind of fit on discovering that his nephew's engagement had been broken off, which he might well do if his crime turned out to be not only a crime but also a blunder. And his conduct to the girl is, to say the least of it, strange. Nor will his character help him. He frequents the opium dens of the East-end of London. Guilty, guilty, most certainly guilty. There is nothing to be said in arrest of judgment. Let the judge put on the black cap, and Jasper be devoted to his merited doom. Such was the story that Dickens was unravelling in the spring and early summer of 1870. And fortune smiled upon it. He had sold the copyright for the large sum of £7,500, and a half share of the profits after a sale of twenty-five thousand copies, plus £1,000 for the advance sheets sent to America; and the sale was more than answering his expectations. Nor did prosperity look favourably on the book alone. It also, in one sense, showered benefits on the author. He was worth, as the evidence of the Probate Court was to show only too soon, a sum of over £80,000. He was happy in his children. He was universally loved, honoured, courted. "Troops of friends," though, alas! death had made havoc among the oldest, were still his. Never had man exhibited less inclination to pay fawning court to greatness and social rank. Yet when the Queen expressed a desire to see him, as she did in March, 1870, he felt not only pride, but a gentleman's pleasure in acceding to her wish, and came away charmed from a long chatting interview. But, while prosperity was smiling thus, the shadows of his day of life were lengthening, lengthening, and the night was at hand. On Wednesday, June 8th, he seemed in excellent spirits; worked all the morning in the Châlet[35] as was his wont, returned to the house for lunch and a cigar, and then, being anxious to get on with "Edwin Drood," went back to his desk once more. The weather was superb. All round the landscape lay in fullest beauty of leafage and flower, and the air rang musically with the song of birds. What were his thoughts that summer day as he sat there at his work? Writing many years before, he had asked whether the "subtle liquor of the blood" may not "perceive, by properties within itself," when danger is imminent, and so "run cold and dull"? Did any such monitor within, one wonders, warn him at all that the hand of death was uplifted to strike, and that its shadow lay upon him? Judging from the words that fell from his pen that day we might almost think that it was so--we might almost go further, and guess with what hopes and fears he looked into the darkness beyond. Never at any time does he appear to have been greatly troubled by speculative doubt. There is no evidence in his life, no evidence in his letters, no evidence in his books, that he had ever seen any cause to question the truth of the reply which Christianity gives to the world-old problems of man's origin and destiny. For abstract speculation he had not the slightest turn or taste. In no single one of his characters does he exhibit any fierce mental struggle as between truth and error. All that side of human experience, with its anguish of battle, its despairs, and its triumphs, seems to have been unknown to him. Perhaps he had the stronger grasp of other matters in consequence--who knows? But the fact remains. With a trust quite simple and untroubled, he held through life to the faith of Christ. When his children were little, he had written prayers for them, had put the Bible into simpler language for their use. In his will, dated May 12, 1869, he had said, "I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the broad teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there." And now, on this last day of his life, in probably the last letter that left his pen, he wrote to one who had objected to some passage in "Edwin Drood" as irreverent: "I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour--because I feel it." And with a significance, of which, as I have said, he may himself have been dimly half-conscious, among the last words of his unfinished story, written that very afternoon, are words that tell of glorious summer sunshine transfiguring the city of his imagination, and of the changing lights, and the song of birds, and the incense from garden and meadow that "penetrate into the cathedral" of Cloisterham, "subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life." For now the end had come. When he went in to dinner Miss Hogarth noticed that he looked very ill, and wished at once to send for a doctor. But he refused, struggled for a short space against the impending fit, and tried to talk, at last very incoherently. Then, when urged to go up to his bed, he rose, and, almost immediately, slid from her supporting arm, and fell on the floor. Nor did consciousness return. He passed from the unrest of life into the peace of eternity on the following day, June 9, 1870, at ten minutes past six in the evening. And now he lies in Westminster Abbey, among the men who have most helped, by deed or thought, to make this England of ours what it is. Dean Stanley only gave effect to the national voice when he assigned to him that place of sepulture. The most popular, and in most respects the greatest novelist of his time; the lord over the laughter and tears of a whole generation; the writer, in his own field of fiction, whose like we shall probably not see again for many a long, long year, if ever; where could he be laid more fittingly for his last long sleep than in the hallowed resting-place which the country sets apart for the most honoured of her children? So he lies there among his peers in the Southern Transept. Close beside him sleep Dr. Johnson, the puissant literary autocrat of his own time; and Garrick, who was that time's greatest actor; and Handel, who may fittingly claim to have been one of the mightiest musicians of all time. There sleeps, too, after the fitful fever of his troubled life, the witty, the eloquent Sheridan. In close proximity rests Macaulay, the artist-historian and essayist. Within the radius of a few yards lies all that will ever die of Chaucer, who five hundred years ago sounded the spring note of English literature, and gave to all after-time the best, brightest glimpse into mediæval England; and all that is mortal also of Spenser of the honey'd verse; and of Beaumont, who had caught an echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his own day a not unworthy rival of Shakespeare's self; and of "glorious" and most masculine John Dryden. From his monument Shakespeare looks upon the place with his kindly eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and one can almost imagine a smile of fellowship upon the marble faces of those later dead--Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Thackeray. Nor in that great place of the dead does Dickens enjoy cold barren honour alone. Nearly seventeen years have gone by since he was laid there--yes, nearly seventeen years, though it seems only yesterday that I was listening to the funeral sermon in which Dean Stanley spoke of the simple and sufficient faith in which he had lived and died. But though seventeen years have gone by, yet are outward signs not wanting of the peculiar love that clings to him still. As I strolled through the Abbey this last Christmas Eve I found his grave, and his grave alone, made gay with the season's hollies. "Lord, keep my memory green,"--in another sense than he used the words, that prayer is answered. And of the future what shall we say? His fame had a brilliant day while he lived; it has a brilliant day now. Will it fade into twilight, without even an after-glow; will it pass altogether into the night of oblivion? I cannot think so. The vitality of Dickens' works is singularly great. They are all a-throb, as it were, with hot human blood. They are popular in the highest sense because their appeal is universal, to the uneducated as well as the educated. The humour is superb, and most of it, so far as one can judge, of no ephemeral kind. The pathos is more questionable, but that too, at its simplest and best; and especially when the humour is shot with it--is worthy of a better epithet than excellent. It is supremely touching. Imagination, fancy, wit, eloquence, the keenest observation, the most strenuous endeavour to reach the highest artistic excellence, the largest kindliness,--all these he brought to his life-work. And that work, as I think, will live, I had almost dared to prophesy for ever. Of course fashions change. Of course no writer of fiction, writing for his own little day, can permanently meet the needs of all after times. Some loss of immediate vital interest is inevitable. Nevertheless, in Dickens' case, all will not die. Half a century, a century hence, he will still be read; not perhaps as he was read when his words flashed upon the world in their first glory and freshness, nor as he is read now in the noon of his fame. But he will be read much more than we read the novelists of the last century--be read as much, shall I say, as we still read Scott. And so long as he _is_ read, there will be one gentle and humanizing influence the more at work among men. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [31] For his own graphic account of the accident, see his "Letters." [32] He computed that he had made £12,000 by the two first series of readings. [33] "Charles Dickens as I Knew Him." By George Dolby. Miss Dickens considers this "the best and truest picture of her father yet written." [34] Mr. Dolby remonstrated on this, and it was in connection with a very slight show of temper on the occasion that he says: "In all my experiences with the Chief that was the only time I ever heard him address angry words to any one." [35] The Châlet, since sold and removed, stood at the edge of a kind of "wilderness," which is separated from Gad's Hill Place by the high road. A tunnel, constructed by Dickens, connects the "wilderness" and the garden of the house. Close to the road, in the "wilderness," and fronting the house, are two fine cedars. INDEX. A. "Administrative Reform" agitation, 129 _All the Year Round_, 114, 115 America, Dickens' first visit to United States in 1842, 71, 74-82, 94, 95; second visit in 1867-8, 152-153 "American Notes," 68, 79-81 B. "Barnaby Rudge," 52, 69-70, 108 Barnard, Mr., his illustrations to Dickens' works, 143 "Battle of Life," 104 _Bentley's Miscellany_ edited by Dickens, 49, 51 "Bleak House," 116-119 Boulogne, 119, 120 Bret Harte, Mr., on Little Nell, 64 Browne, or "Phiz," his illustrations to Dickens' works, 140-142 C. Carlyle, his description of Dickens quoted, 35; and of Dickens' reading, 124; his influence on Dickens, 126, 127; see also 98 and 139 Chapman and Hall, 40, 41, 42, 51, 61 Chatham, 13 Childhood, Dickens' feeling for its pathos, 12, 63 "Child's History of England," 115 "Chimes," 55, 96-99, 142 "Christmas Carol," 91-92, 125 "Christopher North," 72 Cowden Clarke, Mrs., quoted, 110 Cruikshank, his illustrations to "Sketches" and "Oliver Twist," 140-142 D. _Daily News_, started with Dickens as editor, 99, 100, 103, 114 "David Copperfield"--in many respects autobiographical, 14-16, 21, 133; analysis of, 63, 68, 111-113 Dick, Mr., 107, 108 Dickens, Charles, birth, 12; childhood and boyhood, 12-26; school experiences, 25, 26; law experiences, 27, 28; experiences as reporter for the press, 28-30; first attempts at authorship, 31-33; marriage, 34; his personal appearance in early manhood, 35, 36; influence of his early training, 36-39; pecuniary position after publication of "Pickwick," 51, 52; habits of work and relaxation, 54-56; reception at Edinburgh, 71, 72; American experiences, 74-81; affection for his children, 82, 83; Italian experiences, 93-99; appointed editor of _Daily News_, 99, 100; efficiency in practical matters, 102, 103; his charm as a holiday companion, 110; first public readings in 1853, 121; character of his reading, 124, 125; purchase of Gad's Hill Place, 131, 132; separation from his wife, 132-138; general love in which he was held, 135, 136; tendency to caricature in his art, 142; essential refinement in his writing and in himself, 147, 148; his presence of mind, 149; his brave battle against failing strength, 149-155; with what thoughts he faced death, 158, 159; his death, 159; resting-place in Westminster Abbey, 159-161; love that clings to his memory, 161; future of his fame, 161, 162 Dickens, John, his character, 16, 17; his imprisonment, 22, 23, 28; his death, 115 Dickens, Miss, biography of her father, quoted, 50, 83, 150 Dickens, Mrs. (Dickens' mother), 24, 25 Dickens, Mrs., 82; separated from her husband, 132-138 Dolby, Mr., manager for the readings, 150, 151, 153 "Dombey and Son," 63, 103-107, 110 Dombey, Paul, 63, 65-66, 68, 105 E. Edinburgh, Dickens' reception there, 71, 72 "Edwin Drood," 143, 155-157 F. Fildes, Mr. L., A.R.A., illustrates "Edwin Drood," 143 Flite, Miss, 108, 109 Forster, John, 19, 38, 99, 116; his opinion on the advisability of public readings, 121, 122 G. Gad's Hill Place, 13; purchase of, 131, 132 Genoa, 54, 55, 95-96, 98, 99 Grant, Mr. James, 42 "Great Expectations," 63, 143-145 H. "Hard Times," 126-129 "Haunted Man," The, 110-111 Helps, Sir Arthur, on Dickens' powers of observation, 32; on his essential refinement, 148 Hogarth, Mary, her death and character, 52-53 Horne, on description of Little Nell's death and burial, 64, 66-67 _Household Words_, 113-115, 134 Humour of Dickens, 32, 33, 45, 46, 142, 161 I. Italy in 1844, 94-95 J. Jeffrey, his opinion of Little Nell, 63, 71, 72 L. Landor, his admiration for Little Nell, 64; his likeness to Mr. Boythorn, 119 Lausanne, 103, 104 Leigh Hunt, 118 "Little Dorrit," 22, 129-131, 142-143 Little Nell, criticism on her character and story, 63-67, 71, 72, 73 London, Dickens' knowledge of, and walks in, 32, 54-56 M. Macaulay, 80, 128, 160 Macready, the tragic actor, 73, 76, 82, 83 Marshalsea Prison, Dickens' father imprisoned there, 16, 20, 21-23; made the chief scene of "Little Dorrit," 130 "Martin Chuzzlewit," 84, 85, 88-90 _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 61, 62, 90, 141 Micawber, Mr., 15, 16, 22 N. Nickleby, Mrs., 25 "Nicholas Nickleby," 50, 59-61, 90 O. "Old Curiosity Shop," 61, 62-69 "Oliver Twist," 49, 51, 57-59, 63, 141 "Our Mutual Friend," 86, 143, 145-147 P. Paris, 109, 131 Pathos of Dickens, 32, 33, 67-69, 161 "Pickwick," 40-48, 49, 51, 90, 141 "Pictures from Italy," 99, 100-101 Pipchin, Mrs., 20, 23 Plots, Dickens', 85-88 Q. _Quarterly Review_ foretells Dickens' speedy downfall, 50, 51 R. Readings, Dickens', 121-125, 139, 150-155 Ruskin, Mr., his opinion of "Hard Times," 128 S. Sam Weller, 46, 47 Scott, Sir Walter, 43, 87, 162 Seymour, his connection with "Pickwick," 40-42, 141 "Sketches by Boz," 31-33, 52, 140, 141 Stanley, Dean, 159, 161 Stone, Mr. Marcus, R.A., illustrates "Our Mutual Friend," 143 T. Taine, M., his criticism criticised, 107-109 "Tale of Two Cities," 139-140 Thackeray, 53, 135, 145; as a reader, 124, 125 Tiny Tim, 68, 125 Toots, Mr., 107, 108, 109 W. Washington Irving, 73, 148 Westminster Abbey, Dickens place of burial, 159-161 Y. Yates, Edmund, Mr., quoted, 38 BIBLIOGRAPHY. BY JOHN P. ANDERSON _(British Museum)._ * * * * * I. WORKS. II. SELECTIONS. III. SINGLE WORKS. IV. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. V. APPENDIX-- Biographical, Critical, etc. Dramatic. Musical. Parodies and Imitations. Poetical. Magazine and Newspaper Articles. VI. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. * * * * * I. WORKS. FIRST CHEAP EDITION. 19 vols. London, 1847-67, 8vo. This edition was in three series, the first and third being published by Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the second by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. It was printed in double columns, with frontispieces by Leslie, Hablôt K. Browne, Cruikshank, etc. LIBRARY EDITION. 22 vols. London, 1858-59, 8vo. LIBRARY EDITION. Illustrated. 30 vols. London, 1861-1873. The original illustrations were added to the later issues of the Library Edition, and the series completed in 30 vols. THE PEOPLE'S EDITION. 25 vols. London, 1865-1867, 8vo. A re-issue of the Cheap Edition. THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION. Illustrated. 21 vols. London, 1867-1873, 8vo. THE HOUSEHOLD EDITION. Illustrated. 22 vols. London, 1871-1879, 4to. ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY EDITION. 30 vols. London, 1873-1876, 8vo. THE POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION. Illustrated. 30 vols. London, 1878-1880, 8vo. THE POCKET EDITION. 30 vols. London, 1880, 16mo. THE DIAMOND EDITION. Illustrated. 14 vols. London, 1880, 16mo. �DITION DE LUXE. Illustrated. 30 vols. London, 1881, 4to. One thousand copies only of this �dition de Luxe were printed for sale, each numbered, and it was dedicated to Her Majesty the Queen. THE CABINET EDITION. Illustrated. London, 1885, etc., 16mo. A re-issue of the Pocket Edition. II. SELECTIONS. The Beauties of Pickwick. Collected and arranged by Sam Weller. London, 1838, 8vo. The Story Teller. A collection of tales, stories, and novels. By Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, etc. Edited by Hermann Schütz. Siegen, 1850, 8vo. Immortelles from C.D. By Ich. London, 1856, 8vo. Novels and Tales reprinted from Household Words. 11 vols. (_Tauchnitz Edition_). Leipzig, 1856-59, 16mo. Christmas Stories from the Household Words. Conducted by C.D. London [1860], 8vo. The Poor Traveller: Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn; and Mrs. Gamp, by C.D. London, 1858, 8vo. Arranged by Dickens for his Readings. Dialogues from Dickens. Arranged by W.E. Fette. Two Series. Boston, 1870-71, 8vo. A Cyclopædia of the best thoughts of C.D. Compiled and alphabetically arranged by F.G. De Fontaine. New York, 1873, 8vo. A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens. Being fac-similes of original drawings by F. Barnard [with extracts from some of D.'s works]. 2 pts. London [1879]-85, folio. ----Another Edition. London, 1884, folio. The Dickens Reader. Character Readings from the stories of Charles Dickens. Selected, adapted, and arranged by Nathan Sheppard, with numerous illustrations by F. Barnard, New York, 1881, 4to. The Charles Dickens Birthday Book. Compiled and edited by his eldest daughter (Mary Dickens). With illustrations by his youngest daughter (Kate Perugini). London, 1882, 8vo. Readings from the works of C.D. Condensed and adapted by J.A. Jennings. Dublin [1882], 8vo. The Readings of C.D. as arranged and read by himself. With illustrations. London, 1883, 8vo. Chips from Dickens selected by Thomas Mason. Glasgow [1884], 32mo. Tales from Charles Dickens's Works. London [1884], 8vo. The Humour and Pathos of Charles Dickens. Selected by Chas. Kent. London, 1884, 8vo. Child-Pictures from Dickens. [Illustrated.] London, 1885, 4to. Wellerisms from "Pickwick" and "Master Humphrey's Clock." Selected by Charles F. Rideal, and Edited, with an Introduction, by Charles Kent, author of "The Humour and Pathos of Charles Dickens." London, 1886, 8vo. III. SINGLE WORKS. American Notes for general circulation. 2 vols. London, 1842, 8vo. ----[Other Editions. London, 1850, 8vo.; London, 1884, 8vo]. Bleak House. With illustrations, by H.K. Browne. London, 1853, 8vo. Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn, by Charles Dickens, as condensed by himself for his readings. Boston, 1868, 8vo. The Holly-Tree Inn was the Christmas Number of "Household Words" for 1855. Dickens contributed "The Guest," "The Boots," and "The Bill." A Child's History of England. With a frontispiece by F.W. Topham. 3 vols. London, 1852-54, 16mo. The Chimes: a Goblin Story of some bells that rang an old year out and a new year in. By Charles Dickens. [Illustrated by Maclise, Doyle, Leech, and Clarkson Stanfield.] London, 1845, 8vo. An edition with notes and elucidations by K. ten Bruggencate was published at Groningen in 1883. Christmas Books. London, 1852, 8vo. Christmas Books. With illustrations by Sir E. Landseer, Maclise, Stanfield, F. Stone, Doyle, Leech, and Tenniel. London, 1869, 8vo. A Christmas Carol in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. By C.D. With illustrations by John Leech. London, 1843, 8vo. ----Condensed by himself, for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. By C.D. [Illustrated by Maclise, Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, Leech, and Landseer.] London, 1846, 16mo. The Battle of Life: A Love Story. [Illustrated by Maclise, Stanfield, Doyle, and Leech.] London, 1846, 16mo. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. [Illustrated by Stanfield, John Tenniel, Frank Stone, and John Leech.] London, 1848, 16mo. Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, wholesale, retail, and for exportation. With illustrations by H.K. Browne. London, 1848, 8vo. The Story of Little Dombey. By C.D. London, 1858, 8vo. Revised by Dickens for his Readings. The Story of Little Dombey. By C.D., as condensed by himself for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions. (_Tauchnitz Edition_, vol. 894.) Leipzig, 1867, 16mo. The Christmas Number of "All the Year Round" for 1865. Dickens contributed chap. i., "To be Taken Immediately;" chap. vi., "To be Taken With a Grain of Salt;" and the concluding chapter, "To be Taken for Life." Doctor Marigold. By C.D., as condensed by himself for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Great Expectations. By C.D. In three volumes. London, 1861, 8vo. Appeared originally in _All the Year Round_, December 1, 1860, to August 3, 1861. An American edition was published the same year with illustrations by J. McLenan. Hard Times. For these Times. By C.D. London, 1854, 8vo. Appeared originally in Household Words, April 1 to August 12, 1854. Hunted Down. (_Tauchnitz Edition_, vol. 536.) Leipzig, 1860, 16mo. Appeared originally in the _New York Ledger_, August 20, 27, Sept. 3, 1859, and _All the Year Round_, Aug. 4 and 11, 1860. Hunted Down. A Story. By C.D. With some account of T.G. Wainewright, the poisoner [by John Camden Hotten]. London [1870], 8vo. Is She his Wife? or, Something Singular. A comic burletta in one act. Boston [U.S.], 1877, 16mo. First produced at the St. James's Theatre, March 6, 1837. Mr. Shepherd says that this was first printed in 1837, but no copy is known to exist. The Lamplighter: A Farce. By C.D. (1838). Only 250 copies were privately printed in 1879 from the MS. copy in the Forster Collection at South Kensington; each copy numbered. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. With illustrations by Phiz [_i.e._, H.K. Browne]. London, 1844, 8vo. Mrs. Gamp [extracted from "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit"]. By C.D., as condensed by himself, for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. With illustrations by Phiz. London, 1839, 8vo. Contains a portrait of Dickens, and 39 illustrations. Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School [extracted from "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby"]. By C.D., as condensed by himself, for his readings. (Four Chapters). Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Another edition in three chapters was published at Boston the same year. Little Dorrit. With illustrations, by H.K. Browne. London [1855]-57, 8vo. Master Humphrey's Clock. With illustrations by George Cattermole and H.K. Browne. 3 vols. London, 1840-41, 8vo. Comprises two stories, "The Old Curiosity Shop" and "Barnaby Rudge," both subsequently issued as independent works, the first in 1848, and the second in 1849. The Old Curiosity Shop. London, 1848, 8vo. Barnaby Rudge. A Tale of the Riots of Eighty. London, 1849, 8vo. Mr. Nightingale's Diary: a Farce, in one act. London, 1851, 8vo. Privately printed and extremely scarce. There is a copy in the Forster Collection at South Kensington. ----Another edition. Boston [U.S.], 1877, 16mo. This edition is now scarce. The Mudfog Papers. Now first collected. London, 1880, 8vo. Reprinted from Bentley's Miscellany. ----Second edition. London, 1880, 8vo. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. With twelve illustrations by S.L. Fildes, and a portrait. London, 1870, 8vo. Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. By "Boz." In three volumes. [With illustrations by George Cruikshank.] London, 1838, 8vo. The second edition, with the title-page reading "Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens," appeared the following year; the third edition, with a new preface, was published in 1841. The edition of 1846, in one volume, bears the following title-page:--"The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. By Charles Dickens. With twenty-four illustrations on Steel, by George Cruikshank." Our Mutual Friend. With illustrations by Marcus Stone. 2 vols. London, 1865, 8vo. The Personal History of David Copperfield. With illustrations, by H.K. Browne. London, 1850, 8vo. David Copperfield. By C.D., as condensed by himself, for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Pictures from Italy. By C.D. The vignette illustrations on wood, by Samuel Palmer. London, 1846, 8vo. Appeared originally in the _Daily News_, from January to March 1846, with the title of "Travelling Letters written on the Road. By Charles Dickens." The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Being a faithful record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures, and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members. Edited by "Boz." With forty-three illustrations by R. Seymour, R.W. Buss, and Phiz [H.K. Browne], London, 1837, 8vo. In twenty monthly parts, commencing April 1836, and ending November 1837, no number being issued for June 1837. ----Another edition. V.D. Land, Launceston, 1838, 8vo. This edition of Pickwick is interesting from the fact that it was published in Van Dieman's Land, the illustrations being exact copies of the originals executed in lithography. There is an additional title-page, engraved, bearing date 1836. ----The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, with notes and illustrations. Edited by C. Dickens the younger, (Jubilee Edition.) 2 vols. London, 1886, 8vo. Mr. Bob. Sawyer's Party [extracted from "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club"] by C.D., as condensed by himself, for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Bardell and Pickwick [extracted from "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club"] by C.D., as condensed by himself, for his readings. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. Sketches by "Boz," illustrative of every-day life and every-day people. In two volumes. Illustrations by George Cruikshank. London, 1836, 12mo. ----Second edition. London, 1836, 12mo. Sketches by "Boz." Third edition. London, 1837, 12mo. ----Second Series. London, 1837, 12mo. ----First complete edition of the two series. With forty illustrations by George Cruikshank. London, 1839, 8vo. ----Sketches and Tales of London Life. [Selections from "Sketches by Boz."] London [1877], 8vo. ----The Tuggs's at Ramsgate [from "Sketches by Boz"]. London [1870], 8vo. Sketches of Young Gentlemen. Dedicated to the Young Ladies. With six illustrations by "Phiz" (H.K. Browne). London, 1838, 8vo. Sketches of Young Couples; with an urgent Remonstrance to the Gentlemen of England (being Bachelors or Widowers) on the present alarming Crisis. With six illustrations by "Phiz" [H.K. Browne]. London, 1840, 8vo. An edition was published in 1869 with the title "Sketches of Young Couples, Young Ladies, Young Gentlemen. By Quiz. Illustrated by Phiz." Only the first and third of these sketches were written by Charles Dickens. "The Sketches of Young Ladies" were by an anonymous author, who also assumed the pseudonym of Quiz. Somebody's Luggage. (_Tauchnitz Edition_, vol. 888.) Leipzig, 1867, 16mo. The Christmas Number of _All the Year Round_ for 1862. Dickens contributed "His leaving it till called for"; "His Boots"; "His Brown-paper Parcel" and "His Wonderful End." The Strange Gentleman: A Comic Burletta. In two acts. By "Boz." First performed at the St. James's Theatre, on Thursday, September 29, 1836. London, 1837, 8vo. Sunday under Three Heads. As it is; as Sabbath bills would make it; as it might be made. By Timothy Sparks. London, 1836, 12mo. Reproduced in fac-simile, London, 1884, and in Pearson's Manchester Series of Fac-simile Reprints, Manchester, same date. A Tale of Two Cities. With illustrations by H.K. Browne. London, 1859, 8vo. Originally issued in _All the Year Round_, between April 30 and November 26, 1859. The Uncommercial Traveller. By C.D. London, 1861, 8vo. Consists of seventeen papers which originally appeared in _All the Year Round_ with this title between January 28 and October 13, 1860. The impression which was issued in 1868 in the Charles Dickens Edition contains eleven fresh papers. The Village Coquettes: A Comic Opera. In two acts. By C.D. The music by John Hullah. London, 1836, 8vo. ----Songs, choruses, and concerted pieces in the Operatic Burletta of The Village Coquettes as produced at St. James's Theatre. The drama and words of the songs by "Boz." The music by John Hullah. London, 1837, 8vo. Editions of "The Village Coquettes" were published at Leipzig, 1845, and at Amsterdam, 1868, in English, and it was reprinted in 1878. _See_ also under _Music_. IV. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. All the Year Round. A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens. London, 1859-1870, 8vo. Commenced on the 30th of April 1859. Bentley's Miscellany. [Successively edited by Boz, Ainsworth, Albert Smith, etc.] Vol. 1-64. London, 1837-68, 8vo. Evenings of a Working Man, being the occupation of his scanty leisure. By John Overs. With a preface relative to the author, by C.D. London, 1844, 16mo. Household Words: a weekly journal. Conducted by C.D. 19 vols. London, 1850-59, 8vo. This Journal commenced on the 30th March 1850, and was continued to the 28th of May 1859, when it was incorporated with _All the Year Round_. A cheap edition of Household Words, in 19 vols. was published in 1868-73. ----Christmas Stories from Household Words (1850-58). Conducted by C.D. London, [1860], 8vo. Legends and Lyrics, by Adelaide Anne Procter. With an introduction by C.D. New edition, illustrated by Dobson, Palmer, Tenniel, etc. London, 1866, 4to. The Letters of C.D. Edited by his sister-in-law (G. Hogarth) and his eldest daughter (M. Dickens). 3 vols. London, 1880-1882, 8vo. ----Another edition. 2 vols. London, 1882, 8vo. The Library of Fiction; or Family Story-Teller. [Edited by C.D.] London, 1836-37, 8vo. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London, 1839, 8vo. The notes and preface were written by Dickens. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Edited by "Boz." With illustrations by G. Cruikshank. 2 vols. London, 1838, 12mo. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Another edition. Revised by C. Whitehead. London, 1846, 8vo. ----Another edition. London, 1853, 8vo. ----Another edition. London, 1866, 8vo. Two other editions were published in 1884 by G. Routledge and Sons, and J. Dicks. The Newsvendors' Benevolent and Provident Institution. Speeches on behalf of the Institution by C.D. London, 1871, 8vo. The Pic-Nic Papers by various hands. Edited by C.D. With illustrations by George Cruikshank. 3 vols. London, 1841, 8vo. Dickens contributed a preface and the opening tale, "The Lamplighter's Story." The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens. With a few Miscellanies in prose. Now first collected, edited, prefaced, and annotated by R.H. Shepherd. 2 vols. London, 1882, 8vo. This work was almost immediately suppressed, as it contained copyright matter. A new edition appeared in 1885, without the copyright play of "No Thoroughfare." Religious Opinions of Chauncy Hare Townshend. Published as directed in his Will, by his literary executor [Charles Dickens]. London, 1869, 8vo. Royal Literary Fund. A summary of facts in answer to allegations contained in "The Case of the Reformers of the Literary Fund," stated by C.D., etc. [London, 1858], 8vo. Speech delivered at the meeting of the Administrative Reform Association. London, 1855, 8vo. Speech of C.D. as Chairman of the Anniversary Festival Dinner of the Royal Free Hospital, 1863. [London, 1870], 12mo. The Speeches of C.D., 1841-1870, edited and prefaced by R.H. Shepherd. With a new bibliography, revised and enlarged. London, 1884, 8vo. Speeches, letters, and sayings of C.D. To which is added a Sketch of the author by G.A. Sala, and Dean Stanley's sermon. New York, 1870, 8vo. Speeches: Literary and Social. London [1870], 8vo. A Wonderful Ghost Story. With letters of C.D. to the author respecting it. By Thomas Heaphy. London, 1882, 8vo. V. APPENDIX. BIOGRAPHICAL, CRITICAL, ETC. Adshead, Joseph.--Prisons and Prisoners. London, 1845, 8vo. The Fictions of Dickens upon solitary confinement, pp. 95-121. Allbut, Robert.--London Rambles "En Zigzag," with Charles Dickens. London [1886], 8vo. Atlantic Almanac.--The Atlantic Almanac for 1871. Boston, 1871, 8vo. A short biographical notice of Dickens, with portrait and view of Gad's Hill, pp. 20-21. Bagehot, Walter.--Literary Studies, by the late Walter Bagehot. 2 vols. London, 1879, 8vo. Charles Dickens (1858), vol. 2, pp. 184-220. Bayne, Peter.--Essays in Biography and Criticism. By Peter Bayne. First series. Boston, 1857, 8vo. The modern novel: Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, pp. 363-392. Behn-Eschenburg, H.--Charles Dickens. Von H. Behn-Eschenburg. Basel, 1872, 8vo. Hft. 6, of "Oeffentliche Vorträge gehalten in der Schweiz." Brimley, George.--Essays by the late George Brimley. Edited by William George Clark. Cambridge, 1858, 8vo. "Bleak House," pp. 289-301. Reprinted from the _Spectator_, September 24th, 1853. Browne, Hablôt K.--Dombey and Son. The four portraits of Edith, Florence, Alice, and Little Paul. London, 1848, 8vo. ----Dombey and Son. Full-length portraits of Dombey and Carker, Miss Tox, Mrs. Skewton, etc. London, 1848, 8vo. ----Six illustrations to The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Engraved from original drawings by Phiz. London [1854], 8vo. Buchanan, Robert.--A Poet's Sketch-Book; selections from the prose writings of Robert Buchanan. London, 1883, 8vo. The Good Genie of Fiction. Charles Dickens, pp. 119-140. (Reprinted from _St. Paul's Magazine_, 1872, pp. 130-148.) Calverley, C.S.--Fly Leaves. Second Edition. By C.S. Calverley. Cambridge, 1872, 8vo. An Examination Paper. "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club," pp. 121-124. Canning, S.G.--Philosophy of Charles Dickens. By the Hon. Albert S.G. Canning. London, 1880, 8vo. Cary, Thomas G.--Letter to a lady in France on the supposed failure of a national bank ... with answers to enquiries concerning the books of Captain Marryat and Mr. Dickens. [By Thomas G. Cary.] Boston [U.S.], 1843, 8vo. ----Second Edition. Boston, [U.S.], 1844, 8vo. Chambers, Robert.--Cyclopædia of English Literature. Edited by Robert Chambers. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1844, 8vo. Charles Dickens, vol. ii., pp. 630-633. ----Another Edition. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1860, 8vo. Charles Dickens, with a portrait, vol. ii., pp. 644-650. ----Third Edition, 2 vols. London, 1876, 8vo. Charles Dickens, with a portrait, vol. ii., pp. 515-521. Chapman, T.J.--Schools and Schoolmasters; from the works of Charles Dickens. New York, 1871, 8vo. Clarke, Charles and Mary Cowden.--Recollections of Writers. By Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke. With letters of Charles Lamb ... and Charles Dickens, etc. London, 1878, 8vo. Cleveland, Charles Dexter.--English Literature of the Nineteenth Century. A new edition. Philadelphia, 1867, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 718-730. Cochrane, Robert.--Risen by Perseverance; or, lives of self-made men. By Robert Cochrane. Edinburgh, 1879, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 172-223. Cook, James.--Bibliography of the writings of Charles Dickens, with many curious and interesting particulars relating to his works. By James Cook. London, 1879, 8vo. Cruikshank, George.--George Cruikshank's Magazine. London, 1854, 8vo. February 1854, pp. 74-80, "A letter from Hop-o'-My-Thumb to Charles Dickens, Esq., upon 'Frauds on the Fairies,' 'Whole Hogs,' etc." D., H.W.--Ward and Lock's Penny Books for the People. Biographical series. The Life of Charles Dickens. By H.W.D. Pp. 513-528. London, 1882, 8vo. Davey, Samuel.--Darwin, Carlyle and Dickens, with other essays. By Samuel Davey. London, [1876], 8vo. Denman, Lord.--Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and Slave Trade. Six articles by Lord Denman. London, 1853, 8vo. ----Second Edition. London, 1853, 8vo. Dépret, Louis.--Chez les Anglais. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Longfellow, etc. Paris, 1879. Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, occupies pp. 71-130. Dickens, Charles.--Chas. Dickens. A critical biography. London, 1858, 8vo. No. 1 of a series entitled "Our Contemporaries," etc. ----The Life and Times of Charles Dickens. With a portrait. (_Police News_ edition.) London. [1870], 8vo. ----The Life of Charles Dickens. London [1881], 8vo. ----The Life of Charles Dickens. London [1882], 8vo. Part of Haughton's Popular Illustrated Biographies. ----Some Notes on America to be re-written, suggested with respect to Charles Dickens. Philadelphia, 1868, 8vo. ----Catalogue of the beautiful collection of modern pictures, etc., of Charles Dickens, which will be sold by auction by Messrs. Christie, Manson and Woods ... July 9, 1870. London [1870], 4to. ----Dickens Memento, with introduction by F. Phillimore, and "Hints to Dickens Collectors," by J.F. Dexter. Catalogue with purchasers' names, etc. London [1884], 4to. ----Mary.--Charles Dickens. By his eldest daughter (Mary Dickens). London, 1885, 8vo. Part of the series "The World's Workers," etc. Dilke, Charles W.--The Papers of a Critic, etc. 2 vols. London, 1875, 8vo. Reference to the Literary Fund Controversy, with a letter from C.D. to C.W. Dilke. Vol. i., pp. 79, 80. Dolby, George.--Charles Dickens as I knew him. The story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (1866-1870). By George Dolby. London, 1885, 8vo. Drake, Samuel Adams.--Our Great Benefactors; short biographies, etc. Boston, 1884, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 102-111, illustrated. Dulcken, A.--Scenes from "The Pickwick Papers," designed by A. Dulcken. London [1861], obl. fol. ----H.W.--Worthies of the World, a series of historical and critical sketches, etc. Edited by H.W. Dulcken. London [1881], 8vo. Biography of Charles Dickens, with a portrait, pp. 513-528. Essays.--English Essays. 4 vols. Hamburg, 1870, 8vo. Vol. iv. contains an article reprinted from the _Illustrated London News_, June 18, 1870, on Charles Dickens. Field, Kate.--Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings. Taken from life. By Kate Field. Boston, [U.S.], [1868], 8vo. ----Another edition. Illustrated. Boston (U.S.), 1871, 8vo. Fields, James T.--In and out of doors with Charles Dickens. By James T. Fields. Boston, (U.S.), 1876, 16mo. ----James T. Fields. Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches. Boston [U.S.], 1881, 8vo. Pp. 152-160 relate to Dickens. Fitzgerald, Percy.--Two English Essayists. C. Lamb and C. Dickens. By Percy Fitzgerald. London, 1864, 8vo. Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, series 2. ----Recreations of a Literary Man. By Percy Fitzgerald. 2 vols. London, 1882, 8vo. Charles Dickens as an editor, vol. i., pp. 48-96; Charles Dickens at Home, vol. i., pp. 97-171. Forster, John.--The Life of Charles Dickens. (With portraits.) 3 vols. London, 1872-4, 8vo. Numerous editions. Friswell, J. Hain.--Modern Men of Letters honestly criticised. By J. Hain Friswell. London, 1870, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 1-45. Frost, Thomas.--In Kent with Charles Dickens. By Thomas Frost. London, 1880, 8vo. Gill, T.--Report of the Dinner given to C.D. in Boston. Reported by T. Gill and W. English. Boston [U.S.], 1842, 8vo. Hall, Samuel Carter.--A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, etc. By S.C. Hall. London, 1871, 4to. Charles Dickens, pp. 449-452. ----Second edition. London, 1877, 4to. Charles Dickens, pp. 454-458. Ham, James Panton.--Parables of Fiction: a memorial discourse on C. Dickens. By James Panton Ham. London, 1870, 8vo. Hanaford, P.A.--Life and Writings of C. Dickens. New York, 1882, 8vo. Hassard, John R.G.--A Pickwickian Pilgrimage. (Letters on "the London of Charles Dickens.") By John R.G. Hassard. Boston (U.S.), 1881, 8vo. Heavisides, Edward Marsh.--The Poetical and Prose Remains of Edward Marsh Heavisides. London, 1850, 8vo. The Essay on Dickens's writings, pp. 1-27. Hollingshead, John.--To-Day; Essays and Miscellanies. 2 vols. London, 1865, 8vo. Mr. Dickens and his Critics, vol. ii., pp. 277-283; Mr. Dickens as a Reader, vol. ii., pp. 284-296. Hollingshead, John.--Miscellanies. Stories and Essays by John Hollingshead. 3 vols. London, 1874, 8vo. Mr. Dickens and his critics, vol. iii., pp. 270-274; Mr. Dickens as a Reader, vol. iii., pp. 275-283. Horne, Richard H.--A New Spirit of the Age. Edited by R.H. Horne. 2 vols. London, 1844, 12mo. Charles Dickens, with portrait, vol. i., pp. 1-76. Hotten, John Camden.--Charles Dickens, the Story of his Life. By the Author of the Life of Thackeray (J.C. Hotten). With illustrations and fac-similes. London (1870), 8vo. ----Popular edition. London (1873), 12mo. Hume, A.B.--A Christmas Memorial of Charles Dickens. By A.B. Hume. 1870, 8vo. Contains a fac-simile of Charles Dickens's letter to Mr. J.W. Makeham, dated June 8, 1870, and an Ode to his memory. Hutton, Laurence.--Literary Landmarks of London. By Laurence Hutton. London [1885], 8vo. Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, pp. 79-86. Irving, Walter.--Charles Dickens. [An essay.] By Walter Irving. Edinburgh, 1874, 8vo. Jeaffreson, J. Cordy.--Novels and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria. By J. Cordy Jeaffreson. 2 vols. London, 1858, 8vo. Charles Dickens, vol. ii., pp. 303-334. Jerrold, Blanchard.--The Best of All Good Company. Edited by Blanchard Jerrold. Pt. 1., A Day with Charles Dickens. London, 1871, 8vo. Reprinted in 1872, 8 vo. Johnson, Charles Plumptre.--Hints to Collectors of original editions of the works of Charles Dickens. By Charles Plumptre Johnson. London, 1885, 8vo. Johnson, Joseph.--Clever Boys of our Time, and how they became famous men. Edinburgh [1878], 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 40-63. Jones, Charles H.--Appleton's New Handy-volume Series. A short life of Charles Dickens, etc. By Charles H. Jones. New York, 1880, 8vo. Joubert, André.--André Joubert. Charles Dickens, sa vie et ses oeuvres. Paris, 1872, 8vo. Kent, Charles.--The Charles Dickens Dinner. An authentic record of the public banquet given to Mr Charles Dickens ... prior to his departure for the United States. [With a preface signed C.K. _i.e._, Charles Kent.] London, 1867, 8vo. Kent, Charles.--Charles Dickens as a Reader. By Charles Kent. London, 1872, 8vo. Kitton, Fred. G.--"Phiz" (Hablôt Knight Browne.) A Memoir. Including a selection from his Correspondence and Notes on his principal works. By Fred. G. Kitton. With a portrait and numerous illustrations. London, 1882, 8vo. An account is given of the relationship that existed between Dickens and Phiz. ----Dickensiana. A Bibliography of the literature relating to Charles Dickens and his writings. Compiled by Fred. G. Kitton. London, 1880, 8vo. Langton, Robert.--Charles Dickens and Rochester, etc. By Robert Langton. London, 1886, 8vo. Langton, Robert.--The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens, etc. By Robert Langton. Manchester, 1883, 8vo. L'Estrange, A.G.--History of English Humour, etc. By the Rev. A.G. L'Estrange. 2 vols. London, 1878, 8vo. Chapter 18 of vol. ii. is devoted to Dickens. Lynch, Judge.--Judge Lynch (of America), his two letters to Charles Dickens (of England) upon the subject of the Court of Chancery. London, 1859, 8vo. McCarthy, Justin.--A History of Our Own Times. A new edition. 4 vols. London, 1882, 8vo. Dickens and Thackeray, vol. ii., pp. 255-259. McKenzie, Charles H.--The Religious Sentiments of C.D., collected from his writings. By Charles H. McKenzie. Newcastle, 1884, 8vo. Mackenzie, R. Shelton.--Life of Charles Dickens, etc. By R. Shelton Mackenzie. Philadelphia [1870], 8vo. Macrae, David.--Home and Abroad; Sketches and Gleanings. By David Macrae. Glasgow, 1871, 8vo. Carlyle and Dickens, pp. 122-128. Masson, David.--British Novelists and their styles: being a critical sketch of the history of British prose fiction. By David Masson. Cambridge, 1859, 8vo. Dickens and Thackeray, pp. 233-253. Mateaux, C.L.--Brave Lives and Noble. By Miss C.L. Mateaux. London, 1883, 8vo. The Boyhood of Dickens, pp. 313-320. Mézières, L.--Histoire Critique de la Littérature Anglaise, etc. Seconde édition. 3 tom. Paris, 1841, 8vo. Dickens, Le Club Pickwick, tom. iii., pp. 469-496. Nicholson, Renton.--Nicholson's Sketches of Celebrated Characters. London [1856], 8vo. Charles Dickens. By Renton Nicholson, p. 11. Nicoll, Henry J.--Landmarks of English Literature. By Henry J. Nicoll. London, 1883, 8vo. Dickens noticed, pp. 378-385. Notes and Queries. General Index to Notes and Queries. Five Series. London, 1856-80, 4to. Numerous references to C.D. Parley.--Parley's Penny Library. London, [1841], 18mo. Charles Dickens, with a portrait, vol. i. ----Peter Parley's Annual for 1871, etc. London [1871], 8vo. Charles Dickens as Boy and Man, pp. 320-335. Parton, James.--Illustrious Men and their achievements; or, the people's book of biography. New York [1882], 8vo. Charles Dickens as a Citizen, pp. 831-841. ----Some noted Princes, Authors, and Statesmen of our time. By Canon Farrar, James T. Fields, Archibald Forbes, etc. Edited by James Parton. New York [1886], 4to. Dickens with his children, by Mamie Dickens, pp. 30-47, illustrated; Recollections of Dickens, by James T. Fields, pp. 48-51. Payn, James.--The Youth and Middle Age of Charles Dickens. By James Payn. Edinburgh, 1883, 8vo. Reprinted from _Chambers's Journal_, January 1872, February 1873, March 1874. ----Some literary recollections. By James Payn. London, 1884, 8vo. Chapter vi., First meeting with Dickens. Reprinted from _The Cornhill Magazine_. Pemberton, T. Edgar.--Dickens's London; or, London in the works of Charles Dickens. By T. Edgar Pemberton. London, 1876, 8vo. Perkins, F.B.--Charles Dickens: a sketch of his life and works. By F.B. Perkins. New York, 1870, 12mo. Pierce, Gilbert A.--The Dickens Dictionary. A key to the characters and principal incidents in the tales of Charles Dickens. By Gilbert A. Pierce. Illustrated. Boston [U.S.], 1872, 12mo. ----Another edition. London, 1878, 8vo. Poe, Edgar A.--The Literati: some honest opinions about autorial merits and demerits, etc. By Edgar A. Poe. New York, 1850, 8vo. Notice of "Barnaby Rudge," pp. 464-482. ----The works of E.A. Poe. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1875, 8vo. Vol. 3, Marginalia, Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop," and Dickens and Bulwer, pp. 373-375. Powell, Thomas.--The Living Authors of England. By Thos. Powell. New York, 1849, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 153-178. ----Pictures of the Living Authors of Britain. By Thos. Powell. London, 1851, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 88-115. Pryde, David.--The Genius and Writings of Charles Dickens. By David Pryde. Edinburgh, 1869, 8vo. Reeve, Lovell A.--Portraits of men of eminence in literature, science, and art, with biographical memoirs. [Vols. iii.-vi. by E. Walford]. 6 vols. London, 1863-67, 8vo. Vol. iv., Charles Dickens, pp. 93-99. Richardson, David Lester.--Literary Recreations, etc. By David Lester Richardson. London, 1852, 8vo. Dickens's "David Copperfield," and Thackeray's "Pendennis," pp. 238-243. Rimmer, Alfred.--About England with Dickens. By Alfred Rimmer. With fifty-eight illustrations. London, 1883, 8vo. Sala, Geo. A.--Charles Dickens. [An Essay.] London [1870], 8vo. Santvoord, C. Van.--Discourses on special occasions, and miscellaneous papers. By C. Van Santvoord. New York, 1856, 8vo. Charles Dickens and his philosophy, pp. 333-359. Schmidt, Julian.--Charles Dickens. Eine charakteristik. Leipzig 1852, 8vo. Seymour, Mrs.--An account of the Origin of the "Pickwick Papers." By Mrs. Seymour, etc. London, n.d. Shepard, William.--The Literary Life. Edited by William Shepard. Pen Pictures of Modern Authors. New York, 1882, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 236-293. Shepherd, Richard Herne.--The Bibliography of Dickens. A bibliographical list, arranged in chronological order, of the published writings in prose and verse of Charles Dickens. From 1834 to 1880. Manchester, [1880], 8vo. Spedding, James.--Reviews and Discussions, literary, political, and historical. By James Spedding. London, 1879, 8vo. Dickens's "American Notes," pp. 240-276. Reprinted from the _Edinburgh Review_, Jan. 1843. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn.--Sermon preached in Westminster Abbey, ... the Sunday following the funeral of Dickens. London, 1870, 8vo. Stoddard, Richard Henry.--Bric-a-Brac Series. Anecdote Biographies of Thackeray and Dickens. Edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. New York, 1874, 8vo. Taine, H.--Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. Par H. Taine. 4 tom. Paris, 1864, 8vo. Le Roman--Dickens, tom. iv., pp. 3-69. ----History of English Literature. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1874, 8vo. The Novel--Dickens. Vol. iv., pp. 115-164. Taylor, Theodore.--Charles Dickens: the story of his life. New York, n.d., 8vo. Thackeray, William Makepeace.--Early and late papers hitherto uncollected. Boston, 1867, 8vo. Dickens in France (a description of a performance of Nicholas Nickleby in Paris), pp. 95-121. Appeared originally in _Fraser's Magazine_, March 1842. Thomson, David Croal.--Life and Labours of Hablôt Knight Browne, "Phiz." By David Croal Thomson. With one hundred and thirty illustrations, etc. London, 1884, 8vo. Contains a series of illustrations to Dickens, printed from the original plates and blocks. Timbs, John.--Anecdote Lives of the later wits and humourists. By John Timbs. 2 vols. London, 1874, 8vo. Vol. ii., pp. 201-255, relate to Dickens. Times, The.--A second series of Essays from _The Times_. London, 1854, 8vo. Dickens and Thackeray, pp. 320-338. ----Eminent Persons: biographies reprinted from the _Times_, 1870-79. London, 1880, 8vo. Mr. Charles Dickens--Leading Article, June 10, 1870; Obituary notice, June 11, 1870, pp. 8-12. Tooley, Mrs. G.W.--Lives, Great and Simple. London, 1884, 8vo. Charles Dickens, pp. 183-197. Ward, Adolphus W.--Charles Dickens. A lecture by Professor Ward. [_Science Lectures_, series 2.] Manchester, 1871, 8vo. ----Dickens. By Adolphus William Ward. [_English Men of Letters_ Series.] London, 1882, 8vo. Watkins, William.--Charles Dickens, with anecdotes and recollections of his life. Written and compiled by William Watkins. London [1870], 8vo. Watt, James Crabb.--Great Novelists. Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Lytton. By James Crabb Watt. Edinburgh, 1880, 8vo. ----Another Edition. London [1885], 8vo. Weizmann, Louis.--Dickens und Daudet in deutscher Uebersetzung. Von Louis Weizmann. Berlin, 1880, 8vo. Weller, Sam.--On the Origin of Sam Weller, and the real cause of the success of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, etc. London, 1883, 8vo. Welsh, Alfred H.--Development of English Literature and Language. 2 vols. Chicago, 1882, 8vo. Dickens, vol. ii., pp. 438-454. World.--The World's Great Men: a Gallery of over a hundred portraits and biographies, etc. London [1880], 8vo. Charles Dickens, with portrait, pp. 125-128. Yates, Edmund.--Edmund Yates: his recollections and experiences. 2 vols. London, 1884, 8vo. A Dickens Chapter, vol. ii., pp. 91-128. DRAMATIC. Plays founded on Dickens's Works. Yankee Notes for English Circulation: a farce, in one act. By E. Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. 46. The Battle of Life: a drama, in three acts. By Edward Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. 57. The drama founded on the Christmas Annual of Charles Dickens, called The Battle of Life: dramatized by Albert Smith. In three acts and in verse. London (1846), 12mo. La Bataille de la Vie. Pièce en trois actes, etc. Par M.M. Mélesville et André de Goy. Paris, 1853, 8vo. Bleak House; or, Poor "Jo:" a drama, in four acts. Adapted from Dickens's "Bleak House," by George Lander. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 388.) London, n.d., 12mo. Lady Dedlock's Secret: a drama, in four acts. Founded on an episode in Dickens's "Bleak House." By J. Palgrave Simpson. London, n.d., 8vo. "Move On;" or, Jo, the Outcast: a drama, in three acts. Adapted by James Mortimer. Not published. Poor "Jo:" a drama, in three acts. Adapted by Mr. Terry Hurst. Not published. Jo: a drama, in three acts. Adapted from Charles Dickens's "Bleak House." By J.P. Burnett. Not published. The Chimes: a Goblin Story. A drama, in four quarters, dramatised by Mark Lemon and Gilbert A. A'Beckett. London, n.d., 8vo. Webster's "Acting National Drama," vol. 11. A Christmas Carol. By C.Z. Barnett. London (1872), 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. 94. The Cricket on the Hearth; or, a fairy tale of home: a drama, in three acts. Dramatized by Albert Smith (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 394). London, n.d., 12mo. The Cricket on the Hearth: a fairy tale of home. By Edward Stirling. (_Webster's "Acting National Drama_," vol. 12.) London, n.d., 12mo. The Cricket on the Hearth: a fairy tale of home in three chirps. By W.T. Townsend. London (1860), 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. 44. Dot: a Fairy Tale of Home. A drama, in three acts. From the "Cricket on the Hearth," by Charles Dickens. Dramatized by Dion Boucicault. Not published. David Copperfield: a drama, in three acts. Adapted from Dickens's popular work of the same name, by John Brougham. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 474.) London, n.d., 12mo. Little Em'ly: a drama, in four acts. Adapted from Dickens's "David Copperfield," by Andrew Halliday. New York, n.d., 8vo. Dombey and Son: in three acts. Dramatized by John Brougham. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 373.) London, n.d., 12mo. Captain Cuttle: a comic drama, in one act. By John Brougham. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 572.) London, n.d., 12mo. Great Expectations: a Drama, in three acts, and a prologue. Adapted by W.S. Gilbert. Not published. The Haunted Man: a drama. Adapted from Charles Dickens's Christmas Story. Not published. Tom Pinch: a Domestic Comedy, in three acts. Adapted by Messrs. Dilley and Clifton, from "Martin Chuzzlewit." London, n.d. Martin Chuzzlewit: or, his Wills and his Ways, etc. A drama, in three acts. By Thomas Higgie. London [1872], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition, Supplement, vol. i. Tartüffe Junior, von H.C.L. Klein. [Play in five acts, after "The Life of Martin Chuzzlewit."] Neuwied, 1864, 16mo. Martin Chuzzlewit: a drama, in three acts. By E. Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. 50. Mrs. Harris! a farce, in one act. By Edward Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. 57. Mrs. Gamp's Party. (Adapted from "Martin Chuzzlewit.") In one act. Manchester, n.d., 12mo. Mrs. Sarah Gamp's Tea and Turn Out: a Bozzian Sketch, in one act. By B. Webster. London, n.d., 12mo. Acting National Drama, vol. xiii. Martin Chuzzlewit: a drama, in three acts. By Charles Webb. London, n.d., 12mo. Master Humphrey's Clock: a domestic drama, in two acts. By F.F. Cooper. (_Duncombe's British Theatre_, vol. xli.) London, n.d., 12mo. The Old Curiosity Shop: a drama, in four acts. Adapted by Mr. Charles Dickens, Jun., from his father's novel. Not published. Mrs. Jarley's Far-Famed Collection of Wax-Works, as arranged by G.B. Bartlett. In two parts. London [1873], 8vo. The Old Curiosity Shop: a drama, in four acts. Adapted from Charles Dickens's novel of the same name, by George Lander. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 398.) London, n.d., 12mo. The Old Curiosity Shop: a drama, in two acts. By E. Stirling. London [1868], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. lxxvii. Barnaby Rudge: a drama, in three acts. Adapted from Dickens's work by Thomas Higgie. London [1854], 12mo. Barnaby Rudge: a domestic drama, in three acts. By Charles Selby and Charles Melville. London [1875], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. ci. A Message from the Sea: a drama, in four acts. Founded on Charles Dickens's tale of that name. By John Brougham. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 459.) London, n.d., 12mo. A Message from the Sea: a drama, in three acts. By Charles Dickens and William Wilkie Collins. London, 1861, 8vo. The Infant Phenomenon, etc.: a domestic piece, in one act. Being an episode in the adventures of "Nicholas Nickleby." Adapted by H. Horncastle. London, n.d., 8vo. Nicholas Nickleby: a drama, in four acts. Adapted by H. Simms. (_Dicks' Standard Plays_, No. 469.) London, n.d., 12mo. The Fortunes of Smike, or a Sequel to Nicholas Nickleby: a drama, in two acts. By Edward Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Webster's "Acting National Drama," vol. ix. Nicholas Nickleby: a farce, in two acts. By Edward Stirling. London, n.d., 12mo. Webster's "Acting National Drama," vol. v. Nicholas Nickleby: an Episodic Sketch, in three tableaux, based upon an incident in "Nicholas Nickleby." Not published. L'Abîme, drame en cinq actes. [Founded on the story of "No Thoroughfare."] Paris, 1868, 8vo. No Thorough Fare: a drama, in five acts, and a prologue. By Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. New York, n.d., 8vo. Identity; or, No Thoroughfare. A drama, in four acts. By Louis Lequêl. New York, n.d., 8vo. Bumble's Courtship. From Dickens's "Oliver Twist." A Comic Interlude, in one act. By Frank E. Emson. London [1874], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. xcix. Oliver Twist: a serio-comic burletta, in three acts. By George Almar. London, n.d., 12mo. Webster's "Acting National Drama," vol. vi. Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress: a domestic drama, in three acts. By C.Z. Barnett. London, n.d., 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. xxix. Oliver Twist: a serio-comic burletta, in four acts. By George Almar. New York, n.d. Sam Weller, or the Pickwickians: a drama, in three acts, etc. By W.T. Moncrieff. London, 1837, 8vo. The Pickwickians, or the Peregrinations of Sam Weller: a Comic Drama, in three acts. Arranged from Moncrieff's adaptation of Charles Dickens's work, by T.H. Lacy. London [1837], 8vo. The Great Pickwick Case, arranged as a comic operetta. The words of the songs by Robert Pollitt; the music arranged by Thomas Rawson. Manchester [1884], 8vo. The Pickwick Club ... a burletta, in three acts. By E. Stirling. London [1837], 12mo. Duncombe's British Theatre, vol. xxvi. The Peregrinations of Pickwick: an acting drama. By William Leman Rede. London, 1837, 8vo. Bardell _versus_ Pickwick; versified and diversified. Songs and choruses. Words by T.H. Gem; music by Frank Spinney. Leamington [1881], 12mo. The Dead Witness; or Sin and its Shadow. A drama, in three acts, founded on "The Widow's Story" of The Seven Poor Travellers, by Charles Dickens. The drama written by Wybert Reeve. London [1874], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. xcix. A Tale of Two Cities: a drama, in two acts, etc. By Tom Taylor. London [1860], 12mo. Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays, vol. xlv. The Tale of Two Cities: a drama, in three acts. Adapted by H.J. Rivers, etc. London [1862], 12mo. MUSICAL. All the Year Round; or, The Search for Happiness. A song. Words by W.S. Passmore; music by John J. Blockley. London [1860], fol. Yankee Notes for English Circulation; or, Boz in A-Merry-Key. Comic song, by J. Briton. Music by Loder. [1842.] Dolly Varden: a Ballad. Words and music by Cotsford Dick. London [1880], fol. Maypole Hugh: a song. Words by Charles Bradberry; music by George E. Fox. London [1881], fol. The Chimes Quadrille. (_Musical Bouquet_, No. 5.) London, n.d., fol. The Cricket on the Hearth: Quadrille. By F. Lancelott. (_Musical Bouquet_, No. 57.) London [1846], fol. What are the Wild Waves Saying? A vocal duet. Written by Joseph E. Carpenter; music by Stephen Glover. London [1850], fol. A Voice from the Waves: a vocal duet, in answer to the above. Words by R. Ryan; music by Stephen Glover. London [1850], fol. Little Dorrit's Vigil. A Song. Written by John Barnes; composed by George Linley. London [1856], fol. Who Passes by this Road so Late? Blandois' song, from "Little Dorrit." Words by Charles Dickens. Music by H.R.S. Dalton, London [1857], fol. My Dear Old Home: a ballad. Words by J.E. Carpenter. Music by John J. Blockley. [Founded on Dickens's "Little Dorrit."] London [1857], fol. Floating Away: a ballad. Words by J.E. Carpenter. Music by John J. Blockley. [Founded on a passage in "Little Dorrit."] London [1857], fol. The Nicholas Nickleby Quadrilles and Nickleby Galop. By Sydney Vernon. London, 1839, fol. Little Nell: a melody. Composed by George Linley, and arranged for the pianoforte by Carlo Zotti. London [1865], fol. The Ivy Green: a song. Music by Mrs. Henry Dale. London [1840], fol. The song is introduced in chap. vi. of the "Pickwick Papers" as a recitation by the clergyman of Dingley Dell. The Ivy Green: a song. Music by A. De Belfour. London [1843], fol. The Ivy Green. Arranged for the pianoforte by Ricardo Linter. London [1844], fol. The Ivy Green: a song. Music by Henry Russell. London [1844], fol. The Ivy Green. Music by W. Lovell Phillips. London [1844], fol. Gabriel Grub. Cantata Seria Buffa. Adapted from "Pickwick." Music by George E. Fox. London [1881], 4to. Sam Weller's Adventures: a song of the Pickwickians. (Reprinted in _The Life and Times of James Catnach_, by Charles Hindley. London, 1878). The Tuggs's at Ramsgate. Versified from "Boz's" sketch. The Child and the Old Man: song in the Opera, "The Village Coquettes." The words by Charles Dickens, the music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. Love is not a feeling to pass away: a ballad in "The Village Coquettes." Words by C. Dickens. Music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. My Fair Home: air in "The Village Coquettes." Words by Charles Dickens. Music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. No light bound of stag or timid hare. Quintett in the Opera, "The Village Coquettes." The words by Charles Dickens, the music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. Some Folks who have grown old. Song in "The Village Coquettes." Words by Charles Dickens. Music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. There's a Charm in Spring: a ballad in "The Village Coquettes." Words by Charles Dickens. Music by John Hullah. London [1836], fol. The Cares of the Day: song with chorus, in the Opera, "The Village Coquettes." The words by Charles Dickens, composed by John Hullah. London [1858], fol. In Rich and Lowly Station shine. Duet in the Opera, "The Village Coquettes." The words by Charles Dickens, the music by John Hullah. London [1858], fol. Autumn Leaves: air from the Opera, "The Village Coquettes." The words by Charles Dickens, the music by John Hullah. London [1871], fol. PARODIES AND IMITATIONS. Change for the American Notes; or, Letters from London to New York. By an American Lady. London, 1843, 8vo. Current American Notes. By "Buz." London, n.d. The Battle of London Life; or, "Boz" and his Secretary. By Morna. With a portrait and illustrations by G.A. Sala. London, 1849. The Battle Won by the Wind. By Ch----s D*ck*ns, etc. Published in _The Puppet Showman's Album_. Illustrated by Gavarni. Bleak House: a Narrative of Real Life, etc. London, 1856. Characteristic Sketches of Young Gentlemen. By Quiz Junior. With woodcut illustrations. London [1838]. A Child's History of Germany. By H.W. Friedlaender. A Pendant to a Child's History of England, by Charles Dickens. Celle, 1861, 8vo. "Christmas Eve" with the Spirits ... with some further tidings of the Lives of Scrooge and Tiny Tim. London, 1870. A Christmas Carol: being a few scattered staves, from a familiar composition, re-arranged for performance, by a distinguished Musical Amateur, during the holiday season, at H--rw--rd--n. With four illustrations by Harry Furness. _Punch_, Dec. 1885, pp. 304, 305. Micawber Redivivus; or, How to Make a Fortune as a Middleman, etc. By Jonathan Coalfield [_i.e._ W. Graham Simpson?]. [London, 1883], 8vo. [Transcriber's Note: The subtitle of this volume should be "How He Made a Fortune as a Middleman, etc."] Dombey and Son Finished: a burlesque. Illustrated by Albert Smith. _The Man in the Moon_, 1848, pp. 59-67. Dombey and Daughter: a moral fiction. By Renton Nicholson. London [1850], 8vo. Dolby and Father, by Buz. [A satire on C. Dickens.] New York, 1868, 12mo. Hard Times (Refinished). By Charles Diggens. Parody on _Hard Times_, published in "Our Miscellany." Edited by H. Yates and R.B. Brough, pp. 142-156. The Haunted Man. By CH--R--S D--C--K--N--S. New York, 1870, 12mo. _Condensed Novels, and Other Papers._ By F. Bret Harte. Mister Humfries' Clock. "Bos," Maker. A miscellany of striking interest. Illustrated. London, 1840, 8vo. Master Timothy's Bookcase; or, the Magic Lanthorn of the World. By G.W.M. Reynolds. London, 1842. A Girl at a Railway Junction's Reply [to an article in the Christmas number for 1866 of "All the Year Round," entitled "Mugby Junction."] London [1867], 8vo. The Cloven Foot: being an adaptation of the English novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" to American scenes, characters, customs, and nomenclature. By Orpheus C. Kerr. New York, 1870, 8vo. The Mystery of Mr. E. Drood. By Orpheus C. Kerr. _The Piccadilly Annual_, Dec. 1870, pp. 59-62. The Mystery of Mr. E. Drood. An adaptation. By O.C. Kerr. London [1871], 8vo. John Jasper's Secret: a sequel to Charles Dickens's unfinished novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Philadelphia [1871]. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Part the Second, by the Spirit Pen of Charles Dickens, etc. Brattleboro' [U.S.], 1873. A Great Mystery Solved: being a sequel to "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." By Gillian Vase. 3 vols. London, 1878, 8vo. Nicholas Nickelbery. Containing the adventures of the family of Nickelbery. By "Bos." With forty-three woodcut illustrations. London [1838], 8vo. Scenes from the Life of Nickleby Married ... being a sequel to the "Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby." Edited by "Guess." With twenty-one etched illustrations by "Quiz." London, 1840. No Thoroughfare: the Book in Eight Acts, etc. _The Mask._ February 1868, pp. 14-18. No Throughfare. [A Parody upon Dickens's "No Thoroughfare."] By C----s D----s, B. Brownjohn, and Domby. Second Edition. Boston [U.S.], 1868, 8vo. The Life and Adventures of Oliver Twiss, the Workhouse Boy. [Edited by Bos.] London [1839]. 8vo. Posthumous Papers of the Cadger's Club. With sixteen engravings. London [1837]. Posthumous Papers of the Wonderful Discovery Club, formerly of Camden Town. Established by Sir Peter Patron. Edited by "Poz." With eleven illustrations, designed by Squib, and engraved by Point. London, 1838. The Post-humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club. Edited by "Bos." Illustrated with 120 engravings. 2 vols. London [1839], 8vo. There are, in fact, 332 engravings. Pickwick in America! detailing all the ... adventures of taat [_sic._] individual in the United States. Edited by "Bos." Illustrated with forty-six engravings. London [1840], 8vo. Pickwick Abroad; or, the Tour in France. By George W.M. Reynolds. Illustrated with forty-one steel plates, by Alfred Crowquill, etc. London, 1839, 8vo. --Another edition. London, 1864, 8vo. Lloyd's Pickwickian Songster, etc. London [1837]. Pickwick Songster. With portraits, designed by C.J. Grant, of "Mr. Pickwick as Apollo," and "Sam Weller brushing boots." London, n.d. The Pickwick Comic Almanac for 1838. With twelve comic woodcut illustrations, drawn by R. Cruikshank. London, 1838. Mr. Pickwick's Collection of Songs. Illustrated. London [1837], 12mo. Pickwick Treasury of Wit; or, Joe Miller's Jest Book. Dublin, 1840. Sam Weller's Favourite Song Book. London [1837], 12mo. Sam Weller's Pickwick Jest-Book, etc. With illustrations by Cruikshank, and portraits of all the "Pickwick" characters. London, 1837. The Sam Weller Scrap Sheet. With forty woodcut portraits of "all the Pickwick Characters," etc. London, n.d. Facts and Figures from Italy. Addressed during the last two winters to C. Dickens, being an appendix to his "Pictures." By Don Jeremy Savonarola. London, 1847, 8vo. The Sketch Book. By "Bos." Containing tales, sketches, etc. With seventeen woodcut illustrations. London [1837], 8vo. POETICAL. Impromptu. By C.J. Davids. _Bentley's Miscellany_, No. 2, March 1837, p. 297. Poetical Epistle from Father Prout to "Boz." A poem of seven verses. _Bentley's Miscellany_, Jan. 1838, p. 71. A Tribute to Charles Dickens. A poem of twelve lines. By the Hon. Mrs. Norton. _English Bijou Almanac_, 1842. To Charles Dickens on his proposed voyage to America, 1842. By Thomas Hood. _New Monthly Magazine_, Feb. 1842, p. 217. To Charles Dickens, on his "Christmas Carol." A poem of fifteen lines. By W.W.G. _Illuminated Magazine_, Feb. 1844, p. 189. To Charles Dickens on his "Oliver Twist." By T.N. Talfourd. _Tragedies; to which are added a few Sonnets and Verses_, by T.N. Talfourd, p. 244. London, 1844. 16mo. The American's Apostrophe to "Boz." A poem. _The Book of Ballads_ [_by T. Martin and W.E. Aytoun_]. _Edited by Bon Gaultier_, pp. 81-86. London, 1845, 16mo. To Charles Dickens. A Sonnet. _Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine_, March 1845, p. 250. To Charles Dickens. A Dedicatory Sonnet. By John Forster. _The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith_, by John Forster. London, 1848, 8vo. To Charles Dickens. A Dedicatory Poem of two verses. By James Ballantine. _Poems_, by James Ballantine. Edinburgh, 1856, 8vo. Au Revoir. A poem of four verses. _Judy_, Oct. 30, 1867, p. 37. A Welcome to Dickens. A poem of eighty-four lines. By F.J. Parmentier. _Harper's Weekly_, Nov. 30, 1867, pp. 757, 758. Impromptu. A Humorous Verse of six lines. _Life of Charles Dickens_, by R. Shelton Mackenzie, p. 97. Philadelphia [1870], 8vo. Charles Dickens reading to his daughters on the Lawn at Gadshill. A poem of eight verses. By the Editor (C.W.). _Life_, Dec. 8, 1880, p. 1005. Memorial Verses, June 9, 1870. Fifteen verses. By F.T.P. _Daily News_, June 18, 1870, p. 5. Ode to the Memory of Charles Dickens. By A.B. Hume. _A Christmas Memorial of Charles Dickens_, by A.B. Hume. London, 1870, 8vo. Charles Dickens. Born February 7, 1812. Died June 9, 1870. A memorial poem of fourteen verses. _Punch_, June 18, 1870, p. 244. In Memoriam. June 9, 1870. A poem of six verses. _Graphic_, June 18, 1870, p. 678. Charles Dickens. Born 7th February 1812; died 9th June 1870. A memorial sonnet. _Judy_, June 22, 1870, p. 91. In Memory. A poem of ten verses, with an illustration by F. Barnard. _Fun_, June 25, 1870, p. 157. In Memoriam. A poem of seventy lines. By H.M.C. _Gentleman's Magazine_, July 1, 1870, p. 22. To His Memory. A poem of five verses. _Argosy_, August, 1870, p. 114. A Man of the Crowd to Charles Dickens. A poem of a hundred-and-six lines. By E.J. Milliken. _Gentleman's Magazine_, August 1870, pp. 277-279. Dickens. A memorial poem of two verses. By O.C.K. (Orpheus C. Kerr). _Piccadilly Annual_, Dec. 1870, p. 72. In Memoriam. Charles Dickens. _Obiit_, June 9, 1870. Five verses. _Charles Dickens, with anecdotes and recollections of his life._ By William Watkins. London [1870], 8vo. Dickens in Camp. A poem of ten verses. By F. Bret Harte. _Poems_, by F. Bret Harte. Boston, 1871, 12mo. Dickens at Gadshill. A poem of eighteen verses. By C.K. (Charles Kent). _Athenæum_, June 3, 1871, p. 687. Death of Charles Dickens. A poem of seventeen verses. _The Circe and other Poems_, by John Appleby, 1873. At Gad's Hill. An obituary poem of fourteen verses. By Richard Henry Stoddard. _Bric-a-Brac Series. Anecdote Biographies of Thackeray and Dickens_, p. 296. By Richard Henry Stoddard. New York, 1874, 8vo. At the Grave of Dickens. A sonnet. By Clelia R. Crespi. _Detroit Free Press_, July 1884. In Memoriam: Charles Dickens. Died June 9, 1870. A sonnet. By C.K. _Graphic_, June 6, 1885, p. 586. MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES. Charles Dickens. _Revue Britannique_, Avril 1843, pp. 340-376.--_People's Journal_ (portrait), by William Howitt, 1846, vol. 1, pp. 8-12.--_Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Arthur Dudley, March 1848, pp. 901-922--_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, April 1855, pp. 451-466; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, June 1855, pp. 200-214.--_Die Gartenlaube_ (portrait), 1856, pp. 73-75.--_Saturday Review_, May 1858, pp. 474, 475; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, July 1858, pp. 263-265--_Town Talk_, June 1858, p. 76.--_National Review_, vol. 7, 1858, pp. 458-486.--_Illustrated News of the World_, Supplement, Oct. 9, 1858.--_National Review_ (by W. Bagehot), Oct. 1858, pp. 458-486; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, 1858, pp. 643-659; and in "Literary Studies by the late Walter Bagehot."--_Critic_ (portrait), 1858, pp. 534-537.--_Harper's New Monthly Magazine_, 1862, pp. 376-380.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 1, 1866, p. 79; vol. 9, p. 225.--_Harper's Weekly_ (portrait), 1867, p. 757; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, 1867, pp. 688-690.--_North American Review_, by C.E. Norton, April, 1868, pp. 671-672.--_Court Suburb Magazine_, by B., Dec. 1868, pp. 142, 143.--_Contemporary Review_, by George Stott, Feb. 1869, pp. 203-225; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, March 1869, pp. 707-720.--_L'Illustration_ (portrait), by Jules Claretie, 18 Juin, 1870--_Le Monde Illustré_ (portrait), by Léo de Bernard, 25 Juin, 1870.--_Annual Register_, 1870, pp. 151-153.--_Illustrated London News_ (portrait), June, 1870, p. 639.--_Spectator_, 1870, pp. 716, 717.--_Ueber Land und Meer_ (portrait), No. 42, 1870, p. 19--_Fraser's Magazine_, July 1870, pp. 130-134.--_Putnam's Monthly Magazine_, by P. Godwin, vol. 16, 1870, p. 231.--_St. Paul's Magazine_, by Anthony Trollope, July 1870, pp. 370-375; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, Sept. 1870, pp. 297-301.--_Illustrated Magazine_, by "Meteor," 1870, pp. 164, 165.--_Illustrated Review_, with portrait, vol. 1, 1870, pp. 1-4.--_Hours at Home_, by D.G. Mitchell, 1870, pp. 363-368.--_Gentleman's Magazine_ (portrait), July 1870, pp. 21, 22.--_Graphic_ (portrait), 1870, p. 687.--_Nation_ (by J.R. Dennett), 1870, pp. 380, 381.--_Temple Bar_, by Alfred Austin, July 1870, pp. 554-562.--_St. James's Magazine_ (portrait), 1870, pp. 696-699.--_Victoria Magazine_, by Edward Roscoe, vol. 15, 1870, pp. 357-363.--_Art Journal_, July, 1870, p. 224.--_Leisure Hour_ (portrait), by Miss E.J. Whately, Nov. 1870, pp. 728-732.--_New Eclectic_, by B. Jerrold, vol. 7, 1871, p. 332.--_London Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1871, pp. 265-286.--_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, June 1871, pp. 673-695; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, Sept. 1871, pp. 257, 274; _Littell's Living Age_, July 1871, pp. 29-44.--_Gentleman's Magazine_, by George Barnett Smith, 1874, pp. 301-316.--_Social Notes_, by Moy Thomas (portrait), etc., Oct. 1879, pp. 114-117.--_Fortnightly Review_, by Mowbray Morris, Dec. 1882, pp. 762-779. ----About England with. _Scribner's Monthly_, by B.E. Martin [illustrated], Aug. 1880, pp. 494-503. ----Amateur Theatricals. _Macmillan's Magazine_, Jan. 1871, pp. 206-215; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, March 1871, pp. 322-330.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 10, p. 70. ----As "Captain Bobadil" (portrait). _Every Saturday_, vol. 11, p. 295. ----American Notes. _Fraser's Magazine_, Nov. 1842, pp. 617-629.--_Monthly Review_, Nov. 1842, pp. 392-403.--_Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, Nov. 1842, pp. 348, 349, 356, 357.--_New Monthly Magazine_ (by Thomas Hood), Nov. 1842, pp. 396-406.--_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, by Q.Q.Q., Dec. 1842, pp. 783-801.--_Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, vol. 9, 1842, pp. 737-746.--_Christian Remembrancer_, Dec. 1842, pp. 679, 680.--_Edinburgh Review_, by James Spedding, Jan. 1843, pp. 497-522. Reprinted in "Reviews and Discussions," etc., by James Spedding; Note to the above, Feb. 1843, p. 301.--_Eclectic Museum_, vol. 1, 1843, p. 230.--_North American Review_, Jan. 1843, pp. 212-237.--_Quarterly Review_, March 1843, pp. 502-522.--_Westminster Review_, by H., 1843, pp. 146-160.--_New Englander_, by J.P. Thompson, 1843, pp. 64-84.--_Southern Literary Messenger_, 1843, pp. 58-62.--_Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, April 1877, pp. 462-466. ----And Benjamin Disraeli. _Tailor and Cutter_, July 1870, pp. 401-402. ----The Styles of Disraeli and. _Galaxy_, by Richard Grant White, Aug. 1870, pp. 253-263. ----And Thackeray. _Littell's Living Age_, vol. 21, p. 224.--_Dublin Review_, April 1871, pp. 315-350. ----And Bulwer. A Contrast. _Temple Bar_, Jan. 1875, pp. 168-180. ----Living Literati; Sir E. Bulwer Lytton and Mr. Charles Dickens. _Eginton's Literary Railway Miscellany_, 1854, pp. 19-25, 174-188. ----And Chauncy Hare Townshend. _London Society_, Aug. 1870, pp. 157-159. ----And his Critics. _The Train_, by John Hollingshead, Aug. 1857, pp. 76-79; reprinted in "Essays and Miscellanies" by John Hollingshead. ----And his Debt of Honour. _Land We Love_, vol. 5, p. 414. ----And his Illustrators. With nine illustrations. _Christmas Bookseller_, 1879, pp. 15-21. ----And his Letters. Part 1. By Mary Cowden Clarke. _Gentleman's Magazine_, Dec. 1876, pp. 708-713. ----And his Works. _Fraser's Magazine_, April 1840, pp. 381-400. ----Another Gossip about.--_Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine_, vol. 12, 1872, pp. 78-83. ----As an Author and Reader. _Welcome_, with portrait, vol. 12, 1885, pp. 166-170. ----As a Dramatic Critic. _Longman's Magazine_, by Dutton Cook, May 1883, pp. 29-42. ----As a Dramatist and a Poet. _Gentleman's Magazine_, by Percy Fitzgerald, 1878, pp. 61-77. ----As a Humaniser. _St. James's Magazine_, by Arnold Quamoclit, 1879, pp. 281-291. ----As a Journalist. _Journalist, A Monthly Phonographic Magazine_, by Charles Kent, in Pitman's Shorthand, vol. 1, Dec. 1879, pp. 17-25. Done into English--_Time_, July 1881, pp. 361-374. ----As a Literary Exemplar. _University Quarterly_, by F.A. Walker, vol. 1, p. 91, etc. ----As a Moralist. _Old and New_, April 1871, pp. 480-483. ----As a Moral Teacher. _Monthly Religious Magazine_, by J.H. Morison, vol. 44, p. 129, etc. ----As a Reader. _The Critic_, 1858, pp. 537, 538. ----Eine Vorlesung von Charles Dickens. _Die Gartenlaube_, by Corvin (portrait), 1861, pp. 612-614. ----Readings by Charles Dickens. _Land We Love_, by T.C. De Leon, vol. 4, p. 421, etc. ----Farewell Reading in London. _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, pp. 242, 260. ----Last Readings. _Graphic_, February 1870, p. 250. ----New Reading. Illustrated. _Tinsley's Magazine_, by Edmund Yates, 1869, pp. 60-64. ----At Home. _Every Saturday_, vol. 2, p. 396. _Gentleman's Magazine_ (by Percy Fitzgerald), November 1881, pp. 562-583.--_Cornhill Magazine_ (by his eldest daughter), 1885, pp. 32-51. ----At Gadshill Place. _Life_, 1880, pp. 1005, 1006. ----Biographical Sketch of. _The Eclectic Magazine_ (portrait), 1864, pp. 115-117. ----Bleak House. _Rambler_, vol. 1. N.S., 1854, pp. 41-45. ----Boyhood of. _Thistle_, by J.D.D., vol. 1, pp. 51-55. ----Childhood of. (Illustrated.) _Manchester Quarterly_, by Robert L. Langton, vol. 1, 1882, pp. 178-180. ----Early Life of. _Every Saturday_, vol. 12, p. 60. ----Boz. _The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine_, by J.T., July 1870, pp. 14-16. ----The "Boz" Ball. _Historical Magazine_, by P.M., pp. 110-113 and 291-294. ----"Boz" in Paris.--_Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine_, vol. 10, pp. 186-189. ----Boz _versus_ Dickens. _Parker's London Magazine_, February 1845, pp. 122-128. ----Grip the Raven, in "Barnaby Rudge." _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, 542, 742, 749. ----The Battle of Life. _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, 1847, pp. 55-60. ----Bleak House. _Spectator_ (by George Brimley), Sep. 1853, pp. 923-925. Reprinted in "Essays by the late George Brimley."--_United States Magazine and Democratic Review_, Sep. 1853, pp. 276-280.--_North American Review_ (by W. Sargent,) Oct. 1853, pp. 409-439.--_Eclectic Review_, Dec. 1853, pp. 665-679. ----Characters in. _Putnam's Monthly Magazine_ (by C.F. Riggs), 1853, pp. 558-562. ----Characters from Dickens [Illustrated]. _Jack and Jill_, 1885-6. ----The Chimes. _Dublin Review_, Dec. 1844, pp. 560-568.--_Eclectic Review_, 1845, pp. 70-88.--_Edinburgh Review_, Jan. 1845, pp. 181-189; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, May 1845, pp. 33-38. ----Christmas Books. _Union Magazine_, 1846, pp. 223-236. ----A Christmas Carol. _Dublin Review_, 1843, pp. 510-529.--_Fraser's Magazine_, by M.A.T., Feb. 1844, pp. 167-169.--_Hood's Magazine_, 1844, pp. 68-75.--_Knickerbocker_, by S.G. Clark, March, 1844, pp. 276-281. ----Controversy. _American Publishers' Circular_, June 1867, pp. 68-69. ----Cricket on the Hearth. _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, 1846, pp. 44-48.--_Oxford and Cambridge Review_, vol. 2, 1846, pp. 43-50. ----David Copperfield. _Fraser's Magazine_, Dec. 1850, pp. 698-710; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, Feb. 1851, pp. 247-258. ----David Copperfield and Arthur Pendennis. _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1851, pp. 499-504.--_Prospective Review_, July 1851, pp. 157-191.--_North British Review_ (by David Masson), May 1851, pp. 57-89; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, July 1851, pp. 97-110. ----Schools; or, Teachers and Taught. _Family Herald_, July 1849, pp. 204-205. ----The Death of. Articles reprinted from the _Saturday Review_, the _Spectator_, the _Daily News_, and the _Times_. _Eclectic Magazine_, Aug. 1870, pp. 217-224.--_Saturday Review_, June 11, 1870, pp. 760, 761.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 9, 1870, p. 450. ----Devonshire House Theatricals. _Bentley's Miscellany_, 1851, pp. 660-667. ----Dictionary of (Pierce and Wheeler's). _Every Saturday_, vol. 11, p. 258. ----Dogs; or, the Landseer of Fiction. [Illustrated.] _London Society_, July 1863, pp. 48-61. ----Dombey and Son. _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, Oct. 1846, pp. 269, 270.--_North British Review_, May 1847, pp. 110-136.--_Rambler_, vol. 1, 1848, pp. 64, 66.--_Sun_ (by Charles Kent), April 13, 1848. ---- ----Humourists: Dickens and Thackeray (Dombey and Son and Vanity Fair). _English Review_, Dec. 1848, pp. 257-275; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, March 1849, pp. 370-379. ---- ----The Wooden Midshipman (of "Dombey and Son"). (By Ashby Sterry.) _All the Year Round_, Oct. 1881, pp. 173-179. ----English Magazines on, 1870. _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 482. ----Farewell Banquet to, 1867. _Every Saturday_, vol. 4, p. 705. ----A Few Words on. _Town and Country_, by A.J.H. Crespi, N.S., vol. 1, 1873, pp. 265-273. ----Footprints of. _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_, by M.D. Conway. 1870, pp. 610-616. ----Forster's Life of (Vol. 1). _Examiner_, by Herbert Wilson, Dec. 1871, pp. 1217, 1218; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, Feb. 1872, pp. 237-240.--_Chambers's Journal_ (by James Payn), Jan. 1872, pp. 17-21 and 40-45.--_Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1872, pp. 125-147.--_Nation_, 1872, pp. 42, 43.--_Fortnightly Review_, by J. Herbert Stack, Jan. 1872, pp. 117-120.--_Fraser's Magazine_, Jan. 1872, pp. 105-113; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, March 1872, pp. 277-284.--_Canadian Monthly_, Feb. 1872, pp. 179-182.--_Lakeside Monthly_, April 1872, pp. 336-340.--_Overland Monthly_, by George B. Merrill, May 1872, pp. 443-451. ----Forster's Life of (vol. 2). _Examiner_, Nov. 1872, pp. 1132, 1133.--_Nation_, 1873, pp. 28, 29.--_Chambers's Journal_ (by James Payn), Feb. 1873, pp. 74-79.--_Canadian Monthly_, Feb. 1873, pp. 171-173.--_Temple Bar_, May 1873, pp. 169-185. ----Forster's Life of (vol. 3). _Examiner_, 1874, pp. 161, 162.--_Nation_, 1874, pp. 175, 176.--_Chambers's Journal_ (by James Payn), March 1874, pp. 177-180.--_Canadian Monthly_, April 1874, pp. 364-366. ----Forster's Life of. _International Review_, May 1874, pp. 417-420.--_North American Review_, vol. 114, p. 413.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 14, p. 608.--_Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Léon Boucher, tom. 8, 1875, pp. 95-126.--_American Bibliopolist_, vol. 4, p. 125.--_Catholic World_, by J.R.G. Hassard, vol. 30, p. 692. ----Four months with. (1842.) _Atlantic Monthly_, by G.W. Putnam. 1870, pp. 476-482, 591-599. ----French Criticism of. _People's Journal_, vol. 5, p. 228. ----On the Genius of. _Knickerbocker_, by F.W. Shelton, May 1852, pp. 421-431.--_Putnam's Monthly Magazine_, by G.F. Talbot, 1855, pp. 263-272.--_Atlantic Monthly_, by E.P. Whipple, May 1867, pp. 546-554.--_Spectator_, 1870, pp. 749-751.--_New Eclectic_, vol. 7, 1871, p. 257 ----The "Good Genie" of Fiction. _St. Paul's Magazine_, by Robert Buchanan, 1872, pp. 130-148; reprinted in "A Poet's Sketch-Book," etc., by Robert Buchanan, 1883. ----Great Expectations. _Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, Sep. 1877, pp. 327-333.--_Eclectic Review_, Oct. 1861, pp. 458-477.--_Dublin University Magazine_, Dec. 1861, pp. 685-693. ----Bygone Celebrities: I. The Guild of Literature and Art. _Gentleman's Magazine_, by R.H. Horne, Feb. 1871, pp. 247-262. ----Hard Times. _Westminster Review_, Oct. 1854, pp. 604-608.--_Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, March 1877, pp. 353-358. ----The Home of. _Hours at Home_, by John D. Sherwood, July 1867, pp. 239-242.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 228. ----In and Out of London with. _Scribner's Monthly_, by B.E. Martin. [Illustrated.] May 1881, pp. 32-45. ----In London with. _Scribner's Monthly_, by B.E. Martin. (Illustrated). March 1881, pp. 649-664. ----In the Editor's Chair. _Gentleman's Magazine_, by Percy Fitzgerald, June 1881, pp. 725-742. ----In Memoriam. By A.H. (Arthur Helps). _Macmillan's Magazine_, July 1870, pp. 236-240.--_Gentleman's Magazine_, by Blanchard Jerrold, July 1870, pp. 228-241; reprinted, with additions, as "A Day with Charles Dickens," in the "Best of all Good Company," by Blanchard Jerrold, 1872. ----In New York (by J.R. Dennett). _Nation_, 1867, pp. 482, 483. ----In Poet's Corner. _Illustrated London News_, June 1870, pp. 652 and 662, 663. ----In Relation to Christmas. _Graphic_ Christmas Number, 1870, p, 19. ----In Relation to Criticism. _Fortnightly Review_, by George Henry Lewes, 1872, pp. 141-154; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, 1872, pp. 445-453; _Every Saturday_, vol. 12., p. 246, etc. ----A Lost Work of (Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular). _The Pen; a Journal of Literature_, by Richard Herne Shepherd, October 1880, pp. 311, 312. ----Least known writings of. _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 471. ----Letters of. _Fortnightly Review_, by William Minto, Dec. 1879, pp. 845-862; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, 1880, pp. 3-13; _Eclectic Magazine_, 1880, pp. 165-175.--_Nation_, by W.C. Brownell, December 1879, pp. 388-390.--_Literary World_, December 1879, pp. 369-371.--_Scribner's Monthly_, Jan. 1880, pp. 470, 471.--_Appleton's Journal of Literature_, 1880, pp. 72-81.--_Contemporary Review_, by Matthew Browne, 1880, pp. 77-85.--_North American Review_, by Eugene L. Didier, March 1880, pp. 302-306.--_Westminster Review_, April 1880, pp. 423-448; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, June 1880, pp. 707-720.--_Dublin Review_, by Helen Atteridge, April 1880, pp. 409-438.--_Month_, by the Rev. G. Macleod, May 1880, pp. 81-97.--_International Review_, by J.S. Morse, Jnn., vol. 8, p. 271. ----Life and Letters of. _Catholic World_, vol. 30, pp. 692-701. ----Little Boys and Great Men. _Little Folks_, by C.L.M. Nos. 64, 65. ----Little Dorrit. _Edinburgh Review_, July 1857, pp. 124-156.--_Leader_, June 1857, pp. 616, 617.--_Sun_, by Charles Kent, June 26, 1857. ----Lives of the Illustrious. _The Biographical Magazine_, by J.H.F., vol. 2, pp. 276-297. ----Manuscripts, _Chambers's Journal_, Nov. 1877, pp. 710-712; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, 1878, pp. 80-82; _Littell's Living Age_, 1878, pp. 252-254.--_Potter's American Monthly_, vol. 10, p. 156. ----Life and adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. _Monthly Review_, Sept. 1844, pp. 137-146.--_National Review_, July 1861, pp. 134-150. ----Master Humphrey's Clock. _Monthly Review_, May 1840, pp. 35-43.--_Christian Examiner_, March 1842, pp. 1-19. ----Memories of Charles Dickens. _Atlantic Monthly_, by J.T. Fields, Aug. 1870, pp. 235-245; same article, _Piccadilly Annual_, 1870, pp. 66-72. ----Bygone Celebrities: II. Mr. Nightingale's Diary. _Gentleman's Magazine_, by R.H. Horne. May 1871, pp. 660-672. ----Modern Novelists. _Westminster Review_, Oct. 1864, pp. 414-441; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, 1865, pp. 42-59. ----Modern Novels. Including the "Pickwick Papers," "Nicholas Nickleby," and "Master Humphrey's Clock." _Christian Remembrancer_, Dec. 1842, pp. 581-596. ----Moral Services to Literature. _Spectator_, April 1869, pp. 474, 475; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, July 1869, pp. 103-106. ----Mystery of Edwin Drood. _Graphic_, April 1870, p. 438.--_Every Saturday_, 1870, vol. 9, pp. 291, 594.--_Spectator_, 1870, pp. 1176, 1177.--_Old and New_, (by George B. Woods), Nov. 1870, pp. 530-533.--_Southern Magazine_, 1873, vol. 14, p. 219.--_Belgravia_ (by Thomas Foster), June 1878, pp. 453-473. ----How "Edwin Drood" was Illustrated. [Illustrated.] _Century Magazine_, by Alice Meynell, Feb. 1884, pp. 522-528. ----A Quasi-Scientific Inquiry into "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Illustrated. _Knowledge_, by Thomas Foster, Sep. 12, Nov. 14, 1884. ----Suggestions for a Conclusion to "Edwin Drood." _Cornhill Magazine_, March 1884, pp. 308-317. ----Edwin Drood. Concluded by Charles Dickens, through a Medium. _Transatlantic_, vol. 2, 1873, pp. 173-183. ----In France. (Acting of Nicholas Nickleby in Paris.) _Fraser's Magazine_, March 1842, pp. 342-352. ----Nomenclature. _Belgravia_, by W.F. Peacock, 1873, pp. 267-276, 393-402. ----Notes and Correspondence. _Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine_, vol. 11, 1871, pp. 91-95. ----Novel Reading: The works of. _Nineteenth Century_, by Anthony Trollope, 1879, pp. 24-43. ----Novels and Novelists. _North American Review_, by E.P. Whipple, October 1849, pp. 383-407; reprinted in "Literature and Life," etc., by E.P. Whipple. ----Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge. _Christian Remembrancer_, vol. 4, 1842, p. 581.--_Pall Mall Gazette_, January 1, 1884, pp. 11, 12. ----The Old Lady of Fetter Lane (Old Curiosity Shop). (Illustrated.) _Pall Mall Gazette_, January 5, 1884, p. ----Oliver Twist. _Southern Literary Messenger_, May 1837, pp. 323-325.--_London and Westminster Review_, July 1837, pp. 194-215.--_Dublin University Magazine_, December 1838, pp. 699-723.--_Quarterly Review_, June 1839, pp. 83-102.--_Christian Examiner_, by J.S.D., Nov. 1839, pp. 161-174.--_Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, Oct. 1876, pp. 474-479. ----On Bells. _Belgravia_, by George Delamere Cowan, Jan. 1876, pp. 380-387. ----Our Letter. _St. Nicholas_, by M.F. Armstrong, 1877, pp. 438-441. ----Our Mutual Friend. _Eclectic Review_, Nov. 1865, pp. 455-476.--_Nation_, Dec. 1865, pp. 786, 787.--_Westminster Review_, April 1866, pp. 582-585. ----Our Mutual Friend in Manuscript. _Scribner's Monthly Magazine_, by Kate Field, August 1874, pp. 472-475. ----Pickwick Club. _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1836, pp. 787, 788; Sept. 1837, pp. 525-532.--_Littell's Museum of Foreign Literature_, vol. 32, 1837, p. 195.--_Monthly Review_, Feb. 1837, pp. 153-163.--_Eclectic Review_, April 1837, pp. 339-355.--_Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, April 1837, pp. 109, 110.--_London and Westminster Review_, July 1837, pp. 194-215.--_Quarterly Review_, Oct. 1837, pp. 484-518.--_Belgravia_, by W.S. (W. Sawyer), July 1870, pp. 33-36.--_Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, Aug. 1876, pp. 219-224. ---- ----Mr. Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. [Illustrated.] _Scribner's Monthly_, by B.E. Martin, Sept. 1880, pp. 641-656. ---- ----From Faust to Mr. Pickwick. _Contemporary Review_, by Matthew Browne, July 1880, pp. 162-176. ---- ----German Translation of the "Pickwick Papers." _Dublin Review_, Feb. 1840, pp. 160-188. ---- ----The Origin of the Pickwick Papers. _Society_, by R.H. Shepherd, Oct. 4, 1884, pp. 18-20. ---- ----The Portrait of Mr. Pickwick. _Belgravia_, by George Augustus Sala, Aug. 1870, pp. 165-171. ----Pictures from Italy. _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, vol. 13, 1846, pp. 461-466.--_Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, 1846, pp. 389-391.--_Dublin Review_, Sept. 1846, pp. 184-201.--_Sun_, by Charles Kent, March 1846. ----Poetic Element in the Style of. _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 811. ----The Pressmen of, and Thackeray. _Graphic_, by T.H. North, 1881, p. 116. ----Reception of. _United States Magazine and Democratic Review_ (portrait), April 1842, pp. 315-320. ----Reminiscences of. _Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine_, by E.E.C., vol. 10, 1871, pp. 336-344. ----Remonstrance with. _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_, April 1857, pp. 490-503; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, May 1857, pp. 480-492. ----Sale of the Effects of. _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 557.--_Chambers's Journal_, 1870, pp. 522-505. ----Seasonable Words about. _The Overland Monthly_, by N.S. Dodge, 1871, pp. 72-82. ----Secularistic Teaching. _Secular Chronicle_, by Harriet T. Law (portrait). Dec. 1877, pp. 289-291. ----Shadow on Life of. _Atlantic Monthly_, by Edwin P. Whipple, Aug. 1877, pp. 227-233. ----Sketches by Boz. _Monthly Review_, March 1836, pp. 350-357; 1837, pp. 153-163.--_Mirror_, April 1836, pp. 249-250--_London and Westminster Review_, July 1837, pp. 194-215.--_Quarterly Review_, Oct. 1837, pp. 484-518. ---- ----The Boarding House (Sketches by Boz). _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_, April 1836, pp. 83, 84. ---- ----Watkins Tottle and other Sketches (Sketches by Boz). _Southern Literary Messenger_, 1836, pp. 457-460. ----Son talent et ses oeuvres. _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by H. Taine. Feb. 1856, pp. 618-647. ----Studien über Dickens und den Humor. _Westermann's Jahrbuch der Illustrirten Deutschen Monatshefte_, Von Julian Schmidt (portrait), April-July 1870. ----Studies of English Authors. No. V. Charles Dickens. In eleven chapters. _Literary World_, by Peter Bayne, March 21 to May 30, 1879. ----Study. _Graphic_ Christmas Number, by C.C. 1870. ----A Tale of Two Cities. _Saturday Review_, Dec. 1859, pp. 741-743; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, Feb. 1860, pp. 366-369. _Sun_, by Charles Kent, Aug. 11, 1859. ----Tales. _Edinburgh Review_, Oct. 1838, pp. 75-97. ----The Tendency of Works of. _Argosy_, by A.D., 1885, pp. 282-292. ----The Tension in. _Every Saturday_, Dec. 1872, pp. 678-679. ----A Tramp with. Through London by Night with the Great Novelist. _Detroit Free Press_, April 7, 1883. ----Tulrumble, and Oliver Twist. _Southern Literary Messenger_, May 1837, pp. 323-325. ----The "Two Green Leaves" (portrait). _Graphic_, March 26, 1870, pp. 388-390. ----Unpublished Letters. _Times_, Oct. 27, 1883. ----Satire on. _Blackwood's Magazine_, by S. Warren, vol. 60, 1846, pp. 590-605; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, vol. 10, 1847, p. 65. ----Use of the Bible. _Temple Bar_, September 1869, pp. 225-234; same article, _Appleton's Journal_, Oct. 16, 23, 1869, pp. 265-267, 294, 295; _Every Saturday_, vol. 8, p. 411. ----Verse. _Spectator_, 1877, pp. 1651-1653; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, 1878, pp. 237-241. ----Visit to Charles Dickens by Hans Christian Andersen. _Bentley's Miscellany_, 1860, pp. 181-185; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, 1860, pp. 692-695, _Eclectic Magazine_, 1864, pp. 110-114. ---- ----Andersen's. _Temple Bar_, December 1870, pp. 27-46; same article, _Eclectic Magazine_, 1871, pp. 183-196, _Every Saturday_, vol. 9, p. 874, etc.; Appendix to _Pictures of Travels in Sweden_, etc. ---- ----Pilgrimage. [Visit to Gadshill.] _Lippincott's Magazine_, by Barton Hill. Sept. 1870, pp. 288-293. ----Voice of Christmas Past. (Illustrated.) _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_, by Mrs. Z.B. Buddington, January 1871, pp. 187-200. ----With the Newsvendors.--_Every Saturday_, vol. 9. p. 318. ----Works. _London University Magazine_, by J.S. (James Spedding), vol. 1, 1842, pp. 378-398.--_North British Review_, by J. Cleghorn, May 1845, pp. 65-87; same article, _Littell's Living Age_, June 1845, pp. 601-610.--_National Quarterly Review_, by H. Dennison, 1860, vol. 1, p. 91.--_British Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1862, pp. 135-159.--_Scottish Review_, Dec. 1883, pp. 125-147. VI.--CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. Sketches by Boz 1836-37 Sunday under Three Heads 1836 The Village Coquettes 1836 The Strange Gentleman 1837 Pickwick Papers 1837 Oliver Twist 1838 Sketches of Young Gentlemen 1838 Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi 1838 Nicholas Nickleby 1839 Sketches of Young Couples 1840 Master Humphrey's Clock (The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge) 1840-1 American Notes 1842 Christmas Carol 1843 Martin Chuzzlewit 1844 The Chimes 1845 Cricket on the Hearth 1846 Pictures from Italy 1846 Battle of Life 1846 Dombey and Son 1848 Haunted Man 1848 David Copperfield 1850 Mr. Nightingale's Diary 1851 Child's History of England 1852-4 Bleak House 1853 Hard Times 1854 Little Dorrit 1857 Hunted Down 1859 Tale of Two Cities 1859 Great Expectations 1861 Uncommercial Traveller 1861 Our Mutual Friend 1865 Mystery of Edwin Drood 1870 _Printed by_ WALTER SCOTT, _Felling, Newcastle-on-Tyne_ GREAT WRITERS. A NEW SERIES OF CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES. EDITED BY PROFESSOR ERIC S. 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If the future numbers are as good as the first, a great success may be anticipated."--_The Standard._ Vol. II. is "LIFE OF COLERIDGE." BY HALL CAINE. Vol. III. will be "LIFE OF DICKENS." BY FRANK T. MARZIALS. [Ready Feb. 20. Vol. IV. will be "LIFE OF ROSSETTI." BY JOSEPH KNIGHT. [Ready March 20. The following Gentlemen have agreed to write the volumes forming the First Year's Issue:--WILLIAM ROSSETTI, HALL CAINE, RICHARD GARNETT, FRANK T. MARZIALS, WILLIAM SHARP, JOSEPH KNIGHT, AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, Professor D'ARCY THOMPSON, R.B. HALDANE, M.P., AUSTIN DOBSON, Colonel F. GRANT, and THE EDITOR. Library Edition of "Great Writers."--A Limited Issue of all the Volumes in this Series will be published, printed on large paper of extra quality, in handsome binding, Demy 8vo, price 2s. 6d. per volume. * * * * * LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row. The Canterbury Poets. _In_ SHILLING _Monthly Volumes, Square 8vo. 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17797	----	Transcribed from the 1871 Richard Bentley and Son edition by Les Bowler. A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN. [Jane Austen: Jane.jpg] [Title Page: title.jpg] PREFACE. THE MEMOIR of my AUNT, JANE AUSTEN, has been received with more favour than I had ventured to expect. The notices taken of it in the periodical press, as well as letters addressed to me by many with whom I am not personally acquainted, show that an unabated interest is still taken in every particular that can be told about her. I am thus encouraged not only to offer a Second Edition of the Memoir, but also to enlarge it with some additional matter which I might have scrupled to intrude on the public if they had not thus seemed to call for it. In the present Edition, the narrative is somewhat enlarged, and a few more letters are added; with a short specimen of her childish stories. The cancelled chapter of 'Persuasion' is given, in compliance with wishes both publicly and privately expressed. A fragment of a story entitled 'The Watsons' is printed; and extracts are given from a novel which she had begun a few months before her death; but the chief addition is a short tale never before published, called 'Lady Susan.' {0a} I regret that the little which I have been able to add could not appear in my First Edition; as much of it was either unknown to me, or not at my command, when I first published; and I hope that I may claim some indulgent allowance for the difficulty of recovering little facts and feelings which had been merged half a century deep in oblivion. NOVEMBER 17, 1870. CONTENTS. Chapter I. _Introductory Remarks--Birth of Jane Austen--Her Family Connections--Their Influence on her Writings_ Chapter II. _Description of Steventon--Life at Steventon--Changes of Habits and Customs in the last Century_ Chapter III. _Early Compositions--Friends at Ashe--A very Old Letter--Lines on the Death of Mrs. Lefroy--Observations on Jane Austen's Letter-writing--Letters_ Chapter IV. _Removal from Steventon--Residence at Bath and at Southampton--Settling at Chawton_ Chapter V. _Description of Jane Austen's person, character, and tastes_ Chapter VI. _Habits of Composition resumed after a long interval--First publication--The interest taken by the Author in the success of her Works_ Chapter VII. _Seclusion from the literary world--Notice from the Prince Regent--Correspondence with Mr. Clarke--Suggestions to alter her style of writing_ Chapter VIII. _Slow growth of her fame--Ill success of first attempts at publication--Two Reviews of her works contrasted_ Chapter IX. _Opinions expressed by eminent persons--Opinions of others of less eminence--Opinion of American readers_ Chapter X. _Observations on the Novels_ Chapter XI. _Declining health of Jane Austen--Elasticity of her spirits--Her resignation and humility--Her death_ Chapter XII. _The cancelled Chapter of 'Persuasion_' Chapter XIII. _The last work_ Chapter XIV. _Postscript_ 'He knew of no one but himself who was inclined to the work. This is no uncommon motive. A man sees something to be done, knows of no one who will do it but himself, and so is driven to the enterprise.' HELPS' _Life of Columbus_, ch. i. CHAPTER I. _Introductory Remarks--Birth of Jane Austen--Her Family Connections--Their Influence on her Writings_. More than half a century has passed away since I, the youngest of the mourners, {1} attended the funeral of my dear aunt Jane in Winchester Cathedral; and now, in my old age, I am asked whether my memory will serve to rescue from oblivion any events of her life or any traits of her character to satisfy the enquiries of a generation of readers who have been born since she died. Of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course. Even her fame may be said to have been posthumous: it did not attain to any vigorous life till she had ceased to exist. Her talents did not introduce her to the notice of other writers, or connect her with the literary world, or in any degree pierce through the obscurity of her domestic retirement. I have therefore scarcely any materials for a detailed life of my aunt; but I have a distinct recollection of her person and character; and perhaps many may take an interest in a delineation, if any such can be drawn, of that prolific mind whence sprung the Dashwoods and Bennets, the Bertrams and Woodhouses, the Thorpes and Musgroves, who have been admitted as familiar guests to the firesides of so many families, and are known there as individually and intimately as if they were living neighbours. Many may care to know whether the moral rectitude, the correct taste, and the warm affections with which she invested her ideal characters, were really existing in the native source whence those ideas flowed, and were actually exhibited by her in the various relations of life. I can indeed bear witness that there was scarcely a charm in her most delightful characters that was not a true reflection of her own sweet temper and loving heart. I was young when we lost her; but the impressions made on the young are deep, and though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not forgotten that 'Aunt Jane' was the delight of all her nephews and nieces. We did not think of her as being clever, still less as being famous; but we valued her as one always kind, sympathising, and amusing. To all this I am a living witness, but whether I can sketch out such a faint outline of this excellence as shall be perceptible to others may be reasonably doubted. Aided, however, by a few survivors {3} who knew her, I will not refuse to make the attempt. I am the more inclined to undertake the task from a conviction that, however little I may have to tell, no one else is left who could tell so much of her. Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at the Parsonage House of Steventon in Hampshire. Her father, the Rev. George Austen, was of a family long established in the neighbourhood of Tenterden and Sevenoaks in Kent. I believe that early in the seventeenth century they were clothiers. Hasted, in his history of Kent, says: 'The clothing business was exercised by persons who possessed most of the landed property in the Weald, insomuch that almost all the ancient families of these parts, now of large estates and genteel rank in life, and some of them ennobled by titles, are sprung from ancestors who have used this great staple manufacture, now almost unknown here.' In his list of these families Hasted places the Austens, and he adds that these clothiers 'were usually called the Gray Coats of Kent; and were a body so numerous and united that at county elections whoever had their vote and interest was almost certain of being elected.' The family still retains a badge of this origin; for their livery is of that peculiar mixture of light blue and white called Kentish gray, which forms the facings of the Kentish militia. Mr. George Austen had lost both his parents before he was nine years old. He inherited no property from them; but was happy in having a kind uncle, Mr. Francis Austen, a successful lawyer at Tunbridge, the ancestor of the Austens of Kippington, who, though he had children of his own, yet made liberal provision for his orphan nephew. The boy received a good education at Tunbridge School, whence he obtained a scholarship, and subsequently a fellowship, at St. John's College, Oxford. In 1764 he came into possession of the two adjoining Rectories of Deane and Steventon in Hampshire; the former purchased for him by his generous uncle Francis, the latter given by his cousin Mr. Knight. This was no very gross case of plurality, according to the ideas of that time, for the two villages were little more than a mile apart, and their united populations scarcely amounted to three hundred. In the same year he married Cassandra, youngest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Leigh, of the family of Leighs of Warwickshire, who, having been a fellow of All Souls, held the College living of Harpsden, near Henley-upon-Thames. Mr. Thomas Leigh was a younger brother of Dr. Theophilus Leigh, a personage well known at Oxford in his day, and his day was not a short one, for he lived to be ninety, and held the Mastership of Balliol College for above half a century. He was a man more famous for his sayings than his doings, overflowing with puns and witticisms and sharp retorts; but his most serious joke was his practical one of living much longer than had been expected or intended. He was a fellow of Corpus, and the story is that the Balliol men, unable to agree in electing one of their own number to the Mastership, chose him, partly under the idea that he was in weak health and likely soon to cause another vacancy. It was afterwards said that his long incumbency had been a judgment on the Society for having elected an _Out-College Man_. {5} I imagine that the front of Balliol towards Broad Street which has recently been pulled down must have been built, or at least restored, while he was Master, for the Leigh arms were placed under the cornice at the corner nearest to Trinity gates. The beautiful building lately erected has destroyed this record, and thus 'monuments themselves memorials need.' His fame for witty and agreeable conversation extended beyond the bounds of the University. Mrs. Thrale, in a letter to Dr. Johnson, writes thus: 'Are you acquainted with Dr. Leigh, {6} the Master of Balliol College, and are you not delighted with his gaiety of manners and youthful vivacity, now that he is eighty-six years of age? I never heard a more perfect or excellent pun than his, when some one told him how, in a late dispute among the Privy Councillors, the Lord Chancellor struck the table with such violence that he split it. "No, no, no," replied the Master; "I can hardly persuade myself that he _split_ the _table_, though I believe he _divided_ the _Board_."' Some of his sayings of course survive in family tradition. He was once calling on a gentleman notorious for never opening a book, who took him into a room overlooking the Bath Road, which was then a great thoroughfare for travellers of every class, saying rather pompously, 'This, Doctor, I call my study.' The Doctor, glancing his eye round the room, in which no books were to be seen, replied, 'And very well named too, sir, for you know Pope tells us, "The proper _study_ of mankind is _Man_."' When my father went to Oxford he was honoured with an invitation to dine with this dignified cousin. Being a raw undergraduate, unaccustomed to the habits of the University, he was about to take off his gown, as if it were a great coat, when the old man, then considerably turned eighty, said, with a grim smile, 'Young man, you need not strip: we are not going to fight.' This humour remained in him so strongly to the last that he might almost have supplied Pope with another instance of 'the ruling passion strong in death,' for only three days before he expired, being told that an old acquaintance was lately married, having recovered from a long illness by eating eggs, and that the wits said that he had been egged on to matrimony, he immediately trumped the joke, saying, 'Then may the yoke sit easy on him.' I do not know from what common ancestor the Master of Balliol and his great-niece Jane Austen, with some others of the family, may have derived the keen sense of humour which they certainly possessed. Mr. and Mrs. George Austen resided first at Deane, but removed in 1771 to Steventon, which was their residence for about thirty years. They commenced their married life with the charge of a little child, a son of the celebrated Warren Hastings, who had been committed to the care of Mr. Austen before his marriage, probably through the influence of his sister, Mrs. Hancock, whose husband at that time held some office under Hastings in India. Mr. Gleig, in his 'Life of Hastings,' says that his son George, the offspring of his first marriage, was sent to England in 1761 for his education, but that he had never been able to ascertain to whom this precious charge was entrusted, nor what became of him. I am able to state, from family tradition, that he died young, of what was then called putrid sore throat; and that Mrs. Austen had become so much attached to him that she always declared that his death had been as great a grief to her as if he had been a child of her own. About this time, the grandfather of Mary Russell Mitford, Dr. Russell, was Rector of the adjoining parish of Ashe; so that the parents of two popular female writers must have been intimately acquainted with each other. As my subject carries me back about a hundred years, it will afford occasions for observing many changes gradually effected in the manners and habits of society, which I may think it worth while to mention. They may be little things, but time gives a certain importance even to trifles, as it imparts a peculiar flavour to wine. The most ordinary articles of domestic life are looked on with some interest, if they are brought to light after being long buried; and we feel a natural curiosity to know what was done and said by our forefathers, even though it may be nothing wiser or better than what we are daily doing or saying ourselves. Some of this generation may be little aware how many conveniences, now considered to be necessaries and matters of course, were unknown to their grandfathers and grandmothers. The lane between Deane and Steventon has long been as smooth as the best turnpike road; but when the family removed from the one residence to the other in 1771, it was a mere cart track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassable for a light carriage. Mrs. Austen, who was not then in strong health, performed the short journey on a feather-bed, placed upon some soft articles of furniture in the waggon which held their household goods. In those days it was not unusual to set men to work with shovel and pickaxe to fill up ruts and holes in roads seldom used by carriages, on such special occasions as a funeral or a wedding. Ignorance and coarseness of language also were still lingering even upon higher levels of society than might have been expected to retain such mists. About this time, a neighbouring squire, a man of many acres, referred the following difficulty to Mr. Austen's decision: 'You know all about these sort of things. Do tell us. Is Paris in France, or France in Paris? for my wife has been disputing with me about it.' The same gentleman, narrating some conversation which he had heard between the rector and his wife, represented the latter as beginning her reply to her husband with a round oath; and when his daughter called him to task, reminding him that Mrs. Austen never swore, he replied, 'Now, Betty, why do you pull me up for nothing? that's neither here nor there; you know very well that's only _my way of telling the story_.' Attention has lately been called by a celebrated writer to the inferiority of the clergy to the laity of England two centuries ago. The charge no doubt is true, if the rural clergy are to be compared with that higher section of country gentlemen who went into parliament, and mixed in London society, and took the lead in their several counties; but it might be found less true if they were to be compared, as in all fairness they ought to be, with that lower section with whom they usually associated. The smaller landed proprietors, who seldom went farther from home than their county town, from the squire with his thousand acres to the yeoman who cultivated his hereditary property of one or two hundred, then formed a numerous class--each the aristocrat of his own parish; and there was probably a greater difference in manners and refinement between this class and that immediately above them than could now be found between any two persons who rank as gentlemen. For in the progress of civilisation, though all orders may make some progress, yet it is most perceptible in the lower. It is a process of 'levelling up;' the rear rank 'dressing up,' as it were, close to the front rank. When Hamlet mentions, as something which he had 'for _three years taken_ note of,' that 'the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier,' it was probably intended by Shakspeare as a satire on his own times; but it expressed a principle which is working at all times in which society makes any progress. I believe that a century ago the improvement in most country parishes began with the clergy; and that in those days a rector who chanced to be a gentleman and a scholar found himself superior to his chief parishioners in information and manners, and became a sort of centre of refinement and politeness. Mr. Austen was a remarkably good-looking man, both in his youth and his old age. During his year of office at Oxford he had been called the 'handsome Proctor;' and at Bath, when more than seventy years old, he attracted observation by his fine features and abundance of snow-white hair. Being a good scholar he was able to prepare two of his sons for the University, and to direct the studies of his other children, whether sons or daughters, as well as to increase his income by taking pupils. In Mrs. Austen also was to be found the germ of much of the ability which was concentrated in Jane, but of which others of her children had a share. She united strong common sense with a lively imagination, and often expressed herself, both in writing and in conversation, with epigrammatic force and point. She lived, like many of her family, to an advanced age. During the last years of her life she endured continual pain, not only patiently but with characteristic cheerfulness. She once said to me, 'Ah, my dear, you find me just where you left me--on the sofa. I sometimes think that God Almighty must have forgotten me; but I dare say He will come for me in His own good time.' She died and was buried at Chawton, January 1827, aged eighty-eight. * * * * * Her own family were so much, and the rest of the world so little, to Jane Austen, that some brief mention of her brothers and sister is necessary in order to give any idea of the objects which principally occupied her thoughts and filled her heart, especially as some of them, from their characters or professions in life, may be supposed to have had more or less influence on her writings: though I feel some reluctance in bringing before public notice persons and circumstances essentially private. Her eldest brother James, my own father, had, when a very young man, at St. John's College, Oxford, been the originator and chief supporter of a periodical paper called 'The Loiterer,' written somewhat on the plan of the 'Spectator' and its successors, but nearly confined to subjects connected with the University. In after life he used to speak very slightingly of this early work, which he had the better right to do, as, whatever may have been the degree of their merits, the best papers had certainly been written by himself. He was well read in English literature, had a correct taste, and wrote readily and happily, both in prose and verse. He was more than ten years older than Jane, and had, I believe, a large share in directing her reading and forming her taste. Her second brother, Edward, had been a good deal separated from the rest of the family, as he was early adopted by his cousin, Mr. Knight, of Godmersham Park in Kent and Chawton House in Hampshire; and finally came into possession both of the property and the name. But though a good deal separated in childhood, they were much together in after life, and Jane gave a large share of her affections to him and his children. Mr. Knight was not only a very amiable man, kind and indulgent to all connected with him, but possessed also a spirit of fun and liveliness, which made him especially delightful to all young people. Her third brother, Henry, had great conversational powers, and inherited from his father an eager and sanguine disposition. He was a very entertaining companion, but had perhaps less steadiness of purpose, certainly less success in life, than his brothers. He became a clergyman when middle-aged; and an allusion to his sermons will be found in one of Jane's letters. At one time he resided in London, and was useful in transacting his sister's business with her publishers. Her two youngest brothers, Francis and Charles, were sailors during that glorious period of the British navy which comprises the close of the last and the beginning of the present century, when it was impossible for an officer to be almost always afloat, as these brothers were, without seeing service which, in these days, would be considered distinguished. Accordingly, they were continually engaged in actions of more or less importance, and sometimes gained promotion by their success. Both rose to the rank of Admiral, and carried out their flags to distant stations. Francis lived to attain the very summit of his profession, having died, in his ninety-third year, G.C.B. and Senior Admiral of the Fleet, in 1865. He possessed great firmness of character, with a strong sense of duty, whether due from himself to others, or from others to himself. He was consequently a strict disciplinarian; but, as he was a very religious man, it was remarked of him (for in those days, at least, it was remarkable) that he maintained this discipline without ever uttering an oath or permitting one in his presence. On one occasion, when ashore in a seaside town, he was spoken of as '_the_ officer who kneeled at church;' a custom which now happily would not be thought peculiar. Charles was generally serving in frigates or sloops; blockading harbours, driving the ships of the enemy ashore, boarding gun-boats, and frequently making small prizes. At one time he was absent from England on such services for seven years together. In later life he commanded the Bellerophon, at the bombardment of St. Jean d'Acre in 1840. In 1850 he went out in the Hastings, in command of the East India and China station, but on the breaking out of the Burmese war he transferred his flag to a steam sloop, for the purpose of getting up the shallow waters of the Irrawaddy, on board of which he died of cholera in 1852, in the seventy- fourth year of his age. His sweet temper and affectionate disposition, in which he resembled his sister Jane, had secured to him an unusual portion of attachment, not only from his own family, but from all the officers and common sailors who served under him. One who was with him at his death has left this record of him: 'Our good Admiral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease, and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.' The Order in Council of the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, expresses 'admiration of the staunch high spirit which, notwithstanding his age and previous sufferings, had led the Admiral to take his part in the trying service which has closed his career.' These two brothers have been dwelt on longer than the others because their honourable career accounts for Jane Austen's partiality for the Navy, as well as for the readiness and accuracy with which she wrote about it. She was always very careful not to meddle with matters which she did not thoroughly understand. She never touched upon politics, law, or medicine, subjects which some novel writers have ventured on rather too boldly, and have treated, perhaps, with more brilliancy than accuracy. But with ships and sailors she felt herself at home, or at least could always trust to a brotherly critic to keep her right. I believe that no flaw has ever been found in her seamanship either in 'Mansfield Park' or in 'Persuasion.' But dearest of all to the heart of Jane was her sister Cassandra, about three years her senior. Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane's side with the feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this feeling always remained; and even in the maturity of her powers, and in the enjoyment of increasing success, she would still speak of Cassandra as of one wiser and better than herself. In childhood, when the elder was sent to the school of a Mrs. Latournelle, in the Forbury at Reading, the younger went with her, not because she was thought old enough to profit much by the instruction there imparted, but because she would have been miserable without her sister; her mother observing that 'if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.' This attachment was never interrupted or weakened. They lived in the same home, and shared the same bed-room, till separated by death. They were not exactly alike. Cassandra's was the colder and calmer disposition; she was always prudent and well judging, but with less outward demonstration of feeling and less sunniness of temper than Jane possessed. It was remarked in her family that 'Cassandra had the _merit_ of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the _happiness_ of a temper that never required to be commanded.' When 'Sense and Sensibility' came out, some persons, who knew the family slightly, surmised that the two elder Miss Dashwoods were intended by the author for her sister and herself; but this could not be the case. Cassandra's character might indeed represent the '_sense_' of Elinor, but Jane's had little in common with the '_sensibility_' of Marianne. The young woman who, before the age of twenty, could so clearly discern the failings of Marianne Dashwood, could hardly have been subject to them herself. This was the small circle, continually enlarged, however, by the increasing families of four of her brothers, within which Jane Austen found her wholesome pleasures, duties, and interests, and beyond which she went very little into society during the last ten years of her life. There was so much that was agreeable and attractive in this family party that its members may be excused if they were inclined to live somewhat too exclusively within it. They might see in each other much to love and esteem, and something to admire. The family talk had abundance of spirit and vivacity, and was never troubled by disagreements even in little matters, for it was not their habit to dispute or argue with each other: above all, there was strong family affection and firm union, never to be broken but by death. It cannot be doubted that all this had its influence on the author in the construction of her stories, in which a family party usually supplies the narrow stage, while the interest is made to revolve round a few actors. It will be seen also that though her circle of society was small, yet she found in her neighbourhood persons of good taste and cultivated minds. Her acquaintance, in fact, constituted the very class from which she took her imaginary characters, ranging from the member of parliament, or large landed proprietor, to the young curate or younger midshipman of equally good family; and I think that the influence of these early associations may be traced in her writings, especially in two particulars. First, that she is entirely free from the vulgarity, which is so offensive in some novels, of dwelling on the outward appendages of wealth or rank, as if they were things to which the writer was unaccustomed; and, secondly, that she deals as little with very low as with very high stations in life. She does not go lower than the Miss Steeles, Mrs. Elton, and John Thorpe, people of bad taste and underbred manners, such as are actually found sometimes mingling with better society. She has nothing resembling the Brangtons, or Mr. Dubster and his friend Tom Hicks, with whom Madame D'Arblay loved to season her stories, and to produce striking contrasts to her well bred characters. [Steventon Parsonage: Parsonage.jpg] CHAPTER II. _Description of Steventon--Life at Steventon--Changes of Habits and Customs in the last Century_. As the first twenty-five years, more than half of the brief life of Jane Austen, were spent in the parsonage of Steventon, some description of that place ought to be given. Steventon is a small rural village upon the chalk hills of north Hants, situated in a winding valley about seven miles from Basingstoke. The South-Western railway crosses it by a short embankment, and, as it curves round, presents a good view of it on the left hand to those who are travelling down the line, about three miles before entering the tunnel under Popham Beacon. It may be known to some sportsmen, as lying in one of the best portions of the Vine Hunt. It is certainly not a picturesque country; it presents no grand or extensive views; but the features are small rather than plain. The surface continually swells and sinks, but the hills are not bold, nor the valleys deep; and though it is sufficiently well clothed with woods and hedgerows, yet the poverty of the soil in most places prevents the timber from attaining a large size. Still it has its beauties. The lanes wind along in a natural curve, continually fringed with irregular borders of native turf, and lead to pleasant nooks and corners. One who knew and loved it well very happily expressed its quiet charms, when he wrote True taste is not fastidious, nor rejects, Because they may not come within the rule Of composition pure and picturesque, Unnumbered simple scenes which fill the leaves Of Nature's sketch book. Of this somewhat tame country, Steventon, from the fall of the ground, and the abundance of its timber, is certainly one of the prettiest spots; yet one cannot be surprised that, when Jane's mother, a little before her marriage, was shown the scenery of her future home, she should have thought it unattractive, compared with the broad river, the rich valley, and the noble hills which she had been accustomed to behold at her native home near Henley-upon-Thames. The house itself stood in a shallow valley, surrounded by sloping meadows, well sprinkled with elm trees, at the end of a small village of cottages, each well provided with a garden, scattered about prettily on either side of the road. It was sufficiently commodious to hold pupils in addition to a growing family, and was in those times considered to be above the average of parsonages; but the rooms were finished with less elegance than would now be found in the most ordinary dwellings. No cornice marked the junction of wall and ceiling; while the beams which supported the upper floors projected into the rooms below in all their naked simplicity, covered only by a coat of paint or whitewash: accordingly it has since been considered unworthy of being the Rectory house of a family living, and about forty-five years ago it was pulled down for the purpose of erecting a new house in a far better situation on the opposite side of the valley. North of the house, the road from Deane to Popham Lane ran at a sufficient distance from the front to allow a carriage drive, through turf and trees. On the south side the ground rose gently, and was occupied by one of those old-fashioned gardens in which vegetables and flowers are combined, flanked and protected on the east by one of the thatched mud walls common in that country, and overshadowed by fine elms. Along the upper or southern side of this garden, ran a terrace of the finest turf, which must have been in the writer's thoughts when she described Catharine Morland's childish delight in 'rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.' But the chief beauty of Steventon consisted in its hedgerows. A hedgerow, in that country, does not mean a thin formal line of quickset, but an irregular border of copse-wood and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes, the first bird's-nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional seats, entitled 'The Wood Walk.' The other ran straight up the hill, under the name of 'The Church Walk,' because it led to the parish church, as well as to a fine old manor-house, of Henry VIII.'s time, occupied by a family named Digweed, who have for more than a century rented it, together with the chief farm in the parish. The church itself--I speak of it as it then was, before the improvements made by the present rector-- A little spireless fane, Just seen above the woody lane, might have appeared mean and uninteresting to an ordinary observer; but the adept in church architecture would have known that it must have stood there some seven centuries, and would have found beauty in the very narrow early English windows, as well as in the general proportions of its little chancel; while its solitary position, far from the hum of the village, and within sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the gray manor-house through its circling screen of sycamores, has in it something solemn and appropriate to the last resting-place of the silent dead. Sweet violets, both purple and white, grow in abundance beneath its south wall. One may imagine for how many centuries the ancestors of those little flowers have occupied that undisturbed, sunny nook, and may think how few living families can boast of as ancient a tenure of their land. Large elms protrude their rough branches; old hawthorns shed their annual blossoms over the graves; and the hollow yew-tree must be at least coeval with the church. [Steventon Manor House: ManorHouse.jpg] But whatever may be the beauties or defects of the surrounding scenery, this was the residence of Jane Austen for twenty-five years. This was the cradle of her genius. These were the first objects which inspired her young heart with a sense of the beauties of nature. In strolls along those wood-walks, thick-coming fancies rose in her mind, and gradually assumed the forms in which they came forth to the world. In that simple church she brought them all into subjection to the piety which ruled her in life, and supported her in death. The home at Steventon must have been, for many years, a pleasant and prosperous one. The family was unbroken by death, and seldom visited by sorrow. Their situation had some peculiar advantages beyond those of ordinary rectories. Steventon was a family living. Mr. Knight, the patron, was also proprietor of nearly the whole parish. He never resided there, and consequently the rector and his children came to be regarded in the neighbourhood as a kind of representatives of the family. They shared with the principal tenant the command of an excellent manor, and enjoyed, in this reflected way, some of the consideration usually awarded to landed proprietors. They were not rich, but, aided by Mr. Austen's powers of teaching, they had enough to afford a good education to their sons and daughters, to mix in the best society of the neighbourhood, and to exercise a liberal hospitality to their own relations and friends. A carriage and a pair of horses were kept. This might imply a higher style of living in our days than it did in theirs. There were then no assessed taxes. The carriage, once bought, entailed little further expense; and the horses probably, like Mr. Bennet's, were often employed on farm work. Moreover, it should be remembered that a pair of horses in those days were almost necessary, if ladies were to move about at all; for neither the condition of the roads nor the style of carriage-building admitted of any comfortable vehicle being drawn by a single horse. When one looks at the few specimens still remaining of coach-building in the last century, it strikes one that the chief object of the builders must have been to combine the greatest possible weight with the least possible amount of accommodation. The family lived in close intimacy with two cousins, Edward and Jane Cooper, the children of Mrs. Austen's eldest sister, and Dr. Cooper, the vicar of Sonning, near Reading. The Coopers lived for some years at Bath, which seems to have been much frequented in those days by clergymen retiring from work. I believe that Cassandra and Jane sometimes visited them there, and that Jane thus acquired the intimate knowledge of the topography and customs of Bath, which enabled her to write 'Northanger Abbey' long before she resided there herself. After the death of their own parents, the two young Coopers paid long visits at Steventon. Edward Cooper did not live undistinguished. When an undergraduate at Oxford, he gained the prize for Latin hexameters on 'Hortus Anglicus' in 1791; and in later life he was known by a work on prophecy, called 'The Crisis,' and other religious publications, especially for several volumes of Sermons, much preached in many pulpits in my youth. Jane Cooper was married from her uncle's house at Steventon, to Captain, afterwards Sir Thomas Williams, under whom Charles Austen served in several ships. She was a dear friend of her namesake, but was fated to become a cause of great sorrow to her, for a few years after the marriage she was suddenly killed by an accident to her carriage. There was another cousin closely associated with them at Steventon, who must have introduced greater variety into the family circle. This was the daughter of Mr. Austen's only sister, Mrs. Hancock. This cousin had been educated in Paris, and married to a Count de Feuillade, of whom I know little more than that he perished by the guillotine during the French Revolution. Perhaps his chief offence was his rank; but it was said that the charge of 'incivism,' under which he suffered, rested on the fact of his having laid down some arable land into pasture--a sure sign of his intention to embarrass the Republican Government by producing a famine! His wife escaped through dangers and difficulties to England, was received for some time into her uncle's family, and finally married her cousin Henry Austen. During the short peace of Amiens, she and her second husband went to France, in the hope of recovering some of the Count's property, and there narrowly escaped being included amongst the _detenus_. Orders had been given by Buonaparte's government to detain all English travellers, but at the post-houses Mrs. Henry Austen gave the necessary orders herself, and her French was so perfect that she passed everywhere for a native, and her husband escaped under this protection. She was a clever woman, and highly accomplished, after the French rather than the English mode; and in those days, when intercourse with the Continent was long interrupted by war, such an element in the society of a country parsonage must have been a rare acquisition. The sisters may have been more indebted to this cousin than to Mrs. La Tournelle's teaching for the considerable knowledge of French which they possessed. She also took the principal parts in the private theatricals in which the family several times indulged, having their summer theatre in the barn, and their winter one within the narrow limits of the dining-room, where the number of the audience must have been very limited. On these occasions, the prologues and epilogues were written by Jane's eldest brother, and some of them are very vigorous and amusing. Jane was only twelve years old at the time of the earliest of these representations, and not more than fifteen when the last took place. She was, however, an early observer, and it may be reasonably supposed that some of the incidents and feelings which are so vividly painted in the Mansfield Park theatricals are due to her recollections of these entertainments. Some time before they left Steventon, one great affliction came upon the family. Cassandra was engaged to be married to a young clergyman. He had not sufficient private fortune to permit an immediate union; but the engagement was not likely to be a hopeless or a protracted one, for he had a prospect of early preferment from a nobleman with whom he was connected both by birth and by personal friendship. He accompanied this friend to the West Indies, as chaplain to his regiment, and there died of yellow fever, to the great concern of his friend and patron, who afterwards declared that, if he had known of the engagement, he would not have permitted him to go out to such a climate. This little domestic tragedy caused great and lasting grief to the principal sufferer, and could not but cast a gloom over the whole party. The sympathy of Jane was probably, from her age, and her peculiar attachment to her sister, the deepest of all. Of Jane herself I know of no such definite tale of love to relate. Her reviewer in the 'Quarterly' of January 1821 observes, concerning the attachment of Fanny Price to Edmund Bertram: 'The silence in which this passion is cherished, the slender hopes and enjoyments by which it is fed, the restlessness and jealousy with which it fills a mind naturally active, contented, and unsuspicious, the manner in which it tinges every event, and every reflection, are painted with a vividness and a detail of which we can scarcely conceive any one but a female, and we should almost add, a female writing from recollection, capable.' This conjecture, however probable, was wide of the mark. The picture was drawn from the intuitive perceptions of genius, not from personal experience. In no circumstance of her life was there any similarity between herself and her heroine in 'Mansfield Park.' She did not indeed pass through life without being the object of warm affection. In her youth she had declined the addresses of a gentleman who had the recommendations of good character, and connections, and position in life, of everything, in fact, except the subtle power of touching her heart. There is, however, one passage of romance in her history with which I am imperfectly acquainted, and to which I am unable to assign name, or date, or place, though I have it on sufficient authority. Many years after her death, some circumstances induced her sister Cassandra to break through her habitual reticence, and to speak of it. She said that, while staying at some seaside place, they became acquainted with a gentleman, whose charm of person, mind, and manners was such that Cassandra thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her sister's love. When they parted, he expressed his intention of soon seeing them again; and Cassandra felt no doubt as to his motives. But they never again met. Within a short time they heard of his sudden death. I believe that, if Jane ever loved, it was this unnamed gentleman; but the acquaintance had been short, and I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness. Any description that I might attempt of the family life at Steventon, which closed soon after I was born, could be little better than a fancy- piece. There is no doubt that if we could look into the households of the clergy and the small gentry of that period, we should see some things which would seem strange to us, and should miss many more to which we are accustomed. Every hundred years, and especially a century like the last, marked by an extraordinary advance in wealth, luxury, and refinement of taste, as well as in the mechanical arts which embellish our houses, must produce a great change in their aspect. These changes are always at work; they are going on now, but so silently that we take no note of them. Men soon forget the small objects which they leave behind them as they drift down the stream of life. As Pope says-- Nor does life's stream for observation stay; It hurries all too fast to mark their way. Important inventions, such as the applications of steam, gas, and electricity, may find their places in history; but not so the alterations, great as they may be, which have taken place in the appearance of our dining and drawing-rooms. Who can now record the degrees by which the custom prevalent in my youth of asking each other to take wine together at dinner became obsolete? Who will be able to fix, twenty years hence, the date when our dinners began to be carved and handed round by servants, instead of smoking before our eyes and noses on the table? To record such little matters would indeed be 'to chronicle small beer.' But, in a slight memoir like this, I may be allowed to note some of those changes in social habits which give a colour to history, but which the historian has the greatest difficulty in recovering. At that time the dinner-table presented a far less splendid appearance than it does now. It was appropriated to solid food, rather than to flowers, fruits, and decorations. Nor was there much glitter of plate upon it; for the early dinner hour rendered candlesticks unnecessary, and silver forks had not come into general use: while the broad rounded end of the knives indicated the substitute generally used instead of them. {31} The dinners too were more homely, though not less plentiful and savoury; and the bill of fare in one house would not be so like that in another as it is now, for family receipts were held in high estimation. A grandmother of culinary talent could bequeath to her descendant fame for some particular dish, and might influence the family dinner for many generations. Dos est magna parentium Virtus. One house would pride itself on its ham, another on its game-pie, and a third on its superior furmity, or tansey-pudding. Beer and home-made wines, especially mead, were more largely consumed. Vegetables were less plentiful and less various. Potatoes were used, but not so abundantly as now; and there was an idea that they were to be eaten only with roast meat. They were novelties to a tenant's wife who was entertained at Steventon Parsonage, certainly less than a hundred years ago; and when Mrs. Austen advised her to plant them in her own garden, she replied, 'No, no; they are very well for you gentry, but they must be terribly _costly to rear_.' But a still greater difference would be found in the furniture of the rooms, which would appear to us lamentably scanty. There was a general deficiency of carpeting in sitting-rooms, bed-rooms, and passages. A pianoforte, or rather a spinnet or harpsichord, was by no means a necessary appendage. It was to be found only where there was a decided taste for music, not so common then as now, or in such great houses as would probably contain a billiard-table. There would often be but one sofa in the house, and that a stiff, angular, uncomfortable article. There were no deep easy-chairs, nor other appliances for lounging; for to lie down, or even to lean back, was a luxury permitted only to old persons or invalids. It was said of a nobleman, a personal friend of George III. and a model gentleman of his day, that he would have made the tour of Europe without ever touching the back of his travelling carriage. But perhaps we should be most struck with the total absence of those elegant little articles which now embellish and encumber our drawing-room tables. We should miss the sliding bookcases and picture-stands, the letter-weighing machines and envelope cases, the periodicals and illustrated newspapers--above all, the countless swarm of photograph books which now threaten to swallow up all space. A small writing-desk, with a smaller work-box, or netting-case, was all that each young lady contributed to occupy the table; for the large family work-basket, though often produced in the parlour, lived in the closet. There must have been more dancing throughout the country in those days than there is now: and it seems to have sprung up more spontaneously, as if it were a natural production, with less fastidiousness as to the quality of music, lights, and floor. Many country towns had a monthly ball throughout the winter, in some of which the same apartment served for dancing and tea-room. Dinner parties more frequently ended with an extempore dance on the carpet, to the music of a harpsichord in the house, or a fiddle from the village. This was always supposed to be for the entertainment of the young people, but many, who had little pretension to youth, were very ready to join in it. There can be no doubt that Jane herself enjoyed dancing, for she attributes this taste to her favourite heroines; in most of her works, a ball or a private dance is mentioned, and made of importance. Many things connected with the ball-rooms of those days have now passed into oblivion. The barbarous law which confined the lady to one partner throughout the evening must indeed have been abolished before Jane went to balls. It must be observed, however, that this custom was in one respect advantageous to the gentleman, inasmuch as it rendered his duties more practicable. He was bound to call upon his partner the next morning, and it must have been convenient to have only one lady for whom he was obliged To gallop all the country over, The last night's partner to behold, And humbly hope she caught no cold. But the stately minuet still reigned supreme; and every regular ball commenced with it. It was a slow and solemn movement, expressive of grace and dignity, rather than of merriment. It abounded in formal bows and courtesies, with measured paces, forwards, backwards and sideways, and many complicated gyrations. It was executed by one lady and gentleman, amidst the admiration, or the criticism, of surrounding spectators. In its earlier and most palmy days, as when Sir Charles and Lady Grandison delighted the company by dancing it at their own wedding, the gentleman wore a dress sword, and the lady was armed with a fan of nearly equal dimensions. Addison observes that 'women are armed with fans, as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them.' The graceful carriage of each weapon was considered a test of high breeding. The clownish man was in danger of being tripped up by his sword getting between his legs: the fan held clumsily looked more of a burden than an ornament; while in the hands of an adept it could be made to speak a language of its own. {35} It was not everyone who felt qualified to make this public exhibition, and I have been told that those ladies who intended to dance minuets, used to distinguish themselves from others by wearing a particular kind of lappet on their head-dress. I have heard also of another curious proof of the respect in which this dance was held. Gloves immaculately clean were considered requisite for its due performance, while gloves a little soiled were thought good enough for a country dance; and accordingly some prudent ladies provided themselves with two pairs for their several purposes. The minuet expired with the last century: but long after it had ceased to be danced publicly it was taught to boys and girls, in order to give them a graceful carriage. Hornpipes, cotillons, and reels, were occasionally danced; but the chief occupation of the evening was the interminable country dance, in which all could join. This dance presented a great show of enjoyment, but it was not without its peculiar troubles. The ladies and gentlemen were ranged apart from each other in opposite rows, so that the facilities for flirtation, or interesting intercourse, were not so great as might have been desired by both parties. Much heart-burning and discontent sometimes arose as to _who_ should stand above _whom_, and especially as to who was entitled to the high privilege of calling and leading off the first dance: and no little indignation was felt at the lower end of the room when any of the leading couples retired prematurely from their duties, and did not condescend to dance up and down the whole set. We may rejoice that these causes of irritation no longer exist; and that if such feelings as jealousy, rivalry, and discontent ever touch celestial bosoms in the modern ball-room they must arise from different and more recondite sources. I am tempted to add a little about the difference of personal habits. It may be asserted as a general truth, that less was left to the charge and discretion of servants, and more was done, or superintended, by the masters and mistresses. With regard to the mistresses, it is, I believe, generally understood, that at the time to which I refer, a hundred years ago, they took a personal part in the higher branches of cookery, as well as in the concoction of home-made wines, and distilling of herbs for domestic medicines, which are nearly allied to the same art. Ladies did not disdain to spin the thread of which the household linen was woven. Some ladies liked to wash with their own hands their choice china after breakfast or tea. In one of my earliest child's books, a little girl, the daughter of a gentleman, is taught by her mother to make her own bed before leaving her chamber. It was not so much that they had not servants to do all these things for them, as that they took an interest in such occupations. And it must be borne in mind how many sources of interest enjoyed by this generation were then closed, or very scantily opened to ladies. A very small minority of them cared much for literature or science. Music was not a very common, and drawing was a still rarer, accomplishment; needlework, in some form or other, was their chief sedentary employment. But I doubt whether the rising generation are equally aware how much gentlemen also did for themselves in those times, and whether some things that I can mention will not be a surprise to them. Two homely proverbs were held in higher estimation in my early days than they are now--'The master's eye makes the horse fat;' and, 'If you would be well served, serve yourself.' Some gentlemen took pleasure in being their own gardeners, performing all the scientific, and some of the manual, work themselves. Well-dressed young men of my acquaintance, who had their coat from a London tailor, would always brush their evening suit themselves, rather than entrust it to the carelessness of a rough servant, and to the risks of dirt and grease in the kitchen; for in those days servants' halls were not common in the houses of the clergy and the smaller country gentry. It was quite natural that Catherine Morland should have contrasted the magnificence of the offices at Northanger Abbey with the few shapeless pantries in her father's parsonage. A young man who expected to have his things packed or unpacked for him by a servant, when he travelled, would have been thought exceptionally fine, or exceptionally lazy. When my uncle undertook to teach me to shoot, his first lesson was how to clean my own gun. It was thought meritorious on the evening of a hunting day, to turn out after dinner, lanthorn in hand, and visit the stable, to ascertain that the horse had been well cared for. This was of the more importance, because, previous to the introduction of clipping, about the year 1820, it was a difficult and tedious work to make a long-coated hunter dry and comfortable, and was often very imperfectly done. Of course, such things were not practised by those who had gamekeepers, and stud-grooms, and plenty of well-trained servants; but they were practised by many who were unequivocally gentlemen, and whose grandsons, occupying the same position in life, may perhaps be astonished at being told that '_such things were_.' I have drawn pictures for which my own experience, or what I heard from others in my youth, have supplied the materials. Of course, they cannot be universally applicable. Such details varied in various circles, and were changed very gradually; nor can I pretend to tell how much of what I have said is descriptive of the family life at Steventon in Jane Austen's youth. I am sure that the ladies there had nothing to do with the mysteries of the stew-pot or the preserving-pan; but it is probable that their way of life differed a little from ours, and would have appeared to us more homely. It may be that useful articles, which would not now be produced in drawing-rooms, were hemmed, and marked, and darned in the old- fashioned parlour. But all this concerned only the outer life; there was as much cultivation and refinement of mind as now, with probably more studied courtesy and ceremony of manner to visitors; whilst certainly in that family literary pursuits were not neglected. I remember to have heard of only two little things different from modern customs. One was, that on hunting mornings the young men usually took their hasty breakfast in the kitchen. The early hour at which hounds then met may account for this; and probably the custom began, if it did not end, when they were boys; for they hunted at an early age, in a scrambling sort of way, upon any pony or donkey that they could procure, or, in default of such luxuries, on foot. I have been told that Sir Francis Austen, when seven years old, bought on his own account, it must be supposed with his father's permission, a pony for a guinea and a half; and after riding him with great success for two seasons, sold him for a guinea more. One may wonder how the child could have so much money, and how the animal could have been obtained for so little. The same authority informs me that his first cloth suit was made from a scarlet habit, which, according to the fashion of the times, had been his mother's usual morning dress. If all this is true, the future admiral of the British Fleet must have cut a conspicuous figure in the hunting-field. The other peculiarity was that, when the roads were dirty, the sisters took long walks in pattens. This defence against wet and dirt is now seldom seen. The few that remain are banished from good society, and employed only in menial work; but a hundred and fifty years ago they were celebrated in poetry, and considered so clever a contrivance that Gay, in his 'Trivia,' ascribes the invention to a god stimulated by his passion for a mortal damsel, and derives the name 'Patten' from 'Patty.' The patten now supports each frugal dame, Which from the blue-eyed Patty takes the name. But mortal damsels have long ago discarded the clumsy implement. First it dropped its iron ring and became a clog; afterwards it was fined down into the pliant galoshe--lighter to wear and more effectual to protect--a no less manifest instance of gradual improvement than Cowper indicates when he traces through eighty lines of poetry his 'accomplished sofa' back to the original three-legged stool. As an illustration of the purposes which a patten was intended to serve, I add the following epigram, written by Jane Austen's uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, on reading in a newspaper the marriage of Captain Foote to Miss Patten:-- Through the rough paths of life, with a patten your guard, May you safely and pleasantly jog; May the knot never slip, nor the ring press too hard, Nor the _Foot_ find the _Patten_ a clog. At the time when Jane Austen lived at Steventon, a work was carried on in the neighbouring cottages which ought to be recorded, because it has long ceased to exist. Up to the beginning of the present century, poor women found profitable employment in spinning flax or wool. This was a better occupation for them than straw plaiting, inasmuch as it was carried on at the family hearth, and did not admit of gadding and gossiping about the village. The implement used was a long narrow machine of wood, raised on legs, furnished at one end with a large wheel, and at the other with a spindle on which the flax or wool was loosely wrapped, connected together by a loop of string. One hand turned the wheel, while the other formed the thread. The outstretched arms, the advanced foot, the sway of the whole figure backwards and forwards, produced picturesque attitudes, and displayed whatever of grace or beauty the work-woman might possess. {41} Some ladies were fond of spinning, but they worked in a quieter manner, sitting at a neat little machine of varnished wood, like Tunbridge ware, generally turned by the foot, with a basin of water at hand to supply the moisture required for forming the thread, which the cottager took by a more direct and natural process from her own mouth. I remember two such elegant little wheels in our own family. It may be observed that this hand-spinning is the most primitive of female accomplishments, and can be traced back to the earliest times. Ballad poetry and fairy tales are full of allusions to it. The term 'spinster' still testifies to its having been the ordinary employment of the English young woman. It was the labour assigned to the ejected nuns by the rough earl who said, 'Go spin, ye jades, go spin.' It was the employment at which Roman matrons and Grecian princesses presided amongst their handmaids. Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates spinning and measuring out the thread of human life. Holy Scripture honours it in those 'wise-hearted women' who 'did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun' for the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness: and an old English proverb carries it still farther back to the time 'when Adam delved and Eve span.' But, at last, this time-honoured domestic manufacture is quite extinct amongst us--crushed by the power of steam, overborne by a countless host of spinning jennies, and I can only just remember some of its last struggles for existence in the Steventon cottages. CHAPTER III. _Early Compositions--Friends at Ashe--A very old Letter--Lines on the Death of Mrs. Lefroy--Observations on Jane Austen's Letter-writing--Letters_. I know little of Jane Austen's childhood. Her mother followed a custom, not unusual in those days, though it seems strange to us, of putting out her babies to be nursed in a cottage in the village. The infant was daily visited by one or both of its parents, and frequently brought to them at the parsonage, but the cottage was its home, and must have remained so till it was old enough to run about and talk; for I know that one of them, in after life, used to speak of his foster mother as 'Movie,' the name by which he had called her in his infancy. It may be that the contrast between the parsonage house and the best class of cottages was not quite so extreme then as it would be now, that the one was somewhat less luxurious, and the other less squalid. It would certainly seem from the results that it was a wholesome and invigorating system, for the children were all strong and healthy. Jane was probably treated like the rest in this respect. In childhood every available opportunity of instruction was made use of. According to the ideas of the time, she was well educated, though not highly accomplished, and she certainly enjoyed that important element of mental training, associating at home with persons of cultivated intellect. It cannot be doubted that her early years were bright and happy, living, as she did, with indulgent parents, in a cheerful home, not without agreeable variety of society. To these sources of enjoyment must be added the first stirrings of talent within her, and the absorbing interest of original composition. It is impossible to say at how early an age she began to write. There are copy books extant containing tales some of which must have been composed while she was a young girl, as they had amounted to a considerable number by the time she was sixteen. Her earliest stories are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be nonsensical, but the nonsense has much spirit in it. They are usually preceded by a dedication of mock solemnity to some one of her family. It would seem that the grandiloquent dedications prevalent in those days had not escaped her youthful penetration. Perhaps the most characteristic feature in these early productions is that, however puerile the matter, they are always composed in pure simple English, quite free from the over- ornamented style which might be expected from so young a writer. One of her juvenile effusions is given, as a specimen of the kind of transitory amusement which Jane was continually supplying to the family party. THE MYSTERY. AN UNFINISHED COMEDY. DEDICATION. TO THE REV. GEORGE AUSTEN. SIR,--I humbly solicit your patronage to the following Comedy, which, though an unfinished one, is, I flatter myself, as complete a _Mystery_ as any of its kind. I am, Sir, your most humble Servant, THE AUTHOR. THE MYSTERY, A COMEDY. _DRAMATIS PERSONAE_. _Men_. _Women_. Col. ELLIOTT. FANNY ELLIOTT. OLD HUMBUG. Mrs. HUMBUG YOUNG HUMBUG. _and_ Sir Edward Spangle Daphne. and Corydon. ACT I. SCENE I.--_A Garden_. _Enter_ CORYDON. _Corydon_. But hush: I am interrupted. [_Exit_ CORYDON. _Enter_ OLD HUMBUG _and his_ SON, _talking_. _Old Hum_. It is for that reason that I wish you to follow my advice. Are you convinced of its propriety? _Young Hum_. I am, sir, and will certainly act in the manner you have pointed out to me. _Old Hum_. Then let us return to the house. [_Exeunt_. SCENE II.--_A parlour in_ HUMBUG'S _house_. MRS. HUMBUG _and_ FANNY _discovered at work_. _Mrs. Hum_. You understand me, my love? _Fanny_. Perfectly, ma'am: pray continue your narration. _Mrs. Hum_. Alas! it is nearly concluded; for I have nothing more to say on the subject. _Fanny_. Ah! here is Daphne. _Enter_ DAPHNE. _Daphne_. My dear Mrs. Humbug, how d'ye do? Oh! Fanny, it is all over. _Fanny_. Is it indeed! _Mrs. Hum_. I'm very sorry to hear it. _Fanny_. Then 'twas to no purpose that I-- _Daphne_. None upon earth. _Mrs. Hum_. And what is to become of--? _Daphne_. Oh! 'tis all settled. (_Whispers_ MRS. HUMBUG.) _Fanny_. And how is it determined? _Daphne_. I'll tell you. (_Whispers_ FANNY.) _Mrs. Hum_. And is he to--? _Daphne_. I'll tell you all I know of the matter. (_Whispers_ MRS. HUMBUG _and_ FANNY.) _Fanny_. Well, now I know everything about it, I'll go away. _Mrs. Hum_. and _Daphne_. And so will I. [_Exeunt_. SCENE III.--_The curtain rises, and discovers_ SIR EDWARD SPANGLE _reclined in an elegant attitude on a sofa fast asleep_. _Enter_ COL. ELLIOTT. _Col. E_. My daughter is not here, I see. There lies Sir Edward. Shall I tell him the secret? No, he'll certainly blab it. But he's asleep, and won't hear me;--so I'll e'en venture. (_Goes up to_ SIR EDWARD, _whispers him, and exit_.) END OF THE FIRST ACT. FINIS. * * * * * Her own mature opinion of the desirableness of such an early habit of composition is given in the following words of a niece:-- 'As I grew older, my aunt would talk to me more seriously of my reading and my amusements. I had taken early to writing verses and stories, and I am sorry to think how I troubled her with reading them. She was very kind about it, and always had some praise to bestow, but at last she warned me against spending too much time upon them. She said--how well I recollect it!--that she knew writing stories was a great amusement, and _she_ thought a harmless one, though many people, she was aware, thought otherwise; but that at my age it would be bad for me to be much taken up with my own compositions. Later still--it was after she had gone to Winchester--she sent me a message to this effect, that if I would take her advice I should cease writing till I was sixteen; that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the corresponding years of her own life.' As this niece was only twelve years old at the time of her aunt's death, these words seem to imply that the juvenile tales to which I have referred had, some of them at least, been written in her childhood. But between these childish effusions, and the composition of her living works, there intervened another stage of her progress, during which she produced some stories, not without merit, but which she never considered worthy of publication. During this preparatory period her mind seems to have been working in a very different direction from that into which it ultimately settled. Instead of presenting faithful copies of nature, these tales were generally burlesques, ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly romances. Something of this fancy is to be found in 'Northanger Abbey,' but she soon left it far behind in her subsequent course. It would seem as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought _not_ to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction. The family have, rightly, I think, declined to let these early works be published. Mr. Shortreed observed very pithily of Walter Scott's early rambles on the borders, 'He was makin' himsell a' the time; but he didna ken, may be, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought of little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun.' And so, in a humbler way, Jane Austen was 'makin' hersell,' little thinking of future fame, but caring only for 'the queerness and the fun;' and it would be as unfair to expose this preliminary process to the world, as it would be to display all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn up. It was, however, at Steventon that the real foundations of her fame were laid. There some of her most successful writing was composed at such an early age as to make it surprising that so young a woman could have acquired the insight into character, and the nice observation of manners which they display. 'Pride and Prejudice,' which some consider the most brilliant of her novels, was the first finished, if not the first begun. She began it in October 1796, before she was twenty-one years old, and completed it in about ten months, in August 1797. The title then intended for it was 'First Impressions.' 'Sense and Sensibility' was begun, in its present form, immediately after the completion of the former, in November 1797 but something similar in story and character had been written earlier under the title of 'Elinor and Marianne;' and if, as is probable, a good deal of this earlier production was retained, it must form the earliest specimen of her writing that has been given to the world. 'Northanger Abbey,' though not prepared for the press till 1803, was certainly first composed in 1798. Amongst the most valuable neighbours of the Austens were Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy and their family. He was rector of the adjoining parish of Ashe; she was sister to Sir Egerton Brydges, to whom we are indebted for the earliest notice of Jane Austen that exists. In his autobiography, speaking of his visits at Ashe, he writes thus: 'The nearest neighbours of the Lefroys were the Austens of Steventon. I remember Jane Austen, the novelist, as a little child. She was very intimate with Mrs. Lefroy, and much encouraged by her. Her mother was a Miss Leigh, whose paternal grandmother was sister to the first Duke of Chandos. Mr. Austen was of a Kentish family, of which several branches have been settled in the Weald of Kent, and some are still remaining there. When I knew Jane Austen, I never suspected that she was an authoress; but my eyes told me that she was fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full.' One may wish that Sir Egerton had dwelt rather longer on the subject of these memoirs, instead of being drawn away by his extreme love for genealogies to her great-grandmother and ancestors. That great-grandmother however lives in the family records as Mary Brydges, a daughter of Lord Chandos, married in Westminster Abbey to Theophilus Leigh of Addlestrop in 1698. When a girl she had received a curious letter of advice and reproof, written by her mother from Constantinople. Mary, or 'Poll,' was remaining in England with her grandmother, Lady Bernard, who seems to have been wealthy and inclined to be too indulgent to her granddaughter. This letter is given. Any such authentic document, two hundred years old, dealing with domestic details, must possess some interest. This is remarkable, not only as a specimen of the homely language in which ladies of rank then expressed themselves, but from the sound sense which it contains. Forms of expression vary, but good sense and right principles are the same in the nineteenth that they were in the seventeenth century. 'MY DEARES POLL, 'Yr letters by Cousin Robbert Serle arrived here not before the 27th of Aprill, yett were they hartily wellcome to us, bringing ye joyful news which a great while we had longed for of my most dear Mother & all other relations & friends good health which I beseech God continue to you all, & as I observe in yrs to yr Sister Betty ye extraordinary kindness of (as I may truly say) the best Mothr & Gnd Mothr in the world in pinching herself to make you fine, so I cannot but admire her great good Housewifry in affording you so very plentifull an allowance, & yett to increase her Stock at the rate I find she hath done; & think I can never sufficiently mind you how very much it is yr duty on all occasions to pay her yr gratitude in all humble submission & obedience to all her commands soe long as you live. I must tell you 'tis to her bounty & care in ye greatest measure you are like to owe yr well living in this world, & as you cannot but be very sensible you are an extra-ordinary charge to her so it behoves you to take particular heed tht in ye whole course of yr life, you render her a proportionable comfort, especially since 'tis ye best way you can ever hope to make her such amends as God requires of yr hands. but Poll! it grieves me a little yt I am forced to take notice of & reprove you for some vaine expressions in yr lettrs to yr Sister--you say concerning yr allowance "you aime to bring yr bread & cheese even" in this I do not discommend you, for a foule shame indeed it would be should you out run the Constable having soe liberall a provision made you for yr maintenance--but ye reason you give for yr resolution I cannot at all approve for you say "to spend more you can't" thats because you have it not to spend, otherwise it seems you would. So yt 'tis yr Grandmothrs discretion & not yours tht keeps you from extravagancy, which plainly appears in ye close of yr sentence, saying yt you think it simple covetousness to save out of yrs but 'tis my opinion if you lay all on yr back 'tis ten tymes a greater sin & shame thn to save some what out of soe large an allowance in yr purse to help you at a dead lift. Child, we all know our beginning, but who knows his end? Ye best use tht can be made of fair weathr is to provide against foule & 'tis great discretion & of noe small commendations for a young woman betymes to shew herself housewifly & frugal. Yr Mother neither Maide nor wife ever yett bestowed forty pounds a yeare on herself & yett if you never fall undr a worse reputation in ye world thn she (I thank God for it) hath hitherto done, you need not repine at it, & you cannot be ignorant of ye difference tht was between my fortune & what you are to expect. You ought likewise to consider tht you have seven brothers & sisters & you are all one man's children & therefore it is very unreasonable that one should expect to be preferred in finery soe much above all ye rest for 'tis impossible you should soe much mistake yr ffather's condition as to fancy he is able to allow every one of you forty pounds a yeare a piece, for such an allowance with the charge of their diett over and above will amount to at least five hundred pounds a yeare, a sum yr poor ffather can ill spare, besides doe but bethink yrself what a ridiculous sight it will be when yr grandmothr & you come to us to have noe less thn seven waiting gentlewomen in one house, for what reason can you give why every one of yr Sistrs should not have every one of ym a Maide as well as you, & though you may spare to pay yr maide's wages out of yr allowance yett you take no care of ye unnecessary charge you put yr ffathr to in yr increase of his family, whereas if it were not a piece of pride to have ye name of keeping yr maide she yt waits on yr good Grandmother might easily doe as formerly you know she hath done, all ye business you have for a maide unless as you grow oldr you grow a veryer Foole which God forbid! 'Poll, you live in a place where you see great plenty & splendour but let not ye allurements of earthly pleasures tempt you to forget or neglect ye duty of a good Christian in dressing yr bettr part which is yr soule, as will best please God. I am not against yr going decent & neate as becomes yr ffathers daughter but to clothe yrself rich & be running into every gaudy fashion can never become yr circumstances & instead of doing you creditt & getting you a good prefernt it is ye readiest way you can take to fright all sober men from ever thinking of matching thmselves with women that live above thyr fortune, & if this be a wise way of spending money judge you! & besides, doe but reflect what an od sight it will be to a stranger that comes to our house to see yr Grandmothr yr Mothr & all yr Sisters in a plane dress & you only trickd up like a bartlemew-babby--you know what sort of people those are tht can't faire well but they must cry rost meate now what effect could you imagine yr writing in such a high straine to yr Sisters could have but either to provoke thm to envy you or murmur against us. I must tell you neithr of yr Sisters have ever had twenty pounds a yeare allowance from us yett, & yett theyr dress hath not disparaged neithr thm nor us & without incurring ye censure of simple covetousness they will have some what to shew out of their saving that will doe thm creditt & I expect yt you tht are theyr elder Sister shd rather sett thm examples of ye like nature thn tempt thm from treading in ye steps of their good Grandmothr & poor Mothr. This is not half what might be saide on this occasion but believing thee to be a very good natured dutyfull child I shd have thought it a great deal too much but yt having in my coming hither past through many most desperate dangers I cannot forbear thinking & preparing myself for all events, & therefore not knowing how it may please God to dispose of us I conclude it my duty to God & thee my dr child to lay this matter as home to thee as I could, assuring you my daily prayers are not nor shall not be wanting that God may give you grace always to remember to make a right use of this truly affectionate counsell of yr poor Mothr. & though I speak very plaine down-right english to you yett I would not have you doubt but that I love you as hartily as any child I have & if you serve God and take good courses I promise you my kindness to you shall be according to yr own hart's desire, for you may be certain I can aime at nothing in what I have now writ but yr real good which to promote shall be ye study & care day & night 'Of my dear Poll 'thy truly affectionate Mothr. 'ELIZA CHANDOS. 'Pera of Galata, May ye 6th 1686. 'P.S.--Thy ffathr & I send thee our blessing, & all thy brothrs & sistrs theyr service. Our harty & affectionate service to my brothr & sistr Childe & all my dear cozens. When you see my Lady Worster & cozen Howlands pray present thm my most humble service.' This letter shows that the wealth acquired by trade was already manifesting itself in contrast with the straitened circumstances of some of the nobility. Mary Brydges's 'poor ffather,' in whose household economy was necessary, was the King of England's ambassador at Constantinople; the grandmother, who lived in 'great plenty and splendour,' was the widow of a Turkey merchant. But then, as now, it would seem, rank had the power of attracting and absorbing wealth. At Ashe also Jane became acquainted with a member of the Lefroy family, who was still living when I began these memoirs, a few months ago; the Right Hon. Thomas Lefroy, late Chief Justice of Ireland. One must look back more than seventy years to reach the time when these two bright young persons were, for a short time, intimately acquainted with each other, and then separated on their several courses, never to meet again; both destined to attain some distinction in their different ways, one to survive the other for more than half a century, yet in his extreme old age to remember and speak, as he sometimes did, of his former companion, as one to be much admired, and not easily forgotten by those who had ever known her. Mrs. Lefroy herself was a remarkable person. Her rare endowments of goodness, talents, graceful person, and engaging manners, were sufficient to secure her a prominent place in any society into which she was thrown; while her enthusiastic eagerness of disposition rendered her especially attractive to a clever and lively girl. She was killed by a fall from her horse on Jane's birthday, Dec. 16, 1804. The following lines to her memory were written by Jane four years afterwards, when she was thirty- three years old. They are given, not for their merits as poetry, but to show how deep and lasting was the impression made by the elder friend on the mind of the younger:-- TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. LEFROY. 1. The day returns again, my natal day; What mix'd emotions in my mind arise! Beloved Friend; four years have passed away Since thou wert snatched for ever from our eyes. 2. The day commemorative of my birth, Bestowing life, and light, and hope to me, Brings back the hour which was thy last on earth. O! bitter pang of torturing memory! 3. Angelic woman! past my power to praise In language meet thy talents, temper, mind, Thy solid worth, thy captivating grace, Thou friend and ornament of human kind. 4. But come, fond Fancy, thou indulgent power; Hope is desponding, chill, severe, to thee: Bless thou this little portion of an hour; Let me behold her as she used to be. 5. I see her here with all her smiles benign, Her looks of eager love, her accents sweet, That voice and countenance almost divine, Expression, harmony, alike complete. 6. Listen! It is not sound alone, 'tis sense, 'Tis genius, taste, and tenderness of soul: 'Tis genuine warmth of heart without pretence, And purity of mind that crowns the whole. 7. She speaks! 'Tis eloquence, that grace of tongue, So rare, so lovely, never misapplied By her, to palliate vice, or deck a wrong: She speaks and argues but on virtue's side. 8. Hers is the energy of soul sincere; Her Christian spirit, ignorant to feign, Seeks but to comfort, heal, enlighten, cheer, Confer a pleasure or prevent a pain. 9. Can aught enhance such goodness? yes, to me Her partial favour from my earliest years Consummates all: ah! give me but to see Her smile of love! The vision disappears. 10. 'Tis past and gone. We meet no more below, Short is the cheat of Fancy o'er the tomb. Oh! might I hope to equal bliss to go, To meet thee, angel, in thy future home. 11. Fain would I feel an union with thy fate: Fain would I seek to draw an omen fair From this connection in our earthly date. Indulge the harmless weakness. Reason, spare. The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling and lively imagination; and Jane was exceedingly unhappy when she was told that her father, now seventy years of age, had determined to resign his duties to his eldest son, who was to be his successor in the Rectory of Steventon, and to remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. Jane had been absent from home when this resolution was taken; and, as her father was always rapid both in forming his resolutions and in acting on them, she had little time to reconcile herself to the change. * * * * * A wish has sometimes been expressed that some of Jane Austen's letters should be published. Some entire letters, and many extracts, will be given in this memoir; but the reader must be warned not to expect too much from them. With regard to accuracy of language indeed every word of them might be printed without correction. The style is always clear, and generally animated, while a vein of humour continually gleams through the whole; but the materials may be thought inferior to the execution, for they treat only of the details of domestic life. There is in them no notice of politics or public events; scarcely any discussions on literature, or other subjects of general interest. They may be said to resemble the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand, of the twigs and mosses supplied by the tree in which it is placed; curiously constructed out of the simplest matters. Her letters have very seldom the date of the year, or the signature of her christian name at full length; but it has been easy to ascertain their dates, either from the post-mark, or from their contents. * * * * * The two following letters are the earliest that I have seen. They were both written in November 1800; before the family removed from Steventon. Some of the same circumstances are referred to in both. The first is to her sister Cassandra, who was then staying with their brother Edward at Godmersham Park, Kent:-- 'Steventon, Saturday evening, Nov. 8th. 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA, 'I thank you for so speedy a return to my two last, and particularly thank you for your anecdote of Charlotte Graham and her cousin, Harriet Bailey, which has very much amused both my mother and myself. If you can learn anything farther of that interesting affair, I hope you will mention it. I have two messages; let me get rid of them, and then my paper will be my own. Mary fully intended writing to you by Mr. Chute's frank, and only happened entirely to forget it, but will write soon; and my father wishes Edward to send him a memorandum of the price of the hops. The tables are come, and give general contentment. I had not expected that they would so perfectly suit the fancy of us all three, or that we should so well agree in the disposition of them; but nothing except their own surface can have been smoother. The two ends put together form one constant table for everything, and the centre piece stands exceedingly well under the glass, and holds a great deal most commodiously, without looking awkwardly. They are both covered with green baize, and send their best love. The Pembroke has got its destination by the sideboard, and my mother has great delight in keeping her money and papers locked up. The little table which used to stand there has most conveniently taken itself off into the best bedroom; and we are now in want only of the chiffonniere, which is neither finished nor come. So much for that subject; I now come to another, of a very different nature, as other subjects are very apt to be. Earle Harwood has been again giving uneasiness to his family and talk to the neighbourhood; in the present instance, however, he is only unfortunate, and not in fault. 'About ten days ago, in cocking a pistol in the guard-room at Marcau, he accidentally shot himself through the thigh. Two young Scotch surgeons in the island were polite enough to propose taking off the thigh at once, but to that he would not consent; and accordingly in his wounded state was put on board a cutter and conveyed to Haslar Hospital, at Gosport, where the bullet was extracted, and where he now is, I hope, in a fair way of doing well. The surgeon of the hospital wrote to the family on the occasion, and John Harwood went down to him immediately, attended by James, {62} whose object in going was to be the means of bringing back the earliest intelligence to Mr. and Mrs. Harwood, whose anxious sufferings, particularly those of the latter, have of course been dreadful. They went down on Tuesday, and James came back the next day, bringing such favourable accounts as greatly to lessen the distress of the family at Deane, though it will probably be a long while before Mrs. Harwood can be quite at ease. _One_ most material comfort, however, they have; the assurance of its being really an accidental wound, which is not only positively declared by Earle himself, but is likewise testified by the particular direction of the bullet. Such a wound could not have been received in a duel. At present he is going on very well, but the surgeon will not declare him to be in no danger. {63} Mr. Heathcote met with a genteel little accident the other day in hunting. He got off to lead his horse over a hedge, or a house, or something, and his horse in his haste trod upon his leg, or rather ancle, I believe, and it is not certain whether the small bone is not broke. Martha has accepted Mary's invitation for Lord Portsmouth's ball. He has not yet sent out his own invitations, but _that_ does not signify; Martha comes, and a ball there is to be. I think it will be too early in her mother's absence for me to return with her. '_Sunday Evening_.--We have had a dreadful storm of wind in the fore part of this day, which has done a great deal of mischief among our trees. I was sitting alone in the dining-room when an odd kind of crash startled me--in a moment afterwards it was repeated. I then went to the window, which I reached just in time to see the last of our two highly valued elms descend into the Sweep!!!! The other, which had fallen, I suppose, in the first crash, and which was the nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sunk among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, beating off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all. One large elm out of the two on the left-hand side as you enter what I call the elm walk, was likewise blown down; the maple bearing the weathercock was broke in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all the three elms which grew in Hall's meadow, and gave such ornament to it, are gone; two were blown down, and the other so much injured that it cannot stand. I am happy to add, however, that no greater evil than the loss of trees has been the consequence of the storm in this place, or in our immediate neighbourhood. We grieve, therefore, in some comfort. 'I am yours ever, 'J. A.' The next letter, written four days later than the former, was addressed to Miss Lloyd, an intimate friend, whose sister (my mother) was married to Jane's eldest brother:-- 'Steventon, Wednesday evening, Nov. 12th. 'MY DEAR MARTHA, 'I did not receive your note yesterday till after Charlotte had left Deane, or I would have sent my answer by her, instead of being the means, as I now must be, of lessening the elegance of your new dress for the Hurstbourne ball by the value of 3_d_. You are very good in wishing to see me at Ibthorp so soon, and I am equally good in wishing to come to you. I believe our merit in that respect is much upon a par, our self-denial mutually strong. Having paid this tribute of praise to the virtue of both, I shall here have done with panegyric, and proceed to plain matter of fact. In about a fortnight's time I hope to be with you. I have two reasons for not being able to come before. I wish so to arrange my visit as to spend some days with you after your mother's return. In the 1st place, that I may have the pleasure of seeing her, and in the 2nd, that I may have a better chance of bringing you back with me. Your promise in my favour was not quite absolute, but if your will is not perverse, you and I will do all in our power to overcome your scruples of conscience. I hope we shall meet next week to talk all this over, till we have tired ourselves with the very idea of my visit before my visit begins. Our invitations for the 19th are arrived, and very curiously are they worded. {65} Mary mentioned to you yesterday poor Earle's unfortunate accident, I dare say. He does not seem to be going on very well. The two or three last posts have brought less and less favourable accounts of him. John Harwood has gone to Gosport again to-day. We have two families of friends now who are in a most anxious state; for though by a note from Catherine this morning there seems now to be a revival of hope at Manydown, its continuance may be too reasonably doubted. Mr. Heathcote, {66a} however, who has broken the small bone of his leg, is so good as to be going on very well. It would be really too much to have three people to care for. 'You distress me cruelly by your request about books. I cannot think of any to bring with me, nor have I any idea of our wanting them. I come to you to be talked to, not to read or hear reading; I can do that at home; and indeed I am now laying in a stock of intelligence to pour out on you as my share of the conversation. I am reading Henry's History of England, which I will repeat to you in any manner you may prefer, either in a loose, desultory, unconnected stream, or dividing my recital, as the historian divides it himself, into seven parts:--The Civil and Military: Religion: Constitution: Learning and Learned Men: Arts and Sciences: Commerce, Coins, and Shipping: and Manners. So that for every evening in the week there will be a different subject. The Friday's lot--Commerce, Coins, and Shipping--you will find the least entertaining; but the next evening's portion will make amends. With such a provision on my part, if you will do yours by repeating the French Grammar, and Mrs. Stent {66b} will now and then ejaculate some wonder about the cocks and hens, what can we want? Farewell for a short time. We all unite in best love, and I am your very affectionate 'J. A.' The two next letters must have been written early in 1801, after the removal from Steventon had been decided on, but before it had taken place. They refer to the two brothers who were at sea, and give some idea of a kind of anxieties and uncertainties to which sisters are seldom subject in these days of peace, steamers, and electric telegraphs. At that time ships were often windbound or becalmed, or driven wide of their destination; and sometimes they had orders to alter their course for some secret service; not to mention the chance of conflict with a vessel of superior power--no improbable occurrence before the battle of Trafalgar. Information about relatives on board men-of-war was scarce and scanty, and often picked up by hearsay or chance means; and every scrap of intelligence was proportionably valuable:-- 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA, 'I should not have thought it necessary to write to you so soon, but for the arrival of a letter from Charles to myself. It was written last Saturday from off the Start, and conveyed to Popham Lane by Captain Boyle, on his way to Midgham. He came from Lisbon in the "Endymion." I will copy Charles's account of his conjectures about Frank: "He has not seen my brother lately, nor does he expect to find him arrived, as he met Captain Inglis at Rhodes, going up to take command of the 'Petrel,' as he was coming down; but supposes he will arrive in less than a fortnight from this time, in some ship which is expected to reach England about that time with dispatches from Sir Ralph Abercrombie." The event must show what sort of a conjuror Captain Boyle is. The "Endymion" has not been plagued with any more prizes. Charles spent three pleasant days in Lisbon. 'They were very well satisfied with their royal passenger, {68} whom they found jolly and affable, who talks of Lady Augusta as his wife, and seems much attached to her. 'When this letter was written, the "Endymion" was becalmed, but Charles hoped to reach Portsmouth by Monday or Tuesday. He received my letter, communicating our plans, before he left England; was much surprised, of course, but is quite reconciled to them, and means to come to Steventon once more while Steventon is ours.' From a letter written later in the same year:-- 'Charles has received 30_l_. for his share of the privateer, and expects 10_l_. more; but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and topaze crosses for us. He must be well scolded. The "Endymion" has already received orders for taking troops to Egypt, which I should not like at all if I did not trust to Charles being removed from her somehow or other before she sails. He knows nothing of his own destination, he says, but desires me to write directly, as the "Endymion" will probably sail in three or four days. He will receive my yesterday's letter, and I shall write again by this post to thank and reproach him. We shall be unbearably fine.' CHAPTER IV. _Removal from Steventon--Residences at Bath and at Southampton--Settling at Chawton_. The family removed to Bath in the spring of 1801, where they resided first at No. 4 Sydney Terrace, and afterwards in Green Park Buildings. I do not know whether they were at all attracted to Bath by the circumstance that Mrs. Austen's only brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot, spent part of every year there. The name of Perrot, together with a small estate at Northleigh in Oxfordshire, had been bequeathed to him by a great uncle. I must devote a few sentences to this very old and now extinct branch of the Perrot family; for one of the last survivors, Jane Perrot, married to a Walker, was Jane Austen's great grandmother, from whom she derived her Christian name. The Perrots were settled in Pembrokeshire at least as early as the thirteenth century. They were probably some of the settlers whom the policy of our Plantagenet kings placed in that county, which thence acquired the name of 'England beyond Wales,' for the double purpose of keeping open a communication with Ireland from Milford Haven, and of overawing the Welsh. One of the family seems to have carried out this latter purpose very vigorously; for it is recorded of him that he slew _twenty-six men_ of Kemaes, a district of Wales, and _one wolf_. The manner in which the two kinds of game are classed together, and the disproportion of numbers, are remarkable; but probably at that time the wolves had been so closely killed down, that _lupicide_ was become a more rare and distinguished exploit than _homicide_. The last of this family died about 1778, and their property was divided between Leighs and Musgraves, the larger portion going to the latter. Mr. Leigh Perrot pulled down the mansion, and sold the estate to the Duke of Marlborough, and the name of these Perrots is now to be found only on some monuments in the church of Northleigh. Mr. Leigh Perrot was also one of several cousins to whom a life interest in the Stoneleigh property in Warwickshire was left, after the extinction of the earlier Leigh peerage, but he compromised his claim to the succession in his lifetime. He married a niece of Sir Montague Cholmeley of Lincolnshire. He was a man of considerable natural power, with much of the wit of his uncle, the Master of Balliol, and wrote clever epigrams and riddles, some of which, though without his name, found their way into print; but he lived a very retired life, dividing his time between Bath and his place in Berkshire called Scarlets. Jane's letters from Bath make frequent mention of this uncle and aunt. The unfinished story, now published under the title of 'The Watsons,' must have been written during the author's residence in Bath. In the autumn of 1804 she spent some weeks at Lyme, and became acquainted with the Cobb, which she afterwards made memorable for the fall of Louisa Musgrove. In February 1805, her father died at Bath, and was buried at Walcot Church. The widow and daughters went into lodgings for a few months, and then removed to Southampton. The only records that I can find about her during those four years are the three following letters to her sister; one from Lyme, the others from Bath. They shew that she went a good deal into society, in a quiet way, chiefly with ladies; and that her eyes were always open to minute traits of character in those with whom she associated:-- _Extract from a letter from Jane Austen to her Sister_. 'Lyme, Friday, Sept. 14 (1804). 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I take the first sheet of fine striped paper to thank you for your letter from Weymouth, and express my hopes of your being at Ibthorp before this time. I expect to hear that you reached it yesterday evening, being able to get as far as Blandford on Wednesday. Your account of Weymouth contains nothing which strikes me so forcibly as there being no ice in the town. For every other vexation I was in some measure prepared, and particularly for your disappointment in not seeing the Royal Family go on board on Tuesday, having already heard from Mr. Crawford that he had seen you in the very act of being too late. But for there being no ice, what could prepare me! You found my letter at Andover, I hope, yesterday, and have now for many hours been satisfied that your kind anxiety on my behalf was as much thrown away as kind anxiety usually is. I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this morning. It was absolutely necessary that I should have the little fever and indisposition which I had: it has been all the fashion this week in Lyme. We are quite settled in our lodgings by this time, as you may suppose, and everything goes on in the usual order. The servants behave very well, and make no difficulties, though nothing certainly can exceed the inconvenience of the offices, except the general dirtiness of the house and furniture, and all its inhabitants. I endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, and be useful, and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters, as fast as I can, and keep everything as it was under your administration . . . . The ball last night was pleasant, but not full for Thursday. My father staid contentedly till half-past nine (we went a little after eight), and then walked home with James and a lanthorn, though I believe the lanthorn was not lit, as the moon was up; but sometimes this lanthorn may be a great convenience to him. My mother and I staid about an hour later. Nobody asked me the two first dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Crawford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville, Mrs. Granville's son, whom my dear friend Miss A. introduced to me, or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction, asked me if I meant to dance again. I think he must be Irish by his ease, and because I imagine him to belong to the honbl B.'s, who are son, and son's wife of an Irish viscount, bold queer- looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme. I called yesterday morning (ought it not in strict propriety to be termed yester-morning?) on Miss A. and was introduced to her father and mother. Like other young ladies she is considerably genteeler than her parents. Mrs. A. sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of my visit. But do not mention this at home, lest a warning should act as an example. We afterwards walked together for an hour on the Cobb; she is very converseable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging. She seems to like people rather too easily. 'Yours affectly, 'J. A.' Letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra at Ibthorp, alluding to the sudden death of Mrs. Lloyd at that place:-- '25 Gay Street (Bath), Monday, April 8, 1805. 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Here is a day for you. Did Bath or Ibthorp ever see such an 8th of April? It is March and April together; the glare of the one and the warmth of the other. We do nothing but walk about. As far as your means will admit, I hope you profit by such weather too. I dare say you are already the better for change of place. We were out again last night. Miss Irvine invited us, when I met her in the Crescent, to drink tea with them, but I rather declined it, having no idea that my mother would be disposed for another evening visit there so soon; but when I gave her the message, I found her very well inclined to go; and accordingly, on leaving Chapel, we walked to Lansdown. This morning we have been to see Miss Chamberlaine look hot on horseback. Seven years and four months ago we went to the same riding-house to see Miss Lefroy's performance! {75a} What a different set are we now moving in! But seven years, I suppose, are enough to change every pore of one's skin and every feeling of one's mind. We did not walk long in the Crescent yesterday. It was hot and not crowded enough; so we went into the field, and passed close by S. T. and Miss S. {75b} again. I have not yet seen her face, but neither her dress nor air have anything of the dash or stylishness which the Browns talked of; quite the contrary; indeed, her dress is not even smart, and her appearance very quiet. Miss Irvine says she is never speaking a word. Poor wretch; I am afraid she is _en penitence_. Here has been that excellent Mrs. Coulthart calling, while my mother was out, and I was believed to be so. I always respected her, as a good- hearted friendly woman. And the Browns have been here; I find their affidavits on the table. The "Ambuscade" reached Gibraltar on the 9th of March, and found all well; so say the papers. We have had no letters from anybody, but we expect to hear from Edward to-morrow, and from you soon afterwards. How happy they are at Godmersham now! I shall be very glad of a letter from Ibthorp, that I may know how you all are, but particularly yourself. This is nice weather for Mrs. J. Austen's going to Speen, and I hope she will have a pleasant visit there. I expect a prodigious account of the christening dinner; perhaps it brought you at last into the company of Miss Dundas again. '_Tuesday_.--I received your letter last night, and wish it may be soon followed by another to say that all is over; but I cannot help thinking that nature will struggle again, and produce a revival. Poor woman! May her end be peaceful and easy as the exit we have witnessed! And I dare say it will. If there is no revival, suffering must be all over; even the consciousness of existence, I suppose, was gone when you wrote. The nonsense I have been writing in this and in my last letter seems out of place at such a time, but I will not mind it; it will do you no harm, and nobody else will be attacked by it. I am heartily glad that you can speak so comfortably of your own health and looks, though I can scarcely comprehend the latter being really approved. Could travelling fifty miles produce such an immediate change? You were looking very poorly here, and everybody seemed sensible of it. Is there a charm in a hack postchaise? But if there were, Mrs. Craven's carriage might have undone it all. I am much obliged to you for the time and trouble you have bestowed on Mary's cap, and am glad it pleases her; but it will prove a useless gift at present, I suppose. Will not she leave Ibthorp on her mother's death? As a companion you are all that Martha can be supposed to want, and in that light, under these circumstances, your visit will indeed have been well timed. '_Thursday_.--I was not able to go on yesterday; all my wit and leisure were bestowed on letters to Charles and Henry. To the former I wrote in consequence of my mother's having seen in the papers that the "Urania" was waiting at Portsmouth for the convoy for Halifax. This is nice, as it is only three weeks ago that you wrote by the "Camilla." I wrote to Henry because I had a letter from him in which he desired to hear from me very soon. His to me was most affectionate and kind, as well as entertaining; there is no merit to him in _that_; he cannot help being amusing. He offers to meet us on the sea coast, if the plan of which Edward gave him some hint takes place. Will not this be making the execution of such a plan more desirable and delightful than ever? He talks of the rambles we took together last summer with pleasing affection. 'Yours ever, 'J. A.' _From the same to the same_. 'Gay St. Sunday Evening, 'April 21 (1805). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am much obliged to you for writing to me again so soon; your letter yesterday was quite an unexpected pleasure. Poor Mrs. Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything, and unwelcome to everybody . . . . My morning engagement was with the Cookes, and our party consisted of George and Mary, a Mr. L., Miss B., who had been with us at the concert, and the youngest Miss W. Not Julia; we have done with her; she is very ill; but Mary. Mary W.'s turn is actually come to be grown up, and have a fine complexion, and wear great square muslin shawls. I have not expressly enumerated myself among the party, but there I was, and my cousin George was very kind, and talked sense to me every now and then, in the intervals of his more animated fooleries with Miss B., who is very young, and rather handsome, and whose gracious manners, ready wit, and solid remarks, put me somewhat in mind of my old acquaintance L. L. There was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing and common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit; all that bordered on it or on sense came from my cousin George, whom altogether I like very well. Mr. B. seems nothing more than a tall young man. My evening engagement and walk was with Miss A., who had called on me the day before, and gently upbraided me in her turn with a change of manners to her since she had been in Bath, or at least of late. Unlucky me! that my notice should be of such consequence, and my manners so bad! She was so well disposed, and so reasonable, that I soon forgave her, and made this engagement with her in proof of it. She is really an agreeable girl, so I think I may like her; and her great want of a companion at home, which may well make any tolerable acquaintance important to her, gives her another claim on my attention. I shall endeavour as much as possible to keep my intimacies in their proper place, and prevent their clashing. Among so many friends, it will be well if I do not get into a scrape; and now here is Miss Blashford come. I should have gone distracted if the Bullers had staid . . . . When I tell you I have been visiting a countess this morning, you will immediately, with great justice, but no truth, guess it to be Lady Roden. No: it is Lady Leven, the mother of Lord Balgonie. On receiving a message from Lord and Lady Leven through the Mackays, declaring their intention of waiting on us, we thought it right to go to them. I hope we have not done too much, but the friends and admirers of Charles must be attended to. They seem very reasonable, good sort of people, very civil, and full of his praise. {80} We were shewn at first into an empty drawing-room, and presently in came his lordship, not knowing who we were, to apologise for the servant's mistake, and to say himself what was untrue, that Lady Leven was not within. He is a tall gentlemanlike looking man, with spectacles, and rather deaf. After sitting with him ten minutes we walked away; but Lady Leven coming out of the dining parlour as we passed the door, we were obliged to attend her back to it, and pay our visit over again. She is a stout woman, with a very handsome face. By this means we had the pleasure of hearing Charles's praises twice over. They think themselves excessively obliged to him, and estimate him so highly as to wish Lord Balgonie, when he is quite recovered, to go out to him. There is a pretty little Lady Marianne of the party, to be shaken hands with, and asked if she remembered Mr. Austen: . . . 'I shall write to Charles by the next packet, unless you tell me in the meantime of your intending to do it. 'Believe me, if you chuse, 'Yr affte Sister.' Jane did not estimate too highly the 'Cousin George' mentioned in the foregoing letter; who might easily have been superior in sense and wit to the rest of the party. He was the Rev. George Leigh Cooke, long known and respected at Oxford, where he held important offices, and had the privilege of helping to form the minds of men more eminent than himself. As Tutor in Corpus Christi College, he became instructor to some of the most distinguished undergraduates of that time: amongst others to Dr. Arnold, the Rev. John Keble, and Sir John Coleridge. The latter has mentioned him in terms of affectionate regard, both in his Memoir of Keble, and in a letter which appears in Dean Stanley's 'Life of Arnold.' Mr. Cooke was also an impressive preacher of earnest awakening sermons. I remember to have heard it observed by some of my undergraduate friends that, after all, there was more good to be got from George Cooke's plain sermons than from much of the more laboured oratory of the University pulpit. He was frequently Examiner in the schools, and occupied the chair of the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, from 1810 to 1853. Before the end of 1805, the little family party removed to Southampton. They resided in a commodious old-fashioned house in a corner of Castle Square. I have no letters of my aunt, nor any other record of her, during her four years' residence at Southampton; and though I now began to know, and, what was the same thing, to love her myself, yet my observations were only those of a young boy, and were not capable of penetrating her character, or estimating her powers. I have, however, a lively recollection of some local circumstances at Southampton, and as they refer chiefly to things which have been long ago swept away, I will record them. My grandmother's house had a pleasant garden, bounded on one side by the old city walls; the top of this wall was sufficiently wide to afford a pleasant walk, with an extensive view, easily accessible to ladies by steps. This must have been a part of the identical walls which witnessed the embarkation of Henry V. before the battle of Agincourt, and the detection of the conspiracy of Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, which Shakspeare has made so picturesque; when, according to the chorus in Henry V., the citizens saw The well-appointed King at Hampton Pier Embark his royalty. Among the records of the town of Southampton, they have a minute and authentic account, drawn up at that time, of the encampment of Henry V. near the town, before his embarkment for France. It is remarkable that the place where the army was encamped, then a low level plain, is now entirely covered by the sea, and is called Westport. {83} At that time Castle Square was occupied by a fantastic edifice, too large for the space in which it stood, though too small to accord well with its castellated style, erected by the second Marquis of Lansdowne, half-brother to the well-known statesman, who succeeded him in the title. The Marchioness had a light phaeton, drawn by six, and sometimes by eight little ponies, each pair decreasing in size, and becoming lighter in colour, through all the grades of dark brown, light brown, bay, and chestnut, as it was placed farther away from the carriage. The two leading pairs were managed by two boyish postilions, the two pairs nearest to the carriage were driven in hand. It was a delight to me to look down from the window and see this fairy equipage put together; for the premises of this castle were so contracted that the whole process went on in the little space that remained of the open square. Like other fairy works, however, it all proved evanescent. Not only carriage and ponies, but castle itself, soon vanished away, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision.' On the death of the Marquis in 1809, the castle was pulled down. Few probably remember its existence; and any one who might visit the place now would wonder how it ever could have stood there. In 1809 Mr. Knight was able to offer his mother the choice of two houses on his property; one near his usual residence at Godmersham Park in Kent; the other near Chawton House, his occasional residence in Hampshire. The latter was chosen; and in that year the mother and daughters, together with Miss Lloyd, a near connection who lived with them, settled themselves at Chawton Cottage. Chawton may be called the _second_, as well as the _last_ home of Jane Austen; for during the temporary residences of the party at Bath and Southampton she was only a sojourner in a strange land; but here she found a real home amongst her own people. It so happened that during her residence at Chawton circumstances brought several of her brothers and their families within easy distance of the house. Chawton must also be considered the place most closely connected with her career as a writer; for there it was that, in the maturity of her mind, she either wrote or rearranged, and prepared for publication the books by which she has become known to the world. This was the home where, after a few years, while still in the prime of life, she began to droop and wither away, and which she left only in the last stage of her illness, yielding to the persuasion of friends hoping against hope. [Chawton Church: ChawtonChurch.jpg] This house stood in the village of Chawton, about a mile from Alton, on the right hand side, just where the road to Winchester branches off from that to Gosport. It was so close to the road that the front door opened upon it; while a very narrow enclosure, paled in on each side, protected the building from danger of collision with any runaway vehicle. I believe it had been originally built for an inn, for which purpose it was certainly well situated. Afterwards it had been occupied by Mr. Knight's steward; but by some additions to the house, and some judicious planting and skreening, it was made a pleasant and commodious abode. Mr. Knight was experienced and adroit at such arrangements, and this was a labour of love to him. A good-sized entrance and two sitting-rooms made the length of the house, all intended originally to look upon the road, but the large drawing-room window was blocked up and turned into a book-case, and another opened at the side which gave to view only turf and trees, as a high wooden fence and hornbeam hedge shut out the Winchester road, which skirted the whole length of the little domain. Trees were planted each side to form a shrubbery walk, carried round the enclosure, which gave a sufficient space for ladies' exercise. There was a pleasant irregular mixture of hedgerow, and gravel walk, and orchard, and long grass for mowing, arising from two or three little enclosures having been thrown together. The house itself was quite as good as the generality of parsonage-houses then were, and much in the same style; and was capable of receiving other members of the family as frequent visitors. It was sufficiently well furnished; everything inside and out was kept in good repair, and it was altogether a comfortable and ladylike establishment, though the means which supported it were not large. I give this description because some interest is generally taken in the residence of a popular writer. Cowper's unattractive house in the street of Olney has been pointed out to visitors, and has even attained the honour of an engraving in Southey's edition of his works: but I cannot recommend any admirer of Jane Austen to undertake a pilgrimage to this spot. The building indeed still stands, but it has lost all that gave it its character. After the death of Mrs. Cassandra Austen, in 1845, it was divided into tenements for labourers, and the grounds reverted to ordinary uses. CHAPTER V. _Description of Jane Austen's person, character, and tastes_. As my memoir has now reached the period when I saw a great deal of my aunt, and was old enough to understand something of her value, I will here attempt a description of her person, mind, and habits. In person she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders. At the time of which I am now writing, she never was seen, either morning or evening, without a cap; I believe that she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required; and that, though remarkably neat in their dress as in all their ways, they were scarcely sufficiently regardful of the fashionable, or the becoming. She was not highly accomplished according to the present standard. Her sister drew well, and it is from a drawing of hers that the likeness prefixed to this volume has been taken. Jane herself was fond of music, and had a sweet voice, both in singing and in conversation; in her youth she had received some instruction on the pianoforte; and at Chawton she practised daily, chiefly before breakfast. I believe she did so partly that she might not disturb the rest of the party who were less fond of music. In the evening she would sometimes sing, to her own accompaniment, some simple old songs, the words and airs of which, now never heard, still linger in my memory. She read French with facility, and knew something of Italian. In those days German was no more thought of than Hindostanee, as part of a lady's education. In history she followed the old guides--Goldsmith, Hume, and Robertson. Critical enquiry into the usually received statements of the old historians was scarcely begun. The history of the early kings of Rome had not yet been dissolved into legend. Historic characters lay before the reader's eyes in broad light or shade, not much broken up by details. The virtues of King Henry VIII. were yet undiscovered, nor had much light been thrown on the inconsistencies of Queen Elizabeth; the one was held to be an unmitigated tyrant, and an embodied Blue Beard; the other a perfect model of wisdom and policy. Jane, when a girl, had strong political opinions, especially about the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender of Charles I. and his grandmother Mary; but I think it was rather from an impulse of feeling than from any enquiry into the evidences by which they must be condemned or acquitted. As she grew up, the politics of the day occupied very little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. She was well acquainted with the old periodicals from the 'Spectator' downwards. Her knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers from that great master. Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends. Amongst her favourite writers, Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both, stood high. It is well that the native good taste of herself and of those with whom she lived, saved her from the snare into which a sister novelist had fallen, of imitating the grandiloquent style of Johnson. She thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe; perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail; and would sometimes say, in jest, that, if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe; looking on the author quite as an abstract idea, and ignorant and regardless what manner of man he might be. Scott's poetry gave her great pleasure; she did not live to make much acquaintance with his novels. Only three of them were published before her death; but it will be seen by the following extract from one of her letters, that she was quite prepared to admit the merits of 'Waverley'; and it is remarkable that, living, as she did, far apart from the gossip of the literary world, she should even then have spoken so confidently of his being the author of it:-- 'Walter Scott has no business to write novels; especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and ought not to be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not mean to like "Waverley," if I can help it, but I fear I must. I am quite determined, however, not to be pleased with Mrs. ---'s, should I ever meet with it, which I hope I may not. I think I can be stout against anything written by her. I have made up my mind to like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, E.'s, and my own.' It was not, however, what she _knew_, but what she _was_, that distinguished her from others. I cannot better describe the fascination which she exercised over children than by quoting the words of two of her nieces. One says:-- 'As a very little girl I was always creeping up to aunt Jane, and following her whenever I could, in the house and out of it. I might not have remembered this but for the recollection of my mother's telling me privately, that I must not be troublesome to my aunt. Her first charm to children was great sweetness of manner. She seemed to love you, and you loved her in return. This, as well as I can now recollect, was what I felt in my early days, before I was old enough to be amused by her cleverness. But soon came the delight of her playful talk. She could make everything amusing to a child. Then, as I got older, when cousins came to share the entertainment, she would tell us the most delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and her fairies had all characters of their own. The tale was invented, I am sure, at the moment, and was continued for two or three days, if occasion served.' Again: 'When staying at Chawton, with two of her other nieces, we often had amusements in which my aunt was very helpful. She was the one to whom we always looked for help. She would furnish us with what we wanted from her wardrobe; and she would be the entertaining visitor in our make- believe house. She amused us in various ways. Once, I remember, in giving a conversation as between myself and my two cousins, supposing we were all grown up, the day after a ball.' Very similar is the testimony of another niece:--'Aunt Jane was the general favourite with children; her ways with them being so playful, and her long circumstantial stories so delightful. These were continued from time to time, and were begged for on all possible and impossible occasions; woven, as she proceeded, out of nothing but her own happy talent for invention. Ah! if but one of them could be recovered! And again, as I grew older, when the original seventeen years between our ages seemed to shrink to seven, or to nothing, it comes back to me now how strangely I missed her. It had become so much a habit with me to put by things in my mind with a reference to her, and to say to myself, I shall keep this for aunt Jane.' A nephew of hers used to observe that his visits to Chawton, after the death of his aunt Jane, were always a disappointment to him. From old associations he could not help expecting to be particularly happy in that house; and never till he got there could he realise to himself how all its peculiar charm was gone. It was not only that the chief light in the house was quenched, but that the loss of it had cast a shade over the spirits of the survivors. Enough has been said to show her love for children, and her wonderful power of entertaining them; but her friends of all ages felt her enlivening influence. Her unusually quick sense of the ridiculous led her to play with all the common-places of everyday life, whether as regarded persons or things; but she never played with its serious duties or responsibilities, nor did she ever turn individuals into ridicule. With all her neighbours in the village she vas on friendly, though not on intimate, terms. She took a kindly interest in all their proceedings, and liked to hear about them. They often served for her amusement; but it was her own nonsense that gave zest to the gossip. She was as far as possible from being censorious or satirical. She never abused them or _quizzed_ them--_that_ was the word of the day; an ugly word, now obsolete; and the ugly practice which it expressed is much less prevalent now than it was then. The laugh which she occasionally raised was by imagining for her neighbours, as she was equally ready to imagine for her friends or herself, impossible contingencies, or by relating in prose or verse some trifling anecdote coloured to her own fancy, or in writing a fictitious history of what they were supposed to have said or done, which could deceive nobody. The following specimens may be given of the liveliness of mind which imparted an agreeable flavour both to her correspondence and her conversation:-- ON READING IN THE NEWSPAPERS THE MARRIAGE OF MR. GELL TO MISS GILL, OF EASTBOURNE. At Eastbourne Mr. Gell, From being perfectly well, Became dreadfully ill, For love of Miss Gill. So he said, with some sighs, I'm the slave of your _iis_; Oh, restore, if you please, By accepting my _ees_. ON THE MARRIAGE OF A MIDDLE-AGED FLIRT WITH A MR. WAKE, WHOM, IT WAS SUPPOSED, SHE WOULD SCARCELY HAVE ACCEPTED IN HER YOUTH. Maria, good-humoured, and handsome, and tall, For a husband was at her last stake; And having in vain danced at many a ball, Is now happy to _jump at a Wake_. 'We were all at the play last night to see Miss O'Neil in Isabella. I do not think she was quite equal to my expectation. I fancy I want something more than can be. Acting seldom satisfies me. I took two pockethandkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature, however, and hugs Mr. Young delightfully.' 'So, Miss B. is actually married, but I have never seen it in the papers; and one may as well be single if the wedding is not to be in print.' Once, too, she took it into her head to write the following mock panegyric on a young friend, who really was clever and handsome:-- 1. In measured verse I'll now rehearse The charms of lovely Anna: And, first, her mind is unconfined Like any vast savannah. 2. Ontario's lake may fitly speak Her fancy's ample bound: Its circuit may, on strict survey Five hundred miles be found. 3. Her wit descends on foes and friends Like famed Niagara's Fall; And travellers gaze in wild amaze, And listen, one and all. 4. Her judgment sound, thick, black, profound, Like transatlantic groves, Dispenses aid, and friendly shade To all that in it roves. 5. If thus her mind to be defined America exhausts, And all that's grand in that great land In similes it costs-- 6. Oh how can I her person try To image and portray? How paint the face, the form how trace In which those virtues lay? 7. Another world must be unfurled, Another language known, Ere tongue or sound can publish round Her charms of flesh and bone. I believe that all this nonsense was nearly extempore, and that the fancy of drawing the images from America arose at the moment from the obvious rhyme which presented itself in the first stanza. The following extracts are from letters addressed to a niece who was at that time amusing herself by attempting a novel, probably never finished, certainly never published, and of which I know nothing but what these extracts tell. They show the good-natured sympathy and encouragement which the aunt, then herself occupied in writing 'Emma,' could give to the less matured powers of the niece. They bring out incidentally some of her opinions concerning compositions of that kind:-- _Extracts_. 'Chawton, Aug. 10, 1814. 'Your aunt C. does not like desultory novels, and is rather fearful that yours will be too much so; that there will be too frequent a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be sometimes introduced, of apparent consequence, which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story. And people in general do not care much about it, for your comfort . . .' 'Sept. 9. 'You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on; and I hope you will write a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.' 'Sept. 28. 'Devereux Forrester being ruined by his vanity is very good: but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression: it is such thorough novel slang; and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel that he opened.' 'Hans Place (Nov. 1814). 'I have been very far from finding your book an evil, I assure you. I read it immediately, and with great pleasure. Indeed, I do think you get on very fast. I wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly. Julian's history was quite a surprise to me. You had not very long known it yourself, I suspect; but I have no objection to make to the circumstance; it is very well told, and his having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an additional interest with him. I like the idea; a very proper compliment to an aunt! I rather imagine, indeed, that nieces are seldom chosen but in compliment to some aunt or other. I dare say your husband was in love with me once, and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of a scarlet fever.' Jane Austen was successful in everything that she attempted with her fingers. None of us could throw spilikins in so perfect a circle, or take them off with so steady a hand. Her performances with cup and ball were marvellous. The one used at Chawton was an easy one, and she has been known to catch it on the point above an hundred times in succession, till her hand was weary. She sometimes found a resource in that simple game, when unable, from weakness in her eyes, to read or write long together. A specimen of her clear strong handwriting is here given. Happy would the compositors for the press be if they had always so legible a manuscript to work from. But the writing was not the only part of her letters which showed superior handiwork. In those days there was an art in folding and sealing. No adhesive envelopes made all easy. Some people's letters always looked loose and untidy; but her paper was sure to take the right folds, and her sealing-wax to drop into the right place. Her needlework both plain and ornamental was excellent, and might almost have put a sewing machine to shame. She was considered especially great in satin stitch. She spent much time in these occupations, and some of her merriest talk was over clothes which she and her companions were making, sometimes for themselves, and sometimes for the poor. There still remains a curious specimen of her needlework made for a sister-in- law, my mother. In a very small bag is deposited a little rolled up housewife, furnished with minikin needles and fine thread. In the housewife is a tiny pocket, and in the pocket is enclosed a slip of paper, on which, written as with a crow quill, are these lines:-- This little bag, I hope, will prove To be not vainly made; For should you thread and needles want, It will afford you aid. And, as we are about to part, 'T will serve another end: For, when you look upon this bag, You'll recollect your friend. It is the kind of article that some benevolent fairy might be supposed to give as a reward to a diligent little girl. The whole is of flowered silk, and having been never used and carefully preserved, it is as fresh and bright as when it was first made seventy years ago; and shows that the same hand which painted so exquisitely with the pen could work as delicately with the needle. I have collected some of the bright qualities which shone, as it were, on the surface of Jane Austen's character, and attracted most notice; but underneath them there lay the strong foundations of sound sense and judgment, rectitude of principle, and delicacy of feeling, qualifying her equally to advise, assist, or amuse. She was, in fact, as ready to comfort the unhappy, or to nurse the sick, as she was to laugh and jest with the lighthearted. Two of her nieces were grown up, and one of them was married, before she was taken away from them. As their minds became more matured, they were admitted into closer intimacy with her, and learned more of her graver thoughts; they know what a sympathising friend and judicious adviser they found her to be in many little difficulties and doubts of early womanhood. I do not venture to speak of her religious principles: that is a subject on which she herself was more inclined to _think_ and _act_ than to _talk_, and I shall imitate her reserve; satisfied to have shown how much of Christian love and humility abounded in her heart, without presuming to lay bare the roots whence those graces grew. Some little insight, however, into these deeper recesses of the heart must be given, when we come to speak of her death. CHAPTER VI. _Habits of Composition resumed after a long interval--First publication--The interest taken by the Author in the success of her Works_. It may seem extraordinary that Jane Austen should have written so little during the years that elapsed between leaving Steventon and settling at Chawton; especially when this cessation from work is contrasted with her literary activity both before and after that period. It might rather have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have called forth her powers; while the quiet life which the family led both at Bath and Southampton must have afforded abundant leisure for composition; but so it was that nothing which I know of, certainly nothing which the public have seen, was completed in either of those places. I can only state the fact, without assigning any cause for it; but as soon as she was fixed in her second home, she resumed the habits of composition which had been formed in her first, and continued them to the end of her life. The first year of her residence at Chawton seems to have been devoted to revising and preparing for the press 'Sense and Sensibility,' and 'Pride and Prejudice'; but between February 1811 and August 1816, she began and completed 'Mansfield Park,' 'Emma,' and 'Persuasion,' so that the last five years of her life produced the same number of novels with those which had been written in her early youth. How she was able to effect all this is surprising, for she had no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming. She was not, however, troubled with companions like her own Mrs. Allen in 'Northanger Abbey,' whose 'vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such that, as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent; and therefore, while she sat at work, if she lost her needle, or broke her thread, or saw a speck of dirt on her gown, she must observe it, whether there were any one at leisure to answer her or not.' In that well occupied female party there must have been many precious hours of silence during which the pen was busy at the little mahogany writing-desk, {102} while Fanny Price, or Emma Woodhouse, or Anne Elliott was growing into beauty and interest. I have no doubt that I, and my sisters and cousins, in our visits to Chawton, frequently disturbed this mystic process, without having any idea of the mischief that we were doing; certainly we never should have guessed it by any signs of impatience or irritability in the writer. As so much had been previously prepared, when once she began to publish, her works came out in quick succession. 'Sense and Sensibility' was published in 1811, 'Pride and Prejudice' at the beginning of 1813, 'Mansfield Park' in 1814, 'Emma' early in 1816; 'Northanger Abbey' and 'Persuasion' did not appear till after her death, in 1818. It will be shown farther on why 'Northanger Abbey,' though amongst the first written, was one of the last published. Her first three novels were published by Egerton, her last three by Murray. The profits of the four which had been printed before her death had not at that time amounted to seven hundred pounds. I have no record of the publication of 'Sense and Sensibility,' nor of the author's feelings at this her first appearance before the public; but the following extracts from three letters to her sister give a lively picture of the interest with which she watched the reception of 'Pride and Prejudice,' and show the carefulness with which she corrected her compositions, and rejected much that had been written:-- Chawton, Friday, January 29 (1813). 'I hope you received my little parcel by J. Bond on Wednesday evening, my dear Cassandra, and that you will be ready to hear from me again on Sunday, for I feel that I must write to you to-day. I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London. On Wednesday I received one copy sent down by Falkener, with three lines from Henry to say that he had given another to Charles and sent a third by the coach to Godmersham . . . . The advertisement is in our paper to-day for the first time: 18_s_. He shall ask 1_l_. 1_s_. for my two next, and 1_l_. 8_s_. for my stupidest of all. Miss B. dined with us on the very day of the book's coming, and in the evening we fairly set at it, and read half the first vol. to her, prefacing that, having intelligence from Henry that such a work would soon appear, we had desired him to send it whenever it came out, and I believe it passed with her unsuspected. She was amused, poor soul! _That_ she could not help, you know, with two such people to lead the way, but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like _her_ at least I do not know. There are a few typical errors; and a "said he," or a "said she," would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but "I do not write for such dull elves" as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves. The second volume is shorter than I could wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part. I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than "Sense and Sensibility" altogether. Now I will try and write of something else.' Chawton, Thursday, February 4 (1813). 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter was truly welcome, and I am much obliged to you for all your praise; it came at a right time, for I had had some fits of disgust. Our second evening's reading to Miss B. had not pleased me so well, but I believe something must be attributed to my mother's too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style . . . . The greatest blunder in the printing that I have met with is in page 220, v. 3, where two speeches are made into one. There might as well be no suppers at Longbourn; but I suppose it was the remains of Mrs. Bennett's old Meryton habits.' The following letter seems to have been written soon after the last two: in February 1813:-- 'This will be a quick return for yours, my dear Cassandra; I doubt its having much else to recommend it; but there is no saying; it may turn out to be a very long and delightful letter. I am exceedingly pleased that you can say what you do, after having gone through the whole work, and Fanny's praise is very gratifying. My hopes were tolerably strong of _her_, but nothing like a certainty. Her liking Darcy and Elizabeth is enough. She might hate all the others, if she would. I have her opinion under her own hand this morning, but your transcript of it, which I read first, was not, and is not, the less acceptable. To _me_ it is of course all praise, but the more exact truth which she sends you is good enough . . . . Our party on Wednesday was not unagreeable, though we wanted a master of the house less anxious and fidgety, and more conversable. Upon Mrs. ---'s mentioning that she had sent the rejected addresses to Mrs. H., I began talking to her a little about them, and expressed my hope of their having amused her. Her answer was, "Oh dear yes, very much, very droll indeed, the opening of the house, and the striking up of the fiddles!" What she meant, poor woman, who shall say? I sought no farther. As soon as a whist party was formed, and a round table threatened, I made my mother an excuse and came away, leaving just as many for _their_ round table as there were at Mrs. Grant's. {107} I wish they might be as agreeable a set. My mother is very well, and finds great amusement in glove-knitting, and at present wants no other work. We quite run over with books. She has got Sir John Carr's "Travels in Spain," and I am reading a Society octavo, an "Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire," by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written and highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan, or even the two Mr. Smiths of the city. The first soldier I ever sighed for; but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit. Yesterday, moreover, brought us "Mrs. Grant's Letters," with Mr. White's compliments; but I have disposed of them, compliments and all, to Miss P., and amongst so many readers or retainers of books as we have in Chawton, I dare say there will be no difficulty in getting rid of them for another fortnight, if necessary. I have disposed of Mrs. Grant for the second fortnight to Mrs. ---. It can make no difference to _her_ which of the twenty-six fortnights in the year the 3 vols. lie on her table. I have been applied to for information as to the oath taken in former times of Bell, Book, and Candle, but have none to give. Perhaps you may be able to learn something of its origin where you now are. Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick quarto volumes which one always sees in the breakfast parlour there must be acquainted with everything in the world. I detest a quarto. Capt. Pasley's book is too good for their society. They will not understand a man who condenses his thoughts into an octavo. I have learned from Sir J. Carr that there is no Government House at Gibraltar. I must alter it to the Commissioner's.' The following letter belongs to the same year, but treats of a different subject. It describes a journey from Chawton to London, in her brother's curricle, and shows how much could be seen and enjoyed in course of a long summer's day by leisurely travelling amongst scenery which the traveller in an express train now rushes through in little more than an hour, but scarcely sees at all:-- 'Sloane Street, Thursday, May 20 (1813). 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA, 'Before I say anything else, I claim a paper full of halfpence on the drawing-room mantel-piece; I put them there myself, and forgot to bring them with me. I cannot say that I have yet been in any distress for money, but I chuse to have my due, as well as the Devil. How lucky we were in our weather yesterday! This wet morning makes one more sensible of it. We had no rain of any consequence. The head of the curricle was put half up three or four times, but our share of the showers was very trifling, though they seemed to be heavy all round us, when we were on the Hog's-back, and I fancied it might then be raining so hard at Chawton as to make you feel for us much more than we deserved. Three hours and a quarter took us to Guildford, where we staid barely two hours, and had only just time enough for all we had to do there; that is, eating a long and comfortable breakfast, watching the carriages, paying Mr. Harrington, and taking a little stroll afterwards. From some views which that stroll gave us, I think most highly of the situation of Guildford. We wanted all our brothers and sisters to be standing with us in the bowling-green, and looking towards Horsham. I was very lucky in my gloves--got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked at all like a glove shop, and gave only four shillings for them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything, and their worth certainly remains to be proved; but I think they look very well. We left Guildford at twenty minutes before twelve (I hope somebody cares for these minutiae), and were at Esher in about two hours more. I was very much pleased with the country in general. Between Guildford and Ripley I thought it particularly pretty, also about Painshill; and from a Mr. Spicer's grounds at Esher, which we walked into before dinner, the views were beautiful. I cannot say what we did not see, but I should think there could not be a wood, or a meadow, or palace, or remarkable spot in England that was not spread out before us on one side or other. Claremont is going to be sold: a Mr. Ellis has it now. It is a house that seems never to have prospered. After dinner we walked forward to be overtaken at the coachman's time, and before he did overtake us we were very near Kingston. I fancy it was about half- past six when we reached this house--a twelve hours' business, and the horses did not appear more than reasonably tired. I was very tired too, and glad to get to bed early, but am quite well to-day. I am very snug in the front drawing-room all to myself, and would not say "thank you" for any company but you. The quietness of it does me good. I have contrived to pay my two visits, though the weather made me a great while about it, and left me only a few minutes to sit with Charlotte Craven. {110} She looks very well, and her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education. Her manners are as unaffected and pleasing as ever. She had heard from her mother to- day. Mrs. Craven spends another fortnight at Chilton. I saw nobody but Charlotte, which pleased me best. I was shewn upstairs into a drawing-room, where she came to me, and the appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like, amused me very much; it was full of modern elegancies. 'Yours very affectly., 'J. A.' The next letter, written in the following year, contains an account of another journey to London, with her brother Henry, and reading with him the manuscript of 'Mansfield Park':-- 'Henrietta Street, Wednesday, March 2 (1814). 'MY DEAR CASSANDRA, 'You were wrong in thinking of us at Guildford last night: we were at Cobham. On reaching G. we found that John and the horses were gone on. We therefore did no more than we had done at Farnham--sit in the carriage while fresh horses were put in, and proceeded directly to Cobham, which we reached by seven, and about eight were sitting down to a very nice roast fowl, &c. We had altogether a very good journey, and everything at Cobham was comfortable. I could not pay Mr. Harrington! That was the only alas! of the business. I shall therefore return his bill, and my mother's 2_l_., that you may try your luck. We did not begin reading till Bentley Green. Henry's approbation is hitherto even equal to my wishes. He says it is different from the other two, but does not appear to think it at all inferior. He has only married Mrs. R. I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part. He took to Lady B. and Mrs. N. most kindly, and gives great praise to the drawing of the characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny, and, I think, foresees how it will all be. I finished the "Heroine" last night, and was very much amused by it. I wonder James did not like it better. It diverted me exceedingly. We went to bed at ten. I was very tired, but slept to a miracle, and am lovely to-day, and at present Henry seems to have no complaint. We left Cobham at half-past eight, stopped to bait and breakfast at Kingston, and were in this house considerably before two. Nice smiling Mr. Barlowe met us at the door and, in reply to enquiries after news, said that peace was generally expected. I have taken possession of my bedroom, unpacked my bandbox, sent Miss P.'s two letters to the twopenny post, been visited by Md. B., and am now writing by myself at the new table in the front room. It is snowing. We had some snowstorms yesterday, and a smart frost at night, which gave us a hard road from Cobham to Kingston; but as it was then getting dirty and heavy, Henry had a pair of leaders put on to the bottom of Sloane St. His own horses, therefore, cannot have had hard work. I watched for _veils_ as we drove through the streets, and had the pleasure of seeing several upon vulgar heads. And now, how do you all do?--you in particular, after the worry of yesterday and the day before. I hope Martha had a pleasant visit again, and that you and my mother could eat your beef-pudding. Depend upon my thinking of the chimney-sweeper as soon as I wake to-morrow. Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got; as it is in a front box, however, I hope we shall do pretty well--Shylock, a good play for Fanny--she cannot be much affected, I think. Mrs. Perigord has just been here. She tells me that we owe her master for the silk-dyeing. My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are. They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin. It is evening. We have drank tea, and I have torn through the third vol. of the "Heroine." I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style. Henry is going on with "Mansfield Park." He admires H. Crawford: I mean properly, as a clever, pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it. We hear that Mr. Kean is more admired than ever. There are no good places to be got in Drury Lane for the next fortnight, but Henry means to secure some for Saturday fortnight, when you are reckoned upon. Give my love to little Cass. I hope she found my bed comfortable last night. I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor anybody quite so large as Gogmagolicus. 'Yours affly., 'J. AUSTEN.' CHAPTER VII. _Seclusion from the literary world--Notice from the Prince Regent--Correspondence with Mr. Clarke--Suggestions to alter her style of writing_. Jane Austen lived in entire seclusion from the literary world: neither by correspondence, nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary authors. It is probable that she never was in company with any person whose talents or whose celebrity equalled her own; so that her powers never could have been sharpened by collision with superior intellects, nor her imagination aided by their casual suggestions. Whatever she produced was a genuine home-made article. Even during the last two or three years of her life, when her works were rising in the estimation of the public, they did not enlarge the circle of her acquaintance. Few of her readers knew even her name, and none knew more of her than her name. I doubt whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note, whose personal obscurity was so complete. I can think of none like her, but of many to contrast with her in that respect. Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, was at an early age petted by Dr. Johnson, and introduced to the wits and scholars of the day at the tables of Mrs. Thrale and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Anna Seward, in her self-constituted shrine at Lichfield, would have been miserable, had she not trusted that the eyes of all lovers of poetry were devoutly fixed on her. Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth were indeed far from courting publicity; they loved the privacy of their own families, one with her brother and sister in their Hampstead villa, the other in her more distant retreat in Ireland; but fame pursued them, and they were the favourite correspondents of Sir Walter Scott. Crabbe, who was usually buried in a country parish, yet sometimes visited London, and dined at Holland House, and was received as a fellow-poet by Campbell, Moore, and Rogers; and on one memorable occasion he was Scott's guest at Edinburgh, and gazed with wondering eyes on the incongruous pageantry with which George IV. was entertained in that city. Even those great writers who hid themselves amongst lakes and mountains associated with each other; and though little seen by the world were so much in its thoughts that a new term, 'Lakers,' was coined to designate them. The chief part of Charlotte Bronte's life was spent in a wild solitude compared with which Steventon and Chawton might be considered to be in the gay world; and yet she attained to personal distinction which never fell to Jane's lot. When she visited her kind publisher in London, literary men and women were invited purposely to meet her: Thackeray bestowed upon her the honour of his notice; and once in Willis's Rooms, {117} she had to walk shy and trembling through an avenue of lords and ladies, drawn up for the purpose of gazing at the author of 'Jane Eyre.' Miss Mitford, too, lived quietly in 'Our Village,' devoting her time and talents to the benefit of a father scarcely worthy of her; but she did not live there unknown. Her tragedies gave her a name in London. She numbered Milman and Talfourd amongst her correspondents; and her works were a passport to the society of many who would not otherwise have sought her. Hundreds admired Miss Mitford on account of her writings for one who ever connected the idea of Miss Austen with the press. A few years ago, a gentleman visiting Winchester Cathedral desired to be shown Miss Austen's grave. The verger, as he pointed it out, asked, 'Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady; so many people want to know where she was buried?' During her life the ignorance of the verger was shared by most people; few knew that 'there was anything particular about that lady.' It was not till towards the close of her life, when the last of the works that she saw published was in the press, that she received the only mark of distinction ever bestowed upon her; and that was remarkable for the high quarter whence it emanated rather than for any actual increase of fame that it conferred. It happened thus. In the autumn of 1815 she nursed her brother Henry through a dangerous fever and slow convalescence at his house in Hans Place. He was attended by one of the Prince Regent's physicians. All attempts to keep her name secret had at this time ceased, and though it had never appeared on a title-page, all who cared to know might easily learn it: and the friendly physician was aware that his patient's nurse was the author of 'Pride and Prejudice.' Accordingly he informed her one day that the Prince was a great admirer of her novels; that he read them often, and kept a set in every one of his residences; that he himself therefore had thought it right to inform his Royal Highness that Miss Austen was staying in London, and that the Prince had desired Mr. Clarke, the librarian of Carlton House, to wait upon her. The next day Mr. Clarke made his appearance, and invited her to Carlton House, saying that he had the Prince's instructions to show her the library and other apartments, and to pay her every possible attention. The invitation was of course accepted, and during the visit to Carlton House Mr. Clarke declared himself commissioned to say that if Miss Austen had any other novel forthcoming she was at liberty to dedicate it to the Prince. Accordingly such a dedication was immediately prefixed to 'Emma,' which was at that time in the press. Mr. Clarke was the brother of Dr. Clarke, the traveller and mineralogist, whose life has been written by Bishop Otter. Jane found in him not only a very courteous gentleman, but also a warm admirer of her talents; though it will be seen by his letters that he did not clearly apprehend the limits of her powers, or the proper field for their exercise. The following correspondence took place between them. Feeling some apprehension lest she should make a mistake in acting on the verbal permission which she had received from the Prince, Jane addressed the following letter to Mr. Clarke:-- 'Nov. 15, 1815. 'SIR,--I must take the liberty of asking you a question. Among the many flattering attentions which I received from you at Carlton House on Monday last was the information of my being at liberty to dedicate any future work to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, without the necessity of any solicitation on my part. Such, at least, I believed to be your words; but as I am very anxious to be quite certain of what was intended, I entreat you to have the goodness to inform me how such a permission is to be understood, and whether it is incumbent on me to show my sense of the honour, by inscribing the work now in the press to His Royal Highness; I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful.' The following gracious answer was returned by Mr. Clarke, together with a suggestion which must have been received with some surprise:-- 'Carlton House, Nov. 16, 1815. 'DEAR MADAM,--It is certainly not _incumbent_ on you to dedicate your work now in the press to His Royal Highness; but if you wish to do the Regent that honour either now or at any future period I am happy to send you that permission, which need not require any more trouble or solicitation on your part. 'Your late works, Madam, and in particular "Mansfield Park," reflect the highest honour on your genius and your principles. In every new work your mind seems to increase its energy and power of discrimination. The Regent has read and admired all your publications. 'Accept my best thanks for the pleasure your volumes have given me. In the perusal of them I felt a great inclination to write and say so. And I also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in some future work the habits of life, and character, and enthusiasm of a clergyman, who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, who should be something like Beattie's Minstrel-- Silent when glad, affectionate tho' shy, And in his looks was most demurely sad; And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why. Neither Goldsmith, nor La Fontaine in his "Tableau de Famille," have in my mind quite delineated an English clergyman, at least of the present day, fond of and entirely engaged in literature, no man's enemy but his own. Pray, dear Madam, think of these things. 'Believe me at all times with sincerity and respect, your faithful and obliged servant, 'J. S. CLARKE, Librarian.' The following letter, written in reply, will show how unequal the author of 'Pride and Prejudice' felt herself to delineating an enthusiastic clergyman of the present day, who should resemble Beattie's Minstrel:-- 'Dec. 11. 'DEAR SIR,--My "Emma" is now so near publication that I feel it right to assure you of my not having forgotten your kind recommendation of an early copy for Carlton House, and that I have Mr. Murray's promise of its being sent to His Royal Highness, under cover to you, three days previous to the work being really out. I must make use of this opportunity to thank you, dear Sir, for the very high praise you bestow on my other novels. I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merits. My greatest anxiety at present is that this fourth work should not disgrace what was good in the others. But on this point I will do myself the justice to declare that, whatever may be my wishes for its success, I am strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred "Pride and Prejudice" it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred "Mansfield Park" inferior in good sense. Such as it is, however, I hope you will do me the favour of accepting a copy. Mr. Murray will have directions for sending one. I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am _not_. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. 'Believe me, dear Sir, 'Your obliged and faithful humbl Sert. 'JANE AUSTEN.' {122} Mr. Clarke, however, was not to be discouraged from proposing another subject. He had recently been appointed chaplain and private English secretary to Prince Leopold, who was then about to be united to the Princess Charlotte; and when he again wrote to express the gracious thanks of the Prince Regent for the copy of 'Emma' which had been presented, he suggests that 'an historical romance illustrative of the august House of Cobourg would just now be very interesting,' and might very properly be dedicated to Prince Leopold. This was much as if Sir William Ross had been set to paint a great battle-piece; and it is amusing to see with what grave civility she declined a proposal which must have struck her as ludicrous, in the following letter:-- 'MY DEAR SIR,--I am honoured by the Prince's thanks and very much obliged to yourself for the kind manner in which you mention the work. I have also to acknowledge a former letter forwarded to me from Hans Place. I assure you I felt very grateful for the friendly tenor of it, and hope my silence will have been considered, as it was truly meant, to proceed only from an unwillingness to tax your time with idle thanks. Under every interesting circumstance which your own talents and literary labours have placed you in, or the favour of the Regent bestowed, you have my best wishes. Your recent appointments I hope are a step to something still better. In my opinion, the service of a court can hardly be too well paid, for immense must be the sacrifice of time and feeling required by it. 'You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other. 'I remain, my dear Sir, 'Your very much obliged, and sincere friend, 'J. AUSTEN. 'Chawton, near Alton, April 1, 1816.' Mr. Clarke should have recollected the warning of the wise man, 'Force not the course of the river.' If you divert it from the channel in which nature taught it to flow, and force it into one arbitrarily cut by yourself, you will lose its grace and beauty. But when his free course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with the enamelled stones, Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh in his pilgrimage: And so by many winding nooks he strays With willing sport. All writers of fiction, who have genius strong enough to work out a course of their own, resist every attempt to interfere with its direction. No two writers could be more unlike each other than Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte; so much so that the latter was unable to understand why the former was admired, and confessed that she herself 'should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses;' but each writer equally resisted interference with her own natural style of composition. Miss Bronte, in reply to a friendly critic, who had warned her against being too melodramatic, and had ventured to propose Miss Austen's works to her as a study, writes thus:-- 'Whenever I _do_ write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call "melodrama." I _think_ so, but I am not sure. I _think_, too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's "mild eyes," to finish more, and be more subdued; but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master--which will have its way--putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature, new moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?' {126} The playful raillery with which the one parries an attack on her liberty, and the vehement eloquence of the other in pleading the same cause and maintaining the independence of genius, are very characteristic of the minds of the respective writers. The suggestions which Jane received as to the sort of story that she ought to write were, however, an amusement to her, though they were not likely to prove useful; and she has left amongst her papers one entitled, 'Plan of a novel according to hints from various quarters.' The names of some of those advisers are written on the margin of the manuscript opposite to their respective suggestions. 'Heroine to be the daughter of a clergyman, who after having lived much in the world had retired from it, and settled on a curacy with a very small fortune of his own. The most excellent man that can be imagined, perfect in character, temper, and manner, without the smallest drawback or peculiarity to prevent his being the most delightful companion to his daughter from one year's end to the other. Heroine faultless in character, beautiful in person, and possessing every possible accomplishment. Book to open with father and daughter conversing in long speeches, elegant language, and a tone of high serious sentiment. The father induced, at his daughter's earnest request, to relate to her the past events of his life. Narrative to reach through the greater part of the first volume; as besides all the circumstances of his attachment to her mother, and their marriage, it will comprehend his going to sea as chaplain to a distinguished naval character about the court; and his going afterwards to court himself, which involved him in many interesting situations, concluding with his opinion of the benefits of tithes being done away with . . . . From this outset the story will proceed, and contain a striking variety of adventures. Father an exemplary parish priest, and devoted to literature; but heroine and father never above a fortnight in one place: he being driven from his curacy by the vile arts of some totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion. No sooner settled in one country of Europe, than they are compelled to quit it, and retire to another, always making new acquaintance, and always obliged to leave them. This will of course exhibit a wide variety of character. The scene will be for ever shifting from one set of people to another, but there will be no mixture, all the good will be unexceptionable in every respect. There will be no foibles or weaknesses but with the wicked, who will be completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them. Early in her career, the heroine must meet with the hero: all perfection, of course, and only prevented from paying his addresses to her by some excess of refinement. Wherever she goes, somebody falls in love with her, and she receives repeated offers of marriage, which she refers wholly to her father, exceedingly angry that he should not be the first applied to. Often carried away by the anti-hero, but rescued either by her father or the hero. Often reduced to support herself and her father by her talents, and work for her bread; continually cheated, and defrauded of her hire; worn down to a skeleton, and now and then starved to death. At last, hunted out of civilised society, denied the poor shelter of the humblest cottage, they are compelled to retreat into Kamtschatka, where the poor father quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the ground, and after four or five hours of tender advice and parental admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives against the holders of tithes. Heroine inconsolable for some time, but afterwards crawls back towards her former country, having at least twenty narrow escapes of falling into the hands of anti-hero; and at last, in the very nick of time, turning a corner to avoid him, runs into the arms of the hero himself, who, having just shaken off the scruples which fettered him before, was at the very moment setting off in pursuit of her. The tenderest and completest _eclaircissement_ takes place, and they are happily united. Throughout the whole work heroine to be in the most elegant society, and living in high style.' Since the first publication of this memoir, Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street has very kindly sent to me copies of the following letters, which his father received from Jane Austen, when engaged in the publication of 'Emma.' The increasing cordiality of the letters shows that the author felt that her interests were duly cared for, and was glad to find herself in the hands of a publisher whom she could consider as a friend. Her brother had addressed to Mr. Murray a strong complaint of the tardiness of a printer:-- '23 Hans Place, Thursday, November 23 (1815). 'SIR,--My brother's note last Monday has been so fruitless, that I am afraid there can be but little chance of my writing to any good effect; but yet I am so very much disappointed and vexed by the delays of the printers, that I cannot help begging to know whether there is no hope of their being quickened. Instead of the work being ready by the end of the present month, it will hardly, at the rate we now proceed, be finished by the end of the next; and as I expect to leave London early in December, it is of consequence that no more time should be lost. Is it likely that the printers will be influenced to greater dispatch and punctuality by knowing that the work is to be dedicated, by permission, to the Prince Regent? If you can make that circumstance operate, I shall be very glad. My brother returns "Waterloo" with many thanks for the loan of it. We have heard much of Scott's account of Paris. {130} If it be not incompatible with other arrangements, would you favour us with it, supposing you have any set already opened? You may depend upon its being in careful hands. 'I remain, Sir, your obt. humble Set. 'J. AUSTEN.' 'Hans Place, December 11 (1815). 'DEAR SIR,--As I find that "Emma" is advertised for publication as early as Saturday next, I think it best to lose no time in settling all that remains to be settled on the subject, and adopt this method as involving the smallest tax on your time. 'In the first place, I beg you to understand that I leave the terms on which the trade should be supplied with the work entirely to your judgment, entreating you to be guided in every such arrangement by your own experience of what is most likely to clear off the edition rapidly. I shall be satisfied with whatever you feel to be best. The title-page must be "Emma, dedicated by permission to H.R.H. the Prince Regent." And it is my particular wish that one set should be completed and sent to H.R.H. two or three days before the work is generally public. It should be sent under cover to the Rev. J. S. Clarke, Librarian, Carlton House. I shall subjoin a list of those persons to whom I must trouble you to forward also a set each, when the work is out; all unbound, with "From the Authoress" in the first page. 'I return you, with very many thanks, the books you have so obligingly supplied me with. I am very sensible, I assure you, of the attention you have paid to my convenience and amusement. I return also "Mansfield Park," as ready for a second edition, I believe, as I can make it. I am in Hans Place till the 16th. From that day inclusive, my direction will be Chawton, Alton, Hants. 'I remain, dear Sir, 'Yr faithful humb. Servt. 'J. AUSTEN. 'I wish you would have the goodness to send a line by the bearer, stating _the day_ on which the set will be ready for the Prince Regent.' 'Hans Place, December 11 (1815). 'DEAR SIR,--I am much obliged by yours, and very happy to feel everything arranged to our mutual satisfaction. As to my direction about the title-page, it was arising from my ignorance only, and from my having never noticed the proper place for a dedication. I thank you for putting me right. Any deviation from what is usually done in such cases is the last thing I should wish for. I feel happy in having a friend to save me from the ill effect of my own blunder. 'Yours, dear Sir, &c. 'J. AUSTEN.' 'Chawton, April 1, 1816. 'DEAR SIR,--I return you the "Quarterly Review" with many thanks. The Authoress of "Emma" has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it, except in the total omission of "Mansfield Park." I cannot but be sorry that so clever a man as the Reviewer of "Emma" should consider it as unworthy of being noticed. You will be pleased to hear that I have received the Prince's thanks for the _handsome_ copy I sent him of "Emma." Whatever he may think of _my_ share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right. 'In consequence of the late event in Henrietta Street, I must request that if you should at any time have anything to communicate by letter, you will be so good as to write by the post, directing to me (Miss J. Austen), Chawton, near Alton; and that for anything of a larger bulk, you will add to the same direction, by _Collier's Southampton coach_. 'I remain, dear Sir, 'Yours very faithfully, 'J. AUSTEN.' About the same time the following letters passed between the Countess of Morley and the writer of 'Emma.' I do not know whether they were personally acquainted with each other, nor in what this interchange of civilities originated:-- _The Countess of Morley to Miss J. Austen_. 'Saltram, December 27 (1815). 'MADAM,--I have been most anxiously waiting for an introduction to "Emma," and am infinitely obliged to you for your kind recollection of me, which will procure me the pleasure of her acquaintance some days sooner than I should otherwise have had it. I am already become intimate with the Woodhouse family, and feel that they will not amuse and interest me less than the Bennetts, Bertrams, Norrises, and all their admirable predecessors. I can give them no higher praise. 'I am, Madam, your much obliged 'F. MORLEY.' _Miss J. Austen to the Countess of Morley_. 'MADAM,--Accept my thanks for the honour of your note, and for your kind disposition in favour of "Emma." In my present state of doubt as to her reception in the world, it is particularly gratifying to me to receive so early an assurance of your Ladyship's approbation. It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which "Emma's" predecessors have experienced, and to believe that I have not yet, as almost every writer of fancy does sooner or later, overwritten myself. 'I am, Madam, 'Your obliged and faithful Servt. 'J. AUSTEN.' 'December 31, 1815.' CHAPTER VIII. _Slow growth of her fame--Ill success of first attempts at publication--Two Reviews of her works contrasted_. Seldom has any literary reputation been of such slow growth as that of Jane Austen. Readers of the present day know the rank that is generally assigned to her. They have been told by Archbishop Whately, in his review of her works, and by Lord Macaulay, in his review of Madame D'Arblay's, the reason why the highest place is to be awarded to Jane Austen, as a truthful drawer of character, and why she is to be classed with those who have approached nearest, in that respect, to the great master Shakspeare. They see her safely placed, by such authorities, in her niche, not indeed amongst the highest orders of genius, but in one confessedly her own, in our British temple of literary fame; and it may be difficult to make them believe how coldly her works were at first received, and how few readers had any appreciation of their peculiar merits. Sometimes a friend or neighbour, who chanced to know of our connection with the author, would condescend to speak with moderate approbation of 'Sense and Sensibility,' or 'Pride and Prejudice'; but if they had known that we, in our secret thoughts, classed her with Madame D'Arblay or Miss Edgeworth, or even with some other novel writers of the day whose names are now scarcely remembered, they would have considered it an amusing instance of family conceit. To the multitude her works appeared tame and commonplace, {136a} poor in colouring, and sadly deficient in incident and interest. It is true that we were sometimes cheered by hearing that a different verdict had been pronounced by more competent judges: we were told how some great statesman or distinguished poet held these works in high estimation; we had the satisfaction of believing that they were most admired by the best judges, and comforted ourselves with Horace's 'satis est Equitem mihi plaudere.' So much was this the case, that one of the ablest men of my acquaintance {136b} said, in that kind of jest which has much earnest in it, that he had established it in his own mind, as a new test of ability, whether people _could_ or _could not_ appreciate Miss Austen's merits. But though such golden opinions were now and then gathered in, yet the wide field of public taste yielded no adequate return either in praise or profit. Her reward was not to be the quick return of the cornfield, but the slow growth of the tree which is to endure to another generation. Her first attempts at publication were very discouraging. In November, 1797, her father wrote the following letter to Mr. Cadell:-- 'Sir,--I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprising 3 vols., about the length of Miss Burney's "Evelina." As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort shd make its first appearance under a respectable name, I apply to you. I shall be much obliged therefore if you will inform me whether you choose to be concerned in it, what will be the expense of publishing it at the author's risk, and what you will venture to advance for the property of it, if on perusal it is approved of. Should you give any encouragement, I will send you the work. 'I am, Sir, your humble Servant, 'GEORGE AUSTEN.' 'Steventon, near Overton, Hants, '1st Nov. 1797.' This proposal was declined by return of post! The work thus summarily rejected must have been 'Pride and Prejudice.' The fate of 'Northanger Abbey' was still more humiliating. It was sold, in 1803, to a publisher in Bath, for ten pounds, but it found so little favour in his eyes, that he chose to abide by his first loss rather than risk farther expense by publishing such a work. It seems to have lain for many years unnoticed in his drawers; somewhat as the first chapters of 'Waverley' lurked forgotten amongst the old fishing-tackle in Scott's cabinet. Tilneys, Thorpes, and Morlands consigned apparently to eternal oblivion! But when four novels of steadily increasing success had given the writer some confidence in herself, she wished to recover the copyright of this early work. One of her brothers undertook the negotiation. He found the purchaser very willing to receive back his money, and to resign all claim to the copyright. When the bargain was concluded and the money paid, but not till then, the negotiator had the satisfaction of informing him that the work which had been so lightly esteemed was by the author of 'Pride and Prejudice.' I do not think that she was herself much mortified by the want of early success. She wrote for her own amusement. Money, though acceptable, was not necessary for the moderate expenses of her quiet home. Above all, she was blessed with a cheerful contented disposition, and an humble mind; and so lowly did she esteem her own claims, that when she received 150_l_. from the sale of 'Sense and Sensibility,' she considered it a prodigious recompense for that which had cost her nothing. It cannot be supposed, however, that she was altogether insensible to the superiority of her own workmanship over that of some contemporaries who were then enjoying a brief popularity. Indeed a few touches in the following extracts from two of her letters show that she was as quicksighted to absurdities in composition as to those in living persons. 'Mr. C.'s opinion is gone down in my list; but as my paper relates only to "Mansfield Park," I may fortunately excuse myself from entering Mr. D's. I will redeem my credit with him by writing a close imitation of "Self-Control," as soon as I can. I will improve upon it. My heroine shall not only be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself. She shall cross the Atlantic in the same way; and never stop till she reaches Gravesend.' 'We have got "Rosanne" in our Society, and find it much as you describe it; very good and clever, but tedious. Mrs. Hawkins' great excellence is on serious subjects. There are some very delightful conversations and reflections on religion: but on lighter topics I think she falls into many absurdities; and, as to love, her heroine has very comical feelings. There are a thousand improbabilities in the story. Do you remember the two Miss Ormsdens introduced just at last? Very flat and unnatural. Madelle. Cossart is rather my passion.' Two notices of her works appeared in the 'Quarterly Review.' One in October 1815, and another, more than three years after her death, in January 1821. The latter article is known to have been from the pen of Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. {140} They differ much from each other in the degree of praise which they award, and I think also it may be said, in the ability with which they are written. The first bestows some approval, but the other expresses the warmest admiration. One can scarcely be satisfied with the critical acumen of the former writer, who, in treating of 'Sense and Sensibility,' takes no notice whatever of the vigour with which many of the characters are drawn, but declares that 'the interest and _merit_ of the piece depends _altogether_ upon the behaviour of the elder sister!' Nor is he fair when, in 'Pride and Prejudice,' he represents Elizabeth's change of sentiments towards Darcy as caused by the sight of his house and grounds. But the chief discrepancy between the two reviewers is to be found in their appreciation of the commonplace and silly characters to be found in these novels. On this point the difference almost amounts to a contradiction, such as one sometimes sees drawn up in parallel columns, when it is desired to convict some writer or some statesman of inconsistency. The Reviewer, in 1815, says: 'The faults of these works arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends. Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward, or too long dwelt on, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society.' The Reviewer, in 1821, on the contrary, singles out the fools as especial instances of the writer's abilities, and declares that in this respect she shows a regard to character hardly exceeded by Shakspeare himself. These are his words: 'Like him (Shakspeare) she shows as admirable a discrimination in the character of fools as of people of sense; a merit which is far from common. To invent indeed a conversation full of wisdom or of wit requires that the writer should himself possess ability; but the converse does not hold good, it is no fool that can describe fools well; and many who have succeeded pretty well in painting superior characters have failed in giving individuality to those weaker ones which it is necessary to introduce in order to give a faithful representation of real life: they exhibit to us mere folly in the abstract, forgetting that to the eye of the skilful naturalist the insects on a leaf present as wide differences as exist between the lion and the elephant. Slender, and Shallow, and Aguecheek, as Shakspeare has painted them, though equally fools, resemble one another no more than Richard, and Macbeth, and Julius Caesar; and Miss Austen's {142} Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Rushworth, and Miss Bates are no more alike than her Darcy, Knightley, and Edmund Bertram. Some have complained indeed of finding her fools too much like nature, and consequently tiresome. There is no disputing about tastes; all we can say is, that such critics must (whatever deference they may outwardly pay to received opinions) find the "Merry Wives of Windsor" and "Twelfth Night" very tiresome; and that those who look with pleasure at Wilkie's pictures, or those of the Dutch school, must admit that excellence of imitation may confer attraction on that which would be insipid or disagreeable in the reality. Her minuteness of detail has also been found fault with; but even where it produces, at the time, a degree of tediousness, we know not whether that can justly be reckoned a blemish, which is absolutely essential to a very high excellence. Now it is absolutely impossible, without this, to produce that thorough acquaintance with the characters which is necessary to make the reader heartily interested in them. Let any one cut out from the "Iliad" or from Shakspeare's plays everything (we are far from saying that either might not lose some parts with advantage, but let him reject everything) which is absolutely devoid of importance and interest _in_ _itself_; and he will find that what is left will have lost more than half its charms. We are convinced that some writers have diminished the effect of their works by being scrupulous to admit nothing into them which had not some absolute and independent merit. They have acted like those who strip off the leaves of a fruit tree, as being of themselves good for nothing, with the view of securing more nourishment to the fruit, which in fact cannot attain its full maturity and flavour without them.' The world, I think, has endorsed the opinion of the later writer; but it would not be fair to set down the discrepancy between the two entirely to the discredit of the former. The fact is that, in the course of the intervening five years, these works had been read and reread by many leaders in the literary world. The public taste was forming itself all this time, and 'grew by what it fed on.' These novels belong to a class which gain rather than lose by frequent perusals, and it is probable that each Reviewer represented fairly enough the prevailing opinions of readers in the year when each wrote. Since that time, the testimonies in favour of Jane Austen's works have been continual and almost unanimous. They are frequently referred to as models; nor have they lost their first distinction of being especially acceptable to minds of the highest order. I shall indulge myself by collecting into the next chapter instances of the homage paid to her by such persons. CHAPTER IX. _Opinions expressed by eminent persons--Opinions of others of less eminence--Opinion of American readers_. Into this list of the admirers of my Aunt's works, I admit those only whose eminence will be universally acknowledged. No doubt the number might have been increased. Southey, in a letter to Sir Egerton Brydges, says: 'You mention Miss Austen. Her novels are more true to nature, and have, for my sympathies, passages of finer feeling than any others of this age. She was a person of whom I have heard so well and think so highly, that I regret not having had an opportunity of testifying to her the respect which I felt for her.' It may be observed that Southey had probably heard from his own family connections of the charm of her private character. A friend of hers, the daughter of Mr. Bigge Wither, of Manydown Park near Basingstoke, was married to Southey's uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, who had been useful to his nephew in many ways, and especially in supplying him with the means of attaining his extensive knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese literature. Mr. Hill had been Chaplain to the British Factory at Lisbon, where Southey visited him and had the use of a library in those languages which his uncle had collected. Southey himself continually mentions his uncle Hill in terms of respect and gratitude. S. T. Coleridge would sometimes burst out into high encomiums of Miss Austen's novels as being, 'in their way, perfectly genuine and individual productions.' I remember Miss Mitford's saying to me: 'I would almost cut off one of my hands, if it would enable me to write like your aunt with the other.' The biographer of Sir J. Mackintosh says: 'Something recalled to his mind the traits of character which are so delicately touched in Miss Austen's novels . . . He said that there was genius in sketching out that new kind of novel . . . He was vexed for the credit of the "Edinburgh Review" that it had left her unnoticed .{145} . . The "Quarterly" had done her more justice . . . It was impossible for a foreigner to understand fully the merit of her works. Madame de Stael, to whom he had recommended one of her novels, found no interest in it; and in her note to him in reply said it was "vulgaire": and yet, he said, nothing could be more true than what he wrote in answer: "There is no book which that word would so little suit." . . . Every village could furnish matter for a novel to Miss Austen. She did not need the common materials for a novel, strong emotions, or strong incidents.' {146} It was not, however, quite impossible for a foreigner to appreciate these works; for Mons. Guizot writes thus: 'I am a great novel reader, but I seldom read German or French novels. The characters are too artificial. My delight is to read English novels, particularly those written by women. "C'est toute une ecole de morale." Miss Austen, Miss Ferrier, &c., form a school which in the excellence and profusion of its productions resembles the cloud of dramatic poets of the great Athenian age.' In the 'Keepsake' of 1825 the following lines appeared, written by Lord Morpeth, afterwards seventh Earl of Carlisle, and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, accompanying an illustration of a lady reading a novel. Beats thy quick pulse o'er Inchbald's thrilling leaf, Brunton's high moral, Opie's deep wrought grief? Has the mild chaperon claimed thy yielding heart, Carroll's dark page, Trevelyan's gentle art? Or is it thou, all perfect Austen? Here Let one poor wreath adorn thy early bier, That scarce allowed thy modest youth to claim Its living portion of thy certain fame! Oh! Mrs. Bennet! Mrs. Norris too! While memory survives we'll dream of you. And Mr. Woodhouse, whose abstemious lip Must thin, but not too thin, his gruel sip. Miss Bates, our idol, though the village bore; And Mrs. Elton, ardent to explore. While the clear style flows on without pretence, With unstained purity, and unmatched sense: Or, if a sister e'er approached the throne, She called the rich 'inheritance' her own. The admiration felt by Lord Macaulay would probably have taken a very practical form, if his life had been prolonged. I have the authority of his sister, Lady Trevelyan, for stating that he had intended to undertake the task upon which I have ventured. He purposed to write a memoir of Miss Austen, with criticisms on her works, to prefix it to a new edition of her novels, and from the proceeds of the sale to erect a monument to her memory in Winchester Cathedral. Oh! that such an idea had been realised! That portion of the plan in which Lord Macaulay's success would have been most certain might have been almost sufficient for his object. A memoir written by him would have been a monument. I am kindly permitted by Sir Henry Holland to give the following quotation from his printed but unpublished recollections of his past life:-- 'I have the picture still before me of Lord Holland lying on his bed, when attacked with gout, his admirable sister, Miss Fox, beside him reading aloud, as she always did on these occasions, some one of Miss Austen's novels, of which he was never wearied. I well recollect the time when these charming novels, almost unique in their style of humour, burst suddenly on the world. It was sad that their writer did not live to witness the growth of her fame.' My brother-in-law, Sir Denis Le Marchant, has supplied me with the following anecdotes from his own recollections:-- 'When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. Whewell, then a Fellow and afterwards Master of the College, often spoke to me with admiration of Miss Austen's novels. On one occasion I said that I had found "Persuasion" rather dull. He quite fired up in defence of it, insisting that it was the most beautiful of her works. This accomplished philosopher was deeply versed in works of fiction. I recollect his writing to me from Caernarvon, where he had the charge of some pupils, that he was weary of _his_ stay, for he had read the circulating library twice through. 'During a visit I paid to Lord Lansdowne, at Bowood, in 1846, one of Miss Austen's novels became the subject of conversation and of praise, especially from Lord Lansdowne, who observed that one of the circumstances of his life which he looked back upon with vexation was that Miss Austen should once have been living some weeks in his neighbourhood without his knowing it. 'I have heard Sydney Smith, more than once, dwell with eloquence on the merits of Miss Austen's novels. He told me he should have enjoyed giving her the pleasure of reading her praises in the "Edinburgh Review." "Fanny Price" was one of his prime favourites.' I close this list of testimonies, this long 'Catena Patrum,' with the remarkable words of Sir Walter Scott, taken from his diary for March 14, 1826: {149} 'Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of "Pride and Prejudice." That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!' The well-worn condition of Scott's own copy of these works attests that they were much read in his family. When I visited Abbotsford, a few years after Scott's death, I was permitted, as an unusual favour, to take one of these volumes in my hands. One cannot suppress the wish that she had lived to know what such men thought of her powers, and how gladly they would have cultivated a personal acquaintance with her. I do not think that it would at all have impaired the modest simplicity of her character; or that we should have lost our own dear 'Aunt Jane' in the blaze of literary fame. It may be amusing to contrast with these testimonies from the great, the opinions expressed by other readers of more ordinary intellect. The author herself has left a list of criticisms which it had been her amusement to collect, through means of her friends. This list contains much of warm-hearted sympathising praise, interspersed with some opinions which may be considered surprising. One lady could say nothing better of 'Mansfield Park,' than that it was 'a mere novel.' Another owned that she thought 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' downright nonsense; but expected to like 'Mansfield Park' better, and having finished the first volume, hoped that she had got through the worst. Another did not like 'Mansfield Park.' Nothing interesting in the characters. Language poor. One gentleman read the first and last chapters of 'Emma,' but did not look at the rest because he had been told that it was not interesting. The opinions of another gentleman about 'Emma' were so bad that they could not be reported to the author. 'Quot homines, tot sententiae.' Thirty-five years after her death there came also a voice of praise from across the Atlantic. In 1852 the following letter was received by her brother Sir Francis Austen:-- 'Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 6th Jan. 1852. 'Since high critical authority has pronounced the delineations of character in the works of Jane Austen second only to those of Shakspeare, transatlantic admiration appears superfluous; yet it may not be uninteresting to her family to receive an assurance that the influence of her genius is extensively recognised in the American Republic, even by the highest judicial authorities. The late Mr. Chief Justice Marshall, of the supreme Court of the United States, and his associate Mr. Justice Story, highly estimated and admired Miss Austen, and to them we owe our introduction to her society. For many years her talents have brightened our daily path, and her name and those of her characters are familiar to us as "household words." We have long wished to express to some of her family the sentiments of gratitude and affection she has inspired, and request more information relative to her life than is given in the brief memoir prefixed to her works. 'Having accidentally heard that a brother of Jane Austen held a high rank in the British Navy, we have obtained his address from our friend Admiral Wormley, now resident in Boston, and we trust this expression of our feeling will be received by her relations with the kindness and urbanity characteristic of Admirals of _her creation_. Sir Francis Austen, or one of his family, would confer a great favour by complying with our request. The autograph of his sister, or a few lines in her handwriting, would be placed among our chief treasures. 'The family who delight in the companionship of Jane Austen, and who present this petition, are of English origin. Their ancestor held a high rank among the first emigrants to New England, and his name and character have been ably represented by his descendants in various public stations of trust and responsibility to the present time in the colony and state of Massachusetts. A letter addressed to Miss Quincey, care of the Honble Josiah Quincey, Boston, Massachusetts, would reach its destination.' Sir Francis Austen returned a suitable reply to this application; and sent a long letter of his sister's, which, no doubt, still occupies the place of honour promised by the Quincey family. CHAPTER X. _Observations on the Novels_. It is not the object of these memoirs to attempt a criticism on Jane Austen's novels. Those particulars only have been noticed which could be illustrated by the circumstances of her own life; but I now desire to offer a few observations on them, and especially on one point, on which my age renders me a competent witness--the fidelity with which they represent the opinions and manners of the class of society in which the author lived early in this century. They do this the more faithfully on account of the very deficiency with which they have been sometimes charged--namely, that they make no attempt to raise the standard of human life, but merely represent it as it was. They certainly were not written to support any theory or inculcate any particular moral, except indeed the great moral which is to be equally gathered from an observation of the course of actual life--namely, the superiority of high over low principles, and of greatness over littleness of mind. These writings are like photographs, in which no feature is softened; no ideal expression is introduced, all is the unadorned reflection of the natural object; and the value of such a faithful likeness must increase as time gradually works more and more changes in the face of society itself. A remarkable instance of this is to be found in her portraiture of the clergy. She was the daughter and the sister of clergymen, who certainly were not low specimens of their order: and she has chosen three of her heroes from that profession; but no one in these days can think that either Edmund Bertram or Henry Tilney had adequate ideas of the duties of a parish minister. Such, however, were the opinions and practice then prevalent among respectable and conscientious clergymen before their minds had been stirred, first by the Evangelical, and afterwards by the High Church movement which this century has witnessed. The country may be congratulated which, on looking back to such a fixed landmark, can find that it has been advancing instead of receding from it. The long interval that elapsed between the completion of 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798, and the commencement of 'Mansfield Park' in 1811, may sufficiently account for any difference of style which may be perceived between her three earlier and her three later productions. If the former showed quite as much originality and genius, they may perhaps be thought to have less of the faultless finish and high polish which distinguish the latter. The characters of the John Dashwoods, Mr. Collins, and the Thorpes stand out from the canvas with a vigour and originality which cannot be surpassed; but I think that in her last three works are to be found a greater refinement of taste, a more nice sense of propriety, and a deeper insight into the delicate anatomy of the human heart, marking the difference between the brilliant girl and the mature woman. Far from being one of those who have over-written themselves, it may be affirmed that her fame would have stood on a narrower and less firm basis, if she had not lived to resume her pen at Chawton. Some persons have surmised that she took her characters from individuals with whom she had been acquainted. They were so life-like that it was assumed that they must once have lived, and have been transferred bodily, as it were, into her pages. But surely such a supposition betrays an ignorance of the high prerogative of genius to create out of its own resources imaginary characters, who shall be true to nature and consistent in themselves. Perhaps, however, the distinction between keeping true to nature and servilely copying any one specimen of it is not always clearly apprehended. It is indeed true, both of the writer and of the painter, that he can use only such lineaments as exist, and as he has observed to exist, in living objects; otherwise he would produce monsters instead of human beings; but in both it is the office of high art to mould these features into new combinations, and to place them in the attitudes, and impart to them the expressions which may suit the purposes of the artist; so that they are nature, but not exactly the same nature which had come before his eyes; just as honey can be obtained only from the natural flowers which the bee has sucked; yet it is not a reproduction of the odour or flavour of any particular flower, but becomes something different when it has gone through the process of transformation which that little insect is able to effect. Hence, in the case of painters, arises the superiority of original compositions over portrait painting. Reynolds was exercising a higher faculty when he designed Comedy and Tragedy contending for Garrick, than when he merely took a likeness of that actor. The same difference exists in writings between the original conceptions of Shakspeare and some other creative geniuses, and such full-length likenesses of individual persons, 'The Talking Gentleman' for instance, as are admirably drawn by Miss Mitford. Jane Austen's powers, whatever may be the degree in which she possessed them, were certainly of that higher order. She did not copy individuals, but she invested her own creations with individuality of character. A reviewer in the 'Quarterly' speaks of an acquaintance who, ever since the publication of 'Pride and Prejudice,' had been called by his friends Mr. Bennet, but the author did not know him. Her own relations never recognised any individual in her characters; and I can call to mind several of her acquaintance whose peculiarities were very tempting and easy to be caricatured of whom there are no traces in her pages. She herself, when questioned on the subject by a friend, expressed a dread of what she called such an 'invasion of social proprieties.' She said that she thought it quite fair to note peculiarities and weaknesses, but that it was her desire to create, not to reproduce; 'besides,' she added, 'I am too proud of my gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B.' She did not, however, suppose that her imaginary characters were of a higher order than are to be found in nature; for she said, when speaking of two of her great favourites, Edmund Bertram and Mr. Knightley: 'They are very far from being what I know English gentlemen often are.' She certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter. We have seen, in one of her letters, her personal affection for Darcy and Elizabeth; and when sending a copy of 'Emma' to a friend whose daughter had been lately born, she wrote thus: 'I trust you will be as glad to see my "Emma," as I shall be to see your Jemima.' She was very fond of Emma, but did not reckon on her being a general favourite; for, when commencing that work, she said, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.' She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philip's clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton; that the 'considerable sum' given by Mrs. Norris to William Price was one pound; that Mr. Woodhouse survived his daughter's marriage, and kept her and Mr. Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word 'pardon.' Of the good people in 'Northanger Abbey' and 'Persuasion' we know nothing more than what is written: for before those works were published their author had been taken away from us, and all such amusing communications had ceased for ever. CHAPTER XI. _Declining health of Jane Austen--Elasticity of her spirits--Her resignation and humility--Her death_. Early in the year 1816 some family troubles disturbed the usually tranquil course of Jane Austen's life; and it is probable that the inward malady, which was to prove ultimately fatal, was already felt by her; for some distant friends, {159} whom she visited in the spring of that year, thought that her health was somewhat impaired, and observed that she went about her old haunts, and recalled old recollections connected with them in a particular manner, as if she did not expect ever to see them again. It is not surprising that, under these circumstances, some of her letters were of a graver tone than had been customary with her, and expressed resignation rather than cheerfulness. In reference to these troubles in a letter to her brother Charles, after mentioning that she had been laid up with an attack of bilious fever, she says: 'I live up stairs for the present and am coddled. I am the only one of the party who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves.' And again, to another correspondent: 'But I am getting too near complaint; it has been the appointment of God, however secondary causes may have operated.' But the elasticity of her spirits soon recovered their tone. It was in the latter half of that year that she addressed the two following lively letters to a nephew, one while he was at Winchester School, the other soon after he had left it:-- 'Chawton, July 9, 1816. 'MY DEAR E.--Many thanks. A thank for every line, and as many to Mr. W. Digweed for coming. We have been wanting very much to hear of your mother, and are happy to find she continues to mend, but her illness must have been a very serious one indeed. When she is really recovered, she ought to try change of air, and come over to us. Tell your father that I am very much obliged to him for his share of your letter, and most sincerely join in the hope of her being eventually much the better for her present discipline. She has the comfort moreover of being confined in such weather as gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad, and has been too bad for a long time, much worse than any one can bear, and I begin to think it will never be fine again. This is a _finesse_ of mine, for I have often observed that if one writes about the weather, it is generally completely changed before the letter is read. I wish it may prove so now, and that when Mr. W. Digweed reaches Steventon to-morrow, he may find you have had a long series of hot dry weather. We are a small party at present, only grandmamma, Mary Jane, and myself. Yalden's coach cleared off the rest yesterday. I am glad you recollected to mention your being come home. {161a} My heart began to sink within me when I had got so far through your letter without its being mentioned. I was dreadfully afraid that you might be detained at Winchester by severe illness, confined to your bed perhaps, and quite unable to hold a pen, and only dating from Steventon in order, with a mistaken sort of tenderness, to deceive me. But now I have no doubt of your being at home. I am sure you would not say it so seriously unless it actually were so. We saw a countless number of post-chaises full of boys pass by yesterday morning {161b}--full of future heroes, legislators, fools, and villains. You have never thanked me for my last letter, which went by the cheese. I cannot bear not to be thanked. You will not pay us a visit yet of course; we must not think of it. Your mother must get well first, and you must go to Oxford and _not_ be elected; after that a little change of scene may be good for you, and your physicians I hope will order you to the sea, or to a house by the side of a very considerable pond. {161c} Oh! it rains again. It beats against the window. Mary Jane and I have been wet through once already to-day; we set off in the donkey-carriage for Farringdon, as I wanted to see the improvement Mr. Woolls is making, but we were obliged to turn back before we got there, but not soon enough to avoid a pelter all the way home. We met Mr. Woolls. I talked of its being bad weather for the hay, and he returned me the comfort of its being much worse for the wheat. We hear that Mrs. S. does not quit Tangier: why and wherefore? Do you know that our Browning is gone? You must prepare for a William when you come, a good-looking lad, civil and quiet, and seeming likely to do. Good bye. I am sure Mr. W. D. {162} will be astonished at my writing so much, for the paper is so thin that he will be able to count the lines if not to read them. Yours affecly, 'JANE AUSTEN.' In the next letter will be found her description of her own style of composition, which has already appeared in the notice prefixed to 'Northanger Abbey' and 'Persuasion':-- 'Chawton, Monday, Dec. 16th (1816). 'MY DEAR E.,--One reason for my writing to you now is, that I may have the pleasure of directing to you Esqre. I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries--how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city. Charles Knight and his companions passed through Chawton about 9 this morning; later than it used to be. Uncle Henry and I had a glimpse of his handsome face, looking all health and good humour. I wonder when you will come and see us. I know what I rather speculate upon, but shall say nothing. We think uncle Henry in excellent looks. Look at him this moment, and think so too, if you have not done it before; and we have the great comfort of seeing decided improvement in uncle Charles, both as to health, spirits, and appearance. And they are each of them so agreeable in their different way, and harmonise so well, that their visit is thorough enjoyment. Uncle Henry writes very superior sermons. You and I must try to get hold of one or two, and put them into our novels: it would be a fine help to a volume; and we could make our heroine read it aloud on a Sunday evening, just as well as Isabella Wardour, in the "Antiquary," is made to read the "History of the Hartz Demon" in the ruins of St. Ruth, though I believe, on recollection, Lovell is the reader. By the bye, my dear E., I am quite concerned for the loss your mother mentions in her letter. Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that _I_ have not been at Steventon lately, and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them: two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour? 'You will hear from uncle Henry how well Anna is. She seems perfectly recovered. Ben was here on Saturday, to ask uncle Charles and me to dine with them, as to-morrow, but I was forced to decline it, the walk is beyond my strength (though I am otherwise very well), and this is not a season for donkey-carriages; and as we do not like to spare uncle Charles, he has declined it too. _Tuesday_. Ah, ah! Mr. E. I doubt your seeing uncle Henry at Steventon to-day. The weather will prevent your expecting him, I think. Tell your father, with aunt Cass's love and mine, that the pickled cucumbers are extremely good, and tell him also--"tell him what you will." No, don't tell him what you will, but tell him that grandmamma begs him to make Joseph Hall pay his rent, if he can. 'You must not be tired of reading the word _uncle_, for I have not done with it. Uncle Charles thanks your mother for her letter; it was a great pleasure to him to know that the parcel was received and gave so much satisfaction, and he begs her to be so good as to give three shillings for him to Dame Staples, which shall be allowed for in the payment of her debt here. 'Adieu, Amiable! I hope Caroline behaves well to you. Yours affecly, 'J. AUSTEN.' I cannot tell how soon she was aware of the serious nature of her malady. By God's mercy it was not attended with much suffering; so that she was able to tell her friends as in the foregoing letter, and perhaps sometimes to persuade herself that, excepting want of strength, she was 'otherwise very well;' but the progress of the disease became more and more manifest as the year advanced. The usual walk was at first shortened, and then discontinued; and air was sought in a donkey-carriage. Gradually, too, her habits of activity within the house ceased, and she was obliged to lie down much. The sitting-room contained only one sofa, which was frequently occupied by her mother, who was more than seventy years old. Jane would never use it, even in her mother's absence; but she contrived a sort of couch for herself with two or three chairs, and was pleased to say that this arrangement was more comfortable to her than a real sofa. Her reasons for this might have been left to be guessed, but for the importunities of a little niece, which obliged her to explain that if she herself had shown any inclination to use the sofa, her mother might have scrupled being on it so much as was good for her. It is certain, however, that the mind did not share in this decay of the bodily strength. 'Persuasion' was not finished before the middle of August in that year; and the manner in which it was then completed affords proof that neither the critical nor the creative powers of the author were at all impaired. The book had been brought to an end in July; and the re-engagement of the hero and heroine effected in a totally different manner in a scene laid at Admiral Croft's lodgings. But her performance did not satisfy her. She thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better. This weighed upon her mind, the more so probably on account of the weak state of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low spirits. But such depression was little in accordance with her nature, and was soon shaken off. The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views and brighter inspirations: the sense of power revived; and imagination resumed its course. She cancelled the condemned chapter, and wrote two others, entirely different, in its stead. The result is that we possess the visit of the Musgrove party to Bath; the crowded and animated scenes at the White Hart Hotel; and the charming conversation between Capt. Harville and Anne Elliot, overheard by Capt. Wentworth, by which the two faithful lovers were at last led to understand each other's feelings. The tenth and eleventh chapters of 'Persuasion' then, rather than the actual winding-up of the story, contain the latest of her printed compositions, her last contribution to the entertainment of the public. Perhaps it may be thought that she has seldom written anything more brilliant; and that, independent of the original manner in which the _denouement_ is brought about, the pictures of Charles Musgrove's good-natured boyishness and of his wife's jealous selfishness would have been incomplete without these finishing strokes. The cancelled chapter exists in manuscript. It is certainly inferior to the two which were substituted for it: but it was such as some writers and some readers might have been contented with; and it contained touches which scarcely any other hand could have given, the suppression of which may be almost a matter of regret. {167} The following letter was addressed to her friend Miss Bigg, then staying at Streatham with her sister, the wife of the Reverend Herbert Hill, uncle of Robert Southey. It appears to have been written three days before she began her last work, which will be noticed in another chapter; and shows that she was not at that time aware of the serious nature of her malady:-- 'Chawton, January 24, 1817. 'MY DEAR ALETHEA,--I think it time there should be a little writing between us, though I believe the epistolary debt is on _your_ side, and I hope this will find all the Streatham party well, neither carried away by the flood, nor rheumatic through the damps. Such mild weather is, you know, delightful to _us_, and though we have a great many ponds, and a fine running stream through the meadows on the other side of the road, it is nothing but what beautifies us and does to talk of. _I_ have certainly gained strength through the winter and am not far from being well; and I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness. I am convinced that _bile_ is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself. You will be glad to hear thus much of me, I am sure. We have just had a few days' visit from Edward, who brought us a good account of his father, and the very circumstance of his coming at all, of his father's being able to spare him, is itself a good account. He grows still, and still improves in appearance, at least in the estimation of his aunts, who love him better and better, as they see the sweet temper and warm affections of the boy confirmed in the young man: I tried hard to persuade him that he must have some message for William, {169a} but in vain. . . . This is not a time of year for donkey-carriages, and our donkeys are necessarily having so long a run of luxurious idleness that I suppose we shall find they have forgotten much of their education when we use them again. We do not use two at once however; don't imagine such excesses. . . Our own new clergyman {169b} is expected here very soon, perhaps in time to assist Mr. Papillon on Sunday. I shall be very glad when the first hearing is over. It will be a nervous hour for our pew, though we hear that he acquits himself with as much ease and collectedness, as if he had been used to it all his life. We have no chance we know of seeing you between Streatham and Winchester: you go the other road and are engaged to two or three houses; if there should be any change, however, you know how welcome you would be. . . . We have been reading the "Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo," and generally with much approbation. Nothing will please all the world, you know; but parts of it suit me better than much that he has written before. The opening--_the proem_ I believe he calls it--is very beautiful. Poor man! one cannot but grieve for the loss of the son so fondly described. Has he at all recovered it? What do Mr. and Mrs. Hill know about his present state? 'Yours affly, 'J. AUSTEN. 'The real object of this letter is to ask you for a receipt, but I thought it genteel not to let it appear early. We remember some excellent orange wine at Manydown, made from Seville oranges, entirely or chiefly. I should be very much obliged to you for the receipt, if you can command it within a few weeks.' On the day before, January 23rd, she had written to her niece in the same hopeful tone: 'I feel myself getting stronger than I was, and can so perfectly walk _to_ Alton, _or_ back again without fatigue, that I hope to be able to do _both_ when summer comes.' Alas! summer came to her only on her deathbed. March 17th is the last date to be found in the manuscript on which she was engaged; and as the watch of the drowned man indicates the time of his death, so does this final date seem to fix the period when her mind could no longer pursue its accustomed course. And here I cannot do better than quote the words of the niece to whose private records of her aunt's life and character I have been so often indebted:-- 'I do not know how early the alarming symptoms of her malady came on. It was in the following March that I had the first idea of her being seriously ill. It had been settled that about the end of that month, or the beginning of April, I should spend a few days at Chawton, in the absence of my father and mother, who were just then engaged with Mrs. Leigh Perrot in arranging her late husband's affairs; but Aunt Jane became too ill to have me in the house, and so I went instead to my sister Mrs. Lefroy at Wyards'. The next day we walked over to Chawton to make enquiries after our aunt. She was then keeping her room, but said she would see us, and we went up to her. She was in her dressing gown, and was sitting quite like an invalid in an arm- chair, but she got up and kindly greeted us, and then, pointing to seats which had been arranged for us by the fire, she said, "There is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline." {171} It is strange, but those trifling words were the last of hers that I can remember, for I retain no recollection of what was said by anyone in the conversation that ensued. I was struck by the alteration in herself. She was very pale, her voice was weak and low, and there was about her a general appearance of debility and suffering; but I have been told that she never had much acute pain. She was not equal to the exertion of talking to us, and our visit to the sick room was a very short one, Aunt Cassandra soon taking us away. I do not suppose we stayed a quarter of an hour; and I never saw Aunt Jane again.' In May 1817 she was persuaded to remove to Winchester, for the sake of medical advice from Mr. Lyford. The Lyfords have, for some generations, maintained a high character in Winchester for medical skill, and the Mr. Lyford of that day was a man of more than provincial reputation, in whom great London practitioners expressed confidence. Mr. Lyford spoke encouragingly. It was not, of course, his business to extinguish hope in his patient, but I believe that he had, from the first, very little expectation of a permanent cure. All that was gained by the removal from home was the satisfaction of having done the best that could be done, together with such alleviations of suffering as superior medical skill could afford. Jane and her sister Cassandra took lodgings in College Street. They had two kind friends living in the Close, Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg, the mother and aunt of the present Sir Wm. Heathcote of Hursley, between whose family and ours a close friendship has existed for several generations. These friends did all that they could to promote the comfort of the sisters, during that sad sojourn in Winchester, both by their society, and by supplying those little conveniences in which a lodging-house was likely to be deficient. It was shortly after settling in these lodgings that she wrote to a nephew the following characteristic letter, no longer, alas in her former strong, clear hand. 'Mrs. David's, College St., Winton, 'Tuesday, May 27th. 'There is no better way, my dearest E., of thanking you for your affectionate concern for me during my illness than by telling you myself, as soon as possible, that I continue to get better. I will not boast of my handwriting; neither that nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty, but in other respects I gain strength very fast. I am now out of bed from 9 in the morning to 10 at night: upon the sofa, it is true, but I eat my meals with aunt Cassandra in a rational way, and can employ myself, and walk from one room to another. Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and if he fails, I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned, and disinterested body. Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little drawing-room with a bow window overlooking Dr. Gabell's garden. {173} Thanks to the kindness of your father and mother in sending me their carriage, my journey hither on Saturday was performed with very little fatigue, and had it been a fine day, I think I should have felt none; but it distressed me to see uncle Henry and Wm. Knight, who kindly attended us on horseback, riding in the rain almost the whole way. We expect a visit from them to-morrow, and hope they will stay the night; and on Thursday, which is a confirmation and a holiday, we are to get Charles out to breakfast. We have had but one visit from _him_, poor fellow, as he is in sick-room, but he hopes to be out to-night. We see Mrs. Heathcote every day, and William is to call upon us soon. God bless you, my dear E. If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious, sympathising friends be yours: and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_ could not feel this. 'Your very affecte Aunt, 'J. A.' The following extract from a letter which has been before printed, written soon after the former, breathes the same spirit of humility and thankfulness:-- 'I will only say further that my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse, has not been made ill by her exertions. As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.' Throughout her illness she was nursed by her sister, often assisted by her sister-in-law, my mother. Both were with her when she died. Two of her brothers, who were clergymen, lived near enough to Winchester to be in frequent attendance, and to administer the services suitable for a Christian's death-bed. While she used the language of hope to her correspondents, she was fully aware of her danger, though not appalled by it. It is true that there was much to attach her to life. She was happy in her family; she was just beginning to feel confidence in her own success; and, no doubt, the exercise of her great talents was an enjoyment in itself. We may well believe that she would gladly have lived longer; but she was enabled without dismay or complaint to prepare for death. She was a humble, believing Christian. Her life had been passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affections, without any self-seeking or craving after applause. She had always sought, as it were by instinct, to promote the happiness of all who came within her influence, and doubtless she had her reward in the peace of mind which was granted her in her last days. Her sweetness of temper never failed. She was ever considerate and grateful to those who attended on her. At times, when she felt rather better, her playfulness of spirit revived, and she amused them even in their sadness. Once, when she thought herself near her end, she said what she imagined might be her last words to those around her, and particularly thanked her sister-in- law for being with her, saying: 'You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary.' When the end at last came, she sank rapidly, and on being asked by her attendants whether there was anything that she wanted, her reply was, '_Nothing but death_.' These were her last words. In quietness and peace she breathed her last on the morning of July 18, 1817. On the 24th of that month she was buried in Winchester Cathedral, near the centre of the north aisle, almost opposite to the beautiful chantry tomb of William of Wykeham. A large slab of black marble in the pavement marks the place. Her own family only attended the funeral. Her sister returned to her desolated home, there to devote herself, for ten years, to the care of her aged mother; and to live much on the memory of her lost sister, till called many years later to rejoin her. Her brothers went back sorrowing to their several homes. They were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners; and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected to see. CHAPTER XII. _The Cancelled Chapter (Chap. X.) of 'Persuasion_.' With all this knowledge of Mr. Elliot and this authority to impart it, Anne left Westgate Buildings, her mind deeply busy in revolving what she had heard, feeling, thinking, recalling, and foreseeing everything, shocked at Mr. Elliot, sighing over future Kellynch, and pained for Lady Russell, whose confidence in him had been entire. The embarrassment which must be felt from this hour in his presence! How to behave to him? How to get rid of him? What to do by any of the party at home? Where to be blind? Where to be active? It was altogether a confusion of images and doubts--a perplexity, an agitation which she could not see the end of. And she was in Gay Street, and still so much engrossed that she started on being addressed by Admiral Croft, as if he were a person unlikely to be met there. It was within a few steps of his own door. 'You are going to call upon my wife,' said he. 'She will be very glad to see you.' Anne denied it. 'No! she really had not time, she was in her way home;' but while she spoke the Admiral had stepped back and knocked at the door, calling out, 'Yes, yes; do go in; she is all alone; go in and rest yourself.' Anne felt so little disposed at this time to be in company of any sort, that it vexed her to be thus constrained, but she was obliged to stop. 'Since you are so very kind,' said she, 'I will just ask Mrs. Croft how she does, but I really cannot stay five minutes. You are sure she is quite alone?' The possibility of Captain Wentworth had occurred; and most fearfully anxious was she to be assured--either that he was within, or that he was not--_which_ might have been a question. 'Oh yes! quite alone, nobody but her mantua-maker with her, and they have been shut up together this half-hour, so it must be over soon.' 'Her mantua-maker! Then I am sure my calling now would be most inconvenient. Indeed you must allow me to leave my card and be so good as to explain it afterwards to Mrs. Croft.' 'No, no, not at all--not at all--she will be very happy to see you. Mind, I will not swear that she has not something particular to say to you, but that will all come out in the right place. I give no hints. Why, Miss Elliot, we begin to hear strange things of you (smiling in her face). But you have not much the look of it, as grave as a little judge!' Anne blushed. 'Aye, aye, that will do now, it is all right. I thought we were not mistaken.' She was left to guess at the direction of his suspicions; the first wild idea had been of some disclosure from his brother-in-law, but she was ashamed the next moment, and felt how far more probable it was that he should be meaning Mr. Elliot. The door was opened, and the man evidently beginning to _deny_ his mistress, when the sight of his master stopped him. The Admiral enjoyed the joke exceedingly. Anne thought his triumph over Stephen rather too long. At last, however, he was able to invite her up stairs, and stepping before her said, 'I will just go up with you myself and show you in. I cannot stay, because I must go to the Post- Office, but if you will only sit down for five minutes I am sure Sophy will come, and you will find nobody to disturb you--there is nobody but Frederick here,' opening the door as he spoke. Such a person to be passed over as nobody to _her_! After being allowed to feel quite secure, indifferent, at her ease, to have it burst on her that she was to be the next moment in the same room with him! No time for recollection! for planning behaviour or regulating manners! There was time only to turn pale before she had passed through the door, and met the astonished eyes of Captain Wentworth, who was sitting by the fire, pretending to read, and prepared for no greater surprise than the Admiral's hasty return. Equally unexpected was the meeting on each side. There was nothing to be done, however, but to stifle feelings, and to be quietly polite, and the Admiral was too much on the alert to leave any troublesome pause. He repeated again what he had said before about his wife and everybody, insisted on Anne's sitting down and being perfectly comfortable--was sorry he must leave her himself, but was sure Mrs. Croft would be down very soon, and would go upstairs and give her notice directly. Anne _was_ sitting down, but now she arose, again to entreat him not to interrupt Mrs. Croft and re-urge the wish of going away and calling another time. But the Admiral would not hear of it; and if she did not return to the charge with unconquerable perseverance, or did not with a more passive determination walk quietly out of the room (as certainly she might have done), may she not be pardoned? If she _had_ no horror of a few minutes' tete-a-tete with Captain Wentworth, may she not be pardoned for not wishing to give him the idea that she had? She reseated herself, and the Admiral took leave, but on reaching the door, said-- 'Frederick, a word with _you_ if you please.' Captain Wentworth went to him, and instantly, before they were well out of the room, the Admiral continued-- 'As I am going to leave you together, it is but fair I should give you something to talk of; and so, if you please--' Here the door was very firmly closed, she could guess by which of the two--and she lost entirely what immediately followed, but it was impossible for her not to distinguish parts of the rest, for the Admiral, on the strength of the door's being shut, was speaking without any management of voice, though she could hear his companion trying to check him. She could not doubt their being speaking of her. She heard her own name and Kellynch repeatedly. She was very much disturbed. She knew not what to do, or what to expect, and among other agonies felt the possibility of Captain Wentworth's not returning into the room at all, which, after her consenting to stay, would have been--too bad for language. They seemed to be talking of the Admiral's lease of Kellynch. She heard him say something of the lease being signed--or not signed--_that_ was not likely to be a very agitating subject, but then followed-- 'I hate to be at an uncertainty. I must know at once. Sophy thinks the same.' Then in a lower tone Captain Wentworth seemed remonstrating, wanting to be excused, wanting to put something off. 'Phoo, phoo,' answered the Admiral, 'now is the time; if you will not speak, I will stop and speak myself.' 'Very well, sir, very well, sir,' followed with some impatience from his companion, opening the door as he spoke-- 'You will then, you promise you will?' replied the Admiral in all the power of his natural voice, unbroken even by one thin door. 'Yes, sir, yes.' And the Admiral was hastily left, the door was closed, and the moment arrived in which Anne was alone with Captain Wentworth. She could not attempt to see how he looked, but he walked immediately to a window as if irresolute and embarrassed, and for about the space of five seconds she repented what she had done--censured it as unwise, blushed over it as indelicate. She longed to be able to speak of the weather or the concert, but could only compass the relief of taking a newspaper in her hand. The distressing pause was over, however; he turned round in half a minute, and coming towards the table where she sat, said in a voice of effort and constraint-- 'You must have heard too much already, Madam, to be in any doubt of my having promised Admiral Croft to speak to you on a particular subject, and this conviction determines me to do so, however repugnant to my--to all my sense of propriety to be taking so great a liberty! You will acquit me of impertinence I trust, by considering me as speaking only for another, and speaking by necessity; and the Admiral is a man who can never be thought impertinent by one who knows him as you do. His intentions are always the kindest and the best, and you will perceive he is actuated by none other in the application which I am now, with--with very peculiar feelings--obliged to make.' He stopped, but merely to recover breath, not seeming to expect any answer. Anne listened as if her life depended on the issue of his speech. He proceeded with a forced alacrity:-- 'The Admiral, Madam, was this morning confidently informed that you were--upon my soul, I am quite at a loss, ashamed (breathing and speaking quickly)--the awkwardness of _giving_ information of this kind to one of the parties--you can be at no loss to understand me. It was very confidently said that Mr. Elliot--that everything was settled in the family for a union between Mr. Elliot and yourself. It was added that you were to live at Kellynch--that Kellynch was to be given up. This the Admiral knew could not be correct. But it occurred to him that it might be the _wish_ of the parties. And my commission from him, Madam, is to say, that if the family wish is such, his lease of Kellynch shall be cancelled, and he and my sister will provide themselves with another home, without imagining themselves to be doing anything which under similar circumstances would not be done for _them_. This is all, Madam. A very few words in reply from you will be sufficient. That _I_ should be the person commissioned on this subject is extraordinary! and believe me, Madam, it is no less painful. A very few words, however, will put an end to the awkwardness and distress we may _both_ be feeling.' Anne spoke a word or two, but they were unintelligible; and before she could command herself, he added, 'If you will only tell me that the Admiral may address a line to Sir Walter, it will be enough. Pronounce only the words, _he may_, and I shall immediately follow him with your message.' 'No, Sir,' said Anne; 'there is no message. You are misin--the Admiral is misinformed. I do justice to the kindness of his intentions, but he is quite mistaken. There is no truth in any such report.' He was a moment silent. She turned her eyes towards him for the first time since his re-entering the room. His colour was varying, and he was looking at her with all the power and keenness which she believed no other eyes than his possessed. 'No truth in any such report?' he repeated. 'No truth in any _part_ of it?' 'None.' He had been standing by a chair, enjoying the relief of leaning on it, or of playing with it. He now sat down, drew it a little nearer to her, and looked with an expression which had something more than penetration in it--something softer. Her countenance did not discourage. It was a silent but a very powerful dialogue; on his supplication, on hers acceptance. Still a little nearer, and a hand taken and pressed; and 'Anne, my own dear Anne!' bursting forth in all the fulness of exquisite feeling,--and all suspense and indecision were over. They were re-united. They were restored to all that had been lost. They were carried back to the past with only an increase of attachment and confidence, and only such a flutter of present delight as made them little fit for the interruption of Mrs. Croft when she joined them not long afterwards. _She_, probably, in the observations of the next ten minutes saw something to suspect; and though it was hardly possible for a woman of her description to wish the mantua-maker had imprisoned her longer, she might be very likely wishing for some excuse to run about the house, some storm to break the windows above, or a summons to the Admiral's shoemaker below. Fortune favoured them all, however, in another way, in a gentle, steady rain, just happily set in as the Admiral returned and Anne rose to go. She was earnestly invited to stay dinner. A note was despatched to Camden Place, and she staid--staid till ten at night; and during that time the husband and wife, either by the wife's contrivance, or by simply going on in their usual way, were frequently out of the room together--gone upstairs to hear a noise, or downstairs to settle their accounts, or upon the landing to trim the lamp. And these precious moments were turned to so good an account that all the most anxious feelings of the past were gone through. Before they parted at night, Anne had the felicity of being assured that in the first place (so far from being altered for the worse), she had gained inexpressibly in personal loveliness; and that as to character, hers was now fixed on his mind as _perfection_ itself, maintaining the just medium of fortitude and gentleness--that he had never ceased to love and prefer her, though it had been only at Uppercross that he had learnt to do her justice, and only at Lyme that he had begun to understand his own feelings; that at Lyme he had received lessons of more than one kind--the passing admiration of Mr. Elliot had at least _roused_ him, and the scene on the Cobb, and at Captain Harville's, had fixed her superiority. In his preceding attempts to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove (the attempts of anger and pique), he protested that he had continually felt the impossibility of really caring for Louisa, though till _that day_, till the leisure for reflection which followed it, he had not understood the perfect excellence of the mind with which Louisa's could so ill bear comparison; or the perfect, the unrivalled hold it possessed over his own. There he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind; there he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there had begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way. From that period to the present had his penance been the most severe. He had no sooner been free from the horror and remorse attending the first few days of Louisa's accident, no sooner had begun to feel himself alive again, than he had begun to feel himself, though alive, not at liberty. He found that he was considered by his friend Harville an engaged man. The Harvilles entertained not a doubt of a mutual attachment between him and Louisa; and though this to a degree was contradicted instantly, it yet made him feel that perhaps by _her_ family, by everybody, by _herself_ even, the same idea might be held, and that he was not _free_ in honour, though if such were to be the conclusion, too free alas! in heart. He had never thought justly on this subject before, and he had not sufficiently considered that his excessive intimacy at Uppercross must have its danger of ill consequence in many ways; and that while trying whether he could attach himself to either of the girls, he might be exciting unpleasant reports if not raising unrequited regard. He found too late that he had entangled himself, and that precisely as he became thoroughly satisfied of his not _caring_ for Louisa at all, he must regard himself as bound to her if her feelings for him were what the Harvilles supposed. It determined him to leave Lyme, and await her perfect recovery elsewhere. He would gladly weaken by any _fair_ means whatever sentiment or speculations concerning them might exist; and he went therefore into Shropshire, meaning after a while to return to the Crofts at Kellynch, and act as he found requisite. He had remained in Shropshire, lamenting the blindness of his own pride and the blunders of his own calculations, till at once released from Louisa by the astonishing felicity of her engagement with Benwick. Bath--Bath had instantly followed in _thought_, and not long after in _fact_. To Bath--to arrive with hope, to be torn by jealousy at the first sight of Mr. Elliot; to experience all the changes of each at the concert; to be miserable by the morning's circumstantial report, to be now more happy than language could express, or any heart but his own be capable of. He was very eager and very delightful in the description of what he had felt at the concert; the evening seemed to have been made up of exquisite moments. The moment of her stepping forward in the octagon room to speak to him, the moment of Mr. Elliot's appearing and tearing her away, and one or two subsequent moments, marked by returning hope or increasing despondency, were dwelt on with energy. 'To see you,' cried he, 'in the midst of those who could not be my well- wishers; to see your cousin close by you, conversing and smiling, and feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match! To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you! Even if your own feelings were reluctant or indifferent, to consider what powerful support would be his! Was it not enough to make the fool of me which I appeared? How could I look on without agony? Was not the very sight of the friend who sat behind you; was not the recollection of what had been, the knowledge of her influence, the indelible, immovable impression of what persuasion had once done--was it not all against me?' 'You should have distinguished,' replied Anne. 'You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.' 'Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus,' he replied; 'but I could not. I could not derive benefit from the late knowledge I had acquired of your character. I could not bring it into play; it was overwhelmed, buried, lost in those earlier feelings which I had been smarting under year after year. I could think of you only as one who had yielded, who had given me up, who had been influenced by anyone rather than by me. I saw you with the very person who had guided you in that year of misery. I had no reason to believe her of less authority now. The force of habit was to be added.' 'I should have thought,' said Anne, 'that my manner to yourself might have spared you much or all of this.' 'No, no! Your manner might be only the ease which your engagement to another man would give. I left you in this belief; and yet--I was determined to see you again. My spirits rallied with the morning, and I felt that I had still a motive for remaining here. The Admiral's news, indeed, was a revulsion; since that moment I have been divided what to do, and had it been confirmed, this would have been my last day in Bath.' There was time for all this to pass, with such interruptions only as enhanced the charm of the communication, and Bath could hardly contain any other two beings at once so rationally and so rapturously happy as during that evening occupied the sofa of Mrs. Croft's drawing-room in Gay Street. Captain Wentworth had taken care to meet the Admiral as he returned into the house, to satisfy him as to Mr. Elliot and Kellynch; and the delicacy of the Admiral's good-nature kept him from saying another word on the subject to Anne. He was quite concerned lest he might have been giving her pain by touching on a tender part--who could say? She might be liking her cousin better than he liked her; and, upon recollection, if they had been to marry at all, why should they have waited so long? When the evening closed, it is probable that the Admiral received some new ideas from his wife, whose particularly friendly manner in parting with her gave Anne the gratifying persuasion of her seeing and approving. It had been such a day to Anne; the hours which had passed since her leaving Camden Place had done so much! She was almost bewildered--almost too happy in looking back. It was necessary to sit up half the night, and lie awake the remainder, to comprehend with composure her present state, and pay for the overplus of bliss by headache and fatigue. * * * * * Then follows Chapter XI., _i.e_. XII. in the published book and at the end is written-- _Finis_, _July_ 18, 1816. CHAPTER XIII. _The Last Work_. Jane Austen was taken from us: how much unexhausted talent perished with her, how largely she might yet have contributed to the entertainment of her readers, if her life had been prolonged, cannot be known; but it is certain that the mine at which she had so long laboured was not worked out, and that she was still diligently employed in collecting fresh materials from it. 'Persuasion' had been finished in August 1816; some time was probably given to correcting it for the press; but on the 27th of the following January, according to the date on her own manuscript, she began a new novel, and worked at it up to the 17th of March. The chief part of this manuscript is written in her usual firm and neat hand, but some of the latter pages seem to have been first traced in pencil, probably when she was too weak to sit long at her desk, and written over in ink afterwards. The quantity produced does not indicate any decline of power or industry, for in those seven weeks twelve chapters had been completed. It is more difficult to judge of the quality of a work so little advanced. It had received no name; there was scarcely any indication what the course of the story was to be, nor was any heroine yet perceptible, who, like Fanny Price, or Anne Elliot, might draw round her the sympathies of the reader. Such an unfinished fragment cannot be presented to the public; but I am persuaded that some of Jane Austen's admirers will be glad to learn something about the latest creations which were forming themselves in her mind; and therefore, as some of the principal characters were already sketched in with a vigorous hand, I will try to give an idea of them, illustrated by extracts from the work. The scene is laid at Sanditon, a village on the Sussex coast, just struggling into notoriety as a bathing-place, under the patronage of the two principal proprietors of the parish, Mr. Parker and Lady Denham. Mr. Parker was an amiable man, with more enthusiasm than judgment, whose somewhat shallow mind overflowed with the one idea of the prosperity of Sanditon, together with a jealous contempt of the rival village of Brinshore, where a similar attempt was going on. To the regret of his much-enduring wife, he had left his family mansion, with all its ancestral comforts of gardens, shrubberies, and shelter, situated in a valley some miles inland, and had built a new residence--a Trafalgar House--on the bare brow of the hill overlooking Sanditon and the sea, exposed to every wind that blows; but he will confess to no discomforts, nor suffer his family to feel any from the change. The following extract brings him before the reader, mounted on his hobby:-- 'He wanted to secure the promise of a visit, and to get as many of the family as his own house would hold to follow him to Sanditon as soon as possible; and, healthy as all the Heywoods undeniably were, he foresaw that every one of them would be benefitted by the sea. He held it indeed as certain that no person, however upheld for the present by fortuitous aids of exercise and spirit in a semblance of health, could be really in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year. The sea air and sea-bathing together were nearly infallible; one or other of them being a match for every disorder of the stomach, the lungs, or the blood. They were anti-spasmodic, anti- pulmonary, anti-bilious, and anti-rheumatic. Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. They were healing, softening, relaxing, fortifying, and bracing, seemingly just as was wanted; sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the sea-bath was the certain corrective; and when bathing disagreed, the sea breeze was evidently designed by nature for the cure. His eloquence, however, could not prevail. Mr. and Mrs. Heywood never left home. . . . The maintenance, education, and fitting out of fourteen children demanded a very quiet, settled, careful course of life; and obliged them to be stationary and healthy at Willingden. What prudence had at first enjoined was now rendered pleasant by habit. They never left home, and they had a gratification in saying so.' Lady Denham's was a very different character. She was a rich vulgar widow, with a sharp but narrow mind, who cared for the prosperity of Sanditon only so far as it might increase the value of her own property. She is thus described:-- 'Lady Denham had been a rich Miss Brereton, born to wealth, but not to education. Her first husband had been a Mr. Hollis, a man of considerable property in the country, of which a large share of the parish of Sanditon, with manor and mansion-house, formed a part. He had been an elderly man when she married him; her own age about thirty. Her motives for such a match could be little understood at the distance of forty years, but she had so well nursed and pleased Mr. Hollis that at his death he left her everything--all his estates, and all at her disposal. After a widowhood of some years she had been induced to marry again. The late Sir Harry Denham, of Denham Park, in the neighbourhood of Sanditon, succeeded in removing her and her large income to his own domains; but he could not succeed in the views of permanently enriching his family which were attributed to him. She had been too wary to put anything out of her own power, and when, on Sir Harry's death, she returned again to her own house at Sanditon, she was said to have made this boast, "that though she had _got_ nothing but her title from the family, yet she had _given_ nothing for it." For the title it was to be supposed that she married. 'Lady Denham was indeed a great lady, beyond the common wants of society; for she had many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of people to be courted by:--her own relations, who might very reasonably wish for her original thirty thousand pounds among them; the legal heirs of Mr. Hollis, who might hope to be more indebted to _her_ sense of justice than he had allowed them to be to _his_; and those members of the Denham family for whom her second husband had hoped to make a good bargain. By all these, or by branches of them, she had, no doubt, been long and still continued to be well attacked; and of these three divisions Mr. Parker did not hesitate to say that Mr. Hollis's kindred were the least in favour, and Sir Harry Denham's the most. The former, he believed, had done themselves irremediable harm by expressions of very unwise resentment at the time of Mr. Hollis's death: the latter, to the advantage of being the remnant of a connection which she certainly valued, joined those of having been known to her from their childhood, and of being always at hand to pursue their interests by seasonable attentions. But another claimant was now to be taken into account: a young female relation whom Lady Denham had been induced to receive into her family. After having always protested against any such addition, and often enjoyed the repeated defeat she had given to every attempt of her own relations to introduce 'this young lady, or that young lady,' as a companion at Sanditon House, she had brought back with her from London last Michaelmas a Miss Clara Brereton, who bid fair to vie in favour with Sir Edward Denham, and to secure for herself and her family that share of the accumulated property which they had certainly the best right to inherit.' Lady Denham's character comes out in a conversation which takes place at Mr. Parker's tea-table. 'The conversation turned entirely upon Sanditon, its present number of visitants, and the chances of a good season. It was evident that Lady Denham had more anxiety, more fears of loss than her coadjutor. She wanted to have the place fill faster, and seemed to have many harassing apprehensions of the lodgings being in some instances underlet. To a report that a large boarding-school was expected she replies, 'Ah, well, no harm in that. They will stay their six weeks, and out of such a number who knows but some may be consumptive, and want asses' milk; and I have two milch asses at this very time. But perhaps the little Misses may hurt the furniture. I hope they will have a good sharp governess to look after them.' But she wholly disapproved of Mr. Parker's wish to secure the residence of a medical man amongst them. 'Why, what should we do with a doctor here? It would only be encouraging our servants and the poor to fancy themselves ill, if there was a doctor at hand. Oh, pray let us have none of that tribe at Sanditon: we go on very well as we are. There is the sea, and the downs, and my milch asses: and I have told Mrs. Whitby that if anybody enquires for a chamber horse, they may be supplied at a fair rate (poor Mr. Hollis's chamber horse, as good as new); and what can people want more? I have lived seventy good years in the world, and never took physic, except twice: and never saw the face of a doctor in all my life on my own account; and I really believe if my poor dear Sir Harry had never seen one neither, he would have been alive now. Ten fees, one after another, did the men take who sent him out of the world. I beseech you, Mr. Parker, no doctors here.' This lady's character comes out more strongly in a conversation with Mr. Parker's guest, Miss Charlotte Heywood. Sir Edward Denham with his sister Esther and Clara Brereton have just left them. 'Charlotte accepted an invitation from Lady Denham to remain with her on the terrace, when the others adjourned to the library. Lady Denham, like a true great lady, talked, and talked only of her own concerns, and Charlotte listened. Taking hold of Charlotte's arm with the ease of one who felt that any notice from her was a favour, and communicative from the same sense of importance, or from a natural love of talking, she immediately said in a tone of great satisfaction, and with a look of arch sagacity:-- 'Miss Esther wants me to invite her and her brother to spend a week with me at Sanditon House, as I did last summer, but I shan't. She has been trying to get round me every way with her praise of this and her praise of that; but I saw what she was about. I saw through it all. I am not very easily taken in, my dear.' Charlotte could think of nothing more harmless to be said than the simple enquiry of, 'Sir Edward and Miss Denham?' 'Yes, my dear; _my young folks_, as I call them, sometimes: for I take them very much by the hand, and had them with me last summer, about this time, for a week--from Monday to Monday--and very delighted and thankful they were. For they are very good young people, my dear. I would not have you think that I only notice them for poor dear Sir Harry's sake. No, no; they are very deserving themselves, or, trust me, they would not be so much in my company. I am not the woman to help anybody blindfold. I always take care to know what I am about, and who I have to deal with before I stir a finger. I do not think I was ever overreached in my life; and that is a good deal for a woman to say that has been twice married. Poor dear Sir Harry (between ourselves) thought at first to have got more, but (with a bit of a sigh) he is gone, and we must not find fault with the dead. Nobody could live happier together than us: and he was a very honourable man, quite the gentleman, of ancient family; and when he died I gave Sir Edward his gold watch.' This was said with a look at her companion which implied its right to produce a great impression; and seeing no rapturous astonishment in Charlotte's countenance, she added quickly, 'He did not bequeath it to his nephew, my dear; it was no bequest; it was not in the will. He only told me, and _that_ but _once_, that he should wish his nephew to have his watch; but it need not have been binding, if I had not chose it.' 'Very kind indeed, very handsome!' said Charlotte, absolutely forced to affect admiration. 'Yes, my dear; and it is not the only kind thing I have done by him. I have been a very liberal friend to Sir Edward; and, poor young man, he needs it bad enough. For, though I am only the dowager, my dear, and he is the heir, things do not stand between us in the way they usually do between those two parties. Not a shilling do I receive from the Denham estate. Sir Edward has no payments to make _me_. _He_ don't stand uppermost, believe me; it is _I_ that help _him_.' 'Indeed! he is a very fine young man, and particularly elegant in his address.' This was said chiefly for the sake of saying something; but Charlotte directly saw that it was laying her open to suspicion, by Lady Denham's giving a shrewd glance at her, and replying, 'Yes, yes; he's very well to look at; and it is to be hoped that somebody of large fortune will think so; for Sir Edward _must_ marry for money. He and I often talk that matter over. A handsome young man like him will go smirking and smiling about, and paying girls compliments, but he knows he _must_ marry for money. And Sir Edward is a very steady young man, in the main, and has got very good notions.' 'Sir Edward Denham,' said Charlotte, 'with such personal advantages, may be almost sure of getting a woman of fortune, if he chooses it.' This glorious sentiment seemed quite to remove suspicion. 'Aye, my dear, that is very sensibly said; and if we could but get a young heiress to Sanditon! But heiresses are monstrous scarce! I do not think we have had an heiress here, nor even a _Co_., since Sanditon has been a public place. Families come after families, but, as far as I can learn, it is not one in a hundred of them that have any real property, landed or funded. An income, perhaps, but no property. Clergymen, may be, or lawyers from town, or half-pay officers, or widows with only a jointure; and what good can such people do to anybody? Except just as they take our empty houses, and (between ourselves) I think they are great fools for not staying at home. Now, if we could get a young heiress to be sent here for her health, and, as soon as she got well, have her fall in love with Sir Edward! And Miss Esther must marry somebody of fortune, too. She must get a rich husband. Ah! young ladies that have no money are very much to be pitied.' After a short pause: 'If Miss Esther thinks to talk me into inviting them to come and stay at Sanditon House, she will find herself mistaken. Matters are altered with me since last summer, you know: I have Miss Clara with me now, which makes a great difference. I should not choose to have my two housemaid's time taken up all the morning in dusting out bedrooms. They have Miss Clara's room to put to rights, as well as mine, every day. If they had hard work, they would want higher wages.' Charlotte's feelings were divided between amusement and indignation. She kept her countenance, and kept a civil silence; but without attempting to listen any longer, and only conscious that Lady Denham was still talking in the same way, allowed her own thoughts to form themselves into such meditation as this:--'She is thoroughly mean; I had no expectation of anything so bad. Mr. Parker spoke too mildly of her. He is too kind- hearted to see clearly, and their very connection misleads him. He has persuaded her to engage in the same speculation, and because they have so far the same object in view, he fancies that she feels like him in other things; but she is very, very mean. I can see no good in her. Poor Miss Brereton! And it makes everybody mean about her. This poor Sir Edward and his sister! how far nature meant them to be respectable I cannot tell; but they are obliged to be mean in their servility to her; and I am mean, too, in giving her my attention with the appearance of coinciding with her. Thus it is when rich people are sordid.' Mr. Parker has two unmarried sisters of singular character. They live together; Diana, the younger, always takes the lead, and the elder follows in the same track. It is their pleasure to fancy themselves invalids to a degree and in a manner never experienced by others; but, from a state of exquisite pain and utter prostration, Diana Parker can always rise to be officious in the concerns of all her acquaintance, and to make incredible exertions where they are not wanted. It would seem that they must be always either very busy for the good of others, or else extremely ill themselves. Some natural delicacy of constitution, in fact, with an unfortunate turn for medicine, especially quack medicine, had given them an early tendency at various times to various disorders. The rest of their suffering was from their own fancy, the love of distinction, and the love of the wonderful. They had charitable hearts and many amiable feelings; but a spirit of restless activity, and the glory of doing more than anybody else, had a share in every exertion of benevolence, and there was vanity in all they did, as well as in all they endured. These peculiarities come out in the following letter of Diana Parker to her brother:-- 'MY DEAR TOM,--We were much grieved at your accident, and if you had not described yourself as having fallen into such very good hands, I should have been with you at all hazards the day after receipt of your letter, though it found me suffering under a more severe attack than usual of my old grievance, spasmodic bile, and hardly able to crawl from my bed to the sofa. But how were you treated? Send me more particulars in your next. If indeed a simple sprain, as you denominate it, nothing would have been so judicious as friction--friction by the hand alone, supposing it could be applied _immediately_. Two years ago I happened to be calling on Mrs. Sheldon, when her coachman sprained his foot, as he was cleaning the carriage, and could hardly limp into the house; but by the immediate use of friction alone, steadily persevered in (I rubbed his ancle with my own hands for four hours without intermission), he was well in three days. . . . Pray never run into peril again in looking for an apothecary on our account; for had you the most experienced man in his line settled at Sanditon, it would be no recommendation to us. We have entirely done with the whole medical tribe. We have consulted physician after physician in vain, till we are quite convinced that they can do nothing for us, and that we must trust to our knowledge of our own wretched constitutions for any relief; but if you think it advisable for the interests of the _place_ to get a medical man there, I will undertake the commission with pleasure, and have no doubt of succeeding. I could soon put the necessary irons in the fire. As for getting to Sanditon myself, it is an impossibility. I grieve to say that I cannot attempt it, but my feelings tell me too plainly that in my present state the sea-air would probably be the death of me; and in truth I doubt whether Susan's nerves would be equal to the effort. She has been suffering much from headache, and six leeches a day, for ten days together, relieved her so little that we thought it right to change our measures; and being convinced on examination that much of the evil lay in her gums, I persuaded her to attack the disorder there. She has accordingly had three teeth drawn, and is decidedly better; but her nerves are a good deal deranged, she can only speak in a whisper, and fainted away this morning on poor Arthur's trying to suppress a cough.' Within a week of the date of this letter, in spite of the impossibility of moving, and of the fatal effects to be apprehended from the sea-air, Diana Parker was at Sanditon with her sister. She had flattered herself that by her own indefatigable exertions, and by setting at work the agency of many friends, she had induced two large families to take houses at Sanditon. It was to expedite these politic views that she came; and though she met with some disappointment of her expectation, yet she did not suffer in health. Such were some of the _dramatis personae_, ready dressed and prepared for their parts. They are at least original and unlike any that the author had produced before. The success of the piece must have depended on the skill with which these parts might be played; but few will be inclined to distrust the skill of one who had so often succeeded. If the author had lived to complete her work, it is probable that these personages might have grown into as mature an individuality of character, and have taken as permanent a place amongst our familiar acquaintance, as Mr. Bennet, or John Thorp, Mary Musgrove, or Aunt Norris herself. CHAPTER XIV. _Postscript_. When first I was asked to put together a memoir of my aunt, I saw reasons for declining the attempt. It was not only that, having passed the three score years and ten usually allotted to man's strength, and being unaccustomed to write for publication, I might well distrust my ability to complete the work, but that I also knew the extreme scantiness of the materials out of which it must be constructed. The grave closed over my aunt fifty-two years ago; and during that long period no idea of writing her life had been entertained by any of her family. Her nearest relatives, far from making provision for such a purpose, had actually destroyed many of the letters and papers by which it might have been facilitated. They were influenced, I believe, partly by an extreme dislike to publishing private details, and partly by never having assumed that the world would take so strong and abiding an interest in her works as to claim her name as public property. It was therefore necessary for me to draw upon recollections rather than on written documents for my materials; while the subject itself supplied me with nothing striking or prominent with which to arrest the attention of the reader. It has been said that the happiest individuals, like nations during their happiest periods, have no history. In the case of my aunt, it was not only that her course of life was unvaried, but that her own disposition was remarkably calm and even. There was in her nothing eccentric or angular; no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sensibility or exaggeration of feeling, which not unfrequently accompanies great talents, to be worked up into a picture. Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly enough in her works, but of which a biographer can make little use. The motive which at last induced me to make the attempt is exactly expressed in the passage prefixed to these pages. I thought that I saw something to be done: knew of no one who could do it but myself, and so was driven to the enterprise. I am glad that I have been able to finish my work. As a family record it can scarcely fail to be interesting to those relatives who must ever set a high value on their connection with Jane Austen, and to them I especially dedicate it; but as I have been asked to do so, I also submit it to the censure of the public, with all its faults both of deficiency and redundancy. I know that its value in their eyes must depend, not on any merits of its own, but on the degree of estimation in which my aunt's works may still be held; and indeed I shall esteem it one of the strongest testimonies ever borne to her talents, if for her sake an interest can be taken in so poor a sketch as I have been able to draw. BRAY VICARAGE: Sept. 7, 1869. _Postscript printed at the end of the first edition; omitted from the second_. Since these pages were in type, I have read with astonishment the strange misrepresentation of my aunt's manners given by Miss Mitford in a letter which appears in her lately-published Life, vol. i. p. 305. Miss Mitford does not profess to have known Jane Austen herself, but to report what had been told her by her mother. Having stated that her mother '_before her marriage_' was well acquainted with Jane Austen and her family, she writes thus:--'Mamma says that she was _then_ the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.' The editor of Miss Mitford's Life very properly observes in a note how different this description is from 'every other account of Jane Austen from whatever quarter.' Certainly it is so totally at variance with the modest simplicity of character which I have attributed to my aunt, that if it could be supposed to have a semblance of truth, it must be equally injurious to her memory and to my trustworthiness as her biographer. Fortunately I am not driven to put my authority in competition with that of Miss Mitford, nor to ask which ought to be considered the better witness in this case; because I am able to prove by a reference to dates that Miss Mitford must have been under a mistake, and that her mother could not possibly have known what she was supposed to have reported; inasmuch as Jane Austen, at the time referred to, was a little girl. Mrs. Mitford was the daughter of Dr. Russell, Rector of Ashe, a parish adjoining Steventon, so that the families of Austen and Russell must at that time have been known to each other. But the date assigned by Miss Mitford for the termination of the acquaintance is the time of her mother's marriage. This took place in October 1785, when Jane, who had been born in December 1775, was not quite ten years old. In point of fact, however, Miss Russell's opportunities of observing Jane Austen must have come to an end still earlier: for upon Dr. Russell's death, in January 1783, his widow and daughter removed from the neighbourhood, so that all intercourse between the families ceased when Jane was little more than seven years old. All persons who undertake to narrate from hearsay things which are supposed to have taken place before they were born are liable to error, and are apt to call in imagination to the aid of memory: and hence it arises that many a fancy piece has been substituted for genuine history. I do not care to correct the inaccurate account of Jane Austen's manners in after life: because Miss Mitford candidly expresses a doubt whether she had not been misinformed on that point. _Nov_. 17, 1869. NOTES. {0a} _The Watsons_ and _Lady Susan_ are not included in this reprint. {1} I went to represent my father, who was too unwell to attend himself, and thus I was the only one of my generation present. {3} My chief assistants have been my sisters, Mrs. B. Lefroy and Miss Austen, whose recollections of our aunt are, on some points, more vivid than my own. I have not only been indebted to their memory for facts, but have sometimes used their words. Indeed some passages towards the end of the work were entirely written by the latter. I have also to thank some of my cousins, and especially the daughters of Admiral Charles Austen, for the use of letters and papers which had passed into their hands, without which this Memoir, scanty as it is, could not have been written. {5} There seems to have been some doubt as to the validity of this election; for Hearne says that it was referred to the Visitor, who confirmed it. (Hearne's _Diaries_, v.2.) {6} Mrs. Thrale writes Dr. _Lee_, but there can be no doubt of the identity of person. {31} The celebrated Beau Brummel, who was so intimate with George IV. as to be able to quarrel with him, was born in 1771. It is reported that when he was questioned about his parents, he replied that it was long since he had heard of them, but that he imagined the worthy couple must have cut their own throats by that time, because when he last saw them they were eating peas with their knives. Yet Brummel's father had probably lived in good society; and was certainly able to put his son into a fashionable regiment, and to leave him 30,000 pounds. {31a} Raikes believes that he had been Secretary to Lord North. Thackeray's idea that he had been a footman cannot stand against the authority of Raikes, who was intimate with the son. {31a} Raikes's Memoirs, vol. ii p. 207. {35} See 'Spectator,' No. 102, on the Fan Exercise. Old gentlemen who had survived the fashion of wearing swords were known to regret the disuse of that custom, because it put an end to one way of distinguishing those who had, from those who had not, been used to good society. To wear the sword easily was an art which, like swimming and skating, required to be learned in youth. Children could practise it early with their toy swords adapted to their size. {41} Mrs. Gaskell, in her tale of 'Sylvia's Lovers,' declares that this hand-spinning rivalled harp-playing in its gracefulness. {62} James, the writer's eldest brother. {63} The limb was saved. {65} The invitation, the ball dress, and some other things in this and the preceding letter refer to a ball annually given at Hurstbourne Park, on the anniversary of the Earl of Portsmouth's marriage with his first wife. He was the Lord Portsmouth whose eccentricities afterwards became notorious, and the invitations, as well as other arrangements about these balls, were of a peculiar character. {66a} The father of Sir William Heathcote, of Hursley, who was married to a daughter of Mr. Bigg Wither, of Manydown, and lived in the neighbourhood. {66b} A very dull old lady, then residing with Mrs. Lloyd. {68} The Duke of Sussex, son of George III., married, without royal consent, to the Lady Augusta Murray. {75a} Here is evidence that Jane Austen was acquainted with Bath before it became her residence in 1801. See p.[25]. {75b} A gentleman and lady lately engaged to be married. {80} It seems that Charles Austen, then first lieutenant of the 'Endymion,' had had an opportunity of shewing attention and kindness to some of Lord Leven's family. {83} See Wharton's note to Johnson and Steevens' Shakspeare. {102} This mahogany desk, which has done good service to the public, is now in the possession of my sister, Miss Austen. {107} At this time, February 1813, 'Mansfield Park' was nearly finished. {110} The present Lady Pollen, of Redenham, near Andover, then at a school in London. {117} See Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life of Miss Bronte,' vol. ii. p. 215. {122} It was her pleasure to boast of greater ignorance than she had any just claim to. She knew more than her mother tongue, for she knew a good deal of French and a little of Italian. {126} Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life of Miss Bronte,' vol. ii. p. 53. {130} This must have been 'Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk.' {136a} A greater genius than my aunt shared with her the imputation of being _commonplace_. Lockhart, speaking of the low estimation in which Scott's conversational powers were held in the literary and scientific society of Edinburgh, says: 'I think the epithet most in vogue concerning it was "commonplace."' He adds, however, that one of the most eminent of that society was of a different opinion, who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly, "I have the misfortune to think differently from you--in my humble opinion Walter Scott's sense is a still more wonderful thing than his genius."--Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vol. iv. chap. v. {136b} The late Mr. R. H. Cheney. {140} Lockhart had supposed that this article had been written by Scott, because it exactly accorded with the opinions which Scott had often been heard to express, but he learned afterwards that it had been written by Whately; and Lockhart, who became the Editor of the Quarterly, must have had the means of knowing the truth. (See Lockhart's _Life of Sir Walter Scott_, vol. v. p. 158.) I remember that, at the time when the review came out, it was reported in Oxford that Whately had written the article at the request of the lady whom he afterwards married. {142} In transcribing this passage I have taken the liberty so far to correct it as to spell her name properly with an 'e.' {145} Incidentally she had received high praise in Lord Macaulay's Review of Madame D'Arblay's Works in the 'Edinburgh.' {146} _Life of Sir J. Mackintosh_, vol. ii. p. 472. {149} Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vol. vi. chap. vii. {159} The Fowles, of Kintbury, in Berkshire. {161a} It seems that her young correspondent, after dating from his home, had been so superfluous as to state in his letter that he was returned home, and thus to have drawn on himself this banter. {161b} The road by which many Winchester boys returned home ran close to Chawton Cottage. {161c} There was, though it exists no longer, a pond close to Chawton Cottage, at the junction of the Winchester and Gosport roads. {162} Mr. Digweed, who conveyed the letters to and from Chawton, was the gentleman named in page[22], as renting the old manor-house and the large farm at Steventon. {167} This cancelled chapter is now printed, in compliance with the requests addressed to me from several quarters. {169a} Miss Bigg's nephew, the present Sir William Heathcote, of Hursley. {169b} Her brother Henry, who had been ordained late in life. {171} The writer was at that time under twelve years old. {173} It was the corner house in College Street, at the entrance to Commoners. 
18645	----	Transcriber's note: The letter "o" with a macron is rendered [=o] in this text. It only appears in the word "Public[=o]la". A detailed transcriber's note will be found at the end of the text. English Men of Letters Edited by John Morley THACKERAY by ANTHONY TROLLOPE London: MacMillan and Co. 1879. The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved. Charles Dickens and Evans, Crystal Palace Press. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE BIOGRAPHICAL 1 CHAPTER II. FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH 62 CHAPTER III. VANITY FAIR 90 CHAPTER IV. PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES 108 CHAPTER V. ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS 122 CHAPTER VI. THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES 139 CHAPTER VII. THACKERAY'S LECTURES 154 CHAPTER VIII. THACKERAY'S BALLADS 168 CHAPTER IX. THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK 184 THACKERAY CHAPTER I. BIOGRAPHICAL. In the foregoing volumes of this series of _English Men of Letters_, and in other works of a similar nature which have appeared lately as to the _Ancient Classics_ and _Foreign Classics_, biography has naturally been, if not the leading, at any rate a considerable element. The desire is common to all readers to know not only what a great writer has written, but also of what nature has been the man who has produced such great work. As to all the authors taken in hand before, there has been extant some written record of the man's life. Biographical details have been more or less known to the world, so that, whether of a Cicero, or of a Goethe, or of our own Johnson, there has been a story to tell. Of Thackeray no life has been written; and though they who knew him,--and possibly many who did not,--are conversant with anecdotes of the man, who was one so well known in society as to have created many anecdotes, yet there has been no memoir of his life sufficient to supply the wants of even so small a work as this purports to be. For this the reason may simply be told. Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste offended by some fulsome biography. Paragraphs, of which the eulogy seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name. We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his little details,--his literary remains, as such documents used to be called,--might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to produce. Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,--while there were two living, and since that the one surviving,--have carried out the order which has appeared to them to be sacred. Such being the case, it certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of Thackeray. In this preliminary chapter I will give such incidents and anecdotes of his life as will tell the reader perhaps all about him that a reader is entitled to ask. I will tell how he became an author, and will say how first he worked and struggled, and then how he worked and prospered, and became a household word in English literature;--how, in this way, he passed through that course of mingled failure and success which, though the literary aspirant may suffer, is probably better both for the writer and for the writings than unclouded early glory. The suffering no doubt is acute, and a touch of melancholy, perhaps of indignation, may be given to words which have been written while the heart has been too full of its own wrongs; but this is better than the continued note of triumph which is still heard in the final voices of the spoilt child of literature, even when they are losing their music. Then I will tell how Thackeray died, early indeed, but still having done a good life's work. Something of his manner, something of his appearance I can say, something perhaps of his condition of mind; because for some few years he was known to me. But of the continual intercourse of himself with the world, and of himself with his own works, I can tell little, because no record of his life has been made public. William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, on July 18, 1811. His father was Richmond Thackeray, son of W. M. Thackeray of Hadley, near Barnet, in Middlesex. A relation of his, of the same name, a Rev. Mr. Thackeray, I knew well as rector of Hadley, many years afterwards. Him I believe to have been a second cousin of our Thackeray, but I think they had never met each other. Another cousin was Provost of Kings at Cambridge, fifty years ago, as Cambridge men will remember. Clergymen of the family have been numerous in England during the century, and there was one, a Rev. Elias Thackeray, whom I also knew in my youth, a dignitary, if I remember right, in the diocese of Meath. The Thackerays seem to have affected the Church; but such was not at any period of his life the bias of our novelist's mind. His father and grandfather were Indian civil servants. His mother was Anne Becher, whose father was also in the Company's service. She married early in India, and was only nineteen when her son was born. She was left a widow in 1816, with only one child, and was married a few years afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael Smyth, with whom Thackeray lived on terms of affectionate intercourse till the major died. All who knew William Makepeace remember his mother well, a handsome, spare, gray-haired lady, whom Thackeray treated with a courtly deference as well as constant affection. There was, however, something of discrepancy between them as to matters of religion. Mrs. Carmichael Smyth was disposed to the somewhat austere observance of the evangelical section of the Church. Such, certainly, never became the case with her son. There was disagreement on the subject, and probably unhappiness at intervals, but never, I think, quarrelling. Thackeray's house was his mother's home whenever she pleased it, and the home also of his stepfather. He was brought a child from India, and was sent early to the Charter House. Of his life and doings there his friend and schoolfellow George Venables writes to me as follows; "My recollection of him, though fresh enough, does not furnish much material for biography. He came to school young,--a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy. I think his experience there was not generally pleasant. Though he had afterwards a scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction in the school; and I should think that the character of the head-master, Dr. Russell, which was vigorous, unsympathetic, and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no skill in games, and, I think, no taste for them.... He was already known by his faculty of making verses, chiefly parodies. I only remember one line of one parody on a poem of L. E. L.'s, about 'Violets, dark blue violets;' Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, bright green cabbages,' and we thought it very witty. He took part in a scheme, which came to nothing, for a school magazine, and he wrote verses for it, of which I only remember that they were good of their kind. When I knew him better, in later years, I thought I could recognise the sensitive nature which he had as a boy.... His change of retrospective feeling about his school days was very characteristic. In his earlier books he always spoke of the Charter House as Slaughter House and Smithfield. As he became famous and prosperous his memory softened, and Slaughter House was changed into Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome ended his life." In February, 1829, when he was not as yet eighteen, Thackeray went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and was, I think, removed in 1830. It may be presumed, therefore, that his studies there were not very serviceable to him. There are few, if any, records left of his doings at the university,--unless it be the fact that he did there commence the literary work of his life. The line about the cabbages, and the scheme of the school magazine, can hardly be said to have amounted even to a commencement. In 1829 a little periodical was brought out at Cambridge, called _The Snob_, with an assurance on the title that it was _not_ conducted by members of the university. It is presumed that Thackeray took a hand in editing this. He certainly wrote, and published in the little paper, some burlesque lines on the subject which was given for the Chancellor's prize poem of the year. This was _Timbuctoo_, and Tennyson was the victor on the occasion. There is some good fun in the four first and four last lines of Thackeray's production. In Africa,--a quarter of the world,-- Men's skins are black; their hair is crisped and curled; And somewhere there, unknown to public view A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo. * * * * * I see her tribes the hill of glory mount, And sell their sugars on their own account; While round her throne the prostrate nations come, Sue for her rice, and barter for her rum. I cannot find in _The Snob_ internal evidence of much literary merit beyond this. But then how many great writers have there been from whose early lucubrations no future literary excellence could be prognosticated? There is something at any rate in the name of the publication which tells of work that did come. Thackeray's mind was at all times peculiarly exercised with a sense of snobbishness. His appreciation of the vice grew abnormally, so that at last he had a morbid horror of a snob--a morbid fear lest this or the other man should turn snob on his hands. It is probable that the idea was taken from the early _Snob_ at Cambridge, either from his own participation in the work or from his remembrance of it. _The Snob_ lived, I think, but nine weeks, and was followed at an interval, in 1830, by _The Gownsman_, which lived to the seventeenth number, and at the opening of which Thackeray no doubt had a hand. It professed to be a continuation of _The Snob_. It contains a dedication to all proctors, which I should not be sorry to attribute to him. "To all Proctors, past, present, and future-- Whose taste it is our privilege to follow, Whose virtue it is our duty to imitate, Whose presence it is our interest to avoid." There is, however, nothing beyond fancy to induce me to believe that Thackeray was the author of the dedication, and I do not know that there is any evidence to show that he was connected with _The Snob_ beyond the writing of _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he left Cambridge, and went to Weimar either in that year or in 1831. Between Weimar and Paris he spent some portion of his earlier years, while his family,--his mother, that is, and his stepfather,--were living in Devonshire. It was then the purport of his life to become an artist, and he studied drawing at Paris, affecting especially Bonnington, the young English artist who had himself painted at Paris and who had died in 1828. He never learned to draw,--perhaps never could have learned. That he was idle, and did not do his best, we may take for granted. He was always idle, and only on some occasions, when the spirit moved him thoroughly, did he do his best even in after life. But with drawing,--or rather without it,--he did wonderfully well even when he did his worst. He did illustrate his own books, and everyone knows how incorrect were his delineations. But as illustrations they were excellent. How often have I wished that characters of my own creating might be sketched as faultily, if with the same appreciation of the intended purpose. Let anyone look at the "plates," as they are called in _Vanity Fair_, and compare each with the scenes and the characters intended to be displayed, and there see whether the artist,--if we may call him so,--has not managed to convey in the picture the exact feeling which he has described in the text. I have a little sketch of his, in which a cannon-ball is supposed to have just carried off the head of an aide-de-camp,--messenger I had perhaps better say, lest I might affront military feelings,--who is kneeling on the field of battle and delivering a despatch to Marlborough on horseback. The graceful ease with which the duke receives the message though the messenger's head be gone, and the soldier-like precision with which the headless hero finishes his last effort of military obedience, may not have been portrayed with well-drawn figures, but no finished illustration ever told its story better. Dickens has informed us that he first met Thackeray in 1835, on which occasion the young artist aspirant, looking no doubt after profitable employment, "proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book." It is singular that such should have been the first interview between the two great novelists. We may presume that the offer was rejected. In 1832, Thackeray came of age, and inherited his fortune,--as to which various stories have been told. It seems to have amounted to about five hundred a year, and to have passed through his hands in a year or two, interest and principal. It has been told of him that it was all taken away from him at cards, but such was not the truth. Some went in an Indian bank in which he invested it. A portion was lost at cards. But with some of it,--the larger part as I think,--he endeavoured, in concert with his stepfather, to float a newspaper, which failed. There seem to have been two newspapers in which he was so concerned, _The National Standard_ and _The Constitutional_. On the latter he was engaged with his stepfather, and in carrying that on he lost the last of his money. _The National Standard_ had been running for some weeks when Thackeray joined it, and lost his money in it. It ran only for little more than twelve months, and then, the money having gone, the periodical came to an end. I know no road to fortune more tempting to a young man, or one that with more certainty leads to ruin. Thackeray, who in a way more or less correct, often refers in his writings, if not to the incidents, at any rate to the remembrances of his own life, tells us much of the story of this newspaper in _Lovel the Widower_. "They are welcome," says the bachelor, "to make merry at my charges in respect of a certain bargain which I made on coming to London, and in which, had I been Moses Primrose purchasing green spectacles, I could scarcely have been more taken in. My Jenkinson was an old college acquaintance, whom I was idiot enough to imagine a respectable man. The fellow had a very smooth tongue and sleek sanctified exterior. He was rather a popular preacher, and used to cry a good deal in the pulpit. He and a queer wine merchant and bill discounter, Sherrick by name, had somehow got possession of that neat little literary paper, _The Museum_, which perhaps you remember, and this eligible literary property my friend Honeyman, with his wheedling tongue, induced me to purchase." Here is the history of Thackeray's money, told by himself plainly enough, but with no intention on his part of narrating an incident in his own life to the public. But the drollery of the circumstances, his own mingled folly and young ambition, struck him as being worth narration, and the more forcibly as he remembered all the ins and outs of his own reflections at the time,--how he had meant to enchant the world, and make his fortune. There was literary capital in it of which he could make use after so many years. Then he tells us of this ambition, and of the folly of it; and at the same time puts forward the excuses to be made for it. "I daresay I gave myself airs as editor of that confounded _Museum_, and proposed to educate the public taste, to diffuse morality and sound literature throughout the nation, and to pocket a liberal salary in return for my services. I daresay I printed my own sonnets, my own tragedy, my own verses.... I daresay I wrote satirical articles.... I daresay I made a gaby of myself to the world. Pray, my good friend, hast thou never done likewise? If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man." Thackeray was quite aware of his early weaknesses, and in the maturity of life knew well that he had not been precociously wise. He delighted so to tell his friends, and he delighted also to tell the public, not meaning that any but an inner circle should know that he was speaking of himself. But the story now is plain to all who can read.[1] It was thus that he lost his money; and then, not having prospered very well with his drawing lessons in Paris or elsewhere, he was fain to take up literature as a profession. It is a business which has its allurements. It requires no capital, no special education, no training, and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay. If a man can command a table, a chair, pen, paper, and ink, he can commence his trade as literary man. It is thus that aspirants generally do commence it. A man may or may not have another employment to back him, or means of his own; or,--as was the case with Thackeray, when, after his first misadventure, he had to look about him for the means of living,--he may have nothing but his intellect and his friends. But the idea comes to the man that as he has the pen and ink, and time on his hand, why should he not write and make money? It is an idea that comes to very many men and women, old as well as young,--to many thousands who at last are crushed by it, of whom the world knows nothing. A man can make the attempt though he has not a coat fit to go out into the street with; or a woman, though she be almost in rags. There is no apprenticeship wanted. Indeed there is no room for such apprenticeship. It is an art which no one teaches; there is no professor who, in a dozen lessons, even pretends to show the aspirant how to write a book or an article. If you would be a watchmaker, you must learn; or a lawyer, a cook, or even a housemaid. Before you can clean a horse you must go into the stable, and begin at the beginning. Even the cab-driving tiro must sit for awhile on the box, and learn something of the streets, before he can ply for a fare. But the literary beginner rushes at once at the top rung of his ladder;--as though a youth, having made up his mind to be a clergyman, should demand, without preliminary steps, to be appointed Bishop of London. That he should be able to read and write is presumed, and that only. So much may be presumed of everyone, and nothing more is wanted. In truth nothing more is wanted,--except those inner lights as to which, so many men live and die without having learned whether they possess them or not. Practice, industry, study of literature, cultivation of taste, and the rest, will of course lend their aid, will probably be necessary before high excellence is attained. But the instances are not to seek,--are at the fingers of us all,--in which the first uninstructed effort has succeeded. A boy, almost, or perhaps an old woman, has sat down and the book has come, and the world has read it, and the booksellers have been civil and have written their cheques. When all trades, all professions, all seats at offices, all employments at which a crust can be earned, are so crowded that a young man knows not where to look for the means of livelihood, is there not an attraction in this which to the self-confident must be almost invincible? The booksellers are courteous and write their cheques, but that is not half the whole? _Monstrari digito!_ That is obtained. The happy aspirant is written of in newspapers, or, perhaps, better still, he writes of others. When the barrister of forty-five has hardly got a name beyond Chancery Lane, this glorious young scribe, with the first down on his lips, has printed his novel and been talked about. The temptation is irresistible, and thousands fall into it. How is a man to know that he is not the lucky one or the gifted one? There is the table and there the pen and ink. Among the unfortunate he who fails altogether and from the first start is not the most unfortunate. A short period of life is wasted, and a sharp pang is endured. Then the disappointed one is relegated to the condition of life which he would otherwise have filled a little earlier. He has been wounded, but not killed, or even maimed. But he who has a little success, who succeeds in earning a few halcyon, but, ah! so dangerous guineas, is drawn into a trade from which he will hardly escape till he be driven from it, if he come out alive, by sheer hunger. He hangs on till the guineas become crowns and shillings,--till some sad record of his life, made when he applies for charity, declares that he has worked hard for the last year or two and has earned less than a policeman in the streets or a porter at a railway. It is to that that he is brought by applying himself to a business which requires only a table and chair, with pen, ink, and paper! It is to that which he is brought by venturing to believe that he has been gifted with powers of imagination, creation, and expression. The young man who makes the attempt knows that he must run the chance. He is well aware that nine must fail where one will make his running good. So much as that does reach his ears, and recommends itself to his common sense. But why should it not be he as well as another? There is always some lucky one winning the prize. And this prize when it has been won is so well worth the winning! He can endure starvation,--so he tells himself,--as well as another. He will try. But yet he knows that he has but one chance out of ten in his favour, and it is only in his happier moments that he flatters himself that that remains to him. Then there falls upon him,--in the midst of that labour which for its success especially requires that a man's heart shall be light, and that he be always at his best,--doubt and despair. If there be no chance, of what use is his labour? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, and amuse himself after that fashion? Thus the very industry which alone could give him a chance is discarded. It is so that the young man feels who, with some slight belief in himself and with many doubts, sits down to commence the literary labour by which he hopes to live. So it was, no doubt, with Thackeray. Such were his hopes and his fears;--with a resolution of which we can well understand that it should have waned at times, of earning his bread, if he did not make his fortune, in the world of literature. One has not to look far for evidence of the condition I have described,--that it was so, Amaryllis and all. How or when he made his very first attempt in London, I have not learned; but he had not probably spent his money without forming "press" acquaintances, and had thus found an aperture for the thin end of the wedge. He wrote for _The Constitutional_, of which he was part proprietor, beginning his work for that paper as a correspondent from Paris. For a while he was connected with _The Times_ newspaper, though his work there did not I think amount to much. His first regular employment was on _Fraser's Magazine_, when Mr. Fraser's shop was in Regent Street, when Oliver Yorke was the presumed editor, and among contributors, Carlyle was one of the most notable. I imagine that the battle of life was difficult enough with him even after he had become one of the leading props of that magazine. All that he wrote was not taken, and all that was taken was not approved. In 1837-38, the _History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_ appeared in the magazine. The _Great Hoggarty Diamond_ is now known to all readers of Thackeray's works. It is not my purpose to speak specially of it here, except to assert that it has been thought to be a great success. When it was being brought out, the author told a friend of his,--and of mine,--that it was not much thought of at Fraser's, and that he had been called upon to shorten it. That is an incident disagreeable in its nature to any literary gentleman, and likely to be specially so when he knows that his provision of bread, certainly of improved bread and butter, is at stake. The man who thus darkens his literary brow with the frown of disapproval, has at his disposal all the loaves and all the fishes that are going. If the writer be successful, there will come a time when he will be above such frowns; but, when that opinion went forth, Thackeray had not yet made his footing good, and the notice to him respecting it must have been very bitter. It was in writing this _Hoggarty Diamond_ that Thackeray first invented the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. Samuel Titmarsh was the writer, whereas Michael Angelo was an intending illustrator. Thackeray's nose had been broken in a school fight, while he was quite a little boy, by another little boy, at the Charter House; and there was probably some association intended to be jocose with the name of the great artist, whose nose was broken by his fellow-student Torrigiano, and who, as it happened, died exactly three centuries before Thackeray. I can understand all the disquietude of his heart when that warning, as to the too great length of his story, was given to him. He was not a man capable of feeling at any time quite assured in his position, and when that occurred he was very far from assurance. I think that at no time did he doubt the sufficiency of his own mental qualification for the work he had taken in hand; but he doubted all else. He doubted the appreciation of the world; he doubted his fitness for turning his intellect to valuable account; he doubted his physical capacity,--dreading his own lack of industry; he doubted his luck; he doubted the continual absence of some of those misfortunes on which the works of literary men are shipwrecked. Though he was aware of his own power, he always, to the last, was afraid that his own deficiencies should be too strong against him. It was his nature to be idle,--to put off his work,--and then to be angry with himself for putting it off. Ginger was hot in the mouth with him, and all the allurements of the world were strong upon him. To find on Monday morning an excuse why he should not on Monday do Monday's work was, at the time, an inexpressible relief to him, but had become deep regret,--almost a remorse,--before the Monday was over. To such a one it was not given to believe in himself with that sturdy rock-bound foundation which we see to have belonged to some men from the earliest struggles of their career. To him, then, must have come an inexpressible pang when he was told that his story must be curtailed. Who else would have told such a story of himself to the first acquaintance he chanced to meet? Of Thackeray it might be predicted that he certainly would do so. No little wound of the kind ever came to him but what he disclosed it at once. "They have only bought so many of my new book." "Have you seen the abuse of my last number?" "What am I to turn my hand to? They are getting tired of my novels." "They don't read it," he said to me of _Esmond_. "So you don't mean to publish my work?" he said once to a publisher in an open company. Other men keep their little troubles to themselves. I have heard even of authors who have declared how all the publishers were running after their books; I have heard some discourse freely of their fourth and fifth editions; I have known an author to boast of his thousands sold in this country, and his tens of thousands in America; but I never heard anyone else declare that no one would read his _chef-d'oeuvre_, and that the world was becoming tired of him. It was he who said, when he was fifty, that a man past fifty should never write a novel. And yet, as I have said, he was from an early age fully conscious of his own ability. That he was so is to be seen in the handling of many of his early works,--in _Barry Lyndon_, for instance, and the _Memoirs of Mr. C. James Yellowplush_. The sound is too certain for doubt of that kind. But he had not then, nor did he ever achieve that assurance of public favour which makes a man confident that his work will be successful. During the years of which we are now speaking Thackeray was a literary Bohemian in this sense,--that he never regarded his own status as certain. While performing much of the best of his life's work he was not sure of his market, not certain of his readers, his publishers, or his price; nor was he certain of himself. It is impossible not to form some contrast between him and Dickens as to this period of his life,--a comparison not as to their literary merits, but literary position. Dickens was one year his junior in age, and at this time, viz. 1837-38, had reached almost the zenith of his reputation. _Pickwick_ had been published, and _Oliver Twist_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_ were being published. All the world was talking about the young author who was assuming his position with a confidence in his own powers which was fully justified both by his present and future success. It was manifest that he could make, not only his own fortune, but that of his publishers, and that he was a literary hero bound to be worshipped by all literary grades of men, down to the "devils" of the printing-office. At that time, Thackeray, the older man, was still doubting, still hesitating, still struggling. Everyone then had accepted the name of Charles Dickens. That of William Thackeray was hardly known beyond the circle of those who are careful to make themselves acquainted with such matters. It was then the custom, more generally than it is at present, to maintain anonymous writing in magazines. Now, if anything of special merit be brought out, the name of the author, if not published, is known. It was much less so at the period in question; and as the world of readers began to be acquainted with Jeames Yellowplush, Catherine Hayes, and other heroes and heroines, the names of the author had to be inquired for. I remember myself, when I was already well acquainted with the immortal Jeames, asking who was the writer. The works of Charles Dickens were at that time as well known to be his, and as widely read in England, as those almost of Shakespeare. It will be said of course that this came from the earlier popularity of Dickens. That is of course; but why should it have been so? They had begun to make their effort much at the same time; and if there was any advantage in point of position as they commenced, it was with Thackeray. It might be said that the genius of the one was brighter than that of the other, or, at any rate, that it was more precocious. But after-judgment has, I think, not declared either of the suggestions to be true. I will make no comparison between two such rivals, who were so distinctly different from each, and each of whom, within so very short a period, has come to stand on a pedestal so high,--the two exalted to so equal a vocation. And if Dickens showed the best of his power early in life, so did Thackeray the best of his intellect. In no display of mental force did he rise above _Barry Lyndon_. I hardly know how the teller of a narrative shall hope to mount in simply intellectual faculty above the effort there made. In what then was the difference? Why was Dickens already a great man when Thackeray was still a literary Bohemian? The answer is to be found not in the extent or in the nature of the genius of either man, but in the condition of mind,--which indeed may be read plainly in their works by those who have eyes to see. The one was steadfast, industrious, full of purpose, never doubting of himself, always putting his best foot foremost and standing firmly on it when he got it there; with no inward trepidation, with no moments in which he was half inclined to think that this race was not for his winning, this goal not to be reached by his struggles. The sympathy of friends was good to him, but he could have done without it. The good opinion which he had of himself was never shaken by adverse criticism; and the criticism on the other side, by which it was exalted, came from the enumeration of the number of copies sold. He was a firm reliant man, very little prone to change, who, when he had discovered the nature of his own talent, knew how to do the very best with it. It may almost be said that Thackeray was the very opposite of this. Unsteadfast, idle, changeable of purpose, aware of his own intellect but not trusting it, no man ever failed more generally than he to put his best foot foremost. Full as his works are of pathos, full of humour, full of love and charity, tending, as they always do, to truth and honour and manly worth and womanly modesty, excelling, as they seem to me to do, most other written precepts that I know, they always seem to lack something that might have been there. There is a touch of vagueness which indicates that his pen was not firm while he was using it. He seems to me to have been dreaming ever of some high flight, and then to have told himself, with a half-broken heart, that it was beyond his power to soar up into those bright regions. I can fancy as the sheets went from him every day he told himself, in regard to every sheet, that it was a failure. Dickens was quite sure of his sheets. "I have got to make it shorter!" Then he would put his hands in his pockets, and stretch himself, and straighten the lines of his face, over which a smile would come, as though this intimation from his editor were the best joke in the world; and he would walk away, with his heart bleeding, and every nerve in an agony. There are none of us who want to have much of his work shortened now. In 1837 Thackeray married Isabella, daughter of Colonel Matthew Shawe, and from this union there came three daughters, Anne, Jane, and Harriet. The name of the eldest, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, who has followed so closely in her father's steps, is a household word to the world of novel readers; the second died as a child; the younger lived to marry Leslie Stephen, who is too well known for me to say more than that he wrote, the other day, the little volume on Dr. Johnson in this series; but she, too, has now followed her father. Of Thackeray's married life what need be said shall be contained in a very few words. It was grievously unhappy; but the misery of it came from God, and was in no wise due to human fault. She became ill, and her mind failed her. There was a period during which he would not believe that her illness was more than illness, and then he clung to her and waited on her with an assiduity of affection which only made his task the more painful to him. At last it became evident that she should live in the companionship of some one with whom her life might be altogether quiet, and she has since been domiciled with a lady with whom she has been happy. Thus she was, after but a few years of married life, taken away from him, and he became as it were a widower till the end of his days. At this period, and indeed for some years after his marriage, his chief literary dependence was on _Fraser's Magazine_. He wrote also at this time in the _New Monthly Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out his _Paris Sketch Book_, as to which he tells us by a notice printed with the first edition, that half of the sketches had already been published in various periodicals. Here he used the name Michael Angelo Titmarsh, as he did also with the _Journey from Cornhill to Cairo_. Dickens had called himself Boz, and clung to the name with persistency as long as the public would permit it. Thackeray's affection for assumed names was more intermittent, though I doubt whether he used his own name altogether till it appeared on the title-page of _Vanity Fair_. About this time began his connection with _Punch_, in which much of his best work appeared. Looking back at our old friend as he used to come out from week to week at this time, we can hardly boast that we used to recognise how good the literary pabulum was that was then given for our consumption. We have to admit that the ordinary reader, as the ordinary picture-seer, requires to be guided by a name. We are moved to absolute admiration by a Raphael or a Hobbema, but hardly till we have learned the name of the painter, or, at any rate, the manner of his painting. I am not sure that all lovers of poetry would recognise a _Lycidas_ coming from some hitherto unknown Milton. Gradually the good picture or the fine poem makes its way into the minds of a slowly discerning public. _Punch_, no doubt, became very popular, owing, perhaps, more to Leech, its artist, than to any other single person. Gradually the world of readers began to know that there was a speciality of humour to be found in its pages,--fun and sense, satire and good humour, compressed together in small literary morsels as the nature of its columns required. Gradually the name of Thackeray as one of the band of brethren was buzzed about, and gradually became known as that of the chief of the literary brothers. But during the years in which he did much for _Punch_, say from 1843 to 1853, he was still struggling to make good his footing in literature. They knew him well in the _Punch_ office, and no doubt the amount and regularity of the cheques from Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the then and still owners of that happy periodical, made him aware that he had found for himself a satisfactory career. In "a good day for himself, the journal, and the world, Thackeray found _Punch_." This was said by his old friend Shirley Brooks, who himself lived to be editor of the paper and died in harness, and was said most truly. _Punch_ was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than _Fraser_. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him, but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the brothers of _Punch_. We can only imagine what were his thoughts as to himself and that other man, who was then known as the great novelist of the day,--of a rivalry with whom he was certainly conscious. _Punch_ was very much to him, but was not quite enough. That must have been very clear to himself as he meditated the beginning of _Vanity Fair_. Of the contributions to the periodical, the best known now are _The Snob Papers_ and _The Ballads of Policeman X_. But they were very numerous. Of Thackeray as a poet, or maker of verses, I will say a few words in a chapter which will be devoted to his own so-called ballads. Here it seems only necessary to remark that there was not apparently any time in his career at which he began to think seriously of appearing before the public as a poet. Such was the intention early in their career with many of our best known prose writers, with Milton, and Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson, with Scott, Macaulay, and more lately with Matthew Arnold; writers of verse and prose who ultimately prevailed some in one direction, and others in the other. Milton and Goldsmith have been known best as poets, Johnson and Macaulay as writers of prose. But with all of them there has been a distinct effort in each art. Thackeray seems to have tumbled into versification by accident; writing it as amateurs do, a little now and again for his own delectation, and to catch the taste of partial friends. The reader feels that Thackeray would not have begun to print his verses unless the opportunity of doing so had been brought in his way by his doings in prose. And yet he had begun to write verses when he was very young;--at Cambridge, as we have seen, when he contributed more to the fame of Timbuctoo than I think even Tennyson has done,--and in his early years at Paris. Here again, though he must have felt the strength of his own mingled humour and pathos, he always struck with an uncertain note till he had gathered strength and confidence by popularity. Good as they generally were, his verses were accidents, written not as a writer writes who claims to be a poet, but as though they might have been the relaxation of a doctor or a barrister. And so they were. When Thackeray first settled himself in London, to make his living among the magazines and newspapers, I do not imagine that he counted much on his poetic powers. He describes it all in his own dialogue between the pen and the album. "Since he," says the pen, speaking of its master, Thackeray: Since he my faithful service did engage, To follow him through his queer pilgrimage I've drawn and written many a line and page. Caricatures I scribbled have, and rhymes, And dinner-cards, and picture pantomimes, And many little children's books at times. I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain; The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain; The idle word that he'd wish back again. I've helped him to pen many a line for bread. It was thus he thought of his work. There had been caricatures, and rhymes, and many little children's books; and then the lines written for his bread, which, except that they were written for _Punch_, were hardly undertaken with a more serious purpose. In all of it there was ample seriousness, had he known it himself. What a tale of the restlessness, of the ambition, of the glory, of the misfortunes of a great country is given in the ballads of Peter the French drummer! Of that brain so full of fancy the pen had lightly written all the fancies. He did not know it when he was doing so, but with that word, fancy, he has described exactly the gift with which his brain was specially endowed. If a writer be accurate, or sonorous, or witty, or simply pathetic, he may, I think, gauge his own powers. He may do so after experience with something of certainty. But fancy is a gift which the owner of it cannot measure, and the power of which, when he is using it, he cannot himself understand. There is the same lambent flame flickering over everything he did, even the dinner-cards and the picture pantomimes. He did not in the least know what he put into those things. So it was with his verses. It was only by degrees, when he was told of it by others, that he found that they too were of infinite value to him in his profession. The _Irish Sketch Book_ came out in 1843, in which he used, but only half used, the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. He dedicates it to Charles Lever, and in signing the dedication gave his own name. "Laying aside," he says, "for a moment the travelling title of Mr. Titmarsh, let me acknowledge these favours in my own name, and subscribe myself, &c. &c., W. M. Thackeray." So he gradually fell into the declaration of his own identity. In 1844 he made his journey to Turkey and Egypt,--_From Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, as he called it, still using the old nom de plume, but again signing the dedication with his own name. It was now made to the captain of the vessel in which he encountered that famous white squall, in describing which he has shown the wonderful power he had over words. In 1846 was commenced, in numbers, the novel which first made his name well known to the world. This was _Vanity Fair_, a work to which it is evident that he devoted all his mind. Up to this time his writings had consisted of short contributions, chiefly of sketches, each intended to stand by itself in the periodical to which it was sent. _Barry Lyndon_ had hitherto been the longest; but that and _Catherine Hayes_, and the _Hoggarty Diamond_, though stories continued through various numbers, had not as yet reached the dignity,--or at any rate the length,--of a three-volume novel. But of late novels had grown to be much longer than those of the old well-known measure. Dickens had stretched his to nearly double the length, and had published them in twenty numbers. The attempt had caught the public taste and had been pre-eminently successful. The nature of the tale as originated by him was altogether unlike that to which the readers of modern novels had been used. No plot, with an arranged catastrophe or _dénoûment_, was necessary. Some untying of the various knots of the narrative no doubt were expedient, but these were of the simplest kind, done with the view of giving an end to that which might otherwise be endless. The adventures of a _Pickwick_ or a _Nickleby_ required very little of a plot, and this mode of telling a story, which might be continued on through any number of pages, as long as the characters were interesting, met with approval. Thackeray, who had never depended much on his plot in the shorter tales which he had hitherto told, determined to adopt the same form in his first great work, but with these changes;--That as the central character with Dickens had always been made beautiful with unnatural virtue,--for who was ever so unselfish as _Pickwick_, so manly and modest as _Nicholas_, or so good a boy as _Oliver_?--so should his centre of interest be in every respect abnormally bad. As to Thackeray's reason for this,--or rather as to that condition of mind which brought about this result,--I will say something in a final chapter, in which I will endeavour to describe the nature and effect of his work generally. Here it will be necessary only to declare that, such was the choice he now made of a subject in his first attempt to rise out of a world of small literary contributions, into the more assured position of the author of a work of importance. We are aware that the monthly nurses of periodical literature did not at first smile on the effort. The proprietors of magazines did not see their way to undertake _Vanity Fair_, and the publishers are said to have generally looked shy upon it. At last it was brought out in numbers,--twenty-four numbers instead of twenty, as with those by Dickens,--under the guardian hands of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. This was completed in 1848, and then it was that, at the age of thirty-seven, Thackeray first achieved for himself a name and reputation through the country. Before this he had been known at _Fraser's_ and at the _Punch_ office. He was known at the Garrick Club, and had become individually popular among literary men in London. He had made many fast friends, and had been, as it were, found out by persons of distinction. But Jones, and Smith, and Robinson, in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, did not know him as they knew Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Macaulay,--not as they knew Landseer, or Stansfeld, or Turner; not as they knew Macready, Charles Kean, or Miss Faucit. In that year, 1848, his name became common in the memoirs of the time. On the 5th of June I find him dining with Macready, to meet Sir J. Wilson, Panizzi, Landseer, and others. A few days afterwards Macready dined with him. "Dined with Thackeray, met the Gordons, Kenyons, Procters, Reeve, Villiers, Evans, Stansfeld, and saw Mrs. Sartoris and S. C. Dance, White, H. Goldsmid, in the evening." Again; "Dined with Forster, having called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, Kenyon, Procter, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, Thackeray." Macready was very accurate in jotting down the names of those he entertained, who entertained him, or were entertained with him. _Vanity Fair_ was coming out, and Thackeray had become one of the personages in literary society. In the January number of 1848 the _Edinburgh Review_ had an article on Thackeray's works generally as they were then known. It purports to combine the _Irish Sketch Book_, the _Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, and _Vanity Fair_ as far as it had then gone; but it does in truth deal chiefly with the literary merits of the latter. I will quote a passage from the article, as proving in regard to Thackeray's work an opinion which was well founded, and as telling the story of his life as far as it was then known; "Full many a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and among the most remarkable of these is Michael Angelo Titmarsh, alias William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the _Irish Sketch Book_, of _A Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, of _Jeames's Diary_, of _The Snob Papers_ in _Punch_, of _Vanity Fair_, etc. etc. "Mr. Thackeray is now about thirty-seven years of age, of a good family, and originally intended for the bar. He kept seven or eight terms at Cambridge, but left the university without taking a degree, with the view of becoming an artist; and we well remember, ten or twelve years ago, finding him day after day engaged in copying pictures in the Louvre, in order to qualify himself for his intended profession. It may be doubted, however, whether any degree of assiduity would have enabled him to excel in the money-making branches, for his talent was altogether of the Hogarth kind, and was principally remarkable in the pen-and-ink sketches of character and situation, which he dashed off for the amusement of his friends. At the end of two or three years of desultory application he gave up the notion of becoming a painter, and took to literature. He set up and edited with marked ability a weekly journal, on the plan of _The Athenæum_ and _Literary Gazette_, but was unable to compete successfully with such long-established rivals. He then became a regular man of letters,--that is, he wrote for respectable magazines and newspapers, until the attention attracted to his contributions in _Fraser's Magazine_ and _Punch_ emboldened him to start on his own account, and risk an independent publication." Then follows a eulogistic and, as I think, a correct criticism on the book as far as it had gone. There are a few remarks perhaps a little less eulogistic as to some of his minor writings, _The Snob Papers_ in particular; and at the end there is a statement with which I think we shall all now agree; "A writer with such a pen and pencil as Mr. Thackeray's is an acquisition of real and high value in our literature." The reviewer has done his work in a tone friendly to the author, whom he knew,[2]--as indeed it may be said that this little book will be written with the same feeling,--but the public has already recognised the truth of the review generally. There can be no doubt that Thackeray, though he had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to periodicals,--to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral literature of the month,--had already become effective on the tastes and morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good breeding but never approaches it; dishonest gambling, whether with dice or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already received condign punishment from Yellowplush, Titmarsh, Fitzboodle, and Ikey Solomon. Under all those names Thackeray had plied his trade as a satirist. Though the truths, as the reviewer said, had been merely sent undulating through the air, they had already become effective. Thackeray had now become a personage,--one of the recognised stars of the literary heaven of the day. It was an honour to know him; and we may well believe that the givers of dinners were proud to have him among their guests. He had opened his oyster,--with his pen, an achievement which he cannot be said to have accomplished until _Vanity Fair_ had come out. In inquiring about him from those who survive him, and knew him well in those days, I always hear the same account. "If I could only tell you the impromptu lines which fell from him!" "If I had only kept the drawings from his pen, which used to be chucked about as though they were worth nothing!" "If I could only remember the drolleries!" Had they been kept, there might now be many volumes of these sketches, as to which the reviewer says that their talent was "altogether of the Hogarth kind." Could there be any kind more valuable? Like Hogarth, he could always make his picture tell his story; though, unlike Hogarth, he had not learned to draw. I have had sent to me for my inspection an album of drawings and letters, which, in the course of twenty years, from 1829 to 1849, were despatched from Thackeray to his old friend Edward Fitzgerald. Looking at the wit displayed in the drawings, I feel inclined to say that had he persisted he would have been a second Hogarth. There is a series of ballet scenes, in which "Flore et Zephyr" are the two chief performers, which for expression and drollery exceed anything that I know of the kind. The set in this book are lithographs, which were published, but I do not remember to have seen them elsewhere. There are still among us many who knew him well;--Edward Fitzgerald and George Venables, James Spedding and Kinglake, Mrs. Procter,--the widow of Barry Cornwall, who loved him well,--and Monckton Milnes, as he used to be, whose touching lines written just after Thackeray's death will close this volume, Frederick Pollock and Frank Fladgate, John Blackwood and William Russell,--and they all tell the same story. Though he so rarely talked, as good talkers do, and was averse to sit down to work, there were always falling from his mouth and pen those little pearls. Among the friends who had been kindest and dearest to him in the days of his strugglings he once mentioned three to me,--Matthew Higgins, or Jacob Omnium as he was more popularly called; William Stirling, who became Sir William Maxwell; and Russell Sturgis, who is now the senior partner in the great house of Barings. Alas, only the last of these three is left among us! Thackeray was a man of no great power of conversation. I doubt whether he ever shone in what is called general society. He was not a man to be valuable at a dinner-table as a good talker. It was when there were but two or three together that he was happy himself and made others happy; and then it would rather be from some special piece of drollery that the joy of the moment would come, than from the discussion of ordinary topics. After so many years his old friends remember the fag-ends of the doggerel lines which used to drop from him without any effort on all occasions of jollity. And though he could be very sad,--laden with melancholy, as I think must have been the case with him always,--the feeling of fun would quickly come to him, and the queer rhymes would be poured out as plentifully as the sketches were made. Here is a contribution which I find hanging in the memory of an old friend, the serious nature of whose literary labours would certainly have driven such lines from his mind, had they not at the time caught fast hold of him: In the romantic little town of Highbury My father kept a circulatin' library; He followed in his youth that man immortal, who Conquered the Frenchmen on the plains of Waterloo. Mamma was an inhabitant of Drogheda, Very good she was to darn and to embroider. In the famous island of Jamaica, For thirty years I've been a sugar-baker; And here I sit, the Muses' 'appy vot'ry, A cultivatin' every kind of po'try, There may, perhaps, have been a mistake in a line, but the poem has been handed down with fair correctness over a period of forty years. He was always versifying. He once owed me five pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence, his share of a dinner bill at Richmond. He sent me a cheque for the amount in rhyme, giving the proper financial document on the second half of a sheet of note paper. I gave the poem away as an autograph, and now forget the lines. This was all trifling, the reader will say. No doubt. Thackeray was always trifling, and yet always serious. In attempting to understand his character it is necessary for you to bear within your own mind the idea that he was always, within his own bosom, encountering melancholy with buffoonery, and meanness with satire. The very spirit of burlesque dwelt within him,--a spirit which does not see the grand the less because of the travesties which it is always engendering. In his youthful,--all but boyish,--days in London, he delighted to "put himself up" at the Bedford, in Covent Garden. Then in his early married days he lived in Albion Street, and from thence went to Great Coram Street, till his household there was broken up by his wife's illness. He afterwards took lodgings in St. James's Chambers, and then a house in Young Street, Kensington. Here he lived from 1847, when he was achieving his great triumph with _Vanity Fair_, down to 1853, when he removed to a house which he bought in Onslow Square. In Young Street there had come to lodge opposite to him an Irish gentleman, who, on the part of his injured country, felt very angry with Thackeray. _The Irish Sketch Book_ had not been complimentary, nor were the descriptions which Thackeray had given generally of Irishmen; and there was extant an absurd idea that in his abominable heroine Catherine Hayes he had alluded to Miss Catherine Hayes the Irish singer. Word was taken to Thackeray that this Irishman intended to come across the street and avenge his country on the calumniator's person. Thackeray immediately called upon the gentleman, and it is said that the visit was pleasant to both parties. There certainly was no blood shed. He had now succeeded,--in 1848,--in making for himself a standing as a man of letters, and an income. What was the extent of his income I have no means of saying; nor is it a subject on which, as I think, inquiry should be made. But he was not satisfied with his position. He felt it to be precarious, and he was always thinking of what he owed to his two girls. That _arbitrium popularis auræ_ on which he depended for his daily bread was not regarded by him with the confidence which it deserved. He did not probably know how firm was the hold he had obtained of the public ear. At any rate he was anxious, and endeavoured to secure for himself a permanent income in the public service. He had become by this time acquainted, probably intimate, with the Marquis of Clanricarde, who was then Postmaster-General. In 1848 there fell a vacancy in the situation of Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office, and Lord Clanricarde either offered it to him or promised to give it to him. The Postmaster-General had the disposal of the place,--but was not altogether free from control in the matter. When he made known his purpose at the Post Office, he was met by an assurance from the officer next under him that the thing could not be done. The services were wanted of a man who had had experience in the Post Office; and, moreover, it was necessary that the feelings of other gentlemen should be consulted. Men who have been serving in an office many years do not like to see even a man of genius put over their heads. In fact, the office would have been up in arms at such an injustice. Lord Clanricarde, who in a matter of patronage was not scrupulous, was still a good-natured man and amenable. He attempted to befriend his friend till he found that it was impossible, and then, with the best grace in the world, accepted the official nominee that was offered to him. It may be said that had Thackeray succeeded in that attempt he would surely have ruined himself. No man can be fit for the management and performance of special work who has learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year; and no man could have been less so than Thackeray. There are men who, though they be not fit, are disposed to learn their lesson and make themselves as fit as possible. Such cannot be said to have been the case with this man. For the special duties which he would have been called upon to perform, consisting to a great extent of the maintenance of discipline over a large body of men, training is required, and the service would have suffered for awhile under any untried elderly tiro. Another man might have put himself into harness. Thackeray never would have done so. The details of his work after the first month would have been inexpressibly wearisome to him. To have gone into the city, and to have remained there every day from eleven till five, would have been all but impossible to him. He would not have done it. And then he would have been tormented by the feeling that he was taking the pay and not doing the work. There is a belief current, not confined to a few, that a man may be a Government Secretary with a generous salary, and have nothing to do. The idea is something that remains to us from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them. Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have found his work as Assistant-Secretary at the General Post Office to be altogether too much for him. And then it was no doubt his intention to join literature with the Civil Service. He had been taught to regard the Civil Service as easy, and had counted upon himself as able to add it to his novels, and his work with his _Punch_ brethren, and to his contributions generally to the literature of the day. He might have done so, could he have risen at five, and have sat at his private desk for three hours before he began his official routine at the public one. A capability for grinding, an aptitude for continuous task work, a disposition to sit in one's chair as though fixed to it by cobbler's wax, will enable a man in the prime of life to go through the tedium of a second day's work every day; but of all men Thackeray was the last to bear the wearisome perseverance of such a life. Some more or less continuous attendance at his office he must have given, and with it would have gone _Punch_ and the novels, the ballads, the burlesques, the essays, the lectures, and the monthly papers full of mingled satire and tenderness, which have left to us that Thackeray which we could so ill afford to lose out of the literature of the nineteenth century. And there would have remained to the Civil Service the memory of a disgraceful job. He did not, however, give up the idea of the Civil Service. In a letter to his American friend, Mr. Reed, dated 8th November, 1854, he says; "The secretaryship of our Legation at Washington was vacant the other day, and I instantly asked for it; but in the very kindest letter Lord Clarendon showed how the petition was impossible. First, the place was given away. Next, it would not be fair to appoint out of the service. But the first was an excellent reason;--not a doubt of it." The validity of the second was probably not so apparent to him as it is to one who has himself waited long for promotion. "So if ever I come," he continues, "as I hope and trust to do this time next year, it must be in my own coat, and not the Queen's." Certainly in his own coat, and not in the Queen's, must Thackeray do anything by which he could mend his fortune or make his reputation. There never was a man less fit for the Queen's coat. Nevertheless he held strong ideas that much was due by the Queen's ministers to men of letters, and no doubt had his feelings of slighted merit, because no part of the debt due was paid to him. In 1850 he wrote a letter to _The Morning Chronicle_, which has since been republished, in which he alludes to certain opinions which had been put forth in _The Examiner_. "I don't see," he says, "why men of letters should not very cheerfully coincide with Mr. Examiner in accepting all the honours, places, and prizes which they can get. The amount of such as will be awarded to them will not, we may be pretty sure, impoverish the country much; and if it is the custom of the State to reward by money, or titles of honour, or stars and garters of any sort, individuals who do the country service,--and if individuals are gratified at having 'Sir' or 'My lord' appended to their names, or stars and ribbons hooked on to their coats and waistcoats, as men most undoubtedly are, and as their wives, families, and relations are,--there can be no reason why men of letters should not have the chance, as well as men of the robe or the sword; or why, if honour and money are good for one profession, they should not be good for another. No man in other callings thinks himself degraded by receiving a reward from his Government; nor, surely, need the literary man be more squeamish about pensions, and ribbons, and titles, than the ambassador, or general, or judge. Every European state but ours rewards its men of letters. The American Government gives them their full share of its small patronage; and if Americans, why not Englishmen?" In this a great subject is discussed which would be too long for these pages; but I think that there now exists a feeling that literature can herself, for herself, produce a rank as effective as any that a Queen's minister can bestow. Surely it would be a repainting of the lily, an adding a flavour to the rose, a gilding of refined gold to create to-morrow a Lord Viscount Tennyson, a Baron Carlyle, or a Right Honourable Sir Robert Browning. And as for pay and pension, the less the better of it for any profession, unless so far as it may be payment made for work done. Then the higher the payment the better, in literature as in all other trades. It may be doubted even whether a special rank of its own be good for literature, such as that which is achieved by the happy possessors of the forty chairs of the Academy in France. Even though they had an angel to make the choice,--which they have not,--that angel would do more harm to the excluded than good to the selected. _Pendennis_, _Esmond_, and _The Newcomes_ followed _Vanity Fair_,--not very quickly indeed, always at an interval of two years,--in 1850, 1852, and 1854. As I purpose to devote a separate short chapter, or part of a chapter, to each of these, I need say nothing here of their special merits or demerits. _Esmond_ was brought out as a whole. The others appeared in numbers. "He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." It is a mode of pronunciation in literature by no means very articulate, but easy of production and lucrative. But though easy it is seductive, and leads to idleness. An author by means of it can raise money and reputation on his book before he has written it, and when the pang of parturition is over in regard to one part, he feels himself entitled to a period of ease because the amount required for the next division will occupy him only half the month. This to Thackeray was so alluring that the entirety of the final half was not always given to the task. His self-reproaches and bemoanings when sometimes the day for reappearing would come terribly nigh, while yet the necessary amount of copy was far from being ready, were often very ludicrous and very sad;--ludicrous because he never told of his distress without adding to it something of ridicule which was irresistible, and sad because those who loved him best were aware that physical suffering had already fallen upon him, and that he was deterred by illness from the exercise of continuous energy. I myself did not know him till after the time now in question. My acquaintance with him was quite late in his life. But he has told me something of it, and I have heard from those who lived with him how continual were his sufferings. In 1854, he says in one of his letters to Mr. Reed,--the only private letters of his which I know to have been published; "I am to-day just out of bed after another, about the dozenth, severe fit of spasms which I have had this year. My book would have been written but for them." His work was always going on, but though not fuller of matter,--that would have been almost impossible,--would have been better in manner had he been delayed neither by suffering nor by that palsying of the energies which suffering produces. This ought to have been the happiest period of his life, and should have been very happy. He had become fairly easy in his circumstances. He had succeeded in his work, and had made for himself a great name. He was fond of popularity, and especially anxious to be loved by a small circle of friends. These good things he had thoroughly achieved. Immediately after the publication of _Vanity Fair_ he stood high among the literary heroes of his country, and had endeared himself especially to a special knot of friends. His face and figure, his six feet four in height, with his flowing hair, already nearly gray, and his broken nose, his broad forehead and ample chest, encountered everywhere either love or respect; and his daughters to him were all the world,--the bairns of whom he says, at the end of the _White Squall_ ballad; I thought, as day was breaking, My little girls were waking, And smiling, and making A prayer at home for me. Nothing could have been more tender or endearing than his relations with his children. But still there was a skeleton in his cupboard,--or rather two skeletons. His home had been broken up by his wife's malady, and his own health was shattered. When he was writing _Pendennis_, in 1849, he had a severe fever, and then those spasms came, of which four or five years afterwards he wrote to Mr. Reed. His home, as a home should be, was never restored to him,--or his health. Just at that period of life at which a man generally makes a happy exchange in taking his wife's drawing-room in lieu of the smoking-room of his club, and assumes those domestic ways of living which are becoming and pleasant for matured years, that drawing-room and those domestic ways were closed against him. The children were then no more than babies, as far as society was concerned,--things to kiss and play with, and make a home happy if they could only have had their mother with them. I have no doubt there were those who thought that Thackeray was very jolly under his adversity. Jolly he was. It was the manner of the man to be so,--if that continual playfulness which was natural to him, lying over a melancholy which was as continual, be compatible with jollity. He laughed, and ate, and drank, and threw his pearls about with miraculous profusion. But I fancy that he was far from happy. I remember once, when I was young, receiving advice as to the manner in which I had better spend my evenings; I was told that I ought to go home, drink tea, and read good books. It was excellent advice, but I found that the reading of good books in solitude was not an occupation congenial to me. It was so, I take it, with Thackeray. He did not like his lonely drawing-room, and went back to his life among the clubs by no means with contentment. In 1853, Thackeray having then his own two girls to provide for, added a third to his family, and adopted Amy Crowe, the daughter of an old friend, and sister of the well-known artist now among us. How it came to pass that she wanted a home, or that this special home suited her, it would be unnecessary here to tell even if I knew. But that he did give a home to this young lady, making her in all respects the same as another daughter, should be told of him. He was a man who liked to broaden his back for the support of others, and to make himself easy under such burdens. In 1862, she married a Thackeray cousin, a young officer with the Victoria Cross, Edward Thackeray, and went out to India,--where she died. In 1854, the year in which _The Newcomes_ came out, Thackeray had broken his close alliance with _Punch_. In December of that year there appeared from his pen an article in _The Quarterly_ on _John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character_. It is a rambling discourse on picture-illustration in general, full of interest, but hardly good as a criticism,--a portion of literary work for which he was not specially fitted. In it he tells us how Richard Doyle, the artist, had given up his work for _Punch_, not having been able, as a Roman Catholic, to endure the skits which, at that time, were appearing in one number after another against what was then called Papal aggression. The reviewer,--Thackeray himself,--then tells us of the secession of himself from the board of brethren. "Another member of Mr. Punch's cabinet, the biographer of _Jeames_, the author of _The Snob Papers_, resigned his functions, on account of Mr. Punch's assaults upon the present Emperor of the French nation, whose anger Jeames thought it was unpatriotic to arouse." How hard it must be for Cabinets to agree! This man or that is sure to have some pet conviction of his own, and the better the man the stronger the conviction! Then the reviewer went on in favour of the artist of whom he was specially speaking, making a comparison which must at the time have been odious enough to some of the brethren. "There can be no blinking the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet John Leech is the right-hand man. Fancy a number of _Punch_ without Leech's pictures! What would you give for it?" Then he breaks out into strong admiration of that one friend,--perhaps with a little disregard as to the feelings of other friends.[3] This _Critical Review_, if it may properly be so called,--at any rate it is so named as now published,--is to be found in our author's collected works, in the same volume with _Catherine_. It is there preceded by another, from _The Westminster Review_, written fourteen years earlier, on _The Genius of Cruikshank_. This contains a descriptive catalogue of Cruikshank's works up to that period, and is interesting from the piquant style in which it is written. I fancy that these two are the only efforts of the kind which he made,--and in both he dealt with the two great caricaturists of his time, he himself being, in the imaginative part of a caricaturist's work, equal in power to either of them. We now come to a phase of Thackeray's life in which he achieved a remarkable success, attributable rather to his fame as a writer than to any particular excellence in the art which he then exercised. He took upon himself the functions of a lecturer, being moved to do so by a hope that he might thus provide a sum of money for the future sustenance of his children. No doubt he had been advised to this course, though I do not know from whom specially the advice may have come. Dickens had already considered the subject, but had not yet consented to read in public for money on his own account. John Forster, writing of the year 1846, says of Dickens and the then only thought-of exercise of a new profession; "I continued to oppose, for reasons to be stated in their place, that which he had set his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and which I still can wish he had preferred to surrender with all that seemed to be its enormous gain." And again he says, speaking of a proposition which had been made to Dickens from the town of Bradford; "At first this was entertained, but was abandoned, with some reluctance, upon the argument that to become publicly a reader must alter, without improving, his position publicly as a writer, and that it was a change to be justified only when the higher calling should have failed of the old success." The meaning of this was that the money to be made would be sweet, but that the descent to a profession which was considered to be lower than that of literature itself would carry with it something that was bitter. It was as though one who had sat on the woolsack as Lord Chancellor should raise the question whether for the sake of the income attached to it, he might, without disgrace, occupy a seat on a lower bench; as though an architect should consider with himself the propriety of making his fortune as a contractor; or the head of a college lower his dignity, while he increased his finances, by taking pupils. When such discussions arise, money generally carries the day,--and should do so. When convinced that money may be earned without disgrace, we ought to allow money to carry the day. When we talk of sordid gain and filthy lucre, we are generally hypocrites. If gains be sordid and lucre filthy, where is the priest, the lawyer, the doctor, or the man of literature, who does not wish for dirty hands? An income, and the power of putting by something for old age, something for those who are to come after, is the wholesome and acknowledged desire of all professional men. Thackeray having children, and being gifted with no power of making his money go very far, was anxious enough on the subject. We may say now, that had he confined himself to his pen, he would not have wanted while he lived, but would have left but little behind him. That he was anxious we have seen, by his attempts to subsidise his literary gains by a Government office. I cannot but think that had he undertaken public duties for which he was ill qualified, and received a salary which he could hardly have earned, he would have done less for his fame than by reading to the public. Whether he did that well or ill, he did it well enough for the money. The people who heard him, and who paid for their seats, were satisfied with their bargain,--as they were also in the case of Dickens; and I venture to say that in becoming publicly a reader, neither did Dickens or Thackeray "alter his position as a writer," and "that it was a change to be justified," though the success of the old calling had in no degree waned. What Thackeray did enabled him to leave a comfortable income for his children, and one earned honestly, with the full approval of the world around him. Having saturated his mind with the literature of Queen Anne's time,--not probably in the first instance as a preparation for _Esmond_, but in such a way as to induce him to create an Esmond,--he took the authors whom he knew so well as the subject for his first series of lectures. He wrote _The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_ in 1851, while he must have been at work on _Esmond_, and first delivered the course at Willis's Rooms in that year. He afterwards went with these through many of our provincial towns, and then carried them to the United States, where he delivered them to large audiences in the winter of 1852 and 1853. Some few words as to the merits of the composition I will endeavour to say in another place. I myself never heard him lecture, and can therefore give no opinion of the performance. That which I have heard from others has been very various. It is, I think, certain that he had none of those wonderful gifts of elocution which made it a pleasure to listen to Dickens, whatever he read or whatever he said; nor had he that power of application by using which his rival taught himself with accuracy the exact effect to be given to every word. The rendering of a piece by Dickens was composed as an oratorio is composed, and was then studied by heart as music is studied. And the piece was all given by memory, without any looking at the notes or words. There was nothing of this with Thackeray. But the thing read was in itself of great interest to educated people. The words were given clearly, with sufficient intonation for easy understanding, so that they who were willing to hear something from him felt on hearing that they had received full value for their money. At any rate, the lectures were successful. The money was made,--and was kept. He came from his first trip to America to his new house in Onslow Square, and then published _The Newcomes_. This, too, was one of his great works, as to which I shall have to speak hereafter. Then, having enjoyed his success in the first attempt to lecture, he prepared a second series. He never essayed the kind of reading which with Dickens became so wonderfully popular. Dickens recited portions from his well-known works. Thackeray wrote his lectures expressly for the purpose. They have since been added to his other literature, but they were prepared as lectures. The second series were _The Four Georges_. In a lucrative point of view they were even more successful than the first, the sum of money realised in the United States having been considerable. In England they were less popular, even if better attended, the subject chosen having been distasteful to many. There arose the question whether too much freedom had not been taken with an office which, though it be no longer considered to be founded on divine right, is still as sacred as can be anything that is human. If there is to remain among us a sovereign, that sovereign, even though divested of political power, should be endowed with all that personal respect can give. If we wish ourselves to be high, we should treat that which is over us as high. And this should not depend altogether on personal character, though we know,--as we have reason to know,--how much may be added to the firmness of the feeling by personal merit. The respect of which we speak should, in the strongest degree, be a possession of the immediate occupant, and will naturally become dim,--or perhaps be exaggerated,--in regard to the past, as history or fable may tell of them. No one need hesitate to speak his mind of King John, let him be ever so strong a stickler for the privileges of majesty. But there are degrees of distance, and the throne of which we wish to preserve the dignity seems to be assailed when unmeasured evil is said of one who has sat there within our own memory. There would seem to each of us to be a personal affront were a departed relative delineated with all those faults by which we must own that even our near relatives have been made imperfect. It is a general conviction as to this which so frequently turns the biography of those recently dead into mere eulogy. The fictitious charity which is enjoined by the _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_ banishes truth. The feeling of which I speak almost leads me at this moment to put down my pen. And, if so much be due to all subjects, is less due to a sovereign? Considerations such as these diminished, I think, the popularity of Thackeray's second series of lectures; or, rather, not their popularity, but the estimation in which they were held. On this head he defended himself more than once very gallantly, and had a great deal to say on his side of the question. "Suppose, for example, in America,--in Philadelphia or in New York,--that I had spoken about George IV. in terms of praise and affected reverence, do you believe they would have hailed his name with cheers, or have heard it with anything of respect?" And again; "We degrade our own honour and the sovereign's by unduly and unjustly praising him; and the mere slaverer and flatterer is one who comes forward, as it were, with flash notes, and pays with false coin his tribute to Cæsar. I don't disguise that I feel somehow on my trial here for loyalty,--for honest English feeling." This was said by Thackeray at a dinner at Edinburgh, in 1857, and shows how the matter rested on his mind. Thackeray's loyalty was no doubt true enough, but was mixed with but little of reverence. He was one who revered modesty and innocence rather than power, against which he had in the bottom of his heart something of republican tendency. His leaning was no doubt of the more manly kind. But in what he said at Edinburgh he hardly hit the nail on the head. No one had suggested that he should have said good things of a king which he did not believe to be true. The question was whether it may not be well sometimes for us to hold our tongues. An American literary man, here in England, would not lecture on the morals of Hamilton, on the manners of General Jackson, on the general amenities of President Johnson. In 1857 Thackeray stood for Oxford, in the liberal interest, in opposition to Mr. Cardwell. He had been induced to do this by his old friend Charles Neate, who himself twice sat for Oxford, and died now not many months since. He polled 1,017 votes, against 1,070 by Mr. Cardwell; and was thus again saved by his good fortune from attempting to fill a situation in which he would not have shone. There are, no doubt, many to whom a seat in Parliament comes almost as the birthright of a well-born and well-to-do English gentleman. They go there with no more idea of shining than they do when they are elected to a first-class club;--hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and the House of Commons is the place where a man ought to be--for a certain number of hours. Such men neither succeed nor fail, for nothing is expected of them. From such a one as Thackeray something would have been expected, which would not have been forthcoming. He was too desultory for regular work,--full of thought, but too vague for practical questions. He could not have endured to sit for two or three hours at a time with his hat over his eyes, pretending to listen, as is the duty of a good legislator. He was a man intolerant of tedium, and in the best of his time impatient of slow work. Nor, though his liberal feelings were very strong, were his political convictions definite or accurate. He was a man who mentally drank in much, feeding his fancy hourly with what he saw, what he heard, what he read, and then pouring it all out with an immense power of amplification. But it would have been impossible for him to study and bring home to himself the various points of a complicated bill with a hundred and fifty clauses. In becoming a man of letters, and taking that branch of letters which fell to him, he obtained the special place that was fitted for him. He was a round peg in a round hole. There was no other hole which he would have fitted nearly so well. But he had his moment of political ambition, like others,--and paid a thousand pounds for his attempt. In 1857 the first number of _The Virginians_ appeared, and the last,--the twenty-fourth,--in October, 1859. This novel, as all my readers are aware, is a continuance of _Esmond_, and will be spoken of in its proper place. He was then forty-eight years old, very gray, with much of age upon him, which had come from suffering,--age shown by dislike of activity and by an old man's way of thinking about many things,--speaking as though the world were all behind him instead of before; but still with a stalwart outward bearing, very erect in his gait, and a countenance peculiarly expressive and capable of much dignity. I speak of his personal appearance at this time, because it was then only that I became acquainted with him. In 1859 he undertook the last great work of his life, the editorship of _The Cornhill Magazine_, a periodical set on foot by Mr. George Smith, of the house of Smith and Elder, with an amount of energy greater than has generally been bestowed upon such enterprises. It will be well remembered still how much _The Cornhill_ was talked about and thought of before it first appeared, and how much of that thinking and talking was due to the fact that Mr. Thackeray was to edit it. _Macmillan's_, I think, was the first of the shilling magazines, having preceded _The Cornhill_ by a month, and it would ill become me, who have been a humble servant to each of them, to give to either any preference. But it must be acknowledged that a great deal was expected from _The Cornhill_, and I think it will be confessed that it was the general opinion that a great deal was given by it. Thackeray had become big enough to give a special _éclat_ to any literary exploit to which he attached himself. Since the days of _The Constitutional_ he had fought his way up the ladder and knew how to take his stand there with an assurance of success. When it became known to the world of readers that a new magazine was to appear under Thackeray's editorship, the world of readers was quite sure that there would be a large sale. Of the first number over one hundred and ten thousand were sold, and of the second and third over one hundred thousand. It is in the nature of such things that the sale should fall off when the novelty is over. People believe that a new delight has come, a new joy for ever, and then find that the joy is not quite so perfect or enduring as they had expected. But the commencement of such enterprises may be taken as a measure of what will follow. The magazine, either by Thackeray's name or by its intrinsic merits,--probably by both,--achieved a great success. My acquaintance with him grew from my having been one of his staff from the first. About two months before the opening day I wrote to him suggesting that he should accept from me a series of four short stories on which I was engaged. I got back a long letter in which he said nothing about my short stories, but asking whether I could go to work at once and let him have a long novel, so that it might begin with the first number. At the same time I heard from the publisher, who suggested some interesting little details as to honorarium. The little details were very interesting, but absolutely no time was allowed to me. It was required that the first portion of my book should be in the printer's hands within a month. Now it was my theory,--and ever since this occurrence has been my practice,--to see the end of my own work before the public should see the commencement.[4] If I did this thing I must not only abandon my theory, but instantly contrive a story, or begin to write it before it was contrived. That was what I did, urged by the interesting nature of the details. A novelist cannot always at the spur of the moment make his plot and create his characters who shall, with an arranged sequence of events, live with a certain degree of eventful decorum, through that portion of their lives which is to be portrayed. I hesitated, but allowed myself to be allured to what I felt to be wrong, much dreading the event. How seldom is it that theories stand the wear and tear of practice! I will not say that the story which came was good, but it was received with greater favour than any I had written before or have written since. I think that almost anything would have been then accepted coming under Thackeray's editorship. I was astonished that work should be required in such haste, knowing that much preparation had been made, and that the service of almost any English novelist might have been obtained if asked for in due time. It was my readiness that was needed, rather than any other gift! The riddle was read to me after a time. Thackeray had himself intended to begin with one of his own great novels, but had put it off till it was too late. _Lovel the Widower_ was commenced at the same time with my own story, but _Lovel the Widower_ was not substantial enough to appear as the principal joint at the banquet. Though your guests will undoubtedly dine off the little delicacies you provide for them, there must be a heavy saddle of mutton among the viands prepared. I was the saddle of mutton, Thackeray having omitted to get his joint down to the fire in time enough. My fitness lay in my capacity for quick roasting. It may be interesting to give a list of the contributors to the first number. My novel called _Framley Parsonage_ came first. At this banquet the saddle of mutton was served before the delicacies. Then there was a paper by Sir John Bowring on _The Chinese and Outer Barbarians_. The commencing number of _Lovel the Widower_ followed. George Lewes came next with his first chapters of _Studies in Animal Life_. Then there was Father Prout's _Inauguration Ode_, dedicated to the author of _Vanity Fair_,--which should have led the way. I need hardly say that Father Prout was the Rev. F. Mahony. Then followed _Our Volunteers_, by Sir John Burgoyne; _A Man of Letters of the Last Generation_, by Thornton Hunt; _The Search for Sir John Franklin_, from a private journal of an officer of the Fox, now Sir Allen Young; and _The First Morning of 1860_, by Mrs. Archer Clive. The number was concluded by the first of those _Roundabout Papers_ by Thackeray himself, which became so delightful a portion of the literature of _The Cornhill Magazine_. It would be out of my power, and hardly interesting, to give an entire list of those who wrote for _The Cornhill_ under Thackeray's editorial direction. But I may name a few, to show how strong was the support which he received. Those who contributed to the first number I have named. Among those who followed were Alfred Tennyson, Jacob Omnium, Lord Houghton, William Russell, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Robert Bell, George Augustus Sala, Mrs. Gaskell, James Hinton, Mary Howitt, John Kaye, Charles Lever, Frederick Locker, Laurence Oliphant, John Ruskin, Fitzjames Stephen, T. A. Trollope, Henry Thompson, Herman Merivale, Adelaide Proctor, Matthew Arnold, the present Lord Lytton, and Miss Thackeray, now Mrs. Ritchie. Thackeray continued the editorship for two years and four months, namely, up to April, 1862; but, as all readers will remember, he continued to write for it till he died, the day before Christmas Day, in 1863. His last contribution was, I think, a paper written for and published in the November number, called, "_Strange to say on Club Paper_," in which he vindicated Lord Clyde from the accusation of having taken the club stationery home with him. It was not a great subject, for no one could or did believe that the Field-Marshal had been guilty of any meanness; but the handling of it has made it interesting, and his indignation has made it beautiful. The magazine was a great success, but justice compels me to say that Thackeray was not a good editor. As he would have been an indifferent civil servant, an indifferent member of Parliament, so was he perfunctory as an editor. It has sometimes been thought well to select a popular literary man as an editor; first, because his name will attract, and then with an idea that he who can write well himself will be a competent judge of the writings of others. The first may sell a magazine, but will hardly make it good; and the second will not avail much, unless the editor so situated be patient enough to read what is sent to him. Of a magazine editor it is required that he should be patient, scrupulous, judicious, but above all things hard-hearted. I think it may be doubted whether Thackeray did bring himself to read the basketfuls of manuscripts with which he was deluged, but he probably did, sooner or later, read the touching little private notes by which they were accompanied,--the heartrending appeals, in which he was told that if this or the other little article could be accepted and paid for, a starving family might be saved from starvation for a month. He tells us how he felt on receiving such letters in one of his _Roundabout Papers_, which he calls "_Thorns in the cushion_." "How am I to know," he says--"though to be sure I begin to know now,--as I take the letters off the tray, which of those envelopes contains a real _bona fide_ letter, and which a thorn? One of the best invitations this year I mistook for a thorn letter, and kept it without opening." Then he gives the sample of a thorn letter. It is from a governess with a poem, and with a prayer for insertion and payment. "We have known better days, sir. I have a sick and widowed mother to maintain, and little brothers and sisters who look to me." He could not stand this, and the money would be sent, out of his own pocket, though the poem might be--postponed, till happily it should be lost. From such material a good editor could not be made. Nor, in truth, do I think that he did much of the editorial work. I had once made an arrangement, not with Thackeray, but with the proprietors, as to some little story. The story was sent back to me by Thackeray--rejected. _Virginibus puerisque!_ That was the gist of his objection. There was a project in a gentleman's mind,--as told in my story,--to run away with a married woman! Thackeray's letter was very kind, very regretful,--full of apology for such treatment to such a contributor. But--_Virginibus puerisque!_ I was quite sure that Thackeray had not taken the trouble to read the story himself. Some moral deputy had read it, and disapproving, no doubt properly, of the little project to which I have alluded, had incited the editor to use his authority. That Thackeray had suffered when he wrote it was easy to see, fearing that he was giving pain to one he would fain have pleased. I wrote him a long letter in return, as full of drollery as I knew how to make it. In four or five days there came a reply in the same spirit,--boiling over with fun. He had kept my letter by him, not daring to open it,--as he says that he did with that eligible invitation. At last he had given it to one of his girls to examine,--to see whether the thorn would be too sharp, whether I had turned upon him with reproaches. A man so susceptible, so prone to work by fits and starts, so unmethodical, could not have been a good editor. In 1862 he went into the new house which he had built for himself at Palace Green. I remember well, while this was still being built, how his friends used to discuss his imprudence in building it. Though he had done well with himself, and had made and was making a large income, was he entitled to live in a house the rent of which could not be counted at less than from five hundred to six hundred pounds a year? Before he had been there two years, he solved the question by dying,--when the house was sold for two thousand pounds more than it had cost. He himself, in speaking of his project, was wont to declare that he was laying out his money in the best way he could for the interest of his children;--and it turned out that he was right. In 1863 he died in the house which he had built, and at the period of his death was writing a new novel in numbers, called _Denis Duval_. In _The Cornhill_, _The Adventures of Philip_ had appeared. This new enterprise was destined for commencement on 1st January, 1864, and, though the writer was gone, it kept its promise, as far as it went. Three numbers, and what might probably have been intended for half of a fourth, appeared. It may be seen, therefore, that he by no means held to my theory, that the author should see the end of his work before the public sees the commencement. But neither did Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell, both of whom died with stories not completed, which, when they died, were in the course of publication. All the evidence goes against the necessity of such precaution. Nevertheless, were I giving advice to a tiro in novel writing, I should recommend it. With the last chapter of _Denis Duval_ was published in the magazine a set of notes on the book, taken for the most part from Thackeray's own papers, and showing how much collateral work he had given to the fabrication of his novel. No doubt in preparing other tales, especially _Esmond_, a very large amount of such collateral labour was found necessary. He was a man who did very much of such work, delighting to deal in little historical incidents. They will be found in almost everything that he did, and I do not know that he was ever accused of gross mistakes. But I doubt whether on that account he should be called a laborious man. He could go down to Winchelsea, when writing about the little town, to see in which way the streets lay, and to provide himself with what we call local colouring. He could jot down the suggestions, as they came to his mind, of his future story. There was an irregularity in such work which was to his taste. His very notes would be delightful to read, partaking of the nature of pearls when prepared only for his own use. But he could not bring himself to sit at his desk and do an allotted task day after day. He accomplished what must be considered as quite a sufficient life's work. He had about twenty-five years for the purpose, and that which he has left is an ample produce for the time. Nevertheless he was a man of fits and starts, who, not having been in his early years drilled to method, never achieved it in his career. He died on the day before Christmas Day, as has been said above, very suddenly, in his bed, early in the morning, in the fifty-third year of his life. To those who saw him about in the world there seemed to be no reason why he should not continue his career for the next twenty years. But those who knew him were so well aware of his constant sufferings, that, though they expected no sudden catastrophe, they were hardly surprised when it came. His death was probably caused by those spasms of which he had complained ten years before, in his letter to Mr. Reed. On the last day but one of the year, a crowd of sorrowing friends stood over his grave as he was laid to rest in Kensal Green; and, as quickly afterwards as it could be executed, a bust to his memory was put up in Westminster Abbey. It is a fine work of art, by Marochetti; but, as a likeness, is, I think, less effective than that which was modelled, and then given to the Garrick Club, by Durham, and has lately been put into marble, and now stands in the upper vestibule of the club. Neither of them, in my opinion, give so accurate an idea of the man as a statuette in bronze, by Boehm, of which two or three copies were made. One of them is in my possession. It has been alleged, in reference to this, that there is something of a caricature in the lengthiness of the figure, in the two hands thrust into the trousers pockets, and in the protrusion of the chin. But this feeling has originated in the general idea that any face, or any figure, not made by the artist more beautiful or more graceful than the original is an injustice. The face must be smoother, the pose of the body must be more dignified, the proportions more perfect, than in the person represented, or satisfaction is not felt. Mr. Boehm has certainly not flattered, but, as far as my eye can judge, he has given the figure of the man exactly as he used to stand before us. I have a portrait of him in crayon, by Samuel Lawrence, as like, but hardly as natural. A little before his death Thackeray told me that he had then succeeded in replacing the fortune which he had lost as a young man. Ho had, in fact, done better, for he left an income of seven hundred and fifty pounds behind him. It has been said of Thackeray that he was a cynic. This has been said so generally, that the charge against him has become proverbial. This, stated barely, leaves one of two impressions on the mind, or perhaps the two together,--that this cynicism was natural to his character and came out in his life, or that it is the characteristic of his writings. Of the nature of his writings generally, I will speak in the last chapter of this little book. As to his personal character as a cynic, I must find room to quote the following first stanzas of the little poem which appeared to his memory in _Punch_, from the pen of Shirley Brooks; He was a cynic! By his life all wrought Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways; His heart wide open to all kindly thought, His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise! He was a cynic! You might read it writ In that broad brow, crowned with its silver hair; In those blue eyes, with childlike candour lit, In that sweet smile his lips were wont to wear! He was a cynic! By the love that clung About him from his children, friends, and kin; By the sharp pain light pen and gossip tongue Wrought in him, chafing the soft heart within! The spirit and nature of the man have been caught here with absolute truth. A public man should of course be judged from his public work. If he wrote as a cynic,--a point which I will not discuss here,--it may be fair that he who is to be known as a writer should be so called. But, as a man, I protest that it would be hard to find an individual farther removed from the character. Over and outside his fancy, which was the gift which made him so remarkable,--a certain feminine softness was the most remarkable trait about him. To give some immediate pleasure was the great delight of his life,--a sovereign to a schoolboy, gloves to a girl, a dinner to a man, a compliment to a woman. His charity was overflowing. His generosity excessive. I heard once a story of woe from a man who was the dear friend of both of us. The gentleman wanted a large sum of money instantly,--something under two thousand pounds,--had no natural friends who could provide it, but must go utterly to the wall without it. Pondering over this sad condition of things just revealed to me, I met Thackeray between the two mounted heroes at the Horse Guards, and told him the story. "Do you mean to say that I am to find two thousand pounds?" he said, angrily, with some expletives. I explained that I had not even suggested the doing of anything,--only that we might discuss the matter. Then there came over his face a peculiar smile, and a wink in his eye, and he whispered his suggestion, as though half ashamed of his meanness. "I'll go half," he said, "if anybody will do the rest." And he did go half, at a day or two's notice, though the gentleman was no more than simply a friend. I am glad to be able to add that the money was quickly repaid. I could tell various stories of the same kind, only that I lack space, and that they, if simply added one to the other, would lack interest. He was no cynic, but he was a satirist, and could now and then be a satirist in conversation, hitting very hard when he did hit. When he was in America he met at dinner a literary gentleman of high character, middle-aged, and most dignified deportment. The gentleman was one whose character and acquirements stood very high,--deservedly so,--but who, in society, had that air of wrapping his toga around him, which adds, or is supposed to add, many cubits to a man's height. But he had a broken nose. At dinner he talked much of the tender passion, and did so in a manner which stirred up Thackeray's feeling of the ridiculous. "What has the world come to," said Thackeray out loud to the table, "when two broken-nosed old fogies like you and me sit talking about love to each other!" The gentleman was astounded, and could only sit wrapping his toga in silent dismay for the rest of the evening. Thackeray then, as at other similar times, had no idea of giving pain, but when he saw a foible he put his foot upon it, and tried to stamp it out. Such is my idea of the man whom many call a cynic, but whom I regard as one of the most soft-hearted of human beings, sweet as Charity itself, who went about the world dropping pearls, doing good, and never wilfully inflicting a wound. FOOTNOTES: [1] The report that he had lost all his money and was going to live by painting in Paris, was still prevalent in London in 1836. Macready, on the 27th April of that year, says in his _Diary_; "At Garrick Club, where I dined and saw the papers. Met Thackeray, who has spent all his fortune, and is now about to settle in Paris, I believe as an artist." But at this time he was, in truth, turning to literature as a profession. [2] The article was written by Abraham Hayward, who is still with us, and was no doubt instigated by a desire to assist Thackeray in his struggle upwards, in which it succeeded. [3] For a week there existed at the _Punch_ office a grudge against Thackeray in reference to this awkward question: "What would you give for your _Punch_ without John Leech?" Then he asked the confraternity to dinner,--_more Thackerayano_,--and the confraternity came. Who can doubt but they were very jolly over the little blunder? For years afterwards Thackeray was a guest at the well-known _Punch_ dinner, though he was no longer one of the contributors. [4] I had begun an Irish story and half finished it, which would reach just the required length. Would that do, I asked. I was civilly told that my Irish story would no doubt be charming, but was not quite the thing that was wanted. Could I not begin a new one,--English,--and if possible about clergymen? The details were so interesting that had a couple of archbishops been demanded, I should have produced them. CHAPTER II. FRASER'S MAGAZINE AND PUNCH. How Thackeray commenced his connection with _Fraser's Magazine_ I am unable to say. We know how he had come to London with a view to a literary career, and that he had at one time made an attempt to earn his bread as a correspondent to a newspaper from Paris. It is probable that he became acquainted with the redoubtable Oliver Yorke, otherwise Dr. Maginn, or some of his staff, through the connection which he had thus opened with the press. He was not known, or at any rate he was unrecognised, by _Fraser_ in January, 1835, in which month an amusing catalogue was given of the writers then employed, with portraits of them, all seated at a symposium. I can trace no article to his pen before November, 1837, when the _Yellowplush Correspondence_ was commenced, though it is hardly probable that he should have commenced with a work of so much pretension. There had been published a volume called _My Book, or the Anatomy of Conduct_, by John Skelton, and a very absurd book no doubt it was. We may presume that it contained maxims on etiquette, and that it was intended to convey in print those invaluable lessons on deportment which, as Dickens has told us, were subsequently given by Mr. Turveydrop, in the academy kept by him for that purpose. Thackeray took this as his foundation for the _Fashionable Fax and Polite Annygoats_, by Jeames Yellowplush, with which he commenced those repeated attacks against snobbism which he delighted to make through a considerable portion of his literary life. Oliver Yorke has himself added four or five pages of his own to Thackeray's lucubrations; and with the second, and some future numbers, there appeared illustrations by Thackeray himself, illustrations at this time not having been common with the magazine. From all this I gather that the author was already held in estimation by _Fraser's_ confraternity. I remember well my own delight with _Yellowplush_ at the time, and how I inquired who was the author. It was then that I first heard Thackeray's name. The _Yellowplush Papers_ were continued through nine numbers. No further reference was made to Mr. Skelton and his book beyond that given at the beginning of the first number, and the satire is only shown by the attempt made by Yellowplush, the footman, to give his ideas generally on the manners of noble life. The idea seems to be that a gentleman may, in heart and in action, be as vulgar as a footman. No doubt he may, but the chances are very much that he won't. But the virtue of the memoir does not consist in the lessons, but in the general drollery of the letters. The "orthogwaphy is inaccuwate," as a certain person says in the memoirs,--"so inaccuwate" as to take a positive study to "compwehend" it; but the joke, though old, is so handled as to be very amusing. Thackeray soon rushes away from his criticisms on snobbism to other matters. There are the details of a card-sharping enterprise, in which we cannot but feel that we recognise something of the author's own experiences in the misfortunes of Mr. Dawkins; there is the Earl of Crab's, and then the first of those attacks which he was tempted to make on the absurdities of his brethren of letters, and the only one which now has the appearance of having been ill-natured. His first victims were Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton, as he was then. We can surrender the doctor to the whip of the satirist; and for "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig," as the novelist is made to call himself, we can well believe that he must himself have enjoyed the _Yellowplush Memoirs_ if he ever re-read them in after life. The speech in which he is made to dissuade the footman from joining the world of letters is so good that I will venture to insert it: "Bullwig was violently affected; a tear stood in his glistening i. 'Yellowplush,' says he, seizing my hand, 'you _are_ right. Quit not your present occupation; black boots, clean knives, wear plush all your life, but don't turn literary man. Look at me. I am the first novelist in Europe. I have ranged with eagle wings over the wide regions of literature, and perched on every eminence in its turn. I have gazed with eagle eyes on the sun of philosophy, and fathomed the mysterious depths of the human mind. All languages are familiar to me, all thoughts are known to me, all men understood by me. I have gathered wisdom from the honeyed lips of Plato, as we wandered in the gardens of the Academies; wisdom, too, from the mouth of Job Johnson, as we smoked our backy in Seven Dials. Such must be the studies, and such is the mission, in this world of the Poet-Philosopher. But the knowledge is only emptiness; the initiation is but misery; the initiated a man shunned and banned by his fellows. Oh!' said Bullwig, clasping his hands, and throwing his fine i's up to the chandelier, 'the curse of Pwomethus descends upon his wace. Wath and punishment pursue them from genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer! Wo and thrice-bitter desolation! Earth is the wock on which Zeus, wemorseless, stwetches his withing wictim;--men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him. Ai, ai! it is agony eternal,--gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush, would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace, beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's sake!'--Here he looked round with agony;--'give me a glass of bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire on his contemporaries of which it may be said that the older he grew the more amusing it was, and at the same time less likely to hurt the feelings of the author satirised. The next tale of any length from Thackeray's pen, in the magazine, was that called _Catherine_, which is the story taken from the life of a wretched woman called Catherine Hayes. It is certainly not pleasant reading, and was not written with a pleasant purpose. It assumes to have come from the pen of Ikey Solomon, of Horsemonger Lane, and its object is to show how disgusting would be the records of thieves, cheats, and murderers if their doings and language were described according to their nature instead of being handled in such a way as to create sympathy, and therefore imitation. Bulwer's _Eugene Aram_, Harrison Ainsworth's _Jack Sheppard_, and Dickens' Nancy were in his mind, and it was thus that he preached his sermon against the selection of such heroes and heroines by the novelists of the day. "Be it granted," he says, in his epilogue, "Solomon is dull; but don't attack his morality. He humbly submits that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall allow a single sentiment of pity or admiration to enter his bosom for any character in the poem, it being from beginning to end a scene of unmixed rascality, performed by persons who never deviate into good feeling." The intention is intelligible enough, but such a story neither could have been written nor read,--certainly not written by Thackeray, nor read by the ordinary reader of a first-class magazine,--had he not been enabled to adorn it by infinite wit. Captain Brock, though a brave man, is certainly not described as an interesting or gallant soldier; but he is possessed of great resources. Captain Macshane, too, is a thorough blackguard; but he is one with a dash of loyalty about him, so that the reader can almost sympathise with him, and is tempted to say that Ikey Solomon has not quite kept his promise. _Catherine_ appeared in 1839 and 1840. In the latter of those years _The Shabby Genteel_ story also came out. Then in 1841 there followed _The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond_, illustrated by Samuel's cousin, Michael Angelo. But though so announced in _Fraser_, there were no illustrations, and those attached to the story in later editions are not taken from sketches by Thackeray. This, as far as I know, was the first use of the name Titmarsh, and seems to indicate some intention on the part of the author of creating a hoax as to two personages,--one the writer and the other the illustrator. If it were so he must soon have dropped the idea. In the last paragraph he has shaken off his cousin Michael. The main object of the story is to expose the villany of bubble companies, and the danger they run who venture to have dealings with city matters which they do not understand. I cannot but think that he altered his mind and changed his purpose while he was writing it, actuated probably by that editorial monition as to its length. In 1842 were commenced _The Confessions of George Fitz-Boodle_, which were continued into 1843. I do not think that they attracted much attention, or that they have become peculiarly popular since. They are supposed to contain the reminiscences of a younger son, who moans over his poverty, complains of womankind generally, laughs at the world all round, and intersperses his pages with one or two excellent ballads. I quote one, written for the sake of affording a parody, with the parody along with it, because the two together give so strong an example of the condition of Thackeray's mind in regard to literary products. The "humbug" of everything, the pretence, the falseness of affected sentiment, the remoteness of poetical pathos from the true condition of the average minds of men and women, struck him so strongly, that he sometimes allowed himself almost to feel,--or at any rate, to say,--that poetical expression, as being above nature, must be unnatural. He had declared to himself that all humbug was odious, and should be by him laughed down to the extent of his capacity. His Yellowplush, his Catherine Hayes, his Fitz-Boodle, his Barry Lyndon, and Becky Sharp, with many others of this kind, were all invented and treated for this purpose and after this fashion. I shall have to say more on the same subject when I come to _The Snob Papers_. In this instance he wrote a very pretty ballad, _The Willow Tree_,--so good that if left by itself it would create no idea of absurdity or extravagant pathos in the mind of the ordinary reader,--simply that he might render his own work absurd by his own parody. THE WILLOW-TREE. No. I. THE WILLOW-TREE. No. II. Know ye the willow-tree, Whose gray leaves quiver, Whispering gloomily To yon pale river? Lady, at eventide Wander not near it! They say its branches hide A sad lost spirit! Long by the willow-tree Vainly they sought her, Wild rang the mother's screams O'er the gray water. "Where is my lovely one? Where is my daughter? Rouse thee, sir constable-- Rouse thee and look. Fisherman, bring your net, Boatman, your hook. Beat in the lily-beds, Dive in the brook." Once to the willow-tree A maid came fearful, Pale seemed her cheek to be, Her blue eye tearful. Soon as she saw the tree, Her steps moved fleeter. No one was there--ah me!-- No one to meet her! Vainly the constable Shouted and called her. Vainly the fisherman Beat the green alder. Vainly he threw the net. Never it hauled her! Quick beat her heart to hear The far bells' chime Toll from the chapel-tower The trysting-time. But the red sun went down In golden flame, And though she looked around, Yet no one came! Mother beside the fire Sat, her night-cap in; Father in easychair, Gloomily napping; When at the window-sill Came a light tapping. Presently came the night, Sadly to greet her,-- Moon in her silver light, Stars in their glitter. Then sank the moon away Under the billow. Still wept the maid alone-- There by the willow! And a pale countenance Looked through the casement. Loud beat the mother's heart, Sick with amazement, And at the vision which Came to surprise her! Shrieking in an agony-- "Lor'! it's Elizar!" Through the long darkness, By the stream rolling, Hour after hour went on Tolling and tolling. Long was the darkness, Lonely and stilly. Shrill came the night wind, Piercing and chilly. Yes, 'twas Elizabeth;-- Yes, 'twas their girl; Pale was her cheek, and her Hair out of curl. "Mother!" the loved one, Blushing, exclaimed, "Let not your innocent Lizzy be blamed. Yesterday, going to Aunt Jones's to tea, Mother, dear mother, I Forgot the door-key! And as the night was cold, And the way steep, Mrs. Jones kept me to Breakfast and sleep." Shrill blew the morning breeze, Biting and cold. Bleak peers the gray dawn Over the wold! Bleak over moor and stream Looks the gray dawn, Gray with dishevelled hair. Still stands the willow there-- The maid is gone! Whether her pa and ma Fully believed her, That we shall never know. Stern they received her; And for the work of that Cruel, though short, night,-- Sent her to bed without Tea for a fortnight. Domine, Domine! Sing we a litany-- Sing for poor maiden-hearts broken and weary; Sing we a litany, Wail we and weep we a wild miserere! MORAL. Hey diddle diddlety, Cat and the fiddlety, Maidens of England take caution by she! Let love and suicide Never tempt you aside, And always remember to take the door-key! Mr. George Fitz-Boodle gave his name to other narratives beyond his own _Confessions_. A series of stories was carried on by him in _Fraser_, called _Men's Wives_, containing three; _Ravenwing_, _Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry_, and _Dennis Hoggarty's Wife_. The first chapter in _Mr. and Mrs. Frank Berry_ describes "The Fight at Slaughter House." Slaughter House, as Mr. Venables reminded us in the last chapter, was near Smithfield in London,--the school which afterwards became Grey Friars; and the fight between Biggs and Berry is the record of one which took place in the flesh when Thackeray was at the Charter House. But Mr. Fitz-Boodle's name was afterwards attached to a greater work than these, to a work so great that subsequent editors have thought him to be unworthy of the honour. In the January number, 1844, of _Fraser's Magazine_, are commenced the _Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_, and the authorship is attributed to Mr. Fitz-Boodle. The title given in the magazine was _The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the last Century_. By Fitz-Boodle. In the collected edition of Thackeray's works the _Memoirs_ are given as "Written by himself," and were, I presume, so brought out by Thackeray, after they had appeared in _Fraser_. Why Mr. George Fitz-Boodle should have been robbed of so great an honour I do not know. In imagination, language, construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did anything more remarkable than _Barry Lyndon_. I have quoted the words which he put into the mouth of Ikey Solomon, declaring that in the story which he has there told he has created nothing but disgust for the wicked characters he has produced, and that he has "used his humble endeavours to cause the public also to hate them." Here, in _Barry Lyndon_, he has, probably unconsciously, acted in direct opposition to his own principles: Barry Lyndon is as great a scoundrel as the mind of man ever conceived. He is one who might have taken as his motto Satan's words; "Evil, be thou my good." And yet his story is so written that it is almost impossible not to entertain something of a friendly feeling for him. He tells his own adventures as a card-sharper, bully, and liar; as a heartless wretch, who had neither love nor gratitude in his composition; who had no sense even of loyalty; who regarded gambling as the highest occupation to which a man could devote himself, and fraud as always justified by success; a man possessed by all meannesses except cowardice. And the reader is so carried away by his frankness and energy as almost to rejoice when he succeeds, and to grieve with him when he is brought to the ground. The man is perfectly satisfied as to the reasonableness,--I might almost say, as to the rectitude,--of his own conduct throughout. He is one of a decayed Irish family, that could boast of good blood. His father had obtained possession of the remnants of the property by turning Protestant, thus ousting the elder brother, who later on becomes his nephew's confederate in gambling. The elder brother is true to the old religion, and as the law stood in the last century, the younger brother, by changing his religion, was able to turn him out. Barry, when a boy, learns the slang and the gait of the debauched gentlemen of the day. He is specially proud of being a gentleman by birth and manners. He had been kidnapped, and made to serve as a common soldier, but boasts that he was at once fit for the occasion when enabled to show as a court gentleman. "I came to it at once," he says, "and as if I had never done anything else all my life. I had a gentleman to wait upon me, a French _friseur_ to dress my hair of a morning. I knew the taste of chocolate as by intuition almost, and could distinguish between the right Spanish and the French before I had been a week in my new position. I had rings on all my fingers and watches in both my fobs, canes, trinkets, and snuffboxes of all sorts. I had the finest natural taste for lace and china of any man I ever knew." To dress well, to wear a sword with a grace, to carry away his plunder with affected indifference, and to appear to be equally easy when he loses his last ducat, to be agreeable to women, and to look like a gentleman,--these are his accomplishments. In one place he rises to the height of a grand professor in the art of gambling, and gives his lessons with almost a noble air. "Play grandly, honourably. Be not of course cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as mean souls are." And he boasts of his accomplishments with so much eloquence as to make the reader sure that he believes in them. He is quite pathetic over himself, and can describe with heartrending words the evils that befall him when others use against him successfully any of the arts which he practises himself. The marvel of the book is not so much that the hero should evidently think well of himself, as that the author should so tell his story as to appear to be altogether on the hero's side. In _Catherine_, the horrors described are most truly disgusting,--so much that the story, though very clever, is not pleasant reading. _The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon_ are very pleasant to read. There is nothing to shock or disgust. The style of narrative is exactly that which might be used as to the exploits of a man whom the author intended to represent as deserving of sympathy and praise,--so that the reader is almost brought to sympathise. But I should be doing an injustice to Thackeray if I were to leave an impression that he had taught lessons tending to evil practice, such as he supposed to have been left by _Jack Sheppard_ or _Eugene Aram_. No one will be tempted to undertake the life of a _chevalier d'industrie_ by reading the book, or be made to think that cheating at cards is either an agreeable or a profitable profession. The following is excellent as a tirade in favour of gambling, coming from Redmond de Balibari, as he came to be called during his adventures abroad, but it will hardly persuade anyone to be a gambler; "We always played on parole with anybody,--any person, that is, of honour and noble lineage. We never pressed for our winnings, or declined to receive promissory notes in lieu of gold. But woe to the man who did not pay when the note became due! Redmond de Balibari was sure to wait upon him with his bill, and I promise you there were very few bad debts. On the contrary, gentlemen were grateful to us for our forbearance, and our character for honour stood unimpeached. In latter times, a vulgar national prejudice has chosen to cast a slur upon the character of men of honour engaged in the profession of play; but I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of the French aristocracy (in the shameful revolution, which served them right) brought discredit upon our order. They cry fie now upon men engaged in play; but I should like to know how much more honourable _their_ modes of livelihood are than ours. The broker of the Exchange, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and dabbles with lying loans, and trades upon state-secrets,--what is he but a gamester? The merchant who deals in teas and tallow, is he any better? His bales of dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year instead of every ten minutes, and the sea is his green-table. You call the profession of the law an honourable one, where a man will lie for any bidder;--lie down poverty for the sake of a fee from wealth; lie down right because wrong is in his brief. You call a doctor an honourable man,--a swindling quack who does not believe in the nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering in your ear that it is a fine morning. And yet, forsooth, a gallant man, who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral world! It is a conspiracy of the middle-class against gentlemen. It is only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of chivalry. It has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed no courage? How have we had the best blood and the brightest eyes too, of Europe throbbing round the table, as I and my uncle have held the cards and the bank against some terrible player, who was matching some thousands out of his millions against our all, which was there on the baize! When we engaged that daring Alexis Kossloffsky, and won seven thousand louis on a single coup, had we lost we should have been beggars the next day; when _he_ lost, he was only a village and a few hundred serfs in pawn the worse. When at Toeplitz the Duke of Courland brought fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and challenged our bank to play against the sealed bags, what did we ask? 'Sir,' said we, 'we have but eighty thousand florins in bank, or two hundred thousand at three months. If your highness's bags do not contain more than eighty thousand we will meet you.' And we did; and after eleven hours' play, in which our bank was at one time reduced to two hundred and three ducats, we won seventeen thousand florins of him. Is _this_ not something like boldness? Does this profession not require skill, and perseverance, and bravery? Four crowned heads looked on at the game, and an imperial princess, when I turned up the ace of hearts and made Paroli, burst into tears. No man on the European Continent held a higher position than Redmond Barry then; and when the Duke of Courland lost he was pleased to say that we had won nobly. And so we had, and spent nobly what we won." This is very grand, and is put as an eloquent man would put it who really wished to defend gambling. The rascal, of course, comes to a miserable end, but the tone of the narrative is continued throughout. He is brought to live at last with his old mother in the Fleet prison, on a wretched annuity of fifty pounds per annum, which she has saved out of the general wreck, and there he dies of delirium tremens. For an assumed tone of continued irony, maintained through the long memoir of a life, never becoming tedious, never unnatural, astounding us rather by its naturalness, I know nothing equal to _Barry Lyndon_. As one reads, one sometimes is struck by a conviction that this or the other writer has thoroughly liked the work on which he is engaged. There is a gusto about his passages, a liveliness in the language, a spring in the motion of the words, an eagerness of description, a lilt, if I may so call it, in the progress of the narrative, which makes the reader feel that the author has himself greatly enjoyed what he has written. He has evidently gone on with his work without any sense of weariness, or doubt; and the words have come readily to him. So it has been with _Barry Lyndon_. "My mind was filled full with those blackguards," Thackeray once said to a friend. It is easy enough to see that it was so. In the passage which I have above quoted, his mind was running over with the idea that a rascal might be so far gone in rascality as to be in love with his own trade. This was the last of Thackeray's long stories in _Fraser_. I have given by no means a complete catalogue of his contributions to the magazine, but I have perhaps mentioned those which are best known. There were many short pieces which have now been collected in his works, such as _Little Travels and Roadside Sketches_, and the _Carmen Lilliense_, in which the poet is supposed to be detained at Lille by want of money. There are others which I think are not to be found in the collected works, such as a _Box of Novels by Titmarsh_, and _Titmarsh in the Picture Galleries_. After the name of Titmarsh had been once assumed it was generally used in the papers which he sent to _Fraser_. Thackeray's connection with _Punch_ began in 1843, and, as far as I can learn, _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History_ was his first contribution. They, however, have not been found worthy of a place in the collected edition. His short pieces during a long period of his life were so numerous that to have brought them all together would have weighted his more important works with too great an amount of extraneous matter. The same lady, Miss Tickletoby, gave a series of lectures. There was _The History of the next French Revolution_, and _The Wanderings of our Fat Contributor_,--the first of which is, and the latter is not, perpetuated in his works. Our old friend Jeames Yellowplush, or De la Pluche,--for we cannot for a moment doubt that he is the same Jeames,--is very prolific, and as excellent in his orthography, his sense, and satire, as ever. These papers began with _The Lucky Speculator_. He lives in The Albany; he hires a brougham; and is devoted to Miss Emily Flimsey, the daughter of Sir George, who had been his master,--to the great injury of poor Maryanne, the fellow-servant who had loved him in his kitchen days. Then there follows that wonderful ballad, _Jeames of Backley Square_. Upon this he writes an angry letter to _Punch_, dated from his chambers in The Albany; "Has a reglar suscriber to your amusing paper, I beg leaf to state that I should never have done so had I supposed that it was your 'abbit to igspose the mistaries of privit life, and to hinger the delligit feelings of umble individyouls like myself." He writes in his own defence, both as to Maryanne and to the share-dealing by which he had made his fortune; and he ends with declaring his right to the position which he holds. "You are corrict in stating that I am of hancient Normin fam'ly. This is more than Peal can say, to whomb I applied for a barnetcy; but the primmier being of low igstraction, natrally stikles for his horder." And the letter is signed "Fitzjames De la Pluche." Then follows his diary, beginning with a description of the way in which he rushed into _Punch's_ office, declaring his misfortunes, when losses had come upon him. "I wish to be paid for my contribewtions to your paper. Suckmstances is altered with me." Whereupon he gets a cheque upon Messrs. Pump and Aldgate, and has himself carried away to new speculations. He leaves his diary behind him, and _Punch_ surreptitiously publishes it. There is much in the diary which comes from Thackeray's very heart. Who does not remember his indignation against Lord Bareacres? "I gave the old humbug a few shares out of my own pocket. 'There, old Pride,' says I, 'I like to see you down on your knees to a footman. There, old Pomposity! Take fifty pounds. I like to see you come cringing and begging for it!' Whenever I see him in a very public place, I take my change for my money. I digg him in the ribbs, or clap his padded old shoulders. I call him 'Bareacres, my old brick,' and I see him wince. It does my 'art good." It does Thackeray's heart good to pour himself out in indignation against some imaginary Bareacres. He blows off his steam with such an eagerness that he forgets for a time, or nearly forgets, his cacography. Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge Question," "Mr. Jeames again." Of all our author's heroes Jeames is perhaps the most amusing. There is not much in that joke of bad spelling, and we should have been inclined to say beforehand, that Mrs. Malaprop had done it so well and so sufficiently, that no repetition of it would be received with great favour. Like other dishes, it depends upon the cooking. Jeames, with his "suckmstances," high or low, will be immortal. There were _The Travels in London_, a long series of them; and then _Punch's Prize Novelists_, in which Thackeray imitates the language and plots of Bulwer, Disraeli, Charles Lever, G. P. R. James, Mrs. Gore, and Cooper, the American. They are all excellent; perhaps Codlingsby is the best. Mendoza, when he is fighting with the bargeman, or drinking with Codlingsby, or receiving Louis Philippe in his rooms, seems to have come direct from the pen of our Premier. Phil Fogerty's jump, and the younger and the elder horsemen, as they come riding into the story, one in his armour and the other with his feathers, have the very savour and tone of Lever and James; but then the savour and the tone are not so piquant. I know nothing in the way of imitation to equal Codlingsby, if it be not The Tale of Drury Lane, by W. S. in the _Rejected Addresses_, of which it is said that Walter Scott declared that he must have written it himself. The scene between Dr. Franklin, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Tatua, the chief of the Nose-rings, as told in _The Stars and Stripes_, is perfect in its way, but it fails as being a caricature of Cooper. The caricaturist has been carried away beyond and above his model, by his own sense of fun. Of the ballads which appeared in _Punch_ I will speak elsewhere, as I must give a separate short chapter to our author's power of versification; but I must say a word of _The Snob Papers_, which were at the time the most popular and the best known of all Thackeray's contributions to _Punch_. I think that perhaps they were more charming, more piquant, more apparently true, when they came out one after another in the periodical, than they are now as collected together. I think that one at a time would be better than many. And I think that the first half in the long list of snobs would have been more manifestly snobs to us than they are now with the second half of the list appended. In fact, there are too many of them, till the reader is driven to tell himself that the meaning of it all is that Adam's family is from first to last a family of snobs. "First," says Thackeray, in preface, "the world was made; then, as a matter of course, snobs; they existed for years and years, and were no more known than America. But presently,--ingens patebat tellus,--the people became darkly aware that there was such a race. Not above five-and-twenty years since, a name, an expressive monosyllable, arose to designate that case. That name has spread over England like railroads subsequently; snobs are known and recognised throughout an empire on which I am given to understand the sun never sets. _Punch_ appears at the right season to chronicle their history; and the individual comes forth to write that history in _Punch_. "I have,--and for this gift I congratulate myself with a deep and abiding thankfulness,--an eye for a snob. If the truthful is the beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;--to track snobs through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles; to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of snob-ore. Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life. You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of snobs; to do so shows that you are yourself a snob. I myself have been taken for one." The state of Thackeray's mind when he commenced his delineations of snobbery is here accurately depicted. Written, as these papers were, for _Punch_, and written, as they were, by Thackeray, it was a necessity that every idea put forth should be given as a joke, and that the satire on society in general should be wrapped up in burlesque absurdity. But not the less eager and serious was his intention. When he tells us, at the end of the first chapter, of a certain Colonel Snobley, whom he met at "Bagnigge Wells," as he says, and with whom he was so disgusted that he determined to drive the man out of the house, we are well aware that he had met an offensive military gentleman,--probably at Tunbridge. Gentlemen thus offensive, even though tamely offensive, were peculiarly offensive to him. We presume, by what follows, that this gentleman, ignorantly,--for himself most unfortunately,--spoke of Public[=o]la. Thackeray was disgusted,--disgusted that such a name should be lugged into ordinary conversation at all, and then that a man should talk about a name with which he was so little acquainted as not to know how to pronounce it. The man was therefore a snob, and ought to be put down; in all which I think that Thackeray was unnecessarily hard on the man, and gave him too much importance. So it was with him in his whole intercourse with snobs,--as he calls them. He saw something that was distasteful, and a man instantly became a snob in his estimation. "But you _can_ draw," a man once said to him, there having been some discussion on the subject of Thackeray's art powers. The man meant no doubt to be civil, but meant also to imply that for the purpose needed the drawing was good enough, a matter on which he was competent to form an opinion. Thackeray instantly put the man down as a snob for flattering him. The little courtesies of the world and the little discourtesies became snobbish to him. A man could not wear his hat, or carry his umbrella, or mount his horse, without falling into some error of snobbism before his hypercritical eyes. St. Michael would have carried his armour amiss, and St. Cecilia have been snobbish as she twanged her harp. I fancy that a policeman considers that every man in the street would be properly "run in," if only all the truth about the man had been known. The tinker thinks that every pot is unsound. The cobbler doubts the stability of every shoe. So at last it grew to be the case with Thackeray. There was more hope that the city should be saved because of its ten just men, than for society, if society were to depend on ten who were not snobs. All this arose from the keenness of his vision into that which was really mean. But that keenness became so aggravated by the intenseness of his search that the slightest speck of dust became to his eyes as a foul stain. Public[=o]la, as we saw, damned one poor man to a wretched immortality, and another was called pitilessly over the coals, because he had mixed a grain of flattery with a bushel of truth. Thackeray tells us that he was born to hunt out snobs, as certain dogs are trained to find truffles. But we can imagine that a dog, very energetic at producing truffles, and not finding them as plentiful as his heart desired, might occasionally produce roots which were not genuine,--might be carried on in his energies till to his senses every fungus-root became a truffle. I think that there has been something of this with our author's snob-hunting, and that his zeal was at last greater than his discrimination. The nature of the task which came upon him made this fault almost unavoidable. When a hit is made, say with a piece at a theatre, or with a set of illustrations, or with a series of papers on this or the other subject,--when something of this kind has suited the taste of the moment, and gratified the public, there is a natural inclination on the part of those who are interested to continue that which has been found to be good. It pays and it pleases, and it seems to suit everybody. Then it is continued usque ad nauseam. We see it in everything. When the king said he liked partridges, partridges were served to him every day. The world was pleased with certain ridiculous portraits of its big men. The big men were soon used up, and the little men had to be added. We can imagine that even _Punch_ may occasionally be at a loss for subjects wherewith to delight its readers. In fact, _The Snob Papers_ were too good to be brought to an end, and therefore there were forty-five of them. A dozen would have been better. As he himself says in his last paper, "for a mortal year we have been together flattering and abusing the human race." It was exactly that. Of course we know,--everybody always knows,--that a bad specimen of his order may be found in every division of society. There may be a snob king, a snob parson, a snob member of parliament, a snob grocer, tailor, goldsmith, and the like. But that is not what has been meant. We did not want a special satirist to tell us what we all knew before. Had snobbishness been divided for us into its various attributes and characteristics, rather than attributed to various classes, the end sought,--the exposure, namely, of the evil,--would have been better attained. The snobbishness of flattery, of falsehood, of cowardice, lying, time-serving, money-worship, would have been perhaps attacked to a better purpose than that of kings, priests, soldiers, merchants, or men of letters. The assault as made by Thackeray seems to have been made on the profession generally. The paper on clerical snobs is intended to be essentially generous, and is ended by an allusion to certain old clerical friends which has a sweet tone of tenderness in it. "How should he who knows you, not respect you or your calling? May this pen never write a pennyworth again if it ever casts ridicule upon either." But in the meantime he has thrown his stone at the covetousness of bishops, because of certain Irish prelates who died rich many years before he wrote. The insinuation is that bishops generally take more of the loaves and fishes than they ought, whereas the fact is that bishops' incomes are generally so insufficient for the requirements demanded of them, that a feeling prevails that a clergyman to be fit for a bishopric should have a private income. He attacks the snobbishness of the universities, showing us how one class of young men consists of fellow-commoners, who wear lace and drink wine with their meals, and another class consists of sizars, or servitors, who wear badges, as being poor, and are never allowed to take their food with their fellow-students. That arrangements fit for past times are not fit for these is true enough. Consequently they should gradually be changed; and from day to day are changed. But there is no snobbishness in this. Was the fellow-commoner a snob when he acted in accordance with the custom of his rank and standing? or the sizar who accepted aid in achieving that education which he could not have got without it? or the tutor of the college, who carried out the rules entrusted to him? There are two military snobs, Rag and Famish. One is a swindler and the other a debauched young idiot. No doubt they are both snobs, and one has been, while the other is, an officer. But there is,--I think, not an unfairness so much as an absence of intuition,--in attaching to soldiers especially two vices to which all classes are open. Rag was a gambling snob, and Famish a drunken snob,--but they were not specially military snobs. There is a chapter devoted to dinner-giving snobs, in which I think the doctrine laid down will not hold water, and therefore that the snobbism imputed is not proved. "Your usual style of meal," says the satirist--"that is plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection,--should be that to which you welcome your friends." Then there is something said about the "Brummagem plate pomp," and we are told that it is right that dukes should give grand dinners, but that we,--of the middle class,--should entertain our friends with the simplicity which is customary with us. In all this there is, I think, a mistake. The duke gives a grand dinner because he thinks his friends will like it, sitting down when alone with the duchess, we may suppose, with a retinue and grandeur less than that which is arrayed for gala occasions. So is it with Mr. Jones, who is no snob because he provides a costly dinner,--if he can afford it. He does it because he thinks his friends will like it. It may be that the grand dinner is a bore,--and that the leg of mutton with plenty of gravy and potatoes all hot, would be nicer. I generally prefer the leg of mutton myself. But I do not think that snobbery is involved in the other. A man, no doubt, may be a snob in giving a dinner. I am not a snob because for the occasion I eke out my own dozen silver forks with plated ware; but if I make believe that my plated ware is true silver, then I am a snob. In that matter of association with our betters,--we will for the moment presume that gentlemen and ladies with titles or great wealth are our betters,--great and delicate questions arise as to what is snobbery, and what is not, in speaking of which Thackeray becomes very indignant, and explains the intensity of his feelings as thoroughly by a charming little picture as by his words. It is a picture of Queen Elizabeth as she is about to trample with disdain on the coat which that snob Raleigh is throwing for her use on the mud before her. This is intended to typify the low parasite nature of the Englishman which has been described in the previous page or two. "And of these calm moralists,"--it matters not for our present purpose who were the moralists in question,--"is there one I wonder whose heart would not throb with pleasure if he could be seen walking arm-in-arm with a couple of dukes down Pall Mall? No; it is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a snob." And again: "How should it be otherwise in a country where lordolatry is part of our creed, and where our children are brought up to respect the 'Peerage' as the Englishman's second Bible." Then follows the wonderfully graphic picture of Queen Elizabeth and Raleigh. In all this Thackeray has been carried away from the truth by his hatred for a certain meanness of which there are no doubt examples enough. As for Raleigh, I think we have always sympathised with the young man, instead of despising him, because he felt on the impulse of the moment that nothing was too good for the woman and the queen combined. The idea of getting something in return for his coat could hardly have come so quick to him as that impulse in favour of royalty and womanhood. If one of us to-day should see the queen passing, would he not raise his hat, and assume, unconsciously, something of an altered demeanour because of his reverence for majesty? In doing so he would have no mean desire of getting anything. The throne and its occupant are to him honourable, and he honours them. There is surely no greater mistake than to suppose that reverence is snobbishness. I meet a great man in the street, and some chance having brought me to his knowledge, he stops and says a word to me. Am I a snob because I feel myself to be graced by his notice? Surely not. And if his acquaintance goes further and he asks me to dinner, am I not entitled so far to think well of myself because I have been found worthy of his society? They who have raised themselves in the world, and they, too, whose position has enabled them to receive all that estimation can give, all that society can furnish, all that intercourse with the great can give, are more likely to be pleasant companions than they who have been less fortunate. That picture of two companion dukes in Pall Mall is too gorgeous for human eye to endure. A man would be scorched to cinders by so much light, as he would be crushed by a sack of sovereigns even though he might be allowed to have them if he could carry them away. But there can be no doubt that a peer taken at random as a companion would be preferable to a clerk from a counting-house,--taken at random. The clerk might turn out a scholar on your hands, and the peer no better than a poor spendthrift;--but the chances are the other way. A tufthunter is a snob, a parasite is a snob, the man who allows the manhood within him to be awed by a coronet is a snob. The man who worships mere wealth is a snob. But so also is he who, in fear lest he should be called a snob, is afraid to seek the acquaintance,--or if it come to speak of the acquaintance,--of those whose acquaintance is manifestly desirable. In all this I feel that Thackeray was carried beyond the truth by his intense desire to put down what is mean. It is in truth well for us all to know what constitutes snobbism, and I think that Thackeray, had he not been driven to dilution and dilatation, could have told us. If you will keep your hands from picking and stealing, and your tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering, you will not be a snob. The lesson seems to be simple, and perhaps a little trite, but if you look into it, it will be found to contain nearly all that is necessary. But the excellence of each individual picture as it is drawn is not the less striking because there may be found some fault with the series as a whole. What can excel the telling of the story of Captain Shindy at his club,--which is, I must own, as true as it is graphic. Captain Shindy is a real snob. "'Look at it, sir; is it cooked? Smell it, sir. Is it meat fit for a gentleman?' he roars out to the steward, who stands trembling before him, and who in vain tells him that the Bishop of Bullocksmithy has just had three from the same loin." The telling as regards Captain Shindy is excellent, but the sidelong attack upon the episcopate is cruel. "All the waiters in the club are huddled round the captain's mutton-chop. He roars out the most horrible curses at John for not bringing the pickles. He utters the most dreadful oaths because Thomas has not arrived with the Harvey sauce. Peter comes tumbling with the water-jug over Jeames, who is bringing the 'glittering canisters with bread.' * * * * * "Poor Mrs. Shindy and the children are, meanwhile, in dingy lodgings somewhere, waited upon by a charity girl in pattens." The visit to Castle Carabas, and the housekeeper's description of the wonders of the family mansion, is as good. "'The Side Entrance and 'All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator hover the mantelpiece was brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when a capting with Lord Hanson. The harms on the cheers is the harms of the Carabas family. The great 'all is seventy feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and thirty-eight feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the buth of Venus and 'Ercules and 'Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most famous sculpture of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco, represents Painting, Harchitecture, and Music,--the naked female figure with the barrel-organ,--introducing George, first Lord Carabas, to the Temple of the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor is Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to Lionel, second marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff in the French Revolution. We now henter the South Gallery," etc. etc. All of which is very good fun, with a dash of truth in it also as to the snobbery;--only in this it will be necessary to be quite sure where the snobbery lies. If my Lord Carabas has a "buth of Venus," beautiful for all eyes to see, there is no snobbery, only good-nature, in the showing it; nor is there snobbery in going to see it, if a beautiful "buth of Venus" has charms for you. If you merely want to see the inside of a lord's house, and the lord is puffed up with the pride of showing his, then there will be two snobs. Of all those papers it may be said that each has that quality of a pearl about it which in the previous chapter I endeavoured to explain. In each some little point is made in excellent language, so as to charm by its neatness, incision, and drollery. But _The Snob Papers_ had better be read separately, and not taken in the lump. Thackeray ceased to write for _Punch_ in 1852, either entirely or almost so. CHAPTER III. VANITY FAIR. Something has been said, in the biographical chapter, of the way in which _Vanity Fair_ was produced, and of the period in the author's life in which it was written. He had become famous,--to a limited extent,--by the exquisite nature of his contributions to periodicals; but he desired to do something larger, something greater, something, perhaps, less ephemeral. For though _Barry Lyndon_ and others have not proved to be ephemeral, it was thus that he regarded them. In this spirit he went to work and wrote _Vanity Fair_. It may be as well to speak first of the faults which were attributed to it. It was said that the good people were all fools, and that the clever people were all knaves. When the critics,--the talking critics as well as the writing critics,--began to discuss _Vanity Fair_, there had already grown up a feeling as to Thackeray as an author--that he was one who had taken up the business of castigating the vices of the world. Scott had dealt with the heroics, whether displayed in his Flora MacIvors or Meg Merrilieses, in his Ivanhoes or Ochiltrees. Miss Edgeworth had been moral; Miss Austen conventional; Bulwer had been poetical and sentimental; Marryat and Lever had been funny and pugnacious, always with a dash of gallantry, displaying funny naval and funny military life; and Dickens had already become great in painting the virtues of the lower orders. But by all these some kind of virtue had been sung, though it might be only the virtue of riding a horse or fighting a duel. Even Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard, with whom Thackeray found so much fault, were intended to be fine fellows, though they broke into houses and committed murders. The primary object of all those writers was to create an interest by exciting sympathy. To enhance our sympathy personages were introduced who were very vile indeed,--as Bucklaw, in the guise of a lover, to heighten our feelings for Ravenswood and Lucy; as Wild, as a thief-taker, to make us more anxious for the saving of Jack; as Ralph Nickleby, to pile up the pity for his niece Kate. But each of these novelists might have appropriately begun with an _Arma virumque cano_. The song was to be of something godlike,--even with a Peter Simple. With Thackeray it had been altogether different. Alas, alas! the meanness of human wishes; the poorness of human results! That had been his tone. There can be no doubt that the heroic had appeared contemptible to him, as being untrue. The girl who had deceived her papa and mamma seemed more probable to him than she who perished under the willow-tree from sheer love,--as given in the last chapter. Why sing songs that are false? Why tell of Lucy Ashtons and Kate Nicklebys, when pretty girls, let them be ever so beautiful, can be silly and sly? Why pour philosophy out of the mouth of a fashionable young gentleman like Pelham, seeing that young gentlemen of that sort rarely, or we may say never, talk after that fashion? Why make a housebreaker a gallant charming young fellow, the truth being that housebreakers as a rule are as objectionable in their manners as they are in their morals? Thackeray's mind had in truth worked in this way, and he had become a satirist. That had been all very well for _Fraser_ and _Punch_; but when his satire was continued through a long novel, in twenty-four parts, readers,--who do in truth like the heroic better than the wicked,--began to declare that this writer was no novelist, but only a cynic. Thence the question arises what a novel should be,--which I will endeavour to discuss very shortly in a later chapter. But this special fault was certainly found with _Vanity Fair_ at the time. Heroines should not only be beautiful, but should be endowed also with a quasi celestial grace,--grace of dignity, propriety, and reticence. A heroine should hardly want to be married, the arrangement being almost too mundane,--and, should she be brought to consent to undergo such bond, because of its acknowledged utility, it should be at some period so distant as hardly to present itself to the mind as a reality. Eating and drinking should be altogether indifferent to her, and her clothes should be picturesque rather than smart, and that from accident rather than design. Thackeray's Amelia does not at all come up to the description here given. She is proud of having a lover, constantly declaring to herself and to others that he is "the greatest and the best of men,"--whereas the young gentleman is, in truth, a very little man. She is not at all indifferent as to her finery, nor, as we see incidentally, to enjoying her suppers at Vauxhall. She is anxious to be married,--and as soon as possible. A hero too should be dignified and of a noble presence; a man who, though he may be as poor as Nicholas Nickleby, should nevertheless be beautiful on all occasions, and never deficient in readiness, address, or self-assertion. _Vanity Fair_ is specially declared by the author to be "a novel without a hero," and therefore we have hardly a right to complain of deficiency of heroic conduct in any of the male characters. But Captain Dobbin does become the hero, and is deficient. Why was he called Dobbin, except to make him ridiculous? Why is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward? Why was he the son of a grocer? Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to the recognised taste of novel readers. And then again there was the feeling of another great fault. Let there be the virtuous in a novel and let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime and the ridiculous,--only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the sublime be in the ascendant. Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause, and Cuddie, and Poundtext. But here, in this novel, the vicious and the absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the noble. Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley are the real heroine and hero of the story. It is with them that the reader is called upon to interest himself. It is of them that he will think when he is reading the book. It is by them that he will judge the book when he has read it. There was no doubt a feeling with the public that though satire may be very well in its place, it should not be made the backbone of a work so long and so important as this. A short story such as _Catherine_ or _Barry Lyndon_ might be pronounced to have been called for by the iniquities of an outside world; but this seemed to the readers to have been addressed almost to themselves. Now men and women like to be painted as Titian would paint them, or Raffaelle,--not as Rembrandt, or even Rubens. Whether the ideal or the real is the best form of a novel may be questioned, but there can be no doubt that as there are novelists who cannot descend from the bright heaven of the imagination to walk with their feet upon the earth, so there are others to whom it is not given to soar among clouds. The reader must please himself, and make his selection if he cannot enjoy both. There are many who are carried into a heaven of pathos by the woes of a Master of Ravenswood, who fail altogether to be touched by the enduring constancy of a Dobbin. There are others,--and I will not say but they may enjoy the keenest delight which literature can give,--who cannot employ their minds on fiction unless it be conveyed in poetry. With Thackeray it was essential that the representations made by him should be, to his own thinking, lifelike. A Dobbin seemed to him to be such a one as might probably be met with in the world, whereas to his thinking a Ravenswood was simply a creature of the imagination. He would have said of such, as we would say of female faces by Raffaelle, that women would like to be like them, but are not like them. Men might like to be like Ravenswood, and women may dream of men so formed and constituted, but such men do not exist. Dobbins do, and therefore Thackeray chose to write of a Dobbin. So also of the preference given to Becky Sharp and to Rawdon Crawley. Thackeray thought that more can be done by exposing the vices than extolling the virtues of mankind. No doubt he had a more thorough belief in the one than in the other. The Dobbins he did encounter--seldom; the Rawdon Crawleys very often. He saw around him so much that was mean! He was hurt so often by the little vanities of people! It was thus that he was driven to that overthoughtfulness about snobs of which I have spoken in the last chapter. It thus became natural to him to insist on the thing which he hated with unceasing assiduity, and only to break out now and again into a rapture of love for the true nobility which was dear to him,--as he did with the character of Captain Dobbin. It must be added to all this that, before he has done with his snob or his knave, he will generally weave in some little trait of humanity by which the sinner shall be relieved from the absolute darkness of utter iniquity. He deals with no Varneys or Deputy-Shepherds, all villany and all lies, because the snobs and knaves he had seen had never been all snob or all knave. Even Shindy probably had some feeling for the poor woman he left at home. Rawdon Crawley loved his wicked wife dearly, and there were moments even with her in which some redeeming trait half reconciles her to the reader. Such were the faults which were found in _Vanity Fair_; but though the faults were found freely, the book was read by all. Those who are old enough can well remember the effect which it had, and the welcome which was given to the different numbers as they appeared. Though the story is vague and wandering, clearly commenced without any idea of an ending, yet there is something in the telling which makes every portion of it perfect in itself. There are absurdities in it which would not be admitted to anyone who had not a peculiar gift of making even his absurdities delightful. No schoolgirl who ever lived would have thrown back her gift-book, as Rebecca did the "dixonary," out of the carriage window as she was taken away from school. But who does not love that scene with which the novel commences? How could such a girl as Amelia Osborne have got herself into such society as that in which we see her at Vauxhall? But we forgive it all because of the telling. And then there is that crowning absurdity of Sir Pitt Crawley and his establishment. I never could understand how Thackeray in his first serious attempt could have dared to subject himself and Sir Pitt Crawley to the critics of the time. Sir Pitt is a baronet, a man of large property, and in Parliament, to whom Becky Sharp goes as a governess at the end of a delightful visit with her friend Amelia Sedley, on leaving Miss Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door. "When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of twinkling gray eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the grin. "'This Sir Pitt Crawley's?' says John from the box. "'E'es,' says the man at the door with a nod. "'Hand down these 'ere trunks there,' said John. "'Hand 'em down yourself,' said the porter." But John on the box declines to do this, as he cannot leave his horses. "The bald-headed man, taking his hands out of his breeches' pockets, advanced on this summons, and throwing Miss Sharp's trunk over his shoulder, carried it into the house." Then Becky is shown into the house, and a dismantled dining-room is described, into which she is led by the dirty man with the trunk. Two kitchen chairs, and a round table, and an attenuated old poker and tongs, were, however, gathered round the fireplace, as was a saucepan over a feeble, sputtering fire. There was a bit of cheese and bread and a tin candlestick on the table, and a little black porter in a pint pot. "Had your dinner, I suppose?" This was said by him of the bald head. "It is not too warm for you? Like a drop of beer?" "Where is Sir Pitt Crawley?" said Miss Sharp majestically. "He, he! _I_'m Sir Pitt Crawley. Rek'lect you owe me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he! ask Tinker if I ain't." The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her appearance, with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she had been despatched a minute before Miss Sharp's arrival; and she handed the articles over to Sir Pitt, who had taken his seat by the fire. "Where's the farden?" said he. "I gave you three-halfpence; where's the change, old Tinker?" "There," replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin. "It's only baronets as cares about farthings." Sir Pitt Crawley has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted; and from this commencement of Sir Pitt Crawley have grown the wonderful characters of the Crawley family,--old Miss Crawley, the worldly, wicked, pleasure-loving aunt, the Rev. Bute Crawley and his wife, who are quite as worldly, the sanctimonious elder son, who in truth is not less so, and Rawdon, who ultimately becomes Becky's husband,--who is the bad hero of the book, as Dobbin is the good hero. They are admirable; but it is quite clear that Thackeray had known nothing of what was coming about them when he caused Sir Pitt to eat his tripe with Mrs. Tinker in the London dining-room. There is a double story running through the book, the parts of which are but lightly woven together, of which the former tells us the life and adventures of that singular young woman Becky Sharp, and the other the troubles and ultimate success of our noble hero Captain Dobbin. Though it be true that readers prefer, or pretend to prefer, the romantic to the common in their novels, and complain of pages which are defiled with that which is low, yet I find that the absurd, the ludicrous, and even the evil, leave more impression behind them than the grand, the beautiful, or even the good. Dominie Sampson, Dugald Dalgetty, and Bothwell are, I think, more remembered than Fergus MacIvor, than Ivanhoe himself, or Mr. Butler the minister. It certainly came to pass that, in spite of the critics, Becky Sharp became the first attraction in _Vanity Fair_. When we speak now of _Vanity Fair_, it is always to Becky that our thoughts recur. She has made a position for herself in the world of fiction, and is one of our established personages. I have already said how she left school, throwing the "dixonary" out of the window, like dust from her feet, and was taken to spend a few halcyon weeks with her friend Amelia Sedley, at the Sedley mansion in Russell Square. There she meets a brother Sedley home from India,--the immortal Jos,--at whom she began to set her hitherto untried cap. Here we become acquainted both with the Sedley and with the Osborne families, with all their domestic affections and domestic snobbery, and have to confess that the snobbery is stronger than the affection. As we desire to love Amelia Sedley, we wish that the people around her were less vulgar or less selfish,--especially we wish it in regard to that handsome young fellow, George Osborne, whom she loves with her whole heart. But with Jos Sedley we are inclined to be content, though he be fat, purse-proud, awkward, a drunkard, and a coward, because we do not want anything better for Becky. Becky does not want anything better for herself, because the man has money. She has been born a pauper. She knows herself to be but ill qualified to set up as a beauty,--though by dint of cleverness she does succeed in that afterwards. She has no advantages in regard to friends or family as she enters life. She must earn her bread for herself. Young as she is, she loves money, and has a great idea of the power of money. Therefore, though Jos is distasteful at all points, she instantly makes her attack. She fails, however, at any rate for the present. She never becomes his wife, but at last she succeeds in getting some of his money. But before that time comes she has many a suffering to endure, and many a triumph to enjoy. She goes to Sir Pitt Crawley as governess for his second family, and is taken down to Queen's Crawley in the country. There her cleverness prevails, even with the baronet, of whom I have just given Thackeray's portrait. She keeps his accounts, and writes his letters, and helps him to save money; she reads with the elder sister books they ought not to have read; she flatters the sanctimonious son. In point of fact, she becomes all in all at Queen's Crawley, so that Sir Pitt himself falls in love with her,--for there is reason to think that Sir Pitt may soon become again a widower. But there also came down to the baronet's house, on an occasion of general entertaining, Captain Rawdon Crawley. Of course Becky sets her cap at him, and of course succeeds. She always succeeds. Though she is only the governess, he insists upon dancing with her, to the neglect of all the young ladies of the neighbourhood. They continue to walk together by moonlight,--or starlight,--the great, heavy, stupid, half-tipsy dragoon, and the intriguing, covetous, altogether unprincipled young woman. And the two young people absolutely come to love one another in their way,--the heavy, stupid, fuddled dragoon, and the false, covetous, altogether unprincipled young woman. The fat aunt Crawley is a maiden lady, very rich, and Becky quite succeeds in gaining the rich aunt by her wiles. The aunt becomes so fond of Becky down in the country, that when she has to return to her own house in town, sick from over-eating, she cannot be happy without taking Becky with her. So Becky is installed in the house in London, having been taken away abruptly from her pupils, to the great dismay of the old lady's long-established resident companion. They all fall in love with her; she makes herself so charming, she is so clever; she can even, by help of a little care in dressing, become so picturesque! As all this goes on, the reader feels what a great personage is Miss Rebecca Sharp. Lady Crawley dies down in the country, while Becky is still staying with his sister, who will not part with her. Sir Pitt at once rushes up to town, before the funeral, looking for consolation where only he can find it. Becky brings him down word from his sister's room that the old lady is too ill to see him. "So much the better," Sir Pitt answered; "I want to see you, Miss Sharp. I want you back at Queen's Crawley, miss," the baronet said. His eyes had such a strange look, and were fixed upon her so stedfastly that Rebecca Sharp began almost to tremble. Then she half promises, talks about the dear children, and angles with the old man. "I tell you I want you," he says; "I'm going back to the vuneral, will you come back?--yes or no?" "I daren't. I don't think--it wouldn't be right--to be alone--with you, sir," Becky said, seemingly in great agitation. "I say again, I want you. I can't get on without you. I didn't see what it was till you went away. The house all goes wrong. It's not the same place. All my accounts has got muddled again. You must come back. Do come back. Dear Becky, do come." "Come,--as what, sir?" Rebecca gasped out. "Come as Lady Crawley, if you like. There, will that zatisfy you? Come back and be my wife. You're vit for it. Birth be hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see. You've got more brains in your little vinger than any baronet's wife in the country. Will you come? Yes or no?" Rebecca is startled, but the old man goes on. "I'll make you happy; zee if I don't. You shall do what you like, spend what you like, and have it all your own way. I'll make you a settlement. I'll do everything regular. Look here," and the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr. But Rebecca, though she had been angling, angling for favour and love and power, had not expected this. For once in her life she loses her presence of mind, and exclaims: "Oh Sir Pitt; oh sir; I--I'm married already!" She has married Rawdon Crawley, Sir Pitt's younger son, Miss Crawley's favourite among those of her family who are looking for her money. But she keeps her secret for the present, and writes a charming letter to the Captain; "Dearest,--Something tells me that we shall conquer. You shall leave that odious regiment. Quit gaming, racing, and be a good boy, and we shall all live in Park Lane, and _ma tante_ shall leave us all her money." _Ma tante's_ money has been in her mind all through, but yet she loves him. "Suppose the old lady doesn't come to," Rawdon said to his little wife as they sat together in the snug little Brompton lodgings. She had been trying the new piano all the morning. The new gloves fitted her to a nicety. The new shawl became her wonderfully. The new rings glittered on her little hands, and the new watch ticked at her waist. "_I'll_ make your fortune," she said; and Delilah patted Samson's cheek. "You can do anything," he said, kissing the little hand. "By Jove you can! and we'll drive down to the Star and Garter and dine, by Jove!" They were neither of them quite heartless at that moment, nor did Rawdon ever become quite bad. Then follow the adventures of Becky as a married woman, through all of which there is a glimmer of love for her stupid husband, while it is the real purpose of her heart to get money how she may,--by her charms, by her wit, by her lies, by her readiness. She makes love to everyone,--even to her sanctimonious brother-in-law, who becomes Sir Pitt in his time,--and always succeeds. But in her love-making there is nothing of love. She gets hold of that well-remembered old reprobate, the Marquis of Steyne, who possesses the two valuable gifts of being very dissolute and very rich, and from him she obtains money and jewels to her heart's desire. The abominations of Lord Steyne are depicted in the strongest language of which _Vanity Fair_ admits. The reader's hair stands almost on end in horror at the wickedness of the two wretches,--at her desire for money, sheer money; and his for wickedness, sheer wickedness. Then her husband finds her out,--poor Rawdon! who with all his faults and thickheaded stupidity, has become absolutely entranced by the wiles of his little wife. He is carried off to a sponging-house, in order that he may be out of the way, and, on escaping unexpectedly from thraldom, finds the lord in his wife's drawing-room. Whereupon he thrashes the old lord, nearly killing him; takes away the plunder which he finds on his wife's person, and hurries away to seek assistance as to further revenge;--for he is determined to shoot the marquis, or to be shot. He goes to one Captain Macmurdo, who is to act as his second, and there he pours out his heart. "You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said, half-inarticulately. "Damme, I followed her like a footman! I gave up everything I had to her. I'm a beggar because I would marry her. By Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch to get her anything she fancied. And she,--she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me a hundred pounds to get me out of quod!" His friend alleges that the wife may be innocent after all. "It may be so," Rawdon exclaimed sadly; "but this don't look very innocent!" And he showed the captain the thousand-pound note which he had found in Becky's pocketbook. But the marquis can do better than fight; and Rawdon, in spite of his true love, can do better than follow the quarrel up to his own undoing. The marquis, on the spur of the moment, gets the lady's husband appointed governor of Coventry Island, with a salary of three thousand pounds a year; and poor Rawdon at last condescends to accept the appointment. He will not see his wife again, but he makes her an allowance out of his income. In arranging all this, Thackeray is enabled to have a side blow at the British way of distributing patronage,--for the favour of which he was afterwards himself a candidate. He quotes as follows from _The Royalist_ newspaper: "We hear that the governorship"--of Coventry Island--"has been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B., a distinguished Waterloo officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at Coventry Island, is admirably calculated for the post." The reader, however, is aware that the officer in question cannot write a sentence or speak two words correctly. Our heroine's adventures are carried on much further, but they cannot be given here in detail. To the end she is the same,--utterly false, selfish, covetous, and successful. To have made such a woman really in love would have been a mistake. Her husband she likes best,--because he is, or was, her own. But there is no man so foul, so wicked, so unattractive, but that she can fawn over him for money and jewels. There are women to whom nothing is nasty, either in person, language, scenes, actions, or principle,--and Becky is one of them; and yet she is herself attractive. A most wonderful sketch, for the perpetration of which all Thackeray's power of combined indignation and humour was necessary! The story of Amelia and her two lovers, George Osborne and Captain, or as he came afterwards to be, Major, and Colonel Dobbin, is less interesting, simply because goodness and eulogy are less exciting than wickedness and censure. Amelia is a true, honest-hearted, thoroughly English young woman, who loves her love because he is grand,--to her eyes,--and loving him, loves him with all her heart. Readers have said that she is silly, only because she is not heroic. I do not know that she is more silly than many young ladies whom we who are old have loved in our youth, or than those whom our sons are loving at the present time. Readers complain of Amelia because she is absolutely true to nature. There are no Raffaellistic touches, no added graces, no divine romance. She is feminine all over, and British,--loving, true, thoroughly unselfish, yet with a taste for having things comfortable, forgiving, quite capable of jealousy, but prone to be appeased at once, at the first kiss; quite convinced that her lover, her husband, her children are the people in all the world to whom the greatest consideration is due. Such a one is sure to be the dupe of a Becky Sharp, should a Becky Sharp come in her way,--as is the case with so many sweet Amelias whom we have known. But in a matter of love she is sound enough and sensible enough,--and she is as true as steel. I know no trait in Amelia which a man would be ashamed to find in his own daughter. She marries her George Osborne, who, to tell the truth of him, is but a poor kind of fellow, though he is a brave soldier. He thinks much of his own person, and is selfish. Thackeray puts in a touch or two here and there by which he is made to be odious. He would rather give a present to himself than to the girl who loved him. Nevertheless, when her father is ruined he marries her, and he fights bravely at Waterloo, and is killed. "No more firing was heard at Brussels. The pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and the city,--and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart." Then follows the long courtship of Dobbin, the true hero,--he who has been the friend of George since their old school-days; who has lived with him and served him, and has also loved Amelia. But he has loved her,--as one man may love another,--solely with a view to the profit of his friend. He has known all along that George and Amelia have been engaged to each other as boy and girl. George would have neglected her, but Dobbin would not allow it. George would have jilted the girl who loved him, but Dobbin would not let him. He had nothing to get for himself, but loving her as he did, it was the work of his life to get for her all that she wanted. George is shot at Waterloo, and then come fifteen years of widowhood,--fifteen years during which Becky is carrying on her manoeuvres,--fifteen years during which Amelia cannot bring herself to accept the devotion of the old captain, who becomes at last a colonel. But at the end she is won. "The vessel is in port. He has got the prize he has been trying for all his life. The bird has come in at last. There it is, with its head on its shoulder, billing and cooing clean up to his heart, with soft outstretched fluttering wings. This is what he has asked for every day and hour for eighteen years. This is what he has pined after. Here it is,--the summit, the end, the last page of the third volume." The reader as he closes the book has on his mind a strong conviction, the strongest possible conviction, that among men George is as weak and Dobbin as noble as any that he has met in literature; and that among women Amelia is as true and Becky as vile as any he has encountered. Of so much he will be conscious. In addition to this he will unconsciously have found that every page he has read will have been of interest to him. There has been no padding, no longueurs; every bit will have had its weight with him. And he will find too at the end, if he will think of it--though readers, I fear, seldom think much of this in regard to books they have read--that the lesson taught in every page has been good. There may be details of evil painted so as to disgust,--painted almost too plainly,--but none painted so as to allure. CHAPTER IV. PENDENNIS AND THE NEWCOMES. The absence of the heroic was, in Thackeray, so palpable to Thackeray himself that in his original preface to _Pendennis_, when he began to be aware that his reputation was made, he tells his public what they may expect and what they may not, and makes his joking complaint of the readers of his time because they will not endure with patience the true picture of a natural man. "Even the gentlemen of our age," he says,--adding that the story of _Pendennis_ is an attempt to describe one of them, just as he is,--"even those we cannot show as they are with the notorious selfishness of their time and their education. Since the author of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must shape him, and give him a certain conventional temper." Then he rebukes his audience because they will not listen to the truth. "You will not hear what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms,--what is the life and talk of your sons." You want the Raffaellistic touch, or that of some painter of horrors equally removed from the truth. I tell you how a man really does act,--as did Fielding with Tom Jones,--but it does not satisfy you. You will not sympathise with this young man of mine, this Pendennis, because he is neither angel nor imp. If it be so, let it be so. I will not paint for you angels or imps, because I do not see them. The young man of the day, whom I do see, and of whom I know the inside and the out thoroughly, him I have painted for you; and here he is, whether you like the picture or not. This is what Thackeray meant, and, having this in his mind, he produced _Pendennis_. The object of a novel should be to instruct in morals while it amuses. I cannot think but that every novelist who has thought much of his art will have realised as much as that for himself. Whether this may best be done by the transcendental or by the commonplace is the question which it more behoves the reader than the author to answer, because the author may be fairly sure that he who can do the one will not, probably cannot, do the other. If a lad be only five feet high he does not try to enlist in the Guards. Thackeray complains that many ladies have "remonstrated and subscribers left him," because of his realistic tendency. Nevertheless he has gone on with his work, and, in _Pendennis_, has painted a young man as natural as Tom Jones. Had he expended himself in the attempt, he could not have drawn a Master of Ravenswood. It has to be admitted that Pendennis is not a fine fellow. He is not as weak, as selfish, as untrustworthy as that George Osborne whom Amelia married in _Vanity Fair_; but nevertheless, he is weak, and selfish, and untrustworthy. He is not such a one as a father would wish to see his son, or a mother to welcome as a lover for her daughter. But then, fathers are so often doomed to find their sons not all that they wish, and mothers to see their girls falling in love with young men who are not Paladins. In our individual lives we are contented to endure an admixture of evil, which we should resent if imputed to us in the general. We presume ourselves to be truth-speaking, noble in our sentiments, generous in our actions, modest and unselfish, chivalrous and devoted. But we forgive and pass over in silence a few delinquencies among ourselves. What boy at school ever is a coward,--in the general? What gentleman ever tells a lie? What young lady is greedy? We take it for granted, as though they were fixed rules in life, that our boys from our public schools look us in the face and are manly; that our gentlemen tell the truth as a matter of course; and that our young ladies are refined and unselfish. Thackeray is always protesting that it is not so, and that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. He knows that we have our little home experiences. Let us have the facts out, and mend what is bad if we can. This novel of _Pendennis_ is one of his loudest protests to this effect. I will not attempt to tell the story of Pendennis, how his mother loved him, how he first came to be brought up together with Laura Bell, how he thrashed the other boys when he was a boy, and how he fell in love with Miss Fotheringay, née Costigan, and was determined to marry her while he was still a hobbledehoy, how he went up to Boniface, that well-known college at Oxford, and there did no good, spending money which he had not got, and learning to gamble. The English gentleman, as we know, never lies; but Pendennis is not quite truthful; when the college tutor, thinking that he hears the rattling of dice, makes his way into Pen's room, Pen and his two companions are found with three _Homers_ before them, and Pen asks the tutor with great gravity; "What was the present condition of the river Scamander, and whether it was navigable or no?" He tells his mother that, during a certain vacation he must stay up and read, instead of coming home,--but, nevertheless, he goes up to London to amuse himself. The reader is soon made to understand that, though Pen may be a fine gentleman, he is not trustworthy. But he repents and comes home, and kisses his mother; only, alas! he will always be kissing somebody else also. The story of the Amorys and the Claverings, and that wonderful French cook M. Alcide Mirobolant, forms one of those delightful digressions which Thackeray scatters through his novels rather than weaves into them. They generally have but little to do with the story itself, and are brought in only as giving scope for some incident to the real hero or heroine. But in this digression Pen is very much concerned indeed, for he is brought to the very verge of matrimony with that peculiarly disagreeable lady Miss Amory. He does escape at last, but only within a few pages of the end, when we are made unhappy by the lady's victory over that poor young sinner Foker, with whom we have all come to sympathise, in spite of his vulgarity and fast propensities. She would to the last fain have married Pen, in whom she believes, thinking that he would make a name for her. "Il me faut des émotions," says Blanche. Whereupon the author, as he leaves her, explains the nature of this Miss Amory's feelings. "For this young lady was not able to carry out any emotion to the full, but had a sham enthusiasm, a sham hatred, a sham love, a sham taste, a sham grief; each of which flared and shone very vehemently for an instant, but subsided and gave place to the next sham emotion." Thackeray, when he drew this portrait, must certainly have had some special young lady in his view. But though we are made unhappy for Foker, Foker too escapes at last, and Blanche, with her emotions, marries that very doubtful nobleman Comte Montmorenci de Valentinois. But all this of Miss Amory is but an episode. The purport of the story is the way in which the hero is made to enter upon the world, subject as he has been to the sweet teaching of his mother, and subject as he is made to be to the worldly lessons of his old uncle the major. Then he is ill, and nearly dies, and his mother comes up to nurse him. And there is his friend Warrington, of whose family down in Suffolk we shall have heard something when we have read _The Virginians_,--one I think of the finest characters, as it is certainly one of the most touching, that Thackeray ever drew. Warrington, and Pen's mother, and Laura are our hero's better angels,--angels so good as to make us wonder that a creature so weak should have had such angels about him; though we are driven to confess that their affection and loyalty for him are natural. There is a melancholy beneath the roughness of Warrington, and a feminine softness combined with the reticent manliness of the man, which have endeared him to readers beyond perhaps any character in the book. Major Pendennis has become immortal. Selfish, worldly, false, padded, caring altogether for things mean and poor in themselves; still the reader likes him. It is not quite all for himself. To Pen he is good,--to Pen who is the head of his family, and to come after him as the Pendennis of the day. To Pen and to Pen's mother he is beneficent after his lights. In whatever he undertakes it is so contrived that the reader shall in some degree sympathise with him. And so it is with poor old Costigan, the drunken Irish captain, Miss Fotheringay's papa. He was not a pleasant person. "We have witnessed the déshabille of Major Pendennis," says our author; "will any one wish to be valet-de-chambre to our other hero, Costigan? It would seem that the captain, before issuing from his bedroom, scented himself with otto of whisky." Yet there is a kindliness about him which softens our hearts, though in truth he is very careful that the kindness shall always be shown to himself. Among these people Pen makes his way to the end of the novel, coming near to shipwreck on various occasions, and always deserving the shipwreck which he has almost encountered. Then there will arise the question whether it might not have been better that he should be altogether shipwrecked, rather than housed comfortably with such a wife as Laura, and left to that enjoyment of happiness forever after, which is the normal heaven prepared for heroes and heroines who have done their work well through three volumes. It is almost the only instance in all Thackeray's works in which this state of bliss is reached. George Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in _Vanity Fair_, is killed almost before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow, after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may so call him, of the novel which I shall mention just now, is carried so far beyond his matrimonial elysium that we are allowed to see too plainly how far from true may be those promises of hymeneal happiness forever after. The cares of married life have settled down heavily upon his young head before we leave him. He not only marries, but loses his wife, and is left a melancholy widower with his son. Esmond and Beatrix certainly reach no such elysium as that of which we are speaking. But Pen, who surely deserved a Nemesis, though perhaps not one so black as that demanded by George Osborne's delinquencies, is treated as though he had been passed through the fire, and had come out,--if not pure gold, still gold good enough for goldsmiths. "And what sort of a husband will this Pendennis be?" This is the question asked by the author himself at the end of the novel; feeling, no doubt, some hesitation as to the justice of what he had just done. "And what sort of a husband will this Pendennis be?" many a reader will ask, doubting the happiness of such a marriage and the future of Laura. The querists are referred to that lady herself, who, seeing his faults and wayward moods--seeing and owning that there are better men than he--loves him always with the most constant affection. The assertion could be made with perfect confidence, but is not to the purpose. That Laura's affection should be constant, no one would doubt; but more than that is wanted for happiness. How about Pendennis and his constancy? _The Newcomes_, which I bracket in this chapter with _Pendennis_, was not written till after _Esmond_, and appeared between that novel and _The Virginians_, which was a sequel to _Esmond_. It is supposed to be edited by Pen, whose own adventures we have just completed, and is commenced by that celebrated night passed by Colonel Newcome and his boy Clive at the Cave of Harmony, during which the colonel is at first so pleasantly received and so genially entertained, but from which he is at last banished, indignant at the iniquities of our drunken old friend Captain Costigan, with whom we had become intimate in Pen's own memoirs. The boy Clive is described as being probably about sixteen. At the end of the story he has run through the adventures of his early life, and is left a melancholy man, a widower, one who has suffered the extremity of misery from a stepmother, and who is wrapped up in the only son that is left to him,--as had been the case with his father at the beginning of the novel. _The Newcomes_, therefore, like Thackeray's other tales, is rather a slice from the biographical memoirs of a family, than a romance or novel in itself. It is full of satire from the first to the last page. Every word of it seems to have been written to show how vile and poor a place this world is; how prone men are to deceive, how prone to be deceived. There is a scene in which "his Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness Rummun Loll," is introduced to Colonel Newcome,--or rather presented,--for the two men had known each other before. All London was talking of Rummun Loll, taking him for an Indian prince, but the colonel, who had served in India, knew better. Rummun Loll was no more than a merchant, who had made a precarious fortune by doubtful means. All the girls, nevertheless, are running after his Excellency. "He's known to have two wives already in India," says Barnes Newcome; "but, by gad, for a settlement, I believe some of the girls here would marry him." We have a delightful illustration of the London girls, with their bare necks and shoulders, sitting round Rummun Loll and worshipping him as he reposes on his low settee. There are a dozen of them so enchanted that the men who wish to get a sight of the Rummun are quite kept at a distance. This is satire on the women. A few pages on we come upon a clergyman who is no more real than Rummun Loll. The clergyman, Charles Honeyman, had married the colonel's sister and had lost his wife, and now the brothers-in-law meet. "'Poor, poor Emma!' exclaimed the ecclesiastic, casting his eyes towards the chandelier and passing a white cambric pocket-handkerchief gracefully before them. No man in London understood the ring business or the pocket-handkerchief business better, or smothered his emotion more beautifully. 'In the gayest moments, in the giddiest throng of fashion, the thoughts of the past will rise; the departed will be among us still. But this is not the strain wherewith to greet the friend newly arrived on our shores. How it rejoices me to behold you in old England.'" And so the satirist goes on with Mr. Honeyman the clergyman. Mr. Honeyman the clergyman has been already mentioned, in that extract made in our first chapter from _Lovel the Widower_. It was he who assisted another friend, "with his wheedling tongue," in inducing Thackeray to purchase that "neat little literary paper,"--called then _The Museum_, but which was in truth _The National Standard_. In describing Barnes Newcome, the colonel's relative, Thackeray in the same scene attacks the sharpness of the young men of business of the present day. There were, or were to be, some transactions with Rummun Loll, and Barnes Newcome, being in doubt, asks the colonel a question or two as to the certainty of the Rummun's money, much to the colonel's disgust. "The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite unaffectedly, good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you talked to him for a week you would not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the colonel regarded him. Here was a young fellow as keen as the oldest curmudgeon,--a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, that would pursue his bond as rigidly as Shylock." "Barnes Newcome never missed a church," he goes on, "or dressing for dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting for his money. He seldom drank too much, and never was late for business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief his sleep or severe his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited as any sepulchre in the whole bills of mortality." Thackeray had lately seen some Barnes Newcome when he wrote that. It is all satire; but there is generally a touch of pathos even through the satire. It is satire when Miss Quigley, the governess in Park Street, falls in love with the old colonel after some dim fashion of her own. "When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, faint signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear colonel amidst a thousand horsemen." The colonel had drunk a glass of wine with her after his stately fashion, and the foolish old maid thinks too much of it. Then we are told how she knits purses for him, "as she sits alone in the schoolroom,--high up in that lone house, when the little ones are long since asleep,--before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little desk containing her mother's letters and her mementoes of home." Miss Quigley is an ass; but we are made to sympathise entirely with the ass, because of that morsel of pathos as to her mother's letters. Clive Newcome, our hero, who is a second Pen, but a better fellow, is himself a satire on young men,--on young men who are idle and ambitious at the same time. He is a painter; but, instead of being proud of his art, is half ashamed of it,--because not being industrious he has not, while yet young, learned to excel. He is "doing" a portrait of Mrs. Pendennis, Laura, and thus speaks of his business. "No. 666,"--he is supposed to be quoting from the catalogue of the Royal Academy for the year,--"No. 666. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, George Street. No. 979. Portrait of Mrs. Muggins on her gray pony, Newcome. No. 579. Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq.'s dog Toby, Newcome. This is what I am fit for. These are the victories I have set myself on achieving. Oh Mrs. Pendennis! isn't it humiliating? Why isn't there a war? Why haven't I a genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who begs me to come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too. He gets his canvases with a good light upon them; excludes the contemplation of other objects; stands beside his picture in an attitude himself; and thinks that he and they are masterpieces. Oh me, what drivelling wretches we are! Fame!--except that of just the one or two,--what's the use of it?" In all of which Thackeray is speaking his own feelings about himself as well as the world at large. What's the use of it all? Oh vanitas vanitatum! Oh vanity and vexation of spirit! "So Clive Newcome," he says afterwards, "lay on a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there. He went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and black care jumped up behind the moody horseman." As I write this I have before me a letter from Thackeray to a friend describing his own success when _Vanity Fair_ was coming out, full of the same feeling. He is making money, but he spends it so fast that he never has any; and as for the opinions expressed on his books, he cares little for what he hears. There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated behind the horseman,--and would have been equally so had there been no real care present to him. A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic most common to him,--which, however, was relieved by an always present capacity for instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most satirical. It was these that produced the Osbornes, the Dobbins, the Pens, the Clives, and the Newcomes, whom, when he loved them the most, he could not save himself from describing as mean and unworthy. A somewhat heroic hero of romance,--such a one, let us say, as Waverley, or Lovel in _The Antiquary_, or Morton in _Old Mortality_,--was revolting to him, as lacking those foibles which human nature seemed to him to demand. The story ends with two sad tragedies, neither of which would have been demanded by the story, had not such sadness been agreeable to the author's own idiosyncrasy. The one is the ruin of the old colonel's fortunes, he having allowed himself to be enticed into bubble speculations; and the other is the loss of all happiness, and even comfort, to Clive the hero, by the abominations of his mother-in-law. The woman is so iniquitous, and so tremendous in her iniquities, that she rises to tragedy. Who does not know Mrs. Mack the Campaigner? Why at the end of his long story should Thackeray have married his hero to so lackadaisical a heroine as poor little Rosey, or brought on the stage such a she-demon as Rosey's mother? But there is the Campaigner in all her vigour, a marvel of strength of composition,--one of the most vividly drawn characters in fiction;--but a woman so odious that one is induced to doubt whether she should have been depicted. The other tragedy is altogether of a different kind, and though unnecessary to the story, and contrary to that practice of story-telling which seems to demand that calamities to those personages with whom we are to sympathise should not be brought in at the close of a work of fiction, is so beautifully told that no lover of Thackeray's work would be willing to part with it. The old colonel, as we have said, is ruined by speculation, and in his ruin is brought to accept the alms of the brotherhood of the Grey Friars. Then we are introduced to the Charter House, at which, as most of us know, there still exists a brotherhood of the kind. He dons the gown,--this old colonel, who had always been comfortable in his means, and latterly apparently rich,--and occupies the single room, and eats the doled bread, and among his poor brothers sits in the chapel of his order. The description is perhaps as fine as anything that Thackeray ever did. The gentleman is still the gentleman, with all the pride of gentry;--but not the less is he the humble bedesman, aware that he is living upon charity, not made to grovel by any sense of shame, but knowing that, though his normal pride may be left to him, an outward demeanour of humility is befitting. And then he dies. "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time,--and, just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 'Adsum,'--and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called; and, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Maker!" CHAPTER V. ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS. The novel with which we are now going to deal I regard as the greatest work that Thackeray did. Though I do not hesitate to compare himself with himself, I will make no comparison between him and others; I therefore abstain from assigning to _Esmond_ any special niche among prose fictions in the English language, but I rank it so high as to justify me in placing him among the small number of the highest class of English novelists. Much as I think of _Barry Lyndon_ and _Vanity Fair_, I cannot quite say this of them; but, as a chain is not stronger than its weakest link, so is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist to be placed in no lower level than that which he has attained by his highest sustained flight. The excellence which has been reached here Thackeray achieved, without doubt, by giving a greater amount of forethought to the work he had before him than had been his wont. When we were young we used to be told, in our house at home, that "elbow-grease" was the one essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the operation needed. Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist,--or poet, or dramatist,--requires. It is not only his plot that has to be turned and re-turned in his mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects, so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to hit it on the head,--so that he may himself understand the passion, the calmness, the virtues, the vices, the rewards and punishments which he means to explain to others,--so that his proportions shall be correct, and he be saved from the absurdity of devoting two-thirds of his book to the beginning, or two-thirds to the completion of his task. It is from want of this special labour, more frequently than from intellectual deficiency, that the tellers of stories fail so often to hit their nails on the head. To think of a story is much harder work than to write it. The author can sit down with the pen in his hand for a given time, and produce a certain number of words. That is comparatively easy, and if he have a conscience in regard to his task, work will be done regularly. But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about, or sit cosily over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts, and make the things fit,--that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of the words is as though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement of your story is as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you walked. Fielding had carried his sack of flour before he wrote _Tom Jones_, and Scott his before he produced _Ivanhoe_. So had Thackeray done,--a very heavy sack of flour,--in creating _Esmond_. In _Vanity Fair_, in _Pendennis_, and in _The Newcomes_, there was more of that mere wandering in which no heavy burden was borne. The richness of the author's mind, the beauty of his language, his imagination and perception of character are all there. For that which was lovely he has shown his love, and for the hateful his hatred; but, nevertheless, they are comparatively idle books. His only work, as far as I can judge them, in which there is no touch of idleness, is _Esmond_. _Barry Lyndon_ is consecutive, and has the well-sustained purpose of exhibiting a finished rascal; but _Barry Lyndon_ is not quite the same from beginning to end. All his full-fledged novels, except _Esmond_, contain rather strings of incidents and memoirs of individuals, than a completed story. But _Esmond_ is a whole from beginning to end, with its tale well told, its purpose developed, its moral brought home,--and its nail hit well on the head and driven in. I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much the best, that there was none second to it. "That was what I intended," he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt been so when he conceived and carried out this work. To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that which he had made his own, but from that also which belonged to the time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and to create in it personages who were to be peculiarly concerned with the period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of expression then prevalent. No one who has not tried it can understand how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one's own language other than that which habit has made familiar. To write in another language, if the language be sufficiently known, is a much less arduous undertaking. The lad who attempts to write his essay in Ciceronian Latin struggles to achieve a style which is not indeed common to him, but is more common than any other he has become acquainted with in that tongue. But Thackeray in his work had always to remember his Swift, his Steele, and his Addison, and to forget at the same time the modes of expression which the day had adopted. Whether he asked advice on the subject, I do not know. But I feel sure that if he did he must have been counselled against it. Let my reader think what advice he would give to any writer on such a subject. Probably he asked no advice, and would have taken none. No doubt he found himself, at first imperceptibly, gliding into a phraseology which had attractions for his ear, and then probably was so charmed with the peculiarly masculine forms of sentences which thus became familiar to him, that he thought it would be almost as difficult to drop them altogether as altogether to assume the use of them. And if he could do so successfully, how great would be the assistance given to the local colouring which is needed for a novel in prose, the scene of which is thrown far back from the writer's period! Were I to write a poem about Coeur de Lion I should not mar my poem by using the simple language of the day; but if I write a prose story of the time, I cannot altogether avoid some attempt at far-away quaintnesses in language. To call a purse a "gypsire," and to begin your little speeches with "Marry come up," or to finish them with "Quotha," are but poor attempts. But even they have had their effect. Scott did the best he could with his Coeur de Lion. When we look to it we find that it was but little; though in his hands it passed for much. "By my troth," said the knight, "thou hast sung well and heartily, and in high praise of thine order." We doubt whether he achieved any similarity to the language of the time; but still, even in the little which he attempted there was something of the picturesque. But how much more would be done if in very truth the whole language of a story could be thrown with correctness into the form of expression used at the time depicted? It was this that Thackeray tried in his _Esmond_, and he has done it almost without a flaw. The time in question is near enough to us, and the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had been written naturally,--though not natural to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a tour de force; and successful as such a tour de force so seldom is. But though Thackeray was successful in adopting the tone he wished to assume, he never quite succeeded, as far as my ear can judge, in altogether dropping it again. And yet it has to be remembered that though _Esmond_ deals with the times of Queen Anne, and "copies the language" of the time, as Thackeray himself says in the dedication, the story is not supposed to have been written till the reign of George II. Esmond in his narrative speaks of Fielding and Hogarth, who did their best work under George II. The idea is that Henry Esmond, the hero, went out to Virginia after the events told, and there wrote the memoir in the form of an autobiography. The estate of Castlewood in Virginia had been given to the Esmond family by Charles II., and this Esmond, our hero, finding that expatriation would best suit both his domestic happiness and his political difficulties,--as the reader of the book will understand might be the case,--settles himself in the colony, and there writes the history of his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond, and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is continued in _The Virginians_, the name given to a record of two lads who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before _The Virginians_ appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the details and characters which he had originated in _Esmond_. It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories, and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry," she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry, and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself, would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,--military courage,--and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose name is in some degree under a cloud; for though he be not in truth an illegitimate offshoot of the noble family which is his, and though he knows that he is not so, still he has to live as though he were. He becomes a soldier, and it was just then that our army was accustomed "to swear horribly in Flanders." But Esmond likes his books, and cannot swear or drink like other soldiers. Nevertheless he has a sort of liking for fast ways in others, knowing that such are the ways of a gallant cavalier. There is a melancholy over his life which makes him always, to himself and to others, much older than his years. He is well aware that, being as he is, it is impossible that Beatrix should love him. Now and then there is a dash of lightness about him, as though he had taught himself in his philosophy that even sorrow may be borne with a smile,--as though there was something in him of the Stoic's doctrine, which made him feel that even disappointed love should not be seen to wound too deep. But still when he smiles, even when he indulges in some little pleasantry, there is that garb of melancholy over him which always makes a man a prig. But he is a gentleman from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. Thackeray had let the whole power of his intellect apply itself to a conception of the character of a gentleman. This man is brave, polished, gifted with that old-fashioned courtesy which ladies used to love, true as steel, loyal as faith himself, with a power of self-abnegation which astonishes the criticising reader when he finds such a virtue carried to such an extent without seeming to be unnatural. To draw the picture of a man and say that he is gifted with all the virtues is easy enough,--easy enough to describe him as performing all the virtues. The difficulty is to put your man on his legs, and make him move about, carrying his virtues with a natural gait, so that the reader shall feel that he is becoming acquainted with flesh and blood, not with a wooden figure. The virtues are all there with Henry Esmond, and the flesh and blood also, so that the reader believes in them. But still there is left a flavour of the character which Thackeray himself tasted when he called his hero a prig. The two heroines, Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, are mother and daughter, of whom the former is in love with Esmond, and the latter is loved by him. Fault has been found with the story, because of the unnatural rivalry,--because it has been felt that a mother's solicitude for her daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those who have understood, the tale;--not because they have read it, but because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a protégé; and from the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter, she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is alive, and though he is a drunken brute,--after the manner of lords of that time,--she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him, gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a widow;--and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,--as he says of himself when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"--"the guardian of all the family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all." The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional sprightliness with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,--as shown always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal strength,--as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;--a mixture which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him, because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at the moment to quarrel with Harry and to be unjust to him. He had been ill, and had gone away to the wars, and then she had learned the truth, and had been wretched enough. But when he comes back, and she sees him, by chance at first, as the anthem is being sung in the cathedral choir, as she is saying her prayers, her heart flows over with tenderness to him. "I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, Harry, in the anthem when they sang it,--'When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion we were like them that dream,'--I thought, yes, like them that dream,--them that dream. And then it went on, 'They that sow in tears shall reap in joy, and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come home again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.' I looked up from the book and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head." And so it goes on, running into expressions of heartmelting tenderness. And yet she herself does not know that her own heart is seeking his with all a woman's love. She is still willing that he should possess Beatrix. "I would call you my son," she says, "sooner than the greatest prince in Europe." But she warns him of the nature of her own girl. "'Tis for my poor Beatrix I tremble, whose headstrong will affrights me, whose jealous temper, and whose vanity no prayers of mine can cure." It is but very gradually that Esmond becomes aware of the truth. Indeed, he has not become altogether aware of it till the tale closes. The reader does not see that transfer of affection from the daughter to the mother which would fail to reach his sympathy. In the last page of the last chapter it is told that it is so,--that Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,--but it is not told till all the incidents of the story have been completed. But of the three characters I have named, Beatrix is the one that has most strongly exercised the writer's powers, and will most interest the reader. As far as outward person is concerned she is very lovely,--so charming, that every man that comes near to her submits himself to her attractions and caprices. It is but rarely that a novelist can succeed in impressing his reader with a sense of female loveliness. The attempt is made so frequently,--comes so much as a matter of course in every novel that is written, and fails so much as a matter of course, that the reader does not feel the failure. There are things which we do not expect to have done for us in literature because they are done so seldom. Novelists are apt to describe the rural scenes among which their characters play their parts, but seldom leave any impression of the places described. Even in poetry how often does this occur? The words used are pretty, well chosen, perhaps musical to the ear, and in that way befitting; but unless the spot has violent characteristics of its own, such as Burley's cave or the waterfall of Lodore, no striking portrait is left. Nor are we disappointed as we read, because we have not been taught to expect it to be otherwise. So it is with those word-painted portraits of women, which are so frequently given and so seldom convey any impression. Who has an idea of the outside look of Sophia Western, or Edith Bellenden, or even of Imogen, though Iachimo, who described her, was so good at words? A series of pictures,--illustrations,--as we have with Dickens' novels, and with Thackeray's, may leave an impression of a figure,--though even then not often of feminine beauty. But in this work Thackeray has succeeded in imbuing us with a sense of the outside loveliness of Beatrix by the mere force of words. We are not only told it, but we feel that she was such a one as a man cannot fail to covet, even when his judgment goes against his choice. Here the judgment goes altogether against the choice. The girl grows up before us from her early youth till her twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, and becomes,--such as her mother described her,--one whose headlong will, whose jealousy, and whose vanity nothing could restrain. She has none of those soft foibles, half allied to virtues, by which weak women fall away into misery or perhaps distraction. She does not want to love or to be loved. She does not care to be fondled. She has no longing for caresses. She wants to be admired,--and to make use of the admiration she shall achieve for the material purposes of her life. She wishes to rise in the world; and her beauty is the sword with which she must open her oyster. As to her heart, it is a thing of which she becomes aware, only to assure herself that it must be laid aside and put out of the question. Now and again Esmond touches it. She just feels that she has a heart to be touched. But she never has a doubt as to her conduct in that respect. She will not allow her dreams of ambition to be disturbed by such folly as love. In all that there might be something, if not good and great, nevertheless grand, if her ambition, though worldly, had in it a touch of nobility. But this poor creature is made with her bleared blind eyes to fall into the very lowest depths of feminine ignobility. One lover comes after another. Harry Esmond is, of course, the lover with whom the reader interests himself. At last there comes a duke,--fifty years old, indeed, but with semi-royal appanages. As his wife she will become a duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency. The man is stern, cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment. She is to be Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings. The story here, with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction. Then, in the last moment, the duke is killed in a duel, and the news is brought to the girl by Esmond. She turns upon him and rebukes him harshly. Then she moves away, and feels in a moment that there is nothing left for her in this world, and that she can only throw herself upon devotion for consolation. "I am best in my own room and by myself," she said. Her eyes were quite dry, nor did Esmond ever see them otherwise, save once, in respect of that grief. She gave him a cold hand as she went out. "Thank you, brother," she said in a low voice, and with a simplicity more touching than tears, "all that you have said is true and kind, and I will go away and will ask pardon." But the consolation coming from devotion did not go far with such a one as her. We cannot rest on religion merely by saying that we will do so. Very speedily there comes consolation in another form. Queen Anne is on her deathbed, and a young Stuart prince appears upon the scene, of whom some loyal hearts dream that they can make a king. He is such as Stuarts were, and only walks across the novelist's canvas to show his folly and heartlessness. But there is a moment in which Beatrix thinks that she may rise in the world to the proud place of a royal mistress. That is her last ambition! That is her pride! That is to be her glory! The bleared eyes can see no clearer than that. But the mock prince passes away, and nothing but the disgrace of the wish remains. Such is the story of _Esmond_, leaving with it, as does all Thackeray's work, a melancholy conviction of the vanity of all things human. _Vanitas vanitatum_, as he wrote on the pages of the French lady's album, and again in one of the earlier numbers of _The Cornhill Magazine_. With much that is picturesque, much that is droll, much that is valuable as being a correct picture of the period selected, the gist of the book is melancholy throughout. It ends with the promise of happiness to come, but that is contained merely in a concluding paragraph. The one woman, during the course of the story, becomes a widow, with a living love in which she has no hope, with children for whom her fears are almost stronger than her affection, who never can rally herself to happiness for a moment. The other, with all her beauty and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,--and marries at last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her intrigues. Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother of the girl he has loved. And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader cannot pause with delight. The nature in it is true nature. Given a story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct themselves. It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the prospect of things joyful, and to see,--or believe that he saw,--in all human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be antagonistic to true contentment. All his snobs, and all his fools, and all his knaves, come from the same conviction. Is it not the doctrine on which our religion is founded,--though the sadness of it there is alleviated by the doubtful promise of a heaven? Though thrice a thousand years are passed Since David's son, the sad and splendid, The weary king ecclesiast Upon his awful tablets penned it. So it was that Thackeray preached his sermon. But melancholy though it be, the lesson taught in _Esmond_ is salutary from beginning to end. The sermon truly preached is that glory can only come from that which is truly glorious, and that the results of meanness end always in the mean. No girl will be taught to wish to shine like Beatrix, nor will any youth be made to think that to gain the love of such a one it can be worth his while to expend his energy or his heart. _Esmond_ was published in 1852. It was not till 1858, some time after he had returned from his lecturing tours, that he published the sequel called _The Virginians_. It was first brought out in twenty-four monthly numbers, and ran through the years 1858 and 1859, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans having been the publishers. It takes up by no means the story of _Esmond_, and hardly the characters. The twin lads, who are called the Virginians, and whose name is Warrington, are grandsons of Esmond and his wife Lady Castlewood. Their one daughter, born at the estate in Virginia, had married a Warrington, and the Virginians are the issue of that marriage. In the story, one is sent to England, there to make his way; and the other is for awhile supposed to have been killed by the Indians. How he was not killed, but after awhile comes again forward in the world of fiction, will be found in the story, which it is not our purpose to set forth here. The most interesting part of the narrative is that which tells us of the later fortunes of Madame Beatrix,--the Baroness Bernstein,--the lady who had in her youth been Beatrix Esmond, who had then condescended to become Mrs. Tasker, the tutor's wife, whence she rose to be the "lady" of a bishop, and, after the bishop had been put to rest under a load of marble, had become the baroness,--a rich old woman, courted by all her relatives because of her wealth. In _The Virginians_, as a work of art, is discovered, more strongly than had shown itself yet in any of his works, that propensity to wandering which came to Thackeray because of his idleness. It is, I think, to be found in every book he ever wrote,--except _Esmond_; but is here more conspicuous than it had been in his earlier years. Though he can settle himself down to his pen and ink,--not always even to that without a struggle, but to that with sufficient burst of energy to produce a large average amount of work,--he cannot settle himself down to the task of contriving a story. There have been those,--and they have not been bad judges of literature,--who have told me that they have best liked these vague narratives. The mind of the man has been clearly exhibited in them. In them he has spoken out his thoughts, and given the world to know his convictions, as well as could have been done in the carrying out any well-conducted plot. And though the narratives be vague, the characters are alive. In _The Virginians_, the two young men and their mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!--but if he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This, I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_. The author's mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is; but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master, till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth been encountered. CHAPTER VI. THACKERAY'S BURLESQUES. As so much of Thackeray's writing partakes of the nature of burlesque, it would have been unnecessary to devote a separate chapter to the subject, were it not that there are among his tales two or three so exceedingly good of their kind, coming so entirely up to our idea of what a prose burlesque should be, that were I to omit to mention them I should pass over a distinctive portion of our author's work. The volume called _Burlesques_, published in 1869, begins with the _Novels by Eminent Hands_, and _Jeames's Diary_, to which I have already alluded. It contains also _The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan_, _A Legend of the Rhine_, and _Rebecca and Rowena_. It is of these that I will now speak. _The History of the Next French Revolution_ and _Cox's Diary_, with which the volume is concluded, are, according to my thinking, hardly equal to the others; nor are they so properly called burlesques. Nor will I say much of Major Gahagan, though his adventures are very good fun. He is a warrior,--that is, of course,--and he is one in whose wonderful narrative all that distant India can produce in the way of boasting, is superadded to Ireland's best efforts in the same line. Baron Munchausen was nothing to him; and to the bare and simple miracles of the baron is joined that humour without which Thackeray never tells any story. This is broad enough, no doubt, but is still humour;--as when the major tells us that he always kept in his own apartment a small store of gunpowder; "always keeping it under my bed, with a candle burning for fear of accidents." Or when he describes his courage; "I was running,--running as the brave stag before the hounds,--running, as I have done a great number of times in my life, when there was no help for it but a run." Then he tells us of his digestion. "Once in Spain I ate the leg of a horse, and was so eager to swallow this morsel, that I bolted the shoe as well as the hoof, and never felt the slightest inconvenience from either." He storms a citadel, and has only a snuff box given him for his reward. "Never mind," says Major Gahagan; "when they want me to storm a fort again, I shall know better." By which we perceive that the major remembered his Horace, and had in his mind the soldier who had lost his purse. But the major's adventures, excellent as they are, lack the continued interest which is attached to the two following stories. Of what nature is _The Legend of the Rhine_, we learn from the commencement. "It was in the good old days of chivalry, when every mountain that bathes its shadow in the Rhine had its castle; not inhabited as now by a few rats and owls, nor covered with moss and wallflowers and funguses and creeping ivy. No, no; where the ivy now clusters there grew strong portcullis and bars of steel; where the wallflowers now quiver in the ramparts there were silken banners embroidered with wonderful heraldry; men-at-arms marched where now you shall only see a bank of moss or a hideous black champignon; and in place of the rats and owlets, I warrant me there were ladies and knights to revel in the great halls, and to feast and dance, and to make love there." So that we know well beforehand of what kind will this story be. It will be pure romance,--burlesqued. "Ho seneschal, fill me a cup of hot liquor; put sugar in it, good fellow; yea, and a little hot water,--but very little, for my soul is sad as I think of those days and knights of old." A knight is riding alone on his war-horse, with all his armour with him,--and his luggage. His rank is shown by the name on his portmanteau, and his former address and present destination by a card which was attached. It had run, "Count Ludwig de Hombourg, Jerusalem, but the name of the Holy City had been dashed out with the pen, and that of Godesberg substituted." "By St. Hugo of Katzenellenbogen," said the good knight shivering, "'tis colder here than at Damascus. Shall I be at Godesberg in time for dinner?" He has come to see his friend Count Karl, Margrave of Godesberg. But at Godesberg everything is in distress and sorrow. There is a new inmate there, one Sir Gottfried, since whose arrival the knight of the castle has become a wretched man, having been taught to believe all evils of his wife, and of his child Otto, and a certain stranger, one Hildebrandt. Gottfried, we see with half an eye, has done it all. It is in vain that Ludwig de Hombourg tells his old friend Karl that this Gottfried is a thoroughly bad fellow, that he had been found to be a cardsharper in the Holy Land, and had been drummed out of his regiment. "'Twas but some silly quarrel over the wine-cup," says Karl. "Hugo de Brodenel would have no black bottle on the board." We think we can remember the quarrel of "Brodenel" and the black bottle, though so many things have taken place since that. There is a festival in the castle, and Hildebrandt comes with the other guests. Then Ludwig's attention is called by poor Karl, the father, to a certain family likeness. Can it be that he is not the father of his own child? He is playing cards with his friend Ludwig when that traitor Gottfried comes and whispers to him, and makes an appointment. "I will be there too," thought Count Ludwig, the good Knight of Hombourg. On the next morning, before the stranger knight had shaken off his slumbers, all had been found out and everything done. The lady has been sent to a convent and her son to a monastery. The knight of the castle has no comfort but in his friend Gottfried, a distant cousin who is to inherit everything. All this is told to Sir Ludwig,--who immediately takes steps to repair the mischief. "A cup of coffee straight," says he to the servitors. "Bid the cook pack me a sausage and bread in paper, and the groom saddle Streithengst. We have far to ride." So this redresser of wrongs starts off, leaving the Margrave in his grief. Then there is a great fight between Sir Ludwig and Sir Gottfried, admirably told in the manner of the later chroniclers,--a hermit sitting by and describing everything almost as well as Rebecca did on the tower. Sir Ludwig being in the right, of course gains the day. But the escape of the fallen knight's horse is the cream of this chapter. "Away, ay, away!--away amid the green vineyards and golden cornfields; away up the steep mountains, where he frightened the eagles in their eyries; away down the clattering ravines, where the flashing cataracts tumble; away through the dark pine-forests, where the hungry wolves are howling; away over the dreary wolds, where the wild wind walks alone; away through the splashing quagmires, where the will-o'-the wisp slunk frightened among the reeds; away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine; away by tower and town, highroad and hamlet.... Brave horse! gallant steed! snorting child of Araby! On went the horse, over mountains, rivers, turnpikes, applewomen; and never stopped until he reached a livery-stable in Cologne, where his master was accustomed to put him up!" The conquered knight, Sir Gottfried, of course reveals the truth. This Hildebrandt is no more than the lady's brother,--as it happened a brother in disguise,--and hence the likeness. Wicked knights when they die always divulge their wicked secrets, and this knight Gottfried does so now. Sir Ludwig carries the news home to the afflicted husband and father; who of course instantly sends off messengers for his wife and son. The wife won't come. All she wants is to have her dresses and jewels sent to her. Of so cruel a husband she has had enough. As for the son, he has jumped out of a boat on the Rhine, as he was being carried to his monastery, and was drowned! But he was not drowned, but had only dived. "The gallant boy swam on beneath the water, never lifting his head for a single moment between Godesberg and Cologne; the distance being twenty-five or thirty miles." Then he becomes an archer, dressed in green from head to foot. How it was is all told in the story; and he goes to shoot for a prize at the Castle of Adolf the Duke of Cleeves. On his way he shoots a raven marvellously,--almost as marvellously as did Robin Hood the twig in Ivanhoe. Then one of his companions is married, or nearly married, to the mysterious "Lady of Windeck,"--would have been married but for Otto, and that the bishop and dean, who were dragged up from their long-ago graves to perform the ghostly ceremony, were prevented by the ill-timed mirth of a certain old canon of the church named Schidnischmidt. The reader has to read the name out long before he recognises an old friend. But this of the Lady of Windeck is an episode. How at the shooting-match, which of course ensued, Otto shot for and won the heart of a fair lady, the duke's daughter, need not be told here, nor how he quarrelled with the Rowski of Donnerblitz,--the hideous and sulky, but rich and powerful, nobleman who had come to take the hand, whether he could win the heart or not, of the daughter of the duke. It is all arranged according to the proper and romantic order. Otto, though he enlists in the duke's archer-guard as simple soldier, contrives to fight with the Rowski de Donnerblitz, Margrave of Eulenschrenkenstein, and of course kills him. "'Yield, yield, Sir Rowski!' shouted he in a calm voice. A blow dealt madly at his head was the reply. It was the last blow that the count of Eulenschrenkenstein ever struck in battle. The curse was on his lips as the crashing steel descended into his brain and split it in two. He rolled like a dog from his horse, his enemy's knee was in a moment on his chest, and the dagger of mercy at his throat, as the knight once more called upon him to yield." The knight was of course the archer who had come forward as an unknown champion, and had touched the Rowski's shield with the point of his lance. For this story, as well as the rest, is a burlesque on our dear old favourite Ivanhoe. That everything goes right at last, that the wife comes back from her monastery, and joins her jealous husband, and that the duke's daughter has always, in truth, known that the poor archer was a noble knight,--these things are all matters of course. But the best of the three burlesques is _Rebecca and Rowena, or A Romance upon Romance_, which I need not tell my readers is a continuation of _Ivanhoe_. Of this burlesque it is the peculiar characteristic that, while it has been written to ridicule the persons and the incidents of that perhaps the most favourite novel in the English language, it has been so written that it would not have offended the author had he lived to read it, nor does it disgust or annoy those who most love the original. There is not a word in it having an intention to belittle Scott. It has sprung from the genuine humour created in Thackeray's mind by his aspect of the romantic. We remember how reticent, how dignified was Rowena,--how cold we perhaps thought her, whether there was so little of that billing and cooing, that kissing and squeezing, between her and Ivanhoe which we used to think necessary to lovers' blisses. And there was left too on our minds, an idea that Ivanhoe had liked the Jewess almost as well as Rowena, and that Rowena might possibly have become jealous. Thackeray's mind at once went to work and pictured to him a Rowena such as such a woman might become after marriage; and as Ivanhoe was of a melancholy nature and apt to be hipped, and grave, and silent, as a matter of course Thackeray presumes him to have been henpecked after his marriage. Our dear Wamba disturbs his mistress in some devotional conversation with her chaplain, and the stern lady orders that the fool shall have three-dozen lashes. "I got you out of Front de Boeuf's castle," said poor Wamba, piteously, appealing to Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, "and canst thou not save me from the lash?" "Yes; from Front de Boeuf's castle, _when you were locked up with the Jewess in the tower_!" said Rowena, haughtily replying to the timid appeal of her husband. "Gurth, give him four-dozen,"--and this was all poor Wamba got by applying for the mediation of his master. Then the satirist moralises; "Did you ever know a right-minded woman pardon another for being handsomer and more love-worthy than herself?" Rowena is "always flinging Rebecca into Ivanhoe's teeth;" and altogether life at Rotherwood, as described by the later chronicles, is not very happy even when most domestic. Ivanhoe becomes sad and moody. He takes to drinking, and his lady does not forget to tell him of it. "Ah dear axe!" he exclaims, apostrophising his weapon, "ah gentle steel! that was a merry time when I sent thee crashing into the pate of the Emir Abdul Melek!" There was nothing left to him but his memories; and "in a word, his life was intolerable." So he determines that he will go and look after king Richard, who of course was wandering abroad. He anticipates a little difficulty with his wife; but she is only too happy to let him go, comforting herself with the idea that Athelstane will look after her. So her husband starts on his journey. "Then Ivanhoe's trumpet blew. Then Rowena waved her pocket-handkerchief. Then the household gave a shout. Then the pursuivant of the good knight, Sir Wilfrid the Crusader, flung out his banner,--which was argent, a gules cramoisy with three Moors impaled,--then Wamba gave a lash on his mule's haunch, and Ivanhoe, heaving a great sigh, turned the tail of his war-horse upon the castle of his fathers." Ivanhoe finds Coeur de Leon besieging the Castle of Chalons, and there they both do wondrous deeds, Ivanhoe always surpassing the king. The jealousy of the courtiers, the ingratitude of the king, and the melancholy of the knight, who is never comforted except when he has slaughtered some hundreds, are delightful. Roger de Backbite and Peter de Toadhole are intended to be quite real. Then his majesty sings, passing off as his own, a song of Charles Lever's. Sir Wilfrid declares the truth, and twits the king with his falsehood, whereupon he has the guitar thrown at his head for his pains. He catches the guitar, however, gracefully in his left hand, and sings his own immortal ballad of _King Canute_,--than which Thackeray never did anything better. "Might I stay the sun above us, good Sir Bishop?" Canute cried; "Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride? If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide. Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?" Said the bishop, bowing lowly; "Land and sea, my lord, are thine." Canute turned towards the ocean; "Back," he said, "thou foaming brine." But the sullen ocean answered with a louder deeper roar, And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling, sounding on the shore; Back the keeper and the bishop, back the king and courtiers bore. We must go to the book to look at the picture of the king as he is killing the youngest of the sons of the Count of Chalons. Those illustrations of Doyle's are admirable. The size of the king's head, and the size of his battle-axe as contrasted with the size of the child, are burlesque all over. But the king has been wounded by a bolt from the bow of Sir Bertrand de Gourdon while he is slaughtering the infant, and there is an end of him. Ivanhoe, too, is killed at the siege,--Sir Roger de Backbite having stabbed him in the back during the scene. Had he not been then killed, his widow Rowena could not have married Athelstane, which she soon did after hearing the sad news; nor could he have had that celebrated epitaph in Latin and English; Hie est Guilfridus, belli dum vixit avidus. Cum gladeo et lancea Normannia et quoque Francia Verbera dura dabat. Per Turcos multum equitabat. Guilbertum occidit;--atque Hyerosolyma vidit. Heu! nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa. Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.[5] The translation we are told was by Wamba; Under the stone you behold, Buried and coffined and cold, Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold. Always he marched in advance, Warring in Flanders and France, Doughty with sword and with lance Famous in Saracen fight, Rode in his youth, the Good Knight, Scattering Paynims in flight. Brian, the Templar untrue, Fairly in tourney he slew; Saw Hierusalem too. Now he is buried and gone, Lying beneath the gray stone. Where shall you find such a one? Long time his widow deplored, Weeping, the fate of her lord, Sadly cut off by the sword. When she was eased of her pain, Came the good lord Athelstane, When her ladyship married again. The next chapter begins naturally as follows; "I trust nobody will suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend Ivanhoe is really dead." He is of course cured of his wounds, though they take six years in the curing. And then he makes his way back to Rotherwood, in a friar's disguise, much as he did on that former occasion when we first met him, and there is received by Athelstane and Rowena,--and their boy!--while Wamba sings him a song: Then you know the worth of a lass, Once you have come to forty year! No one, of course, but Wamba knows Ivanhoe, who roams about the country, melancholy,--as he of course would be,--charitable,--as he perhaps might be,--for we are specially told that he had a large fortune and nothing to do with it, and slaying robbers wherever he met them;--but sad at heart all the time. Then there comes a little burst of the author's own feelings, while he is burlesquing. "Ah my dear friends and British public, are there not others who are melancholy under a mask of gaiety, and who in the midst of crowds are lonely! Liston was a most melancholy man; Grimaldi had feelings; and then others I wot of. But psha!--let us have the next chapter." In all of which there was a touch of earnestness. Ivanhoe's griefs were enhanced by the wickedness of king John, under whom he would not serve. "It was Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, I need scarcely say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,--The Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,--and how could he take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly. "This is a quarrel in which I can't interfere. Common politeness forbids. Let yonder ale-swilling Athelstane defend his,--ha, ha!--_wife_; and my Lady Rowena guard her,--ha, ha!--_son_!" and he laughed wildly and madly. But Athelstane is killed,--this time in earnest,--and then Ivanhoe rushes to the rescue. He finds Gurth dead at the park-lodge, and though he is all alone,--having outridden his followers,--he rushes up the chestnut avenue to the house, which is being attacked. "An Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe!" he bellowed out with a shout that overcame all the din of battle;--"Notre Dame à la recousse?" and to hurl his lance through the midriff of Reginald de Bracy, who was commanding the assault,--who fell howling with anguish,--to wave his battle-axe over his own head, and to cut off those of thirteen men-at-arms, was the work of an instant. "An Ivanhoe! an Ivanhoe!" he still shouted, and down went a man as sure as he said "hoe!" Nevertheless he is again killed by multitudes, or very nearly,--and has again to be cured by the tender nursing of Wamba. But Athelstane is really dead, and Rowena and the boy have to be found. He does his duty and finds them,--just in time to be present at Rowena's death. She has been put in prison by king John, and is in extremis when her first husband gets to her. "Wilfrid, my early loved,"[6] slowly gasped she removing her gray hair from her furrowed temples, and gazing on her boy fondly as he nestled on Ivanhoe's knee,--"promise me by St. Waltheof of Templestowe,--promise me one boon!" "I do," said Ivanhoe, clasping the boy, and thinking that it was to that little innocent that the promise was intended to apply. "By St. Waltheof?" "By St. Waltheof!" "Promise me then," gasped Rowena, staring wildly at him, "that you will never marry a Jewess!" "By St. Waltheof!" cried Ivanhoe, "but this is too much," and he did not make the promise. "Having placed young Cedric at school at the Hall of Dotheboys, in Yorkshire, and arranged his family affairs, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe quitted a country which had no longer any charm for him, as there was no fighting to be done, and in which his stay was rendered less agreeable by the notion that king John would hang him." So he goes forth and fights again, in league with the Knights of St. John,--the Templars naturally having a dislike to him because of Brian de Bois Guilbert. "The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with the melancholy warrior whose lance did such service to the cause, was that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. So the Jews, in cursing the Christians, always excepted the name of the Desdichado,--or the double disinherited, as he now was,--the Desdichado Doblado." Then came the battle of Alarcos, and the Moors were all but in possession of the whole of Spain. Sir Wilfrid, like other good Christians, cannot endure this, so he takes ship in Bohemia, where he happens to be quartered, and has himself carried to Barcelona, and proceeds "to slaughter the Moors forthwith." Then there is a scene in which Isaac of York comes on as a messenger, to ransom from a Spanish knight, Don Beltram de Cuchilla y Trabuco, y Espada, y Espelon, a little Moorish girl. The Spanish knight of course murders the little girl instead of taking the ransom. Two hundred thousand dirhems are offered, however much that may be; but the knight, who happens to be in funds at the time, prefers to kill the little girl. All this is only necessary to the story as introducing Isaac of York. Sir Wilfrid is of course intent upon finding Rebecca. Through all his troubles and triumphs, from his gaining and his losing of Rowena, from the day on which he had been "_locked up with the Jewess in the tower_," he had always been true to her. "Away from me!" said the old Jew, tottering. "Away, Rebecca is,--dead!" Then Ivanhoe goes out and kills fifty thousand Moors, and there is the picture of him,--killing them. But Rebecca is not dead at all. Her father had said so because Rebecca had behaved very badly to him. She had refused to marry the Moorish prince, or any of her own people, the Jews, and had gone as far as to declare her passion for Ivanhoe and her resolution to be a Christian. All the Jews and Jewesses in Valencia turned against her,--so that she was locked up in the back-kitchen and almost starved to death. But Ivanhoe found her of course, and makes her Mrs. Ivanhoe, or Lady Wilfrid the second. Then Thackeray tells us how for many years he, Thackeray, had not ceased to feel that it ought to be so. "Indeed I have thought of it any time these five-and-twenty years,--ever since, as a boy at school, I commenced the noble study of novels,--ever since the day when, lying on sunny slopes, of half-holidays, the fair chivalrous figures and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me, ever since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet's fancy, and longed to see her righted." And so, no doubt, it had been. The very burlesque had grown from the way in which his young imagination had been moved by Scott's romance. He had felt from the time of those happy half-holidays in which he had been lucky enough to get hold of the novel, that according to all laws of poetic justice, Rebecca, as being the more beautiful and the more interesting of the heroines, was entitled to the possession of the hero. We have all of us felt the same. But to him had been present at the same time all that is ludicrous in our ideas of middle-age chivalry; the absurdity of its recorded deeds, the blood-thirstiness of its recreations, the selfishness of its men, the falseness of its honour, the cringing of its loyalty, the tyranny of its princes. And so there came forth Rebecca and Rowena, all broad fun from beginning to end, but never without a purpose,--the best burlesque, as I think, in our language. FOOTNOTES: [5] I doubt that Thackeray did not write the Latin epitaph, but I hardly dare suggest the name of any author. The "vixit avidus" is quite worthy of Thackeray; but had he tried his hand at such mode of expression he would have done more of it. I should like to know whether he had been in company with Father Prout at the time. [6] There is something almost illnatured in his treatment of Rowena, who is very false in her declarations of love;--and it is to be feared that by Rowena, the author intends the normal married lady of English society. CHAPTER VII. THACKERAY'S LECTURES. In speaking of Thackeray's life I have said why and how it was that he took upon himself to lecture, and have also told the reader that he was altogether successful in carrying out the views proposed to himself. Of his peculiar manner of lecturing I have said but little, never having heard him. "He pounded along,--very clearly," I have been told; from which I surmise that there was no special grace of eloquence, but that he was always audible. I cannot imagine that he should have been ever eloquent. He could not have taken the trouble necessary with his voice, with his cadences, or with his outward appearance. I imagine that they who seem so naturally to fall into the proprieties of elocution have generally taken a great deal of trouble beyond that which the mere finding of their words has cost them. It is clearly to the matter of what he then gave the world, and not to the manner, that we must look for what interest is to be found in the lectures. Those on _The English Humorists_ were given first. The second set was on _The Four Georges_. In the volume now before us _The Georges_ are printed first, and the whole is produced simply as a part of Thackeray's literary work. Looked at, however, in that light the merit of the two sets of biographical essays is very different. In the one we have all the anecdotes which could be brought together respecting four of our kings,--who as men were not peculiar, though their reigns were, and will always be, famous, because the country during the period was increasing greatly in prosperity and was ever strengthening the hold it had upon its liberties. In the other set the lecturer was a man of letters dealing with men of letters, and himself a prince among humorists is dealing with the humorists of his own country and language. One could not imagine a better subject for such discourses from Thackeray's mouth than the latter. The former was not, I think, so good. In discussing the lives of kings the biographer may trust to personal details or to historical facts. He may take the man, and say what good or evil may be said of him as a man;--or he may take the period, and tell his readers what happened to the country while this or the other king was on the throne. In the case with which we are dealing, the lecturer had not time enough or room enough for real history. His object was to let his audience know of what nature were the men; and we are bound to say that the pictures have not on the whole been flattering. It was almost necessary that with such a subject such should be the result. A story of family virtues, with princes and princesses well brought up, with happy family relations, all couleur de rose,--as it would of course become us to write if we were dealing with the life of a living sovereign,--would not be interesting. No one on going to hear Thackeray lecture on the Georges expected that. There must be some piquancy given, or the lecture would be dull;--and the eulogy of personal virtues can seldom be piquant. It is difficult to speak fittingly of a sovereign, either living or not, long since gone. You can hardly praise such a one without flattery. You can hardly censure him without injustice. We are either ignorant of his personal doings or we know them as secrets, which have been divulged for the most part either falsely or treacherously,--often both falsely and treacherously. It is better, perhaps, that we should not deal with the personalities of princes. I believe that Thackeray fancied that he had spoken well of George III., and am sure that it was his intention to do so. But the impression he leaves is poor. "He is said not to have cared for Shakespeare or tragedy much; farces and pantomimes were his joy;--and especially when clown swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would laugh so outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to say, 'My gracious monarch, do compose yourself.' 'George, be a king!' were the words which she,"--his mother,--"was ever croaking in the ears of her son; and a king the simple, stubborn, affectionate, bigoted man tried to be." "He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtues he knew he tried to practise; what knowledge he could master he strove to acquire." If the lectures were to be popular, it was absolutely necessary that they should be written in this strain. A lecture simply laudatory on the life of St. Paul would not draw even the bench of bishops to listen to it; but were a flaw found in the apostle's life, the whole Church of England would be bound to know all about it. I am quite sure that Thackeray believed every word that he said in the lectures, and that he intended to put in the good and the bad, honestly, as they might come to his hand. We may be quite sure that he did not intend to flatter the royal family;--equally sure that he would not calumniate. There were, however, so many difficulties to be encountered that I cannot but think that the subject was ill-chosen. In making them so amusing as he did and so little offensive great ingenuity was shown. I will now go back to the first series, in which the lecturer treated of Swift, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Prior, Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. All these Thackeray has put in their proper order, placing the men from the date of their birth, except Prior, who was in truth the eldest of the lot, but whom it was necessary to depose, in order that the great Swift might stand first on the list, and Smollett, who was not born till fourteen years after Fielding, eight years after Sterne, and who has been moved up, I presume, simply from caprice. From the birth of the first to the death of the last, was a period of nearly a hundred years. They were never absolutely all alive together; but it was nearly so, Addison and Prior having died before Smollett was born. Whether we should accept as humorists the full catalogue, may be a question; though we shall hardly wish to eliminate any one from such a dozen of names. Pope we should hardly define as a humorist, were we to be seeking for a definition specially fit for him, though we shall certainly not deny the gift of humour to the author of _The Rape of the Lock_, or to the translator of any portion of _The Odyssey_. Nor should we have included Fielding or Smollett, in spite of Parson Adams and Tabitha Bramble, unless anxious to fill a good company. That Hogarth was specially a humorist no one will deny; but in speaking of humorists we should have presumed, unless otherwise notified, that humorists in letters only had been intended. As Thackeray explains clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage: "If humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness,--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture,--your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him,--sometimes love him. And as his business is to mark other people's lives and peculiarities, we moralise upon _his_ life when he is gone,--and yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon." Having thus explained his purpose, Thackeray begins his task, and puts Swift in his front rank as a humorist. The picture given of this great man has very manifestly the look of truth, and if true, is terrible indeed. We do, in fact, know it to be true,--even though it be admitted that there is still room left for a book to be written on the life of the fearful dean. Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also,--with some fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who made others miserable, and who deserved misery. Our business, during the page or two which we can give to the subject, is not with Swift but with Thackeray's picture of Swift. It is painted with colours terribly strong and with shadows fearfully deep. "Would you like to have lived with him?" Thackeray asks. Then he says how pleasant it would have been to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith. "I should like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says. "But Swift! If you had been his inferior in parts,--and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely,--his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you. If, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,--and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture! "If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world.... How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you, and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach. It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know, a dean,--but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched. Thackeray describes him as a clerical highwayman, seizing on all he could get. But "the great prize has not yet come. The coach with the mitre and crozier in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed on the way from St. James's; and he waits and waits till nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different way and escaped him. So he fires his pistol into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country;"--or, in other words, takes a poor deanery in Ireland. Thackeray explains very correctly, as I think, the nature of the weapons which the man used,--namely, the words and style with which he wrote. "That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on November 30, 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister-island the honour and glory; but it seems to me he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. Goldsmith was an Irishman and always an Irishman; Steele was an Irishman and always an Irishman; Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English, his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and economy, as he used his money;--with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinions before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness." This is quite true of him, and the result is that though you may deny him sincerity, simplicity, humanity, or good taste, you can hardly find fault with his language. Swift was a clergyman, and this is what Thackeray says of him in regard to his sacred profession. "I know of few things more conclusive as to the sincerity of Swift's religion, than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench! Gay, the author of _The Beggar's Opera_; Gay, the wildest of the wits about town! It was this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders, to mount in a cassock and bands,--just as he advised him to husband his shillings, and put his thousand pounds out to interest." It was not that he was without religion,--or without, rather, his religious beliefs and doubts, "for Swift," says Thackeray, "was a reverent, was a pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those "orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade, he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest. Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver. I can imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such a book as that. It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift. "He shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan. He slunk away from his fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven-score years. He was always alone,--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When that went, silence and utter night closed over him. An immense genius, an awful downfall and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to mention,--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we have had as yet but little to do with humour. Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is described here rather as a man of fashion. A man of fashion he certainly was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,--worshipping that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience, because she is not only merry but shameless also. Congreve's muse was about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself,--and I think, as little amusing. "Reading in these plays now," says Thackeray, "is like shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it mean?--the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling, and retreating, the cavaliers seuls advancing upon their ladies, then ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated?" It is always so with Congreve's plays, and Etherege's and Wycherley's. The world we meet there is not our world, and as we read the plays we have no sympathy with these unknown people. It was not that they lived so long ago. They are much nearer to us in time than the men and women who figured on the stage in the reign of James I. But their nature is farther from our nature. They sparkle but never warm. They are witty but leave no impression. I might almost go further, and say that they are wicked but never allure. "When Voltaire came to visit the Great Congreve," says Thackeray, "the latter rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this, perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible. But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a pretty fellow." There is no doubt as to the true humour of Addison, who next comes up before us, but I think that he makes hardly so good a subject for a lecturer as the great gloomy man of intellect, or the frivolous man of pleasure. Thackeray tells us all that is to be said about him as a humorist in so few lines that I may almost insert them on this page: "But it is not for his reputation as the great author of _Cato_ and _The Campaign_, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and high distinction as Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a guardian of British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tattler of small talk and a Spectator of mankind that we cherish and love him, and owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried;--only peccadilloes and small sins against society, only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set _The Tatler_ a going. "But with his friend's discovery of _The Tatler_, Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak. He does not go very deep. Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep. There is no trace of suffering in his writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully selfish,--if I must use the word!" Such was Addison as a humorist; and when the hearer shall have heard also,--or the reader read,--that this most charming Tattler also wrote _Cato_, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him. Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who left behind him a much smaller name,--but was quite Addison's equal as a humorist and a wit. Addison, though he had the reputation of a toper, was respectability itself. Steele was almost always disreputable. He was brought from Ireland, placed at the Charter House, and then transferred to Oxford, where he became acquainted with Addison. Thackeray says that "Steele found Addison a stately college don at Oxford." The stateliness and the don's rank were attributable no doubt to the more sober character of the English lad, for, in fact, the two men were born in the same year, 1672. Steele, who during his life was affected by various different tastes, first turned himself to literature, but early in life was bitten by the hue of a red coat and became a trooper in the Horse Guards. To the end he vacillated in the same way. "In that charming paper in _The Tatler_, in which he records his father's death, his mother's griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is interrupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, 'the same as is to be sold at Garraway's next week;' upon the receipt of which he sends for three friends, and they fall to instantly, drinking two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in the morning." He had two wives, whom he loved dearly and treated badly. He hired grand houses, and bought fine horses for which he could never pay. He was often religious, but more often drunk. As a man of letters, other men of letters who followed him, such as Thackeray, could not be very proud of him. But everybody loved him; and he seems to have been the inventor of that flying literature which, with many changes in form and manner, has done so much for the amusement and edification of readers ever since his time. He was always commencing, or carrying on,--often editing,--some one of the numerous periodicals which appeared during his time. Thackeray mentions seven: _The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_, _The Englishman_, _The Lover_, _The Reader_, and _The Theatre_; that three of them are well known to this day,--the three first named,--and are to be found in all libraries, is proof that his life was not thrown away. I almost question Prior's right to be in the list, unless indeed the mastery over well-turned conceits is to be included within the border of humour. But Thackeray had a strong liking for Prior, and in his own humorous way rebukes his audience for not being familiar with _The Town and Country Mouse_. He says that Prior's epigrams have the genuine sparkle, and compares Prior to Horace. "His song, his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves and his epicureanism bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master." I cannot say that I agree with this. Prior is generally neat in his expression. Horace is happy,--which is surely a great deal more. All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments somewhat guided, somewhat assisted. That they were all men of humour there can be no doubt. Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would have been specially ranked as a humorist among men of letters, may be a question. Sterne was a humorist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a writer did so, and so was Goldsmith. Of the excellence and largeness of the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the other, it is not necessary that I should here say much. But I will give a short passage from our author as to each. He has been quoting somewhat at length from Sterne, and thus he ends; "And with this pretty dance and chorus the volume artfully concludes. Even here one can't give the whole description. There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption,--a hint as of an impure presence. Some of that dreary double entendre may be attributed to freer times and manners than ours,--but not all. The foul satyr's eyes leer out of the leaves constantly. The last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked. The last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon." Now a line or two about Goldsmith, and I will then let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself. "The poor fellow was never so friendless but that he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he would give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London courts." Of this too I will remind my readers,--those who have bookshelves well-filled to adorn their houses,--that Goldsmith stands in the front where all the young people see the volumes. There are few among the young people who do not refresh their sense of humour occasionally from that shelf, Sterne is relegated to some distant and high corner. The less often that he is taken down the better. Thackeray makes some half excuse for him because of the greater freedom of the times. But "the times" were the same for the two. Both Sterne and Goldsmith wrote in the reign of George II.; both died in the reign of George III. CHAPTER VIII. THACKERAY'S BALLADS. We have a volume of Thackeray's poems, republished under the name of _Ballads_, which is, I think, to a great extent a misnomer. They are all readable, almost all good, full of humour, and with some fine touches of pathos, most happy in their versification, and, with a few exceptions, hitting well on the head the nail which he intended to hit. But they are not on that account ballads. Literally, a ballad is a song, but it has come to signify a short chronicle in verse, which may be political, or pathetic, or grotesque,--or it may have all three characteristics or any two of them; but not on that account is any grotesque poem a ballad,--nor, of course, any pathetic or any political poem. _Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ may fairly be called a ballad, containing as it does a chronicle of a certain well-defined transaction; and the story of _King Canute_ is a ballad,--one of the best that has been produced in our language in modern years. But such pieces as those called _The End of the Play_ and _Vanitas Vanitatum_, which are didactic as well as pathetic, are not ballads in the common sense; nor are such songs as _The Mahogany Tree_, or the little collection called _Love Songs made Easy_. The majority of the pieces are not ballads, but if they be good of the kind we should be ungrateful to quarrel much with the name. How very good most of them are, I did not know till I re-read them for the purpose of writing this chapter. There is a manifest falling off in some few,--which has come from that source of literary failure which is now so common. If a man write a book or a poem because it is in him to write it,--the motive power being altogether in himself and coming from his desire to express himself,--he will write it well, presuming him to be capable of the effort. But if he write his book or poem simply because a book or poem is required from him, let his capability be what it may, it is not unlikely that he will do it badly. Thackeray occasionally suffered from the weakness thus produced. A ballad from _Policeman X_,--_Bow Street Ballads_ they were first called,--was required by _Punch_, and had to be forthcoming, whatever might be the poet's humour, by a certain time. _Jacob Omnium's Hoss_ is excellent. His heart and feeling were all there, on behalf of his friend, and against that obsolete old court of justice. But we can tell well when he was looking through the police reports for a subject, and taking what chance might send him, without any special interest in the matter. _The Knight and the Lady of Bath_, and the _Damages Two Hundred Pounds_, as they were demanded at Guildford, taste as though they were written to order. Here, in his verses as in his prose, the charm of Thackeray's work lies in the mingling of humour with pathos and indignation. There is hardly a piece that is not more or less funny, hardly a piece that is not satirical;--and in most of them, for those who will look a little below the surface, there is something that will touch them. Thackeray, though he rarely uttered a word, either with his pen or his mouth, in which there was not an intention to reach our sense of humour, never was only funny. When he was most determined to make us laugh, he had always a further purpose;--some pity was to be extracted from us on behalf of the sorrows of men, or some indignation at the evil done by them. This is the beginning of that story as to the _Two Hundred Pounds_, for which as a ballad I do not care very much: Special jurymen of England who admire your country's laws, And proclaim a British jury worthy of the nation's applause, Gaily compliment each other at the issue of a cause, Which was tried at Guildford 'sizes, this day week as ever was. Here he is indignant, not only in regard to some miscarriage of justice on that special occasion, but at the general unfitness of jurymen for the work confided to them. "Gaily compliment yourselves," he says, "on your beautiful constitution, from which come such beautiful results as those I am going to tell you!" When he reminded us that Ivanhoe had produced Magna Charta, there was a purpose of irony even there in regard to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what are you but snobs! There is nothing so often misguided as general indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or a politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was often perfect. The lines in which he addresses that Pallis Court, at the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime. O Pallis Court, you move My pity most profound. A most amusing sport You thought it, I'll be bound, To saddle hup a three-pound debt, With two-and-twenty pound. Good sport it is to you To grind the honest poor, To pay their just or unjust debts With eight hundred per cent, for Lor; Make haste and get your costes in, They will not last much mor! Come down from that tribewn, Thou shameless and unjust; Thou swindle, picking pockets in The name of Truth august; Come down, thou hoary Blasphemy, For die thou shalt and must. And go it, Jacob Homnium, And ply your iron pen, And rise up, Sir John Jervis, And shut me up that den; That sty for fattening lawyers in, On the bones of honest men. "Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it. There is a branch of his poetry which he calls,--or which at any rate is now called, _Lyra Hybernica_, for which no doubt _The Groves of Blarney_ was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!" Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally graphic. That on _The Cristal Palace_,--not that at Sydenham, but its forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,--is very good, as the following catalogue of its contents will show; There's holy saints And window paints, By Maydiayval Pugin; Alhamborough Jones Did paint the tones Of yellow and gambouge in. There's fountains there And crosses fair; There's water-gods with urns; There's organs three, To play, d'ye see? "God save the Queen," by turns. There's statues bright Of marble white, Of silver, and of copper; And some in zinc, And some, I think, That isn't over proper. There's staym ingynes, That stands in lines, Enormous and amazing, That squeal and snort Like whales in sport, Or elephants a grazing. There's carts and gigs, And pins for pigs, There's dibblers and there's harrows, And ploughs like toys For little boys, And ilegant wheel-barrows. For thim genteels Who ride on wheels, There's plenty to indulge 'em There's droskys snug From Paytersbug, And vayhycles from Bulgium. There's cabs on stands And shandthry danns; There's waggons from New York here; There's Lapland sleighs Have cross'd the seas, And jaunting cyars from Cork here. In writing this Thackeray was a little late with his copy for _Punch_; not, we should say, altogether an uncommon accident to him. It should have been with the editor early on Saturday, if not before, but did not come till late on Saturday evening. The editor, who was among men the most good-natured and I should think the most forbearing, either could not, or in this case would not, insert it in the next week's issue, and Thackeray, angry and disgusted, sent it to _The Times_. In _The Times_ of next Monday it appeared,--very much I should think to the delight of the readers of that august newspaper. Mr. Molony's account of the ball given to the Nepaulese ambassadors by the Peninsular and Oriental Company, is so like Barham's coronation in the account it gives of the guests, that one would fancy it must be by the same hand. The noble Chair[7] stud at the stair And bade the dhrums to thump; and he Did thus evince to that Black Prince The welcome of his Company.[8] O fair the girls and rich the curls, And bright the oys you saw there was; And fixed each oye you then could spoi On General Jung Bahawther was! This gineral great then tuck his sate, With all the other ginerals, Bedad his troat, his belt, his coat, All bleezed with precious minerals; And as he there, with princely air, Recloinin on his cushion was, All round about his royal chair The squeezin and the pushin was. O Pat, such girls, such jukes and earls, Such fashion and nobilitee! Just think of Tim, and fancy him Amidst the high gentilitee! There was the Lord de L'Huys, and the Portygeese Ministher and his lady there, And I recognised, with much surprise, Our messmate, Bob O'Grady, there. All these are very good fun,--so good in humour and so good in expression, that it would be needless to criticise their peculiar dialect, were it not that Thackeray has made for himself a reputation by his writing of Irish. In this he has been so entirely successful that for many English readers he has established a new language which may not improperly be called Hybernico-Thackerayan. If comedy is to be got from peculiarities of dialect, as no doubt it is, one form will do as well as another, so long as those who read it know no better. So it has been with Thackeray's Irish, for in truth he was not familiar with the modes of pronunciation which make up Irish brogue. Therefore, though he is always droll, he is not true to nature. Many an Irishman coming to London, not unnaturally tries to imitate the talk of Londoners. You or I, reader, were we from the West, and were the dear County Galway to send either of us to Parliament, would probably endeavour to drop the dear brogue of our country, and in doing so we should make some mistakes. It was these mistakes which Thackeray took for the natural Irish tone. He was amused to hear a major called "Meejor," but was unaware that the sound arose from Pat's affection of English softness of speech. The expression natural to the unadulterated Irishman would rather be "Ma-ajor." He discovers his own provincialism, and trying to be polite and urbane, he says "Meejor." In one of the lines I have quoted there occurs the word "troat." Such a sound never came naturally from the mouth of an Irishman. He puts in an h instead of omitting it, and says "dhrink." He comes to London, and finding out that he is wrong with his "dhrink," he leaves out all the h's he can, and thus comes to "troat." It is this which Thackeray has heard. There is a little piece called the _Last Irish Grievance_, to which Thackeray adds a still later grievance, by the false sounds which he elicits from the calumniated mouth of the pretended Irish poet. Slaves are "sleeves," places are "pleeces," Lord John is "Lard Jahn," fatal is "fetal," danger is "deenger," and native is "neetive." All these are unintended slanders. Tea, Hibernicé, is "tay," please is "plaise," sea is "say," and ease is "aise." The softer sound of e is broadened out by the natural Irishman,--not, to my ear, without a certain euphony;--but no one in Ireland says or hears the reverse. The Irishman who in London might talk of his "neetive" race, would be mincing his words to please the ear of the cockney. _The Chronicle of the Drum_ would be a true ballad all through, were it not that there is tacked on to it a long moral in an altered metre. I do not much value the moral, but the ballad is excellent, not only in much of its versification and in the turns of its language, but in the quaint and true picture it gives of the French nation. The drummer, either by himself or by some of his family, has drummed through a century of French battling, caring much for his country and its glory, but understanding nothing of the causes for which he is enthusiastic. Whether for King, Republic, or Emperor, whether fighting and conquering or fighting and conquered, he is happy as long as he can beat his drum on a field of glory. But throughout his adventures there is a touch of chivalry about our drummer. In all the episodes of his country's career he feels much of patriotism and something of tenderness. It is thus he sings during the days of the Revolution: We had taken the head of King Capet, We called for the blood of his wife; Undaunted she came to the scaffold, And bared her fair neck to the knife. As she felt the foul fingers that touched her, She shrank, but she deigned not to speak; She looked with a royal disdain, And died with a blush on her cheek! 'Twas thus that our country was saved! So told us the Safety Committee! But, psha, I've the heart of a soldier,-- All gentleness, mercy, and pity. I loathed to assist at such deeds, And my drum beat its loudest of tunes, As we offered to justice offended, The blood of the bloody tribunes. Away with such foul recollections! No more of the axe and the block. I saw the last fight of the sections, As they fell 'neath our guns at St. Rock. Young Bonaparte led us that day. And so it goes on. I will not continue the stanza, because it contains the worst rhyme that Thackeray ever permitted himself to use. _The Chronicle of the Drum_ has not the finish which he achieved afterwards, but it is full of national feeling, and carries on its purpose to the end with an admirable persistency; A curse on those British assassins Who ordered the slaughter of Ney; A curse on Sir Hudson who tortured The life of our hero away. A curse on all Russians,--I hate them; On all Prussian and Austrian fry; And, oh, but I pray we may meet them And fight them again ere I die. _The White Squall_,--which I can hardly call a ballad, unless any description of a scene in verse may be included in the name,--is surely one of the most graphic descriptions ever put into verse. Nothing written by Thackeray shows more plainly his power over words and rhymes. He draws his picture without a line omitted or a line too much, saying with apparent facility all that he has to say, and so saying it that every word conveys its natural meaning. When a squall, upon a sudden, Came o'er the waters scudding; And the clouds began to gather, And the sea was lashed to lather, And the lowering thunder grumbled, And the lightning jumped and tumbled, And the ship and all the ocean Woke up in wild commotion. Then the wind set up a howling, And the poodle dog a yowling, And the cocks began a crowing, And the old cow raised a lowing, As she heard the tempest blowing; And fowls and geese did cackle, And the cordage and the tackle Began to shriek and crackle; And the spray dashed o'er the funnels, And down the deck in runnels; And the rushing water soaks all, From the seamen in the fo'ksal To the stokers whose black faces Peer out of their bed-places; And the captain, he was bawling, And the sailors pulling, hauling, And the quarter-deck tarpauling Was shivered in the squalling; And the passengers awaken, Most pitifully shaken; And the steward jumps up and hastens For the necessary basins. Then the Greeks they groaned and quivered, And they knelt, and moaned, and shivered, As the plunging waters met them, And splashed and overset them; And they call in their emergence Upon countless saints and virgins; And their marrowbones are bended, And they think the world is ended. And the Turkish women for'ard Were frightened and behorror'd; And shrieking and bewildering, The mothers clutched their children; The men sang "Allah! Illah! Mashallah Bis-millah!" As the warning waters doused them, And splashed them and soused them And they called upon the Prophet, And thought but little of it. Then all the fleas in Jewry Jumped up and bit like fury; And the progeny of Jacob Did on the main-deck wake up. (I wot these greasy Rabbins Would never pay for cabins); And each man moaned and jabbered in His filthy Jewish gaberdine, In woe and lamentation, And howling consternation. And the splashing water drenches Their dirty brats and wenches; And they crawl from bales and benches, In a hundred thousand stenches. This was the White Squall famous, Which latterly o'ercame us. _Peg of Limavaddy_ has always been very popular, and the public have not, I think, been generally aware that the young lady in question lived in truth at Newton Limavady (with one d). But with the correct name Thackeray would hardly have been so successful with his rhymes. Citizen or Squire Tory, Whig, or Radi- Cal would all desire Peg of Limavaddy. Had I Homer's fire Or that of Sergeant Taddy Meetly I'd admire Peg of Limavaddy. And till I expire Or till I go mad I Will sing unto my lyre Peg of Limavaddy. _The Cane-bottomed Chair_ is another, better, I think, than _Peg of Limavaddy_, as containing that mixture of burlesque with the pathetic which belonged so peculiarly to Thackeray, and which was indeed the very essence of his genius. But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest, There's one that I love and I cherish the best. For the finest of couches that's padded with hair I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair. 'Tis a bandy-legged, high-bottomed, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair. * * * * * She comes from the past and revisits my room, She looks as she then did all beauty and bloom; So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair, And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair. This, in the volume which I have now before me, is followed by a picture of Fanny in the chair, to which I cannot but take exception. I am quite sure that when Fanny graced the room and seated herself in the chair of her old bachelor friend, she had not on a low dress and loosely-flowing drawing-room shawl, nor was there a footstool ready for her feet. I doubt also the headgear. Fanny on that occasion was dressed in her morning apparel, and had walked through the streets, carried no fan, and wore no brooch but one that might be necessary for pinning her shawl. _The Great Cossack Epic_ is the longest of the ballads. It is a legend of St. Sophia of Kioff, telling how Father Hyacinth, by the aid of St. Sophia, whose wooden statue he carried with him, escaped across the Borysthenes with all the Cossacks at his tail. It is very good fun; but not equal to many of the others. Nor is the _Carmen Lilliense_ quite to my taste. I should not have declared at once that it had come from Thackeray's hand, had I not known it. But who could doubt the _Bouillabaisse_? Who else could have written that? Who at the same moment could have been so merry and so melancholy,--could have gone so deep into the regrets of life, with words so appropriate to its jollities? I do not know how far my readers will agree with me that to read it always must be a fresh pleasure; but in order that they may agree with me, if they can, I will give it to them entire. If there be one whom it does not please, he will like nothing that Thackeray ever wrote in verse. THE BALLAD OF BOUILLABAISSE. A street there is in Paris famous, For which no rhyme our language yields, Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is-- The New Street of the Little Fields; And here's an inn, not rich and splendid, But still in comfortable case; The which in youth I oft attended, To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse. This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is,-- A sort of soup, or broth, or brew Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace: All these you eat at Terré's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse. Indeed, a rich and savoury stew 'tis; And true philosophers, methinks, Who love all sorts of natural beauties, Should love good victuals and good drinks. And Cordelier or Benedictine Might gladly sure his lot embrace, Nor find a fast-day too afflicting Which served him up a Bouillabaisse. I wonder if the house still there is? Yes, here the lamp is, as before; The smiling red-cheeked écaillère is Still opening oysters at the door. Is Terré still alive and able? I recollect his droll grimace; He'd come and smile before your table, And hope you liked your Bouillabaisse. We enter,--nothing's changed or older. "How's Monsieur Terré, waiter, pray?" The waiter stares and shrugs his shoulder,-- "Monsieur is dead this many a day." "It is the lot of saint and sinner; So honest Terré's run his race." "What will Monsieur require for dinner?" "Say, do you still cook Bouillabaisse?" "Oh, oui, Monsieur," 's the waiter's answer, "Quel vin Monsieur desire-t-il?" "Tell me a good one." "That I can, sir: The chambertin with yellow seal." "So Terré's gone," I say, and sink in My old accustom'd corner-place; "He's done with feasting and with drinking, With Burgundy and Bouillabaisse." My old accustomed corner here is, The table still is in the nook; Ah! vanish'd many a busy year is This well-known chair since last I took. When first I saw ye, cari luoghi, I'd scarce a beard upon my face, And now a grizzled, grim old fogy, I sit and wait for Bouillabaisse. Where are you, old companions trusty, Of early days here met to dine? Come, waiter! quick, a flagon crusty; I'll pledge them in the good old wine. The kind old voices and old faces My memory can quick retrace; Around the board they take their places, And share the wine and Bouillabaisse. There's Jack has made a wondrous marriage; There's laughing Tom is laughing yet; There's brave Augustus drives his carriage; There's poor old Fred in the _Gazette_; O'er James's head the grass is growing. Good Lord! the world has wagged apace Since here we set the claret flowing, And drank, and ate the Bouillabaisse. Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting, In this same place,--but not alone. A fair young face was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me! There's no one now to share my cup. * * * * * I drink it as the Fates ordain it. Come fill it, and have done with rhymes; Fill up the lonely glass, and drain it In memory of dear old times. Welcome the wine, whate'er the seal is; And sit you down and say your grace With thankful heart, whate'er the meal is. Here comes the smoking Bouillabaisse. I am not disposed to say that Thackeray will hold a high place among English poets. He would have been the first to ridicule such an assumption made on his behalf. But I think that his verses will be more popular than those of many highly reputed poets, and that as years roll on they will gain rather than lose in public estimation. FOOTNOTES: [7] Chair--_i.e._ Chairman. [8] _I.e._ The P. and O. Company. CHAPTER IX. THACKERAY'S STYLE AND MANNER OF WORK. A novel in style should be easy, lucid, and of course grammatical. The same may be said of any book; but that which is intended to recreate should be easily understood,--for which purpose lucid narration is an essential. In matter it should be moral and amusing. In manner it may be realistic, or sublime, or ludicrous;--or it may be all these if the author can combine them. As to Thackeray's performance in style and matter I will say something further on. His manner was mainly realistic, and I will therefore speak first of that mode of expression which was peculiarly his own. Realism in style has not all the ease which seems to belong to it. It is the object of the author who affects it so to communicate with his reader that all his words shall seem to be natural to the occasion. We do not think the language of Dogberry natural, when he tells neighbour Seacole that "to write and read comes by nature." That is ludicrous. Nor is the language of Hamlet natural when he shows to his mother the portrait of his father; See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command. That is sublime. Constance is natural when she turns away from the Cardinal, declaring that He talks to me that never had a son. In one respect both the sublime and ludicrous are easier than the realistic. They are not required to be true. A man with an imagination and culture may feign either of them without knowing the ways of men. To be realistic you must know accurately that which you describe. How often do we find in novels that the author makes an attempt at realism and falls into a bathos of absurdity, because he cannot use appropriate language? "No human being ever spoke like that," we say to ourselves,--while we should not question the naturalness of the production, either in the grand or the ridiculous. And yet in very truth the realistic must not be true,--but just so far removed from truth as to suit the erroneous idea of truth which the reader may be supposed to entertain. For were a novelist to narrate a conversation between two persons of fair but not high education, and to use the ill-arranged words and fragments of speech which are really common in such conversations, he would seem to have sunk to the ludicrous, and to be attributing to the interlocutors a mode of language much beneath them. Though in fact true, it would seem to be far from natural. But on the other hand, were he to put words grammatically correct into the mouths of his personages, and to round off and to complete the spoken sentences, the ordinary reader would instantly feel such a style to be stilted and unreal. This reader would not analyse it, but would in some dim but sufficiently critical manner be aware that his author was not providing him with a naturally spoken dialogue. To produce the desired effect the narrator must go between the two. He must mount somewhat above the ordinary conversational powers of such persons as are to be represented,--lest he disgust. But he must by no means soar into correct phraseology,--lest he offend. The realistic,--by which we mean that which shall seem to be real,--lies between the two, and in reaching it the writer has not only to keep his proper distance on both sides, but has to maintain varying distances in accordance with the position, mode of life, and education of the speakers. Lady Castlewood in _Esmond_ would not have been properly made to speak with absolute precision; but she goes nearer to the mark than her more ignorant lord, the viscount; less near, however, than her better-educated kinsman, Henry Esmond. He, however, is not made to speak altogether by the card, or he would be unnatural. Nor would each of them speak always in the same strain, but they would alter their language according to their companion,--according even to the hour of the day. All this the reader unconsciously perceives, and will not think the language to be natural unless the proper variations be there. In simple narrative the rule is the same as in dialogue, though it does not admit of the same palpable deviation from correct construction. The story of any incident, to be realistic, will admit neither of sesquipedalian grandeur nor of grotesque images. The one gives an idea of romance and the other of burlesque, to neither of which is truth supposed to appertain. We desire to soar frequently, and then we try romance. We desire to recreate ourselves with the easy and droll. Dulce est desipere in loco. Then we have recourse to burlesque. But in neither do we expect human nature. I cannot but think that in the hands of the novelist the middle course is the most powerful. Much as we may delight in burlesque, we cannot claim for it the power of achieving great results. So much I think will be granted. For the sublime we look rather to poetry than to prose, and though I will give one or two instances just now in which it has been used with great effect in prose fiction, it does not come home to the heart, teaching a lesson, as does the realistic. The girl who reads is touched by Lucy Ashton, but she feels herself to be convinced of the facts as to Jeanie Deans, and asks herself whether she might not emulate them. Now as to the realism of Thackeray, I must rather appeal to my readers than attempt to prove it by quotation. Whoever it is that speaks in his pages, does it not seem that such a person would certainly have used such words on such an occasion? If there be need of examination to learn whether it be so or not, let the reader study all that falls from the mouth of Lady Castlewood through the novel called _Esmond_, or all that falls from the mouth of Beatrix. They are persons peculiarly situated,--noble women, but who have still lived much out of the world. The former is always conscious of a sorrow; the latter is always striving after an effect;--and both on this account are difficult of management. A period for the story has been chosen which is strange and unknown to us, and which has required a peculiar language. One would have said beforehand that whatever might be the charms of the book, it would not be natural. And yet the ear is never wounded by a tone that is false. It is not always the case that in novel reading the ear should be wounded because the words spoken are unnatural. Bulwer does not wound, though he never puts into the mouth of any of his persons words such as would have been spoken. They are not expected from him. It is something else that he provides. From Thackeray they are expected,--and from many others. But Thackeray never disappoints. Whether it be a great duke, such as he who was to have married Beatrix, or a mean chaplain, such as Tusher, or Captain Steele the humorist, they talk,--not as they would have talked probably, of which I am no judge,--but as we feel that they might have talked. We find ourselves willing to take it as proved because it is there, which is the strongest possible evidence of the realistic capacity of the writer. As to the sublime in novels, it is not to be supposed that any very high rank of sublimity is required to put such works within the pale of that definition. I allude to those in which an attempt is made to soar above the ordinary actions and ordinary language of life. We may take as an instance _The Mysteries of Udolpho_. That is intended to be sublime throughout. Even the writer never for a moment thought of descending to real life. She must have been untrue to her own idea of her own business had she done so. It is all stilted,--all of a certain altitude among the clouds. It has been in its time a popular book, and has had its world of readers. Those readers no doubt preferred the diluted romance of Mrs. Radcliff to the condensed realism of Fielding. At any rate they did not look for realism. _Pelham_ may be taken as another instance of the sublime, though there is so much in it that is of the world worldly, though an intentional fall to the ludicrous is often made in it. The personages talk in glittering dialogues, throwing about philosophy, science, and the classics, in a manner which is always suggestive and often amusing. The book is brilliant with intellect. But no word is ever spoken as it would have been spoken;--no detail is ever narrated as it would have occurred. Bulwer no doubt regarded novels as romantic, and would have looked with contempt on any junction of realism and romance, though, in varying his work, he did not think it beneath him to vary his sublimity with the ludicrous. The sublime in novels is no doubt most effective when it breaks out, as though by some burst of nature, in the midst of a story true to life. "If," said Evan Maccombich, "the Saxon gentlemen are laughing because a poor man such as me thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman nor the honour of a gentleman." That is sublime. And, again, when Balfour of Burley slaughters Bothwell, the death scene is sublime. "Die, bloodthirsty dog!" said Burley. "Die as thou hast lived! Die like the beasts that perish--hoping nothing, believing nothing!"----"And fearing nothing," said Bothwell. Horrible as is the picture, it is sublime. As is also that speech of Meg Merrilies, as she addresses Mr. Bertram, standing on the bank. "Ride your ways," said the gipsy; "ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram. This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain rooftree stand the faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh; see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan." That is romance, and reaches the very height of the sublime. That does not offend, impossible though it be that any old woman should have spoken such words, because it does in truth lift the reader up among the bright stars. It is thus that the sublime may be mingled with the realistic, if the writer has the power. Thackeray also rises in that way to a high pitch, though not in many instances. Romance does not often justify to him an absence of truth. The scene between Lady Castlewood and the Duke of Hamilton is one, when she explains to her child's suitor who Henry Esmond is. "My daughter may receive presents from the head of our house," says the lady, speaking up for her kinsman. "My daughter may thankfully take kindness from her father's, her mother's, her brother's dearest friend." The whole scene is of the same nature, and is evidence of Thackeray's capacity for the sublime. And again, when the same lady welcomes the same kinsman on his return from the wars, she rises as high. But as I have already quoted a part of the passage in the chapter on this novel, I will not repeat it here. It may perhaps be said of the sublime in novels,--which I have endeavoured to describe as not being generally of a high order,--that it is apt to become cold, stilted, and unsatisfactory. What may be done by impossible castles among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible heroes and heroines, and fraught with impossible horrors, _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ have shown us. But they require a patient reader, and one who can content himself with a long protracted and most unemotional excitement. The sublimity which is effected by sparkling speeches is better, if the speeches really have something in them beneath the sparkles. Those of Bulwer generally have. Those of his imitators are often without anything, the sparkles even hardly sparkling. At the best they fatigue; and a novel, if it fatigues, is unpardonable. Its only excuse is to be found in the amusement it affords. It should instruct also, no doubt, but it never will do so unless it hides its instruction and amuses. Scott understood all this, when he allowed himself only such sudden bursts as I have described. Even in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, which I do not regard as among the best of his performances, as he soars high into the sublime, so does he descend low into the ludicrous. In this latter division of pure fiction,--the burlesque, as it is commonly called, or the ludicrous,--Thackeray is quite as much at home as in the realistic, though, the vehicle being less powerful, he has achieved smaller results by it. Manifest as are the objects in his view when he wrote _The Hoggarty Diamond_ or _The Legend of the Rhine_, they were less important and less evidently effected than those attempted by _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_. Captain Shindy, the Snob, does not tell us so plainly what is not a gentleman as does Colonel Newcome what is. Nevertheless the ludicrous has, with Thackeray, been very powerful, and very delightful. In trying to describe what is done by literature of this class, it is especially necessary to remember that different readers are affected in a different way. That which is one man's meat is another man's poison. In the sublime, when the really grand has been reached, it is the reader's own fault if he be not touched. We know that many are indifferent to the soliloquies of Hamlet, but we do not hesitate to declare to ourselves that they are so because they lack the power of appreciating grand language. We do not scruple to attribute to those who are indifferent some inferiority of intelligence. And in regard to the realistic, when the truth of a well-told story or life-like character does not come home, we think that then, too, there is deficiency in the critical ability. But there is nothing necessarily lacking to a man because he does not enjoy _The Heathen Chinee_ or _The Biglow Papers_; and the man to whom these delights of American humour are leather and prunello may be of all the most enraptured by the wit of Sam Weller or the mock piety of Pecksniff. It is a matter of taste and not of intellect, as one man likes caviare after his dinner, while another prefers apple-pie; and the man himself cannot, or, as far as we can see, does not direct his own taste in the one matter more than in the other. Therefore I cannot ask others to share with me the delight which I have in the various and peculiar expressions of the ludicrous which are common to Thackeray. Some considerable portion of it consists in bad spelling. We may say that Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush, or C. FitzJeames De La Pluche, as he is afterwards called, would be nothing but for his "orthogwaphy so carefully inaccuwate." As I have before said, Mrs. Malaprop had seemed to have reached the height of this humour, and in having done so to have made any repetition unpalatable. But Thackeray's studied blundering is altogether different from that of Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop uses her words in a delightfully wrong sense. Yellowplush would be a very intelligible, if not quite an accurate writer, had he not made for himself special forms of English words altogether new to the eye. "My ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit; I may have been changed at nus; but I've always had gen'l'm'nly tastes through life, and have no doubt that I come of a gen'l'm'nly origum." We cannot admit that there is wit, or even humour, in bad spelling alone. Were it not that Yellowplush, with his bad spelling, had so much to say for himself, there would be nothing in it; but there is always a sting of satire directed against some real vice, or some growing vulgarity, which is made sharper by the absurdity of the language. In _The Diary of George IV._ there are the following reflections on a certain correspondence; "Wooden you phansy, now, that the author of such a letter, instead of writun about pipple of tip-top quality, was describin' Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin' to was a chased modist lady of honour and mother of a family? _O trumpery! o morris!_ as Homer says. This is a higeous pictur of manners, such as I weap to think of, as every morl man must weap." We do not wonder that when he makes his "ajew" he should have been called up to be congratulated on the score of his literary performances by his master, before the Duke, and Lord Bagwig, and Dr. Larner, and "Sawedwadgeorgeearllittnbulwig." All that Yellowplush says or writes are among the pearls which Thackeray was continually scattering abroad. But this of the distinguished footman was only one of the forms of the ludicrous which he was accustomed to use in the furtherance of some purpose which he had at heart. It was his practice to clothe things most revolting with an assumed grace and dignity, and to add to the weight of his condemnation by the astounding mendacity of the parody thus drawn. There was a grim humour in this which has been displeasing to some, as seeming to hold out to vice a hand which has appeared for too long a time to be friendly. As we are disposed to be not altogether sympathetic with a detective policeman who shall have spent a jolly night with a delinquent, for the sake of tracing home the suspected guilt to his late comrade, so are some disposed to be almost angry with our author, who seems to be too much at home with his rascals, and to live with them on familiar terms till we doubt whether he does not forget their rascality. _Barry Lyndon_ is the strongest example we have of this style of the ludicrous, and the critics of whom I speak have thought that our friendly relations with Barry have been too genial, too apparently genuine, so that it might almost be doubtful whether during the narrative we might not, at this or the other crisis, be rather with him than against him. "After all," the reader might say, on coming to that passage in which Barry defends his trade as a gambler,--a passage which I have quoted in speaking of the novel,--"after all, this man is more hero than scoundrel;" so well is the burlesque humour maintained, so well does the scoundrel hide his own villany. I can easily understand that to some it should seem too long drawn out. To me it seems to be the perfection of humour,--and of philosophy. If such a one as Barry Lyndon, a man full of intellect, can be made thus to love and cherish his vice, and to believe in its beauty, how much more necessary is it to avoid the footsteps which lead to it? But, as I have said above, there is no standard by which to judge of the excellence of the ludicrous as there is of the sublime, and even the realistic. No writer ever had a stronger proclivity towards parody than Thackeray; and we may, I think, confess that there is no form of literary drollery more dangerous. The parody will often mar the gem of which it coarsely reproduces the outward semblance. The word "damaged," used instead of "damask," has destroyed to my ear for ever the music of one of the sweetest passages in Shakespeare. But it must be acknowledged of Thackeray that, fond as he is of this branch of humour, he has done little or no injury by his parodies. They run over with fun, but are so contrived that they do not lessen the flavour of the original. I have given in one of the preceding chapters a little set of verses of his own, called _The Willow Tree_, and his own parody on his own work. There the reader may see how effective a parody may be in destroying the sentiment of the piece parodied. But in dealing with other authors he has been grotesque without being severely critical, and has been very like, without making ugly or distasteful that which he has imitated. No one who has admired _Coningsby_ will admire it the less because of _Codlingsby_. Nor will the undoubted romance of _Eugene Aram_ be lessened in the estimation of any reader of novels by the well-told career of _George de Barnwell_. One may say that to laugh _Ivanhoe_ out of face, or to lessen the glory of that immortal story, would be beyond the power of any farcical effect. Thackeray in his _Rowena and Rebecca_ certainly had no such purpose. Nothing of _Ivanhoe_ is injured, nothing made less valuable than it was before, yet, of all prose parodies in the language, it is perhaps the most perfect. Every character is maintained, every incident has a taste of Scott. It has the twang of _Ivanhoe_ from beginning to end, and yet there is not a word in it by which the author of _Ivanhoe_ could have been offended. But then there is the purpose beyond that of the mere parody. Prudish women have to be laughed at, and despotic kings, and parasite lords and bishops. The ludicrous alone is but poor fun; but when the ludicrous has a meaning, it can be very effective in the hands of such a master as this. "He to die!" resumed the bishop. "He a mortal like to us! Death was not for him intended, though _communis omnibus_. Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and cavil thus!" So much I have said of the manner in which Thackeray did his work, endeavouring to represent human nature as he saw it, so that his readers should learn to love what is good, and to hate what is evil. As to the merits of his style, it will be necessary to insist on them the less, because it has been generally admitted to be easy, lucid, and grammatical. I call that style easy by which the writer has succeeded in conveying to the reader that which the reader is intended to receive with the least possible amount of trouble to him. I call that style lucid which conveys to the reader most accurately all that the writer wishes to convey on any subject. The two virtues will, I think, be seen to be very different. An author may wish to give an idea that a certain flavour is bitter. He shall leave a conviction that it is simply disagreeable. Then he is not lucid. But he shall convey so much as that, in such a manner as to give the reader no trouble in arriving at the conclusion. Therefore he is easy. The subject here suggested is as little complicated as possible; but in the intercourse which is going on continually between writers and readers, affairs of all degrees of complication are continually being discussed, of a nature so complicated that the inexperienced writer is puzzled at every turn to express himself, and the altogether inartistic writer fails to do so. Who among writers has not to acknowledge that he is often unable to tell all that he has to tell? Words refuse to do it for him. He struggles and stumbles and alters and adds, but finds at last that he has gone either too far or not quite far enough. Then there comes upon him the necessity of choosing between two evils. He must either give up the fulness of his thought, and content himself with presenting some fragment of it in that lucid arrangement of words which he affects; or he must bring out his thought with ambages; he must mass his sentences inconsequentially; he must struggle up hill almost hopelessly with his phrases,--so that at the end the reader will have to labour as he himself has laboured, or else to leave behind much of the fruit which it has been intended that he should garner. It is the ill-fortune of some to be neither easy or lucid; and there is nothing more wonderful in the history of letters than the patience of readers when called upon to suffer under the double calamity. It is as though a man were reading a dialogue of Plato, understanding neither the subject nor the language. But it is often the case that one has to be sacrificed to the other. The pregnant writer will sometimes solace himself by declaring that it is not his business to supply intelligence to the reader; and then, in throwing out the entirety of his thought, will not stop to remember that he cannot hope to scatter his ideas far and wide unless he can make them easily intelligible. Then the writer who is determined that his book shall not be put down because it is troublesome, is too apt to avoid the knotty bits and shirk the rocky turns, because he cannot with ease to himself make them easy to others. If this be acknowledged, I shall be held to be right in saying not only that ease and lucidity in style are different virtues, but that they are often opposed to each other. They may, however, be combined, and then the writer will have really learned the art of writing. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. It is to be done, I believe, in all languages. A man by art and practice shall at least obtain such a masterhood over words as to express all that he thinks, in phrases that shall be easily understood. In such a small space as can here be allowed, I cannot give instances to prove that this has been achieved by Thackeray. Nor would instances prove the existence of the virtue, though instances might the absence. The proof lies in the work of the man's life, and can only become plain to those who have read his writings. I must refer readers to their own experiences, and ask them whether they have found themselves compelled to study passages in Thackeray in order that they might find a recondite meaning, or whether they have not been sure that they and the author have together understood all that there was to understand in the matter. Have they run backward over the passages, and then gone on, not quite sure what the author has meant? If not, then he has been easy and lucid. We have not had it so easy with all modern writers, nor with all that are old. I may best perhaps explain my meaning by taking something written long ago; something very valuable, in order that I may not damage my argument by comparing the easiness of Thackeray with the harshness of some author who has in other respects failed of obtaining approbation. If you take the play of _Cymbeline_ you will, I think, find it to be anything but easy reading. Nor is Shakespeare always lucid. For purposes of his own he will sometimes force his readers to doubt his meaning, even after prolonged study. It has ever been so with _Hamlet_. My readers will not, I think, be so crossgrained with me as to suppose that I am putting Thackeray as a master of style above Shakespeare. I am only endeavouring to explain by reference to the great master the condition of literary production which he attained. Whatever Thackeray says, the reader cannot fail to understand; and whatever Thackeray attempts to communicate, he succeeds in conveying. That he is grammatical I must leave to my readers' judgment, with a simple assertion in his favour. There are some who say that grammar,--by which I mean accuracy of composition, in accordance with certain acknowledged rules,--is only a means to an end; and that, if a writer can absolutely achieve the end by some other mode of his own, he need not regard the prescribed means. If a man can so write as to be easily understood, and to convey lucidly that which he has to convey without accuracy of grammar, why should he subject himself to unnecessary trammels? Why not make a path for himself, if the path so made will certainly lead him whither he wishes to go? The answer is, that no other path will lead others whither he wishes to carry them but that which is common to him and to those others. It is necessary that there should be a ground equally familiar to the writer and to his readers. If there be no such common ground, they will certainly not come into full accord. There have been recusants who, by a certain acuteness of their own, have partly done so,--wilful recusants; but they have been recusants, not to the extent of discarding grammar,--which no writer could do and not be altogether in the dark,--but so far as to have created for themselves a phraseology which has been picturesque by reason of its illicit vagaries; as a woman will sometimes please ill-instructed eyes and ears by little departures from feminine propriety. They have probably laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to be correct, and have achieved at the best but a short-lived success;--as is the case also with the unconventional female. The charm of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder. And there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been altogether known to them. Among those very dear to me in English literature, one or two might be named of either sort, whose works, though they have that in them which will insure to them a long life, will become from year to year less valuable and less venerable, because their authors have either scorned or have not known that common ground of language on which the author and his readers should stand together. My purport here is only with Thackeray, and I say that he stands always on that common ground. He quarrels with none of the laws. As the lady who is most attentive to conventional propriety may still have her own fashion of dress and her own mode of speech, so had Thackeray very manifestly his own style; but it is one the correctness of which has never been impugned. I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them; but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers--Does not _The Rambler_ taste of Johnson; _The Decline and Fall_, of Gibbon; _The Middle Ages_, of Hallam; _The History of England_, of Macaulay; and _The Invasion of the Crimea_, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine tread of _The Saturday_, and the precise toe of _The Spectator_? I have sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of any,--writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast." Thackeray, too, has a strong flavour of Thackeray. I am inclined to think that his most besetting sin in style,--the little earmark by which he is most conspicuous,--is a certain affected familiarity. He indulges too frequently in little confidences with individual readers, in which pretended allusions to himself are frequent. "What would you do? what would you say now, if you were in such a position?" he asks. He describes this practice of his in the preface to _Pendennis_. "It is a sort of confidential talk between writer and reader.... In the course of his volubility the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." In the short contributions to periodicals on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses and conversations were natural and efficacious; but in a larger work of fiction they cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may aspire. You feel that each morsel as you read it is a detached bit, and that it has all been written in detachments. The book is robbed of its integrity by a certain good-humoured geniality of language, which causes the reader to be almost too much at home with his author. There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have been sometimes inclined to think that our author has sometimes failed to stand up for himself with sufficiency of "personal deportment." In other respects Thackeray's style is excellent. As I have said before, the reader always understands his words without an effort, and receives all that the author has to give. There now remains to be discussed the matter of our author's work. The manner and the style are but the natural wrappings in which the goods have been prepared for the market. Of these goods it is no doubt true that unless the wrappings be in some degree meritorious the article will not be accepted at all; but it is the kernel which we seek, which, if it be not of itself sweet and digestible, cannot be made serviceable by any shell however pretty or easy to be cracked. I have said previously that it is the business of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will go further, and will add, having been for many years a most prolific writer of novels myself, that I regard him who can put himself into close communication with young people year after year without making some attempt to do them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor your matter may be, however near you may come to that "foolishest of existing mortals," as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still, if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because the novelist amuses that he is thus influential. The sermon too often has no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse any one. I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can hardly do into her task-work; and there she is taught,--how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the suspicion of such tutorship. But he too will there learn either to speak the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten demeanour which too many professors of the craft give out as their dearest precepts. At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house now from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them almost indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own novel? Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed,--this inner confidence,--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and what thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young friend? This, which it will certainly be his duty to consider with so much care, will be the matter of his work. We know what was thought of such matter, when Lydia in the play was driven to the necessity of flinging "_Peregrine Pickle_ under the toilet," and thrusting "_Lord Aimwell_ under the sofa." We have got beyond that now, and are tolerably sure that our girls do not hide their novels. The more freely they are allowed, the more necessary is it that he who supplies shall take care that they are worthy of the trust that is given to them. Now let the reader ask himself what are the lessons which Thackeray has taught. Let him send his memory running back over all those characters of whom we have just been speaking, and ask himself whether any girl has been taught to be immodest, or any man unmanly, by what Thackeray has written. A novelist has two modes of teaching,--by good example or bad. It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be evil, therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages with whom we have been made well acquainted from our youth upwards, would have been omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the teaching is not more efficacious which comes from the evil example. What story was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine reticence, and the horrors of feminine evil-doing, than the fate of Effie Deans? The Templar would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has not encouraged others by the freedom of his life. Varney was utterly bad,--but though a gay courtier, he has enticed no others to go the way that he went. So it has been with Thackeray. His examples have been generally of that kind,--but they have all been efficacious in their teaching on the side of modesty and manliness, truth and simplicity. When some girl shall have traced from first to last the character of Beatrix, what, let us ask, will be the result on her mind? Beatrix was born noble, clever, beautiful, with certain material advantages, which it was within her compass to improve by her nobility, wit, and beauty. She was quite alive to that fact, and thought of those material advantages, to the utter exclusion, in our mind, of any idea of moral goodness. She realised it all, and told herself that that was the game she would play. "Twenty-five!" says she; "and in eight years no man has ever touched my heart!" That is her boast when she is about to be married,--her only boast of herself. "A most detestable young woman!" some will say. "An awful example!" others will add. Not a doubt of it. She proves the misery of her own career so fully that no one will follow it. The example is so awful that it will surely deter. The girl will declare to herself that not in that way will she look for the happiness which she hopes to enjoy; and the young man will say as he reads it, that no Beatrix shall touch his heart. You may go through all his characters with the same effect. Pendennis will be scorned because he is light; Warrington loved because he is strong and merciful; Dobbin will be honoured because he is unselfish; and the old colonel, though he be foolish, vain, and weak, almost worshipped because he is so true a gentleman. It is in the handling of questions such as these that we have to look for the matter of the novelist,--those moral lessons which he mixes up with his jam and his honey. I say that with Thackeray the physic is always curative and never poisonous. He may he admitted safely into that close fellowship, and be allowed to accompany the dear ones to their retreats. The girl will never become bold under his preaching, or taught to throw herself at men's heads. Nor will the lad receive a false flashy idea of what becomes a youth, when he is first about to take his place among men. As to that other question, whether Thackeray be amusing as well as salutary, I must leave it to public opinion. There is now being brought out of his works a more splendid edition than has ever been produced in any age or any country of the writings of such an author. A certain fixed number of copies only is being issued, and each copy will cost £33 12s. when completed. It is understood that a very large proportion of the edition has been already bought or ordered. Cost, it will be said, is a bad test of excellence. It will not prove the merit of a book any more than it will of a horse. But it is proof of the popularity of the book. Print and illustrate and bind up some novels how you will, no one will buy them. Previous to these costly volumes, there have been two entire editions of his works since the author's death, one comparatively cheap and the other dear. Before his death his stories had been scattered in all imaginable forms. I may therefore assert that their charm has been proved by their popularity. There remains for us only this question,--whether the nature of Thackeray's works entitle him to be called a cynic. The word is one which is always used in a bad sense. "Of a dog; currish," is the definition which we get from Johnson,--quite correctly, and in accordance with its etymology. And he gives us examples. "How vilely does this cynic rhyme," he takes from Shakespeare; and Addison speaks of a man degenerating into a cynic. That Thackeray's nature was soft and kindly,--gentle almost to a fault,--has been shown elsewhere. But they who have called him a cynic have spoken of him merely as a writer,--and as writer he has certainly taken upon himself the special task of barking at the vices and follies of the world around him. Any satirist might in the same way be called a cynic in so far as his satire goes. Swift was a cynic certainly. Pope was cynical when he was a satirist. Juvenal was all cynical, because he was all satirist. If that be what is meant, Thackeray was certainly a cynic. But that is not all that the word implies. It intends to go back beyond the work of the man, and to describe his heart. It says of any satirist so described that he has given himself up to satire, not because things have been evil, but because he himself has been evil. Hamlet is a satirist, whereas Thersites is a cynic. If Thackeray be judged after this fashion, the word is as inappropriate to the writer as to the man. But it has to be confessed that Thackeray did allow his intellect to be too thoroughly saturated with the aspect of the ill side of things. We can trace the operation of his mind from his earliest days, when he commenced his parodies at school; when he brought out _The Snob_ at Cambridge, when he sent _Yellowplush_ out upon the world as a satirist on the doings of gentlemen generally; when he wrote his _Catherine_, to show the vileness of the taste for what he would have called Newgate literature; and _The Hoggarty Diamond_, to attack bubble companies; and _Barry Lyndon_, to expose the pride which a rascal may take in his rascality. Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, Beatrix, both as a young and as an old woman, were written with the same purpose. There is a touch of satire in every drawing that he made. A jeer is needed for something that is ridiculous, scorn has to be thrown on something that is vile. The same feeling is to be found in every line of every ballad. VANITAS VANITATUM. Methinks the text is never stale, And life is every day renewing Fresh comments on the old old tale, Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin. Hark to the preacher, preaching still! He lifts his voice and cries his sermon, Here at St. Peter's of Cornhill, As yonder on the Mount of Hermon-- For you and me to heart to take (O dear beloved brother readers), To-day,--as when the good king spake Beneath the solemn Syrian cedars. It was just so with him always. He was "crying his sermon," hoping, if it might be so, to do something towards lessening the evils he saw around him. We all preach our sermon, but not always with the same earnestness. He had become so urgent in the cause, so loud in his denunciations, that he did not stop often to speak of the good things around him. Now and again he paused and blessed amid the torrent of his anathemas. There are Dobbin, and Esmond, and Colonel Newcome. But his anathemas are the loudest. It has been so I think nearly always with the eloquent preachers. I will insert here,--especially here at the end of this chapter, in which I have spoken of Thackeray's matter and manner of writing, because of the justice of the criticism conveyed,--the lines which Lord Houghton wrote on his death, and which are to be found in the February number of _The Cornhill_ of 1864. It was the first number printed after his death. I would add that, though no Dean applied for permission to bury Thackeray in Westminster Abbey, his bust was placed there without delay. What is needed by the nation in such a case is simply a lasting memorial there, where such memorials are most often seen and most highly honoured. But we can all of us sympathise with the feeling of the poet, writing immediately on the loss of such a friend: When one, whose nervous English verse Public and party hates defied, Who bore and bandied many a curse Of angry times,--when Dryden died, Our royal abbey's Bishop-Dean Waited for no suggestive prayer, But, ere one day closed o'er the scene, Craved, as a boon, to lay him there. The wayward faith, the faulty life, Vanished before a nation's pain. Panther and Hind forgot their strife, And rival statesmen thronged the fane. O gentle censor of our age! Prime master of our ampler tongue! Whose word of wit and generous page Were never wrath, except with wrong,-- Fielding--without the manner's dross, Scott--with a spirit's larger room, What Prelate deems thy grave his loss? What Halifax erects thy tomb? But, may be, he,--who so could draw The hidden great,--the humble wise, Yielding with them to God's good law, Makes the Pantheon where he lies. THE END. * * * * * CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature, and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performances. The Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty. The following are arranged for: SPENSER The Dean of St. Paul's. [In the Press. HUME Professor Huxley. [Ready. BUNYAN James Anthony Froude. JOHNSON Leslie Stephen. [Ready. GOLDSMITH William Black. [Ready. MILTON Mark Pattison. COWPER Goldwin Smith. SWIFT John Morley. BURNS Principal Shairp. [Ready. SCOTT Richard H. Hutton. [Ready. SHELLEY J. A. Symonds. [Ready. GIBBON J. C. Morison. [Ready. BYRON Professor Nichol. DEFOE W. Minto. [Ready. BURKE John Morley. HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jnr. CHAUCER A. W. Ward. THACKERAY Anthony Trollope. [Ready. ADAM SMITH Leonard H. Courtney, M.P. BENTLEY Professor R. C. Jebb. LANDOR Professor Sidney Colvin. POPE Leslie Stephen. WORDSWORTH F. W. H. Myers. SOUTHEY Professor E. Dowden. [OTHERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED.] OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. "The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr. Johnson. It could hardly have been done better; and it will convey to the readers for whom it is intended a juster estimate of Johnson than either of the two essays of Lord Macaulay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._ "We have come across few writers who have had a clearer insight into Johnson's character, or who have brought to the study of it a better knowledge of the time in which Johnson lived and the men whom he knew."--_Saturday Review._ "We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his poems and novels."--_Examiner._ "The tone of the volume is excellent throughout."--_Athenæum_ Review of "Scott." "As a clear, thoughtful, and attractive record of the life and works of the greatest among the world's historians, it deserves the highest praise."--_Examiner_ Review of "Gibbon." "The lovers of this great poet (Shelley) are to be congratulated at having at their command so fresh, clear, and intelligent a presentment of the subject, written by a man of adequate and wide culture."--_Athenæum._ "It may fairly be said that no one now living could have expounded Hume with more sympathy or with equal perspicuity."--_Athenæum._ "The story of Defoe's adventurous life may be followed with keen interest in Mr. Minto's attractive book."--_Academy._ * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: The poems WILLOW TREE No. I and WILLOW TREE No. II were side by side in the original. There are variant spellings of the following name: Jeames Yellowplush Mr. C. James Yellowplush Spellings were left as in the original. The following changes were made to the text: page 5--Thackeray's version was 'Cabbages, bright green cabbages,'{added missing ending quotation mark} and we thought it very witty. page 78--Then there are "Jeames on Time Bargings," "Jeames on the Gauge{original had Guage} Question," "Mr. Jeames again." page 131--"I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, Harry{original has Henry}, in the anthem when they sang page 143--The wife won't{original has wo'n't} come. page 143--On his way he{original has be} shoots a raven marvellously page 158--As Thackeray explains clearly what he means by a humorist, I may as well here repeat the passage:{punctuation missing in original} "If humour only meant laughter page 166--I will then let my reader go to the volume and study the lectures for himself.{no punctuation in original} "The poor fellow was never page 212--[Ready.{original is missing period--this occurred in the line referencing DEFOE and the line referencing THACKERAY} The following words used an "oe" ligature in the original: Boeuf chef-d'oevre Coeur manoeuvres 
2993	----	Transcribed from the 1921 Jonathan Cape edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org SAMUEL BUTLER: A Sketch, by Henry Festing Jones Author of _Samuel Butler_: _A Memoir_ Jonathan Cape Eleven Gower Street London _First published in_ "_The Humour of Homer & Other Essays_" _by Samuel Butler_ 1913. _Reissued by Jonathan Cape_ 1921 Samuel Butler: A Sketch Samuel Butler was born on the 4th December, 1835, at the Rectory, Langar, near Bingham, in Nottinghamshire. His father was the Rev. Thomas Butler, then Rector of Langar, afterwards one of the canons of Lincoln Cathedral, and his mother was Fanny Worsley, daughter of John Philip Worsley of Arno's Vale, Bristol, sugar-refiner. His grandfather was Dr. Samuel Butler, the famous headmaster of Shrewsbury School, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. The Butlers are not related either to the author of _Hudibras_, or to the author of the _Analogy_, or to the present Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Butler's father, after being at school at Shrewsbury under Dr. Butler, went up to St. John's College, Cambridge; he took his degree in 1829, being seventh classic and twentieth senior optime; he was ordained and returned to Shrewsbury, where he was for some time assistant master at the school under Dr. Butler. He married in 1832 and left Shrewsbury for Langar. He was a learned botanist, and made a collection of dried plants which he gave to the Town Museum of Shrewsbury. Butler's childhood and early life were spent at Langar among the surroundings of an English country rectory, and his education was begun by his father. In 1843, when he was only eight years old, the first great event in his life occurred; the family, consisting of his father and mother, his two sisters, his brother and himself, went to Italy. The South-Eastern Railway stopped at Ashford, whence they travelled to Dover in their own carriage; the carnage was put on board the steamboat, they crossed the Channel, and proceeded to Cologne, up the Rhine to Basle and on through Switzerland into Italy, through Parma, where Napoleon's widow was still reigning, Modena, Bologna, Florence, and so to Rome. They had to drive where there was no railway, and there was then none in all Italy except between Naples and Castellamare. They seemed to pass a fresh custom-house every day, but, by tipping the searchers, generally got through without inconvenience. The bread was sour and the Italian butter rank and cheesy--often uneatable. Beggars ran after the carriage all day long, and when they got nothing jeered at the travellers and called them heretics. They spent half the winter in Rome, and the children were taken up to the top of St. Peter's as a treat to celebrate their father's birthday. In the Sistine Chapel they saw the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI., and in the Corso, in broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a staircase like a sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man and his wife. The second half of the winter was spent in Naples. This early introduction to the land which he always thought of and often referred to as his second country made an ineffaceable impression upon him. In January, 1846, he went to school at Allesley, near Coventry, under the Rev. E. Gibson. He seldom referred to his life there, though sometimes he would say something that showed he had not forgotten all about it. For instance, in 1900, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, now the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed him a medieval missal, laboriously illuminated. He found that it fatigued him to look at it, and said that such books ought never to be made. Cockerell replied that such books relieved the tedium of divine service, on which Butler made a note ending thus: Give me rather a robin or a peripatetic cat like the one whose loss the parishioners of St. Clement Danes are still deploring. When I was at school at Allesley the boy who knelt opposite me at morning prayers, with his face not more than a yard away from mine, used to blow pretty little bubbles with his saliva which he would send sailing off the tip of his tongue like miniature soap bubbles; they very soon broke, but they had a career of a foot or two. I never saw anyone else able to get saliva bubbles right away from him and, though I have endeavoured for some fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never yet could start the bubble off my tongue without its bursting. Now things like this really do relieve the tedium of church, but no missal that I have ever seen will do anything except increase it. In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H. Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury are reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough in _The Way of All Flesh_, Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy. During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went straight to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of other composers had only awakened and intensified. He became as one of the listening brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the chorded shell" in the _Song for Saint Cecilia's Day_: Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of double pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he ever asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to bring _Solomon_ that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of "With thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often tried to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up--they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the _Messiah_, failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could forgive the last two for having led music astray from the Handel tradition, and paved the road from Bach to Beethoven. Everything connected with Handel interested him. He remembered old Mr. Brooke, Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been present at the Handel Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss Susannah Apthorp, of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon Handel's knee. He often regretted that these were his only links with "the greatest of all composers." Besides his love for Handel he had a strong liking for drawing, and, during the winter of 1853-4, his family again took him to Italy, where, being now eighteen, he looked on the works of the old masters with intelligence. In October, 1854, he went into residence at St. John's College, Cambridge. He showed no aptitude for any particular branch of academic study, nevertheless he impressed his friends as being likely to make his mark. Just as he used reminiscences of his own schooldays at Shrewsbury for Ernest's life at Roughborough, so he used reminiscences of his own Cambridge days for those of Ernest. When the Simeonites, in _The Way of All Flesh_, "distributed tracts, dropping them at night in good men's letter boxes while they slept, their tracts got burnt or met with even worse contumely." Ernest Pontifex went so far as to parody one of these tracts and to get a copy of the parody "dropped into each of the Simeonites' boxes." Ernest did this in the novel because Butler had done it in real life. Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, of the University Library, has found, among the Cambridge papers of the late J. Willis Clark's collection, three printed pieces belonging to the year 1855 bearing on the subject. He speaks of them in an article headed "Samuel Butler and the Simeonites," and signed A. T. B. in the _Cambridge Magazine_, 1st March, 1913; the first is "a genuine Simeonite tract; the other two are parodies. All three are anonymous. At the top of the second parody is written 'By S. Butler, March 31.'" The article gives extracts from the genuine tract and the whole of Butler's parody. Besides parodying Simeonite tracts, Butler wrote various other papers during his undergraduate days, some of which, preserved by one of his contemporaries, who remained a lifelong friend, the Rev. Canon Joseph M'Cormick, now Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, are reproduced in _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912). He also steered the Lady Margaret first boat, and Canon M'Cormick told me of a mishap that occurred on the last night of the races in 1857. Lady Margaret had been head of the river since 1854, Canon M'Cormick was rowing 5, Philip Pennant Pearson (afterwards P. Pennant) was 7, Canon Kynaston, of Durham (whose name formerly was Snow), was stroke, and Butler was cox. When the cox let go of the bung at starting, the rope caught in his rudder lines, and Lady Margaret was nearly bumped by Second Trinity. They escaped, however, and their pursuers were so much exhausted by their efforts to catch them that they were themselves bumped by First Trinity at the next corner. Butler wrote home about it: 11 March, 1857. Dear Mamma: My foreboding about steering was on the last day nearly verified by an accident which was more deplorable than culpable the effects of which would have been ruinous had not the presence of mind of No. 7 in the boat rescued us from the very jaws of defeat. The scene is one which never can fade from my remembrance and will be connected always with the gentlemanly conduct of the crew in neither using opprobrious language nor gesture towards your unfortunate son but treating him with the most graceful forbearance; for in most cases when an accident happens which in itself is but slight, but is visited with serious consequences, most people get carried away with the impression created by the last so as to entirely forget the accidental nature of the cause and if we had been quite bumped I should have been ruined, as it is I get praise for coolness and good steering as much as and more than blame for my accident and the crew are so delighted at having rowed a race such as never was seen before that they are satisfied completely. All the spectators saw the race and were delighted; another inch and I should never have held up my head again. One thing is safe, it will never happen again. The _Eagle_, "a magazine supported by members of St. John's College," issued its first number in the Lent term of 1858; it contains an article by Butler "On English Composition and Other Matters," signed "Cellarius": Most readers will have anticipated me in admitting that a man should be clear of his meaning before he endeavours to give it any kind of utterance, and that, having made up his mind what to say, the less thought he takes how to say it, more than briefly, pointedly and plainly, the better. From this it appears that, when only just over twenty-two, Butler had already discovered and adopted those principles of writing from which he never departed. In the fifth number of the _Eagle_ is an article, "Our Tour," also signed "Cellarius"; it is an account of a tour made in June, 1857, with a friend whose name he Italianized into Giuseppe Verdi, through France into North Italy, and was written, so he says, to show how they got so much into three weeks and spent only 25 pounds; they did not, however, spend quite so much, for the article goes on, after bringing them back to England, "Next day came safely home to dear old St. John's, cash in hand 7d." {1} Butler worked hard with Shilleto, an old pupil of his grandfather, and was bracketed 12th in the Classical Tripos of 1858. Canon M'Cormick told me that he would no doubt have been higher but for the fact that he at first intended to go out in mathematics; it was only during the last year of his time that he returned to the classics, and his being so high as he was spoke well for the classical education of Shrewsbury. It had always been an understood thing that he was to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman; accordingly, after taking his degree, he went to London and began to prepare for ordination, living and working among the poor as lay assistant under the Rev. Philip Perring, Curate of St. James's, Piccadilly, an old pupil of Dr. Butler at Shrewsbury. {2} Placed among such surroundings, he felt bound to think out for himself many theological questions which at this time were first presented to him, and, the conclusion being forced upon him that he could not believe in the efficacy of infant baptism, he declined to be ordained. It was now his desire to become an artist; this, however, did not meet with the approval of his family, and he returned to Cambridge to try for pupils and, if possible, to get a fellowship. He liked being at Cambridge, but there were few pupils and, as there seemed to be little chance of a fellowship, his father wished him to come down and adopt some profession. A long correspondence took place in the course of which many alternatives were considered. There are letters about his becoming a farmer in England, a tutor, a homoepathic doctor, an artist, or a publisher, and the possibilities of the army, the bar, and diplomacy. Finally it was decided that he should emigrate to New Zealand. His passage was paid, and he was to sail in the _Burmah_, but a cousin of his received information about this vessel which caused him, much against his will, to get back his passage money and take a berth in the _Roman Emperor_, which sailed from Gravesend on one of the last days of September, 1859. On that night, for the first time in his life, he did not say his prayers. "I suppose the sense of change was so great that it shook them quietly off. I was not then a sceptic; I had got as far as disbelief in infant baptism, but no further. I felt no compunction of conscience, however, about leaving off my morning and evening prayers--simply I could no longer say them." The _Roman Emperor_, after a voyage every incident of which interested him deeply, arrived outside Port Lyttelton. The captain shouted to the pilot who came to take them in: "Has the _Robert Small_ arrived?" "No," replied the pilot, "nor yet the _Burmah_." And Butler, writing home to his people, adds the comment: "You may imagine what I felt." The _Burmah_ was never heard of again. He spent some time looking round, considering what to do and how to employ the money with which his father was ready to supply him, and determined upon sheep-farming. He made several excursions looking for country, and ultimately took up a run which is still called Mesopotamia, the name he gave it because it is situated among the head-waters of the Rangitata. It was necessary to have a horse, and he bought one for 55 pounds, which was not considered dear. He wrote home that the horse's name was "Doctor": "I hope he is a Homoeopathist." From this, and from the fact that he had already contemplated becoming a homoeopathic doctor himself, I conclude that he had made the acquaintance of Dr. Robert Ellis Dudgeon, the eminent homoeopathist, while he was doing parish work in London. After his return to England Dr. Dudgeon was his medical adviser, and remained one of his most intimate friends until the end of his life. Doctor, the horse, is introduced into _Erewhon Revisited_; the shepherd in Chapter XXVI tells John Hicks that Doctor "would pick fords better than that gentleman could, I know, and if the gentleman fell off him he would just stay stock still." Butler carried on his run for about four and a half years, and the open- air life agreed with him; he ascribed to this the good health he afterwards enjoyed. The following, taken from a notebook he kept in the colony and destroyed, gives a glimpse of one side of his life there; he preserved the note because it recalled New Zealand so vividly. April, 1861. It is Sunday. We rose later than usual. There are five of us sleeping in the hut. I sleep in a bunk on one side of the fire; Mr. Haast, {3} a German who is making a geological survey of the province, sleeps upon the opposite one; my bullock-driver and hut-keeper have two bunks at the far end of the hut, along the wall, while my shepherd lies in the loft among the tea and sugar and flour. It was a fine morning, and we turned out about seven o'clock. The usual mutton and bread for breakfast with a pudding made of flour and water baked in the camp oven after a joint of meat--Yorkshire pudding, but without eggs. While we were at breakfast a robin perched on the table and sat there a good while pecking at the sugar. We went on breakfasting with little heed to the robin, and the robin went on pecking with little heed to us. After breakfast Pey, my bullock-driver, went to fetch the horses up from a spot about two miles down the river, where they often run; we wanted to go pig-hunting. I go into the garden and gather a few peascods for seed till the horses should come up. Then Cook, the shepherd, says that a fire has sprung up on the other side of the river. Who could have lit it? Probably someone who had intended coming to my place on the preceding evening and has missed his way, for there is no track of any sort between here and Phillips's. In a quarter of an hour he lit another fire lower down, and by that time, the horses having come up, Haast and myself--remembering how Dr. Sinclair had just been drowned so near the same spot--think it safer to ride over to him and put him across the river. The river was very low and so clear that we could see every stone. On getting to the river-bed we lit a fire and did the same on leaving it; our tracks would guide anyone over the intervening ground. Besides his occupation with the sheep, he found time to play the piano, to read and to write. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are two copies of the Greek Testament, very fully annotated by him at the University and in the colony. He also read the _Origin of Species_, which, as everyone knows, was published in 1859. He became "one of Mr. Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers, and wrote a philosophic dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the _Origin of Species_" (_Unconscious Memory_, close of Chapter I). This dialogue, unsigned, was printed in the _Press_, Canterbury, New Zealand, on 20th December, 1862. A copy of the paper was sent to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to a, presumably, English editor with a letter, now in the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, speaking of the dialogue as "remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate an account of Mr. D's theory." It is possible that Butler himself sent the newspaper containing his dialogue to Mr. Darwin; if so he did not disclose his name, for Darwin says in his letter that he does not know who the author was. Butler was closely connected with the _Press_, which was founded by James Edward FitzGerald, the first Superintendent of the Province, in May, 1861; he frequently contributed to its pages, and once, during FitzGerald's absence, had charge of it for a short time, though he was never its actual editor. The _Press_ reprinted the dialogue and the correspondence which followed its original appearance on 8th June, 1912. On 13th June, 1863, the _Press_ printed a letter by Butler signed "Cellarius" and headed "Darwin among the Machines," reprinted in _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912). The letter begins: "Sir: There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances"; and goes on to say that, as the vegetable kingdom was developed from the mineral, and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, "so now, in the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types of the race." He then speaks of the minute members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of the thirteenth century. Then comes the question: Who will be man's successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate. In 1863 Butler's family published in his name _A First Year in Canterbury Settlement_, which, as the preface states, was compiled from his letters home, his journal and extracts from two papers contributed to the _Eagle_. These two papers had appeared in the _Eagle_ as three articles entitled "Our Emigrant" and signed "Cellarius." The proof-sheets of the book went out to New Zealand for correction and were sent back in the Colombo, which was as unfortunate as the _Burmah_, for she was wrecked. The proofs, however, were fished up, though so nearly washed out as to be almost undecipherable. Butler would have been just as well pleased if they had remained at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, for he never liked the book and always spoke of it as being full of youthful priggishness; but I think he was a little hard upon it. Years afterwards, in one of his later books, after quoting two passages from Mr. Grant Allen and pointing out why he considered the second to be a recantation of the first, he wrote: "When Mr. Allen does make stepping-stones of his dead selves he jumps upon them to some tune." And he was perhaps a little inclined to treat his own dead self too much in the same spirit. Butler did very well with the sheep, sold out in 1864, and returned via Callao to England. He travelled with three friends whose acquaintance he had made in the colony; one was Charles Paine Pauli, to whom he dedicated _Life and Habit_. He arrived in August, 1864, in London, where he took chambers consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, a painting-room and a pantry, at 15, Clifford's Inn, second floor (north). The net financial result of the sheep-farming and the selling out was that he practically doubled his capital, that is to say he had about 8,000 pounds. This he left in New Zealand, invested on mortgage at 10 per cent., the then current rate in the colony; it produced more than enough for him to live upon in the very simple way that suited him best, and life in the Inns of Court resembles life at Cambridge in that it reduces the cares of housekeeping to a minimum; it suited him so well that he never changed his rooms, remaining there thirty-eight years till his death. He was now his own master and able at last to turn to painting. He studied at the art school in Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, which had formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler's time, was being carried on by Francis Stephen Cary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby, and is well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb. Among his fellow- students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Cary was a boy and there was a talk at his father's house as to what profession he should take up, Lamb, who was present, said: "I should make him an apo-po-pothe-Cary." They used to repeat this story freely among themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed. Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist F. S. Cary was can see his picture of Charles and Mary Lamb in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1865 Butler sent from London to New Zealand an article entitled "Lucubratio Ebria," which was published in the _Press_ of 29th July, 1865. It treated machines from a point of view different from that adopted in "Darwin among the Machines," and was one of the steps that led to _Erewhon_ and ultimately to _Life and Habit_. The article is reproduced in _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912). Butler also studied art at South Kensington, but by 1867 he had begun to go to Heatherley's School of Art in Newman Street, where he continued going for many years. He made a number of friends at Heatherley's, and among them Miss Eliza Mary Anne Savage. There also he first met Charles Gogin, who, in 1896, painted the portrait of Butler which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. He described himself as an artist in the Post Office Directory, and between 1868 and 1876 exhibited at the Royal Academy about a dozen pictures, of which the most important was "Mr. Heatherley's Holiday," hung on the line in 1874. He left it by his will to his college friend Jason Smith, whose representatives, after his death, in 1910, gave it to the nation, and it is now in the National Gallery of British Art. Mr. Heatherley never went away for a holiday; he once had to go out of town on business and did not return till the next day; one of the students asked him how he had got on, saying no doubt he had enjoyed the change and that he must have found it refreshing to sleep for once out of London. "No," said Heatherley, "I did not like it. Country air has no body." The consequence was that, whenever there was a holiday and the school was shut, Heatherley employed the time in mending the skeleton; Butler's picture represents him so engaged in a corner of the studio. In this way he got his model for nothing. Sometimes he hung up a looking-glass near one of his windows and painted his own portrait. Many of these he painted out, but after his death we found a little store of them in his rooms, some of the early ones very curious. Of the best of them one is now at Canterbury, New Zealand, one at St. John's College, Cambridge, and one at the Schools, Shrewsbury. This is Butler's own account of himself, taken from a letter to Sir Julius von Haast; although written in 1865 it is true of his mode of life for many years: I have been taking lessons in painting ever since I arrived. I was always very fond of it and mean to stick to it; it suits me and I am not without hopes that I shall do well at it. I live almost the life of a recluse, seeing very few people and going nowhere that I can help--I mean in the way of parties and so forth; if my friends had their way they would fritter away my time without any remorse; but I made a regular stand against it from the beginning and so, having my time pretty much in my own hands, work hard; I find, as I am sure you must find, that it is next to impossible to combine what is commonly called society and work. But the time saved from society was not all devoted to painting. He modified his letter to the _Press_ about "Darwin among the Machines" and, so modified, it appeared in 1865 as "The Mechanical Creation" in the _Reasoner_, a paper then published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. And his mind returned to the considerations which had determined him to decline to be ordained. In 1865 he printed anonymously a pamphlet which he had begun in New Zealand, the result of his study of the Greek Testament, entitled _The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically examined_. After weighing this evidence and comparing one account with another, he came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not die upon the cross. It is improbable that a man officially executed should escape death, but the alternative, that a man actually dead should return to life, seemed to Butler more improbable still and unsupported by such evidence as he found in the gospels. From this evidence he concluded that Christ swooned and recovered consciousness after his body had passed into the keeping of Joseph of Arimathaea. He did not suppose fraud on the part of the first preachers of Christianity; they sincerely believed that Christ died and rose again. Joseph and Nicodemus probably knew the truth but kept silence. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle was never hereafter absent from Butler's mind. In 1869, having been working too hard, he went abroad for a long change. On his way back, at the Albergo La Luna, in Venice, he met an elderly Russian lady in whose company he spent most of his time there. She was no doubt impressed by his versatility and charmed, as everyone always was, by his conversation and original views on the many subjects that interested him. We may be sure he told her all about himself and what he had done and was intending to do. At the end of his stay, when he was taking leave of her, she said: "Et maintenant, Monsieur, vous allez creer," meaning, as he understood her, that he had been looking long enough at the work of others and should now do something of his own. This sank into him and pained him. He was nearly thirty-five, and hitherto all had been admiration, vague aspiration and despair; he had produced in painting nothing but a few sketches and studies, and in literature only a few ephemeral articles, a collection of youthful letters and a pamphlet on the Resurrection; moreover, to none of his work had anyone paid the slightest attention. This was a poor return for all the money which had been spent upon his education, as Theobald would have said in _The Way of All Flesh_. He returned home dejected, but resolved that things should be different in the future. While in this frame of mind he received a visit from one of his New Zealand friends, the late Sir F. Napier Broome, afterwards Governor of Western Australia, who incidentally suggested his rewriting his New Zealand articles. The idea pleased him; it might not be creating, but at least it would be doing something. So he set to work on Sundays and in the evenings, as relaxation from his profession of painting, and, taking his New Zealand article, "Darwin among the Machines," and another, "The World of the Unborn," as a starting-point and helping himself with a few sentences from _A First Year in Canterbury Settlement_, he gradually formed _Erewhon_. He sent the MS. bit by bit, as it was written, to Miss Savage for her criticism and approval. He had the usual difficulty about finding a publisher. Chapman and Hall refused the book on the advice of George Meredith, who was then their reader, and in the end he published it at his own expense through Messrs. Trubner. Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell told me that in 1912 Mr. Bertram Dobell, second- hand bookseller of Charing Cross Road, offered a copy of _Erewhon_ for 1 pounds 10s.; it was thus described in his catalogue: "Unique copy with the following note in the author's handwriting on the half-title: 'To Miss E. M. A. Savage this first copy of _Erewhon_ with the author's best thanks for many invaluable suggestions and corrections.'" When Mr. Cockerell inquired for the book it was sold. After Miss Savage's death in 1885 all Butler's letters to her were returned to him, including the letter he wrote when he sent her this copy of _Erewhon_. He gave her the first copy issued of all his books that were published in her lifetime, and, no doubt, wrote an inscription in each. If the present possessors of any of them should happen to read this sketch I hope they will communicate with me, as I should like to see these books. I should also like to see some numbers of the _Drawing-Room Gazette_, which about this time belonged to or was edited by a Mrs. Briggs. Miss Savage wrote a review of _Erewhon_, which appeared in the number for 8th June, 1872, and Butler quoted a sentence from her review among the press notices in the second edition. She persuaded him to write for Mrs. Briggs notices of concerts at which Handel's music was performed. In 1901 he made a note on one of his letters that he was thankful there were no copies of the _Drawing-Room Gazette_ in the British Museum, meaning that he did not want people to read his musical criticisms; nevertheless, I hope some day to come across back numbers containing his articles. The opening of _Erewhon_ is based upon Butler's colonial experiences; some of the descriptions remind one of passages in _A First Year in Canterbury Settlement_, where he speaks of the excursions he made with Doctor when looking for sheep-country. The walk over the range as far as the statues is taken from the Upper Rangitata district, with some alterations; but the walk down from the statues into Erewhon is reminiscent of the Leventina Valley in the Canton Ticino. The great chords, which are like the music moaned by the statues are from the prelude to the first of Handel's _Trois Lecons_; he used to say: "One feels them in the diaphragm--they are, as it were, the groaning and labouring of all creation travailing together until now." There is a place in New Zealand named Erewhon, after the book; it is marked on the large maps, a township about fifty miles west of Napier in the Hawke Bay Province (North Island). I am told that people in New Zealand sometimes call their houses Erewhon and occasionally spell the word Erehwon which Butler did not intend; he treated wh as a single letter, as one would treat th. Among other traces of Erewhon now existing in real life are Butler's Stones on the Hokitika Pass, so called because of a legend that they were in his mind when he described the statues. The book was translated into Dutch in 1873 and into German in 1897. Butler wrote to Charles Darwin to explain what he meant by the "Book of the Machines": "I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do and should be shocked at having done." Soon after this Butler was invited to Down and paid two visits to Mr. Darwin there; he thus became acquainted with all the family and for some years was on intimate terms with Mr. (now Sir) Francis Darwin. It is easy to see by the light of subsequent events that we should probably have had something not unlike _Erewhon_ sooner or later, even without the Russian lady and Sir F. N. Broome, to whose promptings, owing to a certain diffidence which never left him, he was perhaps inclined to attribute too much importance. But he would not have agreed with this view at the time; he looked upon himself as a painter and upon _Erewhon_ as an interruption. It had come, like one of those creatures from the Land of the Unborn, pestering him and refusing to leave him at peace until he consented to give it bodily shape. It was only a little one, and he saw no likelihood of its having any successors. So he satisfied its demands and then, supposing that he had written himself out, looked forward to a future in which nothing should interfere with the painting. Nevertheless, when another of the unborn came teasing him he yielded to its importunities and allowed himself to become the author of _The Fair Haven_, which is his pamphlet on the Resurrection, enlarged and preceded by a realistic memoir of the pseudonymous author, John Pickard Owen. In the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, are two copies of the pamphlet with pages cut out; he used these pages in forming the MS. of _The Fair Haven_. To have published this book as by the author of _Erewhon_ would have been to give away the irony and satire. And he had another reason for not disclosing his name; he remembered that as soon as curiosity about the authorship of _Erewhon_ was satisfied, the weekly sales fell from fifty down to only two or three. But, as he always talked openly of whatever was in his mind, he soon let out the secret of the authorship of _The Fair Haven_, and it became advisable to put his name to a second edition. One result of his submitting the MS. of _Erewhon_ to Miss Savage was that she thought he ought to write a novel, and urged him to do so. I have no doubt that he wrote the memoir of John Pickard Owen with the idea of quieting Miss Savage and also as an experiment to ascertain whether he was likely to succeed with a novel. The result seems to have satisfied him, for, not long after _The Fair Haven_, he began _The Way of All Flesh_, sending the MS. to Miss Savage, as he did everything he wrote, for her approval and putting her into the book as Ernest's Aunt Alethea. He continued writing it in the intervals of other work until her death in February, 1885, after which he did not touch it. It was published in 1903 by Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, his literary executor. Soon after _The Fair Haven_ Butler began to be aware that his letter in the _Press_, "Darwin among the Machines," was descending with further modifications and developing in his mind into a theory about evolution which took shape as _Life and Habit_; but the writing of this very remarkable and suggestive book was delayed and the painting interrupted by absence from England on business in Canada. He had been persuaded by a college friend, a member of one of the great banking families, to call in his colonial mortgages and to put the money into several new companies. He was going to make thirty or forty per cent, instead of only ten. One of these companies was a Canadian undertaking, of which he became a director; it was necessary for someone to go to headquarters and investigate its affairs; he went, and was much occupied by the business for two or three years. By the beginning of 1876 he had returned finally to London, but most of his money was lost and his financial position for the next ten years caused him very serious anxiety. His personal expenditure was already so low that it was hardly possible to reduce it, and he set to work at his profession more industriously than ever, hoping to paint something that he could sell, his spare time being occupied with _Life and Habit_, which was the subject that really interested him more deeply than any other. Following his letter in the _Press_, wherein he had seen machines as in process of becoming animate, he went on to regard them as living organs and limbs which we had made outside ourselves. What would follow if we reversed this and regarded our limbs and organs as machines which we had manufactured as parts of our bodies? In the first place, how did we come to make them without knowing anything about it? But then, how comes anybody to do anything unconsciously? The answer usually would be: By habit. But can a man be said to do a thing by habit when he has never done it before? His ancestors have done it, but not he. Can the habit have been acquired by them for his benefit? Not unless he and his ancestors are the same person. Perhaps, then, they are the same person. In February, 1876, partly to clear his mind and partly to tell someone, he wrote down his thoughts in a letter to his namesake, Thomas William Gale Butler, a fellow art-student who was then in New Zealand; so much of the letter as concerns the growth of his theory is given in _The Note- Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912). In September, 1877, when _Life and Habit_ was on the eve of publication, Mr. Francis Darwin came to lunch with him in Clifford's Inn and, in course of conversation, told him that Professor Ray Lankester had written something in _Nature_ about a lecture by Dr. Ewald Hering of Prague, delivered so long ago as 1870, "On Memory as a Universal Function of Organized Matter." This rather alarmed Butler, but he deferred looking up the reference until after December, 1877, when his book was out, and then, to his relief, he found that Hering's theory was very similar to his own, so that, instead of having something sprung upon him which would have caused him to want to alter his book, he was supported. He at once wrote to the _Athenaeum_, calling attention to Hering's lecture, and then pursued his studies in evolution. _Life and Habit_ was followed in 1879 by _Evolution Old and New_, wherein he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles Darwin, and came to the conclusion that the old was better. But while agreeing with the earlier writers in thinking that the variations whose accumulation results in species were originally due to intelligence, he could not take the view that the intelligence resided in an external personal God. He had done with all that when he gave up the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He proposed to place the intelligence inside the creature ("The Deadlock in Darwinism," _post_). In 1880 he continued the subject by publishing _Unconscious Memory_. Chapter IV of this book is concerned with a personal quarrel between himself and Charles Darwin which arose out of the publication by Charles Darwin of Dr. Krause's _Life of Erasmus Darwin_. We need not enter into particulars here, the matter is fully dealt with in a pamphlet, _Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler_: _A Step towards Reconciliation_, which I wrote in 1911, the result of a correspondence between Mr. Francis Darwin and myself. Before this correspondence took place Mr. Francis Darwin had made several public allusions to _Life and Habit_; and in September, 1908, in his inaugural address to the British Association at Dublin, he did Butler the posthumous honour of quoting from his translation of Hering's lecture "On Memory," which is in _Unconscious Memory_, and of mentioning Butler as having enunciated the theory contained in _Life and Habit_. In 1886 Butler published his last book on evolution, _Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification_? His other contributions to the subject are some essays, written for the _Examiner_ in 1879, "God the Known and God the Unknown," which were republished by Mr. Fifield in 1909, and the articles "The Deadlock in Darwinism" which appeared in the _Universal Review_ in 1890 and some further notes on evolution will be found in _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_ (1912). It was while he was writing _Life and Habit_ that I first met him. For several years he had been in the habit of spending six or eight weeks of the summer in Italy and the Canton Ticino, generally making Faido his headquarters. Many a page of his books was written while resting by the fountain of some subalpine village or waiting in the shade of the chestnuts till the light came so that he could continue a sketch. Every year he returned home by a different route, and thus gradually became acquainted with every part of the Canton and North Italy. There is scarcely a town or village, a point of view, a building, statue or picture in all this country with which he was not familiar. In 1878 he happened to be on the Sacro Monte above Varese at the time I took my holiday; there I joined him, and nearly every year afterwards we were in Italy together. He was always a delightful companion, and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions. "A man's holiday," he would say, "is his garden," and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too. I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying: "We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out." He had not heard it before and, though amused, appeared preoccupied, and perhaps a little jealous, during the rest of the evening. Next morning, while he was pouring out his coffee, his eyes twinkled and he said, with assumed carelessness: "By the by, do you remember?--wasn't it Columbus who bashed the egg down on the table and said 'Eppur non si muove'?" He was welcome wherever he went, full of fun and ready to play while doing the honours of the country. Many of the peasants were old friends, and every day we were sure to meet someone who remembered him. Perhaps it would be an old woman labouring along under a burden; she would smile and stop, take his hand and tell him how happy she was to meet him again and repeat her thanks for the empty wine bottle he had given her after an out-of-door luncheon in her neighbourhood four or five years before. There was another who had rowed him many times across the Lago di Orta and had never been in a train but once in her life, when she went to Novara to her son's wedding. He always remembered all about these people and asked how the potatoes were doing this year and whether the grandchildren were growing up into fine boys and girls, and he never forgot to inquire after the son who had gone to be a waiter in New York. At Civiasco there is a restaurant which used to be kept by a jolly old lady, known for miles round as La Martina; we always lunched with her on our way over the Colma to and from Varallo-Sesia. On one occasion we were accompanied by two English ladies and, one being a teetotaller, Butler maliciously instructed La Martina to make the _sabbaglione_ so that it should be _forte_ and _abbondante_, and to say that the Marsala, with which it was more than flavoured, was nothing but vinegar. La Martina never forgot that when she looked in to see how things were going, he was pretending to lick the dish clean. These journeys provided the material for a book which he thought of calling "Verdi Prati," after one of Handel's most beautiful songs; but he changed his mind, and it appeared at the end of 1881 as _Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino_ with more than eighty illustrations, nearly all by Butler. Charles Gogin made an etching for the frontispiece, drew some of the pictures, and put figures into others; half a dozen are mine. They were all redrawn in ink from sketches made on the spot, in oil, water-colour, and pencil. There were also many illustrations of another kind--extracts from Handel's music, each chosen because Butler thought it suitable to the spirit of the scene he wished to bring before the reader. The introduction concludes with these words: "I have chosen Italy as my second country, and would dedicate this book to her as a thank-offering for the happiness she has afforded me." In the spring of 1883 he began to compose music, and in 1885 we published together an album of minuets, gavottes, and fugues. This led to our writing _Narcissus_, which is an Oratorio Buffo in the Handelian manner--that is as nearly so as we could make it. It is a mistake to suppose that all Handel's oratorios are upon sacred subjects; some of them are secular. And not only so, but, whatever the subject, Handel was never at a loss in treating anything that came into his words by way of allusion or illustration. As Butler puts it in one of his sonnets: He who gave eyes to ears and showed in sound All thoughts and things in earth or heaven above-- From fire and hailstones running along the ground To Galatea grieving for her love-- He who could show to all unseeing eyes Glad shepherds watching o'er their flocks by night, Or Iphis angel-wafted to the skies, Or Jordan standing as an heap upright-- And so on. But there is one subject which Handel never treated--I mean the Money Market. Perhaps he avoided it intentionally; he was twice bankrupt, and Mr. R. A. Streatfeild tells me that the British Museum possesses a MS. letter from him giving instructions as to the payment of the dividends on 500 pounds South Sea Stock. Let us hope he sold out before the bubble burst; if so, he was more fortunate than Butler, who was at this time of his life in great anxiety about his own financial affairs. It seemed a pity that Dr. Morell had never offered Handel some such words as these: The steadfast funds maintain their wonted state While all the other markets fluctuate. Butler wondered whether Handel would have sent the steadfast funds up above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the _Messiah_. He thought something of the kind ought to have been done, and in the absence of Handel and Dr. Morell we determined to write an oratorio that should attempt to supply the want. In order to make our libretto as plausible as possible, we adopted the dictum of Monsieur Jourdain's Maitre a danser: "Lorsqu'on a des personnes a faire parler en musique, il faut bien que, pour la vraisemblance, on donne dans la bergerie." Narcissus is accordingly a shepherd in love with Amaryllis; they come to London with other shepherds and lose their money in imprudent speculations on the Stock Exchange. In the second part the aunt and godmother of Narcissus, having died at an advanced age worth one hundred thousand pounds, all of which she has bequeathed to her nephew and godson, the obstacle to his union with Amaryllis is removed. The money is invested in consols and all ends happily. In December, 1886, Butler's father died, and his financial difficulties ceased. He engaged Alfred Emery Cathie as clerk, but made no other change, except that he bought a pair of new hair brushes and a larger wash-hand basin. Any change in his mode of life was an event. When in London he got up at 6.30 in the summer and 7.30 in the winter, went into his sitting-room, lighted the fire, put the kettle on and returned to bed. In half an hour he got up again, fetched the kettle of hot water, emptied it into the cold water that was already in his bath, refilled the kettle and put it back on the fire. After dressing, he came into his sitting-room, made tea and cooked, in his Dutch oven, something he had bought the day before. His laundress was an elderly woman, and he could not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning; on the other hand, he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to go out; so it ended in his doing a great deal for himself. He then got his breakfast and read the Times. At 9.30 Alfred came, with whom he discussed anything requiring attention, and soon afterwards his laundress arrived. Then he started to walk to the British Museum, where he arrived about 10.30, every alternate morning calling at the butcher's in Fetter Lane to order his meat. In the Reading Room at the Museum he sat at Block B ("B for Butler") and spent an hour "posting his notes"--that is reconsidering, rewriting, amplifying, shortening, and indexing the contents of the little note-book he always carried in his pocket. After the notes he went on till 1.30 with whatever book he happened to be writing. On three days of the week he dined in a restaurant on his way home, and on the other days he dined in his chambers where his laundress had cooked his dinner. At two o'clock Alfred returned (having been home to dinner with his wife and children) and got tea ready for him. He then wrote letters and attended to his accounts till 3.45, when he smoked his first cigarette. He used to smoke a great deal, but, believing it to be bad for him, took to cigarettes instead of pipes, and gradually smoked less and less, making it a rule not to begin till some particular hour, and pushing this hour later and later in the day, till it settled itself at 3.45. There was no water laid on in his rooms, and every day he fetched one can full from the tap in the court, Alfred fetching the rest. When anyone expostulated with him about cooking his own breakfast and fetching his own water, he replied that it was good for him to have a change of occupation. This was partly the fact, but the real reason, which he could not tell everyone, was that he shrank from inconveniencing anybody; he always paid more than was necessary when anything was done for him, and was not happy then unless he did some of the work himself. At 5.30 he got his evening meal, he called it his tea, and it was little more than a facsimile of breakfast. Alfred left in time to post the letters before six. Butler then wrote music till about 8, when he came to see me in Staple Inn, returning to Clifford's Inn by about 10. After a light supper, latterly not more than a piece of toast and a glass of milk, he played one game of his own particular kind of Patience, prepared his breakfast things and fire ready for the next morning, smoked his seventh and last cigarette, and went to bed at eleven o'clock. He was fond of the theatre, but avoided serious pieces. He preferred to take his Shakespeare from the book, finding that the spirit of the plays rather evaporated under modern theatrical treatment. In one of his books he brightens up the old illustration of _Hamlet_ without the Prince of Denmark by putting it thus: "If the character of Hamlet be entirely omitted, the play must suffer, even though Henry Irving himself be cast for the title-role." Anyone going to the theatre in this spirit would be likely to be less disappointed by performances that were comic or even frankly farcical. Latterly, when he grew slightly deaf, listening to any kind of piece became too much of an effort; nevertheless, he continued to the last the habit of going to one pantomime every winter. There were about twenty houses where he visited, but he seldom accepted an invitation to dinner--it upset the regularity of his life; besides, he belonged to no club and had no means of returning hospitality. When two colonial friends called unexpectedly about noon one day, soon after he settled in London, he went to the nearest cook-shop in Fetter Lane and returned carrying a dish of hot roast pork and greens. This was all very well once in a way, but not the sort of thing to be repeated indefinitely. On Thursdays, instead of going to the Museum, he often took a day off, going into the country sketching or walking, and on Sundays, whatever the weather, he nearly always went into the country walking; his map of the district for thirty miles round London is covered all over with red lines showing where he had been. He sometimes went out of town from Saturday to Monday, and for over twenty years spent Christmas at Boulogne-sur-Mer. There is a Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia with many chapels, each containing life-sized statues and frescoes illustrating the life of Christ. Butler had visited this sanctuary repeatedly, and was a great favourite with the townspeople, who knew that he was studying the statues and frescoes in the chapels, and who remembered that in the preface to _Alps and Sanctuaries_ he had declared his intention of writing about them. In August, 1887, the Varallesi brought matters to a head by giving him a civic dinner on the Mountain. Everyone was present, there were several speeches and, when we were coming down the slippery mountain path after it was all over, he said to me: "You know, there's nothing for it now but to write that book about the Sacro Monte at once. It must be the next thing I do." Accordingly, on returning home, he took up photography and, immediately after Christmas, went back to Varallo to photograph the statues and collect material. Much research was necessary and many visits to out-of- the-way sanctuaries which might have contained work by the sculptor Tabachetti, whom he was rescuing from oblivion and identifying with the Flemish Jean de Wespin. One of these visits, made after his book was published, forms the subject of "The Sanctuary of Montrigone." _Ex Voto_, the book about Varallo, appeared in 1888, and an Italian translation by Cavaliere Angelo Rizzetti was published at Novara in 1894. "Quis Desiderio . . . ?" (_The Humour of Homer and Other Essays_) was developed in 1888 from something in a letter from Miss Savage nearly ten years earlier. On the 15th of December, 1878, in acknowledging this letter, Butler wrote: I am sure that any tree or flower nursed by Miss Cobbe would be the _very_ first to fade away and that her gazelles would die long before they ever came to know her _well_. The sight of the brass buttons on her pea-jacket would settle them out of hand. There was an enclosure in Miss Savage's letter, but it is unfortunately lost; I suppose it must have been a newspaper cutting with an allusion to Moore's poem and perhaps a portrait of Miss Frances Power Cobbe--pea-jacket, brass buttons, and all. On the 10th November, 1879, Miss Savage, having been ill, wrote to Butler: I have been dipping into the books of Moses, being sometimes at a loss for something to read while shut up in my apartment. You know that I have never read the Bible much, consequently there is generally something of a novelty that I hit on. As you do know your Bible well, perhaps you can tell me what became of Aaron. The account given of his end in Numbers xx. is extremely ambiguous and unsatisfactory. Evidently he did not come by his death fairly, but whether he was murdered secretly for the furtherance of some private ends, or publicly in a State sacrifice, I can't make out. I myself rather incline to the former opinion, but I should like to know what the experts say about it. A very nice, exciting little tale might be made out of it in the style of the police stories in _All the rear Round_ called "The Mystery of Mount Hor or What became of Aaron?" Don't forget to write to me. Butler's people had been suggesting that he should try to earn money by writing in magazines, and Miss Savage was falling in with the idea and offering a practical suggestion. I do not find that he had anything to tell her about the death of Aaron. On 23rd March, 1880, she wrote: Dear Mr. Butler: Read the subjoined poem of Wordsworth and let me know what you understand its meaning to be. Of course I have my opinion, which I think of communicating to the Wordsworth Society. You can belong to that Society for the small sum of 2/6 per annum. I think of joining because it is cheap. "The subjoined poem" was the one beginning: "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," and Butler made this note on the letter: To the foregoing letter I answered that I concluded Miss Savage meant to imply that Wordsworth had murdered Lucy in order to escape a prosecution for breach of promise. _Miss Savage to Butler_. 2nd April, 1880: My dear Mr. Butler: I don't think you see all that I do in the poem, and I am afraid that the suggestion of a DARK SECRET in the poet's life is not so very obvious after all. I was hoping you would propose to devote yourself for a few months to reading the _Excursion_, his letters, &c., with a view to following up the clue, and I am disappointed though, to say the truth, the idea of a _crime_ had not flashed upon me when I wrote to you. How well the works of _great_ men repay attention and study! But you, who know your Bible so well, how was it that you did not detect the plagiarism in the last verse? Just refer to the account of the disappearance of Aaron (I have not a Bible at hand, we want one sadly in the club) but I am sure that the words are identical [I cannot see what Miss Savage meant. 1901. S. B.] _Cassell's Magazine_ have offered a prize for setting the poem to music, and I fell to thinking how it could be treated musically, and so came to a right comprehension of it. Although Butler, when editing Miss Savage's letters in 1901, could not see the resemblance between Wordsworth's poem and Numbers xx., he at once saw a strong likeness between Lucy and Moore's heroine whom he had been keeping in an accessible pigeon-hole of his memory ever since his letter about Miss Frances Power Cobbe. He now sent Lucy to keep her company and often spoke of the pair of them as probably the two most disagreeable young women in English literature--an opinion which he must have expressed to Miss Savage and with which I have no doubt she agreed. In the spring of 1888, on his return from photographing the statues at Varallo, he found, to his disgust, that the authorities of the British Museum had removed Frost's _Lives of Eminent Christians_ from its accustomed shelf in the Reading Room. Soon afterwards Harry Quilter asked him to write for the _Universal Review_ and he responded with "Quis Desiderio . . . ?" In this essay he compares himself to Wordsworth and dwells on the points of resemblance between Lucy and the book of whose assistance he had now been deprived in a passage which echoes the opening of Chapter V of _Ex Voto_, where he points out the resemblances between Varallo and Jerusalem. Early in 1888 the leading members of the Shrewsbury Archaeological Society asked Butler to write a memoir of his grandfather and of his father for their Quarterly Journal. This he undertook to do when he should have finished _Ex Voto_. In December, 1888, his sisters, with the idea of helping him to write the memoir, gave him his grandfather's correspondence, which extended from 1790 to 1839. On looking over these very voluminous papers he became penetrated with an almost Chinese reverence for his ancestor and, after getting the Archaeological Society to absolve him from his promise to write the memoir, set about a full life of Dr. Butler, which was not published till 1896. The delay was caused partly by the immense quantity of documents he had to sift and digest, the number of people he had to consult, and the many letters he had to write, and partly by something that arose out of _Narcissus_, which we published in June, 1888. Butler was not satisfied with having written only half of this work; he wanted it to have a successor, so that by adding his two halves together, he could say he had written a whole Handelian oratorio. While staying with his sisters at Shrewsbury with this idea in his mind, he casually took up a book by Alfred Ainger about Charles Lamb and therein stumbled upon something about the _Odyssey_. It was years since he had looked at the poem, but, from what he remembered, he thought it might provide a suitable subject for musical treatment. He did not, however, want to put Dr. Butler aside, so I undertook to investigate. It is stated on the title-page of both _Narcissus_ and _Ulysses_ that the words were written and the music composed by both of us. As to the music, each piece bears the initials of the one who actually composed it. As to the words, it was necessary first to settle some general scheme and this, in the case of _Narcissus_, grew in the course of conversation. The scheme of _Ulysses_ was constructed in a more formal way and Butler had perhaps rather less to do with it. We were bound by the _Odyssey_, which is, of course, too long to be treated fully, and I selected incidents that attracted me and settled the order of the songs and choruses. For this purpose, as I out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in the smallness of my Greek, I used _The Adventures of Ulysses_ by Charles Lamb, which we should have known nothing about but for Ainger's book. Butler acquiesced in my proposals, but, when it came to the words themselves, he wrote practically all the libretto, as he had done in the case of _Narcissus_; I did no more than suggest a few phrases and a few lines here and there. We had sent _Narcissus_ for review to the papers, and, as a consequence, about this time, made the acquaintance of Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland, then musical critic of the _Times_; he introduced us to that learned musician William Smith Rockstro, under whom we studied medieval counterpoint while composing _Ulysses_. We had already made some progress with it when it occurred to Butler that it would not take long and might, perhaps, be safer if he were to look at the original poem, just to make sure that Lamb had not misled me. Not having forgotten all his Greek, he bought a copy of the _Odyssey_ and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it down. When he came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria he felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that something in the personality of the author was eluding him. For months he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set about translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to Chiavenna, and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect me, he made this note: It was during the few days that I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the _Odyssey_. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani till January, 1892. He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and the AEgadean Islands. As soon as he could after this discovery he went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept turning up to support his view. It is all in his book _The Authoress of the Odyssey_, published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi. His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring. He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the _Iliad_, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the received theories. It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after giving it his best attention, he found it did not hold water, then no weight of authority could make him say that it did. This matter of the geography of the _Iliad_ is only one among many commonly received opinions which he examined for himself and found no reason to dispute; on these he considered it unnecessary to write. It is characteristic of his passion for doing things thoroughly that he learnt nearly the whole of the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_ by heart. He had a Pickering copy of each poem, which he carried in his pocket and referred to in railway trains, both in England and Italy, when saying the poems over to himself. These two little books are now in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was, however, disappointed to find that he could not retain more than a book or two at a time and that, on learning more, he forgot what he had learnt first; but he was about sixty at the time. Shakespeare's Sonnets, on which he published a book in 1899, gave him less trouble in this respect; he knew them all by heart, and also their order, and one consequence of this was that he wrote some sonnets in the Shakespearian form. He found this intimate knowledge of the poet's work more useful for his purpose than reading commentaries by those who are less familiar with it. "A commentary on a poem," he would say, "may be useful as material on which to form an estimate of the commentator, but the poem itself is the most important document you can consult, and it is impossible to know it too intimately if you want to form an opinion about it and its author." It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more than the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture; the composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was, of course, "the greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare, Homer, and the Authoress of the _Odyssey_; and in architecture the man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum. Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in the company of inferior people when he had these. And he treated those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it was what he found them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about them was of little or no consequence. And now, at the end of his life, his thoughts reverted to the two subjects which had occupied him more than thirty years previously--namely, _Erewhon_ and the evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The idea of what might follow from belief in one single supposed miracle had been slumbering during all those years and at last rose again in the form of a sequel to _Erewhon_. In _Erewhon Revisited_ Mr. Higgs returns to find that the Erewhonians now believe in him as a god in consequence of the supposed miracle of his going up in a balloon to induce his heavenly father to send the rain. Mr. Higgs and the reader know that there was no miracle in the case, but Butler wanted to show that whether it was a miracle or not did not signify provided that the people believed it be one. And so Mr. Higgs is present in the temple which is being dedicated to him and his worship. The existence of his son George was an afterthought and gave occasion for the second leading idea of the book--the story of a father trying to win the love of a hitherto unknown son by risking his life in order to show himself worthy of it--and succeeding. Butler's health had already begun to fail, and when he started for Sicily on Good Friday, 1902, it was for the last time: he knew he was unfit to travel, but was determined to go, and was looking forward to meeting Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Fuller Maitland, whom he was to accompany over the Odyssean scenes at Trapani and Mount Eryx. But he did not get beyond Palermo; there he was so much worse that he could not leave his room. In a few weeks he was well enough to be removed to Naples, and Alfred went out and brought him home to London. He was taken to a nursing home in St. John's Wood where he lay for a month, attended by his old friend Dr. Dudgeon, and where he died on the 18th June, 1902. There was a great deal he still wanted to do. He had intended to revise _The Way of All Flesh_, to write a book about Tabachetti, and to publish a new edition of _Ex Voto_ with the mistakes corrected. Also he wished to reconsider the articles reprinted in _The Humour of Homer_, and was looking forward to painting more sketches and composing more music. While lying ill and very feeble within a few days of the end, and not knowing whether it was to be the end or not, he said to me: "I am much better to-day. I don't feel at all as though I were going to die. Of course, it will be all wrong if I do get well, for there is my literary position to be considered. First I write _Erewhon_--that is my opening subject; then, after modulating freely through all my other books and the music and so on, I return gracefully to my original key and write _Erewhon Revisited_. Obviously, now is the proper moment to come to a full close, make my bow and retire; but I believe I am getting well, after all. It's very inartistic, but I cannot help it." Some of his readers complain that they often do not know whether he is serious or jesting. He wrote of Lord Beaconsfield: "Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as indeed who can? it is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it with a fair amount of success." To veil his own earnestness he turned most naturally to humour, employing it in a spirit of reverence, as all the great humorists have done, to express his deepest and most serious convictions. He was aware that he ran the risk of being misunderstood by some, but he also knew that it is useless to try to please all, and, like Mozart, he wrote to please himself and a few intimate friends. I cannot speak at length of his kindness, consideration, and sympathy; nor of his generosity, the extent of which was very great and can never be known--it was sometimes exercised in unexpected ways, as when he gave my laundress a shilling because it was "such a beastly foggy morning"; nor of his slightly archaic courtliness--unless among people he knew well he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail--he kept accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening, and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty- six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to say: "Il sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete." Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel's _Six Great Fugues_. He called this "The Old Man Fugue," and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest Pontifex in _The Way of All Flesh_ offer it to Edward Overton as an epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left off wanting any tombstone long before he died. In accordance with his wish his body was cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to mark the spot. Footnotes: {1} I am indebted to one of Butler's contemporaries at Cambridge, the Rev. Dr. T. G. Bonney, F.R.S., and also to Mr. John F. Harris, both of St. John's College, for help in finding and dating Butler's youthful contributions to the _Eagle_. {2} This gentleman, on the death of his father in 1866, became the Rev. Sir Philip Perring, Bart. {3} The late Sir Julius von Haast, K.C.M.G., appointed Provincial Geologist in 1860, was ennobled by the Austrian Government and knighted by the British. He died in 1887. 
1827	----	VOLUME 1*** Transcribed from the 1906 Smith, Elder, and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE--VOLUME 1 CHAPTER I The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe. Keighley station is on this line of railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name. The number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yorkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis. Keighley is in process of transformation from a populous, old-fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing town. It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of the professional middle- class, such as abound in our old cathedral towns. In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south. Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesqueness. Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform and enduring lines. The frame-work of the doors, and the lintels of the windows, even in the smallest dwellings, are made of blocks of stone. There is no painted wood to require continual beautifying, or else present a shabby aspect; and the stone is kept scrupulously clean by the notable Yorkshire housewives. Such glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits in the women. But the voices of the people are hard, and their tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a Carrodus to the musical world. The names over the shops (of which the one just given is a sample) seem strange even to an inhabitant of the neighbouring county, and have a peculiar smack and flavour of the place. The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his journey in a westerly direction. First come some villas; just sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely belong to any one liable to be summoned in a hurry, at the call of suffering or danger, from his comfortable fireside; the lawyer, the doctor, and the clergyman, live at hand, and hardly in the suburbs, with a screen of shrubs for concealment. In a town one does not look for vivid colouring; what there may be of this is furnished by the wares in the shops, not by foliage or atmospheric effects; but in the country some brilliancy and vividness seems to be instinctively expected, and there is consequently a slight feeling of disappointment at the grey neutral tint of every object, near or far off, on the way from Keighley to Haworth. The distance is about four miles; and, as I have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of workmen's houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse and out-buildings, it can hardly be called "country" any part of the way. For two miles the road passes over tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a "beck" flowing through meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist of pale, hungry-looking, grey green oats. Right before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors--grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be. For a short distance the road appears to turn away from Haworth, as it winds round the base of the shoulder of a hill; but then it crosses a bridge over the "beck," and the ascent through the village begins. The flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses' feet; and, even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of slipping backwards. The old stone houses are high compared to the width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a wall. But this surmounted, the church lies a little off the main road on the left; a hundred yards, or so, and the driver relaxes his care, and the horse breathes more easily, as they pass into the quite little by- street that leads to Haworth Parsonage. The churchyard is on one side of this lane, the school-house and the sexton's dwelling (where the curates formerly lodged) on the other. The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond. The area of this oblong is filled up by a crowded churchyard, and a small garden or court in front of the clergyman's house. As the entrance to this from the road is at the side, the path goes round the corner into the little plot of ground. Underneath the windows is a narrow flower-border, carefully tended in days of yore, although only the most hardy plants could be made to grow there. Within the stone wall, which keeps out the surrounding churchyard, are bushes of elder and lilac; the rest of the ground is occupied by a square grass- plot and a gravel walk. The house is of grey stone, two stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering. It appears to have been built about a hundred years ago, and to consist of four rooms on each story; the two windows on the right (as the visitor stands with his back to the church, ready to enter in at the front door) belonging to Mr. Bronte's study, the two on the left to the family sitting-room. Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness. The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking- glass. Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity. The little church lies, as I mentioned, above most of the houses in the village; and the graveyard rises above the church, and is terribly full of upright tombstones. The chapel or church claims greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom; but there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which remain unmodernized, and in the lower part of the steeple. Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were constructed before the reign of Henry VII. It is probable that there existed on this ground, a "field-kirk," or oratory, in the earliest times; and, from the Archbishop's registry at York, it is ascertained that there was a chapel at Haworth in 1317. The inhabitants refer inquirers concerning the date to the following inscription on a stone in the church tower:-- "Hic fecit Caenobium Monachorum Auteste fundator. A. D. sexcentissimo." That is to say, before the preaching of Christianity in Northumbria. Whitaker says that this mistake originated in the illiterate copying out, by some modern stone-cutter, of an inscription in the character of Henry the Eighth's time on an adjoining stone:-- "Orate pro bono statu Eutest Tod." "Now every antiquary knows that the formula of prayer 'bono statu' always refers to the living. I suspect this singular Christian name has been mistaken by the stone-cutter for Austet, a contraction of Eustatius, but the word Tod, which has been mis-read for the Arabic figures 600, is perfectly fair and legible. On the presumption of this foolish claim to antiquity, the people would needs set up for independence, and contest the right of the Vicar of Bradford to nominate a curate at Haworth." I have given this extract, in order to explain the imaginary groundwork of a commotion which took place in Haworth about five and thirty years ago, to which I shall have occasion to allude again more particularly. The interior of the church is commonplace; it is neither old enough nor modern enough to compel notice. The pews are of black oak, with high divisions; and the names of those to whom they belong are painted in white letters on the doors. There are neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table, bearing the following inscription:-- HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MARIA BRONTE, WIFE OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A.B., MINISTER OF HAWORTH. HER SOUL DEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. 15TH, 1821, IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE. "Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." MATTHEW xxiv. 44. ALSO HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MARIA BRONTE, DAUGHTER OF THE AFORESAID; SHE DIED ON THE 6TH OF MAY, 1825, IN THE 12TH YEAR OF HER AGE; AND OF ELIZABETH BRONTE, HER SISTER, WHO DIED JUNE 15TH, 1825, IN THE 11TH YEAR OF HER AGE. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."--MATTHEW xviii. 3. HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF PATRICK BRANWELL BRONTE, WHO DIED SEPT. 24TH, 1848, AGED 30 YEARS; AND OF EMILY JANE BRONTE, WHO DIED DEC. 19TH, 1848, AGED 29 YEARS, SON AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, INCUMBENT. THIS STONE IS ALSO DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ANNE BRONTE, {1} YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A.B. SHE DIED, AGED 27 YEARS, MAY 28TH, 1849, AND WAS BURIED AT THE OLD CHURCH, SCARBORO.' At the upper part of this tablet ample space is allowed between the lines of the inscription; when the first memorials were written down, the survivors, in their fond affection, thought little of the margin and verge they were leaving for those who were still living. But as one dead member of the household follows another fast to the grave, the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped. After the record of Anne's death, there is room for no other. But one more of that generation--the last of that nursery of six little motherless children--was yet to follow, before the survivor, the childless and widowed father, found his rest. On another tablet, below the first, the following record has been added to that mournful list:-- ADJOINING LIE THE REMAINS OF CHARLOTTE, WIFE OF THE REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS, A.B., AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A.B., INCUMBENT SHE DIED MARCH 31ST, 1855, IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE. {2} This tablet, which corrects the error in the former tablet as to the age of Anne Bronte, bears the following inscription in Roman letters; the initials, however, being in old English. CHAPTER II For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Bronte, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed, and from which both her own and her sisters' first impressions of human life must have been received. I shall endeavour, therefore, before proceeding further with my work, to present some idea of the character of the people of Haworth, and the surrounding districts. Even an inhabitant of the neighbouring county of Lancaster is struck by the peculiar force of character which the Yorkshiremen display. This makes them interesting as a race; while, at the same time, as individuals, the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency they possess gives them an air of independence rather apt to repel a stranger. I use this expression "self-sufficiency" in the largest sense. Conscious of the strong sagacity and the dogged power of will which seem almost the birthright of the natives of the West Riding, each man relies upon himself, and seeks no help at the hands of his neighbour. From rarely requiring the assistance of others, he comes to doubt the power of bestowing it: from the general success of his efforts, he grows to depend upon them, and to over-esteem his own energy and power. He belongs to that keen, yet short-sighted class, who consider suspicion of all whose honesty is not proved as a sign of wisdom. The practical qualities of a man are held in great respect; but the want of faith in strangers and untried modes of action, extends itself even to the manner in which the virtues are regarded; and if they produce no immediate and tangible result, they are rather put aside as unfit for this busy, striving world; especially if they are more of a passive than an active character. The affections are strong and their foundations lie deep: but they are not--such affections seldom are--wide-spreading; nor do they show themselves on the surface. Indeed, there is little display of any of the amenities of life among this wild, rough population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life; something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour; the dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed. Their feelings are not easily roused, but their duration is lasting. Hence there is much close friendship and faithful service; and for a correct exemplification of the form in which the latter frequently appears, I need only refer the reader of "Wuthering Heights" to the character of "Joseph." From the same cause come also enduring grudges, in some cases amounting to hatred, which occasionally has been bequeathed from generation to generation. I remember Miss Bronte once telling me that it was a saying round about Haworth, "Keep a stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it, and keep it seven year longer, that it may be ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near." The West Riding men are sleuth-hounds in pursuit of money. Miss Bronte related to my husband a curious instance illustrative of this eager desire for riches. A man that she knew, who was a small manufacturer, had engaged in many local speculations which had always turned out well, and thereby rendered him a person of some wealth. He was rather past middle age, when he bethought him of insuring his life; and he had only just taken out his policy, when he fell ill of an acute disease which was certain to end fatally in a very few days. The doctor, half-hesitatingly, revealed to him his hopeless state. "By jingo!" cried he, rousing up at once into the old energy, "I shall _do_ the insurance company! I always was a lucky fellow!" These men are keen and shrewd; faithful and persevering in following out a good purpose, fell in tracking an evil one. They are not emotional; they are not easily made into either friends or enemies; but once lovers or haters, it is difficult to change their feeling. They are a powerful race both in mind and body, both for good and for evil. The woollen manufacture was introduced into this district in the days of Edward III. It is traditionally said that a colony of Flemings came over and settled in the West Riding to teach the inhabitants what to do with their wool. The mixture of agricultural with manufacturing labour that ensued and prevailed in the West Riding up to a very recent period, sounds pleasant enough at this distance of time, when the classical impression is left, and the details forgotten, or only brought to light by those who explore the few remote parts of England where the custom still lingers. The idea of the mistress and her maidens spinning at the great wheels while the master was abroad ploughing his fields, or seeing after his flocks on the purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, there come out details of coarseness--of the uncouthness of the rustic mingled with the sharpness of the tradesman--of irregularity and fierce lawlessness--that rather mar the vision of pastoral innocence and simplicity. Still, as it is the exceptional and exaggerated characteristics of any period that leave the most vivid memory behind them, it would be wrong, and in my opinion faithless, to conclude that such and such forms of society and modes of living were not best for the period when they prevailed, although the abuses they may have led into, and the gradual progress of the world, have made it well that such ways and manners should pass away for ever, and as preposterous to attempt to return to them, as it would be for a man to return to the clothes of his childhood. The patent granted to Alderman Cockayne, and the further restrictions imposed by James I. on the export of undyed woollen cloths (met by a prohibition on the part of the States of Holland of the import of English- dyed cloths), injured the trade of the West Riding manufacturers considerably. Their independence of character, their dislike of authority, and their strong powers of thought, predisposed them to rebellion against the religious dictation of such men as Laud, and the arbitrary rule of the Stuarts; and the injury done by James and Charles to the trade by which they gained their bread, made the great majority of them Commonwealth men. I shall have occasion afterwards to give one or two instances of the warm feelings and extensive knowledge on subjects of both home and foreign politics existing at the present day in the villages lying west and east of the mountainous ridge that separates Yorkshire and Lancashire; the inhabitants of which are of the same race and possess the same quality of character. The descendants of many who served under Cromwell at Dunbar, live on the same lands as their ancestors occupied then; and perhaps there is no part of England where the traditional and fond recollections of the Commonwealth have lingered so long as in that inhabited by the woollen manufacturing population of the West Riding, who had the restrictions taken off their trade by the Protector's admirable commercial policy. I have it on good authority that, not thirty years ago, the phrase, "in Oliver's days," was in common use to denote a time of unusual prosperity. The class of Christian names prevalent in a district is one indication of the direction in which its tide of hero-worship sets. Grave enthusiasts in politics or religion perceive not the ludicrous side of those which they give to their children; and some are to be found, still in their infancy, not a dozen miles from Haworth, that will have to go through life as Lamartine, Kossuth, and Dembinsky. And so there is a testimony to what I have said, of the traditional feeling of the district, in the fact that the Old Testament names in general use among the Puritans are yet the prevalent appellations in most Yorkshire families of middle or humble rank, whatever their religious persuasion may be. There are numerous records, too, that show the kindly way in which the ejected ministers were received by the gentry, as well as by the poorer part of the inhabitants, during the persecuting days of Charles II. These little facts all testify to the old hereditary spirit of independence, ready ever to resist authority which was conceived to be unjustly exercised, that distinguishes the people of the West Riding to the present day. The parish of Halifax touches that of Bradford, in which the chapelry of Haworth is included; and the nature of the ground in the two parishes is much the of the same wild and hilly description. The abundance of coal, and the number of mountain streams in the district, make it highly favourable to manufactures; and accordingly, as I stated, the inhabitants have for centuries been engaged in making cloth, as well as in agricultural pursuits. But the intercourse of trade failed, for a long time, to bring amenity and civilization into these outlying hamlets, or widely scattered dwellings. Mr. Hunter, in his "Life of Oliver Heywood," quotes a sentence out of a memorial of one James Rither, living in the reign of Elizabeth, which is partially true to this day:-- "They have no superior to court, no civilities to practise: a sour and sturdy humour is the consequence, so that a stranger is shocked by a tone of defiance in every voice, and an air of fierceness in every countenance." Even now, a stranger can hardly ask a question without receiving some crusty reply, if, indeed, he receive any at all. Sometimes the sour rudeness amounts to positive insult. Yet, if the "foreigner" takes all this churlishness good-humouredly, or as a matter of course, and makes good any claim upon their latent kindliness and hospitality, they are faithful and generous, and thoroughly to be relied upon. As a slight illustration of the roughness that pervades all classes in these out-of- the-way villages, I may relate a little adventure which happened to my husband and myself, three years ago, at Addingham-- From Penigent to Pendle Hill, From Linton to Long-_Addingham_ And all that Craven coasts did tell, &c.-- one of the places that sent forth its fighting men to the famous old battle of Flodden Field, and a village not many miles from Haworth. We were driving along the street, when one of those ne'er-do-weel lads who seem to have a kind of magnetic power for misfortunes, having jumped into the stream that runs through the place, just where all the broken glass and bottles are thrown, staggered naked and nearly covered with blood into a cottage before us. Besides receiving another bad cut in the arm, he had completely laid open the artery, and was in a fair way of bleeding to death--which, one of his relations comforted him by saying, would be likely to "save a deal o' trouble." When my husband had checked the effusion of blood with a strap that one of the bystanders unbuckled from his leg, he asked if a surgeon had been sent for. "Yoi," was the answer; "but we dunna think he'll come." "Why not?" "He's owd, yo seen, and asthmatic, and it's up-hill." My husband taking a boy for his guide, drove as fast as he could to the surgeon's house, which was about three-quarters of a mile off, and met the aunt of the wounded lad leaving it. "Is he coming?" inquired my husband. "Well, he didna' say he wouldna' come." "But, tell him the lad may bleed to death." "I did." "And what did he say?" "Why, only, 'D-n him; what do I care?'" It ended, however, in his sending one of his sons, who, though not brought up to "the surgering trade," was able to do what was necessary in the way of bandages and plasters. The excuse made for the surgeon was, that "he was near eighty, and getting a bit doited, and had had a matter o' twenty childer." Among the most unmoved of the lookers-on was the brother of the boy so badly hurt; and while he was lying in a pool of blood on the flag floor, and crying out how much his arm was "warching," his stoical relation stood coolly smoking his bit of black pipe, and uttered not a single word of either sympathy or sorrow. Forest customs, existing in the fringes of dark wood, which clothed the declivity of the hills on either side, tended to brutalize the population until the middle of the seventeenth century. Execution by beheading was performed in a summary way upon either men or women who were guilty of but very slight crimes; and a dogged, yet in some cases fine, indifference to human life was thus generated. The roads were so notoriously bad, even up to the last thirty years, that there was little communication between one village and another; if the produce of industry could be conveyed at stated times to the cloth market of the district, it was all that could be done; and, in lonely houses on the distant hill- side, or by the small magnates of secluded hamlets, crimes might be committed almost unknown, certainly without any great uprising of popular indignation calculated to bring down the strong arm of the law. It must be remembered that in those days there was no rural constabulary; and the few magistrates left to themselves, and generally related to one another, were most of them inclined to tolerate eccentricity, and to wink at faults too much like their own. Men hardly past middle life talk of the days of their youth, spent in this part of the country, when, during the winter months, they rode up to the saddle-girths in mud; when absolute business was the only reason for stirring beyond the precincts of home, and when that business was conducted under a pressure of difficulties which they themselves, borne along to Bradford market in a swift first-class carriage, can hardly believe to have been possible. For instance, one woollen manufacturer says that, not five and twenty years ago, he had to rise betimes to set off on a winter's-morning in order to be at Bradford with the great waggon-load of goods manufactured by his father; this load was packed over-night, but in the morning there was a great gathering around it, and flashing of lanterns, and examination of horses' feet, before the ponderous waggon got under way; and then some one had to go groping here and there, on hands and knees, and always sounding with a staff down the long, steep, slippery brow, to find where the horses might tread safely, until they reached the comparative easy-going of the deep-rutted main road. People went on horseback over the upland moors, following the tracks of the pack-horses that carried the parcels, baggage, or goods from one town to another, between which there did not happen to be a highway. But in winter, all such communication was impossible, by reason of the snow which lay long and late on the bleak high ground. I have known people who, travelling by the mail-coach over Blackstone Edge, had been snowed up for a week or ten days at the little inn near the summit, and obliged to spend both Christmas and New Year's Day there, till the store of provisions laid in for the use of the landlord and his family falling short before the inroads of the unexpected visitors, they had recourse to the turkeys, geese, and Yorkshire pies with which the coach was laden; and even these were beginning to fail, when a fortunate thaw released them from their prison. Isolated as the hill villages may be, they are in the world, compared with the loneliness of the grey ancestral houses to be seen here and there in the dense hollows of the moors. These dwellings are not large, yet they are solid and roomy enough for the accommodation of those who live in them, and to whom the surrounding estates belong. The land has often been held by one family since the days of the Tudors; the owners are, in fact, the remains of the old yeomanry--small squires--who are rapidly becoming extinct as a class, from one of two causes. Either the possessor falls into idle, drinking habits, and so is obliged eventually to sell his property: or he finds, if more shrewd and adventurous, that the "beck" running down the mountain-side, or the minerals beneath his feet, can be turned into a new source of wealth; and leaving the old plodding life of a landowner with small capital, he turns manufacturer, or digs for coal, or quarries for stone. Still there are those remaining of this class--dwellers in the lonely houses far away in the upland districts--even at the present day, who sufficiently indicate what strange eccentricity--what wild strength of will--nay, even what unnatural power of crime was fostered by a mode of living in which a man seldom met his fellows, and where public opinion was only a distant and inarticulate echo of some clearer voice sounding behind the sweeping horizon. A solitary life cherishes mere fancies until they become manias. And the powerful Yorkshire character, which was scarcely tamed into subjection by all the contact it met with in "busy town or crowded mart," has before now broken out into strange wilfulness in the remoter districts. A singular account was recently given me of a landowner (living, it is true, on the Lancashire side of the hills, but of the same blood and nature as the dwellers on the other,) who was supposed to be in the receipt of seven or eight hundred a year, and whose house bore marks of handsome antiquity, as if his forefathers had been for a long time people of consideration. My informant was struck with the appearance of the place, and proposed to the countryman who was accompanying him, to go up to it and take a nearer inspection. The reply was, "Yo'd better not; he'd threap yo' down th' loan. He's let fly at some folk's legs, and let shot lodge in 'em afore now, for going too near to his house." And finding, on closer inquiry, that such was really the inhospitable custom of this moorland squire, the gentleman gave up his purpose. I believe that the savage yeoman is still living. Another squire, of more distinguished family and larger property--one is thence led to imagine of better education, but that does not always follow--died at his house, not many miles from Haworth, only a few years ago. His great amusement and occupation had been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased, and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner, around and above him, as he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner he died. These are merely instances of eccentricity compared to the tales of positive violence and crime that have occurred in these isolated dwellings, which still linger in the memories of the old people of the district, and some of which were doubtless familiar to the authors of "Wuthering Heights" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." The amusements of the lower classes could hardly be expected to be more humane than those of the wealthy and better educated. The gentleman, who has kindly furnished me with some of the particulars I have given, remembers the bull-baitings at Rochdale, not thirty years ago. The bull was fastened by a chain or rope to a post in the river. To increase the amount of water, as well as to give their workpeople the opportunity of savage delight, the masters were accustomed to stop their mills on the day when the sport took place. The bull would sometimes wheel suddenly round, so that the rope by which he was fastened swept those who had been careless enough to come within its range down into the water, and the good people of Rochdale had the excitement of seeing one or two of their neighbours drowned, as well as of witnessing the bull baited, and the dogs torn and tossed. The people of Haworth were not less strong and full of character than their neighbours on either side of the hills. The village lies embedded in the moors, between the two counties, on the old road between Keighley and Colne. About the middle of the last century, it became famous in the religious world as the scene of the ministrations of the Rev. William Grimshaw, curate of Haworth for twenty years. Before this time, it is probable that the curates were of the same order as one Mr. Nicholls, a Yorkshire clergyman, in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation, who was "much addicted to drinking and company-keeping," and used to say to his companions, "You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above the earth," that was, into the pulpit. Mr. Grimshaw's life was written by Newton, Cowper's friend; and from it may be gathered some curious particulars of the manner in which a rough population were swayed and governed by a man of deep convictions, and strong earnestness of purpose. It seems that he had not been in any way remarkable for religious zeal, though he had led a moral life, and been conscientious in fulfilling his parochial duties, until a certain Sunday in September, 1744, when the servant, rising at five, found her master already engaged in prayer; she stated that, after remaining in his chamber for some time, he went to engage in religious exercises in the house of a parishioner, then home again to pray; thence, still fasting, to the church, where, as he was reading the second lesson, he fell down, and, on his partial recovery, had to be led from the church. As he went out, he spoke to the congregation, and told them not to disperse, as he had something to say to them, and would return presently. He was taken to the clerk's house, and again became insensible. His servant rubbed him, to restore the circulation; and when he was brought to himself "he seemed in a great rapture," and the first words he uttered were, "I have had a glorious vision from the third heaven." He did not say what he had seen, but returned into the church, and began the service again, at two in the afternoon, and went on until seven. From this time he devoted himself, with the fervour of a Wesley, and something of the fanaticism of a Whitfield, to calling out a religious life among his parishioners. They had been in the habit of playing at foot-ball on Sunday, using stones for this purpose; and giving and receiving challenges from other parishes. There were horse-races held on the moors just above the village, which were periodical sources of drunkenness and profligacy. Scarcely a wedding took place without the rough amusement of foot-races, where the half-naked runners were a scandal to all decent strangers. The old custom of "arvills," or funeral feasts, led to frequent pitched battles between the drunken mourners. Such customs were the outward signs of the kind of people with whom Mr. Grimshaw had to deal. But, by various means, some of the most practical kind, he wrought a great change in his parish. In his preaching he was occasionally assisted by Wesley and Whitfield, and at such times the little church proved much too small to hold the throng that poured in from distant villages, or lonely moorland hamlets; and frequently they were obliged to meet in the open air; indeed, there was not room enough in the church even for the communicants. Mr. Whitfield was once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that he hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years; "whereupon Mr. Grimshaw stood up in his place, and said with a loud voice, 'Oh, sir! for God's sake do not speak so. I pray you do not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with their eyes open.'" But if they were so bound, it was not for want of exertion on Mr. Grimshaw's part to prevent them. He used to preach twenty or thirty times a week in private houses. If he perceived any one inattentive to his prayers, he would stop and rebuke the offender, and not go on till he saw every one on their knees. He was very earnest in enforcing the strict observance of Sunday; and would not even allow his parishioners to walk in the fields between services. He sometimes gave out a very long Psalm (tradition says the 119th), and while it was being sung, he left the reading-desk, and taking a horsewhip went into the public-houses, and flogged the loiterers into church. They were swift who could escape the lash of the parson by sneaking out the back way. He had strong health and an active body, and rode far and wide over the hills, "awakening" those who had previously had no sense of religion. To save time, and be no charge to the families at whose houses he held his prayer-meetings, he carried his provisions with him; all the food he took in the day on such occasions consisting simply of a piece of bread and butter, or dry bread and a raw onion. The horse-races were justly objectionable to Mr. Grimshaw; they attracted numbers of profligate people to Haworth, and brought a match to the combustible materials of the place, only too ready to blaze out into wickedness. The story is, that he tried all means of persuasion, and even intimidation, to have the races discontinued, but in vain. At length, in despair, he prayed with such fervour of earnestness that the rain came down in torrents, and deluged the ground, so that there was no footing for man or beast, even if the multitude had been willing to stand such a flood let down from above. And so Haworth races were stopped, and have never been resumed to this day. Even now the memory of this good man is held in reverence, and his faithful ministrations and real virtues are one of the boasts of the parish. But after his time, I fear there was a falling back into the wild rough heathen ways, from which he had pulled them up, as it were, by the passionate force of his individual character. He had built a chapel for the Wesleyan Methodists, and not very long after the Baptists established themselves in a place of worship. Indeed, as Dr. Whitaker says, the people of this district are "strong religionists;" only, fifty years ago, their religion did not work down into their lives. Half that length of time back, the code of morals seemed to be formed upon that of their Norse ancestors. Revenge was handed down from father to son as an hereditary duty; and a great capability for drinking without the head being affected was considered as one of the manly virtues. The games of foot-ball on Sundays, with the challenges to the neighbouring parishes, were resumed, bringing in an influx of riotous strangers to fill the public-houses, and make the more sober-minded inhabitants long for good Mr. Grimshaw's stout arm, and ready horsewhip. The old custom of "arvills" was as prevalent as ever. The sexton, standing at the foot of the open grave, announced that the "arvill" would be held at the Black Bull, or whatever public-house might be fixed upon by the friends of the dead; and thither the mourners and their acquaintances repaired. The origin of the custom had been the necessity of furnishing some refreshment for those who came from a distance, to pay the last mark of respect to a friend. In the life of Oliver Heywood there are two quotations, which show what sort of food was provided for "arvills" in quiet Nonconformist connections in the seventeenth century; the first (from Thoresby) tells of "cold possets, stewed prunes, cake, and cheese," as being the arvill after Oliver Heywood's funeral. The second gives, as rather shabby, according to the notion of the times (1673), "nothing but a bit of cake, draught of wine, piece of rosemary, and pair of gloves." But the arvills at Haworth were often far more jovial doings. Among the poor, the mourners were only expected to provide a kind of spiced roll for each person; and the expense of the liquors--rum, or ale, or a mixture of both called "dog's nose"--was generally defrayed by each guest placing some money on a plate, set in the middle of the table. Richer people would order a dinner for their friends. At the funeral of Mr. Charnock (the next successor but one to Mr. Grimshaw in the incumbency), above eighty people were bid to the arvill, and the price of the feast was 4s. 6d. per head, all of which was defrayed by the friends of the deceased. As few "shirked their liquor," there were very frequently "up- and-down fights" before the close of the day; sometimes with the horrid additions of "pawsing" and "gouging," and biting. Although I have dwelt on the exceptional traits in the characteristics of these stalwart West-Ridingers, such as they were in the first quarter of this century, if not a few years later, I have little doubt that in the everyday life of the people so independent, wilful, and full of grim humour, there would be much found even at present that would shock those accustomed only to the local manners of the south; and, in return, I suspect the shrewd, sagacious, energetic Yorkshireman would hold such "foreigners" in no small contempt. I have said, it is most probable that where Haworth Church now stands, there was once an ancient "field-kirk," or oratory. It occupied the third or lowest class of ecclesiastical structures, according to the Saxon law, and had no right of sepulture, or administration of sacraments. It was so called because it was built without enclosure, and open to the adjoining fields or moors. The founder, according to the laws of Edgar, was bound, without subtracting from his tithes, to maintain the ministering priest out of the remaining nine parts of his income. After the Reformation, the right of choosing their clergyman, at any of those chapels of ease which had formerly been field-kirks, was vested in the freeholders and trustees, subject to the approval of the vicar of the parish. But owing to some negligence, this right has been lost to the freeholders and trustees at Haworth, ever since the days of Archbishop Sharp; and the power of choosing a minister has lapsed into the hands of the Vicar of Bradford. So runs the account, according to one authority. Mr. Bronte says,--"This living has for its patrons the Vicar of Bradford and certain trustees. My predecessor took the living with the consent of the Vicar of Bradford, but in opposition to the trustees; in consequence of which he was so opposed that, after only three weeks' possession, he was compelled to resign." A Yorkshire gentleman, who has kindly sent me some additional information on this subject since the second edition of my work was published, write, thus:-- "The sole right of presentation to the incumbency of Haworth is vested in the Vicar of Bradford. He only can present. The funds, however, from which the clergyman's stipend mainly proceeds, are vested in the hands of trustees, who have the power to withhold them, if a nominee is sent of whom they disapprove. On the decease of Mr. Charnock, the Vicar first tendered the preferment to Mr. Bronte, and he went over to his expected cure. He was told that towards himself they had no personal objection; but as a nominee of the Vicar he would not be received. He therefore retired, with the declaration that if he could not come with the approval of the parish, his ministry could not be useful. Upon this the attempt was made to introduce Mr. Redhead. "When Mr. Redhead was repelled, a fresh difficulty arose. Some one must first move towards a settlement, but a spirit being evoked which could not be allayed, action became perplexing. The matter had to be referred to some independent arbitrator, and my father was the gentleman to whom each party turned its eye. A meeting was convened, and the business settled by the Vicar's conceding the choice to the trustees, and the acceptance of the Vicar's presentation. That choice forthwith fell on Mr. Bronte, whose promptness and prudence had won their hearts." In conversing on the character of the inhabitants of the West Riding with Dr. Scoresby, who had been for some time Vicar of Bradford, he alluded to certain riotous transactions which had taken place at Haworth on the presentation of the living to Mr. Redhead, and said that there had been so much in the particulars indicative of the character of the people, that he advised me to inquire into them. I have accordingly done so, and, from the lips of some of the survivors among the actors and spectators, I have learnt the means taken to eject the nominee of the Vicar. The previous incumbent had been the Mr. Charnock whom I have mentioned as next but one in succession to Mr. Grimshaw. He had a long illness which rendered him unable to discharge his duties without assistance, and Mr. Redhead gave him occasional help, to the great satisfaction of the parishioners, and was highly respected by them during Mr. Charnock's lifetime. But the case was entirely altered when, at Mr. Charnock's death in 1819, they conceived that the trustees had been unjustly deprived of their rights by the Vicar of Bradford, who appointed Mr. Redhead as perpetual curate. The first Sunday he officiated, Haworth Church was filled even to the aisles; most of the people wearing the wooden clogs of the district. But while Mr. Redhead was reading the second lesson, the whole congregation, as by one impulse, began to leave the church, making all the noise they could with clattering and clumping of clogs, till, at length, Mr. Redhead and the clerk were the only two left to continue the service. This was bad enough, but the next Sunday the proceedings were far worse. Then, as before, the church was well filled, but the aisles were left clear; not a creature, not an obstacle was in the way. The reason for this was made evident about the same time in the reading of the service as the disturbances had begun the previous week. A man rode into the church upon an ass, with his face turned towards the tail, and as many old hats piled on his head as he could possibly carry. He began urging his beast round the aisles, and the screams, and cries, and laughter of the congregation entirely drowned all sound of Mr. Redhead's voice, and, I believe, he was obliged to desist. Hitherto they had not proceeded to anything like personal violence; but on the third Sunday they must have been greatly irritated at seeing Mr. Redhead, determined to brave their will, ride up the village street, accompanied by several gentlemen from Bradford. They put up their horses at the Black Bull--the little inn close upon the churchyard, for the convenience of arvills as well as for other purposes--and went into church. On this the people followed, with a chimney-sweeper, whom they had employed to clean the chimneys of some out-buildings belonging to the church that very morning, and afterward plied with drink till he was in a state of solemn intoxication. They placed him right before the reading- desk, where his blackened face nodded a drunken, stupid assent to all that Mr. Redhead said. At last, either prompted by some mischief-maker, or from some tipsy impulse, he clambered up the pulpit stairs, and attempted to embrace Mr. Redhead. Then the profane fun grew fast and furious. Some of the more riotous, pushed the soot-covered chimney-sweeper against Mr. Redhead, as he tried to escape. They threw both him and his tormentor down on the ground in the churchyard where the soot-bag had been emptied, and, though, at last, Mr. Redhead escaped into the Black Bull, the doors of which were immediately barred, the people raged without, threatening to stone him and his friends. One of my informants is an old man, who was the landlord of the inn at the time, and he stands to it that such was the temper of the irritated mob, that Mr. Redhead was in real danger of his life. This man, however, planned an escape for his unpopular inmates. The Black Bull is near the top of the long, steep Haworth street, and at the bottom, close by the bridge, on the road to Keighley, is a turnpike. Giving directions to his hunted guests to steal out at the back door (through which, probably, many a ne'er-do-weel has escaped from good Mr. Grimshaw's horsewhip), the landlord and some of the stable-boys rode the horses belonging to the party from Bradford backwards and forwards before his front door, among the fiercely-expectant crowd. Through some opening between the houses, those on the horses saw Mr. Redhead and his friends creeping along behind the street; and then, striking spurs, they dashed quickly down to the turnpike; the obnoxious clergyman and his friends mounted in haste, and had sped some distance before the people found out that their prey had escaped, and came running to the closed turnpike gate. This was Mr. Redhead's last appearance at Haworth for many years. Long afterwards, he came to preach, and in his sermon to a large and attentive congregation he good-humouredly reminded them of the circumstances which I have described. They gave him a hearty welcome, for they owed him no grudge; although before they had been ready enough to stone him, in order to maintain what they considered to be their rights. The foregoing account, which I heard from two of the survivors, in the presence of a friend who can vouch for the accuracy of my repetition, has to a certain degree been confirmed by a letter from the Yorkshire gentleman, whose words I have already quoted. "I am not surprised at your difficulty in authenticating matter-of-fact. I find this in recalling what I have heard, and the authority on which I have heard anything. As to the donkey tale, I believe you are right. Mr. Redhead and Dr. Ramsbotham, his son-in-law, are no strangers to me. Each of them has a niche in my affections. "I have asked, this day, two persons who lived in Haworth at the time to which you allude, the son and daughter of an acting trustee, and each of them between sixty and seventy years of age, and they assure me that the donkey was introduced. One of them says it was mounted by a half-witted man, seated with his face towards the tail of the beast, and having several hats piled on his head. Neither of my informants was, however, present at these edifying services. I believe that no movement was made in the church on either Sunday, until the whole of the authorised reading- service was gone through, and I am sure that nothing was more remote from the more respectable party than any personal antagonism toward Mr. Redhead. He was one of the most amiable and worthy of men, a man to myself endeared by many ties and obligations. I never heard before your book that the sweep ascended the pulpit steps. He was present, however, in the clerical habiliments of his order . . . I may also add that among the many who were present at those sad Sunday orgies the majority were non-residents, and came from those moorland fastnesses on the outskirts of the parish locally designated as 'ovver th' steyres,' one stage more remote than Haworth from modern civilization. "To an instance or two more of the rusticity of the inhabitants of the chapelry of Haworth, I may introduce you. "A Haworth carrier called at the office of a friend of mine to deliver a parcel on a cold winter's day, and stood with the door open. 'Robin! shut the door!' said the recipient. 'Have you no doors in your country?' 'Yoi,' responded Robin, 'we hev, but we nivver steik 'em.' I have frequently remarked the number of doors open even in winter. "When well directed, the indomitable and independent energies of the natives of this part of the country are invaluable; dangerous when perverted. I shall never forget the fierce actions and utterances of one suffering from delirium tremens. Whether in its wrath, disdain, or its dismay, the countenance was infernal. I called once upon a time on a most respectable yeoman, and I was, in language earnest and homely, pressed to accept the hospitality of the house. I consented. The word to me was, 'Nah, Maister, yah mun stop an hev sum te-ah, yah mun, eah, yah mun.' A bountiful table was soon spread; at all events, time soon went while I scaled the hills to see 't' maire at wor thretty year owd, an't' feil at wor fewer.' On sitting down to the table, a venerable woman officiated, and after filling the cups, she thus addressed me: 'Nah, Maister, yah mun loawze th'taible' (loose the table). The master said, 'Shah meeans yah mun sey t' greyce.' I took the hint, and uttered the blessing. "I spoke with an aged and tried woman at one time, who, after recording her mercies, stated, among others, her powers of speech, by asserting 'Thank the Lord, ah nivver wor a meilly-meouthed wumman.' I feel particularly at fault in attempting the orthography of the dialect, but must excuse myself by telling you that I once saw a letter in which the word I have just now used (excuse) was written 'ecksqueaize!' "There are some things, however, which rather tend to soften the idea of the rudeness of Haworth. No rural district has been more markedly the abode of musical taste and acquirement, and this at a period when it was difficult to find them to the same extent apart from towns in advance of their times. I have gone to Haworth and found an orchestra to meet me, filled with local performers, vocal and instrumental, to whom the best works of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Marcello, &c. &c., were familiar as household words. By knowledge, taste, and voice, they were markedly separate from ordinary village choirs, and have been put in extensive requisition for the solo and chorus of many an imposing festival. One man still survives, who, for fifty years, has had one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard, and with it a refined and cultivated taste. To him and to others many inducements have been offered to migrate; but the loom, the association, the mountain air have had charms enow to secure their continuance at home. I love the recollection of their performance; that recollection extends over more than sixty years. The attachments, the antipathies and the hospitalities of the district are ardent, hearty, and homely. Cordiality in each is the prominent characteristic. As a people, these mountaineers have ever been accessible to gentleness and truth, so far as I have known them; but excite suspicion or resentment, and they give emphatic and not impotent resistance. Compulsion they defy. "I accompanied Mr. Heap on his first visit to Haworth after his accession to the vicarage of Bradford. It was on Easter day, either 1816 or 1817. His predecessor, the venerable John Crosse, known as the 'blind vicar,' had been inattentive to the vicarial claims. A searching investigation had to be made and enforced, and as it proceeded stout and sturdy utterances were not lacking on the part of the parishioners. To a spectator, though rude, they were amusing, and significant, foretelling what might be expected, and what was afterwards realised, on the advent of a new incumbent, if they deemed him an intruder. "From their peculiar parochial position and circumstances, the inhabitants of the chapelry have been prompt, earnest, and persevering in their opposition to church-rates. Although ten miles from the mother- church, they were called upon to defray a large proportion of this obnoxious tax,--I believe one fifth. "Besides this, they had to maintain their own edifice, &c., &c. They resisted, therefore, with energy, that which they deemed to be oppression and injustice. By scores would they wend their way from the hills to attend a vestry meeting at Bradford, and in such service failed not to show less of the _suaviter in modo_ than the _fortiter in re_. Happily such occasion for their action has not occurred for many years. "The use of patronymics has been common in this locality. Inquire for a man by his Christian name and surname, and you may have some difficulty in finding him: ask, however, for 'George o' Ned's,' or 'Dick o' Bob's,' or 'Tom o' Jack's,' as the case may be, and your difficulty is at an end. In many instances the person is designated by his residence. In my early years I had occasion to inquire for Jonathan Whitaker, who owned a considerable farm in the township. I was sent hither and thither, until it occurred to me to ask for 'Jonathan o' th' Gate.' My difficulties were then at an end. Such circumstances arise out of the settled character and isolation of the natives. "Those who have witnessed a Haworth wedding when the parties were above the rank of labourers, will not easily forget the scene. A levy was made on the horses of the neighbourhood, and a merry cavalcade of mounted men and women, single or double, traversed the way to Bradford church. The inn and church appeared to be in natural connection, and as the labours of the Temperance Society had then to begin, the interests of sobriety were not always consulted. On remounting their steeds they commenced with a race, and not unfrequently an inebriate or unskilful horseman or woman was put _hors de combat_. A race also was frequent at the end. of these wedding expeditions, from the bridge to the toll-bar at Haworth. The race-course you will know to be anything but level." Into the midst of this lawless, yet not unkindly population, Mr. Bronte brought his wife and six little children, in February, 1820. There are those yet alive who remember seven heavily-laden carts lumbering slowly up the long stone street, bearing the "new parson's" household goods to his future abode. One wonders how the bleak aspect of her new home--the low, oblong, stone parsonage, high up, yet with a still higher back-ground of sweeping moors--struck on the gentle, delicate wife, whose health even then was failing. CHAPTER III The Rev. Patrick Bronte is a native of the County Down in Ireland. His father Hugh Bronte, was left an orphan at an early age. He came from the south to the north of the island, and settled in the parish of Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. There was some family tradition that, humble as Hugh Bronte's circumstances were, he was the descendant of an ancient family. But about this neither he nor his descendants have cared to inquire. He made an early marriage, and reared and educated ten children on the proceeds of the few acres of land which he farmed. This large family were remarkable for great physical strength, and much personal beauty. Even in his old age, Mr. Bronte is a striking-looking man, above the common height, with a nobly-shaped head, and erect carriage. In his youth he must have been unusually handsome. He was born on Patrickmas day (March 17), 1777, and early gave tokens of extraordinary quickness and intelligence. He had also his full share of ambition; and of his strong sense and forethought there is a proof in the fact, that, knowing that his father could afford him no pecuniary aid, and that he must depend upon his own exertions, he opened a public school at the early age of sixteen; and this mode of living he continued to follow for five or six years. He then became a tutor in the family of the Rev. Mr. Tighe, rector of Drumgooland parish. Thence he proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was entered in July, 1802, being at the time five-and-twenty years of age. After nearly four years' residence, he obtained his B.A. degree, and was ordained to a curacy in Essex, whence he removed into Yorkshire. The course of life of which this is the outline, shows a powerful and remarkable character, originating and pursuing a purpose in a resolute and independent manner. Here is a youth--a boy of sixteen--separating himself from his family, and determining to maintain himself; and that, not in the hereditary manner by agricultural pursuits, but by the labour of his brain. I suppose, from what I have heard, that Mr. Tighe became strongly interested in his children's tutor, and may have aided him, not only in the direction of his studies, but in the suggestion of an English university education, and in advice as to the mode in which he should obtain entrance there. Mr. Bronte has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech; he never could have shown his Celtic descent in the straight Greek lines and long oval of his face; but at five-and-twenty, fresh from the only life he had ever known, to present himself at the gates of St. John's proved no little determination of will, and scorn of ridicule. While at Cambridge, he became one of a corps of volunteers, who were then being called out all over the country to resist the apprehended invasion by the French. I have heard him allude, in late years, to Lord Palmerston as one who had often been associated with him then in the mimic military duties which they had to perform. We take him up now settled as a curate at Hartshead, in Yorkshire--far removed from his birth-place and all his Irish connections; with whom, indeed, he cared little to keep up any intercourse, and whom he never, I believe, revisited after becoming a student at Cambridge. Hartshead is a very small village, lying to the east of Huddersfield and Halifax; and, from its high situation--on a mound, as it were, surrounded by a circular basin--commanding a magnificent view. Mr. Bronte resided here for five years; and, while the incumbent of Hartshead, he wooed and married Maria Branwell. She was the third daughter of Mr. Thomas Branwell, merchant, of Penzance. Her mother's maiden name was Carne: and, both on father's and mother's side, the Branwell family were sufficiently well descended to enable them to mix in the best society that Penzance then afforded. Mr. and Mrs. Branwell would be living--their family of four daughters and one son, still children--during the existence of that primitive state of society which is well described by Dr. Davy in the life of his brother. "In the same town, when the population was about 2,000 persons, there was only one carpet, the floors of rooms were sprinkled with sea-sand, and there was not a single silver fork. "At that time, when our colonial possessions were very limited, our army and navy on a small scale, and there was comparatively little demand for intellect, the younger sons of gentlemen were often of necessity brought up to some trade or mechanical art, to which no discredit, or loss of caste, as it were, was attached. The eldest son, if not allowed to remain an idle country squire, was sent to Oxford or Cambridge, preparatory to his engaging in one of the three liberal professions of divinity, law, or physic; the second son was perhaps apprenticed to a surgeon or apothecary, or a solicitor; the third to a pewterer or watchmaker; the fourth to a packer or mercer, and so on, were there more to be provided for. "After their apprenticeships were finished, the young men almost invariably went to London to perfect themselves in their respective trade or art: and on their return into the country, when settled in business, they were not excluded from what would now be considered genteel society. Visiting then was conducted differently from what it is at present. Dinner-parties were almost unknown, excepting at the annual feast-time. Christmas, too, was then a season of peculiar indulgence and conviviality, and a round of entertainments was given, consisting of tea and supper. Excepting at these two periods, visiting was almost entirely confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three o'clock, broke up at nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly some round game at cards, as Pope Joan, or Commerce. The lower class was then extremely ignorant, and all classes were very superstitious; even the belief in witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous. There was scarcely a parish in the Mount's Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot to which some story of supernatural horror was not attached. Even when I was a boy, I remember a house in the best street of Penzance which was uninhabited because it was believed to be haunted, and which young people walked by at night at a quickened pace, and with a beating heart. Amongst the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting, generally ending in drunkenness, were what they most delighted in. Smuggling was carried on to a great extent; and drunkenness, and a low state of morals, were naturally associated with it. Whilst smuggling was the means of acquiring wealth to bold and reckless adventurers, drunkenness and dissipation occasioned the ruin of many respectable families." I have given this extract because I conceive it bears some reference to the life of Miss Bronte, whose strong mind and vivid imagination must have received their first impressions either from the servants (in that simple household, almost friendly companions during the greater part of the day,) retailing the traditions or the news of Haworth village; or from Mr. Bronte, whose intercourse with his children appears to have been considerably restrained, and whose life, both in Ireland and at Cambridge, had been spent under peculiar circumstances; or from her aunt, Miss Branwell, who came to the parsonage, when Charlotte was only six or seven years old, to take charge of her dead sister's family. This aunt was older than Mrs. Bronte, and had lived longer among the Penzance society, which Dr. Davy describes. But in the Branwell family itself, the violence and irregularity of nature did not exist. They were Methodists, and, as far as I can gather, a gentle and sincere piety gave refinement and purity of character. Mr. Branwell, the father, according to his descendants' account, was a man of musical talent. He and his wife lived to see all their children grown up, and died within a year of each other--he in 1808, she in 1809, when their daughter Maria was twenty- five or twenty-six years of age. I have been permitted to look over a series of nine letters, which were addressed by her to Mr. Bronte, during the brief term of their engagement in 1812. They are full of tender grace of expression and feminine modesty; pervaded by the deep piety to which I have alluded as a family characteristic. I shall make one or two extracts from them, to show what sort of a person was the mother of Charlotte Bronte: but first, I must state the circumstances under which this Cornish lady met the scholar from Ahaderg, near Loughbrickland. In the early summer of 1812, when she would be twenty-nine, she came to visit her uncle, the Reverend John Fennel, who was at that time a clergyman of the Church of England, living near Leeds, but who had previously been a Methodist minister. Mr. Bronte was the incumbent of Hartshead; and had the reputation in the neighbourhood of being a very handsome fellow, full of Irish enthusiasm, and with something of an Irishman's capability of falling easily in love. Miss Branwell was extremely small in person; not pretty, but very elegant, and always dressed with a quiet simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character, and of which some of the details call to mind the style of dress preferred by her daughter for her favourite heroines. Mr. Bronte was soon captivated by the little, gentle creature, and this time declared that it was for life. In her first letter to him, dated August 26th, she seems almost surprised to find herself engaged, and alludes to the short time which she has known him. In the rest there are touches reminding one of Juliet's-- "But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true, Than those that have more cunning to be strange." There are plans for happy pic-nic parties to Kirkstall Abbey, in the glowing September days, when "Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin Jane,"--the last engaged to a Mr. Morgan, another clergyman--were of the party; all since dead, except Mr. Bronte. There was no opposition on the part of any of her friends to her engagement. Mr. and Mrs. Fennel sanctioned it, and her brother and sisters in far-away Penzance appear fully to have approved of it. In a letter dated September 18th, she says:-- "For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever; so far from it, that my sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother, used to consult me on every occasion of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my opinions and actions: perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage, and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error, yet, in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt, I have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor." In the same letter she tells Mr. Bronte, that she has informed her sisters of her engagement, and that she should not see them again so soon as she had intended. Mr. Fennel, her uncle, also writes to them by the same post in praise of Mr. Bronte. The journey from Penzance to Leeds in those days was both very long and very expensive; the lovers had not much money to spend in unnecessary travelling, and, as Miss Branwell had neither father nor mother living, it appeared both a discreet and seemly arrangement that the marriage should take place from her uncle's house. There was no reason either why the engagement should be prolonged. They were past their first youth; they had means sufficient for their unambitious wants; the living of Hartshead is rated in the Clergy List at 202_l_. per annum, and she was in the receipt of a small annuity (50_l_. I have been told) by the will of her father. So, at the end of September, the lovers began to talk about taking a house, for I suppose that Mr. Bronte up to that time had been in lodgings; and all went smoothly and successfully with a view to their marriage in the ensuing winter, until November, when a misfortune happened, which she thus patiently and prettily describes:-- "I suppose you never expected to be much the richer for me, but I am sorry to inform you that I am still poorer than I thought myself. I mentioned having sent for my books, clothes, &c. On Saturday evening, about the time when you were writing the description of your imaginary shipwreck, I was reading and feeling the effects of a real one, having then received a letter from my sister giving me an account of the vessel in which she had sent my box being stranded on the coast of Devonshire, in consequence of which the box was dashed to pieces with the violence of the sea, and all my little property, with the exception of a very few articles, being swallowed up in the mighty deep. If this should not prove the prelude to something worse I shall think little of it, as it is the first disastrous circumstance which has occurred since I left my home." The last of these letters is dated December the 5th. Miss Branwell and her cousin intended to set about making the wedding-cake in the following week, so the marriage could not be far off. She had been learning by heart a "pretty little hymn" of Mr. Bronte's composing; and reading Lord Lyttelton's "Advice to a Lady," on which she makes some pertinent and just remarks, showing that she thought as well as read. And so Maria Branwell fades out of sight; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Bronte, but it is as an invalid, not far from death; still patient, cheerful, and pious. The writing of these letters is elegant and neat; while there are allusions to household occupations--such as making the wedding-cake; there are also allusions to the books she has read, or is reading, showing a well-cultivated mind. Without having anything of her daughter's rare talents, Mrs. Bronte must have been, I imagine, that unusual character, a well-balanced and consistent woman. The style of the letters is easy and good; as is also that of a paper from the same hand, entitled "The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns," which was written rather later, with a view to publication in some periodical. She was married from her uncle's house in Yorkshire, on the 29th of December, 1812; the same day was also the wedding-day of her younger sister, Charlotte Branwell, in distant Penzance. I do not think that Mrs. Bronte ever revisited Cornwall, but she has left a very pleasant impression on the minds of those relations who yet survive; they speak of her as "their favourite aunt, and one to whom they, as well as all the family, looked up, as a person of talent and great amiability of disposition;" and, again, as "meek and retiring, while possessing more than ordinary talents, which she inherited from her father, and her piety was genuine and unobtrusive." Mr. Bronte remained for five years at Hartshead, in the parish of Dewsbury. There he was married, and his two children, Maria and Elizabeth, were born. At the expiration of that period, he had the living of Thornton, in Bradford Parish. Some of those great West Riding parishes are almost like bishoprics for their amount of population and number of churches. Thornton church is a little episcopal chapel of ease, rich in Nonconformist monuments, as of Accepted Lister and his friend Dr. Hall. The neighbourhood is desolate and wild; great tracts of bleak land, enclosed by stone dykes, sweeping up Clayton heights. The church itself looks ancient and solitary, and as if left behind by the great stone mills of a flourishing Independent firm, and the solid square chapel built by the members of that denomination. Altogether not so pleasant a place as Hartshead, with its ample outlook over cloud-shadowed, sun-flecked plain, and hill rising beyond hill to form the distant horizon. Here, at Thornton, Charlotte Bronte was born, on the 21st of April, 1816. Fast on her heels followed Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne. After the birth of this last daughter, Mrs. Bronte's health began to decline. It is hard work to provide for the little tender wants of many young children where the means are but limited. The necessaries of food and clothing are much more easily supplied than the almost equal necessaries of attendance, care, soothing, amusement, and sympathy. Maria Bronte, the eldest of six, could only have been a few months more than six years old, when Mr. Bronte removed to Haworth, on February the 25th, 1820. Those who knew her then, describe her as grave, thoughtful, and quiet, to a degree far beyond her years. Her childhood was no childhood; the cases are rare in which the possessors of great gifts have known the blessings of that careless happy time; _their_ unusual powers stir within them, and, instead of the natural life of perception--the objective, as the Germans call it--they begin the deeper life of reflection--the subjective. Little Maria Bronte was delicate and small in appearance, which seemed to give greater effect to her wonderful precocity of intellect. She must have been her mother's companion and helpmate in many a household and nursery experience, for Mr. Bronte was, of course, much engaged in his study; and besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appearance on the scene as a drag both on his wife's strength, and as an interruption to the comfort of the household. Haworth Parsonage is--as I mentioned in the first chapter--an oblong stone house, facing down the hill on which the village stands, and with the front door right opposite to the western door of the church, distant about a hundred yards. Of this space twenty yards or so in depth are occupied by the grassy garden, which is scarcely wider than the house. The graveyard lies on two sides of the house and garden. The house consists of four rooms on each floor, and is two stories high. When the Brontes took possession, they made the larger parlour, to the left of the entrance, the family sitting-room, while that on the right was appropriated to Mr. Bronte as a study. Behind this was the kitchen; behind the former, a sort of flagged store-room. Upstairs were four bed- chambers of similar size, with the addition of a small apartment over the passage, or "lobby" as we call it in the north. This was to the front, the staircase going up right opposite to the entrance. There is the pleasant old fashion of window seats all through the house; and one can see that the parsonage was built in the days when wood was plentiful, as the massive stair-banisters, and the wainscots, and the heavy window-frames testify. This little extra upstairs room was appropriated to the children. Small as it was, it was not called a nursery; indeed, it had not the comfort of a fire-place in it; the servants--two affectionate, warm-hearted sisters, who cannot now speak of the family without tears--called the room the "children's study." The age of the eldest student was perhaps by this time seven. The people in Haworth were none of them very poor. Many of them were employed in the neighbouring worsted mills; a few were mill-owners and manufacturers in a small way; there were also some shopkeepers for the humbler and everyday wants; but for medical advice, for stationery, books, law, dress, or dainties, the inhabitants had to go to Keighley. There were several Sunday-schools; the Baptists had taken the lead in instituting them, the Wesleyans had followed, the Church of England had brought up the rear. Good Mr. Grimshaw, Wesley's friend, had built a humble Methodist chapel, but it stood close to the road leading on to the moor; the Baptists then raised a place of worship, with the distinction of being a few yards back from the highway; and the Methodists have since thought it well to erect another and a larger chapel, still more retired from the road. Mr. Bronte was ever on kind and friendly terms with each denomination as a body; but from individuals in the village the family stood aloof, unless some direct service was required, from the first. "They kept themselves very close," is the account given by those who remember Mr. and Mrs. Bronte's coming amongst them. I believe many of the Yorkshiremen would object to the system of parochial visiting; their surly independence would revolt from the idea of any one having a right, from his office, to inquire into their condition, to counsel, or to admonish them. The old hill-spirit lingers in them, which coined the rhyme, inscribed on the under part of one of the seats in the Sedilia of Whalley Abbey, not many miles from Haworth, "Who mells wi' what another does Had best go home and shoe his goose." I asked an inhabitant of a district close to Haworth what sort of a clergyman they had at the church which he attended. "A rare good one," said he: "he minds his own business, and ne'er troubles himself with ours." Mr. Bronte was faithful in visiting the sick and all those who sent for him, and diligent in attendance at the schools; and so was his daughter Charlotte too; but, cherishing and valuing privacy themselves, they were perhaps over-delicate in not intruding upon the privacy of others. From their first going to Haworth, their walks were directed rather out towards the heathery moors, sloping upwards behind the parsonage, than towards the long descending village street. A good old woman, who came to nurse Mrs. Bronte in the illness--an internal cancer--which grew and gathered upon her, not many months after her arrival at Haworth, tells me that at that time the six little creatures used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things. They were grave and silent beyond their years; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house; for, at the time which my informant speaks of, Mrs. Bronte was confined to the bedroom from which she never came forth alive. "You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up" (Maria, but seven!) "in the children's study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one everything when she came out; debates in Parliament, and I don't know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. They were good little creatures. Emily was the prettiest." Mrs. Bronte was the same patient, cheerful person as we have seen her formerly; very ill, suffering great pain, but seldom if ever complaining; at her better times begging her nurse to raise her in bed to let her see her clean the grate, "because she did it as it was done in Cornwall;" devotedly fond of her husband, who warmly repaid her affection, and suffered no one else to take the night-nursing; but, according to my informant, the mother was not very anxious to see much of her children, probably because the sight of them, knowing how soon they were to be left motherless, would have agitated her too much. So the little things clung quietly together, for their father was busy in his study and in his parish, or with their mother, and they took their meals alone; sat reading, or whispering low, in the "children's study," or wandered out on the hill-side, hand in hand. The ideas of Rousseau and Mr. Day on education had filtered down through many classes, and spread themselves widely out. I imagine, Mr. Bronte must have formed some of his opinions on the management of children from these two theorists. His practice was not half so wild or extraordinary as that to which an aunt of mine was subjected by a disciple of Mr. Day's. She had been taken by this gentleman and his wife, to live with them as their adopted child, perhaps about five-and-twenty years before the time of which I am writing. They were wealthy people and kind hearted, but her food and clothing were of the very simplest and rudest description, on Spartan principles. A healthy, merry child, she did not much care for dress or eating; but the treatment which she felt as a real cruelty was this. They had a carriage, in which she and the favourite dog were taken an airing on alternate days; the creature whose turn it was to be left at home being tossed in a blanket--an operation which my aunt especially dreaded. Her affright at the tossing was probably the reason why it was persevered in. Dressed-up ghosts had become common, and she did not care for them, so the blanket exercise was to be the next mode of hardening her nerves. It is well known that Mr. Day broke off his intention of marrying Sabrina, the girl whom he had educated for this purpose, because, within a few weeks of the time fixed for the wedding, she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves. Yet Mr. Day and my aunt's relations were benevolent people, only strongly imbued with the crotchet that by a system of training might be educed the hardihood and simplicity of the ideal savage, forgetting the terrible isolation of feelings and habits which their pupils would experience in the future life which they must pass among the corruptions and refinements of civilization. Mr. Bronte wished to make his children hardy, and indifferent to the pleasures of eating and dress. In the latter he succeeded, as far as regarded his daughters. His strong, passionate, Irish nature was, in general, compressed down with resolute stoicism; but it was there notwithstanding all his philosophic calm and dignity of demeanour; though he did not speak when he was annoyed or displeased. Mrs. Bronte, whose sweet nature thought invariably of the bright side, would say, "Ought I not to be thankful that he never gave me an angry word?" Mr. Bronte was an active walker, stretching away over the moors for many miles, noting in his mind all natural signs of wind and weather, and keenly observing all the wild creatures that came and went in the loneliest sweeps of the hills. He has seen eagles stooping low in search of food for their young; no eagle is ever seen on those mountain slopes now. He fearlessly took whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him right. In the days of the Luddites, he had been for the peremptory interference of the law, at a time when no magistrate could be found to act, and all the property of the West Riding was in terrible danger. He became unpopular then among the millworkers, and he esteemed his life unsafe if he took his long and lonely walks unarmed; so he began the habit, which has continued to this day, of invariably carrying a loaded pistol about with him. It lay on his dressing-table with his watch; with his watch it was put on in the morning; with his watch it was taken off at night. Many years later, during his residence at Haworth, there was a strike; the hands in the neighbourhood felt themselves aggrieved by the masters, and refused to work: Mr. Bronte thought that they had been unjustly and unfairly treated, and he assisted them by all the means in his power to "keep the wolf from their doors," and avoid the incubus of debt. Several of the more influential inhabitants of Haworth and the neighbourhood were mill-owners; they remonstrated pretty sharply with him, but he believed that his conduct was right and persevered in it. His opinions might be often both wild and erroneous, his principles of action eccentric and strange, his views of life partial, and almost misanthropical; but not one opinion that he held could be stirred or modified by any worldly motive: he acted up to his principles of action; and, if any touch of misanthropy mingled with his view of mankind in general, his conduct to the individuals who came in personal contact with him did not agree with such view. It is true that he had strong and vehement prejudices, and was obstinate in maintaining them, and that he was not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient. But I do not pretend to be able to harmonize points of character, and account for them, and bring them all into one consistent and intelligible whole. The family with whom I have now to do shot their roots down deeper than I can penetrate. I cannot measure them, much less is it for me to judge them. I have named these instances of eccentricity in the father because I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter. Mrs. Bronte died in September, 1821, and the lives of those quiet children must have become quieter and lonelier still. Charlotte tried hard, in after years, to recall the remembrance of her mother, and could bring back two or three pictures of her. One was when, sometime in the evening light, she had been playing with her little boy, Patrick Branwell, in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage. But the recollections of four or five years old are of a very fragmentary character. Owing to some illness of the digestive organs, Mr. Bronte was obliged to be very careful about his diet; and, in order to avoid temptation, and possibly to have the quiet necessary for digestion, he had begun, before his wife's death, to take his dinner alone--a habit which he always retained. He did not require companionship, therefore he did not seek it, either in his walks, or in his daily life. The quiet regularity of his domestic hours was only broken in upon by church-wardens, and visitors on parochial business; and sometimes by a neighbouring clergyman, who came down the hills, across the moors, to mount up again to Haworth Parsonage, and spend an evening there. But, owing to Mrs. Bronte's death so soon after her husband had removed into the district, and also to the distances, and the bleak country to be traversed, the wives of these clerical friends did not accompany their husbands; and the daughters grew up out of childhood into girlhood bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex, and station. But the children did not want society. To small infantine gaieties they were unaccustomed. They were all in all to each other. I do not suppose that there ever was a family more tenderly bound to each other. Maria read the newspapers, and reported intelligence to her younger sisters which it is wonderful they could take an interest in. But I suspect that they had no "children's books," and that their eager minds "browzed undisturbed among the wholesome pasturage of English literature," as Charles Lamb expresses it. The servants of the household appear to have been much impressed with the little Brontes' extraordinary cleverness. In a letter which I had from him on this subject, their father writes:--"The servants often said that they had never seen such a clever little child" (as Charlotte), "and that they were obliged to be on their guard as to what they said and did before her. Yet she and the servants always lived on good terms with each other." These servants are yet alive; elderly women residing in Bradford. They retain a faithful and fond recollection of Charlotte, and speak of her unvarying kindness from the "time when she was ever such a little child!" when she would not rest till she had got the old disused cradle sent from the parsonage to the house where the parents of one of them lived, to serve for a little infant sister. They tell of one long series of kind and thoughtful actions from this early period to the last weeks of Charlotte Bronte's life; and, though she had left her place many years ago, one of these former servants went over from Bradford to Haworth on purpose to see Mr. Bronte, and offer him her true sympathy, when his last child died. I may add a little anecdote as a testimony to the admirable character of the likeness of Miss Bronte prefixed to this volume. A gentleman who had kindly interested himself in the preparation of this memoir took the first volume, shortly after the publication, to the house of this old servant, in order to show her the portrait. The moment she caught a glimpse of the frontispiece, "There she is," in a minute she exclaimed. "Come, John, look!" (to her husband); and her daughter was equally struck by the resemblance. There might not be many to regard the Brontes with affection, but those who once loved them, loved them long and well. I return to the father's letter. He says:-- "When mere children, as soon as they could read and write, Charlotte and her brothers and sisters used to invent and act little plays of their own, in which the Duke of Wellington, my daughter Charlotte's hero, was sure to come off conqueror; when a dispute would not unfrequently arise amongst them regarding the comparative merits of him, Buonaparte, Hannibal, and Caesar. When the argument got warm, and rose to its height, as their mother was then dead, I had sometimes to come in as arbitrator, and settle the dispute according to the best of my judgment. Generally, in the management of these concerns, I frequently thought that I discovered signs of rising talent, which I had seldom or never before seen in any of their age . . . A circumstance now occurs to my mind which I may as well mention. When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask. "I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, 'Age and experience.' I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell), what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, 'Reason with him, and when he won't listen to reason, whip him.' I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman; he answered, 'By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.' I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, 'The Bible.' And what was the next best; she answered, 'The Book of Nature.' I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, 'That which would make her rule her house well.' Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, 'By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.' I may not have given precisely their words, but I have nearly done so, as they made a deep and lasting impression on my memory. The substance, however, was exactly what I have stated." The strange and quaint simplicity of the mode taken by the father to ascertain the hidden characters of his children, and the tone and character of these questions and answers, show the curious education which was made by the circumstances surrounding the Brontes. They knew no other children. They knew no other modes of thought than what were suggested to them by the fragments of clerical conversation which they overheard in the parlour, or the subjects of village and local interest which they heard discussed in the kitchen. Each had their own strong characteristic flavour. They took a vivid interest in the public characters, and the local and the foreign as well as home politics discussed in the newspapers. Long before Maria Bronte died, at the age of eleven, her father used to say he could converse with her on any of the leading topics of the day with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person. CHAPTER IV About a year after Mrs. Bronte's death, an elder sister, as I have before mentioned, came from Penzance to superintend her brother-in-law's household, and look after his children. Miss Branwell was, I believe, a kindly and conscientious woman, with a good deal of character, but with the somewhat narrow ideas natural to one who had spent nearly all her life in the same place. She had strong prejudices, and soon took a distaste to Yorkshire. From Penzance, where plants which we in the north call greenhouse flowers grow in great profusion, and without any shelter even in the winter, and where the soft warm climate allows the inhabitants, if so disposed, to live pretty constantly in the open air, it was a great change for a lady considerably past forty to come and take up her abode in a place where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish, and where a tree of even moderate dimensions might be hunted for far and wide; where the snow lay long and late on the moors, stretching bleakly and barely far up from the dwelling which was henceforward to be her home; and where often, on autumnal or winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and rage together, tearing round the house as if they were wild beasts striving to find an entrance. She missed the small round of cheerful, social visiting perpetually going on in a country town; she missed the friends she had known from her childhood, some of whom had been her parents' friends before they were hers; she disliked many of the customs of the place, and particularly dreaded the cold damp arising from the flag floors in the passages and parlours of Haworth Parsonage. The stairs, too, I believe, are made of stone; and no wonder, when stone quarries are near, and trees are far to seek. I have heard that Miss Branwell always went about the house in pattens, clicking up and down the stairs, from her dread of catching cold. For the same reason, in the latter years of her life, she passed nearly all her time, and took most of her meals, in her bedroom. The children respected her, and had that sort of affection for her which is generated by esteem; but I do not think they ever freely loved her. It was a severe trial for any one at her time of life to change neighbourhood and habitation so entirely as she did; and the greater her merit. I do not know whether Miss Branwell taught her nieces anything besides sewing, and the household arts in which Charlotte afterwards was such an adept. Their regular lessons were said to their father; and they were always in the habit of picking up an immense amount of miscellaneous information for themselves. But a year or so before this time, a school had been begun in the North of England for the daughters of clergymen. The place was Cowan Bridge, a small hamlet on the coach-road between Leeds and Kendal, and thus easy of access from Haworth, as the coach ran daily, and one of its stages was at Keighley. The yearly expense for each pupil (according to the entrance-rules given in the Report for 1842, and I believe they had not been increased since the establishment of the schools in 1823) was as follows: "Rule 11. The terms for clothing, lodging, boarding, and educating, are 14_l_. a year; half to be paid in advance, when the pupils are sent; and also 1_l_. entrance-money, for the use of books, &c. The system of education comprehends history, geography, the use of the globes, grammar, writing and arithmetic, all kinds of needlework, and the nicer kinds of household work--such as getting up fine linen, ironing, &c. If accomplishments are required, an additional charge of 3_l_. a year is made for music or drawing, each." Rule 3rd requests that the friends will state the line of education desired in the case of every pupil, having a regard to her future prospects. Rule 4th states the clothing and toilette articles which a girl is expected to bring with her; and thus concludes: "The pupils all appear in the same dress. They wear plain straw cottage bonnets; in summer white frocks on Sundays, and nankeen on other days; in winter, purple stuff frocks, and purple cloth cloaks. For the sake of uniformity, therefore, they are required to bring 3_l_. in lieu of frocks, pelisse, bonnet, tippet, and frills; making the whole sum which each pupil brings with her to the school-- 7_l_. half-year in advance. 1_l_. entrance for books. 1_l_. entrance for clothes. The 8th rule is,--"All letters and parcels are inspected by the superintendent;" but this is a very prevalent regulation in all young ladies' schools, where I think it is generally understood that the schoolmistress may exercise this privilege, although it is certainly unwise in her to insist too frequently upon it. There is nothing at all remarkable in any of the other regulations, a copy of which was doubtless in Mr. Bronte's hands when he formed the determination to send his daughters to Cowan Bridge School; and he accordingly took Maria and Elizabeth thither in July, 1824. I now come to a part of my subject which I find great difficulty in treating, because the evidence relating to it on each side is so conflicting that it seems almost impossible to arrive at the truth. Miss Bronte more than once said to me, that she should not have written what she did of Lowood in "Jane Eyre," if she had thought the place would have been so immediately identified with Cowan Bridge, although there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it; she also said that she had not considered it necessary, in a work of fiction, to state every particular with the impartiality that might be required in a court of justice, nor to seek out motives, and make allowances for human failings, as she might have done, if dispassionately analysing the conduct of those who had the superintendence of the institution. I believe she herself would have been glad of an opportunity to correct the over-strong impression which was made upon the public mind by her vivid picture, though even she, suffering her whole life long, both in heart and body, from the consequences of what happened there, might have been apt, to the last, to take her deep belief in facts for the facts themselves--her conception of truth for the absolute truth. In some of the notices of the previous editions of this work, it is assumed that I derived the greater part of my information with regard to her sojourn at Cowan Bridge from Charlotte Bronte herself. I never heard her speak of the place but once, and that was on the second day of my acquaintance with her. A little child on that occasion expressed some reluctance to finish eating his piece of bread at dinner; and she, stooping down, and addressing him in a low voice, told him how thankful she should have been at his age for a piece of bread; and when we--though I am not sure if I myself spoke--asked her some question as to the occasion she alluded to, she replied with reserve and hesitation, evidently shying away from what she imagined might lead to too much conversation on one of her books. She spoke of the oat-cake at Cowan Bridge (the clap-bread of Westmorland) as being different to the leaven- raised oat-cake of Yorkshire, and of her childish distaste for it. Some one present made an allusion to a similar childish dislike in the true tale of "The terrible knitters o' Dent" given in Southey's "Common-place Book:" and she smiled faintly, but said that the mere difference in food was not all: that the food itself was spoilt by the dirty carelessness of the cook, so that she and her sisters disliked their meals exceedingly; and she named her relief and gladness when the doctor condemned the meat, and spoke of having seen him spit it out. These are all the details I ever heard from her. She so avoided particularizing, that I think Mr. Carus Wilson's name never passed between us. I do not doubt the general accuracy of my informants,--of those who have given, and solemnly repeated, the details that follow,--but it is only just to Miss Bronte to say that I have stated above pretty nearly all that I ever heard on the subject from her. A clergyman, living near Kirby Lonsdale, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, was the prime mover in the establishment of this school. He was an energetic man, sparing no labour for the accomplishment of his ends. He saw that it was an extremely difficult task for clergymen with limited incomes to provide for the education of their children; and he devised a scheme, by which a certain sum was raised annually by subscription, to complete the amount required to furnish a solid and sufficient English education, for which the parent's payment of 14_l_. a year would not have been sufficient. Indeed, that made by the parents was considered to be exclusively appropriated to the expenses of lodging and boarding, and the education provided for by the subscriptions. Twelve trustees were appointed; Mr. Wilson being not only a trustee, but the treasurer and secretary; in fact, taking most of the business arrangements upon himself; a responsibility which appropriately fell to him, as he lived nearer the school than any one else who was interested in it. So his character for prudence and judgment was to a certain degree implicated in the success or failure of Cowan Bridge School; and the working of it was for many years the great object and interest of his life. But he was apparently unacquainted with the prime element in good administration--seeking out thoroughly competent persons to fill each department, and then making them responsible for, and judging them by, the result, without perpetual interference with the details. So great was the amount of good which Mr. Wilson did, by his constant, unwearied superintendence, that I cannot help feeling sorry that, in his old age and declining health, the errors which he was believed to have committed, should have been brought up against him in a form which received such wonderful force from the touch of Miss Bronte's great genius. No doubt whatever can be entertained of the deep interest which he felt in the success of the school. As I write, I have before me his last words on giving up the secretaryship in 1850: he speaks of the "withdrawal, from declining health, of an eye, which, at all events, has loved to watch over the schools with an honest and anxious interest;"--and again he adds, "that he resigns, therefore, with a desire to be thankful for all that God has been pleased to accomplish through his instrumentality (the infirmities and unworthinesses of which he deeply feels and deplores)." Cowan Bridge is a cluster of some six or seven cottages, gathered together at both ends of a bridge, over which the high road from Leeds to Kendal crosses a little stream, called the Leck. This high road is nearly disused now; but formerly, when the buyers from the West Riding manufacturing districts had frequent occasion to go up into the North to purchase the wool of the Westmorland and Cumberland farmers, it was doubtless much travelled; and perhaps the hamlet of Cowan Bridge had a more prosperous look than it bears at present. It is prettily situated; just where the Leck-fells swoop into the plain; and by the course of the beck alder-trees and willows and hazel bushes grow. The current of the stream is interrupted by broken pieces of grey rock; and the waters flow over a bed of large round white pebbles, which a flood heaves up and moves on either side out of its impetuous way till in some parts they almost form a wall. By the side of the little, shallow, sparkling, vigorous Leck, run long pasture fields, of the fine short grass common in high land; for though Cowan Bridge is situated on a plain, it is a plain from which there is many a fall and long descent before you and the Leck reach the valley of the Lune. I can hardly understand how the school there came to be so unhealthy, the air all round about was so sweet and thyme-scented, when I visited it last summer. But at this day, every one knows that the site of a building intended for numbers should be chosen with far greater care than that of a private dwelling, from the tendency to illness, both infectious and otherwise, produced by the congregation of people in close proximity. The house is still remaining that formed part of that occupied by the school. It is a long, bow-windowed cottage, now divided into two dwellings. It stands facing the Leck, between which and it intervenes a space, about seventy yards deep, that was once the school garden. This original house was an old dwelling of the Picard family, which they had inhabited for two generations. They sold it for school purposes, and an additional building was erected, running at right angles from the older part. This new part was devoted expressly to schoolrooms, dormitories, &c.; and after the school was removed to Casterton, it was used for a bobbin-mill connected with the stream, where wooden reels were made out of the alders, which grow profusely in such ground as that surrounding Cowan Bridge. This mill is now destroyed. The present cottage was, at the time of which I write, occupied by the teachers' rooms, the dinner- room and kitchens, and some smaller bedrooms. On going into this building, I found one part, that nearest to the high road, converted into a poor kind of public-house, then to let, and having all the squalid appearance of a deserted place, which rendered it difficult to judge what it would look like when neatly kept up, the broken panes replaced in the windows, and the rough-cast (now cracked and discoloured) made white and whole. The other end forms a cottage, with the low ceilings and stone floors of a hundred years ago; the windows do not open freely and widely; and the passage upstairs, leading to the bedrooms, is narrow and tortuous: altogether, smells would linger about the house, and damp cling to it. But sanitary matters were little understood thirty years ago; and it was a great thing to get a roomy building close to the high road, and not too far from the habitation of Mr. Wilson, the originator of the educational scheme. There was much need of such an institution; numbers of ill-paid clergymen hailed the prospect with joy, and eagerly put down the names of their children as pupils when the establishment should be ready to receive them. Mr. Wilson was, no doubt, pleased by the impatience with which the realisation of his idea was anticipated, and opened the school with less than a hundred pounds in hand, and with pupils, the number of whom varies according to different accounts; Mr. W. W. Carus Wilson, the son of the founder, giving it as seventy; while Mr. Shepheard, the son-in-law, states it to have been only sixteen. Mr. Wilson felt, most probably, that the responsibility of the whole plan rested upon him. The payment made by the parents was barely enough for food and lodging; the subscriptions did not flow very freely into an untried scheme; and great economy was necessary in all the domestic arrangements. He determined to enforce this by frequent personal inspection; carried perhaps to an unnecessary extent, and leading occasionally to a meddling with little matters, which had sometimes the effect of producing irritation of feeling. Yet, although there was economy in providing for the household, there does not appear to have been any parsimony. The meat, flour, milk, &c., were contracted for, but were of very fair quality; and the dietary, which has been shown to me in manuscript, was neither bad nor unwholesome; nor, on the whole, was it wanting in variety. Oatmeal porridge for breakfast; a piece of oat-cake for those who required luncheon; baked and boiled beef, and mutton, potato-pie, and plain homely puddings of different kinds for dinner. At five o'clock, bread and milk for the younger ones; and one piece of bread (this was the only time at which the food was limited) for the elder pupils, who sat up till a later meal of the same description. Mr. Wilson himself ordered in the food, and was anxious that it should be of good quality. But the cook, who had much of his confidence, and against whom for a long time no one durst utter a complaint, was careless, dirty, and wasteful. To some children oatmeal porridge is distasteful, and consequently unwholesome, even when properly made; at Cowan Bridge School it was too often sent up, not merely burnt, but with offensive fragments of other substances discoverable in it. The beef, that should have been carefully salted before it was dressed, had often become tainted from neglect; and girls, who were school-fellows with the Brontes, during the reign of the cook of whom I am speaking, tell me that the house seemed to be pervaded, morning, noon, and night, by the odour of rancid fat that steamed out of the oven in which much of their food was prepared. There was the same carelessness in making the puddings; one of those ordered was rice boiled in water, and eaten with a sauce of treacle and sugar; but it was often uneatable, because the water had been taken out of the rain tub, and was strongly impregnated with the dust lodging on the roof, whence it had trickled down into the old wooden cask, which also added its own flavour to that of the original rain water. The milk, too, was often "bingy," to use a country expression for a kind of taint that is far worse than sourness, and suggests the idea that it is caused by want of cleanliness about the milk pans, rather than by the heat of the weather. On Saturdays, a kind of pie, or mixture of potatoes and meat, was served up, which was made of all the fragments accumulated during the week. Scraps of meat from a dirty and disorderly larder, could never be very appetizing; and, I believe, that this dinner was more loathed than any in the early days of Cowan Bridge School. One may fancy how repulsive such fare would be to children whose appetites were small, and who had been accustomed to food, far simpler perhaps, but prepared with a delicate cleanliness that made it both tempting and wholesome. At many a meal the little Brontes went without food, although craving with hunger. They were not strong when they came, having only just recovered from a complication of measles and hooping-cough: indeed, I suspect they had scarcely recovered; for there was some consultation on the part of the school authorities whether Maria and Elizabeth should be received or not, in July 1824. Mr. Bronte came again, in the September of that year, bringing with him Charlotte and Emily to be admitted as pupils. It appears strange that Mr. Wilson should not have been informed by the teachers of the way in which the food was served up; but we must remember that the cook had been known for some time to the Wilson family, while the teachers were brought together for an entirely different work--that of education. They were expressly given to understand that such was their department; the buying in and management of the provisions rested with Mr. Wilson and the cook. The teachers would, of course, be unwilling to lay any complaints on the subject before him. There was another trial of health common to all the girls. The path from Cowan Bridge to Tunstall Church, where Mr. Wilson preached, and where they all attended on the Sunday, is more than two miles in length, and goes sweeping along the rise and fall of the unsheltered country, in a way to make it a fresh and exhilarating walk in summer, but a bitter cold one in winter, especially to children like the delicate little Brontes, whose thin blood flowed languidly in consequence of their feeble appetites rejecting the food prepared for them, and thus inducing a half- starved condition. The church was not warmed, there being no means for this purpose. It stands in the midst of fields, and the damp mist must have gathered round the walls, and crept in at the windows. The girls took their cold dinner with them, and ate it between the services, in a chamber over the entrance, opening out of the former galleries. The arrangements for this day were peculiarly trying to delicate children, particularly to those who were spiritless and longing for home, as poor Maria Bronte must have been; for her ill health was increasing, and the old cough, the remains of the hooping-cough, lingered about her. She was far superior in mind to any of her play-fellows and companions, and was lonely amongst them from that very cause; and yet she had faults so annoying that she was in constant disgrace with her teachers, and an object of merciless dislike to one of them, who is depicted as "Miss Scatcherd" in "Jane Eyre," and whose real name I will be merciful enough not to disclose. I need hardly say, that Helen Burns is as exact a transcript of Maria Bronte as Charlotte's wonderful power of reproducing character could give. Her heart, to the latest day on which we met, still beat with unavailing indignation at the worrying and the cruelty to which her gentle, patient, dying sister had been subjected by this woman. Not a word of that part of "Jane Eyre" but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher. Those who had been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with which Helen Burns' sufferings are described. They had, before that, recognised the description of the sweet dignity and benevolence of Miss Temple as only a just tribute to the merits of one whom all that knew her appear to hold in honour; but when Miss Scatcherd was held up to opprobrium they also recognised in the writer of "Jane Eyre" an unconsciously avenging sister of the sufferer. One of their fellow-pupils, among other statements even worse, gives me the following:--The dormitory in which Maria slept was a long room, holding a row of narrow little beds on each side, occupied by the pupils; and at the end of this dormitory there was a small bed-chamber opening out of it, appropriated to the use of Miss Scatcherd. Maria's bed stood nearest to the door of this room. One morning, after she had become so seriously unwell as to have had a blister applied to her side (the sore from which was not perfectly healed), when the getting-up bell was heard, poor Maria moaned out that she was so ill, so very ill, she wished she might stop in bed; and some of the girls urged her to do so, and said they would explain it all to Miss Temple, the superintendent. But Miss Scatcherd was close at hand, and her anger would have to be faced before Miss Temple's kind thoughtfulness could interfere; so the sick child began to dress, shivering with cold, as, without leaving her bed, she slowly put on her black worsted stockings over her thin white legs (my informant spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flushed out undying indignation). Just then Miss Scatcherd issued from her room, and, without asking for a word of explanation from the sick and frightened girl, she took her by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits. There she left her. My informant says, Maria hardly spoke, except to beg some of the more indignant girls to be calm; but, in slow, trembling movements, with many a pause, she went down-stairs at last,--and was punished for being late. Any one may fancy how such an event as this would rankle in Charlotte's mind. I only wonder that she did not remonstrate against her father's decision to send her and Emily back to Cowan Bridge, after Maria's and Elizabeth's deaths. But frequently children are unconscious of the effect which some of their simple revelations would have in altering the opinions entertained by their friends of the persons placed around them. Besides, Charlotte's earnest vigorous mind saw, at an unusually early age, the immense importance of education, as furnishing her with tools which she had the strength and the will to wield, and she would be aware that the Cowan Bridge education was, in many points, the best that her father could provide for her. Before Maria Bronte's death, that low fever broke out, in the spring of 1825, which is spoken of in "Jane Eyre." Mr. Wilson was extremely alarmed at the first symptoms of this. He went to a kind motherly woman, who had had some connection with the school--as laundress, I believe--and asked her to come and tell him what was the matter with them. She made herself ready, and drove with him in his gig. When she entered the schoolroom, she saw from twelve to fifteen girls lying about; some resting their aching heads on the table, others on the ground; all heavy- eyed, flushed, indifferent, and weary, with pains in every limb. Some peculiar odour, she says, made her recognise that they were sickening for "the fever;" and she told Mr. Wilson so, and that she could not stay there for fear of conveying the infection to her own children; but he half commanded, and half entreated her to remain and nurse them; and finally mounted his gig and drove away, while she was still urging that she must return to her own house, and to her domestic duties, for which she had provided no substitute. However, when she was left in this unceremonious manner, she determined to make the best of it; and a most efficient nurse she proved: although, as she says, it was a dreary time. Mr. Wilson supplied everything ordered by the doctors, of the best quality and in the most liberal manner; the invalids were attended by Dr. Batty, a very clever surgeon in Kirby, who had had the medical superintendence of the establishment from the beginning, and who afterwards became Mr. Wilson's brother-in-law. I have heard from two witnesses besides Charlotte Bronte, that Dr. Batty condemned the preparation of the food by the expressive action of spitting out a portion of it. He himself, it is but fair to say, does not remember this circumstance, nor does he speak of the fever itself as either alarming or dangerous. About forty of the girls suffered from this, but none of them died at Cowan Bridge; though one died at her own home, sinking under the state of health which followed it. None of the Brontes had the fever. But the same causes, which affected the health of the other pupils through typhus, told more slowly, but not less surely, upon their constitutions. The principal of these causes was the food. The bad management of the cook was chiefly to be blamed for this; she was dismissed, and the woman who had been forced against her will to serve as head nurse, took the place of housekeeper; and henceforward the food was so well prepared that no one could ever reasonably complain of it. Of course it cannot be expected that a new institution, comprising domestic and educational arrangements for nearly a hundred persons, should work quite smoothly at the beginning. All this occurred during the first two years of the establishment, and in estimating its effect upon the character of Charlotte Bronte, we must remember that she was a sensitive thoughtful child, capable of reflecting deeply, if not of analyzing truly; and peculiarly susceptible, as are all delicate and sickly children, to painful impressions. What the healthy suffer from but momentarily and then forget, those who are ailing brood over involuntarily and remember long,--perhaps with no resentment, but simply as a piece of suffering that has been stamped into their very life. The pictures, ideas, and conceptions of character received into the mind of the child of eight years old, were destined to be reproduced in fiery words a quarter of a century afterwards. She saw but one side of Mr. Wilson's character; and many of those who knew him at that time assure me of the fidelity with which this is represented, while at the same time they regret that the delineation should have obliterated, as it were, nearly all that was noble or conscientious. And that there were grand and fine qualities in Mr. Wilson, I have received abundant evidence. Indeed for several weeks past I have received letters almost daily, bearing on the subject of this chapter; some vague, some definite; many full of love and admiration for Mr. Wilson, some as full of dislike and indignation; few containing positive facts. After giving careful consideration to this mass of conflicting evidence, I have made such alterations and omissions in this chapter as seem to me to be required. It is but just to state that the major part of the testimony with which I have been favoured from old pupils is in high praise of Mr. Wilson. Among the letters that I have read, there is one whose evidence ought to be highly respected. It is from the husband of "Miss Temple." She died in 1856, but he, a clergyman, thus wrote in reply to a letter addressed to him on the subject by one of Mr. Wilson's friends:--"Often have I heard my late dear wife speak of her sojourn at Cowan Bridge; always in terms of admiration of Mr. Carus Wilson, his parental love to his pupils, and their love for him; of the food and general treatment, in terms of approval. I have heard her allude to an unfortunate cook, who used at times to spoil the porridge, but who, she said, was soon dismissed." The recollections left of the four Bronte sisters at this period of their lives, on the minds of those who associated with them, are not very distinct. Wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds, were hidden under an enforced propriety and regularity of demeanour and expression, just as their faces had been concealed by their father, under his stiff, unchanging mask. Maria was delicate, unusually clever and thoughtful for her age, gentle, and untidy. Of her frequent disgrace from this last fault--of her sufferings, so patiently borne--I have already spoken. The only glimpse we get of Elizabeth, through the few years of her short life, is contained in a letter which I have received from "Miss Temple." "The second, Elizabeth, is the only one of the family of whom I have a vivid recollection, from her meeting with a somewhat alarming accident, in consequence of which I had her for some days and nights in my bedroom, not only for the sake of greater quiet, but that I might watch over her myself. Her head was severely cut, but she bore all the consequent suffering with exemplary patience, and by it won much upon my esteem. Of the two younger ones (if two there were) I have very slight recollections, save that one, a darling child, under five years of age, was quite the pet nursling of the school." This last would be Emily. Charlotte was considered the most talkative of the sisters--a "bright, clever, little child." Her great friend was a certain "Mellany Hane" (so Mr. Bronte spells the name), whose brother paid for her schooling, and who had no remarkable talent except for music, which her brother's circumstances forbade her to cultivate. She was "a hungry, good-natured, ordinary girl;" older than Charlotte, and ever ready to protect her from any petty tyranny or encroachments on the part of the elder girls. Charlotte always remembered her with affection and gratitude. I have quoted the word "bright" in the account of Charlotte. I suspect that this year of 1825 was the last time it could ever be applied to her. In the spring of it, Maria became so rapidly worse that Mr. Bronte was sent for. He had not previously been aware of her illness, and the condition in which he found her was a terrible shock to him. He took her home by the Leeds coach, the girls crowding out into the road to follow her with their eyes over the bridge, past the cottages, and then out of sight for ever. She died a very few days after her arrival at home. Perhaps the news of her death falling suddenly into the life of which her patient existence had formed a part, only a little week or so before, made those who remained at Cowan Bridge look with more anxiety on Elizabeth's symptoms, which also turned out to be consumptive. She was sent home in charge of a confidential servant of the establishment; and she, too, died in the early summer of that year. Charlotte was thus suddenly called into the responsibilities of eldest sister in a motherless family. She remembered how anxiously her dear sister Maria had striven, in her grave earnest way, to be a tender helper and a counsellor to them all; and the duties that now fell upon her seemed almost like a legacy from the gentle little sufferer so lately dead. Both Charlotte and Emily returned to school after the Midsummer holidays in this fatal year. But before the next winter it was thought desirable to advise their removal, as it was evident that the damp situation of the house at Cowan Bridge did not suit their health. {3} CHAPTER V For the reason just stated, the little girls were sent home in the autumn of 1825, when Charlotte was little more than nine years old. About this time, an elderly woman of the village came to live as servant at the parsonage. She remained there, as a member of the household, for thirty years; and from the length of her faithful service, and the attachment and respect which she inspired, is deserving of mention. Tabby was a thorough specimen of a Yorkshire woman of her class, in dialect, in appearance, and in character. She abounded in strong practical sense and shrewdness. Her words were far from flattery; but she would spare no deeds in the cause of those whom she kindly regarded. She ruled the children pretty sharply; and yet never grudged a little extra trouble to provide them with such small treats as came within her power. In return, she claimed to be looked upon as a humble friend; and, many years later, Miss Bronte told me that she found it somewhat difficult to manage, as Tabby expected to be informed of all the family concerns, and yet had grown so deaf that what was repeated to her became known to whoever might be in or about the house. To obviate this publication of what it might be desirable to keep secret, Miss Bronte used to take her out for a walk on the solitary moors; where, when both were seated on a tuft of heather, in some high lonely place, she could acquaint the old woman, at leisure, with all that she wanted to hear. Tabby had lived in Haworth in the days when the pack-horses went through once a week, with their tinkling bells and gay worsted adornment, carrying the produce of the country from Keighley over the hills to Colne and Burnley. What is more, she had known the "bottom," or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the "beck" on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. But that was when there were no mills in the valleys; and when all the wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm-houses round. "It wur the factories as had driven 'em away," she said. No doubt she had many a tale to tell of by- gone days of the country-side; old ways of living, former inhabitants, decayed gentry, who had melted away, and whose places knew them no more; family tragedies, and dark superstitious dooms; and in telling these things, without the least consciousness that there might ever be anything requiring to be softened down, would give at full length the bare and simple details. Miss Branwell instructed the children at regular hours in all she could teach, making her bed-chamber into their schoolroom. Their father was in the habit of relating to them any public news in which he felt an interest; and from the opinions of his strong and independent mind they would gather much food for thought; but I do not know whether he gave them any direct instruction. Charlotte's deep thoughtful spirit appears to have felt almost painfully the tender responsibility which rested upon her with reference to her remaining sisters. She was only eighteen months older than Emily; but Emily and Anne were simply companions and playmates, while Charlotte was motherly friend and guardian to both; and this loving assumption of duties beyond her years, made her feel considerably older than she really was. Patrick Branwell, their only brother, was a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent. Mr. Bronte's friends advised him to send his son to school; but, remembering both the strength of will of his own youth and his mode of employing it, he believed that Patrick was better at home, and that he himself could teach him well, as he had taught others before. So Patrick, or as his family called him--Branwell, remained at Haworth, working hard for some hours a day with his father; but, when the time of the latter was taken up with his parochial duties, the boy was thrown into chance companionship with the lads of the village--for youth will to youth, and boys will to boys. Still, he was associated in many of his sisters' plays and amusements. These were mostly of a sedentary and intellectual nature. I have had a curious packet confided to me, containing an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space; tales, dramas, poems, romances, written principally by Charlotte, in a hand which it is almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass. No description will give so good an idea of the extreme minuteness of the writing as the annexed facsimile of a page. Among these papers there is a list of her works, which I copy, as a curious proof how early the rage for literary composition had seized upon her:-- CATALOGUE OF MY BOOKS, WITH THE PERIOD OF THEIR COMPLETION, UP TO AUGUST 3RD, 1830. Two romantic tales in one volume; viz., The Twelve Adventurers and the Adventures in Ireland, April 2nd, 1829. The Search after Happiness, a Tale, Aug. 1st, 1829. Leisure Hours, a Tale, and two Fragments, July 6th 1829. The Adventures of Edward de Crack, a Tale, Feb. 2nd, 1830. The Adventures of Ernest Alembert, a Tale, May 26th, 1830. An interesting Incident in the Lives of some of the most eminent Persons of the Age, a Tale, June 10th, 1830. Tales of the Islanders, in four volumes. Contents of the 1st Vol.:--l. An Account of their Origin; 2. A Description of Vision Island; 3. Ratten's Attempt; 4. Lord Charles Wellesley and the Marquis of Douro's Adventure; completed June 31st, 1829. 2nd Vol.:--1. The School-rebellion; 2. The strange Incident in the Duke of Wellington's Life; 3. Tale to his Sons; 4. The Marquis of Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley's Tale to his little King and Queen; completed Dec. 2nd, 1829. 3rd Vol.:--1. The Duke of Wellington's Adventure in the Cavern; 2. The Duke of Wellington and the little King's and Queen's visit to the Horse-Guards; completed May 8th, 1830. 4th Vol.:--1. The three old Washer-women of Strathfieldsaye; 2. Lord C. Wellesley's Tale to his Brother; completed July 30th, 1830. Characters of Great Men of the Present Age, Dec. 17th 1829. The Young Men's Magazines, in Six Numbers, from August to December, the latter months double number, completed December the 12th, 1829. General index to their contents:--1. A True Story; 2. Causes of the War; 3. A Song; 4. Conversations; 5. A True Story continued; 6. The Spirit of Cawdor; 7. Interior of a Pothouse, a Poem; 8. The Glass Town, a Song; 9. The Silver Cup, a Tale; 10. The Table and Vase in the Desert, a Song; 11. Conversations; 12. Scene on the Great Bridge; 13. Song of the Ancient Britons; 14. Scene in my Tun, a Tale; 15. An American Tale; 16. Lines written on seeing the Garden of a Genius; 17. The Lay of the Glass Town; 18. The Swiss Artist, a Tale; 19. Lines on the Transfer of this Magazine; 20. On the Same, by a different hand; 21. Chief Genii in Council; 22. Harvest in Spain; 23. The Swiss Artists continued; 24. Conversations. The Poetaster, a Drama, in 2 volumes, July 12th, 1830. A Book of Rhymes, finished December 17th, 1829. Contents:--1. The Beauty of Nature; 2. A Short Poem; 3. Meditations while Journeying in a Canadian Forest; 4. Song of an Exile; 5. On Seeing the Ruins of the Tower of Babel; 6. _A Thing of_ 14 _lines_; 7. Lines written on the Bank of a River one fine Summer Evening; 8. Spring, a Song; 9. Autumn, a Song. Miscellaneous Poems, finished May 30th, 1830. Contents:--1. The Churchyard; 2. Description of the Duke of Wellington's Palace on the Pleasant Banks of the Lusiva; this article is a small prose tale or incident; 3. Pleasure; 4. Lines written on the Summit of a high Mountain of the North of England; 5. Winter; 6. Two Fragments, namely, 1st, The Vision; 2nd, A Short untitled Poem; the Evening Walk, a Poem, June 23rd, 1830. Making in the whole twenty-two volumes. C. BRONTE, _August_ 3, 1830 As each volume contains from sixty to a hundred pages, and the size of the page lithographed is rather less than the average, the amount of the whole seems very great, if we remember that it was all written in about fifteen months. So much for the quantity; the quality strikes me as of singular merit for a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Both as a specimen of her prose style at this time, and also as revealing something of the quiet domestic life led by these children, I take an extract from the introduction to "Tales of the Islanders," the title of one of their "Little Magazines:"-- "June the 31st, 1829. "The play of the 'Islanders' was formed in December, 1827, in the following manner. One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snow-storms, and high piercing night winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, 'I don't know what to do.' This was echoed by Emily and Anne. "_Tabby_. 'Wha ya may go t' bed.' "_Branwell_. 'I'd rather do anything than that.' "_Charlotte_. 'Why are you so glum to-night, Tabby? Oh! suppose we had each an island of our own.' "_Branwell_. 'If we had I would choose the Island of Man.' "_Charlotte_. 'And I would choose the Isle of Wight.' "_Emily_. 'The Isle of Arran for me.' "_Anne_. 'And mine shall be Guernsey.' "We then chose who should be chief men in our islands. Branwell chose John Bull, Astley Cooper, and Leigh Hunt; Emily, Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart, Johnny Lockhart; Anne, Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, Sir Henry Halford. I chose the Duke of Wellington and two sons, Christopher North and Co., and Mr. Abernethy. Here our conversation was interrupted by the, to us, dismal sound of the clock striking seven, and we were summoned off to bed. The next day we added many others to our list of men, till we got almost all the chief men of the kingdom. After this, for a long time, nothing worth noticing occurred. In June, 1828, we erected a school on a fictitious island, which was to contain 1,000 children. The manner of the building was as follows. The Island was fifty miles in circumference, and certainly appeared more like the work of enchantment than anything real," &c. Two or three things strike me much in this fragment; one is the graphic vividness with which the time of the year, the hour of the evening, the feeling of cold and darkness outside, the sound of the night-winds sweeping over the desolate snow-covered moors, coming nearer and nearer, and at last shaking the very door of the room where they were sitting--for it opened out directly on that bleak, wide expanse--is contrasted with the glow, and busy brightness of the cheerful kitchen where these remarkable children are grouped. Tabby moves about in her quaint country- dress, frugal, peremptory, prone to find fault pretty sharply, yet allowing no one else to blame her children, we may feel sure. Another noticeable fact is the intelligent partisanship with which they choose their great men, who are almost all stanch Tories of the time. Moreover, they do not confine themselves to local heroes; their range of choice has been widened by hearing much of what is not usually considered to interest children. Little Anne, aged scarcely eight, picks out the politicians of the day for her chief men. There is another scrap of paper, in this all but illegible handwriting, written about this time, and which gives some idea of the sources of their opinions. THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR 1829. "Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography-book; she wrote on its blank leaf, 'Papa lent me this book.' This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast-things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlour, brushing the carpet. Papa and Branwell are gone to Keighley. Aunt is upstairs in her room, and I am sitting by the table writing this in the kitchen. Keighley is a small town four miles from here. Papa and Branwell are gone for the newspaper, the 'Leeds Intelligencer,' a most excellent Tory newspaper, edited by Mr. Wood, and the proprietor, Mr. Henneman. We take two and see three newspapers a week. We take the 'Leeds Intelligencer,' Tory, and the 'Leeds Mercury,' Whig, edited by Mr. Baines, and his brother, son-in-law, and his two sons, Edward and Talbot. We see the 'John Bull;' it is a high Tory, very violent. Mr. Driver lends us it, as likewise 'Blackwood's Magazine,' the most able periodical there is. The Editor is Mr. Christopher North, an old man seventy-four years of age; the 1st of April is his birth-day; his company are Timothy Tickler, Morgan O'Doherty, Macrabin Mordecai, Mullion, Warnell, and James Hogg, a man of most extraordinary genius, a Scottish shepherd. Our plays were established; 'Young Men,' June, 1826; 'Our Fellows,' July, 1827; 'Islanders,' December, 1827. These are our three great plays, that are not kept secret. Emily's and my best plays were established the 1st of December, 1827; the others March, 1828. Best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones. Their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them. The 'Young Men's' play took its rise from some wooden soldiers Branwell had: 'Our Fellows' from 'AEsop's Fables;' and the 'Islanders' from several events which happened. I will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly if I can. First, 'Young Men.' Papa bought Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds; when Papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed, 'This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke!' When I had said this, Emily likewise took up one and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part. Emily's was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him 'Gravey.' Anne's was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him 'Waiting-Boy.' Branwell chose his, and called him 'Buonaparte.'" The foregoing extract shows something of the kind of reading in which the little Brontes were interested; but their desire for knowledge must have been excited in many directions, for I find a "list of painters whose works I wish to see," drawn up by Charlotte when she was scarcely thirteen:-- "Guido Reni, Julio Romano, Titian, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Annibal Caracci, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Carlo Cignani, Vandyke, Rubens, Bartolomeo Ramerghi." Here is this little girl, in a remote Yorkshire parsonage, who has probably never seen anything worthy the name of a painting in her life, studying the names and characteristics of the great old Italian and Flemish masters, whose works she longs to see some time, in the dim future that lies before her! There is a paper remaining which contains minute studies of, and criticisms upon, the engravings in "Friendship's Offering for 1829;" showing how she had early formed those habits of close observation, and patient analysis of cause and effect, which served so well in after-life as handmaids to her genius. The way in which Mr. Bronte made his children sympathise with him in his great interest in politics, must have done much to lift them above the chances of their minds being limited or tainted by petty local gossip. I take the only other remaining personal fragment out of "Tales of the Islanders;" it is a sort of apology, contained in the introduction to the second volume, for their not having been continued before; the writers had been for a long time too busy, and latterly too much absorbed in politics. "Parliament was opened, and the great Catholic question was brought forward, and the Duke's measures were disclosed, and all was slander, violence, party-spirit, and confusion. Oh, those six months, from the time of the King's speech to the end! Nobody could write, think, or speak on any subject but the Catholic question, and the Duke of Wellington, and Mr. Peel. I remember the day when the Intelligence Extraordinary came with Mr. Peel's speech in it, containing the terms on which the Catholics were to be let in! With what eagerness Papa tore off the cover, and how we all gathered round him, and with what breathless anxiety we listened, as one by one they were disclosed, and explained, and argued upon so ably, and so well! and then when it was all out, how aunt said that she thought it was excellent, and that the Catholics could do no harm with such good security! I remember also the doubts as to whether it would pass the House of Lords, and the prophecies that it would not; and when the paper came which was to decide the question, the anxiety was almost dreadful with which we listened to the whole affair: the opening of the doors; the hush; the royal dukes in their robes, and the great duke in green sash and waistcoat; the rising of all the peeresses when he rose; the reading of his speech--Papa saying that his words were like precious gold; and lastly, the majority of one to four (sic) in favour of the Bill. But this is a digression," &c., &c. This must have been written when she was between thirteen and fourteen. It will be interesting to some of my readers to know what was the character of her purely imaginative writing at this period. While her description of any real occurrence is, as we have seen, homely, graphic, and forcible, when she gives way to her powers of creation, her fancy and her language alike run riot, sometimes to the very borders of apparent delirium. Of this wild weird writing, a single example will suffice. It is a letter to the editor of one of the "Little Magazines." "Sir,--It is well known that the Genii have declared that unless they perform certain arduous duties every year, of a mysterious nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be burnt up, and gathered together in one mighty globe, which will roll in solitary grandeur through the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be succeeded by Eternity; and the impudence of this is only to be paralleled by another of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to stagnant waters, the pestilential vapours of which shall slay all living creatures, except the blood-thirsty beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this desolation the palace of the Chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the land at morning, at noontide and night; but that they shall have their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of this needs no remark, and therefore I haste to subscribe myself, &c. "July 14, 1829." It is not unlikely that the foregoing letter may have had some allegorical or political reference, invisible to our eyes, but very clear to the bright little minds for whom it was intended. Politics were evidently their grand interest; the Duke of Wellington their demi-god. All that related to him belonged to the heroic age. Did Charlotte want a knight-errant, or a devoted lover, the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley, came ready to her hand. There is hardly one of her prose-writings at this time in which they are not the principal personages, and in which their "august father" does not appear as a sort of Jupiter Tonans, or Deus ex Machina. As one evidence how Wellesley haunted her imagination, I copy out a few of the titles to her papers in the various magazines. "Liffey Castle," a Tale by Lord C. Wellesley. "Lines to the River Aragua," by the Marquis of Douro. "An Extraordinary Dream," by Lord C. Wellesley. "The Green Dwarf, a Tale of the Perfect Tense," by the Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley. "Strange Events," by Lord C. A. F. Wellesley. Life in an isolated village, or a lonely country-house, presents many little occurrences which sink into the mind of childhood, there to be brooded over. No other event may have happened, or be likely to happen, for days, to push one of these aside, before it has assumed a vague and mysterious importance. Thus, children leading a secluded life are often thoughtful and dreamy: the impressions made upon them by the world without--the unusual sights of earth and sky--the accidental meetings with strange faces and figures (rare occurrences in those out-of-the-way places)--are sometimes magnified by them into things so deeply significant as to be almost supernatural. This peculiarity I perceive very strongly in Charlotte's writings at this time. Indeed, under the circumstances, it is no peculiarity. It has been common to all, from the Chaldean shepherds--"the lonely herdsman stretched on the soft grass through half a summer's day"--the solitary monk--to all whose impressions from without have had time to grow and vivify in the imagination, till they have been received as actual personifications, or supernatural visions, to doubt which would be blasphemy. To counterbalance this tendency in Charlotte, was the strong common sense natural to her, and daily called into exercise by the requirements of her practical life. Her duties were not merely to learn her lessons, to read a certain quantity, to gain certain ideas; she had, besides, to brush rooms, to run errands up and down stairs, to help in the simpler forms of cooking, to be by turns play-fellow and monitress to her younger sisters and brother, to make and to mend, and to study economy under her careful aunt. Thus we see that, while her imagination received vivid impressions, her excellent understanding had full power to rectify them before her fancies became realities. On a scrap of paper, she has written down the following relation:-- "June 22, 1830, 6 o'clock p.m. "Haworth, near Bradford. "The following strange occurrence happened on the 22nd of June, 1830:--At the time Papa was very ill, confined to his bed, and so weak that he could not rise without assistance. Tabby and I were alone in the kitchen, about half-past nine ante-meridian. Suddenly we heard a knock at the door; Tabby rose and opened it. An old man appeared, standing without, who accosted her thus:-- "_Old Man_.--'Does the parson live here?' "_Tabby_.--'Yes.' "_Old Man_.--'I wish to see him.' "_Tabby_.--'He is poorly in bed.' "_Old Man_.--'I have a message for him.' "_Tabby_.--'Who from?' "_Old Man_.--'From the Lord.' "_Tabby_.--'Who?' "_Old Man_.--'The Lord. He desires me to say that the Bridegroom is coming, and that we must prepare to meet him; that the cords are about to be loosed, and the golden bowl broken; the pitcher broken at the fountain.' "Here he concluded his discourse, and abruptly went his way. As Tabby closed the door, I asked her if she knew him. Her reply was, that she had never seen him before, nor any one like him. Though I am fully persuaded that he was some fanatical enthusiast, well meaning perhaps, but utterly ignorant of true piety; yet I could not forbear weeping at his words, spoken so unexpectedly at that particular period." Though the date of the following poem is a little uncertain, it may be most convenient to introduce it here. It must have been written before 1833, but how much earlier there are no means of determining. I give it as a specimen of the remarkable poetical talent shown in the various diminutive writings of this time; at least, in all of them which I have been able to read. THE WOUNDED STAG. Passing amid the deepest shade Of the wood's sombre heart, Last night I saw a wounded deer Laid lonely and apart. Such light as pierced the crowded boughs (Light scattered, scant and dim,) Passed through the fern that formed his couch And centred full on him. Pain trembled in his weary limbs, Pain filled his patient eye, Pain-crushed amid the shadowy fern His branchy crown did lie. Where were his comrades? where his mate? All from his death-bed gone! And he, thus struck and desolate, Suffered and bled alone. Did he feel what a man might feel, Friend-left, and sore distrest? Did Pain's keen dart, and Grief's sharp sting Strive in his mangled breast? Did longing for affection lost Barb every deadly dart; Love unrepaid, and Faith betrayed, Did these torment his heart? No! leave to man his proper doom! These are the pangs that rise Around the bed of state and gloom, Where Adam's offspring dies! CHAPTER VI This is perhaps a fitting time to give some personal description of Miss Bronte. In 1831, she was a quiet, thoughtful girl, of nearly fifteen years of age, very small in figure--"stunted" was the word she applied to herself,--but as her limbs and head were in just proportion to the slight, fragile body, no word in ever so slight a degree suggestive of deformity could properly be applied to her; with soft, thick, brown hair, and peculiar eyes, of which I find it difficult to give a description, as they appeared to me in her later life. They were large and well shaped; their colour a reddish brown; but if the iris was closely examined, it appeared to be composed of a great variety of tints. The usual expression was of quiet, listening intelligence; but now and then, on some just occasion for vivid interest or wholesome indignation, a light would shine out, as if some spiritual lamp had been kindled, which glowed behind those expressive orbs. I never saw the like in any other human creature. As for the rest of her features, they were plain, large, and ill set; but, unless you began to catalogue them, you were hardly aware of the fact, for the eyes and power of the countenance over-balanced every physical defect; the crooked mouth and the large nose were forgotten, and the whole face arrested the attention, and presently attracted all those whom she herself would have cared to attract. Her hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw; when one of the former was placed in mine, it was like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm. The delicate long fingers had a peculiar fineness of sensation, which was one reason why all her handiwork, of whatever kind--writing, sewing, knitting--was so clear in its minuteness. She was remarkably neat in her whole personal attire; but she was dainty as to the fit of her shoes and gloves. I can well imagine that the grave serious composure, which, when I knew her, gave her face the dignity of an old Venetian portrait, was no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless children. But in a girl only just entered on her teens, such an expression would be called (to use a country phrase) "old-fashioned;" and in 1831, the period of which I now write, we must think of her as a little, set, antiquated girl, very quiet in manners, and very quaint in dress; for besides the influence exerted by her father's ideas concerning the simplicity of attire befitting the wife and daughters of a country clergyman, her aunt, on whom the duty of dressing her nieces principally devolved, had never been in society since she left Penzance, eight or nine years before, and the Penzance fashions of that day were still dear to her heart. In January, 1831, Charlotte was sent to school again. This time she went as a pupil to Miss W---, who lived at Roe Head, a cheerful roomy country house, standing a little apart in a field, on the right of the road from Leeds to Huddersfield. Three tiers of old-fashioned semicircular bow windows run from basement to roof; and look down upon a long green slope of pasture-land, ending in the pleasant woods of Kirklees, Sir George Armitage's park. Although Roe Head and Haworth are not twenty miles apart, the aspect of the country is as totally dissimilar as if they enjoyed a different climate. The soft curving and heaving landscape round the former gives a stranger the idea of cheerful airiness on the heights, and of sunny warmth in the broad green valleys below. It is just such a neighbourhood as the monks loved, and traces of the old Plantagenet times are to be met with everywhere, side by side with the manufacturing interests of the West Riding of to-day. There is the park of Kirklees, full of sunny glades, speckled with black shadows of immemorial yew-trees; the grey pile of building, formerly a "House of professed Ladies;" the mouldering stone in the depth of the wood, under which Robin Hood is said to lie; close outside the park, an old stone- gabled house, now a roadside inn, but which bears the name of the "Three Nuns," and has a pictured sign to correspond. And this quaint old inn is frequented by fustian-dressed mill-hands from the neighbouring worsted factories, which strew the high road from Leeds to Huddersfield, and form the centres round which future villages gather. Such are the contrasts of modes of living, and of times and seasons, brought before the traveller on the great roads that traverse the West Riding. In no other part of England, I fancy, are the centuries brought into such close, strange contact as in the district in which Roe Head is situated. Within six miles of Miss W---'s house--on the left of the road, coming from Leeds--lie the remains of Howley Hall, now the property of Lord Cardigan, but formerly belonging to a branch of the Saviles. Near to it is Lady Anne's well; "Lady Anne," according to tradition, having been worried and eaten by wolves as she sat at the well, to which the indigo-dyed factory people from Birstall and Batley woollen mills would formerly repair on Palm Sunday, when the waters possess remarkable medicinal efficacy; and it is still believed by some that they assume a strange variety of colours at six o'clock on the morning of that day. All round the lands held by the farmer who lives in the remains of Howley Hall are stone houses of to-day, occupied by the people who are making their living and their fortunes by the woollen mills that encroach upon and shoulder out the proprietors of the ancient halls. These are to be seen in every direction, picturesque, many-gabled, with heavy stone carvings of coats of arms for heraldic ornament; belonging to decayed families, from whose ancestral lands field after field has been shorn away, by the urgency of rich manufacturers pressing hard upon necessity. A smoky atmosphere surrounds these old dwellings of former Yorkshire squires, and blights and blackens the ancient trees that overshadow them; cinder-paths lead up to them; the ground round about is sold for building upon; but still the neighbours, though they subsist by a different state of things, remember that their forefathers lived in agricultural dependence upon the owners of these halls; and treasure up the traditions connected with the stately households that existed centuries ago. Take Oakwell Hall, for instance. It stands in a pasture-field, about a quarter of a mile from the high road. It is but that distance from the busy whirr of the steam-engines employed in the woollen mills at Birstall; and if you walk to it from Birstall Station about meal-time, you encounter strings of mill-hands, blue with woollen dye, and cranching in hungry haste over the cinder-paths bordering the high road. Turning off from this to the right, you ascend through an old pasture-field, and enter a short by-road, called the "Bloody Lane"--a walk haunted by the ghost of a certain Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of an old hall close by, in the days of the Stuarts. From the "Bloody Lane," overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is situated. It is known in the neighbourhood to be the place described as "Field Head," Shirley's residence. The enclosure in front, half court, half garden; the panelled hall, with the gallery opening into the bed- chambers running round; the barbarous peach-coloured drawing-room; the bright look-out through the garden-door upon the grassy lawns and terraces behind, where the soft-hued pigeons still love to coo and strut in the sun,--are described in "Shirley." The scenery of that fiction lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place in the immediate neighbourhood. They show a bloody footprint in a bed-chamber of Oakwell Hall, and tell a story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is approached. Captain Batt was believed to be far away; his family was at Oakwell; when in the dusk, one winter evening, he came stalking along the lane, and through the hall, and up the stairs, into his own room, where he vanished. He had been killed in a duel in London that very same afternoon of December 9th, 1684. The stones of the Hall formed part of the more ancient vicarage, which an ancestor of Captain Batt's had seized in the troublous times for property which succeeded the Reformation. This Henry Batt possessed himself of houses and money without scruple; and, at last, stole the great bell of Birstall Church, for which sacrilegious theft a fine was imposed on the land, and has to be paid by the owner of the Hall to this day. But the Oakwell property passed out of the hands of the Batts at the beginning of the last century; collateral descendants succeeded, and left this picturesque trace of their having been. In the great hall hangs a mighty pair of stag's horns, and dependent from them a printed card, recording the fact that, on the 1st of September, 1763, there was a great hunting-match, when this stag was slain; and that fourteen gentlemen shared in the chase, and dined on the spoil in that hall, along with Fairfax Fearneley, Esq., the owner. The fourteen names are given, doubtless "mighty men of yore;" but, among them all, Sir Fletcher Norton, Attorney-General, and Major-General Birch were the only ones with which I had any association in 1855. Passing on from Oakwell there lie houses right and left, which were well known to Miss Bronte when she lived at Roe Head, as the hospitable homes of some of her school-fellows. Lanes branch off for three or four miles to heaths and commons on the higher ground, which formed pleasant walks on holidays, and then comes the white gate into the field-path leading to Roe Head itself. One of the bow-windowed rooms on the ground floor with the pleasant look- out I have described was the drawing-room; the other was the schoolroom. The dining-room was on one side of the door, and faced the road. The number of pupils, during the year and a half Miss Bronte was there, ranged from seven to ten; and as they did not require the whole of the house for their accommodation, the third story was unoccupied, except by the ghostly idea of a lady, whose rustling silk gown was sometimes heard by the listeners at the foot of the second flight of stairs. The kind motherly nature of Miss W---, and the small number of the girls, made the establishment more like a private family than a school. Moreover, she was a native of the district immediately surrounding Roe Head, as were the majority of her pupils. Most likely Charlotte Bronte, in coming from Haworth, came the greatest distance of all. "E.'s" home was five miles away; two other dear friends (the Rose and Jessie Yorke of "Shirley") lived still nearer; two or three came from Huddersfield; one or two from Leeds. I shall now quote from a valuable letter which I have received from "Mary," one of these early friends; distinct and graphic in expression, as becomes a cherished associate of Charlotte Bronte's. The time referred to is her first appearance at Roe Head, on January 19th, 1831. "I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable. She was coming to school at Miss W---'s. When she appeared in the schoolroom, her dress was changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman, so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was given her, she dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched it, and when she was told to hold her head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose, so that it was not possible to help laughing." This was the first impression she made upon one of those whose dear and valued friend she was to become in after-life. Another of the girls recalls her first sight of Charlotte, on the day she came, standing by the schoolroom window, looking out on the snowy landscape, and crying, while all the rest were at play. "E." was younger than she, and her tender heart was touched by the apparently desolate condition in which she found the oddly-dressed, odd-looking little girl that winter morning, as "sick for home she stood in tears," in a new strange place, among new strange people. Any over-demonstrative kindness would have scared the wild little maiden from Haworth; but "E." (who is shadowed forth in the Caroline Helstone of "Shirley") managed to win confidence, and was allowed to give sympathy. To quote again from "Mary's" letter:-- "We thought her very ignorant, for she had never learnt grammar at all, and very little geography." This account of her partial ignorance is confirmed by her other school- fellows. But Miss W--- was a lady of remarkable intelligence and of delicate tender sympathy. She gave a proof of this in her first treatment of Charlotte. The little girl was well-read, but not well-grounded. Miss W--- took her aside and told her she was afraid that she must place her in the second class for some time till she could overtake the girls of her own age in the knowledge of grammar, &c.; but poor Charlotte received this announcement with so sad a fit of crying, that Miss W---'s kind heart was softened, and she wisely perceived that, with such a girl, it would be better to place her in the first class, and allow her to make up by private study in those branches where she was deficient. "She would confound us by knowing things that were out of our range altogether. She was acquainted with most of the short pieces of poetry that we had to learn by heart; would tell us the authors, the poems they were taken from, and sometimes repeat a page or two, and tell us the plot. She had a habit of writing in italics (printing characters), and said she had learnt it by writing in their magazine. They brought out a 'magazine' once a month, and wished it to look as like print as possible. She told us a tale out of it. No one wrote in it, and no one read it, but herself, her brother, and two sisters. She promised to show me some of these magazines, but retracted it afterwards, and would never be persuaded to do so. In our play hours she sate, or stood still, with a book, if possible. Some of us once urged her to be on our side in a game at ball. She said she had never played, and could not play. We made her try, but soon found that she could not see the ball, so we put her out. She took all our proceedings with pliable indifference, and always seemed to need a previous resolution to say 'No' to anything. She used to go and stand under the trees in the play-ground, and say it was pleasanter. She endeavoured to explain this, pointing out the shadows, the peeps of sky, &c. We understood but little of it. She said that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn, on a stone, to watch the water flow by. I told her she should have gone fishing; she said she never wanted. She always showed physical feebleness in everything. She ate no animal food at school. It was about this time I told her she was very ugly. Some years afterwards, I told her I thought I had been very impertinent. She replied, 'You did me a great deal of good, Polly, so don't repent of it.' She used to draw much better, and more quickly, than anything we had seen before, and knew much about celebrated pictures and painters. Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her 'what she saw in it.' She could always see plenty, and explained it very well. She made poetry and drawing at least exceedingly interesting to me; and then I got the habit, which I have yet, of referring mentally to her opinion on all matters of that kind, along with many more, resolving to describe such and such things to her, until I start at the recollection that I never shall." To feel the full force of this last sentence--to show how steady and vivid was the impression which Miss Bronte made on those fitted to appreciate her--I must mention that the writer of this letter, dated January 18th, 1856, in which she thus speaks of constantly referring to Charlotte's opinion has never seen her for eleven years, nearly all of which have been passed among strange scenes, in a new continent, at the antipodes. "We used to be furious politicians, as one could hardly help being in 1832. She knew the names of the two ministries; the one that resigned, and the one that succeeded and passed the Reform Bill. She worshipped the Duke of Wellington, but said that Sir Robert Peel was not to be trusted; he did not act from principle like the rest, but from expediency. I, being of the furious radical party, told her 'how could any of them trust one another; they were all of them rascals!' Then she would launch out into praises of the Duke of Wellington, referring to his actions; which I could not contradict, as I knew nothing about him. She said she had taken interest in politics ever since she was five years old. She did not get her opinions from her father--that is, not directly--but from the papers, &c., he preferred." In illustration of the truth of this, I may give an extract from a letter to her brother, written from Roe Head, May 17th, 1832:--"Lately I had begun to think that I had lost all the interest which I used formerly to take in politics; but the extreme pleasure I felt at the news of the Reform Bill's being thrown out by the House of Lords, and of the expulsion, or resignation of Earl Grey, &c., convinced me that I have not as yet lost all my penchant for politics. I am extremely glad that aunt has consented to take in 'Fraser's Magazine;' for, though I know from your description of its general contents it will be rather uninteresting when compared with 'Blackwood,' still it will be better than remaining the whole year without being able to obtain a sight of any periodical whatever; and such would assuredly be our case, as, in the little wild moorland village where we reside, there would be no possibility of borrowing a work of that description from a circulating library. I hope with you that the present delightful weather may contribute to the perfect restoration of our dear papa's health; and that it may give aunt pleasant reminiscences of the salubrious climate of her native place," &c. To return to "Mary's" letter. "She used to speak of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at Cowan Bridge. I used to believe them to have been wonders of talent and kindness. She told me, early one morning, that she had just been dreaming; she had been told that she was wanted in the drawing-room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth. I was eager for her to go on, and when she said there was no more, I said, 'but go on! _Make it out_! I know you can.' She said she would not; she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely, they were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. They were very fashionably dressed, and began criticising the room, &c. "This habit of 'making out' interests for themselves that most children get who have none in actual life, was very strong in her. The whole family used to 'make out' histories, and invent characters and events. I told her sometimes they were like growing potatoes in a cellar. She said, sadly, 'Yes! I know we are!' "Some one at school said she 'was always talking about clever people; Johnson, Sheridan, &c.' She said, 'Now you don't know the meaning of _clever_, Sheridan might be clever; yes, Sheridan was clever,--scamps often are; but Johnson hadn't a spark of cleverality in him.' No one appreciated the opinion; they made some trivial remark about '_cleverality_,' and she said no more. "This is the epitome of her life. At our house she had just as little chance of a patient hearing, for though not school-girlish, we were more intolerant. We had a rage for practicality, and laughed all poetry to scorn. Neither she nor we had any idea but that our opinions were the opinions of all the _sensible_ people in the world, and we used to astonish each other at every sentence . . . Charlotte, at school, had no plan of life beyond what circumstances made for her. She knew that she must provide for herself, and chose her trade; at least chose to begin it once. Her idea of self-improvement ruled her even at school. It was to cultivate her tastes. She always said there was enough of hard practicality and _useful_ knowledge forced on us by necessity, and that the thing most needed was to soften and refine our minds. She picked up every scrap of information concerning painting, sculpture, poetry, music, &c., as if it were gold." What I have heard of her school days from other sources, confirms the accuracy of the details in this remarkable letter. She was an indefatigable student: constantly reading and learning; with a strong conviction of the necessity and value of education, very unusual in a girl of fifteen. She never lost a moment of time, and seemed almost to grudge the necessary leisure for relaxation and play-hours, which might be partly accounted for by the awkwardness in all games occasioned by her shortness of sight. Yet, in spite of these unsociable habits, she was a great favourite with her school-fellows. She was always ready to try and do what they wished, though not sorry when they called her awkward, and left her out of their sports. Then, at night, she was an invaluable story-teller, frightening them almost out of their wits as they lay in bed. On one occasion the effect was such that she was led to scream out aloud, and Miss W---, coming up stairs, found that one of the listeners had been seized with violent palpitations, in consequence of the excitement produced by Charlotte's story. Her indefatigable craving for knowledge tempted Miss W--- on into setting her longer and longer tasks of reading for examination; and towards the end of the year and a half that she remained as a pupil at Roe Head, she received her first bad mark for an imperfect lesson. She had had a great quantity of Blair's "Lectures on Belles Lettres" to read; and she could not answer some of the questions upon it; Charlotte Bronte had a bad mark. Miss W--- was sorry, and regretted that she had set Charlotte so long a task. Charlotte cried bitterly. But her school-fellows were more than sorry--they were indignant. They declared that the infliction of ever so slight a punishment on Charlotte Bronte was unjust--for who had tried to do her duty like her?--and testified their feeling in a variety of ways, until Miss W---, who was in reality only too willing to pass over her good pupil's first fault, withdrew the bad mark; and the girls all returned to their allegiance except "Mary," who took her own way during the week or two that remained of the half-year, choosing to consider that Miss W---, in giving Charlotte Bronte so long a task, had forfeited her claim to obedience of the school regulations. The number of pupils was so small that the attendance to certain subjects at particular hours, common in larger schools, was not rigidly enforced. When the girls were ready with their lessons, they came to Miss W--- to say them. She had a remarkable knack of making them feel interested in whatever they had to learn. They set to their studies, not as to tasks or duties to be got through, but with a healthy desire and thirst for knowledge, of which she had managed to make them perceive the relishing savour. They did not leave off reading and learning as soon as the compulsory pressure of school was taken away. They had been taught to think, to analyse, to reject, to appreciate. Charlotte Bronte was happy in the choice made for her of the second school to which she was sent. There was a robust freedom in the out-of-doors life of her companions. They played at merry games in the fields round the house: on Saturday half-holidays they went long scrambling walks down mysterious shady lanes, then climbing the uplands, and thus gaining extensive views over the country, about which so much had to be told, both of its past and present history. Miss W--- must have had in great perfection the French art, "conter," to judge from her pupil's recollections of the tales she related during these long walks, of this old house, or that new mill, and of the states of society consequent on the changes involved by the suggestive dates of either building. She remembered the times when watchers or wakeners in the night heard the distant word of command, and the measured tramp of thousands of sad desperate men receiving a surreptitious military training, in preparation for some great day which they saw in their visions, when right should struggle with might and come off victorious: when the people of England, represented by the workers of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire, should make their voice heard in a terrible slogan, since their true and pitiful complaints could find no hearing in parliament. We forget, now-a-days, so rapid have been the changes for the better, how cruel was the condition of numbers of labourers at the close of the great Peninsular war. The half-ludicrous nature of some of their grievances has lingered on in tradition; the real intensity of their sufferings has become forgotten. They were maddened and desperate; and the country, in the opinion of many, seemed to be on the verge of a precipice, from which it was only saved by the prompt and resolute decision of a few in authority. Miss W--- spoke of those times; of the mysterious nightly drillings; of thousands on lonely moors; of the muttered threats of individuals too closely pressed upon by necessity to be prudent; of the overt acts, in which the burning of Cartwright's mill took a prominent place; and these things sank deep into the mind of one, at least, among her hearers. Mr. Cartwright was the owner of a factory called Rawfolds, in Liversedge, not beyond the distance of a walk from Roe Head. He had dared to employ machinery for the dressing of woollen cloth, which was an unpopular measure in 1812, when many other circumstances conspired to make the condition of the mill-hands unbearable from the pressure of starvation and misery. Mr. Cartwright was a very remarkable man, having, as I have been told, some foreign blood in him, the traces of which were very apparent in his tall figure, dark eyes and complexion, and singular, though gentlemanly bearing. At any rate he had been much abroad, and spoke French well, of itself a suspicious circumstance to the bigoted nationality of those days. Altogether he was an unpopular man, even before he took the last step of employing shears, instead of hands, to dress his wool. He was quite aware of his unpopularity, and of the probable consequences. He had his mill prepared for an assault. He took up his lodgings in it; and the doors were strongly barricaded at night. On every step of the stairs there was placed a roller, spiked with barbed points all round, so as to impede the ascent of the rioters, if they succeeded in forcing the doors. On the night of Saturday the 11th of April, 1812, the assault was made. Some hundreds of starving cloth-dressers assembled in the very field near Kirklees that sloped down from the house which Miss W--- afterwards inhabited, and were armed by their leaders with pistols, hatchets, and bludgeons, many of which had been extorted by the nightly bands that prowled about the country, from such inhabitants of lonely houses as had provided themselves with these means of self-defence. The silent sullen multitude marched in the dead of that spring-night to Rawfolds, and giving tongue with a great shout, roused Mr. Cartwright up to the knowledge that the long-expected attack was come. He was within walls, it is true; but against the fury of hundreds he had only four of his own workmen and five soldiers to assist him. These ten men, however, managed to keep up such a vigorous and well-directed fire of musketry that they defeated all the desperate attempts of the multitude outside to break down the doors, and force a way into the mill; and, after a conflict of twenty minutes, during which two of the assailants were killed and several wounded, they withdrew in confusion, leaving Mr. Cartwright master of the field, but so dizzy and exhausted, now the peril was past, that he forgot the nature of his defences, and injured his leg rather seriously by one of the spiked rollers, in attempting to go up his own staircase. His dwelling was near the factory. Some of the rioters vowed that, if he did not give in, they would leave this, and go to his house, and murder his wife and children. This was a terrible threat, for he had been obliged to leave his family with only one or two soldiers to defend them. Mrs. Cartwright knew what they had threatened; and on that dreadful night, hearing, as she thought, steps approaching, she snatched up her two infant children, and put them in a basket up the great chimney, common in old-fashioned Yorkshire houses. One of the two children who had been thus stowed away used to point out with pride, after she had grown up to woman's estate, the marks of musket shot, and the traces of gunpowder on the walls of her father's mill. He was the first that had offered any resistance to the progress of the "Luddites," who had become by this time so numerous as almost to assume the character of an insurrectionary army. Mr. Cartwright's conduct was so much admired by the neighbouring mill-owners that they entered into a subscription for his benefit which amounted in the end to 3,000_l_. Not much more than a fortnight after this attack on Rawfolds, another manufacturer who employed the obnoxious machinery was shot down in broad daylight, as he was passing over Crossland Moor, which was skirted by a small plantation in which the murderers lay hidden. The readers of "Shirley" will recognise these circumstances, which were related to Miss Bronte years after they occurred, but on the very spots where they took place, and by persons who remembered full well those terrible times of insecurity to life and property on the one hand, and of bitter starvation and blind ignorant despair on the other. Mr. Bronte himself had been living amongst these very people in 1812, as he was then clergyman at Hartshead, not three miles from Rawfolds; and, as I have mentioned, it was in these perilous times that he began his custom of carrying a loaded pistol continually about with him. For not only his Tory politics, but his love and regard for the authority of the law, made him despise the cowardice of the surrounding magistrates, who, in their dread of the Luddites, refused to interfere so as to prevent the destruction of property. The clergy of the district were the bravest men by far. There was a Mr. Roberson of Heald's Hall, a friend of Mr. Bronte's who has left a deep impression of himself on the public mind. He lived near Heckmondwike, a large, straggling, dirty village, not two miles from Roe Head. It was principally inhabited by blanket weavers, who worked in their own cottages; and Heald's Hall is the largest house in the village, of which Mr. Roberson was the vicar. At his own cost, he built a handsome church at Liversedge, on a hill opposite the one on which his house stood, which was the first attempt in the West Riding to meet the wants of the overgrown population, and made many personal sacrifices for his opinions, both religious and political, which were of the true old- fashioned Tory stamp. He hated everything which he fancied had a tendency towards anarchy. He was loyal in every fibre to Church and King; and would have proudly laid down his life, any day, for what he believed to be right and true. But he was a man of an imperial will, and by it he bore down opposition, till tradition represents him as having something grimly demoniac about him. He was intimate with Cartwright, and aware of the attack likely to be made on his mill; accordingly, it is said, he armed himself and his household, and was prepared to come to the rescue, in the event of a signal being given that aid was needed. Thus far is likely enough. Mr. Roberson had plenty of warlike spirit in him, man of peace though he was. But, in consequence of his having taken the unpopular side, exaggerations of his character linger as truth in the minds of the people; and a fabulous story is told of his forbidding any one to give water to the wounded Luddites, left in the mill-yard, when he rode in the next morning to congratulate his friend Cartwright on his successful defence. Moreover, this stern, fearless clergyman had the soldiers that were sent to defend the neighbourhood billeted at his house; and this deeply displeased the workpeople, who were to be intimidated by the red-coats. Although not a magistrate, he spared no pains to track out the Luddites concerned in the assassination I have mentioned; and was so successful in his acute unflinching energy, that it was believed he had been supernaturally aided; and the country people, stealing into the fields surrounding Heald's Hall on dusky winter evenings, years after this time, declared that through the windows they saw Parson Roberson dancing, in a strange red light, with black demons all whirling and eddying round him. He kept a large boys' school; and made himself both respected and dreaded by his pupils. He added a grim kind of humour to his strength of will; and the former quality suggested to his fancy strange out-of-the-way kinds of punishment for any refractory pupils: for instance, he made them stand on one leg in a corner of the schoolroom, holding a heavy book in each hand; and once, when a boy had run away home, he followed him on horseback, reclaimed him from his parents, and, tying him by a rope to the stirrup of his saddle, made him run alongside of his horse for the many miles they had to traverse before reaching Heald's Hall. One other illustration of his character may be given. He discovered that his servant Betty had "a follower;" and, watching his time till Richard was found in the kitchen, he ordered him into the dining-room, where the pupils were all assembled. He then questioned Richard whether he had come after Betty; and on his confessing the truth, Mr. Roberson gave the word, "Off with him, lads, to the pump!" The poor lover was dragged to the court-yard, and the pump set to play upon him; and, between every drenching, the question was put to him, "Will you promise not to come after Betty again?" For a long time Richard bravely refused to give in; when "Pump again, lads!" was the order. But, at last, the poor soaked "follower" was forced to yield, and renounce his Betty. The Yorkshire character of Mr. Roberson would be incomplete if I did not mention his fondness for horses. He lived to be a very old man, dying some time nearer to 1840 than 1830; and even after he was eighty years of age, he took great delight in breaking refractory steeds; if necessary, he would sit motionless on their backs for half-an-hour or more to bring them to. There is a story current that once, in a passion, he shot his wife's favourite horse, and buried it near a quarry, where the ground, some years after, miraculously opened and displayed the skeleton; but the real fact is, that it was an act of humanity to put a poor old horse out of misery; and that, to spare it pain, he shot it with his own hands, and buried it where, the ground sinking afterwards by the working of a coal- pit, the bones came to light. The traditional colouring shows the animus with which his memory is regarded by one set of people. By another, the neighbouring clergy, who remember him riding, in his old age, down the hill on which his house stood, upon his strong white horse--his bearing proud and dignified, his shovel hat bent over and shadowing his keen eagle eyes--going to his Sunday duty like a faithful soldier that dies in harness--who can appreciate his loyalty to conscience, his sacrifices to duty, and his stand by his religion--his memory is venerated. In his extreme old age, a rubric meeting was held, at which his clerical brethren gladly subscribed to present him with a testimonial of their deep respect and regard. This is a specimen of the strong character not seldom manifested by the Yorkshire clergy of the Established Church. Mr. Roberson was a friend of Charlotte Bronte's father; lived within a couple of miles of Roe Head while she was at school there; and was deeply engaged in transactions, the memory of which was yet recent when she heard of them, and of the part which he had had in them. I may now say a little on the character of the Dissenting population immediately surrounding Roe Head; for the "Tory and clergyman's daughter," "taking interest in politics ever since she was five years old," and holding frequent discussions with such of the girls as were Dissenters and Radicals, was sure to have made herself as much acquainted as she could with the condition of those to whom she was opposed in opinion. The bulk of the population were Dissenters, principally Independents. In the village of Heckmondwike, at one end of which Roe Head is situated, there were two large chapels belonging to that denomination, and one to the Methodists, all of which were well filled two or three times on a Sunday, besides having various prayer-meetings, fully attended, on week- days. The inhabitants were a chapel-going people, very critical about the doctrine of their sermons, tyrannical to their ministers, and violent Radicals in politics. A friend, well acquainted with the place when Charlotte Bronte was at school, has described some events which occurred then among them:-- "A scene, which took place at the Lower Chapel at Heckmondwike, will give you some idea of the people at that time. When a newly-married couple made their appearance at chapel, it was the custom to sing the Wedding Anthem, just after the last prayer, and as the congregation was quitting the chapel. The band of singers who performed this ceremony expected to have money given them, and often passed the following night in drinking; at least, so said the minister of the place; and he determined to put an end to this custom. In this he was supported by many members of the chapel and congregation; but so strong was the democratic element, that he met with the most violent opposition, and was often insulted when he went into the street. A bride was expected to make her first appearance, and the minister told the singers not to perform the anthem. On their declaring they would, he had the large pew which they usually occupied locked; they broke it open: from the pulpit he told the congregation that, instead of their singing a hymn, he would read a chapter; hardly had he uttered the first word, before up rose the singers, headed by a tall, fierce-looking weaver, who gave out a hymn, and all sang it at the very top of their voices, aided by those of their friends who were in the chapel. Those who disapproved of the conduct of the singers, and sided with the minister, remained seated till the hymn was finished. Then he gave out the chapter again, read it, and preached. He was just about to conclude with prayer, when up started the singers and screamed forth another hymn. These disgraceful scenes were continued for many weeks, and so violent was the feeling, that the different parties could hardly keep from blows as they came through the chapel-yard. The minister, at last, left the place, and along with him went many of the most temperate and respectable part of the congregation, and the singers remained triumphant. "I believe that there was such a violent contest respecting the choice of a pastor, about this time, in the Upper Chapel at Heckmondwike, that the Riot Act had to be read at a church-meeting." Certainly, the _soi-disant_ Christians who forcibly ejected Mr. Redhead at Haworth, ten or twelve years before, held a very heathen brotherhood with the _soi-disant_ Christians of Heckmondwike; though the one set might be called members of the Church of England and the other Dissenters. The letter from which I have taken the above extract relates throughout to the immediate neighbourhood of the place where Charlotte Bronte spent her school-days, and describes things as they existed at that very time. The writer says,--"Having been accustomed to the respectful manners of the lower orders in the agricultural districts, I was at first, much disgusted and somewhat alarmed at the great freedom displayed by the working classes of Heckmondwike and Gomersall to those in a station above them. The term 'lass,' was as freely applied to any young lady, as the word 'wench' is in Lancashire. The extremely untidy appearance of the villagers shocked me not a little, though I must do the housewives the justice to say that the cottages themselves were not dirty, and had an air of rough plenty about them (except when trade was bad), that I had not been accustomed to see in the farming districts. The heap of coals on one side of the house-door, and the brewing tubs on the other, and the frequent perfume of malt and hops as you walked along, proved that fire and 'home-brewed' were to be found at almost every man's hearth. Nor was hospitality, one of the main virtues of Yorkshire, wanting. Oat-cake, cheese, and beer were freely pressed upon the visitor. "There used to be a yearly festival, half-religious, half social, held at Heckmondwike, called 'The Lecture.' I fancy it had come down from the times of the Nonconformists. A sermon was preached by some stranger at the Lower Chapel, on a week-day evening, and the next day, two sermons in succession were delivered at the Upper Chapel. Of course, the service was a very long one, and as the time was June, and the weather often hot, it used to be regarded by myself and my companions as no pleasurable way of passing the morning. The rest of the day was spent in social enjoyment; great numbers of strangers flocked to the place; booths were erected for the sale of toys and gingerbread (a sort of 'Holy Fair'); and the cottages, having had a little extra paint and white-washing, assumed quite a holiday look. "The village of Gomersall" (where Charlotte Bronte's friend "Mary" lived with her family), "which was a much prettier place than Heckmondwike, contained a strange-looking cottage, built of rough unhewn stones, many of them projecting considerably, with uncouth heads and grinning faces carved upon them; and upon a stone above the door was cut, in large letters, 'SPITE HALL.' It was erected by a man in the village, opposite to the house of his enemy, who had just finished for himself a good house, commanding a beautiful view down the valley, which this hideous building quite shut out." Fearless--because this people were quite familiar to all of them--amidst such a population, lived and walked the gentle Miss W---'s eight or nine pupils. She herself was born and bred among this rough, strong, fierce set, and knew the depth of goodness and loyalty that lay beneath their wild manners and insubordinate ways. And the girls talked of the little world around them, as if it were the only world that was; and had their opinions and their parties, and their fierce discussions like their elders--possibly, their betters. And among them, beloved and respected by all, laughed at occasionally by a few, but always to her face--lived, for a year and a half, the plain, short-sighted, oddly-dressed, studious little girl they called Charlotte Bronte. CHAPTER VII Miss Bronte left Roe Head in 1832, having won the affectionate regard both of her teacher and her school-fellows, and having formed there the two fast friendships which lasted her whole life long; the one with "Mary," who has not kept her letters; the other with "E.," who has kindly entrusted me with a large portion of Miss Bronte's correspondence with her. This she has been induced to do by her knowledge of the urgent desire on the part of Mr. Bronte that the life of his daughter should be written, and in compliance with a request from her husband that I should be permitted to have the use of these letters, without which such a task could be but very imperfectly executed. In order to shield this friend, however, from any blame or misconstruction, it is only right to state that, before granting me this privilege, she throughout most carefully and completely effaced the names of the persons and places which occurred in them; and also that such information as I have obtained from her bears reference solely to Miss Bronte and her sisters, and not to any other individuals whom I may find it necessary to allude to in connection with them. In looking over the earlier portion of this correspondence, I am struck afresh by the absence of hope, which formed such a strong characteristic in Charlotte. At an age when girls, in general, look forward to an eternal duration of such feelings as they or their friends entertain, and can therefore see no hindrance to the fulfilment of any engagements dependent on the future state of the affections, she is surprised that "E." keeps her promise to write. In after-life, I was painfully impressed with the fact, that Miss Bronte never dared to allow herself to look forward with hope; that she had no confidence in the future; and I thought, when I heard of the sorrowful years she had passed through, that it had been this this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her. But it appears from the letters, that it must have been, so to speak, constitutional; or, perhaps, the deep pang of losing her two elder sisters combined with a permanent state of bodily weakness in producing her hopelessness. If her trust in God had been less strong, she would have given way to unbounded anxiety, at many a period of her life. As it was, we shall see, she made a great and successful effort to leave "her times in His hands." After her return home, she employed herself in teaching her sisters, over whom she had had superior advantages. She writes thus, July 21st, 1832, of her course of life at the parsonage:-- "An account of one day is an account of all. In the morning, from nine o'clock till half-past twelve, I instruct my sisters, and draw; then we walk till dinner-time. After dinner I sew till tea-time, and after tea I either write, read, or do a little fancy-work, or draw, as I please. Thus, in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course, my life is passed. I have been only out twice to tea since I came home. We are expecting company this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we shall have all the female teachers of the Sunday-school to tea." I may here introduce a quotation from a letter which I have received from "Mary" since the publication of the previous editions of this memoir. "Soon after leaving school she admitted reading something of Cobbett's. 'She did not like him,' she said; 'but all was fish that came to her net.' At this time she wrote to me that reading and drawing were the only amusements she had, and that her supply of books was very small in proportion to her wants. She never spoke of her aunt. When I saw Miss Branwell she was a very precise person, and looked very odd, because her dress, &c., was so utterly out of fashion. She corrected one of us once for using the word 'spit' or 'spitting.' She made a great favourite of Branwell. She made her nieces sew, with purpose or without, and as far as possible discouraged any other culture. She used to keep the girls sewing charity clothing, and maintained to me that it was not for the good of the recipients, but of the sewers. 'It was proper for them to do it,' she said. Charlotte never was 'in wild excitement' that I know of. When in health she used to talk better, and indeed when in low spirits never spoke at all. She needed her best spirits to say what was in her heart, for at other times she had not courage. She never gave decided opinions at such times . . . "Charlotte said she could get on with any one who had a bump at the top of their heads (meaning conscientiousness). I found that I seldom differed from her, except that she was far too tolerant of stupid people, if they had a grain of kindness in them." It was about this time that Mr. Bronte provided his children with a teacher in drawing, who turned out to be a man of considerable talent, but very little principle. Although they never attained to anything like proficiency, they took great interest in acquiring this art; evidently, from an instinctive desire to express their powerful imaginations in visible forms. Charlotte told me, that at this period of her life, drawing, and walking out with her sisters, formed the two great pleasures and relaxations of her day. The three girls used to walk upwards toward the "purple-black" moors, the sweeping surface of which was broken by here and there a stone-quarry; and if they had strength and time to go far enough, they reached a waterfall, where the beck fell over some rocks into the "bottom." They seldom went downwards through the village. They were shy of meeting even familiar faces, and were scrupulous about entering the house of the very poorest uninvited. They were steady teachers at the Sunday-School, a habit which Charlotte kept up very faithfully, even after she was left alone; but they never faced their kind voluntary, and always preferred the solitude and freedom of the moors. * * * * * In the September of this year, Charlotte went to pay her first visit to her friend "E." It took her into the neighbourhood of Roe Head, and brought her into pleasant contact with many of her old school-fellows. After this visit she and her friend seem to have agreed to correspond in French, for the sake of improvement in the language. But this improvement could not be great, when it could only amount to a greater familiarity with dictionary words, and when there was no one to explain to them that a verbal translation of English idioms hardly constituted French composition; but the effort was laudable, and of itself shows how willing they both were to carry on the education which they had begun under Miss W-. I will give an extract which, whatever may be thought of the language, is graphic enough, and presents us with a happy little family picture; the eldest sister returning home to the two younger, after a fortnight's absence. "J'arrivait a Haworth en parfaite sauvete sans le moindre accident ou malheur. Mes petites soeurs couraient hors de la maison pour me rencontrer aussitot que la voiture se fit voir, et elles m'embrassaient avec autant d'empressement et de plaisir comme si j'avais ete absente pour plus d'an. Mon Papa, ma Tante, et le monsieur dent men frere avoit parle, furent tous assembles dans le Salon, et en peu de temps je m'y rendis aussi. C'est souvent l'ordre du Ciel que quand on a perdu un plaisir il y en a un autre pret a prendre sa place. Ainsi je venois de partir de tres-chers amis, mais tout a l'heure je revins a des parens aussi chers et bon dans le moment. Meme que vous me perdiez (ose-je croire que mon depart vous etait un chagrin?) vous attendites l'arrivee de votre frere, et de votre soeur. J'ai donne a mes soeurs les pommes que vous leur envoyiez avec tant de bonte; elles disent qu'elles sont sur que Mademoiselle E. est tres-aimable et bonne; l'une et l'autre sont extremement impatientes de vous voir; j'espere qu'en peu de mois elles auront ce plaisir." But it was some time yet before the friends could meet, and meanwhile they agreed to correspond once a month. There were no events to chronicle in the Haworth letters. Quiet days, occupied in reaching, and feminine occupations in the house, did not present much to write about; and Charlotte was naturally driven to criticise books. Of these there were many in different plights, and according to their plight, kept in different places. The well-bound were ranged in the sanctuary of Mr. Bronte's study; but the purchase of books was a necessary luxury to him, but as it was often a choice between binding an old one, or buying a new one, the familiar volume, which had been hungrily read by all the members of the family, was sometimes in such a condition that the bedroom shelf was considered its fitting place. Up and down the house were to be found many standard works of a solid kind. Sir Walter Scott's writings, Wordsworth's and Southey's poems were among the lighter literature; while, as having a character of their own--earnest, wild, and occasionally fanatical--may be named some of the books which came from the Branwell side of the family--from the Cornish followers of the saintly John Wesley--and which are touched on in the account of the works to which Caroline Helstone had access in "Shirley:"--"Some venerable Lady's Magazines, that had once performed a voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm"--(possibly part of the relics of Mrs. Bronte's possessions, contained in the ship wrecked on the coast of Cornwall)--"and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticisms; and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living." Mr. Bronte encouraged a taste for reading in his girls; and though Miss Branwell kept it in due bounds, by the variety of household occupations, in which she expected them not merely to take a part, but to become proficients, thereby occupying regularly a good portion of every day, they were allowed to get books from the circulating library at Keighley; and many a happy walk, up those long four miles, must they have had, burdened with some new book, into which they peeped as they hurried home. Not that the books were what would generally be called new; in the beginning of 1833, the two friends seem almost simultaneously to have fallen upon "Kenilworth," and Charlotte writes as follows about it:-- "I am glad you like 'Kenilworth;' it is certainly more resembling a romance than a novel: in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter's pen. Varney is certainly the personification of consummate villainy; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature, as well as a surprising skill in embodying his perceptions, so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge." Commonplace as this extract may seem, it is noteworthy on two or three accounts: in the first place, instead of discussing the plot or story, she analyses the character of Varney; and next, she, knowing nothing of the world, both from her youth and her isolated position, has yet been so accustomed to hear "human nature" distrusted, as to receive the notion of intense and artful villainy without surprise. What was formal and set in her way of writing to "E." diminished as their personal acquaintance increased, and as each came to know the home of the other; so that small details concerning people and places had their interest and their significance. In the summer of 1833, she wrote to invite her friend to come and pay her a visit. "Aunt thought it would be better" (she says) "to defer it until about the middle of summer, as the winter, and even the spring seasons, are remarkably cold and bleak among our mountains." The first impression made on the visitor by the sisters of her school- friend was, that Emily was a tall, long-armed girl, more fully grown than her elder sister; extremely reserved in manner. I distinguish reserve from shyness, because I imagine shyness would please, if it knew how; whereas, reserve is indifferent whether it pleases or not. Anne, like her eldest sister, was shy; Emily was reserved. Branwell was rather a handsome boy, with "tawny" hair, to use Miss Bronte's phrase for a more obnoxious colour. All were very clever, original, and utterly different to any people or family "E." had ever seen before. But, on the whole, it was a happy visit to all parties. Charlotte says, in writing to "E.," just after her return home--"Were I to tell you of the impression you have made on every one here, you would accuse me of flattery. Papa and aunt are continually adducing you as an example for me to shape my actions and behaviour by. Emily and Anne say 'they never saw any one they liked so well as you.' And Tabby, whom you have absolutely fascinated, talks a great deal more nonsense about your ladyship than I care to repeat. It is now so dark that, notwithstanding the singular property of seeing in the night-time, which the young ladies at Roe Head used to attribute to me, I can scribble no longer." To a visitor at the parsonage, it was a great thing to have Tabby's good word. She had a Yorkshire keenness of perception into character, and it was not everybody she liked. Haworth is built with an utter disregard of all sanitary conditions: the great old churchyard lies above all the houses, and it is terrible to think how the very water-springs of the pumps below must be poisoned. But this winter of 1833-4 was particularly wet and rainy, and there were an unusual number of deaths in the village. A dreary season it was to the family in the parsonage: their usual walks obstructed by the spongy state of the moors--the passing and funeral bells so frequently tolling, and filling the heavy air with their mournful sound--and, when they were still, the "chip, chip," of the mason, as he cut the grave-stones in a shed close by. In many, living, as it were, in a churchyard, and with all the sights and sounds connected with the last offices to the dead things of everyday occurrence, the very familiarity would have bred indifference. But it was otherwise with Charlotte Bronte. One of her friends says:--"I have seen her turn pale and feel faint when, in Hartshead church, some one accidentally remarked that we were walking over graves. Charlotte was certainly afraid of death. Not only of dead bodies, or dying people. She dreaded it as something horrible. She thought we did not know how long the 'moment of dissolution' might really be, or how terrible. This was just such a terror as only hypochondriacs can provide for themselves. She told me long ago that a misfortune was often preceded by the dream frequently repeated which she gives to 'Jane Eyre,' of carrying a little wailing child, and being unable to still it. She described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church. The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was like the cholera, present to susceptible people,--some feeling more, some less." About the beginning of 1834, "E." went to London for the first time. The idea of her friend's visit seems to have stirred Charlotte strangely. She appears to have formed her notions of its probable consequences from some of the papers in the "British Essayists," "The Rambler," "The Mirror," or "The Lounger," which may have been among the English classics on the parsonage bookshelves; for she evidently imagines that an entire change of character for the worse is the usual effect of a visit to "the great metropolis," and is delighted to find that "E." is "E." still. And, as her faith in her friend's stability is restored, her own imagination is deeply moved by the idea of what great wonders are to be seen in that vast and famous city. "Haworth, February 20th, 1834. "Your letter gave me real and heartfelt pleasure, mingled with no small share of astonishment. Mary had previously informed me of your departure for London, and I had not ventured to calculate on any communication from you while surrounded by the splendours and novelties of that great city, which has been called the mercantile metropolis of Europe. Judging from human nature, I thought that a little country girl, for the first time in a situation so well calculated to excite curiosity, and to distract attention, would lose all remembrance, for a time at least, of distant and familiar objects, and give herself up entirely to the fascination of those scenes which were then presented to her view. Your kind, interesting, and most welcome epistle showed me, however, that I had been both mistaken and uncharitable in these suppositions. I was greatly amused at the tone of nonchalance which you assumed, while treating of London and its wonders. Did you not feel awed while gazing at St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey? Had you no feeling of intense and ardent interest, when in St. James's you saw the palace where so many of England's kings have held their courts, and beheld the representations of their persons on the walls? You should not be too much afraid of appearing _country-bred_; the magnificence of London has drawn exclamations of astonishment from travelled men, experienced in the world, its wonders and beauties. Have you yet seen anything of the great personages whom the sitting of Parliament now detains in London--the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Earl Grey, Mr. Stanley, Mr. O'Connell? If I were you, I would not be too anxious to spend my time in reading whilst in town. Make use of your own eyes for the purposes of observation now, and, for a time at least, lay aside the spectacles with which authors would furnish us." In a postscript she adds:-- "Will you be kind enough to inform me of the number of performers in the King's military band?" And in something of the same strain she writes on "June 19th. "My own Dear E., "I may rightfully and truly call you so now. You _have_ returned or _are_ returning from London--from the great city which is to me as apocryphal as Babylon, or Nineveh, or ancient Rome. You are withdrawing from the world (as it is called), and bringing with you--if your letters enable me to form a correct judgment--a heart as unsophisticated, as natural, as true, as that you carried there. I am slow, _very_ slow, to believe the protestations of another; I know my own sentiments, I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of man and woman kind are to me sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls, which I cannot easily either unseal or decipher. Yet time, careful study, long acquaintance, overcome most difficulties; and, in your case, I think they have succeeded well in bringing to light and construing that hidden language, whose turnings, windings, inconsistencies, and obscurities, so frequently baffle the researches of the honest observer of human nature . . . I am truly grateful for your mindfulness of so obscure a person as myself, and I hope the pleasure is not altogether selfish; I trust it is partly derived from the consciousness that my friend's character is of a higher, a more steadfast order than I was once perfectly aware of. Few girls would have done as you have done--would have beheld the glare, and glitter, and dazzling display of London with dispositions so unchanged, heart so uncontaminated. I see no affectation in your letters, no trifling, no frivolous contempt of plain, and weak admiration of showy persons and things." In these days of cheap railway trips, we may smile at the idea of a short visit to London having any great effect upon the character, whatever it may have upon the intellect. But her London--her great apocryphal city--was the "town" of a century before, to which giddy daughters dragged unwilling papas, or went with injudicious friends, to the detriment of all their better qualities, and sometimes to the ruin of their fortunes; it was the Vanity Fair of the "Pilgrim's Progress" to her. But see the just and admirable sense with which she can treat a subject of which she is able to overlook all the bearings. "Haworth, July 4th, 1834. "In your last, you request me to tell you of your faults. Now, really, how can you be so foolish! I _won't_ tell you of your faults, because I don't know them. What a creature would that be, who, after receiving an affectionate and kind letter from a beloved friend, should sit down and write a catalogue of defects by way of answer! Imagine me doing so, and then consider what epithets you would bestow on me. Conceited, dogmatical, hypocritical, little humbug, I should think, would be the mildest. Why, child! I've neither time nor inclination to reflect on your _faults_ when you are so far from me, and when, besides, kind letters and presents, and so forth, are continually bringing forth your goodness in the most prominent light. Then, too, there are judicious relations always round you, who can much better discharge that unpleasant office. I have no doubt their advice is completely at your service; why then should I intrude mine? If you will not hear them, it will be vain though one should rise from the dead to instruct you. Let us have no more nonsense, if you love me. Mr. --- is going to be married, is he? Well, his wife elect appeared to me to be a clever and amiable lady, as far as I could judge from the little I saw of her, and from your account. Now to that flattering sentence must I tack on a list of her faults? You say it is in contemplation for you to leave ---. I am sorry for it. --- is a pleasant spot, one of the old family halls of England, surrounded by lawn and woodland, speaking of past times, and suggesting (to me at least) happy feelings. M. thought you grown less, did she? I am not grown a bit, but as short and dumpy as ever. You ask me to recommend you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakspeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakspeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting; you will never wish to read them over twice. Omit the comedies of Shakspeare, and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain, of Byron, though the latter is a magnificent poem, and read the rest fearlessly; that must indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII., from Richard III., from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Scott's sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm. Nor can Wordsworth's, nor Campbell's, nor Southey's--the greatest part at least of his; some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can; I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's Life of Nelson, Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Life of Sheridan, Moore's Life of Byron, Wolfe's Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audubon, and Goldsmith and White's history of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, adhere to standard authors, and avoid novelty." From this list, we see that she must have had a good range of books from which to choose her own reading. It is evident, that the womanly consciences of these two correspondents were anxiously alive to many questions discussed among the stricter religionists. The morality of Shakspeare needed the confirmation of Charlotte's opinion to the sensitive "E.;" and a little later, she inquired whether dancing was objectionable, when indulged in for an hour or two in parties of boys and girls. Charlotte replies, "I should hesitate to express a difference of opinion from Mr. ---, or from your excellent sister, but really the matter seems to me to stand thus. It is allowed on all hands, that the sin of dancing consists not in the mere action of 'shaking the shanks' (as the Scotch say), but in the consequences that usually attend it; namely, frivolity and waste of time; when it is used only, as in the case you state, for the exercise and amusement of an hour among young people (who surely may without any breach of God's commandments be allowed a little light-heartedness), these consequences cannot follow. Ergo (according to my manner of arguing), the amusement is at such times perfectly innocent." Although the distance between Haworth and B--- was but seventeen miles, it was difficult to go straight from the one to the other without hiring a gig or vehicle of some kind for the journey. Hence a visit from Charlotte required a good deal of pre-arrangement. _The_ Haworth gig was not always to be had; and Mr. Bronte was often unwilling to fall into any arrangement for meeting at Bradford or other places, which would occasion trouble to others. The whole family had an ample share of that sensitive pride which led them to dread incurring obligations, and to fear "outstaying their welcome" when on any visit. I am not sure whether Mr. Bronte did not consider distrust of others as a part of that knowledge of human nature on which he piqued himself. His precepts to this effect, combined with Charlotte's lack of hope, made her always fearful of loving too much; of wearying the objects of her affection; and thus she was often trying to restrain her warm feelings, and was ever chary of that presence so invariably welcome to her true friends. According to this mode of acting, when she was invited for a month, she stayed but a fortnight amidst "E.'s" family, to whom every visit only endeared her the more, and by whom she was received with that kind of quiet gladness with which they would have greeted a sister. She still kept up her childish interest in politics. In March, 1835, she writes: "What do you think of the course politics are taking? I make this enquiry, because I now think you take a wholesome interest in the matter; formerly you did not care greatly about it. B., you see, is triumphant. Wretch! I am a hearty hater, and if there is any one I thoroughly abhor, it is that man. But the Opposition is divided, Red- hots, and Luke-warms; and the Duke (par excellence _the_ Duke) and Sir Robert Peel show no signs of insecurity, though they have been twice beat; so 'Courage, mon amie,' as the old chevaliers used to say, before they joined battle." In the middle of the summer of 1835, a great family plan was mooted at the parsonage. The question was, to what trade or profession should Branwell be brought up? He was now nearly eighteen; it was time to decide. He was very clever, no doubt; perhaps to begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family. The sisters hardly recognised their own, or each others' powers, but they knew _his_. The father, ignorant of many failings in moral conduct, did proud homage to the great gifts of his son; for Branwell's talents were readily and willingly brought out for the entertainment of others. Popular admiration was sweet to him. And this led to his presence being sought at "arvills" and all the great village gatherings, for the Yorkshiremen have a keen relish for intellect; and it likewise procured him the undesirable distinction of having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his liquor. "Do you want some one to help you with your bottle, sir? If you do, I'll send up for Patrick" (so the villagers called him till the day of his death, though in his own family he was always "Branwell"). And while the messenger went, the landlord entertained his guest with accounts of the wonderful talents of the boy, whose precocious cleverness, and great conversational powers, were the pride of the village. The attacks of ill health to which Mr. Bronte had been subject of late years, rendered it not only necessary that he should take his dinner alone (for the sake of avoiding temptations to unwholesome diet), but made it also desirable that he should pass the time directly succeeding his meals in perfect quiet. And this necessity, combined with due attention to his parochial duties, made him partially ignorant how his son employed himself out of lesson-time. His own youth had been spent among people of the same conventional rank as those into whose companionship Branwell was now thrown; but he had had a strong will, and an earnest and persevering ambition, and a resoluteness of purpose which his weaker son wanted. It is singular how strong a yearning the whole family had towards the art of drawing. Mr. Bronte had been very solicitous to get them good instruction; the girls themselves loved everything connected with it--all descriptions or engravings of great pictures; and, in default of good ones, they would take and analyse any print or drawing which came in their way, and find out how much thought had gone to its composition, what ideas it was intended to suggest, and what it _did_ suggest. In the same spirit, they laboured to design imaginations of their own; they lacked the power of execution, not of conception. At one time, Charlotte had the notion of making her living as an artist, and wearied her eyes in drawing with pre-Raphaelite minuteness, but not with pre-Raphaelite accuracy, for she drew from fancy rather than from nature. But they all thought there could be no doubt about Branwell's talent for drawing. I have seen an oil painting of his, done I know not when, but probably about this time. It was a group of his sisters, life-size, three-quarters' length; not much better than sign-painting, as to manipulation; but the likenesses were, I should think, admirable. I could only judge of the fidelity with which the other two were depicted, from the striking resemblance which Charlotte, upholding the great frame of canvas, and consequently standing right behind it, bore to her own representation, though it must have been ten years and more since the portraits were taken. The picture was divided, almost in the middle, by a great pillar. On the side of the column which was lighted by the sun, stood Charlotte, in the womanly dress of that day of gigot sleeves and large collars. On the deeply shadowed side, was Emily, with Anne's gentle face resting on her shoulder. Emily's countenance struck me as full of power; Charlotte's of solicitude; Anne's of tenderness. The two younger seemed hardly to have attained their full growth, though Emily was taller than Charlotte; they had cropped hair, and a more girlish dress. I remember looking on those two sad, earnest, shadowed faces, and wondering whether I could trace the mysterious expression which is said to foretell an early death. I had some fond superstitious hope that the column divided their fates from hers, who stood apart in the canvas, as in life she survived. I liked to see that the bright side of the pillar was towards _her_--that the light in the picture fell on _her_: I might more truly have sought in her presentment--nay, in her living face--for the sign of death--in her prime. They were good likenesses, however badly executed. From thence I should guess his family augured truly that, if Branwell had but the opportunity, and, alas! had but the moral qualities, he might turn out a great painter. The best way of preparing him to become so appeared to be to send him as a pupil to the Royal Academy. I dare say he longed and yearned to follow this path, principally because it would lead him to that mysterious London--that Babylon the great--which seems to have filled the imaginations and haunted the minds of all the younger members of this recluse family. To Branwell it was more than a vivid imagination, it was an impressed reality. By dint of studying maps, he was as well acquainted with it, even down to its by-ways, as if he had lived there. Poor misguided fellow! this craving to see and know London, and that stronger craving after fame, were never to be satisfied. He was to die at the end of a short and blighted life. But in this year of 1835, all his home kindred were thinking how they could best forward his views, and how help him up to the pinnacle where he desired to be. What their plans were, let Charlotte explain. These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother's idolized wish. Would to God they might be the last who met with such a miserable return! "Haworth, July 6th, 1835. "I had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you at Haworth this summer, but human affairs are mutable, and human resolutions must bend to the course of events. We are all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a governess. This last determination I formed myself, knowing that I should have to take the step sometime, 'and better sune as syne,' to use the Scotch proverb; and knowing well that papa would have enough to do with his limited income, should Branwell be placed at the Royal Academy, and Emily at Roe Head. Where am I going to reside? you will ask. Within four miles of you, at a place neither of us is unacquainted with, being no other than the identical Roe Head mentioned above. Yes! I am going to teach in the very school where I was myself taught. Miss W--- made me the offer, and I preferred it to one or two proposals of private governess-ship, which I had before received. I am sad--very sad--at the thoughts of leaving home; but duty--necessity--these are stern mistresses, who will not be disobeyed. Did I not once say you ought to be thankful for your independence? I felt what I said at the time, and I repeat it now with double earnestness; if anything would cheer me, it is the idea of being so near you. Surely, you and Polly will come and see me; it would be wrong in me to doubt it; you were never unkind yet. Emily and I leave home on the 27th of this month; the idea of being together consoles us both somewhat, and, truth, since I must enter a situation, 'My lines have fallen in pleasant places.' I both love and respect Miss W-." CHAPTER VIII On the 29th of July, 1835, Charlotte, now a little more than nineteen years old, went as teacher to Miss W---'s. Emily accompanied her as a pupil; but she became literally ill from home-sickness, and could not settle to anything, and after passing only three months at Roe Head, returned to the parsonage and the beloved moors. Miss Bronte gives the following reasons as those which prevented Emily's remaining at school, and caused the substitution of her younger sister in her place at Miss W---'s:-- "My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her;--out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was--liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength, threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on." This physical suffering on Emily's part when absent from Haworth, after recurring several times under similar circumstances, became at length so much an acknowledged fact, that whichever was obliged to leave home, the sisters decided that Emily must remain there, where alone she could enjoy anything like good health. She left it twice again in her life; once going as teacher to a school in Halifax for six months, and afterwards accompanying Charlotte to Brussels for ten. When at home, she took the principal part of the cooking upon herself, and did all the household ironing; and after Tabby grew old and infirm, it was Emily who made all the bread for the family; and any one passing by the kitchen-door, might have seen her studying German out of an open book, propped up before her, as she kneaded the dough; but no study, however interesting, interfered with the goodness of the bread, which was always light and excellent. Books were, indeed, a very common sight in that kitchen; the girls were taught by their father theoretically, and by their aunt, practically, that to take an active part in all household work was, in their position, woman's simple duty; but in their careful employment of time, they found many an odd five minutes for reading while watching the cakes, and managed the union of two kinds of employment better than King Alfred. Charlotte's life at Miss W---'s was a very happy one, until her health failed. She sincerely loved and respected the former schoolmistress, to whom she was now become both companion and friend. The girls were hardly strangers to her, some of them being younger sisters of those who had been her own playmates. Though the duties of the day might be tedious and monotonous, there were always two or three happy hours to look forward to in the evening, when she and Miss W--- sat together--sometimes late into the night--and had quiet pleasant conversations, or pauses of silence as agreeable, because each felt that as soon as a thought or remark occurred which they wished to express, there was an intelligent companion ready to sympathise, and yet they were not compelled to "make talk." Miss W--- was always anxious to afford Miss Bronte every opportunity of recreation in her power; but the difficulty often was to persuade her to avail herself of the invitations which came, urging her to spend Saturday and Sunday with "E." and "Mary," in their respective homes, that lay within the distance of a walk. She was too apt to consider, that allowing herself a holiday was a dereliction of duty, and to refuse herself the necessary change, from something of an over-ascetic spirit, betokening a loss of healthy balance in either body or mind. Indeed, it is clear that such was the case, from a passage, referring to this time, in the letter of "Mary" from which I have before given extracts. "Three years after--" (the period when they were at school together)--"I heard that she had gone as teacher to Miss W---'s. I went to see her, and asked how she could give so much for so little money, when she could live without it. She owned that, after clothing herself and Anne, there was nothing left, though she had hoped to be able to save something. She confessed it was not brilliant, but what could she do? I had nothing to answer. She seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty, and, when she could get, used to sit alone, and 'make out.' She told me afterwards, that one evening she had sat in the dressing-room until it was quite dark, and then observing it all at once, had taken sudden fright." No doubt she remembered this well when she described a similar terror getting hold upon Jane Eyre. She says in the story, "I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls--occasionally turning a fascinated eye towards the gleaming mirror--I began to recall what I had heard of dead men troubled in their graves . . . I endeavoured to be firm; shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly through the dark room; at this moment, a ray from the moon penetrated some aperture in the blind. No! moon light was still, and this stirred . . . prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears which I deemed the rustling of wings; something seemed near me." {4} "From that time," Mary adds, "her imaginations became gloomy or frightful; she could not help it, nor help thinking. She could not forget the gloom, could not sleep at night, nor attend in the day. "She told me that one night, sitting alone, about this time, she heard a voice repeat these lines: "'Come thou high and holy feeling, Shine o'er mountain, flit o'er wave, Gleam like light o'er dome and shielding.' "There were eight or ten more lines which I forget. She insisted that she had not made them, that she had heard a voice repeat them. It is possible that she had read them, and unconsciously recalled them. They are not in the volume of poems which the sisters published. She repeated a verse of Isaiah, which she said had inspired them, and which I have forgotten. Whether the lines were recollected or invented, the tale proves such habits of sedentary, monotonous solitude of thought as would have shaken a feebler mind." Of course, the state of health thus described came on gradually, and is not to be taken as a picture of her condition in 1836. Yet even then there is a despondency in some of her expressions, that too sadly reminds one of some of Cowper's letters. And it is remarkable how deeply his poems impressed her. His words, his verses, came more frequently to her memory, I imagine, than those of any other poet. "Mary" says: "Cowper's poem, 'The Castaway,' was known to them all, and they all at times appreciated, or almost appropriated it. Charlotte told me once that Branwell had done so; and though his depression was the result of his faults, it was in no other respect different from hers. Both were not mental but physical illnesses. She was well aware of this, and would ask how that mended matters, as the feeling was there all the same, and was not removed by knowing the cause. She had a larger religious toleration than a person would have who had never questioned, and the manner of recommending religion was always that of offering comfort, not fiercely enforcing a duty. One time I mentioned that some one had asked me what religion I was of (with the view of getting me for a partizan), and that I had said that that was between God and me;--Emily (who was lying on the hearth-rug) exclaimed, 'That's right.' This was all I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects. Charlotte was free from religious depression when in tolerable health; when that failed, her depression returned. You have probably seen such instances. They don't get over their difficulties; they forget them, when their stomach (or whatever organ it is that inflicts such misery on sedentary people) will let them. I have heard her condemn Socinianism, Calvinism, and many other 'isms' inconsistent with Church of Englandism. I used to wonder at her acquaintance with such subjects." "May 10th, 1836. "I was struck with the note you sent me with the umbrella; it showed a degree of interest in my concerns which I have no right to expect from any earthly creature. I won't play the hypocrite; I won't answer your kind, gentle, friendly questions in the way you wish me to. Don't deceive yourself by imagining I have a bit of real goodness about me. My darling, if I were like you, I should have my face Zion-ward, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me--but I _am not like you_. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me. But I know the treasures of the _Bible_; I love and adore them. I can _see_ the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus. "You are far too kind and frequent in your invitations. You puzzle me. I hardly know how to refuse, and it is still more embarrassing to accept. At any rate, I cannot come this week, for we are in the very thickest melee of the Repetitions. I was hearing the terrible fifth section when your note arrived. But Miss Wooler says I must go to Mary next Friday, as she promised for me on Whit-Sunday; and on Sunday morning I will join you at church, if it be convenient, and stay till Monday. There's a free and easy proposal! Miss W--- has driven me to it. She says her character is implicated." Good, kind Miss W---! however monotonous and trying were the duties Charlotte had to perform under her roof, there was always a genial and thoughtful friend watching over her, and urging her to partake of any little piece of innocent recreation that might come in her way. And in those Midsummer holidays of 1836, her friend E. came to stay with her at Haworth, so there was one happy time secured. Here follows a series of letters, not dated, but belonging to the latter portion of this year; and again we think of the gentle and melancholy Cowper. "My dear dear E., "I am at this moment trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note; it is what I never received before--it is the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart . . . I thank you with energy for this kindness. I will no longer shrink from answering your questions. I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes to be made so. I have stings of conscience, visitings of remorse, glimpses of holy, of inexpressible things, which formerly I used to be a stranger to; it may all die away, and I may be in utter midnight, but I implore a merciful Redeemer, that, if this be the dawn of the gospel, it may still brighten to perfect day. Do not mistake me--do not think I am good; I only wish to be so. I only hate my former flippancy and forwardness. Oh! I am no better than ever I was. I am in that state of horrid, gloomy uncertainty that, at this moment, I would submit to be old, grey-haired, to have passed all my youthful days of enjoyment, and to be settling on the verge of the grave, if I could only thereby ensure the prospect of reconciliation to God, and redemption through his Son's merits. I never was exactly careless of these matters, but I have always taken a clouded and repulsive view of them; and now, if possible, the clouds are gathering darker, and a more oppressive despondency weighs on my spirits. You have cheered me, my darling; for one moment, for an atom of time, I thought I might call you my own sister in the spirit; but the excitement is past, and I am now as wretched and hopeless as ever. This very night I will pray as you wish me. May the Almighty hear me compassionately! and I humbly hope he will, for you will strengthen my polluted petitions with your own pure requests. All is bustle and confusion round me, the ladies pressing with their sums and their lessons . . . If you love me, _do, do, do_ come on Friday: I shall watch and wait for you, and if you disappoint me I shall weep. I wish you could know the thrill of delight which I experienced, when, as I stood at the dining- room window, I saw ---, as he whirled past, toss your little packet over the wall." Huddersfield market-day was still the great period for events at Roe Head. Then girls, running round the corner of the house and peeping between tree-stems, and up a shadowy lane, could catch a glimpse of a father or brother driving to market in his gig; might, perhaps, exchange a wave of the hand; or see, as Charlotte Bronte did from the window, a white packet tossed over the avail by come swift strong motion of an arm, the rest of the traveller's body unseen. "Weary with a day's hard work . . . I am sitting down to write a few lines to my dear E. Excuse me if I say nothing but nonsense, for my mind is exhausted and dispirited. It is a stormy evening, and the wind is uttering a continual moaning sound, that makes me feel very melancholy. At such times--in such moods as these--it is my nature to seek repose in some calm tranquil idea, and I have now summoned up your image to give me rest. There you sit, upright and still in your black dress, and white scarf, and pale marble-like face--just like reality. I wish you would speak to me. If we should be separated--if it should be our lot to live at a great distance, and never to see each other again--in old age, how I should conjure up the memory of my youthful days, and what a melancholy pleasure I should feel in dwelling on the recollection of my early friend! . . . I have some qualities that make me very miserable, some feelings that you can have no participation in--that few, very few, people in the world can at all understand. I don't pride myself on these peculiarities. I strive to conceal and suppress them as much as I can; but they burst out sometimes, and then those who see the explosion despise me, and I hate myself for days afterwards . . . I have just received your epistle and what accompanied it. I can't tell what should induce you and your sisters to waste your kindness on such a one as me. I'm obliged to them, and I hope you'll tell them so. I'm obliged to you also, more for your note than for your present. The first gave me pleasure, the last something like pain." * * * * * The nervous disturbance, which is stated to have troubled her while she was at Miss W---'s, seems to have begun to distress her about this time; at least, she herself speaks of her irritable condition, which was certainly only a temporary ailment. "You have been very kind to me of late, and have spared me all those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as if I had been touched with a hot iron; things that nobody else cares for, enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the deeper for concealment." Compare this state of mind with the gentle resignation with which she had submitted to be put aside as useless, or told of her ugliness by her school-fellows, only three years before. "My life since I saw you has passed as monotonously and unbroken as ever; nothing but teach, teach, teach, from morning till night. The greatest variety I ever have is afforded by a letter from you, or by meeting with a pleasant new book. The 'Life of Oberlin,' and 'Leigh Richmond's Domestic Portraiture,' are the last of this description. The latter work strongly attracted and strangely fascinated my attention. Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay; and read the 'Memoir of Wilberforce,'--that short record of a brief uneventful life; I shall never forget it; it is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young talented sincere Christian." * * * * * About this time Miss W--- removed her school from the fine, open, breezy situation of Roe Head, to Dewsbury Moor, only two or three miles distant. Her new residence was on a lower site, and the air was less exhilarating to one bred in the wild hill-village of Haworth. Emily had gone as teacher to a school at Halifax, where there were nearly forty pupils. "I have had one letter from her since her departure," writes Charlotte, on October 2nd, 1836: "it gives an appalling account of her duties; hard labour from six in the morning to eleven at night, with only one half- hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she can never stand it." * * * * * When the sisters met at home in the Christmas holidays, they talked over their lives, and the prospect which they afforded of employment and remuneration. They felt that it was a duty to relieve their father of the burden of their support, if not entirely, or that of all three, at least that of one or two; and, naturally, the lot devolved upon the elder ones to find some occupation which would enable them to do this. They knew that they were never likely to inherit much money. Mr. Bronte had but a small stipend, and was both charitable and liberal. Their aunt had an annuity of 50_l_., but it reverted to others at her death, and her nieces had no right, and were the last persons in the world to reckon upon her savings. What could they do? Charlotte and Emily were trying teaching, and, as it seemed, without much success. The former, it is true, had the happiness of having a friend for her employer, and of being surrounded by those who knew her and loved her; but her salary was too small for her to save out of it; and her education did not entitle her to a larger. The sedentary and monotonous nature of the life, too, was preying upon her health and spirits, although, with necessity "as her mistress," she might hardly like to acknowledge this even to herself. But Emily--that free, wild, untameable spirit, never happy nor well but on the sweeping moors that gathered round her home--that hater of strangers, doomed to live amongst them, and not merely to live but to slave in their service--what Charlotte could have borne patiently for herself, she could not bear for her sister. And yet what to do? She had once hoped that she herself might become an artist, and so earn her livelihood; but her eyes had failed her in the minute and useless labour which she had imposed upon herself with a view to this end. It was the household custom among these girls to sew till nine o'clock at night. At that hour, Miss Branwell generally went to bed, and her nieces' duties for the day were accounted done. They put away their work, and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down,--as often with the candles extinguished, for economy's sake, as not,--their figures glancing into the fire-light, and out into the shadow, perpetually. At this time, they talked over past cares and troubles; they planned for the future, and consulted each other as to their plans. In after years this was the time for discussing together the plots of their novels. And again, still later, this was the time for the last surviving sister to walk alone, from old accustomed habit, round and round the desolate room, thinking sadly upon the "days that were no more." But this Christmas of 1836 was not without its hopes and daring aspirations. They had tried their hands at story-writing, in their miniature magazine, long ago; they all of them "made out" perpetually. They had likewise attempted to write poetry; and had a modest confidence that they had achieved a tolerable success. But they knew that they might deceive themselves, and that sisters' judgments of each other's productions were likely to be too partial to be depended upon. So Charlotte, as the eldest, resolved to write to Southey. I believe (from an expression in a letter to be noticed hereafter), that she also consulted Coleridge; but I have not met with any part of that correspondence. On December 29th, her letter to Southey was despatched; and from an excitement not unnatural in a girl who has worked herself up to the pitch of writing to a Poet Laureate and asking his opinion of her poems, she used some high-flown expressions which, probably, gave him the idea that she was a romantic young lady, unacquainted with the realities of life. This, most likely, was the first of those adventurous letters that passed through the little post-office of Haworth. Morning after morning of the holidays slipped away, and there was no answer; the sisters had to leave home, and Emily to return to her distasteful duties, without knowing even whether Charlotte's letter had ever reached its destination. Not dispirited, however, by the delay, Branwell determined to try a similar venture, and addressed the following letter to Wordsworth. It was given by the poet to Mr. Quillinan in 1850, after the name of Bronte had become known and famous. I have no means of ascertaining what answer was returned by Mr. Wordsworth; but that he considered the letter remarkable may, I think, be inferred both from its preservation, and its recurrence to his memory when the real name of Currer Bell was made known to the public. "Haworth, near Bradford, "Yorkshire, January 19, 1837. "Sir,--I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you, because from the day of my birth to this the nineteenth year of my life, I have lived among secluded hills, where I could neither know what I was, or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke--out of the impulse and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it. For as to self-conceit, that could not receive food from flattery, since to this hour, not half a dozen people in the world know that I have ever penned a line. "But a change has taken place now, sir: and I am arrived at an age wherein I must do something for myself: the powers I possess must be exercised to a definite end, and as I don't know them myself I must ask of others what they are worth. Yet there is not one here to tell me; and still, if they are worthless, time will henceforth be too precious to be wasted on them. "Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose works I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my writings, and asking of him a judgment of its contents. I must come before some one from whose sentence there is no appeal; and such a one is he who has developed the theory of poetry as well as its practice, and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory of a thousand years to come. "My aim, sir, is to push out into the open world, and for this I trust not poetry alone--that might launch the vessel, but could not bear her on; sensible and scientific prose, bold and vigorous efforts in my walk in life, would give a farther title to the notice of the world; and then again poetry ought to brighten and crown that name with glory; but nothing of all this can be ever begun without means, and as I don't possess these, I must in every shape strive to gain them. Surely, in this day, when there is not a _writing_ poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward. "What I send you is the Prefatory Scene of a much longer subject, in which I have striven to develop strong passions and weak principles struggling with a high imagination and acute feelings, till, as youth hardens towards age, evil deeds and short enjoyments end in mental misery and bodily ruin. Now, to send you the whole of this would be a mock upon your patience; what you see, does not even pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and, as you would hold a light to one in utter darkness--as you value your own kindheartedness--_return_ me an _answer_, if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more. Forgive undue warmth, because my feelings in this matter cannot be cool; and believe me, sir, with deep respect, "Your really humble servant, "P. B. Bronte" The poetry enclosed seems to me by no means equal to parts of the letter; but, as every one likes to judge for himself, I copy the six opening stanzas--about a third of the whole, and certainly not the worst. So where he reigns in glory bright, Above those starry skies of night, Amid his Paradise of light Oh, why may I not be? Oft when awake on Christmas morn, In sleepless twilight laid forlorn, Strange thoughts have o'er my mind been borne, How he has died for me. And oft within my chamber lying, Have I awaked myself with crying From dreams, where I beheld Him dying Upon the accursed Tree. And often has my mother said, While on her lap I laid my head, She feared for time I was not made, But for Eternity. So "I can read my title clear, To mansions in the skies, And let me bid farewell to fear, And wipe my weeping eyes." I'll lay me down on this marble stone, And set the world aside, To see upon her ebon throne The Moon in glory ride. Soon after Charlotte returned to Dewsbury Moor, she was distressed by hearing that her friend "E." was likely to leave the neighbourhood for a considerable length of time. "Feb. 20th. "What shall I do without you? How long are we likely to be separated? Why are we to be denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality. I long to be with you, because it seems as if two or three days, or weeks, spent in your company would beyond measure strengthen me in the enjoyment of those feelings which I have so lately begun to cherish. You first pointed out to me that way in which I am so feebly endeavouring to travel, and now I cannot keep you by my side, I must proceed sorrowfully alone. Why are we to be divided? Surely, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the _creature_. At first, I could not say 'Thy will be done!' I felt rebellious, but I knew it was wrong to feel so. Being left a moment alone this morning, I prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to _every_ decree of God's will, though it should be dealt forth by a far severer hand than the present disappointment; since then I have felt calmer and humbler, and consequently happier. Last Sunday I took up my Bible in a gloomy state of mind: I began to read--a feeling stole over me such as I have not known for many long years--a sweet, placid sensation, like those, I remember, which used to visit me when I was a little child, and, on Sunday evenings in summer, stood by the open window reading the life of a certain French nobleman, who attained a purer and higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the early martyrs." "E.'s" residence was equally within a walk from Dewsbury Moor as it had been from Roe Head; and on Saturday afternoons both "Mary" and she used to call upon Charlotte, and often endeavoured to persuade her to return with them, and be the guest of one of them till Monday morning; but this was comparatively seldom. Mary says:--"She visited us twice or thrice when she was at Miss W---'s. We used to dispute about politics and religion. She, a Tory and clergyman's daughter, was always in a minority of one in our house of violent Dissent and Radicalism. She used to hear over again, delivered _with authority_, all the lectures I had been used to give her at school on despotic aristocracy, mercenary priesthood, &c. She had not energy to defend herself; sometimes she owned to a _little_ truth in it, but generally said nothing. Her feeble health gave her her yielding manner, for she could never oppose any one without gathering up all her strength for the struggle. Thus she would let me advise and patronise most imperiously, sometimes picking out any grain of sense there might be in what I said, but never allowing any one materially to interfere with her independence of thought and action. Though her silence sometimes left one under the impression that she agreed when she did not, she never gave a flattering opinion, and thus her words were golden, whether for praise or blame." "Mary's" father was a man of remarkable intelligence, but of strong, not to say violent prejudices, all running in favour of Republicanism and Dissent. No other county but Yorkshire could have produced such a man. His brother had been a _detenu_ in France, and had afterwards voluntarily taken up his residence there. Mr. T. himself had been much abroad, both on business and to see the great continental galleries of paintings. He spoke French perfectly, I have been told, when need was; but delighted usually in talking the broadest Yorkshire. He bought splendid engravings of the pictures which he particularly admired, and his house was full of works of art and of books; but he rather liked to present his rough side to any stranger or new-comer; he would speak his broadest, bring out his opinions on Church and State in their most startling forms, and, by and by, if he found his hearer could stand the shock, he would involuntarily show his warm kind heart, and his true taste, and real refinement. His family of four sons and two daughters were brought up on Republican principles; independence of thought and action was encouraged; no "shams" tolerated. They are scattered far and wide: Martha, the younger daughter, sleeps in the Protestant cemetery at Brussels; Mary is in New Zealand; Mr. T. is dead. And so life and death have dispersed the circle of "violent Radicals and Dissenters" into which, twenty years ago, the little, quiet, resolute clergyman's daughter was received, and by whom she was truly loved and honoured. January and February of 1837 had passed away, and still there was no reply from Southey. Probably she had lost expectation and almost hope when at length, in the beginning of March, she received the letter inserted in Mr. C. C. Southey's life of his Father, vol. iv. p. 327. After accounting for his delay in replying to hers by the fact of a long absence from home, during which his letters had accumulated, whence "it has lain unanswered till the last of a numerous file, not from disrespect or indifference to its contents, but because in truth it is not an easy task to answer it, nor a pleasant one to cast a damp over the high spirits and the generous desires of youth," he goes on to say: "What you are I can only infer from your letter, which appears to be written in sincerity, though I may suspect that you have used a fictitious signature. Be that as it may, the letter and the verses bear the same stamp, and I can well understand the state of mind they indicate. * * * * * "It is not my advice that you have asked as to the direction of your talents, but my opinion of them, and yet the opinion may be worth little, and the advice much. You evidently possess, and in no inconsiderable degree, what Wordsworth calls the 'faculty of verse.' I am not depreciating it when I say that in these times it is not rare. Many volumes of poems are now published every year without attracting public attention, any one of which if it had appeared half a century ago, would have obtained a high reputation for its author. Whoever, therefore, is ambitious of distinction in this way ought to be prepared for disappointment. "But it is not with a view to distinction that you should cultivate this talent, if you consult your own happiness. I, who have made literature my profession, and devoted my life to it, and have never for a moment repented of the deliberate choice, think myself, nevertheless, bound in duty to caution every young man who applies as an aspirant to me for encouragement and advice, against taking so perilous a course. You will say that a woman has no need of such a caution; there can be no peril in it for her. In a certain sense this is true; but there is a danger of which I would, with all kindness and all earnestness, warn you. The day dreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind; and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable, you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else. Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this life, and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will bring with them but too much. "But do not suppose that I disparage the gift which you possess; nor that I would discourage you from exercising it. I only exhort you so to think of it, and so to use it, as to render it conducive to your own permanent good. Write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity; the less you aim at that the more likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it. So written, it is wholesome both for the heart and soul; it may be made the surest means, next to religion, of soothing the mind and elevating it. You may embody in it your best thoughts and your wisest feelings, and in so doing discipline and strengthen them. "Farewell, madam. It is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself, that I write to you in this strain; but because I remember it. You will neither doubt my sincerity nor my good will; and however ill what has here been said may accord with your present views and temper, the longer you live the more reasonable it will appear to you. Though I may be but an ungracious adviser, you will allow me, therefore, to subscribe myself, with the best wishes for your happiness here and hereafter, your true friend, "ROBERT SOUTHEY." * * * * * I was with Miss Bronte when she received Mr. Cuthbert Southey's note, requesting her permission to insert the foregoing letter in his father's life. She said to me, "Mr. Southey's letter was kind and admirable; a little stringent, but it did me good." It is partly because I think it so admirable, and partly because it tends to bring out her character, as shown in the following reply, that I have taken the liberty of inserting the foregoing extracts from it. "Sir, March 16th. "I cannot rest till I have answered your letter, even though by addressing you a second time I should appear a little intrusive; but I must thank you for the kind and wise advice you have condescended to give me. I had not ventured to hope for such a reply; so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit. I must suppress what I feel, or you will think me foolishly enthusiastic. "At the first perusal of your letter, I felt only shame and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody; I felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion; but after I had thought a little and read it again and again, the prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit. You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties for the sake of imaginative pleasures; of writing for the love of fame; for the selfish excitement of emulation. You kindly allow me to write poetry for its own sake, provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do, in order to pursue that single, absorbing, exquisite gratification. I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote. My father is a clergyman of limited, though competent income, and I am the eldest of his children. He expended quite as much in my education as he could afford in justice to the rest. I thought it therefore my duty, when I left school, to become a governess. In that capacity I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment's time for one dream of the imagination. In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity, which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits. Following my father's advice--who from my childhood has counselled me, just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter--I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don't always succeed, for sometimes when I'm teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself; and my father's approbation amply rewarded me for the privation. Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print: if the wish should rise, I'll look at Southey's letter, and suppress it. It is honour enough for me that I have written to him, and received an answer. That letter is consecrated; no one shall ever see it, but papa and my brother and sisters. Again I thank you. This incident, I suppose, will be renewed no more; if I live to be an old woman, I shall remember it thirty years hence as a bright dream. The signature which you suspected of being fictitious is my real name. Again, therefore, I must sign myself, "C. Bronte. "P.S.--Pray, sir, excuse me for writing to you a second time; I could not help writing, partly to tell you how thankful I am for your kindness, and partly to let you know that your advice shall not be wasted; however sorrowfully and reluctantly it may be at first followed. "C. B." I cannot deny myself the gratification of inserting Southey's reply:-- "Keswick, March 22, 1837. "Dear Madam, "Your letter has given me great pleasure, and I should not forgive myself if I did not tell you so. You have received admonition as considerately and as kindly as it was given. Let me now request that, if you ever should come to these Lakes while I am living here, you will let me see you. You would then think of me afterwards with the more good-will, because you would perceive that there is neither severity nor moroseness in the state of mind to which years and observation have brought me. "It is, by God's mercy, in our power to attain a degree of self-government, which is essential to our own happiness, and contributes greatly to that of those around us. Take care of over- excitement, and endeavour to keep a quiet mind (even for your health it is the best advice that can be given you): your moral and spiritual improvement will then keep pace with the culture of your intellectual powers. "And now, madam, God bless you! "Farewell, and believe me to be your sincere friend, "ROBERT SOUTHEY. Of this second letter, also, she spoke, and told me that it contained an invitation for her to go and see the poet if ever she visited the Lakes. "But there was no money to spare," said she, "nor any prospect of my ever earning money enough to have the chance of so great a pleasure, so I gave up thinking of it." At the time we conversed together on the subject we were at the Lakes. But Southey was dead. This "stringent" letter made her put aside, for a time, all idea of literary enterprise. She bent her whole energy towards the fulfilment of the duties in hand; but her occupation was not sufficient food for her great forces of intellect, and they cried out perpetually, "Give, give," while the comparatively less breezy air of Dewsbury Moor told upon her health and spirits more and more. On August 27, 1837, she writes:-- "I am again at Dewsbury, engaged in the old business,--teach, teach, teach . . . _When will you come home_? Make haste! You have been at Bath long enough for all purposes; by this time you have acquired polish enough, I am sure; if the varnish is laid on much thicker, I am afraid the good wood underneath will be quite concealed, and your Yorkshire friends won't stand that. Come, come. I am getting really tired of your absence. Saturday after Saturday comes round, and I can have no hope of hearing your knock at the door, and then being told that 'Miss E. is come.' Oh, dear! in this monotonous life of mine, that was a pleasant event. I wish it would recur again; but it will take two or three interviews before the stiffness--the estrangement of this long separation--will wear away." About this time she forgot to return a work-bag she had borrowed, by a messenger, and in repairing her error she says:--"These aberrations of memory warn me pretty intelligibly that I am getting past my prime." AEtat 21! And the same tone of despondency runs through the following letter:-- "I wish exceedingly that I could come to you before Christmas, but it is impossible; another three weeks must elapse before I shall again have my comforter beside me, under the roof of my own dear quiet home. If I could always live with you, and daily read the Bible with you--if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught, from the same pure fountain of mercy--I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often plan the pleasant life which we might lead together, strengthening each other in that power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion, which the first saints of God often attained to. My eyes fill with tears when I contrast the bliss of such a state, brightened by hopes of the future, with the melancholy state I now live in, uncertain that I ever felt true contrition, wandering in thought and deed, longing for holiness, which I shall _never_, _never_ obtain, smitten at times to the heart with the conviction that ghastly Calvinistic doctrines are true--darkened, in short, by the very shadows of spiritual death. If Christian perfection be necessary to salvation, I shall never be saved; my heart is a very hotbed for sinful thoughts, and when I decide on an action I scarcely remember to look to my Redeemer for direction. I know not how to pray; I cannot bend my life to the grand end of doing good; I go on constantly seeking my own pleasure, pursuing the gratification of my own desires. I forget God, and will not God forget me? And, meantime, I know the greatness of Jehovah; I acknowledge the perfection of His word; I adore the purity of the Christian faith; my theory is right, my practice horribly wrong." The Christmas holidays came, and she and Anne returned to the parsonage, and to that happy home circle in which alone their natures expanded; amongst all other people they shrivelled up more or less. Indeed, there were only one or two strangers who could be admitted among the sisters without producing the same result. Emily and Anne were bound up in their lives and interests like twins. The former from reserve, the latter from timidity, avoided all friendships and intimacies beyond their family. Emily was impervious to influence; she never came in contact with public opinion, and her own decision of what was right and fitting was a law for her conduct and appearance, with which she allowed no one to interfere. Her love was poured out on Anne, as Charlotte's was on her. But the affection among all the three was stronger than either death or life. "E." was eagerly welcomed by Charlotte, freely admitted by Emily, and kindly received by Anne, whenever she could visit them; and this Christmas she had promised to do so, but her coming had to be delayed on account of a little domestic accident detailed in the following letter:-- "Dec. 29, 1837. "I am sure you will have thought me very remiss in not sending my promised letter long before now; but I have a sufficient and very melancholy excuse in an accident that befell our old faithful Tabby, a few days after my return home. She was gone out into the village on some errand, when, as she was descending the steep street, her foot slipped on the ice, and she fell; it was dark, and no one saw her mischance, till after a time her groans attracted the attention of a passer-by. She was lifted up and carried into the druggist's near; and, after the examination, it was discovered that she had completely shattered and dislocated one leg. Unfortunately, the fracture could not be set till six o'clock the next morning, as no surgeon was to be had before that time, and she now lies at our house in a very doubtful and dangerous state. Of course we are all exceedingly distressed at the circumstance, for she was like one of our own family. Since the event we have been almost without assistance--a person has dropped in now and then to do the drudgery, but we have as yet been able to procure no regular servant; and consequently, the whole work of the house, as well as the additional duty of nursing Tabby, falls on ourselves. Under these circumstances I dare not press your visit here, at least until she is pronounced out of danger; it would be too selfish of me. Aunt wished me to give you this information before, but papa and all the rest were anxious I should delay until we saw whether matters took a more settled aspect, and I myself kept putting it off from day to day, most bitterly reluctant to give up all the pleasure I had anticipated so long. However, remembering what you told me, namely, that you had commended the matter to a higher decision than ours, and that you were resolved to submit with resignation to that decision, whatever it might be, I hold it my duty to yield also, and to be silent; it may be all for the best. I fear, if you had been here during this severe weather, your visit would have been of no advantage to you, for the moors are blockaded with snow, and you would never have been able to get out. After this disappointment, I never dare reckon with certainty on the enjoyment of a pleasure again; it seems as if some fatality stood between you and me. I am not good enough for you, and you must be kept from the contamination of too intimate society. I would urge your visit yet--I would entreat and press it--but the thought comes across me, should Tabby die while you are in the house, I should never forgive myself. No! it must not be, and in a thousand ways the consciousness of that mortifies and disappoints me most keenly, and I am not the only one who is disappointed. All in the house were looking to your visit with eagerness. Papa says he highly approves of my friendship with you, and he wishes me to continue it through life." A good neighbour of the Brontes--a clever, intelligent Yorkshire woman, who keeps a druggist's shop in Haworth, and from her occupation, her experience, and excellent sense, holds the position of village doctress and nurse, and, as such, has been a friend, in many a time of trial, and sickness, and death, in the households round--told me a characteristic little incident connected with Tabby's fractured leg. Mr. Bronte is truly generous and regardful of all deserving claims. Tabby had lived with them for ten or twelve years, and was, as Charlotte expressed it, "one of the family." But on the other hand, she was past the age for any very active service, being nearer seventy than sixty at the time of the accident; she had a sister living in the village; and the savings she had accumulated, during many years' service, formed a competency for one in her rank of life. Or if, in this time of sickness, she fell short of any comforts which her state rendered necessary, the parsonage could supply them. So reasoned Miss Branwell, the prudent, not to say anxious aunt; looking to the limited contents of Mr. Bronte's purse, and the unprovided- for-future of her nieces; who were, moreover, losing the relaxation of the holidays, in close attendance upon Tabby. Miss Branwell urged her views upon Mr. Bronte as soon as the immediate danger to the old servant's life was over. He refused at first to listen to the careful advice; it was repugnant to his liberal nature. But Miss Branwell persevered; urged economical motives; pressed on his love for his daughters. He gave way. Tabby was to be removed to her sister's, and there nursed and cared for, Mr. Bronte coming in with his aid when her own resources fell short. This decision was communicated to the girls. There were symptoms of a quiet, but sturdy rebellion, that winter afternoon, in the small precincts of Haworth parsonage. They made one unanimous and stiff remonstrance. Tabby had tended them in their childhood; they, and none other, should tend her in her infirmity and age. At tea-time, they were sad and silent, and the meal went away untouched by any of the three. So it was at breakfast; they did not waste many words on the subject, but each word they did utter was weighty. They "struck" eating till the resolution was rescinded, and Tabby was allowed to remain a helpless invalid entirely dependent upon them. Herein was the strong feeling of Duty being paramount to pleasure, which lay at the foundation of Charlotte's character, made most apparent; for we have seen how she yearned for her friend's company; but it was to be obtained only by shrinking from what she esteemed right, and that she never did, whatever might be the sacrifice. She had another weight on her mind this Christmas. I have said that the air of Dewsbury Moor did not agree with her, though she herself was hardly aware how much her life there was affecting her health. But Anne had begun to suffer just before the holidays, and Charlotte watched over her younger sisters with the jealous vigilance of some wild creature, that changes her very nature if danger threatens her young. Anne had a slight cough, a pain at her side, a difficulty of breathing. Miss W--- considered it as little more than a common cold; but Charlotte felt every indication of incipient consumption as a stab at her heart, remembering Maria and Elizabeth, whose places once knew them, and should know them no more. Stung by anxiety for this little sister, she upbraided Miss W--- for her fancied indifference to Anne's state of health. Miss W--- felt these reproaches keenly, and wrote to Mr. Bronte about them. He immediately replied most kindly, expressing his fear that Charlotte's apprehensions and anxieties respecting her sister had led her to give utterance to over- excited expressions of alarm. Through Miss W---'s kind consideration, Anne was a year longer at school than her friends intended. At the close of the half-year Miss W--- sought for the opportunity of an explanation of each other's words, and the issue proved that "the falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love." And so ended the first, last, and only difference Charlotte ever had with good, kind Miss W ---. Still her heart had received a shock in the perception of Anne's delicacy; and all these holidays she watched over her with the longing, fond anxiety, which is so full of sudden pangs of fear. Emily had given up her situation in the Halifax school, at the expiration of six months of arduous trial, on account of her health, which could only be re-established by the bracing moorland air and free life of home. Tabby's illness had preyed on the family resources. I doubt whether Branwell was maintaining himself at this time. For some unexplained reason, he had given up the idea of becoming a student of painting at the Royal Academy, and his prospects in life were uncertain, and had yet to be settled. So Charlotte had quietly to take up her burden of teaching again, and return to her previous monotonous life. Brave heart, ready to die in harness! She went back to her work, and made no complaint, hoping to subdue the weakness that was gaining ground upon her. About this time, she would turn sick and trembling at any sudden noise, and could hardly repress her screams when startled. This showed a fearful degree of physical weakness in one who was generally so self-controlled; and the medical man, whom at length, through Miss W---'s entreaty, she was led to consult, insisted on her return to the parsonage. She had led too sedentary a life, he said; and the soft summer air, blowing round her home, the sweet company of those she loved, the release, the freedom of life in her own family, were needed, to save either reason or life. So, as One higher than she had over-ruled that for a time she might relax her strain, she returned to Haworth; and after a season of utter quiet, her father sought for her the enlivening society of her two friends, Mary and Martha T. At the conclusion of the following letter, written to the then absent E., there is, I think, as pretty a glimpse of a merry group of young people as need be; and like all descriptions of doing, as distinct from thinking or feeling, in letters, it saddens one in proportion to the vivacity of the picture of what was once, and is now utterly swept away. "Haworth, June 9, 1838. "I received your packet of despatches on Wednesday; it was brought me by Mary and Martha, who have been staying at Haworth for a few days; they leave us to-day. You will be surprised at the date of this letter. I ought to be at Dewsbury Moor, you know; but I stayed as long as I was able, and at length I neither could nor dared stay any longer. My health and spirits had utterly failed me, and the medical man whom I consulted enjoined me, as I valued my life, to go home. So home I went, and the change has at once roused and soothed me; and I am now, I trust, fairly in the way to be myself again. "A calm and even mind like yours cannot conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to you, when, after weeks of mental and bodily anguish not to be described, something like peace began to dawn again. Mary is far from well. She breathes short, has a pain in her chest, and frequent flushings of fever. I cannot tell you what agony these symptoms give me; they remind me too strongly of my two sisters, whom no power of medicine could save. Martha is now very well; she has kept in a continual flow of good humour during her stay here, and has consequently been very fascinating . . . " "They are making such a noise about me I cannot write any more. Mary is playing on the piano; Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run; and Branwell is standing before her, laughing at her vivacity." Charlotte grew much stronger in this quiet, happy period at home. She paid occasional visits to her two great friends, and they in return came to Haworth. At one of their houses, I suspect, she met with the person to whom the following letter refers--some one having a slight resemblance to the character of "St. John," in the last volume of "Jane Eyre," and, like him, in holy orders. "March 12, 1839. . . . "I had a kindly leaning towards him, because he is an amiable and well-disposed man. Yet I had not, and could not have, that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him; and if ever I marry, it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband. Ten to one I shall never have the chance again; but _n'importe_. Moreover, I was aware that he knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. Why! it would startle him to see me in my natural home character; he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed. I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband. I would laugh, and satirize, and say whatever came into my head first. And if he were a clever man, and loved me, the whole world, weighed in the balance against his smallest wish, should be light as air." So that--her first proposal of marriage--was quietly declined and put on one side. Matrimony did not enter into the scheme of her life, but good, sound, earnest labour did; the question, however, was as yet undecided in what direction she should employ her forces. She had been discouraged in literature; her eyes failed her in the minute kind of drawing which she practised when she wanted to express an idea; teaching seemed to her at this time, as it does to most women at all times, the only way of earning an independent livelihood. But neither she nor her sisters were naturally fond of children. The hieroglyphics of childhood were an unknown language to them, for they had never been much with those younger than themselves. I am inclined to think, too, that they had not the happy knack of imparting information, which seems to be a separate gift from the faculty of acquiring it; a kind of sympathetic tact, which instinctively perceives the difficulties that impede comprehension in a child's mind, and that yet are too vague and unformed for it, with its half-developed powers of expression, to explain by words. Consequently, teaching very young children was anything but a "delightful task" to the three Bronte sisters. With older girls, verging on womanhood, they might have done better, especially if these had any desire for improvement. But the education which the village clergyman's daughters had received, did not as yet qualify them to undertake the charge of advanced pupils. They knew but little French, and were not proficients in music; I doubt whether Charlotte could play at all. But they were all strong again, and, at any rate, Charlotte and Anne must put their shoulders to the wheel. One daughter was needed at home, to stay with Mr. Bronte and Miss Branwell; to be the young and active member in a household of four, whereof three--the father, the aunt, and faithful Tabby--were past middle age. And Emily, who suffered and drooped more than her sisters when away from Haworth, was the one appointed to remain. Anne was the first to meet with a situation. "April 15th, 1839. "I could not write to you in the week you requested, as about that time we were very busy in preparing for Anne's departure. Poor child! she left us last Monday; no one went with her; it was her own wish that she might be allowed to go alone, as she thought she could manage better and summon more courage if thrown entirely upon her own resources. We have had one letter from her since she went. She expresses herself very well satisfied, and says that Mrs. --- is extremely kind; the two eldest children alone are under her care, the rest are confined to the nursery, with which and its occupants she has nothing to do . . . I hope she'll do. You would be astonished what a sensible, clever letter she writes; it is only the talking part that I fear. But I do seriously apprehend that Mrs. --- will sometimes conclude that she has a natural impediment in her speech. For my own part, I am as yet 'wanting a situation,' like a housemaid out of place. By the way, I have lately discovered I have quite a talent for cleaning, sweeping up hearths, dusting rooms, making beds, &c.; so, if everything else fails, I can turn my hand to that, if anybody will give me good wages for little labour. I won't be a cook; I hate soothing. I won't be a nurserymaid, nor a lady's-maid, far less a lady's companion, or a mantua-maker, or a straw-bonnet maker, or a taker-in of plain work. I won't be anything but a housemaid . . . With regard to my visit to G., I have as yet received no invitation; but if I should be asked, though I should feel it a great act of self- denial to refuse, yet I have almost made up my mind to do so, though the society of the T.'s is one of the most rousing pleasures I have ever known. Good-bye, my darling E., &c. "P. S.--Strike out that word 'darling;' it is humbug. Where's the use of protestations? We've known each other, and liked each other, a good while; that's enough." Not many weeks after this was written, Charlotte also became engaged as a governess. I intend carefully to abstain from introducing the names of any living people, respecting whom I may have to tell unpleasant truths, or to quote severe remarks from Miss Bronte's letters; but it is necessary that the difficulties she had to encounter in her various phases of life, should be fairly and frankly made known, before the force "of what was resisted" can be at all understood. I was once speaking to her about "Agnes Grey"--the novel in which her sister Anne pretty literally describes her own experience as a governess--and alluding more particularly to the account of the stoning of the little nestlings in the presence of the parent birds. She said that none but those who had been in the position of a governess could ever realise the dark side of "respectable" human nature; under no great temptation to crime, but daily giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its conduct towards those dependent on it sometimes amounts to a tyranny of which one would rather be the victim than the inflicter. We can only trust in such cases that the employers err rather from a density of perception and an absence of sympathy, than from any natural cruelty of disposition. Among several things of the same kind, which I well remember, she told me what had once occurred to herself. She had been entrusted with the care of a little boy, three or four years old, during the absence of his parents on a day's excursion, and particularly enjoined to keep him out of the stable- yard. His elder brother, a lad of eight or nine, and not a pupil of Miss Bronte's, tempted the little fellow into the forbidden place. She followed, and tried to induce him to come away; but, instigated by his brother, he began throwing stones at her, and one of them hit her so severe a blow on the temple that the lads were alarmed into obedience. The next day, in full family conclave, the mother asked Miss Bronte what occasioned the mark on her forehead. She simply replied, "An accident, ma'am," and no further inquiry was made; but the children (both brothers and sisters) had been present, and honoured her for not "telling tales." From that time, she began to obtain influence over all, more or less, according to their different characters; and as she insensibly gained their affection, her own interest in them was increasing. But one day, at the children's dinner, the small truant of the stable-yard, in a little demonstrative gush, said, putting his hand in hers, "I love 'ou, Miss Bronte." Whereupon, the mother exclaimed, before all the children, "Love the _governess_, my dear!" "The family into which she first entered was, I believe, that of a wealthy Yorkshire manufacturer. The following extracts from her correspondence at this time will show how painfully the restraint of her new mode of life pressed upon her. The first is from a letter to Emily, beginning with one of the tender expressions in which, in spite of 'humbug,' she indulged herself. 'Mine dear love,' 'Mine-bonnie love,' are her terms of address to this beloved sister. "June 8th, 1839. "I have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. The country, the house and the grounds are, as I have said, divine; but, alack-a-day! there is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you--pleasant woods, white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky--and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them. The children are constantly with me. As for correcting them, I quickly found that was out of the question; they are to do as they like. A complaint to the mother only brings black looks on myself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children. I have tried that plan once, and succeeded so notably, I shall try no more. I said in my last letter that Mrs. --- did not know me. I now begin to find she does not intend to know me; that she cares nothing about me, except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be got out of me; and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needle-work; yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress. I do not think she likes me at all, because I can't help being shy in such an entirely novel scene, surrounded as I have hitherto been by strange and constantly changing faces . . . I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks' society; but I have had enough of it--it is dreary work to look on and listen. I see more clearly than I have ever done before, that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil . . . One of the pleasantest afternoons I have spent here--indeed, the only one at all pleasant--was when Mr. --- walked out with his children, and I had orders to follow a little behind. As he strolled on through his fields, with his magnificent Newfoundland dog at his side, he looked very like what a frank, wealthy, Conservative gentleman ought to be. He spoke freely and unaffectedly to the people he met, and, though he indulged his children and allowed them to tease himself far too much, he would not suffer them grossly to insult others." (WRITTEN IN PENCIL TO A FRIEND.) "July, 1839. "I cannot procure ink, without going into the drawing-room, where I do not wish to go . . . I should have written to you long since, and told you every detail of the utterly new scene into which I have lately been cast, had I not been daily expecting a letter from yourself, and wondering and lamenting that you did not write; for you will remember it was your turn. I must not bother you too much with my sorrows, of which, I fear, you have heard an exaggerated account. If you were near me, perhaps I might be tempted to tell you all, to grow egotistical, and pour out the long history of a private governess's trials and crosses in her first situation. As it is, I will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me, thrown at once into the midst of a large family, at a time when they were particularly gay--when the house was filled with company--all strangers--people whose faces I had never seen before. In this state I had charge given me of a set of pampered, spoilt, turbulent children, whom I was expected constantly to amuse, as well as to instruct. I soon found that the constant demand on my stock of animal spirits reduced them to the lowest state of exhaustion; at times I felt--and, I suppose, seemed--depressed. To my astonishment, I was taken to task on the subject by Mrs. --- with a sternness of manner and a harshness of language scarcely credible; like a fool, I cried most bitterly. I could not help it; my spirits quite failed me at first. I thought I had done my best--strained every nerve to please her; and to be treated in that way, merely because I was shy and sometimes melancholy, was too bad. At first I was for giving all up and going home. But, after a little reflection, I determined to summon what energy I had, and to weather the storm. I said to myself, 'I have never yet quitted a place without gaining a friend; adversity is a good school; the poor are born to labour, and the dependent to endure.' I resolved to be patient, to command my feelings, and to take what came; the ordeal, I reflected, would not last many weeks, and I trusted it would do me good. I recollected the fable of the willow and the oak; I bent quietly, and now, I trust, the storm is blowing over me. Mrs. --- is generally considered an agreeable woman; so she is, I doubt not, in general society. She behaves somewhat more civilly to me now than she did at first, and the children are a little more manageable; but she does not know my character, and she does not wish to know it. I have never had five minutes' conversation with her since I came, except while she was scolding me. I have no wish to be pitied, except by yourself; if I were talking to you I could tell you much more." (TO EMILY, ABOUT THIS TIME.) "Mine bonnie love, I was as glad of your letter as tongue can express: it is a real, genuine pleasure to hear from home; a thing to be saved till bedtime, when one has a moment's quiet and rest to enjoy it thoroughly. Write whenever you can. I could like to be at home. I could like to work in a mill. I could like to feel some mental liberty. I could like this weight of restraint to be taken off. But the holidays will come. Coraggio." Her temporary engagement in this uncongenial family ended in the July of this year; not before the constant strain upon her spirits and strength had again affected her health; but when this delicacy became apparent in palpitations and shortness of breathing, it was treated as affectation--as a phase of imaginary indisposition, which could be dissipated by a good scolding. She had been brought up rather in a school of Spartan endurance than in one of maudlin self-indulgence, and could bear many a pain and relinquish many a hope in silence. After she had been at home about a week, her friend proposed that she should accompany her in some little excursion, having pleasure alone for its object. She caught at the idea most eagerly at first; but her hope stood still, waned, and had almost disappeared before, after many delays, it was realised. In its fulfilment at last, it was a favourable specimen of many a similar air-bubble dancing before her eyes in her brief career, in which stern realities, rather than pleasures, formed the leading incidents. "July 26th, 1839. "Your proposal has almost driven me 'clean daft'--if you don't understand that ladylike expression, you must ask me what it means when I see you. The fact is, an excursion with you anywhere,--whether to Cleathorpe or Canada,--just by ourselves, would be to me most delightful. I should, indeed, like to go; but I can't get leave of absence for longer than a week, and I'm afraid that would not suit you--must I then give it up entirely? I feel as if I _could not_; I never had such a chance of enjoyment before; I do want to see you and talk to you, and be with you. When do you wish to go? Could I meet you at Leeds? To take a gig from Haworth to B., would be to me a very serious increase of expense, and I happen to be very low in cash. Oh! rich people seem to have many pleasures at their command which we are debarred from! However, no repining. "Say when you go, and I shall be able in my answer to say decidedly whether I can accompany you or not. I must--I will--I'm set upon it--I'll be obstinate and bear down all opposition. "P.S.--Since writing the above, I find that aunt and papa have determined to go to Liverpool for a fortnight, and take us all with them. It is stipulated, however, that I should give up the Cleathorpe scheme. I yield reluctantly." I fancy that, about this time, Mr. Bronte found it necessary, either from failing health or the increased populousness of the parish, to engage the assistance of a curate. At least, it is in a letter written this summer that I find mention of the first of a succession of curates, who henceforward revolved round Haworth Parsonage, and made an impression on the mind of one of its inmates which she has conveyed pretty distinctly to the world. The Haworth curate brought his clerical friends and neighbours about the place, and for a time the incursions of these, near the parsonage tea-time, formed occurrences by which the quietness of the life there was varied, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes disagreeably. The little adventure recorded at the end of the following letter is uncommon in the lot of most women, and is a testimony in this case to the unusual power of attraction--though so plain in feature--which Charlotte possessed, when she let herself go in the happiness and freedom of home. "August 4th, 1839. "The Liverpool journey is yet a matter of talk, a sort of castle in the air; but, between you and me, I fancy it is very doubtful whether it will ever assume a more solid shape. Aunt--like many other elderly people--likes to talk of such things; but when it comes to putting them into actual execution, she rather falls off. Such being the case, I think you and I had better adhere to our first plan of going somewhere together independently of other people. I have got leave to accompany you for a week--at the utmost a fortnight--but no more. Where do you wish to go? Burlington, I should think, from what M. says, would be as eligible a place as any. When do you set off? Arrange all these things according to your convenience; I shall start no objections. The idea of seeing the sea--of being near it--watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noon-day--in calm, perhaps in storm--fills and satisfies my mind. I shall be discontented at nothing. And then I am not to be with a set of people with whom I have nothing in common--who would be nuisances and bores: but with you, whom I like and know, and who knows me. "I have an odd circumstance to relate to you: prepare for a hearty laugh! The other day, Mr. ---, a vicar, came to spend the day with us, bringing with him his own curate. The latter gentleman, by name Mr. B., is a young Irish clergyman, fresh from Dublin University. It was the first time we had any of us seen him, but, however, after the manner of his countrymen, he soon made himself at home. His character quickly appeared in his conversation; witty, lively, ardent, clever too; but deficient in the dignity and discretion of an Englishman. At home, you know, I talk with ease, and am never shy--never weighed down and oppressed by that miserable _mauvaise honte_ which torments and constrains me elsewhere. So I conversed with this Irishman, and laughed at his jests; and, though I saw faults in his character, excused them because of the amusement his originality afforded. I cooled a little, indeed, and drew in towards the latter part of the evening, because he began to season his conversation with something of Hibernian flattery, which I did not quite relish. However, they went away, and no more was thought about them. A few days after, I got a letter, the direction of which puzzled me, it being in a hand I was not accustomed to see. Evidently, it was neither from you nor Mary, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! I hope you are laughing heartily. This is not like one of my adventures, is it? It more nearly resembles Martha's. I am certainly doomed to be an old maid. Never mind. I made up my mind to that fate ever since I was twelve years old. "Well! thought I, I have heard of love at first sight, but this beats all! I leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the injustice of guessing wrong." On the 14th of August she still writes from Haworth:-- "I have in vain packed my box, and prepared everything for our anticipated journey. It so happens that I can get no conveyance this week or the next. The only gig let out to hire in Haworth, is at Harrowgate, and likely to remain there, for aught I can hear. Papa decidedly objects to my going by the coach, and walking to B., though I am sure I could manage it. Aunt exclaims against the weather, and the roads, and the four winds of heaven, so I am in a fix, and, what is worse, so are you. On reading over, for the second or third time, your last letter (which, by the by, was written in such hieroglyphics that, at the first hasty perusal, I could hardly make out two consecutive words), I find you intimate that if I leave this journey till Thursday I shall be too late. I grieve that I should have so inconvenienced you; but I need not talk of either Friday or Saturday now, for I rather imagine there is small chance of my ever going at all. The elders of the house have never cordially acquiesced in the measure; and now that impediments seem to start up at every step, opposition grows more open. Papa, indeed, would willingly indulge me, but this very kindness of his makes me doubt whether I ought to draw upon it; so, though I could battle out aunt's discontent, I yield to papa's indulgence. He does not say so, but I know he would rather I stayed at home; and aunt meant well too, I dare say, but I am provoked that she reserved the expression of her decided disapproval till all was settled between you and myself. Reckon on me no more; leave me out in your calculations: perhaps I ought, in the beginning, to have had prudence sufficient to shut my eyes against such a prospect of pleasure, so as to deny myself the hope of it. Be as angry as you please with me for disappointing you. I did not intend it, and have only one thing more to say--if you do not go immediately to the sea, will you come to see us at Haworth? This invitation is not mine only, but papa's and aunt's." However, a little more patience, a little more delay, and she enjoyed the pleasure she had wished for so much. She and her friend went to Easton for a fortnight in the latter part of September. It was here she received her first impressions of the sea. "Oct. 24th. "Have you forgotten the sea by this time, E.? Is it grown dim in your mind? Or can you still see it, dark, blue, and green, and foam-white, and hear it roaring roughly when the wind is high, or rushing softly when it is calm? . . . I am as well as need be, and very fat. I think of Easton very often, and of worthy Mr. H., and his kind-hearted helpmate, and of our pleasant walks to H--- Wood, and to Boynton, our merry evenings, our romps with little Hancheon, &c., &c. If we both live, this period of our lives will long be a theme for pleasant recollection. Did you chance, in your letter to Mr. H., to mention my spectacles? I am sadly inconvenienced by the want of them. I can neither read, write, nor draw with comfort in their absence. I hope Madame won't refuse to give them up . . . Excuse the brevity of this letter, for I have been drawing all day, and my eyes are so tired it is quite a labour to write." But, as the vivid remembrance of this pleasure died away, an accident occurred to make the actual duties of life press somewhat heavily for a time. "December 21st, 1839 "We are at present, and have been during the last month, rather busy, as, for that space of time, we have been without a servant, except a little girl to run errands. Poor Tabby became so lame that she was at length obliged to leave us. She is residing with her sister, in a little house of her own, which she bought with her savings a year or two since. She is very comfortable, and wants nothing; as she is near, we see her very often. In the meantime, Emily and I are sufficiently busy, as you may suppose: I manage the ironing, and keep the rooms clean; Emily does the baking, and attends to the kitchen. We are such odd animals, that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new face amongst us. Besides, we do not despair of Tabby's return, and she shall not be supplanted by a stranger in her absence. I excited aunt's wrath very much by burning the clothes, the first time I attempted to iron; but I do better now. Human feelings are queer things; I am much happier black-leading the stoves, making the beds, and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else. I must indeed drop my subscription to the Jews, because I have no money to keep it up. I ought to have announced this intention to you before, but I quite forgot I was a subscriber. I intend to force myself to take another situation when I can get one, though I _hate_ and _abhor_ the very thoughts of governess-ship. But I must do it; and, therefore, I heartily wish I could hear of a family where they need such a commodity as a governess." CHAPTER IX The year 1840 found all the Brontes living at home, except Anne. As I have already intimated, for some reason with which I am unacquainted, the plan of sending Branwell to study at the Royal Academy had been relinquished; probably it was found, on inquiry, that the expenses of such a life, were greater than his father's slender finances could afford, even with the help which Charlotte's labours at Miss W---'s gave, by providing for Anne's board and education. I gather from what I have heard, that Branwell must have been severely disappointed when the plan fell through. His talents were certainly very brilliant, and of this he was fully conscious, and fervently desired, by their use, either in writing or drawing, to make himself a name. At the same time, he would probably have found his strong love of pleasure and irregular habits a great impediment in his path to fame; but these blemishes in his character were only additional reasons why he yearned after a London life, in which he imagined he could obtain every stimulant to his already vigorous intellect, while at the same time he would have a license of action to be found only in crowded cities. Thus his whole nature was attracted towards the metropolis; and many an hour must he have spent poring over the map of London, to judge from an anecdote which has been told me. Some traveller for a London house of business came to Haworth for a night; and according to the unfortunate habit of the place, the brilliant "Patrick" was sent for to the inn, to beguile the evening by his intellectual conversation and his flashes of wit. They began to talk of London; of the habits and ways of life there; of the places of amusement; and Branwell informed the Londoner of one or two short cuts from point to point, up narrow lanes or back streets; and it was only towards the end of the evening that the traveller discovered, from his companion's voluntary confession, that he had never set foot in London at all. At this time the young man seemed to have his fate in his own hands. He was full of noble impulses, as well as of extraordinary gifts; not accustomed to resist temptation, it is true, from any higher motive than strong family affection, but showing so much power of attachment to all about him that they took pleasure in believing that, after a time, he would "right himself," and that they should have pride and delight in the use he would then make of his splendid talents. His aunt especially made him her great favourite. There are always peculiar trials in the life of an only boy in a family of girls. He is expected to act a part in life; to _do_, while they are only to _be_; and the necessity of their giving way to him in some things, is too often exaggerated into their giving way to him in all, and thus rendering him utterly selfish. In the family about whom I am writing, while the rest were almost ascetic in their habits, Branwell was allowed to grow up self-indulgent; but, in early youth, his power of attracting and attaching people was so great, that few came in contact with him who were not so much dazzled by him as to be desirous of gratifying whatever wishes he expressed. Of course, he was careful enough not to reveal anything before his father and sisters of the pleasures he indulged in; but his tone of thought and conversation became gradually coarser, and, for a time, his sisters tried to persuade themselves that such coarseness was a part of manliness, and to blind themselves by love to the fact that Branwell was worse than other young men. At present, though he had, they were aware, fallen into some errors, the exact nature of which they avoided knowing, still he was their hope and their darling; their pride, who should some time bring great glory to the name of Bronte. He and his sister Charlotte were both slight and small of stature, while the other two were of taller and larger make. I have seen Branwell's profile; it is what would be generally esteemed very handsome; the forehead is massive, the eye well set, and the expression of it fine and intellectual; the nose too is good; but there are coarse lines about the mouth, and the lips, though of handsome shape, are loose and thick, indicating self-indulgence, while the slightly retreating chin conveys an idea of weakness of will. His hair and complexion were sandy. He had enough of Irish blood in him to make his manners frank and genial, with a kind of natural gallantry about them. In a fragment of one of his manuscripts which I have read, there is a justness and felicity of expression which is very striking. It is the beginning of a tale, and the actors in it are drawn with much of the grace of characteristic portrait-painting, in perfectly pure and simple language which distinguishes so many of Addison's papers in the "Spectator." The fragment is too short to afford the means of judging whether he had much dramatic talent, as the persons of the story are not thrown into conversation. But altogether the elegance and composure of style are such as one would not have expected from this vehement and ill-fated young man. He had a stronger desire for literary fame burning in his heart, than even that which occasionally flashed up in his sisters'. He tried various outlets for his talents. He wrote and sent poems to Wordsworth and Coleridge, who both expressed kind and laudatory opinions, and he frequently contributed verses to the _Leeds Mercury_. In 1840, he was living at home, employing himself in occasional composition of various kinds, and waiting till some occupation, for which he might be fitted without any expensive course of preliminary training, should turn up; waiting, not impatiently; for he saw society of one kind (probably what he called "life") at the Black Bull; and at home he was as yet the cherished favourite. Miss Branwell was unaware of the fermentation of unoccupied talent going on around her. She was not her nieces' confidante--perhaps no one so much older could have been; but their father, from whom they derived not a little of their adventurous spirit, was silently cognisant of much of which she took no note. Next to her nephew, the docile, pensive Anne was her favourite. Of her she had taken charge from her infancy; she was always patient and tractable, and would submit quietly to occasional oppression, even when she felt it keenly. Not so her two elder sisters; they made their opinions known, when roused by any injustice. At such times, Emily would express herself as strongly as Charlotte, although perhaps less frequently. But, in general, notwithstanding that Miss Branwell might be occasionally unreasonable, she and her nieces went on smoothly enough; and though they might now and then be annoyed by petty tyranny, she still inspired them with sincere respect, and not a little affection. They were, moreover, grateful to her for many habits she had enforced upon them, and which in time had become second nature: order, method, neatness in everything; a perfect knowledge of all kinds of household work; an exact punctuality, and obedience to the laws of time and place, of which no one but themselves, I have heard Charlotte say, could tell the value in after-life; with their impulsive natures, it was positive repose to have learnt implicit obedience to external laws. People in Haworth have assured me that, according to the hour of day--nay, the very minute--could they have told what the inhabitants of the parsonage were about. At certain times the girls would be sewing in their aunt's bedroom--the chamber which, in former days, before they had outstripped her in their learning, had served them as a schoolroom; at certain (early) hours they had their meals; from six to eight, Miss Branwell read aloud to Mr. Bronte; at punctual eight, the household assembled to evening prayers in his study; and by nine he, the aunt, and Tabby, were all in bed,--the girls free to pace up and down (like restless wild animals) in the parlour, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be their future life. At the time of which I write, the favourite idea was that of keeping a school. They thought that, by a little contrivance, and a very little additional building, a small number of pupils, four or six, might be accommodated in the parsonage. As teaching seemed the only profession open to them, and as it appeared that Emily at least could not live away from home, while the others also suffered much from the same cause, this plan of school-keeping presented itself as most desirable. But it involved some outlay; and to this their aunt was averse. Yet there was no one to whom they could apply for a loan of the requisite means, except Miss Branwell, who had made a small store out of her savings, which she intended for her nephew and nieces eventually, but which she did not like to risk. Still, this plan of school-keeping remained uppermost; and in the evenings of this winter of 1839-40, the alterations that would be necessary in the house, and the best way of convincing their aunt of the wisdom of their project, formed the principal subject of their conversation. This anxiety weighed upon their minds rather heavily, during the months of dark and dreary weather. Nor were external events, among the circle of their friends, of a cheerful character. In January, 1840, Charlotte heard of the death of a young girl who had been a pupil of hers, and a schoolfellow of Anne's, at the time when the sisters were together at Roe Head; and had attached herself very strongly to the latter, who, in return, bestowed upon her much quiet affection. It was a sad day when the intelligence of this young creature's death arrived. Charlotte wrote thus on January 12th, 1840:-- "Your letter, which I received this morning, was one of painful interest. Anne C., it seems, is _dead_; when I saw her last, she was a young, beautiful, and happy girl; and now 'life's fitful fever' is over with her, and she 'sleeps well.' I shall never see her again. It is a sorrowful thought; for she was a warm-hearted, affectionate being, and I cared for her. Wherever I seek for her now in this world, she cannot be found, no more than a flower or a leaf which withered twenty years ago. A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have who have seen all drop round them, friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone. But tears are fruitless, and I try not to repine." During this winter, Charlotte employed her leisure hours in writing a story. Some fragments of the manuscript yet remain, but it is in too small a hand to be read without great fatigue to the eyes; and one cares the less to read it, as she herself condemned it, in the preface to the "Professor," by saying that in this story she had got over such taste as she might once have had for the "ornamental and redundant in composition." The beginning, too, as she acknowledges, was on a scale commensurate with one of Richardson's novels, of seven or eight volumes. I gather some of these particulars from a copy of a letter, apparently in reply to one from Wordsworth, to whom she had sent the commencement of the story, sometime in the summer of 1840. "Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am not so much attached to this but that I can give it up without much distress. No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a Richardsonian concern of it . . . I had materials in my head for half- a-dozen volumes . . . Of course, it is with considerable regret I relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched. It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains, and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have no father nor mother but your own imagination . . . I am sorry I did not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the 'Ladies' Magazine' was flourishing like a green bay-tree. In that case, I make no doubt, my aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned close-printed pages . . . I recollect, when I was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, and reading them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure. You give a correct description of the patient Grisels of those days. My aunt was one of them; and to this day she thinks the tales of the 'Ladies' Magazine' infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature. So do I; for I read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration, but a very weak one of criticism . . . I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney's clerk or a novel- reading dress-maker. I will not help you at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusion from that--I may employ an amanuensis. Seriously, sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter. I almost wonder you took the trouble to read and notice the novelette of an anonymous scribe, who had not even the manners to tell you whether he was a man or a woman, or whether his 'C. T.' meant Charles Timms or Charlotte Tomkins." There are two or three things noticeable in the letter from which these extracts are taken. The first is the initials with which she had evidently signed the former one to which she alludes. About this time, to her more familiar correspondents, she occasionally calls herself "Charles Thunder," making a kind of pseudonym for herself out of her Christian name, and the meaning of her Greek surname. In the next place, there is a touch of assumed smartness, very different from the simple, womanly, dignified letter which she had written to Southey, under nearly similar circumstances, three years before. I imagine the cause of this difference to be twofold. Southey, in his reply to her first letter, had appealed to the higher parts of her nature, in calling her to consider whether literature was, or was not, the best course for a woman to pursue. But the person to whom she addressed this one had evidently confined himself to purely literary criticisms, besides which, her sense of humour was tickled by the perplexity which her correspondent felt as to whether he was addressing a man or a woman. She rather wished to encourage the former idea; and, in consequence, possibly, assumed something of the flippancy which very probably existed in her brother's style of conversation, from whom she would derive her notions of young manhood, not likely, as far as refinement was concerned, to be improved by the other specimens she had seen, such as the curates whom she afterwards represented in "Shirley." These curates were full of strong, High-Church feeling. Belligerent by nature, it was well for their professional character that they had, as clergymen, sufficient scope for the exercise of their warlike propensities. Mr. Bronte, with all his warm regard for Church and State, had a great respect for mental freedom; and, though he was the last man in the world to conceal his opinions, he lived in perfect amity with all the respectable part of those who differed from him. Not so the curates. Dissent was schism, and schism was condemned in the Bible. In default of turbaned Saracens, they entered on a crusade against Methodists in broadcloth; and the consequence was that the Methodists and Baptists refused to pay the church-rates. Miss Bronte thus describes the state of things at this time:-- "Little Haworth has been all in a bustle about church-rates, since you were here. We had a stirring meeting in the schoolroom. Papa took the chair, and Mr. C. and Mr. W. acted as his supporters, one on each side. There was violent opposition, which set Mr. C.'s Irish blood in a ferment, and if papa had not kept him quiet, partly by persuasion and partly by compulsion, he would have given the Dissenters their kale through the reek--a Scotch proverb, which I will explain to you another time. He and Mr. W. both bottled up their wrath for that time, but it was only to explode with redoubled force at a future period. We had two sermons on dissent, and its consequences, preached last Sunday--one in the afternoon by Mr. W., and one in the evening by Mr. C. All the Dissenters were invited to come and hear, and they actually shut up their chapels, and came in a body; of course the church was crowded. Mr. W. delivered a noble, eloquent, High-Church, Apostolical-Succession discourse, in which he banged the Dissenters most fearlessly and unflinchingly. I thought they had got enough for one while, but it was nothing to the dose that was thrust down their throats in the evening. A keener, cleverer, bolder, and more heart- stirring harangue than that which Mr. C. delivered from Haworth pulpit, last Sunday evening, I never heard. He did not rant; he did not cant; he did not whine; he did not sniggle; he just got up and spoke with the boldness of a man who was impressed with the truth of what he was saying, who has no fear of his enemies, and no dread of consequences. His sermon lasted an hour, yet I was sorry when it was done. I do not say that I agree either with him, or with Mr. W., either in all or in half their opinions. I consider them bigoted, intolerant, and wholly unjustifiable on the ground of common sense. My conscience will not let me be either a Puseyite or a Hookist; _mais_, if I were a Dissenter, I would have taken the first opportunity of kicking, or of horse-whipping both the gentlemen for their stern, bitter attack on my religion and its teachers. But in spite of all this, I admired the noble integrity which could dictate so fearless an opposition against so strong an antagonist. "P.S.--Mr. W. has given another lecture at the Keighley Mechanics' Institution, and papa has also given a lecture; both are spoken of very highly in the newspapers, and it is mentioned as a matter of wonder that such displays of intellect should emanate from the village of Haworth, 'situated among the bogs and mountains, and, until very lately, supposed to be in a state of semi-barbarism.' Such are the words of the newspaper." To fill up the account of this outwardly eventless year, I may add a few more extracts from the letters entrusted to me. "May 15th, 1840. "Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect--I do not say _love_; because, I think, if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense _passion_, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and, in the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only temporary: it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse, perhaps, than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man's part; and on the woman's--God help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone. "I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all. Reason tells me so, and I am not so utterly the slave of feeling but that I can _occasionally hear_ her voice." "June 2nd, 1840. "M. is not yet come to Haworth; but she is to come on the condition that I first go and stay a few days there. If all be well, I shall go next Wednesday. I may stay at G--- until Friday or Saturday, and the early part of the following week I shall pass with you, if you will have me--which last sentence indeed is nonsense, for as I shall be glad to see you, so I know you will be glad to see me. This arrangement will not allow much time, but it is the only practicable one which, considering all the circumstances, I can effect. Do not urge me to stay more than two or three days, because I shall be obliged to refuse you. I intend to walk to Keighley, there to take the coach as far as B---, then to get some one to carry my box, and to walk the rest of the way to G-. If I manage this, I think I shall contrive very well. I shall reach B. by about five o'clock, and then I shall have the cool of the evening for the walk. I have communicated the whole arrangement to M. I desire exceedingly to see both her and you. Good-bye. C. B. C. B. C. B. C. B. "If you have any better plan to suggest I am open to conviction, provided your plan is practicable." "August 20th, 1840. "Have you seen anything of Miss H. lately? I wish they, or somebody else, would get me a situation. I have answered advertisements without number, but my applications have met with no success. "I have got another bale of French books from G. containing upwards of forty volumes. I have read about half. They are like the rest, clever, wicked, sophistical, and immoral. The best of it is, they give one a thorough idea of France and Paris, and are the best substitute for French conversation that I have met with. "I positively have nothing more to say to you, for I am in a stupid humour. You must excuse this letter not being quite as long as your own. I have written to you soon, that you might not look after the postman in vain. Preserve this writing as a curiosity in caligraphy--I think it is exquisite--all brilliant black blots, and utterly illegible letters. 'CALIBAN.' "'The wind bloweth where it listeth. Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.' That, I believe, is Scripture, though in what chapter or book, or whether it be correctly quoted, I can't possibly say. However, it behoves me to write a letter to a young woman of the name of E., with whom I was once acquainted, 'in life's morning march, when my spirit was young.' This young woman wished me to write to her some time since, though I have nothing to say--I e'en put it off, day by day, till at last, fearing that she will 'curse me by her gods,' I feel constrained to sit down and tack a few lines together, which she may call a letter or not as she pleases. Now if the young woman expects sense in this production, she will find herself miserably disappointed. I shall dress her a dish of salmagundi--I shall cook a hash--compound a stew--toss up an _omelette soufflee a la Francaise_, and send it her with my respects. The wind, which is very high up in our hills of Judea, though, I suppose, down in the Philistine flats of B. parish it is nothing to speak of, has produced the same effects on the contents of my knowledge-box that a quaigh of usquebaugh does upon those of most other bipeds. I see everything _couleur de rose_, and am strongly inclined to dance a jig, if I knew how. I think I must partake of the nature of a pig or an ass--both which animals are strongly affected by a high wind. From what quarter the wind blows I cannot tell, for I never could in my life; but I should very much like to know how the great brewing-tub of Bridlington Bay works, and what sort of yeasty froth rises just now on the waves. "A woman of the name of Mrs. B., it seems, wants a teacher. I wish she would have me; and I have written to Miss W. to tell her so. Verily, it is a delightful thing to live here at home, at full liberty to do just what one pleases. But I recollect some scrubby old fable about grasshoppers and ants, by a scrubby old knave yclept AEsop; the grasshoppers sang all the summer, and starved all the winter. "A distant relation of mine, one Patrick Branwell, has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad. Leeds and Manchester--where are they? Cities in the wilderness, like Tadmor, alias Palmyra--are they not? "There is one little trait respecting Mr. W. which lately came to my knowledge, which gives a glimpse of the better side of his character. Last Saturday night he had been sitting an hour in the parlour with Papa; and, as he went away, I heard Papa say to him 'What is the matter with you? You seem in very low spirits to-night.' 'Oh, I don't know. I've been to see a poor young girl, who, I'm afraid, is dying.' 'Indeed; what is her name?' 'Susan Bland, the daughter of John Bland, the superintendent.' Now Susan Bland is my oldest and best scholar in the Sunday-school; and, when I heard that, I thought I would go as soon as I could to see her. I did go on Monday afternoon, and found her on her way to that 'bourn whence no traveller returns.' After sitting with her some time, I happened to ask her mother, if she thought a little port wine would do her good. She replied that the doctor had recommended it, and that when Mr. W. was last there, he had brought them a bottle of wine and jar of preserves. She added, that he was always good-natured to poor folks, and seemed to have a deal of feeling and kindheartedness about him. No doubt, there are defects in his character, but there are also good qualities . . . God bless him! I wonder who, with his advantages, would be without his faults. I know many of his faulty actions, many of his weak points; yet, where I am, he shall always find rather a defender than an accuser. To be sure, my opinion will go but a very little way to decide his character; what of that? People should do right as far as their ability extends. You are not to suppose, from all this, that Mr. W. and I are on very amiable terms; we are not at all. We are distant, cold, and reserved. We seldom speak; and when we do, it is only to exchange the most trivial and common-place remarks." The Mrs. B. alluded to in this letter, as in want of a governess, entered into a correspondence with Miss Bronte, and expressed herself much pleased with the letters she received from her, with the "style and candour of the application," in which Charlotte had taken care to tell her, that if she wanted a showy, elegant, or fashionable person, her correspondent was not fitted for such a situation. But Mrs. B. required her governess to give instructions in music and singing, for which Charlotte was not qualified: and, accordingly, the negotiation fell through. But Miss Bronte was not one to sit down in despair after disappointment. Much as she disliked the life of a private governess, it was her duty to relieve her father of the burden of her support, and this was the only way open to her. So she set to advertising and inquiring with fresh vigour. In the meantime, a little occurrence took place, described in one of her letters, which I shall give, as it shows her instinctive aversion to a particular class of men, whose vices some have supposed she looked upon with indulgence. The extract tells all that need be known, for the purpose I have in view, of the miserable pair to whom it relates. "You remember Mr. and Mrs. ---? Mrs. --- came here the other day, with a most melancholy tale of her wretched husband's drunken, extravagant, profligate habits. She asked Papa's advice; there was nothing she said but ruin before them. They owed debts which they could never pay. She expected Mr. ---'s instant dismissal from his curacy; she knew, from bitter experience, that his vices were utterly hopeless. He treated her and her child savagely; with much more to the same effect. Papa advised her to leave him for ever, and go home, if she had a home to go to. She said, this was what she had long resolved to do; and she would leave him directly, as soon as Mr. B. dismissed him. She expressed great disgust and contempt towards him, and did not affect to have the shadow of regard in any way. I do not wonder at this, but I do wonder she should ever marry a man towards whom her feelings must always have been pretty much the same as they are now. I am morally certain no decent woman could experience anything but aversion towards such a man as Mr. ---. Before I knew, or suspected his character, and when I rather wondered at his versatile talents, I felt it in an uncontrollable degree. I hated to talk with him--hated to look at him; though as I was not certain that there was substantial reason for such a dislike, and thought it absurd to trust to mere instinct, I both concealed and repressed the feeling as much as I could; and, on all occasions, treated him with as much civility as I was mistress of. I was struck with Mary's expression of a similar feeling at first sight; she said, when we left him, 'That is a hideous man, Charlotte!' I thought 'He is indeed.'" CHAPTER X Early in March, 1841, Miss Bronte obtained her second and last situation as a governess. This time she esteemed herself fortunate in becoming a member of a kind-hearted and friendly household. The master of it, she especially regarded as a valuable friend, whose advice helped to guide her in one very important step of her life. But as her definite acquirements were few, she had to eke them out by employing her leisure time in needlework; and altogether her position was that of "bonne" or nursery governess, liable to repeated and never-ending calls upon her time. This description of uncertain, yet perpetual employment, subject to the exercise of another person's will at all hours of the day, was peculiarly trying to one whose life at home had been full of abundant leisure. _Idle_ she never was in any place, but of the multitude of small talks, plans, duties, pleasures, &c., that make up most people's days, her home life was nearly destitute. This made it possible for her to go through long and deep histories of feeling and imagination, for which others, odd as it sounds, have rarely time. This made it inevitable that--later on, in her too short career--the intensity of her feeling should wear out her physical health. The habit of "making out," which had grown with her growth, and strengthened with her strength, had become a part of her nature. Yet all exercise of her strongest and most characteristic faculties was now out of the question. She could not (as while she was at Miss W---'s) feel, amidst the occupations of the day, that when evening came, she might employ herself in more congenial ways. No doubt, all who enter upon the career of a governess have to relinquish much; no doubt, it must ever be a life of sacrifice; but to Charlotte Bronte it was a perpetual attempt to force all her faculties into a direction for which the whole of her previous life had unfitted them. Moreover, the little Brontes had been brought up motherless; and from knowing nothing of the gaiety and the sportiveness of childhood--from never having experienced caresses or fond attentions themselves--they were ignorant of the very nature of infancy, or how to call out its engaging qualities. Children were to them the troublesome necessities of humanity; they had never been drawn into contact with them in any other way. Years afterwards, when Miss Bronte came to stay with us, she watched our little girls perpetually; and I could not persuade her that they were only average specimens of well brought up children. She was surprised and touched by any sign of thoughtfulness for others, of kindness to animals, or of unselfishness on their part: and constantly maintained that she was in the right, and I in the wrong, when we differed on the point of their unusual excellence. All this must be borne in mind while reading the following letters. And it must likewise be borne in mind--by those who, surviving her, look back upon her life from their mount of observation--how no distaste, no suffering ever made her shrink from any course which she believed it to be her duty to engage in. "March 3rd, 1841. "I told some time since, that I meant to get a situation, and when I said so my resolution was quite fixed. I felt that however often I was disappointed, I had no intention of relinquishing my efforts. After being severely baffled two or three times,--after a world of trouble, in the way of correspondence and interviews,--I have at length succeeded, and am fairly established in my new place. * * * * * "The house is not very large, but exceedingly comfortable and well regulated; the grounds are fine and extensive. In taking the place, I have made a large sacrifice in the way of salary, in the hope of securing comfort,--by which word I do not mean to express good eating and drinking, or warm fire, or a soft bed, but the society of cheerful faces, and minds and hearts not dug out of a lead-mine, or cut from a marble quarry. My salary is not really more than 16_l_. per annum, though it is nominally 20_l_., but the expense of washing will be deducted therefrom. My pupils are two in number, a girl of eight, and a boy of six. As to my employers, you will not expect me to say much about their characters when I tell you that I only arrived here yesterday. I have not the faculty of telling an individual's disposition at first sight. Before I can venture to pronounce on a character, I must see it first under various lights and from various points of view. All I can say therefore is, both Mr. and Mrs. --- seem to me good sort of people. I have as yet had no cause to complain of want of considerateness or civility. My pupils are wild and unbroken, but apparently well-disposed. I wish I may be able to say as much next time I write to you. My earnest wish and endeavour will be to please them. If I can but feel that I am giving satisfaction, and if at the same time I can keep my health, I shall, I hope, be moderately happy. But no one but myself can tell how hard a governess's work is to me--for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are for the employment. Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this, or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of children. I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain for me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to go into the kitchen to request its removal. I am a fool. Heaven knows I cannot help it! "Now can you tell me whether it is considered improper for governesses to ask their friends to come and see them. I do not mean, of course, to stay, but just for a call of an hour or two? If it is not absolute treason, I do fervently request that you will contrive, in some way or other, to let me have a sight of your face. Yet I feel, at the same time, that I am making a very foolish and almost impracticable demand; yet this is only four miles from B---!" * * * * * "March 21st. "You must excuse a very short answer to your most welcome letter; for my time is entirely occupied. Mrs. --- expected a good deal of sewing from me. I cannot sew much during the day, on account of the children, who require the utmost attention. I am obliged, therefore, to devote the evenings to this business. Write to me often; very long letters. It will do both of us good. This place is far better than ---, but God knows, I have enough to do to keep a good heart in the matter. What you said has cheered me a little. I wish I could always act according to your advice. Home-sickness affects me sorely. I like Mr. --- extremely. The children are over-indulged, and consequently hard at times to manage. _Do, do_, do come and see me; if it be a breach of etiquette, never mind. If you can only stop an hour, come. Talk no more about my forsaking you; my darling, I could not afford to do it. I find it is not in my nature to get on in this weary world without sympathy and attachment in some quarter; and seldom indeed do we find it. It is too great a treasure to be ever wantonly thrown away when once secured." Miss Bronte had not been many weeks in her new situation before she had a proof of the kind-hearted hospitality of her employers. Mr. --- wrote to her father, and urgently invited him to come and make acquaintance with his daughter's new home, by spending a week with her in it; and Mrs. --- expressed great regret when one of Miss Bronte's friends drove up to the house to leave a letter or parcel, without entering. So she found that all her friends might freely visit her, and that her father would be received with especial gladness. She thankfully acknowledged this kindness in writing to urge her friend afresh to come and see her; which she accordingly did. "June, 1841. "You can hardly fancy it possible, I dare say, that I cannot find a quarter of an hour to scribble a note in; but so it is; and when a note is written, it has to be carried a mile to the post, and that consumes nearly an hour, which is a large portion of the day. Mr. and Mrs. --- have been gone a week. I heard from them this morning. No time is fixed for their return, but I hope it will not be delayed long, or I shall miss the chance of seeing Anne this vacation. She came home, I understand, last Wednesday, and is only to be allowed three weeks' vacation, because the family she is with are going to Scarborough. _I should like to see her_, to judge for myself of the state of her health. I dare not trust any other person's report, no one seems minute enough in their observations. I should very much have liked you to have seen her. I have got on very well with the servants and children so far; yet it is dreary, solitary work. You can tell as well as me the lonely feeling of being without a companion." Soon after this was written, Mr. and Mrs. --- returned, in time to allow Charlotte to go and look after Anne's health, which, as she found to her intense anxiety, was far from strong. What could she do to nurse and cherish up this little sister, the youngest of them all? Apprehension about her brought up once more the idea of keeping a school. If, by this means, they three could live together, and maintain themselves, all might go well. They would have some time of their own, in which to try again and yet again at that literary career, which, in spite of all baffling difficulties, was never quite set aside as an ultimate object; but far the strongest motive with Charlotte was the conviction that Anne's health was so delicate that it required a degree of tending which none but her sister could give. Thus she wrote during those midsummer holidays. "Haworth, July 18th, 1841. "We waited long and anxiously for you, on the Thursday that you promised to come. I quite wearied my eyes with watching from the window, eye-glass in hand, and sometimes spectacles on nose. However, you are not to blame . . . and as to disappointment, why, all must suffer disappointment at some period or other of their lives. But a hundred things I had to say to you will now be forgotten, and never said. There is a project hatching in this house, which both Emily and I anxiously wished to discuss with you. The project is yet in its infancy, hardly peeping from its shell; and whether it will ever come out a fine full-fledged chicken, or will turn addle and die before it cheeps, is one of those considerations that are but dimly revealed by the oracles of futurity. Now, don't be nonplussed by all this metaphorical mystery. I talk of a plain and everyday occurrence, though, in Delphic style, I wrap up the information in figures of speech concerning eggs, chickens etceatera, etcaeterorum. To come to the point: Papa and aunt talk, by fits and starts, of our--id est, Emily, Anne, and myself--commencing a school! I have often, you know, said how much I wished such a thing; but I never could conceive where the capital was to come from for making such a speculation. I was well aware, indeed, that aunt had money, but I always considered that she was the last person who would offer a loan for the purpose in question. A loan, however, she _has_ offered, or rather intimates that she perhaps _will_ offer in case pupils can be secured, an eligible situation obtained, &c. This sounds very fair, but still there are matters to be considered which throw something of a damp upon the scheme. I do not expect that aunt will sink more than 150_l_. in such a venture; and would it be possible to establish a respectable (not by any means a _showy_) school, and to commence housekeeping with a capital of only that amount? Propound the question to your sister, if you think she can answer it; if not, don't say a word on the subject. As to getting into debt, that is a thing we could none of us reconcile our mind to for a moment. We do not care how modest, how humble our commencement be, so it be made on sure grounds, and have a safe foundation. In thinking of all possible and impossible places where we could establish a school, I have thought of Burlington, or rather of the neighbourhood of Burlington. Do you remember whether there was any other school there besides that of Miss ---? This is, of course, a perfectly crude and random idea. There are a hundred reasons why it should be an impracticable one. We have no connections, no acquaintances there; it is far from home, &c. Still, I fancy the ground in the East Riding is less fully occupied than in the West. Much inquiry and consideration will be necessary, of course, before any place is decided on; and I fear much time will elapse before any plan is executed . . . Write as soon as you can. I shall not leave my present situation till my future prospects assume a more fixed and definite aspect." A fortnight afterwards, we see that the seed has been sown which was to grow up into a plan materially influencing her future life. "August 7th, 1841. "This is Saturday evening; I have put the children to bed; now I am going to sit down and answer your letter. I am again by myself--housekeeper and governess--for Mr. and Mrs. --- are staying at ---. To speak truth, though I am solitary while they are away, it is still by far the happiest part of my time. The children are under decent control, the servants are very observant and attentive to me, and the occasional absence of the master and mistress relieves me from the duty of always endeavouring to seem cheerful and conversable. Martha ---, it appears, is in the way of enjoying great advantages; so is Mary, for you will be surprised to hear that she is returning immediately to the Continent with her brother; not, however, to stay there, but to take a month's tour and recreation. I have had a long letter from Mary, and a packet containing a present of a very handsome black silk scarf, and a pair of beautiful kid gloves, bought at Brussels. Of course, I was in one sense pleased with the gift--pleased that they should think of me so far off, amidst the excitements of one of the most splendid capitals of Europe; and yet it felt irksome to accept it. I should think Mary and Martha have not more than sufficient pocket-money to supply themselves. I wish they had testified their regard by a less expensive token. Mary's letters spoke of some of the pictures and cathedrals she had seen--pictures the most exquisite, cathedrals the most venerable. I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter: such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish for wings--wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent thirst to see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a minute. I was tantalised by the consciousness of faculties unexercised,--then all collapsed, and I despaired. My dear, I would hardly make that confession to any one but yourself; and to you, rather in a letter than _viva voce_. These rebellious and absurd emotions were only momentary; I quelled them in five minutes. I hope they will not revive, for they were acutely painful. No further steps have been taken about the project I mentioned to you, nor probably will be for the present; but Emily, and Anne, and I, keep it in view. It is our polar star, and we look to it in all circumstances of despondency. I begin to suspect I am writing in a strain which will make you think I am unhappy. This is far from being the case; on the contrary, I know my place is a favourable one, for a governess. What dismays and haunts me sometimes, is a conviction that I have no natural knack for my vocation. If teaching only were requisite, it would be smooth and easy; but it is the living in other people's houses--the estrangement from one's real character--the adoption of a cold, rigid, apathetic exterior, that is painful . . . You will not mention our school project at present. A project not actually commenced is always uncertain. Write to me often, my dear Nell; you _know_ your letters are valued. Your 'loving child' (as you choose to call me so), C. B. "P.S. I am well in health; don't fancy I am not, but I have one aching feeling at my heart (I must allude to it, though I had resolved not to). It is about Anne; she has so much to endure: far, far more than I ever had. When my thoughts turn to her, they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger. I know what concealed susceptibility is in her nature, when her feelings are wounded. I wish I could be with her, to administer a little balm. She is more lonely--less gifted with the power of making friends, even than I am. 'Drop the subject.'" She could bear much for herself; but she could not patiently bear the sorrows of others, especially of her sisters; and again, of the two sisters, the idea of the little, gentle, youngest suffering in lonely patience, was insupportable to her. Something must be done. No matter if the desired end were far away; all time was lost in which she was not making progress, however slow, towards it. To have a school, was to have some portion of daily leisure, uncontrolled but by her own sense of duty; it was for the three sisters, loving each other with so passionate an affection, to be together under one roof, and yet earning their own subsistence; above all, it was to have the power of watching over these two whose life and happiness were ever to Charlotte far more than her own. But no trembling impatience should lead her to take an unwise step in haste. She inquired in every direction she could, as to the chances which a new school might have of success. In all there seemed more establishments like the one which the sisters wished to set up than could be supported. What was to be done? Superior advantages must be offered. But how? They themselves abounded in thought, power, and information; but these are qualifications scarcely fit to be inserted in a prospectus. Of French they knew something; enough to read it fluently, but hardly enough to teach it in competition with natives or professional masters. Emily and Anne had some knowledge of music; but here again it was doubtful whether, without more instruction, they could engage to give lessons in it. Just about this time, Miss W--- was thinking of relinquishing her school at Dewsbury Moor; and offered to give it up in favour of her old pupils, the Brontes. A sister of hers had taken the active management since the time when Charlotte was a teacher; but the number of pupils had diminished; and, if the Brontes undertook it, they would have to try and work it up to its former state of prosperity. This, again, would require advantages on their part which they did not at present possess, but which Charlotte caught a glimpse of. She resolved to follow the clue, and never to rest till she had reached a successful issue. With the forced calm of a suppressed eagerness, that sends a glow of desire through every word of the following letter, she wrote to her aunt thus. "Dear Aunt, "Sept. 29th, 1841. "I have heard nothing of Miss W--- yet since I wrote to her, intimating that I would accept her offer. I cannot conjecture the reason of this long silence, unless some unforeseen impediment has occurred in concluding the bargain. Meantime, a plan has been suggested and approved by Mr. and Mrs. --- " (the father and mother of her pupils) "and others, which I wish now to impart to you. My friends recommend me, if I desire to secure permanent success, to delay commencing the school for six months longer, and by all means to contrive, by hook or by crook, to spend the intervening time in some school on the continent. They say schools in England are so numerous, competition so great, that without some such step towards attaining superiority, we shall probably have a very hard struggle, and may fail in the end. They say, moreover, that the loan of 100_l_., which you have been so kind as to offer us, will, perhaps, not be all required now, as Miss W--- will lend us the furniture; and that, if the speculation is intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum, at least, ought to be laid out in the manner I have mentioned, thereby insuring a more speedy repayment both of interest and principal. "I would not go to France or to Paris. I would go to Brussels, in Belgium. The cost of the journey there, at the dearest rate of travelling, would be 5_l_.; living is there little more than half as dear as it is in England, and the facilities for education are equal or superior to any other place in Europe. In half a year, I could acquire a thorough familiarity with French. I could improve greatly in Italian, and even get a dash of German, i.e., providing my health continued as good as it is now. Mary is now staying at Brussels, at a first-rate establishment there. I should not think of going to the Chateau de Kokleberg, where she is resident, as the terms are much too high; but if I wrote to her, she, with the assistance of Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the British Chaplain, would be able to secure me a cheap, decent residence and respectable protection. I should have the opportunity of seeing her frequently; she would make me acquainted with the city; and, with the assistance of her cousins, I should probably be introduced to connections far more improving, polished, and cultivated, than any I have yet known. "These are advantages which would turn to real account, when we actually commenced a school; and, if Emily could share them with me, we could take a footing in the world afterwards which we can never do now. I say Emily instead of Anne; for Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered. I feel certain, while I am writing, that you will see the propriety of what I say. You always like to use your money to the best advantage. You are not fond of making shabby purchases; when you do confer a favour, it is often done in style; and depend upon it, 50_l_., or 100_l_., thus laid out, would be well employed. Of course, I know no other friend in the world to whom I could apply on this subject except yourself. I feel an absolute conviction that, if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. Papa will, perhaps, think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition? When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, he was as ambitious as I am now. I want us _all_ to get on. I know we have talents, and I want them to be turned to account. I look to you, aunt, to help us. I think you will not refuse. I know, if you consent, it shall not be my fault if you ever repent your kindness." This letter was written from the house in which she was residing as governess. It was some little time before an answer came. Much had to be talked over between the father and aunt in Haworth Parsonage. At last consent was given. Then, and not till then, she confided her plan to an intimate friend. She was not one to talk over-much about any project, while it remained uncertain--to speak about her labour, in any direction, while its result was doubtful. "Nov. 2nd, 1841. "Now let us begin to quarrel. In the first place, I must consider whether I will commence operations on the defensive, or the offensive. The defensive, I think. You say, and I see plainly, that your feelings have been hurt by an apparent want of confidence on my part. You heard from others of Miss W---'s overtures before I communicated them to you myself. This is true. I was deliberating on plans important to my future prospects. I never exchanged a letter with you on the subject. True again. This appears strange conduct to a friend, near and dear, long-known, and never found wanting. Most true. I cannot give you my _excuses_ for this behaviour; this word _excuse_ implies confession of a fault, and I do not feel that I have been in fault. The plain fact is, I _was_ not, I am not now, certain of my destiny. On the contrary, I have been most uncertain, perplexed with contradictory schemes and proposals. My time, as I have often told you, is fully occupied; yet I had many letters to write, which it was absolutely necessary should be written. I knew it would avail nothing to write to you then to say I was in doubt and uncertainty--hoping this, fearing that, anxious, eagerly desirous to do what seemed impossible to be done. When I thought of you in that busy interval, it was to resolve, that you should know all when my way was clear, and my grand end attained. If I could, I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results. Miss W--- did most kindly propose that I should come to Dewsbury Moor and attempt to revive the school her sister had relinquished. She offered me the use of her furniture. At first, I received the proposal cordially, and prepared to do my utmost to bring about success; but a fire was kindled in my very heart, which I could not quench. I so longed to increase my attainments--to become something better than I am; a glimpse of what I felt, I showed to you in one of my former letters--only a glimpse; Mary cast oil upon the flames--encouraged me, and in her own strong, energetic language, heartened me on. I longed to go to Brussels; but how could I get there? I wished for one, at least, of my sisters to share the advantage with me. I fixed on Emily. She deserved the reward, I knew. How could the point be managed? In extreme excitement, I wrote a letter home, which carried the day. I made an appeal to aunt for assistance, which was answered by consent. Things are not settled; yet it is sufficient to say we have a _chance_ of going for half a year. Dewsbury Moor is relinquished. Perhaps, fortunately so. In my secret soul, I believe there is no cause to regret it. My plans for the future are bounded to this intention: if I once get to Brussels, and if my health is spared, I will do my best to make the utmost of every advantage that shall come within my reach. When the half-year is expired, I will do what I can. * * * * * "Believe me, though I was born in April, the month of cloud and sunshine, I am not changeful. My spirits are unequal, and sometimes I speak vehemently, and sometimes I say nothing at all; but I have a steady regard for you, and if you will let the cloud and shower pass by, be sure the sun is always behind, obscured, but still existing." At Christmas she left her situation, after a parting with her employers which seems to have affected and touched her greatly. "They only made too much of me," was her remark, after leaving this family; "I did not deserve it." * * * * * All four children hoped to meet together at their father's house this December. Branwell expected to have a short leave of absence from his employment as a clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railway, in which he had been engaged for five months. Anne arrived before Christmas-day. She had rendered herself so valuable in her difficult situation, that her employers vehemently urged her to return, although she had announced her resolution to leave them; partly on account of the harsh treatment she had received, and partly because her stay at home, during her sisters' absence in Belgium, seemed desirable, when the age of the three remaining inhabitants of the parsonage was taken into consideration. After some correspondence and much talking over plans at home, it seemed better, in consequence of letters which they received from Brussels giving a discouraging account of the schools there, that Charlotte and Emily should go to an institution at Lille, in the north of France, which was highly recommended by Baptist Noel, and other clergymen. Indeed, at the end of January, it was arranged that they were to set off for this place in three weeks, under the escort of a French lady, then visiting in London. The terms were 50_l_. each pupil, for board and French alone, but a separate room was to be allowed for this sum; without this indulgence, it was lower. Charlotte writes:-- "January 20th, 1842. "I consider it kind in aunt to consent to an extra sum for a separate room. We shall find it a great privilege in many ways. I regret the change from Brussels to Lille on many accounts, chiefly that I shall not see Martha. Mary has been indefatigably kind in providing me with information. She has grudged no labour, and scarcely any expense, to that end. Mary's price is above rubies. I have, in fact, two friends--you and her--staunch and true, in whose faith and sincerity I have as strong a belief as I have in the Bible. I have bothered you both--you especially; but you always get the tongs and heap coals of fire upon my head. I have had letters to write lately to Brussels, to Lille, and to London. I have lots of chemises, nightgowns, pocket- handkerchiefs, and pockets to make; besides clothes to repair. I have been, every week since I came home, expecting to see Branwell, and he has never been able to get over yet. We fully expect him, however, next Saturday. Under these circumstances how can I go visiting? You tantalize me to death with talking of conversations by the fireside. Depend upon it, we are not to have any such for many a long month to come. I get an interesting impression of old age upon my face; and when you see me next I shall certainly wear caps and spectacles." CHAPTER XI I am not aware of all the circumstances which led to the relinquishment of the Lille plan. Brussels had had from the first a strong attraction for Charlotte; and the idea of going there, in preference to any other place, had only been given up in consequence of the information received of the second-rate character of its schools. In one of her letters reference has been made to Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the chaplain of the British Embassy. At the request of his brother--a clergyman, living not many miles from Haworth, and an acquaintance of Mr. Bronte's--she made much inquiry, and at length, after some discouragement in her search, heard of a school which seemed in every respect desirable. There was an English lady who had long lived in the Orleans family, amidst the various fluctuations of their fortunes, and who, when the Princess Louise was married to King Leopold, accompanied her to Brussels, in the capacity of reader. This lady's granddaughter was receiving her education at the pensionnat of Madame Heger; and so satisfied was the grandmother with the kind of instruction given, that she named the establishment, with high encomiums, to Mrs. Jerkins; and, in consequence, it was decided that, if the terms suited, Miss Bronte and Emily should proceed thither. M. Heger informs me that, on receipt of a letter from Charlotte, making very particular inquiries as to the possible amount of what are usually termed "extras," he and his wife were so much struck by the simple earnest tone of the letter, that they said to each other:--"These are the daughters of an English pastor, of moderate means, anxious to learn with an ulterior view of instructing others, and to whom the risk of additional expense is of great consequence. Let us name a specific sum, within which all expenses shall be included." This was accordingly done; the agreement was concluded, and the Brontes prepared to leave their native county for the first time, if we except the melancholy and memorable residence at Cowan Bridge. Mr. Bronte determined to accompany his daughters. Mary and her brother, who were experienced in foreign travelling, were also of the party. Charlotte first saw London in the day or two they now stopped there; and, from an expression in one of her subsequent letters, they all, I believe, stayed at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster Row--a strange, old-fashioned tavern, of which I shall have more to say hereafter. Mary's account of their journey is thus given. "In passing through London, she seemed to think our business was and ought to be, to see all the pictures and statues we could. She knew the artists, and know where other productions of theirs were to be found. I don't remember what we saw except St. Paul's. Emily was like her in these habits of mind, but certainly never took her opinion, but always had one to offer . . . I don't know what Charlotte thought of Brussels. We arrived in the dark, and went next morning to our respective schools to see them. We were, of course, much preoccupied, and our prospects gloomy. Charlotte used to like the country round Brussels. 'At the top of every hill you see something.' She took, long solitary walks on the occasional holidays." Mr. Bronte took his daughters to the Rue d'Isabelle, Brussels; remained one night at Mr. Jenkins'; and straight returned to his wild Yorkshire village. What a contrast to that must the Belgian capital have presented to those two young women thus left behind! Suffering acutely from every strange and unaccustomed contact--far away from their beloved home, and the dear moors beyond--their indomitable will was their great support. Charlotte's own words, with regard to Emily, are:-- "After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the continent. The same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer, but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills." They wanted learning. They came for learning. They would learn. Where they had a distinct purpose to be achieved in intercourse with their fellows, they forgot themselves; at all other times they were miserably shy. Mrs. Jenkins told me that she used to ask them to spend Sundays and holidays with her, until she found that they felt more pain than pleasure from such visits. Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well--on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking. And yet there was much in Brussels to strike a responsive chord in her powerful imagination. At length she was seeing somewhat of that grand old world of which she had dreamed. As the gay crowds passed by her, so had gay crowds paced those streets for centuries, in all their varying costumes. Every spot told an historic tale, extending back into the fabulous ages when Jan and Jannika, the aboriginal giant and giantess, looked over the wall, forty feet high, of what is now the Rue Villa Hermosa, and peered down upon the new settlers who were to turn them out of the country in which they had lived since the deluge. The great solemn Cathedral of St. Gudule, the religious paintings, the striking forms and ceremonies of the Romish Church--all made a deep impression on the girls, fresh from the bare walls and simple worship of Haworth Church. And then they were indignant with themselves for having been susceptible of this impression, and their stout Protestant hearts arrayed themselves against the false Duessa that had thus imposed upon them. The very building they occupied as pupils, in Madame Heger's pensionnat, had its own ghostly train of splendid associations, marching for ever, in shadowy procession, through and through the ancient rooms, and shaded alleys of the gardens. From the splendour of to-day in the Rue Royale, if you turn aside, near the statue of the General Beliard, you look down four flights of broad stone steps upon the Rue d'Isabelle. The chimneys of the houses in it are below your feet. Opposite to the lowest flight of steps, there is a large old mansion facing you, with a spacious walled garden behind--and to the right of it. In front of this garden, on the same side as the mansion, and with great boughs of trees sweeping over their lowly roofs, is a row of small, picturesque, old-fashioned cottages, not unlike, in degree and uniformity, to the almshouses so often seen in an English country town. The Rue d'Isabelle looks as though it had been untouched by the innovations of the builder for the last three centuries; and yet any one might drop a stone into it from the back windows of the grand modern hotels in the Rue Royale, built and furnished in the newest Parisian fashion. In the thirteenth century, the Rue d'Isabelle was called the Fosse-aux- Chiens; and the kennels for the ducal hounds occupied the place where Madame Heger's pensionnat now stands. A hospital (in the ancient large meaning of the word) succeeded to the kennel. The houseless and the poor, perhaps the leprous, were received, by the brethren of a religious order, in a building on this sheltered site; and what had been a fosse for defence, was filled up with herb-gardens and orchards for upwards of a hundred years. Then came the aristocratic guild of the cross-bow men--that company the members whereof were required to prove their noble descent--untainted for so many generations, before they could be admitted into the guild; and, being admitted, were required to swear a solemn oath, that no other pastime or exercise should take up any part of their leisure, the whole of which was to be devoted to the practice of the noble art of shooting with the cross-bow. Once a year a grand match was held, under the patronage of some saint, to whose church-steeple was affixed the bird, or semblance of a bird, to be hit by the victor. {5} The conqueror in the game was Roi des Arbaletriers for the coming year, and received a jewelled decoration accordingly, which he was entitled to wear for twelve months; after which he restored it to the guild, to be again striven for. The family of him who died during the year that he was king, were bound to present the decoration to the church of the patron saint of the guild, and to furnish a similar prize to be contended for afresh. These noble cross-bow men of the middle ages formed a sort of armed guard to the powers in existence, and almost invariably took the aristocratic, in preference to the democratic side, in the numerous civil dissensions of the Flemish towns. Hence they were protected by the authorities, and easily obtained favourable and sheltered sites for their exercise-ground. And thus they came to occupy the old fosse, and took possession of the great orchard of the hospital, lying tranquil and sunny in the hollow below the rampart. But, in the sixteenth century, it became necessary to construct a street through the exercise-ground of the "Arbaletriers du Grand Serment," and, after much delay, the company were induced by the beloved Infanta Isabella to give up the requisite plot of ground. In recompense for this, Isabella--who herself was a member of the guild, and had even shot down the bird, and been queen in 1615--made many presents to the arbaletriers; and, in return, the grateful city, which had long wanted a nearer road to St. Gudule, but been baffled by the noble archers, called the street after her name. She, as a sort of indemnification to the arbaletriers, caused a "great mansion" to be built for their accommodation in the new Rue d'Isabelle. This mansion was placed in front of their exercise-ground, and was of a square shape. On a remote part of the walls, may still be read-- PHILLIPPO IIII. HISPAN. REGE. ISABELLA-CLARA-EUGENIA HISPAN. INFANS. MAGNAE GULDAE REGINA GULDAE FRATRIBUS POSUIT. In that mansion were held all the splendid feasts of the Grand Serment des Arbaletriers. The master-archer lived there constantly, in order to be ever at hand to render his services to the guild. The great saloon was also used for the court balls and festivals, when the archers were not admitted. The Infanta caused other and smaller houses to be built in her new street, to serve as residences for her "garde noble;" and for her "garde bourgeoise," a small habitation each, some of which still remain, to remind us of English almshouses. The "great mansion," with its quadrangular form; the spacious saloon--once used for the archducal balls, where the dark, grave Spaniards mixed with the blond nobility of Brabant and Flanders--now a schoolroom for Belgian girls; the cross-bow men's archery-ground--all are there--the pensionnat of Madame Heger. This lady was assisted in the work of instruction by her husband--a kindly, wise, good, and religious man--whose acquaintance I am glad to have made, and who has furnished me with some interesting details, from his wife's recollections and his own, of the two Miss Brontes during their residence in Brussels. He had the better opportunities of watching them, from his giving lessons in the French language and literature in the school. A short extract from a letter, written to me by a French lady resident in Brussels, and well qualified to judge, will help to show the estimation in which he is held. "Je ne connais pas personnellement M. Heger, mais je sais qu'il est peu de caracteres aussi nobles, aussi admirables que le sien. Il est un des membres les plus zeles de cette Societe de S. Vincent de Paul dont je t'ai deja parle, et ne se contente pas de servir les pauvres et les malades, mais leur consacre encore les soirees. Apres des journees absorbees tout entieres par les devoirs que sa place lui impose, il reunit les pauvres, les ouvriers, leur donne des cours gratuits, et trouve encore le moyen de les amuser en les instruisant. Ce devouement te dira assez que M. Heger est profondement et ouvertement religieux. Il a des manieres franches et avenantes; il se fait aimer de tous ceux qui l'approchent, et surtout des enfants. Il a la parole facile, et possde a un haut degre l'eloquence du bon sens et du coeur. Il n'est point auteur. Homme de zele et de conscience, il vient de se demettre des fonctions elevees et lucratives qu'il exercait a l'Athenee, celles de Prefet des Etudes, parce qu'il ne peut y realiser le bien qu'il avait espere, introduire l'enseignement religieux dans le programme des etudes. J'ai vu une fois Madame Heger, qui a quelque chose de froid et de compasse dans son maintien, et qui previent peu en sa faveur. Je la crois pourtant aimee et appreciee par ses eleves." There were from eighty to a hundred pupils in the pensionnat, when Charlotte and Emily Bronte entered in February 1842. M. Heger's account is that they knew nothing of French. I suspect they knew as much (or as little), for all conversational purposes, as any English girls do, who have never been abroad, and have only learnt the idioms and pronunciation from an Englishwoman. The two sisters clung together, and kept apart from the herd of happy, boisterous, well-befriended Belgian girls, who, in their turn, thought the new English pupils wild and scared-looking, with strange, odd, insular ideas about dress; for Emily had taken a fancy to the fashion, ugly and preposterous even during its reign, of gigot sleves, and persisted in wearing them long after they were "gone out." Her petticoats, too, had not a curve or a wave in them, but hung down straight and long, clinging to her lank figure. The sisters spoke to no one but from necessity. They were too full of earnest thought, and of the exile's sick yearning, to be ready for careless conversation or merry game. M. Heger, who had done little but observe, during the few first weeks of their residence in the Rue d'Isabelle, perceived that with their unusual characters, and extraordinary talents, a different mode must be adopted from that in which he generally taught French to English girls. He seems to have rated Emily's genius as something even higher than Charlotte's; and her estimation of their relative powers was the same. Emily had a head for logic, and a capability of argument, unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman, according to M. Heger. Impairing the force of this gift, was a stubborn tenacity of will, which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned. "She should have been a man--a great navigator," said M. Heger in speaking of her. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life." And yet, moreover, her faculty of imagination was such that, if she had written a history, her view of scenes and characters would have been so vivid, and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument, that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions, or his cooler perceptions of its truth. But she appeared egotistical and exacting compared to Charlotte, who was always unselfish (this is M. Heger's testimony); and in the anxiety of the elder to make her younger sister contented she allowed her to exercise a kind of unconscious tyranny over her. After consulting with his wife, M. Heger told them that he meant to dispense with the old method of grounding in grammar, vocabulary, &c., and to proceed on a new plan--something similar to what he had occasionally adopted with the elder among his French and Belgian pupils. He proposed to read to them some of the master-pieces of the most celebrated French authors (such as Casimir de la Vigne's poem on the "Death of Joan of Arc," parts of Bossuet, the admirable translation of the noble letter of St. Ignatius to the Roman Christians in the "Bibliotheque Choisie des Peres de l'Eglise," &c.), and after having thus impressed the complete effect of the whole, to analyse the parts with them, pointing out in what such or such an author excelled, and where were the blemishes. He believed that he had to do with pupils capable, from their ready sympathy with the intellectual, the refined, the polished, or the noble, of catching the echo of a style, and so reproducing their own thoughts in a somewhat similar manner. After explaining his plan to them, he awaited their reply. Emily spoke first; and said that she saw no good to be derived from it; and that, by adopting it, they should lose all originality of thought and expression. She would have entered into an argument on the subject, but for this, M. Heger had no time. Charlotte then spoke; she also doubted the success of the plan; but she would follow out M. Heger's advice, because she was bound to obey him while she was his pupil. Before speaking of the results, it may be desirable to give an extract from one of her letters, which shows some of her first impressions of her new life. "Brussels, 1842 (May?). "I was twenty-six years old a week or two since; and at this ripe time of life I am a school-girl, and, on the whole, very happy in that capacity. It felt very strange at first to submit to authority instead of exercising it--to obey orders instead of giving them; but I like that state of things. I returned to it with the same avidity that a cow, that has long been kept on dry hay, returns to fresh grass. Don't laugh at my simile. It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural to command. "This is a large school, in which there are about forty externes, or day pupils, and twelve pensionnaires, or boarders. Madame Heger, the head, is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss ---. I think the severe points are a little softened, because she has not been disappointed, and consequently soured. In a word, she is a married instead of a maiden lady. There are three teachers in the school--Mademoiselle Blanche, Mademoiselle Sophie, and Mademoiselle Marie. The two first have no particular character. One is an old maid, and the other will be one. Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original, but of repulsive and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except myself and Emily, her bitter enemies. No less than seven masters attend, to teach the different branches of education--French, Drawing, Music, Singing, Writing, Arithmetic, and German. All in the house are Catholics except ourselves, one other girl, and the gouvernante of Madame's children, an Englishwoman, in rank something between a lady's maid and a nursery governess. The difference in country and religion makes a broad line of demarcation between us and all the rest. We are completely isolated in the midst of numbers. Yet I think I am never unhappy; my present life is so delightful, so congenial to my own nature, compared to that of a governess. My time, constantly occupied, passes too rapidly. Hitherto both Emily and I have had good health, and therefore we have been able to work well. There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken--M. Heger, the husband of Madame. He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament. He is very angry with me just at present, because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as '_peu correct_.' He did not tell me so, but wrote the word on the margin of my book, and asked, in brief stern phrase, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations? adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable. The fact is, some weeks ago, in a high-flown humour, he forbade me to use either dictionary or grammar in translating the most difficult English compositions into French. This makes the task rather arduous, and compels me every now and then to introduce an English word, which nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it. Emily and he don't draw well together at all. Emily works like a horse, and she has had great difficulties to contend with--far greater than I have had. Indeed, those who come to a French school for instruction ought previously to have acquired a considerable knowledge of the French language, otherwise they will lose a great deal of time, for the course of instruction is adapted to natives and not to foreigners; and in these large establishments they will not change their ordinary course for one or two strangers. The few private lessons that M. Heger has vouchsafed to give us, are, I suppose, to be considered a great favour; and I can perceive they have already excited much spite and jealousy in the school. "You will abuse this letter for being short and dreary, and there are a hundred things which I want to tell you, but I have not time. Brussels is a beautiful city. The Belgians hate the English. Their external morality is more rigid than ours. To lace the stays without a handkerchief on the neck is considered a disgusting piece of indelicacy." The passage in this letter where M. Heger is represented as prohibiting the use of dictionary or grammar, refers, I imagine, to the time I have mentioned, when he determined to adopt a new method of instruction in the French language, of which they were to catch the spirit and rhythm rather from the ear and the heart, as its noblest accents fell upon them, than by over-careful and anxious study of its grammatical rules. It seems to me a daring experiment on the part of their teacher; but, doubtless, he knew his ground; and that it answered is evident in the composition of some of Charlotte's _devoirs_, written about this time. I am tempted, in illustration of this season of mental culture, to recur to a conversation which I had with M. Heger on the manner in which he formed his pupils' style, and to give a proof of his success, by copying a _devoir_ of Charlotte's with his remarks upon it. He told me that one day this summer (when the Brontes had been for about four months receiving instruction from him) he read to them Victor Hugo's celebrated portrait of Mirabeau, "mais, dans ma lecon je me bornais a ce qui concerne _Mirabeau orateur_. C'est apres l'analyse de ce morceau, considere surtout du point de vue du fond, de la disposition de ce qu'on pourrait appeler _la charpente_ qu'ont ete faits les deux portraits que je vous donne." He went on to say that he had pointed out to them the fault in Victor Hugo's style as being exaggeration in conception, and, at the same time, he had made them notice the extreme beauty of his "nuances" of expression. They were then dismissed to choose the subject of a similar kind of portrait. This selection M. Heger always left to them; for "it is necessary," he observed, "before sitting down to write on a subject, to have thoughts and feelings about it. I cannot tell on what subject your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you." The marginal comments, I need hardly say, are M. Heger's; the words in italics are Charlotte's, for which he substitutes a better form of expression, which is placed between brackets. {6} IMITATION. "Le 31 Juillet, 1842. PORTRAIT DE PIERRE L'HERMITE. CHARLOTTE BRONTE "De temps en temps, il parait sur la terre des hommes destines a etre les instruments [predestines] {Pourquoi cette suppression?} de grands changements moraux ou politiques. Quelquefois c'est un conquerant, un Alexandre ou un Attila, qui passe comme un ouragan, et purifie l'atmosphere moral, comme l'orage purifie l'atmosphere physique; quelquefois, c'est un revolutionnaire, un Cromwell, ou un Robespierre, qui fait expier par un roi {les fautes et} les vices de toute une dynastie; quelquefois c'est un enthousiaste religieux comme Mahomet, ou Pierre l'Hermite, qui, avec le seul levier de la pensee, souleve des nations entieres, les deracine et les transplante dans des climats nouveaux, _peuplant l'Asie avec les habitants de l'Europe_. Pierre l'Hermite etait gentilhomme de Picardie, en France, {Invtile, quand vous ecrivez er francais} pourquoi donc n'a-t-il passe sa vie comma les autres gentilhommes, ses contemporains, ont passe la leur, a table, a la chasse, dans son lit, sans s'inquieter de Saladin, ou de ses Sarrasins? N'est-ce pas, parce qu'il y a dans certaines natures, _une ardour_ [un foyer d'activite] indomptable qui ne leur permet pas de rester inactives, _qui les force a se remuer afin d'exercer les facultes puissantes, qui meme en dormant sont pretes, comme Sampson, a briser les noeuds qui les retiennent_? {Vous avez commence a parler de Pierre: vous etes entree dans le sujet: marchez au but.} "Pierre prit la profession des armes; _si son ardeur avait ete de cette espece_ [s'il n'avait eu que cette ardeur vulgaire] qui provient d'une robuste sante, _il aurait_ [c'eut] ete un brave militaire, et rien de plus; mais son ardeur etait celle de l'ame, sa flamme etait pure et elle s'elevait vers le ciel. "_Sans doute_ [Il est vrai que] la jeunesse de Pierre _etait_ [fet] troublee par passions orageuses; les natures puissantes sont extremes en tout, elles ne connaissent la tiedeur ni dans le bien, ni dans le mal; Pierre donc chercha d'abord avidement la gloire qui se fletrit et les plaisirs qui trompent, mais _il fit bientot la decouverte_ [bientot il s'apercut] que ce qu'il poursuivait n'etait qe'une illusion a laquelle il ne pourrait jamais atteindre; {Vnutile, quand vous avez dit illusion} il retourna donc sur ses pas, il recommenca le voyage de la vie, mais cette fois il evita le chemin spacieux qui mene a la perdition et il prit le chemin etroit qui mene a la vie; _puisque_ [comme] le trajet etait long et difficile il jeta la casque et les armes du soldat, et se vetit de l'habit simple du moine. A la vie militaire succeda la vie monastique, car les extremes se touchent, et _chez l'homme sincere_ la sincerite du repentir amene [necessairement a la suite] _avec lui_ la rigueur de la penitence. [Voila donc Pierre devenu moine!] "Mais _Pierre_ [il] avait en lui un principe qui l'empechait de rester long-temps inactif, ses idees, sur quel sujet _qu'il soit_ [que ce fut] ne pouvaient pas etre bornees; il ne lui suffisait pas que lui- meme fut religieux, que lui-meme fut convaincu de la realite de Christianisme (sic), il fallait que toute l'Europe, que toute l'Asie, partageat sa conviction et professat la croyance de la Croix. La Piete [fervente] elevee par la Genie, nourrie par la Solitude, _fit naitre une espece d'inspiration_ [exalta son ame jusqu'a l'inspiration] _dans son ame_, et lorsqu'il quitta sa cellule et reparut dans le monde, il portait comme Moise l'empreinte de la Divinite sur son front, et _tout_ [tous] reconnurent en lui la veritable apotre de la Croix. "Mahomet n'avait jamais remue les molles nations de l'Orient comme alors Pierre remua les peuples austeres de l'Occident; il fallait que cette eloquence fut d'une force presque miraculeuse _qui pouvait_ [presqu'elle] persuad_er_ [ait] aux rois de vendre leurs royaumes _afin de procurer_ [pour avoir] des armes et des soldats _pour aider_ [a offrir] a Pierre dans la guerre sainte qu'il voulait livrer aux infideles. La puissance de Pierre [l'Hermite] n'etait nullement une puissance physique, car la nature, ou pour mieux dire, Dieu est impartial dans la distribution de ses dons; il accorde a l'un de ses enfants la grace, la beaute, les perfections corporelles, a l'autre l'esprit, la grandeur morale. Pierre donc etait un homme petit, d'une physionomie peu agreable; mais il avait ce courage, cette constance, cet enthousiasme, cette energie de sentiment qui ecrase toute opposition, et qui fait que la volonte d'un seul homme devient la loi de toute une nation. Pour se former une juste idee de l'influence qu'exerca cet homme sur les _caracteres_ [choses] et les idees de son temps, il faut se le representer au milieu de l'armee des croisees dans son double role de prophete et de guerrier; le pauvre hermite, vetu _du pauvre_ [de l'humble] habit gris est la plus puissant qieun roi; il est entoure _d'une_ [de la] multitude [avide] une multitude qui ne voit que lui, tandis qui lui, il ne voit que le ciel; ses yeux leves semblent dire, 'Je vois Dieu et les anges, et j'ai perdu de vue la terre!' "_Dans ce moment le_ [mais ce] pauvre _habit_ [froc] gris est pour lui comme le manteau d'Elijah; il l'enveloppe d'inspiration; _il_ [Pierre] lit dans l'avenir; il voit Jerusalem delivree; [il voit] le saint sepulcre libre; il voit le Croissant argent est arrache du Temple, et l'Oriflamme et la Croix rouge sont etabli a sa place; non-seulement Pierre voit ces merveilles, mais il les fait voir a tous ceux qui l'entourent; il ravive l'esperance et le courage dans [tous ces corps epuises de fatigues et de privations]. La bataille ne sera livree que demain, mais la victoire est decidee ce soir. Pierre a promis; et les Croises se fient a sa parole, comme les Israelites se fiaient a celle de Moise et de Josue." As a companion portrait to this, Emily chose to depict Harold on the eve of the battle of Hastings. It appears to me that her _devoir_ is superior to Charlotte's in power and in imagination, and fully equal to it in language; and that this, in both cases, considering how little practical knowledge of French they had when they arrived at Brussels in February, and that they wrote without the aid of dictionary or grammar, is unusual and remarkable. We shall see the progress Charlotte had made, in ease and grace of style, a year later. In the choice of subjects left to her selection, she frequently took characters and scenes from the Old Testament, with which all her writings show that she was especially familiar. The picturesqueness and colour (if I may so express it), the grandeur and breadth of its narrations, impressed her deeply. To use M. Heger's expression, "Elle etait nourrie de la Bible." After he had read De la Vigne's poem on Joan of Arc, she chose the "Vision and Death of Moses on Mount Nebo" to write about; and, in looking over this _devoir_, I was much struck with one or two of M. Heger's remarks. After describing, in a quiet and simple manner, the circumstances under which Moses took leave of the Israelites, her imagination becomes warmed, and she launches out into a noble strain, depicting the glorious futurity of the Chosen People, as, looking down upon the Promised Land, he sees their prosperity in prophetic vision. But, before reaching the middle of this glowing description, she interrupts herself to discuss for a moment the doubts that have been thrown on the miraculous relations of the Old Testament. M. Heger remarks, "When you are writing, place your argument first in cool, prosaic language; but when you have thrown the reins on the neck of your imagination, do not pull her up to reason." Again, in the vision of Moses, he sees the maidens leading forth their flocks to the wells at eventide, and they are described as wearing flowery garlands. Here the writer is reminded of the necessity of preserving a certain verisimilitude: Moses might from his elevation see mountains and plains, groups of maidens and herds of cattle, but could hardly perceive the details of dress, or the ornaments of the head. When they had made further progress, M. Heger took up a more advanced plan, that of synthetical teaching. He would read to them various accounts of the same person or event, and make them notice the points of agreement and disagreement. Where they were different, he would make them seek the origin of that difference by causing them to examine well into the character and position of each separate writer, and how they would be likely to affect his conception of truth. For instance, take Cromwell. He would read Bossuet's description of him in the "Oraison Funebre de la Reine d'Angleterre," and show how in this he was considered entirely from the religious point of view, as an instrument in the hands of God, preordained to His work. Then he would make them read Guizot, and see how, in this view, Cromwell was endowed with the utmost power of free-will, but governed by no higher motive than that of expediency; while Carlyle regarded him as a character regulated by a strong and conscientious desire to do the will of the Lord. Then he would desire them to remember that the Royalist and Commonwealth men had each their different opinions of the great Protector. And from these conflicting characters, he would require them to sift and collect the elements of truth, and try to unite them into a perfect whole. This kind of exercise delighted Charlotte. It called into play her powers of analysis, which were extraordinary, and she very soon excelled in it. Wherever the Brontes could be national they were so, with the same tenacity of attachment which made them suffer as they did whenever they left Haworth. They were Protestant to the backbone in other things beside their religion, but pre-eminently so in that. Touched as Charlotte was by the letter of St. Ignatius before alluded to, she claimed equal self-devotion, and from as high a motive, for some of the missionaries of the English Church sent out to toil and to perish on the poisonous African coast, and wrote as an "imitation," "Lettre d'un Missionnaire, Sierra Leone, Afrique." Something of her feeling, too, appears in the following letter:-- "Brussels, 1842. "I consider it doubtful whether I shall come home in September or not. Madame Heger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay another half-year, offering to dismiss her English master, and take me as English teacher; also to employ Emily some part of each day in teaching music to a certain number of the pupils. For these services we are to be allowed to continue our studies in French and German, and to have board, &c., without paying for it; no salaries, however, are offered. The proposal is kind, and in a great selfish city like Brussels, and a great selfish school, containing nearly ninety pupils (boarders and day pupils included), implies a degree of interest which demands gratitude in return. I am inclined to accept it. What think you? I don't deny I sometimes wish to be in England, or that I have brief attacks of home sickness; but, on the whole, I have borne a very valiant heart so far; and I have been happy in Brussels, because I have always been fully occupied with the employments that I like. Emily is making rapid progress in French, German, music, and drawing. Monsieur and Madame Heger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character, under her singularities. "If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls is this school, it in a character singularly cold, selfish, animal, and inferior. They are very mutinous and difficult for the teachers to manage; and their principles are rotten to the core. We avoid them, which it is not difficult to do, as we have the brand of Protestantism and Anglicism upon us. People talk of the danger which Protestants expose themselves to in going to reside in Catholic countries, and thereby running the chance of changing their faith. My advice to all Protestants who are tempted to do anything so besotted as turn Catholics, is, to walk over the sea on to the Continent; to attend mass sedulously for a time; to note well the mummeries thereof; also the idiotic, mercenary aspect of all the priests; and then, if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble, childish piece of humbug, let them turn Papists at once--that's all. I consider Methodism, Quakerism, and the extremes of High and Low Churchism foolish, but Roman Catholicism beats them all. At the same time, allow me to tell you, that there are some Catholics who are as good as any Christians can be to whom the Bible is a sealed book, and much better than many Protestants." When the Brontes first went to Brussels, it was with the intention of remaining there for six months, or until the _grandes vacances_ began in September. The duties of the school were then suspended for six weeks or two months, and it seemed a desirable period for their return. But the proposal mentioned in the foregoing letter altered their plans. Besides, they were happy in the feeling that they were making progress in all the knowledge they had so long been yearning to acquire. They were happy, too, in possessing friends whose society had been for years congenial to them, and in occasional meetings with these, they could have the inexpressible solace to residents in a foreign country--and peculiarly such to the Brontes--of talking over the intelligence received from their respective homes--referring to past, or planning for future days. "Mary" and her sister, the bright, dancing, laughing Martha, were parlour-boarders in an establishment just beyond the barriers of Brussels. Again, the cousins of these friends were resident in the town; and at their house Charlotte and Emily were always welcome, though their overpowering shyness prevented their more valuable qualities from being known, and generally kept them silent. They spent their weekly holiday with this family, for many months; but at the end of the time, Emily was as impenetrable to friendly advances as at the beginning; while Charlotte was too physically weak (as "Mary" has expressed it) to "gather up her forces" sufficiently to express any difference or opposition of opinion, and had consequently an assenting and deferential manner, strangely at variance with what they knew of her remarkable talents and decided character. At this house, the T.'s and the Brontes could look forward to meeting each other pretty frequently. There was another English family where Charlotte soon became a welcome guest, and where, I suspect, she felt herself more at her ease than either at Mrs. Jenkins', or the friends whom I have first mentioned. An English physician, with a large family of daughters, went to reside at Brussels, for the sake of their education. He placed them at Madame Heger's school in July, 1842, not a month before the beginning of the _grandes vacances_ on August 15th. In order to make the most of their time, and become accustomed to the language, these English sisters went daily, through the holidays, to the pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle. Six or eight boarders remained, besides the Miss Brontes. They were there during the whole time, never even having the break to their monotonous life, which passing an occasional day with a friend would have afforded them; but devoting themselves with indefatigable diligence to the different studies in which they were engaged. Their position in the school appeared, to these new comers, analogous to what is often called that of a parlour-boarder. They prepared their French, drawing, German, and literature for their various masters; and to these occupations Emily added that of music, in which she was somewhat of a proficient; so much so as to be qualified to give instruction in it to the three younger sisters of my informant. The school was divided into three classes. In the first were from fifteen to twenty pupils; in the second, sixty was about the average number--all foreigners, excepting the two Brontes and one other; in the third, there were from twenty to thirty pupils. The first and second classes occupied a long room, divided by a wooden partition; in each division were four long ranges of desks; and at the end was the _estrade_, or platform, for the presiding instructor. On the last row, in the quietest corner, sat Charlotte and Emily, side by side, so deeply absorbed in their studies as to be insensible to any noise or movement around them. The school-hours were from nine to twelve (the luncheon hour), when the boarders and half-boarders--perhaps two-and-thirty girls--went to the refectoire (a room with two long tables, having an oil- lamp suspended over each), to partake of bread and fruit; the _externes_, or morning pupils, who had brought their own refreshment with them, adjourning to eat it in the garden. From one to two, there was fancy- work--a pupil reading aloud some light literature in each room; from two to four, lessons again. At four, the externes left; and the remaining girls dined in the refectoire, M. and Madame Heger presiding. From five to six there was recreation, from six to seven, preparation for lessons; and, after that succeeded the _lecture pieuse_--Charlotte's nightmare. On rare occasions, M. Heger himself would come in, and substitute a book of a different and more interesting kind. At eight, there was a slight meal of water and _pistolets_ (the delicious little Brussels rolls), which was immediately followed by prayers, and then to bed. The principal bedroom was over the long classe, or schoolroom. There were six or eight narrow beds on each side of the apartment, every one enveloped in its white draping curtain; a long drawer, beneath each, served for a wardrobe, and between each was a stand for ewer, basin, and looking-glass. The beds of the two Miss Brontes were at the extreme end of the room, almost as private and retired as if they had been in a separate apartment. During the hours of recreation, which were always spent in the garden, they invariably walked together, and generally kept a profound silence; Emily, though so much the taller, leaning on her sister. Charlotte would always answer when spoken to, taking the lead in replying to any remark addressed to both; Emily rarely spoke to any one. Charlotte's quiet, gentle manner never changed. She was never seen out of temper for a moment; and occasionally, when she herself had assumed the post of English teacher, and the impertinence or inattention of her pupils was most irritating, a slight increase of colour, a momentary sparkling of the eye, and more decided energy of manner, were the only outward tokens she gave of being conscious of the annoyance to which she was subjected. But this dignified endurance of hers subdued her pupils, in the long run, far more than the voluble tirades of the other mistresses. My informant adds:--"The effect of this manner was singular. I can speak from personal experience. I was at that time high-spirited and impetuous, not respecting the French mistresses; yet, to my own astonishment, at one word from her, I was perfectly tractable; so much so, that at length, M. and Madame Heger invariably preferred all their wishes to me through her; the other pupils did not, perhaps, love her as I did, she was so quiet and silent; but all respected her." With the exception of that part which describes Charlotte's manner as English teacher--an office which she did not assume for some months later--all this description of the school life of the two Brontes refers to the commencement of the new scholastic year in October 1842; and the extracts I have given convey the first impression which the life at a foreign school, and the position of the two Miss Brontes therein, made upon an intelligent English girl of sixteen. I will make a quotation from "Mary's" letter referring to this time. "The first part of her time at Brussels was not uninteresting. She spoke of new people and characters, and foreign ways of the pupils and teachers. She knew the hopes and prospects of the teachers, and mentioned one who was very anxious to marry, 'she was getting so old.' She used to get her father or brother (I forget which) to be the bearer of letters to different single men, who she thought might be persuaded to do her the favour, saying that her only resource was to become a sister of charity if her present employment failed and that she hated the idea. Charlotte naturally looked with curiosity to people of her own condition. This woman almost frightened her. 'She declares there is nothing she can turn to, and laughs at the idea of delicacy,--and she is only ten years older than I am!' I did not see the connection till she said, 'Well, Polly, I should hate being a sister of charity; I suppose that would shock some people, but I should.' I thought she would have as much feeling as a nurse as most people, and more than some. She said she did not know how people could bear the constant pressure of misery, and never to change except to a new form of it. It would be impossible to keep one's natural feelings. I promised her a better destiny than to go begging any one to marry her, or to lose her natural feelings as a sister of charity. She said, 'My youth is leaving me; I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet.' At such times she seemed to think that most human beings were destined by the pressure of worldly interests to lose one faculty and feeling after another 'till they went dead altogether. I hope I shall be put in my grave as soon as I'm dead; I don't want to walk about so.' Here we always differed. I thought the degradation of nature she feared was a consequence of poverty, and that she should give her attention to earning money. Sometimes she admitted this, but could find no means of earning money. At others she seemed afraid of letting her thoughts dwell on the subject, saying it brought on the worst palsy of all. Indeed, in her position, nothing less than entire constant absorption in petty money matters could have scraped together a provision. "Of course artists and authors stood high with Charlotte, and the best thing after their works would have been their company. She used very inconsistently to rail at money and money-getting, and then wish she was able to visit all the large towns in Europe, see all the sights and know all the celebrities. This was her notion of literary fame,--a passport to the society of clever people . . . When she had become acquainted with the people and ways at Brussels her life became monotonous, and she fell into the same hopeless state as at Miss W---'s, though in a less degree. I wrote to her, urging her to go home or elsewhere; she had got what she wanted (French), and there was at least novelty in a new place, if no improvement. That if she sank into deeper gloom she would soon not have energy to go, and she was too far from home for her friends to hear of her condition and order her home as they had done from Miss W---'s. She wrote that I had done her a great service, that she should certainly follow my advice, and was much obliged to me. I have often wondered at this letter. Though she patiently tolerated advice, she could always quietly put it aside, and do as she thought fit. More than once afterwards she mentioned the 'service' I had done her. She sent me 10_l_. to New Zealand, on hearing some exaggerated accounts of my circumstances, and told me she hoped it would come in seasonably; it was a debt she owed me 'for the service I had done her.' I should think 10_l_. was a quarter of her income. The 'service' was mentioned as an apology, but kindness was the real motive." The first break in this life of regular duties and employments came heavily and sadly. Martha--pretty, winning, mischievous, tricksome Martha--was taken ill suddenly at the Chateau de Koekelberg. Her sister tended her with devoted love; but it was all in vain; in a few days she died. Charlotte's own short account of this event is as follows:-- "Martha T.'s illness was unknown to me till the day before she died. I hastened to Koekelberg the next morning--unconscious that she was in great danger--and was told that it was finished. She had died in the night. Mary was taken away to Bruxelles. I have seen Mary frequently since. She is in no ways crushed by the event; but while Martha was ill, she was to her more than a mother--more than a sister: watching, nursing, cherishing her so tenderly, so unweariedly. She appears calm and serious now; no bursts of violent emotion; no exaggeration of distress. I have seen Martha's grave--the place where her ashes lie in a foreign country." Who that has read "Shirley" does not remember the few lines--perhaps half a page--of sad recollection? "He has no idea that little Jessy will die young, she is so gay, and chattering, and arch--original even now; passionate when provoked, but most affectionate if caressed; by turns gentle and rattling; exacting yet generous; fearless . . . yet reliant on any who will help her. Jessy, with her little piquant face, engaging prattle, and winning ways, is made to be a pet. * * * * * "Do you know this place? No, you never saw it; but you recognise the nature of these trees, this foliage--the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are these dim garlands of everlasting flowers. Here is the place: green sod and a grey marble head-stone--Jessy sleeps below. She lived through an April day; much loved was she, much loving. She often, in her brief life, shed tears--she had frequent sorrows; she smiled between, gladdening whatever saw her. Her death was tranquil and happy in Rose's guardian arms, for Rose had been her stay and defence through many trials; the dying and the watching English girls were at that hour alone in a foreign country, and the soil of that country gave Jessy a grave. * * * * * "But, Jessy, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky; but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest; it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower" (Haworth): "it rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard: the nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago: a howling, rainy autumn evening too--when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new made in a heretic cemetery, sat near a wood fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for, so long as they lived; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling; and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them; Life and Friendship yet blessed them: but Jessy lay cold, coffined, solitary--only the sod screening her from the storm." This was the first death that had occurred in the small circle of Charlotte's immediate and intimate friends since the loss of her two sisters long ago. She was still in the midst of her deep sympathy with "Mary," when word came from home that her aunt, Miss Branwell, was ailing--was very ill. Emily and Charlotte immediately resolved to go home straight, and hastily packed up for England, doubtful whether they should ever return to Brussels or not, leaving all their relations with M. and Madame Heger, and the pensionnat, uprooted, and uncertain of any future existence. Even before their departure, on the morning after they received the first intelligence of illness--when they were on the very point of starting--came a second letter, telling them of their aunt's death. It could not hasten their movements, for every arrangement had been made for speed. They sailed from Antwerp; they travelled night and day, and got home on a Tuesday morning. The funeral and all was over, and Mr. Bronte and Anne were sitting together, in quiet grief for the loss of one who had done her part well in their household for nearly twenty years, and earned the regard and respect of many who never knew how much they should miss her till she was gone. The small property which she had accumulated, by dint of personal frugality and self-denial, was bequeathed to her nieces. Branwell, her darling, was to have had his share; but his reckless expenditure had distressed the good old lady, and his name was omitted in her will. When the first shock was over, the three sisters began to enjoy the full relish of meeting again, after the longest separation they had had in their lives. They had much to tell of the past, and much to settle for the future. Anne had been for some little time in a situation, to which she was to return at the end of the Christmas holidays. For another year or so they were again to be all three apart; and, after that, the happy vision of being together and opening a school was to be realised. Of course they did not now look forward to settling at Burlington, or any other place which would take them away from their father; but the small sum which they each independently possessed would enable them to effect such alterations in the parsonage-house at Haworth as would adapt it to the reception of pupils. Anne's plans for the interval were fixed. Emily quickly decided to be the daughter to remain at home. About Charlotte there was much deliberation and some discussion. Even in all the haste of their sudden departure from Brussels, M. Heger had found time to write a letter of sympathy to Mr. Bronte on the loss which he had just sustained; a letter containing such a graceful appreciation of the daughters' characters, under the form of a tribute of respect to their father, that I should have been tempted to copy it, even had there not also been a proposal made in it respecting Charlotte, which deserves a place in the record of her life. "Au Reverend Monsieur Bronte, Pasteur Evangelique, &c, &c. "Samedi, 5 Obre. "MONSIEUR, "Un evenement bien triste decide mesdemoiselles vas filles a retourner brusquement en Angleterre, ce depart qui nous afflige beaucoup a cependant ma complete approbation; il est bien naturel qu'elles cherchent a vous consoler de ce que le ciel vient de vous oter, on se serrant autour de vous, poui mieux vous faire apprecier ce que le ciel vous a donne et ce qu'il vous laisse encore. J'espere que vous me pardonnerez, Monsieur, de profiter de cette circonstance pour vous faire parvenir l'expression de mon respect; je n'ai pas l'honneur de vous connaitre personnellement, et cependant j'eprouve pour votre personne un sentiment de sincere veneration, car en jugeant un pere de famille par ses enfants on ne risque pas de se tromper, et sous ce rapport l'education et les sentiments que nous avons trouves dans mesdemoiselles vos filles n'ont pu que nous donner une tres-haute idee de votre merite et de votre caractere. Vous apprendrez sans doute avec plaisir que vos enfants ont fait du progres tresremarquable dans toutes les branches de l'enseignenient, et que ces progres sont entierement du a leur amour pour le travail et a leur perseverance; nous n'avons eu que bien peu a faire avec de pareilles eleves; leur avancement est votre oeuvre bien plus que la notre; nous n'avons pas eu a leur apprendre le prix du temps et de l'instruction, elles avaient appris tout cela dans la maison paternelle, et nous n'avons eu, pour notre part, que le faible merite de diriger leurs efforts et de fournir un aliment convenable a la louable activite que vos filles ont puisees dans votre exemple et dans vos lecons. Puissent les eloges meritees que nous donnons a vos enfants vous etre de quelque consolation dans le malheur que vous afflige; c'est la notre espoir en vous ecrivant, et ce sera, pour Mesdemoiselles Charlotte et Emily, une douce et belle recompense de leurs travaux. "En perdant nos deux cheres eleves, nous ne devons pas vous cacher que nous eprouvons a la fois et du chagrin et de l'inquietude; nous sommes affliges parce que cette brusque separation vient briser l'affection presque paternelle que nous leur avons vouee, et notre peine s'augmente a la vue de tant de travaux interrompues, de tant de choses bien commencees, et qui ne demandent que quelque temps encore pour etre menees a bonne fin. Dans un an, chacune de vos demoiselles eut ete entierement premunie contre les eventualites de l'avenir; chacune d'elles acquerait a la fois et l'instruction et la science d'enseignement; Mlle Emily allait apprendre le piano; recevoir les lecons du meilleur professeur que nous ayons en Belgique, et deja elle avait elle-meme de petites eleves; elle perdait donc a la fois un reste d'ignorance et un reste plus genant encore de timidite; Mlle Charlotte commencait a donner des lecons en francais, et d'acquerir cette assurance, cet aplomb si necessaire dans l'enseignement; encore un an tout au plus et l'oeuvre etait achevee et bien achevee. Alors nous aurions pu, si cela vous eut convenu, offrir a mesdemoiselles vos filles ou du moins a l'une des deux une position qui eut ete dans ses gouts, et qui lui eut donne cette douce independance si difficile a trouver pour une jeune personne. Ce n'est pas, croyez le bien, Monsieur, ce n'est pas ici pour nous une question d'interet personnel, c'est une question d'affection; vous me pardonnerez si nous vous parlons de vos enfants, si nous nous occupons de leur avenir, comme si elles faisaient partie de notre famille; leurs qualites personnelles, leur bon vouloir, leur zele extreme sont les seules causes qui nous poussent a nous hasarder de la sorte. Nous savons, Monsieur, que vous peserez plus murement et plus sagement que nous la consequence qu'aurait pour l'avenir une interruption complete dans les etudes de vos deux filles; vous deciderez ce qu'il faut faire, et vous nous pardonnerez notre franchise, si vous daignez considerer que le motif qui nous fait agir est une affection bien desinteressee et qui s'affligerait beaucoup de devoir deja se resigner a n'etre plus utile a vos chers enfants. "Agreez, je vous prie, Monsieur, l'expression respectueuse de mes sentiments de haute consideration. "C. HEGER." There was so much truth, as well as so much kindness in this letter--it was so obvious that a second year of instruction would be far more valuable than the first, that there was no long hesitation before it was decided that Charlotte should return to Brussels. Meanwhile, they enjoyed their Christmas all together inexpressibly. Branwell was with them; that was always a pleasure at this time; whatever might be his faults, or even his vices, his sisters yet held him up as their family hope, as they trusted that he would some day be their family pride. They blinded themselves to the magnitude of the failings of which they were now and then told, by persuading themselves that such failings were common to all men of any strength of character; for, till sad experience taught them better, they fell into the usual error of confounding strong passions with strong character. Charlotte's friend came over to see her, and she returned the visit. Her Brussels life must have seemed like a dream, so completely, in this short space of time, did she fall back into the old household ways; with more of household independence than she could ever have had during her aunt's lifetime. Winter though it was, the sisters took their accustomed walks on the snow-covered moors; or went often down the long road to Keighley, for such books as had been added to the library there during their absence from England. CHAPTER XII Towards the end of January, the time came for Charlotte to return to Brussels. Her journey thither was rather disastrous. She had to make her way alone; and the train from Leeds to London, which should have reached Euston-square early in the afternoon, was so much delayed that it did not get in till ten at night. She had intended to seek out the Chapter Coffee-house, where she had stayed before, and which would have been near the place where the steam-boats lay; but she appears to have been frightened by the idea of arriving at an hour which, to Yorkshire notions, was so late and unseemly; and taking a cab, therefore, at the station, she drove straight to the London Bridge Wharf, and desired a waterman to row her to the Ostend packet, which was to sail the next morning. She described to me, pretty much as she has since described it in "Villette," her sense of loneliness, and yet her strange pleasure in the excitement of the situation, as in the dead of that winter's night she went swiftly over the dark river to the black hull's side, and was at first refused leave to ascend to the deck. "No passengers might sleep on board," they said, with some appearance of disrespect. She looked back to the lights and subdued noises of London--that "Mighty Heart" in which she had no place--and, standing up in the rocking boat, she asked to speak to some one in authority on board the packet. He came, and her quiet simple statement of her wish, and her reason for it, quelled the feeling of sneering distrust in those who had first heard her request; and impressed the authority so favourably that he allowed her to come on board, and take possession of a berth. The next morning she sailed; and at seven on Sunday evening she reached the Rue d'Isabelle once more; having only left Haworth on Friday morning at an early hour. Her salary was 16_l_. a year; out of which she had to pay for her German lessons, for which she was charged as much (the lessons being probably rated by time) as when Emily learnt with her and divided the expense, viz., ten francs a month. By Miss Bronte's own desire, she gave her English lessons in the _classe_, or schoolroom, without the supervision of Madame or M. Heger. They offered to be present, with a view to maintain order among the unruly Belgian girls; but she declined this, saying that she would rather enforce discipline by her own manner and character than be indebted for obedience to the presence of a _gendarme_. She ruled over a new schoolroom, which had been built on the space in the play-ground adjoining the house. Over that First Class she was _surveillante_ at all hours; and henceforward she was called _Mademoiselle_ Charlotte by M. Heger's orders. She continued her own studies, principally attending to German, and to Literature; and every Sunday she went alone to the German and English chapels. Her walks too were solitary, and principally taken in the allee defendue, where she was secure from intrusion. This solitude was a perilous luxury to one of her temperament; so liable as she was to morbid and acute mental suffering. On March 6th, 1843, she writes thus:-- "I am settled by this time, of course. I am not too much overloaded with occupation; and besides teaching English, I have time to improve myself in German. I ought to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for my good fortunes. I hope I am thankful; and if I could always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely, or long for companionship, or friendship, or whatever they call it, I should do very well. As I told you before, M. and Madame Heger are the only two persons in the house for whom I really experience regard and esteem, and of course, I cannot be always with them, nor even very often. They told me, when I first returned, that I was to consider their sitting- room my sitting-room also, and to go there whenever I was not engaged in the schoolroom. This, however, I cannot do. In the daytime it is a public room, where music-masters and mistresses are constantly passing in and out; and in the evening, I will not, and ought not to intrude on M. and Madame Heger and their children. Thus I am a good deal by myself, out of school-hours; but that does not signify. I now regularly give English lessons to M. Heger and his brother-in-law. They get on with wonderful rapidity; especially the first. He already begins to speak English very decently. If you could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like Englishmen, and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to all eternity. "The Carnival is just over, and we have entered upon the gloom and abstinence of Lent. The first day of Lent we had coffee without milk for breakfast; vinegar and vegetables, with a very little salt fish, for dinner; and bread for supper. The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery. M. Heger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks. It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing. I have been twice to the D.'s" (those cousins of "Mary's" of whom I have before made mention). "When she leaves Bruxelles, I shall have nowhere to go to. I have had two letters from Mary. She does not tell me she has been ill, and she does not complain; but her letters are not the letters of a person in the enjoyment of great happiness. She has nobody to be as good to her as M. Heger is to me; to lend her books; to converse with her sometimes, &c. "Good-bye. When I say so, it seems to me that you will hardly hear me; all the waves of the Channel heaving and roaring between must deaden the sound." From the tone of this letter, it may easily be perceived that the Brussels of 1843 was a different place from that of 1842. Then she had Emily for a daily and nightly solace and companion. She had the weekly variety of a visit to the family of the D.s; and she had the frequent happiness of seeing "Mary" and Martha. Now Emily was far away in Haworth--where she or any other loved one, might die, before Charlotte, with her utmost speed, could reach them, as experience, in her aunt's case, had taught her. The D.s were leaving Brussels; so, henceforth, her weekly holiday would have to be passed in the Rue d'Isabelle, or so she thought. "Mary" was gone off on her own independent course; Martha alone remained--still and quiet for ever, in the cemetery beyond the Porte de Louvain. The weather, too, for the first few weeks after Charlotte's return, had been piercingly cold; and her feeble constitution was always painfully sensitive to an inclement season. Mere bodily pain, however acute, she could always put aside; but too often ill-health assailed her in a part far more to be dreaded. Her depression of spirits, when she was not well, was pitiful in its extremity. She was aware that it was constitutional, and could reason about it; but no reasoning prevented her suffering mental agony, while the bodily cause remained in force. The Hegers have discovered, since the publication of "Villette," that at this beginning of her career as English teacher in their school, the conduct of her pupils was often impertinent and mutinous in the highest degree. But of this they were unaware at the time, as she had declined their presence, and never made any complaint. Still it must have been a depressing thought to her at this period, that her joyous, healthy, obtuse pupils were so little answerable to the powers she could bring to bear upon them; and though from their own testimony, her patience, firmness, and resolution, at length obtained their just reward, yet with one so weak in health and spirits, the reaction after such struggles as she frequently had with her pupils, must have been very sad and painful. She thus writes to her friend E.:-- "April, 1843. "Is there any talk of your coming to Brussels? During the bitter cold weather we had through February, and the principal part of March, I did not regret that you had not accompanied me. If I had seen you shivering as I shivered myself, if I had seen your hands and feet as red and swelled as mine were, my discomfort would just have been doubled. I can do very well under this sort of thing; it does not fret me; it only makes me numb and silent; but if you were to pass a winter in Belgium, you would be ill. However, more genial weather is coming now, and I wish you were here. Yet I never have pressed you, and never would press you too warmly to come. There are privations and humiliations to submit to; there is monotony and uniformity of life; and, above all, there is a constant sense of solitude in the midst of numbers. The Protestant, the foreigner, is a solitary being, whether as teacher or pupil. I do not say this by way of complaining of my own lot; for though I acknowledge that there are certain disadvantages in my present position, what position on earth is without them? And, whenever I turn back to compare what I am with what I was--my place here with my place at Mrs. ---'s for instance--I am thankful. There was an observation in your last letter which excited, for a moment, my wrath. At first, I thought it would be folly to reply to it, and I would let it die. Afterwards, I determined to give one answer, once for all. 'Three or four people,' it seems, 'have the idea that the future _epoux_ of Mademoiselle Bronte is on the Continent.' These people are wiser than I am. They could not believe that I crossed the sea merely to return as teacher to Madame Hegers. I must have some more powerful motive than respect for my master and mistress, gratitude for their kindness, &c., to induce me to refuse a salary of 50_l_. in England, and accept one of 16_l_. in Belgium. I must, forsooth, have some remote hope of entrapping a husband somehow, or somewhere. If these charitable people knew the total seclusion of the life I lead,--that I never exchange a word with any other man than Monsieur Heger, and seldom indeed with him,--they would, perhaps, cease to suppose that any such chimerical and groundless notion had influenced my proceedings. Have I said enough to clear myself of so silly an imputation? Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other things than wedlock." The following is an extract, from one of the few letters which have been preserved, of her correspondence with her sister Emily:-- "May 29, 1843 "I get on here from day to day in a Robinson-Crusoe-like sort of way, very lonely, but that does not signify. In other respects, I have nothing substantial to complain of, nor is this a cause for complaint. I hope you are well. Walk out often on the moors. My love to Tabby. I hope she keeps well." And about this time she wrote to her father, "June 2nd, 1818, "I was very glad to hear from home. I had begun to get low-spirited at not receiving any news, and to entertain indefinite fears that something was wrong. You do not say anything about your own health, but I hope you are well, and Emily also. I am afraid she will have a good deal of hard work to do now that Hannah" (a servant-girl who had been assisting Tabby) "is gone. I am exceedingly glad to hear that you still keep Tabby" (considerably upwards of seventy). "It is an act of great charity to her, and I do not think it will be unrewarded, for she is very faithful, and will always serve you, when she has occasion, to the best of her abilities; besides, she will be company for Emily, who, without her, would be very lonely." I gave a _devoir_, written after she had been four months under M. Heger's tuition. I will now copy out another, written nearly a year later, during which the progress made appears to me very great. "31 Mai, 1843. "SUR LA MORT DE NAPOLEON. "Napoleon naquit en Corse et mourut a Ste. Helene. Entre ces deux iles rien qu'un vaste et brulant desert et l'ocean immense. Il naquit fils d'un simple gentilhomme, et mourut empereur, mais sans couronne et dans les fers. Entre son berceau et sa tombe qu'y a-t-il? la carriere d'un soldat parvenu, des champs de bataille, une mer de sang, un trone, puis du sang encore, et des fers. Sa vie, c'est l'arc en ciel; les deux points extremes touchent la terre, la comble lumi-neuse mesure les cieux. Sur Napoleon au berceau une mere brillait; dans la maison paternelle il avait des freres et des soeurs; plus tard dans son palais il eut une femme qui l'aimait. Mais sur son lit de mort Napoleon est seul; plus de mere, ni de frere, ni de soeur, ni de femme, ni d'enfant!! D'autres ont dit et rediront ses exploits, moi, je m'arrete a contempler l'abandonnement de sa derniere heure! "Il est la, exile et captif, enchaine sur un ecueil. Nouveau Promethee il subit le chatiment de son orgueil! Promethee avait voulu etre Dieu et Createur; il deroba le feu du Ciel pour animer le corps qu'il avait forme. Et lui, Buonaparte, il a voulu creer, non pas un homme, mais un empire, et pour donner une existence, une ame, a son oeuvre gigantesque, il n'a pas hesite a arracher la vie a des nations entieres. Jupiter indigne de l'impiete de Promethee, le riva vivant a la cime du Caucase. Ainsi, pour punir l'ambition rapace de Buonaparte, la Providence l'a enchaine, jusqu'a ce que la mort s'en suivit, sur un roc isole de l'Atlantique. Peut-etre la aussi a-t-il senti lui fouillant le flanc cet insatiable vautour dont parle la fable, peut-etre a-t-il souffert aussi cette soif du coeur, cette faim de l'ame, qui torturent l'exile, loin de sa famille et de sa patrie. Mais parler ainsi n'est-ce pas attribuer gratuitement a Napoleon une humaine faiblesse qu'il n'eprouva jamais? Quand donc s'est-il laisse enchainer par un lien d'affection? Sans doute d'autres conquerants ont hesite dans leur carriere de gloire, arretes par un obstacle d'amour ou d'amitie, retenus par la main d'une femme, rappeles par la voix d'un ami--lui, jamais! Il n'eut pas besoin, comme Ulysse, de se lier au mat du navire, ni de se boucher les oreilles avec de la cire; il ne redoutait pas le chant des Sirenes--il le dedaignait; il se fit marbre et fer pour executer ses grands projets. Napoleon ne se regardait pas comme un homme, mais comme l'incarnation d'un peuple. Il n'aimait pas; il ne considerait ses amis et ses proches que comme des instruments auxquels il tint, tant qu'ils furent utiles, et qu'il jeta de cote quand ils cesserent de l'etre. Qu'on ne se permette donc pas d'approcher du sepulcre du Corse avec sentiments de pitie, ou de souiller de larmes la pierre qui couvre ses restes, son ame repudierait tout cela. On a dit, je le sais, qu'elle fut cruelle la main qui le separa de sa femme et de son enfant. Non, c'etait une main qui, comme la sienne, ne tremblait ni de passion ni de crainte, c'etait la main d'un homme froid, convaincu, qui avait su deviner Buonaparte; et voici ce que disait cet homme que la defaite n'a pu humilier, ni la victoire enorgueiller. 'Marie-Louise n'est pas la femme de Napoleon; c'est la France que Napoleon a epousee; c'est la France qu'il aime, leur union enfante la perte de l'Europe; voila la divorce que je veux; voila l'union qu'il faut briser.' "La voix des timides et des traitres protesta contre cette sentence. 'C'est abuser de droit de la victoire! C'est fouler aux pieds le vaincu! Que l'Angleterre se montre clemente, qu'elle ouvre ses bras pour recevoir comme hote son ennemi desarme.' L'Angleterre aurait peut-etre ecoute ce conseii, car partout et toujours il y a des ames faibles et timorees bientot seduites par la flatterie ou effrayees par le reproche. Mais la Providence permit qu'un homme se trouvat qui n'a jamais su ce que c'est que la crainte; qui aima sa patrie mieux que sa renommee; impenetrable devant les menaces, inaccessible aux louanges, il se presenta devant le conseil de la nation, et levant son front tranquille en haut, il osa dire: 'Que la trahison se taise! car c'est trahir que de conseiller de temporiser avec Buonaparte. Moi je sais ce que sont ces guerres dont l'Europe saigne encore, comme une victime sous le couteau du boucher. Il faut en finir avec Napoleon Buonaparte. Vous vous effrayez a tort d'un mot si dur! Je n'ai pas de magnanimite, dit-on? Soit! que m'importe ce qu'on dit de moi? Je n'ai pas ici a me faire une reputation de heros magnanime, mais a guerir, si la cure est possible, l'Europe qui se meurt, epuisee de ressources et de sang, l'Europe dont vous negligez les vrais interets, pre-occupes que vous etes d'une vaine renommee de clemence. Vous etes faibles! Eh bien! je viens vous aider. Envoyez Buonaparte a Ste. Helene! n'hesitez pas, ne cherchez pas un autre endroit; c'est le seul convenable. Je vous le dis, j'ai reflechi pour vous; c'est la qu'il doit etre et non pas ailleurs. Quant a Napoleon, homme, soldat, je n'ai rien contre lui; c'est un lion royal, aupres de qui vous n'etes que des chacals. Mais Napoleon Empereur, c'est autre chose, je l'extirperai du sol de l'Europe.' Et celui qui parla ainsi toujours sut garder sa promesse, celle-la comme toutes les autres. Je l'ai dit, et je le repete, cet homme est l'egal de Napoleon par le genie; comme trempe de caractere, comme droiture, comme elevation de pensee et de but, il est d'une tout autre espece. Napoleon Buonaparte etait avide de renommee et de gloire; Arthur Wellesley ne se soucie ni de l'une ni de l'autre; l'opinion publique, la popularite, etaient choses de grand valeur aux yeux de Napoleon; pour Wellington l'opinion publique est une rumeur, un rien que le souffle de son inflexible volonte fait disparaitre comme une bulle de savon. Napoleon flattait le peuple; Wellington le brusqne; l'un cherchait les applau-dissements, l'autre ne se soucie que du temoignage de sa conscience; quand elle approuve, c'est assez; toute autre louange l'obsede. Aussi ce peuple, qui adorait Buonaparte s'irritait, s'insurgeait contre la morgue de Wellington: parfois il lui temoigna sa colere et sa haine par des grognements, par des hurlements de betes fauves; et alors, avec une impassibilite de senateur romain, le moderne Coriolan toisait du regard l'emeute furieuse; il croisait ses bras nerveux sur sa large poitrine, et seul, debout sur son seuil, il attendait, il bravait cette tempete populaire dont les flots venaient mourir a quelques pas de lui: et quand la foule, honteuse de sa rebellion, venait lecher les pieds du maitre, le hautain patricien meprisait l'hommage d'aujourd'hui comme la haine d'hier, et dans les rues de Londres, et devant son palais ducal d'Apsley, il repoussait d'un genre plein de froid dedain l'incommode empressement du peuple enthousiaste. Cette fierte neanmoins n'excluait pas en lui une rare modestie; partout il se soustrait a l'eloge; se derobe au panegyrique; jamais il ne parle de ses exploits, et jamais il ne souffre qu'un autre lui en parle en sa presence. Son caractere egale en grandeur et surpasse en verite celui de tout autre heros ancien ou moderne. La gloire de Napoleon crut en une nuit, comme la vigne de Jonas, et il suffit d'un jour pour la fletrir; la gloire de Wellington est comme les vieux chenes qui ombragent le chateau de ses peres sur les rives du Shannon; le chene croit lentement; il lui faut du temps pour pousser vers le ciel ses branches noueuses, et pour enfoncer dans le sol ces racines profondes qui s'enchevetrent dans les fondements solides de la terre; mais alors, l'arbre seculaire, inebranlable comme le roc ou il a sa base, brave et la faux du temps et l'effort des vents et des tempetes. Il faudra peut-etre un siecle a l'Angleterre pour qu'elle connaise la valeur de son heros. Dans un siecle, l'Europe entiere saura combien Wellington a des droits a sa reconnaissance." How often in writing this paper "in a strange land," must Miss Bronte have thought of the old childish disputes in the kitchen of Haworth parsonage, touching the respective merits of Wellington and Buonaparte! Although the title given to her _devoir_ is, "On the Death of Napoleon," she seems yet to have considered it a point of honour rather to sing praises to an English hero than to dwell on the character of a foreigner, placed as she was among those who cared little either for an England or for Wellington. She now felt that she had made great progress towards obtaining proficiency in the French language, which had been her main object in coming to Brussels. But to the zealous learner "Alps on Alps arise." No sooner is one difficulty surmounted than some other desirable attainment appears, and must be laboured after. A knowledge of German now became her object; and she resolved to compel herself to remain in Brussels till that was gained. The strong yearning to go home came upon her; the stronger self-denying will forbade. There was a great internal struggle; every fibre of her heart quivered in the strain to master her will; and, when she conquered herself, she remained, not like a victor calm and supreme on the throne, but like a panting, torn, and suffering victim. Her nerves and her spirits gave way. Her health became much shaken. "Brussels, August 1st, 1843. "If I complain in this letter, have mercy and don't blame me, for, I forewarn you, I am in low spirits, and that earth and heaven are dreary and empty to me at this moment. In a few days our vacation will begin; everybody is joyous and animated at the prospect, because everybody is to go home. I know that I am to stay here during the five weeks that the holidays last, and that I shall be much alone during that time, and consequently get downcast, and find both days and nights of a weary length. It is the first time in my life that I have really dreaded the vacation. Alas! I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart; and I do so wish to go home. Is not this childish? Pardon me, for I cannot help it. However, though I am not strong enough to bear up cheerfully, I can still bear up; and I will continue to stay (D. V.) some months longer, till I have acquired German; and then I hope to see all your faces again. Would that the vacation were well over! it will pass so slowly. Do have the Christian charity to write me a long, long letter; fill it with the minutest details; nothing will be uninteresting. Do not think it is because people are unkind to me that I wish to leave Belgium; nothing of the sort. Everybody is abundantly civil, but home-sickness keeps creeping over me. I cannot shake it off. Believe me, very merrily, vivaciously, gaily, yours, "C.B." The _grandes vacances_ began soon after the date of this letter, when she was left in the great deserted pensionnat, with only one teacher for a companion. This teacher, a Frenchwoman, had always been uncongenial to her; but, left to each other's sole companionship, Charlotte soon discovered that her associate was more profligate, more steeped in a kind of cold, systematic sensuality, than she had before imagined it possible for a human being to be; and her whole nature revolted from this woman's society. A low nervous fever was gaining upon Miss Bronte. She had never been a good sleeper, but now she could not sleep at all. Whatever had been disagreeable, or obnoxious, to her during the day, was presented when it was over with exaggerated vividness to her disordered fancy. There were causes for distress and anxiety in the news from home, particularly as regarded Branwell. In the dead of the night, lying awake at the end of the long deserted dormitory, in the vast and silent house, every fear respecting those whom she loved, and who were so far off in another country, became a terrible reality, oppressing her and choking up the very life-blood in her heart. Those nights were times of sick, dreary, wakeful misery; precursors of many such in after years. In the daytime, driven abroad by loathing of her companion and by the weak restlessness of fever, she tried to walk herself into such a state of bodily fatigue as would induce sleep. So she went out, and with weary steps would traverse the Boulevards and the streets, sometimes for hours together; faltering and resting occasionally on some of the many benches placed for the repose of happy groups, or for solitary wanderers like herself. Then up again--anywhere but to the pensionnat--out to the cemetery where Martha lay--out beyond it, to the hills whence there is nothing to be seen but fields as far as the horizon. The shades of evening made her retrace her footsteps--sick for want of food, but not hungry; fatigued with long continued exercise--yet restless still, and doomed to another weary, haunted night of sleeplessness. She would thread the streets in the neighbourhood of the Rue d'Isabelle, and yet avoid it and its occupant, till as late an hour as she dared be out. At last, she was compelled to keep her bed for some days, and this compulsory rest did her good. She was weak, but less depressed in spirits than she had been, when the school re-opened, and her positive practical duties recommenced. She writes thus:-- "October 13th, 1843 "Mary is getting on well, as she deserves to do. I often hear from her. Her letters and yours are one of my few pleasures. She urges me very much to leave Brussels and go to her; but, at present, however tempted to take such a step, I should not feel justified in doing so. To leave a certainty for a complete uncertainty, would be to the last degree imprudent. Notwithstanding that, Brussels is indeed desolate to me now. Since the D.s left, I have had no friend. I had, indeed, some very kind acquaintances in the family of a Dr. ---, but they, too, are gone now. They left in the latter part of August, and I am completely alone. I cannot count the Belgians anything. It is a curious position to be so utterly solitary in the midst of numbers. Sometimes the solitude oppresses me to an excess. One day, lately, I felt as if I could bear it no longer, and I went to Madame Heger, and gave her notice. If it had depended on her, I should certainly have soon been at liberty; but M. Heger, having heard of what was in agitation, sent for me the day after, and pronounced with vehemence his decision, that I should not leave. I could not, at that time, have persevered in my intention without exciting him to anger; so I promised to stay a little while longer. How long that will be, I do not know. I should not like to return to England to do nothing. I am too old for that now; but if I could hear of a favourable opportunity for commencing a school, I think I should embrace it. We have as yet no fires here, and I suffer much from cold; otherwise, I am well in health. Mr. --- will take this letter to England. He is a pretty-looking and pretty behaved young man, apparently constructed without a backbone; by which I don't allude to his corporal spine, which is all right enough, but to his character. "I get on here after a fashion; but now that Mary D. has left Brussels, I have nobody to speak to, for I count the Belgians as nothing. Sometimes I ask myself how long shall I stay here; but as yet I have only asked the question; I have not answered it. However, when I have acquired as much German as I think fit, I think I shall pack up bag and baggage and depart. Twinges of home-sickness cut me to the heart, every now and then. To-day the weather is glaring, and I am stupified with a bad cold and headache. I have nothing to tell you. One day is like another in this place. I know you, living in the country, can hardly believe it is possible life can be monotonous in the centre of a brilliant capital like Brussels; but so it is. I feel it most on holidays, when all the girls and teachers go out to visit, and it sometimes happens that I am left, during several hours, quite alone, with four great desolate schoolrooms at my disposition. I try to read, I try to write; but in vain. I then wander about from room to room, but the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs down one's spirits like lead. You will hardly believe that Madame Heger (good and kind as I have described her) never comes near me on these occasions. I own, I was astonished the first time I was left alone thus; when everybody else was enjoying the pleasures of a fete day with their friends, and she knew I was quite by myself, and never took the least notice of me. Yet, I understand, she praises me very much to everybody, and says what excellent lessons I give. She is not colder to me than she is to the other teachers; but they are less dependent on her than I am. They have relations and acquaintances in Bruxelles. You remember the letter she wrote me, when I was in England? How kind and affectionate that was? is it not odd? In the meantime, the complaints I make at present are a sort of relief which I permit myself. In all other respects I am well satisfied with my position, and you may say so to people who inquire after me (if any one does). Write to me, dear, whenever you can. You do a good deed when you send me a letter, for you comfort a very desolate heart." One of the reasons for the silent estrangement between Madame Heger and Miss Bronte, in the second year of her residence at Brussels, is to be found in the fact, that the English Protestant's dislike of Romanism increased with her knowledge of it, and its effects upon those who professed it; and when occasion called for an expression of opinion from Charlotte Bronte, she was uncompromising truth. Madame Heger, on the opposite side, was not merely a Roman Catholic, she was _devote_. Not of a warm or impulsive temperament, she was naturally governed by her conscience, rather than by her affections; and her conscience was in the hands of her religious guides. She considered any slight thrown upon her Church as blasphemy against the Holy Truth; and, though she was not given to open expression of her thoughts and feelings, yet her increasing coolness of behaviour showed how much her most cherished opinions had been wounded. Thus, although there was never any explanation of Madame Heger's change of manner, this may be given as one great reason why, about this time, Charlotte was made painfully conscious of a silent estrangement between them; an estrangement of which, perhaps, the former was hardly aware. I have before alluded to intelligence from home, calculated to distress Charlotte exceedingly with fears respecting Branwell, which I shall speak of more at large when the realisation of her worst apprehensions came to affect the daily life of herself and her sisters. I allude to the subject again here, in order that the reader may remember the gnawing, private cares, which she had to bury in her own heart; and the pain of which could only be smothered for a time under the diligent fulfilment of present duty. Another dim sorrow was faintly perceived at this time. Her father's eyesight began to fail; it was not unlikely that he might shortly become blind; more of his duty must devolve on a curate, and Mr. Bronte, always liberal, would have to pay at a higher rate than he had heretofore done for this assistance. She wrote thus to Emily:-- "Dec.1st, 1843. "This is Sunday morning. They are at their idolatrous 'messe,' and I am here, that is in the Refectoire. I should like uncommonly to be in the dining-room at home, or in the kitchen, or in the back kitchen. I should like even to be cutting up the hash, with the clerk and some register people at the other table, and you standing by, watching that I put enough flour, not too much pepper, and, above all, that I save the best pieces of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper, the first of which personages would be jumping about the dish and carving-knife, and the latter standing like a devouring flame on the kitchen-floor. To complete the picture, Tabby blowing the fire, in order to boil the potatoes to a sort of vegetable glue! How divine are these recollections to me at this moment! Yet I have no thought of coming home just now. I lack a real pretext for doing so; it is true this place is dismal to me, but I cannot go home without a fixed prospect when I get there; and this prospect must not be a situation; that would be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. _You_ call yourself idle! absurd, absurd! . . . Is papa well? Are you well? and Tabby? You ask about Queen Victoria's visit to Brussels. I saw her for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very well on the whole. They said she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle. Write to me again soon. Tell me whether papa really wants me very much to come home, and whether you do likewise. I have an idea that I should be of no use there--a sort of aged person upon the parish. I pray, with heart and soul, that all may continue well at Haworth; above all in our grey half-inhabited house. God bless the walls thereof! Safety, health, happiness, and prosperity to you, papa, and Tabby. Amen. "C. B." Towards the end of this year (1843) various reasons conspired with the causes of anxiety which have been mentioned, to make her feel that her presence was absolutely and imperatively required at home, while she had acquired all that she proposed to herself in coming to Brussels the second time; and was, moreover, no longer regarded with the former kindliness of feeling by Madame Heger. In consequence of this state of things, working down with sharp edge into a sensitive mind, she suddenly announced to that lady her immediate intention of returning to England. Both M. and Madame Heger agreed that it would be for the best, when they learnt only that part of the case which she could reveal to them--namely, Mr. Bronte's increasing blindness. But as the inevitable moment of separation from people and places, among which she had spent so many happy hours, drew near, her spirits gave way; she had the natural presentiment that she saw them all for the last time, and she received but a dead kind of comfort from being reminded by her friends that Brussels and Haworth were not so very far apart; that access from one place to the other was not so difficult or impracticable as her tears would seem to predicate; nay, there was some talk of one of Madame Heger's daughters being sent to her as a pupil, if she fulfilled her intention of trying to begin a school. To facilitate her success in this plan, should she ever engage in it, M. Heger gave her a kind of diploma, dated from, and sealed with the seal of the Athenee Royal de Bruxelles, certifying that she was perfectly capable of teaching the French language, having well studied the grammar and composition thereof, and, moreover, having prepared herself for teaching by studying and practising the best methods of instruction. This certificate is dated December 29th 1843, and on the 2nd of January, 1844, she arrived at Haworth. On the 23rd of the month she writes as follows:-- "Every one asks me what I am going to do, now that I am returned home; and every one seems to expect that I should immediately commence a school. In truth, it is what I should wish to do. I desire it above all things. I have sufficient money for the undertaking, and I hope now sufficient qualifications to give me a fair chance of success; yet I cannot yet permit myself to enter upon life--to touch the object which seems now within my reach, and which I have been so long straining to attain. You will ask me why? It is on papa's account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him (at least, as long as Branwell and Anne are absent), in order to pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God, I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait. "I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend. At parting he gave me a kind of diploma certifying my abilities as a teacher, sealed with the seal of the Athenee Royal, of which he is professor. I was surprised also at the degree of regret expressed by my Belgian pupils, when they knew I was going to leave. I did not think it had been in their phlegmatic nature . . . I do not know whether you feel as I do, but there are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is tamed down and broken. I have fewer illusions; what I wish for now is active exertion--a stake in life. Haworth seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world. I no longer regard myself as young--indeed, I shall soon be twenty-eight; and it seems as if I ought to be working and braving the rough realities of the world, as other people do. It is, however, my duty to restrain this feeling at present, and I will endeavour to do so." Of course her absent sister and brother obtained a holiday to welcome her return home, and in a few weeks she was spared to pay a visit to her friend at B. But she was far from well or strong, and the short journey of fourteen miles seems to have fatigued her greatly. Soon after she came back to Haworth, in a letter to one of the household in which she had been staying, there occurs this passage:--"Our poor little cat has been ill two days, and is just dead. It is piteous to see even an animal lying lifeless. Emily is sorry." These few words relate to points in the characters of the two sisters, which I must dwell upon a little. Charlotte was more than commonly tender in her treatment of all dumb creatures, and they, with that fine instinct so often noticed, were invariably attracted towards her. The deep and exaggerated consciousness of her personal defects--the constitutional absence of hope, which made her slow to trust in human affection, and, consequently, slow to respond to any manifestation of it--made her manner shy and constrained to men and women, and even to children. We have seen something of this trembling distrust of her own capability of inspiring affection, in the grateful surprise she expresses at the regret felt by her Belgian pupils at her departure. But not merely were her actions kind, her words and tones were ever gentle and caressing, towards animals: and she quickly noticed the least want of care or tenderness on the part of others towards any poor brute creature. The readers of "Shirley" may remember that it is one of the tests which the heroine applies to her lover. "Do you know what soothsayers I would consult?" . . . "The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in my wainscot; the bird in frost and snow that pecks at my window for a crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee. I know somebody to whose knee the black cat loves to climb, against whose shoulder and cheek it likes to purr. The old dog always comes out of his kennel and wags his tail, and whines affectionately when somebody passes." [For "somebody" and "he," read "Charlotte Bronte" and "she."] "He quietly strokes the cat, and lets her sit while he conveniently can; and when he must disturb her by rising, he puts her softly down, and never flings her from him roughly: he always whistles to the dog, and gives him a caress." The feeling, which in Charlotte partook of something of the nature of an affection, was, with Emily, more of a passion. Some one speaking of her to me, in a careless kind of strength of expression, said, "she never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals." The helplessness of an animal was its passport to Charlotte's heart; the fierce, wild, intractability of its nature was what often recommended it to Emily. Speaking of her dead sister, the former told me that from her many traits in Shirley's character were taken; her way of sitting on the rug reading, with her arm round her rough bull-dog's neck; her calling to a strange dog, running past, with hanging head and lolling tongue, to give it a merciful draught of water, its maddened snap at her, her nobly stern presence of mind, going right into the kitchen, and taking up one of Tabby's red-hot Italian irons to sear the bitten place, and telling no one, till the danger was well-nigh over, for fear of the terrors that might beset their weaker minds. All this, looked upon as a well-invented fiction in "Shirley," was written down by Charlotte with streaming eyes; it was the literal true account of what Emily had done. The same tawny bull-dog (with his "strangled whistle"), called "Tartar" in "Shirley," was "Keeper" in Haworth parsonage; a gift to Emily. With the gift came a warning. Keeper was faithful to the depths of his nature as long as he was with friends; but he who struck him with a stick or whip, roused the relentless nature of the brute, who flew at his throat forthwith, and held him there till one or the other was at the point of death. Now Keeper's household fault was this. He loved to steal upstairs, and stretch his square, tawny limbs, on the comfortable beds, covered over with delicate white counterpanes. But the cleanliness of the parsonage arrangements was perfect; and this habit of Keeper's was so objectionable, that Emily, in reply to Tabby's remonstrances, declared that, if he was found again transgressing, she herself, in defiance of warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half-triumphantly, half-tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone. She went upstairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage below, full of the dark shadows of coming night. Down-stairs came Emily, dragging after her the unwilling Keeper, his hind legs set in a heavy attitude of resistance, held by the "scuft of his neck," but growling low and savagely all the time. The watchers would fain have spoken, but durst not, for fear of taking off Emily's attention, and causing her to avert her head for a moment from the enraged brute. She let him go, planted in a dark corner at the bottom of the stairs; no time was there to fetch stick or rod, for fear of the strangling clutch at her throat--her bare clenched fist struck against his red fierce eyes, before he had time to make his spring, and, in the language of the turf, she "punished him" till his eyes were swelled up, and the half-blind, stupified beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swollen head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself. The generous dog owed her no grudge; he loved her dearly ever after; he walked first among the mourners to her funeral; he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room, and never, so to speak, rejoiced, dog fashion, after her death. He, in his turn, was mourned over by the surviving sister. Let us somehow hope, in half Red Indian creed, that he follows Emily now; and, when he rests, sleeps on some soft white bed of dreams, unpunished when he awakens to the life of the land of shadows. Now we can understand the force of the words, "Our poor little cat is dead. Emily is sorry." CHAPTER XIII The moors were a great resource this spring; Emily and Charlotte walked out on them perpetually, "to the great damage of our shoes, but I hope, to the benefit of our health." The old plan of school-keeping was often discussed in these rambles; but in-doors they set with vigour to shirt- making for the absent Branwell, and pondered in silence over their past and future life. At last they came to a determination. "I have seriously entered into the enterprise of keeping a school--or rather, taking a limited number of pupils at home. That is, I have begun in good earnest to seek for pupils. I wrote to Mrs. --- " (the lady with whom she had lived as governess, just before going to Brussels), "not asking her for her daughter--I cannot do that--but informing her of my intention. I received an answer from Mr. --- expressive of, I believe, sincere regret that I had not informed them a month sooner, in which case, he said, they would gladly have sent me their own daughter, and also Colonel S.'s, but that now both were promised to Miss C. I was partly disappointed by this answer, and partly gratified; indeed, I derived quite an impulse of encouragement from the warm assurance that if I had but applied a little sooner they would certainly have sent me their daughter. I own I had misgivings that nobody would be willing to send a child for education to Haworth. These misgivings are partly done away with. I have written also to Mrs. B., and have enclosed the diploma which M. Heger gave me before I left Brussels. I have not yet received her answer, but I wait for it with some anxiety. I do not expect that she will send me any of her children, but if she would, I dare say she could recommend me other pupils. Unfortunately, she knows us only very slightly. As soon as I can get an assurance of only _one_ pupil, I will have cards of terms printed, and will commence the repairs necessary in the house. I wish all that to be done before winter. I think of fixing the board and English education at 25_l_. per annum." Again, at a later date, July 24th, in the same year, she writes:-- "I am driving on with my small matter as well as I can. I have written to all the friends on whom I have the slightest claim, and to some on whom I have no claim; Mrs. B., for example. On her, also, I have actually made bold to call. She was exceedingly polite; regretted that her children were already at school at Liverpool; thought the undertaking a most praiseworthy one, but feared I should have some difficulty in making it succeed on account of the _situation_. Such is the answer I receive from almost every one. I tell them the _retired situation_ is, in some points of view, an advantage; that were it in the midst of a large town I could not pretend to take pupils on terms so moderate (Mrs. B. remarked that she thought the terms very moderate), but that, as it is, not having house-rent to pay, we can offer the same privileges of education that are to be had in expensive seminaries, at little more than half their price; and as our number must be limited, we can devote a large share of time and pains to each pupil. Thank you for the very pretty little purse you have sent me. I make to you a curious return in the shape of half a dozen cards of terms. Make such use of them as your judgment shall dictate. You will see that I have fixed the sum at 35_l_., which I think is the just medium, considering advantages and disadvantages." This was written in July; August, September, and October passed away, and no pupils were to be heard of. Day after day, there was a little hope felt by the sisters until the post came in. But Haworth village was wild and lonely, and the Brontes but little known, owing to their want of connections. Charlotte writes on the subject, in the early winter months, to this effect-- "I, Emily, and Anne, are truly obliged to you for the efforts you have made in our behalf; and if you have not been successful, you are only like ourselves. Every one wishes us well; but there are no pupils to be had. We have no present intention, however, of breaking our hearts on the subject, still less of feeling mortified at defeat. The effort must be beneficial, whatever the result may be, because it teaches us experience, and an additional knowledge of this world. I send you two more circulars." A month later, she says:-- "We have made no alterations yet in our house. It would be folly to do so, while there is so little likelihood of our ever getting pupils. I fear you are giving yourself too much trouble on our account. Depend upon it, if you were to persuade a mamma to bring her child to Haworth, the aspect of the place would frighten her, and she would probably take the dear girl back with her, instanter. We are glad that we have made the attempt, and we will not be cast down because it has not succeeded." There were, probably, growing up in each sister's heart, secret unacknowledged feelings of relief, that their plan had not succeeded. Yes! a dull sense of relief that their cherished project had been tried and had failed. For that house, which was to be regarded as an occasional home for their brother, could hardly be a fitting residence for the children of strangers. They had, in all likelihood, become silently aware that his habits were such as to render his society at times most undesirable. Possibly, too, they had, by this time, heard distressing rumours concerning the cause of that remorse and agony of mind, which at times made him restless and unnaturally merry, at times rendered him moody and irritable. In January, 1845, Charlotte says:--"Branwell has been quieter and less irritable, on the whole, this time than he was in summer. Anne is, as usual, always good, mild, and patient." The deep-seated pain which he was to occasion to his relations had now taken a decided form, and pressed heavily on Charlotte's health and spirits. Early in this year, she went to H. to bid good-bye to her dear friend "Mary," who was leaving England for Australia. Branwell, I have mentioned, had obtained the situation of a private tutor. Anne was also engaged as governess in the same family, and was thus a miserable witness to her brother's deterioration of character at this period. Of the causes of this deterioration I cannot speak; but the consequences were these. He went home for his holidays reluctantly, stayed there as short a time as possible, perplexing and distressing them all by his extraordinary conduct--at one time in the highest spirits, at another, in the deepest depression--accusing himself of blackest guilt and treachery, without specifying what they were; and altogether evincing an irritability of disposition bordering on insanity. Charlotte and Emily suffered acutely from his mysterious behaviour. He expressed himself more than satisfied with his situation; he was remaining in it for a longer time than he had ever done in any kind of employment before; so that for some time they could not conjecture that anything there made him so wilful, and restless, and full of both levity and misery. But a sense of something wrong connected with him, sickened and oppressed them. They began to lose all hope in his future career. He was no longer the family pride; an indistinct dread, caused partly by his own conduct, partly by expressions of agonising suspicion in Anne's letters home, was creeping over their minds that he might turn out their deep disgrace. But, I believe, they shrank from any attempt to define their fears, and spoke of him to each other as little as possible. They could not help but think, and mourn, and wonder. "Feb. 20th, 1845. "I spent a week at H., not very pleasantly; headache, sickliness, and flatness of spirits, made me a poor companion, a sad drag on the vivacious and loquacious gaiety of all the other inmates of the house. I never was fortunate enough to be able to rally, for as much as a single hour, while I was there. I am sure all, with the exception perhaps of Mary, were very glad when I took my departure. I begin to perceive that I have too little life in me, now-a-days, to be fit company for any except very quiet people. Is it age, or what else, that changes me so?" Alas! she hardly needed to have asked this question. How could she be otherwise than "flat-spirited," "a poor companion," and a "sad drag" on the gaiety of those who were light-hearted and happy! Her honest plan for earning her own livelihood had fallen away, crumbled to ashes; after all her preparations, not a pupil had offered herself; and, instead of being sorry that this wish of many years could not be realised, she had reason to be glad. Her poor father, nearly sightless, depended upon her cares in his blind helplessness; but this was a sacred pious charge, the duties of which she was blessed in fulfilling. The black gloom hung over what had once been the brightest hope of the family--over Branwell, and the mystery in which his wayward conduct was enveloped. Somehow and sometime, he would have to turn to his home as a hiding place for shame; such was the sad foreboding of his sisters. Then how could she be cheerful, when she was losing her dear and noble "Mary," for such a length of time and distance of space that her heart might well prophesy that it was "for ever"? Long before, she had written of Mary T., that she "was full of feelings noble, warm, generous, devoted, and profound. God bless her! I never hope to see in this world a character more truly noble. She would die willingly for one she loved. Her intellect and attainments are of the very highest standard." And this was the friend whom she was to lose! Hear that friend's account of their final interview:-- "When I last saw Charlotte (Jan. 1845), she told me she had quite decided to stay at home. She owned she did not like it. Her health was weak. She said she should like any change at first, as she had liked Brussels at first, and she thought that there must be some possibility for some people of having a life of more variety and more communion with human kind, but she saw none for her. I told her very warmly, that she ought not to stay at home; that to spend the next five years at home, in solitude and weak health, would ruin her; that she would never recover it. Such a dark shadow came over her face when I said, 'Think of what you'll be five years hence!' that I stopped, and said, 'Don't cry, Charlotte!' She did not cry, but went on walking up and down the room, and said in a little while, 'But I intend to stay, Polly.'" A few weeks after she parted from Mary, she gives this account of her days at Haworth. "March 24th, 1845. "I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth. There is no event whatever to mark its progress. One day resembles another; and all have heavy, lifeless physiognomies. Sunday, baking-day, and Saturday, are the only ones that have any distinctive mark. Meantime, life wears away. I shall soon be thirty; and I have done nothing yet. Sometimes I get melancholy at the prospect before and behind me. Yet it is wrong and foolish to repine. Undoubtedly, my duty directs me to stay at home for the present. There was a time when Haworth was a very pleasant place to me; it is not so now. I feel as if we were all buried here. I long to travel; to work; to live a life of action. Excuse me, dear, for troubling you with my fruitless wishes. I will put by the rest, and not trouble you with them. You must write to me. If you knew how welcome your letters are, you would write very often. Your letters, and the French newspapers, are the only messengers that come to me from the outer world beyond our moors; and very welcome messengers they are." One of her daily employments was to read to her father, and it required a little gentle diplomacy on her part to effect this duty; for there were times when the offer of another to do what he had been so long accustomed to do for himself, only reminded him too painfully of the deprivation under which he was suffering. And, in secret, she, too, dreaded a similar loss for herself. Long-continued ill health, a deranged condition of the liver, her close application to minute drawing and writing in her younger days, her now habitual sleeplessness at nights, the many bitter noiseless tears she had shed over Branwell's mysterious and distressing conduct--all these causes were telling on her poor eyes; and about this time she thus writes to M. Heger:-- "Il n'y a rien que je crains comme le desoeuvrement, l'inertie, la lethargie des facultes. Quand le corps est paresseux l'esprit souffre cruellement; je ne connaitrais pas cette lethargie, si je pouvais ecrire. Autrefois je passais des journees, des semaines, des mois entiers a ecrire, et pas tout-a-fait sans fruit, puisque Southey et Coleridge, deux de nos meilleurs auteurs, a qui j'ai envoye certains manuscrits, en ont bien voulu temoigner leur approbation; mais a present, j'ai la vue trop faible; si j'ecrivais beaueoup je deviendrais aveugle. Cette faiblesse de vue est pour moi une terrible privation; sans cela, savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur? J'ecrirais un livre et je le dedierais a mon maitre de litterature, au seul maitre que j'aie jamais eu--a vous, Monsieur! Je vous ai dit souvent en francais combien je vous respecte, combien je suis redevable a votre bonte, a vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglais. Cela ne se peut pas; il ne faut pas y penser. La carriere des lettres m'est fermee . . . N'oubliez pas de me dire comment vous vous portez, comment Madame et les enfants se portent. Je compte bientot avoir de vos nouvelles; cette idee me souris, car le souvenir de vos bontes ne s'effacera jamais de ma memoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera, le respect que vous m'avez inspire durera aussi. Agreez, Monsieur," &c. It is probable, that even her sisters and most intimate friends did not know of this dread of ultimate blindness which beset her at this period. What eyesight she had to spare she reserved for the use of her father. She did but little plain-sewing; not more writing than could be avoided, and employed herself principally in knitting. "April 2nd, 1845. "I see plainly it is proved to us that there is scarcely a draught of unmingled happiness to be had in this world. ---'s illness comes with --- 's marriage. Mary T. finds herself free, and on that path to adventure and exertion to which she has so long been seeking admission. Sickness, hardship, danger are her fellow travellers--her inseparable companions. She may have been out of the reach of these S. W. N. W. gales, before they began to blow, or they may have spent their fury on land, and not ruffled the sea much. If it has been otherwise, she has been sorely tossed, while we have been sleeping in our beds, or lying awake thinking about her. Yet these real, material dangers, when once past, leave in the mind the satisfaction of having struggled with difficulty, and overcome it. Strength, courage, and experience are their invariable results; whereas, I doubt whether suffering purely mental has any good result, unless it be to make us by comparison less sensitive to physical suffering . . . Ten years ago, I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor for a married man. I should have certainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and wondered how you could possibly regret being civil to a decent individual, merely because he happened to be single, instead of double. Now, however, I can perceive that your scruples are founded on common sense. I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay--cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. Never mind! well-meaning women have their own consciences to comfort them after all. Do not, therefore, be too much afraid of showing yourself as you are, affectionate and good-hearted; do not too harshly repress sentiments and feelings excellent in themselves, because you fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity. Still, a composed, decent, equable deportment is a capital treasure to a woman, and that you possess. Write again soon, for I feel rather fierce, and want stroking down." "June 13th, 1845. "As to the Mrs. ---, who, you say, is like me, I somehow feel no leaning to her at all. I never do to people who are said to be like me, because I have always a notion that they are only like me in the disagreeable, outside, first-acquaintance part of my character; in those points which are obvious to the ordinary run of people, and which I know are not pleasing. You say she is 'clever'--'a clever person.' How I dislike the term! It means rather a shrewd, very ugly, meddling, talking woman . . . I feel reluctant to leave papa for a single day. His sight diminishes weekly; and can it be wondered at that, as he sees the most precious of his faculties leaving him, his spirits sometimes sink? It is so hard to feel that his few and scanty pleasures must all soon go. He has now the greatest difficulty in either reading or writing; and then he dreads the state of dependence to which blindness will inevitably reduce him. He fears that he will be nothing in his parish. I try to cheer him; sometimes I succeed temporarily, but no consolation can restore his sight, or atone for the want of it. Still he is never peevish; never impatient; only anxious and dejected." For the reason just given, Charlotte declined an invitation to the only house to which she was now ever asked to come. In answer to her correspondent's reply to this letter, she says:-- "You thought I refused you coldly, did you? It was a queer sort of coldness, when I would have given my ears to say Yes, and was obliged to say No. Matters, however, are now a little changed. Anne is come home, and her presence certainly makes me feel more at liberty. Then, if all be well, I will come and see you. Tell me only when I must come. Mention the week and the day. Have the kindness also to answer the following queries, if you can. How far is it from Leeds to Sheffield? Can you give me a notion of the cost? Of course, when I come, you will let me enjoy your own company in peace, and not drag me out a visiting. I have no desire at all to see your curate. I think he must be like all the other curates I have seen; and they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race. At this blessed moment, we have no less than three of them in Haworth parish--and there is not one to mend another. The other day, they all three, accompanied by Mr. S., dropped, or rather rushed, in unexpectedly to tea. It was Monday (baking day), and I was hot and tired; still, if they had behaved quietly and decently, I would have served them out their tea in peace; but they began glorifying themselves, and abusing Dissenters in such a manner, that my temper lost its balance, and I pronounced a few sentences sharply and rapidly, which struck them all dumb. Papa was greatly horrified also, but I don't regret it." On her return from this short visit to her friend, she travelled with a gentleman in the railway carriage, whose features and bearing betrayed him, in a moment, to be a Frenchman. She ventured to ask him if such was not the case; and, on his admitting it, she further inquired if he had not passed a considerable time in Germany, and was answered that he had; her quick ear detected something of the thick guttural pronunciation, which, Frenchmen say, they are able to discover even in the grandchildren of their countrymen who have lived any time beyond the Rhine. Charlotte had retained her skill in the language by the habit of which she thus speaks to M. Heger:-- "Je crains beaucoup d'oublier le francais--j'apprends tous les jours une demie page de francais par coeur, et j'ai grand plaisir a apprendre cette lecon, Veuillez presenter a Madame l'assurance de mon estime; je crains que Maria-Louise et Claire ne m'aient deja oubliees; mais je vous reverrai un jour; aussitot que j'aurais gagne assez d'argent pour alter a Bruxelles, j'y irai." And so her journey back to Haworth, after the rare pleasure of this visit to her friend, was pleasantly beguiled by conversation with the French gentleman; and she arrived at home refreshed and happy. What to find there? It was ten o'clock when she reached the parsonage. Branwell was there, unexpectedly, very ill. He had come home a day or two before, apparently for a holiday; in reality, I imagine, because some discovery had been made which rendered his absence imperatively desirable. The day of Charlotte's return, he had received a letter from Mr. ---, sternly dismissing him, intimating that his proceedings were discovered, characterising them as bad beyond expression, and charging him, on pain of exposure, to break off immediately, and for ever, all communication with every member of the family. Whatever may have been the nature and depth of Branwell's sins,--whatever may have been his temptation, whatever his guilt,--there is no doubt of the suffering which his conduct entailed upon his poor father and his innocent sisters. The hopes and plans they had cherished long, and laboured hard to fulfil, were cruelly frustrated; henceforward their days were embittered and the natural rest of their nights destroyed by his paroxysms of remorse. Let us read of the misery caused to his poor sisters in Charlotte's own affecting words:-- "We have had sad work with Branwell. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his agony of mind. No one in this house could have rest; and, at last, we have been obliged to send him from home for a week, with some one to look after him. He has written to me this morning, expressing some sense of contrition . . . but as long as he remains at home, I scarce dare hope for peace in the house. We must all, I fear, prepare for a season of distress and disquietude. When I left you, I was strongly impressed with the feeling that I was going back to sorrow." "August, 1845. "Things here at home are much as usual; not very bright as it regards Branwell, though his health, and consequently his temper, have been somewhat better this last day or two, because he is now _forced to_ abstain." "August 18th, 1845. "I have delayed writing, because I have no good news to communicate. My hopes ebb low indeed about Branwell. I sometimes fear he will never be fit for much. The late blow to his prospects and feelings has quite made him reckless. It is only absolute want of means that acts as any check to him. One ought, indeed, to hope to the very last; and I try to do so, but occasionally hope in his case seems so fallacious." "Nov. 4th, 1845. "I hoped to be able to ask you to come to Haworth. It almost seemed as if Branwell had a chance of getting employment, and I waited to know the result of his efforts in order to say, dear ---, come and see us. But the place (a secretaryship to a railway committee) is given to another person. Branwell still remains at home; and while _he_ is here, _you_ shall not come. I am more confirmed in that resolution the more I see of him. I wish I could say one word to you in his favour, but I cannot. I will hold my tongue. We are all obliged to you for your kind suggestion about Leeds; but I think our school schemes are, for the present, at rest." "Dec. 31st, 1845. "You say well, in speaking of ---, that no sufferings are so awful as those brought on by dissipation; alas! I see the truth of this observation daily proved. --and--must have as weary and burdensome a life of it in waiting upon their unhappy brother. It seems grievous, indeed, that those who have not sinned should suffer so largely." In fact, all their latter days blighted with the presence of cruel, shameful suffering,--the premature deaths of two at least of the sisters,--all the great possibilities of their earthly lives snapped short,--may be dated from Midsummer 1845. For the last three years of Branwell's life, he took opium habitually, by way of stunning conscience; he drank moreover, whenever he could get the opportunity. The reader may say that I have mentioned his tendency to intemperance long before. It is true; but it did not become habitual, as far as I can learn, until after he was dismissed from his tutorship. He took opium, because it made him forget for a time more effectually than drink; and, besides, it was more portable. In procuring it he showed all the cunning of the opium-eater. He would steal out while the family were at church--to which he had professed himself too ill to go--and manage to cajole the village druggist out of a lump; or, it might be, the carrier had unsuspiciously brought him some in a packet from a distance. For some time before his death he had attacks of delirium tremens of the most frightful character; he slept in his father's room, and he would sometimes declare that either he or his father should be dead before the morning. The trembling sisters, sick with fright, would implore their father not to expose himself to this danger; but Mr. Bronte is no timid man, and perhaps he felt that he could possibly influence his son to some self-restraint, more by showing trust in him than by showing fear. The sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte would saunter out, saying, with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, "The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it; he does his best--the poor old man! but it's all over with me." CHAPTER XIV In the course of this sad autumn of 1845, a new interest came up; faint, indeed, and often lost sight of in the vivid pain and constant pressure of anxiety respecting their brother. In the biographical notice of her sisters, which Charlotte prefixed to the edition of "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey," published in 1850--a piece of writing unique, as far as I know, in its pathos and its power--she says:-- "One day in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse, in my sister Emily's handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me--a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music, wild, melancholy, and elevating. My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed: it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication . . . Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since Emily's had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own. We had very early cherished the dream of one day being authors. We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names, positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because--without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called 'feminine,' we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise. The bringing out of our little book was hard work. As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset; though inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of others. The great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied. Being greatly harassed by this obstacle, I ventured to apply to the Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh, for a word of advice; _they_ may have forgotten the circumstance, but _I_ have not, for from them I received a brief and business-like, but civil and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at last made way." I inquired from Mr. Robert Chambers, and found, as Miss Bronte conjectured, that he had entirely forgotten the application which had been made to him and his brother for advice; nor had they any copy or memorandum of the correspondence. There is an intelligent man living in Haworth, who has given me some interesting particulars relating to the sisters about this period. He says:-- "I have known Miss Bronte, as Miss Bronte, a long time; indeed, ever since they came to Haworth in 1819. But I had not much acquaintance with the family till about 1843, when I began to do a little in the stationery line. Nothing of that kind could be had nearer than Keighley before I began. They used to buy a great deal of writing paper, and I used to wonder whatever they did with so much. I sometimes thought they contributed to the Magazines. When I was out of stock, I was always afraid of their coming; they seemed so distressed about it, if I had none. I have walked to Halifax (a distance of ten miles) many a time, for half a ream of paper, for fear of being without it when they came. I could not buy more at a time for want of capital. I was always short of that. I did so like them to come when I had anything for them; they were so much different to anybody else; so gentle and kind, and so very quiet. They never talked much. Charlotte sometimes would sit and inquire about our circumstances so kindly and feelingly! . . . Though I am a poor working man (which I have never felt to be any degradation), I could talk with her with the greatest freedom. I always felt quite at home with her. Though I never had any school education, I never felt the want of it in her company." The publishers to whom she finally made a successful application for the production of "Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell's poems," were Messrs. Aylott and Jones, Paternoster Row. Mr. Aylott has kindly placed the letters which she wrote to them on the subject at my disposal. The first is dated January 28th, 1846, and in it she inquires if they will publish one volume octavo of poems; if not at their own risk, on the author's account. It is signed "C. Bronte." They must have replied pretty speedily, for on January 31st she writes again:-- "GENTLEMEN, "Since you agree to undertake the publication of the work respecting which I applied to you, I should wish now to know, as soon as possible, the cost of paper and printing. I will then send the necessary remittance, together with the manuscript. I should like it to be printed in one octavo volume, of the same quality of paper and size of type as Moxon's last edition of Wordsworth. The poems will occupy, I should think, from 200 to 250 pages. They are not the production of a clergyman, nor are they exclusively of a religious character; but I presume these circumstances will be immaterial. It will, perhaps, be necessary that you should see the manuscript, in order to calculate accurately the expense of publication; in that case I will send it immediately. I should like, however, previously, to have some idea of the probable cost; and if, from what I have said, you can make a rough calculation on the subject, I should be greatly obliged to you." In her next letter, February 6th, she says:-- "You will perceive that the poems are the work of three persons, relatives--their separate pieces are distinguished by their respective signatures." She writes again on February 15th; and on the 16th she says:-- "The MS. will certainly form a thinner volume than I had anticipated. I cannot name another model which I should like it precisely to resemble, yet, I think, a duodecimo form, and a somewhat reduced, though still _clear_ type, would be preferable. I only stipulate for _clear_ type, not too small, and good paper." On February 21st she selects the "long primer type" for the poems, and will remit 31_l_. 10_s_. in a few days. Minute as the details conveyed in these notes are, they are not trivial, because they afford such strong indications of character. If the volume was to be published at their own risk, it was necessary that the sister conducting the negotiation should make herself acquainted with the different kinds of type, and the various sizes of books. Accordingly she bought a small volume, from which to learn all she could on the subject of preparation for the press. No half-knowledge--no trusting to other people for decisions which she could make for herself; and yet a generous and full confidence, not misplaced, in the thorough probity of Messrs. Aylott and Jones. The caution in ascertaining the risk before embarking in the enterprise, and the prompt payment of the money required, even before it could be said to have assumed the shape of a debt, were both parts of a self-reliant and independent character. Self-contained also was she. During the whole time that the volume of poems was in the course of preparation and publication, no word was written telling anyone, out of the household circle, what was in progress. I have had some of the letters placed in my hands, which she addressed to her old schoolmistress, Miss W-. They begin a little before this time. Acting on the conviction, which I have all along entertained, that where Charlotte Bronte's own words could be used, no others ought to take their place, I shall make extracts from this series, according to their dates. "Jan. 30th, 1846. "MY DEAR MISS W---, "I have not yet paid my visit to ---; it is, indeed, more than a year since I was there, but I frequently hear from E., and she did not fail to tell me that you were gone into Worcestershire; she was unable, however, to give me your exact address. Had I known it, I should have written to you long since. I thought you would wonder how we were getting on, when you heard of the railway panic; and you may be sure that I am very glad to be able to answer your kind inquiries by the assurance that our small capital is as yet undiminished. The York and Midland is, as you say, a very good line, yet, I confess to you, I should wish, for my own part, to be wise in time. I cannot think that even the very best lines will continue for many years at their present premiums; and I have been most anxious for us to sell our shares ere it be too late, and to secure the proceeds in some safer, if, for the present, less profitable investment. I cannot, however, persuade my sisters to regard the affair precisely from my point of view; and I feel as if I would rather run the risk of loss than hurt Emily's feelings by acting in direct opposition to her opinion. She managed in a most handsome and able manner for me, when I was in Brussels, and prevented by distance from looking after my own interests; therefore, I will let her manage still, and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is; and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish, I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity; and as long as we can regard those we love, and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by what appear to us unreasonable and headstrong notions. "You, my dear Miss W---, know, full as well as I do, the value of sisters' affection to each other; there is nothing like it in this world, I believe, when they are nearly equal in age, and similar in education, tastes, and sentiments. You ask about Branwell; he never thinks of seeking employment, and I begin to fear that he has rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life; besides, if money were at his disposal, he would use it only to his own injury; the faculty of self-government is, I fear, almost destroyed in him. You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings? I do, indeed. I have often thought so; and I think, too, that the mode of bringing them up is strange: they are not sufficiently guarded from temptation. Girls are protected as if they were something very frail or silly indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world, as if they, of all beings in existence, were the wisest and least liable to be led astray. I am glad you like Broomsgrove, though, I dare say, there are few places you would _not_ like, with Mrs. M. for a companion. I always feel a peculiar satisfaction when I hear of your enjoying yourself, because it proves that there really is such a thing as retributive justice even in this world. You worked hard; you denied yourself all pleasure, almost all relaxation, in your youth, and in the prime of life; now you are free, and that while you have still, I hope, many years of vigour and health in which you can enjoy freedom. Besides, I have another and very egotistical motive for being pleased; it seems that even 'a lone woman' can be happy, as well as cherished wives and proud mothers. I am glad of that. I speculate much on the existence of unmarried and never-to-be-married women now-a-days; and I have already got to the point of considering that there is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly, without support of husband or brother; and who, having attained the age of forty-five or upwards, retains in her possession a well-regulated mind, a disposition to enjoy simple pleasures, and fortitude to support inevitably pains, sympathy with the sufferings of others, and willingness to relieve want as far as her means extend." During the time that the negotiation with Messrs. Aylott and Co. was going on, Charlotte went to visit her old school-friend, with whom she was in such habits of confidential intimacy; but neither then nor afterwards, did she ever speak to her of the publication of the poems; nevertheless, this young lady suspected that the sisters wrote for Magazines; and in this idea she was confirmed when, on one of her visits to Haworth, she saw Anne with a number of "Chambers's Journal," and a gentle smile of pleasure stealing over her placid face as she read. "What is the matter?" asked the friend. "Why do you smile?" "Only because I see they have inserted one of my poems," was the quiet reply; and not a word more was said on the subject. To this friend Charlotte addressed the following letters:-- "March 3rd, 1846. "I reached home a little after two o'clock, all safe and right yesterday; I found papa very well; his sight much the same. Emily and Anne were going to Keighley to meet me; unfortunately, I had returned by the old road, while they were gone by the new, and we missed each other. They did not get home till half-past four, and were caught in the heavy shower of rain which fell in the afternoon. I am sorry to say Anne has taken a little cold in consequence, but I hope she will soon be well. Papa was much cheered by my report of Mr. C.'s opinion, and of old Mrs. E.'s experience; but I could perceive he caught gladly at the idea of deferring the operation a few months longer. I went into the room where Branwell was, to speak to him, about an hour after I got home: it was very forced work to address him. I might have spared myself the trouble, as he took no notice, and made no reply; he was stupified. My fears were not in vain. I hear that he got a sovereign while I have been away, under pretence of paying a pressing debt; he went immediately and changed it at a public-house, and has employed it as was to be expected. --- concluded her account by saying he was a 'hopeless being;' it is too true. In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is. What the future has in store I do not know." "March 31st, 1846. "Our poor old servant Tabby had a sort of fit, a fortnight since, but is nearly recovered now. Martha" (the girl they had to assist poor old Tabby, and who remains still the faithful servant at the parsonage,) "is ill with a swelling in her knee, and obliged to go home. I fear it will be long before she is in working condition again. I received the number of the 'Record' you sent . . . I read D'Aubigne's letter. It is clever, and in what he says about Catholicism very good. The Evangelical Alliance part is not very practicable, yet certainly it is more in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel to preach unity among Christians than to inculcate mutual intolerance and hatred. I am very glad I went to--when I did, for the changed weather has somewhat changed my health and strength since. How do you get on? I long for mild south and west winds. I am thankful papa continues pretty well, though often made very miserable by Branwell's wretched conduct. _There_--there is no change but for the worse." Meanwhile the printing of the volume of poems was quietly proceeding. After some consultation and deliberation, the sisters had determined to correct the proofs themselves, Up to March 28th the publishers had addressed their correspondent as C. Bronte, Esq.; but at this time some "little mistake occurred," and she desired Messrs. Aylott and Co. in future to direct to her real address, "_Miss_ Bronte," &c. She had, however, evidently left it to be implied that she was not acting on her own behalf, but as agent for the real authors, since in a note dated April 6th, she makes a proposal on behalf of "C., E., and A. Bell," which is to the following effect, that they are preparing for the press a work of fiction, consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales, which may be published either together, as a work of three volumes, of the ordinary novel size, or separately, as single volumes, as may be deemed most advisable. She states, in addition, that it is not their intention to publish these tales on their own account; but that the authors direct her to ask Messrs. Aylott and Co. whether they would be disposed to undertake the work, after having, of course, by due inspection of the MS., ascertained that its contents are such as to warrant an expectation of success. To this letter of inquiry the publishers replied speedily, and the tenor of their answer may be gathered from Charlotte's, dated April 11th. "I beg to thank you, in the name of C., E., and A. Bell, for your obliging offer of advice. I will avail myself of it, to request information on two or three points. It is evident that unknown authors have great difficulties to contend with, before they can succeed in bringing their works before the public. Can you give me any hint as to the way in which these difficulties are best met? For instance, in the present case, where a work of fiction is in question, in what form would a publisher be most likely to accept the MS.? Whether offered as a work of three vols., or as tales which might be published in numbers, or as contributions to a periodical? "What publishers would be most likely to receive favourably a proposal of this nature? "Would it suffice to _write_ to a publisher on the subject, or would it be necessary to have recourse to a personal interview? "Your opinion and advice on these three points, or on any other which your experience may suggest as important, would be esteemed by us as a favour." It is evident from the whole tenor of this correspondence, that the truthfulness and probity of the firm of publishers with whom she had to deal in this her first literary venture, were strongly impressed upon her mind, and was followed by the inevitable consequence of reliance on their suggestions. And the progress of the poems was not unreasonably lengthy or long drawn out. On April 20th she writes to desire that three copies may be sent to her, and that Messrs. Aylott will advise her as to the reviewers to whom copies ought to be sent. I give the next letter as illustrating the ideas of these girls as to what periodical reviews or notices led public opinion. "The poems to be neatly done up in cloth. Have the goodness to send copies and advertisements, _as early as possible_, to each of the undermentioned periodicals. "'Colburn's New Monthly Magazine.' "'Bentley's Magazine.' "'Hood's Magazine.' "'Jerrold's Shilling Magazine.' "'Blackwood's Magazine.' "'The Edinburgh Review.' "'Tait's Edinburgh Magazine.' "'The Dublin University Magazine.' "Also to the 'Daily News' and to the 'Britannia' papers. "If there are any other periodicals to which you have been in the habit of sending copies of works, let them be supplied also with copies. I think those I have mentioned will suffice for advertising." In compliance with this latter request, Messrs. Aylott suggest that copies and advertisements of the work should be sent to the "Athenaeum," "Literary Gazette," "Critic," and "Times;" but in her reply Miss Bronte says, that she thinks the periodicals she first mentioned will be sufficient for advertising in at present, as the authors do not wish to lay out a larger sum than two pounds in advertising, esteeming the success of a work dependent more on the notice it receives from periodicals than on the quantity of advertisements. In case of any notice of the poems appearing, whether favourable or otherwise, Messrs. Aylott and Co. are requested to send her the name and number of those periodicals in which such notices appear; as otherwise, since she has not the opportunity of seeing periodicals regularly, she may miss reading the critique. "Should the poems be remarked upon favourably, it is my intention to appropriate a further sum for advertisements. If, on the other hand, they should pass unnoticed or be condemned, I consider it would be quite useless to advertise, as there is nothing, either in the title of the work, or the names of the authors, to attract attention from a single individual." I suppose the little volume of poems was published some time about the end of May, 1846. It stole into life; some weeks passed over, without the mighty murmuring public discovering that three more voices were uttering their speech. And, meanwhile, the course of existence moved drearily along from day to day with the anxious sisters, who must have forgotten their sense of authorship in the vital care gnawing at their hearts. On June 17th, Charlotte writes:-- "Branwell declares that he neither can nor will do anything for himself; good situations have been offered him, for which, by a fortnight's work, he might have qualified himself, but he will do nothing except drink and make us all wretched." In the "Athenaeum" of July 4th, under the head of poetry for the million, came a short review of the poems of C., E., and A. Bell. The reviewer assigns to Ellis the highest rank of the three "brothers," as he supposes them to be; he calls Ellis "a fine, quaint spirit;" and speaks of "an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted." Again, with some degree of penetration, the reviewer says, that the poems of Ellis "convey an impression of originality beyond what his contributions to these volumes embody." Currer is placed midway between Ellis and Acton. But there is little in the review to strain out, at this distance of time, as worth preserving. Still, we can fancy with what interest it was read at Haworth Parsonage, and how the sisters would endeavour to find out reasons for opinions, or hints for the future guidance of their talents. I call particular attention to the following letter of Charlotte's, dated July 10th, 1846. To whom it was written, matters not; but the wholesome sense of duty in it--the sense of the supremacy of that duty which God, in placing us in families, has laid out for us, seems to deserve especial regard in these days. "I see you are in a dilemma, and one of a peculiar and difficult nature. Two paths lie before you; you conscientiously wish to choose the right one, even though it be the most steep, strait, and rugged; but you do not know which is the right one; you cannot decide whether duty and religion command you to go out into the cold and friendless world, and there to earn your living by governess drudgery, or whether they enjoin your continued stay with your aged mother, neglecting, _for the present_, every prospect of independency for yourself, and putting up with daily inconvenience, sometimes even with privations. I can well imagine, that it is next to impossible for you to decide for yourself in this matter, so I will decide it for you. At least, I will tell you what is my earnest conviction on the subject; I will show you candidly how the question strikes me. The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest--which implies the greatest good to others; and this path, steadily followed, will lead, I believe, in time, to prosperity and to happiness, though it may seem, at the outset, to tend quite in a contrary direction. Your mother is both old and infirm; old and infirm people have but few sources of happiness--fewer almost than the comparatively young and healthy can conceive; to deprive them of one of these is cruel. If your mother is more composed when you are with her, stay with her. If she would be unhappy in case you left her, stay with her. It will not apparently, as far as short-sighted humanity can see, be for your advantage to remain at ---, nor will you be praised and admired for remaining at home to comfort your mother; yet, probably, your own conscience will approve, and if it does, stay with her. I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself." The remainder of this letter is only interesting to the reader as it conveys a peremptory disclaimer of the report that the writer was engaged to be married to her father's curate--the very same gentleman to whom, eight years afterwards, she was united; and who, probably, even now, although she was unconscious of the fact, had begun his service to her, in the same tender and faithful spirit as that in which Jacob served for Rachel. Others may have noticed this, though she did not. A few more notes remain of her correspondence "on behalf of the Messrs. Bell" with Mr. Aylott. On July 15th she says, "I suppose, as you have not written, no other notices have yet appeared, nor has the demand for the work increased. Will you favour me with a line stating whether _any_, or how many copies have yet been sold?" But few, I fear; for, three days later, she wrote the following:-- "The Messrs. Bell desire me to thank you for your suggestion respecting the advertisements. They agree with you that, since the season is unfavourable, advertising had better be deferred. They are obliged to you for the information respecting the number of copies sold." On July 23rd she writes to the Messrs. Aylott:-- "The Messrs. Bell would be obliged to you to post the enclosed note in London. It is an answer to the letter you forwarded, which contained an application for their autographs from a person who professed to have read and admired their poems. I think I before intimated, that the Messrs. Bell are desirous for the present of remaining unknown, for which reason they prefer having the note posted in London to sending it direct, in order to avoid giving any clue to residence, or identity by post-mark, &c." Once more, in September, she writes, "As the work has received no further notice from any periodical, I presume the demand for it has not greatly increased." In the biographical notice of her sisters, she thus speaks of the failure of the modest hopes vested in this publication. "The book was printed; it is scarcely known, and all of it that merits to be known are the poems of Ellis Bell. "The fixed conviction I held, and hold, of the worth of these poems, has not, indeed, received the confirmation of much favourable criticism; but I must retain it notwithstanding." FOOTNOTES: {1} A reviewer pointed out the discrepancy between the age (twenty-seven years) assigned, on the mural tablet, to Anne Bronte at the time of her death in 1849, and the alleged fact that she was born at Thornton, from which place Mr. Bronte removed on February 25th, 1820. I was aware of the discrepancy, but I did not think it of sufficient consequence to be rectified by an examination of the register of births. Mr. Bronte's own words, on which I grounded my statement as to the time of Anne Bronte's birth, are as follows:-- "In Thornton, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane, and Anne were born." And such of the inhabitants of Haworth as have spoken on the subject say that all the children of Mr. and Mrs. Bronte were born before they removed to Haworth. There is probably some mistake in the inscription on the tablet. {2} In the month of April 1858, a neat mural tablet was erected within the Communion railing of the Church at Haworth, to the memory of the deceased members of the Bronte family. The tablet is of white Carrara marble on a ground of dove-coloured marble, with a cornice surmounted by an ornamental pediment of chaste design. Between the brackets which support the tablet, is inscribed the sacred monogram I.H.S., in old English letters. In Memory of Maria, wife of the Rev. P. Bronte, A.B., Minister of Haworth, She died Sept. 15th, 1821, in the 39th year of her age. Also, of Maria, their daughter, who died May 6th, 1825, in the 12th year of her age. Also, of Elizabeth, their daughter, who died June 15th, 1825, in the 11th year of her age. Also, of Patrick Branwell, their son, who died Sept. 24th, 1848, aged 31 years. Also, of Emily Jane, their daughter, who died Dec. 19th, 1848, aged 30 years. Also, of Anne, their daughter, who died May 28th, 1849, aged 29 years. She was buried at the Old Church, Scarborough. Also, of Charlotte, their daughter, wife of the Rev. A. B. Nicholls, B.A. She died March 31st, 1855, in the 39th year of her age. "The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law, but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."--1 Cor. xv. 56, 57. {3} With regard to my own opinion of the present school, I can only give it as formed after what was merely a cursory and superficial inspection, as I do not believe that I was in the house above half an hour; but it was and is this,--that the house at Casterton seemed thoroughly healthy and well kept, and is situated in a lovely spot; that the pupils looked bright, happy, and well, and that the lady superintendent was a most prepossessing looking person, who, on my making some inquiry as to the accomplishments taught to the pupils, said that the scheme of education was materially changed since the school had been opened. I would have inserted this testimony in the first edition, had I believed that any weight could be attached to an opinion formed on such slight and superficial grounds. {4} "Jane Eyre," vol. I., page 20. {5} Scott describes the sport, "Shooting at the Popinjay," "as an ancient game formerly practised with archery, but at this period (1679) with firearms. This was the figure of a bird decked with parti-coloured feathers, so as to resemble a popinjay or parrot. It was suspended to a pole, and served for a mark at which the competitors discharged their fusees and carbines in rotation, at the distance of seventy paces. He whose ball brought down the mark held the proud title of Captain of the Popinjay for the remainder of the day, and was usually escorted in triumph to the most respectable change-house in the neighbourhood, where the evening was closed with conviviality, conducted under his auspices, and if he was able to maintain it, at his expense."--Old Mortality. {6} In this Gutenberg eBook M. Heger's comments are given in {} at approximately the place where they occur--DP. 
25852	----	For the reader: Things that were handwritten are denoted in the text as HW: Asterisms in the text are denoted by [asterism] THE LETTERS OF [HW: Charles Dickens] THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. EDITED BY HIS SISTER-IN-LAW AND HIS ELDEST DAUGHTER. In Two Volumes. VOL. I. 1833 to 1856. London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1880. [_The Right of Translation is Reserved._] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. TO KATE PERUGINI, THIS MEMORIAL OF HER FATHER IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED BY HER AUNT AND SISTER. PREFACE. We intend this Collection of Letters to be a Supplement to the "Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster. That work, perfect and exhaustive as a biography, is only incomplete as regards correspondence; the scheme of the book having made it impossible to include in its space any letters, or hardly any, besides those addressed to Mr. Forster. As no man ever expressed _himself_ more in his letters than Charles Dickens, we believe that in publishing this careful selection from his general correspondence we shall be supplying a want which has been universally felt. Our request for the loan of letters was so promptly and fully responded to, that we have been provided with more than sufficient material for our work. By arranging the letters in chronological order, we find that they very frequently explain themselves and form a narrative of the events of each year. Our collection dates from 1833, the commencement of Charles Dickens's literary life, just before the starting of the "Pickwick Papers," and is carried on up to the day before his death, in 1870. We find some difficulty in being quite accurate in the arrangements of letters up to the end of 1839, for he had a careless habit in those days about dating his letters, very frequently putting only the day of the week on which he wrote, curiously in contrast with the habit of his later life, when his dates were always of the very fullest. A blank is made in Charles Dickens's correspondence with his family by the absence of any letter addressed to his daughter Kate (Mrs. Perugini), to her great regret and to ours. In 1873, her furniture and other possessions were stored in the warehouse of the Pantechnicon at the time of the great fire there. All her property was destroyed, and, among other things, a box of papers which included her letters from her father. It was our intention as well as our desire to have thanked, individually, every one--both living friends and representatives of dead ones--for their readiness to give us every possible help to make our work complete. But the number of such friends, besides correspondents hitherto unknown, who have volunteered contributions of letters, make it impossible in our space to do otherwise than to express, collectively, our earnest and heartfelt thanks. A separate word of gratitude, however, must be given by us to Mr. Wilkie Collins for the invaluable help which we have received from his great knowledge and experience, in the technical part of our work, and for the deep interest which he has shown from the beginning, in our undertaking. It is a great pleasure to us to have the name of Henry Fielding Dickens associated with this book. To him, for the very important assistance he has given in making our Index, we return our loving thanks. In writing our explanatory notes we have, we hope, left nothing out which in any way requires explanation from us. But we have purposely made them as short as possible; our great desire being to give to the public another book from Charles Dickens's own hands--as it were, a portrait of himself by himself. Those letters which need no explanation--and of those we have many--we give without a word from us. In publishing the more private letters, we do so with the view of showing him in his homely, domestic life--of showing how in the midst of his own constant and arduous work, no household matter was considered too trivial to claim his care and attention. He would take as much pains about the hanging of a picture, the choosing of furniture, the superintending any little improvement in the house, as he would about the more serious business of his life; thus carrying out to the very letter his favourite motto of "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well." MAMIE DICKENS. GEORGINA HOGARTH. LONDON: _October_, 1879. ERRATA. VOL. I. Page 111, line 6. For "because if I hear of you," _read_ "because I hear of you." " 114, line 24. For "any old end," _read_ "or any old end." " 137. First paragraph, second sentence, _should read_, "All the ancient part of Rome is wonderful and impressive in the extreme, far beyond the possibility of exaggeration. As to the," etc. " 456, line 11. For "Mr." _read_ "Mrs." Book I. 1833 TO 1842. THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1833 OR 1834, AND 1835, 1836. NARRATIVE. We have been able to procure so few early letters of any general interest that we put these first years together. Charles Dickens was then living, as a bachelor, in Furnival's Inn, and was engaged as a parliamentary reporter on _The Morning Chronicle_. The "Sketches by Boz" were written during these years, published first in "The Monthly Magazine" and continued in _The Evening Chronicle_. He was engaged to be married to Catherine Hogarth in 1835--the marriage took place on the 2nd April, 1836; and he continued to live in Furnival's Inn with his wife for more than a year after their marriage. They passed the summer months of that year in a lodging at Chalk, near Gravesend, in the neighbourhood associated with all his life, from his childhood to his death. The two letters which we publish, addressed to his wife as Miss Hogarth, have no date, but were written in 1835. The first of the two refers to the offer made to him by Chapman and Hall to edit a monthly periodical, the emolument (which he calls "too tempting to resist!") to be fourteen pounds a month. The bargain was concluded, and this was the starting of "The Pickwick Papers." The first number was published in March, 1836. The second letter to Miss Hogarth was written after he had completed three numbers of "Pickwick," and the character who is to "make a decided hit" is "Jingle." The first letter of this book is addressed to Henry Austin, a friend from his boyhood, who afterwards married his second sister Letitia. It bears no date, but must have been written in 1833 or 1834, during the early days of his reporting for _The Morning Chronicle_; the journey on which he was "ordered" being for that paper. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] FURNIVAL'S INN, _Wednesday Night, past 12._ DEAR HENRY, I have just been ordered on a journey, the length of which is at present uncertain. I may be back on Sunday very probably, and start again on the following day. Should this be the case, you shall hear from me before. Don't laugh. I am going (alone) in a gig; and, to quote the eloquent inducement which the proprietors of Hampstead _chays_ hold out to Sunday riders--"the gen'l'm'n drives himself." I am going into Essex and Suffolk. It strikes me I shall be spilt before I pay a turnpike. I have a presentiment I shall run over an only child before I reach Chelmsford, my first stage. Let the evident haste of this specimen of "The Polite Letter Writer" be its excuse, and Believe me, dear Henry, most sincerely yours, [HW: Charles Dickens] NOTE.--To avoid the monotony of a constant repetition, we propose to dispense with the signature at the close of each letter, excepting to the first and last letters of our collection. Charles Dickens's handwriting altered so much during these years of his life, that we have thought it advisable to give a facsimile of his autograph to this our first letter; and we reproduce in the same way his latest autograph. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] FURNIVAL'S INN, _Wednesday Evening, 1835._ MY DEAREST KATE, The House is up; but I am very sorry to say that I must stay at home. I have had a visit from the publishers this morning, and the story cannot be any longer delayed; it must be done to-morrow, as there are more important considerations than the mere payment for the story involved too. I must exercise a little self-denial, and set to work. They (Chapman and Hall) have made me an offer of fourteen pounds a month, to write and edit a new publication they contemplate, entirely by myself, to be published monthly, and each number to contain four woodcuts. I am to make my estimate and calculation, and to give them a decisive answer on Friday morning. The work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist. * * * * * [Sidenote: The same.] _Sunday Evening._ * * * * * I have at this moment got Pickwick and his friends on the Rochester coach, and they are going on swimmingly, in company with a very different character from any I have yet described, who I flatter myself will make a decided hit. I want to get them from the ball to the inn before I go to bed; and I think that will take me until one or two o'clock at the earliest. The publishers will be here in the morning, so you will readily suppose I have no alternative but to stick at my desk. * * * * * 1837. NARRATIVE. From the commencement of "The Pickwick Papers," and of Charles Dickens's married life, dates the commencement of his literary life and his sudden world-wide fame. And this year saw the beginning of many of those friendships which he most valued, and of which he had most reason to be proud, and which friendships were ended only by death. The first letters which we have been able to procure to Mr. Macready and Mr. Harley will be found under this date. In January, 1837, he was living in Furnival's Inn, where his first child, a son, was born. It was an eventful year to him in many ways. He removed from Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street in March, and here he sustained the first great grief of his life. His young sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, to whom he was devotedly attached, died very suddenly, at his house, on the 7th May. In the autumn of this year he took lodgings at Broadstairs. This was his first visit to that pleasant little watering-place, of which he became very fond, and whither he removed for the autumn months with all his household, for many years in succession. Besides the monthly numbers of "Pickwick," which were going on through this year until November, when the last number appeared, he had commenced "Oliver Twist," which was appearing also monthly, in the magazine called "Bentley's Miscellany," long before "Pickwick" was completed. And during this year he had edited, for Mr. Bentley, "The Life of Grimaldi," the celebrated clown. To this book he wrote himself only the preface, and altered and rearranged the autobiographical MS. which was in Mr. Bentley's possession. The letter to Mr. Harley, which bears no date, but must have been written either in 1836 or 1837, refers to a farce called "The Strange Gentleman" (founded on one of the "Sketches," called the "Great Winglebury Duel"), which he wrote expressly for Mr. Harley, and which was produced at the St. James's Theatre, under the management of Mr. Braham. The only other piece which he wrote for that theatre was the story of an operetta, called "The Village Coquettes," the music of which was composed by Mr. John Hullah. [Sidenote: Mr. J. P. Harley.] 48, DOUGHTY STREET, _Saturday Morning._ MY DEAR SIR, I have considered the terms on which I could afford just now to sell Mr. Braham the acting copyright in London of an entirely new piece for the St. James's Theatre; and I could not sit down to write one in a single act of about one hour long, under a hundred pounds. For a new piece in two acts, a hundred and fifty pounds would be the sum I should require. I do not know whether, with reference to arrangements that were made with any other writers, this may or may not appear a large item. I state it merely with regard to the value of my own time and writings at this moment; and in so doing I assure you I place the remuneration below the mark rather than above it. As you begged me to give you my reply upon this point, perhaps you will lay it before Mr. Braham. If these terms exceed his inclination or the ability of the theatre, there is an end of the matter, and no harm done. Believe me ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] 48, DOUGHTY STREET, _Wednesday Evening._ MY DEAR SIR, There is a semi-business, semi-pleasure little dinner which I intend to give at The Prince of Wales, in Leicester Place, Leicester Square, on Saturday, at five for half-past precisely, at which only Talfourd, Forster, Ainsworth, Jerdan, and the publishers will be present. It is to celebrate (that is too great a word, but I can think of no better) the conclusion of my "Pickwick" labours; and so I intend, before you take that roll upon the grass you spoke of, to beg your acceptance of one of the first complete copies of the work. I shall be much delighted if you would join us. I know too well the many anxieties that press upon you just now to seek to persuade you to come if you would prefer a night's repose and quiet. Let me assure you, notwithstanding, most honestly and heartily that there is no one I should be more happy or gratified to see, and that among your brilliant circle of well-wishers and admirers you number none more unaffectedly and faithfully yours than, My dear Sir, yours most truly. 1838. NARRATIVE. In February of this year Charles Dickens made an expedition with his friend, and the illustrator of most of his books, Mr. Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"), to investigate for himself the real facts as to the condition of the Yorkshire schools, and it may be observed that portions of a letter to his wife, dated Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, which will be found among the following letters, were reproduced in "Nicholas Nickleby." In the early summer he had a cottage at Twickenham Park. In August and September he was again at Broadstairs; and in the late autumn he made another bachelor excursion--Mr. Browne being again his companion--in England, which included his first visit to Stratford-on-Avon and Kenilworth. In February appeared the first number of "Nicholas Nickleby," on which work he was engaged all through the year, writing each number ready for the following month, and never being in advance, as was his habit with all his other periodical works, until his very latest ones. The first letter which appears under this date, from Twickenham Park, is addressed to Mr. Thomas Mitton, a schoolfellow at one of his earliest schools, and afterwards for some years his solicitor. The letter contains instructions for his first will; the friend of almost his whole life, Mr. John Forster, being appointed executor to this will as he was to the last, to which he was "called upon to act" only three years before his own death. The letter which we give in this year to Mr. Justice Talfourd is, unfortunately, the only one we have been able to procure to that friend, who was, however, one with whom he was most intimately associated, and with whom he maintained a constant correspondence. The letter beginning "Respected Sir" was an answer to a little boy (Master Hastings Hughes), who had written to him as "Nicholas Nickleby" approached completion, stating his views and wishes as to the rewards and punishments to be bestowed on the various characters in the book. The letter was sent to him through the Rev. Thomas Barham, author of "The Ingoldsby Legends." The two letters to Mr. Macready, at the end of this year, refer to a farce which Charles Dickens wrote, with an idea that it might be suitable for Covent Garden Theatre, then under Mr. Macready's management. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] GRETA BRIDGE, _Thursday, Feb. 1st, 1838._ MY DEAREST KATE, I am afraid you will receive this later than I could wish, as the mail does not come through this place until two o'clock to-morrow morning. However, I have availed myself of the very first opportunity of writing, so the fault is that mail's, and not this. We reached Grantham between nine and ten on Thursday night, and found everything prepared for our reception in the very best inn I have ever put up at. It is odd enough that an old lady, who had been outside all day and came in towards dinner time, turned out to be the mistress of a Yorkshire school returning from the holiday stay in London. She was a very queer old lady, and showed us a long letter she was carrying to one of the boys from his father, containing a severe lecture (enforced and aided by many texts of Scripture) on his refusing to eat boiled meat. She was very communicative, drank a great deal of brandy and water, and towards evening became insensible, in which state we left her. Yesterday we were up again shortly after seven A.M., came on upon our journey by the Glasgow mail, which charged us the remarkably low sum of six pounds fare for two places inside. We had a very droll male companion until seven o'clock in the evening, and a most delicious lady's-maid for twenty miles, who implored us to keep a sharp look-out at the coach-windows, as she expected the carriage was coming to meet her and she was afraid of missing it. We had many delightful vauntings of the same kind; but in the end it is scarcely necessary to say that the coach did not come, but a very dirty girl did. As we came further north the mire grew deeper. About eight o'clock it began to fall heavily, and, as we crossed the wild heaths hereabout, there was no vestige of a track. The mail kept on well, however, and at eleven we reached a bare place with a house standing alone in the midst of a dreary moor, which the guard informed us was Greta Bridge. I was in a perfect agony of apprehension, for it was fearfully cold, and there were no outward signs of anybody being up in the house. But to our great joy we discovered a comfortable room, with drawn curtains and a most blazing fire. In half an hour they gave us a smoking supper and a bottle of mulled port (in which we drank your health), and then we retired to a couple of capital bedrooms, in each of which there was a rousing fire halfway up the chimney. We have had for breakfast, toast, cakes, a Yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham, and eggs; and are now going to look about us. Having finished our discoveries, we start in a postchaise for Barnard Castle, which is only four miles off, and there I deliver the letter given me by Mitton's friend. All the schools are round about that place, and a dozen old abbeys besides, which we shall visit by some means or other to-morrow. We shall reach York on Saturday I hope, and (God willing) I trust I shall be at home on Wednesday morning. I wish you would call on Mrs. Bentley and thank her for the letter; you can tell her when I expect to be in York. A thousand loves and kisses to the darling boy, whom I see in my mind's eye crawling about the floor of this Yorkshire inn. Bless his heart, I would give two sovereigns for a kiss. Remember me too to Frederick, who I hope is attentive to you. Is it not extraordinary that the same dreams which have constantly visited me since poor Mary died follow me everywhere? After all the change of scene and fatigue, I have dreamt of her ever since I left home, and no doubt shall till I return. I should be sorry to lose such visions, for they are very happy ones, if it be only the seeing her in one's sleep. I would fain believe, too, sometimes, that her spirit may have some influence over them, but their perpetual repetition is extraordinary. Love to all friends. Ever, my dear Kate, Your affectionate Husband. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] TWICKENHAM PARK, _Tuesday Night._ DEAR TOM, I sat down this morning and put on paper my testamentary meaning. Whether it is sufficiently legal or not is another question, but I hope it is. The rough draft of the clauses which I enclose will be preceded by as much of the fair copy as I send you, and followed by the usual clause about the receipts of the trustees being a sufficient discharge. I also wish to provide that if all our children should die before twenty-one, and Kate married again, half the surplus should go to her and half to my surviving brothers and sisters, share and share alike. This will be all, except a few lines I wish to add which there will be no occasion to consult you about, as they will merely bear reference to a few tokens of remembrance and one or two slight funeral directions. And so pray God that you may be gray, and Forster bald, long before you are called upon to act as my executors. I suppose I shall see you at the water-party on Thursday? We will then make an appointment for Saturday morning, and if you think my clauses will do, I will complete my copy, seal it up, and leave it in your hands. There are some other papers which you ought to have. We must get a box. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Serjeant Talfourd, M.P.] TWICKENHAM PARK, _Sunday, July 15th, 1838._ MY DEAR TALFOURD, I cannot tell you how much pleasure I have derived from the receipt of your letter. I have heard little of you, and seen less, for so long a time, that your handwriting came like the renewal of some old friendship, and gladdened my eyes like the face of some old friend. If I hear from Lady Holland before you return, I shall, as in duty bound, present myself at her bidding; but between you and me and the general post, I hope she may not renew her invitation until I can visit her with you, as I would much rather avail myself of your personal introduction. However, whatever her ladyship may do I shall respond to, and anyway shall be only too happy to avail myself of what I am sure cannot fail to form a very pleasant and delightful introduction. Your kind invitation and reminder of the subject of a pleasant conversation in one of our pleasant rides, has thrown a gloom over the brightness of Twickenham, for here I am chained. It is indispensably necessary that "Oliver Twist" should be published in three volumes, in September next. I have only just begun the last one, and, having the constant drawback of my monthly work, shall be sadly harassed to get it finished in time, especially as I have several very important scenes (important to the story I mean) yet to write. Nothing would give me so much pleasure as to be with you for a week or so. I can only imperfectly console myself with the hope that when you see "Oliver" you will like the close of the book, and approve my self-denial in staying here to write it. I should like to know your address in Scotland when you leave town, so that I may send you the earliest copy if it be produced in the vacation, which I pray Heaven it may. Meanwhile, believe that though my body is on the banks of the Thames, half my heart is going the Oxford circuit. Mrs. Dickens and Charley desire their best remembrances (the latter expresses some anxiety, not unmixed with apprehension, relative to the Copyright Bill, in which he conceives himself interested), with hearty wishes that you may have a fine autumn, which is all you want, being sure of all other means of enjoyment that a man can have. I am, my dear Talfourd, Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--I hope you are able to spare a moment now and then to glance at "Nicholas Nickleby," and that you have as yet found no reason to alter the opinion you formed on the appearance of the first number. You know, I suppose, that they elected me at the Athenæum? Pray thank Mr. Serjeant Storks for me. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] LION HOTEL, SHREWSBURY, _Thursday, Nov. 1st, 1838._ MY DEAREST LOVE, I received your welcome letter on arriving here last night, and am rejoiced to hear that the dear children are so much better. I hope that in your next, or your next but one, I shall learn that they are quite well. A thousand kisses to them. I wish I could convey them myself. We found a roaring fire, an elegant dinner, a snug room, and capital beds all ready for us at Leamington, after a very agreeable (but very cold) ride. We started in a postchaise next morning for Kenilworth, with which we were both enraptured, and where I really think we MUST have lodgings next summer, please God that we are in good health and all goes well. You cannot conceive how delightful it is. To read among the ruins in fine weather would be perfect luxury. From here we went on to Warwick Castle, which is an ancient building, newly restored, and possessing no very great attraction beyond a fine view and some beautiful pictures; and thence to Stratford-upon-Avon, where we sat down in the room where Shakespeare was born, and left our autographs and read those of other people and so forth. We remained at Stratford all night, and found to our unspeakable dismay that father's plan of proceeding by Bridgenorth was impracticable, as there were no coaches. So we were compelled to come here by way of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, starting at eight o'clock through a cold wet fog, and travelling, when the day had cleared up, through miles of cinder-paths and blazing furnaces, and roaring steam-engines, and such a mass of dirt, gloom, and misery as I never before witnessed. We got pretty well accommodated here when we arrived at half-past four, and are now going off in a postchaise to Llangollen--thirty miles--where we shall remain to-night, and where the Bangor mail will take us up to-morrow. Such are our movements up to this point, and when I have received your letter at Chester I shall write to you again and tell you when I shall be back. I can say positively that I shall not exceed the fortnight, and I think it very possible that I may return a day or two before it expires. We were at the play last night. It was a bespeak--"The Love Chase," a ballet (with a phenomenon!), divers songs, and "A Roland for an Oliver." It is a good theatre, but the actors are very funny. Browne laughed with such indecent heartiness at one point of the entertainment, that an old gentleman in the next box suffered the most violent indignation. The bespeak party occupied two boxes, the ladies were full-dressed, and the gentlemen, to a man, in white gloves with flowers in their button-holes. It amused us mightily, and was really as like the Miss Snevellicci business as it could well be. My side has been very bad since I left home, although I have been very careful not to drink much, remaining to the full as abstemious as usual, and have not eaten any great quantity, having no appetite. I suffered such an ecstasy of pain all night at Stratford that I was half dead yesterday, and was obliged last night to take a dose of henbane. The effect was most delicious. I slept soundly, and without feeling the least uneasiness, and am a great deal better this morning; neither do I find that the henbane has affected my head, which, from the great effect it had upon me--exhilarating me to the most extraordinary degree, and yet keeping me sleepy--I feared it would. If I had not got better I should have turned back to Birmingham, and come straight home by the railroad. As it is, I hope I shall make out the trip. God bless you, my darling. I long to be back with you again and to see the sweet Babs. Your faithful and most affectionate Husband. [Sidenote: Master Hastings Hughes.] DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON, _Dec. 12th, 1838._ RESPECTED SIR, I have given Squeers one cut on the neck and two on the head, at which he appeared much surprised and began to cry, which, being a cowardly thing, is just what I should have expected from him--wouldn't you? I have carefully done what you told me in your letter about the lamb and the two "sheeps" for the little boys. They have also had some good ale and porter, and some wine. I am sorry you didn't say _what_ wine you would like them to have. I gave them some sherry, which they liked very much, except one boy, who was a little sick and choked a good deal. He was rather greedy, and that's the truth, and I believe it went the wrong way, which I say served him right, and I hope you will say so too. Nicholas had his roast lamb, as you said he was to, but he could not eat it all, and says if you do not mind his doing so he should like to have the rest hashed to-morrow with some greens, which he is very fond of, and so am I. He said he did not like to have his porter hot, for he thought it spoilt the flavour, so I let him have it cold. You should have seen him drink it. I thought he never would have left off. I also gave him three pounds of money, all in sixpences, to make it seem more, and he said directly that he should give more than half to his mamma and sister, and divide the rest with poor Smike. And I say he is a good fellow for saying so; and if anybody says he isn't I am ready to fight him whenever they like--there! Fanny Squeers shall be attended to, depend upon it. Your drawing of her is very like, except that I don't think the hair is quite curly enough. The nose is particularly like hers, and so are the legs. She is a nasty disagreeable thing, and I know it will make her very cross when she sees it; and what I say is that I hope it may. You will say the same I know--at least I think you will. I meant to have written you a long letter, but I cannot write very fast when I like the person I am writing to, because that makes me think about them, and I like you, and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight o'clock at night, and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when it is my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not say anything more besides this--and that is my love to you and Neptune; and if you will drink my health every Christmas Day I will drink yours--come. I am, Respected Sir, Your affectionate Friend. P.S.--I don't write my name very plain, but you know what it is you know, so never mind. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Monday Morning._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I have not seen you for the past week, because I hoped when we next met to bring "The Lamplighter" in my hand. It would have been finished by this time, but I found myself compelled to set to work first at the "Nickleby" on which I am at present engaged, and which I regret to say--after my close and arduous application last month--I find I cannot write as quickly as usual. I must finish it, at latest, by the 24th (a doubtful comfort!), and the instant I have done so I will apply myself to the farce. I am afraid to name any particular day, but I pledge myself that you shall have it this month, and you may calculate on that promise. I send you with this a copy of a farce I wrote for Harley when he left Drury Lane, and in which he acted for some seventy nights. It is the best thing he does. It is barely possible you might like to try it. Any local or temporary allusions could be easily altered. Believe me that I only feel gratified and flattered by your inquiry after the farce, and that if I had as much time as I have inclination, I would write on and on and on, farce after farce and comedy after comedy, until I wrote you something that would run. You do me justice when you give me credit for good intentions; but the extent of my good-will and strong and warm interest in you personally and your great undertaking, you cannot fathom nor express. Believe me, my dear Macready, Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--For Heaven's sake don't fancy that I hold "The Strange Gentleman" in any estimation, or have a wish upon the subject. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C Macready.] 48, DOUGHTY STREET, _December 13th, 1838._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I can have but one opinion on the subject--withdraw the farce at once, by all means. I perfectly concur in all you say, and thank you most heartily and cordially for your kind and manly conduct, which is only what I should have expected from you; though, under such circumstances, I sincerely believe there are few but you--if any--who would have adopted it. Believe me that I have no other feeling of disappointment connected with this matter but that arising from the not having been able to be of some use to you. And trust me that, if the opportunity should ever arrive, my ardour will only be increased--not damped--by the result of this experiment. Believe me always, my dear Macready, Faithfully yours. 1839. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens was still living in Doughty Street, but he removed at the end of this year to 1, Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. He hired a cottage at Petersham for the summer months, and in the autumn took lodgings at Broadstairs. The cottage at Alphington, near Exeter, mentioned in the letter to Mr. Mitton, was hired by Charles Dickens for his parents. He was at work all through this year on "Nicholas Nickleby." We have now the commencement of his correspondence with Mr. George Cattermole. His first letter was written immediately after Mr. Cattermole's marriage with Miss Elderton, a distant connection of Charles Dickens; hence the allusions to "cousin," which will be found in many of his letters to Mr. Cattermole. The bride and bridegroom were passing their honeymoon in the neighbourhood of Petersham, and the letter refers to a request from them for the loan of some books, and also to his having lent them his pony carriage and groom, during their stay in this neighbourhood. The first letter in this year to Mr. Macready is in answer to one from him, announcing his retirement from the management of Covent Garden Theatre. The portrait by Mr. Maclise, mentioned to Mr. Harley, was the, now, well-known one, which appeared as a frontispiece to "Nicholas Nickleby." [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Sunday._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I will have, if you please, three dozen of the extraordinary champagne; and I am much obliged to you for recollecting me. I ought not to be sorry to hear of your abdication, but I am, notwithstanding, most heartily and sincerely sorry, for my own sake and the sake of thousands, who may now go and whistle for a theatre--at least, such a theatre as you gave them; and I do now in my heart believe that for a long and dreary time that exquisite delight has passed away. If I may jest with my misfortunes, and quote the Portsmouth critic of Mr. Crummles's company, I say that: "As an exquisite embodiment of the poet's visions and a realisation of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama is gone--perfectly gone." With the same perverse and unaccountable feeling which causes a heart-broken man at a dear friend's funeral to see something irresistibly comical in a red-nosed or one-eyed undertaker, I receive your communication with ghostly facetiousness; though on a moment's reflection I find better cause for consolation in the hope that, relieved from your most trying and painful duties, you will now have leisure to return to pursuits more congenial to your mind, and to move more easily and pleasantly among your friends. In the long catalogue of the latter, I believe that there is not one prouder of the name, or more grateful for the store of delightful recollections you have enabled him to heap up from boyhood, than, My dear Macready, Yours always faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] NEW LONDON INN, EXETER, _Wednesday Morning, March 6th, 1839._ DEAR TOM, Perhaps you have heard from Kate that I succeeded yesterday in the very first walk, and took a cottage at a place called Alphington, one mile from Exeter, which contains, on the ground-floor, a good parlour and kitchen, and above, a full-sized country drawing-room and three bedrooms; in the yard behind, coal-holes, fowl-houses, and meat-safes out of number; in the kitchen, a neat little range; in the other rooms, good stoves and cupboards; and all for twenty pounds a year, taxes included. There is a good garden at the side well stocked with cabbages, beans, onions, celery, and some flowers. The stock belonging to the landlady (who lives in the adjoining cottage), there was some question whether she was not entitled to half the produce, but I settled the point by paying five shillings, and becoming absolute master of the whole! I do assure you that I am charmed with the place and the beauty of the country round about, though I have not seen it under very favourable circumstances, for it snowed when I was there this morning, and blew bitterly from the east yesterday. It is really delightful, and when the house is to rights and the furniture all in, I shall be quite sorry to leave it. I have had some few things second-hand, but I take it seventy pounds will be the mark, even taking this into consideration. I include in that estimate glass and crockery, garden tools, and such like little things. There is a spare bedroom of course. That I have furnished too. I am on terms of the closest intimacy with Mrs. Samuell, the landlady, and her brother and sister-in-law, who have a little farm hard by. They are capital specimens of country folks, and I really think the old woman herself will be a great comfort to my mother. Coals are dear just now--twenty-six shillings a ton. They found me a boy to go two miles out and back again to order some this morning. I was debating in my mind whether I should give him eighteenpence or two shillings, when his fee was announced--twopence! The house is on the high road to Plymouth, and, though in the very heart of Devonshire, there is as much long-stage and posting life as you would find in Piccadilly. The situation is charming. Meadows in front, an orchard running parallel to the garden hedge, richly-wooded hills closing in the prospect behind, and, away to the left, before a splendid view of the hill on which Exeter is situated, the cathedral towers rising up into the sky in the most picturesque manner possible. I don't think I ever saw so cheerful or pleasant a spot. The drawing-room is nearly, if not quite, as large as the outer room of my old chambers in Furnival's Inn. The paint and paper are new, and the place clean as the utmost excess of snowy cleanliness can be. You would laugh if you could see me powdering away with the upholsterer, and endeavouring to bring about all sorts of impracticable reductions and wonderful arrangements. He has by him two second-hand carpets; the important ceremony of trying the same comes off at three this afternoon. I am perpetually going backwards and forwards. It is two miles from here, so I have plenty of exercise, which so occupies me and prevents my being lonely that I stopped at home to read last night, and shall to-night, although the theatre is open. Charles Kean has been the star for the last two evenings. He was stopping in this house, and went away this morning. I have got his sitting-room now, which is smaller and more comfortable than the one I had before. You will have heard perhaps that I wrote to my mother to come down to-morrow. There are so many things she can make comfortable at a much less expense than I could, that I thought it best. If I had not, I could not have returned on Monday, which I now hope to do, and to be in town at half-past eight. Will you tell my father that if he could devise any means of bringing him down, I think it would be a great thing for him to have Dash, if it be only to keep down the trampers and beggars. The cheque I send you below. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] ELM COTTAGE, PETERSHAM, _Wednesday Morning._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, Why is "Peveril" lingering on my dusty shelves in town, while my fair cousin and your fair bride remains in blissful ignorance of his merits? There he is, I grieve to say, but there he shall not be long, for I shall be visiting my other home on Saturday morning, and will bring him bodily down and forward him the moment he arrives. Not having many of my books here, I don't find any among them which I think more suitable to your purpose than a carpet-bagful sent herewith, containing the Italian and German novelists (convenient as being easily taken up and laid down again; and I suppose you won't read long at a sitting), Leigh Hunt's "Indicator" and "Companion" (which have the same merit), "Hood's Own" (complete), "A Legend of Montrose," and "Kenilworth," which I have just been reading with greater delight than ever, and so I suppose everybody else must be equally interested in. I have Goldsmith, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists "handy;" and I need not say that you have them on hand too, if you like. You know all I would say from my heart and soul on the auspicious event of yesterday; but you don't know what I could say about the delightful recollections I have of your "good lady's" charming looks and bearing, upon which I discoursed most eloquently here last evening, and at considerable length. As I am crippled in this respect, however, by the suspicion that possibly she may be looking over your shoulder while you read this note (I would lay a moderate wager that you have looked round twice or thrice already), I shall content myself with saying that I am ever heartily, my dear Cattermole, Hers and yours. P.S.--My man (who with his charge is your man while you stay here) waits to know if you have any orders for him. [Sidenote: Mr. J. P. Harley.] ELM COTTAGE, PETERSHAM, NEAR RICHMOND, _June 28th, 1839._ MY DEAR HARLEY, I have "left my home," and been here ever since the end of April, and shall remain here most probably until the end of September, which is the reason that we have been such strangers of late. I am very sorry that I cannot dine with you on Sunday, but some people are coming here, and I cannot get away. Better luck next time, I hope. I was on the point of writing to you when your note came, to ask you if you would come down here next Saturday--to-morrow week, I mean--and stop till Monday. I will either call for you at the theatre, at any time you name, or send for you, "punctual," and have you brought down. Can you come if it's fine? Say yes, like a good fellow as you are, and say it per post. I have countermanded that face. Maclise has made another face of me, which all people say is astonishing. The engraving will be ready soon, and I would rather you had that, as I am sure you would if you had seen it. In great haste to save the post, I am, my dear Harley, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. William Longman.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Monday Morning._ MY DEAR SIR, On Friday I have a family dinner at home--uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins--an annual gathering. By what fatality is it that you always ask me to dine on the wrong day? While you are tracing this non-consequence to its cause, I wish you would tell Mr. Sydney Smith that of all the men I ever heard of and never saw, I have the greatest curiosity to see and the greatest interest to know him. Begging my best compliments at home, I am, my dear Sir, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] PETERSHAM, _July 26th, 1839._ MY DEAR MACREADY, Fix your visit for whenever you please. It can never give us anything but delight to see you, and it is better to look forward to such a pleasure than to look back upon it, as the last gratification is enjoyable all our lives, and the first for a few short stages in the journey. I feel more true and cordial pleasure than I can express to you in the request you have made. Anything which can serve to commemorate our friendship and to keep the recollection of it alive among our children is, believe me, and ever will be, most deeply prized by me. I accept the office with hearty and fervent satisfaction; and, to render this pleasant bond between us the more complete, I must solicit you to become godfather to the last and final branch of a genteel small family of three which I am told may be looked for in that auspicious month when Lord Mayors are born and guys prevail. This I look upon as a bargain between us, and I have shaken hands with you in spirit upon it. Family topics remind me of Mr. Kenwigs. As the weather is wet, and he is about to make his last appearance on my little stage, I send Mrs. Macready an early proof of the next number, containing an account of his baby's progress. I am going to send you something else on Monday--a tragedy. Don't be alarmed. I didn't write it, nor do I want it acted. A young Scotch lady whom I don't know (but she is evidently very intelligent and accomplished) has sent me a translation of a German play, soliciting my aid and advice in the matter of its publication. Among a crowd of Germanisms, there are many things in it which are so very striking, that I am sure it will amuse you very much. At least I think it will; it has me. I am going to send it back to her--when I come to Elstree will be time enough; and meantime, if you bestow a couple of hours upon it, you will not think them thrown away. It's a large parcel, and I must keep it here till somebody goes up to town and can book it by the coach. I warrant it, large as it looks, readable in two hours; and I very much want to know what you think of the first act, and especially the opening, which seems to me quite famous. The metre is very odd and rough, but now and then there's a wildness in it which helps the thing very much; and altogether it has left a something on my mind which I can't get rid of. Mrs. Dickens joins with me in kindest regards to yourself, Mrs., and Miss Macready. And I am always, My dear Macready, Faithfully and truly yours. P.S.--A dreadful thought has just occurred to me--that this is a quadruple letter, and that Elstree may not be within the twopenny post. Pray Heaven my fears are unfounded. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] 40, ALBION STREET, BROADSTAIRS, _September 21st, 1839._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I am so anxious to prefer a request to you which does not admit of delay that I send you a double letter, with the one redeeming point though of having very little in it. Let me prefix to the last number of "Nickleby," and to the book, a duplicate of the leaf which I now send you. Believe me that there will be no leaf in the volume which will afford me in times to come more true pleasure and gratification, than that in which I have written your name as foremost among those of the friends whom I love and honour. Believe me, there will be no one line in it conveying a more honest truth or a more sincere feeling than that which describes its dedication to you as a slight token of my admiration and regard. So let me tell the world by this frail record that I was a friend of yours, and interested to no ordinary extent in your proceedings at that interesting time when you showed them such noble truths in such noble forms, and gave me a new interest in, and associations with, the labours of so many months. I write to you very hastily and crudely, for I have been very hard at work, having only finished to-day, and my head spins yet. But you know what I mean. I am then always, Believe me, my dear Macready, Faithfully yours. P.S.--(Proof of Dedication enclosed): "To W. C. Macready, Esq., the following pages are inscribed, as a slight token of admiration and regard, by his friend, the Author." [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Friday Night, Oct. 25th, 1839._ MY DEAR MACREADY, The book, the whole book, and nothing but the book (except the binding, which is an important item), has arrived at last, and is forwarded herewith. The red represents my blushes at its gorgeous dress; the gilding, all those bright professions which I do not make to you; and the book itself, my whole heart for twenty months, which should be yours for so short a term, as you have it always. With best regards to Mrs. and Miss Macready, always believe me, My dear Macready, Your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: The same.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Thursday, Nov. 14th, 1839._ MY DEAR MACREADY, Tom Landseer--that is, the deaf one, whom everybody quite loves for his sweet nature under a most deplorable infirmity--Tom Landseer asked me if I would present to you from him the accompanying engraving, which he has executed from a picture by his brother Edwin; submitting it to you as a little tribute from an unknown but ardent admirer of your genius, which speaks to his heart, although it does not find its way there through his ears. I readily undertook the task, and send it herewith. I urged him to call upon you with me and proffer it boldly; but he is a very modest and delicately-minded creature, and was shy of intruding. If you thank him through me, perhaps you will say something about my bringing him to call, and so gladden the gentle artist and make him happy. You must come and see my new house when we have it to rights. By Christmas Day we shall be, I hope, your neighbours. Kate progresses splendidly, and, with me, sends her best remembrances to Mrs. Macready and all your house. Ever believe me, Dear Macready, Faithfully yours. 1840. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens was at Broadstairs with his family for the autumn months. During all this year he was busily engaged with the periodical entitled "Master Humphrey's Clock," in which the story of "The Old Curiosity Shop" subsequently appeared. Nearly all these letters to Mr. George Cattermole refer to the illustrations for this story. The one dated March 9th alludes to short papers written for "Master Humphrey's Clock" prior to the commencement of "The Old Curiosity Shop." We have in this year Charles Dickens's first letter to Mr. Daniel Maclise, this and one other being, unfortunately, the only letters we have been able to obtain addressed to this much-loved friend and most intimate companion. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, January 13th, 1840._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, I am going to propound a mightily grave matter to you. My now periodical work appears--or I should rather say the first number does--on Saturday, the 28th of March; and as it has to be sent to America and Germany, and must therefore be considerably in advance, it is now in hand; I having in fact begun it on Saturday last. Instead of being published in monthly parts at a shilling each only, it will be published in weekly parts at threepence and monthly parts at a shilling; my object being to baffle the imitators and make it as novel as possible. The plan is a new one--I mean the plan of the fiction--and it will comprehend a great variety of tales. The title is: "Master Humphrey's Clock." Now, among other improvements, I have turned my attention to the illustrations, meaning to have woodcuts dropped into the text and no separate plates. I want to know whether you would object to make me a little sketch for a woodcut--in indian-ink would be quite sufficient--about the size of the enclosed scrap; the subject, an old quaint room with antique Elizabethan furniture, and in the chimney-corner an extraordinary old clock--the clock belonging to Master Humphrey, in fact, and no figures. This I should drop into the text at the head of my opening page. I want to know besides--as Chapman and Hall are my partners in the matter, there need be no delicacy about my asking or your answering the question--what would be your charge for such a thing, and whether (if the work answers our expectations) you would like to repeat the joke at regular intervals, and, if so, on what terms? I should tell you that I intend to ask Maclise to join me likewise, and that the copying the drawing on wood and the cutting will be done in first-rate style. We are justified by past experience in supposing that the sale would be enormous, and the popularity very great; and when I explain to you the notes I have in my head, I think you will see that it opens a vast number of very good subjects. I want to talk the matter over with you, and wish you would fix your own time and place--either here or at your house or at the Athenæum, though this would be the best place, because I have my papers about me. If you would take a chop with me, for instance, on Tuesday or Wednesday, I could tell you more in two minutes than in twenty letters, albeit I have endeavoured to make this as businesslike and stupid as need be. Of course all these tremendous arrangements are as yet a profound secret, or there would be fifty Humphreys in the field. So write me a line like a worthy gentleman, and convey my best remembrances to your worthy lady. Believe me always, my dear Cattermole, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Afternoon._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, I think the drawing most famous, and so do the publishers, to whom I sent it to-day. If Browne should suggest anything for the future which may enable him to do you justice in copying (on which point he is very anxious), I will communicate it to you. It has occurred to me that perhaps you will like to see his copy on the block before it is cut, and I have therefore told Chapman and Hall to forward it to you. In future, I will take care that you have the number to choose your subject from. I ought to have done so, perhaps, in this case; but I was very anxious that you should do the room. Perhaps the shortest plan will be for me to send you, as enclosed, regularly; but if you prefer keeping account with the publishers, they will be happy to enter upon it when, where, and how you please. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, March 9th, 1840._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, I have been induced, on looking over the works of the "Clock," to make a slight alteration in their disposal, by virtue of which the story about "John Podgers" will stand over for some little time, and that short tale will occupy its place which you have already by you, and which treats of the assassination of a young gentleman under circumstances of peculiar aggravation. I shall be greatly obliged to you if you will turn your attention to this last morsel as the feature of No. 3, and still more if you can stretch a point with regard to time (which is of the last importance just now), and make a subject out of it, rather than find one in it. I would neither have made this alteration nor have troubled you about it, but for weighty and cogent reasons which I feel very strongly, and into the composition of which caprice or fastidiousness has no part. I should tell you perhaps, with reference to Chapman and Hall, that they will never trouble you (as they never trouble me) but when there is real and pressing occasion, and that their representations in this respect, unlike those of most men of business, are to be relied upon. I cannot tell you how admirably I think Master Humphrey's room comes out, or what glowing accounts I hear of the second design you have done. I had not the faintest anticipation of anything so good--taking into account the material and the despatch. With best regards at home, Believe me, dear Cattermole, Heartily yours. P.S.--The new (No. 3) tale begins: "I hold a lieutenant's commission in his Majesty's army, and served abroad in the campaigns of 1677 and 1678." It has at present no title. [Sidenote: Mr. S. A. Diezman.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _10th March, 1840._ MY DEAR SIR, I will not attempt to tell you how much gratified I have been by the receipt of your first English letter; nor can I describe to you with what delight and gratification I learn that I am held in such high esteem by your great countrymen, whose favourable appreciation is flattering indeed. To you, who have undertaken the laborious (and often, I fear, very irksome) task of clothing me in the German garb, I owe a long arrear of thanks. I wish you would come to England, and afford me an opportunity of slightly reducing the account. It is with great regret that I have to inform you, in reply to the request contained in your pleasant communication, that my publishers have already made such arrangements and are in possession of such stipulations relative to the proof-sheets of my new works, that I have no power to send them out of England. If I had, I need not tell you what pleasure it would afford me to promote your views. I am too sensible of the trouble you must have already had with my writings to impose upon you now a long letter. I will only add, therefore, that I am, My dear Sir, With great sincerity, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Daniel Maclise.] BROADSTAIRS, _June 2nd, 1840._ MY DEAR MACLISE, My foot is in the house, My bath is on the sea, And, before I take a souse, Here's a single note to thee. It merely says that the sea is in a state of extraordinary sublimity; that this place is, as the Guide Book most justly observes, "unsurpassed for the salubrity of the refreshing breezes, which are wafted on the ocean's pinions from far-distant shores." That we are all right after the perils and voyages of yesterday. That the sea is rolling away in front of the window at which I indite this epistle, and that everything is as fresh and glorious as fine weather and a splendid coast can make it. Bear these recommendations in mind, and shunning Talfourdian pledges, come to the bower which is shaded for you in the one-pair front, where no chair or table has four legs of the same length, and where no drawers will open till you have pulled the pegs off, and then they keep open and won't shut again. COME! I can no more. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _December 21st._ MY DEAR GEORGE, Kit, the single gentleman, and Mr. Garland go down to the place where the child is, and arrive there at night. There has been a fall of snow. Kit, leaving them behind, runs to the old house, and, with a lanthorn in one hand and the bird in its cage in the other, stops for a moment at a little distance with a natural hesitation before he goes up to make his presence known. In a window--supposed to be that of the child's little room--a light is burning, and in that room the child (unknown, of course, to her visitors, who are full of hope) lies dead. If you have any difficulty about Kit, never mind about putting him in. The two others to-morrow. Faithfully always. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday Morning._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, I sent the MS. of the enclosed proof, marked 2, up to Chapman and Hall, from Devonshire, mentioning a subject of an old gateway, which I had put in expressly with a view to your illustrious pencil. By a mistake, however, it went to Browne instead. Chapman is out of town, and such things have gone wrong in consequence. The subject to which I wish to call your attention is in an unwritten number to follow this one, but it is a mere echo of what you will find at the conclusion of this proof marked 2. I want the cart, gaily decorated, going through the street of the old town with the wax brigand displayed to fierce advantage, and the child seated in it also dispersing bills. As many flags and inscriptions about Jarley's Wax Work fluttering from the cart as you please. You know the wax brigands, and how they contemplate small oval miniatures? That's the figure I want. I send you the scrap of MS. which contains the subject. Will you, when you have done this, send it with all speed to Chapman and Hall, as we are mortally pressed for time, and I must go hard to work to make up for what I have lost by being dutiful and going to see my father. I want to see you about a frontispiece to our first "Clock" volume, which will come out (I think) at the end of September, and about other matters. When shall we meet and where? I say nothing about our cousin or the baby, for Kate bears this, and will make me a full report and convey all loves and congratulations. Could you dine with us on Sunday, at six o'clock sharp? I'd come and fetch you in the morning, and we could take a ride and walk. We shall be quite alone, unless Macready comes. What say you? Don't forget despatch, there's a dear fellow, and ever believe me, Heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] _December 22nd, 1840._ DEAR GEORGE, The child lying dead in the little sleeping-room, which is behind the open screen. It is winter time, so there are no flowers; but upon her breast and pillow, and about her bed, there may be strips of holly and berries, and such free green things. Window overgrown with ivy. The little boy who had that talk with her about angels may be by the bedside, if you like it so; but I think it will be quieter and more peaceful if she is quite alone. I want it to express the most beautiful repose and tranquillity, and to have something of a happy look, if death can. 2. The child has been buried inside the church, and the old man, who cannot be made to understand that she is dead, repairs to the grave and sits there all day long, waiting for her arrival, to begin another journey. His staff and knapsack, her little bonnet and basket, etc., lie beside him. "She'll come to-morrow," he says when it gets dark, and goes sorrowfully home. I think an hourglass running out would help the notion; perhaps her little things upon his knee, or in his hand. I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it. Love to Missis. Ever and always heartily. 1841. NARRATIVE. In the summer of this year Charles Dickens made, accompanied by Mrs. Dickens, his first visit to Scotland, and was received in Edinburgh with the greatest enthusiasm. He was at Broadstairs with his family for the autumn, and at the close of the year he went to Windsor for change of air after a serious illness. On the 17th January "The Old Curiosity Shop" was finished. In the following week the first number of his story of "Barnaby Rudge" appeared, in "Master Humphrey's Clock," and the last number of this story was written at Windsor, in November of this year. We have the first letters to his dear and valued friends the Rev. William Harness and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth. Also his first letter to Mr. Monckton Milnes (now Lord Houghton). Of the letter to Mr. John Tomlin we would only remark, that it was published in an American magazine, edited by Mr. E. A. Poe, in the year 1842. "The New First Rate" (first letter to Mr. Harrison Ainsworth) must, we think, be an allusion to the outside cover of "Bentley's Miscellany," which first appeared in this year, and of which Mr. Ainsworth was editor. The two letters to Mr. Lovejoy are in answer to a requisition from the people of Reading that he would represent them in Parliament. The letter to Mr. George Cattermole (26th June) refers to a dinner given to Charles Dickens by the people of Edinburgh, on his first visit to that city. The "poor Overs," mentioned in the letter to Mr. Macready of 24th August, was a carpenter dying of consumption, to whom Dr. Elliotson had shown extraordinary kindness. "When poor Overs was dying" (wrote Charles Dickens to Mr. Forster), "he suddenly asked for a pen and ink and some paper, and made up a little parcel for me, which it was his last conscious act to direct. She (his wife) told me this, and gave it me. I opened it last night. It was a copy of his little book, in which he had written my name, 'with his devotion.' I thought it simple and affecting of the poor fellow." "The Saloon," alluded to in our last letter of this year, was an institution at Drury Lane Theatre during Mr. Macready's management. The original purpose for which this saloon was established having become perverted and degraded, Charles Dickens had it much at heart to remodel and improve it. Hence this letter to Mr. Macready. [Sidenote: Rev. William Harness.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday Morning, Jan. 2nd, 1841._ MY DEAR HARNESS, I should have been very glad to join your pleasant party, but all next week I shall be laid up with a broken heart, for I must occupy myself in finishing the "Curiosity Shop," and it is such a painful task to me that I must concentrate myself upon it tooth and nail, and go out nowhere until it is done. I have delayed answering your kind note in a vague hope of being heart-whole again by the seventh. The present state of my work, however (Christmas not being a very favourable season for making progress in such doings), assures me that this cannot be, and that I must heroically deny myself the pleasure you offer. Always believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday, Jan. 14th, 1841._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, I cannot tell you how much obliged I am to you for altering the child, or how much I hope that my wish in that respect didn't go greatly against the grain. I saw the old inn this morning. Words cannot say how good it is. I can't bear the thought of its being cut, and should like to frame and glaze it in _statu quo_ for ever and ever. Will you do a little tail-piece for the "Curiosity" story?--only one figure if you like--giving some notion of the etherealised spirit of the child; something like those little figures in the frontispiece. If you will, and can despatch it at once, you will make me happy. I am, for the time being, nearly dead with work and grief for the loss of my child. Always, my dear George, Heartily yours. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday Night, Jan. 28th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, I sent to Chapman and Hall yesterday morning about the second subject for No. 2 of "Barnaby," but found they had sent it to Browne. The first subject of No. 3 I will either send to you on Saturday, or, at latest, on Sunday morning. I have also directed Chapman and Hall to send you proofs of what has gone before, for reference, if you need it. I want to know whether you feel ravens in general and would fancy Barnaby's raven in particular. Barnaby being an idiot, my notion is to have him always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him. Should you like the subject when this raven makes his first appearance? Faithfully always. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday Evening, Jan. 30th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, I send you the first four slips of No. 48, containing the description of the locksmith's house, which I think will make a good subject, and one you will like. If you put the "'prentice" in it, show nothing more than his paper cap, because he will be an important character in the story, and you will need to know more about him as he is minutely described. I may as well say that he is very short. Should you wish to put the locksmith in, you will find him described in No. 2 of "Barnaby" (which I told Chapman and Hall to send you). Browne has done him in one little thing, but so very slightly that you will not require to see his sketch, I think. Now, I must know what you think about the raven, my buck; I otherwise am in this fix. I have given Browne no subject for this number, and time is flying. If you would like to have the raven's first appearance, and don't object to having both subjects, so be it. I shall be delighted. If otherwise, I must feed that hero forthwith. I cannot close this hasty note, my dear fellow, without saying that I have deeply felt your hearty and most invaluable co-operation in the beautiful illustrations you have made for the last story, that I look at them with a pleasure I cannot describe to you in words, and that it is impossible for me to say how sensible I am of your earnest and friendly aid. Believe me that this is the very first time any designs for what I have written have touched and moved me, and caused me to feel that they expressed the idea I had in my mind. I am most sincerely and affectionately grateful to you, and am full of pleasure and delight. Believe me, my dear Cattermole, Always heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. John Tomlin.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _Tuesday, Feb. 23rd, 1841._ DEAR SIR, You are quite right in feeling assured that I should answer the letter you have addressed to me. If you had entertained a presentiment that it would afford me sincere pleasure and delight to hear from a warm-hearted and admiring reader of my books in the backwoods of America, you would not have been far wrong. I thank you cordially and heartily both for your letter and its kind and courteous terms. To think that I have awakened a fellow-feeling and sympathy with the creatures of many thoughtful hours among the vast solitudes in which you dwell, is a source of the purest delight and pride to me; and believe me that your expressions of affectionate remembrance and approval, sounding from the green forests on the banks of the Mississippi, sink deeper into my heart and gratify it more than all the honorary distinctions that all the courts in Europe could confer. It is such things as these that make one hope one does not live in vain, and that are the highest reward of an author's life. To be numbered among the household gods of one's distant countrymen, and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world's great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with one in the spirit, is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth. That I may be happy enough to cheer some of your leisure hours for a very long time to come, and to hold a place in your pleasant thoughts, is the earnest wish of "Boz." And, with all good wishes for yourself, and with a sincere reciprocation of all your kindly feeling, I am, dear Sir, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. R. Monckton Milnes] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Wednesday, March 10th, 1841._ MY DEAR MILNES, I thank you very much for the "Nickleby" correspondence, which I will keep for a day or two, and return when I see you. Poor fellow! The long letter is quite admirable, and most affecting. I am not quite sure either of Friday or Saturday, for, independently of the "Clock" (which for ever wants winding), I am getting a young brother off to New Zealand just now, and have my mornings sadly cut up in consequence. But, knowing your ways, I know I may say that I will come if I can; and that if I can't I won't. That Nellicide was the act of Heaven, as you may see any of these fine mornings when you look about you. If you knew the pain it gave me--but what am I talking of? if you don't know, nobody does. I am glad to shake you by the hand again autographically, And am always, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, February 9th._ MY DEAR GEORGE, My notes tread upon each other's heels. In my last I quite forgot business. Will you, for No. 49, do the locksmith's house, which was described in No. 48? I mean the outside. If you can, without hurting the effect, shut up the shop as though it were night, so much the better. Should you want a figure, an ancient watchman in or out of his box, very sleepy, will be just the thing for me. I have written to Chapman and requested him to send you a block of a long shape, so that the house may come upright as it were. Faithfully ever. [Sidenote: The same.] OLD SHIP HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _Feb. 26th, 1841._ MY DEAR KITTENMOLES, I passed your house on Wednesday, being then atop of the Brighton Era; but there was nobody at the door, saving a solitary poulterer, and all my warm-hearted aspirations lodged in the goods he was delivering. No doubt you observed a peculiar relish in your dinner. That was the cause. I send you the MS. I fear you will have to read all the five slips; but the subject I think of is at the top of the last, when the guest, with his back towards the spectator, is looking out of window. I think, in your hands, it will be a very pretty one. Then, my boy, when you have done it, turn your thoughts (as soon as other engagements will allow) first to the outside of The Warren--see No. 1; secondly, to the outside of the locksmith's house, by night--see No. 3. Put a penny pistol to Chapman's head and demand the blocks of him. I have addled my head with writing all day, and have barely wit enough left to send my love to my cousin, and--there's a genealogical poser--what relation of mine may the dear little child be? At present, I desire to be commended to her clear blue eyes. Always, my dear George, Faithfully yours, [HW: Boz.] [Sidenote: Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _April 29th, 1841._ MY DEAR AINSWORTH, With all imaginable pleasure. I quite look forward to the day. It is an age since we met, and it ought not to be. The artist has just sent home your "Nickleby." He suggested variety, pleading his fancy and genius. As an artful binder must have his way, I put the best face on the matter, and gave him his. I will bring it together with the "Pickwick" to your house-warming with me. The old _Royal George_ went down in consequence of having too much weight on one side. I trust the new "First Rate" won't be heavy anywhere. There seems to me to be too much whisker for a shilling, but that's a matter of taste. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. G. Lovejoy.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Monday Evening, May 31st, 1841._ SIR, I am much obliged and flattered by the receipt of your letter, which I should have answered immediately on its arrival but for my absence from home at the moment. My principles and inclinations would lead me to aspire to the distinction you invite me to seek, if there were any reasonable chance of success, and I hope I should do no discredit to such an honour if I won and wore it. But I am bound to add, and I have no hesitation in saying plainly, that I cannot afford the expense of a contested election. If I could, I would act on your suggestion instantly. I am not the less indebted to you and the friends to whom the thought occurred, for your good opinion and approval. I beg you to understand that I am restrained solely (and much against my will) by the consideration I have mentioned, and thank both you and them most warmly. Yours faithfully. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _June 10th, 1841._ DEAR SIR, I am favoured with your note of yesterday's date, and lose no time in replying to it. The sum you mention, though small I am aware in the abstract, is greater than I could afford for such a purpose; as the mere sitting in the House and attending to my duties, if I were a member, would oblige me to make many pecuniary sacrifices, consequent upon the very nature of my pursuits. The course you suggest did occur to me when I received your first letter, and I have very little doubt indeed that the Government would support me--perhaps to the whole extent. But I cannot satisfy myself that to enter Parliament under such circumstances would enable me to pursue that honourable independence without which I could neither preserve my own respect nor that of my constituents. I confess therefore (it may be from not having considered the points sufficiently, or in the right light) that I cannot bring myself to propound the subject to any member of the administration whom I know. I am truly obliged to you nevertheless, and am, Dear Sir, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Wednesday Evening, July 28th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, Can you do for me by Saturday evening--I know the time is short, but I think the subject will suit you, and I am greatly pressed--a party of rioters (with Hugh and Simon Tappertit conspicuous among them) in old John Willet's bar, turning the liquor taps to their own advantage, smashing bottles, cutting down the grove of lemons, sitting astride on casks, drinking out of the best punch-bowls, eating the great cheese, smoking sacred pipes, etc. etc.; John Willet, fallen backward in his chair, regarding them with a stupid horror, and quite alone among them, with none of The Maypole customers at his back. It's in your way, and you'll do it a hundred times better than I can suggest it to you, I know. Faithfully always. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] BROADSTAIRS, _Friday, August 6th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, Here is a subject for the next number; the next to that I hope to send you the MS. of very early in the week, as the best opportunities of illustration are all coming off now, and we are in the thick of the story. The rioters went, sir, from John Willet's bar (where you saw them to such good purpose) straight to The Warren, which house they plundered, sacked, burned, pulled down as much of as they could, and greatly damaged and destroyed. They are supposed to have left it about half an hour. It is night, and the ruins are here and there flaming and smoking. I want--if you understand--to show one of the turrets laid open--the turret where the alarm-bell is, mentioned in No. 1; and among the ruins (at some height if possible) Mr. Haredale just clutching our friend, the mysterious file, who is passing over them like a spirit; Solomon Daisy, if you can introduce him, looking on from the ground below. Please to observe that the M. F. wears a large cloak and a slouched hat. This is important, because Browne will have him in the same number, and he has not changed his dress meanwhile. Mr. Haredale is supposed to have come down here on horseback, pell-mell; to be excited to the last degree. I think it will make a queer picturesque thing in your hands. I have told Chapman and Hall that you may like to have a block of a peculiar shape for it. One of them will be with you almost as soon as you receive this. We are very anxious to know that our cousin is out of her trouble, and you free from your anxiety. Mind you write when it comes off. And when she is quite comfortable come down here for a day or two, like a bachelor, as you will be. It will do you a world of good. Think of that. Always, dear Cattermole, Heartily yours. P.S.--When you have done the subject, I wish you'd write me one line and tell me how, that I may be sure we agree. Loves from Kate. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday, August 13th._ MY DEAR CATTERMOLE, Will you turn your attention to a frontispiece for our first volume, to come upon the left-hand side of the book as you open it, and to face a plain printed title? My idea is, some scene from the "Curiosity Shop," in a pretty border, or scroll-work, or architectural device; it matters not what, so that it be pretty. The scene even might be a fanciful thing, partaking of the character of the story, but not reproducing any particular passage in it, if you thought that better for the effect. I ask you to think of this, because, although the volume is not published until the end of September, there is no time to lose. We wish to have it engraved with great care, and worked very skilfully; and this cannot be done unless we get it on the stocks soon. They will give you every opportunity of correction, alteration, revision, and all other ations and isions connected with the fine arts. Always believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] BROADSTAIRS, _August 19th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, When Hugh and a small body of the rioters cut off from The Warren beckoned to their pals, they forced into a very remarkable postchaise Dolly Varden and Emma Haredale, and bore them away with all possible rapidity; one of their company driving, and the rest running beside the chaise, climbing up behind, sitting on the top, lighting the way with their torches, etc. etc. If you can express the women inside without showing them--as by a fluttering veil, a delicate arm, or so forth appearing at the half-closed window--so much the better. Mr. Tappertit stands on the steps, which are partly down, and, hanging on to the window with one hand and extending the other with great majesty, addresses a few words of encouragement to the driver and attendants. Hugh sits upon the bar in front; the driver sitting postilion-wise, and turns round to look through the window behind him at the little doves within. The gentlemen behind are also anxious to catch a glimpse of the ladies. One of those who are running at the side may be gently rebuked for his curiosity by the cudgel of Hugh. So they cut away, sir, as fast as they can. Always faithfully. P.S.--John Willet's bar is noble. We take it for granted that cousin and baby are hearty. Our loves to them. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] BROADSTAIRS, _Tuesday, August 24th, 1841._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I must thank you, most heartily and cordially, for your kind note relative to poor Overs. I can't tell you how glad I am to know that he thoroughly deserves such kindness. What a good fellow Elliotson is. He kept him in his room a whole hour, and has gone into his case as if he were Prince Albert; laying down all manner of elaborate projects and determining to leave his friend Wood in town when he himself goes away, on purpose to attend to him. Then he writes me four sides of paper about the man, and says he can't go back to his old work, for that requires muscular exertion (and muscular exertion he mustn't make), what are we to do with him? He says: "Here's five pounds for the present." I declare before God that I could almost bear the Jones's for five years out of the pleasure I feel in knowing such things, and when I think that every dirty speck upon the fair face of the Almighty's creation, who writes in a filthy, beastly newspaper; every rotten-hearted pander who has been beaten, kicked, and rolled in the kennel, yet struts it in the editorial "We," once a week; every vagabond that an honest man's gorge must rise at; every live emetic in that noxious drug-shop the press, can have his fling at such men and call them knaves and fools and thieves, I grow so vicious that, with bearing hard upon my pen, I break the nib down, and, with keeping my teeth set, make my jaws ache. I have put myself out of sorts for the day, and shall go and walk, unless the direction of this sets me up again. On second thoughts I think it will. Always, my dear Macready, Your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, September 12th, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, Here is a business letter, written in a scramble just before post time, whereby I dispose of loves to cousin in a line. Firstly. Will you design, upon a block of wood, Lord George Gordon, alone and very solitary, in his prison in the Tower? The chamber as ancient as you please, and after your own fancy; the time, evening; the season, summer. Secondly. Will you ditto upon a ditto, a sword duel between Mr. Haredale and Mr. Chester, in a grove of trees? No one close by. Mr. Haredale has just pierced his adversary, who has fallen, dying, on the grass. He (that is, Chester) tries to staunch the wound in his breast with his handkerchief; has his snuffbox on the earth beside him, and looks at Mr. Haredale (who stands with his sword in his hand, looking down on him) with most supercilious hatred, but polite to the last. Mr. Haredale is more sorry than triumphant. Thirdly. Will you conceive and execute, after your own fashion, a frontispiece for "Barnaby"? Fourthly. Will you also devise a subject representing "Master Humphrey's Clock" as stopped; his chair by the fireside, empty; his crutch against the wall; his slippers on the cold hearth; his hat upon the chair-back; the MSS. of "Barnaby" and "The Curiosity Shop" heaped upon the table; and the flowers you introduced in the first subject of all withered and dead? Master Humphrey being supposed to be no more. I have a fifthly, sixthly, seventhly, and eighthly; for I sorely want you, as I approach the close of the tale, but I won't frighten you, so we'll take breath. Always, my dear Cattermole, Heartily yours. P.S.--I have been waiting until I got to subjects of this nature, thinking you would like them best. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] BROADSTAIRS, _September 21st, 1841._ MY DEAR GEORGE, Will you, before you go on with the other subjects I gave you, do one of Hugh, bareheaded, bound, tied on a horse, and escorted by horse-soldiers to jail? If you can add an indication of old Fleet Market, and bodies of foot soldiers firing at people who have taken refuge on the tops of stalls, bulk-heads, etc., it will be all the better. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Talfourd.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _December 16th, 1841._ MY DEAR MARY, I should be delighted to come and dine with you on your birthday, and to be as merry as I wish you to be always; but as I am going, within a very few days afterwards, a very long distance from home, and shall not see any of my children for six long months, I have made up my mind to pass all that week at home for their sakes; just as you would like your papa and mamma to spend all the time they possibly could spare with you if they were about to make a dreary voyage to America; which is what I am going to do myself. But although I cannot come to see you on that day, you may be sure I shall not forget that it is your birthday, and that I shall drink your health and many happy returns, in a glass of wine, filled as full as it will hold. And I shall dine at half-past five myself, so that we may both be drinking our wine at the same time; and I shall tell my Mary (for I have got a daughter of that name but she is a very small one as yet) to drink your health too; and we shall try and make believe that you are here, or that we are in Russell Square, which is the best thing we can do, I think, under the circumstances. You are growing up so fast that by the time I come home again I expect you will be almost a woman; and in a very few years we shall be saying to each other: "Don't you remember what the birthdays used to be in Russell Square?" and "How strange it seems!" and "How quickly time passes!" and all that sort of thing, you know. But I shall always be very glad to be asked on your birthday, and to come if you will let me, and to send my love to you, and to wish that you may live to be very old and very happy, which I do now with all my heart. Believe me always, My dear Mary, Yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, Dec. 28th, 1841._ MY DEAR MACREADY, This note is about the saloon. I make it as brief as possible. Read it when you have time. As we were the first experimentalists last night you will be glad to know what it wants. First, the refreshments are preposterously dear. A glass of wine is a shilling, and it ought to be sixpence. Secondly, they were served out by the wrong sort of people--two most uncomfortable drabs of women, and a dirty man with his hat on. Thirdly, there ought to be a box-keeper to ring a bell or give some other notice of the commencement of the overture to the after-piece. The promenaders were in a perpetual fret and worry to get back again. And fourthly, and most important of all--if the plan is ever to succeed--you must have some notice up to the effect that as it is now a place of resort for ladies, gentlemen are requested not to lounge there in their hats and greatcoats. No ladies will go there, though the conveniences should be ten thousand times greater, while the sort of swells who have been used to kick their heels there do so in the old sort of way. I saw this expressed last night more strongly than I can tell you. Hearty congratulations on the brilliant triumph. I have always expected one, as you know, but nobody could have imagined the reality. Always, my dear Macready, Affectionately yours. 1842. NARRATIVE. In January of this year Charles Dickens went, with his wife, to America, the house in Devonshire Terrace being let for the term of their absence (six months), and the four children left in a furnished house in Osnaburgh Street, Regent's Park, under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Macready. They returned from America in July, and in August went to Broadstairs for the autumn months as usual, and in October Charles Dickens made an expedition to Cornwall, with Mr. Forster, Mr. Maclise, and Mr. Stanfield for his companions. During his stay at Broadstairs he was engaged in writing his "American Notes," which book was published in October. At the end of the year he had written the first number of "Martin Chuzzlewit," which appeared in January, 1843. An extract from a letter, addressed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall before his departure for America, is given as a testimony of the estimation in which Charles Dickens held the firm with whom he was connected for so many years. His letters to Mr. H. P. Smith, for many years actuary of the Eagle Insurance Office, are a combination of business and friendship. Mr. Smith gives us, as an explanation of a note to him, dated 14th July, that he alluded to the stamp of the office upon the cheque, which was, as he described it, "almost a work of art"--a truculent-looking eagle seated on a rock and scattering rays over the whole sheet. Of letters written by Charles Dickens in America we have been able to obtain very few. One, to Dr. F. H. Deane, Cincinnati, complying with his request to write him an epitaph for the tombstone of his little child, has been kindly copied for us from an album, by Mrs. Fields, of Boston. Therefore, it is not directly received, but as we have no doubt of its authenticity, we give it here; and there is one to Mr. Halleck, the American poet. At the close of the voyage to America (a very bad and dangerous one), a meeting of the passengers, with Lord Mulgrave in the chair, took place, and a piece of plate and thanks were voted to the captain of the _Britannia_, Captain Hewett. The vote of thanks, being drawn up by Charles Dickens, is given here. We have letters in this year to Mr. Thomas Hood, Miss Pardoe, Mrs. Trollope, and Mr. W. P. Frith. The last-named artist--then a very young man--had made great success with several charming pictures of Dolly Varden. One of these was bought by Charles Dickens, who ordered a companion picture of Kate Nickleby, from the young painter, whose acquaintance he made at the same time; and the two letters to Mr. Frith have reference to the purchase of the one picture and the commission for the other. The letter to Mr. Cattermole is an acknowledgment also of a completed commission of two water-colour drawings, from the subjects of two of Mr. Cattermole's illustrations to "The Old Curiosity Shop." A note to Mr. Macready, at the close of this year, refers to the first representation of Mr. Westland Marston's play, "The Patrician's Daughter." Charles Dickens took great interest in the production of this work at Drury Lane. It was, to a certain extent, an experiment of the effect of a tragedy of modern times and in modern dress; and the prologue, which Charles Dickens wrote and which we give, was intended to show that there need be no incongruity between plain clothes of this century and high tragedy. The play was quite successful. [Sidenote: Messrs. Chapman and Hall.] * * * * * Having disposed of the business part of this letter, I should not feel at ease on leaving England if I did not tell you once more with my whole heart that your conduct to me on this and all other occasions has been honourable, manly, and generous, and that I have felt it a solemn duty, in the event of any accident happening to me while I am away, to place this testimony upon record. It forms part of a will I have made for the security of my children; for I wish them to know it when they are capable of understanding your worth and my appreciation of it. Always believe me, Faithfully and truly yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Monday, Jan. 3rd, 1842._ MY DEAR MITTON, This is a short note, but I will fulfil the adage and make it a merry one. We came down in great comfort. Our luggage is now aboard. Anything so utterly and monstrously absurd as the size of our cabin, no "gentleman of England who lives at home at ease" can for a moment imagine. Neither of the portmanteaus would go into it. There! These Cunard packets are not very big you know actually, but the quantity of sleeping-berths makes them much smaller, so that the saloon is not nearly as large as in one of the Ramsgate boats. The ladies' cabin is so close to ours that I could knock the door open without getting off something they call my bed, but which I believe to be a muffin beaten flat. This is a great comfort, for it is an excellent room (the only good one in the ship); and if there be only one other lady besides Kate, as the stewardess thinks, I hope I shall be able to sit there very often. They talk of seventy passengers, but I can't think there will be so many; they talk besides (which is even more to the purpose) of a very fine passage, having had a noble one this time last year. God send it so! We are in the best spirits, and full of hope. I was dashed for a moment when I saw our "cabin," but I got over that directly, and laughed so much at its ludicrous proportions, that you might have heard me all over the ship. God bless you! Write to me by the first opportunity. I will do the like to you. And always believe me, Your old and faithful Friend. NARRATIVE. At a meeting of the passengers on board the _Britannia_ steam-ship, travelling from Liverpool to Boston, held in the saloon of that vessel, on Friday, the 21st January, 1842, it was moved and seconded: "That the Earl of Mulgrave do take the chair." The motion having been carried unanimously, the Earl of Mulgrave took the chair accordingly. It was also moved and seconded, and carried unanimously: "That Charles Dickens, Esq., be appointed secretary and treasurer to the meeting." The three following resolutions were then proposed and carried _nem. con._: "First. That, gratefully recognising the blessing of Divine Providence by which we are brought nearly to the termination of our voyage, we have great pleasure in expressing our high appreciation of Captain Hewett's nautical skill and of his indefatigable attention to the management and safe conduct of the ship, during a more than ordinarily tempestuous passage. "Secondly. That a subscription be opened for the purchase of a piece of silver plate, and that Captain Hewett be respectfully requested to accept it, as a sincere expression of the sentiments embodied in the foregoing resolution. "Thirdly. That a committee be appointed to carry these resolutions into effect; and that the committee be composed of the following gentlemen: Charles Dickens, Esq., E. Dunbar, Esq., and Solomon Hopkins, Esq." The committee having withdrawn and conferred with Captain Hewett, returned, and informed the meeting that Captain Hewett desired to attend and express his thanks, which he did. The amount of the subscription was reported at fifty pounds, and the list was closed. It was then agreed that the following inscription should be placed upon the testimonial to Captain Hewett: THIS PIECE OF PLATE was presented to CAPTAIN JOHN HEWETT, of the BRITANNIA Steam-ship, By the Passengers on board that vessel in a voyage from Liverpool to Boston, in the month of January, 1842, As a slight acknowledgment of his great ability and skill under circumstances of much difficulty and danger, And as a feeble token of their lasting gratitude. Thanks were then voted to the chairman and to the secretary, and the meeting separated. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] TREMONT HOUSE, BOSTON, _January 31st, 1842._ MY DEAR MITTON, I am so exhausted with the life I am obliged to lead here, that I have had time to write but one letter which is at all deserving of the name, as giving any account of our movements. Forster has it, in trust, to tell you all its news; and he has also some newspapers which I had an opportunity of sending him, in which you will find further particulars of our progress. We had a dreadful passage, the worst, the officers all concur in saying, that they have ever known. We were eighteen days coming; experienced a dreadful storm which swept away our paddle-boxes and stove our lifeboats; and ran aground besides, near Halifax, among rocks and breakers, where we lay at anchor all night. After we left the English Channel we had only one fine day. And we had the additional discomfort of being eighty-six passengers. I was ill five days, Kate six; though, indeed, she had a swelled face and suffered the utmost terror all the way. I can give you no conception of my welcome here. There never was a king or emperor upon the earth so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained in public at splendid balls and dinners, and waited on by public bodies and deputations of all kinds. I have had one from the Far West--a journey of two thousand miles! If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surround it and escort me home; if I go to the theatre, the whole house (crowded to the roof) rises as one man, and the timbers ring again. You cannot imagine what it is. I have five great public dinners on hand at this moment, and invitations from every town and village and city in the States. There is a great deal afloat here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the time I come home. When you write to me again--I say again, hoping that your first letter will be soon upon its way here--direct to me to the care of David Colden, Esq., New York. He will forward all communications by the quickest conveyance and will be perfectly acquainted with all my movements. Always your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Fitz-Greene Halleck.] CARLTON HOUSE, _February 14th, 1842._ MY DEAR SIR, Will you come and breakfast with me on Tuesday, the 22nd, at half-past ten? Say yes. I should have been truly delighted to have a talk with you to-night (being quite alone), but the doctor says that if I talk to man, woman, or child this evening I shall be dumb to-morrow. Believe me, with true regard, Faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] BALTIMORE, _March 22nd, 1842._ MY DEAR FRIEND, I beg your pardon, but you were speaking of rash leaps at hasty conclusions. Are you quite sure you designed that remark for me? Have you not, in the hurry of correspondence, slipped a paragraph into my letter which belongs of right to somebody else? When did you ever find me leap at wrong conclusions? I pause for a reply. Pray, sir, did you ever find me admiring Mr. ----? On the contrary, did you never hear of my protesting through good, better, and best report that he was not an open or a candid man, and would one day, beyond all doubt, displease you by not being so? I pause again for a reply. Are you quite sure, Mr. Macready--and I address myself to you with the sternness of a man in the pit--are you quite sure, sir, that you do not view America through the pleasant mirage which often surrounds a thing that has been, but not a thing that is? Are you quite sure that when you were here you relished it as well as you do now when you look back upon it. The early spring birds, Mr. Macready, _do_ sing in the groves that you were, very often, not over well pleased with many of the new country's social aspects. Are the birds to be trusted? Again I pause for a reply. My dear Macready, I desire to be so honest and just to those who have so enthusiastically and earnestly welcomed me, that I burned the last letter I wrote to you--even to you to whom I would speak as to myself--rather than let it come with anything that might seem like an ill-considered word of disappointment. I preferred that you should think me neglectful (if you could imagine anything so wild) rather than I should do wrong in this respect. Still it is of no use. I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniments of court circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast--excepting its education of the people and its care for poor children--it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon; and England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison. _You_ live here, Macready, as I have sometimes heard you imagining! _You!_ Loving you with all my heart and soul, and knowing what your disposition really is, I would not condemn you to a year's residence on this side of the Atlantic for any money. Freedom of opinion! Where is it? I see a press more mean, and paltry, and silly, and disgraceful than any country I ever knew. If that is its standard, here it is. But I speak of Bancroft, and am advised to be silent on that subject, for he is "a black sheep--a Democrat." I speak of Bryant, and am entreated to be more careful, for the same reason. I speak of international copyright, and am implored not to ruin myself outright. I speak of Miss Martineau, and all parties--Slave Upholders and Abolitionists, Whigs, Tyler Whigs, and Democrats, shower down upon me a perfect cataract of abuse. "But what has she done? Surely she praised America enough!" "Yes, but she told us of some of our faults, and Americans can't bear to be told of their faults. Don't split on that rock, Mr. Dickens, don't write about America; we are so very suspicious." Freedom of opinion! Macready, if I had been born here and had written my books in this country, producing them with no stamp of approval from any other land, it is my solemn belief that I should have lived and died poor, unnoticed, and a "black sheep" to boot. I never was more convinced of anything than I am of that. The people are affectionate, generous, open-hearted, hospitable, enthusiastic, good-humoured, polite to women, frank and candid to all strangers, anxious to oblige, far less prejudiced than they have been described to be, frequently polished and refined, very seldom rude or disagreeable. I have made a great many friends here, even in public conveyances, whom I have been truly sorry to part from. In the towns I have formed perfect attachments. I have seen none of that greediness and indecorousness on which travellers have laid so much emphasis. I have returned frankness with frankness; met questions not intended to be rude, with answers meant to be satisfactory; and have not spoken to one man, woman, or child of any degree who has not grown positively affectionate before we parted. In the respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably. The sight of slavery in Virginia, the hatred of British feeling upon the subject, and the miserable hints of the impotent indignation of the South, have pained me very much; on the last head, of course, I have felt nothing but a mingled pity and amusement; on the other, sheer distress. But however much I like the ingredients of this great dish, I cannot but come back to the point upon which I started, and say that the dish itself goes against the grain with me, and that I don't like it. You know that I am truly a Liberal. I believe I have as little pride as most men, and I am conscious of not the smallest annoyance from being "hail fellow well met" with everybody. I have not had greater pleasure in the company of any set of men among the thousands I have received (I hold a regular levée every day, you know, which is duly heralded and proclaimed in the newspapers) than in that of the carmen of Hertford, who presented themselves in a body in their blue frocks, among a crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, and bade me welcome through their spokesman. They had all read my books, and all perfectly understood them. It is not these things I have in my mind when I say that the man who comes to this country a Radical and goes home again with his opinions unchanged, must be a Radical on reason, sympathy, and reflection, and one who has so well considered the subject that he has no chance of wavering. We have been to Boston, Worcester, Hertford, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Fredericksburgh, Richmond, and back to Washington again. The premature heat of the weather (it was eighty yesterday in the shade) and Clay's advice--how you would like Clay!--have made us determine not to go to Charleston; but having got to Richmond, I think I should have turned back under any circumstances. We remain at Baltimore for two days, of which this is one; then we go to Harrisburgh. Then by the canal boat and the railroad over the Alleghany Mountains to Pittsburgh, then down the Ohio to Cincinnati, then to Louisville, and then to St. Louis. I have been invited to a public entertainment in every town I have entered, and have refused them; but I have excepted St. Louis as the farthest point of my travels. My friends there have passed some resolutions which Forster has, and will show you. From St. Louis we cross to Chicago, traversing immense prairies. Thence by the lakes and Detroit to Buffalo, and so to Niagara. A run into Canada follows of course, and then--let me write the blessed word in capitals--we turn towards HOME. Kate has written to Mrs. Macready, and it is useless for me to thank you, my dearest friend, or her, for your care of our dear children, which is our constant theme of discourse. Forster has gladdened our hearts with his account of the triumph of "Acis and Galatea," and I am anxiously looking for news of the tragedy. Forrest breakfasted with us at Richmond last Saturday--he was acting there, and I invited him--and he spoke very gratefully, and very like a man, of your kindness to him when he was in London. David Colden is as good a fellow as ever lived; and I am deeply in love with his wife. Indeed we have received the greatest and most earnest and zealous kindness from the whole family, and quite love them all. Do you remember one Greenhow, whom you invited to pass some days with you at the hotel on the Kaatskill Mountains? He is translator to the State Office at Washington, has a very pretty wife, and a little girl of five years old. We dined with them, and had a very pleasant day. The President invited me to dinner, but I couldn't stay for it. I had a private audience, however, and we attended the public drawing-room besides. Now, don't you rush at the quick conclusion that I have rushed at a quick conclusion. Pray, be upon your guard. If you can by any process estimate the extent of my affectionate regard for you, and the rush I shall make when I reach London to take you by your true right hand, I don't object. But let me entreat you to be very careful how you come down upon the sharpsighted individual who pens these words, which you seem to me to have done in what Willmott would call "one of Mr. Macready's rushes." As my pen is getting past its work, I have taken a new one to say that I am ever, my dear Macready, Your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] BALTIMORE, UNITED STATES, _March 22nd, 1842._ MY DEAR FRIEND, We have been as far south as Richmond in Virginia (where they grow and manufacture tobacco, and where the labour is all performed by slaves), but the season in those latitudes is so intensely and prematurely hot, that it was considered a matter of doubtful expediency to go on to Charleston. For this unexpected reason, and because the country between Richmond and Charleston is but a desolate swamp the whole way, and because slavery is anything but a cheerful thing to live amidst, I have altered my route by the advice of Mr. Clay (the great political leader in this country), and have returned here previous to diving into the far West. We start for that part of the country--which includes mountain travelling, and lake travelling, and prairie travelling--the day after to-morrow, at eight o'clock in the morning; and shall be in the West, and from there going northward again, until the 30th of April or 1st of May, when we shall halt for a week at Niagara, before going further into Canada. We have taken our passage home (God bless the word) in the _George Washington_ packet-ship from New York. She sails on the 7th of June. I have departed from my resolution not to accept any more public entertainments; they have been proposed in every town I have visited--in favour of the people of St. Louis, my utmost western point. That town is on the borders of the Indian territory, a trifling distance from this place--only two thousand miles! At my second halting-place I shall be able to write to fix the day; I suppose it will be somewhere about the 12th of April. Think of my going so far towards the setting sun to dinner! In every town where we stay, though it be only for a day, we hold a regular levée or drawing-room, where I shake hands on an average with five or six hundred people, who pass on from me to Kate, and are shaken again by her. Maclise's picture of our darlings stands upon a table or sideboard the while; and my travelling secretary, assisted very often by a committee belonging to the place, presents the people in due form. Think of two hours of this every day, and the people coming in by hundreds, all fresh, and piping hot, and full of questions, when we are literally exhausted and can hardly stand. I really do believe that if I had not a lady with me, I should have been obliged to leave the country and go back to England. But for her they never would leave me alone by day or night, and as it is, a slave comes to me now and then in the middle of the night with a letter, and waits at the bedroom door for an answer. It was so hot at Richmond that we could scarcely breathe, and the peach and other fruit trees were in full blossom; it was so cold at Washington next day that we were shivering; but even in the same town you might often wear nothing but a shirt and trousers in the morning, and two greatcoats at night, the thermometer very frequently taking a little trip of thirty degrees between sunrise and sunset. They do lay it on at the hotels in such style! They charge by the day, so that whether one dines out or dines at home makes no manner of difference. T'other day I wrote to order our rooms at Philadelphia to be ready on a certain day, and was detained a week longer than I expected in New York. The Philadelphia landlord not only charged me half rent for the rooms during the whole of that time, but board for myself and Kate and Anne during the whole time too, though we were actually boarding at the same expense during the same time in New York! What do you say to that? If I remonstrated, the whole virtue of the newspapers would be aroused directly. We were at the President's drawing-room while we were in Washington. I had a private audience besides, and was asked to dinner, but couldn't stay. Parties--parties--parties--of course, every day and night. But it's not all parties. I go into the prisons, the police-offices, the watch-houses, the hospitals, the workhouses. I was out half the night in New York with two of their most famous constables; started at midnight, and went into every brothel, thieves' house, murdering hovel, sailors' dancing-place, and abode of villany, both black and white, in the town. I went _incog._ behind the scenes to the little theatre where Mitchell is making a fortune. He has been rearing a little dog for me, and has called him "Boz."[1] I am going to bring him home. In a word I go everywhere, and a hard life it is. But I am careful to drink hardly anything, and not to smoke at all. I have recourse to my medicine-chest whenever I feel at all bilious, and am, thank God, thoroughly well. When I next write to you, I shall have begun, I hope, to turn my face homeward. I have a great store of oddity and whimsicality, and am going now into the oddest and most characteristic part of this most queer country. Always direct to the care of David Colden, Esq., 28, Laight Street, Hudson Square, New York. I received your Caledonia letter with the greatest joy. Kate sends her best remembrances. And I am always. P.S.--Richmond was my extreme southern point, and I turn from the South altogether the day after to-morrow. Will you let the Britannia[2] know of this change--if needful? [Sidenote: Dr. F. H. Deane.] CINCINNATI, OHIO, _April 4th, 1842._ MY DEAR SIR, I have not been unmindful of your request for a moment, but have not been able to think of it until now. I hope my good friends (for whose christian-names I have left blanks in the epitaph) may like what I have written, and that they will take comfort and be happy again. I sail on the 7th of June, and purpose being at the Carlton House, New York, about the 1st. It will make me easy to know that this letter has reached you. Faithfully yours. This is the Grave of a Little Child, WHOM GOD IN HIS GOODNESS CALLED TO A BRIGHT ETERNITY WHEN HE WAS VERY YOUNG. HARD AS IT IS FOR HUMAN AFFECTION TO RECONCILE ITSELF TO DEATH IN ANY SHAPE (AND MOST OF ALL, PERHAPS, AT FIRST IN THIS), HIS PARENTS CAN EVEN NOW BELIEVE THAT IT WILL BE A CONSOLATION TO THEM THROUGHOUT THEIR LIVES, AND WHEN THEY SHALL HAVE GROWN OLD AND GRAY, Always to think of him as a Child in Heaven. "_And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them._" HE WAS THE SON OF Q---- AND M---- THORNTON, CHRISTENED CHARLES JERKING. HE WAS BORN ON THE 20TH DAY OF JANUARY, 1841, AND HE DIED ON THE 12TH DAY OF MARCH, 1842, HAVING LIVED ONLY THIRTEEN MONTHS AND TWENTY DAYS. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] NIAGARA FALLS (English Side), _Sunday, May 1st, 1842._ MY DEAR HENRY, Although I date this letter as above, it will not be so old a one as at first sight it would appear to be when it reaches you. I shall carry it on with me to Montreal, and despatch it from there by the steamer which goes to Halifax, to meet the Cunard boat at that place, with Canadian letters and passengers. Before I finally close it, I will add a short postscript, so that it will contain the latest intelligence. We have had a blessed interval of quiet in this beautiful place, of which, as you may suppose, we stood greatly in need, not only by reason of our hard travelling for a long time, but on account of the incessant persecutions of the people, by land and water, on stage coach, railway car, and steamer, which exceeds anything you can picture to yourself by the utmost stretch of your imagination. So far we have had this hotel nearly to ourselves. It is a large square house, standing on a bold height, with overhanging eaves like a Swiss cottage, and a wide handsome gallery outside every story. These colonnades make it look so very light, that it has exactly the appearance of a house built with a pack of cards; and I live in bodily terror lest any man should venture to step out of a little observatory on the roof, and crush the whole structure with one stamp of his foot. Our sitting-room (which is large and low like a nursery) is on the second floor, and is so close to the Falls that the windows are always wet and dim with spray. Two bedrooms open out of it--one our own; one Anne's. The secretary slumbers near at hand, but without these sacred precincts. From the three chambers, or any part of them, you can see the Falls rolling and tumbling, and roaring and leaping, all day long, with bright rainbows making fiery arches down a hundred feet below us. When the sun is on them, they shine and glow like molten gold. When the day is gloomy, the water falls like snow, or sometimes it seems to crumble away like the face of a great chalk cliff, or sometimes again to roll along the front of the rock like white smoke. But it all seems gay or gloomy, dark or light, by sun or moon. From the bottom of both Falls, there is always rising up a solemn ghostly cloud, which hides the boiling cauldron from human sight, and makes it in its mystery a hundred times more grand than if you could see all the secrets that lie hidden in its tremendous depth. One Fall is as close to us as York Gate is to No. 1, Devonshire Terrace. The other (the great Horse-shoe Fall) may be, perhaps, about half as far off as "Creedy's."[3] One circumstance in connection with them is, in all the accounts, greatly exaggerated--I mean the noise. Last night was perfectly still. Kate and I could just hear them, at the quiet time of sunset, a mile off. Whereas, believing the statements I had heard I began putting my ear to the ground, like a savage or a bandit in a ballet, thirty miles off, when we were coming here from Buffalo. I was delighted to receive your famous letter, and to read your account of our darlings, whom we long to see with an intensity it is impossible to shadow forth, ever so faintly. I do believe, though I say it as shouldn't, that they are good 'uns--both to look at and to go. I roared out this morning, as soon as I was awake, "Next month," which we have been longing to be able to say ever since we have been here. I really do not know how we shall ever knock at the door, when that slowest of all impossibly slow hackney-coaches shall pull up--at home. I am glad you exult in the fight I have had about the copyright. If you knew how they tried to stop me, you would have a still greater interest in it. The greatest men in England have sent me out, through Forster, a very manly, and becoming, and spirited memorial and address, backing me in all I have done. I have despatched it to Boston for publication, and am coolly prepared for the storm it will raise. But my best rod is in pickle. Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard, and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live by writing? I vow before high heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities, that when I speak about them I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. "Robbers that ye are," I think to myself when I get upon my legs, "here goes!" The places we have lodged in, the roads we have gone over, the company we have been among, the tobacco-spittle we have wallowed in, the strange customs we have complied with, the packing-cases in which we have travelled, the woods, swamps, rivers, prairies, lakes, and mountains we have crossed, are all subjects for legends and tales at home; quires, reams, wouldn't hold them. I don't think Anne has so much as seen an American tree. She never looks at a prospect by any chance, or displays the smallest emotion at any sight whatever. She objects to Niagara that "it's nothing but water," and considers that "there is too much of that." I suppose you have heard that I am going to act at the Montreal theatre with the officers? Farce-books being scarce, and the choice consequently limited, I have selected Keeley's part in "Two o'Clock in the Morning." I wrote yesterday to Mitchell, the actor and manager at New York, to get and send me a comic wig, light flaxen, with a small whisker halfway down the cheek; over this I mean to wear two night-caps, one with a tassel and one of flannel; a flannel wrapper, drab tights and slippers, will complete the costume. I am very sorry to hear that business is so flat, but the proverb says it never rains but it pours, and it may be remarked with equal truth upon the other side, that it never _don't_ rain but it holds up very much indeed. You will be busy again long before I come home, I have no doubt. We purpose leaving this on Wednesday morning. Give my love to Letitia and to mother, and always believe me, my dear Henry, Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] MONTREAL, CANADA, _May 12th, 1842._ All well, though (with the exception of one from Fred) we have received no letters whatever by the _Caledonia_. We have experienced impossible-to-be-described attentions in Canada. Everybody's carriage and horses are at our disposal, and everybody's servants; and all the Government boats and boats' crews. We shall play, between the 20th and the 25th, "A Roland for an Oliver," "Two o'Clock in the Morning," and "Deaf as a Post." [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Longman.] ATHEN�UM, _Friday Afternoon._ MY DEAR SIR, If I could possibly have attended the meeting yesterday I would most gladly have done so. But I have been up the whole night, and was too much exhausted even to write and say so before the proceedings came on. I have fought the fight across the Atlantic with the utmost energy I could command; have never been turned aside by any consideration for an instant; am fresher for the fray than ever; will battle it to the death, and die game to the last. I am happy to say that my boy is quite well again. From being in perfect health he fell into alarming convulsions with the surprise and joy of our return. I beg my regards to Mrs. Longman, And am always, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Pardoe.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _July 19th, 1842._ DEAR MADAM, I beg to set you right on one point in reference to the American robbers, which perhaps you do not quite understand. The existing law allows them to reprint any English book, without any communication whatever with the author or anybody else. My books have all been reprinted on these agreeable terms. But sometimes, when expectation is awakened there about a book before its publication, one firm of pirates will pay a trifle to procure early proofs of it, and get so much the start of the rest as they can obtain by the time necessarily consumed in printing it. Directly it is printed it is common property, and may be reprinted a thousand times. My circular only referred to such bargains as these. I should add that I have no hope of the States doing justice in this dishonest respect, and therefore do not expect to overtake these fellows, but we may cry "Stop thief!" nevertheless, especially as they wince and smart under it. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday, July 14th, 1842._ MY DEAR SMITH, The cheque safely received. As you say, it would be cheap at any money. My devotion to the fine arts renders it impossible for me to cash it. I have therefore ordered it to be framed and glazed. I am really grateful to you for the interest you take in my proceedings. Next time I come into the City I will show you my introductory chapter to the American book. It may seem to prepare the reader for a much greater amount of slaughter than he will meet with; but it is honest and true. Therefore my hand does not shake. Best love and regards. "Certainly" to the Richmondian intentions. Always faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Harrison Ainsworth.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _September 14th, 1842._ MY DEAR AINSWORTH, The enclosed has been sent to me by a young gentleman in Devonshire (of whom I know no more than that I have occasionally, at his request, read and suggested amendments in some of his writings), with a special petition that I would recommend it to you for insertion in your magazine. I think it very pretty, and I have no doubt you will also. But it is poetry, and may be too long. He is a very modest young fellow, and has decided ability. I hope when I come home at the end of the month, we shall foregather more frequently. Of course you are working, tooth and nail; and of course I am. Kate joins me in best regards to yourself and all your house (not forgetting, but especially remembering, my old friend, Mrs. Touchet), and I am always, My dear Ainsworth, Heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, September 25th, 1842._ MY DEAR HENRY, I enclose you the Niagara letter, with many thanks for the loan of it. Pray tell Mr. Chadwick that I am greatly obliged to him for his remembrance of me, and I heartily concur with him in the great importance and interest of the subject, though I do differ from him, to the death, on his crack topic--the New Poor-Law. I have been turning my thoughts to this very item in the condition of American towns, and had put their present aspects strongly before the American people; therefore I shall read his report with the greater interest and attention. We return next Saturday night. If you will dine with us next day or any day in the week, we shall be truly glad and delighted to see you. Let me know, then, what day you will come. I need scarcely say that I shall joyfully talk with you about the Metropolitan Improvement Society, then or at any time; and with love to Letitia, in which Kate and the babies join, I am always, my dear Henry, Affectionately yours. P.S.--The children's present names are as follows: Katey (from a lurking propensity to fieryness), Lucifer Box. Mamey (as generally descriptive of her bearing), Mild Glo'ster. Charley (as a corruption of Master Toby), Flaster Floby. Walter (suggested by his high cheek-bones), Young Skull. Each is pronounced with a peculiar howl, which I shall have great pleasure in illustrating. [Sidenote: Rev. William Harness.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _November 8th, 1842._ MY DEAR HARNESS, Some time ago, you sent me a note from a friend of yours, a barrister, I think, begging me to forward to him any letters I might receive from a deranged nephew of his, at Newcastle. In the midst of a most bewildering correspondence with unknown people, on every possible and impossible subject, I have forgotten this gentleman's name, though I have a kind of hazy remembrance that he lived near Russell Square. As the Post Office would be rather puzzled, perhaps, to identify him by such an address, may I ask the favour of you to hand him the enclosed, and to say that it is the second I have received since I returned from America? The last, I think, was a defiance to mortal combat. With best remembrances to your sister, in which Mrs. Dickens joins, believe me, my dear Harness, Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, Nov. 12th, 1842._ MY DEAR MACREADY, You pass this house every day on your way to or from the theatre. I wish you would call once as you go by, and soon, that you may have plenty of time to deliberate on what I wish to suggest to you. The more I think of Marston's play, the more sure I feel that a prologue to the purpose would help it materially, and almost decide the fate of any ticklish point on the first night. Now I have an idea (not easily explainable in writing but told in five words), that would take the prologue out of the conventional dress of prologues, quite. Get the curtain up with a dash, and begin the play with a sledge-hammer blow. If on consideration, you should think with me, I will write the prologue heartily. Faithfully yours ever. PROLOGUE TO MR. MARSTON'S PLAY OF "THE PATRICIAN'S DAUGHTER." No tale of streaming plumes and harness bright Dwells on the poet's maiden harp to-night; No trumpet's clamour and no battle's fire Breathes in the trembling accents of his lyre; Enough for him, if in his lowly strain He wakes one household echo not in vain; Enough for him, if in his boldest word The beating heart of MAN be dimly heard. Its solemn music which, like strains that sigh Through charmèd gardens, all who hearing die; Its solemn music he does not pursue To distant ages out of human view; Nor listen to its wild and mournful chime In the dead caverns on the shore of Time; But musing with a calm and steady gaze Before the crackling flames of living days, He hears it whisper through the busy roar Of what shall be and what has been before. Awake the Present! shall no scene display The tragic passion of the passing day? Is it with Man, as with some meaner things, That out of death his single purpose springs? Can his eventful life no moral teach Until he be, for aye, beyond its reach? Obscurely shall he suffer, act, and fade, Dubb'd noble only by the sexton's spade? Awake the Present! Though the steel-clad age Find life alone within the storied page, Iron is worn, at heart, by many still-- The tyrant Custom binds the serf-like will; If the sharp rack, and screw, and chain be gone, These later days have tortures of their own; The guiltless writhe, while Guilt is stretched in sleep, And Virtue lies, too often, dungeon deep. Awake the Present! what the Past has sown Be in its harvest garner'd, reap'd, and grown! How pride breeds pride, and wrong engenders wrong, Read in the volume Truth has held so long, Assured that where life's flowers freshest blow, The sharpest thorns and keenest briars grow, How social usage has the pow'r to change Good thoughts to evil; in its highest range To cramp the noble soul, and turn to ruth The kindling impulse of our glorious youth, Crushing the spirit in its house of clay, Learn from the lessons of the present day. Not light its import and not poor its mien; Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] _Saturday Morning._ MY DEAR MACREADY, One suggestion, though it be a late one. Do have upon the table, in the opening scene of the second act, something in a velvet case, or frame, that may look like a large miniature of Mabel, such as one of Ross's, and eschew that picture. It haunts me with a sense of danger. Even a titter at that critical time, with the whole of that act before you, would be a fatal thing. The picture is bad in itself, bad in its effect upon the beautiful room, bad in all its associations with the house. In case of your having nothing at hand, I send you by bearer what would be a million times better. Always, my dear Macready, Faithfully yours. P.S.--I need not remind you how common it is to have such pictures in cases lying about elegant rooms. [Sidenote: Mr. W. P. Frith.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _November 15th, 1842._ MY DEAR SIR, I shall be very glad if you will do me the favour to paint me two little companion pictures; one, a Dolly Varden (whom you have so exquisitely done already), the other, a Kate Nickleby. Faithfully yours always. P.S.--I take it for granted that the original picture of Dolly with the bracelet is sold? [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _November 17th, 1842._ MY DEAR SIR, Pray consult your own convenience in the matter of my little commission; whatever suits your engagements and prospects will best suit me. I saw an unfinished proof of Dolly at Mitchell's some two or three months ago; I thought it was proceeding excellently well then. It will give me great pleasure to see her when completed. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Hood.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _November 30th, 1842._ MY DEAR HOOD, In asking your and Mrs. Hood's leave to bring Mrs. D.'s sister (who stays with us) on Tuesday, let me add that I should very much like to bring at the same time a very unaffected and ardent admirer of your genius, who has no small portion of that commodity in his own right, and is a very dear friend of mine and a very famous fellow; to wit, Maclise, the painter, who would be glad (as he has often told me) to know you better, and would be much pleased, I know, if I could say to him, "Hood wants me to bring you." I use so little ceremony with you, in the conviction that you will use as little with me, and say, "My dear D.--Convenient;" or, "My dear D.--Ill-convenient," (as the popular phrase is), just as the case may be. Of course, I have said nothing to him. Always heartily yours, BOZ. [Sidenote: Mrs. Trollope.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _December 16th, 1842._ MY DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE, Let me thank you most cordially for your kind note, in reference to my Notes, which has given me true pleasure and gratification. As I never scrupled to say in America, so I can have no delicacy in saying to you, that, allowing for the change you worked in many social features of American society, and for the time that has passed since you wrote of the country, I am convinced that there is no writer who has so well and accurately (I need not add so entertainingly) described it, in many of its aspects, as you have done; and this renders your praise the more valuable to me. I do not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue. It seems to me essentially natural, and quite inevitable, that common observers should accuse an uncommon one of this fault, and I have no doubt that you were long ago of this opinion; very much to your own comfort. Mrs. Dickens begs me to thank you for your kind remembrance of her, and to convey to you her best regards. Always believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _December 20th, 1842._ MY DEAR GEORGE, It is impossible for me to tell you how greatly I am charmed with those beautiful pictures, in which the whole feeling, and thought, and expression of the little story is rendered to the gratification of my inmost heart; and on which you have lavished those amazing resources of yours with a power at which I fairly wondered when I sat down yesterday before them. I took them to Mac, straightway, in a cab, and it would have done you good if you could have seen and heard him. You can't think how moved he was by the old man in the church, or how pleased I was to have chosen it before he saw the drawings. You are such a queer fellow and hold yourself so much aloof, that I am afraid to say half I would say touching my grateful admiration; so you shall imagine the rest. I enclose a note from Kate, to which I hope you will bring the only one acceptable reply. Always, my dear Cattermole, Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [1] The little dog--a white Havana spaniel--_was_ brought home and renamed, after an incidental character in "Nicholas Nickleby," "Mr. Snittle Timbery." This was shortened to "Timber," and under that name the little dog lived to be very old, and accompanied the family in all its migrations, including the visits to Italy and Switzerland. [2] Life Insurance Office. [3] Mr. Macready's--so pronounced by one of Charles Dickens's little children. Book II. 1843 TO 1857. 1843. NARRATIVE. We have, unfortunately, very few letters of interest in this year. But we are able to give the commencement of Charles Dickens's correspondence with his beloved friends, Mr. Douglas Jerrold and Mr. Clarkson Stanfield; with Lord Morpeth (afterwards Lord Carlisle), for whom he always entertained the highest regard; and with Mr. Charles Babbage. He was at work upon "Martin Chuzzlewit" until the end of the year, when he also wrote and published the first of his Christmas stories--"The Christmas Carol." He was much distressed by the sad fate of Mr. Elton (a respected actor), who was lost in the wreck of the _Pegasus_, and was very eager and earnest in his endeavours to raise a fund on behalf of Mr. Elton's children. We are sorry to be unable to give any explanation as to the nature of the Cockspur Street Society, mentioned in this first letter to Mr. Charles Babbage. But we publish it notwithstanding, considering it to be one of general interest. The "Little History of England" was never finished--not, that is to say, the one alluded to in the letter to Mr. Jerrold. Mr. David Dickson kindly furnishes us with an explanation of the letter dated 10th May. "It was," he says, "in answer to a letter from me, pointing out that the 'Shepherd' in 'Pickwick' was apparently reflecting on the scriptural doctrine of the new birth." The beginning of the letter to Mr. Jerrold (15th June) is, as will be readily understood, an imaginary cast of a purely imaginary play. A portion of this letter has already been published, in Mr. Blanchard Jerrold's life of his father. It originated in a proposal of Mr. Webster's--the manager of the Haymarket Theatre--to give five hundred pounds for a prize comedy by an English author. The opera referred to in the letter to Mr. R. H. Horne was called "The Village Coquettes," and the farce was "The Strange Gentleman," already alluded to by us, in connection with a letter to Mr. Harley. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Babbage.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _April 27th, 1843._ MY DEAR SIR, I write to you, _confidentially_, in answer to your note of last night, and the tenor of mine will tell you why. You may suppose, from seeing my name in the printed letter you have received, that I am favourable to the proposed society. I am decidedly opposed to it. I went there on the day I was in the chair, after much solicitation; and being put into it, opened the proceedings by telling the meeting that I approved of the design in theory, but in practice considered it hopeless. I may tell you--I did not tell them--that the nature of the meeting, and the character and position of many of the men attending it, cried "Failure" trumpet-tongued in my ears. To quote an expression from Tennyson, I may say that if it were the best society in the world, the grossness of some natures in it would have weight to drag it down. In the wisdom of all you urge in the notes you have sent me, taking them as statements of theory, I entirely concur. But in practice, I feel sure that the present publishing system cannot be overset until authors are different men. The first step to be taken is to move as a body in the question of copyright, enforce the existing laws, and try to obtain better. For that purpose I hold that the authors and publishers must unite, as the wealth, business habits, and interest of that latter class are of great importance to such an end. The Longmans and Murray have been with me proposing such an association. That I shall support. But having seen the Cockspur Street Society, I am as well convinced of its invincible hopelessness as if I saw it written by a celestial penman in the Book of Fate. My dear Sir, Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Douglas Jerrold.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _May 3rd, 1843._ MY DEAR JERROLD, Let me thank you most cordially for your books, not only for their own sakes (and I have read them with perfect delight), but also for this hearty and most welcome mark of your recollection of the friendship we have established; in which light I know I may regard and prize them. I am greatly pleased with your opening paper in the Illuminated. It is very wise, and capital; written with the finest end of that iron pen of yours; witty, much needed, and full of truth. I vow to God that I think the parrots of society are more intolerable and mischievous than its birds of prey. If ever I destroy myself, it will be in the bitterness of hearing those infernal and damnably good old times extolled. Once, in a fit of madness, after having been to a public dinner which took place just as this Ministry came in, I wrote the parody I send you enclosed, for Fonblanque. There is nothing in it but wrath; but that's wholesome, so I send it you. I am writing a little history of England for my boy, which I will send you when it is printed for him, though your boys are too old to profit by it. It is curious that I have tried to impress upon him (writing, I daresay, at the same moment with you) the exact spirit of your paper, for I don't know what I should do if he were to get hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the parrots' necks in his very cradle. Oh Heaven, if you could have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation, since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at. It was perfectly overwhelming. But if I could have partaken it with anybody who would have felt it as you would have done, it would have had quite another aspect; or would at least, like a "classic mask" (oh d---- that word!) have had one funny side to relieve its dismal features. Supposing fifty families were to emigrate into the wilds of North America--yours, mine, and forty-eight others--picked for their concurrence of opinion on all important subjects and for their resolution to found a colony of common-sense, how soon would that devil, Cant, present itself among them in one shape or other? The day they landed, do you say, or the day after? That is a great mistake (almost the only one I know) in the "Arabian Nights," when the princess restores people to their original beauty by sprinkling them with the golden water. It is quite clear that she must have made monsters of them by such a christening as that. My dear Jerrold, Faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. David Dickson.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _May 10th, 1843._ SIR, Permit me to say, in reply to your letter, that you do not understand the intention (I daresay the fault is mine) of that passage in the "Pickwick Papers" which has given you offence. The design of "the Shepherd" and of this and every other allusion to him is, to show how sacred things are degraded, vulgarised, and rendered absurd when persons who are utterly incompetent to teach the commonest things take upon themselves to expound such mysteries, and how, in making mere cant phrases of divine words, these persons miss the spirit in which they had their origin. I have seen a great deal of this sort of thing in many parts of England, and I never knew it lead to charity or good deeds. Whether the great Creator of the world and the creature of his hands, moulded in his own image, be quite so opposite in character as you believe, is a question which it would profit us little to discuss. I like the frankness and candour of your letter, and thank you for it. That every man who seeks heaven must be born again, in good thoughts of his Maker, I sincerely believe. That it is expedient for every hound to say so in a certain snuffling form of words, to which he attaches no good meaning, I do not believe. I take it there is no difference between us. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Douglas Jerrold.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _June 13th, 1843._ MY DEAR JERROLD, Yes, you have anticipated my occupation. Chuzzlewit be d----d. High comedy and five hundred pounds are the only matters I can think of. I call it "The One Thing Needful; or, A Part is Better than the Whole." Here are the characters: Old Febrile Mr. FARREN. Young Febrile (his Son) Mr. HOWE. Jack Hessians (his Friend) Mr. W. LACY. Chalks (a Landlord) Mr. GOUGH. Hon. Harry Staggers Mr. MELLON. Sir Thomas Tip Mr. BUCKSTONE. Swig Mr. WEBSTER. The Duke of Leeds Mr. COUTTS. Sir Smivin Growler Mr. MACREADY. Servants, Gamblers, Visitors, etc. Mrs. Febrile Mrs. GALLOT. Lady Tip Mrs. HUMBY. Mrs. Sour Mrs. W. CLIFFORD. Fanny Miss A. SMITH. One scene, where Old Febrile tickles Lady Tip in the ribs, and afterwards dances out with his hat behind him, his stick before, and his eye on the pit, I expect will bring the house down. There is also another point, where Old Febrile, at the conclusion of his disclosure to Swig, rises and says: "And now, Swig, tell me, have I acted well?" And Swig says: "Well, Mr. Febrile, have you ever acted ill?" which will carry off the piece. Herne Bay. Hum. I suppose it's no worse than any other place in this weather, but it is watery rather--isn't it? In my mind's eye, I have the sea in a perpetual state of smallpox; and the chalk running downhill like town milk. But I know the comfort of getting to work in a fresh place, and proposing pious projects to one's self, and having the more substantial advantage of going to bed early and getting up ditto, and walking about alone. I should like to deprive you of the last-named happiness, and to take a good long stroll, terminating in a public-house, and whatever they chanced to have in it. But fine days are over, I think. The horrible misery of London in this weather, with not even a fire to make it cheerful, is hideous. But I have my comedy to fly to. My only comfort! I walk up and down the street at the back of the theatre every night, and peep in at the green-room window, thinking of the time when "Dick--ins" will be called for by excited hundreds, and won't come till Mr. Webster (half Swig and half himself) shall enter from his dressing-room, and quelling the tempest with a smile, beseech that wizard, if he be in the house (here he looks up at my box), to accept the congratulations of the audience, and indulge them with a sight of the man who has got five hundred pounds in money, and it's impossible to say how much in laurel. Then I shall come forward, and bow once--twice--thrice--roars of approbation--Brayvo--brarvo--hooray--hoorar--hooroar--one cheer more; and asking Webster home to supper, shall declare eternal friendship for that public-spirited individual. They have not sent me the "Illustrated Magazine." What do they mean by that? You don't say your daughter is better, so I hope you mean that she is quite well. My wife desires her best regards. I am always, my dear Jerrold, Faithfully your Friend, THE CONGREVE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (which I mean to be called in the Sunday papers). P.S.--I shall dedicate it to Webster, beginning: "My dear Sir,--When you first proposed to stimulate the slumbering dramatic talent of England, I assure you I had not the least idea"--etc. etc. etc. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _July 26th, 1843._ MY DEAR STANFIELD, I am chairman of a committee, whose object is to open a subscription, and arrange a benefit for the relief of the seven destitute children of poor Elton the actor, who was drowned in the _Pegasus_. They are exceedingly anxious to have the great assistance of your name; and if you will allow yourself to be announced as one of the body, I do assure you you will help a very melancholy and distressful cause. Faithfully always. P.S.--The committee meet to-night at the Freemasons', at eight o'clock. [Sidenote: Lord Morpeth.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _August 3rd, 1843._ DEAR LORD MORPETH, In acknowledging the safe receipt of your kind donation in behalf of poor Mr. Elton's orphan children, I hope you will suffer me to address you with little ceremony, as the best proof I can give you of my cordial reciprocation of all you say in your most welcome note. I have long esteemed you and been your distant but very truthful admirer; and trust me that it is a real pleasure and happiness to me to anticipate the time when we shall have a nearer intercourse. Believe me, with sincere regard, Faithfully your Servant. [Sidenote: Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _October 13th, 1843._ MY DEAR AINSWORTH, I want very much to see you, not having had that old pleasure for a long time. I am at this moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints, and fractious in the temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold, caught the other day, I suspect, at Liverpool, where I got exceedingly wet; but I will make prodigious efforts to get the better of it to-night by resorting to all conceivable remedies, and if I succeed so as to be only negatively disgusting to-morrow, I will joyfully present myself at six, and bring my womankind along with me. Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. R. H. Horne.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _November 13th, 1843._ * * * * * Pray tell that besotted ---- to let the opera sink into its native obscurity. I did it in a fit of d----ble good nature long ago, for Hullah, who wrote some very pretty music to it. I just put down for everybody what everybody at the St. James's Theatre wanted to say and do, and that they could say and do best, and I have been most sincerely repentant ever since. The farce I also did as a sort of practical joke, for Harley, whom I have known a long time. It was funny--adapted from one of the published sketches called the "Great Winglebury Duel," and was published by Chapman and Hall. But I have no copy of it now, nor should I think they have. But both these things were done without the least consideration or regard to reputation. I wouldn't repeat them for a thousand pounds apiece, and devoutly wish them to be forgotten. If you will impress this on the waxy mind of ---- I shall be truly and unaffectedly obliged to you. Always faithfully yours. 1844. NARRATIVE. In the summer of this year the house in Devonshire Terrace was let, and Charles Dickens started with his family for Italy, going first to a villa at Albaro, near Genoa, for a few months, and afterwards to the Palazzo Pescheire, Genoa. Towards the end of this year he made excursions to the many places of interest in this country, and was joined at Milan by his wife and sister-in-law, previous to his own departure alone on a business visit to England. He had written his Christmas story, "The Chimes," and was anxious to take it himself to England, and to read it to some of his most intimate friends there. Mr. Macready went to America and returned in the autumn, and towards the end of the year he paid a professional visit to Paris. Charles Dickens's letter to his wife (26th February) treats of a visit to Liverpool, where he went to take the chair on the opening of the Mechanics' Institution and to make a speech on education. The "Fanny" alluded to was his sister, Mrs. Burnett; the _Britannia_, the ship in which he and Mrs. Dickens made their outward trip to America; the "Mrs. Bean," the stewardess, and "Hewett," the captain, of that same vessel. The letter to Mr. Charles Knight was in acknowledgment of the receipt of a prospectus entitled "Book Clubs for all readers." The attempt, which fortunately proved completely successful, was to establish a cheap book club. The scheme was, that a number of families should combine together, each contributing about three halfpennies a week; which contribution would enable them, by exchanging the volumes among them, to have sufficient reading to last the year. The publications, which were to be made as cheap as possible, could be purchased by families at the end of the year, on consideration of their putting by an extra penny a week for that purpose. Charles Dickens, who always had the comfort and happiness of the working-classes greatly at heart, was much interested in this scheme of Mr. Charles Knight's, and highly approved of it. Charles Dickens and this new correspondent became subsequently true and fast friends. "Martin Chuzzlewit" was dramatised in the early autumn of this year, at the Lyceum Theatre, which was then under the management of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Keeley. Charles Dickens superintended some rehearsals, but had left England before the play was acted in public. The man "Roche," alluded to in his letter to Mr. Maclise, was the French courier engaged to go with the family to Italy. He remained as servant there, and was with Charles Dickens through all his foreign travels. His many excellent qualities endeared him to the whole family, and his master never lost sight of this faithful servant until poor Roche's untimely death in 1849. The Rev. Edward Tagart was a celebrated Unitarian minister, and a very highly esteemed and valued friend. The "Chickenstalker" (letter to Mrs. Dickens, November 8th), is an instance of the eccentric names he was constantly giving to his children, and these names he frequently made use of in his books. In this year we have our first letter to Mr. (afterwards Sir Edwin) Landseer, for whom Charles Dickens had the highest admiration and personal regard. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 3rd, 1844._ MY VERY DEAR MACREADY, You know all the news, and you know I love you; so I no more know why I write than I do why I "come round" after the play to shake hands with you in your dressing-room. I say come, as if you were at this present moment the lessee of Drury Lane, and had ---- with a long face on one hand, ---- elaborately explaining that everything in creation is a joint-stock company on the other, the inimitable B. by the fire, in conversation with ----. Well-a-day! I see it all, and smell that extraordinary compound of odd scents peculiar to a theatre, which bursts upon me when I swing open the little door in the hall, accompanies me as I meet perspiring supers in the narrow passage, goes with me up the two steps, crosses the stage, winds round the third entrance P.S. as I wind, and escorts me safely into your presence, where I find you unwinding something slowly round and round your chest, which is so long that no man can see the end of it. Oh that you had been at Clarence Terrace on Nina's birthday! Good God, how we missed you, talked of you, drank your health, and wondered what you were doing! Perhaps you are Falkland enough (I swear I suspect you of it) to feel rather sore--just a little bit, you know, the merest trifle in the world--on hearing that Mrs. Macready looked brilliant, blooming, young, and handsome, and that she danced a country dance with the writer hereof (Acres to your Falkland) in a thorough spirit of becoming good humour and enjoyment. Now you don't like to be told that? Nor do you quite like to hear that Forster and I conjured bravely; that a plum-pudding was produced from an empty saucepan, held over a blazing fire kindled in Stanfield's hat without damage to the lining; that a box of bran was changed into a live guinea-pig, which ran between my godchild's feet, and was the cause of such a shrill uproar and clapping of hands that you might have heard it (and I daresay did) in America; that three half-crowns being taken from Major Burns and put into a tumbler-glass before his eyes, did then and there give jingling answers to the questions asked of them by me, and knew where you were and what you were doing, to the unspeakable admiration of the whole assembly. Neither do you quite like to be told that we are going to do it again next Saturday, with the addition of demoniacal dresses from the masquerade shop; nor that Mrs. Macready, for her gallant bearing always, and her best sort of best affection, is the best creature I know. Never mind; no man shall gag me, and those are my opinions. My dear Macready, the lecturing proposition is not to be thought of. I have not the slightest doubt or hesitation in giving you my most strenuous and decided advice against it. Looking only to its effect at home, I am immovable in my conviction that the impression it would produce would be one of failure, and a reduction of yourself to the level of those who do the like here. To us who know the Boston names and honour them, and who know Boston and like it (Boston is what I would have the whole United States to be), the Boston requisition would be a valuable document, of which you and your friends might be proud. But those names are perfectly unknown to the public here, and would produce not the least effect. The only thing known to the public here is, that they ask (when I say "they" I mean the people) everybody to lecture. It is one of the things I have ridiculed in "Chuzzlewit." Lecture you, and you fall into the roll of Lardners, Vandenhoffs, Eltons, Knowleses, Buckinghams. You are off your pedestal, have flung away your glass slipper, and changed your triumphal coach into a seedy old pumpkin. I am quite sure of it, and cannot express my strong conviction in language of sufficient force. "Puff-ridden!" why to be sure they are. The nation is a miserable Sindbad, and its boasted press the loathsome, foul old man upon his back, and yet they will tell you, and proclaim to the four winds for repetition here, that they don't need their ignorant and brutal papers, as if the papers could exist if they didn't need them! Let any two of these vagabonds, in any town you go to, take it into their heads to make you an object of attack, or to direct the general attention elsewhere, and what avail those wonderful images of passion which you have been all your life perfecting! I have sent you, to the charge of our trusty and well-beloved Colden, a little book I published on the 17th of December, and which has been a most prodigious success--the greatest, I think, I have ever achieved. It pleases me to think that it will bring you home for an hour or two, and I long to hear you have read it on some quiet morning. Do they allow you to be quiet, by-the-way? "Some of our most fashionable people, sir," denounced me awfully for liking to be alone sometimes. Now that we have turned Christmas, I feel as if your face were directed homewards, Macready. The downhill part of the road is before us now, and we shall travel on to midsummer at a dashing pace; and, please Heaven, I will be at Liverpool when you come steaming up the Mersey, with that red funnel smoking out unutterable things, and your heart much fuller than your trunks, though something lighter! If I be not the first Englishman to shake hands with you on English ground, the man who gets before me will be a brisk and active fellow, and even then need put his best leg foremost. So I warn Forster to keep in the rear, or he'll be blown. If you shall have any leisure to project and put on paper the outline of a scheme for opening any theatre on your return, upon a certain list subscribed, and on certain understandings with the actors, it strikes me that it would be wise to break ground while you are still away. Of course I need not say that I will see anybody or do anything--even to the calling together of the actors--if you should ever deem it desirable. My opinion is that our respected and valued friend Mr. ---- will stagger through another season, if he don't rot first. I understand he is in a partial state of decomposition at this minute. He was very ill, but got better. How is it that ---- always do get better, and strong hearts are so easy to die? Kate sends her tender love; so does Georgy, so does Charlie, so does Mamey, so does Katey, so does Walter, so does the other one who is to be born next week. Look homeward always, as we look abroad to you. God bless you, my dear Macready. Ever your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Laman Blanchard.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 4th, 1844._ MY DEAR BLANCHARD, I cannot thank you enough for the beautiful manner and the true spirit of friendship in which you have noticed my "Carol." But I _must_ thank you because you have filled my heart up to the brim, and it is running over. You meant to give me great pleasure, my dear fellow, and you have done it. The tone of your elegant and fervent praise has touched me in the tenderest place. I cannot write about it, and as to talking of it, I could no more do that than a dumb man. I have derived inexpressible gratification from what I know was a labour of love on your part. And I can never forget it. When I think it likely that I may meet you (perhaps at Ainsworth's on Friday?) I shall slip a "Carol" into my pocket and ask you to put it among your books for my sake. You will never like it the less for having made it the means of so much happiness to me. Always, my dear Blanchard, Faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] LIVERPOOL, RADLEY'S HOTEL, _Monday, Feb. 26th, 1844._ MY DEAR KATE, I got down here last night (after a most intolerably wet journey) before seven, and found Thompson sitting by my fire. He had ordered dinner, and we ate it pleasantly enough, and went to bed in good time. This morning, Mr. Yates, the great man connected with the Institution (and a brother of Ashton Yates's), called. I went to look at it with him. It is an enormous place, and the tickets have been selling at two and even three guineas apiece. The lecture-room, in which the celebration is held, will accommodate over thirteen hundred people. It was being fitted with gas after the manner of the ring at Astley's. I should think it an easy place to speak in, being a semicircle with seats rising one above another to the ceiling, and will have eight hundred ladies to-night, in full dress. I am rayther shaky just now, but shall pull up, I have no doubt. At dinner-time to-morrow you will receive, I hope, a facetious document hastily penned after I return to-night, telling you how it all went off. When I came back here, I found Fanny and Hewett had picked me up just before. We all went off straight to the _Britannia_, which lay where she did when we went on board. We went into the old little cabin and the ladies' cabin, but Mrs. Bean had gone to Scotland, as the ship does not sail again before May. In the saloon we had some champagne and biscuits, and Hewett had set out upon the table a block of Boston ice, weighing fifty pounds. Scott, of the _Caledonia_, lunched with us--a very nice fellow. He saw Macready play Macbeth in Boston, and gave me a tremendous account of the effect. Poor Burroughs, of the _George Washington_, died on board, on his last passage home. His little wife was with him. Hewett dines with us to-day, and I have procured him admission to-night. I am very sorry indeed (and so was he), that you didn't see the old ship. It was the strangest thing in the world to go on board again. I had Bacon with me as far as Watford yesterday, and very pleasant. Sheil was also in the train, on his way to Ireland. Give my best love to Georgy, and kisses to the darlings. Also affectionate regards to Mac and Forster. Ever affectionately. OUT OF THE COMMON--PLEASE. DICKENS _against_ THE WORLD. Charles Dickens, of No. 1, Devonshire Terrace, York Gate, Regent's Park, in the county of Middlesex, gentleman, the successful plaintiff in the above cause, maketh oath and saith: That on the day and date hereof, to wit at seven o'clock in the evening, he, this deponent, took the chair at a large assembly of the Mechanics' Institution at Liverpool, and that having been received with tremendous and enthusiastic plaudits, he, this deponent, did immediately dash into a vigorous, brilliant, humorous, pathetic, eloquent, fervid, and impassioned speech. That the said speech was enlivened by thirteen hundred persons, with frequent, vehement, uproarious, and deafening cheers, and to the best of this deponent's knowledge and belief, he, this deponent, did speak up like a man, and did, to the best of his knowledge and belief, considerably distinguish himself. That after the proceedings of the opening were over, and a vote of thanks was proposed to this deponent, he, this deponent, did again distinguish himself, and that the cheering at that time, accompanied with clapping of hands and stamping of feet, was in this deponent's case thundering and awful. And this deponent further saith, that his white-and-black or magpie waistcoat, did create a strong sensation, and that during the hours of promenading, this deponent heard from persons surrounding him such exclamations as, "What is it! _Is_ it a waistcoat? No, it's a shirt"--and the like--all of which this deponent believes to have been complimentary and gratifying; but this deponent further saith that he is now going to supper, and wishes he may have an appetite to eat it. CHARLES DICKENS. Sworn before me, at the Adelphi } Hotel, Liverpool, on the 26th } of February, 1844. } S. RADLEY. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _April 30th, 1844._ MY DEAR STANFIELD, The Sanatorium, or sick house for students, governesses, clerks, young artists, and so forth, who are above hospitals, and not rich enough to be well attended in illness in their own lodgings (you know its objects), is going to have a dinner at the London Tavern, on Tuesday, the 5th of June. The Committee are very anxious to have you for a steward, as one of the heads of a large class; and I have told them that I have no doubt you will act. There is no steward's fee or collection whatever. They are particularly anxious also to have Mr. Etty and Edwin Landseer. As you see them daily at the Academy, will you ask them or show them this note? Sir Martin became one of the Committee some few years ago, at my solicitation, as recommending young artists, struggling alone in London, to the better knowledge of this establishment. The dinner is to comprise the new feature of ladies dining at the tables with the gentlemen--not looking down upon them from the gallery. I hope in your reply you will not only book yourself, but Mrs. Stanfield and Mary. It will be very brilliant and cheerful I hope. Dick in the chair. Gentlemen's dinner-tickets a guinea, as usual; ladies', twelve shillings. I think this is all I have to say, except (which is nonsensical and needless) that I am always, Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edwin Landseer.] ATHEN�UM, _Monday Morning, May 27th, 1844._ MY DEAR LANDSEER, I have let my house with such delicious promptitude, or, as the Americans would say, "with sich everlass'in slickness and al-mity sprydom," that we turn out to-night! in favour of a widow lady, who keeps it all the time we are away! Wherefore if you, looking up into the sky this evening between five and six (as possibly you may be, in search of the spring), should see a speck in the air--a mere dot--which, growing larger and larger by degrees, appears in course of time to be an eagle (chain and all) in a light cart, accompanied by a raven of uncommon sagacity, curse that good-nature which prompted you to say it--that you would give them house-room. And do it for the love of BOZ. P.S.--The writer hereof may be heerd on by personal enquiry at No. 9, Osnaburgh Terrace, New Road. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _June 4th, 1844._ MY DEAR SIR, Many thanks for your proof, and for your truly gratifying mention of my name. I think the subject excellently chosen, the introduction exactly what it should be, the allusion to the International Copyright question most honourable and manly, and the whole scheme full of the highest interest. I had already seen your prospectus, and if I can be of the feeblest use in advancing a project so intimately connected with an end on which my heart is set--the liberal education of the people--I shall be sincerely glad. All good wishes and success attend you! Believe me always, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Dudley Costello.] _June 7th, 1844._ DEAR SIR, Mrs. Harris, being in that delicate state (just confined, and "made comfortable," in fact), hears some sounds below, which she fancies may be the owls (or howls) of the husband to whom she is devoted. They ease her mind by informing her that these sounds are only organs. By "they" I mean the gossips and attendants. By "organs" I mean instrumental boxes with barrels in them, which are commonly played by foreigners under the windows of people of sedentary pursuits, on a speculation of being bribed to leave the street. Mrs. Harris, being of a confiding nature, believed in this pious fraud, and was fully satisfied "that his owls was organs." Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Robert Keeley.] 9, OSNABURGH TERRACE, _Monday Evening, June 24th, 1844._ MY DEAR SIR, I have been out yachting for two or three days; and consequently could not answer your letter in due course. I cannot, consistently with the opinion I hold and have always held, in reference to the principle of adapting novels for the stage, give you a prologue to "Chuzzlewit." But believe me to be quite sincere in saying that if I felt I could reasonably do such a thing for anyone, I would do it for you. I start for Italy on Monday next, but if you have the piece on the stage, and rehearse on Friday, I will gladly come down at any time you may appoint on that morning, and go through it with you all. If you be not in a sufficiently forward state to render this proposal convenient to you, or likely to assist your preparations, do not take the trouble to answer this note. I presume Mrs. Keeley will do Ruth Pinch. If so, I feel secure about her, and of Mrs. Gamp I am certain. But a queer sensation begins in my legs, and comes upward to my forehead, when I think of Tom. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Daniel Maclise.] VILLA DI BAGNARELLO, ALBARO, _Monday, July 22nd, 1844._ MY VERY DEAR MAC, I address you with something of the lofty spirit of an exile--a banished commoner--a sort of Anglo-Pole. I don't exactly know what I have done for my country in coming away from it; but I feel it is something--something great--something virtuous and heroic. Lofty emotions rise within me, when I see the sun set on the blue Mediterranean. I am the limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner and my boots are green. Apropos of blue. In a certain picture, called "The Serenade," you painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the South of France--at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles--I saw deep blue skies (not _so_ deep though--oh Lord, no!), and also in America; but the sky above me is familiar to my sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin-brother shining through the window of Jack Straw's--that down in Devonshire I have seen a better sky? I daresay it is; but like a great many other heresies, it is true. But such green--green--green--as flutters in the vineyard down below the windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such lilac, and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet--in anything--picture, book, or verbal boredom--such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as is that same sea. It has such an absorbing, silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it--only so much as you could scoop up on the beach, in the hollow of your hand--would wash out everything else, and make a great blue blank of your intellect. When the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic! From any one of eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may behold the broad sea; villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose leaves--strewn with thorns--stifled in thorns! Dyed through and through and through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce, like everything else in these parts, and goes down headlong. Run to fetch your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night--and it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here (I forget its name, and Fletcher and Roche are both out) that chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very loud, something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born to chirp--to progress in chirping--to chirp louder, louder, louder--till it gives one tremendous chirp, and bursts itself. That is its life and death. Everything "is in a concatenation accordingly." The day gets brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter, hotter, hotter, till it bursts. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper, till it tumbles down and rots. Ask me a question or two about fresco--will you be so good? All the houses are painted in fresco hereabout--the outside walls I mean; the fronts, and backs, and sides--and all the colour has run into damp and green seediness, and the very design has struggled away into the component atoms of the plaster. Sometimes (but not often) I can make out a Virgin with a mildewed glory round her head; holding nothing, in an indiscernible lap, with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arms of a cherub, but it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old fresco-painted vases outside my own gate--one on either hand--which are so faint, that I never saw them till last night; and only then because I was looking over the wall after a lizard, who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar above, and crawled over one of these embellishments to his retreat. There is a church here--the Church of the Annunciation--which they are now (by "they" I mean certain noble families) restoring at a vast expense, as a work of piety. It is a large church, with a great many little chapels in it, and a very high dome. Every inch of this edifice is painted, and every design is set in a great gold frame or border elaborately wrought. You can imagine nothing so splendid. It is worth coming the whole distance to see. But every sort of splendour is in perpetual enactment through the means of these churches. Gorgeous processions in the streets, illuminations of windows on festa nights; lighting up of lamps and clustering of flowers before the shrines of saints; all manner of show and display. The doors of the churches stand wide open; and in this hot weather great red curtains flutter and wave in their palaces; and if you go and sit in one of these to get out of the sun, you see the queerest figures kneeling against pillars, and the strangest people passing in and out, and vast streams of women in veils (they don't wear bonnets), with great fans in their hands, coming and going, that you are never tired of looking on. Except in the churches, you would suppose the city (at this time of year) to be deserted, the people keep so close within doors. Indeed it is next to impossible to go out into the heat. I have only been into Genoa twice myself. We are deliciously cool here, by comparison; being high, and having the sea breeze. There is always some shade in the vineyard, too; and underneath the rocks on the sea-shore, so if I choose to saunter I can do it easily, even in the hot time of the day. I am as lazy, however, as--as you are, and do little but eat and drink and read. As I am going to transmit regular accounts of all sight-seeings and journeyings to Forster, who will show them to you, I will not bore you with descriptions, however. I hardly think you allow enough for the great brightness and brilliancy of colour which is commonly achieved on the Continent, in that same fresco painting. I saw some--by a French artist and his pupil--in progress at the cathedral at Avignon, which was as bright and airy as anything can be,--nothing dull or dead about it; and I have observed quite fierce and glaring colours elsewhere. We have a piano now (there was none in the house), and have fallen into a pretty settled easy track. We breakfast about half-past nine or ten, dine about four, and go to bed about eleven. We are much courted by the visiting people, of course, and I very much resort to my old habit of bolting from callers, and leaving their reception to Kate. Green figs I have already learnt to like. Green almonds (we have them at dessert every day) are the most delicious fruit in the world. And green lemons, combined with some rare hollands that is to be got here, make prodigious punch, I assure you. You ought to come over, Mac; but I don't expect you, though I am sure it would be a very good move for you. I have not the smallest doubt of that. Fletcher has made a sketch of the house, and will copy it in pen-and-ink for transmission to you in my next letter. I shall look out for a place in Genoa, between this and the winter time. In the meantime, the people who come out here breathe delightedly, as if they had got into another climate. Landing in the city, you would hardly suppose it possible that there could be such an air within two miles. Write to me as often as you can, like a dear good fellow, and rely upon the punctuality of my correspondence. Losing you and Forster is like losing my arms and legs, and dull and lame I am without you. But at Broadstairs next year, please God, when it is all over, I shall be very glad to have laid up such a store of recollections and improvement. I don't know what to do with Timber. He is as ill-adapted to the climate at this time of year as a suit of fur. I have had him made a lion dog; but the fleas flock in such crowds into the hair he has left, that they drive him nearly frantic, and renders it absolutely necessary that he should be kept by himself. Of all the miserable hideous little frights you ever saw, you never beheld such a devil. Apropos, as we were crossing the Seine within two stages of Paris, Roche suddenly said to me, sitting by me on the box: "The littel dog 'ave got a great lip!" I was thinking of things remote and very different, and couldn't comprehend why any peculiarity in this feature on the part of the dog should excite a man so much. As I was musing upon it, my ears were attracted by shouts of "Helo! hola! Hi, hi, hi! Le voilà! Regardez!" and the like. And looking down among the oxen--we were in the centre of a numerous drove--I saw him, Timber, lying in the road, curled up--you know his way--like a lobster, only not so stiff, yelping dismally in the pain of his "lip" from the roof of the carriage; and between the aching of his bones, his horror of the oxen, and his dread of me (who he evidently took to be the immediate agent in and cause of the damage), singing out to an extent which I believe to be perfectly unprecedented; while every Frenchman and French boy within sight roared for company. He wasn't hurt. Kate and Georgina send their best loves; and the children add "theirs." Katey, in particular, desires to be commended to "Mr. Teese." She has a sore throat; from sitting in constant draughts, I suppose; but with that exception, we are all quite well. Ever believe me, my dear Mac, Your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Rev. Edward Tagart.] ALBARO, NEAR GENOA, _Friday, August 9th, 1844._ MY DEAR SIR, I find that if I wait to write you a long letter (which has been the cause of my procrastination in fulfilling my part of our agreement), I am likely to wait some time longer. And as I am very anxious to hear from you; not the less so, because if I hear of you through my brother, who usually sees you once a week in my absence; I take pen in hand and stop a messenger who is going to Genoa. For my main object being to qualify myself for the receipt of a letter from you, I don't see why a ten-line qualification is not as good as one of a hundred lines. You told me it was possible that you and Mrs. Tagart might wander into these latitudes in the autumn. I wish you would carry out that infant intention to the utmost. It would afford us the truest delight and pleasure to receive you. If you come in October, you will find us in the Palazzo Peschiere, in Genoa, which is surrounded by a delicious garden, and is a most charming habitation in all respects. If you come in September, you will find us less splendidly lodged, but on the margin of the sea, and in the midst of vineyards. The climate is delightful even now; the heat being not at all oppressive, except in the actual city, which is what the Americans would call considerable fiery, in the middle of the day. But the sea-breezes out here are refreshing and cool every day, and the bathing in the early morning is something more agreeable than you can easily imagine. The orange trees of the Peschiere shall give you their most fragrant salutations if you come to us at that time, and we have a dozen spare beds in that house that I know of; to say nothing of some vast chambers here and there with ancient iron chests in them, where Mrs. Tagart might enact Ginevra to perfection, and never be found out. To prevent which, I will engage to watch her closely, if she will only come and see us. The flies are incredibly numerous just now. The unsightly blot a little higher up was occasioned by a very fine one who fell into the inkstand, and came out, unexpectedly, on the nib of my pen. We are all quite well, thank Heaven, and had a very interesting journey here, of which, as well as of this place, I will not write a word, lest I should take the edge off those agreeable conversations with which we will beguile our walks. Pray tell me about the presentation of the plate, and whether ---- was very slow, or trotted at all, and if so, when. He is an excellent creature, and I respect him very much, so I don't mind smiling when I think of him as he appeared when addressing you and pointing to the plate, with his head a little on one side, and one of his eyes turned up languidly. Also let me know exactly how you are travelling, and when, and all about it; that I may meet you with open arms on the threshold of the city, if happily you bend your steps this way. You had better address me, "Poste Restante, Genoa," as the Albaro postman gets drunk, and when he has lost letters, and is sober, sheds tears--which is affecting, but hardly satisfactory. Kate and her sister send their best regards to yourself, and Mrs. and Miss Tagart, and all your family. I heartily join them in all kind remembrances and good wishes. As the messenger has just looked in at the door, and shedding on me a balmy gale of onions, has protested against being detained any longer, I will only say (which is not at all necessary) that I am ever, Faithfully yours. P.S.--There is a little to see here, in the church way, I assure you. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] ALBARO, _Saturday Night, August 24th, 1844._ MY DEAR STANFIELD, I love you so truly, and have such pride and joy of heart in your friendship, that I don't know how to begin writing to you. When I think how you are walking up and down London in that portly surtout, and can't receive proposals from Dick to go to the theatre, I fall into a state between laughing and crying, and want some friendly back to smite. "Je-im!" "Aye, aye, your honour," is in my ears every time I walk upon the sea-shore here; and the number of expeditions I make into Cornwall in my sleep, the springs of Flys I break, the songs I sing, and the bowls of punch I drink, would soften a heart of stone. We have had weather here, since five o'clock this morning, after your own heart. Suppose yourself the Admiral in "Black-eyed Susan" after the acquittal of William, and when it was possible to be on friendly terms with him. I am T. P.[4] My trousers are very full at the ankles, my black neckerchief is tied in the regular style, the name of my ship is painted round my glazed hat, I have a red waistcoat on, and the seams of my blue jacket are "paid"--permit me to dig you in the ribs when I make use of this nautical expression--with white. In my hand I hold the very box connected with the story of Sandomingerbilly. I lift up my eyebrows as far as I can (on the T. P. model), take a quid from the box, screw the lid on again (chewing at the same time, and looking pleasantly at the pit), brush it with my right elbow, take up my right leg, scrape my right foot on the ground, hitch up my trousers, and in reply to a question of yours, namely, "Indeed, what weather, William?" I deliver myself as follows: Lord love your honour! Weather! Such weather as would set all hands to the pumps aboard one of your fresh-water cockboats, and set the purser to his wits' ends to stow away, for the use of the ship's company, the casks and casks full of blue water as would come powering in over the gunnel! The dirtiest night, your honour, as ever you see 'atween Spithead at gun-fire and the Bay of Biscay! The wind sou'-west, and your house dead in the wind's eye; the breakers running up high upon the rocky beads, the light'us no more looking through the fog than Davy Jones's sarser eye through the blue sky of heaven in a calm, or the blue toplights of your honour's lady cast down in a modest overhauling of her catheads: avast! (_whistling_) my dear eyes; here am I a-goin' head on to the breakers (_bowing_). _Admiral_ (_smiling_). No, William! I admire plain speaking, as you know, and so does old England, William, and old England's Queen. But you were saying---- _William._ Aye, aye, your honour (_scratching his head_). I've lost my reckoning. Damme!--I ast pardon--but won't your honour throw a hencoop or any old end of towline to a man as is overboard? _Admiral_ (_smiling still_). You were saying, William, that the wind---- _William_ (_again cocking his leg, and slapping the thighs very hard_). Avast heaving, your honour! I see your honour's signal fluttering in the breeze, without a glass. As I was a-saying, your honour, the wind was blowin' from the sou'-west, due sou'-west, your honour, not a pint to larboard nor a pint to starboard; the clouds a-gatherin' in the distance for all the world like Beachy Head in a fog, the sea a-rowling in, in heaps of foam, and making higher than the mainyard arm, the craft a-scuddin' by all taught and under storms'ils for the harbour; not a blessed star a-twinklin' out aloft--aloft, your honour, in the little cherubs' native country--and the spray is flying like the white foam from the Jolly's lips when Poll of Portsea took him for a tailor! (_laughs._) _Admiral_ (_laughing also_). You have described it well, William, and I thank you. But who are these? _Enter Supers in calico jackets to look like cloth, some in brown holland petticoat-trousers and big boots, all with very large buckles. Last Super rolls on a cask, and pretends to keep it. Other Supers apply their mugs to the bunghole and drink, previously holding them upside down._ _William_ (_after shaking hands with everybody_). Who are these, your honour! Messmates as staunch and true as ever broke biscuit. Ain't you, my lads? _All._ Aye, aye, William. That we are! that we are! _Admiral_ (_much affected_). Oh, England, what wonder that----! But I will no longer detain you from your sports, my humble friends (ADMIRAL _speaks very low, and looks hard at the orchestra, this being the cue for the dance_)--from your sports, my humble friends. Farewell! _All._ Hurrah! hurrah! [_Exit_ ADMIRAL. _Voice behind._ Suppose the dance, Mr. Stanfield. Are you all ready? Go then! My dear Stanfield, I wish you would come this way and see me in that Palazzo Peschiere! Was ever man so welcome as I would make you! What a truly gentlemanly action it would be to bring Mrs. Stanfield and the baby. And how Kate and her sister would wave pocket-handkerchiefs from the wharf in joyful welcome! Ah, what a glorious proceeding! Do you know this place? Of course you do. I won't bore you with anything about it, for I know Forster reads my letters to you; but what a place it is. The views from the hills here, and the immense variety of prospects of the sea, are as striking, I think, as such scenery can be. Above all, the approach to Genoa, by sea from Marseilles, constitutes a picture which you ought to paint, for nobody else can ever do it! William, you made that bridge at Avignon better than it is. Beautiful as it undoubtedly is, you made it fifty times better. And if I were Morrison, or one of that school (bless the dear fellows one and all!), I wouldn't stand it, but would insist on having another picture gratis, to atone for the imposition. The night is like a seaside night in England towards the end of September. They say it is the prelude to clear weather. But the wind is roaring now, and the sea is raving, and the rain is driving down, as if they had all set in for a real hearty picnic, and each had brought its own relations to the general festivity. I don't know whether you are acquainted with the coastguard and men in these parts? They are extremely civil fellows, of a very amiable manner and appearance, but the most innocent men in matters you would suppose them to be well acquainted with, in virtue of their office, that I ever encountered. One of them asked me only yesterday, if it would take a year to get to England in a ship? Which I thought for a coastguardman was rather a tidy question. It would take a long time to catch a ship going there if he were on board a pursuing cutter though. I think he would scarcely do it in twelve months, indeed. So you were at Astley's t'other night. "Now, Mr. Stickney, sir, what can I come for to go for to do for to bring for to fetch for to carry for you, sir?" "He, he, he! Oh, I say, sir!" "Well, sir?" "Miss Woolford knows me, sir. She laughed at me!" I see him run away after this; not on his feet, but on his knees and the calves of his legs alternately; and that smell of sawdusty horses, which was never in any other place in the world, salutes my nose with painful distinctness. What do you think of my suddenly finding myself a swimmer? But I have really made the discovery, and skim about a little blue bay just below the town here, like a fish in high spirits. I hope to preserve my bathing-dress for your inspection and approval, or possibly to enrich your collection of Italian costumes on my return. Do you recollect Yarnold in "Masaniello"? I fear that I, unintentionally, "dress at him," before plunging into the sea. I enhanced the likeness very much, last Friday morning, by singing a barcarole on the rocks. I was a trifle too flesh-coloured (the stage knowing no medium between bright salmon and dirty yellow), but apart from that defect, not badly made up by any means. When you write to me, my dear Stanny, as I hope you will soon, address Poste Restante, Genoa. I remain out here until the end of September, and send in for my letters daily. There is a postman for this place, but he gets drunk and loses the letters; after which he calls to say so, and to fall upon his knees. About three weeks ago I caught him at a wine-shop near here, playing bowls in the garden. It was then about five o'clock in the afternoon, and he had been airing a newspaper addressed to me, since nine o'clock in the morning. Kate and Georgina unite with me in most cordial remembrances to Mrs. and Miss Stanfield, and to all the children. They particularise all sorts of messages, but I tell them that they had better write themselves if they want to send any. Though I don't know that this writing would end in the safe deliverance of the commodities after all; for when I began this letter, I meant to give utterance to all kinds of heartiness, my dear Stanfield; and I come to the end of it without having said anything more than that I am--which is new to you--under every circumstance and everywhere, Your most affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] PALAZZO PESCHIERE, GENOA, _October 14th, 1844._ MY VERY DEAR MACREADY, My whole heart is with you _at home_. I have not yet felt so far off as I do now, when I think of you there, and cannot fold you in my arms. This is only a shake of the hand. I couldn't _say_ much to you, if I were home to greet you. Nor can I write much, when I think of you, safe and sound and happy, after all your wanderings. My dear fellow, God bless you twenty thousand times. Happiness and joy be with you! I hope to see you soon. If I should be so unfortunate as to miss you in London, I will fall upon you, with a swoop of love, in Paris. Kate says all kind things in the language; and means more than are in the dictionary capacity of all the descendants of all the stonemasons that worked at Babel. Again and again and again, my own true friend, God bless you! Ever yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Douglas Jerrold.] CREMONA, _Saturday Night, October 16th, 1844._ MY DEAR JERROLD, As half a loaf is better than no bread, so I hope that half a sheet of paper may be better than none at all, coming from one who is anxious to live in your memory and friendship. I should have redeemed the pledge I gave you in this regard long since, but occupation at one time, and absence from pen and ink at another, have prevented me. Forster has told you, or will tell you, that I very much wish you to hear my little Christmas book; and I hope you will meet me, at his bidding, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. I have tried to strike a blow upon that part of the brass countenance of wicked Cant, when such a compliment is sorely needed at this time, and I trust that the result of my training is at least the exhibition of a strong desire to make it a staggerer. If _you_ should think at the end of the four rounds (there are no more) that the said Cant, in the language of _Bell's Life_, "comes up piping," I shall be very much the better for it. I am now on my way to Milan; and from thence (after a day or two's rest) I mean to come to England by the grandest Alpine pass that the snow may leave open. You know this place as famous of yore for fiddles. I don't see any here now. But there is a whole street of coppersmiths not far from this inn; and they throb so d----ably and fitfully, that I thought I had a palpitation of the heart after dinner just now, and seldom was more relieved than when I found the noise to be none of mine. I was rather shocked yesterday (I am not strong in geographical details) to find that Romeo was only banished twenty-five miles. That is the distance between Mantua and Verona. The latter is a quaint old place, with great houses in it that are now solitary and shut up--exactly the place it ought to be. The former has a great many apothecaries in it at this moment, who could play that part to the life. For of all the stagnant ponds I ever beheld, it is the greenest and weediest. I went to see the old palace of the Capulets, which is still distinguished by their cognizance (a hat carved in stone on the courtyard wall). It is a miserable inn. The court was full of crazy coaches, carts, geese, and pigs, and was ankle-deep in mud and dung. The garden is walled off and built out. There was nothing to connect it with its old inhabitants, and a very unsentimental lady at the kitchen door. The Montagues used to live some two or three miles off in the country. It does not appear quite clear whether they ever inhabited Verona itself. But there is a village bearing their name to this day, and traditions of the quarrels between the two families are still as nearly alive as anything can be, in such a drowsy neighbourhood. It was very hearty and good of you, Jerrold, to make that affectionate mention of the "Carol" in _Punch_, and I assure you it was not lost on the distant object of your manly regard, but touched him as you wished and meant it should. I wish we had not lost so much time in improving our personal knowledge of each other. But I have so steadily read you, and so selfishly gratified myself in always expressing the admiration with which your gallant truths inspired me, that I must not call it time lost, either. You rather entertained a notion, once, of coming to see me at Genoa. I shall return straight, on the 9th of December, limiting my stay in town to one week. Now couldn't you come back with me? The journey, that way, is very cheap, costing little more than twelve pounds; and I am sure the gratification to you would be high. I am lodged in quite a wonderful place, and would put you in a painted room, as big as a church and much more comfortable. There are pens and ink upon the premises; orange trees, gardens, battledores and shuttlecocks, rousing wood-fires for evenings, and a welcome worth having. Come! Letter from a gentleman in Italy to Bradbury and Evans in London. Letter from a gentleman in a country gone to sleep to a gentleman in a country that would go to sleep too, and never wake again, if some people had their way. You can work in Genoa. The house is used to it. It is exactly a week's post. Have that portmanteau looked to, and when we meet, say, "I am coming." I have never in my life been so struck by any place as by Venice. It is _the_ wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, d----able old place. I entered it by night, and the sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed is a part of me for the rest of my existence. And, oh God! the cells below the water, underneath the Bridge of Sighs; the nook where the monk came at midnight to confess the political offender; the bench where he was strangled; the deadly little vault in which they tied him in a sack, and the stealthy crouching little door through which they hurried him into a boat, and bore him away to sink him where no fisherman dare cast his net--all shown by torches that blink and wink, as if they were ashamed to look upon the gloomy theatre of sad horrors; past and gone as they are, these things stir a man's blood, like a great wrong or passion of the instant. And with these in their minds, and with a museum there, having a chamber full of such frightful instruments of torture as the devil in a brain fever could scarcely invent, there are hundreds of parrots, who will declaim to you in speech and print, by the hour together, on the degeneracy of the times in which a railroad is building across the water at Venice; instead of going down on their knees, the drivellers, and thanking Heaven that they live in a time when iron makes roads, instead of prison bars and engines for driving screws into the skulls of innocent men. Before God, I could almost turn bloody-minded, and shoot the parrots of our island with as little compunction as Robinson Crusoe shot the parrots in his. I have not been in bed, these ten days, after five in the morning, and have been, travelling many hours every day. If this be the cause of my inflicting a very stupid and sleepy letter on you, my dear Jerrold, I hope it will be a kind of signal at the same time, of my wish to hail you lovingly even from this sleepy and unpromising state. And believe me as I am, Always your Friend and Admirer. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] PESCHIERE, GENOA, _Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 1844._ MY DEAR MITTON, The cause of my not having written to you is too obvious to need any explanation. I have worn myself to death in the month I have been at work. None of my usual reliefs have been at hand; I have not been able to divest myself of the story--have suffered very much in my sleep in consequence--and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate, that I am as nervous as a man who is dying of drink, and as haggard as a murderer. I believe I have written a tremendous book, and knocked the "Carol" out of the field. It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt. I leave here to-morrow for Venice and many other places; and I shall certainly come to London to see my proofs, coming by new ground all the way, cutting through the snow in the valleys of Switzerland, and plunging through the mountains in the dead of winter. I would accept your hearty offer with right goodwill, but my visit being one of business and consultation, I see impediments in the way, and insurmountable reasons for not doing so. Therefore, I shall go to an hotel in Covent Garden, where they know me very well, and with the landlord of which I have already communicated. My orders are not upon a mighty scale, extending no further than a good bedroom and a cold shower-bath. Bradbury and Evans are going at it, ding-dong, and are wild with excitement. All news on that subject (and on every other) I must defer till I see you. That will be immediately after I arrive, of course. Most likely on Monday, 2nd December. Kate and her sister (who send their best regards) and all the children are as well as possible. The house is _perfect_; the servants are as quiet and well-behaved as at home, which very rarely happens here, and Roche is my right hand. There never was such a fellow. We have now got carpets down--burn fires at night--draw the curtains, and are quite wintry. We have a box at the opera, which, is close by (for nothing), and sit there when we please, as in our own drawing-room. There have been three fine days in four weeks. On every other the water has been falling down in one continual sheet, and it has been thundering and lightening every day and night. My hand shakes in that feverish and horrible manner that I can hardly hold a pen. And I have so bad a cold that I can't see. In haste to save the post, Ever faithfully. P.S.--Charley has a writing-master every day, and a French master. He and his sisters are to be waited on by a professor of the noble art of dancing, next week. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] PARMA, ALBERGO DELLA POSTA, _Friday, Nov. 8th, 1844._ MY DEAREST KATE, "If missis could see us to-night, what would she say?" That was the brave C.'s remark last night at midnight, and he had reason. We left Genoa, as you know, soon after five on the evening of my departure; and in company with the lady whom you saw, and the dog whom I don't think you did see, travelled all night at the rate of four miles an hour over bad roads, without the least refreshment until daybreak, when the brave and myself escaped into a miserable caffé while they were changing horses, and got a cup of that drink hot. That same day, a few hours afterwards, between ten and eleven, we came to (I hope) the d----dest inn in the world, where, in a vast chamber, rendered still more desolate by the presence of a most offensive specimen of what D'Israeli calls the Mosaic Arab (who had a beautiful girl with him), I regaled upon a breakfast, almost as cold, and damp, and cheerless, as myself. Then, in another coach, much smaller than a small Fly, I was packed up with an old padre, a young Jesuit, a provincial avvocato, a private gentleman with a very red nose and a very wet brown umbrella, and the brave C. and I went on again at the same pace through the mud and rain until four in the afternoon, when there was a place in the coupé (two indeed), which I took, holding that select compartment in company with a very ugly but very agreeable Tuscan "gent," who said "_gia_" instead of "_si_," and rung some other changes in this changing language, but with whom I got on very well, being extremely conversational. We were bound, as you know perhaps, for Piacenza, but it was discovered that we couldn't get to Piacenza, and about ten o'clock at night we halted at a place called Stradella, where the inn was a series of queer galleries open to the night, with a great courtyard full of waggons and horses, and "_velociferi_," and what not in the centre. It was bitter cold and very wet, and we all walked into a bare room (mine!) with two immensely broad beds on two deal dining-tables, a third great empty table, the usual washing-stand tripod, with a slop-basin on it, and two chairs. And then we walked up and down for three-quarters of an hour or so, while dinner, or supper, or whatever it was, was getting ready. This was set forth (by way of variety) in the old priest's bedroom, which had two more immensely broad beds on two more deal dining-tables in it. The first dish was a cabbage boiled in a great quantity of rice and hot water, the whole flavoured with cheese. I was so cold that I thought it comfortable, and so hungry that a bit of cabbage, when I found such a thing floating my way, charmed me. After that we had a dish of very little pieces of pork, fried with pigs' kidneys; after that a fowl; after that something very red and stringy, which I think was veal; and after that two tiny little new-born-baby-looking turkeys, very red and very swollen. Fruit, of course, to wind up, and garlic in one shape or another in every course. I made three jokes at supper (to the immense delight of the company), and retired early. The brave brought in a bush or two and made a fire, and after that a glass of screeching hot brandy and water; that bottle of his being full of brandy. I drank it at my leisure, undressed before the fire, and went into one of the beds. The brave reappeared about an hour afterwards and went into the other; previously tying a pocket-handkerchief round and round his head in a strange fashion, and giving utterance to the sentiment with which this letter begins. At five this morning we resumed our journey, still through mud and rain, and at about eleven arrived at Piacenza; where we fellow-passengers took leave of one another in the most affectionate manner. As there was no coach on till six at night, and as it was a very grim, despondent sort of place, and as I had had enough of diligences for one while, I posted forward here in the strangest carriages ever beheld, which we changed when we changed horses. We arrived here before six. The hotel is quite French. I have dined very well in my own room on the second floor; and it has two beds in it, screened off from the room by drapery. I only use one to-night, and that is already made. I purpose posting on to Bologna, if I can arrange it, at twelve to-morrow; seeing the sights here first. It is dull work this travelling alone. My only comfort is in motion. I look forward with a sort of shudder to Sunday, when I shall have a day to myself in Bologna; and I think I must deliver my letters in Venice in sheer desperation. Never did anybody want a companion after dinner so much as I do. There has been music on the landing outside my door to-night. Two violins and a violoncello. One of the violins played a solo, and the others struck in as an orchestra does now and then, very well. Then he came in with a small tin platter. "Bella musica," said I. "Bellissima musica, signore. Mi piace moltissimo. Sono felice, signoro," said he. I gave him a franc. "O moltissimo generoso. Tanto generoso signore!" It was a joke to laugh at when I was learning, but I swear unless I could stagger on, Zoppa-wise, with the people, I verily believe I should have turned back this morning. In all other respects I think the entire change has done me undoubted service already. I am free of the book, and am red-faced; and feel marvellously disposed to sleep. So for all the straggling qualities of this straggling letter, want of sleep must be responsible. Give my best love to Georgy, and my paternal blessing to Mamey, Katey, Charley, Wally, and Chickenstalker. P.S.--Get things in their places. I can't bear to picture them otherwise. P.P.S.--I think I saw Roche sleeping with his head on the lady's shoulder, in the coach. I couldn't swear it, and the light was deceptive. But I think I did. Alia sign^{a} Sign^{a} Dickens. Palazzo Peschiere, Genova. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] FRIBOURG, _Saturday Night, November 23rd, 1844._ MY DEAREST KATE, For the first time since I left you I am sitting in a room of my own hiring, with a fire and a bed in it. And I am happy to say that I have the best and fullest intentions of sleeping in the bed, having arrived here at half-past four this afternoon, without any cessation of travelling, night or day, since I parted from Mr. Bairr's cheap firewood. The Alps appeared in sight very soon after we left Milan--by eight or nine o'clock in the morning; and the brave C. was so far wrong in his calculations that we began the ascent of the Simplon that same night, while you were travelling (as I would I were) towards the Peschiere. Most favourable state of circumstances for journeying up that tremendous pass! The brightest moon I ever saw, all night, and daybreak on the summit. The glory of which, making great wastes of snow a rosy red, exceeds all telling. We _sledged_ through the snow on the summit for two hours or so. The weather was perfectly fair and bright, and there was neither difficulty nor danger--except the danger that there always must be, in such a place, of a horse stumbling on the brink of an immeasurable precipice. In which case no piece of the unfortunate traveller would be left large enough to tell his story in dumb show. You may imagine something of the rugged grandeur of such a scene as this great passage of these great mountains, and indeed Glencoe, well sprinkled with snow, would be very like the ascent. But the top itself, so wild, and bleak, and lonely, is a thing by itself, and not to be likened to any other sight. The cold was piercing; the north wind high and boisterous; and when it came driving in our faces, bringing a sharp shower of little points of snow and piercing it into our very blood, it really was, what it is often said to be, "cutting"--with a very sharp edge too. There are houses of refuge here--bleak, solitary places--for travellers overtaken by the snow to hurry to, as an escape from death; and one great house, called the Hospital, kept by monks, where wayfarers get supper and bed for nothing. We saw some coming out and pursuing their journey. If all monks devoted themselves to such uses, I should have little fault to find with them. The cold in Switzerland, since, has been something quite indescribable. My eyes are tingling to-night as one may suppose cymbals to tingle when they have been lustily played. It is positive pain to me to write. The great organ which I was to have had "pleasure in hearing" don't play on a Sunday, at which the brave is inconsolable. But the town is picturesque and quaint, and worth seeing. And this inn (with a German bedstead in it about the size and shape of a baby's linen-basket) is perfectly clean and comfortable. Butter is so cheap hereabouts that they bring you a great mass like the squab of a sofa for tea. And of honey, which is most delicious, they set before you a proportionate allowance. We start to-morrow morning at six for Strasburg, and from that town, or the next halting-place on the Rhine, I will report progress, if it be only in half-a-dozen words. I am anxious to hear that you reached Genoa quite comfortably, and shall look forward with impatience to that letter which you are to indite with so much care and pains next Monday. My best love to Georgy, and to Charley, and Mamey, and Katey, and Wally, and Chickenstalker. I have treated myself to a new travelling-cap to-night (my old one being too thin), and it is rather a prodigious affair I flatter myself. Swiss towns, and mountains, and the Lake of Geneva, and the famous suspension bridge at this place, and a great many other objects (with a very low thermometer conspicuous among them), are dancing up and down me, strangely. But I am quite collected enough, notwithstanding, to have still a very distinct idea that this hornpipe travelling is uncomfortable, and that I would gladly start for my palazzo out of hand without any previous rest, stupid as I am and much as I want it. Ever, my dear love, Affectionately yours. P.S.--I hope the dancing lessons will be a success. Don't fail to let me know. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] H�TEL BRISTOL, PARIS, _Thursday Night, Nov. 28th, 1844, Half-past Ten._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, Since I wrote to you what would be called in law proceedings the exhibit marked A, I have been round to the Hôtel Brighton, and personally examined and cross-examined the attendants. It is painfully clear to me that I shall not see you to-night, nor until Tuesday, the 10th of December, when, please God, I shall re-arrive here, on my way to my Italian bowers. I mean to stay all the Wednesday and all the Thursday in Paris. One night to see you act (my old delight when you little thought of such a being in existence), and one night to read to you and Mrs. Macready (if that scamp of Lincoln's Inn Fields has not anticipated me) my little Christmas book, in which I have endeavoured to plant an indignant right-hander on the eye of certain wicked Cant that makes my blood boil, which I hope will not only cloud that eye with black and blue, but many a gentle one with crystal of the finest sort. God forgive me, but I think there are good things in the little story! I took it for granted you were, as your American friends say, "in full blast" here, and meant to have sent a card into your dressing-room, with "Mr. G. S. Hancock Muggridge, United States," upon it. But Paris looks coldly on me without your eye in its head, and not being able to shake your hand I shake my own head dolefully, which is but poor satisfaction. My love to Mrs. Macready. I will swear to the death that it is truly hers, for her gallantry in your absence if for nothing else, and to you, my dear Macready, I am ever a devoted friend. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] H�TEL BRISTOL, PARIS, _Thursday Night, Nov. 28th, 1844._ MY DEAREST KATE, With an intolerable pen and no ink, I am going to write a few lines to you to report progress. I got to Strasburg on Monday night, intending to go down the Rhine. But the weather being foggy, and the season quite over, they could not insure me getting on for certain beyond Mayence, or our not being detained by unpropitious weather. Therefore I resolved (the malle poste being full) to take the diligence hither next day in the afternoon. I arrived here at half-past five to-night, after fifty hours of it in a French coach. I was so beastly dirty when I got to this house, that I had quite lost all sense of my identity, and if anybody had said, "Are you Charles Dickens?" I should have unblushingly answered, "No; I never heard of him." A good wash, and a good dress, and a good dinner have revived me, however; and I can report of this house, concerning which the brave was so anxious when we were here before, that it is the best I ever was in. My little apartment, consisting of three rooms and other conveniences, is a perfect curiosity of completeness. You never saw such a charming little baby-house. It is infinitely smaller than those first rooms we had at Meurice's, but for elegance, compactness, comfort, and quietude, exceeds anything I ever met with at an inn. The moment I arrived here, I enquired, of course, after Macready. They said the English theatre had not begun yet, that they thought he was at Meurice's, where they knew some members of the company to be. I instantly despatched the porter with a note to say that if he were there, I would come round and hug him, as soon as I was clean. They referred the porter to the Hôtel Brighton. He came back and told me that the answer there was: "M. Macready's rooms were engaged, but he had not arrived. He was expected to-night!" If we meet to-night, I will add a postscript. Wouldn't it be odd if we met upon the road between this and Boulogne to-morrow? I mean, as a recompense for my late sufferings, to get a hackney-carriage if I can and post that journey, starting from here at eight to-morrow morning, getting to Boulogne sufficiently early next morning to cross at once, and dining with Forster that same day--to wit, Saturday. I have notions of taking you with me on my next journey (if you would like to go), and arranging for Georgy to come to us by steamer--under the protection of the English captain, for instance--to Naples; there I would top and cap all our walks by taking her up to the crater of Vesuvius with me. But this is dependent on her ability to be perfectly happy for a fortnight or so in our stately palace with the children, and such foreign aid as the Simpsons. For I love her too dearly to think of any project which would involve her being uncomfortable for that space of time. You can think this over, and talk it over; and I will join you in doing so, please God, when I return to our Italian bowers, which I shall be heartily glad to do. They tell us that the landlord of this house, going to London some week or so ago, was detained at Boulogne two days by a high sea, in which the packet could not put out. So I hope there is the greater chance of no such bedevilment happening to me. Paris is better than ever. Oh dear, how grand it was when I came through it in that caravan to-night! I hope we shall be very hearty here, and able to say with Wally, "Han't it plassant!" Love to Charley, Mamey, Katey, Wally, and Chickenstalker. The last-named, I take it for granted, is indeed prodigious. Best love to Georgy. Ever, my dearest Kate, Affectionately yours. P.S.--I have been round to Macready's hotel; it is now past ten, and he has not arrived, nor does it seem at all certain that he seriously intended to arrive to-night. So I shall not see him, I take it for granted, until my return. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] PIAZZA COFFEE HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN, _Monday, Dec. 2nd, 1844._ MY DEAREST KATE, I received, with great delight, your _excellent_ letter of this morning. Do not regard this as my answer to it. It is merely to say that I have been at Bradbury and Evans's all day, and have barely time to write more than that I _will_ write to-morrow. I arrived about seven on Saturday evening, and rushed into the arms of Mac and Forster. Both of them send their best love to you and Georgy, with a heartiness not to be described. The little book is now, as far as I am concerned, all ready. One cut of Doyle's and one of Leech's I found so unlike my ideas, that I had them both to breakfast with me this morning, and with that winning manner which you know of, got them with the highest good humour to do both afresh. They are now hard at it. Stanfield's readiness, delight, wonder at my being pleased with what he has done is delicious. Mac's frontispiece is charming. The book is quite splendid; the expenses will be very great, I have no doubt. Anybody who has heard it has been moved in the most extraordinary manner. Forster read it (for dramatic purposes) to A'Beckett. He cried so much and so painfully, that Forster didn't know whether to go on or stop; and he called next day to say that any expression of his feeling was beyond his power. But that he believed it, and felt it to be--I won't say what. As the reading comes off to-morrow night, I had better not despatch my letters to you until _Wednesday's_ post. I must close to save this (heartily tired I am, and I dine at Gore House to-day), so with love to Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Wally, and Chickenstalker, ever, believe me, Yours, with true affection. P.S.--If you had seen Macready last night, undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read, you would have felt, as I did, what a thing it is to have power. FOOTNOTES: [4] T. P. Cooke, the celebrated actor of "William" in Douglas Jerrold's play of "Black-eyed Susan." 1845. NARRATIVE. At the beginning of this year, Charles Dickens was still living at the Palazzo Peschiere, Genoa, with his family. In February, he went with his wife to Rome for the Carnival, leaving his sister-in-law and children at Genoa; Miss Hogarth joining them later on at Naples. They all returned to Rome for the Holy Week, and then went to Florence, and so back to Genoa. He continued his residence at Genoa until June of this year, when he returned to England by Switzerland and Belgium, the party being met at Brussels by Mr. Forster, Mr. Maclise, and Mr. Douglas Jerrold, and arriving at home at the end of June. The autumn months, until the 1st October, were again spent at Broadstairs. And in this September was the first amateur play at Miss Kelly's theatre in Dean Street, under the management of Charles Dickens, with Messrs. Jerrold, Mark Lemon, John Leech, Gilbert A'Beckett, Leigh, Frank Stone, Forster, and others as his fellow-actors. The play selected was Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," in which Charles Dickens acted Captain Bobadil. The first performance was a private one, merely as an entertainment for the actors and their friends, but its success speedily led to a repetition of the same performance, and afterwards to many other performances for public and charitable objects. "Every Man in his Humour" was shortly after repeated, at the same little theatre, for a useful charity which needed help; and later in the year Beaumont and Fletcher's play of "The Elder Brother" was given by the same company, at the same place, for the benefit of Miss Kelly. There was a farce played after the comedy on each occasion--not always the same one--in which Charles Dickens and Mark Lemon were the principal actors. The letters which we have for this year, refer, with very few exceptions, to these theatricals, and therefore need no explanation. He was at work at the end of this year on another Christmas book, "The Cricket on the Hearth," and was also much occupied with the project of _The Daily News_ paper, of which he undertook the editorship at its starting, which took place in the beginning of the following year, 1846. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ROME, _Tuesday, February 4th, 1845._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, This is a very short note, but time is still shorter. Come by the first boat by all means. If there be a good one a day or two before it, come by that. Don't delay on any account. I am very sorry you are not here. The Carnival is a very remarkable and beautiful sight. I have been regretting the having left you at home all the way here. Kate says, will you take counsel with Charlotte about colour (I put in my word, as usual, for brightness), and have the darlings' bonnets made at once, by the same artist as before? Kate would have written, but is gone with Black to a day performance at the opera, to see Cerito dance. At two o'clock each day we sally forth in an open carriage, with a large sack of sugar-plums and at least five hundred little nosegays to pelt people with. I should think we threw away, yesterday, a thousand of the latter. We had the carriage filled with flowers three or four times. I wish you could have seen me catch a swell brigand on the nose with a handful of very large confetti every time we met him. It was the best thing I have ever done. "The Chimes" are nothing to it. Anxiously expecting you, I am ever, Dear Georgy, Yours most affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] NAPLES, _Monday, February 17th, 1845._ MY DEAR MITTON, This will be a hasty letter, for I am as badly off in this place as in America--beset by visitors at all times and seasons, and forced to dine out every day. I have found, however, an excellent man for me--an Englishman, who has lived here many years, and is well acquainted with _the people_, whom he doctored in the bad time of the cholera, when the priests and everybody else fled in terror. Under his auspices, I have got to understand the low life of Naples (among the fishermen and idlers) almost as well as I understand the do. do. of my own country; always excepting the language, which is very peculiar and extremely difficult, and would require a year's constant practice at least. It is no more like Italian than English is to Welsh. And as they don't say half of what they mean, but make a wink or a kick stand for a whole sentence, it's a marvel to me how they comprehend each other. At Rome they speak beautiful Italian (I am pretty strong at that, I believe); but they are worse here than in Genoa, which I had previously thought impossible. It is a fine place, but nothing like so beautiful as people make it out to be. The famous bay is, to my thinking, as a piece of scenery, immeasurably inferior to the Bay of Genoa, which is the most lovely thing I have ever seen. The city, in like manner, will bear no comparison with Genoa. But there is none in Italy that will, except Venice. As to houses, there is no palace like the Peschiere for architecture, situation, gardens, or rooms. It is a great triumph to me, too, to find how cheap it is. At Rome, the English people live in dirty little fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, with not one room as large as your own drawing-room, and pay, commonly, seven or eight pounds a week. I was a week in Rome on my way here, and saw the Carnival, which is perfectly delirious, and a great scene for a description. All the ancient part of Rome is wonderful and impressive in the extreme. Far beyond the possibility of exaggeration as to the modern part, it might be anywhere or anything--Paris, Nice, Boulogne, Calais, or one of a thousand other places. The weather is so atrocious (rain, snow, wind, darkness, hail, and cold) that I can't get over into Sicily. But I don't care very much about it, as I have planned out ten days of excursion into the neighbouring country. One thing of course--the ascent of Vesuvius, Herculaneum and Pompeii, the two cities which were covered by its melted ashes, and dug out in the first instance accidentally, are more full of interest and wonder than it is possible to imagine. I have heard of some ancient tombs (quite unknown to travellers) dug in the bowels of the earth, and extending for some miles underground. They are near a place called Viterbo, on the way from Rome to Florence. I shall lay in a small stock of torches, etc., and explore them when I leave Rome. I return there on the 1st of March, and shall stay there nearly a month. Saturday, February 22nd.--Since I left off as above, I have been away on an excursion of three days. Yesterday evening, at four o'clock, we began (a small party of six) the ascent of Mount Vesuvius, with six saddle-horses, an armed soldier for a guard, and twenty-two guides. The latter rendered necessary by the severity of the weather, which is greater than has been known for twenty years, and has covered the precipitous part of the mountain with deep snow, the surface of which is glazed with one smooth sheet of ice from the top of the cone to the bottom. By starting at that hour I intended to get the sunset about halfway up, and night at the top, where the fire is raging. It was an inexpressibly lovely night without a cloud; and when the day was quite gone, the moon (within a few hours of the full) came proudly up, showing the sea, and the Bay of Naples, and the whole country, in such majesty as no words can express. We rode to the beginning of the snow and then dismounted. Catherine and Georgina were put into two litters, just chairs with poles, like those in use in England on the 5th of November; and a fat Englishman, who was of the party, was hoisted into a third, borne by eight men. I was accommodated with a tough stick, and we began to plough our way up. The ascent was as steep as this line /--very nearly perpendicular. We were all tumbling at every stop; and looking up and seeing the people in advance tumbling over one's very head, and looking down and seeing hundreds of feet of smooth ice below, was, I must confess, anything but agreeable. However, I knew there was little chance of another clear night before I leave this, and gave the word to get up, somehow or other. So on we went, winding a little now and then, or we should not have got on at all. By prodigious exertions we passed the region of snow, and came into that of fire--desolate and awful, you may well suppose. It was like working one's way through a dry waterfall, with every mass of stone burnt and charred into enormous cinders, and smoke and sulphur bursting out of every chink and crevice, so that it was difficult to breathe. High before us, bursting out of a hill at the top of the mountain, shaped like this [HW: A], the fire was pouring out, reddening the night with flames, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders that fell down again in showers. At every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron; and the confusion in the darkness (for the smoke obscured the moon in this part), and the quarrelling and shouting and roaring of the guides, and the waiting every now and then for somebody who was not to be found, and was supposed to have stumbled into some pit or other, made such a scene of it as I can give you no idea of. My ladies were now on foot, of course; but we dragged them on as well as we could (they were thorough game, and didn't make the least complaint), until we got to the foot of that topmost hill I have drawn so beautifully. Here we all stopped; but the head guide, an English gentleman of the name of Le Gros--who has been here many years, and has been up the mountain a hundred times--and your humble servant, resolved (like jackasses) to climb that hill to the brink, and look down into the crater itself. You may form some notion of what is going on inside it, when I tell you that it is a hundred feet higher than it was six weeks ago. The sensation of struggling up it, choked with the fire and smoke, and feeling at every step as if the crust of ground between one's feet and the gulf of fire would crumble in and swallow one up (which is the real danger), I shall remember for some little time, I think. But we did it. We looked down into the flaming bowels of the mountain and came back again, alight in half-a-dozen places, and burnt from head to foot. You never saw such devils. And _I_ never saw anything so awful and terrible. Roche had been tearing his hair like a madman, and crying that we should all three be killed, which made the rest of the company very comfortable, as you may suppose. But we had some wine in a basket, and all swallowed a little of that and a great deal of sulphur before we began to descend. The usual way, after the fiery part is past--you will understand that to be all the flat top of the mountain, in the centre of which, again, rises the little hill I have drawn--is to slide down the ashes, which, slipping from under you, make a gradually increasing ledge under your feet, and prevent your going too fast. But when we came to this steep place last night, we found nothing there but one smooth solid sheet of ice. The only way to get down was for the guides to make a chain, holding by each other's hands, and beat a narrow track in it into the snow below with their sticks. My two unfortunate ladies were taken out of their litters again, with half-a-dozen men hanging on to each, to prevent their falling forward; and we began to descend this way. It was like a tremendous dream. It was impossible to stand, and the only way to prevent oneself from going sheer down the precipice, every time one fell, was to drive one's stick into one of the holes the guides had made, and hold on by that. Nobody could pick one up, or stop one, or render one the least assistance. Now, conceive my horror, when this Mr. Le Gros I have mentioned, being on one side of Georgina and I on the other, suddenly staggers away from the narrow path on to the smooth ice, gives us a jerk, lets go, and plunges headforemost down the smooth ice into the black night, five hundred feet below! Almost at the same instant, a man far behind, carrying a light basket on his head with some of our spare cloaks in it, misses his footing and rolls down in another place; and after him, rolling over and over like a black bundle, goes a boy, shrieking as nobody but an Italian can shriek, until the breath is tumbled out of him. The Englishman is in bed to-day, terribly bruised but without any broken bones. He was insensible at first and a mere heap of rags; but we got him before the fire, in a little hermitage there is halfway down, and he so far recovered as to be able to take some supper, which was waiting for us there. The boy was brought in with his head tied up in a bloody cloth, about half an hour after the rest of us were assembled. And the man who had had the basket was not found when we left the mountain at midnight. What became of the cloaks (mine was among them) I know as little. My ladies' clothes were so torn off their backs that they would not have been decent, if there could have been any thought of such things at such a time. And when we got down to the guides' house, we found a French surgeon (one of another party who had been up before us) lying on a bed in a stable, with God knows what horrible breakage about him, but suffering acutely and looking like death. A pretty unusual trip for a pleasure expedition, I think! I am rather stiff to-day but am quite unhurt, except a slight scrape on my right hand. My clothes are burnt to pieces. My ladies are the wonder of Naples, and everybody is open-mouthed. Address me as usual. All letters are forwarded. The children well and happy. Best regards. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] ALBION HOTEL, BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, Aug. 17th, 1845._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I have been obliged to communicate with the _Punch_ men in reference to Saturday, the 20th, as that day of the week is usually their business dinner day, and I was not quite sure that it could be conveniently altered. Jerrold now assures me that it can for such a purpose, and that it shall, and therefore consider the play as being arranged to come off on Saturday, the 20th of next month. I don't know whether I told you that we have changed the farce; and now we are to act "Two o'clock in the Morning," as performed by the inimitable B. at Montreal. In reference to Bruce Castle school, I think the question set at rest most probably by the fact of there being no vacancy (it is always full) until Christmas, when Howitt's two boys and Jerrold's one go in and fill it up again. But after going carefully through the school, a question would arise in my mind whether the system--a perfectly admirable one; the only recognition of education as a broad system of moral and intellectual philosophy, that I have ever seen in practice--do not require so much preparation and progress in the mind of the boy, as that he shall have come there younger and less advanced than Willy; or at all events without that very different sort of school experience which he must have acquired at Brighton. I have no warrant for this doubt, beyond a vague uneasiness suggesting a suspicion of its great probability. On such slight ground I would not hint it to anyone but you, who I know will give it its due weight, and no more and no less. I have the paper setting forth the nature of the higher classical studies, and the books they read. It is the usual course, and includes the great books in Greek and Latin. They have a miscellaneous library, under the management of the boys themselves, of some five or six thousand volumes, and every means of study and recreation, and every inducement to self-reliance and self-exertion that can easily be imagined. As there is no room just now, you can turn it over in your mind again. And if you would like to see the place yourself, when you return to town, I shall be delighted to go there with you. I come home on Wednesday. It is our rehearsal night; and of course the active and enterprising stage-manager must be at his post. Ever, my dear Macready, Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. George Cattermole.] _August 27th, 1845._ MY DEAR GEORGE, I write a line to tell you a project we have in view. A little party of us have taken Miss Kelly's theatre for the night of the 20th of next month, and we are going to act a play there, with correct and pretty costume, good orchestra, etc. etc. The affair is strictly private. The admission will be by cards of invitation; every man will have from thirty to thirty-five. Nobody can ask any person without the knowledge and sanction of the rest, my objection being final; and the expense to each (exclusive of the dress, which every man finds for himself) will not exceed two guineas. Forster plays, and Stone plays, and I play, and some of the _Punch_ people play. Stanfield, having the scenery and carpenters to attend to, cannot manage his part also. It is Downright, in "Every Man in his Humour," not at all long, but very good; he wants you to take it. And so help me. We shall have a brilliant audience. The uphill part of the thing is already done, our next rehearsal is next Tuesday, and if you will come in you will find everything to your hand, and all very merry and pleasant. Let me know what you decide, like a Kittenmolian Trojan. And with love from all here to all there, Believe me, ever, Heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday, Sept. 18th, 1845._ MY DEAR MACREADY, We have a little supper, sir, after the farce, at No. 9, Powis Place, Great Ormond Street, in an empty house belonging to one of the company. There I am requested by my fellows to beg the favour of thy company and that of Mrs. Macready. The guests are limited to the actors and their ladies--with the exception of yourselves, and D'Orsay, and George Cattermole, "or so"--that sounds like Bobadil a little. I am going to adopt your reading of the fifth act with the worst grace in the world. It seems to me that you don't allow enough for Bobadil having been frequently beaten before, as I have no doubt he had been. The part goes down hideously on this construction, and the end is mere lees. But never mind, sir, I intend bringing you up with the farce in the most brilliant manner. Ever yours affectionately. N.B.--Observe. I think of changing my present mode of life, and am open to an engagement. N.B. No. 2.--I will undertake not to play tragedy, though passion is my strength. N.B. No. 3.--I consider myself a chained lion.[5] [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _October 2nd, 1845._ MY DEAR STANNY, I send you the claret jug. But for a mistake, you would have received the little remembrance almost immediately after my return from abroad. I need not say how much I should value another little sketch from your extraordinary hand in this year's small volume, to which Mac again does the frontispiece. But I cannot hear of it, and will not have it (though the gratification of such aid, to me, is really beyond all expression), unless you will so far consent to make it a matter of business as to receive, without asking any questions, a cheque in return from the publishers. Do not misunderstand me--though I am not afraid there is much danger of your doing so, for between us misunderstanding is, I hope, not easy. I know perfectly well that nothing can pay you for the devotion of any portion of your time to such a use of your art. I know perfectly well that no terms would induce you to go out of your way, in such a regard, for perhaps anybody else. I cannot, nor do I desire to, vanquish the friendly obligation which help from you imposes on me. But I am not the sole proprietor of those little books; and it would be monstrous in you if you were to dream of putting a scratch into a second one without some shadowy reference to the other partners, ten thousand times more monstrous in me if any consideration on earth could induce me to permit it, which nothing will or shall. So, see what it comes to. If you will do me a favour on my terms it will be more acceptable to me, my dear Stanfield, than I can possibly tell you. If you will not be so generous, you deprive me of the satisfaction of receiving it at your hands, and shut me out from that possibility altogether. What a stony-hearted ruffian you must be in such a case! Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday Evening, Oct. 17th, 1845._ MY DEAR MACREADY, You once--only once--gave the world assurance of a waistcoat. You wore it, sir, I think, in "Money." It was a remarkable and precious waistcoat, wherein certain broad stripes of blue or purple disported themselves as by a combination of extraordinary circumstances, too happy to occur again. I have seen it on your manly chest in private life. I saw it, sir, I think, the other day in the cold light of morning--with feelings easier to be imagined than described. Mr. Macready, sir, are you a father? If so, lend me that waistcoat for five minutes. I am bidden to a wedding (where fathers are made), and my artist cannot, I find (how should he?), imagine such a waistcoat. Let me show it to him as a sample of my tastes and wishes; and--ha, ha, ha, ha!--eclipse the bridegroom! I will send a trusty messenger at half-past nine precisely, in the morning. He is sworn to secrecy. He durst not for his life betray us, or swells in ambuscade would have the waistcoat at the cost of his heart's blood. Thine, THE UNWAISTCOATED ONE. [Sidenote: Viscount Morpeth.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Nov. 28th, 1845._ MY DEAR LORD MORPETH, I have delayed writing to you until now, hoping I might have been able to tell you of our dramatic plans, and of the day on which we purpose playing. But as these matters are still in abeyance, I will give you that precious information when I come into the receipt of it myself. And let me heartily assure you, that I had at least as much pleasure in seeing you the other day as you can possibly have had in seeing me; and that I shall consider all opportunities of becoming better known to you among the most fortunate and desirable occasions of my life. And that I am with your conviction about the probability of our liking each other, and, as Lord Lyndhurst might say, with "something more." Ever faithfully yours. FOOTNOTE: [5] This alludes to a theatrical story of a second-rate actor, who described himself as a "chained lion," in a theatre where he had to play inferior parts to Mr. Macready. 1846. NARRATIVE. In the spring of this year Charles Dickens gave up the editorship of, and finally, all connection with _The Daily News_, and went again abroad with his family; the house in Devonshire Terrace being let for twelve months. He made his summer residence at Lausanne, taking a villa (Rosemont) there, from May till November. Here he wrote "The Battle of Life," and the first number of "Dombey and Son." In November he removed to Paris, where he took a house in the Rue de Courcelles for the winter, and where he lived and was at work upon "Dombey" until March, 1847. Among the English residents that summer at Lausanne he made many friendships, in proof of which he dedicated the Christmas book written there to his "English friends in Lausanne." The especially intimate friendships which he formed were with M. de Cerjat, who was always a resident of Lausanne with his family; Mr. Haldimand, whose name is identified with the place, and with the Hon. Richard and Mrs. Watson, of Rockingham Castle. He maintained a constant correspondence with them, and to Mr. and Mrs. Watson he afterwards dedicated his own favourite of all his books, "David Copperfield." M. de Cerjat, from the time of Charles Dickens leaving Lausanne, began a custom, which he kept up almost without an interval to the time of his own death, of writing him a long letter every Christmas, to which he returned answers, which will be given in this and the following years. In this year we have the commencement of his association and correspondence with Mr. W. H. Wills. Their connection began in the short term of his editorship of _The Daily News_, when he at once fully appreciated Mr. Wills's invaluable business qualities. And when, some time later, he started his own periodical, "Household Words," he thought himself very fortunate in being able to secure Mr. Wills's co-operation as editor of that journal, and afterwards of "All the Year Round," with which "Household Words" was incorporated. They worked together on terms of the most perfect mutual understanding, confidence, and affectionate regard, until Mr. Wills's health made it necessary for him to retire from the work in 1868. Besides his first notes to Mr. Wills in this year, we have our first letters to his dear friends, the Rev. James White, Walter Savage Landor, and Miss Marion Ely, the niece of Lady Talfourd. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _February 18th, 1846._ MY DEAR MR. WILLS, Do look at the enclosed from Mrs. What's-her-name. For a surprising audacity it is remarkable even to me, who am positively bullied, and all but beaten, by these people. I wish you would do me the favour to write to her (in your own name and from your own address), stating that you answered her letter as you did, because if I were the wealthiest nobleman in England I could not keep pace with one-twentieth part of the demands upon me, and because you saw no internal evidence in her application to induce you to single it out for any especial notice. That the tone of this letter renders you exceedingly glad you did so; and that you decline, from me, holding any correspondence with her. Something to that effect, after what flourish your nature will. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _February 24th, 1846._ I cannot help telling you, my dear White, for I can think of no formal use of Mister to such a writer as you, that I have just now read your tragedy, "The Earl of Gowrie," with a delight which I should in vain endeavour to express to you. Considered with reference to its story, or its characters, or its noble poetry, I honestly regard it as a work of most remarkable genius. It has impressed me powerfully and enduringly. I am proud to have received it from your hand. And if I have to tell you what complete possession it has taken of me--that is, if I _could_ tell you--I do believe you would be glad to know it. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday Morning, March 2nd, 1846._ MY DEAR MR. WILLS, I really don't know what to say about the New Brunswicker. The idea will obtrude itself on my mind, that he had no business to come here on such an expedition; and that it is a piece of the wild conceit for which his countrymen are so remarkable, and that I can hardly afford to be steward to such adventurers. On the other hand, your description of him pleases me. Then that purse which I could never keep shut in my life makes mouths at me, saying, "See how empty I am." Then I fill it, and it looks very rich indeed. I think the best way is to say, that if you think you can do him any _permanent_ good with five pounds (that is, get him home again) I will give you the money. But I should be very much indisposed to give it him, merely to linger on here about town for a little time and then be hard up again. As to employment, I do in my soul believe that if I were Lord Chancellor of England, I should have been aground long ago, for the patronage of a messenger's place. Say all that is civil for me to the proprietor of _The Illustrated London News_, who really seems to be very liberal. "Other engagements," etc. etc., "prevent me from entertaining," etc. etc. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _March 4th, 1846._ MY DEAR MR. WILLS, I assure you I am very truly and unaffectedly sensible of your earnest friendliness, and in proof of my feeling its worth I shall unhesitatingly trouble you sometimes, in the fullest reliance on your meaning what you say. The letter from Nelson Square is a very manly and touching one. But I am more helpless in such a case as that than in any other, having really fewer means of helping such a gentleman to employment than I have of firing off the guns in the Tower. Such, appeals come to me here in scores upon scores. The letter from Little White Lion Street does not impress me favourably. It is not written in a simple or truthful manner, I am afraid, and is _not_ a good reference. Moreover, I think it probable that the writer may have deserted some pursuit for which he is qualified, for vague and laborious strivings which he has no pretensions to make. However, I will certainly act on your impression of him, whatever it may be. And if you could explain to the gentleman in Nelson Square, that I am not evading his request, but that I do not know of anything to which I can recommend him, it would be a great relief to me. I trust this new printer _is_ a Tartar; and I hope to God he will so proclaim and assert his Tartar breeding, as to excommunicate ---- from the "chapel" over which he presides. Tell Powell (with my regards) that he needn't "deal with" the American notices of the "Cricket." I never read one word of their abuse, and I should think it base to read their praises. It is something to know that one is righted so soon; and knowing that, I can afford to know no more. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _March 6th, 1846._ MY DEAR STANNY, In reference to the damage of the candlesticks, I beg to quote (from "The Cricket on the Hearth," by the highly popular and deservedly so Dick) this reply: "I'll damage you if you enquire." Ever yours, My block-reeving, Main-brace splicing, Lead-heaving, Ship-conning, Stun'sail-bending, Deck-swabbing Son of a sea-cook, HENRY BLUFF, H.M.S. _Timber._ [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, April 13th, 1846._ MY DEAR SIR, Do you recollect sending me your biography of Shakespeare last autumn, and my not acknowledging its receipt? I do, with remorse. The truth is, that I took it out of town with me, read it with great pleasure as a charming piece of honest enthusiasm and perseverance, kept it by me, came home, meant to say all manner of things to you, suffered the time to go by, got ashamed, thought of speaking to you, never saw you, felt it heavy on my mind, and now fling off the load by thanking you heartily, and hoping you will not think it too late. Always believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Ely.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Sunday, April 19th, 1846._ MY DEAR MISS ELY, A mysterious emissary brought me a note in your always welcome handwriting at the Athenæum last night. I enquired of the servant in attendance whether the bearer of this letter was of my vast establishment. To which he replied "Yezzir." "Then," said I, "tell him not to wait." Maclise was with me. It was then half-past seven. We had been walking, and were splashed to the eyes. We debated upon the possibility of getting to Russell Square in reasonable time--decided that it would be in the worst taste to appear when the performance would be half over--and very reluctantly decided not to come. You may suppose how dirty and dismal we were when we went to the Thames Tunnel, of all places in the world, instead! When I came home here at midnight I found another letter from you (I left off in this place to press it dutifully to my lips). Then my mind misgave me that _you_ must have sent to the Athenæum. At the apparent rudeness of my reply, my face, as Hadji Baba says, was turned upside down, and fifty donkeys sat upon my father's grave--or would have done so, but for his not being dead yet. Therefore I send this humble explanation--protesting, however, which I do most solemnly, against being invited under such untoward circumstances; and claiming as your old friend and no less old admirer to be instantly invited to the next performance, if such a thing is ever contemplated. Ever, my dear Miss Ely, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Douglas Jerrold.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, May 26th, 1846._ MY DEAR JERROLD, I send you herewith some books belonging to you. A thousand thanks for the "Hermit." He took my fancy mightily when I first saw him in the "Illuminated;" and I have stowed him away in the left-hand breast pocket of my travelling coat, that we may hold pleasant converse together on the Rhine. You see what confidence I have in him! I wish you would seriously consider the expediency and feasibility of coming to Lausanne in the summer or early autumn. I must be at work myself during a certain part of every day almost, and you could do twice as much there as here. It is a wonderful place to see--and what sort of welcome you would find I will say nothing about, for I have vanity enough to believe that you would be willing to feel yourself as much at home in my household as in any man's. Do think it over. I could send you the minutest particular of the journey. It is really all railroad and steamboat, and the easiest in the world. At Macready's on Thursday, we shall meet, please God! Always, my dear Jerrold, Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GENEVA, _Saturday, October 24th, 1846._ MY DEAR MACREADY, The welcome sight of your handwriting moves me (though I have nothing to say) to show you mine, and if I could recollect the passage in Virginius I would paraphrase it, and say, "Does it seem to tremble, boy? Is it a loving autograph? Does it beam with friendship and affection?" all of which I say, as I write, with--oh Heaven!--such a splendid imitation of you, and finally give you one of those grasps and shakes with which I have seen you make the young Icilius stagger again. Here I am, running away from a bad headache as Tristram Shandy ran away from death, and lodging for a week in the Hôtel de l'�cu de Genève, wherein there is a large mirror shattered by a cannon-ball in the late revolution. A revolution, whatever its merits, achieved by free spirits, nobly generous and moderate, even in the first transports of victory, elevated by a splendid popular education, and bent on freedom from all tyrants, whether their crowns be shaven or golden. The newspapers may tell you what they please. I believe there is no country on earth but Switzerland in which a violent change could have been effected in the Christian spirit shown in this place, or in the same proud, independent, gallant style. Not one halfpennyworth of property was lost, stolen, or strayed. Not one atom of party malice survived the smoke of the last gun. Nothing is expressed in the Government addresses to the citizens but a regard for the general happiness, and injunctions to forget all animosities; which they are practically obeying at every turn, though the late Government (of whose spirit I had some previous knowledge) did load the guns with such material as should occasion gangrene in the wounds, and though the wounded _do_ die, consequently, every day, in the hospital, of sores that in themselves were nothing. _You_ a mountaineer! _You_ examine (I have seen you do it) the point of your young son's bâton de montagne before he went up into the snow! And _you_ talk of coming to Lausanne in March! Why, Lord love your heart, William Tell, times are changed since you lived at Altorf. There is not a mountain pass open until June. The snow is closing in on all the panorama already. I was at the Great St. Bernard two months ago, and it was bitter cold and frosty then. Do you think I could let you hazard your life by going up any pass worth seeing in bleak March? Never shall it be said that Dickens sacrificed his friend upon the altar of his hospitality! Onward! To Paris! (Cue for band. Dickens points off with truncheon, first entrance P.S. Page delivers gauntlets on one knee. Dickens puts 'em on and gradually falls into a fit of musing. Mrs. Dickens lays her hand upon his shoulder. Business. Procession. Curtain.) It is a great pleasure to me, my dear Macready, to hear from yourself, as I had previously heard from Forster, that you are so well pleased with "Dombey," which is evidently a great success and a great hit, thank God! I felt that Mrs. Brown was strong, but I was not at all afraid of giving as heavy a blow as I could to a piece of hot iron that lay ready at my hand. For that is my principle always, and I hope to come down with some heavier sledge-hammers than that. I know the lady of whom you write. ---- left there only yesterday. The story may arise only in her manner, which is extraordinarily free and careless. He was visiting her here, when I was here last, three weeks ago. I knew her in Italy. It is not her fault if scandal ever leaves her alone, for such a braver of all conventionalities never wore petticoats. But I should be sorry to hear there was anything guilty in her conduct. She is very clever, really learned, very pretty, much neglected by her husband, and only four-and-twenty years of age. Kate and Georgy send their best loves to Mrs. and Miss Macready and all your house. Your most affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Haldimand.] PARIS, _November, 1846._ * * * * * Talking of which[6] reminds me to say, that I have written to my printers, and told them to prefix to "The Battle of Life" a dedication that is printed in illuminated capitals on my heart. It is only this: "This Christmas book is cordially inscribed to my English friends in Switzerland." I shall trouble you with a little parcel of three or four copies to distribute to those whose names will be found written in them, as soon as they can be made ready, and believe me, that there is no success or approval in the great world beyond the Jura that will be more precious and delightful to me, than the hope that I shall be remembered of an evening in the coming winter time, at one or two friends' I could mention near the Lake of Geneva. It runs with a spring tide, that will always flow and never ebb, through my memory; and nothing less than the waters of Lethe shall confuse the music of its running, until it loses itself in that great sea, for which all the currents of our life are desperately bent. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.] PARIS, _Sunday, November 22nd, 1846._ YOUNG MAN, I will not go there if I can help it. I have not the least confidence in the value of your introduction to the Devil. I can't help thinking that it would be of better use "the other way, the other way," but I won't try it there, either, at present, if I can help it. Your godson says is that your duty? and he begs me to enclose a blush newly blushed for you. As to writing, I have written to you twenty times and twenty more to that, if you only knew it. I have been writing a little Christmas book, besides, expressly for you. And if you don't like it, I shall go to the font of Marylebone Church as soon as I conveniently can and renounce you: I am not to be trifled with. I write from Paris. I am getting up some French steam. I intend to proceed upon the longing-for-a-lap-of-blood-at-last principle, and if you _do_ offend me, look to it. We are all well and happy, and they send loves to you by the bushel. We are in the agonies of house-hunting. The people are frightfully civil, and grotesquely extortionate. One man (with a house to let) told me yesterday that he loved the Duke of Wellington like a brother. The same gentleman wanted to hug me round the neck with one hand, and pick my pocket with the other. Don't be hard upon the Swiss. They are a thorn in the sides of European despots, and a good wholesome people to live near Jesuit-ridden kings on the brighter side of the mountains. My hat shall ever be ready to be thrown up, and my glove ever ready to be thrown down for Switzerland. If you were the man I took you for, when I took you (as a godfather) for better and for worse, you would come to Paris and amaze the weak walls of the house I haven't found yet with that steady snore of yours, which I once heard piercing the door of your bedroom in Devonshire Terrace, reverberating along the bell-wire in the hall, so getting outside into the street, playing Eolian harps among the area railings, and going down the New Road like the blast of a trumpet. I forgive you your reviling of me: there's a shovelful of live coals for your head--does it burn? And am, with true affection--does it burn now?-- Ever yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Richard Watson.] PARIS, 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, ST. HONOR�, _Friday, Nov. 27th, 1846._ MY DEAR WATSON, We were housed only yesterday. I lose no time in despatching this memorandum of our whereabouts, in order that you may not fail to write me a line before you come to Paris on your way towards England, letting me know on what day we are to expect you to dinner. We arrived here quite happily and well. I don't mean here, but at the Hôtel Brighton, in Paris, on Friday evening, between six and seven o'clock. The agonies of house-hunting were frightfully severe. It was one paroxysm for four mortal days. I am proud to express my belief, that we are lodged at last in the most preposterous house in the world. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes does not, exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes. The dining-rooms, staircases, and passages, quite inexplicable. The dining-room is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. But it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery. The maddest man in Bedlam, having the materials given him, would be likely to devise such a suite, supposing his case to be hopeless and quite incurable. Pray tell Mrs. Watson, with my best regards, that the dance of the two sisters in the little Christmas book is being done as an illustration by Maclise; and that Stanfield is doing the battle-ground and the outside of the Nutmeg Grater Inn. Maclise is also drawing some smaller subjects for the little story, and they write me that they hope it will be very pretty, and they think that I shall like it. I shall have been in London before I see you, probably, and I hope the book itself will then be on its road to Lausanne to speak for itself, and to speak a word for me too. I have never left so many friendly and cheerful recollections in any place; and to represent me in my absence, its tone should be very eloquent and affectionate indeed. Well, if I don't turn up again next summer it shall not be my fault. In the meanwhile, I shall often and often look that way with my mind's eye, and hear the sweet, clear, bell-like voice of ---- with the ear of my imagination. In the event of there being any change--but it is not likely--in the appearance of his cravat behind, where it goes up into his head, I mean, and frets against his wig--I hope some one of my English friends will apprise me of it, for the love of the great Saint Bernard. I have not seen Lord Normanby yet. I have not seen anything up to this time but houses and lodgings. There seems to be immense excitement here on the subject of ---- however, and a perfectly stupendous sensation getting up. I saw the king the other day coming into Paris. His carriage was surrounded by guards on horseback, and he sat very far back in it, I thought, and drove at a great pace. It was strange to see the préfet of police on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance, looking to the right and left as he rode, like a man who suspected every twig in every tree in the long avenue. The English relations look anything but promising, though I understand that the Count St. Aulaire is to remain in London, notwithstanding the newspaper alarms to the contrary. If there be anything like the sensation in England about ---- that there is here, there will be a bitter resentment indeed. The democratic society of Paris have announced, this morning, their intention of printing and circulating fifty thousand copies of an appeal in every European language. It is a base business beyond question, and comes at an ill time. Mrs. Dickens and her sister desire their best regards to be sent to you and their best loves to Mrs. Watson, in which I join, as nearly as I may. Believe me, with great truth, Very sincerely yours. P.S.--Mrs. Dickens is going to write to Mrs. Watson next week, she says. [Sidenote: M. Cerjat.] PARIS, 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, ST. HONOR�, _Friday, Nov. 27th, 1846._ MY DEAR CERJAT, When we turned out of your view on that disconsolate Monday, when you so kindly took horse and rode forth to say good-bye, we went on in a very dull and drowsy manner, I can assure you. I could have borne a world of punch in the rumble and been none the worse for it. There was an uncommonly cool inn that night, and quite a monstrous establishment at Auxonne the next night, full of flatulent passages and banging doors. The next night we passed at Montbard, where there is one of the very best little inns in all France. The next at Sens, and so we got here. The roads were bad, but not very for French roads. There was no deficiency of horses anywhere; and after Pontarlier the weather was really not too cold for comfort. They weighed our plate at the frontier custom-house, spoon by spoon, and fork by fork, and we lingered about there, in a thick fog and a hard frost, for three long hours and a half, during which the officials committed all manner of absurdities, and got into all sorts of disputes with my brave courier. This was the only misery we encountered--except leaving Lausanne, and that was enough to last us and _did_ last us all the way here. We are living on it now. I felt, myself, much as I should think the murderer felt on that fair morning when, with his gray-haired victim (those unconscious gray hairs, soon to be bedabbled with blood), he went so far towards heaven as the top of that mountain of St. Bernard without one touch of remorse. A weight is on my breast. The only difference between me and the murderer is, that his weight was guilt and mine is regret. I haven't a word of news to tell you. I shouldn't write at all if I were not the vainest man in the world, impelled by a belief that you will be glad to hear from me, even though you hear no more than that I have nothing to say. "Dombey" is doing wonders. It went up, after the publication of the second number, over the thirty thousand. This is such a very large sale, so early in the story, that I begin to think it will beat all the rest. Keeley and his wife are making great preparations for producing the Christmas story, and I have made them (as an old stage manager) carry out one or two expensive notions of mine about scenery and so forth--in particular a sudden change from the inside of the doctor's house in the midst of the ball to the orchard in the snow--which ought to tell very well. But actors are so bad, in general, and the best are spread over so many theatres, that the "cast" is black despair and moody madness. There is no one to be got for Marion but a certain Miss ----, I am afraid--a pupil of Miss Kelly's, who acted in the private theatricals I got up a year ago. Macready took her afterwards to play Virginia to his Virginius, but she made nothing of it, great as the chance was. I have promised to show her what I mean, as near as I can, and if you will look into the English Opera House on the morning of the 17th, 18th, or 19th of next month, between the hours of eleven and four, you will find me in a very hot and dusty condition, playing all the parts of the piece, to the immense diversion of all the actors, actresses, scene-shifters, carpenters, musicians, chorus people, tailors, dressmakers, scene-painters, and general ragamuffins of the theatre. Moore, the poet, is very ill--I fear dying. The last time I saw him was immediately before I left London, and I thought him sadly changed and tamed, but not much more so than such a man might be under the heavy hand of time. I believe he suffered severe grief in the death of a son some time ago. The first man I met in Paris was ----, who took hold of me as I was getting into a coach at the door of the hotel. He hadn't a button on his shirt (but I don't think he ever has), and you might have sown what boys call "mustard and cress" in the dust on his coat. I have not seen Lord Normanby yet, as we have only just got a house (the queerest house in Europe!) to lay our heads in; but there seems reason to fear that the growing dissensions between England and France, and the irritation of the French king, may lead to the withdrawal of the minister on each side of the Channel. Have you cut down any more trees, played any more rubbers, propounded any more teasers to the players at the game of Yes and No? How is the old horse? How is the gray mare? How is Crab (to whom my respectful compliments)? Have you tried the punch yet; if yes, did it succeed; if no, why not? Is Mrs. Cerjat as happy and as well as I would have her, and all your house ditto ditto? Does Haldimand play whist with any science yet? Ha, ha, ha! the idea of his saying _I_ hadn't any! And are those damask-cheeked virgins, the Miss ----, still sleeping on dewy rose leaves near the English church? Remember me to all your house, and most of all to its other head, with all the regard and earnestness that a "numble individual" (as they always call it in the House of Commons) who once travelled with her in a car over a smooth country may charge you with. I have added two lines to the little Christmas book, that I hope both you and she may not dislike. Haldimand will tell you what they are. Kate and Georgy send their kindest loves, and Kate is "going" to write "next week." Believe me always, my dear Cerjat, full of cordial and hearty recollections of this past summer and autumn, and your part in my part of them, Very faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] 58, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, _Saturday, Dec. 19th, 1846._ MY DEAREST KATE, I really am bothered to death by this confounded _dramatization_ of the Christmas book. They were in a state so horrible at Keeley's yesterday (as perhaps Forster told you when he wrote), that I was obliged to engage to read the book to them this morning. It struck me that Mrs. Leigh Murray, Miss Daly, and Vining seemed to understand it best. Certainly Miss Daly knew best what she was about yesterday. At eight to-night we have a rehearsal with scenery and band, and everything but dresses. I see no possibility of escaping from it before one or two o'clock in the morning. And I was at the theatre all day yesterday. Unless I had come to London, I do not think there would have been much hope of the version being more than just tolerated, even that doubtful. All the actors bad, all the business frightfully behindhand. The very words of the book confused in the copying into the densest and most insufferable nonsense. I must exempt, however, from the general slackness both the Keeleys. I hope they will be very good. I have never seen anything of its kind better than the manner in which they played the little supper scene between Clemency and Britain, yesterday. It was quite perfect, even to me. The small manager, Forster, Talfourd, Stanny, and Mac dine with me at the Piazza to-day, before the rehearsal. I have already one or two uncommonly good stories of Mac. I reserve them for narration. I have also a dreadful cold, which I would not reserve if I could help it. I can hardly hold up my head, and fight through from hour to hour, but had serious thoughts just now of walking off to bed. Christmas book published to-day--twenty-three thousand copies already gone!!! Browne's plates for next "Dombey" much better than usual. I have seen nobody yet, of course. But I sent Roche up to your mother this morning, to say I am in town and will come shortly. There is a great thaw here to-day, and it is raining hard. I hope you have the advantage (if it be one, which I am not sure of) of a similar change in Paris. Of course I start again on Thursday. We are expecting (Roche and I) a letter from the malle poste people, to whom we have applied for places. The journey here was long and cold--twenty-four hours from Paris to Boulogne. Passage not very bad, and made in two hours. I find I can't write at all, so I had best leave off. I am looking impatiently for your letter on Monday morning. Give my best love to Georgy, and kisses to all the dear children. And believe me, my love, Most affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] PIAZZA COFFEE-HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN, _Monday, Dec. 21st, 1846._ MY DEAREST KATE, In a quiet interval of half an hour before going to dine at Macready's, I sit down to write you a few words. But I shall reserve my letter for to-morrow's post, in order that you may hear what _I_ hear of the "going" of the play to-night. Think of my being there on Saturday, with a really frightful cold, and working harder than ever I did at the amateur plays, until two in the morning. There was no supper to be got, either here or anywhere else, after coming out; and I was as hungry and thirsty as need be. The scenery and dresses are very good indeed, and they have spent money on it _liberally_. The great change from the ball-room to the snowy night is most effective, and both the departure and the return will tell, I think, strongly on an audience. I have made them very quick and excited in the passionate scenes, and so have infused some appearance of life into those parts of the play. But I can't make a Marion, and Miss ---- is awfully bad. She is a mere nothing all through. I put Mr. Leigh Murray into such a state, by making him tear about, that the perspiration ran streaming down his face. They have a great let. I believe every place in the house is taken. Roche is going. _Tuesday Morning._--The play went, as well as I can make out--I hoped to have had Stanny's report of it, but he is ill--with great effect. There was immense enthusiasm at its close, and great uproar and shouting for me. Forster will go on Wednesday, and write you his account of it. I saw the Keeleys on the stage at eleven o'clock or so, and they were in prodigious spirits and delight. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, PARIS, _Sunday Night, Dec. 27th, 1846._ MY VERY DEAR FORSTER, Amen, amen. Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and heaven at last, for all of us. I enclose you a letter from Jeffrey, which you may like to read. _Bring it to me back when you come over._ I have told him all he wants to know. Is it not a strange example of the hazards of writing in numbers that a man like him should form his notion of Dombey and Miss Tox on three months' knowledge? I have asked him the same question, and advised him to keep his eye on both of them as time rolls on. We had a cold journey here from Boulogne, but the roads were not very bad. The malle poste, however, now takes the trains at Amiens. We missed it by ten minutes, and had to wait three hours--from twelve o'clock until three, in which interval I drank brandy and water, and slept like a top. It is delightful travelling for its speed, that malle poste, and really for its comfort too. But on this occasion it was not remarkable for the last-named quality. The director of the post at Boulogne told me a lamentable story of his son at Paris being ill, and implored me to bring him on. The brave doubted the representations altogether, but I couldn't find it in my heart to say no; so we brought the director, bodkinwise, and being a large man, in a great number of greatcoats, he crushed us dismally until we got to the railroad. For two passengers (and it never carries more) it is capital. For three, excruciating. Write to ---- what you have said to me. You need write no more. He is full of vicious fancies and wrong suspicions, even of Hardwick, and I would rather he heard it from you than from me, whom he is not likely to love much in his heart. I doubt it may be but a rusty instrument for want of use, the ----ish heart. My most important present news is that I am going to take a jorum of hot rum and egg in bed immediately, and to cover myself up with all the blankets in the house. Love from all. I have a sensation in my head, as if it were "on edge." It is still very cold here, but the snow had disappeared on my return, both here and on the road, except within ten miles or so of Boulogne. Ever affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [6] "The Battle of Life." 1847. NARRATIVE. At the beginning of the year Charles Dickens was still living in Paris--Rue de Courcelles. His stay was cut shorter than he intended it to have been, by the illness from scarlet fever of his eldest son, who was at school in London. Consequent upon this, he and his wife went to London at the end of February, taking up their abode at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square, the Devonshire Terrace house being still occupied by its tenant, Sir James Duke, and the sick boy under the care of his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, in Albany Street. The children, with their aunt, remained in Paris, until a temporary house had been taken for the family in Chester Place, Regent's Park; and Roche was then sent back to take _all_ home. In Chester Place another son was born--Sydney Smith Haldimand--his godfathers being Mr. Haldimand, of Lausanne, and Mr. H. P. Smith, of the Eagle Life Assurance office. He was christened at the same time as a daughter of Mr. Macready's, and the letters to Mr. Smith have reference to the postponement of the christening on Mr. Smith's account. In May, Charles Dickens had lodgings in Brighton for some weeks, for the recovery of Mrs. Dickens's health; going there first with his wife and sister-in-law and the eldest boy--now recovered from his fever--and being joined at the latter part of the time by his two little daughters, to whom there are some letters among those which follow here. He removed earlier than usual this summer to Broadstairs, which remained his head-quarters until October, with intervals of absence for amateur theatrical tours (which Mr. Forster calls "splendid strolling"), in which he was usually accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law. Several new recruits had been added to the theatrical company, from among distinguished literary men and artists, and it now included, besides those previously named, Mr. George Cruikshank, Mr. George Henry Lewes, and Mr. Augustus Egg; the supreme management and arrangement of everything being always left to Charles Dickens. "Every Man in his Humour" and farces were again played at Manchester and Liverpool, for the benefit of Mr. Leigh Hunt, and the dramatic author, Mr. John Poole. By the end of the Broadstairs holiday, the house in Devonshire Terrace was vacant, and the family returned to it in October. All this year Charles Dickens had been at work upon the monthly numbers of "Dombey and Son," in spite of these many interruptions. He began at Broadstairs a Christmas book. But he found that the engrossing interest of his novel approaching completion made it impossible for him to finish the other work in time. So he decided to let this Christmas pass without a story, and postponed the publication of "The Haunted Man" until the following year. At the close of the year he went to Leeds, to take the chair at a meeting of the Mechanics' Institute, and on the 28th December he presided at the opening of the Glasgow Athenæum; he and his wife being the guests of the historian--_then_ Mr. Sheriff, afterwards Sir Archibald Alison. From a letter to his sister-in-law, written from Edinburgh, it will be seen that Mrs. Dickens was prevented by sudden illness from being present at the "demonstration." At the end of that letter there is another illustration of the odd names he was in the habit of giving to his children, the last of the three, the "Hoshen Peck," being a corruption of "Ocean Spectre"--a name which had, afterwards, a sad significance, as the boy (Sydney Smith) became a sailor, and died and was buried at sea two years after his father's death. The letters in this year need very little explanation. In the first letter to Mrs. Watson, he alludes to a sketch which she had made from "The Battle of Life," and had sent to Charles Dickens, as a remembrance, when her husband paid a short visit to Paris in this winter. And there are two letters to Miss Marguerite Power, the niece of the Countess of Blessington--a lady for whom he had then, and until her death, a most affectionate friendship and respect, for the sake of her own admirable qualities, and in remembrance of her delightful association with Gore House, where he was a frequent visitor. For Lady Blessington he had a high admiration and great regard, and she was one of his earliest appreciators; and Alfred, Comte D'Orsay, was also a much-loved friend. His "own marchioness," alluded to in the second letter to Miss Power, was the younger and very charming sister of his correspondent. We much regret having been unable to procure any letters addressed to Mr. Egg. His intimacy with him began first in the plays of this year; but he became, almost immediately, one of the friends for whom he had an especial affection; and Mr. Egg was a regular visitor at his house and at his seaside places of resort for many years after this date. The letter to Mr. William Sandys has reference to an intention which Charles Dickens _had_ entertained, of laying the scene of a story in Cornwall; Mr. Sandys, himself a Cornishman, having proposed to send him some books to help him as to the dialect. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] PARIS, 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, _Jan. 25th, 1847._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I cannot allow your wandering lord to return to your--I suppose "arms" is not improper--arms, then, without thanking you in half-a-dozen words for your letter, and assuring you that I had great interest and pleasure in its receipt, and that I say Amen to all _you_ say of our happy past and hopeful future. There is a picture of Lausanne--St. Bernard--the tavern by the little lake between Lausanne and Vevay, which is kept by that drunken dog whom Haldimand believes to be so sober--and of many other such scenes, within doors and without--that rises up to my mind very often, and in the quiet pleasure of its aspect rather daunts me, as compared with the reality of a stirring life; but, please God, we will have some more pleasant days, and go up some more mountains, somewhere, and laugh together, at somebody, and form the same delightful little circle again, somehow. I quite agree with you about the illustrations to the little Christmas book. I was delighted with yours. Your good lord before-mentioned will inform you that it hangs up over my chair in the drawing-room here; and when you come to England (after I have seen you again in Lausanne) I will show it you in my little study at home, quietly thanking you on the bookcase. Then we will go and see some of Turner's recent pictures, and decide that question to Haldimand's utmost confusion. You will find Watson looking wonderfully well, I think. When he was first here, on his way to England, he took an extraordinary bath, in which he was rubbed all over with chemical compounds, and had everything done to him that could be invented for seven francs. It _may_ be the influence of this treatment that I see in his face, but I think it's the prospect of coming back to Elysée. All I can say is, that when _I_ come that way, and find myself among those friends again, I expect to be perfectly lovely--a kind of Glorious Apollo, radiant and shining with joy. Kate and her sister send all kinds of love in this hasty packet, and I am always, my dear Mrs. Watson, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Rev. Edward Tagart.] PARIS, 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, ST. HONOR�, _Thursday, Jan. 28th, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, Before you read any more, I wish you would take those tablets out of your drawer, in which you have put a black mark against my name, and erase it neatly. I don't deserve it, on my word I don't, though appearances are against me, I unwillingly confess. I had gone to Geneva, to recover from an uncommon depression of spirits consequent on too much sitting over "Dombey" and the little Christmas book, when I received your letter as I was going out walking, one sunshiny, windy day. I read it on the banks of the Rhone, where it runs, very blue and swift, between two high green hills, with ranges of snowy mountains filling up the distance. Its cordial and unaffected tone gave me the greatest pleasure--did me a world of good--set me up for the afternoon, and gave me an evening's subject of discourse. For I talked to "them" (that is, Kate and Georgy) about those bright mornings at the Peschiere, until bedtime, and threatened to write you such a letter next day as would--I don't exactly know what it was to do, but it was to be a great letter, expressive of all kinds of pleasant things, and, perhaps the most genial letter that ever was written. From that hour to this, I have again and again and again said, "I'll write to-morrow," and here I am to-day full of penitence--really sorry and ashamed, and with no excuse but my writing-life, which makes me get up and go out, when my morning work is done, and look at pen and ink no more until I begin again. Besides which, I have been seeing Paris--wandering into hospitals, prisons, dead-houses, operas, theatres, concert-rooms, burial-grounds, palaces, and wine-shops. In my unoccupied fortnight of each month, every description of gaudy and ghastly sight has been passing before me in a rapid panorama. Before that, I had to come here from Switzerland, over frosty mountains in dense fogs, and through towns with walls and drawbridges, and without population, or anything else in particular but soldiers and mud. I took a flight to London for four days, and went and came back over one sheet of snow, sea excepted; and I wish that had been snow too. Then Forster (who is here now, and begs me to send his kindest regards) came to see Paris for himself, and in showing it to him, away I was borne again, like an enchanted rider. In short, I have had no rest in my play; and on Monday I am going to work again. A fortnight hence the play will begin once more; a fortnight after that the work will follow round, and so the letters that I care for go unwritten. Do you care for French news? I hope not, because I don't know any. There is a melodrama, called "The French Revolution," now playing at the Cirque, in the first act of which there is the most tremendous representation of _a people_ that can well be imagined. There are wonderful battles and so forth in the piece, but there is a power and massiveness in the mob which is positively awful. At another theatre, "Clarissa Harlowe" is still the rage. There are some things in it rather calculated to astonish the ghost of Richardson, but Clarissa is very admirably played, and dies better than the original to my thinking; but Richardson is no great favourite of mine, and never seems to me to take his top-boots off, whatever he does. Several pieces are in course of representation, involving rare portraits of the English. In one, a servant, called "Tom Bob," who wears a particularly English waistcoat, trimmed with gold lace and concealing his ankles, does very good things indeed. In another, a Prime Minister of England, who has ruined himself by railway speculations, hits off some of our national characteristics very happily, frequently making incidental mention of "Vishmingster," "Regeenstreet," and other places with which you are well acquainted. "Sir Fakson" is one of the characters in another play--"English to the Core;" and I saw a Lord Mayor of London at one of the small theatres the other night, looking uncommonly well in a stage-coachman's waistcoat, the order of the Garter, and a very low-crowned broad-brimmed hat, not unlike a dustman. I was at Geneva at the time of the revolution. The moderation and mildness of the successful party were beyond all praise. Their appeals to the people of all parties--printed and pasted on the walls--have no parallel that I know of, in history, for their real good sterling Christianity and tendency to promote the happiness of mankind. My sympathy is strongly with the Swiss radicals. They know what Catholicity is; they see, in some of their own valleys, the poverty, ignorance, misery, and bigotry it always brings in its train wherever it is triumphant; and they would root it out of their children's way at any price. I fear the end of the struggle will be, that some Catholic power will step in to crush the dangerously well-educated republics (very dangerous to such neighbours); but there is a spirit in the people, or I very much mistake them, that will trouble the Jesuits there many years, and shake their altar steps for them. This is a poor return (I look down and see the end of the paper) for your letter, but in its cordial spirit of reciprocal friendship, it is not so bad a one if you could read it as I do, and it eases my mind and discharges my conscience. We are coming home, please God, at the end of March. Kate and Georgy send their best regards to you, and their loves to Mrs. and Miss Tagart and the children. _Our_ children wish to live too in _your_ children's remembrance. You will be glad, I know, to hear that "Dombey" is doing wonders, and that the Christmas book shot far ahead of its predecessors. I hope you will like _the last chapter of No. 5_. If you can spare me a scrap of your handwriting in token of forgiveness, do; if not, I'll come and beg your pardon on the 31st of March. Ever believe me, Cordially and truly yours. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] VICTORIA HOTEL, EUSTON SQUARE, _Thursday, March 4th, 1847._ MY DEAREST MAMEY, I have not got much to say, and that's the truth; but I cannot let this letter go into the post without wishing you many many happy returns of your birthday, and sending my love to Auntey and to Katey, and to all of them. We were at Mrs. Macready's last night, where there was a little party in honour of Mr. Macready's birthday. We had some dancing, and they wished very much that you and Katey had been there; so did I and your mamma. We have not got back to Devonshire Terrace yet, but are living at an hotel until Sir James Duke returns from Scotland, which will be on Saturday or Monday. I hope when he comes home and finds us here he will go out of Devonshire Terrace, and let us get it ready for you. Roche is coming back to you very soon. He will leave here on Saturday morning. He says he hopes you will have a very happy birthday, and he means to drink your health on the road to Paris. Always your affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] CHESTER PLACE, _Tuesday Night._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, * * * * * So far from having "got through my agonies," as you benevolently hope, I have not yet begun them. No, on this _ninth of the month_ I have not yet written a single slip. What could I do; house-hunting at first, and beleaguered all day to-day and yesterday by furniture that must be altered, and things that must be put away? My wretchedness, just now, is inconceivable. Tell Anne, by-the-bye (not with reference to my wretchedness, but in connection with the arrangements generally), that I can't get on at all without her. If Kate has not mentioned it, get Katey and Mamey to write and send a letter to Charley; of course not hinting at our being here. He wants to hear from them. Poor little Hall is dead, as you will have seen, I dare say, in the paper. This house is very cheerful on the drawing-room floor and above, looking into the park on one side and Albany Street on the other. Forster is mild. Maclise, exceedingly bald on the crown of his head. Roche has just come in to know if he may "blow datter light." Love to all the darlings. Regards to everybody else. Love to yourself. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens and Miss Katey Dickens.] 148, KING'S ROAD, BRIGHTON, _Monday, May 24, 1847._ MY DEAR MAMEY AND KATEY, I was very glad to receive your nice letter. I am going to tell you something that I hope will please you. It is this: I am coming to London Thursday, and I mean to bring you both back here with me, to stay until we all come home together on the Saturday. I hope you like this. Tell John to come with the carriage to the London Bridge Station, on Thursday morning at ten o'clock, and to wait there for me. I will then come home and fetch you. Mamma and Auntey and Charley send their loves. I send mine too, to Walley, Spim, and Alfred, and Sydney. Always, my dears, Your affectionate Papa. [Sidenote: Mr. William Sandys.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _June 13th, 1847._ DEAR SIR, Many thanks for your kind note. I shall hope to see you when we return to town, from which we shall now be absent (with a short interval in next month) until October. Your account of the Cornishmen gave me great pleasure; and if I were not sunk in engagements so far, that the crown of my head is invisible to my nearest friends, I should have asked you to make me known to them. The new dialogue I will ask you by-and-by to let me see. I have, for the present, abandoned the idea of sinking a shaft in Cornwall. I have sent your Shakesperian extracts to Collier. It is a great comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. It is a fine mystery; and I tremble every day lest something should come out. If he had had a Boswell, society wouldn't have respected his grave, but would calmly have had his skull in the phrenological shop-windows. Believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.] CHESTER PLACE, _June 14th, 1847._ MY DEAR SMITH, Haldimand stayed at No. 7, Connaught Place, Hyde Park, when I saw him yesterday. But he was going to cross to Boulogne to-day. The young Pariah seems pretty comfortable. He is of a cosmopolitan spirit I hope, and stares with a kind of leaden satisfaction at his spoons, without afflicting himself much about the established church. Affectionately yours. P.S.--I think of bringing an action against you for a new sort of breach of promise, and calling all the bishops to estimate the damage of having our christening postponed for a fortnight. It appears to me that I shall get a good deal of money in this way. If you have any compromise to offer, my solicitors are Dodson and Fogg. [Sidenote: Miss Power.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _July 2nd, 1847._ MY DEAR MISS POWER, Let me thank you, very sincerely, for your kind note and for the little book. I read the latter on my way down here with the greatest pleasure. It is a charming story gracefully told, and very gracefully and worthily translated. I have not been better pleased with a book for a long time. I cannot say I take very kindly to the illustrations. They are a long way behind the tale to my thinking. The artist understands it very well, I dare say, but does not express his understanding of it, in the least degree, to any sense of mine. Ah Rosherville! That fated Rosherville, when shall we see it! Perhaps in one of those intervals when I am up to town from here, and suddenly appear at Gore House, somebody will propose an excursion there, next day. If anybody does, somebody else will be ready to go. So this deponent maketh oath and saith. I am looking out upon a dark gray sea, with a keen north-east wind blowing it in shore. It is more like late autumn than midsummer, and there is a howling in the air as if the latter were in a very hopeless state indeed. The very Banshee of Midsummer is rattling the windows drearily while I write. There are no visitors in the place but children, and they (my own included) have all got the hooping-cough, and go about the beach choking incessantly. A miserable wanderer lectured in a library last night about astronomy; but being in utter solitude he snuffed out the transparent planets he had brought with him in a box and fled in disgust. A white mouse and a little tinkling box of music that stops at "come," in the melody of the Buffalo Gals, and can't play "out to-night," are the only amusements left. I beg from my solitude to send my love to Lady Blessington, and your sister, and Count D'Orsay. I think of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck did. There is one in my cell (with a speckled body and twenty-two very decided knees) who seems to know me. Dear Miss Power, Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.] BROADSTAIRS, _July 9th, 1847._ MY DEAR SMITH, I am really more obliged to you for your kindness about "The Eagle" (as I always call your house) than I can say. But when I come to town to-morrow week, for the Liverpool and Manchester plays, I shall have Kate and Georgy with me. Moreover I shall be continually going out and coming in at unholy hours. Item, the timid will come at impossible seasons to "go over" their parts with the manager. Item, two Jews with musty sacks of dresses will be constantly coming backwards and forwards. Item, sounds as of "groans" will be heard while the inimitable Boz is "getting" his words--which happens all day. Item, Forster will incessantly deliver an address by Bulwer. Item, one hundred letters per diem will arrive from Manchester and Liverpool; and five actresses, in very limp bonnets, with extraordinary veils attached to them, will be always calling, protected by five mothers. No, no, my actuary. Some congenial tavern is the fitting scene for these things, if I don't get into Devonshire Terrace, whereof I have some spark of hope. Eagles couldn't look the sun in the face and have such enormities going on in their nests. I am, for the time, that obscene thing, in short, now chronicled in the Marylebone Register of Births-- A PLAYER, Though still yours. [Sidenote: Miss Power.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Tuesday, July 14th, 1847._ MY DEAR MISS POWER, Though I am hopeless of Rosherville until after the 28th--for am I not beckoned, by angels of charity and by local committees, to Manchester and Liverpool, and to all sorts of bedevilments (if I may be allowed the expression) in the way of managerial miseries in the meantime--here I find myself falling into parenthesis within parenthesis, like Lord Brougham--yet will I joyfully come up to London on Friday, to dine at your house and meet the Dane, whose Books I honour, and whose--to make the sentiment complete, I want something that would sound like "Bones, I love!" but I can't get anything that unites reason with beauty. You, who have genius and beauty in your own person, will supply the gap in your kindness. An advertisement in the newspapers mentioning the dinner-time, will be esteemed a favour. Some wild beasts (in cages) have come down here, and involved us in a whirl of dissipation. A young lady in complete armour--at least, in something that shines very much, and is exceedingly scaley--goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, "Behold the abazid power of woobad!" and we all applaud tumultuously. Seriously, she beats Van Amburgh. And I think the Duke of Wellington must have her painted by Landseer. My penitent regards to Lady Blessington, Count D'Orsay, and my own Marchioness. Ever, dear Miss Power, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BROADSTAIRS, _Wednesday, August 4th, 1847._ MY DEAREST MAMEY, I am delighted to hear that you are going to improve in your spelling, because nobody can write properly without spelling well. But I know you will learn whatever you are taught, because you are always good, industrious, and attentive. That is what I always say of my Mamey. The note you sent me this morning is a very nice one, and the spelling is beautiful. Always, my dear Mamey, Your affectionate Papa. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Morning, Nov. 23rd, 1847._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I am in the whirlwind of finishing a number with a crisis in it; but I can't fall to work without saying, in so many words, that I feel all words insufficient to tell you what I think of you after a night like last night. The multitudes of new tokens by which I know you for a great man, the swelling within me of my love for you, the pride I have in you, the majestic reflection I see in you of all the passions and affections that make up our mystery, throw me into a strange kind of transport that has no expression but in a mute sense of an attachment, which, in truth and fervency, is worthy of its subject. What is this to say! Nothing, God knows, and yet I cannot leave it unsaid. Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--I never saw you more gallant and free than in the gallant and free scenes last night. It was perfectly captivating to behold you. However, it shall not interfere with my determination to address you as Old Parr in all future time. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] EDINBURGH, _Thursday, December 13th, 1847._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I "take up my pen," as the young ladies write, to let you know how we are getting on; and as I shall be obliged to put it down again very soon, here goes. We lived with very hospitable people in a very splendid house near Glasgow, and were perfectly comfortable. The meeting was the most stupendous thing as to numbers, and the most beautiful as to colours and decorations I ever saw. The inimitable did wonders. His grace, elegance, and eloquence, enchanted all beholders. _Kate didn't go!_ having been taken ill on the railroad between here and Glasgow. It has been snowing, sleeting, thawing, and freezing, sometimes by turns and sometimes all together, since the night before last. Lord Jeffrey's household are in town here, not at Craigcrook, and jogging on in a cosy, old-fashioned, comfortable sort of way. We have some idea of going to York on Sunday, passing that night at Alfred's, and coming home on Monday; but of this, Kate will advise you when she writes, which she will do to-morrow, after I shall have seen the list of railway trains. She sends her best love. She is a little poorly still, but nothing to speak of. She is frightfully anxious that her not having been to the great demonstration should be kept a secret. But I say that, like murder, it will out, and that to hope to veil such a tremendous disgrace from the general intelligence is out of the question. In one of the Glasgow papers she is elaborately described. I rather think Miss Alison, who is seventeen, was taken for her, and sat for the portrait. Best love from both of us, to Charley, Mamey, Katey, Wally, Chickenstalker, Skittles, and the Hoshen Peck; last, and not least, to you. We talked of you at the Macreadys' party on Monday night. I hope ---- came out lively, also that ---- was truly amiable. Finally, that ---- took everybody to their carriages, and that ---- wept a good deal during the festivities? God bless you. Take care of yourself, for the sake of mankind in general. Ever affectionately, dear Georgy. 1848. NARRATIVE. In March of this year Charles Dickens went with his wife for two or three weeks to Brighton, accompanied by Mrs. Macready, who was in delicate health, and we give a letter to Mr. Macready from Brighton. Early in the year, "Dombey and Son" was finished, and he was again busy with an amateur play, with the same associates and some new adherents; the proceeds being, at first, intended to go towards the curatorship of Shakespeare's house, which post was to be given to Mr. Sheridan Knowles. The endowment was abandoned, upon the town and council of Stratford-on-Avon taking charge of the house; the large sum realised by the performances being handed over to Mr. Sheridan Knowles. The play selected was "The Merry Wives of Windsor;" the farce, "Love, Law, and Physic." There were two performances at the Haymarket in April, at one of which her Majesty and the Prince Consort were present; and in July there were performances at Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Some ladies accompanied the "strollers" on this theatrical provincial tour, and Mrs. Dickens and her sister were of the party. Many of the following letters bear reference to these plays. In this summer, his eldest sister Fanny (Mrs. Burnett) died, and there are sorrowful allusions to her illness in several of the letters. The autumn months were again spent at Broadstairs, where he wrote "The Haunted Man," which was illustrated by Mr. Frank Stone, Mr. Leech, and others. At the end of the year and at the end of his work, he took another short holiday at Brighton with his wife and sister-in-law; and the letters to Mr. Stone on the subject of his illustrations to "The Haunted Man" are written from Brighton. The first letters which we have to Mr. Mark Lemon come here. We regret to have been unable to procure any letters addressed to Mr. Leech, with whom, as with Mr. Lemon, Charles Dickens was very intimately associated for many years. Also, we have the beginning of his correspondence with Mr. Charles Kent. He wrote (an unusual thing for him to do) to the editor of _The Sun_ newspaper, begging him to thank the writer of a particularly sympathetic and earnest review of "Dombey and Son," which appeared in _The Sun_ at the close of the book. Mr. Charles Kent replied in his proper person, and from that time dates a close friendship and constant correspondence. With the letter to Mr. Forster we give, as a note, a letter which Baron Taüchnitz published in his edition of Mr. Forster's "Life of Oliver Goldsmith." Mr. Peter Cunningham, as an important member of the "Shakespeare's House" committee, managed the _un_-theatrical part of this Amateur Provincial Tour, and was always pleasantly connected with the plays. The book alluded to in the last letter for this year, to be dedicated to Charles Dickens's daughters by Mr. Mark Lemon, was called "The Enchanted Doll." [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Babbage.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _February 26th, 1848._ MY DEAR SIR, Pray let me thank you for your pamphlet. I confess that I am one of the unconvinced grumblers, and that I doubt the present or future existence of any government in England, strong enough to convert the people to your income-tax principles. But I do not the less appreciate the ability with which you advocate them, nor am I the less gratified by any mark of your remembrance. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] JUNCTION HOUSE, BRIGHTON, _March 2nd, 1848._ MY DEAR MACREADY, We have migrated from the Bedford and come here, where we are very comfortably (not to say gorgeously) accommodated. Mrs. Macready is certainly better already, and I really have very great hopes that she will come back in a condition so blooming, as to necessitate the presentation of a piece of plate to the undersigned trainer. You mean to come down on Sunday and on Sunday week. If you don't, I shall immediately take the Victoria, and start Mr. ----, of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, as a smashing tragedian. Pray don't impose upon me this cruel necessity. I think Lamartine, so far, one of the best fellows in the world; and I have lively hopes of that great people establishing a noble republic. Our court had best be careful not to overdo it in respect of sympathy with ex-royalty and ex-nobility. Those are not times for such displays, as, it strikes me, the people in some of our great towns would be apt to express pretty plainly. However, we'll talk of all this on these Sundays, and Mr. ---- shall _not_ be raised to the pinnacle of fame. Ever affectionately yours, My dear Macready. [Sidenote: Editor of _The Sun_.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Friday, April 14th, 1848._ _Private._ Mr. Charles Dickens presents his compliments to the Editor of _The Sun_, and begs that gentleman will have the goodness to convey to the writer of the notice of "Dombey and Son," in last evening's paper, Mr. Dickens's warmest acknowledgments and thanks. The sympathy expressed in it is so very earnestly and unaffectedly stated, that it is particularly welcome and gratifying to Mr. Dickens, and he feels very desirous indeed to convey that assurance to the writer of that frank and genial farewell. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Charles M. Kent.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _April 18th, 1848._ DEAR SIR, Pray let me repeat to you personally what I expressed in my former note, and allow me to assure you, as an illustration of my sincerity, that I have never addressed a similar communication to anybody except on one occasion. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, April 22nd, 1848._ MY DEAR FORSTER,[7] I finished Goldsmith yesterday, after dinner, having read it from the first page to the last with the greatest care and attention. As a picture of the time, I really think it impossible to give it too much praise. It seems to me to be the very essence of all about the time that I have ever seen in biography or fiction, presented in most wise and humane lights, and in a thousand new and just aspects. I have never liked Johnson half so well. Nobody's contempt for Boswell ought to be capable of increase, but I have never seen him in my mind's eye half so plainly. The introduction of him is quite a masterpiece. I should point to that, if I didn't know the author, as being done by somebody with a remarkably vivid conception of what he narrated, and a most admirable and fanciful power of communicating it to another. All about Reynolds is charming; and the first account of the Literary Club and of Beauclerc as excellent a piece of description as ever I read in my life. But to read the book is to be in the time. It lives again in as fresh and lively a manner as if it were presented on an impossibly good stage by the very best actors that ever lived, or by the real actors come out of their graves on purpose. And as to Goldsmith himself, and _his_ life, and the tracing of it out in his own writings, and the manful and dignified assertion of him without any sobs, whines, or convulsions of any sort, it is throughout a noble achievement, of which, apart from any private and personal affection for you, I think (and really believe) I should feel proud, as one who had no indifferent perception of these books of his--to the best of my remembrance--when little more than a child. I was a little afraid in the beginning, when he committed those very discouraging imprudences, that you were going to champion him somewhat indiscriminately; but I very soon got over that fear, and found reason in every page to admire the sense, calmness, and moderation with which you make the love and admiration of the reader cluster about him from his youth, and strengthen with his strength--and weakness too, which is better still. I don't quite agree with you in two small respects. First, I question very much whether it would have been a good thing for every great man to have had his Boswell, inasmuch as I think that two Boswells, or three at most, would have made great men extraordinarily false, and would have set them on always playing a part, and would have made distinguished people about them for ever restless and distrustful. I can imagine a succession of Boswells bringing about a tremendous state of falsehood in society, and playing the very devil with confidence and friendship. Secondly, I cannot help objecting to that practice (begun, I think, or greatly enlarged by Hunt) of italicising lines and words and whole passages in extracts, without some very special reason indeed. It does appear to be a kind of assertion of the editor over the reader--almost over the author himself--which grates upon me. The author might almost as well do it himself to my thinking, as a disagreeable thing; and it is such a strong contrast to the modest, quiet, tranquil beauty of "The Deserted Village," for instance, that I would almost as soon hear "the town crier" speak the lines. The practice always reminds me of a man seeing a beautiful view, and not thinking how beautiful it is half so much as what he shall say about it. In that picture at the close of the third book (a most beautiful one) of Goldsmith sitting looking out of window at the Temple trees, you speak of the "gray-eyed" rooks. Are you sure they are "gray-eyed"? The raven's eye is a deep lustrous black, and so, I suspect, is the rook's, except when the light shines full into it. I have reserved for a closing word--though I _don't_ mean to be eloquent about it, being far too much in earnest--the admirable manner in which the case of the literary man is stated throughout this book. It is splendid. I don't believe that any book was ever written, or anything ever done or said, half so conducive to the dignity and honour of literature as "The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith," by J. F., of the Inner Temple. The gratitude of every man who is content to rest his station and claims quietly on literature, and to make no feint of living by anything else, is your due for evermore. I have often said, here and there, when you have been at work upon the book, that I was sure it would be; and I shall insist on that debt being due to you (though there will be no need for insisting about it) as long as I have any tediousness and obstinacy to bestow on anybody. Lastly, I never will hear the biography compared with Boswell's except under vigorous protest. For I do say that it is mere folly to put into opposite scales a book, however amusing and curious, written by an unconscious coxcomb like that, and one which surveys and grandly understands the characters of all the illustrious company that move in it. My dear Forster, I cannot sufficiently say how proud I am of what you have done, or how sensible I am of being so tenderly connected with it. When I look over this note, I feel as if I had said no part of what I think; and yet if I were to write another I should say no more, for I can't get it out. I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic. And again I say, most solemnly, that literature in England has never had, and probably never will have, such a champion as you are, in right of this book. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] _Wednesday, May 3rd, 1848._ MY DEAR LEMON, Do you think you could manage, before we meet to-morrow, to get from the musical director of the Haymarket (whom I don't know) a note of the overtures he purposes playing on our two nights? I am obliged to correct and send back the bill proofs to-morrow (they are to be brought to Miss Kelly's)--and should like, for completeness' sake, to put the music in. Before "The Merry Wives," it must be something Shakespearian. Before "Animal Magnetism," something very telling and light--like "Fra Diavolo." Wednesday night's music in a concatenation accordingly, and jolly little polkas and quadrilles between the pieces, always beginning the moment the act-drop is down. If any little additional strength should be really required in the orchestra, so be it. Can you come to Miss Kelly's by _three_? I should like to show you bills, tickets, and so forth, before they are worked. In order that they may not interfere with or confuse the rehearsal, I have appointed Peter Cunningham to meet me there at three, instead of half-past. Faithfully ever. P.S.--If you should be disposed to chop together early, send me a line to the Athenæum. I have engaged to be with Barry at ten, to go over the Houses of Parliament. When I have done so, I will go to the club on the chance of a note from you, and would meet you where you chose. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] ATHEN�UM, _Thursday, May 4th, 1848._ MY DEAR WHITE, I have not been able to write to you until now. I have lived in hope that Kate and I might be able to run down to see you and yours for a day, before our design for enforcing the Government to make Knowles the first custodian of the Shakespeare house should come off. But I am so perpetually engaged in drilling the forces, that I see no hope of making a pleasant expedition to the Isle of Wight until about the twentieth. Then I shall hope to do so for one day. But of this I will advise you further, in due course. My doubts about the house you speak of are twofold, First, I could not leave town so soon as May, having affairs to arrange for a sick sister. And secondly, I fear Bonchurch is not sufficiently bracing for my chickens, who thrive best in breezy and cool places. This has set me thinking, sometimes of the Yorkshire coast, sometimes of Dover. I would not have the house at Bonchurch reserved for me, therefore. But if it should be empty, we will go and look at it in a body. I reserve the more serious part of my letter until the last, my dear White, because it comes from the bottom of my heart. None of your friends have thought and spoken oftener of you and Mrs. White than we have these many weeks past. I should have written to you, but was timid of intruding on your sorrow. What you say, and the manner in which you tell me I am connected with it in your recollection of your dear child, now among the angels of God, gives me courage to approach your grief--to say what sympathy we have felt with it, and how we have not been unimaginative of these deep sources of consolation to which you have had recourse. The traveller who journeyed in fancy from this world to the next was struck to the heart to find the child he had lost, many years before, building him a tower in heaven. Our blessed Christian hopes do not shut out the belief of love and remembrance still enduring there, but irradiate it and make it sacred. Who should know that better than you, or who more deeply feel the touching truths and comfort of that story in the older book, where, when the bereaved mother is asked, "Is it well with the child?" she answers, "It _is_ well." God be with you. Kate and her sister desire their kindest love to yourself and Mrs. White, in which I heartily join. Being ever, my dear White, Your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Wednesday, May 10th, 1848._ MY DEAR MACREADY, We are rehearsing at the Haymarket now, and Lemon mentioned to me yesterday that Webster had asked him if he would sound Forster or me as to your intention of having a farewell benefit before going to America, and whether you would like to have it at the Haymarket, and also as to its being preceded by a short engagement there. I don't know what your feelings may be on this latter head, but thinking it well that you may know how the land lies in these seas, send you this; the rather (excuse Elizabethan phrase, but you know how indispensable it is to me under existing circumstances)--the rather that I am thereto encouraged by thy consort, who has just come a-visiting here, with thy fair daughters, Mistress Nina and the little Kate. Wherefore, most selected friend, perpend at thy leisure, and so God speed thee! And no more at present from, Thine ever. From my tent in my garden. ANOTHER "BOBADIL" NOTE. I must tell you this, sir, I am no general man; but for William Shakespeare's sake (you may embrace it at what height of favour you please) I will communicate with you on the twenty-first, and do esteem you to be a gentleman of some parts--of a good many parts in truth. I love few words. [Illustration: HW: Signature: Bobadil] At Cobb's, a water-bearer, _October 11th._ [Sidenote: Mr. Peter Cunningham.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday Morning, June 22nd, 1848._ MY DEAR CUNNINGHAM, I will be at Miss Kelly's to-morrow evening, from seven to eight, and shall hope to see you there, for a little conversation, touching the railroad arrangements. All preparations completed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. There will be a great deal of money taken, especially at the latter place. I wish I could persuade you, seriously, to come into training for Nym, in "The Merry Wives." He is never on by himself, and all he has to do is good, without being difficult. If you could screw yourself up to the doing of that part in Scotland, it would prevent our taking some new man, and would cover you (all over) with glory. Faithfully yours always. P.S.--I am fully persuaded that an amateur manager has more correspondence than the Home Secretary. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, REGENT'S PARK, _July 27th, 1848._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I thought to have been at Rockingham long ago! It seems a century since I, standing in big boots on the Haymarket stage, saw you come into a box upstairs and look down on the humbled Bobadil, since then I have had the kindest of notes from you, since then the finest of venison, and yet I have not seen the Rockingham flowers, and they are withering I daresay. But we have acted at Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; and the business of all this--and graver and heavier daily occupation in going to see a dying sister at Hornsey--has so worried me that I have hardly had an hour, far less a week. I shall never be quite happy, in a theatrical point of view, until you have seen me play in an English version of the French piece, "L'Homme Blasé," which fairly turned the head of Glasgow last Thursday night as ever was; neither shall I be quite happy, in a social point of view, until I have been to Rockingham again. When the first event will come about Heaven knows. The latter will happen about the end of the November fogs and wet weather. For am I not going to Broadstairs now, to walk about on the sea-shore (why don't you bring your rosy children there?) and think what is to be done for Christmas! An idea occurs to me all at once. I must come down and read you that book before it's published. Shall it be a bargain? Were you all in Switzerland? I don't believe _I_ ever was. It is such a dream now. I wonder sometimes whether I ever disputed with a Haldimand; whether I ever drank mulled wine on the top of the Great St. Bernard, or was jovial at the bottom with company that have stolen into my affection; whether I ever was merry and happy in that valley on the Lake of Geneva, or saw you one evening (when I didn't know you) walking down among the green trees outside Elysée, arm-in-arm with a gentleman in a white hat. I am quite clear that there is no foundation for these visions. But I should like to go somewhere, too, and try it all over again. I don't know how it is, but the ideal world in which my lot is cast has an odd effect on the real one, and makes it chiefly precious for such remembrances. I get quite melancholy over them sometimes, especially when, as now, those great piled-up semicircles of bright faces, at which I have lately been looking--all laughing, earnest and intent--have faded away like dead people. They seem a ghostly moral of everything in life to me. Kate sends her best love, in which Georgy would as heartily unite, I know, but that she is already gone to Broadstairs with the children. We think of following on Saturday morning, but that depends on my poor sister. Pray give my most cordial remembrances to Watson, and tell him they include a great deal. I meant to have written you a letter. I don't know what this is. There is no word for it. So, if you will still let me owe you one, I will pay my debt, on the smallest encouragement, from the seaside. Here, there, and elsewhere, I am, with perfect truth, believe me, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Saturday, August 26th, 1848._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I was about to write to you when I received your welcome letter. You knew I should come from a somewhat longer distance than this to give you a hearty God-speed and farewell on the eve of your journey. What do you say to Monday, the fourth, or Saturday, the second? Fix either day, let me know which suits you best--at what hour you expect the Inimitable, and the Inimitable will come up to the scratch like a man and a brother. Permit me, in conclusion, to nail my colours to the mast. Stars and stripes are so-so--showy, perhaps; but my colours is THE UNION JACK, which I am told has the remarkable property of having braved a thousand years the battle AND the breeze. Likewise, it is the flag of Albion--the standard of Britain; and Britons, as I am informed, never, never, never--will--be--slaves! My sentiment is: Success to the United States as a golden campaigning ground, but blow the United States to 'tarnal smash as an Englishman's place of residence. Gentlemen, are you all charged? Affectionately ever. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday, Sept. 8th, 1848._ MY DEAREST MAMEY, We shall be very glad to see you all again, and we hope you will be very glad to see us. Give my best love to dear Katey, also to Frankey, Alley, and the Peck. I have had a nice note from Charley just now. He says it is expected at school that when Walter puts on his jacket, all the Miss Kings will fall in love with him to desperation and faint away. Ever, my dear Mamey, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Effingham William Wilson.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Nov. 7th, 1848._ "A NATIONAL THEATRE." SIR, I beg you to accept my best thanks for your pamphlet and your obliging note. That such a theatre as you describe would be but worthy of this nation, and would not stand low upon the list of its instructors, I have no kind of doubt. I wish I could cherish a stronger faith than I have in the probability of its establishment on a rational footing within fifty years. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, Nov. 21st, 1848._ MY DEAR STONE, I send you herewith the second part of the book, which I hope may interest you. If you should prefer to have it read to you by the Inimitable rather than to read it, I shall be at home this evening (loin of mutton at half-past five), and happy to do it. The proofs are full of printers' errors, but with the few corrections I have scrawled upon it, you will be able to make out what they mean. I send you, on the opposite side, a list of the subjects already in hand from this second part. If you should see no other in it that you like (I think it important that you should keep Milly, as you have begun with her), I will, in a day or two, describe you an unwritten subject for the third part of the book. Ever faithfully. SUBJECTS IN HAND FOR THE SECOND PART. 1. Illuminated page. Tenniel. Representing Redlaw going upstairs, and the Tetterby family below. 2. The Tetterby supper. Leech. 3. The boy in Redlaw's room, munching his food and staring at the fire. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] BRIGHTON, _Thursday Night, Nov. 23rd, 1848._ MY DEAR STONE, We are unanimous. The drawing of Milly on the chair is CHARMING. I cannot tell you how much the little composition and expression please me. Do that, by all means. I fear she must have a little cap on. There is something coming in the last part, about her having had a dead child, which makes it yet more desirable than the existing text does that she should have that little matronly sign about her. Unless the artist is obdurate indeed, and then he'll do as he likes. I am delighted to hear that you have your eye on her in the students' room. You will really, pictorially, make the little woman whom I love. Kate and Georgy send their kindest remembrances. I write hastily to save the post. Ever, my dear Stone, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] BEDFORD HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _Monday Night, Nov. 27th, 1848._ MY DEAR STONE, You are a TRUMP, emphatically a TRUMP, and such are my feelings towards you at this moment that I think (but I am not sure) that if I saw you about to place a card on a wrong pack at Bibeck (?), I wouldn't breathe a word of objection. Sir, there is a subject I have written to-day for the third part, that I think and hope will just suit you. Scene, Tetterby's. Time, morning. The power of bringing back people's memories of sorrow, wrong and trouble, has been given by the ghost to Milly, though she don't know it herself. As she comes along the street, Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby recover themselves, and are mutually affectionate again, and embrace, closing _rather_ a good scene of quarrel and discontent. The moment they do so, Johnny (who has seen her in the distance and announced her before, from which moment they begin to recover) cries "Here she is!" and she comes in, surrounded by the little Tetterbys, the very spirit of morning, gladness, innocence, hope, love, domesticity, etc. etc. etc. etc. I would limit the illustration to her and the children, which will make a fitness between it and your other illustrations, and give them all a character of their own. The exact words of the passage I endorsed on another slip of paper. Note. There are six boy Tetterbys present (young 'Dolphus is not there), including Johnny; and in Johnny's arms is Moloch, the baby, who is a girl. I hope to be back in town next Monday, and will lose no time in reporting myself to you. Don't wait to send me the drawing of this. I know how pretty she will be with the children in your hands, and should be a stupendous jackass if I had any distrust of it. The Duke of Cambridge is staying in this house, and they are driving me mad by having Life Guards bands under our windows, playing _our_ overtures! I have been at work all day, and am going to wander into the theatre, where (for the comic man's benefit) "two gentlemen of Brighton" are performing two counts in a melodrama. I was quite addle-headed for the time being, and think an amateur or so would revive me. No 'Tone! I don't in the abstract approve of Brighton. I couldn't pass an autumn here; but it is a gay place for a week or so; and when one laughs and cries, and suffers the agitation that some men experience over their books, it's a bright change to look out of window, and see the gilt little toys on horseback going up and down before the mighty sea, and thinking nothing of it. Kate's love and Georgy's. They say you'll contradict every word of this letter. Faithfully ever. [SLIP OF PAPER ENCLOSED.] "Hurrah! here's Mrs. Williams!" cried Johnny. So she was, and all the Tetterby children with her; and as she came in, they kissed her and kissed one another, and kissed the baby and kissed their father and mother, and then ran back and flocked and danced about her, trooping on with her in triumph. (After which, she is going to say: "What, are _you_ all glad to see me too! Oh, how happy it makes me to find everyone so glad to see me this bright morning!") [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] BEDFORD HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _Nov. 28th, 1848._ MY DEAR MARK, I assure you, most unaffectedly and cordially, that the dedication of that book to Mary and _Kate_ (not Catherine) will be a real delight to me, and to all of us. I know well that you propose it in "affectionate regard," and value and esteem it, therefore, in a way not easy of expression. You were talking of "coming" down, and now, in a mean and dodging way, you write about "sending" the second act! I have a propogician to make. Come down on Friday. There is a train leaves London Bridge at two--gets here at four. By that time I shall be ready to strike work. We can take a little walk, dine, discuss, and you can go back in good time next morning. I really think this ought to be done, and indeed MUST be done. Write and say it shall be done. A little management will be required in dramatising the third part, where there are some things I _describe_ (for effect's sake, and as a matter of art) which must be _said_ on the stage. Redlaw is in a new condition of mind, which fact must be shot point-blank at the audience, I suppose, "as from the deadly level of a gun." By anybody who knew how to play Milly, I think it might be made very good. Its effect is very pleasant upon me. I have also given Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby another innings. I went to the play last night--fifth act of Richard the Third. Richmond by a stout _lady_, with a particularly well-developed bust, who finished all the speeches with the soubrette simper. Also, at the end of the tragedy she came forward (still being Richmond) and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, on Wednesday next the entertainments will be for _My_ benefit, when I hope to meet your approbation and support." Then, having bowed herself into the stage-door, she looked out of it, and said, winningly, "Won't you come?" which was enormously applauded. Ever affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [7] LETTER OF BARON TA�CHNITZ. Having had the privilege to see a letter which the late Mr. Charles Dickens wrote to the author of this work upon its first appearance, and which there was no intention to publish in England, it became my lively wish to make it known to the readers of my edition. I therefore addressed an earnest request to Mr. Forster, that he would permit the letter to be prefixed to a reprint not designed for circulation in England, where I could understand his reluctance to sanction its publication. Its varied illustration of the subject of the book, and its striking passages of personal feeling and character, led me also to request that I might be allowed to present it in facsimile. Mr. Forster complied; and I am most happy to be thus enabled to give to my public, on the following pages, so attractive and so interesting a letter, reproduced in the exact form in which it was written, by the most popular and admired-of writers--too early gone. TA�CHNITZ. Leipsic, _May 23, 1873._ 1849. NARRATIVE. This, as far as correspondence is concerned, was an uneventful year. In the spring Charles Dickens took one of his holidays at Brighton, accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law and two daughters, and they were joined in their lodgings by Mr. and Mrs. Leech. From Brighton he writes the letter--as a song--which we give, to Mr. Mark Lemon, who had been ill, asking him to pay them a visit. In the summer, Charles Dickens went with his family, for the first time, to Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, having hired for six months the charming villa, Winterbourne, belonging to the Rev. James White. And now began that close and loving intimacy which for the future was to exist between these two families. Mr. Leech also took a house at Bonchurch. All through this year Charles Dickens was at work upon "David Copperfield." As well as giving eccentric names to his children and friends, he was also in the habit of giving such names to himself--that of "Sparkler" being one frequently used by him. Miss Joll herself gives us the explanation of the letter to her on capital punishment: "Soon after the appearance of his 'Household Words,' some friends were discussing an article in it on 'Private Executions.' They contended that it went to prove Mr. Dickens was an advocate of capital punishment. I, however, took a different view of the matter, and ventured to write and inquire his views on the subject, and to my letter he sent me a courteous reply." [Sidenote: Mr. Dudley Costello.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday Night, Jan. 26th, 1849._ MY DEAR COSTELLO, I am desperate! Engaged in links of adamant to a "monster in human form"--a remarkable expression I think I remember to have once met with in a newspaper--whom I encountered at Franconi's, whence I have just returned, otherwise I would have done all three things right heartily and with my accustomed sweetness. Think of me another time when chops are on the carpet (figuratively speaking), and see if I won't come and eat 'em! Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--I find myself too despondent for the flourish. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Night, Feb. 27th, 1849._ MY DEAREST MAMEY, I am not engaged on the evening of your birthday. But even if I had an engagement of the most particular kind, I should excuse myself from keeping it, so that I might have the pleasure of celebrating at home, and among my children, the day that gave me such a dear and good daughter as you. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _May 25th, 1849._ MY DEAR STANFIELD. No--no--no! Murder, murder! Madness and misconception! Any _one_ of the subjects--not the whole. Oh, blessed star of early morning, what do you think I am made of, that I should, on the part of any man, prefer such a pig-headed, calf-eyed, donkey-eared, imp-hoofed request! Says my friend to me, "Will you ask _your_ friend, Mr. Stanfield, what the damage of a little picture of that size would be, that I may treat myself with the same, if I can afford it?" Says I, "I will." Says he, "Will you suggest that I should like it to be _one_ of those subjects?" Says I, "I will." I am beating my head against the door with grief and frenzy, and I shall continue to do so, until I receive your answer. Ever heartily yours, THE MISCONCEIVED ONE. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, June 4th, 1849._ MY DEAR STONE, Leech and Sparkler having promised their ladies to take them to Ascot, and having failed in their truths, propoge to take them to Greenwich instead, next Wednesday. Will that alteration in the usual arrangements be agreeable to Gaffin, S.? If so, the place of meeting is the Sparkler's Bower, and the hour, one exactly. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] SHANKLIN, ISLE OF WIGHT, _Monday Night, June 16th, 1849._ MY DEAR KATE, I have but a moment. Just got back and post going out. I have taken a most delightful and beautiful house, belonging to White, at Bonchurch; cool, airy, private bathing, everything delicious. I think it is the prettiest place I ever saw in my life, at home or abroad. Anne may begin to dismantle Devonshire Terrace. I have arranged for carriages, luggage, and everything. The man with the post-bag is swearing in the passage. Ever affectionately. P.S.--A waterfall on the grounds, which I have arranged with a carpenter to convert into a perpetual shower-bath. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, June 25th, 1849._ MY DEAR LEMON, I am very unwilling to deny Charley the pleasure you so kindly offer him. But as it is just the close of the half-year when they are getting together all the half-year's work--and as that day's pleasure would weaken the next day's duty, I think I must be "more like an ancient Roman than a ----" Sparkler, and that it will be wisest in me to say nothing about it. Get a clean pocket-handkerchief ready for the close of "Copperfield" No. 3; "simple and quiet, but very natural and touching."--_Evening Bore._ Ever affectionately. NEW SONG. TUNE--"Lesbia hath a beaming eye." 1. Lemon is a little hipped, And this is Lemon's true position; He is not pale, he's not white-lipped, Yet wants a little fresh condition. Sweeter 'tis to gaze upon Old ocean's rising, falling billows, Than on the houses every one, That form the street called Saint Anne's Willers. Oh, my Lemon, round and fat, Oh, my bright, my right, my tight 'un, Think a little what you're at-- Don't stay at home, but come to Brighton! 2. Lemon has a coat of frieze, But all so seldom Lemon wears it, That it is a prey to fleas, And ev'ry moth that's hungry tears it. Oh, that coat's the coat for me, That braves the railway sparks and breezes, Leaving every engine free To smoke it, till its owner sneezes! Then my Lemon, round and fat, L., my bright, my right, my tight 'un, Think a little what you're at-- On Tuesday first, come down to Brighton! T. SPARKLER. Also signed, CATHERINE DICKENS, ANNIE LEECH, GEORGINA HOGARTH, MARY DICKENS, KATIE DICKENS, JOHN LEECH. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] WINTERBOURNE, _Sunday Evening, Sept. 23rd, 1849._ MY DEAR WHITE, I have a hundred times at least wanted to say to you how good I thought those papers in "Blackwood"--how excellent their purpose, and how delicately and charmingly worked out. Their subtle and delightful humour, and their grasp of the whole question, were something more pleasant to me than I can possibly express. "How comes this lumbering Inimitable to say this, on this Sunday night of all nights in the year?" you naturally ask. Now hear the Inimitable's honest avowal! I make so bold because I heard that Morning Service better read this morning than ever I have heard it read in my life. And because--for the soul of me--I cannot separate the two things, or help identifying the wise and genial man out of church with the earnest and unaffected man in it. Midsummer madness, perhaps, but a madness I hope that will hold us true friends for many and many a year to come. The madness is over as soon as you have burned this letter (see the history of the Gunpowder Plot), but let us be friends much longer for these reasons and many included in them not herein expressed. Affectionately always. [Sidenote: Miss Joll.] ROCKINGHAM CASTLE, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, _Nov. 27th, 1849._ Mr. Charles Dickens presents his compliments to Miss Joll. He is, on principle, opposed to capital punishment, but believing that many earnest and sincere people who are favourable to its retention in extreme cases would unite in any temperate effort to abolish the evils of public executions, and that the consequences of public executions are disgraceful and horrible, he has taken the course with which Miss Joll is acquainted as the most hopeful, and as one undoubtedly calculated to benefit society at large. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday Night, Nov. 30th, 1849._ _A Quarter-past Ten._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Plunged in the deepest gloom, I write these few words to let you know that, just now, when the bell was striking ten, I drank to [Illustration: H. E. R.!] and to all the rest of Rockingham; as the wine went down my throat, I felt distinctly that it was "changing those thoughts to madness." On the way here I was a terror to my companions, and I am at present a blight and mildew on my home. Think of me sometimes, as I shall long think of our glorious dance last night. Give my most affectionate regards to Watson, and my kind remembrances to all who remember me, and believe me, Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--I am in such an incapable state, that after executing the foregoing usual flourish I swooned, and remained for some time insensible. Ha, ha, ha! Why was I ever restored to consciousness!!! P.P.S.--"Changing" those thoughts ought to be "driving." But my recollection is incoherent and my mind wanders. [Sidenote: M. Cerjat.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, Dec. 29th, 1849._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I received your letter at breakfast-time this morning with a pleasure my eloquence is unable to express and your modesty unable to conceive. It is so delightful to be remembered at this time of the year in your house where we have been so happy, and in dear old Lausanne, that we always hope to see again, that I can't help pushing away the first page of "Copperfield" No. 10, now staring at me with what I may literally call a blank aspect, and plunging energetically into this reply. What a strange coincidence that is about Blunderstone House! Of all the odd things I have ever heard (and their name is Legion), I think it is the oddest. I went down into that part of the country on the 7th of January last year, when I was meditating the story, and chose Blunderstone for the sound of its name. I had previously observed much of what you say about the poor girls. In all you suggest with so much feeling about their return to virtue being cruelly cut off, I concur with a sore heart. I have been turning it over in my mind for some time, and hope, in the history of Little Em'ly (who _must_ fall--there is no hope for her), to put it before the thoughts of people in a new and pathetic way, and perhaps to do some good. You will be glad to hear, I know, that "Copperfield" is a great success. I think it is better liked than any of my other books. We had a most delightful time at Watsons' (for both of them we have preserved and strengthened a real affection), and were the gayest of the gay. There was a Miss Boyle staying in the house, who is an excellent amateur actress, and she and I got up some scenes from "The School for Scandal" and from "Nickleby," with immense success. We played in the old hall, with the audience filled up and running over with servants. The entertainments concluded with feats of legerdemain (for the performance of which I have a pretty good apparatus, collected at divers times and in divers places), and we then fell to country dances of a most frantic description, and danced all night. We often spoke of you and Mrs. Cerjat and of Haldimand, and wished you were all there. Watson and I have some fifty times "registered a vow" (like O'Connell) to come to Lausanne together, and have even settled in what month and week. Something or other has always interposed to prevent us; but I hope, please God, most certainly to see it again, when my labours-Copperfieldian shall have terminated. You have no idea what that hanging of the Mannings really was. The conduct of the people was so indescribably frightful, that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils. I feel, at this hour, as if I never could go near the place again. My letters have made a great to-do, and led to a great agitation of the subject; but I have not a confident belief in any change being made, mainly because the total abolitionists are utterly reckless and dishonest (generally speaking), and would play the deuce with any such proposition in Parliament, unless it were strongly supported by the Government, which it would certainly not be, the Whig motto (in office) being "_laissez aller_." I think Peel might do it if he came in. Two points have occurred to me as being a good commentary to the objections to my idea. The first is that a most terrific uproar was made when the hanging processions were abolished, and the ceremony shrunk from Tyburn to the prison door. The second is that, at this very time, under the British Government in New South Wales, executions take place _within the prison walls_, with decidedly improved results. (I am waiting to explode this fact on the first man of mark who gives me the opportunity.) Unlike you, we have had no marriages or giving in marriage here. We might have had, but a certain young lady, whom you know, is hard to please. The children are all well, thank God! Charley is going to Eton the week after next, and has passed a first-rate examination. Kate is quite well, and unites with me and Georgina in love to you and Mrs. Cerjat and Haldimand, whom I would give a good deal (tell him) to have several hours' contradiction of at his own table. Good heavens, how obstinate we would both be! I see him leaning back in his chair, with his right forefinger out, and saying, "Good God!" in reply to some proposition of mine, and then laughing. All in a moment a feeling comes over me, as if you and I have been still talking, smoking cigars outside the inn at Martigny, the piano sounding inside, and Lady Mary Taylour singing. I look into my garden (which is covered with snow) rather dolefully, but take heart again, and look brightly forward to another expedition to the Great St. Bernard, when Mrs. Cerjat and I shall laugh as I fancy I have never laughed since, in one of those one-sided cars; and when we shall again learn from Haldimand, in a little dingy cabaret, at lunch-time, how to secure a door in travelling (do you remember?) by balancing a chair against it on its two hind-legs. I do hope that we may all come together again once more, while there is a head of hair left among us; and in this hope remain, my dear Cerjat, Your faithful Friend. 1850. NARRATIVE. In the spring Charles Dickens took a short holiday again, with his wife and sister-in-law, at Brighton, from whence he wrote to Mr. Wills, on "Household Words" business. The first number of this journal appeared on the 30th March. This autumn he succeeded, for the first time, in getting possession of the "Fort House," Broadstairs, on which he had always set his affections. He was hard at work on the closing numbers of "David Copperfield" during all the summer and autumn. The family moved to Broadstairs in July, but as a third daughter was born in August, they were not joined by Mrs. Dickens until the end of September. "David Copperfield" was finished in October. The beginning of his correspondence with Mrs. Gaskell is in his asking her to contribute to "Household Words," which she did from the first number, and very frequently afterwards both to "Household Words" and "All the Year Round." The letter to Mr. David Roberts, R.A., is one thanking him for a remembrance of his (Mr. Roberts's) travels in the East--a picture of a "Simoom in the Desert," which was one of Charles Dickens's most highly prized possessions. A letter to Mr. Sheridan Knowles contains allusions which we have no means of explaining, but we publish it, as it is characteristic, and addressed to a literary celebrity. Its being inscribed to "Daddy" Knowles illustrates a habit of Charles Dickens--as does a letter later in this year to Mr. Stone, beginning, "My dear P."--of giving nicknames to the friends with whom he was on the most affectionate and intimate terms. Mr. Stone--especially included in this category--was the subject of many such names; "Pump," or "Pumpion," being one by which he was frequently addressed--a joke as good-humouredly and gladly received as it was kindly and pleasantly intended. There were no public amateur theatricals this year; but in November, the greater part of the amateur company played for three nights at Knebworth Park, as the guests of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (afterwards Lord Lytton), who entertained all his county neighbours to witness the performances. The play was "Every Man in his Humour," and farces, varied each night. This year we have our first letter to Miss Mary Boyle, a cousin of Mrs. Watson, well known as an amateur actress and an accomplished lady. Miss Boyle was to have acted with the amateur company at Knebworth, but was prevented by domestic affliction. Early in the following year there was a private play at Rockingham Castle, when Miss Boyle acted with Charles Dickens, the play being "Used Up," in which Mrs. Dickens also acted; and the farce, "Animal Magnetism," in which Miss Boyle and Miss Hogarth played. The letters to Mrs. Watson in this year refer chiefly to the preparations for the play in her house. The accident mentioned in the letter addressed to Mr. Henry Bicknell (son-in-law of Mr. David Roberts, R.A., and a much-esteemed friend of Charles Dickens) was an accident which happened to Mrs. Dickens, while rehearsing at a theatre. She fell through a trap-door, spraining her ankle so badly as to be incapacitated from taking her part in the theatricals at Knebworth. [Sidenote: Mr. David Roberts, R.A.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 3rd, 1850._ MY DEAR ROBERTS, I am more obliged to you than I can tell you for the beautiful mark of your friendly remembrance which you have sent me this morning. I shall set it up among my household gods with pride. It gives me the highest gratification, and I beg you to accept my most cordial and sincere thanks. A little bit of the tissue paper was sticking to the surface of the picture, and has slightly marked it. It requires but a touch, as one would dot an "i" or cross a "t," to remove the blemish; but as I cannot think of a recollection so full of poetry being touched by any hand but yours, I have told Green the framer, whenever he shall be on his way with it, to call on you by the road. I enclose a note from Mrs. Dickens, which I hope will impress you into a country dance, with which we hope to dismiss Christmas merrily. Ever, my dear Roberts, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. James Sheridan Knowles.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 3rd, 1850._ MY DEAR GOOD KNOWLES, Many happy New Years to you, and to all who are near and dear to you. Your generous heart unconsciously exaggerates, I am sure, my merit in respect of that most honourable gentleman who has been the occasion of our recent correspondence. I cannot sufficiently admire the dignity of his conduct, and I really feel indebted to you for giving me the gratification of observing it. As to that "cross note," which, rightly considered, was nothing of the sort, if ever you refer to it again, I'll do--I don't exactly know what, but something perfectly desperate and ferocious. If I have ever thought of it, it has only been to remember with delight how soon we came to a better understanding, and how heartily we confirmed it with a most expressive shake of the hand, one evening down in that mouldy little den of Miss Kelly's. Heartily and faithfully yours. "Daddy" Knowles. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 31st, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, You may perhaps have seen an announcement in the papers of my intention to start a new cheap weekly journal of general literature. I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of "Mary Barton" (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages. No writer's name will be used, neither my own nor any other; every paper will be published without any signature, and all will seem to express the general mind and purpose of the journal, which is the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition. I should set a value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would attract attention and do good. Of course I regard your time as valuable, and consider it so when I ask you if you could devote any of it to this purpose. If you could and would prefer to speak to me on the subject, I should be very glad indeed to come to Manchester for a few hours and explain anything you might wish to know. My unaffected and great admiration of your book makes me very earnest in all relating to you. Forgive my troubling you for this reason, and believe me ever, Faithfully yours. P.S.--Mrs. Dickens and her sister send their love. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, Feb. 5th, 1850._ MY DEAR WHITE, I have been going to write to you for a long time, but have always had in my mind that you might come here with Lotty any day. As Lotty has come without you, however (witness a tremendous rampaging and ravaging now going on upstairs!), I despatch this note to say that I suppose you have seen the announcement of "the" new weekly thing, and that if you would ever write anything for it, you would please me better than I can tell you. We hope to do some solid good, and we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as we can. (And, putting our hands in our breeches pockets, we say complacently, that our money is as good as Blackwood's any day in the week.) Now the murder's out! Are you never coming to town any more? Must I come to Bonchurch? Am I born (for the eight-and-thirtieth time) next Thursday, at half-past five, and do you mean to say you are _not_ coming to dinner? Well, well, I can always go over to Puseyism to spite my friends, and that's some comfort. Poor dear Jeffrey! I had heard from him but a few days, and the unopened proof of No. 10 was lying on his table when he died. I believe I have lost as affectionate a friend as I ever had, or ever shall have, in this world. Ever heartily yours, my dear White. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _February 8th, 1850._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, Let me thank you in the heartiest manner for your most kind and gratifying mention of me in your able pamphlet. It gives me great pleasure, and I sincerely feel it. I quite agree with you in all you say so well of the injustice and impolicy of this excessive taxation. But when I think of the condition of the great mass of the people, I fear that I could hardly find the heart to press for justice in this respect, before the window-duty is removed. They cannot read without light. They cannot have an average chance of life and health without it. Much as we feel our wrong, I fear that they feel their wrong more, and that the things just done in this wise must bear a new physical existence. I never see you, and begin to think we must have another play--say in Cornwall--expressly to bring us together. Very faithfully yours. SUGGESTIONS FOR TITLES OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS." THE FORGE: A Weekly Journal, Conducted by Charles Dickens. "Thus at the glowing Forge of Life our actions must be wrought, Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed and thought."--_Longfellow._ THE HEARTH. THE FORGE. THE CRUCIBLE. THE ANVIL OF THE TIME. CHARLES DICKENS'S OWN. SEASONABLE LEAVES. EVERGREEN LEAVES. HOME. HOME-MUSIC. CHANGE. TIME AND TIDE. TWOPENCE. ENGLISH BELLS. WEEKLY BELLS. THE ROCKET. GOOD HUMOUR. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 148, KING'S ROAD, BRIGHTON, _Tuesday Night, March 12th, 1850._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have made a correction or two in my part of the post-office article. I still observe the top-heavy "Household Words" in the title. The title of "The Amusements of the People" has to be altered as I have marked it. I would as soon have my hair cut off as an intolerable Scotch shortness put into my titles by the elision of little words. "The Seasons" wants a little punctuation. Will the "Incident in the Life of Mademoiselle Clairon" go into those two pages? I fear not, but one article would be infinitely better, I am quite certain, than two or three short ones. If it will go in, in with it. I shall be back, please God, by dinner-time to-morrow week. I will be ready for Smithfield either on the following Monday morning at four, or any other morning you may arrange for. Would it do to make up No. 2 on Wednesday, the 20th, instead of Saturday? If so, it would be an immense convenience to me. But if it be distinctly necessary to make it up on Saturday, say by return, and I am to be relied upon. Don't fail in this. I really _can't_ promise to be comic. Indeed, your note put me out a little, for I had just sat down to begin, "It will last my time." I will shake my head a little, and see if I can shake a more comic substitute out of it. As to _two_ comic articles, or two any sort of articles, out of me, that's the intensest extreme of no-goism. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _July 13th, 1850._ MY DEAR WHITE, Being obliged (sorely against my will) to leave my work this morning and go out, and having a few spare minutes before I go, I write a hasty note, to hint how glad I am to have received yours, and how happy and tranquil we feel it to be for you all, that the end of that long illness has come.[8] Kate and Georgy send best loves to Mrs. White, and we hope she will take all needful rest and relief after those arduous, sad, and weary weeks. I have taken a house at Broadstairs, from early in August until the end of October, as I don't want to come back to London until I shall have finished "Copperfield." I am rejoiced at the idea of your going there. You will find it the healthiest and freshest of places; and there are Canterbury, and all varieties of what Leigh Hunt calls "greenery," within a few minutes' railroad ride. It is not very picturesque ashore, but extremely so seaward; all manner of ships continually passing close inshore. So come, and we'll have no end of sports, please God. I am glad to say, as I know you will be to hear, that there seems a bright unanimity about "Copperfield." I am very much interested in it and pleased with it myself. I have carefully planned out the story, for some time past, to the end, and am making out my purposes with great care. I should like to know what you see from that tower of yours. I have little doubt you see the real objects in the prospect. "Household Words" goes on _thoroughly well_. It is expensive, of course, and demands a large circulation; but it is taking a great and steady stand, and I have no doubt already yields a good round profit. To-morrow week I shall expect you. You shall have a bottle of the "Twenty." I have kept a few last lingering caskets with the gem enshrined therein, expressly for you. Ever, my dear White, Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] H�TEL WINDSOR, PARIS, _Thursday, July 27th, 1850._ _After post-time._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have had much ado to get to work; the heat here being so intense that I can do nothing but lie on the bare floor all day. I never felt it anything like so hot in Italy. There is nothing doing in the theatres, and the atmosphere is so horribly oppressive there that one can hardly endure it. I came out of the Français last night half dead. I am writing at this moment with nothing on but a shirt and pair of white trousers, and have been sitting four hours at this paper, but am as faint with the heat as if I had been at some tremendous gymnastics; and yet we had a thunderstorm last night. I hope we are doing pretty well in Wellington Street. My anxiety makes me feel as if I had been away a year. I hope to be home on Tuesday evening, or night at latest. I have picked up a very curious book of French statistics that will suit us, and an odd proposal for a company connected with the gambling in California, of which you will also be able to make something. I saw a certain "Lord Spleen" mentioned in a playbill yesterday, and will look after that distinguished English nobleman to-night, if possible. Rachel played last night for the last time before going to London, and has not so much in her as some of our friends suppose. The English people are perpetually squeezing themselves into courtyards, blind alleys, closed edifices, and other places where they have no sort of business. The French people, as usual, are making as much noise as possible about everything that is of no importance, but seem (as far as one can judge) pretty quiet and good-humoured. They made a mighty hullabaloo at the theatre last night, when Brutus (the play was "Lucretia") declaimed about liberty. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _August 9th, 1850._ MY DEAR WILLS, I shall be obliged to you if you will write to this man, and tell him that what he asks I never do--firstly, because I have no kind of connection with any manager or theatre; secondly, because I am asked to read so many manuscripts, that compliance is impossible, or I should have no other occupation or relaxation in the world. [Symbol: right hand] A foreign gentleman, with a beard, name unknown, but signing himself "A Fellow Man," and dating from nowhere, declined, twice yesterday, to leave this house for any less consideration than the insignificant one of "twenty pounds." I have had a policeman waiting for him all day. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] BROADSTAIRS, _Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, 1850._ MY DEAREST KATE, I enclose a few lines from Georgy, and write these to say that I purpose going home at some time on Thursday, but I cannot say precisely when, as it depends on what work I do to-morrow. Yesterday Charles Knight, White, Forster, Charley, and I walked to Richborough Castle and back. Knight dined with us afterwards; and the Whites, the Bicknells, and Mrs. Gibson came in in the evening and played vingt-et-un. Having no news I must tell you a story of Sydney. The children, Georgy, and I were out in the garden on Sunday evening (by-the-bye, I made a beautiful passage down, and got to Margate a few minutes after one), when I asked Sydney if he would go to the railroad and see if Forster was coming. As he answered very boldly "Yes," I opened the garden-gate, upon which he set off alone as fast as his legs would carry him; and being pursued, was not overtaken until he was through the Lawn House Archway, when he was still going on at full speed--I can't conceive where. Being brought back in triumph, he made a number of fictitious starts, for the sake of being overtaken again, and we made a regular game of it. At last, when he and Ally had run away, instead of running after them, we came into the garden, shut the gate, and crouched down on the ground. Presently we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm, "Why, the gate's shut, and they're all gone!" Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but the Phenomenon shouting, "Open the gate!" sent an enormous stone flying into the garden (among our heads) by way of alarming the establishment. I thought it a wonderful piece of character, showing great readiness of resource. He would have fired a perfect battery of stones, or very likely have broken the pantry window, I think, if we hadn't let him in. They are all in great force, and send their loves. They are all much excited with the expectation of receiving you on Friday, and would start me off to fetch you now if I would go. Our train on Friday will be half-past twelve. I have spoken to Georgy about the partridges, and hope we may find some. Ever, my dearest Kate, Most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Monday Night, Sept. 16th, 1850._ MY DEAR MISS BOYLE, Your letter having arrived in time for me to write a line by the evening post, I came out of a paroxysm of "Copperfield," to say that I am _perfectly delighted_ to read it, and to know that we are going to act together in that merry party. We dress "Every Man" in Queen Elizabeth's time. The acting copy is much altered from the old play, but we still smooth down phrases when needful. I don't remember anyone that is changed. Georgina says she can't describe the dress Mrs. Kitely used to wear. I shall be in town on Saturday, and will then get Maclise to make me a little sketch, of it, carefully explained, which I will post to you. At the same time I will send you the book. After consideration of forces, it has occurred to me (old Ben being, I daresay, rare; but I _do_ know rather heavy here and there) that Mrs. Inchbald's "Animal Magnetism," which we have often played, will "go" with a greater laugh than anything else. That book I will send you on Saturday too. You will find your part (Lisette, I think it is called, but it is a waiting-maid) a most admirable one; and I have seen people laugh at the piece until they have hung over the front of the boxes like ripe fruit. You may dress the part to please yourself after reading it. We wear powder. I will take care (bringing a theatrical hairdresser for the company) of your wig! We will rehearse the two pieces when we go down, or at least anything with which you have to do, over and over again. You will find my company so well used to it, and so accustomed to consider it a grave matter of business, as to make it easy. I am now awaiting the French books with a view to "Rockingham," and I hope to report of that too, when I write to you on Saturday. My dear Miss Boyle, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday, Sept. 20th, 1850._ MY DEAR MISS BOYLE, I enclose you the book of "Animal Magnetism," and the book of "Every Man in his Humour;" also a sketch by Mr. Maclise of a correct and picturesque Mrs. Kitely. Mr. Forster is Kitely; Mr. Lemon, Brainworm; Mr. Leech, Master Matthew; Mr. Jerrold, Master Stephen; Mr. Stone, Downright. Kitely's dress is a very plain purple gown, like a Bluecoat-boy's. Downright's dress is also very sober, chiefly brown and gray. All the rest of us are very bright. I am flaming red. Georgina will write you about your colour and hers in "Animal Magnetism;" the gayer the better. I am the Doctor, in black, with red stockings. Mr. Lemon (an excellent actor), the valet, as far as I can remember, in blue and yellow, and a chintz waistcoat. Mr. Leech is the Marquis, and Mr. Egg the one-eyed servant. What do you think of doing "Animal Magnetism" as the last piece (we may play three in all, I think) at Rockingham? If so, we might make Quin the one-eyed servant, and beat up with Mrs. Watson for a Marquis. Will you tell me what you think of this, addressed to Broadstairs? I have not heard from Bulwer again. I daresay I have crossed a letter from him by coming up to-day; but I have every reason to believe that the last week in October is the time. Ever very faithfully yours. P.S.--This is quite a managerial letter, which I write with all manner of appointments and business discussions going on about me, having my pen on the paper and my eye on "Household Words," my head on "Copperfield" and my ear nowhere particularly. I will let you know about "A Day after the Wedding." I have sent for the book on Monday. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _September 24th, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Coming out of "Copperfield" into a condition of temporary and partial consciousness, I plunge into histrionic duties, and hold enormous correspondence with Miss Boyle, between whom and myself the most portentous packets are continually passing. I send you a piece we purpose playing last at Rockingham, which "my company" played in London, Scotland, Manchester, Liverpool, and I don't know where else. It is one of the most ridiculous things ever done. We purpose, as I have said, playing it last. Why do I send it to you? Because there is an excellent part (played in my troupe by George Cruikshank) for your brother in it--Jeffrey; with a black patch on his eye, and a lame leg, he would be charming--noble! If he is come home, give him my love and tell him so. If he is not come home, do me that favour when he does come. And add that I have a wig for him belonging to the part, which I have an idea of sending to the Exposition of '51, as a triumph of human ingenuity. I am the Doctor; Miss Boyle, Lisette; Georgy, the other little woman. We have nearly arranged our "bill" for Rockingham. We shall want one more reasonably good actor, besides your brother and Miss Boyle's, to play the Marquis in this piece. Do you know a being endowed by nature with the requisite qualities? There are some things in the next "Copperfield" that I think better than any that have gone before. After I have been believing such things with all my heart and soul, two results always ensue: first, I can't write plainly to the eye; secondly, I can't write sensibly to the mind. So "Copperfield" is to blame, and I am not, for this wandering note; and if you like it, you'll forgive me. With my affectionate remembrances to Watson, Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, Very faithfully yours. P.S.--I find I am not equal to the flourish. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Wednesday, Oct 30th, 1850._ MY DEAR MISS BOYLE, We are all extremely concerned and distressed to lose you. But we feel that it cannot be otherwise, and we do not, in our own expectation of amusement, forget the sad cause of your absence. Bulwer was here yesterday; and if I were to tell you how earnestly he and all the other friends whom you don't know have looked forward to the projected association with you, and in what a friendly spirit they all express their disappointment, you would be quite moved by it, I think. Pray don't give yourself the least uneasiness on account of the blank in our arrangements. I did not write to you yesterday, in the hope that I might be able to tell you to-day that I had replaced you, in however poor a way. I cannot do that yet, but I am busily making out some means of filling the parts before we rehearse to-morrow night, and I trust to be able to do so in some out-of-the-way manner. Mrs. Dickens and Bridget send you their kindest remembrances. They are bitterly disappointed at not seeing you to-day, but we all hope for a better time. Dear Miss Boyle, Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday Evening, Nov. 23rd, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Being well home from Knebworth, where everything has gone off in a whirl of triumph and fired the whole length and breadth of the county of Hertfordshire, I write a short note to say that we are yours any time after Twelfth-night, and that we look forward to seeing you with the greatest pleasure. I should have made this reply to your last note sooner, but that I have been waiting to send you "Copperfield" in a new waistcoat. His tailor is so slow that it has not yet appeared; but when the resplendent garment comes home it shall be forwarded. I have not your note at hand, but I think you said "any time after Christmas." At all events, and whatever you said, we will conclude a treaty on any terms you may propose. And if it should include any of Charley's holidays, perhaps you would allow us to put a brass collar round his neck, and chain him up in the stable. Kate and Georgina (who has covered herself with glory) join me in best remembrances and regards to Watson and you and all the house. I have stupendous proposals to make concerning Switzerland in the spring. I promised Bulwer to make enquiry of you about "Miss Watson," whom he once knew and greatly wished to hear of. He associated her (but was not clear how) with Lady Palmer. My dear Mrs. Watson, Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Bicknell.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _November 28th, 1850._ MY DEAR MR. BICKNELL, If I ever did such a thing, believe me I would do it at your request. But I don't, and if you could see the ramparts of letters from similar institutions with which my desk bristles every now and then, you would feel that nothing lies between total abstinence (in this regard) and utter bewilderment and lecturation. Mrs. Dickens and her sister unite with me in kind regards to you and Mrs. Bicknell. The consequences of the accident are fast fading, I am happy to say. We all hope to hear shortly that Mrs. Bicknell has recovered that other little accident, which (as you and I know) will occasionally happen in well-regulated families. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Wednesday, Dec. 4th, 1850._ MY DEAR LANDOR, I have been (a strange thing for me) so very unwell since Sunday, that I have hardly been able to hold up my head--a bilious attack, I believe, and a very miserable sort of business. This, my dear friend, is the reason why I have not sooner written to you in reference to your noble letter, which I read in _The Examiner_, and for which--as it exalts me--I cannot, cannot thank you in words. We had been following up the blow in Kinkel's[9] favour, and I was growing sanguine, in the hope of getting him out (having enlisted strong and active sympathy in his behalf), when the news came of his escape. Since then we have heard nothing of him. I rather incline to the opinion that the damnable powers that be connived at his escape, but know nothing. Whether he be retaken or whether he appear (as I am not without hope he may) in the streets of London, I shall be a party to no step whatever without consulting you; and if any scrap of intelligence concerning him shall reach me, it shall be yours immediately. Horne wrote the article. I shall see him here to-night, and know how he will feel your sympathy and support. But I do not wait to see him before writing, lest you should think me slow to feel your generosity. We said at home when we read your letter, that it was like the opening of your whole munificent and bare heart. Ever most affectionately yours, My dear Landor. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] [Symbol: right hand] THIS IS NO. 2. DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday Morning, Dec. 9th, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Your note to me of Saturday has crossed mine to you, I find. If you open both of mine together, please to observe _this is No. 2_. You may rely on Mr. Tucker's doing his work thoroughly well and charging a fair price. It is not possible for him to say aforehand, in such a case, what it will cost, I imagine, as he will have to adapt his work to the place. Nathan's stage knowledge may be stated in the following figures: 00000000000. Therefore, I think you had best refer Mr. Tucker to _me_, and I will apply all needful screws and tortures to him. I have thought of one or two very ingenious (hem!) little contrivances for adapting the difficulties of "Used Up" to the small stage. They will require to be so exactly explained to your carpenter (though very easy little things in themselves), that I think I had better, before Christmas, send my servant down for an hour--he is quite an old stager now--to show him precisely what I mean. It is not a day's work, but it would be extremely difficult to explain in writing. I developed these wonderful ideas to the master carpenter at one of the theatres, and he shook his head with an intensely mournful air, and said, "Ah, sir, it's a universal observation in the profession, sir, that it was a great loss to the public when you took to writing books!" which I thought complimentary to "Copperfield." Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, Dec. 14th, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I shall be delighted to come on the seventh instead of the eighth. We consider it an engagement. Over and above the pleasure of a quiet day with you, I think I can greatly facilitate the preparations (that's the way, you see, in which we cheat ourselves into making duties of pleasures) by being at Rockingham a day earlier. So that's settled. I was quite certain when that Child of Israel mentioned those dimensions, that he must be wrong. For which wooden-headedness the Child shall be taken to task on Monday morning, when I am going to look at his preparations, by appointment, about the door. Don't you observe, that the scenery not being made expressly for the room, it may be impossible to use it as you propose? There is a scene before that wall, and unless the door in the scene (supposing there to be one, which I am not sure of) should come exactly into the place of the door of the room, the door of the room might as well be in Africa. If it could be used it would still require to be backed (excuse professional technicality) by another scene in the passage. And if it be rather in the side of the bottom of the room (as I seem to remember it), it would be shut out of sight, or partially, by the side scenes. Do you comprehend these stage managerial sagacities? That piece of additional room in so small a stage would be of immense service, if we could avail ourselves of it. If we can't, I have another means (I think) of discovering Leech, Saville, and Coldstream at table. I am constantly turning over in my mind the capacities of the place, and hope by one means or other to make something more than the best of it. As to the fireplace, you will never be able to use that. The heat of the lamp will be very great, and ventilation will be the thing wanted. Thirteen feet and a half of depth, diminished by stage fittings and furniture, is a small space. I think the doorway could be used in the last scene, with the castle steps and platform for the staircase running straight through it toward the hall. _Nous verrons._ I will write again about my visit of inspection, probably on Monday. Will you let them know that Messrs. Nathan, of Titchborne Street, Haymarket, will dress them, please, and that I will engage for their doing it thoroughly well; also that Mr. Wilson, theatrical hairdresser, Strand, near St. Clement's Churchyard, will come down with wigs, etc., to "make up" everybody; that he has a list of the pieces from me, and that he will be glad to measure the heads and consult the tastes of all concerned, if they will give him the opportunity beforehand? I should like to see Sir Adonis Leech and the Hon. T. Saville if I can. For they ought to be wonderfully made up, and to be as unlike themselves as possible, and to contrast well with each other and with me. I rather grudge _caro sposo_ coming into the company. I should like him so much to see the play. If we do it all well together it ought to be so very pleasant. I never saw a great mass of people so charmed with a little story as when we acted it at the Glasgow Theatre. But I have no other reason for faltering when I take him to my arms. I feel that he is the man for the part.[10] I see him with a blue bag, a flaxen wig, and green spectacles. I know what it will be. I foresee how all that sessional experience will come out. I reconcile myself to it, in spite of the selfish consideration of wanting him elsewhere; and while I have a heavy sense of a light being snuffed out in the audience, perceive a new luminary shining on the stage! Your brother[11] would make a capital tiger, too! Very short tight surtout, doeskins, bright top-boots, white cravat, bouquet in button-hole, close wig--very good, ve--ry good. It clearly must be so. The thing is done. I told you we were opening a tremendous correspondence when we first began to write on such a long subject. But do let me tell you, once and for all, that I am in the business heart and soul, and that you cannot trouble me respecting it, and that I wouldn't willingly or knowingly leave the minutest detail unprovided for. It cannot possibly be a success if the smallest peppercorn of arrangement be omitted. And a success it must be! I couldn't go into such a thing, or help to bring you poorly out of it, for any earthly consideration. Talking of forgetting, isn't it odd? I doubt if I could forget words I had learned, so long as I wanted them. But the moment the necessity goes, they go. I know my place and everybody's place in this identical piece of "Used Up" perfectly, and could put every little object on its own square inches of room exactly where it ought to be. But I have no more recollection of my words now (I took the book up yesterday) than if I had only seen the play as one of the audience at a theatre. Perhaps not so much. With cordial remembrances, Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _December 19th, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I am sorry to say that business ("Household Words" business) will keep me in town to-morrow. But on Monday I propose coming down and returning the same day. The train for my money appears to be the half-past six A.M. (horrible initials!), and to that invention for promoting early rising I design to commit myself. I am shocked if I also made the mistake of confounding those two (and too) similar names.[12] But I think Mr. S-T-A-F-F-O-R-D had better do the Marquis. I am glad to find that we agree, but we always do. I have closely overhauled the little theatre, and the carpenter and painter. The whole has been entirely repainted (I mean the proscenium and scenery) for this especial purpose, and is extremely pretty. I don't think, the scale considered, that anything better _could_ be done. It is very elegant. I have brought "the Child" to this. For the hire of the theatre, fifteen pounds. The carriage to be extra. The Child's fares and expenses (which will be very moderate) to be extra. The stage carpenter's wages to be extra--seven shillings a day. I don't think, when you see the things, that you will consider this too much. It is as good as the Queen's little theatre at Windsor, raised stage excepted. I have had an extraction made, which will enable us to use the door. I am at present breaking my man's heart, by teaching him how to imitate the sounds of the smashing of the windows and the breaking of the balcony in "Used Up." In the event of his death from grief, I have promised to do something for his mother. Thinking it possible that you might not see the enclosed until next month, and hoping that it is seasonable for Christmas, I send it. Being, with cordial regards and all seasonable good wishes, Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, Faithfully yours. P.S.--This [blot] is a tear over the devotion of Captain Boyle, who (as I learned from the Child of Israel this morning) would not decide upon Farmer Wurzel's coat, without referring the question of buttons to managerial approval. [Sidenote: Mr. John Poole.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Night, Christmas Eve, 1850._ MY DEAR POOLE, On the Sunday when I last saw you, I went straight to Lord John's with the letter you read. He was out of town, and I left it with my card. On the following Wednesday I received a note from him, saying that he did not bear in mind exactly what I had told him of you before, and asking me to tell it again. I immediately replied, of course, and gave him an exact description of you and your condition, and your way of life in Paris and everything else; a perfect diorama in little, with you pervading it. To-day I got a letter from him, announcing that you have a pension of _a hundred a year_! of which I heartily wish you joy. He says: "I am happy to say that the Queen has approved of a pension of one hundred pounds a year to Mr. Poole. "The Queen, in her gracious answer, informs me that she meant to have mentioned Mr. Poole to me, and that she had wished to place him in the Charter House, but found the society there was not such as he could associate with. "Be so good as to inform Mr. Poole that directions are given for his pension, which will date from the end of June last." I have lost no time in answering this, but you must brace up your energies to write him a short note too, and another for the Queen. If you are in Paris, shall I ascertain what authority I shall need from you to receive the half-year, which I suppose will be shortly due? I can receive it as usual. With all good wishes and congratulations, seasonable and unseasonable, Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday Morning, Dec. 30th, 1850._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, As your letter is _decided_, the scaffolding shall be re-erected round Charley's boots (it has been taken down, and the workmen had retired to their respective homes in various parts of England and Wales) and his dressing proceeded with. I have been very much pleased with him in the matter, as he has never made the least demonstration of disappointment or mortification, and was perfectly contented to give in. (_Here I break off to go to Boxall._) (_Here I return much exhausted._) Your time shall be stated in the bills for both nights. I propose to rehearse on the day, on Thursday and Friday, and in the evening on Saturday, that we may try our lights. Therefore: {will come on Tuesday, 7th January, as there must be a {responsible person to anathematise, and as the company NATHAN {seem so slow about their dresses, that I foresee the AND {strong probability of Nathan having a good deal to do STAGE CARPENTER {at Rockingham without respect. WILSON will come on Saturday, 11th January. TUCKER will come on Saturday, 11th January. I shall be delighted to see your brother, and so no more at present from Yours ever, COLDSTREAM FREELOVE DOCTOR DICKENS. P.S.--As Boxall (with his head very much on one side and his spectacles on) danced backward from the canvas incessantly with great nimbleness, and returned, and made little digs at it with his pencil, with a horrible grin on his countenance, I augur that he pleased himself this morning. "Tag" added by Mr. Dickens to "Animal Magnetism," played at Rockingham Castle. ANIMAL MAGNETISM.--TAG. [After LA FLEUR says to the Marquis: "Sir, return him the wand; and the ladies, I daresay, will fall in love with him again."] DOCTOR. I'm cheated, robbed! I don't believe! I hate Wand, Marquis, Doctor, Ward, Lisette, and Fate! LA FLEUR. Not me? DOCTOR. _You_ worse, you rascal, than the rest. LA FLEUR. (_bowing_). To merit it, good sir, I've done my best. LISETTE. (_sharply_). And I. CONSTANCE. I fear that I too have a claim Upon your anger. LISETTE. Anger, madam? Shame! He's justly treated, as he might have known. And if the wand were a divining one It would have turn'd, within his very hands, Point-blank to where your handsome husband stands. CONSTANCE (_glancing at_ DOCTOR). I would it were the wand of Harlequin, To change his temper and his favour win. JEFFREY (_peeping in_). In that case, mistress, you might be so kind As wave me back the eye of which I'm blind. MARQUIS (_laughing and examining it_). 'Tis nothing but a piece of senseless wood, And has no influence for harm or good. Yet stay! It surely draws me towards those Indulgent, pleasant, smiling, beaming rows! It surely charms me. ALL. And us too. MARQUIS. To bend Before their gen'rous efforts to commend; To cheer us on, through these few happy hours, And strew our mimic way with real flowers. [_All make obeisance._ Stay yet again. Among us all, I feel One subtle, all-pervading influence steal, Stirring one wish within one heart and head, Bright be the path our host and hostess tread! Blest be their children, happy be their race, Long may they live, this ancient hall to grace Long bear of English virtues noble fruit-- Green-hearted ROCKINGHAM! strike deep thy root FOOTNOTES: [8] The last illness of Mrs. White's mother. [9] Dr. Gottfried Kinkel, a distinguished scholar and Professor in the University of Bonn, who was at that time undergoing very rigorous State imprisonment in Prussia, for political reasons. Dr. Kinkel was afterwards well known as a teacher and lecturer on Art in London, where he resided for many years. [10] The part of the lawyer in "Used Up." It was _not_ played after all by Mr. Watson, but by Mr. (now Sir William) Boxall, R.A., a very old and intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, and of Charles Dickens. [11] This part, finally, was played by Charles Dickens, junior. [12] Mr. Stafford and Mr. Stopford, who both acted in the plays at Rockingham. 1851. NARRATIVE. In February this year, Charles Dickens made a short bachelor excursion with Mr. Leech and the Hon. Spencer Lyttelton to Paris, from whence we give a letter to his wife. She was at this time in very bad health, and the little infant Dora had a serious illness during the winter. The child rallied for the time, but Mrs. Dickens continued so ill that she was advised to try the air--and water--of Malvern. And early in March, she and her sister were established in lodgings there, the children being left in London, and Charles Dickens dividing his time between Devonshire Terrace and Malvern. He was busily occupied before this time in superintending the arrangements for Mr. Macready's last appearance on the stage at Drury Lane, and for a great dinner which was given to Mr. Macready after it on the 1st March, at which the chair was taken by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. With him Charles Dickens was then engaged in maturing a scheme, which had been projected at the time of the amateur play at Knebworth, of a Guild of Literature and Art, which was to found a provident fund for literary men and artists; and to start which, a series of dramatic performances by the amateur company was proposed. Sir E. B. Lytton wrote a comedy, "Not so Bad as We Seem," for the purpose, to be played in London and the provinces; and the Duke of Devonshire turned one of the splendid rooms in Devonshire House into a theatre, for the first occasion of its performance. It was played early in May before her Majesty and the Prince Consort, and a large audience. Later in the season, there were several representations of the comedy (with a farce, "Mr. Nightingale's Diary," written by Charles Dickens for himself and Mr. Mark Lemon) in the Hanover Square Rooms. But in the interval between the Macready banquet and the play at Devonshire House, Charles Dickens underwent great family trouble and sorrow. His father, whose health had been declining for some time, became seriously ill, and Charles Dickens was summoned from Malvern to attend upon him. Mr. John Dickens died on the 31st March. On the 14th April, Charles Dickens had gone from Malvern to preside at the annual dinner of the General Theatrical Fund, and found his children all well at Devonshire Terrace. He was playing with his baby, Dora, before he went to the dinner; soon after he left the house the child died suddenly in her nurse's arms. The sad news was communicated to the father after his duties at the dinner were over. The next day, Mr. Forster went to Malvern to break the news to Mrs. Dickens, and she and her sister returned with him to London, and the Malvern lodgings were given up. But Mrs. Dickens being still out of health, and London being more than usually full (this being the year of the Great Exhibition), Charles Dickens decided to let the town house again for a few months, and engaged the Fort House, Broadstairs, from the beginning of May until November. This, which was his longest sojourn at Broadstairs, was also the last, as the following summer he changed his seaside resort, and never returned to that pretty little watering-place, although he always retained an affectionate interest in it. The lease of the Devonshire Terrace house was to expire this year. It was now too small for his family, so he could not renew it, although he left it with regret. From the beginning of the year, he had been in negotiation for a house in Tavistock Square, in which his friend Mr. Frank Stone had lived for some years. Many letters which follow are on the subject of this house and the improvements Charles Dickens made in it. His brother-in-law, Henry Austin--himself an architect--superintended the "works" at Tavistock House, as he did afterwards those at Gad's Hill--and there are many characteristic letters to Mr. Austin while these works were in progress. In the autumn, as a letter written in August to Mr. Stone will show, an exchange of houses was made--Mr. Stone removing with his family to Devonshire Terrace until his own new house was ready--while the alterations in Tavistock House went on, and Charles Dickens removed into it from Broadstairs, in November. His eldest son was now an Eton boy. He had been one of the party and had played a small part in the play at Rockingham Castle, in the Christmas holidays, and his father's letters to Mrs. Watson at the beginning of this year have reference to this play. This year he wrote and published the "Haunted Man," which he had found himself unable to finish for the previous Christmas. It was the last of the Christmas _books_. He abandoned them in favour of a Christmas number of "Household Words," which he continued annually for many years in "Household Words" and "All the Year Round," and in which he had the collaboration of other writers. The "Haunted Man" was dramatised and produced at the Adelphi Theatre, under the management of Mr. Benjamin Webster. Charles Dickens read the book himself, at Tavistock House, to a party of actors and actresses. At the end of the year he wrote the first number of "Bleak House," although it was not published until March of the following year. With the close attention and the hard work he gave, from the time of its starting, to his weekly periodical, he found it to be most desirable, now, in beginning a new monthly serial, that he should be ready with some numbers in advance before the appearance of the first number. A provincial tour for the "Guild" took place at the end of the year. A letter to his wife, from Clifton, in November, gives a notion of the general success and enthusiasm with which the plays were attended. The "new Hardman," to whom he alludes as taking that part in Sir E. B. Lytton's comedy in the place of Mr. Forster, was Mr. John Tenniel, who was a new addition, and a very valuable and pleasant one, to the company. Mr. Topham, the delightful water-colour painter, Mr. Dudley Costello, and Mr. Wilkie Collins were also new recruits to the company of "splendid strollers" about this time. A letter to Mr. Wills, asking him to take a part in the comedy, is given here. He never did _act_ with the company, but he complied with Charles Dickens's desire that he should be "in the scheme" by giving it all sorts of assistance, and almost invariably being one of the party in the provincial tours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 24th, 1851._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Kate will have told you, I daresay, that my despondency on coming to town was relieved by a talk with Lady John Russell, of which you were the subject, and in which she spoke of you with an earnestness of old affection and regard that did me good. I date my recovery (which has been slow) from that hour. I am still feeble, and liable to sudden outbursts of causeless rage and demoniacal gloom, but I shall be better presently. What a thing it is, that we can't be always innocently merry and happy with those we like best without looking out at the back windows of life! Well, one day perhaps--after a long night--the blinds on that side of the house will be down for ever, and nothing left but the bright prospect in front. Concerning supper-toast (of which I feel bound to make some mention), you did, as you always do, right, and exactly what was most agreeable to me. My love to your excellent husband (I wonder whether he and the dining-room have got to rights yet!), and to the jolly little boys and the calm little girl. Somehow, I shall always think of Lord Spencer as eternally walking up and down the platform at Rugby, in a high chill wind, with no apparent hope of a train--as I left him; and somehow I always think of Rockingham, after coming away, as if I belonged to it and had left a bit of my heart behind, which it is so very odd to find wanting twenty times a day. Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, faithfully yours, and his. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Night, Jan. 28th, 1851._ MY DEAR, DEAR MRS. WATSON, I presume you mean Mr. Stafford and Mr. Stopford to pay Wilson (as I have instructed him) a guinea each? Am I right? In that just case I still owe you a guinea for _my_ part. I was going to send you a post-office order for that amount, when a faint sense of absurdity mantled my ingenuous visage with a blush, and I thought it better to owe you the money until we met. I hope it may be soon! I believe I may lay claim to the mysterious inkstand, also to a volume lettered on the back, "Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, II.," which I left when I came down at Christmas. Will you take care of them as hostages until we effect an exchange? Charley went back in great spirits, threatening to write to George. It was a very wet night, and John took him to the railway. He said, on his return: "Mas'r Charles went off very gay, sir. He found some young gen'lemen as was his friends in the train, sir." "Come," said I, "I am glad of that. How many were there? Two or three?" "Oh dear, sir, there was a matter of forty, sir! All with their heads out o' the coach-windows, sir, a-hallooing 'Dickens!' all over the station!" Her ladyship and the ward of the FIZ-ZISH-UN send their best loves, in which I heartily join. If you and your dear husband come to town before we bring out Bulwer's comedy, I think we must have a snug reading of it. Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday, Jan. 31st, 1851._ MY DEAR LEMON, We are deeply sorry to receive the mournful intelligence of your calamity. But we know you will both have found comfort in that blessed belief, from which the sacred figure with the child upon His knee is, in all stages of our lives, inseparable, for of such is the kingdom of God! We join in affectionate loves to you and your dear wife. She well deserves your praise, I am sure. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, Feb. 10th, 1851._ MY DEAR WILLS, There is a small part in Bulwer's comedy, but very good what there is--not much--my servant, who opens the play, which I should be very glad if you would like to do. Pray understand that there is no end of men who would do it, and that if you have the least objection to the trouble, I don't make this the expression of a wish even. Otherwise, I would like you to be in the scheme, which is a very great and important one, and which cannot have too many men who are steadily--not flightily, like some of our friends--in earnest, and who are not to be lightly discouraged. If you do the part, I would like to have a talk with you about the secretarial duties. They must be performed by someone I clearly see, and will require good business direction. I should like to put some young fellow, to whom such work and its remuneration would be an object, under your eye, if we could find one entire and perfect chrysolite anywhere. Let me know whether I am to rate you on the ship's books or not. If yes, consider yourself "called" to the reading (by Macready) at Forster's rooms, on Wednesday, the 19th, at three. And in the meantime you shall have a proof of the plan. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] H�TEL WAGRAM, PARIS, _Thursday, Feb. 12th, 1851._ MY DEAREST KATE, I received your letter this morning (on returning from an expedition to a market thirteen miles away, which involved the necessity of getting up at five), and am delighted to have such good accounts of all at home. We had D'Orsay to dinner yesterday, and I am hurried to dress now, in order to pay a promised visit to his _atelier_. He was very happy with us, and is much improved both in spirits and looks. Lord and Lady Castlereagh live downstairs here, and we went to them in the evening, and afterwards brought him upstairs to smoke. To-night we are going to see Lemaître in the renowned "Belphégor" piece. To-morrow at noon we leave Paris for Calais (the Boulogne boat does not serve our turn), and unless the weather for crossing should be absurd, I shall be at home, please God, early on the evening of Saturday. It continues to be delightful weather here--gusty, but very clear and fine. Leech and I had a charming country walk before breakfast this morning at Poissy and enjoyed it very much. The rime was on the grass and trees, and the country most delicious. Spencer Lyttelton is a capital companion on a trip, and a great addition to the party. We have got on famously and been very facetious. With best love to Georgina and the darlings, Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Friday Night, late, Feb. 21st, 1851._ MY DEAR MISS BOYLE, I have devoted a couple of hours this evening to going very carefully over your paper (which I had read before) and to endeavouring to bring it closer, and to lighten it, and to give it that sort of compactness which a habit of composition, and of disciplining one's thoughts like a regiment, and of studying the art of putting each soldier into his right place, may have gradually taught me to think necessary. I hope, when you see it in print, you will not be alarmed by my use of the pruning-knife. I have tried to exercise it with the utmost delicacy and discretion, and to suggest to you, especially towards the end, how this sort of writing (regard being had to the size of the journal in which it appears) requires to be compressed, and is made pleasanter by compression. This all reads very solemnly, but only because I want you to read it (I mean the article) with as loving an eye as I have truly tried to touch it with a loving and gentle hand. I propose to call it "My Mahogany Friend." The other name is too long, and I think not attractive. Until I go to the office to-morrow and see what is actually in hand, I am not certain of the number in which it will appear, but Georgy shall write on Monday and tell you. We are always a fortnight in advance of the public or the mechanical work could not be done. I think there are many things in it that are _very pretty_. The Katie part is particularly well done. If I don't say more, it is because I have a heavy sense, in all cases, of the responsibility of encouraging anyone to enter on that thorny track, where the prizes are so few and the blanks so many; where---- But I won't write you a sermon. With the fire going out, and the first shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me (as they usually begin to do, when I have finished an old one), I am in danger of doing the heavy business, and becoming a heavy guardian, or something of that sort, instead of the light and airy Joe. So good-night, and believe that you may always trust me, and never find a grim expression (towards you) in any that I wear. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. David Roberts, R.A.] _February 21st, 1851._ Oh my dear Roberts, if you knew the trouble we have had and the money we pay for Drury Lane for one night for the benefit, you would never dream of it for the dinner. _There isn't possibility of getting a theatre._ I will do all I can for your charming little daughter, and hope to squeeze in half-a-dozen ladies at the last; but we must not breathe the idea or we shall not dare to execute it, there will be such an outcry. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _February 27th, 1851._ MY DEAR MACREADY, Forster told me to-day that you wish Tennyson's sonnet to be read after your health is given on Saturday. I am perfectly certain that it would not do at that time. I am quite convinced that the audience would not receive it, under these exciting circumstances, as it ought to be received. If I had to read it, I would on no account undertake to do so at that period, in a great room crowded with a dense company. I have an instinctive assurance that it would fail. Being with Bulwer this morning, I communicated your wish to him, and he immediately felt as I do. I could enter into many reasons which induce me to form this opinion. But I believe that you have that confidence in me that I may spare you the statement of them. I want to know one thing from you. As I shall be obliged to be at the London Tavern in the afternoon of to-morrow, Friday (I write, observe, on Thursday night), I shall be much helped in the arrangements if you will send me your answer by a messenger (addressed here) on the receipt of this. Which would you prefer--that "Auld Lang Syne" should be sung after your health is given and before you return thanks, or after you have spoken? I cannot forbear a word about last night. I think I have told you sometimes, my much-loved friend, how, when I was a mere boy, I was one of your faithful and devoted adherents in the pit; I believe as true a member of that true host of followers as it has ever boasted. As I improved myself and was improved by favouring circumstances in mind and fortune, I only became the more earnest (if it were possible) in my study of you. No light portion of my life arose before me when the quiet vision to which I am beholden, in I don't know how great a decree, or for how much--who does?--faded so nobly from my bodily eyes last night. And if I were to try to tell you what I felt--of regret for its being past for ever, and of joy in the thought that you could have taken your leave of _me_ but in God's own time--I should only blot this paper with some drops that would certainly not be of ink, and give very faint expression to very strong emotions. What is all this in writing! It is only some sort of relief to my full heart, and shows very little of it to you; but that's something, so I let it go. Ever, my dearest Macready, Your most affectionate Friend. P.S.--My very flourish departs from me for the moment. [Sidenote: Mr. David Roberts, R.A.] KNUTSFORD LODGE, GREAT MALVERN, _March 20th, 1851._ MY DEAR ROBERTS, Mrs. Dickens has been unwell, and I am here with her. I want you to give a quarter of an hour to the perusal of the enclosed prospectus; to consider the immense value of the design, if it be successful, to artists young and old; and then to bestow your favourable consideration on the assistance I am going to ask of you for the sake and in the name of the cause. For the representation of the new comedy Bulwer has written for us, to start this scheme, I am having an ingenious theatre made by Webster's people, for erection on certain nights in the Hanover Square Rooms. But it will first be put up in the Duke of Devonshire's house, where the first representation will take place before a brilliant company, including (I believe) the Queen. Now, will you paint us a scene--the scene of which I enclose Bulwer's description from the prompter's book? It will be a cloth with a set-piece. It should be sent to your studio or put up in a theatre painting-room, as you would prefer. I have asked Stanny to do another scene, Edwin Landseer, and Louis Haghe. The Devonshire House performance will probably be on Monday, the 28th of April. I should want to have the scenery complete by the 20th, as it would require to be elaborately worked and rehearsed. _You_ could do it in no time after sending in your pictures, and will you? What the value of such aid would be I need not say. I say no more of the reasons that induce me to ask it, because if they are not in the prospectus they are nowhere. On Monday and Tuesday nights I shall be in town for rehearsal, but until then I shall be here. Will you let me have a line from you in reply? My dear Roberts, ever faithfully yours. _Description of the Scene proposed:_ STREETS OF LONDON IN THE TIME OF GEORGE I. In perspective, an alley inscribed DEADMAN'S LANE; a large, old-fashioned, gloomy, mysterious house in the corner, marked No. 1. (_This No. 1, Deadman's Lane, has been constantly referred to in the play as the abode of a mysterious female figure, who enters masked, and passes into this house on the scene being disclosed._) It is night, and there are moonlight mediums. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] H. W. OFFICE, _Monday, March 26th, 1851._ MY DEAREST KATE, I reserve all news of the play until I come down. The Queen appoints the 30th of April. There is no end of trouble. My father slept well last night, and is as well this morning (they send word) as anyone in such a state, so cut and slashed, can be. I have been waiting at home for Bulwer all the morning (it is now two), and am now waiting for Lemon before I go up there. I will not close this note until I have been. It is raining here incessantly. The streets are in a most miserable state. A van, containing the goods of some unfortunate family moving, has broken down close outside, and the whole scene is a picture of dreariness. The children are quite well and very happy. I had Dora down this morning, who was quite charmed to see me. That Miss Ketteridge appointed two to-day for seeing the house, and probably she is at this moment disparaging it. My father is very weak and low, but not worse, I hope, than might be expected. I am going home to dine with the children. By working here late to-night (coming back after dinner) I can finish what I have to do for the play. Therefore I hope to be with you to-morrow, in good time for dinner. Ever affectionately. P.S.--Love to Georgy. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Thursday Morning, April 3rd, 1851._ MY DEAR WILLS, I took my threatened walk last night, but it yielded little but generalities. However, I thought of something for _to-night_, that I think will make a splendid paper. I have an idea that it might be connected with the gas paper (making gas a great agent in an effective police), and made one of the articles. This is it: "A Night in a Station-house." If you would go down to our friend Mr. Yardley, at Scotland Yard, and get a letter or order to the acting chief authority at that station-house in Bow Street, to enable us to hear the charges, observe the internal economy of the station-house all night, go round to the cells with the visiting policeman, etc., I would stay there, say from twelve to-night to four or five in the morning. We might have a "night-cap," a fire, and some tea at the office hard by. If you could conveniently borrow an hour or two from the night we could both go. If not, I would go alone. It would make a wonderful good paper at a most appropriate time, when the back slums of London are going to be invaded by all sorts of strangers. You needn't exactly say that _I_ was going _in propriâ_ (unless it were necessary), and, of course, you wouldn't say that I propose to-night, because I am so worn by the sad arrangements in which I am engaged, and by what led to them, that I cannot take my natural rest. But to-morrow night we go to the gas-works. I might not be so disposed for this station-house observation as I shall be to-night for a long time, and I see a most singular and admirable chance for us in the descriptive way, not to be lost. Therefore, if you will arrange the thing before I come down at four this afternoon, any of the Scotland Yard people will do it, I should think; if our friend by any accident should not be there, I will go into it. If they should recommend any other station-house as better for the purpose, or would think it better for us to go to more than one under the guidance of some trustworthy man, of course we will pay any man and do as they recommend. But I think one topping station-house would be best. Faithfully ever. P.S.--I write from my bed. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] _Saturday, May 24th, 1851._ MY DEAR MACREADY, We are getting in a good heap of money for the Guild. The comedy has been very much improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in the play. And there _is_ a farce to be produced on Tuesday next, wherein a distinguished amateur will sustain a variety of assumption-parts, and in particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on Wednesday or Thursday. Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you think of us among the London fleas! But they tell me you are coming in for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town to attend to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in the streets. They will misdirect you for what the vulgar call "a lark," meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into some respectable shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by his being dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his hat being made of sticking-plaster. You may perhaps see in some odd place an intelligent-looking man, with a curious little wooden table before him and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but don't do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These, too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy should be), I would recommend you to see ---- at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Anybody will show it to you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile, recollect. Porter is twopence per pint; what is called stout is fourpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these will please you after a time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can serve you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your happy family, so remote from this Babel, Believe me, my dear Friend, Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of _King Charles the First_. [Sidenote: The Earl of Carlisle.] BROADSTAIRS, _July 8th, 1851._ MY DEAR LORD CARLISLE, We shall be delighted to see you, if you will come down on Saturday. Mr. Lemon may perhaps be here, with his wife, but no one else. And we can give you a bed that may be surpassed, with a welcome that certainly cannot be. The general character of Broadstairs as to size and accommodation was happily expressed by Miss Eden, when she wrote to the Duke of Devonshire (as he told me), saying how grateful she felt to a certain sailor, who asked leave to see her garden, for not plucking it bodily up, and sticking it in his button-hole. As we think of putting mignonette-boxes outside the windows, for the younger children to sleep in by-and-by, I am afraid we should give your servant the cramp if we hardily undertook to lodge him. But in case you should decide to bring one, he is easily disposable hard by. Don't come by the boat. It is rather tedious, and both departs and arrives at inconvenient hours. There is a railway train from the Dover terminus to Ramsgate, at half-past twelve in the day, which will bring you in three hours. Another at half-past four in the afternoon. If you will tell me by which you come (I hope the former), I will await you at the terminus with my little brougham. You will have for a night-light in the room we shall give you, the North Foreland lighthouse. That and the sea and air are our only lions. It is a very rough little place, but a very pleasant one, and you will make it pleasanter than ever to me. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _July 11th, 1851._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I am so desperately indignant with you for writing me that short apology for a note, and pretending to suppose that under any circumstances I could fail to read with interest anything _you_ wrote to me, that I have more than half a mind to inflict a regular letter upon you. If I were not the gentlest of men I should do it! Poor dear Haldimand, I have thought of him so often. That kind of decay is so inexpressibly affecting and piteous to me, that I have no words to express my compassion and sorrow. When I was at Abbotsford, I saw in a vile glass case the last clothes Scott wore. Among them an old white hat, which seemed to be tumbled and bent and broken by the uneasy, purposeless wandering, hither and thither, of his heavy head. It so embodied Lockhart's pathetic description of him when he tried to write, and laid down his pen and cried, that it associated itself in my mind with broken powers and mental weakness from that hour. I fancy Haldimand in such another, going listlessly about that beautiful place, and remembering the happy hours we have passed with him, and his goodness and truth. I think what a dream we live in, until it seems for the moment the saddest dream that ever was dreamed. Pray tell us if you hear more of him. We really loved him. To go to the opposite side of life, let me tell you that a week or so ago I took Charley and three of his schoolfellows down the river gipsying. I secured the services of Charley's godfather (an old friend of mine, and a noble fellow with boys), and went down to Slough, accompanied by two immense hampers from Fortnum and Mason, on (I believe) the wettest morning ever seen out of the tropics. It cleared before we got to Slough; but the boys, who had got up at four (we being due at eleven), had horrible misgivings that we might not come, in consequence of which we saw them looking into the carriages before us, all face. They seemed to have no bodies whatever, but to be all face; their countenances lengthened to that surprising extent. When they saw us, the faces shut up as if they were upon strong springs, and their waistcoats developed themselves in the usual places. When the first hamper came out of the luggage-van, I was conscious of their dancing behind the guard; when the second came out with bottles in it, they all stood wildly on one leg. We then got a couple of flys to drive to the boat-house. I put them in the first, but they couldn't sit still a moment, and were perpetually flying up and down like the toy figures in the sham snuff-boxes. In this order we went on to "Tom Brown's, the tailor's," where they all dressed in aquatic costume, and then to the boat-house, where they all cried in shrill chorus for "Mahogany"--a gentleman, so called by reason of his sunburnt complexion, a waterman by profession. (He was likewise called during the day "Hog" and "Hogany," and seemed to be unconscious of any proper name whatsoever.) We embarked, the sun shining now, in a galley with a striped awning, which I had ordered for the purpose, and all rowing hard, went down the river. We dined in a field; what I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk, the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence, must ever remain untold. I feel, even now, old with the anxiety of that tremendous hour. They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like lobsters' to be comfortable, but only temporarily. He recovered, and I suppose outlived the salad he took. I have heard nothing to the contrary, and I imagine I should have been implicated on the inquest if there had been one. We had tea and rashers of bacon at a public-house, and came home, the last five or six miles in a prodigious thunderstorm. This was the great success of the day, which they certainly enjoyed more than anything else. The dinner had been great, and Mahogany had informed them, after a bottle of light champagne, that he never would come up the river "with ginger company" any more. But the getting so completely wet through was the culminating part of the entertainment. You never in your life saw such objects as they were; and their perfect unconsciousness that it was at all advisable to go home and change, or that there was anything to prevent their standing at the station two mortal hours to see me off, was wonderful. As to getting them to their dames with any sort of sense that they were damp, I abandoned the idea. I thought it a success when they went down the street as civilly as if they were just up and newly dressed, though they really looked as if you could have rubbed them to rags with a touch, like saturated curl-paper. I am sorry you have not been able to see our play, which I suppose you won't now, for I take it you are not going on Monday, the 21st, our last night in town? It is worth seeing, not for the getting up (which modesty forbids me to approve), but for the little bijou it is, in the scenery, dresses, and appointments. They are such as never can be got together again, because such men as Stanfield, Roberts, Grieve, Haghe, Egg, and others, never can be again combined in such a work. Everything has been done at its best from all sorts of authorities, and it is really very beautiful to look at. I find I am "used up" by the Exhibition. I don't say "there is nothing in it"--there's too much. I have only been twice; so many things bewildered me. I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it. I am not sure that I have seen anything but the fountain and perhaps the Amazon. It is a dreadful thing to be obliged to be false, but when anyone says, "Have you seen ----?" I say, "Yes," because if I don't, I know he'll explain it, and I can't bear that. ---- took all the school one day. The school was composed of a hundred "infants," who got among the horses' legs in crossing to the main entrance from the Kensington Gate, and came reeling out from between the wheels of coaches undisturbed in mind. They were clinging to horses, I am told, all over the park. When they were collected and added up by the frantic monitors, they were all right. They were then regaled with cake, etc., and went tottering and staring all over the place; the greater part wetting their forefingers and drawing a wavy pattern on every accessible object. One infant strayed. He was not missed. Ninety and nine were taken home, supposed to be the whole collection, but this particular infant went to Hammersmith. He was found by the police at night, going round and round the turnpike, which he still supposed to be a part of the Exhibition. He had the same opinion of the police, also of Hammersmith workhouse, where he passed the night. When his mother came for him in the morning, he asked when it would be over? It was a great Exhibition, he said, but he thought it long. As I begin to have a foreboding that you will think the same of this act of vengeance of mine, this present letter, I shall make an end of it, with my heartiest and most loving remembrances to Watson. I should have liked him of all things to have been in the Eton expedition, tell him, and to have heard a song (by-the-bye, I have forgotten that) sung in the thunderstorm, solos by Charley, chorus by the friends, describing the career of a booby who was plucked at college, every verse ending: I don't care a fig what the people may think, But what WILL the governor say! which was shouted with a deferential jollity towards myself, as a governor who had that day done a creditable action, and proved himself worthy of all confidence. With love to the boys and girls, Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, Most sincerely yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Sunday, July 20th, 1851._ MY DEAR STONE, I have been considering the great house question since you kindly called yesterday evening, and come to the conclusion that I had better not let it go. I am convinced it is the prudent thing for me to do, and that I am very unlikely to find the same comforts for the rising generation elsewhere, for the same money. Therefore, as Robins no doubt understands that you would come to me yesterday--passing his life as he does amidst every possible phase of such negotiations--I think it hardly worth while to wait for the receipt of his coming letter. If you will take the trouble to call on him in the morning, and offer the £1,450, I shall be very much obliged to you. If you will receive from me full power to conclude the purchase (subject of course to my solicitor's approval of the lease), pray do. I give you _carte blanche_ to £1,500, but I think the £1,450 ought to win the day. I don't make any apologies for thrusting this honour upon you, knowing what a thorough-going old pump you are. Lemon and his wife are coming here, after the rehearsal, to a gipsy sort of cold dinner. Time, half-past three. Viands, pickled salmon and cold pigeon-pie. Occupation afterwards, lying on the carpet as a preparation for histrionic strength. Will you come with us from the Hanover Square Rooms? Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Sunday, July 27th, 1851._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, A most excellent Shadow![13] I have sent it up to the printer, and Wills is to send you a proof. Will you look carefully at all the earlier part, where the use of the past tense instead of the present a little hurts the picturesque effect? I understand each phase of the thing to be _always a thing present before the mind's eye_--a shadow passing before it. Whatever is done, must be _doing_. Is it not so? For example, if I did the Shadow of Robinson Crusoe, I should not say he _was_ a boy at Hull, when his father lectured him about going to sea, and so forth; but he _is_ a boy at Hull. There he is, in that particular Shadow, eternally a boy at Hull; his life to me is a series of shadows, but there is no "was" in the case. If I choose to go to his manhood, I can. These shadows don't change as realities do. No phase of his existence passes away, if I choose to bring it to this unsubstantial and delightful life, the only death of which, to me, is _my_ death, and thus he is immortal to unnumbered thousands. If I am right, will you look at the proof through the first third or half of the papers, and see whether the Factor comes before us in that way? If not, it is merely the alteration of the verb here and there that is requisite. You say you are coming down to look for a place next week. Now, Jerrold says he is coming on Thursday, by the cheap express at half-past twelve, to return with me for the play early on Monday morning. Can't you make that holiday too? I have promised him our only spare bed, but we'll find you a bed hard by, and shall be delighted "to eat and drink you," as an American once wrote to me. We will make expeditions to Herne Bay, Canterbury, where not? and drink deep draughts of fresh air. Come! They are beginning to cut the corn. You will never see the country so pretty. If you stay in town these days, you'll do nothing. I feel convinced you'll not buy the "Memoirs of a Man of Quality." Say you'll come! Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Saturday, August 23rd, 1851._ MY DEAR STONE, A "dim vision" occurs to me, arising out of your note; also presents itself to the brains of my other half. Supposing you should find, on looking onward, a possibility of your being houseless at Michaelmas, what do you say to using Devonshire Terrace as a temporary encampment? It will not be in its usual order, but we would take care that there should be as much useful furniture of all sorts there, as to render it unnecessary for you to move a stick. If you should think this a convenience, then I should propose to you to pile your furniture in the middle of the rooms at Tavistock House, and go out to Devonshire Terrace two or three weeks _before_ Michaelmas, to enable my workmen to commence their operations. This might be to our mutual convenience, and therefore I suggest it. Certainly the sooner I can begin on Tavistock House the better. And possibly your going into Devonshire Terrace might relieve you from a difficulty that would otherwise be perplexing. I make this suggestion (I need not say to _you_) solely on the chance of its being useful to both of us. If it were merely convenient to me, you know I shouldn't dream of it. Such an arrangement, while it would cost you nothing, would perhaps enable you to get your new house into order comfortably, and do exactly the same thing for me. Ever affectionately. P.S.--I anticipated your suggestion some weeks ago, when I found I couldn't build a stable. I said I ought to have permission to take the piece of ground into my garden, which was conceded. Loaden writes me this morning that he thinks he can get permission to build a stable one storey high, without a chimney. I reply that on the whole I would rather enlarge the garden than build a stable with those restrictions. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, September 7th, 1851._ MY DEAR HENRY, I am in that state of mind which you may (once) have seen described in the newspapers as "bordering on distraction;" the house given up to me, the fine weather going on (soon to break, I daresay), the painting season oozing away, my new book waiting to be born, and NO WORKMEN ON THE PREMISES, along of my not hearing from you!! I have torn all my hair off, and constantly beat my unoffending family. Wild notions have occurred to me of sending in my own plumber to do the drains. Then I remember that you have probably written to prepare _your_ man, and restrain my audacious hand. Then Stone presents himself, with a most exasperatingly mysterious visage, and says that a rat has appeared in the kitchen, and it's his opinion (Stone's, not the rat's) that the drains want "compo-ing;" for the use of which explicit language I could fell him without remorse. In my horrible desire to "compo" everything, the very postman becomes my enemy because he brings no letter from you; and, in short, I don't see what's to become of me unless I hear from you to-morrow, which I have not the least expectation of doing. Going over the house again, I have materially altered the plans--abandoned conservatory and front balcony--decided to make Stone's painting-room the drawing-room (it is nearly six inches higher than the room below), to carry the entrance passage right through the house to a back door leading to the garden, and to reduce the once intended drawing-room--now school-room--to a manageable size, making a door of communication between the new drawing-room and the study. Curtains and carpets, on a scale of awful splendour and magnitude, are already in preparation, and still--still-- NO WORKMEN ON THE PREMISES. To pursue this theme is madness. Where are you? When are you coming home? Where is the man who is to do the work? Does he know that an army of artificers must be turned in at once, and the whole thing finished out of hand? O rescue me from my present condition. Come up to the scratch, I entreat and implore you! I send this to Lætitia to forward, Being, as you well know why, Completely floored by N. W., I _Sleep_. I hope you may be able to read this. My state of mind does not admit of coherence. Ever affectionately. P.S.--NO WORKMEN ON THE PREMISES! Ha! ha! ha! (I am laughing demoniacally.) [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, September 21st, 1851._ MY DEAR HENRY, It is quite clear we could do nothing else with the drains than what you have done. Will it be at all a heavy item in the estimate? If there be the _least_ chance of a necessity for the pillar, let us have it. Let us dance in peace, whatever we do, and only go into the kitchen by the staircase. Have they cut the door between the drawing-room and the study yet? The foreman will let Shoolbred know when the feat is accomplished. O! and did you tell him of another brass ventilator in the dining-room, opening into the dining-room flue? I don't think I shall come to town until you want to show the progress, whenever that may be. I shall look forward to another dinner, and I think we must encourage the Oriental, for the goodness of its wine. I am getting a complete set of a certain distinguished author's works prepared for a certain distinguished architect, which I hope he will accept, as a slight, though very inadequate, etc. etc.; affectionate, etc.; so heartily and kindly taking so much interest, etc. etc. Love to Lætitia. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _October 7th, 1851._ MY DEAR HENRY, O! O! O! D---- the Pantechnicon. O! I will be at Tavistock House at twelve on Saturday, and then will wait for you until I see you. If we return together--as I hope we shall--our express will start at half-past four, and we ought to dine (somewhere about Temple Bar) at three. The infamous ---- says the stoves shall be fixed to-morrow. O! if this were to last long; the distraction of the new book, the whirling of the story through one's mind, escorted by workmen, the imbecility, the wild necessity of beginning to write, the not being able to do so, the, O! I should go---- O! Ever affectionately. P.S.--None. I have torn it off. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _October 10th, 1851._ ON THE DEATH OF HER MOTHER. MY DEAR MISS BOYLE, Your remembrance at such a time--not thrown away upon me, trust me--is a sufficient assurance that you know how truly I feel towards you, and with what an earnest sympathy I must think of you now. God be with you! There is indeed nothing terrible in such a death, nothing that we would undo, nothing that we may remember otherwise than with deeply thankful, though with softened hearts. Kate sends you her affectionate love. I enclose a note from Georgina. Pray give my kindest remembrances to your brother Cavendish, and believe me now and ever, Faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Eeles.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" OFFICE, _Wednesday Evening, Oct. 22nd, 1851._ DEAR MR. EELES, I send you the list I have made for the book-backs. I should like the "History of a Short Chancery Suit" to come at the bottom of one recess, and the "Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington" at the bottom of the other. If you should want more titles, and will let me know how many, I will send them to you. Faithfully yours. LIST OF IMITATION BOOK-BACKS. _Tavistock House_, 1851. Five Minutes in China. 3 vols. Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols. Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols. Mr. Green's Overland Mail. 2 vols. Captain Cook's Life of Savage. 2 vols. A Carpenter's Bench of Bishops. 2 vols. Toot's Universal Letter-Writer. 2 vols. Orson's Art of Etiquette. Downeaster's Complete Calculator. History of the Middling Ages. 6 vols. Jonah's Account of the Whale. Captain Parry's Virtues of Cold Tar. Kant's Ancient Humbugs. 10 vols. Bowwowdom. A Poem. The Quarrelly Review. 4 vols. The Gunpowder Magazine. 4 vols. Steele. By the Author of "Ion." The Art of Cutting the Teeth. Matthew's Nursery Songs. 2 vols. Paxton's Bloomers. 5 vols. On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets. Drowsy's Recollections of Nothing. 3 vols. Heavyside's Conversations with Nobody. 3 vols. Commonplace Book of the Oldest Inhabitant. 2 vols. Growler's Gruffiology, with Appendix. 4 vols. The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols. Burke (of Edinburgh) on the Sublime and Beautiful. 2 vols. Teazer's Commentaries. King Henry the Eighth's Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols. Miss Biffin on Deportment. Morrison's Pills Progress. 2 vols. Lady Godiva on the Horse. Munchausen's Modern Miracles. 4 vols. Richardson's Show of Dramatic Literature. 12 vols. Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep. As many volumes as possible. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Saturday, Oct. 25th, 1851._ MY DEAR HENRY, On the day of our departure, I thought we were going--backward--at a most triumphant pace; but yesterday we rather recovered. The painters still mislaid their brushes every five minutes, and chiefly whistled in the intervals; and the carpenters (especially the Pantechnicon) continued to look sideways with one eye down pieces of wood, as if they were absorbed in the contemplation of the perspective of the Thames Tunnel, and had entirely relinquished the vanities of this transitory world; but still there was an improvement, and it is confirmed to-day. White lime is to be seen in kitchens, the bath-room is gradually resolving itself from an abstract idea into a fact--youthful, extremely youthful, but a fact. The drawing-room encourages no hope whatever, nor the study. Staircase painted. Irish labourers howling in the school-room, but I don't know why. I see nothing. Gardener vigorously lopping the trees, and really letting in the light and air. Foreman sweet-tempered but uneasy. Inimitable hovering gloomily through the premises all day, with an idea that a little more work is done when he flits, bat-like, through the rooms, than when there is no one looking on. Catherine all over paint. Mister McCann, encountering Inimitable in doorways, fades obsequiously into areas, and there encounters him again, and swoons with confusion. Several reams of blank paper constantly spread on the drawing-room walls, and sliced off again, which looks like insanity. Two men still clinking at the new stair-rails. I think they must be learning a tune; I cannot make out any other object in their proceedings. Since writing the above, I have been up there again, and found the young paper-hanger putting on his slippers, and looking hard at the walls of the servants' room at the top of the house, as if he meant to paper it one of these days. May Heaven prosper his intentions! When do you come back? I hope soon. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] CLIFTON, _November 13th, 1851._ MY DEAREST KATE, I have just received your second letter, and am quite delighted to find that all is going on so vigorously, and that you are in such a methodical, business-like, and energetic state. I shall come home by the express on Saturday morning, and shall hope to be at home between eleven and twelve. We had a noble night last night. The room (which is the largest but one in England) was crammed in every part. The effect of from thirteen to fourteen hundred people, all well dressed, and all seated in one unbroken chamber, except that the floor rose high towards the end of the hall, was most splendid, and we never played to a better audience. The enthusiasm was prodigious; the place delightful for speaking in; no end of gas; another hall for a dressing-room; an immense stage; and every possible convenience. We were all thoroughly pleased, I think, with the whole thing, and it was a very great and striking success. To-morrow-night, having the new Hardman, I am going to try the play with all kinds of cuts, taking out, among other things, some half-dozen printed pages of "Wills's Coffee House." We are very pleasant and cheerful. They are all going to Matthew Davenport Hill's to lunch this morning, and to see some woods about six or seven miles off. I prefer being quiet, and shall go out at my leisure and call on Elliot. We are very well lodged and boarded, and, living high up on the Downs, are quite out of the filth of Bristol. I saw old Landor at Bath, who has bronchitis. When he was last in town, "Kenyon drove him about, by God, half the morning, under a most damnable pretence of taking him to where Walter was at school, and they never found the confounded house!" He had in his pocket on that occasion a souvenir for Walter in the form of a Union shirt-pin, which is now in my possession, and shall be duly brought home. I am tired enough, and shall be glad when to-morrow night is over. We expect a very good house. Forster came up to town after the performance last night, and promised to report to you that all was well. Jerrold is in extraordinary force. I don't think I ever knew him so humorous. And this is all my news, which is quite enough. I am continually thinking of the house in the midst of all the bustle, but I trust it with such confidence to you that I am quite at my ease about it. With best love to Georgy and the girls, Ever, my dearest Kate, most affectionately yours. P.S.--I forgot to say that Topham has suddenly come out as a juggler, and swallows candles, and does wonderful things with the poker very well indeed, but with a bashfulness and embarrassment extraordinarily ludicrous. [Sidenote: Mr. Eeles.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, _Nov. 17th, 1851._ DEAR MR. EELES, I must thank you for the admirable manner in which you have done the book-backs in my room. I feel personally obliged to you, I assure you, for the interest you have taken in my whim, and the promptitude with which you have completely carried it out. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday Afternoon, Dec. 5th, 1851._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I write in great haste to tell you that Mr. Wills, in the utmost consternation, has brought me your letter, just received (four o'clock), and that it is _too late_ to recall your tale. I was so delighted with it that I put it first in the number (not hearing of any objection to my proposed alteration by return of post), and the number is now made up and in the printer's hands. I cannot possibly take the tale out--it has departed from me. I am truly concerned for this, but I hope you will not blame me for what I have done in perfect good faith. Any recollection of me from your pen cannot (as I think you know) be otherwise than truly gratifying to me; but with my name on every page of "Household Words," there would be--or at least I should feel--an impropriety in so mentioning myself. I was particular, in changing the author, to make it "Hood's _Poems_" in the most important place--I mean where the captain is killed--and I hope and trust that the substitution will not be any serious drawback to the paper in any eyes but yours. I would do anything rather than cause you a minute's vexation arising out of what has given me so much pleasure, and I sincerely beseech you to think better of it, and not to fancy that any shade has been thrown on your charming writing, by The unfortunate but innocent. P.S.--I write at a gallop, not to lose another post. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, December 21st, 1851._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, If you were not the most suspicious of women, always looking for soft sawder in the purest metal of praise, I should call your paper delightful, and touched in the tenderest and most delicate manner. Being what you are, I confine myself to the observation that I have called it "A Love Affair at Cranford," and sent it off to the printer. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. Peter Cunningham.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _December 26th, 1851._ MY DEAR CUNNINGHAM, About the three papers. 1st. With Mr. Plowman of Oxford, Wills will communicate. 2nd. (Now returned.) I have seen, in nearly the same form, before. The list of names is overwhelming. 3rd. I am not at all earnest in the Savage matter; firstly, because I think so tremendous a vagabond never could have obtained an honest living in any station of existence or at any period of time; and secondly, because I think it of the highest importance that such an association as our Guild should not appear to resent upon society the faults of individuals who were flagrantly impracticable. At its best, it is liable to that suspicion, as all such efforts have been on the part of many jealous persons, to whom it _must_ look for aid. And any stop that in the least encourages it is one of a fatal kind. I do _not_ think myself, but this is merely an individual opinion, that Savage _was_ a man of genius, or that anything of his writing would have attracted much notice but for the bastard's reference to his mother. For these reasons combined, I should not be inclined to add my subscription of two guineas to yours, unless the inscription were altered as I have altered it in pencil. But in that case I should be very glad to respond to your suggestion, and to snuff out all my smaller disinclination. Faithfully yours ever. FOOTNOTE: [13] Mr. Charles Knight was writing a series of papers in "Household Words," called "Shadows." 1852. NARRATIVE. In the summer of this year, Charles Dickens hired a house at Dover for three months, whither he went with his family. At the end of this time he sent his children and servants back to Tavistock House, and crossed over to Boulogne, with his wife and sister-in-law, to inspect that town and its neighbourhood, with a view of making it his summer quarters in the following year. Many amateur performances were given in the provinces in aid of the fund for the Guild of Literature and Art; Charles Dickens, as usual, taking the whole management on his own shoulders. In March, the first number of "Bleak House" appeared, and he was at work on this book all through the year, as well as being constantly occupied with his editorship of "Household Words." We have, in the letters for this year, Charles Dickens's first to Lord John Russell (afterwards the Earl Russell); a friend whom he held in the highest estimation, and to whom he was always grateful for many personal kindnesses. We have also his first letter to Mr. Wilkie Collins, with whom he became most intimately associated in literary work. The affectionate friendship he had for him, the high value in which he held him as a brother-artist, are constantly expressed in Charles Dickens's own letters to Mr. Collins, and in his letters to other friends. "Those gallant men" (in the letter to Mr. J. Crofton Croker) had reference to an antiquarian club, called the Noviomagians, who were about to give a dinner in honour of Sir Edward Belcher and Captain Kellett, the officers in command of the Arctic Exploring Expedition, to which Charles Dickens was also invited. Mr. Crofton Croker was the president of this club, and to denote his office it was customary to put on a cocked hat after dinner. The "lost character" he writes of in a letter to Mrs. Watson, refers to two different decipherings of his handwriting; this sort of study being in fashion then, and he and his friends at Rockingham Castle deriving much amusement from it. The letter dated July 9th was in answer to an anonymous correspondent, who wrote to him as follows: "I venture to trespass on your attention with one serious query, touching a sentence in the last number of 'Bleak House.' Do the supporters of Christian missions to the heathen really deserve the attack that is conveyed in the sentence about Jo' seated in his anguish on the door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts? The allusion is severe, but is it just? Are such boys as Jo' neglected? What are ragged schools, town missions, and many of those societies I regret to see sneered at in the last number of 'Household Words'?" The "Duke of Middlesex," in the letter we have here to Mr. Charles Knight, was the name of the character played by Mr. F. Stone, in Sir E. B. Lytton's comedy of "Not so Bad as we Seem." Our last letter in this year, to Mr. G. Linnæus Banks, was in acknowledgment of one from him on the subject of a proposed public dinner to Charles Dickens, to be given by the people of Birmingham, when they were also to present him with a salver and a diamond ring. The dinner was given in the following year, and the ring and salver (the latter an artistic specimen of Birmingham ware) were duly presented by Mr. Banks, who acted as honorary secretary, in the names of the subscribers, at the rooms of the Birmingham Fine Arts Association. Mr. Banks, and the artist, Mr. J. C. Walker, were the originators of this demonstration. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 31st, 1852._ MY DEAR MACREADY, If the "taxes on knowledge" mean the stamp duty, the paper duty, and the advertisement duty, they seem to me to be unnecessarily confounded, and unfairly too. I have already declined to sign a petition for the removal of the stamp duty on newspapers. I think the reduced duty is some protection to the public against the rash and hasty launching of blackguard newspapers. I think the newspapers are made extremely accessible to the poor man at present, and that he would not derive the least benefit from the abolition of the stamp. It is not at all clear to me, supposing he wants _The Times_ a penny cheaper, that he would get it a penny cheaper if the tax were taken off. If he supposes he would get in competition two or three new journals as good to choose from, he is mistaken; not knowing the immense resources and the gradually perfective machinery necessary to the production of such a journal. It appears to me to be a fair tax enough, very little in the way of individuals, not embarrassing to the public in its mode of being levied, and requiring some small consideration and pauses from the American kind of newspaper projectors. Further, a committee has reported in favour of the repeal, and the subject may be held to need no present launching. The repeal of the paper duty would benefit the producers of periodicals immensely. It would make a very large difference to me, in the case of such a journal as "Household Words." But the gain to the public would be very small. It would not make the difference of enabling me, for example, to reduce the price of "Household Words," by its fractional effect upon a copy, or to increase the quantity of matter. I might, in putting the difference into my pocket, improve the quality of the paper a little, but not one man in a thousand would notice it. It _might_ (though I am not sure even of this) remove the difficulties in the way of a deserving periodical with a small sale. Charles Knight holds that it would. But the case, on the whole, appeared to me so slight, when I went to Downing Street with a deputation on the subject, that I said (in addressing the Chancellor of the Exchequer) I could not honestly maintain it for a moment as against the soap duty, or any other pressing on the mass of the poor. The advertisement duty has this preposterous anomaly, that a footman in want of a place pays as much in the way of tax for the expression of his want, as Professor Holloway pays for the whole list of his miraculous cures. But I think, at this time especially, there is so much to be considered in the necessity the country will be under of having money, and the necessity of justice it is always under, to consider the physical and moral wants of the poor man's home, as to justify a man in saying: "I must wait a little, all taxes are more or less objectionable, and so no doubt are these, but we must have some; and I have not made up my mind that all these things that are mixed up together _are_ taxes on knowledge in reality." Kate and Georgy unite with me in kindest and heartiest love to dear Mrs. Macready. We are always with you in spirit, and always talking about you. I am obliged to conclude very hastily, being beset to-day with business engagements. Saw the lecture and was delighted; thought the idea admirable. Again, loves upon loves to dear Mrs. Macready and to Miss Macready also, and Kate and all the house. I saw ---- play (O Heaven!) "Macbeth," the other night, in three hours and fifty minutes, which is quick, I think. Ever and always affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. J. Crofton Croker.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _March 6th, 1852._ MY DEAR SIR, I have the greatest interest in those gallant men, and should have been delighted to dine in their company. I feel truly obliged to you for your kind remembrance on such an occasion. But I am engaged to Lord Lansdowne on Wednesday, and can only drink to them in the spirit, which I have often done when they have been farther off. I hope you will find occasion to put on your cocked hat, that they may see how terrific and imposing "a fore-and-after" can be made on shore. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _April 6th, 1852._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, My "lost character" was one of those awful documents occasionally to be met with, which WILL be everywhere. It glared upon me from every drawer I had, fell out of books, lurked under keys, hid in empty inkstands, got into portfolios, frightened me by inscrutably passing into locked despatch-boxes, and was not one character, but a thousand. This was when I didn't want it. I look for it this morning, and it is nowhere! Probably will never be beheld again. But it was very unlike this one; and there is no doubt that when these ventures come out good, it is only by lucky chance and coincidence. She never mentioned my love of order before, and it is so remarkable (being almost a _dis_order), that she ought to have fainted with surprise when my handwriting was first revealed to her. I was very sorry to leave Rockingham the other day, and came away in quite a melancholy state. The Birmingham people were very active; and the Shrewsbury gentry quite transcendent. I hope we shall have a very successful and dazzling trip. It is delightful to me to think of your coming to Birmingham; and, by-the-bye, if you will tell me in the previous week what hotel accommodation you want, Mr. Wills will look to it with the greatest pleasure. Your bookseller ought to be cashiered. I suppose "he" (as Rogers calls everybody's husband) went out hunting with the idea of diverting his mind from dwelling on its loss. Abortive effort! Charley brings this with himself. With kindest regards and remembrances, Ever, dear Mrs. Watson, most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _June 29th, 1852._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, A thousand thanks for the Shadow, which, is charming. May you often go (out of town) and do likewise! I dined with Charles Kemble, yesterday, to meet Emil Devrient, the German actor. He said (Devrient is my antecedent) that Ophelia _spoke_ the snatches of ballads in their German version of "Hamlet," because they didn't know the airs. Tom Taylor said that you had published the airs in your "Shakespeare." I said that if it were so, I knew you would be happy to place them at the German's service. If you have got them and will send them to me, I will write to Devrient (who knows no English) a French explanation and reminder of the circumstance, and will tell him that you responded like a man and a--I was going to say publisher, but you are nothing of the sort, except as Tonson. Then indeed you are every inch a pub.! Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The Lord John Russell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, June 30th, 1852._ MY DEAR LORD, I am most truly obliged to you for your kind note, and for your so generously thinking of me in the midst of your many occupations. I do assure you that your ever ready consideration had already attached me to you in the warmest manner, and made me very much your debtor. I thank you unaffectedly and very earnestly, and am proud to be held in your remembrance. Believe me always, yours faithfully and obliged. [Sidenote: Anonymous Correspondent.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, _July 9th, 1852._ SIR, I have received your letter of yesterday's date, and shall content myself with a brief reply. There was a long time during which benevolent societies were spending immense sums on missions abroad, when there was no such thing as a ragged school in England, or any kind of associated endeavour to penetrate to those horrible domestic depths in which such schools are now to be found, and where they were, to my most certain knowledge, neither placed nor discovered by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. If you think the balance between the home mission and the foreign mission justly held in the present time, I do not. I abstain from drawing the strange comparison that might be drawn between the sums even now expended in endeavours to remove the darkest ignorance and degradation from our very doors, because I have some respect for mistakes that may be founded in a sincere wish to do good. But I present a general suggestion of the still-existing anomaly (in such a paragraph as that which offends you), in the hope of inducing some people to reflect on this matter, and to adjust the balance more correctly. I am decidedly of opinion that the two works, the home and the foreign, are _not_ conducted with an equal hand, and that the home claim is by far the stronger and the more pressing of the two. Indeed, I have very grave doubts whether a great commercial country, holding communication with all parts of the world, can better Christianise the benighted portions of it than by the bestowal of its wealth and energy on the making of good Christians at home, and on the utter removal of neglected and untaught childhood from its streets, before it wanders elsewhere. For, if it steadily persist in this work, working downward to the lowest, the travellers of all grades whom it sends abroad will be good, exemplary, practical missionaries, instead of undoers of what the best professed missionaries can do. These are my opinions, founded, I believe, on some knowledge of facts and some observation. If I could be scared out of them, let me add in all good humour, by such easily-impressed words as "antichristian" or "irreligious," I should think that I deserved them in their real signification. I have referred in vain to page 312 of "Household Words" for the sneer to which you call my attention. Nor have I, I assure you, the least idea where else it is to be found. I am, Sir, your faithful Servant. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] 10, CAMDEN CRESCENT, DOVER, _July 22nd, 1852._ MY DEAR MARY, This is indeed a noble letter. The description of the family is quite amazing. I _must_ return it myself to say that I HAVE appreciated it. I am going to do "Used Up" at Manchester on the 2nd of September. O, think of that! With another Mary!!! How can I ever say, "_Dear_ Joe, if you like!" The voice may fully frame the falsehood, but the heart--the heart, Mr. Wurzel--will have no part in it. My dear Mary, you do scant justice to Dover. It is not quite a place to my taste, being too bandy (I mean musical, no reference to its legs), and infinitely too genteel. But the sea is very fine, and the walks are quite remarkable. There are two ways of going to Folkestone, both lovely and striking in the highest degree; and there are heights, and downs, and country roads, and I don't know what, everywhere. To let you into a secret, I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as "Copperfield." But I foresee, I think, some very good things in "Bleak House." I shouldn't wonder if they were the identical things that D'Israeli sees looming in the distance. I behold them in the months ahead and weep. Watson seemed, when I saw him last, to be holding on as by a sheet-anchor to theatricals at Christmas. Then, O rapture! but be still, my fluttering heart. This is one of what I call my wandering days before I fall to work. I seem to be always looking at such times for something I have not found in life, but may possibly come to a few thousands of years hence, in some other part of some other system. God knows. At all events I won't put your pastoral little pipe out of tune by talking about it. I'll go and look for it on the Canterbury road among the hop-gardens and orchards. Ever faithfully your Friend, JOE. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] 10, CAMDEN CRESCENT, DOVER, _Sunday, Aug. 1st, 1852._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, I don't see why you should go to the Ship, and I won't stand it. The state apartment will be occupied by the Duke of Middlesex (whom I think you know), but we can easily get a bed for you hard by. Therefore you will please to drive here next Saturday evening. Our regular dinner hour is half-past five. If you are later, you will find something ready for you. If you go on in that way about your part, I shall think you want to play Mr. Gabblewig. Your rôle, though a small one on the stage, is a large one off it; and no man is more important to the Guild, both on and off. My dear friend Watson! Dead after an illness of four days. He dined with us this day three weeks. I loved him as my heart, and cannot think of him without tears. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] DOVER, _August 5th, 1852._ MY DEAR MARK, Poor dear Watson was dead when the paragraph in the paper appeared. He was buried in his own church yesterday. Last Sunday three weeks (the day before he went abroad) he dined with us, and was quite well and happy. She has come home, is at Rockingham with the children, and does not weakly desert his grave, but sets up her rest by it from the first. He had been wandering in his mind a little before his death, but recovered consciousness, and fell asleep (she says) quite gently and peacefully in her arms. I loved him very much, and God knows he deserved it. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The Earl of Carlisle.] 10, CAMDEN CRESCENT, DOVER, _Thursday, Aug. 5th, 1852._ MY DEAR LORD CARLISLE, 'Peared to me (as Uncle Tom would say) until within these last few days, that I should be able to write to you, joyfully accepting your Saturday's invitation after Newcastle, in behalf of all whom it concerned. But the Sunderland people rushed into the field to propose our acting there on that Saturday, the only possible night. And as it is the concluding Guild expedition, and the Guild has a paramount claim on us, I have been obliged to knock my own inclinations on the head, cut the throat of my own wishes, and bind the Company hand and foot to the Sunderland lieges. I don't mean to tell them now of your invitation until we shall have got out of that country. There might be rebellion. We are staying here for the autumn. Is there any hope of your repeating your visit to these coasts? Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] 10, CAMDEN CRESCENT, DOVER, _August 5th, 1852._ ON THE DEATH OF MR. WATSON. MY DEAR, DEAR MRS. WATSON, I cannot bear to be silent longer, though I know full well--no one better I think--how your love for him, and your trust in God, and your love for your children will have come to the help of such a nature as yours, and whispered better things than any friendship can, however faithful and affectionate. We held him so close in our hearts--all of us here--and have been so happy with him, and so used to say how good he was, and what a gentle, generous, noble spirit he had, and how he shone out among commoner men as something so real and genuine, and full of every kind of worthiness, that it has often brought the tears into my eyes to talk of him; we have been so accustomed to do this when we looked forward to years of unchanged intercourse, that now, when everything but truth goes down into the dust, those recollections which make the sword so sharp pour balm into the wound. And if it be a consolation to us to know the virtues of his character, and the reasons that we had for loving him, O how much greater is your comfort who were so devoted to him, and were the happiness of his life! We have thought of you every day and every hour; we think of you now in the dear old house, and know how right it is, for his dear children's sake, that you should have bravely set up your rest in the place consecrated by their father's memory, and within the same summer shadows that fall upon his grave. We try to look on, through a few years, and to see the children brightening it, and George a comfort and a pride and an honour to you; and although it _is_ hard to think of what we have lost, we know how something of it will be restored by your example and endeavours, and the blessing that will descend upon them. We know how the time will come when some reflection of that cordial, unaffected, most affectionate presence, which we can never forget, and never would forget if we could--such is God's great mercy--will shine out of your boy's eyes upon you, his best friend and his last consoler, and fill the void there is now. May God, who has received into His rest through this affliction as good a man as ever I can know and love and mourn for on this earth, be good to you, dear friends, through these coming years! May all those compassionate and hopeful lessons of the great Teacher who shed divine tears for the dead bring their full comfort to you! I have no fear of that, my confidence is certainty. I cannot write what I wish; I had so many things to say, I seem to have said none. It is so with the remembrances we send. I cannot put them into words. If you should ever set up a record in the little church, I would try to word it myself, and God knows out of the fulness of my heart, if you should think it well. My dear Friend, Yours, with the truest affection and sympathy. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] H�TEL DES BAINS, BOULOGNE, _Tuesday Night, Oct. 5th, 1852._ ON THE DEATH OF MRS. MACREADY. MY DEAREST MACREADY, I received your melancholy letter while we were staying at Dover, a few days after it was written; but I thought it best not to write to you until you were at home again, among your dear children. Its tidings were not unexpected to us, had been anticipated in many conversations, often thought of under many circumstances; but the shock was scarcely lessened by this preparation. The many happy days we have passed together came crowding back; all the old cheerful times arose before us; and the remembrance of what we had loved so dearly and seen under so many aspects--all natural and delightful and affectionate and ever to be cherished--was, how pathetic and touching you know best! But my dear, dear Macready, this is not the first time you have felt that the recollection of great love and happiness associated with the dead soothes while it wounds. And while I can imagine that the blank beside you may grow wider every day for many days to come, I _know_--I think--that from its depths such comfort will arise as only comes to great hearts like yours, when they can think upon their trials with a steady trust in God. My dear friend, I have known her so well, have been so happy in her regard, have been so light-hearted with her, have interchanged so many tender remembrances of you with her when you were far away, and have seen her ever so simply and truly anxious to be worthy of you, that I cannot write as I would and as I know I ought. As I would press your hand in your distress, I let this note go from me. I understand your grief, I deeply feel the reason that there is for it, yet in that very feeling find a softening consolation that must spring up a hundred-thousandfold for you. May Heaven prosper it in your breast, and the spirits that have gone before, from the regions of mercy to which they have been called, smooth the path you have to tread alone! Children are left you. Your good sister (God bless her!) is by your side. You have devoted friends, and more reasons than most men to be self-reliant and stedfast. Something is gone that never in this world can be replaced, but much is left, and it is a part of her life, her death, her immortality. Catherine and Georgina, who are with me here, send you their overflowing love and sympathy. We hope that in a little while, and for a little while at least, you will come among us, who have known the happiness of being in this bond with you, and will not exclude us from participation in your past and future. Ever, my dearest Macready, with unchangeable affection, Yours in all love and truth. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] H�TEL DES BAINS, BOULOGNE, _Tuesday, Oct. 12th, 1852._ MY DEAR WILLS, H. W. I have thought of the Christmas number, but not very successfully, because I have been (and still am) constantly occupied with "Bleak House." I purpose returning home either on Sunday or Monday, as my work permits, and we will, immediately thereafter, dine at the office and talk it over, so that you may get all the men to their work. The fault of ----'s poem, besides its intrinsic meanness as a composition, is that it goes too glibly with the comfortable ideas (of which we have had a great deal too much in England since the Continental commotions) that a man is to sit down and make himself domestic and meek, no matter what is done to him. It wants a stronger appeal to rulers in general to let men do this, fairly, by governing them well. As it stands, it is at about the tract-mark ("Dairyman's Daughter," etc.) of political morality, and don't think that it is necessary to write _down_ to any part of our audience. I always hold that to be as great a mistake as can be made. I wish you would mention to Thomas, that I think the paper on hops _extremely well done_. He has quite caught the idea we want, and caught it in the best way. In pursuing the bridge subject, I think it would be advisable to look up the _Thames police_. I have a misty notion of some capital papers coming out of it. Will you see to this branch of the tree among the other branches? MYSELF. To Chapman I will write. My impression is that I shall not subscribe to the Hood monument, as I am not at all favourable to such posthumous honours. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] H�TEL DES BAINS, BOULOGNE, _Wednesday Night, Oct. 13th, 1852._ MY DEAR WILLS, The number coming in after dinner, since my letter was written and posted, I have gone over it. I am grievously depressed by it; it is so exceedingly bad. If you have anything else to put first, don't put ----'s paper first. (There is nothing better for a beginning in the number as it stands, but this is very bad.) It is a mistake to think of it as a first article. The article itself is in the main a mistake. Firstly, the subject requires the greatest discretion and nicety of touch. And secondly, it is all wrong and self-contradictory. Nobody can for a moment suppose that "sporting" amusements are the sports of the PEOPLE; the whole gist of the best part of the description is to show that they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class. The greater part of them are at a miserable discount (horse-racing excepted, which has been already sufficiently done in H. W.), and there is no reason for running amuck at them at all. I have endeavoured to remove much of my objection (and I think have done so), but, both in purpose and in any general address, it is as wide of a first article as anything can well be. It would do best in the opening of the number. About Sunday in Paris there is no kind of doubt. Take it out. Such a thing as that crucifixion, unless it were done in a masterly manner, we have no business to stagger families with. Besides, the name is a comprehensive one, and should include a quantity of fine matter. Lord bless me, what I could write under that head! Strengthen the number, pray, by anything good you may have. It is a very dreary business as it stands. The proofs want a thorough revision. In haste, going to bed. Ever faithfully. P.S.--I want a name for Miss Martineau's paper. TRIUMPHANT CARRIAGES (or TRIUMPHAL). DUBLIN STOUTHEARTEDNESS. PATIENCE AND PREJUDICE. Take which you like best. [Sidenote: Mr. John Watkins.] MONDAY, _October 18th, 1852._ SIR, On my return to town I find the letter awaiting me which you did me the favour to address to me, I believe--for it has no date--some days ago. I have the greatest tenderness for the memory of Hood, as I had for himself. But I am not very favourable to posthumous memorials in the monument way, and I should exceedingly regret to see any such appeal as you contemplate made public, remembering another public appeal that was made and responded to after Hood's death. I think that I best discharge my duty to my deceased friend, and best consult the respect and love with which I remember him, by declining to join in any such public endeavours as that which you (in all generosity and singleness of purpose, I am sure) advance. I shall have a melancholy gratification in privately assisting to place a simple and plain record over the remains of a great writer that should be as modest as he was himself, but I regard any other monument in connection with his mortal resting-place as a mistake. I am, Sir, your faithful Servant. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Tuesday, Oct. 19th, 1852._ MY DEAR WHITE, We are now getting our Christmas extra number together, and I think you are the boy to do, if you will, one of the stories. I propose to give the number some fireside name, and to make it consist entirely of short stories supposed to be told by a family sitting round the fire. _I don't care about their referring to Christmas at all_; nor do I design to connect them together, otherwise than by their names, as: THE GRANDFATHER'S STORY. THE FATHER'S STORY. THE DAUGHTER'S STORY. THE SCHOOLBOY'S STORY. THE CHILD'S STORY. THE GUEST'S STORY. THE OLD NURSE'S STORY. The grandfather might very well be old enough to have lived in the days of the highwaymen. Do you feel disposed, from fact, fancy, or both, to do a good winter-hearth story of a highwayman? If you do, I embrace you (per post), and throw up a cap I have purchased for the purpose into mid-air. Think of it and write me a line in reply. We are all well and blooming. Are you never coming to town any more? Never going to drink port again, metropolitaneously, but _always_ with Fielden? Love to Mrs. White and the children, if Lotty be not out of the list long ago. Ever faithfully, my dear White. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] ATHEN�UM, _Monday, November 22nd, 1852._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, Having just now finished my work for the time being, I turn in here in the course of a rainy walk, to have the gratification of writing a few lines to you. If my occupations with this same right hand were less numerous, you would soon be tired of me, I should write to you so often. You asked Catherine a question about "Bleak House." Its circulation is half as large again as "Copperfield"! I have just now come to the point I have been patiently working up to in the writing, and I hope it will suggest to you a pretty and affecting thing. In the matter of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," I partly though not entirely agree with Mr. James. No doubt a much lower art will serve for the handling of such a subject in fiction, than for a launch on the sea of imagination without such a powerful bark; but there are many points in the book very admirably done. There is a certain St. Clair, a New Orleans gentleman, who seems to me to be conceived with great power and originality. If he had not "a Grecian outline of face," which I began to be a little tired of in my earliest infancy, I should think him unexceptionable. He has a sister too, a maiden lady from New England, in whose person the besetting weaknesses and prejudices of the Abolitionists themselves, on the subject of the blacks, are set forth in the liveliest and truest colours and with the greatest boldness. I have written for "Household Words" of this next publication-day an article on the State funeral,[14] showing why I consider it altogether a mistake, to be temperately but firmly objected to; which I daresay will make a good many of the admirers of such things highly indignant. It may have right and reason on its side, however, none the less. Charley and I had a great talk at Dover about his going into the army, when I thought it right to set before him fairly and faithfully the objections to that career, no less than its advantages. The result was that he asked in a very manly way for time to consider. So I appointed to go down to Eton on a certain day at the beginning of this month, and resume the subject. We resumed it accordingly at the White Hart, at Windsor, and he came to the conclusion that he would rather be a merchant, and try to establish some good house of business, where he might find a path perhaps for his younger brothers, and stay at home, and make himself the head of that long, small procession. I was very much pleased with him indeed; he showed a fine sense and a fine feeling in the whole matter. We have arranged, therefore, that he shall leave Eton at Christmas, and go to Germany after the holidays, to become well acquainted with that language, now most essential in such a walk of life as he will probably tread. And I think this is the whole of my news. We are always talking of you at home. Mary Boyle dined with us a little while ago. You look out, I imagine, on a waste of water. When I came from Windsor, I thought I must have made a mistake and got into a boat (in the dark) instead of a railway-carriage. Catherine and Georgina send their kindest loves. I am ever, with the best and truest wishes of my heart, my dear Mrs. Watson, Your most affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Monday, Nov. 22nd, 1852._ MY DEAR WHITE, First and foremost, there is no doubt whatever of your story suiting "Household Words." It is a very good story indeed, and would be serviceable at any time. I am not quite so clear of its suiting the Christmas number, for this reason. You know what the spirit of the Christmas number is. When I suggested the stories being about a highwayman, I got hold of that idea as being an adventurous one, including various kinds of wrong, expressing a state of society no longer existing among us, and pleasant to hear (therefore) from an old man. Now, your highwayman not being a real highwayman after all, the kind of suitable Christmas interest I meant to awaken in the story is not in it. Do you understand? For an ordinary number it is quite unobjectionable. If you should think of any other idea, narratable by an old man, which you think would strike the chord of the season; and if you should find time to work it out during the short remainder of this month, I should be greatly pleased to have it. In any case, this story goes straightway into type. What tremendous weather it is! Our best loves to all at home. (I have just bought thirty bottles of the most stunning port on earth, which Ellis of the Star and Garter, Richmond, wrote to me of.) I think you will find some good going in the next "Bleak House." I write shortly, having been working my head off. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Wednesday, Dec. 1st, 1852._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I send you the proof of "The Old Nurse's Story," with my proposed alteration. I shall be glad to know whether you approve of it. To assist you in your decision, I send you, also enclosed, the original ending. And I have made a line with ink across the last slip but one, where the alteration begins. Of course if you wish to enlarge, explain, or re-alter, you will do it. Do not keep the proof longer than you can help, as I want to get to press with all despatch. I hope I address this letter correctly. I am far from sure. In haste. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday, December 9th, 1852._ MY DEAR WILLS, I am driven mad by dogs, who have taken it into their accursed heads to assemble every morning in the piece of ground opposite, and who have barked this morning _for five hours without intermission_; positively rendering it impossible for me to work, and so making what is really ridiculous quite serious to me. I wish, between this and dinner, you would send John to see if he can hire a gun, with a few caps, some powder, and a few charges of small shot. If you duly commission him with a card, he can easily do it. And if I get those implements up here to-night, I'll be the death of some of them to-morrow morning. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday Evening, Dec. 9th, 1852._ MY DEAR WHITE, I hear you are not going to poor Macready's. Now, don't you think it would do you good to come here instead? _I_ say it would, and I ought to know! We can give you everything but a bed (all ours are occupied in consequence of the boys being at home), and shall all be delighted to see you. Leave the bed to us, and we'll find one hard by. I say nothing of the last day of the old year, and the dancing out of that good old worthy that will take place here (for you might like to hear the bells at home); but after the twentieth, I shall be comparatively at leisure, and good for anything or nothing. Don't you consider it your duty to your family to come? _I_ do, and I again say that I ought to know. Our best love to Mrs. White and Lotty--happily so much better, we rejoice to hear--and all. So no more at present from THE INIMITABLE B. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday, Dec. 17th, 1852._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I received your kind note yesterday morning with the truest gratification, for I _am_ the writer of "The Child's Story" as well as of "The Poor Relation's." I assure you, you have given me the liveliest and heartiest pleasure by what you say of it. I don't claim for my ending of "The Nurse's Story" that it would have made it a bit better. All I can urge in its behalf is, that it is what I should have done myself. But there is no doubt of the story being admirable as it stands, and there _is_ some doubt (I think) whether Forster would have found anything wrong in it, if he had not known of my hammering over the proofs in making up the number, with all the three endings before me. With kindest regards to Mr. Gaskell, Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, Dec. 20th, 1852._ MY DEAR COLLINS, If I did not know that you are likely to have a forbearing remembrance of my occupation, I should be full of remorse for not having sooner thanked you for "Basil." Not to play the sage or the critic (neither of which parts, I hope, is at all in my line), but to say what is the friendly truth, I may assure you that I have read the book with very great interest, and with a very thorough conviction that you have a call to this same art of fiction. I think the probabilities here and there require a little more respect than you are disposed to show them, and I have no doubt that the prefatory letter would have been better away, on the ground that a book (of all things) should speak for and explain itself. But the story contains admirable writing, and many clear evidences of a very delicate discrimination of character. It is delightful to find throughout that you have taken great pains with it besides, and have "gone at it" with a perfect knowledge of the jolter-headedness of the conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes, and that any writing can be done without the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable. For all these reasons, I have made "Basil's" acquaintance with great gratification, and entertain a high respect for him. And I hope that I shall become intimate with many worthy descendants of his, who are yet in the limbo of creatures waiting to be born. Always faithfully yours. P.S.--I am open to any proposal to go anywhere any day or days this week. Fresh air and change in any amount I am ready for. If I could only find an idle man (this is a general observation), he would find the warmest recognition in this direction. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday Evening, Dec. 20th, 1852._ MY DEAR STONE, Every appearance of brightness! Shall I expect you to-morrow morning? If so, at what hour? I think of taking train afterwards, and going down for a walk on Chatham lines. If you can spare the day for fresh air and an impromptu bit of fish and chop, I can recommend you one of the most delightful of men for a companion. O, he is indeed refreshing!!! Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Christmas Eve, 1852._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have gone carefully through the number--an awful one for the amount of correction required--and have made everything right. If my mind could have been materialised, and drawn along the tops of all the spikes on the outside of the Queen's Bench prison, it could not have been more agonised than by the ----, which, for imbecility, carelessness, slovenly composition, relatives without antecedents, universal chaos, and one absorbing whirlpool of jolter-headedness, beats anything in print and paper I have ever "gone at" in my life. I shall come and see how you are to-morrow. Meantime everything is in perfect trim in these parts, and I have sent down to Stacey to come here and top up with a final interview before I go. Just after I had sent the messenger off to you, yesterday, concerning the toll-taker memoranda, the other idea came into my head, and in the most obliging manner came out of it. Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--Here is ---- perpetually flitting about Brydges Street, and hovering in the neighbourhood, with a veil of secrecy drawn down over his chin, so ludicrously transparent, that I can't help laughing while he looks at me. [Sidenote: Mr. G. Linnæus Banks.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Dec. 26th, 1852._ MY DEAR SIR, I will not attempt to tell you how affected and gratified I am by the intelligence your kind letter conveys to me. Nothing would be more welcome to me than such a mark of confidence and approval from such a source, nothing more precious, or that I could set a higher worth upon. I hasten to return the gauges, of which I have marked one as the size of the finger, from which this token will never more be absent as long as I live. With feelings of the liveliest gratitude and cordiality towards the many friends who so honour me, and with many thanks to you for the genial earnestness with which you represent them, I am, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours. P.S.--Will you do me the favour to inform the dinner committee that a friend of mine, Mr. Clement, of Shrewsbury, is very anxious to purchase a ticket for the dinner, and that if they will be so good as to forward one for him to me I shall feel much obliged. FOOTNOTE: [14] The great Duke of Wellington's funeral. 1853. NARRATIVE. In this year, Charles Dickens was still writing "Bleak House," and went to Brighton for a short time in the spring. In May he had an attack of illness, a return of an old trouble of an inflammatory pain in the side, which was short but very severe while it lasted. Immediately on his recovery, early in June, a departure from London for the summer was resolved upon. He had decided upon trying Boulogne this year for his holiday sojourn, and as soon as he was strong enough to travel, he, his wife, and sister-in-law went there in advance of the family, taking up their quarters at the Hôtel des Bains, to find a house, which was speedily done. The pretty little Villa des Moulineaux, and its excellent landlord, at once took his fancy, and in that house, and in another on the same ground, also belonging to M. Beaucourt, he passed three very happy summers. And he became as much attached to "Our French Watering Place" as to "Our English" one. Having written a sketch of Broadstairs under that name in "Household Words," he did the same of Boulogne under the former title. During the summer, besides his other work, he was employed in dictating "The Child's History of England," which he published in "Household Words," and which was the only book he ever wrote by dictation. But, as at Broadstairs and other seaside homes, he had always plenty of relaxation and enjoyment in the visits of his friends. In September he finished "Bleak House," and in October he started with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Egg from Boulogne, on an excursion through parts of Switzerland and Italy; his wife and family going home at the same time, and he himself returning to Tavistock House early in December. His eldest son, Charles, had left Eton some time before this, and had gone for the completion of his education to Leipsic. He was to leave Germany at the end of the year, therefore it was arranged that he should meet the travellers in Paris on their homeward journey, and they all returned together. Just before Christmas he went to Birmingham in fulfilment of an offer which he had made at the dinner given to him at Birmingham on the 6th of January (of which he writes to Mr. Macready in the first letter that follows here), to give two readings from his own books for the benefit of the New Midland Institute. They were his first public readings. He read "The Christmas Carol" on one evening, and "The Cricket on the Hearth" on the next, before enormous audiences. The success was so great, and the sum of money realised for the institute so large, that he consented to give a second reading of "The Christmas Carol," remaining another night in Birmingham for the purpose, on the condition that seats were reserved, at prices within their means, for the working men. And to his great satisfaction they formed a large proportion, and were among the most enthusiastic and appreciative of his audience. He was accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law, and on this occasion a breakfast was given to him after his last reading, at which a silver flower-basket, duly inscribed, was very gracefully presented to _Mrs._ Charles Dickens. The letters in this year require little explanation. Those to his wife and sister-in-law and Mr. Wills give a little history of his Italian journey. At Naples he found his excellent friend Sir James Emerson Tennent, with his wife and daughter, with whom he joined company in the ascent of Vesuvius. The two letters to M. Regnier, the distinguished actor of the Théâtre Français--with whom Charles Dickens had formed a sincere friendship during his first residence in Paris--on the subject of a projected benefit to Miss Kelly, need no further explanation. Mr. John Delane, editor of _The Times_, and always a highly-esteemed friend of Charles Dickens, had given him an introduction to a school at Boulogne, kept by two English gentlemen, one a clergyman and the other a former Eton master, the Rev. W. Bewsher and Mr. Gibson. He had at various times four boys at this school, and very frequently afterwards he expressed his gratitude to Mr. Delane for having given him the introduction, which turned out so satisfactory in every respect. The letter of grateful acknowledgment from Mr. Poole and Charles Dickens to Lord Russell was for the pension for which the old dramatic author was indebted to that nobleman, and which enabled him to live comfortably until the end of his life. A note to Mr. Marcus Stone was sent with a copy of "The Child's History of England." The sketch referred to was one of "Jo'," in "Bleak House," which showed great feeling and artistic promise, since fully fulfilled by the young painter, but very remarkable in a boy so young as he was at that time. The letter to Mr. Stanfield, in seafaring language, is a specimen of a playful way in which he frequently addressed that dear friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] "A curiosity from _him_. No date. No signature."--W. H. H. MY DEAR WILLS, I have not a shadow of a doubt about Miss Martineau's story. It is certain to tell. I think it very effectively, admirably done; a fine plain purpose in it; quite a singular novelty. For the last story in the Christmas number it will be great. I couldn't wish for a better. Mrs. Gaskell's ghost story I have got this morning; have not yet read. It is long. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield.] H.M.S. _Tavistock, January 2nd, 1853._ Yoho, old salt! Neptun' ahoy! You don't forget, messmet, as you was to meet Dick Sparkler and Mark Porpuss on the fok'sle of the good ship _Owssel Words_, Wednesday next, half-past four? Not you; for when did Stanfell ever pass his word to go anywheers and not come! Well. Belay, my heart of oak, belay! Come alongside the _Tavistock_ same day and hour, 'stead of _Owssel Words_. Hail your shipmets, and they'll drop over the side and join you, like two new shillings a-droppin' into the purser's pocket. Damn all lubberly boys and swabs, and give me the lad with the tarry trousers, which shines to me like di'mings bright! [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday Night, Jan. 14th, 1853._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have been much affected by the receipt of your kindest and best of letters; for I know out of the midst of what anxieties it comes to me, and I appreciate such remembrance from my heart. You and yours are always with us, however. It is no new thing for you to have a part in any scene of my life. It very rarely happens that a day passes without our thoughts and conversation travelling to Sherborne. We are so much there that I cannot tell you how plainly I see you as I write. I know you would have been full of sympathy and approval if you had been present at Birmingham, and that you would have concurred in the tone I tried to take about the eternal duties of the arts to the people. I took the liberty of putting the court and that kind of thing out of the question, and recognising nothing _but_ the arts and the people. The more we see of life and its brevity, and the world and its varieties, the more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in which we are drops, and not to bye-ponds (very stagnant) here and there, ever can or ever will lay the foundations of an endurable retrospect. Is it not so? _You_ should have as much practical information on this subject, now, my dear friend, as any man. My dearest Macready, I cannot forbear this closing word. I still look forward to our meeting as we used to do in the happy times we have known together, so far as your old hopefulness and energy are concerned. And I think I never in my life have been more glad to receive a sign, than I have been to hail that which I find in your handwriting. Some of your old friends at Birmingham are full of interest and enquiry. Kate and Georgina send their dearest loves to you, and to Miss Macready, and to all the children. I am ever, and no matter where I am--and quite as much in a crowd as alone--my dearest Macready, Your affectionate and most attached Friend. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 3rd, 1853._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, The subject is certainly not too serious, so sensibly treated. I have no doubt that you may do a great deal of good by pursuing it in "Household Words." I thoroughly agree in all you say in your note, have similar reasons for giving it some anxious consideration, and shall be greatly interested in it. Pray decide to do it. Send the papers, as you write them, to me. Meanwhile I will think of a name for them, and bring it to bear upon yours, if I think yours improvable. I am sure you may rely on being widely understood and sympathised with. Forget that I called those two women my dear friends! Why, if I told you a fiftieth part of what I have thought about them, you would write me the most suspicious of notes, refusing to receive the fiftieth part of that. So I don't write, particularly as you laid your injunctions on me concerning Ruth. In revenge, I will now mention one word that I wish you would take out whenever you reprint that book. She would never--I am ready to make affidavit before any authority in the land--have called her seducer "Sir," when they were living at that hotel in Wales. A girl pretending to be what she really was would have done it, but she--never! Ever most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, May 9th, 1853._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I meant to have spoken to you last night about a matter in which I hope you can assist me, but I forgot it. I think I must have been quite _bouleversé_ by your supposing (as you pretended to do, when you went away) that it was not a great pleasure and delight to me to see you act! There is a certain Miss Kelly, now sixty-two years old, who was once one of the very best of English actresses, in the greater and better days of the English theatre. She has much need of a benefit, and I am exerting myself to arrange one for her, on about the 9th of June, if possible, at the St. James's Theatre. The first piece will be an entertainment of her own, and she will act in the last. Between these two (and at the best time of the night), it would be a great attraction to the public, and a great proof of friendship to me, if you would act. If we could manage, through your influence and with your assistance, to present a little French vaudeville, such as "_Le bon Homme jadis_," it would make the night a grand success. Mitchell's permission, I suppose, would be required. That I will undertake to apply for, if you will tell me that you are willing to help us, and that you could answer for the other necessary actors in the little French piece, whatever the piece might be, that you would choose for the purpose. Pray write me a short note in answer, on this point. I ought to tell you that the benefit will be "under distinguished patronage." The Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Leinster, the Duke of Beaufort, etc. etc., are members of the committee with me, and I have no doubt that the audience will be of the _élite_. I have asked Mr. Chapman to come to me to-morrow, to arrange for the hiring of the theatre. Mr. Harley (a favourite English comedian whom you may know) is our secretary. And if I could assure the committee to-morrow afternoon of your co-operation, I am sure they would be overjoyed. _Votre tout dévoué._ [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 20th, 1853._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I am heartily obliged to you for your kind letter respecting Miss Kelly's benefit. It is to take place _on Thursday, the 16th June_; Thursday the 9th (the day originally proposed) being the day of Ascot Races, and therefore a bad one for the purpose. Mitchell, like a brave _garçon_ as he is, most willingly consents to your acting for us. Will you think what little French piece it will be best to do, in order that I may have it ready for the bills? Ever faithfully yours, my dear Regnier. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] BOULOGNE, _Monday, June 13th, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, You will be glad, I know, to hear that we had a delightful passage yesterday, and that I made a perfect phenomenon of a dinner. It is raining hard to-day, and my back feels the draught; but I am otherwise still mending. I have signed, sealed, and delivered a contract for a house (once occupied for two years by a man I knew in Switzerland), which is not a large one, but stands in the middle of a great garden, with what the landlord calls a "forest" at the back, and is now surrounded by flowers, vegetables, and all manner of growth. A queer, odd, French place, but extremely well supplied with all table and other conveniences, and strongly recommended. The address is: Château des Moulineaux, Rue Beaurepaire, Boulogne. There is a coach-house, stabling for half-a-dozen horses, and I don't know what. We take possession this afternoon, and I am now laying in a good stock of creature comforts. So no more at present from Yours ever faithfully. P.S.--Mrs. Dickens and her sister unite in kindest regards. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] CH�TEAU DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Saturday Night, June 18th, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, "BLEAK HOUSE." Thank God, I have done half the number with great care, and hope to finish on Thursday or Friday next. O how thankful I feel to be able to have done it, and what a relief to get the number out! GENERAL MOVEMENTS OF INIMITABLE. _I don't think_ (I am not sure) I shall come to London until after the completion of "Bleak House," No. 18--the number after this now in hand--for it strikes me that I am better here at present. I have picked up in the most extraordinary manner, and I believe you would never suppose to look at me that I had had that week or barely an hour of it. If there should be any occasion for our meeting in the meantime, a run over here would do you no harm, and we should be delighted to see you at any time. If you suppose this place to be in a street, you are much mistaken. It is in the country, though not more than ten minutes' walk from the post-office, and is the best doll's-house of many rooms, in the prettiest French grounds, in the most charming situation I have ever seen; the best place I have ever lived in abroad, except at Genoa. You can scarcely imagine the beauty of the air in this richly-wooded hill-side. As to comforts in the house, there are all sorts of things, beginning with no end of the coldest water and running through the most beautiful flowers down to English foot-baths and a Parisian liqueur-stand. Your parcel (frantic enclosures and all) arrived quite safely last night. This will leave by steamer to-morrow, Sunday evening. There is a boat in the morning, but having no one to send to-night I can't reach it, and to-morrow being Sunday it will come to much the same thing. I think that's all at present. Ever, my dear Wills, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] CH�TEAU DES MOULINEAUX, RUE BEAUREPAIRE, BOULOGNE, _Thursday, June 23rd, 1853._ MY DEAR PUMPION, I take the earliest opportunity, after finishing my number--ahem!--to write you a line, and to report myself (thank God) brown, well, robust, vigorous, open to fight any man in England of my weight, and growing a moustache. Any person of undoubted pluck, in want of a customer, may hear of me at the bar of Bleak House, where my money is down. I think there is an abundance of places here that would suit you well enough; and Georgina is ready to launch on voyages of discovery and observation with you. But it is necessary that you should consider for how long a time you want it, as the folks here let much more advantageously for the tenant when they know the term--don't like to let without. It seems to me that the best thing you can do is to get a paper of the South Eastern tidal trains, fix your day for coming over here in five hours (when you will pay through to Boulogne at London Bridge), let me know the day, and come and see how you like the place. _I_ like it better than ever. We can give you a bed (two to spare, at a pinch three), and show you a garden and a view or so. The town is not so cheap as places farther off, but you get a great deal for your money, and by far the best wine at tenpence a bottle that I have ever drank anywhere. I really desire no better. I may mention for your guidance (for I count upon your coming to overhaul the general aspect of things), that you have nothing on earth to do with your luggage when it is once in the boat, _until after you have walked ashore_. That you will be filtered with the rest of the passengers through a hideous, whitewashed, quarantine-looking custom-house, where a stern man of a military aspect will demand your passport. That you will have nothing of the sort, but will produce your card with this addition: "Restant à Boulogne, chez M. Charles Dickens, Château des Moulineaux." That you will then be passed out at a little door, like one of the ill-starred prisoners on the bloody September night, into a yelling and shrieking crowd, cleaving the air with the names of the different hotels, exactly seven thousand six hundred and fifty-four in number. And that your heart will be on the point of sinking with dread, then you will find yourself in the arms of the Sparkler of Albion. All unite in kindest regards. Ever affectionately. P.S.--I thought you might like to see the flourish again. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, July 27th, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have thought of another article to be called "Frauds upon the Fairies," _à propos_ of George Cruikshank's editing. Half playfully and half seriously, I mean to protest most strongly against alteration, for any purpose, of the beautiful little stories which are so tenderly and humanly useful to us in these times, when the world is too much with us, early and late; and then to re-write "Cinderella" according to Total Abstinence, Peace Society, and Bloomer principles, and expressly for their propagation. I shall want his book of "Hop o' my Thumb" (Forster noticed it in the last _Examiner_), and the most simple and popular version of "Cinderella" you can get me. I shall not be able to do it until after finishing "Bleak House," but I shall do it the more easily for having the books by me. So send them, if convenient, in your next parcel. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] CH�TEAU DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Sunday, Aug. 24th, 1853._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, Some unaccountable delay in the transmission here of the parcel which contained your letter, caused me to come into the receipt of it a whole week after its date. I immediately wrote to Miss Coutts, who has written to you, and I hope some good may come of it. I know it will not be her fault if none does. I was very much concerned to read your account of poor Mrs. Warner, and to read her own plain and unaffected account of herself. Pray assure her of my cordial sympathy and remembrance, and of my earnest desire to do anything in my power to help to put her mind at ease. We are living in a beautiful little country place here, where I have been hard at work ever since I came, and am now (after an interval of a week's rest) going to work again to finish "Bleak House." Kate and Georgina send their kindest loves to you, and Miss Macready, and all the rest. They look forward, I assure you, to their Sherborne visit, when I--a mere forlorn wanderer--shall be roaming over the Alps into Italy. I saw "The Midsummer Night's Dream" of the Opéra Comique, done here (very well) last night. The way in which a poet named Willyim Shay Kes Peer gets drunk in company with Sir John Foll Stayffe, fights with a noble 'night, Lor Latimeer (who is in love with a maid-of-honour you may have read of in history, called Mees Oleevia), and promises not to do so any more on observing symptoms of love for him in the Queen of England, is very remarkable. Queen Elizabeth, too, in the profound and impenetrable disguise of a black velvet mask, two inches deep by three broad, following him into taverns and worse places, and enquiring of persons of doubtful reputation for "the sublime Williams," was inexpressibly ridiculous. And yet the nonsense was done with a sense quite admirable. I have been very much struck by the book you sent me. It is one of the wisest, the manliest, and most serviceable I ever read. I am reading it again with the greatest pleasure and admiration. Ever most affectionately yours, My dear Macready. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Saturday, Aug. 27th, 1853._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I received your letter--most welcome and full of interest to me--when I was hard at work finishing "Bleak House." We are always talking of you; and I had said but the day before, that one of the first things I would do on my release would be to write to you. To finish the topic of "Bleak House" at once, I will only add that I like the conclusion very much and think it _very pretty indeed_. The story has taken extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months, when its purpose has been gradually working itself out. It has retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old "Copperfield" by a round ten thousand or more. I have never had so many readers. We had a little reading of the final double number here the night before last, and it made a great impression I assure you. We are all extremely well, and like Boulogne very much indeed. I laid down the rule before we came, that we would know nobody here, and we _do_ know nobody here. We evaded callers as politely as we could, and gradually came to be understood and left to ourselves. It is a fine bracing air, a beautiful open country, and an admirable mixture of town and country. We live on a green hill-side out of the town, but are in the town (on foot) in ten minutes. Things are tolerably cheap, and exceedingly good; the people very cheerful, good-looking, and obliging; the houses very clean; the distance to London short, and easily traversed. I think if you came to know the place (which I never did myself until last October, often as I have been through it), you could be but in one mind about it. Charley is still at Leipzig. I shall take him up somewhere on the Rhine, to bring him home for Christmas, as I come back on my own little tour. He has been in the Hartz Mountains on a walking tour, and has written a journal thereof, which he has sent home in portions. It has cost about as much in postage as would have bought a pair of ponies. I contemplate starting from here on Monday, the 10th of October; Catherine, Georgina, and the rest of them will then go home. I shall go first by Paris and Geneva to Lausanne, for it has a separate place in my memory. If the autumn should be very fine (just possible after such a summer), I shall then go by Chamonix and Martigny, over the Simplon to Milan, thence to Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, and Naples, thence, I hope, to Sicily. Back by Bologna, Florence, Rome, Verona, Mantua, etc., to Venice, and home by Germany, arriving in good time for Christmas Day. Three nights in Christmas week, I have promised to read in the Town Hall at Birmingham, for the benefit of a new and admirable institution for working men projected there. The Friday will be the last night, and I shall read the "Carol" to two thousand working people, stipulating that they shall have that night entirely to themselves. It just occurs to me that I mean to engage, for the two months odd, a travelling servant. I have not yet got one. If you should happen to be interested in any good foreigner, well acquainted with the countries and the languages, who would like such a master, how delighted I should be to like _him_! Ever since I have been here, I have been very hard at work, often getting up at daybreak to write through many hours. I have never had the least return of illness, thank God, though I was so altered (in a week) when I came here, that I doubt if you would have known me. I am redder and browner than ever at the present writing, with the addition of a rather formidable and fierce moustache. Lowestoft I know, by walking over there from Yarmouth, when I went down on an exploring expedition, previous to "Copperfield." It is a fine place. I saw the name "Blunderstone" on a direction-post between it and Yarmouth, and took it from the said direction-post for the book. We imagined the Captain's ecstasies when we saw the birth of his child in the papers. In some of the descriptions of Chesney Wold, I have taken many bits, chiefly about trees and shadows, from observations made at Rockingham. I wonder whether you have ever thought so! I shall hope to hear from you again soon, and shall not fail to write again before I go away. There seems to be nothing but "I" in this letter; but "I" know, my dear friend, that you will be more interested in that letter in the present connection, than in any other I could take from the alphabet. Catherine and Georgina send their kindest loves, and more messages than this little sheet would hold. If I were to give you a hint of what we feel at the sight of your handwriting, and at the receipt of a word from yourself about yourself, and the dear boys, and the precious little girls, I should begin to be sorrowful, which is rather the tendency of my mind at the close of another long book. I heard from Cerjat two or three days since. Goff, by-the-bye, lived in this house two years. Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, Yours, with true affection and regard. [Sidenote: Mr. Peter Cunningham.] CH�TEAU DES MOULINEAUX, RUE BEAUREPAIRE, BOULOGNE. MY DEAR CUNNINGHAM, A note--Cerberus-like--of three heads. First. I know you will be glad to hear that the manager is himself again. Vigorous, brown, energetic, muscular; the pride of Albion and the admiration of Gaul. Secondly. I told Wills when I left home, that I was quite pained to see the end of your excellent "Bowl of Punch" altered. I was unaffectedly touched and gratified by the heartiness of the original; and saw no earthly, celestial, or subterranean objection to its remaining, as it did not so unmistakably apply to me as to necessitate the observance of my usual precaution in the case of such references, by any means. Thirdly. If you ever have a holiday that you don't know what to do with, _do_ come and pass a little time here. We live in a charming garden in a very pleasant country, and should be delighted to receive you. Excellent light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two cows (for milk punch), vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains (with no water in 'em), and thirty-seven clocks (keeping, as I conceive, Australian time; having no reference whatever to the hours on this side of the globe). I know, my dear Cunningham, that the British nation can ill afford to lose you; and that when the Audit Office mice are away, the cats of that great public establishment will play. But pray consider that the bow may be sometimes bent too long, and that ever-arduous application, even in patriotic service, is to be avoided. No one can more highly estimate your devotion to the best interests of Britain than I. But I wish to see it tempered with a wise consideration for your own amusement, recreation, and pastime. All work and no play may make Peter a dull boy as well as Jack. And (if I may claim the privilege of friendship to remonstrate) I would say that you do not take enough time for your meals. Dinner, for instance, you habitually neglect. Believe me, this rustic repose will do you good. Winkles also are to be obtained in these parts, and it is well remarked by Poor Richard, that a bird in the handbook is worth two in the bush. Ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, _Sept. 8th, 1853._ MY DEAR LANDOR, I am in town for a day or two, and Forster tells me I may now write to thank you for the happiness you have given me by honouring my name with such generous mention, on such a noble place, in your great book. I believe he has told you already that I wrote to him from Boulogne, not knowing what to do, as I had not received the precious volume, and feared you might have some plan of sending it to me, with which my premature writing would interfere. You know how heartily and inexpressibly I prize what you have written to me, or you never would have selected me for such a distinction. I could never thank you enough, my dear Landor, and I will not thank you in words any more. Believe me, I receive the dedication like a great dignity, the worth of which I hope I thoroughly know. The Queen could give me none in exchange that I wouldn't laughingly snap my fingers at. We are staying at Boulogne until the 10th of October, when I go into Italy until Christmas, and the rest come home. Kate and Georgina would send you their best loves if they were here, and would never leave off talking about it if I went back and told them I had written to you without such mention of them. Walter is a very good boy, and comes home from school with honourable commendation. He passed last Sunday in solitary confinement (in a bath-room) on bread and water, for terminating a dispute with the nurse by throwing a chair in her direction. It is the very first occasion of his ever having got into trouble, for he is a great favourite with the whole house, and one of the most amiable boys in the boy world. (He comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt-pin). If I go and look at your old house, as I shall if I go to Florence, I shall bring you back another leaf from the same tree as I plucked the last from. Ever, my dear Landor, Heartily and affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. John Delane.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Monday, Sept. 12th, 1853._ MY DEAR DELANE, I am very much obliged to you, I assure you, for your frank and full reply to my note. Nothing could be more satisfactory, and I have to-day seen Mr. Gibson and placed my two small representatives under his charge. His manner is exactly what you describe him. I was greatly pleased with his genuineness altogether. We remain here until the tenth of next month, when I am going to desert my wife and family and run about Italy until Christmas. If I can execute any little commission for you or Mrs. Delane--in the Genoa street of silversmiths, or anywhere else--I shall be delighted to do so. I have been in the receipt of several letters from Macready lately, and rejoice to find him quite himself again, though I have great misgivings that he will lose his eldest boy before he can be got to India. Mrs. Dickens and her sister are proud of your message, and beg their kind regards to be forwarded in return; my other half being particularly comforted and encouraged by your account of Mr. Gibson. In this charge I am to include Mrs. Delane, who, I hope, will make an exchange of remembrances, and give me hers for mine. I never saw anything so ridiculous as this place at present. They expected the Emperor ten or twelve days ago, and put up all manner of triumphal arches made of evergreens, which look like tea-leaves now, and will take a withered and weird appearance hardly to be foreseen, long before the twenty-fifth, when the visit is vaguely expected to come off. In addition to these faded garlands all over the leading streets, there are painted eagles hoisted over gateways and sprawling across a hundred ways, which have been washed out by the rain and are now being blistered by the sun, until they look horribly ludicrous. And a number of our benighted compatriots who came over to see a perfect blaze of _fêtes_, go wandering among these shrivelled preparations and staring at ten thousand flag-poles without any flags upon them, with a kind of indignant curiosity and personal injury quite irresistible. With many thanks, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] BOULOGNE, _Sunday, Sept. 18th, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, COURIER. Edward Kaub will bring this. He turned up yesterday, accounting for his delay by waiting for a written recommendation, and having at the last moment (as a foreigner, not being an Englishman) a passport to get. I quite agree with you as to his appearance and manner, and have engaged him. It strikes me that it would be an excellent beginning if you would deliver him a neat and appropriate address, telling him what in your conscience you can find to tell of me favourably as a master, and particularly impressing upon him _readiness and punctuality_ on his part as the great things to be observed. I think it would have a much better effect than anything I could say in this stage, if said from yourself. But I shall be much obliged to you if you will act upon this hint forthwith. W. H. WILLS. No letter having arrived from the popular author of "The Larboard Fin,"[15] by this morning's post, I rather think one must be on the way in the pocket of Gordon's son. If Kaub calls for this before young Scotland arrives, you will understand if I do not herein refer to an unreceived letter. But I shall leave this open, until Kaub comes for it. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: The Lord John Russell.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, Sept. 21st, 1853._ MY DEAR LORD, Your note having been forwarded to me here, I cannot forbear thanking you with all my heart for your great kindness. Mr. Forster had previously sent me a copy of your letter to him, together with the expression of the high and lasting gratification he had in your handsome response. I know he feels it most sincerely. I became the prey of a perfect spasm of sensitive twinges, when I found that the close of "Bleak House" had not penetrated to "the wilds of the North" when your letter left those parts. I was so very much interested in it myself when I wrote it here last month, that I have a fond sort of faith in its interesting its readers. But for the hope that you may have got it by this time, I should refuse comfort. That supports me. The book has been a wonderful success. Its audience enormous. I fear there is not much chance of my being able to execute any little commission for Lady John anywhere in Italy. But I am going across the Alps, leaving here on the tenth of next month, and returning home to London for Christmas Day, and should indeed be happy if I could do her any dwarf service. You will be interested, I think, to hear that Poole lives happily on his pension, and lives within it. He is quite incapable of any mental exertion, and what he would have done without it I cannot imagine. I send it to him at Paris every quarter. It is something, even amid the estimation in which you are held, which is but a foreshadowing of what shall be by-and-by as the people advance, to be so gratefully remembered as he, with the best reason, remembers you. Forgive my saying this. But the manner of that transaction, no less than the matter, is always fresh in my memory in association with your name, and I cannot help it. My dear Lord, Yours very faithfully and obliged. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, Sept. 21st, 1853._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, The courier was unfortunately engaged. He offered to recommend another, but I had several applicants, and begged Mr. Wills to hold a grand review at the "Household Words" office, and select the man who is to bring me down as his victim. I am extremely sorry the man you recommend was not to be had. I should have been so delighted to take him. I am finishing "The Child's History," and clearing the way through "Household Words," in general, before I go on my trip. I forget whether I told you that Mr. Egg the painter and Mr. Collins are going with me. The other day I was in town. In case you should not have heard of the condition of that deserted village, I think it worth mentioning. All the streets of any note were unpaved, mountains high, and all the omnibuses were sliding down alleys, and looking into the upper windows of small houses. At eleven o'clock one morning I was positively _alone_ in Bond Street. I went to one of my tailors, and he was at Brighton. A smutty-faced woman among some gorgeous regimentals, half finished, had not the least idea when he would be back. I went to another of my tailors, and he was in an upper room, with open windows and surrounded by mignonette boxes, playing the piano in the bosom of his family. I went to my hosier's, and two of the least presentable of "the young men" of that elegant establishment were playing at draughts in the back shop. (Likewise I beheld a porter-pot hastily concealed under a Turkish dressing-gown of a golden pattern.) I then went wandering about to look for some ingenious portmanteau, and near the corner of St. James's Street saw a solitary being sitting in a trunk-shop, absorbed in a book which, on a close inspection, I found to be "Bleak House." I thought this looked well, and went in. And he really was more interested in seeing me, when he knew who I was, than any face I had seen in any house, every house I knew being occupied by painters, including my own. I went to the Athenæum that same night, to get my dinner, and it was shut up for repairs. I went home late, and had forgotten the key and was locked out. Preparations were made here, about six weeks ago, to receive the Emperor, who is not come yet. Meanwhile our countrymen (deluded in the first excitement) go about staring at these arrangements, with a personal injury upon them which is most ridiculous. And they _will_ persist in speaking an unknown tongue to the French people, who _will_ speak English to them. Kate and Georgina send their kindest loves. We are all quite well. Going to drop two small boys here, at school with a former Eton tutor highly recommended to me. Charley was heard of a day or two ago. He says his professor "is very short-sighted, always in green spectacles, always drinking weak beer, always smoking a pipe, and always at work." The last qualification seems to appear to Charley the most astonishing one. Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] HOTEL DE LA VILLA, MILAN, _Tuesday, Oct. 25th, 1853._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I have walked to that extent in Switzerland (walked over the Simplon on Sunday, as an addition to the other feats) that one pair of the new strong shoes has gone to be mended this morning, and the other is in but a poor way; the snow having played the mischief with them. On the Swiss side of the Simplon, we slept at the beastliest little town, in the wildest kind of house, where some fifty cats tumbled into the corridor outside our bedrooms all at once in the middle of the night--whether through the roof or not, I don't know; for it was dark when we got up--and made such a horrible and terrific noise that we started out of our beds in a panic. I strongly objected to opening the door lest they should get into the room and tear at us; but Edward opened his, and laid about him until he dispersed them. At Domo D'Ossola we had three immense bedrooms (Egg's bed twelve feet wide!), and a sala of imperceptible extent in the dim light of two candles and a wood fire; but were very well and very cheaply entertained. Here, we are, as you know, housed in the greatest comfort. We continue to get on very well together. We really do admirably. I lose no opportunity of inculcating the lesson that it is of no use to be out of temper in travelling, and it is very seldom wanted for any of us. Egg is an excellent fellow, and full of good qualities; I am sure a generous and staunch man at heart, and a good and honourable nature. I shall send Catherine from Genoa a list of the places where letters will find me. I shall hope to hear from you too, and shall be very glad indeed to do so. No more at present. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] CROCE DI MALTA, GENOA, _Saturday, Oct. 29th, 1853._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, We had thirty-one hours consecutively on the road between this and Milan, and arrived here in a rather damaged condition. We live at the top of this immense house, overlooking the port and sea, pleasantly and airily enough, though it is no joke to get so high, and though the apartment is rather vast and faded. The old walks are pretty much the same as ever, except that they have built behind the Peschiere on the San Bartolomeo hill, and changed the whole town towards San Pietro d'Arena, where we seldom went. The Bisagno looks just the same, strong just now, and with very little water in it. Vicoli stink exactly as they used to, and are fragrant with the same old flavour of very rotten cheese kept in very hot blankets. The Mezzaro pervades them as before. The old Jesuit college in the Strada Nuova is under the present government the Hôtel de Ville, and a very splendid caffé with a terrace garden has arisen between it and Palavicini's old palace. Another new and handsome caffé has been built in the Piazza Carlo Felice, between the old caffé of the Bei Arti (where Fletcher stopped for the bouquets in the green times, when we went to the ----'s party), and the Strada Carlo Felice. The old beastly gate and guardhouse on the Albaro road are still in their dear old beastly state, and the whole of that road is just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but the beggars in general are all cleared off, and our old one-armed Belisario made a sudden evaporation a year or two ago. I am going to the Peschiere to-day. The puppets are here, and the opera is open, but only with a buffo company, and without a buffet. We went to the Scala, where they did an opera of Verdi's, called "Il Trovatore," and a poor enough ballet. The whole performance miserable indeed. I wish you were here to take some of the old walks. It is quite strange to walk about alone. Good-bye, my dear Georgy. Pray tell me how Kate is. I rather fancy from her letter, though I scarcely know why, that she is not quite as well as she was at Boulogne. I was charmed with your account of the Plornishghenter and everything and everybody else. Kiss them all for me. Ever most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] H�TEL DES �TRANGERS, NAPLES, _Friday Night, Nov. 4th, 1853._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, Instead of embarking on Monday at Genoa, we were delayed (in consequence of the boat's being a day later when there are thirty-one days in the month) until Tuesday. Going aboard that morning at half-past nine, we found the steamer more than full of passengers from Marseilles, and in a state of confusion not to be described. We could get no places at the table, got our dinners how we could on deck, had no berths or sleeping accommodation of any kind, and had paid heavy first-class fares! To add to this, we got to Leghorn too late to steam away again that night, getting the ship's papers examined first--as the authorities said so, not being favourable to the new express English ship, English officered--and we lay off the lighthouse all night long. The scene on board beggars description. Ladies on the tables, gentlemen under the tables, and ladies and gentlemen lying indiscriminately on the open deck, arrayed like spoons on a sideboard. No mattresses, no blankets, nothing. Towards midnight, attempts were made by means of an awning and flags to make this latter scene remotely approach an Australian encampment; and we three lay together on the bare planks covered with overcoats. We were all gradually dozing off when a perfectly tropical rain fell, and in a moment drowned the whole ship. The rest of the night was passed upon the stairs, with an immense jumble of men and women. When anybody came up for any purpose we all fell down; and when anybody came down we all fell up again. Still, the good-humour in the English part of the passengers was quite extraordinary. There were excellent officers aboard, and the first mate lent me his cabin to wash in in the morning, which I afterwards lent to Egg and Collins. Then we and the Emerson Tennents (who were aboard) and the captain, the doctor, and the second officer went off on a jaunt together to Pisa, as the ship was to lie at Leghorn all day. The captain was a capital fellow, but I led him, facetiously, such a life all day, that I got almost everything altered at night. Emerson Tennent, with the greatest kindness, turned his son out of his state room (who, indeed, volunteered to go in the most amiable manner), and I got a good bed there. The store-room down by the hold was opened for Egg and Collins, and they slept with the moist sugar, the cheese in cut, the spices, the cruets, the apples and pears--in a perfect chandler's shop; in company with what the ----'s would call a "hold gent"--who had been so horribly wet through overnight that his condition frightened the authorities--a cat, and the steward--who dozed in an arm-chair, and all night long fell headforemost, once in every five minutes, on Egg, who slept on the counter or dresser. Last night I had the steward's own cabin, opening on deck, all to myself. It had been previously occupied by some desolate lady, who went ashore at Civita Vecchia. There was little or no sea, thank Heaven, all the trip; but the rain was heavier than any I have ever seen, and the lightning very constant and vivid. We were, with the crew, some two hundred people; with boats, at the utmost stretch, for one hundred, perhaps. I could not help thinking what would happen if we met with any accident; the crew being chiefly Maltese, and evidently fellows who would cut off alone in the largest boat on the least alarm. The speed (it being the crack express ship for the India mail) very high; also the running through all the narrow rocky channels. Thank God, however, here we are. Though the more sensible and experienced part of the passengers agreed with me this morning that it was not a thing to try often. We had an excellent table after the first day, the best wines and so forth, and the captain and I swore eternal friendship. Ditto the first officer and the majority of the passengers. We got into the bay about seven this morning, but could not land until noon. We towed from Civita Vecchia the entire Greek navy, I believe, consisting of a little brig-of-war, with great guns, fitted as a steamer, but disabled by having burst the bottom of her boiler in her first run. She was just big enough to carry the captain and a crew of six or so, but the captain was so covered with buttons and gold that there never would have been room for him on board to put these valuables away if he hadn't worn them, which he consequently did, all night. Whenever anything was wanted to be done, as slackening the tow-rope or anything of that sort, our officers roared at this miserable potentate, in violent English, through a speaking-trumpet, of which he couldn't have understood a word under the most favourable circumstances, so he did all the wrong things first, and the right things always last. The absence of any knowledge of anything not English on the part of the officers and stewards was most ridiculous. I met an Italian gentleman on the cabin steps, yesterday morning, vainly endeavouring to explain that he wanted a cup of tea for his sick wife. And when we were coming out of the harbour at Genoa, and it was necessary to order away that boat of music you remember, the chief officer (called aft for the purpose, as "knowing something of Italian,") delivered himself in this explicit and clear manner to the principal performer: "Now, signora, if you don't sheer off, you'll be run down; so you had better trice up that guitar of yours, and put about." We get on as well as possible, and it is extremely pleasant and interesting, and I feel that the change is doing me great and real service, after a long continuous strain upon the mind; but I am pleased to think that we are at our farthest point, and I look forward with joy to coming home again, to my old room, and the old walks, and all the old pleasant things. I wish I had arranged, or could have done so--for it would not have been easy--to find some letters here. It is a blank to stay for five days in a place without any. I don't think Edward knows fifty Italian words; but much more French is spoken in Italy now than when we were here, and he stumbles along somehow. I am afraid this is a dull letter, for I am very tired. You must take the will for the deed, my dear, and good night. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ROME, _Sunday Night, Nov. 13th, 1853._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, We arrived here yesterday afternoon, at between three and four. On sending to the post-office this morning, I received your pleasant little letter, and one from Miss Coutts, who is still at Paris. But to my amazement there was none from Catherine! You mention her writing, and I cannot but suppose that your two letters must have been posted together. However, I received none from her, and I have all manner of doubts respecting the plainness of its direction. They will not produce the letters here as at Genoa, but persist in looking them out at the post-office for you. I shall send again to-morrow, and every day until Friday, when we leave here. If I find no letter from her _to-morrow_, I shall write to her nevertheless by that post which brings this, so that you may both hear from me together. One night, at Naples, Edward came in, open-mouthed, to the table d'hôte where we were dining with the Tennents, to announce "The Marchese Garofalo." I at first thought it must be the little parrot-marquess who was once your escort from Genoa; but I found him to be a man (married to an Englishwoman) whom we used to meet at Ridgway's. He was very glad to see me, and I afterwards met him at dinner at Mr. Lowther's, our chargé d'affaires. Mr. Lowther was at the Rockingham play, and is a very agreeable fellow. We had an exceedingly pleasant dinner of eight, preparatory to which I was near having the ridiculous adventure of not being able to find the house and coming back dinnerless. I went in an open carriage from the hotel in all state, and the coachman, to my surprise, pulled up at the end of the Chiaja. "Behold the house," says he, "of Il Signor Larthoor!"--at the same time pointing with his whip into the seventh heaven, where the early stars were shining. "But the Signor Larthoor," returns the Inimitable darling, "lives at Pausilippo." "It is true," says the coachman (still pointing to the evening star), "but he lives high up the Salita Sant' Antonio, where no carriage ever yet ascended, and that is the house" (evening star as aforesaid), "and one must go on foot. Behold the Salita Sant' Antonio!" I went up it, a mile and a half I should think. I got into the strangest places, among the wildest Neapolitans--kitchens, washing-places, archways, stables, vineyards--was baited by dogs, answered in profoundly unintelligible Neapolitan, from behind lonely locked doors, in cracked female voices, quaking with fear; could hear of no such Englishman or any Englishman. By-and-by I came upon a Polenta-shop in the clouds, where an old Frenchman, with an umbrella like a faded tropical leaf (it had not rained for six weeks) was staring at nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand. To him I appealed concerning the Signor Larthoor. "Sir," said he, with the sweetest politeness, "can you speak French?" "Sir," said I, "a little." "Sir," said he, "I presume the Signor Loothere"--you will observe that he changed the name according to the custom of his country--"is an Englishman." I admitted that he was the victim of circumstances and had that misfortune. "Sir," said he, "one word more. _Has_ he a servant with a wooden leg?" "Great Heaven, sir," said I, "how do I know! I should think not, but it is possible." "It is always," said the Frenchman, "possible. Almost all the things of the world are always possible." "Sir," said I--you may imagine my condition and dismal sense of my own absurdity, by this time--"that is true." He then took an immense pinch of snuff, wiped the dust off his umbrella, led me to an arch commanding a wonderful view of the bay of Naples, and pointed deep into the earth from which I had mounted. "Below there, near the lamp, one finds an Englishman, with a servant with a wooden leg. It is always possible that he is the Signor Loothere." I had been asked at six, and it was now getting on for seven. I went down again in a state of perspiration and misery not to be described, and without the faintest hope of finding the place. But as I was going down to the lamp, I saw the strangest staircase up a dark corner, with a man in a white-waistcoat (evidently hired) standing on the top of it, fuming. I dashed in at a venture, found it was the place, made the most of the whole story, and was indescribably popular. The best of it was, that as nobody ever did find the place, he had put a servant at the bottom of the Salita, to "wait for an English gentleman." The servant (as he presently pleaded), deceived by the moustache, had allowed the English gentleman to pass unchallenged. The night before we left Naples we were at the San Carlo, where, with the Verdi rage of our old Genoa time, they were again doing the "Trovatore." It seemed rubbish on the whole to me, but was very fairly done. I think "La Tenco," the prima donna, will soon be a great hit in London. She is a very remarkable singer and a fine actress, to the best of my judgment on such premises. There seems to be no opera here, at present. There was a Festa in St. Peter's to-day, and the Pope passed to the Cathedral in state. We were all there. We leave here, please God, on Friday morning, and post to Florence in three days and a half. We came here by Vetturino. Upon the whole, the roadside inns are greatly improved since our time. Half-past three and half-past four have been, however, our usual times of rising on the road. I was in my old place at the Coliseum this morning, and it was as grand as ever. With that exception the ruined part of Rome--the real original Rome--looks smaller than my remembrance made it. It is the only place on which I have yet found that effect. We are in the old hotel. You are going to Bonchurch I suppose? will be there, perhaps, when this letter reaches you? I shall be pleased to think of you as at home again, and making the commodious family mansion look natural and home-like. I don't like to think of my room without anybody to peep into it now and then. Here is a world of travelling arrangements for me to settle, and here are Collins and Egg looking sideways at me with an occasional imploring glance as beseeching me to settle it. So I leave off. Good-night. Ever, my dearest Georgy, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Sir James Emerson Tennent.] H�TEL DES �LES BRITANNIQUES, PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, ROME, _Monday, Nov. 14th, 1853._ MY DEAR TENNENT, As I never made a good bargain in my life--except once, when, on going abroad, I let my house on excellent terms to an admirable tenant, who never paid anything--I sent Edward into the Casa Dies yesterday morning, while I invested the premises from the outside, and carefully surveyed them. It is a very clean, large, bright-looking house at the corner of the Via Gregoriana; not exactly in a part of Rome I should pick out for living in, and on what I should be disposed to call the wrong side of the street. However, this is not to the purpose. Signor Dies has no idea of letting an apartment for a short time--scouted the idea of a month--signified that he could not be brought to the contemplation of two months--was by no means clear that he could come down to the consideration of three. This of course settled the business speedily. This hotel is no longer kept by the Melloni I spoke of, but is even better kept than in his time, and is a very admirable house. I have engaged a small apartment for you to be ready on Thursday afternoon (at two piastres and a half--two-and-a-half per day--sitting-room and three bedrooms, one double-bedded and two not). If you would like to change to ours, which is a very good one, on Friday morning, you can of course do so. As our dining-room is large, and there is no table d'hôte here, I will order dinner in it for our united parties at six on Thursday. You will be able to decide how to arrange for the remainder of your stay, after being here and looking about you--two really necessary considerations in Rome. Pray make my kind regards to Lady Tennent, and Miss Tennent, and your good son, who became homeless for my sake. Mr. Egg and Mr. Collins desire to be also remembered. It has been beautiful weather since we left Naples, until to-day, when it rains in a very dogged, sullen, downcast, and determined manner. We have been speculating at breakfast on the possibility of its raining in a similar manner at Naples, and of your wandering about the hotel, refusing consolation. I grieve to report the Orvieto considerably damaged by the general vine failure, but still far from despicable. Montefiascone (the Est wine you know) is to be had here; and we have had one bottle in the very finest condition, and one in a second-rate state. The Coliseum, in its magnificent old decay, is as grand as ever; and with the electric telegraph darting through one of its ruined arches like a sunbeam and piercing direct through its cruel old heart, is even grander. Believe me always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] ROME, _Monday, Nov. 14th, 1853._ MY DEAREST CATHERINE, As I have mentioned in my letter to Georgy (written last night but posted with this), I received her letter without yours, to my unbounded astonishment. This morning, on sending again to the post-office, I at last got yours, and most welcome it is with all its contents. I found Layard at Naples, who went up Vesuvius with us, and was very merry and agreeable. He is travelling with Lord and Lady Somers, and Lord Somers being laid up with an attack of malaria fever, Layard had a day to spare. Craven, who was Lord Normanby's Secretary of Legation in Paris, now lives at Naples, and is married to a French lady. He is very hospitable and hearty, and seemed to have vague ideas that something might be done in a pretty little private theatre he has in his house. He told me of Fanny Kemble and the Sartoris's being here. I have also heard of Thackeray's being here--I don't know how truly. Lockhart is here, and, I fear, very ill. I mean to go and see him. We are living in the old hotel, which is not now kept by Meloni, who has retired. I don't know whether you recollect an apartment at the top of the house, to which we once ran up with poor Roche to see the horses start in the race at the Carnival time? That is ours, in which I at present write. We have a large back dining-room, a handsome front drawing-room, looking into the Piazza del Popolo, and three front bedrooms, all on a floor. The whole costs us about four shillings a day each. The hotel is better kept than ever. There is a little kitchen to each apartment where the dinner is kept hot. There is no house comparable to it in Paris, and it is better than Mivart's. We start for Florence, post, on Friday morning, and I am bargaining for a carriage to take us on to Venice. Edward is an excellent servant, and always cheerful and ready for his work. He knows no Italian, except the names of a few things, but French is far more widely known here now than in our time. Neither is he an experienced courier as to roads and so forth; but he picks up all that I want to know, here and there, somehow or other. I am perfectly pleased with him, and would rather have him than an older hand. Poor dear Roche comes back to my mind though, often. I have written to engage the courier from Turin into France, from _Tuesday, the 6th December_. This will bring us home some two days after the tenth, probably. I wrote to Charley from Naples, giving him his choice of meeting me at Lyons, in Paris, or at Boulogne. I gave him full instructions what to do if he arrived before me, and he will write to me at Turin saying where I shall find him. I shall be a day or so later than I supposed as the nearest calculation I could make when I wrote to him; but his waiting for me at an hotel will not matter. We have had delightful weather, with one day's exception, until to-day, when it rained very heavily and suddenly. Egg and Collins have gone to the Vatican, and I am "going" to try whether I can hit out anything for the Christmas number. Give my love to Forster, and tell him I won't write to him until I hear from him. I have not come across any English whom I know except Layard and the Emerson Tennents, who will be here on Thursday from Civita Vecchia, and are to dine with us. The losses up to this point have been two pairs of shoes (one mine and one Egg's), Collins's snuff-box, and Egg's dressing-gown. We observe the managerial punctuality in all our arrangements, and have not had any difference whatever. I have been reserving this side all through my letter, in the conviction that I had something else to tell you. If I had, I cannot remember what it is. I introduced myself to Salvatore at Vesuvius, and reminded him of the night when poor Le Gros fell down the mountains. He was full of interest directly, remembered the very hole, put on his gold-banded cap, and went up with us himself. He did not know that Le Gros was dead, and was very sorry to hear it. He asked after the ladies, and hoped they were very happy, to which I answered, "Very." The cone is completely changed since our visit, is not at all recognisable as the same place; and there is no fire from the mountain, though there is a great deal of smoke. Its last demonstration was in 1850. I shall be glad to think of your all being at home again, as I suppose you will be soon after the receipt of this. Will you see to the invitations for Christmas Day, and write to Lætitia? I shall be very happy to be at home again myself, and to embrace you; for of course I miss you _very much_, though I feel that I could not have done a better thing to clear my mind and freshen it up again, than make this expedition. If I find Charley much ahead of me, I shall start on through a night or so to meet him, and leave the others to catch us up. I look upon the journey as almost closed at Turin. My best love to Mamey, and Katey, and Sydney, and Harry, and the darling Plornishghenter. We often talk about them, and both my companions do so with interest. They always send all sorts of messages to you, which I never deliver. God bless you! Take care of yourself. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] ROME, _Thursday Afternoon, Nov. 17th, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, Just as I wrote the last words of the enclosed little story for the Christmas number just now, Edward brought in your letter. Also one from Forster (tell him) which I have not yet opened. I will write again--and write to him--from Florence. I am delighted to have news of you. The enclosed little paper for the Christmas number is in a character that nobody else is likely to hit, and which is pretty sure to be considered pleasant. Let Forster have the MS. with the proof, and I know he will correct it to the minutest point. I have a notion of another little story, also for the Christmas number. If I can do it at Venice, I will, and send it straight on. But it is not easy to work under these circumstances. In travelling we generally get up about three; and in resting we are perpetually roaming about in all manner of places. Not to mention my being laid hold of by all manner of people. KEEP "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" IMAGINATIVE! is the solemn and continual Conductorial Injunction. Delighted to hear of Mrs. Gaskell's contributions. Yes by all manner of means to Lady Holland. Will you ask her whether she has Sydney Smith's letters to me, which I placed (at Mrs. Smith's request) either in Mrs. Smith's own hands or in Mrs. Austin's? I cannot remember which, but I think the latter. In making up the Christmas number, don't consider my paper or papers, with any reference saving to where they will fall best. I have no liking, in the case, for any particular place. All perfectly well. Companion moustaches (particularly Egg's) dismal in the extreme. Kindest regards to Mrs. Wills. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] FLORENCE, _Monday, Nov. 21st, 1853._ H. W. MY DEAR WILLS, I sent you by post from Rome, on Wednesday last, a little story for the Christmas number, called "The Schoolboy's Story." I have an idea of another short one, to be called "Nobody's Story," which I hope to be able to do at Venice, and to send you straight home before this month is out. I trust you have received the first safely. Edward continues to do extremely well. He is always, early and late, what you have seen him. He is a very steady fellow, a little too bashful for a courier even; settles prices of everything now, as soon as we come into an hotel; and improves fast. His knowledge of Italian is painfully defective, and, in the midst of a howling crowd at a post-house or railway station, this deficiency perfectly stuns him. I was obliged last night to get out of the carriage, and pluck him from a crowd of porters who were putting our baggage into wrong conveyances--by cursing and ordering about in all directions. I should think about ten substantives, the names of ten common objects, form his whole Italian stock. It matters very little at the hotels, where a great deal of French is spoken now; but, on the road, if none of his party knew Italian, it would be a very serious inconvenience indeed. Will you write to Ryland if you have not heard from him, and ask him what the Birmingham reading-nights are really to be? For it is ridiculous enough that I positively don't know. Can't a Saturday Night in a Truck District, or a Sunday Morning among the Ironworkers (a fine subject) be knocked out in the course of the same visit? If you should see any managing man you know in the Oriental and Peninsular Company, I wish you would very gravely mention to him from me that if they are not careful what they are about with their steamship _Valetta_, between Marseilles and Naples, they will suddenly find that they will receive a blow one fine day in _The Times_, which it will be a very hard matter for them ever to recover. When I sailed in her from Genoa, there had been taken on board, _with no caution in most cases from the agent, or hint of discomfort_, at least forty people of both sexes for whom there was no room whatever. I am a pretty old traveller as you know, but I never saw anything like the manner in which pretty women were compelled to lie among the men in the great cabin and on the bare decks. The good humour was beyond all praise, but the natural indignation very great; and I was repeatedly urged to stand up for the public in "Household Words," and to write a plain description of the facts to _The Times_. If I had done either, and merely mentioned that all these people paid heavy first-class fares, I will answer for it that they would have been beaten off the station in a couple of months. I did neither, because I was the best of friends with the captain and all the officers, and never saw such a fine set of men; so admirable in the discharge of their duty, and so zealous to do their best by everybody. It is impossible to praise them too highly. But there is a strong desire at all the ports along the coast to throw impediments in the way of the English service, and to favour the French and Italian boats. In those boats (which I know very well) great care is taken of the passengers, and the accommodation is very good. If the Peninsula and Oriental add to all this the risk of such an exposure as they are _certain_ to get (if they go on so) in _The Times_, they are dead sure to get a blow from the public which will make them stagger again. I say nothing of the number of the passengers and the room in the ship's boats, though the frightful consideration the contrast presented must have been in more minds than mine. I speak only of the taking people for whom there is no sort of accommodation as the most decided swindle, and the coolest, I ever did with my eyes behold. Kindest regards from fellow-travellers. Ever, my dear Wills, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] VENICE, _Friday, November 25th, 1853._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, We found an English carriage from Padua at Florence, and hired it to bring it back again. We travelled post with four horses all the way (from Padua to this place there is a railroad) and travelled all night. We left Florence at half-past six in the morning, and got to Padua at eleven next day--yesterday. The cold at night was most intense. I don't think I have ever felt it colder. But our carriage was very comfortable, and we had some wine and some rum to keep us warm. We came by Bologna (where we had tea) and Ferrara. You may imagine the delays in the night when I tell you that each of our passports, after receiving _six visés_ at Florence, received in the course of the one night, _nine more_, every one of which was written and sealed; somebody being slowly knocked out of bed to do it every time! It really was excruciating. Landor had sent me a letter to his son, and on the day before we left Florence I thought I would go out to Fiesoli and leave it. So I got a little one-horse open carriage and drove off alone. We were within half a mile of the Villa Landoro, and were driving down a very narrow lane like one of those at Albaro, when I saw an elderly lady coming towards us, very well dressed in silk of the Queen's blue, and walking freshly and briskly against the wind at a good round pace. It was a bright, cloudless, very cold day, and I thought she walked with great spirit, as if she enjoyed it. I also thought (perhaps that was having him in my mind) that her ruddy face was shaped like Landor's. All of a sudden the coachman pulls up, and looks enquiringly at me. "What's the matter?" says I. "Ecco la Signora Landoro?" says he. "For the love of Heaven, don't stop," says I. "_I_ don't know her, I am only going to the house to leave a letter--go on!" Meanwhile she (still coming on) looked at me, and I looked at her, and we were both a good deal confused, and so went our several ways. Altogether, I think it was as disconcerting a meeting as I ever took part in, and as odd a one. Under any other circumstances I should have introduced myself, but the separation made the circumstances so peculiar that "I didn't like." The Plornishghenter is evidently the greatest, noblest, finest, cleverest, brightest, and most brilliant of boys. Your account of him is most delightful, and I hope to find another letter from you somewhere on the road, making me informed of his demeanour on your return. On which occasion, as on every other, I have no doubt he will have distinguished himself as an irresistibly attracting, captivating May-Roon-Ti-Groon-Ter. Give him a good many kisses for me. I quite agree with Syd as to his ideas of paying attention to the old gentleman. It's not bad, but deficient in originality. The usual deficiency of an inferior intellect with so great a model before him. I am very curious to see whether the Plorn remembers me on my reappearance. I meant to have gone to work this morning, and to have tried a second little story for the Christmas number of "Household Words," but my letters have (most pleasantly) put me out, and I defer all such wise efforts until to-morrow. Egg and Collins are out in a gondola with a servitore di piazza. You will find this but a stupid letter, but I really have no news. We go to the opera, whenever there is one, see sights, eat and drink, sleep in a natural manner two or three nights, and move on again. Edward was a little crushed at Padua yesterday. He had been extraordinarily cold all night in the rumble, and had got out our clothes to dress, and I think must have been projecting a five or six hours' sleep, when I announced that he was to come on here in an hour and a half to get the rooms and order dinner. He fell into a sudden despondency of the profoundest kind, but was quite restored when we arrived here between eight and nine. We found him waiting at the Custom House with a gondola in his usual brisk condition. It is extraordinary how few English we see. With the exception of a gentlemanly young fellow (in a consumption I am afraid), married to the tiniest little girl, in a brown straw hat, and travelling with his sister and her sister, and a consumptive single lady, travelling with a maid and a Scotch terrier christened Trotty Veck, we have scarcely seen any, and have certainly spoken to none, since we left Switzerland. These were aboard the _Valetta_, where the captain and I indulged in all manner of insane suppositions concerning the straw hat--the "Little Matron" we called her; by which name she soon became known all over the ship. The day we entered Rome, and the moment we entered it, there was the Little Matron, alone with antiquity--and Murray--on the wall. The very first church I entered, there was the Little Matron. On the last afternoon, when I went alone to St. Peter's, there was the Little Matron and her party. The best of it is, that I was extremely intimate with them, invited them to Tavistock House, when they come home in the spring, and have not the faintest idea of their name. There was no table d'hôte at Rome, or at Florence, but there is one here, and we dine at it to-day, so perhaps we may stumble upon somebody. I have heard from Charley this morning, who appoints (wisely) Paris as our place of meeting. I had a letter from Coote, at Florence, informing me that his volume of "Household Songs" was ready, and requesting permission to dedicate it to me. Which of course I gave. I am beginning to think of the Birmingham readings. I suppose you won't object to be taken to hear them? This is the last place at which we shall make a stay of more than one day. We shall stay at Parma one, and at Turin one, supposing De la Rue to have been successful in taking places with the courier into France for the day on which we want them (he was to write to bankers at Turin to do it), and then we shall come hard and fast home. I feel almost there already, and shall be delighted to close the pleasant trip, and get back to my own Piccola Camera--if, being English, you understand what _that_ is. My best love and kisses to Mamey, Katey, Sydney, Harry, and the noble Plorn. Last, not least, to yourself, and many of them. I will not wait over to-morrow, tell Kate, for her letter; but will write then, whether or no. Ever, my dearest Georgy, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Marcus Stone.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _December 19th, 1853._ MY DEAR MARCUS, You made an excellent sketch from a book of mine which I have received (and have preserved) with great pleasure. Will you accept from me, in remembrance of it, _this_ little book? I believe it to be true, though it may be sometimes not as genteel as history has a habit of being. Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTE: [15] Meaning Mr. W. H. Wills himself. 1854. NARRATIVE. The summer of this year was also spent at Boulogne, M. Beaucourt being again the landlord; but the house, though still on the same "property," stood on the top of the hill, above the Moulineaux, and was called the Villa du Camp de Droite. In the early part of the year Charles Dickens paid several visits to the English provinces, giving readings from his books at many of the large manufacturing towns, and always for some good and charitable purpose. He was still at work upon "Hard Times," which was finished during the summer, and was constantly occupied with "Household Words." Many of our letters for this year are to the contributors to this journal. The last is an unusually interesting one. He had for some time past been much charmed with the writings of a certain Miss Berwick, who, he knew, to be a contributor under a feigned name. When at last the lady confided her real name, and he discovered in the young poetess the daughter of his dear friends, Mr.[16] and Mrs. Procter, the "new sensation" caused him intense surprise, and the greatest pleasure and delight. Miss Adelaide Procter was, from this time, a frequent contributor to "Household Words," more especially to the Christmas numbers. There are really very few letters in this year requiring any explanation from us--many explaining themselves, and many having allusion to incidents in the past year, which have been duly noted by us for 1853. The portrait mentioned in the letter to Mr. Collins, for which he was sitting to Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A., was to be one of a series of oil sketches of the then celebrated literary men of the day, in their studies. We believe this portrait to be now in the possession of Mrs. Ward. In explanation of the letter to Mr. John Saunders on the subject of the production of the latter's play, called "Love's Martyrdom," we will give the dramatist's own words: "Having printed for private circulation a play entitled 'Love's Martyrdom,' and for which I desired to obtain the independent judgment of some of our most eminent literary men, before seeking the ordeal of the stage, I sent a copy to Mr. Dickens, and the letter in question is his acknowledgment. * * * * * "He immediately took steps for the introduction of the play to the theatre. At first he arranged with Mr. Phelps, of Sadler's Wells, but subsequently, with that gentleman's consent, removed it to the Haymarket. There it was played with Miss Helen Faucit in the character of Margaret, Miss Swanborough (who shortly after married and left the stage) as Julia, Mr. Barry Sullivan as Franklyn, and Mr. Howe as Laneham. "As far as the play itself was concerned, it was received on all sides as a genuine dramatic and poetic success, achieved, however, as an eminent critic came to my box to say, through greater difficulties than he had ever before seen a dramatic work pass through. The time has not come for me to speak freely of these, but I may point to two of them: the first being the inadequate rehearsals, which caused Mr. Dickens to tell me on the stage, four or five days only before the first performance, that the play was not then in as good a state as it would have been in at Paris three weeks earlier. The other was the breakdown of the performer of a most important secondary part; a collapse so absolute that he was changed by the management before the second representation of the piece." This ill-luck of the beginning, pursued the play to its close. "The Haymarket Theatre was at the time in the very lowest state of prostration, through the Crimean War; the habitual frequenters were lovers of comedy, and enjoyers of farce and burlesque; and there was neither the money nor the faith to call to the theatre by the usual methods, vigorously and discriminatingly pursued, the multitudes that I believed could have been so called to a better and more romantic class of comedy. "Even under these and other, similarly depressing circumstances, the nightly receipts were about £60, the expenses being £80; and on the last--an author's--night, there was an excellent and enthusiastic house, yielding, to the best of my recollection, about £140, but certainly between £120 and £140. And with that night--the sixth or seventh--the experiment ended." [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 7th, 1854._ MY DEAR LANDOR, I heartily assure you that to have your name coupled with anything I have done is an honour and a pleasure to me. I cannot say that I am sorry that you should have thought it necessary to write to me, for it is always delightful to me to see your hand, and to know (though I want no outward and visible sign as an assurance of the fact) that you are ever the same generous, earnest, gallant man. Catherine and Georgina send their kind loves. So does Walter Landor, who came home from school with high judicial commendation and a prize into the bargain. Ever, my dear Landor, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday, January 13th, 1854._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, On the very day after I sent the Christmas number to Rockingham, I heard of your being at Brighton. I should have sent another there, but that I had a misgiving I might seem to be making too much of it. For, when I thought of the probability of the Rockingham copy going on to Brighton, and pictured to myself the advent of two of those very large envelopes at once at Junction House at breakfast time, a sort of comic modesty overcame me. I was heartily pleased with the Birmingham audience, which was a very fine one. I never saw, nor do I suppose anybody ever did, such an interesting sight as the working people's night. There were two thousand five hundred of them there, and a more delicately observant audience it is impossible to imagine. They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried with most delightful earnestness, and animated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together. It is an enormous place for the purpose; but I had considered all that carefully, and I believe made the most distant person hear as well as if I had been reading in my own room. I was a little doubtful before I began on the first night whether it was quite practicable to conceal the requisite effort; but I soon had the satisfaction of finding that it was, and that we were all going on together, in the first page, as easily, to all appearance, as if we had been sitting round the fire. I am obliged to go out on Monday at five and to dine out; but I will be at home at any time before that hour that you may appoint. You say you are only going to stay one night in town; but if you could stay two, and would dine with us alone on Tuesday, _that_ is the plan that we should all like best. Let me have one word from you by post on Monday morning. Few things that I saw, when I was away, took my fancy so much as the Electric Telegraph, piercing, like a sunbeam, right through the cruel old heart of the Coliseum at Rome. And on the summit of the Alps, among the eternal ice and snow, there it was still, with its posts sustained against the sweeping mountain winds by clusters of great beams--to say nothing of its being at the bottom of the sea as we crossed the Channel. With kindest loves, Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, Most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, January 16th, 1854._ MY DEAR MARY, It is all very well to pretend to love me as you do. Ah! If you loved as _I_ love, Mary! But, when my breast is tortured by the perusal of such a letter as yours, Falkland, Falkland, madam, becomes my part in "The Rivals," and I play it with desperate earnestness. As thus: FALKLAND (_to Acres_). Then you see her, sir, sometimes? ACRES. See her! Odds beams and sparkles, yes. See her acting! Night after night. FALKLAND (_aside and furious_). Death and the devil! Acting, and I not there! Pray, sir (_with constrained calmness_), what does she act? ACRES. Odds, monthly nurses and babbies! Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, "which, wotever it is, my dear (_mimicking_), I likes it brought reg'lar and draw'd mild!" _That's_ very like her. FALKLAND. Confusion! Laceration! Perhaps, sir, perhaps she sometimes acts--ha! ha! perhaps she sometimes acts, I say--eh! sir?--a--ha, ha, ha! a fairy? (_With great bitterness._) ACRES. Odds, gauzy pinions and spangles, yes! You should hear her sing as a fairy. You should see her dance as a fairy. Tol de rol lol--la--lol--liddle diddle. (_Sings and dances_). _That's_ very like her. FALKLAND. Misery! while I, devoted to her image, can scarcely write a line now and then, or pensively read aloud to the people of Birmingham. (_To him._) And they applaud her, no doubt they applaud her, sir. And she--I see her! Curtsies and smiles! And they--curses on them! they laugh and--ha, ha, ha!--and clap their hands--and say it's very good. Do they not say it's very good, sir? Tell me. Do they not? ACRES. Odds, thunderings and pealings, of course they do! and the third fiddler, little Tweaks, of the county town, goes into fits. Ho, ho, ho, I can't bear it (_mimicking_); take me out! Ha, ha, ha! O what a one she is! She'll be the death of me. Ha, ha, ha, ha! _That's_ very like her! FALKLAND. Damnation! Heartless Mary! (_Rushes out._) Scene opens, and discloses coals of fire, heaped up into form of letters, representing the following inscription: When the praise thou meetest To thine ear is sweetest, O then REMEMBER JOE! (_Curtain falls._) [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, Jan. 16th, 1854._ MY DEAR CERJAT, Guilty. The accused pleads guilty, but throws himself upon the mercy of the court. He humbly represents that his usual hour for getting up, in the course of his travels, was three o'clock in the morning, and his usual hour for going to bed, nine or ten the next night. That the places in which he chiefly deviated from these rules of hardship, were Rome and Venice; and that at those cities of fame he shut himself up in solitude, and wrote Christmas papers for the incomparable publication known as "Household Words." That his correspondence at all times, arising out of the business of the said "Household Words" alone, was very heavy. That his offence, though undoubtedly committed, was unavoidable, and that a nominal punishment will meet the justice of the case. We had only three bad days out of the whole time. After Naples, which was very hot, we had very cold, clear, bright weather. When we got to Chamounix, we found the greater part of the inns shut up and the people gone. No visitors whatsoever, and plenty of snow. These were the very best circumstances under which to see the place, and we stayed a couple of days at the Hôtel de Londres (hastily re-furbished for our entertainment), and climbed through the snow to the Mer de Glace, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Then we went, in mule procession (I walking) to the old hotel at Martigny, where Collins was ill, and I suppose I bored Egg to death by talking all the evening about the time when you and I were there together. Naples (a place always painful to me, in the intense degradation of the people) seems to have only three classes of inhabitants left in it--priests, soldiers (standing army one hundred thousand strong), and spies. Of macaroni we ate very considerable quantities everywhere; also, for the benefit of Italy, we took our share of every description of wine. At Naples I found Layard, the Nineveh traveller, who is a friend of mine and an admirable fellow; so we fraternised and went up Vesuvius together, and ate more macaroni and drank more wine. At Rome, the day after our arrival, they were making a saint at St. Peter's; on which occasion I was surprised to find what an immense number of pounds of wax candles it takes to make the regular, genuine article. From Turin to Paris, over the Mont Cenis, we made only one journey. The Rhone, being frozen and foggy, was not to be navigated, so we posted from Lyons to Chalons, and everybody else was doing the like, and there were no horses to be got, and we were stranded at midnight in amazing little cabarets, with nothing worth mentioning to eat in them, except the iron stove, which was rusty, and the billiard-table, which was musty. We left Turin on a Tuesday evening, and arrived in Paris on a Friday evening; where I found my son Charley, hot--or I should rather say cold--from Germany, with his arms and legs so grown out of his coat and trousers, that I was ashamed of him, and was reduced to the necessity of taking him, under cover of night, to a ready-made establishment in the Palais Royal, where they put him into balloon-waisted pantaloons, and increased my confusion. Leaving Calais on the evening of Sunday, the 10th of December; fact of distinguished author's being aboard, was telegraphed to Dover; thereupon authorities of Dover Railway detained train to London for distinguished author's arrival, rather to the exasperation of British public. D. A. arrived at home between ten and eleven that night, thank God, and found all well and happy. I think you see _The Times_, and if so, you will have seen a very graceful and good account of the Birmingham readings. It was the most remarkable thing that England could produce, I think, in the way of a vast intelligent assemblage; and the success was most wonderful and prodigious--perfectly overwhelming and astounding altogether. They wound up by giving my wife a piece of plate, having given me one before; and when you come to dine here (may it be soon!) it shall be duly displayed in the centre of the table. Tell Mrs. Cerjat, to whom my love, and all our loves, that I have highly excited them at home here by giving them an account in detail of all your daughters; further, that the way in which Catherine and Georgina have questioned me and cross-questioned me about you all, notwithstanding, is maddening. Mrs. Watson has been obliged to pass her Christmas at Brighton alone with her younger children, in consequence of her two eldest boys coming home to Rockingham from school with the whooping-cough. The quarantine expires to-day, however; and she drives here, on her way back into Northamptonshire, to-morrow. The sad affair of the Preston strike remains unsettled; and I hear, on strong authority, that if that were settled, the Manchester people are prepared to strike next. Provisions very dear, but the people very temperate and quiet in general. So ends this jumble, which looks like the index to a chapter in a book, I find, when I read it over. Ever, my dear Cerjat, heartily your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 18th, 1854._ MY DEAR SIR, I am quite delighted to find that you are so well satisfied, and that the enterprise has such a light upon it. I think I never was better pleased in my life than I was with my Birmingham friends. That principle of fair representation of all orders carefully carried out, I believe, will do more good than any of us can yet foresee. Does it not seem a strange thing to consider that I have never yet seen with these eyes of mine, a mechanic in any recognised position on the platform of a Mechanics' Institution? Mr. Wills may be expected to sink, shortly, under the ravages of letters from all parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland, proposing readings. He keeps up his spirits, but I don't see how they are to carry him through. Mrs. Dickens and Miss Hogarth beg their kindest regards; and I am, my dear sir, with much regard, too, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 30th, 1854._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, Indeed there is no fear of my thinking you the owner of a cold heart. I am more than three parts disposed, however, to be ferocious with you for ever writing down such a preposterous truism. My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else--the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time--the men who, through long years to come, will do more to damage the real useful truths of political economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life; the addled heads who would take the average of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a soldier in nankeens on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur, and who would comfort the labourer in travelling twelve miles a day to and from his work, by telling him that the average distance of one inhabited place from another in the whole area of England, is not more than four miles. Bah! What have you to do with these? I shall put the book upon a private shelf (after reading it) by "Once upon a Time." I should have buried my pipe of peace and sent you this blast of my war-horn three or four days ago, but that I have been reading to a little audience of three thousand five hundred at Bradford. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, March 7th, 1854._ MY DEAR WHITE, I am tardy in answering your letter; but "Hard Times," and an immense amount of enforced correspondence, are my excuse. To you a sufficient one, I know. As I should judge from outward and visible appearances, I have exactly as much chance of seeing the Russian fleet reviewed by the Czar as I have of seeing the English fleet reviewed by the Queen. "Club Law" made me laugh very much when I went over it in the proof yesterday. It is most capitally done, and not (as I feared it might be) too directly. It is in the next number but one. Mrs. ---- has gone stark mad--and stark naked--on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t'other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went out in that trim she would be invisible. She is now in a madhouse, and, I fear, hopelessly insane. One of the curious manifestations of her disorder is that she can bear nothing black. There is a terrific business to be done, even when they are obliged to put coals on her fire. ---- has a thing called a Psycho-grapher, which writes at the dictation of spirits. It delivered itself, a few nights ago, of this extraordinarily lucid message: X. Y. Z! upon which it was gravely explained by the true believers that "the spirits were out of temper about something." Said ---- had a great party on Sunday, when it was rumoured "a count was going to raise the dead." I stayed till the ghostly hour, but the rumour was unfounded, for neither count nor plebeian came up to the spiritual scratch. It is really inexplicable to me that a man of his calibre can be run away with by such small deer. _� propos_ of spiritual messages comes in Georgina, and, hearing that I am writing to you, delivers the following enigma to be conveyed to Mrs. White: "Wyon of the Mint lives _at_ the Mint." Feeling my brain going after this, I only trust it with loves from all to all. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _March 17th, 1854._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, I have read the article with much interest. It is most conscientiously done, and presents a great mass of curious information condensed into a surprisingly small space. I have made a slight note or two here and there, with a soft pencil, so that a touch of indiarubber will make all blank again. And I earnestly entreat your attention to the point (I have been working upon it, weeks past, in "Hard Times") which I have jocosely suggested on the last page but one. The English are, so far as I know, the hardest-worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if, in their wretched intervals of pleasure, they read for amusement and do no worse. They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them! Affectionately yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," NO. 16, WELLINGTON STREET, NORTH STRAND, _Wednesday, April 12th, 1854._ * * * * * I know all the walks for many and many miles round about Malvern, and delightful walks they are. I suppose you are already getting very stout, very red, very jovial (in a physical point of view) altogether. Mark and I walked to Dartford from Greenwich, last Monday, and found Mrs. ---- acting "The Stranger" (with a strolling company from the Standard Theatre) in Mr. Munn's schoolroom. The stage was a little wider than your table here, and its surface was composed of loose boards laid on the school forms. Dogs sniffed about it during the performances, and _the_ carpenter's highlows were ostentatiously taken off and displayed in the proscenium. We stayed until a quarter to ten, when we were obliged to fly to the railroad, but we sent the landlord of the hotel down with the following articles: 1 bottle superior old port, 1 do. do. golden sherry, 1 do. do. best French brandy, 1 do. do. 1st quality old Tom gin, 1 bottle superior prime Jamaica rum, 1 do. do. small still _Isla_ whiskey, 1 kettle boiling water, two pounds finest white lump sugar, Our cards, 1 lemon, and Our compliments. The effect we had previously made upon the theatrical company by being beheld in the first two chairs--there was nearly a pound in the house--was altogether electrical. My ladies send their kindest regards, and are disappointed at your not saying that you drink two-and-twenty tumblers of the limpid element, every day. The children also unite in "loves," and the Plornishghenter, on being asked if he would send his, replies "Yes--man," which we understand to signify cordial acquiescence. Forster just come back from lecturing at Sherborne. Describes said lecture as "Blaze of Triumph." H. W. AGAIN. Miss--I mean Mrs.--Bell's story very nice. I have sent it to the printer, and entitled it "The Green Ring and the Gold Ring." This apartment looks desolate in your absence; but, O Heavens, how tidy! F. W. Mrs. Wills supposed to have gone into a convent at Somers Town. My dear Wills, Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday Night, April 15th, 1854._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I have read the "Fatal Revenge." Don't do what the minor theatrical people call "despi-ser" me, but I think it's very bad. The concluding narrative is by far the most meritorious part of the business. Still, the people are so very convulsive and tumble down so many places, and are always knocking other people's bones about in such a very irrational way, that I object. The way in which earthquakes won't swallow the monsters, and volcanoes in eruption won't boil them, is extremely aggravating. Also their habit of bolting when they are going to explain anything. You have sent me a very different and a much better book; and for that I am truly grateful. With the dust of "Maturin" in my eyes, I sat down and read "The Death of Friends," and the dust melted away in some of those tears it is good to shed. I remember to have read "The Backroom Window" some years ago, and I have associated it with you ever since. It is a most delightful paper. But the two volumes are all delightful, and I have put them on a shelf where you sit down with Charles Lamb again, with Talfourd's vindication of him hard by. We never meet. I hope it is not irreligious, but in this strange London I have an inclination to adapt a portion of the Church Service to our common experience. Thus: "We have left unmet the people whom we ought to have met, and we have met the people whom we ought not to have met, and there seems to be no help in us." But I am always, my dear Procter, (At a distance), Very cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _April 21st, 1854._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I safely received the paper from Mr. Shaen, welcomed it with three cheers, and instantly despatched it to the printer, who has it in hand now. I have no intention of striking. The monstrous claims at domination made by a certain class of manufacturers, and the extent to which the way is made easy for working men to slide down into discontent under such hands, are within my scheme; but I am not going to strike, so don't be afraid of me. But I wish you would look at the story yourself, and judge where and how near I seem to be approaching what you have in your mind. The first two months of it will show that. I will "make my will" on the first favourable occasion. We were playing games last night, and were fearfully clever. With kind regards to Mr. Gaskell, always, my dear Mrs. Gaskell, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 30th, 1854._ MY DEAR STONE, I can_not_ stand a total absence of ventilation, and I should have liked (in an amiable and persuasive manner) to have punched ----'s head, and opened the register stoves. I saw the supper tables, sir, in an empty state, and was charmed with them. Likewise I recovered myself from a swoon, occasioned by long contact with an unventilated man of a strong flavour from Copenhagen, by drinking an unknown species of celestial lemonade in that enchanted apartment. I am grieved to say that on Saturday I stand engaged to dine, at three weeks' notice, with one ----, a man who has read every book that ever was written, and is a perfect gulf of information. Before exploding a mine of knowledge he has a habit of closing one eye and wrinkling up his nose, so that he seems perpetually to be taking aim at you and knocking you over with a terrific charge. Then he looks again, and takes another aim. So you are always on your back, with your legs in the air. How can a man be conversed with, or walked with, in the county of Middlesex, when he is reviewing the Kentish Militia on the shores of Dover, or sailing, every day for three weeks, between Dover and Calais? Ever affectionately. P.S.--"Humphry Clinker" is certainly Smollett's best. I am rather divided between "Peregrine Pickle" and "Roderick Random," both extraordinarily good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume of "Peregrine" as the richer of the two. [Sidenote: Mr. Peter Cunningham.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _June 7th, 1854._ MY DEAR CUNNINGHAM, I cannot become one of the committee for Wilson's statue, after entertaining so strong an opinion against the expediency of such a memorial in poor dear Talfourd's case. But I will subscribe my three guineas, and will pay that sum to the account at Coutts's when I go there next week, before leaving town. "The Goldsmiths" admirably done throughout. It is a book I have long desired to see done, and never expected to see half so well done. Many thanks to you for it. Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--Please to observe the address at Boulogne: "Villa du Camp de Droite." [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] VILLA DU CAMP DE DROITE, _Thursday, June 22nd, 1854._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have nothing to say, but having heard from you this morning, think I may as well report all well. We have a most charming place here. It beats the former residence all to nothing. We have a beautiful garden, with all its fruits and flowers, and a field of our own, and a road of our own away to the Column, and everything that is airy and fresh. The great Beaucourt hovers about us like a guardian genius, and I imagine that no English person in a carriage could by any possibility find the place. Of the wonderful inventions and contrivances with which a certain inimitable creature has made the most of it, I will say nothing, until you have an opportunity of inspecting the same. At present I will only observe that I have written exactly seventy-two words of "Hard Times," since I have been here. The children arrived on Tuesday night, by London boat, in every stage and aspect of sea-sickness. The camp is about a mile off, and huts are now building for (they say) sixty thousand soldiers. I don't imagine it to be near enough to bother us. If the weather ever should be fine, it might do you good sometimes to come over with the proofs on a Saturday, when the tide serves well, before you and Mrs. W. make your annual visit. Recollect there is always a bed, and no sudden appearance will put us out. Kind regards. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] VILLA DU CAMP DE DROITE, BOULOGNE, _Wednesday Night, July 12th, 1854._ MY DEAR COLLINS, Bobbing up, corkwise, from a sea of "Hard Times" I beg to report this tenement--AMAZING!!! Range of view and air, most free and delightful; hill-side garden, delicious; field, stupendous; speculations in haycocks already effected by the undersigned, with the view to the keeping up of a "home" at rounders. I hope to finish and get to town by next Wednesday night, the 19th; what do you say to coming back with me on the following Tuesday? The interval I propose to pass in a career of amiable dissipation and unbounded license in the metropolis. If you will come and breakfast with me about midnight--anywhere--any day, and go to bed no more until we fly to these pastoral retreats, I shall be delighted to have so vicious an associate. Will you undertake to let Ward know that if he still wishes me to sit to him, he shall have me as long as he likes, at Tavistock House, on Monday, the 24th, from ten A.M.? I have made it understood here that we shall want to be taken the greatest care of this summer, and to be fed on nourishing meats. Several new dishes have been rehearsed and have come out very well. I have met with what they call in the City "a parcel" of the celebrated 1846 champagne. It is a very fine wine, and calculated to do us good when weak. The camp is about a mile off. Voluptuous English authors reposing from their literary fatigues (on their laurels) are expected, when all other things fail, to lie on straw in the midst of it when the days are sunny, and stare at the blue sea until they fall asleep. (About one hundred and fifty soldiers have been at various times billeted on Beaucourt since we have been here, and he has clinked glasses with them every one, and read a MS. book of his father's, on soldiers in general, to them all.) I shall be glad to hear what you say to these various proposals. I write with the Emperor in the town, and a great expenditure of tricolour floating thereabouts, but no stir makes its way to this inaccessible retreat. It is like being up in a balloon. Lionising Englishmen and Germans start to call, and are found lying imbecile in the road halfway up. Ha! ha! ha! Kindest regards from all. The Plornishghenter adds Mr. and Mrs. Goose's duty. Ever faithfully. P.S.--The cobbler has been ill these many months, and unable to work; has had a carbuncle in his back, and has it cut three times a week. The little dog sits at the door so unhappy and anxious to help, that I every day expect to see him beginning a pair of top boots. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Saturday, July 22nd, 1854._ MY DEAR GEORGINA, Neither you nor Catherine did justice to Collins's book.[17] I think it far away the cleverest novel I have ever seen written by a new hand. It is in some respects masterly. "Valentine Blyth" is as original, and as well done as anything can be. The scene where he shows his pictures is full of an admirable humour. Old Mat is admirably done. In short, I call it a very remarkable book, and have been very much surprised by its great merit. Tell Kate, with my love, that she will receive to-morrow in a little parcel, the complete proofs of "Hard Times." They will not be corrected, but she will find them pretty plain. I am just now going to put them up for her. I saw Grisi the night before last in "Lucrezia Borgia"--finer than ever. Last night I was drinking gin-slings till daylight, with Buckstone of all people, who saw me looking at the Spanish dancers, and insisted on being convivial. I have been in a blaze of dissipation altogether, and have succeeded (I think), in knocking the remembrance of my work out. Loves to all the darlings, from the Plornish-Maroon upward. London is far hotter than Naples. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] VILLA DU CAMP DE DROITE, BOULOGNE, _Thursday, Aug. 17th, 1854._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I sent your MS. off to Wills yesterday, with instructions to forward it to you without delay. I hope you will have received it before this notification comes to hand. The usual festivity of this place at present--which is the blessing of soldiers by the ten thousand--has just now been varied by the baptising of some new bells, lately hung up (to my sorrow and lunacy) in a neighbouring church. An English lady was godmother; and there was a procession afterwards, wherein an English gentleman carried "the relics" in a highly suspicious box, like a barrel organ; and innumerable English ladies in white gowns and bridal wreaths walked two and two, as if they had all gone to school again. At a review, on the same day, I was particularly struck by the commencement of the proceedings, and its singular contrast to the usual military operations in Hyde Park. Nothing would induce the general commanding in chief to begin, until chairs were brought for all the lady-spectators. And a detachment of about a hundred men deployed into all manner of farmhouses to find the chairs. Nobody seemed to lose any dignity by the transaction, either. With kindest regards, my dear Mrs. Gaskell, Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Rev. William Harness.] VILLA DU CAMP DE DROITE, BOULOGNE, _Saturday, Aug. 19th, 1854._ MY DEAR HARNESS, Yes. The book came from me. I could not put a memorandum to that effect on the title-page, in consequence of my being here. I am heartily glad you like it. I know the piece you mention, but am far from being convinced by it. A great misgiving is upon me, that in many things (this thing among the rest) too many are martyrs to _our_ complacency and satisfaction, and that we must give up something thereof for their poor sakes. My kindest regards to your sister, and my love (if I may send it) to another of your relations. Always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] VILLA DU CAMP DE DROITE, BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, Sept. 6th, 1854._ * * * * * Any Saturday on which the tide serves your purpose (next Saturday excepted) will suit me for the flying visit you hint at; and we shall be delighted to see you. Although the camp is not above a mile from this gate, we never see or hear of it, unless we choose. If you could come here in dry weather you would find it as pretty, airy, and pleasant a situation as you ever saw. We illuminated the whole front of the house last night--eighteen windows--and an immense palace of light was seen sparkling on this hill-top for miles and miles away. I rushed to a distance to look at it, and never saw anything of the same kind half so pretty. The town[18] looks like one immense flag, it is so decked out with streamers; and as the royal yacht approached yesterday--the whole range of the cliff tops lined with troops, and the artillery matches in hand, all ready to fire the great guns the moment she made the harbour; the sailors standing up in the prow of the yacht, the Prince in a blazing uniform, left alone on the deck for everybody to see--a stupendous silence, and then such an infernal blazing and banging as never was heard. It was almost as fine a sight as one could see under a deep blue sky. In our own proper illumination I laid on all the servants, all the children now at home, all the visitors (it is the annual "Household Words" time), one to every window, with everything ready to light up on the ringing of a big dinner-bell by your humble correspondent. St. Peter's on Easter Monday was the result. Best love from all. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] BOULOGNE, _Tuesday, Sept. 26th, 1854._ MY DEAR COLLINS, First, I have to report that I received your letter with much pleasure. Secondly, that the weather has entirely changed. It is so cool that we have not only a fire in the drawing-room regularly, but another to dine by. The delicious freshness of the air is charming, and it is generally bright and windy besides. Thirdly, that ----'s intellectual faculties appear to have developed suddenly. He has taken to borrowing money; from which I infer (as he has no intention whatever of repaying) that his mental powers are of a high order. Having got a franc from me, he fell upon Mrs. Dickens for five sous. She declining to enter into the transaction, he beleaguered that feeble little couple, Harry and Sydney, into paying two sous each for "tickets" to behold the ravishing spectacle of an utterly-non-existent-and-there-fore-impossible-to-be-produced toy theatre. He eats stony apples, and harbours designs upon his fellow-creatures until he has become light-headed. From the couch rendered uneasy by this disorder he has arisen with an excessively protuberant forehead, a dull slow eye, a complexion of a leaden hue, and a croaky voice. He has become a horror to me, and I resort to the most cowardly expedients to avoid meeting him. He, on the other hand, wanting another franc, dodges me round those trees at the corner, and at the back door; and I have a presentiment upon me that I shall fall a sacrifice to his cupidity at last. On the Sunday night after you left, or rather on the Monday morning at half-past one, Mary was taken _very ill_. English cholera. She was sinking so fast, and the sickness was so exceedingly alarming, that it evidently would not do to wait for Elliotson. I caused everything to be done that we had naturally often thought of, in a lonely house so full of children, and fell back upon the old remedy; though the difficulty of giving even it was rendered very great by the frightful sickness. Thank God, she recovered so favourably that by breakfast time she was fast asleep. She slept twenty-four hours, and has never had the least uneasiness since. I heard--of course afterwards--that she had had an attack of sickness two nights before. I think that long ride and those late dinners had been too much for her. Without them I am inclined to doubt whether she would have been ill. Last Sunday as ever was, the theatre took fire at half-past eleven in the forenoon. Being close by the English church, it showered hot sparks into that temple through the open windows. Whereupon the congregation shrieked and rose and tumbled out into the street; ---- benignly observing to the only ancient female who would listen to him, "I fear we must part;" and afterwards being beheld in the street--in his robes and with a kind of sacred wildness on him--handing ladies over the kennel into shops and other structures, where they had no business whatever, or the least desire to go. I got to the back of the theatre, where I could see in through some great doors that had been forced open, and whence the spectacle of the whole interior, burning like a red-hot cavern, was really very fine, even in the daylight. Meantime the soldiers were at work, "saving" the scenery by pitching it into the next street; and the poor little properties (one spinning-wheel, a feeble imitation of a water-mill, and a basketful of the dismalest artificial flowers very conspicuous) were being passed from hand to hand with the greatest excitement, as if they were rescued children or lovely women. In four or five hours the whole place was burnt down, except the outer walls. Never in my days did I behold such feeble endeavours in the way of extinguishment. On an average I should say it took ten minutes to throw half a gallon of water on the great roaring heap; and every time it was insulted in this way it gave a ferocious burst, and everybody ran off. Beaucourt has been going about for two days in a clean collar; which phenomenon evidently means something, but I don't know what. Elliotson reports that the great conjuror lives at his hotel, has extra wine every day, and fares expensively. Is he the devil? I have heard from the Kernel.[19] Wa'al, sir, sayin' as he minded to locate himself with us for a week, I expected to have heard from him again this morning, but have not. Beard comes to-morrow. Kindest regards and remembrances from all. Ward lives in a little street between the two Tintilleries. The Plornish-Maroon desires his duty. He had a fall yesterday, through overbalancing himself in kicking his nurse. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] BOULOGNE, _Friday, Oct. 13th, 1854._ MY DEAR STONE, Having some little matters that rather press on my attention to see to in town, I have made up my mind to relinquish the walking project, and come straight home (by way of Folkestone) on Tuesday. I shall be due in town at midnight, and shall hope to see you next day, with the top of your coat-collar mended. Everything that happens here we suppose to be an announcement of the taking of Sebastopol. When a church-clock strikes, we think it is the joy-bell, and fly out of the house in a burst of nationality--to sneak in again. If they practise firing at the camp, we are sure it is the artillery celebrating the fall of the Russian, and we become enthusiastic in a moment. I live in constant readiness to illuminate the whole house. Whatever anybody says I believe; everybody says, every day, that Sebastopol is in flames. Sometimes the Commander-in-Chief has blown himself up, with seventy-five thousand men. Sometimes he has "cut" his way through Lord Raglan, and has fallen back on the advancing body of the Russians, one hundred and forty-two thousand strong, whom he is going to "bring up" (I don't know where from, or how, or when, or why) for the destruction of the Allies. All these things, in the words of the catechism, "I steadfastly believe," until I become a mere driveller, a moonstruck, babbling, staring, credulous, imbecile, greedy, gaping, wooden-headed, addle-brained, wool-gathering, dreary, vacant, obstinate civilian. Ever, my fellow-countryman, affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. John Saunders.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _October 26th, 1854._ DEAR SIR, I have had much gratification and pleasure in the receipt of your obliging communication. Allow me to thank you for it, in the first place, with great cordiality. Although I cannot say that I came without any prepossessions to the perusal of your play (for I had favourable inclinings towards it before I began), I _can_ say that I read it with the closest attention, and that it inspired me with a strong interest, and a genuine and high admiration. The parts that involve some of the greatest difficulties of your task appear to me those in which you shine most. I would particularly instance the end of Julia as a very striking example of this. The delicacy and beauty of her redemption from her weak rash lover, are very far, indeed beyond the range of any ordinary dramatist, and display the true poetical strength. As your hopes now centre in Mr. Phelps, and in seeing the child of your fancy on his stage, I will venture to point out to you not only what I take to be very dangerous portions of "Love's Martyrdom" as it stands, _for presentation on the stage_, but portions which I believe Mr. Phelps will speedily regard in that light when he sees it before him in the persons of live men and women on the wooden boards. Knowing him, I think he will be then as violently discouraged as he is now generously exalted; and it may be useful to you to be prepared for the consideration of those passages. I do not regard it as a great stumbling-block that the play of modern times best known to an audience proceeds upon the main idea of this, namely, that there was a hunchback who, because of his deformity, mistrusted himself. But it is certainly a grain in the balance when the balance is going the wrong way, and therefore it should be most carefully trimmed. The incident of the ring is an insignificant one to look at over a row of gaslights, is difficult to convey to an audience, and the least thing will make it ludicrous. If it be so well done by Mr. Phelps himself as to be otherwise than ludicrous, it will be disagreeable. If it be either, it will be perilous, and doubly so, because you revert to it. The quarrel scene between the two brothers in the third act is now so long that the justification of blind passion and impetuosity--which can alone bear out Franklyn, before the bodily eyes of a great concourse of spectators, in plunging at the life of his own brother--is lost. That the two should be parted, and that Franklyn should again drive at him, and strike him, and then wound him, is a state of things to set the sympathy of an audience in the wrong direction, and turn it from the man you make happy to the man you leave unhappy. I would on no account allow the artist to appear, attended by that picture, more than once. All the most sudden inconstancy of Clarence I would soften down. Margaret must act much better than any actress I have ever seen, if all her lines fall in pleasant places; therefore, I think she needs compression too. All this applies solely to the theatre. If you ever revise the sheets for readers, will you note in the margin the broken laughter and the appeals to the Deity? If, on summing them up, you find you want them all, I would leave them as they stand by all means. If not, I would blot accordingly. It is only in the hope of being slightly useful to you by anticipating what I believe Mr. Phelps will discover--or what, if ever he should pass it, I have a strong conviction the audience will find out--that I have ventured on these few hints. Your concurrence with them generally, on reconsideration, or your preference for the poem as it stands, can not in the least affect my interest in your success. On the other hand, I have a perfect confidence in your not taking my misgivings ill; they arise out of my sincere desire for the triumph of your work. With renewed thanks for the pleasure you have afforded me, I am, dear Sir, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _November 1st, 1854._ (And a constitutionally foggy day.) MY DEAREST MACREADY, I thought it better not to encumber the address to working men with details. Firstly, because they would detract from whatever fiery effect the words may have in them; secondly, because writing and petitioning and pressing a subject upon members and candidates are now so clearly understood; and thirdly, because the paper was meant as an opening to a persistent pressure of the whole question on the public, which would yield other opportunities of touching on such points. In the number _for next week_--not this--is one of those following-up articles called "A Home Question." It is not written by me, but is generally of my suggesting, and is exceedingly well done by a thorough and experienced hand. I think you will find in it, generally, what you want. I have told the printers to send you a proof by post as soon as it is corrected--that is to say, as soon as some insertions I made in it last night are in type and in their places. My dear old Parr, I don't believe a word you write about King John! That is to say, I don't believe you take into account the enormous difference between the energy summonable-up in your study at Sherborne and the energy that will fire up in you (without so much as saying "With your leave" or "By your leave") in the Town Hall at Birmingham. I know you, you ancient codger, I know you! Therefore I will trouble you to be so good as to do an act of honesty after you have been to Birmingham, and to write to me, "Ingenuous boy, you were correct. I find I could have read 'em 'King John' with the greatest ease." In that vast hall in the busy town of Sherborne, in which our illustrious English novelist is expected to read next month--though he is strongly of opinion that he is deficient in power, and too old--I wonder what accommodation there is for reading! because our illustrious countryman likes to stand at a desk breast-high, with plenty of room about him, a sloping top, and a ledge to keep his book from tumbling off. If such a thing should not be there, however, on his arrival, I suppose even a Sherborne carpenter could knock it up out of a deal board. _Is_ there a deal board in Sherborne though? I should like to hear Katey's opinion on that point. In this week's "Household Words" there is an exact portrait of our Boulogne landlord, which I hope you will like. I think of opening the next long book I write with a man of juvenile figure and strong face, who is always persuading himself that he is infirm. What do you think of the idea? I should like to have your opinion about it. I would make him an impetuous passionate sort of fellow, devilish grim upon occasion, and of an iron purpose. Droll, I fancy? ---- is getting a little too fat, but appears to be troubled by the great responsibility of directing the whole war. He doesn't seem to be quite clear that he has got the ships into the exact order he intended, on the sea point of attack at Sebastopol. We went to the play last Saturday night with Stanfield, whose "high lights" (as Maclise calls those knobs of brightness on the top of his cheeks) were more radiant than ever. We talked of you, and I told Stanny how they are imitating his "Acis and Galatea" sea in "Pericles," at Phelps's. He didn't half like it; but I added, in nautical language, that it was merely a piratical effort achieved by a handful of porpoise-faced swabs, and that brought him up with a round turn, as we say at sea. We are looking forward to the twentieth of next month with great pleasure. All Tavistock House send love and kisses to all Sherborne House. If there is anything I can bring down for you, let me know in good course of time. Ever, my dearest Macready, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, Nov. 1st, 1854._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I take upon myself to answer your letter to Catherine, as I am referred to in it. The "Walk" is not my writing. It is very well done by a close imitator. Why I found myself so "used up" after "Hard Times" I scarcely know, perhaps because I intended to do nothing in that way for a year, when the idea laid hold of me by the throat in a very violent manner, and because the compression and close condensation necessary for that disjointed form of publication gave me perpetual trouble. But I really was tired, which is a result so very incomprehensible that I can't forget it. I have passed an idle autumn in a beautiful situation, and am dreadfully brown and big. For further particulars of Boulogne, see "Our French Watering Place," in this present week of "Household Words," which contains a faithful portrait of our landlord there. If you carry out that bright Croydon idea, rely on our glad co-operation, only let me know all about it a few days beforehand; and if you feel equal to the contemplation of the moustache (which has been cut lately) it will give us the heartiest pleasure to come and meet you. This in spite of the terrific duffery of the Crystal Palace. It is a very remarkable thing in itself; but to have so very large a building continually crammed down one's throat, and to find it a new page in "The Whole Duty of Man" to go there, is a little more than even I (and you know how amiable I am) can endure. You always like to know what I am going to do, so I beg to announce that on the 19th of December I am going to read the "Carol" at Reading, where I undertook the presidency of the Literary Institution on the death of poor dear Talfourd. Then I am going on to Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, to do the like for another institution, which is one of the few remaining pleasures of Macready's life. Then I am coming home for Christmas Day. Then I believe I must go to Bradford, in Yorkshire, to read once more to a little fireside party of four thousand. Then I am coming home again to get up a new little version of "The Children in the Wood" (yet to be written, by-the-bye), for the children to act on Charley's birthday. I am full of mixed feeling about the war--admiration of our valiant men, burning desires to cut the Emperor of Russia's throat, and something like despair to see how the old cannon-smoke and blood-mists obscure the wrongs and sufferings of the people at home. When I consider the Patriotic Fund on the one hand, and on the other the poverty and wretchedness engendered by cholera, of which in London alone, an infinitely larger number of English people than are likely to be slain in the whole Russian war have miserably and needlessly died--I feel as if the world had been pushed back five hundred years. If you are reading new books just now, I think you will be interested with a controversy between Whewell and Brewster, on the question of the shining orbs about us being inhabited or no. Whewell's book is called, "On the Plurality of Worlds;" Brewster's, "More Worlds than One." I shouldn't wonder if you know all about them. They bring together a vast number of points of great interest in natural philosophy, and some very curious reasoning on both sides, and leave the matter pretty much where it was. We had a fine absurdity in connection with our luggage, when we left Boulogne. The barometer had within a few hours fallen about a foot, in honour of the occasion, and it was a tremendous night, blowing a gale of wind and raining a little deluge. The luggage (pretty heavy, as you may suppose), in a cart drawn by two horses, stuck fast in a rut in our field, and couldn't be moved. Our man, made a lunatic by the extremity of the occasion, ran down to the town to get two more horses to help it out, when he returned with those horses and carter B, the most beaming of men; carter A, who had been soaking all the time by the disabled vehicle, descried in carter B the acknowledged enemy of his existence, took his own two horses out, and walked off with them! After which, the whole set-out remained in the field all night, and we came to town, thirteen individuals, with one comb and a pocket-handkerchief. I was upside-down during the greater part of the passage. Dr. Rae's account of Franklin's unfortunate party is deeply interesting; but I think hasty in its acceptance of the details, particularly in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions, which I don't believe. Franklin, on a former occasion, was almost starved to death, had gone through all the pains of that sad end, and lain down to die, and no such thought had presented itself to any of them. In famous cases of shipwreck, it is very rare indeed that any person of any humanising education or refinement resorts to this dreadful means of prolonging life. In open boats, the coarsest and commonest men of the shipwrecked party have done such things; but I don't remember more than one instance in which an officer had overcome the loathing that the idea had inspired. Dr. Rae talks about their _cooking_ these remains too. I should like to know where the fuel came from. Kindest love and best regards. Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday Night, Nov. 3rd, 1854._ MY DEAR STANNY, First of all, here is enclosed a letter for Mrs. Stanfield, which, if you don't immediately and faithfully deliver, you will hear of in an unpleasant way from the station-house at the curve of the hill above you. Secondly, this is not to remind you that we meet at the Athenæum next Monday at five, because none but a mouldy swab as never broke biscuit or lay out on the for'sel-yard-arm in a gale of wind ever forgot an appointment with a messmate. But what I want you to think of at your leisure is this: when our dear old Macready was in town last, I saw it would give him so much interest and pleasure if I promised to go down and read my "Christmas Carol" to the little Sherborne Institution, which is now one of the few active objects he has in the life about him, that I came out with that promise in a bold--I may say a swaggering way. Consequently, on Wednesday, the 20th of December, I am going down to see him, with Kate and Georgina, returning to town in good time for Christmas, on Saturday, the 23rd. Do you think you could manage to go and return with us? I really believe there is scarcely anything in the world that would give him such extraordinary pleasure as such a visit; and if you would empower me to send him an intimation that he may expect it, he will have a daily joy in looking forward to the time (I am seriously sure) which we--whose light has not gone out, and who are among our old dear pursuits and associations--can scarcely estimate. I don't like to broach the idea in a careless way, and so I propose it thus, and ask you to think of it. Ever most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Procter.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Dec. 17th, 1854._ MY DEAR MISS PROCTER, You have given me a new sensation. I did suppose that nothing in this singular world could surprise me, but you have done it. You will believe my congratulations on the delicacy and talent of your writing to be sincere. From the first, I have always had an especial interest in that Miss Berwick, and have over and over again questioned Wills about her. I suppose he has gone on gradually building up an imaginary structure of life and adventure for her, but he has given me the strangest information! Only yesterday week, when we were "making up" "The Poor Travellers," as I sat meditatively poking the office fire, I said to him, "Wills, have you got that Miss Berwick's proof back, of the little sailor's song?" "No," he said. "Well, but why not?" I asked him. "Why, you know," he answered, "as I have often told you before, she don't live at the place to which her letters are addressed, and so there's always difficulty and delay in communicating with her." "Do you know what age she is?" I said. Here he looked unfathomably profound, and returned, "Rather advanced in life." "You said she was a governess, didn't you?" said I; to which he replied in the most emphatic and positive manner, "A governess." He then came and stood in the corner of the hearth, with his back to the fire, and delivered himself like an oracle concerning you. He told me that early in life (conveying to me the impression of about a quarter of a century ago) you had had your feelings desperately wounded by some cause, real or imaginary--"It does not matter which," said I, with the greatest sagacity--and that you had then taken to writing verses. That you were of an unhappy temperament, but keenly sensitive to encouragement. That you wrote after the educational duties of the day were discharged. That you sometimes thought of never writing any more. That you had been away for some time "with your pupils." That your letters were of a mild and melancholy character, and that you did not seem to care as much as might be expected about money. All this time I sat poking the fire, with a wisdom upon me absolutely crushing; and finally I begged him to assure the lady that she might trust me with her real address, and that it would be better to have it now, as I hoped our further communications, etc. etc. etc. You must have felt enormously wicked last Tuesday, when I, such a babe in the wood, was unconsciously prattling to you. But you have given me so much pleasure, and have made me shed so many tears, that I can only think of you now in association with the sentiment and grace of your verses. So pray accept the blessing and forgiveness of Richard Watts, though I am afraid you come under both his conditions of exclusion.[20] Very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [16] The poet "Barry Cornwall." [17] "Hide and Seek." [18] On the occasion of the Prince Consort's visit to the camp at Boulogne. [19] Mr. Egg. [20] The inscription on the house in Rochester known as "Watts's Charity" is to the effect that it furnishes a night's lodging for six poor travellers--"not being Rogues or Proctors." 1855. NARRATIVE. In the beginning of this year, Charles Dickens gave public readings at Reading, Sherborne, and Bradford in Yorkshire, to which reference is made in the first following letters. Besides this, he was fully occupied in getting up a play for his children, which was acted on the 6th January. Mr. Planché's fairy extravaganza of "Fortunio and his Seven Gifted Servants" was the play selected, the parts being filled by all his own children and some of their young friends, and Charles Dickens, Mr. Mark Lemon, and Mr. Wilkie Collins playing with them, the only grown-up members of the company. In February he made a short trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins, with an intention of going on to Bordeaux, which was abandoned on account of bad weather. Out of the success of the children's play at Tavistock House rose a scheme for a serious play at the same place. Mr. Collins undertaking to write a melodrama for the purpose, and Mr. Stanfield to paint scenery and drop-scene, Charles Dickens turned one of the rooms of the house into a very perfect little theatre, and in June "The Lighthouse" was acted for three nights, with "Mr. Nightingale's Diary" and "Animal Magnetism" as farces; the actors being himself and several members of the original amateur company, the actresses, his two daughters and his sister-in-law. Mr. Stanfield, after entering most heartily into the enterprise, and giving constant time and attention to the painting of his beautiful scenes, was unfortunately ill and unable to attend the first performance. We give a letter to him, reporting its great success. In this summer Charles Dickens made a speech at a great meeting at Drury Lane Theatre on the subject of "Administrative Reform," of which he writes to Mr. Macready. On this subject of "Administrative Reform," too, we give two letters to the great Nineveh traveller Mr. Layard (now Sir Austen H. Layard), for whom, as his letters show, he conceived at once the affectionate friendship which went on increasing from this time for the rest of his life. Mr. Layard also spoke at the Drury Lane meeting. Charles Dickens had made a promise to give another reading at Birmingham for the funds of the institute which still needed help; and in a letter to Mr. Arthur Ryland, asking him to fix a time for it, he gives the first idea of a selection from "David Copperfield," which was afterwards one of the most popular of his readings. He was at all times fond of making excursions for a day--or two or three days--to Rochester and its neighbourhood; and after one of these, this year, he writes to Mr. Wills that he has seen a "small freehold" to be sold, _opposite_ the house on which he had fixed his childish affections (and which he calls in _this_ letter the "Hermitage," its real name being "Gad's Hill Place"). The latter house was not, at that time, to be had, and he made some approach to negotiations as to the other "little freehold," which, however, did not come to anything. Later in the year, however, Mr. Wills, by an accident, discovered that Gad's Hill Place, the property of Miss Lynn, the well-known authoress, and a constant contributor to "Household Words," was itself for sale; and a negotiation for its purchase commenced, which was not, however, completed until the following spring. Later in the year, the performance of "The Lighthouse" was repeated, for a charitable purpose, at the Campden House theatre. This autumn was passed at Folkestone. Charles Dickens had decided upon spending the following winter in Paris, and the family proceeded there from Folkestone in October, making a halt at Boulogne; from whence his sister-in-law preceded the party to Paris, to secure lodgings, with the help of Lady Olliffe. He followed, to make his choice of apartments that had been found, and he writes to his wife and to Mr. Wills, giving a description of the Paris house. Here he began "Little Dorrit." In a letter to Mrs. Watson, from Folkestone, he gives her the name which he had first proposed for this story--"Nobody's Fault." During his absence from England, Mr. and Mrs. Hogarth occupied Tavistock House, and his eldest son, being now engaged in business, remained with them, coming to Paris only for Christmas. Three of his boys were at school at Boulogne at this time, and one, Walter Landor, at Wimbledon, studying for an Indian army appointment. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 3rd, 1855._ MY DEAR CERJAT, When your Christmas letter did not arrive according to custom, I felt as if a bit of Christmas had fallen out and there was no supplying the piece. However, it was soon supplied by yourself, and the bowl became round and sound again. The Christmas number of "Household Words," I suppose, will reach Lausanne about midsummer. The first ten pages or so--all under the head of "The First Poor Traveller"--are written by me, and I hope you will find, in the story of the soldier which they contain, something that may move you a little. It moved me _not_ a little in the writing, and I believe has touched a vast number of people. We have sold eighty thousand of it. I am but newly come home from reading at Reading (where I succeeded poor Talfourd as the president of an institution), and at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, and at Bradford, in Yorkshire. Wonderful audiences! and the number at the last place three thousand seven hundred. And yet but for the noise of their laughing and cheering, they "went" like one man. The absorption of the English mind in the war is, to me, a melancholy thing. Every other subject of popular solicitude and sympathy goes down before it. I fear I clearly see that for years to come domestic reforms are shaken to the root; every miserable red-tapist flourishes war over the head of every protester against his humbug; and everything connected with it is pushed to such an unreasonable extent, that, however kind and necessary it may be in itself, it becomes ridiculous. For all this it is an indubitable fact, I conceive, that Russia MUST BE stopped, and that the future peace of the world renders the war imperative upon us. The Duke of Newcastle lately addressed a private letter to the newspapers, entreating them to exercise a larger discretion in respect of the letters of "Our Own Correspondents," against which Lord Raglan protests as giving the Emperor of Russia information for nothing which would cost him (if indeed he could get it at all) fifty or a hundred thousand pounds a year. The communication has not been attended with much effect, so far as I can see. In the meantime I do suppose we have the wretchedest Ministry that ever was--in whom nobody not in office of some sort believes--yet whom there is nobody to displace. The strangest result, perhaps, of years of Reformed Parliaments that ever the general sagacity did _not_ foresee. Let me recommend you, as a brother-reader of high distinction, two comedies, both Goldsmith's--"She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Good-natured Man." Both are so admirable and so delightfully written that they read wonderfully. A friend of mine, Forster, who wrote "The Life of Goldsmith," was very ill a year or so ago, and begged me to read to him one night as he lay in bed, "something of Goldsmith's." I fell upon "She Stoops to Conquer," and we enjoyed it with that wonderful intensity, that I believe he began to get better in the first scene, and was all right again in the fifth act. I am charmed by your account of Haldimand, to whom my love. Tell him Sydney Smith's daughter has privately printed a life of her father with selections from his letters, which has great merit, and often presents him exactly as he used to be. I have strongly urged her to publish it, and I think she will do so, about March. My eldest boy has come home from Germany to learn a business life at Birmingham (I think), first of all. The whole nine are well and happy. Ditto, Mrs. Dickens. Ditto, Georgina. My two girls are full of interest in yours; and one of mine (as I think I told you when I was at Elysée) is curiously like one of yours in the face. They are all agog now about a great fairy play, which is to come off here next Monday. The house is full of spangles, gas, Jew theatrical tailors, and pantomime carpenters. We all unite in kindest and best loves to dear Mrs. Cerjat and all the blooming daughters. And I am, with frequent thoughts of you and cordial affection, ever, my dear Cerjat, Your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 3rd, 1855._ MY DEAR MARY, This is a word of heartfelt greeting; in exchange for yours, which came to me most pleasantly, and was received with a cordial welcome. If I had leisure to write a letter, I should write you, at this point, perhaps the very best letter that ever was read; but, being in the agonies of getting up a gorgeous fairy play for the postboys, on Charley's birthday (besides having the work of half-a-dozen to do as a regular thing), I leave the merits of the wonderful epistle to your lively fancy. Enclosing a kiss, if you will have the kindness to return it when done with. I have just been reading my "Christmas Carol" in Yorkshire. I should have lost my heart to the beautiful young landlady of my hotel (age twenty-nine, dress, black frock and jacket, exquisitely braided) if it had not been safe in your possession. Many, many happy years to you! My regards to that obstinate old Wurzell[21] and his dame, when you have them under lock and key again. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 27th, 1855._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure. You will not, I hope, allow that not-lucid interval of dissatisfaction with yourself (and me?), which beset you for a minute or two once upon a time, to linger in the shape of any disagreeable association with "Household Words." I shall still look forward to the large sides of paper, and shall soon feel disappointed if they don't begin to reappear. I thought it best that Wills should write the business letter on the conclusion of the story, as that part of our communications had always previously rested with him. I trust you found it satisfactory? I refer to it, not as a matter of mere form, but because I sincerely wish everything between us to be beyond the possibility of misunderstanding or reservation. Dear Mrs. Gaskell, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, Jan. 29th, 1855._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, I have been in the greatest difficulty--which I am not yet out of--to know what to read at Birmingham. I fear the idea of next month is now impracticable. Which of two other months do you think would be preferable for your Birmingham objects? Next May, or next December? Having already read two Christmas books at Birmingham, I should like to get out of that restriction, and have a swim in the broader waters of one of my long books. I have been poring over "Copperfield" (which is my favourite), with the idea of getting a reading out of it, to be called by some such name as "Young Housekeeping and Little Emily." But there is still the huge difficulty that I constructed the whole with immense pains, and have so woven it up and blended it together, that I cannot yet so separate the parts as to tell the story of David's married life with Dora, and the story of Mr. Peggotty's search for his niece, within the time. This is my object. If I could possibly bring it to bear, it would make a very attractive reading, with, a strong interest in it, and a certain completeness. This is exactly the state of the case. I don't mind confiding to you, that I never can approach the book with perfect composure (it had such perfect possession of me when I wrote it), and that I no sooner begin to try to get it into this form, than I begin to read it all, and to feel that I cannot disturb it. I have not been unmindful of the agreement we made at parting, and I have sat staring at the backs of my books for an inspiration. This project is the only one that I have constantly reverted to, and yet I have made no progress in it! Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, _Saturday Evening, Feb. 3rd, 1855._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I am coming to Paris for a week, with my friend Collins--son of the English painter who painted our green lanes and our cottage children so beautifully. Do not tell this to Le Vieux. Unless I have the ill fortune to stumble against him in the street I shall not make my arrival known to him. I purpose leaving here on Sunday, the 11th, but I shall stay that night at Boulogne to see two of my little boys who are at school there. We shall come to Paris on Monday, the 12th, arriving there in the evening. Now, _mon cher_, do you think you can, without inconvenience, engage me for a week an apartment--cheerful, light, and wholesome--containing a comfortable _salon et deux chambres à coucher_. I do not care whether it is an hotel or not, but the reason why I do not write for an apartment to the Hôtel Brighton is, that there they expect one to dine at home (I mean in the apartment) generally; whereas, as we are coming to Paris expressly to be always looking about us, we want to dine wherever we like every day. Consequently, what we want to find is a good apartment, where we can have our breakfast but where we shall never dine. Can you engage such accommodation for me? If you can, I shall feel very much obliged to you. If the apartment should happen to contain a little bed for a servant I might perhaps bring one, but I do not care about that at all. I want it to be pleasant and gay, and to throw myself _en garçon_ on the festive _diableries de Paris_. Mrs. Dickens and her sister send their kindest regards to Madame Regnier and you, in which I heartily join. All the children send their loves to the two brave boys and the Normandy _bonnes_. I shall hope for a short answer from you one day next week. My dear Regnier, Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Friday, Feb. 9th, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, I want to alter the arrangements for to-morrow, and put you to some inconvenience. When I was at Gravesend t'other day, I saw, at Gad's Hill--just opposite to the Hermitage, where Miss Lynn used to live--a little freehold to be sold. The spot and the very house are literally "a dream of my childhood," and I should like to look at it before I go to Paris. With that purpose I must go to Strood by the North Kent, at a quarter-past ten to-morrow morning, and I want you, strongly booted, to go with me! (I know the particulars from the agent.) Can you? Let me know. If you can, can you manage so that we can take the proofs with us? If you can't, will you bring them to Tavistock House at dinner time to-morrow, half-past five? Forster will dine with us, but no one else. I am uncertain of your being in town to-night, but I send John up with this. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] H�TEL MEURICE, PARIS, _Friday, Feb. 16th, 1855._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I heard from home last night; but the posts are so delayed and put out by the snow, that they come in at all sorts of times except the right times, and utterly defy all calculation. Will you tell Catherine with my love, that I will write to her again to-morrow afternoon; I hope she may then receive my letter by Monday morning, and in it I purpose telling her when I may be expected home. The weather is so severe and the roads are so bad, that the journey to and from Bordeaux seems out of the question. We have made up our minds to abandon it for the present, and to return about Tuesday night or Wednesday. Collins continues in a queer state, but is perfectly cheerful under the stoppage of his wine and other afflictions. We have a beautiful apartment, very elegantly furnished, very thickly carpeted, and as warm as any apartment in Paris _can_ be in such weather. We are very well waited on and looked after. We breakfast at ten, read and write till two, and then I go out walking all over Paris, while the invalid sits by the fire or is deposited in a café. We dine at five, in a different restaurant every day, and at seven or so go to the theatre--sometimes to two theatres, sometimes to three. We get home about twelve, light the fire, and drink lemonade, to which _I_ add rum. We go to bed between one and two. I live in peace, like an elderly gentleman, and regard myself as in a negative state of virtue and respectability. The theatres are not particularly good, but I have seen Lemaître act in the most wonderful and astounding manner. I am afraid we must go to the Opéra Comique on Sunday. To-morrow we dine with Regnier and to-day with the Olliffes. "La Joie fait Peur," at the Français, delighted me. Exquisitely played and beautifully imagined altogether. Last night we went to the Porte St. Martin to see a piece (English subject) called "Jane Osborne," which the characters pronounce "Ja Nosbornnne." The seducer was Lord Nottingham. The comic Englishwoman's name (she kept lodgings and was a very bad character) was Missees Christmas. She had begun to get into great difficulties with a gentleman of the name of Meestair Cornhill, when we were obliged to leave, at the end of the first act, by the intolerable stench of the place. The whole theatre must be standing over some vast cesspool. It was so alarming that I instantly rushed into a café and had brandy. My ear has gradually become so accustomed to French, that I understand the people at the theatres (for the first time) with perfect ease and satisfaction. I walked about with Regnier for an hour and a half yesterday, and received many compliments on my angelic manner of speaking the celestial language. There is a winter Franconi's now, high up on the Boulevards, just like the round theatre on the Champs Elysées, and as bright and beautiful. A clown from Astley's is all in high favour there at present. He talks slang English (being evidently an idiot), as if he felt a perfect confidence that everybody understands him. His name is Boswell, and the whole cirque rang last night with cries for Boz Zwilllll! Boz Zweellll! Boz Zwuallll! etc. etc. etc. etc. I must begin to look out for the box of bon-bons for the noble and fascinating Plornish-Maroon. Give him my love and a thousand kisses. Loves to Mamey, Katey, Sydney, Harry, and the following stab to Anne--she forgot to pack me any shaving soap. Ever, my dear Georgy, most affectionately yours. P.S.--Collins sends kind regards. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] H�TEL MEURICE, PARIS, _Friday, Feb. 16th, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, I received your letter yesterday evening. I have not yet seen the lists of trains and boats, but propose arranging to return about Tuesday or Wednesday. In the meantime I am living like Gil Blas and doing nothing. I am very much obliged to you, indeed, for the trouble you have kindly taken about the little freehold. It is clear to me that its merits resolve themselves into the view and the spot. If I had more money these considerations might, with me, overtop all others. But, as it is, I consider the matter quite disposed of, finally settled in the negative, and to be thought no more about. I shall not go down and look at it, as I could add nothing to your report. Paris is finer than ever, and I go wandering about it all day. We dine at all manner of places, and go to two or three theatres in the evening. I suppose, as an old farmer said of Scott, I am "makin' mysel'" all the time; but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond. I live in continual terror of ----, and am strongly fortified within doors, with a means of retreat into my bedroom always ready. Up to the present blessed moment, his staggering form has not appeared. As to yesterday's post from England, I have not, at the present moment, the slightest idea where it may be. It is under the snow somewhere, I suppose; but nobody expects it, and _Galignani_ reprints every morning leaders from _The Times_ of about a fortnight or three weeks old. Collins, who is not very well, sends his "penitent regards," and says he is enjoying himself as much as a man with the weight of a broken promise on his conscience can. Ever, my dear Wills, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _February 26th, 1855._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, Charley came home, I assure you, perfectly delighted with his visit to you, and rapturous in his accounts of your great kindness to him. It appears to me that the first question in reference to my reading (I have not advanced an inch in my "Copperfield" trials by-the-bye) is, whether you think you could devise any plan in connection with the room at Dee's, which would certainly bring my help in money up to five hundred pounds. That is what I want. If it could be done by a subscription for two nights, for instance, I would not be chary of my time and trouble. But if you cannot see your way clearly to that result in that connection, then I think it would be better to wait until we can have the Town Hall at Christmas. I have promised to read, about Christmas time, at Sheffield and at Peterboro'. I _could_ add Birmingham to the list, then, if need were. But what I want is, to give the institution in all five hundred pounds. That is my object, and nothing less will satisfy me. Will you think it over, taking counsel with whomsoever you please, and let me know what conclusion you arrive at. Only think of me as subservient to the institution. My dear Mr. Ryland, always very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. David Roberts, R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _February 28th, 1855._ MY DEAR DAVID ROBERTS, I hope to make it quite plain to you, in a few words, why I think it right to stay away from the Lord Mayor's dinner to the club. If I did not feel a kind of rectitude involved in my non-acceptance of his invitation, your note would immediately induce me to change my mind. Entertaining a strong opinion on the subject of the City Corporation as it stands, and the absurdity of its pretensions in an age perfectly different, in all conceivable respects, from that to which it properly belonged as a reality, I have expressed that opinion on more than one occasion, within a year or so, in "Household Words." I do not think it consistent with my respect for myself, or for the art I profess, to blow hot and cold in the same breath; and to laugh at the institution in print, and accept the hospitality of its representative while the ink is staring us all in the face. There is a great deal too much of this among us, and it does not elevate the earnestness or delicacy of literature. This is my sole consideration. Personally I have always met the present Lord Mayor on the most agreeable terms, and I think him an excellent one. As between you, and me, and him, I cannot have the slightest objection to your telling him the truth. On a more private occasion, when he was not keeping his state, I should be delighted to interchange any courtesy with that honourable and amiable gentleman, Mr. Moon. Believe me always cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Austen H. Layard.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday Evening, April 3rd, 1855._ DEAR LAYARD, Since I had the pleasure of seeing you again at Miss Coutts's (really a greater pleasure to me than I could easily tell you), I have thought a good deal of the duty we all owe you of helping you as much as we can. Being on very intimate terms with Lemon, the editor of "Punch" (a most affectionate and true-hearted fellow), I mentioned to him in confidence what I had at heart. You will find yourself the subject of their next large cut, and of some lines in an earnest spirit. He again suggested the point to Mr. Shirley Brookes, one of their regular corps, who will do what is right in _The Illustrated London News_ and _The Weekly Chronicle_, papers that go into the hands of large numbers of people. I have also communicated with Jerrold, whom I trust, and have begged him not to be diverted from the straight path of help to the most useful man in England on all possible occasions. Forster I will speak to carefully, and I have no doubt it will quicken him a little; not that we have anything to complain of in his direction. If you ever see any new loophole, cranny, needle's-eye, through which I can present your case to "Household Words," I most earnestly entreat you, as your staunch friend and admirer--you _can_ have no truer--to indicate it to me at any time or season, and to count upon my being Damascus steel to the core. All this is nothing; because all these men, and thousands of others, dote upon you. But I know it would be a comfort to me, in your hard-fighting place, to be assured of such sympathy, and therefore only I write. You have other recreations for your Sundays in the session, I daresay, than to come here. But it is generally a day on which I do not go out, and when we dine at half-past five in the easiest way in the world, and smoke in the peacefulest manner. Perhaps one of these Sundays after Easter you might not be indisposed to begin to dig us out? And I should like, on a Saturday of your appointing, to get a few of the serviceable men I know--such as I have mentioned--about you here. Will you think of this, too, and suggest a Saturday for our dining together? I am really ashamed and moved that you should do your part so manfully and be left alone in the conflict. I felt you to be all you are the first moment I saw you. I know you will accept my regard and fidelity for what they are worth. Dear Layard, very heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Austen H. Layard.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, April 10th, 1855._ DEAR LAYARD, I shall of course observe the strictest silence, at present, in reference to your resolutions. It will be a most acceptable occupation to me to go over them with you, and I have not a doubt of their producing a strong effect out of doors. There is nothing in the present time at once so galling and so alarming to me as the alienation of the people from their own public affairs. I have no difficulty in understanding it. They have had so little to do with the game through all these years of Parliamentary Reform, that they have sullenly laid down their cards, and taken to looking on. The players who are left at the table do not see beyond it, conceive that gain and loss and all the interest of the play are in their hands, and will never be wiser until they and the table and the lights and the money are all overturned together. And I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering, instead of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned by any one of a thousand accidents--a bad harvest--the last strain too much of aristocratic insolence or incapacity--a defeat abroad--a mere chance at home--with such a devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld since. Meanwhile, all our English tuft-hunting, toad-eating, and other manifestations of accursed gentility--to say nothing of the Lord knows who's defiances of the proven truth before six hundred and fifty men--ARE expressing themselves every day. So, every day, the disgusted millions with this unnatural gloom are confirmed and hardened in the very worst of moods. Finally, round all this is an atmosphere of poverty, hunger, and ignorant desperation, of the mere existence of which perhaps not one man in a thousand of those not actually enveloped in it, through the whole extent of this country, has the least idea. It seems to me an absolute impossibility to direct the spirit of the people at this pass until it shows itself. If they begin to bestir themselves in the vigorous national manner; if they would appear in political reunion, array themselves peacefully but in vast numbers against a system that they know to be rotten altogether, make themselves heard like the sea all round this island, I for one should be in such a movement heart and soul, and should think it a duty of the plainest kind to go along with it, and try to guide it by all possible means. But you can no more help a people who do not help themselves than you can help a man who does not help himself. And until the people can be got up from the lethargy, which is an awful symptom of the advanced state of their disease, I know of nothing that can be done beyond keeping their wrongs continually before them. I shall hope to see you soon after you come back. Your speeches at Aberdeen are most admirable, manful, and earnest. I would have such speeches at every market-cross, and in every town-hall, and among all sorts and conditions of men; up in the very balloons, and down in the very diving-bells. Ever, cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday, April 14th, 1855._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I cannot express to you how very much delighted I am with the "Steele." I think it incomparably the best of the series. The pleasanter humanity of the subject may commend it more to one's liking, but that again requires a delicate handling, which you have given to it in a most charming manner. It is surely not possible to approach a man with a finer sympathy, and the assertion of the claims of literature throughout is of the noblest and most gallant kind. I don't agree with you about the serious papers in _The Spectator_, which I think (whether they be Steele's or Addison's) are generally as indifferent as the humour of _The Spectator_ is delightful. And I have always had a notion that Prue understood her husband very well, and held him in consequence, when a fonder woman with less show of caprice must have let him go. But these are points of opinion. The paper is masterly, and all I have got to say is, that if ---- had a grain of the honest sentiment with which it overflows, he never would or could have made so great a mistake. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday, April 26th, 1855._ ON THE DEATH OF AN INFANT. MY DEAR MARK, I will call for you at two, and go with you to Highgate, by all means. Leech and I called on Tuesday evening and left our loves. I have not written to you since, because I thought it best to leave you quiet for a day. I have no need to tell you, my dear fellow, that my thoughts have been constantly with you, and that I have not forgotten (and never shall forget) who sat up with me one night when a little place in my house was left empty. It is hard to lose any child, but there are many blessed sources of consolation in the loss of a baby. There is a beautiful thought in Fielding's "Journey from this World to the Next," where the baby he had lost many years before was found by him all radiant and happy, building him a bower in the Elysian Fields where they were to live together when he came. Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--Our kindest loves to Mrs. Lemon. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, May 20th, 1855._ MY DEAR STANNY, I have a little lark in contemplation, if you will help it to fly. Collins has done a melodrama (a regular old-style melodrama), in which there is a very good notion. I am going to act it, as an experiment, in the children's theatre here--I, Mark, Collins, Egg, and my daughter Mary, the whole _dram. pers._; our families and yours the whole audience; for I want to make the stage large and shouldn't have room for above five-and-twenty spectators. Now there is only one scene in the piece, and that, my tarry lad, is the inside of a lighthouse. Will you come and paint it for us one night, and we'll all turn to and help? It is a mere wall, of course, but Mark and I have sworn that you must do it. If you will say yes, I should like to have the tiny flats made, after you have looked at the place, and not before. On Wednesday in this week I am good for a steak and the play, if you will make your own appointment here; or any day next week except Thursday. Write me a line in reply. We mean to burst on an astonished world with the melodrama, without any note of preparation. So don't say a syllable to Forster if you should happen to see him. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday Afternoon, Six o'clock, May 22nd, 1855._ MY DEAR STANNY, Your note came while I was out walking. Even if I had been at home I could not have managed to dine together to-day, being under a beastly engagement to dine out. Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I shall expect you here some time to-morrow, and will remain at home. I only wait your instructions to get the little canvases made. O, what a pity it is not the outside of the light'us, with the sea a-rowling agin it! Never mind, we'll get an effect out of the inside, and there's a storm and a shipwreck "off;" and the great ambition of my life will be achieved at last, in the wearing of a pair of very coarse petticoat trousers. So hoorar for the salt sea, mate, and bouse up! Ever affectionately, DICKY. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 23rd, 1855._ MY DEAR MARK, Stanny says he is only sorry it is not the outside of the lighthouse with a raging sea and a transparent light. He enters into the project with the greatest delight, and I think we shall make a capital thing of it. It now occurs to me that we may as well do a farce too. I should like to get in a little part for Katey, and also for Charley, if it were practicable. What do you think of "Animal Mag."? You and I in our old parts; Collins, Jeffrey; Charley, the Markis; Katey and Mary (or Georgina), the two ladies? Can you think of anything merry that is better? It ought to be broad, as a relief to the melodrama, unless we could find something funny with a story in it too. I rather incline myself to "Animal Mag." Will you come round and deliver your sentiments? Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday, May 24th, 1855._ MY DEAR STONE, Great projects are afoot here for a grown-up play in about three weeks' time. Former schoolroom arrangements to be reversed--large stage and small audience. Stanfield bent on desperate effects, and all day long with his coat off, up to his eyes in distemper colours. Will you appear in your celebrated character of Mr. Nightingale? I want to wind up with that popular farce, we all playing our old parts. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 24th, 1855._ MY DEAR STONE, That's right! You will find the words come back very quickly. Why, _of course_ your people are to come, and if Stanfield don't astonish 'em, I'm a Dutchman. O Heaven, if you could hear the ideas he proposes to me, making even _my_ hair stand on end! Will you get Marcus or some similar bright creature to copy out old Nightingale's part for you, and then return the book? This is the prompt-book, the only one I have; and Katey and Georgina (being also in wild excitement) want to write their parts out with all despatch. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday, May 24th, 1855._ MY DEAR COLLINS, I shall expect you to-morrow evening at "Household Words." I have written a little ballad for Mary--"The Story of the Ship's Carpenter and the Little Boy, in the Shipwreck." Let us close up with "Mr. Nightingale's Diary." Will you look whether you have a book of it, or your part. All other matters and things hereunto belonging when we meet. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mrs. Trollope.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday Morning, June 19th, 1855._ MY DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE, I was out of town on Sunday, or I should have answered your note immediately on its arrival. I cannot have the pleasure of seeing the famous "medium" to-night, for I have some theatricals at home. But I fear I shall not in any case be a good subject for the purpose, as I altogether want faith in the thing. I have not the least belief in the awful unseen world being available for evening parties at so much per night; and, although I should be ready to receive enlightenment from any source, I must say I have very little hope of it from the spirits who express themselves through mediums, as I have never yet observed them to talk anything but nonsense, of which (as Carlyle would say) there is probably enough in these days of ours, and in all days, among mere mortality. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, June 20th, 1855._ MY DEAR STANNY, I write a hasty note to let you know that last night was perfectly wonderful!!! Such an audience! Such a brilliant success from first to last! The Queen had taken it into her head in the morning to go to Chatham, and had carried Phipps with her. He wrote to me asking if it were possible to give him a quarter of an hour. I got through that time before the overture, and he came without any dinner, so influenced by eager curiosity. Lemon and I did every conceivable absurdity, I think, in the farce; and they never left off laughing. At supper I proposed your health, which was drunk with nine times nine, and three cheers over. We then turned to at Scotch reels (having had no exercise), and danced in the maddest way until five this morning. It is as much as I can do to guide the pen. With loves to Mrs. Stanfield and all, Ever most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday, June 30th, 1855._ MY VERY DEAR MACREADY, I write shortly, after a day's work at my desk, rather than lose a post in answering your enthusiastic, earnest, and young--how young, in all the best side of youth--letter. To tell you the truth, I confidently expected to hear from you. I knew that if there were a man in the world who would be interested in, and who would approve of, my giving utterance to whatever was in me at this time, it would be you. I was as sure of you as of the sun this morning. The subject is surrounded by difficulties; the Association is sorely in want of able men; and the resistance of all the phalanx, who have an interest in corruption and mismanagement, is the resistance of a struggle against death. But the great, first, strong necessity is to rouse the people up, to keep them stirring and vigilant, to carry the war dead into the tent of such creatures as ----, and ring into their souls (or what stands for them) that the time for dandy insolence is gone for ever. It may be necessary to come to that law of primogeniture (I have no love for it), or to come to even greater things; but this is the first service to be done, and unless it is done, there is not a chance. For this, and to encourage timid people to come in, I went to Drury Lane the other night; and I wish you had been there and had seen and heard the people. The Association will be proud to have your name and gift. When we sat down on the stage the other night, and were waiting a minute or two to begin, I said to Morley, the chairman (a thoroughly fine earnest fellow), "this reminds me so of one of my dearest friends, with a melancholy so curious, that I don't know whether the place feels familiar to me or strange." He was full of interest directly, and we went on talking of you until the moment of his getting up to open the business. They are going to print my speech in a tract-form, and send it all over the country. I corrected it for the purpose last night. We are all well. Charley in the City; all the boys at home for the holidays; three prizes brought home triumphantly (one from the Boulogne waters and one from Wimbledon); I taking dives into a new book, and runs at leap-frog over "Household Words;" and Anne going to be married--which is the only bad news. Catherine, Georgie, Mary, Katey, Charley, and all the rest, send multitudes of loves. Ever, my dearest Macready, with unalterable affection and attachment, Your faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] 3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, _Tuesday, July 17th, 1855._ MY DEAR COLLINS, Walter goes back to school on the 1st of August. Will you come out of school to this breezy vacation on the same day, or rather _this day fortnight, July 31st_? for that is the day on which he leaves us, and we begin (here's a parent!) to be able to be comfortable. Why a boy of that age should seem to have on at all times a hundred and fifty pair of double-soled boots, and to be always jumping a bottom stair with the whole hundred and fifty, I don't know. But the woeful fact is within my daily experience. We have a very pleasant little house, overlooking the sea, and I think you will like the place. It rained, in honour of our arrival, with the greatest vigour, yesterday. I went out after dinner to buy some nails (you know the arrangements that would be then in progress), and I stopped in the rain, about halfway down a steep, crooked street, like a crippled ladder, to look at a little coachmaker's, where there had just been a sale. Speculating on the insolvent coachmaker's business, and what kind of coaches he could possibly have expected to get orders for in Folkestone, I thought, "What would bring together fifty people now, in this little street, at this little rainy minute?" On the instant, a brewer's van, with two mad horses in it, and the harness dangling about them--like the trappings of those horses you are acquainted with, who bolted through the starry courts of heaven--dashed by me, and in that instant, such a crowd as would have accumulated in Fleet Street sprang up magically. Men fell out of windows, dived out of doors, plunged down courts, precipitated themselves down steps, came down waterspouts, instead of rain, I think, and I never saw so wonderful an instance of the gregarious effect of an excitement. A man, a woman, and a child had been thrown out on the horses taking fright and the reins breaking. The child is dead, and the woman very ill but will probably recover, and the man has a hand broken and other mischief done to him. Let me know what Wigan says. If he does not take the play, and readily too, I would recommend you not to offer it elsewhere. You have gained great reputation by it, have done your position a deal of good, and (as I think) stand so well with it, that it is a pity to engender the notion that you care to stand better. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] FOLKESTONE, _September 16th, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, Scrooge is delighted to find that Bob Cratchit is enjoying his holiday in such a delightful situation; and he says (with that warmth of nature which has distinguished him since his conversion), "Make the most of it, Bob; make the most of it." [I am just getting to work on No. 3 of the new book, and am in the hideous state of mind belonging to that condition.] I have not a word of news. I am steeped in my story, and rise and fall by turns into enthusiasm and depression. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] FOLKESTONE, _Sunday, Sept. 16th, 1855._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, This will be a short letter, but I hope not unwelcome. If you knew how often I write to you--in intention--I don't know where you would find room for the correspondence. Catherine tells me that you want to know the name of my new book. I cannot bear that you should know it from anyone but me. It will not be made public until the end of October; the title is: "NOBODY'S FAULT." Keep it as the apple of your eye--an expressive form of speech, though I have not the least idea of what it means. Next, I wish to tell you that I have appointed to read at Peterboro', on Tuesday, the 18th of December. I have told the Dean that I cannot accept his hospitality, and that I am going with Mr. Wills to the inn, therefore I shall be absolutely at your disposal, and shall be more than disappointed if you don't stay with us. As the time approaches will you let me know your arrangements, and whether Mr. Wills can bespeak any rooms for you in arranging for me? Georgy will give you our address in Paris as soon as we shall have settled there. We shall leave here, I think, in rather less than a month from this time. You know my state of mind as well as I do, indeed, if you don't know it much better, it is not the state of mind I take it to be. How I work, how I walk, how I shut myself up, how I roll down hills and climb up cliffs; how the new story is everywhere--heaving in the sea, flying with the clouds, blowing in the wind; how I settle to nothing, and wonder (in the old way) at my own incomprehensibility. I am getting on pretty well, have done the first two numbers, and am just now beginning the third; which egotistical announcements I make to you because I know you will be interested in them. All the house send their kindest loves. I think of inserting an advertisement in _The Times_, offering to submit the Plornishghenter to public competition, and to receive fifty thousand pounds if such another boy cannot be found, and to pay five pounds (my fortune) if he can. Ever, my dear Mrs. Watson, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] FOLKESTONE, _Sunday, Sept. 30th, 1855._ MY DEAR COLLINS, Welcome from the bosom of the deep! If a hornpipe will be acceptable to you at any time (as a reminder of what the three brothers were always doing), I shall be, as the chairman says at Mr. Evans's, "happy to oblige." I have almost finished No. 3, in which I have relieved my indignant soul with a scarifier. Sticking at it day after day, I am the incompletest letter-writer imaginable--seem to have no idea of holding a pen for any other purpose but that book. My fair Laura has not yet reported concerning Paris, but I should think will have done so before I see you. And now to that point. I purpose being in town on _Monday, the 8th_, when I have promised to dine with Forster. At the office, between half-past eleven and one that day, I will expect you, unless I hear from you to the contrary. Of course the H. W. stories are at your disposition. If you should have completed your idea, we might breakfast together at the G. on the Tuesday morning and discuss it. Or I shall be in town after ten on the Monday night. At the office I will tell you the idea of the Christmas number, which will put you in train, I hope, for a story. I have postponed the shipwreck idea for a year, as it seemed to require more force from me than I could well give it with the weight of a new start upon me. All here send their kindest remembrances. We missed you very much, and the Plorn was quite inconsolable. We slide down Cæsar occasionally. They launched the boat, the rapid building of which you remember, the other day. All the fishermen in the place, all the nondescripts, and all the boys pulled at it with ropes from six A.M. to four P.M. Every now and then the ropes broke, and they all fell down in the shingle. The obstinate way in which the beastly thing wouldn't move was so exasperating that I wondered they didn't shoot it, or burn it. Whenever it moved an inch they all cheered; whenever it wouldn't move they all swore. Finally, when it was quite given over, some one tumbled against it accidentally (as it appeared to me, looking out at my window here), and it instantly shot about a mile into the sea, and they all stood looking at it helplessly. Kind regards to Pigott, in which all unite. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] FOLKESTONE, _Thursday, Oct. 4th, 1855._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have been hammering away in that strenuous manner at my book, that I have had leisure for scarcely any letters but such, as I have been obliged to write; having a horrible temptation when I lay down my book-pen to run out on the breezy downs here, tear up the hills, slide down the same, and conduct myself in a frenzied manner, for the relief that only exercise gives me. Your letter to Miss Coutts in behalf of little Miss Warner I despatched straightway. She is at present among the Pyrenees, and a letter from her crossed that one of mine in which I enclosed yours, last week. Pray stick to that dim notion you have of coming to Paris! How delightful it would be to see your aged countenance and perfectly bald head in that capital! It will renew your youth, to visit a theatre (previously dining at the Trois Frères) in company with the jocund boy who now addresses you. Do, do stick to it. You will be pleased to hear, I know, that Charley has gone into Baring's house under very auspicious circumstances. Mr. Bates, of that firm, had done me the kindness to place him at the brokers' where he was. And when said Bates wrote to me a fortnight ago to say that an excellent opening had presented itself at Baring's, he added that the brokers gave Charley "so high a character for ability and zeal" that it would be unfair to receive him as a volunteer, and he must begin at a fifty-pound salary, to which I graciously consented. As to the suffrage, I have lost hope even in the ballot. We appear to me to have proved the failure of representative institutions without an educated and advanced people to support them. What with teaching people to "keep in their stations," what with bringing up the soul and body of the land to be a good child, or to go to the beershop, to go a-poaching and go to the devil; what with having no such thing as a middle class (for though we are perpetually bragging of it as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper); what with flunkyism, toadyism, letting the most contemptible lords come in for all manner of places, reading _The Court Circular_ for the New Testament, I do reluctantly believe that the English people are habitually consenting parties to the miserable imbecility into which we have fallen, _and never will help themselves out of it_. Who is to do it, if anybody is, God knows. But at present we are on the down-hill road to being conquered, and the people WILL be content to bear it, sing "Rule Britannia," and WILL NOT be saved. In No. 3 of my new book I have been blowing off a little of indignant steam which would otherwise blow me up, and with God's leave I shall walk in the same all the days of my life; but I have no present political faith or hope--not a grain. I am going to read the "Carol" here to-morrow in a long carpenter's shop, which looks far more alarming as a place to hear in than the Town Hall at Birmingham. Kindest loves from all to your dear sister, Kate and the darlings. It is blowing a gale here from the south-west and raining like mad. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] 2, RUE ST. FLORENTIN, _Tuesday, Oct. 16th, 1855._ MY DEAREST CATHERINE, We have had the most awful job to find a place that would in the least suit us, for Paris is perfectly full, and there is nothing to be got at any sane price. However, we have found two apartments--an _entresol_ and a first floor, with a kitchen and servants' room at the top of the house, at No. 49, Avenue des Champs Elysées. You must be prepared for a regular Continental abode. There is only one window in each room, but the front apartments all look upon the main street of the Champs Elysées, and the view is delightfully cheerful. There are also plenty of rooms. They are not over and above well furnished, but by changing furniture from rooms we don't care for to rooms we _do_ care for, we shall be able to make them home-like and presentable. I think the situation itself almost the finest in Paris; and the children will have a window from which to look on the busy life outside. We could have got a beautiful apartment in the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré for a very little more, most elegantly furnished; but the greater part of it was on a courtyard, and it would never have done for the children. This, that I have taken for six months, is seven hundred francs per month, and twenty more for the _concierge_. What you have to expect is a regular French residence, which a little habitation will make pretty and comfortable, with nothing showy in it, but with plenty of rooms, and with that wonderful street in which the Barrière de l'�toile stands outside. The amount of rooms is the great thing, and I believe it to be the place best suited for us, at a not unreasonable price in Paris. Georgina and Lady Olliffe[22] send their loves. Georgina and I add ours to Mamey, Katey, the Plorn, and Harry. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 49, AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Friday, Oct. 19th, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, After going through unheard-of bedevilments (of which you shall have further particulars as soon as I come right side upwards, which may happen in a day or two), we are at last established here in a series of closets, but a great many of them, with all Paris perpetually passing under the windows. Letters may have been wandering after me to that home in the Rue de Balzac, which is to be the subject of more lawsuits between the man who let it to me and the man who wouldn't let me have possession, than any other house that ever was built. But I have had no letters at all, and have been--ha, ha!--a maniac since last Monday. I will try my hand at that paper for H. W. to-morrow, if I can get a yard of flooring to sit upon; but we have really been in that state of topsy-turvyhood that even that has been an unattainable luxury, and may yet be for eight-and-forty hours or so, for anything I see to the contrary. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 49, AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Sunday Night, Oct. 21st, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, Coming here from a walk this afternoon, I found your letter of yesterday awaiting me. I send this reply by my brother Alfred, who is here, and who returns home to-morrow. You should get it at the office early on Tuesday. I will go to work to-morrow, and will send you, please God, an article by Tuesday's post, which you will get on Wednesday forenoon. Look carefully to the proof, as I shall not have time to receive it for correction. When you arrange about sending your parcels, will you ascertain, and communicate to me, the prices of telegraph messages? It will save me trouble, having no foreign servant (though French is in that respect a trump), and may be useful on an emergency. I have two floors here--_entresol_ and first--in a doll's house, but really pretty within, and the view without astounding, as you will say when you come. The house is on the Exposition side, about half a quarter of a mile above Franconi's, of course on the other side of the way, and close to the Jardin d'Hîver. Each room has but one window in it, but we have no fewer than six rooms (besides the back ones) looking on the Champs Elysées, with the wonderful life perpetually flowing up and down. We have no spare-room, but excellent stowage for the whole family, including a capital dressing-room for me, and a really slap-up kitchen near the stairs. Damage for the whole, seven hundred francs a month. But, sir--but--when Georgina, the servants, and I were here for the first night (Catherine and the rest being at Boulogne), I heard Georgy restless--turned out--asked: "What's the matter?" "Oh, it's dreadfully dirty. I can't sleep for the smell of my room." Imagine all my stage-managerial energies multiplied at daybreak by a thousand. Imagine the porter, the porter's wife, the porter's wife's sister, a feeble upholsterer of enormous age from round the corner, and all his workmen (four boys), summoned. Imagine the partners in the proprietorship of the apartment, and martial little man with François-Prussian beard, also summoned. Imagine your inimitable chief briefly explaining that dirt is not in his way, and that he is driven to madness, and that he devotes himself to no coat and a dirty face, until the apartment is thoroughly purified. Imagine co-proprietors at first astounded, then urging that "it's not the custom," then wavering, then affected, then confiding their utmost private sorrows to the Inimitable, offering new carpets (accepted), embraces (not accepted), and really responding like French bricks. Sallow, unbrushed, unshorn, awful, stalks the Inimitable through the apartment until last night. Then all the improvements were concluded, and I do really believe the place to be now worth eight or nine hundred francs per month. You must picture it as the smallest place you ever saw, but as exquisitely cheerful and vivacious, clean as anything human can be, and with a moving panorama always outside, which is Paris in itself. You mention a letter from Miss Coutts as to Mrs. Brown's illness, which you say is "enclosed to Mrs. Charles Dickens." It is not enclosed, and I am mad to know where she writes from that I may write to her. Pray set this right, for her uneasiness will be greatly intensified if she have no word from me. I thought we were to give £1,700 for the house at Gad's Hill. Are we bound to £1,800? Considering the improvements to be made, it is a little too much, isn't it? I have a strong impression that at the utmost we were only to divide the difference, and not to pass £1,750. You will set me right if I am wrong. But I don't think I am. I write very hastily, with the piano playing and Alfred looking for this. Ever, my dear Wills, faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 49, AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYS�ES, _Wednesday, Oct. 24th, 1855._ MY DEAR WILLS, In the Gad's Hill matter, I too would like to try the effect of "not budging." _So do not go beyond the_ £1,700. Considering what I should have to expend on the one hand, and the low price of stock on the other, I do not feel disposed to go beyond that mark. They won't let a purchaser escape for the sake of the £100, I think. And Austin was strongly of opinion, when I saw him last, that £1,700 was enough. You cannot think how pleasant it is to me to find myself generally known and liked here. If I go into a shop to buy anything, and give my card, the officiating priest or priestess brightens up, and says: "_Ah! c'est l'écrivain célèbre! Monsieur porte un nom très-distingué. Mais! je suis honoré et intéressé de voir Monsieur Dick-in. Je lis un des livres de monsieur tous les jours_" (in the _Moniteur_). And a man who brought some little vases home last night, said: "_On connaît bien en France que Monsieur Dick-in prend sa position sur la dignité de la littérature. Ah! c'est grande chose! Et ses caractères_" (this was to Georgina, while he unpacked) "_sont si spirituellement tournées! Cette Madame Tojare_" (Todgers), "_ah! qu'elle est drôle et précisément comme une dame que je connais à Calais._" You cannot have any doubt about this place, if you will only recollect it is the great main road from the Place de la Concorde to the Barrière de l'�toile. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] _Wednesday, November 21st, 1855._ MY DEAR REGNIER, In thanking you for the box you kindly sent me the day before yesterday, let me thank you a thousand times for the delight we derived from the representation of your beautiful and admirable piece. I have hardly ever been so affected and interested in any theatre. Its construction is in the highest degree excellent, the interest absorbing, and the whole conducted by a masterly hand to a touching and natural conclusion. Through the whole story from beginning to end, I recognise the true spirit and feeling of an artist, and I most heartily offer you and your fellow-labourer my felicitations on the success you have achieved. That it will prove a very great and a lasting one, I cannot for a moment doubt. O my friend! If I could see an English actress with but one hundredth part of the nature and art of Madame Plessy, I should believe our English theatre to be in a fair way towards its regeneration. But I have no hope of ever beholding such a phenomenon. I may as well expect ever to see upon an English stage an accomplished artist, able to write and to embody what he writes, like you. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Madame Viardot.] 49, AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYS�ES, _Monday, Dec. 3rd, 1855._ DEAR MADAME VIARDOT, Mrs. Dickens tells me that you have only borrowed the first number of "Little Dorrit," and are going to send it back. Pray do nothing of the sort, and allow me to have the great pleasure of sending you the succeeding numbers as they reach me. I have had such delight in your great genius, and have so high an interest in it and admiration of it, that I am proud of the honour of giving you a moment's intellectual pleasure. Believe me, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Dec. 23rd, 1855._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I have a moment in which to redeem my promise, of putting you in possession of my Little Friend No. 2, before the general public. It is, of course, at the disposal of your circle, but until the month is out, is understood to be a prisoner in the castle. If I had time to write anything, I should still quite vainly try to tell you what interest and happiness I had in once more seeing you among your dear children. Let me congratulate you on your Eton boys. They are so handsome, frank, and genuinely modest, that they charmed me. A kiss to the little fair-haired darling and the rest; the love of my heart to every stone in the old house. Enormous effect at Sheffield. But really not a better audience perceptively than at Peterboro', for that could hardly be, but they were more enthusiastically demonstrative, and they took the line, "and to Tiny Tim who did NOT die," with a most prodigious shout and roll of thunder. Ever, my dear Friend, most faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [21] Captain Cavendish Boyle was governor of the military prison at Weedon. [22] Wife of the late Sir Joseph Olliffe, Physician to the British Embassy. 1856. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens having taken an _appartement_ in Paris for the winter months, 49, Avenue des Champs Elysées, was there with his family until the middle of May. He much enjoyed this winter sojourn, meeting many old friends, making new friends, and interchanging hospitalities with the French artistic world. He had also many friends from England to visit him. Mr. Wilkie Collins had an _appartement de garçon_ hard by, and the two companions were constantly together. The Rev. James White and his family also spent their winter at Paris, having taken an _appartement_ at 49, Avenue des Champs Elysées, and the girls of the two families had the same masters, and took their lessons together. After the Whites' departure, Mr. Macready paid Charles Dickens a visit, occupying the vacant _appartement_. During this winter Charles Dickens was, however, constantly backwards and forwards between Paris and London on "Household Words" business, and was also at work on his "Little Dorrit." While in Paris he sat for his portrait to the great Ary Scheffer. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition of this year, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The summer was again spent at Boulogne, and once more at the Villa des Moulineaux, where he received constant visits from English friends, Mr. Wilkie Collins taking up his quarters for many weeks at a little cottage in the garden; and there the idea of another play, to be acted at Tavistock House, was first started. Many of our letters for this year have reference to this play, and will show the interest which Charles Dickens took in it, and the immense amount of care and pains given by him to the careful carrying out of this favourite amusement. The Christmas number of "Household Words," written by Charles Dickens and Mr. Collins, called "The Wreck of the _Golden Mary_," was planned by the two friends during this summer holiday. It was in this year that one of the great wishes of his life was to be realised, the much-coveted house--Gad's Hill Place--having been purchased by him, and the cheque written on the 14th of March--on a "Friday," as he writes to his sister-in-law, in the letter of this date. He frequently remarked that all the important, and so far fortunate, events of his life had happened to him on a Friday. So that, contrary to the usual superstition, that day had come to be looked upon by his family as his "lucky" day. The allusion to the "plainness" of Miss Boyle's handwriting is good-humouredly ironical; that lady's writing being by no means famous for its legibility. The "Anne" mentioned in the letter to his sister-in-law, which follows the one to Miss Boyle, was the faithful servant who had lived with the family so long; and who, having left to be married the previous year, had found it a very difficult matter to recover from her sorrow at this parting. And the "godfather's present" was for a son of Mr. Edmund Yates. "The Humble Petition" was written to Mr. Wilkie Collins during that gentleman's visit to Paris. The explanation of the remark to Mr. Wills (6th April), that he had paid the money to Mr. Poole, is that Charles Dickens was the trustee through whom the dramatist received his pension. The letter to the Duke of Devonshire has reference to the peace illuminations after the Crimean war. The M. Forgues for whom, at Mr. Collins's request, he writes a short biography of himself, was the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The speech at the London Tavern was on behalf of the Artists' Benevolent Fund. Miss Kate Macready had sent some clever poems to "Household Words," with which Charles Dickens had been much pleased. He makes allusion to these, in our two remaining letters to Mr. Macready. "I did write it for you" (letter to Mrs. Watson, 17th October), refers to that part of "Little Dorrit" which treats of the visit of the Dorrit family to the Great St. Bernard. An expedition which it will be remembered he made himself, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Watson and other friends. The letter to Mrs. Horne refers to a joke about the name of a friend of this lady's, who had once been brought by her to Tavistock House. The letter to Mr. Mitton concerns the lighting of the little theatre at Tavistock House. Our last letter is in answer to one from Mr. Kent, asking him to sit to Mr. John Watkins for his photograph. We should add, however, that he did subsequently give this gentleman some sittings. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, _Sunday, Jan. 6th, 1856._ MY DEAR WILLS, I should like Morley to do a Strike article, and to work into it the greater part of what is here. But I cannot represent myself as holding the opinion that all strikes among this unhappy class of society, who find it so difficult to get a peaceful hearing, are always necessarily wrong, because I don't think so. To open a discussion of the question by saying that the men are "_of course_ entirely and painfully in the wrong," surely would be monstrous in any one. Show them to be in the wrong here, but in the name of the eternal heavens show why, upon the merits of this question. Nor can I possibly adopt the representation that these men are wrong because by throwing themselves out of work they throw other people, possibly without their consent. If such a principle had anything in it, there could have been no civil war, no raising by Hampden of a troop of horse, to the detriment of Buckinghamshire agriculture, no self-sacrifice in the political world. And O, good God, when ---- treats of the suffering of wife and children, can he suppose that these mistaken men don't feel it in the depths of their hearts, and don't honestly and honourably, most devoutly and faithfully believe that for those very children, when they shall have children, they are bearing all these miseries now! I hear from Mrs. Fillonneau that her husband was obliged to leave town suddenly before he could get your parcel, consequently he has not brought it; and White's sovereigns--unless you have got them back again--are either lying out of circulation somewhere, or are being spent by somebody else. I will write again on Tuesday. My article is to begin the enclosed. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Monday, Jan. 7th, 1856._ MY DEAR MARK, I want to know how "Jack and the Beanstalk" goes. I have a notion from a notice--a favourable notice, however--which I saw in _Galignani_, that Webster has let down the comic business. In a piece at the Ambigu, called the "Rentrée à Paris," a mere scene in honour of the return of the troops from the Crimea the other day, there is a novelty which I think it worth letting you know of, as it is easily available, either for a serious or a comic interest--the introduction of a supposed electric telegraph. The scene is the railway terminus at Paris, with the electric telegraph office on the prompt side, and the clerks _with their backs to the audience_--much more real than if they were, as they infallibly would be, staring about the house--working the needles; and the little bell perpetually ringing. There are assembled to greet the soldiers, all the easily and naturally imagined elements of interest--old veteran fathers, young children, agonised mothers, sisters and brothers, girl lovers--each impatient to know of his or her own object of solicitude. Enter to these a certain marquis, full of sympathy for all, who says: "My friends, I am one of you. My brother has no commission yet. He is a common soldier. I wait for him as well as all brothers and sisters here wait for _their_ brothers. Tell me whom you are expecting." Then they all tell him. Then he goes into the telegraph-office, and sends a message down the line to know how long the troops will be. Bell rings. Answer handed out on slip of paper. "Delay on the line. Troops will not arrive for a quarter of an hour." General disappointment. "But we have this brave electric telegraph, my friends," says the marquis. "Give me your little messages, and I'll send them off." General rush round the marquis. Exclamations: "How's Henri?" "My love to Georges;" "Has Guillaume forgotten Elise?" "Is my son wounded?" "Is my brother promoted?" etc. etc. Marquis composes tumult. Sends message--such a regiment, such a company--"Elise's love to Georges." Little bell rings, slip of paper handed out--"Georges in ten minutes will embrace his Elise. Sends her a thousand kisses." Marquis sends message--such a regiment, such a company--"Is my son wounded?" Little bell rings. Slip of paper handed out--"No. He has not yet upon him those marks of bravery in the glorious service of his country which his dear old father bears" (father being lamed and invalided). Last of all, the widowed mother. Marquis sends message--such a regiment, such a company--"Is my only son safe?" Little bell rings. Slip of paper handed out--"He was first upon the heights of Alma." General cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. "He was made a sergeant at Inkermann." Another cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. "He was made colour-sergeant at Sebastopol." Another cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. "He was the first man who leaped with the French banner on the Malakhoff tower." Tremendous cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. "But he was struck down there by a musket-ball, and----Troops have proceeded. Will arrive in half a minute after this." Mother abandons all hope; general commiseration; troops rush in, down a platform; son only wounded, and embraces her. As I have said, and as you will see, this is available for any purpose. But done with equal distinction and rapidity, it is a tremendous effect, and got by the simplest means in the world. There is nothing in the piece, but it was impossible not to be moved and excited by the telegraph part of it. I hope you have seen something of Stanny, and have been to pantomimes with him, and have drunk to the absent Dick. I miss you, my dear old boy, at the play, woefully, and miss the walk home, and the partings at the corner of Tavistock Square. And when I go by myself, I come home stewing "Little Dorrit" in my head; and the best part of _my_ play is (or ought to be) in Gordon Street. I have written to Beaucourt about taking that breezy house--a little improved--for the summer, and I hope you and yours will come there often and stay there long. My present idea, if nothing should arise to unroot me sooner, is to stay here until the middle of May, then plant the family at Boulogne, and come with Catherine and Georgy home for two or three weeks. When I shall next run across I don't know, but I suppose next month. We are up to our knees in mud here. Literally in vehement despair, I walked down the avenue outside the Barrière de l'�toile here yesterday, and went straight on among the trees. I came back with top-boots of mud on. Nothing will cleanse the streets. Numbers of men and women are for ever scooping and sweeping in them, and they are always one lake of yellow mud. All my trousers go to the tailor's every day, and are ravelled out at the heels every night. Washing is awful. Tell Mrs. Lemon, with my love, that I have bought her some Eau d'Or, in grateful remembrance of her knowing what it is, and crushing the tyrant of her existence by resolutely refusing to be put down when that monster would have silenced her. You may imagine the loves and messages that are now being poured in upon me by all of them, so I will give none of them; though I am pretending to be very scrupulous about it, and am looking (I have no doubt) as if I were writing them down with the greatest care. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, _Saturday, Jan. 19th, 1856._ MY DEAR COLLINS, I had no idea you were so far on with your book, and heartily congratulate you on being within sight of land. It is excessively pleasant to me to get your letter, as it opens a perspective of theatrical and other lounging evenings, and also of articles in "Household Words." It will not be the first time that we shall have got on well in Paris, and I hope it will not be by many a time the last. I purpose coming over, early in February (as soon, in fact, as I shall have knocked out No. 5 of "Little D."), and therefore we can return in a jovial manner together. As soon as I know my day of coming over, I will write to you again, and (as the merchants--say Charley--would add) "communicate same" to you. The lodging, _en garçon_, shall be duly looked up, and I shall of course make a point of finding it close here. There will be no difficulty in that. I will have concluded the treaty before starting for London, and will take it by the month, both because that is the cheapest way, and because desirable places don't let for shorter terms. I have been sitting to Scheffer to-day--conceive this, if you please, with No. 5 upon my soul--four hours!! I am so addleheaded and bored, that if you were here, I should propose an instantaneous rush to the Trois Frères. Under existing circumstances I have no consolation. I think THE portrait[23] is the most astounding thing ever beheld upon this globe. It has been shrieked over by the united family as "Oh! the very image!" I went down to the _entresol_ the moment I opened it, and submitted it to the Plorn--then engaged, with a half-franc musket, in capturing a Malakhoff of chairs. He looked at it very hard, and gave it as his opinion that it was Misser Hegg. We suppose him to have confounded the Colonel with Jollins. I met Madame Georges Sand the other day at a dinner got up by Madame Viardot for that great purpose. The human mind cannot conceive any one more astonishingly opposed to all my preconceptions. If I had been shown her in a state of repose, and asked what I thought her to be, I should have said: "The Queen's monthly nurse." _Au reste_, she has nothing of the _bas bleu_ about her, and is very quiet and agreeable. The way in which mysterious Frenchmen call and want to embrace me, suggests to any one who knows me intimately, such infamous lurking, slinking, getting behind doors, evading, lying--so much mean resort to craven flights, dastard subterfuges, and miserable poltroonery--on my part, that I merely suggest the arrival of cards like this: [Illustration: HW: Horgues homme de lettres or Drouse membre de l'Institut or Cregibus Patalanternois Ecole des Beaux arts --every five minutes. Books also arrive with, on the flyleaf, Jaubaud Hommage à l'illustre romancier d'Angleterre Charles De Kean.] --and I then write letters of terrific _empressement_, with assurances of all sorts of profound considerations, and never by any chance become visible to the naked eye. At the Porte St. Martin they are doing the "Orestes," put into French verse by Alexandre Dumas. Really one of the absurdest things I ever saw. The scene of the tomb, with all manner of classical females, in black, grouping themselves on the lid, and on the steps, and on each other, and in every conceivable aspect of obtrusive impossibility, is just like the window of one of those artists in hair, who address the friends of deceased persons. To-morrow week a fête is coming off at the Jardin d'Hîver, next door but one here, which I must certainly go to. The fête of the company of the Folies Nouvelles! The ladies of the company are to keep stalls, and are to sell to Messieurs the Amateurs orange-water and lemonade. Paul le Grand is to promenade among the company, dressed as Pierrot. Kalm, the big-faced comic singer, is to do the like, dressed as a Russian Cossack. The entertainments are to conclude with "La Polka des Bêtes féroces, par la Troupe entière des Folies Nouvelles." I wish, without invasion of the rights of British subjects, or risk of war, ---- could be seized by French troops, brought over, and made to assist. The _appartement_ has not grown any bigger since you last had the joy of beholding me, and upon my honour and word I live in terror of asking ---- to dinner, lest she should not be able to get in at the dining-room door. I _think_ (am not sure) the dining-room would hold her, if she could be once passed in, but I don't see my way to that. Nevertheless, we manage our own family dinners very snugly there, and have good ones, as I think you will say, every day at half-past five. I have a notion that we may knock out a _series_ of descriptions for H. W. without much trouble. It is very difficult to get into the Catacombs, but my name is so well known here that I think I may succeed. I find that the guillotine can be got set up in private, like Punch's show. What do you think of _that_ for an article? I find myself underlining words constantly. It is not my nature. It is mere imbecility after the four hours' sitting. All unite in kindest remembrances to you, your mother and brother. Ever cordially. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Jan. 28th, 1856._ MY DEAR MARY, I am afraid you will think me an abandoned ruffian for not having acknowledged your more than handsome warm-hearted letter before now. But, as usual, I have been so occupied, and so glad to get up from my desk and wallow in the mud (at present about six feet deep here), that pleasure correspondence is just the last thing in the world I have had leisure to take to. Business correspondence with all sorts and conditions of men and women, O my Mary! is one of the dragons I am perpetually fighting; and the more I throw it, the more it stands upon its hind legs, rampant, and throws me. Yes, on that bright cold morning when I left Peterboro', I felt that the best thing I could do was to say that word that I would do anything in an honest way to avoid saying, at one blow, and make off. I was so sorry to leave you all! You can scarcely imagine what a chill and blank I felt on that Monday evening at Rockingham. It was so sad to me, and engendered a constraint so melancholy and peculiar, that I doubt if I were ever much more out of sorts in my life. Next morning, when it was light and sparkling out of doors, I felt more at home again. But when I came in from seeing poor dear Watson's grave, Mrs. Watson asked me to go up in the gallery, which I had last seen in the days of our merry play. We went up, and walked into the very part he had made and was so fond of, and she looked out of one window and I looked out of another, and for the life of me I could not decide in my own heart whether I should console or distress her by going and taking her hand, and saying something of what was naturally in my mind. So I said nothing, and we came out again, and on the whole perhaps it was best; for I have no doubt we understood each other very well without speaking a word. Sheffield was a tremendous success and an admirable audience. They made me a present of table-cutlery after the reading was over; and I came away by the mail-train within three-quarters of an hour, changing my dress and getting on my wrappers partly in the fly, partly at the inn, partly on the platform. When we got among the Lincolnshire fens it began to snow. That changed to sleet, that changed to rain; the frost was all gone as we neared London, and the mud has all come. At two or three o'clock in the morning I stopped at Peterboro' again, and thought of you all disconsolately. The lady in the refreshment-room was very hard upon me, harder even than those fair enslavers usually are. She gave me a cup of tea, as if I were a hyena and she my cruel keeper with a strong dislike to me. I mingled my tears with it, and had a petrified bun of enormous antiquity in miserable meekness. It is clear to me that climates are gradually assimilating over a great part of the world, and that in the most miserable part of our year there is very little to choose between London and Paris, except that London is not so muddy. I have never seen dirtier or worse weather than we have had here since I returned. In desperation I went out to the Barrières last Sunday on a headlong walk, and came back with my very eyebrows smeared with mud. Georgina is usually invisible during the walking time of the day. A turned-up nose may be seen in the midst of splashes, but nothing more. I am settling to work again, and my horrible restlessness immediately assails me. It belongs to such times. As I was writing the preceding page, it suddenly came into my head that I would get up and go to Calais. I don't know why; the moment I got there I should want to go somewhere else. But, as my friend the Boots says (see Christmas number "Household Words"): "When you come to think what a game you've been up to ever since you was in your own cradle, and what a poor sort of a chap you were, and how it's always yesterday with you, or else to-morrow, and never to-day, that's where it is." My dear Mary, would you favour me with the name and address of the professor that taught you writing, for I want to improve myself? Many a hand have I seen with many characteristics of beauty in it--some loopy, some dashy, some large, some small, some sloping to the right, some sloping to the left, some not sloping at all; but what I like in _your_ hand, Mary, is its plainness, it is like print. Them as runs may read just as well as if they stood still. I should have thought it was copper-plate if I hadn't known you. They send all sorts of messages from here, and so do I, with my best regards to Bedgy and pardner and the blessed babbies. When shall we meet again, I wonder, and go somewhere! Ah! Believe me ever, my dear Mary, Yours truly and affectionately, Joe. (That doesn't look plain.) JOE. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Friday, Feb. 8th, 1856._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I must write this at railroad speed, for I have been at it all day, and have numbers of letters to cram into the next half-hour. I began the morning in the City, for the Theatrical Fund; went on to Shepherd's Bush; came back to leave cards for Mr. Baring and Mr. Bates; ran across Piccadilly to Stratton Street, stayed there an hour, and shot off here. I have been in four cabs to-day, at a cost of thirteen shillings. Am going to dine with Mark and Webster at half-past four, and finish the evening at the Adelphi. The dinner was very successful. Charley was in great force, and floored Peter Cunningham and the Audit Office on a question about some bill transactions with Baring's. The other guests were B. and E., Shirley Brooks, Forster, and that's all. The dinner admirable. I never had a better. All the wine I sent down from Tavistock House. Anne waited, and looked well and happy, very much brighter altogether. It gave me great pleasure to see her so improved. Just before dinner I got all the letters from home. They could not have arrived more opportunely. The godfather's present looks charming now it is engraved, and John is just now going off to take it to Mrs. Yates. To-morrow Wills and I are going to Gad's Hill. It will occupy the whole day, and will just leave me time to get home to dress for dinner. And that's all that I have to say, except that the first number of "Little Dorrit" has gone to forty thousand, and the other one fast following. My best love to Catherine, and to Mamey and Katey, and Walter and Harry, and the noble Plorn. I am grieved to hear about his black eye, and fear that I shall find it in the green and purple state on my return. Ever affectionately. THE HUMBLE PETITION OF CHARLES DICKENS, A DISTRESSED FOREIGNER, SHEWETH, That your Petitioner has not been able to write one word to-day, or to fashion forth the dimmest shade of the faintest ghost of an idea. That your Petitioner is therefore desirous of being taken out, and is not at all particular where. That your Petitioner, being imbecile, says no more. But will ever, etc. (whatever that may be). PARIS, _March 3rd, 1856._ [Sidenote: Mr. Douglas Jerrold.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" OFFICE, _March 6th, 1856._ MY DEAR JERROLD, Buckstone has been with me to-day in a state of demi-semi-distraction, by reason of Macready's dreading his asthma so much as to excuse himself (of necessity, I know) from taking the chair for the fund on the occasion of their next dinner. I have promised to back Buckstone's entreaty to you to take it; and although I know that you have an objection which you once communicated to me, I still hold (as I did then) that it is a reason _for_ and not against. Pray reconsider the point. Your position in connection with dramatic literature has always suggested to me that there would be a great fitness and grace in your appearing in this post. I am convinced that the public would regard it in that light, and I particularly ask you to reflect that we never can do battle with the Lords, if we will not bestow ourselves to go into places which they have long monopolised. Now pray discuss this matter with yourself once more. If you can come to a favourable conclusion I shall be really delighted, and will of course come from Paris to be by you; if you cannot come to a favourable conclusion I shall be really sorry, though I of course most readily defer to your right to regard such a matter from your own point of view. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" OFFICE, _Tuesday, March 11th, 1856_.[24] MY DEAR GEORGY, I have been in bed half the day with my cold, which is excessively violent, consequently have to write in a great hurry to save the post. Tell Catherine that I have the most prodigious, overwhelming, crushing, astounding, blinding, deafening, pulverising, scarifying secret, of which Forster is the hero, imaginable by the whole efforts of the whole British population. It is a thing of that kind that, after I knew it, (from himself) this morning, I lay down flat as if an engine and tender had fallen upon me. Love to Catherine (not a word of Forster before anyone else), and to Mamey, Katey, Harry, and the noble Plorn. Tell Collins with my kind regards that Forster has just pronounced to me that "Collins is a decidedly clever fellow." I hope he is a better fellow in health, too. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Friday, March 14th, 1856._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I am amazed to hear of the snow (I don't know why, but it excited John this morning beyond measure); though we have had the same east wind here, and _the_ cold and _my_ cold have both been intense. Yesterday evening Webster, Mark, Stanny, and I went to the Olympic, where the Wigans ranged us in a row in a gorgeous and immense private box, and where we saw "Still Waters Run Deep." I laughed (in a conspicuous manner) to that extent at Emery, when he received the dinner-company, that the people were more amused by me than by the piece. I don't think I ever saw anything meant to be funny that struck me as so extraordinarily droll. I couldn't get over it at all. After the piece we went round, by Wigan's invitation, to drink with him. It being positively impossible to get Stanny off the stage, we stood in the wings during the burlesque. Mrs. Wigan seemed really glad to see her old manager, and the company overwhelmed him with embraces. They had nearly all been at the meeting in the morning. I have seen Charley only twice since I came to London, having regularly been in bed until mid-day. To my amazement, my eye fell upon him at the Adelphi yesterday. This day I have paid the purchase-money for Gad's Hill Place. After drawing the cheque, I turned round to give it to Wills (£1,790), and said: "Now isn't it an extraordinary thing--look at the day--Friday! I have been nearly drawing it half-a-dozen times, when the lawyers have not been ready, and here it comes round upon a Friday, as a matter of course." Kiss the noble Plorn a dozen times for me, and tell him I drank his health yesterday, and wished him many happy returns of the day; also that I hope he will not have broken all his toys before I come back. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Saturday, March 22nd, 1856._ MY DEAR MACREADY, I want you--you being quite well again, as I trust you are, and resolute to come to Paris--so to arrange your order of march as to let me know beforehand when you will come, and how long you will stay. We owe Scribe and his wife a dinner, and I should like to pay the debt when you are with us. Ary Scheffer too would be delighted to see you again. If I could arrange for a certain day I would secure them. We cannot afford (you and I, I mean) to keep much company, because we shall have to look in at a theatre or so, I daresay! It would suit my work best, if I could keep myself clear until Monday, the 7th of April. But in case that day should be too late for the beginning of your brief visit with a deference to any other engagements you have in contemplation, then fix an earlier one, and I will make "Little Dorrit" curtsy to it. My recent visit to London and my having only just now come back have thrown me a little behindhand; but I hope to come up with a wet sail in a few days. You should have seen the ruins of Covent Garden Theatre. I went in the moment I got to London--four days after the fire. Although the audience part and the stage were so tremendously burnt out that there was not a piece of wood half the size of a lucifer-match for the eye to rest on, though nothing whatever remained but bricks and smelted iron lying on a great black desert, the theatre still looked so wonderfully like its old self grown gigantic that I never saw so strange a sight. The wall dividing the front from the stage still remained, and the iron pass-doors stood ajar in an impossible and inaccessible frame. The arches that supported the stage were there, and the arches that supported the pit; and in the centre of the latter lay something like a Titanic grape-vine that a hurricane had pulled up by the roots, twisted, and flung down there; this was the great chandelier. Gye had kept the men's wardrobe at the top of the house over the great entrance staircase; when the roof fell in it came down bodily, and all that part of the ruins was like an old Babylonic pavement, bright rays tesselating the black ground, sometimes in pieces so large that I could make out the clothes in the "Trovatore." I should run on for a couple of hours if I had to describe the spectacle as I saw it, wherefore I will immediately muzzle myself. All here unite in kindest loves to dear Miss Macready, to Katie, Lillie, Benvenuta, my godson, and the noble Johnny. We are charmed to hear such happy accounts of Willy and Ned, and send our loving remembrance to them in the next letters. All Parisian novelties you shall see and hear for yourself. Ever, my dearest Macready, Your affectionate Friend. P.S.--Mr. F.'s aunt sends her defiant respects. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] 49, AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Thursday Night, March 27th, 1856 (after post time)._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, If I had had any idea of your coming (see how naturally I use the word when I am three hundred miles off!) to London so soon, I would never have written one word about the jump over next week. I am vexed that I did so, but as I did I will not now propose a change in the arrangements, as I know how methodical you tremendously old fellows are. That's your secret I suspect. That's the way in which the blood of the Mirabels mounts in your aged veins, even at your time of life. How charmed I shall be to see you, and we all shall be, I will not attempt to say. On that expected Sunday you will lunch at Amiens but not dine, because we shall wait dinner for you, and you will merely have to tell that driver in the glazed hat to come straight here. When the Whites left I added their little apartment to this little apartment, consequently you shall have a snug bedroom (is it not waiting expressly for you?) overlooking the Champs Elysées. As to the arm-chair in my heart, no man on earth----but, good God! you know all about it. You will find us in the queerest of little rooms all alone, except that the son of Collins the painter (who writes a good deal in "Household Words") dines with us every day. Scheffer and Scribe shall be admitted for one evening, because they know how to appreciate you. The Emperor we will not ask unless you expressly wish it; it makes a fuss. If you have no appointed hotel at Boulogne, go to the Hôtel des Bains, there demand "Marguerite," and tell her that I commended you to her special care. It is the best house within my experience in France; Marguerite the best housekeeper in the world. I shall charge at "Little Dorrit" to-morrow with new spirits. The sight of you is good for my boyish eyes, and the thought of you for my dawning mind. Give the enclosed lines a welcome, then send them on to Sherborne. Ever yours most affectionately and truly. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 49, CHAMPS ELYS�ES, PARIS, _Sunday, April 6th, 1856._ MY DEAR WILLS, CHRISTMAS. Collins and I have a mighty original notion (mine in the beginning) for another play at Tavistock House. I propose opening on Twelfth Night the theatrical season of that great establishment. But now a tremendous question. Is MRS. WILLS! game to do a Scotch housekeeper, in a supposed country-house, with Mary, Katey, Georgina, etc.? If she can screw her courage up to saying "Yes," that country-house opens the piece in a singular way, and that Scotch housekeeper's part shall flow from the present pen. If she says "No" (but she won't), no Scotch housekeeper can be. The Tavistock House season of four nights pauses for a reply. Scotch song (new and original) of Scotch housekeeper would pervade the piece. YOU had better pause for breath. Ever faithfully. POOLE. I have paid him his money. Here is the proof of life. If you will get me the receipt to sign, the money can go to my account at Coutts's. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, May 5th, 1856._ MY DEAR CATHERINE, I did nothing at Dover (except for "Household Words"), and have not begun "Little Dorrit," No. 8, yet. But I took twenty-mile walks in the fresh air, and perhaps in the long run did better than if I had been at work. The report concerning Scheffer's portrait I had from Ward. It is in the best place in the largest room, but I find the _general_ impression of the artists exactly mine. They almost all say that it wants something; that nobody could mistake whom it was meant for, but that it has something disappointing in it, etc. etc. Stanfield likes it better than any of the other painters, I think. His own picture is magnificent. And Frith, in a "Little Child's Birthday Party," is quite delightful. There are many interesting pictures. When you see Scheffer, tell him from me that Eastlake, in his speech at the dinner, referred to the portrait as "a contribution from a distinguished man of genius in France, worthy of himself and of his subject." I did the maddest thing last night, and am deeply penitent this morning. We stayed at Webster's till any hour, and they wanted me, at last, to make punch, which couldn't be done when the jug was brought, because (to Webster's burning indignation) there was only one lemon in the house. Hereupon I then and there besought the establishment in general to come and drink punch on Thursday night, after the play; on which occasion it will become necessary to furnish fully the table with some cold viands from Fortnum and Mason's. Mark has looked in since I began this note, to suggest that the great festival may come off at "Household Words" instead. I am inclined to think it a good idea, and that I shall transfer the locality to that business establishment. But I am at present distracted with doubts and torn by remorse. The school-room and dining-room I have brought into habitable condition and comfortable appearance. Charley and I breakfast at half-past eight, and meet again at dinner when he does not dine in the City, or has no engagement. He looks very well. The audiences at Gye's are described to me as absolute marvels of coldness. No signs of emotion can be hammered, out of them. Panizzi sat next me at the Academy dinner, and took it very ill that I disparaged ----. The amateurs here are getting up another pantomime, but quarrel so violently among themselves that I doubt its ever getting on the stage. Webster expounded his scheme for rebuilding the Adelphi to Stanfield and myself last night, and I felt bound to tell him that I thought it wrong from beginning to end. This is all the theatrical news I know. I write by this post to Georgy. Love to Mamey, Katey, Harry, and the noble Plorn. I should be glad to see him here. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, May 5th, 1856._ MY DEAR GEORGY, You will not be much surprised to hear that I have done nothing yet (except for H. W.), and have only just settled down into a corner of the school-room. The extent to which John and I wallowed in dust for four hours yesterday morning, getting things neat and comfortable about us, you may faintly imagine. At four in the afternoon came Stanfield, to whom I no sooner described the notion of the new play, than he immediately upset all my new arrangements by making a proscenium of the chairs, and planning the scenery with walking-sticks. One of the least things he did was getting on the top of the long table, and hanging over the bar in the middle window where that top sash opens, as if he had got a hinge in the middle of his body. He is immensely excited on the subject. Mark had a farce ready for the managerial perusal, but it won't do. I went to the Dover theatre on Friday night, which was a miserable spectacle. The pit is boarded over, and it is a drinking and smoking place. It was "for the benefit of Mrs. ----," and the town had been very extensively placarded with "Don't forget Friday." I made out four and ninepence (I am serious) in the house, when I went in. We may have warmed up in the course of the evening to twelve shillings. A Jew played the grand piano; Mrs. ---- sang no end of songs (with not a bad voice, poor creature); Mr. ---- sang comic songs fearfully, and danced clog hornpipes capitally; and a miserable woman, shivering in a shawl and bonnet, sat in the side-boxes all the evening, nursing Master ----, aged seven months. It was a most forlorn business, and I should have contributed a sovereign to the treasury, if I had known how. I walked to Deal and back that day, and on the previous day walked over the downs towards Canterbury in a gale of wind. It was better than still weather after all, being wonderfully fresh and free. If the Plorn were sitting at this school-room window in the corner, he would see more cats in an hour than he ever saw in his life. _I_ never saw so many, I think, as I have seen since yesterday morning. There is a painful picture of a great deal of merit (Egg has bought it) in the exhibition, painted by the man who did those little interiors of Forster's. It is called "The Death of Chatterton." The dead figure is a good deal like Arthur Stone; and I was touched on Saturday to see that tender old file standing before it, crying under his spectacles at the idea of seeing his son dead. It was a very tender manifestation of his gentle old heart. This sums up my news, which is no news at all. Kiss the Plorn for me, and expound to him that I am always looking forward to meeting him again, among the birds and flowers in the garden on the side of the hill at Boulogne. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The Duke of Devonshire.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, June 1st, 1856._ MY DEAR DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, Allow me to thank you with all my heart for your kind remembrance of me on Thursday night. My house was already engaged to Miss Coutts's, and I to--the top of St. Paul's, where the sight was most wonderful! But seeing that your cards gave me leave to present some person not named, I conferred them on my excellent friend Dr. Elliotson, whom I found with some fireworkless little boys in a desolate condition, and raised to the seventh heaven of happiness. You are so fond of making people happy, that I am sure you approve. Always your faithful and much obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _June 6th, 1856._ MY DEAR COLLINS, I have never seen anything about myself in print which has much correctness in it--any biographical account of myself I mean. I do not supply such particulars when I am asked for them by editors and compilers, simply because I am asked for them every day. If you want to prime Forgues, you may tell him without fear of anything wrong, that I was born at Portsmouth on the 7th of February, 1812; that my father was in the Navy Pay Office; that I was taken by him to Chatham when I was very young, and lived and was educated there till I was twelve or thirteen, I suppose; that I was then put to a school near London, where (as at other places) I distinguished myself like a brick; that I was put in the office of a solicitor, a friend of my father's, and didn't much like it; and after a couple of years (as well as I can remember) applied myself with a celestial or diabolical energy to the study of such things as would qualify me to be a first-rate parliamentary reporter--at that time a calling pursued by many clever men who were young at the Bar; that I made my début in the gallery (at about eighteen, I suppose), engaged on a voluminous publication no longer in existence, called _The Mirror of Parliament_; that when _The Morning Chronicle_ was purchased by Sir John Easthope and acquired a large circulation, I was engaged there, and that I remained there until I had begun to publish "Pickwick," when I found myself in a condition to relinquish that part of my labours; that I left the reputation behind me of being the best and most rapid reporter ever known, and that I could do anything in that way under any sort of circumstances, and often did. (I daresay I am at this present writing the best shorthand writer in the world.) That I began, without any interest or introduction of any kind, to write fugitive pieces for the old "Monthly Magazine," when I was in the gallery for _The Mirror of Parliament_; that my faculty for descriptive writing was seized upon the moment I joined _The Morning Chronicle_, and that I was liberally paid there and handsomely acknowledged, and wrote the greater part of the short descriptive "Sketches by BOZ" in that paper; that I had been a writer when I was a mere baby, and always an actor from the same age; that I married the daughter of a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, who was the great friend and assistant of Scott, and who first made Lockhart known to him. And that here I am. Finally, if you want any dates of publication of books, tell Wills and he'll get them for you. This is the first time I ever set down even these particulars, and, glancing them over, I feel like a wild beast in a caravan describing himself in the keeper's absence. Ever faithfully. P.S.--I made a speech last night at the London Tavern, at the end of which all the company sat holding their napkins to their eyes with one hand, and putting the other into their pockets. A hundred people or so contributed nine hundred pounds then and there. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Sunday, June 15th 1856._ MY DEAR OLD BOY, This place is beautiful--a burst of roses. Your friend Beaucourt (who _will not_ put on his hat), has thinned the trees and greatly improved the garden. Upon my life, I believe there are at least twenty distinct smoking-spots expressly made in it. And as soon as you can see your day in next month for coming over with Stanny and Webster, will you let them both know? I should not be very much surprised if I were to come over and fetch you, when I know what your day is. Indeed, I don't see how you could get across properly without me. There is a fête here to-night in honour of the Imperial baptism, and there will be another to-morrow. The Plorn has put on two bits of ribbon (one pink and one blue), which he calls "companys," to celebrate the occasion. The fact that the receipts of the fêtes are to be given to the sufferers by the late floods reminds me that you will find at the passport office a tin-box, condescendingly and considerately labelled in English: FOR THE OVERFLOWINGS, which the chief officer clearly believes to mean, for the sufferers from the inundations. I observe more Mingles in the laundresses' shops, and one inscription, which looks like the name of a duet or chorus in a playbill, "Here they mingle." Will you congratulate Mrs. Lemon, with our loves, on her gallant victory over the recreant cabman? Walter has turned up, rather brilliant on the whole; and that (with shoals of remembrances and messages which I don't deliver) is all my present intelligence. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Mark Lemon.] H. W. OFFICE, _July 2nd, 1856._ MY DEAR MARK, I am concerned to hear that you are ill, that you sit down before fires and shiver, and that you have stated times for doing so, like the demons in the melodramas, and that you mean to take a week to get well in. Make haste about it, like a dear fellow, and keep up your spirits, because I have made a bargain with Stanny and Webster that they shall come to Boulogne to-morrow week, Thursday the 10th, and stay a week. And you know how much pleasure we shall all miss if you are not among us--at least for some part of the time. If you find any unusually light appearance in the air at Brighton, it is a distant refraction (I have no doubt) of the gorgeous and shining surface of Tavistock House, now transcendently painted. The theatre partition is put up, and is a work of such terrific solidity, that I suppose it will be dug up, ages hence, from the ruins of London, by that Australian of Macaulay's who is to be impressed by its ashes. I have wandered through the spectral halls of the Tavistock mansion two nights, with feelings of the profoundest depression. I have breakfasted there, like a criminal in Pentonville (only not so well). It is more like Westminster Abbey by midnight than the lowest-spirited man--say you at present for example--can well imagine. There has been a wonderful robbery at Folkestone, by the new manager of the Pavilion, who succeeded Giovannini. He had in keeping £16,000 of a foreigner's, and bolted with it, as he supposed, but in reality with only £1,400 of it. The Frenchman had previously bolted with the whole, which was the property of his mother. With him to England the Frenchman brought a "lady," who was, all the time and at the same time, endeavouring to steal all the money from him and bolt with it herself. The details are amazing, and all the money (a few pounds excepted) has been got back. They will be full of sympathy and talk about you when I get home, and I shall tell them that I send their loves beforehand. They are all enclosed. The moment you feel hearty, just write me that word by post. I shall be so delighted to receive it. Ever, my dear Boy, your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Savage Landor.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Saturday Evening, July 5th, 1856._ MY DEAR LANDOR, I write to you so often in my books, and my writing of letters is usually so confined to the numbers that I _must_ write, and in which I have no kind of satisfaction, that I am afraid to think how long it is since we exchanged a direct letter. But talking to your namesake this very day at dinner, it suddenly entered my head that I would come into my room here as soon as dinner should be over, and write, "My dear Landor, how are you?" for the pleasure of having the answer under your own hand. That you _do_ write, and that pretty often, I know beforehand. Else why do I read _The Examiner_? We were in Paris from October to May (I perpetually flying between that city and London), and there we found out, by a blessed accident, that your godson was horribly deaf. I immediately consulted the principal physician of the Deaf and Dumb Institution there (one of the best aurists in Europe), and he kept the boy for three months, and took unheard-of pains with him. He is now quite recovered, has done extremely well at school, has brought home a prize in triumph, and will be eligible to "go up" for his India examination soon after next Easter. Having a direct appointment, he will probably be sent out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life "up the country," before he well knows he is alive, which indeed seems to be rather an advanced stage of knowledge. And there in Paris, at the same time, I found Marguerite Power and Little Nelly, living with their mother and a pretty sister, in a very small, neat apartment, and working (as Marguerite told me) hard for a living. All that I saw of them filled me with respect, and revived the tenderest remembrances of Gore House. They are coming to pass two or three weeks here for a country rest, next month. We had many long talks concerning Gore House, and all its bright associations; and I can honestly report that they hold no one in more gentle and affectionate remembrance than you. Marguerite is still handsome, though she had the smallpox two or three years ago, and bears the traces of it here and there, by daylight. Poor little Nelly (the quicker and more observant of the two) shows some little tokens of a broken-off marriage in a face too careworn for her years, but is a very winning and sensible creature. We are expecting Mary Boyle too, shortly. I have just been propounding to Forster if it is not a wonderful testimony to the homely force of truth, that one of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make anyone laugh or cry? Yet I think, with some confidence, that you never did either over any passage in "Robinson Crusoe." In particular, I took Friday's death as one of the least tender and (in the true sense) least sentimental things ever written. It is a book I read very much; and the wonder of its prodigious effect on me and everyone, and the admiration thereof, grows on me the more I observe this curious fact. Kate and Georgina send you their kindest loves, and smile approvingly on me from the next room, as I bend over my desk. My dear Landor, you see many I daresay, and hear from many I have no doubt, who love you heartily; but we silent people in the distance never forget you. Do not forget us, and let us exchange affection at least. Ever your Admirer and Friend. [Sidenote: The Duke of Devonshire.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, NEAR BOULOGNE, _Saturday Night, July 5th, 1856._ MY DEAR DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, From this place where I am writing my way through the summer, in the midst of rosy gardens and sea airs, I cannot forbear writing to tell you with what uncommon pleasure I received your interesting letter, and how sensible I always am of your kindness and generosity. You were always in the mind of my household during your illness; and to have so beautiful, and fresh, and manly an assurance of your recovery from it, under your own hand, is a privilege and delight that I will say no more of. I am so glad you like Flora. It came into my head one day that we have all had our Floras, and that it was a half-serious, half-ridiculous truth which had never been told. It is a wonderful gratification to me to find that everybody knows her. Indeed, some people seem to think I have done them a personal injury, and that their individual Floras (God knows where they are, or who!) are each and all Little Dorrit's. We were all grievously disappointed that you were ill when we played Mr. Collins's "Lighthouse" at my house. If you had been well, I should have waited upon you with my humble petition that you would come and see it; and if you had come I think you would have cried, which would have charmed me. I hope to produce another play at home next Christmas, and if I can only persuade you to see it from a special arm-chair, and can only make you wretched, my satisfaction will be intense. May I tell you, to beguile a moment, of a little "Tag," or end of a piece, I saw in Paris this last winter, which struck me as the prettiest I had ever met with? The piece was not a new one, but a revival at the Vaudeville--"Les Mémoires du Diable." Admirably constructed, very interesting, and extremely well played. The plot is, that a certain M. Robin has come into possession of the papers of a deceased lawyer, and finds some relating to the wrongful withholding of an estate from a certain baroness, and to certain other frauds (involving even the denial of the marriage to the deceased baron, and the tarnishing of his good name) which are so very wicked that he binds them up in a book and labels them "Mémoires du Diable." Armed with this knowledge he goes down to the desolate old château in the country--part of the wrested-away estate--from which the baroness and her daughter are going to be ejected. He informs the mother that he can right her and restore the property, but must have, as his reward, her daughter's hand in marriage. She replies: "I cannot promise my daughter to a man of whom I know nothing. The gain would be an unspeakable happiness, but I resolutely decline the bargain." The daughter, however, has observed all, and she comes forward and says: "Do what you have promised my mother you can do, and I am yours." Then the piece goes on to its development, in an admirable way, through the unmasking of all the hypocrites. Now, M. Robin, partly through his knowledge of the secret ways of the old château (derived from the lawyer's papers), and partly through his going to a masquerade as the devil--the better to explode what he knows on the hypocrites--is supposed by the servants at the château really to be the devil. At the opening of the last act he suddenly appears there before the young lady, and she screams, but, recovering and laughing, says: "You are not really the ----?" "Oh dear no!" he replies, "have no connection with him. But these people down here are so frightened and absurd! See this little toy on the table; I open it; here's a little bell. They have a notion that whenever this bell rings I shall appear. Very ignorant, is it not?" "Very, indeed," says she. "Well," says M. Robin, "if you should want me very much to appear, try the bell, if only for a jest. Will you promise?" Yes, she promises, and the play goes on. At last he has righted the baroness completely, and has only to hand her the last document, which proves her marriage and restores her good name. Then he says: "Madame, in the progress of these endeavours I have learnt the happiness of doing good for its own sake. I made a necessary bargain with you; I release you from it. I have done what I undertook to do. I wish you and your amiable daughter all happiness. Adieu! I take my leave." Bows himself out. People on the stage astonished. Audience astonished--incensed. The daughter is going to cry, when she looks at the box on the table, remembers the bell, runs to it and rings it, and he rushes back and takes her to his heart; upon which we all cry with pleasure, and then laugh heartily. This looks dreadfully long, and perhaps you know it already. If so, I will endeavour to make amends with Flora in future numbers. Mrs. Dickens and her sister beg to present their remembrances to your Grace, and their congratulations on your recovery. I saw Paxton now and then when you were ill, and always received from him most encouraging accounts. I don't know how heavy he is going to be (I mean in the scale), but I begin to think Daniel Lambert must have been in his family. Ever your Grace's faithful and obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Tuesday, July 8th, 1856._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I perfectly agree with you in your appreciation of Katie's poem, and shall be truly delighted to publish it in "Household Words." It shall go into the very next number we make up. We are a little in advance (to enable Wills to get a holiday), but as I remember, the next number made up will be published in three weeks. We are pained indeed to read your reference to my poor boy. God keep him and his father. I trust he is not conscious of much suffering himself. If that be so, it is, in the midst of the distress, a great comfort. "Little Dorrit" keeps me pretty busy, as you may suppose. The beginning of No. 10--the first line--now lies upon my desk. It would not be easy to increase upon the pains I take with her anyhow. We are expecting Stanfield on Thursday, and Peter Cunningham and his wife on Monday. I would we were expecting you! This is as pretty and odd a little French country house as could be found anywhere; and the gardens are most beautiful. In "Household Words," next week, pray read "The Diary of Anne Rodway" (in two not long parts). It is by Collins, and I think possesses great merit and real pathos. Being in town the other day, I saw Gye by accident, and told him, when he praised ---- to me, that she was a very bad actress. "Well!" said he, "_you_ may say anything, but if anybody else had told me that I should have stared." Nevertheless, I derived an impression from his manner that she had not been a profitable speculation in respect of money. That very same day Stanfield and I dined alone together at the Garrick, and drank your health. We had had a ride by the river before dinner (of course he _would_ go and look at boats), and had been talking of you. It was this day week, by-the-bye. I know of nothing of public interest that is new in France, except that I am changing my moustache into a beard. We all send our most tender loves to dearest Miss Macready and all the house. The Hammy boy is particularly anxious to have his love sent to "Misr Creedy." Ever, my dearest Macready, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] VILLA DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Sunday, July 13th, 1856._ MY DEAR COLLINS, We are all sorry that you are not coming until the middle of next month, but we hope that you will then be able to remain, so that we may all come back together about the 10th of October. I think (recreation allowed, etc.), that the play will take that time to write. The ladies of the _dram. pers._ are frightfully anxious to get it under way, and to see you locked up in the pavilion; apropos of which noble edifice I have omitted to mention that it is made a more secluded retreat than it used to be, and is greatly improved by the position of the door being changed. It is as snug and as pleasant as possible; and the Genius of Order has made a few little improvements about the house (at the rate of about tenpence apiece), which the Genius of Disorder will, it is hoped, appreciate. I think I must come over for a small spree, and to fetch you. Suppose I were to come on the 9th or 10th of August to stay three or four days in town, would that do for you? Let me know at the end of this month. I cannot tell you what a high opinion I have of Anne Rodway. I took "Extracts" out of the title because it conveyed to the many-headed an idea of incompleteness--of something unfinished--and is likely to stall some readers off. I read the first part at the office with strong admiration, and read the second on the railway coming back here, being in town just after you had started on your cruise. My behaviour before my fellow-passengers was weak in the extreme, for I cried as much as you could possibly desire. Apart from the genuine force and beauty of the little narrative, and the admirable personation of the girl's identity and point of view, it is done with an amount of honest pains and devotion to the work which few men have better reason to appreciate than I, and which no man can have a more profound respect for. I think it excellent, feel a personal pride and pleasure in it which is a delightful sensation, and know no one else who could have done it. Of myself I have only to report that I have been hard at it with "Little Dorrit," and am now doing No. 10. This last week I sketched out the notion, characters, and progress of the farce, and sent it off to Mark, who has been ill of an ague. It ought to be very funny. The cat business is too ludicrous to be treated of in so small a sheet of paper, so I must describe it _vivâ voce_ when I come to town. French has been so insufferably conceited since he shot tigerish cat No. 1 (intent on the noble Dick, with green eyes three inches in advance of her head), that I am afraid I shall have to part with him. All the boys likewise (in new clothes and ready for church) are at this instant prone on their stomachs behind bushes, whooshing and crying (after tigerish cat No. 2): "French!" "Here she comes!" "There she goes!" etc. I dare not put my head out of window for fear of being shot (it is as like a _coup d'état_ as possible), and tradesmen coming up the avenue cry plaintively: "_Ne tirez pas, Monsieur Fleench; c'est moi--boulanger. Ne tirez pas, mon ami._" Likewise I shall have to recount to you the secret history of a robbery at the Pavilion at Folkestone, which you will have to write. Tell Piggot, when you see him, that we shall all be much pleased if he will come at his own convenience while you are here, and stay a few days with us. I shall have more than one notion of future work to suggest to you while we are beguiling the dreariness of an arctic winter in these parts. May they prosper! Kind regards from all to the Dramatic Poet of the establishment, and to the D. P.'s mother and brother. Ever yours. P.S.--If the "Flying Dutchman" should be done again, pray do go and see it. Webster expressed his opinion to me that it was "a neat piece." I implore you to go and see a neat piece. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] BOULOGNE, _Thursday, August 7th, 1856._ MY DEAR WILLS, I do not feel disposed to record those two Chancery cases; firstly, because I would rather have no part in engendering in the mind of any human creature, a hopeful confidence in that den of iniquity. And secondly, because it seems to me that the real philosophy of the facts is altogether missed in the narrative. The wrong which chanced to be set right in these two cases was done, as all such wrong is, mainly because these wicked courts of equity, with all their means of evasion and postponement, give scoundrels confidence in cheating. If justice were cheap, sure, and speedy, few such things could be. It is because it has become (through the vile dealing of those courts and the vermin they have called into existence) a positive precept of experience that a man had better endure a great wrong than go, or suffer himself to be taken, into Chancery, with the dream of setting it right. It is because of this that such nefarious speculations are made. Therefore I see nothing at all to the credit of Chancery in these cases, but everything to its discredit. And as to owing it to Chancery to bear testimony to its having rendered justice in two such plain matters, I have no debt of the kind upon my conscience. In haste, ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] BOULOGNE, _Friday, August 8th, 1856._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I like the second little poem very much indeed, and think (as you do) that it is a great advance upon the first. Please to note that I make it a rule to pay for everything that is inserted in "Household Words," holding it to be a part of my trust to make my fellow-proprietors understand that they have no right to unrequited labour. Therefore, when Wills (who has been ill and is gone for a holiday) does his invariable spiriting gently, don't make Katey's case different from Adelaide Procter's. I am afraid there is no possibility of my reading Dorsetshirewards. I have made many conditional promises thus: "I am very much occupied; but if I read at all, I will read for your institution in such an order on my list." Edinburgh, which is No. 1, I have been obliged to put as far off as next Christmas twelvemonth. Bristol stands next. The working men at Preston come next. And so, if I were to go out of the record and read for your people, I should bring such a house about my ears as would shake "Little Dorrit" out of my head. Being in town last Saturday, I went to see Robson in a burlesque of "Medea." It is an odd but perfectly true testimony to the extraordinary power of his performance (which is of a very remarkable kind indeed), that it points the badness of ----'s acting in a most singular manner, by bringing out what she might do and does not. The scene with Jason is perfectly terrific; and the manner in which the comic rage and jealousy does not pitch itself over the floor at the stalls is in striking contrast to the manner in which the tragic rage and jealousy does. He has a frantic song and dagger dance, about ten minutes long altogether, which has more passion in it than ---- could express in fifty years. We all unite in kindest love to Miss Macready and all your dear ones; not forgetting my godson, to whom I send his godfather's particular love twice over. The Hammy boy is so brown that you would scarcely know him. Ever, my dear Macready, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday Morning, Sept. 28th, 1856._ MY DEAR WILLS, I suddenly remember this morning that in Mr. Curtis's article, "Health and Education," I left a line which must come out. It is in effect that the want of healthy training leaves girls in a fit state to be the subjects of mesmerism. I would not on any condition hurt Elliotson's feelings (as I should deeply) by leaving that depreciatory kind of reference in any page of H. W. He has suffered quite enough without a stab from a friend. So pray, whatever the inconvenience may be in what Bradbury calls "the Friars," take that passage out. By some extraordinary accident, after observing it, I forgot to do it. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday, Oct. 4th, 1856._ MY DEAR MAMEY, The preparations for the play are already beginning, and it is christened (this is a great dramatic secret, which I suppose you know already) "The Frozen Deep." Tell Katey, with my best love, that if she fail to come back six times as red, hungry, and strong as she was when she went away, I shall give her part to somebody else. We shall all be very glad to see you both back again; when I say "we" I include the birds (who send their respectful duty) and the Plorn. Kind regards to all at Brighton. Ever, my dear Mamey, your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] Tavistock House, _Tuesday, Oct. 7th, 1856._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I _did_ write it for you; and I hoped in writing it, that you would think so. All those remembrances are fresh in my mind, as they often are, and gave me an extraordinary interest in recalling the past. I should have been grievously disappointed if you had not been pleased, for I took aim at you with a most determined intention. Let me congratulate you most heartily on your handsome Eddy having passed his examination with such credit. I am sure there is a spirit shining out of his eyes, which will do well in that manly and generous pursuit. You will naturally feel his departure very much, and so will he; but I have always observed within my experience, that the men who have left home young have, many long years afterwards, had the tenderest love for it, and for all associated with it. That's a pleasant thing to think of, as one of the wise and benevolent adjustments in these lives of ours. I have been so hard at work (and shall be for the next eight or nine months), that sometimes I fancy I have a digestion, or a head, or nerves, or some odd encumbrance of that kind, to which I am altogether unaccustomed, and am obliged to rush at some other object for relief; at present the house is in a state of tremendous excitement, on account of Mr. Collins having nearly finished the new play we are to act at Christmas, which is very interesting and extremely clever. I hope this time you will come and see it. We purpose producing it on Charley's birthday, Twelfth Night; but we shall probably play four nights altogether--"The Lighthouse" on the last occasion--so that if you could come for the two last nights, you would see both the pieces. I am going to try and do better than ever, and already the school-room is in the hands of carpenters; men from underground habitations in theatres, who look as if they lived entirely upon smoke and gas, meet me at unheard-of hours. Mr. Stanfield is perpetually measuring the boards with a chalked piece of string and an umbrella, and all the elder children are wildly punctual and business-like to attract managerial commendation. If you don't come, I shall do something antagonistic--try to unwrite No. 11, I think. I should particularly like you to see a new and serious piece so done. Because I don't think you know, without seeing, how good it is!!! None of the children suffered, thank God, from the Boulogne risk. The three little boys have gone back to school there, and are all well. Katey came away ill, but it turned out that she had the whooping-cough for the second time. She has been to Brighton, and comes home to-day. I hear great accounts of her, and hope to find her quite well when she arrives presently. I am afraid Mary Boyle has been praising the Boulogne life too highly. Not that I deny, however, our having passed some very pleasant days together, and our having had great pleasure in her visit. You will object to me dreadfully, I know, with a beard (though not a great one); but if you come and see the play, you will find it necessary there, and will perhaps be more tolerant of the fearful object afterwards. I need not tell you how delighted we should be to see George, if you would come together. Pray tell him so, with my kind regards. I like the notion of Wentworth and his philosophy of all things. I remember a philosophical gravity upon him, a state of suspended opinion as to myself, it struck me, when we last met, in which I thought there was a great deal of oddity and character. Charley is doing very well at Baring's, and attracting praise and reward to himself. Within this fortnight there turned up from the West Indies, where he is now a chief justice, an old friend of mine, of my own age, who lived with me in lodgings in the Adelphi, when I was just Charley's age. He had a great affection for me at that time, and always supposed I was to do some sort of wonders. It was a very pleasant meeting indeed, and he seemed to think it so odd that I shouldn't be Charley! This is every atom of no-news that will come out of my head, and I firmly believe it is all I have in it--except that a cobbler at Boulogne, who had the nicest of little dogs, that always sat in his sunny window watching him at work, asked me if I would bring the dog home, as he couldn't afford to pay the tax for him. The cobbler and the dog being both my particular friends, I complied. The cobbler parted with the dog heart-broken. When the dog got home here, my man, like an idiot as he is, tied him up and then untied him. The moment the gate was open, the dog (on the very day after his arrival) ran out. Next day, Georgy and I saw him lying, all covered with mud, dead, outside the neighbouring church. How am I ever to tell the cobbler? He is too poor to come to England, so I feel that I must lie to him for life, and say that the dog is fat and happy. Mr. Plornish, much affected by this tragedy, said: "I s'pose, pa, I shall meet the cobbler's dog" (in heaven). Georgy and Catherine send their best love, and I send mine. Pray write to me again some day, and I can't be too busy to be happy in the sight of your familiar hand, associated in my mind with so much that I love and honour. Ever, my dear Mr. Watson, most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Horne.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, _Oct. 20th, 1856._ MY DEAR MRS. HORNE, I answer your note by return of post, in order that you may know that the Stereoscopic Nottage has not written to me yet. Of course I will not lose a moment in replying to him when he does address me. We shall be greatly pleased to see you again. You have been very, very often in our thoughts and on our lips, during this long interval. And "she" is near you, is she? O I remember her well! And I am still of my old opinion! Passionately devoted to her sex as I am (they are the weakness of my existence), I still consider her a failure. She had some extraordinary christian-name, which I forget. Lashed into verse by my feelings, I am inclined to write: My heart disowns Ophelia Jones; only I think it was a more sounding name. Are these the tones-- Volumnia Jones? No. Again it seems doubtful. God bless her bones, Petronia Jones! I think not. Carve I on stones Olympia Jones? Can _that_ be the name? Fond memory favours it more than any other. My love to her. Ever, my dear Mrs. Horne, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Duke of Devonshire.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _December 1st, 1856._ MY DEAR DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, The moment the first bill is printed for the first night of the new play I told you of, I send it to you, in the hope that you will grace it with your presence. There is not one of the old actors whom you will fail to inspire as no one else can; and I hope you will see a little result of a friendly union of the arts, that you may think worth seeing, and that you can see nowhere else. We propose repeating it on Thursday, the 8th; Monday, the 12th; and Wednesday, the 14th of January. I do not encumber this note with so many bills, and merely mention those nights in case any one of them should be more convenient to you than the first. But I shall hope for the first, unless you dash me (N. B.--I put Flora into the current number on purpose that this might catch you softened towards me, and at a disadvantage). If there is hope of your coming, I will have the play clearly copied, and will send it to you to read beforehand. With the most grateful remembrances, and the sincerest good wishes for your health and happiness, I am ever, my dear Duke of Devonshire, Your faithful and obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] Tavistock House, _Wednesday, Dec. 3rd, 1856._ MY DEAR MITTON, The inspector from the fire office--surveyor, by-the-bye, they called him--duly came. Wills described him as not very pleasant in his manners. I derived the impression that he was so exceedingly dry, that if _he_ ever takes fire, he must burn out, and can never otherwise be extinguished. Next day, I received a letter from the secretary, to say that the said surveyor had reported great additional risk from fire, and that the directors, at their meeting next Tuesday, would settle the extra amount of premium to be paid. Thereupon I thought the matter was becoming complicated, and wrote a common-sense note to the secretary (which I begged might be read to the directors), saying that I was quite prepared to pay any extra premium, but setting forth the plain state of the case. (I did not say that the Lord Chief Justice, the Chief Baron, and half the Bench were coming; though I felt a temptation to make a joke about burning them all.) Finally, this morning comes up the secretary to me (yesterday having been the great Tuesday), and says that he is requested by the directors to present their compliments, and to say that they could not think of charging for any additional risk at all; feeling convinced that I would place the gas (which they considered to be the only danger) under the charge of one competent man. I then explained to him how carefully and systematically that was all arranged, and we parted with drums beating and colours flying on both sides. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday Evening, Dec. 13th_, 1856. MY DEAREST MACREADY, We shall be charmed to squeeze Willie's friend in, and it shall be done by some undiscovered power of compression on the second night, Thursday, the 14th. Will you make our compliments to his honour, the Deputy Fiscal, present him with the enclosed bill, and tell him we shall be cordially glad to see him? I hope to entrust him with a special shake of the hand, to be forwarded to our dear boy (if a hoary sage like myself may venture on that expression) by the next mail. I would have proposed the first night, but that is too full. You may faintly imagine, my venerable friend, the occupation of these also gray hairs, between "Golden Marys," "Little Dorrits," "Household Wordses," four stage-carpenters entirely boarding on the premises, a carpenter's shop erected in the back garden, size always boiling over on all the lower fires, Stanfield perpetually elevated on planks and splashing himself from head to foot, Telbin requiring impossibilities of smart gasmen, and a legion of prowling nondescripts for ever shrinking in and out. Calm amidst the wreck, your aged friend glides away on the "Dorrit" stream, forgetting the uproar for a stretch of hours, refreshes himself with a ten or twelve miles walk, pitches headforemost into foaming rehearsals, placidly emerges for editorial purposes, smokes over buckets of distemper with Mr. Stanfield aforesaid, again calmly floats upon the "Dorrit" waters. With very best love to Miss Macready and all the rest, Ever, my dear Macready, most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Power.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _December 15th, 1856._ MY DEAR MARGUERITE, I am not _quite_ clear about the story; not because it is otherwise than exceedingly pretty, but because I am rather in a difficult position as to stories just now. Besides beginning a long one by Collins with the new year (which will last five or six months), I have, as I always have at this time, a considerable residue of stories written for the Christmas number, not suitable to it, and yet available for the general purposes of "Household Words." This limits my choice for the moment to stories that have some decided specialties (or a great deal of story) in them. But I will look over the accumulation before you come, and I hope you will never see your little friend again but in print. You will find us expecting you on the night of the twenty-fourth, and heartily glad to welcome you. The most terrific preparations are in hand for the play on Twelfth Night. There has been a carpenter's shop in the garden for six weeks; a painter's shop in the school-room; a gasfitter's shop all over the basement; a dressmaker's shop at the top of the house; a tailor's shop in my dressing-room. Stanfield has been incessantly on scaffoldings for two months; and your friend has been writing "Little Dorrit," etc. etc., in corners, like the sultan's groom, who was turned upside-down by the genie. Kindest love from all, and from me. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Christmas Eve, 1856._ MY DEAR SIR, I cannot leave your letter unanswered, because I am really anxious that you should understand why I cannot comply with your request. Scarcely a week passes without my receiving requests from various quarters to sit for likenesses, to be taken by all the processes ever invented. Apart from my having an invincible objection to the multiplication of my countenance in the shop-windows, I have not, between my avocations and my needful recreation, the time to comply with these proposals. At this moment there are three cases out of a vast number, in which I have said: "If I sit at all, it shall be to you first, to you second, and to you third." But I assure you, I consider myself almost as unlikely to go through these three conditional achievements as I am to go to China. Judge when I am likely to get to Mr. Watkins! I highly esteem and thank you for your sympathy with my writings. I doubt if I have a more genial reader in the world. Very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [23] Of Mr. Wilkie Collins. [24] This note was written after hearing from Mr. Forster of his intended marriage. PROLOGUE TO "THE LIGHTHOUSE." (Spoken by CHARLES DICKENS.) _Slow music all the time, unseen speaker, curtain down._ A story of those rocks where doomed ships come To cast them wreck'd upon the steps of home, Where solitary men, the long year through-- The wind their music and the brine their view-- Warn mariners to shun the beacon-light; A story of those rocks is here to-night. Eddystone lighthouse [_Exterior view discovered._ In its ancient form; Ere he who built it wish'd for the great storm That shiver'd it to nothing; once again Behold outgleaming on the angry main! Within it are three men; to these repair In our frail bark of Fancy, swift as air! They are but shadows, as the rower grim Took none but shadows in his boat with him. So be _ye_ shades, and, for a little space, The real world a dream without a trace. Return is easy. It will have ye back Too soon to the old beaten dusty track; For but one hour forget it. Billows rise, Blow winds, fall rain, be black ye midnight skies; And you who watch the light, arise! arise! [_Exterior view rises and discovers the scene._ THE SONG OF THE WRECK. I. The wind blew high, the waters raved, A ship drove on the land, A hundred human creatures saved, Kneeled down upon the sand. Threescore were drowned, threescore were thrown Upon the black rocks wild, And thus among them, left alone, They found one helpless child. II. A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred, Stood out from all the rest, And gently laid the lonely head Upon his honest breast. And travelling o'er the desert wide, It was a solemn joy, To see them, ever side by side, The sailor and the boy. III. In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst, The two were still but one, Until the strong man drooped the first, And felt his labours done. Then to a trusty friend he spake, "Across the desert wide, O take this poor boy for my sake!" And kissed the child and died. IV. Toiling along in weary plight, Through heavy jungle, mire, These two came later every night To warm them at the fire. Until the captain said one day, "O seaman good and kind, To save thyself now come away, And leave the boy behind!" V. The child was slumb'ring near the blaze, "O captain, let him rest Until it sinks, when God's own ways Shall teach us what is best!" They watched the whitened ashy heap, They touched the child in vain; They did not leave him there asleep, He never woke again. This song was sung to the music of "Little Nell," a ballad composed by the late Mr. George Linley, to the words of Miss Charlotte Young, and dedicated to Charles Dickens. He was very fond of it, and his eldest daughter had been in the habit of singing it to him constantly since she was quite a child. END OF VOL. I. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 63, "levee" changed to "levée" (regular levée every) Page 66, "levee" changed to "levée" (a regular levée) Page 114, word "or" inserted into text. (hencoop or any old) Page 304, 305, 307, 312, "Chateau" changed to "Château" Page 339, "chistened" changed to "christened" (christened Trotty Veck) 
25854	----	THE LETTERS OF Charles Dickens [Illustration] THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. EDITED BY HIS SISTER-IN-LAW AND HIS ELDEST DAUGHTER VOL. III. 1836 TO 1870. London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, LIMITED, 11, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1882. [_The Right of Translation is Reserved._] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. PREFACE. Since our publication of "The Letters of Charles Dickens" we have received the letters addressed to the late Lord Lytton, which we were unable to procure in time for our first two volumes in consequence of his son's absence in India. We thank the Earl of Lytton cordially for his kindness in sending them to us very soon after his return. We also offer our sincere thanks to Sir Austen H. Layard, and to the senders of many other letters, which we now publish for the first time. With a view to making our selection as complete as possible, we have collected together the letters from Charles Dickens which have already been published in various Biographies, and have chosen and placed in chronological order among our new letters those which we consider to be of the greatest interest. As our Narrative was finished in our second volume, this volume consists of Letters _only_, with occasional foot-notes wherever there are allusions requiring explanation. MAMIE DICKENS. GEORGINA HOGARTH. LONDON: _September, 1881._ ERRATA. VOL. III. Page 87, line 5. For "J. W. Leigh Murray," _read_ "Mr. Leigh Murray." " 111, line 8. For "annoying," _read_ "amazing." " 243, line 10. For "Tarass Boulla," _read_ "Tarass Boulba." " 259, line 6, and in footnote. For "Hazlett," _read_ "Hazlitt." " 261, line 2. For "procters," _read_ "proctors." THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1836 to 1839. [Sidenote: Mr. John Hullah.] FURNIVAL'S INN, _Sunday Evening (1836)_ (?). MY DEAR HULLAH, Have you seen _The Examiner_? It is rather depreciatory of the opera; but, like all inveterate critiques against Braham, so well done that I cannot help laughing at it, for the life and soul of me. I have seen _The Sunday Times_, _The Dispatch_, and _The Satirist_, all of which blow their critic trumpets against unhappy me most lustily. Either I must have grievously awakened the ire of all the "adapters" and their friends, or the drama must be decidedly bad. I haven't made up my mind yet which of the two is the fact. I have not seen the _John Bull_ or any of the Sunday papers except _The Spectator_. If you have any of them, bring 'em with you on Tuesday. I am afraid that for "dirty Cummins'" allusion to Hogarth I shall be reduced to the necessity of being valorous the next time I meet him. Believe me, most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] FURNIVAL'S INN, _Monday Afternoon, 7 o'clock (1836)._ MY DEAR HULLAH, Mr. Hogarth has just been here, with news which I think you will be glad to hear. He was with Braham yesterday, who was _far more full_ of the opera[1] than he was; speaking highly of my works and "fame" (!), and expressing an earnest desire to be the first to introduce me to the public as a dramatic writer. He said that he intended opening at Michaelmas; and added (unasked) that it was his intention to produce the opera within _one month_ of his first night. He wants a low comedy part introduced--without singing--thinking it will take with the audience; but he is desirous of explaining to me what he means and who he intends to play it. I am to see him on Sunday morning. Full particulars of the interview shall be duly announced. Perhaps I shall see you meanwhile. I have only time to add that I am Most faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] PETERSHAM, _Monday Evening (1836)._ DEAR HULLAH, Since I called on you this morning I have not had time to look over the words of "The Child and the Old Man." It occurs to me, as I shall see you on Wednesday morning, that the best plan will be for you to bring the music (if you possibly can) without the words, and we can put them in then. Of course this observation applies only to that particular song. Braham having sent to me about the farce, I called on him this morning. Harley wrote, when he had read the whole of the opera, saying: "It's a sure card--nothing wrong there. Bet you ten pound it runs fifty nights. Come; don't be afraid. You'll be the gainer by it, and you mustn't mind betting; it's a capital custom." They tell the story with infinite relish. I saw the fair manageress,[2] who is fully of Harley's opinion, so is Braham. The only difference is, that they are far more enthusiastic than Harley--far more enthusiastic than ourselves even. That is a bold word, isn't it? It is a true one, nevertheless. "Depend upon it, sir," said Braham to Hogarth yesterday, when he went there to say I should be in town to-day, "depend upon it, sir, that there has been no such music since the days of Sheil, and no such piece since "The Duenna."" "Everybody is delighted with it," he added, to me to-day. "I played it to Stansbury, who is by no means an excitable person, and he was charmed." This was said with great emphasis, but I have forgotten the grand point. It was not, "I played it to Stansbury," but, "I sang it--_all through_!!!" I begged him, as the choruses are to be put into rehearsal directly the company get together, to let us have, through Mrs. Braham, the necessary passports to the stage, which will be forwarded. He leaves town on the _8th of September_. He will be absent a month, and the first rehearsal will take place immediately on his return; previous to it (I mean the first rehearsal--not the return) I am to read the piece. His only remaining suggestion is, that Miss Rainforth will want another song when the piece is in rehearsal--"a bravura--something in the 'Soldier Tired' way." We must have a confab about this on Wednesday morning. Harley called in Furnival's Inn, to express his high delight and gratification, but unfortunately we had left town. I shall be at head-quarters by 12 Wednesday noon. Believe me, dear Hullah, Most faithfully yours. P.S.--Tell me on Wednesday when you can come down here, for a day or two. Beautiful place--meadow for exercise, horse for your riding, boat for your rowing, room for your studying--anything you like. [Sidenote: Mr. George Hogarth.] [3]13, FURNIVAL'S INN, _Tuesday Evening, January 20th, 1837._ MY DEAR SIR, As you have begged me to write an original sketch for the first number of the new evening paper, and as I trust to your kindness to refer my application to the proper quarter, should I be unreasonably or improperly trespassing upon you, I beg to ask whether it is probable that if I commenced a series of articles, written under some attractive title, for _The Evening Chronicle_, its conductors would think I had any claim to some additional remuneration (of course, of no great amount) for doing so? Let me beg of you not to misunderstand my meaning. Whatever the reply may be, I promised you an article, and shall supply it with the utmost readiness, and with an anxious desire to do my best, which I honestly assure you would be the feeling with which I should always receive any request coming personally from yourself. I merely wish to put it to the proprietors, first, whether a continuation of light papers in the style of my "Street Sketches" would be considered of use to the new paper; and, secondly, if so, whether they do not think it fair and reasonable that, taking my share of the ordinary reporting business of _The Chronicle_ besides, I should receive something for the papers beyond my ordinary salary as a reporter. Begging you to excuse my troubling you, and taking this opportunity of acknowledging the numerous kindnesses I have already received at your hands since I have had the pleasure of acting under you, I am, my dear Sir, very sincerely yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Hogarth.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Thursday Night, October 26th, 1837._ MY DEAR MRS. HOGARTH, I need not thank you for your present[4] of yesterday, for you know the sorrowful pleasure I shall take in wearing it, and the care with which I shall prize it, until--so far as relates to this life--I am like her. I have never had her ring off my finger by day or night, except for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long. I can solemnly say that, waking or sleeping, I have never lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall. It will be a great relief to my heart when I find you sufficiently calm upon this sad subject to claim the promise I made you when she lay dead in this house, never to shrink from speaking of her, as if her memory must be avoided, but rather to take a melancholy pleasure in recalling the times when we were all so happy--so happy that increase of fame and prosperity has only widened the gap in my affections, by causing me to think how she would have shared and enhanced all our joys, and how proud I should have been (as God knows I always was) to possess the affections of the gentlest and purest creature that ever shed a light on earth. I wish you could know how I weary now for the three rooms in Furnival's Inn, and how I miss that pleasant smile and those sweet words which, bestowed upon our evening's work, in our merry banterings round the fire, were more precious to me than the applause of a whole world would be. I can recall everything she said and did in those happy days, and could show you every passage and line we read together. I see _now_ how you are capable of making great efforts, even against the afflictions you have to deplore, and I hope that, soon, our words may be where our thoughts are, and that we may call up those old memories, not as shadows of the bitter past, but as lights upon a happier future. Believe me, my dear Mrs. Hogarth, Ever truly and affectionately yours. FOOTNOTES: [1] "The Village Coquettes." [2] Mrs. Braham. [3] Printed in "Forty Years' Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs," by Charles Mackay. [4] A chain made of Mary Hogarth's hair, sent to Charles Dickens on the first anniversary of her birthday, after her death. [5]DIARY--1838. _Monday, January 1st, 1838._ A sad New Year's Day in one respect, for at the opening of last year poor Mary was with us. Very many things to be grateful for since then, however. Increased reputation and means--good health and prospects. We never know the full value of blessings till we lose them (we were not ignorant of this one when we had it, I hope). But if she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than anyone I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for, but a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one day, through his mercy, rejoin her. I wrote to Mrs. Hogarth yesterday, taking advantage of the opportunity afforded me by her sending, as a New Year's token, a pen-wiper of poor Mary's, imploring her, as strongly as I could, to think of the many remaining claims upon her affection and exertions, and not to give way to unavailing grief. Her answer came to-night, and she seems hurt at my doing so--protesting that in all useful respects she is the same as ever. Meant it for the best, and still hope I did right. _Saturday, January 6th, 1838._ Our boy's birthday--one year old. A few people at night--only Forster, the De Gex's, John Ross, Mitton, and the Beards, besides our families--to twelfth-cake and forfeits. This day last year, Mary and I wandered up and down Holborn and the streets about for hours, looking after a little table for Kate's bedroom, which we bought at last at the very first broker's which we had looked into, and which we had passed half-a-dozen times because I _didn't like_ to ask the price. I took her out to Brompton at night, as we had no place for her to sleep in (the two mothers being with us); she came back again next day to keep house for me, and stopped nearly the rest of the month. I shall never be so happy again as in those chambers three storeys high--never if I roll in wealth and fame. I would hire them to keep empty, if I could afford it. _Monday, January 8th, 1838._ I began the "Sketches of Young Gentlemen" to-day. One hundred and twenty-five pounds for such a little book, without my name to it, is pretty well. This and the "Sunday"[6] by-the-bye, are the only two things I have not done as Boz. _Tuesday, January 9th, 1838._ Went to the Sun office to insure my life, where the Board seemed disposed to think I work too much. Made Forster and Pickthorn, my Doctor, the references--and after an interesting interview with the Board and the Board's Doctor, came away to work again. _Wednesday, January 10th, 1838._ At work all day, and to a quadrille party at night. City people and rather dull. Intensely cold coming home, and vague reports of a fire somewhere. Frederick says the Royal Exchange, at which I sneer most sagely; for---- _Thursday, January 11th, 1838._ To-day the papers are full of it, and it _was_ the Royal Exchange, Lloyd's, and all the shops round the building. Called on Browne and went with him to see the ruins, of which we saw as much as we should have done if we had stopped at home. _Sunday, January 14th, 1838._ To church in the morning, and when I came home I wrote the preceding portion of this diary, which henceforth I make a steadfast resolution not to neglect, or _paint_. I have not done it yet, nor will I; but say what rises to my lips--my mental lips at least--without reserve. No other eyes will see it, while mine are open in life, and although I daresay I shall be ashamed of a good deal in it, I should like to look over it at the year's end. In Scott's diary, which I have been looking at this morning, there are thoughts which have been mine by day and by night, in good spirits and bad, since Mary died. "Another day, and a bright one to the external world again opens on us; the air soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They cannot refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not . . . (she) who will be laid among the ruins. . . . She is sentient and conscious of my emotions _somewhere_--where, we cannot tell, how, we cannot tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me. * * * * * "I have seen her. There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic; but that yellow masque with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression? I will not look upon it again." I know but too well how true all this is. _Monday, January 15th, 1838._ Here ends this brief attempt at a diary. I grow sad over this checking off of days, and can't do it. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. W. L. Sammins.] 48, DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON, _January 31st, 1839._ SIR, Circumstances have enabled me to relinquish my old connection with the "Miscellany"[7] at an earlier period than I had expected. I am no longer its editor, but I have referred your paper to my successor, and marked it as one "requiring attention." I have no doubt it will receive it. With reference to your letter bearing date on the 8th of last October, let me assure you that I have delayed answering it--not because a constant stream of similar epistles has rendered me callous to the anxieties of a beginner, in those doubtful paths in which I walk myself--but because you ask me to do that which I would scarce do, of my own unsupported opinion, for my own child, supposing I had one old enough to require such a service. To suppose that I could gravely take upon myself the responsibility of withdrawing you from pursuits you have already undertaken, or urging you on in a most uncertain and hazardous course of life, is really a compliment to my judgment and inflexibility which I cannot recognize and do not deserve (or desire). I hoped that a little reflection would show you how impossible it is that I could be expected to enter upon a task of so much delicacy, but as you have written to me since, and called (unfortunately at a period when I am obliged to seclude myself from all comers), I am compelled at last to tell you that I can do nothing of the kind. If it be any satisfaction to you to know that I have read what you sent me, and read it with great pleasure, though, as you treat of local matters, I am necessarily in the dark here and there, I can give you the assurance very sincerely. With this, and many thanks to you for your obliging expressions towards myself, I am, Sir, Your very obedient Servant. [Sidenote: Mr. J. P. Harley.] DOUGHTY STREET, _Thursday Morning._[8] MY DEAR HARLEY, This is my birthday. Many happy returns of the day to you and me. I took it into my head yesterday to get up an impromptu dinner on this auspicious occasion--only my own folks, Leigh Hunt, Ainsworth, and Forster. I know you can't dine here in consequence of the tempestuous weather on the Covent Garden shores, but if you will come in when you have done Trinculizing, you will delight me greatly, and add in no inconsiderable degree to the "conviviality" of the meeting. Lord bless my soul! Twenty-seven years old. Who'd have thought it? I _never_ did! But I grow sentimental. Always yours truly. [Sidenote: Mr. Edward Chapman.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _27th December, 1839._ MY DEAR SIR, The place where you pledge yourself to pay for my beef and mutton when I eat it, and my ale and wine when I drink it, is the Treasurer's Office of the Middle Temple, the new building at the bottom of Middle Temple Lane on the right-hand side. You walk up into the first-floor and say (boldly) that you come to sign Mr. Charles Dickens's bond--which is already signed by Mr. Sergeant Talfourd. I suppose I should formally acquaint you that I have paid the fees, and that the responsibility you incur is a very slight one--extending very little beyond my good behaviour, and honourable intentions to pay for all wine-glasses, tumblers, or other dinner-furniture that I may break or damage. I wish you would do me another service, and that is to choose, at the place you told me of, a reasonable copy of "The Beauties of England and Wales." You can choose it quite as well as I can, or better, and I shall be much obliged to you. I should like you to send it at once, as I am diving into all kinds of matters at odd minutes with a view to our forthcoming operations. Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [5] This fragment of a diary was found amongst some papers which have recently come to light. The Editors give only those paragraphs which are likely to be of any public interest. The original manuscript has been added to "The Forster Collection," at the South Kensington Museum. [6] "Sunday, under Three Heads," a small pamphlet published about this time. [7] "Bentley's Miscellany." [8] No other date, but it must have been 7th February, 1839. 1840. [Sidenote: Mr. H. G. Adams.[9]] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Saturday, Jan. 18th, 1840._ DEAR SIR, The pressure of other engagements will, I am compelled to say, prevent me from contributing a paper to your new local magazine.[10] But I beg you to set me down as a subscriber to it, and foremost among those whose best wishes are enlisted in your cause. It will afford me real pleasure to hear of your success, for I have many happy recollections connected with Kent, and am scarcely less interested in it than if I had been a Kentish man bred and born, and had resided in the county all my life. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thompson.[11]] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday, 15th December, 1840._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, I have received a most flattering message from the head turnkey of the jail this morning, intimating that "there warn't a genelman in all London he'd be gladder to show his babies to, than Muster Dickins, and let him come wenever he would to that shop he wos welcome." But as the Governor (who is a very nice fellow and a gentleman) is not at home this morning, and furthermore as the morning itself has rather gone out of town in respect of its poetical allurements, I think we had best postpone our visit for a day or two. Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [9] Mr. Adams, the Hon. Secretary of the Chatham Mechanics' Institute, which office he held for many years. [10] "The Kentish Coronal." [11] An intimate friend. 1841. [Sidenote: Rev. Thomas Robinson.[12]] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Thursday, April 8th, 1841._ DEAR SIR, I am much obliged to you for your interesting letter. Nor am I the less pleased to receive it, by reason that I cannot find it in my conscience to agree in many important respects with the body to which you belong. In the love of virtue and hatred of vice, in the detestation of cruelty and encouragement of gentleness and mercy, all men who endeavour to be acceptable to their Creator in any way, may freely agree. There are more roads to Heaven, I am inclined to think, than any sect believes; but there can be none which have not these flowers garnishing the way. I feel it a great tribute, therefore, to receive your letter. It is most welcome and acceptable to me. I thank you for it heartily, and am proud of the approval of one who suffered in his youth, even more than my poor child. While you teach in your walk of life the lessons of tenderness you have learnt in sorrow, trust me that in mine, I will pursue cruelty and oppression, the enemies of all God's creatures of all codes and creeds, so long as I have the energy of thought and the power of giving it utterance. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Countess of Blessington.] [13]DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _June 2nd, 1841._ DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, The year goes round so fast, that when anything occurs to remind me of its whirling, I lose my breath, and am bewildered. So your handwriting last night had as startling an effect upon me, as though you had sealed your note with one of your own eyes. I remember my promise, as in cheerful duty bound, and with Heaven's grace will redeem it. At this moment, I have not the faintest idea how, but I am going into Scotland on the 19th to see Jeffrey, and while I am away (I shall return, please God, in about three weeks) will look out for some accident, incident, or subject for small description, to send you when I come home. You will take the will for the deed, I know; and, remembering that I have a "Clock" which always wants winding up, will not quarrel with me for being brief. Have you seen Townshend's magnetic boy? You heard of him, no doubt, from Count D'Orsay. If you get him to Gore House, don't, I entreat you, have more than eight people--four is a better number--to see him. He fails in a crowd, and is _marvellous_ before a few. I am told that down in Devonshire there are young ladies innumerable, who read crabbed manuscripts with the palms of their hands, and newspapers with their ankles, and so forth; and who are, so to speak, literary all over. I begin to understand what a blue-stocking means, and have not the smallest doubt that Lady ---- (for instance) could write quite as entertaining a book with the sole of her foot as ever she did with her head. I am a believer in earnest, and I am sure you would be if you saw this boy, under moderately favourable circumstances, as I hope you will, before he leaves England. Believe me, dear Lady Blessington, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. L. Gaylord Clark.] _September 28th, 1841._ MY DEAR SIR, I condole with you from my heart on the loss[14] you have sustained, and I feel proud of your permitting me to sympathise with your affliction. It is a great satisfaction to me to have been addressed, under similar circumstances, by many of your countrymen since the "Curiosity Shop" came to a close. Some simple and honest hearts in the remote wilds of America have written me letters on the loss of children--so numbering my little book, or rather heroine, with their household gods; and so pouring out their trials and sources of comfort in them, before me as a friend, that I have been inexpressibly moved, and am whenever I think of them, I do assure you. You have already all the comfort, that I could lay before you; all, I hope, that the affectionate spirit of your brother, now in happiness, can shed into your soul. On the 4th of next January, if it please God, I am coming with my wife on a three or four months' visit to America. The British and North American packet will bring me, I hope, to Boston, and enable me, in the third week of the new year, to set my foot upon the soil I have trodden in my day-dreams many times, and whose sons (and daughters) I yearn to know and to be among. I hope you are surprised, and I hope not unpleasantly. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Hogarth.] [15]DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Sunday, October 24th, 1841._ MY DEAR MRS. HOGARTH, For God's sake be comforted, and bear this well, for the love of your remaining children. I had always intended to keep poor Mary's grave for us and our dear children, and for you. But if it will be any comfort to you to have poor George buried there, I will cheerfully arrange to place the ground at your entire disposal. Do not consider me in any way. Consult only your own heart. Mine seems to tell me that as they both died so young and so suddenly, they ought both to be buried together. Try--do try--to think that they have but preceded you to happiness, and will meet you with joy in heaven. There _is_ consolation in the knowledge that you have treasure there, and that while you live on earth, there are creatures among the angels, who owed their being to you. Always yours with true affection. [Sidenote: Mr. Washington Irving.] MY DEAR SIR,[16] There is no man in the world who could have given me the heartfelt pleasure you have, by your kind note of the 13th of last month. There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. If you could know how earnestly I write this, you would be glad to read it--as I hope you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the hand I autobiographically hold out to you over the broad Atlantic. I wish I could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit England. I can't. I have held it at arm's length, and taken a bird's-eye view of it, after reading it a great many times, but there is no greater encouragement in it this way than on a microscopic inspection. I should love to go with you--as I have gone, God knows how often--into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbour Court, and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with you, outside the last of the coaches down to Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart glad to compare notes with you about that shabby gentleman in the oilcloth hat and red nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back-parlour of the Masons' Arms; and about Robert Preston and the tallow-chandler's widow, whose sitting-room is second nature to me; and about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in the daytime, when a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy. I have a good deal to say, too, about that dashing Alonzo de Ojeda, that you can't help being fonder of than you ought to be; and much to hear concerning Moorish legend, and poor unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet I should show you his mutilated carcass with a joy past all expression. I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were naturally, and by the very laws of gravity, into your open arms. Questions come thronging to my pen as to the lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so. I don't know what to say first or what to leave unsaid, and am constantly disposed to break off and tell you again how glad I am this moment has arrived. My dear Washington Irving, I cannot thank you enough for your cordial and generous praise, or tell you what deep and lasting gratification it has given me. I hope to have many letters from you, and to exchange a frequent correspondence. I send this to say so. After the first two or three I shall settle down into a connected style, and become gradually rational. You know what the feeling is, after having written a letter, sealed it, and sent it off. I shall picture your reading this, and answering it before it has lain one night in the post-office. Ten to one that before the fastest packet could reach New York I shall be writing again. Do you suppose the post-office clerks care to receive letters? I have my doubts. They get into a dreadful habit of indifference. A postman, I imagine, is quite callous. Conceive his delivering one to himself, without being startled by a preliminary double knock! Always your faithful Friend. FOOTNOTES: [12] A Dissenting minister, once himself a workhouse boy, and writing on the character of Oliver Twist. This letter was published in "Harper's New Monthly Magazine," in 1862. [13] This, and all other Letters addressed to the Countess of Blessington, were printed in "Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington." [14] The death of his correspondent's twin-brother, Willis Gaylord Clark. [15] On the occasion of the sudden death of Mrs. Hogarth's son, George. [16] This, and all other Letters addressed to Mr. Washington Irving, were printed in "The Life and Letters of Washington Irving," edited by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving. 1842. [Sidenote: Professor Felton.] FULLER'S HOTEL, WASHINGTON, _Monday, March 14th, 1842._ MY DEAR FELTON,[17] I was more delighted than I can possibly tell you, to receive (last Saturday night) your welcome letter. We and the oysters missed you terribly in New York. You carried away with you more than half the delight and pleasure of my New World; and I heartily wish you could bring it back again. There are very interesting men in this place--highly interesting, of course--but it's not a comfortable place; is it? If spittle could wait at table we should be nobly attended, but as that property has not been imparted to it in the present state of mechanical science, we are rather lonely and orphan-like, in respect of "being looked arter." A blithe black was introduced on our arrival, as our peculiar and especial attendant. He is the only gentleman in the town who has a peculiar delicacy in intruding upon my valuable time. It usually takes seven rings and a threatening message from ---- to produce him; and when he comes he goes to fetch something, and, forgetting it by the way, comes back no more. We have been in great distress, really in distress, at the non-arrival of the _Caledonia_. You may conceive what our joy was, when, while we were dining out yesterday, H. arrived with the joyful intelligence of her safety. The very news of her having really arrived seemed to diminish the distance between ourselves and home, by one half at least. And this morning (though we have not yet received our heap of despatches, for which we are looking eagerly forward to this night's mail)--this morning there reached us unexpectedly, through the Government bag (Heaven knows how they came there!), two of our many and long-looked-for letters, wherein was a circumstantial account of the whole conduct and behaviour of our pets; with marvellous narrations of Charley's precocity at a Twelfth Night juvenile party at Macready's; and tremendous predictions of the governess, dimly suggesting his having got out of pot-hooks and hangers, and darkly insinuating the possibility of his writing us a letter before long; and many other workings of the same prophetic spirit, in reference to him and his sisters, very gladdening to their mother's heart, and not at all depressing to their father's. There was, also, the doctor's report, which was a clean bill; and the nurse's report, which was perfectly electrifying; showing as it did how Master Walter had been weaned, and had cut a double tooth, and done many other extraordinary things, quite worthy of his high descent. In short, we were made very happy and grateful; and felt as if the prodigal father and mother had got home again. What do you think of this incendiary card being left at my door last night? "General G. sends compliments to Mr. Dickens, and called with two literary ladies. As the two L. L.'s are ambitious of the honour of a personal introduction to Mr. D., General G. requests the honour of an appointment for to-morrow." I draw a veil over my sufferings. They are sacred. We shall be in Buffalo, please Heaven, on the 30th of April. If I don't find a letter from you in the care of the postmaster at that place, I'll never write to you from England. But if I _do_ find one, my right hand shall forget its cunning, before I forget to be your truthful and constant correspondent; not, dear Felton, because I promised it, nor because I have a natural tendency to correspond (which is far from being the case), nor because I am truly grateful to you for, and have been made truly proud by, that affectionate and elegant tribute which ---- sent me, but because you are a man after my own heart, and I love you _well_. And for the love I bear you, and the pleasure with which I shall always think of you, and the glow I shall feel when I see your handwriting in my own home, I hereby enter into a solemn league and covenant to write as many letters to you as you write to me, at least. Amen. Come to England! Come to England! Our oysters are small, I know; they are said by Americans to be coppery; but our hearts are of the largest size. We are thought to excel in shrimps, to be far from despicable in point of lobsters, and in periwinkles are considered to challenge the universe. Our oysters, small though they be, are not devoid of the refreshing influence which that species of fish is supposed to exercise in these latitudes. Try them and compare. Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Washington Irving.] WASHINGTON, _Monday Afternoon, March 21st, 1842._ MY DEAR IRVING, We passed through--literally passed through--this place again to-day. I did not come to see you, for I really have not the heart to say "good-bye" again, and felt more than I can tell you when we shook hands last Wednesday. You will not be at Baltimore, I fear? I thought, at the time, that you only said you might be there, to make our parting the gayer. Wherever you go, God bless you! What pleasure I have had in seeing and talking with you, I will not attempt to say. I shall never forget it as long as I live. What would I give, if we could have but a quiet week together! Spain is a lazy place, and its climate an indolent one. But if you have ever leisure under its sunny skies to think of a man who loves you, and holds communion with your spirit oftener, perhaps, than any other person alive--leisure from listlessness, I mean--and will write to me in London, you will give me an inexpressible amount of pleasure. Your affectionate friend. [Sidenote: Professor Felton.] MONTREAL, _Saturday, 21st May, 1842._ MY DEAR FELTON, I was delighted to receive your letter yesterday, and was well pleased with its contents. I anticipated objection to Carlyle's[18] letter. I called particular attention to it for three reasons. Firstly, because he boldly _said_ what all the others _think_, and therefore deserved to be manfully supported. Secondly, because it is my deliberate opinion that I have been assailed on this subject in a manner in which no man with any pretensions to public respect or with the remotest right to express an opinion on a subject of universal literary interest would be assailed in any other country. . . . I really cannot sufficiently thank you, dear Felton, for your warm and hearty interest in these proceedings. But it would be idle to pursue that theme, so let it pass. The wig and whiskers are in a state of the highest preservation. The play comes off next Wednesday night, the 25th. What would I give to see you in the front row of the centre box, your spectacles gleaming not unlike those of my dear friend Pickwick, your face radiant with as broad a grin as a staid professor may indulge in, and your very coat, waistcoat, and shoulders expressive of what we should take together when the performance was over! I would give something (not so much, but still a good round sum) if you could only stumble into that very dark and dusty theatre in the daytime (at any minute between twelve and three), and see me with my coat off, the stage manager and universal director, urging impracticable ladies and impossible gentlemen on to the very confines of insanity, shouting and driving about, in my own person, to an extent which would justify any philanthropic stranger in clapping me into a strait-waistcoat without further inquiry, endeavouring to goad H. into some dim and faint understanding of a prompter's duties, and struggling in such a vortex of noise, dirt, bustle, confusion, and inextricable entanglement of speech and action as you would grow giddy in contemplating. We perform "A Roland for an Oliver," "A Good Night's Rest," and "Deaf as a Post." This kind of voluntary hard labour used to be my great delight. The _furor_ has come strong upon me again, and I begin to be once more of opinion that nature intended me for the lessee of a national theatre, and that pen, ink, and paper have spoiled a manager. Oh, how I look forward across that rolling water to home and its small tenantry! How I busy myself in thinking how my books look, and where the tables are, and in what positions the chairs stand relatively to the other furniture; and whether we shall get there in the night, or in the morning, or in the afternoon; and whether we shall be able to surprise them, or whether they will be too sharply looking out for us; and what our pets will say; and how they'll look, and who will be the first to come and shake hands, and so forth! If I could but tell you how I have set my heart on rushing into Forster's study (he is my great friend, and writes at the bottom of all his letters: "My love to Felton"), and into Maclise's painting-room, and into Macready's managerial ditto, without a moment's warning, and how I picture every little trait and circumstance of our arrival to myself, down to the very colour of the bow on the cook's cap, you would almost think I had changed places with my eldest son, and was still in pantaloons of the thinnest texture. I left all these things--God only knows what a love I have for them--as coolly and calmly as any animated cucumber; but when I come upon them again I shall have lost all power of self-restraint, and shall as certainly make a fool of myself (in the popular meaning of that expression) as ever Grimaldi did in his way, or George the Third in his. And not the less so, dear Felton, for having found some warm hearts, and left some instalments of earnest and sincere affection, behind me on this continent. And whenever I turn my mental telescope hitherward, trust me that one of the first figures it will descry will wear spectacles so like yours that the maker couldn't tell the difference, and shall address a Greek class in such an exact imitation of your voice, that the very students hearing it should cry, "That's he! Three cheers. Hoo-ray-ay-ay-ay-ay!" About those joints of yours, I think you are mistaken. They _can't_ be stiff. At the worst they merely want the air of New York, which, being impregnated with the flavour of last year's oysters, has a surprising effect in rendering the human frame supple and flexible in all cases of rust. A terrible idea occurred to me as I wrote those words. The oyster-cellars--what do they do when oysters are not in season? Is pickled salmon vended there? Do they sell crabs, shrimps, winkles, herrings? The oyster-openers--what do _they_ do? Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster season. Who knows? Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _Sunday, July 31st, 1842._ MY DEAR FELTON, Of all the monstrous and incalculable amount of occupation that ever beset one unfortunate man, mine has been the most stupendous since I came home. The dinners I have had to eat, the places I have had to go to, the letters I have had to answer, the sea of business and of pleasure in which I have been plunged, not even the genius of an ---- or the pen of a ---- could describe. Wherefore I indite a monstrously short and wildly uninteresting epistle to the American Dando; but perhaps you don't know who Dando was. He was an oyster-eater, my dear Felton. He used to go into oyster-shops, without a farthing of money, and stand at the counter eating natives, until the man who opened them grew pale, cast down his knife, staggered backward, struck his white forehead with his open hand, and cried, "You are Dando!!!" He has been known to eat twenty dozen at one sitting, and would have eaten forty, if the truth had not flashed upon the shopkeeper. For these offences he was constantly committed to the House of Correction. During his last imprisonment he was taken ill, got worse and worse, and at last began knocking violent double knocks at Death's door. The doctor stood beside his bed, with his fingers on his pulse. "He is going," says the doctor. "I see it in his eye. There is only one thing that would keep life in him for another hour, and that is--oysters." They were immediately brought. Dando swallowed eight, and feebly took a ninth. He held it in his mouth and looked round the bed strangely. "Not a bad one, is it?" says the doctor. The patient shook his head, rubbed his trembling hand upon his stomach, bolted the oyster, and fell back--dead. They buried him in the prison-yard, and paved his grave with oyster-shells. We are all well and hearty, and have already begun to wonder what time next year you and Mrs. Felton and Dr. Howe will come across the briny sea together. To-morrow we go to the seaside for two months. I am looking out for news of Longfellow, and shall be delighted when I know that he is on his way to London and this house. I am bent upon striking at the piratical newspapers with the sharpest edge I can put upon my small axe, and hope in the next session of Parliament to stop their entrance into Canada. For the first time within the memory of man, the professors of English literature seem disposed to act together on this question. It is a good thing to aggravate a scoundrel, if one can do nothing else, and I think we _can_ make them smart a little in this way. . . . I wish you had been at Greenwich the other day, where a party of friends gave me a private dinner; public ones I have refused. C---- was perfectly wild at the reunion, and, after singing all manner of marine songs, wound up the entertainment by coming home (six miles) in a little open phaeton of mine, _on his head_, to the mingled delight and indignation of the metropolitan police. We were very jovial indeed; and I assure you that I drank your health with fearful vigour and energy. On board that ship coming home I established a club, called the United Vagabonds, to the large amusement of the rest of the passengers. This holy brotherhood committed all kinds of absurdities, and dined always, with a variety of solemn forms, at one end of the table, below the mast, away from all the rest. The captain being ill when we were three or four days out, I produced my medicine-chest and recovered him. We had a few more sick men after that, and I went round "the wards" every day in great state, accompanied by two Vagabonds, habited as Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer, bearing enormous rolls of plaster and huge pairs of scissors. We were really very merry all the way, breakfasted in one party at Liverpool, shook hands, and parted most cordially. . . . Affectionately your faithful friend. P.S.--I have looked over my journal, and have decided to produce my American trip in two volumes. I have written about half the first since I came home, and hope to be out in October. This is "exclusive news," to be communicated to any friends to whom you may like to intrust it, my dear F----. [Sidenote: The same.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _September 1st, 1842._ MY DEAR FELTON, Of course that letter in the papers was as foul a forgery as ever felon swung for. . . . I have not contradicted it publicly, nor shall I. When I tilt at such wringings out of the dirtiest mortality, I shall be another man--indeed, almost the creature they would make me. I gave your message to Forster, who sends a despatch-box full of kind remembrances in return. He is in a great state of delight with the first volume of my American book (which I have just finished), and swears loudly by it. It is _True_ and Honourable I know, and I shall hope to send it you, complete, by the first steamer in November. Your description of the porter and the carpet-bags prepares me for a first-rate facetious novel, brimful of the richest humour, on which I have no doubt you are engaged. What is it called? Sometimes I imagine the title-page thus: OYSTERS IN EVERY STYLE OR OPENINGS OF LIFE BY YOUNG DANDO. As to the man putting the luggage on his head, as a sort of sign, I adopt it from this hour. I date this from London, where I have come, as a good profligate, graceless bachelor, for a day or two; leaving my wife and babbies at the seaside. . . . Heavens! if you were but here at this minute! A piece of salmon and a steak are cooking in the kitchen; it's a very wet day, and I have had a fire lighted; the wine sparkles on a side table; the room looks the more snug from being the only _un_dismantled one in the house; plates are warming for Forster and Maclise, whose knock I am momentarily expecting; that groom I told you of, who never comes into the house, except when we are all out of town, is walking about in his shirt-sleeves without the smallest consciousness of impropriety; a great mound of proofs are waiting to be read aloud, after dinner. With what a shout I would clap you down into the easiest chair, my genial Felton, if you could but appear, and order you a pair of slippers instantly! Since I have written this, the aforesaid groom--a very small man (as the fashion is), with fiery red hair (as the fashion is _not_)--has looked very hard at me and fluttered about me at the same time, like a giant butterfly. After a pause, he says, in a Sam Wellerish kind of way: "I vent to the club this mornin', sir. There vorn't no letters, sir." "Very good, Topping." "How's missis, sir?" "Pretty well, Topping." "Glad to hear it, sir. _My_ missis ain't wery well, sir." "No!" "No, sir, she's a goin', sir, to have a hincrease wery soon, and it makes her rather nervous, sir; and ven a young voman gets at all down at sich a time, sir, she goes down wery deep, sir." To this sentiment I replied affirmatively, and then he adds, as he stirs the fire (as if he were thinking out loud): "Wot a mystery it is! Wot a go is natur'!" With which scrap of philosophy, he gradually gets nearer to the door, and so fades out of the room. This same man asked me one day, soon after I came home, what Sir John Wilson was. This is a friend of mine, who took our house and servants, and everything as it stood, during our absence in America. I told him an officer. "A wot, sir?" "An officer." And then, for fear he should think I meant a police-officer, I added, "An officer in the army." "I beg your pardon, sir," he said, touching his hat, "but the club as I always drove him to wos the United Servants." The real name of this club is the United Service, but I have no doubt he thought it was a high-life-below-stairs kind of resort, and that this gentleman was a retired butler or superannuated footman. There's the knock, and the Great Western sails, or steams rather, to-morrow. Write soon again, dear Felton, and ever believe me. . . . Your affectionate friend. P.S.--All good angels prosper Dr. Howe! He, at least, will not like me the less, I hope, for what I shall say of Laura. [Sidenote: The same.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _31st December, 1842._ MY DEAR FELTON, Many and many happy New Years to you and yours! As many happy children as may be quite convenient (no more!), and as many happy meetings between them and our children, and between you and us, as the kind fates in their utmost kindness shall favourably decree! The American book (to begin with that) has been a most complete and thorough-going success. Four large editions have now been sold _and paid for_, and it has won golden opinions from all sorts of men, except our friend in F----, who is a miserable creature; a disappointed man in great poverty, to whom I have ever been most kind and considerate (I need scarcely say that); and another friend in B----, no less a person than an illustrious gentleman named ----, who wrote a story called ----. They have done no harm, and have fallen short of their mark, which, of course, was to annoy me. Now I am perfectly free from any diseased curiosity in such respects, and whenever I hear of a notice of this kind, I never read it; whereby I always conceive (don't you?) that I get the victory. With regard to your slave-owners, they may cry, till they are as black in the face as their own slaves, that Dickens lies. Dickens does not write for their satisfaction, and Dickens will not explain for their comfort. Dickens has the name and date of every newspaper in which every one of those advertisements appeared, as they know perfectly well; but Dickens does not choose to give them, and will not at any time between this and the day of judgment. . . . I have been hard at work on my new book, of which the first number has just appeared. The Paul Joneses who pursue happiness and profit at other men's cost will no doubt enable you to read it, almost as soon as you receive this. I hope you will like it. And I particularly commend, my dear Felton, one Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters to your tender regards. I have a kind of liking for them myself. Blessed star of morning, such a trip as we had into Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away! The "we" means Forster, Maclise, Stanfield (the renowned marine painter), and the Inimitable Boz. We went down into Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with post-horses. Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners, paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the post-boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled. Stanfield (an old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of wayfaring; and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other scientific instruments. The luggage was in Forster's department; and Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs. Heavens! If you could have seen the necks of bottles--distracting in their immense varieties of shape--peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the hot punch (not white, dear Felton, like that amazing compound I sent you a taste of, but a rich, genial, glowing brown) which came in every evening in a huge broad china bowl! I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield (who is very much of your figure and temperament, but fifteen years older) got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun. But stop till you come to England--I say no more. The actuary of the national debt couldn't calculate the number of children who are coming here on Twelfth Night, in honour of Charley's birthday, for which occasion I have provided a magic lantern and divers other tremendous engines of that nature. But the best of it is that Forster and I have purchased between us the entire stock-in-trade of a conjurer, the practice and display whereof is intrusted to me. And O my dear eyes, Felton, if you could see me conjuring the company's watches into impossible tea-caddies, and causing pieces of money to fly, and burning pocket-handkerchiefs without hurting 'em, and practising in my own room, without anybody to admire, you would never forget it as long as you live. In those tricks which require a confederate, I am assisted (by reason of his imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders. We come out on a small scale, to-night, at Forster's, where we see the old year out and the new one in. Particulars shall be forwarded in my next. I have quite made up my mind that F---- really believes he _does_ know you personally, and has all his life. He talks to me about you with such gravity that I am afraid to grin, and feel it necessary to look quite serious. Sometimes he _tells_ me things about you, doesn't ask me, you know, so that I am occasionally perplexed beyond all telling, and begin to think it was he, and not I, who went to America. It's the queerest thing in the world. The book I was to have given Longfellow for you is not worth sending by itself, being only a Barnaby. But I will look up some manuscript for you (I think I have that of the American Notes complete), and will try to make the parcel better worth its long conveyance. With regard to Maclise's pictures, you certainly are quite right in your impression of them; but he is "such a discursive devil" (as he says about himself) and flies off at such odd tangents, that I feel it difficult to convey to you any general notion of his purpose. I will try to do so when I write again. I want very much to know about ---- and that charming girl. . . . Give me full particulars. Will you remember me cordially to Sumner, and say I thank him for his welcome letter? The like to Hillard, with many regards to himself and his wife, with whom I had one night a little conversation which I shall not readily forget. The like to Washington Allston, and all friends who care for me and have outlived my book. . . . Always, my dear Felton, With true regard and affection, yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Tom Hood.] MY DEAR HOOD, I can't state in figures (not very well remembering how to get beyond a million) the number of candidates for the Sanatorium matronship, but if you will ask your little boy to trace figures in the beds of your garden, beginning at the front wall, going down to the cricket-ground, coming back to the wall again, and "carrying over" to the next door, and will then set a skilful accountant to add up the whole, the product, as the Tutor's Assistants say, will give you the amount required. I have pledged myself (being assured of her capability) to support a near relation of Miss E----'s; otherwise, I need not say how glad I should have been to forward any wish of yours. Very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [17] This, and all other Letters addressed to Professor Felton, were printed in Mr. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," originally published in _The Atlantic Monthly Magazine_. [18] On the subject of International Copyright. 1843. [Sidenote: Mr. Macvey Napier.] [19]DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, LONDON, _January 21st, 1843._ MY DEAR SIR, Let me hasten to say, in the fullest and most explicit manner, that you have acted a most honourable, open, fair and manly part in the matter of my complaint,[20] for which I beg you to accept my best thanks, and the assurance of my friendship and regard. I would on no account publish the letter you have sent me for that purpose, as I conceive that by doing so, I should not reciprocate the spirit in which you have written to me privately. But if you should, upon consideration, think it not inexpedient to set the _Review_ right in regard to this point of fact, by a note in the next number, I should be glad to see it there. In reference to the article itself, it did, by repeating this statement, hurt my feelings excessively; and is, in this respect, I still conceive, most unworthy of its author. I am at a loss to divine who its author is. I _know_ he read in some cut-throat American paper, this and other monstrous statements, which I could at any time have converted into sickening praise by the payment of some fifty dollars. I know that he is perfectly aware that his statement in the _Review_ in corroboration of these lies, would be disseminated through the whole of the United States; and that my contradiction will never be heard of. And though I care very little for the opinion of any person who will set the statement of an American editor (almost invariably an atrocious scoundrel) against my character and conduct, such as they may be; still, my sense of justice does revolt from this most cavalier and careless exhibition of me to a whole people, as a traveller under false pretences, and a disappointed intriguer. The better the acquaintance with America, the more defenceless and more inexcusable such conduct is. For, I solemnly declare (and appeal to any man but the writer of this paper, who has travelled in that country, for confirmation of my statement) that the source from which he drew the "information" so recklessly put forth again in England, is infinitely more obscene, disgusting, and brutal than the very worst Sunday newspaper that has ever been printed in Great Britain. Conceive _The Edinburgh Review_ quoting _The Satirist_, or _The Man about Town_, as an authority against a man with one grain of honour, or feather-weight of reputation. With regard to yourself, let me say again that I thank you with all sincerity and heartiness, and fully acquit you of anything but kind and generous intentions towards me. In proof of which, I do assure you that I am even more desirous than before to write for the _Review_, and to find some topic which would at once please me and you. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Professor Felton.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _March 2nd, 1843._ MY DEAR FELTON, I don't know where to begin, but plunge headlong with a terrible splash into this letter, on the chance of turning up somewhere. Hurrah! Up like a cork again, with _The North American Review_ in my hand. Like you, my dear ----, and I can say no more in praise of it, though I go on to the end of the sheet. You cannot think how much notice it has attracted here. Brougham called the other day, with the number (thinking I might not have seen it), and I being out at the time, he left a note, speaking of it, and of the writer, in terms that warmed my heart. Lord Ashburton (one of whose people wrote a notice in the _Edinburgh_ which they have since publicly contradicted) also wrote to me about it in just the same strain. And many others have done the like. I am in great health and spirits and powdering away at Chuzzlewit, with all manner of facetiousness rising up before me as I go on. As to news, I have really none, saving that ---- (who never took any exercise in his life) has been laid up with rheumatism for weeks past, but is now, I hope, getting better. My little captain, as I call him--he who took me out, I mean, and with whom I had that adventure of the cork soles--has been in London too, and seeing all the lions under my escort. Good heavens! I wish you could have seen certain other mahogany-faced men (also captains) who used to call here for him in the morning, and bear him off to docks and rivers and all sorts of queer places, whence he always returned late at night, with rum-and-water tear-drops in his eyes, and a complication of punchy smells in his mouth! He was better than a comedy to us, having marvellous ways of tying his pocket-handkerchief round his neck at dinner-time in a kind of jolly embarrassment, and then forgetting what he had done with it; also of singing songs to wrong tunes, and calling land objects by sea names, and never knowing what o'clock it was, but taking midnight for seven in the evening; with many other sailor oddities, all full of honesty, manliness, and good temper. We took him to Drury Lane Theatre to see "Much Ado About Nothing." But I never could find out what he meant by turning round, after he had watched the first two scenes with great attention, and inquiring "whether it was a Polish piece." . . . On the 4th of April I am going to preside at a public dinner for the benefit of the printers; and if you were a guest at that table, wouldn't I smite you on the shoulder, harder than ever I rapped the well-beloved back of Washington Irving at the City Hotel in New York! You were asking me--I love to say asking, as if we could talk together--about Maclise. He is such a discursive fellow, and so eccentric in his might, that on a mental review of his pictures I can hardly tell you of them as leading to any one strong purpose. But the annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy comes off in May, and then I will endeavour to give you some notion of him. He is a tremendous creature, and might do anything. But, like all tremendous creatures, he takes his own way, and flies off at unexpected breaches in the conventional wall. You know H----'s Book, I daresay. Ah! I saw a scene of mingled comicality and seriousness at his funeral some weeks ago, which has choked me at dinner-time ever since. C---- and I went as mourners; and as he lived, poor fellow, five miles out of town, I drove C---- down. It was such a day as I hope, for the credit of nature, is seldom seen in any parts but these--muddy, foggy, wet, dark, cold, and unutterably wretched in every possible respect. Now, C---- has enormous whiskers, which straggle all down his throat in such weather, and stick out in front of him, like a partially unravelled bird's-nest; so that he looks queer enough at the best, but when he is very wet, and in a state between jollity (he is always very jolly with me) and the deepest gravity (going to a funeral, you know), it is utterly impossible to resist him; especially as he makes the strangest remarks the mind of man can conceive, without any intention of being funny, but rather meaning to be philosophical. I really cried with an irresistible sense of his comicality all the way; but when he was dressed out in a black cloak and a very long black hat-band by an undertaker (who, as he whispered me with tears in his eyes--for he had known H---- many years--was a "character, and he would like to sketch him"), I thought I should have been obliged to go away. However, we went into a little parlour where the funeral party was, and God knows it was miserable enough, for the widow and children were crying bitterly in one corner, and the other mourners--mere people of ceremony, who cared no more for the dead man than the hearse did--were talking quite coolly and carelessly together in another; and the contrast was as painful and distressing as anything I ever saw. There was an Independent clergyman present, with his bands on and a bible under his arm, who, as soon as we were seated, addressed ---- thus, in a loud emphatic voice: "Mr. C----, have you seen a paragraph respecting our departed friend, which has gone the round of the morning papers?" "Yes, sir," says C----, "I have," looking very hard at me the while, for he had told me with some pride coming down that it was his composition. "Oh!" said the clergyman. "Then you will agree with me, Mr. C----, that it is not only an insult to me, who am the servant of the Almighty, but an insult to the Almighty, whose servant I am." "How is that, sir?" said C----. "It is stated, Mr. C----, in that paragraph," says the minister, "that when Mr. H---- failed in business as a bookseller, he was persuaded by _me_ to try the pulpit; which is false, incorrect, unchristian, in a manner blasphemous, and in all respects contemptible. Let us pray." With which, my dear Felton, and in the same breath, I give you my word, he knelt down, as we all did, and began a very miserable jumble of an extemporary prayer. I was really penetrated with sorrow for the family, but when C---- (upon his knees, and sobbing for the loss of an old friend) whispered me, "that if that wasn't a clergyman, and it wasn't a funeral, he'd have punched his head," I felt as if nothing but convulsions could possibly relieve me. . . . Faithfully always, my dear Felton. [Sidenote: Mrs. Hogarth.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _8th May, 1843._ MY DEAR MRS. HOGARTH, I was dressing to go to church yesterday morning--thinking, very sadly, of that time six years--when your kind note and its accompanying packet were brought to me. The best portrait that was ever painted would be of little value to you and me, in comparison with that unfading picture we have within us; and of the worst (which ----'s really is) I can only say, that it has no interest in my eyes, beyond being something which she sat near in its progress, full of life and beauty. In that light, I set some store by the copy you have sent me; and as a mark of your affection, I need not say I value it very much. As any record of that dear face, it is utterly worthless. I trace in many respects a strong resemblance between her mental features and Georgina's--so strange a one, at times, that when she and Kate and I are sitting together, I seem to think that what has happened is a melancholy dream from which I am just awakening. The perfect like of what she was, will never be again, but so much of her spirit shines out in this sister, that the old time comes back again at some seasons, and I can hardly separate it from the present. After she died, I dreamed of her every night for many months--I think for the better part of a year--sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other. And so it did. I went down into Yorkshire, and finding it still present to me, in a strange scene and a strange bed, I could not help mentioning the circumstance in a note I wrote home to Kate. From that moment I have never dreamed of her once, though she is so much in my thoughts at all times (especially when I am successful, and have prospered in anything) that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is. Always affectionately. [Sidenote: Professor Felton.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _September 1st, 1843._ MY DEAR FELTON, If I thought it in the nature of things that you and I could ever agree on paper, touching a certain Chuzzlewitian question whereupon F---- tells me you have remarks to make, I should immediately walk into the same, tooth and nail. But as I don't, I won't. Contenting myself with this prediction, that one of these years and days, you will write or say to me: "My dear Dickens, you were right, though rough, and did a world of good, though you got most thoroughly hated for it." To which I shall reply: "My dear Felton, I looked a long way off and not immediately under my nose." . . . At which sentiment you will laugh, and I shall laugh; and then (for I foresee this will all happen in my land) we shall call for another pot of porter and two or three dozen of oysters. Now, don't you in your own heart and soul quarrel with me for this long silence? Not half so much as I quarrel with myself, I know; but if you could read half the letters I write to you in imagination, you would swear by me for the best of correspondents. The truth is, that when I have done my morning's work, down goes my pen, and from that minute I feel it a positive impossibility to take it up again, until imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk. I walk about brimful of letters, facetious descriptions, touching morsels, and pathetic friendships, but can't for the soul of me uncork myself. The post-office is my rock ahead. My average number of letters that _must_ be written every day is, at the least, a dozen. And you could no more know what I was writing to you spiritually, from the perusal of the bodily thirteenth, than you could tell from my hat what was going on in my head, or could read my heart on the surface of my flannel waistcoat. This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon--in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay--our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the Goodwin Sands?) whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big lighthouse called the North Foreland on a hill behind the village, a severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz. At one he disappears, and presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen--a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise--splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be seen in another bay-window on the ground-floor, eating a strong lunch; after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they _do_ say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles, or so, away), and then I'm told there is a sound in Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses. I never shall have been so near you since we parted aboard the _George Washington_ as next Tuesday. Forster, Maclise, and I, and perhaps Stanfield, are then going aboard the Cunard steamer at Liverpool, to bid Macready good-bye, and bring his wife away. It will be a very hard parting. You will see and know him of course. We gave him a splendid dinner last Saturday at Richmond, whereat I presided with my accustomed grace. He is one of the noblest fellows in the world, and I would give a great deal that you and I should sit beside each other to see him play Virginius, Lear, or Werner, which I take to be, every way, the greatest piece of exquisite perfection that his lofty art is capable of attaining. His Macbeth, especially the last act, is a tremendous reality; but so indeed is almost everything he does. You recollect, perhaps, that he was the guardian of our children while we were away. I love him dearly. . . . You asked me, long ago, about Maclise. He is such a wayward fellow in his subjects, that it would be next to impossible to write such an article as you were thinking of about him. I wish you could form an idea of his genius. One of these days a book will come out, "Moore's Irish Melodies," entirely illustrated by him, on every page. _When_ it comes, I'll send it to you. You will have some notion of him then. He is in great favour with the Queen, and paints secret pictures for her to put upon her husband's table on the morning of his birthday, and the like. But if he has a care, he will leave his mark on more enduring things than palace walls. And so L---- is married. I remember _her_ well, and could draw her portrait, in words, to the life. A very beautiful and gentle creature, and a proper love for a poet. My cordial remembrances and congratulations. Do they live in the house where we breakfasted? . . . I very often dream I am in America again; but, strange to say, I never dream of you. I am always endeavouring to get home in disguise, and have a dreary sense of the distance. _� propos_ of dreams, is it not a strange thing if writers of fiction never dream of their own creations; recollecting, I suppose, even in their dreams, that they have no real existence? _I_ never dreamed of any of my own characters, and I feel it so impossible that I would wager Scott never did of his, real as they are. I had a good piece of absurdity in my head a night or two ago. I dreamed that somebody was dead. I don't know who, but it's not to the purpose. It was a private gentleman, and a particular friend; and I was greatly overcome when the news was broken to me (very delicately) by a gentleman in a cocked hat, top boots, and a sheet. Nothing else. "Good God!" I said, "is he dead?" "He is as dead, sir," rejoined the gentleman, "as a door-nail. But we must all die, Mr. Dickens, sooner or later, my dear sir." "Ah!" I said. "Yes, to be sure. Very true. But what did he die of?" The gentleman burst into a flood of tears, and said, in a voice broken by emotion: "He christened his youngest child, sir, with a toasting-fork." I never in my life was so affected as at his having fallen a victim to this complaint. It carried a conviction to my mind that he never could have recovered. I knew that it was the most interesting and fatal malady in the world; and I wrung the gentleman's hand in a convulsion of respectful admiration, for I felt that this explanation did equal honour to his head and heart! What do you think of Mrs. Gamp? And how do you like the undertaker? I have a fancy that they are in your way. Oh heaven! such green woods as I was rambling among down in Yorkshire, when I was getting that done last July! For days and weeks we never saw the sky but through green boughs; and all day long I cantered over such soft moss and turf, that the horse's feet scarcely made a sound upon it. We have some friends in that part of the country (close to Castle Howard, where Lord Morpeth's father dwells in state, _in_ his park indeed), who are the jolliest of the jolly, keeping a big old country house, with an ale cellar something larger than a reasonable church, and everything, like Goldsmith's bear dances, "in a concatenation accordingly." Just the place for you, Felton! We performed some madnesses there in the way of forfeits, picnics, rustic games, inspections of ancient monasteries at midnight, when the moon was shining, that would have gone to your heart, and, as Mr. Weller says, "come out on the other side." . . . Write soon, my dear Felton; and if I write to you less often than I would, believe that my affectionate heart is with you always. Loves and regards to all friends, from yours ever and ever. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Macvey Napier.] BROADSTAIRS, _September 16th, 1843._ MY DEAR SIR, I hinted, in a letter of introduction I gave Mr. Hood to you, that I had been thinking of a subject for the _Edinburgh_. Would it meet the purposes of the _Review_ to come out strongly against any system of education based exclusively on the principles of the Established Church? If it would, I should like to show why such a thing as the Church Catechism is wholly inapplicable to the state of ignorance that now prevails; and why no system but one, so general in great religious principles as to include all creeds, can meet the wants and understandings of the dangerous classes of society. This is the only broad ground I could hold, consistently with what I feel and think on such a subject. But I could give, in taking it, a description of certain voluntary places of instruction, called "the ragged schools," now existing in London, and of the schools in jails, and of the ignorance presented in such places, which would make a very striking paper, especially if they were put in strong comparison with the effort making, by subscription, to maintain exclusive Church instruction. I could show these people in a state so miserable and so neglected, that their very nature rebels against the simplest religion, and that to convey to them the faintest outlines of any system of distinction between right and wrong is in itself a giant's task, before which mysteries and squabbles for forms _must_ give way. Would this be too much for the _Review_? Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [19] This, and all other Letters addressed to Mr. Macvey Napier, were printed in "Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq.," editor of _The Edinburgh Review_, edited by his son Macvey Napier. [20] His complaint was that the reviewer of his "American Notes," in the number for January, 1843, had represented him as having gone to America as a missionary in the cause of international copyright--an allegation which Charles Dickens repudiated, and which was rectified in the way he himself suggested. 1844. [Sidenote: Professor Felton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, LONDON, _January 2nd, 1844._ MY VERY DEAR FELTON, You are a prophet, and had best retire from business straightway. Yesterday morning, New Year's Day, when I walked into my little workroom after breakfast, and was looking out of window at the snow in the garden--not seeing it particularly well in consequence of some staggering suggestions of last night, whereby I was beset--the postman came to the door with a knock, for which I denounced him from my heart. Seeing your hand upon the cover of a letter which he brought, I immediately blessed him, presented him with a glass of whisky, inquired after his family (they are all well), and opened the despatch with a moist and oystery twinkle in my eye. And on the very day from which the new year dates, I read your New Year congratulations as punctually as if you lived in the next house. Why don't you? Now, if instantly on the receipt of this you will send a free and independent citizen down to the Cunard wharf at Boston, you will find that Captain Hewett, of the _Britannia_ steamship (my ship), has a small parcel for Professor Felton of Cambridge; and in that parcel you will find a Christmas Carol in prose; being a short story of Christmas by Charles Dickens. Over which Christmas Carol Charles Dickens wept and laughed and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed. . . . Its success is most prodigious. And by every post all manner of strangers write all manner of letters to him about their homes and hearths, and how this same Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a little shelf by itself. Indeed, it is the greatest success, as I am told, that this ruffian and rascal has ever achieved. Forster is out again; and if he don't go in again, after the manner in which we have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blindman's-buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before. To keep the Chuzzlewit going, and do this little book, the Carol, in the odd times between two parts of it, was, as you may suppose, pretty tight work. But when it was done I broke out like a madman. And if you could have seen me at a children's party at Macready's the other night, going down a country dance with Mrs. M., you would have thought I was a country gentleman of independent property, residing on a tiptop farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face every day. . . . Your friend, Mr. P----, dined with us one day (I don't know whether I told you this before), and pleased us very much. Mr. C---- has dined here once, and spent an evening here. I have not seen him lately, though he has called twice or thrice; for K---- being unwell and I busy, we have not been visible at our accustomed seasons. I wonder whether H---- has fallen in your way. Poor H----! He was a good fellow, and has the most grateful heart I ever met with. Our journeyings seem to be a dream now. Talking of dreams, strange thoughts of Italy and France, and maybe Germany, are springing up within me as the Chuzzlewit clears off. It's a secret I have hardly breathed to anyone, but I "think" of leaving England for a year, next midsummer, bag and baggage, little ones and all--then coming out with _such_ a story, Felton, all at once, no parts, sledgehammer blow. I send you a Manchester paper, as you desire. The report is not exactly done, but very well done, notwithstanding. It was a very splendid sight, I assure you, and an awful-looking audience. I am going to preside at a similar meeting at Liverpool on the 26th of next month, and on my way home I may be obliged to preside at another at Birmingham. I will send you papers, if the reports be at all like the real thing. I wrote to Prescott about his book, with which I was perfectly charmed. I think his descriptions masterly, his style brilliant, his purpose manly and gallant always. The introductory account of Aztec civilisation impressed me exactly as it impressed you. From beginning to end the whole history is enchanting and full of genius. I only wonder that, having such an opportunity of illustrating the doctrine of visible judgments, he never remarks, when Cortes and his men tumble the idols down the temple steps and call upon the people to take notice that their gods are powerless to help themselves, that possibly if some intelligent native had tumbled down the image of the Virgin or patron saint after them nothing very remarkable might have ensued in consequence. Of course you like Macready. Your name's Felton. I wish you could see him play Lear. It is stupendously terrible. But I suppose he would be slow to act it with the Boston company. Hearty remembrances to Sumner, Longfellow, Prescott, and all whom you know I love to remember. Countless happy years to you and yours, my dear Felton, and some instalment of them, however slight, in England, in the loving company of THE PROSCRIBED ONE. Oh, breathe not his name! [Sidenote: Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer.] ATHEN�UM, _Thursday Afternoon, 25th January, 1844._ MY DEAR SIR EDWARD, I received your kind cheque yesterday, in behalf of the Elton family; and am much indebted to you on their behalf. Pray do not believe that the least intentional neglect has prevented me from calling on you, or that I am not sincerely desirous to avail myself of any opportunity of cultivating your friendship. I venture to say this to you in an unaffected and earnest spirit, and I hope it will not be displeasing to you. At the time when you called, and for many weeks afterwards, I was so closely occupied with my little Carol (the idea of which had just occurred to me), that I never left home before the owls went out, and led quite a solitary life. When I began to have a little time and to go abroad again, I knew that you were in affliction, and I then thought it better to wait, even before I left a card at your door, until the pressure of your distress had past. I fancy a reproachful spirit in your note, possibly because I knew that I may appear to deserve it. But _do_ let me say to you that it would give me real pain to retain the idea that there was any coldness between us, and that it would give me heartfelt satisfaction to know the reverse. I shall make a personal descent upon you before Sunday, in the hope of telling you this myself. But I cannot rest easy without writing it also. And if this should lead to a better knowledge in each of us, of the other, believe me that I shall always look upon it as something I have long wished for. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thompson.] [21]LIVERPOOL, _Wednesday Night, 28th February, Half-past ten at night._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, There never were such considerate people as they are here. After offering me unbounded hospitality and my declining it, they leave me to myself like gentlemen. They saved me from all sorts of intrusion at the Town Hall--brought me back--and left me to my quiet supper (now on the table) as they had left me to my quiet dinner. I wish you had come. It was really a splendid sight. The Town Hall was crammed to the roof by, I suppose, two thousand persons. The ladies were in full dress and immense numbers; and when Dick showed himself, the whole assembly stood up, rustling like the leaves of a wood. Dick, with the heart of a lion, dashed in bravely. He introduced that about the genie in the casket with marvellous effect; and was applauded to the echo, which did applaud again. He was horribly nervous when he arrived at Birmingham,[22] but when he stood upon the platform, I don't believe his pulse increased ten degrees. A better and quicker audience never listened to man. The ladies had hung the hall (do you know what an immense place it is?) with artificial flowers all round. And on the front of the great gallery, immediately fronting this young gentleman, were the words in artificial flowers (you'll observe) "Welcome Boz" in letters about six feet high. Behind his head, and about the great organ, were immense transparencies representing several Fames crowning a corresponding number of Dicks, at which Victoria (taking out a poetic licence) was highly delighted. * * * * * I am going to bed. The landlady is not literary, and calls me Mr. Digzon. In other respects it is a good house. My dear Thompson, always yours. [Sidenote: Countess of Blessington.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _March 10th, 1844._ MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, I have made up my mind to "see the world," and mean to decamp, bag and baggage, next midsummer for a twelvemonth. I purpose establishing my family in some convenient place, from whence I can make personal ravages on the neighbouring country, and, somehow or other, have got it into my head that Nice would be a favourable spot for head-quarters. You are so well acquainted with these matters, that I am anxious to have the benefit of your kind advice. I do not doubt that you can tell me whether this same Nice be a healthy place the year through, whether it be reasonably cheap, pleasant to look at and to live in, and the like. If you will tell me, when you have ten minutes to spare for such a client, I shall be delighted to come to you, and guide myself by your opinion. I will not ask you to forgive me for troubling you, because I am sure beforehand that you will do so. I beg to be kindly remembered to Count D'Orsay and to your nieces--I was going to say "the Misses Power," but it looks so like the blue board at a ladies' school, that I stopped short. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thompson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _March 13th, 1844._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, Think of Italy! Don't give that up! Why, my house is entered at Phillips's and at Gillow's to be let for twelve months; my letter of credit lies ready at Coutts's; my last number of Chuzzlewit comes out in June; and the first week, if not the first day in July, sees me, God willing, steaming off towards the sun. Yes. We must have a few books, and everything that is idle, sauntering, and enjoyable. We must lie down at the bottom of those boats, and devise all kinds of engines for improving on that gallant holiday. I see myself in a striped shirt, moustache, blouse, red sash, straw hat, and white trousers, sitting astride a mule, and not caring for the clock, the day of the month, or the week. Tinkling bells upon the mule, I hope. I look forward to it day and night, and wish the time were come. Don't _you_ give it up. That's all. * * * * * Always, my dear Thompson, Faithfully your friend. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Sunday, March 24th, 1844._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, My study fireplace having been suddenly seized with symptoms of insanity, I have been in great affliction. The bricklayer was called in, and considered it necessary to perform an extensive operation without delay. I don't know whether you are aware of a peculiar bricky raggedness (not unaccompanied by pendent stalactites of mortar) which is exposed to view on the removal of a stove, or are acquainted with the suffocating properties of a kind of accidental snuff which flies out of the same cavernous region in great abundance. It is very distressing. I have been walking about the house after the manner of the dove before the waters subsided for some days, and have no pens or ink or paper. Hence this gap in our correspondence which I now repair. What are you doing??? When are you coming away???? Why are you stopping there????? Do enlighten me, for I think of you constantly, and have a true and real interest in your proceedings. D'Orsay, who knows Italy very well indeed, strenuously insists there is no such place for headquarters as Pisa. Lady Blessington says so also. What do you say? On the first of July! The first of July! Dick turns his head towards the orange groves. * * * * * Daniel not having yet come to judgment, there is no news stirring. Every morning I proclaim: "At home to Mr. Thompson." Every evening I ejaculate with Monsieur Jacques[23]: "But he weel come. I know he weel." After which I look vacantly at the boxes; put my hands to my gray wig, as if to make quite sure that it is still on my head, all safe: and go off, first entrance O.P. to soft music. * * * * * Always faithfully your friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Ebenezer Jones.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, REGENT'S PARK, _Monday, 15th April, 1844._ DEAR SIR, I don't know how it has happened that I have been so long in acknowledging the receipt of your kind present of your poems[24]; but I _do_ know that I have often thought of writing to you, and have very often reproached myself for not carrying that thought into execution. I have not been neglectful of the poems themselves, I assure you, but have read them with very great pleasure. They struck me at the first glance as being remarkably nervous, picturesque, imaginative, and original. I have frequently recurred to them since, and never with the slightest abatement of that impression. I am much flattered and gratified by your recollection of me. I beg you to believe in my unaffected sympathy with, and appreciation of, your powers; and I entreat you to accept my best wishes, and genuine though tardy thanks. Dear Sir, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Babbage.] 9, OSNABURGH TERRACE, NEW ROAD, _28th May, 1844._ MY DEAR SIR, I regret to say that we are placed in the preposterous situation of being obliged to postpone our little dinner-party on Saturday, by reason of having no house to dine in. We have not been burnt out; but a desirable widow (as a tenant, I mean) proposed, only last Saturday, to take our own house for the whole term of our intended absence abroad, on condition that she had possession of it to-day. We fled, and were driven into this place, which has no convenience for the production of any other banquet than a cold collation of plate and linen, the only comforts we have not left behind us. My consolation lies in knowing what sort of dinner you would have had if you had come _here_, and in looking forward to claiming the fulfilment of your kind promise when we are again at home. Always believe me, my dear Sir, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Countess of Blessington.] MILAN, _Wednesday, November 20th, 1844._ MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, Appearances are against me. Don't believe them. I have written you, in intention, fifty letters, and I can claim no credit for anyone of them (though they were the best letters you ever read), for they all originated in my desire to live in your memory and regard. Since I heard from Count D'Orsay, I have been beset in I don't know how many ways. First of all, I went to Marseilles and came back to Genoa. Then I moved to the Peschiere. Then some people, who had been present at the Scientific Congress here, made a sudden inroad on that establishment, and overran it. Then they went away, and I shut myself up for a month, close and tight, over my little Christmas book, "The Chimes." All my affections and passions got twined and knotted up in it, and I became as haggard as a murderer, long before I wrote "The End." When I had done that, like "_The_ man of Thessaly," who having scratched his eyes out in a quickset hedge, plunged into a bramble-bush to scratch them in again, I fled to Venice, to recover the composure I had disturbed. From thence I went to Verona and to Mantua. And now I am here--just come up from underground, and earthy all over, from seeing that extraordinary tomb in which the dead saint lies in an alabaster case, with sparkling jewels all about him to mock his dusty eyes, not to mention the twenty-franc pieces which devout votaries were ringing down upon a sort of sky-light in the cathedral pavement above, as if it were the counter of his heavenly shop. You know Verona? You know everything in Italy, _I_ know. The Roman Amphitheatre there delighted me beyond expression. I never saw anything so full of solemn ancient interest. There are the four-and-forty rows of seats, as fresh and perfect as if their occupants had vacated them but yesterday--the entrances, passages, dens, rooms, corridors, the numbers over some of the arches. An equestrian troop had been there some days before, and had scooped out a little ring at one end of the arena, and had their performances in that spot. I should like to have seen it, of all things, for its very dreariness. Fancy a handful of people sprinkled over one corner of the great place (the whole population of Verona wouldn't fill it now); and a spangled cavalier bowing to the echoes, and the grass-grown walls! I climbed to the topmost seat, and looked away at the beautiful view for some minutes; when I turned round, and looked down into the theatre again, it had exactly the appearance of an immense straw hat, to which the helmet in the Castle of Otranto was a baby; the rows of seats representing the different plaits of straw, and the arena the inside of the crown. I had great expectations of Venice, but they fell immeasurably short of the wonderful reality. The short time I passed there went by me in a dream. I hardly think it possible to exaggerate its beauties, its sources of interest, its uncommon novelty and freshness. A thousand and one realisations of the Thousand and one Nights, could scarcely captivate and enchant me more than Venice. Your old house at Albaro--Il Paradiso--is spoken of as yours to this day. What a gallant place it is! I don't know the present inmate, but I hear that he bought and furnished it not long since, with great splendour, in the French style, and that he wishes to sell it. I wish I were rich and could buy it. There is a third-rate wine shop below Byron's house, and the place looks dull and miserable, and ruinous enough. Old ---- is a trifle uglier than when I first arrived. He has periodical parties, at which there are a great many flowerpots and a few ices--no other refreshments. He goes about, constantly charged with extemporaneous poetry, and is always ready, like tavern dinners, on the shortest notice and the most reasonable terms. He keeps a gigantic harp in his bedroom, together with pen, ink, and paper, for fixing his ideas as they flow, a kind of profane King David, but truly good-natured and very harmless. Pray say to Count D'Orsay everything that is cordial and loving from me. The travelling purse he gave me has been of immense service. It has been constantly opened. All Italy seems to yearn to put its hand in it. I think of hanging it, when I come back to England, on a nail as a trophy, and of gashing the brim like the blade of an old sword, and saying to my son and heir, as they do upon the stage: "You see this notch, boy? Five hundred francs were laid low on that day, for post-horses. Where this gap is, a waiter charged your father treble the correct amount--and got it. This end, worn into teeth like the rasped edge of an old file, is sacred to the Custom Houses, boy, the passports, and the shabby soldiers at town-gates, who put an open hand and a dirty coat-cuff into the coach windows of all 'Forestieri.' Take it, boy. Thy father has nothing else to give!" My desk is cooling itself in a mail-coach, somewhere down at the back of the cathedral, and the pens and ink in this house are so detestable, that I have no hope of your ever getting to this portion of my letter. But I have the less misery in this state of mind, from knowing that it has nothing in it to repay you for the trouble of perusal. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] COVENT GARDEN, _Sunday, Noon (December, 1844)._ MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, Business for other people (and by no means of a pleasant kind) has held me prisoner during two whole days, and will so detain me to-day, in the very agony of my departure for Italy again, that I shall not even be able to reach Gore House once more, on which I had set my heart. I cannot bear the thought of going away without some sort of reference to the happy day you gave me on Monday, and the pleasure and delight I had in your earnest greeting. I shall never forget it, believe me. It would be worth going to China--it would be worth going to America, to come home again for the pleasure of such a meeting with you and Count D'Orsay--to whom my love, and something as near it to Miss Power and her sister as it is lawful to send. It will be an unspeakable satisfaction to me (though I am not maliciously disposed) to know under your own hand at Genoa that my little book made you cry. I hope to prove a better correspondent on my return to those shores. But better or worse, or any how, I am ever, my dear Lady Blessington, in no common degree, and not with an every-day regard, yours. Very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [21] On the occasion of a great meeting of the Mechanics' Institution at Liverpool, with Charles Dickens in the chair. [22] He had also presided two evenings previously at a meeting of the Polytechnic Institution at Birmingham. [23] A character in a Play, well known at this time. [24] "Studies of Sensation and Event." 1845. [Sidenote: The same.] GENOA, _May 9th, 1845._ MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, Once more in my old quarters, and with rather a tired sole to my foot, from having found such an immense number of different resting-places for it since I went away. I write you my last Italian letter for this bout, designing to leave here, please God, on the ninth of next month, and to be in London again by the end of June. I am looking forward with great delight to the pleasure of seeing you once more, and mean to come to Gore House with such a swoop as shall astonish the poodle, if, after being accustomed to his own size and sense, he retain the power of being astonished at anything in the wide world. You know where I have been, and every mile of ground I have travelled over, and every object I have seen. It is next to impossible, surely, to exaggerate the interest of Rome; though, I think, it _is_ very possible to find the main source of interest in the wrong things. Naples disappointed me greatly. The weather was bad during a great part of my stay there. But if I had not had mud, I should have had dust, and though I had had sun, I must still have had the Lazzaroni. And they are so ragged, so dirty, so abject, so full of degradation, so sunken and steeped in the hopelessness of better things, that they would make heaven uncomfortable, if they could ever get there. I didn't expect to see a handsome city, but I expected something better than that long dull line of squalid houses, which stretches from the Chiaja to the quarter of the Porta Capuana; and while I was quite prepared for a miserable populace, I had some dim belief that there were bright rays among them, and dancing legs, and shining sun-browned faces. Whereas the honest truth is, that connected with Naples itself, I have not one solitary recollection. The country round it charmed me, I need not say. Who can forget Herculaneum and Pompeii? As to Vesuvius, it burns away in my thoughts, beside the roaring waters of Niagara, and not a splash of the water extinguishes a spark of the fire; but there they go on, tumbling and flaming night and day, each in its fullest glory. I have seen so many wonders, and each of them has such a voice of its own, that I sit all day long listening to the roar they make as if it were in a sea-shell, and have fallen into an idleness so complete, that I can't rouse myself sufficiently to go to Pisa on the twenty-fifth, when the triennial illumination of the Cathedral and Leaning Tower, and Bridges, and what not, takes place. But I have already been there; and it cannot beat St. Peter's, I suppose. So I don't think I shall pluck myself up by the roots, and go aboard a steamer for Leghorn. Let me thank you heartily for the "Keepsake" and the "Book of Beauty." They reached me a week or two ago. I have been very much struck by two papers in them--one, Landor's "Conversations," among the most charming, profound, and delicate productions I have ever read; the other, your lines on Byron's room at Venice. I am as sure that you wrote them from your heart, as I am that they found their way immediately to mine. It delights me to receive such accounts of Maclise's fresco. If he will only give his magnificent genius fair play, there is not enough cant and dulness even in the criticism of art from which Sterne prayed kind heaven to defend him, as the worst of all the cants continually canted in this canting world--to keep the giant down an hour. Our poor friend, the naval governor,[25] has lost his wife, I am sorry to hear, since you and I spoke of his pleasant face. Do not let your nieces forget me, if you can help it, and give my love to Count D'Orsay, with many thanks to him for his charming letter. I was greatly amused by his account of ----. There was a cold shade of aristocracy about it, and a dampness of cold water, which entertained me beyond measure. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Macvey Napier.] 1, DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _July 28th, 1845._ MY DEAR SIR, As my note is to bear reference to business, I will make it as short and plain as I can. I think I could write a pretty good and a well-timed article on the _Punishment of Death_, and sympathy with great criminals, instancing the gross and depraved curiosity that exists in reference to them, by some of the outrageous things that were written, done, and said in recent cases. But as I am not sure that my views would be yours, and as their statement would be quite inseparable from such a paper, I will briefly set down their purport that you may decide for yourself. Society, having arrived at that state in which it spares bodily torture to the worst criminals, and having agreed, if criminals be put to death at all, to kill them in the speediest way, I consider the question with reference to society, and not at all with reference to the criminal, holding that, in a case of cruel and deliberate murder, he is already mercifully and sparingly treated. But, as a question for the deliberate consideration of all reflective persons, I put this view of the case. With such very repulsive and odious details before us, may it not be well to inquire whether the punishment of death be beneficial to society? I believe it to have a horrible fascination for many of those persons who render themselves liable to it, impelling them onward to the acquisition of a frightful notoriety; and (setting aside the strong confirmation of this idea afforded in individual instances) I presume this to be the case in very badly regulated minds, when I observe the strange fascination which everything connected with this punishment, or the object of it, possesses for tens of thousands of decent, virtuous, well-conducted people, who are quite unable to resist the published portraits, letters, anecdotes, smilings, snuff-takings, of the bloodiest and most unnatural scoundrel with the gallows before him. I observe that this strange interest does not prevail to anything like the same degree where death is not the penalty. Therefore I connect it with the dread and mystery surrounding death in any shape, but especially in this avenging form, and am disposed to come to the conclusion that it produces crime in the criminally disposed, and engenders a diseased sympathy--morbid and bad, but natural and often irresistible--among the well-conducted and gentle. Regarding it as doing harm to both these classes, it may even then be right to inquire, whether it has any salutary influence on those small knots and specks of people, mere bubbles in the living ocean, who actually behold its infliction with their proper eyes. On this head it is scarcely possible to entertain a doubt, for we know that robbery, and obscenity, and callous indifference are of no commoner occurrence anywhere than at the foot of the scaffold. Furthermore, we know that all exhibitions of agony and death have a tendency to brutalise and harden the feelings of men, and have always been the most rife among the fiercest people. Again, it is a great question whether ignorant and dissolute persons (ever the great body of spectators, as few others will attend), seeing _that_ murder done, and not having seen the other, will not, almost of necessity, sympathise with the man who dies before them, especially as he is shown, a martyr to their fancy, tied and bound, alone among scores, with every kind of odds against him. I should take all these threads up at the end by a vivid little sketch of the origin and progress of such a crime as Hooker's, stating a somewhat parallel case, but an imaginary one, pursuing its hero to his death, and showing what enormous harm he does _after_ the crime for which he suffers. I should state none of these positions in a positive sledge-hammer way, but tempt and lure the reader into the discussion of them in his own mind; and so we come to this at last--whether it be for the benefit of society to elevate even this crime to the awful dignity and notoriety of death; and whether it would not be much more to its advantage to substitute a mean and shameful punishment, degrading the deed and the committer of the deed, and leaving the general compassion to expend itself upon the only theme at present quite forgotten in the history, that is to say, the murdered person. I do not give you this as an outline of the paper, which I think I could make attractive. It is merely an exposition of the inferences to which its whole philosophy must tend. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thompson.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _17th October, 1845._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, Roche has not returned; and from what I hear of your movements, I fear I cannot answer for his being here in time for you. I enclose you, lest I should forget it, the letter to the Peschiere agent. He is the Marquis Pallavicini's man of business, and speaks the most abominable Genoese ever heard. He is a rascal of course; but a more reliable villain, in his way, than the rest of his kind. You recollect what I told you of the Swiss banker's wife, the English lady? If you would like Christiana[26] to have a friend at Genoa in the person of a most affectionate and excellent little woman, and if you would like to have a resource in the most elegant and comfortable family there, I need not say that I shall be delighted to give you a letter to those who would die to serve me. Always yours. [Sidenote: Mr. H. P. Smith.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _4th November, 1845._ MY DEAR SMITH, My chickens and their little aunt will be delighted to do honour to the Lord Mayor on the ninth. So should I be, but I am hard at it, grinding my teeth. I came down with Thompson the other day, hoping to see you. You are keeping it up, however, in some holiday region, and your glass-case looked like a large pantry, out of which some giant had stolen the meat. Best regards to Mrs. Smith from all of us. Kate quite hearty, and the baby, like Goldsmith's bear, "in a concatenation" accordingly. Always, my dear Smith, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Macvey Napier.] _November 10th, 1845._ MY DEAR SIR, I write to you in great haste. I most bitterly regret the being obliged to disappoint and inconvenience you (as I fear I shall do), but I find it will be _impossible_ for me to write the paper on Capital Punishment for your next number. The fault is really not mine. I have been involved for the last fortnight in one maze of distractions, which nothing could have enabled me to anticipate or prevent. Everything I have had to do has been interfered with and cast aside. I have never in my life had so many insuperable obstacles crowded into the way of my pursuits. It is as little my fault, believe me, as though I were ill and wrote to you from my bed. And pray bear as gently as you can with the vexation I occasion you, when I tell you how very heavily it falls upon myself. Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [25] Lieut. Tracey, R.N., who was at this time Governor of Tothill Fields Prison. [26] Mrs. Thompson. 1846. [Sidenote: Mr. W. J. Fox.] OFFICE OF THE "DAILY NEWS," WHITEFRIARS, _21st January, 1846._ MY DEAR FOX,[27] The boy is in waiting. I need not tell you how our Printer failed us last night.[28] I hope for better things to-night, and am bent on a fight for it. If we can get a good paper to-morrow, I believe we are as safe as such a thing can be. Your leader most excellent. I made bold to take out ---- for reasons that I hinted at the other day, and which I think have validity in them. He is unscrupulous and indiscreet. Cobden never so. It didn't offend you? Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Thompson.] ROSEMONT, _Tuesday Morning._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, All kinds of hearty and cordial congratulations on the event.[29] We are all delighted that it is at last well over. There is an uncertainty attendant on angelic strangers (as Miss Tox says) which it is a great relief to have so happily disposed of. Ever yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, ST. HONOR�, PARIS, _2nd December, 1846._ MY DEAR THOMPSON, We got to Paris, in due course, on the Friday evening. We had a pleasant and prosperous journey, having rather cold weather in Switzerland and on the borders thereof, and a slight detention of three hours and a half at the frontier Custom House, atop of a mountain, in a hard frost and a dense fog. We came into this house last Thursday. It has a pretty drawing-room, approached through four most extraordinary chambers. It is the most ridiculous and preposterous house in the world, I should think. It belongs to a Marquis Castellane, but was fitted (so Paul Pry Poole said, who dined here yesterday) by ---- in a fit of temporary insanity, I have no doubt. The dining-room is mere midsummer madness, and is designed to represent a bosky grove. At this present writing, snow is falling in the street, and the weather is very cold, but not so cold as it was yesterday. I dined with Lord Normanby on Sunday last. Everything seems to be queer and uncomfortable in the diplomatic way, and he is rather bothered and worried, to my thinking. I found young Sheridan (Mrs. Norton's brother) the attaché. I know him very well, and he is a good man for my sight-seeing purposes. There are to be no theatricals unless the times should so adjust themselves as to admit of their being French, to which the Markis seems to incline, as a bit of conciliation and a popular move. Lumley, of Italian opera notoriety, also dined here yesterday, and seems hugely afeard of the opposition opera at Covent Garden, who have already spirited away Grisi and Mario, which he affects to consider a great comfort and relief. I gave him some uncompromising information on the subject of his pit, and told him that if he didn't conciliate the middle classes, he might depend on being damaged, very decidedly. The danger of the Covent Garden enterprise seems to me to be that they are going in for ballet too, and I really don't think the house is large enough to repay the double expense. Forster writes me that Mac has come out with tremendous vigour in the Christmas Book, and took off his coat at it with a burst of such alarming energy that he has done four subjects! Stanfield has done three. Keeleys are making that "change"[30] I was so hot upon at Lausanne, and seem ready to spend money with bold hearts, but the cast (as far as I know it, at present) would appear to be black despair and moody madness. J. W. Leigh Murray, from the Princess's, is to be the Alfred, and Forster says there is a Mrs. Gordon at Bolton's who must be got for Grace. I am horribly afraid ---- will do one of the lawyers, and there seems to be nobody but ---- for Marion. I shall run over and carry consternation into the establishment, as soon as I have done the number. But I have not begun it yet, though I hope to do so to-night, having been quite put out by chopping and changing about, and by a vile touch of biliousness, that makes my eyes feel as if they were yellow bullets. "Dombey" has passed its thirty thousand already. Do you remember a mysterious man in a straw hat low-crowned, and a Petersham coat, who was a sort of manager or amateur man-servant at Miss Kelly's? Mr. Baynton Bolt, sir, came out, the other night, as Macbeth, at the Royal Surrey Theatre. There's all my news for you! Let me know, in return, whether you have fought a duel yet with your milingtary landlord, and whether Lausanne is still that giddy whirl of dissipation it was wont to be, also full particulars of your fairer and better half, and of the baby. I will send a Christmas book to Clermont as soon as I get any copies. And so no more at present from yours ever. FOOTNOTES: [27] Mr. W. J. Fox, afterwards M.P. for Oldham, well known for his eloquent advocacy of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, was engaged to write the political articles in the first numbers of the _Daily News_. [28] The first issue of the _Daily News_ was a sad failure, as to printing. [29] The birth, at Lausanne, of Mr. Thompson's eldest daughter, Elizabeth Thompson, now Mrs. Butler, the celebrated artist. [30] In the dramatised "Battle of Life." 1847. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _January 12th, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR EDWARD, The Committee of the General Theatrical Fund (who are all actors) are anxious to prefer a petition to you to preside at their next annual dinner at the London Tavern, and having no personal knowledge of you, have requested me, as one of their Trustees, through their Secretary, Mr. Cullenford, to give them some kind of presentation to you. I will only say that I have felt great interest in their design, which embraces all sorts and conditions of actors from the first, and it has been maintained by themselves with extraordinary perseverance and determination. It has been in existence some years, but it is only two years since they began to dine. At their first festival I presided, at their second, Macready. They very naturally hold that if they could prevail on you to reign over them now they would secure a most powerful and excellent advocate, whose aid would serve and grace their cause immensely. I sympathise with their feeling so cordially, and know so well that it would certainly be mine if I were in their case (as, indeed, it is, being their friend), that I comply with their request for an introduction. And I will not ask you to excuse my troubling you, feeling sure that I may use this liberty with you. Believe me always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Countess of Blessington.] 48, RUE DE COURCELLES, PARIS, _January 24th, 1847._ MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON, I feel very wicked in beginning this note, and deeply remorseful for not having begun and ended it long ago. But _you_ know how difficult it is to write letters in the midst of a writing life; and as you know too (I hope) how earnestly and affectionately I always think of you, wherever I am, I take heart, on a little consideration, and feel comparatively good again. Forster has been cramming into the space of a fortnight every description of impossible and inconsistent occupation in the way of sight-seeing. He has been now at Versailles, now in the prisons, now at the opera, now at the hospitals, now at the Conservatoire, and now at the Morgue, with a dreadful insatiability. I begin to doubt whether I had anything to do with a book called "Dombey," or ever sat over number five (not finished a fortnight yet) day after day, until I half began, like the monk in poor Wilkie's story, to think it the only reality in life, and to mistake all the realities for short-lived shadows. Among the multitude of sights, we saw our pleasant little bud of a friend, Rose Chéri, play Clarissa Harlowe the other night. I believe she does it in London just now, and perhaps you may have seen it. A most charming, intelligent, modest, affecting piece of acting it is, with a death superior to anything I ever saw on the stage, except Macready's Lear. The theatres are admirable just now. We saw "Gentil Bernard" at the Variétés last night, acted in a manner that was absolutely perfect. It was a little picture of Watteau, animated and talking from beginning to end. At the Cirque there is a new show-piece called the "French Revolution," in which there is a representation of the National Convention, and a series of battles (fought by some five hundred people, who look like five thousand) that are wonderful in their extraordinary vigour and truth. Gun-cotton gives its name to the general annual jocose review at the Palais Royal, which is dull enough, saving for the introduction of Alexandre Dumas, sitting in his study beside a pile of quarto volumes about five feet high, which he says is the first tableau of the first act of the first piece to be played on the first night of his new theatre. The revival of Molière's "Don Juan," at the Français, has drawn money. It is excellently played, and it is curious to observe how different _their_ Don Juan and valet are from our English ideas of the master and man. They are playing "Lucretia Borgia" again at the Porte St. Martin, but it is poorly performed and hangs fire drearily, though a very remarkable and striking play. We were at Victor Hugo's house last Sunday week, a most extraordinary place, looking like an old curiosity shop, or the property-room of some gloomy, vast, old theatre. I was much struck by Hugo himself, who looks like a genius as he is, every inch of him, and is very interesting and satisfactory from head to foot. His wife is a handsome woman, with flashing black eyes. There is also a charming ditto daughter of fifteen or sixteen, with ditto eyes. Sitting among old armour and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. Edward Chapman.] CHESTER PLACE, _Monday, 3rd May, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, Here is a young lady--Miss Power, Lady Blessington's niece--has "gone and been" and translated a story by Georges Sand, the French writer, which she has printed, and got four woodcuts engraved ready for. She wants to get it published--something in the form of the Christmas books. I know the story, and it is a very fine one. Will you do it for her? There is no other risk than putting a few covers on a few copies. Half-profits is what she expects and no loss. She has made appeal to me, and if there is to be a hard-hearted ogre in the business at all, I would rather it should be you than I; so I have told her I would make proposals to your mightiness. Answer this straightway, for I have no doubt the fair translator thinks I am tearing backwards and forwards in a cab all day to bring the momentous affair to a conclusion. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. James Sheridan Knowles.] [31]148, KING'S ROAD, BRIGHTON, _26th May, 1847._ MY DEAR KNOWLES, I have learned, I hope, from the art we both profess (if you will forgive this classification of myself with you) to respect a man of genius in his mistakes, no less than in his triumphs. You have so often read the human heart well that I can readily forgive your reading mine ill, and greatly wronging me by the supposition that any sentiment towards you but honour and respect has ever found a place in it. You write as few lines which, dying, you would wish to blot, as most men. But if you ever know me better, as I hope you may (the fault shall not be mine if you do not), I know you will be glad to have received the assurance that some part of your letter has been written on the sand and that the wind has already blown over it. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Dr. Hodgson.[32]] REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _Friday, 4th June, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, I have rarely, if ever, seen a more remarkable effort of what I may call intellectual memory than the enclosed. It is evidence, I think, of very uncommon power. I have read it with the greatest interest and surprise, and I am truly obliged to you for giving me the opportunity. If you should see no objection to telling the young lady herself this much, pray do so, as it is sincere praise. Your criticism of Coombe's pamphlet is as justly felt as it is earnestly and strongly written. I undergo more astonishment and disgust in connection with that question of education almost every day of my life than is awakened in me by any other member of the whole magazine of social monsters that are walking about in these times. You were in my thoughts when your letter arrived this morning, for we have a half-formed idea of reviving our old amateur theatrical company for a special purpose, and even of bringing it bodily to Manchester and Liverpool, on which your opinion would be very valuable. If we should decide on Monday, when we meet, to pursue our idea in this warm weather, I will explain it to you in detail, and ask counsel of you in regard of a performance at Liverpool. Meantime it is mentioned to no one. Your interest in "Dombey" gives me unaffected pleasure. I hope you will find no reason to think worse of it as it proceeds. There is a great deal to do--one or two things among the rest that society will not be the worse, I hope, for thinking about a little. May I beg to be remembered to Mrs. Hodgson? You always remember me yourself, I hope, as one who has a hearty interest in all you do and in all you have so admirably done for the advancement of the best objects. Always believe me very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _June 12th, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, I write to you in reference to a scheme to which you may, perhaps, already have seen some allusion in the London _Athenæum_ of to-day. The party of amateurs connected with literature and art, who acted in London two years ago, have resolved to play again at one of the large theatres here for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, and to make a great appeal to all classes of society in behalf of a writer who should have received long ago, but has not yet, some enduring return from his country for all he has undergone and all the good he has done. It is believed that such a demonstration by literature on behalf of literature, and such a mark of sympathy by authors and artists, for one who has written so well, would be of more service, present and prospective, to Hunt than almost any other means of help that could be devised. And we know, from himself, that it would be most gratifying to his own feelings. The arrangements are, as yet, in an imperfect state; for the date of their being carried out depends on our being able to get one of the large theatres before the close of the present London season. In the event of our succeeding, we purpose acting in London, on Wednesday the 14th of July, and on Monday the 19th. On the first occasion we shall play "Every Man in His Humour," and a farce; on the second, "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and a farce. But we do not intend to stop here. Believing that Leigh Hunt has done more to instruct the young men of England, and to lend a helping hand to those who educate themselves, than any writer in England, we are resolved to come down, in a body, to Liverpool and Manchester, and to act one night at each place. And the object of my letter is, to ask you, as the representative of the great educational establishment of Liverpool, whether we can count on your active assistance; whether you will form a committee to advance our object; and whether, if we send you our circulars and addresses, you will endeavour to secure us a full theatre, and to enlist the general sympathy and interest in behalf of the cause we have at heart? I address, by this post, a letter, which is almost the counterpart of the present, to the honorary secretaries of the Manchester Athenæum. If we find in both towns such a response as we confidently expect, I would propose, on behalf of my friends, that the Liverpool and Manchester Institutions should decide for us, at which town we shall first appear, and which play we shall act in each place. I forbear entering into any more details, however, until I am favoured with your reply. Always believe me, my dear Sir, faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Alexander Ireland.] REGENT'S PARK, LONDON, _June 17th, 1847._ DEAR SIR,[33] In the hope that I may consider myself personally introduced to you by Dr. Hodgson, of Liverpool, I take the liberty of addressing you in this form. I hear from that friend of ours, that you are greatly interested in all that relates to Mr. Leigh Hunt, and that you will be happy to promote our design in reference to him. Allow me to assure you of the gratification with which I have received this intelligence, and of the importance we shall all attach to your valuable co-operation. I have received a letter from Mr. Langley, of the Athenæum, informing me that a committee is in course of formation, composed of directors of that institution (acting as private gentlemen) and others. May I hope to find that you are one of this body, and that I may soon hear of its proceedings, and be in communication with it? Allow me to thank you beforehand for your interest in the cause, and to look forward to the pleasure of doing so in person, when I come to Manchester. Dear Sir, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] ATHEN�UM CLUB, LONDON, _Saturday, June 26th, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, The news of Mr. Hunt's pension is quite true. We do not propose to act in London after this change in his affairs, but we do still distinctly propose to act in Manchester and Liverpool. I have set forth the plain state of the case in a letter to Mr. Robinson by this post (a counterpart of which I have addressed to Liverpool), and to which, in the midst of a most laborious correspondence on the subject, I beg to refer you. It will be a great satisfaction to us to believe that we shall still be successful in Manchester. There is great and urgent need why we should be so, I assure you. If you can help to bring the matter speedily into a practical and plain shape, you will render Hunt the greatest service. I fear, in respect to your kind invitation, that neither Jerrold nor I will feel at liberty to accept it. There was a pathetic proposal among us that we should "keep together;" and, as president of the society, I am bound, I fear, to stand by the brotherhood with particular constancy. Nor do I think that we shall have more than one very short evening in Manchester. I write in great haste. The sooner I can know (at Broadstairs, in Kent) the Manchester and Liverpool nights, and what the managers say, the better (I hope) will be the entertainments. My dear Sir, very faithfully yours. P.S.--I enclose a copy of our London circular, issued before the granting of the pension. [Sidenote: The same.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _July 11th, 1847._ MY DEAR SIR, I am much indebted to you for the present of your notice of Hunt's books. I cannot praise it better or more appropriately than by saying it is in Hunt's own spirit, and most charmingly expressed. I had the most sincere and hearty pleasure in reading it.[34] Your announcement of "The Working Man's Life" had attracted my attention by reason of the title, which had a great interest for me.[35] I hardly know if there is something wanting to my fancy in a certain genuine simple air I had looked for in the first part. But there is great promise in it, and I shall be earnest to know how it proceeds. Now, to leave these pleasant matters, and resume my managerial character, which I shall be heartily glad (between ourselves) to lay down again, though I have none but pleasant correspondents, and the most easily governable company of actors on earth. I have written to Mr. Robinson by this post that I wish these words, from our original London circular, to stand at top of the bills, after "For the Benefit of Mr. Leigh Hunt": "It is proposed to devote a portion of the proceeds of this benefit to the assistance of another celebrated writer, whose literary career is at an end, and who has no provision for the decline of his life." I have also told him that there is no objection to its being known that this is Mr. Poole, the author of "Paul Pry," and "Little Pedlington," and many comic pieces of great merit, and whose farce of "Turning the Tables" we mean to finish with in Manchester. Beyond what he will get from these benefits, he has no resource in this wide world, _I know_. There are reasons which make it desirable to get this fact abroad, and if you see no objection to paragraphing it at your office (sending the paragraph round, if you should please, to the other Manchester papers), I should be much obliged to you. You may like to know, as a means of engendering a more complete individual interest in our actors, who they are. Jerrold and myself you have heard of; Mr. George Cruikshank and Mr. Leech (the best caricaturists of any time perhaps) need no introduction. Mr. Frank Stone (a Manchester man) and Mr. Egg are artists of high reputation. Mr. Forster is the critic of _The Examiner_, the author of "The Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and very distinguished as a writer in _The Edinburgh Review_. Mr. Lewes is also a man of great attainments in polite literature, and the author of a novel published not long since, called "Ranthorpe." Mr. Costello is a periodical writer, and a gentleman renowned as a tourist. Mr. Mark Lemon is a dramatic author, and the editor of _Punch_--a most excellent actor, as you will find. My brothers play small parts, for love, and have no greater note than the Treasury and the City confer on their disciples. Mr. Thompson is a private gentleman. You may know all this, but I thought it possible you might like to hold the key to our full company. Pray use it as you will. My dear Sir, Faithfully yours always. FOOTNOTES: [31] Written to Mr. Sheridan Knowles after some slight misunderstanding, the cause of which is unknown to the Editors. [32] Dr. Hodgson, then Principal of the Liverpool Institute, and Principal of the Chorlton High School, Manchester. [33] Mr. Alexander Ireland, the manager and one of the proprietors of _The Manchester Examiner_. [34] This refers to an essay on "The Genius and Writings of Leigh Hunt," contributed to _The Manchester Examiner_. [35] The "Autobiography of a Working Man," by "One who has whistled at the Plough" (Alex. Somerville), originally appeared in _The Manchester Examiner_, and afterwards was published as a volume, 1848. 1848. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _10th April, 1848, Monday Evening._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I confess to small faith in any American profits having international copyright for their aim. But I will carefully consider Blackwood's letter (when I get it) and will call upon you and tell you what occurs to me in reference to it, before I communicate with that northern light. I have been "going" to write to you for many a day past, to thank you for your kindness to the General Theatrical Fund people, and for your note to me; but I have waited until I should hear of your being stationary somewhere. What you said of the "Battle of Life" gave me great pleasure. I was thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so short a story. I did not see its full capacity until it was too late to think of another subject, and I have always felt that I might have done a great deal better if I had taken it for the groundwork of a more extended book. But for an insuperable aversion I have to trying back in such a case, I should certainly forge that bit of metal again, as you suggest--one of these days perhaps. I have not been special constable myself to-day--thinking there was rather an epidemic in that wise abroad. I walked over and looked at the preparations, without any baggage of staff, warrant, or affidavit. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Cowden Clarke.] [36]DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _14th April, 1848._ DEAR MRS. COWDEN CLARKE, I did not understand, when I had the pleasure of conversing with you the other evening, that you had really considered the subject, and desired to play. But I am very glad to understand it now; and I am sure there will be a universal sense among us of the grace and appropriateness of such a proceeding. Falstaff (who depends very much on Mrs. Quickly) may have in his modesty, some timidity about acting with an amateur actress. But I have no question, as you have studied the part, and long wished to play it, that you will put him completely at his ease on the first night of your rehearsal. Will you, towards that end, receive this as a solemn "call" to rehearsal of "The Merry Wives" at Miss Kelly's theatre, to-morrow (Saturday) _week_ at seven in the evening? And will you let me suggest another point for your consideration? On the night when "The Merry Wives" will _not_ be played, and when "Every Man in his Humour" _will_ be, Kenny's farce of "Love, Law, and Physic" will be acted. In that farce there is a very good character (one Mrs. Hilary, which I have seen Mrs. Orger, I think, act to admiration), that would have been played by Mrs. C. Jones, if she had acted Dame Quickly, as we at first intended. If you find yourself quite comfortable and at ease among us, in Mrs. Quickly, would you like to take this other part too? It is an excellent farce, and is safe, I hope, to be very well done. We do not play to purchase the house[37] (which may be positively considered as paid for), but towards endowing a perpetual curatorship of it, for some eminent literary veteran. And I think you will recognise in this even a higher and more gracious object than the securing, even, of the debt incurred for the house itself. Believe me, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Alexander Ireland.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _May 22nd, 1848._ MY DEAR SIR, You very likely know that my company of amateurs have lately been playing, with a great reputation, in London here. The object is, "The endowment of a perpetual curatorship of Shakespeare's house, to be always held by some one distinguished in literature, and more especially in dramatic literature," and we have already a pledge from the Shakespeare House Committee that Sheridan Knowles shall be recommended to the Government as the first curator. This pledge, which is in the form of a minute, we intend to advertise in our country bills. Now, on Monday, the 5th of June, we are going to play at Liverpool, where we are assured of a warm reception, and where an active committee for the issuing of tickets is already formed. Do you think the Manchester people would be equally glad to see us again, and that the house could be filled, as before, at our old prices? _If yes, would you and our other friends go, at once, to work in the cause?_ The only night on which we could play in Manchester would be Saturday, the 3rd of June. It is possible that the depression of the times may render a performance in Manchester unwise. In that case I would immediately abandon the idea. But what I want to know, _by return of post_ is, is it safe or unsafe? If the former, here is the bill as it stood in London, with the addition, on the back, of a paragraph I would insert in Manchester, of which immediate use can be made. If the latter, my reason for wishing to settle the point immediately is that we may make another use of that Saturday night. Assured of your generous feeling I make no apology for troubling you. A sum of money, got together by these means, will insure to literature (I will take good care of that) a proper expression of itself in the bestowal of an essentially literary appointment, not only now but henceforth. Much is to be done, time presses, and the least added the better. I have addressed a counterpart of this letter to Mr. Francis Robinson, to whom perhaps you will communicate the bill. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Cowden Clarke.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday Evening, July 22nd, 1848._ MY DEAR MRS. CLARKE, I have no energy whatever, I am very miserable. I loathe domestic hearths. I yearn to be a vagabond. Why can't I marry Mary?[38] Why have I seven children--not engaged at sixpence a-night apiece, and dismissable for ever, if they tumble down, not taken on for an indefinite time at a vast expense, and never,--no never, never,--wearing lighted candles round their heads.[39] I am deeply miserable. A real house like this is insupportable, after that canvas farm wherein I was so happy. What is a humdrum dinner at half-past five, with nobody (but John) to see me eat it, compared with _that_ soup, and the hundreds of pairs of eyes that watched its disappearance? Forgive this tear.[40] It is weak and foolish, I know. Pray let me divide the little excursional excesses of the journey among the gentlemen, as I have always done before, and pray believe that I have had the sincerest pleasure and gratification in your co-operation and society, valuable and interesting on all public accounts, and personally of no mean worth, nor held in slight regard. You had a sister once, when we were young and happy--I think they called her Emma. If she remember a bright being who once flitted like a vision before her, entreat her to bestow a thought upon the "Gas" of departed joys. I can write no more. Y. G.[41] THE (DARKENED) G. L. B.[42] P.S.--"I am completely _blasé_--literally used up. I am dying for excitement. Is it possible that nobody can suggest anything to make my heart beat violently, my hair stand on end--but no!" Where did I hear those words (so truly applicable to my forlorn condition) pronounced by some delightful creature? In a previous state of existence, I believe. Oh, Memory, Memory! Ever yours faithfully. Y--no C. G.--no D. C. D. I think it is--but I don't know--"there's nothing in it." FOOTNOTES: [36] This and following letters to Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke appeared in a volume entitled "Recollections of Writers." [37] The house in which Shakespeare was born, at Stratford-on-Avon. [38] A character in "Used Up." [39] As fairies in "Merry Wives." [40] A huge blot of smeared ink. [41] "Young Gas."} [42] "Gas-Light Boy."} Names he had playfully given himself. 1849. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _23rd February, 1849._ MY DEAR SIR EDWARD, I have not written sooner to thank you for "King Arthur" because I felt sure you would prefer my reading it before I should do so, and because I wished to have an opportunity of reading it with the sincerity and attention which such a composition demands. This I have done. I do not write to express to you the measure of my gratification and pleasure (for I should find that very difficult to be accomplished to my own satisfaction), but simply to say that I have read the poem, and dwelt upon it with the deepest interest, admiration, and delight; and that I feel proud of it as a very good instance of the genius of a great writer of my own time. I should feel it as a kind of treason to what has been awakened in me by the book, if I were to try to set off my thanks to you, or if I were tempted into being diffuse in its praise. I am too earnest on the subject to have any misgiving but that I shall convey something of my earnestness to you in the briefest and most unaffected flow of expression. Accept it for what a genuine word of homage is worth, and believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. C. Cowden Clarke.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _May 5th, 1849._ MY DEAR SIR, I am very sorry to say that my Orphan Working School vote is promised in behalf of an unfortunate young orphan, who, after being canvassed for, polled for, written for, quarrelled for, fought for, called for, and done all kind of things for, by ladies who wouldn't go away and wouldn't be satisfied with anything anybody said or did for them, was floored at the last election and comes up to the scratch next morning, for the next election, fresher than ever. I devoutly hope he may get in, and be lost sight of for evermore. Pray give my kindest regards to my quondam Quickly, and believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Joseph C. King.[43]] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Saturday, December 1st, 1849._ MY DEAR SIR, I hasten to let you know what took place at Eton to-day. I found that I _did_ stand in some sort committed to Mr. Evans, though not so much so but that I could with perfect ease have declined to place Charley in his house if I had desired to do so. I must say, however, that after seeing Mr. Cookesley (a most excellent man in his way) and seeing Mr. Evans, and Mr. Evans's house, I think I should, under any circumstances, have given the latter the preference as to the domestic part of Charley's life. I would certainly prefer to try it. I therefore thought it best to propose to have Mr. Cookesley for his tutor, and to place him as a boarder with Mr. Evans. Both gentlemen seemed satisfied with this arrangement, and Dr. Hawtrey expressed his approval of it also. Mr. Cookesley, wishing to know what Charley could do, asked me if I would object to leaving him there for half-an-hour or so. As Charley appeared not at all afraid of this proposal, I left him then and there. On my return, Mr. Cookesley said, in high and unqualified terms, that he had been thoroughly well grounded and well taught--that he had examined him in Virgil and Herodotus, and that he not only knew what he was about perfectly well, but showed an intelligence in reference to those authors which did his tutor great credit. He really appeared most interested and pleased, and filled me with a grateful feeling towards you, to whom Charley owes so much. He said there were certain verses in imitation of Horace (I really forget what sort of verses) to which Charley was unaccustomed, and which were a little matter enough in themselves, but were made a great point of at Eton, and could be got up well in a month "_from an Old Etonian_." For this purpose he would desire Charley to be sent every day to a certain Mr. Hardisty, in Store Street, Bedford Square, to whom he had already (in my absence) prepared a note. Between ourselves, I must not hesitate to tell you plainly that this appeared to me to be a conventional way of bestowing a little patronage. But, of course, I had nothing for it but to say it should be done; upon which, Mr. Cookesley added that he was then certain that Charley, on coming after the Christmas holidays, would be placed at once in "the remove," which seemed to surprise Mr. Evans when I afterwards told him of it as a high station. I will take him to this gentleman on Monday, and arrange for his going there every day; but, if you will not object, I should still like him to remain with you, and to have the advantage of preparing these annoying verses under your eye until the holidays. That Mr. Cookesley may have his own way thoroughly, I will send Charley to Mr. Hardisty daily until the school at Eton recommences. Let me impress upon you in the strongest manner, not only that I was inexpressibly delighted myself by the readiness with which Charley went through this ordeal with a stranger, but that I also saw you would have been well pleased and much gratified if you could have seen Mr. Cookesley afterwards. He had evidently not expected such a result, and took it as not at all an ordinary one. My dear Sir, yours faithfully and obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. Alexander Ireland.] [Private.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, LONDON, _24th December, 1849._ MY DEAR SIR, You will not be offended by my saying that (in common with many other men) I think "our London correspondent" one of the greatest nuisances of this kind, inasmuch as our London correspondent, seldom knowing anything, feels bound to know everything, and becomes in consequence a very reckless gentleman in respect of the truthfulness of his intelligence. In your paper, sent to me this morning, I see the correspondent mentions one ----, and records how I was wont to feast in the house of the said ----. As I never was in the man's house in my life, or within five miles of it that I know of, I beg you will do me the favour to contradict this. You will be the less surprised by my begging you to set this right, when I tell you that, hearing of his book, and knowing his history, I wrote to New York denouncing him as "a forger and a thief;" that he thereupon put the gentleman who published my letter into prison, and that having but one day before the sailing of the last steamer to collect the proofs printed in the accompanying sheet (which are but a small part of the villain's life), I got them together in short time, and sent them out to justify the character I gave him. It is not agreeable to me to be supposed to have sat at this amiable person's feasts. Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTE: [43] Mr. Joseph Charles King, the friend of many artists and literary men, conducted a private school, at which the sons of Mr. Macready and of Charles Dickens were being educated at this time. 1850. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] BROADSTAIRS, KENT, _Tuesday, 3rd September, 1850._ MY DEAR SIR EDWARD, I have had the long-contemplated talk with Forster about the play, and write to assure you that I shall be delighted to come down to Knebworth and do Bobadil, or anything else, provided it would suit your convenience to hold the great dramatic festival in the last week of October. The concluding number of "Copperfield" will prevent me from leaving here until Saturday, the 26th of that month. If I were at my own disposal, I hope I need not say I should be at yours. Forster will tell you with what men we must do the play, and what laurels we would propose to leave for the gathering of new aspirants; of whom I hope you have a reasonable stock in your part of the country. Do you know Mary Boyle--daughter of the old Admiral? because she is the very best actress I ever saw off the stage, and immeasurably better than a great many I have seen on it. I have acted with her in a country house in Northamptonshire, and am going to do so again next November. If you know her, I think she would be more than pleased to play, and by giving her something good in a farce we could get her to do Mrs. Kitely. In that case my little sister-in-law would "go on" for the second lady, and you could do without actresses, besides giving the thing a particular grace and interest. If we could get Mary Boyle, we would do "Used Up," which is a delightful piece, as the farce. But maybe you know nothing about the said Mary, and in that case I should like to know what you would think of doing. You gratify me more than I can tell you by what you say about "Copperfield," the more so as I hope myself that some heretofore-deficient qualities are there. You are not likely to misunderstand me when I say that I like it very much, and am deeply interested in it, and that I have kept and am keeping my mind very steadily upon it. Believe me always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Sunday Night, November 3rd, 1850._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I should have waited at home to-day on the chance of your calling, but that I went over to look after Lemon; and I went for this reason: the surgeon opines that there is no possibility of Mrs. Dickens being able to play, although she is going on "as well as possible," which I sincerely believe. Now, _when_ the accident happened, Mrs. Lemon told my little sister-in-law that she would gladly undertake the part if it should become necessary. Going after her to-day, I found that she and Lemon had gone out of town, but will be back to-night. I have written to her, earnestly urging her to the redemption of her offer. I have no doubt of being able to see her well up in the characters; and I hope you approve of this remedy. If she once screws her courage to the sticking place, I have no fear of her whatever. This is what I would say to you. If I don't see you here, I will write to you at Forster's, reporting progress. Don't be discouraged, for I am full of confidence, and resolve to do the utmost that is in me--and I well know they all will--to make the nights at Knebworth _triumphant_. Once in a thing like this--once in everything, to my thinking--it must be carried out like a mighty enterprise, heart and soul. Pray regard me as wholly at the disposal of the theatricals, until they shall be gloriously achieved. My unfortunate other half (lying in bed) is very anxious that I should let you know that she means to break her heart if she should be prevented from coming as one of the audience, and that she has been devising means all day of being brought down in the brougham with her foot upon a T. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Wednesday Evening, November 13th, 1850._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, On the principle of postponing nothing connected with the great scheme, I have been to Ollivier's, where I found our friend the choremusicon in a very shattered state--his mouth wide open--the greater part of his teeth out--his bowels disclosed to the public eye--and his whole system frightfully disordered. In this condition he is speechless. I cannot, therefore, report touching his eloquence, but I find he is a piano as well as a choremusicon--that he requires to pass through no intermediate stage between choremusicon and piano, and therefore that he can easily and certainly accompany songs. Now, will you have it? I am inclined to believe that on the whole, it is the best thing. I have not heard of anything else having happened to anybody. If I should not find you gone to Australia or elsewhere, and should not have occasion to advertise in the third column of _The Times_, I shall hope not to add to your misfortunes--I dare not say to afford you consolation--by shaking hands with you to-morrow night, and afterwards keeping every man connected with the theatrical department to his duty. Ever faithfully yours. 1851. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Sunday Night, January 5th, 1851._ MY DEAR BULWER, I am so sorry to have missed you! I had gone down to Forster, comedy in hand. I think it _most admirable_.[44] Full of character, strong in interest, rich in capital situations, and _certain to go nobly_. You know how highly I thought of "Money," but I sincerely think these three acts finer. I did not think of the slight suggestions you make, but I said, _en passant_, that perhaps the drunken scene might do better on the stage a little concentrated. I don't believe it would require even that, with the leading-up which you propose. I cannot say too much of the comedy to express what I think and feel concerning it; and I look at it, too, remember, with the yellow eye of an actor! I should have taken to it (need I say so!) _con amore_ in any case, but I should have been jealous of your reputation, exactly as I appreciate your generosity. If I had a misgiving of ten lines I should have scrupulously mentioned it. Stone will take the Duke capitally; and I will answer for his being got into doing it _very well_. Looking down the perspective of a few winter evenings here, I am confident about him. Forster will be thoroughly sound and real. Lemon is so surprisingly sensible and trustworthy on the stage, that I don't think any actor could touch his part as he will; and I hope you will have opportunities of testing the accuracy of this prediction. Egg ought to do the Author to absolute perfection. As to Jerrold--there he stands in the play! I would propose Leech (well made up) for Easy. He is a good name, and I see nothing else for him. This brings me to my own part. If we had anyone, or could get anyone, for Wilmot, I could do (I think) something so near your meaning in Sir Gilbert, that I let him go with a pang. Assumption has charms for me--I hardly know for how many wild reasons--so delightful, that I feel a loss of, oh! I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being someone in voice, etc., not at all like myself. But--I speak quite freely, knowing you will not mistake me--I know from experience that we could find nobody to hold the play together in Wilmot if I didn't do it. I think I could touch the gallant, generous, careless pretence, with the real man at the bottom of it, so as to take the audience with him from the first scene. I am quite sure I understand your meaning; and I am absolutely certain that as Jerrold, Forster, and Stone came in, I could, as a mere little bit of mechanics, present them better by doing that part, and paying as much attention to their points as my own, than another amateur actor could. Therefore I throw up my cap for Wilmot, and hereby devote myself to him, heart and head! I ought to tell you that in a play we once rehearsed and never played (but rehearsed several times, and very carefully), I saw Lemon do a piece of reality with a rugged pathos in it, which I felt, as I stood on the stage with him to be extraordinarily good. In the serious part of Sir Gilbert he will surprise you. And he has an intuitive discrimination in such things which will just keep the suspicious part from being too droll at the outset--which will just show a glimpse of something in the depths of it. The moment I come back to town (within a fortnight, please God!) I will ascertain from Forster where you are. Then I will propose to you that we call our company together, agree upon one general plan of action, and that you and I immediately begin to see and book our Vice-Presidents, etc. Further, I think we ought to see about the Queen. I would suggest our playing first about three weeks before the opening of the Exhibition, in order that it may be the town talk before the country people and foreigners come. Macready thinks with me that a very large sum of money may be got in London. I propose (for cheapness and many other considerations) to make a theatre expressly for the purpose, which we can put up and take down--say in the Hanover Square Rooms--and move into the country. As Watson wanted something of a theatre made for his forthcoming Little Go, I have made it a sort of model of what I mean, and shall be able to test its working powers before I see you. Many things that, for portability, were to be avoided in Mr. Hewitt's theatre, I have replaced with less expensive and weighty contrivances. Now, my dear Bulwer, I have come to the small hours, and am writing alone here, as if _I_ were writing something to do what your comedy will. At such a time the temptation is strong upon me to say a great deal more, but I will only say this--in mercy to you--that I do devoutly believe that this plan carried, will entirely change the status of the literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position, which no Government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have implicit confidence in the scheme--so splendidly begun--if we carry it out with a steadfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come, and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring benefactor. Oh! what a procession of New Years might walk out of all this, after we are very dusty! Ever yours faithfully. P.S.--I have forgotten something. I suggest this title: "Knowing the World; or, Not So Bad As We Seem." [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Night, March 4th, 1851._ MY DEAR BULWER, I know you will be glad to hear what I have to tell you. I wrote to the Duke of Devonshire this morning, enclosing him the rough proof of the scheme, and plainly telling him what we wanted, _i.e._, to play for the first time at his house, to the Queen and Court. Within a couple of hours he wrote me as follows: "DEAR SIR, "I have read with very great interest the prospectus of the new endowment which you have confided to my perusal. "Your manner of doing so is a proof that I am honoured by your goodwill and approbation. "I'm truly happy to offer you my earnest and sincere co-operation. My services, my house, and my subscription will be at your orders. And I beg you to let me see you before long, not merely to converse upon this subject, but because I have long had the greatest wish to improve our acquaintance, which has, as yet, been only one of crowded rooms." This is quite princely, I think, and will push us along as brilliantly as heart could desire. Don't you think so too? Yesterday Lemon and I saw the Secretary of the National Provident Institution (the best Office for the purpose, I am inclined to think) and stated all our requirements. We appointed to meet the chairman and directors next Tuesday; so on the day of our reading and dining I hope we shall have that matter in good time. The theatre is also under consultation; and directly after the reading we shall go briskly to work in all departments. I hear nothing but praises of your Macready speech--of its eloquence, delicacy, and perfect taste, all of which it is good to hear, though I know it all beforehand as well as most men can tell it me. Ever cordially. [Sidenote: The same.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Tuesday Morning, 25th March, 1851._ MY DEAR BULWER, Coming home at midnight last night after our first rehearsal, I find your letter. I write to entreat you, if you make any change in the first three acts, to let it be only of the slightest kind. Because we are now fairly under way, everybody is already drilled into his place, and in two or three rehearsals those acts will be in a tolerably presentable state. It is of vital importance that we should get the last two acts _soon_. The Queen and Prince are coming--Phipps wrote me yesterday the most earnest letter possible--the time is fearfully short, and we _must_ have the comedy in such a state as that it will go like a machine. Whatever you do, for heaven's sake don't be persuaded to endanger that! Even at the risk of your falling into the pit with despair at beholding anything of the comedy in its present state, if you can by any possibility come down to Covent Garden Theatre to-night, do. I hope you will see in Lemon the germ of a very fine presentation of Sir Geoffrey. I think Topham, too, will do Easy admirably. We really did wonders last night in the way of arrangement. I see the ground-plan of the first three acts distinctly. The dressing and furnishing and so forth, will be a perfect picture, and I will answer for the men in three weeks' time. In great haste, my dear Bulwer, Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Cowden Clarke.] GREAT MALVERN, _29th March, 1851._ MY DEAR MRS. COWDEN CLARKE, Ah, those were days indeed, when we were so fatigued at dinner that we couldn't speak, and so revived at supper that we couldn't go to bed; when wild in inns the noble savage ran; and all the world was a stage, gas-lighted in a double sense--by the Young Gas and the old one! When Emmeline Montague (now Compton, and the mother of two children) came to rehearse in our new comedy[45] the other night, I nearly fainted. The gush of recollection was so overpowering that I couldn't bear it. I use the portfolio[46] for managerial papers still. That's something. But all this does not thank you for your book.[47] I have not got it yet (being here with Mrs. Dickens, who has been very unwell), but I shall be in town early in the week, and shall bring it down to read quietly on these hills, where the wind blows as freshly as if there were no Popes and no Cardinals whatsoever--nothing the matter anywhere. I thank you a thousand times, beforehand, for the pleasure you are going to give me. I am full of faith. Your sister Emma, she is doing work of some sort on the P.S. side of the boxes, in some dark theatre, _I know_, but where, I wonder? W.[48] has not proposed to her yet, has he? I understood he was going to offer his hand and heart, and lay his leg[49] at her feet. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Mitton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _19th April, 1851._ MY DEAR MITTON, I have been in trouble, or I should have written to you sooner. My wife has been, and is, far from well. My poor father's death caused me much distress. I came to London last Monday to preside at a public dinner--played with little Dora, my youngest child, before I went--and was told when I left the chair that she had died in a moment. I am quite happy again, but I have undergone a good deal. I am not going back to Malvern, but have let this house until September, and taken the "Fort," at Broadstairs. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, _Monday, 28th April, 1851._ MY DEAR BULWER, I see you are so anxious, that I shall endeavour to send you this letter by a special messenger. I think I can relieve your mind completely. The Duke has read the play. He asked for it a week ago, and had it. He has been at Brighton since. He called here before eleven on Saturday morning, but I was out on the play business, so I went to him at Devonshire House yesterday. He almost knows the play by heart. He is supremely delighted with it, and critically understands it. In proof of the latter part of this sentence I may mention that he had made two or three memoranda of trivial doubtful points, _every one of which had attracted our attention in rehearsal_, as I found when he showed them to me. He thoroughly understands and appreciates the comedy of the Duke--threw himself back in his chair and laughed, as I say of Walpole, "till I thought he'd have choked," about his first Duchess, who was a Percy. He suggested that he shouldn't say: "You know how to speak to the heart of a Noble," because it was not likely that he would call himself a Noble. He thought we might close up the Porter and Softhead a little more (already done) and was so charmed and delighted to recall the comedy that he was more pleased than any boy you ever saw when I repeated two or three of the speeches in my part for him. He is coming to the rehearsal to-day (we rehearse now at Devonshire House, three days a-week, all day long), and, since he read the play, has conceived a most magnificent and noble improvement in the Devonshire House plan, by which, I daresay, we shall get another thousand or fifteen hundred pounds. There is not a grain of distrust or doubt in him. I am perfectly certain that he would confide to me, and does confide to me, his whole mind on the subject. More than this, the Duke comes out the best man in the play. I am happy to report to you that Stone does the honourable manly side of that pride inexpressibly better than I should have supposed possible in him. The scene where he makes that reparation to the slandered woman is _certain_ to be an effect. He is _not_ a jest upon the order of Dukes, but a great tribute to them. I have sat looking at the play (as you may suppose) pretty often, and carefully weighing every syllable of it. I see, in the Duke, the most estimable character in the piece. I am as sure that I represent the audience in this as I am that I hear the words when they are spoken before me. The first time that scene with Hardman was seriously done, it made an effect on the company that quite surprised and delighted me; and whenever and wherever it is done (but most of all at Devonshire House) the result will be the same. Everyone is greatly improved. I wrote an earnest note to Forster a few days ago on the subject of his being too loud and violent. He has since subdued himself with the most admirable pains, and improved the part a thousand per cent. All the points are gradually being worked and smoothed out with the utmost neatness all through the play. They are all most heartily anxious and earnest, and, upon the least hitch, will do the same thing twenty times over. The scenery, furniture, etc., are rapidly advancing towards completion, and will be beautiful. The dresses are a perfect blaze of colour, and there is not a pocket-flap or a scrap of lace that has not been made according to Egg's drawings to the quarter of an inch. Every wig has been made from an old print or picture. From the Duke's snuff-box to Will's Coffee-house, you will find everything in perfect truth and keeping. I have resolved that whenever we come to a weak place in the acting, it must, somehow or other, be made a strong one. The places that I used to be most afraid of are among the best points now. Will you come to the dress rehearsal on the Tuesday evening before the Queen's night? There will be no one present but the Duke. I write in the greatest haste, for the rehearsal time is close at hand, and I have the master carpenter and gasman to see before we begin. Miss Coutts is one of the most sensible of women, and if I had not seen the Duke yesterday, I would have shown her the play directly. But there can't be any room for anxiety on the head that has troubled you so much. You may clear it from your mind as completely as Gunpowder Plot. In great haste, ever cordially. [Sidenote: The Hon. Miss Eden.[50]] BROADSTAIRS, _Sunday, 28th September, 1851._ MY DEAR MISS EDEN, Many thanks for the grapes; which must have come from the identical vine a man ought to sit under. They were a prodigy of excellence. I have been concerned to hear of your indisposition, but thought the best thing I could do, was to make no formal calls when you were really ill. I have been suffering myself from another kind of malady--a severe, spasmodic, house-buying-and-repairing attack--which has left me extremely weak and all but exhausted. The seat of the disorder has been the pocket. I had the kindest of notes from the kindest of men this morning, and am going to see him on Wednesday. Of course I mean the Duke of Devonshire. Can I take anything to Chatsworth for you? Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone.] EXTRACT FROM LETTER TO MR. STONE. _8th September, 1851._ You never saw such a sight as the sands between this and Margate presented yesterday. This day fortnight a steamer laden with cattle going from Rotterdam to the London market, was wrecked on the Goodwin--on which occasion, by-the-bye, the coming in at night of our Salvage Luggers laden with dead cattle, which where hoisted up upon the pier where they lay in heaps, was a most picturesque and striking sight. The sea since Wednesday has been very rough, blowing in straight upon the land. Yesterday, the shore was strewn with hundreds of oxen, sheep, and pigs (and with bushels upon bushels of apples), in every state and stage of decay--burst open, rent asunder, lying with their stiff hoofs in the air, or with their great ribs yawning like the wrecks of ships--tumbled and beaten out of shape, and yet with a horrible sort of humanity about them. Hovering among these carcases was every kind of water-side plunderer, pulling the horns out, getting the hides off, chopping the hoofs with poleaxes, etc. etc., attended by no end of donkey carts, and spectral horses with scraggy necks, galloping wildly up and down as if there were something maddening in the stench. I never beheld such a demoniacal business! Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] BROADSTAIRS, _Monday, 8th September, 1851._ MY DEAR HENRY, Your letter, received this morning, has considerably allayed the anguish of my soul. Our letters crossed, of course, as letters under such circumstances always do. I am perpetually wandering (in fancy) up and down the house[51] and tumbling over the workmen; when I feel that they are gone to dinner I become low, when I look forward to their total abstinence on Sunday, I am wretched. The gravy at dinner has a taste of glue in it. I smell paint in the sea. Phantom lime attends me all the day long. I dream that I am a carpenter and can't partition off the hall. I frequently dance (with a distinguished company) in the drawing-room, and fall into the kitchen for want of a pillar. A great to-do here. A steamer lost on the Goodwins yesterday, and our men bringing in no end of dead cattle and sheep. I stood a supper for them last night, to the unbounded gratification of Broadstairs. They came in from the wreck very wet and tired, and very much disconcerted by the nature of their prize--which, I suppose, after all, will have to be recommitted to the sea, when the hides and tallow are secured. One lean-faced boatman murmured, when they were all ruminative over the bodies as they lay on the pier: "Couldn't sassages be made on it?" but retired in confusion shortly afterwards, overwhelmed by the execrations of the bystanders. Ever affectionately. P.S.--Sometimes I think ----'s bill will be too long to be added up until Babbage's calculating machine shall be improved and finished. Sometimes that there is not paper enough ready made, to carry it over and bring it forward upon. I dream, also, of the workmen every night. They make faces at me, and won't do anything. [Sidenote: Mr. Austen Henry Layard.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, _16th December, 1851._ MY DEAR LAYARD,[52] I want to renew your recollection of "the last time we parted"--not at Wapping Old Stairs, but at Miss Coutts's--when we vowed to be more intimate after all nations should have departed from Hyde Park, and I should be able to emerge from my cave on the sea-shore. Can you, and will you, be in town on Wednesday, the last day of the present old year? If yes, will you dine with us at a quarter after six, and see the New Year in with such extemporaneous follies of an exploded sort (in genteel society) as may occur to us? Both Mrs. Dickens and I would be really delighted if this should find you free to give us the pleasure of your society. Believe me always, very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [44] "Not So Bad As We Seem; or, Many Sides to a Character." [45] "Not So Bad As We Seem." [46] An embroidered blotting-book given by Mrs. Cowden Clarke. [47] One of the series in "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines," dedicated to Charles Dickens. [48] Wilmot, the clever veteran prompter, who was engaged to accompany the acting-tours. [49] A wooden one. [50] Miss Eden had a cottage at Broadstairs, and was residing there at this time. [51] Tavistock House. [52] Now Sir Austen Henry Layard. 1852. [Sidenote: Mr. James Bower Harrison.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, _5th January, 1852._ DEAR SIR, I have just received the work[53] you have had the kindness to send me, and beg to thank you for it, and for your obliging note, cordially. It is a very curious little volume, deeply interesting, and written (if I may be allowed to say so) with as much power of knowledge and plainness of purpose as modesty. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday Night, 15th February, 1852._ MY DEAR BULWER, I left Liverpool at four o'clock this morning, and am so blinded by excitement, gas, and waving hats and handkerchiefs, that I can hardly see to write, but I cannot go to bed without telling you what a triumph we have had. Allowing for the necessarily heavy expenses of all kinds, I believe we can hardly fund less than a Thousand Pounds out of this trip alone. And, more than that, the extraordinary interest taken in the idea of the Guild by "this grand people of England" down in these vast hives, and the enthusiastic welcome they give it, assure me that we may do what we will if we will only be true and faithful to our design. There is a social recognition of it which I cannot give you the least idea of. I sincerely believe that we have the ball at our feet, and may throw it up to the very Heaven of Heavens. And I don't speak for myself alone, but for all our people, and not least of all for Forster, who has been absolutely stunned by the tremendous earnestness of these great places. To tell you (especially after your affectionate letter) what I would have given to have had you there would be idle. But I can most seriously say that all the sights of the earth turned pale in my eyes, before the sight of three thousand people with one heart among them, and no capacity in them, in spite of all their efforts, of sufficiently testifying to you how they believe you to be right, and feel that they cannot do enough to cheer you on. They understood the play (_far better acted by this time than ever you have seen it_) as well as you do. They allowed nothing to escape them. They rose up, when it was over, with a perfect fury of delight, and the Manchester people sent a requisition after us to Liverpool to say that if we will go back there in May, when we act at Birmingham (as of course we shall) they will joyfully undertake to fill the Free Trade Hall again. Among the Tories of Liverpool the reception was equally enthusiastic. We played, two nights running, to a hall crowded to the roof--more like the opera at Genoa or Milan than anything else I can compare it to. We dined at the Town Hall magnificently, and it made no difference in the response. I said what we were quietly determined to do (when the Guild was given as the toast of the night), and really they were so noble and generous in their encouragement that I should have been more ashamed of myself than I hope I ever shall be, if I could have felt conscious of having ever for a moment faltered in the work. I will answer for Birmingham--for any great working town to which we chose to go. We have won a position for the idea which years upon years of labour could not have given it. I believe its worldly fortunes have been advanced in this last week fifty years at least. I feebly express to you what Forster (who couldn't be at Liverpool, and has not those shouts ringing in his ears) has felt from the moment he set foot in Manchester. Believe me we may carry a perfect fiery cross through the North of England, and over the Border, in this cause, if need be--not only to the enrichment of the cause, but to the lasting enlistment of the people's sympathy. I have been so happy in all this that I could have cried on the shortest notice any time since Tuesday. And I do believe that our whole body would have gone to the North Pole with me if I had shown them good reason for it. I hope I am not so tired but that you may be able to read this. I have been at it almost incessantly, day and night for a week, and I am afraid my handwriting suffers. But in all other respects I am only a giant refreshed. We meet next Saturday you recollect? Until then, and ever afterwards, Believe me, heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Cowden Clarke.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _3rd March, 1852._ MY DEAR MRS. CLARKE, It is almost an impertinence to tell you how delightful your flowers were to me; for you who thought of that beautiful and delicately-timed token of sympathy and remembrance, must know it very well already. I do assure you that I have hardly ever received anything with so much pleasure in all my life. They are not faded yet--are on my table here--but never can fade out of my remembrance. I should be less than a Young Gas, and more than an old Manager--that commemorative portfolio is here too--if I could relieve my heart of half that it could say to you. All my house are my witnesses that you have quite filled it, and this note is my witness that I can _not_ empty it. Ever faithfully and gratefully your friend. [Sidenote: Mr. James Bower Harrison.] LONDON, TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _26th March, 1852._ DEAR SIR, I beg to thank you for your interesting pamphlet, and to add that I shall be very happy to accept an article from you on the subject[54] for "Household Words." I should already have suggested to you that I should have great pleasure in receiving contributions from one so well and peculiarly qualified to treat of many interesting subjects, but that I felt a delicacy in encroaching on your other occupations. Will you excuse my remarking that to make an article on this particular subject useful, it is essential to address the employed as well as the employers? In the case of the Sheffield grinders the difficulty was, for many years, not with the masters, but the men. Painters who use white lead are with the greatest difficulty persuaded to be particular in washing their hands, and I daresay that I need not remind you that one could not generally induce domestic servants to attend to the commonest sanitary principles in their work without absolutely forcing them to experience their comfort and convenience. Dear Sir, very faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [53] The "Medical Aspects of Death, and the Medical Aspects of the Human Mind." [54] The injurious effects of the manufacture of lucifer matches on the employed. 1853. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 1, JUNCTION PARADE, BRIGHTON, _Thursday night, 4th March, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, I am sorry, but Brutus sacrifices unborn children of his own as well as those of other people. "The Sorrows of Childhood," long in type, and long a mere mysterious name, must come out. The paper really is, like the celebrated ambassadorial appointment, "too bad." "A Doctor of Morals," _impossible of insertion as it stands_. A mere puff, with all the difficult facts of the question blinked, and many statements utterly at variance with what I am known to have written. It is exactly because the great bulk of offences in a great number of places are committed by professed thieves, that it will not do to have pet prisoning advocated without grave remonstrance and great care. That class of prisoner is not to be reformed. We must begin at the beginning and prevent, by stringent correction and supervision of wicked parents, that class of prisoner from being regularly supplied as if he were a human necessity. Do they teach trades in workhouses and try to fit _their_ people (the worst part of them) for society? Come with me to Tothill Fields Bridewell, and I will show you what a workhouse girl is. Or look to my "Walk in a Workhouse" (in "H. W.") and to the glance at the youths I saw in one place positively kept like wolves. Mr. ---- thinks prisons could be made nearly self-supporting. Have you any idea of the difficulty that is found in disposing of Prison-work, or does he think that the Treadmills didn't grind the air because the State or the Magistracy objected to the competition of prison-labour with free-labour, but because the work _could not be got_? I never can have any kind of prison-discipline disquisition in "H. W." that does not start with the first great principle I have laid down, and that does not protest against Prisons being considered _per se_. Whatever chance is given to a man in a prison must be given to a man in a refuge for distress. The article in itself is very good, but it must have these points in it, otherwise I am not only compromising opinions I am known to hold, but the journal itself is blowing hot and cold, and playing fast and loose in a ridiculous way. "Starting a Paper in India" is very droll to us. But it is full of references that the public don't understand, and don't in the least care for. Bourgeois, brevier, minion, and nonpareil, long primer, turn-ups, dunning advertisements, and reprints, back forme, imposing-stone, and locking-up, are all quite out of their way, and a sort of slang that they have no interest in. Let me see a revise when you have got it together, and if you can strengthen it--do. I mention all the objections that occur to me as I go on, not because you can obviate them (except in the case of the prison-paper), but because if I make a point of doing so always you will feel and judge the more readily both for yourself and me too when I take an Italian flight. YOU: How are the eyes getting on? ME: I have been at work all day. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: The same.] BOULOGNE, _Sunday, 7th August, 1853._ MY DEAR WILLS, Can't possibly write autographs until I have written "Bleak House." My work has been very hard since I have been here; and when I throw down my pen of a day, I throw down myself, and can take up neither article. The "C. P." is very well done, but I cannot make up my mind to lend my blow to the great Forge-bellows of puffery at work. I so heartily desire to have nothing to do with it, that I wish you would cancel this article altogether, and substitute something else. As to the guide-books, I think they are a sufficiently flatulent botheration in themselves, without being discussed. A lurking desire is always upon me to put Mr. ----'s speech on Accidents to the public, as chairman of the Brighton Railway, against his pretensions as a chairman of public instructors and guardians. And I don't know but that I may come to it at some odd time. This strengthens me in my wish to avoid the bellows. How two men can have gone, one after the other, to the Camp, and have written nothing about it, passes my comprehension. I have been in great doubt about the end of ----. I wish you would suggest to him from me, when you see him, how wrong it is. Surely he cannot be insensible to the fact that military preparations in England at this time mean Defence. Woman, says ----, means Home, love, children, Mother. Does he not find any protection for these things in a wise and moderate means of Defence; and is not the union between these things and those means one of the most natural, significant, and plain in the world? I wish you would send friend Barnard here a set of "Household Words," in a paid parcel (on the other side is an inscription to be neatly pasted into vol. i. before sending), with a post-letter beforehand from yourself, saying that I had begged you to forward the books, feeling so much obliged to him for his uniform attention and politeness. Also that you will not fail to continue his set, as successive volumes appear. ASPECTS OF NATURE. We have had a tremendous sea here. Steam-packet in the harbour frantic, and dashing her brains out against the stone walls. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] BOULOGNE, _September 30th, 1853._ MY DEAR WHITE, As you wickedly failed in your truth to the writer of books you adore, I write something that I hoped to have said, and meant to have said, in the confidence of the Pavilion among the trees. Will you write another story for the Christmas No.? It will be exactly (I mean the Xmas No.) on the same plan as the last. I shall be at the office from Monday to Thursday, and shall hope to receive a cheery "Yes," in reply. Loves from all to all, and my particular love to Mrs. White. Ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Charles Dickens.] HOTEL DE LONDRES, CHAMOUNIX, _Thursday Night, 20th October, 1853._ MY DEAREST KATE, We[55] came here last night after a very long journey over very bad roads, from Geneva, and leave here (for Montigny, by the Tête Noire) at 6 to-morrow morning. Next morning early we mean to try the Simplon. After breakfast to-day we ascended to the Mer de Glace--wonderfully different at this time of the year from when we saw it--a great portion of the ascent being covered with snow, and the climbing very difficult. Regardless of my mule, I walked up and walked down again, to the great admiration of the guides, who pronounced me "an Intrepid." The little house at the top being closed for the winter, and Edward having forgotten to carry any brandy, we had nothing to drink at the top--which was a considerable disappointment to the Inimitable, who was streaming with perspiration from head to foot. But we made a fire in the snow with some sticks, and after a not too comfortable rest came down again. It took a long time--from 10 to 3. The appearance of Chamounix at this time of year is very remarkable. The travellers are over for the season, the inns are generally shut up, all the people who can afford it are moving off to Geneva, the snow is low on the mountains, and the general desolation and grandeur extraordinarily fine. I wanted to pass by the Col de Balme, but the snow lies too deep upon it. You would have been quite delighted if you could have seen the warmth of our old Lausanne friends, and the heartiness with which they crowded down on a fearfully bad morning to see us off. We passed the night at the Ecu de Genève, in the rooms once our old rooms--at that time (the day before yesterday) occupied by the Queen of the French (ex- I mean) and Prince Joinville and his family. Tell Sydney that all the way here from Geneva, and up to the Sea of Ice this morning, I wore his knitting, which was very comfortable indeed. I mean to wear it on the long mule journey to Martigny to-morrow. We get on extremely well. Edward continues as before. He had never been here, and I took him up to the Mer de Glace this morning, and had a mule for him. I shall leave this open, as usual, to add a word or two on our arrival at Martigny. We have had an amusingly absurd incident this afternoon. When we came here, I saw added to the hotel--our old hotel, and I am now writing in the room where we once dined at the table d'hôte--some baths, cold and hot, down on the margin of the torrent below. This induced us to order three hot baths. Thereupon the keys of the bath-rooms were found with immense difficulty, women ran backwards and forwards across the bridge, men bore in great quantities of wood, a horrible furnace was lighted, and a smoke was raised which filled the whole valley. This began at half-past three, and we congratulated each other on the distinction we should probably acquire by being the cause of the conflagration of the whole village. We sat by the fire until half-past five (dinner-time), and still no baths. Then Edward came up to say that the water was as yet only "tippit," which we suppose to be tepid, but that by half-past eight it would be in a noble state. Ever since the smoke has poured forth in enormous volume, and the furnace has blazed, and the women have gone and come over the bridge, and piles of wood have been carried in; but we observe a general avoidance of us by the establishment which still looks like failure. We have had a capital dinner, the dessert whereof is now on the table. When we arrived, at nearly seven last night, all the linen in the house, newly washed, was piled in the sitting-room, all the curtains were taken down, and all the chairs piled bottom upwards. They cleared away as much as they could directly, and had even got the curtains up at breakfast this morning. I am looking forward to letters at Genoa, though I doubt if we shall get there (supposing all things right at the Simplon) before Monday night or Tuesday morning. I found there last night what F---- would call "Mr. Smith's" story of Mont Blanc, and took it to bed to read. It is extremely well and unaffectedly done. You would be interested in it. MARTIGNY, _Friday Afternoon, October 21st._ Safely arrived here after a most delightful day, without a cloud. I walked the whole way. The scenery most beautifully presented. We are in the hotel where our old St. Bernard party assembled. I should like to see you all very much indeed. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The same.] H�TEL DE LA VILLE, MILAN, _25th October, 1853._ MY DEAREST CATHERINE, The road from Chamounix here takes so much more time than I supposed (for I travelled it day and night, and my companions don't at all understand the idea of never going to bed) that we only reached Milan last night, though we had been travelling twelve and fifteen hours a day. We crossed the Simplon on Sunday, when there was not (as there is not now) a particle of cloud in the whole sky, and when the pass was as nobly grand and beautiful as it possibly can be. There was a good deal of snow upon the top, but not across the road, which had been cleared. We crossed the Austrian frontier yesterday, and, both there and at the gate of Milan, received all possible consideration and politeness. I have not seen Bairr yet. He has removed from the old hotel to a larger one at a few hours' distance. The head-waiter remembered me very well last night after I had talked to him a little while, and was greatly interested in hearing about all the family, and about poor Roche. The boy we used to have at Lausanne is now seventeen-and-a-half--very tall, he says. The elder girl, fifteen, very like her mother, but taller and more beautiful. He described poor Mrs. Bairr's death (I am speaking of the head-waiter before mentioned) in most vivacious Italian. It was all over in ten minutes, he said. She put her hands to her head one day, down in the courtyard, and cried out that she heard little bells ringing violently in her ears. They sent off for Bairr, who was close by. When she saw him, she stretched out her arms, said in English, "Adieu, my dear!" and fell dead. He has not married again, and he never will. She was a good woman (my friend went on), excellent woman, full of charity, loved the poor, but _un poco furiosa_--that was nothing! The new hotel is just like the old one, admirably kept, excellently furnished, and a model of comfort. I hope to be at Genoa on Thursday morning, and to find your letter there. We have agreed to drop Sicily, and to return home by way of Marseilles. Our projected time for reaching London is the 10th of December. As this house is full, I daresay we shall meet some one we know at the table d'hôte to-day. It is extraordinary that the only travellers we have encountered, since we left Paris, have been one horribly vapid Englishman and wife whom we dropped at Basle, one boring Englishman whom we found (and, thank God, left) at Geneva, and two English maiden ladies, whom we found sitting on a rock (with parasols) the day before yesterday, in the most magnificent part of the Gorge of Gondo, the most awful portion of the Simplon--there awaiting their travelling chariot, in which, with their money, their parasols, and a perfect shop of baskets, they were carefully _locked up_ by an English servant in sky blue and silver buttons. We have been in the most extraordinary vehicles--like swings, like boats, like Noah's arks, like barges and enormous bedsteads. After dark last night, a landlord, where we changed horses, discovered that the luggage would certainly be stolen from _questo porco d'uno carro_--this pig of a cart--his complimentary description of our carriage, unless cords were attached to each of the trunks, which cords were to hang down so that we might hold them in our hands all the way, and feel any tug that might be made at our treasures. You will imagine the absurdity of our jolting along some twenty miles in this way, exactly as if we were in three shower-baths and were afraid to pull the string. We are going to the Scala to-night, having got the old box belonging to the hotel, the old key of which is lying beside me on the table. There seem to be no singers of note here now, and it appears for the time to have fallen off considerably. I shall now bring this to a close, hoping that I may have more interesting jottings to send you about the old scenes and people, from Genoa, where we shall stay two days. You are now, I take it, at Macready's. I shall be greatly interested by your account of your visit there. We often talk of you all. Edward's Italian is (I fear) very weak. When we began to get really into the language, he reminded me of poor Roche in Germany. But he seems to have picked up a little this morning. He has been unfortunate with the unlucky Egg, leaving a pair of his shoes (his favourite shoes) behind in Paris, and his flannel dressing-gown yesterday morning at Domo d'Ossola. In all other respects he is just as he was. Egg and Collins have gone out to kill the lions here, and I take advantage of their absence to write to you, Georgie, and Miss Coutts. Wills will have told you, I daresay, that Cerjat accompanied us on a miserably wet morning, in a heavy rain, down the lake. By-the-bye, the wife of one of his cousins, born in France of German parents, living in the next house to Haldimand's, is one of the most charming, natural, open-faced, and delightful women I ever saw. Madame de ---- is set up as the great attraction of Lausanne; but this capital creature shuts her up altogether. We have called her (her--the real belle), ever since, the early closing movement. I am impatient for letters from home; confused ideas are upon me that you are going to White's, but I have no notion when. Take care of yourself, and God bless you. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: The same.] CROCE DI MALTA, GENOA, _Friday Night, October 29th, 1853._ MY DEAREST CATHERINE, As we arrived here later than I had expected (in consequence of the journey from Milan being most horribly slow) I received your welcome letter only this morning. I write this before going to bed, that I may be sure of not being taken by any engagement off the post time to-morrow. We came in last night between seven and eight. The railroad to Turin is finished and opened to within twenty miles of Genoa. Its effect upon the whole town, and especially upon that part of it lying down beyond the lighthouse and away by San Pietro d'Arena, is quite wonderful. I only knew the place by the lighthouse, so numerous were the new buildings, so wide the streets, so busy the people, and so thriving and busy the many signs of commerce. To-day I have seen ----, the ----, the ----, and the ----, the latter of whom live at Nervi, fourteen or fifteen miles off, towards Porto Fino. First, of the ----. They are just the same, except that Mrs. ----'s face is larger and fuller, and her hair rather gray. As I rang at their bell she came out walking, and stared at me. "What! you don't know me?" said I; upon which she recognised me very warmly, and then said in her old quiet way: "I expected to find a ruin. We heard you had been so ill; and I find you younger and better-looking than ever. But it's so strange to see you without a bright waistcoat. Why haven't you got a bright waistcoat on?" I apologised for my black one, and was sent upstairs, when ---- presently appeared in a hideous and demoniacal nightdress, having turned out of bed to greet his distinguished countryman. After a long talk, in the course of which I arranged to dine there on Sunday early, before starting by the steamer for Naples, and in which they told me every possible and impossible particular about their minutest affairs, and especially about ----'s marriage, I set off for ----, at ----. I had found letters from him here, and he had been here over and over again, and had driven out no end of times to the Gate to leave messages for me, and really is (in his strange uncouth way) crying glad to see me. I found him and his wife in a little comfortable country house, overlooking the sea, sitting in a small summer-house on wheels, exactly like a bathing machine. I found her rather pretty, extraordinarily cold and composed, a mere piece of furniture, _talking broken English_. Through eight months in the year they live in this country place. She never reads, never works, never talks, never gives an order or directs anything, has only a taste for going to the theatre (where she never speaks either) and buying clothes. They sit in the garden all day, dine at four, _smoke their cigars_, go in at eight, sit about till ten, and then go to bed. The greater part of this I had from ---- himself in a particularly unintelligible confidence in the garden, the only portion of which that I could clearly understand were the words "and one thing and another," repeated one hundred thousand times. He described himself as being perfectly happy, and seemed very fond of his wife. "But that," said ---- to me this morning, looking like the figure-head of a ship, with a nutmeg-grater for a face, "that he ought to be, and must be, and is bound to be--he couldn't help it." Then I went on to the ----'s, and found them living in a beautiful situation in a ruinous Albaro-like palace. Coming upon them unawares, I found ----, with a pointed beard, smoking a great German pipe, in a pair of slippers; the two little girls very pale and faint from the climate, in a singularly untidy state--one (heaven knows why!) without stockings, and both with their little short hair cropped in a manner never before beheld, and a little bright bow stuck on the top of it. ---- said she had invented this headgear as a picturesque thing, adding that perhaps it was--and perhaps it was not. She was greatly flushed and agitated, but looked very well, and seems to be greatly liked here. We had disturbed her at her painting in oils, and I rather received an impression that, what with that, and what with music, the household affairs went a little to the wall. ---- was teaching the two little girls the multiplication table in a disorderly old billiard-room with all manner of maps in it. Having obtained a gracious permission from the lady of the school, I am going to show my companions the Sala of the Peschiere this morning. It is raining intensely hard in the regular Genoa manner, so that I can hardly hope for Genoa's making as fine an impression as I could desire. Our boat for Naples is a large French mail boat, and we hope to get there on Tuesday or Wednesday. If the day after you receive this you write to the Poste Restante, Rome, it will be the safest course. Friday's letter write Poste Restante, Florence. You refer to a letter you suppose me to have received from Forster--to whom my love. No letter from him has come to hand. I will resume my report of this place in my next. In the meantime, I will not fail to drink dear Katey's health to-day. Edward has just come in with mention of an English boat on Tuesday morning, superior to French boat to-morrow, and faster. I shall inquire at ---- and take the best. When I next write I will give you our route in detail. I am pleased to hear of Mr. Robson's success in a serious part, as I hope he will now be a fine actor. I hope you will enjoy yourself at Macready's, though I fear it must be sometimes but a melancholy visit. Good-bye, my dear, and believe me ever most affectionately. _Sunday, 30th October._ We leave for Naples to-morrow morning by the Peninsular and Oriental Company's steamer the _Valletta_. I send a sketch of our movements that I have at last been able to make. Mrs. ---- quite came out yesterday. So did Mrs. ---- (in a different manner), by violently attacking Mrs. ---- for painting ill in oils when she might be playing well on the piano. It rained hard all yesterday, but is finer this morning. We went over the Peschiere in the wet afternoon. The garden is sorely neglected now, and the rooms are all full of boarding-school beds, and most of the fireplaces are closed up, but the old beauty and grandeur of the place were in it still. This will find you, I suppose, at Sherborne. My heartiest love to dear Macready, and to Miss Macready, and to all the house. I hope my godson has not forgotten me. I will think of Charley (from whom I have heard here) and soon write to him definitely. At present I think he had better join me at Boulogne. I shall not bring the little boys over, as, if we keep our time, it would be too long before Christmas Day. With love to Georgy, ever most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The same.] HOTEL DES �TRANGERS, NAPLES, _Friday Night, November 4th, 1853._ MY DEAREST CATHERINE, We arrived here at midday--two days after our intended time, under circumstances which I reserve for Georgina's letter, by way of variety--in what Forster used to call good health and sp--p--pirits. We have a charming apartment opposite the sea, a little lower down than the Victoria--in the direction of the San Carlo Theatre--and the windows are now wide open as on an English summer night. The first persons we found on board at Genoa, were Emerson Tennent, Lady Tennent, their son and daughter. They are all here too, in an apartment over ours, and we have all been constantly together in a very friendly way, ever since our meeting. We dine at the table d'hôte--made a league together on board--and have been mutually agreeable. They have no servant with them, and have profited by Edward. He goes on perfectly well, is always cheerful and ready, has been sleeping on board (upside down, I believe), in a corner, with his head in the wet and his heels against the side of the paddle-box--but has been perpetually gay and fresh. As soon as we got our luggage from the custom house, we packed complete changes in a bag, set off in a carriage for some warm baths, and had a most refreshing cleansing after our long journey. There was an odd Neapolitan attendant--a steady old man--who, bringing the linen into my bath, proposed to "soap me." Upon which I called out to the other two that I intended to have everything done to me that could be done, and gave him directions accordingly. I was frothed all over with Naples soap, rubbed all down, scrubbed with a brush, had my nails cut, and all manner of extraordinary operations performed. He was as much disappointed (apparently) as surprised not to find me dirty, and kept on ejaculating under his breath, "Oh, Heaven! how clean this Englishman is!" He also remarked that the Englishman is as fair as a beautiful woman. Some relations of Lord John Russell's, going to Malta, were aboardship, and we were very pleasant. Likewise there was a Mr. Young aboard--an agreeable fellow, not very unlike Forster in person--who introduced himself as the brother of the Miss Youngs whom we knew at Boulogne. He was musical and had much good-fellowship in him, and we were very agreeable together also. On the whole I became decidedly popular, and was embraced on all hands when I came over the side this morning. We are going up Vesuvius, of course, and to Herculaneum and Pompeii, and the usual places. The Tennents will be our companions in most of our excursions, but we shall leave them here behind us. Naples looks just the same as when we left it, except that the weather is much better and brighter. On the day before we left Genoa, we had another dinner with ---- at his country place. He was the soul of hospitality, and really seems to love me. You would have been quite touched if you could have seen the honest warmth of his affection. On the occasion of this second banquet, Egg made a brilliant mistake that perfectly convulsed us all. I had introduced all the games with great success, and we were playing at the "What advice would you have given that person?" game. The advice was "Not to bully his fellow-creatures." Upon which, Egg triumphantly and with the greatest glee, screamed, "Mr. ----!" utterly forgetting ----'s relationship, which I had elaborately impressed upon him. The effect was perfectly irresistible and uncontrollable; and the little woman's way of humouring the joke was in the best taste and the best sense. While I am upon Genoa I may add, that when we left the Croce the landlord, in hoping that I was satisfied, told me that as I was an old inhabitant, he had charged the prices "as to a Genoese." They certainly were very reasonable. Mr. and Mrs. Sartoris have lately been staying in this house, but are just gone. It is kept by an English waiting-maid who married an Italian courier, and is extremely comfortable and clean. I am getting impatient to hear from you with all home news, and shall be heartily glad to get to Rome, and find my best welcome and interest at the post-office there. That ridiculous ---- and her mother were at the hotel at Leghorn the day before yesterday, where the mother (poor old lady!) was so ill from the fright and anxiety consequent on her daughter's efforts at martyrdom, that it is even doubtful whether she will recover. I learnt from a lady friend of ----, that all this nonsense originated at Nice, where she was stirred up by Free Kirk parsons--itinerant--any one of whom I take her to be ready to make a semi-celestial marriage with. The dear being who told me all about her was a noble specimen--single, forty, in a clinging flounced black silk dress, which wouldn't drape, or bustle, or fall, or do anything of that sort--and with a leghorn hat on her head, at least (I am serious) _six feet round_. The consequence of its immense size, was, that whereas it had an insinuating blue decoration in the form of a bow in front, it was so out of her knowledge behind, that it was all battered and bent in that direction--and, viewed from that quarter, she looked drunk. My best love to Mamey and Katey, and Sydney the king of the nursery, and Harry and the dear little Plornishghenter. I kiss almost all the children I encounter in remembrance of their sweet faces, and talk to all the mothers who carry them. I hope to hear nothing but good news from you, and to find nothing but good spirits in your expected letter when I come to Rome. I already begin to look homeward, being now at the remotest part of the journey, and to anticipate the pleasure of return. Ever most affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [55] Charles Dickens, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mr. Augustus Egg, and Edward the courier. 1854. [Sidenote: Mr. Frederick Grew.[56]] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, _13th January, 1854._ MY DEAR SIR, I beg, through you, to assure the artizans' committee in aid of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, that I have received the resolution they have done me the honour to agree upon for themselves and their fellow-workmen, with the highest gratification. I awakened no pleasure or interest among them at Birmingham which they did not repay to me with abundant interest. I have their welfare and happiness sincerely at heart, and shall ever be their faithful friend. Your obedient servant. [Sidenote: Mrs. Gaskell.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _February 18th, 1854._ MY DEAR MRS. GASKELL, I am sorry to say that I am not one of the Zoologicals, or I should have been delighted to have had a hand in the introduction of a child to the lions and tigers. But Wills shall send up to the gardens this morning, and see if Mr. Mitchell, the secretary, can be found. If he be producible I have no doubt that I can send you what you want in the course of the day. Such has been the distraction of _my_ mind in _my_ story, that I have twice forgotten to tell you how much I liked the Modern Greek Songs. The article is printed and at press for the very next number as ever is. Don't put yourself out at all as to the division of the story into parts; I think you had far better write it in your own way. When we come to get a little of it into type, I have no doubt of being able to make such little suggestions as to breaks of chapters as will carry us over all that easily. My dear Mrs. Gaskell, Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Rev. W. Harness.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday Evening, May 19th, 1854._ MY DEAR HARNESS, On Thursday, the first of June, we shall be delighted to come. (Might I ask for the mildest whisper of the dinner-hour?) I am more than ever devoted to your niece, if possible, for giving me the choice of two days, as on the second of June I am a fettered mortal. I heard a manly, Christian sermon last Sunday at the Foundling--with _great satisfaction_. If you should happen to know the preacher of it, pray thank him from me. Ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 26th, 1854._ MY DEAR WHITE, Here is Conolly in a dreadful state of mind because you won't dine with him on the 7th of June next to meet Stratford-on-Avon people, writing to me, to ask me to write to you and ask you what you mean by it. What _do_ you mean by it? It appears to Conolly that your supposing you _can_ have anything to do is a clear case of monomania, one of the slight instances of perverted intellect, wherein a visit to him cannot fail to be beneficial. After conference with my learned friend I am of the same opinion. Loves from all in Tavistock to all in Bonchurch. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, August 2nd, 1854._ MY DEAR WILLS, I will endeavour to come off my back (and the grass) to do an opening paper for the starting number of "North and South." I can't positively answer for such a victory over the idleness into which I have delightfully sunk, as the achievement of this feat; but let us hope. During a fête on Monday night the meteor flag of England (forgotten to be struck at sunset) was _stolen!!!_ Manage the proofs of "H. W." so that I may not have to correct them on a Sunday. I am not going over to the Sabbatarians, but like the haystack (particularly) on a Sunday morning. I should like John to call on M. Henri, Townshend's servant, 21, Norfolk Street, Park Lane, and ask him if, when he comes here with his master, he can take charge of a trap bat and ball. If yea, then I should like John to proceed to Mr. Darke, Lord's Cricket Ground, and purchase said trap bat and ball of the best quality. Townshend is coming here on the 15th, probably will leave town a day or two before. Pray be in a condition to drink a glass of the 1846 champagne when _you_ come. I think I have no more to say at present. I cannot sufficiently admire my prodigious energy in coming out of a stupor to write this letter. Ever faithfully. FOOTNOTE: [56] Secretary to the Artizans' Committee in aid of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. 1855. [Sidenote: Miss King.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday Evening, February 9th, 1855._ MY DEAR MISS KING, I wish to get over the disagreeable part of my letter in the beginning. I have great doubts of the possibility of publishing your story in portions. But I think it possesses _very great merit_. My doubts arise partly from the nature of the interest which I fear requires presentation as a whole, and partly on your manner of relating the tale. The people do not sufficiently work out their own purposes in dialogue and dramatic action. You are too much their exponent; what you do for them, they ought to do for themselves. With reference to publication in detached portions (or, indeed, with a reference to the force of the story in any form), that long stoppage and going back to possess the reader with the antecedents of the clergyman's biography, are rather crippling. I may mention that I think the boy (the child of the second marriage) a little too "slangy." I know the kind of boyish slang which belongs to such a character in these times; but, considering his part in the story, I regard it as the author's function to elevate such a characteristic, and soften it into something more expressive of the ardour and flush of youth, and its romance. It seems to me, too, that the dialogues between the lady and the Italian maid are conventional but not natural. This observation I regard as particularly applying to the maid, and to the scene preceding the murder. Supposing the main objection surmountable, I would venture then to suggest to you the means of improvement in this respect. The paper is so full of good touches of character, passion, and natural emotion, that I very much wish for a little time to reconsider it, and to try whether condensation here and there would enable us to get it say into four parts. I am not sanguine of this, for I observed the difficulties as I read it the night before last; but I am very unwilling, I assure you, to decline what has so much merit. I am going to Paris on Sunday morning for ten days or so. I purpose being back again within a fortnight. If you will let me think of this matter in the meanwhile, I shall at least have done all I can to satisfy my own appreciation of your work. But if, in the meantime, you should desire to have it back with any prospect of publishing it through other means, a letter--the shortest in the world--from you to Mr. Wills at the "Household Words" office will immediately produce it. I repeat with perfect sincerity that I am much impressed by its merits, and that if I had read it as the production of an entire stranger, I think it would have made exactly this effect upon me. My dear Miss King, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _24th February, 1855._ MY DEAR MISS KING, I have gone carefully over your story again, and quite agree with you that the episode of the clergyman could be told in a very few lines. Startling as I know it will appear to you, I am bound to say that I think the purpose of the whole tale would be immensely strengthened by great compression. I doubt if it could not be told more forcibly in half the space. It is certainly too long for "Household Words," and I fear my idea of it is too short for you. I am, if possible, more unwilling than I was at first to decline it; but the more I have considered it, the longer it has seemed to grow. Nor can I ask you to try to present it free from that objection, because I already perceive the difficulty, and pain, of such an effort. To the best of my knowledge, you are wrong about the Lady at last, and to the best of my observation, you do not express what you explain yourself to mean in the case of the Italian attendant. I have met with such talk in the romances of Maturin's time--certainly never in Italian life. These, however, are slight points easily to be compromised in an hour. The great obstacle I must leave wholly to your own judgment, in looking over the tale again. Believe me always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. M. Thackeray.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday Evening, 23rd March, 1855._ MY DEAR THACKERAY,[57] I have read in _The Times_ to-day an account of your last night's lecture, and cannot refrain from assuring you in all truth and earnestness that I am profoundly touched by your generous reference to me. I do not know how to tell you what a glow it spread over my heart. Out of its fulness I do entreat you to believe that I shall never forget your words of commendation. If you could wholly know at once how you have moved me, and how you have animated me, you would be the happier I am very certain. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. Forster.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday, 29th March, 1855._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I have hope of Mr. Morley,[58] whom one cannot see without knowing to be a straightforward, earnest man. _I_ also think Higgins[59] will materially help them.[60] Generally, I quite agree with you that they hardly know what to be at; but it is an immensely difficult subject to start, and they must have every allowance. At any rate, it is not by leaving them alone and giving them no help, that they can be urged on to success. (Travers, too, I think, a man of the Anti-Corn-Law-League order.) Higgins told me, after the meeting on Monday night, that on the previous evening he had been closeted with ----, whose letter in that day's paper he had put right for _The Times_. He had never spoken to ---- before, he said, and found him a rather muddle-headed Scotchman as to his powers of conveying his ideas. He (Higgins) had gone over his documents judicially, and with the greatest attention; and not only was ---- wrong in every particular (except one very unimportant circumstance), but, in reading documents to the House, had stopped short in sentences where no stop was, and by so doing had utterly perverted their meaning. This is to come out, of course, when said ---- gets the matter on. I thought the case so changed, before I knew this, by his letter and that of the other shipowners, that I told Morley, when I went down to the theatre, that I felt myself called upon to relieve him from the condition I had imposed. For the rest, I am quite calmly confident that I only do justice to the strength of my opinions, and use the power which circumstances have given me, conscientiously and moderately, with a right object, and towards the prevention of nameless miseries. I should be now reproaching myself if I had not gone to the meeting, and, having been, I am very glad. A good illustration of a Government office. ---- very kindly wrote to me to suggest that "Houses of Parliament" illustration. After I had dined on Wednesday, and was going to jog slowly down to Drury Lane, it suddenly came into my head that perhaps his details were wrong. I had just time to turn to the "Annual Register," and _not one of them was correct_! This is, of course, in close confidence. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Winter.] _Tuesday, 3rd April, 1855._ MY DEAR MARIA,[61] A necessity is upon me now--as at most times--of wandering about in my old wild way, to think. I could no more resist this on Sunday or yesterday than a man can dispense with food, or a horse can help himself from being driven. I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, make its own demands upon me, and sometimes, for months together, put everything else away from me. If I had not known long ago that my place could never be held, unless I were at any moment ready to devote myself to it entirely, I should have dropped out of it very soon. All this I can hardly expect you to understand--or the restlessness and waywardness of an author's mind. You have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had occasion to think or care about it, and you cannot have the necessary consideration for it. "It is only half-an-hour,"--"It is only an afternoon,"--"It is only an evening," people say to me over and over again; but they don't know that it is impossible to command one's self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes,--or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can't help it; I must go my way whether or no. I thought you would understand that in sending the card for the box I sent an assurance that there was nothing amiss. I am pleased to find that you were all so interested with the play. My ladies say that the first part is too painful and wants relief. I have been going to see it a dozen times, but have never seen it yet, and never may. Madame Céleste is injured thereby (you see how unreasonable people are!) and says in the green-room, "M. Dickens est artiste! Mais il n'a jamais vu 'Janet Pride!'" It is like a breath of fresh spring air to know that that unfortunate baby of yours is out of her one close room, and has about half-a-pint of very doubtful air per day. I could only have become her Godfather on the condition that she had five hundred gallons of open air at any rate every day of her life; and you would soon see a rose or two in the face of my other little friend, Ella, if you opened all your doors and windows throughout the whole of all fine weather, from morning to night. I am going off; I don't know where or how far, to ponder about I don't know what. Sometimes I am half in the mood to set off for France, sometimes I think I will go and walk about on the seashore for three or four months, sometimes I look towards the Pyrenees, sometimes Switzerland. I made a compact with a great Spanish authority last week, and vowed I would go to Spain. Two days afterwards Layard and I agreed to go to Constantinople when Parliament rises. To-morrow I shall probably discuss with somebody else the idea of going to Greenland or the North Pole. The end of all this, most likely, will be, that I shall shut myself up in some out-of-the-way place I have not yet thought of, and go desperately to work there. Once upon a time I didn't do such things you say. No. But I have done them through a good many years now, and they have become myself and my life. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The same.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, June 30th, 1855._ MY DEAR MRS. WINTER, I am truly grieved to hear of your affliction in the loss of your darling baby. But if you be not, even already, so reconciled to the parting from that innocent child for a little while, as to bear it gently and with a softened sorrow, I know that that not unhappy state of mind must soon arise. The death of infants is a release from so much chance and change--from so many casualties and distresses--and is a thing so beautiful in its serenity and peace--that it should not be a bitterness, even in a mother's heart. The simplest and most affecting passage in all the noble history of our Great Master, is His consideration for little children, and in reference to yours, as many millions of bereaved mothers poor and rich will do in reference to theirs until the end of time, you may take the comfort of the generous words, "And He took a child, and set it in the midst of them." In a book, by one of the greatest English writers, called "A Journey from this World to the Next," a parent comes to the distant country beyond the grave, and finds the little girl he had lost so long ago, engaged in building a bower to receive him in, when his aged steps should bring him there at last. He is filled with joy to see her, so young--so bright--so full of promise--and is enraptured to think that she never was old, wan, tearful, withered. This is always one of the sources of consolation in the deaths of children. With no effort of the fancy, with nothing to undo, you will always be able to think of the pretty creature you have lost, _as a child_ in heaven. A poor little baby of mine lies in Highgate cemetery--and I laid her just as you think of laying yours, in the catacombs there, until I made a resting-place for all of us in the free air. It is better that I should not come to see you. I feel quite sure of that, and will think of you instead. God bless and comfort you! Mrs. Dickens and her sister send their kindest condolences to yourself and Mr. Winter. I add mine with all my heart. Affectionately your friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, 8th July, 1855._ MY DEAR COLLINS, I don't know whether you may have heard from Webster, or whether the impression I derived from Mark's manner on Friday may be altogether correct. But it strongly occurred to me that Webster was going to decline the play, and that he really has worried himself into a fear of playing Aaron. Now, when I got this into my head--which was during the rehearsal--I considered two things:--firstly, how we could best put about the success of the piece more widely and extensively even than it has yet reached; and secondly, how you could be best assisted against a bad production of it hereafter, or no production of it. I thought I saw immediately, that the point would be to have this representation noticed in the newspapers. So I waited until the rehearsal was over and we had profoundly astonished the family, and then asked Colonel Waugh what he thought of sending some cards for Tuesday to the papers. He highly approved, and I yesterday morning directed Mitchell to send to all the morning papers, and to some of the weekly ones--a dozen in the whole. I dined at Lord John's yesterday (where Meyerbeer was, and said to me after dinner: "Ah, mon ami illustre! que c'est noble de vous entendre parler d'haute voix morale, à la table d'un ministre!" for I gave them a little bit of truth about Sunday that was like bringing a Sebastopol battery among the polite company), I say, after this long parenthesis, I dined at Lord John's, and found great interest and talk about the play, and about what everybody who had been here had said of it. And I was confirmed in my decision that the thing for you was the invitation to the papers. Hence I write to tell you what I have done. I dine at home at half-past five if you are disengaged, and I shall be at home all the evening. Ever faithfully. NOTE (by Mr. Wilkie Collins).--This characteristically kind endeavour to induce managers of theatres to produce "The Lighthouse," after the amateur performances of the play, was not attended with any immediate success. The work remained in the author's desk until Messrs. Robson and Emden undertook the management of the Olympic Theatre. They opened their first season with "The Lighthouse;" the part of Aaron Gurnock being performed by Mr. F. Robson.--W. C. [Sidenote: Miss Emily Jolly.] 3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, KENT, _Tuesday, 17th July, 1855._ DEAR MADAM,[62] Your manuscript, entitled a "Wife's Story," has come under my own perusal within these last three or four days. I recognise in it such great merit and unusual promise, and I think it displays so much power and knowledge of the human heart, that I feel a strong interest in you as its writer. I have begged the gentleman, who is in my confidence as to the transaction of the business of "Household Words," to return the MS. to you by the post, which (as I hope) will convey this note to you. My object is this: I particularly entreat you to consider the catastrophe. You write to be read, of course. The close of the story is unnecessarily painful--will throw off numbers of persons who would otherwise read it, and who (as it stands) will be deterred by hearsay from so doing, and is so tremendous a piece of severity, that it will defeat your purpose. All my knowledge and experience, such as they are, lead me straight to the recommendation that you will do well to spare the life of the husband, and of one of the children. Let her suppose the former dead, from seeing him brought in wounded and insensible--lose nothing of the progress of her mental suffering afterwards when that doctor is in attendance upon her--but bring her round at last to the blessed surprise that her husband is still living, and that a repentance which can be worked out, _in the way of atonement for the misery she has occasioned to the man whom she so ill repaid for his love, and made so miserable_, lies before her. So will you soften the reader whom you now as it were harden, and so you will bring tears from many eyes, which can only have their spring in affectionately and gently touched hearts. I am perfectly certain that with this change, all the previous part of your tale will tell for twenty times as much as it can in its present condition. And it is because I believe you have a great fame before you if you do justice to the remarkable ability you possess, that I venture to offer you this advice in what I suppose to be the beginning of your career. I observe some parts of the story which would be strengthened, even in their psychological interest, by condensation here and there. If you will leave that to me, I will perform the task as conscientiously and carefully as if it were my own. But the suggestion I offer for your acceptance, no one but yourself can act upon. Let me conclude this hasty note with the plain assurance that I have never been so much surprised and struck by any manuscript I have read, as I have been by yours. Your faithful Servant. [Sidenote: The same.] 3, ALBION VILLAS, FOLKESTONE, _July 21st, 1855._ DEAR MADAM, I did not enter, in detail, on the spirit of the alteration I propose in your story; because I thought it right that you should think out that for yourself if you applied yourself to the change. I can now assure you that you describe it exactly as I had conceived it; and if I had wanted anything to confirm me in my conviction of its being right, our both seeing it so precisely from the same point of view, would be ample assurance to me. I would leave her new and altered life to be inferred. It does not appear to me either necessary or practicable (within such limits) to do more than that. Do not be uneasy if you find the alteration demanding time. I shall quite understand that, and my interest will keep. _When_ you finish the story, send it to Mr. Wills. Besides being in daily communication with him, I am at the office once a week; and I will go over it in print, before the proof is sent to you. Very faithfully yours. 1855.[63] [Sidenote: Captain Morgan.] DEAR FRIEND,[64] I am always delighted to hear from you. Your genial earnestness does me good to think of. And every day of my life I feel more and more that to be thoroughly in earnest is everything, and to be anything short of it is nothing. You see what we have been doing to our valiant soldiers.[65] You see what miserable humbugs we are. And because we have got involved in meshes of aristocratic red tape to our unspeakable confusion, loss, and sorrow, the gentlemen who have been so kind as to ruin us are going to give us a day of humiliation and fasting the day after to-morrow. I am sick and sour to think of such things at this age of the world. . . . I am in the first stage of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it. Always most cordially yours. FOOTNOTES: [57] The Editors have great pleasure in publishing another note to Mr. Thackeray, which has been found and sent to them by his daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, since the publication of the first two volumes. [58] Chairman of the "Administrative Reform League" Meeting at Drury Lane Theatre. [59] Mr. Higgins, best known as a writer in _The Times_, under the name of "Jacob Omnium." [60] The Members of the Administrative Reform League. [61] Mrs. Winter, a very dear friend and companion of Charles Dickens in his youth. [62] Miss Emily Jolly, authoress of "Mr. Arle," and many other clever novels. [63] This, and another Letter to Captain Morgan which appears under date of 1860, were published in _Scribner's Monthly_, October, 1877. [64] Captain Morgan was a captain in the American Merchant Service. He was an intimate friend of Mr. Leslie, R.A. (the great painter), by whom he was made known to Charles Dickens. [65] This Letter was written during the Crimean war. 1856. [Sidenote: Mr. T. Ross. Mr. J. Kenny.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, 19th May, 1856._ GENTLEMEN, I have received a letter signed by you (which I assume to be written mainly on behalf of what are called Working-Men and their families) inviting me to attend a meeting in our Parish Vestry Hall this evening on the subject of the stoppage of the Sunday bands in the Parks. I thoroughly agree with you that those bands have afforded an innocent and healthful enjoyment on the Sunday afternoon, to which the people have a right. But I think it essential that the working people should, of themselves and by themselves, assert that right. They have been informed, on the high authority of their first Minister (lately rather in want of House of Commons votes I am told) that they are almost indifferent to it. The correction of that mistake, if official omniscience can be mistaken, lies with themselves. In case it should be considered by the meeting, which I prefer for this reason not to attend, expedient to unite with other Metropolitan parishes in forming a fund for the payment of such expenses as may be incurred in peaceably and numerously representing to the governing powers that the harmless recreation they have taken away is very much wanted, I beg you to put down my name as a subscriber of ten pounds. And I am, your faithful Servant. [Sidenote: Mr. Washington Irving.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _London, July 5th, 1856._ MY DEAR IRVING, If you knew how often I write to you individually and personally in my books, you would be no more surprised in seeing this note than you were in seeing me do my duty by that flowery julep (in what I dreamily apprehend to have been a former state of existence) at Baltimore. Will you let me present to you a cousin of mine, Mr. B----, who is associated with a merchant's house in New York? Of course he wants to see you, and know you. How can _I_ wonder at that? How can anybody? I had a long talk with Leslie at the last Academy dinner (having previously been with him in Paris), and he told me that you were flourishing. I suppose you know that he wears a moustache--so do I for the matter of that, and a beard too--and that he looks like a portrait of Don Quixote. Holland House has four-and-twenty youthful pages in it now--twelve for my lord, and twelve for my lady; and no clergyman coils his leg up under his chair all dinner-time, and begins to uncurve it when the hostess goes. No wheeled chair runs smoothly in with that beaming face in it; and ----'s little cotton pocket-handkerchief helped to make (I believe) this very sheet of paper. A half-sad, half-ludicrous story of Rogers is all I will sully it with. You know, I daresay, that for a year or so before his death he wandered, and lost himself like one of the Children in the Wood, grown up there and grown down again. He had Mrs. Procter and Mrs. Carlyle to breakfast with him one morning--only those two. Both excessively talkative, very quick and clever, and bent on entertaining him. When Mrs. Carlyle had flashed and shone before him for about three-quarters of an hour on one subject, he turned his poor old eyes on Mrs. Procter, and pointing to the brilliant discourser with his poor old finger, said (indignantly), "Who is _she_?" Upon this, Mrs. Procter, cutting in, delivered (it is her own story) a neat oration on the life and writings of Carlyle, and enlightened him in her happiest and airiest manner; all of which he heard, staring in the dreariest silence, and then said (indignantly, as before), "And who are _you_?" Ever, my dear Irving, Most affectionately and truly yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A] VILLE DES MOULINEAUX, BOULOGNE, _Wednesday, 9th July, 1856._ MY DEAR STONE, I have got a capital part for you in the farce,[66] not a difficult one to learn, as you never say anything but "Yes" and "No." You are called in the _dramatis personæ_ an able-bodied British seaman, and you are never seen by mortal eye to do anything (except inopportunely producing a mop) but stand about the deck of the boat in everybody's way, with your hair immensely touzled, one brace on, your hands in your pockets, and the bottoms of your trousers tucked up. Yet you are inextricably connected with the plot, and are the man whom everybody is inquiring after. I think it is a very whimsical idea and extremely droll. It made me laugh heartily when I jotted it all down yesterday. Loves from all my house to all yours. Ever affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [66] The farce alluded to, however, was never written. It had been projected to be played at the Amateur Theatricals at Tavistock House. 1857. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, 28th January, 1857._ MY DEAR BULWER, I thought Wills had told you as to the Guild (for I begged him to) that he can do absolutely nothing until our charter is seven years old. It is the stringent and express prohibition of the Act of Parliament--for which things you members, thank God, are responsible and not I. When I observed this clause (which was just as we were going to grant a pension, if we could agree on a good subject), I caused our Counsel's opinion to be taken on it, and there is not a doubt about it. I immediately recommended that there should be no expenses--that the interest on the capital should be all invested as it accrued--that the chambers should be given up and the clerk discharged--and that the Guild should have the use of the "Household Words" office rent free, and the services of Wills on the same terms. All of which was done. A letter is now copying, to be sent round to all the members, explaining, with the New Year, the whole state of the thing. You will receive this. It appears to me that it looks wholesome enough. But if a strong idiot comes and binds your hands, or mine, or both, for seven years, what is to be done against him? As to greater matters than this, however--as to all matters on this teeming Earth--it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament altogether, is just the dreariest failure and nuisance that has bothered this much-bothered world. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Miss Emily Jolly.] GRAVESEND, KENT, _10th April, 1857._ DEAR MADAM, As I am away from London for a few days, your letter has been forwarded to me. I can honestly encourage and assure you that I believe the depression and want of confidence under which you describe yourself as labouring to have no sufficient foundation. First as to "Mr. Arle." I have constantly heard it spoken of with great approval, and I think it a book of considerable merit. If I were to tell you that I see no evidence of inexperience in it, that would not be true. I think a little more stir and action to be desired also; but I am surprised by your being despondent about it, for I assure you that I had supposed it (always remembering that it is your first novel) to have met with a very good reception. I can bring to my memory--here, with no means of reference at hand--only two papers of yours that have been unsuccessful at "Household Words." I think the first was called "The Brook." It appeared to me to break down upon a confusion that pervaded it, between a Coroner's Inquest and a Trial. I have a general recollection of the mingling of the two, as to facts and forms that should have been kept apart, in some inextricable manner that was beyond my powers of disentanglement. The second was about a wife's writing a Novel and keeping the secret from her husband until it was done. I did not think the incident of sufficient force to justify the length of the narrative. But there is nothing fatal in either of these mischances. Mr. Wills told me when I spoke to him of the latter paper that you had it in contemplation to offer a longer story to "Household Words." If you should do so, I assure you I shall be happy to read it myself, and that I shall have a sincere desire to accept it, if possible. I can give you no better counsel than to look into the life about you, and to strive for what is noblest and true. As to further encouragement, I do not, I can most strongly add, believe that you have any reason to be downhearted. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday Morning, 30th May, 1857._ DEAR MADAM, I read your story, with all possible attention, last night. I cannot tell you with what reluctance I write to you respecting it, for my opinion of it is _not_ favourable, although I perceive your heart in it, and great strength. Pray understand that I claim no infallibility. I merely express my own honest opinion, formed against my earnest desire. I do not lay it down as law for others, though, of course, I believe that many others would come to the same conclusion. It appears to me that the story is one that cannot possibly be told within the compass to which you have limited yourself. The three principal people are, every one of them, in the wrong with the reader, and you cannot put any of them right, without making the story extend over a longer space of time, and without anatomising the souls of the actors more slowly and carefully. Nothing would justify the departure of Alice, but her having some strong reason to believe that in taking that step, _she saved her lover_. In your intentions as to that lover's transfer of his affections to Eleanor, I descry a striking truth; but I think it confusedly wrought out, and all but certain to fail in expressing itself. Eleanor, I regard as forced and overstrained. The natural result is, that she carries a train of anti-climax after her. I particularly notice this at the point when she thinks she is going to be drowned. The whole idea of the story is sufficiently difficult to require the most exact truth and the greatest knowledge and skill in the colouring throughout. In this respect I have no doubt of its being extremely defective. The people do not talk as such people would; and the little subtle touches of description which, by making the country house and the general scene real, would give an air of reality to the people (much to be desired) are altogether wanting. The more you set yourself to the illustration of your heroine's passionate nature, the more indispensable this attendant atmosphere of truth becomes. It would, in a manner, oblige the reader to believe in her. Whereas, for ever exploding like a great firework without any background, she glares and wheels and hisses, and goes out, and has lighted nothing. Lastly, I fear she is too convulsive from beginning to end. Pray reconsider, from this point of view, her brow, and her eyes, and her drawing herself up to her full height, and her being a perfumed presence, and her floating into rooms, also her asking people how they dare, and the like, on small provocation. When she hears her music being played, I think she is particularly objectionable. I have a strong belief that if you keep this story by you three or four years, you will form an opinion of it not greatly differing from mine. There is so much good in it, so much reflection, so much passion and earnestness, that, if my judgment be right, I feel sure you will come over to it. On the other hand, I do not think that its publication, as it stands, would do you service, or be agreeable to you hereafter. I have no means of knowing whether you are patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that you are not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough. When one is impelled to write this or that, one has still to consider: "How much of this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotion and superfluous energy--how much remains that is truly belonging to this ideal character and these ideal circumstances?" It is in the laborious struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for it, that the road to the correction of faults lies. [Perhaps I may remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you.] I should not have written so much, or so plainly, but for your last letter to me. It seems to demand that I should be strictly true with you, and I am so in this letter, without any reservation either way. Very faithfully yours. 1858. [Sidenote: Mr. Albert Smith.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday Night, 1st December, 1858._ MY DEAR ALBERT, I cannot tell you how grieved I am for poor dear Arthur (even you can hardly love him better than I do), or with what anxiety I shall wait for further news of him. Pray let me know how he is to-morrow. Tell them at home that Olliffe is the kindest and gentlest of men--a man of rare experience and opportunity--perfect master of his profession, and to be confidently and implicitly relied upon. There is no man alive, in whose hands I would more thankfully trust myself. I will write a cheery word to the dear fellow in the morning. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Smith.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Thursday, 2nd December, 1858._ MY DEAR ARTHUR, I cannot tell you how surprised and grieved I was last night to hear from Albert of your severe illness. It is not my present intention to give you the trouble of reading anything like a letter, but I MUST send you my loving word; and tell you how we all think of you. And here am I going off to-morrow to that meeting at Manchester without _you!_ the wildest and most impossible of moves as it seems to me. And to think of my coming back by Coventry, on Saturday, to receive the chronometer--also without you! If you don't get perfectly well soon, my dear old fellow, I shall come over to Paris to look after you, and to tell Olliffe (give him my love, and the same for Lady Olliffe) what a Blessing he is. With kindest regards to Mrs. Arthur and her sister, Ever heartily and affectionately yours. 1859. [Sidenote: Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, _Wednesday, 12th January, 1859._ MY DEAR FRITH, At eleven on Monday morning next, the gifted individual whom you will transmit to posterity,[67] will be at Watkins'. Table also shall be there, and chair. Velvet coat likewise if the tailor should have sent it home. But the garment is more to be doubted than the man whose signature here follows. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Cowden Clark.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _21st August, 1859._ MY DEAR MRS. COWDEN CLARKE, I cannot tell you how much pleasure I have derived from the receipt of your earnest letter. Do not suppose it possible that such praise can be "less than nothing" to your old manager. It is more than all else. Here in my little country house on the summit of the hill where Falstaff did the robbery, your words have come to me in the most appropriate and delightful manner. When the story can be read all at once, and my meaning can be better seen, I will send it to you (sending it to Dean Street, if you tell me of no better way), and it will be a hearty gratification to think that you and your good husband are reading it together. For you must both take notice, please, that I have a reminder of you always before me. On my desk, here, stand two green leaves[68] which I every morning station in their ever-green place at my elbow. The leaves on the oak-trees outside the window are less constant than these, for they are with me through the four seasons. Lord! to think of the bygone day when you were stricken mute (was it not at Glasgow?) and, being mounted on a tall ladder at a practicable window, stared at Forster, and with a noble constancy refused to utter word! Like the Monk among the pictures with Wilkie, I begin to think _that_ the real world, and this the sham that goes out with the lights. God bless you both. Ever faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [67] The portrait by Mr. Frith is now in the Forster Collection, at the South Kensington Museum. [68] A porcelain paper-weight with two green leaves enamelled on it, between which were placed the initials C. D. A present from Mrs. C. Clarke. 1860. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] [69]TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, W.C., _Friday Night, Feb. 3, 1860._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, I can most honestly assure you that I think "Roccabella" a very remarkable book indeed. Apart--quite apart--from my interest in you, I am certain that if I had taken it up under any ordinarily favourable circumstances as a book of which I knew nothing whatever, I should not--could not--have relinquished it until I had read it through. I had turned but a few pages, and come to the shadow on the bright sofa at the foot of the bed, when I knew myself to be in the hands of an artist. That rare and delightful recognition I never lost for a moment until I closed the second volume at the end. I am "a good audience" when I have reason to be, and my girls would testify to you, if there were need, that I cried over it heartily. Your story seems to me remarkably ingenious. I had not the least idea of the purport of the sealed paper until you chose to enlighten me; and then I felt it to be quite natural, quite easy, thoroughly in keeping with the character and presentation of the Liverpool man. The position of the Bell family in the story has a special air of nature and truth; is quite new to me, and is so dexterously and delicately done that I find the deaf daughter no less real and distinct than the clergyman's wife. The turn of the story round that damnable Princess I pursued with a pleasure with which I could pursue nothing but a true interest; and I declare to you that if I were put upon finding anything better than the scene of Roccabella's death, I should stare round my bookshelves very much at a loss for a long time. Similarly, your characters have really surprised me. From the lawyer to the Princess, I swear to them as true; and in your fathoming of Rosamond altogether, there is a profound wise knowledge that I admire and respect with a heartiness not easily overstated in words. I am not quite with you as to the Italians. Your knowledge of the Italian character seems to me surprisingly subtle and penetrating; but I think we owe it to those most unhappy men and their political wretchedness to ask ourselves mercifully, whether their faults are not essentially the faults of a people long oppressed and priest-ridden;--whether their tendency to slink and conspire is not a tendency that spies in every dress, from the triple crown to a lousy head, have engendered in their ancestors through generations? Again, like you, I shudder at the distresses that come of these unavailing risings; my blood runs hotter, as yours does, at the thought of the leaders safe, and the instruments perishing by hundreds; yet what is to be done? Their wrongs are so great that they _will_ rise from time to time somehow. It would be to doubt the eternal providence of God to doubt that they will rise successfully at last. Unavailing struggles against a dominant tyranny precede all successful turning against it. And is it not a little hard in us Englishman, whose forefathers have risen so often and striven against so much, to look on, in our own security, through microscopes, and detect the motes in the brains of men driven mad? Think, if you and I were Italians, and had grown from boyhood to our present time, menaced in every day through all these years by that infernal confessional, dungeons, and soldiers, could we be better than these men? Should we be so good? I should not, I am afraid, if I know myself. Such things would make of me a moody, bloodthirsty, implacable man, who would do anything for revenge; and if I compromised the truth--put it at the worst, habitually--where should I ever have had it before me? In the old Jesuits' college at Genoa, on the Chiaja at Naples, in the churches of Rome, at the University of Padua, on the Piazzo San Marco at Venice, where? And the government is in all these places, and in all Italian places. I have seen something of these men. I have known Mazzini and Gallenga; Manin was tutor to my daughters in Paris; I have had long talks about scores of them with poor Ary Scheffer, who was their best friend. I have gone back to Italy after ten years, and found the best men I had known there exiled or in jail. I believe they have the faults you ascribe to them (nationally, not individually), but I could not find it in my heart, remembering their miseries, to exhibit those faults without referring them back to their causes. You will forgive my writing this, because I write it exactly as I write my cordial little tribute to the high merits of your book. If it were not a living reality to me, I should care nothing about this point of disagreement; but you are far too earnest a man, and far too able a man, to be left unremonstrated with by an admiring reader. You cannot write so well without influencing many people. If you could tell me that your book had but twenty readers, I would reply, that so good a book will influence more people's opinions, through those twenty, than a worthless book would through twenty thousand; and I express this with the perfect confidence of one in whose mind the book has taken, for good and all, a separate and distinct place. Accept my thanks for the pleasure you have given me. The poor acknowledgment of testifying to that pleasure wherever I go will be my pleasure in return. And so, my dear Chorley, good night, and God bless you. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir John Bowring.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, 31st October, 1860._ MY DEAR SIR JOHN,[70] First let me congratulate you on your marriage and wish you all happiness and prosperity. Secondly, I must tell you that I was greatly vexed with the Chatham people for not giving me early notice of your lecture. In that case I should (of course) have presided, as President of the Institution, and I should have asked you to honour my Falstaff house here. But when they made your kind intention known to me, I had made some important business engagements at the "All the Year Round" office for that evening, which I could not possibly forego. I charged them to tell you so, and was going to write to you when I found your kind letter. Thanks for your paper, which I have sent to the Printer's with much pleasure. We heard of your accident here, and of your "making nothing of it." I said that you didn't make much of disasters, and that you took poison (from natives) as quite a matter of course in the way of business. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. A. H. Layard.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, 4th December, 1860._ MY DEAR LAYARD, I know you will readily believe that I would come if I could, and that I am heartily sorry I cannot. A new story of my writing, nine months long, is just begun in "All the Year Round." A certain allotment of my time when I have that story-demand upon me, has, all through my author life, been an essential condition of my health and success. I have just returned here to work so many hours every day for so many days. It is really impossible for me to break my bond. There is not a man in England who is more earnestly your friend and admirer than I am. The conviction that you know it, helps me out through this note. You are a man of so much mark to me, that I even regret your going into the House of Commons--for which assembly I have but a scant respect. But I would not mention it to the Southwark electors if I could come to-morrow; though I should venture to tell them (and even that your friends would consider very impolitic) that I think them very much honoured by having such a candidate for their suffrages. My daughter and sister-in-law want to know what you have done with your "pledge" to come down here again. If they had votes for Southwark they would threaten to oppose you--but would never do it. I was solemnly sworn at breakfast to let you know that we should be delighted to see you. Bear witness that I kept my oath. Ever, my dear Layard, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Captain Morgan.] DEAR FRIEND, I am heartily obliged to you for your seasonable and welcome remembrance. It came to the office (while I was there) in the pleasantest manner, brought by two seafaring men as if they had swum across with it. I have already told ---- what I am very well assured of concerning you, but you are such a noble fellow that I must not pursue that subject. But you will at least take my cordial and affectionate thanks. . . . We have a touch of most beautiful weather here now, and this country is most beautiful too. I wish I could carry you off to a favourite spot of mine between this and Maidstone, where I often smoke your cigars and think of you. We often take our lunch on a hillside there in the summer, and then I lie down on the grass--a splendid example of laziness--and say, "Now for my Morgan!" My daughter and her aunt declare that they know the true scent of the true article (which I don't in the least believe), and sometimes they exclaim, "That's not a Morgan," and the worst of it is they were once right by accident. . . . I hope you will have seen the Christmas number of "All the Year Round."[71] Here and there, in the description of the sea-going hero, I have given a touch or two of remembrance of Somebody you know; very heartily desiring that thousands of people may have some faint reflection of the pleasure I have for many years derived from the contemplation of a most amiable nature and most remarkable man. With kindest regards, believe me, dear Morgan, Ever affectionately yours. FOOTNOTES: [69] This and all other Letters addressed to Mr. H. F. Chorley, were printed in "Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters of Henry Fothergill Chorley," compiled by Mr. H. G. Hewlett. [70] Sir John Bowring, formerly Her Majesty's Plenipotentiary in China, and Governor of Hong Kong. [71] "A Message from the Sea." 1861. [Sidenote: Mrs. Malleson.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Monday, 14th January, 1861._ MY DEAR MRS. MALLESON, I am truly sorry that I cannot have the pleasure of dining with you on Thursday. Although I consider myself quite well, and although my doctor almost admits the fact when I indignantly tax him with it, I am not discharged. His treatment renders him very fearful that I should take cold in going to and fro; and he makes excuses, therefore (as I darkly suspect), for keeping me here until said treatment is done with. This morning he tells me he must see me "once more, on Wednesday." As he has said the like for a whole week, my confidence is not blooming enough at this present writing to justify me in leaving a possibility of Banquo's place at your table. Hence this note. It is screwed out of me. With kind regards to Mr. Malleson, believe me, Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, 23rd January, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I am delighted to receive your letter, and to look forward with confidence to having such a successor in August. I can honestly assure you that I never have been so pleased at heart in all my literary life, as I am in the proud thought of standing side by side with you before this great audience. In regard of the story,[72] I have perfect faith in such a master-hand as yours; and I know that what such an artist feels to be terrible and original, is unquestionably so. You whet my interest by what you write of it to the utmost extent. Believe me ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 3, HANOVER TERRACE, REGENT'S PARK, _Sunday, 28th April, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, My story will finish in the first week in August. Yours ought to begin in the last week of July, or the last week but one. Wilkie Collins will be at work to follow you. The publication has made a very great success with "Great Expectations," and could not present a finer time for you. The question of length may be easily adjusted. Of the misgiving you entertain I cannot of course judge until you give me leave to rush to the perusal. I swear that I never thought I had half so much self-denial as I have shown in this case! I think I shall come out at Exeter Hall as a choice vessel on the strength of it. In the meanwhile I have quickened the printer and told him to get on fast. You cannot think how happy you make me by what you write of "Great Expectations." There is nothing like the pride of making such an effect on such a writer as you. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: The same.] 3, HANOVER TERRACE, REGENT'S PARK, _Wednesday, 8th May, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I am anxious to let you know that Mr. Frederic Lehmann, who is coming down to Knebworth to see you (with his sister Mrs. Benzon) is a particular friend of mine, for whom I have a very high and warm regard. Although he will sufficiently enlist your sympathy on his own behalf, I am sure that you will not be the less interested in him because I am. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 3, HANOVER TERRACE, _Sunday, 12th May, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I received your revised proofs only yesterday, and I sat down to read them last night. And before I say anything further I may tell you that I COULD NOT lay them aside, but was obliged to go on with them in my bedroom until I got into a very ghostly state indeed. This morning I have taken them again and have gone through them with the utmost attention. Of the beauty and power of the writing I say not a word, or of its originality and boldness, or of its quite extraordinary constructive skill. I confine myself solely to your misgiving, and to the question whether there is any sufficient foundation for it. On the last head I say, without the faintest hesitation, most decidedly there is NOT sufficient foundation for it. I do not share it in the least. I believe that the readers who have here given their minds (or perhaps had any to give) to those strange psychological mysteries in ourselves, of which we are all more or less conscious, will accept your wonders as curious weapons in the armoury of fiction, and will submit themselves to the Art with which said weapons are used. Even to that class of intelligence the marvellous addresses itself from a very strong position; and that class of intelligence is not accustomed to find the marvellous in such very powerful hands as yours. On more imaginative readers the tale will fall (or I am greatly mistaken) like a spell. By readers who combine some imagination, some scepticism, and some knowledge and learning, I hope it will be regarded as full of strange fancy and curious study, startling reflections of their own thoughts and speculations at odd times, and wonder which a master has a right to evoke. In the last point lies, to my thinking, the whole case. If you were the Magician's servant instead of the Magician, these potent spirits would get the better of you; but you _are_ the Magician, and they don't, and you make them serve your purpose. Occasionally in the dialogue I see an expression here and there which might--always solely with a reference to your misgiving--be better away; and I think that the vision, to use the word for want of a better--in the museum, should be made a little less abstruse. I should not say that, if the sale of the journal was below the sale of _The Times_ newspaper; but as it is probably several thousands higher, I do. I would also suggest that after the title we put the two words--A ROMANCE. It is an absurdly easy device for getting over your misgiving with the blockheads, but I think it would be an effective one. I don't, on looking at it, like the title. Here are a few that have occurred to me. "The Steel Casket." "The Lost Manuscript." "Derval Court." "Perpetual Youth." "Maggie." "Dr. Fenwick." "Life and Death." The four last I think the best. There is an objection to "Dr. Fenwick" because there has been "Dr. Antonio," and there is a book of Dumas' which repeats the objection. I don't think "Fenwick" startling enough. It appears to me that a more startling title would take the (John) Bull by the horns, and would be a serviceable concession to your misgiving, as suggesting a story off the stones of the gas-lighted Brentford Road. The title is the first thing to be settled, and cannot be settled too soon. For the purposes of the weekly publication the divisions of the story will often have to be greatly changed, though afterwards, in the complete book, you can, of course, divide it into chapters, free from that reference. For example: I would end the first chapter on the third slip at "and through the ghostly streets, under the ghostly moon, went back to my solitary room." The rest of what is now your first chapter might be made Chapter II., and would end the first weekly part. I think I have become, by dint of necessity and practice, rather cunning in this regard; and perhaps you would not mind my looking closely to such points from week to week. It so happens that if you had written the opening of this story expressly for the occasion its striking incidents could not possibly have followed one another better. One other merely mechanical change I suggest now. I would not have an initial letter for the town, but would state in the beginning that I gave the town a fictitious name. I suppose a blank or a dash rather fends a good many people off--because it always has that effect upon me. Be sure that I am perfectly frank and open in all I have said in this note, and that I have not a grain of reservation in my mind. I think the story a very fine one, one that no other man could write, and that there is no strength in your misgiving for the two reasons: firstly, that the work is professedly a work of Fancy and Fiction, in which the reader is not required against his will to take everything for Fact; secondly, that it is written by the man who can write it. The Magician's servant does not know what to do with the ghost, and has, consequently, no business with him. The Magician does know what to do with him, and has all the business with him that he can transact. I am quite at ease on the points that you have expressed yourself as not at ease upon. Quite. I cannot too often say that if they were carried on weak shoulders they would break the bearer down. But in your mastering of them lies the mastery over the reader. This will reach you at Knebworth, I hope, to-morrow afternoon. Pray give your doubts to the winds of that high spot, and believe that if I had them I would swarm up the flag-staff quite as nimbly as Margrave and nail the Fenwick colours to the top. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 3, HANOVER TERRACE, REGENT'S PARK, _Monday, Twentieth May, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I did not read from Australia till the end, because I was obliged to be hard at work that day, and thought it best that the MS. should come back to you rather than that I should detain it. Of course, I _can_ read it, whenever it suits you. As to Isabel's dying and Fenwick's growing old, I would say that, beyond question, whatever the meaning of the story tends to, is the proper end. All the alterations you mention in your last, are excellent. As to title, "Margrave, a Tale of Mystery," would be sufficiently striking. I prefer "Wonder" to "Mystery," because I think it suggests something higher and more apart from ordinary complications of plot, or the like, which "Mystery" might seem to mean. Will you kindly remark that the title PRESSES, and that it will be a great relief to have it as soon as possible. The last two months of my story are our best time for announcement and preparation. Of course, it is most desirable that your story should have the full benefit of them. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Lady Olliffe.] LORD WARDEN HOTEL, DOVER, _Sunday, Twenty-sixth May, 1861._ MY DEAR LADY OLLIFFE, I have run away to this sea-beach to get rid of my neuralgic face. Touching the kind invitations received from you this morning, I feel that the only course I can take--without being a Humbug--is to decline them. After the middle of June I shall be mostly at Gad's Hill--I know that I cannot do better than keep out of the way of hot rooms and late dinners, and what would you think of me, or call me, if I were to accept and not come! No, no, no. Be still my soul. Be virtuous, eminent author. Do _not_ accept, my Dickens. She is to come to Gad's Hill with her spouse. Await her _there_, my child. (Thus the voice of wisdom.) My dear Lady Olliffe, Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Milner Gibson.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, Eighth July, 1861._ MY DEAR MRS. GIBSON, I want very affectionately and earnestly to congratulate you on your eldest daughter's approaching marriage. Up to the moment when Mary told me of it, I had foolishly thought of her always as the pretty little girl with the frank loving face whom I saw last on the sands at Broadstairs. I rubbed my eyes and woke at the words "going to be married," and found I had been walking in my sleep some years. I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand me when I say so, and no more. But I shall be with you in the best part of myself, in the warmth of sympathy and friendship--and I send my love to the dear girl, and devoutly hope and believe that she will be happy. The face that I remember with perfect accuracy, and could draw here, if I could draw at all, was made to be happy and to make a husband so. I wonder whether you ever travel by railroad in these times! I wish Mary could tempt you to come by any road to this little place. With kind regard to Milner Gibson, believe me ever, Affectionately and faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Seventeenth September, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I am delighted with your letter of yesterday--delighted with the addition to the length of the story--delighted with your account of it, and your interest in it--and even more than delighted by what you say of our working in company. Not one dissentient voice has reached me respecting it. Through the dullest time of the year we held our circulation most gallantly. And it could not have taken a better hold. I saw Forster on Friday (newly returned from thousands of provincial lunatics), and he really was more impressed than I can tell you by what he had seen of it. Just what you say you think it will turn out to be, _he_ was saying, almost in the same words. I am burning to get at the whole story;--and you inflame me in the maddest manner by your references to what I don't know. The exquisite art with which you have changed it, and have overcome the difficulties of the mode of publication, has fairly staggered me. I know pretty well what the difficulties are; and there is no other man who could have done it, I ween. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. H. G. Adams.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Sixth October, 1861._ MY DEAR MR. ADAMS, My readings are a sad subject to me just now, for I am going away on the 28th to read fifty times, and I have lost Mr. Arthur Smith--a friend whom I can never replace--who always went with me, and transacted, as no other man ever can, all the business connected with them, and without whom, I fear, they will be dreary and weary to me. But this is not to the purpose of your letter. I desire to be useful to the Institution of the place with which my childhood is inseparably associated, and I will serve it this next Christmas if I can. Will you tell me when I could do you most good by reading for you? Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Twelfth November, 1861._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I grieve to reply to your note, that I am obliged to read at Newcastle on the 21st. Poor Arthur Smith had pledged me to do so before I knew that my annual engagement with you was being encroached on. I am heartily sorry for this, and shall miss my usual place at your table, quite as much (to say the least) as my place can possibly miss me. You may be sure that I shall drink to my dear old friend in a bumper that day, with love and best wishes. Don't leave me out next year for having been carried away north this time. Ever yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] QUEEN'S HEAD HOTEL, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, _Wednesday Night, Twentieth November, 1861._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I have read here, this evening, very attentively, Nos. 19 and 20. I have not the least doubt of the introduced matter; whether considered for its policy, its beauty, or its wise bearing on the story, it is decidedly a great improvement. It is at once very suggestive and very new to have these various points of view presented to the reader's mind. That the audience is good enough for anything that is well presented to it, I am quite sure. When you can avoid _notes_, however, and get their substance into the text, it is highly desirable in the case of so large an audience, simply because, as so large an audience necessarily reads the story in small portions, it is of the greater importance that they should retain as much of its argument as possible. Whereas the difficulty of getting numbers of people to read notes (which they invariably regard as interruptions of the text, not as strengtheners or elucidators of it) is wonderful. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The same.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Eighteenth December_, 1861. MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I have not had a moment in which to write to you. Even now I write with the greatest press upon me, meaning to write in detail in a day or two. But I have _read_, at all events, though not written. And I say, Most masterly and most admirable! It is impossible to lay the sheets down without finishing them. I showed them to Georgina and Mary, and they read and read and never stirred until they had read all. There cannot be a doubt of the beauty, power, and artistic excellence of the whole. I counsel you most strongly NOT to append the proposed dialogue between Fenwick and Faber, and NOT to enter upon any explanation beyond the title-page and the motto, unless it be in some very brief preface. Decidedly I would not help the reader, if it were only for the reason that that anticipates his being in need of help, and his feeling objections and difficulties that require solution. Let the book explain itself. It speaks _for_ itself with a noble eloquence. Ever affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [72] "A Strange Story." 1862. [Sidenote: The same.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, Twenty-fourth January, 1862._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I have considered your questions, and here follow my replies. 1. I think you undoubtedly _have_ the right to forbid the turning of your play into an opera. 2. I do _not_ think the production of such an opera in the slightest degree likely to injure the play or to render it a less valuable property than it is now. If it could have any effect on so standard and popular a work as "The Lady of Lyons," the effect would, in my judgment, be beneficial. But I believe the play to be high above any such influence. 3. Assuming you do consent to the adaptation, in a desire to oblige Oxenford, I would not recommend your asking any pecuniary compensation. This for two reasons: firstly, because the compensation could only be small at the best; secondly, because your taking it would associate you (unreasonably, but not the less assuredly) with the opera. The only objection I descry is purely one of feeling. Pauline trotting about in front of the float, invoking the orchestra with a limp pocket-handkerchief, is a notion that makes goose-flesh of my back. Also a yelping tenor going away to the wars in a scene a half-an-hour long is painful to contemplate. Damas, too, as a bass, with a grizzled bald head, blatently bellowing about Years long ago, When the sound of the drum First made his blood glow With a rum ti tum tum-- rather sticks in my throat; but there really seems to me to be no other objection, if you can get over this. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Baylis.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, First February, 1862._ MY DEAR MR. BAYLIS, I have just come home. Finding your note, I write to you at once, or you might do me the wrong of supposing me unmindful of it and you. I agree with you about Smith himself, and I don't think it necessary to pursue the painful subject. Such things are at an end, I think, for the time being;--fell to the ground with the poor man at Cremorne. If they should be resumed, then they must be attacked; but I hope the fashion (far too much encouraged in its Blondin-beginning by those who should know much better) is over. It always appears to me that the common people have an excuse in their patronage of such exhibitions which people above them in condition have not. Their lives are full of physical difficulties, and they like to see such difficulties overcome. They go to see them overcome. If I am in danger of falling off a scaffold or a ladder any day, the man who claims that he can't fall from anything is a very wonderful and agreeable person to me. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] 16, HYDE PARK GATE, SOUTH KENSINGTON GORE, W., _Saturday, 1st March, 1862._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, I was at your lecture[73] this afternoon, and I hope I may venture to tell you that I was extremely pleased and interested. Both the matter of the materials and the manner of their arrangement were quite admirable, and a modesty and complete absence of any kind of affectation pervaded the whole discourse, which was quite an example to the many whom it concerns. If you could be a very little louder, and would never let a sentence go for the thousandth part of an instant until the last word is out, you would find the audience more responsive. A spoken sentence will never run alone in all its life, and is never to be trusted to itself in its most insignificant member. See it _well out_--with the voice--and the part of the audience is made surprisingly easier. In that excellent description of the Spanish mendicant and his guitar, as well as the very happy touches about the dance and the castanets, the people were really desirous to express very hearty appreciation; but by giving them rather too much to do in watching and listening for latter words, you stopped them. I take the liberty of making the remark, as one who has fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas. For the rest nothing could be better. Knowledge, ingenuity, neatness, condensation, good sense, and good taste in delightful combination. Affectionately always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Austin.] PARIS, RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONOR�, 27, _Friday, Seventh November, 1862._ MY DEAR LETITIA, I should have written to you from here sooner, but for having been constantly occupied. Your improved account of yourself is very cheering and hopeful. Through determined occupation and action, lies the way. Be sure of it. I came over to France before Georgina and Mary, and went to Boulogne to meet them coming in by the steamer on the great Sunday--the day of the storm. I stood (holding on with both hands) on the pier at Boulogne, five hours. The Sub-Marine Telegraph had telegraphed their boat as having come out of Folkestone--though the companion boat from Boulogne didn't try it--and at nine o'clock at night, she being due at six, there were no signs of her. My principal dread was, that she would try to get into Boulogne; which she could not possibly have done without carrying away everything on deck. The tide at nine o'clock being too low for any such desperate attempt, I thought it likely that they had run for the Downs and would knock about there all night. So I went to the Inn to dry my pea-jacket and get some dinner anxiously enough, when, at about ten, came a telegram from them at Calais to say they had run in there. To Calais I went, post, next morning, expecting to find them half-dead (of course, they had arrived half-drowned), but I found them elaborately got up to come on to Paris by the next Train, and the most wonderful thing of all was, that they hardly seem to have been frightened! Of course, they had discovered at the end of the voyage, that a young bride and her husband, the only other passengers on deck, and with whom they had been talking all the time, were an officer from Chatham whom they knew very well (when dry), just married and going to India! So they all set up house-keeping together at Dessin's at Calais (where I am well known), and looked as if they had been passing a mild summer there. We have a pretty apartment here, but house-rent is awful to mention. Mrs. Bouncer (muzzled by the Parisian police) is also here, and is a wonderful spectacle to behold in the streets, restrained like a raging Lion. I learn from an embassy here, that the Emperor has just made an earnest proposal to our Government to unite with France (and Russia, if Russia will) in an appeal to America to stop the brutal war. Our Government's answer is not yet received, but I think I clearly perceive that the proposal will be declined, on the ground "that the time has not yet come." Ever affectionately. FOOTNOTE: [73] The first of the series on "National Music." 1863. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, December 18th, 1863._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, This is a "Social Science" note, touching prospective engagements. If you are obliged, as you were last year, to go away between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, then we rely upon your coming back to see the old year out. Furthermore, I rely upon you for this: Lady Molesworth says she will come down for a day or two, and I have told her that I shall ask you to be her escort, and to arrange a time. Will you take counsel with her, and arrange accordingly? After our family visitors are gone, Mary is going a-hunting in Hampshire; but if you and Lady Molesworth could make out from Saturday, the 9th of January, as your day of coming together, or for any day between that and Saturday, the 16th, it would be beforehand with her going and would suit me excellently. There is a new officer at the dockyard, _vice_ Captain ---- (now an admiral), and I will take that opportunity of paying him and his wife the attention of asking them to dine in these gorgeous halls. For all of which reasons, if the Social Science Congress of two could meet and arrive at a conclusion, the conclusion would be thankfully booked by the illustrious writer of these lines. On Christmas Eve there is a train from your own Victoria Station at 4.35 p.m., which will bring you to Strood (Rochester Bridge Station) in an hour, and there a majestic form will be descried in a Basket. Yours affectionately. 1864. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] LORD WARDEN HOTEL, DOVER, _Sunday, 16th October, 1864._ MY DEAR WILLS, I was unspeakably relieved, and most agreeably surprised to get your letter this morning. I had pictured you as lying there waiting full another week. Whereas, please God, you will now come up with a wet sheet and a flowing sail--as we say in these parts. My expectations of "Mrs. Lirriper's" sale are not so mighty as yours, but I am heartily glad and grateful to be honestly able to believe that she is nothing but a good 'un. It is the condensation of a quantity of subjects and the very greatest pains. George Russell knew nothing whatever of the slightest doubt of your being elected at the Garrick. Rely on my probing the matter to the bottom and ascertaining everything about it, and giving you the fullest information in ample time to decide what shall be done. Don't bother yourself about it. I have spoken. On my eyes be it. As next week will not be my working-time at "Our Mutual Friend," I shall devote the day of Friday (_not_ the evening) to making up news. Therefore I write to say that if you would rather stay where you are than come to London, _don't come_. I shall throw my hat into the ring at eleven, and shall receive all the punishment that can be administered by two Nos. on end like a British Glutton. Ever. [Sidenote: The same.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, 30th November, 1864._ MY DEAR WILLS, I found the beautiful and perfect Brougham[74] awaiting me in triumph at the Station when I came down yesterday afternoon. Georgina and Marsh were both highly mortified that it had fallen dark, and the beauties of the carriage were obscured. But of course I had it out in the yard the first thing this morning, and got in and out at both the doors, and let down and pulled up the windows, and checked an imaginary coachman, and leaned back in a state of placid contemplation. It is the lightest and prettiest and best carriage of the class ever made. But you know that I value it for higher reasons than these. It will always be dear to me--far dearer than anything on wheels could ever be for its own sake--as a proof of your ever generous friendship and appreciation, and a memorial of a happy intercourse and a perfect confidence that have never had a break, and that surely never can have any break now (after all these years) but one. Ever your faithful. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, 31st December, 1864._ MY DEAR MARY, Many happy years to you and those who are near and dear to you. These and a thousand unexpressed good wishes of his heart from the humble Jo. And also an earnest word of commendation of the little Christmas book.[75] Very gracefully and charmingly done. The right feeling, the right touch; a very neat hand, and a very true heart. Ever your affectionate. FOOTNOTES: [74] A present from Mr. Wills. [75] The book was called "Woodland Gossip." 1865. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, 20th July, 1865._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I am truly sorry to reply to your kind and welcome note that we cannot come to Knebworth on a visit at this time: firstly, because I am tied by the leg to my book. Secondly, because my married daughter and her husband are with us. Thirdly, because my two boys are at home for their holidays. But if you would come out of that murky electioneering atmosphere and come to us, you don't know how delighted we should be. You should have your own way as completely as though you were at home. You should have a cheery room, and you should have a Swiss châlet all to yourself to write in. _Smoking regarded as a personal favour to the family._ Georgina is so insupportably vain on account of being a favourite of yours, that you might find _her_ a drawback; but nothing else would turn out in that way, I hope. _Won't_ you manage it? _Do_ think of it. If, for instance, you would come back with us on that Guild Saturday. I have turned the house upside down and inside out since you were here, and have carved new rooms out of places then non-existent. Pray do think of it, and do manage it. I should be heartily pleased. I hope you will find the purpose and the plot of my book very plain when you see it as a whole piece. I am looking forward to sending you the proofs complete about the end of next month. It is all sketched out and I am working hard on it, giving it all the pains possible to be bestowed on a labour of love. Your critical opinion two months in advance of the public will be invaluable to me. For you know what store I set by it, and how I think over a hint from you. I notice the latest piece of poisoning ingenuity in Pritchard's case. When he had made his medical student boarders sick, by poisoning the family food, he then quietly walked out, took an emetic, and made himself sick. This with a view to ask them, in examination on a possible trial, whether he did not present symptoms at the time like the rest?--A question naturally asked for him and answered in the affirmative. From which I get at the fact. If your constituency don't bring you in they deserve to lose you, and may the Gods continue to confound them! I shudder at the thought of such public life as political life. Would there not seem to be something horribly rotten in the system of it, when one stands amazed how any man--not forced into it by position, as you are--can bear to live it? But the private life here is my point, and again I urge upon you. Do think of it, and Do come. I want to tell you how I have been impressed by the "Boatman." It haunts me as only a beautiful and profound thing can. The lines are always running in my head, as the river runs with me. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," NO. 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, W.C., _Saturday, 28th of October, 1865._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, I find your letter here only to-day. I shall be delighted to dine with you on Tuesday, the 7th, but I cannot answer for Mary, as she is staying with the Lehmanns. To the best of my belief, she is coming to Gad's this evening to dine with a neighbour. In that case, she will immediately answer for herself. I have seen the _Athenæum_, and most heartily and earnestly thank you. Trust me, there is nothing I could have wished away, and all that I read there affects and delights me. I feel so generous an appreciation and sympathy so very strongly, that if I were to try to write more, I should blur the words by seeing them dimly. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Procter.] GAD'S HILL, _Sunday, 29th October, 1865._ MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER, The beautiful table-cover was a most cheering surprise to me when I came home last night, and I lost not a moment in finding a table for it, where it stands in a beautiful light and a perfect situation. Accept my heartiest thanks for a present on which I shall set a peculiar and particular value. Enclosed is the MS. of the introduction.[76] The printers have cut it across and mended it again, because I always expect them to be quick, and so they distribute my "copy" among several hands, and apparently not very clean ones in this instance. Odd as the poor butcher's feeling appears, I think I can understand it. Much as he would not have liked his boy's grave to be without a tombstone, had he died ashore and had a grave, so he can't bear him to drift to the depths of the ocean unrecorded. My love to Procter. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. B. Rye.[77]] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, 3rd November, 1865._ DEAR SIR, I beg you to accept my cordial thanks for your curious "Visits to Rochester." As I peeped about its old corners with interest and wonder when I was a very little child, few people can find a greater charm in that ancient city than I do. Believe me, yours faithfully and obliged. FOOTNOTES: [76] Written by Charles Dickens for a new edition of Miss Adelaide Procter's Poems, which was published after her death. [77] Late keeper of printed books at the British Museum, now of Exeter. 1866. [Sidenote: Mr. Forster.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, 26th January, 1866._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I most heartily hope that your doleful apprehensions will prove unfounded. These changes from muggy weather to slight sharp frost, and back again, touch weak places, as I find by my own foot; but the touch goes by. May it prove so with you! Yesterday Captain ----, Captain ----, and Captain ----, dined at Gad's. They are, all three, naval officers of the highest reputation. ---- is supposed to be the best sailor in our Service. I said I had been remarking at home, _à propos_ of the _London_, that I knew of no shipwreck of a large strong ship (not carrying weight of guns) in the open sea, and that I could find none such in the shipwreck books. They all agreed that the unfortunate Captain Martin _must_ have been unacquainted with the truth as to what can and what can not be done with a Steamship having rigging and canvas; and that no sailor would dream of turning a ship's stern to such a gale--_unless his vessel could run faster than the sea_. ---- said (and the other two confirmed) that the _London_ was the better for everything that she lost aloft in such a gale, and that with her head kept to the wind by means of a storm topsail--which is hoisted from the deck and requires no man to be sent aloft, and can be set under the worst circumstances--the disaster could not have occurred. If he had no such sail, he could have improvised it, even of hammocks and the like. They said that under a Board of Enquiry into the wreck, any efficient witness must of necessity state this as the fact, and could not possibly avoid the conclusion that the seamanship was utterly bad; and as to the force of the wind, for which I suggested allowance, they all had been in West Indian hurricanes and in Typhoons, and had put the heads of their ships to the wind under the most adverse circumstances. I thought you might be interested in this, as you have no doubt been interested in the case. They had a great respect for the unfortunate Captain's character, and for his behaviour when the case was hopeless, but they had not the faintest doubt that he lost the ship and those two hundred and odd lives. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. R. M. Ross.[78]] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, 19th February, 1866._ DEAR SIR, I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your obliging letter enclosing a copy of the Resolution passed by the members of the St. George Club on my last past birthday. Do me the kindness to assure those friends of mine that I am touched to the heart by their affectionate remembrance, and that I highly esteem it. To have established such relations with readers of my books is a great happiness to me, and one that I hope never to forfeit by being otherwise than manfully and truly in earnest in my vocation. I am, dear sir, Your faithful servant. [Sidenote: Mr. R. Browning.] 6, SOUTHWICK PLACE, HYDE PARK, _Monday, 12th March, 1866._ MY DEAR BROWNING,[79] Will you dine here next Sunday at half-past six punctually, instead of with Forster? I am going to read Thirty times, in London and elsewhere, and as I am coming out with "Doctor Marigold," I had written to ask Forster to come on Sunday and hear me sketch him. Forster says (with his own boldness) that he is sure it would not bore you to have that taste of his quality after dinner. I should be delighted if this should prove true. But I give warning that in that case I shall exact a promise from you to come to St. James's Hall one evening in April or May, and hear "David Copperfield," my own particular favourite. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Lord Lytton.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, 16th July, 1866._ MY DEAR LYTTON, First, let me congratulate you on the honour which Lord Derby has conferred upon the peerage. And next, let me thank you heartily for your kind letter. I am very sorry to report that we are so encumbered with engagements in the way of visitors coming here that we cannot see our way to getting to Knebworth yet. Mary and Georgina send you their kind regard, and hope that the delight of coming to see you is only deferred. Fitzgerald will be so proud of your opinion of his "Mrs. Tillotson," and will (I know) derive such great encouragement from it that I have faithfully quoted it, word for word, and sent it on to him in Ireland. He is a very clever fellow (you may remember, perhaps, that I brought him to Knebworth on the Guild day) and has charming sisters and an excellent position. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.[80]] _September, 1866._ MY DEAR SIR, Again I have to thank you very heartily for your kindness in writing to me about my son. The intelligence you send me concerning him is a great relief and satisfaction to my mind, and I cannot separate those feelings from a truly grateful recognition of the advice and assistance for which he is much beholden to you, or from his strong desire to deserve your good opinion. Believe me always, my dear sir, Your faithful and truly obliged. [Sidenote: Anonymous.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday, 27th December, 1866._ DEAR MADAM,[81] You make an absurd, though common mistake, in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers. I know nothing about "impenetrable barrier," "outsiders," and "charmed circles." I know that anyone who can write what is suitable to the requirements of my own journal--for instance--is a person I am heartily glad to discover, and do not very often find. And I believe this to be no rare case in periodical literature. I cannot undertake to advise you in the abstract, as I number my unknown correspondents by the hundred. But if you offer anything to me for insertion in "All the Year Round," you may be sure that it will be honestly read, and that it will be judged by no test but its own merits and adaptability to those pages. But I am bound to add that I do not regard successful fiction as a thing to be achieved in "leisure moments." Faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [78] The honorary secretary of the St. George Club, Manchester. [79] Robert Browning, the Poet, a dear and valued friend. [80] Mr. Rusden was, at this time, Clerk to the House of Parliament, in Melbourne. He was the kindest of friends to the two sons of Charles Dickens, in Australia, from the time that the elder of the two first went out there. And Charles Dickens had the most grateful regard for him, and maintained a frequent correspondence with him--as a friend--although they never saw each other. [81] Anonymous. 1867. [Sidenote: Hon. Robert Lytton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, 17th April, 1867._ MY DEAR ROBERT LYTTON,[82] It would have been really painful to me, if I had seen you and yours at a Reading of mine in right of any other credentials than my own. Your appreciation has given me higher and purer gratification than your modesty can readily believe. When I first entered on this interpretation of myself (then quite strange in the public ear) I was sustained by the hope that I could drop into some hearts, some new expression of the meaning of my books, that would touch them in a new way. To this hour that purpose is so strong in me, and so real are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers, as if I had never stood there before. You will know from this what a delight it is to be delicately understood, and why your earnest words cannot fail to move me. We are delighted to be remembered by your charming wife, and I am entrusted with more messages from this house to her, than you would care to give or withhold, so I suppress them myself and absolve you from the difficulty. Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry W. Phillips.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday, 16th April, 1867._ MY DEAR MR. PHILLIPS,[83] Although I think the scheme has many good points, I have this doubt: Would boys so maintained at any one of our great public schools stand at a decided disadvantage towards boys not so maintained? Foundation Scholars, in many cases, win their way into public schools and so enforce respect and even assert superiority. In many other cases their patron is a remote and misty person, or Institution, sanctioned by Time and custom. But the proposed position would be a very different one for a student to hold, and boys are too often inconsiderate, proud, and cruel. I should like to know whether this point has received consideration from the projectors of the design? Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry F. Chorley.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, June 2nd, 1867._ MY DEAR CHORLEY, Thank God I have come triumphantly through the heavy work of the fifty-one readings, and am wonderfully fresh. I grieve to hear of your sad occupation. You know where to find rest, and quiet, and sympathy, when you can change the dreary scene. I saw poor dear Stanfield (on a hint from his eldest son) in a day's interval between two expeditions. It was clear that the shadow of the end had fallen on him. It happened well that I had seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea-effect, of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it under his pillow. This place is looking very pretty. The freshness and repose of it, after all those thousands of gas-lighted faces, sink into the soul.[84] [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] _September 3rd, 1867._ MY DEAR FIELDS,[85] Your cheering letter of the 21st of August arrived here this morning. A thousand thanks for it. I begin to think (nautically) that I "head west'ard." You shall hear from me fully and finally as soon as Dolby shall have reported personally. The other day I received a letter from Mr. ----, of New York (who came over in the winning yacht, and described the voyage in _The Times_), saying he would much like to see me. I made an appointment in London, and observed that when he _did_ see me he was obviously astonished. While I was sensible that the magnificence of my appearance would fully account for his being overcome, I nevertheless angled for the cause of his surprise. He then told me that there was a paragraph going round the papers to the effect that I was "in a critical state of health." I asked him if he was sure it wasn't "cricketing" state of health. To which he replied, Quite. I then asked him down here to dinner, and he was again staggered by finding me in sporting training; also much amused. Yesterday's and to-day's post bring me this unaccountable paragraph from hosts of uneasy friends, with the enormous and wonderful addition that "eminent surgeons" are sending me to America for "cessation from literary labour"!!! So I have written a quiet line to _The Times_, certifying to my own state of health, and have also begged Dixon to do the like in _The Athenæum_. I mention the matter to you, in order that you may contradict, from me, if the nonsense should reach America unaccompanied by the truth. But I suppose that _The New York Herald_ will probably have got the letter from Mr. ---- aforesaid. . . . Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins are here; and the joke of the time is to feel my pulse when I appear at table, and also to inveigle innocent messengers to come over to the summer-house, where I write (the place is quite changed since you were here, and a tunnel under the highroad connects this shrubbery with the front garden), to ask, with their compliments, how I find myself _now_. If I come to America this next November, even you can hardly imagine with what interest I shall try Copperfield on an American audience, or, if they give me their heart, how freely and fully I shall give them mine. We will ask Dolby then whether he ever heard it before. I cannot thank you enough for your invaluable help to Dolby. He writes that at every turn and moment the sense and knowledge and tact of Mr. Osgood are inestimable to him. Ever, my dear Fields, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Lord Lytton.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Tuesday, 17th September, 1867._ MY DEAR LYTTON, I am happy to tell you that the play was admirably done last night, and made a marked impression. Pauline is weak, but so carefully trained and fitted into the picture as to be never disagreeable, and sometimes (as in the last scene) very pathetic. Fechter has played nothing nearly so well as Claude since he played in Paris in the "Dame aux Camélias," or in London as Ruy Blas. He played the fourth act as finely as Macready, and the first much better. The dress and bearing in the fifth act are quite new, and quite excellent. Of the Scenic arrangements, the most noticeable are:--the picturesque struggle of the cottage between the taste of an artist, and the domestic means of poverty (expressed to the eye with infinite tact);--the view of Lyons (Act v. Scene 1), with a foreground of quay wall which the officers are leaning on, waiting for the general;--and the last scene--a suite of rooms giving on a conservatory at the back, through which the moon is shining. You are to understand that all these scenic appliances are subdued to the Piece, instead of the Piece being sacrificed to them; and that every group and situation has to be considered, not only with a reference to each by itself, but to the whole story. Beauséant's speaking the original contents of the letter was a decided point, and the immense house was quite breathless when the Tempter and the Tempted stood confronted as he made the proposal. There was obviously a great interest in seeing a Frenchman play the part. The scene between Claude and Gaspar (the small part very well done) was very closely watched for the same reason, and was loudly applauded. I cannot say too much of the brightness, intelligence, picturesqueness, and care of Fechter's impersonation throughout. There was a remarkable delicacy in his gradually drooping down on his way home with his bride, until he fell upon the table, a crushed heap of shame and remorse, while his mother told Pauline the story. His gradual recovery of himself as he formed better resolutions was equally well expressed; and his being at last upright again and rushing enthusiastically to join the army, brought the house down. I wish you could have been there. He never spoke English half so well as he spoke your English; and the audience heard it with the finest sympathy and respect. I felt that I should have been very proud indeed to have been the writer of the Play. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] [86]_October, 1867._ MY DEAR FIELDS, I hope the telegraph clerks did not mutilate out of recognition or reasonable guess the words I added to Dolby's last telegram to Boston. "_Tribune_ London correspondent totally false." Not only is there not a word of truth in the pretended conversation, but it is so absurdly unlike me that I cannot suppose it to be even invented by anyone who ever heard me exchange a word with mortal creature. For twenty years I am perfectly certain that I have never made any other allusion to the republication of my books in America than the good-humoured remark, "that if there had been international copyright between England and the States, I should have been a man of very large fortune, instead of a man of moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive public position." Nor have I ever been such a fool as to charge the absence of international copyright upon individuals. Nor have I ever been so ungenerous as to disguise or suppress the fact that I have received handsome sums for advance sheets. When I was in the States, I said what I had to say on the question, and there an end. I am absolutely certain that I have never since expressed myself, even with soreness, on the subject. Reverting to the preposterous fabrication of the London correspondent, the statement that I ever talked about "these fellows" who republished my books or pretended to know (what I don't know at this instant) who made how much out of them, or ever talked of their sending me "conscience money," is as grossly and completely false as the statement that I ever said anything to the effect that I could not be expected to have an interest in the American people. And nothing can by any possibility be falser than that. Again and again in these pages ("All the Year Round") I have expressed my interest in them. You will see it in the "Child's History of England." You will see it in the last preface to "American Notes." Every American who has ever spoken with me in London, Paris, or where not, knows whether I have frankly said, "You could have no better introduction to me than your country." And for years and years when I have been asked about reading in America, my invariable reply has been, "I have so many friends there, and constantly receive so many earnest letters from personally unknown readers there, that, but for domestic reasons, I would go to-morrow." I think I must, in the confidential intercourse between you and me, have written you to this effect more than once. The statement of the London correspondent from beginning to end is false. It is false in the letter and false in the spirit. He may have been misinformed, and the statement may not have originated with him. With whomsoever it originated, it never originated with me, and consequently is false. More than enough about it. As I hope to see you so soon, my dear Fields, and as I am busily at work on the Christmas number, I will not make this a longer letter than I can help. I thank you most heartily for your proffered hospitality, and need not tell you that if I went to any friend's house in America, I would go to yours. But the readings are very hard work, and I think I cannot do better than observe the rule on that side of the Atlantic which I observe on this, of never, under such circumstances, going to a friend's house, but always staying at a hotel. I am able to observe it here, by being consistent and never breaking it. If I am equally consistent there, I can (I hope) offend no one. Dolby sends his love to you and all his friends (as I do), and is girding up his loins vigorously. Ever, my dear Fields, Heartily and affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thornbury.] GAD'S HILL, _Saturday, 5th October, 1867._ MY DEAR THORNBURY, Behold the best of my judgment on your questions.[87] Susan Hopley and Jonathan Bradford? No. Too well known. London Strikes and Spitalfields Cutters? Yes. Fighting FitzGerald? Never mind him. Duel of Lord Mohun and Duke of Hamilton? Ye-e-es. Irish Abductions? I think not. Brunswick Theatre? More Yes than No. Theatrical Farewells? Yes. Bow Street Runners (as compared with Modern Detectives)? Yes. Vauxhall and Ranelagh in the Last Century? Most decidedly. Don't forget Miss Burney. Smugglers? No. Overdone. Lacenaire? No. Ditto. Madame Laffarge? No. Ditto. Fashionable Life Last Century? Most decidedly yes. Debates on the Slave Trade? Yes, generally. But beware of the Pirates, as we did them in the beginning of "Household Words." Certainly I acquit you of all blame in the Bedford case. But one cannot do otherwise than sympathise with a son who is reasonably tender of his father's memory. And no amount of private correspondence, we must remember, reaches the readers of a printed and published statement. I told you some time ago that I believed the arsenic in Eliza Fenning's case to have been administered by the apprentice. I never was more convinced of anything in my life than of the girl's innocence, and I want words in which to express my indignation at the muddle-headed story of that parsonic blunderer whose audacity and conceit distorted some words that fell from her in the last days of her baiting. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Lord Lytton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, 14th October, 1867._ MY DEAR LYTTON, I am truly delighted to find that you are so well pleased with Fechter in "The Lady of Lyons." It was a labour of love with him, and I hold him in very high regard. _Don't_ give way to laziness, and _do_ proceed with that play. There never was a time when a good new play was more wanted, or had a better opening for itself. Fechter is a thorough artist, and what he may sometimes want in personal force is compensated by the admirable whole he can make of a play, and his perfect understanding of its presentation as a picture to the eye and mind. I leave London on the 8th of November early, and sail from Liverpool on the 9th. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: The same.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Friday, 25th October, 1867._ MY DEAR LYTTON, I have read the Play[88] with great attention, interest, and admiration; and I need not say to _you_ that the art of it--the fine construction--the exquisite nicety of the touches--with which it is wrought out--have been a study to me in the pursuit of which I have had extraordinary relish. Taking the Play as it stands, I have nothing whatever to add to your notes and memoranda of the points to be touched again, except that I have a little uneasiness in that burst of anger and inflexibility consequent on having been deceived, coming out of Hegio. I see the kind of actor who _must_ play Hegio, and I see that the audience will not believe in his doing anything so serious. (I suppose it would be impossible to get this effect out of the mother--or through the mother's influence, instead of out of the godfather of Hegiopolis?) Now, as to the classical ground and manners of the Play. I suppose the objection to the Greek dress to be already--as Defoe would write it, "gotten over" by your suggestion. I suppose the dress not to be conventionally associated with stilts and boredom, but to be new to the public eye and very picturesque. Grant all that;--the names remain. Now, not only used such names to be inseparable in the public mind from stately weariness, but of late days they have become inseparable in the same public mind from silly puns upon the names, and from Burlesque. You do not know (I hope, at least, for my friend's sake) what the Strand Theatre is. A Greek name and a break-down nigger dance, have become inseparable there. I do not mean to say that your genius may not be too powerful for such associations; but I do most positively mean to say that you would lose half the play in overcoming them. At the best you would have to contend against them through the first three acts. The old tendency to become frozen on classical ground would be in the best part of the audience; the new tendency to titter on such ground would be in the worst part. And instead of starting fair with the audience, it is my conviction that you would start with them against you and would have to win them over. Furthermore, with reference to your note to me on this head, you take up a position with reference to poor dear Talfourd's "Ion" which I altogether dispute. It never was a popular play, I say. It derived a certain amount of out-of-door's popularity from the circumstances under which, and the man by whom, it was written. But I say that it never was a popular play on the Stage, and never made out a case of attraction there. As to changing the ground to Russia, let me ask you, did you ever see the "Nouvelles Russes" of Nicolas Gogol, translated into French by Louis Viardot? There is a story among them called "Tarass Boulla," in which, as it seems to me, all the conditions you want for such transplantation are to be found. So changed, you would have the popular sympathy with the Slave or Serf, or Prisoner of War, from the first. But I do not think it is to be got, save at great hazard, and with lamentable waste of force on the ground the Play now occupies. I shall keep this note until to-morrow to correct my conviction if I can see the least reason for correcting it; but I feel very confident indeed that I cannot be shaken in it. * * * * * _Saturday._ I have thought it over again, and have gone over the play again with an imaginary stage and actors before me, and I am still of the same mind. Shall I keep the MS. till you come to town? Believe me, ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Fechter.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, _3rd December, 1867._ MY DEAR FECHTER, I have been very uneasy about you, seeing in the paper that you were taken ill on the stage. But a letter from Georgy this morning reassures me by giving me a splendid account of your triumphant last night at the Lyceum. I hope to bring out our Play[89] with Wallack in New York, and to have it played in many other parts of the States. I have sent to Wilkie for models, etc. If I waited for time to do more than write you my love, I should miss the mail to-morrow. Take my love, then, my dear fellow, and believe me ever Your affectionate. FOOTNOTES: [82] The Hon. Robert Lytton--now the Earl of Lytton--in literature well known as "Owen Meredith." [83] Mr. Henry W. Phillips, at this time secretary of the Artists' General Benevolent Society. He was eager to establish some educational system in connection with that institution. [84] The remainder has been cut off for the signature. [85] This and all other Letters to Mr. J. T. Fields were printed in Mr. Fields' "In and Out of Doors with Charles Dickens." [86] A ridiculous paragraph in the papers following close on the public announcement that Charles Dickens was coming to America in November, drew from him this letter to Mr. Fields, dated early in October. [87] As to subjects for articles in "All the Year Round." [88] The Play referred to is founded on the "Captives" of Plautus, and is entitled "The Captives." It has never been acted or published. [89] "No Thoroughfare." 1868. _3rd February, 1868._ [90]Articles of Agreement entered into at Baltimore, in the United States of America, this third day of February in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight, between ---- ----, British subject, _alias_ the man of Ross, and ---- ---- ----, American citizen, _alias_ the Boston Bantam. Whereas, some Bounce having arisen between the above men in reference to feats of pedestrianism and agility, they have agreed to settle their differences and prove who is the better man, by means of a walking-match for two hats a side and the glory of their respective countries; and whereas they agree that the said match shall come off, whatsoever the weather, on the Mill Dam Road outside Boston, on Saturday, the twenty-ninth day of this present month; and whereas they agree that the personal attendants on themselves during the whole walk, and also the umpires and starters and declarers of victory in the match shall be ---- ---- of Boston, known in sporting circles as Massachusetts Jemmy, and Charles Dickens of Falstaff's Gad's Hill, whose surprising performances (without the least variation) on that truly national instrument, the American catarrh, have won for him the well-merited title of the Gad's Hill Gasper: 1. The men are to be started, on the day appointed, by Massachusetts Jemmy and The Gasper. 2. Jemmy and The Gasper are, on some previous day, to walk out at the rate of not less than four miles an hour by The Gasper's watch, for one hour and a half. At the expiration of that one hour and a half they are to carefully note the place at which they halt. On the match's coming off they are to station themselves in the middle of the road, at that precise point, and the men (keeping clear of them and of each other) are to turn round them, right shoulder inward, and walk back to the starting-point. The man declared by them to pass the starting-point first is to be the victor and the winner of the match. 3. No jostling or fouling allowed. 4. All cautions or orders issued to the men by the umpires, starters, and declarers of victory to be considered final and admitting of no appeal. A sporting narrative of the match to be written by The Gasper within one week after its coming off, and the same to be duly printed (at the expense of the subscribers to these articles) on a broadside. The said broadside to be framed and glazed, and one copy of the same to be carefully preserved by each of the subscribers to these articles. 6. The men to show on the evening of the day of walking at six o'clock precisely, at the Parker House, Boston, when and where a dinner will be given them by The Gasper. The Gasper to occupy the chair, faced by Massachusetts Jemmy. The latter promptly and formally to invite, as soon as may be after the date of these presents, the following guests to honour the said dinner with their presence; that is to say [here follow the names of a few of his friends, whom he wished to be invited]. Now, lastly. In token of their accepting the trusts and offices by these articles conferred upon them, these articles are solemnly and formally signed by Massachusetts Jemmy and by the Gad's Hill Gasper, as well as by the men themselves. Signed by the Man of Ross, otherwise ----. Signed by the Boston Bantam, otherwise ----. Signed by Massachusetts Jemmy, otherwise ----. Signed by the Gad's Hill Gasper, otherwise Charles Dickens. Witness to the signatures, ----. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Lanman.] WASHINGTON, _February 5th, 1868._ MY DEAR SIR, Allow me to thank you most cordially for your kind letter, and for its accompanying books. I have a particular love for books of travel, and shall wander into the "Wilds of America" with great interest. I have also received your charming Sketch with great pleasure and admiration. Let me thank you for it heartily. As a beautiful suggestion of nature associated with this country, it shall have a quiet place on the walls of my house as long as I live. Your reference to my dear friend Washington Irving renews the vivid impressions reawakened in my mind at Baltimore the other day. I saw his fine face for the last time in that city. He came there from New York to pass a day or two with me before I went westward, and they were made among the most memorable of my life by his delightful fancy and genial humour. Some unknown admirer of his books and mine sent to the hotel a most enormous mint julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, one on either side of it, with great solemnity (it filled a respectable-sized paper), but the solemnity was of very short duration. It was quite an enchanted julep, and carried us among innumerable people and places that we both knew. The julep held out far into the night, and my memory never saw him afterward otherwise than as bending over it, with his straw, with an attempted gravity (after some anecdote, involving some wonderfully droll and delicate observation of character), and then, as his eyes caught mine, melting into that captivating laugh of his which was the brightest and best I have ever heard. Dear Sir, with many thanks, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Pease.] BALTIMORE, _9th February, 1868._ DEAR MADAM, Mr. Dolby has _not_ come between us, and I have received your letter. My answer to it is, unfortunately, brief. I am not coming to Cleveland or near it. Every evening on which I can possibly read during the remainder of my stay in the States is arranged for, and the fates divide me from "the big woman with two smaller ones in tow." So I send her my love (to be shared in by the two smaller ones, if she approve--but not otherwise), and seriously assure her that her pleasant letter has been most welcome. Dear madam, faithfully your friend. [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] ABOARD THE "RUSSIA," BOUND FOR LIVERPOOL, _Sunday, 26th April, 1868._ MY DEAR FIELDS, In order that you may have the earliest intelligence of me, I begin this note to-day in my small cabin, purposing (if it should prove practicable) to post it at Queenstown for the return steamer. We are already past the Banks of Newfoundland, although our course was seventy miles to the south, with the view of avoiding ice seen by Judkins in the _Scotia_ on his passage out to New York. The _Russia_ is a magnificent ship, and has dashed along bravely. We had made more than thirteen hundred and odd miles at noon to-day. The wind, after being a little capricious, rather threatens at the present time to turn against us, but our run is already eighty miles ahead of the _Russia's_ last run in this direction--a very fast one. . . . To all whom it may concern, report the _Russia_ in the highest terms. She rolls more easily than the other Cunard Screws, is kept in perfect order, and is most carefully looked after in all departments. We have had nothing approaching to heavy weather, still one can speak to the trim of the ship. Her captain, a gentleman; bright, polite, good-natured, and vigilant. . . . As to me, I am greatly better, I hope. I have got on my right boot to-day for the first time; the "true American" seems to be turning faithless at last; and I made a Gad's Hill breakfast this morning, as a further advance on having otherwise eaten and drunk all day ever since Wednesday. You will see Anthony Trollope, I daresay. What was my amazement to see him with these eyes come aboard in the mail tender just before we started! He had come out in the _Scotia_ just in time to dash off again in said tender to shake hands with me, knowing me to be aboard here. It was most heartily done. He is on a special mission of convention with the United States post-office. We have been picturing your movements, and have duly checked off your journey home, and have talked about you continually. But I have thought about you both, even much, much more. You will never know how I love you both; or what you have been to me in America, and will always be to me everywhere; or how fervently I thank you. All the working of the ship seems to be done on my forehead. It is scrubbed and holystoned (my head--not the deck) at three every morning. It is scraped and swabbed all day. Eight pairs of heavy boots are now clattering on it, getting the ship under sail again. Legions of ropes'-ends are flopped upon it as I write, and I must leave off with Dolby's love. * * * * * _Thursday, 30th._ Soon after I left off as above we had a gale of wind which blew all night. For a few hours on the evening side of midnight there was no getting from this cabin of mine to the saloon, or _vice versâ_, so heavily did the sea break over the decks. The ship, however, made nothing of it, and we were all right again by Monday afternoon. Except for a few hours yesterday (when we had a very light head-wind), the weather has been constantly favourable, and we are now bowling away at a great rate, with a fresh breeze filling all our sails. We expect to be at Queenstown between midnight and three in the morning. I hope, my dear Fields, you may find this legible, but I rather doubt it, for there is motion enough on the ship to render writing to a landsman, however accustomed to pen and ink, rather a difficult achievement. Besides which, I slide away gracefully from the paper, whenever I want to be particularly expressive. . . . ----, sitting opposite to me at breakfast, always has the following items: A large dish of porridge into which he casts slices of butter and a quantity of sugar. Two cups of tea. A steak. Irish stew. Chutnee and marmalade. Another deputation of two has solicited a reading to-night. Illustrious novelist has unconditionally and absolutely declined. More love, and more to that, from your ever affectionate friend. [Sidenote: The same.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _May 15th, 1868._ MY DEAR FIELDS, I have found it so extremely difficult to write about America (though never so briefly) without appearing to blow trumpets on the one hand, or to be inconsistent with my avowed determination _not_ to write about it on the other, that I have taken the simple course enclosed. The number will be published on the 6th of June. It appears to me to be the most modest and manly course, and to derive some graceful significance from its title. Thank my dear Mrs. Fields for me for her delightful letter received on the 16th. I will write to her very soon, and tell her about the dogs. I would write by this post, but that Wills' absence (in Sussex, and getting no better there as yet) so overwhelms me with business that I can scarcely get through it. Miss me? Ah, my dear fellow, but how do I miss _you_! We talk about you both at Gad's Hill every day of our lives. And I never see the place looking very pretty indeed, or hear the birds sing all day long and the nightingales all night, without restlessly wishing that you were both there. With best love, and truest and most enduring regard, ever, my dear Fields, Your most affectionate. . . . I hope you will receive by Saturday's Cunard a case containing: 1. A trifling supply of the pen-knibs that suited your hand. 2. A do. of unfailing medicine for cockroaches. 3. Mrs. Gamp, for ----. The case is addressed to you at Bleecker Street, New York. If it should be delayed for the knibs (or nibs) promised to-morrow, and should be too late for the Cunard packet, it will in that case come by the next following Inman steamer. Everything here looks lovely, and I find it (you will be surprised to hear) really a pretty place! I have seen "No Thoroughfare" twice. Excellent things in it, but it drags to my thinking. It is, however, a great success in the country, and is now getting up with great force in Paris. Fechter is ill, and was ordered off to Brighton yesterday. Wills is ill too, and banished into Sussex for perfect rest. Otherwise, thank God, I find everything well and thriving. You and my dear Mrs. Fields are constantly in my mind. Procter greatly better. [Sidenote: Mr. Fechter.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, 22nd May, 1868._ MY DEAR FECHTER, I have an idea about the bedroom act, which I should certainly have suggested if I had been at our "repetitions" here.[91] I want it done _to the sound of the Waterfall_. I want the sound of the Waterfall louder and softer as the wind rises and falls, to be spoken through--like the music. I want the Waterfall _listened to when spoken of, and not looked out at_. The mystery and gloom of the scene would be greatly helped by this, and it would be new and picturesquely fanciful. I am very anxious to hear from you how the piece seems to go,[92] and how the artists, who are to act it, seem to understand their parts. Pray tell me, too, when you write, how you found Madame Fechter, and give all our loves to all. Ever heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. James T. Fields.] GAD'S HILL, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _25th May, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. FIELDS, As you ask me about the dogs, I begin with them. When I came down first, I came to Gravesend, five miles off. The two Newfoundland dogs, coming to meet me with the usual carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me coming in my usual dress out at the usual door, it struck me that their recollection of my having been absent for any unusual time was at once cancelled. They behaved (they are both young dogs) exactly in their usual manner; coming behind the basket phaeton as we trotted along, and lifting their heads to have their ears pulled--a special attention which they receive from no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard, Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with her great fore-paws. Mamie's little dog, too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the greatest agitation on being called down and asked by Mamie, "Who is this?" and tore round and round me, like the dog in the Faust outlines. You must know that all the farmers turned out on the road in their market-chaises to say, "Welcome home, sir!" and that all the houses along the road were dressed with flags; and that our servants, to cut out the rest, had dressed this house so that every brick of it was hidden. They had asked Mamie's permission to "ring the alarm-bell" (!) when master drove up, but Mamie, having some slight idea that that compliment might awaken master's sense of the ludicrous, had recommended bell abstinence. But on Sunday the village choir (which includes the bell-ringers) made amends. After some unusually brief pious reflections in the crowns of their hats at the end of the sermon, the ringers bolted out, and rang like mad until I got home. There had been a conspiracy among the villagers to take the horse out, if I had come to our own station, and draw me here. Mamie and Georgy had got wind of it and warned me. Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mirrors in the Swiss châlet (where I write) and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in, at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious. Dolby (who sends a world of messages) found his wife much better than he expected, and the children (wonderful to relate!) perfect. The little girl winds up her prayers every night with a special commendation to Heaven of me and the pony--as if I must mount him to get there! I dine with Dolby (I was going to write "him," but found it would look as if I were going to dine with the pony) at Greenwich this very day, and if your ears do not burn from six to nine this evening, then the Atlantic is a non-conductor. We are already settling--think of this!--the details of my farewell course of readings. I am brown beyond belief, and cause the greatest disappointment in all quarters by looking so well. It is really wonderful what those fine days at sea did for me! My doctor was quite broken down in spirits when he saw me, for the first time since my return, last Saturday. "Good Lord!" he said, recoiling, "seven years younger!" It is time I should explain the otherwise inexplicable enclosure. Will you tell Fields, with my love (I suppose he hasn't used _all_ the pens yet?), that I think there is in Tremont Street a set of my books, sent out by Chapman, not arrived when I departed. Such set of the immortal works of our illustrious, etc., is designed for the gentleman to whom the enclosure is addressed. If T., F. and Co., will kindly forward the set (carriage paid) with the enclosure to ----'s address, I will invoke new blessings on their heads, and will get Dolby's little daughter to mention them nightly. "No Thoroughfare" is very shortly coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal. It is still playing here, but without Fechter, who has been very ill. The doctor's dismissal of him to Paris, however, and his getting better there, enables him to get up the play there. He and Wilkie missed so many pieces of stage-effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with his report, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbing in the bedroom scene at the Swiss inn to be done to the sound of a waterfall rising and falling with the wind. Although in the very opening of that scene they speak of the waterfall and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a good stage-carpenter, in an hour. My dear love to Fields once again. Same to you and him from Mamie and Georgy. I cannot tell you both how I miss you, or how overjoyed I should be to see you here. Ever, my dear Mrs. Fields, Your most affectionate friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Alexander Ireland.] THE ATHEN�UM, _Saturday, 30th May, 1868._ DEAR MR. IRELAND, Many thanks for the book[93] you have kindly lent me. My interest in its subject is scarcely less than your own, and the book has afforded me great pleasure. I hope it will prove a very useful tribute to Hazlett and Hunt (in extending the general knowledge of their writings), as well as a deservedly hearty and loving one. You gratify me much by your appreciation of my desire to promote the kindest feelings between England and America. But the writer of the generous article in _The Manchester Examiner_ is quite mistaken in supposing that I intend to write a book on the United States. The fact is exactly the reverse, or I could not have spoken without some appearance of having a purpose to serve. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Tuesday, 7th July, 1868._ MY DEAR FIELDS, I have delayed writing to you (and Mrs. Fields, to whom my love) until I should have seen Longfellow. When he was in London the first time he came and went without reporting himself, and left me in a state of unspeakable discomfiture. Indeed, I should not have believed in his having been here at all, if Mrs. Procter had not told me of his calling to see Procter. However, on his return he wrote to me from the Langham Hotel, and I went up to town to see him, and to make an appointment for his coming here. He, the girls, and Appleton, came down last Saturday night and stayed until Monday forenoon. I showed them all the neighbouring country that could be shown in so short a time, and they finished off with a tour of inspection of the kitchens, pantry, wine-cellar, pickles, sauces, servants' sitting-room, general household stores, and even the Cellar Book, of this illustrious establishment. Forster and Kent (the latter wrote certain verses to Longfellow, which have been published in _The Times_, and which I sent to D----) came down for a day, and I hope we all had a really "good time." I turned out a couple of postillions in the old red jacket of the old red royal Dover Road, for our ride; and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago. Of course we went to look at the old houses in Rochester, and the old cathedral, and the old castle, and the house for the six poor travellers who, "not being rogues or procters, shall have lodging, entertainment, and four pence each." Nothing can surpass the respect paid to Longfellow here, from the Queen downward. He is everywhere received and courted, and finds (as I told him he would, when we talked of it in Boston) the working-men at least as well acquainted with his books as the classes socially above them. . . . Last Thursday I attended, as sponsor, the christening of Dolby's son and heir--a most jolly baby, who held on tight by the rector's left whisker while the service was performed. What time, too, his little sister, connecting me with the pony, trotted up and down the centre aisle, noisily driving herself as that celebrated animal, so that it went very hard with the sponsorial dignity. Wills is not yet recovered from that concussion of the brain, and I have all his work to do. This may account for my not being able to devise a Christmas number, but I seem to have left my invention in America. In case you should find it, please send it over. I am going up to town to-day to dine with Longfellow. And now, my dear Fields, you know all about me and mine. You are enjoying your holiday? and are still thinking sometimes of our Boston days, as I do? and are maturing schemes for coming here next summer? A satisfactory reply to the last question is particularly entreated. I am delighted to find you both so well pleased with the Blind Book scheme.[94] I said nothing of it to you when we were together, though I had made up my mind, because I wanted to come upon you with that little burst from a distance. It seemed something like meeting again when I remitted the money and thought of your talking of it. The dryness of the weather is amazing. All the ponds and surface-wells about here are waterless, and the poor people suffer greatly. The people of this village have only one spring to resort to, and it is a couple of miles from many cottages. I do not let the great dogs swim in the canal, because the people have to drink of it. But when they get into the Medway it is hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble (the son, Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among some floating timber, and became frightened. Don (the father) was standing by me, shaking off the wet and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden he perceived something amiss, and went in with a bound and brought Bumble out by the ear. The scientific way in which he towed him along was charming. Ever your loving. [Sidenote: Mr. J. E. Millais, R.A.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, 19th July, 1868._ MY DEAR MILLAIS,[95] I received the enclosed letter yesterday, and I have, perhaps unjustly--some vague suspicions of it. As I know how faithful and zealous you have been in all relating to poor Leech, I make no apology for asking you whether you can throw any light upon its contents. You will be glad to hear that Charles Collins is decidedly better to-day, and is out of doors. Believe me always, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Serle.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, 29th July, 1868._ MY DEAR SERLE,[96] I do not believe there is the slightest chance of an international Copyright law being passed in America for a long time to come. Some Massachusetts men do believe in such a thing, but they fail (as I think) to take into account the prompt western opposition. Such an alteration as you suggest in the English law would give no copyright in America, you see. The American publisher could buy no absolute _right_ of priority. Any American newspaper could (and many would, in a popular case) pirate from him, as soon as they could get the matter set up. He could buy no more than he buys now when he arranges for advance sheets from England, so that there may be simultaneous publication in the two countries. And success in England is of so much importance towards the achievement of success in America, that I greatly doubt whether previous publications in America would often be worth more to an American publisher or manager than simultaneous publication. Concerning the literary man in Parliament who would undertake to bring in a Bill for such an amendment of our copyright law, with weight enough to keep his heart unbroken while he should be getting it through its various lingering miseries, all I can say is--I decidedly don't know him. On that horrible Staplehurst day, I had not the slightest idea that I knew anyone in the train out of my own compartment. Mrs. Cowden Clarke[97] wrote me afterwards, telling me in the main what you tell me, and I was astonished. It is remarkable that my watch (a special chronometer) has never gone quite correctly since, and to this day there sometimes comes over me, on a railway--in a hansom cab--or any sort of conveyance--for a few seconds, a vague sense of dread that I have no power to check. It comes and passes, but I cannot prevent its coming. Believe me, always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.] _24th August, 1868._ MY DEAR SIR, I should have written to you much sooner, but that I have been home from the United States barely three months, and have since been a little uncertain as to the precise time and way of sending my youngest son out to join his brother Alfred. It is now settled that he shall come out in the ship _Sussex_, 1000 tons, belonging to Messrs. Money, Wigram, and Co. She sails from Gravesend, but he will join her at Plymouth on the 27th September, and will proceed straight to Melbourne. Of this I apprise Alfred by this mail. . . . I cannot sufficiently thank you for your kindness to Alfred. I am certain that a becoming sense of it and desire to deserve it, has done him great good. Your report of him is an unspeakable comfort to me, and I most heartily assure you of my gratitude and friendship. In the midst of your colonial seethings and heavings, I suppose you have some leisure to consult equally the hopeful prophets and the dismal prophets who are all wiser than any of the rest of us as to things at home here. My own strong impression is that whatsoever change the new Reform Bill may effect will be very gradual indeed and quite wholesome. Numbers of the middle class who seldom or never voted before will vote now, and the greater part of the new voters will in the main be wiser as to their electoral responsibilities and more seriously desirous to discharge them for the common good than the bumptious singers of "Rule Britannia," "Our dear old Church of England," and all the rest of it. If I can ever do anything for any accredited friend of yours coming to the old country, command me. I shall be truly glad of any opportunity of testifying that I do not use a mere form of words in signing myself, Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Russell Sturgis.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Monday, 14th December, 1868._[98] MY DEAR MR. RUSSELL STURGIS, I am "reading" here, and shall be through this week. Consequently I am only this morning in receipt of your kind note of the 10th, forwarded from my own house. Believe me I am as much obliged to you for your generous and ready response to my supposed letter as I should have been if I had really written it. But I know nothing whatever of it or of "Miss Jeffries," except that I have a faint impression of having recently noticed that name among my begging-letter correspondents, and of having associated it in my mind with a regular professional hand. Your caution has, I hope, disappointed this swindler. But my testimony is at your service if you should need it, and I would take any opportunity of bringing one of those vagabonds to punishment; for they are, one and all, the most heartless and worthless vagabonds on the face of the earth. Believe me, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. James T. Fields.] GLASGOW, _Wednesday, December 16, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. FIELDS, . . . First, as you are curious about the Oliver murder, I will tell you about that trial of the same at which you _ought_ to have assisted. There were about a hundred people present in all. I have changed my stage. Besides that back screen which you know so well, there are two large screens of the same colour, set off, one on either side, like the "wings" at a theatre. And besides these again, we have a quantity of curtains of the same colour, with which to close in any width of room from wall to wall. Consequently, the figure is now completely isolated, and the slightest action becomes much more important. This was used for the first time on the occasion. But behind the stage--the orchestra being very large and built for the accommodation of a numerous chorus--there was ready, on the level of the platform, a very long table, beautifully lighted, with a large staff of men ready to open oysters and set champagne-corks flying. Directly I had done, the screens being whisked off by my people, there was disclosed one of the prettiest banquets you can imagine; and when all the people came up, and the gay dresses of the ladies were lighted by those powerful lights of mine, the scene was exquisitely pretty; the hall being newly decorated, and very elegantly; and the whole looking like a great bed of flowers and diamonds. Now, you must know that all this company were, before the wine went round, unmistakably pale, and had horror-stricken faces. Next morning Harness (Fields knows--Rev. William--did an edition of Shakespeare--old friend of the Kembles and Mrs. Siddons), writing to me about it, and saying it was "a most amazing and terrific thing," added, "but I am bound to tell you that I had an almost irresistible impulse upon me to _scream_, and that, if anyone had cried out, I am certain I should have followed." He had no idea that, on the night, P----, the great ladies' doctor, had taken me aside and said: "My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place." It is impossible to soften it without spoiling it, and you may suppose that I am rather anxious to discover how it goes on the 5th of January!!! We are afraid to announce it elsewhere, without knowing, except that I have thought it pretty safe to put it up once in Dublin. I asked Mrs. K----, the famous actress, who was at the experiment: "What do _you_ say? Do it or not?" "Why, of course, do it," she replied. "Having got at such an effect as that, it must be done. But," rolling her large black eyes very slowly, and speaking very distinctly, "the public have been looking out for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and by Heaven they have got it!" With which words, and a long breath and a long stare, she became speechless. Again, you may suppose that I am a little anxious! Not a day passes but Dolby and I talk about you both, and recall where we were at the corresponding time of last year. My old likening of Boston to Edinburgh has been constantly revived within these last ten days. There is a certain remarkable similarity of _tone_ between the two places. The audiences are curiously alike, except that the Edinburgh audience has a quicker sense of humour and is a little more genial. No disparagement to Boston in this, because I consider an Edinburgh audience perfect. I trust, my dear Eugenius, that you have recognised yourself in a certain Uncommercial, and also some small reference to a name rather dear to you? As an instance of how strangely something comic springs up in the midst of the direst misery, look to a succeeding Uncommercial, called "A Small Star in the East," published to-day, by-the-bye. I have described, _with exactness_, the poor places into which I went, and how the people behaved, and what they said. I was wretched, looking on; and yet the boiler-maker and the poor man with the legs filled me with a sense of drollery not to be kept down by any pressure. The atmosphere of this place, compounded of mists from the highlands and smoke from the town factories, is crushing my eyebrows as I write, and it rains as it never does rain anywhere else, and always does rain here. It is a dreadful place, though much improved and possessing a deal of public spirit. Improvement is beginning to knock the old town of Edinburgh about, here and there; but the Canongate and the most picturesque of the horrible courts and wynds are not to be easily spoiled, or made fit for the poor wretches who people them to live in. Edinburgh is so changed as to its notabilities, that I had the only three men left of the Wilson and Jeffrey time to dine with me there, last Saturday. I think you will find "Fatal Zero" (by Percy Fitzgerald) a very curious analysis of a mind, as the story advances. A new beginner in "A. Y. R." (Hon. Mrs. Clifford, Kinglake's sister), who wrote a story in the series just finished, called "The Abbot's Pool," has just sent me another story. I have a strong impression that, with care, she will step into Mrs. Gaskell's vacant place. Wills is no better, and I have work enough even in that direction. God bless the woman with the black mittens for making me laugh so this morning! I take her to be a kind of public-spirited Mrs. Sparsit, and as such take her to my bosom. God bless you both, my dear friends, in this Christmas and New Year time, and in all times, seasons, and places, and send you to Gad's Hill with the next flowers! Ever your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. Russell Sturgis.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Friday, 18th December, 1868._ MY DEAR MR. RUSSELL STURGIS, I return you the forged letter, and devoutly wish that I had to flog the writer in virtue of a legal sentence. I most cordially reciprocate your kind expressions in reference to our future intercourse, and shall hope to remind you of them five or six months hence, when my present labours shall have gone the way of all other earthly things. It was particularly interesting to me when I was last at Boston to recognise poor dear Felton's unaffected and genial ways in his eldest daughter, and to notice how, in tender remembrance of him, she is, as it were, Cambridge's daughter. Believe me always, faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [90] It was at Baltimore that Charles Dickens first conceived the idea of a walking-match, which should take place on his return to Boston, and he drew up a set of humorous "articles." [91] The Play of "No Thoroughfare," was produced at the Adelphi Theatre, under the management of Mr. Webster. [92] Mr. Fechter was, at this time, superintending the production of a French version of "No Thoroughfare," in Paris. It was called "L'Abîme." [93] The volume referred to is a "List of the Writings of William Hazlett and Leigh Hunt, chronologically arranged, with Notes, descriptive, critical, and explanatory, etc." [94] A copy of "The Old Curiosity Shop," in raised letters for the use of the Blind, had been printed by Charles Dickens's order at the "Perkins Institution for the Blind" in Boston, and presented by him to that institution in this year. [95] John Everett Millais, R.A. (The Editors make use of this note, as it is the only one which Mr. Millais has been able to find for them, and they are glad to have the two names associated together). [96] A dramatic author, who was acting manager of Covent Garden Theatre in 1838, when his acquaintance with Charles Dickens first began. This letter is in answer to some questions put to Charles Dickens by Mr. Serle on the subject of the extension of copyright to the United States of America. [97] Mrs. Cowden Clarke wrote to tell Charles Dickens that her sister, Miss Sabilla Novello, and her brother, Mr. Alfred Novello, were also in the train, and escaped without injury. [98] A forged letter from Charles Dickens, introducing an impostor, had been addressed to Mr. Russell Sturgis. 1869. [Sidenote: Mrs. Forster.] QUEEN'S HOTEL, MANCHESTER, _Monday, 8th March, 1869._ MY DEAR MRS. FORSTER, A thousand thanks for your note, which has reached me here this afternoon. At breakfast this morning Dolby showed me the local paper with a paragraph in it recording poor dear Tennent's[99] death. You may imagine how shocked I was. Immediately before I left town this last time, I had an unusually affectionate letter from him, enclosing one from Forster, and proposing the friendly dinner since appointed for the 25th. I replied to him in the same spirit, and felt touched at the time by the gentle earnestness of his tone. It is remarkable that I talked of him a great deal yesterday to Dolby (who knew nothing of him), and that I reverted to him again at night before going to bed--with no reason that I know of. Dolby was strangely impressed by this, when he showed me the newspaper. God be with us all! Ever your affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. H. A. Layard.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Saturday, 13th March, 1869._ MY DEAR LAYARD, Coming to town for a couple of days, from York, I find your beautiful present.[100] With my heartiest congratulations on your marriage, accept my most cordial thanks for a possession that I shall always prize foremost among my worldly goods; firstly, for your sake; secondly, for its own. Not one of these glasses shall be set on table until Mrs. Layard is there, to touch with her lips the first champagne that any of them shall ever hold! This vow has been registered in solemn triumvirate at Gad's Hill. The first week in June will about see me through my present work, I hope. I came to town hurriedly to attend poor dear Emerson Tennent's funeral. You will know how my mind went back, in the York up-train at midnight, to Mount Vesuvius and our Neapolitan supper. I have given Mr. Hills, of Oxford Street, the letter of introduction to you that you kindly permitted. He has immense local influence, and could carry his neighbours in favour of any good design. My dear Layard, ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Miss Florence Olliffe.] 26, WELLINGTON STREET, _Tuesday, 16th March, 1869._ MY DEAR FLORENCE,[101] I have received your kind note this morning, and I hasten to thank you for it, and to assure your dear mother of our most cordial sympathy with her in her great affliction, and in loving remembrance of the good man and excellent friend we have lost. The tidings of his being very ill indeed had, of course, been reported to me. For some days past I had taken up the newspaper with sad misgivings; and this morning, before I got your letter, they were realised. I loved him truly. His wonderful gentleness and kindness, years ago, when we had sickness in our household in Paris, has never been out of my grateful remembrance. And, socially, his image is inseparable from some of the most genial and delightful friendly hours of my life. I am almost ashamed to set such recollections by the side of your mother's great bereavement and grief, but they spring out of the fulness of my heart. May God be with her and with you all! Ever yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Friday, April 9th, 1869._ MY DEAR FIELDS, The faithful _Russia_ will bring this out to you, as a sort of warrant to take you into loving custody and bring you back on her return trip. I rather think that when the 12th of June shall have shaken off these shackles,[102] there _will_ be borage on the lawn at Gad's. Your heart's desire in that matter, and in the minor particulars of Cobham Park, Rochester Castle, and Canterbury, shall be fulfilled, please God! The red jackets shall turn out again upon the turnpike-road, and picnics among the cherry-orchards and hop-gardens shall be heard of in Kent. Then, too, shall the Uncommercial resuscitate (being at present nightly murdered by Mr. W. Sikes) and uplift his voice again. The chief officer of the _Russia_ (a capital fellow) was at the Reading last night, and Dolby specially charged him with the care of you and yours. We shall be on the borders of Wales, and probably about Hereford, when you arrive. Dolby has insane projects of getting over here to meet you; so amiably hopeful and obviously impracticable, that I encourage him to the utmost. The regular little captain of the _Russia_, Cook, is just now changed into the _Cuba_, whence arise disputes of seniority, etc. I wish he had been with you, for I liked him very much when I was his passenger. I like to think of your being in _my_ ship! ---- and ---- have been taking it by turns to be "on the point of death," and have been complimenting one another greatly on the fineness of the point attained. My people got a very good impression of ----, and thought her a sincere and earnest little woman. The _Russia_ hauls out into the stream to-day, and I fear her people may be too busy to come to us to-night. But if any of them do, they shall have the warmest of welcomes for your sake. (By-the-bye, a very good party of seamen from the Queen's ship _Donegal_, lying in the Mersey, have been told off to decorate St. George's Hall with the ship's bunting. They were all hanging on aloft upside down, holding to the gigantically high roof by nothing, this morning, in the most wonderfully cheerful manner.) My son Charley has come for the dinner, and Chappell (my Proprietor, as--isn't it Wemmick?--says) is coming to-day, and Lord Dufferin (Mrs. Norton's nephew) is to come and make _the_ speech. I don't envy the feelings of my noble friend when he sees the hall. Seriously, it is less adapted to speaking than Westminster Abbey, and is as large. . . . I hope you will see Fechter in a really clever piece by Wilkie.[103] Also you will see the Academy Exhibition, which will be a very good one; and also we will, please God, see everything and more, and everything else after that. I begin to doubt and fear on the subject of your having a horror of me after seeing the murder. I don't think a hand moved while I was doing it last night, or an eye looked away. And there was a fixed expression of horror of me, all over the theatre, which could not have been surpassed if I had been going to be hanged to that red velvet table. It is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity; and I hope it will remain so! [Is it lawful--would that woman in the black gaiters, green veil, and spectacles, hold it so--to send my love to the pretty M----?] Pack up, my dear Fields, and be quick. Ever your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.] PRESTON, _Thursday, 22nd April, 1869._ MY DEAR SIR, I am finishing my Farewell Readings--to-night is the seventy-fourth out of one hundred--and have barely time to send you a line to thank you most heartily for yours of the 30th January, and for your great kindness to Alfred and Edward. The latter wrote by the same mail, on behalf of both, expressing the warmest gratitude to you, and reporting himself in the stoutest heart and hope. I never can thank you sufficiently. You will see that the new Ministry has made a decided hit with its Budget, and that in the matter of the Irish Church it has the country at its back. You will also see that the "Reform League" has dissolved itself, indisputably because it became aware that the people did not want it. I think the general feeling in England is a desire to get the Irish Church out of the way of many social reforms, and to have it done _with_ as already done _for_. I do not in the least believe myself that agrarian Ireland is to be pacified by any such means, or can have it got out of its mistaken head that the land is of right the peasantry's, and that every man who owns land has stolen it and is therefore to be shot. But that is not the question. The clock strikes post-time as I write, and I fear to write more, lest, at this distance from London, I should imperil the next mail. Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Chappell.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Monday, 3rd May, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. CHAPPELL, I am really touched by your letter. I can most truthfully assure you that your part in the inconvenience of this mishap has given me much more concern than my own; and that if I did not hope to have our London Farewells yet, I should be in a very gloomy condition on your account. Pray do not suppose that _you_ are to blame for my having done a little too much--a wild fancy indeed! The simple fact is, that the rapid railway travelling was stretched a hair's breadth too far, and that _I_ ought to have foreseen it. For, on the night before the last night of our reading in America, when Dolby was cheering me with a review of the success, and the immediate prospect of the voyage home, I told him, to his astonishment: "I am too far gone, and too worn out to realise anything but my own exhaustion. Believe me, if I had to read but twice more, instead of once, I couldn't do it." We were then just beyond our recent number. And it was the travelling that I had felt throughout. The sharp precautionary remedy of stopping instantly, was almost as instantly successful the other day. I told Dr. Watson that he had never seen me knocked out of time, and that he had no idea of the rapidity with which I should come up again. Just as three days' repose on the Atlantic steamer made me, in my altered appearance, the amazement of the captain, so this last week has set me up, thank God, in the most wonderful manner. The sense of exhaustion seems a dream already. Of course I shall train myself carefully, nevertheless, all through the summer and autumn. I beg to send my kind regards to Mrs. Chappell, and I shall hope to see her and you at Teddington in the long bright days. It would disappoint me indeed if a lasting friendship did not come of our business relations. In the spring I trust I shall be able to report to you that I am ready to take my Farewells in London. Of this I am pretty certain: that I never will take them at all, unless with you on your own conditions. With an affectionate regard for you and your brother, believe me always, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Tuesday, 18th May, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. RUSDEN, As I daresay some exaggerated accounts of my having been very ill have reached you, I begin with the true version of the case. I daresay I _should_ have been very ill if I had not suddenly stopped my Farewell Readings when there were yet five-and-twenty remaining to be given. I was quite exhausted, and was warned by the doctors to stop (for the time) instantly. Acting on the advice, and going home into Kent for rest, I immediately began to recover, and within a fortnight was in the brilliant condition in which I can now--thank God--report myself. I cannot thank you enough for your care of Plorn. I was quite prepared for his not settling down without a lurch or two. I still hope that he may take to colonial life. . . . In his letter to me about his leaving the station to which he got through your kindness, he expresses his gratitude to you quite as strongly as if he had made a wonderful success, and seems to have acquired no distaste for anything but the one individual of whom he wrote that betrayed letter. But knowing the boy, I want to try him fully. You know all our public news, such as it is, at least as well as I do. Many people here (of whom I am one) do not like the look of American matters. What I most fear is that the perpetual bluster of a party in the States will at last set the patient British back up. And if our people begin to bluster too, and there should come into existence an exasperating war-party on both sides, there will be great danger of a daily-widening breach. The first shriek of the first engine that traverses the San Francisco Railroad from end to end will be a death-warning to the disciples of Jo Smith. The moment the Mormon bubble gets touched by neighbours it will break. Similarly, the red man's course is very nearly run. A scalped stoker is the outward and visible sign of his utter extermination. Not Quakers enough to reach from here to Jerusalem will save him by the term of a single year. I don't know how it may be with you, but it is the fashion here to be absolutely certain that the Emperor of the French is fastened by Providence and the fates on a throne of adamant expressly constructed for him since the foundations of the universe were laid. He knows better, and so do the police of Paris, and both powers must be grimly entertained by the resolute British belief, knowing what they have known, and doing what they have done through the last ten years. What Victor Hugo calls "the drop-curtain, behind which is constructing the great last act of the French Revolution," has been a little shaken at the bottom lately, however. One seems to see the feet of a rather large chorus getting ready. I enclose a letter for Plorn to your care, not knowing how to address him. Forgive me for so doing (I write to Alfred direct), and believe me, my dear Mr. Rusden, Yours faithfully and much obliged. [Sidenote: Miss Emily Jolly.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, 22nd July, 1869._ DEAR MISS JOLLY, Mr. Wills has retired from here (for rest and to recover his health), and my son, who occupies his place, brought me this morning a story[104] in MS., with a request that I would read it. I read it with extraordinary interest, and was greatly surprised by its uncommon merit. On asking whence it came, I found that it came from you! You need not to be told, after this, that I accept it with more than readiness. If you will allow me I will go over it with great care, and very slightly touch it here and there. I think it will require to be divided into three portions. You shall have the proofs and I will publish it immediately. I think so VERY highly of it that I will have special attention called to it in a separate advertisement. I congratulate you most sincerely and heartily on having done a very special thing. It will always stand apart in my mind from any other story I ever read. I write with its impression newly and strongly upon me, and feel absolutely sure that I am not mistaken. Believe me, faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Hon. Robert Lytton.] 26, WELLINGTON STREET, LONDON, _Thursday, 2nd September, 1869._ MY DEAR ROBERT LYTTON, "John Acland" is most willingly accepted, and shall come in to the next monthly part. I shall make bold to condense him here and there (according to my best idea of story-telling), and particularly where he makes the speech:--And with the usual fault of being too long, here and there, I think you let the story out too much--prematurely--and this I hope to prevent artfully. I think your title open to the same objection, and therefore propose to substitute: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOHN ACLAND. This will leave the reader in doubt whether he really _was_ murdered, until the end. I am sorry you do not pursue the other prose series. You can do a great deal more than you think for, with whatever you touch; and you know where to find a firmly attached and admiring friend always ready to take the field with you, and always proud to see your plume among the feathers in the Staff. Your account of my dear Boffin[105] is highly charming:--I had been troubled with a misgiving that he was good. May his shadow never be more correct! I wish I could have you at the murder from "Oliver Twist." I am always, my dear Robert Lytton, Affectionately your friend. * * * * * Pray give my kindest regards to Fascination Fledgeby, who (I have no doubt) has by this time half-a-dozen new names, feebly expressive of his great merits. [Sidenote: The same.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, _Friday, 1st October, 1869._ MY DEAR ROBERT LYTTON, I am assured by a correspondent that "John Acland" has been done before. Said correspondent has evidently read the story--and is almost confident in "Chambers's Journal." This is very unfortunate, but of course cannot be helped. There is always a possibility of such a malignant conjunction of stars when the story is a true one. In the case of a good story--as this is--liable for years to be told at table--as this was--there is nothing wonderful in such a mischance. Let us shuffle the cards, as Sancho says, and begin again. You will of course understand that I do not tell you this by way of complaint. Indeed, I should not have mentioned it at all, but as an explanation to you of my reason for winding the story up (which I have done to-day) as expeditiously as possible. You might otherwise have thought me, on reading it as published, a little hard on Mr. Doilly. I have not had time to direct search to be made in "Chambers's;" but as to the main part of the story having been printed somewhere, I have not the faintest doubt. And I believe my correspondent to be also right as to the where. You could not help it any more than I could, and therefore will not be troubled by it any more than I am. The more I get of your writing, the better I shall be pleased. Do believe me to be, as I am, Your genuine admirer And affectionate friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, 24th October, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. RUSDEN, This very day a great meeting is announced to come off in London, as a demonstration in favour of a Fenian "amnesty." No doubt its numbers and importance are ridiculously over-estimated, but I believe the gathering will turn out to be big enough to be a very serious obstruction in the London streets. I have a great doubt whether such demonstrations ought to be allowed. They are bad as a precedent, and they unquestionably interfere with the general liberty and freedom of the subject. Moreover, the time must come when this kind of threat and defiance will have to be forcibly stopped, and when the unreasonable toleration of it will lead to a sacrifice of life among the comparatively innocent lookers-on that might have been avoided but for a false confidence on their part, engendered in the damnable system of _laisser-aller_. You see how right we were, you and I, in our last correspondence on this head, and how desperately unsatisfactory the condition of Ireland is, especially when considered with a reference to America. The Government has, through Mr. Gladstone, just now spoken out boldly in reference to the desired amnesty. (So much the better for them or they would unquestionably have gone by the board.) Still there is an uneasy feeling abroad that Mr. Gladstone himself would grant this amnesty if he dared, and that there is a great weakness in the rest of their Irish policy. And this feeling is very strong amongst the noisiest Irish howlers. Meanwhile, the newspapers go on arguing Irish matters as if the Irish were a reasonable people, in which immense assumption I, for one, have not the smallest faith. Again, I have to thank you most heartily for your kindness to my two boys. It is impossible to predict how Plorn will settle down, or come out of the effort to do so. But he has unquestionably an affectionate nature, and a certain romantic touch in him. Both of these qualities are, I hope, more impressible for good than for evil, and I trust in God for the rest. The news of Lord Derby's death will reach you, I suppose, at about the same time as this letter. A rash, impetuous, passionate man; but a great loss for his party, as a man of mind and mark. I was staying last June with Lord Russell--six or seven years older, but (except for being rather deaf) in wonderful preservation, and brighter and more completely armed at all points than I have seen him these twenty years. As this need not be posted till Friday, I shall leave it open for a final word or two; and am until then, and then, and always afterwards, my dear Mr. Rusden, Your faithful and much obliged. _Thursday, 28th._ We have no news in England except two slight changes in the Government consequent on Layard's becoming our Minister at Madrid. He is not long married to a charming lady, and will be far better in Spain than in the House of Commons. The Ministry are now holding councils on the Irish Land Tenure question, which is the next difficulty they have to deal with, as you know. Last Sunday's meeting was a preposterous failure; still, it brought together in the streets of London all the ruffian part of the population of London, and that is a serious evil which any one of a thousand accidents might render mischievous. There is no existing law, however, to stop these assemblages, so that they keep moving while in the streets. The Government was undoubtedly wrong when it considered it had the right to close Hyde Park; that is now universally conceded. I write to Alfred and Plorn both by this mail. They can never say enough of your kindness when they write to me. [Sidenote: Mr. A. H. Layard.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Monday, 8th November, 1869._ MY DEAR LAYARD, On Friday or Saturday next I can come to you at any time after twelve that will suit your convenience. I had no idea of letting you go away without my God-speed; but I knew how busy you must be; and kept in the background, biding my time. I am sure you know that there is no man living more attached to you than I am. After considering the subject with the jealousy of a friend, I have a strong conviction that your change[106] is a good one; ill as you can be spared from the ranks of men who are in earnest here. With kindest regards to Mrs. Layard. Ever faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [99] Sir James Emerson Tennent. [100] Some Venetian glass champagne tumblers. [101] Miss Florence Olliffe, who wrote to announce the death of her father, Sir Joseph Olliffe. [102] The Readings. [103] The "piece" here alluded to was called "Black and White." It was presented at the Adelphi Theatre. The outline of the plot was suggested by Mr. Fechter. [104] The story was called "An Experience." [105] "Boffin" and "Fascination Fledgeby," were nicknames given to his children by Mr. Robert Lytton at this time. [106] Mr. Layard's appointment as British Minister at Madrid. 1870. [Sidenote: Mr. James T. Fields.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, LONDON, W., _Friday, January 14th, 1870._ MY DEAR FIELDS, We live here (opposite the Marble Arch) in a charming house until the 1st of June, and then return to Gad's. The conservatory is completed, and is a brilliant success; but an expensive one! I should be quite ashamed of not having written to you and my dear Mrs. Fields before now, if I didn't know that you will both understand how occupied I am, and how naturally, when I put my papers away for the day, I get up and fly. I have a large room here, with three fine windows, overlooking the Park--unsurpassable for airiness and cheerfulness. You saw the announcement of the death of poor dear Harness. The circumstances are curious. He wrote to his old friend the Dean of Battle saying he would come to visit him on that day (the day of his death). The Dean wrote back: "Come next day, instead, as we are obliged to go out to dinner, and you will be alone." Harness told his sister a little impatiently that he _must_ go on the first-named day; that he had made up his mind to go, and MUST. He had been getting himself ready for dinner, and came to a part of the staircase whence two doors opened--one, upon another level passage; one, upon a flight of stone steps. He opened the wrong door, fell down the steps, injured himself very severely, and died in a few hours. You will know--_I_ don't--what Fechter's success is in America at the time of this present writing. In his farewell performances at the Princess's he acted very finely. I thought the three first acts of his Hamlet very much better than I had ever thought them before--and I always thought very highly of them. We gave him a foaming stirrup cup at Gad's Hill. Forster (who has been ill with his bronchitis again) thinks No. 2 of the new book ("Edwin Drood") a clincher,--I mean that word (as his own expression) for _Clincher_. There is a curious interest steadily working up to No. 5, which requires a great deal of art and self-denial. I think also, apart from character and picturesqueness, that the young people are placed in a very novel situation. So I hope--at Nos. 5 and 6, the story will turn upon an interest suspended until the end. I can't believe it, and don't, and won't, but they say Harry's twenty-first birthday is next Sunday. I have entered him at the Temple just now; and if he don't get a fellowship at Trinity Hall when his time comes, I shall be disappointed, if in the present disappointed state of existence. I hope you may have met with the little touch of Radicalism I gave them at Birmingham in the words of Buckle? With pride I observe that it makes the regular political traders, of all sorts, perfectly mad. Such was my intentions, as a grateful acknowledgment of having been misrepresented. I think Mrs. ----'s prose very admirable; but I don't believe it! No, I do _not_. My conviction is that those islanders get frightfully bored by the islands, and wish they had never set eyes upon them! Charley Collins has done a charming cover for the monthly part of the new book. At the very earnest representations of Millais (and after having seen a great number of his drawings) I am going to engage with a new man; retaining of course, C. C.'s cover aforesaid.[107] Katie has made some more capital portraits, and is always improving. My dear Mrs. Fields, if "He" (made proud by chairs and bloated by pictures) does not give you my dear love, let us conspire against him when you find him out, and exclude him from all future confidences. Until then, Ever affectionately yours and his. [Sidenote: Lord Lytton.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, _Monday, 14th February, 1870._ MY DEAR LYTTON, I ought to have mentioned in my hurried note to you, that my knowledge of the consultation[108] in question only preceded yours by certain hours; and that Longman asked me if I would make the design known to you, as he thought it might be a liberty to address you otherwise. This I did therefore. The class of writers to whom you refer at the close of your note, have no copyright, and do not come within my case at all. I quite agree with you as to their propensities and deserts. Indeed, I suppose in the main that there is very little difference between our opinions. I do not think the present Government worse than another, and I think it better than another by the presence of Mr. Gladstone; but it appears to me that our system fails. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frederic Chapman.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, _Monday, 14th March, 1870._ DEAR FREDERIC CHAPMAN, Mr. Fildes has been with me this morning, and without complaining of ---- or expressing himself otherwise than as being obliged to him for his care in No. 1, represents that there is a brother-student of his, a wood-engraver, perfectly acquainted with his style and well understanding his meaning, who would render him better. I have replied to him that there can be no doubt that he has a claim beyond dispute to our employing whomsoever he knows will present him in his best aspect. Therefore, we must make the change; the rather because the fellow-student in question has engraved Mr. Fildes' most successful drawings hitherto. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Mackay.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, 21st April, 1870._ MY DEAR MACKAY, I have placed "God's Acre." The prose paper, "The False Friend," has lingered, because it seems to me that the idea is to be found in an introduced story of mine called "The Baron of Grogzwig" in "Pickwick." Be pleasant with the Scottish people in handling Johnson, because I love them. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Sir John Bowring.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday, 5th May, 1870._ MY DEAR SIR JOHN, I send you many cordial thanks for your note, and the very curious drawing accompanying it. I ought to tell you, perhaps, that the opium smoking I have described, I saw (exactly as I have described it, penny ink-bottle and all) down in Shadwell this last autumn. A couple of the Inspectors of Lodging-Houses knew the woman and took me to her as I was making a round with them to see for myself the working of Lord Shaftesbury's Bill. Believe me, always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. J. B. Buckstone.] [109]_Sunday, 15th May, 1870._ MY DEAR BUCKSTONE, I send a duplicate of this note to the Haymarket, in case it should miss you out of town. For a few years I have been liable, at wholly uncertain and incalculable times, to a severe attack of neuralgia in the foot, about once in the course of a year. It began in an injury to the finer muscles or nerves, occasioned by over-walking in the deep snow. When it comes on I cannot stand, and can bear no covering whatever on the sensitive place. One of these seizures is upon me now. Until it leaves me I could no more walk into St. James's Hall than I could fly in the air. I hope you will present my duty to the Prince of Wales, and assure his Royal Highness that nothing short of my being (most unfortunately) disabled for the moment would have prevented my attending, as trustee of the Fund,[110] at the dinner, and warmly expressing my poor sense of the great and inestimable service his Royal Highness renders to a most deserving institution by so kindly commending it to the public. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Rusden.] ATHEN�UM, _Friday Evening, 20th May, 1870._ MY DEAR MR. RUSDEN, I received your most interesting and clear-sighted letter about Plorn just before the departure of the last mail from here to you. I did not answer then because another incoming mail was nearly due, and I expected (knowing Plorn so well) that some communication from him such as he made to you would come to me. I was not mistaken. The same arguing of the squatter question--vegetables and all--appeared. This gave me an opportunity of touching on those points by this mail, without in the least compromising you. I cannot too completely express my concurrence with your excellent idea that his correspondence with you should be regarded as confidential. Just as I could not possibly suggest a word more neatly to the point, or more thoughtfully addressed, to such a young man than your reply to his letter, I hope you will excuse my saying that it is a perfect model of tact, good sense, and good feeling. I had been struck by his persistently ignoring the possibility of his holding any other position in Australasia than his present position, and had inferred from it a homeward tendency. What is most curious to me is that he is very sensible, and yet does not seem to understand that he has qualified himself for no public examinations in the old country, and could not possibly hold his own against any competition for anything to which I could get him nominated. But I must not trouble you about my boys as if they were yours. It is enough that I can never thank you for your goodness to them in a generous consideration of me. I believe the truth as to France to be that a citizen Frenchman never forgives, and that Napoleon will never live down the _coup d'état_. This makes it enormously difficult for any well-advised English newspaper to support him, and pretend not to know on what a volcano his throne is set. Informed as to his designs on the one hand, and the perpetual uneasiness of his police on the other (to say nothing of a doubtful army), _The Times_ has a difficult game to play. My own impression is that if it were played too boldly for him, the old deplorable national antagonism would revive in his going down. That the wind will pass over his Imperiality on the sands of France I have not the slightest doubt. In no country on the earth, but least of all there, can you seize people in their houses on political warrants, and kill in the streets, on no warrant at all, without raising a gigantic Nemesis--not very reasonable in detail, perhaps, but none the less terrible for that. The commonest dog or man driven mad is a much more alarming creature than the same individuality in a sober and commonplace condition. Your friend ---- ---- is setting the world right generally all round (including the flattened ends, the two poles), and, as a Minister said to me the other day, "has the one little fault of omniscience." You will probably have read before now that I am going to be everything the Queen can make me.[111] If my authority be worth anything believe on it that I am going to be nothing but what I am, and that that includes my being as long as I live, Your faithful and heartily obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. Alfred Tennyson Dickens.] ATHEN�UM CLUB, _Friday Night, 20th May, 1870._ MY DEAR ALFRED,[112] I have just time to tell you under my own hand that I invited Mr. Bear to a dinner of such guests as he would naturally like to see, and that we took to him very much, and got on with him capitally. I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind? I notice that he always writes as if his present life were the be-all and the end-all of his emigration, and as if I had no idea of you two becoming proprietors, and aspiring to the first positions in the colony, without casting off the old connection. From Mr. Bear I had the best accounts of you. I told him that they did not surprise me, for I had unbounded faith in you. For which take my love and blessing. They will have told you all the news here, and that I am hard at work. This is not a letter so much as an assurance that I never think of you without hope and comfort. Ever, my dear Alfred, Your affectionate Father. * * * * * This Letter did not reach Australia until after these two absent sons of Charles Dickens had heard, by telegraph, the news of their father's death. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [107] Mr. Charles Collins was obliged to give up the illustrating of "Edwin Drood," on account of his failing health. [108] A meeting of Publishers and Authors to discuss the subject of International Copyright. [109] Printed in Mackenzie's "Life of Dickens." [110] The General Theatrical Fund. [111] An allusion to an unfounded rumour. [112] Charles Dickens's son, Alfred Tennyson. INDEX. Acrobats, 213 Adams, Mr. H. G., letters to, 15, 208 Agreement, a sporting, 244 Ainsworth, Mr. W. H., 13 Air, Dickens's love of fresh, 169 Allston, Mr. Washington, 42 America, feeling for the "Curiosity Shop" in, 19; projected visit to, 20; description of life in, 24; how Dickens was interviewed in, 26; amateur theatricals in, 28; friends in, 30, 238; voyage home from, 34; second visit of Dickens to, 234, 241, 244-249; Dickens's feeling for the people of, 237; the great walking-match in, 244; second journey home from, 249-252; desire on the part of Dickens to promote friendly relations between England and, 259; letters from, 24, 27, 28, 244-249 "American Notes, The," success of, 38; criticisms on, 38, 43; and see 34, 35, 237 Appleton, Mr., 260 Ashburton, Lord, 46 Austin, Mr. Henry, letter to, 130 Austin, Mrs., letter to, 214 Author, dreams of an, 55; penalties of an, 168 Babbage, Mr. Charles, letter to, 69 Bairr, Mrs., 146 Bath, a, abroad, 144; at Naples, 155 "Battle of Life, The," the drama of, 87; Dickens on, 102 Baylis, Mr., letter to, 212 Bear, Mr., 299 Beard, Mr., 9 Begging-letter Writers, Dickens on, 267 "Bentley's Miscellany," Dickens's connection with, 12 Benzon, Mrs., 199 Biliousness, an effect of, 87 Birmingham, meeting of Polytechnic Institution at, 64; the Institute at, 158 Birthday greeting, a, 226 "Black and White," Fechter in Wilkie Collins's play of, 277 "Bleak House," 140 Blessington, the Countess of, 68; letters to, 17, 65, 70, 74, 75, 89 Blue-stockings, Dickens on, 18 Boulogne, Dickens at, 140, 141, 161 Bouncer, Mrs., Miss Dickens's dog, 216, 255 Bowring, Sir John, letters to, 193, 295 Boy, the Magnetic, 18 Boyle, Miss Mary, 113; letter to, 220 Braham, Mr., 1-3 Braham, Mrs., 3 Breakfast, a, aboard ship, 251 Broadstairs, description of, 53; life at, 54, 125; a wreck at, 129, 131 Brougham, Lord, 46 Browning, Mr. Robert, letter to, 227 Buckstone, Mr., letter to, 296 Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, letter to, 62; and see Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lytton, Lord Butler, Mrs., 85 Calculation, a long, 43 Captain, a sea, 47 "Captives, The," Dickens's criticism on Lord Lytton's play of, 241 Carlyle, Mr. Thomas, 28 Carlyle, Mrs., 179 Céleste, Madame, 168 Cerjat, M. de, 148 Chapman, Mr. Edward, letters to, 14, 91 Chapman, Mr. Frederic, letter to, 294 Chappell, Mr. T., 277; letter to, 279 Charity, a vote for a, 108 Chéri, Rose, 90 Children, Dickens on the death of, 170 "Child's History of England, A," 237 "Chimes, The," Dickens at work on, 71; his interest in, 71 Chorley, Mr. Henry F., letters to, 190, 213, 216, 222, 231 Christening, a boisterous, 261 "Christmas Carol, The," Dickens at work on, 59, 63; success of, 60 Christmas keeping, 60 _Chronicle, The Evening_, Dickens's connection with, 5 Clark, Mr. L. Gaylord, letter to, 19 Clark, Mr. W. Gaylord, 19 Clarke, Mrs. Cowden, 264; and see Letters Clifford, Hon. Mrs., 271 Cobden, Mr. Richard, 84 Collins, Mr. Charles, 292 Collins, Mr. Wilkie, 142, 148, 198, 233, 244, 258; letter to, 171 Conjurer, Dickens as a, 41 Conolly, Mr., 160 Cookesley, Mr., 109 Copyright, Dickens on international, 28, 33, 44, 102, 237, 263, 293 Corn Laws, the Repeal of the, 84 Cornwall, a trip to, 39 Costello, Mr., 101 Coutts, Miss, 128, 132, 148 Covent Garden Opera, commencement of the, 86 Criticism, on Dickens's opera, 1; Dickens on American, 44; on art, 77; Dickens's appreciation of Thackeray's, 165; by Chorley on Dickens, 223 Cruikshank, Mr. George, 101 Cullenford, Mr., 88 _Daily News, The_, first issue of, 84 "Dando," the oyster-eater, 32, 35 "David Copperfield," Dickens at work on, 113; Dickens's feeling for, 114; his liking for the reading of, 227, 234 Death, Dickens on the punishment of, 78 De Gex, Mr., 9 Derby, Lord, Dickens's opinion of, 288 Devonshire, the Duke of, 121, 128, 129 Diary, fragments of Dickens's, 8-12 Dickens, Alfred, 265, 278, 289; letter to, 299 Dickens, Charles, his affection for Mary Hogarth, 6-9, 11, 50; his diary, 8-12; his relations with _The Chronicle_, 5; his "Sketches of Young Gentlemen," 9; his "Sunday in Three Parts," 9; insures his life, 10; his connection with "Bentley's Miscellany," 12; is entered at the Middle Temple, 14; his feeling for Kent, 15; his religious views, 16, 17; the purpose of his writing, 17; his childhood, 22; his first visit to America, 24-31; as a stage-manager, 29, 100, 127; dinner to, at Greenwich, 33; takes a trip to Cornwall, 39; as a conjuror, 41; on American criticism, 44; facetious description of himself, 53; at Broadstairs, 54, 125; his views on education, 58; at work on "The Christmas Carol," 59; in Italy, 70-78; at work on "The Chimes," 71; in Paris, 85, 89; organises theatricals for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103; organises theatricals to found a curatorship of Shakespeare's house, 104; acts in theatricals at Knebworth, 113, 114, 116; theatricals in aid of the Guild of Literature and Art, 118-128, 133-135; as an editor, 137-140, 159, 162-164, 173-175, 181, 183, 202, 229, 239, 284, 286, 295; at Boulogne, 140, 141, 161; his expedition to Switzerland and Italy, 142-158; his excitability when at work, 169; his love of fresh air, 169; on the death of children, 170; on red tape, 176; on Sunday bands, 177; sits to Frith for his portrait, 188; his readings, 208, 227, 230, 232, 238; at work on "Our Mutual Friend," 218, 221; readings in America, 234; his love for the American people, 237; his second visit to America, 241, 244, 252; at Gad's Hill, 256; farewell course of readings, 256, 278; his reminiscences of the Staplehurst accident, 264; his reading of the murder from "Oliver Twist," 268; serious illness of, 280, 281; great physical power of, 280 Dickens, Charles, jun., 9, 25, 41, 109, 154, 277; at "All the Year Round" office, 283 Dickens, Mrs. Charles, 9, 51, 114, 115, 124, 125, 171; and see Letters Dickens, Dora, death of, 125 Dickens, Edward, nicknamed Plorn, 158, 265, 273, 281, 288, 289, 297 Dickens, Henry F., 157; entered at the Temple, 292 Dickens, Kate, 153, 157, 293 Dickens, Miss, 157, 196, 205, 210, 215, 217, 222, 228, 255, 256, 258 Dickens, Sydney, 143, 157 Dickens, Walter, 25 Disease, a new form of, 129 Dissent, Dickens's views on, 16 "Doctor Marigold," reading of, 227 Dogs, Dickens's, 255, 262; Don, the Newfoundland, rescues his son, 262 Dolby, Mr. George, 234, 238, 248, 256, 261, 270, 273, 276 "Dombey and Son," sale of, 87; see also 89, 94 D'Orsay, Count, 18, 66, 68, 70, 73, 74, 78 Dream, an absurd, 56 Dufferin, Lord, 277 Dumas, Alexandre, 90 Earnestness, Dickens on, 176 Eden, the Hon. Miss, letter to, 128 Edinburgh, 270 Editor, Dickens as an, 137-140, 159, 162-164, 173-175, 181, 183, 202, 229, 239, 284-286, 295 Education, Dickens on, 58 Edward, the courier, 142-144, 148, 155 "Edwin Drood," Dickens on, 292; the opium scene in, 295 Egg, Mr. A., 101, 118, 127, 142, 148, 156 Evans, Mr., 109 "Experience, An," 283 "Fatal Zero," by Percy Fitzgerald, 291 Fechter, Mr. Charles, in "The Lady of Lyons," 234, 240; Dickens's admiration of, 240; and see 253, 257, 277, 291; letters to, 244, 254 Fechter, Madame, 254 Felton, Professor, 272; and see Letters Felton, Mrs., 33 Fenian Amnesty, meeting in favour of a, 287, 289 Fields, Mr. James T.; see Letters Fields, Mrs., 252, 260, 291; letter to, 255 Fildes, Mr., 294 Fitzgerald, Mr. Percy, 228, 271 Forster, Mr. John, 9, 10, 13, 30, 35, 36, 39, 41, 54, 60, 86, 89, 101, 113, 117, 127, 133, 154, 188, 207, 227, 260, 292; letters to, 165, 225 Forster, Mrs., letter to, 273 Fox, Mr. W. J., letter to, 84 Frith, R.A., Mr. W. P., letter to, 188 Funeral, the comic side of a, 48 Gad's Hill, descriptions of, 252, 256; Dickens's writing-room at, 256; Longfellow's visit to, 260; and see 276 Gallenga, Monsieur, 192 "Gamp, Mrs.," 56 Gaskell, Mrs., 271; letter to, 159 General Theatrical Fund, the, 88, 102, 296 Gibson, Mrs. Milner, letter to, 205 "Girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines, The," 124 Gladstone, Mr., 258, 294 Glasgow, 270 Gordon, Mrs., 87 "Great Expectations," 198 Greenwich, Dinner to Dickens at, 33 Grew, Mr. Frederick, letter to, 158 Grisi, Madame, 86 Guide Books, 140 Guild of Literature and Art, the, 120, 180; theatricals in aid of, 118-128, 133-135 Hardisty, Mr., 111 Harley, Mr. J. P., 3, 4; letter to, 13 Harness, Rev. W., 269, 291; letter to, 159 Harrison, Mr. James Bower, letters to, 132, 136 Hat, a Leghorn, 157 Hazlett, Mr. William, 259 Higgins, Mr., 165, 166 Hillard, Mr., 42 Hills, Mr., 274 Hodgson, Dr., 97; letters to, 93, 95 Hogarth, Mr., 2 Hogarth, George, 20; letter to, 5 Hogarth, Georgina, 51, 154, 196, 210, 215, 219, 221, 228, 244, 256, 258 Hogarth, Mary, 6-9, 11, 20, 50 Hogarth, Mrs., letters to, 6, 20, 50 Holland House, 178 Home, thoughts of, 29; a welcome to, 255 Hood, Mr. Tom, letter to, 43 House of Commons, the, Dickens's opinion of, 181, 194 Howe, Dr., 33, 37 Hugo, Victor, Dickens's opinion of, 91; and see 283 Hullah, Mr. John, letters to, 1-3 Hunt, Mr. Leigh, 13, 95, 97-100, 259 Hyde Park, closing of, by the Government in 1869, 289 Ireland, Mr. Alexander; see Letters Ireland, Dickens on, 279; in 1869, 288; land tenure in, 289 Irish Church, the, the Disestablishment of, 279 Irving, Mr. Washington, 47, 247; letters to, 21, 27, 178 Italian patriots, Dickens on, 191 Italy, visions of holiday life in, 66; proposed visit to, 66, 68; Dickens in, 70-78, 145-158; the Peschiere Palace at Genoa in, 153; a bath at Naples in, 155 Jerrold, Mr. Douglas, 98, 101, 118 "John Acland," by the Hon. Robert Lytton, 284, 286 Jolly, Miss Emily, letters to, 173, 175, 181, 183, 283 Jones, Mr. Ebenezer, letter to, 68 Keeley, Mr. and Mrs., 87 Kenny, Mr. J., letter to, 177 Kent, Mr. C., 260 Kent, Dickens's affection for, 15 "Kentish Coronal, The," 15 King, Mr. Joseph C., letter to, 109 King, Miss, letters to, 162, 164 "King Arthur," Dickens's opinion of Lord Lytton's poem of, 107 King David, a profane, 73 Knowles, Mr. James Sheridan, 104; letter to, 92 "Lady of Lyons, The," Dickens on the proposed opera of, 211; Fechter in, 234, 240 Landor, Mr. Walter, 77 Langley, Mr., 97 Lanman, Mr. Charles, letter to, 247 Lausanne, friends in, 143 Layard, Mr. Austen Henry, 169, 289; and see Letters Layard, Mrs., 274 Leech, Mr. John, 101, 118 Lehmann, Mr. Frederic, 199, 223 Lemon, Mr. Mark, 101, 114, 118, 119, 122, 123 Lemon, Mrs., 114 Leslie, R.A., Mr., 176, 178 LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS TO: Adams, Mr. H. G., 15, 208 Anonymous, 229 Austin, Mr. Henry, 130 Austin, Mrs., 214 Babbage, Mr. Charles, 69 Baylis, Mr., 212 Blessington, the Countess of, 17, 65, 70, 74, 75, 89 Bowring, Sir John, 193, 295 Boyle, Miss Mary, 220 Browning, Mr. Robert, 227 Buckstone, Mr., 296 Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, 62; and see Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, and Lytton, Lord Chapman, Mr. Edward, 14, 91 Chapman, Mr. Frederic, 294 Chappell, Mr. Tom, 279 Chorley, Mr. Henry F., 190, 213, 216, 222, 231 Clark, Mr. L. Gaylord, 19 Clarke, Mrs. Cowden, 103, 106, 108, 123, 136, 188 Collins, Mr. Wilkie, 171 Dickens, Alfred, 299 Dickens, Mrs. Charles, 142, 145, 149, 153, 154 Eden, the Hon. Miss, 128 Fechter, Mr. Charles, 244, 254 Felton, Professor, 24, 28, 32, 35, 38, 46, 52, 59 Fields, Mr. James T., 232, 236, 249, 252, 260, 268, 270, 290 Fields, Mrs. James T., 255 Forster, Mr. John, 165, 225 Forster, Mrs. John, 273 Fox, Mr. W. J., 84 Frith, R.A., Mr. W. P., 188 Gaskell, Mrs., 159 Gibson, Mrs. Milner, 205 Grew, Mr. Frederick, 158 Harley, Mr. J. P., 13 Harness, Rev. W., 159 Harrison, Mr. James Bower, 132, 136 Hodgson, Dr., 93, 95 Hogarth, Mr. George, 5 Hogarth, Mrs., 6, 20, 50 Hood, Mr. Tom, 43 Hullah, Mr. John, 1-3 Ireland, Mr. Alexander, 97-99, 104, 112, 259 Irving, Mr. Washington, 21, 27, 178 Jolly, Miss Emily, 173, 175, 181, 183, 283 Jones, Mr. Ebenezer, 68 Kenny, Mr. J., and Ross, Mr. T., 177 King, Mr. Joseph C., 109 King, Miss, 162, 164 Knowles, Mr. James Sheridan, 92 Lanman, Mr. Charles, 247 Layard, Mr. Austen Henry, 132, 194, 274, 290 Lytton, Hon. Robert, 230, 281, 286 Lytton, Lord, 228, 234, 240, 241, 293; see also Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, and Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, 88, 102, 107, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 125, 133, 180, 198-200, 204, 207, 209-211, 220; see also Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, and Lytton, Lord Mackay, Mr. Charles, 295 Malleson, Mrs., 197 Millais, R.A., Mr. J. E., 263 Mitton, Mr., 125 Morgan, Captain, 176, 195 Napier, Mr. Macvey, 43, 57, 78, 83 Olliffe, Lady, 205 Olliffe, Miss, 275 Pease, Mrs., 248 Phillips, Mr. Henry W., 231 Procter, Mr. B. W., 208 Procter, Mrs., 223 Robinson, Rev. Thomas, 16 Ross, Mr. R. M., 226 Rusden, Mr., 228, 265, 278, 281, 287, 289, 297 Rye, Mr. W. B., 224 Sammins, Mr. W. L., 12 Serle, Mr., 263 Smith, Mr. Albert, 186 Smith, Mr. Arthur, 187 Smith, Mr. H. P., 82 Stone, Mr. Frank, 129, 179 Sturgis, Mr. Russell, 267, 272 Thackeray, Mr. W. M., 165 Thompson, Mr., 16, 64, 66, 67, 81, 85 Thornbury, Mr. Walter, 239 White, Rev. James, 141, 160 Wills, Mr. W. H., 137, 140, 161, 218, 219 Winter, Mrs., 167, 170 Lewes, Mr., 101 "Lighthouse, The," production of, at the Olympic, 172 "Lirriper, Mrs.," 218 Liverpool, meeting of the Mechanics' Institute at, 64; theatricals at, 96, 98 _London_, the, wreck of, 225 Longfellow, Mr., 33, 39, 42, 62, 260, 261 Longman, Mr., 293 Lumley, Mr., 86 Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer; see Letters; see also Bulwer, Sir Edward Lytton, and Lytton, Lord Lytton, Lord; see Letters Lytton, Hon. Robert, letters to, 230, 284, 286 Mackay, Mr. Charles, letter to, 295 Maclise, R.A., Mr. Daniel, 30, 36, 39, 42, 47, 54, 55, 77, 86 Macready, Mr. W., 25, 30, 54, 60, 62, 88, 90, 119, 153, 234 Macready, Miss, 153 Malleson, Mrs., letter to, 197 "Man about Town, The," 45 Manchester, Dickens at, 61; theatricals at, 96, 98, 105 Manin, M., 192 Mario, Signor, 86 Martin, Captain, 225 "Martin Chuzzlewit," 39, 46, 52, 66 Mazzini, M., 192 "Medical Aspects of Death, The," 132 "Message from the Sea, A," 196 Meyerbeer, M., 172 Millais, R.A., Mr. J. E., 292; letter to, 263 Mistake, a common, among would-be authors, 229 Mitton, Mr., 9; letter to, 125 "Modern Greek Songs," 159 Molesworth, Lady, 216 "Money," Dickens on Lord Lytton's play of, 117 Montague, Miss Emmeline, 124 Morgan, Captain, letters to, 176, 195 Morley, Mr., 165, 166 Morpeth, Lord, 57 "Mrs. Tillotson," by Percy Fitzgerald, 228 "Much Ado about Nothing," a captain's views on, 47 Murray, Mr. Leigh, 87 Napier, Mr. Macvey, letters to, 43, 67, 78, 83 Naples, Dickens at, 76 Napoleon the Third, Dickens prophesies the overthrow of, 298 "National Music," Mr. Chorley's lecture on, 213 Nature, Topping, the groom, on, 36 Niagara, the falls of, 76 Nicknames, of Professor Felton, 32; Dickens's, of himself, 62, 64, 107, 124, 143; of his son Edward, 158, 281 Normanby, Lord, 86 "No Thoroughfare," the play of, 244, 253, 254, 257 "Not sSo Bad As We Seem," Dickens's opinion of Lord Lytton's comedy of, 117; Dickens plays in, 118, 124 Novello, Mr. Alfred, 264 Novello, Miss Sabilla, 264 Novel-writing, Dickens on, 185 "Old Curiosity Shop, The," feeling for, in America, 19 "Oliver Twist," 16; the reading of the murder from, 268; effect of the murder reading, 278 Olliffe, Sir J., 186, 187 Olliffe, Lady, 187; letter to, 205 Olliffe, Miss, letter to, 275 Osgood, Mr., 234 "Our London Correspondent," Dickens on, 112 "Our Mutual Friend," 218, 221 Oyster cellars out of season, 31 Oysters, 26, 35 Paris, Dickens in, 85, 89; the drama in, 90 Pease, Mrs., letter to, 248 Phillips, Mr. Henry W., letter to, 231 Pickthorn, Dr., 10 Picnic, a, in Kent, 260 Political Life, Dickens's opinion of, 222 Political meetings, Dickens on, 287 Poole, Mr., 85, 100 Portrait of Dickens, by Frith, 188 Power, Miss, 66, 74, 91 Prescott, Dickens's admiration for, 61 Prince Consort, the, 123 Prince of Wales, the, 296 Prisons, Dickens on discipline in, 138 Pritchard the poisoner, 221 Procter, Mr. B. W., 253, 260; letter to, 208 Procter, Mrs., 179, 223, 260 Procter, Miss Adelaide, 223 Puffery, Dickens's hatred of, 140 Punishment of death, Dickens on the, 78 Purse, a theatrical, 73 Queen, the, Maclise and, 55; her reception of Longfellow, 261; and see 119, 121, 123, 299 Rainforth, Miss, 4 Reade, Mr. Charles, 233 Readings, Dickens's public, 208, 227, 230, 231; the object of the, 230; the proposed series of, in America, 234; the labour of the, 238; farewell series of, 256, 278, 281; the trial reading of the murder, 268, 276; effect of the reading of the murder on the audience, 278 Red tape, Dickens on, 176 Reform Bill, Dickens on the, 266 Reform meeting at Drury-lane Theatre, 165 Religion, Dickens on, 17 _Review_, _The North American_, 46; _The Edinburgh_, 43, 46, 57, 58, 78, 83 Robinson, Mr., 98, 100, 105 Robinson, Rev. Thomas, letter to, 16 Robson, Mr. F., 153, 172 "Roccabella," Dickens's opinion of Mr. Chorley's story of, 190 Roche, the courier, 146 Rogers, Mr. Samuel, 178 Rome, Dickens at, 76 Ross, Mr. John, 9 Ross, Mr. R. M., letter to, 226 Ross, Mr. T., letter to, 177 Royal Exchange, the, fire at, 10 Rusden, Mr.; see Letters Russell, Mr. George, 218 Russell, Lord John, 172, 288 _Russia_, s.s., the, 249, 276 Rye, Mr. W. B., letter to, 224 Sammins, Mr. W. L., letter to, 12 Sartoris, Mr. and Mrs., 157 _Satirist, The_, 45 Sausage, a questionable, 131 Scheffer, Ary, 192 Schools, Dickens on ragged, 58 Scotland, Dickens's love for the people of, 295 Scott, Sir Walter, extracts from the diary of, 11, 56 Serle, Mr., letter to, 263 Shakespeare, curatorship of house of, 104 Sheridan, 86 "Sketches of Young Gentlemen," by Dickens, 9 Slave-owners, Dickens on, 38 Smith, Mr. Albert, letter to, 186 Smith, Mr. Arthur, 186, 208; letter to, 187 Smith, Mr. H. P., letter to, 82 Speaking, Dickens on public, 214 Stage-manager, Dickens as a, 29, 100, 127 Stanfield, Mr. Clarkson, 39, 41, 54, 86, 232 Stansbury, Mr., 4 Staplehurst, the railway accident at, 264 Stone, Mr. Frank, 101, 117, 127; letters to, 129, 179 "Strange Story, A," Dickens's criticism on, 198, 204, 207, 210 "Studies of Sensation and Event," 69 Sturgis, Mr. Russell, letters to, 267, 272 Sumner, Mr., 42, 62 Sunday bands, 177 "Sunday under Three Heads," by Charles Dickens, 9 Switzerland, expedition to, 142-145; ascent of the Mer de Glace, 142; a hot bath in, 144; passage of the Simplon, 146; travellers in, 147; carriages in, 147 Sympathy, letters of, 19, 20, 170, 275 Tavistock House, 130 Temple, the, Dickens becomes a student at, 14 Tennent, Sir Emerson, 154, 273, 274 Tennent, Lady, 154 Thackeray, Mr. W. M., letter to, 165 Theatricals, in America, 28; Dickens as a stage-manager, 29; for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103; for the endowment of a curatorship of Shakespeare's house, 104; reminiscences of, 106; at Knebworth, 113, 114, 116; for the Guild of Literature, 118-128, 133-135; at Tavistock House, 179 Thompson, Mr.; see Letters Thompson, Mrs., 82 Thompson, Miss Elizabeth, 85 Thornbury, Mr. Walter, letter to, 239 Topham, Mr., 123 Topping, the groom, on nature, 36 Townshend, Mr., 161 Tracey, Lieutenant, 77 Travers, Mr., 166 "Uncommercial Traveller, The," 270, 276 "United Vagabonds, The," 34 Venice, Dickens at, 72 Verona, Dickens at, 71 Vesuvius, Dickens's ascent of, 76 "Village Coquettes," Braham's opinion of Dickens's opera of, 2; Harley's opinion of, 3 "Visits to Rochester," 224 Waistcoats, Dickens's fondness for bright, 150 Waterfall, a, as a stage effect, 254, 258 Watson, Dr., 280 White, Rev. James, letters to, 141, 160 White, Mrs., 142 "Wilds of America," 247 Wills, Mr. W. H., 159, 175, 180, 253, 261, 271, 283; and see Letters Wilmot, Mr., 124 Wilson, Sir John, 37 Winter, Mrs., letters to, 167, 170 "Woodland Gossip," Dickens's criticism on, 220 Work, Dickens at, 168, 185 "Working Man's Life, The," 99 Young, Mr., 155 CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. _11, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C._ (_Late 193, Piccadilly, W._) _NOVEMBER, 1881._ CATALOGUE OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED, INCLUDING DRAWING EXAMPLES, DIAGRAMS, MODELS, INSTRUMENTS, ETC. ISSUED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT, SOUTH KENSINGTON, FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND ART AND SCIENCE CLASSES. NEW NOVELS. Just ready, in 3 vols., _THE VICAR'S PEOPLE: A Story of a Stain._ BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN, Author of "The Parson o' Dumford." * * * * * Just ready, in 1 vol., _THE MISSING NOTE._ BY MRS. 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ORIGINAL EDITIONS. _In Demy 8vo._ THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. With Illustrations by S. L. Fildes, and a Portrait engraved by Baker. Cloth, 7s. 6d. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. With Forty Illustrations by Marcus Stone. Cloth, £1 1s. THE PICKWICK PAPERS. With Forty-three Illustrations by Seymour and Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. SKETCHES BY "BOZ." With Forty Illustrations by George Cruikshank. Cloth, £1 1s. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. DOMBEY AND SON. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. DAVID COPPERFIELD. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. BLEAK HOUSE. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. LITTLE DORRIT. With Forty Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, £1 1s. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. With Seventy-five Illustrations by George Cattermole and H. K. Browne. A New Edition. Uniform with the other volumes, £1 1s. BARNABY RUDGE: a Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty. With Seventy-eight Illustrations by George Cattermole and H. K. Browne. Uniform with the other volumes, £1 1s. CHRISTMAS BOOKS: Containing--The Christmas Carol; The Cricket on the Hearth; The Chimes; The Battle of Life; The Haunted House. With all the original Illustrations. Cloth, 12s. OLIVER TWIST and TALE OF TWO CITIES. In one volume. Cloth, £1 1s. OLIVER TWIST. Separately. With Twenty-four Illustrations by George Cruikshank. Cloth, 11s. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Separately. With Sixteen Illustrations by Phiz. Cloth, 9s. [***] _The remainder of Dickens's Works were not originally printed in Demy 8vo._ LIBRARY EDITION. _In Post 8vo. With the Original Illustrations, 30 vols., cloth, £12._ _s._ _d._ PICKWICK PAPERS 43 Illustrns., 2 vols. 16 0 NICHOLAS NICKLEBY 39 " 2 vols. 16 0 MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 40 " 2 vols. 16 0 OLD CURIOSITY SHOP & REPRINTED PIECES 36 " 2 vols. 16 0 BARNABY RUDGE and HARD TIMES 36 " 2 vols. 16 0 BLEAK HOUSE 40 " 2 vols. 16 0 LITTLE DORRIT 40 " 2 vols. 16 0 DOMBEY AND SON 38 " 2 vols. 16 0 DAVID COPPERFIELD 38 " 2 vols. 16 0 OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 40 " 2 vols. 16 0 SKETCHES BY "BOZ" 39 " 1 vol. 8 0 OLIVER TWIST 24 " 1 vol. 8 0 CHRISTMAS BOOKS 17 " 1 vol. 8 0 A TALE OF TWO CITIES 16 " 1 vol. 8 0 GREAT EXPECTATIONS 8 " 1 vol. 8 0 PICTURES FROM ITALY & AMERICAN NOTES 8 " 1 vol. 8 0 UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 8 " 1 vol. 8 0 CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 8 " 1 vol. 8 0 EDWIN DROOD and MISCELLANIES 12 " 1 vol. 8 0 CHRISTMAS STORIES from "Household Words," &c. 14 " 1 vol. 8 0 THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. By JOHN FORSTER. With Illustrations. Uniform with this Edition. 1 vol., 10s. 6d. THE "CHARLES DICKENS" EDITION. _In Crown 8vo. In 21 vols., cloth, with Illustrations, £3 16s._ _s._ _d._ PICKWICK PAPERS 8 Illustrations 4 0 MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 8 " 4 0 DOMBEY AND SON 8 " 4 0 NICHOLAS NICKLEBY 8 " 4 0 DAVID COPPERFIELD 8 " 4 0 BLEAK HOUSE 8 " 4 0 LITTLE DORRIT 8 " 4 0 OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 8 " 4 0 BARNABY RUDGE 8 " 3 6 OLD CURIOSITY SHOP 8 " 3 6 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 4 " 3 6 EDWIN DROOD and OTHER STORIES 8 " 3 6 CHRISTMAS STORIES, from "Household Words" 8 " 3 6 SKETCHES BY "BOZ" 8 " 3 6 AMERICAN NOTES and REPRINTED PIECES 8 " 3 6 CHRISTMAS BOOKS 8 " 3 6 OLIVER TWIST 8 " 3 6 GREAT EXPECTATIONS 8 " 3 6 TALE OF TWO CITIES 8 " 3 0 HARD TIMES and PICTURES FROM ITALY 8 " 3 0 UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 4 " 3 0 THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. Uniform with this Edition, with Numerous Illustrations. 2 vols. THE ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY EDITION. _Complete in 30 Volumes. Demy 8vo, 10s. each; or set, £15._ This Edition is printed on a finer paper and in a larger type than has been employed in any previous edition. The type has been cast especially for it, and the page is of a size to admit of the introduction of all the original illustrations. No such attractive issue has been made of the writings of Mr. Dickens, which, various as have been the forms of publication adapted to the demands of an ever widely-increasing popularity, have never yet been worthily presented in a really handsome library form. The collection comprises all the minor writings it was Mr. Dickens's wish to preserve. SKETCHES BY "BOZ." With 40 Illustrations by George Cruikshank. PICKWICK PAPERS. 2 vols. With 42 Illustrations by Phiz. OLIVER TWIST. With 24 Illustrations by Cruikshank. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Phiz. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP and REPRINTED PIECES. 2 vols. With Illustrations by Cattermole, &c. BARNABY RUDGE and HARD TIMES. 2 vols. With Illustrations by Cattermole, &c. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 2 vols. With 4 Illustrations by Phiz. AMERICAN NOTES and PICTURES FROM ITALY. 1 vol. With 8 Illustrations. DOMBEY AND SON. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Phiz. DAVID COPPERFIELD. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Phiz. BLEAK HOUSE. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Phiz. LITTLE DORRIT. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Phiz. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. With 16 Illustrations by Phiz. THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. With 8 Illustrations by Marcus Stone. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. With 8 Illustrations by Marcus Stone. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 2 vols. With 40 Illustrations by Marcus Stone. CHRISTMAS BOOKS. With 17 Illustrations by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. Maclise, R.A., &c. &c. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. With 8 Illustrations by Marcus Stone. CHRISTMAS STORIES. (From "Household Words" and "All the Year Round.") With 14 Illustrations. EDWIN DROOD AND OTHER STORIES. With 12 Illustrations by S. L. Fildes. HOUSEHOLD EDITION. _Complete in 22 Volumes. Crown 4to, cloth, £4 8s. 6d._ MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, with 59 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. DAVID COPPERFIELD, with 60 Illustrations and a Portrait, cloth, 5s. BLEAK HOUSE, with 61 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. LITTLE DORRIT, with 58 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. PICKWICK PAPERS, with 56 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, with 58 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, with 59 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. DOMBEY AND SON, with 61 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. EDWIN DROOD; REPRINTED PIECES; and other Stories, with 30 Illustrations, cloth, 5s. THE LIFE OF DICKENS. By JOHN FORSTER. With 40 Illustrations. Cloth, 5s. BARNABY RUDGE, with 46 Illustrations, cloth, 4s. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, with 32 Illustrations, cloth, 4s. CHRISTMAS STORIES, with 23 Illustrations, cloth, 4s. OLIVER TWIST, with 28 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. GREAT EXPECTATIONS, with 26 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. SKETCHES BY "BOZ," with 36 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER, with 26 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. CHRISTMAS BOOKS, with 28 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND, with 15 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. AMERICAN NOTES and PICTURES FROM ITALY, with 18 Illustrations, cloth, 3s. A TALE OF TWO CITIES, with 25 Illustrations, cloth, 2s. 6d. HARD TIMES, with 20 Illustrations, cloth, 2s. 6d. MR. DICKENS'S READINGS. _Fcap. 8vo, sewed._ CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE. 1s. CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. 1s. CHIMES: A GOBLIN STORY. 1s. STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY. 1s. POOR TRAVELLER, BOOTS AT THE HOLLY-TREE INN, and MRS. GAMP. 1s. * * * * * A CHRISTMAS CAROL, with the Original Coloured Plates; being a reprint of the Original Edition. Small 8vo, red cloth, gilt edges, 5s. THE POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS, _In 30 Vols., large crown 8vo, price £6; separate Vols. 4s. each._ An Edition printed on good paper, containing Illustrations selected from the Household Edition, on Plate Paper. Each Volume has about 450 pages and 16 full-page Illustrations. SKETCHES BY "BOZ." PICKWICK. 2 vols. OLIVER TWIST. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 2 vols. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 2 vols. DOMBEY AND SON. 2 vols. DAVID COPPERFIELD. 2 vols. CHRISTMAS BOOKS. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 2 vols. CHRISTMAS STORIES. BLEAK HOUSE. 2 vols. LITTLE DORRIT. 2 vols. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP AND REPRINTED PIECES. 2 vols. BARNABY RUDGE. 2 vols. UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. TALE OF TWO CITIES. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. EDWIN DROOD and MISCELLANIES. PICTURES FROM ITALY AND AMERICAN NOTES. * * * * * _The Cheapest and Handiest Edition of_ THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. The Pocket Volume Edition of Charles Dickens's Works. _In 30 Vols., small fcap. 8vo, £2 5s._ _List of Books, Drawing Examples, Diagrams, Models, Instruments, &c.,_ INCLUDING THOSE ISSUED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT, SOUTH KENSINGTON, FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND ART AND SCIENCE CLASSES. * * * * * CATALOGUE OF MODERN WORKS ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. 8vo, sewed, 1s. _BENSON (W.)_-- PRINCIPLES OF THE SCIENCE OF COLOUR. Small 4to, cloth, 15s. MANUAL OF THE SCIENCE OF COLOUR. Coloured Frontispiece and Illustrations. 12mo, cloth, 2s. 6d. _BRADLEY (THOMAS), of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich_-- ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRICAL DRAWING. In Two Parts, with 60 Plates. Oblong folio, half-bound, each part 16s. Selections (from the above) of 20 Plates, for the use of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Oblong folio, half-bound, 16s. _BURCHETT_-- LINEAR PERSPECTIVE. With Illustrations. Post 8vo, cloth, 7s. PRACTICAL GEOMETRY. Post 8vo, cloth, 5s. DEFINITIONS OF GEOMETRY. Third Edition. 24mo, sewed, 5d. _CARROLL (JOHN)_-- FREEHAND DRAWING LESSONS FOR THE BLACK BOARD. 6s. _CUBLEY (W. H.)_-- A SYSTEM OF ELEMENTARY DRAWING. With Illustrations and Examples. Imperial 4to, sewed, 8s. _DAVISON (ELLIS A.)_-- DRAWING FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. Post 8vo, cloth, 3s. MODEL DRAWING. 12mo, cloth, 3s. THE AMATEUR HOUSE CARPENTER: A Guide in Building, Making, and Repairing. With numerous Illustrations, drawn on Wood by the Author. Demy 8vo, 10s. 6d. _DELAMOTTE (P. H.)_-- PROGRESSIVE DRAWING-BOOK FOR BEGINNERS. 12mo, 3s. 6d. _DICKSEE (J. R.)_-- SCHOOL PERSPECTIVE. 8vo, cloth, 5s. _DYCE_-- DRAWING-BOOK OF THE GOVERNMENT SCHOOL OF DESIGN: ELEMENTARY OUTLINES OF ORNAMENT. 50 Plates. Small folio, sewed, 5s.; mounted, 18s. INTRODUCTION TO DITTO. Fcap. 8vo, 6d. _FOSTER (VERE)_-- DRAWING-BOOKS: (a) Forty-two Numbers, at 1d. each. (b) Forty-six Numbers, at 3d. each. The set _b_ includes the subjects in _a_. DRAWING-CARDS: Freehand Drawing: First Grade, Sets I., II., III., price 1s. each; in cloth cases, 1s. 6d. each. Second Grade, Set I., price 2s.; in cloth case, 3s. _HENSLOW (PROFESSOR)_-- ILLUSTRATIONS TO BE EMPLOYED IN THE PRACTICAL LESSONS ON BOTANY. Prepared for South Kensington Museum. Post 8vo, sewed, 6d. _JACOBSTHAL (E.)_-- GRAMMATIK DER ORNAMENTE, in 7 Parts of 20 Plates each. Price, unmounted, £3 13s. 6d.; mounted on cardboard, £11 4s. The Parts can be had separately. _JEWITT_-- HANDBOOK OF PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE. 18mo, cloth, 1s. 6d. _KENNEDY (JOHN)_-- FIRST GRADE PRACTICAL GEOMETRY, 12mo, 6d. FREEHAND DRAWING-BOOK. 16mo, cloth, 1s. 6d. _LINDLEY (JOHN)_-- SYMMETRY OF VEGETATION: Principles to be Observed in the Delineation of Plants. 12mo, sewed, 1s. _MARSHALL_-- HUMAN BODY. Text and Plates reduced from the large Diagrams. 2 vols., cloth, £1 1s. _NEWTON (E. TULLEY, F.G.S.)_-- THE TYPICAL PARTS IN THE SKELETONS OF A CAT, DUCK, AND CODFISH, being a Catalogue with Comparative Descriptions arranged in a Tabular Form. Demy 8vo, 3s. _OLIVER (PROFESSOR)_-- ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 109 Plates. Oblong 8vo, cloth. Plain, 16s.; coloured, £1 6s. _POYNTER (E. J., R.A.), issued under the superintendence of_-- ELEMENTARY, FREEHAND, ORNAMENT: Book I. Simple Geometrical Forms, 6d. " II. Conventionalised Floral Forms, &c., 6d. FREEHAND--FIRST GRADE: Book I. Simple Objects and Ornament, 6d. " II. Various Objects, 6d. " III. Objects and Architectural Ornaments, 6d. " IV. Architectural Ornament, 6d. " V. Objects of Glass and Pottery, 6d. " VI. Common Objects, 6d. FREEHAND--SECOND GRADE: Book I. Various Forms of Anthermion, &c., 1s. " II. Greek, Roman, and Venetian, 1s. " III. Italian Renaissance, 1s. " IV. Roman, Italian, Japanese, &c. 1s. THE SOUTH KENSINGTON DRAWING CARDS, Containing the same examples as the books: Elementary Freehand Cards. Four packets, 9d. each. First Grade Freehand Cards. Six packets, 1s. each. Second Grade Freehand Cards. Four packets, 1s. 6d. each. _PUCKETT (R. CAMPBELL)_-- SCIOGRAPHY, OR RADIAL PROJECTION OF SHADOWS. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. _REDGRAVE_-- MANUAL AND CATECHISM ON COLOUR. Fifth Edition. 24mo, sewed, 9d. _ROBSON (GEORGE)_-- ELEMENTARY BUILDING CONSTRUCTION. Oblong folio, sewed, 8s. _WALLIS (GEORGE)_-- DRAWING-BOOK. Oblong, sewed, 3s. 6d.; mounted, 8s. _WORNUM (R. N.)_-- THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLES: An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art. Royal 8vo, cloth, 8s. DRAWING FOR YOUNG CHILDREN. Containing 150 Copies. 16mo, cloth, 3s. 6d. EDUCATIONAL DIVISION OF SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM: CLASSIFIED CATALOGUE OF. Ninth Edition. 8vo, 7s. ELEMENTARY DRAWING COPY-BOOKS, for the Use of Children from four years old and upwards, in Schools and Families. Compiled by a Student certificated by the Science and Art Department as an Art Teacher. Seven Books in 4to, sewed: Book I. Letters, 8d. " II. Ditto, 8d. " III. Geometrical and Ornamental Forms, 8d. " IV. Objects, 8d. " V. Leaves, 8d. " VI. Birds, Animals, &c., 8d. " VII. Leaves, Flowers, and Sprays, 8d. [***] Or in Sets of Seven Books, 4s. 6d. ENGINEER AND MACHINIST DRAWING-BOOK, 16 Parts, 71 Plates. Folio, £1 12s.; mounted, £3 4s. PRINCIPLES OF DECORATIVE ART. Folio, sewed, 1s. DIAGRAM OF THE COLOURS OF THE SPECTRUM, with Explanatory Letterpress, on roller, 10s. 6d. COPIES FOR OUTLINE DRAWING: DYCE'S ELEMENTARY OUTLINES OF ORNAMENT, 50 Selected Plates, mounted back and front, 18s.; unmounted, sewed, 5s. WEITBRICHT'S OUTLINES OF ORNAMENT, reproduced by Herman, 12 Plates, mounted back and front, 8s. 6d.; unmounted, 2s. MORGHEN'S OUTLINES OF THE HUMAN FIGURE reproduced by Herman, 20 Plates, mounted back and front, 15s.; unmounted, 3s. 4d. ONE SET OF FOUR PLATES, Outlines of Tarsia, from Gruner, mounted, 3s. 6d. unmounted, 7d. ALBERTOLLI'S FOLIAGE, one set of Four Plates, mounted, 3s. 6d.; unmounted, 5d. OUTLINE OF TRAJAN FRIEZE, mounted, 1s. WALLIS'S DRAWING-BOOK, mounted, 8s., unmounted, 3s. 6d. OUTLINE DRAWINGS OF FLOWERS, Eight Sheets, mounted, 3s. 6d.; unmounted, 8d. COPIES FOR SHADED DRAWING: COURSE OF DESIGN. By Ch. Bargue (French), 20 Selected Sheets, 11 at 2s. and 9 at 3s. each. £2 9s. ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES. By J. B. Tripon. 10 Plates, £1. MECHANICAL STUDIES. By J. B. Tripon. 15s. per dozen. FOLIATED SCROLL FROM THE VATICAN, unmounted, 5d.; mounted, 1s. 3d. TWELVE HEADS after Holbein, selected from his Drawings in Her Majesty's Collection at Windsor. Reproduced in Autotype. Half imperial, £1 16s. LESSONS IN SEPIA, 9s. per dozen, or 1s. each. COLOURED EXAMPLES: A SMALL DIAGRAM OF COLOUR, mounted, 1s. 6d.; unmounted, 9d. TWO PLATES OF ELEMENTARY DESIGN, unmounted, 1s.; mounted, 3s. 9d. CAMELLIA, mounted, 3s. 9d.; unmounted, 2s. 9d. COTMAN'S PENCIL LANDSCAPES (set of 9), mounted, 15s. " SEPIA DRAWINGS (set of 5), mounted, £1. ALLONGE'S LANDSCAPES IN CHARCOAL (Six), at 4s. each, or the set, £1 4s. SOLID MODELS, &c.: *Box of Models, £1 4s. A Stand with a universal joint, to show the solid models, &c., £1 18s. *One Wire Quadrangle, with a circle and cross within it, and one straight wire. One solid cube. One Skeleton Wire Cube. One Sphere. One Cone. One Cylinder. One Hexagonal Prism. £2 2s. Skeleton Cube in wood, 3s. 6d. 18-inch Skeleton Cube in wood, 12s. *Three objects of form in Pottery: Indian Jar, } Celadon Jar, } 18s. 6d. Bottle, } *Five selected Vases in Majolica Ware, £2 11s. *Three selected Vases in Earthenware, 18s. Imperial Deal Frames, glazed, without sunk rings, 10s. each. *Davidson's Smaller Solid Models, in Box, £2, containing-- 2 Square Slabs. 9 Oblong Blocks (steps). 2 Cubes. 4 Square Blocks. Octagon Prism. Cylinder. Cone. Jointed Cross. Triangular Prism. Pyramid, Equilateral. Pyramid, Isosceles. Square Block. *Davidson's Advanced Drawing Models, £9.--The following is a brief description of the Models:--An Obelisk--composed of 2 Octagonal Slabs, 26 and 20 inches across, and each 3 inches high; 1 Cube, 12 inches edge; 1 Monolith (forming the body of the obelisk) 3 feet high; 1 Pyramid, 6 inches base; the complete object is thus nearly 5 feet high. A Market Cross--composed of 3 Slabs, 24, 18, and 12 inches across, and each 3 inches high; 1 Upright, 3 feet high; 2 Cross Arms, united by mortise and tenon joints; complete height, 3 feet 9 inches. A Step-Ladder, 23 inches high. A Kitchen Table, 14 1/2 inches high. A Chair to correspond. A Four-legged Stool, with projecting top and cross rails, height 14 inches. A Tub, with handles and projecting hoops, and the divisions between the staves plainly marked. A strong Trestle, 18 inches high. A Hollow Cylinder, 9 inches in diameter, and 12 inches long, divided lengthwise. A Hollow Sphere, 9 inches in diameter, divided into semi-spheres, one of which is again divided into quarters; the semi-sphere, when placed on the cylinder, gives the form and principles of shading a dome, whilst one of the quarters placed on half the cylinder forms a niche. *Davidson's Apparatus for Teaching Practical Geometry (22 models), £5. *Binn's Models for Illustrating the Elementary Principles of Orthographic Projection as applied to Mechanical Drawing, in box, £1 10s. Miller's Class Drawing Models.--These Models are particularly adapted for teaching large classes; the stand is very strong, and the universal joint will hold the Models in any position. _Wood Models_: Square Prism, 12 inches side, 18 inches high; Hexagonal Prism, 14 inches side, 18 inches high; Cube, 14 inches side; Cylinder, 13 inches diameter, 16 inches high; Hexagon Pyramid, 14 inches diameter, 22 1/2 inches side; Square Pyramid, 14 inches side, 22 1/2 inches side; Cone, 13 inches diameter, 22 1/2 inches side; Skeleton Cube, 19 inches solid wood 1 3/4 inch square; Intersecting Circles, 19 inches solid wood 2 1/4 by 1 1/2 inches. _Wire Models_: Triangular Prism, 17 inches side, 22 inches high; Square Prism, 14 inches side, 20 inches high; Hexagonal Prism, 16 inches diameter, 21 inches high; Cylinder, 14 inches diameter, 21 inches high; Hexagon Pyramid, 18 inches diameter, 24 inches high; Square Pyramid, 17 inches side, 24 inches high; Cone, 17 inches side, 24 inches high; Skeleton Cube, 19 inches side; Intersecting Circles, 19 inches side; Plain Circle, 19 inches side; Plain Square, 19 inches side. Table, 27 inches by 21 1/2 inches. Stand. The set complete, £14 13s. Vulcanite Set Square, 5s. Large Compasses, with chalk-holder, 5s. *Slip, two set squares and =T= square, 5s. *Parkes's Case of Instruments, containing 6-inch compasses with pen and pencil leg, 5s. *Prize Instrument Case, with 6-inch compasses, pen and pencil leg, 2 small compasses, pen and scale, 18s. 6-inch Compasses, with shifting pen and point, 4s. 6d. Small Compass, in case, 1s. * Models, &c., entered as sets, can only be supplied in sets. LARGE DIAGRAMS. ASTRONOMICAL: TWELVE SHEETS. By JOHN DREW, Ph. Dr., F.R.S.A. Prepared for the Committee of Council on Education. Sheets, £2 8s.; on rollers and varnished, £4 4s. BOTANICAL: NINE SHEETS. Illustrating a Practical Method of Teaching Botany. By Professor HENSLOW, F.L.S. £2; on rollers and varnished, £3 3s. CLASS. DIVISION. SECTION. DIAGRAM. { { Thalamifloral 1 Dicotyledon { Angiospermous { Calycifloral 2 & 3 { { Corollifloral 4 { { Incomplete 5 { Gymnospermous 6 { Petaloid { Superior 7 { { Inferior 8 Monocotyledons { { Glumaceous 9 BUILDING CONSTRUCTION: TEN SHEETS. By WILLIAM J. GLENNY, Professor of Drawing, King's College. In sets, £1 1s. LAXTON'S EXAMPLES OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION IN TWO DIVISIONS, containing 32 Imperial Plates, £1. BUSBRIDGE'S DRAWINGS OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION, 11 Sheets. 2s. 9d. Mounted, 5s. 6d. GEOLOGICAL: DIAGRAM OF BRITISH STRATA. By H. W. BRISTOW, F.R.S., F.G.S. A Sheet, 4s.; on roller and varnished, 7s. 6d. MECHANICAL: DIAGRAMS OF THE MECHANICAL POWERS, AND THEIR APPLICATIONS IN MACHINERY AND THE ARTS GENERALLY. By DR. JOHN ANDERSON. 8 Diagrams, highly coloured on stout paper, 3 feet 6 inches by 2 feet 6 inches. Sheets £1 per set; mounted on rollers, £2. DIAGRAMS OF THE STEAM-ENGINE. By Professor GOODEVE and Professor SHELLEY. Stout paper, 40 inches by 27 inches, highly coloured. Sets of 41 Diagrams (52 1/2 Sheets), £6 6s.; varnished and mounted on rollers, £11 11s. MACHINE DETAILS. By Professor UNWIN. 16 Coloured Diagrams. Sheets, £2 2s.; mounted on rollers and varnished, £3 14s. SELECTED EXAMPLES OF MACHINES, OF IRON AND WOOD (French). By STANISLAS PETTIT. 60 Sheets, £3 5s.; 13s. per dozen. BUSBRIDGE'S DRAWINGS OF MACHINE CONSTRUCTION. 50 Sheets, 12s. 6d. Mounted, £1 5s. LESSONS IN MECHANICAL DRAWING. By STANISLAS PETTIT. 1s. per dozen; also larger Sheets, more advanced copies, 2s. per dozen. LESSONS IN ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING. By STANISLAS PETTIT. 1s. per dozen; also larger Sheets, more advanced copies, 2s. per dozen. PHYSIOLOGICAL: ELEVEN SHEETS. Illustrating Human Physiology, Life Size and Coloured from Nature. Prepared under the direction of JOHN MARSHALL, F.R.S., F.R.C.S., &c. Each Sheet, 12s. 6d. On canvas and rollers, varnished, £1 1s. 1. THE SKELETON AND LIGAMENTS. 2. THE MUSCLES, JOINTS, AND ANIMAL MECHANICS. 3. THE VISCERA IN POSITION.--THE STRUCTURE OF THE LUNGS. 4. THE ORGANS OF CIRCULATION. 5. THE LYMPHATICS OR ABSORBENTS. 6. THE ORGANS OF DIGESTION. 7. THE BRAIN AND NERVES.--THE ORGANS OF THE VOICE. 8. THE ORGANS OF THE SENSES. 9. THE ORGANS OF THE SENSES. 10. THE MICROSCOPIC STRUCTURE OF THE TEXTURES AND ORGANS. 11. THE MICROSCOPIC STRUCTURE OF THE TEXTURES AND ORGANS. * * * * * HUMAN BODY, LIFE SIZE. By JOHN MARSHALL, F.R.S., F.R.C.S. Each Sheet, 12s. 6d.; on canvas and rollers, varnished, £1 1s. Explanatory Key, 1s. 1. THE SKELETON, Front View. 2. THE MUSCLES, Front View. 3. THE SKELETON, Back View. 4. THE MUSCLES, Back View. 5. THE SKELETON, Side View. 6. THE MUSCLES, Side View. 7. THE FEMALE SKELETON, Front View. ZOOLOGICAL: TEN SHEETS. Illustrating the Classification of Animals. By ROBERT PATTERSON. £2; on canvas and rollers, varnished, £3 10s. The same, reduced in size on Royal paper, in 9 Sheets, uncoloured, 12s. THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW Edited by JOHN MORLEY. THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is published on the 1st of every month (the issue on the 15th being suspended), and a Volume is completed every Six Months. _The following are among the Contributors:_-- SIR RUTHERFORD ALCOCK. MATHEW ARNOLD. PROFESSOR BAIN. PROFESSOR BEESLY. DR. BRIDGES. HON. GEORGE C. BRODRICK. SIR GEORGE CAMPBELL, M.P. J. CHAMBERLAIN, M.P. PROFESSOR SIDNEY COLVIN. MONTAGUE COOKSON, Q.C. L. H. COURTNEY, M.P. G. H. DARWIN. F. W. FARRAR. PROFESSOR FAWCETT, M.P. EDWARD A. FREEMAN. MRS. GARRET-ANDERSON. M. E. GRANT DUFF, M.P. THOMAS HARE. F. HARRISON. LORD HOUGHTON. PROFESSOR HUXLEY. PROFESSOR JEVONS. �MILE DE LAVELEYE. T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE. RIGHT HON. R. LOWE, M.P. SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, M.P. LORD LYTTON. SIR H. S. MAINE. DR. MAUDSLEY. PROFESSOR MAX M�LLER. PROFESSOR HENRY MORLEY. G. OSBORNE MORGAN, Q.C., M.P. WILLIAM MORRIS. F. W. NEWMAN. W. G. PALGRAVE. WALTER H. PATER. RT. HON. LYON PLAYFAIR, M.P. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. HERBERT SPENCER. HON. E. L. STANLEY. SIR J. FITZJAMES STEPHEN, Q.C. LESLIE STEPHEN. J. HUTCHISON STIRLING. A. C. SWINBURNE. DR. VON SYBEL. J. A. SYMONDS. W. T. THORNTON. HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. ANTHONY TROLLOPE. PROFESSOR TYNDALL. THE EDITOR. &c. &c. &c. THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW _is published at 2s. 6d._ * * * * * CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED, 11, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS,] [CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Asterisms, three asterisks in a triangle formation, are indicated by [***]. Page7, "recal" changed to "recall" (I can recall everything) Page 63, "alway" changed to "always" (always look upon) Page 66, "an" changed to "and" (straw hat, and) Page 127, removed repeated word "it". (Original reads: wherever it it is done) Page 154, "d'hote" changed to "d'hôte" (the table d'hôte) Page 212, "scena" changed to "scene a" (scene a half-an-hour) Page 217, "tha" changed to "that" (have told her that) Page 228, "withdraw" changed to "withdrawn" (withdrawn from the wear) Page 243, word "be" inserted into text (to be found) Page 292, "Sich" changed to "Such" (Such was my) Page 302, "conjuror" changed to "conjurer" to match text. (Conjuror, Dickens as a) Page 306, "Not so Bad as we Seem" changed to "Not So Bad As We Seem" Page 307, "Rocabella" changed to "Roccabella" ("Roccabella," Dickens's opini on) 
36641	----	WOMEN NOVELISTS _Of_ QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN Women Novelists _Of_ Queen Victoria's Reign _A Book of Appreciations_ By Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge Adeline Sergeant & Edna Lyall London Hurst & Blackett, Limited 13 Great Marlborough Street 1897 _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_ Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. At the Ballantyne Press CONTENTS THE SISTERS BRONTË _By_ MRS. OLIPHANT _Page_ 1 GEORGE ELIOT _By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON _Page_ 61 MRS. GASKELL _By_ EDNA LYALL _Page_ 117 MRS. CROWE MRS. ARCHER CLIVE MRS. HENRY WOOD _By_ ADELINE SERGEANT _Page_ 149 LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON MRS. STRETTON ANNE MANNING _By_ CHARLOTTE M. YONGE _Page_ 193 DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK) _By_ MRS. PARR _Page_ 217 JULIA KAVANAGH AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS _By_ MRS. MACQUOID _Page_ 249 MRS. NORTON _By_ MRS. ALEXANDER _Page_ 275 "A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER) MRS. EWING _By_ MRS. MARSHALL _Page_ 291 PUBLISHERS' NOTE _Having been concerned for many years in the publication of works of fiction by feminine writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our contribution to the celebration of "the longest Reign," a volume having for its subject leading Women Novelists of the Victorian Era._ _In the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early to assess the merit or forecast the future of their works. The present book, therefore, is restricted to Women Novelists deceased._ _It was further necessary to confine the volume within reasonable limits, and it was decided, consequently, that it should deal only with Women who did all their work in Fiction after the accession of the Queen. This decision excludes not only such writers as Lady Morgan, Mrs. Opie, Miss Ferrier, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Jane Porter, who, although they died after 1837, published all their most notable stories early in the century; but also such writers as Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs. Trollope, Lady Blessington, and Mrs. Marsh, who made their débuts as novelists between 1823 and 1834._ _As regards some of the last-named, it might be urged that the works they produced have now no interest other than historical, and can be said to live only so far as they embody more or less accurate descriptions of Society early in the Reign. The "Deerbrook" and "The Hour and the Man" of Miss Martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps, still read; but it is as a political economist and miscellaneous writer, rather than as a Novelist, that their author ranks in literature; while of the tales by Miss Pardoe, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, and others once equally popular, scarcely the titles are now recollected._ _On the other hand, the eminence and permanence of the Brontës, George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell are universally recognised; the popularity of Mrs. Craik and Mrs. Henry Wood is still admittedly great; the personality of Mrs. Norton will always send students to her works; Mrs. Crowe and Mrs. Clive were pioneers in domestic and "sensational" fiction; Lady Georgiana Fullerton produced a typical religious novel; Miss Manning made pleasing and acceptable the autobiographico-historical narrative; the authors of "The Valley of a Hundred Fires" of "Barbara's History," and of "Adèle" have even now their readers and admirers; while "A. L. O. E." and Mrs. Ewing were among the most successful caterers for the young._ _It has seemed to us that value as well as interest would attach to critical estimates of and biographical notes upon, these representative Novelists, supplied by living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad to have been able to secure for the purpose, the services of the contributors to this volume, all of whom may claim to discourse with some authority upon the art they cultivate. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to say that each contributor is responsible only for the essay to which her name is appended._ THE SISTERS BRONTË _By_ MRS. OLIPHANT THE SISTERS BRONTË The effect produced upon the general mind by the appearance of Charlotte Brontë in literature, and afterwards by the record of her life when that was over, is one which it is nowadays somewhat difficult to understand. Had the age been deficient in the art of fiction, or had it followed any long level of mediocrity in that art, we could have comprehended this more easily. But Charlotte Brontë appeared in the full flush of a period more richly endowed than any other we know of in that special branch of literature, so richly endowed, indeed, that the novel had taken quite fictitious importance, and the names of Dickens and Thackeray ranked almost higher than those of any living writers except perhaps Tennyson, then young and on his promotion too. Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade who, though in their day extremely popular, have never had justice from a public which now seems almost to have forgotten them, formed a powerful second rank to these two great names. It is a great addition to the value of the distinction gained by the new comer that it was acquired in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination. But this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had no artificial means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the part of a writer possessing little experience or knowledge of the world, and no sort of social training or adventitious aid. The genius was indeed unmistakable, and possessed in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in the most vivid and actual pictures of life. But the life of which it had command was seldom attractive, often narrow, local, and of a kind which meant keen personal satire more than any broader view of human existence. A group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their little parochial background as only the most real art of portraiture, intensified by individual scorn and dislike, could have made them: the circle of limited interests, small emulations, keen little spites and rancours, filling the atmosphere of a great boarding school, the Brussels _Pensionnat des filles_--these were the two spheres chiefly portrayed: but portrayed with an absolute untempered force which knew neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality, but burned upon the paper and made everything round dim in the contrast. I imagine it was this extraordinary naked force which was the great cause of a success, never perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the present day, when edition follows edition, and thousand thousand, of the books which are the favourites of the public: but one which has lived and lasted through nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to carry on a little literature of its own, book after book following each other not so much to justify as to reproclaim and echo to all the winds the fame originally won. No one else of the century, I think, has called forth this persevering and lasting homage. Not Dickens, though perhaps more of him than of any one else has been dealt out at intervals to an admiring public; not Thackeray, of whom still we know but little; not George Eliot, though her fame has more solid foundations than that of Miss Brontë. Scarcely Scott has called forth more continual droppings of elucidation, explanation, remark. Yet the books upon which this tremendous reputation is founded though vivid, original, and striking in the highest degree, are not great books. Their philosophy of life is that of a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost _nil_, their conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a mind self-centred and working in the narrowest orbit. It is rather, as we have said, the most incisive and realistic art of portraiture than any exercise of the nobler arts of fiction--imagination, combination, construction--or humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its problems--upon which this fame is built. The curious circumstance that Charlotte Brontë was, if the word may be so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder, Emily, whose genius has been taken for granted, carrying the wilder elements of the common inspiration to extremity in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of "Wuthering Heights," while Anne diluted such powers of social observation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable novels of a much commoner order, has no doubt also enhanced the central figure of the group to an amazing degree. They placed her strength in relief by displaying its separate elements, and thus commending the higher skill and larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors and wild country and rude image of man better than the one, and misunderstanding the common course of more subdued life less than the other. The three together are for ever inseparable; they were homely, lowly, somewhat neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few charms to the careless eye: yet no group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant as themselves have ever, I think, in the course of history--certainly never in this century--come to such universal recognition. The effect is quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for; but there cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which nobody can deny. * * * * * These three daughters of a poor country clergyman came into the world early in the century, the dates of their births being 1816, 1818, 1820, in the barest of little parsonages in the midst of the moors--a wild but beautiful country, and a rough but highly characteristic and keen-witted people. Yorkshire is the very heart of England; its native force, its keen practical sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in the nation of the largest of the shires has given it a strong individual character and position almost like that of an independent province. But the Brontës, whose name is a softened and decorated edition of a common Irish name, were not of that forcible race: and perhaps the strong strain after emotion, and revolt against the monotonies of life, which were so conspicuous in them were more easily traceable to their Celtic origin than many other developments attributed to that cause. They were motherless from an early age, children of a father who, after having been depicted as a capricious tyrant, seems now to have found a fairer representation as a man with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet neither unkind to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. There was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim of a disagreeable romance, but apparent now as only a specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the ordinary ne'er-do-well of a family, without force of character or self-control to keep his place with decency in the world. These children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as the power of inscribing words upon paper was acquired by them, inventing imaginary countries and compiling visionary records of them as so many imaginative children do. The elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls another, connected by the closest links of companionship. It was thought or hoped that the son was the genius of the family, and at the earliest possible age he began to send his effusions to editors, and to seek admission to magazines with the mingled arrogance and humility of a half-fledged creature. But the world knows now that it was not poor Branwell who was the genius of the family; and this injury done him in his cradle, and the evil report of him that everybody gives throughout his life, awakens a certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth so unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he must have considered his natural inferiors and vassals. We are told by Charlotte Brontë herself that he never knew of the successes of his sisters, the fact of their successive publications being concealed from him out of tenderness for his feelings; but it is scarcely to be credited that when the parish knew the unfortunate brother did not find out. The unhappy attempt of Mrs. Gaskell in writing the lives of the sisters to make this melancholy young man accountable for the almost brutal element in Emily Brontë's conception of life, and the strange views of Charlotte as to what men were capable of, has made him far too important in their history; where, indeed, he had no need to have appeared at all, had the family pride consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in veiling rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. So far as can be made out now, he had as little as possible to do with their development in any way. There was nothing unnatural or out of the common in the youthful life of the family except that strange gift of genius, which though consistent with every genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of Scott, seems in other developments of character to turn all the elements into chaos. Its effect upon the parson's three daughters was, indeed, not of a very wholesome kind. It awakened in them an uneasy sense of superiority which gave double force to every one of the little hardships which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a governess in a middle-class house, has to support: and made life harder instead of sweeter to them in many ways, since it was full of the biting experience of conditions less favourable than those of many persons round them whom they could not but feel inferior to themselves. The great school, which it was Charlotte Brontë's first act when she began her literary career to invest with an almost tragic character of misery, privation, and wrong, was her first step from home. Yorkshire schools did not at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the world, and Nicholas Nickleby was forming his acquaintance with the squalid cruelty of Dotheboys Hall just about the same time when Charlotte Brontë's mind was being filled with the privations and discontents of Lowood. In such a case there is generally some fire where there is so much smoke, and probably Lowood was under no very heavenly _régime_: but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply accentuated by that keen criticism which is suggested by the constant sense of injured worth and consciousness of a superiority not acknowledged. The same feeling pursued her into the situations as governess which she occupied one after another, and in which her indignation at being expected to feel affection for the children put under her charge, forms a curious addition to the other grievances with which fate pursues her life. No doubt there are many temptations in the life of a governess; the position of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management with double force because of the effect they have on herself--especially if she feels herself competent, had she but the power, to set things right--must always be a difficult one. It was not continued long enough, however, to involve very much suffering; though no doubt it helped to mature the habit of sharp personal criticism and war with the world. At the same time Charlotte Brontë made some very warm personal friendships, and wrote a great many letters to the school friends who pleased her, in which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness is occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girlhood, to the great improvement of the atmosphere if not of the mind. Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor, women not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic story, remained her close friends as long as she lived, and her letters to them, though always a little demure, give us a gentler idea of her than anything else she has written. Not that there is much charm either of style or subject in them: but there is no sort of bitterness or sense of insufficient appreciation. Nothing can be more usual and commonplace, indeed, than this portion of her life. As in so many cases, the artificial lights thrown upon it by theories formed afterwards, clear away when we examine its actual records, and it is apparent that there was neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor internal struggle in the existence of the girl who, though more or less in arms against everybody outside--especially when holding a position superior to her own, more especially still when exercising authority over her in any way--was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy, young woman at home, with friends to whom she could pour out long pages of what is, on the whole, quite moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or other young person of the opposite sex, suspected of "paying attention" to one or other of the little coterie. These allusions are not more lofty or dignified than are similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there is not a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which afterwards put up the Haworth curates in all their imperfections before the world. The other sisters at this time in the background, two figures always clinging together, looking almost like one, have no great share in this softer part of Charlotte's life. They were, though so different in character, completely devoted to each other, apparently forming no other friendships, each content with the one other partaker of her every thought. A little literature seems to have been created between them, little chapters of recollection and commentary upon their life, sealed up and put away for three years in each case, to be opened on Emily's or on Anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their close unity, though the little papers were in themselves simple in the extreme. Anne too became a governess with something of the same experience as Charlotte, and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people who were not the least unkind to her. But Emily had no such trials. She remained at home perhaps because she was too uncompromising to be allowed to make the experiment of putting up with other people, perhaps because one daughter at home was indispensable. The family seems to have had kind and trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there is no evidence of exceptional hardness or roughness in their circumstances in any way. In 1842, Charlotte and Emily, aged respectively twenty-six and twenty-four, went to Brussels. Their design was "to acquire a thorough familiarity with French," also some insight into other languages, with the view of setting up a school on their own account. The means were supplied by the aunt, who had lived in their house and taken more or less care of them since their mother's death. The two sisters were nearly a year in the Pensionnat Héger, now so perfectly known in every detail of its existence to all who have read "Villette." They were recalled by the death of the kind aunt who had procured them this advantage, and afterwards Charlotte, no one quite knows why, went back to Brussels for a second year, in which all her impressions were probably strengthened and intensified. Certainly a more clear and lifelike picture, scathing in its cold yet fierce light, was never made than that of the white tall Brussels house, its class rooms, its gardens, its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous and shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. It startles the reader to find--a fact which we had forgotten--that M. Paul Emmanuel was M. Héger, the husband of Madame Héger and legitimate head of the house: and that this daring and extraordinary girl did not hesitate to encounter gossip or slander by making him so completely the hero of her romance. Slander in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such a fiery spirit as that of Charlotte Brontë: but it shows her perfect independence of mind and scorn of comment that she should have done this. In the end of '43 she returned home, and the episode was over. It was really the only episode of possible practical significance in her life until we come to the records of her brief literary career and her marriage, both towards its end. * * * * * The prospect of the school which the three sisters were to set up together was abandoned; there was no more talk of governessing. We are not told if it was the small inheritance of the aunt--only, Mr. Clement Shorter informs us, £1500--which enabled the sisters henceforward to remain at home without thought of further effort: but certainly this was what happened. And the lives of the two younger were drawing so near the end that it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment of comparative grace together. Their life was extremely silent, secluded, and apart. There was the melancholy figure of Branwell to distract the house with the spectacle of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder; but this can scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had been a more beloved brother. He was not, however, veiled by any tender attempt to cover his follies or wickedness, but openly complained of to all their friends, which mitigates the affliction: and they seem to have kept very separate from him, living in a world of their own. In 1846 a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, was published at their own cost. It had not the faintest success; they were informed by the publisher that two copies only had been sold, and the only satisfaction that remained to them was to send a few copies to some of the owners of those great names which the enthusiastic young women had worshipped from afar as stars in the firmament. These poems were re-published after Charlotte Brontë had attained her first triumph, and people had begun to cry out and wonder over "Wuthering Heights." The history of "Jane Eyre," on the other hand, is that of most works which have been the beginning of a career. It fell into the hands of the right man, the "reader" of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. Williams, a man of great intelligence and literary insight. The first story written by Charlotte Brontë, which was called "The Professor," and was the original of "Villette," written at a time when her mind was very full of the emotions raised by that singular portion of her life, had been rejected by a number of publishers, and was also rejected by Mr. Williams, who found it at once too crude and too _short_ for the risks of publication, three volumes at that period being your only possible form for fiction. But he saw the power in it, and begged the author to try again at greater length. She did so; not on the basis of the "Professor" as might have seemed natural--probably the materials were still too much at fever-heat in her mind to be returned to at that moment--but by the story of "Jane Eyre," which at once placed Charlotte Brontë amid the most popular and powerful writers of her time. I remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest which in the midst of all the Mrs. Gores, Mrs. Marshs, &c.--the latter name is mentioned along with those of Thackeray and Dickens even by Mr. Williams--came upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took up the first volume of "Jane Eyre." The period of the heroine in white muslin, the immaculate creature who was of sweetness and goodness all compact, had lasted in the common lines of fiction up to that time. Miss Austen indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and empty fiction, yet it continued, as it always does continue more or less, the primitive ideal. But "Jane Eyre" gave her, for the moment, the _coup de grace_. That the book should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary to the circumstances of the writer: and the governess was already a favourite figure in fiction. But generally she was of the beautiful, universally fascinating, all-enduring kind, the amiable blameless creature whose secret merits were never so hidden but that they might be perceived by a keen sighted hero. I am not sure, indeed, that anybody believed Miss Brontë when she said her heroine was plain. It is very clear from the story that Jane was never unnoticed, never failed to please, except among the women, whom it is the instinctive art of the novelist to rouse in arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating the jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in respect to the women who please men. No male cynic was ever stronger on that subject than this typical woman. She cannot have believed it, I presume, since her closest friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect faith in their kindness: but this is a matter of conventional belief which has nothing to do with individual experience. It is one of the doctrines unassailable of the art of fiction; a thirty-ninth article in which every writer of novels is bound to believe. Miss Brontë did not know fine ladies, and therefore, in spite of herself and a mind the reverse of vulgar, she made the competitors for Mr. Rochester's favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons, an error, curiously enough, which seems to have been followed by George Eliot in the corresponding scenes in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," where Captain Wybrow's _fiancée_ treats poor Tiny very much as the beauty in Mr. Rochester's house treats Jane Eyre. Both were imaginary pictures, which perhaps more or less excuses their untruthfulness in writers both so sincere and lifelike in treating things they knew. It is amusing to remember that Jane Eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching argument to Miss Rigby in the _Quarterly_ to decide that the writer was not and could not possibly be a woman. The much larger and more significant fact that no man (until in quite recent days when there have been instances of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the subject and inspiration of his book, the only interest in it, was entirely overlooked in what was, notwithstanding, the very shrewd and telling argument about the dress. The chief thing, however, that distressed the candid and as yet unaccustomed reader in "Jane Eyre," and made him hope that it might be a man who had written it, was the character of Rochester's confidences to the girl whom he loved--not the character of Rochester, which was completely a woman's view, but that he should have talked to a girl so evidently innocent of his amours and his mistresses. This, however, I think, though, as we should have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a young woman such as Charlotte Brontë was, was also emphatically a woman's view. A man might have credited another man of Rochester's kind with impulses practically more heinous and designs of the worst kind: but he would not have made him err in that way. In this was a point of honour which the woman did not understand. It marks a curious and subtle difference between the sexes. The woman less enlightened in practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice; but her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently permits her hero to do and say things so completely against the code which is binding on gentlemen whether vicious or otherwise that her want of perception becomes conspicuous. The fact that the writer of the review in the _Quarterly_ was herself a woman accounts for her mistake in supposing that the book was written if not by a man, by "a woman unsexed;" "a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex." And afterwards, when Mrs. Gaskell made her disastrous statements about Branwell Brontë and other associates of Charlotte's youth, it was with the hope of proving that the speech and manners of the men to whom she had been accustomed were of a nature to justify her in any such misapprehension of the usual manners of gentlemen. It was on the contrary, as I think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could have suggested this special error. The mind of such a woman, casting about for something to make her wicked but delightful hero do by way of demonstrating his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the very wickedest thing she could think of, yet still attractive: for is there not a thrill of curiosity in searching out what such a strange being might think or say, which is of itself a strong sensation? Miss Brontë was, I think, the first to give utterance to that curiosity of the woman in respect to the man, and fascination of interest in him--not the ideal man, not Sir Kenneth, too reverent for anything but silent worship--which has since risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a tone upon modern fiction at which probably she would have been horrified. * * * * * There were numberless stories in those days of guilty love and betrayal, of how "lovely woman stoops to folly," and all the varieties of that endless subject; but it was, except in the comic vein, or with grotesque treatment, the pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. A true lady of romance walked superior: she accepted (or not) the devotion: she stooped from her white height to reward her adorer: but that she herself should condescend to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashionable life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or call out for him to heaven and earth when he tarried in his coming, was unknown to the situations of romantic art. When the second of Charlotte Brontë's books appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation in store for the public. The young women in "Shirley" were all wild for this lover who, though promised by all the laws of nature and romance, did not appear. They leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their hands, calling for him--appealing to heaven and earth. Why were they left to wear out their bloom, to lose their freshness, to spend their days in sewing and dreaming, when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and by sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them? Nothing was thought of the extra half-million of women in those days; perhaps it had not begun to exist; but that "nobody was coming to marry us, nobody coming to woo" was apparent. Young ladies like Miss Charlotte Brontë and Miss Ellen Nussey her friend, would have died rather than give vent to such sentiments; but when the one of them to whom that gift was given found that her pen had become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current of the restrained feeling burst all boundaries, and she poured forth the cry which nobody had suspected before. It had been a thing to be denied, to be indignantly contradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put herself forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the world. When such a phenomenon appeared, she was condemned as either bad or foolish by every law: and the idea that she was capable of "running after" a man was the most dreadful accusation that could be brought against a woman. Miss Brontë's heroines, however, did not precisely do this. Shirley and Caroline Helstone were not in love so much as longing for love, clamouring for it, feeling it to be their right of which they were somehow defrauded. There is a good deal to be said for such a view. If it is the most virtuous thing in the world for a man to desire to marry, to found a family, to be the father of children, it should be no shameful thing for a woman to own the same desire. But it is somehow against the instinct of primitive humanity, which has decided that the woman should be no more than responsive, maintaining a reserve in respect to her feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once, and only once, and to One only" of the poet. Charlotte Brontë was the first to overthrow this superstition. Personally I am disposed to stand for the superstition, and dislike all transgression of it. But that was not the view of the most reticent and self-controlled of maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict proprieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising curates, and unacquainted with other men. In her secret heart, she demanded of fate night and day why she, so full of life and capability, should be left there to dry up and wither; and why Providence refused her the completion of her being. Her heart was not set on a special love; still less was there anything fleshly or sensual in her imagination. It is a shame to use such words in speaking of her, even though to cast them forth as wholly inapplicable. The woman's grievance--that she should be left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the natural openings of life: without hope of motherhood: with the great instinct of her being unfulfilled--was almost a philosophical, and entirely an abstract, grievance, felt by her for her kind: for every woman dropped out of sight and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she was created. And I think it was the first time this cry had been heard out of the mouth of a perfectly modest and pure-minded woman, nay, out of the mouth of any woman; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the Sapphos for love. It was more startling, more confusing to the general mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. The gentle victim of "a disappointment," or even the soured and angered victim, was a thing quite understood and familiar: but not the woman calling upon heaven and earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against her to cheat her of her natural career. So far as I can see this was the great point which gave force to Charlotte Brontë's genius and conferred upon her the curious pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers of her time. In this view "Shirley," though I suppose the least popular, is the most characteristic of her works. It is dominated throughout with this complaint. Curates? Yes, there they are, a group of them. Is that the thing you expect us women to marry? Yet it is our right to bear children, to guide the house. And we are half of the world, and where is the provision for us? This cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general public in the most curious way; they did not know what to make of it. Was it a shameless woman who was so crying out? It is always the easiest way, and one which avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every question. But it was scarcely easy to believe this in face of other circumstances. Mrs. Gaskell, as much puzzled as any one, when Charlotte Brontë's short life was over, tried hard to account for it by "environment" as the superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly of her brother, and the coarseness of all the Yorkshiremen round; and thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope without other intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject of it inaugurated an entirely new kind of social revolution. The cry of the women indeed almost distressed as well as puzzled the world. The vivid genius still held it, but the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. The _Times_ blew a trumpet of dismay; the book was revolution as well as revelation. It was an outrage upon good taste, it was a betrayal of sentiments too widespread to be comfortable. It was indelicate if not immodest. We have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was a potent one at that period. And it was quite a just reproach. That cry shattered indeed altogether the "delicacy" which was supposed to be the most exquisite characteristic of womankind. The softening veil is blown away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the world. From that period to this is a long step. We have travelled through many years and many gradations of sentiment: and we have now arrived at a standard of opinion by which the "sex-problem" has become the most interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction, to be discussed by men and women alike with growing warmth and openness, the immodest and the indelicate being equally and scornfully dismissed as barriers with which Art has nothing to do. My impression is that Charlotte Brontë was the pioneer and founder of this school of romance, though it would probably have shocked and distressed her as much as any other woman of her age. * * * * * The novels of Emily and Anne Brontë were published shortly after "Jane Eyre," in three volumes, of which "Wuthering Heights" occupied the first two. I am obliged to confess that I have never shared the common sentiment of enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. The absence of almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality and misery, tempered only by an occasional gleam of the heather, the freshness of an occasional blast over the moors, have prevented me from appreciating a force which I do not deny but cannot admire. The figure of Heathcliffe, which perhaps has called forth more praise than any other single figure in the literature of the time, does not touch me. I can understand how in the jumble which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him more or less by Rochester and other of Charlotte Brontë's heroes, he may take his place in a sort of system, and thus have humanities read into him, so to speak, which he does not himself possess. But though the horror and isolation of the house is powerful I have never been able to reconcile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the estimate of Emily Brontë's genius held so strongly by so many people. There is perhaps the less harm in refraining from much comment on this singular book, of which I gladly admit the unique character, since it has been the occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. To me Emily Brontë is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common to them both. We perceive better the tempering sense of possibility by which Charlotte made her rude and almost brutal hero still attractive, even in his masterful ferocity, when we see Emily's incapacity to express anything in _her_ hero except perhaps a touch of that tragic pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still, which is in the soul of a man who never more, whatever he does, can set himself right. This is the one strain of poetry to my mind in the wild conception. There was no measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temperance in her methods. The youngest of all, the gentle Anne, would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but for her association with these imperative spirits. An ordinary little novelette and a moral story, working out the disastrous knowledge gained by acquaintance with the unfortunate Branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. She was the element wanting in Emily's rugged work and nature. Instead of being two sisters constantly entwined with each other, never separate when they could help it, had Anne been by some fantastic power swamped altogether and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe that Emily might then have shown herself the foremost of the three. But the group as it stands is more interesting than any single individual could be. And had Charlotte Brontë lived a long and triumphant life, a fanciful writer might have imagined that the throwing off of those other threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured greater force and charity into her veins. But we are baffled in all our suggestions for the amendment of the ways of Providence. * * * * * The melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months, which swept from Haworth Parsonage three of its inmates, and left Charlotte and her father alone to face life as they might, was now approaching; and it seems so completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. Branwell was the first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a pathetic note in the record. Then came the extraordinary passion and agony of Emily, which has affected the imagination so much, and which, had it been for any noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. But to die the death of a Stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection to Nature, regardless of the feelings of all around, for the sake of pride and self-will alone, is not an act to be looked upon with the reverential sympathy which, however, it has secured from many. The strange creature with her shoes on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last to acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her weakness, gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and painful work. Her death took place in December of the same year (1848) in which Branwell died. Anne, already delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after her sister's death, and in May 1849 she followed, but in all sweetness and calmness, to her early grave. She was twenty-eight; Emily twenty-nine. So soon had the fever of life worn itself out and peace come. Charlotte was left alone. There had not been to her in either of them the close companion which they had found in each other. But yet life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which occurred in such a startling and quick succession as always makes bereavement more terrible. This occurred at the height of her mental activity. "Shirley" had been published, and had been received with the divided feeling we have referred to; and when she was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the solace which of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre seclusion of the Parsonage, to which, however, her favourite friend, Ellen Nussey, came from time to time. One or two visits to London occurred after the two first publications in which, a demure little person, silent and shy, yet capable of expressing herself very distinctly by times, and by no means unconscious of the claim she now had upon other people's respect and admiration, Charlotte Brontë made a little sensation in the society which was opened to her, not always of a very successful kind. Everybody will remember the delightfully entertaining chapter in literary history in which Mrs. Ritchie, with charming humour and truth, recounts the visit of this odd little lion to her father's house, and Thackeray's abrupt and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that nothing more was to be made of her than an absorbed conversation with the governess in the back drawing-room, a situation like one in a novel, and so very like the act of modest greatness, singling out the least important person as the object of her attentions. She is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly--a small woman with a big nose, and no other notable feature, not even the bright eyes which are generally attributed to genius--which was probably, however, better than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography, after a picture by Richmond, which is the typical portrait of a governess of the old style, a gentle creature deprecating and wistful. Her letters are very good letters, well expressed in something of the old-fashioned way, but without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. Indeed, charm does not seem to have been hers in any way. But she had a few very staunch friends who held fast by her all her life, notwithstanding the uncomfortable experience of being "put in a book," which few people like. It is a gift by itself to put other living people in books. The novelist does not always possess it; to many the realms of imagination are far more easy than the arid realms of fact, and to frame an image of a man much more natural than to take his portrait. I am not sure that it is not a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one. Anyhow, Miss Brontë possessed it in great perfection. Impossible to doubt that the characters of "Shirley" were real men; still more impossible to doubt for a moment the existence of M. Paul Emmanuel. The pursuit of such a system requires other faculties than those of the mere romancist. It demands a very clear-cut opinion, a keen judgment not disturbed by any strong sense of the complexities of nature, nor troubled by any possibility of doing injustice to its victim. * * * * * One thing strikes us very strongly in the description of the school, Lowood, which was her very first step in literature, and in which there can now be no doubt, from her own remarks on the manner in which it was received, she had a vindictive purpose. I scarcely know why, for, of course, the dates are all there to prove the difference--but my own conclusion had always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, old enough to form an opinion when she left the school. I find, with much consternation, that she was only nine; and that so far as such a strenuous opinion was her own at all, it must have been formed at that early and not very judicious age. That the picture should be so vivid with only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful; but it is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great institution, its founder and all its ways. Nevertheless, it had its scathing and wounding effect as much as if the little observer, whose small judgment worked so precociously, had been capable of understanding the things which she condemned. It would be rash to trust nineteen in such a report, but nine! It was at a different age and in other circumstances that Charlotte Brontë made her deep and extraordinary study of the Brussels Pensionnat. She was twenty-seven; she had already gone through a number of those years of self-repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the heart burns. She was, if we may accept the freedom of her utterances in fiction as more descriptive of her mind than the measured sentences of her letters, angry with fate and the world which denied her a brighter career, and bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the company of despised and almost hated inferiors during the best of her life. Her tremendous gift of sight--not second sight or any visionary way of regarding the object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision which took in every detail, and was decisive on every act as if it had been the vision of the gods--was now fully matured. She saw all that was about her with this extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing it all round and through and through. She makes us also see and know the big white house, with every room distinct: the garden, with its great trees and alleys: the class-rooms, each with its tribune: the girls, fat and round and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and herself as spectator, looking on with contemptuous indifference, not caring to discriminate between them. The few English figures, which concern her more, are drawn keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness; the teachers sharply accentuated, Mdlle. Sophie, for instance, who, when she is in a rage, has no lips, and all the sharp contentions and false civilities of those banded Free Lances, enemies to everybody and to each other; the image of watchful suspicion in the head of the house--all these are set forth in glittering lines of steel. There is not a morsel of compunction in the picture. Everybody is bad, worthless, a hater of the whole race. The mistress of the establishment moves about stealthily, watching, her eyes showing through a mist in every corner, going and coming without a sound. What a picture it is! There is not a good meaning in the whole place--not even that beneficent absence of meaning which softens the view. They are all bent on their own aims, on gaining an advantage great or small over their neighbours; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a revision of judgment--except one. The little Englishwoman herself, who is the centre of all this, is not represented as more lovable than the rest. She is the hungry little epicure, looking on while others feast, and envying every one of them, even while she snarls at their fare as apples of Gomorrah. She cannot abide that they should be better off than she, even though she scorns their satisfaction in what they possess. Her wild and despairing rush through Brussels when the town is _en fête_, cold, impassioned, fever-hot with rancour and loneliness, produces the most amazing effect on the mind. She is the banished spirit for whom there is no place, the little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear and rend everything that is happy. One feels that she has a certain justification and realises the full force of being left out in the cold, of having no part or lot in the matter when other people are amused and rejoice. Many other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect with milder means, but I suppose because of a feeble-minded desire to preserve the reputation of their forlorn heroine and give the reader an amiable view of her, no one has succeeded like the author of "Villette," who is in no way concerned for the amiability of Lucy Snowe. For the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as its power. Lucy Snowe is her own historian; it is the hot blood of the autobiographist that rushes through her veins, yet no attempt is made to recommend her to the reader or gain his sympathy. She is much too real to think of these outside things, or of how people will judge her, or how to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes. We do not know whether Charlotte Brontë ever darted out of the white still house, standing dead in the moonlight, and rushed through the streets and, like a ghost, into the very heart of the gaslights and festivities; but it would be difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done so, imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness upon a living brain. Whether it was Charlotte Brontë or Lucy Snowe, the effect is the same. We are not even asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to approve her. Nothing is demanded from us on her account but merely to behold the soul in revolt and the strange workings of her despair. It was chiefly because of the indifference to her of Dr. John that Lucy was thus driven into a momentary madness; and with the usual regardless indiscretion of all Charlotte Brontë's amateur biographers, Mr. Shorter intimates to us who was the living man who was Dr. John and occasioned all the commotion. The tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for the victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began the much more engrossing interest which still remained behind. Nothing up to this point has attracted us in "Villette," except, indeed, the tremendous vitality and reality of the whole, the sensation of the actual which is in every line, and which forbids us to believe for a moment that what we are reading is fiction. But a very different sentiment comes into being as we become acquainted with the black bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of M. Paul Emmanuel. He is the one only character in Miss Brontë's little world who has a real charm, whose entrance upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens in us not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sympathy. The quick-witted, quick-tempered Frenchman, with all the foibles of his vanity displayed, as susceptible to any little slight as a girl, as easily pleased with a sign of kindness, as far from the English ideal as it is possible to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with displeasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel, delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the fullest light, intolerable but always enchanting. He is as full of variety as Rosalind, as devoid of dignity as Pierrot, contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet conquering all our prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not to be capable of. How was it that for this once the artist got the better of all her restrictions and overcame all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to be heartily loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts? I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that he was M. Héger, and the master of the establishment, and not the clever tutor who had so much of Madame Beck's confidence. But anyhow, he is the best that Miss Brontë ever did for us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect picture. The Rochesters were all more or less fictitious, notwithstanding the unconscious inalienable force of realism which gives them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind of overbearing life; but Miss Brontë never did understand what she did not know. She had to see a thing before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did see it, with what force she saw! She knew M. Paul Emmanuel, watching him day by day, seeing all his littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man. He stands out, as the curates stood out, absolutely real men about whom we could entertain no doubt, recognisable anywhere. The others were either a woman's men, like the Moors of Shirley, whose roughness was bluster (she could not imagine an Englishman who was not rough and rude), and their strength more or less made up; or an artificial composition like St. John, an ideal bully like Rochester. The ideal was not her forte--she had few gifts that way: but she saw with overwhelming lucidity and keenness, and what she saw, without a doubt, without a scruple, she could put upon the canvas in lines of fire. Seldom, very seldom, did an object appear within reach of that penetrating light, which could be drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being to be loved. Was not the sole model of that species M. Paul? It would seem that in the piteous poverty of her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never met before a human creature in whom she could completely trust, or one who commended himself to her entirely, with all his foibles and weaknesses increasing, not diminishing, the charm. It is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endeavour to search out what were the sentiments of Charlotte Brontë for M. Héger. Any one whom it would be more impossible to imagine as breaking the very first rule of English decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards another woman's husband, I cannot imagine. Her fancy was wild and her utterance free, and she liked to think that men were quite untrammelled by those proprieties which bound herself like bonds of iron in her private person, and that she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their dreadful experiences: but she herself was as prim and Puritan as any little blameless governess that ever went out of an English parish. But while believing this I cannot but feel it was an intolerable spite of fortune that the one man whom she knew in her life, whom her story could make others love, the only man whom she saw with that real illumination which does justice to humanity, was not M. Paul Emmanuel but M. Héger. This was why we were left trembling at the end of Lucy Snowe's story, not knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could fitly end the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against the doom--as if it had concerned our own happiness. Was this new-born power in her, the power of representing a man at his best, she who by nature saw both men and women from their worst side, a sign of the development of genius in herself, the softening of that scorn with which she had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of inferior beings, the mellowing influence of maturity? So we might have said, had it not been that after this climax of production she never spake word more in the medium of fiction. Had she told the world everything she had to say? Could she indeed say nothing but what she had seen and known in her limited experience--the trials of school and governessing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude? That strange form of imagination which can deal only with fact, and depict nothing but what is under its eyes, is in its way perhaps the most impressive of all--especially when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen outward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love for the race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and motives. It is unfortunately true in human affairs that those who expect a bad ending to everything, and suspect a motive at least dubious to every action, prove right in a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth and realism have been appropriated to their works by almost universal consent. Indeed there are some critics who think this the only true form of art. But it is at the same time a power with many limitations. The artist who labours, as M. Zola does, searching into every dust-heap, as if he could find out human nature, the only thing worth depicting, with all its closely hidden secrets, all its flying indistinguishable tones, all its infinite gradations of feeling, by that nauseous process, or by a roaring progress through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit of a superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle of cities--must lay up for himself and for his reader many disappointments and deceptions: but the science of artistic study, as exemplified in him, had not been invented in Charlotte Brontë's day. She did not attempt to go and see things with the intention of representing them; she was therefore limited to the representation of those things which naturally in the course of life came under her eyes. She knew, though only as a child, the management and atmosphere of a great school, and set it forth, branding a great institution with an insufferable stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows? She went to another school and turned out every figure in it for our inspection--a community all jealous, spiteful, suspicious, clandestine: even the chance pupil with no particular relation to her story or herself, painted with all her frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape. "She was Miss So-and-So," say the army of commentators who have followed Miss Brontë, picking up all the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the girl who had the misfortune to be in the Brussels Pensionnat along with that remorseless artist may be able to study the character of her ancestress. The public we fear loves this kind of art, however, notwithstanding all its drawbacks. On the other hand probably no higher inspiration could have set before us so powerfully the image of M. Paul. Thus we are made acquainted with the best and the worst which can be effected by this method--the base in all their baseness, the excellent all the dearer for their characteristic faults: but the one representation scarcely less offensive than the other to the victim. Would it be less trying to the individual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in the light of love and glowing adoration, than in the more natural light of scorn? I know not indeed which would be the worst ordeal to go through, to be drawn like Madame Beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes appearing out of every corner, surprising every incautious word, than to be put upon the scene in the other manner, with all your peccadilloes exposed in the light of admiration and fondness, and yourself put to play the part of hero and lover. The point of view of the public is one thing, that of the victim quite another. We are told that Miss Brontë, perhaps with a momentary compunction for what she had done, believed herself to have prevented all injurious effects by securing that "Villette" should not be published in Brussels, or translated into the French tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile hopes since the very desire to hinder its appearance was a proof that this appearance would be of unusual interest. The fury of the lady exposed in all her stealthy ways could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration of his town as Lucy Snowe's captivating lover. To be sure it may be said the public has nothing to do with this. These individuals are dead and gone, and no exposure can hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to posterity his delight in M. Paul. But all the same it is a cruel and in reality an immoral art; and it has this great disadvantage, that its area is extremely circumscribed, especially when the artist lives most of her life in a Yorkshire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable persons come in her way. * * * * * There was however one subject of less absolute realism which Charlotte Brontë had at her command, having experienced in her own person and seen her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women, of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out at windows which never show any one coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? Must the women wait and long and see their lives thrown away, and have no power to save themselves? The position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely be expressed without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more often a sneer at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline Helston both cried out for that husband with an indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous but it was horribly genuine and true. Note there was nothing sensual about these young women. It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which perhaps only women understand. They wanted their life, their place in the world, the rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. Why did not it come to them? The old patience in which women have lived for all the centuries fails now and again in a keen moment of energy when some one arises who sees no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working and give up her birthright, which is to carry on the world. The reader was horrified with these sentiments from the lips of young women. The women were half ashamed, yet more than half stirred and excited by the outcry, which was true enough if indelicate. All very well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for themselves, establishing their independence. How much have we said of all that, endeavouring to persuade ourselves! Charlotte Brontë had the courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted. It was not a living but their share in life, a much more legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had there been any way to secure it in England. Miss Brontë herself said correct things about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her heroines. They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted their share in life--to have their position by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world, and link the generations each to each. In her philosophy marriage was the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love than was to be expected and with a covert conviction in her mind that if not one man then another was better than any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism: but when she finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emmanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place. Poor Charlotte Brontë! She has not been as other women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life. Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought about this one and that, and every name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from London about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend Miss Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went away and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might be possibly a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over. She was hard upon Miss Austen for having no comprehension of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less impassioned than she as she considered the question of Mr. Taylor, reluctant to come to any decision yet disappointed when it came to nothing. There was no longing in her mind for Mr. Taylor, but there was for life and action and the larger paths and the little Joes. This longing which she expressed with so much vehemence and some poetic fervour as the burden of the lives of Shirley and her friends has been the keynote of a great deal that has followed--the revolts and rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the "Sex Problem," and a great deal more. From that first point to the prevailing discussion of all the questions involved is a long way; but it is a matter of logical progression, and when once the primary matter is opened, every enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be expected. Charlotte Brontë was in herself the embodiment of all old-fashioned restrictions. She was proper, she was prim, her life was hedged in by all the little rules which bind the primitive woman. But when she left her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of imagination her exposure of the bondage in which she sat with all her sisters was far more daring than if she had been a woman of many experiences and knew what she was speaking of. She did know the longing, the discontent, the universal contradiction and contrariety which is involved in that condition of unfulfilment to which so many grey and undeveloped lives are condemned. For her and her class, which did not speak of it, everything depended upon whether the woman married or did not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon, but their ambition was neither ignoble nor unclean. It was bold, indeed, in proportion to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of perception of any grosser side. Their share in life, their part in the mutual building of the house, was what they sought. But the seed she thus sowed has come to many growths which would have appalled Charlotte Brontë. Those who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have quite forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not emancipation but an extended duty. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have followed and to which nothing could be less desirable than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility or service--we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic hearth. The marriage which--after all these wild embodiments of the longing and solitary heart which could not consent to abandon its share in life, after Shirley and Lucy Snowe, and that complex unity of three female souls all unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death--she accepted in the end of her life, is the strangest commentary upon all that went before, or rather, upon all the literary and spiritual part of her history, though it was a quite appropriate ending to Mr. Brontë's daughter, and even to the writer of those sober letters which discussed Mr. Taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged, and how it was a little disappointing after all to see him go away. Her final suitor was one of the class which she had criticised so scathingly, one who, it might have been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter the presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but who would seem to have brought all the urgency of a _grand passion_ to the sombre parlour of the parsonage, to the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman who would not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it was poured out before her without warning. She was startled and confused by his declaration and appeal, never apparently having contemplated the possibility of any such occurrence; and in the interval which followed the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not conceal his heartbroken condition but suffered without complaining while the lady looked on wistful, touched and attracted by the unlooked-for love, and gradually melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who offered it. Mr. Brontë evidently thought that if this now distinguished daughter who had been worshipped among the great people in London, and talked of in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature age, it should be some one distinguished like herself, and not the mere curate who was the natural fate of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and least known. Charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate enact various tragic follies of love for her sake with a sort of awe and wonder, astonished to find herself thus possessed still of the charm which none are so sure as women that only youth and beauty can be expected to possess. And she had never had any beauty, and, though she was not old, was no longer young. It is a conventional fiction that a woman still in the thirties is beyond the exercise of that power. Indeed, it would be hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. Certainly the demeanour of Mr. Nicholls gave her full reason to believe that it had not departed from her. He faltered in the midst of the service, grew pale, almost lost his self-possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling figures round the altar; and no doubt this rather shocking and startling exhibition of his feelings was more pardonable to the object of so much emotion than it was likely to have been to any other spectator. The romance is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint ecclesiastical way. And soon Charlotte was drawn still more upon her lover's side by the violence of her father. It was decided that the curate was to go, and that this late gleam of love-making was to be extinguished and the old dim atmosphere to settle down again for ever. Finally, however, the mere love of love, which had always been more to her than any personal inclination, and the horror of that permanent return to the twilight of dreamy living against which she had struggled all her life, overcame her, and gave her courage; but she married characteristically, not as women marry who are carried to a new home and make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the circumstances of the old and receiving her husband into her father's house where she had already passed through so many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams, and which was full to overflowing with the associations of the past. We have no reason to suppose that it did not add to the happiness of her life; indeed, every indication is to the contrary, and the husband seems to have been kind, considerate and affectionate. Still this thing upon which so many of her thoughts had been fixed during her whole life, which she had felt to be the necessary condition of full development, and for which the little impassioned female circle of which she was the expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and earth, came to her at last very much in the form of a catastrophe. No doubt the circumstances of her quickly failing health and shortened life promote this feeling. But without really taking these into consideration the sensation remains the same. The strange little keen soul with its sharply fixed restrictions, yet intense force of perception within its limits, dropped out of the world into which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief and sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum house between the old father and the sober husband, into the clerical atmosphere with which she had no sympathy, into the absolute quiet of domestic life to which no Prince Charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his wand the grey mornings and evenings into golden days. Well! was not this that which she had longed for, the natural end of life towards which her Shirley, her Caroline, her Lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands, indignant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance? And so it was, but how different! Lucy Snowe's little housekeeping, all the preparations which M. Paul made for her comfort and which seemed better to her than any palace, would not they too have taken the colour of perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the Professor assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth? Ah no, for Lucy Snowe loved the man, and Charlotte Brontë, as appears, loved only the love. It is a parable. She said a little later that she began to see that this was the fate which she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend Ellen, perhaps for her Emily if she had lived--the good man very faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold--yet flatter than the flattest days of old, _solidement nourri_, a good substantial husband, managing all the parish business, full of talk about the Archdeacon's charge, and the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland parishes. We can conceive that she got to fetching his slippers for him and taking great care that he was comfortable, and perhaps had it been so ordained might have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked together, of her youth. But she only had a year in which to do all that, and this is how her marriage seems to turn into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild creature that had never borne captivity before, and which now could no longer rush forth into the heart of any shining _fête_, or to the window of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw off the burden of the perennial contradiction, the ceaseless unrest of the soul, the boilings of the volcano under the snow. * * * * * I have said it was difficult to account for the extreme interest still attaching to everything connected with Charlotte Brontë; not only the story of her peculiar genius, but also of everybody connected with her, though the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance except the sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer part. One way, however, in which these sisters have won some part of their long-lasting interest is due to the treatment to which they have been subjected. They are the first victims of that ruthless art of biography which is one of the features of our time; and that not only by Mrs. Gaskell, who took up her work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so anxious to explain how it was that her heroine expressed certain ideas not usual in the mouths of women, that she was compelled to take away the reputation of a number of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these two remarkable women. But everybody who has touched their history since, and there have been many--for it would seem that gossip, when restrained by no bonds of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or that of a parish priest--has followed the same vicious way without any remonstrance or appeal for mercy. We have all taken it for granted that no mercy was to be shown to the Brontës. Let every rag be torn from Charlotte, of whom there is the most to say. Emily had the good luck to be no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the complete exposure of every confidence and every thought which has happened to her sister. Is it because she has nobody to defend her that she has been treated thus barbarously? I cannot conceive a situation more painful, more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father and the husband dwelling silent together in that sombre parsonage, from which every ray of light seems to depart with the lost woman, whose presence had kept a little savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from the inner being of their dearest and nearest. They complained as much as two voiceless persons could, or at least the father complained: and the very servants came hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of their character: but nobody noted the protest of the old man amid the silence of the moors: and the husband was more patient and spoke no word. Even he, however, after nearly half a century, when that far-off episode of life must have become dim to him, has thrown his relics open for a little more revelation, a little more interference with the helpless ashes of the dead. No dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. We know, or at least are told, who Charlotte meant by every character she ever portrayed, even while the model still lives. We know her opinion of her friends, or rather acquaintances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety of common life. Protests have been offered in other places against a similar treatment of other persons; but scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect to Charlotte Brontë. The resurrection people have been permitted to make their researches as they pleased. It throws a curious pathos, a not unsuitably tragic light upon a life always so solitary, that this should all have passed in silence because there was actually no one to interfere, no one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no mere should be said. When one looks into the matter a little more closely, one finds it is so with almost all those who have specially suffered at the hands of the biographer. The Carlyles had no child, no brother to rise up in their defence. It gives the last touch of melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. Mrs. Gaskell, wise woman, defended herself from a similar treatment by will, and left children behind her to protect her memory. But the Brontës are at the mercy of every one who cares to give another raking to the diminished heap of _débris_. The last writer who has done so, Mr. Clement Shorter, had some real new light to throw upon a story which surely has now been sufficiently turned inside out, and has done his work with perfect good feeling, and, curiously enough after so many exploitations, in a way which shows that interest has not yet departed from the subject. But we trust that now the memory of Charlotte Brontë will be allowed to rest. [Signature: Mrs. M. Oliphant] GEORGE ELIOT _By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON GEORGE ELIOT In this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of George Eliot's private life and character. Death has resolved her individuality into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and doubtful action no longer troubles us. But her work still remains as common property for all men to appraise at its true value--to admire for its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur, yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime. For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation more than has George Eliot. As a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato and Kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the laity; her faults of style and method praised as genius--since her death she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always follows on extravagant esteem. The mud-born ephemeridæ of literature have dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran like a golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by pedantry, we have the ignorance which misquotes Lemprière and thinks itself classic. For her outspoken language and forcible diction, wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive epithets and those unveiled presentations of the sexual instinct which seem to make the world one large lupanar. For her accurate science and profound philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do not understand and never could have created; and for her scholarly diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as defective as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively great--almost too colossal in her supremacy. But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss of oblivion, George Eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's. Our Immortals will include in their company, as one of the "choir invisible" whose voice will never be stilled for man, the author of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," of the "Mill on the Floss" and "Middlemarch." * * * * * Her first essays in fiction, her "Scenes of Clerical Life," show the germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. In "Janet's Repentance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can be more delicately touched than the nascent love between Janet and Mr. Tryon. No more subtle sign of Janet's besetting sin could be given than by that candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride, timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation, is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. It would be impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. We can indicate only one or two. That splendid paragraph in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," beginning: "While this poor heart was being bruised"--the sharp summing up of Mr. Amos Barton's "middling" character--Lady Cheverel's silent criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism--the almost Shakesperean humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the commonplace women; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's "It's right enough to be speritial--I'm no enemy to that--but I like my potatoes meally;"--these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent weakness of the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when they first appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_, on re-reading them in cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure in literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and attenuated manner. * * * * * "Adam Bede," the first novel proper of the long series, shows George Eliot at her best in her three most noteworthy qualities--lofty principles, lifelike delineation of character, and fine humour, both broad and subtle. The faults of the story are the all-pervading anachronism of thought and circumstance; the dragging of the plot in the earlier half of the book; and the occasional ugliness of style, where, as in that futile opening sentence the author as I directly addresses the reader as You. The scene is laid in the year 1799--before the Trades Unions had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make him leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the clock begins to strike--before too the hour of leaving off was fixed at six. We older people can remember when workmen wrought up to eight and were never too exact even then. Precision of the kind practised at the present day was not known then; and why were there no apprentices in Adam's shop? Apprentices were a salient feature in all the working community, and no shop could have existed without them. Nor would the seduction by the young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been the heinous crime George Eliot has made it. If women of the lower class held a somewhat better position than they did in King Arthur's time, when, to be the mother of a knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far above her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her, they still retained some of the old sense of inferiority. Does any one remember that famous answer in the Yelverton trial not much more than a generation ago? In 1799 Hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all concerned, save perhaps by Adam himself; and Arthur Donnithorne would have suffered no more for his escapade than did our well-known Tom Jones for his little diversions. And--were there any night schools for illiterate men in 1799? And how was that reprieve got so quickly at a time when there were neither railroads nor telegraphs?--indeed, would it have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone was felony and felony was death? Also, would Hetty have been alone in her cell? In 1799 all prisoners were herded together, young and old, untried and condemned; and the separate system was not in existence. Save for Hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the story might have been made as of present time with more _vraisemblance_ and harmoniousness. These objections apart, how supreme the whole book is! The characters stand out fresh, firm and living. As in some paintings you feel as if you could put your hand round the body, so in George Eliot's writings you feel that you have met those people in the flesh, and talked to them, holding them by the hand and looking into their eyes. There is not a line of loose drawing anywhere. From the four Bedes, with that inverted kind of heredity which Zola has so powerfully shown, to the stately egoism of Mrs. Irwine--from the marvellous portraiture of Hetty Sorrel with her soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her heart "as hard as a cherry-stone" according to Mrs. Poyser--from the weak-willed yet not conscienceless Arthur Donnithorne to the exquisite purity of Dinah, the character-drawing is simply perfect. Many were people personally known to George Eliot, and those who were at all behind the scenes recognised the portraits. Down at Wirksworth they knew the Bedes, Dinah, the Poysers, and some others. In London, among the intimates of George Lewes, Hetty needed no label. Mrs. Poyser's good things were common property in the neighbourhood long before George Eliot crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her matchless setting; and Dinah's sermon was not all imaginary. But though in some sense her work was portraiture, it was portraiture passed through the alembic of her brilliant genius, from commonplace material distilled into the finest essence. It is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of the wise, witty, tender and high-minded things scattered broadcast over this book--as, indeed, over all that George Eliot ever wrote. That paragraph beginning--"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it"; the description of Hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her sharp-tongued aunt; phrases like "John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant," and "young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world"; that sharp little bit of moral and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man "meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of Hebrew"--forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors as is a Christian's bounden duty, but treating as "the enemy of his race, the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the Hebrew points"; how masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other unnoted passages! Hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed finery, reminds one too closely of Gretchen with her fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the English version; and we question the truth of Adam Bede's hypothetical content with such a Dorothy Doolittle as his wife. Writers of love stories among the working classes in bygone days forget that notableness was then part of a woman's virtue--part of her claims to love and consideration--and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness did not count to her honour any more than graceful movements and æsthetic taste would count to the honour of a Tommy in the trenches who could neither handle a spade nor load a rifle. Blackmore made the same mistake in his "Lorna Doone," and George Eliot has repeated it in Adam's love for Hetty solely for her beauty and without "faculty" as her dower. In his own way Bartle Massey, misogynist, is as smart as Mrs. Poyser herself, as amusing and as trenchant; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty years and more too modern, and the long dissertation at the beginning of the second book is a blot, because it is a clog and an interruption. Not so that glorious description of nature in August when "the sun was hidden for a moment and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy;"--nor that deep and tender bit of introspection, setting forth the spiritual good got from sorrow as well as its indestructible impress. Yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages there are too many of them in this as in all George Eliot's works. They hamper the action and lend an air of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has nothing to do. It is bad style as well as bad art, and irritating to a critical, while depressing to a sympathetic reader. But summing up all the faults together, and giving full weight to each, we gladly own the masterly residuum that is left. The dawning love between Adam and Dinah alone is enough to claim for "Adam Bede" one of the highest places in literature, had not that place been already taken by the marvellous truth, diversity and power of the character-drawing. Mrs. Poyser's epigrams, too, generally made when she was "knitting with fierce rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function like the twittering of a crab's antennæ," both too numerous and too well known to quote, would have redeemed the flimsiest framework and the silliest padding extant. The light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the time to read and appreciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins still alive? When he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold attempt to don the giant's robe? * * * * * If "Adam Bede" was partly reminiscent, "The Mill on the Floss" was partly autobiographical. There is no question that in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted herself. Those who knew her when she first came to London knew her as a pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet had not put on that "made" and artificial pose which was her distinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still Maggie Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. For indeed, the union between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love for Philip or her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to her affection of old time, her pity and her love of art--Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous love of beauty. But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere _persiflage_, his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his--the woman who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who boldly crossed the Rubicon--and who, in her after efforts to cover up the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences. Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-looking Jonas Chuzzlewit. Read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control, much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. Tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed on her; for where there is this unlucky divergence between principle and temperament, the will can never be firm nor the walk steady. Sweet little Lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof, than could be found in all Maggie's struggles between passion and principle. The great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional limitations of the other; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much disgrace on her family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right. There is something in "The Mill on the Floss" akin to the gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In "Adam Bede" is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events were worked out to their final issues in "The Mill on the Floss," it seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear perceptions, must go under; and Mr. Tulliver was no match against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife--was not Mrs. Tulliver well known at Coventry?--was another step in the terrible March of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all--not a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is Æschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house. The humour in "The Mill on the Floss" is almost as rich as that of "Adam Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness. The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister Grigg--allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things--is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it. "The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":-- "They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"Maggie's tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies":--Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's repertory? Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own. * * * * * Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _Deus ex machinâ_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with "Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip of her young women. The beginning of "Silas Marner" is much finer than that of either of her former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In those early days of which "Silas Marner" treats, a man from the next parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "Frenchy" himself, were he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on all these counts--his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of Ravaloe--his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of Providence to show his innocence--and his strange and uncongenial trade. Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the weaving industry?--else what could they have done with the thread which they themselves had spun? If it were disposed of to a travelling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? It would have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout; but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible. The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified flight to the Rainbow introduces us to one of George Eliot's most masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour. "The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness"--these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord, "a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor"--do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called _Mr._ in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself"--from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent--rich, racy and to the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before. Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's estimate of men. "It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that 'men _would_ be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the fairies' dance. "Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say 'snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller." But in spite of all this literary value of "Silas Marner" we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot. The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the right moment and in the right place--the adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of living free from the restraint of care--the discovery of Dunsay's body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold--the _impasse_ of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's gates: all these things make "Silas Marner" a beautiful unreality, taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance. * * * * * In "Felix Holt" we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it was in the early thirties when the "democratic wave," which has swept away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political, was first beginning to make itself felt. But here again George Eliot gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those new conditions of the Reform Bill which gave Treby Magna for the first time a member, and which also for the first time created the Revising Barrister--while Trades Unions were still unrecognised by the law, and did their work mainly by rattening and violence. Any one who was an intelligent and wide-awake child at that time, and who can remember the talk of the excited elders, must remember things somewhat differently from what George Eliot has set down. Radical was in those days a term of reproach, carrying with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with shame, as we might now say Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most advanced Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a Radical. Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also the lower sediment, might be Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold Transome, who would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for the Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something akin to Frankenstein's Monster. No one knew where his power began nor where it ended; and on each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which, once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would stop. In its construction "Felix Holt" is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of all George Eliot's books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of "Felix Holt" showed both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. Also she repeats the situation of Eppie and her adopted father Silas in that of Esther and Rufus Lyon. But where it was natural enough for the contentedly rustic Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and unknown--her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state--natural in her though eminently unnatural in the drama of life--it was altogether inharmonious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to Transome Court. George Eliot's usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in her delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which she is so fond--the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness--even in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby; and the comic chorus of rustic clowns, which George Eliot always introduces where she can, is comparatively poor. She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at Treby Manor--"a much grander person than her ladyship"--"as wearing gold and jewelry to a vast amount of suet." When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes, George Eliot misses what would have been absolutely certain--these fine little points of difference between the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the half-bred Esther of Malhouse Yard; and yet, quite unintentionally, she makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversations and flirtatious coquetries with Harold Transome. Nor, we venture to think, as going too far on the other side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and surroundings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as "importunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can be denied that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote "Felix Holt," it is undeniably her least successful work. And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it! If Homer nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him? The opening of the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. "His sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in undress:"--"The higher pains of a dim political consciousness:"--"The younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his questionable station and unknown experience:"--"Her life would be exalted into something quite new--into a sort of difficult blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers" (true for George Eliot herself but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon):--These are instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind. Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between Felix and Esther! It is in these grave and tender indications of love that George Eliot is at her best. Gentle as "sleeping flowers"--delicately wrought, like the most perfect cameos--graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet strong--they are always the very gems of her work. And in "Felix Holt" especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior quality of so much that surrounds them. Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. Whether he would have won such a girl as Esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be doubtful; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his nature--for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in costume--for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is supreme. And with one of George Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great master. "Blows are sarcasms turned stupid; wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest." The last three books of the series are the most ponderous. Still beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and flowers of which the girth is inconvenient; and in one, at least, certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a prominence fatal to perfect work. Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot became painfully laboured. Her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and inartistic technicality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her manners. All her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the general good, of conformity with established moral standards, while her life was in direct opposition to her words; for though she did no other woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of righteousness, however irksome they might be. And it was this endeavour to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-will and self-sacrifice, that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who knew her history, was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola," the first of the ponderous last three. Her noblest work, "Romola" is yet one of George Eliot's most defective in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. The loftiness of sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined with what seems to us to be the most extraordinary indifference to--for it cannot be ignorance of--the social and domestic conditions of the time. The whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of the Church--the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the proud exclusiveness of the well-born citizens of any state. Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by Cosmo and Lorenzo to the learned men of all nations, especially to Greek scholars who, in the first fervour of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant, too, the example set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had given his beautiful daughter Alessandra in marriage to the "soldier-poet" Marullo; was it likely that even an eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adventurer, flung up like a second Ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and unidentified by any document? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had already employed him, waif and stray as he was; but that he should have consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her more conservative and more suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero, should have consented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as that an English country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a handsome gipsy. If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the improbability of the whole of Tito's career becomes still more striking. As, in Athens, the Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the autochthon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public office or the higher kind of marriage; and though the stricter part of the law was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in Italy. It seems more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer, should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a base kind of scout and unhonoured spy. That he should ever have taken the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same substance as a fairy tale. The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian; and his modes of life and thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter spoken of. The Church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip; and while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo was a pagan, but he died receiving the Sacraments. The Borgias were criminals, but their professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks and nuns, but they had to confess God and the Church; and their diatribes had to be carefully worded--as witness Rabelais--or a plea would certainly be found for the fire and faggot--as with Fra Dolcino and Savonarola. So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and now, are considered integral to morality. It could not have been possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter "aloof from the debasing influence" of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for a servant. The times did not allow it; no more than we should allow it now in this freer day. This womanless home for an Italian girl at any time, more especially in the Middle Ages, when even young wives were bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in workmanship. So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being anachronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start to finish. The things which both she and Tessa did, and were allowed to do, are on a par with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Peter Wilkins." It was as impossible for Tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she was, to come into Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years old to be sent with a message on business into the City of London alone. To this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the streets of Italian cities unaccompanied; and maidenhood is, as it always was, sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have gone out and come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. With streets filled by the turbulent factions of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night? She is said to be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to Tessa's house, or merely accompanied by Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see her dying brother--which also, by the way, was impossible--or attended, at a distance, by old Maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary nun. She would have lost name and state had she committed these eccentricities; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent to a convent--that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that prison for contumacy--and her godfather would have been the first to consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. The scene she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously impossible--as is their English-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the public-house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. English, too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at night. For the matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note whatever appeared alone in the streets when out on a midnight expedition, either to commit murder or break the seventh commandment. He took some one with him, friend or servant, armed; and to this day you will not find Italians willingly walk alone at night. The whole of this kind of life, if necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. So is Romola's flight, disguised as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between her and Savonarola, the _vraisemblance_ is spoilt by this impossibility of condition. Nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city, have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of India suddenly turned loose in the streets and environs of Delhi--as felt all those women whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern women call it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a feeling did not exist. All these things are anachronisms; as much so as if a novelist of the twentieth century, writing of English life in the eighteenth, should clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn them into the football field and cricket-ground. These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various scenes. Nothing can excel the power with which Tito's character is shown in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive criminality. The whole action may be summed up in George Eliot's own words. "When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act, he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of sincerity." But, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and affectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of Tito's character, we cannot accept the Tessa episode as true to life in general, while it is eminently untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes and baby face, so incessantly repeated and harped on. She is as nauseating as she is impossible; and the whole story from first to last is an ugly blot on the book. In Romola and in Savonarola we touch the heights. The "tall lily" is an exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. Her two interviews with Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest is beyond praise both for style and psychology. So, too, are the changes in the great preacher himself--the first, when his simple earnestness of belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal assumption, as is the way with all reformers--the second, when he abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of trial comes on him, and the World no longer stands between God and his soul. The final scenes of the Frate's public life are powerfully wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep religious fervour; but it is in scenes and circumstances of this kind that she is ever at her best. In humour and psychologic insight she is greater than any English woman writer we have had; in aphorisms she is unrivalled; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral, intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is nowhere. Contrast Romola's character and manner of life--above all those two thoroughly English letters of hers--with all that we know of Vittoria Colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day--which was Romola's--and at once we see the difference between them--the difference wrought by four centuries--Vittoria being essentially a woman of the time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck; while Romola is as essentially a product of the nineteenth century. In spite of the local colour--which, after all, is only a wash--given by the descriptions of pageants and processions, and by the history of which George Eliot so ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech about Tessa's place in the house and the children's sweets, to Romola's as characteristically English attitude and hygienic objections--from a little maiden, without a caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary visit to the studio and night perambulations about the city. All these shortcomings notwithstanding, "Romola" will ever remain one of the noblest works of our noblest author; and, after all, did not Shakspere make Hector quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and Romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived and loved in the times of the great Eliza? Where we have so much to admire--nay, to venerate--we may let the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of by those who would be candid and not fulsome--just and not flattering. By the way, did George Eliot know that "Baldassare" is the name of one of the devils invoked to this day by Sicilian witches? * * * * * The longest of all the novels, "Middlemarch," is the most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordinate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as one of George Cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by what George Eliot would have called fission--a division into two. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential; for George Eliot was far too good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been cut out--failing that fission, which would have been still better--the work would have gained in proportion to its compression. The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with life and fate--all are rebellious against things as they find them. Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; Romola's is the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness; Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt; but it has not the unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology. The most masterly bits of work in "Middlemarch" are the characters of Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw in the drawing; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who Hetty Sorrel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two copies. No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal. To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature. All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is tender. That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity--his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman--his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved--all made the threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and feebler species"--who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to exercise over the stronger man. Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie; and Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. Beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish them--or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will Ladislaw--the utter snob that he is! Where were George Eliot's perceptions? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear-sighted? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands out as did Romola's--like a "white lily" in the garden. She is a superb creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's? The canvas of "Middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good some of the characters are! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth; the commonplace negation of all great and all unworthy qualities of the Vincys--Celia and Sir James--Mr. Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader--all are supreme. We confess we do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful delator Raffles--George Eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will not bear comparison. No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things. Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"--(But, farther on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!--"In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the _revolutions of an irregular solid_.")--Mrs. Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred:"--"Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families:"--"Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain:"--"Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley:"--"But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences"--an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious experience:--"That controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"--These are a few picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but inadequately represented by stray nuggets. Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness in Mr. Casaubon when he had received his death-warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to bed. It is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth. * * * * * The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, "Daniel Deronda" is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most unnatural of all George Eliot's books. Of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its predecessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural. Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French caricature of an English milord than like a possible English gentleman depicted by a compatriot. Deronda himself is a prig of the first water; while Gwendolen is self-contradictory all through--like a tangled skein of which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines of self-will, pride, worldly ambition and personal self-indulgence--without either conscience or deep affections--self-contained and self-controlled--she wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has prepared us. That she should ever have loved, or even fancied she loved, such a frozen fish as Grandcourt was impossible to a girl so full of energy as Gwendolen is shown to be. Clear in her desires of what she wanted, she would have accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful life to which else she would have been condemned. But she would have accepted him without even that amount of self-deception which is portrayed in the decisive interview. She knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately chose to ignore it. So far good. It is what she would have done. But where is the logic of making her "carry on" as she did when she received the diamonds on her wedding-day? It was a painful thing, sure enough, and the mad letter that came with them was disagreeable enough; but it could not have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made Gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred, seeing that she already knew the whole shameful story. These are faults in psychology; and the conduct of the plot is also imperfect. George Eliot's plots are always bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining instead confusion and unintelligibility; but surely nothing can be much sillier than the whole story of Deronda's birth and upbringing, nor can anything be more unnatural than the character and conduct of his mother. What English gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born Jewish child under conditions which made the whole world believe him to be his own illegitimate son? And what young man, brought up in the belief that he was an English gentleman by birth--leaving out on which side of the blanket--would have rejoiced to find himself a Jew instead? The whole story is improbable and far-fetched; as also is Deronda's rescue of Mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the Meyricks. It is all distortion, and in no wise like real life; and some of the characters are as much twisted out of shape as is the story. Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne are the most natural of the whole gallery--the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling most of the others. Of these others, Gwendolen herself is far and away the most unsatisfactory. Her sudden hatred of her husband is strained; so is her love for Deronda; so is her repentance for her constructive act of murder. That she should have failed to throw the rope to Grandcourt, drowning in the sea, was perhaps natural enough. That she should have felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself in such humiliating unreserve to Deronda was not. All through the story her action with regard to Deronda is dead against the base lines of her character, and is compatible only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion as does sometimes make women mad. We have no hint of this. On the contrary, all that Gwendolen says is founded on spiritual longing for spiritual improvement--spiritual direction with no hint of sexual impulse. Yet she acts as one overpowered by that impulse--throwing to the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common sense. Esther was not harmonious with herself in her choice of Felix Holt over Harold Transome, but Esther was naturalness incarnate compared with Gwendolen as towards Daniel Deronda. And the evolution of Esther's soul, and the glimpse given of Rosamond's tardy sense of some kind of morality, difficult to be believed as each was, were easy sums in moral arithmetic contrasted with the birth and sudden growth of what had been Gwendolen's very rudimentary soul--springing into maturity in a moment, like a fully-armed Athene, without the need of the more gradual process. Add to all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden wain--add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last novel is also her worst. But then the one immediately preceding was incomparably her best. We come now to the beauties of the work--to the inimitable force of some phrases--to the noble aim and meaning of the story--to the lofty spirit informing all those interrupting disquisitions, which are really interpolated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. Take this little shaft aimed at that _Græculus esuriens_ Lush, that "half-caste among gentlemen" and the _âme damnée_ of Grandcourt. "Lush's love of ease was well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found them relishing." Again: "We sit up at night to read about Cakya-Mouni, Saint Francis and Oliver Cromwell, but whether we should be glad for any one at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal himself as a new relation, is quite another matter:"--"A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived; but Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which, superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though, to an ardent reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth which makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (We extract this sentence as an instance of George Eliot's fine feeling and delicate perception expressed in her worst and clumsiest manner.) "A blush is no language, only a dubious flag-signal, which may mean either of two contradictions." "Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song;" "Mrs. Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds." It is in such "polite pea-shooting" as this that George Eliot shows her inimitable humour--the quick give-and-take of her conversations being always in harmony with her characters. But, indeed, unsatisfactory as a novel though "Daniel Deronda" is, it is full of beauties of all kinds, from verbal wit to the grandly colossal sublimity of Mordecai, and Deronda's outburst of passionate desire to weld the scattered Jews into one nation of which he should be the heart and brain. * * * * * Whatever George Eliot did bears this impress of massive sincerity--of deep and earnest feeling--of lofty purpose and noble teaching. She was not a fine artist, and she spoilt her later work by pedantry and overlay, but she stands out as the finest woman writer we have had or probably shall have--stands a head and shoulders above the best of the rest. She touched the darker parts of life and passion, but she touched them with clean hands and a pure mind, and with that spirit of philosophic truth which can touch pitch and not be defiled. Yet prolific as she was, and the creator of more than one living character, she was not a flexible writer and her range was limited. She repeated situations and motives with a curious narrowness of scope, and in almost all her heroines, save Dinah and Dorothea, who are evoluted from the beginning, paints the gradual evolution of a soul by the ennobling influence of a higher mind and a religious love. We come now to a curious little crop of errors. Though so profound a scholar--being indeed too learned for perfect artistry--she makes strange mistakes for a master of the language such as she was. She spells "insistence" with an "a," and she gives a superfluous "c" to "Machiavelli." She sometimes permits herself to slip into the literary misdemeanour of no nominative to her sentence, and into the graver sin of making a singular verb govern the plural noun of a series. She says "frightened at" and "under circumstances"; "by the sly" and "down upon"; and she follows "neither" with "or," as also "never" and "not." She is "averse to"; she has even been known to split her infinitive, and to say "and which" without remorse. Once she condescends to the iniquity of "proceeding to take," than which "commencing" is only one stage lower in literary vulgarity; and many of her sentences are as clumsy as a clown's dancing-steps. As no one can accuse her of either ignorance or indifference, still less of haste and slap-dash, these small flaws in the great jewel of her genius are instructive instances of the clinging effect of our carelessness in daily speech; so that grammatical inaccuracy becomes as a second nature to us, and has to be unlearned by all who write. Nevertheless, with all her faults fully acknowledged and honestly shown, we ever return as to an inexhaustible fountain, to her greatness of thought, her supreme power, her nobility of aim, her matchless humour, her magnificent drawing, her wise philosophy, her accurate learning--as profound as it was accurate. Though we do not bracket her with Plato and Kant, as did one of her panegyrists, nor hold her equal to Fielding for naturalness, nor to Scott for picturesqueness, nor as able as was Thackeray to project herself into the conditions of thought and society of times other than her own, we do hold her as the sceptred queen of our English Victorian authoresses--superior even to Charlotte Brontë, to Mrs. Gaskell, to Harriet Martineau--formidable rivals as these are to all others, living or dead. If she had not crossed that Rubicon, or, having crossed it, had been content with more complete insurgency than she was, she would have been a happier woman and a yet more finished novelist. As things were, her life and principles were at cross-corners; and when her literary success had roused up her social ambition, and fame had lifted her far above the place where her birth had set her, she realised the mistake she had made. Then the sense of inharmoniousness between what she was and what she would have been did, to some degree, react on her work, to the extent at least of killing in it all passion and spontaneity. Her whole life and being were moulded to an artificial pose, and the "made" woman could not possibly be the spontaneous artist. Her yet more fatal blunder of marrying an obscure individual many years younger than herself, and so destroying the poetry of her first union by destroying its sense of continuity and constancy, would have still more disastrously reacted on her work had she lived. She died in time, for anything below "Theophrastus Such" would have seriously endangered her fame and lessened her greatness--culminating as this did in "Middlemarch," the best and grandest of her novels, from the zenith of which "Daniel Deronda," her last, is a sensible decline. [Signature: E. Lynn Linton.] MRS. GASKELL _By_ EDNA LYALL MRS. GASKELL Of all the novelists of Queen Victoria's reign there is not one to whom the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to Mrs. Gaskell. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every description. The hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can forget the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of French verbs as she pores over "Wives and Daughters" on a Saturday half-holiday, and, as George Sand remarked to Lord Houghton, this same book, "Wives and Daughters," "would rivet the attention of the most _blasé_ man of the world." With the exception of her powerful "Life of Charlotte Brontë," Mrs. Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories. The enormous difficulties which attended the writing of a biography of the author of "Jane Eyre" would, we venture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time. It is easy now, years after Charlotte Brontë's death, to criticise the wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up slight mistakes, to maintain that in some details Mrs. Gaskell was wrong. To be wise too late is an easy and, to some apparently, a most grateful task; but it would, nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fascinating interest, or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the undertaking. As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the "Life of Charlotte Brontë" "ranks with Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' and Lockhart's 'Life of Scott.'" It is pleasant, too, to read Charlotte Brontë's own words in a letter to Mr. Williams, where she mentions her first letter from her future friend and biographer: "The letter you forwarded this morning was from Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of 'Mary Barton.' She said I was not to answer it, but I cannot help doing so. The note brought the tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my sister Emily. In Miss Martineau's mind I have always felt the same, though there are wide differences. Both these ladies are above me--certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience. I think I could look up to them if I knew them." For lovers of the author of "Mary Barton" it is hard, however, not to feel a grudge against the "Life of Charlotte Brontë"--or, rather, the reception accorded to it. Owing to the violent attacks to which it gave rise, to a threatened action for libel on the part of some of those mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to which the publication of the Biography subjected the writer, Mrs. Gaskell determined that no record of her own life should be written. It is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light mixed with the many vexations. Charles Kingsley writes to Mrs. Gaskell in warm appreciation of the "Life": "Be sure," he says, "that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed, age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. 'Jane Eyre' I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only ones I care to open. 'Shirley' disgusted me at the opening, and I gave up the writer and her books with the notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written." Mrs. Gaskell's wish regarding her own biography has, of course, been respected by her family; but the world is the poorer, and it is impossible not to regret that the life of so dearly loved a writer must never be attempted. The books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's, wedded to that true mother's heart which is wide enough to take in all the needy. Looking, moreover, at that goodly row of novels--whether in the dear old shabby volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or in that dainty little set recently published in a case, which the rising generation can enjoy--one cannot help reflecting that here is "A Little Child's Monument," surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love and a great grief that could be imagined. It was not until the death of her little child--the only son of the family--that Mrs. Gaskell, completely broken down by grief, began, at her husband's suggestion, to write. And thus a great sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful harvest, as grief borne with strength and courage always may do; and the world has good reason to remember that little ten months' child whose short life brought about such great results. A question naturally suggests itself at this point as to Mrs. Gaskell's birth and education. How far had she inherited her literary gifts? And in what way had her mind been influenced by the surroundings of her childhood and girlhood? Her mother, Mrs. Stevenson, was a Miss Holland, of Sandlebridge, in Cheshire; her father--William Stevenson--was at first classical tutor in the Manchester Academy, and later on, during his residence in Edinburgh, was editor of the _Scots Magazine_ and a frequent contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_. He was next appointed Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, an appointment which caused his removal from Edinburgh to Chelsea; and it was there, in Cheyne Row, that Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, the future novelist, was born. Owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted when only a month old by her aunt, Mrs. Lumb, and taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little town so wonderfully described in "Cranford." For two years in her girlhood she was educated at Stratford-on-Avon, walking in the flowery meadows where Shakspere once walked, worshipping in the stately old church where he worshipped, and where he willed that his body should be left at rest; nor is it possible to help imagining that the associations of that ideal place had an influence on the mind of the future writer, doing something to give that essentially English tone which characterises all her books. After her father's second marriage she went to live with him, and her education was superintended by him until his death in 1829, when she once more returned to Knutsford. Here, at the age of twenty-two, she was married to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester; and Manchester remained her home ever after. Such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to have such a wide and lasting influence for good. For nothing is more striking than this when we think over the well-known novels--they are not only consummate works of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and rich with the most delightful humour and pathos--they are books from which that morbid lingering over the loathsome details of vice, those sensuous descriptions of sin too rife in the novels of the present day, are altogether excluded. Not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any sense; they are wholly free from the horrid prudery, the Pharisaical temper, which makes a merit of walking through life in blinkers and refuses to know of anything that can shock the respectable. Mrs. Gaskell was too genuine an artist to fall either into this error or into the error of bad taste and want of reserve. She drew life with utter reverence; she held the highest of all ideals, and she dared to be true. How tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her treatment of the difficult subject which forms the _motif_ of "Ruth"! How sorrowfully true to life is the story of the dressmaker's apprentice with no place in which to spend her Sunday afternoons! We seem ourselves to breathe the dreadful "stuffy" atmosphere of the workroom, to feel the dreary monotony of the long day's work. It is so natural that the girl's fancy should be caught by Henry Bellingham, who was courteous to her when she mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball; so inevitable that she should lose her heart to him when she witnessed his gallant rescue of the drowning child. But her fall was not inevitable, and one of the finest bits in the whole novel is the description of Ruth's hesitation in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and unjustly cast off by her employer, she has just accepted her lover's suggestion that she shall go with him to London, little guessing what the promise involved, yet intuitively feeling that her consent had been unwise. "Ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold, and went and opened the window, and leant out into the still, sweet evening air. The bush of sweetbriar underneath the window scented the place, and the delicious fragrance reminded her of her old home. I think scents affect and quicken the memory even more than either sights or sounds; for Ruth had instantly before her eyes the little garden beneath the window of her mother's room, with the old man leaning on his stick watching her, just as he had done not three hours before on that very afternoon." She remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and his wife who had served her parents in their lifetime, and for their sake would help and advise her now. Would it not be better to go to them? "She put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door; but then she saw the square figure of the landlord standing at the open house door, smoking his evening pipe, and looming large and distinct against the dark air and landscape beyond. Ruth remembered the cup of tea that she had drunk; it must be paid for, and she had no money with her. She feared that he would not let her leave the house without paying. She thought that she would leave a note for Mr. Bellingham saying where she was gone, and how she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared of equal magnitude to her; and the difficulty of passing the landlord while he stood there, and of giving him an explanation of the circumstances, appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with inconvenience as far more serious situations. She kept peeping out of her room after she had written her little pencil note, to see if the outer door was still obstructed. There he stood motionless, enjoying his pipe, and looking out into the darkness which gathered thick with the coming night. The fumes of the tobacco were carried into the house and brought back Ruth's sick headache. Her energy left her; she became stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion; she modified her plan of action to the determination of asking Mr. Bellingham to take her to Milham Grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead of to London. And she thought in her simplicity that he would instantly consent when he had heard her reasons." The selfishness of the man who took advantage of her weakness and ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at all exaggerated. Henry Bellingham is no monster of wickedness, but a man with many fine qualities spoilt by an over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and yielding too easily to her worldly-wise arguments. Ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness--she calls it "unfairness"--when, on their arrival in Wales, he persuades the landlady to give them rooms in the hotel and to turn out on a false pretext some other guests into the _dépendance_ across the road. She understands his selfish littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks to him during that wonderfully described interview in the chapter called "The Meeting on the Sands." He cannot in the least understand her. "The deep sense of penitence she expressed he took for earthly shame, which he imagined he could soon soothe away." He actually has the audacity to tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant refusal, he offers her marriage. To his great amazement she refuses this too. "Why, what on earth makes you say that?" asked he.... "I do not love you. I did once. Don't say I did not love you then; but I do not now. I could never love you again. All you have said and done since you came to Abermouth has only made me wonder how I ever could have loved you. We are very far apart; the time that has pressed down my life like brands of hot iron, and scarred me for ever, has been nothing to you. You have talked of it with no sound of moaning in your voice, no shadow over the brightness of your face; it has left no sense of sin on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts; and yet I might plead that I was an ignorant child; only I will not plead anything, for God knows all. But this is only one piece of our great difference." "You mean that I am no saint," he said, impatient at her speech. "Granted. But people who are no saints have made very good husbands before now. Come, don't let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness interfere with substantial happiness--happiness both to you and to me--for I am sure I can make you happy--ay! and make you love me too, in spite of your pretty defiance.... And here are advantages for Leonard, to be gained by you quite in a holy and legitimate way." She stood very erect. "If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. You shall have nothing to do with my boy by my consent, much less by my agency. I would rather see him working on the roadside than leading such a life--being such a one as you are.... If at last I have spoken out too harshly and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is yours. If there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that it would bring Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough." Later on, a fever visits the town, and Ruth becomes a nurse. When she hears that the father of her child is ill and untended she volunteers to nurse him, and, being already worn out with work, she dies in consequence. The man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness, are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at Ruth as she lies dead. He was "disturbed" by the distress of the old servant Sally, and saying, "Come, my good woman! we must all die," _tries to console her with a sovereign_!! The old servant turns upon him indignantly, then "bent down and kissed the lips from whose marble, unyielding touch he recoiled even in thought." At that moment the old minister, who had sheltered Ruth in her trouble, enters. Henry makes many offers to him as to providing for Ruth's child, Leonard, and says, "I cannot tell you how I regret that she should have died in consequence of her love to me." But from gentle old Mr. Benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern words, "Men may call such actions as yours youthful follies. There is another name for them with God." The sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful humour of Sally, the servant. The account of the wooing of Jeremiah Dixon is a masterpiece; and Sally's hesitation when, having found her proof against the attractions of "a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and eighty pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be ready for killing by Christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy. "Well, now! would you believe it? the pig were a temptation. I'd a receipt for curing hams.... However, I resisted. Says I, very stern, because I felt I'd been wavering, 'Master Dixon, once for all, pig or no pig, I'll not marry you.'" The description of the minister's home is very beautiful. Here are a few lines which show in what its charm consisted: "In the Bensons' house there was the same unconsciousness of individual merit, the same absence of introspection and analysis of motive, as there had been in her mother; but it seemed that their lives were pure and good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some law the obedience to which was of itself harmonious peace, and which governed them.... This household had many failings; they were but human, and, with all their loving desire to bring their lives into harmony with the will of God, they often erred and fell short. But somehow the very errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher excellences in another; and so they reacted upon each other, and the result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace." The publication of "Ruth," with its brave, outspoken words, its fearless demand for one standard of morality for men and women, subjected the author to many attacks, as we may gather from the following warm-hearted letter by Charles Kingsley: "_July 25, 1853._ "I am sure that you will excuse my writing to you thus abruptly when you read the cause of my writing. I am told, to my great astonishment, that you had heard painful speeches on account of 'Ruth'; what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust.... Among all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard, but one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteousness of the book, and that above all from really good women. If you could have heard the things which I heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough High Church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more doubt than I have, that, whatsoever the 'snobs' and the bigots may think, English people, in general, have but one opinion of 'Ruth,' and that is, one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not you have had this said to you already often. Believe me, you may have it said to you as often as you will by the purest and most refined of English women. May God bless you, and help you to write many more such books as you have already written, is the fervent wish of your very faithful servant, "C. KINGSLEY." "Mary Barton," which was the first of the novels, was published in 1848, and this powerful and fascinating story at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the first rank of English novelists. People differed as to the views set forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its great merits. Like "Alton Locke," it has done much to break down class barriers and make the rich try to understand the poor; and when we see the great advance in this direction which has been made since the date of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the first appearance of such a book must have been. The secret of the extraordinary power which the book exercises on its readers is, probably, that the writer takes one into the very heart of the life she is describing. Most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention. Why? Because they are written either as mere "goody" books for parish libraries, and are carefully watered down lest they should prove too sensational and enthralling; or because they are written by people who have only a surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the life they would fain depict. "David Copperfield" is probably the most popular book Dickens ever wrote, and is likely to outlive his other works, just because he himself knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass through, and could draw from real knowledge the characters in the background. And at the present time we are all able to understand the Indian Mutiny in a way that has never been possible before, because Mrs. Steel in her wonderful novel, "On the Face of the Waters," has, through her knowledge of native life, given us a real insight into the heart of a great nation. Brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons, but unless there is in it some germ of real truth which appeals to the heart and conscience it will not live. Sensationalism alone will not hold its ground. There must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his subject if the book is to do its true work. And we venture to think that "Mary Barton," which for nearly half a century has been influencing people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact that Mrs. Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any detestable, patronising way, but knew them as _friends_. This surely is the reason why the characters in the novel are so intensely real. What could be finer than the portrait of Mary herself, from the time when we are first introduced to her as the young apprentice to a milliner and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when she has passed through her great agony? How entirely the reader learns to live with her in her brave struggle to prove her lover's innocence! One of the most powerful parts of the book is the description of her plucky pursuit of the good ship _John Cropper_, on board of which was the only man who could save her lover's life by proving an alibi. But it is not only the leading characters that are so genuine and so true to life. Old Ben Sturgis, the boat-man, rough of speech but with more heart than many a smooth-tongued talker; his wife, who sheltered Mary when she had no notion what manner of woman she was; Job Legh, who proved such a good friend to both hero and heroine in their trouble, and whose well-meaning deception of old Mrs. Wilson is so humorously described; John Barton, the father, with the mournful failure at the close of his upright life; old Mr. Carson, the rich father of the murdered man, with his thirst for vengeance, and his tardy but real forgiveness, when he let himself be led by a little child--all these are living men and women, not puppets; while in the character and the tragic story of poor Esther we see the fruits of the writer's deep knowledge of the life of those she helped when released from gaol. But Mrs. Gaskell looked on both sides of the question. In "North and South," published in 1855, she deals with the labour question from the master's standpoint, and in Mr. Thornton draws a most striking picture of a manufacturer who is just and well-meaning--one who really respects and cares for the men he employs. The main interest of this book lies, however, in the character of the heroine, Margaret, who is placed in a most cruel dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. By far the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable Frederick to escape, Margaret tells a deliberate falsehood to the detective who is in search of him. The torture of mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered this intentional lie, and the difficult question whether under any circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the writer's most powerful way. In 1853--the same year in which "Ruth" was published--the greatest of all Mrs. Gaskell's works appeared, the inimitable "Cranford." For humour and for pathos we have nothing like this in all the Victorian literature. It is a book of which one can never tire: yet it can scarcely be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town and its inhabitants. What English man or woman is there, however, who will not read and re-read its pages with laughter and tears? Cranford is said to be in many respects the Knutsford of Mrs. Gaskell's childhood and youth, and there is something so wonderfully lifelike in the descriptions of the manners and customs of the very select little community that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the assertion. They were gently bred, those old Cranford folk, with their "elegant economy," their hatred of all display, and their considerate tact. There is pathos as well as fun in the description of Mrs. Forrester pretending not to know what cakes were sent up "at a party in her baby-house of a dwelling ... though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes!" There is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page of the book, for there was no hurrying life among those dignified old people. "I had often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no garden; the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to some town-dweller. Things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford." Who has not laughed over Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney cow "meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel" after her disaster in the lime-pit! or over the masterly description of Miss Jenkyns, who "wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior." Dear old Miss Matty, however, with her reverence for the stronger sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a closer hold on the heart of the reader. The description of the meeting of the former lovers is idyllic; and when Thomas Holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home authorities reverses her own ordinance against "followers" in the case of Martha, the maid-servant, but otherwise makes no sign. "Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feelings--a concealment she practised even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook again, though the book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little table by her bedside. She did not think I heard her when she asked the little milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's, or that I noticed the reply: "'But she wears widows' caps, ma'am!' "'Oh? I only meant something in that style; not widows', of course, but rather like Mrs. Jamieson's.'" In the whole book there is not a character that we cannot vividly realise: the Honourable (but sleepy) Mrs. Jamieson; brisk, cheerful Lady Glenmire, who married the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her title to become plain Mrs. Hoggins; Miss Pole, who always with withering scorn called ghosts "indigestion," until the night they heard of the headless lady who had been seen wringing her hands in Darkness Lane, when, to avoid "the woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered the sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another way! Captain Brown with his devotion to the writings of Mr. Boz and his feud with Miss Jenkyns as to the superior merits of Dr. Johnson; and Peter, the long-lost brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate practical joker. One and all they become our life-long friends, while the book stands alone as a perfect picture of English country town society fifty years ago. Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet some of them are very beautiful. "Cousin Phillis," for example, gives one more of the real atmosphere of country life than any other writer except Wordsworth. We seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as we read the story. Charming, too, is "My Lady Ludlow" with her genteel horror of dissenters subdued in the end by her genuine good feeling. How often one has longed for that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church, in which, if she did not like the sermon, she would pull up a glass window as though she had been in her coach, and shut out the sound of the obnoxious preacher! But, with all her peculiarities, she was the most courteous of women--a lady in the true sense of the word--and when people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread out her handkerchief on the front of her dress as the footman handed her coffee, my Lady Ludlow with infinite tact and grace promptly spread _her_ handkerchief exactly in the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had adopted. Among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one called "The Crooked Branch," in which the scene at the assizes has almost unrivalled power; while among the lighter short stories, "My French Master," with its delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "Mr. Harrison's Confessions," the delightfully written love-story of a young country doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable. In 1863 the novel "Sylvia's Lovers" was published, and although, by its fine description of old Whitby and the pathos of the story, it has won many admirers, we infinitely prefer its successor, "Wives and Daughters." There is something very sad in the thought that this last and best of the writer's stories was left unfinished; but happily very little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly touched in to the almost perfect picture of English home life by the daughter who had been not only Mrs. Gaskell's child but her friend. "Wives and Daughters" will always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of life and character; while Molly Gibson, with her loyal heart and sweet sunshiny nature, will, we venture to think, better represent the majority of English girls than the happily abnormal Dodos and Millicent Chynes of present-day fashion. In Mr. Gibson's second wife the author has given us a most subtle study of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted woman, and she is made all the more repulsive because of her outward charms, her soft seductive voice and her lavish employment of terms of endearment. Wonderfully clever, too, is the study of poor little Cynthia, her daughter, whose relations to Molly are most charmingly drawn. The story was just approaching its happy and wholesome ending, and the difficulties which had parted Roger Hamley and Molly had just disappeared, when death summoned the writer from a world she had done so much to brighten and to raise. On Sunday evening, November 12, 1865, Mrs. Gaskell died quite suddenly at Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, a house which she had recently bought as a surprise for her husband. Sad as such a death must always be for those who are left behind, one can imagine nothing happier than "death in harness" for a worker who loves his work. ".... There's rest above. Below let work be death, if work be love!" Her "last days," wrote one of those who knew her best, "had been full of loving thought and tender help for others. She was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words." That is the summing-up of the whole; and, after all, what better could a long biography give us? The motto of all of us should surely be the words of Mme. Viardot Garcia: "First I am a woman ... then I am an artist." And assuredly Mrs. Gaskell's life was ruled on those lines. "It was wonderful"--wrote her daughter, Mrs. Holland, in a letter to me the other day--"how her writing never interfered with her social or domestic duties. I think she was the best and most practical housekeeper I ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess, to say nothing of being everything as a mother and friend. She combined both, being my mother and greatest friend in a way you do not often, I think, find between mother and daughter." Some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal wife and mother cares little and knows less about the world beyond the little world of home. Mrs. Gaskell, however, took a keen interest in the questions of the day, and was a Liberal in politics; while it is quite evident that neither these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended to interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the noblest type. The friend as well as the mother of her children, the sharer of all her husband's interests, she yet found time to use to the utmost the great literary gift that had been entrusted to her; while her sympathy for those in trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with prisoners. She was one of the fellow labourers of Thomas Wright, the well-known prison philanthropist, and was able to help in finding places for young girls who had been discharged from prison. For working women she also held classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many close friendships. How far the characters in the novels were studied from life is a question which naturally suggests itself; and Mrs. Holland replies to it as follows: "I do not think my mother ever _consciously_ took her characters from special individuals, but we who knew often thought we recognised people, and would tell her, 'Oh, so and so is just like Mr. Blank,' or something of that kind; and she would say, 'So it is, but I never meant it for him.' And really many of the characters are from originals, or rather are like originals, but they were not consciously meant to be like." For another detail which will interest Mrs. Gaskell's fellow workers I am indebted to the same source: "Sometimes she planned her novels more or less beforehand, but in many cases, certainly in that of 'Wives and Daughters,' she had very little plot made beforehand, but planned her story as she wrote. She generally wrote in the morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was quiet." Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell. Her books, with their wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty, their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead with us to love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the author's voice imploring us to "seize the day" and to "make friends," as she does in actual words at the close of one of her Christmas stories, adding pathetically: "I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night on Bethlehem Heights." [Signature: A E Bayly. 'Edna Lyall.'] MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD _By_ ADELINE SERGEANT MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD Mrs. Catherine Crowe, whose maiden name was Stevens, was born at Borough Green, in Kent, about 1800, and died in 1876. She married Colonel Crowe in 1822, and took up her residence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were written chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best known by her novel, "Susan Hopley," and her collection of ghost stories, "The Night Side of Nature." She was a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of insanity. But love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels, the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment and considerable dramatic power. As a writer, indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile; she wrote plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this generation. It is evident too, that she believed herself--rightly or wrongly--to be possessed of great philosophical discrimination; but it must be acknowledged that her philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander. * * * * * It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respecting the status and education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly "advanced." In "Lilly Dawson," for instance, a story published in 1847, she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education which women were then receiving. "It is true," she says, "that there is little real culture amongst men; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they have still more advantages. If their education has been bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours a day at worsted work and embroidery; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics than in strumming Hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte." Her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words from the same work of fiction. "If, as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer; where man reasons she sees. Nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world's history, if man would but let her play it out, and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom." Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer herself, the very quintessence of Ibsenism! It must have required considerable courage to write in this way in the year 1847, and Mrs. Crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational reform. In many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong individuality and decided opinions. * * * * * Her first work was a drama, "Aristodemus," published anonymously in 1838; it showed considerable ability and was well regarded by the critics. She then wrote a novel, "Men and Women, or Manorial Rights," in 1839; and in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction: "Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant." This story was more generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest than the rest. Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of "The Seeress of Provorst," by Justinus Kerner, a book of revelations concerning the inner life of man; and in 1848 she published a book called "The Night Side of Nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the English language. Its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the author. She seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in her way. From the humble apologies, however, with which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a change has passed over people's minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the Society for Psychical Research, and would have had no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject. She divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams (where we get Sir Noel Paton's account of his mother's curious vision); warnings; double-dreaming and trance, with the stories of Colonel Townshend's voluntary trance and the well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the ghost of Claverhouse; doppel-gängers and apparitions (including the stories of Lady Beresford's branded wrist and Lord Lyttleton's warning); and other chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to find among these the original account of "Pearlin Jean," of which Miss Sarah Tytler has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. An account of the phenomena of _stigmata_ and the case of Catherine Emmerich, are also described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of "The Night Side of Nature." Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for Christmas, in the year 1859; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the now almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years. It is also curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled "Pippie's Warning, or Mind Your Temper"--another instance of her versatility of mind. "The Adventures of a Beauty" and "Light and Darkness" appeared in 1852. The latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. Mrs. Crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this collection. There is an account of the celebrated poisoners, Frau Gottfried, Madame Ursinus, and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims; and of Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a visit. The histories of Lesurques, the hero of the "Lyons Mail," and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who became a nun, are well narrated; but nearly all the stories are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of Mr. Wilkie Collins. "The Priest of St. Quentin" and "The Lycanthropist" are two of the most powerful. Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was "Linny Lockwood," issued in 1854. A sentence from the preface to this book anticipates--rather early, as we may think--the approaching death of the three-volume novel: "Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time soliciting me to write them an original novel for their cheap series; and being convinced that the period for publishing at £1 11s. 6d., books of a kind that people generally read but once, is gone by, I have resolved to make the experiment." She wrote another tragedy, "The Cruel Kindness," in 1853, and abridged "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for children. In 1859 a pamphlet on "Spiritualism and the Age we Live in," constituted the last of her more important works, although she continued, for some time after recovery from the attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to write papers and stories for periodicals. In spite of Mrs. Crowe's love for the supernatural and the horrible, she is one of the pioneers of the purely domestic story--that story of the affections and the emotions peculiar to the Victorian Age. She is allied to the schools of Richardson and Fanny Burney rather than to those of Sir Walter Scott or Miss Austen; for although her incidents are often romantic and even far-fetched, her characters are curiously homely and generally of humble environment. Thus, for instance, "Susan Hopley" is a maid-servant (though not of the Pamela kind nor with the faintest resemblance to Esther Waters); Lilly Dawson, although proved ultimately to be the daughter of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier life as a drudge and a dependent; and Linny Lockwood, while refined and educated, is reduced to the situation of a lady's maid. The circumstances of her heroines are, as a rule, extremely prosaic, and would possibly have been condemned by writers of Miss Austen's school as hopelessly vulgar; but Mrs. Crowe's way of treating these characters and their surroundings bears upon it no stamp of vulgarity at all. Its great defect is its want of humour to light up the sordid side of the life which she describes. She is almost always serious, full of exalted and occasionally overstrained sentiment. And even when treating of childhood, it is rarely that she relaxes so far as (in "Lilly Dawson") to describe the naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying for the cat. This is almost the sole glimpse of a sense of fun to which Mrs. Crowe treats us in her numerous volumes. To the present age "Susan Hopley," although so popular at the time of its publication, is less attractive than the stories of "Linny Lockwood" and "Lilly Dawson." The form adopted for the recital of Susan's narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises Susan's reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and supposed to be told by her in mature age, when she is housekeeper to the hero of the story. Nevertheless, the plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of Susan's brother by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the subsequent exposure of his guilt by means of Susan's energy and the repentance of one of his victims. It has all the elements of a sensational story, with the exception of a "sympathetic" heroine or any other really interesting character; for Susan Hopley, the embodiment of all homely virtues, is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the attractiveness of the "beautiful and haughty" dairymaid, Mabel Lightfoot, whose frailty forms an important element in the discovery of Gaveston's guilt. "Lilly Dawson" may be said to possess something of a psychological interest, which redeems it from the charge of dulness brought against "Susan Hopley." The heroine is thrown as a child into the hands of a wild and lawless family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a household slave; and the child appears at first to be utterly stupid and apathetic. A touch of affection and sympathy is needed before her intellect awakes. In fear of being forced to marry one of the sons of the house in which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen, she escapes from her enemies, becomes the guide and adopted child of an old blind man, takes service as a nursemaid, is employed in a milliner's workroom, narrowly escapes being murdered by the man whom she refused to marry, and finally acts as maid in the house of her own relations, where she is discovered and received with the greatest affection. Nevertheless, she cannot endure the life of "a fine lady," and goes back ultimately to marry the humble lover whose kindness had cheered her in the days of her childhood and poverty. In "Linny Lockwood" there is a touch of emotion, even of passion, which is wanting in the previous stories. It embraces scenes and situations which are quite as moving as any which thrilled the English public in the pages of "Jane Eyre" or "East Lynne," but, owing possibly to Mrs. Crowe's obstinate realism and somewhat didactic homeliness of diction and sentiment, it seems somewhat to have missed its mark. Linny Lockwood marries a man entirely unworthy of her, whose love strays speedily from her to another woman--a married woman with whom he elopes and whom he afterwards abandons. Linny, being poor and destitute, looks about for work, and takes the post of maid to her husband's deserted mistress, without, of course, knowing what had been the connection between them. But before the birth of Kate's child, Linny learns the truth and nevertheless remains with her to soothe her weakness, and lessen the pangs of remorse of which the poor woman ultimately dies. A full explanation between the two women takes place before Kate's death; and the child that is left behind is adopted by Linny Lockwood, who refuses to pardon the husband, who sues to her for forgiveness, or to live with him again. The character of Linny Lockwood is a very beautiful one, and the story appeals to the reader's sensibilities more strongly than the recital of Susan Hopley's adventures or the girlish sorrows of Lilly Dawson. * * * * * Mrs. Crowe's writings certainly heralded the advent of a new kind of fiction: a kind which has been, perhaps more than any other, characteristic of the early years of the Victorian Age. It is the literature of domestic realism, of homely unromantic characters, which no accessories of exciting adventure can render interesting or remarkable in themselves--characters distinguished by every sort of virtue, yet not possessed of any ideal attractiveness. She is old-fashioned enough to insist upon a happy ending, to punish the wicked and to reward the good. But amid all the conventionality of her style, one is conscious of a note of hard common sense and a power of seeing things as they really are, which in these days would probably have forced her (perhaps against her will) into the realistic school. She seems, in fact, to hover between two ages of literature, and to be possessed at times of two different spirits--one the romantic and the supernatural, the other distinctly commonplace and workaday. Perhaps it is by the former that she will be chiefly remembered, but it is through the latter that she takes a place in English literature. She left a mark upon the age in which she lived, and she helped, in a quiet, undemonstrative fashion, to mould the women of England after higher ideals than had been possible in the early days of the century. Those who consider the development of women to be one of the distinguishing features of Queen Victoria's reign should not forget that they owe deep gratitude to writers like Mrs. Crowe, who upheld the standard of a woman's right to education and economic independence long before these subjects were discussed in newspapers and upon public platforms. For, as George Eliot has said, with her usual wisdom, it is owing to the labours of those who have lived in comparative obscurity and lie in forgotten graves, that things are well with us here and now. Caroline Clive was the second daughter and co-heiress of Edmund Meysey-Wigley, of Shakenhurst, Worcestershire. She was born in 1801, at Brompton Green, London, and was married in 1840 to the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, Warwickshire. In the latest edition of her poems, her daughter states that "Mrs. Archer Clive, from a severe illness when she was three years old, was lame; and though her strong mind and high spirit carried her happily through childhood and early life, as she grew up she felt sharply the loss of all the active pleasures enjoyed by others." Her novel, "Paul Ferroll," contains a touching poem which shows how deeply she felt the privations consequent on her infirmity. "Gaeta's orange groves were there Half circling round the sun-kissed sea; And all were gone and left the fair Rich garden solitude but me. "My feeble feet refused to tread The rugged pathway to the bay; Down the steep rocky way they tread And gain the boat and glide away. * * * * * "Above me hung the golden glow Of fruit which is at one with flowers; Below me gleamed the ocean's flow, Like sapphires in the midday hours. "A passing by there was of wings, Of silent, flower-like butterflies; The sudden beetle as it springs Full of the life of southern skies. * * * * * "It was an hour of bliss to die, But not to sleep, for ever came The warm thin air, and, passing by, Fanned sense and soul and heart to flame." A great love of nature and a yearning to tread its scenes breathe in every word of these lines, which possess an essentially pathetic charm of their own. Mrs. Clive died in July 1873, from the result of an accident, by which her dress was set on fire when she was writing in her boudoir at Whitfield, with her books and papers around her. Her health was extremely delicate, and she had been for many years a confirmed invalid. Her first work consisted of the well-known "IX Poems by V." published in 1840. These poems were very favourably received, and were much praised by Dugald Stewart, by Lockhart, and by Mr. Gladstone, who says of them, "They form a small book, which is the life and soul of a great book." They were also very favourably reviewed in the _Quarterly_ (LXVI. 408-11). Her other poems, "I Watch the Heavens," "The Queen's Ball," "The Vale of the Rea," etc., have been re-published with the original "IX" in a separate volume. "Year After Year," published in 1858, passed into two editions; but Mrs. Clive's reputation chiefly rests upon her story of "Paul Ferroll," published in 1855, and its sequel, "Why Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife." The second story was, however, in no way equal to the first; and a subsequent novel, "John Greswold," which appeared in 1864, was decidedly inferior to its predecessors, although containing passages of considerable literary merit. "Paul Ferroll" has passed through several editions, and has been translated into French. It was not until the fourth edition that the concluding chapter, which brings the story down to the death of Paul Ferroll, was added. * * * * * There is little difference in date between the writings of Mrs. Crowe and those of Mrs. Archer Clive, but there is a tremendous gap between their methods and the tone of their novels. As a matter of fact they belong to different generations, in spite of their similarity of age. Mrs. Crowe belongs to the older school of fictionists, while Mrs. Archer Clive is curiously modern. The tone and style are like the tone and style of the present day, not so much in the dialogue, which is generally stilted, after the fashion of the age in which she lived, as in the mental attitude of the characters, in the atmosphere of the books, and the elaborate, sometimes even artistic, collocation of scenes and incidents. * * * * * "Paul Ferroll" is often looked upon merely as a novel of plot, almost the first "sensational" novel, as we call it, of the century. But it is more than that. There is a distinct working out of character and a subordination of mere incident to its development; and the original ending was of so striking and pathetic a nature that we can only regret the subsequent addition, which probably the influence of others made necessary, just as in "Villette" Charlotte Brontë was obliged to soften down her own conception, in order to satisfy the conventional requirements of her friends. The story of "Paul Ferroll" displays a good deal of constructive skill, although the mystery enfolded in its pages is more easily penetrated than would be the case in a modern sensational novel. The fact is, we have increased our knowledge of the intricacies both of human nature and of criminal law in these latter days, and our novelists are cleverer in concealing or half revealing their mysteries than they were in "the forties." For a few pages, at least, the reader may be deluded into the belief that Paul Ferroll is a worthy and innocent man, and that his wife has been murdered by some revengeful servant or ruffianly vagabond. But the secret of his guilt is too speedily fathomed; and from that point to the end of the book, the question turns on the possibilities of its discovery or the likelihood and effects of his own confession. Mrs. Clive's picture of the "bold bad man" is not so successful as that of Charlotte Brontë's Rochester. Rochester, with all his faults, commands sympathy, but our sympathies are alienated from Paul Ferroll when we find (in the first chapter) that he could ride out tranquilly on a summer's morning, scold his gardener, joke with the farmer's wife, and straighten out the farmer's accounts, when he had just previously murdered his wife in her sleep by thrusting a sharp pointed knife through her head "below the ear." Even although he afterwards exhibits agitation on being brought face to face with the corpse of his wife, we cannot rid ourselves of our remembrance of the insensibility which he had shown. The motive for the crime is not far to seek. He had fixed his affections on a young girl, his marriage with whom had been prevented by the woman who became his wife. Dissension and increasing bitterness grew up between the pair; and her death was held as a release by Paul Ferroll, who hastened to bring home, as his second wife, the girl whom he had formerly loved. No suspicion attached to him, and he is careful to provide means of defence for the labourer Franks and his wife, who have been accused of the murder. On returning home with his second wife, to whom he is passionately attached, he devotes himself entirely to literary pursuits, refusing to mix with any of the society of the place. From time to time his motive is allowed to appear; he has determined never to accept a favour from, nor become a friend of, the country gentlemen, with whom he is thrown into contact, so that they shall never have to say, supposing the truth should ever be acknowledged, that he has made his way into their houses on false pretences. But in spite of his seclusion, he lives a life of ideal happiness with his wife, Ellinor, and their beautiful little child, Janet, who, however, occupies quite a secondary place in the hearts of her father and mother, who are wrapt up in one another. The events of the next few years are not treated in detail, although there is at one point a most interesting description of the state of a town in which cholera rages, when Paul Ferroll flings himself with heroic ardour into every effort to stem the tide of the disease. Owing to a riot at the time of the Assizes, Ferroll fires on one of the crowd and kills him, so that by a curious coincidence, he is tried for murder, and has full experience of the horrors accompanying the situation of a criminal. He is sentenced to death but pardoned, and returns to his old life at home. The widow of the labourer who had formerly been accused of the murder of his first wife then returns to England, and Ferroll knows that her return increases the danger of discovery. He tries to escape it by going abroad, but finds on his return that Martha Franks, the widow, is in possession of some trinkets which belonged to the late Mrs. Ferroll, that she has been accused of theft and finally of the murder of her mistress. This is the very conjuncture which had always appeared possible to Paul Ferroll; the moment has come when he feels himself obliged to confess the truth, in order to save a fellow creature from unjust condemnation. He thereupon acknowledges his guilt, is at once conveyed to prison, and after a merely formal trial is condemned to death--the execution to take place, apparently, in three days, according to the inhuman custom of the time. Ellinor dies on the day when she hears of his confession; and Janet, his daughter, now eighteen years old, and Janet's young lover, Hugh Bartlett, are the only persons who remain faithful to him or make efforts for his safety. Through Hugh's efforts and the treachery of the gaoler, Paul Ferroll manages, in a somewhat improbable manner, to escape from prison; and he and Janet make their way to Spain, whence they will be able to take ship for America. The conclusion of the story, as at first written, is particularly striking. Janet, after an illness, has come to herself: "She did not know the place where she was. The air was warm and perfumed, the windows shaded, the room quite a stranger to her. An elderly woman, with a black silk mantle on her head and over her shoulders, spoke to her. She did not understand the meaning, but she knew the words were Spanish. Then the tide of recollection rushed back, and the black cold night came fully before her, which was the last thing she recollected. 'My father,' she said, rising as well as she could. The woman had gone to the window and beckoned, and in another minute Mr. Ferroll stood by her bedside. 'Can you still love me, Janet?' said he. 'Love you! oh yes, my father.'" It seems a pity that a concluding chapter was afterwards added, containing a description of Janet's life with her father in Boston, and of his dying moments and last words, which might well have been left to the imagination. The original conclusion was more impressive without these details. It is rather curious, too, that Mrs. Clive should have written another volume to explain _why_ Paul Ferroll killed his wife; but possibly she thought further explanation was necessary, since she prefixed to the latter volume a quotation from Froude's "Henry the Eighth": "A man does not murder his wife gratuitously." In this book she changes the names of all the characters except that of Ellinor. Paul Ferroll is Leslie, and his wife, Anne, is Laura. Ellinor, the young and beautiful girl out of a convent, completely enchants Leslie, whom Laura had intended to marry; and Laura contrives, by deliberate malice, so completely to sever them that he makes Laura his wife, while Ellinor returns to the convent. "Violent were the passions of the strong but bitter man; fierce the hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect. Wild was the fury of the man who believed in but one world of good, and saw the mortal moments pass away unenjoyed and irretrievable. Out of these hours arose a purpose. The reader sees the man and knows the deed. From the premises laid before him, he need not indeed conclude that even that man would do the deed, but since it was told in 1855 that the husband killed his wife, so now in 1860 it is explained _why_ he killed her." This second volume is decidedly inferior to the first, but it shared in the popularity which "Paul Ferroll" had already achieved, and the author's vigorous portraiture of characters and events was well marked in both volumes. * * * * * With her third volume, "John Greswold," came a sudden falling off, at any rate as regards dramatic force. "John Greswold" is the autobiography of a young man who has very little story to tell and does not know how to tell it. No grip is laid on the reader's attention; no character claims especial interest, but the thing that is remarkable in the book is the literary touch, which is far more perceptible than in the more interesting story of "Paul Ferroll." The book is somewhat inchoate, but contains short passages of real beauty, keen shafts of observation, and an occasional flight of emotional expression, which raise the writer to a greater literary elevation than the merely sensational incidents of her earlier novels. She has gained in reflective power, but lost her dramatic instinct. Consequently "John Greswold" was less successful than "Paul Ferroll." The conclusion of the book, vague and indecisive, shows the author to be marked out by nature as one of the Impressionist School. It is powerful and yet indefinite; in fact it could only have been written by one with a true poetic gift. "The seven stars that never set are going westward. The funeral car of Lazarus moves on and the three mourners follow behind. They are above the fir wood and that's the sign of midnight. Twenty-three years ago I was born into this world and now the twenty-third has run out. The time is gone. The known things are all over and buried in the darkness behind. Before me lies the great blank page of the future and no writing traced upon it. But it is nothing to me. I won't ask nor think, nor hope, nor fear about it. The leaf of the book is turned and there's an end--the tale is told." * * * * * "Paul Ferroll" may be considered as the precursor of the purely sensational novel, or of what may be called the novel of mystery. Miss Brontë in "Jane Eyre" uses to some extent the same kind of material, but her work is far more a study of character than the story of "Paul Ferroll" can claim to be. In "Paul Ferroll," indeed, the analysis of motive is entirely absent. The motives that actuated Paul Ferroll are to be gathered simply from chance expressions or his actions. No description of the human heart has been attempted. The picture of the violent, revengeful, strongly passionate nature of the man is forcible enough, but it is displayed by action and not by introspection. It is for this reason that Mrs. Clive may be placed in the forefront of the sensational novelists of the century. She anticipated the work of Wilkie Collins, of Charles Reade, of Miss Braddon, and many others of their school, in showing human nature as expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a physician, nor analysing it like a priest. A vigorous representation of the outside semblance of things is the peculiar characteristic of the so-called sensational novelist; and it is in this respect that "Paul Ferroll" excels many of the novels of incident written during the first half of this century. It heralded a new departure in the ways of fiction. It set forth the delights of a mystery, the pleasures of suspense, together with a thrilling picture of "the strong man in adversity," which has been beloved of fiction-mongers from the first days of fable in the land. But perhaps it was successful, most of all, because it introduced its readers to a new sensation. Hitherto they had been taught to look on the hero of a novel as necessarily a noble and virtuous being, endowed with heroic, not to say angelic qualities; but this conviction was now to be reversed. The change was undoubtedly startling. Even Scott had not got beyond the tradition of a good young man as hero, a tradition which the Brontës and Mrs. Archer Clive were destined to break down. For Scott's most fascinating character, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, was confessedly the villain of the piece; and the splendidly picturesque figure of Dundee was supposed to be less attractive than the tame and scrupulous personality of Henry Morton. It was a convention amongst writers that vice and crime must be repulsive, and that there was something inherently attractive in virtue--a wholesome doctrine, insufficiently preached in these days, but not strictly consistent with facts. To find, therefore, a villain--and a thorough-paced villain, the murderer of his wife--installed in the place of hero and represented as noble, handsome, and gifted, naturally thrilled the readers' minds with a mixture of horror and delight. The substitution of villain for hero is now too common to excite remark, but it was a striking event in the days when "Paul Ferroll" was published, although there had been instances of a similar kind in the novels of the eighteenth century. The new fashion gained ground and speedily exceeded the limits which Mrs. Archer Clive would no doubt have set to it; but it is nevertheless in part to her that we owe this curious transposition of _rôles_, which has revolutionised the aims and objects of fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. MRS. HENRY WOOD The art of the _raconteur_, pure and simple, is apt to be undervalued in our days. A rage for character-painting, for analysis, for subtle discrimination, down to the minutest detail, has taken hold upon us; and although we have lately returned to a taste for adventure of the more stirring kind, there is still an underlying conviction that the highest forms of literary art deal with mental states and degrees of emotions, instead of with the ordinary complications of every-day life. Hence the person who is gifted simply with a desire (and the power) of telling a story _as_ a story, with no ulterior motive, with no ambition of intellectual achievement, the Scheherazade of our quiet evenings and holiday afternoons, is apt to take a much lower place in our estimation than she deserves. This is especially the case with Mrs. Henry Wood. It is impossible to claim for her any lofty literary position; she is emphatically un-literary and middle-class. But she never has cause to say, "Story? God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir," for she always has a very distinct and convincing story, which she handles with a skill which can perhaps be valued only by the professional novelist, who knows the technical difficulty of handling the numerous _groups_ of characters which Mrs. Wood especially affects. There is no book of hers which deals--as so many novels deal--with merely one or two characters. She takes the whole town into her story, wherever it may be. We not only know the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff and the Squire, but we are intimate (particularly intimate) with the families of the local lawyer and doctor. We are almost equally well acquainted with their bootmaker and green-grocer, while their maids and their grooms are as much living entities to us as if they had served us in our own houses. To take a great group of _dramatis personæ_, widely differing in circumstances, in character, in individuality; to keep them all perfectly clear without confusion and without wavering; to evolve from them some central figures on which the attention of the subsidiary characters shall be unavoidably fixed, and to weave a plot of mystery, intrigue, treachery or passion which must be resolved to its ultimate elements before the last page of the book--to do all this is really an achievement of which many a writer, who values himself on his intellectual superiority to Mrs. Henry Wood, might well be proud. It is no more easy to marshal a multitude of characters in the pages of your book than to dispose bodies of soldiers in advantageous positions over an unknown country. The eye of a general is in some respects needed for both operations, and the true balance and proportion of a plot are not matters which come by accident or can be accomplished without skill. It may not be literary skill, but it is skill of a kind which deserves recognition, under what name soever it may be classed. * * * * * Mrs. Henry Wood was born in Worcestershire in 1814, and died in London in 1887. She suffered from delicate health and passed the greater part of her life as an invalid. She was the daughter of Mr. Thomas Price, one of the largest glove manufacturers in the city of Worcester. She married Mr. Henry Wood, the head of a large banking and shipping firm, who retired early from work and died comparatively young. It was not until middle life that Mrs. Wood began to write; and her first work,--perhaps, of all her works, the most popular--was "East Lynne," which first appeared in _Colburn's New Monthly Magazine_. Its success was prodigious and it is still one of the most popular novels upon the shelves of every circulating library. It has been translated into many languages and dramatised in different forms. It was published in 1861, and reached a fifth edition within the year. Amongst her most popular works also are "The Channings" and "Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles," 1862; "The Shadow of Ashlydyat," 1863; "St. Martin's Eve," 1866; "A Life's Secret," 1867; "Roland Yorke," a sequel to "The Channings," 1869; "Johnny Ludlow," stories re-printed from the _Argosy_, 1874 to 1885; "Edina," 1876; "Pomeroy Abbey," 1878; "Court Netherleigh," 1881; and many other stories and novels. Mrs. Wood was for many years the editor of the _Argosy_. * * * * * The reason of the popularity of "East Lynne" is not far to seek. It is, to begin with, a very touching story; and its central situation, which in some respects recalls the relation of the two women in Mrs. Crowe's "Linny Lockwood," is genuinely striking. It is perhaps not worth while to argue as to its probability. It is, of course, barely possible that a woman should come disguised into the house where she formerly reigned as mistress, and act as governess to her own children, without being recognised. As a matter of fact, she is recognised by one of the servants only on account of a momentary forgetfulness of her disguise. Her own husband, her own children, do not know her in the least; and although he and his kinswoman are vaguely troubled by what they consider a chance resemblance, they dismiss it from their minds as utterly impossible, until the day when Lady Isabel, dying in her husband's house, begs to see him for the last time. The changes in her personal appearance, her lameness, for instance, and the greyness of her hair, are very ingeniously contrived; but it certainly seems almost impossible that two or three years should have so completely changed her that nobody should even guess at her identity. The present generation complains that the pathos of the story is overdone; but even if detail after detail is multiplied, so as to harrow the reader's feelings almost unnecessarily, the fact still remains that Mrs. Wood has imagined as pitiful and tragic a situation as could possibly exist in the domestic relations of man and woman. The erring wife returning to find her husband married to another woman, to nurse one of her own children through his last illness without being recognised by him or by her husband, and to die at last in her husband's house with the merest shadow of consolation in the shape of his somewhat grudging forgiveness, presents us with a figure which cannot fail to be extremely pathetic. The faults of Mrs. Henry Wood's style, its occasional prolixity and commonplaceness, the iteration of the moral reflections, as well as the triteness and feebleness sometimes of the dialogue, very nearly disappear from view when we resign ourselves to a consideration of this tragic situation. It cannot be denied that there is just a touch of mawkishness now and then, just a slight ring of false sentiment in the pity accorded to Lady Isabel, who was certainly one of the silliest young women that ever existed in the realms of fiction. Nevertheless the spectacle of the mother nursing the dying boy, who does not know her, is one that will always appeal to the heart of the ordinary reader, and will go far to account for the extraordinary popularity of "East Lynne." A novelist of more aspiring genius would perhaps have concentrated our attention exclusively upon Lady Isabel's feelings and tragic fate. Here Mrs. Wood's failings, as well as her capacities, reveal themselves. She sees the tragic side of things, but she sees also (and perhaps too much) the pathos of small incidents, the importance of trifles. She spares us no jot of the sordid side of life. And in a novel of the undoubted power of "East Lynne" there are some details which might have been spared us. The rapacity of the creditors who seize the body of Lady Isabel's father, the gossip of the servants, the suspicions of Afy Hallijohn, and, in short, almost all the underplot respecting Richard Hare--these matters are superfluous. The reader's eye ought to be kept more attentively upon the heroine and her relations with Mr. Carlisle and Sir Francis. The one inexplicable point in the story is Lady Isabel's desertion of her husband for a man whom she must despise. It is never hinted that she had for one moment lost her heart to Francis Levison. She left her husband out of sheer pique and jealousy, loving him ardently all the while, although, in her ignorance and folly, she scarcely knew that she loved him. Here the story is weak. We feel that Mrs. Wood sacrifices probability in her effort to obtain a striking situation. For the strongest part of "East Lynne" is the description of what occurs when Lady Isabel returns as a governess to her old home, when her husband, supposing her to be dead, has married his old love Barbara Hare. To this situation, everything is subordinate; and it is in itself so strong that we cannot wonder if the author strains a point or two in order to achieve it. But the curious, the characteristic, thing is that even in this supreme crisis of the story, Mrs. Wood's essential love of detail, and of somewhat commonplace detail, asserts itself over and over again. The incidents she takes pains to narrate are rational enough. There is no reason why pathos should be marred because a dying child asks for cheese with his tea, or because the sensible stepmother condemns Lucy to a diet of bread and water for some trifling offence, or because Miss Cornelia Carlisle displays her laughable eccentricities at Lady Isabel's bedside. The pathos is marred now and then, not because of these trifling yet irritating incidents, but because we get an impression that the author has forced a number of utterly prosaic people into a tragic situation for which they are eminently unfitted. The ducking of Sir Francis Levison in the horsepond is an example of this. The man was a heartless villain and murderer, yet he is presented to us in a scene of almost vulgar farce as part of his retribution. If the author had herself realised the insufficiency of her characters to rise to the tragic height demanded of them, she might have achieved either satire or intense realism; but there is a certain smugness in Mrs. Henry Wood's acceptance of the commonplaces of life which makes us feel her an inadequate painter of tragedy. We close the book with a suspicion that she preferred the intolerable Barbara to the winsome and erring Lady Isabel. "East Lynne" owes half its popularity, however, to that reaction against inane and impossible goodness which has taken place since the middle of the century. Just as Rochester and Paul Ferroll are protests against the conventional hero, so Lady Isabel is a protest against the conventional heroine--and a portent of her time! We were all familiar with beauty and virtue in distress, from Clarissa Harlowe downwards. It is during later years that we have become conversant with beauty and guilt as objects of our sympathy and commiseration. The moralists of the time--Saturday Reviewers, and others--perceived the change from one point of view, and were not slow to comment on it. Their opposition to the modern novel was chiefly based upon what they called a glorification of vice and crime. Now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, we can see very well that no more praise of wrong-doing was implied by Mrs. Wood's portrait of Lady Isabel than by Thackeray's keen-edged delineation of Becky Sharp or George Eliot's sorrowful sympathy with Maggie Tulliver. What was at first set down as a new and revolutionary kind of admiration for weakness and criminality soon resolved itself into a manifestation of that remarkable _Zeit-Geist_ which has made itself felt in every department of human life. It is that side of the modern spirit which leads to the comprehension of the sufferings of others, to a new pity for their faults and weaknesses, a new breadth of tolerance, and a generous reluctance to judge harshly of one's fellow man. It has crept into the domain of law, of religious thought, of philanthropic effort, and it cannot be excluded from the realms of literature and art. It is, in fact, the scientific spirit, which says "there's nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so;" which refuses to dogmatise or hastily to condemn; which looks for the motives and reasons and causes of men's actions, and knows the infinite gradations between folly and wisdom, between black and white, between right and wrong. If science had done nothing else, it would be an enormous gain that she should teach us to suspend our judgment, to weigh evidence, and thus to pave the way for that diviner spirit by which we refuse to consider any sinner irreclaimable or any criminal beyond the reach of human sympathy. "East Lynne" was received with general acclamation, and has been translated, it is said, into every known tongue, including Parsee and Hindustanee. "Some years ago," her son states, "one of the chief librarians in Madrid informed Mrs. Henry Wood that the most popular book on his shelves, original or translated, was 'East Lynne.' Not very long ago it was translated into Welsh and brought out in a Welsh newspaper. It has been dramatised and played so often that had the author received a small royalty from every representation it was long since estimated that it would have returned to her no less than a quarter of a million sterling, but she never received anything.... In the English Colonies the sale of the various works increased steadily year by year. In France the story has been dramatised and is frequently played in Paris and the Provinces." On its first appearance, an enthusiastic review in the _Times_ produced a tremendous effect upon the public; the libraries were besieged for copies, and the printers had to work night and day upon new editions. In fact the success of "East Lynne" was one of the most remarkable literary incidents of the century. * * * * * The most popular of Mrs. Henry Wood's books, next to "East Lynne," seem to be "Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles" and "The Channings." These are stories of more entirely quiet domestic interest than "East Lynne." The situations are less tragical and the plots less complicated. Mrs. Halliburton's quiet endurance of the privations and difficulties of her life, the pathetic life and death of her little Janey, and the ultimate success and achievements of her sons, linger in the memory of the reader as a pleasant and homely picture of the vicissitudes of English life. There is a more humorous element in "The Channings," from the introduction of so many youthful characters--the boys of the Cathedral school, notably Bywater, who is the incarnation of good-humoured impudence, giving brightness to the tone of the story. The schoolboys are in this, as in many other of Mrs. Wood's novels, particularly well drawn. They are not prigs; they are anything but angels, in spite of their white surplices and their beautiful voices; and their escapades and adventures in the old cloisters were wild enough to make the old monks turn in their graves. No doubt many incidents of this kind were drawn from life and owe their origin to Mrs. Wood's acquaintance with the Choir School belonging to Worcester Cathedral. It was not the only occasion on which the manufacturer's daughter turned her knowledge of Worcester to good account. It may be said that the majority of her novels are coloured, more or less, by the author's lengthy residence in a cathedral town. It was in 1874 that the first series of short stories, supposed to be narrated by Johnny Ludlow, began in the _Argosy_. Johnny Ludlow is a young lad belonging to a Worcestershire family, who is supposed to narrate incidents which have come under his observation at school or at home. Some of the stories thus produced are striking and vigorous; others are of less merit, but all are distinguished by the strong individuality of the characters, and by the fidelity with which Worcester and Worcestershire life are described. It now seems extraordinary that there should have been the slightest doubt as to the authorship of these stories, for Mrs. Wood's peculiarities of style are observable on every page. Mr. Charles W. Wood, her son, remarks that "no one knew, or even guessed at, the authorship;" but this is a rather exaggerated statement, as we have reason to be aware that the author was recognised at once by critics of discrimination. Still the general public were for some time deceived, imagining Johnny Ludlow to be a new author, whose stories they occasionally contrasted with those of Mrs. Henry Wood, and were said to prefer, probably much to the novelist's own amusement. The great variety of plot and incident found in the "Johnny Ludlow" stories is their most remarkable feature. The same characters are, of course, introduced again and again, as Johnny Ludlow moves in a circle of country squires, clergy, and townspeople. But it is astonishing with how much effect the stories of different lives can be placed in the same setting, and with what infinite changes the life of a country district can be reproduced. The characters are clearly drawn and often very well contrasted, and no doubt Mrs. Henry Wood's memories of her earlier life in the district contributed largely to the success of this series. The first series ran in the _Argosy_ and were re-printed, 1874-1880, while a second and third series maintained their popularity in 1881 and in 1885. * * * * * It has been computed that Mrs. Wood wrote not fewer than from three to four hundred short stories, every one of them with a distinct and carefully worked-out plot, in addition to nearly forty long novels: a proof, if any were wanted, of the extreme fertility of her imagination and the facility of her pen. It has, however, sometimes been wondered why Mrs. Henry Wood's works should have attained so great a circulation when they are conspicuously wanting in the higher graces of literary style or intellectual attainment. The reason appears to lie chiefly in certain qualities of her writings which appeal in an entirely creditable way to the heart and mind of the British public. Mrs. Wood's stories, although sensational in plot, are purely domestic. They are concerned chiefly with the great middle-class of England, and she describes lower middle-class life with a zest and a conviction and a sincerity which we do not find in many modern writers, who are apt to sneer at the _bourgeois_ habits and modes of thought found in so many English households. Now the _bourgeoisie_ does not like to be sneered at. If it eats tripe and onions, and wears bright blue silk dresses, and rejoices in dinner-tea, it nevertheless considers its fashions to be as well worth serious attention as those of the Upper Ten. Mrs. Henry Wood never satirises, she only records. It is her fidelity to truth, to the smallest domestic detail, which has charmed and will continue to charm, a large circle of readers, who are inclined perhaps to glory in the name of "Philistine." Then there is the loftier quality of a high, if somewhat conventional, moral tone. Mrs. Wood's novels are emphatically on the side of purity, honesty, domestic life and happiness. There is no book of hers which does not breathe this spirit, or can be said to be anything but harmless. Her character-drawing has merit; but it is not to be wondered at, considering the number of works she produced, that she should repeat the same type over and over again with a certain monotonous effect. The sweet and gentle wife and mother, not too strong in character, but perfectly refined and conscientious, such as Maria in the "Shadow of Ashlydyat"; the "perfect gentleman," noble, upright, proud, generally with blue eyes and straight features, like Oswald Cray and Mr. Carlisle and Mr. North--these are characters with which we continually meet and of which, admirable in themselves as they are, we sometimes weary. But although the portraiture is not very subtle, it is on the whole faithful to life. Then there is that especial group of Mrs. Wood's stories already mentioned, into which an element of freshness, then somewhat unusual in fiction, is largely introduced. These are the stories which have much to do with boys and boy-life--notably "The Channings," "Roland Yorke," "Orville College," "Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles," "Lady Grace," and the "Johnny Ludlow" series. These books, less sensational in plot than many of Mrs. Wood's novels, have been peculiarly successful, perhaps because the scenes and characters are largely drawn from real life. Mrs. Wood's long residence at Worcester made her familiar with the life of the college boys, who haunt the precincts of the stately old cathedral, and she has introduced her knowledge of their pranks with very great effect. Her descriptions of the old city itself, of the streets, of the cloisters, of the outlying villages and byways, are remarkably accurate, and remind one of the use which Charles Dickens made, in the same way, of Rochester and its cathedral. It is really extraordinary to see how large a part of Mrs. Wood's work is concerned with Worcester, and how well she could render, when she chose, the dialogue of the country and the customs of its people. The reason is, of course, that these things are true; that she gives us in these books a part of her own experience, of her own life. Another group of her books is interesting for a similar reason--the novels in which she deals with business life, and the relations of employers to their men. Such are "A Life's Secret," which is the very interesting history of a strike; "The Foggy Night at Offord," "Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles," and several of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, where incidents of the manufacturing districts of England have been introduced with very good effect, Mrs. Wood's own connection with glove manufacturers in Worcester having supplied her with ample materials for this kind of fiction. In "A Life's Secret" there is an extremely clever picture of the lower type of workman, and some excellent sketches of poor people and of the misery they suffer during the strike and subsequent lockout. The third class of Mrs. Wood's books consists of what may be called works of pure imagination, with sometimes a slight touch of the romantic and supernatural--such as "The Shadow of Ashlydyat," "St. Martin's Eve," "Lady Adelaide's Oath," "Lord Oakburn's Daughters," "George Canterbury's Will," etc. From the literary point of view these books are less worthy than the others, but they are particularly well constructed and ingenious. There are no loose ends, and Mrs. Wood's skill in weaving a plot seems never to have diminished to the last day of her life. But her earlier and perhaps simpler work had more real value than even the books which display such great constructive skill. Mrs. Wood would possibly have taken a higher place amongst English novelists if she had avoided mere sensation, and confined herself to what she could do well--namely, the faithful and realistic rendering of English middle class life. She has had, perhaps, more popularity than any novelist of the Victorian age; and her popularity is justified by the wholesomeness and purity of her moral tone, the ingenuity and sustained interest of her plots, and the quiet truthfulness, in many cases, of her delineation of character. Her faults are those of the class for which she wrote, her merits are theirs also. It is no small praise to say that she never revelled in dangerous situations, nor justified the wrong-doing of any of her characters. When one considers the amount of work that she produced, and the nature of that work, it is amazing to reflect on the variety of incident and character which she managed to secure. Her plots often turned upon sad or even tragic events, but the sadness and the tragedy were natural and simple. There was nothing unwholesome about her books. She will probably be read and remembered longer than many writers of a far higher literary standing; and although fashions, even in fiction, have greatly changed since the days when "East Lynne" and "The Channings" made their mark, there is no doubt that they hold their place in the affections of many an English novel-reader. They neither aim high nor fall low: their gentle mediocrity is soothing; and they are not without those gleams of insight and intensity which reveal the gift of the born story-teller--a title to which Mrs. Henry Wood may well lay claim. [Signature: Adeline Sergeant.] LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON MRS. STRETTON. ANNE MANNING _By_ CHARLOTTE M. YONGE LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON MRS. STRETTON. ANNE MANNING The three ladies here grouped together are similar in the purity and principle which breathe throughout their writings, though different in other respects. The first named wrote in the stress, and later in the calm, of a religious struggle; the second in the peaceful, fond memory of a happy home-life; the third in the pleasurable realisation of historic days long gone by. In each case, the life is reflected in the books. Georgiana Charlotte Leveson Gower was born on September 23, 1812, being the second daughter of one of those noble families predestined, by their rank and condition, to a diplomatic course. Her father became ultimately Earl Granville, and when his little daughter was twelve years old, he received the appointment of ambassador at Paris. It is well known that the upper diplomatic circles form the _crème de la crème_ of aristocratic society, their breeding, refinement, knowledge of man and manners, as well as their tact, being almost necessarily of the highest order. Lady Granville was noted for her admirable management of her receptions, and her power of steering her way through the motley crowd of visitors and residents presented to her. The charm of her manner was very remarkable, and made a great impression on all who came in her way. And, giving reality and absolute sincerity to all this unfailing sweetness, Lady Granville was a deeply religious and conscientious woman, who trained her daughters to the highest standard of excellence, and taught them earnest devotion. Naturally, French was as familiar to the young ladies as English, and they became intimate with many of the best and purest families in France, among others, with that of de Ferronaye, whose memoirs, as told by one of them, Mrs. Augustus Craven, has touched many hearts. It was a happy life, in which study and accomplishment had their place, and gaieties did not lose the zest of youthful enjoyment because they were part of the duty of station. Between France and England the time of the family was spent, and, in 1833, both sisters were married--Lady Georgiana on July 13, to Alexander Fullerton, heir to considerable estates in Gloucestershire and in Ireland. He had been in the Guards, but had resigned his commission, and become an _attaché_ to the Embassy at Paris. There the young couple continued, and there, at the end of the year, was born their only child, a son, whose very delicate health was a constant anxiety. In 1841 Lord Granville ceased to be ambassador, and the whole family led a wandering life in the South of France, Italy, and Germany, interspersed with visits in England. In 1843 Mr. Fullerton, after long study of the controversy, was received into the Church of Rome. His wife had always greatly delighted in the deep and beautiful rites of that communion, in its best aspects, and many of her most intimate friends were devout and enlightened members of that Church; but she had been bred up as a faithful Anglican, and she made no change as long as her father lived. The tale on which her chief fame rests was the product of the heart-searchings that she underwent, at the very time when the thoughts and studies of good men were tending to discover neglected truths in the Church of England. Lady Georgiana said, in her old age, that she had never written for her own pleasure, or to find expression of feeling, but always with a view to the gains for her charities. She would rather have written poetry, and the first impulse was given by her publisher telling her that she would find a novel far more profitable than verses. Yet it is hardly possible to believe that when once embarked she did not write from her heart. She was a long time at work on her tale, which was written during sojourns at various continental resorts, and finally submitted to two such different critics as Lord Brougham and Charles Greville, both of whom were carried away by admiration of the wonderful pathos of the narrative, and the charm of description, as well as the character-drawing. It is, however, curious that, while marking some lesser mistakes, neither advised her to avoid the difficulty which makes the entire plot an impossibility, namely, the omission of an inquest, which must have rendered the secrecy of "Ellen Middleton" out of the question. The story opens most effectively with the appearance of a worn and wasted worshipper in Salisbury Cathedral. One of the canons becomes interested, and with much difficulty induces her to confide her griefs to him in an autobiography, which she had intended to be read only after her death. The keynote of Ellen's misfortunes is a slight blow, given in a moment of temper, at fifteen years old, to her cousin, a naughty child of eight, causing a fatal fall into the river below. No one knows the manner of the disaster, except two persons whose presence was unknown to her: Henry Lovell, a relative of the family, and his old nurse, whom he swears to silence. This woman, however, cannot refrain from strewing mysterious hints in Ellen's way, and Henry Lovell obtains a power over the poor girl which is the bane of her life. His old nurse (by very unlikely means) drives him into a marriage with her grand-daughter, Alice, whose lovely, innocent, devotional character, is one of the great charms of the book. Ellen, almost at the same time, marries her cousin, Edward Middleton, whom she loves with all her heart; but he is a hard man, severe in his integrity, and his distrust is awakened by Henry's real love for Ellen, and the machinations by which he tries to protect her from the malice of the old nurse. The net closes nearer and nearer round Ellen, till at last Edward finds her on her knees before Henry, conjuring him to let her confess her secret. Without giving her a hearing, Edward commands her to quit his house. A letter from Henry, declaring that she is his own, and that she will not escape him, drives her to seek concealment at Salisbury, where she is dying of consumption, caused by her broken heart, when the good canon finds her, gives her absolution, and brings about repentance, reconciliation, and an infinite peace, in which we are well content to let her pass away, tended by her husband, her mother-like aunt, and the gentle Alice. It is altogether a fine tragedy. The strong passions of Henry Lovell, the enthusiastic nature of Ellen, beaten back in every higher flight by recurring threats from her enemies, the unbending nature of Edward, and in the midst the exquisite sweetness of Alice, like a dove in the midst of the tempest, won all hearts, either by the masterly analysis of passion or by the beauty of delineation, while the religious side of the tale was warmly welcomed by those who did not think, like Lord Brougham, that it was "rank Popery." The sense of the power and beauty of the story is only enhanced by freshly reading it after the lapse of many years. Naturally, it was a great success, and the second book, "Grantley Manor," which was not published till after her father's death and her own secession to Rome, was floated up on the same tide of popularity. It contrasted two half-sisters, Margaret and Ginevra, one wholly English, the other half Italian by race and entirely so by breeding. Still, though Ginevra is the more fascinating, Margaret is her superior in straightforward truth. For, indeed, Lady Georgiana never fell into the too frequent evil of depreciation and contempt of the system she had quitted, and remained open-minded and loving to the last. The excellence of style and knowledge of character as well as the tone of high breeding which are felt in all these writings recommended both this and "Ladybird," published in 1852. Both are far above the level of the ordinary novel, and some readers preferred "Ladybird" to the two predecessors. * * * * * In the meantime, an estate in England at Midgham had become a home, and young Granville Fullerton had gone into the army. On the 29th of May 1855, he was cut off by a sudden illness, and his parents' life was ever after a maimed one, though full of submission and devotion. Externally, indeed, Lady Georgiana still showed her bright playfulness of manner, and keen interest in all around her, so that the charm of her society was very great, but her soul was the more entirely absorbed in religion and in charity, doing the most menial offices for the sick poor and throwing herself into the pleasures of little children. She questioned with herself whether she ought to spend time in writing instead of on her poor, when the former task meant earning two hundred pounds a year for them, but she decided on uniting the two occupations, the more readily because she found that her works had a good influence and helped on a religious serial in which she took a warm interest. But her _motifs_ were now taken from history, not actual life. "La Comtesse de Boneval" is a really marvellous _tour de force_, being a development from a few actual letters written by a poor young wife, whose reluctant husband left her, after ten days, for foreign service, and never returned. Lady Georgiana makes clear the child's hero-worship, the brief gleam of gladness, the brave resolve not to interfere with duty and honour, and the dreary deserted condition. All is written in French, not only pure and grammatical, but giving in a wonderful manner the epigrammatic life and freshness of the old Parisian society. This is really the ablest, perhaps the most pathetic, of her books. "Ann Sherwood" is a picture of the sufferings of the Romanists in Elizabethan times, "A Stormy Life" is the narrative of a companion of Margaret of Anjou--both showing too much of the author's bias. "Too Strange not to be True" is founded on a very curious story, disinterred by Lord Dover, purporting that the unhappy German wife of the ferociously insane son of Peter the Great, at the point of death from his brutality, was smuggled away by her servants, with the help of Countess Konigsmark, the mother of Marshal Saxe, while a false funeral took place. She was conveyed to the French Settlements in Louisiana, and there, after hearing that the Czarowitz was dead, she married a French gentleman, the Chevalier d'Auban. Here, in these days of one-volume tales, the story might well have ended, but Lady Georgiana pursues the history through the latter days of the princess, after she had returned to Europe and had been bereaved of her husband and her daughter. She lived at Brussels, and again met Marshal Saxe in her extreme old age. The figures of the Chevalier, and the sweet daughter, Mina, are very winning and graceful, and there are some most interesting descriptions of the Jesuit missions to the Red Indians; but, as a whole, the book had better have closed with the marriage with d'Auban. * * * * * There is little more to say of Lady Georgiana's life. It was always affectionate, cheerful and unselfish, and it became increasingly devout as she grew older. After a long illness, she died at Bournemouth, on the 19th of January 1885, remembered fondly by many, and honoured by all who knew her saintly life. As to literary fame, she may be described as having written one first-rate book and a number fairly above the average. MRS. STRETTON About the same time as "Ellen Middleton" appeared, a novel was making its way rather by force of affectionate family portraiture than by plot or incident. "The Valley of a Hundred Fires" is really and truly Mrs. Stretton's picture of her father and mother, and her home; and her mother is altogether her heroine, while old family habits and anecdotes are given with only a few alterations. "The Valley of the Hundred Fires" has been placed by her on the borders of Wales, but it really was Gateshead, in Durham, quite as black and quite as grimy as the more southern region, inasmuch as no flowers would grow in the Rectory garden which, nevertheless, the children loved so heartily as to call it dear old Dingy. (It is Cinder Tip in the story.) Literally, they lived so as to show that "Love's a flower that will not die For lack of leafy screen; And Christian hope may cheer the eye That ne'er saw vernal green;" and that--at least, in the early days of this century--an abnormally large family was no misfortune to themselves or their parents. The real name was Collinson, and the deep goodness and beneficence of the father, the Reverend John Collinson, and the undaunted cheerfulness, motherliness, and discipline of Emily, his wife, shine throughout, not at all idealised. The number of their children was fifteen, ten daughters and five sons; and the second daughter, Julia Cecilia, was, as she describes herself, a tall, lank, yellow baby who was born on the 25th of November 1812. She became as the eldest daughter to the others, for there had always been a promise that if there were several girls the eldest should be adopted by her aunt, wife to a clergyman and childless. The two homes were a great contrast: the one kept in absolute order and great refinement, with music and flowers the constant delight and occupation, and the single adopted child trained up in all the precision of the household; while the other was a house of joyous freedom, kept under the needful restraints of sound religious principle, discipline and unselfishness. The story went that when the children were asked how many of them there were, they answered, "One young lady and eight little girls." Mrs. Collinson used to say, that if she ever saw any signs that her "one young lady" was either pining for companionship, or growing spoilt by the position, she would recall her at once; but the child was always happy and obedient, and pleased to impart her accomplishments to her sisters, who admired without jealousy. Comical adventures are recorded in the "Valley," such as when the whole train of little damsels, walking out under the convoy of Julia and a young nurserymaid, encountered a bull, which had lifted a gate on its horns. The maid thrust the baby into Julia's arms and ran away, while her charges retired into a ditch, the elder ones not much alarmed, because, as they said, the bull could not hurt them with the gate on its horns. It passed safely by them; but the little ones confessed to having been dreadfully frightened by a snail in the ditch, "which put out its horns like a little Kerry cow," and it creeped and it creeped! One incident in their early childhood was the rioting that pervaded the collieries in the years immediately following the great French war. Mr. Collinson, being a magistrate, was called upon to accompany the dragoons in order to read the Riot Act. He thus left his family unprotected; but the seven thousand pitmen never touched the Rectory, and, according to the "Valley," replied courteously to two of the children, who rushed out to the top of the Cinder Tip, begging to know whether they had seen "our papa" and if he was safe. There was another sadder episode, related also with much feeling, though a little altered, for it concerned the second son, not the eldest (then the only son) as described. A blow from a cricket ball did irreparable mischief to his knee, and it was suddenly decreed that amputation was necessary, long before the days of chloroform. The father was away from home, the mother sentenced not to be present, and the doctors consented that Julia should hold the patient's hand, smooth his hair, and try to tell him stories through the operation. It was successfully and bravely carried out, but the evil was not removed, and a few weeks later this much-loved boy was taken away. The circumstances, very beautiful and consoling, are given in the story; and there too is told how, before sunset on that sad day, the ninth little daughter was given, and struggled hard for the vigorous life she afterwards attained. The "Parson's man" said one day, when his mistress, for once in her life, indulged in a sigh that her garden could never rival that of her sister, "We've got the finer flowers, ma'am." Education was not the tyrannical care in those days that it is at present, and the young people obtained it partly through their parents, some at school, and some by the help of their grandmother and their aunt, but mostly by their own intelligence and exertions; and the family income was augmented by Mr. Collinson taking pupils. He had a fair private income; he had a curate, and was able to give a good education to his sons, one of whom made himself a name as Admiral Collinson, one of the Arctic explorers. If there were anxieties, they did not tell upon the children, whose memories reflect little save sunshine. * * * * * At nineteen, Julia Collinson became the wife of Walter de Winton, Esquire, of Maedlwch Castle, Radnorshire; but after only twelve years was left a widow, with two sons and a daughter. Her life was devoted to making their home as bright and joyous as her own had been; and it was only in the loneliness that ensued on the children going to school that her authorship commenced, with a child's book called "The Lonely Island." Later she wrote "The Valley of the Hundred Fires," tracing the habits, characters and the destiny of the family of Gateshead. The father was by this time dead, and extracts from his sermons and diary appear; but "Emily," the mother, is the real heroine of the whole narrative, and though there is so little plot that it hardly deserves the name of novel, there is a wonderful charm in the delineation. There are a few descriptions of manners and of dresses which are amusing; nor must we omit the portrait of the grandmother, Mrs. King (called Reine in the book), daughter to the governor of one of the colonies in America before the separation, with the manners of her former princess-ship and something of the despotism. She was a friend of Hannah More, a beneficent builder of schools, and produced a revolt by herself cutting the hair of all the scholars! "The Queen of the County" relates Mrs. de Winton's experiences of elections among "the stormy hills of Wales" in the early days of the Reform Bill. "Margaret and her Bridesmaids" draws more upon invention. Each of two young girls, through the injudiciousness of her parents, has married the _wrong_ person. Margaret acquiesces too much in her husband's indolence, and when herself roused to the perception of duty tries in vain to recover lost ground. Her friend Lottie is a high-spirited little soul, determined to do her duty as a wife, but not to pretend the love she does not feel, till it has been won. She is rather provokingly and unnaturally perfect, especially as she is only seventeen, always knowing when to obey up to the letter in a manner which must so have "riled" her husband that his persistent love is hardly credible, though it shows itself in attempts to isolate her, so that she shall have no resource save himself. His endeavours bring upon him heart complaint, whereof he dies, under her tender care, though she never affects to be grief-stricken. Only, as Margaret has lost her husband about the same time in a yachting accident, Lottie refuses to listen to the addresses of a former lover of Margaret's until she is convinced both that her friend will never form another attachment and that the original passion she had inspired is absolutely dead. There is a good deal of character in the story, though overdrawn, and it has survived so as to call for a new edition. * * * * * To her children, as well as to her many nephews and nieces, Mrs. de Winton was a charming companion-mother, always fresh, young, vigorous and as full of playfulness as the Julia who led the band of little sisters. When all her children were grown up, in 1858, she married Richard William Stretton, who had been their guardian and an intimate friend of the family, by whom he was much beloved. He died in 1868, and Mrs. Stretton followed him on the 17th of July 1878, leaving behind her one of the brightest of memories. Her books are emphatically herself in their liveliness, their tenderness, their fond enshrining of the past. The third of our group had an even more eventless life, and, instead of letting her imagination dwell on her own past, she studied the women of past history, and realised what they must have felt and thought in the scenes where most of them figure only as names. Her father belonged to the higher professional class, and lived with his large family, of whom Anne was the eldest, at the Paragon, Chelsea, where at eight years old Anne listened to the crash of the carriages, when the Bourbons were on their return to France, and witnessed the ecstasy of London on the visit of the Allied Sovereigns after Waterloo. With the help of masters for special accomplishments, the daughters had the best of educations, namely, the stimulating influence of their father, an accomplished man, for whom they practised their music, wrote their themes, went out star-gazing, and studied astronomy, listening with delight to his admirable reading of Scott or Shakspere; they also had the absolute freedom of an extensive library. Anne Manning was pronounced to be no genius, but a most diligent, industrious girl; as indeed was proved, for, becoming convinced during the brief reign of a good governess of the duty of solid reading, she voluntarily read from the age of fourteen ten pages a day of real, if dry, history, persevering year after year, and thus unconsciously laying in a good foundation for her future work. For health's sake the family went into the country, where they became tenants of a tumble-down Cistercian priory on the borders of Salisbury Plain. The numerous girls, with their mother and governess, lived there constantly; the father coming down as often as his business would allow, almost always by the Saturday coach, to spend Sunday. Here the first literary venture was made, when Anne was about seventeen. It was a short dialogue on a serious subject, which a young aunt managed to get accepted in St. Paul's Churchyard; and, as Miss Manning candidly avows, was so well advertised privately by her fond grandfather that--such were the palmy days of authorship--five hundred copies brought her in a profit of £60. The story, "Village Belles," was completed at Tenby, the Priory having become too ruinous for habitation. It was put into the hands of Baldwin and Cradock, and no proofs were sent till the whole of the two first volumes came together. It was introduced to Mr. Manning thus, "Papa, I don't know what you will say, but I have been writing a story." "Ho! ho! ho!" was his first answer, but he afterwards said, "My dear, I like your story very much"--and never again referred to it. Her own after judgment was that it was an "incurably young, inexperienced tale which, after all top dressing, remained but daisied meadow grass." Sorrow came in to fill the minds of the family (to the exclusion of mere fictitious interests) in the deaths within short intervals of two of the sisters, and their mother's invalidism, ending, within a few years, in her death. After this the winters were spent by the three sisters at the Paragon, the summers in a cottage at Penshurst, their father coming down for the Sunday. Anne Manning, meantime, was pursuing studies in painting and was an excellent amateur artist. She was also a botanist, and this has much to do with her accuracy in writing details of country life and habits. * * * * * Dates, alas! are wanting both in her own "Passages in the life of an Authoress," and in the recollections of her kind and affectionate biographer, Mrs. Batty; but it seems to have been in 1849 that her "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," at first written to amuse herself and her sisters, and afterwards sent to assist a brother in Australia, who was starting a local magazine, was given to the editor of "Sharpe's Magazine," then in its early youth. It made her fame. Nobody had particularly thought of Milton in his domestic capacity before, except as having advocated divorce and made his daughters read Greek to him, and it was reserved for Miss Manning to make the wife paint her own portrait as the lively, eager girl, happy in country freedom with her brothers, important with her "housewife-skep" in her mother's absence, pleased with dress, but touched by the beautiful countenance and the sudden admiration of the strange visitor. There proves to be a debt which makes her marriage with him convenient to the father, and it is carried out in spite of the mother's strong objections, alike to the suitor's age, his politics, and his puritanism. We go along with the country girl in her disappointment and sense of dreariness in her unaccustomed London life, in the staid and serious household, where she sorely misses her brothers and is soon condemned for love of junketing. Then come her joy in her visit to her home at Forest Hill and her reluctance to return, fortified by her father's disapproval of Milton's opinions. By the time that a visit to some wise relatives has brought her to a better mind and to yearning after her husband, Milton has taken offence and has put forth his plea for divorce, which so angers her father that he will not hear of her return; nor does she go back till after many months and the surrender of Oxford, when on her own impulse she hurries to London, meets her husband unexpectedly, and when he "looks down on her with goodness and sweetness 'tis like the sun's gleams shining after rain." There Mary Powell's journal ends. It is written in beautiful English, such as might well have been contemporary and could only have been acquired by familiarity with the writers of the period, flowing along without effort or pedantry so as to be a really successful imitation. It crept into separate publication anonymously, and achieved a great success, being in fact the first of many books imitating the like style of autobiography; nor has it ever been allowed to drop into oblivion. It was followed up after a time by "Deborah's Diary," being the record supposed to be kept by Milton's one faithful and dutiful daughter, who lived with him in his old age. The "fascination of the old style," as she calls it, led her to deal with "The Household of Sir Thomas More" in the person of his noble daughter Margaret. There was a good deal more genuine material here, and she has woven in the fragments from Erasmus and others with great ingenuity, and imitated the style of the fifteenth century as well as she had done that of the seventeenth. From that time Anne Manning's books had a ready sale, though still her name did not appear. "Cherry and Violet" was a tale of the plague of London; "Edward Osborne" told of the apprentice who leapt from the window of a house on London Bridge to save his master's daughter from drowning; "The Old Chelsea Bunhouse" described the haunts with which Miss Manning was familiar; and there were other stories of country life, such as the "Ladies of Bever Hollow." All were written in the purest style, such as could only be attained by one to whom slip-shod writing was impossible, and to whom it was equally impossible not to write what was gentle, charitable, and full of religious principle. Miss Manning was a kind friend and charming letter-writer. Her health began to fail in 1854, when she was writing for a magazine "Some Passages in the Life of an Authoress," never completed. She continued to be an invalid under the care of her sisters till her death on the 14th of September, 1879. [Signature: C M Yonge] DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK) _By_ MRS. PARR DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK) In the small circle of women writers who shed literary lustre on the early years of her present Majesty's reign was Dinah Mulock, best known to the present novel-reading generation as the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." To appreciate fully the position that we claim for her, it will be necessary to turn back to the period when she began to write, and see who were her contemporaries. Pre-eminent among these stand out three names--names immortal on the roll of fame for so long as taste and critical judgment last; the books of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot must be regarded as masterpieces of fiction. We, their humble followers, bow before their genius which time, fashion, or progress cannot dim or take from; therefore, to have achieved success and to have made an abiding fame while such luminaries were shining in the firmament was a distinction to be justly proud of--the result of talent, delicacy of handling, and grasp of character that were only a little below genius. How vast the difference that one small step would have made it is not our purpose to show; our intention is rather to take a general view of the work of a writer who--now that close upon half a century has passed, since, in 1849, timidly and without giving her name, she launched on the world her first novel, "The Ogilvies"--has never lost her hold upon the reading public of Great Britain, the Colonies, America, or wherever the English tongue is spoken. * * * * * Dinah Mulock was born in 1826 at Stoke-upon-Trent in Staffordshire. Her disposition towards literature seems to have been inherited from her father, who was connected--but in no very prosperous way--with letters, and was known to Byron and to the poet Moore, whose fellow countryman he was. At the time of his daughter's birth, he was acting as spiritual minister to a small congregation who were followers of what were then generally thought to be his advanced and unorthodox opinions. Few who forsake the established road for their own peculiar rut find that prosperity bears them company, and the fortunes of the Mulock family during the embryo authoress's early years were unsettled and unsatisfactory. We are all given to rebel against the clouds which overcast our youth, seldom realising that to this pinch of adverse circumstance we owe much of that power to depict the sorrows, joys, and perplexities of life in the setting forth of which Miss Mulock became so eminently successful. Before she had reached the age of twenty, she left her home and came to London, "feeling conscious," we are told, "of a vocation for authorship." Now, in the present day, when novel writing has become an employment, profession, distraction, I might almost say a curse, there would be nothing remarkable in such a conviction; but in 1846 the mania of desiring to see their names in print had not seized upon our sex; therefore the divine afflatus must have been very strong which sent a timid attractive girl, hampered by all the prejudices of her day, to try the fortunes of her pen in London. That she had not been deceived in her quality is shown by the success of "The Ogilvies," which not only was popular with novel readers, but raised hopes that the writer possessed great dramatic power, to be more ably used when experience had corrected the crude faults of a first book. The story, based on passionate first love, is written with the enthusiasm and vigour which comes pleasantly from a young hand, and makes us disposed to view leniently the superabundance of sentiment which, under other circumstances, we should censure. The death of the boy, Leigh Pennythorne, is rendered with a pathos which calls for admiration, and we are not surprised to see it ranked with the death of little Paul Dombey; while that of Katherine Lynedon, spoken of at the time as possessing great dramatic force, strikes us now as melodramatic and sensational. * * * * * Encouraged by having found favour with the public, Miss Mulock followed up her success with "Olive" (1850), "Agatha's Husband" (1852), "Head of the Family" (1854). Her literary reputation was now established; and, though her _magnum opus_, "John Halifax," had yet to be written, it may be as well to consider some of the merits and weaknesses of her style, her treatment of her subjects, and her delineation of character. In a short sketch, such as this, it is not possible to give a synopsis of the plots of the various books, or even, in most cases, extracts from them. We have to confine ourselves to the endeavour to realise the effect they produced at the time they were written--the estimation they were then held in, and to see what position they now command among the novels of the present day. Perhaps it will be only fair towards the faults we are about to find that we should recall the forward strides made by women in the past forty years. We who can recall the faulty teaching and the many prejudices of that date must often question if women now are sufficiently sensible of the advantages they possess. A reviewer of Miss Mulock's novels, writing in 1866, says: "It is one of the chief misfortunes of almost every female novelist that her own education, as a woman, has been wretchedly defective;" and further on he adds: "the _education_ of the majority of women leaves them not only without information, but without intelligent interest in any subject that does not immediately concern them." He then points out that it seems impossible for women to describe a man as he is--that they see him only from the outside. "They are ignorant of the machinery which sets the thing going, and the principle of the machinery; and so they discreetly tell you what kind of case it has, but nothing more." Now, when the time has come that young men and maidens have other interests in common than those which spring out of flirtation and love-making, we may feel quite sure that each sex will get a better insight and have a juster knowledge of the other. The general taste for exercise, and the development of activity and health of body, has killed sentimentality and the heroines of the Rosa Matilda school. Not that these were the heroines that Miss Mulock created. Her ideals are to a certain extent made of flesh and blood, although they are not always living figures. Even at the period when we are told that "In the world of letters few authors have so distinct and at the same time so eminent a position as this lady," her judicious admirers find fault with her overflow of feminine sentimentality, which never permitted her ideal sufferers to conquer their griefs so far that they could take a practical and healthy interest in the affairs of the living world. "They live only 'for others'" says one critic, "'the beautiful light' is always in their faces; their hands 'work spasmodically' at least once in every two or three chapters." Regarding the cramping influence of the prejudices which hedged in women in Miss Mulock's day, is it not very possible that this flaw in the portraiture of her own sex may have been due to the narrowness of her training rather than to any deficiency in her talent? Nothing more plainly shows how warped her judgment had become than many of the passages in "A Woman's Thoughts about Women." This is a book with much sound argument in it, and full of the desire to rectify the feminine grievances to which she was not blind. But when we come to a passage like the following, in which she asserts that all who "preach up lovely uselessness, fascinating frivolity, delicious helplessness, not only insult womanhood but her Creator," we ask how is this to be reconciled with the text which comes immediately after: "Equally blasphemous, and perhaps even more harmful, is the outcry about the equality of the sexes; the frantic attempt to force women, many of whom are either ignorant of, or unequal for, their own duties, into the position and duties of men. A pretty state of matters would ensue! Who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose confused inanities of a ladies' committee would immediately go and give his vote for a female House of Commons? or who, on receipt of a lady's letter of business--I speak of the average--would henceforth desire to have our courts of justice stocked with matronly lawyers and our colleges thronged by 'sweet girl graduates with their golden hair'? As for finance, if you pause to consider the extreme difficulty there always is in balancing Mrs. Smith's housekeeping book, or Miss Smith's quarterly allowance, I think, my dear Paternal Smith, you need not be much afraid lest this loud acclaim for women's rights should ever end in pushing you from your counting house, college, or elsewhere." On this showing, such crass ignorance is to be accepted in women, and is to be taken as a matter of course and as natural to them as cutting their teeth or having measles or chicken pox. It is of little use to advocate "Self Dependence," "Female Professions," "Female Handicrafts," for those who cannot write a business letter or do a simple sum. Miss Mulock may have had, indeed I fear had, much reason to cast these reproaches at her sex. But that she did not feel their shame, and urge her sister women to strive for an education more worthy of intelligent beings, proves to me how deeply her mental gifts suffered from the cramping influence of the time in which she lived. Could she have enjoyed some of the advantages which spring out of the greater freedom of thought and action permitted in the present day, how greatly it would have enlarged her mental vision! Her male creations would have been cast in a more vigorous man-like mould. Her feminine ideals would no longer be incarnations of sentiment but living vital creatures. Where the mind is stunted the mental insight must be limited; and strong as were Miss Mulock's talents, they were never able to burst the bonds which for generations had kept the greater number of women in intellectual imprisonment. * * * * * In "Olive," the novel which immediately followed "The Ogilvies," Miss Mulock ventured on a very fresh and interesting subject. Olive, the heroine of the story, is a deformed girl, "a puir bit crippled lassie" with a crooked spine. To make this centre-character attractive and all-absorbing was a worthy effort on the part of an author, and we take up the book and settle ourselves to see how it will be done. Unfortunately, before long, the courage which conceived the personal blemish gives way, and, succumbing to the difficulties of making mind triumph over beauty, Miss Mulock commits the artistic error of trying to impress upon you that, notwithstanding the pages of lamentations over this deformity and the attack made on your sympathy, the disfigurement was so slight that no person could possibly have noticed it. Naturally this puts the heroine in a more commonplace position; and as several minor plots are introduced which Olive only serves to string together, much of the interest in her with which we started is frittered away. Finally, Olive marries and restores the faith of a religious sceptic. And here it is curious to read the objections raised at the time against bringing into fiction "subjects most vital to the human soul." One critic, after describing the hero he is willing to accept--and, much to our regret, space prevents us showing this terrible model that we have escaped--says: "But a hero whose intellectual crotchets, or delusions, or blindness, are to be entrusted for repairs to a fascinating heroine--a mental perplexity which is to be solved in fiction--a deep-rooted scepticism which is to lose its _vis vitæ_ according to the artistic demands of a tale of the fancy, this we cannot away with. Sceptics are not plastic and obliging. Would to Heaven scepticism _could_ be cured by bright eyes, dulcet tones, and a novelist's art of love!" Criticisms in this tone make more plain to us the difficulties which novelists in the fifties had to grapple with. So many subjects were tabooed, so many natural impulses restrained, while the bogey Propriety was flaunted to scare the most innocent actions, so that nothing short of genius could ride safely over such narrow-minded bigotry. That an extreme licence should follow before the happy mean could be arrived at, was a safe prediction; but many of the writers in that day must have had a hard task while trying to clip the wings of their soaring imaginations, so that they might not rise above the level marked out by Mrs. Grundy. Now, all these social dogmas must have had an immense influence on the receptive mind of Dinah Mulock, and readers must not lose sight of this fact should they be inclined to call some of her books didactic, formal, or old-fashioned. She never posed as a brilliant, impassioned writer of stories which tell of wrongs, or crimes, or great mental conflicts. In her novels there is no dissection of character, no probing into the moral struggles of the human creature. Her teaching holds high the standard of duty, patience, and the unquestioning belief that all that God wills is well. * * * * * The enormous hold which, ever since its first appearance in 1857, "John Halifax" has had on a great portion of the English-speaking public, is due to the lofty elevation of its tone, its unsullied purity and goodness, combined with a great freshness, which appeals to the young and seems to put them and the book in touch with each other. Those who read the story years ago still recollect the charm it had for them; and, in a degree, the same fascination exists for youthful readers at the present time. The theme is noble, setting forth the high moral truth of "the nobility of man as man," and into its development the author threw all her powers. From the opening sentence, where you are at once introduced to the ragged, muddy boy and the sickly helpless lad, you feel that these two will prove to be the leading actors in the story--probably made contrasts of, and perhaps played one against the other. This idea, however, is speedily dispelled. Possibly from a dread of failing where it is thought so many women do fail--in the portrayal of the unseen sides of character and the infinite subtleties it gives rise to--Miss Mulock, wisely we think, decided to place her story in the autobiographic form; and the gentle refined invalid, Phineas Fletcher, is made the _deus ex machinâ_ to unravel to the reader not only the romance of his friend John Halifax's history, but also the working of his noble chivalrous nature. Few situations are more pathetically drawn than the attitude of these two lads, with its exchange of dependence and hero-worship on the one side, and of tender, helpful compassion on the other. A true David and Jonathan we see them, full of the trust, confidence, and sincerity young unsullied natures are capable of. And the story of the friendship, as it grows towards maturity, is equally well told. His energy and his indomitable faith in himself make a prosperous man of the penniless boy. We follow him on from driving the skin cart to being master of the tan-yard; and throughout all his temptations, struggles, success, he maintains the same honest, fearless spirit. It seems natural that when to such an exalted nature love comes it should come encircled with romance, and the wooing of Ursula March, as told by sensitive, affectionate Phineas Fletcher, is very prettily described. For the reason that Ursula is an heiress with a host of aristocratic relations, John believes his love for her to be hopeless. He struggles against this overwhelming passion for some time, until the continuous strain throws him into a fever of which his friend fears he will die. In this agonising strait Phineas is inspired with the idea of confessing the truth to Ursula; and, after a touching scene in which this is most delicately done, she determines to go to the man who is dying of love for her. In the interview, which is too long to be given in its entirety and too good to be curtailed, John tells her that owing to a great sorrow that has come to him he must leave Norton Bury and go to America. She begs to be told the reason, and without an actual avowal he lets her see his secret. "'John, stay!' "It was but a low, faint cry, like that of a little bird. But he heard it--felt it. In the silence of the dark she crept up to him, like a young bird to its mate, and he took her into the shelter of his love for evermore. At once all was made clear between them, for whatever the world might say they were in the sight of heaven equal, and she received as much as she gave." When lights are brought into the room John takes Ursula's hand and leads her to where old Abel Fletcher is sitting. "His head was erect, his eyes shining, his whole aspect that of a man who declares before all the world, 'This is my _own_." 'Eh?' said my father, gazing at them from over his spectacles. "John spoke brokenly, 'We have no parents, neither she nor I. Bless her--for she has promised to be my wife.' "And the old man blessed her with tears." Abel Fletcher, grave, stern, uncompromising--as members of the Society of Friends in that day were wont to be--is a clever study. He will not yield readily to the influence of John, and when he does give way it is by slow degrees. Yet one of the most winning traits in this somewhat over-perfect young man, given at times to impress his moral obligations rather brusquely, is the deference he pays to his former master and the filial affection he keeps for him; and the author manages in these scenes to put the two into excellent touch with each other--so that, through John's attitude to him, the hard close-fisted old tanner is transfigured into a patriarch who fitly gives his blessing to the bride, and later on, in a scene of great pathos, bestows his last benediction on her blind baby daughter. It was said at the time of its publication, and it is still said, that in "John Halifax" Miss Mulock reached the summit of her power. That she felt this herself seems to be shown by her adopting the title of "Author of 'John Halifax.'" Its publication was in many ways a new departure. It was the first of that numerous series of books brought out by her (after) life-long friend, Mr. Blackett. Those were not the days when "twenty thousand copies were exhausted before a word of this novel was written;" yet the book had a remarkable and legitimate success. Of its merits a notable critic said, "If we could erase half a dozen sentences from this book it would stand as one of the most beautiful stories in the English language, conveying one of the highest moral truths." And that these few sentences, while in no way affecting the actual beauty of the story, are a blot and an "artistic and intellectual blunder--" the more to be deplored in a book whose moral teaching throughout is so excellent--we must confess. "The ragged boy, with his open, honest face, as he asks the respectable Quaker for work, is no beggar; the lad who drives the cart of dangling skins is not inferior to Phineas Fletcher, who watches for him from his father's windows and longs for his companionship; and the tanner--the honest and good man who marries Ursula March, a lady born--is her equal. Having shown that men in the sight of God are equal and that therefore all good men must be equal upon earth, what need that John should have in his keeping a little Greek Testament which he views as a most precious possession because in it is written 'Guy Halifax, Gentleman'? Are we to conclude that all his moral excellence and intellectual worth were derived from _ladies_ and _gentlemen_ who had been his remote ancestors, but with whom he had never been in personal contact at all, since at twelve years old he was a ragged orphan, unable to read and write?" Miss Mulock could not have meant this, and yet she lays herself open to the charge, a kind of echo of which is heard in the adding to her good plain title of "John Halifax" the unnecessary tag, "Gentleman." * * * * * Her literary career being now fully established, Miss Mulock decided on taking up her permanent residence in London; and, about this time, she went to live at Wildwood, a cottage at North End, Hampstead. The now ubiquitous interviewer--that benefactor of those who want to know--had not then been called into being, so there is no record at hand to tell how the rooms were furnished, what the mistress wore, her likes, dislikes, and the various idiosyncrasies she displayed in half an hour's conversation. Such being the case we must be content with the simple fact that, charming by the candid sincerity of her disposition, and the many personal attractions that when young she possessed, Miss Mulock speedily drew around her a circle of friends whom, with rare fidelity, she ever after kept. * * * * * "John Halifax" was followed in 1859 by "A Life for a Life," a novel which, although it never obtained the same popularity, fully maintains the position won by its precursor. In it Miss Mulock breaks new ground both as to plot and the manner in which she relates the story, which is told by the hero and heroine in the form of a journal kept by each, so that we have alternate chapters of _his_ story and _her_ story. This form of construction is peculiar and occasionally presents to the reader some difficulties, but as a medium to convey opinions and convictions which the author desires to demonstrate it is happily conceived. The motive of the book is tragedy, the keynote murder--that is murder according to the exigencies of the story-teller. Max Urquhart, the hero--who at the time the tale opens is a staid, serious man of forty--is the perpetrator of this crime, committed at the age of nineteen in a fit of intoxication on a man named Johnston. Journeying from London to join a brother who is dying of consumption at Pau, Urquhart, through a mistake, finds that instead of being at Southampton he is at Salisbury. On the way he has made the acquaintance of the pseudo-driver of the coach, a flashy, dissipated fellow, who by a tissue of lies induces the raw Scotch lad to remain for some hours at the inn and then be driven on by him to where they will overtake the right coach. By this man young Urquhart is made drunk, and when as a butt he no longer amuses the sottish company they brutally turn him into the street. Later on he is aroused by the cut of a whip. It is his coach companion who pacifies him with the assurance that if he gets into the gig he will be speedily taken by him to Southampton. The lad consents, he is helped up and soon falls fast asleep to be awakened in the middle of Salisbury plain by his savage tormentor, who pushes him out and tells him to take up his lodging at Stonehenge. The poor youth, with just sufficient sense left in him to feel that he is being kept from his dying brother, implores the ruffian to take him on his way. "To the devil with your brother," is the answer, and in spite of all entreaties, Johnston whips up his horse, and is on the point of starting, when Urquhart, maddened by rage, catches him unawares, drags him from the gig, and, flings him violently on the ground, where his head strikes against one of the great stones, and he is killed. How Urquhart manages to reach Southampton, and to get to Pau, he never knows; but when he does arrive at his destination, it is to find his brother dead and buried, and the fit of mania which follows is set down to the shock this gives him. At the end of a year, hearing that Johnston's death is attributed to accident, and being under the conviction that if the truth were told he would be hanged, he resolves to lock the secret in his own breast until the hour of his death draws near, and, in the meanwhile, to expiate his offence by living for others, and for the good he can do to them. He becomes an army doctor, goes through the Crimean War, and, when we are introduced to him, is doing duty at Aldershot, near where, at a ball, he meets the inevitable she, Theodora Johnston. If the hero is drawn dark, thin, with a spare, wiry figure, and a formal, serious air, the portrait of the heroine, with her undeniably ordinary figure, and a face neither pretty nor young, forms a fitting pendant to it. These two are irresistibly drawn towards each other, and, notwithstanding that the lady bears the fatal name of Johnston, they soon become engaged. Dr. Urquhart's tender conscience then demands that the tragic misdeed of his life shall be confessed to the woman he is about to make his wife, and, in a letter, he confides to her the sad history, adding, as postscript, some few days later: "I have found his grave at last." Here follows the inscription, which proves the dead man to have been the son of Theodora's father, her own half-brother, Henry Johnston. "Farewell, Theodora!" It is impossible here to give more than this crude outline of the plot of a book in which, far beyond the story she means to tell, the author has her own individual opinions and convictions to impress on us. The temptation to earnest writers to try, through their writings, to make converts of their readers, is often very strong, and in this instance Miss Mulock undoubtedly gave way to it. She had not only a vehement abhorrence of capital punishment, but, to quote from her book, she maintained "that any sin, however great, being repented of and forsaken, is, by God, and ought to be by man, altogether pardoned, blotted out, and done away." As was at the time said, "Her argument demands a stronger case than she has dared to put;" but so ably are the incidents strung together, so touchingly are the relative positions of these suffering souls described, that their sorrows, affection, and fidelity become convincing; and, full of the pathetic tragedy of the situation, we are oblivious of the fact that what is called a crime is nothing greater than an accident, a misfortune, and that for murder we must substitute manslaughter. * * * * * From the date of the appearance of "John Halifax," Miss Mulock's pen was never long idle. Composition was not a labour to her; and friends who knew her at that time, describe her as walking about the room, or bending over on a low stool, rapidly setting down her thoughts in that small delicate writing which gave no trouble to read. She had beautiful hands; a tall, slim, graceful figure; and, with the exception of her mouth, which was too small, and not well shaped, delicate and regular features. These attractions, heightened by a charming frankness of manner, made her very popular. Her poetic vein was strong. She published several volumes of poems, and many of her verses, when set to music, became much admired as songs. Following "A Life for a Life," came, in somewhat quick succession, "Studies from Life," "Mistress and Maid," "Christian's Mistake," "A Noble Life," "Two Marriages." These in a period of ten years. As may be supposed, they are not all of equal merit; neither does any one of them touch the higher level of the author's earlier books. Still, there is good honest work in each, and the same exalted purity of tone, while much of the sentimentality complained of before is wholly omitted or greatly toned down. "Mistress and Maid" is one of those good, quiet stories, full of homely truths and pleasant teaching, in which is shown the writer's quick sympathy with the working class. The maid, Elizabeth, is as full of character and of refined feelings as is Hilary Leaf, the mistress, and her one romance of love, although not so fortunate, has quite as much interest. The opening scenes, in which these two first meet, are excellent, giving us, all through their early association, touches of humour--a quality which, in Miss Mulock's writings, is very rare. The picture of the rather tall, awkward, strongly built girl of fifteen, hanging behind her anxious-eyed, sad-voiced mother, who pushes her into notice with "I've brought my daughter, ma'am, as you sent word you'd take on trial. 'Tis her first place, and her'll be awk'ard like at first. Hold up your head, Elizabeth," is drawn with that graphic fidelity which gives interest to the most commonplace things in life. The awkward girl proves to be a rough diamond, capable of much polish, and by the kindly teaching of Hilary Leaf she is turned into an admirable, praiseworthy woman. One has to resist the temptation to say more about Hilary Leaf, an energetic, intelligent girl who, when she cannot make a living for herself and her sister by school-keeping, tries, and succeeds, by shop-keeping. The description of the struggles of these two poor ladies to pay their way, and keep up a respectable appearance, comes sympathetically from the pen of a woman whose heart was ever open to similar distresses in real life. To her praise be it remembered that to any tale of true suffering Dinah Mulock never closed her ears or her hand. * * * * * Her next two novels, "Christian's Mistake" and "A Noble Life," in our opinion, fall far short of any of her previous efforts. Yet they were both received with much popular favour, particularly the former, which called forth warm praise from reviewers. For us not one of the characters has a spark of vitality. Christian is not even the shadow of a young girl made of flesh and blood. Her forbearance and self-abnegation are maddening. Her husband, the "Master of St. Bede's,'" twenty-five years her senior and a widower, is nothing but a lay figure, meant to represent a good man, but utterly devoid of intellect and, one would think, of feeling, since he permits his young bride, possessed of all the seraphic virtues, to be snubbed and brow-beaten by two vulgar shrewish sisters-in-law. There is no interest of plot or depicting of character, and the children are as unreal and offensive as their grown up relations. In "A Noble Life," also, there is nothing which stirs our sympathies. Even the personal deformities of the unfortunate little earl fail to touch us, and, when grown up and invested with every meritorious attribute, he is more like the "example" of a moral tale than a being of human nature. * * * * * As has been said, the portrayal of men is not this author's strong point. "Her sympathy with a good man is complete on the moral, but defective on the intellectual side"--a serious deficiency in one who has to create beings in whom we are asked to take a sustained interest. That she could rise superior to this defect is shown in "The Woman's Kingdom." In this story Miss Mulock displays all her old charm of simplicity and directness, and is strong in her treatment of domestic life. At the outset she announces that it will be a thorough love story, and takes as her text that "love is the very heart of life, the pivot upon which its whole machinery turns, without which no human existence can be complete, and with which, however broken and worn in part, it can still go on working somehow, and working to a comparatively useful and cheerful end." This question we shall not stop to argue, but proceed with--we cannot say the plot, for of plot there is none; it is just an every-day version of the old, old story, given with admirable force and sweetness. It is said to appeal principally to young women, and it is possible that this is true, as the writer can recall the intense pleasure reading it gave to her nearly thirty years ago. The book opens with the description of some seaside lodgings, in which we find twin sisters as opposite in character as in appearance. Edna is an epitome of all the virtues in a very plain binding. Letty, vain, spoilt, but loving her sister dearly, is a beauty. "Such women Nature makes rarely, very rarely; queens of beauty who instinctively take their places in the tournament of life, and rain influence upon weak mortals, especially men mortals." Two of the latter kind arrive as lodgers at the same house, brothers, also most dissimilar--Julius Stedman, impulsive, erratic and undisciplined; William, his elder brother, a grave, hard-working doctor, just starting practice. The four speedily become acquaintances--friends--and when they part are secretly lovers. Letty, by reason of what she calls "her unfortunate appearance," never doubts but that she has conquered both brothers; but happily it is to Edna that the young doctor has given his heart; and when in time Letty hears the news, "and remembers that she had been placing herself and Dr. Stedman in the position of the Irish ballad couplet, Did ye ever hear of Captain Baxter, Whom Miss Biddy refused afore he axed her? her vanity was too innocent and her nature too easy to bear offence long." "But to think that after all the offers I have had you should be the first to get married, or anyhow, engaged! Who would ever have expected such a thing?" "Who would, indeed?" said Edna, in all simplicity, and with a sense almost of contrition for the fact. "Well, never mind," answered Letty consolingly, "I am sure I hope you will be very happy; and as for me"--she paused and sighed--"I should not wonder if I were left an old maid after all, in spite of my appearance." But to be left an old maid is not to be Letty's fate. Julius, already bewitched by her beauty through being much more thrown into her society, falls passionately in love with her, and for lack of any one else, and because his ardour flatters and amuses her, Letty encourages him, permits an engagement, and promises to join him in India. But on the voyage out she meets a rich Mr. Vanderdecken, with whom she lands at the Cape, and whom she marries. This is the tragic note in the happy story, the one drop of gall in the Stedmans' cup of felicity. Edna and her husband are patterns of domestic well-being. The joys and cares of every-day life have mellowed all that was good in them, and the account given of their home and their family is one we dwell upon lovingly. Perhaps it is but natural that in our later reading we should note some small discrepancies that had formerly escaped us. We regret that the sisters had drifted so widely apart, and that each should seem to be so unconcerned at the distance which divides them. It is as if happiness can make us callous as well as luxury. And although it was true that Letty's desertion suddenly wrecked the hopes of her lover, it seems hardly probable that such an unstable being as Julius would have taken her falseness so seriously. A wiser man might have foreseen the possibility. Still, when this and more is said, our liking for the story remains as strong as ever. We know of few books which give a better picture of healthful domestic happiness and pure family life. * * * * * Although we have hitherto called, and shall continue to call, our authoress by her maiden name, she had in 1864 changed it by marrying Mr. G. Lillie Craik, a partner in the house of Macmillan & Co., and shortly after she removed to Shortlands, near Bromley, in Kent. This change in her state does not appear to have interfered with her occupation, and for many years volume followed volume in quick succession. Unwisely, we think, for her literary reputation, she was led, through her strong sympathy, to advocate marriage with a deceased wife's sister in a novel, published in 1871, called "Hannah." The novel with a purpose is almost certain to fall into the error of giving the argument on one side only. Its author has rarely any toleration for the ethical aspect of the other side of the question, and it is to be doubted if such books ever advance the cause they desire to advocate. In "Hannah" we are perfectly surfeited by those who wish to marry within the forbidden degree, and we feel as little toleration for the placid Bernard Rivers--one of those men who never believe in the pinch of a shoe until they want to put it on their own feet--as for Jim Dixon, who, after evading the law, speedily grows tired of the deceased wife's sister, and avails himself of his legal advantage to take another wife. The objections we feel to novels of this class are well stated by a writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, No. clxxxix. "We object," he says, "on principle to stories written with the purpose of illustrating an opinion, or establishing a doctrine. We consider this an illegitimate use of fiction. Fiction may be rightfully employed to impress upon the public mind an acknowledged truth, or to revive a forgotten woe--never to prove a disputed one. Its appropriate aims are the delineation of life, the exhibition and analysis of character, the portraiture of passion, the description of nature." In most of these aims Miss Mulock had proved herself an expert. In addition to her numerous novels and volumes of poems, she wrote a large number of tales for children, many of which, I am told, are exceedingly charming. One cannot read her books without being struck by the intense affection she felt for children. She had none of her own, but she adopted a daughter to whom she gave a mother's love and care. From time to time there appeared from her pen volumes of short stories, studies, and essays; but it is not by these that her name and fame will be kept green. Neither will her reputation rest on her later novels. This she must have realised herself when writing, "Brains, even if the strongest, will only last a certain time and do a certain quantity of work--really good work." Miss Mulock had begun to work the rich vein of her imagination at an early age. She took few holidays, and gave herself but little rest. She was by no means what is termed a literary woman. She was not a great reader; and although much praise is due to the efforts she made to improve herself, judged by the present standard, her education remained very defective. That she lacked the fire of genius is true, but it is no less true that she was gifted with great imaginative ability and the power of depicting ordinary men and women leading upright, often noble lives. The vast public that such books as hers appeal to is shown in the large circulation of some of her works, the sale of "John Halifax, Gentleman" amounting to 250,000 copies, 80,000 of which--the sixpenny edition--have been sold within the last few months. This shows that her popularity is not confined to any one class. The gospel she wrote was for all humanity. As a woman, she was loved best by those who knew her best. "Dinah was far more clever than her books," said an old friend who had been recalling pleasant memories to repeat to me. She died suddenly on the 12th of October 1887, from failure of the heart's action--the death she had described in the cases of Catherine Ogilvie, of John Halifax, and of Ursula, his wife--the death she had always foreseen for herself. Around her grave in Keston churchyard stood a crowd of mourners--rich, poor, old and young--sorrowing for the good loyal friend who had gone from them, whose face they should see no more. [Signature: Louisa Parr] JULIA KAVANAGH. AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS _By_ MRS. MACQUOID JULIA KAVANAGH. AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS It is difficult to think of two writers more strongly contrasted, judging from the revelation their books afford of their natures and ways of thought. They both strove, in their novels, to represent individual specimens of humanity. They must both have possessed the power of distinct vision; but though Miss Kavanagh was a keen observer of externals, her types seem to have been created by imaginative faculty rather than by insight into real men and women, while Miss Edwards appears to have gone about the world open-eyed, and with note-book in hand, so vivid are some of her portraits. In traditions, also, these writers differ. Miss Kavanagh has complete faith in the old French motto, "le bon sang ne peut pas mentir;" while one of Miss Edwards's heroes, an aristocrat by birth, is extremely happy as a merchant captain, with his plebeian Italian wife. The two writers, however, strike the same note in regard to some of their female personages. Both Barbara Churchill and Nathalie Montolieu are truthful to rudeness. Julia Kavanagh never obtrudes her personality on the reader, though she lifts him into the exquisitely pure and peaceful atmosphere which one fancies must have been hers. There is something so restful in her books, that it is difficult to believe she was born no longer ago than 1824, and that only twenty years ago she died in middle life; she seems to belong to a farther-away age--probably because her secluded life kept her strongly linked to the past, out of touch with the new generation and the new world of thought around her. She began to write for magazines while still very young, and was only twenty-three when her first book, "The Three Paths," a child's story, was published. After this she wrote about fourteen novels, the best known of which are "Madeleine," "Nathalie," and "Adèle." She wrote many short stories, some of which were re-printed in volumes--notably the collection called "Forget-me-nots," published after her death. She also wrote "A Summer and Winter in the two Sicilies," "Woman in France in the 18th Century," "Women of Christianity," and two books which seem to have been highly praised--"Englishwomen of Letters" and "Frenchwomen of Letters." * * * * * Julia Kavanagh's first novel, "Madeleine," appeared in 1848--a charming story, its scene being in the Auvergne. The beginning is very striking, the theme being somewhat like that of "Bertha in the Lane"; but Madeleine, when she has given up her false lover, devotes the rest of her life to founding and caring for an orphanage. Born in Ireland, Julia Kavanagh spent the days of her youth in Normandy, and the scene of her second novel, "Nathalie," is Norman, though Nathalie herself is a handsome, warm-blooded Provençale. The scenery and surroundings are very lifelike, but, with one exception, the people are less attractive than they are in "Adèle." In both books one feels a wish to eliminate much of the interminable talk, which could easily be dispensed with. Nathalie, the country doctor's orphan daughter, teacher to the excellently drawn schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Dantin, is sometimes disturbingly rude and tactless, in spite of her graceful beauty. With all this _gaucherie_, and a violent temper to boot, Nathalie exercises a singular fascination over the people of the story, especially over the delightful Canoness, Aunt Radégonde, who is to me the most real of Miss Kavanagh's characters. Madame Radégonde de Sainville is a true old French lady of fifty years ago, as charming as she is natural. The men in Julia Kavanagh's books have led secluded lives, or they are extremely reserved--very hard nuts indeed to crack for the ingenuous, inexperienced girls on whom they bestow their lordly affection. One does not pity Nathalie, who certainly brings her troubles on herself; but in the subsequent book, sweet little Adèle is too bright a bit of sunshine to be sacrificed to such a being as William Osborne. The old château in which Adèle has spent her short life is in the north-east of France; its luxuriant but neglected garden, full of lovely light and shade, its limpid lake, and the old French servants, are delightfully fresh. The chapters which describe these are exquisite reading--a gentle idyll glowing with sunshine, and with a leisureful charm that makes one resent the highly coloured intrusion of the Osborne family, though the Osborne women afford an effective contrast. Adèle is scantily educated, but she is always delightful, though we are never allowed to forget that she is descended from the ancient family of de Courcelles. She is thoroughly amiable and much enduring, in spite of an occasional waywardness. * * * * * Fresh and full of beauty as these novels are, with their sweet pure-heartedness, their truth and restful peace, they cannot compare with the admirable short sketches of the quiet side of French life by the same writer. The scenes in which the characters of these short stories are set, show the truth of Julia Kavanagh's observation, as well as the quality of her style; they are quite as beautiful as some of Guy de Maupassant's little gem-like Norman stories, but they are perfectly free from cynicism, although she truly shows the greedy grasping nature of the Norman peasant. The gifts of this writer are intensified, and more incisively shown, in these sketches because they contain few superfluous words and conversations. Julia Kavanagh must have revelled in the creation of such tales as "By the Well," and its companions; they are steeped in joyous brightness, toned here and there with real pathos as in "Clément's Love" and "Annette's Love-Story," in the collection called "Forget-me-nots." * * * * * Such a story as "By the Well" would nowadays be considered a lovely idyll, and, by critics able to appreciate its breadth and finished detail, a Meissonier in point of execution: it glows with true colour. Fifine Delpierre is not a decked-out peasant heroine; she is a bare-footed, squalid, half-clothed, half-starved little girl, when we first see her beside the well. This is the scene that introduces her. "It has a roof, as most wells have in Normandy, a low thatched roof, shaggy, brown, and old, but made rich and gorgeous when the sun shines upon it by many a tuft of deep green fern, and many a cluster of pink sedum and golden stonecrop. Beneath that roof, in perpetual shade and freshness, lies the low round margin, built of heavy ill-jointed stones, grey and discoloured with damp and age; and within this ... spreads an irregular but lovely fringe of hart's-tongue. The long glossy leaves of a cool pale green grow in the clefts of the inner wall, so far as the eye can reach, stretching and vanishing into the darkness, at the bottom of which you see a little tremulous circle of watery light. This well is invaluable to the Lenuds, for, as they pass by the farm the waters of the little river grow brackish and unfit for use. So long ago, before they were rich, the Lenuds having discovered this spring through the means of a neighbouring mason, named Delpierre, got him to sink and make the well, in exchange for what is called a servitude in French legal phrase; that is to say, that he and his were to have the use of the well for ever and ever. Bitter strife was the result of this agreement. The feud lasted generations, during which the Lenuds throve and grew rich, and the Delpierres got so poor, that, at the time when this story opens, the last had just died leaving a widow and three children in bitter destitution. Maître Louis Lenud, for the Parisian Monsieur had not yet reached Manneville, immediately availed himself of this fact to bolt and bar the postern-door through which his enemy had daily invaded the courtyard to go to the well.... "'It was easily done, and it cost me nothing--not a sou,' exultingly thought Maître Louis Lenud, coming to this conclusion for the hundredth time on a warm evening in July. The evening was more than warm, it was sultry; yet Maître Louis sat by the kitchen fire watching his old servant, Madeleine, as she got onion soup ready for the evening meal, utterly careless of the scorching blaze which shot up the deep dark funnel of the chimney. Pierre, his son, unable to bear this additional heat, stood in the open doorway, waiting with the impatience of eighteen for his supper, occasionally looking out on the farmyard, grey and quiet at this hour, but oftener casting a glance within. The firelight danced about the stone kitchen, now lighting up the _armoire_ in the corner, with cupids and guitars, and shepherds' pipes and tabors, and lovers' knots carved on its brown oak panels; now showing the lad the bright copper saucepans, hung in rows upon the walls; now revealing the stern grim figure of his father, with his heavy grey eyebrows and his long Norman features both harsh and acute; and very stern could Maître Louis look, though he wore a faded blue blouse, an old handkerchief round his neck, and on his head a white cotton nightcap, with a stiff tassel to it; now suddenly subsiding and leaving all in the dim uncertain shadows of twilight. "During one of these grey intervals, the long-drawling Norman voice of Maître Louis spoke: "'The Delpierres have given up the well,' he said, with grim triumph. "'Ay, but Fifine comes and draws water every night,' tauntingly answered Pierre. "'Hem!' the old man exclaimed with a growl.... "'Fifine comes and draws water every night,' reiterated Pierre.... "... he had seen the eldest child Fifine, a girl of eight or ten, sitting on her doorstep singing her little brother to sleep, with a wreath of hart's-tongue round her head, and a band of it round her waist. 'And a little beggar, too, she looked,' scornfully added Pierre, 'with her uncombed hair and her rags.' "'Shall we let the dog loose to-night?' he said." "Maître Louis uttered his deepest growl, and promised to break every bone in his son's body if he attempted such a thing. "Pierre silently gulped down his onion soup, but the 'do it if you dare' of the paternal wink only spurred him on. He gave up the dog as too cruel, but not his revenge. "The night was a lovely one and its tender subdued meaning might have reached Pierre's heart, but did not. He saw as he crouched in the grass near the old well that the full round moon hung in the sky; he saw that the willows by the little river looked very calm and still" ... [the revengeful lad watches for the child and falls asleep, then wakes suddenly]. "... behold ... there was little Fifine with her pitcher standings in the moonlight ... she stood there with her hair falling about her face, her torn bodice, her scanty petticoats, and her little bare feet. How the little traitress had got in, whilst he, the careless dragon, slept, Pierre could not imagine; but she was evidently quite unconscious of his presence.... The child set her pitcher down very softly, shook back the hanging hair from her face, and peeped into the well. She liked to look thus into that deep dark hole, with its damp walls clothed with the long green hart's-tongue that had betrayed her. She liked also to look at that white circle of water below; for you see if there was a wrathful Adam by her, ready for revenge, she was a daughter of Eve, and Eve-like enjoyed the flavour of this forbidden fruit.... Fifine ... took up her pitcher again and walked straight on to the river. Pierre stared amazed, then suddenly he understood it all. There was an old forgotten gap in the hedge beyond the little stream, and through that gap Fifine and her pitcher nightly invaded Maître Louis Lenud's territory.... having picked up a sharp flint which lay in the grass Pierre rose and bided his opportunity. Fifine went on till she had half-crossed a bridge-like plank which spanned the stream, then, as her ill-luck would have it, she stood still to listen to the distant hooting of an owl in the old church tower on the hill. Pierre saw the child's black figure in the moonlight standing out clearly against the background of grey willows, he saw the white plank and the dark river tipped with light flowing on beneath it. Above all, he saw Fifine's glazed pitcher, bright as silver; he was an unerring marksman, and he took a sure aim at this. The flint sped swiftly through the air; there was a crash, a low cry, and all was suddenly still. Both Fifine and her pitcher had tumbled into the river below and vanished there." Pierre rescues her, and when Fifine has been for some years in service with the repentant Pierre's cousin her improved looks and clothing make her unrecognisable to the thick-headed well-meaning young farmer. * * * * * The only fault that can be found with these chronicles of Manneville is the likeness between them. The "Miller of Manneville," in the "Forget-me-not" collection, is full of charm, but it too much resembles "By the Well." The "Story of Monique" gives, however, a happy variety, and Monique is a thorough French girl; so is Mimi in the bright little story called "Mimi's Sin." Angélique again, in "Clément's Love," is a girl one meets with over and over again in Normandy, but these Norman stories are all so exquisitely told that it is invidious to single out favourites. The stories laid in England, in which the characters are English, are less graphic; they lack the fresh and true atmosphere of their fellows placed across the Channel. Julia Kavanagh died at Nice, where she spent the last few years of her life. Had she lived longer she would perhaps have given us some graphic stories from the Riviera, for it is evident that foreign people and foreign ways attracted her sympathies so powerfully that she was able to reproduce them in their own atmosphere. In a brief but touching preface to the collection called "Forget-me-nots," published after her death, Mr. C. W. Wood gives us a lovable glimpse of this charming writer; reading this interesting little sketch deepens regret that one had not the privilege of personally knowing so sweet a woman. In regard to truth of atmosphere in her foreign stories, Julia Kavanagh certainly surpasses Amelia B. Edwards. In "Barbara's History," in "Lord Brackenbury," and in other stories by Miss Edwards, there are beautiful and graphic descriptions of foreign scenery, and we meet plenty of foreign people; but we feel that the latter are described by an Englishwoman who has taken an immense amount of pains to make herself acquainted with their ways and their speech--they somewhat lack spontaneity. In the two novels named there are chapters so full of local history and association that one thinks it might be well to have the books for companions when visiting the places described; they are full of talent--in some places near akin to genius. "Barbara's History" contains a great deal of genuine humour. It is a most interesting and exciting story, though in parts stagey; the opening chapters, indeed the whole of Barbara's stay at her great-aunt's farm of Stoneycroft, are so excellent that one cannot wonder the book was a great success. Now and again passages and characters remind one of Dickens; the great-aunt, Mrs. Sandyshaft, is a thorough Dickens woman, with a touch of the great master's exaggeration; Barbara's father is another Dickens character. There are power and passion as well as humour in this book, but in spite of its interest it becomes fatiguing when Barbara leaves her aunt and the hundred pigs. There is remarkable truth of characterisation in some of this writer's novels. Hugh Farquhar is sometimes an eccentric bore, but he is real. Barbara Churchill at times is wearyingly pedantic; then, again, she is just as delightfully original--her first meeting with Mrs. Sandyshaft is so inimitable that I must transcribe a part of it. A rich old aunt has invited Barbara Churchill, a neglected child of ten years old, to stay with her in Suffolk. Barbara is the youngest of Mr. Churchill's three girls, and she is not loved by either her widowed father or her sisters, though an old servant named Goody dotes on the child. Barbara is sent by stage-coach from London to Ipswich:-- "Dashing on between the straggling cottages, and up a hill so closely shaded by thick trees that the dusk seems to thicken suddenly to-night, we draw up all at once before a great open gate, leading to a house of which I can only see the gabled outline and the lighted windows. "The guard jumps down; the door is thrown open; and two persons, a man and a woman, come hurrying down the path. "'One little girl and one box, as per book,' says the guard, lifting me out and setting me down in the road, as if I were but another box, to be delivered as directed. "'From London?' asks the woman sharply. "'From London,' replies the guard, already scrambling back to his seat; 'All right, ain't it?' "'All right.' "Whereupon the coach plunges on again into the dusk; the man shoulders my box as though it were a feather; and the woman who looks strangely gaunt and grey by this uncertain light, seizes me by the wrist and strides away towards the house at a pace that my cramped and weary limbs can scarcely accomplish. "Sick and bewildered, I am hurried into a cheerful room where the table is spread as if for tea and supper, and a delicious perfume of coffee and fresh flowers fills the air; and--and, all at once even in the moment when I am first observing them, these sights and scents grow all confused and sink away together, and I remember nothing ... when I recover, I find myself laid upon a sofa, with my cloak and bonnet off, my eyes and mouth full of Eau de Cologne, and my hands smarting under a volley of slaps, administered by a ruddy young woman on one side, and by the same gaunt person who brought me in from the coach on the other. Seeing me look up, they both desist; and the latter, drawing back a step or two, as if to observe me to greater advantage, puts on an immense pair of heavy gold spectacles, stares steadily for some seconds, and and at length says: "'What did you mean by that now?' "Unprepared for so abrupt a question, I lie as if fascinated by her bright grey eyes, and cannot utter a syllable. "'Are you better?' "Still silent, I bow my head feebly, and keep looking at her. "'Hey now. Am I a basilisk? Are you dumb, child?' "Wondering why she speaks to me thus, and being, moreover, so very weak and tired, what can I do, but try in vain to answer, and failing in the effort, burst into tears again? Hereupon she frowns, pulls off her glasses, shakes her head angrily, and, saying: 'That's done to aggravate me, I know it is,' stalks away to the window, and stands there grimly, looking out upon the night. The younger woman, with a world of kindness in her rosy face ... whispers me not to cry. "'That child's hungry,' says the other coming suddenly back. 'That's what's the matter with her. She's hungry, I know she is, and I won't be contradicted. Do you hear me, Jane?--I won't be contradicted.' "'Indeed, ma'am, I think she is hungry, and tired too, poor little thing.' "'Tired and hungry!... Mercy alive, then why don't she eat? Here's food enough for a dozen people. Child, what will you have? Ham, cold chicken pie, bread, butter, cheese, tea, coffee, ale?' " ... Everything tastes delicious; and not even the sight of the gaunt housekeeper ... has power to spoil my enjoyment. "For she is the housekeeper, beyond a doubt. Those heavy gold spectacles, that sad-coloured gown, that cap with its plain close bordering can belong to no one but a housekeeper. Wondering within myself that she should be so disagreeable; then where my aunt herself can be; why she has not yet come to welcome me; how she will receive me when she does come; and whether I shall have presence of mind enough to remember all the curtseys I have been drilled to make, and all the speeches I have been taught to say, I find myself eating as though nothing at all had been the matter with me, and even staring now and then quite confidently at my opposite neighbour.... Left alone now with the sleeping dogs and the housekeeper--who looks as if she never slept in her life--I find the evening wearisome. Observing too that she continues to look at me in the same grim imperturbable way, and seeing no books anywhere about, it occurs to me that a little conversation would perhaps be acceptable, and that, as I am her mistress's niece, it is my place to speak first. "'If you please, ma'am,' I begin after a long hesitation. "'HEY?' "Somewhat disconcerted by the sharpness and suddenness of this interruption, I pause, and take some moments to recover myself. "'If you please, ma'am, when am I to see my aunt?' "'Hey? What? Who?' "'My aunt, if you please, ma'am?' "'Mercy alive! and pray who do you suppose I am?' "'You, ma'am,' I falter, with a vague uneasiness impossible to describe; 'are you not the housekeeper?' "To say that she glares vacantly at me from behind her spectacles, loses her very power of speech, and grows all at once quite stiff and rigid in her chair, is to convey but a faint picture of the amazement with which she receives this observation. "'I,' she gasps at length, 'I! Gracious me, child, I am your aunt.' I feel my countenance become an utter blank. I am conscious of turning red and white, hot and cold, all in one moment. My ears tingle; my heart sinks within me; I can neither speak nor think. A dreadful silence follows, and in the midst of this silence my aunt, without any kind of warning, bursts into a grim laugh, and says: "'Barbara, come and kiss me.' "I could have kissed a kangaroo just then, in the intensity of my relief; and so getting up quite readily, touch her gaunt cheek with my childish lips, and look the gratitude I dare not speak. To my surprise she draws me closer to her knee, passes one hand idly through my hair, looks not unkindly, into my wondering eyes, and murmurs more to herself than me, the name of 'Barbara.' "This gentle mood is, however, soon dismissed, and as if ashamed of having indulged it, she pushes me away, frowns, shakes her head, and says quite angrily: "'Nonsense, child, nonsense. It's time you went to bed.'" [Next morning at breakfast.] "'Your name,' said my aunt, with a little off-hand nod, 'is Bab. Remember that.'" ... [Mrs. Sandyshaft asks her great niece why she took her for the housekeeper; the child hesitates, and at last owns that it was because of her dress.] ... "'Too shabby?' "'N--no, ma'am, not shabby; but....' "'But what? You must learn to speak out, Bab. I hate people who hesitate.' "'But Papa said you were so rich, and....' "'Ah! He said I was rich did he? Rich! Oho! And what more, Bab? What more? Rich indeed! Come, you must tell me. What else did he say when he told you I was rich?' "'N--nothing more, ma'am,' I replied, startled and confused by her sudden vehemence. 'Indeed nothing more.' "'Bab!' said my aunt bringing her hand down so heavily upon the table that the cups and saucers rang again, 'Bab, that's false. If he told you I was rich, he told you how to get my money by-and-by. He told you to cringe and fawn, and worm yourself into my favour, to profit by my death, to be a liar, a flatterer, and a beggar, and why? Because I am rich. Oh yes, because I am rich.' "I sat as if stricken into stone, but half comprehending what she meant, and unable to answer a syllable. "'Rich indeed!' she went on, excited more and more by her own words and stalking to and fro between the window and the table, like one possessed. 'Aha! we shall see, we shall see. Listen to me, child. I shall leave you nothing--not a farthing. Never expect it--never hope for it. If you are good and true, and I like you, I shall be a friend to you while I live; but if you are mean and false, and tell me lies, I shall despise you. Do you hear? I shall despise you, send you home, never speak to you, or look at you again. Either way, you will get nothing by my death. Nothing--nothing!' "My heart swelled within me--I shook from head to foot. I tried to speak and the words seemed to choke me. "'I don't want it,' I cried passionately. 'I--I am not mean. I have told no lies--not one.' "My aunt stopped short, and looked sternly down upon me, as if she would read my very soul. "'Bab,' said she, 'do you mean to tell me that your father said nothing to you about why I may have asked you here, or what might come of it? Nothing? Not a word?' "'He said it might be for my good--he told Miss Whymper to make me curtsey and walk better, and come into a room properly; he said he wished me to please you. That was all. He never spoke of money, or of dying, or of telling lies--never.' "'Well then,' retorted my aunt, sharply, 'he meant it.' "Flushed and trembling in my childish anger, I sprang from my chair and stood before her, face to face. "'He did not mean it,' I cried. 'How dare you speak so of Papa? How dare....' "I could say no more, but, terrified at my own impetuosity, faltered, covered my face with both hands, and burst into an agony of sobs. "'Bab,' said my aunt, in an altered voice, 'little Bab,' and took me all at once in her two arms, and kissed me on the forehead. "My anger was gone in a moment. Something in her tone, in her kiss, in my own heart, called up a quick response; and nestling close in her embrace, I wept passionately. Then she sat down, drew me on her knee, smoothed my hair with her hand, and comforted me as if I had been a little baby. "'So brave,' said she, 'so proud, so honest. Come, little Bab, you and I must be friends.' "And we were friends from that minute; for from that minute a mutual confidence and love sprang up between us. Too deeply moved to answer her in words, I only clung the closer, and tried to still my sobs. She understood me. "'Come,' said she, after a few seconds of silence, 'let's go and see the pigs.'" The sketch of Hilda Churchill is very good, and so is that of the Grand Duke of Zollenstrasse. Taken as a whole, if we leave out the concluding chapters, "Barbara's History" is a stirring, original, and very amusing book, full of historical and topographical information, written in terse and excellent English, and very rich in colour--the people in it are so wonderfully alive. * * * * * "Lord Brackenbury" is very clever and full of pictures, but it lacks the brightness and the originality of "Barbara's History." Amelia B. Edwards wrote several other novels--"Half a Million of Money," "Miss Carew," "Debenham's Vow," &c. &c. She also published a collection of short tales--"Monsieur Maurice," etc.--and a book of ballads. Born in 1831, she began to write at a time when sensational stories were in fashion, and produced a number of exciting stories--"The Four-fifteen Express," "The Tragedy in the Bardello Palace," "The Patagonian Brothers"--all extremely popular; though, when we read them now, they seem wanting in the insight into human nature so remarkably shown in some of her novels. She was a distinguished Egyptologist, and the foundation in 1883 of the Egypt Exploration Fund was largely due to her efforts; she became one of the secretaries to this enterprise, and wrote a good deal on Egyptian subjects for European and American periodicals. She wrote and illustrated some interesting travel books, especially her delightful "A Thousand Miles up the Nile," and an account of her travels in 1872 among the--at that time--rarely visited Dolomites. The latter is called "Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys:" it is interesting, but not so bright as the Nile book. When one considers that a large part of her output involved constant and laborious research--that for the purposes of many of the books she had to take long and fatiguing journeys--the amount of good work she accomplished is very remarkable; the more so, because she was not only a writer, but an active promoter of some of the public movements of her time. She was a member of the Biblical Archæological Society--a member, too, of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Literature. Then she entered into the woman's question, not so popular in those days as it is in these, and was vice-president of a Society for promoting Women's Suffrage. It is difficult to understand how in so busy and varied a life she could have found sufficient leisure for writing fiction; but she had a very large mental grasp, and probably as large a power of concentration. Remembering that she was an omnivorous reader, a careful student, possessed too of an excellent memory, we need not wonder at the fulness and richness of her books. [Signature: Katherine S. Macquoid] MRS. NORTON _By_ MRS. ALEXANDER MRS. NORTON It is hardly necessary to state that this beautiful and charming woman was the second daughter of Thomas Sheridan and grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, of Regency renown. She was one of three sisters famous for beauty and brains, the eldest of whom married Lord Dufferin, and the youngest Lord Seymour, afterwards Duke of Somerset. Born in the first decade of the present century, she married at nineteen, in 1827, George Norton, brother of the third Lord Grantley--a union which proved most unhappy. In 1836 Mr. Norton sought for a divorce, in an action which entirely failed. Nevertheless, Norton remained irreconcilable, and availed himself of all the powers which the law then lent to a vindictive husband, claiming the proceeds of his wife's literary work, and interfering between her and her children. But it is with Mrs. Norton as a writer rather than as a woman that we are concerned, and it is useless now to dwell upon the story of her wrongs and struggles. Previous to this unfortunate suit she produced, in 1829, "The Story of Rosalie, with other Poems," which seems to have been her first published work. This was well received and much admired. In 1830 "The Undying One," a poem on the Wandering Jew, was brought out, followed in 1840 by "The Dream and other Poems." This was highly praised in the _Quarterly Review_ by Lockhart, who spoke of her as "the Byron of poetesses." Other poems from her pen touched on questions of social interest: "A Voice from the Factories" and "The Child of the Islands," a poem on the social condition of the English people. She also printed "English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century," and published much of it in pamphlets on Lord Cranworth's Divorce Bill of this year (1853), thus assisting in the amelioration of the laws relating to the custody of children, and the protection of married women's earnings. Her natural tendency was towards poetry, and the first five books published by her were all in verse. In 1851 appeared a novel, in three volumes, called "Stuart of Dunleath," which was succeeded by "Lost and Saved" and "Old Sir Douglas." It is curious to observe the depth and width of the gulf which yawns between the novel of 1851 and the novel of to-day. The latter opens with some brief sentence spoken by one of the characters, or a short dialogue between two or three of them, followed by a rapid sketch of their position or an equally brief picture of the scene in which the action of the piece is laid. The reader is plunged at once into the drama, and left to guess the parts allotted by the author to his puppets. Forty-five years ago, when Mrs. Norton wrote "Stuart of Dunleath," the reader had to pass through a wide porch and many long passages before he reached the inner chambers of the story. An account of the hero and heroine's families, even to the third and fourth generation, was indispensable, and the minutest particulars of their respective abodes and surroundings were carefully detailed. The tale travelled by easy stages, with many a pause where byways brought additional wayfarers to join the throng of those already travelling through the pages; while each and all, regardless of proportion, were described with equal fulness whatever their degree of importance. * * * * * These are the characteristics of Mrs. Norton's novels, which stretch in a leisurely fashion to something like two hundred thousand words. Nevertheless, "Stuart of Dunleath" shows great ability and knowledge of the world. It is evidently written by a well-read, cultivated, and refined woman, with warm feelings and strong religious convictions. The descriptions are excellent, the language is easy and graceful. The scene of the story lies chiefly in Scotland, and the Scotch characters are very well drawn, save one, Lady Macfarren, who is inhumanly hard. This, too, is one of the peculiarities of the forty or forty-five year old novel; its people are terribly consistent in good or evil. The dignity, the high-mindedness, the angelic purity of the heroine is insupportable, and the stainless honour, the stern resistance to temptation, the defiance of tyrannical wrongdoers, makes the hero quite as bad. In "Stuart of Dunleath," however, the hero is decidedly weak. He is the guardian of Eleanor Raymond, the heroine, and, seeing a probability of making a large profit by a speculative loan, risks her money, hoping to obtain the means to buy back his estate without diminishing her fortune. The speculation fails. Eleanor is reduced to poverty, and Stuart is supposed to drown himself. Then the impoverished heroine, who is desperately in love with her guardian, is compelled to marry a wealthy baronet, Sir Stephen Penrhyn. This is the beginning of troubles, and very bad troubles they are, continuing steadily through two-thirds of the book. Sir Stephen is a brutally bad husband, is shamelessly unfaithful, personally violent, breaks his wife's arm, and makes her life a burden. Her little twin sons are drowned in a boating accident, and then Stuart returns from the grave, having been stopped in his attempt to drown himself by a picturesque old clergyman, and started off to America, where he manages to recover the lost fortune. By his advice, Eleanor leaves her tyrant and takes steps to obtain a divorce, but before the case is ready for hearing is seized with scruples and gives up the attempt, chiefly because she fears she is influenced by an unholy love for Stuart. Finally she gets leave of absence from her amiable spouse, and dies of a broken heart before it expires, Stuart having married her dearest friend, the brilliant Lady Margaret Fordyce, thinking that Eleanor had no real affection for him. The scruples are much to her credit, of course, but she might have tried to save the remainder of her life from the degradation which must have been the result of a reunion with her husband, yet kept aloof from Stuart without offending God or breaking any sacred law. Eighteen very distinct characters figure in these pages, and three or four children. Of these the best drawn are those most lightly sketched. The author's favourites are too much described, their merits, their peculiarities, their faults (if allowed to have any) are detailed as the writer sees them. But they do not act and live and develop themselves to the reader, and, therefore, become abstractions, not living entities. * * * * * "Lost and Saved," written some dozen of years afterward, has much the same qualities as "Stuart of Dunleath." The subsidiary characters are more convincing than the leading ladies and gentlemen. The hero, if such a man could be so termed, with his extreme selfishness, his surface amiability, his infirmity of purpose and utter faithlessness, is well drawn. There is a respectable hero also, but we do not see much of him, which is not to be regretted, as he is an intolerable prig. In this romance the heroine elopes with Treherne, the villainous hero. (Of course, there are the usual family objections to their wedding.) They intend to go to Trieste, but in the confusion of a night march they get on board the wrong steamer, and find themselves at Alexandria. Here Treherne is confronted with his aunt, the magnificent Marchioness of Updown. He is therefore obliged to suppress Beatrice (the heroine) until the Marchioness "moves on." They consequently set off on a voyage up the Nile, apparently in search of a clergyman to marry them. It seems, by the way, a curious sort of hunting-ground in which to track an English parson. Then Beatrice falls dangerously ill, and nothing will save her save a parson and the marriage service. A benevolent and sympathetic young doctor is good enough to simulate a British chaplain, and the knot is tied to the complete satisfaction of Beatrice. Much misery ensues. It must be added that the magnificent Marchioness of Updown is an extraordinary picture. Besides being a peeress by marriage, she is the daughter of an earl, an aristocrat born and bred. Yet her vulgarity is amazing. Her stupid ill-nature, her ignorance, her speech and manner, suggest the idea of a small shopkeeper in a shabby street. In this novel Mrs. Norton portrays the whited-sepulchre sort of woman very clearly in Milly, Lady Nesdale, who is admired and petted by Society, always smiling, well tempered, well dressed, careful to observe _les bienséances_, making herself pleasant even to her husband; while, screened by this fair seeming, she tastes of a variety of forbidden fruit, one mouthful of which would be enough to consign a less astute woman to social death. This class of character figures largely in present day novels, but few equal, none surpass, Mrs. Norton's masterly touch. "Old Sir Douglas," her last novel, was published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, 1867. It is planned on the same lines as her previous works of fiction--the plot rather complicated, the characters extremely numerous; among these is an almost abnormally wicked woman who works endless mischief. * * * * * It was, however, as a poetess that Mrs. Norton was chiefly known. Her verse was graceful and harmonious, but more emotional than intellectual. Wrath at injustice and cruelty stirred the depths of her soul; her heart was keenly alive to the social evils around her and she longed passionately for power to redress them. The effect of her own wrongs and sufferings was to quicken her ardour to help her fellow women smarting under English law as it at that time existed. What that law then permitted is best exemplified by her own experience. When the legal proceedings between her and her husband were over, and her innocence of the charges brought against her was fully established, she was allowed to see her children only _once_ for the space of half an hour in the presence of two witnesses chosen by Mr. Norton, though this state of things was afterwards ameliorated by the Infant Custody Act, which allowed some little further restricted intercourse. But these evil times are past. Indeed, it seems hard to believe that barely fifty years separates the barbarous injustice of that period from the decent amenities of this, as regards the respective rights of husbands and wives. Mrs. Norton's second poem of importance, "The Undying One," is founded on the legend of the Wandering Jew, a subject always attractive to the poetic imagination. It contains many charming lines, and touches on an immense variety of topics, wandering, like its hero, over many lands. The sufferings of isolation are vividly depicted, and isolation must, of necessity, be the curse of endless life in this world. "Thus, thus, to shrink from every outstretched hand, To strive in secret and alone to stand, Or, when obliged to mingle in the crowd, Curb the pale lip which quiveringly obeys, Gapes wide with sudden laughter, vainly loud, Or writhes a faint, slow smile to meet their gaze. This, this is hell! the soul which dares not show The barbed sorrow which is rankling there, Gives way at length beneath its weight of woe, Withers unseen, and darkens to despair!" In these days of rapidity and concentration, poems such as this would never emerge from the manuscript stage, in which they might be read by appreciative friends with abundant leisure. The same observation applies to "The Dream." A mother sits watching the slumber of her beautiful young daughter who, waking, tells her dream of an exquisite life with the one she loves best, unshadowed by grief or pain. The mother warns her that life will not be like this, and draws a somewhat formidable picture of its realities. From this the girl naturally shrinks, wondering where Good is to be found, and is answered thus: "He that deals blame, and yet forgets to praise, Who sets brief storms against long summer days, Hath a sick judgment. And shall we _all_ condemn, and _all_ distrust, Because some men are false and some unjust?" Some of Mrs. Norton's best and most impassioned verses are to be found in the dedication of this poem to her friend, the Duchess of Sutherland. Affection, gratitude, indignation, grief, regret--_these_ are the sources of Mrs. Norton's inspiration; but of any coldly intellectual solution of life's puzzles, such as more modern writers affect, there is little trace. "The Lady of La Garaye" is a Breton tale (a true one) of a beautiful and noble Châtelaine, on whom Heaven had showered all joy and blessing. Adored by her husband, she shared every hour of his life and accompanied him in his favourite sport of hunting. One day she dared to follow him over too wide a leap. Her horse fell with and on her. She was terribly injured, and crippled for life. After much lamenting she is comforted by a good priest, and institutes a hospital for incurables, she and her husband devoting themselves to good works for the remainder of their days. The versification is smooth, the descriptions are graceful and picturesque; but neither the subject nor its treatment is enthralling. Mrs. Norton's finest poetic efforts are to be found in her short pieces. One entitled "Ataraxia" has a soothing charm, which owes half its melody to the undertone of sadness which pervades the verse. "Come forth! The sun hath flung on Thetis' breast The glittering tresses of his golden hair; All things are heavy with a noon-day rest, And floating sea-birds cleave the stirless air. Against the sky in outlines clear and rude The cleft rocks stand, while sunbeams slant between And lulling winds are murmuring through the wood Which skirts the bright bay, with its fringe of green. "Come forth! all motion is so gentle now It seems thy step alone should walk the earth, Thy voice alone, the 'ever soft and low,' Wake the far haunting echoes into birth. "Too wild would be Love's passionate store of hope, Unmeet the influence of his changeful power, Ours be companionship whose gentle scope Hath charm enough for such a tranquil hour." From the perusal of her writings, the impression given by her portrait, and the reminiscences of one who knew her, we gather an idea of this charming and gifted woman, whose nature seems to have been rich in all that makes for the happiness of others, and of herself. We feel that she possessed a mind abundantly stored, an imagination stimulated and informed by sojourning in many lands; a heart, originally tender and compassionate, mellowed by maternal love, a judgment trained and restrained by constant intercourse with the best minds of the period, a wit keen as a damascene blade, and a soul to feel, even to enthusiasm, the wrongs and sufferings of others. Add to these gifts the power of swift expression, and we can imagine what a fascination Mrs. Norton must have possessed for those of her contemporaries who had the privilege of knowing her. "She was the most brilliant woman I ever met," said the late Charles Austen, "and her brilliancy was like summer lightning; it dazzled, but did not hurt." Unless, indeed, she was impelled to denounce some wrong or injustice, when her words could strike home. Yet to this lovely and lovable woman, life was a long disappointment; and through all she has written a strain of profound rebellion against the irony of fate colours her views, her delineations of character, her estimate of the social world. By her relations and friends she was warmly appreciated. She did not succeed in obtaining the relief of divorce until about 1853. Mr. Norton survived till 1875, and in 1877, a few months before her death, his widow married Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. * * * * * It is a curious instance of the change of fashion and the transient nature of popular memory that great difficulty is experienced in obtaining copies of Mrs. Norton's works, especially of her poems. "The Undying One," "The Dream," and one or two smaller pieces, are found only in the British Museum Library. The novels are embedded in the deeper strata of Mudie's, but are not mentioned in the catalogue of that all-embracing collection. Yet forty years ago, Mrs. Norton acknowledged that she made at one time about £1400 a year by her pen, this chiefly by her contributions to the annuals of that time. Mrs. Norton, however, had not to contend with the cruel competition which lowers prices while it increases labour. In her day, the workers were few, and the employers less difficult to please. But these comparisons are not only odious, but fruitless. The crowd, the competition, the desperate struggle for life, exists, increases, and we cannot alter it. We can but train for the contest as best we may, and say with the lovely and sorely tried subject of this sketch, as she writes in her poem to her absent boys: "Though my lot be hard and lonely, Yet I hope--I hope through all." [Signature: Annie Hector] ("MRS. ALEXANDER") "A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER) MRS. EWING _By_ MRS. MARSHALL "A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER) MRS. EWING Forty years ago, the mystic letters "A. L. O. E." ("A Lady of England") on the title-page of a book ensured its welcome from the children of those days. There was not then the host of gaily bound volumes pouring from the press to be piled up in tempting array in every bookseller's shop at Christmas. The children for whom "A. L. O. E." wrote were contented to read a "gift-book" more than once; and, it must be said, her stories were deservedly popular, and bore the crucial test of being read aloud to an attentive audience several times. Many of these stories still live, and the allegorical style in which "A. L. O. E." delighted has a charm for certain youthful minds to this day. There is a pride and pleasure in thinking out the lessons hidden under the names of the stalwart giants in the "Giant Killer," which is one of "A. L. O. E.'s" earlier and best tales. A fight with Giant Pride, a hard battle with Giant Sloth, has an inspiriting effect on boys and girls, who are led to "look at home" and see what giants hold them in bondage. "A. L. O. E.'s" style was almost peculiar to herself. She generally used allegory and symbol, and she was fired with the desire to arrest the attention of her young readers and "do them good." We may fear that she often missed her aim by forcing the moral, and by indulging in long and discursive "preachments," which interrupted the main current of the story, and were impatiently skipped that it might flow on again without vexatious hindrances. In her early girlhood and womanhood "A. L. O. E." had written plays, which, we are told by her biographer, Miss Agnes Giberne, were full of wit and fun. Although her literary efforts took a widely different direction when she began to write for children, still there are flashes of humour sparkling here and there on the pages of her most didactic stories, showing that her keen sense of the ludicrous was present though it was kept very much in abeyance. From the first publication of "The Claremont Tales" her success as a writer for children was assured. The list of her books covering the space of fifteen or twenty years is a very long one, and she had no difficulty in finding publishers ready to bring them out in an attractive form. * * * * * "The Rambles of a Rat" is before me, as I write, in a new edition, and is a very fair specimen of "A. L. O. E.'s" work. Weighty sayings are put into the mouth of the rats, and provoke a smile. The discussion about the ancestry of Whiskerando and Ratto ends with the trite remark--which, however, was not spoken aloud--that the great weakness of one opponent was pride of birth, and his anxiety to be thought of an ancient family; but the chief matter, in Ratto's opinion, was not whether our ancestors do honour to us, but whether by our conduct we do not disgrace them. Probably this page of the story was hastily turned here, that the history of the two little waifs and strays who took shelter in the warehouse, where the rats lived, might be followed. Later on there is a discussion between a father and his little boy about the advantage of ragged schools, then a somewhat new departure in philanthropy. Imagine a boy of nine, in our time, exclaiming, "What a glorious thing it is to have ragged schools and reformatories, to give the poor and the ignorant, and the wicked, a chance of becoming honest and happy." Boys of Neddy's age, nowadays, would denounce him as a little prig, who ought to be well snubbed for his philanthropical ambition, when he went on to say, "How I should like to build a ragged school myself!" "The Voyage of the Rats to Russia" is full of interest and adventure, and the glimpse of Russian life is vivid, and in "A. L. O. E.'s" best manner. Indeed, she had a graphic pen, and her descriptions of places and things were always true to life. In "Pride and his Prisoners," for instance, there are stirring scenes, drawn with that dramatic power which had characterised the plays she wrote in her earlier days. "The Pretender, a farce in two Acts, by Charlotte Maria Tucker," is published in Miss Giberne's biography. In this farce there is a curious and constantly recurring play on words, but the allegory and the symbol with which she afterwards clothed her stories are absent. * * * * * "A. L. O. E." did not write merely to _amuse_ children; and the countless fairy tales and books of startling adventure, in their gilded covers and with their profuse illustrations, which are published every year, have thrown her stories into the shade. But they are written with verve and spirit, and in good English, which is high praise, and cannot always be given to the work of her successors in juvenile literature. In her books, as in every work she undertook throughout her life, she had the high and noble aim of doing good. Whether she might have widened the sphere of her influence by less of didactic teaching, and by allowing her natural gifts to have more play, it is not for us to inquire. It is remarkable that this long practice in allegory and symbol fitted her for her labours in her latter years, amongst the boys and girls of the Far East. Her style was well adapted to the Oriental mind, and kindled interest and awoke enthusiasm in the hearts of the children in the Batala Schools. Here she did a great work, which she undertook at the age of fifty-four, when she offered her services to the Church Missionary Society as an unpaid missionary. "All for love, and no reward" may surely be said to be "A. L. O. E.'s" watchword, as, with untiring energy, she laboured amongst the children in a distant part of the empire. Even there she was busy as an author. By her fertile pen she could reach thousands in that part of India who would never see her face or hear her voice. She wrote for India as she had written for England, ever keeping before her the good of her readers. The Hindu boys and girls, as well as the children of this country, have every reason to hold her name in grateful remembrance as one of the authors who have left a mark on the reign of Queen Victoria. MRS. EWING There lingers over some people whom we know a nameless charm. It is difficult to define it, and yet we feel it in their presence as we feel the subtle fragrance of flowers, borne to us on the wings of the fresh breeze, which has wandered over gorse and heather, beds of wild hyacinth, and cowslip fields, in the early hours of a sunny spring day. A charm like this breathes over the stories which Mrs. Ewing has left as an inheritance for English children, and for their elders also, for all time. The world must be better for her work; and looking back over the sometimes toilsome paths of authorship, this surely, above all others, is the guerdon all craftswomen of the pen should strive to win. There is nothing morbid or melodramatic in Mrs. Ewing's beautiful stories. They bubble over with the joys of child-life; they bristle with its humour; they touch its sorrows with a tender, sympathetic hand; they lend a gentle sadness of farewell to Death itself, with the sure hope of better things to come. * * * * * It was in 1861 and 1862 that those who were looking for healthy stories for children found, in "Melchior's Dream and other Tales," precisely what they wanted. Soon after, _Aunt Judy's Magazine_, edited by Mrs. Ewing's mother, Mrs. Gatty, made a new departure in the periodical literature for children. The numbers were eagerly looked for month by month, and the title of the magazine was given to commemorate the "Judy" of the nursery, who had often kept a bevy of little brothers and sisters happy and quiet by pouring forth into their willing ears stories full of the prowess of giants, the freaks of fairies, with occasional but always good-natured shafts aimed at the little faults and frailties of the listening children. _Aunt Judy's Magazine_ had no contributions from Mrs. Ewing's pen till May 1866 and May 1867. Then the delightful "Remembrances of Mrs. Overtheway" enchanted her youthful readers. Little Ida's own story and her lonely childhood had an especial charm for them; and Mrs. Overtheway's remembrances of the far-off days when she, too, was a child, were told as things that had really happened. And so they had! For, in the disappointment of the imaginative child who had created a fair vision from her grandmother's description of Mrs. Anastasia Moss as a golden-haired beauty in rose-bud brocade, and instead, saw an old lady with sunken black eyes, dressed in _feuilles mortes_ satin, many a child may have found the salient parts of her own experience rehearsed! "Alas!" says Mrs. Overtheway, when little Ida, soothed by her gentle voice, has fallen asleep. "Alas! my grown-up friends, does the moral belong to children only? Have manhood and womanhood no passionate, foolish longings, for which we blind ourselves to obvious truth, and of which the vanity does not lessen the disappointment? Do we not all toil after rose-buds to find _feuilles mortes_?" It is in touches like this, in her stories, that Mrs. Ewing appeals to many older hearts as well as to those of the young dreamers, taking their first steps in the journey of life. In 1857, Juliana Horatia Gatty married Alexander Ewing, A.P.D., and for some time "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances" were not continued. The last of them, "Kerguelin's Land," is considered by some critics the most beautiful of the series, ending with the delightful surprise of little Ida's joy in the return of her lost father. * * * * * Mrs. Ewing's stories are so rich in both humour and pathos, that it is difficult to choose from them distinctive specimens of her style, and of that charm which pervades them, a charm which we think is peculiarly her own. Mrs. Ewing gave an unconsciously faithful portrait of herself in "Madam Liberality." The reader has in this story glimpses of the author's own heroic and self-forgetful childhood. Perhaps this tale is not as well known as some which followed it: so a few notes from its pages may not be unwelcome here. Madam Liberality, when a little girl, was accustomed to pick out all the plums from her own slice of cake and afterwards make a feast with them for her brothers and sisters and the dolls. Oyster shells served for plates, and if by any chance the plums did not go round the party, the shell before Madam Liberality's place was always the empty one. Her eldest brother had given her the title of Madam Liberality; and yet he could, with refreshing frankness, shake his head at her and say, "You are the most _meanest_ and the _generousest_ person I ever knew." Madam Liberality wept over this accusation, and it was the grain of truth in it that made her cry, for it was too true that she screwed, and saved, and pinched to have the pleasure of "giving away." "Tom, on the contrary, gave away without pinching and saving. This sounds much handsomer, and it was poor Tom's misfortune that he always believed it to be so, though he gave away what did not belong to him, and fell back for the supply of his own pretty numerous wants upon other people, not forgetting Madam Liberality." What a clever analysis of character is this! We have all known the "Toms," for they are numerous, and some of us have known and but scantily appreciated the far rarer "Madam Liberalitys." It is difficult to read unmoved of the brave child's journey alone to the doctor to have a tooth taken out which had caused her much suffering. Then when about to claim the shilling from her mother, which was the accustomed reward for the unpleasant operation, she remembered the agreement was a shilling for a tooth with fangs, sixpence for a tooth without them. She did so want the larger sum to spend on Christmas presents; so, finding a fang left in her jaw, she went back to the doctor, had it extracted, and staggered home once more, very giddy but very happy, with the tooth and the fang safe in a pill box! "Moralists say a great deal about pain treading so very closely on the heels of pleasure in this life, but they are not always wise or grateful enough to speak of the pleasure which springs out of pain. And yet there is a bliss which comes just when pain has ceased, whose rapture rivals even the high happiness of unbroken health. "Relief is certainly one of the most delicious sensations which poor humanity can enjoy." Madam Liberality often suffered terrible pain from quinsy. Thus we read sympathetically of her heroic efforts one Christmastide, when nearly suffocated with this relentless disease, to go on with her preparations to get her little gifts ready for the family. And how we rejoice when a cart rumbles up to the door and brings a load of beautiful presents, sent by a benevolent lady who has known Madam Liberality's desire to make purchases for her brothers and sisters, and has determined to give her this delightful surprise. * * * * * The story of Madam Liberality, from childhood to maturity, is, we think, written in Mrs. Ewing's best manner, though, perhaps, it has never gained the widespread popularity of "Jackanapes," and "The Story of a Short Life," or "A Flat Iron for a Farthing." Of the last-named story Mrs. Bundle is almost the central figure. In the childhood of Reginald Dacre, who writes his own reminiscences, she played a prominent part. Loyal and true, she held the old traditions of faithful service; her master's people were her people, and she had but few interests apart from them. The portrait of Reginald's mother hung in his father's dressing-room, and was his resort in the early days of his childish sorrows. Once when his dog Rubens had been kicked by a guest in his father's house, Reginald went to that picture of his golden-haired mother and wept out his plaintive entreaties that "Mamma would come back to Rubens and to him--they were so miser-ra-ble." "Then," he says, "in the darkness came a sob that was purely human, and I was clasped in a woman's arms and covered with tender kisses and soothing caresses. For one wild moment, in my excitement and the boundless faith of childhood, I thought my mother had heard me and come back. But it was only Nurse Bundle!" Then, passing over many years, when Reginald Dacre brought his bride to his old home, this faithful friend, after giving her loving welcome to the new Mrs. Dacre, went, in the confusion and bewilderment of old age, with its strange mingling of past and present, to the room where the portrait of her lost lady with the golden hair still hung; and there, the story goes on to say, "There, where years before she had held me in her arms with tears, I, weeping also, held her now in mine--quite dead!" This is one of the most pathetic incidents in all Mrs. Ewing's works, told without the least exaggeration and with the simplicity which is one of the characteristics of her style. "Lob Lie by the Fire" contains some of the author's brightest flashes of humour, and yet it closes with a description of Macalister's death, drawn with the tender hand with which that solemn mystery is ever touched by Mrs. Ewing, beautiful in its pathetic simplicity. Nothing in its way can be more profoundly touching than the few words which end this story:-- "After a while Macalister repeated the last word, '_Home_.' And as he spoke there spread over his face a smile so tender and so full of happiness that John Broom held his breath as he watched him. As the light of sunrise creeps over the face of some rugged rock, it crept from chin to brow, and the pale blue eyes shone, tranquil, like water that reflects heaven. And when it had passed, it left them still open--but gems that had lost their ray." * * * * * "Jackanapes" is so well known, almost the best known of the author's charming stories, that we will not dwell on the pathos of that last scene, when Jackanapes, like one in the old allegory, heard the trumpets calling for him on the other side--the gallant boy who had laid down his life for his friend. But the character of the Gray Goose, who slept securely with one leg tucked up under her on the green, is so delightfully suggestive that we must give some of her wisdom as a specimen of the author's humorous but never unkindly hits at the weaknesses to which we are all prone. "The Gray Goose and the big Miss Jessamine were the only elderly persons who kept their ages secret. Indeed, Miss Jessamine never mentioned any one's age, or recalled the exact year in which anything had happened. The Gray Goose also avoided dates. She never got farther than 'last Michaelmas,' 'the Michaelmas before that,' and 'the Michaelmas before the Michaelmas before that.' After this her head, which was small, became confused, and she said 'Ga-ga!' and changed the subject." Then again: "The Gray Goose always ran away at the first approach of the caravans, and never came back to the green till nothing was left of the fair but footmarks and oyster-shells. Running away was her pet principle; the only system, she maintained, by which you can live long and easily, and lose nothing. "Why in the world should any one spoil the pleasures of life, or risk his skin, if he can help it? 'What's the use? Said the goose.' Before answering which one might have to consider what world, which life, and whether his skin were a goose skin. But the Gray Goose's head would never have held all that." * * * * * Major Ewing was stationed at Aldershot in 1869, and during the eight years Mrs. Ewing lived there her pen was never idle. _Aunt Judy's Magazine_ for 1870 was well supplied with tales, of which "Amelia" is perhaps one of the best. To her life at Aldershot we owe the story which had for its motto "Loetus sorte mea," and which is full of the most graphic descriptions of the huts and the soldiers' life in camp. As in the story of Madam Liberality we have glimpses of the author's childhood with all its little cares and joys, so in the "Story of a Short Life" we have the actual experience of a soldier's life in camp. O'Reilly, the useful man of all trades, with his warm Irish heart, and his devotion to the Colonel's wife, his erratic and haphazard way of performing his duties, his admiration for the little gentleman in his velvet coat and lace collar, who stood erect by his side when the funeral passed to the music of the Dead March, imitating his soldierlike bearing and salute, is a vivid picture touched by the skilled hand of a word painter. So also is the figure of the V.C., who in his first talk with the crippled child, stands before us as the ideal of a brave soldier, who sets but little store on his achievements, modest as the truly great always are, and encouraging the boy to fight a brave battle against irritable temper and impatience at the heavy cross of suffering laid upon him. "'You are a V.C.,' Leonard is saying, 'and you ought to know. I suppose nothing--not even if I could be good always from this minute right away till I die--nothing could ever count up to the courage of a V.C.?' "'God knows it could, a thousand times over,' was the V.C.'s reply. "'Where are you going? Please don't go. Look at me. They're not going to chop the Queen's head off, are they?' "'Heaven forbid! What are you thinking about?' "'Why because--look at me again--ah! you've winked it away; but your eyes were full of tears, and the only other brave man I ever heard of crying was Uncle Rupert, and that was because he knew they were going to chop the poor king's head off.' That was enough to make anybody cry." They were in the room where the picture of the young cavalier ancestor of Leonard hung. He always called him "Uncle Rupert," and he would meditate on the young face with the eyes dim with tears--eyes which always seemed to follow him, and, as he fancied, watched him sorrowfully, now no longer able to jump about and play with the Sweep, but lying helpless on his couch, or limping about on his crutches, often with pain and difficulty. This conversation between the V.C. and Leonard was the beginning of a strong friendship which was put to the test one Sunday when Leonard lay dying in the hut of his uncle, the barrack-master. The V.C. hated anything like display or bringing himself into notice. Thus it cost him something to take up his position outside the iron church in the camp, that Leonard might hear the last verses of the tug-of-war hymn. The V.C.'s attachment to his little friend triumphed over his dislike to stand alone singing, "The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain." The melodious voice of the gallant young soldier rang through the air and reached the dying ears of little Leonard. The soldiers loved this hymn, and the organist could never keep them back. The soldiers, the story says, had begun to tug. In a moment more the organ stopped, and the V.C. found himself with over three hundred men at his back, singing without accompaniment and in unison: "A noble army, men and boys, The matron and the maid, Around the Saviour's throne rejoice In robes of white arrayed." Even now, as the men paused to take breath after their "tug," the organ spoke again softly but seraphically. Clearer and sweeter above the voices behind him rose the voice of the V.C. singing to his little friend: "They climbed the steep ascent to Heaven Through peril, toil and pain." The men sang on, but the V.C. stopped as if he had been shot. For a man's hand had come to the Barrack Master's window _and pulled down the blind_! Here, again, we have an instance of this author's power to touch her readers, even to tears, by the true pathos which needs but few words to bring it home to many hearts. Taken as a whole, "The Story of a Short Life" has, it may be, some faults of construction, which arose from its being written in detached portions. The history of St. Martin, though it is not without its bearing on the story of the beautiful and once active child's bruised and broken life, and his desire to be a soldier, rather spoils the continuity of the narrative. "The Story of a Short Life" was not published in book form until four days before the author's death; but it was not her last work, though from its appearance at that moment the title was spoken of by some reviewers as singularly appropriate. Mrs. Ewing's love for animals may be seen in all her stories--Leonard's beloved "Sweep," Lollo the red-haired pony on which Jackanapes took his first ride, and the dog in the blind man's story dying of grief on his grave, are all signs of the author's affection for those who have been well called "our silent friends." Her own pets were indeed her friends--from a pink-nosed bulldog called Hector, to a refugee pup saved from the common hang-man, and a collie buried with honours, his master making a sketch of him as he lay on his bier. Mrs. Ewing was passionately fond of flowers, and "Mary's Meadow" was written in the last years of her life as a serial for _Aunt Judy's Magazine_. Her very last literary work was a series of letters from a Little Garden, and the love of and care for flowers is the theme. * * * * * Much of Mrs. Ewing's work cannot be noticed in a paper which is necessarily short. But enough has been said to show what was her peculiar gift as a writer for children. It is sometimes said that to write books for children cannot be considered a high branch of literature. We venture to think this is a mistake. There is nothing more difficult than to arrest the attention of children. They do not as a rule care to be _written down_ to--they can appreciate what is good and are pleased when their elders can enter into and admire the story which has interested and delighted them. To write as Mrs. Ewing wrote is undoubtedly a great gift which not many possess, but a careful study of her works by young and old authors and readers alike cannot be without benefit. She was a perfect mistress of the English language; she was never dull and never frivolous. There is not a slip-shod sentence, or an exaggerated piling up of adjectives to be found in her pages. She knew what she had to say, and she said it in language at once pure, forcible, and graceful. We must be grateful to her for leaving for us, and for our children's children, so much that is a model of all that tends to make the literature of the young--yes, and of the old also--attractive, healthy, and delightful. [Signature: Emma Marshall] Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh * * * * * TRANSCRIBER NOTES: Punctuation has been normalized without note. The following have been corrected: page 45: "beween" changed to "between" (discriminate between them) page 48: "esipodes" changed to "episodes" (of the episodes in her own life) page 70: "of of" changed to "of" (part of a woman's virtue) page 97: "Shakespeare" changed to "Shakspere" for consistency (did not Shakspere make Hector) page 100: "Sorel" chanaged to "Sorrel" (and who Hetty Sorrel) page 185: "mon s" changed to "monks" (to make the old monks) page 298: "Melchoir's" changed to "Melchior's" ("Melchior's Dream and Other Tales") 
36714	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive.) English Men of Letters EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY DICKENS BY ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS FRANKLIN SQUARE ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. JOHNSON Leslie Stephen. GIBBON J. C. Morison. SCOTT R. H. Hutton. SHELLEY J. A. Symonds. HUME T. H. Huxley. GOLDSMITH William Black. DEFOE William Minto. BURNS J. C. Shairp. SPENSER R. W. Church. THACKERAY Anthony Trollope. BURKE John Morley. MILTON Mark Pattison. HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr. SOUTHEY E. Dowden. CHAUCER A. W. Ward. BUNYAN J. A. Froude. COWPER Goldwin Smith. POPE Leslie Stephen. BYRON John Nichol. LOCKE Thomas Fowler. WORDSWORTH F. Myers. DRYDEN G. Saintsbury. LANDOR Sidney Colvin. DE QUINCEY David Masson. LAMB Alfred Ainger. BENTLEY R. C. Jebb. DICKENS A. W. Ward. GRAY E. W. Gosse. SWIFT Leslie Stephen. STERNE H. D. Traill. MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison. FIELDING Austin Dobson. SHERIDAN Mrs. Oliphant. ADDISON W. J. Courthope. BACON R. W. Church. COLERIDGE H. D. Traill. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J. A. Symonds. KEATS Sidney Colvin. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. _Other volumes in preparation._ PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. _Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price._ PREFACE. At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend John Forster, but not to be found in the English editions of the _Life_, the writer adds to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words: "I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." Dickens was a man of few close friendships--"his breast," he said, "would not hold many people"--but, of these friendships, that with Forster was one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. To Dickens, at least, his future biographer must have been the embodiment of two qualities rarely combined in equal measure--discretion and candour. In literary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was given, and nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of Dickens passed through his faithful helpmate's hands. Nor were there many important decisions formed by Dickens concerning himself in the course of his manhood to which Forster was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once counselled in vain. On Mr. Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_, together with the three volumes of _Letters_ collected by Dickens's eldest daughter and his sister-in-law--his "dearest and best friend"--it is superfluous to state that the biographical portion of the following essay is mainly based. It may be superfluous, but it cannot be considered impertinent, if I add that the shortcomings of the _Life_ have, in my opinion, been more frequently proclaimed than defined; and that its merits are those of its author as well as of its subject. My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me in connexion with the production of this little volume by Miss Hogarth, Mr. Charles Dickens, Professor Henry Morley, Mr. Alexander Ireland, Mr. John Evans, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Britton. Mr. Evans has kindly enabled me to correct some inaccuracies in Mr. Forster's account of Dickens's early Chatham days on unimpeachable first-hand evidence. I also beg Captain and Mrs. Budden to accept my thanks for allowing me to see Gad's Hill Place. I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Librarian of the Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in affording me much useful aid and information. With the kind permission of Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of Dickens's life, in the period 1838-'41, from a hitherto unpublished source--a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of _The Law and Commercial Daily Remembrancer_ for those years. These volumes formed no part of the Forster bequest, but were added to it, under certain conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief; and sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another with no other note than "Work." Mr. R. H. Shepherd's _Bibliography of Dickens_ has been of considerable service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as a charming reminiscence of the connexion between _Charles Dickens and Rochester_, Mr. Robert Langton's sketches illustrating a paper recently printed under that title? Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to me on this, any more than on former occasions. A. W. W. CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE v CHAPTER I. BEFORE "PICKWICK" 1 CHAPTER II. FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS 20 CHAPTER III. STRANGE LANDS 49 CHAPTER IV. "DAVID COPPERFIELD" 85 CHAPTER V. CHANGES 108 CHAPTER VI. LAST YEARS 146 CHAPTER VII. THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME 192 DICKENS. CHAPTER I. BEFORE "PICKWICK." [1812-1836.] Charles Dickens, the eldest son, and the second of the eight children, of John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on Friday, February 7, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huffham. His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and employed in the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was recalled to London when his eldest son was only two years of age; and two years afterwards was transferred to Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 1821. Thus Chatham, and the more venerable city of Rochester adjoining, with their neighbourhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodland and marshes, became, in the words of Dickens's biographer, the birthplace of his fancy. He looked upon himself as, to all intents and purposes, a Kentish man born and bred, and his heart was always in this particular corner of the incomparable county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred Jingle's spasmodic eloquence had, in the very first number of _Pickwick_, epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, already the scene of one of the _Sketches_, Dickens returned to the local associations of his early childhood. It was at Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on his solitary tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night's sleep "near a cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps;" and in many a Christmas narrative or uncommercial etching the familiar features of town and country, of road and river, were reproduced, before in _Great Expectations_ they suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his faithful fancy once more haunted the well-known precincts. During the last thirteen years of his life he was again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where, with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so often made holiday; where, when hope was young, he had spent his honey-moon; and whither, after his last restless wanderings, he was to return, to seek such repose as he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the daily life of the "very queer small boy" of that early time is only quite incidentally to be associated with the grand gentleman's house on Gad's Hill, where his father, little thinking that his son was to act over again the story of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he might some day come to live, if he were to be very persevering, and to work hard. The family abode was in Ordnance (not St. Mary's) Place, at Chatham, amidst surroundings classified in Mr. Pickwick's notes as "appearing to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and dock-yard men." But though the half-mean, half-picturesque aspect of the Chatham streets may already at an early age have had its fascination for Dickens, yet his childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of observation. Having learned reading from his mother, he was sent with his elder sister, Fanny, to a day-school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles, the eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, whose family had formed an intimate acquaintance with their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The younger Giles children were pupils at the school of their elder brother with Charles and Fanny Dickens, and thus naturally their constant playmates. In later life Dickens preserved a grateful remembrance, at times refreshed by pleasant communications between the families, of the training he had received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as generous man, who, recognising his pupil's abilities, seems to have resolved that they should not lie fallow for want of early cultivation. Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for supposing that this period of his life was anything but happy. For his sister Fanny he always preserved a tender regard; and a touching little paper, written by him after her death in womanhood, relates how the two children used to watch the stars together, and make friends with one in particular, as belonging to themselves. But obviously he did not lack playmates of his own sex; and it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes made him disinclined to take much part in the rougher sports of his school-fellows, that he found plenty of time for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came to pass that already as a child he followed his own likings in the two directions from which they were never very materially to swerve. He once said of himself that he had been "a writer when a mere baby, an actor always." Of these two passions he could always, as a child and as a man, be "happy with either," and occasionally with both at the same time. In his tender years he was taken by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to see the legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits behind the scenes at private theatricals; while his own juvenile powers as a teller of stories and singer of comic songs (he was possessed, says one who remembers him, of a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fellows. He also wrote a--not strictly original--tragedy, which is missing among his _Reprinted Pieces_. There is nothing unique in these childish doings, nor in the circumstance that he was an eager reader of works of fiction; but it is noteworthy that chief among the books to which he applied himself, in a small neglected bookroom in his father's house, were those to which his allegiance remained true through much of his career as an author. Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination for his mind from his earliest childhood, besides the "Arabian Nights" and kindred tales, and the English Essayists, he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes and Le Sage, in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald's collection of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as he was no great reader in the days of his authorship, and had to go through hard times of his own before, it was well that the literature of his childhood was good of its kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay. Dickens afterwards made it an article of his social creed that the imagination of the young needs nourishment as much as their bodies require food and clothing; and he had reason for gratefully remembering that at all events the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect. But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began. Misfortune pursued the elder Dickens to town, his salary having been decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street, Camden Town; and here, what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son's education to take care of itself. John Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him, and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years; nor would it be fair, because of a similarity in their experiences, and in the grandeur of their habitual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the immortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details of manner and incident, can the character of the elder Dickens be thought to have suggested that of the pitiful "Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison, almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London. Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles, whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive sketches of odd personages among his acquaintance, had become familiar with the inside of a pawnbroker's shop, and had sold the paternal "library" piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller, with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber's representative. But neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens's abortive efforts at setting up an educational establishment had been of avail. Her husband's creditors _would not_ give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and more especially for the little eldest son, now ten years old, in which, as he afterwards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, "but for the mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little vagabond." Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiography, communicated to him by Dickens five-and-twenty years after the period to which it refers, and subsequently incorporated with but few changes in the _Personal History of David Copperfield_. Who can forget the thrill with which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of the solitary child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, was an episode in the life of Charles Dickens himself? Between fact and fiction there was but a difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby's wine warehouse down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren's blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, in which a place had been found for the boy by a relative, a partner in the concern; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and the miserable pay, the uncongenial companionship during worktime, and the speculative devices of the dinner-hour were the same in each case. At this time, after his family had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to the little waif at night was a lodging in Little College Street, Camden Town, presenting even fewer attractions than Mr. Micawber's residence in Windsor Terrace, and kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs. Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. On his urgent remonstrance--"the first I had ever made about my lot"--concerning the distance from his family at which he was left through the week, a back attic was found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, "where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards;" and he now breakfasted and supped with his parents in their apartment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon by a faithful "orfling," who had accompanied the family and its fortunes from Chatham, and who is said by Forster to have her part in the character of the Marchioness. Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his discharge, and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodgings, a quarrel occurred between the elder Dickens and his cousin, and the boy was in consequence taken away from the business. He had not been ill-treated there; nor indeed is it ill-treatment which leads to David Copperfield's running away in the story. Nevertheless, it is not strange that Dickens should have looked back with a bitterness very unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish solitude and degradation. He never "forgot" his mother's having wished him to remain in the warehouse; the subject of his employment there was never afterwards mentioned in the family; he could not bring himself to go near old Hungerford Market so long as it remained standing; and to no human being, not even to his wife, did he speak of this passage in his life until he narrated it in the fragment of autobiography which he confided to his trusty friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain; for no man is expected to dilate upon the days "when he lived among the beggars in St. Mary Axe," and it is only the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or falsely, in the sordid memories of the time before they became rich or powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his childhood might have ceased to be resented by one whom the world on the whole treated so kindly, at least they left his heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender to the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion "eaten his bread with tears" when a puny child. A happy accident having released the David Copperfield of actual life from his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at that time was the lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. "The world has done much better since in that way, and will do far better yet," he writes at the close of his description of _Our School_, the "Wellington House Academy," situate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this worthy and his usher, "considered to know everything as opposed to the chief who was considered to know nothing," furnished some of the features in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly doubted by an old school-fellow whether the statement "We were First Boy" is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, when he entered the school, was "put into Virgil," he was not put there to much purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the resumption of the old amusements which were to grow into the occupations of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot. After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for Charles Dickens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who had probably lost his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber's phrase, "hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter, and must have rejoiced when a Gray's Inn solicitor of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son, took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His office associates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the blacking warehouse; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequented, in company with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor theatres, and even occasionally to have acted there; and assuredly it must have been personal knowledge which suggested the curiously savage description of _Private Theatres_ in the _Sketches by Boz_, the all but solitary _unkindly_ reference to theatrical amusements in his works. But whatever his experiences of this kind may have been, he passed unscathed through them; and during the year and a half of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the technicalities of the law to be able to assail its enormities without falling into rudimentary errors about it, and sufficient knowledge of lawyers and lawyers' men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters. Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the son into the line of life from which he was easily to pass into the career where success and fame awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter for the _Morning Herald_, his son, who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, resolved to essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life, two of his most marked characteristics--strength of will, and a determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it thoroughly. The art of short-hand, which he now resolutely set himself to master, was in those days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he had conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But Dickens, whose education no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a reporter of the highest class he needed something besides the knowledge of short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of Dickens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what is not less true than obvious; but he had this one quality of the true lover of reading, that he never professed a familiarity with that of which he knew little or nothing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors' Commons. With this occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years. Once more David Copperfield, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth, will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story, but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of opinion that he had loved particularly wisely; but how well he had loved is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora; for it was as such that, not very chivalrously, he could bring himself to describe her, for the second time, in _Little Dorrit_. Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a newspaper, he had, and not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It was the profession to which--uncommercially--he was attached during so great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a stage of his own, he seemed to be but following an irresistible fascination. His best friend described him to me as "a born actor;" and who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only--those whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is behind them? His love of acting was stronger than himself; and I doubt whether he ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it. "Assumption," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, "has charms for me--I hardly know for how many wild reasons--so delightful that I feel a loss of, oh! I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre and everything which savoured of histrionics with an intensity not even to be imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same passion. He had that "belief in a play" which he so pleasantly described as one of the characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and acting which makes a little separate world of the "quality." One of the staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English tragedian of his age, Macready; one of the delights of his last years was his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No performer, however, was so obscure or so feeble as to be outside the pale of his sympathy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all manner of entertainers and entertainments--from Mr. Vincent Crummles and the more or less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary's horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley's wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickleson the giant; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously applauding a young lady "who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, 'Behold the abazid power of woobad!'" He was unable to sit through a forlorn performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house when he entered, and which "had warmed up in the course of the evening to twelve shillings;" and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as Pantaloon: "Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir--no one knows it better, sir--there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy, sir!--a boy!" Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the streets he first sees in the United States remind him irresistibly of the set-scene in a London pantomime; and at Verona his interest is divided between _Romeo and Juliet_ and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the amphitheatre. What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he achieved as an amateur actor and manager, and in his more than half-dramatic readings. But, the influence of early associations and personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the genius of Frédéric Lemaître, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. "Sound melodrama and farce" were the dramatic species which he affected, and in which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more in the other; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his thoroughness, which extended itself to every detail of performance or make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was preserved for literature. But he had carefully prepared himself for his intended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of the illness of the applicant. Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last--in the year 1831--obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter, and after some earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the famous Whig _Morning Chronicle_, then in its best days under the editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had an opportunity of putting forth the energy that was in him. He shrunk from none of the difficulties which in those days attended the exercise of his craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his death he "held a brief for his brothers" at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund: "I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising; writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew." Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and of half achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When at the close of the parliamentary session of the year 1836 his labours as a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gallery. During this period his naturally keen powers of observation must have been sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which constitutes, perhaps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dickens's experience as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed, in which there was a good deal of infidelity; or, at all events, his determined contempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the mouth of "Thisman" or of "Thatman," and his rooted dislike of the "cheap-jacks" and "national dustmen" whom he discerned among our orators and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words. Moreover, the period of Dickens's most active labours as a reporter was one that succeeded a time of great political excitement; and when men wish thankfully to rest after deeds, words are in season. Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, Dickens had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a writer as a "baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer's clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the _Monthly Magazine_ published a paper which he had dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes "dimmed with joy and pride" the young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, was afterwards reprinted in the _Sketches by Boz_ under the title of _Mr. Minns and his Cousin_, and is laughable enough. His success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February, 1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens used this signature not only as the author of the _Sketches_ and a few other minor productions, but also as "editor" of the _Pickwick Papers_, it is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complaining to his wife: "Boz keeps himself very close." But the _Monthly Magazine_, though warmly welcoming its young contributor's lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the _Evening Chronicle_, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the _Morning Chronicle_ that Dickens should be duly remunerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's Inn--one of those old legal inns which he loved so well--he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the _Sketches by Boz_ printed in the _Evening Chronicle_ were already numerous enough, and their success was sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the _Pickwick Papers_, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens's apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of popularity. As for the _Sketches by Boz_, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it. In their collected form these _Sketches_ modestly described themselves as "illustrative of every-day life and every-day people." Herein they only prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse, the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of Dickens's humour are already here, together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early _Sketches_ the latter is at times strained, but its power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the humour--more especially that of the _Tales_--is not of the most refined sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the bane of "light" journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it, very pardonable under the circumstances, but generally absent from Dickens's later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which _Pickwick_ and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's favourite passions and favourite aversions alike reflect themselves here in small. In the description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its full freshness upon it--however he may pretend at Astley's that his "histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course the gift which these _Sketches_ pre-eminently revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of "the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," was not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets. Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the _Sketches_ may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed the days of coaching; "Honest Tom" no more paces the lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D'Orsay hat; the Hickses of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house dinner-tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to "Satan" Montgomery. But the _Sketches by Boz_ have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to mount. CHAPTER II. FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. [1836-1841.] Even in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the world, had his share of troubles--troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart, and vexations manifold in the way of business. But in the history of his early career as an author the word failure has no place. Not that the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_, published as they were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm; for the public needed two or three months to make up its mind that "Boz" was equal to an effort considerably in advance of his _Sketches_. But when the popularity of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished at the present day. Against the productions of _Pickwick_, and of other works of amusement of which it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby; and twenty years later young men at the university talked nothing but _Pickwick_, and quoted nothing but _Pickwick_, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the world at large an examination paper in _Pickwick_, over which pretentious half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to "describe the common Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory definition of "a red-faced Nixon." No changes in manners and customs have interfered with the hold of the work upon nearly all classes of readers at home; and no translation has been dull enough to prevent its being relished even in countries where all English manners and customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally absurd. So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more than thrice fortunate book, that the wildest legends have grown up as to the history of its origin. The facts, however, as stated by Dickens himself, are few and plain. Attracted by the success of the _Sketches_, Messrs. Chapman & Hall proposed to him that he should write "something" in monthly numbers to serve as a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour; and either the publishers or the artist suggested as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a "Nimrod Club" of unlucky sportsmen. The proposition was at Dickens's suggestion so modified that the plates were "to arise naturally out of the text," the range of the latter being left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle's misfortunes by flood and field hold their place by the side of the philanthropical meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An original was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the hero of the book, and a felicitous name for him soon suggested itself. Only a single number of the serial had appeared when Mr. Seymour's own hand put an end to his life. It is well known that among the applicants for the vacant office of illustrator of the _Pickwick Papers_ was Thackeray--the senior of Dickens by a few months--whose style as a draughtsman would have been singularly unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr. Pickwick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some of Dickens's books, Mr. Hablot Browne ("Phiz") was chosen as illustrator. Some happy hits--such as the figure of Mr. Micawber--apart, the illustrations of Dickens by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, are apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author's fidelity to nature, and on the other, to intensify his unreality. _Oliver Twist_, like the _Sketches_, was illustrated by George Cruikshank, a pencil humourist of no common calibre, but as a rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of his heart. Dickens himself was never so well satisfied with any illustrator as with George Cattermole (_alias_ "Kittenmoles"), a connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hablot Browne in _Master Humphrey's Clock_; in his latest works he resorted to the aid of younger artists, whose reputation has since justified his confidence. The most congenial of the pictorial interpreters of Dickens, in his brightest and freshest humour, was his valued friend John Leech, whose services, together occasionally with those of Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as well as of his faithful Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his Christmas books. The _Pickwick Papers_, of which the issue was completed by the end of 1837, brought in to Dickens a large sum of money, and after a time a handsome annual income. On the whole this has remained the most general favourite of all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that _Pickwick_ defies criticism, but also because the circumstances under which the book was begun and carried on make it preposterous to judge it by canons applicable to its author's subsequent fictions. As the serial proceeded, the interest which was to be divided between the inserted tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, was absorbed by the latter. The rise in the style of the book can almost be measured by the change in the treatment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself. In a later preface, Dickens endeavoured to illustrate this change by the analogy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it was only as the author proceeded that he recognised the capabilities of the character, and his own power of making it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as laughable. Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. Nupkins, there follows a little bit of the idyl between Sam and the pretty housemaid, written with a delicacy that could hardly have been suspected in the chronicler of the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative will be found exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos of which Dickens was afterwards so repeatedly to prove himself master, more especially, of course, in those prison scenes for which some of our older novelists may have furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of humour is not wanting which is content to miss its effect with the less attentive reader; as in this passage concerning the ruined cobbler's confidences to Sam in the Fleet: "The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, _sighed_, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head, and went to sleep too." Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and more of irony into a single word. But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details such as this in view of the broad and universally acknowledged comic effects of this masterpiece of English humour. Its many genuinely comic characters are as broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and as true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison's art. The author's humour is certainly not one which eschews simple in favour of subtle means, or which is averse from occasional desipience in the form of the wildest farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden-party--or rather "public breakfast"--at The Den, Eatanswill; Mr. Pickwick's nocturnal descent, through three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of Miss Tomkins's establishment for young ladies; the _supplice d'un homme_ of Mr. Pott; Mr. Weller junior's love-letter, with notes and comments by Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior's own letter of affliction written by somebody else; the footmen's "swarry" at Bath, and Mr. Bob Sawyer's bachelors' party in the Borough--all these and many other scenes and passages have in them that jovial element of exaggeration which nobody mistakes and nobody resents. Whose duty is it to check the volubility of Mr. Alfred Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness, _quot libras_, of the Fat Boy? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the contagious high spirits of the author lies one of the chief charms of the book. Not, however, that the effect produced is obtained without the assistance of a very vigilant art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many brilliant additions which the author made to his original group of personages. If there is nothing so humorous in the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it anything more pathetic than the relation between him and his master. As for Sam Weller's style of speech, scant justice was done to it by Mr. Pickwick when he observed to Job Trotter, "My man is in the right, although his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and occasionally incomprehensible." The fashion of Sam's gnomic philosophy is at least as old as Theocritus;[1] but the special impress which he has given to it is his own, rudely foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the apophthegms of his father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms in _Oliver Twist_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_ show how enduring a hold the whimsical fancy had taken of its creator. For the rest, the freshness of the book continues the same to the end; and farcical as are some of the closing scenes--those, for instance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the movements of the elder Mr. Weller--there is even here no straining after effect. An exception might perhaps be found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is coarsely contrived; but the fun of the character is in itself neither illegitimate nor unwholesome. It will be observed below that it is the constant harping on the same string, the repeated picturing of professional preachers of religion as gross and greasy scoundrels, which in the end becomes offensive in Dickens. On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bidden farewell to his labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words which he uttered at the table of the ever-hospitable Mr. Wardle at the Adelphi. "'I shall never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice--'I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character; frivolous as my pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me--I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all.'" Of course Mr. Pickwick "filled and drained a bumper" to the sentiment. Indeed, it "snoweth" in this book "of meat and drink." Wine, ale, and brandy abound there, and viands to which ample justice is invariably done--even under Mr. Tupman's heart-rending circumstances at the (now, alas! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something of this is due to the times in which the work was composed, and to the class of readers for which we may suppose it in the first instance to have been intended; but Dickens, though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia of good cheer, besides cherishing the associations which are inseparable from it. At the same time, there is a little too much of it in the _Pickwick Papers_, however well its presence may consort with the geniality which pervades them. It is difficult to turn any page of the book without chancing on one of those supremely felicitous phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit of the whole--that spirit of true humour which calls forth at once merriment, good-will, and charity. In the year 1836, which the commencement of the _Pickwick Papers_ has made memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the full tide of authorship. In February, 1837, the second number of _Bentley's Miscellany_, a new monthly magazine which he had undertaken to edit, contained the opening chapters of his story of _Oliver Twist_. Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to _The Strange Gentleman_, a "comic burletta," or farce, in two acts, founded upon the tale in the _Sketches_ called _The Great Winglebury Duel_. It ran for seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author's opinion, was "the best thing Harley did." But the adaptation has no special feature distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the effective bustle of the opening. _The Village Coquettes_, an operetta represented at the St. James's Theatre, with music by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort. In this piece Harley took one part, that of "a very small farmer with a very large circle of intimate friends," and John Parry made his _début_ on the London stage in another. To quote any of the songs in this operetta would be very unfair to Dickens.[2] He was not at all depressed by the unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against which he had to set the round declaration of Braham, that there had been "no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since _The Duenna_." As time went on, however, he became anything but proud of his juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their revival. His third and last attempt of this kind, a farce called _The Lamplighter_, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted, having been withdrawn by Macready's wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it into a story printed among the _Picnic Papers_, a collection generously edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy worthy of so distinguished an actor; and, according to his wont, he had even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to forget--_No Thoroughfare_. But the genius of the age, an influence which is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see mentioned among his literary works the _Life of Grimaldi_, which he merely edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten memorials of forgotten greatness. To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short pamphlet entitled _Sunday under Three Heads_, is not without a certain biographical interest. This little book was written with immediate reference to a bill "for the better observance of the Sabbath," which the House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority; and its special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sunday amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunkenness distinguishing what Dickens called a London _Sunday as it is_. His own love of fresh air and brightness intensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London, "gloomy, close, and stale," which he afterwards drew in _Little Dorrit_, he almost seems to hold Sabbatarianism and the weather responsible for one another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it "not comfortable," so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may perhaps have come to recognise the difficulty of arranging an English _Sunday as it might be made_. On the other hand, he may have remembered his youthful fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church, when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the counterpart of _Sunday as Sabbath bills would have it_: describing how "the usual preparations are making for the band in the open air in the afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions invariably close." The _Sketches of Young Gentlemen_, published in the same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier _Sketches by Boz_, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a fortnight, and noted in his diary that "one hundred and twenty-five pounds for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well." The _Sketches of Young Couples_, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a facetious introduction, suggested by her Majesty's own announcement of her approaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent itself. It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production of _Pickwick_, he began his first long continuous story, the _Adventures of Oliver Twist_. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with his later MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits. But here and there the writing shows traces of excitement; for the author's heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength. _Oliver Twist_ was certainly written _with a purpose_, and with one that was afterwards avowed. The author intended to put before his readers--"so long as their speech did not offend the ear"--a picture of "dregs of life," hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fiction, Fielding in particular, as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens, however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already relished _Paul Clifford_, and which was not to be debarred from exciting itself over _Jack Sheppard_, begun before _Oliver Twist_ had been completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens's purpose was an honest and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the cloud. To that unfailing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the redeeming features in his company of criminals; not only the devotion and the heroism of Nancy, but the irresistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger, and the good-humour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to "plead as earnestly in mitigation of judgment" against him as ever he had done "at the bar for any client he most respected." Other parts of the story were less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police-magistrate, appears to have been a rather hasty portrait of a living original; and the whole picture of Bumble and Bumbledom was certainly a caricature of the working of the new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy's story, and adds to the effect of a marvellously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy's interview with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes--the flight of Sikes, his death at Jacob's Island, and the end of the Jew--the action has an intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from some of the "low" domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author's comic humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types: Bumble and his partner; Noah Claypole, complete in himself, but full of promise for Uriah Heep; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story of _Oliver Twist_ also contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that is weak and (the author of _Endymion_ is to be thanked for the word) "gushy." Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver discreetly "glides" away from the lovers, are barely endurable. But, whatever its shortcomings, _Oliver Twist_ remains an almost unique example of a young author's brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them; and some of its characters will live by the side of Dickens's happiest and most finished creations. Even had a sapient critic been right who declared, during the progress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have worked out "the particular vein of humour which had hitherto yielded so much attractive metal," it would have been worked out to some purpose. After making his readers merry with _Pickwick_, he had thrilled them with _Oliver Twist_; and by the one book as by the other he had made them think better of mankind. But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his hand content with a single task. In April, 1838, several months before the completion of _Oliver Twist_, the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_ appeared; and while engaged upon the composition of these books he contributed to _Bentley's Miscellany_, of which he retained the editorship till the early part of 1839, several smaller articles. Of these, the _Mudfog Papers_ have been recently thought worth reprinting; but even supposing the satire against the Association for the Advancement of Everything to have not yet altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day before yesterday refuses to be revived. _Nicholas Nickleby_, published in twenty numbers, was the labour of many months, but was produced under so great a press of work that during the whole time of publication Dickens was never a single number in advance. Yet, though not one of the most perfect of his books, it is indisputably one of the most thoroughly original, and signally illustrates the absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel of the present. Dickens was never so strong as when he produced from the real; and in this instance--starting, no doubt, with a healthy prejudice--so carefully had he inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of which Dotheboys Hall was to be held up as the infamous type, that there seems to be no difficulty in identifying the site of the very school itself; while the Portsmouth Theatre is to the full as accurate a study as the Yorkshire school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers Cheeryble were real personages well known in Manchester,[3] where even the original of Tim Linkinwater still survives in local remembrance. On the other hand, with how conscious a strength has the author's imaginative power used and transmuted his materials: in the Squeers family creating a group of inimitable grotesqueness; in their humblest victim Smike giving one of his earliest pictures of those outcasts whom he drew again and again with such infinite tenderness; and in Mr. Vincent Crummles and his company, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but a kindly one, for all times! In a third series of episodes in this book, it is universally agreed that the author has no less conspicuously failed. Dickens's first attempt to picture the manners and customs of the aristocracy certainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people. Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed--who is allowed to redeem his character in the end--is not without touches resembling nature. "'I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile, 'such an interest in the drama.' "'Ye-es. It's very interasting,' replied Lord Frederick. "'I'm always ill after Shakspeare,' said Mrs. Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.' "'Ye-es,' replied Lord Frederick. 'He was a clayver man.'" But Sir Mulberry Hawk is a kind of scoundrel not frequently met with in polite society; his henchmen Pluck and Pyke have the air of "followers of Don John," and the enjoyments of the "trainers of young noblemen and gentlemen" at Hampton races, together with the riotous debauch which precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct from the transpontine stage. The fact is that Dickens was here content to draw his vile seducers and wicked orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a thousand times before, and will draw them a thousand times again. Much of the hero's talk is of the same conventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be more genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which finds its outlet in the most unexpected channels, but nowhere so resistlessly as in the invertebrate talk of Mrs. Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary prototype in a character of Miss Austen's; but even if Mrs. Nickleby was founded on Miss Bates, in _Emma_, she left her original far behind. Miss Bates, indeed, is verbose, roundabout, and parenthetic; but the widow never deviates into coherence. _Nicholas Nickleby_ shows the comic genius of its author in full activity, and should be read with something of the buoyancy of spirit in which it was written, and not with a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a scamp as Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens's "monstrous failures." At the same time this book displays the desire of the author to mould his manner on the old models. The very title has a savour of Smollett about it; the style has more than one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of Goldsmith; and the general method of the narrative resembles that of our old novelists and their Spanish and French predecessors. Partly for this reason, and partly, no doubt, because of the rapidity with which the story was written, its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dickens's earlier works. Coincidences are repeatedly employed to help on the action; and the _dénoûment_, which, besides turning Mr. Squeers into a thief, reveals Ralph Nickleby as the father of Smike, is oppressively complete. As to the practical aim of the novel, the author's word must be taken for the fact that "Mr. Squeers and his school were faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible." The exposure, no doubt, did good in its way, though perhaps Mr. Squeers, in a more or less modified form, has proved a tougher adversary to overcome than Mrs. Gamp. During these years Dickens was chiefly resident in the modest locality of Doughty Street, whither he had moved his household from the "three rooms," "three storeys high," in Furnival's Inn, early in 1837. It was not till the end of 1839 that he took up his abode, further west, in a house which he came to like best among all his London habitations, in Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. His town life was, however, varied by long rustications at Twickenham and at Petersham, and by sojourns at the sea-side, of which he was a most consistent votary. He is found in various years of his life at Brighton, Dover, and Bonchurch--where he liked his neighbours better than he liked the climate; and in later years, when he had grown accustomed to the Continent, he repeatedly domesticated himself at Boulogne. But already in 1837 he had discovered the little sea-side village, as it then was, which for many years afterwards became his favourite holiday retreat, and of which he would be the _genius loci_, even if he had not by a special description immortalised _Our English Watering-place_. Broadstairs--whose afternoon tranquillity even to this day is undisturbed except by the Ethiopians on their tramp from Margate to Ramsgate--and its constant visitor, are thus described in a letter written to an American friend in 1843: "This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon--in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay--our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big light-house called the North Foreland on a hill beyond the village, a severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high-water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz." Not a few houses at Broadstairs may boast of having been at one time or another inhabited by him and his. Of the long-desired Fort House, however, which local perverseness triumphantly points out as the original of _Bleak House_ (no part even of _Bleak House_ was written there, though part of _David Copperfield_ was), he could not obtain possession till 1850. As like Bleak House as it is like Chesney Wold, it stands at the very highest end of the place, looking straight out to sea, over the little harbour and its two colliers, with a pleasant stretch of cornfields leading along the cliff towards the light-house which Dickens promised Lord Carlisle should serve him as a night-light. But in 1837 Dickens was content with narrower quarters. The "long small procession of sons" and daughters had as yet only begun with the birth of his eldest boy. His life was simple and full of work, and occasional sea-side or country quarters, and now and then a brief holiday tour, afforded the necessary refreshment of change. In 1837 he made his first short trip abroad, and in the following year, accompanied by Mr. Hablot Browne, he spent a week of enjoyment in Warwickshire, noting in his _Remembrancer_: "Stratford; Shakspeare; the birthplace; visitors, scribblers, old woman (query whether she knows what Shakspeare did), etc." Meanwhile, among his truest home enjoyments were his friendships. They were few in number, mostly with men for whom, after he had once taken them into his heart, he preserved a life-long regard. Chief of all these were John Forster and Daniel Maclise, the high-minded painter, to whom we owe a charming portrait of his friend in this youthful period of his life. Losing them, he afterwards wrote when absent from England, was "like losing my arms and legs, and dull and tame I am without you." Besides these, he was at this time on very friendly terms with William Harrison Ainsworth, who succeeded him in the editorship of the _Miscellany_, and concerning whom he exclaimed in his _Remembrancer_: "Ainsworth has a fine heart." At the close of 1838, Dickens, Ainsworth, and Forster constituted themselves a club called the Trio, and afterwards the Cerberus. Another name frequent in the _Remembrancer_ entries is that of Talfourd, a generous friend, in whom, as Dickens finely said after his death, "the success of other men made as little change as his own." All these, together with Stanfield, the Landseers, Douglas Jerrold, Macready, and others less known to fame, were among the friends and associates of Dickens's prime. The letters, too, remaining from this part of Dickens's life, have all the same tone of unaffected frankness. With some of his intimate friends he had his established epistolary jokes. Stanfield, the great marine painter, he pertinaciously treated as a "very salt" correspondent, communications to whom, as to a "block-reeving, main-brace-splicing, lead-heaving, ship-conning, stun'sail-bending, deck-swabbing son of a sea-cook," needed garnishing with the obscurest technicalities and strangest oaths of his element. (It is touching to turn from these friendly buffooneries to a letter written by Dickens many years afterward--in 1867--and mentioning a visit to "poor dear Stanfield," when "it was clear that the shadow of the end had fallen on him.... It happened well that I had seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea effect, of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it under his pillow.") Macready, after his retirement from the stage, is bantered on the score of his juvenility with a pertinacity of fun recalling similar whimsicalities of Charles Lamb's; or the jest is changed, and the great London actor in his rural retreat is depicted in the character of a country gentleman strange to the wicked ways of the town. As in the case of many delightful letter-writers, the charm of Dickens as a correspondent vanishes so soon as he becomes self-conscious. Even in his letters to Lady Blessington and Mrs. Watson, a striving after effect is at times perceptible; the homage rendered to Lord John Russell is not offered with a light hand; on the contrary, when writing to Douglas Jerrold, Dickens is occasionally so intent upon proving himself a sound Radical that his vehemence all but passes into a shriek. In these early years, at all events, Dickens was happy in the society of his chosen friends. His favourite amusements were a country walk or ride with Forster, or a dinner at Jack Straw's Castle with him and Maclise. He was likewise happy at home. Here, however, in the very innermost circle of his affections, he had to suffer the first great personal grief of his life. His younger sister-in-law, Miss Mary Hogarth, had accompanied him and his wife into their new abode in Doughty Street, and here, in May, 1837, she died, at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the loss of this dearly-loved girl, "young, beautiful, and good." "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her death, "that, waking or sleeping, I have never lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall." "If," ran part of his first entry in the Diary which he began on the first day of the following year, "she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one day, through his mercy, rejoin her." It was not till, in after years, it became necessary to abandon the project, that he ceased to cherish the intention of being buried by her side, and through life the memory of her haunted him with strange vividness. At the Niagara Falls, when the spectacle of Nature in her glory had produced in him, as he describes it, a wondrously tranquil and happy peace of mind, he longed for the presence of his dearest friends, and "I was going to add, what would I give if the dear girl, whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to come so far along with us; but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight." "After she died," he wrote to her mother in May, 1843, "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other. And so it did." Once he dreamt of her, when travelling in Yorkshire; and then, after an interval of many months, as he lay asleep one night at Genoa, it seemed to him as if her spirit visited him and spoke to him in words which he afterwards precisely remembered, when he had awaked, with the tears running down his face. He never forgot her, and in the year before he died he wrote to his friend: "She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is!" In a word, she was the object of the one great imaginative passion of his life. Many have denied that there is any likeness to nature in the fictitious figure in which, according to the wont of imaginative workers, he was irresistibly impelled to embody the sentiment with which she inspired him; but the sentiment itself became part of his nature, and part of his history. When in writing the _Old Curiosity Shop_ he approached the death of Little Nell, he shrunk from the task: "Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story." The _Old Curiosity Shop_ has long been freed from the encumbrances which originally surrounded it, and there is little except biographical interest in the half-forgotten history of _Master Humphrey's Clock_. Early in the year 1840, his success and confidence in his powers induced him to undertake an illustrated weekly journal, in which he depended solely on his own name, and, in the first instance, on his own efforts, as a writer. Such was his trust in his versatility that he did not think it necessary even to open with a continuous story. Perhaps the popularity of the _Pickwick Papers_ encouraged him to adopt the time-honoured device of wrapping up several tales in one. In any case, his framework was in the present instance too elaborate to take hold of the public mind, while the characters introduced into it possessed little or nothing of the freshness of their models in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. In order to re-enforce Master Humphrey, the deaf gentleman, and the other original members of his benevolent conclave, he hereupon resorted to a natural, but none the less unhappy, expedient. Mr. Pickwick was revived, together with Sam Weller and his parent; and a Weller of the third generation was brought on the stage in the person of a precocious four-year-old, "standing with his little legs very wide apart as if the top-boots were familiar to them, and actually winking upon the house-keeper with his infant eye, in imitation of his grandfather." A laugh may have been raised at the time by this attempt, from which, however, every true Pickwickian must have turned sadly away. Nor was there much in the other contents of these early numbers to make up for the disappointment. As, therefore, neither "Master Humphrey's Clock" nor "Mr. Weller's Watch" seemed to promise any lasting success, it was prudently determined that the story of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, of which the first portion had appeared in the fourth number of the periodical, should run on continuously; and when this had been finished, a very short "link" sufficed to introduce another story, _Barnaby Rudge_, with the close of which _Master Humphrey's Clock_ likewise stopped. In the _Old Curiosity Shop_, though it abounds in both grotesquely terrible and boisterously laughable effects, the key-note is that of an idyllic pathos. The sense of this takes hold of the reader at the very outset, as he lingers over the picture, with which the first chapter concludes, of little Nell asleep through the solitary night in the curiosity-dealer's warehouse. It retains possession of him as he accompanies the innocent heroine through her wanderings, pausing with her in the church-yard where all is quiet save the cawing of the satirical rooks, or in the school-master's cottage by the open window, through which is borne upon the evening air the distant hum of the boys at play upon the green, while the poor school-master holds in his hand the small cold one of the little scholar that has fallen asleep. Nor is it absent to the last when Nell herself lies at rest in her little bed. "Her little bird--a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed--was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and motionless forever." The hand which drew Little Nell afterwards formed other figures not less affecting, but none so essentially poetic. Like many such characters, this requires, for its full appreciation, a certain tension of the mind; and those who will not, or cannot, pass in some measure out of themselves, will be likely to tire of the conception, or to declare its execution artificial. Curiously enough, not only was Little Nell a favourite of Landor, a poet and critic utterly averse from meretricious art, but she also deeply moved the sympathy of Lord Jeffrey, who at least knew his own mind, and spoke it in both praise and blame. As already stated, Dickens only with difficulty brought himself to carry his story to its actual issue, though it is hard to believe that he could ever have intended a different close from that which he gave to it. His whole heart was in the story, nor could he have consoled himself by means of an ordinary happy ending. Dickens's comic humour never flowed in a pleasanter vein than in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, and nowhere has it a more exquisite element of pathos in it. The shock-headed, red-cheeked Kit is one of the earliest of those ungainly figures who speedily find their way into our affections--the odd family to which Mr. Toots, Tom Pinch, Tommy Traddles, and Joe Gargery alike belong. But the triumph of this serio-comic form of art in the _Old Curiosity Shop_ is to be found in the later experiences of Dick Swiveller, who seems at first merely a more engaging sample of the Bob Sawyer species, but who ends by endearing himself to the most thoughtless laugher. Dick Swiveller and his protégée have gained a lasting place among the favourite characters of English fiction, and the privations of the Marchioness have possibly had a result which would have been that most coveted by Dickens--that of helping towards the better treatment of a class whose lot is among the dust and ashes, too often very bitter ashes, of many households. Besides these, the story contains a variety of incidental characters of a class which Dickens never grew weary of drawing from the life. Messrs. Codlin, Short, and Company, and the rest of the itinerant showmen, seem to have come straight from the most real of country fairs; and if ever a _troupe_ of comedians deserved pity on their wanderings through a callous world, it was the most diverting and the most dismal of all the mountebanks that gathered round the stew of tripe in the kitchen of The Jolly Sandboys--Jerry's performing dogs. "'Your people don't usually travel in character, do they?' said Short, pointing to the dresses of the dogs. 'It must come expensive if they do.' "'No,' replied Jerry--'no, it's not the custom with us. But we've been playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new wardrobe at the races, so I didn't think it worth while to stop to undress. Down, Pedro!'" In addition to these public servants we have a purveyor of diversion--or instruction--of an altogether different stamp. "Does the caravan look as if _it_ know'd em?" indignantly demands the proprietress of Jarley's wax-work, when asked whether she is acquainted with the men of the Punch show. She too is drawn, or moulded, in the author's most exuberant style of fun, together with _her_ company, in which "all the gentlemen were very pigeon-breasted and very blue about the beards, and all the ladies were miraculous figures; and all the ladies and all the gentlemen were looking intensely nowhere, and staring with extraordinary earnestness at nothing." In contrast with these genial products of observation and humour stand the grotesquely hideous personages who play important parts in the machinery of the story, the vicious dwarf Quilp and the monstrous virago Sally Brass. The former is among the most successful attempts of Dickens in a direction which was full of danger for him, as it is for all writers; the malevolent little demon is so blended with his surroundings--the description of which forms one of the author's most telling pictures of the lonely foulnesses of the river-side--that his life seems natural in its way, and his death a most appropriate ending to it. Sally Brass, "whose accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly legal kind," is less of a caricature, and not without a humorously redeeming point of feminine weakness; yet the end of her and her brother is described at the close of the book with almost tragic earnestness. On the whole, though the poetic sympathy of Dickens when he wrote this book was absorbed in the character of his heroine, yet his genius rarely asserted itself after a more diversified fashion. Of _Barnaby Rudge_, though in my opinion an excellent book after its kind, I may speak more briefly. With the exception of _A Tale of Two Cities_, it was Dickens's only attempt in the historical novel. In the earlier work the relation between the foreground and background of the story is skilfully contrived, and the colouring of the whole, without any elaborate attempt at accurate fidelity, has a generally true and harmonious effect. With the help of her portrait by a painter (Mr. Frith) for whose pictures Dickens had a great liking, Dolly Varden has justly taken hold of the popular fancy as a charming type of a pretty girl of a century ago. And some of the local descriptions in the early part of the book are hardly less pleasing: the Temple in summer, as it was before the charm of Fountain Court was destroyed by its guardians; and the picturesque comforts of the Maypole Inn, described beforehand, by way of contrast to the desecration of its central sanctuary. The intrigue of the story is fairly interesting in itself, and the gentlemanly villain who plays a principal part in it, though, as usual, over-elaborated, is drawn with more skill than Dickens usually displays in such characters. After the main interest of the book has passed to the historical action of the George Gordon riots, the story still retains its coherence, and, a few minor improbabilities apart, is successfully conducted to its close. No historical novel can altogether avoid the banalities of the species; and though Dickens, like all the world, had his laugh at the late Mr. G. P. R. James, he is constrained to introduce the historical hero of the tale, with his confidential adviser, and his attendant, in the familiar guise of three horsemen. As for Lord George Gordon himself, and the riots of which the responsibility remains inseparable from his unhappy memory, the representation of them in the novel sufficiently accords both with poetic probability and with historical fact. The poor lord's evil genius, indeed, Gashford--who has no historical original--tries the reader's sense of verisimilitude rather hard; such converts are uncommon except among approvers. The Protestant hangman, on the other hand, has some slight historical warranty; but the leading part which he is made to play in the riots, and his resolution to go any lengths "in support of the great Protestant principle of hanging," overshoot the mark. It cannot be said that there is any substantial exaggeration in the description of the riots; thus, the burning of the great distiller's house in Holborn is a well-authenticated fact; and there is abundant vigour in the narrative. Repetition is unavoidable in treating such a theme, but in _Barnaby Rudge_ it is not rendered less endurable by mannerism, nor puffed out with rhetoric. One very famous character in this story was, as personages in historical novels often are, made up out of two originals.[4] This was Grip the Raven, who, after seeing the idiot hero of the tale safe through his adventures, resumed his addresses on the subject of the kettle to the horses in the stable; and who, "as he was a mere infant when Barnaby was gray, has very probably gone on talking to the present time." In a later preface to _Barnaby Rudge_, Dickens, with infinite humour, related his experiences of the two originals in question, and how he had been ravenless since the mournful death before the kitchen fire of the second of the pair, the _Grip_ of actual life. This occurred in the house at Devonshire Terrace, into which the family had moved two years before (in 1839). As Dickens's fame advanced his circle of acquaintances was necessarily widened; and in 1841 he was invited to visit Edinburgh, and to receive there the first great tribute of public recognition which had been paid to him. He was entertained with great enthusiasm at a public banquet, voted the freedom of the city, and so overwhelmed with hospitalities that, notwithstanding his frank pleasure in these honours, he was glad to make his escape at last, and refreshed himself with a tour in the Highlands. These excitements may have intensified in him a desire which had for some time been active in his mind, and which in any case would have been kept alive by an incessant series of invitations. He had signed an agreement with his publishers for a new book before this desire took the shape of an actual resolution. There is no great difficulty in understanding why Dickens made up his mind to go to America, and thus to interrupt for the moment a course of life and work which was fast leading him on to great heights of fame and fortune. The question of international copyright alone would hardly have induced him to cross the seas. Probably he felt instinctively that to see men and cities was part of the training as well as of the recreation which his genius required. Dickens was by nature one of those artists who when at work always long to be in sympathy with their public, and to know it to be in sympathy with them. And hitherto he had not met more than part of his public of readers face to face. CHAPTER III. STRANGE LANDS. [1842-1847.] A journey across the Atlantic in midwinter is no child's-play even at the present day, when, bad though their passage may have been, few people would venture to confess doubts, as Dickens did, concerning the safety of such a voyage by steam in heavy weather. The travellers--for Dickens was accompanied by his wife--had an exceptionally rough crossing, the horrors of which he has described in his _American Notes_. His powers of observation were alive in the midst of the lethargy of sea-sickness, and when he could not watch others he found enough amusement in watching himself. At last, on January 28, 1842, they found themselves in Boston harbour. Their stay in the United States lasted about four months, during which time they saw Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Then they passed by Niagara into Canada, and after a pleasant visit to Montreal, diversified by private theatricals with the officers there, were safe at home again in July. Dickens had met with an enthusiastic welcome in every part of the States where he had not gone out of the way of it; in New York, in particular, he had been fêted, with a fervour unique even in the history of American enthusiasms, under the resounding title of "the Guest of the Nation." Still, even this imposed no moral obligation upon him to take the advice tendered to him in America, and to avoid writing about that country--"we are so very suspicious." On the other hand, whatever might be his indignation at the obstinate unwillingness of the American public to be moved a hair's-breadth by his championship of the cause of international copyright,[5] this failure could not, in a mind so reasonable as his, have outweighed the remembrance of the kindness shown to him and to his fame. But the truth seems to be that he had, if not at first, at least very speedily, taken a dislike to American ways which proved too strong for him to the last. In strange lands, most of all in a country which, like the United States, is not in the least ashamed to be what it is, travellers are necessarily at the outset struck by details; and Dickens's habit of minute observation was certain not to let him lose many of them. He was neither long enough in the country to study very closely, nor was it in his way to ponder very deeply, the problems involved in the existence of many of the institutions with which he found fault. Thus, he was indignant at the sight of slavery, and even ventured to "tell a piece of his mind" on the subject to a judge in the South; but when, twenty years later, the great struggle came, at the root of which this question lay, his sympathies were with the cause of disunion and slavery in its conflict with the "mad and villanous" North. In short, his knowledge of America and its affairs was gained in such a way and under such circumstances as to entitle him, if he chose, to speak to the vast public which he commanded as an author of men and manners as observed by him; but he had no right to judge the destinies and denounce the character of a great people on evidence gathered in the course of a holiday tour. Nor, indeed, did the _American Notes_, published by him after his return home, furnish any serious cause of offence. In an introductory chapter, which was judiciously suppressed, he had taken credit for the book as not having "a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composition." Indeed, the contents were rather disappointing from their meagreness. The author showed good taste in eschewing all reference to his personal reception, and good judgment in leaving the copyright question undiscussed. But though his descriptions were as vivid as usual--whether of the small steamboat, "of about half a pony power," on the Connecticut river, or of the dismal scenery on the Mississippi, "great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!"--and though some of the figure-sketches were touched off with the happiest of hands, yet the public, even in 1842, was desirous to learn something more about America than this. It is true that Dickens had, with his usual conscientiousness, examined and described various interesting public institutions in the States--prisons, asylums, and the like; but the book was not a very full one; it was hardly anything but a sketch-book, with more humour, but with infinitely less poetic spirit, than the _Sketch-book_ of the illustrious American author whose friendship had been one of the chief personal gains of Dickens's journey. The _American Notes_, for which the letters to Forster had furnished ample materials, were published in the year of Dickens's return, after he had refreshed himself with a merry Cornish trip in the company of his old friend, and his two other intimates, "Stanny" and "Mac." But he had not come home, as he had not gone out, to be idle. On the first day of the following year, 1843, appeared the first number of the story which was to furnish the real _casus discriminis_ between Dickens and the enemies, as well no doubt as a very large proportion of the friends, whom he had left behind him across the water. The American scenes in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ did not, it is true, begin till the fifth number of the story; nor is it probable from the accounts of the sale, which was much smaller than Dickens had expected, that these particular episodes at first produced any strong feeling in the English public. But the merits of the book gradually obtained for it a popularity at home which has been surpassed by that of but one or two other of Dickens's works; and in proportion to this popularity was the effect exercised by its American chapters. What that effect has been, it would be hypocrisy to question. Dickens, it is very clear, had been unable to resist the temptation of at once drawing upon the vast addition to his literary capital as a humourist. That the satire of many of the American scenes in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is, as satire, not less true than telling, it needs but a small acquaintance with American journalism and oratory even at the present day to perceive; and the heartrending history of Eden, as a type of some of the settlements "vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope," at least had the warrant of something more than hearsay and a look in passing. Nor, as has already been observed, would it have been in accordance either with human nature, or with the fitness of things, had Dickens allowed his welcome in America to become to him (as he termed it in the suppressed Preface to the _Notes_) "an iron muzzle disguised beneath a flower or two." But the frankness, to say the least, of the mirror into which he now invited his late hosts to gaze was not likely to produce grateful compliments to its presenter, nor was the effect softened by the despatch with which this _souvenir_ of the "guest of the nation" was pressed upon its attention. No doubt it would have been easy to reflect that only the evil, not the good, sides of social life in America were held up to derision and contempt, and that an honourable American journalist had no more reason to resent the portraiture of Mr. Jefferson Brick than a virtuous English paterfamilias had to quarrel with that of Mr. Pecksniff. Unfortunately, offence is usually taken where offence is meant; and there can be little doubt as to the _animus_ with which Dickens had written. Only two months after landing at Boston Dickens had declared to Macready, that "however much he liked the ingredients of this great dish, he could not but say that the dish itself went against the grain with him, and that he didn't like it." It was not, and could not be, pleasant for Americans to find the "_New York Sewer_, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed," introduced as the first expression of "the bubbling passions of their country;" or to be certified, apropos of a conversation among American "gentlemen" after dinner, that dollars, and dollars only, at the risk of honesty and honour, filled their souls. "No satirist," Martin Chuzzlewit is told by a candid and open-minded American, "could, I believe, breathe this air." But satire in such passages as these borders too closely on angry invective; and neither the irresistible force nor the earnest pathos of the details which follow can clear away the suspicion that at the bottom lay a desire to depreciate. Nor was the general effect of the American episodes in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ materially modified by their conclusion, to which, with the best of intentions, the author could not bring himself to give a genuinely complimentary turn. The Americans did not like all this, and could not be expected to like it. The tone of the whole satire was too savage, and its tenor was too hopelessly one-sided, for it to pass unresented; while much in it was too near the truth to glance off harmless. It is well known that in time Dickens came himself to understand this. Before quitting America, in 1868, he declared his intention to publish in every future edition of his _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_ his testimony to the magnanimous cordiality of his second reception in the States, and to the amazing changes for the better which he had seen everywhere around him during his second sojourn in the country. But it is not likely that the postscript, all the more since it was added under circumstances so honourable to both sides, has undone, or will undo, the effect of the text. Very possibly the Americans may, in the eyes of the English people as well as in their own, cease to be chargeable with the faults and foibles satirised by Dickens; but the satire itself will live, and will continue to excite laughter and loathing, together with the other satire of the powerful book to which it belongs. For in none of his books is that power, which at times filled their author himself with astonishment, more strikingly and abundantly revealed than in _The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit_. Never was his inventive force more flexible and more at his command; yet none of his books cost him more hard work. The very names of hero and novel were only the final fortunate choice out of a legion of notions; though "Pecksniff" as well as "Charity" and "Mercy" ("not unholy names, I hope," said Mr. Pecksniff to Mrs. Todgers) were first inspirations. The MS. text too is full of the outward signs of care. But the author had his reward in the general impression of finish which is conveyed by this book as compared with its predecessors; so that _Martin Chuzzlewit_ may be described as already one of the masterpieces of Dickens's maturity as a writer. Oddly enough, the one part of the book which moves rather heavily is the opening chapter, an effort in the mock-heroic, probably suggested by the author's eighteenth century readings. A more original work, however, than _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was never composed, or one which more freshly displays the most characteristic qualities of its author's genius. Though the actual construction of the story is anything but faultless--for what could be more slender than the thread by which the American interlude is attached to the main action, or more wildly improbable than the hazardous stratagem of old Martin upon which that action turns?--yet it is so contrived as to fulfil the author's avowed intention of exhibiting under various forms the evil and the folly of selfishness. This vice is capable of both serious and comic treatment, and commended itself in each aspect to Dickens as being essentially antagonistic to his moral and artistic ideals of human life. A true comedy of humours thus unfolded itself with the progress of his book, and one for which the types had not been fetched from afar: "Your homes the scene; yourselves the actors here," had been the motto which he had at first intended to put upon his title-page. Thus, while in "the old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son" selfishness is cultivated as a growth excellent in itself, and the son's sentiment, "Do other men, for they would do you," is applauded by his admiring father, in young Martin the vice rather resembles a weed strong and rank, yet not so strong but that it gives way at last before a manly endeavour to uproot it. The character of the hero, though very far from heroic, is worked out with that reliance upon the fellow-feeling of candid readers which in our great novelists of the eighteenth century has obtained sympathy for much less engaging personages. More especially is the young man's loss of self-respect in the season of his solitary wretchedness depicted with admirable feeling. It would not, I think, be fanciful to assert that in this story Dickens has with equal skill distinguished between two species of unselfishness. Mark Tapley's is the actively unselfish nature, and though his reiteration of his guiding motive is wearisome and occasionally absurd, yet the power of coming out jolly under unpropitious circumstances is a genuinely English ideal of manly virtue. Tom Pinch's character, on the other hand, is unselfish from innate sweetness; and never has the art of Dickens drawn a type which, while closely approaching the border-line of the grotesque, is yet so charmingly true to nature. Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in this book, but all the others pale before the immortal presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced to an original in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own legs has been most properly vindicated against any supposition of likeness to the different type, the subject of Leigh Hunt's _Monthly Nurse_--a paper, by-the-way, distinguished by shrewdness as well as feeling. Imagination has never taken bolder flights than those requisite for the development of Mrs. Gamp's mental processes: "'And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I wonder? Goodness me!' cried Mrs. Gamp. "'What boat did you want?' asked Ruth. "'The Ankworks package,' Mrs. Gamp replied. 'I will not deceive you, my sweet. Why should I?' "'That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,' said Ruth. "'And I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do!' cried Mrs. Gamp, appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous aspiration." A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed in order to fix in distinct forms the peculiarities of her diction, nay, to sustain the unique rhythm of her speech: "'I says to Mrs. Harris,' Mrs. Gamp continued, 'only t' other day, the last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian's Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, "Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all"--"Say not the words, Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case."'" Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to be such that she has been the death of her sisterhood in a great part (to say the least) of our hospital wards and sick-rooms; and as for her oddities of tongue, they are, with the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type of all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, laundresses, and single gentlemen's house-keepers. Compared with her, even her friend and patron, Mr. Mould, and her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the book the low company at Todgers's and the fine company at Mr. Tigg Montague's sink into insignificance. The aged Chuffey is a grotesque study of a very different kind, of which the pathos never loses itself in exaggeration. As for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of grotesque as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers's, he is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest comic type, while at the same time one of the truest, among the innumerable reproductions in English imaginative literature of our favourite national vice--hypocrisy. His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood: "Mr. Pinch," he cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine and captain's biscuits, "if you spare the bottle, we shall quarrel!" His understanding with his daughters is the very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty "that in all he does he has his purpose straight and full before him." And he is a man who understands the times as well as the land in which he lives; for, as M. Taine has admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been full of religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a humanitarian philosopher. Comic art has never more successfully fulfilled its highest task after its truest fashion than in this picture of the rise and fall of a creature who never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to attest the exuberance of its author's genius. The kindly poetic spirit of the Christmas books breathes in sweet Ruth Pinch; and the tragic power of the closing chapters of _Oliver Twist_ is recalled by the picture of Jonas before and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely descriptive passages, though in none of his previous stories had Dickens so completely mastered the secret of describing scenery and weather in their relation to his action or his characters. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ran its course of twenty monthly numbers; but already a week or two before the appearance of the first of these, Dickens had bestowed upon the public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful _Christmas Books_. Among all his productions perhaps none connected him so closely, and as it were personally, with his readers. Nor could it well have been otherwise; since nowhere was he so directly intent upon promoting kindliness of feeling among men--more especially good-will, founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness was, from his point of view, twin-sister to charity; and sulkiness, like selfishness, belonged, as an appropriate ort, to the dust-heap of "Tom Tiddler's Ground." What more fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holiday in which remains a vestige of religious and poetic feeling? Beyond all doubt there is much that is tedious in the _cultus_ of Father Christmas, and there was yet more in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet come to look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as part of their democratic inheritance. But that Dickens should constitute himself its chief minister and interpreter was nothing but fit. Already one of the _Sketches_ had commended a Christmas-dinner at which a seat is not denied even to "poor Aunt Margaret;" and Mr. Pickwick had never been more himself than in the Christmas game of Blind-man's-buff at Dingley Dell, in which "the poor relations caught the people who they thought would like it," and, when the game flagged, "got caught themselves." But he now sought to reach the heart of the subject; and the freshness of his fancy enabled him delightfully to vary his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man harm to be reminded in as well as out of season. Dickens's Christmas books were published in the Christmas seasons of 1843-1846, and of 1848. If the palm is to be granted to any one among them above its fellows, few readers would hesitate, I think, to declare themselves in favour of _The Cricket on the Hearth_, as tender and delicate a domestic idyl as any literature can boast. But the informing spirit proper of these productions, the desire to stir up a feeling of benevolence, more especially towards the poor and lowly, nowhere shows itself more conspicuously than in the earliest, _A Christmas Carol in Prose_, and nowhere more combatively than in the second in date, the "Goblin Story" of _The Chimes_. Of the former its author declared that he "wept and laughed and wept again" over it, "and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking thereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night, when all the sober folks had gone to bed." Simple in its romantic design like one of Andersen's little tales, the _Christmas Carol_ has never lost its hold upon a public in whom it has called forth Christmas thoughts which do not all centre on "holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch;" and the Cratchit household, with Tiny Tim, who did not die, are living realities even to those who have not seen Mr. Toole--an actor after Dickens's own heart--as the father of the family, shivering in his half-yard of comforter. In _The Chimes_, composed in self-absorbed solitude at Genoa, he imagined that "he had written a tremendous book, and knocked the _Carol_ out of the field." Though the little work failed to make "the great uproar" he had confidently anticipated, its purpose was certainly unmistakable; but the effect of hard exaggerations such as Mr. Filer and Alderman Cute, and of a burlesque absurdity like Sir Joseph Bowley, was too dreary to be counteracted by the more pleasing passages of the tale. In his novel _Hard Times_ Dickens afterwards reproduced some of the ideas, and repeated some of the artistic mistakes, to be found in _The Chimes_, though the design of the later work was necessarily of a more mixed kind. The Christmas book has the tone of a _doctrinaire_ protest against _doctrinaires_, and, as Forster has pointed out, is manifestly written under the influence of Carlyle. But its main doctrine was one which Dickens lost no opportunity of proclaiming, and which here breaks forth in the form of an indignant appeal by Richard Fern, the outlaw in spite of himself: "Gentlefolks, be not hard upon the poor!" No feeling was more deeply rooted in Dickens's heart than this; nor could he forbear expressing it by invective and satire as well as by humorous and pathetic pictures of his clients, among whom Trotty Veck too takes a representative place. _The Cricket on the Hearth_, as a true work of art, is not troubled about its moral, easily though half-a-dozen plain morals might be drawn from it; a purer and more lightsome creation of the fancy has never been woven out of homespun materials. Of the same imaginative type, though not executed with a fineness so surpassing, is _The Battle of Life_, the treatment of a fancy in which Dickens appears to have taken great pleasure. Indeed, he declared that he was "thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so short a story." As it stands, it is a pretty idyl of resignation, very poetical in tone as well as in conception, though here and there, notwithstanding the complaint just quoted, rather lengthy. It has been conjectured, with much probability, that the success which had attended dramatic versions of Dickens's previous Christmas books caused "those admirable comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley," to be in his mind "when he drew the charming characters of Britain and Clemency Newcome." At all events the pair serve as good old bits of English pottery to relieve the delicate Sèvres sentiment of Grace and Marion. In the last of Dickens's Christmas books, _The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain_, he returns once more to a machinery resembling those of the earliest. But the fancy on which the action turns is here more forced, and the truth which it illustrates is after all only a half-truth, unless taken as part of the greater truth, that the moral conditions of man's life are more easily marred than mended. Once more the strength of the book lies in its humorous side. The picture of the good Milly's humble protégés, the Tetterby family, is to remind us that happiness consists precisely in that which the poor and the rich may alike obtain, but which it is so difficult for the poor, amidst their shifts and shabbiness, to keep fresh and green. Even without the evil influence of an enchanted chemist, it is hard enough for the Mrs. Tetterbys of real life always to be ministering angels to their families; for the hand of every little Tetterby not occasionally to be against the other little Tetterbys, and even for a devoted Johnny's temper never to rise against Moloch. All the more is that to be cherished in the poor which makes them love one another. More than one of these Christmas books, both the humour and the sentiment of which are so peculiarly English, was written on foreign soil. Dickens's general conceptions of life, not less than his literary individuality, had been formed before he became a traveller and sojourner in foreign lands. In Italy, as elsewhere, a man will, in a sense, find only what he takes there. At all events the changed life brought with it for Dickens, though not at once, a refreshment and a brief repose which invigorated him for some of the truest efforts of his genius. His resolution to spend some time on the Continent had not been taken rashly, although it was at least hastened by business disappointments. He seems at this time, as was virtually inevitable, to have seen a good deal of society in London, and more especially to have become a welcome guest of Lady Blessington and Count d'Orsay at Gore House. Moreover, his services were beginning to be occasionally claimed as a public speaker; and altogether he must have found more of his time than he wished slipping through his hands. Lastly, he very naturally desired to see what was to be seen, and to enjoy what was to be enjoyed, by one gifted with a sleepless observation and animated by a genuine love of nature and art. The letters, public and private, which he wrote from Italy, are not among the most interesting productions of his pen; even his humour seems now and then ill at ease in them, and his descriptive power narrow in its range. His eyes were occasionally veiled, as are those of most travellers in quest of "first impressions." Thus I cannot but think his picture of Naples inadequate, and that of its population unjust. Again, although he may have told the truth in asserting that the Eternal City, at first sight, "looked like--I am half afraid to write the word--like LONDON," and although his general description of Rome has been pronounced correct by competent judgment, yet it is impossible to ignore in it the undertone of Bow Bells. On the other hand, not even in his newspaper letters can he be said to fall into affectation; his impressions are never given pretentiously, and are accordingly seldom altogether worthless; while his criticisms of works of art, when offered, are candid and shrewd, besides being invariably his own. Thus, there was never anything truer in its way than the account which he gave to Maclise of his first impressions a few days after his arrival at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, where he found himself settled with his family in July, 1844. He re-christened his abode, the Villa Bagnerello ("it sounds romantic, but Signor Banderello is a butcher hard by"), "the Pink Jail." Here, with abundance of space and time, and with a view from his writing-table of "the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, the blistering hot fort, with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no broader than his own musket, and the sky," he began his _villeggiatura_, and resolving not to know, or to be known where it could be helped, looked round him at his leisure. This looking round very naturally took up some time; for the circuit of Dickens's daily observation was unusually wide. Soon he was seeking winter-quarters in Genoa it self, and by October was established in the Palazzo Peschiere, situate on a height within the walls of the city, and overlooking the whole of it, with the harbour and the sea beyond. "There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence." Even here, however, among fountains and frescoes, it was some time before he could set steadily to work at his Christmas story. At last the bells of Genoa chimed a title for it into his restless ears; and, though longing with a nostalgy that was specially strong upon him at periods of mental excitement for his nightly walks in the London streets, he settled down to his task. I have already described the spirit in which he executed it. No sooner was the writing done than the other half of his double artist-nature was seized with another craving. The rage which possesses authors to read their writings aloud to sympathizing ears, if such can be found, is a well-worn theme of satire; but in Dickens the actor was almost as strong as the author, and he could not withstand the desire to interpret in person what he had written, and to watch its effect with his own eyes and ears. In the first days of November, therefore, he set off from Genoa, and made his way home by Bologna, Venice, Milan, and the Simplon Pass. Of this journey his _Pictures from Italy_ contains the record, including a chapter about Venice, pitched in an unusually poetic key. But not all the memories of all the Doges could have stayed the execution of his set purpose. On the 30th of November he reached London, and on the 2d of December he was reading the _Chimes_, from the proofs, to the group of friends immortalised in Maclise's inimitable sketch. Three days afterwards the reading was repeated to a slightly different audience; and, indeed, it would seem, from an enthusiastic postscript to a letter addressed to his wife, that he had read at least part of the book to Macready on the night before that of the first conclave. The distance was no doubt wide between the intimacy of these friendly readings and the stormy seas of public audiences; but, however unconsciously, the first step had been taken. It may be worth noticing, in connexion with this, that the scheme of a private dramatic performance, which was to occupy much of Dickens's "leisure" in the year following, was proposed for the first time on the occasion of the first reading of the _Chimes_. Before Christmas he was back again in his "Italian bowers." If the strain of his effort in writing the _Chimes_ had been severe, the holiday which followed was long. In the later winter and early spring of 1845 he and the ladies of his family saw Rome and Naples, and in June their Italian life came to an end, and they were in London before the close of the month. Projects of work remained in abeyance until the absorbing fancy of a private play had been realised with an earnestness such as only Dickens could carry into his amusements, and into this particular amusement above all others. The play was _Every Man in his Humour_; the theatre, the little house in Dean Street, of whose chequered fortunes no theatrical history has succeeded in exhausting the memories; and the manager was, of course, "Bobadil," as Dickens now took to signing himself. His joking remark to Macready, that he "thought of changing his present mode of life, and was open to an engagement," was after all not so very wide of the mark. According to the inevitable rule in such things, he and his friends--among whom Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, and Forster were conspicuous--were "induced" to repeat their performance at a larger house for a public charity, and later in the year they played _The Elder Brother_ for Miss Fanny Kelly's benefit. Leigh Hunt, whose opinion, however, could hardly fail to be influenced by the circumstances under which Ben Jonson's comedy was afterwards performed by the amateurs, and who was no longer the youthful Draco of the _News_, afterwards spoke very highly of Dickens's Bobadil. It had "a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has shown." His acting in the farce which followed Leigh Hunt thought "throughout admirable; quite rich and filled up." Christmas, 1845, had passed, and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ had graced the festival, when an altogether new chapter in Dickens's life seemed about to open for him. The experience through which he now passed was one on which his biographer, for reasons easy to guess, has touched very slightly, while his _Letters_ throw no additional light on it at all. Most people, I imagine, would decline to pronounce upon the qualifications requisite in an editor of a great political journal. Yet, literary power of a kind which acts upon the multitude rapidly and powerfully, habits of order so confirmed as to have almost become second nature, and an interest in the affairs of the nation fed by an ardent enthusiasm for its welfare--these would seem to go some way towards making up the list. Of all these qualifications Dickens at various times gave proof, and they sufficed in later years to make him the successful conductor of a weekly journal which aimed at the enlightenment hardly less than at the entertainment of no inconsiderable portion of the British public. But, in the first place, political journalism proper is a craft of which very few men have been known to become masters by intuition, and Dickens had as yet had no real experience of it. His zealous efforts as a reporter can hardly be taken into account here. He had for a short time edited a miscellany of amusement, and had failed to carry beyond a beginning the not very carefully considered scheme of another. Recently, he had resumed the old notion of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ in a different shape; but nothing had come of his projected cheap weekly paper for the present, while its title, "_The Cricket_," was reserved for a different use. Since his reporting days he had, however, now and then appeared among the lighter combatants of political literature. In 1841 he had thrown a few squibs in the _Examiner_ at Sir Robert Peel and the Tories; and from about the same date he had, besides occasionally contributing to the literary and theatrical columns of the same weekly journal, now and then discussed in it subjects of educational or other general interest.[6] Finally, it is stated by Forster that in 1844, when the greatest political struggle of the last generation was approaching its climax, Dickens contributed some articles to the _Morning Chronicle_ which attracted attention and led to negotiations with the editor that arrived at no positive result. If these contributions treated any political questions whatever, they were, with the exception of the few _Examiner_ papers, and of the letters to the _Daily News_ to be mentioned in this chapter, the only articles of this kind which, to my knowledge, he ever wrote. For, from first to last, whether in the days when Oliver Twist suffered under the maladministration of the Poor-law, or in those when Arthur Clennam failed to make an impression upon the Circumlocution Office, politics were with Dickens a sentiment rather than a study or a pursuit. With his habits of application and method, it might have taken but a very short time for him to train himself as a politician; but this short time never actually occurred. There is, however, no reason to suppose that when, in 1841, a feeler was put out by some more or less influential persons at Reading, with regard to his willingness to be nominated for the representation of that borough, he had any reason for declining the proposal besides that which he stated in his replies. He could not afford the requisite expense; and he was determined not to forfeit his independence through accepting Government--by which I hope he means Whig party--aid for meeting the cost of the contest. Still, in 1845, though slack of faith in the "people who govern us," he had not yet become the irreclaimable political sceptic of later days; and without being in any way bound to the Whigs, he had that general confidence in Lord John Russell which was all they could expect from their irregular followers. As yet, however, he had shown no sign of any special aptitude or inclination for political work, though if he addressed himself to questions affecting the health and happiness of the humbler classes, he was certain to bring to them the enthusiasm of a genuine sympathy. And a question of this kind was uppermost in Englishmen's minds in this year 1845, when at last the time was drawing near for the complete abolition of the tax upon the staple article of the poor man's daily food. The establishment of a new London morning paper, on the scale to which those already in existence had attained, was a serious matter in itself; but it seems to have been undertaken in no spirit of diffidence by the projectors and first proprietors of the _Daily News_. With the early history of the experiment I cannot here concern myself; it is, however, an open secret that the rate of expenditure of the new journal was at first on a most liberal, not to say lavish, scale, and that the losses of the proprietors were for many years very large indeed. Established on those principles of Radicalism which, on the whole, it has in both good and evil times consistently maintained, the _Daily News_ was to rise superior to the opportunism, if not to the advertisements, of the _Times_, and to outstrip the cautious steps of the Whig _Morning Chronicle_. Special attention was to be given to those industrial enterprises with which the world teemed in that speculative age, and no doubt also to those social questions affecting the welfare and elevation of the masses and the relations between employers and employed, which were attracting more and more of the public attention. But in the first instance the actual political situation would oblige the new journal to direct the greater part of its energies to one particular question, which had, in truth, already been threshed out by the organs of public opinion, and as to which the time for action had at last arrived. No Liberal journal projected in 1845, and started early in 1846, could fail to concentrate its activity for a time upon the question of the Corn-laws, to which the session of 1846 was to give the death-blow. It is curious enough, on opening the first number of the _Daily News_, dated January 21, 1846, to find one's self transplanted into the midst of one of the most memorable episodes of our more recent political history. The very advertisements of subscriptions to the Anti-Corn-law League, with the good old Manchester names figuring conspicuously among them, have a historic interest; and the report of a disputation on free-trade at Norwich, in which all the hits are made by Mr. Cobden, another report of a great London meeting on the same subject, and some verses concerning the people's want of its bread, probably written by Mr. Charles Mackay, occupy an entire page of the paper. Railway news and accounts of railway meetings fill about the same space; while the foreign news is extremely meagre. There remain the leading articles, four in number--of which three are on the burning question of the day--and the first of a series of _Travelling Letters Written on the Road, by Charles Dickens_ (the Avignon chapter in the _Pictures from Italy_.)[7] The hand of the editor is traceable only in this _feuilleton_ and in the opening article of the new paper. On internal evidence I conclude that this article, which has little to distinguish it from similar manifestoes, unless it be a moderation of tone that would not have suited Captain Shandon, was not written by Dickens alone or unassisted. But his hand is traceable in the concluding paragraphs, which contain the following wordy but spirited assertion of a cause that Dickens lost no opportunity of advocating: "We seek, so far as in us lies, to elevate the character of the Public Press in England. We believe it would attain a much higher position, and that those who wield its powers would be infinitely more respected as a class, and an important one, if it were purged of a disposition to sordid attacks _upon itself_, which only prevails in England and America. We discern nothing in the editorial plural that justifies a gentleman, or body of gentlemen, in discarding a gentleman's forbearance and responsibility, and venting ungenerous spleen against a rival, by a perversion of a great power--a power, however, which is only great so long as it is good and honest. The stamp on newspapers is not like the stamp on universal medicine-bottles, which licenses anything, however false and monstrous; and we are sure this misuse of it, in any notorious case, not only offends and repels right-minded men in that particular instance, but naturally, though unjustly, involves the whole Press, as a pursuit or profession, in the feeling so awakened, and places the character of all who are associated with it at a great disadvantage. "Entering on this adventure of a new daily journal in a spirit of honourable competition and hope of public usefulness, we seek, in our new station, at once to preserve our own self-respect, and to be respected, for ourselves and for it, by our readers. Therefore, we beg them to receive, in this our first number, the assurance that no recognition or interchange of trade abuse, by us, shall be the destruction of either sentiment; and that we intend proceeding on our way, and theirs, without stooping to any such flowers by the roadside." I am unable to say how many days it was after the appearance of this first number that Dickens, or the proprietors of the journal, or, as seems most likely, both sides simultaneously, began to consider the expediency of ending the connexion between them. He was "revolving plans for quitting the paper" on January 30, and resigned his editorship on February 9 following. In the interval, with the exception of two or three more of the _Travelling Letters_, very few signs of his hand appear in the journal. The number of January 24, however, contains an editorial contribution, in the shape of "a new song, but an old story," concerning _The British Lion_, his accomplishment of eating Corn-law Leagues, his principal keeper, _Wan Humbug_, and so forth. This it would be cruel to unearth. A more important indication of a line of writing that his example may have helped to domesticate in the _Daily News_ appears in the number of February 4, which contains a long letter, with his signature, urging the claims of Ragged Schools, and giving a graphic account of his visit to one in Saffron Hill. After he had placed his resignation in the hands of the proprietors, and was merely holding on at his post till the time of his actual withdrawal, he was naturally not anxious to increase the number of his contributions. The _Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers_--which appeared on February 14--is, of course, an echo of the popular cry of the day; but the subtler pathos of Dickens never found its way into his verse. The most important, and so far as I know, the last, of his contributions to the _Daily News_, consisted of a series of three letters (March 9, 13, and 16) on capital punishment. It was a question which much occupied him at various times of his life, and on which it cannot be shown that he really changed his opinions. The letters in the _Daily News_, based in part on the arguments of one of the ablest men of his day, the "unlucky" Mr. Wakefield, are an interesting contribution to the subject; and the first of them, with its Hogarthian sketch of the temptation and fall of Thomas Hocker, Sunday-school teacher and murderer, would be worth reprinting as an example of Dickens's masterly use of the argument _ex concreto_. The few traditions which linger in the _Daily News_ office concerning Dickens as editor of the paper, agree with the conjecture that his labours on its behalf were limited, or very nearly so, to the few pieces enumerated above. Of course there must have been some inevitable business; but of this much may have been taken off his hands by his sub-editor, Mr. W. H. Wills, who afterwards became his _alter ego_ at the office of his own weekly journal and his intimate personal friend. In the days of the first infancy of the _Daily News_, Mr. Britton, the present publisher of that journal, was attached to the editor as his personal office attendant; and he remembers very vividly what little there can have been to remember about Dickens's performance of his functions. His habit, following a famous precedent, was to make up for coming late--usually about half-past ten P.M.--by going away early--usually not long after midnight. There were frequently sounds of merriment, if not of modest revelry, audible from the little room at the office in Lombard Street, where the editor sat in conclave with Douglas Jerrold and one or two other intimates. Mr. Britton is not sure that the work did not sometimes begin _after the editor had left_; but at all events he cannot recollect that Dickens ever wrote anything at the office--that he ever, for instance, wrote about a debate that had taken place in Parliament on the same night. And he sums up his reminiscences by declaring his conviction that Dickens was "not a newspaper man, at least not when in 'the chair.'" And so Dickens seems on this occasion to have concluded; for when, not long after quitting the paper, he republished with additions the _Travelling Letters_ which during his conduct of it had been its principal ornaments, he spoke of "a brief mistake he had made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between himself and his readers, and departing for a moment from his old pursuits." He had been virtually out of "the chair" almost as soon as he had taken it. His successor, but only for a few months, was his friend Forster. Never has captive released made a more eager or a better use of his recovered freedom. Before the summer had fairly set in Dickens had let his house, and was travelling with his family up the Rhine towards Switzerland. This was, I think, Dickens's only passage through Germany, which in language and literature remained a _terra incognita_ to him, while in various ways so well known to his friendly rivals, Lord Lytton and Thackeray. He was on the track of poor Thomas Hood's old journeyings, whose facetious recollections of Rhineland he had some years before reviewed in a spirit of admiration rather for the author than for the book, funny as it is. His point of destination was Lausanne, where he had resolved to establish his household for the summer, and where by the middle of June they were most agreeably settled in a little villa or cottage which did not belie its name of Rosemont, and from which they looked upon the lake and the mighty Alpine chain beyond. If Rome had reminded Dickens of London, the green woods near Lausanne recalled to him his Kentish glades; but he had the fullest sense and the truest enjoyment of the grandeurs of Alpine scenery, and lost no opportunity of becoming acquainted with them. Thus his letters contain an admirable description (not untinged with satire) of a trip to the Great St. Bernard and its convent, many years afterwards reproduced in one of the few enjoyable chapters of the Second Part of _Little Dorrit_. More interesting, however, because more characteristic, is the freshness and candour with which in Switzerland, where by most English visitors the native inhabitants are "taken for granted," he set himself to observe, and, so far as he could, to appreciate, the people among whom he was a temporary resident. His solutions of some of the political difficulties, which were mostly connected with religious differences, at that time rife in Switzerland, are palpably one-sided. But the generosity of spirit which reveals itself in his kindly recognition of the fine qualities of the people around him is akin to what was best and noblest in Dickens. He had, at the same time, been peculiarly fortunate in finding at Lausanne a circle of pleasant acquaintances, to whom he dedicated the Christmas book which he wrote among the roses and the foliage of his lake-side cottage. Of course _The Battle of Life_ was read aloud by its author to so kindly an audience. The day of parting, however, soon came; on the 16th of November _paterfamilias_ had his "several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of children," in travelling order, and soon had safely stowed them away at Paris "in the most preposterous house in the world. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes, does not, exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes; the dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The dining-room"--which in another letter he describes as "mere midsummer madness"--"is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room, but it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery." Here, with the exception of two brief visits to England, paid before his final departure, he spent three months, familiarising himself for the first time of his life with the second of his "Two Cities." Dickens came to know the French language well enough to use it with ease, if not with elegance; and he lost no opportunity, it need hardly be said, of resorting to the best of schools for the purpose. Macready, previously addressed from "Altorf," had made him acquainted with Regnier, of the Théâtre Français, who in his turn had introduced him to the greenroom of the house of Molière. Other theatres were diligently visited by him and Forster, when the latter arrived on a visit; and celebrities were polite and hospitable to their distinguished English _confrère_. With these, however, Dickens was not cosmopolitan enough to consort except in passing; the love of literary society _because_ it is literary society was at no time one of his predilections or foibles. The streets of Paris were to him more than its _salons_, more even than its theatres. They are so to a larger number of Englishmen than that which cares to confess it, but Dickens would have been the last to disown the impeachment. They were the proper sphere for his powers of humorous observation, as he afterwards showed in more than one descriptive paper as true to life as any of his London _Sketches_. And, moreover, he _needed_ the streets for the work which he had in hand. _Dombey and Son_ had been begun at Rosemont, and the first of its twenty monthly numbers had been published in October, 1846. No reader of the book is likely to forget how, after writing the chapter which relates the death of little Paul, Dickens during the greater part of the night wandered restlessly with a heavy heart about the Paris streets. Sooner, however, than he had intended, his residence abroad had to come to a close; and early in 1847 he and his family were again in London. _Dombey and Son_ has, perhaps, been more criticised than any other amongst the stories of its author; and yet it certainly is not the one which has been least admired, or least loved. Dickens himself, in the brief preface which he afterwards prefixed to the story, assumed a half-defiant air which sits ill upon the most successful author, but which occasionally he was tempted to assume. Before condescending to defend the character of Mr. Dombey as in accordance with both probability and experience, he "made so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of correctly observing the characters of men is a rare one." Yet, though the drawing of this character is only one of the points which have been objected against the story, not only did the book at the time of publication far surpass its predecessor in popularity, but it has, I believe, always preserved to itself a special congregation of enthusiastic admirers. Manifestly, this novel is one of its author's most ambitious endeavours. In it, more distinctly even than in _Chuzzlewit_, he has chosen for his theme one of the chief vices of human nature, and has striven to show what pride cannot achieve, what it cannot conquer, what it cannot withstand. This central idea gives to the story, throughout a most varied succession of scenes, a unity of action to be found in few of Dickens's earlier works. On the other hand, _Dombey and Son_ shares with these earlier productions, and with its successor, _David Copperfield_, the freshness of invention and spontaneous flow of both humour and pathos which at times are wanting in the more powerfully conceived and more carefully constructed romances of Dickens's later years. If there be any force at all in the common remark that the most interesting part of the book ends together with the life of little Paul, the censure falls upon the whole design of the author. Little Paul, in something besides the ordinary meaning of the words, was born to die; and though, like the writer, most readers may have dreaded the hour which was to put an end to that frail life, yet in this case there could be no question--such as was possible in the story of Little Nell--of any other issue. Indeed, deep as is the pathos of the closing scene, its beauty is even surpassed by those which precede it. In death itself there is release for a child as for a man, and for those sitting by the pillow of the patient; but it is the gradual approach of death which seems hardest of all for the watchers to bear; it is the sinking of hope which seems even sadder than its extinction. What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a palpitating heart, that was so visibly expressed in him, so plainly seen by so many people? Every heart is softened and every eye dimmed as the innocent child passes on his way to his grave. The hand of God's angel is on him; he is no longer altogether of this world. The imagination which could picture and present this mysterious haze of feeling, through which the narrative moves, half like a reality, half like a dream, is that of a true poet, and of a great one. What even the loss of his son could not effect in Mr. Dombey is to be accomplished in the progress of the story by a yet stronger agency than sorrow. His pride is to be humbled to the dust, where he is to be sought and raised up by the love of his despised and ill-used daughter. Upon the relations between this pair, accordingly, it was necessary for the author to expend the greatest care, and upon the treatment of those relations the criticism to which the character of Mr. Dombey has been so largely subjected must substantially turn. The unfavourable judgments passed upon it have, in my opinion, not been altogether unjust. The problem obviously was to show how the father's cold indifference towards the daughter gradually becomes jealousy, as he finds that upon her is concentrated, first, the love of his innocent little son, and then that of his haughty second wife; and how hereupon this jealousy deepens into hate. But, unless we are to suppose that Mr. Dombey hated his daughter from the first, the disfavour shown by him on her account to young Walter Gay remains without adequate explanation. His dislike of Florence is not manifestly founded upon his jealousy of what Mrs. Chick calls her brother's "infatuation" for her; and the main motives at work in the unhappy man are either not very skilfully kept asunder, or not very intelligibly intermixed. Nor are the later stages of the relations between father and daughter altogether satisfactorily conceived. The momentary yielding of Mr. Dombey, after his "coming home" with his new wife, is natural and touching; but his threat to visit his daughter with the consequences of her step-mother's conduct is sheer brutality. The passage in which Mr. Dombey's ultimatum to Mrs. Dombey is conveyed by him in her presence through a third person is so artificial as to fall not very far short of absurdity. The closing scene which leads to the flight of Florence is undeniably powerful; but it is the development of the relations between the pair in which the art of the author is in my judgment occasionally at fault. As to the general effect of the latter part of the story--or rather of its main plot--which again has been condemned as melodramatic and unnatural, a distinction should be drawn between its incidents and its characters. Neither Edith Dombey nor Mr. Carker is a character of real life. The pride of the former comes very near to bad breeding, and her lapses into sentiment seem artificial lapses. How differently Thackeray would have managed the "high words" between her and her frivolous mother! how differently, for that matter, he _has_ managed a not altogether dissimilar scene in the _Newcomes_ between Ethel Newcome and old Lady Kew! As for Mr. Carker, with his white teeth and glistening gums, who calls his unhappy brother "Spaniel," and contemplates a life of sensual ease in Sicily, he has the semi-reality of the stage. Possibly the French stage had helped to suggest the _scène de la pièce_ between the fugitives at Dijon--an effective situation, but one which many a novelist might have worked out not less skilfully than Dickens. His own master-hand, however, re-asserts itself in the wondrously powerful narrative of Carker's flight and death. Here again he excites terror--as in the same book he had evoked pity--by foreshadowing, without prematurely revealing, the end. We know what the morning is to bring which rises in awful tranquillity over the victim of his own sins; and, as in Turner's wild but powerful picture, the engine made by the hand of man for peaceful purposes seems a living agent of wrath.[8] No other of Dickens's books is more abundantly stocked than this with genuinely comic characters; but nearly all of them, in accordance with the pathetic tone which is struck at the outset, and which never dies out till the story has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. Lord Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment that Dickens should devote so much pains to characters like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably the habit remained with him from his earliest times of authorship, when he had not always distinguished very accurately between the humorous and the _bizarre_. But Polly and the Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her "select infantine boarding-house," and the whole of Doctor Blimber's establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, and up again, in the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., are among the most admirable of all the great humourist's creations. Against this ample provision for her poor little brother's nursing and training Florence has to set but her one Susan Nipper; but she is a host in herself, an absolutely original character among the thousands of _soubrettes_ that are known to comedy and fiction, and one of the best tonic mixtures ever composed out of much humour and not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling flavour of its own; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only upon whom she acts, as their type acted upon her, "like early gooseberries." Of course she has a favourite figure of speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would probably class among the figures "working by surplusage:" "'Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs. Richards, but that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole set.'" Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of "labelling" his characters, as it has been called, by particular tricks or terms of speech; and there is a certain excess in this direction already in _Dombey and Son_, where not only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished forth. But the invention is still so fresh and the play of humour so varied, that this mannerism cannot be said as yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic charm of a peculiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint home over which he mounts guard during the absence of its owner. The nautical colouring and concomitant fun apart--for only Smollett could have drawn Jack Bunsby's fellow, though the character in his hands would have been differently accentuated--Dickens has never approached more nearly to the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in this singularly attractive part of his book. Elsewhere the story passes into that sphere of society in describing which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. But though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot be denied, human nature in the pigments and figments of her hideous old mother; and, to outward appearance at all events, the counterparts of her apoplectic admirer, Major Bagstock, still pace those pavements and promenades which it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is likewise very far from impossible, and is besides extremely delightful--and a good fellow too at bottom, so that the sting of the satire is here taken away. On the other hand, the meeting between the _sacs et parchemins_ at Mr. Dombey's house is quite out of focus. The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant and unpleasant parts and passages. But enough has been said to recall the exuberant creative force, and the marvellous strength of pathos and humour which _Dombey and Son_ proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his powers as a writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his public readings many years afterwards, when he was reciting the adventures of Little Dombey, he narrates that "a very good fellow," whom he noticed in the stalls, could not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often as he thought that Toots was coming on. And just as Toots had become a reality to this good fellow, so Toots and Toots's little friend, and divers other personages in this story, have become realities to half the world that reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What higher praise could be given to this wonderful book? Of all the works of its author none has more powerfully and more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to us from the aspect of our own streets and our own homes, he too wielded a wizard's wand. After the success of _Dombey_ it might have seemed that nothing further was wanting to crown the prosperity of Dickens's literary career. While the publication of this story was in progress he had concluded arrangements for the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition, which began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated "to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die." He who could thus proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all dispute, the people's chosen favourite among its men of letters. That position he was not to lose so long as he lived; but even at this time the height had not been reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of those who love his writings) he was in his next work to attain. CHAPTER IV. "DAVID COPPERFIELD." [1847-1851.] The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close of 1851, were most assuredly the season in which the genius of Dickens produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon _Dombey and Son_; towards its end he was already engaged upon the earliest portions of _Bleak House_. And it was during the interval that he produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions of our English school--_David Copperfield_. To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly periodical, _Household Words_, began to run its course. There was much play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised: "'Play!' said Thomas Idle. 'Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion's belt, and he calls it "Play." Play!' exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air; 'you can't play. You don't know what it is. You make work of everything!'" "A man," added the same easy philosopher, "who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man." And as at all times in Dickens's life, so most emphatically in these years when his physical powers seemed ready to meet every demand, and the elasticity of his mind seemed equal to every effort, he did nothing by halves. Within this short space of time not only did he write his best book, and conduct a weekly journal of solid merit through its most trying stage, but he also established his reputation as one of the best "unpolitical" speakers in the country; and as an amateur actor and manager successfully weathered what may be called three theatrical seasons, to the labours and glories of which it would be difficult to find a parallel even in the records of that most exacting of all social amusements. One likes to think of him in these years of vigorous manhood, no longer the fair youth with the flowing locks of Maclise's charming portrait, but not yet, I suppose, altogether the commanding and rather stern presence of later years. Mr. Frith's portrait was not painted till 1859, by which time the face occasionally had a more set expression, and the entire personality a more weather-beaten appearance, than this well-known picture suggests. But even eight years before this date, when Dickens was acting in Lord Lytton's comedy the part of a young man of _mode_, Mr. Sala's well-known comparison of his outward man to "some prosperous sea-captain home from a sea-voyage," was thought applicable to him by another shrewd observer, Mr. R. H. Horne, who says that, fashionable "make-up" notwithstanding, "he presented a figure that would have made a good portrait of a Dutch privateer after having taken a capital prize." And in 1856 Ary Scheffer, to whom when sitting for his portrait he had excused himself for being a difficult subject, "received the apology as strictly his due, and said, with a vexed air, 'At this moment, _mon cher_ Dickens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else;' for which I apologised again." In 1853, in the sympathetic neighbourhood of Boulogne, he was "growing a mustache," and, by 1856, a beard of the _Henri Quatre_ type had been added; but even before that time we may well believe that he was, as Mr. Sala says, "one of the few men whose individuality was not effaced by the mournful conventionality of evening-dress." Even in morning-dress he unconsciously contrived, born actor as he was, to have something unusual about him; and, if report speaks the truth, even at the sea-side, when most prodigal of ease, he was careful to dress the character. The five years of which more especially I am speaking brought him repeatedly face to face with the public, and within hearing of the applause that was becoming more and more of a necessity to him. They were thus unmistakably amongst the very happiest years of his life. The shadow that was to fall upon his home can hardly yet have been visible even in the dim distance. For this the young voices were too many and too fresh around him behind the garden-wall in Devonshire Terrace, and amongst the autumnal corn on the cliffs at Broadstairs. "They are all in great force," he writes to his wife, in September, 1850, and "much excited with the expectation of receiving you on Friday;" and I only wish I had space to quote the special report sent on this occasion to the absent mother concerning her precocious three-year-old. What sorrowful experiences he in these years underwent were such as few men escape amongst the chances of life. In 1848 he lost the sister who had been the companion of his earliest days, and three years later his father, whom he had learned to respect as well as love. Not long afterwards his little Dora, the youngest of his flock, was suddenly taken from him. Meanwhile, his old friends clung to him. Indeed, I never heard that he lost the affection of any one who had been attached to him; and though the circle of his real intimates was never greatly widened, yet he was on friendly or even familiar terms with many whose names belong to the history of their times. Amongst these were the late Lord Lytton--then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton--whose splendid abilities were still devoted mainly to literary labours, and between whom and Dickens there were more points of contrast than might at first sight appear. Of Thackeray, too, he seems to have been coming to know more; and with Leech, more especially during a summer sojourn of both their families at Bonchurch, in 1849, he grew intimate. Mr. Monckton Milnes--then, and since as Lord Houghton, _semper amicus, semper hospes_ both to successful merit and to honest endeavour--Lord Carlisle, and others who adorned the great world under more than one of its aspects, were, of course, welcome friends and acquaintances; and even Carlyle occasionally found his way to the house of his staunch admirer, though he might declare that he was, in the language of Mr. Peggotty's house-keeper, "a lorn lone creature, and everything went contrairy with him." It is not very easy to describe the personal habits of a man who is found seeing the spring in at Brighton and the autumn out at Broadstairs, and in the interval "strolling" through the chief towns of the kingdom at the head of a large company of ladies and gentlemen, according to the description which he put into Mrs. Gamp's mouth, "with a great box of papers under his arm, a-talking to everybody wery indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful." But since under ordinary circumstances he made, even in outward matters and arrangements of detail, a home for himself wherever he was, and as a rule cared little for the society of companions whose ideas and ways of life were foreign to his own, certain habits had become second nature to him, and to others he adhered with sophistical tenacity. He was an early riser, if for no other reason, because every man in whose work imagination plays its part must sometimes be alone; and Dickens has told us that there was to him something incomparably solemn in the still solitude of the morning. But it was only exceptionally, and when hard-pressed by the necessities of his literary labours, that he wrote before breakfast; in general he was contented with the ordinary working hours of the morning, not often writing after luncheon, and, except in early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, when engaged on a work of fiction, he considered three of his not very large MS. pages a good, and four an excellent, day's work; and, while very careful in making his corrections clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a morning's labour had ultimately produced. On the other hand, he was frequently slow in beginning a story, being, as he himself says, affected by something like despondency at such times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it, "going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it." A temperate liver, he was at the same time a zealous devotee of bodily exercise. He had not as yet given up riding, and is found, in 1848, spending the whole of a March day, with Forster, Leech, and Mark Lemon, in riding over every part of Salisbury Plain. But walking exercise was at once his forte and his fanaticism. He is said to have constructed for himself a theory that, to every portion of the day given to intellectual labour should correspond an equal number of hours spent in walking; and frequently, no doubt, he gave up his morning's chapter before he had begun it, "entirely persuading himself that he was under a moral obligation" to do his twenty miles on the road. By day he found in the London thoroughfares stimulative variety, and at a later date he states it to be "one of his fancies that even his idlest walk must have its appointed destination;" and by night, in seasons of intellectual excitement, he found in these same streets the refreshment of isolation among crowds. But the walks he loved best were long stretches on the cliffs or across the downs by the sea, where, following the track of his "breathers," one half expects to meet him coming along against the wind at four and a half miles an hour, the very embodiment of energy and brimful of life. And besides this energy he carried with him, wheresoever he pitched his tent, what was the second cause of his extraordinary success in so much of the business of life as it fell to him to perform. He hated disorder as Sir Artegal hated injustice; and if there was anything against which he took up his parable with burning indignation, it was slovenliness, and half-done work, and "shoddiness" of all kinds. His love of order made him always the most regular of men. "Everything with him," Miss Hogarth told me, "went as by clock-work; his movements, his absences from home, and the times of his return were all fixed beforehand, and it was seldom that he failed to adhere to what he had fixed." Like most men endowed with a superfluity of energy, he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not live in a room or in a house till he had put every piece of furniture into its proper place, nor could he begin to work till all his writing-gear was at hand, with no item missing or misplaced. Yet he did not, like so many, combine with these habits and tendencies a saving disposition. "No man," he said of himself, "attaches less importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want of it, than I do." His circumstances, though easy, were never such as to warrant a display to which, perhaps, certain qualities of his character might have inclined him; even at a much later date he described himself--rather oddly, perhaps--as "a man of moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive public position." But, so far as I can gather, he never had a reasonable want which he could not and did not satisfy, though at the same time he cared for very few of the pursuits or amusements that are apt to drain much larger resources than his. He never had to think twice about country or sea-side quarters; wherever it might suit his purpose or fancy to choose them, at one of his south-coast haunts or, for his wife's health, at Malvern, thither he went; and when the whim seized him for a trip _en garçon_ to any part of England or to Paris, he had only to bid the infallible Anne pack his trunk. He was a provident as well as an affectionate father; but the cost of educating his numerous family seems to have caused him no serious anxiety. In 1849 he sent his eldest son to Eton. And while he had sworn a kind of _vendetta_ against begging-letter writers, and afterwards used to parry the attacks of his pertinacious enemies by means of carefully-prepared written forms, his hand seems to have been at all times open for charity. Some of these personal characteristics of Dickens were to be brought out with remarkable vividness during the period of his life which forms the special subject of the present chapter. Never was he more thoroughly himself than as a theatrical manager and actor, surrounded by congenial associates. He starred it to his heart's content at the country seat of his kind Lausanne friends, Mr. and Mrs. Watson. But the first occasion on which he became publicly known in both the above-mentioned capacities was the reproduction of the amateur performance of _Every Man in his Humour_. This time the audiences were to be in Manchester and Liverpool, where it was hoped that a golden harvest might be reaped for Leigh Hunt, who was at that time in sore straits. As it chanced, a civil-list pension was just about this time--1847--conferred upon the most unaffectedly graceful of all modern writers of English verse. It was accordingly resolved to divert part of the proceeds of the undertaking in favour of a worthy playwright, the author of _Paul Pry_. The comedy was acted with brilliant success at Manchester, on July 26, and at Liverpool two days later; and then the "managerial miseries," which Dickens had enjoyed with his whole heart and soul, were over for the nonce. Already, however, in the following year, 1848, an excellent reason was found for their recommencement; and nine performances of Ben Jonson's play, this time alternated with _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, were given by Dickens's "company of amateurs"--the expression is his own--at the Haymarket, and in the theatres of five of the largest towns in the kingdom, for the benefit of Sheridan Knowles. Nothing could have been more honourable than Dickens's readiness to serve the interests of an actor with whom, but for his own generous temper, he would only a few months before have been involved in a wordy quarrel. In _The Merry Wives_, the manager acted Justice Shallow to Mark Lemon's Falstaff. Dame Quickly was played by Mrs. Cowden Clarke, who speedily became a favourite correspondent of Dickens. But the climax of these excitements arrived in the year of wonders, 1851, when, with a flourish of trumpets resounding through the world of fashion as well as of letters, the comedy _Not so Bad as We Seem_, written for the occasion by Bulwer Lytton, was performed under Dickens's management at Devonshire House, in the presence of the Queen, for the benefit of the Guild of Literature and Art. The object was a noble one, though the ultimate result of the scheme has been an almost pitiable failure; and nothing was spared, by the host or the actors, to make the effect worthy of it. While some of the most popular men of letters took parts in the clever and effective play, its scenery was painted by some of the most eminent among the English artists. Dickens was fired by the ardour of the enterprise, and, proceeding on his principle that the performance could not possibly "be a success if the smallest pepper-corn of arrangement were omitted," covered himself and his associates with glory. From Devonshire House play and theatre were transferred to the Hanover Square Rooms, where the farce of _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_ was included in the performance, of which some vivid reminiscences have been published by one of the few survivors of that noble company, Mr. R. H. Horne. Other accounts corroborate his recollections of the farce, which was the triumph of "gag," and would have been reckoned a masterpiece in the old _commedia dell' arte_. The characters played by Dickens included Sam Weller turned waiter; a voluble barrister by the name of Mr. Gabblewig; a hypochondriac suffering from a prescription of mustard and milk; the Gampish mother of a charity-boy (Mr. Egg); and her brother, a stone-deaf old sexton, who appeared to be "at least ninety years of age." The last-named assumption seems to have been singularly effective: "After repeated shoutings ('It's of no use whispering to me, young man') of the word 'buried'--'_Brewed!_ Oh yes, sir, I have brewed many a good gallon of ale in my time. The last batch I brewed, sir, was finer than all the rest--the best ale ever brewed in the county. It used to be called in our parts here "Samson with his hair on!" in allusion'--here his excitement shook the tremulous frame into coughing and wheezing--'in allusion to its great strength.' He looked from face to face to see if his feat was duly appreciated, and his venerable jest understood by those around; and then, softly repeating, with a glimmering smile, 'in allusion to its great strength,' he turned about, and made his exit, like one moving towards his own grave while he thinks he is following the funeral of another." From London the company travelled into the country, where their series of performances was not closed till late in the succeeding year, 1852. Dickens was from first to last the manager, and the ruling spirit of the undertaking. Amongst his latest recruits Mr. Wilkie Collins is specially mentioned by Forster. The acquaintance which thus began soon ripened into a close and lasting friendship, and became, with the exception of that with Forster himself, the most important of all Dickens's personal intimacies for the history of his career as an author. Speech-making was not in quite the same sense, or to quite the same degree, as amateur acting and managing, a voluntary labour on Dickens's part. Not that he was one of those to whom the task of occasionally addressing a public audience is a pain or even a burden. Indeed, he was a born orator; for he possessed both that strong and elastic imaginative power which enables a man to place himself at once in sympathy with his audience, and that gift of speech, pointed, playful, and where necessary impetuous, which pleads well in any assembly for any cause. He had moreover the personal qualifications of a handsome manly presence, a sympathetic eye, and a fine flexible voice, which, as his own hints on public speaking show, he managed with care and intelligence. He had, he says, "fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas." But though a speaker in whom ease bred force, and force ease, he was the reverse of a mere builder of phrases and weaver of periods. "Mere holding forth," he declared, "I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure." His innate hatred of talk for mere talk's sake had doubtless been intensified by his early reporting experiences, and by what had become his stereotyped notion of our parliamentary system. At the Administration Reform meeting in 1855 he stated that he had never before attended a public meeting. On the other hand, he had been for already several years in great request for meetings of a different kind, concerned with the establishment or advancement of educational or charitable institutions in London and other great towns of the country. His addresses from the chair were often of remarkable excellence; and this not merely because crowded halls and increased subscription-lists were their concomitants, and because the happiness of his humour--never out of season, and even on such occasions often singularly prompt--sent every one home in good spirits. In these now forgotten speeches on behalf of Athenæums and Mechanics' Institutes, or of actors' and artists' and newsmen's charities, their occasional advocate never appears occasional. Instead of seeming to have just mastered his brief while the audience was taking its seats, or to have become for the first time deeply interested in his subject in the interval between his soup and his speech, the cause which Dickens pleads never has in him either an imperfectly informed or a half-indifferent representative. Amongst many charming illustrations of a vein of oratory in which he has been equalled by very few if by any public men of his own or the succeeding generation, I will instance only one address, though it belongs to a considerably later date than the time of _David Copperfield_. Nothing, however, that Dickens has ever written--not even _David Copperfield_ itself--breathes a tenderer sympathy for the weakness of unprotected childhood than the beautiful little speech delivered by him on February 9, 1858, on behalf of the London Hospital for Sick Children. Beginning with some touches of humour concerning the spoilt children of the rich, the orator goes on to speak of the "spoilt children" of the poor, illustrating with concrete directness both the humorous and the pathetic side of his subject, and after a skilfully introduced sketch of the capabilities and wants of the "infant institution" for which he pleads, ending with an appeal, founded on a fancy of Charles Lamb, to the support of the "dream-children" belonging to each of his hearers: "the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been." This is true eloquence, of a kind which aims at something besides opening purse-strings. In 1851 he had spoken in the same vein of mixed humour and pathos on behalf of his clients, the poor actors, when, unknown to him, a little child of his own was lying dead at home. But in these years of his life, as indeed at all times, his voice was at the service of such causes as had his sympathy; it was heard at Birmingham, at Leeds, at Glasgow; distance was of little moment to his energetic nature; and as to trouble, how could he do anything by halves? There was yet a third kind of activity, distinct from that of literary work pure and simple, in which Dickens in these years for the first time systematically engaged. It has been seen how he had long cherished the notion of a periodical conducted by himself, and marked by a unity of design which should make it in a more than ordinary sense his own paper. With a genius like his, which attached itself to the concrete, very much depended at the outset upon the choice of a title. _The Cricket_ could not serve again, and for some time the notion of an omnipresent _Shadow_, with something, if possible, tacked to it "expressing the notion of its being cheerful, useful, and always welcome," seemed to promise excellently. For a rather less ambitious design, however, a rather less ambitious title was sought, and at last fortunately found, in the phrase, rendered proverbial by Shakspeare, "_Household Words_." "We hope," he wrote a few weeks before the first number appeared, on March 30, 1850, "to do some solid good, and we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as we can." But _Household Words_, which in form and in cost was to be a paper for the multitude, was to be something more than agreeable and useful and cheap. It was to help in casting out the many devils that had taken up their abode in popular periodical literature, the "bastards of the Mountain," and the foul fiends who dealt in infamous scurrility, and to do this with the aid of a charm more potent than the most lucid argument and the most abundant facts. "In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor," says the _Preliminary Word_ in the first number, "we would tenderly cherish that light of fancy which is inherent in the human breast." To this purpose it was the editor's constant and deliberate endeavour to bind his paper. "KEEP 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS' IMAGINATIVE!" is the "solemn and continual Conductorial Injunction" which three years after the foundation of the journal he impresses, with the artful aid of capitals, upon his faithful coadjutor, Mr. W. H. Wills. In his own contributions he was not forgetful of this maxim, and the most important of them, the serial story, _Hard Times_, was written with the express intention of pointing it as a moral. There are, I suppose, in addition to the many mysterious functions performed by the editor of a literary journal, two of the very highest significance; in the first place, the choice of his contributors, and then, if the expression may be used, the management of them. In both respects but one opinion seems to exist of Dickens's admirable qualities as an editor. Out of the many contributors to _Household Words_, and its kindred successor, _All the Year Round_--some of whom are happily still among living writers--it would be invidious to select for mention a few in proof of the editor's discrimination. But it will not be forgotten that the first number of the earlier journal contained the beginning of a tale by Mrs. Gaskell, whose name will long remain a household word in England, both North and South. And a periodical could hardly be deemed one-sided which included among its contributors scholars and writers of the distinction belonging to the names of Forster and Mr. Henry Morley, together with humorous observers of men and things such as Mr. Sala and Albert Smith. On the other hand, _Household Words_ had what every literary journal ought to have, an individuality of its own; and this individuality was, of course, that of its editor. The mannerisms of Dickens's style afterwards came to be imitated by some among his contributors; but the general unity perceptible in the journal was the natural and legitimate result of the fact that it stood under the independent control of a vigorous editor, assisted by a sub-editor--Mr. W. H. Wills--of rare trustworthiness. Dickens had a keen eye for selecting subjects from a definite field, a ready skill for shaping, if necessary, the articles accepted by him, and a genius for providing them with expressive and attractive titles. Fiction and poetry apart, these articles have mostly a social character or bearing, although they often deviate into the pleasant paths of literature or art; and usually, but by no means always, the scenes or associations with which they connect themselves are of England, English. Nothing could surpass the unflagging courtesy shown by Dickens towards his contributors, great or small, old or new, and his patient interest in their endeavours, while he conducted _Household Words_, and afterwards _All the Year Round_. Of this there is evidence enough to make the records of the office in Wellington Street a pleasant page in the history of journalism. He valued a good workman when he found him, and was far too reasonable and generous to put his own stamp upon all the good metal that passed through his hands. Even in his Christmas Numbers he left the utmost possible freedom to his associates. Where he altered or modified it was as one who had come to know the pulse of the public; and he was not less considerate with novices, than he was frank and explicit with experts, in the writer's art. The articles in his journal being anonymous, he was not tempted to use names as baits for the public, though many who wrote for him were men or women of high literary reputation. And he kept his doors open. While some editors deem it their duty to ward off would-be contributors, as some ministers of state think it theirs to get rid of deputations, Dickens sought to ignore instead of jealously guarding the boundaries of professional literature. Nothing in this way ever gave him greater delight than to have welcomed and published several poems sent to him under a feigned name, but which he afterwards discovered to be the first-fruits of the charming poetical talent of Miss Adelaide Procter, the daughter of his old friend "Barry Cornwall." In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, like the Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with one or more of his familiars, he spared no labour and thought no toil too great. At times, of course, he, like all periodical writers who cannot be merry every Wednesday or caustic every Saturday, felt the pressure of the screw. "As to two comic articles," he exclaims on one occasion, "or two any sort of articles, out of me, that's the intensest extreme of no-goism." But, as a rule, no great writer ever ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His "Uncommercial Travels," as he at a later date happily christened them, familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects of London his long walks had still left unexplored; and he was as conscientious in hunting up the details of a complicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an obscure pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and "commissioners" assisted him in his labours; but he was no _roi fainéant_ on the editorial sofa which he so complacently describes. Whether he was taking _A Walk in a Workhouse_, or knocking at the door of another with the supernumerary waifs in Whitechapel, or _On_ (night) _Duty with Inspector Field_ among the worst of the London slums, he was always ready to see with his own eyes; after which the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more properly journalistic, but he is most delightful when he takes his ease in his _English_ or his _French Watering-place_, or carries his readers with him on _A Flight to Paris_, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless succession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of all is he when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins--this, however, not until the autumn of 1857--he starts on _The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, the earlier chapters of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget himself to enforce the claim of his journal to strengthen the imaginary side of literature. In an assumed character he allows a veteran poet to carry him _By Rail to Parnassus_, and even good-humouredly banters an old friend, George Cruikshank, for having committed _Frauds on the Fairies_ by re-editing legendary lore with the view of inculcating the principle of total abstinence. Such, then, were some of the channels in which the intense mental and physical energy of Dickens found a congenial outlet in these busy years. Yet in the very midst of this multifarious activity the mysterious and controlling power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already said, holds, and will always continue to hold, a place of its own among its works. "Of all my books," he declares, "I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child--and his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD!" He parted from the story with a pang, and when in after life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to master the emotions which it recalled; perhaps even he hardly knew what the effort of its production had cost him. The first number of _David Copperfield_ was published in May, 1849--the last in November, 1850. To judge from the difficulty which Dickens found in choosing a title for his story--of which difficulty plentiful evidence remains in MS. at South Kensington--he must have been fain to delay longer even than usual on the threshold. In the end the name of the hero evolved itself out of a series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to Copperboy, Copperstone--"Copperfull" being reserved as a _lectio varians_ for Mrs. Crupp--and _Copperfield_. Then at last the pen could fall seriously to work, and, proceeding slowly at first--for the first page of the MS. contains a great number of alterations--dip itself now into black, now into blue ink, and in a small writing, already contrasting with the bolder hand of earlier days, produce page upon page of an incomparable book. No doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to _David Copperfield_, and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in the story. Until the publication of Forster's _Life_ no reader of _Copperfield_ could be aware of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of Dickens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully playful humor, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyl of the loves of Doady and Dora--with Jip, as Dora's father might have said, intervening--there were, besides the reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man's unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed disappointment--the sense that "there was always something wanting." But in order to be affected by a personal or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very existence. _Amelia_ would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking the existence of an autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be _there_. But it had far better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused this particular stream of metal with the mass filling his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with _David Copperfield_, which of all Dickens's fictions is on the whole the most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in the author's breast are, as effects, harmonised with local associations old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by Dickens for the first time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his materials. As to the construction of _David Copperfield_, however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy's old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The boy's flight from London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity, as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. Thus, there is real art in the way in which the scene of Barkis's death--written with admirable moderation--prepares for the "greater loss" at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire treatment of his hero's double love story Dickens has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in _Esmond_ and in _Adam Bede_. The best constructed part of _David Copperfield_ is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of which--except in its very beginnings--it forms no integral part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of _David Copperfield_ might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole literature of modern fiction. Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpass the history of the picnic--where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an imaginary rival, "Red Whisker," made the salad--how could they eat it?--and "voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, _being an ingenious beast_, in the hollow trunk of a tree." Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative of the young house-keeping David's real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyl almost imperceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here irresistible. The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other books indulged itself so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dickens had copied from a living original; but receiving a remonstrance from the latter, he good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character, and thereby spoiled what there was in it--not much, in my opinion--to spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of eccentric personages--mad people, in a word--for which Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. David's Aunt is a figure which none but a true humourist such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she must have sprung from the author's brain armed _cap-à-pie_ as she appeared in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still pointed out where the "one great outrage of her life" was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the "salt" division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr. Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and a merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine character was never conceived than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and her mind made up _not_ to desert Mr. Micawber. Delightful too in his way, though of a class more common in Dickens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray's Inn, with the dearest girl in the world and her five sisters, including the beauty, on a visit, may have been suggested by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days. In contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, villanous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without being overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that Dickens's satirical power most diversely displayed itself; and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, the valet Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself could not have surpassed. Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mood of manhood pervading it from first to last. The _reality_ of _David Copperfield_ is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful _art_. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author put into it his life's blood. CHAPTER V. CHANGES. [1852-1858.] I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles Dickens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man's house is truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little before, come to such a pass that he wrote to his faithful friend: "I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed." Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him--the boy whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which no eccentric humours and fantastic _sobriquets_ could conceal. In May, 1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself. In the earlier of these years Dickens's movements were still very much of the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his working hours in this and the following year--the spring of which was partly spent at Brighton--he was engaged upon his new story, _Bleak House_, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853. "To let you into a secret," he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary Boyle, from Dover, "I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as _Copperfield_. But I foresee, I think, some very good things in _Bleak House_." There is no reason to believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its predecessor. According to the author's own testimony it "took extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months" of its issue, and "retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old _Copperfield_ by a round ten thousand or more." To this day the book has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On the other hand, _Bleak House_ was probably the first of Dickens's works which furnished a suitable text to a class of censors whose precious balms have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of amusing being graciously conceded to the "man of genius," his book was charged with "absolute want of construction," and with being a heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a number of "odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit." Of the characters themselves it was asserted that, though in the main excessively funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised, it was regretted that Dickens should never have succeeded in drawing "a man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy." He belonged, unfortunately, "in literature to the same class as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the illustrator in range and power." In other words, he was essentially a caricaturist. As applied to _Bleak House_, with which I am at present alone concerned, this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to _Bleak House_ may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as compared, not with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, but with its immediate predecessor, _David Copperfield_, this novel exhibits a decided advance in that respect. In truth, Dickens in _Bleak House_ for the first time emancipated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less consciously adopted--the novel of adventure, of which the person of the hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element. It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about this time praising for his unlikeness to the "conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes," was already teaching something to, as well as learning something from, the elder. It may also be that the criticism which as editor of _Household Words_ Dickens was now in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of others, unconsciously affected his own methods and processes. Certain it is that from this point of view _Bleak House_ may be said to begin a new series among his works of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of those concerned in it are not a disconnected background from which the mystery of Lady Dedlock's secret stands forth in relief; but the two main parts of the story are skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot. Nor is the success of the general action materially affected by the circumstance that the tone of Esther Summerson's diary is not altogether true. At the same time there is indisputably some unevenness in the construction of _Bleak House_. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in some of its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the reader is strongly revived when that popular favourite, Mr. Inspector Bucket, appears on the scene, and when, more especially in the admirably vivid narrative of Esther's journey with the detective, the nearness of the catastrophe exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery, moreover--such as the Smallweed family's part in the plot--is tiresome; and particular incidents are intolerably horrible or absurd--such as on the one hand the spontaneous combustion (which is proved possible by the analogy of historical facts!), and on the other the intrusion of the oil-grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock's grief. But in general the parts of the narrative are well knit together; and there is a subtle skill in the way in which the two main parts of the story converge towards their common close. The idea of making an impersonal object like a great Chancery suit the centre round which a large and manifold group of characters revolves, seems to savour of a drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme suggested itself to Dickens with a very real purpose, and on the basis of facts which he might well think warranted him in his treatment of it; for, true artist though he was, the thought of exposing some national defect, of helping to bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his mind over any mere literary conception. _Primâ facie_, at least, and with all due deference to Chancery judges and eminent silk gowns like Mr. Blowers, the length of Chancery suits was a real public grievance, as well as a frequent private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the idea of Jarndyce _v._ Jarndyce as diversely affecting those who lived by it, those who rebelled against it, those who died of it, was, in its way, of unique force; and while Dickens never brought to any other of his subjects so useful a knowledge of its external details--in times gone by he had served a "Kenge and Carboys" of his own--hardly any one of those subjects suggested so wide a variety of aspects for characteristic treatment. For never before had his versatility in drawing character filled his canvas with so multitudinous and so various a host of personages. The legal profession, with its servitors and hangers-on of every degree, occupies the centre of the picture. In this group no figure is more deserving of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a four-wheeled affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy manifests itself. We learn very little about him, and probably care less; but he interests us precisely as we should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about whom we might know and care equally little, were we to find him alone in the twilight, drinking his ancient port in his frescoed chamber in those fields where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr. Forster, by-the-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the piety of American research has since put on record, that Mr. Tulkinghorn's house was a picture of the biographer's own residence.) The portrait of Mr. Vholes, who supports an unassailable but unenviable professional reputation for the sake of "the three dear girls at home," and a father whom he has to support "in the Vale of Taunton," is less attractive; but nothing could be more in its place in the story than the clammy tenacity of this legal ghoul and his "dead glove." Lower down in the great system of the law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very quintessence of cockney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour of legal sharpness without which the rankness of the mixture would be incomplete. To the legal group Miss Flite, whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the Temple as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, may likewise be said to belong. She is quite legitimately introduced into the story--which cannot be said of all Dickens's madmen--because her madness associates itself with its main theme. Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of an eccentric by or under plot in this story, in which the family of the Jellybys and the august Mr. Turveydrop are, actively, or by passive endurance, engaged. The philanthropic section of _le monde où l'on s'ennuie_ has never been satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bitterly. Perhaps at the time of the publication of _Bleak House_ the activity of our Mrs. Jellybys took a wider and more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for we read at the end of Esther's diary how Mrs. Jellyby "has been disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived the climate--for rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one." But Mrs. Jellyby's interference in the affairs of other people is after all hurtful only because in busying herself with theirs she forgets her own. The truly offensive benefactress of her fellow-creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and tract in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. Among her victims are her own children, including Alfred, aged five, who has been induced to take an oath "never to use tobacco in any form." The particular vein of feeling that led Dickens to the delineation of these satirical figures was one which never ran dry with him, and which suggested some forcible-feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it a vein of feeling only; for he could hardly have argued in cold blood that the efforts which he ridicules were not misrepresented as a whole by his satire. When poor Jo on his death-bed is "asked whether he ever knew a prayer," and replies that he could never make anything out of those spoken by the gentlemen who "came down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin'," but who "mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong," the author brings a charge which he might not have found it easy to substantiate. Yet--with the exception of such isolated passages--the figure of Jo is in truth one of the most powerful protests that have been put forward on behalf of the friendless outcasts of our streets. Nor did the romantic element in the conception interfere with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at first to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the story, is in Dickens's best pathetic manner, the Bagnet family is in his happiest vein of quiet humour. Mr. Inspector Bucket, though not altogether free from mannerism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For this character, as the pages of _Household Words_ testify, Dickens had made many studies in real life. The detective police-officer had at that time not yet become a standing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the detective of real life begun to destroy the illusion. _Bleak House_ was least of all among the novels hitherto published by its author obnoxious to the charge persistently brought against him, that he was doomed to failure in his attempts to draw characters taken from any but the lower spheres of life--in his attempts, in short, to draw ladies and gentlemen. To begin with, one of the most interesting characters in the book--indeed, in its relation to the main idea of the story, the most interesting of all--is the youthful hero, if he is to be so called, Richard Carson. From the very nature of the conception the character is passive only; but the art and feeling are in their way unsurpassed with which the gradual collapse of a fine nature is here exhibited. Sir Leicester Dedlock, in some measure intended as a type of his class, has been condemned as wooden and unnatural; and no doubt the machinery of that part of the story in which he is concerned creaks before it gets under way. On the other hand, after the catastrophe has overwhelmed him and his house, he becomes a really fine picture, unmarred by any Grandisonianisms in either thought or phrase, of a true gentleman, bowed but not warped by distress. Sir Leicester's relatives, both dead and living; Volumnia's sprightly ancestress on the wall, and that "fair Dedlock" herself; the whole cousinhood, debilitated and otherwise, but of one mind on such points as William Buffy's blameworthy neglect of his duty _when in office_; all these make up a very probable picture of a house great enough--or thinking itself great enough--to look at the affairs of the world from the family point of view. In Lady Dedlock alone a failure must be admitted; but she, with her wicked double, the uncanny French maid Hortense, exists only for the sake of the plot. With all its merits, _Bleak House_ has little of that charm which belongs to so many of Dickens's earlier stories, and to _David Copperfield_ above all. In part, at least, this may be due to the excessive severity of the task which Dickens had set himself in _Bleak House_; for hardly any other of his works is constructed on so large a scale, or contains so many characters organically connected with the progress of its plot; and in part, again, to the half-didactic, half-satirical purport of the story, which weighs heavily on the writer. An overstrained tone announces itself on the very first page; an opening full of power--indeed, of genius--but pitched in a key which we feel at once will not, without effort, be maintained. On the second page the prose has actually become verse; or how else can one describe part of the following apostrophe? "'This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"'" It was possibly with some thought of giving to _Bleak House_ also, though in a different way, the close relation to his experiences of living men to which _David Copperfield_ had owed so much, that Dickens introduced into it two _portraits_. Doubtless, at first, his intention had by no means gone so far as this. His constant counsellor always disliked his mixing up in his fictitious characters any personal reminiscences of particular men, experience having shown that in such cases the whole character came out _more like_ than the author was aware. Nor can Dickens himself have failed to understand how such an experiment is always tempting, and always dangerous; how it is often irreconcilable with good feeling, and quite as often with good taste. In _Bleak House_, however, it occurred to him to introduce likenesses of two living men, both more or less well known to the public and to himself; and both of individualities too clearly marked for a portrait, or even a caricature, of either to be easily mistaken. Of that art of mystification which the authors of both English and French _romans à clef_ have since practised with so much transient success, he was no master, and fortunately so; for what could be more ridiculous than that the reader's interest in a character should be stimulated, first, by its being evidently the late Lord P-lm-rst-n or the P---- of O----, and then by its being no less evidently somebody else? It should be added that neither of the two portrait characters in _Bleak House_ possesses the least importance for the conduct of the story, so that there is nothing to justify their introduction except whatever excellence may belong to them in themselves. Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin as drawn from Walter Savage Landor with his intellectual greatness left out. It was, of course, unlikely that his intellectual greatness should be left in, the intention obviously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways and manner, with a suggestion of what was noble in the character, of Dickens's famous friend. Whether, had he attempted to do so, Dickens could have drawn a picture of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who could put into a classic dialogue that sense of the _naïf_ to which Dickens is generally a stranger, yet passionately admired the most _sentimental_ of all his young friend's poetic figures; and it might almost be said that the intellectual natures of the two men were drawn together by the force of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate with one another during Landor's residence at Bath--which began in 1837--and they frequently met at Gore House. At a celebration of the poet's birthday in his lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of Landor, "the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator." In Landor's spacious mind there was room for cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius differed widely from that of his own; and he could thus afford to sympathise with his whole heart in a creation which men of much smaller intellectual build have pronounced mawkish and unreal. Dickens afterwards gave to one of his sons the names of Walter Landor; and when the old man died at last, _after_ his godson, paid him an eloquent tribute of respect in _All the Year Round_. In this paper the personal intention of the character of Boythorn is avowed by implication; but though Landor esteemed and loved Dickens, it might seem matter for wonder, did not eccentrics after all sometimes cherish their own eccentricity, that his irascible nature failed to resent a rather doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the word, humorous. But the portrait, however imperfect, was in this instance, beyond all doubt, both kindly meant and kindly taken; though it cannot be said to have added to the attractions of the book into which it is introduced. While no doubt ever existed as to this likeness, the case may not seem so clear with regard to the original of Harold Skimpole. It would be far more pleasant to pass by without notice the controversy--if controversy it can be called--which this character provoked; but a wrong done by one eminent man of letters to another, however unforeseen its extent may have been, and however genuine the endeavour to repair its effect, becomes part of literary history. That the original of Harold Skimpole was Leigh Hunt cannot reasonably be called into question. This assertion by no means precludes the possibility, or probability, that a second original suggested certain features in the portrait. Nor does it contradict the substantial truthfulness of Dickens's own statement, published in _All the Year Round_ after Leigh Hunt's death, on the appearance of the new edition of the _Autobiography_ with Thornton Hunt's admirable introduction. While, Dickens then wrote, "he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend," yet "he no more thought, God forgive him! that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature, than he had himself ever thought of charging the blood of Desdemona and Othello on the innocent Academy model who sat for Iago's leg in the picture. Even as to the mere occasional manner," he declared that he had "altered the whole of that part of the text, when two intimate friends of Leigh Hunt--both still living--discovered too strong a resemblance to his 'way.'" But, while accepting this statement, and suppressing a regret that after discovering the dangerous closeness of the resemblance Dickens should have, quite at the end of the story, introduced a satirical reference to Harold Skimpole's autobiography--Leigh Hunt's having been published only a year or two before--one must confess that the explanation only helps to prove the rashness of the offence. While intending the portrait to keep its own secret from the general public, Dickens at the same time must have wished to gratify a few keen-sighted friends. In March, 1852, he writes to Forster, evidently in reference to the apprehensions of his correspondent: "Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him singularly unlike the great original." The "great original" was a man for whom, both before and after this untoward incident in the relations between them, Dickens professed a warm regard, and who, to judge from the testimony of those who knew him well,[9] and from his unaffected narrative of his own life, abundantly deserved it. A perusal of Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_ suffices to show that he used to talk in Skimpole's manner, and even to write in it; that he was at one period of his life altogether ignorant of money matters, and that he cultivated cheerfulness on principle. But it likewise shows that his ignorance of business was acknowledged by him as a misfortune in which he was very far from exulting. "Do I boast of this ignorance?" he writes. "Alas! I have no such respect for the pedantry of absurdity as that. I blush for it, and I only record it out of a sheer painful movement of conscience, as a warning to those young authors who might be led to look upon such folly as a fine thing, which at all events is what I never thought it myself." On the other hand, as his son showed, his cheerfulness, which was not inconsistent with a natural proneness to intervals of melancholy, rested on grounds which were the result of a fine as well as healthy morality. "The value of cheerful opinions," he wrote, in words embodying a moral that Dickens himself was never weary of enforcing, "is inestimable; they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him, and consequently they ought to be religiously inculcated upon his children." At the same time, no quality was more conspicuous in his life than his readiness for hard work, even under the most depressing circumstances; and no feature was more marked in his moral character than his conscientiousness. "In the midst of the sorest temptations," Dickens wrote of him, "he maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain; and in all public and private transactions he was the very soul of truth and honour." To mix up with the outward traits of such a man the detestable obliquities of Harold Skimpole was an experiment paradoxical even as a mere piece of character-drawing. The merely literary result is a failure, while a wound was needlessly inflicted, if not upon Leigh Hunt himself, at least upon all who cherished his friendship or good name. Dickens seems honestly and deeply to have regretted what he had done, and the extremely tasteful little tribute to Leigh Hunt's poetic gifts which, some years before the death of the latter, Dickens wrote for _Household Words_,[10] must have partaken of the nature of an _amende honorable_. Neither his subsequent repudiation of unfriendly intentions, nor his earlier exertions on Leigh Hunt's behalf, are to be overlooked, but they cannot undo a mistake which forms an unfortunate incident in Dickens's literary life, singularly free though that life, as a whole, is from the miseries of personal quarrels, and all the pettinesses with which the world of letters is too familiar. While Dickens was engaged upon a literary work such as would have absorbed the intellectual energies of most men, he not only wrote occasionally for his journal, but also dictated for publication in it, the successive portions of a book altogether outside his usual range of authorship. This was _A Child's History of England_, the only one of his works that was not written by his own hand. A history of England, written by Charles Dickens for his own or any one else's children, was sure to be a different work from one written under similar circumstances by Mr. Freeman or the late M. Guizot. The book, though it cannot be called a success, is, however, by no means devoid of interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and printed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, then a hopeful student of the age of five, which was composed, as he informed Douglas Jerrold at the time, "in the exact spirit" of that advanced politician's paper, "for I don't know what I should do if he were to get hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the parrots' necks in his very cradle." The _Child's History of England_ is written in the same spirit, and illustrates more directly, and, it must be added, more coarsely, than any of Dickens's other works his hatred of ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan is pervaded by a prejudice which is the fruit of anything but knowledge; Edward the Confessor is "the dreary old" and "the maudlin Confessor;" and the Pope and what belongs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To be sure, if King John is dismissed as a "miserable brute," King Henry the Eighth is not more courteously designated as a "blot of blood and grease upon the history of England." On the other hand, it could hardly be but that certain passages of the national story should be well told by so great a master of narrative; and though the strain in which parts of the history of Charles the Second are recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the young, to whom irony is in general _caviare_ indeed, yet there are touches both in the story of "this merry gentleman"--a designation which almost recalls Fagin--and elsewhere in the book not unworthy of its author. Its patriotic spirit is quite as striking as its Radicalism; and vulgar as some of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow in the passage on King Alfred, which declares the "English-Saxon" character to have been "the greatest character among the nations of the earth;" and there is a yet nobler enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any writer's while to infuse into the young, in the passionate earnestness with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the truth is enforced that "nothing can make war otherwise than horrible." This book must have been dictated, and some at least of the latter portion of _Bleak House_ written, at Boulogne, where, after a spring sojourn at Brighton, Dickens spent the summer of 1853, and where were also passed the summers of 1854 and 1856. Boulogne, where Le Sage's last years were spent, was _Our French Watering-place_, so graphically described in a paper in _Household Words_ as a companion picture to the old familiar Broadstairs. The family were comfortably settled on a green hill-side close to the town, "in a charming garden in a very pleasant country," with "excellent light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two cows--for milk-punch--vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains--with no water in 'em--and thirty-seven clocks--keeping, as I conceive, Australian time, having no reference whatever to the hours on this side of the globe." The energetic owner of the Villa des Moulineaux was the "M. Loyal Devasseur" of _Our French Watering-place_--jovial, convivial, genial, sentimental too as a Buonapartist and a patriot. In 1854 the same obliging personage housed the Dickens family in another abode, at the top of the hill, close to the famous Napoleonic column; but in 1856 they came back to the Moulineaux. The former year had been an exciting one for Englishmen in France, with royal visits to and fro to testify to the _entente cordiale_ between the governments. Dickens, notwithstanding his humorous assertions, was only moderately touched by the Sebastopol fever; but when a concrete problem came before him in the shape of a festive demonstration, he addressed himself to it with the irrepressible ardour of the born stage-manager. "In our own proper illumination," he writes, on the occasion of the Prince Consort's visit to the camp at Boulogne, "I laid on all the servants, all the children now at home, all the visitors, one to every window, with everything ready to light up on the ringing of a big dinner-bell by your humble correspondent. St. Peter's on Easter Monday was the result." Of course, at Boulogne, Dickens was cut off neither from his business nor from his private friends. His hospitable invitations were as urgent to his French villa in the summer as to his London house in the winter, and on both sides of the water the _Household Words_ familiars were as sure of a welcome from their chief. During his absences from London he could have had no trustier lieutenant than Mr. W. H. Wills, with whom, being always ready to throw himself into a part, he corresponded in an amusing paragraphed, semi-official style. And neither in his working nor in his leisure hours had he by this time any more cherished companion than Mr. Wilkie Collins, whose progress towards brilliant success he was watching with the keenest and kindliest interest. With him and his old friend Augustus Egg, Dickens, in October, 1853, started on a tour to Switzerland and Italy, in the course of which he saw more than one old friend, and revisited more than one known scene--ascending Vesuvius with Mr. Layard and drinking punch at Rome with David Roberts. It would be absurd to make any lofty demands upon the brief records of a holiday journey; and, for my part, I would rather think of Dickens assiduous over his Christmas number at Rome and at Venice, than weigh his moralisings about the electric telegraph running through the Coliseum. His letters written to his wife during this trip are bright and gay, and it was certainly no roving bachelor who "kissed almost all the children he encountered in remembrance of the sweet faces" of his own, and "talked to all the mothers who carried them." By the middle of December the travellers were home again, and before the year was out he had read to large audiences at Birmingham, on behalf of a public institution, his favourite Christmas stories of _The Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. As yet, however, his mind was not seriously intent upon any labours but those proper to his career as an author, and the year 1854 saw, between the months of April and August, the publication in his journal of a new story, which is among the most characteristic, though not among the most successful, of his works of fiction. In comparison with most of Dickens's novels, _Hard Times_ is contained within a narrow compass; and this, with the further necessity of securing to each successive small portion of the story a certain immediate degree of effectiveness, accounts, in some measure, for the peculiarity of the impression left by this story upon many of its readers. Short as the story relatively is, few of Dickens's fictions were elaborated with so much care. He had not intended to write a new story for a twelvemonth, when, as he says, "the idea laid hold of him by the throat in a very violent manner," and the labour, carried on under conditions of peculiar irksomeness, "used him up" after a quite unaccustomed fashion. The book thus acquired a precision of form and manner which commends it to the French school of criticism rather than to lovers of English humour in its ampler forms and more flowing moods. At the same time the work has its purpose so visibly imprinted on its front, as almost to forbid our regarding it in the first instance apart from the moral which avowedly it is intended to inculcate. This moral, by no means new with Dickens, has both a negative and a positive side. "Do not harden your hearts," is the negative injunction, more especially do not harden them against the promptings of that human kindness which should draw together man and man, old and young, rich and poor; and keep your sympathies fresh by bringing nourishment to them through channels which prejudice or short-sightedness would fain narrow or stop up. This hortatory purpose assumes the form of invective and even of angry menace; and "utilitarian economists, skeletons of school-masters, commissioners of facts, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds," are warned: "The poor you have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives, so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you." No authority, however eminent, not even Mr. Ruskin's, is required to teach reflecting minds the infinite importance of the principles which _Hard Times_ was intended to illustrate. Nor is it of much moment whether the illustrations are always exact; whether the "commissioners of facts" have reason to protest that the unimaginative character of their processes does not necessarily imply an unimaginative purpose in their ends; whether there is any actual Coketown in existence within a hundred miles of Manchester; or whether it suffices that "everybody knew what was meant, but every cotton-spinning town said it was the other cotton-spinning town." The chief personal grievance of Stephen Blackpool has been removed or abated, but the "muddle" is not yet altogether cleared up which prevents the nation and the "national dustmen," its law-givers, from impartially and sympathetically furthering the interest of all classes. In a word, the moral of _Hard Times_ has not yet lost its force, however imperfect or unfair the method may have been in which it is urged in the book. Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic purpose is only too often prone to exaggerate what seems of special importance for the purpose in question, and to heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the clearest light. "Thomas Gradgrind, sir"--who announces himself with something of the genuine Lancashire roll--and his system are a sound and a laughable piece of satire, to begin with, only here and there marred by the satirist's imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures. The "Manchester School," which the novel strives to expose, is in itself to a great extent a figment of the imagination, which to this day serves to round many a hollow period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may fairly be asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the member for Coketown, deaf and blind to any consideration but the multiplication-table? But in any case the cause hardly warrants one of its consequences as depicted in the novel--the utter brutalization of a stolid nature like "the Whelp's." When Gradgrind's son is about to be shipped abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, he reminds his father that he merely exemplifies the statistical law that "so many people out of so many will be dishonest." When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly asked whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiologically assured of the fact; and to the further inquiry whether this heart of his is accessible to compassion, makes answer that "it is accessible to reason, and to nothing else." These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy upon himself savour of the moral justice represented by Gratiano in the fourth act. So, again, Coketown, with its tall chimneys and black river, and its thirteen religious denominations, to which whoever else belonged the working-men did _not_, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But the influence of Coketown, or of a whole wilderness of Coketowns, cannot justly be charged with a tendency to ripen such a product as Josiah Bounderby, who is not only the "bully of humanity," but proves to be a mean-spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self-help. In short, _Hard Times_ errs by its attempt to prove too much. Apart, however, from the didactic purposes which overburden it, the pathos and humour of particular portions of this tale appear to me to have been in no wise overrated. The domestic tragedy of Stephen and Rachael has a subdued intensity of tenderness and melancholy of a kind rare with Dickens, upon whom the example of Mrs. Gaskell in this instance may not have been without its influence. Nor is there anything more delicately and at the same time more appropriately conceived in any of his works than poor Rachael's dominion over the imagination as well as over the affections of her noble-minded and unfortunate lover: "As the shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life." The love-story of poor Louisa is of a different kind, and more wordy in the telling; yet here also the feelings painted are natural and true. The humorous interest is almost entirely concentrated upon the company of horse-riders; and never has Dickens's extraordinary power of humorous observation more genially asserted itself. From Mr. Sleary--"thtout man, game-eye"--and his protagonist, Mr. E. W. B. Childers, who, when he shook his long hair, caused it to "shake all at once," down to Master Kidderminster, who used to form the apex of the human pyramids, and "in whose young nature there was an original flavour of the misanthrope," these honest equestrians are more than worthy to stand by the side of Mr. Vincent Crummles and his company of actors; and the fun has here, in addition to the grotesqueness of the earlier picture, a mellowness of its own. Dickens's comic genius was never so much at its ease and so inexhaustible in ludicrous fancies as in the depiction of such groups as this; and the horse-riders, skilfully introduced to illustrate a truth, wholesome if not novel, would have insured popularity to a far less interesting and to a far less powerful fiction. The year after that which saw the publication of _Hard Times_ was one in which the thoughts of most Englishmen were turned away from the problems approached in that story. But if the military glories of 1854 had not aroused in him any very exuberant enthusiasm, the reports from the Crimea in the ensuing winter were more likely to appeal to his patriotism as well as to his innate impatience of disorder and incompetence. In the first instance, however, he contented himself with those grumblings to which, as a sworn foe of red tape and a declared disbeliever in our parliamentary system, he might claim to have a special right; and he seems to have been too restless in and about himself to have entered very closely into the progress of public affairs. The Christmas had been a merry one at Tavistock House; and the amateur theatricals of its juvenile company had passed through a most successful season. Their history has been written by one of the performers--himself not the least distinguished of the company, since it was he who, in Dickens's house, caused Thackeray to roll off his seat in a fit of laughter. Dickens, who with Mark Lemon disported himself among these precocious minnows, was, as our chronicler relates, like Triplet, "author, manager, and actor too," organiser, deviser, and harmoniser of all the incongruous assembled elements; it was he "who improvised costumes, painted and corked our innocent cheeks, and suggested all the most effective business of the scene." But, as was usual with him, the transition was rapid from play to something very like earnest; and already, in June, 1855, the Tavistock House theatre produced Mr. Wilkie Collins's melodrama of _The Light-house_, which afterwards found its way to the public stage. To Dickens, who performed in it with the author, it afforded "scope for a piece of acting of great power," the old sailor Aaron Gurnock, which by its savage picturesqueness earned a tribute of recognition from Carlyle. No less a hand than Stanfield painted the scenery, and Dickens himself, besides writing the prologue, introduced into the piece a ballad called _The Story of the Wreck_, a not unsuccessful effort in Cowper's manner. At Christmas, 1856-'57, there followed _The Frozen Deep_, another melodrama by the same author; and by this time the management of his private theatricals had become to Dickens a serious business, to be carried on seriously for its own sake. "It was to him," he wrote, "like writing a book in company;" and his young people might learn from it "that kind of humility which is got from the earned knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to do must be done with the heart in it, and in a desperate earnest." _The Frozen Deep_ was several times repeated, on one occasion for the benefit of the daughter of the recently deceased Douglas Jerrold; but by the end of January the little theatre was finally broken up; and though Dickens spent one more winter season at Tavistock House, the shadow was then already falling upon his cheerful home. In the midst of his children's Christmas gaieties of the year 1855 Dickens had given two or three public readings to "wonderful audiences" in various parts of the country. A trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins had followed, during which, as he wrote home, he was wandering about Paris all day, dining at all manner of places, and frequenting the theatres at the rate of two or three a night. "I suppose," he adds, with pleasant self-irony, "as an old farmer said of Scott, I am 'makin' mysel'' all the time; but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond." And in truth a roving, restless spirit was strong upon him in these years. Already, in April, he speaks of himself as "going off; I don't know where or how far, to ponder about I don't know what." France, Switzerland, Spain, Constantinople, in Mr. Layard's company, had been successively in his thoughts, and, for aught he knew, Greenland and the North Pole might occur to him next. At the same time he foresaw that the end of it all would be his shutting himself up in some out-of-the-way place of which he had not yet thought, and going desperately to work there. Before, however, these phantasmagoric schemes had subsided into the quiet plan of an autumn visit to Folkestone, followed during the winter and spring by a residence at Paris, he had at least found a subject to ponder on, which was to suggest an altogether novel element in his next work of fiction. I have said that though, like the majority of his fellow-countrymen, Dickens regarded our war with Russia as inevitable, yet his hatred of all war, and his impatience of the exaggerations of passion and sentiment which all war produces, had preserved him from himself falling a victim to their contagion. On the other hand, when in the winter of 1854-'55 the note of exultation in the bravery of our soldiers in the Crimea began to be intermingled with complaints against the grievously defective arrangements for their comfort and health, and when these complaints, stimulated by the loud-voiced energy of the press, and extending into censures upon the whole antiquated and perverse system of our army administration, speedily swelled into a roar of popular indignation, sincere conviction ranged him on the side of the most uncompromising malcontents. He was at all times ready to give vent to that antipathy against officialism which is shared by so large a number of Englishmen. Though the son of a dock-yard official, he is found roundly asserting that "more obstruction of good things and patronage of bad things has been committed in the dock-yards--as in everything connected with the misdirection of the navy--than in every other branch of the public service put together, including"--the particularisation is hard--"even the Woods and Forests." He had listened, we may be sure, to the scornful denunciations launched by the prophet of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ against Downing Street and all its works, and to the proclamation of the great though rather vague truth that "reform in that Downing Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth all others." And now the heart-rending sufferings of multitudes of brave men had brought to light, in one department of the public administration, a series of complications and perversities which in the end became so patent to the Government itself that they had to be roughly remedied in the very midst of the struggle. The cry for administrative reform, which arose in the year 1855, however crude the form it frequently took, was in itself a logical enough result of the situation; and there is no doubt that the angriness of the complaint was intensified by the attitude taken up in the House of Commons by the head of the Government towards the pertinacious politician who made himself the mouthpiece of the extreme demands of the feeling outside. Mr. Layard was Dickens's valued friend; and the share is thus easily explained which--against his otherwise uniform practice of abstaining from public meetings--the most popular writer of the day took in the Administrative Reform meetings, held in Drury Lane Theatre, on June 27, 1855. The speech which he delivered on this occasion, and which was intended to aid in forcing the "whole question" of Administrative Reform upon the attention of an unwilling Government, possesses no value whatever in connexion with its theme, though of course it is not devoid of some smart and telling hits. Not on the platform, but at his desk as an author, was Dickens to do real service to the cause of administrative efficiency. For whilst invective of a general kind runs off like water from the rock of usage, even Circumlocution Offices are not insensible to the acetous force of satire. Dickens's caricature of British officialism formed the most generally attractive element in the story of _Little Dorrit_--originally intended to be called _Nobody's Fault_--which he published in monthly numbers, from December, 1855, that year, to June, 1857. He was solemnly taken to task for his audacity by the _Edinburgh Review_, which reproached him for his persistent ridicule of "the institutions of the country, the laws, the administration, in a word, the government under which we live." His "charges" were treated as hardly seriously meant, but as worthy of severe reprobation, because likely to be seriously taken by the poor, the uneducated, and the young. And the caricaturist, besides being reminded of the names of several eminent public servants, was specially requested to look, as upon a picture contrasting with his imaginary Circumlocution Office, upon the Post Office, or--for the choice offered was not more extensive--upon the London police, so liberally praised by himself in his own journal. The delighted author of _Little Dorrit_ replied to this not very skilful diatribe in a short and spirited rejoinder in _Household Words_. In this he judiciously confined himself to refuting an unfounded incidental accusation in the Edinburgh article, and to dwelling, as upon a "Curious Misprint," upon the indignant query: "How does he account for the career of _Mr. Rowland Hill_?" whose name, as an example of the ready intelligence of the Circumlocution Office, was certainly an odd _erratum_. Had he, however, cared to make a more general reply to the main article of the indictment, he might have pointed out that, as a matter of fact, our official administrative machinery _had_ recently broken down in one of its most important branches, and that circumlocution in the literal sense of the word--circumlocution between department and department, or office and office--had been one of the principal causes of the collapse. The general drift of the satire was, therefore, in accordance with fact, and the satire itself salutary in its character. To quarrel with it for not taking into consideration what might be said on the other side, was to quarrel with the method of treatment which satire has at all times considered itself entitled to adopt; while to stigmatise a popular book as likely to mislead the ill-informed, was to suggest a restraint which would have deprived wit and humour of most of their opportunities of rendering service to either a good or an evil cause. A far more legitimate exception has been taken to these Circumlocution Office episodes as defective in art by the very reason of their being exaggerations. Those best acquainted with the interiors of our government offices may be right in denying that the Barnacles can be regarded as an existing type. Indeed, it would at no time have been easy to point to any office quite as labyrinthine, or quite as bottomless, as that permanently presided over by Mr. Tite Barnacle; to any chief secretary or commissioner so absolutely wooden of fibre as he; or to any private secretary so completely absorbed in his eye-glass as Barnacle junior. But as satirical figures they one and all fulfil their purpose as thoroughly as the picture of the official sanctum itself, with its furniture "in the higher official manner," and its "general bamboozling air of how not to do it." The only question is, whether satire which, if it is to be effective, must be of a piece and in its way exaggerated, is not out of place in a pathetic and humorous fiction, where, like a patch of too diverse a thread, it interferes with the texture into which it is introduced. In themselves these passages of _Little Dorrit_ deserve to remain unforgotten amongst the masterpieces of literary caricature; and there is, I do not hesitate to say, something of Swiftian force in their grotesque embodiment of a popular current of indignation. The mere name of the Circumlocution Office was a stroke of genius, one of those phrases of Dickens which Professor Masson justly describes as, whether exaggerated or not, "efficacious for social reform." As usual, Dickens had made himself well acquainted with the formal or outside part of his subject; the very air of Whitehall seems to gather round us as Mr. Tite Barnacle, in answer to a persistent enquirer who "wants to know" the position of a particular matter, concedes that it "may have been, in the course of official business, referred to the Circumlocution Office for its consideration," and that "the department may have either originated, or confirmed, a minute on the subject." In the _Household Words_ paper called _A Poor Man's Tale of a Patent_ (1850) will be found a sufficiently elaborate study for Mr. Doyce's experiences of the government of his country, as wrathfully narrated by Mr. Meagles. With the exception of the Circumlocution Office passages--adventitious as they are to the progress of the action--_Little Dorrit_ exhibits a palpable falling-off in inventive power. Forster illustrates by a striking fac-simile the difference between the "labour and pains" of the author's short notes for _Little Dorrit_ and the "lightness and confidence of handling" in what hints he had jotted down for _David Copperfield_. Indeed, his "tablets" had about this time begun to be an essential part of his literary equipment. But in _Little Dorrit_ there are enough internal signs of, possibly unconscious, lassitude. The earlier, no doubt, is, in every respect, the better part of the book; or, rather, the later part shows the author wearily at work upon a canvas too wide for him, and filling it up with a crowd of personages in whom it is difficult to take much interest. Even Mr. Merdle and his catastrophe produce the effect rather of a ghastly allegory than of an "extravagant conception," as the author ironically called it in his preface, derived only too directly from real life. In the earlier part of the book, in so far as it is not once again concerned with enforcing the moral of _Hard Times_ in a different way, by means of Mrs. Clennam and her son's early history, the humour of Dickens plays freely over the figure of the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a psychological masterpiece in its way; but the revolting selfishness of Little Dorrit's father is not redeemed artistically by her own long-suffering; for her pathos lacks the old irresistible ring. Doubtless much in this part of the story--the whole episode, for instance, of the honest turnkey--is in the author's best manner. But, admirable as it is, this new picture of prison-life and prison-sentiment has an undercurrent of bitterness, indeed, almost of contemptuousness, foreign to the best part of Dickens's genius. This is still more perceptible in a figure not less true to life than the Father of the Marshalsea himself--Flora, the overblown flower of Arthur Clennam's boyish love. The humour of the conception is undeniable, but the whole effect is cruel; and, though greatly amused, the reader feels almost as if he were abetting a profanation. Dickens could not have become what he is to the great multitude of his readers had he, as a humourist, often indulged in this cynical mood. There is in general little in the characters of this fiction to compensate for the sense of oppression from which, as he follows the slow course of its far from striking plot, the reader finds it difficult to free himself. A vein of genuine humour shows itself in Mr. Plornish, obviously a favourite of the author's, and one of those genuine working-men, as rare in fiction as on the stage, where Mr. Toole has reproduced the species; but the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Plornish is only a fainter revival of that between Mr. and Mrs. Bagney. Nor is there anything fresh or novel in the characters belonging to another social sphere. Henry Gowan, apparently intended as an elaborate study in psychology, is only a very tedious one; and his mother at Hampton Court, whatever phase of a dilapidated aristocracy she may be intended to caricature, is merely ill-bred. As for Mrs. General, she is so sorry a burlesque that she could not be reproduced without extreme caution even on the stage--to the reckless conventionalities of which, indeed, the whole picture of the Dorrit family as _nouveaux riches_ bears a striking resemblance. There is, on the contrary, some good caricature, which, in one instance at least, was thought transparent by the knowing, in the _silhouettes_ of the great Mr. Merdle's professional guests; but these are, like the Circumlocution Office puppets, satiric sketches, not the living figures of creative humour. I have spoken of this story with a censure which may be regarded as exaggerated in its turn. But I well remember, at the time of its publication in numbers, the general consciousness that _Little Dorrit_ was proving unequal to the high-strung expectations which a new work by Dickens then excited in his admirers, both young and old. There were new and striking features in it, with abundant comic and serious effect, but there was no power in the whole story to seize and hold, and the feeling could not be escaped that the author was not at his best. And Dickens was not at his best when he wrote _Little Dorrit_. Yet while nothing is more remarkable in the literary career of Dickens than this apparently speedy decline of his power, nothing is more wonderful in it than the degree to which he righted himself again, not, indeed, with his public, for the public never deserted its favourite, but with his genius. A considerable part of _Little Dorrit_ must have been written in Paris, where, in October, after a quiet autumn at Folkestone, Dickens had taken a family apartment in the Avenue des Champs �lysées, "about half a quarter of a mile above Franconi's." Here, after his fashion, he lived much to himself, his family, and his guests, only occasionally finding his way into a literary or artistic _salon_; but he sat for his portrait to both Ary and Henri Scheffer, and was easily persuaded to read his _Cricket on the Hearth_ to an audience in the atelier. Macready and Mr. Wilkie Collins were in turn the companions of many "theatrical and lounging" evenings. Intent as Dickens now had become upon the technicalities of his own form of composition, this interest must have been greatly stimulated by the frequent comparison of modern French plays, in most of which nicety of construction and effectiveness of situation have so paramount a significance. At Boulogne, too, Mr. Wilkie Collins was a welcome summer visitor. And in the autumn the two friends started on the _Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_. It came to an untimely end as a pedestrian excursion, but the record of it is one of the pleasantest memorials of a friendship which brightened much of Dickens's life and intensified his activity in work as well as in pleasure. "Mr. Thomas Idle" had indeed a busy time of it in this year 1857. The publication of _Little Dorrit_ was not finished till June, and in August we find him, between a reading and a performance of _The Frozen Deep_ at Manchester--then in the exciting days of the great Art Exhibition--thus describing to Macready his way of filling up his time: "I hope you have seen my tussle with the _Edinburgh_. I saw the chance last Friday week, as I was going down to read the _Carol_ in St. Martin's Hall. Instantly turned to, then and there, and wrote half the article, flew out of bed early next morning, and finished it by noon. Went down to Gallery of Illustration (we acted that night), did the day's business, corrected the proofs in Polar costume in dressing-room, broke up two numbers of _Household Words_ to get it out directly, played in _Frozen Deep_ and _Uncle John_, presided at supper of company, made no end of speeches, went home and gave in completely for four hours, then got sound asleep, and next day was as fresh as you used to be in the far-off days of your lusty youth." It was on the occasion of the readings at St. Martin's Hall, for the benefit of Douglas Jerrold's family, that the thought of giving readings for his own benefit first suggested itself to Dickens; and, as will be seen, by April, 1858, the idea had been carried into execution, and a new phase of life had begun for him. And yet at this very time, when his home was about to cease being in the fullest sense a home to Dickens, by a strange irony of fortune, he had been enabled to carry out a long-cherished fancy and to take possession, in the first instance as a summer residence, of the house on Gad's Hill, of which a lucky chance had made him the owner rather more than a twelvemonth before. "My little place," he wrote in 1858, to his Swiss friend Cerjat, "is a grave red-brick house (time of George the First, I suppose), which I have added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on the summit of Gad's Hill. The robbery was committed before the door, on the man with the treasure, and Falstaff ran away from the identical spot of ground now covered by the room in which I write. A little rustic ale-house, called 'The Sir John Falstaff,' is over the way--has been over the way ever since, in honour of the event.... The whole stupendous property is on the old Dover road...." Among "the blessed woods and fields" which, as he says, had done him "a world of good," in a season of unceasing bodily and mental unrest, the great English writer had indeed found a habitation fitted to become inseparable from his name and fame. It was not till rather later, in 1860, that, after the sale of Tavistock House, Gad's Hill Place became his regular abode, a London house being only now and then taken for the season, while furnished rooms were kept at the office in Wellington Street for occasional use. And it was only gradually that he enlarged and improved his Kentish place so as to make it the pretty and comfortable country-house which at the present day it appears to be; constructing, in course of time, the passage under the high-road to the shrubbery, where the Swiss châlet given to him by Mr. Fechter was set up, and building the pretty little conservatory, which, when completed, he was not to live many days to enjoy. But an old-fashioned, homely look, free from the slightest affectation of quietness, belonged to Gad's Hill Place, even after all these alterations, and belongs to it even at this day, when Dickens's solid old-fashioned furniture has been changed. In the pretty little front hall still hangs the illuminated tablet recalling the legend of Gad's Hill; and on the inside panels of the library door remain the facetious sham book-titles: "Hudson's _Complete Failure_," and "_Ten Minutes in China_," and "Cats' _Lives_" and, on a long series of leather backs, "Hansard's _Guide to Refreshing Sleep_." The rooms are all of a modest size, and the bedrooms--amongst them Dickens's own--very low; but the whole house looks thoroughly habitable, while the views across the cornfields at the back are such as in their undulation of soft outline are nowhere more pleasant than in Kent. Rochester and the Medway are near, even for those who do not--like Dickens and his dogs--count a stretch past three or four "mile-stones on the Dover road" as the mere beginning of an afternoon's walk. At a distance little greater there are in one direction the green glades of Cobham Park, with Chalk and Gravesend beyond; and in another the flat country towards the Thames, with its abundance of market-gardens. There, too, are the marshes on the border of which lie the massive ruin of Cooling Castle, the refuge of the Lollard martyr who was _not_ concerned in the affair on Gad's Hill, and Cooling Church and church-yard, with the quaint little gravestones in the grass. London and the office were within easy reach, and Paris itself was, for practical purposes, not much farther away, so that, in later days at all events, Dickens found himself "crossing the Channel perpetually." The name of Dickens still has a good sound in and about Gad's Hill. He was on very friendly terms with some families whose houses stand near to his own; and though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, than to "wear topboots" and play the squire, yet he had in him not a little of what endears so many a resident country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He was head organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of cricket matches and foot races; and his house was a dispensary for the poor of the parish. He established confidential relations between his house and the Falstaff Inn over the way, regulating his servants' consumption of beer on a strict but liberal plan of his own devising; but it is not for this reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin Trood--for such was the veritable name of mine host of the "Falstaff" in Dickens's time--declares that it was a bad day for the neighbourhood when Dickens was taken away from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which surrounded him in his own country, and Forster has described his astonishment at the manifestation of it on the occasion of the wedding of the youngest daughter of the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popular, and specially among those by whom he was beloved as a friend or honoured as a benefactor. But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest that Dickens was to settle down in his pleasant country house, nor was he ever, except quite at the last, to sit down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a wanderer no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his residence for the summer on Gad's Hill, his home, and that of his younger children, was his wife's home no longer. The separation, which appears to have been preparing itself for some, but no very long, time, took place in May, 1858, when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. Dickens left her husband, who henceforth allowed her an ample separate maintenance, and occasionally corresponded with her, but never saw her again. The younger children remained in their father's house under the self-sacrificing and devoted care of Mrs. Dickens's surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. Shortly afterwards, Dickens thought it well, in printed words which may be left forgotten, to rebut some slanderous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrepresented the circumstances of this separation. The causes of the event were an open secret to his friends and acquaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that affection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty together made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction. It was not incumbent upon his faithful friend and biographer, and much less can it be upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of Dickens's genius entitles to speak of him at all, to declare the standard by which the most painful transaction in his life is to be judged. I say the most painful, for it is with a feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in a letter three years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter's wedding: "I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand me when I say so, and no more." A shadow, too--who would deny it?--falls on every one of the pictures in which the tenderest of modern humourists has painted the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life of which to his generation he had become almost the poet and the prophet, when we remember how he was himself neither blessed with its full happiness nor capable of accepting with resignation the imperfection inherent in it, as in all things human. CHAPTER VI. LAST YEARS. [1858-1870.] The last twelve years of Dickens's life were busy years, like the others; but his activity was no longer merely the expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he continued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputably hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into account the fear of bodily ill-effects resulting from his exertions. Their misgivings had other grounds. Of course, had there been any pressure of pecuniary difficulty or need upon Dickens when he began, or when on successive occasions he resumed, his public readings, there would be nothing further to be said. But I see no suggestion of any such pressure. "My worldly circumstances," he wrote before he had finally made up his mind to read in America, "are very good. I don't want money. All my possessions are free and in the best order. Still," he added, "at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense consideration." Moreover, with all his love of doing as he chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious extravagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in the course of nature he would leave behind him. Love of money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent attractions for most men; and these attractions are perhaps strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake of the race as well as of the prize. Dickens's readings were virtually something new; their success was not only all his own, but unique and unprecedented--what nobody but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. Yet the determining motive--if I read his nature rightly--was, after all, of another kind. "Two souls dwelt in his breast;" and when their aspirations united in one appeal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he felt for his multitudes of readers, and the actor who longed to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thoroughly said to me, to be face to face with his public; and against this liking, which he had already indulged as fully as he could without passing the boundaries between private and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries; and to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid readings such as those of Dickens would, on the face of it, be absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own prerogative of being many things to many men; and where the author of a work, more particularly of a work of fiction, adjusts it to circumstances differing from those of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser art to prejudice the claims of the greater. Dickens cannot have been blind to these considerations; but to others his eyes were never opened. He found much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the "roaring sea of response," to use his own fine metaphor, of which he had become accustomed to "stand upon the beach." His truest sentiment as an author was touched to the quick; and he was, as he says himself, "brought very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be his fame," when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, "Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends?" or when, at Belfast, he was almost overwhelmed with entreaties "to shake hands, Misther Dickens, and God bless you, sir; not ounly for the light you've been in mee house, sir--and God love your face!--this many a year." On the other hand--and this, perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to perceive--there was something vulgarising in the constant striving after immediate success in the shape of large audiences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts. The conditions of the actor's art cannot forego these stimulants; and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To me, at least, it is painful to find Dickens jubilantly recording how at Dublin "eleven bank-notes were thrust into the pay-box--Arthur saw them--at one time for eleven stalls;" how at Edinburgh "neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind, nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings;" while, every allowance being made, there is something almost ludicrous in the double assertion, that "the most delicate audience I had ever seen in any provincial place is Canterbury; but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover." What subjects for parody Dickens would have found in these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man! Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with the very thoroughness with which he entered into the work of his readings. "You have no idea," he tells Forster, in 1867, "how I have worked at them. Finding it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, _I have learnt them all_, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the situation." "From ten years ago to last night," he writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, "I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere." The freshness with which he returned night after night and season after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was itself a genuine actor's gift. "So real," he declares, "are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never stood there before." Dickens's first public readings were given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853-'54, in support of the new Midland Institute; but a record--for the authenticity of which I cannot vouch--remains, that with true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in question, gave a trial reading of the _Christmas Carol_ to a smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent purposes; and the very fact that it had become necessary to decline some of these frequent invitations had again suggested the possibility--which had occurred to him eleven years before--of meeting the demand in a different way. Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of undertaking an entire series of paid public readings would have been carried out, had it not been for the general restlessness which had seized upon Dickens early in 1858, when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or of leisure to absorb him, and when he craved for excitement more than ever. To go home--in this springtime of 1858--was not to find there the peace of contentment. "I must do _something_," he wrote in March to his faithful counsellor, "or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state." So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that month he had entered into his new relation with the public. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of his nature had victoriously asserted itself, and according to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relentless vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began with a brief series at St. Martin's Hall, and then, his invaluable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his manager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven readings into three months and a half of travelling in the "provinces," including Scotland and Ireland. A few winter readings in London, and a short supplementary course in the country during October, 1859, completed this first series. Already, in 1858, we find him, in a letter from Ireland, complaining of the "tremendous strain," and declaring, "I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course." But the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed him--I can testify to the thrill of excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in October, 1859--repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed to him, and with Dublin--where his success was extraordinary--he was so smitten as to think it at first sight "pretty nigh as big as Paris." In return, the Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of view: "'Whaat sart of a hoose, sur?' he asked me. 'Capital.' 'The Lard be praised, for the 'onor o' Dooblin.'" The books, or portions of books, to which he confined himself during this first series of readings were few in number. They comprised the _Carol_ and the _Chimes_, and two stories from earlier Christmas numbers of _Household Words_--may the exclamation of the soft-hearted chambermaid at the Holly Tree Inn, "It's a shame to part 'em!" never vanish from my memory!--together with the episodic readings of the _Trial_ in _Pickwick_, _Mrs. Gamp_, and _Paul Dombey_. Of these the _Pickwick_, which I heard more than once, is still vividly present to me. The only drawback to the complete enjoyment of it was the lurking fear that there had been some tampering with the text, not to be condoned even in its author. But in the way of assumption Charles Mathews the elder himself could have accomplished no more Protean effort. The lack-lustre eye of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, the forensic hitch of Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, and the hopeless impotence of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle were alike incomparable. And if the success of the impersonation of Mr. Samuel Weller was less complete--although Dickens had formerly acted the character on an amateur stage--the reason probably was that, by reason of his endless store of ancient and modern instances, Sam had himself become a quasi-mythical being, whom it was almost painful to find reproduced in flesh and blood. I have not hesitated to treat these readings by Dickens as if they had been the performances of an actor; and the description would apply even more strongly to his later readings, in which he seemed to make his points in a more accentuated fashion than before. "His readings," says Mr. C. Kent, in an interesting little book about them, "were, in the fullest meaning of the words, singularly ingenious and highly-elaborated histrionic performances." As such they had been prepared with a care such as few actors bestow upon their parts, and--for the book was prepared not less than the reading--not all authors bestow upon their plays. Now, the art of reading, even in the case of dramatic works, has its own laws, which even the most brilliant readers cannot neglect except at their peril. A proper pitch has to be found, in the first instance, before the exceptional passages can be, as it were, marked off from it; and the absence of this ground-tone sometimes interfered with the total effect of a reading by Dickens. On the other hand, the exceptional passages were, if not uniformly, at least generally excellent; nor am I at all disposed to agree with Forster in preferring, as a rule, the humorous to the pathetic. At the same time, there was noticeable in these readings a certain hardness which competent critics likewise discerned in Dickens's acting, and which could not, at least in the former case, be regarded as an ordinary characteristic of dilettanteism. The truth is that he isolated his parts too sharply--a frequent fault of English acting, and one more detrimental to the total effect of a reading than even to that of an acted play. No sooner had the heaviest stress of the first series of readings ceased than Dickens was once more at work upon a new fiction. The more immediate purpose was to insure a prosperous launch to the journal which, in the spring of 1859, took the place of _Household Words_. A dispute, painful in its origin, but ending in an amicable issue, had resulted in the purchase of that journal by Dickens; but already a little earlier he had--as he was entitled to do--begun the new venture of _All the Year Round_, with which _Household Words_ was afterwards incorporated. The first number, published on April 30, contained the earliest instalment of _A Tale of Two Cities_, which was completed by November 20 following. This story holds a unique place amongst the fictions of its author. Perhaps the most striking difference between it and his other novels may seem to lie in the all but entire absence from it of any humour or attempt at humour; for neither the brutalities of that "honest tradesman," Jerry, nor the laconisms of Miss Pross, can well be called by that name. Not that his sources of humour were drying up, even though, about this time, he contributed to an American journal a short "romance of the real world," _Hunted Down_, from which the same relief is again conspicuously absent. For the humour of Dickens was to assert itself with unmistakable force in his next longer fiction, and was even before that, in some of his occasional papers, to give delightful proofs of its continued vigour. In the case of the _Tale of Two Cities_, he had a new and distinct design in his mind which did not, indeed, exclude humour, but with which a liberal indulgence in it must have seriously interfered. "I set myself," he writes, "the little task of writing a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of them." He therefore renounced his more usual method in favour of one probably less congenial to him. Yet, in his own opinion at least, he succeeded so well in the undertaking, that when the story was near its end he could venture to express a hope that it was "the best story he had written." So much praise will hardly be given to this novel even by admirers of the French art of telling a story succinctly, or by those who can never resist a rather hysterical treatment of the French Revolution. In my own opinion _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a skilfully though not perfectly constructed novel, which needed but little substantial alteration in order to be converted into a not less effective stage-play. And with such a design Dickens actually sent the proof-sheets of the book to his friend Regnier, in the fearful hope that he might approve of the project of its dramatisation for a French theatre. Cleverly or clumsily adapted, the tale of the Revolution and its sanguinary vengeance was unlikely to commend itself to the Imperial censorship; but an English version was, I believe, afterwards very fairly successful on the boards of the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste was certainly in her right place as Madame Defarge, an excellent character for a melodrama, though rather wearisome as she lies in wait through half a novel. The construction of this story is, as I have said, skilful but not perfect. Dickens himself successfully defended his use of accident in bringing about the death of Madame Defarge. The real objection to the conduct of this episode, however, lies in the inadequacy of the contrivance for leaving Miss Pross behind in Paris. Too much is also, I think, made to turn upon the three words "and their descendants"--non-essential in the original connexion--by which Dr. Manette's written denunciation becomes fatal to those he loves. Still, the general edifice of the plot is solid; its interest is, notwithstanding the crowded background, concentrated with much skill upon a small group of personages; and Carton's self-sacrifice, admirably prepared from the very first, produces a legitimate tragic effect. At the same time the novelist's art vindicates its own claims. Not only does this story contain several narrative episodes of remarkable power--such as the flight from Paris at the close, and the touching little incident of the seamstress, told in Dickens's sweetest pathetic manner--but it is likewise enriched by some descriptive pictures of unusual excellence: for instance, the sketch of Dover in the good old smuggling times, and the mezzo-tint of the stormy evening in Soho. Doubtless the increased mannerism of the style is disturbing, and this not only in the high-strung French scenes. As to the historical element in this novel, Dickens modestly avowed his wish that he might by his story have been able "to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book." But if Dickens desired to depict the noble of the _ancien régime_, either according to Carlyle or according to intrinsic probability, he should not have offered, in his Marquis, a type historically questionable, and unnatural besides. The description of the Saint Antoine, before and during the bursting of the storm, has in it more of truthfulness, or of the semblance of truthfulness; and Dickens's perception of the physiognomy of the French workman is, I think, remarkably accurate. Altogether, the book is an extraordinary _tour de force_, which Dickens never repeated. The opening of a new story by Dickens gave the necessary _impetus_ to his new journal at its earliest stage; nor was the ground thus gained ever lost. Mr. W. H. Wills stood by his chief's side as of old, taking, more especially in later years, no small share of responsibility upon him. The prospectus of _All the Year Round_ had not in vain promised an identity of principle in its conduct with that of its predecessor; in energy and spirit it showed no falling off; and, though not in all respects, the personality of Dickens made itself felt as distinctly as ever. Besides the _Tale of Two Cities_ he contributed to it his story of _Great Expectations_. Amongst his contributors Mr. Wilkie Collins took away the breath of multitudes of readers; Mr. Charles Reade disported himself amongst the facts which gave stamina to his fiction; and Lord Lytton made a daring voyage into a mysterious country. Thither Dickens followed him, for once, in his _Four Stories_, not otherwise noteworthy, and written in a manner already difficult to discriminate from that of Mr. Wilkie Collins. For the rest, the advice with which Dickens aided Lord Lytton's progress in his _Strange Story_ was neither more ready nor more painstaking than that which he bestowed upon his younger contributors, to more than one of whom he generously gave the opportunity of publishing in his journal a long work of fiction. Some of these younger writers were at this period amongst his most frequent guests and associates; for nothing more naturally commended itself to him than the encouragement of the younger generation. But though longer imaginative works played at least as conspicuous a part in the new journal as they had in the old, the conductor likewise continued to make manifest his intention that the lesser contributions should not be treated by readers or by writers as harmless necessary "padding." For this purpose it was requisite not only that the choice of subjects should be made with the utmost care, but also that the master's hand should itself be occasionally visible. Dickens's occasional contributions had been few and unimportant, till in a happy hour he began a series of papers, including many of the pleasantest, as well as of the mellowest, amongst the lighter productions of his pen. As usual, he had taken care to find for this series a name which of itself went far to make its fortune. "I am both a town and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connexion in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent Garden, London--now about the city streets, now about the country by-roads, seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others." The whole collection of these _Uncommercial Traveller_ papers, together with the _Uncommercial Samples_ which succeeded them after Dickens's return from America, and which begin with a graphic account of his homeward voyage _Aboard Ship_, where the voice of conscience spoke in the motion of the screw, amounts to thirty-seven articles, and spreads over a period of nine years. They are necessarily of varying merit, but amongst them are some which deserve a permanent place in our lighter literature. Such are the description of the church-yards on a quiet evening in _The City of the Absent_, the grotesque picture of loneliness in _Chambers_--a favourite theme with Dickens--and the admirable papers on _Shy Neighbourhoods_ and on _Tramps_. Others have a biographical interest, though delightfully objective in treatment; yet others are mere fugitive pieces; but there are few without some of the most attractive qualities of Dickens's easiest style. Dickens contributed other occasional papers to his journal, some of which may be forgotten without injury to his fame. Amongst these may be reckoned the rather dreary _George Silverman's Explanation_ (1868), in which there is nothing characteristic but a vivid picture of a set of ranters, led by a clique of scoundrels; on the other hand, there will always be admirers of the pretty _Holiday Romance_, published nearly simultaneously in America and England, a nosegay of tales told by children, the only fault of which is that, as with other children's nosegays, there is perhaps a little too much of it. I have no room for helping to rescue from partial oblivion an old friend, whose portrait has not, I think, found a home amongst his master's collected sketches. Pincher's counterfeit has gone astray, like _Pincher_ himself. Meanwhile, the special institution of the Christmas number flourished in connexion with _All the Year Round_ down to the year 1867, as it had during the last five years of _Household Words_. It consisted, with the exception of the very last number, of a series of short stories, in a framework of the editor's own devising. To the authors of the stories, of which he invariably himself wrote one or more, he left the utmost liberty, at times stipulating for nothing but that tone of cheerful philanthropy which he had domesticated in his journal. In the Christmas numbers, which gradually attained to such a popularity that of one of the last something like a quarter of a million copies were sold, Dickens himself shone most conspicuously in the introductory sections; and some of these are to be reckoned amongst his very best descriptive character-sketches. Already in _Household Words_ Christmas numbers the introductory sketch of the _Seven Poor Travellers_ from Watt's Charity at supper in the Rochester hostelry, and the excellent description of a winter journey and sojourn at the _Holly Tree Inn_, with an excursus on inns in general, had become widely popular. The _All the Year Round_ numbers, however, largely augmented this success. After _Tom Tiddler's Ground_, with the adventures of Miss Kitty Kimmeens, a pretty little morality in miniature, teaching the same lesson as the vagaries of Mr. Mopes the hermit, came _Somebody's Luggage_, with its exhaustive disquisition on waiters; and then the memorable chirpings of _Mrs. Lirriper_, in both _Lodgings_ and _Legacy_, admirable in the delicacy of their pathos, and including an inimitable picture of London lodging-house life. Then followed the _Prescriptions_ of _Dr. Marigold_, the eloquent and sarcastic but tender-hearted Cheap Jack; and _Mugby Junction_, which gave words to the cry of a whole nation of hungry and thirsty travellers. In the tales and sketches contributed by him to the Christmas numbers, in addition to these introductions, he at times gave the rein to his love for the fanciful and the grotesque, which there was here no reason to keep under. On the whole, written, as in a sense these compositions were, to order, nothing is more astonishing in them than his continued freshness, against which his mannerism is here of vanishing importance; and, inasmuch as after issuing a last Christmas number of a different kind, Dickens abandoned the custom when it had reached the height of popular favour, and when manifold imitations had offered him the homage of their flattery, he may be said to have withdrawn from this campaign in his literary life with banners flying. In the year 1859 Dickens's readings had been comparatively few; and they had ceased altogether in the following year, when the _Uncommercial Traveller_ began his wanderings. The winter from 1859 to 1860 was his last winter at Tavistock House; and, with the exception of his rooms in Wellington Street, he had now no settled residence but Gad's Hill Place. He sought its pleasant retreat about the beginning of June, after the new experience of an attack of rheumatism had made him recognise "the necessity of country training all through the summer." Yet such was the recuperative power, or the indomitable self-confidence, of his nature, that after he had in these summer months contributed some of the most delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_ papers to his journal, we find him already in August "prowling about, meditating a new book." It is refreshing to think of Dickens in this pleasant interval of country life, before he had rushed once more into the excitement of his labours as a public reader. We may picture him to ourselves, accompanied by his dogs, striding along the country roads and lanes, exploring the haunts of the country tramps, "a piece of Kentish road," for instance, "bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, bluebells, and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may." At the foot of that hill, I fancy, lay Dullborough town half asleep in the summer afternoon; and the river in the distance was that which bounded the horizon of a little boy's vision "whose father's family name was Pirrip, and whose Christian name was Philip, but whose infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip." The story of Pip's adventures, the novel of _Great Expectations_, was thought over in these Kentish perambulations between Thames and Medway along the road which runs, apparently with the intention of running out to sea, from Higham towards the marshes; in the lonely church-yard of Cooling village by the thirteen little stone-lozenges, of which Pip counted only five, now nearly buried in their turn by the rank grass; and in quiet saunters through the familiar streets of Rochester, past the "queer" Townhall; and through the "Vines" past the fine old Restoration House, called in the book (by the name of an altogether different edifice) Satis House. And the climax of the narrative was elaborated on a unique steamboat excursion from London to the mouth of the Thames, broken by a night at the "Ship and Lobster," an old riverside inn called "The Ship" in the story. No wonder that Dickens's descriptive genius should become refreshed by these studies of his subject, and that thus _Great Expectations_ should have indisputably become one of the most picturesque of his books. But it is something very much more at the same time. The _Tale of Two Cities_ had as a story strongly seized upon the attention of the reader. But in the earlier chapters of _Great Expectations_ every one felt that Dickens was himself again. Since the Yarmouth scenes in _David Copperfield_ he had written nothing in which description married itself to sentiment so humorously and so tenderly. Uncouth, and slow, and straightforward, and gentle of heart, like Mr. Peggotty, Joe Gargery is as new a conception as he is a genuinely true one; nor is it easy to know under what aspect to relish him most--whether disconsolate in his Sunday clothes, "like some extraordinary bird, standing, as he did, speechless, with his tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm," or at home by his own fireside, winking at his little comrade, and, when caught in the act by his wife, "drawing the back of his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions." Nor since _David Copperfield_ had Dickens again shown such an insight as he showed here into the world of a child's mind. "To be quite sure," he wrote to Forster, "I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe." His fears were unnecessary; for with all its charm the history of Pip lacks the personal element which insures our sympathy to the earlier story and to its hero. In delicacy of feeling, however, as well as in humour of description, nothing in Dickens surpasses the earlier chapters of _Great Expectations_; and equally excellent is the narrative of Pip's disloyalty of heart toward his early friends, down to his departure from the forge, a picture of pitiable selfishness almost Rousseau-like in its fidelity to poor human nature; down to his comic humiliation, when in the pride of his new position and his new clothes, before "that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy." The later and especially the concluding portions of this novel contain much that is equal in power to its opening; but it must be allowed that, before many chapters have ended, a false tone finds its way into the story. The whole history of Miss Havisham, and the crew of relations round the unfortunate creature, is strained and unnatural, and Estella's hardness is as repulsive as that of Edith Dombey herself. Mr. Jaggers and his house-keeper, and even Mr. Wemmick, have an element of artificiality in them, whilst about the Pocket family there is little, if anything at all, that is real. The story, however, seems to recover itself as the main thread in its deftly-woven texture is brought forward again: when on a dark, gusty night, ominous of coming trouble, the catastrophe of Pip's expectations announces itself in the return from abroad of his unknown benefactor, the convict whom he had as a child fed on the marshes. The remainder of the narrative is successful in conveying to the reader the sense of sickening anxiety which fills the hero; the interest is skilfully sustained by the introduction of a very strong situation--Pip's narrow escape out of the clutches of "Old Orlick" in the lime-kiln on the marshes; and the climax is reached in the admirably-executed narrative of the convict's attempt, with the aid of Pip, to escape by the river. The actual winding-up of _Great Expectations_ is not altogether satisfactory; but on the whole the book must be ranked among the very best of Dickens's later novels, as combining, with the closer construction and intenser narrative force common to several of these, not a little of the delightfully genial humour of his earlier works. Already, before _Great Expectations_ was completely published, Dickens had given a few readings at the St. James's Hall, and by the end of October in the same year, 1861, he was once more engaged in a full course of country readings. They occupied him till the following January, only ten days being left for his Christmas number, and a brief holiday for Christmas itself; so close was the adjustment of time and work by this favourite of fortune. The death of his faithful Arthur Smith befell most untowardly before the country readings were begun, but their success was unbroken, from Scotland to South Devon. The long-contemplated extract from _Copperfield_ had at last been added to the list--a self-sacrifice _coram publico_, hallowed by success--and another from _Nicholas Nickleby_, which "went in the wildest manner." He was, however, nearly worn out with fatigue before these winter readings were over, and was glad to snatch a moment of repose before a short spring course in town began. Scarcely was this finished, when he was coquetting in his mind with an offer from Australia, and had already proposed to himself to throw in, as a piece of work by the way, a series of papers to be called _The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down_. Meanwhile, a few readings for a charitable purpose in Paris, and a short summer course at St. James's Hall, completed this second series in the year 1863. Whatever passing thoughts overwork by day or sleeplessness at night may have occasionally brought with them, Dickens himself would have been strangely surprised, as no doubt would have been the great body of a public to which he was by this time about the best known man in England, had he been warned that weakness and weariness were not to be avoided even by a nature endowed with faculties so splendid and with an energy so conquering as his. He seemed to stand erect in the strength of his matured powers, equal as of old to any task which he set himself, and exulting, though with less buoyancy of spirit than of old, in the wreaths which continued to strew his path. Yet already the ranks of his contemporaries were growing thinner, while close to himself death was taking away members of the generation before, and of that after, his own. Amongst them was his mother--of whom his biography and his works have little to say or to suggest--and his second son. Happy events, too, had in the due course of things contracted the family circle at Gad's Hill. Of his intimates, he lost, in 1863, Augustus Egg; and in 1864 John Leech, to whose genius he had himself formerly rendered eloquent homage. A still older associate, the great painter Stanfield, survived till 1867. "No one of your father's friends," Dickens then wrote to Stanfield's son, "can ever have loved him more dearly than I always did, or can have better known the worth of his noble character." Yet another friend, who, however, so far as I can gather, had not at any time belonged to Dickens's most familiar circle, had died on Christmas Eve, 1863--Thackeray, whom it had for some time become customary to compare or contrast with him as his natural rival. Yet in point of fact, save for the tenderness which, as with all humourists of the highest order, was an important element in their writings, and save for the influences of time and country to which they were both subject, there are hardly two other amongst our great humourists who have less in common. Their unlikeness shows itself, among other things, in the use made by Thackeray of suggestions which it is difficult to believe he did not in the first instance owe to Dickens. Who would venture to call Captain Costigan a plagiarism from Mr. Snevellici, or to affect that Wenham and Wagg were copied from Pyke and Pluck, or that Major Pendennis--whose pardon one feels inclined to beg for the juxtaposition--was founded upon Major Bagstock, or the Old Campaigner in the _Newcomes_ on the Old Soldier in _Copperfield_? But that suggestions were in these and perhaps in a few other instances derived from Dickens by Thackeray for some of his most masterly characters, it would, I think, be idle to deny. In any case, the style of these two great writers differed as profoundly as their way of looking at men and things. Yet neither of them lacked a thorough appreciation of the other's genius; and it is pleasant to remember that, after paying in _Pendennis_ a tribute to the purity of Dickens's books, Thackeray in a public lecture referred to his supposed rival in a way which elicited from the latter the warmest of acknowledgments. It cannot be said that the memorial words which, after Thackeray's death, Dickens was prevailed upon to contribute to the _Cornhill Magazine_ did more than justice to the great writer whom England had just lost; but it is well that the kindly and unstinting tribute of admiration should remain on record, to contradict any supposition that a disagreement which had some years previously disturbed the harmony of their intercourse, and of which the world had, according to its wont, made the most, had really estranged two generous minds from one another. The effort which on this occasion Dickens made is in itself a proof of his kindly feeling towards Thackeray. Of Talfourd and Landor and Stanfield he could write readily after their deaths, but he frankly told Mr. Wilkie Collins that, "had he felt he could," he would most gladly have excused himself from writing the "couple of pages" about Thackeray. Dickens, it should be remembered, was at no time a man of many friends. The mere dalliance of friendship was foreign to one who worked so indefatigably in his hours of recreation as well as of labour; and fellowship in work of one kind or another seems to have been, in later years at all events, the surest support to his intimacy. Yet he was most easily drawn, not only to those who could help him, but to those whom he could help in congenial pursuits and undertakings. Such was, no doubt, the origin of his friendship in these later years with an accomplished French actor on the English boards, whom, in a rather barren period of our theatrical history, Dickens may have been justified in describing as "far beyond any one on our stage," and who certainly was an "admirable artist." In 1864 Mr. Fechter had taken the Lyceum, the management of which he was to identify with a more elegant kind of melodrama than that long domesticated lower down the Strand; and Dickens was delighted to bestow on him counsel frankly sought and frankly given. As an author, too, he directly associated himself with the art of his friend.[11] For I may mention here by anticipation that the last of the _All the Year Round_ Christmas numbers, the continuous story of _No Thoroughfare_, was written by Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins in 1867, with a direct eye to its subsequent adaptation to the stage, for which it actually was fitted by Mr. Wilkie Collins in the following year. The place of its production, the Adelphi, suited the broad effects and the rather conventional comic humour of the story and piece. From America, Dickens watched the preparation of the piece with unflagging interest; and his innate and irrepressible genius for stage-management reveals itself in the following passage from a letter written by him to an American friend soon after his return to England: "_No Thoroughfare_ is very shortly coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal. It is still playing here, but without Fechter, who has been very ill. He and Wilkie raised so many pieces of stage-effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with the report, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbery in the bedroom-scene at the Swiss Inn to be done to the sound of a water-fall rising and falling with the wind. Although in the very opening of that scene they speak of the water-fall, and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a good stage-carpenter, in an hour." _Great Expectations_ had been finished in 1860, and already in the latter part of 1861, the year which comprised the main portion of his second series of readings, he had been thinking of a new story. He had even found a title--the unlucky title which he afterwards adopted--but in 1862 the tempting Australian invitation had been a serious obstacle in his way. "I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled, fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it is another question." Nor was it the "unsettled, fluctuating distress" which made it a serious effort for him to attempt another longer fiction. Dickens shared with most writers the experience that both the inventive power and the elasticity of memory decline with advancing years. Already since the time when he was thinking of writing _Little Dorrit_ it had become his habit to enter in a book kept for the purpose memoranda for possible future use, hints for subjects of stories,[12] scenes, situations, and characters; thoughts and fancies of all kinds; titles for possible books. Of these _Somebody's Luggage_, _Our Mutual Friend_, and _No Thoroughfare_--the last an old fancy revived--came to honourable use; as did many names, both Christian and surnames, and combinations of both. Thus, Bradley Headstone's _prænomen_ was derived directly from the lists of the Education Department, and the Lammles and the Stiltstalkings, with Mr. Merdle and the Dorrits, existed as names before the characters were fitted to them. All this, though no doubt in part attributable to the playful readiness of an observation never to be caught asleep, points in the direction of a desire to be securely provided with an armoury of which, in earlier days, he would have taken slight thought. Gradually--indeed, so far as I know, more gradually than in the case of any other of his stories--he had built up the tale for which he had determined on the title of _Our Mutual Friend_, and slowly, and without his old self-confidence, he had, in the latter part of 1863, set to work upon it. "I want to prepare it for the spring, but I am determined not to begin to publish with less than four numbers done. I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn, and if I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more." For, unfortunately, he had resolved on returning to the old twenty-number measure for his new story. Begun with an effort, _Our Mutual Friend_--the publication of which extended from May, 1864, to November, 1865--was completed under difficulties, and difficulties of a kind hitherto unknown to Dickens. In February, 1865, as an immediate consequence, perhaps, of exposure at a time when depression of spirits rendered him less able than usual to bear it, he had a severe attack of illness, of which Forster says that it "put a broad mark between his past life and what remained to him of the future." From this time forward he felt a lameness in his left foot, which continued to trouble him at intervals during the remainder of his life, and which finally communicated itself to the left hand. A comparison of times, however, convinced Forster that the real origin of this ailment was to be sought in general causes. In 1865, as the year wore on, and the pressure of the novel still continued, he felt that he was "working himself into a damaged state," and was near to that which has greater terrors for natures like his than for more placid temperaments--breaking down. So, in May, he went first to the sea-side and then to France. On his return (it was the 9th of June, the date of his death five years afterwards) he was in the railway train which met with a fearful accident at Staplehurst, in Kent. His carriage was the only passenger-carriage in the train which, when the bridge gave way, was not thrown over into the stream. He was able to escape out of the window, to make his way in again for his brandy-flask and the MS. of a number of _Our Mutual Friend_ which he had left behind him, to clamber down the brickwork of the bridge for water, to do what he could towards rescuing his unfortunate fellow-travellers, and to aid the wounded and the dying. "I have," he wrote, in describing the scene, "a--I don't know what to call it: constitutional, I suppose--presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time.... But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake, and am obliged to stop." Nineteen months afterwards, when on a hurried reading tour in the North, he complains to Miss Hogarth of the effect of the railway shaking which since the Staplehurst accident "tells more and more." It is clear how serious a shock the accident had caused. He never, Miss Hogarth thinks, quite recovered it. Yet it might have acted less disastrously upon a system not already nervously weakened. As evidence of the decline of Dickens's nervous power, I hardly know whether it is safe to refer to the gradual change in his handwriting, which in his last years is a melancholy study. All these circumstances should be taken into account in judging of Dickens's last completed novel. The author would not have been himself had he, when once fairly engaged upon his work, failed to feel something of his old self-confidence. Nor was this feeling, which he frankly confessed to Mr. Wilkie Collins, altogether unwarranted. _Our Mutual Friend_[13] is, like the rest of Dickens's later writings, carefully and skilfully put together as a story. No exception is to be taken to it on the ground that the identity on which much of the plot hinges is long foreseen by the reader; for this, as Dickens told his critics in his postscript, had been part of his design, and was, in fact, considering the general nature of the story, almost indispensable. The defect rather lies in the absence of that element of uncertainty which is needed in order to sustain the interest. The story is, no doubt, ingeniously enough constructed, but admiration of an ingenious construction is insufficient to occupy the mind of a reader through an inevitable disentanglement. Moreover, some of the machinery, though cleverly contrived, cannot be said to work easily. Thus, the _ruse_ of the excellent Boffin in playing the part of a skinflint might pass as a momentary device, but its inherent improbability, together with the likelihood of its leading to an untoward result, makes its protraction undeniably tedious. It is not, however, in my opinion at least, in the matter of construction that _Our Mutual Friend_ presents a painful contrast with earlier works produced, like it, "on a large canvas." The conduct of the story as a whole is fully vigorous enough to enchain the attention; and in portions of it the hand of the master displays its unique power. He is at his best in the whole of the water-side scenes, both where "The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" (identified by zealous discoverers with a tavern called "The Two Brewers") lies like an oasis in the midst of a desert of ill-favoured tidal deposits, and where Rogue Riderhood has his lair at the lock higher up the river. A marvellous union of observation and imagination was needed for the picturing of a world in which this amphibious monster has his being; and never did Dickens's inexhaustible knowledge of the physiognomy of the Thames and its banks stand him in better stead than in these powerful episodes. It is unfortunate, though in accordance with the common fate of heroes and heroines, that Lizzie Hexham should, from the outset, have to discard the colouring of her surroundings, and to talk the conventional dialect as well as express the conventional sentiments of the heroic world. Only at the height of the action she ceases to be commonplace, and becomes entitled to be remembered amongst the true heroines of fiction. A more unusual figure, of the half-pathetic, half-grotesque kind for which Dickens had a peculiar liking, is Lizzie's friend, the doll's dressmaker, into whom he has certainly infused an element of genuine sentiment; her protector, Riah, on the contrary, is a mere stage-saint, though by this character Dickens appears to have actually hoped to redeem the aspersions he was supposed to have cast upon the Jews, as if Riah could have redeemed Fagin, any more than Sheva redeemed Shylock. But in this book whole episodes and parts of the plot through which the mystery of John Harmon winds its length along are ill-adapted for giving pleasure to any reader. The whole Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business--if the term may pass--is extremely wearisome; the character of Mr. Venus, in particular, seems altogether unconnected or unarticulated with the general plot, on which, indeed, it is but an accidental excrescence. In the Wilfer family there are the outlines of some figures of genuine humour, but the outlines only; nor is Bella raised into the sphere of the charming out of that of the pert and skittish. A more ambitious attempt, and a more noteworthy failure, was the endeavour to give to the main plot of this novel such a satiric foil as the Circumlocution Office had furnished to the chief action of _Little Dorrit_, in a caricature of society at large, its surface varnish and its internal rottenness. The Barnacles, and those who deemed it their duty to rally round the Barnacles, had, we saw, felt themselves hard hit; but what sphere or section of society could feel itself specially caricatured in the Veneerings, or in their associates--the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly brutal Podsnap, Fascination Fledgeby, and the Lammles, a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and the Chamber of Horrors? Caricature such as this, representing no society that has ever in any part of the world pretended to be "good," corresponds to the wild rhetoric of the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the "gospel according to Podsnappery;" but it is, in truth, satire from which both wit and humour have gone out. An angry, often almost spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their place. Amongst the personages moving in "society" are two which, as playing serious parts in the progress of the plot, the author is necessarily obliged to seek to endow with the flesh and blood of real human beings. Yet it is precisely in these--the friends Eugene and Mortimer--that, in the earlier part of the novel at all events, the constraint of the author's style seems least relieved; the dialogues between these two Templars have an unnaturalness about them as intolerable as euphuism or the effeminacies of the Augustan age. It is true that, when the story reaches its tragic height, the character of Eugene is borne along with it, and his affectations are forgotten. But in previous parts of the book, where he poses as a wit, and is evidently meant for a gentleman, he fails to make good his claims to either character. Even the skilfully contrived contrast between the rivals Eugene Wrayburn and the school-master, Bradley Headstone--through whom and through whose pupil, Dickens, by-the-way, dealt another blow against a system of mental training founded upon facts alone--fails to bring out the conception of Eugene which the author manifestly had in his mind. Lastly, the old way of reconciling dissonances--a marriage which "society" calls a _mésalliance_--has rarely furnished a lamer ending than here; and, had the unwritten laws of English popular fiction permitted, a tragic close would have better accorded with the sombre hue of the most powerful portions of this curiously unequal romance. The effort--for such it was--of _Our Mutual Friend_ had not been over for more than a few months, when Dickens accepted a proposal for thirty nights' readings from the Messrs. Chappell; and by April, 1866, he was again hard at work, flying across the country into Lancashire and Scotland, and back to his temporary London residence in Southwick Place, Hyde Park. In any man more capable than Dickens of controlling the restlessness which consumed him the acceptance of this offer would have been incomprehensible; for his heart had been declared out of order by his physician, and the patient had shown himself in some degree awake to the significance of this opinion. But the readings were begun and accomplished notwithstanding, though not without warnings, on which he insisted on putting his own interpretation. Sleeplessness aggravated fatigue, and stimulants were already necessary to enable him to do the work of his readings without discomfort. Meanwhile, some weeks before they were finished, he had been induced to enter into negotiations about a further engagement to begin at the end of the year. Time was to be left for the Christmas number, which this year could hardly find its scene anywhere else than at a railway junction; and the readings were not to extend over forty nights, which seem ultimately to have been increased to fifty. This second series, which included a campaign in Ireland, brilliantly successful despite snow and rain, and Fenians, was over in May. Then came the climax, for America now claimed her share of the great author for her public halls and chapels and lecture-theatres; and the question of the summer and autumn was whether or not to follow the sound of the distant dollar. It was closely debated between Dickens and his friend Forster and Wills, and he describes himself as "tempest-tossed" with doubts; but his mind had inclined in one direction from the first, and the matter was virtually decided when it resolved to send a confidential agent to make enquiries on the spot. Little imported another and grave attack in his foot; the trusty Mr. Dolby's report was irresistible. Eighty readings within half a year was the estimated number, with profits amounting to over fifteen thousand pounds. The gains actually made were nearly five thousand pounds in excess of this calculation. A farewell banquet, under the presidency of Lord Lytton, gave the favourite author Godspeed on his journey to the larger half of his public; on the 9th of November he sailed from Liverpool, and on the 19th landed at Boston. The voyage, on which, with his old buoyancy, he had contrived to make himself master of the modest revels of the saloon, seems to have done him good, or at least to have made him, as usual, impatient to be at his task. Barely arrived, he is found reporting himself "so well, that I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night, instead of this night week." By December, however, he was at his reading-desk, first at Boston, where he met with the warmest of welcomes, and then at New York, where there was a run upon the tickets, which he described with his usual excited delight. The enthusiasm of his reception by the American public must have been heightened by the thought that it was now or never for them to see him face to face, and, by-gones being by-gones, to testify to him their admiration. But there may have been some foundation for his discovery that some signs of agitation on his part were expected in return, and "that it would have been taken as a suitable compliment if I would stagger on the platform, and instantly drop, overpowered by the spectacle before me." It was but a sad Christmas which he spent with his faithful Dolby at their New York inn, tired, and with a "genuine American catarrh upon him," of which he never freed himself during his stay in the country. Hardly had he left the doctor's hands than he was about again, reading in Boston and New York and their more immediate neighbourhood--that is, within six or seven hours by railway--till February; and then, in order to stimulate his public, beginning a series of appearances at more distant places before returning to his starting-points. His whole tour included, besides a number of New England towns, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and in the north Cleveland and Buffalo. Canada and the West were struck out of the programme, the latter chiefly because exciting political matters were beginning to absorb public attention. During these journeyings Dickens gave himself up altogether to the business of his readings, only occasionally allowing himself to accept the hospitality proffered him on every side. Thus only could he breast the difficulties of his enterprise; for, as I have said, his health was never good during the whole of his visit, and his exertions were severe, though eased by the self-devotion of his attendants, of which, as of his constant kindness, both serious and sportive, towards them it is touching to read. Already in January he describes himself as not seldom "so dead beat" at the close of a reading "that they lay me down on a sofa, after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour," and as suffering from intolerable sleeplessness at night. His appetite was equally disordered, and he lived mainly on stimulants. Why had he condemned himself to such a life? When at last he could declare the stress of his work over he described himself as "nearly used up. Climate, distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work have begun--I may say so, now they are nearly all over--to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness besets me; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down." Indeed, but for his wonderful energy and the feeling of exultation which is derived from a heavy task nearly accomplished, he would have had to follow the advice of "Longfellow and all the Cambridge men," and give in nearly at the last. But he persevered through the farewell readings, both at Boston and at New York, though on the night before the last reading in America he told Dolby that if he "had to read but twice more, instead of once, he couldn't do it." This last reading of all was given at New York on April 20, two days after a farewell banquet at Delmonico's. It was when speaking on this occasion that, very naturally moved by the unalloyed welcome which had greeted him in whatever part of the States he had visited, he made the declaration already mentioned, promising to perpetuate his grateful sense of his recent American experiences. This apology, which was no apology, at least remains one amongst many proofs of the fact that with Dickens kindness never fell on a thankless soil. The merry month of May was still young in the Kentish fields and lanes when the master of Gad's Hill Place was home again at last. "I had not been at sea three days on the passage home," he wrote to his friend Mrs. Watson, "when I became myself again." It was, however, too much when "a 'deputation'--two in number, of whom only one could get into my cabin, while the other looked in at my window--came to ask me to read to the passengers that evening in the saloon. I respectfully replied that sooner than do it I would assault the captain and be put in irons." Alas! he was already fast bound, by an engagement concluded soon after he had arrived in Boston, to a final series of readings at home. "Farewell" is a difficult word to say for any one who has grown accustomed to the stimulating excitement of a public stage, and it is not wonderful that Dickens should have wished to see the faces of his familiar friends--the English public--once more. But the engagement to which he had set his hand was for a farewell of a hundred readings, at the recompense of eight thousand pounds, in addition to expenses and percentage. It is true that he had done this before he had fully realized the effect of his American exertions; but even so there was a terrible unwisdom in the promise. These last readings--and he alone is, in common fairness, to be held responsible for the fact--cut short a life from which much noble fruit might still have been expected for our literature, and which in any case might have been prolonged as a blessing beyond all that gold can buy to those who loved him. Meanwhile he had allowed himself a short respite before resuming his labours in October. It was not more, his friends thought, than he needed, for much of his old buoyancy seemed to them to be wanting in him, except when hospitality or the intercourse of friendship called it forth. What a charm there still was in his genial humour his letters would suffice to show. It does one good to read his description to his kind American friends Mr. and Mrs. Fields of his tranquillity at Gad's Hill: "Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mirrors in the Swiss châlet where I write, and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up amongst the branches of the trees, and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious." Part of this rare leisure he generously devoted to the preparation for the press of a volume of literary remains from the pen of an old friend. The _Religious Opinions of Chauncey Hare Townshend_ should not be altogether overlooked by those interested in Dickens, to whom the loose undogmatic theology of his friend commended itself as readily as the sincere religious feeling underlying it. I cannot say what answer Dickens would have returned to an enquiry as to his creed, but the nature of his religious opinions is obvious enough. Born in the Church of England, he had so strong an aversion from what seemed to him dogmatism of any kind, that he for a time--in 1843--connected himself with a Unitarian congregation; and to Unitarian views his own probably continued during his life most nearly to approach. He described himself as "morally wide asunder from Rome," but the religious conceptions of her community cannot have been a matter of anxious enquiry with him, while he was too liberal-minded to be, unless occasionally, aggressive in his Protestantism. For the rest, his mind, though imaginative, was without mystical tendencies, while for the transitory superstitions of the day it was impossible but that he should entertain the contempt which they deserved. "Although," he writes-- "I regard with a hushed and solemn fear the mysteries between which, and this state of existence, is interposed the barrier of the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and, although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them, I cannot reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells, creaking of boards, and such like insignificances, with the majestic beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted to understand." His piety was undemonstrative and sincere, as his books alone would suffice to prove; and he seems to have sought to impress upon his children those religious truths with the acceptance and practice of which he remained himself content. He loved the New Testament, and had, after some fashion of his own, paraphrased the Gospel narrative for the use of his children; but he thought that "half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testament as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it--whereof comes all manner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining." Of Puritanism in its modern forms he was an uncompromising, and no doubt a conscientious, opponent; and though, with perfect sincerity, he repelled the charge that his attacks upon cant were attacks upon religion, yet their _animus_ is such as to make the misinterpretation intelligible. His Dissenting ministers are of the _Bartholomew Fair_ species; and though, in his later books, a good clergyman here and there makes his modest appearance, the balance can hardly be said to be satisfactorily redressed. The performance of this pious office was not the only kind act he did after his return from America. Of course, however, his own family was nearest to his heart. No kinder or more judicious words were ever addressed by a father to his children than those which, about this time, he wrote to one of his sons, then beginning a successful career at Cambridge, and to another--the youngest--who was setting forth for Australia, to join an elder brother already established in that country. "Poor Plorn," he afterward wrote, "is gone to Australia. It was a hard parting at the last. He seemed to me to become once more my youngest and favourite child as the day drew near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken." In October his "farewell" readings began. He had never had his heart more in the work than now. Curiously enough, not less than two proposals had reached him during this autumn--one from Birmingham and the other from Edinburgh--that he should allow himself to be put forward as a candidate for Parliament; but he declined to entertain either, though in at least one of the two cases the prospects of success would not have been small. His views of political and parliamentary life had not changed since he had written to Bulwer Lytton in 1865: "Would there not seem to be something horribly rotten in the system of political life, when one stands amazed how any man, not forced into it by his position, as you are, can bear to live it?" Indeed, they had hardly changed since the days when he had come into personal contact with them as a reporter. In public and in private he had never ceased to ridicule our English system of party, and to express his contempt for the Legislature and all its works. He had, however, continued to take a lively interest in public affairs, and his letters contain not a few shrewd remarks on both home and foreign questions. Like most liberal minds of his age, he felt a warm sympathy for the cause of Italy; and the English statesman whom he appears to have most warmly admired was Lord Russell, in whose good intentions neither friends nor adversaries were wont to lose faith. Meanwhile his Radicalism gradually became of the most thoroughly independent type, though it interfered neither with his approval of the proceedings in Jamaica as an example of strong government, nor with his scorn of "the meeting of jawbones and asses" held against Governor Eyre at Manchester. The political questions, however, which really moved him deeply were those social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had always directed his attention--the Poor-law, temperance, Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labour and strikes. On all these heads sentiment guided his judgment, but he spared no pains to convince himself that he was in the right; and he was always generous, as when, notwithstanding his interest in _Household Words_, he declared himself unable to advocate the repeal of the paper duty for a moment, "as against the soap duty, or any other pressing on the mass of the poor." Thus he found no difficulty in adhering to the course he had marked out for himself. The subject which now occupied him before all others was a scheme for a new reading, with which it was his wish to vary and to intensify the success of the series on which he was engaged. This was no other than a selection of scenes from _Oliver Twist_, culminating in the scene of the murder of Nancy by Sikes, which, before producing it in public, he resolved to "try" upon a select private audience. The trial was a brilliant success. "The public," exclaimed a famous actress who was present, "have been looking out for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and, by Heaven, they have got it!" Accordingly, from January, 1869, it formed one of the most frequent of his readings, and the effort which it involved counted for much in the collapse which was to follow. Never were the limits between reading and acting more thoroughly effaced by Dickens, and never was the production of an extraordinary effect more equally shared by author and actor. But few who witnessed this extraordinary performance can have guessed the elaborate preparation bestowed upon it, which is evident from the following notes (by Mr. C. Kent) on the book used in it by the reader: "What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however--that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write--is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. 'Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,' is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word '_Action_.' Not a word of it was said. It was simply _done_. Again, immediately below that, on the same page--Sikes _loquitur_: 'Oh! you haven't, haven't you?' passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket ('_Action_' again in MS. on the margin.) Not a word was said about the pistol.... So again, afterwards, as a rousing self-direction, one sees notified in MS. on page 107 the grim stage direction, '_Murder coming!_'" The "Murder" was frequently read by Dickens not less than four times a week during the early months of 1869, in which year, after beginning in Ireland, he had been continually travelling to and fro between various parts of Great Britain and town. Already in February the old trouble in his foot had made itself felt, but, as usual, it had long been disregarded. On the 10th of April he had been entertained at Liverpool, in St. George's Hall, at a banquet presided over by Lord Dufferin, and in a genial speech had tossed back the ball to Lord Houghton, who had pleasantly bantered him for his unconsciousness of the merits of the House of Lords. Ten days afterwards he was to read at Preston, but, feeling uneasy about himself, had reported his symptoms to his doctor in London. The latter hastened down to Preston, and persuaded Dickens to accompany him back to town, where, after a consultation, it was determined that the readings must be stopped for the current year, and that reading combined with travelling must never be resumed. What his sister-in-law and daughter feel themselves justified in calling "the beginning of the end" had come at last. With his usual presence of mind Dickens at once perceived the imperative necessity of interposing, "as it were, a fly-leaf in the book of my life, in which nothing should be written from without for a brief season of a few weeks." But he insisted that the combination of the reading and the travelling was alone to be held accountable for his having found himself feeling, "for the first time in my life, giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch, and dull of spirit." Meanwhile, he for once kept quiet, first in London, and then at Gad's Hill. "This last summer," say those who did most to make it bright for him, "was a very happy one," and gladdened by the visits of many friends. On the retirement, also on account of ill-health, from _All the Year Round_ of his second self, Mr. W. H. Wills, he was fortunately able at once to supply the vacant place by the appointment to it of his eldest son, who seems to have inherited that sense of lucid order which was amongst his father's most distinctive characteristics. He travelled very little this year, though in September he made a speech at Birmingham on behalf of his favourite Midland Institute, delivering himself, at its conclusion, of an antithetical Radical commonplace, which, being misreported or misunderstood, was commented upon with much unnecessary wonderment. With a view to avoiding the danger of excessive fatigue, the latter part of the year was chiefly devoted to writing in advance part of his new book, which, like _Great Expectations_, was to grow up, and to be better for growing up, in his own Kentish home, and almost within sound of the bells of "Cloisterham" Cathedral. But the new book was never to be finished. The first number of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was not published till one more short series of twelve readings, given in London during a period extending from January to March, was at an end. He had obtained Sir Thomas Watson's consent to his carrying out this wish, largely caused by the desire to compensate the Messrs. Chappell in some measure for the disappointment to which he had been obliged to subject them by the interruption of his longer engagement. Thus, though the Christmas of 1869 had brought with it another warning of trouble in the foot, the year 1870 opened busily, and early in January Dickens established himself for the season at 5 Hyde Park Place. Early in the month he made another speech at Birmingham; but the readings were strictly confined to London. On the other hand, it was not to be expected that the "Murder" would be excluded from the list. It was read in January to an audience of actors and actresses; and it is pleasant to think that he was able to testify to his kindly feeling towards their profession on one of the last occasions when he appeared on his own stage. "I set myself," he wrote, "to carrying out of themselves and their observation those who were bent on watching how the effects were got; and, I believe, I succeeded. Coming back to it again, however, I feel it was madness ever to do it so continuously. My ordinary pulse is seventy-two, and it runs up under this effort to one hundred and twelve." Yet this fatal reading was repeated thrice more before the series closed, and with even more startling results upon the reader. The careful observations made by the physician, however, show that the excitement of his last readings was altogether too great for any man to have endured much longer. At last, on March 16, the night came which closed fifteen years of personal relations between the English public and its favourite author, such as are, after all, unparalleled in the history of our literature. His farewell words were few and simple, and referred with dignity to his resolution to devote himself henceforth exclusively to his calling as an author, and to his hope that in but two short weeks' time his audience "might enter, in their own homes, on a new series of readings at which his assistance would be indispensable." Of the short time which remained to him his last book was the chief occupation; and an association thus clings to the _Mystery of Edwin Drood_ which would, in any case, incline us to treat this fragment--for it was to be no more--with tenderness. One would, indeed, hardly be justified in asserting that this story, like that which Thackeray left behind him in the same unfinished state, bade fair to become a masterpiece in its author's later manner; there is much that is forced in its humour, while as to the working out of the chief characters our means of judgment are, of course, incomplete. The outline of the design, on the other hand, presents itself with tolerable clearness to the minds of most readers of insight or experience, though the story deserves its name of a mystery, instead of, like _Our Mutual Friend_, seeming merely to withhold a necessary explanation. And it must be allowed few plots have ever been more effectively laid than this, of which the untying will never be known. Three such personages in relation to a deed of darkness as Jasper for its contriver, Durden for its unconscious accomplice, and Deputy for its self-invited witness, and all so naturally connecting themselves with the locality of the perpetration of the crime, assuredly could not have been brought together except by one who had gradually attained to mastership in the adaptation of characters to the purposes of a plot. Still, the strongest impression left upon the reader of this fragment is the evidence it furnishes of Dickens having retained to the last powers which were most peculiarly and distinctively his own. Having skilfully brought into connexion, for the purposes of his plot, two such strangely-contrasted spheres of life and death as the cathedral close at "Cloisterham" and an opium-smoking den in one of the obscurest corners of London, he is enabled, by his imaginative and observing powers, not only to _realise_ the picturesque elements in both scenes, but also to convert them into a twofold background, accommodating itself to the most vivid hues of human passion. This is to bring out what he was wont to call "the romantic aspect of familiar things." With the physiognomy of Cloisterham--otherwise Rochester--with its cathedral, and its "monastery" ruin, and its "Minor Canon Corner," and its "Nuns' House"--otherwise "Eastgate House," in the High Street--he was, of course, closely acquainted; but he had never reproduced its features with so artistic a cunning, and the Mystery of Edwin Drood will always haunt Bishop Gundulph's venerable building and its tranquil precincts. As for the opium-smoking, we have his own statement that what he described he saw--"exactly as he had described it, penny ink-bottle and all--down in Shadwell" in the autumn of 1869. "A couple of the Inspectors of Lodging-houses knew the woman, and took me to her as I was making a round with them to see for myself the working of Lord Shaftesbury's Bill." Between these scenes John Jasper--a figure conceived with singular force--moves to and fro, preparing his mysterious design. No story of the kind ever began more finely; and we may be excused from enquiring whether signs of diminished vigour of invention and freshness of execution are to be found in other and less prominent portions of the great novelist's last work. Before, in this year 1870, Dickens withdrew from London to Gad's Hill, with the hope of there in quiet carrying his all but half-finished task to its close, his health had not been satisfactory; he had suffered from time to time in his foot, and his weary and aged look was observed by many of his friends. He was able to go occasionally into society; though at the last dinner-party which he attended--it was at Lord Houghton's, to meet the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians--he had been unable to mount above the dining-room floor. Already in March the Queen had found a suitable opportunity for inviting him to wait upon her at Buckingham Palace, when she had much gratified him by her kindly manner; and a few days later he made his appearance at the levee. These acknowledgments of his position as an English author were as they should be; no others were offered, nor is it a matter of regret that there should have been no titles to inscribe on his tomb. He was also twice seen on one of those public occasions which no eloquence graced so readily and so pleasantly as his: once in April, at the dinner for the Newsvenders' Charity, when he spoke of the existence among his humble clients of that "feeling of brotherhood and sympathy which is worth much to all men, or they would herd with wolves;" and once in May--only a day or two before he went home into the country--when, at the Royal Academy dinner, he paid a touching tribute to the eminent painter, Daniel Maclise, who in the good old days had been much like a brother to himself. Another friend and companion, Mark Lemon, passed away a day or two afterwards; and with the most intimate of all, his future biographer, he lamented the familiar faces of their companions--not one of whom had passed his sixtieth year--upon which they were not to look again. On the 30th of May he was once more at Gad's Hill. Here he forthwith set to work on his book, taking walks as usual, though of no very great length. On Thursday, the 9th of June, he had intended to pay his usual weekly visit to the office of his journal, and accordingly, on the 8th, devoted the afternoon as well as the morning to finishing the sixth number of the story. When he came across to the house from the châlet before dinner he seemed to his sister-in-law, who alone of the family was at home, tired and silent, and no sooner had they sat down to dinner than she noticed how seriously ill he looked. It speedily became evident that a fit was upon him. "Come and lie down," she entreated. "Yes, on the ground," he said, very distinctly--these were the last words he spoke--and he slid from her arm and fell upon the floor. He was laid on a couch in the room, and there he remained unconscious almost to the last. He died at ten minutes past six on the evening of the 9th--by which time his daughters and his eldest son had been able to join the faithful watcher by his side; his sister and his son Henry arrived when all was over. His own desire had been to be buried near Gad's Hill; though at one time he is said to have expressed a wish to lie in a disused graveyard, which is still pointed out, in a secluded corner in the moat of Rochester Castle. Preparations had been made accordingly, when the Dean and Chapter of Rochester urged a request that his remains might be placed in their Cathedral. This was assented to; but at the last moment the Dean of Westminster gave expression to a widespread wish that the great national writer might lie in the national Abbey. There he was buried on June 14, without the slightest attempt at the pomp which he had deprecated in his will, and which he almost fiercely condemned in more than one of his writings. "The funeral," writes Dean Stanley, whose own dust now mingles with that of so many illustrious dead, "was strictly private. It took place at an early hour in the summer morning, the grave having been dug in secret the night before, and the vast solitary space of the Abbey was occupied only by the small band of the mourners, and the Abbey clergy, who, without any music except the occasional peal of the organ, read the funeral service. For days the spot was visited by thousands. Many were the tears shed by the poorer visitors. He rests beside Sheridan, Garrick, and Henderson"--the first actor ever buried in the Abbey. Associations of another kind cluster near; but his generous spirit would not have disdained the thought that he would seem even in death the players' friend. A plain memorial brass on the walls of Rochester Cathedral vindicates the share which the ancient city and its neighbourhood will always have in his fame. But most touching of all it is to think of him under the trees of his own garden on the hill, in the pleasant home where, after so many labours and so many wanderings, he died in peace, and as one who had earned his rest. CHAPTER VII. THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME. There is no reason whatever to believe that in the few years which have gone by since Dickens's death the delight taken in his works throughout England and North America, as well as elsewhere, has diminished, or that he is not still one of our few most popular writers. The mere fact that his popularity has remained such since, nearly half a century ago, he, like a beam of spring sunshine, first made the world gay, is a sufficient indication of the influence which he must have exercised upon his age. In our world of letters his followers have been many, though naturally enough those whose original genius impelled them to follow their own course soonest ceased to be his imitators. Amongst these I know no more signal instance than the great novelist whose surpassing merits he had very swiftly recognised in her earliest work. For though in the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ George Eliot seems to be, as it were, hesitating between Dickens and Thackeray as the models of her humorous writing, reminiscences of the former are unmistakable in the opening of _Amos Barton_, in _Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story_, in _Janet's Repentance_; and though it would be hazardous to trace his influence in the domestic scenes in _Adam Bede_, neither a Christmas exordium in one of the books of _The Mill on the Floss_, nor the Sam Weller-like freshness of Bob Wakem in the same powerful story, is altogether the author's own. Two of the most successful Continental novelists of the present day have gone to school with Dickens: the one the truly national writer whose _Debit and Credit_, a work largely in the manner of his English model, has, as a picture of modern life, remained unexcelled in German literature;[14] the other, the brilliant Southerner, who may write as much of the _History of his Books_ as his public may desire to learn, but who cannot write the pathos of Dickens altogether out of _Jack_, or his farcical fun out of _Le Nabab_. And again--for I am merely illustrating, not attempting to describe, the literary influence of Dickens--who could fail to trace in the Californian studies and sketches of Bret Harte elements of humour and of pathos, to which that genuinely original author would be the last to deny that his great English "master" was no stranger? Yet popularity and literary influence, however wide and however strong, often pass away as they have come; and in no field of literature are there many reputations which the sea of time fails before very long to submerge. In prose fiction--a comparatively young literary growth--they are certainly not the most numerous, perhaps because on works of this species the manners and style of an age most readily impress themselves, rendering them proportionately strange to the ages that come after. In the works of even the lesser playwrights who pleased the liberal times of Elizabeth, and in lyrics of even secondary merit that were admired by fantastic Caroline cavaliers, we can still take pleasure. But who can read many of the "standard" novels published as lately even as the days of George the Fourth? The speculation is, therefore, not altogether idle, whether Dickens saw truly when labouring, as most great men do labour, in the belief that his work was not only for a day. Literary eminence was the only eminence he desired, while it was one of the very healthiest elements in his character, that whatever he was, he was thoroughly. He would not have told any one, as Fielding's author told Mr. Booth at the sponging-house, that romance-writing "is certainly the easiest work in the world;" nor, being what he was, could he ever have found it such in his own case. "Whoever," he declared, "is devoted to an art must be content to give himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it." And not only did he obey his own labour-laws, but in the details of his work as a man of letters he spared no pains and no exercise of self-control. "I am," he generously told a beginner, to whom he was counselling patient endeavour, "an impatient and impulsive person myself, but it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you." Never, therefore has a man of letters had a better claim to be judged by his works. As he expressly said in his will, he wished for no other monument than his writings; and with their aid we, who already belong to a new generation, and whose children will care nothing for the gossip and the scandal of which he, like most popular celebrities, was in his lifetime privileged or doomed to become the theme, may seek to form some definite conception of his future place among illustrious Englishmen. It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose that to future generations Dickens, as a writer, will be all that he was to his own. Much that constitutes the subject, or at least furnishes the background, of his pictures of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea, has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land. The form, again, of Dickens's principal works may become obsolete, as it was in a sense accidental. He was the most popular novelist of his day; but should prose fiction, or even the full and florid species of it which has enjoyed so long-lived a favour ever be out of season, the popularity of Dickens's books must experience an inevitable diminution. And even before that day arrives not all the works in a particular species of literature that may to a particular age have seemed destined to live, will have been preserved. Nothing is more surely tested by time than that originality which is the secret of a writer's continuing to be famous, and continuing to be read. Dickens was not--and to whom in these latter ages of literature could such a term be applied?--a self-made writer, in the sense that he owed nothing to those who had gone before him. He was most assuredly no classical scholar--how could he have been? But I should hesitate to call him an ill-read man, though he certainly was neither a great nor a catholic reader, and though he could not help thinking about _Nicholas Nickleby_ while he was reading the _Curse of Kehama_. In his own branch of literature his judgment was sound and sure-footed. It was, of course, a happy accident that as a boy he imbibed that taste for good fiction which is a thing inconceivable to the illiterate. Sneers have been directed against the poverty of his book-shelves in his earlier days of authorship; but I fancy there were not many popular novelists in 1839 who would have taken down with them into the country for a summer sojourn, as Dickens did to Petersham, not only a couple of Scott's novels, but Goldsmith, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists; nor is there one of these national classics--unless it be Swift--with whom Dickens's books or letters fail to show him to have been familiar. Of Goldsmith's books, he told Forster, in a letter which the biographer of Goldsmith modestly suppressed, he "had no indifferent perception--to the best of his remembrance--when little more than a child." He discusses with understanding the relative literary merits of the serious and humorous papers in _The Spectator_; and, with regard to another work of unique significance in the history of English fiction, _Robinson Crusoe_, he acutely observed that "one of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make any one laugh or cry." "It is a book," he added, which he "read very much." It may be noted, by-the-way, that he was an attentive and judicious student of Hogarth; and that thus his criticisms of humorous pictorial art rested upon as broad a basis of comparison as did his judgment of his great predecessors in English humorous fiction. Amongst these predecessors it has become usual to assert that Smollett exercised the greatest influence upon Dickens. It is no doubt true that in David Copperfield's library Smollett's books are mentioned first, and in the greatest number, that a vision of Roderick Random and Strap haunted the very wicket-gate at Blunderstone, that the poor little hero's first thought on entering the King's Bench prison was the strange company whom Roderick met in the Marshalsea; and that the references to Smollett and his books are frequent in Dickens's other books and in his letters. Leghorn seemed to him "made illustrious" by Smollett's grave, and in a late period of his life he criticises his chief fictions with admirable justice. "_Humphry Clinker_," he writes, "is certainly Smollett's best. I am rather divided between _Peregrine Pickle_ and _Roderick Random_, both extraordinarily good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume of _Peregrine_ as the richer of the two." An odd volume of _Peregrine_ was one of the books with which the waiter at the _Holly Tree Inn_ endeavoured to beguile the lonely Christmas of the snowed-up traveller, but the latter "knew every word of it already." In the _Lazy Tour_, "Thomas, now just able to grope his way along, in a doubled-up condition, was no bad embodiment of Commodore Trunnion." I have noted, moreover, coincidences of detail which bear witness to Dickens's familiarity with Smollett's works. To Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as to Captain Cuttle, every man was a "brother," and to the Commodore, as to Mr. Smallweed, the most abusive substantive addressed to a woman admitted of intensification by the epithet "brimstone." I think Dickens had not forgotten the opening of the _Adventures of an Atom_ when he wrote a passage in the opening of his own _Christmas Carol_; and that the characters of Tom Pinch and Tommy Traddles--the former more especially--were not conceived without some thought of honest Strap. Furthermore, it was Smollett's example that probably suggested to Dickens the attractive jingle in the title of his _Nicholas Nickleby_. But these are for the most part mere details. The manner of Dickens as a whole resembles Fielding's more strikingly than Smollett's, as it was only natural that it should. The irony of Smollett is drier than was reconcilable with Dickens's nature; it is only in the occasional extravagances of his humour that the former anticipates anything in the latter, and it is only the coarsest scenes of Dickens's earlier books--such as that between Noah, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerbery in _Oliver Twist_--which recall the whole manner of his predecessor. They resemble one another in their descriptive accuracy, and in the accumulation of detail by which they produce instead of obscuring vividness of impression; but it was impossible that Dickens should prefer the general method of the novel of adventure pure and simple, such as Smollett produced after the example of _Gil Blas_, to the less crude form adopted by Fielding, who adhered to earlier and nobler models. With Fielding's, moreover, Dickens's whole nature was congenial; they both had that tenderness which Smollett lacked; and the circumstance that, of all English writers of the past, Fielding's name alone was given by Dickens to one of his sons, shows how, like so many of Fielding's readers, he had learnt to love him with an almost personal affection. The very spirit of the author of _Tom Jones_--that gaiety which, to borrow the saying of a recent historian concerning Cervantes, renders even brutality agreeable, and that charm of sympathetic feeling which makes us love those of his characters which he loves himself--seem astir in some of the most delightful passages of Dickens's most delightful books. So in _Pickwick_, to begin with, in which, by the way, Fielding is cited with a twinkle of the eye all his own, and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, where a chapter opens with a passage which is pure Fielding: "It was morning, and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath been written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak Miss Pecksniff's nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the goddess, in her intercourse with the fair Cherry, to do so; or, in more prosaic phrase, the tip of that feature in the sweet girl's countenance was always very red at breakfast-time." Amongst the writers of Dickens's own age there were only two, or perhaps three, who in very different degrees and ways exercised a noticeable influence upon his writings. He once declared to Washington Irving that he kept everything written by that delightful author upon "his shelves, and in his thoughts, and in his heart of hearts." And, doubtless, in Dickens's early days as an author the influence of the American classic may have aided to stimulate the imaginative element in his English admirer's genius, and to preserve him from a grossness of humour into which, after the _Sketches by Boz_, he very rarely allowed himself to lapse. The two other writers were Carlyle, and, as I have frequently noted in previous chapters, the friend and fellow-labourer of Dickens's later manhood, Mr. Wilkie Collins. It is no unique experience that the disciple should influence the master; and in this instance, perhaps with the co-operation of the examples of the modern French theatre, which the two friends had studied in common, Mr. Wilkie Collins's manner had, I think, no small share in bringing about a transformation in that of Dickens. His stories thus gradually lost all traces of the older masters both in general method and in detail; whilst he came to condense and concentrate his effects in successions of skilfully-arranged scenes. Dickens's debt to Carlyle was, of course, of another nature; and in his works the proofs are not few of his readiness to accept the teachings of one whom he declared he would "go at all times farther to see than any man alive." There was something singular in the admiration these two men felt for one another; for Carlyle, after an acquaintance of almost thirty years, spoke of Dickens as "a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just, and loving man;" and there is not one of these epithets but seems well considered and well chosen. But neither Carlyle nor Dickens possessed a moral quality omitted in this list, the quality of patience, which abhors either "quietly" or loudly "deciding" a question before considering it under all its aspects, and in a spirit of fairness to all sides. The _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, to confine myself to them,[15] like so much of the political philosophy, if it is to be dignified by that name, which in part Dickens derived from them, were at the time effective strokes of satirical invective; now, their edge seems blunt and their energy inflation. Take the pamphlet on Model Prisons, with its summary of a theory which Dickens sought in every way to enforce upon his readers; or again, that entitled _Downing Street_, which settles the question of party government as a question of the choice between Buffy and Boodle, or, according to Carlyle, the Honourable Felix Parvulus and the Right Honourable Felicissimus Zero. The corrosive power of such sarcasms may be unquestionable; but the angry rhetoric pointed by them becomes part of the nature of those who habitually employ its utterance in lieu of argument; and not a little of the declamatory element in Dickens, which no doubt at first exercised its effect upon a large number of readers, must be ascribed to his reading of a great writer who was often very much more stimulative than nutritious. Something, then, he owed to other writers, but it was little indeed in comparison with what he owed to his natural gifts. First amongst these, I think, must be placed what may, in a word, be called his sensibility--that quality of which humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and pathos are the twin products. And in Dickens both these were paramount powers, almost equally various in their forms and effective in their operation. According to M. Taine, Dickens, whilst he excels in irony of a particular sort, being an Englishman, is incapable of being gay. Such profundities are unfathomable to the readers of _Pickwick_; though the French critic may have generalised from Dickens's later writings only. His pathos is not less true than various, for the gradations are marked between the stern, tragic pathos of _Hard Times_, the melting pathos of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_, and the pathos of helplessness which appeals to us in Smike and Jo. But this sensibility would not have given us Dickens's gallery of living pictures had it not been for the powers of imagination and observation which enabled him spontaneously to exercise it in countless directions. To the way in which his imagination enabled him to identify himself with the figments of his own brain he frequently testified; Dante was not more certain in his celestial and infernal topography than was Dickens as to "every stair in the little mid-shipman's house," and as to "every young gentleman's bedstead in Dr. Blimber's establishment." One particular class of phenomena may be instanced instead of many, in the observation and poetic reproduction of which his singular natural endowment continually manifested itself--I mean those of the weather. It is not, indeed, often that he rises to a fine image like that in the description of the night in which Ralph Nickleby, ruined and crushed, slinks home to his death: "The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train." But he again and again enables us to feel as if the Christmas morning on which Mr. Pickwick ran gaily down the slide, or as if the "very quiet" moonlit night in the midst of which a sudden sound, like the firing of a gun or a pistol, startled the repose of Lincoln's Inn Fields, were not only what we have often precisely experienced in country villages or in London squares, but as if they were the very morning and the very night which we _must_ experience, if we were feeling the glow of wintry merriment, or the awful chill of the presentiment of evil in a dead hour. In its lower form this combination of the powers of imagination and observation has the rapidity of wit, and, indeed, sometimes is wit. The gift of suddenly finding out what a man, a thing, a combination of man and thing, is like--this, too, comes by nature; and there is something electrifying in its sudden exercise, even on the most trivial occasions, as when Flora, delighted with Little Dorrit's sudden rise to fortune, requests to know all "about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths from ear to ear, good gracious!" But Nature, when she gifted Dickens with sensibility, observation, and imagination, had bestowed upon him yet another boon in the quality which seems more prominent than any other in his whole being. The vigour of Dickens--a mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid physical organism--was the parent of some of his foibles; amongst the rest, of his tendency to exaggeration. No fault has been more frequently found with his workmanship than this; nor can he be said to have defended himself very successfully on this head when he declared that he did "not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue." But without this vigour he could not have been creative as he was; and in him there were accordingly united with rare completeness a swift responsiveness to the impulses of humour and pathos, an inexhaustible fertility in discovering and inventing materials for their exercise, and the constant creative desire to give to these newly-created materials a vivid plastic form. And the mention of this last-named gift in Dickens suggests the query whether, finally, there is anything in his _manner_ as a writer which may prevent the continuance of his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be great without a _manner_ of his own; and that Dickens had such a manner his most supercilious censurer will readily allow. His terse narrative power, often intensely humorous in its unblushing and unwinking gravity, and often deeply pathetic in its simplicity, is as characteristic of his manner as is the supreme felicity of phrase, in which he has no equal. As to the latter, I should hardly know where to begin and where to leave off were I to attempt to illustrate it. But, to take two instances of different kinds of wit, I may cite a passage in Guster's narrative of her interview with Lady Dedlock: "And so I took the letter from her, and she said she had nothing to give me; and _I said I was poor myself, and consequently wanted nothing_;" and, of a different kind, the account in one of his letters of a conversation with Macready, in which the great tragedian, after a solemn but impassioned commendation of his friend's reading, "put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his pocket-handkerchief, and _I felt as if I were doing somebody to his Werner_." These, I think, were amongst the most characteristic merits of his style. It also, and more especially in his later years, had its characteristic faults. The danger of degenerating into mannerism is incident to every original manner. There is mannerism in most of the great English prose-writers of Dickens's age--in Carlyle, in Macaulay, in Thackeray--but in none of them is there more mannerism than in Dickens himself. In his earlier writings, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, for instance (I do not, of course, refer to the Portsmouth boards), and even in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, there is much staginess; but in his later works his own mannerism had swallowed up that of the stage, and, more especially in serious passages, his style had become what M. Taine happily characterises as _le style tourmenté_. His choice of words remained throughout excellent, and his construction of sentences clear. He told Mr. Wilkie Collins that "underlining was not his nature;" and in truth he had no need to emphasise his expressions, or to bid the reader "go back upon their meaning." He recognised his responsibility, as a popular writer, in keeping the vocabulary of the language pure; and in _Little Dorrit_ he even solemnly declines to use the French word _trousseau_. In his orthography, on the other hand, he was not free from Americanisms; and his interpunctuation was consistently odd. But these are trifles; his more important mannerisms were, like many really dangerous faults of style, only the excess of characteristic excellences. Thus it was he who elaborated with unprecedented effect that humorous species of paraphrase which, as one of the most imitable devices of his style, has also been the most persistently imitated. We are all tickled when Grip, the raven, "issues orders for the instant preparation of innumerable kettles for purposes of tea;" or when Mr. Pecksniff's eye is "piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm;" but in the end the device becomes a mere trick of circumlocution. Another mannerism which grew upon Dickens, and was faithfully imitated by several of his disciples, was primarily due to his habit of turning a fact, fancy, or situation round on every side. This consisted in the reiteration of a construction, or of part of a construction, in the strained rhetorical fashion to which he at last accustomed us in spite of ourselves, but to which we were loath to submit in his imitators. These and certain other peculiarities, which it would be difficult to indicate without incurring the charge of hypercriticism, hardened as the style of Dickens hardened; and, for instance, in the _Tale of Two Cities_ his mannerisms may be seen side by side in glittering array. By way of compensation, the occasional solecisms and vulgarisms of his earlier style (he only very gradually ridded himself of the cockney habit of punning) no longer marred his pages; and he ceased to break or lapse occasionally, in highly-impassioned passages, into blank verse. From first to last Dickens's mannerism, like everything which he made part of himself, was not merely assumed on occasion, but was, so to speak, absorbed into his nature. It shows itself in almost everything that he wrote in his later years, from the most carefully-elaborated chapters of his books down to the most deeply-felt passages of his most familiar correspondence, in the midst of the most genuine pathos and most exuberant humour of his books, and in the midst of the sound sense and unaffected piety of his private letters. Future generations may, for this very reason, be perplexed and irritated by what we merely stumbled at, and may wish that what is an element hardly separable from many of Dickens's compositions were away from them, as one wishes away from his signature that horrible flourish which in his letters he sometimes represents himself as too tired to append. But no distaste for his mannerisms is likely to obscure the sense of his achievements in the branch of literature to which he devoted the full powers of his genius and the best energies of his nature. He introduced, indeed, no new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, in the earlier of which in particular--_Barnaby Rudge_--he showed a laudable desire to enter into the spirit of a past age; but he was without the reading or the patience of either the author of _Waverley_ or the author of _The Virginians_, and without the fine historic enthusiasm which animates the broader workmanship of _Westward Ho_. For the purely imaginative romance, on the other hand, of which in some of his works Lord Lytton was the most prominent representative in contemporary English literature, Dickens's genius was not without certain affinities; but, to feel his full strength, he needed to touch the earth with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to say of him that he found the ideal in the real, and drew his inspirations from the world around him. Perhaps the strongest temptation which ever seemed likely to divert him from the sounder forms in which his masterpieces were cast lay in the direction of the _novel with a purpose_, the fiction intended primarily and above all things to promote the correction of some social abuse, or the achievement of some social reform. But in spite of himself, to whom the often voiceless cause of the suffering and the oppressed was at all times dearer than any mere literary success, he was preserved from binding his muse, as his friend Cruikshank bound his art, handmaid in a service with which freedom was irreconcilable. His artistic instinct helped him in this, and perhaps also the consciousness that where, as in _The Chimes_ or in _Hard Times_, he had gone furthest in this direction, there had been something jarring in the result. Thus, under the influences described above, he carried on the English novel mainly in the directions which it had taken under its early masters, and more especially in those in which the essential attributes of his own genius prompted him to excel. Amongst the elements on which the effect alike of the novelist's and of the dramatist's work must, apart from style and diction, essentially depend, that of construction is obviously one of the most significant. In this Dickens was, in the earlier period of his authorship, very far from strong. This was due in part to the accident that he began his literary career as a writer of _Sketches_, and that his first continuous book, _Pickwick_, was originally designed as little more than a string of such. It was due in a still greater measure to the influence of those masters of English fiction with whom he had been familiar from boyhood, above all to Smollett. And though, by dint of his usual energy, he came to be able to invent a plot so generally effective as that of _A Tale of Two Cities_, or, I was about to say, of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, yet on this head he had had to contend against a special difficulty; I mean, of course, the publication of most of his books in monthly or even weekly numbers. In the case of a writer both pathetic and humorous the serial method of publication leads the public to expect its due allowance of both pathos and humour every month or week, even if each number, to borrow a homely simile applied in _Oliver Twist_ to books in general, need not contain "the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon." And again, as in a melodrama of the old school, each serial division has, if possible, to close emphatically, effectively, with a promise of yet stranger, more touching, more laughable things to come. On the other hand, with this form of publication repetition is frequently necessary by way of "reminder" to indolent readers, whose memory needs refreshing after the long pauses between the acts. Fortunately, Dickens abhorred living, as it were, from hand to mouth, and thus diminished the dangers to which, I cannot help thinking, Thackeray at times almost succumbed. Yet, notwithstanding, in the arrangement of his incidents and the contrivance of his plots it is often impossible to avoid noting the imperfection of the machinery, or at least the traces of effort. I have already said under what influences, in my opinion, Dickens acquired a constructive skill which would have been conspicuous in most other novelists. If in the combination of parts the workmanship of Dickens was not invariably of the best, on the other hand in the invention of those parts themselves he excelled, his imaginative power and dramatic instinct combining to produce an endless succession of effective scenes and situations, ranging through almost every variety of the pathetic and the humorous. In no direction was nature a more powerful aid to art with him than in this. From his very boyhood he appears to have possessed in a developed form what many others may possess in its germ, the faculty of converting into a scene--putting, as it were, into a frame--personages that came under his notice, and the background on which he saw them. Who can forget the scene in _David Copperfield_ in which the friendless little boy attracts the wonderment of the good people of the public-house where--it being a special occasion--he has demanded a glass of their "very best ale, with a head to it?" In the autobiographical fragment already cited, where the story appears in almost the same words, Dickens exclaims: "Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition." He saw the scene while he was an actor in it. Already the _Sketches by Boz_ showed the exuberance of this power, and in his last years more than one paper in the delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_ series proved it to be as inexhaustible as ever, while the art with which it was exercised had become more refined. Who has better described (for who was more sensitive to it?) the mysterious influence of crowds, and who the pitiful pathos of solitude? Who has ever surpassed Dickens in his representations, varied a thousandfold, but still appealing to the same emotions, common to us all, of the crises or turning-points of human life? Who has dwelt with a more potent effect on that catastrophe which the drama of every human life must reach; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitiful, reverend, terrible, ghastly forms speak more to the imagination and more to the heart? There is, however, one species of scenes in which the genius of Dickens seems to me to exercise a still stronger spell--those which _precede_ a catastrophe, which are charged like thunder-clouds with the coming storm. And here the constructive art is at work; for it is the arrangement of the incidents, past and to come, combined by anticipation in the mind of the reader, which gives their extraordinary force to such scenes as the nocturnal watching of Nancy by Noah, or Carker's early walk to the railway station, where he is to meet his doom. Extremely powerful, too, in a rather different way, is the scene in _Little Dorrit_, described in a word or two, of the parting of Bar and Physician at dawn, after they have "found out Mr. Merdle's complaint:" "Before parting, at Physician's door, they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires, and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers, were peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city and said: 'If all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to Heaven!'" Nor is it awe only, but pity also, which he is able thus to move beforehand, as in _Dombey and Son_, in the incomparable scenes leading up to little Paul's death. More diverse opinions have been expressed as to Dickens's mastery of that highest part of the novelist's art, which we call characterisation. Undoubtedly, the characters which he draws are included in a limited range. Yet I question whether their range can be justly termed narrow as compared with that commanded by any other great English novelist except Scott, or with those of many novelists of other literatures except Balzac. But within his own range Dickens is unapproached. His novels do not altogether avoid the common danger of uninteresting heroes and insipid heroines; but only a very few of his heroes are conventionally declamatory like Nicholas Nickleby, and few of his heroines simper sentimentally like Rose Maylie. Nor can I for a moment assent to the condemnation which has been pronounced upon all the female characters in Dickens's books, as more or less feeble or artificial. At the same time it is true that from women of a mightier mould Dickens's imagination turns aside; he could not have drawn a Dorothea Casaubon any more than he could have drawn Romola herself. Similarly, heroes of the chivalrous or magnanimous type, representatives of generous effort in a great cause, will not easily be met with in his writings: he never even essayed the picture of an artist devoted to Art for her own sake. It suited the genius, and in later years perhaps the temper, of Dickens as an author to leave out of sight those "public virtues" to which no man was in truth less blind than himself, and to remain content with the illustration of types of the private or domestic kind. We may cheerfully take to us the censure that our great humourist was in nothing more English than in this--that his sympathy with the affections of the hearth and the home knew almost no bounds. A symbolisation of this may be found in the honour which, from the _Sketches_ and _Pickwick_ onwards, through a long series of Christmas books and Christmas numbers, Dickens, doubtless very consciously, paid to the one great festival of English family life. Yet so far am I from agreeing with those critics who think that he is hereby lowered to the level of the poets of the teapot and the plum-pudding, that I am at a loss how to express my admiration for this side of his genius--tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful with the playfulness of Goldsmith, natural with the naturalness of the author of _Amelia_. Who was ever more at home with children than he, and, for that matter, with babies to begin with? Mr. Horne relates how he once heard a lady exclaim: "Oh, do read to us about the baby; Dickens is capital at a baby!" Even when most playful, most farcical concerning children, his fun is rarely without something of true tenderness, for he knew the meaning of that dreariest solitude which he has so often pictured, but nowhere, of course, with a truthfulness going so straight to the heart as in _David Copperfield_--the solitude of a child left to itself. Another wonderfully true child-character is that of Pip, in _Great Expectations_, who is also, as his years progress, an admirable study of boy-nature. For Dickens thoroughly understood what that mysterious variety of humankind really is, and was always, if one may so say, on the lookout for him. He knew him in the brightness and freshness which makes true _ingénus_ of such delightful characters (rare enough in fiction) as Walter Gay and Mrs. Lirriper's grandson. He knew him in his festive mood--witness the amusing letter in which he describes a water expedition at Eton with his son and two of his irrepressible school-fellows. He knew him in his precocity--the boy of about three feet high, at the "George and Vulture," "in a hairy cap and fustian overalls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in time the elevation of an hostler;" and the thing on the roof of the Harrisburg coach, which, when the rain was over, slowly upreared itself, and patronisingly piped out the enquiry: "Well, now, stranger, I guess you find this a'most like an English arternoon, hey?" He knew the Gavroche who danced attendance on Mr. Quilp at his wharf, and those strangest, but by no means least true, types of all, the pupil-teachers in Mr. Fagin's academy. But these, with the exception of the last-named, which show much shrewd and kindly insight into the paradoxes of human nature, are, of course, the mere _croquis_ of the great humourist's pencil. His men and women, and the passions, the desires, the loves, and hatreds that agitate them, he has usually chosen to depict on that background of domestic life which is in a greater or less degree common to us all. And it is thus also that he has secured to himself the vast public which vibrates very differently from a mere class or section of society to the touch of a popular speaker or writer. "The more," he writes, "we see of life and its brevity, and the world and its varieties, the more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in which we are drops, and not to by-ponds (very stagnant) here and there, ever can or ever will lay the foundations of an endurable retrospect." The types of character which in his fictions he chiefly delights in reproducing are accordingly those which most of us have opportunities enough of comparing with the realities around us; and this test, a sound one within reasonable limits, was the test he demanded. To no other author were his own characters ever more real; and Forster observes that "what he had most to notice in Dickens at the very outset of his career was his indifference to any praise of his performances on the merely literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose, on their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities, rather than creations of fancy." It is, then, the favourite growths of our own age and country for which we shall most readily look in his works, and not look in vain: avarice and prodigality; pride in all its phases; hypocrisy in its endless varieties, unctuous and plausible, fawning and self-satisfied, formal and moral; and, on the other side, faithfulness, simplicity, long-suffering patience, and indomitable heroic good-humour. Do we not daily make room on the pavement for Mr. Dombey, erect, solemn, and icy, along-side of whom in the road Mr. Carter deferentially walks his sleek horse? Do we not know more than one Anthony Chuzzlewit laying up money for himself and his son, and a curse for both along with it; and many a Richard Carston, sinking, sinking, as the hope grows feebler that Justice or Fortune will at last help one who has not learnt how to help himself? And will not prodigals of a more buoyant kind, like the immortal Mr. Micawber (though, maybe, with an eloquence less ornate than his), when _their_ boat is on the shore and _their_ bark is on the sea, become "perfectly business-like and perfectly practical," and propose, in acknowledgment of a parting gift we had neither hoped nor desired to see again, "bills" or, if we should prefer it, "a bond, or any other description of security?" All this will happen to us, as surely as we shall be buttonholed by Pecksniffs in a state of philanthropic exultation; and watched round corners by 'umble but observant Uriah Heeps; and affronted in what is best in us by the worst hypocrite of all, the hypocrite of religion, who flaunts in our eyes his greasy substitute for what he calls the "light of terewth." To be sure, unless it be Mr. Chadband and those of his tribe, we shall find the hypocrite and the man-out-at-elbows in real life less endurable than their representatives in fiction; for Dickens well understood "that if you do not administer a disagreeable character carefully, the public have a decided tendency to think that the _story_ is disagreeable, and not merely the fictitious form." His economy is less strict with characters of the opposite class, true copies of Nature's own handiwork--the Tom Pinches and Trotty Vecks and Clara Peggottys, who reconcile us with our kind, and Mr. Pickwick himself, "a human being replete with benevolence," to borrow a phrase from a noble passage in Dickens's most congenial predecessor. These characters in Dickens have a warmth which only the creations of Fielding and Smollett had possessed before, and which, like these old masters, he occasionally carries to excess. At the other extreme stand those characters in which the art of Dickens, always in union with the promptings of his moral nature, illustrates the mitigating or redeeming qualities observable even in the outcasts of our civilisation. To me his figures of this kind, when they are not too intensely elaborated, are not the least touching; and there is something as pathetic in the uncouth convict Magwitch as in the consumptive crossing-sweeper Jo. As a matter of course it is possible to take exceptions of one kind or another to some of the characters created by Dickens in so extraordinary a profusion. I hardly know of any other novelist less obnoxious to the charge of repeating himself; though, of course, many characters in his earlier or shorter works contained in themselves the germs of later and fuller developments. But Bob Sawyer and Dick Swiveller, Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep are at least sufficiently independent variations on the same themes. On the other hand, Filer and Cute in _The Chimes_ were the first sketches of Gradgrind and Bounderby in _Hard Times_; and Clemency in _The Battle of Life_ prefigures Peggotty in _David Copperfield_. No one could seriously quarrel with such repetitions as these, and there are remarkably few of them; for the fertile genius of Dickens took delight in the variety of its creativeness, and, as if to exemplify this, there was no relation upon the contrasted humours of which he better loved to dwell than that of partnership. It has been seen how rarely his inventive power condescended to supplement itself by what in the novel corresponds to the mimicry of the stage, and what in truth is as degrading to the one as it is to the other--the reproduction of originals _from real life_. On the other hand, he carries his habit too far of making a particular phrase do duty as an index of a character. This trick also is a trick of the stage, where it often enough makes the judicious grieve. Many may be inclined to censure it in Dickens as one of several forms of the exaggeration which is so frequently condemned in him. There was no charge to which he was more sensitive; and in the preface to _Martin Chuzzlewit_ he accordingly (not for the first time) turned round upon the objectors, declaring roundly that "what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions is plain truth to another;" and hinting a doubt "whether it is _always_ the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull." I certainly do not think that the term "exaggerated" is correctly applied to such conventional characters of sensational romance as Rosa Dartle, who has, as it were, lost her way into _David Copperfield_, while Hortense and Madame Defarge seem to be in their proper places in _Bleak House_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_. In his earlier writings, and in the fresher and less overcharged serious parts of his later books, he rarely if ever paints black in black; even the Jew Fagin has a moment of relenting against the sleeping Oliver; he is not that unreal thing, a "demon," whereas Sikes is that real thing, a brute. On the other hand, certainly he at times makes his characters more laughable than nature; few great humourists have so persistently sought to efface the line which separates the barely possible from the morally probable. This was, no doubt, largely due to his inclination towards the grotesque, which a severer literary training might have taught him to restrain. Thus he liked to introduce insane or imbecile personages into fiction, where, as in real life, they are often dangerous to handle. It is to his sense of the grotesque, rather than to any deep-seated satirical intention, and certainly not to any want of reverence or piety in his very simple and very earnest nature, that I would likewise ascribe the exaggeration and unfairness of which he is guilty against Little Bethel and all its works. But in this, as in other instances, no form of humour requires more delicate handling than the grotesque, and none is more liable to cause fatigue. Latterly, Dickens was always adding to his gallery of eccentric portraits, and if inner currents may be traced by outward signs, it may be worth while to apply the test of his _names_, which become more and more odd as their owners deviate more and more from the path of nature. Who more simply and yet more happily named than the leading members of the Pickwick Club--from the poet, Mr. Snodgrass, to the sportsman, Mr. Winkle--Nathaniel, not Daniel; but with Veneering and Lammle, and Boffin and Venus, and Crisparkle and Grewgious--be they actual names or not--we feel instinctively that we are in the region of the transnormal. Lastly, in their descriptive power and the faithfulness with which they portray the life and ways of particular periods or countries, of special classes, professions, or other divisions of mankind, the books of Dickens are, again of course within their range, unequalled. He sought his materials chiefly at home, though his letters from Italy and Switzerland and America, and his French pictures in sketch and story, show how much wider a field his descriptive powers might have covered. The _Sketches by Boz_ and the _Pickwick Papers_ showed a mastery, unsurpassed before or since, in the description of the life of English society in its middle and lower classes, and in _Oliver Twist_ he lifted the curtain from some of the rotten parts of our civilisation. This history of a work-house child also sounded the note of that sympathy with the poor which gave to Dickens's descriptions of their sufferings and their struggles a veracity beyond mere accuracy of detail. He was still happier in describing their household virtues, their helpfulness to one another, their compassion for those who are the poorest of all--the friendless and the outcast--as he did in his _Old Curiosity Shop_, and in most of his Christmas books. His pictures of middle-class life abounded in kindly humour; but the humour and pathos of poverty--more especially the poverty which has not yet lost its self-respect--commended themselves most of all to his descriptive power. Where, as in _Nicholas Nickleby_ and later works, he essayed to describe the manners of the higher classes, he was, as a rule, far less successful; partly because there was in his nature a vein of rebellion against the existing system of society, so that, except in his latest books, he usually approached a description of members of its dominant orders with a satirical intention, or at least an undertone of bitterness. At the same time I demur to the common assertion that Dickens could not draw a real gentleman. All that can be said is that it very rarely suited his purpose to do so, supposing the term to include manners as well as feelings and actions; though Mr. Twemlow, in _Our Mutual Friend_, might be instanced as a (perhaps rather conscious) exception of one kind, and Sir Leicester Dedlock, in the latter part of _Bleak House_, as another. Moreover, a closer examination of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Cousin Feenix will show that, gull as the one and ninny as the other is, neither has anything that can be called ungentlemanly about him; on the contrary, the characters, on the whole, rather plead in favour of the advantage than of the valuelessness of blue blood. As for Dickens's other noblemen, whom I find enumerated in an American dictionary of his characters, they are nearly all mere passing embodiments of satirical fancies, which pretend to be nothing more. Another ingenious enthusiast has catalogued the numerous callings, professions, and trades of the personages appearing in Dickens's works. I cannot agree with the criticism that in his personages the man is apt to become forgotten in the externals of his calling--the barrister's wig and gown, as it were, standing for the barrister, and the beadle's cocked hat and staff for the beadle. But he must have possessed in its perfection the curious detective faculty of deducing a man's occupation from his manners. To him nothing wore a neutral tint, and no man or woman was featureless. He was, it should be remembered, always observing; half his life he was afoot. When he undertook to describe any novel or unfamiliar kind of manners, he spared no time or trouble in making a special study of his subject. He was not content to know the haunts of the London thieves by hearsay, or to read the history of opium-smoking and its effects in Blue-books. From the office of his journal in London we find him starting on these self-imposed commissions, and from his hotel in New York. The whole art of descriptive reporting, which has no doubt produced a large quantity of trashy writing, but has also been of real service in arousing a public interest in neglected corners of our social life, was, if not actually set on foot, at any rate re-invigorated and vitalised by him. No one was so delighted to notice the oddities which habit and tradition stereotype in particular classes of men. A complete natural history of the country actor, the London landlady, and the British waiter might be compiled from his pages. This power of observation and description extended from human life to that of animals. His habits of life could not but make him the friend of dogs, and there is some reason for a title which was bestowed on him in a paper in a London magazine concerning his own dogs--the Landseer of Fiction. His letters are full of delightful details concerning these friends and companions, Turk, Linda, and the rest of them; nor is the family of their fictitious counterparts, culminating (intellectually) in Merrylegs, less numerous and delightful. Cats were less congenial to Dickens, perhaps because he had no objection to changing house; and they appear in his works in no more attractive form than as the attendant spirits of Mrs. Pipchin and of Mr. Krook. But for the humours of animals in general he had a wonderfully quick eye. Of his ravens I have already spoken. The pony Whisker is the type of kind old gentlemen's ponies. In one of his letters occurs an admirably droll description of the pig-market at Boulogne; and the best unscientific description ever given of a spider was imagined by Dickens at Broadstairs, when in his solitude he thought "of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck did. There is one in my cell (with a speckled body and twenty-two very decided knees) who seems to know me." In everything, whether animate or inanimate, he found out at once the characteristic feature, and reproduced it in words of faultless precision. This is the real secret of his descriptive power, the exercise of which it would be easy to pursue through many other classes of subjects. Scenery, for its own sake, he rarely cared to describe; but no one better understood how to reproduce the combined effect of scenery and weather on the predisposed mind. Thus London and its river in especial are, as I have said, haunted by the memory of Dickens's books. To me it was for years impossible to pass near London Bridge at night, or to idle in the Temple on summer days, or to frequent a hundred other localities on or near the Thames, without instinctively recalling pictures scattered through the works of Dickens--in this respect, also, a real _liber veritatis_. Thus, and in many ways which it would be labour lost to attempt to describe, and by many a stroke or touch of genius which it would be idle to seek to reproduce in paraphrase, the most observing and the most imaginative of our English humourists revealed to us that infinite multitude of associations which binds men together, and makes us members one of another. But though observation and imagination might discern and discover these associations, sympathy--the sympathy of a generous human heart with humanity--alone could breathe into them the warmth of life. Happily, to most men, there is one place consecrated above others to the feelings of love and good-will; "that great altar where the worst among us sometimes perform the worship of the heart, and where the best have offered up such sacrifices and done such deeds of heroism as, chronicled, would put the proudest temples of old time, with all their vaunting annals, to the blush." It was thus that Dickens spoke of the sanctity of _home_; and, English in many things, he was most English in that love of home to which he was never weary of testifying. But, though the "pathway of the sublime" may have been closed to him, he knew well enough that the interests of a people and the interests of humanity are mightier than the domestic loves and cares of any man; and he conscientiously addressed himself, as to the task of his life, to the endeavour to knit humanity together. The method which he, by instinct and by choice, more especially pursued was that of seeking to show the "good in everything." This it is that made him, unreasonably sometimes, ignobly never, the champion of the poor, the helpless, the outcast. He was often tempted into a rhetoric too loud and too shrill, into a satire neither fine nor fair; for he was impatient, but not impatient of what he thought true and good. His purpose, however, was worthy of his powers; nor is there recorded among the lives of English men of letters any more single-minded in its aim, and more successful in the pursuit of it, than his. He was much criticised in his lifetime; and he will, I am well aware, be often criticised in the future by keener and more capable judges than myself. They may miss much in his writings that I find in them; but, unless they find one thing there, it were better that they never opened one of his books. He has indicated it himself when criticising a literary performance by a clever writer: "In this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended to, whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of the earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has made her face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference that the writer can generally imagine without trying it. You don't want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don't want any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion that it is there." The sentiment which Dickens means is the salt which will give a fresh savour of their own to his works so long as our language endures. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [1] See _Idyll_. xv. 77. This discovery is not my own, but that of the late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly with great gusto. [2] For operas, as a form of _dramatic_ entertainment, Dickens seems afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it is difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid. [3] W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of Cannon Street, and their private house in Mosely Street. [4] As there is hardly a character in the whole world of fiction and the drama without some sort of a literary predecessor, so Dickens may have derived the first notion of Grip from the raven Ralpho--likewise the property of an idiot--who frightened Roderick Random and Strap out of their wits, and into the belief that he was the personage Grip so persistently declared himself to be. [5] After dining at a party including the son of an eminent man of letters, he notes in his _Remembrancer_ that he found the great man's son "decidedly lumpish," and appends the reflexion, "Copyrights need be hereditary, for genius isn't." [6] From a list of MSS. at South Kensington, kindly furnished me by Mr. R. F. Sketchley, I find that Mr. R. H. Shepherd's _Bibliography of Dickens_ is incomplete on this head. [7] By an odd coincidence, not less than four out of the six theatres advertising their performances in this first number of the _Daily News_ announce each a different adaptation of _The Cricket on the Hearth_. Amongst the curiosities of the casts are observable: At the Adelphi, Wright as Tilly Slowboy, and at the Haymarket Buckstone in the same character, with William Farren as Caleb Plummer. The latter part is taken at the Princess's by Compton, Mrs. Stirling playing Dot. At the Lyceum, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Mary Keeley, and Mr. Emery, appear in the piece. [8] It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird _Signalman's Story_ in one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one's self. There are excellent descriptions of the _rapidity_ of a railway journey in the first chapter of _The Lazy Tour_, and in another _Household Words_ paper, called _A Flight_. [9] Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the _Bibliography of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt_, who has kindly communicated to me part of his collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle against Leigh Hunt repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, unworthy of notice. [10] _By Rail to Parnassus_, June 16, 1855. [11] One of the last things ever written by Dickens was a criticism of M. Fechter's acting, intended to introduce him to the American public. A false report, by-the-way, declared Dickens to have been the author of the dramatic version of Scott's novel, which at Christmas, 1865-'66, was produced at the Lyceum, under the title of _The Master of Ravenswood_; but he allowed that he had done "a great deal towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, on the stage in his own gallant manner." [12] Dickens undoubtedly had a genius for titles. Amongst some which he suggested for the use of a friend and contributor to his journal are, "_What will he do with it?_" and "_Can he forgive her?_" [13] This title has helped to extinguish the phrase of which it consists. Few would now be found to agree with the last clause of Flora's parenthesis in _Little Dorrit_: "Our mutual friend--too cold a word for me; at least I don't mean that very proper expression, mutual friend." [14] In the last volume of his _magnum opus_ of historical fiction Gustav Freytag describes "Boz" as, about the year 1846, filling with boundless enthusiasm the hearts of young men and maidens in a small Silesian country town. [15] The passage in _Oliver Twist_ (chapter xxxvii.) which illustrates the maxim that "dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine," may, or may not, be a reminiscence of _Sartor Resartus_, then (1838) first published in a volume. ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. The following Volumes are now ready: SAMUEL JOHNSON By LESLIE STEPHEN. EDWARD GIBBON By J. C. MORISON. SIR WALTER SCOTT By R. H. HUTTON. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY By J. A. SYMONDS. DAVID HUME By T. H. HUXLEY. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. By WILLIAM BLACK. DANIEL DEFOE By WILLIAM MINTO. ROBERT BURNS By J. C. SHAIRP. EDMUND SPENSER By R. W. CHURCH. WILLIAM M. THACKERAY By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. EDMUND BURKE By JOHN MORLEY. 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In one volume, 8vo, Cloth, $1 25. _The volumes are sold separately._ Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. _Sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price._ Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. The following misprints have been corrected: "absurb" corrected to "absurd" (page 21) "hear-trending" corrected to "heart-rending" (page 26) "the the" corrected to "the" (page 135) Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. 
22536	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration and family trees. See 22536-h.htm or 22536-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/2/5/3/22536/22536-h/22536-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/2/5/3/22536/22536-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected. The title page lists the authors as Austen-Leigh. The text omits the hyphen. This was retained. Text that was superscripted in the original is enclosed within curly brackets preceded by a carat character. Example: Ser^{t,} In the interests of maintaining the integrity of the Austen letters, archaic or unusual spellings were retained as was inconsistent capitalization. For example: expence, acknowlegement; d'Arblay, D'Arblay. Readers who print this text should be warned that it contains family trees up to 209 characters in width. More detailed notes, including a list of corrections, will be found at the end of the text. JANE AUSTEN HER LIFE AND LETTERS A Family Record by WILLIAM AUSTEN-LEIGH and RICHARD ARTHUR AUSTEN-LEIGH With a Portrait London Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place 1913 [_All rights reserved_] [Illustration: J. Zoffany R. A. pinxit Emery Walker Ph. sc. Jane Austen see p. 62] PREFACE Since 1870-1, when J. E. Austen Leigh[1] published his _Memoir of Jane Austen_, considerable additions have been made to the stock of information available for her biographers. Of these fresh sources of knowledge the set of letters from Jane to Cassandra, edited by Lord Brabourne, has been by far the most important. These letters are invaluable as _mémoires pour servir_; although they cover only the comparatively rare periods when the two sisters were separated, and although Cassandra purposely destroyed many of the letters likely to prove the most interesting, from a distaste for publicity. Some further correspondence, and many incidents in the careers of two of her brothers, may be read in _Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers_, by J. H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback; while Miss Constance Hill has been able to add several family traditions to the interesting topographical information embodied in her _Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends_. Nor ought we to forget the careful research shown in other biographies of the author, especially that by Mr. Oscar Fay Adams. During the last few years, we have been fortunate enough to be able to add to this store; and every existing MS. or tradition preserved by the family, of which we have any knowledge, has been placed at our disposal. It seemed, therefore, to us that the time had come when a more complete chronological account of the novelist's life might be laid before the public, whose interest in Jane Austen (as we readily acknowledge) has shown no signs of diminishing, either in England or in America. The _Memoir_ must always remain the one firsthand account of her, resting on the authority of a nephew who knew her intimately and that of his two sisters. We could not compete with its vivid personal recollections; and the last thing we should wish to do, even were it possible, would be to supersede it. We believe, however, that it needs to be supplemented, not only because so much additional material has been brought to light since its publication, but also because the account given of their aunt by her nephew and nieces could be given only from their own point of view, while the incidents and characters fall into a somewhat different perspective if the whole is seen from a greater distance. Their knowledge of their aunt was during the last portion of her life, and they knew her best of all in her last year, when her health was failing and she was living in much seclusion; and they were not likely to be the recipients of her inmost confidences on the events and sentiments of her youth. Hence the emotional and romantic side of her nature--a very real one--has not been dwelt upon. No doubt the Austens were, as a family, unwilling to show their deeper feelings, and the sad end of Jane's one romance would naturally tend to intensify this dislike of expression; but the feeling was there, and it finally found utterance in her latest work, when, through Anne Elliot, she claimed for women the right of 'loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.' Then, again, her nephew and nieces hardly knew how much she had gone into society, or how much, with a certain characteristic aloofness, she had enjoyed it. Bath, either when she was the guest of her uncle and aunt or when she was a resident; London, with her brother Henry and his wife, and the rather miscellaneous society which they enjoyed; Godmersham, with her brother Edward and his county neighbours in East Kent;--these had all given her many opportunities of studying the particular types which she blended into her own creations. A third point is the uneventful nature of the author's life, which, as we think, has been a good deal exaggerated. Quiet it certainly was; but the quiet life of a member of a large family in the England of that date was compatible with a good deal of stirring incident, happening, if not to herself, at all events to those who were nearest to her, and who commanded her deepest sympathies. We hope therefore that our narrative, with all its imperfections and its inevitable repetition of much that has already been published, will at least be of use in removing misconceptions, in laying some new facts before the reader, and in placing others in a fresh light. It is intended as a narrative, and not as a piece of literary criticism; for we should not care to embark upon the latter in competition with biographers and essayists who have a better claim to be heard. Both in the plan and in the execution of our work we have received much valuable help from another member of the family, Mary A. Austen Leigh.[2] An arrangement courteously made by the owners of the copyright has procured for us a free and ample use of the Letters as edited by Lord Brabourne[3]; while the kindness of Mr. J. G. Nicholson of Castlefield House, Sturton-by-Scawby, Lincolnshire, has opened a completely new source of information in the letters which passed between the Austens and their kinsmen of the half-blood--Walters of Kent and afterwards of Lincolnshire. Miss Jane Austen, granddaughter of Admiral Charles Austen, and Miss Margaret Bellas, great-granddaughter of James Austen, are so good as to allow us to make a fuller use of their family documents than was found possible by the author of the _Memoir_; while Mr. J. H. Hubback permits us to draw freely upon the _Sailor Brothers_, and Captain E. L. Austen, R.N., upon his MSS. Finally, we owe to Admiral Ernest Rice kind permission to have the photograph taken, from which the reproduction of his Zoffany portrait is made into a frontispiece for this volume. We hope that any other friends who have helped us will accept this general expression of our gratitude. W. A. L. R. A. A. L. _April 1913._ In the notes to the text, the following works are referred to under the shortened forms here given:-- _Memoir of Jane Austen_, by her nephew, J. E. Austen Leigh: quoted from second edition, 1871. As _Memoir_. _Letters of Jane Austen_, edited by Edward Lord Brabourne, 1884. As _Brabourne_. _Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers_, by J. H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback, 1906. As _Sailor Brothers_. _Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends_ Constance Hill, 1902. As _Miss Hill_. FOOTNOTES: [1] Father of one of the present writers, and grandfather of the other. [2] Daughter of the author of the _Memoir_. [3] It has not, however, been possible to consult the originals except in the instance of the letters from Jane to Anna Lefroy. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE PREFACE v CHRONOLOGY xiii I. AUSTENS AND LEIGHS, 1600-1764 1 II. STEVENTON, 1764-1785 11 III. WARREN HASTINGS AND THE HANCOCKS, 1752-1794 31 IV. FAMILY LIFE, 1779-1792 46 V. GROWTH AND CHANGE, 1792-1796 67 VI. ROMANCE, 1795-1802 84 VII. AUTHORSHIP AND CORRESPONDENCE, 1796-1798 95 VIII. GODMERSHAM AND STEVENTON, 1798-1799 109 IX. THE LEIGH PERROTS AND BATH, 1799-1800 126 X. CHANGE OF HOME, 1800-1801 141 XI. BATH AGAIN, 1801-1805 165 XII. FROM BATH TO SOUTHAMPTON, 1805-1808 189 XIII. FROM SOUTHAMPTON TO CHAWTON, 1808-1809 209 XIV. _SENSE AND SENSIBILITY_, 1809-1811 235 XV. _PRIDE AND PREJUDICE_, 1812-1814 255 XVI. _MANSFIELD PARK_, 1812-1814 273 XVII. _EMMA_, 1814-1815 299 XVIII. _PERSUASION_, 1815-1816 325 XIX. AUNT JANE, 1814-1817 341 XX. FAILING HEALTH, 1816-1817 369 XXI. WINCHESTER, 1817 388 APPENDIX: THE TEXT OF JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS 405 BIBLIOGRAPHY 421 PEDIGREES _to face page_ 428 I. Austen II. Leigh III. Craven, Fowle, and Lloyd Families INDEX 429 * * * * * PORTRAIT OF JANE AUSTEN _Frontispiece_ CHRONOLOGY OF JANE AUSTEN'S LIFE 1775, Dec. 16 Birth, at Steventon. 1779, June Charles John Austen born. 1780, July James Austen matriculated at Oxford (St. John's). 1782 Jane and Cassandra at Oxford under care of Mrs. Cawley (sister of Dr. Cooper). 1783 Mrs. Cawley having moved to Southampton, Jane nearly died there of a fever. Mrs. Cooper (her aunt) took the infection and died (October). 1784 _The Rivals_ acted at Steventon. 1784 or 1785 Jane and Cassandra left Mrs. Latournelle's school at Reading, and returned home. 1786 Eliza Comtesse de Feuillide came to England. Birth of her son. 1787 James Austen in France. 1788, July Henry Austen matriculated at Oxford (St. John's). Francis Austen went to sea. 1791 Edward Austen married Elizabeth Bridges. 1792, March James Austen married Anne Mathew. 1794, Feb. Comte de Feuillide guillotined. 1795 (?) Cassandra engaged to Thomas Fowle. May Mrs. James Austen died. 1795-6 Mr. Tom Lefroy at Ashe. 1796 _First Impressions_ (_Pride and Prejudice_) begun. Jane subscribed to _Camilla_. 1797, Jan. James Austen married Mary Lloyd. Feb. Thomas Fowle died of fever in the W. Indies. Nov. Jane, with mother and sister, went to Bath. _First Impressions_ refused by Cadell. _Sense and Sensibility_ (already sketched in _Elinor and Marianne_) begun. Dec. enry Austen married Eliza de Feuillide. 1798, Aug. Lady Williams (Jane Cooper) killed in a carriage accident. Mrs. Knight gave up Godmersham to the Edward Austens. Jane's first visit there. 1798, Aug. First draft of _Northanger Abbey_ begun. 1799, May Jane at Bath with the Edward Austens. Aug. Mrs. Leigh Perrot's trouble at Bath. 1801, May Family move from Steventon to Bath. Visit to Sidmouth. Possible date of Jane's romance in the west of England. 1802 Austens at Dawlish and Teignmouth. Visit of sisters to Steventon and Manydown. Jane received an offer of marriage from an old friend. 1803 _Northanger Abbey_ (called _Susan_) revised, and sold to Crosby of London. 1804 Probable date of _The Watsons_. Sept. Austens at Lyme. Dec. Mrs. Lefroy of Ashe killed by a fall from her horse. 1805, Jan. Death of Jane's father at Bath. 1806, July Austens left Bath for Clifton, Adlestrop, and Stoneleigh. 1806-7 Austens settled at Southampton. 1807, March Took possession of house in Castle Square. 1808, Sept. Cassandra at Godmersham. Oct. Mrs. Edward Austen died there after the birth of her eleventh child (John). 1809, April Jane attempted to secure publication of _Susan_ (_Northanger Abbey_). Austens left Southampton. July Austens took possession of Chawton (having been at Godmersham). Jane's authorship resumed. 1811, April Jane with Henry in London (Sloane Street) bringing out _Sense and Sensibility_. Oct. _Sense and Sensibility_ published. 1812 Death of Mrs. T. Knight. Edward Austen took the name of 'Knight.' 1813, Jan. Publication of _Pride and Prejudice_. April Death of Mrs. Henry Austen (Eliza). Sept. Jane's last visit to Godmersham. Second edition of _Sense and Sensibility_. 1814, Jan. _Emma_ begun. March Jane went to London with Henry (reading _Mansfield Park_ by the way). May _Mansfield Park_ published. Threat of lawsuit for Chawton. Nov. Marriage of Anna Austen to Ben Lefroy. 1815, March _Emma_ finished. Oct. Illness of Henry. Nov. Jane shown over Carlton House by Dr. Clarke. Dec. Publication of _Emma_. 1816, March Bankruptcy of Henry Austen (Jane's health began to break about this time). May Jane and Cassandra at Kintbury and Cheltenham. July _Persuasion_ finished. Aug End of _Persuasion_ re-written. Henry took Orders. 1817, Jan. Jane began new work. March Ceased to write. Death of Mr. Leigh Perrot. Jane made her will. May 24 Jane moved to Winchester, and revived somewhat. June 16 Cassandra sent a hopeless account to Fanny Knight. July 18 Death. July 24 Burial in Winchester Cathedral. JANE AUSTEN CHAPTER I AUSTENS AND LEIGHS 1600-1764 At the end of the sixteenth century there was living at Horsmonden--a small village in the Weald of Kent--a certain John Austen. From his will it is evident that he was a man of considerable means, owning property in Kent and Sussex and elsewhere; he also held a lease of certain lands from Sir Henry Whetenhall, including in all probability the manor house of Broadford in Horsmonden. What wealth he had was doubtless derived from the clothing trade; for Hasted[4] instances the Austens, together with the Bathursts, Courthopes, and others, as some of the ancient families of that part 'now of large estate and genteel rank in life,' but sprung from ancestors who had used the great staple manufacture of clothing. He adds that these clothiers 'were usually called the Gray Coats of Kent, and were a body so numerous that at County Elections whoever had their vote and interest was almost certain of being elected.' John Austen died in 1620, leaving a large family.[5] Of these, the fifth son, Francis, who died in 1687, describes himself in his will as a clothier, of Grovehurst; this place being, like Broadford, a pretty timbered house of moderate size near the picturesque old village of Horsmonden. Both houses still belong to the Austen family. Francis left a son, John, whose son was another John. This last John settled at Broadford (while his father remained at Grovehurst), and, when quite young, married Elizabeth Weller. He seems to have been a careless, easy-going man, who thought frugality unnecessary, as he would succeed to the estate on his father's death; but he died of consumption in 1704, a year before that event took place. One of his sisters married into the family of the Stringers (neighbours engaged in the same trade as the Austens), and numbered among her descendants the Knights of Godmersham--a circumstance which exercised an important influence over the subsequent fortunes of the Austen family. Elizabeth Weller, a woman happily cast in a different mould from her husband, was an ancestress of Jane Austen who deserves commemoration. Thrifty, energetic, a careful mother, and a prudent housewife, she managed, though receiving only grudging assistance from the Austen family, to pay off her husband's debts, and to give to all her younger children a decent education at a school at Sevenoaks; the eldest boy (the future squire) being taken off her hands by his grandfather.[6] Elizabeth left behind her not only elaborately kept accounts but also a minute description of her actions through many years and of the motives which governed them. It may be interesting to quote one sentence relating to her move from Horsmonden to Sevenoaks for the sake of her children's education. 'These considerations with y^{e} tho'ts of having my own boys in y^{e} house, with a good master (as all represented him to be) were y^{e} inducements that brought me to Sen'nock, for it seemed to me as if I cou'd not do a better thing for my children's good, their education being my great care, and indeed all I think I was capable of doing for 'em, for I always tho't if they had learning, they might get better shift in y^{e} world, with w^{t} small fortune was alloted 'em.' When the good mother died in 1721, her work was done. Schooldays were over, the daughter married, and the boys already making their way in the world. The young squire and his son held gentle sway at Broadford through the eighteenth century; but much more stirring and able was the next brother, Francis. He became a solicitor. Setting up at Sevenoaks 'with eight hundred pounds and a bundle of pens,' he contrived to amass a very large fortune, living most hospitably, and yet buying up all the valuable land round the town which he could secure, and enlarging his means by marrying two wealthy wives. But his first marriage did not take place till he was nearer fifty than forty; and he had as a bachelor been a most generous benefactor to the sons of his two next brothers, Thomas and William. His second wife, who became in due course of time godmother to her great-niece, Jane Austen, was the widow of Samuel Lennard, of West Wickham, who left her his estate. Legal proceedings ensued over the will, and Mrs. Lennard took counsel of Francis Austen, who ended by winning both the case and her hand. Francis's son by his first wife (known as Motley Austen) rounded off the family estate at Sevenoaks by purchasing the Kippington property. Motley's third son, John, eventually inherited the Broadford estate. Francis's two most distinguished descendants were Colonel Thomas Austen of Kippington, well known as M.P. for Kent, and the Rev. John Thomas Austen, senior wrangler in 1817. Both the two next brothers of Francis Austen adopted the medical profession. Thomas, an apothecary at Tonbridge, had an only son, Henry, who graduated at Cambridge, and, through his uncle's interest, held the living of West Wickham for twenty years. His descendants on the female side are still flourishing. William, the surgeon, Jane Austen's grandfather, is more immediately interesting to us. He married Rebecca, daughter of Sir George Hampson, a physician of Gloucester, and widow of another medical man, James Walter. By her first husband she had a son, William Hampson Walter, born in 1721; by her second she had three daughters, and one son, George, born in 1731. Philadelphia--the only daughter who grew up and married--we shall meet with later. Rebecca Austen died in 1733, and three years later William married Susanna Holk, of whom nothing is known except that she died at an advanced age, and did not mention any of the Austens in her will; neither is there any trace of her in any of the family records with which we are acquainted; so it is hardly probable that little George Austen (Jane's father), who had lost both his parents when he was six years old, continued under the care of his stepmother. However, all that we know of his childhood is that his uncle Francis befriended him, and sent him to Tonbridge School, and that from Tonbridge he obtained a Scholarship (and subsequently a Fellowship) at St. John's College, Oxford--the College at which, later on, through George's own marriage, his descendants were to be 'founder's kin.' He returned to teach at his old school, occupying the post of second master there in 1758, and in the next year he was again in residence at Oxford, where his good looks gained for him the name of 'the handsome proctor.' In 1760 he took Orders, and in 1761 was presented by Mr. Knight of Godmersham--who had married a descendant of his great-aunt, Jane Stringer--to the living of Steventon, near Overton in Hampshire. It was a time of laxity in the Church, and George Austen (though he afterwards became an excellent parish-priest) does not seem to have resided or done duty at Steventon before the year 1764, when his marriage to Cassandra Leigh must have made the rectory appear a desirable home to which to bring his bride. Before we say anything of the Leighs, a few sentences must be devoted to George Austen's relations of the half-blood--the Walters. With his mother's son by her first husband, William Hampson Walter, he remained on intimate terms. A good many letters are extant which passed between the Austens and the Walters during the early married life of the former, the last of them containing the news of the birth of Jane. Besides this, William Walter's daughter, 'Phila,' was a constant correspondent of George Austen's niece Eliza. The Walter family settled in Lincolnshire, where they have held Church preferment, and have also been well known in the world of sport. Phila's brother James seems to have been at the same time an exemplary parson, beloved by his flock, and also a sort of 'Jack Russell,' and is said to have met his death in the hunting-field, by falling into a snow-drift, at the age of eighty-four. His son Henry distinguished himself in a more academical manner. He was second wrangler in 1806, and a Fellow of St. John's. Nor was he only a mathematician; for in June 1813 Jane Austen met a young man named Wilkes, an undergraduate of St. John's, who spoke very highly of Walter as a scholar; he said he was considered the best classic at Cambridge. She adds: 'How such a report would have interested my father!' Henry Walter was at one time tutor at Haileybury, and was also a beneficed clergyman. He was known at Court; indeed, it is said that, while he declined higher preferment for himself, he was consulted by George IV and William IV on the selection of bishops. The wife that George Austen chose belonged to the somewhat large clan of the Leighs of Adlestrop in Gloucestershire, of which family the Leighs[7] of Stoneleigh were a younger branch. Her father was the Rev. Thomas Leigh, elected Fellow of All Souls at so early an age that he was ever after called 'Chick Leigh,' and afterwards Rector of Harpsden, near Henley. Both these branches of the Leigh family descended from Sir Thomas Leigh, Lord Mayor of London, behind whom Queen Elizabeth rode to be proclaimed at Paul's Cross. He was rich enough and great enough to endow more than one son with estates; but while the elder line at Adlestrop remained simple squires, the younger at Stoneleigh rose to a peerage. The latter branch, however, were now rapidly approaching extinction, while the former had many vigorous scions. The family records have much to say of one of the squires--Theophilus (who died in 1724), the husband of Mary Brydges and the father of twelve children, a strong character, and one who lived up to fixed, if rather narrow, ideas of duty. We hear of his old-fashioned dress and elaborate bows and postures, of his affability to his neighbours, and his just, though somewhat strict, government of his sons. It is difficult to picture to oneself a set of modern Oxford men standing patiently after dinner, in the dining-parlour, as Theophilus's sons did, 'till desired to sit down and drink Church and King.' Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, the Duke of Chandos (the patron of Handel), used to send for the daughters to be educated in the splendour of Canons (his place in Middlesex), and to make such matches as he chose for them with dowries of £3000 a-piece. Cassandra's father, Thomas, was the fourth son of Theophilus Leigh. An older and better known brother was another Theophilus, Master of Balliol for more than half a century. The story of his election, in 1727, is remarkable. The Fellows of Balliol could not agree in the choice of any one of their own body; and one set, thinking it would be no disadvantage to have a duke's brother as master, invited their visitor, Dr. Brydges[8], to stand. On his declining, they brought forward his nephew, Theophilus Leigh, then a young Fellow of Corpus. The election resulted in a tie, and the visitor had no qualms of conscience in giving his casting vote to his nephew. Theophilus proved to be a man 'more[9] famous for his sayings than his doings, overflowing with puns and witticisms and sharp retorts; but his most serious joke was his practical one of living much longer than had been expected or intended.' He no doubt became a most dignified Head, and inspired the young men with fear and respect; but he must have sometimes remembered the awful day when he first preached before his father, who immediately turned his back on the divine, saying afterwards: 'I thank you, Theo, for your discourse; let us hereafter have less rhetoric and more divinity; I turned my back lest my presence might daunt you.' When Theo in turn was an old man, and when Jane Austen's eldest brother went to Oxford, he was asked to dine with this dignified kinsman. Being a raw freshman, he was about to take off his gown, when the old man of eighty said with a grim smile: 'Young man, you need not strip; we are not going to fight.'[10] Cassandra Leigh's youth was spent in the quiet rectory of Harpsden, for her father was one of the more conscientious of the gently born clergy of that day, living entirely on his benefice, and greatly beloved in his neighbourhood as an exemplary parish-priest. 'He was one of the most contented, quiet, sweet-tempered, generous, cheerful men I ever knew,' so says the chronicler of the Leigh family, 'and his wife was his counterpart. The spirit of the pugnacious Theophilus dwelt not in him; nor that eternal love of company which distinguished the other brothers, yet he was by no means unsocial.' Towards the end of his life he removed to Bath, being severely afflicted with the gout, and here he died in 1763. His peaceful wife, Jane Walker, was descended on her mother's side from a sufficiently warlike family; she was the daughter of an Oxford physician, who had married a Miss Perrot, one of the last of a very old stock, long settled in Oxfordshire, but also known in Pembrokeshire at least as early as the fourteenth century. They were probably among the settlers planted there to overawe the Welsh, and it is recorded of one of them that he slew 'twenty-six men of Kemaes and one wolf.' A contrast to these uncompromising ancestors was found in Mrs. Leigh's aunt, Ann Perrot, one of the family circle at Harpsden, whom tradition states to have been a very pious, good woman. Unselfish she certainly was, for she earnestly begged her brother, Mr. Thomas Perrot, to alter his will by which he had bequeathed to her his estates at Northleigh in Oxfordshire, and to leave her instead an annuity of one hundred pounds. Her brother complied with her request, and by a codicil devised the estates to his great-nephew, James, son of the Rev. Thomas Leigh, on condition that he took the surname and arms of Perrot.[11] Accordingly, on the death of Mr. Thomas Perrot at the beginning of 1751, James Leigh became James Leigh Perrot of Northleigh. His two sisters, Jane and Cassandra, also profited by the kindness of their great-aunt, who left two hundred pounds to each. Another legacy which filtered through the Walkers from the Perrots to the Austens was the advantage of being 'kin' to the Founder of St. John's College, Oxford--Sir Thomas White--an advantage of which several members of the family availed themselves. Northleigh, for some reason or other, did not suit its new owner. He pulled down the mansion and sold the estate to the Duke of Marlborough, buying for himself a property at Hare Hatch on the Bath Road, midway between Maidenhead and Reading. We shall meet him again, and his devoted wife, Jane Cholmeley; and we shall see a remarkable instance of his steadfast love for her. George Austen perhaps met his future wife at the house of her uncle, the Master of Balliol, but no particulars of the courtship have survived. The marriage took place at Walcot Church, Bath, on April 26, 1764, the bride's father having died at Bath only a short time before. Two circumstances connected with their brief honeymoon--which consisted only of a journey from Bath to Steventon, broken by one day's halt at Andover--may be mentioned. The bride's 'going-away' dress seems to have been a scarlet riding-habit, whose future adventures were not uninteresting; and the pair are believed to have had an unusual companion for such an occasion--namely, a small boy, six years old, the only son of Warren Hastings by his first wife. We are told that he was committed to the charge of Mr. Austen when he was sent over to England in 1761, and we shall see later that there was a reason for this connexion; but a three-year-old boy is a curious charge for a bachelor, and poor little George must have wanted a nurse rather than a tutor. In any case, he came under Mrs. Austen's maternal care, who afterwards mourned for his early death 'as if he had been a child of her own.'[12] FOOTNOTES: [4] _History of Kent._ [5] For further particulars respecting the earlier Austens, we venture to refer our readers to _Chawton Manor and its Owners_, chap. vii. [6] This almost exclusive care of the old man for his eldest grandson may possibly have been the model for the action of old Mr. Dashwood at the beginning of _Sense and Sensibility_. [7] We are allowed to quote freely from a manuscript _History of the Leigh Family of Adlestrop_, written in 1788; some part of which appeared in an article written by the Hon. Agnes Leigh and published in the _National Review_ for April 1907. [8] Brother both of the Duke of Chandos and of Mrs. Leigh. [9] _Memoir_, p. 5. [10] The author of the _Memoir_ remarks on the fact that the Leigh arms were placed on the front of Balliol towards Broad Street, now pulled down. He did not live to see the same arms occupy a similar place on the new buildings at King's College, Cambridge, erected when his son Augustus was Provost. [11] The Perrots seem to have set great store by their armorial bearings: at least we are told that two branches of them lived at Northleigh at the same time in the eighteenth century, hardly on speaking terms with each other, and that one cause of quarrel was a difference of opinion as to whether the three 'pears'--which, in punning heraldry, formed a part of their coat of arms--were to be silver or gold. [12] In the absence of any information as to where George Hastings died or was buried, it is at present impossible to be sure about the details of this interesting tradition. CHAPTER II STEVENTON 1764-1785 Steventon is a small village tucked away among the Hampshire Downs, about seven miles south of Basingstoke. It is now looked down upon at close quarters by the South-Western Railway, but, at the time of which we are writing, it was almost equidistant from two main roads: one running from Basingstoke to Andover, which would be joined at Deane Gate, the other from Basingstoke to Winchester, joined at Popham Lane. Communication with London was maintained--at any rate, in 1800--by two coaches that ran each night through Deane Gate. It does not appear, however, to have been by any means certain that an unexpected traveller would get a place in either of them.[13] The surrounding country is certainly not picturesque; it presents no grand or extensive views: the features, however, being small rather than plain.[14] It is, in fact, an undulating district whose hills have no marked character, and the poverty of whose soil prevents the timber from attaining a great size. We need not therefore be surprised to hear that when Cassandra Leigh saw the place for the first time, just before her marriage, she should think it very inferior to the valley of the Thames at Henley. Yet the neighbourhood had its beauties of rustic lanes and hidden nooks; and Steventon, from the fall of the ground and the abundance of its timber, was one of the prettiest spots in it. The Rectory had been of the most miserable description, but George Austen improved it until it became a tolerably roomy and convenient habitation. It stood 'in a shallow valley, surrounded by sloping meadows, well sprinkled with elm-trees, at the end of a small village of cottages, each well provided with a garden, scattered about prettily on either side of the road. . . . North of the house, the road from Deane to Popham Lane ran at a sufficient distance from the front to allow a carriage drive, through turf and trees. On the south side, the ground rose gently and was occupied by one of those old-fashioned[15] gardens in which vegetables and flowers are combined, flanked and protected on the east by one of the thatched mud walls common in that country, and overshadowed by fine elms. Along the upper or southern side of the garden ran a terrace of the finest turf, which must have been in the writer's thoughts when she described Catherine Morland's childish delight in "rolling down the green slope at the back of the house." 'But the chief beauty of Steventon consisted in its hedgerows. A hedgerow in that country does not mean a thin formal line of quickset, but an irregular border of copse-wood and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional seats, entitled "The Wood Walk." The other ran straight up the hill, under the name of "The Church Walk," because it led to the parish church, as well as to a fine old manor-house of Henry VIII's time, occupied by a family named Digweed, who for more than a century rented it, together with the chief farm in the parish.' The usefulness of a hedgerow as a place where a heroine might remain unseen and overhear what was not intended to reach her ears must have impressed itself early on the mind of our author; and readers of _Persuasion_ will remember the scene in the fields near Uppercross where Anne hears a conversation about herself carried on by Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove. The writer had possibly intended to introduce a similar scene into _Mansfield Park_, for, in a letter to her sister, of January 29, 1813, when turning from _Pride and Prejudice_ to a new subject, she says: 'If you could discover whether Northamptonshire is a country of hedgerows I should be glad again.' Presumably, her question was answered in the negative, and her scrupulous desire for accuracy did not allow of her making use of the intended device. Steventon Church 'might have appeared mean and uninteresting to an ordinary observer; but the adept in church architecture would have known that it must have stood there some seven centuries, and would have found beauty in the very narrow Early English windows, as well as in the general proportions of its little chancel; while its solitary position, far from the hum of the village, and within sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the grey manor-house through its circling green of sycamores, has in it something solemn and appropriate to the last resting-place of the silent dead. Sweet violets, both purple and white, grow in abundance beneath its south wall. One may imagine for how many centuries the ancestors of those little flowers have occupied that undisturbed sunny nook, and may think how few living families can boast of as ancient a tenure of their land. Large elms protrude their rough branches; old hawthorns shed their annual blossoms over the graves; and the hollow yew-tree must be at least coeval with the church. But whatever may be the beauties or defects of the surrounding scenery, this was the residence of Jane Austen for twenty-four years. This was the cradle of her genius. These were the first objects which inspired her young heart with a sense of the beauties of nature. In strolls along these wood-walks, thick-coming fancies rose to her mind, and gradually assumed the forms in which they came forth to the world. In that simple church she brought them all into subjection to the piety which ruled her in life and supported her in death.' To this description of the surroundings of the home, given by the author of the _Memoir_, whose own home it was through childhood and boyhood, we may add a few sentences respecting its interior as it appeared to his sister, Mrs. Lefroy. She speaks of her grandfather's study looking cheerfully into the sunny garden, 'his own exclusive property, safe from the bustle of all household cares,' and adds: 'The dining-or common sitting-room looked to the front and was lighted by two casement windows. On the same side the front door opened into a smaller parlour, and visitors, who were few and rare, were not a bit the less welcome to my grandmother because they found her sitting there busily engaged with her needle,[16] making and mending. In later times--but not probably until my two aunts had completed their short course at Mrs. Latournelle's at Reading Abbey, and were living at home--a sitting-room was made upstairs: "the dressing-room," as they were pleased to call it, perhaps because it opened into a smaller chamber in which my two aunts slept. I remember the common-looking carpet with its chocolate ground, and painted press with shelves above for books, and Jane's piano, and an oval looking-glass that hung between the windows; but the charm of the room with its scanty furniture and cheaply painted walls must have been, for those old enough to understand it, the flow of native wit, with all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family.' Such was the room in which the first versions of _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ were composed. We have anticipated somewhat in describing the Rectory as it appeared after George Austen's reforms, and when his children were growing up in it. As it appeared to him and his wife on their arrival, it must have left much to be desired. The young couple who now entered upon a home which was to be theirs for thirty-seven years had many excellent and attractive qualities. George Austen's handsome, placid, dignified features were an index to his mind. Serene in temper, devoted to his religion and his family, a good father and a good scholar, he deserved the love and respect which every evidence that we have shows him to have gained from his family and his neighbours. His wife's was a somewhat more positive nature: shrewd and acute, high-minded and determined, with a strong sense of humour, and with an energy capable of triumphing over years of indifferent health, she was ardently attached to her children, and perhaps somewhat proud of her ancestors. We are told that she was very particular about the shape of people's noses, having a very aristocratic one herself; but we ought perhaps to add that she admitted she had never been a beauty, at all events in comparison with her own elder sister. If one may divide qualities which often overlap, one would be inclined to surmise that Jane Austen inherited from her father her serenity of mind, the refinement of her intellect, and her delicate appreciation of style, while her mother supplied the acute observation of character, and the wit and humour, for which she was equally distinguished. Steventon was not the only preferment in the neighbourhood that George Austen was to hold. His kind uncle Francis, who had helped him in his schooling, was anxious to do something more for him. He would have liked, it is said, to have put him into the comfortable living of West Wickham in Kent, which was in the gift of his wife; but he considered that another nephew, the son of a brother older than George's father, had a prior claim. Francis, however, did the best thing he could by buying the next presentations of two parishes near Steventon--namely, Ashe and Deane--that his nephew might have whichever fell vacant first. The chances of an early vacancy at Ashe, where Dr. Russell--the grandfather of Mary Russell Mitford--had been established since 1729, must have seemed the greater; but fate decided otherwise. Dr. Russell lived till 1783, and it was Deane that first fell vacant, in 1773. The writer of the _Memoir_, who was under the impression that George Austen became Rector of both Steventon and Deane in 1764, states that the Austens began their married life in the parsonage at Deane, and did not move to Steventon till 1771, seven years later. This cannot be quite correct, because we have letters of George Austen dated from Steventon in 1770; nor is it quite easy to understand why Mr. Austen should have lived in some one else's Rectory in preference to his own, unless we conceive that the Rector of Deane was non-resident, and that George Austen did duty at Deane and rented the parsonage while his own was under repair. It seems impossible now to unravel this skein. The story of the move to Steventon, in 1771, is connected with a statement that the road was then a mere cart-track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassable for a light carriage, and that Mrs. Austen (who was not then in good health) performed the short journey on a feather-bed, placed upon some soft articles of furniture in the waggon which held their household goods. This story is too circumstantial to be without foundation, nor is there any reason to doubt the badness of a country lane; but the particular family-flitting referred to must be left uncertain. George Austen was thirty-three years old when he settled down at his Hampshire living. His wife was some eight years younger. Their means were not large, but George was able to supplement his income both by farming and by taking pupils. Life too was simpler in those days; and we read of Mrs. Austen being without a new gown for two years, and spending much of the time in a red riding-habit, which even then had not finished its usefulness, for it was cut up some years later into a suit for one of her boys. Her time, indeed, was soon busily employed; her eldest boy, James, was born on February 13, 1765; the second, George, on August 26, 1766; and the third, Edward, on October 7, 1767. The Austens followed what was a common custom in those days--namely, that of putting out their children to nurse. An honest woman in Deane had charge of them all in turn, and we are told that one or both of their parents visited them every day. The only excitements to vary the tranquil life at Steventon were occasional visits to or from their near relations. Cassandra's brother was now living on his property called Scarlets, at Hare Hatch, in the parish of Wargrave, and was thus within a day's journey from Steventon. He had married a Miss Cholmeley, of Easton in Lincolnshire, but they had no children. Cassandra's only sister, Jane (the beauty of the family), was married at the end of 1768 to Dr. Cooper, Rector of Whaddon, near Bath. Edward Cooper was the son of Gislingham Cooper, a banker in the Strand, by Ann Whitelock, heiress of Phyllis Court and Henley Manor. Dr. and Mrs. Cooper divided their time between his house at Southcote, near Reading, and Bath--from which latter place no doubt he could keep an eye on his neighbouring parish. The Coopers had two children, Edward and Jane. They and the Austens were on very intimate terms, and it is probable that Jane Austen's early knowledge of Bath was to a great extent owing to the visits paid to them in that place. Another family with whom the Austens were on cousinly terms were the Cookes. Samuel Cooke, Rector of Little Bookham in Surrey and godfather to Jane, had married a daughter of the Master of Balliol (Theophilus Leigh), and their three children, Theophilus, Mary, and George, belonged, like the Coopers, to an inner circle of relations on both sides (Leigh Perrots, Coopers, Cookes, Walters, and Hancocks), who made up--in addition to the outer-circle of country neighbours--the world in which the Austens moved. A few letters addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Walter (extracts from which we shall venture to quote) will give the best idea of the happy, peaceful life passed at Steventon Rectory during these early years. On July 8, 1770, George writes from Steventon of his wife's journey to London to be present at the birth of her sister's child, and adds:-- [17] . . . My James . . . and his brother are both well, and what will surprise you, bear their mother's absence with great philosophy, as I doubt not they would mine, and turn all their little affections towards those who were about them and good to them; this may not be a pleasing reflection to a fond parent, but is certainly wisely designed by Providence for the happiness of the child. A month or so later Cassandra is back again, and writing:-- I was not so happy as to see my nephew Weaver[18]--suppose he was hurried in time, as I think everyone is in town; 'tis a sad place, I would not live in it on any account, one has not time to do one's duty either to God or man. . . . What luck we shall have with those sort of cows I can't say. My little Alderney one turns out tolerably well, and makes more butter than we use, and I have just bought another of the same sort, but as her calf is but just gone, cannot say what she will be good for yet. _December 9, 1770._--My poor little George is come to see me to-day, he seems pretty well, tho' he had a fit lately; it was near a twelve-month since he had one before, so was in hopes they had left him, but must not flatter myself so now. In June 1771, the Austens' fourth child, Henry, was born, and Mrs. Austen writes on November 8, 1772:-- My little boy is come home from nurse, and a fine, stout little fellow he is, and can run anywhere, so now I have all four at home, and some time in January I expect a fifth, so you see it will not be in my power to take any journeys for one while. . . . I believe my sister Hancock will be so good as to come and nurse me again. Unfortunately, poor little George never recovered sufficiently to take his place in the family, and we hear no more of him, though he lived on as late as 1827. The fifth child, Cassandra, was born in January 1773, and on June 6, 1773, Mrs. Austen writes:-- We will not give up the hopes of seeing you both (and as many of your young people as you can conveniently bring) at Steventon before the summer is over. Mr. Austen wants to show his brother his lands and his cattle and many other matters; and I want to show you my Henry and my Cassy, who are both reckoned fine children. Jemmy and Neddy are very happy in a new playfellow, Lord Lymington, whom Mr. Austen has lately taken the charge of; he is between five and six years old, very backward of his age, but good-tempered and orderly. He is the eldest son of Lord Portsmouth, who lives about ten miles from hence. . . . I have got a nice dairy fitted up, and am now worth a bull and six cows, and you would laugh to see them; for they are not much bigger than Jack-asses--and here I have got duckies and ducks and chickens for Phyllis's amusement. In short you must come, and, like Hezekiah, I will show you all my riches. _December 12, 1773._--I thank God we are all quite well and my little girl is almost ready to run away. Our new pupil, Master Vanderstegen, has been with us about a month, he is near fourteen years old, and is very good tempered and well disposed. Lord Lymington has left us, his mamma began to be alarmed at the hesitation in his speech, which certainly grew worse, and is going to take him to London in hopes a Mr. Angier (who undertakes to cure that disorder) may be of service to him. A sixth child, Francis William, was born in April 1774. _August 20, 1775._--We are all, I thank God, in good health, and I am more nimble and active than I was last time, expect to be confined some time in November. My last boy is very stout, and has run alone these two months, and is not yet sixteen months old. My little girl talks all day long, and in my opinion is a very entertaining companion. Henry has been in breeches some months, and thinks himself near as good a man as his brother Neddy. Indeed no one would judge by their looks that there was above three years and a half difference in their ages, one is so little and the other so great. Master Van. is got very well again, and has been with us again these three months; he is gone home this morning for a few holidays. The new infant, however, did not appear quite so soon as was expected, and the last letter of the series is written by George Austen on December 17, 1775. Steventon: December 17, 1775. DEAR SISTER,--You have doubtless been for some time in expectation of hearing from Hampshire, and perhaps wondered a little we were in our old age grown such bad reckoners, but so it was, for Cassy certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago; however, last night the time came, and without a great deal of warning, everything was soon happily over. We have now another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy, and a future companion. She is to be Jenny, and seems to me as if she would be as like Harry as Cassy is to Neddy. Your sister, thank God, is pure well after it. George Austen's prediction was fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Jane and Henry on the other. Jane's godparents were Mrs. Musgrave (a connexion of her mother's), Mrs. Francis Austen (another Jane), wife of George's kind uncle, and Samuel Cooke, Rector of Little Bookham. We may suppose that, like the rest of her family, she spent a considerable part of the first eighteen months of her existence at the good woman's at Deane. We have, indeed, but little information about the household at Steventon for the next few years. Another child--the last--Charles, was born in June 1779. There must, as the children grew older, have been a bright and lively family party to fill the Rectory, all the more so because the boys were educated at home instead of being sent to any school. One of George Austen's sons has described him as being 'not only a profound scholar, but possessed of a most exquisite taste in every species of literature'; and, even if we allow for some filial exaggeration, there can be no doubt that it was a home where good teaching--in every sense of the word--good taste, and a general love of reading prevailed. To balance this characteristic the Austen nature possessed yet another--spread over many members of the family--namely, an enthusiastic love of sport. The boys hunted from an early age, in a scrambling sort of way, upon any pony or donkey that they could procure, or, in default of such luxuries, on foot; perhaps beginning the day with an early breakfast in the kitchen. A wonderful story is told, on good authority, of a piece of amateur horse-dealing accomplished by the youngest son but one, Francis, at the mature age of seven: how he bought on his own account (it must be supposed with his father's permission) a pony for £1 11_s._ 6_d._; hunted it, jumping everything that the pony could get its nose over; and at the end of two years sold it again for £2 12_s._ 6_d._ It was a bright chestnut, and he called it 'Squirrel'; though his elder brothers, to plague him, called it 'Scug.' This was the boy for whose benefit his mother converted into a jacket and trousers the scarlet riding-habit which played so important a part in her early married life. If he mounted 'Squirrel' in this costume, the future Admiral of the Fleet was hunting 'in pink' with a vengeance, and must have contributed not a little to the gaiety of the field. It is evident that part of the good training at Steventon consisted in making the boys, while quite young, manly, active, and self-reliant. When the time came for their leaving home they would not be found unprepared. Mr. Austen found it a pleasant task to educate his own sons with his other pupils, and thereby to dispense with the cost of public schools. We get a glimpse of him as a teacher in a letter of his son Henry, written many years later to Warren Hastings. Henry, by the way, made use of a style that one is thankful Jane did not adopt. Suffer me to say that among the earliest lessons of my infancy I was taught by precept and example to love and venerate your name. I cannot remember the time when I did not associate with your character the idea of everything great, amiable, and good. Your benevolence was a theme on which my young attention hung with truer worship than courtiers ever pay the throne. Your works of taste, both of the pencil and the pen, were continually offered to my notice as objects of imitation and spurs to exertion. I shall never forget the delight which I experienced when, on producing a translation of a well-known Ode of Horace to my father's criticism, he favoured me with a perusal of your manuscript, and as a high mark of commendation said that he was sure Mr. Hastings would have been pleased with the perusal of my humble essay. There is also a pleasant picture of home life at Steventon drawn for us in the _History of the Leigh Family_, in which the writer speaks of Cassandra, 'wife of the truly respectable Mr. Austen,' and adds: 'With his sons (all promising to make figures in life), Mr. Austen educates a few youths of chosen friends and acquaintances. When among this liberal society, the simplicity, hospitality, and taste which commonly prevail in affluent families among the delightful valleys of Switzerland ever recur to my memory.' But though it might be an easy thing to educate his sons at home, it was another matter to teach his daughters, and, according to a family tradition, Cassandra and Jane were dispatched at a very early age to spend a year at Oxford with Mrs. Cawley, a sister of Dr. Cooper--a fact which makes it likely that their cousin, Jane Cooper, was also of the party. Mrs. Cawley was the widow of a Principal of Brasenose College, and is said to have been a stiff-mannered person. She moved presently to Southampton, and there also had the three girls under her charge. At the latter place Cassandra and Jane Austen were attacked by a putrid fever. Mrs. Cawley would not write word of this to Steventon, but Jane Cooper thought it right to do so, upon which Mrs. Austen and Mrs. Cooper set off at once for Southampton and took their daughters away. Jane Austen was very ill and nearly died. Worse befell poor Mrs. Cooper, who took the infection and died at Bath whither she had returned. As Mrs. Cooper died in October 1783, this fixes the date roughly when the sisters went to Oxford and Southampton. Jane would have been full young to profit from the instruction of masters at Oxford (she can hardly have been seven years old when she went there), and it must have been more for the sake of her being with Cassandra than for any other reason that she was sent. On the same principle, she went to school at Reading soon after the Southampton experience. 'Not,' we are told, 'because she was thought old enough to profit much by the instruction there imparted, but because she would have been miserable without her sister'; her mother, in fact, observing that 'if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.' The school chosen was a famous one in its day--namely, the Abbey School in the Forbury at Reading, kept by a Mrs. Latournelle, an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman. Miss Butt, afterwards Mrs. Sherwood, who went to the same school in 1790, says in her Autobiography[19] that Mrs. Latournelle never could speak a word of French; indeed, she describes her as 'a person of the old school, a stout woman, hardly under seventy, but very active, although she had a cork leg. . . . She was only fit for giving out clothes for the wash, and mending them, making tea, ordering dinner, and in fact doing the work of a housekeeper.' But in Mrs. Sherwood's time she had a capable assistant in Madame St. Quentin, an Englishwoman, married to the son of a nobleman in Alsace, who in troubled times had been glad to accept the position of French teacher at Reading Grammar School under Dr. Valpy. Mrs. Sherwood says that the St. Quentins so entirely raised the credit of the seminary that when she went there it contained above sixty pupils. The history of the school did not end with Reading, for the St. Quentins afterwards removed to 22 Hans Place, where they had under their charge Mary Russell Mitford. Still later, after the fall of Napoleon, the St. Quentins moved to Paris, together with Miss Rowden, who had long been the mainstay of the school. It was while the school was here that it received Fanny Kemble among its pupils.[20] Mrs. Sherwood tells us that the school-house at Reading, 'or rather the abbey itself, was exceedingly interesting, . . . the ancient building . . . consisted of a gateway with rooms above, and on each side of it a vast staircase, of which the balustrades had originally been gilt. . . . The best part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful, old-fashioned garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees in hot summer evenings.' Discipline was not severe, for the same lady informs us: 'The liberty which the first class had was so great that if we attended our tutor in his study for an hour or two every morning . . . no human being ever took the trouble to inquire where else we spent the rest of the day between our meals. Thus, whether we gossiped in one turret or another, whether we lounged about the garden, or out of the window above the gateway, no one so much as said "Where have you been, mademoiselle?"' After reading this we are no longer surprised to be told that Cassandra and Jane, together with their cousin, Jane Cooper, were allowed to accept an invitation to dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper, and some of their young friends. School life does not appear to have left any very deep impression on Jane Austen.[21] Probably she went at too youthful an age, and her stay was too short. At any rate, none of the heroines of her novels, except Anne Elliot,[22] are sent to school, though it is likely enough, as several writers have pointed out, that her Reading experiences suggested Mrs. Goddard's school in _Emma_. Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school--not of a seminary, or an establishment, or anything which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems--and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity, but a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies. Mrs. Goddard's school was in high repute. . . . She had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands. It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couples now walked after her to church. She was a plain, motherly kind of woman. Jane herself finished her schooling at the early age of nine. The rest of her education was completed at home. Probably her father taught her in his leisure hours, and James, when he was at home, gave her many useful hints. Father, mother, and eldest brother were all fully capable of helping her, and perhaps even Cassandra did her share. But for the most part her culture must have been self-culture, such as she herself imagined in the case of Elizabeth Bennet. Later on, the French of Reading Abbey school was corrected and fortified by the lessons of her cousin Eliza. On the whole, she grew up with a good stock of such accomplishments as might be expected of a girl bred in one of the more intellectual of the clerical houses of that day. She read French easily, and knew a little of Italian; and she was well read in the English literature of the eighteenth century. As a child, she had strong political opinions, especially on the affairs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender of Charles I and his grandmother, Mary, and did not disdain to make annotations in this sense (which still exist) on the margin of her Goldsmith's _History_. As she grew up, the party politics of the day seem to have occupied very little of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family. Politics in their larger aspect--revolution and war--were of course very real at that date to every patriotic citizen, and came home with especial force to the Austens, whose cousin's husband perished by the guillotine,[23] and whose brothers were constantly fighting on the sea. In her last published sentence at the end of _Persuasion_ the author tells us how her Anne Elliot 'gloried' in being the wife of a sailor; and no doubt she had a similar feeling with regard to her two naval brothers. But there was then no daily authentic intelligence of events as they occurred. Newspapers were a luxury of the rich in those days, and it need excite no surprise to find that the events are very seldom mentioned in Jane's surviving letters.[24] We can be in no doubt as to her fervent, and rather exclusive, love for her own country. Writing to an old friend, within a few months of her own death, she says: 'I hope your letters from abroad are satisfactory. They would not be satisfactory to _me_, I confess, unless they breathed a strong spirit of regret for not being in England.' Of her favourite authors and favourite pursuits, we will speak later. FOOTNOTES: [13] Charles Austen failed to do so in January 1799. See p. 124. [14] The description of Steventon is taken, almost entirely, from the _Memoir_, pp. 18-22. [15] This was written nearly half a century ago, before the revival of mixed gardens. [16] Her daughters seem to have looked upon this publicity of useful needlework with some suspicion. See letter from Lyme, September 14, 1804 (p. 179). [17] These letters, hitherto unpublished, are inserted by the kind permission of Mr. J. G. Nicholson of Castlefield House, Sturton by Scawby, Lincolnshire. [18] Son of Mr. and Mrs. Walter. [19] _Life and Times of Mrs. Sherwood_, edited by F. J. Harvey Darton, p. 124. [20] _Records of a Girlhood_, vol. i. p. 99. By Frances Ann Kemble. London, 1878. [21] There are, we think, but two references to school in her surviving correspondence--namely, in a letter to Cassandra, dated September 1, 1796, where she remarks of her sister's letter: 'I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school'; and in another, dated May 20, 1813, where she describes a room at a school as being 'totally unschool-like.' [22] In the same novel, _Persuasion_, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove have brought back 'the usual stock of accomplishments' from a school at Exeter. [23] See next chapter. [24] It was no uncommon occurrence for the richer folk to hand on their newspaper to their neighbours. Thus we find the Austens, while at Steventon, apparently getting theirs from Mr. Holder at Ashe (p. 148); and, later, getting Mr. Pinckard's paper at Lyme (p. 180). Much in the same way Sir John Middleton in _Sense and Sensibility_ would not be denied the satisfaction of sending the Dashwoods his newspaper every day. CHAPTER III WARREN HASTINGS AND THE HANCOCKS 1752-1794 The title of this chapter may seem at first sight to remove it far from the life of Jane Austen; but Mrs. Hancock (who had been Philadelphia Austen) was her aunt, and Eliza Hancock not only a cousin but also a close friend; and both were always welcome visitors at Steventon. The varying fortunes of these ladies would therefore be an object of constant thought and discussion at the Rectory, and Jane had an early opportunity of becoming interested in the affairs both of India and of France. How the acquaintance of the family with Warren Hastings began, we cannot exactly say; but it certainly lasted long, and resulted on their side in an admiration for his genius and his kindness, and a readiness to defend him when he was attacked. In one of Jane's early unpublished sketches occurs the following passage:-- The eldest daughter had been obliged to accept the offer of one of her cousins to equip her for the East Indies, and tho' infinitely against her inclinations, had been necessitated to embrace the only possibility that was offered to her of a maintenance; yet it was one so opposite to all her ideas of propriety, so contrary to her wishes, so repugnant to her feelings, that she would almost have preferred servitude to it, had choice been allowed her. Her personal attractions had gained her a husband as soon as she had arrived at Bengal, and she had now been married nearly a twelvemonth--splendidly, yet unhappily married. United to a man of double her own age, whose disposition was not amiable, and whose manners were unpleasing, though his character was respectable. When Jane wrote this she may have been thinking of her father's sister, Philadelphia, whose fate is described not very incorrectly, though with a certain amount of exaggeration, in this passage. That Philadelphia Austen went to seek her fortune in India is certain, and that she did so reluctantly is extremely likely. She had at an early age been left an orphan without means or prospects, and the friends who brought her up may have settled the matter for her. Who those friends were, we do not know; but from the intimate terms on which she continued through life--not only with her brother, George Austen, but also, in a less degree, with her half-brother, William Walter--it is probable that she had spent much of her youth with her mother's family. Her brother George, however, as a young man, was poor, and had no home to offer her; but the banishment which threatened entirely to separate the brother and sister proved in the end to have a contrary effect. Philadelphia did in time come back to England, as a wife and as the mother of one daughter, and her husband's subsequent return to India caused her to depend much for companionship upon her English relations. At Steventon little Betsy would find playfellows, somewhat younger than herself, in the elder Austen children, while her mother was discussing the last news from India with the heads of the family. Our first definite information about Philadelphia is, that in November 1751 she petitioned the Court of East India Directors for leave to go to friends at Fort St. David by the _Bombay Castle_; but who these friends were, or what induced her to take so adventurous a journey in search of them, we cannot say. Her sureties were also sureties for a certain Mary Elliott, so they may have been friends intending to travel together. But, according to Sydney Grier's conjecture, Mary Elliott did not, after all, sail in the _Bombay Castle_, but remained behind to marry a certain Captain Buchanan, sailing with him to India the following year. Captain Buchanan lost his life in the Black Hole, and his widow (whether she was Mary Elliott or not) married Warren Hastings. By her second husband she had two children, a son, George, born about 1758, and a daughter born about 1759 who lived only three weeks. The short history of the boy we have already told. Mrs. Hastings died on July 11, 1759, at Cossinbazar.[25] Philadelphia reached Madras on August 4, 1752. It is probable that in those days no girl was long in India without receiving offers of marriage. In fact, Dr. Hancock writing twenty years later, to deprecate his daughter's coming out to India, says to Philadelphia 'You know very well that no girl, tho' but fourteen years old, can arrive in India without attracting the notice of every coxcomb in the place; you yourself know how impossible it is for a young girl to avoid being attached to a young handsome man whose address is agreeable to her.' If there _was_ any handsome young man in Philadelphia's case, it was probably not Mr. Hancock, who must have been forty or more when he married her at Cuddalore on February 22, 1753. The name of Tysoe Saul Hancock appears in the list of European inhabitants at Fort St. David for 1753, as surgeon, at £36 per annum; and at Fort St. David he and Philadelphia remained for three years after their marriage. Where the Hancocks were during the troublous times which began in 1757 is not known; but by the beginning of 1762 they were certainly in Calcutta, for their daughter Elizabeth--better known as Betsy--was born there in December 1761. Warren Hastings, at this time resident at Murshidabad, was godfather to Elizabeth, who received the name he had intended to give to his own infant daughter. The origin of the close intimacy that existed between the Hancocks and Warren Hastings is uncertain; but if Mary Elliott really became the wife of the latter, the friendship of the two women may perhaps explain the great obligation under which Hastings describes himself as being to Philadelphia. The news of the death of his little son was the first thing Hastings heard on landing in England in 1765, and we are told it left a shadow on his face for years. He seems always to have been especially fond of children, and his intimate friends knew they could give no greater pleasure than by informing him of the welfare of his favourites, or by sending messages to them. Thus Marriott, writing to Hastings from India on August 15, 1765, sends his kisses and salaam to 'little ("_great_" I believe I should say) Betsy Hancock,' and a 'good hearty shake by the hand to George; I suppose if I were to go to kiss him he would give me a box on the ears.--Write me particularly how these little ones go.' It seems likely that the Hancocks sailed with Warren Hastings for England in the _Medway_ in 1764-5; but, whenever they went, we learn from Hancock's letters that the journey home cost them the large sum of £1500. He (Hancock) no doubt thought that he had amassed a sufficient fortune--perhaps from trading, or from private practice, for it can hardly have been from his official income--in India to enable him to end his days comfortably at home. But either his Indian investments turned out badly, or he discovered that living in good style in England cost much more than he had anticipated; and after three years he found himself under the disagreeable necessity of a second residence in Bengal, in order to secure a fresh provision for his wife and daughter. So low, indeed, were his finances at the time, that he was forced to borrow money from Hastings to pay for his passage out. He reached Calcutta in 1769, but did not prosper on this second visit. His health was bad, his trading ventures turned out amiss, and there were perpetual difficulties about remitting money home to Philadelphia. Hastings evidently foresaw how matters would end, and with his wonted generosity gave a sum amounting at first to £5000, and increased later to £10,000, in trust for Hancock and his wife during their lives, and, on the death of the survivor, to Betsy. Mr. Hancock himself died in November 1775, 'universally beloved and deeply regretted' (in the words of a young man whom he had befriended), 'the patron of the widow and the fatherless.'[26] He seems indeed to have been a man of affectionate and anxious disposition, strongly attached to his wife and daughter; but the last part of his life was passed away from them amid difficulties and disappointments, and his spirits were hardly high enough to enable him to bear up against unequal fortune. He alludes in his letters, with expressions of regard, to his brother-in-law, George Austen; but characteristically deplores his growing family, thinking that he will not be able to put them out in the world--a difficulty which did not eventually prove to be insuperable. When the news of his death reached England--which would be in about six months' time--George Austen and his wife were, fortunately, present to comfort Philadelphia under the sad tidings. She and Betsy had now been living in England for ten years, and had seen, no doubt, much of the Steventon Austens. Warren Hastings's loyal attachment to the widow and daughter of his friend remained unchanged, and they lived on terms of intimacy with his brother-in-law Woodman and his family. As long as Hancock lived he wrote constantly to wife and child, and gave advice--occasionally, perhaps, of a rather embarrassing kind--about the education of the latter. He discouraged, however, an idea of his wife's that she should bring Betsy out to India at the age of twelve. At last Mrs. Hancock, who, though a really good woman, was over-indulgent to her daughter, was able to fulfil the chief desire of her own heart, and to take her abroad to finish her studies, and later to seek an entry into the great world in Paris. Her husband's affairs had been left in much confusion, but Hastings's generous gift of £10,000 put them above want. Betsy, or rather 'Eliza' ('for what young woman of common gentility,' as we read in _Northanger Abbey_, 'will reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?'), was just grown up when this great move was made. In years to come, her connexion with her Steventon cousins was destined to be a close one; at the present time she was a very pretty, lively girl, fond of amusements, and perhaps estimating her own importance a little too highly. But she had been carefully educated, and was capable of disinterested attachments. She seems to have had a special love for her uncle, George Austen, and one of her earliest letters from Paris, written May 16, 1780, announces that she is sending to him her picture in miniature, adding 'It is reckoned like what I am at present. The dress is quite the present fashion of what I usually wear.' This miniature is still in existence, and represents a charming, fresh young girl, in a low white dress edged with light blue ribbon, the hair turned up and powdered, with a ribbon of the same colour passed through it. Our knowledge of her character at this time is principally derived from a series of letters written by her to her cousin, Phila Walter--letters singularly frank and gossipy, and of especial interest to us from the sidelights they throw on the family circle at Steventon. There are also interesting letters from Phila to her own family. Such a girl as Eliza was not likely to pass unnoticed in any society; and in August 1781 Mr. Woodman writes to tell Warren Hastings that she is on the point of marriage with a French officer, and that 'Mr. Austen is much concerned at the connexion, which he says is giving up all their friends, their country, and he fears their religion.'[27] The intended husband was Jean Capotte, Comte de Feuillide,[28] aged thirty, an officer in the Queen's Regiment of Dragoons, and owner of an estate called Le Marais, near Gaboret, in Guyenne. The marriage took place in the same year, and in the following March, Eliza, now Comtesse de Feuillide, writes Phila a long letter praising the Comte and his devotion to herself. The man to whom I have given my hand is everyways amiable both in mind and person. It is too little to say he loves me, since he literally adores me; entirely devoted to me, and making my inclinations the guide of all his actions, the whole study of his life seems to be to contribute to the happiness of mine. My situation is everyways agreeable, certain of never being separated from my dear Mama, whose presence enhances every other blessing I enjoy, equally sure of my husband's affection, mistress of an easy fortune with the prospect of a very ample one, add to these the advantages of rank and title, and a numerous and brilliant acquaintance amongst whom I can flatter myself I have some sincere friends, and you will unite with me in saying I have reason to be thankful to Providence for the lot fallen to my share; the only thing which can make me uneasy is the distance I am from my relations and country, but this is what I trust I shall not always have to complain of, as the Comte has the greatest desire to see England, and even to make it his residence a part of the year. We shall certainly make you a visit as soon as possible after the peace takes place. In the same letter she mentions how gay the season has been, on account of the birth of the Dauphin, and of the fêtes which accompanied that event. Neither she nor her 'numerous and brilliant acquaintance' had any prevision of the terrible days that awaited all their order, nor any knowledge of the existence of the irresistible forces which were soon to overwhelm them, and to put a tragical end to every hope cherished by the bride, except that of rejoining her English friends. For the present, she led a life of pleasure and gaiety; but that it did not make her forgetful of Steventon is shown by another letter to Phila, dated May 7, 1784:-- I experienced much pleasure from the account you gave me of my Uncle Geo: Austen's family; each of my cousins seems to be everything their parents could wish them; such intelligence would have given me the completest satisfaction had it not been accompanied by the melancholy news of the death of the valuable Mrs. Cooper. I sincerely lament her loss and sympathize with the grief it must have occasioned. Both Mama and myself were very apprehensive of the influence of this event on my aunt's health, but fortunately the last accounts from Steventon assure us that the whole family continue well. On January 19, 1786, she again writes on the subject of a visit to England, about which she hesitates, partly because of the state of her health, and partly because she was expecting a long visit from her cousin, James Austen (eldest son of George Austen)--a young man who, having completed his undergraduate residence at Oxford, was spending some months in France. To England, however, she came, hoping to see much of the Austen family. 'I mean,' she writes, 'to spend a very few days in London, and, if my health allows me, immediately to pay a visit to Steventon, because my uncle informs us that Midsummer and Christmas are the only seasons when his mansion is sufficiently at liberty to admit of his receiving his friends.' The rectory was certainly too small a 'mansion' to contain the Comtesse and her mother, in addition to its own large family party and various pupils; so it is to be hoped that Eliza carried out her project in June, before she was otherwise engaged. She settled for a time in London, at 3 Orchard Street, and there it must be supposed her one child--a little boy--was born in the autumn, to be named Hastings after her own godfather. The Comte, who was himself detained by business in France, had, for some unexplained reason, desired that their child might be born in England. Whether she went again to Steventon at Christmas is uncertain, for her next letter is dated April 9, 1787. Eliza was then in town and expecting a visit from her cousin, Henry Austen--by this time a youth of sixteen about to go into residence at Oxford. She had been indulging in such gaieties as London had to offer her. As to me, I have been for some time past the greatest rake imaginable, and really wonder how such a meagre creature as I am can support so much fatigue, of which the history of one day will give you some idea, for I only stood from two to four in the drawing-room and of course loaded with a great hoop of no inconsiderable weight, went to the Duchess of Cumberland's in the evening and from thence to Almack's, where I staid till five in the morning: all this I did not many days ago, and am yet alive to tell you of it. I believe tho', I should not be able to support London hours, and all the racketing of a London life for a year together. You are very good in your enquiries after my little boy who is in perfect health, but has got no teeth yet, which somewhat mortifies his two Mamas. Eliza's domestic cares and her gaieties must still have left her some time to think with anxiety and apprehension of the impeachment of her godfather and benefactor, Hastings. We have a glimpse of this in a letter of Phila Walter, who was staying with her aunt and cousin in Orchard Street, in April 1788. They went to the trial one day 'and sat from ten till four, completely tired; but I had the satisfaction of hearing all the celebrated orators--Sheridan, Burke, and Fox. The first was so low we could not hear him, the second so hot and hasty we could not understand, the third was highly superior to either, as we could distinguish every word, but not to our satisfaction, as he is so much against Mr. Hastings whom we all wish so well.' In August 1788, Eliza writes:-- What has contributed to hurry me and take up my time is my having been obliged to pay some visits out of town. We spent a little time at Beaumont Lodge,[29] and I am but just returned from an excursion into Berkshire, during which we made some little stay at Oxford. My cousin[30] met us there, and as well as his brother was so good as to take the trouble of shewing us the lions. We visited several of the Colleges, the Museum, etc., and were very elegantly entertained by our gallant relations at St. John's, where I was mightily taken with the garden and longed to be a _Fellow_ that I might walk in it every day; besides I was delighted with the black gown and thought the square cap mighty becoming. I do not think you would know Henry with his hair powdered in a very _tonish_ style, besides he is at present taller than his father. You mention the troubles in France, but you will easily imagine from what I have said concerning my approaching journey, that things are in a quieter state than they were some months ago. Had they continued as they were it is most probable M. de F. would have been called out, and it would have been a very unpleasant kind of duty because he must have borne arms against his own countrymen. We hear but little of Eliza during the next two or three years, which she seems to have spent partly in France, partly in England. She must have been much engrossed by the stirring events in Paris, the result of which was eventually to prove fatal to her husband. In January 1791 she is at Margate for the benefit of her boy, and, though the place is very empty, occupies herself with reading, music, drawing, &c. She adds:-- M. de F. had given me hopes of his return to England this winter, but the turn which the affairs of France have taken will not allow him to quit the Continent at this juncture. I know not whether I have already mentioned it to you, but my _spouse_, who is a strong _Aristocrate_ or Royalist in his heart, has joined this latter party who have taken refuge in Piedmont, and is now at Turin where the French Princes of the Blood are assembled and watching some favourable opportunity to reinstate themselves in the country they have quitted. I am no politician, but think they will not easily accomplish their purpose; time alone can decide this matter, and in the interim you will easily imagine I cannot be wholly unconcerned about events which must inevitably in some degree influence my future destiny. Eliza had another terrible anxiety in June 1791, in the failure of her mother's health. In September she is hoping for a visit from her husband, when, if her mother's health allows, they will all go to Bath,-- a journey from which I promise myself much pleasure, as I have a notion it is a place quite after my own heart; however, the accomplishment of this plan is very uncertain, as from the present appearance of things, France will probably be engaged in a war which will not admit of an officer's (whose services will certainly be required) quitting his country at such a period. . . . My mother has this very morning received a letter from Steventon, where they all enjoy perfect health. The youngest boy, Charles, is gone to the Naval Academy at Portsmouth. As to the young ladies, I hear they are perfect Beauties, and of course gain hearts by dozens. In November she says:-- Edward A. I believe will . . . in another month or two take unto himself a spouse. He shewed me the lady's picture, which is that of a very pretty woman; as to Cassandra, it is very probable, as you observe, that some son of Neptune may have obtained her approbation as she probably experienced much homage from these gallant gentlemen during her acquatic excursions. I hear her sister and herself are two of the prettiest girls in England. Mrs. Hancock died in the winter of 1791-2, and our next letter from Eliza is not till June 7, 1792. In the interval she had been--together with M. de Feuillide, who had perhaps come over to attend the death-bed of Philadelphia--to Bath, from which place she had derived little amusement owing to the state of her spirits. Returning to London, M. de Feuillide had hoped to stay there some time;-- but he soon received accounts from France which informed him that, having already exceeded his leave of absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the nation. Such advices were not to be neglected, and M. de F. was obliged to depart for Paris, but not, however, without giving me hopes of his return in some months, that is to say, when the state of affairs would let him, for at present it is a very difficult business, for a military man especially, to obtain leave to absent himself. On September 26 she writes:-- I can readily believe that the share of sensibility I know you to be possessed of would not suffer you to learn the tragical events of which France has of late been the theatre, without being much affected. My private letters confirm the intelligence afforded by the public prints, and assure me that nothing we there read is exaggerated. M. de F. is at present in Paris. He had determined on coming to England, but finds it impossible to get away. The crisis of her husband's fate was not far distant. How the tragedy was led up to by the events of 1793, we do not know; but in February 1794 he was arrested on the charge of suborning witnesses in favour of the Marquise de Marboeuf. The Marquise had been accused of conspiring against the Republic in 1793;[31] one of the chief counts against her being that she had laid down certain arable land on her estate at Champs, near Meaux, in lucerne, sainfoin, and clover, with the object of producing a famine. The Marquise, by way of defence, printed a memorial of her case, stating, among other things, that she had not done what she was accused of doing, and further, that if she had, she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own property. But it was evident that things were likely to go hard with the Marquise at her trial. The Comte de Feuillide then came upon the scene, and attempted to bribe Morel, one of the Secretaries of the Committee of Safety, to suppress incriminating documents, and even to bear witness in her favour. Morel drew the Count on, and then betrayed him. The Marquise, her agent and the Count were all condemned to death, and the Count suffered the penalty on February 22, 1794.[32] We cannot tell where Eliza was through this trying time. The tradition in the family is that she escaped through dangers and difficulties to England and found a refuge at Steventon; but we have no positive information of her having returned to France at all. It is quite possible that she was at Steventon, and if so, the horror-struck party must have felt as though they were brought very near to the guillotine. It was an event to make a lasting impression on a quick-witted and emotional girl of eighteen, and Eliza remained so closely linked with the family that the tragedy probably haunted Jane's memory for a long time to come. FOOTNOTES: [25] _The Letters of Warren Hastings to his Wife._ Introduced and annotated by Sydney C. Grier, p. 456 _et seq._ For articles by the same author on the Hancock family, see 'A Friend of Warren Hastings' in _Blackwood's Magazine_, April 1904, and 'A God-daughter of Warren Hastings' in _Temple Bar_, May 1905. [26] _Genuine Memoirs of Asiaticus_, by Philip Dormer Stanhope, London, 1784. [27] This did not prove to be the case. [28] This, and not 'de Feuillade,' is the correct spelling. [29] Beaumont Lodge, Old Windsor, where Warren Hastings was then living. [30] Henry Austen, and his elder brother, James. [31] In the _Memoir_ this action is by mistake attributed to the Count. [32] _National Archives_, Paris (de Feuillide), W. 328, dossier 541, and T. 738; (Marboeuf), W. 320, dossier 481. CHAPTER IV FAMILY LIFE 1779-1792 The eldest brother of the family, James, was nearly eleven years older than Jane, and had taken his degree at Oxford before she left school. He had matriculated at St. John's (where he obtained a 'founder's kin' Scholarship and, subsequently, a Fellowship) in 1779, at the early age of fourteen; his departure from home having been perhaps hastened in order to make room for the three or four pupils who were sharing his brothers' studies at that time. His was a scholarly type of mind; he was well read in English literature, had a correct taste, and wrote readily and happily, both in prose and verse. His son, the author of the _Memoir_, believes that he had a large share in directing the reading, and forming the taste, of his sister Jane. James was evidently in sympathy with Cowper's return to nature from the more artificial and mechanical style of Pope's imitators, and so was she; in _Sense and Sensibility_, Marianne, after her first conversation with Willoughby, had happily assured herself of his admiring Pope 'no more than is proper.' In 1786 we hear of James being in France; his cousin Eliza was hoping for a visit of some months from him; but in the next year he had returned, and he must have soon gone into residence at Oxford as a young Fellow of his College; for there, in 1789, he became the originator and chief author of a periodical paper called _The Loiterer_, modelled on _The Spectator_ and its successors. It existed for more than a twelvemonth, and in the last number the whole was offered to the world as a 'rough, but not entirely inaccurate Sketch of the Character, the Manners, and the Amusements of Oxford, at the close of the eighteenth century.' In after life, we are told, he used to speak very slightingly of this early work, 'which he had the better right to do, as, whatever may have been the degree of their merits, the best papers had certainly been written by himself.' Edward Austen's disposition and tastes were as different from James's as his lot in life proved to be. Edward, as his mother says, 'made no pretensions' to literary taste and scholarship; but he was an excellent man of business, kind-hearted and affectionate; and he possessed also a spirit of fun and liveliness, which made him--as time went on--especially delightful to all young people. His history was more like fiction than reality. Most children have at some time or other indulged in day-dreams, in which they succeed to unexpected estates and consequent power; and it all happened to Edward. Mr. Thomas Knight of Godmersham Park in Kent, and Chawton House in Hampshire, had married a second cousin of George Austen, and had placed him in his Rectory at Steventon. His son, another Thomas Knight, and his charming wife, Catherine Knatchbull, took a fancy to young Edward, had him often to their house, and eventually adopted him. The story remains in the family of Mr. and Mrs. Knight's asking for the company of young Edward during his holidays, of his father's hesitating in the interests of the Latin Grammar, and of his mother's clinching the matter by saying 'I think, my dear, you had better oblige your cousins and let the child go.' There was no issue of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Knight, and by degrees they made up their minds to adopt Edward Austen as their heir. This resolution was not only a mark of their regard for Edward but also a compliment to the Austen family in general, whose early promise their cousins had probably observed; the relationship not being near enough to constitute any claim. But Mr. Knight was most serious in his intentions, for in his will he left the estates in remainder to Edward's brothers in succession in case of the failure of his issue, and Mrs. Knight always showed the kindest interest in all the family. Edward was now more and more at Godmersham and less and less at home. Under the Knights' auspices, he was sent, not to the University, but on a 'grand tour,' which included Dresden and Rome. He was probably away on this tour at the date which we have now reached. Jane's favourite brother, Henry, was nearly four years younger than Edward, and was no doubt still profiting by his father's instructions. By 1789 he was not only at Oxford but was contributing to _The Loiterer_ a paper on the sentimental school of Rousseau, and considering 'how far the indulgence of the above-named sentiments affects the immediate happiness or misery of human life.' Henry, whose course in life was marked by sharper curves than that of any of his brothers, was no doubt a very attractive personality. His niece, Mrs. Lefroy, says of him:-- He was the handsomest of his family and, in the opinion of his own father, also the most talented. There were others who formed a different estimate, and considered his abilities greater in show than in reality; but for the most part he was greatly admired. Brilliant in conversation he was, and, like his father, blessed with a hopefulness of temper which in adapting itself to all circumstances, even the most adverse, seemed to create a perpetual sunshine. The race, however, is not all to the swift, it never has been, and, though so highly gifted by nature, my uncle was not prosperous in life. There can be no doubt that by his bright and lovable nature he contributed greatly to the happiness of his sister Jane. She tells us that he could not help being amusing, and she was so good a judge of that quality that we accept her opinion of Henry's humour without demur; but he became so grandiloquent when wishing to be serious that he certainly must have wanted that last and rarest gift of a humorist--the art of laughing at himself. Very different again was the self-contained and steadfast Francis--the future Admiral of the Fleet; who was born in April 1774, and divided in age from Henry by their sister Cassandra. He must have spent some time at home with his sisters, after their return from school, before he entered the Royal Naval Academy, established in 1775 at Portsmouth under the supreme direction of the Lords of the Admiralty. Francis joined it when he was just twelve, and, 'having attracted the particular notice of the Lords of the Admiralty by the closeness of his application, and been in consequence marked out for early promotion,'[33] embarked two and a half years later as a volunteer on board the frigate _Perseverance_ (captain, Isaac Smith), bound to the East Indies. His father on this occasion wrote him a long letter--of which a great part is given in _Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers_.[34] Nothing in this wise and kind letter is more remarkable than the courtesy and delicacy with which the father addresses his advice to the son, who was but a boy, but whom he treats as an officer, and as a young man of whom he already cherished the highest hopes, consequent upon his previous good conduct. He speaks on many topics, religious duties being given the first place among them. He rejoices in the high character Francis had acquired in the academy and assures him that 'your good mother, brothers, sisters and myself will all exult in your reputation and rejoice in your happiness.' The letter concludes thus: 'I have nothing more to add but my blessing and best prayers for your health and prosperity, and to beg you would never forget you have not upon earth a more disinterested and warm friend than your truly affectionate father, Geo. Austen.' We need not be surprised to learn that this letter was found among the Admiral's private papers when he died at the age of ninety-one. The remaining brother, Charles, his sisters' 'own particular little brother,' born in 1779, must have been still in the nursery when his sisters left school. These brothers meant a great deal to Jane[35]; 'but dearest of all to her heart was her sister Cassandra, about three years her senior. Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane's side with the feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this feeling always remained; and even in the maturity of her powers, and in the enjoyment of increasing success, she would still speak of Cassandra as of one wiser and better than herself.' 'Their attachment was never interrupted or weakened; they lived in the same home, and shared the same bedroom, till separated by death. They were not exactly alike. Cassandra's was the colder and calmer disposition; she was always prudent and well-judging, but with less outward demonstration of feeling and less sunniness of temper than Jane possessed. It was remarked in the family that "Cassandra had the _merit_ of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the _happiness_ of a temper which never required to be commanded."' Such was the family party at Steventon; and 'there was so much that was agreeable in it that its members may be excused if they were inclined to live somewhat too exclusively within it.[36] They might see in each other much to love and esteem, and something to admire. The family talk had abundance of spirit and vivacity, and was never troubled by disagreements even in little matters, for it was not their habit to dispute or argue with each other; above all, there was strong family affection and firm union, never to be broken but by death. It cannot be doubted that all this had its influence with the author in the construction of her stories,' in which family life often plays a large part. The party which we have described was for many years 'unbroken[37] by death and seldom visited by sorrow. Their situation had some peculiar advantages beyond those of ordinary rectories. Steventon was a family living. Mr. Knight, the patron, was also proprietor of nearly the whole parish. He never resided there, and, consequently, the Rector and his children came to be regarded in the neighbourhood as representatives of the family. They shared with the principal tenant the command of an excellent manor, and enjoyed, in this reflected way, some of the consideration usually awarded to landed proprietors. They were not rich, but, aided by Mr. Austen's power of teaching, they had enough to afford a good education to their sons and daughters, to mix in the best society of the neighbourhood, and to exercise a liberal hospitality to their own relations and friends.' 'A carriage and pair of horses were kept'; but this could be done more cheaply in the eighteenth century than in the nineteenth. 'There were then no assessed taxes; the carriage, once bought, entailed little further expense; and the horses, probably, like Mr. Bennet's (in _Pride and Prejudice_), were often employed on farm work. Moreover, it should be remembered that a pair of horses in those days were almost a necessity, if ladies were to move about at all; for neither the condition of the roads nor the style of carriage-building admitted of any comfortable vehicle being drawn by a single horse'; indeed, the object of the builders seems to have been 'to combine the greatest possible weight with the least possible amount of accommodation.'[38] Jane Austen lost no time in entering on the career of authorship. She wrote because she must, and with very little prevision of the path which her genius was afterwards to mark out for her. She was urged onward 'by the first stirrings of talent within her and the absorbing interest of early composition. 'It is impossible to say at how early an age she began. There are copy-books extant containing tales, some of which must have been composed while she was a young girl, as they had amounted to a considerable number by the time she was sixteen. Her earliest stories are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be nonsensical, but the nonsense has much spirit in it. They are usually preceded by a dedication of mock solemnity to some one of her family. It would seem that the grandiloquent dedications prevalent in those days had not escaped her youthful penetration. Perhaps the most characteristic feature in those early productions is that, however puerile the matter, they are always composed in pure simple English, quite free from the over-ornamented style which might be expected from so young a writer.'[39] The following is a specimen:-- THE MYSTERY. AN UNFINISHED COMEDY. * * * * * DEDICATION. TO THE REV. GEORGE AUSTEN. SIR,--I humbly solicit your patronage to the following Comedy, which, though an unfinished one, is, I flatter myself, as complete a _Mystery_ as any of its kind. I am, Sir, your most humble Servant, THE AUTHOR. THE MYSTERY, A COMEDY. _DRAMATIS PERSONÆ._ _Men._ Col. ELLIOT. OLD HUMBUG. YOUNG HUMBUG. Sir EDWARD SPANGLE _and_ CORYDON. _Women._ FANNY ELLIOTT. MRS. HUMBUG _and_ DAPHNE. ACT I. SCENE I.--_A Garden._ _Enter_ CORYDON. _Corydon._ But hush: I am interrupted. [_Exit_ CORYDON. _Enter_ OLD HUMBUG _and his_ SON, _talking._ _Old Hum._ It is for that reason that I wish you to follow my advice. Are you convinced of its propriety? _Young Hum._ I am, sir, and will certainly act in the manner you have pointed out to me. _Old Hum._ Then let us return to the house. [_Exeunt._ SCENE II.--_A parlour in_ HUMBUG'S _house_. Mrs. HUMBUG _and_ FANNY _discovered at work._ _Mrs. Hum._ You understand me, my love? _Fanny._ Perfectly, ma'am: pray continue your narration. _Mrs. Hum._ Alas! it is nearly concluded; for I have nothing more to say on the subject. _Fanny._ Ah! here is Daphne. _Enter_ DAPHNE. _Daphne._ My dear Mrs. Humbug, how d'ye do? Oh! Fanny, it is all over. _Fanny._ Is it indeed! _Mrs. Hum._ I'm very sorry to hear it. _Fanny._ Then 'twas to no purpose that I---- _Daphne._ None upon earth. _Mrs. Hum._ And what is to become of----? _Daphne._ Oh! 'tis all settled. (_Whispers_ Mrs. HUMBUG.) _Fanny._ And how is it determined? _Daphne._ I'll tell you. (_Whispers_ FANNY.) _Mrs. Hum._ And is he to----? _Daphne._ I'll tell you all I know of the matter. (_Whispers_ Mrs. HUMBUG _and_ FANNY.) _Fanny._ Well, now I know everything about it, I'll go away. _Mrs. Hum._} And so will I. [_Exeunt._ _Daphne._ } SCENE III.--_The curtain rises, and discovers_ Sir EDWARD SPANGLE _reclined in an elegant attitude on a sofa fast asleep._ _Enter_ Col. ELLIOTT. _Col. E._ My daughter is not here, I see. There lies Sir Edward. Shall I tell him the secret? No, he'll certainly blab it. But he's asleep, and won't hear me, so I'll e'en venture. (_Goes up to_ Sir EDWARD, _whispers him, and exit._) _End of the First Act. Finis._ * * * * * A somewhat later venture, pure extravaganza, called _Evelyn_ is dedicated, by permission, to Miss Mary Lloyd. The manuscript volume which contains _Evelyn_ is grandly entitled on the outside 'Volume the Third'; on the inside 'Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady, consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.' It contains one other tale, unfinished, but of considerable length, called _Kitty or the Bower_, which is preceded by the following dedication, dated 'Steventon, August 1792.' TO MISS AUSTEN. MADAM,--Encouraged by your warm patronage of _The Beautiful Cassandra_ and _The History of England_, which, through your generous support, have obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, and run through four score editions, I take the liberty of begging the same Exertions in favour of the following novel, which I humbly flatter myself possesses Merit beyond any already published, or any that will ever in future appear, except such as may proceed from the pen of your most grateful Humble Servant, THE AUTHOR. The tale begins in characteristic style, which suggests the later _Northanger Abbey_. Catharine had the misfortune, as many heroines have had before her, of losing her parents when she was very young, and of being brought up under the care of a maiden aunt, who, while she tenderly loved her, watched her conduct with so scrutinizing a severity as to make it very doubtful to many people, and to Catharine among the rest, whether she loved her or not. Catharine lives with this aunt in Devonshire, five miles from Exeter. Some friends of her aunt, a Mr. Stanley, M.P., his wife and daughter (very foolish, and suggestive of Isabella Thorpe) come to visit them. Mr. Stanley's son turns up unexpectedly and pays great attention to Catharine, much to the disgust of the aunt, who has a detestation of all young men. The tale comes to an abrupt conclusion with the departure of the guests. The story is at times amusing, but obviously immature, and we need not regret that it was never finished. Other early sketches are _Henry and Eliza_, dedicated to Miss Cooper, which must have been written before the latter's marriage at the end of 1792; _The Visit_, dedicated to the Rev. James Austen; _Jack and Alice_, and _Adventures of Mr. Harley_, dedicated to Francis William Austen, Esq., midshipman on board H.M.S. _Perseverance_ (soon after 1788), and other pieces dedicated to Charles John Austen, Esq. _Evelyn_ and _Kitty_ seem to mark a second stage in her literary education: when she was hesitating between burlesque and immature story-telling, and when indeed it seemed as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought _not_ to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction. [40]'Her own mature opinion of the desirableness of such an early habit of composition is given in the following words of a niece:-- As I grew older, my aunt would talk to me more seriously of my reading and my amusements. I had taken early to writing verses and stories, and I am sorry to think how I troubled her with reading them. She was very kind about it, and always had some praise to bestow, but at last she warned me against spending too much time upon them. She said--how well I recollect it!--that she knew writing stories was a great amusement, and _she_ thought a harmless one, though many people, she was aware, thought otherwise; but that at my age it would be bad for me to be much taken up with my own compositions. Later still--it was after she had gone to Winchester--she sent me a message to this effect, that if I would take her advice I should cease writing till I was sixteen; that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the corresponding years of her own life. 'As this niece was only twelve years old at the time of her aunt's death, these words seem to imply that the juvenile tales which we have mentioned had, some of them at least, been written in her childhood; while others were separated only by a very few years from the period which included specimens of her most brilliant writing.' In the summer of 1788, when the girls were fifteen and twelve respectively, they accompanied their parents on a visit to their great-uncle, old Mr. Francis Austen, at Sevenoaks. Though Jane had been to Oxford, Southampton, and Reading before, it is probable that this was her first visit into Kent, and, what must have been more interesting still, her first visit to London. We have no clue as to where the party stayed in town, but one of Eliza de Feuillide's letters to Philadelphia Walter mentions that they dined with Eliza and her mother on their way back to Hampshire. They talked much of the satisfaction their visit into Kent had afforded them. What did you think of my uncle's looks? I was much pleased with them, and if possible he appeared more amiable than ever to me. What an excellent and pleasing man he is; I love him most sincerely, as indeed I do all the family. I believe it was your first acquaintance with Cassandra and Jane. Though Philadelphia's reply to this letter has not been preserved, we have a letter of hers to her brother. Writing on July 23, she says:-- Yesterday I began an acquaintance with my two female cousins, Austens. My uncle, aunt, Cassandra, and Jane arrived at Mr. F. Austen's the day before. We dined with them there. As it's pure nature to love ourselves, I may be allowed to give the preference to the eldest, who is generally reckoned a most striking resemblance of me in features, complexion, and manners. I never found myself so much disposed to be vain, as I can't help thinking her very pretty, but fancied I could discover _she_ was not so well pleased with the comparison, which reflection abated a great deal of the vanity so likely to arise and so proper to be suppres't. The youngest [Jane] is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve; but it is hasty judgment which you will scold me for. My aunt has lost several fore-teeth, which makes her look old; my uncle is quite white-haired, but looks vastly well; all in high spirits and disposed to be pleased with each other. A day or two later, Philadelphia wrote further:-- I continue to admire my amiable likeness the best of the two in every respect; she keeps up conversation in a very sensible and pleasing manner. Yesterday they all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire [her]. Jane is whimsical and affected. 'Not at all pretty,' 'whimsical and affected.' 'Poor Jane!' one is tempted to exclaim, but whatever she would have said to this estimate of herself, of one thing we may be perfectly sure: that she would have been the first to agree with her critic as to her own absolute inferiority to Cassandra. There is a passage in a letter written from Southampton, February 1807,[41] in which she says she is often 'all astonishment and shame' when she thinks of her own manners as a young girl and contrasts them with what she sees in the 'best children' of a later date. One other mention of Jane at this period may be quoted--that of Sir Egerton Brydges, the author and genealogist. His sister had married Mr. Lefroy, who in 1783 had become rector of Ashe (the living which George Austen would have held, had it become vacant before Deane), in succession to Dr. Russell. Sir Egerton, on his marriage in 1788, had for two years rented Mr. Austen's parsonage at Deane in order to be near his sister. The nearest neighbours of the Lefroys were the Austens at Steventon. I remember Jane Austen the novelist as a little child. She was very intimate with Mrs. Lefroy and much encouraged by her. Her mother was a Miss Leigh, whose paternal grandmother was sister to the first Duke of Chandos. Mr. Austen was of a Kentish family, of which several branches have been settled in the Weald of Kent, and some are still remaining there. When I knew Jane Austen I never suspected that she was an authoress, but my eyes told me that she was fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full. Sir Egerton's description is the more pleasing of the two; but it must be remembered that he was writing long after the time he mentions, and that his recollections were no doubt somewhat mellowed by Jane Austen's subsequent fame; whereas Philadelphia Walter's is an unvarnished contemporary criticism--the impression made by Jane on a girl a few years older than herself. Fortunately, neither looks nor manners are stereotyped at the age of twelve, so we need not be surprised to find that Eliza, when writing in August 1791 in reference to a letter just received from Steventon, talks of the two sisters as 'perfect Beauties,' who were of course gaining 'hearts by dozens.' And again in November of the same year, she writes that she hears 'they are two of the prettiest girls in England.'[42] When due allowance is made for family exaggeration, we may conclude that at eighteen and fifteen years of age both Cassandra and Jane had their fair share of good looks. Eliza's letters give us another glimpse of the sisters in 1792, and indeed of the whole Steventon party. She writes on September 26:-- I have the real pleasure of informing you that our dear Uncle and Aunt are both in perfect health. The former looks uncommonly well, and in my opinion his likeness to my beloved mother is stronger than ever. Often do I sit and trace her features in his, till my heart overflows at my eyes. I always tenderly loved my Uncle, but I think he is now dearer to me than ever, as being the nearest and best beloved relation of the never to be sufficiently regretted parent I have lost; Cassandra and Jane are both very much grown (the latter is now taller than myself), and greatly improved as well in manners as in person, both of which are now much more formed than when you saw them. They are I think equally sensible and both so to a degree seldom met with, but still my heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me indeed requires a return of the same nature. Henry is now rather more than six feet high, I believe; he also is much improved, and is certainly endowed with uncommon abilities, which indeed seem to have been bestowed, though in a different way, upon each member of this family. As to the coolness which you know had taken place between H. and myself, it has now ceased, in consequence of due acknowledgement, on his part, and we are at present on very proper relationlike terms. You know that his family design him for the Church. Cassandra was from home when I arrived; she was then on a visit to Rowling, the abode of her brother Edward--from which she returned some time since, but is now once more absent, as well as her sister, on a visit to the Miss Lloyds, who live at a place called Ibthorp, about eighteen miles from hence. . . . There has been a Club Ball at Basingstoke and a private one in the neighbourhood, both of which my cousins say were very agreeable. The date 1790 or 1791 must be assigned to the portrait--believed to be of Jane Austen, and believed to be by Zoffany--which has been chosen as the frontispiece for this book, as it was for Lord Brabourne's edition of the Letters.[43] We are unable for want of evidence to judge of the likeness of the picture to Jane Austen as a girl; there is, so far as we have heard, no family tradition of her having been painted; and, as her subsequent fame could hardly have been predicted, we should not expect that either her great-uncle Frank, or her cousin, Francis Motley Austen, would go to the expense of a picture of her by Zoffany. Francis Motley had a daughter of his own, another Jane Austen, who became Mrs. Campion of Danny, and a confusion between the two Janes is a possible explanation. On the other hand, we believe there is no tradition in either the Austen or the Campion family of any such portrait of _that_ Jane Austen, and the _provenance_ of our picture is well authenticated. The Rev. Morland Rice (grandson of Edward Austen) was a Demy of Magdalen College, Oxford. An old Fellow of Magdalen, Dr. Newman, many years before his death, told him that he had a portrait of Jane Austen the novelist, that had long been in his family. He stated that it was painted at Bath when she was about fifteen, and he promised to leave him (M. Rice) the picture. A few months before his death, Dr. Newman wrote to his friend, Dr. Bloxam, sending him a picture as a farewell present, and adding: 'I have another picture that I wish to go to your neighbour, Morland Rice. It is a portrait of Jane Austen the novelist, by Zoffany. The picture was given to my stepmother by her friend Colonel Austen of Kippington, Kent, because she was a great admirer of her works.' Colonel Austen was a son of Francis Motley, and it is hardly conceivable that he should give away to a stranger a portrait of his _sister_ Jane as one of his _cousin_ Jane. Our Jane became fifteen on December 16, 1790, and Zoffany returned from India[44] in that year. Jane is believed to have visited her uncle, Dr. Cooper (who died in 1792), at Bath. There is nothing in these dates to raise any great difficulty, and, on the whole, we have good reason to hope that we possess in this picture an authentic portrait of the author. The Austens seem to have been possessed of considerable histrionic talent, and they were decidedly ambitious in the plays they undertook. Their cousin Eliza was out of England in 1784 when their theatricals first began; but on a later occasion she was one of the principal performers. They had their summer theatre in the barn, and their winter theatre either there or within the narrow limits of the dining-room, where the number of listeners must have been very small. In 1784 Sheridan's _Rivals_ was acted by 'some ladies and gentlemen at Steventon.' The same year they seem to have given also the tragedy of _Matilda_.[45] It was the day of prologues and epilogues, and the young actors were careful to omit nothing that would make the performance complete. James, the eldest son, brought into play his skill in verse-making; and we read of Henry Austen speaking a prologue (from his brother's pen) to _The Rivals_, while the prologue to _Matilda_ was given by Edward Austen, and the epilogue by Thomas Fowle. Midsummer and Christmas were the two seasons when George Austen dismissed his pupils for their holidays, and it was at these two periods that the theatricals usually took place. For the year 1787 we have a few details as to contemplated performances. Eliza de Feuillide had come to England with her mother in the summer of 1786, and probably went to Steventon at midsummer. In September 1787 she was at Tunbridge Wells with her mother and her cousin Phila. In a letter to her brother, Phila tells us that they went to the theatre, where (as was the custom in those days) the Comtesse--presumably as a person of some importance--'bespoke' the play, which was _Which is the Man?_[46] and _Bon Ton_.[47] This is interesting, because later on in the same letter Phila says: 'They [i.e. the Comtesse and her mother] go at Christmas to Steventon and mean to act a play, _Which is the Man?_ and _Bon Ton_. My uncle's barn is fitting up quite like a theatre, and all the young folks are to take their part. The Countess is Lady Bob Lardoon [_sic_] in the former and Miss Tittup in the latter. They wish me much of the party and offer to carry me, but I do not think of it. I should like to be a spectator, but am sure I should not have courage to act a part, nor do I wish to attain it.' Eliza was, however, very urgent with Phila that she should send all diffidence _to Coventry_. Your accommodations at Steventon are the only things my Aunt Austen and myself are uneasy about, as the house being very full of company, she says she can only promise you 'a place to hide your head in,' but I think you will not mind this inconvenience. I am sure I should not--to be with you. Do not let your dress neither disturb you, as I think I can manage it so that the _Green Room_ should provide you with what is necessary for acting. We purpose setting out the 17th of December. . . . I assure you we shall have a most brilliant party and a great deal of amusement, the house full of company, frequent balls. You cannot possibly resist so many temptations, especially when I tell you your old friend James is returned from France and is to be of the acting party. But Phila still stood out, and Eliza attacked her once more on November 23, begging her to come for a fortnight to Steventon, provided she could bring herself to act, 'for my Aunt Austen declares "she has not room for any _idle young people_."' We hear no more news of these theatricals, but it is probable that there was a change in the selection of the plays, for there is extant a prologue by James Austen to _The Wonder_,[48] acted at Steventon, December 26 and 28, 1787, as well as an epilogue 'spoken by a Lady in the character of Violante.' There is also a prologue to _The Chances_,[49] acted at Steventon, January 1788. The last Steventon performances of which we have any knowledge took place in January 1790, when a farce called _The Sultan_[50] was acted. The leading lady on this last occasion was Miss Cooper, who spoke the epilogue in the character of Roxalana, Henry Austen playing the title-rôle. On the same occasion Townley's farce, _High Life below Stairs_, was also given. Of Jane's own part in these performances there is no record, for she was only just fourteen when the last took place. But even if she took no more share than Fanny Price, she must have acquired a considerable acquaintance with the language of the theatre--knowledge that she was to turn to good account in _Mansfield Park_. She was an early observer, and it might reasonably be supposed that some of the incidents and feelings which are so vividly painted in the _Mansfield Park_ theatricals are due to her recollections of these entertainments. The talent and liveliness which she would show, if ever she had an opportunity of acting herself, may be imagined. The late Sir William Heathcote is said to have remembered being with her at a Twelfth Night party when he was a little boy, on which occasion she, having drawn the part of Mrs. Candour, acted it with appreciation and spirit. FOOTNOTES: [33] W. R. O'Byrne's _Naval Biographical Dictionary_, 1849. [34] Pp. 16-20. [35] We again make use of the words of the _Memoir_ (pp. 15-17) in the description of the family party, &c. [36] We are told that Jane was one of the least exclusive of the family. [37] _Memoir_, pp. 22, 23. [38] The carriage was given up in 1798. See letter of November 17 in that year in _Brabourne_, vol. i. p. 165. [39] _Memoir_, p. 42. [40] _Memoir_, p. 45. [41] See p. 201. [42] _Supra_, p. 43. [43] A reproduction of this picture appears also as a frontispiece to the first volume of Dent's illustrated edition of the novels (1892). [44] _Dictionary of National Biography_, s.v. [45] By Dr. Thomas Francklin; but said to be almost a translation of Voltaire's _Duc de Foix_. [46] A comedy by Mrs. Cowley. [47] _Bon Ton, or High Life above Stairs_, a comedy by David Garrick. [48] _The Wonder: a Woman keeps a Secret_, a comedy by Mrs. Centlivre. [49] Probably Garrick's version of Fletcher's comedy. [50] _The Sultan: or a Peep into the Seraglio_, by I. Bickerstaffe. CHAPTER V GROWTH AND CHANGE 1792-1796 Though it may hardly be likely that the Austens could rival Mrs. Bennet of _Pride and Prejudice_ by professing to dine with four-and-twenty families, there was, nevertheless (for a quiet country neighbourhood), a very fair amount of society to be had around Steventon. Readers of Jane Austen's letters will come across the names of many Hampshire neighbours, with occasional indications of the estimate which she formed of their intellects and characters. Probably there were many different degrees of refinement in different families; and towards the bottom of the list must have come the squire of many acres,[51] who, we are told, inquired of Mr. Austen whether Paris was in France or France in Paris, and who quoted a speech of the Rector's wife as beginning with a round oath, saying, when remonstrated with, that it was merely his 'way of telling the story.' When the author of the _Memoir_ expresses his belief that a century and a half ago the improvement of manners in most country parishes began with the clergy, he was no doubt thinking of the more learned minority of that body, who would bring into the depths of the country something of the enlightenment of a university. To this minority Jane's father and brother belonged, and thus the family probably gave to the society around them at least as much culture as they received from it in return. In the outer circle of their neighbourhood stood the houses of three peers--those of Lord Portsmouth at Hurstbourne, Lord Bolton at Hackwood, and Lord Dorchester at Greywell. The owners of these places now and then gave balls at home,[52] and could also be relied upon to bring parties to some of the assemblies at Basingstoke. Hardly less important than these magnates were the Mildmays of Dogmersfield and the Chutes of The Vyne. The Mr. Chute of that day was not only one of the two M.P.'s for the whole county of Hampshire, but was also a well-known and popular M.F.H., and the husband of an excellent and cultivated wife. Then came other squires--Portals at Freefolk, Bramstons at Oakley Hall, Jervoises at Herriard, Harwoods at Deane, Terrys at Dummer, Holders at Ashe Park--with several clerical families, and other smaller folk. But there were three houses which meant to the Austen sisters far more than any of the others. The Miss Biggs[53] of Manydown Park--a substantial old manor-house owned by their father, Mr. Bigg Wither, which stands between Steventon and Basingstoke--were especial friends of Cassandra and Jane. One of these, Elizabeth, became Mrs. Heathcote, and was the mother of Sir William Heathcote of Hursley Park--a fine specimen, morally and intellectually, of a country gentleman, and still remembered by many as Member for Oxford University, and as _sole_ patron of John Keble. Catherine, another sister, married Southey's uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill; and Alethea, who never married, was probably for that very reason all the more important to the Steventon sisters. One of the latest of Jane's extant letters is addressed to Alethea. A still closer friendship united Jane and Cassandra to a family named Lloyd, who for a short time inhabited their father's second house, the parsonage at Deane. Mrs. Lloyd had been a Craven--one of the unhappy daughters of a beautiful and fashionable but utterly neglectful mother, who left them to shift for themselves and to marry where they could. In this respect Martha Craven had done better than some of her sisters, having become the wife of a beneficed clergyman of respectable character and good position. With him she had led a peaceful life, and, on his death in January 1789, she spent the first two or three years of a quiet widowhood at Deane. Her second daughter, Eliza, was then already married to a first cousin, Fulwar Craven Fowle; but the two others, Martha and Mary, were still at home. Both became fast friends of Cassandra and Jane, and both were destined eventually to marry into the Austen family. For the present, their near neighbourhood came to an end at the beginning of 1792, when Mrs. Lloyd removed to Ibthorp, eighteen miles distant from Steventon. It was on the occasion of this removal that Jane, then just sixteen years old, presented to Mary Lloyd an interesting specimen of her own needlework--still existing. It is a very small bag, containing a yet smaller rolled-up housewife furnished with minikin needles and fine thread. In the housewife is a tiny pocket, and in the pocket is enclosed a slip of paper, on which, written as with a crow-quill, are these lines:-- This little bag, I hope, will prove To be not vainly made; For should you thread and needles want, It will afford you aid. And, as we are about to part, 'Twill serve another end: For, when you look upon this bag, You'll recollect your friend. _January 1792._ It is made of a scrap of old-fashioned gingham, and, having been carefully preserved, it is in as perfect a condition as when it was first made a hundred and twenty years ago; and shows that the same hand which painted so exquisitely with the pen could work as delicately with the needle.[54] Martha Lloyd also had her dedicatory poem. Some years later, when, it seems, she wanted to go to Harrogate, and hoped in vain for the escort of a Mr. Best, Jane presented her with a copy of doggerel--and probably almost extemporaneous--verses:-- Oh! Mr. Best, you're very bad And all the world shall know it; Your base behaviour shall be sung By me, a tuneful poet. You used to go to Harrogate Each summer as it came, And why, I pray, should you refuse To go this year the same? The way's as plain, the road's as smooth, The posting not increased, You're scarcely stouter than you were, Not younger, Sir, at least. &c., &c. We must mention one other intimate friendship--that which existed between the Austens and the Lefroys of Ashe. Mr. Lefroy was Rector of that parish; and his wife, known within it as 'Madam Lefroy,' was sister to Sir Egerton Brydges to whom we are indebted for the very early notice of Jane Austen as a girl which we have already given. 'Mrs. Lefroy was a remarkable person. Her rare endowments of goodness, talents, graceful person, and engaging manners were sufficient to secure her a prominent place in any society into which she was thrown; while her enthusiastic eagerness of disposition rendered her especially attractive to a clever and lively girl.'[55] How intensely Jane loved and admired her is shown by some lines which she wrote on December 16, 1808--the anniversary both of her own birth and of the sudden death of her friend, killed by a fall from her horse in 1804. It has sometimes been assumed that the self-restraint in expressions of affection to be found throughout Jane's published writings, and the self-control they display in matters of emotion, arises from the fact that in the writer's nature there were no very ardent affections to be restrained, and no overpowering emotions to be suppressed. These lines show the baselessness of such an assumption. It was not for the gaze of the public, but to relieve her own heart, that Jane, at the age of thirty-three, wrote thus, four years after the death of this elder friend. Here she dared to speak as she felt, striving in all the warmth and depth of enduring attachment and admiration to paint a character which she yet declares to have been 'past her power to praise.' The verses continue thus:-- But come, fond fancy, thou indulgent power; Hope is desponding, chill, severe, to thee: Bless thou this little portion of an hour; Let me behold her as she used to be. I see her here with all her smiles benign, Her looks of eager love, her accents sweet, That voice and countenance almost divine, Expression, harmony, alike complete. Listen! It is not sound alone, 'tis sense, 'Tis genius, taste, and tenderness of soul; 'Tis genuine warmth of heart without pretence, And purity of mind that crowns the whole. * * * * * Can aught enhance such goodness? Yes, to me Her partial favour from my earliest years Consummates all: ah! give me but to see Her smile of love! The vision disappears. Time was now to bring changes to the Austens. The elder brothers married. James had a curacy at Overton, and near Overton was Laverstoke Manor House, now occupied by General and Lady Jane Mathew. James became engaged to their daughter Anne, five years older than himself. They were married in March 1792, and started life on an income of £300 (of which £100 was an allowance made by General Mathew), keeping, it is said, a small pack of harriers for the husband, and a close carriage for the wife. James afterwards moved to Deane, where he was his father's curate. The married life of the couple was but short. Their one child, always known as Anna, was born in April 1793, and the mother died suddenly in May 1795, leaving to her daughter only a shadowy recollection of 'a tall and slender lady dressed in white.' The poor little girl fretted in her solitude, till her father took the wise step of sending her to Steventon Rectory to be comforted by her aunts. She was admitted to the chocolate-carpeted dressing-room, which was now becoming a place of eager authorship. Anna was a very intelligent, quick-witted child, and, hearing the original draft of _Pride and Prejudice_ read aloud by its youthful writer to her sister, she caught up the names of the characters and repeated them so much downstairs that she had to be checked; for the composition of the story was still a secret kept from the knowledge of the elders. Anna also composed stories herself long before she could write them down, and preserved a vivid remembrance of her dear Aunt Jane performing that task for her, and then telling her others of endless adventure and fun, which were carried on from day to day, or from visit to visit. Towards the end of 1796 James became engaged to Mary Lloyd, and they were married early in 1797. The marriage could hardly have happened had not General Mathew continued, for the sake of Anna, the £100 a year which he had allowed to his daughter. The event must have been most welcome to Jane; and Mrs. Austen wrote a very cheerful and friendly letter to her daughter-in-law elect, expressing the 'most heartfelt satisfaction at the prospect.' She adds: 'Had the selection been mine, you, my dear Mary, are the person I should have chosen for James's wife, Anna's mother and my daughter, being as certain as I can be of anything in this uncertain world, that you will greatly increase and promote the happiness of each of the three. . . . I look forward to you as a real comfort to me in my old age when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire,[56] and Jane--the Lord knows where. Tell Martha she too shall be my daughter, she does me honour in the request.' There was an unconscious prophecy contained in the last words, for Martha became eventually the second wife of the writer's son Francis. Edward Austen's marriage had preceded his brother's by a few months. His kind patrons, the Knights, would be sure to make this easy for him; and it must have been under their auspices that he married (before the end of 1791) Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, and was settled at Rowling, a small house belonging to the Bridges family, about a mile away from their seat at Goodnestone. No doubt it was a suitable match; but it must also have been a marriage of affection, if one may judge from the happy life which ensued, and from the lovely features of Mrs. Edward Austen, preserved in the miniature by Cosway.[57] Some of Jane's earliest extant letters were written from Rowling. The place was not, however, to be the home of the Edward Austens for long. Mr. Thomas Knight died in 1794, leaving his large estates to his widow for her life. Three years later, in 1797, she determined to make them over, at once, to the adopted son, who was after her death to become their owner, retaining for herself only an income of £2000. On learning her intentions, he sent her a most grateful and affectionate letter,[58] saying that he wrote because he felt himself incapable of speaking with her on the subject; that it was impossible for him and his wife to accede to her plan, for they should never be happy at Godmersham whilst she was living in a smaller and less comfortable house, having quitted a mansion where he had so often heard her say her whole happiness was centred. This protest by no means turned Mrs. Knight from her intentions; on the contrary, she expressed them still more strongly, and in so charming a spirit that we must quote a considerable part of her letter:-- Godmersham Park: Friday. If anything were wanting, my dearest Edward, to confirm my resolution concerning the plan I propose executing, your letter would have that effect; it is impossible for any person to express their gratitude and affection in terms more pleasing and gratifying than you have chosen, and from the bottom of my heart I believe you to be perfectly sincere when you assure me that your happiness is best secured by seeing me in the full enjoyment of everything that can contribute to my ease and comfort, and that happiness, my dear Edward, will be yours by acceding to my wishes. From the time that my partiality for you induced Mr. Knight to treat you as our adopted child I have felt for you the tenderness of a mother, and never have you appeared more deserving of affection than at this time; to reward your merit, therefore, and to place you in a situation where your many excellent qualities will be call'd forth and render'd useful to the neighbourhood is the fondest wish of my heart. Many circumstances attached to large landed possessions, highly gratifying to a man, are entirely lost on me at present; but when I see you in enjoyment of them, I shall, if possible, feel my gratitude to my beloved husband redoubled, for having placed in my hands the power of bestowing happiness on one so very dear to me. If my income had not been sufficient to enable us both to live in affluence I should never have proposed this plan, for nothing would have given me more pain than to have seen a rigid economy take the place of that liberality which the poor have always experienced from the family; but with the income I have assigned you, I trust, my dear Edward, you will feel yourself rich. . . . You may assure yourself and my dear Lizzie, that the pain I shall feel in quitting this dear place will no longer be remembered when I see you in possession of it. My attachment to it can, I think, only cease with my life; but if I am near enough to be your frequent daily visitor and within reach of the sight of you and your boys and Lizzie and her girls, I trust I shall be as happy, perhaps happier, than I am now. . . . Your most sincere friend, C. K. Meanwhile, Francis Austen had made a good start in his profession. Going out to the East Indies, according to the custom of those days as a 'volunteer,' he became a midshipman, but remained one for four years only. Promotion--'that long thought of, dearly earned, and justly valued blessing'--was bestowed upon him two years sooner than it fell to the lot of William Price in _Mansfield Park_, and he became a lieutenant at the age of seventeen--a sufficient testimony to that steadiness of character which distinguished him throughout the course of a very long life. As lieutenant he remained another year in the East Indies, and then returned to serve on the Home Station. The result of this last move was that in 1793, rather more than a year after the marriages of James and Edward, their parents had the delight of welcoming back a son, who, having quitted them as a boy not yet fifteen years old, reappeared as a young man and successful officer, of whom his family might be justly proud. Other events, grave and gay, were now happening at Steventon. Besides Eliza de Feuillide, who took refuge there with her young son while the clouds were gathering round her husband in France, the rectory had another visitor in the summer of 1792, in Jane Cooper, daughter of Mrs. Austen's only sister, who came here after her father's death. Dr. Cooper had set out in June with his son and daughter, and his neighbours, the Lybbe Powyses, on a tour to the Isle of Wight. The tour had important results for the young Coopers, as Edward became engaged to Caroline Lybbe Powys, and his sister to Captain Thomas Williams, R.N., whom she met at Ryde. Dr. Cooper, whose health had been the chief reason for the tour, did not long survive his return, dying at Sonning (of which he had been vicar since 1784) on August 27. The date of his daughter's wedding was already fixed, but had of course to be postponed. She went immediately to Steventon, and was married from the Rectory on December 11 of the same year. One happy result of this marriage was to provide an opening for the naval career of the youngest of the Austens, Charles, who was three years younger than Jane, and whom we last met in the nursery. As he was also five years junior to Francis, the latter must have quitted the Naval Academy some time before his brother entered it. Charles Austen was one of those happy mortals destined to be loved from childhood to old age by every one with whom they come in contact. How great a favourite he was at home is easily to be read between the lines of his sister's letters; and when he died at the age of seventy-three as Admiral of the British Fleet in the Burmese waters, one who was with him wrote that 'his death was a great grief to the whole fleet--I know I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.' The charming expression of countenance in the miniatures still existing of this youngest brother makes such feelings quite comprehensible. On leaving the Academy he served under his cousin's husband, Captain Thomas Williams, and was fortunate enough to witness and take part in a most gallant action when, in June 1796, Captain Williams's frigate, the _Unicorn_, gave chase to a French frigate, _La Tribune_, and, after a run of two hundred and ten miles, succeeded in capturing her. To Charles, at the age of seventeen, this must have been a very exciting experience; while to Captain Williams it brought the honour of knighthood. What with their visitors and their dances, and with a wedding to prepare for, life must have been gay enough for the Miss Austens during the autumn of 1792. Cassandra and Jane were now of an age to enjoy as much dancing as they could get: in fact, if Jane began dancing as early as she made Lydia Bennet begin, she may already have been going for a year or two to the monthly assemblies that Basingstoke (like every other town of any size) boasted of during the winter months. Unfortunately, we know very little of Jane's personal history from 1792 to 1796. Most of her time would naturally be spent at home; but we catch an occasional glimpse of her, now dancing at Southampton, now travelling with Cassandra one hot summer's day from London to stay with her brother Edward at Rowling (in 1794), now visiting in Gloucestershire.[59] Early in 1794 came the shock of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide; and Eliza, widowed and motherless, and with an invalid boy, must have become more of a serious care to her relations. Over the acquittal of her benefactor and godfather, Warren Hastings, there was but one feeling in the family. They all admired him as a high-minded patriot, a warm and disinterested friend, and a scholar whose approbation was an honour. The event inspired Henry Austen with more than his usual grandeur of language. 'Permit me,' he says (writing to Hastings) 'to congratulate my country and myself as an Englishman; for right dear to every Englishman must it be to behold the issue of a combat where forms of judicature threatened to annihilate the essence of justice.' One event of the deepest interest occurred during this period--namely, Cassandra's engagement to Thomas Fowle (brother of Eliza Lloyd's husband), which probably took place in 1795 when she was twenty-three years old. She had known him from childhood, as he was a pupil at Steventon Rectory in 1779. Mr. Fowle had taken Orders, and was at this time Rector of Allington in Wiltshire. An immediate marriage did not seem prudent, but advancement was hoped for from his kinsman, Lord Craven; and, as one of the livings in his gift was Ryton in Shropshire, it must have been to this place that Mrs. Austen alluded as the future home of Cassandra in the letter to her intended daughter-in-law, Mary Lloyd. At present, however, Lord Craven could only show his interest in Mr. Fowle by taking him out with him to the West Indies as chaplain to his own regiment. Jane's literary projects were now assuming a more definite shape, although the process of selection and elimination both in subjects and method was not yet finished. To this period belongs _Elinor and Marianne_, a first sketch for _Sense and Sensibility_, but written in letters. We know that it was read aloud, but no details have come down to us, and it is difficult to guess between whom the letters can have passed, for in the novel Elinor and Marianne are never parted, even for a single day. It seems therefore as if the alterations subsequently made must have been radical; and the difficulty and labour which such a complete transformation would involve make the author's unfavourable judgment on her own earlier method of writing all the stronger. If she decided against using letters as a vehicle for story-telling in the future, it seems all the more probable that the only other instance of her use of this style was at least as early as the date we have now reached. The author of the _Memoir_ yielded with reluctance to many solicitations asking him to include _Lady Susan_ in his second edition;[60] while he himself agreed with other critics that the work was 'scarcely one on which a literary reputation could be founded.' As a stage in the development of the author it has great interest. Strictly speaking, it is not a story but a study. There is hardly any attempt at a plot, or at the grouping of various characters; such as exist are kept in the background, and serve chiefly to bring into bolder relief the one full-length, highly finished, wholly sinister figure which occupies the canvas, but which seems, with the completion of the study, to have disappeared entirely from the mind of its creator. It is equally remarkable that an inexperienced girl should have had independence and boldness enough to draw at full length a woman of the type of Lady Susan, and that, after she had done so, the purity of her imagination and the delicacy of her taste should have prevented her from ever repeating the experiment. But if Jane Austen never again wrote a story in letters, no one was ever more successful in using them for exhibitions of character. The letters of Lucy Steele, Mr. Collins, Isabella Thorpe, Lady Bertram, and Mary Musgrove are all masterpieces of unconscious humour--and some of the more serious letters are not far behind them. The extant letters of Jane herself begin in 1796, and will accompany us through the rest of the story. They are far the most important additions that can be made to the short history contained in the _Memoir_; and the little notices which we have given--it may have seemed with needless particularity--of her relations and neighbours have been given partly in order to enable the readers of her letters to follow the numerous personal allusions to be found in them. We must not, however, try to extract more out of the letters than they will yield. The bulk of them belong to the collection published by Lord Brabourne, and nearly the whole of this collection consists of letters from Jane to Cassandra. But the normal condition of the sisters' lives was to be together--residing in one house, sleeping in one room. We can therefore only learn from this source what happened on the comparatively rare occasions when they were separated. Nor is this all, for a good deal of their correspondence is missing. Some of it is probably lost by accident; a great deal was certainly destroyed by Cassandra of set purpose. The Austens had a great hatred and dread of publicity. Cassandra felt this with especial force, and the memory of Jane was to her so sacred that to allow the gaze of strangers to dwell upon the actions or the feelings of so precious a being would have seemed to her nothing short of profanation. In her old age she became aware that Jane's fame had not only survived but increased, and that a time might come when the public would wish to know more details of her life than had been given in the short memoir, written by Henry Austen, and prefixed to her posthumous works. Cassandra would not indeed be likely to think it possible that the letters themselves should be published,[61] but they might be made use of as materials, and so she determined to do what must have been a great sacrifice, and burn all those which were specially dear to herself, feeling confident that the remainder would not be disturbed. The destroyed MSS. without doubt included much that would have been of particular value to the biographer. We must also remember that the correspondence was between sisters who knew, each of them, what the other was thinking, and could feel sure that nothing one might say would be misapprehended by the other; and the sort of freemasonry which results from such a situation adds to the difficulty of perfect comprehension by outsiders. Jane, too, was a mistress of subtle irony: the inveterate playfulness which is constantly cropping up in her books appears also in her letters. Secure of her correspondent, she could pass criticisms, impute motives, and imagine circumstances which would have been very far from her nature had she thought it possible that any less perfectly informed third person could see them. All our authorities agree in describing her as one of the most considerate and least censorious of mortals. 'She was singularly free,' says one of her nieces, 'from the habit . . . of looking out for people's foibles for her own amusement, or the entertainment of her hearers. . . . I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing.' We may be sure, therefore, that when she seems to imply that her mother's ailments were imaginary, or that Mrs. Knight's generosity to Edward was insignificant, or that Mrs. Knight herself was about to contract a second marriage, she is no more serious than when she describes herself as having taken too much wine, as a hardened flirt, or as a selfish housekeeper ordering only those things which she herself preferred. We must therefore take the letters as they are, without expecting to find any expression of views on such important subjects as religion, politics, or literature--subjects which might better be discussed in conversation with Cassandra; and with these limitations in our minds we shall probably agree with Mr. A. C. Bradley,[62] who does not find the letters disappointing because 'the Jane Austen who wrote the novels is in them.' FOOTNOTES: [51] _Memoir_, p. 9. [52] Lady Dorchester gave one in January 1799, not at Greywell, but at Kempshot, which her husband acquired shortly before the end of the eighteenth century. [53] The sisters kept the name Bigg, though father and brother became Bigg Wither. [54] _Memoir_, pp. 93, 94. [55] _Memoir_, p. 54. [56] See p. 79. [57] _Chawton Manor and its Owners_, p. 159. [58] These letters will be found in Mr. W. H. Pollock's _Jane Austen, her Contemporaries and herself_. [59] _Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 341, and vol. i. p. 281. The Gloucestershire visit was probably to the Fowles at Elkstone. See p. 373. [60] It was far from being his wish that _Lady Susan_ should form the title of a separate volume. This work, and _The Watsons_, were to be printed as an appendix at the end of the _Memoir_. By some mistake, however, when the second edition appeared, the whole book bore the title of _Lady Susan_ on its outside cover. [61] How little she expected them to be published may be gathered from a sentence written by her niece Anna, at the time of the publication of the _Memoir_: 'I can fancy what the indignation of Aunt Cassandra would have been at the mere idea of its [the correspondence] being read and commented upon by any of us nephews and nieces, little or great.' [62] _Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association_, vol. ii. p. 10. CHAPTER VI ROMANCE 1795-1802 Miss Mitford, in a paragraph showing some hostility to Jane Austen, tells us that her own mother spent her maiden life in the neighbourhood of the Austens and knew Jane as 'the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.' It is perhaps a sufficient answer to this attack if we remark that when Mrs. Mitford married and left her home Jane was barely ten years old, and that at a date two years later she was accused by a cousin of being 'prim.' It is probable that on growing up she, like other girls, enjoyed admiration, and it is certain that she attracted a good deal of it; but she says so much to her elder sister and mentor about one particular flirtation that we may be sure that it was neither a serious nor a frequent occupation with her. In a letter[63] written from Steventon, November 17, 1798, she mentions a visit from her friend Mrs. Lefroy, and adds that she had enough private conversation with her to hear all that was interesting,-- which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all, and of her friend very little. She did not once mention the name of the former to _me_, and I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father's afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise. She showed me a letter which she had received from her friend a few weeks ago (in answer to one written by her to recommend a nephew of Mrs. Russell to his notice at Cambridge) towards the end of which was a sentence to this effect: 'I am very sorry to hear of Mrs. Austen's illness. It would give me particular pleasure to have an opportunity of improving my acquaintance with that family with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest. But at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.' This is rational enough; there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner. There seems no likelihood of his coming into Hampshire this Christmas, and it is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me. Mrs. Lefroy's 'friend,' though Jane was interested to hear of him, had evidently not touched her heart, and we should know nothing more of him if it were not for a letter of hers to her brother Frank, written more than fourteen years afterwards, and published in the _Sailor Brothers_.[64] I wonder whether you happened to see Mr. Blackall's marriage in the papers last January. We did. He was married at Clifton to a Miss Lewis, whose father had been late of Antigua. I should very much like to know what sort of a woman she is. He was a piece of perfection--noisy perfection--himself, which I always recollect with regard. We had noticed a few months before his succeeding to a College living, the very living which we recollected his talking of, and wishing for; an exceeding good one, Great[65] Cadbury in Somersetshire. I could wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn, fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window-blind at night. North Cadbury is an Emmanuel College living, and Mr. Blackall was a Fellow of that society, who, after the fashion of the times, had waited long for his living and his wife. Jane had known him well and liked him much, though with sufficient detachment to remember and to criticise his demonstrative manners, his love of instructing others, and other little peculiarities. The 'friend' of 1798 must have been a young Cambridge don; and she was not likely to have had an opportunity of knowing individually more than one of that limited community, who did not naturally come in the Austens' way. It seems obvious to link the two allusions together; and if this is correct, we have identified one of the admirers of our heroine.[66] More serious--but not _very_ serious--was the attachment between her and Mrs. Lefroy's nephew, Tom Lefroy, afterwards Chief Justice of Ireland, which is mentioned somewhat cautiously in the _Memoir_, and the end of which is alluded to in the letter already quoted. The young people became acquainted in the winter of 1795-6, and took to each other from the first. In a lively letter to Cassandra on January 9, 1796, Jane describes a ball at Manydown:-- Mr. H[eathcote][67] began with Elizabeth, and afterwards danced with her again; but _they_ do not know how _to be particular_. I flatter myself, however, that they will profit by the three successive lessons which I have given them. You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I _can_ expose myself, however, only _once more_, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we _are_ to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago. . . . After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as to the other, he has but _one_ fault, which time will I trust entirely remove; it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which _he_ did when he was wounded. A few days later she is writing again:-- Our party to Ashe to-morrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing without _him_), Buller, who is now staying with us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat. _Friday._--At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. Truly the 'prim' little girl of twelve had made considerable progress by the time she was twenty! Unfortunately, there is no further letter to tell us whether Tom made the expected proposal or not; but it is pretty certain that he did not, and indeed there is a good deal of doubt whether it was really expected. Possibly lack of means prevented its ever being a serious matter on his side. They can never have met again on the same intimate terms. If he visited Ashe at all in 1798, the conditions must have been different, for he was by that time tacitly engaged to the lady whom he married in March 1799. Tom Lefroy accordingly disappears from Jane's life, though he never forgot her till his death at the age of ninety. When he was an old man he told a young relation that 'he had been in love with Jane Austen, but it was a boy's love.' As for Jane's feelings, the opinion in the family seems to have been that it was a disappointment, but not a severe one. Had it been severe, either Jane would not have joked about it, or Cassandra would have destroyed the letters. But the day of Jane's one real romance was still to come: a romance which probably affected the flow of her spirits, and helped to disincline her for literary composition, for some time after its occurrence. In this case, as in the other, the author of the _Memoir_ was rather reticent; but shortly after its publication his sister, Caroline Austen, was induced to put down in writing the facts as she knew them. No one could be better qualified to do this, for she was a person of great ability, and endowed with a wonderfully accurate and retentive memory. It will be seen also that she has the unimpeachable authority of Cassandra to support her; we can therefore feel confidence in the truth of the story, although date, place, and even the name[68] of the gentleman are missing. Caroline Austen's account is as follows:-- All that I know is this. At Newtown, Aunt Cassandra was staying with us [i.e. with the writer and her mother, Mrs. James Austen] when we made acquaintance with a certain Mr. H. E., of the Engineers. He was very pleasing and very good-looking. My aunt was very much struck with him, and _I_ was struck by her commendation; she so rarely admired strangers. Afterwards, at another time--I do not remember exactly when--she spoke of him as of one so unusually gifted with all that was agreeable, and said that he reminded her strongly of a gentleman whom they had met one summer when they were by the sea--I think she said in Devonshire; I don't think she named the place, and I am sure she did not say Lyme, for that I should have remembered--that he seemed greatly attracted by my Aunt Jane--I suppose it was an intercourse of some weeks--and that when they had to part (I imagine he was a visitor also, but his family might have lived near) he was urgent to know where they would be the next summer, implying or perhaps saying that he should be there also, wherever it might be. I can only say that the impression left on Aunt Cassandra was that he had fallen in love with her sister, and was quite in earnest. Soon afterwards they heard of his death. Mr. H. E. also died of a sudden illness soon after we had seen him at Newtown, and I suppose it was that coincidence of early death that led my aunt to speak of him--the unknown--at all. I am sure she thought he was worthy of her sister, from the way in which she recalled his memory, and also that she did not doubt, either, that he would have been a successful suitor. This short history contains all the facts that are known. The rest must be left to imagination; but of two things we may be sure: the man whom Cassandra deemed worthy of her sister can have been no ordinary person, and the similarity in the ending of romance in the case of both sisters must have added a strong link of sympathy to the chain of love which bound their lives together. A story is given in the _Reminiscences of Sir Francis H. Doyle_, to the effect that Mr. Austen, accompanied by Cassandra and Jane, took advantage of the Peace of Amiens, in 1802, to undertake a foreign tour. Whilst in Switzerland, they fell in with a young naval officer, who speedily became attached to Jane. His love was returned, and all seemed to be going smoothly. The party were making for Chamonix; but while the Austens kept to such high road as there was, their friend was to make his way thither over the mountains. The Austens reached Chamonix safely, but their friend never arrived, and at last news came that he had over-tired himself and died of brain fever on the way. The Austens returned to England, and Jane resumed her ordinary life, never referring to her adventures abroad. This story is given on the authority of a Miss Ursula Mayow, who heard it thirty or forty years later from a niece of Jane Austen's. Who this niece was we do not know, but she cannot have been either of the two who were grown up before their aunt's death, for they knew nothing of any such journey. As it stands, the story is impossible for many reasons. We give three:-- 1. Such an important and unusual event as a tour in Switzerland could not have taken place without leaving traces behind, and there is no shadow of a tradition of it remaining in the family. 2. They could not possibly have afforded it. George Austen had given up his living, and was hoping to have £600 a year as a maximum for the family party of four persons, and they had just had the expense of setting up house in Bath. 3. We can almost prove an alibi. We know that they were at Dawlish in the year of the Peace of Amiens, and they certainly could not have made another lengthened absence. The story, however, is interesting, for it fits in (so far as its main theme is concerned) with the authentic account given above of Jane's romance in the west, although the setting is completely different. It is quite possible that the fiction originated in an incorrect account--mis-heard or mis-repeated--of the true tale, mixed up with the fact (mentioned below) that the Henry Austens went abroad at this time. One more incident shall be narrated: an incident which, though full of discomfort and inconvenience for the actors, yet lacks the note of tragedy contained in the last. It rests on the same excellent authority, with the additional safeguard that Caroline Austen's own mother must have known the circumstances exactly. The story is as follows:-- In November 1802 Cassandra and Jane came from Bath to pay a visit to their old home--then in the possession of their eldest brother James and his wife Mary. In the course of it, they went to spend a few days with some old friends in the neighbourhood. On the morning of Friday, December 3, they suddenly reappeared--their friends having driven them back--at an unlooked-for moment. All got out, and to Mrs. James Austen's surprise a tender scene of embraces and tears and distressing farewells took place in the hall. No sooner had the carriage disappeared than Cassandra and Jane, without offering any explanation, turned to her and said that they must at once go back to Bath--the very next day--it was absolutely necessary, and (as an escort for young ladies travelling by coach was also necessary) their brother James must take them--although Saturday was a day on which it was most inconvenient for a single-handed rector to go far from his parish; for he could not return till Monday, and there was hardly any time to provide for his Sunday duty. But Cassandra and Jane, in a manner very unlike their usual considerate selves, refused to remain till Monday, nor would they give any reason for this refusal. James was therefore obliged to yield and to go with them to Bath. In course of time the mystery was solved. One[69] of the family with whom they had been staying had made Jane an offer of marriage, which she accepted--only to repent of her action deeply before many hours had passed. Her niece Caroline's remarks are as follows:-- I conjecture that the advantages he could offer, and her gratitude for his love, and her long friendship with his family, induced my aunt to decide that she would marry him when he should ask her, but that having accepted him she found she was miserable. To be sure, she should not have said 'Yes' overnight; but I have always respected her for her courage in cancelling that 'Yes' the next morning; all worldly advantages would have been to her, and she was of an age to know this quite well (she was nearly twenty-seven). My aunts had very small fortunes; and on their father's death, they and their mother would be, they were aware, but poorly off. I believe most young women so circumstanced would have gone on trusting to love after marriage. If this event occurred after the more romantic incident in the west of England it is possible that Jane had hardly as yet regained her wonted balance of mind and calmness of judgment. We have no further tale of the sort to tell. As time went on, she acquiesced cheerfully in the gradual disappearance of youth. She did not eschew balls, but was indifferent whether she was asked to dance or not: 'It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago; I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. . . . You will not expect to hear that _I_ was asked to dance, but I was.' She was to spend the remainder of her life in the centre of family interests, and by degrees to become engrossed in the exciting business of authorship. She could afford to laugh at the suggestion that she should marry the Rector of Chawton, and promise to do so, whatever his reluctance or her own. She retained to the end her freshness and humour, her sympathy with the young: '_We_ do not grow older, of course,' she says in one of her latest letters; and it is evident that this was the impression left with the rising generation of nephews and nieces from their intercourse with her. FOOTNOTES: [63] All the letters in this volume from Jane to Cassandra, as to the source of which no statement is made, are quoted from Lord Brabourne's collection. [64] _Sailor Brothers_, pp. 233 _et seq._ [65] _North_ Cadbury is the correct name of the parish. [66] The Blackall family had been established and respected in Devonshire since the episcopate of their ancestor, Offspring Blackall, Bishop of Exeter in the time of Queen Anne. Our Sam Blackall (an uncle of the same name had preceded him as Fellow of Emmanuel) was great-grandson of the Bishop; he became Fellow, and was ordained, in 1794; took the living of North Cadbury in 1812, and lived until 1842. His college record (which we owe to the courtesy of the Fellows) corresponds very well with our notices of him. He was evidently a sociable and lively member of the combination-room. The 'parlour-book' contains frequent mention of bets made by him on politics and other subjects, and his own particular pair of bowls still survive. He was tutor in 1811, when a great fire occurred in the College, and took his share in appealing for funds with which to rebuild it, application being chiefly made to those who agreed with the college politics in Church and State. He seems to have been one of a large family of brothers; another being John Blackall, of Balliol College, Oxford, for many years a distinguished Exeter physician, who did not die until 1860. [67] Mr. Heathcote and Miss Elizabeth Bigg were married in 1798. [68] Miss Hill (following a family MS.) calls _him_ 'Blackall'; but it seems from what has been said above that the MS. confused two different men. Certainly Cassandra, in telling the story to her niece Caroline, did not give her that, or any other, name; for Caroline speaks of the tale as being--so far as she knew it--'nameless and dateless.' A possible alternative suggestion is that there were two Blackalls concerned: one being the Sam Blackall mentioned above, the other Jane Austen's admirer in the west of England. [69] The author of the _Memoir_ describes this gentleman as one who had the recommendations of good character and connexions and position in life--of everything, in fact, except the subtle power of touching her heart. CHAPTER VII AUTHORSHIP AND CORRESPONDENCE 1796-1798 The appearance of Jane Austen's name among the list of subscribers to Madame d'Arblay's _Camilla_, in 1796, marks the beginning of her literary career. Her father must have paid the necessary subscription for her: and he probably did so believing that his daughter's talent deserved encouragement. Jane's cousins, the Cookes of Bookham, were some of Madame d'Arblay's closest friends while the latter was living in that neighbourhood, from 1793 to 1797, and it is quite likely that they were active in getting subscribers. One likes to think that--as Miss Hill has suggested[70]--Jane may have met Madame d'Arblay when paying a visit to Bookham. Jane was destined to have two periods of active authorship: periods of unequal length, and divided from each other by eight or ten nearly barren years. This unfruitful time has been accounted for in several different ways: as arising from personal griefs, literary disappointment, or want of a settled home. These disturbing causes all existed, and it is probable that each contributed its share to her unwillingness to write; but at present she enjoyed hope and happiness, the vigour and cheerfulness of youth among congenial companions, and a home as yet unvisited by any acute sorrows. No precise date has been assigned to the writing of _Elinor and Marianne_; but after the completion of that sketch her time has been fully mapped out[71] as follows:-- _First Impressions_ (original of _Pride and Prejudice_), begun October 1796, ended August 1797. _Sense and Sensibility_, begun November 1797. _Northanger Abbey_ (probably called _Susan_), written in 1797 and 1798. It has been usual to dwell on the precocity of intellect shown in the composition of the first two of these works by a young and inexperienced girl, and no doubt there is much justice in the observation; but we venture to think that it is in _Northanger Abbey_ that we get the best example of what she could produce at the age of three- or four-and-twenty. In the two others, the revision they underwent before publication was so complete that it is impossible now to separate the earlier from the later work; whereas in _Northanger Abbey_, while there is good evidence from the author's preface of a careful preparation for the press before she sold it in 1803, there is no mention of any radical alteration at a subsequent date. On the contrary, she apologises for what may seem old-fashioned in the social arrangements of the story by alleging the length of time that had elapsed since its completion. There is internal evidence to the same effect: she has not quite shaken off the tendency to satirise contemporary extravagances; and it is not until several chapters are past that she settles herself down to any serious creation of characters. The superiority also in interest and fun of the first volume over the second, though no doubt inherent in the scheme of the story, is a defect which she would hardly have tolerated at a later date. Nevertheless, we think her admirers may be satisfied with this example of her youthful style. The charm with which she manages to invest a simple ingenuous girl like Catherine, the brightness of Henry Tilney--even the shallowness of Isabella and the boorishness of John Thorpe--are things we part from with regret. And in parting with our friends at the end of one of her novels, we part with them for good and all; they never re-appear in another shape elsewhere; even Mrs. Allen and Lady Bertram are by no means the same. It seems to have been only a happy accident (though no doubt an accident very likely to occur) which prevented _First Impressions_ from appearing in its immature shape. George Austen was ready, and indeed anxious, that his daughter's work should be published; and when she had finished the story in August 1797, he took steps to find a publisher. Years afterwards (probably in 1836), at the sale of the effects of Mr. Cadell, the famous London publisher, the following letter was purchased by a connexion of the family:-- SIR,--I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprising 3 vols., about the length of Miss Burney's _Evelina_. As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort sh^{d.} make its first appearance under a respectable name, I apply to you. I shall be much obliged, therefore, if you will inform me whether you choose to be concerned in it, what will be the expense of publishing it at the author's risk, and what you will venture to advance for the property of it, if on perusal it is approved of. Should you give any encouragement, I will send you the work. I am, Sir, your humble servant, GEORGE AUSTEN. Steventon, near Overton, Hants.: November 1, 1797. This proposal, we are told, was declined by return of post. The earliest of Jane's letters which have survived date from the year 1796. They begin at Steventon in the middle of their winter engagements, and when Tom Lefroy was in the foreground.[72] Steventon: Saturday [January 9, 1796]. In the first place, I hope you will live twenty-three years longer. Mr. Tom Lefroy's birthday was yesterday, so that you are very near of an age. After this necessary preamble I shall proceed to inform you that we had an exceeding good ball last night, and that I was very much disappointed at not seeing Charles Fowle of the party, as I had previously heard of his being invited. * * * * * We were so terrible good as to take James in our carriage, though there were three of us before; but indeed he deserves encouragement for the very great improvement which has lately taken place in his dancing. Miss Heathcote is pretty, but not near so handsome as I expected. * * * * * Henry is still hankering after the Regulars, and as his project of purchasing the adjutancy of the Oxfordshire is now over, he has got a scheme in his head about getting a lieutenancy and adjutancy in the 86th, a new-raised regiment, which he fancies will be ordered to the Cape of Good Hope. I heartily hope that he will, as usual, be disappointed in this scheme. Steventon: Thursday [January 14, 1796]. I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last letter, for I write only for fame, and without any view to pecuniary emolument. Tell Mary[73] that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care sixpence. Assure her also as a last and indubitable proof of Warren's indifference to me, that he actually drew that gentleman's picture for me, and delivered it to me without a sigh. The next batch of letters date from a visit paid by Jane, in August 1796, to Rowling, the Kent home of her brother Edward. She seems to have experienced a difficulty in finding an escort for her return journey. Henry kept changing his plans; and Frank, the sailor, was liable to be sent for at a day's notice. She had evidently been studying her copy of _Camilla_. Cork Street: Tuesday morn [August 1796]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted. We reached Staines yesterday, I do not [know] when, without suffering so much from the heat as I had hoped to do. We set off again this morning at seven o'clock, and had a very pleasant drive, as the morning was cloudy and perfectly cool. I came all the way in the chaise from Hartford Bridge. Edward and Frank are both gone out to seek their fortunes; the latter is to return soon and help us seek ours. The former we shall never see again. We are to be at Astley's to-night, which I am glad of. Edward has heard from Henry this morning. He has not been at the races at all, unless his driving Miss Pearson over to Rowling one day can be so called. We shall find him there on Thursday. I hope you are all alive after our melancholy parting yesterday, and that you pursued your intended avocation with success. God bless you! I must leave off, for we are going out. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Everybody's love. Rowling: Thursday [September 1, 1796]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation. I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school. You are indeed the finest comic writer of the present age. * * * * * I am sorry that you found such a conciseness in the strains of my first letter. I must endeavour to make you amends for it, when we meet, by some elaborate details, which I shall shortly begin composing. Our men had but indifferent weather for their visit to Godmersham, for it rained great part of the way there and all the way back. They found Mrs. Knight remarkably well and in very good spirits. It is imagined that she will shortly be married again. I have taken little George once in my arms since I have been here, which I thought very kind. * * * * * To-morrow I shall be just like Camilla in Mr. Dubster's summer-house; for my Lionel will have taken away the ladder by which I came here, or at least by which I intended to get away, and here I must stay till his return. My situation, however, is somewhat preferable to hers, for I am very happy here, though I should be glad to get home by the end of the month. I have no idea that Miss Pearson will return with me. What a fine fellow Charles is, to deceive us into writing two letters to him at Cork! I admire his ingenuity extremely, especially as he is so great a gainer by it. * * * * * I am glad to hear so good an account of Mr. Charde, and only fear that my long absence may occasion his relapse. I practise every day as much as I can--I wish it were more for his sake. . . . Frank has turned a very nice little butter-churn for Fanny. I do not believe that any of the party were aware of the valuables they had left behind; nor can I hear anything of Anna's gloves. Indeed I have not enquired at all about them hitherto. We are very busy making Edward's shirts, and I am proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party. Rowling: Monday [September 5, 1796]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it. . . . I hope John Lovett's accident will not prevent his attending the ball, as you will otherwise be obliged to dance with Mr. Tincton the whole evening. Let me know how J. Harwood deports himself without the Miss Biggs, and which of the Marys will carry the day with my brother James. _We_ were at a ball on Saturday, I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone, and in the evening danced two country-dances and the Boulangeries. I opened the ball with Edward Bridges[74]; the other couples were Lewis Cage and Harriet, Frank and Louisa, Fanny and George. Elizabeth played one country-dance, Lady Bridges the other, which she made Henry dance with her, and Miss Finch played the Boulangeries. In reading over the last three or four lines, I am aware of my having expressed myself in so doubtful a manner that, if I did not tell you to the contrary, you might imagine it was Lady Bridges who made Henry dance with her at the same time that she was playing, which, if not impossible, must appear a very improbable event to you. But it was Elizabeth who danced. We supped there and walked home at night under the shade of two umbrellas. * * * * * We have just got some venison from Godmersham, which the two Mr. Harveys are to devour to-morrow, and on Friday or Saturday the Goodnestone people are to finish their scraps. Henry went away on Friday, as he purposed, _without fayl_. You will hear from him soon, I imagine, as he talked of writing to Steventon shortly. Mr. Richard Harvey is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, and only known to half the neighbourhood, you must not mention it. The lady's name is Musgrave. * * * * * Pray remember me to everybody who does not enquire after me; those who do, remember me without bidding. Give my love to Mary Harrison, and tell her I wish, whenever she is attached to a young man, some _respectable_ Dr. Marchmont may keep them apart for five volumes. Rowling: Thursday [September 15, 1796]. At Nackington we met Lady Sondes' picture over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, and the pictures of her three children in an ante-room, besides Mr. Scott, Miss Fletcher, Mr. Toke, Mr. J. Toke, and the Archdeacon Lynch. Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does not become her complexion. There are two traits in her character which are pleasing--namely, she admires _Camilla_, and drinks no cream in her tea. If you should ever see Lucy, you may tell her that I scolded Miss Fletcher for her negligence in writing, as she desired me to do, but without being able to bring her to any proper sense of shame--that Miss Fletcher says in her defence, that as everybody whom Lucy knew when she was in Canterbury has now left it, she has nothing at all to write to her about. By _everybody_, I suppose Miss Fletcher means that a new set of officers have arrived there. But this is a note of my own. * * * * * His Royal Highness Sir Thomas Williams has at length sailed; the papers say 'on a cruise.' But I hope they are gone to Cork, or I shall have written in vain. Give my love to Jane, as she arrived at Steventon yesterday, I dare say. * * * * * Edward and Frank went out yesterday very early in a couple of shooting jackets, and came home like a couple of bad shots, for they killed nothing at all. They are out again to-day, and are not yet returned. Delightful sport! They are just come home, Edward with his two brace, Frank with his two and a half. What amiable young men! Rowling: Sunday [September 18, 1796]. This morning has been spent in doubt and deliberation, in forming plans and removing difficulties, for it ushered in the day with an event which I had not intended should take place so soon by a week. Frank has received his appointment on board the _Captain John Gore_ commanded by the Triton[75] and will therefore be obliged to be in town on Wednesday; and though I have every disposition in the world to accompany him on that day, I cannot go on the uncertainty of the Pearsons being at home, as I should not have a place to go to in case they were from home. My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'. It will hardly be in Frank's power to take me home--nay, it certainly will not. I shall write again as soon as I get to Greenwich. * * * * * I am very glad that the idea of returning with Frank occurred to me; for as to Henry's coming into Kent again, the time of its taking place is so very uncertain that I should be waiting for _dead men's shoes_. I had once determined to go with Frank to-morrow and take my chance, &c., but they dissuaded me from so rash a step, as I really think on consideration it would have been; for if the Pearsons were not at home, I should inevitably fall a sacrifice to the arts of some fat woman who would make me drunk with small beer. In some way or other, Jane managed to reach Steventon, and at once set to work on _First Impressions_. From that point the letters cease for two years--namely, till October 1798. Several family events occurred during the interval. In January 1797 came the wedding of James Austen and Mary Lloyd. Owing to the friendship which had long existed between the Austens and the Lloyds, this marriage gave great pleasure at Steventon, and Eliza de Feuillide remarks on it as follows:-- James has chosen a second wife in the person of Miss Mary Lloyd, who is not either rich or handsome, but very sensible and good humoured. . . . Jane seems much pleased with the match, and it is natural she should, having long known and liked the lady. Not long after this happy event, the rectory at Steventon was plunged into deep grief, for news came that Cassandra's intended husband, Thomas Fowle, who was expected home from St. Domingo in a few weeks, had died in February of yellow fever. Our chief informant is again Eliza de Feuillide, who writes on May 3:-- This is a very severe stroke to the whole family, and particularly to poor Cassandra, for whom I feel more than I can express. Indeed I am most sincerely grieved at this event, and the pain which it must occasion our worthy relations. Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution and propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation. His kinsman, Lord Craven, who had taken him out as chaplain to his regiment, said afterwards that, had he known of his engagement, he would not have allowed him to go to so dangerous a climate. * * * * * After such a blow as this, Jane was hardly likely to leave Cassandra, and the absence of letters at this time is easily understood. In November of this same year, Mrs. Austen, whose health was not good determined to go to Bath with her daughters. The route from Steventon was by Andover and Devizes, one night being usually spent at the latter place. Mrs. Austen's brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot, was a regular visitor to Bath, and there is every reason to suppose that Jane had already visited the Leigh Perrots or the Coopers, or both, at this still fashionable resort, whose place was only gradually being usurped by Brighton. Owing to the absence of contemporary letters our knowledge of her stay there in 1797 is chiefly derived from reminiscences in later correspondence. Thus in May 1799, when visiting Bath again, Jane remarks that it rained almost all the way from Devizes; 'and our first view of Bath has been just as gloomy as it was last November twelve-month.' We may therefore imagine them 'entering Bath on a wet afternoon'--like Lady Russell, in _Persuasion_--'and driving through the long course of streets . . . amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens.' The Austens probably stayed with the Perrots at their house, No. 1 Paragon Buildings. Writing in April 1805, Jane describes a visit to a riding-school, and says: 'Seven years and four months ago we went to the same riding-house to see Miss Lefroy's performance. What a different set are we now moving in!' It would be interesting to know in what way the set differed, whether in kind or only in the individuals composing it. In this earlier visit Jane was likely to have seen plenty of company, as the Leigh Perrots had a large acquaintance.[76] The Austens stayed at Bath into December, for Elizabeth de Feuillide mentions, on December 11, that she had heard very lately from Jane, 'who is still at Bath with her mother and sister. Mr. Hampson, whom I saw yesterday . . . told me he had heard Cassandra was going to be married, but Jane says not a word of it.' When we think of Jane's silence, and still more of Cassandra's recent grief, we may safely discredit this extremely improbable rumour. On returning home for Christmas, they received a piece of news which, even if it did not come entirely as a surprise, can hardly have given unmixed pleasure. This was the engagement of Henry Austen to his cousin, Eliza de Feuillide--his senior by some ten years. Intended originally for the Church, Henry Austen had abandoned the idea of taking Orders, and had joined the Oxford Militia as lieutenant, in 1793, becoming adjutant and captain four years later. Though he was endowed with many attractive gifts there was a certain infirmity of purpose in his character that was hardly likely to be remedied by a marriage to his very pleasure-loving cousin. In default of Eliza's letter on the occasion to her uncle, we may quote that which she wrote to Warren Hastings:-- DEAR SIR,--As I flatter myself you still take an interest in my welfare, I think it incumbent on me to acquaint you with a circumstance by which it must be materially influenced. I have consented to an Union with my Cousin, Captain Austen, who has the honour of being known to you. He has been for some time in Possession of a comfortable income, and the excellence of his Heart, Temper and Understanding, together with steady attachment to me, his Affection for my little Boy, and disinterested concurrence in the disposal of my Property in favour of this latter, have at length induced me to an acquiescence which I have withheld for more than two years. Need I say, my dear Sir, that I most earnestly wish for your approbation on this occasion, and that it is with the sincerest attachment I shall ever remain Your much obliged and affectionate God-daughter, ELIZABETH DE FEUILLIDE. I beg leave to present my affectionate compliments to Mrs. Hastings. December 26, 1797. Neither side wished for a long engagement, and they were married on December 31. Henry continued with the Militia regiment probably till the Peace of 1802. By 1804 he had joined a brother Militia officer of the name of Maunde, and set up as banker and army agent, with offices in Albany, Piccadilly; removing in or before 1808 to 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Poor little Hastings de Feuillide became subject to epilepsy, and died on October 9, 1801, while the Henry Austens were living in Upper Berkeley Street.[77] During the first half of 1798, Jane, fresh from her late visit to Bath, was able to devote some happy months of unbroken leisure to writing the first draft of the book known to us as _Northanger Abbey_; but her comedy was once more interrupted by one of the tragedies of real life. On August 9 occurred the death of her cousin, Lady Williams (Jane Cooper): while she was driving herself in a whiskey, a dray-horse ran away and drove against the chaise. She was thrown out and killed on the spot: 'never spoke again,' so Mrs. Lybbe Powys records the news on August 14. Jane Williams had been married from Steventon Rectory, and had been, both before and after that event, so frequent a visitor there that her death must have been severely felt by the Austens--especially by the daughters of the family, her friends and contemporaries. FOOTNOTES: [70] _Juniper Hall_, p. 223. [71] In a memorandum written by Cassandra. [72] Other portions of these two letters are quoted in Chapter VI. [73] Cassandra was now staying with the Fowles at Kintbury, and 'Mary' was no doubt Eliza Fowle's sister, Mary Lloyd; not yet engaged to James Austen. [74] Edward Bridges was brother, and Harriet and Louisa were sisters, of Elizabeth Austen; Lady Bridges being their mother. Harriet was afterwards married to the son of Archbishop Moore. [75] A playful inversion on Jane's part. [76] Mrs. Lybbe Powys records in her diary under April 26, 1799: 'To a party at Mr. Leigh Perrot's; eight tables, ninety people' (_Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys_, 1756-1808). [77] _Gentleman's Magazine_, vol. lxxi. p. 965; see also p. 1049. CHAPTER VIII GODMERSHAM AND STEVENTON 1798-1799 Some change after this shock must have been desirable; and at the end of the same month Mr. and Mrs. Austen, with Cassandra and Jane, started on a visit to the Edward Austens--no longer at Rowling but at Godmersham, which, by the generosity of Mrs. Knight, was now become their residence. Edward would naturally wish for a visit from his parents and sisters in his new and beautiful home. We know very little of Jane's doings there, except that she attended a ball at Ashford; but, on her parting from Cassandra (who was left behind) and returning to Steventon with her father and mother, we find ourselves fortunately in the company of the letters once more. Mrs. Austen was at this time in poor health, and Jane evidently felt the responsibility of taking charge of her in Cassandra's absence. 'Bull and George,' Dartford: Wednesday [October 24, 1798]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--You have already heard from Daniel, I conclude, in what excellent time we reached and quitted Sittingbourne, and how very well my mother bore her journey thither. I am now able to send you a continuation of the same good account of her. She was very little fatigued on her arrival at this place, has been refreshed by a comfortable dinner, and now seems quite stout. It wanted five minutes of twelve when we left Sittingbourne, from whence we had a famous pair of horses, which took us to Rochester in an hour and a quarter; the postboy seemed determined to show my mother that Kentish drivers were not always tedious, and really drove as fast as _Cax_. Our next stage was not quite so expeditiously performed; the load was heavy and our horses very indifferent. However, we were in such good time, and my mother bore her journey so well, that expedition was of little importance to us; and as it was, we were very little more than two hours and a half coming hither, and it was scarcely past four when we stopped at the inn. * * * * * I should have begun my letter soon after our arrival but for a little adventure which prevented me. After we had been here a quarter of an hour it was discovered that my writing and dressing boxes had been by accident put into a chaise which was just packing off as we came in, and were driven away towards Gravesend in their way to the West Indies. No part of my property could have been such a prize before, for in my writing box was all my worldly wealth, £7, and my dear Harry's deputation.[78] Mr. Nottley immediately despatched a man and horse after the chaise, and in half an hour's time I had the pleasure of being as rich as ever; they were got about two or three miles off. My day's journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. Your watchfulness with regard to the weather on our accounts was very kind and very effectual. We had one heavy shower on leaving Sittingbourne, but afterwards the clouds cleared away, and we had a very bright _chrystal_ afternoon. My father is now reading the _Midnight Bell_[79] which he has got from the library, and mother sitting by the fire. Our route to-morrow is not determined. We have none of us much inclination for London, and if Mr. Nottley will give us leave, I think we shall go to Staines through Croydon and Kingston, which will be much pleasanter than any other way; but he is decidedly for Clapham and Battersea. God bless you all! Yours affectionately, J. A. I flatter myself that _itty Dordy_[80] will not forget me at least under a week. Kiss him for me. Steventon: Saturday [October 27, 1798]. We arrived here yesterday between four and five, but I cannot send you quite so triumphant an account of our last day's journey as of the first and second. Soon after I had finished my letter from Staines, my mother began to suffer from the exercise or fatigue of travelling, and she was a good deal indisposed. * * * * * James called on us just as we were going to tea, and my mother was well enough to talk very cheerfully to him before she went to bed. . . . They [James and Mary] were to have dined here to-day, but the weather is too bad. I have had the pleasure of hearing that Martha is with them. James fetched her from Ibthorp on Thursday, and she will stay with them till she removes to Kintbury. I am very grand indeed; I had the dignity of dropping out my mother's laudanum last night. I carry about the keys of the wine and closet, and twice since I began this letter have had orders to give in the kitchen. Our dinner was very good yesterday and the chicken boiled perfectly tender; therefore I shall not be obliged to dismiss Nanny on that account. * * * * * Your letter was chaperoned here by one from Mrs. Cooke, in which she says that _Battleridge_[81] is not to come out before January, and she is so little satisfied with Cawthorn's dilatoriness that she never means to employ him again. Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband. There has been a great deal of rain here for this last fortnight, much more than in Kent, and indeed we found the roads all the way from Staines most disgracefully dirty. Steventon Lane has its full share of it, and I don't know when I shall be able to get to Deane. * * * * * My dear _itty Dordy's_ remembrance of me is very pleasing to me--foolishly pleasing, because I know it will be over so soon. My attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manner until a few years have turned him into an ungovernable ungracious fellow. The books from Winton are all unpacked and put away; the binding has compressed them most conveniently, and there is now very good room in the bookcase for all that we wish to have there. I believe the servants were all very glad to see us. Nanny was, I am sure. She confesses that it was very dull, and yet she had her child with her till last Sunday. I understand that there are some grapes left, but I believe not many; they must be gathered as soon as possible, or this rain will entirely rot them. Saturday [November 17, 1798].[82] My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence, and for this reason--I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping. I have had some ragout veal, and I mean to have some haricot mutton to-morrow. We are to kill a pig soon. There is to be a ball at Basingstoke next Thursday. Our assemblies have very kindly declined ever since we laid down the carriage, so that dis-convenience and dis-inclination to go have kept pace together. * * * * * _Sunday._--I have just received a note from James to say that Mary was brought to bed last night, at eleven o'clock, of a fine little boy,[83] and that everything is going on very well. My mother had desired to know nothing of it before it should be all over, and we were clever enough to prevent her having any suspicion of it, though Jenny, who had been left here by her mistress, was sent for home. Steventon: Sunday [November 25, 1798]. MY DEAR SISTER,--I expected to have heard from you this morning, but no letter is come. I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary's children, if, instead of thanking me for the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James. I am sure nobody can desire your letters so much as I do, and I don't think anybody deserves them so well. Having now relieved my heart of a great deal of malevolence, I will proceed to tell you that Mary continues quite well, and my mother tolerably so. I saw the former on Friday, and though I had seen her comparatively hearty the Tuesday before, I was really amazed at the improvement which three days had made in her. She looked well, her spirits were perfectly good, and she spoke much more vigorously than Elizabeth did when we left Godmersham. I had only a glimpse at the child, who was asleep; but Miss Debary told me that his eyes were large, dark, and handsome. _She_ looks much as she used to do, is netting herself a gown in worsteds, and wears what Mrs. Birch would call a _pot hat_. A short and compendious history of Miss Debary! * * * * * We have got _Fitz-Albini_;[84] my father has bought it against my private wishes, for it does not quite satisfy my feelings that we should purchase the only one of Egerton's works of which his family are ashamed. That these scruples, however, do not at all interfere with my reading it, you will easily believe. We have neither of us yet finished the first volume. My father is disappointed--_I_ am not, for I expected nothing better. Never did any book carry more internal evidence of its author. Every sentiment is completely Egerton's. There is very little story, and what there is is told in a strange, unconnected way. There are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated. We have not been able to recognise any of them hitherto, except Dr. and Mrs. Hey and Mr. Oxenden, who is not very tenderly treated. . . . We have got Boswell's _Tour to the Hebrides_, and are to have his _Life of Johnson_; and as some money will yet remain in Burdon's hands, it is to be laid out in the purchase of Cowper's works. This would please Mr. Clarke, could he know it. Steventon: [December 1, 1798]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am so good as to write you again thus speedily, to let you know that I have just heard from Frank. He was at Cadiz, alive and well, on October 19, and had then very lately received a letter from you, written as long ago as when the _London_ was at St. Helen's. But his _raly_ latest intelligence of us was in one from me of September 1st, which I sent soon after we got to Godmersham. He had written a packet full for his dearest friends in England, early in October, to go by the _Excellent_; but the _Excellent_ was not sailed, nor likely to sail, when he despatched this to me. It comprehended letters for both of us, for Lord Spencer,[85] Mr. Daysh,[86] and the East India Directors. Lord St. Vincent had left the fleet when he wrote, and was gone to Gibraltar, it was said to superintend the fitting out of a private expedition from thence against some of the enemies' ports; Minorca or Malta were conjectured to be the objects. Frank writes in good spirits, but says that our correspondence cannot be so easily carried on in future as it has been, as the communication between Cadiz and Lisbon is less frequent than formerly. You and my mother, therefore, must not alarm yourselves at the long intervals that may divide his letters. I address this advice to you two as being the most tender-hearted of the family. My mother made her _entrée_ into the dressing-room through crowds of admiring spectators yesterday afternoon, and we all drank tea together for the first time these five weeks. She has had a tolerable night, and bids fair for a continuance in the same brilliant course of action to-day. . . . Mr. Lyford[87] was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither. We live entirely in the dressing-room now, which I like very much; I always feel so much more elegant in it than in the parlour. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering. _Sunday._--My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward's pigs, and desires he may be told, as encouragement to his taste for them, that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in _his_ pigs, has had pigstyes of a most elegant construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises. This and the following letter contain allusions to Jane's wearing caps. Those intended for use at balls, &c. would be smart head-dresses, worn at that period by younger as well as older women.[88] In later life, the Miss Austens seem to have been rather indifferent to fashion and beauty in their clothing, although always very neat. Steventon: Tuesday [December 18, 1798]. I took the liberty a few days ago of asking your black velvet bonnet to lend me its cawl, which it very readily did, and by which I have been enabled to give a considerable improvement of dignity to my cap, which was before too _nidgetty_ to please me. I shall wear it on Thursday, but I hope you will not be offended with me for following your advice as to its ornaments only in part. I still venture to retain the narrow silver round it, put twice round without any bow, and instead of the black military feather shall put in the coquelicot one as being smarter, and besides, coquelicot is to be all the fashion this winter. After the ball I shall probably make it entirely black. I am sorry that our dear Charles begins to feel the dignity of ill-usage. My father will write to Admiral Gambier.[89] He must have already received so much satisfaction from his acquaintance and patronage of Frank, that he will be delighted, I dare say, to have another of the family introduced to him. * * * * * I am very much obliged to my dear little George for his message--for his _love_ at least; his _duty_, I suppose, was only in consequence of some hint of my favourable intentions towards him from his father or mother. I am sincerely rejoiced, however, that I ever was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of tea.[90] Give my best love to him. I have received a very civil note from Mrs. Martin, requesting my name as a subscriber to her library, which opens January 14, and my name, or rather yours, is accordingly given. My mother finds the money. Mary subscribes too, which I am glad of, but hardly expected. As an inducement to subscribe, Mrs. Martin tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, &c. She might have spared this pretension to _our_ family, who are great novel-readers and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers. * * * * * I enjoyed the hard black frosts of last week very much, and one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself. I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before. * * * * * We dine now at half-past three, and have done dinner, I suppose, before you begin. We drink tea at half-past six. I am afraid you will despise us. My father reads Cowper to us in the morning, to which I listen when I can. How do you spend your evenings? I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her, and that Edward goes to sleep. * * * * * _Wednesday._--I have changed my mind, and changed the trimmings of my cap this morning; they are now such as you suggested. I felt as if I should not prosper if I strayed from your directions, and I think it makes me look more like Lady Conyngham now than it did before, which is all that one lives for now. I believe I _shall_ make my new gown like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect? * * * * * People get so horribly poor and economical in this part of the world that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there. I must do similar justice, however, to the Windsor neighbourhood. Steventon: Monday night [December 24, 1798]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I have got some pleasant news for you which I am eager to communicate, and therefore begin my letter sooner, though I shall not _send_ it sooner than usual. Admiral Gambier, in reply to my father's application, writes as follows:--'As it is usual to keep young officers in small vessels, it being most proper on account of their inexperience, and it being also a situation where they are more in the way of learning their duty, your son has been continued in the _Scorpion_; but I have mentioned to the Board of Admiralty his wish to be in a frigate, and when a proper opportunity offers and it is judged that he has taken his turn in a small ship, I hope he will be removed. With regard to your son now in the _London_ I am glad I can give you the assurance that his promotion is likely to take place very soon, as Lord Spencer has been so good as to say he would include him in an arrangement that he proposes making in a short time relative to some promotions in that quarter.' There! I may now finish my letter and go and hang myself, for I am sure I can neither write nor do anything which will not appear insipid to you after this. _Now_, I really think he will soon be made, and only wish we could communicate our foreknowledge of the event to him whom it principally concerns. My father has written to Daysh to desire that he will inform us, if he can, when the commission is sent. Your chief wish is now ready to be accomplished; and could Lord Spencer give happiness to Martha at the same time, what a joyful heart he would make of yours! I have sent the same extract of the sweets of Gambier to Charles, who, poor fellow, though he sinks into nothing but an humble attendant on the hero of the piece, will, I hope, be contented with the prospect held out to him. By what the Admiral says, it appears as if he had been designedly kept in the _Scorpion_. But I will not torment myself with conjectures and suppositions; facts shall satisfy me. Frank had not heard from any of us for ten weeks when he wrote me on November 12 in consequence of Lord St. Vincent being removed to Gibraltar. When his commission is sent, however, it will not be so long on its road as our letters, because all the Government despatches are forwarded by land to his lordship from Lisbon with great regularity. * * * * * I spent my time [at Manydown] very quietly and very pleasantly with Catherine. Miss Blachford is agreeable enough. I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal. Our ball was very thin, but by no means unpleasant. There were thirty-one people, and only eleven ladies out of the number, and but five single women in the room. Of the gentlemen present you may have some idea from the list of my partners--Mr. Wood, G. Lefroy, Rice, a Mr. Butcher (belonging to the Temples, a sailor and not of the 11th Light Dragoons), Mr. Temple (not the horrid one of all), Mr. Wm. Orde (cousin to the Kingsclere man), Mr. John Harwood, and Mr. Calland, who appeared as usual with his hat in his hand, and stood every now and then behind Catherine and me to be talked to and abused for not dancing. We teased him, however, into it at last. I was very glad to see him again after so long a separation, and he was altogether rather the genius and flirt of the evening. He enquired after you. There were twenty dances, and I danced them all, and without any fatigue. I was glad to find myself capable of dancing so much, and with so much satisfaction as I did; from my slender enjoyment of the Ashford balls (as assemblies for dancing) I had not thought myself equal to it, but in cold weather and with few couples I fancy I could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour. My black cap was openly admired by Mrs. Lefroy, and secretly I imagine by everybody else in the room. * * * * * _Tuesday._--I thank you for your long letter, which I will endeavour to deserve by writing the rest of this as closely as possible. I am full of joy at much of your information; that you should have been to a ball, and have danced at it, and supped with the Prince, and that you should meditate the purchase of a new muslin gown, are delightful circumstances. * * * * * Poor Edward! It is very hard that he, who has everything else in the world that he can wish for, should not have good health too. I know no one more deserving of happiness without alloy than Edward is. * * * * * Of my charities to the poor since I came home you shall have a faithful account. I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins; amounting in all to about half a guinea. But I have no reason to suppose that the _Battys_ would accept of anything, because I have not made them the offer. * * * * * The Lords of the Admiralty will have enough of our applications at present, for I hear from Charles that he has written to Lord Spencer himself to be removed. I am afraid his Serene Highness will be in a passion, and order some of our heads to be cut off. Steventon: Friday [December 28, 1798]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Frank is made. He was yesterday raised to the rank of Commander, and appointed to the _Peterel_ sloop, now at Gibraltar. A letter from Daysh has just announced this, and as it is confirmed by a very friendly one from Mr. Mathew to the same effect, transcribing one from Admiral Gambier to the General,[91] we have no reason to suspect the truth of it. As soon as you have cried a little for joy, you may go on, and learn farther that the India House have taken _Captain Austen's_ petition into consideration--this comes from Daysh--and likewise that Lieutenant Charles John Austen is removed to the _Tamar_ frigate--this comes from the Admiral. We cannot find out where the _Tamar_ is, but I hope we shall now see Charles here at all events. This letter is to be dedicated entirely to good news. If you will send my father an account of your washing and letter expenses, &c., he will send you a draft for the amount of it, as well as for your next quarter,[92] and for Edward's rent. If you don't buy a muslin gown now on the strength of this money and Frank's promotion, I shall never forgive you. Mrs. Lefroy has just sent me word that Lady Dorchester meant to invite me to her ball on January 8, which, though an humble blessing compared with what the last page records, I do not consider as any calamity. I cannot write any more now, but I have written enough to make you very happy, and therefore may safely conclude. Steventon: Tuesday [January 8, 1799]. I am tolerably glad to hear that Edward's income is a good one--as glad as I can be at anybody's being rich except you and me--and I am thoroughly rejoiced to hear of his present to you. * * * * * I assure you that I dread the idea of going to Brighton[93] as much as you do, but I am not without hopes that something may happen to prevent it. * * * * * [_Wednesday._]--You express so little anxiety about my being murdered under Ashe Park Copse by Mrs. Hulbert's servant, that I have a great mind not to tell you whether I was or not, and shall only say that I did not return home that night or the next, as Martha kindly made room for me in her bed, which was the shut-up one in the new nursery. Nurse and the child slept upon the floor, and there we all were in some confusion and great comfort. The bed did exceedingly well for us, both to lie awake in and talk till two o'clock, and to sleep in the rest of the night. I love Martha better than ever, and I mean to go and see her, if I can, when she gets home. We all dined at the Harwoods' on Thursday, and the party broke up the next morning. My sweet little George! I am delighted to hear that he has such an inventive genius as to face-making. I admired his yellow wafer very much, and hope he will choose the wafer for your next letter. I wore my green shoes last night, and took my _white fan_ with me; I am very glad he never threw it into the river. Mrs. Knight[94] giving up the Godmersham estate to Edward was no such prodigious act of generosity after all, it seems, for she has reserved herself an income out of it still; this ought to be known, that her conduct may not be overrated. I rather think Edward shows the most magnanimity of the two, in accepting her resignation with such incumbrances. The more I write, the better my eye gets, so I shall at least keep on till it is quite well, before I give up my pen to my mother. * * * * * I do not think I was very much in request [at the Kempshot ball]. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about. I danced with Mr. John Wood again, twice with a Mr. South, a lad from Winchester, who, I suppose, is as far from being related to the bishop of that diocese as it is possible to be, with G. Lefroy, and J. Harwood, who I think takes to me rather more than he used to do. One of my gayest actions was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured. The Miss Charterises were there, and played the parts of the Miss Edens with great spirit. Charles never came. Naughty Charles! I suppose he could not get superseded in time. * * * * * I do not wonder at your wanting to read _First Impressions_ again, so seldom as you have gone through it, and that so long ago. I _shall_ be able to send this to the post to-day, which exalts me to the utmost pinnacle of human felicity, and makes me bask in the sunshine of prosperity, or gives me any other sensation of pleasure in studied language which you may prefer. Do not be angry with me for not filling my sheet, and believe me yours affectionately, J. A. Steventon: Monday [January 21, 1799]. Charles leaves us to-night. The _Tamar_ is in the Downs, and Mr. Daysh advises him to join her there directly, as there is no chance of her going to the westward. Charles does not approve of this at all, and will not be much grieved if he should be too late for her before she sails, as he may then hope to get into a better station. He attempted to go to town last night, and got as far on his road thither as Deane Gate, but both the coaches were full, and we had the pleasure of seeing him back again. * * * * * Martha writes me word that Charles was very much admired at Kintbury, and Mrs. Lefroy never saw anyone so much improved in her life, and thinks him handsomer than Henry. He appears to far more advantage here than he did at Godmersham, not surrounded by strangers and neither oppressed by a pain in his face or powder in his hair. * * * * * Yesterday came a letter to my mother from Edward Cooper to announce, not the birth of a child, but of a living; for Mrs. Leigh[95] has begged his acceptance of the Rectory of Hamstall-Ridware in Staffordshire, vacant by Mr. Johnson's death. We collect from his letter that he means to reside there, in which he shows his wisdom. Staffordshire is a good way off; so we shall see nothing more of them till, some fifteen years hence, the Miss Coopers are presented to us, fine, jolly, handsome, ignorant girls. The living is valued at £140 a year, but perhaps it may be improvable. How will they be able to convey the furniture of the dressing-room so far in safety? * * * * * Our first cousins seem all dropping off very fast. One is incorporated into the family,[96] another dies,[97] and a third goes into Staffordshire. . . . * * * * * [_Tuesday._]--Our own particular brother got a place in the coach last night, and is now, I suppose, in town. I have no objection at all to your buying our gowns there, as your imagination has pictured to you exactly such a one as is necessary to make me happy. You quite abash me by your progress in notting, for I am still without silk. You must get me some in town or in Canterbury; it should be finer than yours. I thought Edward would not approve of Charles being a crop,[98] and rather wished you to conceal it from him at present, lest it might fall on his spirits and retard his recovery. * * * * * _Wednesday._--I have just heard from Charles, who is by this time at Deal. He is to be Second Lieutenant, which pleases him very well. The _Endymion_ is come into the Downs, which pleases him likewise. He expects to be ordered to Sheerness shortly, as the _Tamar_ has never been refitted. My father and mother made the same match for you last night, and are very much pleased with it. _He_ is a beauty of my mother's. FOOTNOTES: [78] Harry was one of the Digweeds--Edward Austen's tenants at Steventon--who shared with the Rectory party the _deputed_ right of shooting over the Manor (_Persuasion_, ch. iii.). The _New English Dictionary_ (s.v.) says 'The deputation was necessary to constitute a gamekeeper; but it was also frequently used as a means of giving to friends the privilege of shooting game over an estate.' The term of endearment has of course no particular significance. [79] _The Midnight Bell_, a German story (London, 1798), is ascribed in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ to Francis Lathom. This book is mentioned in chapter vi. of _Northanger Abbey_. [80] Afterwards, as George Knight, a well-known Kent cricketer, and one of the principal agents in the introduction of round-arm bowling. [81] _Battleridge, an historical tale founded on facts._ By a lady of quality [? Mrs. Cooke], London, 1799. [82] The first part of this letter is inserted in Chapter VI. [83] James Edward Austen (Leigh), the author of the _Memoir_; in his youth always (after his uncle and cousin had become 'Edward Knight') known as 'Edward Austen.' [84] _Arthur Fitz-Albini_, a novel [by Sir Egerton Brydges]. London, 1798. [85] First Lord of the Admiralty, 1794-1801. [86] George Daysh, clerk in the Ticket Office, Navy Office. [87] The Basingstoke doctor. [88] Anne Elliot, in _Persuasion_, thought that a cap would be a very suitable present for her sister Mary, who was a young woman, and who certainly wished to remain so. [89] One of the Lords of the Admiralty: afterwards Lord Gambier. [90] On his Aunt Jane's birthday. [91] General Mathew, father of James Austen's first wife. [92] The Miss Austens seem to have had a dress allowance of £20 a year. Cf. _Brabourne_, vol. i. p. 189. [93] Brighton had possibly been suggested to her brother Edward as an alternative for Bath. [94] This is of course an amusing mis-statement of the writer's real opinion. See p. 83. [95] The Hon. Mary Leigh, of Stoneleigh. [96] Eliza de Feuillide. [97] Lady Williams. [98] I.e. without powder or pigtail. CHAPTER IX THE LEIGH PERROTS AND BATH 1799-1800 Mrs. Austen's brother, James Leigh Perrot, and his wife had for many years led a prosperous and uneventful life at Scarlets, enjoying the respect and friendship of a large circle of acquaintances. Scarlets was a small property on the Bath road, about thirty miles from London, adjoining the hamlet of Hare Hatch, where (as was often the case on a great highroad) a number of gentlemen's places of moderate size were congregated within easy reach of each other. Among those who sooner or later were neighbours of the Leigh Perrots were Maria Edgeworth's father Richard Lovell Edgeworth (who speaks of the help he received from Mr. Perrot in his experiments of telegraphing from Hare Hatch to Nettlebed by means of windmills), and Thomas Day, the author of _Sandford and Merton_. The house at Scarlets in its then existing shape was the work of Mr. Leigh Perrot, and was of a suitable size for a childless couple in easy circumstances. Its owner had abilities which might have stood him in good stead in any profession, had he adopted one; and he was of a kind and affectionate disposition, combining an easy temper with ready wit, and much resolution of character. His wife was hardly formed for popularity, but she was highly respected. She was not exactly open-handed, but she had a great idea of the claims of family ties, and a keen sense of justice as between herself and others. The couple were unusually devoted to each other. The only crook in their lot appeared to be the constant gout attacks from which the husband suffered, and the necessity for frequent visits to Bath: visits, by the way, which had helped to give to their niece, Jane Austen, such good opportunities for studying the Bath varieties of human nature. The journey, however, of the Austens to Bath in the spring of 1799 (described in our next letters) was independent of the Leigh Perrots. Edward Austen had been suffering, like his uncle, from gout, and determined to try the waters of Bath; his mother and Jane accompanying his family party thither. But the Perrots were already settled in Paragon Buildings[99] when the Austens arrived, and the two families would be constantly meeting. The Austens took up their quarters in Queen Square, which Jane seems to have liked much better than she made her Miss Musgroves like it when she wrote _Persuasion_, sixteen years later. 13 Queen Square: Friday [May 17, 1799]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Our journey yesterday went off exceedingly well; nothing occurred to alarm or delay us. We found the roads in excellent order, had very good horses all the way, and reached Devizes with ease by four o'clock. I suppose John has told you in what manner we were divided when we left Andover, and no alteration was afterwards made. At Devizes we had comfortable rooms and a good dinner, to which we sat down about five; amongst other things we had asparagus and a lobster, which made me wish for you, and some cheesecakes, on which the children[100] made so delightful a supper as to endear the town of Devizes to them for a long time. Well, here we are at Bath; we got here about one o'clock, and have been arrived just long enough to go over the house, fix on our rooms, and be very well pleased with the whole of it. Poor Elizabeth has had a dismal ride of it from Devizes, for it has rained almost all the way, and our first view of Bath has been just as gloomy as it was last November twelvemonth. I have got so many things to say, so many things equally important, that I know not on which to decide at present, and shall therefore go and eat with the children. We stopped in Paragon as we came along, but as it was too wet and dirty for us to get out, we could only see Frank, who told us that his master was very indifferent, but had had a better night last night than usual. * * * * * We are exceedingly pleased with the house; the rooms are quite as large as we expected. Mrs. Bromley is a fat woman in mourning, and a little black kitten runs about the staircase. Elizabeth has the apartment within the drawing-room; she wanted my mother to have it, but as there was no bed in the inner one, and the stairs are so much easier of ascent, or my mother so much stronger than in Paragon as not to regard the double flight, it is settled for us to be above, where we have two very nice-sized rooms, with dirty quilts and everything comfortable. I have the outward and larger apartment, as I ought to have; which is quite as large as our bed-room at home, and my mother's is not materially less. The beds are both as large as any at Steventon, and I have a very nice chest of drawers and a closet full of shelves--so full indeed that there is nothing else in it, and it should therefore be called a cupboard rather than a closet, I suppose. * * * * * There was a very long list of arrivals here in the newspaper yesterday, so that we need not immediately dread absolute solitude; and there is a public breakfast in Sydney Gardens every morning, so that we shall not be wholly starved. Yours very affectionately, JANE. 13 Queen Square: Sunday [June 2, 1799]. Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries, and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, and apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen any of them in hats. A plum or greengage would cost three shillings; cherries and grapes about five, I believe, but this is at some of the dearest shops. My aunt has told me of a very cheap one, near Walcot Church, to which I shall go in quest of something for you. I have never seen an old woman at the pump-room. * * * * * I spent Friday evening with the Mapletons, and was obliged to submit to being pleased in spite of my inclination. We took a very charming walk from six to eight up Beacon Hill, and across some fields, to the village of Charlecombe, which is sweetly situated in a little green valley, as a village with such a name ought to be. Marianne is sensible and intelligent, and even Jane, considering how fair she is, is not unpleasant. We had a Miss North and a Mr. Gould of our party; the latter walked home with me after tea. He is a very young man, just entered Oxford, wears spectacles, and has heard that _Evelina_ was written by Dr. Johnson. * * * * * There is to be a grand gala on Tuesday evening[101] in Sydney Gardens, a concert, with illuminations and fireworks. To the latter Elizabeth and I look forward with pleasure, and even the concert will have more than its usual charm for me, as the gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound. In the morning Lady Willoughby is to present the colours to some corps, or Yeomanry, or other, in the Crescent. 13 Queen Square: Tuesday [June 11, 1799]. I would not let Martha read _First Impressions_ again upon any account, and am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it. As for _Fitz-Albini_, when I get home she shall have it, as soon as ever she will own that Mr. Elliott is handsomer than Mr. Lance, that fair men are preferable to black; for I mean to take every opportunity of rooting out her prejudices. I am very glad you liked my lace, and so are you, and so is Martha, and we are all glad together. I have got your cloak home, which is quite delightful--as delightful at least as half the circumstances which are called so. I do not know what is the matter with me to-day, but I cannot write quietly; I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other. Fortunately I have nothing very particular to say. * * * * * Fanny desires her love to you, her love to grandpapa, her love to Anna, and her love to Hannah; the latter is particularly to be remembered. Edward desires his love to you, to grandpapa, to Anna, to little Edward, to Aunt James and Uncle James, and he hopes all your turkeys and ducks, and chicken and guinea fowls are very well; and he wishes you very much to send him a printed letter, and so does Fanny--and they both rather think they shall answer it. 13 Queen Square: Wednesday [June 19, 1799]. Last Sunday we all drank tea in Paragon; my uncle is still in his flannels, but is getting better again. * * * * * Last night we were in Sydney Gardens again, as there was a repetition of the gala which went off so ill on the 4th. We did not go till nine, and then were in very good time for the fireworks, which were really beautiful, and surpassing my expectation; the illuminations too were very pretty. The weather was as favourable as it was otherwise a fortnight ago. The play on Saturday is, _I hope_, to conclude our gaieties here, for nothing but a lengthened stay will make it otherwise. We go with Mrs. Fellowes. The Austens quitted Bath on Wednesday, June 26, reaching Steventon on the following day, and leaving the Leigh Perrots to an unexpected fate--which they had done nothing whatever to deserve.[102] On Thursday, August 8, Mrs. Leigh Perrot went into a milliner's shop at the corner of Bath and Stall Streets, kept by a certain Mrs. Gregory (but known as Smith's), and bought a piece of _black_ lace. She paid for it, and took it away wrapped up in a piece of paper. After leaving the shop, Mrs. Perrot met her husband and strolled about with him. As they re-passed the same shop a quarter of an hour later, Mrs. Gregory rushed out and accused Mrs. Perrot of having in her possession a piece of _white_ lace. Mrs. Perrot replied that if so it must have been put up in her parcel by mistake. She then handed her parcel to Mrs. Gregory to examine, when a piece of _white_ lace was found therein as well as a piece of _black_. Mrs. Gregory at once accused Mrs. Perrot of having stolen it, and, refusing to listen to any protest, made off with the incriminating piece of lace. A little later, as the Perrots were turning the corner of the Abbey Churchyard, Charles Filby, the shop assistant who had actually sold the black lace, came up and asked Mr. Perrot his name. Mr. Perrot replied that he lived at No. 1 Paragon Buildings, and that his name was on the door. On the same day, Mrs. Gregory and Filby went to the town hall to lay information before the magistrates; but found them so busily engaged in dealing with the excesses of the soldiers who were at that time passing through Bath, that the information could not be taken before August 14. Meanwhile, the piece of _white_ lace was lodged--at any rate, for the night of August 8--at the house of a certain printer named Gye. The result of the magistrates' inquiry may be discovered in _The Times_ of August 20, where we read:-- The Lady of a Gentleman of Bath, possessed of a good fortune, and respected by a numerous circle of acquaintance, was committed on Thursday by G. Chapman, Esq., the Mayor, to the County Gaol at Ilchester, on a charge of privately stealing a card of lace from a haberdasher's shop. As Mrs. Perrot did not come up for trial until the end of the following March, she had to undergo a long and trying confinement. It appears that she was not lodged actually in the gaol, but in some neighbouring house, kept by a man of the name of Scadding. The charge was a monstrous one; the accused had ample means to indulge every wish, and nothing short of lunacy (of which she never showed the slightest sign) could have induced her to commit so petty a theft. Her high character and the absence of motive combined to render it incredible, and, had she been capable of such a deed, she would not have courted detection by walking quietly past the shop, a quarter of an hour later, with the parcel in her hand. There were also strong reasons for thinking that the accusation was the result of a deep-laid plot. Gye, the printer, who lived in the market-place, was believed to be the chief instigator. His character was indifferent, and he had money invested in Gregory's shop; and the business was in so bad a way that there was a temptation to seek for some large haul by way of blackmail. Mrs. Leigh Perrot was selected as the victim, people thought, because her husband was so extremely devoted to her that he would be sure to do anything to save her from the least vexation. If so, the conspirators were mistaken in their man. Mr. Perrot resolved to see the matter through, and, taking no notice of the many suggestions as to hush-money that were apparently circulated, engaged the best counsel possible, secured his most influential acquaintance as witnesses to his wife's character, and spent the terrible intervening period in confinement with her at Ilchester. He was well aware that the criminal law of England, as it then existed, made the lot of untried prisoners as hard, and the difficulty of proving their innocence as great, as possible; he knew also that in the seething disquiet of men's minds, brought about by the French Revolution, it was quite possible they might encounter a jury anxious to cast discredit on the well-to-do classes. He was therefore prepared for a failure of justice; and, we are told, had arranged that in case of an adverse verdict, followed by transportation, he would sell his property and accompany his wife across the seas. Among the warmest supporters of the Leigh Perrots was Mr. Morris--a lawyer of eminence, well used to dealing with evidence, but now living as an invalid at Bath. He was a total stranger to the accused, but maintained most energetically that, apart from her well-known character, the nature of the evidence adduced against her would have been sufficient to prove her innocence. The amazement and indignation of the Steventon party may be imagined. They were too sensible to believe that so mean and objectless a crime should really have been committed by a respectable woman--a near relation of their own, whom they knew intimately; but it was not easy to determine how to show their sympathy. Mr. and Mrs. Austen seem at last to have come (no doubt with their daughters' good-will) to the momentous decision mentioned in the following letter, which was addressed to Mrs. Leigh Perrot on January 11, 1800, by her cousin, Montague Cholmeley.[103] You tell me that your good sister Austen has offered you one or both of her daughters to continue with you during your stay in that vile place, but you decline the kind offer, as you cannot procure them accommodation in the house with you, and you cannot let those elegant young women be your inmates in a prison, nor be subjected to the inconveniences which you are obliged to put up with. So Cassandra and Jane just escaped a residence in gaol and contact with criminals. Another letter written about this time must have given much pleasure to the Leigh Perrots:-- White Hart, Bath. [No date.] HONORED SIR,--You may have forgot your old postillon Ben Dunford but I shall never forget yours and my mistresses great goodness to me when I was taken with the small pox in your sarvice. You sent me very careful to mothers, and paid a nurse and my doctor, and my board for a long time as I was bad, and when I was too bad with biles all over my head so as I could not go to sarvice for a many weeks you maintained me. the famaly as I lives with be a going thro' Bath into Devonshire and we stops two days at the Inn and there I heard of the bad trick as those bad shopkeepers has sarved my mistress and I took the libarty of going to your house to enquire how you both do and the housekeeper said she sent a pasel to you every week and if I had anything to say she could send a letter. I hope Honored Sir you will forgive my taking such a libarty to write but I wish anybody could tell me how to do you and mistress any good. I would travel night and day to serve you both. I be at all times with my humble duty to mistress and you Honored Sir your dutifull sarvant BEN DUNFORD. James Leigh Perrot Esq. The trial took place at Taunton on Saturday, March 29. The old Castle Hall--where Judge Jeffreys once sat on his 'Bloody Assizes'--said to be capable of containing 2000 persons, was filled at an early hour. So urgent was the curiosity, even of the Bar, that the 'Nisi Prius' Court, which stood at the opposite end of the hall, was not opened for business that morning--all the counsel on the circuit surrounding the table of the Crown Bar; while the rest of the hall was thronged with anxious spectators, many hundreds of whom could not possibly have heard a word that was said, and were almost crushed to death and suffocated with heat. Between seven and eight o'clock, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, who had been conveyed from Ilchester, appeared in the dock, attended by Mr. Leigh Perrot and three ladies, and the proceedings commenced. After the evidence for the prosecution was closed, the prisoner was invited by the judge to make her defence. She attempted to address the Court; but, after speaking a few sentences, became so much agitated that her voice failed her; whereupon Mr. Jekyll, one of her counsel, was requested to repeat to the Court what she wished to address to them. She then dictated as follows:-- MY LORD AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY,-- I am informed by my counsel, that they cannot be permitted to offer any observations to you on my case.[104] The circumstances of it do not render it necessary to detain you long. I shall therefore take this opportunity of troubling you with a few words. Placed in a situation the most eligible that any woman could desire, with supplies so ample that I was left rich after every wish was gratified; blessed in the affections of the most generous man as a husband, what could induce me to commit such a crime? Depraved indeed must that mind be that under such circumstances could be so culpable. You will hear from my noble and truly respectable friends what has been my conduct and character for a long series of years; you will hear what has been, and what is now, their opinion of me. Can you suppose that disposition so totally altered, as to lose all recollection of the situation I held in society--to hazard for this meanness my character and reputation, or to endanger the health and peace of mind of a husband whom I would die for? Here her voice faltered; she seemed to be on the point of fainting, and Mr. Leigh Perrot, who had sustained all this trying scene with wonderful resolution, put his handkerchief to his face and wept in agony; many persons in Court, even amongst the counsel, participating in his emotion. The prisoner continued:-- You have heard their evidence against me. I shall make no comment upon it--I shall leave that task where I am certain it will be executed with justice and mercy. I know my own oath in this case is inadmissible, but I call upon that God whom we all adore to attest that I am innocent of this charge, and may He reward or punish me as I speak true or false in denying it. I call that God to witness that I did not know that I had the lace in my possession, nor did I know it when Mrs. Gregory accosted me in the street. I have nothing more to add. Then followed the evidence for the prisoner, which was chiefly evidence to character, and came from persons occupying prominent positions who knew her well, either at her Berkshire home or at Bath. The judge's summing up occupied nearly an hour. In it he said that it was impossible that any person should have a higher character than the prisoner; but if the jury were satisfied with the evidence for the prosecution and believed it, that character ought not to avail her. If, however, upon taking all the circumstances of the case into consideration, the jury should see any reason to disbelieve the witnesses for the prosecution, or which led them to doubt of the prisoner's guilt, they should recollect the very excellent character which had been given her, and in that case it ought to bear great weight with them towards an acquittal. He also alluded to the conduct of the accused after leaving the shop as not being that of a guilty person, and commented on the ease with which she could have secreted the parcel before it was discovered. The jury evidently saw great reason to disbelieve the witnesses for the prosecution, and, after only fifteen[105] minutes, returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty.' The _Star_ tells us that 'the trial lasted seven hours, and the scene of the acquittal was extremely affecting; the agitation and embraces of Mr. and Mrs. Perrot may be more easily conceived than described. The Court was crowded with elegantly dressed women.' Throughout the long months over which the affair extended, the Leigh Perrots had acted as persons convinced of the baselessness of the charge, and determined to confront the accusers, and, as far as the existing state of the law allowed, to establish the innocence of the accused. Among the quantity of congratulatory letters received by Mr. Leigh Perrot, we must content ourselves with quoting the following from Mr. R. L. Edgeworth:-- Edgeworthstown, Ireland: [April 7, 1800.] MY DEAR SIR,--I do not think that I ever felt so much astonishment or indignation as at the abominable transaction which was related in the _Star_ of March 31st. Among my numerous friends and acquaintance, if there was a couple whom I could have selected as the farthest removed from being the objects of such a villainous attack it would have been yourselves! But I too well know, that neither perfect innocence nor consummate prudence are sufficient shields against conspiracy and folly, and that bankrupt fortune and bankrupt character prepare men for the most desperate attempts. I trouble you, my Dear Sir, with a few lines to express the deep sense that I have of regard and esteem for you and the amiable partner of your happiness; for so many as thirty-four years we have been acquainted, and during that time I do not think that I have met any man of such singularly nice feelings of honour and justice. I am sensible that there is some impropriety in this address--but you must excuse it as I snatched this piece of paper the moment I had read the paragraph I allude to--and with tears of indignation in my eyes--aye Sir!--with actual, not sentimental, tears in my eyes I sat down to write to you. Perhaps, after all, you are not the objects of this transaction! Even if that should be the fact you will pardon me for renewing my claim to your remembrance and for assuring you that you possess my esteem and affection. Yours sincerely, RICHD LOVELL EDGEWORTH. James Leigh Perrot, Esq., Bath, England. This strange and painful episode in the life of the family was thus brought to a satisfactory ending. An accusation of petty and purposeless theft had been made against a woman whose uprightness was known to all those around her; a wife who enjoyed (then and always) the absolute confidence of an upright husband. It had been found baseless by a jury after only a few minutes' deliberation; and the Leigh Perrots had the pleasure of seeing the high estimation in which they were held by their neighbours exhibited in a strong light. This estimation was to be theirs for the remainder of their lives, extending in his case over seventeen, and in hers over thirty-five years.[106] For our particular purpose the story seems worth narrating, because it shows that the peaceful and well-ordered progress of Jane Austen's life was not beyond the reach of tragic possibilities. Indeed, at or near this time there were three particular occurrences which, when taken together, might well disturb the serenity and cheerfulness of her mind, and indispose her for writing--especially writing of a humorous character. One of these events, which has already been recorded, was her love story in the West; another was Mrs. Leigh Perrot's trouble; and the third--the loss of her old home--will form part of the subject of the next two chapters. FOOTNOTES: [99] Paragon Buildings are well placed in a convenient part of Bath, between York House Hotel and Walcot Church. From the back of the houses there is a fine view to the south. [100] Fanny (Lady Knatchbull) and Edward (Knight). [101] I.e. on the King's Birthday (June 4). [102] Mr. Leigh Perrot was at this time sixty-three and his wife fifty-four years old. [103] Created a baronet in 1806. [104] Before the passing of the Prisoners' Counsel Act of 1836, counsel were not allowed to address the Court on behalf of prisoners tried for felony. [105] Seven minutes, according to another account. [106] If this story were not specially well authenticated, it would be incredible; but we must remember that this all happened before the reforms of Sir Samuel Romilly, when the law was in a chaotic state, and when offences against property were very severely dealt with. Any larceny above the value of a 1_s._ was a felony, punishable--nominally by death, and actually by seven years' transportation; though the transportation may frequently have been commuted to a sentence of imprisonment. Magistrates had no power of bailing a person committed for a felony, if the stolen article were found in his possession. CHAPTER X CHANGE OF HOME 1800-1801 Though we can guess what was constantly occupying the thoughts of the Austens in the autumn and winter of 1799-1800, nothing remains to tell us how they employed themselves during these anxious months. Perhaps the sisters were at home, and exchanged no letters; but had any been written, we may be pretty sure they would be among those destroyed by Cassandra. When we meet the family again, in October 1800, we find that they have returned to everyday life with its little incidents, its duties, and its pleasures; that Edward and his eldest son have lately left Steventon for Godmersham, taking Cassandra with them, and that Jane is remaining at home with her parents. Steventon: Saturday evening [October 25, 1800]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . You have had a very pleasant journey of course, and have found Elizabeth and all the children very well on your arrival at Godmersham, and I congratulate you on it. Edward is rejoicing this evening, I dare say, to find himself once more at home, from which he fancies he has been absent a great while. His son left behind him the very fine chestnuts which had been selected for planting at Godmersham, and the drawing of his own which he had intended to carry to George; the former will therefore be deposited in the soil of Hampshire instead of Kent, the latter I have already consigned to another element. We have been exceedingly busy ever since you went away. In the first place we have had to rejoice two or three times every day at your having such very delightful weather for the whole of your journey, and in the second place we have been obliged to take advantage of the very delightful weather ourselves by going to see almost all our neighbours. On Thursday we walked to Deane, yesterday to Oakley Hall and Oakley, and to-day to Deane again. At Oakley Hall we did a great deal--eat some sandwiches all over mustard, admired Mr. Bramston's porter, and Mrs. Bramston's transparencies, and gained a promise from the latter of two roots of heartsease, one all yellow and the other all purple, for you. At Oakley we bought ten pair of worsted stockings and a shift; the shift is for Betty Dawkins, as we find she wants it more than a rug; she is one of the most grateful of all whom Edward's charity has reached, or at least she expresses herself more warmly than the rest, for she sends him a 'sight of thanks.' This morning we called at the Harwoods', and in their dining-room found 'Heathcote and Chute[107] for ever'--Mrs. William Heathcote and Mrs. Chute--the first of whom took a long ride yesterday morning with Mrs. Harwood into Lord Carnarvon's park, and fainted away in the evening, and the second walked down from Oakley Hall attended by Mrs. Augusta Bramston; they had meant to come on to Steventon afterwards, but we knew a trick worth two of that. * * * * * James called by my father's desire on Mr. Bayle[108] to inquire into the cause of his being so horrid. Mr. Bayle did not attempt to deny his being horrid, and made many apologies for it; he did not plead his having a drunken self, he talked only of a drunken foreman, &c., and gave hopes of the tables being at Steventon on Monday se'nnight next. We have had no letter since you left us, except one from Mr. Serle, of Bishopstoke, to inquire the character of James Elton. _Sunday._--Our improvements have advanced very well; the bank along the _elm walk_ is sloped down for the reception of thorns and lilacs, and it is settled that the other side of the path is to continue turfed, and to be planted with beech, ash, and larch. Steventon: Saturday [November 1, 1800]. You have written, I am sure, though I have received no letter from you since your leaving London; the post, and not yourself, must have been unpunctual. We have at last heard from Frank; a letter came from him to you yesterday, and I mean to send it on as soon as I can get a ditto (_that_ means a frank), which I hope to do in a day or two. _En attendant_, you must rest satisfied with knowing that on the 8th of July the _Peterel_ with the rest of the Egyptian squadron was off the Isle of Cyprus, whither they went from Jaffa for provisions, &c., and whence they were to sail in a day or two for Alexandria, there to wait the result of the English proposals for the evacuation of Egypt. The rest of the letter, according to the present fashionable style of composition, is chiefly descriptive. Of his promotion he knows nothing; of prizes he is guiltless. * * * * * Did you think of our ball [probably at Basingstoke] on Thursday evening, and did you suppose me at it? You might very safely, for there I was. On Wednesday morning it was settled that Mrs. Harwood, Mary, and I should go together, and shortly afterwards a very civil note of invitation for me came from Mrs. Bramston, who wrote I believe as soon as she knew of the ball. I might likewise have gone with Mrs. Lefroy, and therefore, with three methods of going, I must have been more at the ball than anyone else. I dined and slept at Deane; Charlotte and I did my hair, which I fancy looked very indifferent; nobody abused it, however, and I retired delighted with my success. It was a pleasant ball, and still more good than pleasant, for there were nearly sixty people, and sometimes we had seventeen couple. The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual &c., &c.'s. There was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. I danced nine dances out of ten--five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute, and James Digweed, and four with Catherine.[109] There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves. * * * * * You were inquired after very prettily, and I hope the whole assembly now understands that you are gone into Kent, which the families in general seemed to meet in ignorance of. Lord Portsmouth surpassed the rest in his attentive recollection of you, inquired more into the length of your absence, and concluded by desiring to be 'remembered to you when I wrote next.' Lady Portsmouth had got a different dress on, and Lady Bolton is much improved by a wig. The three Miss Terries were there, but no Annie; which was a great disappointment to me. I hope the poor girl had not set her heart on her appearance that evening so much as I had. Mr. Terry is ill, in a very low way. I said civil things for Edward to Mr. Chute, who amply returned them by declaring that, had he known of my brother's being at Steventon, he should have made a point of calling upon him to thank him for his civility about the Hunt. Steventon: Saturday evening [November 8, 1800].[110] Having just finished _Les Veillées du Château_ I think it a good opportunity for beginning a letter to you while my mind is stored with ideas worth transmitting. * * * * * I thank you for so speedy a return to my two last, and particularly thank you for your anecdote of Charlotte Graham and her cousin, Harriet Bailey, which has very much amused both my mother and myself. If you can learn anything farther of that interesting affair, I hope you will mention it. I have two messages; let me get rid of them, and then my paper will be my own. Mary fully intended writing to you by Mr. Chute's frank, and only happened entirely to forget it, but will write soon; and my father wishes Edward to send him a memorandum in your next letter of the price of the hops. The tables are come, and give general contentment. I had not expected that they would so perfectly suit the fancy of us all three, or that we should so well agree in the disposition of them; but nothing except their own surface can have been smoother. The two ends put together form one constant table for everything, and the centre piece stands exceedingly well under the glass, and holds a great deal most commodiously, without looking awkwardly. They are both covered with green baize, and send their best love. The Pembroke has got its destination by the sideboard, and my mother has great delight in keeping her money and papers locked up. The little table which used to stand there has most conveniently taken itself off into the best bedroom; and we are now in want only of the chiffonniere, which is neither finished nor come. So much for that subject; I now come to another, of a very different nature, as other subjects are very apt to be. Earle Harwood has been again giving uneasiness to his family and talk to the neighbourhood; in the present instance, however, he is only unfortunate, and not in fault. About ten days ago, in cocking a pistol in the guard-room at Marcau (?) he accidentally shot himself through the thigh. Two young Scotch surgeons in the island were polite enough to propose taking off the thigh at once, but to that he would not consent; and accordingly in his wounded state was put on board a cutter and conveyed to Haslar Hospital, at Gosport, where the bullet was extracted, and where he now is, I hope, in a fair way of doing well. The surgeon of the hospital wrote to the family on the occasion, and John Harwood went down to him immediately, attended by James,[111] whose object in going was to be the means of bringing back the earliest intelligence to Mr. and Mrs. Harwood, whose anxious sufferings, particularly those of the latter, have of course been dreadful. They went down on Tuesday, and James came back the next day, bringing such favourable accounts as greatly to lessen the distress of the family at Deane, though it will probably be a long while before Mrs. Harwood can be quite at ease. _One_ most material comfort, however, they have: the assurance of its being really an accidental wound, which is not only positively declared by Earle himself, but is likewise testified by the particular direction of the bullet. Such a wound could not have been received in a duel. At present he is going on very well, but the surgeon will not declare him to be in no danger. . . . James had not time at Gosport to take any other steps towards seeing Charles, than the very few which conducted him to the door of the assembly room in the Inn, where there happened to be a Ball on the night of their arrival; a likely spot enough for the discovery of a Charles: but I am glad to say that he was not of the party, for it was in general a very ungenteel one, and there was hardly a pretty girl in the room. * * * * * Yesterday was a day of great business with me; Mary drove me all in the rain to Basingstoke, and still more all in the rain back again, because it rained harder; and soon after our return to Deane a sudden invitation and an own postchaise took us to Ashe Park to dine _tête-à-tête_ with Mr. Holder, Mr. Gauntlet, and James Digweed; but our _tête-à-tête_ was cruelly reduced by the non-attendance of the two latter. We had a very quiet evening. I believe Mary found it dull, but I thought it very pleasant. To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room is a luxurious sensation. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we were quite silent; I said two or three amusing things, and Mr. Holder made a few infamous puns. * * * * * Mr. Heathcote met with a genteel little accident the other day in hunting; he got off to lead his horse over a hedge, or a house, or something, and his horse in his haste trod upon his leg, or rather ancle, I believe, and it is not certain whether the small bone is not broke. . . . Martha has accepted Mary's invitation for Lord Portsmouth's ball. He has not yet sent out his _own_ invitations, but _that_ does not signify; Martha comes, and a ball there must be. I think it will be too early in her mother's absence for me to return with her. * * * * * _Sunday Evening._--We have had a dreadful storm of wind in the fore part of this day, which has done a great deal of mischief among our trees. I was sitting alone in the dining-room when an odd kind of crash startled me--in a moment afterwards it was repeated; descend into the Sweep!!!!! The other, which had fallen, I suppose, in the first crash, and which was the nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction, sunk among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce-fir, beating off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all. One large elm out of the two on the left-hand side as you enter what I call the elm walk, was likewise blown down; the maypole bearing the weathercock was broke in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all the three elms which grew in Hall's meadow, and gave such ornament to it, are gone; two were blown down, and the other so much injured that it cannot stand. I am happy to add, however, that no greater evil than the loss of trees has been the consequence of the storm in this place, or in our immediate neighbourhood. We grieve, therefore, in some comfort. Mr. Holder's paper tells us that some time in last August Captain Austen and the _Peterel_ were very active in securing a Turkish ship (driven into Port in Cyprus by bad weather) from the French. He was forced to burn her, however. I am yours ever, J. A. Next in order comes a letter to Martha Lloyd:-- Steventon: Wednesday evening [November 12, 1800].[112] MY DEAR MARTHA,--I did not receive your note yesterday till after Charlotte had left Deane, or I would have sent my answer by her, instead of being the means, as I now must be, of lessening the elegance of your new dress for the Hurstbourne ball by the value of 3_d._ You are very good in wishing to see me at Ibthorp so soon, and I am equally good in wishing to come to you. I believe our merit in that respect is much upon a par, our self-denial mutually strong. Having paid this tribute of praise to the virtue of both, I shall here have done with panegyric, and proceed to plain matter of fact. In about a fortnight's time I hope to be with you. I have two reasons for not being able to come before. I wish so to arrange my visit as to spend some days with you after your mother's return. In the 1st place, that I may have the pleasure of seeing her, and in the 2nd, that I may have a better chance of bringing you back with me. Your promise in my favour was not quite absolute, but if your will is not perverse, you and I will do all in our power to overcome your scruples of conscience. I hope we shall meet next week to talk all this over, till we have tired ourselves with the very idea of my visit before my visit begins. Our invitations for the 19th are arrived, and very curiously are they worded.[113] Mary mentioned to you yesterday poor Earle's unfortunate accident, I dare say. He does not seem to be going on very well. The two or three last posts have brought less and less favourable accounts of him. John Harwood has gone to Gosport again to-day. We have two families of friends now who are in a most anxious state; for though by a note from Catherine this morning there seems now to be a revival of hope at Manydown, its continuance may be too reasonably doubted. Mr. Heathcote, however, who has broken the small bone of his leg, is so good as to be going on very well. It would be really too much to have three people to care for. You distress me cruelly by your request about books. I cannot think of any to bring with me, nor have I any idea of our wanting them. I come to you to be talked to, not to read or hear reading; I can do that at home; and indeed I am now laying in a stock of intelligence to pour out on you as my share of the conversation. I am reading Henry's _History of England_, which I will repeat to you in any manner you may prefer, either in a loose, desultory, unconnected stream, or dividing my recital, as the historian divides it himself, into seven parts:--The Civil and Military: Religion: Constitution: Learning and Learned Men: Arts and Sciences: Commerce, Coins, and Shipping: and Manners. So that for every evening in the week there will be a different subject. The Friday's lot--Commerce, Coins, and Shipping--you will find the least entertaining; but the next evening's portion will make amends. With such a provision on my part, if you will do yours by repeating the French Grammar, and Mrs. Stent[114] will now and then ejaculate some wonder about the cocks and hens, what can we want? Farewell for a short time. We all unite in best love, and I am your very affectionate J. A. The Hurstbourne ball took place on November 19, and was graced by the presence of Lieutenant Charles Austen. He had distinguished himself on the _Endymion_, especially in the capture of the _Scipio_ in a heavy gale. His ship was now at Portsmouth waiting for orders. Steventon: Thursday [November 20, 1800]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter took me quite by surprise this morning; you are very welcome, however, and I am very much obliged to you. I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error. Naughty Charles did not come on Tuesday, but good Charles came yesterday morning. About two o'clock he walked in on a Gosport hack. His feeling equal to such a fatigue is a good sign, and his feeling no fatigue in it a still better. He walked down to Deane to dinner; he danced the whole evening, and to-day is no more tired than a gentleman ought to be. Your desire to hear from me on Sunday will, perhaps, bring you a more particular account of the ball than you may care for, because one is prone to think much more of such things the morning after they happen, than when time has entirely driven them out of one's recollection. It was a pleasant evening; Charles found it remarkably so, but I cannot tell why, unless the absence of Miss Terry, towards whom his conscience reproaches him with being now perfectly indifferent, was a relief to him. There were only twelve dances, of which I danced nine, and was merely prevented from dancing the rest by the want of a partner. We began at ten, supped at one, and were at Deane before five. There were but fifty people in the room; very few families indeed from our side of the county, and not many more from the other. My partners were the two St. Johns, Hooper, Holder, and very prodigious Mr. Mathew, with whom I called[115] the last, and whom I liked the best of my little stock. There were very few beauties, and such as there were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck. The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad-featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago; the other is refined into a nice, composed-looking girl, like Catherine Bigg. I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys and thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter, and thought her a queer animal with a white neck. * * * * * Mary said that I looked very well last night. I wore my aunt's gown and handkerchief, and my hair was at least tidy, which was all my ambition. I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner. * * * * * The young lady whom it is expected that Sir Thomas[116] is to marry is Miss Emma Wabshaw; she lives somewhere between Southampton and Winchester, is handsome, accomplished, amiable, and everything but rich. He is certainly finishing his house in a great hurry. Perhaps the report of his being to marry a Miss Fanshawe might originate in his attentions to this very lady--the names are not unlike. * * * * * The three Digweeds all came on Tuesday, and we played a pool at commerce. James Digweed left Hampshire to-day. I think he must be in love with you, from his anxiety to have you go to the Faversham balls, and likewise from his supposition that the two elms fell from their grief at your absence. Was not it a gallant idea? It never occurred to me before, but I dare say it was so. * * * * * I rejoice to say that we have just had another letter from our dear Frank. It is to you, very short, written from Larnica in Cyprus, and so lately as October 2nd. He came from Alexandria, and was to return there in three or four days, knew nothing of his promotion, and does not write above twenty lines, from a doubt of the letter's ever reaching you, and an idea of all letters being opened at Vienna. He wrote a few days before to you from Alexandria by the _Mercury_ sent with despatches to Lord Keith. Another letter must be owing to us besides this, _one_ if not _two_; because none of these are to me. Henry comes to-morrow, for one night only. The visit to Ibthorp came off, as is shown by the following letter:-- Ibthorp: Sunday [November 30, 1800].[117] MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Shall you expect to hear from me on Wednesday or not? I think you will, or I should not write, as the three days and half which have passed since my last letter have not produced many materials towards filling another sheet of paper. But, like Mr. Hastings, 'I do not despair,' and you perhaps, like the faithful Maria, may feel still more certain of the happy event. I have been here ever since a quarter after three on Thursday last, by the Shrewsbury clock, which I am fortunately enabled absolutely to ascertain because Mrs. Stent once lived at Shrewsbury, or at least at Tewksbury. I have the pleasure of thinking myself a very welcome guest, and the pleasure of spending my time very pleasantly. Martha looks well, and wants me to find out that she grows fat; but I cannot carry my complaisance farther than to believe whatever she asserts on the subject. Mrs. Stent gives us quite as much of her company as we wish for, and rather more than she used to do; but perhaps not more than is to our advantage in the end, because it is too dirty even for such desperate walkers as Martha and I to get out of doors, and we are therefore confined to each other's society from morning till night, with very little variety of books or gowns. Three of the Miss Debaries[118] called here the morning after my arrival, but I have not yet been able to return their civility. You know it is not an uncommon circumstance in this parish to have the road from Ibthorp to the Parsonage much dirtier and more impracticable for walking than the road from the Parsonage to Ibthorp. I left my Mother very well when I came away, and left her with strict orders to continue so. * * * * * The endless Debaries are of course very well acquainted with the lady who is to marry Sir Thomas, and all her family. I pardon them, however, as their description of her is favourable. Mrs. Wapshire is a widow, with several sons and daughters, a good fortune, and a house in Salisbury; where Miss Wapshire has been for many years a distinguished beauty. She is now seven or eight and twenty, and tho' still handsome, less handsome than she has been. This promises better than the bloom of seventeen; and in addition to this they say that she has always been remarkable for the propriety of her behaviour distinguishing her far above the general classes of town misses, and rendering her of course very unpopular among them. * * * * * Martha has promised to return with me, and our plan is to have a nice black frost for walking to Whitchurch, and then throw ourselves into a post chaise, one upon the other, our heads hanging out at one door and our feet at the opposite one. If you have never heard that Miss Dawes has been married these two months, I will mention it in my next. Pray do not forget to go to the Canterbury Ball; I shall despise you all most insufferably if you do. * * * * * I have charged my myrmidons to send me an account of the Basingstoke Ball; I have placed my spies at different places that they may collect the more; and by so doing, by sending Miss Bigg to the Town-hall[119] itself, and posting my mother at Steventon I hope to derive from their various observations a good general idea of the whole. Miss Austen, Yours ever, Godmersham Park, J. A. Faversham, Kent. While Jane was away on this visit, Mr. and Mrs. Austen came to a momentous decision--namely, to leave Steventon and retire to Bath. There can be little doubt that the decision was a hasty one. Some of Jane's previous letters contain details of the very considerable improvements that her father had just begun in the Rectory garden; and we do not hear that these improvements were concerted with the son who was to be his successor. So hasty, indeed, did Mr. Austen's decision appear to the Perrots that they suspected the reason to be a growing attachment between Jane and one of the three Digweed brothers. There is not the slightest evidence of this very improbable supposition in Jane's letters, though she _does_ occasionally suggest that James Digweed must be in love with Cassandra, especially when he gallantly supposed that the two elms had fallen from grief at her absence. On the whole it seems most probable that Mrs. Austen's continued ill-health was the reason for the change. Tradition says that when Jane returned home accompanied by Martha Lloyd, the news was abruptly announced by her mother, who thus greeted them: 'Well, girls, it is all settled; we have decided to leave Steventon in such a week, and go to Bath'; and that the shock of the intelligence was so great to Jane that she fainted away. Unfortunately, there is no further direct evidence to show how far Jane's feelings resembled those she has attributed to Marianne Dashwood on leaving Norland; but we have the negative evidence arising from the fact that none of her letters are preserved between November 30, 1800, and January 3, 1801, although Cassandra was at Godmersham during the whole of the intervening month. Silence on the part of Jane to Cassandra for so long a period of absence is unheard of: and according to the rule acted on by Cassandra, destruction of her sister's letters was a proof of their emotional interest. We cannot doubt, therefore, that she wrote in a strain unusual for her more than once in that month; but as she says of Elizabeth Bennet 'it was her business to be satisfied--and certainly her temper to be happy'; and the next letter that we have shows that she was determined to face a new life in a new place with cheerfulness. Steventon: Saturday [January 3, 1801]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA, . . .--My mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the secret. We plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy housemaid, with a sedate middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter. * * * * * There are three parts of Bath which we have thought of as likely to have houses in them--Westgate Buildings, Charles Street, and some of the short streets leading from Laura Place or Pulteney Street. Westgate Buildings, though quite in the lower part of the town, are not badly situated themselves. The street is broad, and has rather a good appearance. Charles Street, however, I think is preferable. The buildings are new, and its nearness to Kingsmead Fields would be a pleasant circumstance. Perhaps you may remember, or perhaps you may forget, that Charles Street leads from the Queen Square Chapel to the two Green Park Streets. The houses in the streets near Laura Place I should expect to be above our price. Gay Street would be too high, except only the lower house on the left-hand side as you ascend. Towards that my mother has no disinclination; it used to be lower rented than any other house in the row, from some inferiority in the apartments. But above all others her wishes are at present fixed on the corner house in Chapel Row, which opens into Prince's Street. Her knowledge of it, however, is confined only to the outside, and therefore she is equally uncertain of its being really desirable as of its being to be had. In the meantime she assures you that she will do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street, although you have not expressed the fearful presentiment of it which was rather expected. We know that Mrs. Perrot will want to get us into Oxford Buildings,[120] but we all unite in particular dislike of that part of the town, and therefore hope to escape. Upon all these different situations you and Edward may confer together, and your opinion of each will be expected with eagerness. * * * * * I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth. I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter. * * * * * My mother bargains for having no trouble at all in furnishing our house in Bath, and I have engaged for your willingly undertaking to do it all. I get more and more reconciled to the idea of our removal. We have lived long enough in this neighbourhood; the Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline, there is something interesting in the bustle of going away, and the prospect of spending future summers by the sea or in Wales is very delightful. For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with envy in the wives of sailors or soldiers. It must not be generally known, however, that I am not sacrificing a great deal in quitting the country, or I can expect to inspire no tenderness, no interest, in those we leave behind. The threatened Act of Parliament does not seem to give any alarm. My father is doing all in his power to increase his income, by raising his tithes, &c., and I do not despair of getting very nearly six hundred a year. Steventon: Thursday [January 8, 1801]. Mr. Peter Debary has declined Deane curacy; he wishes to be settled near London. A foolish reason! as if Deane were not near London in comparison of Exeter or York. Take the whole world through, and he will find many more places at a greater distance from London than Deane than he will at a less. What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine? I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a piece of preferment, so delightful a situation!--that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the metropolis as any other country villages. As this is the case, however, as Mr. Peter Debary has shown himself a Peter in the blackest sense of the word, we are obliged to look elsewhere for an heir; and my father has thought it a necessary compliment to James Digweed to offer the curacy to him, though without considering it as either a desirable or an eligible situation for him. * * * * * Eliza has seen Lord Craven at Barton, and probably by this time at Kintbury, where he was expected for one day this week. She found his manners very pleasing indeed. The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him. From Ibthorp, Fulwar and Eliza are to return with James and Mary to Deane. * * * * * Pray give my love to George; tell him that I am very glad to hear he can skip so well already, and that I hope he will continue to send me word of his improvement in the art. * * * * * _Friday._--Sidmouth is now talked of as our summer abode. Get all the information, therefore, about it that you can from Mrs. C. Cage. My father's old ministers are already deserting him to pay their court to his son. The brown mare, which as well as the black, was to devolve on James at our removal, has not had patience to wait for that, and has settled herself even now at Deane. The death of Hugh Capet, which, like that of Mr. Skipsey, though undesired, was not wholly unexpected, being purposely effected, has made the immediate possession of the mare very convenient, and everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner. Martha and I work at the books every day. Steventon: Wednesday [January 14, 1801]. Your letter to Mary was duly received before she left Deane with Martha yesterday morning, and it gives us great pleasure to know that the Chilham ball was so agreeable, and that you danced four dances with Mr. Kemble. Desirable, however, as the latter circumstance was, I cannot help wondering at its taking place. Why did you dance four dances with so stupid a man? why not rather dance two of them with some elegant brother officer who was struck with your appearance as soon as you entered the room? * * * * * At present the environs of Laura Place seem to be his [my father's] choice. His views on the subject are much advanced since I came home; he grows quite ambitious, and actually requires now a comfortable and a creditable-looking house. * * * * * This morning brought my aunt's reply, and most thoroughly affectionate is its tenor. She thinks with the greatest pleasure of our being settled in Bath--it is an event which will attach her to the place more than anything else could do, &c., &c. She is, moreover, very urgent with my mother not to delay her visit in Paragon, if she should continue unwell, and even recommends her spending the whole winter with them. At present and for many days past my mother has been quite stout, and she wishes not to be obliged by any relapse to alter her arrangements. Mention is made in several letters of Frank's promotion and his ignorance of it. In 1799, while commanding the sloop _Peterel_, he had been entrusted by Lord St. Vincent with dispatches conveying to Nelson at Palermo the startling news of Admiral Bruix's escape from Brest with a considerable fleet, and his entry into the Mediterranean. So important did Francis Austen believe this intelligence to be, that he landed his first lieutenant with the dispatches on the coast of Sicily some way short of Palermo, the wind being unfavourable for the approach to the capital by sea. Nelson next employed him in taking orders to the squadron blockading Malta. Frank spent the autumn and winter cruising about the Mediterranean, and taking various prizes; the most important capture being that of the _Ligurienne_--a French national brig convoying two vessels laden with corn for the French forces in Egypt. This exploit took place in March 1800, and was considered of such importance that he was made a post-captain for it; but so slow and uncertain was communication to and from the seat of war that he knew nothing of his promotion till October--long after his friends at home had become acquainted with it. His being 'collared and thrust out of the _Peterel_ by Captain Inglis' (his successor) is of course a graphic way of describing his change of vessel and promotion. Steventon: Wednesday [January 21, 1801]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end. Well, and so Frank's letter has made you very happy, but you are afraid he would not have patience to stay for the _Haarlem_ which you wish him to have done as being safer than the merchantman. Poor fellow! to wait from the middle of November to the end of December, and perhaps even longer, it must be sad work; especially in a place where the ink is so abominably pale. What a surprise to him it must have been on October 20, to be visited, collared, and thrust out of the _Peterel_ by Captain Inglis. He kindly passes over the poignancy of his feelings in quitting his ship, his officers, and his men. What a pity it is that he should not be in England at the time of his promotion, because he certainly would have had an appointment, so everybody says, and therefore it must be right for me to say it too. Had he been really here, the certainty of the appointment, I dare say, would not have been half so great, but as it could not be brought to the proof his absence will be always a lucky source of regret. Eliza[121] talks of having read in a newspaper that all the First Lieutenants of the frigates whose Captains were to be sent into line-of-battle ships were to be promoted to the rank of Commanders. If it be true, Mr. Valentine may afford himself a fine Valentine's knot, and Charles may perhaps become First of the _Endymion_, though I suppose Captain Durham is too likely to bring a villain with him under that denomination. * * * * * I join with you in wishing for the environs of Laura Place, but do not venture to expect it. My mother hankers after the Square dreadfully, and it is but natural to suppose that my uncle will take _her_ part. It would be very pleasant to be near Sydney Gardens; we might go into the labyrinth every day. Steventon: Sunday [January 25, 1801]. Your unfortunate sister was betrayed last Thursday into a situation of the utmost cruelty. I arrived at Ashe Park before the party from Deane, and was shut up in the drawing-room with Mr. Holder alone for ten minutes. I had some thoughts of insisting on the housekeeper or Mary Corbett being sent for, and nothing could prevail on me to move two steps from the door, on the lock of which I kept one hand constantly fixed. We met nobody but ourselves, played at _vingt-un_ again, and were very cross. * * * * * Your brother Edward makes very honourable mention of you, I assure you, in his letter to James, and seems quite sorry to part with you. It is a great comfort to me to think that my cares have not been thrown away, and that you are respected in the world. Perhaps you may be prevailed on to return with him and Elizabeth into Kent, when they leave us in April, and I rather suspect that your great wish of keeping yourself disengaged has been with that view. Do as you like; I have overcome my desire of your going to Bath with my mother and me. There is nothing which energy will not bring one to. On her way back from Godmersham, Cassandra spent some time with the Henry Austens now in Upper Berkeley Street; and while she was there, Jane sent her a letter, of which the following was a part. Information respecting the sailor brothers on active service was always rare, and proportionately valuable. Manydown: Wednesday [February 11, 1801].[122] MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . I should not have thought it necessary to write to you so soon, but for the arrival of a letter from Charles to myself. It was written last Saturday from off the Start, and conveyed to Popham Lane by Captain Boyle, on his way to Midgham. He came from Lisbon in the _Endymion_. I will copy Charles's account of his conjectures about Frank: 'He has not seen my brother lately, nor does he expect to find him arrived, as he met Captain Inglis at Rhodes, going up to take command of the _Peterel_ as he was coming down; but supposes he will arrive in less than a fortnight from this time, in some ship which is expected to reach England about that time with despatches from Sir Ralph Abercrombie.' The event must show what sort of a conjuror Captain Boyle is. The _Endymion_ has not been plagued with any more prizes. Charles spent three pleasant days in Lisbon. They were very well satisfied with their royal passenger[123] whom they found jolly, fat, and affable, who talks of Lady Augusta as his wife, and seems much attached to her. When this letter was written the _Endymion_ was becalmed, but Charles hoped to reach Portsmouth by Monday or Tuesday. . . . He received my letter, communicating our plans, before he left England, was much surprised, of course, but is quite reconciled to them, and means to come to Steventon once more while Steventon is ours. After this, we have no letters of Jane till she wrote from Bath; so we may suppose that the sisters were soon united. The months of March and April were spent in making the final preparations for leaving Steventon, and in receiving farewell visits from Edward Austen and his wife, as well as from Frank and Charles and Martha Lloyd. At the beginning of May, Mrs. Austen and her two daughters left their old home and went to Ibthorp; two days later, leaving Cassandra behind them, Jane and her mother went in a single day from Ibthorp to Bath, where they stayed with the Leigh Perrots in Paragon Buildings. FOOTNOTES: [107] The two M.P.'s for the county. [108] The carpenter. [109] Catherine Bigg. [110] Partly _Memoir_, p. 58; partly unpublished. [111] James Austen. [112] _Memoir_, p. 61. [113] The invitation, the ball-dress, and some remarks made in this and the preceding letter, refer to a ball annually given at Hurstbourne Park, on the anniversary of the Earl of Portsmouth's wedding-day. He was the third Lord Portsmouth, whose eccentricities afterwards became notorious, and the invitations, as well as other arrangements about these balls, were of a peculiar character. It will be remembered that he had been for a short time a pupil at Steventon Rectory (p. 21). [114] A very dull old lady, then residing with Mrs. Lloyd. [115] For this expression, see 'The Watsons' (in _Memoir_, p. 325). [116] Sir Thomas Williams, whose first wife was Jane Cooper; 'Whapshare' is the correct name of the lady. [117] Unpublished. [118] The Debaries were a large family, one of whom had the Parsonage near Ibthorp. [119] This seems to show that the balls were held at the town hall and not at the 'Angel Inn' (_Miss Hill_, pp. 51-54). [120] Probably Jane wrote 'Axford Buildings,' which were a continuation of Paragon towards Walcot Church. [121] Eliza Fowle. [122] _Memoir_, p. 64. [123] The Duke of Sussex, who married, without the King's consent, Lady Augusta Murray. CHAPTER XI BATH AGAIN 1801-1805 In the separation of Jane and Cassandra, the letters begin again. Paragon: Tuesday [May 5, 1801]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . Our journey here was perfectly free from accident or event; we changed horses at the end of every stage, and paid at almost every turnpike. We had charming weather, hardly any dust, and were exceedingly agreeable, as we did not speak above once in three miles. * * * * * We had a very neat chaise from Devizes; it looked almost as well as a gentleman's, at least as a very shabby gentleman's; in spite of this advantage, however, we were above three hours coming from thence to Paragon, and it was half after seven by your clocks before we entered the house. Frank, whose black head was in waiting in the hall window, received us very kindly; and his master and mistress did not show less cordiality. They both look very well, though my aunt has a violent cough. We drank tea as soon as we arrived, and so ends the account of our journey, which my mother bore without any fatigue. * * * * * There is to be only one more ball--next Monday is the day. The Chamberlaynes are still here. I begin to think better of Mrs. C., and upon recollection believe she has rather a long chin than otherwise, as she remembers us in Gloucestershire,[124] when we were very charming young women. The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see more distinctly through rain. The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place from the top of Kingsdown was all vapour, shadow, smoke, and confusion. I fancy we are to have a house in Seymour Street, or thereabouts. My uncle and aunt both like the situation. I was glad to hear the former talk of all the houses in New King Street as too small; it was my own idea of them. I had not been two minutes in the dining-room before he questioned me with all his accustomary eager interest about Frank and Charles, their views and intentions. I did my best to give information. * * * * * _Tuesday Night._--When my uncle went to take his second glass of water I walked with him, and in our morning's circuit we looked at two houses in Green Park Buildings, one of which pleased me very well. We walked all over it except into the garret; the dining-room is of a comfortable size, just as large as you like to fancy it; the second room about 14ft. square. The apartment over the drawing-room pleased me particularly, because it is divided into two, the smaller one a very nice-sized dressing-room, which upon occasion might admit a bed. The aspect is south-east. The only doubt is about the dampness of the offices, of which there were symptoms. Paragon: Tuesday [May 12, 1801]. Sixty-one guineas and a-half for the three cows gives one some support under the blow of only eleven guineas for the tables. Eight for my pianoforte is about what I really expected to get; I am more anxious to know the amount of my books, especially as they are said to have sold well. * * * * * In the evening, I hope you honoured my toilette and ball with a thought; I dressed myself as well as I could, and had all my finery much admired at home. By nine o'clock my uncle, aunt, and I entered the rooms, and linked Miss Winstone on to us. Before tea it was rather a dull affair; but then the before tea did not last long, for there was only one dance, danced by four couple. Think of four couple, surrounded by about an hundred people, dancing in the Upper Rooms at Bath. After tea we _cheered up_; the breaking up of private parties sent some scores more to the ball, and though it was shockingly and inhumanly thin for this place, there were people enough, I suppose, to have made five or six very pretty Basingstoke assemblies. I then got Mr. Evelyn to talk to, and Miss T. to look at; and I am proud to say that though repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the _She_, I fixed upon the right one from the first. A resemblance to Mrs. L. was my guide. She is not so pretty as I expected; her face has the same defect of baldness as her sister's, and her features not so handsome; she was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else. Mrs. B. and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs. B. thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene. * * * * * _Wednesday._--Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable, but here there were only just enough to make one card table, with six people to look on and talk nonsense to each other. Lady Fust, Mrs. Busby, and a Mrs. Owen sat down with my uncle to whist, within five minutes after the three old _Toughs_ came in, and there they sat, with only the exchange of Adm. Stanhope for my uncle, till their chairs were announced. I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable; I respect Mrs. Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment. Miss Langley is like any other short girl, with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress and exposed bosom. Adm. Stanhope is a gentlemanlike man, but then his legs are too short and his tail too long. Paragon: Thursday [May 21, 1801]. The friendship between Mrs. Chamberlayne and me which you predicted has already taken place, for we shake hands whenever we meet. Our grand walk to Weston was again fixed for yesterday, and was accomplished in a very striking manner. Every one of the party declined it under some pretence or other except our two selves and we had therefore a _tête-à-tête_, but _that_ we should equally have had, after the first two yards, had half the inhabitants of Bath set off with us. It would have amused you to see our progress. We went up by Sion Hill, and returned across the fields. In climbing a hill Mrs. Chamberlayne is very capital; I could with difficulty keep pace with her, yet would not flinch for the world. On plain ground I was quite her equal. And so we posted away under a fine hot sun, _she_ without any parasol or any shade to her hat, stopping for nothing and crossing the churchyard at Weston with as much expedition as if we were afraid of being buried alive. After seeing what she is equal to, I cannot help feeling a regard for her. As to agreeableness, she is much like other people. * * * * * I went with my mother to help look at some houses in New King Street, towards which she felt some kind of inclination, but their size has now satisfied her. They were smaller than I expected to find them; one in particular out of the two was quite monstrously little; the best of the sitting-rooms not so large as the little parlour at Steventon, and the second room in every floor about capacious enough to admit a very small single bed. * * * * * You will be sorry to hear that Marianne Mapleton's disorder has ended fatally. She was believed out of danger on Sunday, but a sudden relapse carried her off the next day. So affectionate a family must suffer severely; and many a girl on early death has been praised into an angel, I believe, on slighter pretensions to beauty, sense, and merit, than Marianne. Paragon: Tuesday [May 26, 1801].[125] . . . . . . . . . The _Endymion_ came into Portsmouth on Sunday and I have sent Charles a short letter by this day's post. My adventures since I wrote you three days ago have been such as the time would easily contain. I walked yesterday morning with Mrs. Chamberlayne to Lyncombe and Widcombe, and in the evening I drank tea with the Holders. Mrs. Chamberlayne's pace was not quite so magnificent on this second trial as on the first: it was nothing more than I could keep up with, without effort, and for many many yards together on a raised narrow footpath I led the way. The walk was very beautiful, as my companion agreed whenever I made the observation. And so ends our friendship, for the Chamberlaynes leave Bath in a day or two. Prepare likewise for the loss of Lady Fust, as you will lose before you find her. My evening visit was by no means disagreeable. Mrs. Lillingston came to engage Mrs. Holder's conversation, and Miss Holder and I adjourned after tea to the inner drawing-room to look over prints and talk pathetically. She is very unreserved and very fond of talking of her deceased brother and sister, whose memories she cherishes with an enthusiasm which, though perhaps a little affected, is not unpleasing. She has an idea of your being remarkably lively, therefore get ready the proper selection of adverbs and due scraps of Italian and French. I must now pause to make some observation on Mrs. Heathcote's having got a little boy.[126] I wish her well to wear it out--and shall proceed. Frank writes me word that he is to be in London to-morrow: some money negotiation, from which he hopes to derive advantage, hastens him from Kent and will detain him a few days behind my father in town. I have seen the Miss Mapletons this morning. Marianne was buried yesterday, and I called without expecting to be let in to enquire after them all. On the servant's invitation, however, I sent in my name, and Jane and Christiana, who were walking in the garden, came to me immediately, and I sat with them about ten minutes. They looked pale and dejected but were more composed than I had thought probable. When I mentioned your coming here on Monday they said they should be very glad to see you. We drink tea to-night with Mrs. Lysons: now this, says my Master, will be mighty dull. . . . I assure you in spite of what I might choose to insinuate in a former letter, that I have seen very little of Mr. Evelyn since my coming here; I met him this morning for only the fourth time, and as to my anecdote about Sydney Gardens, I made the most of the story because it came into advantage, but in fact he only asked me whether I were to be in Sydney Gardens in the evening or not. There is now something like an engagement between us and the Phaeton, which to confess my frailty I have a great desire to go out in; but whether it will come to anything must remain with him. I really believe he is very harmless; people do not seem afraid of him here, and he gets groundsel for his birds and all that. . . . Yours affectionately, J. A. _Wednesday._--I am just returned from my airing in the very bewitching Phaeton and four for which I was prepared by a note from Mr. E., soon after breakfast. We went to the top of Kingsdown, and had a very pleasant drive. One pleasure succeeds another rapidly. On my return I found your letter, and a letter from Charles, on the table. The contents of yours I suppose I need not repeat to you; to thank you for it will be enough. I give Charles great credit for remembering my uncle's direction, and he seems rather surprised at it himself. He has received £30 for his share of the privateer, and expects £10 more, but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and topaze crosses[127] for us--he must be well scolded. The _Endymion_ has already received orders for taking troops to Egypt--which I should not like at all if I did not trust to Charles being removed from her somehow or other before she sails. He knows nothing of his own destination he says--but desires me to write directly--as the _Endymion_ will probably sail in three or four days. He will receive my yesterday's letter to-day, and I shall write again by this post to thank and reproach him. We shall be unbearably fine. So began the five years' residence at Bath. Cassandra and her father (the latter having been paying visits in Kent and London) joined the others at the beginning of June; and from that date till September 1804 there is little that can be said definitely about Jane's life. We know, however, that it was the intention of the Austens to spend the summer of 1801 by the sea--perhaps at Sidmouth; and a letter of Eliza Austen informs us that this plan was duly carried out. She writes to Phila Walter on October 29:-- I conclude that you know of our uncle and aunt Austen and their daughters having spent the summer in Devonshire. They are now returned to Bath, where they are superintending the fitting up of their new house. So the house had at last been fixed on; and we learn in the _Memoir_ that it was No. 4 Sydney Terrace,[128] in the parish of Bathwick. The houses here face the Sydney Gardens, and it is a part of Bath that Jane seems to have fancied. Her residence there is now commemorated by a marble tablet. How long the Austens resided in this house cannot definitely be stated; perhaps they took it for three years--at any rate, by the beginning of 1805 they had moved to 27 Green Park Buildings. Possibly Mr. Austen, as he grew older, had found the distance to the centre of the town too great for his powers of walking. One of the few facts we know concerning their stay in Sydney Place is that at one time Mrs. Austen was extremely ill, but the skill of her medical adviser, a certain Mr. Bowen,[129] and the affectionate care of her daughters pulled her through and enabled her to live for another twenty-five years. Mrs. Austen has recorded the fact of her illness in some humorous verses, entitled 'Dialogue between Death and Mrs. A.' Says Death, 'I've been trying these three weeks and more To seize on old Madam here at Number Four, Yet I still try in vain, tho' she's turned of three score; To what is my ill-success owing?' 'I'll tell you, old Fellow, if you cannot guess, To what you're indebted for your ill success-- To the prayers of my husband, whose love I possess, To the care of my daughters, whom Heaven will bless, To the skill and attention of Bowen.' In 1802, in addition to the visit to Steventon with its distressing incidents,[130] Jane was at Dawlish; for, in a letter written in 1814, she says of the library at Dawlish that it 'was pitiful and wretched twelve years ago and not likely to have anybody's publications.' A writer, too, in _Temple Bar_[131] for February 1879, states that about this time the Austens went to Teignmouth (which would be very easily combined with a stay at Dawlish), and that they resided there some weeks. This was the year of the short cessation of hostilities brought about by the Peace of Amiens. During its continuance, we are told that the Henry Austens went to France in the vain hope of recovering some of her first husband's property, and narrowly escaped being included amongst the _détenus_. 'Orders had been given by Bonaparte's Government to detain all English travellers; but at the post-houses Mrs. Henry Austen gave the necessary orders herself, and her French was so perfect that she passed everywhere for a native, and her husband escaped under this protection.'[132] Our only evidence of Jane's having been absent from Bath in 1803 is that Sir Egerton Brydges,[133] in speaking of her, says: 'The last time I think that I saw her was at Ramsgate in 1803.' On Francis Austen's promotion (already mentioned), Admiral Gambier seems rather to have gone out of his way to choose him as his flag-captain on the _Neptune_; but on the Peace of Amiens, he, like many others, went on half-pay. His first employment when war broke out again, in 1803, was the raising from among the Kent fishermen of a corps of 'sea fencibles,' to protect the coast from invasion. His head-quarters were at Ramsgate, and it was quite likely that Jane would visit him there, especially if she could combine this visit with one to Godmersham. We shall see later that the 'sea fencibles' did not take up the whole of Frank's time. She must now have begun to turn her mind again to her neglected MSS., and especially to _Northanger Abbey_. This, no doubt, underwent a thorough revision (_Belinda_, mentioned in the famous dissertation on novels, was not published till 1801); and there is evidence[134] that she sold the MS., under the title of _Susan_, in the spring of 1803: not, indeed, to a Bath publisher--as has been often stated--but to Messrs. Crosby & Son of London, for ten pounds, stipulating for an early publication. Distrustful of appearing under her own name in the transaction, Jane seems to have employed a certain Mr. Seymour--probably her brother Henry's man of business--a fact which suggests that the sale was effected while Jane was staying in London with Henry. For reasons best known to himself, Mr. Crosby did not proceed with the publication. Besides _Northanger Abbey_, Jane seems to have written at this time the beginning of a tale which was published in the second edition of the Memoir as _The Watsons_,[135] although the author had not given that, or any other name, to it. The setting of the story was very like that of the novels with which we are so familiar, and the characters were sketched in with a firm hand. One of these creations in particular might have been expected to re-appear in another book (if this work was to be laid aside); but such a procedure was contrary to Jane Austen's invariable practice. It is the character of a young man--Tom Musgrave by name--a clever and good-natured toady, with rather more attractive qualities than usually fall to the lot of the members of that fraternity. But why was it laid aside? The writer of the _Memoir_ suggests[136] that the author may have become aware 'of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in a position of poverty and obscurity, which, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain.' To this we may add that circumstances soon occurred to divert her mind from original composition for a considerable period; and when at last she returned to it, she was much more likely to think of the two completed stories that were lying in her desk than of one that was only begun. She did, however, retain in her recollection the outline of the intended story. The MS. of _The Watsons_, still existing, is written on the small sheets of paper described in the _Memoir_: sheets which could be easily covered with a piece of blotting-paper in case of the arrival of unexpected visitors, and which would thus fit in with her desire for secrecy. All the pages are written in her beautifully neat handwriting; but some seem to flow on without doubt or difficulty, while others are subject to copious corrections. As all the MSS. of her six published novels have perished, it is worth our while to notice her methods where we can. The first interruption that occurred to her writing in 1804 was of a pleasant nature, and none of her admirers need regret it: she went to Lyme with her family. They had been joined in their summer rambles by the Henry Austens, who afterwards proceeded with Cassandra to Weymouth, leaving Jane with her parents at Lyme. We have it on record that Jane loved the sight of the beauties of nature so much that she would sometimes say she thought it must form one of the joys of heaven; but she had few opportunities of visiting any scenes of especial beauty. We need not therefore be surprised that the impression produced by Lyme was so great that she retained a vivid and accurate memory of the details eleven years afterwards. In _Persuasion_, she allowed herself to dwell on them with greater fullness and greater enthusiasm than she had ever displayed on similar occasions before. Readers of that book who visit Lyme--especially if they have the valuable help of the Miss Hills' descriptions and sketches--will feel no difficulty in recognising the exact spot on the Cobb which was pointed out to Tennyson as the scene of the fall of Louisa Musgrove, or the well-placed but minute house at the corner of the pier, past which Captain Benwick was seen rushing for the doctor, and in which the Harvilles managed to entertain a large party; they may note the point on the steps leading down to the sea where Mr. Elliot first saw Anne; and if they go to the 'Royal Lion' Hotel and engage a private sitting-room, they can look from the window, as Mary Musgrove looked at her cousin's carriage, when she recognised the Elliot countenance, but failed to see the Elliot arms, because the great-coat was folded over the panels.[137] The letter which follows was written when Cassandra was just leaving Weymouth to go to Ibthorp where old Mrs. Lloyd lay very ill. Lyme: Friday [September 14, 1804].[138] MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I take the first sheet of fine striped paper to thank you for your letter from Weymouth, and express my hopes of your being at Ibthorp before this time. I expect to hear that you reached it yesterday evening, being able to get as far as Blandford on Wednesday. Your account of Weymouth contains nothing which strikes me so forcibly as there being no ice in the town. For every other vexation I was in some measure prepared, and particularly for your disappointment in not seeing the Royal Family go on board on Tuesday, having already heard from Mr. Crawford that he had seen you in the very act of being too late. But for there being no ice, what could prepare me? . . . You found my letter at Andover, I hope, yesterday, and have now for many hours been satisfied that your kind anxiety on my behalf was as much thrown away as kind anxiety usually is. I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this morning. It was absolutely necessary that I should have the little fever and indisposition which I had: it has been all the fashion this week in Lyme. . . . We are quite settled in our lodgings by this time, as you may suppose, and everything goes on in the usual order. The servants behave very well, and make no difficulties, though nothing certainly can exceed the inconvenience of the offices, except the general dirtiness of the house and furniture, and all its inhabitants. I endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, and be useful, and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters, as fast as I can, and keep everything as it was under your administration. . . . James is the delight of our lives, he is quite an Uncle Toby's annuity to us. My Mother's shoes were never so well blacked before, and our plate never looked so clean. He waits extremely well, is attentive, handy, quick and quiet, and in short has a great many more than all the cardinal virtues (for the cardinal virtues in themselves have been so often possessed that they are no longer worth having), and amongst the rest, that of wishing to go to Bath, as I understand from Jenny. He has the laudable thirst I fancy for travelling, which in poor James Selby was so much reprobated; and part of his disappointment in not going with his master arose from his wish of seeing London. * * * * * The ball last night was pleasant, but not full for Thursday. My father staid very contentedly till half-past nine (we went a little after eight), and then walked home with James and a lanthorn, though I believe the lanthorn was not lit, as the moon was up; but this lanthorn may sometimes be a great convenience to him. My mother and I staid about an hour later. Nobody asked me the two first dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Crawford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville, Mrs. Granville's son, whom my dear friend Miss A. offered to introduce to me, or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction, asked me if I meant to dance again. I think he must be Irish by his ease, and because I imagine him to belong to the hon^{ble} B.'s, who are the son, and son's wife of an Irish viscount, bold queer-looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme. * * * * * I called yesterday morning (ought it not in strict propriety to be termed yester-morning?) on Miss A. and was introduced to her father and mother. Like other young ladies she is considerably genteeler than her parents. Mrs. A. sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of my visit. But do not mention this at home, lest a warning should act as an example. We afterwards walked together for an hour on the Cobb; she is very converseable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging. She seems to like people rather too easily. She thought the D.'s pleasant, &c., &c. * * * * * _Friday Evening._--The bathing was so delightful this morning and Molly so pressing with me to enjoy myself that I believe I staid in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, and shall not bathe to-morrow as I had before intended. Jenny and James are walked to Charmouth this afternoon. I am glad to have such an amusement for him, as I am very anxious for his being at once quiet and happy. He can read, and I must get him some books. Unfortunately he has read the first Vol. of _Robinson Crusoe_. We have the Pinckards' newspaper however which I shall take care to lend him. As the autumn of 1804 was succeeded by winter, Jane's thoughts were to be taken up by more serious considerations. On her birthday, December 16, occurred the death (by a fall from her horse) of her great friend, Mrs. Lefroy, on which we have already dwelt.[139] But she was shortly to suffer an even greater loss, for on January 21, 1805, her father died, after an illness of only forty-eight hours. Jane's letter, or rather two letters--for, the first being wrongly directed, she had to write a second--to her brother Frank on this occasion have fortunately been kept. Green Park Buildings: Tuesday evening, January 22, 1805.[140] MY DEAREST FRANK,--I wrote to you yesterday, but your letter to Cassandra this morning, by which we learn the probability of your being by this time at Portsmouth, obliges me to write to you again, having unfortunately a communication as necessary as painful to make to you. Your affectionate heart will be greatly wounded, and I wish the shock could have been lessened by a better preparation; but the event has been sudden and so must be the information of it. We have lost an excellent father. An illness of only eight and forty hours carried him off yesterday morning between ten and eleven. He was seized on Saturday with a return of the feverish complaint which he had been subject to for the last three years. . . . A physician was called in yesterday morning, but he was at that time past all possibility of cure; and Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Bowen had scarcely left his room before he sunk into a sleep from which he never woke. It has been very sudden. Within twenty-four hours of his death he was walking about with only the help of a stick--was even reading. We had, however, some hours of preparation, and when we understood his recovery to be hopeless, most fervently did we pray for the speedy release which ensued. To have seen him languishing long, struggling for hours, would have been dreadful, and, thank God, we were all spared from it. * * * * * Except the restlessness and confusion of high fever, he did not suffer, and he was mercifully spared from knowing that he was about to quit objects so beloved, and so fondly cherished as his wife and children ever were. His tenderness as a father, who can do justice to? * * * * * The funeral is to be on Saturday at Walcot Church.[141] The serenity of the corpse is most delightful. It preserves the sweet benevolent smile which always distinguished him. They kindly press my mother to remove to Steventon as soon as it is all over, but I do not believe she will leave Bath at present. We must have this house for three months longer, and here we shall probably stay till the end of that time. We all unite in love, and I am Affectionately yours, J. A. The companion letter, sent to a different address, gives a similar account, and contains also these words[142]:-- Heavy as is the blow, we can already feel that a thousand comforts remain to us to soften it. Next to that of the consciousness of his worth and constant preparation for another world, is the remembrance of his having suffered, comparatively speaking, nothing. Being quite insensible of his own state, he was spared all pain of separation, and he went off almost in his sleep. My mother bears the shock as well as possible; she was quite prepared for it and feels all the blessing of his being spared a long illness. My uncle and aunt have been with us and show us every imaginable kindness. * * * * * Adieu, my dearest Frank. The loss of such a parent must be felt, or we should be brutes. I wish I could give you a better preparation, but it has been impossible. Yours ever affectionately, J. A. Mr. Austen's death placed his widow and daughters in straitened circumstances; for most of his income had been derived from the livings of Steventon and Deane. In fact the income of Mrs. Austen, together with that of Cassandra (who had inherited one thousand pounds from her intended husband, Thomas Fowle), was no more than two hundred and ten pounds. Fortunately, she had sons who were only too glad to be able to help her, and her income was raised to four hundred and sixty pounds a year by contributions of one hundred pounds from Edward, and fifty pounds from James, Henry, and Frank respectively. Frank, indeed, was ready to do more; for Henry wrote to him to say that their mother 'feels the magnificence of your offer and accepts of half.' Mrs. Austen's first idea was to remain in Bath so long as her brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot, lived there. Accordingly, she gave up her house at Lady Day, and moved, with her daughters and one maid, into furnished lodgings at 25 Gay Street. Early in April, Cassandra was staying at Ibthorp, where it was her lot to attend another death-bed--that of old Mrs. Lloyd. 25 Gay Street: Monday [April 8, 1805]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Here is a day for you! Did Bath or Ibthorp ever see a finer 8th of April? It is March and April together, the glare of one and the warmth of the other. We do nothing but walk about. As far as your means will admit, I hope you profit by such weather too. I dare say you are already the better for change of place. We were out again last night. Miss Irvine invited us, when I met her in the Crescent, to drink tea with them, but I rather declined it, having no idea that my mother would be disposed for another evening visit there so soon; but when I gave her the message, I found her very well inclined to go; and accordingly, on leaving Chapel, we walked to Lansdown. This morning we have been to see Miss Chamberlayne look hot on horseback. Seven years and four months ago we went to the same riding-house to see Miss Lefroy's performance! What a different set are we now moving in! But seven years, I suppose, are enough to change every pore of one's skin and every feeling of one's mind. We did not walk long in the Crescent yesterday. It was hot and not crowded enough; so we went into the field, and passed close by S. T. and Miss S.[143] again. I have not yet seen her face, but neither her dress nor air have anything of the dash or stylishness which the Browns talked of; quite the contrary; indeed, her dress is not even smart, and her appearance very quiet. Miss Irvine says she is never speaking a word. Poor wretch; I am afraid she is _en pénitence_. Here has been that excellent Mrs. Coulthart calling, while my mother was out, and I was believed to be so. I always respected her, as a good-hearted friendly woman. And the Brownes have been here; I find their affidavits on the table. The _Ambuscade_ reached Gibraltar on the 9th of March, and found all well; so say the papers. We have had no letters from anybody, but we expect to hear from Edward to-morrow, and from you soon afterwards. How happy they are at Godmersham now! I shall be very glad of a letter from Ibthorp, that I may know how you all are, but particularly yourself. This is nice weather for Mrs. J. Austen's going to Speen, and I hope she will have a pleasant visit there. I expect a prodigious account of the christening dinner; perhaps it brought you at last into the company of Miss Dundas again. _Tuesday._--I received your letter last night, and wish it may be soon followed by another to say that all is over; but I cannot help thinking that nature will struggle again, and produce a revival. Poor woman! May her end be peaceful and easy as the exit we have witnessed! And I dare say it will. If there is no revival, suffering must be all over; even the consciousness of existence, I suppose, was gone when you wrote. The nonsense I have been writing in this and in my last letter seems out of place at such a time, but I will not mind it; it will do you no harm, and nobody else will be attacked by it. I am heartily glad that you can speak so comfortably of your own health and looks, though I can scarcely comprehend the latter being really approved. Could travelling fifty miles produce such an immediate change? You were looking very poorly here, and everybody seemed sensible of it. Is there a charm in a hack post-chaise? But if there were, Mrs. Craven's carriage might have undone it all. I am much obliged to you for the time and trouble you have bestowed on Mary's cap, and am glad it pleases her; but it will prove a useless gift at present, I suppose. Will not she leave Ibthorp on her mother's death? As a companion you are all that Martha can be supposed to want, and in that light, under these circumstances, your visit will indeed have been well timed. * * * * * The Cookes want us to drink tea with them to-night, but I do not know whether my mother will have nerves for it. We are engaged to-morrow evening--what request we are in! Mrs. Chamberlayne expressed to her niece her wish of being intimate enough with us to ask us to drink tea with her in a quiet way. We have therefore offered her ourselves and our quietness through the same medium. Our tea and sugar will last a great while. I think we are just the kind of people and party to be treated about among our relations; we cannot be supposed to be very rich. * * * * * _Thursday._--I was not able to go on yesterday; all my wit and leisure were bestowed on letters to Charles and Henry. To the former I wrote in consequence of my mother's having seen in the papers that the _Urania_ was waiting at Portsmouth for the convoy for Halifax. This is nice, as it is only three weeks ago that you wrote by the _Camilla_. . . . I wrote to Henry because I had a letter from him in which he desired to hear from me very soon. His to me was most affectionate and kind, as well as entertaining; there is no merit to him in _that_; he cannot help being amusing. . . . He offers to meet us on the sea coast, if the plan of which Edward gave him some hint takes place. Will not this be making the execution of such a plan more desirable and delightful than ever? He talks of the rambles we took together last summer with pleasing affection. Yours ever, J. A. _From the Same to the Same._ Gay Street: Sunday Evening, April 21 [1805].[144] MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am much obliged to you for writing to me again so soon; your letter yesterday was quite an unexpected pleasure. Poor Mrs. Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything, and unwelcome to everybody. Your account of Martha is very comfortable indeed, and now we shall be in no fear of receiving a worse. This day, if she has gone to church, must have been a trial to her feelings, but it will be the last of any acuteness. . . . Yesterday was a busy day with me. I went to Sydney Gardens soon after one and did not return until four, and after dinner I walked to Weston. My morning engagement was with the Cookes, and our party consisted of George and Mary, a Mr. and Miss B. who had been with us at the concert, and the youngest Miss W. Not Julia; we have done with her; she is very ill; but Mary. Mary W.'s turn is actually come to be grown up, and have a fine complexion, and wear a great square muslin shawl. I have not expressly enumerated myself among the party, but there I was, and my cousin George was very kind, and talked sense to me every now and then, in the intervals of his more animated fooling with Miss B., who is very young, and rather handsome, and whose gracious manners, ready wit, and solid remarks, put me somewhat in mind of my old acquaintance L. L. There was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing and common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit; all that bordered on it or on sense came from my cousin George, whom altogether I like very well. Mr. B. seems nothing more than a tall young man. . . . My evening engagement and walk was with Miss A., who had called on me the day before, and gently upbraided me in her turn with a change of manners to her since she had been in Bath, or at least of late. Unlucky me! that my notice should be of such consequence, and my manners so bad! She was so well disposed, and so reasonable, that I soon forgave her, and made this engagement with her in proof of it. She is really an agreeable girl, so I think I may like her; and her great want of a companion at home, which may well make any tolerable acquaintance important to her, gives her another claim on my attention. I shall as much as possible endeavour to keep my intimacies in their proper place, and prevent their clashing. . . . Among so many friends, it will be well if I do not get into a scrape; and now here is Miss Blachford come. I should have gone distracted if the Bullers had staid. . . . I am quite of your opinion as to the folly of concealing any longer our intended partnership with Martha, and wherever there has of late been an enquiry on the subject I have always been sincere, and I have sent word of it to the Mediterranean in a letter to Frank. None of _our_ nearest connections I think will be unprepared for it, and I do not know how to suppose that Martha's have not foreseen it. When I tell you we have been visiting a Countess this morning, you will immediately, with great justice, but no truth, guess it to be Lady Roden. No: it is Lady Leven, the mother of Lord Balgonie. On receiving a message from Lord and Lady Leven through the Mackays, declaring their intention of waiting on us, we thought it right to go to them. I hope we have not done too much, but the friends and admirers of Charles must be attended to. They seem very reasonable, good sort of people, very civil, and full of his praise.[145] We were shewn at first into an empty drawing-room, and presently in came his lordship, not knowing who we were, to apologise for the servant's mistake, and tell a lie himself that Lady Leven was not within. He is a tall gentlemanlike-looking man, with spectacles, and rather deaf. After sitting with him ten minutes we walked away; but, Lady Leven coming out of the dining parlour as we passed the door, we were obliged to attend her back to it, and pay our visit over again. She is a stout woman, with a very handsome face. By this means we had the pleasure of hearing Charles's praises twice over. They think themselves excessively obliged to him, and estimate him so highly as to wish Lord Balgonie, when he is quite recovered, to go out to him. . . . There is a pretty little Lady Marianne of the party, to be shaken hands with, and asked if she remembered Mr. Austen. . . . I shall write to Charles by the next packet, unless you tell me in the meantime of your intending to do it. Believe me, if you chuse, Y^{r} aff^{te} Sister. 'Cousin George' was the Rev. George Leigh Cooke, long known and respected at Oxford, where he held important offices, and had the privilege of helping to form the minds of men more eminent than himself. As tutor at Corpus Christi College, he had under his charge Arnold, Keble, and Sir J. T. Coleridge. The 'intended partnership' with Martha was an arrangement by which Martha Lloyd joined the family party: an arrangement which was based on their affectionate friendship for her, and which succeeded so well that it lasted through Southampton and Chawton, and did not end until after the death of Mrs. Austen in 1827. FOOTNOTES: [124] Probably, when they were on a visit to the Fowles at Elkstone, between Cheltenham and Cirencester. See p. 373. [125] Family MS. One short paragraph, _Memoir_, p. 65; the remainder unpublished. [126] Afterwards Sir William Heathcote, M.P. [127] We remember that in _Mansfield Park_ William Price had been able to afford only the amber cross as a present to Fanny, and not the chain. See _Sailor Brothers_, p. 92. [128] _Terrace_ seems to be a slip; at least, its present name is Sydney Place. We have, unfortunately, no letters dated from this house. [129] There is an inscription to his memory on the wall of the south aisle in the Abbey. [130] See p. 92. [131] In an article called 'Is it Just?' p. 282. [132] _Memoir_, p. 24. [133] _Autobiography_, vol. ii. p. 40. [134] See end of Chapter XIII. [135] The watermarks of 1803 and 1804 on the paper are the sole authority for this date. [136] P. 296. [137] Miss Hill seems to have identified also the cottage, 'Mrs. Dean's house,' in which the Austens themselves lodged in 1804. No doubt decanters, and everything else, have long been perfectly immaculate. [138] Nearly all _Memoir_, p. 68; the remainder unpublished. [139] Chap. V. [140] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 127. [141] Mr. Oscar Fay Adams, a most careful investigator, failed to discover the inscription in Walcot Church to the memory of George Austen. It is in the crypt below the church, and runs as follows: 'Under this stone rest the remains of the Rev. George Austen, Rector of Steventon and Dean in Hampshire, who departed this life the 21st of January 1805, aged 73 years.' [142] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 125. [143] A gentleman and lady lately engaged to be married. [144] _Memoir_, p. 74. [145] It seems that Charles Austen, then first lieutenant of the _Endymion_, had had an opportunity of showing attention and kindness to some of Lord Leven's family. CHAPTER XII FROM BATH TO SOUTHAMPTON 1805-1808 The addition of Martha to the family party made it easy for the two sisters to leave their mother in August and pay a visit to Godmersham; and owing to the fact that they, each in turn, varied their stay at Godmersham by paying a short visit to Lady Bridges at Goodnestone Farm, we have three brief letters from Jane at this date. She was spending her time in the usual way, seeing a good deal of her sister-in-law's neighbours and connexions, and playing with her nephews and nieces. Godmersham Park: Saturday [August 24, 1805]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . George[146] is a fine boy, and well behaved, but Daniel chiefly delighted me; the good humour of his countenance is quite bewitching. After tea we had a cribbage-table, and he and I won two rubbers of his brother and Mrs. Mary. Mr. Brett was the only person there, besides our two families. * * * * * Yesterday was a very quiet day with us; my noisiest efforts were writing to Frank, and playing battledore and shuttlecock with William; he and I have practised together two mornings, and improve a little; we have frequently kept it up _three_ times, and once or twice _six_. The two Edwards went to Canterbury in the chaise, and found Mrs. Knight as you found her, I suppose, the day before, cheerful but weak. * * * * * I have been used very ill this morning: I have received a letter from Frank which I ought to have had when Elizabeth and Henry had theirs, and which in its way from Albany[147] to Godmersham has been to Dover and Steventon. It was finished on the 16th, and tells what theirs told before as to his present situation[148]; he is in a great hurry to be married, and I have encouraged him in it, in the letter which ought to have been an answer to his. He must think it very strange that I do not acknowledge the receipt of his, when I speak of those of the same date to Eliz. and Henry; and to add to my injuries, I forgot to number mine on the outside. * * * * * Elizabeth has this moment proposed a scheme which will be very much for my pleasure if equally convenient to the other party; it is that when you return on Monday, I should take your place at Goodnestone for a few days. Harriot cannot be insincere, let her try for it ever so much, and therefore I defy her to accept this self-invitation of mine, unless it be really what perfectly suits her. As there is no time for an answer, I shall go in the carriage on Monday, and can return with you, if my going to Goodnestone is at all inconvenient. Goodnestone Farm: Tuesday [August 27, 1805]. There is no chance of tickets for the Mr. Bridgeses, as no gentlemen but of the garrison are invited. With a civil note to be fabricated to Lady F., and an answer written to Miss H., you will easily believe that we could not begin dinner till six. We were agreeably surprised by Edward Bridges's company to it. He had been, strange to tell, too late for the cricket match, too late at least to play himself, and, not being asked to dine with the players,[149] came home. It is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions towards me; he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account. Goodnestone Farm: Friday [August 30, 1805]. Next week seems likely to be an unpleasant one to this family on the matter of game. The evil intentions of the Guards are certain, and the gentlemen of the neighbourhood seem unwilling to come forward in any decided or early support of their rights. Edward Bridges has been trying to rouse their spirits, but without success. Mr. Hammond, under the influence of daughters and an expected ball, declares he will do nothing. . . . Yours affectionately, J. A. Cassandra and Jane had a scheme for going to Worthing with some of their young nephews and nieces; but we can say no more about the plan, for the letters now cease until January 1807. As for the events of 1806, there is every reason to believe that the Austens spent the first part of that year in Bath, dividing their time somewhat uncomfortably between different lodgings.[150] Meanwhile, Francis Austen had been helping to make history--though not always in so front a rank as he would have desired to occupy. We left him raising the 'sea fencibles' at Ramsgate, instructing the defenders of the coast, and considering the possibilities of a landing by the French in their flat-bottomed vessels. It was at Ramsgate that he was noted as '_the_ officer who knelt in Church,' and it was there that he met and fell in love with his future wife, Mary Gibson. She became in time one of the best loved of the sisters-in-law; but we are told that at the time the engagement was a slight shock to Cassandra and Jane, because the lady chosen was _not_ Martha Lloyd, as they had hoped she might be. Immediate marriage was out of the question, and in May 1804 Frank was appointed to the _Leopard_, the flagship of Admiral Louis, who at this time held a command in the squadron blockading Napoleon's flotilla. Frank's removal from the _Leopard_ to the _Canopus_[151] brought him home, for a short time, just at the date of his father's death in January 1805. In March, Admiral Louis hoisted his flag in the _Canopus_ and soon became second-in-command to Nelson. Frank, as his flag-captain, took part in the chase after Villeneuve to the West Indies and back. Thus far, fortune had favoured him: a state of things which seemed likely to continue, as he was personally known to Nelson and had reason to hope that he would soon give him the command of a frigate. But a sad reverse was in store for him. September was spent in blockading Cadiz; and, after Nelson's arrival from England in the _Victory_ on September 28, the _Canopus_ was ordered to 'complete supplies'[152] at Gibraltar. After this, followed an order to Admiral Louis to give protection, as far as Cartagena, to a convoy proceeding to Malta. Shaking themselves free from this duty on the news that the enemy's fleet was coming out of Cadiz, they made haste to join the main fleet in spite of contrary winds, and with the dreadful apprehension of being too late for the imminent battle. 'I do not profess,' he writes to Mary Gibson, 'to like fighting for its own sake, but if there has been an action with the combined fleets I shall ever consider the day on which I sailed from the squadron as the most inauspicious one of my life.' Six days later (on October 27) he had to add: 'Alas! my dearest Mary, all my fears are but too fully justified. The fleets have met, and, after a very severe contest, a most decisive victory has been gained by the English. . . . To lose all share in the glory of a day which surpasses all that ever went before is what I cannot think of with any degree of patience.' But he soon turns from selfish regrets to speak of the death of Nelson, and adds: 'I never heard of his equal, nor do I expect again to see such a man. To the soundest judgment he united prompt decision and speedy execution of his plans; and he possessed in a superior degree the happy talent of making every class of persons pleased with their situation, and eager to exert themselves in forwarding the public service.' For his personal disappointment, Frank was, to a certain extent, consoled by taking part in Sir John Duckworth's cruise to the West Indies and in the victory over the French at St. Domingo; the squadron returning home, with three prizes, to receive the thanks of Parliament on their arrival at the beginning of May 1806. In the following July, Francis Austen and Mary Gibson were married.[153] Meanwhile, the long residence at Bath of his mother and sisters had come to an end. On July 2, Mrs. Austen, her two daughters, and Martha Lloyd, left Bath. Cassandra and Jane were thoroughly tired of the place--so says Jane in a letter written two years afterwards to Cassandra, reminding her of their happy feelings of escape.[154] The immediate destination of the party was Clifton, and here Martha Lloyd left them--perhaps for Harrogate in accordance with the lines quoted above.[155] The Austens did not stay long at Clifton, and by the end of the month were at Adlestrop Rectory on a visit to Mr. Thomas Leigh; but neither did this prove more than a brief resting-place, for on August 5 they set out, in somewhat peculiar circumstances, together with Mr. Leigh, his sister (Miss Elizabeth Leigh), Mr. Hill (agent of Mr. Leigh),[156] and all the house party, to stay at Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire. The circumstances were as follows. On July 2, 1806, occurred the death of the Hon. Mary Leigh, who had been for twenty years life-tenant of the Stoneleigh estates, under the will of her brother, the last Lord Leigh. The estates now passed--according to Lord Leigh's will--unto the first and nearest of his kindred, being male and of his blood and name, that should be alive at the time. All the Leighs of the Stoneleigh branch had died out, and an heir had to be sought among their remote cousins, the Adlestrop Leighs. In ordinary circumstances the heir would have been James Henry Leigh, who was the head of this branch; but by the peculiar wording of Lord Leigh's will, all those of an older generation who were thus 'the first and nearest of his blood and name' appeared to take precedence of the natural heir, although this does not seem to have been the intention of Lord Leigh.[157] The _eldest_ Leigh was the Rev. Thomas Leigh,[158] who therefore became the legal owner of Stoneleigh; but as it was thought possible that there might be other claimants, Mr. Leigh's solicitor advised his taking immediate possession; and accordingly Mr. Leigh and all his house party moved from Adlestrop to Stoneleigh. This visit, and the whole question of the succession to Stoneleigh, must have been especially interesting to Jane's mother; for it seemed likely that Mrs. Austen's own brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot, would, under the terms of the will, have a life interest in the estate after Mr. Thomas Leigh, if he survived him. It was, however, obviously most in accordance with the desire of the testator, and with the general opinion of the family, that the estate should go according to the usual rules of succession by primogeniture in the Adlestrop branch; and as all the parties to the transaction were on excellent terms with each other, and as they believed it to be quite doubtful what interpretation a court of law would put upon the will, they settled the matter without any such intervention. Mr. Leigh Perrot resigned his claim to the estate and gained instead a capital sum of £24,000 and an annuity of £2000, which lasted until the death of his wife in 1835. This is no doubt the agreement with Adlestrop, mentioned below in the letter of February 20, 1807,[159] and it must, one would think, have been considered satisfactory: indeed, the writer speaks of the negotiation as 'happily over.' The remaining clause in it which ensured to the Leigh Perrots two bucks, two does, and the game off one manor annually was less successful, for the bucks sometimes arrived in such a condition as to demand immediate burial. Yet it can hardly have been this which made Jane at a later date speak of the 'vile compromise': we should rather treat this expression as one of her _obiter dicta_, not meant to be taken seriously. 'And here,' writes Mrs. Austen on August 13, 1806, 'we found ourselves on Tuesday (that is, yesterday se'nnight), eating fish, venison, and all manner of good things, in a large and noble parlour hung round with family portraits.' Mrs. Austen had expected to find Stoneleigh very grand, but the magnificence of the place surpassed her expectations. After describing its exterior, she adds:-- At nine in the morning we say our prayers in a handsome chapel of which the pulpit, &c., is now hung in black. Then follows breakfast, consisting of chocolate, coffee, and tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter, and dry toast for me. The house steward, a fine large respectable-looking man, orders all these matters. Mr. Leigh and Mr. Hill are busy a great part of the morning. _We_ walk a good deal, for the woods are impenetrable to the sun, even in the middle of an August day. I do not fail to spend some part of every day in the kitchen garden, where the quantity of small fruit exceeds anything you can form an idea of. She concludes her letter by saying:-- Our visit has been a most pleasant one. We all seem in good humour, disposed to be pleased, and endeavouring to be agreeable, and I hope we succeed. Poor Lady Saye and Sele, to be sure, is rather tormenting, though sometimes amusing, and affords Jane many a good laugh, but she fatigues me sadly on the whole. To-morrow we depart. We have seen the remains of Kenilworth, which afforded us much entertainment, and I expect still more from the sight of Warwick Castle, which we are going to see to-day.[160] From Stoneleigh, we may imagine the Austens to have gone on to pay a promised visit to Hamstall-Ridware--Edward Cooper's living in Staffordshire; but the curtain drops on them once more, and is not raised again until Jane is writing from Southampton on January 7, 1807. Owing to the gap in the letters, we have no means of knowing why the Austens selected Southampton as a home; nor are we told what Jane herself thought of the place. At any rate, it was a change from Bath, and she preferred it to Canterbury, which, from its nearness to Godmersham, would have been another very suitable place of residence. Southampton was in her old county, and within fairly easy reach of her old home; and probably one reason for choosing the neighbourhood of a naval centre was, that it enabled them to join forces with Frank Austen and his newly married wife: but we should doubt whether Jane ever felt really at home during her two or three years' residence there, or took much to the society of the place. No doubt the partnership with the Frank Austens and with Martha made it possible for the party to command better quarters, and to live in greater comfort than would have been within reach of the slender means of the Austens by themselves; and when Jane's letters begin again it is pretty clear that the party, though still in lodgings,[161] were getting ready to take possession in March of their house in Castle Square. They were living in a very quiet way, not caring to add to their acquaintance more than was necessary. Cassandra was at this time on a visit to Godmersham, and Martha Lloyd was also away. The Austens were near enough to Steventon to be visited occasionally by James Austen and his wife; and between their own acquaintance, and Frank's friends in the service, they had what they wanted in the way of society. Southampton: Wednesday [January 7, 1807]. Of your visit there [to Canterbury] I must now speak 'incessantly'; it surprises, but pleases me more, and I consider it as a very just and honourable distinction of you, and not less to the credit of Mrs. Knight. I have no doubt of your spending your time with her most pleasantly in quiet and rational conversation, and am so far from thinking her expectations of you will be deceived, that my only fear is of your being so agreeable, so much to her taste, as to make her wish to keep you with her for ever. If that should be the case, we must remove to Canterbury, which I should not like so well as Southampton. * * * * * _Alphonsine_[162] did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure; and we changed it for _The Female Quixote_ which now makes our evening amusement: to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it. * * * * * Our acquaintance increase too fast. He [Frank] was recognised lately by Admiral Bertie, and a few days since arrived the Admiral and his daughter Catherine to wait upon us. There was nothing to like or dislike in either. To the Berties are to be added the Lances, with whose cards we have been endowed, and whose visit Frank and I returned yesterday. They live about a mile and three-quarters from S[outhampton] to the right of the new road to Portsmouth, and I believe their house is one of those which are to be seen almost anywhere among the woods on the other side of the Itchen. It is a handsome building, stands high, and in a very beautiful situation. We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. She was civil and chatty enough, and offered to introduce us to some acquaintance in Southampton, which we gratefully declined. I suppose they must be acting by the orders of Mr. Lance of Netherton in this civility, as there seems no other reason for their coming near us. Southampton: [February 8, 1807]. Our garden is putting in order by a man who bears a remarkably good character, has a very fine complexion, and asks something less than the first. The shrubs which border the gravel walk, he says, are only sweetbriar and roses, and the latter of an indifferent sort; we mean to get a few of the better kind, therefore, and at my own particular desire he procures us some syringas. I could not do without a syringa, for the sake of Cowper's line.[163] We talk also of a laburnum. The border under the terrace wall is clearing away to receive currants and gooseberry bushes, and a spot is found very proper for raspberries. The alterations and improvements within doors, too, advance very properly, and the offices will be made very convenient indeed. Our dressing table is constructing on the spot, out of a large kitchen table belonging to the house, for doing which we have the permission of Mr. Husket, Lord Lansdown's[164] painter--domestic painter, I should call him, for he lives in the castle. Domestic chaplains have given way to this more necessary office, and I suppose whenever the walls want no touching up he is employed about my lady's face. The morning was so wet that I was afraid we should not be able to see our little visitor, but Frank, who alone could go to church, called for her after service, and she is now talking away at my side and examining the treasures of my writing-desk drawers--very happy, I believe. Not at all shy, of course. Her name is Catherine, and her sister's Caroline. She is something like her brother, and as short for her age, but not so well-looking. What is become of all the shyness in the world? Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the progress of time, and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints. * * * * * _Evening._--Our little visitor has just left us, and left us highly pleased with her; she is a nice, natural, open-hearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility which one sees in the best children in the present day; so unlike anything that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment and shame. Half her time was spent at spillikins, which I consider as a very valuable part of our household furniture, and as not the least important benefaction from the family of Knight to that of Austen. * * * * * There, I flatter myself I have constructed you a smartish letter, considering my want of materials, but, like my dear Dr. Johnson, I believe I have dealt more in notions than facts[165]. Southampton: [Friday, February 20, 1807]. We have at last heard something of Mr. Austen's[166] will. It is believed at Tunbridge that he has left everything after the death of his widow to Mr. M. Austen's third son John; and, as the said John was the only one of the family who attended the funeral, it seems likely to be true. * * * * * My mother has heard this morning from Paragon. My aunt talks much of the violent colds prevailing in Bath, from which my uncle has suffered ever since their return, and she has herself a cough much worse than any she ever had before, subject as she has always been to bad ones. She writes in good humour and cheerful spirits, however. The negotiation between them and Adlestrop so happily over, indeed, what can have power to vex her materially? * * * * * _Saturday._--I have received your letter, but I suppose you do not expect me to be gratified by its contents. I confess myself much disappointed by this repeated delay of your return, for though I had pretty well given up all idea of your being with us before our removal, I felt sure that March would not pass quite away without bringing you. Before April comes, of course something else will occur to detain you. But as _you_ are happy, all this is selfishness, of which here is enough for one page. * * * * * Frank's going into Kent depends, of course, upon his being unemployed; but as the First Lord, after promising Lord Moira that Captain A. should have the first good frigate that was vacant, has since given away two or three fine ones, he has no particular reason to expect an appointment now. _He_, however, has scarcely spoken about the Kentish journey. I have my information chiefly from her, and she considers her own going thither as more certain if he should be at sea than if not. Frank has got a very bad cough, for an Austen; but it does not disable him from making very nice fringe for the drawing-room curtains. * * * * * I recommend Mrs. Grant's[167] letters, as a present to her [Martha]; what they are about, and how many volumes they form, I do not know, having never heard of them but from Miss Irvine, who speaks of them as a new and much-admired work, and as one which has pleased her highly. I have inquired for the book here, but find it quite unknown. * * * * * We are reading Baretti's other book,[168] and find him dreadfully abusive of poor Mr. Sharpe. I can no longer take his part against you, as I did nine years ago. Our knowledge of the house which was the Austens' home at Southampton for two years, and of its surroundings, is derived from the personal reminiscences of the author of the _Memoir_, who was now old enough to visit his relatives, and who tells us that at this time he began to know, and 'what was the same thing, to love' his Aunt Jane. 'They lived,' he says,[169] 'in a commodious old-fashioned house in a corner of Castle Square . . . with a pleasant garden, bounded on one side by the old city walls; the top of this wall was sufficiently wide to afford a pleasant walk, with an extensive view easily accessible to ladies by steps.' Castle Square itself was occupied 'by a fantastic edifice, too large for the space in which it stood, though too small to accord well with its castellated style, erected by the second Marquis of Lansdowne.' The whole of this building disappeared after the death of its eccentric owner in November 1809. His half-brother and successor in the peerage--the well-known statesman--became in after life an ardent admirer of Jane Austen's novels, and told a friend[170] that 'one of the circumstances of his life which he looked back upon with vexation was that Miss Austen should once have been living some weeks in his neighbourhood without his knowing it.' Had he known it, however, he would have had no reason--in the Southampton period--for imagining her to be an author. On March 9, 1807, we may imagine the party taking possession of their new house; but Frank can have seen but little of it before he took command of the _St. Albans_ in April, and went to the Cape of Good Hope on convoying duty. He was back by June 30. On Cassandra's return, the two sisters must have been together for a considerable period; but till June 1808 we know little that is definite about them, except that in September 1807, together with their mother, they paid a visit to Chawton House--Edward Austen's Hampshire residence.[171] During these years, Charles Austen was long engaged in the unpleasant and unprofitable duty of enforcing the right of search on the Atlantic seaboard of America. Hardly anything is said in the extant letters of his marriage to Fanny Palmer, daughter of the Attorney-General of Bermuda, which took place in 1807. The month of June 1808 found Jane staying with her brother Henry in Brompton[172]; but we have no details of her stay beyond the fact that she watched some of her acquaintance going to Court on the King's birthday. On June 14 she left London with her brother James, his wife and two children, on a visit to Godmersham. Godmersham: Wednesday [June 15, 1808]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first? At half after seven yesterday morning Henry saw us into our own carriage, and we drove away from the Bath Hotel; which, by-the-bye, had been found most uncomfortable quarters--very dirty, very noisy, and very ill-provided. James began his journey by the coach at five. Our first eight miles were hot; Deptford Hill brought to my mind our hot journey into Kent fourteen years ago; but after Blackheath we suffered nothing, and as the day advanced it grew quite cool. At Dartford, which we reached within the two hours and three-quarters, we went to the Bull, the same inn at which we breakfasted in that said journey, and on the present occasion had about the same bad butter. At half-past ten we were again off, and, travelling on without any adventure reached Sittingbourne by three. Daniel was watching for us at the door of the 'George,' and I was acknowledged very kindly by Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, to the latter of whom I devoted my conversation, while Mary went out to buy some gloves. A few minutes, of course, did for Sittingbourne; and so off we drove, drove, drove, and by six o'clock were at Godmersham. Our two brothers[173] were walking before the house as we approached, as natural as life. Fanny and Lizzie met us in the Hall with a great deal of pleasant joy; we went for a few minutes into the breakfast parlour, and then proceeded to our rooms. Mary has the Hall chamber. I am in the Yellow room--very literally--for I am writing in it at this moment. It seems odd to me to have such a great place all to myself, and to be at Godmersham without you is also odd. You are wished for, I assure you: Fanny, who came to me as soon as she had seen her Aunt James to her room, and stayed while I dressed, was as energetic as usual in her longings for you. She is grown both in height and size since last year, but not immoderately, looks very well, and seems as to conduct and manner just what she was and what one could wish her to continue. Elizabeth, who was dressing when we arrived, came to me for a minute attended by Marianne, Charles, and Louisa, and, you will not doubt, gave me a very affectionate welcome. That I had received such from Edward also I need not mention; but I do, you see, because it is a pleasure. I never saw him look in better health, and Fanny says he is perfectly well. I cannot praise Elizabeth's looks, but they are probably affected by a cold. Her little namesake has gained in beauty in the last three years, though not all that Marianne has lost. Charles is not quite so lovely as he was. Louisa is much as I expected, and Cassandra I find handsomer than I expected, though at present disguised by such a violent breaking-out that she does not come down after dinner. She has charming eyes and a nice open countenance, and seems likely to be very lovable. Her size is magnificent. * * * * * _Thursday._-- . . . I feel rather languid and solitary--perhaps because I have a cold; but three years ago we were more animated with you and Harriot and Miss Sharpe. We shall improve, I dare say, as we go on. * * * * * _Friday._--Edward and Caroline[174] seem very happy here; he has nice play-fellows in Lizzie and Charles. They and their attendant have the boys' attic. Anna will not be surprised that the cutting off her hair is very much regretted by several of the party in this house; I am tolerably reconciled to it by considering that two or three years may restore it again. Godmersham: Monday [June 20, 1808]. This morning brought me a letter from Mrs. Knight, containing the usual fee, and all the usual kindness. She asks me to spend a day or two with her this week, to meet Mrs. C. Knatchbull, who, with her husband, comes to the White Friars to-day, and I believe I shall go. I have consulted Edward, and think it will be arranged for Mrs. J. A.'s going with me one morning, my staying the night, and Edward driving me home the next evening. Her very agreeable present will make my circumstances quite easy. I shall reserve half for my pelisse. * * * * * _Wednesday._--I sent my answer by them [the Moores] to Mrs. Knight; my double acceptance of her note and her invitation, which I wrote without effort, for I am rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing. Ought I to be very much pleased with _Marmion_?[175] As yet I am not. James reads it aloud every evening--the short evening, beginning at about ten, and broken by supper. Godmersham: Sunday [June 26, 1808]. I am very much obliged to you for writing to me on Thursday, and very glad that I owe the pleasure of hearing from you again so soon to such an agreeable cause; but you will not be surprised, nor perhaps so angry as I should be, to find that Frank's history had reached me before in a letter from Henry. We are all very happy to hear of his health and safety; he wants nothing but a good prize to be a perfect character. * * * * * They [the Knatchbulls] return into Somersetshire by way of Sussex and Hants, and are to be at Fareham, and, perhaps, may be in Southampton, on which possibility I said all that I thought right, and, if they are in the place M^{rs.} K. has promised to call in Castle Square; it will be about the end of July. . . . You and I need not tell each other how glad we shall be to receive attention from, or pay it to anyone connected with Mrs. Knight. I cannot help regretting that now, when I feel enough her equal to relish her society, I see so little of the latter. Godmersham: Thursday [June 30, 1808]. You are very kind in mentioning old Mrs. Williams so often. Poor creature! I cannot help hoping that each letter may tell of her suffering being over. If she wants sugar I should like to supply her with it. * * * * * I give you all joy of Frank's return, which happens in the true sailor way, just after our being told not to expect him for some weeks. The wind has been very much against him, but I suppose he must be in our neighbourhood by this time. Fanny is in hourly expectation of him here. Mary's visit in the island is probably shortened by this event. Make our kind love and congratulations to her. * * * * * James and Edward are gone to Sandling to-day--a nice scheme for James, as it will show him a new and fine country. Edward certainly excels in doing the honours to his visitors, and providing for their amusement. They come back this evening. * * * * * It is pleasant to be among people who know one's connections and care about them, and it amuses me to hear John Bridges talk of 'Frank.' I have thought a little of writing to the Downs, but I shall not, it is so very certain that he would be somewhere else when my letter got there. * * * * * _Friday, July 1._--It will be two years to-morrow since we left Bath for Clifton, with what happy feelings of escape! * * * * * In another week I shall be at home, and there, my having been at Godmersham will seem like a dream, as my visit to Brompton seems already. * * * * * The orange wine will want our care soon. But in the meantime, for elegance and ease and luxury, the Hattons and the Milles' dine here to-day, and I shall eat ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy. Luckily the pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinions, will make good amends for orange wine. Little Edward is quite well again. Yours affectionately, with love from all, J. A. FOOTNOTES: [146] George (Hatton) was afterwards Earl of Winchilsea; Daniel was Rector of Great Weldon and Chaplain to Queen Victoria. [147] Henry's banking premises were then in Albany, Piccadilly. [148] At Ushant, after the chase of Villeneuve. [149] The cricket dinner seems to have come at the end of the play, as it did in the celebrated match played at a somewhat later date in the same county between All-Muggleton and Dingley Dell (_Pickwick Papers_, chapter vii.). [150] A letter from Mrs. Austen is extant, dated 'April 1806, Trim Street _still_.' Most writers state that the Austens went to Southampton towards the end of 1805--a year too early. [151] Jane afterwards asked Frank's leave to introduce the names of some of his ships (one of which was the _Canopus_) into _Mansfield Park_. [152] This order is said to have been given to each squadron in succession; and it is evident that the ships of Admiral Louis's squadron were especially likely to be in need of supplies, as they had taken their part in Nelson's chase of Villeneuve. [153] _Sailor Brothers_, chaps. ix, x, and xi. [154] See p. 208. [155] See p. 70. [156] Probably Joseph Hill--the frequent correspondent of the poet Cowper. [157] Miss Mary Leigh left her property--in so far as she had any right to do so--in trust for (_a_) the Rev. Thomas Leigh; (_b_) James Leigh Perrot; (_c_) William Henry Leigh. [158] Not to be confused with his uncle, Thomas Leigh, Rector of Harpsden and father of Mrs. Austen. [159] See p. 201. [160] This letter is quoted by Miss Hill, pp. 163-7. [161] Unfortunately, Jane appears to date her letters merely 'Southampton,' until she moved to Castle Square. [162] _Alphonsine_, by Madame de Genlis; _The Female Quixote_, published 1752, by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, author of the phrase: 'A thought strikes me: let us swear an eternal friendship.' [163] Miss Hill supplies us with the line from _The Task_, 'The Winter Walk at Noon,' ll. 149-50:-- 'Laburnum rich In streaming gold; syringa, ivory pure.' [164] The Austens were about to become Lord Lansdowne's tenants in Castle Square. [165] Johnson to Boswell, July 4, 1774.--Birkbeck Hill's _Boswell_, ii. 279. [166] Mr. John Austen of Broadford, under whose will the property at Horsmonden came into the possession of the family of 'Uncle Frank' on the failure of his own direct heirs. See Chapter I. [167] _Letters from the Mountains: being the real Correspondence of a Lady, between 1773 and 1807_, by Mrs. Grant of Laggan. [168] Probably _An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, etc._ London, 1768-9. [169] _Memoir_, p. 77. [170] _Ibid._ p. 140. [171] _Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 116. [172] The Henry Austens were then living at 16 Michael's Place, Brompton--a row of houses on the site of the present Egerton Mansions. [173] James having arrived by the coach before the others. [174] Son and daughter of James. [175] Mr. W. Fowle speaks of a visit to Steventon, when Jane read 'very sweetly' the first canto of _Marmion_. By that time she was no doubt a warm admirer of the poem. CHAPTER XIII FROM SOUTHAMPTON TO CHAWTON 1808-1809 We do not doubt that the orange wine was duly made and the pleasure of unreserved conversation enjoyed during the remainder of the summer. Before the end of September, Cassandra had gone to Godmersham on what was to prove a long and a sad visit. She arrived just at the time of the birth of her sister-in-law's sixth son and eleventh child, John. For a time all went well with mother and child; but on October 8 Elizabeth Austen was suddenly seized with sickness, and died before the serious nature of her attack had been fully realised.[176] This sad event occurred, as the reader will see, between the second and third of the following letters. Edward Austen's two eldest boys, Edward and George, were now at Winchester School, but were taken away for a time on their mother's death. They went at first to the James Austens, at Steventon, no one appearing to think a journey to so distant a county as Kent feasible; and Jane, whose immediate impulse seems to have been to do what she could for her nephews, resigned them rather unwillingly for the time. On October 22 they went on to their grandmother and aunt at Southampton; and then their Aunt Jane was able to devote herself entirely to them, as her own Jane Bennet once did to her small cousins, and to show how her 'steady sense and sweetness of temper exactly adapted her for attending to them in every way: teaching them, playing with them, and loving them'--words which she probably intended as a description of what Cassandra would have done in a similar position. Castle Square: Saturday [October 1, 1808]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter this morning was quite unexpected, and it is well that it brings such good news to counterbalance the disappointment to me of losing my first sentence, which I had arranged full of proper hopes about your journey, intending to commit them to paper to-day, and not looking for certainty till to-morrow. We are extremely glad to hear of the birth of the child, and trust everything will proceed as well as it begins. His mamma has our best wishes, and he our second best for health and comfort--though I suppose, unless he has our best too, we do nothing for _her_. We are glad it was all over before your arrival, and I am most happy to find who the godmother is to be. My mother was some time guessing the names. About an hour and a half after your toils on Wednesday ended, ours began. At seven o'clock Mrs. Harrison, her two daughters and two visitors, with Mr. Debary and his eldest sister, walked in. A second pool of commerce, and all the longer by the addition of the two girls, who during the first had one corner of the table and spillikins to themselves, was the ruin of us; it completed the prosperity of Mr. Debary, however, for he won them both. Mr. Harrison came in late, and sat by the fire, for which I envied him, as we had our usual luck of having a very cold evening. It rained when our company came, but was dry again before they left us. The Miss Ballards are said to be remarkably well-informed; their manners are unaffected and pleasing, but they do not talk quite freely enough to be agreeable, nor can I discover any right they had by taste or feeling to go their late tour. We have got the second volume of _Espriella's Letters_,[177] and I read it aloud by candlelight. The man describes well, but is horribly anti-English. He deserves to be the foreigner he assumes. The Marquis[178] has put off being cured for another year; after waiting some weeks in vain for the return of the vessel he had agreed for, he is gone into Cornwall to order a vessel built for himself by a famous man in that country, in which he means to go abroad a twelvemonth hence. With love to all, Yours affectionately, J. A. Fanny Austen (afterwards Lady Knatchbull), Edward's eldest daughter, had nearly completed her sixteenth year. She was admirably adapted for the difficult position into which she was about to be thrown: that of companion to her father, mistress of a large household, and adviser to her younger brothers and sisters. She was sensible, even-tempered, affectionate, and conscientious. She did indeed prove 'almost another sister' to Jane, who, as Cassandra said afterwards, was perhaps better known to her than to any other human being, except Cassandra herself. Though this niece did not profess any special literary ability, her Aunt always valued her sound judgment on each new book: and in return she gave her, without fear of offending, advice[179] on the most delicate subjects. The short extracts from Fanny's diary, which her son, Lord Brabourne, gives us, show how constantly 'Aunt Jane' was the object of her thoughts. Castle Square: Friday [October 7, 1808]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter on Tuesday gave us great pleasure, and we congratulate you all upon Elizabeth's hitherto happy recovery; to-morrow, or Sunday, I hope to hear of its advancing in the same style. We are also very glad to know that you are so well yourself, and pray you to continue so. * * * * * We found ourselves tricked into a thorough party at Mrs. M.'s, a quadrille and a commerce table, and music in the other room. There were two pools at commerce, but I would not play more than one, for the stake was three shillings, and I cannot afford to lose that twice in an evening. The Miss M.'s were as civil and as silly as usual. * * * * * _Saturday._--Thank you for your letter, which found me at the breakfast table with my two companions. I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny; I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another sister; and could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me. She is quite after one's own heart; give her my best love, and tell her that I always think of her with pleasure. * * * * * Martha was an hour and a half in Winchester, walking about with the three boys and at the pastry-cook's. She thought Edward grown, and speaks with the same admiration as before of his manners; she saw in George a little likeness to his uncle Henry. [October 13.] I have received your letter, and with most melancholy anxiety was it expected, for the sad news reached us last night, but without any particulars. It came in a short letter to Martha from her sister, begun at Steventon and finished in Winchester. We have felt--we do feel--for you all, as you will not need to be told: for you, for Fanny, for Henry, for Lady Bridges, and for dearest Edward, whose loss and whose sufferings seem to make those of every other person nothing. God be praised that you can say what you do of him: that he has a religious mind to bear him up, and a disposition that will gradually lead him to comfort. My dear, dear Fanny, I am so thankful that she has you with her! You will be everything to her; you will give her all the consolation that human aid can give. May the Almighty sustain you all, and keep you, my dearest Cassandra, well; but for the present I dare say you are equal to everything. You will know that the poor boys are at Steventon. Perhaps it is best for them, as they will have more means of exercise and amusement there than they could have with us, but I own myself disappointed by the arrangement. I should have loved to have them with me at such a time. I shall write to Edward by this post. * * * * * With what true sympathy our feelings are shared by Martha you need not be told; she is the friend and sister under every circumstance. We need not enter into a panegyric on the departed, but it is sweet to think of her great worth, of her solid principles, of her true devotion, her excellence in every relation of life. It is also consolatory to reflect on the shortness of the sufferings which led her from this world to a better. Farewell for the present, my dearest sister. Tell Edward that we feel for him and pray for him. Saturday night [October 15, 1808]. Your accounts make us as comfortable as we can expect to be at such a time. Edward's loss is terrible, and must be felt as such, and these are too early days indeed to think of moderation in grief, either in him or his afflicted daughter, but soon we may hope that our dear Fanny's sense of duty to that beloved father will rouse her to exertion. For his sake, and as the most acceptable proof of love to the spirit of her departed mother, she will try to be tranquil and resigned. Does she feel you to be a comfort to her, or is she too much overpowered for anything but solitude? Your account of Lizzy is very interesting. Poor child! One must hope the impression _will_ be strong, and yet one's heart aches for a dejected mind of eight years old. * * * * * We are anxious to be assured that Edward will not attend the funeral, but when it comes to the point I think he must feel it impossible. * * * * * I am glad you can say what you do of Mrs. Knight and of Goodnestone in general; it is a great relief to me to know that the shock did not make any of them ill. But what a task was yours to announce it! _Now_ I hope you are not overpowered with letter-writing, as Henry[180] and John can ease you of many of your correspondents. * * * * * Upon your letter to Dr. Goddard's[181] being forwarded to them, Mary wrote to ask whether my mother wished to have her grandsons sent to her. We decided on their remaining where they were, which I hope my brother will approve of. I am sure he will do us the justice of believing that in such a decision we sacrificed inclination to what we thought best. I shall write by the coach to-morrow to Mrs. J. A., and to Edward, about their mourning, though this day's post will probably bring directions to them on that subject from yourselves. I shall certainly make use of the opportunity of addressing our nephew on the most serious of all concerns, as I naturally did in my letter to him before. The poor boys are, perhaps, more comfortable at Steventon than they could be here, but you will understand _my feelings_ with respect to it. To-morrow will be a dreadful day for you all. Mr. Whitfield's[182] will be a severe duty. Glad shall I be to hear that it is over. That you are for ever in our thoughts you will not doubt. I see your mournful party in my mind's eye under every varying circumstance of the day; and in the evening especially figure to myself its sad gloom: the efforts to talk, the frequent summons to melancholy orders and cares, and poor Edward, restless in misery, going from one room to another, and perhaps not seldom upstairs, to see all that remains of his Elizabeth. There must be a letter missing between October 15 and October 24, containing Jane's first comment on the offer of a cottage at Chawton, made by Edward Austen to his mother. In the midst of his grief--perhaps, in consequence of his loss--he wished to bind his mother and sisters more closely to himself. He gave them a choice between a house near Godmersham, and one at Chawton; but the mother and sisters were what Jane afterwards called 'Hampshire-born Austens,' and clung to their county. The offer was particularly opportune, for Mrs. Austen was already hesitating between Kent and Hampshire as a place of residence. The attractions of a home at Chawton became greater the more they were considered; and though it was held to be necessary to consult the Frank Austens, whom they would be leaving, no doubt was entertained as to their answer. Castle Square: Monday [October 24, 1808]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Edward and George came to us soon after seven on Saturday, very well, but very cold, having by choice travelled on the outside, and with no great coat but what Mr. Wise, the coachman, good-naturedly spared them of his, as they sat by his side. They were so much chilled when they arrived, that I was afraid they must have taken cold; but it does not seem at all the case; I never saw them looking better. _They behave extremely well_ in every respect, showing quite as much feeling as one wishes to see, and on every occasion speaking of their father with the liveliest affection. His letter was read over by each of them yesterday, and with many tears; George sobbed aloud, Edward's tears do not flow so easily; but as far as I can judge they are both very properly impressed by what has happened. Miss Lloyd, who is a more impartial judge than I can be, is exceedingly pleased with them. George is almost a new acquaintance to me, and I find him in a different way as _engaging as Edward_. We do not want amusement: bilbocatch,[183] at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed; and we mean to avail ourselves of our kind papa's consideration, by not returning to Winchester till quite the evening of Wednesday. * * * * * The _St. Albans_, I find, sailed on the very day of my letters reaching Yarmouth, so that we must not expect an answer[184] at present; we scarcely feel, however, to be in suspense, or only enough to keep our plans to ourselves. We have been obliged to explain them to our young visitors, in consequence of Fanny's letter, but we have not yet mentioned them to Steventon. We are all quite familiarised to the idea ourselves; my mother only wants Mrs. Seward to go out at Midsummer. What sort of a kitchen garden is there? Mrs. J. A. expresses her fear of our settling in Kent, and, till this proposal was made, we began to look forward to it here; my mother was actually talking of a house at Wye. It will be best, however, as it is. * * * * * I hope your sorrowing party were at church yesterday, and have no longer _that_ to dread. Martha was kept at home by a _cold, but I went with my two nephews, and I saw Edward was much affected by the sermon, which, indeed, I could have supposed purposely addressed_ to the afflicted, if the text had not naturally come in the course of Dr. Mant's[185] observations on the Litany: 'All that are in danger, necessity, or tribulation,' was the subject of it. The weather did not allow us afterwards to get farther than the quay, where George was very happy as long as we could stay, flying about from one side to the other, and skipping on board a collier immediately. In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home, to which they were very attentive; but you will not expect to hear that they did not return to conundrums the moment it _was over_. While I write now, George is most industriously making and naming paper ships, at which he afterwards shoots with horse-chestnuts, brought from Steventon on purpose; and Edward equally intent over the _Lake of Killarney_, twisting himself about in one of our great chairs. * * * * * _Tuesday._--The day began cheerfully, but it is not likely to continue what it should, for them or for us. _We had a little water party_ yesterday; I and my two nephews went from the Itchen Ferry up to Northam, where we landed, looked into the 74, and walked home, and it was so much enjoyed that I had intended to take them to Netley to-day; the tide is just right for our going immediately after moonshine,[186] but I am afraid there will be rain; if we cannot get so far, however, we may perhaps go round from the ferry to the quay. I had not proposed doing more than cross the Itchen yesterday, but it proved so pleasant, and so much to the satisfaction of all, that when we reached the middle of the stream we agreed to be rowed up the river; both the boys rowed great part of the way, and their questions and remarks, as well as their enjoyment, were very amusing; George's enquiries were endless, and his eagerness in everything reminds me often _of his Uncle Henry_. Our evening was equally agreeable in its way: I introduced _speculation_,[187] and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off. * * * * * Of Chawton I think I can have nothing more to say, but that everything you say about it in the letter now before me will, I am sure, as soon as I am able to read it to her, make my mother consider the plan with more and more pleasure. Sunday [November 21, 1808]. Your letter, my dear Cassandra, obliges me to write immediately, that you may have the earliest notice of Frank's intending, if possible, to go to Godmersham exactly at the time now fixed for your visit to Goodnestone. * * * * * Your news of Edward Bridges[188] was _quite_ news, for I have had no letter from Wrotham. I wish him happy with all my heart, and hope his choice may turn out according to his own expectations, and beyond those of his family; and I dare say it will. Marriage is a great improver, and in a similar situation Harriet may be as amiable as Eleanor. As to money, that will come, you may be sure, because they cannot do without it. When you see him again, pray give him our congratulations and best wishes. This match will certainly set John and Lucy going. There are six bedchambers at Chawton; Henry wrote to my mother the other day, and luckily mentioned the number, which is just what we wanted to be assured of. He speaks also of garrets for store places, one of which she immediately planned fitting up for Edward's man servant; and now perhaps it must be for our own; for she is already quite reconciled to our keeping one. The difficulty of doing without one had been thought of before. His name shall be Robert, if you please. * * * * * Yes, the Stoneleigh business is concluded, but it was not till yesterday that my mother was regularly informed of it, though the news had reached us on Monday evening by way of Steventon. * * * * * Our brother[189] we may perhaps see in the course of a few days, and we mean to take the opportunity of his help to go one night to the play. Martha ought to see the inside of the theatre once while she lives in Southampton, and I think she will hardly wish to take a second view. * * * * * How could you have a wet day on Thursday? With us it was a prince of days, the most delightful we have had for weeks; soft, bright, with a brisk wind from the south-west; everybody was out and talking of spring, and Martha and I did not know how to turn back. On Friday evening we had some very blowing weather--from 6 to 9, I think we never heard it worse, even here. And one night we had so much rain that it forced its way again into the store closet, and though the evil was comparatively slight and the mischief nothing, I had some employment the next day in drying parcels, &c. I have now moved still more out of the way. * * * * * Adieu! remember me affectionately to everybody, and believe me, Ever yours, J. A. The home at Chawton was now looked upon as a certainty; though none of its future inhabitants inspected it until February 1809, when Cassandra visited it on her way back from Godmersham. It was some years since they had lived in the country, and their future home was likely to be very quiet; so, as Jane recovered her spirits, she determined to crowd into her remaining months at Southampton as much society and amusement as possible. She went to two of the Southampton assemblies--her last recorded appearances as an active ball-goer. Castle Square: Friday [December 9, 1808]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Soon after I had closed my last letter to you we were visited by Mrs. Dickens and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Bertie, the wife of a lately-made Admiral. Mrs. F. A., I believe, was their first object, but they put up with us very kindly, and Mrs. D. finding in Miss Lloyd a friend of Mrs. Dundas, had another motive for the acquaintance. She seems a really agreeable woman--that is, her manners are gentle, and she knows a great many of our connections in West Kent. Mrs. Bertie lives in the Polygon, and was out when we returned her visit, which are _her_ two virtues. A larger circle of acquaintance, and an increase of amusement, is quite in character with our approaching removal. Yes, I mean to go to as many balls as possible, that I may have a good bargain. Everybody is very much concerned at our going away, and everybody is acquainted with Chawton, and speaks of it as a remarkably pretty village, and everybody knows the house we describe, but nobody fixes on the right. I am very much obliged to Mrs. Knight for such a proof of the interest she takes in me, and she may depend upon it that I _will_ marry Mr. Papillon,[190] whatever may be his reluctance or my own. I owe her much more than such a trifling sacrifice. Our ball was rather more amusing than I expected. Martha liked it very much, and I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour. It was past nine before we were sent for, and not twelve when we returned. The room was tolerably full, and there # were, perhaps, thirty couple of dancers. The melancholy part was, to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago. I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. We paid an additional shilling for our tea, which we took as we chose in an adjoining and very comfortable room. There were only four dances, and it went to my heart that the Miss Lances (one of them, too, named Emma) should have partners only for two. You will not expect to hear that _I_ was asked to dance, but I was--by the gentleman whom we met _that Sunday_ with Captain D'Auvergne. We have always kept up a bowing acquaintance since, and, being pleased with his black eyes, I spoke to him at the ball, which brought on me this civility; but I do not know his name, and he seems so little at home in the English language, that I believe his black eyes may be the best of him. Captain D'Auvergne has got a ship. * * * * * Having now cleared away my smaller articles of news, I come to a communication of some weight: no less than that my uncle and aunt[191] are going to allow James £100 a year. We hear of it through Steventon. Mary sent us the other day an extract from my aunt's letter on the subject, in which the donation is made with the greatest kindness, and intended as a compensation for his loss in the conscientious refusal of Hampstead living; £100 a year being all that he had at the time called its worth, as I find it was always intended at Steventon to divide the real income with Kintbury.[192] * * * * * I am glad you are to have Henry with you again; with him and the boys you cannot but have a cheerful, and at times even a merry, Christmas. * * * * * We want to be settled at Chawton in time for Henry to come to us for some shooting in October, at least, or a little earlier, and Edward may visit us after taking his boys back to Winchester. Suppose we name the 4th of September. Will not that do? * * * * * Distribute the affectionate love of a heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it. Tuesday [December 27, 1808]. . . . Lady Sondes' match[193] surprises, but does not offend me; had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry _once_ in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can _wish_ her, to be happy. Do not imagine that your picture of your _tête-à-tête_ with Sir B.[194] makes any change in our expectations here; he could not be really reading, though he held the newspaper in his hand; he was making up his mind to the deed, and the manner of it. I think you will have a letter from him soon. * * * * * We have now pretty well ascertained James's income to be eleven hundred pounds, curate paid, which makes us very happy--the ascertainment as well as the income. * * * * * _Wednesday._--I must write to Charles next week. You may guess in what extravagant terms of praise Earle Harwood speaks of him. He is looked up to by everybody in all America. * * * * * Yes, yes, we _will_ have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for thirty guineas, and I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces, when we have the pleasure of their company. Tuesday [January 10, 1809]. I am not surprised, my dear Cassandra, that you did not find my last letter very full of matter, and I wish this may not have the same deficiency; but we are doing nothing ourselves to write about, and I am therefore quite dependent upon the communications of our friends, or my own wits. * * * * * The _St. Albans_ perhaps may soon be off to help bring home what may remain by this time of our poor army,[195] whose state seems dreadfully critical. The Regency seems to have been heard of only here; my most political correspondents make no mention of it. Unlucky that I should have wasted so much reflection on the subject. I can now answer your question to my mother more at large, and likewise more at small--with equal perspicuity and minuteness; for the very day of our leaving Southampton is fixed; and if the knowledge is of no _use_ to Edward, I am sure it will give him pleasure. Easter Monday, April 3, is the day; we are to sleep that night at Alton, and be with our friends at Bookham the next, if they are then at home; there we remain till the following Monday, and on Tuesday, April 11, hope to be at Godmersham. * * * * * William will be quite recovered, I trust, by the time you receive this. What a comfort his cross-stitch must have been! Pray tell him that I should like to see his work very much. I hope our answers this morning have given satisfaction; we had great pleasure in Uncle Deedes' packet; and pray let Marianne know, in private, that I think she is quite right to work a rug for Uncle John's coffee urn, and that I am sure it must give great pleasure to herself now, and to him when he receives it. The preference of Brag over Speculation does not greatly surprise me, I believe, because I feel the same myself; but it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage; and, after all, what is there so delightful in a pair royal of Braggers? It is but three nines or three knaves, or a mixture of them. When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its ground against Speculation--of which I hope Edward is now convinced. Give my love to him if he is. * * * * * We are now in _Margiana_,[196] and like it very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain. * * * * * _Wednesday._--Charles's rug will be finished to-day, and sent to-morrow to Frank, to be consigned by him to Mr. Turner's care; and I am going to send _Marmion_ out with it--very generous in me, I think. Have you nothing to say of your little namesake? We join in love and many happy returns. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. The Manydown ball was a smaller thing than I expected, but it seems to have made Anna very happy. At _her_ age it would not have done for _me_. Tuesday [January 17, 1809]. I hope you have had no more illness among you, and that William will be soon as well as ever. His working a footstool for Chawton is a most agreeable surprise to me, and I am sure his grandmamma will value it very much as a proof of his affection and industry, but we shall never have the heart to put our feet upon it. I believe I must work a muslin cover in satin stitch to keep it from the dirt. I long to know what his colours are. I guess greens and purples. * * * * * To set against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got _Ida of Athens_,[197] by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her _Irish Girl_[198] does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather. Adieu! I must leave off to stir the fire and call on Miss Murden. _Evening._--I have done them both, the first very often. We found our friend as comfortable as she can ever allow herself to be in cold weather. There is a very neat parlour behind the shop for her to sit in, not very light indeed, being _à la_ Southampton, the middle of three deep, but very lively from the frequent sound of the pestle and mortar. Tuesday [January 24, 1809]. I had the happiness yesterday of a letter from Charles, but I shall say as little about it as possible, because I know _that_ excruciating Henry will have had a letter likewise, to make all my intelligence valueless. It was written at Bermuda on the 7th and 10th of December. All well, and Fanny[199] still only in expectation of being otherwise. He had taken a small prize in his late cruise--a French schooner, laden with sugar; but bad weather parted them, and she had not yet been heard of. His cruise ended December 1st. My September letter was the latest he had received. * * * * * You rejoice me by what you say of Fanny.[200] I hope she will not turn good-for-nothing this ever so long. We thought of and talked of her yesterday with sincere affection, and wished her a long enjoyment of all the happiness to which she seems born. While she gives happiness to those about her she is pretty sure of her own share. I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write, but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning criticism may not hurt my style, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store closet it would be charming. We have been in two or three dreadful states within the last week, from the melting of the snow, &c., and the contest between us and the closet has now ended in our defeat. I have been obliged to move almost everything out of it, and leave it to splash itself as it likes. You have by no means raised my curiosity after Caleb.[201] My disinclination for it before was affected, but now it is real. I do not like the evangelicals. Of course I shall be delighted when I read it, like other people, but till I do I dislike it. * * * * * Your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them waiting in the cold. The room was tolerably full, and the ball opened by Miss Glyn. The Miss Lances had partners, Captain D'Auvergne's friend appeared in regimentals, Caroline Maitland had an officer to flirt with, and Mr. John Harrison was deputed by Captain Smith, being himself absent, to ask me to dance. Everything went well, you see, especially after we had tucked Mrs. Lance's neckerchief in behind and fastened it with a pin. * * * * * Adieu, sweet You. This is grievous news from Spain. It is well that Dr. Moore was spared the knowledge of such a son's death. Monday [January 30]. I am not at all ashamed about the name of the novel, having been guilty of no insult towards your handwriting; the diphthong I always saw, but knowing how fond you were of adding a vowel wherever you could, I attributed it to that alone, and the knowledge of the truth does the book no service; the only merit it could have was in the name of Caleb, which has an honest, unpretending sound, but in Coelebs there is pedantry and affectation. Is it written only to classical scholars? I am sorry to find that Sir J. Moore has a mother living, but though a very heroic son he might not be a very necessary one to her happiness. Deacon Morrell may be more to Mrs. Morrell. I wish Sir John had united something of the Christian with the hero in his death. Thank heaven! we have had no one to care for particularly among the troops--no one, in fact, nearer to us than Sir John himself. * * * * * The store closet, I hope, will never do so again, for much of the evil is proved to have proceeded from the gutter being choked up, and we have had it cleared. We had reason to rejoice in the child's absence at the time of the thaw, for the nursery was not habitable. We hear of similar disasters from almost everybody. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss Austen, Edward Austen's, Esq. Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. This letter brings the Southampton series to an end. The party were not to take up their residence at Chawton till the beginning of September; but they left Southampton in April, and we may presume that they carried out the programme mentioned in Jane's letter of January 10, and went by way of Alton to Bookham, and on to Godmersham. In the whole series of letters written from Southampton, there is not a single allusion to Jane's being engaged upon any novel; and it has been inferred--probably correctly--that her pen was idle during these years. The fact that she had already written three novels, but had not succeeded in publishing a single one, can hardly have encouraged her to write more. But it seems almost certain that, a few days before she left Southampton, she made an effort to secure the publication of the novel which we know as _Northanger Abbey_, by the publisher to whom she had sold it as far back as 1803. The circumstances are somewhat involved, but appear to be as follows: Among the letters preserved by Cassandra, is one said not to be in Jane's hand, addressed to Messrs. Crosbie [_sic_] & Co.,[202] of which these are the contents:-- GENTLEMEN,--In the spring of the year 1803 a MS. novel in two vols., entitled _Susan_, was sold to you by a gentleman of the name of Seymour, and the purchase money £10 rec^{d.} at the same time. Six years have since passed, and this work, of which I am myself the Authoress, has never to the best of my knowledge appeared in print, tho' an early publication was stipulated for at the time of sale. I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance by supposing the MS. by some carelessness to have been lost, and if that was the case am willing to supply you with another copy, if you are disposed to avail yourselves of it, and will engage for no farther delay when it comes into your hands. It will not be in my power from particular circumstances to command this copy before the month of August, but then if you accept my proposal you may depend on receiving it. Be so good as to send me a line in answer as soon as possible as my stay in this place will not exceed a few days. Should no notice be taken of this address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work by applying elsewhere. I am, Gentlemen, etc., etc., M. A. D. Direct to Mrs. Ashton Dennis, Post Office, Southampton April 5, 1809. With this letter was preserved the following reply:-- MADAM,--We have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 5th inst. It is true that at the time mentioned we purchased of Mr. Seymour a MS. novel entitled _Susan_, and paid him for it the sum of £10, for which we have his stamped receipt, as a full consideration, but there was not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to publish it. Should you or anyone else [publish it] we shall take proceedings to stop the sale. The MS. shall be yours for the same as we paid for it. For CROSBY & CO. I am yours, etc. RICHARD CROSBY. From the fact that this letter was carefully preserved among Jane's correspondence, from the almost exact coincidence of the dates at which the writer was to leave Southampton, &c., and from the fact that a Mr. Seymour was Henry Austen's man of business, there can be no reasonable doubt that the letter refers to one of Jane Austen's works. It need cause no surprise that she should have written under an assumed name, or that she should have got some one else to write for her in view of the secrecy which she long maintained regarding the authorship of her novels. If we assume, then, that the letter concerns one of Jane Austen's novels--which novel is it? At first sight it might naturally seem to be the story called _Lady Susan_, which was published in the second edition of the _Memoir_; but there are two objections to this: one, that so far from making two volumes, _Lady Susan_ could hardly have made more than one very thin volume; secondly, that _Lady Susan_ is generally looked upon as an early and immature production; and Jane's judgment should have been too good to allow her to desire the publication of an inferior work at a time when she had already completed, in one form or another, three such novels as _Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, and _Northanger Abbey_. If, therefore, it was not _Lady Susan_--What was it? We cannot doubt that it was the novel we now know as _Northanger Abbey_. When that book was prepared for the press in 1816, it contained the following 'advertisement' or prefatory note:-- This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller,[203] it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no further, the author has never been able to learn. So far, this accords closely enough with the history of the MS. _Susan_ as related in the letter to Messrs. Crosby. For other details we must go to the _Memoir_,[204] where we read:-- It [_Northanger Abbey_] was sold in 1803 to a publisher in Bath for ten pounds; but it found so little favour in his eyes that he chose to abide by his first loss rather than risk further expense by publishing such a work. . . . But when four novels of steadily increasing success had given the writer some confidence in herself, she wished to recover the copyright of this early work. One of her brothers undertook the negotiation. He found the purchaser very willing to receive back his money and to resign all claim to the copyright.[205] This, too, accords closely enough with the history of the MS. _Susan_, with the exception of one expression--namely, 'publisher in Bath'; but probably the writer of the _Memoir_ here made a slip, acting on the very natural inference that a book in the main written about Bath, by a writer at that time living in Bath, would naturally have been offered to a publisher in that town. We are, indeed, confronted by two alternatives: either that Jane Austen, in the year 1803, sold two MSS. for the sum of ten pounds each--one named _Susan_, to a London publisher, which has disappeared altogether, unless it is the same as the sketch _Lady Susan_ (which, as we have seen, is improbable), and the other (_Northanger Abbey_) to a Bath publisher; or that the publisher was really a London and not a Bath publisher, and that the original Christian name of Catherine Morland was Susan.[206] FOOTNOTES: [176] _Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 1. [177] Southey's _Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella_ (London, 1807); a lively account of this country, written in the guise of letters assigned to a fictitious Spanish traveller. [178] Lord Lansdowne, who put off being cured too long: his death occurred about the time when he had proposed to go abroad. [179] See Chapter XIX. [180] Henry Austen and John Bridges. [181] William Stanley Goddard, D.D., Head Master of Winchester, 1796-1809. [182] The Rector of Godmersham. [183] Anglicised form of French word for cup-and-ball--_bilboquet_. [184] As to the move to Chawton. [185] Richard Mant, D.D., Rector of All Saints, Southampton, and father of Bishop Mant. [186] She probably wrote _n_oonshine, a somewhat incorrect way of spelling _nuncheon_ (luncheon). See _Sense and Sensibility_, c. xliv. [187] See p. 225. [188] His approaching marriage to Harriet Foote. [189] Frank. [190] The Rector of Chawton, who was a bachelor. [191] Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot. [192] In 1806, the small living of Hampstead Marshall became vacant by the death of old Mr. Fowle; and Lord Craven, the patron, looking round for an 'honest man' who would hold the living for his nominee, offered it to James Austen. He, however, felt scruples, grounded on the wording of the bond of resignation, and declined the preferment. [193] Her second marriage to General H. T. Montresor. [194] A joking suggestion that Sir Brook Bridges was about to propose to Cassandra. [195] Sir John Moore's heroic twelve days' retreat to Corunna was now in progress, and the battle was fought there on January 16. It is mentioned again in the next two letters. The news on this occasion seems to have come very quickly. The _St. Albans_ (under the command of Francis Austen) was at Spithead, and there took charge of the disembarkation of the remains of Sir John Moore's forces (_Sailor Brothers_, p. 203). [196] _Margiana; or Widdrington Tower_, anon. 5 vols. 1808. For a description of this romance see a reply by M. H. Dodds in _Notes and Queries_, 11 S. vii. pp. 233-4. [197] _Women, or Ida of Athens_, by Sydney Owenson (afterwards Lady Morgan), published in 1809. [198] _The Wild Irish Girl_, published in 1806. [199] Mrs. Charles Austen, whose daughter Cassandra was born on December 22, 1808. [200] Eldest daughter of Jane's brother Edward. [201] This proved to be Hannah More's _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_, published in 1808. See next letter. [202] Messrs. Crosby & Co. of Stationers' Hall Court, London. [203] Mr. Austin Dobson, in his introduction to _Northanger Abbey_ (Macmillan, 1897), makes the mistake of saying that the 'advertisement' of the first edition of 1818 tells us that the MS. was disposed of to 'a Bath bookseller.' [204] _Memoir_, p. 129. [205] This implies that (if _Susan_ and _Northanger Abbey_ were the same) no arrangement was concluded in 1809. Indeed, it does not appear that the author contemplated a re-purchase at that time; and the publisher was unwilling to relinquish his rights on any other terms. [206] Later writers have not even been content to accept the 'publisher in Bath,' but have found a name and habitation for him. Mr. Peach, in his _Historic Houses in Bath_, published in 1883 (p. 150 _note_), says: 'The publisher (who purchased _Northanger Abbey_), we believe, was Bull.' Mr. Oscar Fay Adams, writing in 1891 (_Story of Jane Austen's Life_, p. 93), becomes more definite in his statement that 'nothing of hers (Jane Austen's) had yet been published; for although Bull, a publisher in Old Bond Street [sc. in Bath], had purchased in 1802 [_sic_] the manuscript of _Northanger Abbey_ for the sum of ten pounds, it was lying untouched--and possibly unread--among his papers, at the epoch of her leaving Bath.' It is true that Mr. Dobson, unable to find the authority for Bull's name, is a little more guarded, when he amusingly writes, in 1897:-- 'Even at this distance of time, the genuine devotee of Jane Austen must be conscious of a futile but irresistible desire to "feel the bumps" of that Boeotian bookseller of Bath, who, having bought the manuscript of _Northanger Abbey_ for the base price of ten pounds, refrained from putting it before the world. . . . Only two suppositions are possible: one, that Mr. Bull of the Circulating Library at Bath (if Mr. Bull it were) was constitutionally insensible to the charms of that master-spell which Mrs. Slipslop calls "ironing"; the other, that he was an impenitent and irreclaimable adherent of the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_.' Mr. Meehan, in his _Famous Houses of Bath and District_ (1901), is the most circumstantial of all, writing on p. 197:-- 'Her novel _Northanger Abbey_, which is full of Bath, was finished in 1798, and in 1803 she sold the manuscript for ten pounds to Lewis Bull, a bookseller in the "Lower Walks" (now "Terrace Walk"). Bull had in 1785 succeeded James Leake, and he in turn was succeeded by John Upham. Bull was the founder of the well-known library in Bond Street, London--for many years known as Bull's Library.' CHAPTER XIV _SENSE AND SENSIBILITY_ 1809-1811 We are now bringing Jane Austen to the home which she was to occupy through all the remaining eight years of her life--the home from which she went to lie on her deathbed at Winchester. Into this period were to be crowded a large proportion of her most important literary work, and all the contemporary recognition which she was destined to enjoy. The first six of these years must have been singularly happy. So far as we know, she was in good health, she was a member of a cheerful family party, and she was under the protection of brothers who would see that she and her mother and sister suffered no discomfort. The eldest, James, Rector of Steventon, could reach his mother's house in a morning's ride through pleasant country lanes; Edward, the Squire, occasionally occupied the 'Great House' at Chawton, and often lent it to one of his naval brothers; while Henry in London was only too happy to receive his sisters, show them the sights of the metropolis, and transact Jane's literary business. At home were her mother, her life-long friend Martha, and above all her 'other self'--Cassandra--from whom she had no secrets, and with whom disagreement was impossible. But besides all these living objects of interest, Jane also had her own separate and peculiar world, peopled by the creations of her own bright imagination, which by degrees became more and more real to her as she found others accepting and admiring them. She must have resumed the habit of writing with diffidence, after her previous experience; but the sense of progress, and the success which attended her venture in publishing _Sense and Sensibility_ would by degrees make ample amends for past disappointments. She was no doubt aided by the quiet of her home and its friendly surroundings. In this tranquil spot, where the past and present even now join peaceful hands, she found happy leisure, repose of mind, and absence of distraction, such as any sustained creative effort demands. Chawton was a charming village, about a mile from Alton, and deep in the country; although two main roads from Gosport and Winchester respectively joined on their way towards London just in front of the Austens' cottage. Indeed, the place still refuses to be modernised, in spite of three converging railways, and a necessary but civil notice in the corner requesting motorists to 'drive slowly through the village.' The venerable manor-house (then always called the 'Great House') is on the slope of a hill above the Church, surrounded by garden, meadows, and trees, and commanding a view over the intervening valley to a hill opposite, crowned with a beech wood and known as 'Chawton Park.' The cottage is in the centre of the village, and, as it actually abuts on the road, the Austens could easily see or be seen by travellers. It is supposed to have been built as a posting inn, but it had lately been occupied by Edward Austen's steward. The author of the _Memoir_ describes his uncle's improvements to the place in the following words[207]:-- A good-sized entrance and two sitting-rooms made the length of the house, all intended originally to look upon the road; but the large drawing-room window was blocked up and turned into a book-case, and another opened at the side which gave to view only turf and trees, as a high wooden fence and hornbeam hedge shut out the Winchester road, which skirted the whole length of the little domain. He goes on to speak of the garden laid out at the same time, which proved a great interest to the party of ladies, and in which old Mrs. Austen worked vigorously, almost to the end of her days, often attired in a green round smock like a labourer's: a costume which must have been nearly as remarkable as the red habit of her early married life. Jane Austen was now between thirty-three and thirty-four years old. She was absolutely free from any artistic self-consciousness, from any eccentricity of either temper or manner. 'Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly . . . in her works.'[208] Her tastes were as normal as her nature. She read English literature with eagerness, attracted by the eighteenth-century perfection of style--and still more by the return to nature in Cowper and the introduction of romance in Scott--but repelled by coarseness, which she found even in the _Spectator_, and the presence of which in Fielding made her rank him below Richardson. As for the latter, 'Every circumstance narrated in _Sir Charles Grandison_, all that was ever said or done in the "Cedar Parlour," was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.' Her 'dear Dr. Johnson' was a constant companion; and a younger friend was found in Crabbe, whom--as she used to pretend--she was quite prepared to marry: not knowing at the time whether he had a wife living or not.[209] As to her other tastes, she greatly delighted in the beauties of nature, and no doubt would have enjoyed foreign travel, had not that pleasure been quite out of her reach. Her attitude to music, as an art, is more doubtful. She learnt to play the piano in her youth, and after spending many years without an instrument, took it up again on settling at Chawton; but she says herself that she did this in order to be able to play country-dances for her nephews and nieces; and when she goes to a concert she sometimes remarks on her inability to enjoy it. A concert in Sydney Gardens, however, was not perhaps likely to offer to the hearer many examples of high art; and we have no means of knowing whether, if she had had a chance of being introduced to classical music, it would have appealed to her, as it sometimes does to intellectual people who have been previously quite ignorant that they possessed any musical faculty. We are told that she had a sweet voice, and sang with feeling. 'The Soldier's Adieu' and 'The Yellow-haired Laddie' survive as the names of two of her songs. She was extraordinarily neat-handed in anything which she attempted. Her hand-writing was both strong and pretty; her hemming and stitching, over which she spent much time, 'might have put a sewing-machine to shame'; and at games, like spillikins or cup-and-ball, she was invincible. If this description does not seem to imply so wide a mental outlook as we wish to see in a distinguished author, we must remember that Jane Austen (as her nephew tells us) 'lived in entire seclusion from the literary world,' and probably 'never was in company with any person whose talents or whose celebrity equalled her own.'[210] She was in the middle of a small family circle, the members of which were well-educated according to the fashion of the times, intelligent, and refined; but not especially remarkable for learning or original thought. They accepted the standards and views of their generation, interpreting them in a reasonable and healthy manner. She had therefore no inducement, such as might come from the influence of superior intellects, to dive into difficult problems. Her mental efforts were purely her own, and they led her in another direction; but she saw what she did see so very clearly, that she would probably have been capable of looking more deeply into the heart of things, had any impulse from outside induced her to try. Her vision, however, might not have remained so admirably adapted for the delicate operations nearer to the surface which were her real work in life. Jane's person is thus described for us by her niece Anna, now becoming a grown-up girl and a keen observer: 'The figure tall and slight, but not drooping; well balanced, as was proved by her quick firm step. Her complexion of that rare sort which seems the particular property of light brunettes; a mottled skin, not fair, but perfectly clear and healthy; the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match, and the rather small, but well-shaped, nose.' This is a delightful description; but she adds that in spite of all this, her aunt was not regularly handsome, though most attractive. As to her charm and lovableness there is absolute unanimity among all those who were near enough to her to know what she really was. Jane had by this time seen a good deal of society, and enjoyed it, though with a certain critical aloofness which belonged to her family, and which was hardly to be avoided by so clever a person as herself. This critical spirit was evidently a quality of which she endeavoured to rid herself as of a fault; and one of her nieces, who was too young to know her aunt intimately, until almost the end of her life, was able then to say: 'She was in fact one of the last people in society to be afraid of. I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing. She was naturally shy and not given to talk much in company, and people fancied, knowing that she was clever, that she was on the watch for good material for books from their conversation. Her intimate friends knew how groundless was the apprehension and that it wronged her.' She was not only shy: she was also at times very grave. Her niece Anna is inclined to think that Cassandra was the more equably cheerful of the two sisters. There was, undoubtedly, a quiet intensity of nature in Jane for which some critics have not given her credit. Yet at other times she and this same niece could joke so heartily over their needlework and talk such nonsense together that Cassandra would beg them to stop out of mercy to her, and not keep her in such fits of laughing. Sometimes the laughter would be provoked by the composition of extempore verses, such as those given in the _Memoir_[211] celebrating the charm of the 'lovely Anna'; sometimes the niece would skim over new novels at the Alton Library, and reproduce them with wilful exaggeration. On one occasion she threw down a novel on the counter with contempt, saying she knew it must be rubbish from its name. The name was _Sense and Sensibility_--the secret of which had been strictly kept, even from her. The niece who shared these hearty laughs with her aunts--James's eldest daughter, Anna--differed widely from her cousin, Edward's daughter, Fanny. She was more brilliant both in looks and in intelligence, but also more mercurial and excitable. Both occupied a good deal of Jane's thoughts and affections; but Anna must have been the one who caused her the most amusement and also the most anxiety. The interest in her was heightened when she became engaged to the son of Jane's old friend, Mrs. Lefroy. Anna's giddiness was merely that of youth; she settled down into a steady married life as the careful mother of a large family. She cherished an ardent affection for her Aunt Jane, who evidently exercised a great influence on her character. Jane Austen's literary work was done mainly in the general sitting-room: liable at any moment to be interrupted by servants, children, or visitors--to none of whom had been entrusted the secret of her authorship. Her small sheets of paper could easily be put away or covered with blotting-paper, whenever the creaking swing-door (which she valued for that reason) gave notice that anyone was coming. Her needlework was nearly always a garment for the poor; though she had also by her some satin stitch ready to take up in case of the appearance of company. The nature of the work will help to contradict an extraordinary misconception--namely, that she was indifferent to the needs and claims of the poor: an idea probably based on the fact that she never used them as 'copy.' Nothing could be further from the truth. She was of course quite ignorant of the conditions of life in the great towns, and she had but little money to give, but work, teaching, and sympathy were freely bestowed on rustic neighbours. A very good criterion of her attitude towards her own characters is often furnished by their relations with the poor around them. Instances of this may be found in Darcy's care of his tenants and servants, in Anne Elliot's farewell visits to nearly all the inhabitants of Kellynch, and in Emma's benevolence and good sense when assisting her poorer neighbours. So began the Austens' life at Chawton--probably a quieter life than any they had yet led; their nearest neighbours being the Middletons (who rented the 'Great House' for five years and were still its inmates), the Benns at Faringdon, the Harry Digweeds, Mr. Papillon the Rector (a bachelor living with his sister), and the Clements and Prowting families. The ladies took possession of their cottage on July 7, and the first news that we have of them is in a letter from Mrs. Knight, dated October 26, 1809: 'I heard of the Chawton party looking very comfortable at breakfast from a gentleman who was travelling by their door in a post-chaise about ten days ago.' After this the curtain falls again, and we have no letters and no information for a year and a half from this time. We are sure, however, that Jane settled down to her writing very soon, for by April 1811 _Sense and Sensibility_ was in the printers' hands, and _Pride and Prejudice_ far advanced. Since her fit of youthful enthusiasm, when she had composed three stories in little more than three years, she had had much experience of life to sober and strengthen her. Three changes of residence, the loss of her father, the friendship of Mrs. Lefroy and the shock of her death,[212] her own and her sister's sad love stories, the crisis in the Leigh Perrot history, and her literary disappointments--all these must have made her take up her two old works with a chastened spirit, and a more mature judgment. We cannot doubt that extensive alterations were made: in fact, we know that this was the case with _Pride and Prejudice_. We feel equally certain that, of the two works, _Sense and Sensibility_ was essentially the earlier, both in conception and in composition, and that no one could have sat down to write that work who had already written _Pride and Prejudice_.[213] There is, indeed, no lack of humour in the earlier work--the names of Mrs. Jennings, John Dashwood, and the Palmers are enough to assure us of this; but the humorous parts are not nearly so essential to the story as they become in her later novels: the plot is desultory, and the principal characters lack interest. We feel, in the presence of the virtue and sense of Elinor, a rebuke which never affects us in the same way with Jane Bennet, Fanny Price, or Anne Elliot; while Marianne is often exasperating. Edward Ferrars is rather stiff; and Colonel Brandon is so far removed from us that we never even learn his Christian name. Mr. Helm[214] makes some acute remarks on the freedom which Elinor shows in talking of embarrassing subjects with Willoughby, and on her readiness to attribute his fall to the world rather than to himself. We are to imagine, however, that Elinor had been attracted by him before, and felt his personal charm again while she was under its spell: all the more, because she was herself in a special state of excitement, from the rapid changes in Marianne's condition, and the expectation of seeing her mother. Her excuses for Willoughby were so far from representing any opinion of the author's, that they did not even represent her own after a few hours of reflection. It is one of the many instances which we have of Jane Austen's subtle dramatic instinct. On the whole, there is great merit in the book, and much amusement to be got from it; but it seems natural to look upon it as an experiment on the part of the author, before she put forth her full powers in _Pride and Prejudice_. We are glad, by the way, to hear from Jane herself that Miss Steele never caught the Doctor after all. We must now accompany the author to London, whither she went in April 1811 to stay with her brother Henry and his wife (who had moved from Brompton to 64 Sloane Street), having been preceded by her novel, then in the hands of the printers. Cassandra had in the meanwhile gone to Godmersham. Sloane Street: Thursday [April 18, 1811]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . The badness of the weather disconcerted an excellent plan of mine--that of calling on Miss Beckford again; but from the middle of the day it rained incessantly. Mary[215] and I, after disposing of her father and mother, went to the Liverpool Museum[216] and the British Gallery,[217] and I had some amusement at each, though my preference for men and women always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight. * * * * * I did not see Theo.[218] till late on Tuesday; he was gone to Ilford, but he came back in time to show his usual nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless civility. Henry, who had been confined the whole day to the bank, took me in his way home, and, after putting life and wit into the party for a quarter of an hour, put himself and his sister into a hackney coach. * * * * * Eliza is walking out by herself. She has plenty of business on her hands just now, for the day of the party is settled, and drawing near. Above 80 people are invited for next Tuesday evening, and there is to be some very good music--five professionals, three of them glee singers, besides amateurs. Fanny will listen to this. One of the hirelings is a Capital on the harp, from which I expect great pleasure. The foundation of the party was a dinner to Henry Egerton and Henry Walter,[219] but the latter leaves town the day before. I am sorry, as I wished _her_ prejudice to be done away, but should have been more sorry if there had been no invitation. I am a wretch, to be so occupied with all these things as to seem to have no thoughts to give to people and circumstances which really supply a far more lasting interest--the society in which you are; but I do think of you all, I assure you, and want to know all about everybody, and especially about your visit to the W. Friars[220]; 'mais le moyen' not to be occupied by one's own concerns? _Saturday._--Frank is superseded in the _Caledonia_. Henry brought us this news yesterday from Mr. Daysh, and he heard at the same time that Charles may be in England in the course of a month. Sir Edward Pollen succeeds Lord Gambier in his command, and some captain of his succeeds Frank; and I believe the order is already gone out. Henry means to enquire farther to-day. He wrote to Mary on the occasion. This is something to think of. Henry is convinced that he will have the offer of something else,[221] but does not think it will be at all incumbent on him to accept it; and then follows, what will he do? and where will he live? * * * * * The D'Antraigues and Comte Julien cannot come to the party, which was at first a grief, but she has since supplied herself so well with performers that it is of no consequence; their not coming has produced our going to them to-morrow evening, which I like the idea of. It will be amusing to see the ways of a French circle. * * * * * Our first object to-day was Henrietta St., to consult with Henry in consequence of a very unlucky change of the play for this very night--_Hamlet_ instead of _King John_--and we are to go on Monday to _Macbeth_ instead; but it is a disappointment to us both. Love to all. Thursday [April 25, 1811].[222] No, indeed, I am never too busy to think of _S. and S._[223] I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child; and I am much obliged to you for your enquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to Willoughby's first appearance. Mrs. K. regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait _till_ May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June. Henry does not neglect it; he _has_ hurried the printer, and says he will see him again to-day. It will not stand still during his absence, it will be sent to Eliza. The _Incomes_ remain as they were, but I will get them altered if I can. I am very much gratified by Mrs. K.'s interest in it; and whatever may be the event of it as to my credit with her, sincerely wish her curiosity could be satisfied sooner than is now probable. I think she will like my Elinor, but cannot build on anything else. Our party went off extremely well. There were many solicitudes, alarms, and vexations, beforehand, of course, but at last everything was quite right. The rooms were dressed up with flowers, &c., and looked very pretty. A glass for the mantelpiece was lent by the man who is making their own. Mr. Egerton and Mr. Walter came at half-past five, and the festivities began with a pair of very fine soles. Yes, Mr. Walter--for he postponed his leaving London on purpose--which did not give much pleasure at the time, any more than the circumstance from which it rose--his calling on Sunday and being asked by Henry to take the family dinner on that day, which he did; but it is all smoothed over now, and she likes him very well. At half-past seven arrived the musicians in two hackney coaches, and by eight the lordly company began to appear. Among the earliest were George and Mary Cooke, and I spent the greatest part of the evening very pleasantly with them. The drawing-room being soon hotter than we liked, we placed ourselves in the connecting passage, which was comparatively cool, and gave us all the advantage of the music at a pleasant distance, as well as that of the first view of every new comer. I was quite surrounded by acquaintance, especially gentlemen; and what with Mr. Hampson,[224] Mr. Seymour, Mr. W. Knatchbull, Mr. Guillemarde, Mr. Cure, a Captain Simpson, brother to _the_ Captain Simpson, besides Mr. Walter and Mr. Egerton, in addition to the Cookes, and Miss Beckford, and Miss Middleton, I had quite as much upon my hands as I could do. * * * * * Including everybody we were sixty-six--which was considerably more than Eliza had expected, and quite enough to fill the back drawing-room and leave a few to be scattered about in the other and in the passage. The music was extremely good. It opened (tell Fanny) with 'Poike de Parp pin praise pof Prapela;'[225] and of the other glees I remember, 'In peace love tunes,' 'Rosabelle,' 'The Red Cross Knight,' and 'Poor Insect.' Between the songs were lessons on the harp, or harp and pianoforte together; and the harp-player was Wiepart, whose name seems famous, though new to me. There was one female singer, a short Miss Davis, all in blue, bringing up for the public line, whose voice was said to be very fine indeed; and all the performers gave great satisfaction by doing what they were paid for, and giving themselves no airs. No amateur could be persuaded to do anything. * * * * * This said Captain Simpson told us, on the authority of some other Captain just arrived from Halifax, that Charles[226] was bringing the _Cleopatra_ home, and that she was probably by this time in the Channel; but, as Captain S. was certainly in liquor, we must not quite depend on it. It must give one a sort of expectation, however, and will prevent my writing to him any more. I would rather he should not reach England till I am at home, and the Steventon party gone. My mother and Martha both write with great satisfaction of Anna's behaviour. She is quite an Anna with variations, but she cannot have reached her last, for that is always the most flourishing and showy; she is at about her third or fourth, which are generally simple and pretty. * * * * * We _did_ go to the play after all on Saturday. We went to the Lyceum, and saw the _Hypocrite_, an old play taken from Molière's _Tartuffe_, and were well entertained. Dowton and Mathews were the good actors; Mrs. Edwin was the heroine, and her performance is just what it used to be. I have no chance of seeing Mrs. Siddons; she _did_ act on Monday, but, as Henry was told by the box-keeper that he did not think she would, the plans, and all thought of it, were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in _Constance_, and could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me. Eliza caught her cold on Sunday in our way to the D'Antraigues.[227] The horses actually gibbed on this side of Hyde Park Gate: a load of fresh gravel made it a formidable hill to them, and they refused the collar; I believe there was a sore shoulder to irritate. Eliza was frightened and we got out, and were detained in the evening air several minutes. The cold is in her chest, but she takes care of herself, and I hope it may not last long. This engagement prevented Mr. Walter's staying late--he had his coffee and went away. Eliza enjoyed her evening very much, and means to cultivate the acquaintance; and I see nothing to dislike in them but their taking quantities of snuff. Monsieur, the old Count, is a very fine-looking man, with quiet manners, good enough for an Englishman, and, I believe, is a man of great information and taste. He has some fine paintings, which delighted Henry as much as the son's music gratified Eliza; and among them a miniature of Philip V. of Spain, Louis XIV.'s grandson, which exactly suited _my_ capacity. Count Julien's performance is very wonderful. We met only Mrs. Latouche and Miss East, and we are just now engaged to spend next Sunday evening at Mrs. L.'s, and to meet the D'Antraigues, but M. le Comte must do without Henry. If he would but speak English, _I_ would take to him. Sloane Street: [Tuesday, April 30, 1811]. My head-dress was a bugle-band like the border to my gown, and a flower of Mrs. Tilson's. I depended upon hearing something of the evening from Mr. W. K[natchbull], and am very well satisfied with his notice of me--'A pleasing-looking young woman'--that must do; one cannot pretend to anything better now; thankful to have it continued a few years longer! * * * * * We have tried to get _Self-Control_,[228] but in vain. I _should_ like to know what her estimate is, but am always half afraid of finding a clever novel _too clever_, and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled. * * * * * I forgot to tell you in my last that our cousin, Miss Payne,[2] called in on Saturday, and was persuaded to stay dinner. She told us a great deal about her friend Lady Cath. Brecknell, who is most happily married, and Mr. Brecknell is very religious, and has got black whiskers. Yours very affectionately, JANE. Early in May, Jane left London; and, after paying a short visit to Mrs. Hill (_née_ Catherine Bigg) at Streatham, returned home to Chawton, where she found only her mother and her niece Anna. Chawton: Wednesday [May 29, 1811]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,-- . . . You certainly must have heard before I can tell you that Col. Orde has married our cousin, Margt. Beckford,[229] the Marchess. of Douglas's sister. The papers say that her father disinherits her, but I think too well of an Orde to suppose that she has not a handsome independence of her own. * * * * * We sat upstairs [at the Digweeds'] and had thunder and lightning as usual. I never knew such a spring for thunderstorms as it has been. Thank God! we have had no bad ones here. I thought myself in luck to have my uncomfortable feelings shared by the mistress of the house, as that procured blinds and candles. It had been excessively hot the whole day. Mrs. Harding is a good-looking woman, but not much like Mrs. Toke, inasmuch as she is very brown and has scarcely any teeth; she seems to have some of Mrs. Toke's civility. Miss H. is an elegant, pleasing, pretty-looking girl, about nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter, with flowers in her head and music at her finger ends. She plays very well indeed. I have seldom heard anybody with more pleasure. Friday [May 31]. I have taken your hint, slight as it was, and have written to Mrs. Knight, and most sincerely do I hope it will not be in vain. I cannot endure the idea of her giving away her own wheel, and have told her no more than the truth, in saying that I could never use it with comfort. I had a great mind to add that, if she persisted in giving it, I would spin nothing with it but a rope to hang myself, but I was afraid of making it appear a less serious matter of feeling than it really is. * * * * * From Monday to Wednesday Anna is to be engaged at Faringdon, in order that she may come in for the gaieties of Tuesday (the 4th), on Selborne Common, where there are to be volunteers and felicities of all kinds. Harriet B[enn] is invited to spend the day with the John Whites, and her father and mother have very kindly undertaken to get Anna invited also. * * * * * Poor Anna is suffering from _her_ cold, which is worse to-day, but as she has no sore throat I hope it may spend itself by Tuesday. She had a delightful evening with the Miss Middletons--syllabub, tea, coffee, singing, dancing, a hot supper, eleven o'clock, everything that can be imagined agreeable. She desires her best love to Fanny, and will answer her letter before she leaves Chawton, and engages to send her a particular account of the Selborne day. * * * * * How horrible it is to have so many people killed![230] And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! I return to my letter-writing from calling on Miss Harriot Webb, who is short and not quite straight and cannot pronounce an R any better than her sisters; but she has dark hair, a complexion to suit, and, I think, has the pleasantest countenance and manner of the three--the most natural. She appears very well pleased with her new home, and they are all reading with delight Mrs. H. More's recent publication. You cannot imagine--it is not in human nature to imagine--what a nice walk we have round the orchard. The row of beech look very well indeed, and so does the young quickset hedge in the garden. I hear to-day that an apricot has been detected on one of the trees. My mother is perfectly convinced _now_ that she shall not be overpowered by her cleft-wood, and I believe would rather have more than less. God bless you, and I hope June will find you well, and bring us together. Thursday [June 6]. [Anna] does not return from Faringdon till this evening, and I doubt not has had plenty of the miscellaneous, unsettled sort of happiness which seems to suit her best. We hear from Miss Benn, who was on the Common with the Prowtings, that she was very much admired by the gentlemen in general. * * * * * We began pease[231] on Sunday, but our gatherings are very small, not at all like the gathering in the _Lady of the Lake_. Yesterday I had the agreeable surprise of finding several scarlet strawberries quite ripe; had _you_ been at home, this would have been a pleasure lost. There are more gooseberries and fewer currants than I thought at first. We must buy currants for our wine. * * * * * I had just left off writing and put on my things for walking to Alton, when Anna and her friend Harriot called in their way thither, so we went together. Their business was to provide mourning against the King's death, and my mother has had a bombasin bought for her. I am not sorry to be back again, for the young ladies had a great deal to do, and without much method in doing it. Yours affectionately, J. A. The printing of _Sense and Sensibility_ cannot have been very rapid, for in September 28 there is the following entry in Fanny Austen's diary: 'Letter from At. Cass to beg we would not mention that Aunt Jane wrote _Sense and Sensibility_.' This looks as if it were still on the eve of publication, and it was not in fact advertised until October 31. FOOTNOTES: [207] _Memoir_, p. 80. [208] _Ibid._ p. 196. [209] See pp. 275, 285. [210] We are told in the biographical notice prefixed to Bentley's edition of the novels in 1833, that though Jane, when her authorship was an open secret, was once asked by a stranger to join a literary party at which Madame de Staël would be present, she immediately declined the invitation. [211] _Memoir_, p. 89. [212] She had experienced a similar shock before in the sudden death, by accident, of her cousin, Jane Williams. [213] This judgment is based on the idea that _Elinor and Marianne_ (admittedly earlier than _First Impressions_) bore something of the same relation to _Sense and Sensibility_ that _First Impressions_ did to _Pride and Prejudice_. [214] _Jane Austen and her Country-house Comedy_, by W. H. Helm. [215] Her cousin, Mary Cooke. [216] This may have been Bullock's Natural History Museum, at 22 Piccadilly. See _Notes and Queries_, 11 S.v. 514. [217] In Pall Mall. [218] Theophilus Cooke. [219] See p. 6. [220] White Friars, Canterbury--the residence of Mrs. Knight. [221] He took command of the _Elephant_ on July 18, 1811, and became again concerned in the Napoleonic Wars. _Sailor Brothers_ p. 226. [222] The original of this letter is in the British Museum. [223] _Sense and Sensibility._ We do not know whether the _Incomes_ were ever altered. [224] Mr. Hampson, like Mr. Walter, must have been related to Jane through her grandmother (Rebecca Hampson), who married first, Dr. Walter; secondly, William Austen. Mr. Hampson succeeded to a baronetcy, but was too much of a republican to use the title. [225] Jane and her niece Fanny seem to have invented a language of their own--the chief point of which was to use a 'p' wherever possible. Thus the piece of music alluded to was 'Strike the harp in praise of Bragela.' [226] We learn from a letter of Cassandra that he arrived in time to spend (with his family) a week at Chawton Cottage. He had been absent almost seven years. It was their first sight of his wife. [227] The Comte d'Antraigues and his wife were both of them notable people. _He_ had been elected deputy for the _noblesse_ to the States-General in 1789, and had taken at first the popular side; but as time went on he became estranged from Mirabeau, and was among the earliest to emigrate in 1790. For the rest of his life he was engaged in plotting to restore the Bourbons. His wife had been the celebrated Madame St. Hubert of the Paris opera-house, and was the only woman ever known to have inspired Bonaparte to break forth into verse. Both the Count and Countess were murdered by their valet at Barnes, July 22, 1812. (_Un agent secret sous la Révolution et l'Empire: Le Comte d'Antraigues_, par Léonce Pingaud. Paris, 1894.) [228] A novel by Mrs. Brunton, published in 1810. [229] We can give no explanation of the cousinship, if any existed, of Miss Beckford; Miss Payne may have descended from a sister of Jane's grandmother, Rebecca Austen, who married a man of that name. [230] Perhaps in the battle of Albuera, May 16, 1811, which is described by Professor Oman (_Cambridge Modern History_, ix. 467) as 'the most bloody incident of the whole Peninsular War.' [231] June 2. They ought to have waited for the King's birthday (June 4), which was considered the correct day to begin pease upon. CHAPTER XV _PRIDE AND PREJUDICE_ 1812-1814 The title-page of _Sense and Sensibility_ describes the book as being 'by a Lady.' This ascription satisfied the author's desire for concealment, but it puzzled the advertisers. The first advertisement--that in the _Morning Chronicle_ on October 31, 1811--merely describes it as 'a novel, called _Sense and Sensibility_, by Lady ----.' In the same paper, on November 7, it is styled an 'extraordinary novel by Lady ----'; while on November 28 it sinks to being an 'interesting novel,' but is ascribed to 'Lady A.'[232] Jane's expectations were so modest that she laid by a sum out of her very slender resources to meet the expected loss. She must have been delighted at the result. By July 1813 every copy of the first edition had been sold; and not only had her expenses been cleared but she was one hundred and forty pounds to the good.[233] If we compare this with the thirty pounds that Fanny Burney received for _Evelina_, the one hundred pounds that Maria Edgeworth got for _Castle Rackrent_, or the hundred and forty pounds gained by Miss Ferrier for her first novel, we shall see that Jane Austen had no reason to complain. The money was no doubt very welcome; but still more important from another point of view was the favourable reception of the work. Had it been a failure and an expense to its author, she would hardly have dared, nor could she have afforded, to make a second venture. On the success of _Sense and Sensibility_, we may say, depended the existence of _Pride and Prejudice_. Now she could return with renewed spirit to the preparation of the more famous work which was to follow, and on which she had already been engaged for some time, concurrently with her first-published novel. We have no letters and little news for 1812; but we know that in April Edward Austen and his daughter Fanny came to Chawton House for three weeks. It was their last visit as Austens; for on the death of Mrs. Knight--his kind and generous patron and friend--in October of that year, Edward and all his family took the name of Knight[234]: a name which had been borne by every successive owner of the Chawton Estate since the sixteenth century. In June, Jane went with her mother to stay for a fortnight at Steventon Rectory--the last visit ever paid by Mrs. Austen to any place. When she determined never to leave home again, she said that her latest visit should be to her eldest son. Accordingly she went, and took a final farewell of the place where nearly the whole of her married life had been spent. She was then seventy-two years old, and lived on for sixteen more; but she kept her resolution and never again left Chawton Cottage for a single night. Her long survival can hardly have been expected by those who had to nurse her through frequent fits of illness; but these ailments do not seem to have been of the sort that kills. She was, however, always ready to contemplate the near approach of death both for herself and others; for in July 1811, after buying some bombazine in which to mourn for the poor King, she said: 'If I outlive him it will answer my purpose; if I do not, somebody may mourn for me in it: it will be wanted for one or the other, I dare say, before the moths have eaten it up.' As it happened, the King lived nine more years, and Mrs. Austen sixteen; and it was the lot of the latter to lose two children before her own time came. When Jane died in 1817, the health of her eldest brother, James, was failing, and two years and a half later he died. His mother lived on; but during the last years of her life she endured continual pain not only patiently but with characteristic cheerfulness. She once said to her grandson, Edward Austen: 'Ah, my dear, you find me just where you left me--on the sofa. I sometimes think that God Almighty must have forgotten me; but I dare say He will come for me in His own good time.'[235] Our letters recommence in January 1813--almost at the exact date of the publication of _Pride and Prejudice_--a date which will seem to many people the central point in Jane Austen's life. She appeared, indeed, to be rather of that opinion herself, so far as her modest, unassuming nature would allow her to attribute importance to one of her own works. She calls it her 'darling child,' and does not know how she can tolerate people who will not care at least for Elizabeth. But we had better let her speak for herself. The first of the following letters[236] was written before the publication took place; but the others deal largely with _Pride and Prejudice_, while there is an under-current of allusions to _Mansfield Park_--now approaching completion. Chawton: Sunday evening [January 24, 1813]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--This is exactly the weather we could wish for, if you are but well enough to enjoy it. I shall be glad to hear that you are not confined to the house by an increase of cold. * * * * * We quite run over with books. My mother has got Sir John Carr's _Travels in Spain_ from Miss B. and _I_ am reading a Society octavo, _An Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire_ by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers: a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written and highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson or Buchanan, or even the two Mr. Smiths of the City[237]--the first soldier I ever sighed for--but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit. Yesterday, moreover, brought us Mrs. Grant's _Letters_ with Mr. White's compliments; but I have disposed of them, compliments and all, for the first fortnight to Miss Papillon, and among so many readers or retainers of books as we have in Chawton I dare say there will be no difficulty in getting rid of them for another fortnight if necessary. I learn from Sir J. Carr that there is no Government House at Gibraltar; I must alter it to the Commissioner's.[238] Our party on Wednesday was not unagreeable. . . . We were eleven altogether, as you will find on computation, adding Miss Benn and two strange gentlemen, a Mr. Twyford, curate of Great Worldham, who is living in Alton, and his friend Mr. Wilkes. I don't know that Mr. T. is anything except very dark-complexioned, but Mr. W. was a useful addition, being an easy, talking, pleasantish young man--a _very_ young man, hardly twenty, perhaps. He is of St. John's, Cambridge, and spoke very highly of H. Walter as a scholar. He said he was considered as the best classic in the University. How such a report would have interested my father! * * * * * Upon Mrs. D.'s mentioning that she had sent the _Rejected Addresses_ to Mr. H., I began talking to her a little about them, and expressed my hope of their having amused her. Her answer was 'Oh dear, yes, very much, very droll indeed--the opening of the House and the striking up of the fiddles!' What she meant, poor woman, who shall say? I sought no farther. The P.'s have now got the book, and like it very much; their niece Eleanor has recommended it most warmly to them--_She_ looks like a rejected addresser. As soon as a whist party was formed, and a round table threatened, I made my mother an excuse and came away, leaving just as many for _their_ round table as there were at Mrs. Grant's.[239] I wish they might be as agreeable a set. * * * * * The Miss Sibleys want to establish a Book Society in their side of the country like ours. What can be a stronger proof of that superiority in ours over the Manydown and Steventon society, which I have always foreseen and felt? No emulation of the kind was ever inspired by _their_ proceedings; no such wish of the Miss Sibleys was ever heard in the course of the many years of that Society's existence. And what are their Biglands and their Barrows, their Macartneys and Mackenzies to Captain Pasley's _Essay on the Military Police of the British Empire_ and the _Rejected Addresses_? I have walked once to Alton, and yesterday Miss Papillon and I walked together to call on the Garnets. . . . _I_ had a very agreeable walk, and if _she_ had not, more shame for her, for I was quite as entertaining as she was. Dame G. is pretty well, and we found her surrounded by her well-behaved, healthy, large-eyed children. I took her an old shift, and promised her a set of our linen, and my companion left some of her Bank Stock with her. Tell Martha that I hunt away the rogues every night from under her bed; they feel the difference of her being gone. Friday [January 29, 1813]. I hope you received my little parcel by J. Bond on Wednesday evening, my dear Cassandra, and that you will be ready to hear from me again on Sunday, for I feel that I must write to you to-day. . . . I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London. On Wednesday I received one copy sent down by Falkener, with three lines from Henry to say that he had given another to Charles and sent a third by the coach to Godmersham. * * * * * The advertisement is in our paper to-day for the first time: 18_s._ He shall ask 1_l._ 1_s._ for my two next, and 1_l._ 8_s._ for my stupidest of all.[240] Miss Benn dined with us on the very day of the book's coming, and in the evening we set fairly at it, and read half the first vol. to her, prefacing that, having intelligence from Henry that such a work would soon appear, we had desired him to send it whenever it came out, and I believe it passed with her unsuspected. She was amused, poor soul! _That_ she could not help, you know, with two such people to lead the way, but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like _her_ at least I do not know. There are a few typical[241] errors; and a 'said he,' or a 'said she,' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but-- I do not write for such dull elves As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.[242] The second volume is shorter than I could wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part. I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than _Sense and Sensibility_ altogether. Now I will try and write of something else; and it shall be a complete change of subject--ordination.[243] I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well. If you could discover whether Northamptonshire is a country of hedgerows, I should be glad again. Thursday [February 4, 1813]. Your letter was truly welcome, and I am much obliged to you for all your praise; it came at a right time, for I had had some fits of disgust. Our second evening's reading to Miss Benn had not pleased me so well, but I believe something must be attributed to my mother's too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough and well-satisfied enough. The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style. I doubt your quite agreeing with me here. I know your starched notions. The caution observed at Steventon[244] with regard to the possession of the book is an agreeable surprise to me, and I heartily wish it may be the means of saving you from anything unpleasant--but you must be prepared for the neighbourhood being perhaps already informed of there being such a work in the world and in the Chawton world. . . . The greatest blunder in the printing that I have met with is in page 220, l. 3, where two speeches are made into one.[245] There might as well have been no supper at Longbourn; but I suppose it was the remains of Mrs. Bennet's old Meryton habits. Tuesday [February 9, 1813]. This will be a quick return for yours, my dear Cassandra; I doubt its having much else to recommend it; but there is no saying; it may turn out to be a very long and delightful letter. * * * * * I am exceedingly pleased that you can say what you do, after having gone through the whole work, and Fanny's praise is very gratifying. My hopes were tolerably strong of _her_, but nothing like a certainty. Her liking Darcy and Elizabeth is enough. She might hate all the others if she would. I have her opinion under her own hand this morning, but your transcript of it, which I read first, was not, and is not, the less acceptable. To _me_ it is of course all praise, but the more exact truth which she sends _you_ is good enough. . . . * * * * * I have been applied to for information as to the oath taken in former times of Bell, Book, and Candle, but have none to give. Perhaps you may be able to learn something of its origin and meaning at Manydown. Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick quarto volumes which one always sees in the breakfast parlour there must be acquainted with everything in the world. I detest a quarto. Capt. Pasley's book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a man who condenses his thoughts into an octavo. * * * * * Miss Benn dined here on Friday. I have not seen her since--there is still work for one evening more. I know nothing of the P.'s. The C.'s are at home, and are reduced to read. They have got Miss Edgeworth. I have disposed of Mrs. Grant for the second fortnight to Mrs. D. It can make no difference to _her_ which of the twenty-six fortnights in the year the three volumes lay in her house. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss Austen, Manydown--by favour of Mr. Gray. As she read and re-read _Pride and Prejudice_, Jane must have become aware (if she did not know it before) that she had advanced far beyond _Sense and Sensibility_. Indeed, the earlier work seems to fade out of her mind, so far as allusions to its principal characters are concerned; while those of the later novel remain vivid and attractive to their creator. Even the minor characters were real to her; and she forgot nothing--down to the marriage of Kitty to a clergyman near Pemberley, and that of Mary to one of Uncle Philips's clerks. In this work there seemed to be hardly anything for which she need apologise. Here everything is complete; the humour, though brilliant, is yet always subordinate to the progress of the story; the plot is inevitable, and its turning-point (the first proposal of Darcy) occurs exactly when it ought; while all fear of a commonplace ending is avoided by the insertion of the celebrated interview between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth. It gives us also an excellent example of the way in which Jane Austen composed her stories. We are always in the confidence of the heroine, who is hardly off the stage throughout the whole novel; we see the other characters with her eyes, even when they are persons--like Jane Bennet--with whom we believe ourselves to be intimately acquainted. At the same time, such is the subtle irony of the author that we are quite aware of her intention to make us understand more of the heroine's state of mind than the heroine herself does, and to distinguish between her conscious and unconscious thoughts. Elizabeth has to change from hatred to love--real hatred and real love--in a volume and a half. But it would wound her self-respect if she acknowledged to herself that the pace at which she moved was so rapid; and the change is constantly only half admitted. Even near the end--when she says that, if Darcy is prevented from seeking her hand by the representations of Lady Catherine, she shall soon cease to regret him--we know that this is far from the truth: that her affection is really steadfast, and that she is only trying to disguise from herself her own anxiety. Other examples might easily be found. On April 25, 1813, occurred the death of Eliza, Henry Austen's wife. She had suffered from a long and painful illness, and the end was 'a release at last.' These circumstances would diminish the grief felt at her loss; but the event must have carried their minds back to early days at Steventon; and Jane was sure to remember with gratitude the affection and attention which Eliza had bestowed upon her much younger cousin. Soon afterwards, Henry went down to Chawton; and on May 20 he drove Jane up to London in his curricle. This was a short visit, and, owing to Henry's being in deep mourning, no theatres were visited. Jane went, however, to three picture-galleries--her mind still full of Bennets and Darcys. Sloane Street: [Thursday, May 20, 1813].[246] MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Before I say anything else, I claim a paper full of halfpence on the drawing-room mantelpiece; I put them there myself, and forgot to bring them with me. I cannot say that I have yet been in any distress for money, but I chuse to have my due, as well as the Devil. How lucky we were in our weather yesterday! This wet morning makes one more sensible of it. We had no rain of any consequence. The head of the curricle was put half up three or four times, but our share of the showers was very trifling, though they seemed to be heavy all round us, when we were on the Hog's-back, and I fancied it might then be raining so hard at Chawton as to make you feel for us much more than we deserved. Three hours and a quarter took us to Guildford, where we staid barely two hours, and had only just time enough for all we had to do there; that is, eating a long, comfortable breakfast, watching the carriages, paying Mr. Herington, and taking a little stroll afterwards. From some views which that stroll gave us, I think most highly of the situation of Guildford. We wanted all our brothers and sisters to be standing with us in the bowling-green, and looking towards Horsham. . . . I was very lucky in my gloves--got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked at all like a glove shop, and gave only four shillings for them; upon hearing which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything, and their worth certainly remains to be proved; but I think they look very well. We left Guildford at twenty minutes before twelve (I hope somebody cares for these minutiæ), and were at Esher in about two hours more. I was very much pleased with the country in general. Between Guildford and Ripley I thought it particularly pretty, also about Painshill and everywhere else; and from a Mr. Spicer's grounds at Esher, which we walked into before our dinner, the views were beautiful. I cannot say what we did _not_ see, but I should think that there could not be a wood, or a meadow, or palace, or a remarkable spot in England that was not spread out before us on one side or the other. Claremont is going to be sold: a Mr. Ellis has it now. It is a house that seems never to have prospered. . . . After dinner we walked forward to be overtaken at the coachman's time, and before he did overtake us we were very near Kingston. I fancy it was about half-past six when we reached this house--a twelve hours' business, and the horses did not appear more than reasonably tired. I was very tired too, and very glad to get to bed early, but am quite well to-day. I am very snug with the front drawing-room all to myself, and would not say 'thank you' for any company but you. The quietness of it does me good. I have contrived to pay my two visits, though the weather made me a great while about it, and left me only a few minutes to sit with Charlotte Craven.[247] She looks very well, and her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education. Her manners are as unaffected and pleasing as ever. She had heard from her mother to-day. Mrs. Craven spends another fortnight at Chilton. I saw nobody but Charlotte, which pleased me best. I was shewn upstairs into a drawing-room, where she came to me, and the appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like, amused me very much; it was full of all the modern elegancies. Monday [May 24, 1813]. I am very much obliged to you for writing to me. You must have hated it after a worrying morning. * * * * * I went the day before to Layton's,[248] as I proposed, and got my mother's gown--seven yards at 6_s._ 6_d._ I then walked into No. 10,[249] which is all dirt and confusion, but in a very promising way, and after being present at the opening of a new account, to my great amusement, Henry and I went to the exhibition in Spring Gardens. It is not thought a good collection, but I was very well pleased, particularly (pray tell Fanny) with a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley,[250] excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her sister, but there was no Mrs. Darcy. Perhaps, however, I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds's paintings, which is now showing in Pall Mall, and which we are also to visit. Mrs. Bingley's is exactly herself--size, shaped face, features, and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow. * * * * * The events of yesterday were, our going to Belgrave Chapel in the morning, our being prevented by the rain from going to evening service at St. James, Mr. Hampson's calling, Messrs. Barlow and Phillips[251] dining here, and Mr. and Mrs. Tilson's[252] coming in the evening _à l'ordinaire_. _She_ drank tea with us both Thursday and Saturday; _he_ dined out each day, and on Friday we were with them, and they wish us to go to them to-morrow evening to meet Miss Burdett, but I do not know how it will end. Henry talks of a drive to Hampstead, which may interfere with it. I should like to see Miss Burdett very well, but that I am rather frightened by hearing that she wishes to be introduced to _me_. If I _am_ a wild beast I cannot help it. It is not my own fault. * * * * * Get us the best weather you can for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. We are to go to Windsor in our way to Henley, which will be a great delight. We shall be leaving Sloane Street about 12, two or three hours after Charles's party have begun their journey. You will miss them, but the comfort of getting back into your own room will be great. And then the tea and sugar! * * * * * I am very much obliged to Fanny for her letter; it made me laugh heartily, but I cannot pretend to answer it. Even had I more time, I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss D.[253] would write. I hope Miss Benn is got well again, and will have a comfortable dinner with you to-day. _Monday Evening._--We have been both to the exhibition and Sir J. Reynolds's, and I am disappointed, for there was nothing like Mrs. D. at either. I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy. Setting aside this disappointment, I had great amusement among the pictures; and the driving about, the carriage being open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much, and was ready to laugh all the time at my being where I was. I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a barouche. * * * * * I should not wonder if we got no farther than Reading on Thursday evening, and so reach Steventon only to a reasonable dinner hour the next day; but whatever I may write or you may imagine we know it will be something different. I shall be quiet to-morrow morning; all my business is done, and I shall only call again upon Mrs. Hoblyn, &c. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss Austen, Chawton. A very happy summer awaited the cottage party. Godmersham wanted painting, and its owner moved his family for some months to Chawton. There were almost daily meetings between the two houses, and the friendship between Fanny Knight and her Aunt Jane became still closer as they spent 'delicious mornings' together. Meanwhile, Frank, in command of the _Elephant_, was stationed in the Baltic, and engaged sometimes in convoying small vessels backwards and forwards, sometimes in protecting the transports which took Bernadotte's Swedish troops to the seat of war. The following letter from his sister Jane reached him no doubt in due course. Chawton: [July 3, 1813].[254] MY DEAREST FRANK,--Behold me going to write you as handsome a letter as I can! Wish me good luck. We have had the pleasure of hearing from you lately through Mary, who sent us some of the particulars of yours of June 18 (I think), written off Rugen, and we enter into the delight of your having so good a pilot. Why are you like Queen Elizabeth? Because you know how to chuse wise ministers. Does not this prove you as great a Captain as she was a Queen? This may serve as a riddle for you to put forth among your officers, by way of increasing your proper consequence. It must be a real enjoyment to you, since you are obliged to leave England, to be where you are, seeing something of a new country and one which has been so distinguished as Sweden. You must have great pleasure in it. I hope you may have gone to Carlscroon. Your profession has its _douceurs_ to recompense for some of its privations; to an enquiring and observing mind like yours such _douceurs_ must be considerable. Gustavus Vasa, and Charles XII., and Cristina and Linneus. Do their ghosts rise up before you? I have a great respect for former Sweden, so zealous as it was for Protestantism. And I have always fancied it more like England than other countries; and, according to the map, many of the names have a strong resemblance to the English. July begins unpleasantly with us, cold and showery, but it is often a baddish month. We had some fine dry weather preceding it, which was very acceptable to the Holders of Hay, and the Masters of Meadows. In general it must have been a good hay-making season. Edward has got in all his in excellent order; I speak only of Chawton, but here he has better luck than Mr. Middleton ever had in the five years that he was tenant. Good encouragement for him to come again, and I really hope he will do so another year. The pleasure to us of having them here is so great that if we were not the best creatures in the world we should not deserve it. We go on in the most comfortable way, very frequently dining together, and always meeting in some part of every day. Edward is very well, and enjoys himself as thoroughly as any Hampshire-born Austen can desire. Chawton is not thrown away upon him. * * * * * He will soon have all his children about him. Edward, George and Charles are collected already, and another week brings Henry and William. * * * * * We are in hopes of another visit from our true lawful Henry very soon; he is to be our guest this time. He is quite well, I am happy to say, and does not leave it to my pen, I am sure, to communicate to you the joyful news of his being Deputy Receiver no longer. It is a promotion which he thoroughly enjoys, as well he may; the work of his own mind. He sends you all his own plans of course. The scheme for Scotland we think an excellent one both for himself and his nephew.[255] Upon the whole his spirits are very much recovered. If I may so express myself his mind is not a mind for affliction; he is too busy, too active, too sanguine. Sincerely as he was attached to poor Eliza moreover, and excellently as he behaved to her, he was always so used to be away from her at times, that her loss is not felt as that of many a beloved wife might be, especially when all the circumstances of her long and dreadful illness are taken into the account. He very long knew that she must die, and it was indeed a release at last. Our mourning for her is not over, or we should be putting it on again for Mr. Thomas Leigh, who has just closed a good life at the age of seventy-nine. * * * * * Poor Mrs. L. P. [Leigh Perrot] would now have been mistress of Stoneleigh had there been none of the vile compromise, which in good truth has never been allowed to be of much use to them. It will be a hard trial. * * * * * You will be glad to hear that every copy of _S. and S._ is sold, and that it has brought me £140, besides the copyright, if that should ever be of any value. I have now, therefore, written myself into £250,[256] which only makes me long for more. I have something in hand which I hope the credit of _P. and P._ will sell well, though not half so entertaining, and by the bye shall you object to my mentioning the _Elephant_ in it, and two or three other old ships? I _have_ done it, but it shall not stay to make you angry. They are only just mentioned. * * * * * I hope you continue well and brush your hair, but not all off. Yours very affectionately, J. A. On September 14, Jane left Chawton for London and Godmersham, travelling as one of her brother Edward's large family party. FOOTNOTES: [232] The publisher was a Mr. T. Egerton, described as of the Military Library, Whitehall. He was therefore not the same as Henry Egerton who called in Sloane St. (p. 247) _pace_ Mr. Austin Dobson in his Introduction to _Sense and Sensibility_ (Macmillan, 1896). [233] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 237 (letter from Jane to Frank). See p. 272. [234] We shall in future describe Jane's brother Edward as 'Mr. Knight,' and his children as 'Knight' with the Christian name prefixed; while the name 'Edward Austen' will be reserved for the author of the _Memoir_ (James's eldest son), as he was always known in the family by that name. [235] _Memoir_, p. 11. [236] Cassandra was now staying at Steventon; these letters to her are mainly in the _Memoir_, but are supplemented and re-arranged from family MSS. [237] Authors of the _Rejected Addresses_ (1812). [238] _Mansfield Park_, chapter xxiv. [239] _Mansfield Park_, chapter xxv. [240] _Mansfield Park_ was also published at 18_s._, _Emma_ at £1 1_s._, whereas the first edition of _Sense and Sensibility_ had cost only 15_s._ [241] I.e. typographical. [242] 'I do not rhyme to that dull elf Who cannot image to himself.'--_Marmion_, vi. 38. [243] In _Mansfield Park_ (the scene of which is laid in Northamptonshire), a good deal turns on the steadfast determination of Edmund Bertram to be ordained. [244] The caution observed at Steventon in preserving the secret of the authorship of the novels is shown in a little manuscript poem addressed by young Edward Austen to his aunt, when (at the age of fifteen or sixteen) he was at last informed that the two novels, which he already knew well, were by her. [245] This passage occurs at the end of chapter liv. For a long time the publishers tried to put matters right by making _three_ sentences into one. Mr. Brimley Johnson's was the first edition to break up the sentences properly. See _Appendix_, p. 409-10. [246] _Memoir_, p. 104. [247] Afterwards, Lady Pollen, of Redenham, near Andover, and then at a school in London. [248] Layton and Shears, a millinery establishment at 9 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. [249] After the death of his wife, Henry Austen moved into chambers over his bank, 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. [250] This letter is full of allusions to _Pride and Prejudice_. [251] Two of Henry Austen's clerks. [252] Mr. Tilson was a partner of Henry Austen. [253] Miss Darcy. [254] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 233. One paragraph in this letter (respecting the marriage of Mr. Blackall) is quoted in Chapter VI. [255] Edward Knight, whom his uncle Henry was about to take to Scotland. See p. 279. [256] _Pride and Prejudice_ was sold outright to Mr. Egerton; and this implies that the sum given was £110. CHAPTER XVI _MANSFIELD PARK_ 1812-1814 Jane was now about to pay what proved to be her last visit to Godmersham. On the way thither she, with one division of the Knight family party, halted for a couple of days in London, to stay with Henry at 10 Henrietta Street. Henrietta Street: Wednesday [September 15, 1813, 1/2 past 8]. Here I am, my dearest Cassandra, seated in the breakfast-, dining-, sitting-room, beginning with all my might. Fanny will join me as soon as she is dressed and begin her letter. We arrived at a quarter-past four, and were kindly welcomed by the coachman, and then by his master, and then by William, and then by Mrs. Perigord,[257] who all met us before we reached the foot of the stairs. Mde. Bigeon was below dressing us a most comfortable dinner of soup, fish, bouillée, partridges, and an apple tart, which we sat down to soon after five, after cleaning and dressing ourselves, and feeling that we were most commodiously disposed of. The little adjoining dressing-room to our apartment makes Fanny and myself very well off indeed, and as we have poor Eliza's bed our space is ample every way. Lady Robert is delighted with _P. and P._,[258] and really _was_ so, as I understand, before she knew who wrote it, for, of course, she knows now. He told her with as much satisfaction as if it were my wish. He did not tell _me_ this, but he told Fanny. And Mr. Hastings! I am quite delighted with what such a man writes about it. Henry sent him the books after his return from Daylesford, but you will hear the letter too. * * * * * Fanny and the two little girls are gone to take places for to-night at Covent Garden; _Clandestine Marriage_ and _Midas_. The latter will be a fine show for L. and M.[259] They revelled last night in _Don Juan_, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven. We had scaramouch and a ghost, and were delighted. I speak of _them_; _my_ delight was very tranquil, and the rest of us were sober-minded. _Don Juan_ was the last of three musical things. _Five Hours at Brighton_, in three acts--of which one was over before we arrived, none the worse--and the _Beehive_, rather less flat and trumpery. * * * * * Miss Hare had some pretty caps, and is to make me one like one of them, only _white_ satin instead of blue. It will be white satin and lace, and a little white flower perking out of the left ear, like Harriot Byron's feather. I have allowed her to go as far as £1 16_s._ My gown is to be trimmed everywhere with white ribbon plaited on somehow or other. She says it will look well. I am not sanguine. They trim with white very much. * * * * * Mr. Hall was very punctual yesterday, and curled me out at a great rate. I thought it looked hideous, and longed for a snug cap instead, but my companions silenced me by their admiration. We had very good places in the box next the stage-box, front and second row; the three old ones behind of course. I was particularly disappointed at seeing nothing of Mr. Crabbe. I felt sure of him when I saw that the boxes were fitted up with crimson velvet. * * * * * It was not possible for me to get the worsteds yesterday. I heard Edward last night pressing Henry to come to [? Godmersham], and I think Henry engaged to go there after his November collection.[260] Nothing has been done as to _S. and S._ The books came to hand too late for him to have time for it before he went. * * * * * I long to have you hear Mr. H.'s opinion of _P. and P._ His admiring my Elizabeth so much is particularly welcome to me. Miss Austen, Chawton. Her delight at the appreciation of her book by Warren Hastings may be compared with a passage from Madame d'Arblay's diary, which forms a curious link between the two writers. Mrs. Cooke [Jane Austen's cousin], my excellent neighbour, came in just now to read me a paragraph of a letter from Mrs. Leigh of Oxfordshire, her sister.[261] . . . After much civility about the new work [_Camilla_] and its author, it finishes thus: 'Mr. Hastings I saw just now; I told him what was going forward; he gave a great jump and exclaimed: "Well, then, now I can serve her, thank heaven, and I will! I will write to Anderson to engage Scotland, and I will attack the East Indies myself."'[262] Henrietta Street: Thursday [September 16, 1813, after dinner]. Thank you, my dearest Cassandra, for the nice long letter I sent off this morning. * * * * * We are now all four of us young ladies sitting round the circular table in the inner room writing our letters, while the two brothers are having a comfortable coze in the room adjoining. It is to be a quiet evening, much to the satisfaction of four of the six. My eyes are quite tired of dust and lamps. * * * * * We . . . went to Wedgwood's, where my brother and Fanny chose a dinner set. I believe the pattern is a small lozenge in purple, between lines of narrow gold, and it is to have the crest. * * * * * With love to you all, including Triggs,[263] I remain, Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. The journey from London to Godmersham was no doubt duly narrated in a letter now missing. Those from Godmersham are filled with the ordinary comings and goings of a large family party, and allusions to Kent neighbours--of whom Cassandra would know just enough to be interested in their proceedings. Godmersham Park: Thursday [September 23, 1813]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Thank you five hundred and forty times for the exquisite piece of workmanship which was brought into the room this morning, while we were at breakfast, with some very inferior works of art in the same way, and which I read with high glee, much delighted with everything it told, whether good or bad. It is so rich in striking intelligence that I hardly know what to reply to first. I believe finery must have it. I am extremely glad that you like the poplin. I thought it would have my mother's approbation, but was not so confident of yours. Remember that it is a present. Do not refuse me. I am very rich. * * * * * Let me know when you begin the new tea, and the new white wine. My present elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse. * * * * * ''Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more,' but to make amends for that, our visit to the Tyldens is over. My brother, Fanny, Edwd., and I went; Geo. stayed at home with W. K. There was nothing entertaining, or out of the common way. We met only Tyldens and double Tyldens. A whist-table for the gentlemen, a grown-up musical young lady to play backgammon with Fanny, and engravings of the Colleges at Cambridge for me. In the morning we returned Mrs. Sherer's visit. I like _Mr._ S.[264] very much. * * * * * Poor Dr. Isham is obliged to admire _P. and P._, and to send me word that he is sure he shall not like Madame D'Arblay's new novel[265] half so well. Mrs. C[ooke] invented it all, of course. He desires his compliments to you and my mother. * * * * * I am now alone in the library, mistress of all I survey; at least I may say so, and repeat the whole poem if I like it, without offence to anybody. I have _this_ moment seen Mrs. Driver driven up to the kitchen door. I cannot close with a grander circumstance or greater wit. Yours affectionately, J. A. Miss Austen, Chawton. The next of Jane's surviving letters was addressed to her brother Frank. Godmersham Park [September 25, 1813].[266] MY DEAREST FRANK,--The 11th of this month brought me your letter, and I assure you I thought it very well worth its two and three-pence. I am very much obliged to you for filling me so long a sheet of paper; you are a good one to traffic with in that way, you pay most liberally; my letter was a scratch of a note compared to yours, and then you write so even, so clear, both in style and penmanship, so much to the point, and give so much intelligence, that it is enough to kill one. I am sorry Sweden is so poor, and my riddle so bad. The idea of a fashionable bathing-place in Mecklenberg! How can people pretend to be fashionable or to bathe out of England? Rostock market makes one's mouth water; our cheapest butcher's meat is double the price of theirs; nothing under nine-pence all this summer, and I believe upon recollection nothing under ten-pence. Bread has sunk and is likely to sink more, which we hope may make meat sink too. But I have no occasion to think of the price of bread or of meat where I am now; let me shake off vulgar cares and conform to the happy indifference of East Kent wealth. I wonder whether you and the King of Sweden knew that I was come to Godmersham with my brother. Yes, I suppose you have received due notice of it by some means or other. I have not been here these four years, so I am sure the event deserves to be talked of before and behind, as well as in the middle. We left Chawton on the 14th, spent two entire days in town, and arrived here on the 17th. My brother, Fanny, Lizzie, Marianne and I composed this division of the family, and filled his carriage inside and out. Two post-chaises, under the escort of George, conveyed eight more across the country, the chair brought two, two others came on horseback, and the rest by coach, and so by one means or another, we all are removed. It puts me in remind of St. Paul's shipwreck, when all are said, by different means, to reach the shore in safety. I left my mother, Cassandra, and Martha well, and have had good accounts of them since. At present they are quite alone, but they are going to be visited by Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg, and to have a few days of Henry's company likewise. * * * * * Of our three evenings in town, one was spent at the Lyceum, and another at Covent Garden. _The Clandestine Marriage_ was the most respectable of the performances, the rest were sing-song and trumpery; but it did very well for Lizzie and Marianne, who were indeed delighted, but I wanted better acting. There was no actor worth naming. I believe the theatres are thought at a very low ebb at present. Henry has probably sent you his own account of his visit in Scotland. I wish he had had more time, and could have gone further north, and deviated to the lakes on his way back; but what he was able to do seems to have afforded him great enjoyment, and he met with scenes of higher beauty in Roxburghshire than I had supposed the South of Scotland possessed. Our nephew's gratification was less keen than our brother's. Edward is no enthusiast in the beauties of nature. His enthusiasm is for the sports of the field only. He is a very promising and pleasing young man, however, behaves with great propriety to his father, and great kindness to his brothers and sisters, and we must forgive his thinking more of grouse and partridges than lakes and mountains. * * * * * In this house there is a constant succession of small events, somebody is always going or coming; this morning we had Edward Bridges unexpectedly to breakfast with us, on his way from Ramsgate, where is his wife, to Lenham, where is his church, and to-morrow he dines and sleeps here on his return. They have been all the summer at Ramsgate for her health; she is a poor honey--the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well and who likes her spasms and nervousness, and the consequence they give her, better than anything else. This is an ill-natured statement to send all over the Baltic. The Mr. Knatchbulls, dear Mrs. Knight's brothers, dined here the other day. They came from the Friars, which is still on their hands. The elder made many inquiries after you. Mr. Sherer is quite a new Mr. Sherer to me; I heard him for the first time last Sunday, and he gave us an excellent sermon, a little too eager sometimes in his delivery, but that is to me a better extreme than the want of animation, especially when it evidently comes from the heart, as in him. The clerk is as much like you as ever. I am always glad to see him on that account. But the Sherers are going away. He has a bad curate at Westwell, whom he can eject only by residing there himself. He goes nominally for three years, and a Mr. Paget is to have the curacy of Godmersham; a married man, with a very musical wife, which I hope may make her a desirable acquaintance to Fanny. I thank you very warmly for your kind consent to my application,[267] and the kind hint which followed it. I was previously aware of what I should be laying myself open to; but the truth is that the secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the shadow of a secret now, and that, I believe, whenever the third appears, I shall not even attempt to tell lies about it. I shall rather try to make all the money than all the mystery I can of it. People shall pay for their knowledge if I can make them. Henry heard _P. and P._ warmly praised in Scotland by Lady Robert Kerr and another lady; and what does he do, in the warmth of his brotherly vanity and love, but immediately tell them who wrote it? A thing once set going in that way--one knows how it spreads, and he, dear creature, has set it going so much more than once. I know it is all done from affection and partiality, but at the same time let me here again express to you and Mary my sense of the _superior_ kindness which you have shown on the occasion in doing what I wished. I am trying to harden myself. After all, what a trifle it is, in all its bearings, to the really important points of one's existence, even in this world. Your very affectionate sister, J. A. There is to be a second edition of _S. and S._ Egerton advises it. * * * * * The last paragraph of this letter sets two things plainly before us: a strong preference for remaining unknown if she could, and the invariable sweetness of temper which forbade her to blame a brother whom she loved because he had made such concealment impossible. That this acquiescence, however, was not reached without a struggle the last few words of the paragraph show. Next follows a letter to Cassandra, dated Monday (October 11):-- We had our dinner party on Wednesday, with the addition of Mrs. and Miss Milles. . . . Both mother and daughter are much as I have always found them. I like the mother--first, because she reminds me of Mrs. Birch; and, secondly, because she is cheerful and grateful for what she is at the age of ninety and upwards. The day was pleasant enough. I sat by Mr. Chisholme, and we talked away at a great rate about nothing worth hearing. * * * * * Lizzie is very much obliged to you for your letter and will answer it soon, but has so many things to do that it may be four or five days before she can. This is quite her own message, spoken in rather a desponding tone. Your letter gave pleasure to all of us; we had all the reading of it of course, I _three times_, as I undertook, to the great relief of Lizzie, to read it to Sackree,[268] and afterwards to Louisa. * * * * * Mrs. ---- called here on Saturday. I never saw her before. She is a large, ungenteel woman, with self-satisfied and would-be elegant manners. * * * * * On Thursday, Mr. Lushington,[269] M.P. for Canterbury, and manager of the Lodge Hounds, dines here, and stays the night. He is chiefly young Edward's acquaintance. If I can I will get a frank from him, and write to you all the sooner. I suppose the Ashford ball will furnish something. * * * * * I am looking over _Self-Control_ again, and my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently-meant, elegantly-written work, without anything of nature or probability in it. I declare I do not know whether Laura's passage down the American river is not the most natural, possible, everyday thing she ever does. * * * * * _Tuesday._--I admire the sagacity and taste of Charlotte Williams. Those large dark eyes always judge well. I will compliment her by naming a heroine after her. * * * * * Southey's _Life of Nelson_: I am tired of _Lives of Nelson_, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it. [October 14, 1813.] Now I will prepare for Mr. Lushington, and as it will be wisest also to prepare for his not coming, or my not getting a frank, I shall write very close from the first, and even leave room for the seal in the proper place. When I have followed up my last with this I shall feel somewhat less unworthy of you than the state of our correspondence now requires. * * * * * Mr. W. is about five-or six-and-twenty, not ill-looking, and not agreeable. He is certainly no addition. A sort of cool, gentlemanlike manner, but very silent. They say his name is Henry, a proof how unequally the gifts of fortune are bestowed. I have seen many a John and Thomas much more agreeable. * * * * * We did not go to the ball.[270] It was left to her to decide, and at last she determined against it. She knew that it would be a sacrifice on the part of her father and brothers if they went, and I hope it will prove that _she_ has not sacrificed much. It is not likely that there should have been anybody there whom she would care for. _I_ was very glad to be spared the trouble of dressing and going, and being weary before it was half over, so my gown and my cap are still unworn. It will appear at last, perhaps, that I might have done without either. I produced my brown bombazine yesterday, and it was very much admired indeed, and I like it better than ever. * * * * * The comfort of the billiard-table here is very great; it draws all the gentlemen to it whenever they are within, especially after dinner, so that my brother, Fanny, and I have the library to ourselves in delightful quiet. * * * * * _Friday._--They[271] came last night at about seven. We had given them up, but _I still_ expected them to come. Dessert was nearly over; a better time for arriving than an hour and a half earlier. They were late because they did not set out earlier, and did not allow time enough. Charles did not _aim_ at more than reaching Sittingbourne by three, which could not have brought them here by dinner time. They had a very rough passage; he would not have ventured if he had known how bad it would be. * * * * * However, here they are, safe and well, just like their own nice selves, Fanny looking as neat and white this morning as possible, and dear Charles all affectionate, placid, quiet, cheerful good humour. They are both looking very well, but poor little Cassy is grown extremely thin, and looks poorly. I hope a week's country air and exercise may do her good. I am sorry to say it can be but a week. The baby does not appear so large in proportion as she was, nor quite so pretty, but I have seen very little of her. Cassy was too tired and bewildered just at first to seem to know anybody. We met them in the hall--the women and girl part of us--but before we reached the library she kissed me very affectionately, and has since seemed to recollect me in the same way. It was quite an evening of confusion, as you may suppose. At first we were all walking about from one part of the house to the other; then came a fresh dinner in the breakfast-room for Charles and his wife, which Fanny and I attended; then we moved into the library, were joined by the dining-room people, were introduced, and so forth; and then we had tea and coffee, which was not over till past 10. Billiards again drew all the odd ones away, and Edward, Charles, the two Fannies, and I sat snugly talking. I shall be glad to have our numbers a little reduced, and by the time you receive this we shall be only a family, though a large family, party. Mr. Lushington goes to-morrow. Now I must speak of _him_, and I like him very much. I am sure he is clever, and a man of taste. He got a volume of Milton last night, and spoke of it with warmth. He is quite an M.P., very smiling, with an exceeding good address and readiness of language. I am rather in love with him. I dare say he is ambitious and insincere. He puts me in mind of Mr. Dundas. He has a wide smiling mouth, and very good teeth, and something the same complexion and nose. [October 18, 1813.] No; I have never seen the death of Mrs. Crabbe.[272] I have only just been making out from one of his prefaces that he probably was married. It is almost ridiculous. Poor woman! I will comfort _him_ as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any. October 26. Our Canterbury scheme took place as proposed, and very pleasant it was--Harriot and I and little George within, my brother on the box with the master coachman. * * * * * Our chief business was to call on Mrs. Milles, and we had, indeed, so little else to do that we were obliged to saunter about anywhere and go backwards and forwards as much as possible to make out the time and keep ourselves from having two hours to sit with the good lady--a most extraordinary circumstance in a Canterbury morning. Old Toke came in while we were paying our visit. I thought of Louisa. Miss Milles was queer as usual, and provided us with plenty to laugh at. She undertook in _three words_ to give us the history of Mrs. Scudamore's reconciliation, and then talked on about it for half an hour, using such odd expressions, and so foolishly minute, that I could hardly keep my countenance. * * * * * Owing to a difference of clocks the coachman did not bring the carriage so soon as he ought by half an hour; anything like a breach of punctuality was a great offence, and Mr. Moore was very angry, which I was rather glad of. I wanted to see him angry; and, though he spoke to his servant in a very loud voice and with a good deal of heat, I was happy to perceive that he did not scold Harriot at all. Indeed, there is nothing to object to in his manners to her, and I do believe that he makes her--or she makes herself--very happy. They do not spoil their boy. * * * * * George Hatton[273] called yesterday, and I saw him, saw him for ten minutes; sat in the same room with him, heard him talk, saw him bow, and was not in raptures. I discerned nothing extraordinary. I should speak of him as a gentlemanlike young man--_eh bien! tout est dit._ We are expecting the ladies of the family this morning. [November 3, 1813.] I will keep this celebrated birthday by writing to you, and as my pen seems inclined to write large, I will put my lines very close together. I had but just time to enjoy your letter yesterday before Edward and I set off in the chair for Canty., and I allowed him to hear the chief of it as we went along. * * * * * But now I cannot be quite easy without staying a little while with Henry, unless he wishes it otherwise; his illness and the dull time of year together make me feel that it would be horrible of me not to offer to remain with him, and therefore unless you know of any objection, I wish you would tell him with my best love that I shall be most happy to spend ten days or a fortnight in Henrietta St., if he will accept me. I do not offer more than a fortnight, because I shall then have been some time from home; but it will be a great pleasure to be with him, as it always is. * * * * * Edward and I had a delightful morning for our drive _there_ [to Canterbury], I enjoyed it thoroughly; but the day turned off before we were ready, and we came home in some rain and the apprehension of a great deal. It has not done us any harm, however. He went to inspect the gaol, as a visiting magistrate, and took me with him. I was gratified, and went through all the feelings which people must go through, I think, in visiting such a building. We paid no other visits, only walked about snugly together and shopped. I bought a concert ticket and a sprig of flowers for my old age. * * * * * What a convenient carriage Henry's is, to his friends in general! Who has it next? I am glad William's going is voluntary, and on no worse grounds. An inclination for the country is a venial fault. He has more of Cowper than of Johnson in him--fonder of tame hares and blank verse than of the full tide of human existence at Charing Cross. Oh! I have more of such sweet flattery from Miss Sharp. She is an excellent kind friend. I am read and admired in Ireland, too. There is a Mrs. Fletcher, the wife of a judge, an old lady, and very good and very clever, who is all curiosity to know about me--what I am like, and so forth. I am not known to her by _name_, however. This comes through Mrs. Carrick, not through Mrs. Gore. You are quite out there. I do not despair of having my picture in the Exhibition at last--all white and red, with my head on one side; or perhaps I may marry young Mr. D'Arblay. I suppose in the meantime I shall owe dear Henry a great deal of money for printing, &c. I hope Mrs. Fletcher will indulge herself with _S. and S._ November 6. Having half an hour before breakfast (very snug in my own room, lovely morning, excellent fire--fancy me!) I will give you some account of the last two days. And yet, what is there to be told? I shall get foolishly minute unless I cut the matter short. We met only the Bretons at Chilham Castle, besides a Mr. and Mrs. Osborne and a Miss Lee staying in the house, and were only fourteen altogether. My brother and Fanny thought it the pleasantest party they had ever known there, and I was very well entertained by bits and scraps. * * * * * By-the-bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like. We had music in the evening: Fanny and Miss Wildman played, and Mr. James Wildman sat close by and listened, or pretended to listen. . . . Mrs. Harrison[274] and I found each other out, and had a very comfortable little complimentary friendly chat. She is a sweet woman--still quite a sweet woman in herself, and so like her sister! I could almost have thought I was speaking to Mrs. Lefroy. She introduced me to her daughter, whom I think pretty, but most dutifully inferior to _la Mère Beauté_. * * * * * I was just introduced at last to Mary Plumptre, but should hardly know her again. She was delighted with _me_, however, good enthusiastic soul! And Lady B. found me handsomer than she expected, so you see I am not so very bad as you might think for. Since I wrote last, my 2nd edit.[275] has stared me in the face. Mary tells me that Eliza means to buy it. I wish she may. It can hardly depend upon any more Fyfield Estates. I cannot help hoping that _many_ will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it. Mary heard before she left home that it was very much admired at Cheltenham, and that it was given to Miss Hamilton.[276] It is pleasant to have such a respectable writer named. I cannot tire _you_, I am sure, on this subject, or I would apologise. What weather, and what news![277] We have enough to do to admire them both. I hope you derive your full share of enjoyment from each. * * * * * Lady Eliz. Hatton and Annamaria called here this morning. Yes, they called; but I do not think I can say anything more about them. They came, and they sat, and they went. * * * * * _Sunday._--Excellent sweetness of you to send me such a nice long letter; it made its appearance, with one from my mother, soon after I and my impatient feelings walked in. How glad I am that I did what I did! I was only afraid that _you_ might think the offer superfluous, but you have set my heart at ease. Tell Henry that I _will_ stay with him, let it be ever so disagreeable to him. * * * * * You shall hear from me once more, some day or other. Yours very affectionately, J. A. Miss Austen, 10 Henrietta Street. Even in the middle of this large family party, Jane was not likely to forget the literary profession which she had now seriously adopted. Indeed, it was just at this time that the second edition of _Sense and Sensibility_, on which she had ventured under the advice of her publisher Egerton, appeared.[278] According to our dates, she was not now actually engaged in regular composition--for _Mansfield Park_[279] was completed 'soon after June 1813,' and _Emma_ was not begun till January 21, 1814. We may guess, however, that she was either putting a few humorous touches to Mrs. Norris and Lady Bertram, or else giving herself hints in advance for Miss Bates or Mr. Woodhouse; for we learn something of her process from an eyewitness, her niece Marianne Knight, who related her childish remembrances of her aunt not very many years ago. 'Aunt Jane,'[280] she said, 'would sit very quietly at work beside the fire in the Godmersham library, then suddenly burst out laughing, jump up, cross the room to a distant table with papers lying upon it, write something down, returning presently and sitting down quietly to her work again.' She also remembered how her aunt would take the elder girls into an upstairs room and read to them something that produced peals of laughter, to which the little ones on the wrong side of the door listened, thinking it very hard that they should be shut out from hearing what was so delightful! The laughter may have been the result of the second novel then published, for there is an entry in Fanny Knight's diary: 'We finished _Pride and Prejudice_'; or it may have been caused by a first introduction to Aunt Norris and Lady Bertram. Happy indeed were those who could hear their creator make her characters 'speak as they ought.' The dramatic element in her works is so strong that for complete enjoyment on a first acquaintance it is almost indispensable that they should be read aloud by some person capable of doing them justice. She had this power herself, according to the concurrent testimony of those who heard her, and she handed it on to her nephew, the author of the _Memoir_. On November 13 Jane left Godmersham with Edward, spent two days with some connexions of his at Wrotham, and reached London on the 15th, in time to dine with Henry in Henrietta Street. After that she had various plans; but we do not know which she adopted; and there is nothing further to tell of her movements until March 1814. We know, however, that _Emma_ was begun in January; and that on March 2, when Henry drove his sister up to London, spending a night at Cobham on the way, he was engaged in reading _Mansfield Park_ for the first time. Jane was of course eager to communicate Henry's impressions to Cassandra. Henrietta Street: Wednesday [March 2, 1814]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--You were wrong in thinking of us at Guildford last night: we were at Cobham. On reaching G. we found that John and his horses were gone on. We therefore did no more there than we did at Farnham--sit in the carriage while fresh horses were put in--and proceeded directly to Cobham, which we reached by seven, and about eight were sitting down to a very nice roast fowl, &c. We had altogether a very good journey, and everything at Cobham was comfortable. I could not pay Mr. Herington! That was the only alas! of the business. I shall therefore return his bill, and my mother's £2, that you may try your luck. We did not begin reading till Bentley Green. Henry's approbation is hitherto even equal to my wishes. He says it is very different from the other two, but does not appear to think it at all inferior. He has only married Mrs. R. I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part. He took to Lady B. and Mrs. N. most kindly, and gives great praise to the drawing of the characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny, and, I think, foresees how it will all be. I finished the _Heroine_[281] last night, and was very much amused by it. I wonder James did not like it better. It diverted me exceedingly. We went to bed at ten. I was very tired, but slept to a miracle, and am lovely to-day, and at present Henry seems to have no complaint. We left Cobham at half-past eight, stopped to bait and breakfast at Kingston, and were in this house considerably before two, quite in the style of Mr. Knight. Nice smiling Mr. Barlowe met us at the door and, in reply to enquiries after news, said that peace was generally expected. I have taken possession of my bedroom, unpacked my bandbox, sent Miss P.'s two letters to the twopenny post, been visited by M^{de} Bigeon and am now writing by myself at the new table in the front room. It is snowing. We had some snowstorms[282] yesterday, and a smart frost at night, which gave us a hard road from Cobham to Kingston; but as it was then getting dirty and heavy, Henry had a pair of leaders put on from the latter place to the bottom of Sloane St. His own horses, therefore, cannot have had hard work. I watched for _veils_ as we drove through the streets, and had the pleasure of seeing several upon vulgar heads. And now, how do you all do?--you in particular, after the worry of yesterday and the day before. I hope Martha had a pleasant visit again, and that you and my mother could eat your beef-pudding. Depend upon my thinking of the chimney-sweeper as soon as I wake to-morrow. Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean[283] that only a third and fourth row could be got; as it is in a front box, however, I hope we shall do pretty well--_Shylock_, a good play for Fanny--she cannot be much affected, I think. Mrs. Perigord has just been here. She tells me that we owe her master for the silk-dyeing. My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are. They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin. . . . It is evening. We have drank tea, and I have torn through the third vol. of the _Heroine_. I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style. Henry is going on with _Mansfield Park_. He admires H. Crawford: I mean properly, as a clever, pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it. . . . We hear that Mr. Kean is more admired than ever. . . . There are no good places to be got in Drury Lane for the next fortnight, but Henry means to secure some for Saturday fortnight, when you are reckoned upon. Give my love to little Cass. I hope she found my bed comfortable last night. I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor anybody quite so large as Gogmagoglicus. Saturday [March 5, 1814]. Do not be angry with me for beginning another letter to you. I have read the _Corsair_, mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do. Getting out is impossible. It is a nasty day for everybody. Edward's[284] spirits will be wanting sunshine, and here is nothing but thickness and sleet; and though these two rooms are delightfully warm, I fancy it is very cold abroad. * * * * * _Sunday._--We were quite satisfied with Kean. I cannot imagine better acting, but the part was too short; and, excepting him and Miss Smith, and _she_ did not quite answer my expectation, the parts were ill filled and the play heavy. We were too much tired to stay for the whole of _Illusion_ ('Nour-jahad'), which has three acts; there is a great deal of finery and dancing in it, but I think little merit. Elliston was 'Nour-jahad,' but it is a solemn sort of part, not at all calculated for his powers. There was nothing of the _best_ Elliston about him. I might not have known him but for his voice. * * * * * Henry has this moment said that he likes my _M. P._ better and better; he is in the third volume. I believe _now_ he has changed his mind as to foreseeing the end; he said yesterday, at least, that he defied anybody to say whether H. C. would be reformed, or would forget Fanny in a fortnight. I shall like to see Kean again excessively, and to see him with you too. It appeared to me as if there were no fault in him anywhere; and in his scene with 'Tubal' there was exquisite acting. * * * * * _Monday._--You cannot think how much my ermine tippet is admired both by father and daughter. It was a noble gift. Perhaps you have not heard that Edward has a good chance of escaping his lawsuit. His opponent 'knocks under.' The terms of agreement are not quite settled. We are to see _The Devil to Pay_ to-night. I expect to be very much amused. Excepting Miss Stephens, I daresay _Artaxerxes_ will be very tiresome. * * * * * _Tuesday._--Well, Mr. Hampson dined here, and all that. I was very tired of _Artaxerxes_, highly amused with the farce, and, in an inferior way, with the pantomime that followed. Mr. J. Plumptre joined in the latter part of the evening, walked home with us, ate some soup, and is very earnest for our going to Covent Garden again to-night to see Miss Stephens in the _Farmer's Wife_. He is to try for a box. I do not particularly wish him to succeed. I have had enough for the present. Henry dines to-day with Mr. Spencer. Wednesday [March 9, 1814]. Well, we went to the play again last night, and as we were out a great part of the morning too, shopping, and seeing the Indian jugglers, I am very glad to be quiet now till dressing time. We are to dine at the Tilsons', and to-morrow at Mr. Spencer's. We had not done breakfast yesterday when Mr. J. Plumptre appeared to say that he had secured a box. Henry asked him to dine here, which I fancy he was very happy to do, and so at five o'clock we four sat down to table together while the master of the house was preparing for going out himself. The _Farmer's Wife_ is a musical thing in three acts, and, as Edward was steady in not staying for anything more, we were at home before ten. Fanny and Mr. J. P. are delighted with Miss S[tephens], and her merit in singing is, I dare say, very great; that she gave _me_ no pleasure is no reflection upon her, nor, I hope, upon myself, being what Nature made me on that article. All that I am sensible of in Miss S. is a pleasing person and no skill in acting. We had Mathews, Liston, and Emery; of course, some amusement. Our friends were off before half-past eight this morning, and had the prospect of a heavy cold journey before them. I think they both liked their visit very much. I am sure Fanny did. Henry sees decided attachment between her and his new acquaintance. * * * * * Henry has finished _Mansfield Park_, and his approbation has not lessened. He found the last half of the last volume _extremely interesting_. On Friday we are to be snug with only Mr. Barlowe and an evening of business. I am so pleased that the mead is brewed. Love to all. I have written to Mrs. Hill, and care for nobody. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Henry must have read from a proof copy; for _Mansfield Park_ was not yet published, though on the eve of being so. It was announced in the _Morning Chronicle_ on May 23, and we shall see from the first letter in the next chapter that the Cookes had already been reading it before June 13. It was probably a small issue;[285] but whatever the size may have been, it was entirely sold out in the autumn. The author broke new ground in this work, which (it should be remembered) was the first dating wholly from her more mature Chawton period. Though her novels were all of one type she had a remarkable faculty for creating an atmosphere--differing more or less in each book; and an excellent instance of this faculty is afforded by the decorous, though somewhat cold, dignity of Sir Thomas Bertram's household. In this household Fanny Price grows up, thoroughly appreciating its orderliness, but saved by Edmund's affection and her own warmhearted simplicity from catching the infection of its coldness. She required, however, an experience of the discomforts and vulgarity of Portsmouth to enable her to value to the full the home which she had left. In the first volume she had been too much of a Cinderella to take her proper position in the family party, and it was a real stroke of art to enhance the dignity of the heroine through the courtship of a rich and clever man of the world. A small point worth noticing in the third volume is the manner in which, when the horrible truth breaks in upon Fanny--and upon the reader--the tension is relaxed by Mrs. Price's commonplace remarks about the carpet. Probably, most readers will look upon the theatricals and the Portsmouth episode as the most brilliant parts of the book; but the writing throughout is full of point, and the three sisters--Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, and Mrs. Price--are all productions of the author's most delicately barbed satire. Mrs. Norris, indeed, is an instance of her complex characters so justly praised by Macaulay. One thinks of her mainly as parsimonious; but her parsimony would be worth much less than it is, if it were not set off by her servility to Sir Thomas, her brutality to Fanny, and her undisciplined fondness for her other nieces. Lady Bertram is formed for the enjoyment of all her readers; and a pale example of what she might have become under less propitious circumstances is given by Mrs. Price. Mrs. Norris, we are told, would have done much better than Mrs. Price in her position. It must have given Jane Austen great pleasure to make this remark. None of her bad characters (except possibly Elizabeth Elliot) were quite inhuman to her, and to have found a situation in which Mrs. Norris might have shone would be a real satisfaction. One more remark may be made on _Mansfield Park_. It affords what perhaps is the only[286] probable instance in these books of a portrait drawn from life. She must, one would think, have had in her mind her brother Charles--as he had been twelve or fourteen years earlier--when she drew so charming a sketch of a young sailor in William Price. We must not forget, however, the author's strong denial of depicting individuals, and her declaration that she was too proud of her gentlemen 'to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B.'; nor yet her modest confession, when speaking of two of her favourites--Edmund Bertram and Mr. Knightley--that she was aware they were 'very far from what I know English gentlemen often are.' Jane Austen may perhaps enjoy the distinction of having added words or expressions to colloquial English. The name 'Collins' is almost established as the description of a letter of thanks after a visit; and we have heard of a highly intelligent family among whom a guinea is always alluded to as 'something considerable' in memory of the sum believed (on the authority of the _Memoir_) to have been given to William Price by Aunt Norris.[287] FOOTNOTES: [257] 'Pengird' in _Brabourne_, but surely a misprint. Cf. _Brabourne_, ii. pp. 199, 266. Mme. Perigord and Mme. Bigeon were two of Eliza's French servants who stayed on with Henry until he moved to Hans Place. [258] Lady Robert Kerr, whom Henry met in Scotland, and to whom he divulged the secret of his sister's authorship. [259] Lizzie and Marianne Knight. [260] Part of his duties as Receiver of Oxfordshire. [261] These sisters were daughters of the Master of Balliol; and Mrs. Leigh was married to her first cousin, the Rev. Thomas Leigh, who succeeded to Stoneleigh. (See Leigh pedigree.) [262] Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney, June 18, 1795. [263] The keeper at Chawton. [264] The Rector of Godmersham. [265] _The Wanderer._ [266] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 243. [267] To be allowed to use the names of some of his ships in _Mansfield Park_. [268] The old nurse at Godmersham. [269] Stephen Rumbold Lushington, M.P. for Rye, 1807-12, and for Canterbury, 1812-30, and 1835-37; Privy Councillor; Governor of Madras. [270] At Ashford; 'she' is Fanny. [271] Charles and his party. He was now on the _Namur_ as flag-captain to Sir Thomas Williams, and his wife and two small children were living with him on board. [272] See p. 238. Mrs. Crabbe did not die until October 31, 1813 according to the _Dictionary of National Biography_. [273] Afterwards Earl of Winchilsea. [274] Sister to Mrs. Lefroy. [275] Probably, of _Pride and Prejudice_. [276] Probably Miss Elizabeth Hamilton (1758-1816), author of _The Cottagers of Glenburnie_, &c. [277] (?) Battle of Leipzig, October 16-19, 1813. [278] Also, one of _Pride and Prejudice_. [279] Begun about Feb. 1811. [280] Quoted by Miss Hill, p. 202. [281] _The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina_, by E. S. Barrett (2nd ed. 1814): a satire on Mrs. Radcliffe, in which a conspicuous part is played by an impostor called 'Whylome Eftsoons.' [282] It is said to have been the hardest winter known for twenty years (_Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 218). [283] Kean had made his first appearance at Drury Lane on January 26, 1814, and had immediately taken the town by storm. [284] Edward Knight and his daughter Fanny were to arrive that day. [285] See p. 311. [286] No doubt there were other cases in which particular traits of character were taken from those around her. Her brother Francis certainly thought that the domestic industry of Captain Harville (in _Persuasion_) was copied from himself. (Addenda to _Sailor Brothers_.) [287] The _Memoir_ calls it 'one pound.' The difference is not material, but Mrs. Norris would probably not be above giving herself the benefit of the doubt. CHAPTER XVII _EMMA_ 1814-1815 The last letter but one of the foregoing chapter contains two sentences mentioning the writer's brother, Mr. Knight, which will help us to carry on our story. Writing on March 5, 1814, Jane says: 'It is a nasty day for everybody. Edward's spirits will be wanting sunshine, and here is nothing but thickness and sleet'; and towards the conclusion of the same letter we find the following: 'Perhaps you have not heard that Edward has a good chance of escaping his lawsuit. His opponent "knocks under." The terms of agreement are not quite settled.' There can, we think, be little doubt that both passages--the depressed and the hopeful--refer to a claim over Edward's Hampshire property made by some of the heirs-at-law of the former Knight family whom the Brodnaxes of Godmersham had succeeded. Unfortunately, the cheerful forecast contained in the second passage did not prove to be in accordance with the facts. The lawsuit hung on for three years and was then compromised by Mr. Knight's paying a large sum of money.[288] Perhaps the claim also had its influence in producing the one unflattering estimate of Jane which we shall have to lay before the reader. Miss Mitford was a convinced--but apparently a reluctant--admirer of her genius; and she dwells without disguise on what she considers the want of taste in _Pride and Prejudice_, though even here she adds that Miss Austen 'wants nothing but the _beau idéal_ of the female character to be a perfect novel writer.' In another letter she refers to her mother's unfavourable reminiscences of Jane Austen as a husband-hunter; although Mrs. Mitford's remark must (as we have already pointed out[289]) have been based on an entire misrepresentation, owing to Jane's youthful age at the time when that lady could have known her. * * * * * She proceeds thus:-- A friend of mine who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of 'single blessedness' that ever existed, and that, till _Pride and Prejudice_ showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin, upright piece of wood or iron that fills the corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now: she is still a poker--but a poker of whom every one is afraid. It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable. Most writers are good-humoured chatterers--neither very wise nor very witty; but nine times out of ten (at least in the few that I have known) unaffected and pleasant, and quite removing by their conversation any fear that may have been excited by their works. But a wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed! Miss Mitford has, however, the candour to add a qualification which diminishes the force of her earlier remarks, and bears upon our present subject. She says:-- After all, I do not know that I can quite vouch for this account, though the friend from whom I received it is truth itself; but her family connexions must render her disagreeable to Miss Austen, since she is the sister-in-law of a gentleman who is at law with Miss A.'s brother for the greater part of his fortune. You must have remarked how much her stories hinge upon entailed estates--doubtless she has learnt to dislike entails. Her brother was adopted by a Mr. Knight, who left him his name and two much better legacies in an estate of five thousand a year in Kent, and another of nearly double the value in Hampshire; but it seems he forgot some ceremony--passing a fine, I think they call it--with regard to the Hampshire property, which Mr. Baverstock has claimed in right of his mother, together with the mesne rents, and is likely to be successful.[290] Miss Mitford, indeed, could hardly have done less, after repeating this somewhat spiteful gossip, than mention the hostile quarter from which it arose. We have considered it right to quote part of it, as the writer is an author of some note: but we venture to think that those readers who have accompanied us so far will believe that Jane was guilty of nothing worse than being shy, and talking but little among strangers; and that such strangers as knew something of her literary ability believed, but were quite wrong in believing, that she was taking stock of their peculiarities with a view to introducing them into her next novel. Jane had now completed the first of three visits which she was to pay to Henry this year, and Cassandra was in London in her place; while the Godmersham party were spending two months at Chawton. The two following letters were written by Jane from Chawton in anticipation of a visit to the Cookes at Bookham. Incidentally, Mr. Cooke's remark (quoted in the first) shows that _Mansfield Park_ was already published. We must not forget, however, that its author had been, since January 1814, deep in the composition of _Emma_, and she would be sure to use a visit to the neighbourhood of Leatherhead and Box Hill to verify geographical and other details for her new work. Since her fame was fully established, there have been many attempts to identify the locality of Highbury. 'There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher; another band of enthusiasts support Dorking'; but Mr. E. V. Lucas, in his introduction to a recent edition of the novel, prefers the claim of Leatherhead, which, he says, is rightly placed as regards London and Kingston, and not far wrong as regards Box Hill.[291] Near Leatherhead is a house called 'Randalls'; and in 1761 the vestry of the parish paid their thanks 'in the most respectful manner to Mr. Knightley,' who had remodelled the pulpit and reading-desk of the church.[292] Cobham should be mentioned as another possible alternative, as the distances from London, Richmond, Kingston, and Box Hill suit well.[293] But the most probable supposition of all is that the author purposely avoided identifying it with any one village, while sufficiently defining its position in the county of Surrey. Chawton: Tuesday [June 14, 1814]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Fanny takes my mother to Alton this morning, which gives me an opportunity of sending you a few lines without any other trouble than that of writing them. This is a delightful day in the country, and I hope not much too hot for town. Well, you had a good journey, I trust, and all that, and not rain enough to spoil your bonnet. It appeared so likely to be a wet evening that I went up to the Gt. House between three and four, and dawdled away an hour very comfortably, though Edwd. was not very brisk. The air was clearer in the evening and he was better. We all five walked together into the kitchen garden and along the Gosport road, and they drank tea with us. The only letter to-day is from Mrs. Cooke to me. They do not leave home till July, and want me to come to them, according to my promise. And, after considering everything, I have resolved on going. In addition to their standing claims on me they admire _Mansfield Park_ exceedingly. Mr. Cooke says 'it is the most sensible novel he ever read,' and the manner in which I treat the clergy delights them very much. Altogether, I must go, and I want you to join me there when your visit in Henrietta St. is over. Put this into your capacious head. Take care of yourself, and do not be trampled to death in running after the Emperor.[294] The report in Alton yesterday was that they would certainly travel this road either to or from Portsmouth. I long to know what this bow of the Prince's will produce. Thursday [June 23]. I heard yesterday from Frank. When he began his letter he hoped to be here on Monday, but before it was ended he had been told that the naval review would not take place till Friday, which would probably occasion him some delay, as he cannot get some necessary business of his own attended to while Portsmouth is in such a bustle. I hope Fanny has seen the Emperor, and then I may fairly wish them all away. I go to-morrow, and hope for some delays and adventures. * * * * * Henry at White's! Oh, what a Henry! I do not know what to wish as to Miss B., so I will hold my tongue and my wishes. * * * * * We have called upon Miss Dusantoy and Miss Papillon, and been very pretty. Miss D. has a great idea of being Fanny Price--she and her youngest sister together, who is named Fanny. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Jane's visit to Bookham began on June 24, as soon as the Knights had left Chawton. She was to be away for more than a fortnight, and must have been at Chawton again for a month till the middle of August, when she once more went to join Henry in London. On this occasion she had no rich brother to take her in his carriage, and was forced to come by Yalden's somewhat crowded coach--four inside and fifteen on the top. Henry had moved between June and August, finding a house in his old neighbourhood at 23 Hans Place. Next to him (but separated from him by the entrance to the Pavilion, now the road leading to Pont Street), at No. 22, was the St. Quentins' celebrated school, at which Miss Mitford had been a pupil, as well as Miss Landon and Lady Caroline Lamb.[295] Three doors off, at No. 26, lived Henry's partner, Mr. Tilson, with whom it was possible to converse across the intermediate gardens. 23 Hans Place: Tuesday morning [August, 1814]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I had a very good journey, not crowded, two of the three taken up at Bentley being children, the others of a reasonable size; and they were all very quiet and civil. We were late in London, from being a great load, and from changing coaches at Farnham; it was nearly four, I believe, when we reached Sloane Street. Henry himself met me, and as soon as my trunk and basket could be routed out from all the other trunks and baskets in the world, we were on our way to Hans Place in the luxury of a nice, large, cool, dirty hackney coach. There were four in the kitchen part of Yalden, and I was told fifteen at top, among them Percy Benn. We met in the same room at Egham, but poor Percy was not in his usual spirits. He would be more chatty, I dare say, in his way _from_ Woolwich. We took up a young Gibson at Holybourn, and, in short, everybody either _did_ come up by Yalden yesterday, or wanted to come up. It put me in mind of my own coach between Edinburgh and Stirling.[296] * * * * * It is a delightful place--more than answers my expectation. Having got rid of my unreasonable ideas, I find more space and comfort in the rooms than I had supposed, and the garden is quite a love. I am in the front attic, which is the bedchamber to be preferred. * * * * * _Wednesday._--I got the willow yesterday, as Henry was not quite ready when I reached Hen^{a.} St. I saw Mr. Hampson there for a moment. He dines here to-morrow and proposed bringing his son; so I must submit to seeing George Hampson, though I had hoped to go through life without it. It was one of my vanities, like your not reading _Patronage_. * * * * * Is not this all that can have happened or been arranged? Not quite. Henry wants me to see more of his Hanwell favourite, and has written to invite her to spend a day or two here with me. His scheme is to fetch her on Saturday. I am more and more convinced that he will marry again soon, and like the idea of _her_ better than of anybody else, at hand. Yours very truly and affectionately, JANE. Miss Austen, Chawton. By favour of Mr. Gray. All through this year and the early part of the next, _Emma_ (begun January 1814, finished March 29, 1815) was assiduously worked at. Although polished to the highest degree, it was more quickly composed than any previous work and gave evidence of a practised hand. It was also the most 'Austenish' of all her novels, carrying out most completely her idea of what was fitted to her tastes and capacities. She enjoyed having a heroine 'whom no one would like but herself,' and working on 'three or four families in a country village.' _Emma_ appeals therefore more exclusively than any of the others to an inner circle of admirers: but such admirers may possibly place it at the head of her compositions. There are no stirring incidents; there is no change of scene. The heroine, whose society we enjoy throughout, never sleeps away from home, and even there sees only so much company as an invalid father can welcome. No character in the book is ill, no one is ruined, there is no villain, and no paragon. On the other hand, the plot is admirably contrived and never halts; while the mysteries--exclusively mysteries of courtship and love--are excellently maintained. Emma never expresses any opinion which is thoroughly sound, and seldom makes any forecast which is not belied by the event, yet we always recognise her acuteness, and she by degrees obtains our sympathy. The book also illustrates to the highest degree the author's power of drawing humorous characters; Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and Mrs. Elton in the first class, and Harriet Smith in the second. And the humour is always essential to the delineation of character--it is never an excrescence. It also depends more on what is said than on any tricks of speech; there are no catch-words, and every one speaks practically the same excellent English. Besides this, _Emma_ also gives a very good instance of the author's habit of building up her characters almost entirely without formal description, and leaving analysis to her readers. Her custom of following her creations outside the printed pages enables us to say that the word swept aside unread by Jane Fairfax was 'pardon'; and that the Knightleys' exclusion from Donwell was ended by the death of Mr. Woodhouse in two years' time. According to a less well-known tradition, Jane Fairfax survived her elevation only nine or ten years. Whether the John Knightleys afterwards settled at Hartfield, and whether Frank Churchill married again, may be legitimate subjects for speculation.[297] Meanwhile, _Mansfield Park_ was selling well, and the idea of a second edition began to be mooted. Writing from Chawton to her niece Fanny on another subject (November 18, 1814), she tells her that the first edition is all sold, and adds:-- Your Uncle Henry is rather wanting me to come to town to settle about a second edition, but as I could not very conveniently leave home now, I have written him my will and pleasure, and, unless he still urges it, shall not go. I am very greedy, and want to make the most of it, but as you are much above caring about money I shall not plague you with any particulars. The pleasures of vanity are more within your comprehension, and you will enter into mine at receiving the _praise_ which every now and then comes to me through some channel or other. She did, however, leave home; and our next extract is from a letter written to Fanny from 23 Hans Place, and dated November 30:-- Thank you, but it is not yet settled whether I _do_ hazard a second edition. We are to see Egerton to-day, when it will probably be determined. People are more ready to borrow and praise than to buy, which I cannot wonder at; but though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls 'Pewter' too. Apparently, Egerton did not fancy taking the risk; for there was no second edition until 1816, when it appeared from the publishing house of Murray. Jane's stay in London was a short one; but it included a visit to her niece Anna, who had lately been married to Ben Lefroy, and who was living for the time at Hendon. Early in December, Jane returned home; and three weeks later she and Cassandra set out for a couple of visits: one for a week to Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg in Winchester; the other of longer duration, to their brother at Steventon. Then the curtain is rung down once more, not to be raised till the end of September 1815. During this quiet time, _Emma_ was prepared for the press, and it was no doubt in connexion with its publication that she went to Hans Place on October 4, 1815, for a visit which proved to be much longer and more eventful than the last. For some reason that we are unable to explain, Jane now forsook her former publisher, Mr. Egerton, and put her interests in the charge of the historic house of Murray. She travelled up once more in the company of Henry, who had been paying his mother and sisters a short visit at the cottage. The prolongation of Jane's stay in London to more than a couple of months was caused by Henry's dangerous illness. She gives the news in a letter written to Cassandra and dated Tuesday, October 17:-- . . . What weather we have! What shall we do about it? The 17th October and summer still! Henry is not quite well--a bilious attack with fever. He came back early from Henrietta Street yesterday and went to bed--the comical consequence of which was that Mr. Seymour and I dined together _tête-à-tête_. He is calomeling, and therefore in a way to be better, and I hope may be well to-morrow. * * * * * _Wednesday._--Henry's illness is much more serious than I expected. He has been in bed since three o'clock on Monday. It is a fever--something bilious but chiefly inflammatory. I am not alarmed, but I have determined to send this letter to-day by the post, that you may know how things are going on. There is no chance of his being able to leave Town on Saturday. I asked Mr. Haden[298] that question to-day. Mr. H. is the apothecary from the corner of Sloane Street, successor to Mr. Smith, a very young man, said to be clever, and he is certainly very attentive, and appears hitherto to have understood the complaint. * * * * * As for myself, you may be sure I shall return as soon as I can. Tuesday is in my brain, but you will feel the uncertainty of it. * * * * * You must fancy Henry in the backroom upstairs, and I am generally there also, working or writing. Even in illness, the interests of _Emma_ were not neglected; and a day or two later Henry was able to dictate the following letter to Mr. Murray:-- DEAR SIR,--Severe illness has confined me to my bed ever since I received yours of y^{e} 15th. I cannot yet hold a pen, and employ an amanuensis. The politeness and perspicuity of your letter equally claim my earliest exertion. Your official opinion of the merits of _Emma_ is very valuable and satisfactory.[299] Though I venture to differ occasionally from your critique, yet I assure you the quantum of your commendation rather exceeds than falls short of the author's expectation and my own. The terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected that I am apprehensive of having made some great error in my arithmetical calculation. On the subject of the expence and profit of publishing you must be much better informed than I am, but documents in my possession appear to prove that the sum offered by you for the copyright of _Sense and Sensibility_, _Mansfield Park_, and _Emma_ is not equal to the money which my sister has actually cleared by one very moderate edition of _Mansfield Park_;--(you yourself expressed astonishment that so small an edition of such a work should have been sent into the world)--and a still smaller one of _Sense and Sensibility_.[300] Henry, however, became so alarmingly ill that on October 22 Jane dispatched expresses to her brothers and sister, summoning them to London. Mr. Knight left Godmersham for town on the 23rd, but owing to a delay in the delivery of the letter, James Austen did not receive his till the 24th. He rode to Chawton that evening, and the next day he and Cassandra arrived in London. For a time Henry's life was in imminent danger, but after a week's anxiety he was so far on the road to recovery that his two brothers were able to return home, leaving Jane and Cassandra in charge. It was owing to Jane's untiring exertions at this time that her health began to suffer. One other consequence too, but of a less tragical kind, was due to Henry's illness. The physician that attended him--supplementing, no doubt, Mr. Haden--was one of the Prince Regent's physicians, and he, either knowing or hearing (for it was now an open secret) that Jane Austen was the author of _Pride and Prejudice_, informed her that the Prince greatly admired her novels, 'that he read them often, and kept a set in every one of his residences; that he himself had thought it right to inform His Royal Highness that Miss Austen was staying in London.' The Prince did not so far condescend as to desire to see Miss Austen in person, but he instructed his librarian, Mr. Clarke, to wait upon her and show her any civility in his power. The result was that on November 13 Jane was shown over the library and other apartments at Carlton House, and in the course of the visit Mr. Clarke announced that if Miss Austen had any other novel forthcoming, she was at liberty to dedicate it to the Prince. We cannot tell what may have been the exact amount of pleasure given to Jane by this piece of information, as Cassandra was at that time also in Hans Place, and there is therefore no letter of Jane to her on the subject. But, at any rate, Jane was loyal enough to wish to do what was right and proper in the circumstances. Consequently, on November 15, we find her writing to Mr. Clarke as follows:-- SIR,--I must take the liberty of asking you a question. Among the many flattering attentions which I received from you at Carlton House on Monday last, was the information of my being at liberty to dedicate any future work to His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, without the necessity of any solicitation on my part. Such, at least, I believed to be your words; but as I am very anxious to be quite certain of what was intended, I entreat you to have the goodness to inform me how such a permission is to be understood, and whether it is incumbent on me to show my sense of the honour by inscribing the work now in the press to His Royal Highness; I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful. To which Mr. Clarke replied:-- Carlton House: November 16, 1815. DEAR MADAM,--It is certainly not _incumbent_ on you to dedicate your work now in the press to His Royal Highness; but if you wish to do the Regent that honour either now or at any future period, I am happy to send you that permission, which need not require any more trouble or solicitation on your part. Your late works, Madam, and in particular _Mansfield Park_, reflect the highest honour on your genius and your principles. In every new work your mind seems to increase its energy and power of discrimination. The Regent has read and admired all your publications. Accept my sincere thanks for the pleasure your volumes have given me: in the perusal of them I felt a great inclination to write and say so. And I also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in some future work the habits of life, and character, and enthusiasm of a clergyman, who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, who should be something like Beattie's Minstrel:-- Silent when glad, affectionate tho' shy, And now his look was most demurely sad; And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why. Neither Goldsmith, nor La Fontaine in his _Tableau de Famille_, have in my mind quite delineated an English clergyman, at least of the present day, fond of and entirely engaged in literature, no man's enemy but his own. Pray, dear Madam, think of these things. Believe me at all times with sincerity and respect, Your faithful and obliged servant, J. S. CLARKE, _Librarian_. P.S.--I am going for about three weeks to Mr. Henry Streatfeild, Chiddingstone, Sevenoaks, but hope on my return to town to have the honour of seeing you again. On November 17 Henry was sufficiently recovered to address a letter to Mr. John Murray on his sister's behalf. This was followed by a letter from herself on November 23. Hans Place: Thursday [November 23, 1815]. SIR,--My brother's note last Monday has been so fruitless, that I am afraid there can be but little chance of my writing to any good effect; but yet I am so very much disappointed and vexed by the delays of the printers, that I cannot help begging to know whether there is no hope of their being quickened. Instead of the work being ready by the end of the present month, it will hardly, at the rate we now proceed, be finished by the end of the next; and as I expect to leave London early in December, it is of consequence that no more time should be lost. Is it likely that the printers will be influenced to greater dispatch and punctuality by knowing that the work is to be dedicated, by permission, to the Prince Regent? If you can make that circumstance operate, I shall be very glad. My brother returns _Waterloo_[301] with many thanks for the loan of it. We have heard much of Scott's account of Paris.[302] If it be not incompatible with other arrangements, would you favour us with it, supposing you have any set already opened? You may depend upon its being in careful hands. I remain, Sir, your ob^{t.} humble Se^{t.,} J. AUSTEN. Meanwhile, as Henry was mending, his brother Edward, who had brought his daughter Fanny up to town, left her as a companion to her Aunt Jane, and escorted Cassandra to Chawton. Hans Place: Friday [November 24, 1815]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I have the pleasure of sending you a much better account of _my affairs_, which I know will be a great delight to you. I wrote to Mr. Murray yesterday myself, and Henry wrote at the same time to Roworth.[303] Before the notes were out of the house, I received three sheets and an apology from R. We sent the notes, however, and I had a most civil one in reply from Mr. M. He is so very polite, indeed, that it is quite overcoming. The printers have been waiting for paper--the blame is thrown upon the stationer; but he gives his word that I shall have no farther cause for dissatisfaction. He has lent us _Miss Williams_[304] and _Scott_, and says that any book of his will always be at _my_ service. In short, I am soothed and complimented into tolerable comfort. To-morrow Mr. Haden is to dine with us. There is happiness! We really grow so fond of Mr. Haden that I do not know what to expect. He, and Mr. Tilson, and Mr. Philips made up our circle of wits last night; Fanny played, and he sat and listened and suggested improvements, till Richard came in to tell him that 'the doctor was waiting for him at Captn. Blake's'; and then he was off with a speed that you can imagine. He never does appear in the least above his profession, or out of humour with it, or I should think poor Captn. Blake, whoever he is, in a very bad way. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. I have been listening to dreadful insanity. It is Mr. Haden's firm belief that a person _not_ musical is fit for every sort of wickedness. I ventured to assert a little on the other side, but wished the cause in abler hands. Hans Place: Sunday [November 26, 1815]. I _did_ mention the P. R. in my note to Mr. Murray; it brought me a fine compliment in return. Whether it has done any other good I do not know, but Henry thought it worth trying. The printers continue to supply me very well. I am advanced in Vol. III. to my _arra_-root, upon which peculiar style of spelling there is a modest query in the margin. I will not forget Anna's arrowroot. I hope you have told Martha of my first resolution of letting nobody know that I _might_ dedicate, &c., for fear of being obliged to do it, and that she is thoroughly convinced of my being influenced now by nothing but the most mercenary motives. * * * * * Then came dinner and Mr. Haden, who brought good manners and clever conversation. From 7 to 8 the harp; at 8 Mrs. L. and Miss E. arrived, and for the rest of the evening the drawing-room was thus arranged: on the sofa side the two ladies, Henry, and myself, making the best of it; on the opposite side Fanny and Mr. Haden, in two chairs (I _believe_, at least, they had _two_ chairs), talking together uninterruptedly. Fancy the scene! And what is to be fancied next? Why, that Mr. H. dines here again to-morrow. To-day we are to have Mr. Barlow. Mr. H. is reading _Mansfield Park_ for the first time, and prefers it to _P. and P._ * * * * * Fanny has heard all that I have said to you about herself and Mr. H. Thank you very much for the sight of dearest Charles's letter to yourself. How pleasantly and how naturally he writes! and how perfect a picture of his disposition and feelings his style conveys! Poor dear fellow! Not a present! I have a great mind to send him all the twelve copies which were to have been dispersed among my near connections, beginning with the P. R. and ending with Countess Morley. Adieu. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss Austen. Saturday [December 2, 1815]. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Henry came back yesterday, and might have returned the day before if he had known as much in time. * * * * * I had the comfort of a few lines on Wednesday morning from Henry himself, just after your letter was gone, giving so good an account of his feelings as made me perfectly easy. He met with the utmost care and attention at Hanwell, spent his two days there very quietly and pleasantly, and, being certainly in no respect the worse for going, we may believe that he must be better, as he is quite sure of being himself. To make his return a complete gala Mr. Haden was secured for dinner. I need not say that our evening was agreeable. But you seem to be under a mistake as to Mr. H. You call him an apothecary. He is no apothecary; he has never been an apothecary; there is not an apothecary in this neighbourhood--the only inconvenience of the situation perhaps--but so it is; we have not a medical man within reach. He is a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel, but without the least spice of an apothecary. He is, perhaps, the only person _not_ an apothecary hereabouts. He has never sung to us. He will not sing without a pianoforte accompaniment. * * * * * I am sorry my mother has been suffering, and am afraid this exquisite weather is too good to agree with her. _I_ enjoy it all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally; and I cannot but selfishly hope we are to have it last till Christmas--nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close, muggy weather. Yours affectionately, J. A. It strikes me that I have no business to give the P. R. a binding, but we will take counsel upon the question. Two more letters were written by the author to her publisher while the work was in his hands. On December 11, she writes:-- As I find that _Emma_ is advertised for publication as early as Saturday next, I think it best to lose no time in settling all that remains to be settled on the subject, and adopt this method as involving the smallest tax on your time. . . . . . . The title-page must be '_Emma_, dedicated by permission to H.R.H. the Prince Regent.' And it is my particular wish that one set should be completed and sent to H.R.H. two or three days before the work is generally public. It should be sent under cover to the Rev. J. S. Clarke, Librarian, Carlton House. I shall subjoin a list of those persons to whom I must trouble you to forward also a set each, when the work is out; all unbound with 'From the Authoress' on the first page.[305] . . . I return also _Mansfield Park_ as ready for a second edition, I believe, as I can make it.[306] I am in Hans Place till the 16th; from that day inclusive, my direction will be Chawton, Alton, Hants.[307] On receipt of this, Mr. Murray seems to have sent round a note immediately, asking if it really was Miss Austen's wish that the dedication should be placed on the title-page, for we find Jane writing again the same day:-- DEAR SIR,--I am very much obliged by yours, and very happy to feel everything arranged to our mutual satisfaction. As to my direction about the title-page, it was arising from my ignorance only, and from my having never noticed the proper place for a dedication. I thank you for putting me right. Any deviation from what is usually done in such cases is the last thing I should wish for. I feel happy in having a friend to save me from the ill effect of my own blunder. On December 11, Jane resumed her correspondence with Mr. Clarke:-- DEAR SIR,--My _Emma_ is now so near publication that I feel it right to assure you of my not having forgotten your kind recommendation of an early copy for Carlton House, and that I have Mr. Murray's promise of its being sent to His Royal Highness, under cover to you, three days previous to the work being really out. I must make use of this opportunity to thank you, dear Sir, for the very high praise you bestow on my other novels. I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merit. My greatest anxiety at present is that this fourth work should not disgrace what was good in the others. But on this point I will do myself the justice to declare that, whatever may be my wishes for its success, I am very strongly haunted by the idea that to those readers who have preferred _Pride and Prejudice_ it will appear inferior in wit; and to those who have preferred _Mansfield Park_, very inferior in good sense. Such as it is, however, I hope you will do me the favour of accepting a copy. Mr. Murray will have directions for sending one. I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of November 16th. But I assure you I am _not_. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Believe me, dear Sir, Your obliged and faithful hum^{bl} Ser^{t,} JANE AUSTEN. But Mr. Clarke had not finished with his suggestions, for he replied in a few days:-- Carlton House: Thursday [December 1815]. MY DEAR MADAM,--The letter you were so obliging as to do me the honour of sending, was forwarded to me in Kent, where, in a village, Chiddingstone, near Sevenoaks, I had been hiding myself from all bustle and turmoil and getting spirits for a winter campaign, and strength to stand the sharp knives which many a Shylock is wetting [_sic_] to cut more than a pound of flesh from my heart, on the appearance of _James the Second_.[308] On Monday I go to Lord Egremont's at Petworth--where your praises have long been sounded as they ought to be--I shall then look in on the party at the Pavilion[309] for a couple of nights, and return to preach at Park Street Chapel, Green Street, on the Thanksgiving Day. You were very good to send me _Emma_, which I have in no respect deserved. It is gone to the Prince Regent. I have read only a few pages, which I very much admired--there is so much nature and excellent description of character in everything you describe. Pray continue to write and make all your friends send sketches to help you--and _Mémoires pour servir_, as the French term it. Do let us have an English clergyman after your fancy--much novelty may be introduced--show, dear Madam, what good would be done if tythes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother, as I did, because the High Priest of the Parish in which she died did not pay her remains the respect he ought to do. I have never recovered the shock. Carry your clergyman to sea as the friend of some distinguished naval character about a Court, you can then bring forward, like Le Sage, many interesting scenes of character and interest. But forgive me, I cannot write to you without wishing to elicit your genius, and I fear I cannot do that without trespassing on your patience and good nature. I have desired Mr. Murray to procure, if he can, two little works I ventured to publish from being at sea--sermons which I wrote and preached on the ocean, and the edition which I published of Falconer's _Shipwreck_.[310] Pray, dear Madam, remember that beside my cell at Carlton House, I have another which Dr. Barne procured for me at No. 37 Golden Square, where I often hide myself. There is a small library there much at your service, and if you can make the cell render you any service as a sort of halfway house when you come to Town, I shall be most happy. There is a maid servant of mine always there. I hope to have the honour of sending you _James the Second_ when it reaches a second edition, as some few notes may possibly be then added. Yours, dear Madam, very sincerely, J. S. CLARKE. It is evident that what the writer of the above letter chiefly desired, was that Jane Austen should depict a clergyman who should resemble no one so much as the Rev. J. S. Clarke. This is borne out again in a further letter in which Mr. Clarke expressed the somewhat tardy thanks of his Royal master. Pavilion: March 27, 1816. DEAR MISS AUSTEN,--I have to return you the thanks of His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, for the handsome copy you sent him of your last excellent novel. Pray, dear Madam, soon write again and again. Lord St. Helens and many of the nobility, who have been staying here, paid you the just tribute of their praise. The Prince Regent has just left us for London; and having been pleased to appoint me Chaplain and Private English Secretary to the Prince of Cobourg, I remain here with His Serene Highness and a select party until the marriage. Perhaps when you again appear in print you may chuse to dedicate your volumes to Prince Leopold: any historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting. Believe me at all times, Dear Miss Austen, Your obliged friend, J. S. CLARKE. Jane's sensible reply put an end to any further suggestions:-- MY DEAR SIR,--I am honoured by the Prince's thanks and very much obliged to yourself for the kind manner in which you mention the work. I have also to acknowledge a former letter forwarded to me from Hans Place. I assure you I felt very grateful for the friendly tenor of it, and hope my silence will have been considered, as it was truly meant, to proceed only from an unwillingness to tax your time with idle thanks. Under every interesting circumstance which your own talent and literary labours have placed you in, or the favour of the Regent bestowed, you have my best wishes. Your recent appointments I hope are a step to something still better. In my opinion, the service of a court can hardly be too well paid, for immense must be the sacrifice of time and feeling required by it. You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way, and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other. I remain, my dear Sir, Your very much obliged, and sincere friend, J. AUSTEN. Chawton, near Alton, April 1, 1816. FOOTNOTES: [288] _Chawton Manor and its Owners_, p. 171. [289] Page 84. [290] _Life of Mary Russell Mitford_, by the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange (Bentley, 1870). We ought to add that Miss Mitford's admiration increased with time. Thus, in August 1816, she speaks of _Emma_ 'the best, I think, of all her charming works'; and, at a later date, of her 'exquisite' _Persuasion_. In September 1817 she mentions her death as a 'terrible loss'; and a year afterwards, calls her 'our dear Miss Austen.' [291] Box Hill, however, was seven miles from Highbury, whereas it is only three miles from Leatherhead. [292] _Highways and Byways in Surrey_, by Eric Parker. [293] In support of Cobham, it has been suggested that in chapter xi., where mention is made of this village, the author had forgotten to alter the name to Highbury. Jane knew Cobham as a halting-place on the way from Chawton to London (p. 292). Bookham is another possible claimant. [294] Emperor of Russia, who with the King of Prussia was then visiting England. [295] See p. 26. [296] A visit of Jane to Scotland, of which no record is left in family tradition, is so improbable that we must imagine her to be referring to some joke, or possibly some forgotten tale of her own. [297] One of our author's few inaccuracies is to be found in chapter xlii., where an 'orchard in blossom' is made to coincide with ripe strawberries. When her brother Edward next saw her, he said 'Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those apple-trees of yours that come into bloom in July!' W. H. Pollock's _Jane Austen, etc._, pp. 90-91. [298] No doubt the father of Sir Seymour Haden, and the introducer into England of the stethoscope. He lived at the corner of Hans Street and Sloane Street. [299] Mr. Murray's 'reader' on this occasion was evidently William Gifford, the editor of the _Quarterly Review_, who writes under date Sept. 29, 1815: 'Of _Emma_ I have nothing but good to say. I was sure of the writer before you mentioned her. The MS. though plainly written has yet some, indeed many little omissions, and an expression may now and then be amended in passing through the press. I will readily undertake the revision.' _Memoir of John Murray_ by Samuel Smiles (1891), vol. i. p. 282. [300] The present Mr. John Murray kindly informs us that the original edition of _Emma_ consisted of 2000 copies, of which 1250 were sold within a year. [301] (?) _The Field of Waterloo_, by Sir Walter Scott. [302] _Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk_; or possibly John Scott's _Paris Revisited in 1815_. [303] The printer. [304] _A narrative of the events which have lately taken place in France_, by Helen Maria Williams. London, 1815. [305] These included a set to Miss Edgeworth (_Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth_, edited by A. J. C. Hare (1894), vol. i. p. 235), and another to Lady Morley, a clever woman, to whom _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ had at one time been ascribed (_Life of M. R. Mitford_, by the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange, vol. i. p. 241). [306] Unfortunately, most of the worst misprints remained in the new edition, while certain new ones were added. [307] _Memoir_, pp. 122-4. [308] _Life of King James II, from the Stuart MSS. in Carlton House_, published 1816. [309] At Brighton. [310] Published, 1804. CHAPTER XVIII _PERSUASION_ 1815-1816 So far as we know, Jane went to London in 1815 perfectly sound in health. Her remark to Cassandra on her enjoyment of the muggy, unwholesome weather is written with the security of a person accustomed to be free from bodily ailments, and expecting that condition of things to continue. But, alas! we must look upon this visit, which seemed to mark the highest point in her modest fame, as marking also a downward stage in her career as regards both prosperity and health. Perhaps the excitement of the publication of _Emma_, and probably the close attention on the sick-bed of her brother which coincided with it--possibly even the muggy weather which she praised so highly--combined to diminish her vigour, and to sow the seeds of a disease, the exact nature of which no one seems ever to have been able to determine. These, however, were not the only disquieting circumstances which surrounded her. In the following March her favourite brother, Henry, was declared a bankrupt; and there are one or two indications of her being aware that all was not well with the firm in the autumn. The months which intervened while this catastrophe was impending must have been very trying to one already weakened by all that she had gone through. More agreeable associations, however, arose from the success of _Emma_. There was, for instance, a pleasant exchange of letters with the Countess of Morley, a lady of some literary capacity, to whom Jane had sent a copy of _Emma_, and who expressed her thanks and admiration in very warm terms. The author in her turn, speaking of Lady Morley's approval, says: 'It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which _Emma's_ predecessors have experienced, and to believe that I have not yet, as almost every writer of fancy does sooner or later, overwritten myself.' The end of March brought a still more flattering tribute to Jane's growing fame, in the shape of an article on _Emma_ in the _Quarterly Review_. The _Review_, though dated October 1815, did not appear till March of the following year,[311] and the writer of the article was none other than Sir Walter Scott.[312] The honour of an article in the _Quarterly_ was no doubt mainly due to the fact that Jane had published her latest book with Mr. Murray, its owner. Though the praise contained in the article would scarcely satisfy an enthusiastic admirer of her works,[313] Miss Austen felt she had no cause to complain. In thanking Mr. Murray for lending her a copy of the _Review_, she writes:-- The authoress of _Emma_ has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it, except in the total omission of _Mansfield Park_. I cannot but be sorry that so clever a man as the Reviewer of _Emma_ should consider it as unworthy of being noticed. You will be pleased to hear that I have received the Prince's thanks for the _handsome_ copy I sent him of _Emma_. Whatever he may think of _my_ share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right. The fact that she was honoured with a notice in the _Quarterly_ did not prevent the author from collecting and leaving on record the more domestic criticisms of her family and friends. OPINIONS OF _Emma_. _Captain F. Austen_ liked it extremely, observing that though there might be more wit in _P. and P._ and an higher morality in _M. P._, yet altogether, on account of its peculiar air of Nature throughout, he preferred it to either. _Mrs. Frank Austen_ liked and admired it very much indeed, but must still prefer _P. and P._ _Mrs. J. Bridges_ preferred it to all the others. _Miss Sharp._--Better than _M. P._, but not so well as _P. and P._ Pleased with the heroine for her originality, delighted with Mr. K., and called Mrs. Elton beyond praise--dissatisfied with Jane Fairfax. _Cassandra._--Better than _P. and P._ but not so well as _M. P._ _Fanny K._--Not so well as either _P. and P._ or _M. P._ Could not bear Emma herself. Mr. Knightley delightful. Should like J. F. if she knew more of her. _Mr. and Mrs. James Austen_ did not like it so well as either of the three others. Language different from the others; not so easily read. _Edward_ preferred it to _M. P._ only. Mr. K. liked by everybody. _Miss Bigg._--Not equal to either _P. and P._ or _M. P._ Objected to the sameness of the subject (Matchmaking) all through. Too much of Mrs. Elton and H. Smith. Language superior to the others. _My Mother_ thought it more entertaining than _M. P._, but not so interesting as _P. and P._ No characters in it equal to Lady Catherine or Mr. Collins. _Miss Lloyd_ thought it as clever as either of the others, but did not receive so much pleasure from it as from _P. and P._ and _M. P._ _Fanny Cage_ liked it very much indeed, and classed it between _P. and P._ and _M. P._ _Mrs. and Miss Craven_ liked it very much, but not so much as the others. _Mr. Sherer_ did not think it equal to either _M. P._ (which he liked the best of all) or _P. and P._ Displeased with my pictures of clergymen. _Miss Bigg_, on reading it a second time, liked Miss Bates much better than at first, and expressed herself as liking all the people of Highbury in general, except Harriet Smith, but could not help still thinking _her_ too silly in her loves. _The Family at Upton Gray_ all very much amused with it. Miss Bates a great favourite with Mrs. Beaufoy. _Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot_ saw many beauties in it, but could not think it equal to _P. and P._ Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt them for anything else. Mr. K., however, an excellent character; Emma better luck than a matchmaker often has; pitied Jane Fairfax; thought Frank Churchill better treated than he deserved. _Countess Craven_ admired it very much, but did not think it equal to _P. and P._ which she ranked as the very first of its sort. _Mrs. Guiton_ thought it too natural to be interesting. _Mrs. Digweed_ did not like it so well as the others: in fact if she had not known the author would hardly have got through it. _Miss Terry_ admired it very much, particularly Mrs. Elton. _Henry Sanford_--very much pleased with it--delighted with Miss Bates, but thought Mrs. Elton the best-drawn character in the book. _Mansfield Park_, however, still his favourite. _Mr. Haden_--_quite_ delighted with it. Admired the character of Emma. _Miss Isabella Herries_ did not like it. Objected to my exposing the sex in the character of the heroine. Convinced that I had meant Mrs. and Miss Bates for some acquaintance of theirs. People whom I never heard of before. _Mrs. Harriet Moore_ admired it very much, but _M. P._ still her favourite of all. _Countess of Morley_ delighted with it. _Mr. Cockerell_ liked it so little that Fanny would not send me his opinion. _Mrs. Dickson_ did not much like it--thought it very inferior to _P. and P._ Liked it the less from there being a Mr. and Mrs. Dixon in it. _Mrs. Brandreth_ thought the third volume superior to anything I had ever written--quite beautiful! _Mr. B. Lefroy_ thought that if there had been more incident it would be equal to any of the others. The characters quite as well-drawn and supported as in any, and from being more every-day ones, the more entertaining. Did not like the heroine so well as any of the others. Miss Bates excellent, but rather too much of her. Mr. and Mrs. Elton admirable and John Knightley a sensible man. _Mrs. B. Lefroy_ ranked _Emma_ as a composition with _S. and S._ Not so _brilliant_ as _P. and P._ nor so _equal_ as _M. P._ Preferred Emma herself to all the heroines. The characters, like all the others, admirably well drawn and supported--perhaps rather less strongly marked than some, but only the more natural for that reason. Mr. Knightley, Mrs. Elton, and Miss Bates her favourites. Thought one or two of the conversations too long. _Mrs. Lefroy_ preferred it to _M. P._, but liked _M. P._ the least of all. _Mr. Fowle_ read only the first and last chapters, because he had heard it was not interesting. _Mrs. Lutley Sclater_ liked it very much, better than _M. P._, and thought I had 'brought it all about very cleverly in the last volume.' _Mrs. C. Cage_ wrote thus to Fanny: 'A great many thanks for the loan of _Emma_, which I am delighted with. I like it better than any. Every character is thoroughly kept up. I must enjoy reading it again with Charles. Miss Bates is incomparable, but I was nearly killed with those precious treasures. They are unique, and really with more fun than I can express. I am at Highbury all day, and I can't help feeling I have just got into a new set of acquaintance. No one writes such good sense, and so very comfortable.' _Mrs. Wroughton_ did not like it so well as _P. and P._ Thought the authoress wrong, in such times as these, to draw such clergymen as Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton. _Sir J. Langham_ thought it much inferior to the others. _Mr. Jeffrey_ (of the _Edinburgh Review_) was kept up by it three nights. _Miss Murden._--Certainly inferior to all the others. _Captain C. Austen_ wrote: '_Emma_ arrived in time to a moment. I am delighted with her, more so I think than even with my favourite, _Pride and Prejudice_, and have read it three times in the passage.' _Mrs. D. Dundas_ thought it very clever, but did not like it so well as either of the others. * * * * * We do not know how Mr. Jeffrey's involuntary tribute of admiration was conveyed to the author, but we are sure she must have valued it very highly. It was not the first time she had collected a miscellaneous set of opinions on her work. The two following critiques on _Mansfield Park_--apparently from two ladies of the same family--will illustrate the sort of want of comprehension from which the author had to suffer when she got outside the limits of her own immediate circle. _Mrs. B._--Much pleased with it: particularly with the character of Fanny as being so very natural. Thought Lady Bertram like herself. Preferred it to either of the others; but imagined _that_ might be want of taste, as she did not understand wit. _Mrs. Augusta B._ owned that she thought _S. and S._ and _P. and P._ downright nonsense, but expected to like _M. P._ better, and having finished the first volume, flattered herself she had got through the worst. Meanwhile, the banking-house of Austen, Maunde, and Tilson, had closed its doors; and on March 23, 1816, Henry Austen was declared a bankrupt: the immediate cause of the collapse being the failure of an Alton bank which the London firm had backed. No personal extravagance was charged against Henry; but he had the unpleasant sensation of starting life over again, and of having caused serious loss to several of his family, especially his brother Edward and Mr. Leigh Perrot, who had gone sureties for him on his appointment as Receiver-General for Oxfordshire. Jane herself was fortunate in losing no more than thirteen pounds--a portion of the profits of _Mansfield Park_.[314] Henry Austen possessed an extraordinary elasticity of nature which made a rebound from depression easy--indeed, almost inevitable--in his case. He returned at once to his original intention of taking Orders, as if the intervening military and banking career had been nothing more than an interruption of his normal course. Nor was it merely perfunctory performance of clerical duties to which he looked forward: he was in earnest, and began by making use of his former classical knowledge to take up a serious study of the New Testament in the original language. He seems to have been in advance of his age in this respect; for when he went to be examined by the Bishop, that dignitary, after asking him such questions as he thought desirable, put his hand on a book which lay near him on the table, and which happened to be a Greek Testament, and said: 'As for _this_ book, Mr. Austen, I dare say it is some years since either you or I looked into it.' Henry Austen became in time an earnest preacher of the evangelical school, and was for many years perpetual curate of Bentley, near Alton. He did not marry the 'Hanwell favourite,' but found a wife after some years in Miss Eleanor Jackson, who survived him. It must have been somewhere about this time that Jane Austen succeeded in recovering the MS. of _Northanger Abbey_. An unsuccessful attempt to secure the publication of the novel in the year 1809 has already been noticed; but we learn from the _Memoir_ that after four works of hers had been published, and somewhat widely circulated, one of her brothers (acting for her) negotiated with the publisher who had bought it, and found him very willing to receive back his money, and resign all claim to the copyright. When the bargain was concluded and the money paid, but not till then, the negotiator had the satisfaction of informing him that the work which had been so lightly esteemed was by the author of _Pride and Prejudice_.[315] Meanwhile, Jane had been for some months engaged on _Persuasion_. It was begun before she went to London in the autumn of 1815 for the publication of _Emma_; but that visit and all that happened to her during the winter must certainly have interrupted its composition, and possibly modified its tone. It is less high-spirited and more tender in its description of a stricken heart than anything she had attempted before. In May, Cassandra and Jane left Chawton to spend three weeks at Cheltenham, stopping with their brother at Steventon, and with the Fowles at Kintbury on the way, and again at Steventon on their return. Jane must have been decidedly out of health, for the change in her did not escape the notice of her friends. But whatever was the exact state of her health during the first half of this year, it did not prevent her from being able, on July 18, to write 'Finis' at the end of the first draft of _Persuasion_; and thereby hangs an interesting tale, which we cannot do better than relate in the words of the _Memoir_. The book had been brought to an end in July; and the re-engagement of the hero and heroine effected in a totally different manner in a scene laid at Admiral Croft's lodgings. But her performance did not satisfy her. She thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better. This weighed upon her mind--the more so, probably, on account of the weak state of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low spirits. But such depression was little in accordance with her nature, and was soon shaken off. The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views and brighter inspirations; the sense of power revived; and imagination resumed its course. She cancelled the condemned chapter, and wrote two others, entirely different, in its stead. The result is that we possess the visit of the Musgrove party to Bath; the crowded and animated scenes at the White Hart Hotel; and the charming conversation between Captain Harville and Anne Elliot, overheard by Captain Wentworth, by which the two faithful lovers were at last led to understand each other's feelings. The tenth and eleventh chapters of _Persuasion_, then, rather than the actual winding-up of the story, contain the latest of her printed compositions--her last contribution to the entertainment of the public. Perhaps it may be thought that she has seldom written anything more brilliant; and that, independent of the original manner in which the _dénouement_ is brought about, the pictures of Charles Musgrove's good-natured boyishness and of his wife's jealous selfishness would have been incomplete without these finishing strokes. The cancelled chapter exists in manuscript. It is certainly inferior to the two which were substituted for it; but it was such as some writers and some readers might have been contented with; and it contained touches which scarcely any other hand could have given, the suppression of which may be almost a matter of regret.[316] For the cancelled chapter in _Persuasion_, and for other posthumous writings of the author, we will refer our readers to the second edition of the _Memoir_. They will not fail to note the delicate touches put to the characters of the Crofts by the Admiral's triumph over the servant who was 'denying' Mrs. Croft, and by the frequent excursions of husband and wife together 'upstairs to hear a noise, or downstairs to settle their accounts, or upon the landing to trim the lamp.' But the added chapters take one altogether into a higher province of fiction, where the deepest emotion and the most delicate humour are blended in one scene: a scene that makes one think that, had its author lived, we might have had later masterpieces of a different type from that of their predecessors. _Persuasion_ is of about the same length as _Northanger Abbey_, and it seems natural to suppose that there was some purpose in this similarity, and that the two works were intended to be published together--as in the end they were--each as a two-volume novel. She certainly contemplated the publication of _Northanger Abbey_ (which at that stage bore the name of _Catherine_) after she had recovered it in 1816, and when she wrote the 'advertisement' which appears in the first edition of the book. Yet afterwards she seems rather to have gone back from this intention. Writing to Fanny Knight, March 13, 1817, she says:-- I _will_ answer your kind questions more than you expect. _Miss Catherine_ is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out; but I have a something ready for publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short--about the length of _Catherine_. This is for yourself alone. _Catherine_ is of course _Northanger Abbey_, and the 'something' is _Persuasion_. She returns to the latter in writing again to Fanny, March 23, telling her she will not like it, and adding 'You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.' Two remarkable points in these extracts are: the statement that _Persuasion_ was 'ready for publication,' but was not to appear for a twelvemonth, and the idea that the character of the heroine was, as it were, imposed upon the author by an external force which she was powerless to resist. The intended delay in publishing _Persuasion_ shows how unwilling she was to let anything go till she was quite sure she had polished it to the utmost: and we may imagine that, had health returned, the one comparatively dull and lifeless part of the book--the long story of Mrs. Smith--would have been somehow or other brought to life by touches which she knew so well how to impart. As for the doubt about publishing _Catherine_ at all, it was not unnatural. She might reasonably hesitate to put an immature work by the side of her most mature: she might (and we know that she _did_) feel that the social usages of sixteen years ago, which she was describing in this tale, were no longer those of the day; and it was possible that a satire on Mrs. Radcliffe was not what the public now wanted. The members of the Austen family, who managed the publication of her novels after her death, thought differently; and we are grateful to them for having done so. Had she followed all the advice given her by her friends, she would have produced something very different from either _Northanger Abbey_ or _Persuasion_. It must have been in the course of the year 1816 that she drew up the following 'plan of a novel, according to hints from various quarters,' adding below the names of the friends who gave the hints. Scene to be in the country. Heroine, the daughter of a clergyman[317]: one who, after having lived much in the world, had retired from it, and settled on a curacy with a very small fortune of his own. He, the most excellent man that can be imagined, perfect in character, temper, and manners, without the smallest drawback or peculiarity to prevent his being the most delightful companion to his daughter from one year's end to the other. Heroine,[318] a faultless character herself, perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment and not the least wit,[319] very highly accomplished,[320] understanding modern languages, and (generally speaking) everything that the most accomplished young women learn, but particularly excelling in music--her favourite pursuit--and playing equally well on the pianoforte and harp, and singing in the first style. Her person quite beautiful,[321] dark eyes and plump cheeks. Book to open with the description of father and daughter, who are to converse in long speeches, elegant language, and a tone of high serious sentiment. The father to be induced, at his daughter's earnest request, to relate to her the past events of his life. This narrative will reach through the greater part of the first volume; as besides all the circumstances of his attachment to her mother, and their marriage, it will comprehend his going to sea as chaplain[322] to a distinguished naval character about the Court; his going afterwards to Court himself, which introduced him to a great variety of characters and involved him in many interesting situations, concluding with his opinion of the benefits of tithes being done away, and his having buried his own mother (heroine's lamented grandmother) in consequence of the High Priest of the parish in which she died refusing to pay her remains the respect due to them. The father to be of a very literary turn, an enthusiast in literature, nobody's enemy but his own; at the same time most zealous in the discharge of his pastoral duties, the model of an exemplary parish priest.[323] The heroine's friendship to be sought after by a young woman in the same neighbourhood, of talents and shrewdness, with light eyes and a fair skin, but having a considerable degree of wit[324]; heroine shall shrink from the acquaintance. From this outset the story will proceed and contain a striking variety of adventures. Heroine and her father never above a fortnight together in one place[325]: he being driven from his curacy by the vile arts of some totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion. No sooner settled in one country of Europe than they are necessitated to quit it and retire to another, always making new acquaintance, and always obliged to leave them. This will, of course, exhibit a wide variety of characters, but there will be no mixture. The scene will be for ever shifting from one set of people to another; but all the good[326] will be unexceptionable in every respect, and there will be no foibles or weaknesses but with the wicked, who will be completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them. Early in her career, in the progress of her first removal, heroine must meet with the hero[327]--all perfection, of course, and only prevented from paying his addresses to her by some excess of refinement. Wherever she goes somebody falls in love with her, and she receives repeated offers of marriage, which she always refers wholly to her father, exceedingly angry that _he_[328] should not be first applied to. Often carried away by the anti-hero, but rescued either by her father or the hero. Often reduced to support herself and her father by her talents, and work for her bread; continually cheated and defrauded of her hire; worn down to a skeleton, and now and then starved to death. At last, hunted out of civilised society, denied the poor shelter of the humblest cottage, they are compelled to retreat into Kamschatka, where the poor father, quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the ground, and, after four or five hours of tender advice and parental admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives against holders of tithes. Heroine inconsolable for some time, but afterwards crawls back towards her former country, having at least twenty narrow escapes of falling into the hands of anti-hero; and at last, in the very nick of time, turning a corner to avoid him, runs into the arms of the hero himself, who, having just shaken off the scruples which fettered him before, was at the very moment setting off in pursuit of her. The tenderest and completest _éclaircissement_ takes place, and they are happily united. Throughout the whole work heroine to be in the most elegant society,[329] and living in high style. The name of the work not to be _Emma_,[330] but of same sort as _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_.[331] FOOTNOTES: [311] The article would, of course, have been an impossibility had the _Review_ been published punctually, _Emma_ not appearing till late in December 1815. [312] From information kindly supplied by Mr. John Murray. [313] After a short mention of _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ (in which Sir Walter unkindly suggests that Lizzie Bennet in refusing Darcy 'does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer'), the critic devotes considerable space, including a long quotation, to _Emma_. Summing up, he declares as follows:-- 'Perhaps the reader may collect, from the preceding specimen, both the merits and faults of the author. The former consist much in the force of a narrative, conducted with much neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect. The faults, on the contrary, arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends. Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society.' Had not Sir Walter found it necessary to be somewhat apologetic in commending in public anything so frivolous as a novel, his praise would probably have been more whole-hearted, as in the well-known passage in his diary, under date March 14, 1826:-- 'Read again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of _Pride and Prejudice_. That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!' [314] No division or bitterness seems to have been caused in the family by these events: a remarkable proof of the strong affection which united them. [315] _Memoir_, p. 130. [316] _Memoir_, p. 157. [317] Mr. Gifford. [318] Fanny Knight. [319] Mary Cooke. [320] Fanny Knight. [321] Mary Cooke. [322] Mr. Clarke. [323] Mr. Sherer. [324] Mary Cooke. [325] Many critics. [326] Mary Cooke. [327] Fanny Knight. [328] Mrs. Pearse of Chilton Lodge. [329] Fanny Knight. [330] Mrs. Craven. [331] Mr. H. Sanford. CHAPTER XIX AUNT JANE 1814-1817 Any attempt at depicting the charm and attractiveness of Jane Austen's character must be quite incomplete if it fails to take into account the special manner in which she showed these qualities as an aunt. She herself says in joke to a young niece that she had always maintained the importance of aunts; and she evidently felt, in all seriousness, the responsibility of that relationship, though she would have been one of the last to display her sense of it by any didactic or authoritative utterance. The author of the _Memoir_ tells us that her two nieces who were grown up in her lifetime could say how valuable to them had been her advice in 'the little difficulties and doubts of early womanhood'; and Lord Brabourne quotes here and there extracts from his mother's diary, such as these: 'Aunt Jane and I had a very interesting conversation'; 'Aunt Jane and I had a delicious morning together'; 'Aunt Jane and I very snug'; and so on, until the sad ending: 'I had the misery of losing my dear Aunt Jane after a lingering illness.' Some letters of hers to three of her nieces give a good idea of her value and importance to them, whether as grown women or as children.[332] Fanny Knight, sensible as she was, and early accustomed to responsibility, felt at a loss how to distinguish in her own mind between inclination and love when seriously courted in 1814 by a man of unexceptionable position and character. A reference to her aunt brought her two delightful letters.[333] No definite opinion was expressed or formal advice given in these letters, but they must have helped her by their sympathy, and cleared her mind by the steadiness with which they contemplated the case in all its bearings. Chawton: Friday [November 18, 1814]. I feel quite as doubtful as you could be, my dearest Fanny, as to _when_ my letter may be finished, for I can command very little quiet time at present; but yet I must begin, for I know you will be glad to hear as soon as possible, and I really am impatient myself to be writing something on so very interesting a subject, though I have no hope of writing anything to the purpose. I shall do very little more, I dare say, than say over again what you have said before. I was certainly a good deal surprised _at first_, as I had no suspicion of any change in your feelings, and I have no scruple in saying that you cannot be in love. My dear Fanny, I am ready to laugh at the idea, and yet it is no laughing matter to have had you so mistaken as to your own feelings. And with all my heart I wish I had cautioned you on that point when first you spoke to me; but, though I did not think you then _much_ in love, I did consider you as being attached in a degree quite sufficiently for happiness, as I had no doubt it would increase with opportunity, and from the time of our being in London[334] together I thought you really very much in love. But you certainly are not at all--there is no concealing it. What strange creatures we are! It seems as if your being secure of him had made you indifferent. * * * * * He is just what he ever was, only more evidently and uniformly devoted to _you_. This is all the difference. How shall we account for it? My dearest Fanny, I am writing what will not be of the smallest use to you. I am feeling differently every moment, and shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist your mind. I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next, but as to opinion or counsel I am sure that none will be extracted worth having from this letter. * * * * * Poor dear Mr. A.! Oh, dear Fanny! your mistake has been one that thousands of women fall into. He was the _first_ young man who attached himself to you. That was the charm, and most powerful it is. Among the multitudes, however, that make the same mistake with yourself, there can be few indeed who have so little reason to regret it; _his_ character and _his_ attachment leave you nothing to be ashamed of. Upon the whole, what is to be done? You have no inclination for any other person. His situation in life, family, friends, and, above all, his character, his uncommonly amiable mind, strict principles, just notions, good habits, _all_ that _you_ know so well how to value, _all_ that is really of the first importance--everything of this nature pleads his cause most strongly. You have no doubt of his having superior abilities, he has proved it at the University; he is, I dare say, such a scholar as your agreeable, idle brothers would ill bear a comparison with. Oh, my dear Fanny! the more I write about him the warmer my feelings become--the more strongly I feel the sterling worth of such a young man and the desirableness of your growing in love with him again. I recommend this most thoroughly. There _are_ such beings in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county. Think of all this, Fanny. Mr. A. has advantages which we do not often meet in one person. His only fault, indeed, seems modesty. If he were less modest he would be more agreeable, speak louder, and look impudenter; and is not it a fine character of which modesty is the only defect? I have no doubt he will get more lively and more like yourselves as he is more with you; he will catch your ways if he belongs to you. And, as to there being any objection from his _goodness_, from the danger of his becoming even evangelical, I cannot admit _that_. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling must be happiest and safest. * * * * * And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one side of the question, I shall turn round and entreat you not to commit yourself farther, and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection; and if his deficiencies of manner, &c. &c., strike you more than all his good qualities, if you continue to think strongly of them, give him up at once. Things are now in such a state that you must resolve upon one or the other--either to allow him to go on as he has done, or whenever you are together behave with a coldness which may convince him that he has been deceiving himself. I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time--a great deal when he feels that he must give you up; but it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody. Yours very affectionately, JANE AUSTEN. 23 Hans Place: Wednesday [November 30, 1814]. Now, my dearest Fanny, I will begin a subject which comes in very naturally. You frighten me out of my wits by your reference. Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion; your own feelings, and none but your own, should determine such an important point. So far, however, as answering your question, I have no scruple. I am perfectly convinced that your present feelings, supposing you were to marry _now_, would be sufficient for his happiness; but when I think how very, very far it is from a '_now_,' and take everything that _may be_ into consideration, I dare not say 'Determine to accept him'; the risk is too great for _you_, unless your own sentiments prompt it. You will think me perverse perhaps; in my last letter I was urging everything in his favour, and now I am inclining the other way, but I cannot help it; I am at present more impressed with the possible evil that may arise to _you_ from engaging yourself to him--in word or mind--than with anything else. When I consider how few young men you have yet seen much of; how capable you are (yes, I do still think you _very_ capable) of being really in love; and how full of temptation the next six or seven years of your life will probably be (it is the very period of life for the _strongest_ attachments to be formed)--I cannot wish you, with your present very cool feelings, to devote yourself in honour to him. It is very true that you never may attach another man his equal altogether; but if that other man has the power of attaching you _more_, he will be in your eyes the most perfect. I shall be glad if you _can_ revive past feelings, and from your unbiassed self resolve to go on as you have done, but this I do not expect; and without it I cannot wish you to be fettered. I should not be afraid of your _marrying_ him; with all his worth you would soon love him enough for the happiness of both; but I should dread the continuance of this sort of tacit engagement, with such an uncertainty as there is of _when_ it may be completed. Years may pass before he is independent; you like him well enough to marry, but not well enough to wait; the unpleasantness of appearing fickle is certainly great; but if you think you want punishment for past illusions, there it is, and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound _without_ love--bound to one, and preferring another; _that_ is a punishment which you do _not_ deserve. * * * * * I shall be most glad to hear from you again, my dearest Fanny, but it must not be later than Saturday, as we shall be off on Monday long before the letters are delivered; and write _something_ that may do to be read or told. * * * * * I cannot suppose we differ in our ideas of the Christian religion. You have given an excellent description of it. We only affix a different meaning to the word _evangelical_. Yours most affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss Knight, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. Two remarks in these letters seem to betray the close observer of human nature from the novelist's point of view. Her optimistic opinion as to recovery from disappointments in love may perhaps be adduced by some critics as an argument to show that her feelings were not very deep; we should rather quote them as an instance of her candour--of her saying what other writers cannot help thinking, though they may not like to express the thought. Readers of _Persuasion_ are well aware that the author made room for cases (at all events, in the lives of women) where such disappointments, though they may not kill, yet give a sombre tone to the life and spirits of the sufferer through a long series of years. There is close observation also in the distinction drawn between the amount of love sufficient for a speedy marriage, and that necessary for a long engagement, if unhappiness and possible discredit are to be avoided. On this occasion, neither marriage nor engagement happened to Fanny Knight. Her son tells us that differences in religious ideas tended by degrees to separate the lovers--if lovers they could be called. Her doubt as to caring enough for 'Mr. A.' became a certainty in the course of the year 1815. When her aunt, in November of that year, joked with her about an imaginary tenderness for Mr. Haden, 'the apothecary,' it was no doubt pure 'chaff'; but we may be sure she would not have indulged in it if any serious attachment had then occupied her niece's mind. The remaining letters of this series which we possess were written, after an interval of more than two years, in February and March 1817,[335] only a few months before Jane's death. All idea of Fanny's engaging herself to 'Mr. A.' has now passed away; yet, with natural inconsistency, she lives in dread of his marrying some one else. By this time there is a 'Mr. B.' on the stage, but his courtship, though apparently demonstrative, is not really serious; and the last letter keeps away from love affairs altogether. As to 'Mr. A.,' we are told that he found his happiness elsewhere within a couple of years; while Fanny became engaged to Sir Edward Knatchbull in 1820. Chawton: [February 20, 1817]. MY DEAREST FANNY,--You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my life. Such letters, such entertaining letters, as you have lately sent! such a description of your queer little heart! such a lovely display of what imagination does! You are worth your weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage. I cannot express to you what I have felt in reading your history of yourself--how full of pity and concern, and admiration and amusement, I have been! You are the paragon of all that is silly and sensible, common-place and eccentric, sad and lively, provoking and interesting. Who can keep pace with the fluctuations of your fancy, the capprizios of your taste, the contradictions of your feelings? You are so odd, and all the time so perfectly natural!--so peculiar in yourself, and yet so like everybody else! It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately. You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me to have such thorough pictures of your heart. Oh, what a loss it will be when you are married! You are too agreeable in your single state--too agreeable as a niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of mind is all settled down into conjugal and maternal affections. Mr. B---- frightens me. He will have you. I see you at the altar. I have _some_ faith in Mrs. C. Cage's observation, and still more in Lizzy's; and, besides, I know it _must_ be so. He must be wishing to attach you. It would be too stupid and too shameful in him to be otherwise; and all the family are seeking your acquaintance. Do not imagine that I have any real objection; I have rather taken a fancy to him than not, and I like the house for you. I only do not like you should marry anybody. And yet I do wish you to marry very much, because I know you will never be happy till you are; but the loss of a Fanny Knight will be never made up to me. My 'affec. niece F. C. B----' will be but a poor substitute. I do not like your being nervous, and so apt to cry--it is a sign you are not quite well. * * * * * I enjoy your visit to Goodnestone, it must be a great pleasure to you; you have not seen Fanny Cage in comfort so long. I hope she represents and remonstrates and reasons with you properly. Why should you be living in dread of his marrying somebody else? (Yet, how natural!) You did not choose to have him yourself, why not allow him to take comfort where he can? In your conscience you _know_ that he could not bear a companion with a more animated character. You cannot forget how you felt under the idea of its having been possible that he might have dined in Hans Place. My dearest Fanny, I cannot bear you should be unhappy about him. Think of his principles; think of his father's objection, of want of money, &c., &c. But I am doing no good; no, all that I urge against him will rather make you take his part more, sweet, perverse Fanny. And now I will tell you that we like your Henry to the utmost, to the very top of the glass, quite brimful. He is a very pleasing young man. I do not see how he could be mended. He does really bid fair to be everything his father and sister could wish; and William I love very much indeed, and so we do all; he is quite our own William. In short, we are very comfortable together; that is, we can answer for _ourselves_. * * * * * _Friday._--I had no idea when I began this yesterday of sending it before your brother went back, but I have written away my foolish thoughts at such a rate that I will not keep them many hours longer to stare me in the face. * * * * * Ben and Anna walked here last Sunday to hear Uncle Henry, and she looked so pretty, it was quite a pleasure to see her, so young and so blooming, and so innocent. * * * * * Your objection to the quadrilles delighted me exceedingly. Pretty well, for a lady irrecoverably attached to _one_ person! Sweet Fanny, believe no such thing of yourself, spread no such malicious slander upon your understanding, within the precincts of your imagination. Do not speak ill of your sense merely for the gratification of your fancy; yours is sense which deserves more honourable treatment. You are _not_ in love with him; you never _have_ been really in love with him. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Chawton: Thursday [March 13, 1817]. As to making any adequate return for such a letter as yours, my dearest Fanny, it is absolutely impossible. If I were to labour at it all the rest of my life, and live to the age of Methuselah, I could never accomplish anything so long and so perfect; but I cannot let William go without a few lines of acknowledgment and reply. I have pretty well done with Mr. ----. By your description, he _cannot_ be in love with you, however he may try at it; and I could not wish the match unless there were a great deal of love on his side. * * * * * Poor Mrs. C. Milles, that she should die on the wrong day at last, after being about it so long! It was unlucky that the Goodnestone party could not meet you, and I hope her friendly, obliging, social spirit, which delighted in drawing people together, was not conscious of the division and disappointment she was occasioning. I am sorry and surprised that you speak of her as having little to leave, and must feel for Miss Milles, though she _is_ Molly, if a material loss of income is to attend her other loss. Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with _you_, pretty dear. To you I shall say, as I have often said before, do not be in a hurry, the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before. * * * * * Aunt Cassandra walked to Wyards yesterday with Mrs. Digweed. Anna has had a bad cold, and looks pale. She has just weaned Julia. Chawton: Sunday [March 23, 1817]. I am very much obliged to you, my dearest Fanny, for sending me Mr. W.'s conversation; I had great amusement in reading it, and I hope I am not affronted, and do not think the worse of him for having a brain so very different from mine; but my strongest sensation of all is _astonishment_ at your being able to press him on the subject so perseveringly; and I agree with your papa, that it was not fair. When he knows the truth he will be uncomfortable. You are the oddest creature! Nervous enough in some respects, but in others perfectly without nerves! Quite unrepulsable, hardened, and impudent. Do not oblige him to read any more. Have mercy on him, tell him the truth, and make him an apology. He and I should not in the least agree, of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines. Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked; but there is some very good sense in what he says, and I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young ladies; it shows an amiable and a delicate mind. And he deserves better treatment than to be obliged to read any more of my works. Do not be surprised at finding Uncle Henry acquainted with my having another ready for publication. I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it. You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may _perhaps_ like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.[336] * * * * * Thank you for everything you tell me. I do not feel worthy of it by anything that I can say in return, but I assure you my pleasure in your letters is quite as great as ever, and I am interested and amused just as you could wish me. The Papillons came back on Friday night, but I have not seen them yet, as I do not venture to church. I cannot hear, however, but that they are the same Mr. P. and his sister they used to be. Very affectionately yours, J. AUSTEN. Miss Knight, Godmersham Park, Canterbury. Very different in tone and subject were the letters, addressed about the same time as the two earlier of this series, to her other niece, Anna. Not that Anna was without her own love story: on the contrary, it came to a straightforward and satisfactory climax in her marriage to Ben Lefroy, which took place in November 1814; and no doubt, she, like her cousin, had received letters of sympathy and advice on the realities of life from her aunt. Her own romance, however, did not prevent her from interesting herself in the creations of her brain: indeed, all the three children of James Austen--Anna, Edward, and little Caroline--had indulged freely in the delights of authorship from a very youthful age. It was a novel of Anna's which caused the present correspondence; and we can see from the delicate hints of her aunt that _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Mansfield Park_ had not been without their influence over its matter and style. Readers of these letters will note the kindness with which Jane, now deep in the composition of _Emma_, turns aside from her own work to criticise and encourage, associating her views all the time with those of Cassandra--who was to her like a Court of Appeal--and allowing ample freedom of judgment also to Anna herself. They will see also that her vote is for 'nature and spirit,' above everything; while yet she insists on the necessity of accuracy of detail for producing the illusion of truth in fiction. [May or June, 1814.] MY DEAR ANNA,--I am very much obliged to you for sending your MS. It has entertained me extremely; all of us, indeed. I read it aloud to your Grandmama and Aunt Cass, and we were all very much pleased. The spirit does not droop at all. Sir Thos., Lady Helena and St. Julian are very well done, and Cecilia continues to be interesting in spite of her being so amiable. It was very fit you should advance her age. I like the beginning of Devereux Forester very much, a great deal better than if he had been very good or very bad. A few verbal corrections are all that I felt tempted to make. * * * * * I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person; it is too much like the formal part of Lord Orville,[337] and, I think, is not natural. If _you_ think differently, however, you need not mind me. I am impatient for more, and only wait for a safe conveyance to return this book. [August 10, 1814.] I like the name _Which is the Heroine_ very well, and I dare say shall grow to like it very much in time; but _Enthusiasm_ was something so very superior that every common title must appear to disadvantage. I am not sensible of any blunders about Dawlish; the library was particularly pitiful and wretched twelve years ago and not likely to have anybody's publications. There is no such title as Desborough either among dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, or barons. These were your inquiries. I will now thank you for your envelope received this morning. * * * * * Your Aunt Cass is as well pleased with St. Julian as ever, and I am delighted with the idea of seeing Progillian again. _Wednesday 17._--We have now just finished the first of the three books I had the pleasure of receiving yesterday. I read it aloud and we are all very much amused, and like the work quite as well as ever. I depend on getting through another book before dinner, but there is really a good deal of respectable reading in your forty-eight pages. I have no doubt six will make a very good-sized volume. You must be quite pleased to have accomplished so much. I like Lord Portman[338] and his brother very much. I am only afraid that Lord P.'s good nature will make most people like him better than he deserves. The whole Portman family are very good, and Lady Anne, who was your great dread, you have succeeded particularly well with. Bell Griffin is just what she should be. My corrections have not been more important than before; here and there we have thought the sense could be expressed in fewer words, and I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the other men to the stables, &c., the very day after his breaking his arm; for, though I find your papa did walk out immediately after _his_ arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book. * * * * * Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards forty miles' distance from Dawlish and would not be talked of there. I have put Starcross instead. If you prefer Exeter that must be always safe. I have also scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank. * * * * * I _do_ think you had better omit Lady Helena's postscript. To those that are acquainted with _Pride and Prejudice_ it will seem an imitation. * * * * * We are reading the last book. They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath. They are nearly 100 miles apart. _Thursday._--We finished it last night after our return from drinking tea at the Great House. The last chapter does not please us quite so well; we do not thoroughly like the play, perhaps from having had too much of plays in that way lately,[339] and we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home. Your Aunt C. does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be sometimes introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to _me_ if it does. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort. I should like to have had more of Devereux. I do not feel enough acquainted with him. You were afraid of meddling with him, I dare say. I like your sketch of Lord Clanmurray, and your picture of the two poor young girls' enjoyment is very good. I have not yet noticed St. Julian's serious conversation with Cecilia, but I like it exceedingly. What he says about the madness of otherwise sensible women on the subject of their daughters coming out is worth its weight in gold. I do not see that the language sinks. Pray go on. [September 9, 1814.] We have been very much amused by your three books, but I have a good many criticisms to make, more than you will like. We are not satisfied with Mrs. Forester's settling herself as tenant and near neighbour to such a man as Sir T. H., without having some other inducement to go there. She ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her. A woman going with two girls just growing up into a neighbourhood where she knows nobody but one man of not very good character, is an awkwardness which so prudent a woman as Mrs. F. would not be likely to fall into. Remember she is very prudent. You must not let her act inconsistently. Give her a friend, and let that friend be invited to meet her at the Priory, and we shall have no objection to her dining there as she does; but otherwise a woman in her situation would hardly go there before she had been visited by other families. I like the scene itself, the Miss Lesleys, Lady Anne, and the music very much. . . . Sir Thomas H. you always do very well. I have only taken the liberty of expunging one phrase of his which would not be allowable--'Bless my heart!' It is too familiar and inelegant. Your grandmother is more disturbed at Mrs. Forester's not returning the Egertons' visit sooner than by anything else. They ought to have called at the Parsonage before Sunday. You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left. Mrs. Forester is not careful enough of Susan's health. Susan ought not to be walking out so soon after heavy rains, taking long walks in the dirt. An anxious mother would not suffer it. I like your Susan very much indeed, she is a sweet creature, her playfulness of fancy is very delightful. I like her as she is now exceedingly, but I am not quite so well satisfied with her behaviour to George R. At first she seems all over attachment and feeling, and afterwards to have none at all; she is so extremely composed at the ball and so well satisfied apparently with Mr. Morgan. She seems to have changed her character. You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on, and I hope you will write a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged. You are but _now_ coming to the heart and beauty of your book. Till the heroine grows up the fun must be imperfect, but I expect a great deal of entertainment from the next three or four books, and I hope you will not resent these remarks by sending me no more. * * * * * They are not so much like the Papillons as I expected. Your last chapter is very entertaining, the conversation on genius, &c.; Mr. St. Julian and Susan both talk in character, and very well. In some former parts Cecilia is perhaps a little too solemn and good, but upon the whole her disposition is very well opposed to Susan's, her want of imagination is very natural. I wish you could make Mrs. Forester talk more; but she must be difficult to manage and make entertaining, because there is so much good common sense and propriety about her that nothing can be made very _broad_. Her economy and her ambition must not be staring. The papers left by Mrs. Fisher are very good. Of course one guesses something. I hope when you have written a great deal more, you will be equal to scratching out some of the past. The scene with Mrs. Mellish I should condemn; it is prosy and nothing to the purpose; and indeed the more you can find in your heart to curtail between Dawlish and Newton Priors, the better I think it will be--one does not care for girls till they are grown up. Your Aunt C. quite enters into the exquisiteness of that name--Newton Priors is really a nonpareil. Milton would have given his eyes to have thought of it. Is not the cottage taken from Tollard Royal? [September 28, 1814.] I hope you do not depend on having your book again immediately. I kept it that your grandmama may hear it, for it has not been possible yet to have any public reading. I have read it to your Aunt Cassandra, however, in our own room at night, while we undressed, and with a great deal of pleasure. We like the first chapter extremely, with only a little doubt whether Lady Helena is not almost too foolish. The matrimonial dialogue is very good certainly. I like Susan as well as ever, and begin now not to care at all about Cecilia; she may stay at Easton Court as long as she likes. Henry Mellish, I am afraid, will be too much in the common novel style--a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young man (such as do not much abound in real life), desperately in love and all in vain. But I have no business to judge him so early. * * * * * We feel really obliged to you for introducing a Lady Kenrick; it will remove the greatest fault in the work, and I give you credit for considerable forbearance as an author in adopting so much of our opinion. I expect high fun about Mrs. Fisher and Sir Thomas. * * * * * Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a 'vortex of dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened. * * * * * Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like _Waverley_[340] if I can help it, but fear I must. I am quite determined, however, not to be pleased with Mrs. West's _Alicia De Lacy_, should I ever meet with it, which I hope I shall not. I think I _can_ be stout against anything written by Mrs. West.[341] I have made up my mind to like no novels really but Miss Edgeworth's, yours, and my own. What can you do with Egerton to increase the interest for him? I wish you could contrive something, some family occurrence to bring out his good qualities more. Some distress among brothers and sisters to relieve by the sale of his curacy! Something to carry him mysteriously away, and then be heard of at York or Edinburgh in an old great coat. I would not seriously recommend anything improbable, but if you could invent something spirited for him it would have a good effect. He might lend all his money to Captain Morris, but then he would be a great fool if he did. Cannot the Morrises quarrel and he reconcile them? Excuse the liberty I take in these suggestions. * * * * * The Webbs are really gone! When I saw the wagons at the door, and thought of all the trouble they must have in moving, I began to reproach myself for not having liked them better, but since the wagons have disappeared my conscience has been closed again, and I am excessively glad they are gone. I am very fond of Sherlock's sermons and prefer them to almost any. Anna's marriage took place on November 8. Her husband was afterwards a clergyman, but he did not take Orders until about three years after the marriage; and the first home of the young couple was at Hendon, to which place the following letter was addressed, Jane being at that time with her brother Henry, in Hans Place:-- Hans Place: [November 28, 1814]. MY DEAR ANNA,--I assure you we all came away very much pleased with our visit. We talked of you for about a mile and a half with great satisfaction; and I have been just sending a very good report of you to Miss Benn, with a full account of your dress for Susan and Maria. We were all at the play last night to see Miss O'Neill in _Isabella_. I do not think she was quite equal to my expectations. I fancy I want something more than can be. I took two pocket-handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature, however, and hugs Mr. Young delightfully. I am going this morning to see the little girls in Keppel Street. Cassy was excessively interested about your marriage when she heard of it, which was not until she was to drink your health on the wedding day. She asked a thousand questions in her usual manner, what he said to you and what you said to him. If your uncle were at home he would send his best love, but I will not impose any base fictitious remembrances on you. Mine I can honestly give, and remain Your affectionate Aunt, J. AUSTEN. Early in December, Anna sent her aunt another packet, which elicited the following letter:-- Hans Place: Wednesday. MY DEAR ANNA,--I have been very far from finding your book an evil, I assure you. I read it immediately, and with great pleasure. I think you are going on very well. The description of Dr. Griffin and Lady Helena's unhappiness is very good, just what was likely to be. I am curious to know what the end of _them_ will be. The name of Newton Priors is really invaluable; I never met with anything superior to it. It is delightful; one could live upon the name of Newton Priors for a twelvemonth. Indeed, I do think you get on very fast. I only wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly. I am pleased with the dog scene and with the whole of George and Susan's love, but am more particularly struck with your _serious_ conversations, etc. They are very good throughout. St. Julian's history was quite a surprise to me. You had not very long known it yourself, I suspect; but I have no objection to make to the circumstance, and it is very well told. His having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an additional interest with him. I like the idea--a very proper compliment to an aunt! I rather imagine indeed that nieces are seldom chosen but out of compliment to some aunt or another. I dare say Ben was in love with me once, and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of a scarlet fever. * * * * * [Mrs. Heathcote] writes me word that Miss Blachford is married, but I have never seen it in the papers, and one may as well be single if the wedding is not to be in print. Your affectionate Aunt, J. A. In August 1815 the Lefroys moved from Hendon, and took a small house called Wyards, near Alton, and within a walk of Chawton. Wyards is more than once mentioned in our letters. This is the last letter we possess dealing with Anna's story; and we can understand that the attention of either writer was soon diverted from it by more serious considerations: that of Anna by family cares, that of her aunt by Henry's illness and bankruptcy, and by her own publication of _Emma_ and subsequent failure of health. The last history of the MS. was sad enough. After the death of her kind critic, Anna could not induce herself to go on with the tale; the associations were too melancholy. Long afterwards, she took it out of its drawer, and, in a fit of despondency, threw it into the fire. Her daughter, who tells us this, adds that she herself--a little girl--was sitting on the rug, and remembers that she watched the destruction, amused with the flame. A similar fate befell a tragedy written at a very early age by Anna's little sister Caroline, who was her junior by about twelve years. Caroline believed it to be a necessary part of a tragedy that all the _dramatis personae_ should somehow meet their end, by violence or otherwise, in the last act; and this belief produced such a scene of carnage and woe as to cause fits of laughter among unsympathetic elders, and tears to the author, who threw the unfortunate tragedy into the fire on the spot. Caroline, however, continued to write stories; and some of them are alluded to in a series of little childish letters written to her by her Aunt Jane, which survive, carefully pieced together with silver paper and gum, and which are worth preserving for the presence in them of love and playfulness, and the entire absence of condescension. December 6. MY DEAR CAROLINE,--I wish I could finish stories as fast as you can. I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, and think you have done for her very well; but the good-for-nothing father, who was the real author of all her faults and sufferings, should not escape unpunished. I hope _he_ hung himself, or took the sur-name of _Bone_ or underwent some direful penance or other. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Chawton: Monday, July 15. MY DEAR CAROLINE,--I have followed your directions and find your handwriting admirable. If you continue to improve as much as you have done, perhaps I may not be obliged to shut my eyes at all half a year hence. I have been very much entertained by your story of Carolina and her aged father; it made me laugh heartily, and I am particularly glad to find you so much alive upon any topic of such absurdity, as the usual description of a heroine's father. You have done it full justice, or, if anything be wanting, it is the information of the venerable old man's having married when only twenty-one, and being a father at twenty-two. I had an early opportunity of conveying your letter to Mary Jane, having only to throw it out of window at her as she was romping with your brother in the Back Court. She thanks you for it, and answers your questions through me. I am to tell you that she has passed her time at Chawton very pleasantly indeed, that she does not miss Cassy so much as she expected, and that as to _Diana Temple_, she is ashamed to say it has never been worked at since you went away. . . . Edward's visit has been a great pleasure to us. He has not lost one good quality or good look, and is only altered in being improved by being some months older than when we saw him last. He is getting very near our own age, for _we_ do not grow older of course. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Chawton: Wednesday, March. 13 [1815]. MY DEAR CAROLINE,--I am very glad to have an opportunity of answering your agreeable little letter. You seem to be quite my own niece in your feelings towards Mme. de Genlis. I do not think I could even now, at my sedate time of life, read _Olympe et Théophile_ without being in a rage. It really is too bad! Not allowing them to be happy together when they _are_ married. Don't talk of it, pray. I have just lent your Aunt Frank the first volume of _Les Veillées du Château_, for Mary Jane to read. It will be some time before she comes to the horror of Olympe. . . . I had a very nice letter from your brother not long ago, and I am quite happy to see how much his hand is improving. I am convinced that it will end in a very gentlemanlike hand, much above par. We have had a great deal of fun lately with post-chaises stopping at the door; three times within a few days we had a couple of agreeable visitors turn in unexpectedly--your Uncle Henry and Mr. Tilson, Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg, your Uncle Henry and Mr. Seymour. Take notice it was the same Uncle Henry each time. I remain, my dear Caroline, Your affectionate Aunt, J. AUSTEN. Hans Place: Monday night [October 30, 1815]. MY DEAR CAROLINE,--I have not felt quite equal to taking up your Manuscript, but think I shall soon, and I hope my detaining it so long will be no inconvenience. It gives us great pleasure that you should be at Chawton. I am sure Cassy must be delighted to have you. You will practise your music of course, and I trust to you for taking care of my instrument and not letting it be ill-used in any respect. Do not allow anything to be put on it but what is very light. I hope you will try to make out some other tune besides the Hermit. . . . I am sorry you got wet in your ride; now that you are become an Aunt[342] you are a person of some consequence and must excite great interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, and I am sure of your doing the same now. Believe me, my dear Sister-Aunt, Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. [January 23, 1817.] MY DEAR CAROLINE,--I am always very much obliged to you for writing to me, and have now I believe two or three notes to thank you for; but whatever may be their number, I mean to have this letter accepted as a handsome return for all, for you see I have taken a complete, whole sheet of paper, which is to entitle me to consider it as a very long letter whether I write much or little. We were quite happy to see Edward, it was an unexpected pleasure, and he makes himself as agreeable as ever, sitting in such a quiet comfortable way making his delightful little sketches. He is generally thought grown since he was here last, and rather thinner, but in very good looks. . . . He read his two chapters to us the first evening--both good, but especially the last in our opinion. We think it has more of the spirit and entertainment of the early part of his work.[343] . . . I feel myself getting stronger than I was half a year ago, and can so perfectly well walk to Alton, _or_ back again, without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when summer comes. I spent two or three days with your Uncle and Aunt[344] lately, and though the children are sometimes very noisy and not under such order as they ought and easily might, I cannot help liking them and even loving them, which I hope may be not wholly inexcusable in their and your affectionate Aunt, J. AUSTEN. The Pianoforte often talks of you; in various keys, tunes, and expressions, I allow--but be it Lesson or Country Dance, Sonata or Waltz, _you_ are really its constant theme. I wish you could come and see us, as easily as Edward can. J. A. Wednesday night. [1817.] You send me great news indeed, my dear Caroline, about Mr. Digweed, Mr. Trimmer, and a Grand Pianoforte. I wish it had been a small one, as then you might have pretended that Mr. D.'s rooms were too damp to be fit for it, and offered to take charge of it at the Parsonage. . . . * * * * * I look forward to the four new chapters with pleasure.--But how can you like Frederick better than Edgar? You have some eccentric tastes however, I know, as to Heroes and Heroines. Goodbye. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Chawton: Wednesday, March 26 [1817]. MY DEAR CAROLINE,--Pray make no apologies for writing to me often, I am always very happy to hear from you. . . . I think you very much improved in your writing, and in the way to write a very pretty hand. I wish you could practise your fingering oftener. Would not it be a good plan for you to go and live entirely at Mr. Wm. Digweed's? He could not desire any other remuneration than the pleasure of hearing you practise. I like Frederick and Caroline better than I did, but must still prefer Edgar and Julia. Julia is a warm-hearted, ingenuous, natural girl, which I like her for; but I know the word _natural_ is no recommendation to you. . . . How very well Edward is looking! You can have nobody in your neighbourhood to vie with him at all, except Mr. Portal. I have taken one ride on the donkey and like it very much--and you must try to get me quiet, mild days, that I may be able to go out pretty constantly. A great deal of wind does not suit me, as I have still a tendency to rheumatism. In short I am a poor honey at present. I will be better when you can come and see us. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Caroline Austen contributed to the _Memoir_ written by her brother many of the personal reminiscences of their aunt. She was the niece to whom Jane in her last illness sent a recommendation to read more and write less during the years of girlhood. Caroline obeyed the injunction; she became a very well-read woman, and never wrote stories for publication. She was, however, an admirable talker: able to invest common things with a point and spirit peculiarly her own. She was also an ideal aunt, both to nieces and nephews, who all owe a great deal to her companionship and devotion. FOOTNOTES: [332] The first two batches of letters are to be found in Lord Brabourne's book, vol. ii. p. 277 _et seq._; of the third set (to Caroline) only a few isolated quotations have been published. The second and third sets have been compared with the originals, but we have been unable to do this in the case of the first. [333] Cassandra was evidently not in the secret; and we learn from their niece Anna the interesting fact that, close and intimate as were the relations between the two sisters, they were absolutely silent to each other when the confidences of a third person had to be guarded. [334] Perhaps in March 1814. [335] Lord Brabourne dates them in 1816, and Mr. Oscar Fay Adams and Miss Hill naturally follow him; but such a date is impossible, as they contain allusions to two or three family events which had not then happened. This correction makes the account of her own health in the letters of March 13 and March 23 (which will be found in Chap. XX, p. 383) fit in much better with our information from other sources as to the progress of her illness than would have been the case had it been written in 1816. [336] See p. 336. [337] In _Evelina_. [338] It must be remembered that there was no 'Lord Portman' or 'Lord Desborough' in 1814. [339] In _Mansfield Park_. [340] Published July 7, 1814. Jane Austen had no more doubt as to who was the author than Miss Mitford had. [341] See p. 376. [342] On the birth of Anna Lefroy's eldest daughter, Jemima. [343] See p. 374. [344] No doubt the Frank Austens. CHAPTER XX FAILING HEALTH 1816-1817 During the last year of Jane Austen's life, when her health was gradually failing, and she was obliged to depend--ever more and more exclusively--on her immediate family for society, she had at least the satisfaction of having her two sailor brothers nearer at hand than had often been the case. After Frank's return from the Baltic, early in 1814, nothing occurred of a more serious nature than the Great Naval Review in June--which only indirectly affected him, as he was not then in command of a ship--to prevent his attending to his family. He settled down to a domestic life with wife and children, first of all occupying the Great House at Chawton, but soon moving to Alton. Charles, who for ten years had had active but unexciting work outside the theatre of war, now came more to the front. Commanding the _Phoenix_ frigate, he operated against Murat, when that eccentric sovereign took part with Napoleon on the escape of the latter from Elba. Charles was sent in pursuit of a Neapolitan squadron cruising in the Adriatic; and subsequently he blockaded Brindisi, and waited for the garrison to hoist the white flag of the Bourbons. Later on, he was kept busy with Greek pirates in the Archipelago, until the _Phoenix_ was lost off Smyrna in 1816, when he returned home. The _Phoenix_ had been a lucky ship, Admiral Halsted having made his fortune in her; but her luck was worn out. When she went down, the pilot was on board; no lives were lost, and no blame fell on the captain. It must have been, however, a disappointing end to an exciting time; and, as the war was over, it might be long before he got another ship. A letter from Charles to Jane, during this command, written from Palermo, May 6, 1815, furnishes us with one of the few indications that exist of fame achieved by her during her lifetime:-- Books became the subject of conversation, and I praised _Waverley_ highly, when a young man present observed that nothing had come out for years to be compared with _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and Sensibility_, &c. As I am sure you must be anxious to know the name of a person of so much taste, I shall tell you it is Fox, a nephew of the late Charles James Fox. That you may not be too much elated at this morsel of praise, I shall add that he did not appear to like _Mansfield Park_ so well as the two first, in which, however, I believe he is singular.[345] We may compare this account with the quotation given in the _Memoir_[346] from Sir Henry Holland's _Recollections_:-- I have the picture before me still of Lord Holland lying on his bed, when attacked with gout; his admirable sister, Miss Fox, reading aloud--as she always did on these occasions--some one of Miss Austen's novels, of which he was never wearied. It is as difficult to follow the various stages of Jane's illness as it is to understand the exact nature of her complaint. She must have begun to feel her malady early in the year 1816; for some friends at a distance, whom she visited in the spring, 'thought that her health was somewhat impaired, and observed that she went about her old haunts and recalled the old recollections connected with them in a particular manner--as if she did not expect ever to see them again.'[347] This is, however, almost the only indication that we have of any diminution of vigour at that time; for the three letters to Fanny Knight, given by Lord Brabourne as written in 1816, must be transferred to 1817[348]; and so must the two short extracts[349] on pp. 150, 151 of the _Memoir_, as they evidently refer to a family event which occurred in the March of the later year. The tone of her letters through the remainder of 1816, and at the beginning of the next year, was almost invariably cheerful, and she showed by the completion of _Persuasion_ that she was capable of first-rate literary work during the summer of 1816. The fact is that, as to health, she was an incurable optimist; her natural good spirits made her see the best side, and her unselfishness prompted the suppression of anything that might distress those around her. Nothing, for instance, could be more lively than the following letter to Edward Austen, written while he was still at Winchester School, but had come home for his last summer holidays. Chawton: July 9, 1816. MY DEAR EDWARD,--Many thanks. A thank for every line, and as many to Mr. W. Digweed for coming. We have been wanting very much to hear of your mother, and are happy to find she continues to mend, but her illness must have been a very serious one indeed. When she is really recovered, she ought to try change of air, and come over to us. Tell your father I am very much obliged to him for his share of your letter, and most sincerely join in the hope of her being eventually much the better for her present discipline. She has the comfort moreover of being confined in such weather as gives one little temptation to be out. It is really too bad, and has been too bad for a long time, much worse than anybody _can_ bear, and I begin to think it will never be fine again. This is a _finesse_ of mine, for I have often observed that if one writes about the weather, it is generally completely changed before the letter is read. I wish it may prove so now, and that when Mr. W. Digweed reaches Steventon to-morrow, he may find you have had a long series of hot dry weather. We are a small party at present, only grandmamma, Mary Jane, and myself. Yalden's coach cleared off the rest yesterday. . . . I am glad you recollected to mention your being come home. My heart began to sink within me when I had got so far through your letter without its being mentioned. I was dreadfully afraid that you might be detained at Winchester by severe illness, confined to your bed perhaps, and quite unable to hold a pen, and only dating from Steventon in order, with a mistaken sort of tenderness, to deceive me. But now I have no doubt of your being at home, I am sure you would not say it so seriously unless it actually were so. We saw a countless number of post-chaises full of boys pass by yesterday morning[350]--full of future heroes, legislators, fools, and villains. You have never thanked me for my last letter, which went by the cheese. I cannot bear not to be thanked. You will not pay us a visit yet of course; we must not think of it. Your mother must get well first, and you must go to Oxford and _not_ be elected; after that a little change of scene may be good for you, and your physicians I hope will order you to the sea, or to a house by the side of a very considerable pond.[351] Oh! it rains again. It beats against the window. Mary Jane and I have been wet through once already to-day; we set off in the donkey-carriage for Farringdon, as I wanted to see the improvements Mr. Woolls is making, but we were obliged to turn back before we got there, but not soon enough to avoid a pelter all the way home. We met Mr. Woolls. I talked of its being bad weather for the hay, and he returned me the comfort of its being much worse for the wheat. We hear that Mrs. S. does not quit Tangier: why and wherefore? Do you know that our Browning is gone? You must prepare for a William when you come, a good-looking lad, civil and quiet, and seeming likely to do. Good bye. I am sure Mr. W. D. will be astonished at my writing so much, for the paper is so thin that he will be able to count the lines if not to read them. Yours affec^{ly}, J. AUSTEN. Mr. J. E. Austen. There was a second family visit this year to Cheltenham, where Cassandra and Jane had already been in the spring. Probably their connexion with this watering-place was through Mrs. James Austen, and _hers_ was through her sister, Mrs. Fowle of Kintbury. Mr. Fowle had lived at Elkstone near Cheltenham, and continued to hold that benefice, which was in the gift of the Craven family. The Fowles would naturally renew their intercourse with their old friends in the neighbourhood, and _he_ would go to see his curate and acquaint himself with the circumstances of his parish. The visits to Gloucestershire were therefore for pleasure and business as well as health. In August 1816 it was a recent serious illness of Mrs. James Austen which took the party there; Mrs. Austen being accompanied by her daughter Caroline, and her sister-in-law Cassandra. Meanwhile, Jane remained with her mother at Chawton, where she had Edward Austen as a visitor. During Cassandra's absence Jane wrote to her as follows:-- Chawton: September 4, 1816.[352] We go on very well here, Edward is a great pleasure to me; he drove me to Alton yesterday. I went principally to carry news of you and Henry, and made a regular handsome visit, staying there while Edward went on to Wyards with an invitation to dinner: it was declined, and will be so again to-day probably, for I really believe Anna is not equal to the fatigue. The Alton four drank tea with us last night, and we were very pleasant:--Jeu de Violon, &c.--all new to Mr. Sweney--and he entered into it very well. It was a renewal of former agreeable evenings. We all (except my mother) dine at Alton to-morrow, and perhaps may have some of the same sports again, but I do not think Mr. and Mrs. D. will add much to our wit. Edward is writing a novel--we have all heard what he has written--it is extremely clever, written with great ease and spirit; if he can carry it on in the same way it will be a first-rate work, and in a style, I think, to be popular. Pray tell Mary how much I admire it--and tell Caroline that I think it is hardly fair upon her and myself to have him take up the novel line. Sunday [September 8]. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I have borne the arrival of your letter to-day extremely well; anybody might have thought it was giving me pleasure. I am very glad you find so much to be satisfied with at Cheltenham. While the waters agree, everything else is trifling. * * * * * Our day at Alton was very pleasant, venison quite right, children well-behaved, and Mr. and Mrs. Digweed taking kindly to our charades and other games. I must also observe, for his mother's satisfaction, that Edward at my suggestion devoted himself very properly to the entertainment of Miss S. Gibson. Nothing was wanting except Mr. Sweney, but he, alas! had been ordered away to London the day before. We had a beautiful walk home by moonlight. Thank you, my back has given me scarcely any pain for many days. I have an idea that agitation does it as much harm as fatigue, and that I was ill at the time of your going from the very circumstance of your going. I am nursing myself up now into as beautiful a state as I can, because I hear that Dr. White means to call on me before he leaves the country. * * * * * I have not seen Anna since the day you left us; her father and brother visited her most days. Edward[353] and Ben called here on Thursday. Edward was in his way to Selborne. We found him very agreeable. He is come back from France, thinking of the French as one could wish--disappointed in everything. He did not go beyond Paris. I have a letter from Mrs. Perigord; she and her mother are in London again. She speaks of France as a scene of general poverty and misery: no money, no trade, nothing to be got but by the innkeepers, and as to her own present prospects she is not much less melancholy than before. * * * * * I enjoyed Edward's company very much, as I said before, and yet I was not sorry when Friday came. It had been a busy week, and I wanted a few days' quiet and exemption from the thought and contrivancy which any sort of company gives. I often wonder how _you_ can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the house; and how good Mrs. West[354] could have written such books and collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment. Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb. * * * * * We do not much like Mr. Cooper's new sermons. They are fuller of regeneration and conversion than ever, with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible Society. This is the last letter which we have from Jane to Cassandra. Probably the sisters were not parted again, except when Cassandra went for a few days to Scarlets, on the death of their uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, at the end of the following March; and if Jane wrote then, it must have been in such depression of mind and weakness of body, that her sister would not have preserved the writing for others to see. In the meanwhile, the autumn of 1816 was probably occupied with the preparation of _Persuasion_ for the press; and, on the whole, we should gather from the evidence before us that the earlier part of the winter saw one of those fallacious instances of temporary improvement which so often deceive nurses and patients alike, in cases of internal complaints. 'I have certainly gained strength through the winter,' she says, on January 24, 1817. On the 23rd: 'I feel myself stronger than I was half a year ago'; and it was in this spirit of hopefulness that she had written the following lively letter to Edward Austen, when he had left Winchester and was about to enter on the career of an Oxford undergraduate. Chawton: Monday [December 16, 1816]. MY DEAR EDWARD,--One reason for my writing to you now is, that I may have the pleasure of directing to you _Esq^{re.}_ I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries--how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city. Charles Knight and his companions passed through Chawton about 9 this morning; later than it used to be. Uncle Henry and I had a glimpse of his handsome face, looking all health and good humour. I wonder when you will come and see us. I know what I rather speculate upon, but shall say nothing. We think uncle Henry in excellent looks. Look at him this moment, and think so too, if you have not done it before; and we have the great comfort of seeing decided improvement in uncle Charles, both as to health, spirits, and appearance. And they are each of them so agreeable in their different way, and harmonise so well, that their visit is thorough enjoyment. Uncle Henry writes very superior sermons. You and I must try to get hold of one or two, and put them into our novels: it would be a fine help to a volume; and we could make our heroine read it aloud of a Sunday evening, just as well as Isabella Wardour, in _The Antiquary_, is made to read the _History of the Hartz Demon_, in the ruins of St. Ruth; though I believe, upon recollection, Lovell is the reader. By the bye, my dear Edward, I am quite concerned for the loss your mother mentions in her letter. Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that _I_ have not been at Steventon lately, and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them: two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour? You will hear from uncle Henry how well Anna is. She seems perfectly recovered. Ben was here on Saturday, to ask uncle Charles and me to dine with them, as to-morrow, but I was forced to decline it, the walk is beyond my strength (though I am otherwise very well), and this is not a season for donkey-carriages; and as we do not like to spare uncle Charles, he has declined it too. _Tuesday._ Ah, ha! Mr. Edward. I doubt your seeing uncle Henry at Steventon to-day. The weather will prevent your expecting him, I think. Tell your father, with aunt Cass's love and mine, that the pickled cucumbers are extremely good, and tell him also--'tell him what you will.' No, don't tell him what you will, but tell him that grandmamma begs him to make Joseph Hall pay his rent, if he can. You must not be tired of reading the word _uncle_, for I have not done with it. Uncle Charles thanks your mother for her letter; it was a great pleasure to him to know the parcel was received and gave so much satisfaction, and he begs her to be so good as to give three shillings for him to Dame Staples, which shall be allowed for in the payment of her debt here. I am happy to tell you that Mr. Papillon will soon make his offer, probably next Monday, as he returns on Saturday. His _intention_ can no longer be doubtful in the smallest degree, as he has secured the refusal of the house which Mr. Baverstock at present occupies in Chawton, and is to vacate soon, which is of course intended for Mrs. Elizabeth Papillon. Adieu, Amiable! I hope Caroline behaves well to you. Yours affec^{ly}, J. AUSTEN. J. E. Austen, Esq. The same bright tone pervades the following letter to Alethea Bigg, from which one of the remarks quoted above, as to the improvement of her health, is taken. Chawton: January 24, 1817. MY DEAR ALETHEA,--I think it time there should be a little writing between us, though I believe the epistolary debt is on _your_ side, and I hope this will find all the Streatham party well, neither carried away by the flood, nor rheumatic through the damps. Such mild weather is, you know, delightful to _us_, and though we have a great many ponds, and a fine running stream through the meadows on the other side of the road, it is nothing but what beautifies us and does to talk of. . . . _I_ have certainly gained strength through the winter and am not far from being well; and I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness. I am more and more convinced that _bile_ is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself. You . . . will be glad to hear thus much of me, I am sure. . . . We have just had a few days' visit from Edward, who brought us a good account of his father, and the very circumstance of his coming at all, of his father's being able to spare him, is itself a good account. . . . He grows still, and still improves in appearance, at least in the estimation of his aunts, who love him better and better, as they see the sweet temper and warm affections of the boy confirmed in the young man: I tried hard to persuade him that he must have some message for William,[355] but in vain. . . . This is not a time of year for donkey-carriages, and our donkeys are necessarily having so long a run of luxurious idleness that I suppose we shall find they have forgotten much of their education when we use them again. We do not use two at once, however; don't imagine such excesses. . . . Our own new clergyman[356] is expected here very soon, perhaps in time to assist Mr. Papillon on Sunday. I shall be very glad when the first hearing is over. It will be a nervous hour for our pew, though we hear that he acquits himself with as much ease and collectedness, as if he had been used to it all his life. We have no chance we know of seeing you between Streatham and Winchester: you go the other road and are engaged to two or three houses; if there should be any change, however, you know how welcome you would be. . . . We have been reading the _Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo_,[357] and generally with much approbation. Nothing will please all the world, you know; but parts of it suit me better than much that he has written before. The opening--_the proem_ I believe he calls it--is very beautiful. Poor man! one cannot but grieve for the loss of the son so fondly described. Has he at all recovered it? What do Mr. and Mrs. Hill know about his present state? Yours aff^{ly}, J. AUSTEN. The real object of this letter is to ask you for a receipt, but I thought it genteel not to let it appear early. We remember some excellent orange wine at Manydown, made from Seville oranges, entirely or chiefly. I should be very much obliged to you for the receipt, if you can command it within a few weeks. Three days later, Jane felt well enough to set to work on a fresh novel: thoroughly fresh, for it bore no resemblance to any of her previous stories. A short _résumé_ of this beginning is given in the _Memoir_, and from it the reader will see that the scene is laid at a new watering-place,[358] which is being exploited by two of the leading characters. In the twelve chapters which she wrote, the _dramatis personae_ are sketched in with vigour and decision; but there is little of the subtle refinement which we are accustomed to associate with her work, and certainly nothing of the tender sentiment of _Persuasion_. It is unfair, however, to judge from the first draft of a few introductory chapters, written as they no doubt were to relieve the tedium of long hours of confinement, and written perhaps also to comfort her friends by letting them see that she was still able to work. It is probable, too, that a long step in the downward progress of her condition was taken in the course of the seven weeks during which she was writing for the last time. It began 'in her usual firm and neat hand, but some of the latter pages were first traced in pencil--probably, when she was too ill to sit long at a desk--and afterwards written over in ink.'[359] The last date on the MS. is March 17. She was, no doubt, by this time making frequent use of the temporary couch, which, as we are told, she had contrived out of two or three chairs, so as to leave the one real sofa free for her mother. She professed to like her own couch best; but the importunity of a young niece obliged her to confess that she used it always, because she thought that her mother would not use the sofa enough unless it were absolutely reserved for her service. In February and March followed the three letters written to Fanny Knight--portions of which are given in the last chapter. They chiefly concern Fanny's own affairs, and show how lively Jane's mind still was, and with what unselfish care she could divert it from her own sufferings to the concerns which interested those nearest to her. We now append the sentences in those letters which refer to her own state of health, and which certainly read as if some serious accession of illness had intervened while the correspondence was in progress. _February 20, 1817._--I am almost entirely cured of my rheumatism--just a little pain in my knee, now and then, to make me remember what it was and keep on flannel. Aunt Cassandra nursed me so beautifully. * * * * * _March 13._--I am got tolerably well again, quite equal to walking about and enjoying the air, and by sitting down and resting a good while between my walks I get exercise enough. I have a scheme however for accomplishing more, as the weather grows spring-like. I mean to take to riding the donkey; it will be more independent and less troublesome than the use of the carriage, and I shall be able to go about with Aunt Cassandra in her walks to Alton and Wyards. _March 23._--Many thanks for your kind care of my health; I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was very poorly. I have had a good deal of fever at times, and indifferent nights; but I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough--black and white and every wrong colour. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again. Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life. _Evening._--I was languid and dull and very bad company when I wrote the above; I am better now, to my own feelings at least, and wish I may be more agreeable. We are going to have rain, and after that very pleasant genial weather, which will exactly do for me, as my saddle will then be completed, and air and exercise is what I want. * * * * * _Tuesday._--I took my first ride yesterday, and liked it very much. I went up Mounter's Lane and round by where the new cottages are to be, and found the exercise and everything very pleasant; and I had the advantage of agreeable companions, as Aunt Cass and Edward walked by my side. Aunt Cass is such an excellent nurse, so assiduous and unwearied! But you know all that already. At the end of March she made her will--a brief and simple document of which the operative part was in these words: 'To my dearest sister Cassandra Elizabeth, everything of which I may die possessed, or which may hereafter be due to me, subject to the payment of my funeral expenses and to a legacy of £50 to my brother Henry and £50 to Madame Bigeon.'[360] About the same time another will was causing great disappointment to the Austen family; and as Jane was affected by anything that affected her nearest relations, we must probably attribute to it some share in the rapid decay of her bodily strength. Her uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, died at Scarlets on March 28. He was childless, and left a considerable fortune. As he was also a kind-hearted man and had always shown particular favour to the Austens, it was reasonably expected that they would reap some immediate benefit under his will. Most of the family were in narrow circumstances, and they had lately been crippled by the failure of Henry's business and the lawsuit about Edward's Hampshire property; a legacy, therefore, would have been very acceptable. Mr. Leigh Perrot, however, was actuated in making his will by a stronger motive than love to sister and nephews.[361] He was devoted to his wife, and was perhaps anxious to show that his devotion was increased in consequence of the false accusation with which she had been assailed at Bath in 1799-1800. He showed it by leaving everything to her for her life, and placing Scarlets and a considerable sum at her free disposal. At the same time he left a large sum (subject to her life interest) to James Austen and his heirs, and £1000 apiece to _each_ of Mrs. Austen's children who should survive his wife. Mrs. Leigh Perrot, also, at a later date, gave allowances to some members of the family, and eventually made Edward Austen her heir. None of these advantages, however, fell to them immediately; and the disappointment caused by their uncle's disposition of his property is reflected in the following letter from Jane to her brother Charles. [April 6, 1817.] MY DEAREST CHARLES,--Many thanks for your affectionate letter. I was in your debt before, but I have really been too unwell the last fortnight to write anything that was not absolutely necessary. I have been suffering from a bilious attack attended with a good deal of fever. A few days ago my complaint appeared removed, but I am ashamed to say that the shock of my uncle's will brought on a relapse, and I was so ill on Friday and thought myself so likely to be worse that I could not but press for Cassandra's returning with Frank after the funeral last night, which she of course did; and either her return, or my having seen Mr. Curtis, or my disorder's chusing to go away, have made me better this morning. I live upstairs however for the present, and am coddled. I am the only one of the legatees who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves. My mother has borne the forgetfulness of _her_ extremely well--her expectations for herself were never beyond the extreme of moderation, and she thinks with you that my Uncle always looked forward to surviving her. She desires her best love, and many thanks for your kind feelings; and heartily wishes that her younger children had more, and all her children something immediately. . . . Nothing can be kinder than Mrs. Cooke's enquiries after you [and Harriet] in all her letters, and there was no standing her affectionate way of speaking of _your_ countenance, after her seeing you. God bless you all. Conclude me to be going on well if you hear nothing to the contrary. Yours ever truly, J. A. Tell dear Harriet that whenever she wants me in her service again she must send a hackney chariot all the way for me--for I am not strong enough to travel any other way, and I hope Cassy will take care that it is a green one. . . . We will end this chapter with Caroline Austen's account of her last visit to her Aunt Jane, which occurred about this time. It had been settled[362] that about the end of March, or the beginning of April, I should spend a few days at Chawton, in the absence of my father and mother, who were just then engaged with Mrs. Leigh Perrot in arranging her late husband's affairs; but Aunt Jane became too ill to have me in the house, and so I went instead to my sister Mrs. Lefroy at Wyards. The next day we walked over to Chawton to make enquiries after our aunt. She was then keeping her room, but said she would see us, and we went up to her. She was in her dressing-gown, and was sitting quite like an invalid in an arm-chair, but she got up and kindly greeted us, and then, pointing to seats which had been arranged for us by the fire, she said 'There is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.' It is strange, but those trifling words were the last of hers that I can remember, for I retain no recollection of what was said by anyone in the conversation that ensued. I was struck by the alteration in herself. She was very pale, her voice was weak and low, and there was about her a general appearance of debility and suffering; but I have been told that she never had much acute pain. She was not equal to the exertion of talking to us, and our visit to the sick room was a very short one, Aunt Cassandra soon taking us away. I do not suppose we stayed a quarter of an hour; and I never saw Aunt Jane again. FOOTNOTES: [345] _Sailor Brothers_, p. 270. [346] Page 139. [347] _Memoir_, p. 150. [348] See note on p. 347. [349] One is quoted from a letter to Charles, dated April 6, 1817 (p. 385); the other from a letter written at Winchester shortly before her death (p. 391). [350] The road by which many Winchester boys returned home ran close to Chawton Cottage. [351] A small pond close to Chawton Cottage, at the junction of the Winchester and Gosport roads. [352] Unpublished fragment. [353] Edward Lefroy, brother of Ben. [354] See p. 360. Mrs. West was a farmer's wife who lived to the age of ninety-three, and left behind her eighteen volumes of novels, plays, and poetry. [355] Miss Bigg's nephew, afterwards Sir William Heathcote. [356] Henry Austen. [357] The poem by Southey, who had lost his eldest son early in 1816. It has been already stated that Southey was a nephew of Mr. Hill. [358] The watering-place is called 'Sanditon,' and this name has been given to the twelve chapters by the family. [359] _Memoir_, p. 181. [360] Mme. Bigeon had perhaps lost her savings in the crash that ended her master's banking business. [361] We ought not to forget that he had just lost £10,000 in the bankruptcy of his nephew Henry. [362] _Memoir_, p. 161. CHAPTER XXI WINCHESTER 1817 Even after the beginning of April, Jane's hopefulness did not desert her. 'I am happy,' says James Austen, writing to his daughter Anna, 'to give you a good account, written by herself in a letter from your Aunt Jane; but all who love--and that is all who know her--must be anxious on her account.' When May came, she consented to the proposal of those around her that she should move to Winchester, in order to get the best medical advice that the neighbourhood afforded. The Lyford family had maintained for some time a high character for skill in the profession of medicine at that place; and the Mr. Lyford of the day was a man of more than provincial reputation, in whom great London consultants expressed confidence.[363] Accordingly, on Saturday, May 24, she bade farewell to her mother and her home, and her brother James's carriage conveyed Cassandra and herself to Winchester. The little cavalcade--for they were attended by two riders--started in sadness and in rain; and all must have doubted whether she would ever come back to Chawton. She was going, however, to a place for which she felt the veneration which all good Hampshire people owe to their county town: a veneration shared by a good many Englishmen outside the limits of the county. The sisters took lodgings in College Street, in the house next to what was then called 'Commoners,' and is now the head master's house. On the front wall of the little house where they lived there is now a plaque commemorating the stay of Jane Austen. Near to them, in the Close, were living their old friends Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg, who did all they could to add to their comforts; while at the school were their nephew, Charles Knight, and young William Heathcote--either of whom they might hope to see from time to time. The course of the illness, and its fatal termination, are shown pretty clearly in the letters which follow; the most informing and the most pathetic of which (next to her own) are the two written by Cassandra to Fanny Knight after all was ended. Some of the letters are undated, and we cannot therefore be certain of the order in which they were written; we must also allow for the probable fact that Cassandra did not say more than was necessary to her mother of Jane's increasing weakness and discomfort. Mr. Lyford spoke encouragingly, though it is believed that he had, from the first, very little expectation of a permanent cure. Some temporary rally there seems to have been; and, soon after settling in her lodgings, Jane was able to write as follows to Edward Austen:-- Mrs. David's, College Street, Winton: Tuesday [May 27, 1817].[364] I know no better way, my dearest Edward, of thanking you for your most affectionate concern for me during my illness than by telling you myself, as soon as possible, that I continue to get better. I will not boast of my handwriting; neither that nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty, but in other respects I am gaining strength very fast. I am now out of bed from 9 in the morning to 10 at night: upon the sopha, 'tis true, but I eat my meals with aunt Cass in a rational way, and can employ myself, and walk from one room to another. Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and if he fails, I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned, and disinterested body. Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little drawing-room with a bow window overlooking Dr. Gabell's garden. Thanks to the kindness of your father and mother in sending me their carriage, my journey hither on Saturday was performed with very little fatigue, and had it been a fine day, I think I should have felt none; but it distressed me to see uncle Henry and Wm. Knight, who kindly attended us on horseback, riding in the rain almost all the way. We expect a visit from them to-morrow, and hope they will stay the night; and on Thursday, which is Confirmation and a holiday, we are to get Charles out to breakfast. We have had but one visit yet from _him_, poor fellow, as he is in sick-room, but he hopes to be out to-night. We see Mrs. Heathcote every day, and William is to call upon us soon. God bless you, my dear Edward. If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious, sympathising friends be yours: and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_ could not feel this. Your very affec^{te} Aunt, J. A. Had I not engaged to write to you, you would have heard again from your Aunt Martha, as she charged me to tell you with her best love. J. E. Austen, Esq., Exeter College, Oxford. The original of this letter, which is preserved, bears sad testimony to the truth of her remark about her handwriting. Some few days after this, she must have written her last extant letter, quoted in the short Memoir prefixed to the original edition of _Northanger Abbey_:-- My attendant is encouraging, and talks of making me quite well. I live chiefly on the sofa, but am allowed to walk from one room to the other. I have been out once in a Sedan-chair, and am to repeat it, and be promoted to a wheel-chair as the weather serves. On this subject I will only say further that my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse, has not been made ill by her exertions. As to what I owe to her, and to the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray to God to bless them more and more. Some allusion to the family disappointment about the will probably followed, and she added: 'But I am getting too near complaint. It has been the appointment of God, however secondary causes may have operated.' Jane's mother could still indulge in the hope of her amendment. In a note to Anna, she says:-- You will be happy to hear that our accounts from Winchester are very good. Our letter this morning, which was written yesterday evening, says 'Jane has had a better night than she has had for many weeks and has been comfortable all day. Mr. Lyford says he thinks better of her than he has ever done, though he must still consider her in a precarious state.' And, in another letter-- I had a very comfortable account of your Aunt Jane this morning; she now sits up a little. Charles Knight came this morning: he saw her yesterday, and says she looks better and seem'd very cheerful. She hoped to be well enough to see Mrs. Portal to-day; your Mamma is there (went yesterday by the coach), which I am very glad of. Cassandra did not quite like the nurse they had got, so wish'd Mrs. J. A. to come in her stead, as she promised she would whenever she was wanted. Mrs. James Austen went to Winchester on a Friday; perhaps Friday, June 6. Two or three days afterwards, her husband wrote to their son Edward, who no doubt was following at Oxford with painful interest the varying news. James, at any rate, cherished no illusions as to the possibility of a cure. Steventon: Thursday. MY DEAR EDWARD,--I grieve to write what you will grieve to read; but I must tell you that we can no longer flatter ourselves with the least hope of having your dear valuable Aunt Jane restored to us. The symptoms which returned after the first four or five days at Winchester, have never subsided, and Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate. I need not say what a melancholy gloom this has cast over us all. Your Grandmamma has suffered much, but her affliction can be nothing to Cassandra's. She will indeed be to be pitied. It is some consolation to know that our poor invalid has hitherto felt no very severe pain--which is rather an extraordinary circumstance in her complaint. I saw her on Tuesday and found her much altered, but composed and cheerful. She is well aware of her situation. Your Mother has been there ever since Friday and returns not till all is over--how soon that may be we cannot say--Lyford said he saw no signs of immediate dissolution, but added that with such a pulse it was impossible for any person to last long, and indeed no one can wish it--an easy departure from this to a better world is all that we can pray for. I am going to Winchester again to-morrow; you may depend upon early information, when any change takes place, and should then prepare yourself for what the next letter _may_ announce. Mrs. Heathcote is the greatest possible comfort to them all. . . . We all join in love. Your affectionate Father, J. AUSTEN. Edward's young sister Caroline (aged twelve) adds a few unhappy lines about her aunt, saying: 'I now feel as if I had never loved and valued her enough.' Jane Austen 'retained her faculties, her memory, her fancy, her temper, and her affections--warm, clear, and unimpaired to the last. Neither her love of God, nor of her fellow-creatures flagged for a moment.'[365] Her two clergyman brothers were near at hand to administer the consolations of religion, and she made a point of receiving the Holy Communion while she was still strong enough to follow the Service with full attention. 'While she used the language of hope to her correspondents, she was fully aware of her danger, though not appalled by it.[366] It is true that there was much to attach her to life. She was happy in her family; she was just beginning to feel confidence in her own success; and, no doubt, the exercise of her great talents was an enjoyment in itself. We may well believe that she would gladly have lived longer; but she was enabled without dismay or complaint to prepare for death. She was a humble, believing Christian. Her life had been passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affections, without any self-seeking or craving after applause. She had always sought, as it were by instinct, to promote the happiness of all who came within her influence, and doubtless she had her reward in the peace of mind which was granted her in her last days. Her sweetness of temper never failed. She was ever considerate and grateful to those who attended on her. At times, when she felt rather better, her playfulness of spirit revived, and she amused them even in their sadness. Once, when she thought herself near her end, she said what she imagined might be her last words to those around her, and particularly thanked her sister-in-law for being with her, saying: "You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary."' She wrote whilst she could hold a pen, and with a pencil when a pen had become too laborious. Even a day or two before her death she was able to compose some light verses on St. Swithin, Winchester Races, and the weather. But the record of the last sad hours and of her death in the early morning of Friday, July 18, will be best read in the letter of Cassandra to Fanny Knight. Winchester: Sunday [July 20, 1817].[367] MY DEAREST FANNY,--Doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost. She did love you most sincerely, and never shall I forget the proofs of love you gave her during her illness in writing those kind, amusing letters at a time when I know your feelings would have dictated so different a style. Take the only reward I can give you in the assurance that your benevolent purpose _was_ answered; you _did_ contribute to her enjoyment. Even your last letter afforded pleasure. I merely cut the seal and gave it to her; she opened it and read it herself, afterwards she gave it me to read, and then talked to me a little and not uncheerfully of its contents, but there was then a languor about her which prevented her taking the same interest in anything she had been used to do. Since Tuesday evening, when her complaint returned, there was a visible change, she slept more and much more comfortably; indeed, during the last eight-and-forty hours she was more asleep than awake. Her looks altered and she fell away, but I perceived no material diminution of strength, and, though I was then hopeless of a recovery, I had no suspicion how rapidly my loss was approaching. I _have_ lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed. She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow; I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself. I loved her only too well--not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to and negligent of others; and I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the Hand which has struck this blow. You know me too well to be at all afraid that I should suffer materially from my feelings; I am perfectly conscious of the extent of my irreparable loss, but I am not at all overpowered and very little indisposed, nothing but what a short time, with rest and change of air, will remove. I thank God that I was enabled to attend her to the last, and amongst my many causes of self-reproach I have not to add any wilful neglect of her comfort. She felt herself to be dying about half an hour before she became tranquil and apparently unconscious. During that half-hour was her struggle, poor soul! She said she could not tell us what she suffered, though she complained of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death, and some of her words were: 'God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me!' Her voice was affected, but as long as she spoke she was intelligible. I hope I do not break your heart, my dearest Fanny, by these particulars; I mean to afford you gratification whilst I am relieving my own feelings. I could not write so to anybody else; indeed you are the only person I have written to at all, excepting your grandmamma--it was to her, not your Uncle Charles, I wrote on Friday. Immediately after dinner on Thursday I went into the town to do an errand which your dear aunt was anxious about. I returned about a quarter before six and found her recovering from faintness and oppression; she got so well as to be able to give me a minute account of her seizure, and when the clock struck six she was talking quietly to me. I cannot say how soon afterwards she was seized again with the same faintness, which was followed by the sufferings she could not describe; but Mr. Lyford had been sent for, had applied something to give her ease, and she was in a state of quiet insensibility by seven o'clock at the latest. From that time till half-past four, when she ceased to breathe, she scarcely moved a limb, so that we have every reason to think, with gratitude to the Almighty, that her sufferings were over. A slight motion of the head with every breath remained till almost the last. I sat close to her with a pillow in my lap to assist in supporting her head, which was almost off the bed, for six hours; fatigue made me then resign my place to Mrs. J. A. for two hours and a half, when I took it again, and in about an hour more she breathed her last. I was able to close her eyes myself, and it was a great gratification to me to render her those last services. There was nothing convulsed which gave the idea of pain in her look; on the contrary, but for the continual motion of the head, she gave one the idea of a beautiful statue, and even now, in her coffin, there is such a sweet, serene air over her countenance as is quite pleasant to contemplate. This day, my dearest Fanny, you have had the melancholy intelligence, and I know you suffer severely, but I likewise know that you will apply to the fountain-head for consolation, and that our merciful God is never deaf to such prayers as you will offer. The last sad ceremony is to take place on Thursday morning; her dear remains are to be deposited in the Cathedral. It is a satisfaction to me to think that they are to lie in a building she admired so much; her precious soul, I presume to hope, reposes in a far superior mansion. May mine one day be re-united to it! Your dear papa, your Uncle Henry, and Frank, and Edwd. Austen instead of his father, will attend. I hope they will none of them suffer lastingly from their pious exertions. The ceremony must be over before ten o'clock, as the Cathedral service begins at that hour, so that we shall be at home early in the day, for there will be nothing to keep us here afterwards. Your Uncle James came to us yesterday, and is gone home to-day. Uncle H. goes to Chawton to-morrow morning; he has given every necessary direction here, and I think his company there will do good. He returns to us again on Tuesday evening. I did not think to have written a long letter when I began, but I have found the employment draw me on, and I hope I shall have been giving you more pleasure than pain. Remember me kindly to Mrs. J. Bridges (I am so glad she is with you now), and give my best love to Lizzie and all the others. I am, my dearest Fanny, Most affectionately yours, CASS. ELIZ. AUSTEN. I have said nothing about those at Chawton, because I am sure you hear from your papa. During these sad days, Anna Lefroy had written to her grandmother at Chawton, offering to go to her. Mrs. Austen answered:-- I thank you sincerely for all your kind expressions, and your offer. I am certainly in a good deal of affliction, but trust God will support me. I was not prepared for the blow, though it in a manner hung over us; I had reason to think it at a distance, and was not quite without hope that she might in part recover. After a few months' illness she may be said to have died suddenly. Mr. Lyford supposed a large blood-vessel had given way. I hope her sufferings were not severe--they were not long. I had a letter from Cassandra this morning. She is in great affliction, but bears it like a Christian. Dear Jane is to be buried in the Cathedral, I believe on Thursday--in which case Cassandra will come home as soon as it is over. Cassandra did go home, and a few days later wrote again to Fanny Knight as follows:-- Chawton: Tuesday [July 29, 1817].[368] MY DEAREST FANNY,--I have just read your letter for the third time, and thank you most sincerely for every kind expression to myself, and still more warmly for your praises of her who I believe was better known to you than to any human being besides myself. Nothing of the sort could have been more gratifying to me than the manner in which you write of her, and if the dear angel is conscious of what passes here, and is not above all earthly feelings, she may perhaps receive pleasure in being so mourned. Had _she_ been the survivor I can fancy her speaking of _you_ in almost the same terms. There are certainly many points of strong resemblance in your characters; in your intimate acquaintance with each other, and your mutual strong affection, you were counterparts. Thursday was not so dreadful a day to me as you imagined. There was so much necessary to be done that there was no time for additional misery. Everything was conducted with the greatest tranquillity, and but that I was determined I would see the last, and therefore was upon the listen, I should not have known when they left the house. I watched the little mournful procession the length of the street; and when it turned from my sight, and I had lost her for ever, even then I was not overpowered, nor so much agitated as I am now in writing of it. Never was human being more sincerely mourned by those who attended her remains than was this dear creature. May the sorrow with which she is parted with on earth be a prognostic of the joy with which she is hailed in heaven! I continue very tolerably well--much better than any one could have supposed possible, because I certainly have had considerable fatigue of body as well as anguish of mind for months back; but I really am well, and I hope I am properly grateful to the Almighty for having been so supported. Your grandmamma, too, is much better than when I came home. I did not think your dear papa appeared unwell, and I understand that he seemed much more comfortable after his return from Winchester than he had done before. I need not tell you that he was a great comfort to me; indeed, I can never say enough of the kindness I have received from him and from every other friend. I get out of doors a good deal and am able to employ myself. Of course those employments suit me best which leave me most at leisure to think of her I have lost, and I do think of her in every variety of circumstance. In our happy hours of confidential intercourse, in the cheerful family party which she so ornamented, in her sick room, on her death-bed, and as (I hope) an inhabitant of heaven. Oh, if I may one day be re-united to her there! I know the time must come when my mind will be less engrossed by her idea, but I do not like to think of it. If I think of her less as on earth, God grant that I may never cease to reflect on her as inhabiting heaven, and never cease my humble endeavours (when it shall please God) to join her there. In looking at a few of the precious papers which are now my property I have found some memorandums, amongst which she desires that one of her gold chains may be given to her god-daughter Louisa, and a lock of her hair be set for you. You can need no assurance, my dearest Fanny, that every request of your beloved aunt will be sacred with me. Be so good as to say whether you prefer a brooch or ring. God bless you, my dearest Fanny. Believe me, most affectionately yours, CASS. ELIZTH. AUSTEN. So ends the story of Jane Austen's life. We can only hope that we have succeeded in conveying to the reader even a small part of the feeling which we ourselves entertain of the charm of her personality--a charm almost as remarkable in its way as the brightness of her genius. In one respect it is easy to write about her--there is nothing to conceal. Some readers may perhaps add 'There is little to tell'; and it is true that, though the want of incident in her life has often been exaggerated, her occupations were largely those of helpfulness and sympathy towards others whose lot was more variable than hers, and the development of her own powers to be the delight of generations of readers. But this position gave her quite sufficient opportunity of showing her character--and it is a character which it is a continual pleasure to contemplate. Her perfect balance and good sense did not diminish her liveliness. Her intellectual qualities did not prevent the enjoyment of a dance, or attention to the most domestic duties. Her consciousness of genius left room for a belief that Cassandra was wiser and better than herself. Her keen and humorous observation of the frailties of mankind was compatible with indulgence towards the faults of her neighbours. Her growing fame did not make her the less accessible and delightful to her nieces, who could consult their aunt and obtain a willing listener in any difficulty whatever, from a doubtful love affair to the working of a sampler. Indeed, she is a standing witness to the truth that eccentricity and self-consciousness are not essential parts of genius. When her body had been laid in Winchester Cathedral, the small band of mourners went back in sadness to their different homes. They were very fond and very proud of her; and each, we are told, loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of their own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected to see. Cassandra returned to Chawton and devoted a further ten years to the care of her aged mother. Till old Mrs. Austen's death in 1827, Martha Lloyd remained an inmate, and everything went on, nominally, as before; but the 'chief light was quenched and the loss of it had cast a shade over the spirits of the survivors.'[369] So, when the young Austens went to stay there, expecting to be particularly happy, they could not help feeling something of the chill of disappointment. Later, Martha became the second wife of Francis Austen, while Cassandra lived on at Chawton. One of her great-nieces remembers seeing her towards the end of her life at a christening, 'a pale, dark-eyed old lady, with a high arched nose and a kind smile, dressed in a long cloak and a large drawn bonnet, both made of black satin.' She died of a sudden illness in 1845, at the house of her brother Francis, near Portsmouth--at his house, but in his absence; for he and his family had to leave for the West Indies (where he was to take up a command) while she lay dying. She was tended by her brothers Henry and Charles and her niece Caroline. She was buried beside her mother at Chawton. All her brothers survived her, except James, who was in bad health when his sister Jane died, and followed her in 1819. Edward (Knight) saw his children and his children's children grow up around him, and died at Godmersham as peacefully as he had lived, in 1852. Henry held the living of Steventon for three years after the death of his brother James, till his nephew, William Knight, was ready to take it. He was afterwards Perpetual Curate of Bentley, near Farnham. Later on, he lived for some time in France, and he died at Tunbridge Wells in 1850. Both the sailor brothers rose to be Admirals.[370] Charles was employed in the suppression of the Slave Trade and against Mehemet Ali, and became Rear-Admiral in 1846. In 1850 he commanded in the East Indian and Chinese waters, and died of cholera on the Irawaddy River in 1852, having 'won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness whilst he was struggling with disease.' Francis had thirty years on shore after the end of the long war; and his only subsequent foreign service was the command of the West Indian and North American Station, 1845-48. He, however, constantly rose in his profession, and enjoyed the esteem and respect of the Admiralty. He ended by being G.C.B. and Admiral of the Fleet, and did not die until 1865, aged ninety-one. * * * * * Shortly before the end of her life, Jane Austen wrote on a slip of paper:-- Profits of my novels, over and above the £600 in the Navy Fives. £ _s._ Residue from the 1st edit. of _Mansfield Park_ remaining in Henrietta St., March 1816 13 7 Received from Egerton, on 2nd edit. of _Sense and S._, March 1816 12 15 February 21, 1817, First Profits of _Emma_ 38 18 March 7, 1817. From Egerton--2nd edit. of _S. and S._ 19 13 _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ were published in four volumes by John Murray in 1818, and to the former was prefixed a short biographical notice of the author from the pen of Henry Austen. In 1832 Mr. Bentley bought the copyright of all the novels, except _Pride and Prejudice_ (which Jane Austen had sold outright to Mr. Egerton), from Henry and Cassandra Austen, the joint proprietors, for the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds. Mr. Bentley must also have bought from Mr. Egerton's executors the copyright of _Pride and Prejudice_, for he proceeded to issue a complete edition of the novels with a biographical notice (also by Henry) containing a few extra facts not mentioned in the original edition of _Northanger Abbey_. (James) Edward Austen, who added 'Leigh' to his name on succeeding to the property of Scarlets in 1836, wrote (in 1869-70) the _Memoir_ of his aunt which has been so often used in these pages, and which, as the work of three eyewitnesses,[371] enjoys an authority greater than that of any other account of her. Its publication coincided with the beginning of a great advance in her fame, and we think it may be claimed that it was an important contributory cause of that advance. Before that date, an appreciation of her genius was rather the special possession of small literary circles and individual families; since that date it has been widely spread both in England and in America. From her death to 1870, there was only one complete edition of her works, and nothing, except a few articles and reviews, was written about her. Since 1870, editions, lives, memoirs, &c., have been almost too numerous to count. We, who are adding to this stream of writings, cannot induce ourselves to believe that the interest of the public is yet exhausted. FOOTNOTES: [363] _Memoir_, p. 162. [364] _Memoir_, p. 163. [365] Preface to original edition of _Northanger Abbey_. [366] _Memoir_, p. 165. [367] _Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 333, &c. [368] _Brabourne_, vol. ii. p. 338, &c. [369] _Memoir_, p. 87. [370] _Sailor Brothers_, chap. xviii. [371] His two sisters and himself. APPENDIX _The Text of Jane Austen's Novels._ In the course of frequent reprinting, various errors have crept into the text of the novels, which seem in danger of becoming perpetuated. We therefore make no apology for pointing these out and for giving our reasons why we prefer any particular reading. In arriving at the correct text of Jane Austen, common sense will be our best guide. It is of no use to assume, as some editors have done, that the latest edition which appeared in the author's lifetime, and which might naturally have had the benefit of her corrections, is any more correct than the earliest. Jane Austen was no skilled proofreader, and it is a melancholy fact that the second edition of _Mansfield Park_, which she returned to Mr. Murray 'as ready for press' as she could make it, contains more misprints than any of the other novels, including one or two that do not appear in the first edition. But as the type was evidently re-set, this may have been as much the printer's fault as the author's. Again, though in one of her letters she points out a misprint in the first edition of _Pride and Prejudice_, the passage is not corrected in either the second or third edition, both of which subsequently appeared in her lifetime. Before noticing the various discrepancies, it is necessary to say a few words about the chief editions of note. During the author's lifetime three editions appeared of _Pride and Prejudice_, two of _Sense and Sensibility_ and of _Mansfield Park_, and one of _Emma_. _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ were published soon after her death. No other edition of the novels seems to have been published until Bentley bought up the copyrights of all the novels in 1832, and included them in his 'Standard Novels' series. In process of time, Bentley's edition adopted various emendations in the text. It held the field to all intents and purposes for sixty years (apart from cheap reprints in the 'Parlour Series,' 'Railway Library,' &c.), and its text has largely been followed in later editions, especially by Messrs. Macmillan in their 'Pocket Classics' series. Other recent editions, containing a more or less independent text--arrived at by following the earliest editions--are those edited for Messrs. Dent by Mr. Brimley Johnson, the earliest of which appeared in 1892, and the most recent of which has appeared in 'Everyman's Library'; the Hampshire Edition (_published_ by Mr. Brimley Johnson, but differing considerably from the editions which he has _edited_); and the Winchester Edition, published by Mr. Grant Richards. Finally, with regard to textual criticism, we have an article 'On the printing of Jane Austen's novels,' by the late Dr. Verrall, contributed to the _Cambridge Observer_, about 1892; and two others, also by Dr. Verrall, 'On some passages in Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_,' in the _Cambridge Review_, for November 30 and December 7, 1893; and certain emendations pointed out in a review of a new edition of _Pride and Prejudice_ in the _Saturday Review_ of November 12, 1910. 'SENSE AND SENSIBILITY' In this novel scarcely anything calls for notice. The main divergencies seem to be that the editions are divided between reading 'such happiness' and 'such an happiness,' at the end of Chapter III; between 'by all who called themselves her friends' and 'by all who call themselves her friends,' in Chapter XXXII; and 'one of the happiest couples' or 'one of the happiest couple,' in Chapter L. Johnson's 1892 edition has an unfortunate blunder at the beginning of Chapter XXXII: reading 'their effect on her was entirely such as the former had hoped to see,' instead of 'their effect on her was not entirely,' &c. 'PRIDE AND PREJUDICE' 1. The first passage that we consider to be frequently misprinted is in Chapter III, where Mrs. Bennet is giving her husband an account of the Meryton assembly, and of Mr. Bingley's partners. The first three editions, followed by Mr. Johnson, the Winchester and Hampshire Editions, print thus:-- 'Then the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzie and the Boulanger.' 'If he had had any compassion for me,' cried her husband impatiently, 'he would not have danced half so much! For God's sake, say no more of his partners. O that he had sprained his ankle in the first dance!' 'Oh! my dear,' continued Mrs. Bennet, 'I am quite delighted with him. He is so excessively handsome! and his sisters are charming women. I never in my life saw anything more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the lace upon Mrs. Hurst's gown----' Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any description of finery, &c. Now, here there can be little doubt that we should read, as in Bentley's edition,[372] 'and the two sixth with Lizzie, and the _Boulanger_----' (i.e. Bingley danced the _Boulanger_ with another partner, whose name Mrs. Bennet would have given but for her husband interrupting her). In the first place, there is every reason to suppose that Mr. Bingley danced no more than 'the two sixth' (each dance seems to have been divided into two parts, but without any change of partners) with Lizzie, for Mrs. Bennet has already said that Jane 'was the only creature in the room that he asked a second time.' Secondly, the reading of the first edition destroys the point of 'Here she was interrupted again.' 2. The next passage which is frequently misprinted is in Chapter XIX, where Mr. Collins in the course of his proposal to Elizabeth quotes the advice of his very noble patroness. Bentley's edition here reads:-- 'Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry---- Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own; let her be an active, useful sort of person not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way.' By transposing a comma and a semicolon, the printer has here succeeded in perverting a most characteristic bit of advice of Lady Catherine's. The first three editions, followed by Mr. Johnson; all read 'Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person,' &c., and there can hardly be two opinions as to which reading is the right one. 3. In Chapter XXXVI, where Elizabeth is reviewing her conduct towards Darcy, Bentley's edition, following the first and second editions, makes her exclaim:-- 'How despicably have I acted,' she cried; 'I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameless distrust.' 'Blameless' makes little or no sense, and we should surely follow the third edition, which gives 'blameable.' 4. Chapter XXXVIII, when Elizabeth Bennet and Maria Lucas are leaving Hunsford Parsonage, Mr. Brimley Johnson in his edition of 1892, following the first and second editions, arranges the sentences as follows:-- 'Good gracious!' cried Maria, after a few minutes' silence, 'it seems but a day or two since we first came!--and yet how many things have happened!' 'A great many indeed,' said her companion with a sigh. 'We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice! How much I shall have to tell!' Elizabeth privately added, 'And how much I shall have to conceal!' The effect of this is to give the extremely banal remark about dining and drinking tea at Rosings to Elizabeth instead of to Maria. The third edition, followed by all the others, gives the correct arrangement:-- 'A great many indeed,' said her companion with a sigh. 'We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there twice! How much I shall have to tell!' 5. In Chapter L, where Mrs. Bennet is discussing the various houses in the neighbourhood which might suit Wickham and Lydia, Mr. Bennet is made in Bentley's and all subsequent editions to remark:-- 'Mrs. Bennet, before you take any or all of these houses for your son and daughter, let us come to a right understanding. Into _one_ house in this neighbourhood they shall never have admittance. I will not encourage the imprudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn.' Now 'imprudence' seems distinctly below Mr. Bennet's usual form, and we should obviously follow the first and second editions and read 'impudence.' Compare the sentence in Chapter LVII, where Mr. Bennet, talking of Mr. Collins's correspondence, says:-- 'When I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and hypocrisy of my son-in-law.' It is the third edition that has here gone astray and misled all the others. 6. Chapter LIV, when Bingley and Darcy have been dining at Longbourn, we read in Mr. Johnson's edition, as well as in the Hampshire and Winchester Editions:-- The gentlemen came; and she thought he looked as if he would have answered her hopes; but alas! the ladies had crowded round the table, where Miss Bennet was taking tea, and Elizabeth pouring out the coffee. This is an ingenious little misprint; for what Miss Bennet, who was one of the hostesses, was doing was not _taking_ tea, of course, but _making_ tea. The early editions and Bentley all read 'making.' 7. Chapter LIV, where Jane is trying to persuade Elizabeth that she is in no danger of falling in love with Bingley again, Bentley's edition reads:-- 'You are very cruel,' said her sister [i.e. Elizabeth], 'you will not let me smile, and are provoking me to it every moment.' 'How hard it is in some cases to be believed! And how impossible in others! But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I acknowledge?' 'That is a question which I hardly know how to answer.' Now, if we turn to the first three editions, we find the passage broken up as follows:-- 'You are very cruel,' said her sister, 'you will not let me smile, and are provoking me to it every moment.' 'How hard it is in some cases to be believed! And how impossible in others!' 'But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I acknowledge?' 'That is a question which I hardly know how to answer.' This is the only passage which we can correct on the authority of the author herself. In a letter dated February 4, 1813, she says, referring to the first edition of _Pride and Prejudice_: 'The greatest blunder in printing is in p. 220, l. 3, where two sentences are made into one.' Unfortunately, in trying to correct the mistake, Bentley's edition fell into another, and Mr. Johnson was the first to break up the sentences correctly. The passage should of course run:-- 'You are very cruel,' said her sister, 'you will not let me smile, and are provoking me to it every moment.' 'How hard it is in some cases to be believed!' 'And how impossible in others!' 'But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I acknowledge?' 'That is a question which I hardly know how to answer.' 8. Chapter LV, when Jane's engagement to Bingley had been arranged, Bentley's edition, following the third edition, reads:-- Elizabeth, who was left by herself, now smiled at the rapidity and ease with which an affair was finally settled, that had given them so many previous months of surprise and vexation. 'Surprise' does not seem nearly so suitable a word as 'suspense,' which is found in the first and second editions. 9. Chapter LV, where Jane is talking to Elizabeth about Bingley. Mr. Johnson's editions, following the first three editions, read:-- 'Would you believe it, Lizzie, that when he went to town last November, he really loved me, and nothing but a persuasion of my being indifferent would have prevented his coming down again!' 'He made a little mistake, to be sure; but it is to the credit of his modesty.' This naturally introduced a panegyric from Jane on his diffidence, and the little value he put on his own good qualities. Elizabeth was pleased to find that he had not betrayed the interference of his friends; for, though Jane had the most generous and forgiving heart in the world, she knew it was a circumstance which must prejudice her against him. As this last paragraph stands, 'him' can hardly refer to anyone else but Bingley, which makes nonsense. Nothing was likely to prejudice Jane against him; besides, it was not his 'friends' who had interfered, but his 'friend' Darcy. There can be no doubt, therefore, that we ought to read, with Bentley's edition, 'friend,' and then 'him' will refer to Darcy, against whom Lizzie was very anxious on her own account that Jane should not be prejudiced. 10. Chapter LVI, when Lady Catherine is trying to browbeat Elizabeth, Mr. Johnson reads, in his edition of 1892, following the first two editions (which, however, have a comma after 'accomplished'):-- 'While in their cradles, we planned the union: and now, at the moment when the wishes of both sisters would be accomplished in their marriage, to be prevented by a young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the family?' Most editions, however, following the third, merely alter the interrogation to an exclamation mark; but it is by no means certain that we ought not to read '_is_ their marriage' instead of '_in_ their marriage,' placing the comma three words earlier: then we can keep the interrogation. So the edition published by George Allen in 1894. 'MANSFIELD PARK' 1. Chapter VIII: Bentley's edition, following the first and second editions, reads:-- Mrs. Rushworth proceeded next, under the conviction that everybody must be wanting to see Sotherton, to include Miss Crawford in the invitation; and though Miss Grant, who had not been at the trouble of visiting Mrs. Rushworth, on her coming into the neighbourhood, civilly declined it on her own account, she was glad to secure any pleasure for her sister; and Mary, properly pressed and persuaded, was not long in accepting her share of the civility. Inasmuch as there is no such character as 'Miss Grant' in the book, all other editions read 'Mrs. Grant.' Dr. Verrall, in the pages of the _Cambridge Review_, defended 'Miss Grant,' provided that 'Miss' were placed between inverted commas, as well as the previous 'Miss Crawford'; he believed Mrs. Rushworth to have been a blundering kind of person, who desired to invite Miss Crawford, but while naming 'Miss Crawford' addressed herself to Mrs. Grant. Otherwise (if we read 'Mrs. Grant'), Dr. Verrall argued, there was not the slightest occasion for Mrs. Grant to decline the invitation on her own account, for she had not been in any way invited; nor would there have been any need for Mary to be 'properly pressed and persuaded,' and then to accept 'her share' of the civility. Dr. Verrall's suggestion is ingenious, but not quite convincing. 2. Chapter VIII: Bentley's edition, following the first and second editions, reads:-- When Edmund, therefore, told her in reply, as he did when she would give him the hearing, that she need not distress herself on Mrs. Rushworth's account, because he had taken the opportunity, as he walked with her through the hall, of mentioning Miss Price as one who would probably be of the party, and had directly received a very sufficient invitation for her cousin, &c. '_Her_ cousin' would certainly seem to be a mistake; and all other editions accordingly alter 'her' to 'his.' Dr. Verrall, however, defends 'her'; and would read 'and had directly received a very sufficient invitation for her cousin,' on the ground that Mrs. Rushworth, not quite understanding who was meant by Miss Price, thought she was cousin to the Miss Price who she had previously heard would remain at home with Lady Bertram. Some such explanation, Dr. Verrall thought, would alone account for the 'very sufficient' invitation. 3. Chapter X, p. 106, where Fanny Price says to Mr. Rushworth, who on returning with the key finds Miss Bertram and Mr. Crawford have gone into the park without waiting for him:-- 'They desired me to stay--my cousin Maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts.' So all the editions read; but Dr. Verrall would emend to 'They desired me to say--my cousin,' &c., on the ground that Fanny, who was the soul of truth, had not been desired to stay. But, for the matter of that, neither had her cousin Maria charged her to say anything, for it was Crawford who had suggested that 'Miss Price will be so good as to tell him, that he will find us near that knoll.' However, the emendation is attractive, as it shows Fanny trying to make the best case she can for Maria by eliminating Crawford's share in the transaction. 4. Chapter XXIV: All editions read:-- This dear William would soon be amongst them. There could be no doubt of his obtaining leave of absence immediately, for he was still only a midshipman; and as his parents, from living on the spot, must already have seen him and be seeing him perhaps daily, his direct holidays might with justice be instantly given to his sister. The expression 'his direct holidays,' meaning 'his actual holidays,' is intelligible enough, but did not satisfy Dr. Verrall, who suggested 'derelict' as a naval expression to imply holidays on which no one had a claim, and which might therefore be given to Mansfield Park. Like many of Dr. Verrall's emendations, its ingenuity is greater than its probability. 5. Chapter XXXIII, p. 340:-- Here again was a something of the same Mr. Crawford whom she had so reprobated before. How evidently was there a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned; and alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in. It is difficult to believe that Jane Austen can have written anything so clumsy as 'how always known no principle.' Such, however, is the reading of all the editions, except the Hampshire Edition, which, without giving any note, violently emends to 'how lacking the principle.' 6. Chapter XXXIX: Bentley, following the second edition, reads:-- Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; all was busy without getting on, always behind hand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect. Here the printer has been most ingenious. The text should, of course, be 'always busy,' as it is in the first edition and the Hampshire Edition. 7. Chapter XL: Bentley's edition, following the early editions, reads:-- ' . . . for Henry is in Norfolk; business called him to Everingham ten days ago, or perhaps he only pretended the call, for the sake of being travelling at the same time that you were.' Mr. Johnson and the Winchester Edition read 'to call.' There seems little doubt that 'the call' is the right reading. 8. Chapter XLVII: Bentley and nearly all editions read:-- Time would undoubtedly abate somewhat of his sufferings, but still it was a sort of thing which he never could get entirely the better of; and as to his ever meeting with any other woman who could--it was too impossible to be named but with indignation. The broken sentence means 'a woman who could console him for the loss of Mary.' Mr. Johnson's editions make nonsense of the passage by substituting a comma for the dash after 'could.' 9. Chapter XLVIII: Bentley, following the early editions, reads:-- Maria had destroyed her own character, and he would not, by a vain attempt to restore what never would be restored, be affording his sanction to vice, or in seeking to lessen its disgrace, be anywise accessory to introducing such misery in another man's family, as he had known himself. Mr. Johnson and the Winchester Edition read 'by affording his sanction to vice,' which is an unnecessary alteration. 'EMMA' 1. Chapter XVIII:-- 'No, Emma; your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very "aimable," have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people--nothing really amiable about him.' This reading, found in the first edition and the Winchester Edition, is without doubt correct; but Bentley, Johnson, and the Hampshire Edition read 'He may be very "amiable."' 2. Chapter XXIII:-- But when satisfied on all these points, and their acquaintance proportionably advanced, . . . Mr. Johnson, in his 1892 edition, did not approve of the word 'proportionably,' and read '[proportionately]'; but he has since altered his mind. The first edition and all others read 'proportionably,' and there appears to be authority for such a word. 3. Chapter XXV:-- Vanity, extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper, which must be doing something, good or bad; heedlessness as to the pleasure of his father and Mrs. Weston, indifferent as to how his conduct might appear in general; he became liable to all these [changes]. There are two words in the sentence, which differ in the various editions. The first edition reads 'indifferent' . . . 'changes.' Bentley reads 'indifference' . . . 'changes.' Mr. Johnson and the Winchester Edition read 'indifferent' and 'charges'; the Hampshire Edition 'indifference' and 'charges.' 'Indifference' would seem to be probably right; 'charges,' certainly right. 4. Chapter XXIX:-- 'Emma,' said she, 'this paper is worse than I expected. Look! in places you see it is dreadfully dirty: and the wainscot is more yellow and forlorn than anything could have imagined.' So the first edition; Bentley, and the Hampshire Edition, insert 'one'; Mr. Johnson and the Winchester Edition 'I' after 'anything.' 5. Chapter XXXII, where Mrs. Elton says to Emma:-- 'I assure you, Miss Woodhouse, it is very delightful to me to be reminded of a place I am so extremely partial to as Maple Grove. I have spent so many happy minutes there!' (with a little sign of sentiment). So Mr. Johnson's editions read, following the first edition. But Bentley's, as well as the Hampshire and Winchester Editions, read 'sigh,' which seems to be certainly right. 6. Chapter XLIV:-- Jane took Mrs. Elton aside, and told her at once, that upon thinking over the advantages of Mrs. Suckling's situation, she had come to the resolution of accepting it. So the first edition, followed by Bentley; but this is plainly a mistake for Mrs. Smallridge's, and is corrected by Mr. Johnson, the Winchester and Hampshire Editions. 7. Chapter XLVI, where Mr. Weston tells Emma that his wife has something to break to her, and Emma at once fears for her relations in Brunswick Square:-- 'Mrs. Weston, do not trifle with me. Consider how many of my dearest friends are now in Brunswick Square. Which of them is it? I charge you by all that is sacred not to attempt concealment.' 'Upon my word, Emma----' 'Your word! Why not your honour! Why not say upon your honour, that it has nothing to do with any of them? Good heavens! What can be to be _broke_ to me that does relate to one of that family?' So the first edition, followed by Bentley. But Mr. Johnson, the Hampshire and Winchester Editions insert 'not' before 'relate'; and the negative seems needed. 8. Chapter XLVII:-- This was the conclusion of the first series of reflection. So the first edition, followed by Bentley; Mr. Johnson, the Hampshire and Winchester Editions give 'reflections.' But in Jane Austen's novels the expression 'a series of' is continually followed by a noun in the singular, when nowadays we should probably use the plural--e.g. _Emma_, chapter xxxvi, 'a series of dissipation'; _Sense and Sensibility_, chapter xxvii, 'a series of rain'; chapter xlvi, 'a series of imprudence.' Cf. _Emma_, chapter xxii, 'after a series of what appeared to him strong encouragement'; though the Hampshire Edition has altered this to 'encouragements.' 'NORTHANGER ABBEY' 1. Chapter VI: 'I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton.' A reference to Mrs. Radcliffe's _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ will show that 'Laurentina' should be 'Laurentini.' All editions, however, read 'Laurentina.' 2. Chapter VIII:-- 'Let us walk about and quiz people. Come along with me, and I will show you the four greatest quizzers in the room; my two younger sisters and their partners. I have been laughing at them this half-hour.' So the first edition, the Hampshire and Winchester Editions. Bentley, however, reads 'quizzes,' which seems correct, as the word 'quizzer' usually bore an active sense, and 'quiz' a passive. 3. Chapter XI:-- They all spent the evening together at Thorpe's. It seems improbable that Jane Austen can have written anything other than 'at the Thorpes''; but no edition has had the courage to make the change. 4. Chapter XIII:-- And with these words she broke away and hurried off. Thorpe would have darted after her, but Morland withheld him. 'Let her go, let her go, if she will go. She is as obstinate as----' Thorpe never finished the simile, for it could hardly have been a proper one. So the first edition reads, followed by Bentley and the Winchester Edition. The Hampshire Edition boldly gives 'Morland,' and this seems the natural solution. The only alternative is to break up the sentence thus:-- . . . but Morland withheld him. 'Let her go, let her go, if she will.' 'She is as obstinate as----' Thorpe never finished the simile, &c. But this does not seem so natural; nor do we imagine that the impropriety of the simile would necessarily have debarred Thorpe from completing it. 5. Chapter XXII:-- And for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire as from that of Dresden or Sêve. But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago. So the first edition, and the Hampshire and Winchester Editions; but Bentley emends to 'Sèvres,' which must surely be correct. 6. Chapter XXVI:-- By ten o'clock the chaise-and-four conveyed the two from the abbey, and, after an agreeable drive of almost twenty miles, they entered Woodston, &c. So all the editions; but is not 'two' a misprint for 'trio'--i.e. General Tilney, Eleanor, and Catherine? It is certain that Eleanor was of the party, for we read a little later: 'His son and daughter's observations were of a different kind. They had seldom seen him eat so heartily at any table but his own'; nor is there anything to show that General Tilney rode on horseback. For an example of the use of the word 'trio' by Jane Austen, see _Mansfield Park_, chapter xxix: 'They were now a miserable trio.' 'PERSUASION' 1. Chapter I: The Hampshire and Winchester Editions, following the first edition, print the opening passage as follows:-- Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; where he found occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt. As he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century, and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed: this was the page at which his favourite volume always opened. This obviously makes no sense as it stands; and to no less a light than Macaulay belongs the credit of putting it right. Some of his old friends (says Sir G. O. Trevelyan in his _Life of Macaulay_[373]) may remember how he prided himself on a correction of his own in the first page of _Persuasion_ which he maintained to be worthy of Bentley, and which undoubtedly fulfils all the conditions required to establish the credit of an emendation; for, without the alteration of a word, or even of a letter, it turns into perfectly intelligible common-sense a passage which has puzzled, or which ought to have puzzled, two generations of Miss Austen's readers. And in a footnote, Sir George says:-- A slight change in the punctuation effects all that is required. According to Macaulay the sentence was intended by its author to run thus: 'There any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which his favourite volume opened.' Whether or not the emendation would have satisfied Bentley the critic, it eventually satisfied Bentley the publisher, who adopted it in his later editions. 2. Chapter I, a page or two further on, all editions read:-- Be it known, then, that Sir Walter, like a good father (having met with one or two private disappointments in very unreasonable applications), prided himself on remaining single for his dear daughter's sake. For one daughter, his eldest, he would really have given up anything, which he had not been very much tempted to do. . . . His two other children were of very inferior value. This is one more instance of a misplaced apostrophe, for, as Dr. Verrall pointed out in the _Cambridge Observer_, what Jane Austen must have written is 'for his dear daughters' sake.' Even if the antithesis implied in the next sentence did not demand this, it is obvious that the correct Sir Walter would never have allowed himself to state that he remained single for the sake of one daughter only. Indeed, we have a proof of this in Chapter V, when Elizabeth says: 'And as to my father, I really should not have thought that he who has kept himself single so long for our sakes need be suspected now.' 3. Chapter XXII: Bentley, following the first edition, reads:-- She was earnestly begged to return and dine, and give them all the rest of the day, but her spirits had been so long exerted that at present she felt unequal to move and fit only for home, where she might be sure of being as silent as she chose. Promising to be with them the whole of the following morning, therefore, she closed the fatigues of the present by a toilsome walk to Camden Place, &c. The Hampshire and Winchester Editions read 'more,' and this seems likely to be correct; for those acquainted with the road to Camden Place will know how inadvisable it would be for anyone 'unequal to move' to attempt it. 4. Chapter XXIII: Nearly all editions read: 'The weather was unfavourable, and she had grieved over the rain on her friend's account.' There was no particular 'friend' in the case, as Anne had promised to spend her morning with the Musgroves, and it seems certain we should read 'on her friends' account.' FOOTNOTES: [372] Our references throughout are to Bentley's edition of 1885-6. [373] Vol. ii. pp. 470-1, second edition. BIBLIOGRAPHY The following list of books is confined to the main editions of the novels and, with a few exceptions, to books dealing entirely, or almost entirely, with the author. It does not attempt to include all the cheap reprints of the novels, nor all the histories of English literature, &c., which make mention of Jane Austen, nor the innumerable magazine articles that have been devoted to her and her writings. Many of these last, however, will be found recorded in the bibliographies included in Mr. Goldwin Smith's and Mr. Oscar Fay Adams's volumes. 1811 [Oct.] _Sense and Sensibility._ A novel. In three volumes. By a Lady. London: printed for the author, by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar; and published by T. Egerton, Whitehall, 1811. 12mo. 1813 [Jan.] _Pride and Prejudice._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Sense and Sensibility_. London: printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1813. 12mo. [Vol. I was printed by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar; Vols. II and III by G. Sidney, Northumberland Street, Strand.] 1813 [Oct.] _Pride and Prejudice._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Sense and Sensibility_. Second edition. London: printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1813. 12mo. [Printers as in first edition.] 1813 [Oct.] _Sense and Sensibility._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Pride and Prejudice_. The second edition. London: printed for the author, by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar; and published by T. Egerton, Whitehall, 1813. 12mo. 1814 [May] _Mansfield Park._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_. London: printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1814. 12mo. [Vols. I and III were printed by G. Sidney, Northumberland Street, Strand; Vol. II by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar.] 1815 [Dec.] _Emma._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Pride and Prejudice_, &c., &c. London: printed for John Murray, 1816. 12mo. [Vols. I and II were printed by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar; Vol. III by J. Moyes, Greville Street, Hatton Garden, London.] 1816 [Feb.] _Mansfield Park._ A novel. In three volumes. By the author of _Pride and Prejudice_. Second edition. London: printed for J. Murray, Albemarle Street, 1816. 12mo. [Vols. I and III were printed by J. Moyes, Greville Street, Hatton Garden, London; Vol. II by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar.] 1817 _Pride and Prejudice._ A novel. In two volumes. By the author of _Sense and Sensibility_, &c. Third edition. London: printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1817. 12mo. [Printed by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar.] 1818 _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_. By the author of _Pride and Prejudice_, _Mansfield Park_, &c. With a biographical notice of the author. In four volumes. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1818. 12mo. [Vols. I and II, containing _Northanger Abbey_, were printed by C. Roworth, Bell-yard, Temple-bar; Vols. III and IV, containing _Persuasion_, by T. Davison, Lombard Street, Whitefriars, London.] 1824 _L'Abbaye de Northanger_; traduit de l'anglais de Jeanne Austen, auteur d'_Orgueil et Préjugé_, du _Parc de Mansfield_, de la _Famille Elliott_, de la Nouvelle _Emma_, &c. Par Mme. Hyacinthe de F.**** [Ferrières]. 3 tom. Paris. Pigoreau. 12mo. [There is a short 'Notice biographique' taken from the English edition.] 1833 _Novels by Miss Jane Austen._ 'Standard Novels' series. Five volumes. London: Richard Bentley. 8vo. [This series contains a set of steel engravings--two to each novel, a frontispiece and a vignette after Pickering. _Sense and Sensibility_ contains a biographical notice (by Henry Austen), which includes a few facts not mentioned in the preface to the original edition of _Northanger Abbey_.] 1870 _A Memoir of Jane Austen._ By her nephew, J. E. Austen Leigh. London: Richard Bentley & Son. pp. 236. 8vo. 1871 _A Memoir of Jane Austen._ By her nephew, J. E. Austen Leigh. Second edition; to which is added _Lady Susan_ and fragments of two other unfinished tales by Miss Austen. London: Richard Bentley & Son. pp. 364. 8vo. 1880 _Jane Austen and her Works._ By Sarah Tytler. London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. pp. viii-386. 8vo. [This contains a Life drawn from the _Memoir_, and a résumé of each of the novels.] 1882 _Jane Austen's Novels._ Steventon Edition. Five volumes. London: Richard Bentley & Son. 8vo. 1883 _A Book of Sibyls._ By Anne Isabella Thackeray. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. vi-229. 8vo. ['Jane Austen,' pp. 197-229.] 1884 _Letters of Jane Austen._ Edited, with an introduction and critical remarks, by Edward, Lord Brabourne. Two volumes. London: Richard Bentley & Son. [This includes: (1) a series of letters from Jane to Cassandra; (2) letters from Jane to Fanny Knight; (3) letters from Jane to Anna Austen (Mrs. B. Lefroy); and (4) two letters from Cassandra to Fanny Knight, just after Jane's death.] 1885 _Dictionary of National Biography._ London: Smith, Elder & Co. 'Jane Austen,' by L[eslie]. S[tephen]. [This account, based on the _Memoir_ and the _Letters_ (which latter are said to be trivial and to give no new facts), is accurate: except in stating that Jane was the youngest of seven children, and that she went to Castle Square, Southampton, in 1805.] 1886 _Letters to Dead Authors._ By Andrew Lang. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 8vo. ['To Jane Austen,' pp. 75-85.] 1888 _Chapters from Jane Austen._ Edited by Oscar Fay Adams. Boston: Lee & Shepard. 1889 _Jane Austen._ By S. F. Malden [Mrs. Charles Malden]. 'Eminent Women' series. London: W. H. Allen. pp. 210. 8vo. [Much space is devoted to an abstract of the novels.] 1890 _Life of Jane Austen._ By Goldwin Smith. 'Great Writers' series. London: Walter Scott. pp. 195-v. 8vo. [Contains a bibliography compiled by J. P. Anderson.] 1891 _The Story of Jane Austen's Life._ By Oscar Fay Adams. Chicago: A. D. McClurg & Co. pp. v-277. 8vo. [Includes a bibliography.] 1892 _The Novels of Jane Austen._ Edited by R. Brimley Johnson; with illustrations by William Cubit Cooke, and ornaments by F. C. Tilney. Ten volumes. London: J. M. Dent & Co. [The first volume of _Sense and Sensibility_ contains an account of Jane Austen, pp. xi-xxxi. This was the first really independent issue of the novels--Bentley's edition having previously held the field. Mr. Johnson, as a rule, followed the text of the latest edition which appeared in the author's lifetime. Unfortunately, his printers introduced a good many new misprints of their own.] 1894 _Pride and Prejudice._ With a preface by George Saintsbury, and illustrations by Hugh Thomson. London: George Allen. pp. xxvii-476. 8vo. 1895 _Charades, etc. Written a Hundred Tears Ago._ By Jane Austen and her family. London: Spottiswoode & Co. pp. 34. 8vo. 1895 _Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen, arranged and adapted for Drawing-room Performance._ By Rosina Filippi (Mrs. Dowson); with illustrations by Miss Fletcher. London: J. M. Dent & Co. pp. xv-139. 8vo. 1895-7 _Jane Austen's Novels._ With illustrations by Hugh Thomson [but _Pride and Prejudice_ is illustrated by C. E. Brock] and introductions by Austin Dobson. Five volumes. London: Macmillan & Co. 8vo. [These volumes were afterwards (1902-4) reprinted and issued in Macmillan's 'Illustrated Pocket Classics.'] 1897 _Essays on the Novel: as illustrated by Scott and Miss Austen._ By A. A. Jack. London: Macmillan & Co. ['Miss Austen,' pp. 232-297.] 1898 _The Novels of Jane Austen._ Winchester Edition. Ten volumes. London: Grant Richards. 8vo. [Subsequently, in 1906, this edition was re-issued with a new title-page by John Grant of Edinburgh.] 1898 _Emma._ With an introduction by Joseph Jacobs, and illustrations by Chris Hammond. London: George Allen. pp. xxvi-504. 8vo. 1898 _The Novels of Jane Austen._ Edited by R. Brimley Johnson; with coloured illustrations by C. E. and H. M. Brock. London: J. M. Dent & Co. [This edition seems to be printed from the same type as that used in the 1892 edition. Many of the obvious misprints have been corrected; but two following chapters in _Mansfield Park_ are still numbered xxxii, throwing out the numeration of all subsequent chapters.] 1899 _Jane Austen: Her Contemporaries and Herself._ An essay in criticism. By Walter Herries Pollock. London: Longmans, Green & Co. pp. 125. 8vo. [The contemporaries are Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Ferrier.] 1899 _Sense and Sensibility._ With an introduction by J. Jacobs, and illustrations by Chris Hammond. London: George Allen, pp. xxviii-389. 8vo. 1899 _The Works of Jane Austen._ With coloured frontispieces by H. M. Brock. The Temple Edition. Ten volumes. London: J. M. Dent & Co. 8vo. 1899 _Catherine Morland._ [sc. _Northanger Abbey_.] Roman traduit de l'anglais. Par F. Fénélon. Published in _La Revue blanche_. Paris. pp. 364. 8vo. 1900 _Pride and Prejudice._ With an introduction and notes by E. V. Lucas. Methuen's 'Little Library.' Two volumes. London: Methuen & Co. [1900] _Pride and Prejudice._ Illustrated by Chris Hammond; with an introduction by William Keith Leask. London: The Gresham Publishing Co. 8vo. N.D. 1901 _Northanger Abbey._ With an introduction by E. V. Lucas. Methuen's 'Little Library.' London: Methuen & Co. pp. xiv-273. 8vo. 1902 _The Novels of Jane Austen._ Hampshire Edition. Five volumes. London: R. Brimley Johnson. 8vo. [There is a publisher's note at the beginning of _Pride and Prejudice_, and each novel contains two specially drawn end-papers illustrating its topographical details. The text differs occasionally from that of the novels _edited_ by Mr. Brimley Johnson.] 1902 _Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends._ By Constance Hill. Illustrations by Ellen G. Hill, and reproductions in photogravure, &c. London: John Lane. pp. viii-279. 8vo. [The book contains much topographical detail.] 1904 _Pride and Prejudice._ Illustrated by Chris Hammond. London: Blackie & Son. pp. viii-392. 8vo. 1905 _The Works of Jane Austen._ 'Sense and Sensibility.' Introduction by Sidney Lee. Methuen's Standard Library. London: Methuen & Co. pp. vii-247. 8vo. [It is stated that the text is taken from that of the second edition. The other novels in this series do not seem to have been published up to the present.] 1905 _Jane Austen and her Times._ By G. E. Mitton. With twenty-one illustrations. London: Methuen & Co. pp. viii-334. 8vo. 1906 _Jane Austen's Novels._ With introduction by R. Brimley Johnson. Everyman's Library. Five volumes. London: J. M. Dent & Co. 8vo. 1906 _Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers: being the Adventures of Sir Francis Austen, G.C.B., Admiral of the Fleet, and Rear-Admiral Charles Austen._ By J. H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback. London: John Lane. pp. xiv-294. 8vo. [Four hitherto unpublished letters of Jane to her brothers are given.] 1907 _The Works of Jane Austen_--I. 'Emma.' With an introduction by E. V. Lucas. The World's Classics. Oxford: Henry Frowde. pp. xv-459. 8vo. 1907-9 [_The Novels of Jane Austen._] With coloured illustrations by C. E. Brock. 'The Series of English Idylls.' Five volumes. London: J. M. Dent & Co. 8vo. 1908-10 _The Novels of Jane Austen._ With general introduction and notes by R. Brimley Johnson. Coloured illustrations and end-pieces by A. Wallis Mills. The Saint Martin's Illustrated Library of Standard Authors. Ten volumes. London: Chatto & Windus. 8vo. 1909 _Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy._ By W. H. Helm. London: Eveleigh Nash. pp. x-259. 8vo. [A critical appreciation. The frontispiece is an imaginary portrait of Jane Austen.] 1910 _Pride and Prejudice._ Abridged and edited by Mrs. Frederick Boas. English Literature for Schools. Cambridge: at the University Press. pp. xix-211. 8vo. [The editor's object is to present the book in a form suitable for school reading. Some notes are given.] 1910 _Encyclopædia Britannica._ Eleventh Edition. Cambridge: at the University Press. ['Jane Austen,' by E. V. L[ucas], vol. ii. pp. 906-7.] [This is an accurate account, except that it contains the same two mistakes as those in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.] 1911 _Essays and Studies._ By members of the English Association. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. ['Jane Austen,' by A. C. Bradley, vol. ii. pp. 7-36.] 1911 _Chawton Manor and its Owners._ A family history. By William Austen Leigh and Montagu George Knight. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. viii-219. 4to. [Chapter VII.--'The Austens.'] 1912 _Pride and Prejudice._ Edited with introduction, &c. by K. M. Metcalfe. Oxford University Press: Henry Frowde. pp. xxxii-403. 8vo. [A scholarly edition: the text is that of the first edition, except in a few instances, where a note is given. The title-pages of the three volumes are reproduced in facsimile. Appendix on social customs in J. A.'s day; criticisms, notes, &c.] 1912 _Jane Austen._ By Lady Margaret Sackville. 'The Regent Library.' London: Herbert & Daniel. pp. xvi-471. 8vo. [Long selections from the novels, with an introduction and some appreciations.] 1913 _Old Friends and New Fancies: an Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen._ By Sybil G. Brinton. London: Holden & Hardingham. pp. viii-384. 8vo. 1913 _Jane Austen: a Criticism and Appreciation._ By Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., F.S.A. London: Jarrold & Sons. pp. 129. 8vo. [The frontispiece is a reproduction of a bust of Jane Austen executed by Mr. Fitzgerald.] I. Austens JOHN AUSTEN, of Horsmonden, _d._ 1620 | 5th son Francis, of Grovehurst, _d._ 1687 | John, of Grovehurst, _d._ 1705 | John, of Broadford = Elizabeth Weller _d._ 1704 | ______________________________________________________________|_______________________________________________________________ | | | | | | | John, of Broadford Francis Thomas, M.D. W. _Walter_, _M.D._ = (1)Rebecca Hampson = William = (2) = Susanna Holk 2 sons and a daughter _d._ 1728 | | | | Surgeon, | /|\ /|\ | | _d._ 1737 John, of Broadford (present owners (in female | | _d._ 1807, _s.p.s._ of Broadford) line) Susanna Weaver = W. H. _Walter_ | _____________________________| |_________________________________ | | | | Philadelphia (Rev.) James _Walter_ Rev. George = Cassandra Leigh Philadelphia = T. S. Hancock ('Phila') | R. of Steventon,| _d._ 1827 | (Rev.) Henry _Walter_ _d._ 1805 | (_see_ Leigh | | Pedigree) | | | | Eliza = Jean Capotte | | Comte de | | Feuillide | | | Hastings | _d._ 1801 | 1765 1766 1767 1771 | 1773 1774 1775 1779 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________|_____________________________________________________________ | | | | | | | | (Rev.) James = (1)Anne Mathew; (2)Mary Lloyd George Edward = Elizabeth Bridges (Rev.) Henry = (1)Eliza de Feuillide; (2)Eleanor Jackson Cassandra | Jane | _d._1819 | | (Knight),| (d. 1850) _d._ 1813 _d._ _unm._ | _d._ _unm._ | | | | 1845 | 1817 | | | _d._ 1852 | ____________________________________________________________| Author | ________| _______|__________ ___________|______________________ | _______________________________| | | | | |||||||||| | | B. Lefroy = Anna (Rev.) James Edward Caroline 7. Fanny = Sir E. Knatchbull 1. Edward Francis = (1)Mary Gibson; (2)Martha Lloyd Charles = (1)Frances Palmer; (2)Harriet Palmer | _d._ 1872 (Austen Leigh), _d._ _unm._ 1880 | 2. George (Admiral), | (Admiral), | | | Author of the _Memoir_, Lord Brabourne 3. Henry _d._ 1852 | |________ Charles /|\ _d._ 1874 (Editor of the 4. William Mary Jane | /|\ _Letters_) 5. Charles Cassandra 1. Cassandra (Austen Leighs) 6. John etc. 2. Harriet 8. Elizabeth etc. and 3 others. (Knights of Chawton) II. Leighs Theophilus Leigh = Mary Brydges (of Adlestrop) | (daughter of Lord Chandos) _d._ 1724 | | (12 children--of whom) (Dr.) John Walker = Jane Perrot _____________________|______________________________________________ | | | | | (1) William (3) (Rev.) Theophilus (4) (Rev.) Thomas = Jane Walker (5 children--of whom) (Master of Balliol) (of Harpsden) | _____|__________ ____________|__________ _d._ 1763 | | | | | | James (Rev.) Thomas = Mary, _d._ Cassandra = (Rev.) S. Cooke | | (succeeded 1797 | (of Little | James Henry to Stoneleigh in | Bookham) | (succeeded to 1806) | | Stoneleigh 1813) _d._ 1813, _s.p._ __________|____________ | \|/ | | | | Theophilus (Rev.) George Mary | _______________________________________________________________________| | | | Jane Cholmeley = James (Leigh Perrot) Jane = (Rev.) Edward Cooper Cassandra = (Rev.) G. Austen _d._ 1836 (of Scarlets) _d._ | (R. of Whaddon and _d._ 1827 (_see_ Austen _d._ 1817, _s.p._ 1783 | Sonning), _d._ 1792 Pedigree) _____________________|_______________ | | (Rev.) Edward = Caroline Lybbe Powys Jane = (Sir) Thomas Williams, R.N. (of Hamstall _d._ Ridware) 1798 III. Craven, Fowle, and Lloyd Families. Sir Wm. Craven, Kt. ________________________________|__________________________ | | | 2nd Lord Craven | Charles = Elizabeth Staples _d._ 1711 John ___|_____________________ ____________|__ ____|________ | | | | | | | (Rev.) Wm. Fowle = Jane (Rev.) John Martha = (Rev.) N. Lloyd 3rd Lord Craven Fulwar 5th Lord Craven son rector of | of Chilton _d._ 1805 | _d._ 1739 4th Lord Craven _d._ 1769 | Kintbury and of | House, | 6th Hampstead | Wilts. | Lord Craven Marshall, | | _d._ 1791 _d._ 1806 | | | | | 7th Lord Craven | | _d._ 1825 | | __________________________________________________________________|_________________________________|______ | | | | | | (Rev.) Thomas, Charles (Rev.) Fulwar Craven = Eliza Martha = (Sir) Francis Austen Mary = (Rev.) James rector of Allington _d._ 1806 rector of Kintbury | _d._ 1843 | Austen _d._ 1797 \|/ __________|_____ | | James Edward Caroline INDEX ACADEMY (Royal Naval): Francis Austen there, 49; Charles, 77 Ashe Rectory: home of Lefroys, 71 Austen, Anna (_see also_ Lefroy, Ben): elder daughter of James Austen, her birth and loss of mother, 72, 73; spent much time with Jane and Cassandra, 73; comparison with Fanny Knight, 241; writes novel and receives advice from Aunt Jane, 353-62; married to Ben Lefroy, November 1814, 353 Austen, Caroline: younger daughter of James Austen, 206, 363; writes stories and receives advice from Aunt Jane, 57, 363-8; sees her for the last time, 386; her contributions to _Memoir_ and subsequent history, 368 Austen, Cassandra (_see also_ Austen, Jane): elder daughter of (Rev.) George Austen, born 1773, 20; she and Jane devoted to each other, 50; difference of character, 51; preferred to Jane by Phila Walter, 59; both admired by Eliza, 61; engaged to T. Fowle, who goes as chaplain to West Indies, 79; and dies of yellow fever, 105; C.'s letters from Jane, constantly, from p. 109 onward; after death of her father, C. present at that of Mrs. Lloyd, 183; nurses Jane through illness and on death-bed, 383, 390; writes account of Jane's death to Fanny, 394; her own death in 1845, 402 Austen, Charles: sixth son of (Rev.) George Austen, born 1779, 23; at R.N. Academy, 77; character, 77; under Captain Williams helps to capture _La Tribune_, 78; on _Endymion_ helps to capture _Scipio_, 150; Duke of Sussex a passenger, 163; presents to sisters, 171; kindness to Lord Balgonie, and Lord Leven's gratitude, 187; marries Fanny Palmer, 204; on the _Namur_, and visits Godmersham, 284, 285; commands the _Phoenix_ against Murat, 369; letter to Jane, 370; letter from Jane, 385; subsequent career (Admiral), 403; Austen, Edward (i): third son of (Rev.) George Austen, born 1767, 18; adopted by Knights of Godmersham, 47; makes the 'grand tour,' 48; his character, 47; marries Elizabeth Bridges and settles at Rowling, 74; at Godmersham, 75, 76; goes to Bath, 127; his wife dies, leaving eleven children, 209, &c.; at Chawton House, with Fanny, in 1812, 256; takes the name of Knight, 256; with his family at Chawton, 1813 and 1814, 269, 302; claim made to his Hants property and settled by compromise, 299; loses money by Henry's bankruptcy, 332 Austen, Edward (ii): _see_ Knight, Edward Austen, Edward (iii): _see_ Austen Leigh, (Rev.) J. E. Austen, Fanny (afterwards Fanny Knight; then Lady Knatchbull): description of, 211, 227; in London during her uncle Henry's illness, 213; friendship with Mr. Haden, 311, &c.; letters from Aunt Jane on love affair, 342, &c.; letters to Aunt Jane at Winchester mentioned, 395 Austen, Francis (i): of Grovehurst, fifth son of John Austen (i), _d._ 1687, 2 Austen, Francis (ii): second son of John Austen (iii) and Elizabeth Weller; solicitor at Sevenoaks; befriended his nephews; descendants own Broadford, 3, 4 Austen, (Sir) Francis (_see also_ Ships): fifth son of (Rev.) George Austen, born 1774, 21; youthful horse-dealing, 23; character, 49; at the R.N. Academy, 49; his father's letter, 50; rapid promotion to Lieutenant, 76; returns home in 1793, 76; letter from him at Cadiz, 115; made Commander, 121; at Cyprus, 143; takes news to Nelson and captures _Ligurienne_, 160; made post-Captain, 160, 161; letters from Jane on father's death, 180-2; raising 'sea fencibles' at Ramsgate, 174; engagement to Mary Gibson, 192; appointed to _Leopard_ (under Admiral Louis), 192; move to Canopus, 192; misses Trafalgar, 193; takes part in victory at St. Domingo, 193; marriage, 194; at Southampton with mother and sisters, 197; commands the _Elephant_ in the Baltic, 270; letters from Jane, 270, 278; living at Alton, 369; subsequent career, K.C.B., Admiral of the Fleet, 403 Austen, Francis Motley: son of Francis Austen (ii); acquires Kippington property, 3-4; believed to have had Jane Austen painted by Zoffany, 63 Austen, (Rev.) George (i): son of William A.; helped by Uncle Francis, 4; at Tonbridge and Oxford, 4, 5; Rector of Steventon, 5; marries Cassandra Leigh, 5; his character, 16; Rector also of Deane, 17; letters to Walters, 19-22; letter announcing birth of Jane, 22; takes pupils, 24, 25; his letter to son Francis, 50; offers Jane's first novel to Cadell, 97; leaves Steventon and settles in Bath, 172; visits Teignmouth, Dawlish, and Lyme, 173, 176; dies at Bath, January 1805, 180-2 Austen, George (ii): second son of above, born 1766; subject to fits, 20 Austen, George (iii): second son of Edward Austen (i); a favourite of his aunt Jane, 111, 112, 122; at Southampton after his mother's death, 216, &c.; afterwards (as G. Knight) a celebrated cricketer, 111, _note_ Austen, (Rev.) Henry (i): son of Thomas Austen; held living of West Wickham, 4 Austen, (Rev.) Henry (ii): fourth son of (Rev.) George Austen, born 1771, 20; Jane's favourite brother, 48; contributor to _The Loiterer_, at Oxford, 48; his character, 49; officer in Militia, 107; marries Eliza de Feuillide, 106; in France with her during Peace of Amiens, 173; frequent visits from Jane, 244, 265, 272, 302, 308, 309; death of Eliza, 265; letter to John Murray about _Emma_, 310; severe illness, 309-11; bankruptcy, 325, 332; takes Orders, 332, 333; marries again, 333; his death, 402 Austen, Mrs. Henry: _see_ de Feuillide, Comtesse Austen, (Rev.) James: eldest son of George Austen, born in 1765, 18; Scholar and Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, 46; visits the de Feuillides in France, 39; returns to Oxford and edits _The Loiterer_, 47; his share in forming mind of Jane, 46; writes prologues, &c., for plays, 64, 65; marries (i) Anne Mathew, 72; curate at Overton, then at Deane, 72; birth of daughter Anna, 72, 73; death of wife, 73; marries (ii) Mary Lloyd, 73, 104; Mrs. Austen's letter to her, 73; birth of son, 113; visits Godmersham, 204, &c.; declines a living on grounds of conscience, 223; hopeless letter to his son on Aunt Jane's illness, 392; dies two years after his sister, 402 Austen, Jane (the novelist), (_see also_ under names of books): younger daughter of (Rev.) George Austen, born December 16, 1775, 22; lessons at Oxford and Southampton, 25; dangerous illness, 25; school at Reading, 26; education at home, 29; politics and patriotism, 29, 30; first writings, _Mystery_, 53-5; _Evelyn_ and _Kitty_, 55, opinion on early writing, 57, 58; visit to Uncle Francis at Sevenoaks, 58; Phila Walter's impression, 58, 59; Sir E. Brydges and (later) Eliza admire Jane, 60, 61; probable date of Zoffany portrait, 62-3; theatricals at Steventon, 63-6; verses to Mary and Martha Lloyd, 70; writes _Elinor and Marianne_ and _Lady Susan_, 80, 81; her own letters begin in 1796; their nature and limitations, 81-3; frequent to Cassandra, from p. 109; friendship with S. Blackall (?), Fellow of Emmanuel College, 85, 86; with T. Lefroy (afterwards Chief Justice), 87-9; romance in the west, and sad end, 89, 90; Sir F. H. Doyle's impossible story, 91; embarrassing incident at Steventon, 92-4; visit to Rowling, 99-104; death of Cassandra's lover, 104-5; mother and sisters at Bath, 105; death of Jane Williams, 108; first visit to Godmersham, 109; caps, 116; balls at Basingstoke, 119, 143; at Kempshot, 123; Jane at Bath with Edward, &c., 127; Mrs. Leigh Perrot's trouble, 131-140; great storm at Steventon, 147; letter to Martha, 148; ball at Hurstbourne, 150; Jane at Ibthorp, 153; grief at leaving Steventon, 155; begins life at Bath (Paragon), 165-72; ball, 167; summer (prob.) at Sidmouth, 172; they settle in Bath (Sydney Terrace), 172; prob. at Dawlish in 1802, 173; prob. at Ramsgate in 1803, 174; sells _Northanger Abbey_ and writes _Watsons_, 174, 175; visits Lyme, 176; death of Mrs. Lefroy, 180; death of Jane's father, 180-2; letters to Frank, 180, 181; generosity of brothers, 182; Austens leave Bath for Clifton, 194; visit to Stoneleigh, 194-7; settle at Southampton (Castle Square), 197, 202; visit to Chawton, 203; to Godmersham, 204; death of Mrs. E. Austen, 209; her two eldest boys with Jane, 209-19; offer of a home at Chawton, 216; balls at Southampton, 222, &c.; move to Chawton, 235, 242; her character, appearance, tastes, &c., 237-42; visits to H. Austen and Catherine Hill, 244-51; publication of _Sense and Sensibility_, 255; visit at Steventon, 256; publication of _Pride and Prejudice_, 257; death of Eliza, and visit to Henry, 265; Knights at Chawton House again, 269; last visit to Godmersham, 276, &c.; taking London on the way, 272, &c.; literary work, 290; three times in London in 1814, 302, 304, 308; publication of _Mansfield Park_, 302; visit at Bookham, 304; Knights at Chawton, 302; in London for publication of _Emma_, 309; Henry's illness, 309-11; her own health suffers, 311; correspondence with Mr. Clarke, and visit to Carlton House, 312, 313, 319-324; correspondence with Mr. J. Murray, 310, 314, 318, 319; with Lady Morley, 326; Walter Scott's article in _Quarterly_, 326-328; Henry's bankruptcy, 332; writes out opinions on _Emma_, 328, &c.; composition of _Persuasion_, 333; imaginary novel, 337-40; advises Fanny Knight on love affair, 342, &c.; advises Anna on a novel, 353, &c.; letters to Caroline, 363, &c.; visit to Cheltenham, 373; failing health, 371, &c.; cheerful tone in autumn and winter, 375, &c.; begins new novel, January 1817, and writes for seven weeks, 381; letters to Fanny, 382, &c.; makes her will, &c., 384; death of Mr. Leigh Perrot and his will, 384; letter to Charles, 384-6; Caroline's last visit, 386; move to College Street, Winchester, 388, 389; a slight amendment, 389; writes to Edward Austen, 390; hopeless letter of James, 392; his wife goes to Winchester, 392, 393; Jane's patience and resignation, 393, 394; death (on July 18, 1817), and funeral in Cathedral (July 24), described in letter from Cassandra to Fanny, 394, &c.; charm of character and slow growth of fame, 401, 404 Austen, John (i): _d._ 1620, 1 Austen, John (ii): _d._ 1705, 2 Austen, John (iii): _d._ 1704; his wife (Elizabeth Weller) pays debts and brings up large family, 2, 3 Austen, John (iv) and (v): squires of Broadford; about 1807 property comes to another John (vi), descended from Francis Austen (ii), 3, 4 Austen, (Rev.) John Thomas: Senior Wrangler in 1817, 4 Austen, Philadelphia (_see also_ Hancock, T. S.): goes to India, 32; married to T. S. Hancock, 34 Austen, Colonel Thomas: M.P. for Kent, 4; gives away Zoffany portrait, 63 Austen, Thomas: third son of John Austen (iii); his son Henry holds living of West Wickham; descendants, 4 Austen, William (_see also_ Hampson, Rebecca): fourth son of John Austen (iii); marries Rebecca Walter (_née_ Hampson); their children George and Philadelphia; his second wife Susanna Holk, 4 Austens: family characteristics, 51, 52, 67 Austen Leigh, (Rev.) J. E.: author of _Memoir_; known as Edward Austen, 113, _note_, 256, _note_; his birth in 1798, 113, &c.; visit to Godmersham, 206; characteristics, 364, 368; visit to Chawton, 374; leaves Winchester for Oxford, 377; writes stories, 374, 378; last letter from Aunt Jane, 390; at funeral, for his father, 397; took the name of Leigh on succeeding to Scarlets; wrote _Memoir_, 404 BIGG, Alethea: one of the three sisters (the others, Elizabeth--Mrs. Heathcote, Catherine--Mrs. Hill), great friends of Jane and Cassandra, 68; their father B. Wither of Manydown, 68; Jane stays with Catherine at Streatham, 251; letter to Alethea, 379 Blackall, (Rev.) Samuel: Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, 86, 87, _note_; Rector of North Cadbury, 86; friendship with Jane, 85, 86; perhaps identical with Mrs. Lefroy's 'friend,' 85 Brabourne, Lord: edits Jane's letters, 81 Bridges, Elizabeth: _see_ Austen, Edward (i) Broadford: Austen property at Horsmonden, 2, 3; Francis Austen's descendants succeed, 4 Brydges, Sir Egerton (_see also_ Lefroy, Mrs.): notice of Jane as a girl, 60; his book, _Fitz-Albini_, 114; meets Jane at Ramsgate, 174 _Camilla_: Jane subscribes to, 95; alludes to, 100; Warren Hastings's enthusiasm, 275 Campion, Mrs. (Jane Austen), 62 Castle Square: Austens' home in Southampton, 202, 203 _Catherine_: see _Northanger Abbey_ Cawley, Mrs.: takes charge of Jane, &c.; Jane's severe illness and Mrs. Cooper's death, 25 Chandos, Duke of: brother-in-law of Theophilus Leigh, 7 Chawton: Austens' visit to Edward at Chawton House, 203; offer of cottage there, 216; first sight of it, 220; they settle there, Chap. XIV; description of village, 236; of cottage, 237; Jane leaves it for Winchester, 388 Cheltenham: family visits to, 373 Cholmeley, Jane: _see_ Leigh Perrot, James Chute, W. J. C.: of The Vyne, M.P. and M.F.H., neighbour at Steventon, 68 Clarke, (Rev.) J. S.: Librarian at Carlton House; Jane's correspondence with, 312, 313, 319-24 Cooke, (Rev.) Samuel, D.D.: Rector of Little Bookham, 19; marries daughter of Theophilus Leigh, Master of Balliol, 19; Jane's godfather, 22; George C. a well-known Oxford tutor, 186-8; George and his sister Mary at the H. Austens', 247; Jane's visit to Bookham, 304; Mary Cooke on heroines, 338 Cooper, Dr. E.: Rector of Whaddon and Sonning; marries Jane Leigh (sister of Mrs. G. Austen), 18; their children, 19; death of Mrs. Cooper, at Bath, 25, 39; death of Dr. C. at Sonning, 77 Cooper, E.: son of Dr. E. Cooper, 19; marries Caroline Lybbe Powys, 77; takes living of Hamstall-Ridware, 124 Cooper, Jane (Lady Williams): daughter of Dr. E. Cooper, 19; with Jane and Cassandra under Mrs. Cawley, 25; at school at Reading, 27; married to Captain T. Williams, 77; killed in a carriage accident, 108 Cravens: Mrs. Craven the harsh mother of Mrs. Fowle, Mrs. Lloyd, &c., 69; Lord Craven takes his cousin, T. Fowle, as Chaplain to West Indies; T. F. dies there, 79, 104-5 Crosby, Messrs.: purchasers of _Northanger Abbey_, 174-5; Jane's unsuccessful attempt to secure publication, 230-4; buys MS. back, 333 D'ANTRAIGUES: French _émigré_ family whom Jane visits with the H. Austens, 250 Dawlish: Austens' visit to, in 1802, 173, 354 Day, Thomas: author of _Sandford and Merton_, friend of the Leigh Perrots, 126 De Feuillide, Comtesse (Eliza Hancock), (_see also_ Austen, (Rev.) Henry (ii)): daughter of T. S. Hancock and Philadelphia (Austen), 34; godchild of Warren Hastings, 34; his generosity, 35; Eliza with her mother in England; then Paris, 36; letters to and from Phila Walter, 37-44; married to Comte de Feuillide, 37; in England, 1786; her son (Hastings) born, 39, 40; gaieties, 40; visit to Austens at Oxford, 41; illness and death of Mrs. Hancock, 42, 43; the Comte in difficulties in France, 44; guillotined, 45; Eliza married to Henry Austen, 106; death of Hastings de F., 108; death of Eliza, 265 Deane Rectory: G. Austen, Rector of, from 1773, 17 Digweeds: principal tenants at Steventon, 13; share with Austens deputation of the Manor, 52 Dorchester, Lady: gave a ball at Kempshot, 123 Doyle, Sir F. H.: story in his reminiscences about Jane, 91 Dunford, Ben (postilion): letter to Mr. Leigh Perrot on Mrs. L. P.'s trouble, 135 EDGEWORTH, R. L.: neighbour at Scarlets; experiments, 126; letter on Mrs. L. P.'s acquittal, 139 _Elinor and Marianne_: sketch for _Sense and Sensibility_, in letters, 80 Elliott, Mary: probably a friend of Philadelphia Austen, 33; perhaps Mrs. Buchanan, first wife of Warren Hastings, and link between Hastings and the Hancocks, 34; died 1759, 33 _Emma_: Jane Austen's fourth published novel, December 1815, 318-24; begun Jan. 1814, 306; localities discussed, 302; finished March 1815, 306; description, 306-7; preparing for press, 309; Walter Scott's article on, in the _Quarterly_, 326; private opinions of friends, 328-31 _Evelyn_: early work of Jane, 55 _First Impressions_: original of _Pride and Prejudice_, 96; G. Austen's unsuccessful attempt to sell it, 97, 98 Fowles (_for_ T. Fowle _see_ Austen, Cassandra): Fowles at Kintbury, 69, 373 GAMBIER, Admiral: at the Admiralty, 117; writes to G. Austen, 118; F. Austen, his flag-captain, 174 Gibson, Mary: _see_ Austen, (Sir) Francis Godmersham: given up to Edward Austen by Mrs. Knight, 75, 76 Goodnestone: the Bridges' place; Jane dancing there, 101; Jane and Cassandra there, one after the other, 189-91 Gregory, Mrs.: shopwoman at Bath, 131 HADEN, Mr.: doctor attending Henry Austen; his friendship with Fanny, 309, &c. Hampson, Rebecca: daughter of Sir G. H.; married (i) to James Walter, (ii) to William Austen, her children, 4; her niece, Miss Payne, 251 _note_ Hamstall-Ridware: living given by Mrs. Leigh to E. Cooper, 124 Hancock, Eliza: _see_ de Feuillide, Comtesse Hancock, Tysoe Saul: surgeon in India; marries Philadelphia Austen there, 34; their daughter Betsy (Eliza), 34; Hancocks' return home, 35; H. returns to India; assisted by Hastings; dies in 1775, 35; Philadelphia and Betsy then in England, 36 Harpsden: _see_ Leigh, (Rev.) Thomas (i) Harwoods: neighbours at Steventon, 68; Earle Harwood's accident, 146 Hastings, George: son of Warren H., under charge of G. Austen; with him on wedding tour, 10; dies young, 10 Hastings, Warren: marries Mrs. Buchanan, 33; his son George, under charge of Austens, dies early, 10, 33, 34; generosity to Hancocks, 35; Hancocks, &c. at his trial, 41; Eliza visits him near Windsor, 41; his acquittal, 79; letter from Eliza announcing her marriage to Henry Austen, 107; admiration of _Pride and Prejudice_, 274; of _Camilla_, 275 Heathcote, Mrs. (_see also_ Bigg, Alethea), (Elizabeth Bigg): married to Mr. Heathcote, and mother of Sir W. H., 68; kindness to Jane in illness, 389, 393 Heathcote, Rt. Hon. Sir William, Bart.: of Hursley Park, M.P. for Oxford, 68, 69 Holders: of Ashe, neighbours at Steventon, 68; Jane dines there, 147, 162 IBTHORP: home of Lloyds, 69; Jane there, 153 JEFFREY, Mr.: kept awake by _Emma_, 331 KIPPINGTON: property near Sevenoaks bought by Motley Austen; Colonel Austen, M.P., lived there, 4, 63 _Kitty, or the Bower_: early work of Jane, 55, 56 Knatchbull, Lady: _see_ Austen, Fanny Knight, Edward: son of Edward Austen (i); took the name of Knight, 256; with Jane at Southampton after his mother's death, 216, &c.; in Scotland with his uncle Henry, 279 Knight, Thomas (i): of Godmersham; distant cousin of G. Austen, gives him living of Steventon, 5 Knight, Thomas (ii), (_see also_ Knight, Mrs. T.): adopts Edward Austen, 47 Knight, Mrs. T. (Catherine Knatchbull, widow of above): surrenders property to Edward Austen in 1797, 74-6; her kindness to Austen family, 48, 207; on her death Edward takes the name of Knight, 256 _Lady Susan_: early work of Jane, in letters, published in _Memoir_, 80, 81; she never wrote in letters again, but used them freely, 81 Lances: exchange of visits with, at Southampton, 199; together at a ball, 228 Lansdowne, Marquis of (i): second Marquis; Austens rent a house in Castle Square, Southampton, close to him, 203; his death, 211 Lansdowne, Marquis of (ii): half-brother of (i); the Statesman, and an admirer of Jane's writings, 203 Latournelle, Mrs.: her school at Reading, 26, 27, Cassandra and Jane there, 26-8; easy discipline, 27. _See also_ St. Quentins; Sherwood, Mrs. Lefroy, Ben: marries Anna Austen, November 1814, 353; they live at Hendon, 361; at Wyards, 362 Lefroy, Mrs.: wife of Rector of Ashe, sister of Sir Egerton Brydges; did much for Jane, 71; died by fall from horse, 71, 180; Jane's verses in her memory, 72 Lefroy, Tom (afterwards Chief Justice): his friendship with Jane in 1796, &c., 87, 88; his remembrance of her, 89 Leigh, Cassandra (_see also_ Austen, (Rev.) George); daughter of Leigh, (Rev.) Thomas (i), 7; marriage, 10; character, 16; story of journey on a waggon, 17; illness at Bath and verses to Bowen, 172-3; generosity of sons on death of husband, 182; letter from Stoneleigh, 196; last visit to Steventon, 256, 257; hopeful letters during Jane's illness, 391, 392; letter to Anna after Jane's death, 398; lives on till 1827, 257, 402 _Leigh Chronicle_, quoted, 6-9, 25 Leigh, Hon. Mary: life-tenant of Stoneleigh, dies 1806, 194; her brother's curious will, 195 Leigh, Theophilus: squire of Adlestrop, husband of Mary Brydges, 7; his government of his sons, 7, 8. _See also_ Chandos, Duke of Leigh, (Rev.) Theophilus: Master of Balliol, 7; his witty speeches and long life, 7, 8 Leigh, (Sir) Thomas: Lord Mayor when Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed, 6; Leighs of Adlestrop and of Stoneleigh descended from him, 6 Leigh, (Rev.) Thomas (i): Rector of Harpsden, father of Cassandra Austen, 7; his gentle character, 8; his wife, Jane Walker, descended from the Perrots, 9 Leigh, Thomas (ii): nephew of (i); succeeded to Stoneleigh, 195; the Austens stay with him there, 195-7 Leigh Perrot, James (_see also_ Perrots): son of Rev. Thomas Leigh (of Harpsden), 9; succeeded to Perrot property, and sold it, 9, 10; bought Scarlets, 10, 18, 126; often at Bath (Paragon), 127; marries Jane Cholmeley, 10; Mrs. L. P. accused of stealing lace at Bath, 132; committed and imprisoned, 132; Mrs. Austen offered to send one or both daughters to be with her, 134; trial at Taunton, 135, 138; acquittal, 138; Mrs. Austen and Jane stay at Paragon in 1801, 165; claim to succeed to Stoneleigh compromised, 195, 196; Mr. L. P. loses money by Henry Austen's bankruptcy, 332; his death and will, 384, &c. Lloyds (_see also_ Austen, (Rev.) James): Mrs. Lloyd (Martha Craven) lived at Deane, then at Ibthorp, 69; her daughters, Eliza (Fowle), Martha, and Mary, 69; Jane's gift to Mary with verses, 69, 70; verses to Martha, 70; Mary's marriage to James Austen, 73; Jane's visit to Ibthorp, 153; Cassandra there at death of Mrs. Lloyd, 183, &c.; Martha to live with the Austens, 188; Martha married to Francis Austen, 74, 402 _Loiterer, The_: periodical conducted by James Austen at Oxford, 47; Henry writes in it, 48 Lybbe Powys, Caroline: _see_ Cooper, Edward Lyfords: Hants doctors, 115, 355; one attends Jane in her last illness, 388, &c. Lyme: Jane there with parents in 1804, 176; identification of places in _Persuasion_, 177 _Mansfield Park_: Jane Austen's third published novel, May 1814; mentioned during composition, 258, 259, 261; Frank's ships mentioned in it, 272, 280; finished, 290; Henry reading it on the way to London, 291-6; published in May 1814, 296; description, 296-8; first edition sold out, 296; second edition (Murray), 308; opinions of two friends upon, 332 Mapletons: friends at Bath, 129; death of Marianne M., 169, 170 Marboeuf, Marquise de: accused by Revolutionists; Comte de Feuillide befriends her and shares her fate, 44, 45 Mathew, Anne: _see_ Austen, (Rev.) James Mathew, General: father of first Mrs. James Austen, 72; his generosity, 73 Mitford, Mary Russell: at the St. Quentins' school in London, 27; unflattering views of Jane, 84, 300; gradually modified, 301, _note_ Moore, Sir John: allusions to him and Battle of Corunna, 224, 228, 229 Morley, Countess of: corresponds with Jane, 326 Murray, John: publishes _Emma_, 309; letter from Henry Austen, 310; letters from Jane, 314, 318, 319; publishes second edition of _Mansfield Park_, 308, 318 Musgrave, Mrs.: godmother of Jane, 22 _Mystery, The_: very early work of Jane, 53 NELSON, Lord: Francis Austen conveys a message to, 160; his admiration for him, 193 _Northanger Abbey_: earlier of Jane Austen's two posthumous novels, published in 1818, 403; first version of, 96; description, 96-7; sold (after revision) in 1803, 96; to Messrs. Crosby of London, 174-5; attempt to secure publication (under name _Susan_), 230-4; MS. recovered, 333; doubt about publishing (under name _Catherine_), 336, 337 PALMER, Fanny: _see_ Austen, Charles Perrots: well-known in Oxon and Wales, 9; property of one branch (Northleigh) comes to James Leigh (Perrot), 9; through this descent Austens are 'founder's kin' at St. John's, Oxford, 9; James L. P. sells Northleigh and buys Scarlets, 10 _Persuasion_: later of Jane Austen's two posthumous novels, published, 1818, 403; begun 1815, 333; finished, and end re-written, 1816, 334, 335; probably intended to be published with _Northanger Abbey_ (as it eventually was), 336; author's opinion on it, 336 Portrait of Jane as a girl: _see_ Zoffany Portsmouth, Earl of: as Lord Lymington, a pupil at Steventon, 21; a neighbour, 68; courteous message to Cassandra, 144; ball at Hurstbourne, 150 _Pride and Prejudice_ (see also _First Impressions_): Jane's second published novel, January 1813, 257; read aloud at Chawton, 260; &c.; author's own comments, 260-3; description of, 263-5; Jane looks out for pictures of Mrs. Bingley and Mrs. Darcy, 267-9; Warren Hastings's admiration, 275; Henry divulges secret of authorship, 281; second edition, 289, 290; young Fox's admiration, 370 RAMSGATE: Francis Austen there, raising a corps, 174; Jane perhaps there in 1803, 174 Rice, (Rev.) Morland: owner of Zoffany portrait, 63 Rowden, Miss: _see_ St. Quentins, the Russell, Miss (Mrs. Mitford): mother of Mary Russell Mitford, 84, 300; her father Rector of Ashe, 1729-83, 17 ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, Oxford: George Austen, Scholar and Fellow there, 4, 5; his sons James and Henry there, 39, 41, 46 St. Quentins, the: chiefly manage Mrs. Latournelle's school at Reading, 26; move to London, then to Paris; assisted by Miss Rowden, 27; M. R. Mitford and Fanny Kemble educated by them, 27; also Miss Landon, and Lady Caroline Lamb, 305 'Sanditon': name given to Jane's first chapters of a new work, 381, _note_; description, 381, 382 Scarlets: home of the Leigh Perrots, 10, 18, 126, 384 Scott, Sir Walter: writes article in _Quarterly_ on _Emma_, 326 _Sense and Sensibility_: Jane Austen's first published novel; sketch for, in letters called _Elinor and Marianne_, 79, 80; early version of, 96; resumed on settling at Chawton, 242; in hands of printer, April 1811, 244; comes out at end of October, 254; description of, 243, 244; its publication a secret, 254; its success, 255, 256; second edition, 290 Sherwood, Mrs.: as Miss Butt, at Mrs. Latournelle's school at Reading; her description of it, 26, 27 Ships (in which Frank or Charles served): the _Unicorn_, 78; the _Triton_, 103; the _Tamar_, 121; the _Peterel_, 121, &c.; the _Endymion_, 125; the _Neptune_, 174; the _Leopard_, 192; the _Canopus_, 192; the _St. Albans_, 203; the _Elephant_, 270; the _Namur_, 284, _note_; the _Phoenix_, 369 Southampton: Austens settle there, 197; house in Castle Square, 198; description of surroundings, 202, 203; they leave Southampton, 229 Steventon Rectory: given to G. Austen, 5; description of, 11-15; G. Austen and family live there (or occasionally at Deane) till 1801, 17, 155, &c.; leave it for Bath, 164; Cassandra and Jane visit the James Austens there, 92, 93; Mrs. G. Austen visits it for the last time, 256 Stoneleigh: visit to, 194; Mr. Leigh Perrot's claim to property compromised, 195 Stringer, Jane, sister of John Austen (iii): one of her descendants married to Thomas Knight (i) of Godmersham, 2 _Susan_: see _Northanger Abbey_ TAUNTON: Mrs. Leigh Perrot tried and acquitted there, 135, &c. Theatricals at Steventon: names of pieces, prologues &c., 63-6; Jane's share unknown, 66 Trafalgar: Frank Austen just misses battle, 192, 193 WALKER, Jane: _see_ Leigh, (Rev.) Thomas (i) Walter, (Rev.) Henry: son of (Rev.) James W., 6; mathematician and scholar, 6, 259; known at Court, 6 Walter, (Rev.) James: son of W. H. Walter, met his death in the hunting-field, aged eighty-four, 5 Walter, Philadelphia: cousin and correspondent of Eliza de Feuillide, 5; letters to and from, 38-44, 58, 59, 61, 65, 104, 105 Walter, William Hampson: elder half-brother of (Rev.) George Austen, 4; correspondence between his wife and himself and the Austens, 19-22 _Watsons, The_: commencement of story, written by Jane about 1804, 175; why discontinued, 175, 176 Weller, Elizabeth: _see_ Austen, John (iii) Williams, Captain T.: captured _La Tribune_; knighted, 78; marries (i) Jane Cooper, who was killed in a carriage accident, 77, 108; (ii) Miss Whapshare, 152, 154 Winchester: Jane moves there for advice, 388; lodges in College Street, 389; dies there, and is buried in the Cathedral, 396, 397, 399 ZOFFANY: painter of (believed) portrait of Jane as a girl, _frontispiece_, 62; its history, 63 PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER LONDON AND ETON * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Page 29, "tell" changed to "tells" (author tells us) Page 159, repeated text was deleted. The original reads: likely spot the very few which conducted him to the door of the assembly room in the Inn, where there happened to be a Ball on the night of their arrival; a likely spot enough for the discovery of a Charles: but I am glad to say that he was not of Pages 211-212, a section of repeated text was deleted. The original reads: She was sensible, even-tempered, affectionate, and conscientious. She did indeed prove 'almost another sister' to Jane, even-tempered, affectionate, and conscientious. She did indeed prove 'almost another sister' to Jane, who, as Cassandra Page 389, "fron" changed to "front" (the front wall) Page 425, "Fénéon" changed to "Fénélon" (Par. F. Fénélon) Page 445, "de Feuillide, Comtesse de" changed to "de Feuillide, Comtesse" Some references in the index were lacking page numbers. These have been provided as follows: Under Austen, Fanny in London during her uncle Henry's illness, 213; Austen, (Sir) Francis (_see also_ Ships): takes news to Nelson and captures _Ligurienne_, 160; appointed to _Leopard_ (under Admiral Louis), 192; Austen, (Rev.) George (i): Rector of Steventon, 5; Austen, Jane (the novelist) death of Mr. Leigh Perrot and his will, 384; The following words were inconsistently hyphenated. This was retained to mimic the spelling in the original letters. apiece/a-piece bedroom/bed-room bookcase/book-case commonplace/common-place deathbed/death-bed disinclination/dis-inclination everyday/every-day handwriting/hand-writing playfellows/play-fellows postchaise/post-chaise surname/sur-name twelvemonth/twelve-month Punctuation in the letter on page 135 was retained as printed. (me. the) 
37888	----	[Illustration: REV. PATRICK BRONTË.] CHARLOTTE BRONTË. A Monograph. BY T. WEMYSS REID. _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._ London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1877. [_All Rights Reserved._] _THIRD EDITION._ CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE LORD HOUGHTON, D.C.L. F.R.S. &c. THIS MEMORIAL OF A LIFE WHICH HAS ADDED A NEW GLORY TO THE LITERARY HISTORY OF YORKSHIRE IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED BY HIS GRATEFUL FRIEND THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. I have spoken so freely in the opening chapter of this Monograph of the circumstances under which it has been written, that very little need be said by way of introduction here. This attempt to throw some fresh light upon the character of one of the most remarkable women of our age has not been a task lightly taken up, or hastily performed. The life and genius of Charlotte Brontë had long engaged my attention before I undertook, at the request of the lady to whom I am indebted for most of the original materials I have employed in these pages, the work which I have now completed. In executing that work I have had ample reason to feel and acknowledge my own deficiencies. With the knowledge that I was treading in the footsteps of so consummate a literary artist as Mrs. Gaskell, I have been compelled to refrain from writing not a few of the chapters in Charlotte Brontë's life which are necessary to a complete acquaintance with her character, simply because they had been written so well already. And whilst I necessarily shrink from any appearance of rivalry with Charlotte Brontë's original biographer, I have been additionally oppressed by the feeling that the pen which can do full justice to one of the most moving and noble stories in English literature has not yet been found. But I have been sustained both by the sympathy of many friends, known and unknown, who share my feelings with regard to the Brontës, and by the invaluable assistance rendered to me by those who were intimately acquainted with the household at Haworth Parsonage. Foremost among these must be mentioned Miss Ellen Nussey, the schoolfellow and life-long friend of Charlotte Brontë, who has freely placed at my disposal all the letters and other materials she possessed from which any light could be thrown upon the career of her old companion, and who has in addition aided me with much valuable counsel and advice in the decision of many difficult points. Miss Wooler, who was Charlotte's attached teacher, and who still happily survives in a green old age, has also placed me under obligations by her readiness to supply me with her pupil's letters to herself. Nor must I omit to mention my indebtedness to Lord Houghton for information upon questions which could only be decided by those who met "Currer Bell" during her brief visits to London at a time when she was one of the literary lions of society. The additions made in this volume to the Monograph as it originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ are numerous and considerable. It should be mentioned that a few of the letters now published (about twenty) were printed some years ago in an American magazine now extinct. The remainder, and by far the larger portion, will be entirely new to readers alike in England and the United States. HEADINGLEY HILL, LEEDS, _February, 1877_. [Illustration: In Memory of Maria, wife of the Rev'd P. Brontë. A.B., Minister of Haworth. She died Sept'r 15th, 1821, in the 59th year of her age. Also of Maria, their daughter; who died May 6th, 1825, in the 12th year of her age. Also of Elizabeth, their Daughter; who died June 15th, 1825, in the 11th year of her age. Also of Patrick Branwell, their son; who died Sept'r 24th, 1848, aged 31 years. Also of Emily Jane, their daughter; who died Dec'r 19th, 1848, aged 30 years. Also of Anne, their daughter; who died May 28th, 1849, aged 29 years. She was buried at the Old Church, Scarborough. Also of Charlotte, their daughter; wife of the Rev'd A. B. Nicolls, B.A. She died March 31st, 1855, in the 39th year of her age. Also of the aforementioned Rev'd P. Brontë, A.B., who died June 7th, 1861, in the 85th year of his age; having been Incumbent of Haworth for upwards of 41 years. "_The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ._" 1 Cor. xv. 56, 57. THE NEW BRONTË TABLET.] CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY 1 Mrs. Gaskell's "Memoir"--Charlotte Brontë's Letters. CHAPTER II. THE STORY OF "JANE EYRE" 7 "Jane Eyre:" its Publication and Popularity; Unfavourable Criticisms --Mr. Thackeray and "Rochester"--Loose Gossip--The Truth. CHAPTER III. EARLY HISTORY OF THE BRONTËS 14 Charlotte Brontë's Surroundings: the True Charm of her Story-- Haworth--Mr. Brontë: his Characteristics and Eccentricities--The Brontë Children--Charlotte's Escape to the Golden City--Juvenile Efforts--"The Play of the Islanders." CHAPTER IV. THE FAMILY AT HAWORTH 29 Charlotte and her Friend--Bolton Bridge--A Family Sketch--Shyness of the Sisters--Varying Moods--The Youthful Politician--Branwell Brontë--Emily--Anne. CHAPTER V. LIFE AS A GOVERNESS 45 Governess Life--A Mental Struggle--First offer of Marriage--Sympathy with others--Trials of her own Life. CHAPTER VI. THE TURNING-POINT 57 The Storm and Stress Period--Not what the World supposes it to have been--Visit to Brussels: its Influence upon her Life-- Disillusioned--Return Home--A Fallen Idol--A Pleasant Meeting --Branwell's Disgrace. CHAPTER VII. AUTHORSHIP AND BEREAVEMENT 73 Branwell's Fall--Publication of the Poems--Emily's Poetry-- Novel-writing begun--"The Professor"--"Wuthering Heights"-- "Agnes Grey"--"Jane Eyre"--The Secret of the Authorship-- Growth in Power--Branwell's Death--Decline and Death of Emily--Death of Anne. CHAPTER VIII. "SHIRLEY" 99 The Bitterness of Bereavement--Visit to London--Meets Thackeray --Authors and Critics--"Shirley" published: its Reception by the Critics--Husbands and Wives--An Invitation. CHAPTER IX. LONELINESS AND FAME 112 Life at Home--Rumours of Marriage--Edits the Works of her Sisters --An offer of Marriage--Mr. Thackeray's Lectures--The Crystal Palace. CHAPTER X. "VILLETTE" 127 "Villette" begun--Life and Letters whilst writing it--Great Depression of Spirits--Difficulty in writing--"Lucy Snowe"-- "Villette" finished: its Private Reception; the Public Verdict: Waiting for _The Times_. CHAPTER XI. MARRIAGE AND DEATH 148 A Secret History--Mr. Nicholls--Offer of Marriage--Mr. Brontë's Opposition--A Cruel Struggle--Mr. Nicholls leaves Haworth--The High Church Party and "Villette"--Miss Martineau--A Trip to Scotland--Brighter Prospects--Engaged to Mr. Nicholls--New Out-look upon Life--The Wedding--Married Life--The Last Christmas--Illness and Death. CHAPTER XII. POSTHUMOUS HONOURS 183 A Nation's Mourning--Charlotte's Humility--Mrs. Gaskell's "Memoir:" Effect produced by it--Letter from Mr. Kingsley--Pilgrims to Haworth--An American Visitor--Death of Mr. Brontë--Devotion of Mr. Nicholls. CHAPTER XIII. THE BRONTË NOVELS 201 The Brontë Novels--"Wuthering Heights:" its Cleverness and Weirdness--Characters of the Story--Emily's Genius--Curious Foreshadowings--Mr. Brontë's Influence on Emily--Anne's Novels --"The Professor." CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION 228 Charlotte's Character--Sufferings and Work. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. REV. PATRICK BRONTË _Frontispiece_ PAGE THE NEW BRONTË TABLET x HAWORTH VILLAGE _Facing_ 18 THE HOUSE THAT CHARLOTTE VISITED 44 THE ROE HEAD SCHOOL _Facing_ 46 HAWORTH PARSONAGE AND GRAVEYARD " 82 THE "FIELD HEAD" OF SHIRLEY " 101 THE "BRIARFIELD" CHURCH OF SHIRLEY " 106 FAC-SIMILE LETTER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË " 134 HAWORTH CHURCH " 172 INTERIOR OF HAWORTH CHURCH " 191 ORGAN LOFT OVER THE BRONTË TABLET AND PEW 200 To the Memory of the Author of "Jane Eyre." Beside her sisters lay her down to rest, By the lone church that stands amid the moors; And let her grave be wet with moorland showers; Let moorland larks sing o'er her mouldering breast! Hers was the keen true spirit, that confest That she was nurtured in no garden bowers, Nor taught to deck her brow with cultured flowers, Nor by the soft and summer wind carest. Her words came o'er us, as in harvest-tide Come the swift rain-clouds o'er her native skies, Scattering the thin sheaves by the heather's side; So fared it with our tame hypocrisies: But lo! the clouds are past, and far and wide The purple ridges glow beneath our eyes. W. H. CHARLTON. _Hesleyside, 1855._ CHARLOTTE BRONTË. I. INTRODUCTORY. It is just twenty years since one of the most fascinating and artistic biographies in the English language was given to the world. Mrs. Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Brontë" no sooner appeared than it took firm possession of the public mind; and it has ever since retained its hold upon all who take an interest in the career of one who has been called, in language which is far less extravagant in reality than in appearance, "the foremost woman of her age." Written with admirable skill, in a style at once powerful and picturesque, and with a sympathy such as only one artist could feel for another, it richly merited the popularity which it gained and has kept. Mrs. Gaskell, however, laboured under one serious disadvantage, which no longer exists in anything like the same degree in which it did twenty years ago. Writing but a few months after Charlotte Brontë had been laid in her grave, and whilst the father to whom she was indebted for so much that was characteristic in her life and genius was still living, Mrs. Gaskell had necessarily to deal with many circumstances which affected living persons too closely to be handled in detail. Even as it was she involved herself in serious embarrassment by some of her allusions to incidents connected more or less nearly with the life of Charlotte Brontë; corrections and retractations were forced upon her, the later editions of the book differed considerably from the first, and at last she was compelled to announce that any further correspondence concerning it must be conducted through her solicitors. Thus she was crippled in her attempt to paint a full-length picture of a remarkable life, and her story was what Mr. Thackeray called it, "necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable." There was, moreover, another matter in which Mrs. Gaskell was at fault. She seems to have set out with the determination that her work should be pitched in a particular key. She had formed her own conception of Charlotte Brontë's character, and with the passion of the true artist and the ability of the practised writer she made everything bend to that conception. The result was that whilst she produced a singularly striking and effective portrait of her heroine, it was not one which was absolutely satisfactory to those who were the oldest and closest friends of Charlotte Brontë. If the truth must be told, the life of the author of "Jane Eyre" was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been. That during the later years in which this wonderful woman produced the works by which she has made her name famous, her career was clouded by sorrow and oppressed by anguish both mental and physical, is perfectly true. That she was made what she was in the furnace of affliction cannot be doubted; but it is not true that she was throughout her whole life the victim of that extreme depression of spirits which afflicted her at rare intervals, and which Mrs. Gaskell has presented to us with so much vividness and emphasis. On the contrary, her letters show that at any rate up to the time of her leaving for Brussels, she was a happy and high-spirited girl, and that even to the very last she had the faculty of overcoming her sorrows by means of that steadfast courage which was her most precious possession, and to which she was so much indebted for her successive victories over trials and disappointments of no ordinary character. Those who imagine that Charlotte Brontë's spirit was in any degree a morbid or melancholy one do her a singular injustice. Intensely reserved in her converse with all save the members of her own household, and the solitary friend to whom she clung with such passionate affection throughout her life, she revealed to these The other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, which were and have remained hidden from the world, but which must be seen by those who would know what Charlotte Brontë really was as a woman. Alas! those who knew her and her sisters well during their brief lives are few in number now. The Brontës who plucked the flower of fame out of the thorny waste in which their lots were cast survive in their books and in Mrs. Gaskell's biography. But the Brontës, the women who lived and suffered thirty years ago, and whose characters were instinct with so rare and lofty a nobility, so keen a sensitiveness, so pure a nobility, are known no longer. Yet one mode of making acquaintance with them is still open to some among us. From her school-days down to the hour in which she was stretched prostrate in her last sickness, Charlotte Brontë kept up the closest and most confidential intercourse with her one life-long friend. To that friend she addressed letters which may be counted by hundreds, scarcely one of which fails to contain some characteristic touch worthy of the author of "Villette." No one can read this remarkable correspondence without learning the secret of the writer's character; none, as I believe, can read it without feeling that the woman who "stole like a shadow" into the field of English literature in 1847, and in less than eight years after stole as noiselessly away, was truer and nobler even than her works, truer and nobler even than that masterly picture of her life for which we are indebted to Mrs. Gaskell. These letters lie before me as I write. Here are the faded sheets of 1832, written in the school-girl's hand, filled with the school-girl's extravagant terms of endearment, yet enriched here and there by sentences which are worthy to live--some of which have already, indeed, taken their place in the literature of England; and here is the faint pencil note written to "my own dear Nell" out of the writer's "dreary sick-bed," which was so soon to be the bed of death! Between the first letter and that last sad note what outpourings of the mind of Charlotte Brontë are embodied in this precious pile of cherished manuscript! Over five-and-twenty years of a blameless life this artless record stretches. So far as Charlotte Brontë's history as a woman, and the history of her family are concerned, it is complete for the whole of that period, the only breaks in the story being those which occurred when she and her friend were together. Of her early literary ventures we find little here, for even to her friend she did not dare in the first instance to betray the novel joys which filled her soul when she at last discovered her true vocation, and spoke to a listening world; but of her later life as an author, of her labours from the day when she owned "Jane Eyre" as the child of her brain, there are constant and abundant traces. Here, too, we read all her secret sorrows, her hopes, her fears, her communings with her own heart. Many things there are in this record too sacred to be given to the world. Even now it is with a tender and a reverent hand that one must touch these "noble letters of the dead;" but those who are allowed to see them, to read them and ponder over them, must feel as I do, that the soul of Charlotte Brontë stands revealed in these unpublished pages, and that only here can we see what manner of woman this really was who in the solitude and obscurity of the Yorkshire hill-parsonage built up for herself an imperishable name, enriched the literature of England with treasures of priceless value, and withal led for nearly forty years a life that was made sacred and noble by the self-repression and patient endurance which were its most marked characteristics. Mrs. Gaskell has done her work so well that the world would scarcely care to listen to a mere repetition of the Brontë story, even though the story-teller were as gifted as the author of "Ruth" herself. But those who have been permitted to gain a new insight into Charlotte Brontë's character, those who are allowed to command materials of which the biographer of 1857 could make no use, may venture to lay a tribute-wreath of their own upon the altar of this great woman's memory--a tribute-wreath woven of flowers culled from her own letters. And it cannot be that the time is yet come when the name or the fame or the touching story of the unique and splendid genius to whom we owe "Jane Eyre," will fall upon the ears of English readers like "a tale of little meaning" or of doubtful interest. II. THE STORY OF "JANE EYRE." In the late autumn of 1847 the reading public of London suddenly found itself called to admire and wonder at a novel which, without preliminary puff of any kind, had been placed in its hands. "'Jane Eyre,' by Currer Bell," became the theme of every tongue, and society exhausted itself in conjectures as to the identity of the author, and the real meaning of the book. It was no ordinary book, and it produced no ordinary sensation. Disfigured here and there by certain crudities of thought and by a clumsiness of expression which betrayed the hand of a novice, it was nevertheless lit up from the first page to the last by the fire of a genius the depth and power of which none but the dullest could deny. The hand of its author seized upon the public mind whether it would or no, and society was led captive, in the main against its will, by one who had little of the prevailing spirit of the age, and who either knew nothing of conventionalism, or despised it with heart and soul. Fierce was the revolt against the influence of this new-comer in the wide arena of letters, who had stolen in, as it were in the night, and taken the citadel by surprise. But for the moment all opposition was beaten down by sheer force of genius, and "Jane Eyre" made her way, compelling recognition, wherever men and women were capable of seeing and admitting a rare and extraordinary intellectual supremacy. "How well I remember," says Mr. Thackeray, "the delight and wonder and pleasure with which I read 'Jane Eyre,' sent to me by an author whose name and sex were then alike unknown to me; and how with my own work pressing upon me, I could not, having taken the volumes up, lay them down until they were read through." It was the same everywhere. Even those who saw nothing to commend in the story, those who revolted against its free employment of great passions and great griefs, and those who were elaborately critical upon its author's ignorance of the ways of polite society, had to confess themselves bound by the spell of the magician. "Jane Eyre" gathered admirers fast; and for every admirer she had a score of readers. Those who remember that winter of nine-and-twenty years ago know how something like a "Jane Eyre" fever raged among us. The story which had suddenly discovered a glory in uncomeliness, a grandeur in overmastering passion, moulded the fashion of the hour, and "Rochester airs" and "Jane Eyre graces" became the rage. The book, and its fame and influence, travelled beyond the seas with a speed which in those days was marvellous. In sedate New England homes the history of the English governess was read with an avidity which was not surpassed in London itself, and within a few months of the publication of the novel it was famous throughout two continents. No such triumph has been achieved in our time by any other English author; nor can it be said, upon the whole, that many triumphs have been better merited. It happened that this anonymous story, bearing the unmistakable marks of an unpractised hand, was put before the world at the very moment when another great masterpiece of fiction was just beginning to gain the ear of the English public. But at the moment of publication "Jane Eyre" swept past "Vanity Fair" with a marvellous and impetuous speed which left Thackeray's work in the distant background; and its unknown author in a few weeks gained a wider reputation than that which one of the master minds of the century had been engaged for long years in building up. The reaction from this exaggerated fame, of course, set in, and it was sharp and severe. The blots in the book were easily hit; its author's unfamiliarity with the stage business of the play was evident enough--even to dunces; so it was a simple matter to write smart articles at the expense of a novelist who laid himself open to the whole battery of conventional criticism. In "Jane Eyre" there was much painting of souls in their naked reality; the writer had gauged depths which the plummet of the common story-teller could never have sounded, and conflicting passions were marshalled on the stage with a masterful daring which Shakespeare might have envied; but the costumes, the conventional by-play, the scenery, even the wording of the dialogue, were poor enough in all conscience. The merest playwright or reviewer could have done better in these matters--as the unknown author was soon made to understand. Additional piquancy was given to the attack by the appearance, at the very time when the "Jane Eyre" fever was at its height, of two other novels, written by persons whose sexless names proclaimed them the brothers or the sisters of Currer Bell. Human nature is not so much changed from what it was in 1847 that one need apologise for the readiness with which the reading world in general, and the critical world in particular, adopted the theory that "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" were earlier works from the pen which had given them "Jane Eyre." In "Wuthering Heights" some of the faults of the other book were carried to an extreme, and some of its conspicuous merits were distorted and exaggerated until they became positive blemishes; whilst "Agnes Grey" was a feeble and commonplace tale which it was easy to condemn. So the author of "Jane Eyre" was compelled to bear not only her own burden, but that of the two stories which had followed the successful novel; and the reviewers--ignorant of the fact that they were killing three birds at a single shot--rejoiced in the larger scope which was thus afforded to their critical energy. Here and there, indeed, a manful fight on behalf of Currer Bell was made by writers who knew nothing but the name and the book. "It is soul speaking to soul," cried _Fraser's Magazine_ in December, 1847; "it is not a book for prudes," added _Blackwood_, a few months later; "it is not a book for effeminate and tasteless men; it is for the enjoyment of a feeling heart and critical understanding." But in the main the verdict of the critics was adverse. It was discovered that the story was improper and immoral; it was said to be filled with descriptions of "courtship after the manner of kangaroos," and to be impregnated with a "heathenish doctrine of religion;" whilst there went up a perfect chorus of reprobation directed against its "coarseness of language," "laxity of tone," "horrid taste," and "sheer rudeness and vulgarity." From the book to the author was of course an easy transition. London had been bewildered, and its literary quidnuncs utterly puzzled, when such a story first came forth inscribed with an unknown name. Many had been the rumours eagerly passed from mouth to mouth as to the real identity of Currer Bell. Upon one point there had, indeed, been something like unanimity among the critics, and the story of "Jane Eyre" had been accepted as something more than a romance, as a genuine autobiography in which real and sorrowful experiences were related. Even the most hostile critic of the book had acknowledged that "it contained the story of struggles with such intense suffering and sorrow, as it was sufficient misery to know that any one had conceived, far less passed through." Where then was this wonderful governess to be found? In what obscure hiding-place could the forlorn soul, whose cry of agony had stirred the hearts of readers everywhere, be discovered? We may smile now, with more of sadness than of bitterness, at the base calumnies of the hour, put forth in mere wantonness and levity by a people ever seeking to know some new thing, and to taste some new sensation. The favourite theory of the day--a theory duly elaborated and discussed in the most orthodox and respectable of the reviews--was that Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp were merely different portraits of the same character; and that their original was to be found in the person of a discarded mistress of Mr. Thackeray, who had furnished the great author with a model for the heroine of "Vanity Fair," and had revenged herself upon him by painting him as the Rochester of "Jane Eyre!" It was after dwelling upon this marvellous theory of the authorship of the story that the _Quarterly Review_, with Pecksniffian charity, calmly summed up its conclusions in these memorable words: "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has for some sufficient reason long forfeited the society of her own sex." The world knows the truth now. It knows that these bitter and shameful words were applied to one of the truest and purest of women; to a woman who from her birth had led a life of self-sacrifice and patient endurance; to a woman whose affections dwelt only in the sacred shelter of her home, or with companions as pure and worthy as herself; to one of those few women who can pour out all their hearts in converse with their friends, happy in the assurance that years hence the stranger into whose hands their frank confessions may pass will find nothing there that is not loyal, true, and blameless. There was wonder among the critics, wonder too in the gay world of London, when the secret was revealed, and men were told that the author of "Jane Eyre" was no passionate light-o'-love who had merely transcribed the sad experiences of her own life; but "an austere little Joan of Arc," pure, gentle, and high-minded, of whom Thackeray himself could say that "a great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always." The quidnuncs had searched far and wide for the author of "Jane Eyre;" but we may well doubt whether, when the truth came out at last, they were not more than ever mystified by the discovery that Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë, the young daughter of a country parson in a remote moorland parish of Yorkshire. That such a woman should have written such a book was more than a nine days' wonder; and for the key to that which is one of the great marvels and mysteries of English literature we must go to Charlotte Brontë's life itself. III. EARLY HISTORY OF THE BRONTËS. There is a striking passage in Mr. Greg's "Enigmas of Life," in which the influence of external circumstances upon the inner lives of men and women is dwelt upon somewhat minutely, and, by way of example, the connection between religious "conviction" and an imperfect digestion is carefully traced out. That we are the creatures of circumstance can hardly be doubted, nor that our destinies are moulded, just as the coral reefs are built, by the action of innumerable influences, each in itself apparently trivial and insignificant. But the habit which leads men to find a full explanation of the lives of those who have attained exceptional distinction in the circumstances amid which their lot has been cast cannot be said to be a very wholesome or happy one. Few have suffered more cruelly from this trick than the Brontë family. Graphic pictures have been presented to the world of their home among the hills, and of their surroundings in their early years; whilst the public have been asked to believe that some great shadow of gloom rested over their lives from their birth, and that to this fact, and to the influence of the moors, must be attributed, not only the peculiar bent of their genius, but the whole colour and shape of their lives. Those who are thus determined to account for everything that lies out of the range of common experience would do well, before they attempt to analyse the great mystery of genius, to reveal to us the true cause of the superlative excellence of this or that rare _cru_, the secret which gives Johannisberg or Château d'Yquem its glory in the eyes of connoisseurs. Circumstances apparently have little to do with the production of the fragrance and bouquet of these famous wines; for we know that grapes growing close at hand on similar vines and seemingly under precisely similar conditions, warmed by the same sun, refreshed by the same showers, fanned by the same breezes, produce a wine which is comparatively worthless. When the world has expounded this riddle, it will be time enough to deal with that deeper problem of genius on which we are now too apt to lay presumptuous and even violent hands. The Brontës have suffered grievously from this fashion, inasmuch as their picturesque and striking surroundings have been allowed to obscure our view of the women themselves. We have made a picture of their lives, and have filled in the mere accessories with such pre-Raphaelite minuteness that the distinct individuality of the heroines has been blurred and confused amid the general blaze of vivid colour, the crowd of "telling" points. No individual is to be blamed for this fact. The world, as we have seen, was first introduced to "Currer Bell" and her sisters under romantic circumstances; the lives of those simple, sternly-honest women were enveloped from the moment when the public made their acquaintance in a certain haze of romantic mystery; and when all had passed away, and the time came for the "many-headed beast" to demand the full satisfaction of its curiosity, it would have nothing but the completion of that romance which from the first it had figured in outline for itself. Who then does not know the salient points of that strange and touching story which tells us how the author of "Jane Eyre" lived and died? Who is not acquainted with that grim parsonage among the hills, where the sisters dwelt amidst such uncongenial and even weird influences; living like recluses in the house of a Protestant pastor; associated with sorrow and suffering, and terrible pictures of degrading vice, during their blameless maidenhood; constructing an ideal world of their own, and dwelling in it heedless of the real world which was in motion all around them? Who has not been amused and interested by those graphic pictures of Yorkshire life in the last century, in which the local flavour is so intense and piquant, and which are hardly the less interesting because they relate to an order of things which had passed away entirely long before the Brontës appeared upon the stage? And who has not been moved by the dark tragedy of Branwell Brontë's life, hinted at rather than explicitly stated, in Mrs. Gaskell's story, but yet standing out in such prominence that those who know no better may be forgiven if they regard it as having been the powerful and all-pervading influence which made the career of the sisters what it was? The true charm of the history of the Brontës, however, does not lie in these things. It is not to be found in the surroundings of their lives, remarkable and romantic as they were, but in the women themselves, and in those characteristics of their hearts and their intellects which were independent of the accidents of condition. Charlotte herself would have been the first to repudiate the notion that there was anything strikingly exceptional in their outward circumstances. With a horror of being considered eccentric that amounted to a passion, she united an almost morbid dread of the notice of strangers. If she could ever have imagined that readers throughout the world would come to associate her name, and still more the names of her idolised sisters, with the ruder features of the Yorkshire character, or with such a domestic tragedy as that amid which her unhappy brother's life terminated, her spirit would have arisen in indignant revolt against that which she would have regarded almost in the light of a personal outrage. [Illustration: HAWORTH VILLAGE.] And yet if their surroundings at Haworth had comparatively little to do with the development of the genius of the three sisters, it cannot be doubted that two influences which Mrs. Gaskell has rightly made prominent in her book did affect their characters, one in a minor, and the other in a very marked degree. The influence of the moors is to be traced both in their lives and their works; whilst far more distinctly is to be traced the influence of their father. As to the first there is little to be said in addition to that which all know already. There is a railway station now at Haworth, and all the world therefore can get to the place without difficulty or inconvenience. Yet even to-day, when the engine goes, shrieking past it many times between sunrise and sunset, Haworth is not as other places are. A little manufacturing village, sheltered in a nook among the hills and moors which stretch from the heart of Yorkshire into the heart of Lancashire, it bears the vivid impress of its situation. The moors which lie around it for miles on every side are superb during the summer and autumn months. Then Haworth is in its glory; a gray stone hamlet set in the midst of a vast sea of odorous purple, and swept by breezes which bear into its winding street the hum of the bees and the fragrance of the heather. But it is in the drear, leaden days of winter, when the moors are covered with snow, that we see what Haworth really is. Then we know that this is a place apart from the outer world; even the railway seems to have failed to bring it into the midst of that great West Riding which lies close at hand with its busy mills and multitudes; and the dullest therefore can understand that in the days when the railway was not, and Haworth lay quite by itself, neglected and unseen in its upland valley, its people must have been blessed by some at least of those insular peculiarities which distinguished the villagers of Zermatt and Pontresina before the flood of summer tourists had swept into those comparatively remote crannies of the Alps. Nurtured among these lonely moors, and accustomed, as all dwellers on thinly-peopled hillsides are, to study the skies and the weather, as the inhabitants of towns and plains study the faces of men and women, the Brontës unquestionably drew their love of nature, their affection for tempestuous winds and warring clouds, from their residence at Haworth. But this influence was trivial compared with the hereditary influences of their father's character. Few more remarkable personalities than that of the Rev. Patrick Brontë have obtruded themselves upon the smooth uniformity of modern society. The readers of Mrs. Gaskell's biography know that the incumbent of Haworth was an eccentric man, but the full measure of his eccentricity and waywardness has never yet been revealed to the world. He was an Irishman by birth, but when still a young man he had gone to Yorkshire as a curate, and in Yorkshire he remained to the end of his days. His real name was not Brontë--regarding the origin of which word there was so much unnecessary mystery when his daughter became famous--but Prunty. Born of humble parentage in the parish of Ahaderg, County Down, he was one of a large family, all of whom were said to be remarkable for their physical strength and personal beauty. Patrick Prunty was the most remarkable member of the family, and his talents were early recognised by Mr. Tighe, the rector of Drumgooland. This gentleman undertook part at least of the cost of his education, which was completed at St. John's College, Cambridge. As to the change of name from Prunty to Brontë, many fantastic stories have been told. Amongst them is one which represents the Brontës as having derived their name from that of the Bronterres, an ancient Irish family with which they were connected. The connection may possibly have existed, but there is no doubt upon one point. The incumbent of Haworth in early life bore the name of Prunty, and it was not until very shortly, before he left Ireland for England that he changed it, at the request of his patron, Mr. Tighe, for the more euphonious appellation of Brontë. He appears to have been a strange compound of good and evil. That he was not without some good is acknowledged by all who knew him. He had kindly feelings towards most people, and he delighted in the stern rectitude which distinguished many of his Yorkshire flock. When his daughter became famous, no one was better pleased at the circumstance than he was. He cut out of every newspaper every scrap which referred to her; he was proud of her achievements, proud of her intellect, and jealous for her reputation. But throughout his whole life there was but one person with whom he had any real sympathy, and that person was himself. Passionate, self-willed, vain, habitually cold and distant in his demeanour towards those of his own household, he exhibited in a marked degree many of the characteristics which Charlotte Brontë afterwards sketched in the portrait of the Mr. Helston of "Shirley." The stranger who encountered him found a scrupulously polite gentleman of the old school, who was garrulous about his past life, and who needed nothing more than the stimulus of a glass of wine to become talkative on the subject of his conquests over the hearts of the ladies of his acquaintance. As you listened to the quaintly-attired old man who chatted on with inexhaustible volubility, you possibly conceived the idea that he was a mere fribble, gay, conceited, harmless; but at odd times a searching glance from the keen, deep-sunk eyes warned you that you also were being weighed in the balance by your companion, and that this assumption of light-hearted vanity was far from revealing the real man to you. Only those who dwelt under the same roof knew him as he really was. Among the many stories told of him by his children, there is one relating to the meek and gentle woman who was his wife, and whose lot it was to submit to persistent coldness and neglect. Somebody had given Mrs. Brontë a very pretty dress, and her husband, who was as proud as he was self-willed, had taken offence at the gift. A word to his wife, who lived in habitual dread of her lordly master, would have secured all he wanted; but in his passionate determination that she should not wear the obnoxious garment, he deliberately cut it to pieces, and presented her with the tattered fragments. Even during his wife's lifetime he formed the habit of taking his meals alone; he constantly carried loaded pistols in his pockets, and when excited he would fire these at the doors of the outhouses, so that the villagers were quite accustomed to the sound of pistol-shots at any hour of the day in their pastor's house. It would be a mistake to suppose that violence was one of the weapons to which Mr. Brontë habitually resorted. However stern and peremptory might be his dealings with his wife (who soon left him to spend the remainder of his life in a dreary widowhood), his general policy was to secure his end by craft rather than by force. A profound belief in his own superior wisdom was conspicuous among his characteristics, and he felt convinced that no one was too clever to be outwitted by his diplomacy. He had also an amazing persistency, which led him to pursue any course on which he had embarked with dogged determination. It happened in later years, when his strength was failing, and when at last he began to see his daughter in her true light, that he quarrelled with her regarding the character of one of their friends. The daughter, always dutiful and respectful, found that any effort to stem the torrent of his bitter and unjust wrath when he spoke of the friend who had offended him, was attended by consequences which were positively dangerous. The veins of his forehead swelled, his eyes glared, his voice shook, and she was fain to submit lest her father's passion should prove fatal to him. But when, wounded beyond endurance by his violence and injustice, she withdrew for a few days from her home, and told her father that she would receive no letters from him in which this friend's name was mentioned, the old man's cunning took the place of passion. He wrote long and affectionate letters to her on general subjects; but accompanying each letter was a little slip of paper, which professed to be a note from Charlotte's dog Flossy to his "much-respected and beloved mistress," in which the dog, declaring that he saw "a good deal of human nature that was hid from those who had the gift of language," was made to repeat the attacks upon the obnoxious person which Mr. Brontë dared no longer make in his own character. It was to the care of such a father as this, in the midst of the rude and uncongenial society of the lonely manufacturing village, that six motherless children, five daughters and one son, were left in the year 1821. The parson's children were not allowed to associate with their little neighbours in the hamlet; their aunt, who came to the parsonage after their mother's death, had scarcely more sympathy with them than their father himself; their only friend was the rough but kindly servant Tabby, who pitied the bairns without understanding them, and whose acts of graciousness were too often of such a character as to give them more pain than pleasure. So they grew up strange, lonely, old-fashioned children, with absolutely no knowledge of the world outside; so quiet and demure in their habits that, years afterwards, when they invited some of their Sunday scholars up to the parsonage, and wished to amuse them, they found that they had to ask the scholars to teach them how to play--they had never learned. Carefully secluded from the rest of the world, the little Brontë children found out fashions of their own in the way of amusement, and curious fashions they were. Whilst they were still in the nursery, when the oldest of the family, Maria, was barely nine years old, and Charlotte, the third, was just six, they had begun to take a quaint interest in literature and politics. Heaven knows who it was who first told these wonderful pigmies of the great deeds of a Wellington or the crimes of a Bonaparte; but at an age when other children are generally busy with their bricks or their dolls, and when all life's interests are confined for them within the walls of a nursery, these marvellous Brontës were discussing the life of the Great Duke, and maintaining the Tory cause as ardently as the oldest and sturdiest of the village politicians in the neighbouring inn. There is a touching story of Charlotte at six years old, which gives us some notion of the ideal life led by the forlorn little girl at this time, when, her two elder sisters having been sent to school, she found herself living at home, the eldest of the motherless brood. She had read "The Pilgrim's Progress," and had been fascinated, young as she was, by that wondrous allegory. Everything in it was to her true and real; her little heart had gone forth with Christian on his pilgrimage to the Golden City, her bright young mind had been fired by the Bedford tinker's description of the glories of the Celestial Place; and she made up her mind that she too would escape from the City of Destruction, and gain the haven towards which the weary spirits of every age have turned with eager longing. But where was this glittering city, with its streets of gold, its gates of pearl, its walls of precious stones, its streams of life and throne of light? Poor little girl! The only place which seemed to her to answer Bunyan's description of the celestial town was one which she had heard the servants discussing with enthusiasm in the kitchen, and its name was Bradford! So to Bradford little Charlotte Brontë, escaping from that Haworth Parsonage which she believed to be a doomed spot, set off one day in 1822. Ingenious persons may speculate if they please upon the sore disappointment which awaited her when, like older people, reaching the place which she had imagined to be Heaven, she found that it was only Bradford. But she never even reached her imaginary Golden City. When her tender feet had carried her a mile along the road, she came to a spot where overhanging trees made the highway dark and gloomy; she imagined that she had come to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and, fearing to go forward, was presently discovered by her nurse cowering by the roadside. Of the school-days of the Brontës nothing need be said here. Every reader of "Jane Eyre" knows what Charlotte Brontë herself thought of that charitable institution to which she has given so unenviable a notoriety. There she lost her oldest sister, whose fate is described in the tragic tale of Helen Burns; and it was whilst she was at this place that her second sister, Elizabeth, also died. Only one thing need be added to this dismal record of the stay at Cowan Bridge. During the whole time of their sojourn there, the young Brontës scarcely ever knew what it was to be free from the pangs of hunger. Charlotte was now the head of the little family; the remaining members of which were her brother Branwell and her sisters Emily and Anne. Mrs. Gaskell has given the world a vivid picture of the life which these four survivors from the hardships of Cowan Bridge led between the years 1825 and 1831. They spent those years at Haworth, almost without care or sympathy. Their father saw little in their lot to interest him, nothing to drag him out of his selfish absorption in his own pursuits; their aunt, a permanent invalid, conceived that her duty was accomplished when she had taught them a few lessons and insisted on their doing a certain amount of needlework every day. For the rest they were left to themselves, and thus early they showed the bent of their genius by spending their time in writing novels. Mrs. Gaskell has given us some idea of the character of these juvenile performances in a series of extracts which sufficiently indicate their rare merit. She has, however, paid exclusive attention to Charlotte's productions. All readers of the Brontë story will remember the account of the play of "The Islanders," and other remarkable specimens, showing with what real vigour and originality Charlotte could handle her pen whilst she was still in the first year of her teens; but those few persons who have seen the whole of the juvenile library of the family bear testimony to the fact that Branwell and Emily were at least as industrious and successful as Charlotte herself. Indeed, even at this early age, the _bizarre_ character of Emily's genius was beginning to manifest itself, and her leaning towards weird and supernatural effects was exhibited whilst she composed her first fairy tales within the walls of her nursery. It may be well to bear in mind the frequency with which the critics have charged Charlotte Brontë with exaggerating the precocity of children. What we know of the early days of the Brontës proves that what would have been exaggeration in any other person was in the case of Charlotte nothing but a truthful reproduction of her own experiences. Only one specimen of these earliest writings of the Brontës can be quoted here: it is that to which I have already referred, the play of "The Islanders:" June the 31st, 1829. The play of "The Islanders" was formed in December, 1827, in the following manner. One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snow-storms and high piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candles having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at length broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, "I don't know what to do." This was echoed by Emily and Anne. _Tabby._ Wha, ya may go t' bed. _Branwell._ I'd rather do anything than that. _Charlotte._ Why are you so glum to-night, Tabby? Oh! suppose we had each an island of our own. _Branwell._ If we had, I would choose the Island of Man. _Charlotte._ And I would choose the Isle of Wight. _Emily._ The Isle of Arran for me. _Anne._ And mine shall be Guernsey. We then chose who should be the chief men in our islands. Branwell chose John Bull, Astley Cooper, and Leigh Hunt; Emily, Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart, Johnny Lockhart; Anne, Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, Sir Henry Halford. I chose the Duke of Wellington and two sons, Christopher North and Co., and Mr. Abernethy. Here our conversation was interrupted by the, to us, dismal sound of the clock striking seven, and we were summoned off to bed. IV. THE FAMILY AT HAWORTH. The years have slipped away, and the Brontës are no longer children. They have passed out of that strange condition of premature activity in which their brains were so busy, their lives so much at variance with the lives of others of their age; they have even "finished" their education, according to the foolish phrase of the world, and, having made some acquaintances and a couple of friends at good Miss Wooler's school at Roehead, Charlotte is again at home, young, hopeful, and in her own way merry, waiting with her brother and her sisters till that mystery of life which seems filled with hidden charms to those who still have it all before them shall be revealed. One bright June morning in 1833, a handsome carriage and pair is standing opposite the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Bridge, the spot loved by all anglers and artists who know anything of the scenery of the Wharfe. In the carriage with some companions is a young girl, whose face, figure, and manner may be conjured up by all who have read "Shirley," for this pleasant, comely Yorkshire maiden, as we see her on this particular morning, is identical with the Caroline Helston who figures in the pages of that novel. Miss N---- is waiting for her quondam schoolfellow and present bosom friend, Charlotte Brontë, who is coming with her brother and sisters to join in an excursion to the enchanted site of Bolton Abbey hard by. Presently, on the steep road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go forward unseen, and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dogcart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Brontë esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. But the lad's face is a handsome and a striking one, full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the slightest shade of care, giving one the impression of somebody altogether hopeful, promising, even brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out quotations from his favourite poets, applying them to the lovely scene around him; and with what a mischievous delight, in his superior nerve and mettle, he attempts feats of charioteering which fill the timid heart of the youngest of the party with sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvellous plainness and ugliness, stamped with the brand "home-made" in characters which none can mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding roses, and the ever-musical stream; most of all, perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and the expectation of that coming meeting with her friend, which is so near at hand. Behind sit a pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate regular features, whom the stranger would at once pick out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling Charlotte's. Emily Brontë does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene; how quick she is to note the least prominent of the beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sunshine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedgerows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, meet her brother's ceaseless flood of sparkling words with opposing currents of speech, she utters at times a strange, deep guttural sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of a joy too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during a long summer's day. Suddenly the dogcart rattles noisily into the open space in front of the Devonshire Arms, and the Brontës see the carriage and its occupants. In an instant there is silence; Branwell contrasts his humble equipage with that which already stands at the inn door, and a flush of mortified pride colours his face; the sisters scarcely note this contrast, but to their dismay they see that their friend is not alone, and each draws a long deep breath, and prepares for that fiercest of all the ordeals they know, a meeting with entire strangers. The laughter is stilled; even Branwell's volubility is at an end; the glad light dies out of their eyes, and when they alight and submit to the process of being introduced to Miss N----'s companions, their faces are as dull and commonplace as their dresses. It is no imaginary scene we have been watching. Miss N---- still recalls that painful moment when the merry talk and laughter of her friends were quenched at sight of the company awaiting them, and when throughout a day to which all had looked forward with anticipations of delight, the three Brontës clung to each other or to their friend, scarcely venturing to speak above a whisper, and betraying in every look and word the positive agony which filled their hearts when a stranger approached them. It was this excessive shyness in the company of those who were unfamiliar to them which was the most marked characteristic of the sisters. The weakness was as much physical as moral; and those who suppose that it was accompanied by any morbid depression of spirits, or any lack of vigour and liveliness when the incubus of a stranger's presence was removed, entirely mistake their true character. Unhappily, first impressions are always strongest, and running through the whole of Mrs. Gaskell's story, may be seen the impression produced at her first meeting with Charlotte Brontë by her nervous shrinking and awkwardness in the midst of unknown faces. It was not thus with those who, brought into the closest of all fellowship with her, the fellowship of school society, knew the secrets of her heart far better than did any who became acquainted with her in after life. To such the real Charlotte Brontë, who knew no timidity in their presence, was a bold, clever, outspoken and impulsive girl; ready to laugh with the merriest, and not even indisposed to join in practical jokes with the rest of her schoolfellows. The picture we get in the "Life" is that of a victim to secret terrors and superstitious fancies. The real Charlotte Brontë, when stories were current as to the presence of a ghost in the upper chambers of the old school-house at Roehead, did not hesitate to go up to these rooms alone and in the darkness of a winter's night, leaving her companions shivering in terror round the fire downstairs. When she had left school, and began that correspondence with Miss N---- which is the great source of our knowledge, not merely of the course of her life, but of the secrets of her heart, it must not be supposed that she wrote always in that serious spirit which pervades most of the letters quoted by Mrs. Gaskell. On the contrary, those who have access to the letters will find that even some of the passages given in the "Life" are allied to sentences showing that the frame of mind in which they were written was very different from that which it appears to have been. The following letter, written from Haworth in the beginning of 1835, is an example: Well, here I am as completely separated from you as if a hundred, instead of seventeen, miles intervened between us. I can neither hear you nor see you nor feel you. You are become a mere thought, an unsubstantial impression on the memory, which, however, is happily incapable of erasure. My journey home was rather melancholy, and would have been very much so but for the presence and conversation of my worthy companion. I found him a very intelligent man. He told me the adventures of his sailor's life, his shipwreck and the hurricane he had witnessed in the West Indies, with a much better flow of language than many of far greater pretensions are masters of. I thought he appeared a little dismayed by the wildness of the country round Haworth, and I imagine he has carried back a pretty report of it. What do you think of the course politics are taking? I make this inquiry because I now think you have a wholesome interest in the matter; formerly you did not care greatly about it. B----, you see, is triumphant. Wretch! I am a hearty hater, and if there is any one I thoroughly abhor it is that man. But the Opposition is divided. Red-hots and lukewarms; and the Duke (_par excellence the_ Duke) and Sir Robert Peel show no signs of insecurity, although they have been twice beat. So "_courage, mon amie!_" Heaven defend the right! as the old Cavaliers used to say before they joined battle. Now, Ellen, laugh heartily at all that rodomontade. But you have brought it on yourself. Don't you remember telling me to write such letters to you as I wrote to Mary? There's a specimen! Hereafter should follow a long disquisition on books; but I'll spare you that. Those who turn to Mrs. Gaskell's "Life" will find one of the sentences in this letter quoted, but without the burst of laughter over "all that rodomontade" at the end which shows that Charlotte's interest in politics was not unmingled with the happy levity of youth. Still more striking as an illustration of her true character, with its infinite variety of moods, its sudden transitions from grave to gay, is the letter I now quote: Last Saturday afternoon, being in one of my sentimental humours, I sat down and wrote to you such a note as I ought to have written to none but M----, who is nearly as mad as myself; to-day, when I glanced it over, it occurred to me that Ellen's calm eye would look at this with scorn, so I determined to concoct some production more fit for the inspection of common sense. I will not tell you all I think and feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that I should long ago have been set down by all who know me as a Frenchified fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle; and you have spared me those little sallies of ridicule which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince as if I had been touched with a hot iron; things that nobody else cares for enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them; but they only sting the deeper for concealment, and I'm an idiot. Ellen, I wish I could live with you always, I begin to cling to you more fondly than ever I did. If we had but a cottage and a competency of our own, I do think we might live and love on till death, without being dependent on any third person for happiness. Mrs. Gaskell has made a very partial and imperfect use of this letter, by quoting merely from the words "You have been very kind to me of late," down to "they only sting the deeper for concealment." Thus it will be seen that an importance is given to an evanescent mood which it was far from meriting, and that lighter side to Charlotte's character which was prominent enough to her nearest and dearest friends is entirely concealed from the outer world. Again, I say, we must not blame Mrs. Gaskell. Such sentences as those which she omitted from the letter I have just given are not only entirely inconsistent with that ideal portrait of "Currer Bell" which the world had formed for itself out of the bare materials in existence during the author's lifetime, but are also utterly at variance with Mrs. Gaskell's personal conception of Charlotte Brontë's character, founded upon her brief acquaintance with her during her years of loneliness and fame. The quick transitions which marked her moods in converse with her friends may be traced all through her letters to Miss N----. The quotations I have already made show how suddenly on the same page she passes from gaiety to sadness; and so her letters, dealing as they do with an endless variety of topics, reflect only the mood of the writer at the moment that she penned them, and it is only by reading and studying the whole, not by selecting those which reflect a particular phase of her character, that we can complete the portrait we would fain produce. Here are some extracts from letters which are not to be found in the "Life," and which illustrate what I have said. They were all written between the beginning of 1832 and the end of 1835: Tell M---- I hope she will derive benefit from the perusal of Cobbett's lucubrations; but I beg she will on no account burden her memory with passages to be repeated for my edification, lest I should not fully appreciate either her kindness or their merit, since that worthy personage and his principles, whether private or political, are no great favourites of mine. I am really very much obliged to you--she writes in September, 1832--for your well-filled and _very_ interesting letter. It forms a striking contrast to my brief meagre epistles; but I know you will excuse the utter dearth of news visible in them when you consider the situation in which I am placed, quite out of the reach of all intelligence except what I obtain through the medium of the newspapers, and I believe you would not find much to interest you in a political discussion, or a summary of the accidents of the week.... I am sorry, very sorry, that Miss ---- has turned out to be so different from what you thought her; but, my dearest Ellen, you must never expect perfection in this world; and I know your naturally confiding and affectionate disposition has led you to imagine that Miss ---- was almost faultless.... I think, dearest Ellen, our friendship is destined to form an exception to the general rule regarding school friendships. At least I know that absence has not in the least abated the sisterly affection which I feel towards you. Your last letter revealed a state of mind which promised much. As I read it, I could not help wishing that my own feelings more nearly resembled yours; but unhappily all the good thoughts that enter _my_ mind evaporate almost before I have had time to ascertain their existence. Every right resolution which I form is so transient, so fragile, and so easily broken, that I sometimes fear I shall never be what I ought. I write a hasty line to assure you we shall be happy to see you on the day you mention. As you are now acquainted with the neighbourhood and its total want of society, and with our plain, monotonous mode of life, I do not fear so much as I used to do, that you will be disappointed with the dulness and sameness of your visit. One thing, however, will make the daily routine more unvaried than ever. Branwell, who used to enliven us, is to leave us in a few days, and enter the situation of a private tutor in the neighbourhood of U----. How he will like to settle remains yet to be seen. At present he is full of hope and resolution. I, who know his variable nature and his strong turn for active life, dare not be too sanguine. We are as busy as possible in preparing for his departure, and shirt-making and collar-stitching fully occupy our time. April, 1835. The election! the election! that cry has rung even among our lonely hills like the blast of a trumpet. How has it been round the populous neighbourhood of B----? Under what banner have your brothers ranged themselves? the Blue or the Yellow? Use your influence with them; entreat them, if it be necessary on your knees, to stand by their country and religion in this day of danger!... Stuart Wortley, the son of the most patriotic patrician Yorkshire owns, must be elected the representative of his native province. Lord Morpeth was at Haworth last week, and I saw him. My opinion of his lordship is recorded in a letter I wrote yesterday to Mary. It is not worth writing over again, so I will not trouble you with it here. Even these brief extracts will show that Charlotte Brontë's life at this time was not a morbid one. These years between 1832 and 1835 must be counted among the happiest of her life--of all the lives of the little household at Haworth, in fact. The young people were accustomed to their father's coldness and eccentricity, and to their aunt's dainty distaste for all Northern customs and Northern people, themselves included. Shy they were and peculiar, alike in their modes of life and their modes of thought; but there was a wholesome, healthy happiness about all of them that gave promise of peaceful lives hereafter. Some literary efforts of a humble kind brightened their hopes at this time. Charlotte had written some juvenile poems (not now worth reprinting), and she sought the opinion of Southey upon them. The poet laureate gave her a kindly and considerate answer, which did not encourage her to persevere in these efforts; nor was an attempt by Branwell to secure the patronage of Wordsworth for some productions of his own more successful. Had anybody ventured into the wilds of Haworth parish at this new year of 1835, and made acquaintance with the parson's family, it is easy to say upon whom the attention of the stranger would have been riveted. Branwell Brontë, of whom casual mention is made in one of the foregoing letters, was the hope and pride of the little household. All who knew him at this time bear testimony to his remarkable talents, his striking graces. Small in stature like Charlotte herself, he was endowed with a rare personal beauty. But it was in his intellectual gifts that his chief charm was found. Even his father's dull parishioners recognised the fire of genius in the lad; and any one who cares to go to Haworth now and inquire into the story of the Brontës, will find that the most vivid reminiscences, the fondest memories of the older people in the village, centre in this hapless youth. Ambitious and clever, he seemed destined to play a considerable part in the world. His conversational powers were remarkable; he gave promise of more than ordinary ability as an artist, and he had even as a boy written verses of no common power. Among other accomplishments, more curious than useful, of which he could boast, was the ability to write two letters simultaneously. It is but a small trait in the history of this remarkable family, yet it deserves to be noticed, that its least successful member excelled Napoleon himself in one respect. The great conqueror could dictate half-a-dozen letters concurrently to his secretaries. Branwell Brontë could do more than this. With a pen in each hand, he could write two different letters at the same moment. Charlotte was Branwell's senior by one year. In 1835, when in her nineteenth year, she was by no means the unattractive person she has been represented as being. There is a little caricature sketched by herself lying before me as I write. In it all the more awkward of her physical points are ingeniously exaggerated. The prominent forehead bulges out in an aggressive manner, suggestive of hydrocephalus, the nose, "tip-tilted like the petal of a flower," and the mouth are made unnecessarily large; whilst the little figure is clumsy and ungainly. But though she could never pretend to beauty, she had redeeming features, her eyes, hair, and massive forehead all being attractive points. Emily, who was two years her junior, had, like Charlotte, a bad complexion; but she was tall and well-formed, whilst her eyes were of remarkable beauty. All through her life her temperament was more than merely peculiar. She inherited not a little of her father's eccentricity, untempered by her father's _savoir faire_. Her aversion to strangers has been already mentioned. When the curates, who formed the only society of Haworth, found their way to the parsonage, she avoided them as though they had brought the pestilence in their train. On the rare occasions when she went out into the world, she would sit absolutely silent in the company of those who were unfamiliar to her. So intense was this reserve that even in her own family, where alone she was at ease, something like dread was mingled with the affection felt towards her. On one occasion, whilst Charlotte's friend was visiting the parsonage, Charlotte herself was unable through illness to take any walks with her. To the amazement of the household, Emily volunteered to accompany Miss N---- on a ramble over the moors. They set off together, and the girl threw aside her reserve, and talked with a freedom and vigour which gave evidence of the real strength of her character. Her companion was charmed with her intelligence and geniality. But on returning to the parsonage Charlotte was found awaiting them, and, as soon as she had a chance of doing so, she anxiously put to Miss N---- the question, "How did Emily behave herself?" It was the first time she had ever been known to invite the company of any one outside the narrow limits of the family circle. Her chief delight was to roam on the moors, followed by her dogs, to whom she would whistle in masculine fashion. Her heart, indeed, was given to these dumb creatures of the earth. She never forgave those who ill-treated them, nor trusted those whom they disliked. One is reminded of Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" by some traits of Emily Brontë: If the flowers had been her own infants, she Could never have nursed them more tenderly; and, like the lady of the poem, her tenderness and charity could reach even ----the poor banished insects, whose intent, Although they did ill, was innocent. One instance of her remarkable personal courage is related in "Shirley," where she herself is sketched under the character of the heroine. It is her adventure with the mad dog which bit her at the door of the parsonage kitchen whilst she was offering it water. The brave girl took an iron from the fire, where it chanced to be heating, and immediately cauterised the wound on her arm, making a broad, deep scar, which was there until the day of her death. Not until many weeks after did she tell her sisters what had happened. Passionately fond of her home among the hills, and of the rough Yorkshire people among whom she had been reared, she sickened and pined away when absent from Haworth. A strange untamed and untamable character was hers; and none but her two sisters ever seem to have appreciated her remarkable merits, or to have recognised the fine though immature genius which shows itself in every line of the weird story of "Wuthering Heights." Anne, the youngest of the family, had beauty in addition to her other gifts. Intellectually she was greatly inferior to her sisters; but her mildness and sweetness of temperament won the affections of many who were repelled by the harsher exteriors of Charlotte and Emily. This was the family which lived happily and quietly among the hills during those years when life with its vicissitudes still lay in the distance. Gay their existence could not be called; but their letters show that it was unquestionably peaceful, happy, and wholesome. [Illustration: THE HOUSE THAT CHARLOTTE VISITED.] V. LIFE AS A GOVERNESS. Moved by the hope of lightening the family expenses and enabling Branwell to get a thorough artistic training at the Royal Academy, Charlotte resolved to go out as a governess. Her first "place" was at her old school at Roehead, where she was with her friend, Miss Wooler, and where she was also very near the home of her confidante, Miss N----. Emily went with her for a time, but she soon sickened and pined for the moors, and after a trial of but a few months she returned to Haworth. A great deal of sympathy has been bestowed upon the Brontës in connection with their lives as governesses; nor am I prepared to say that this sympathy is wholly misplaced. Their reserve, their affection for each other, their ignorance of the world, combined to make "the cup of life as it is mixed for the class termed governesses"--to use Charlotte's own phrase--particularly distasteful to them. But it is a mistake to suppose that they were treated with harshness during their governess life, or that Charlotte, at least, felt her trials to be at all unbearable. It was decidedly unpleasant to sacrifice the independence and the family companionship of Haworth for drudgery and loneliness in the household of a stranger; but it was a duty, and as such it was accepted without repining by two, at least, of the sisters. Emily's peculiar temperament made her quite unfitted for life among strangers; she made many attempts to overcome her reserve, but all were unavailing; and after a brief experience in one or two families in different parts of Yorkshire, she returned to Haworth to reside there permanently as her father's housekeeper. There is no need to dwell upon this episode in the lives of the Brontës. They were living among unfamiliar faces, and had little temptation to display themselves in their true characters, but extracts from a few of Charlotte's letters to her friends will show something of the course of her thought at this time. With the exception of a detached sentence or two these letters will be quite new to the readers of Mrs. Gaskell's "Life:" I have been waiting for an opportunity of sending a letter to you as you wished; but as no such opportunity offers itself, I have at length determined to write to you by post, fearing that if I delayed any longer you would attribute my tardiness to indifference. I can scarcely realise the distance that lies between us, or the length of time which may elapse before we meet again. Now, Ellen, I have no news to tell you, no changes to communicate. My life since I saw you last has passed away as monotonously and unvaryingly as ever--nothing but teach, teach, teach, from morning till night. The greatest variety I ever have is afforded by a letter from you, a call from the T----s, or by meeting with a pleasant new book. The "Life of Oberlin," and Legh Richmond's "Domestic Portraiture," are the last of this description I have perused. The latter work strongly attracted and strangely fascinated my attention. Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay, and read the "Memoir of Richmond." That short record of a brief and uneventful life I shall never forget. It is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narration it gives of the life and death of a young, talented, sincere Christian. Get the book, Ellen (I wish I had it to give you), read it, and tell me what you think of it. Yesterday I heard that you had been ill since you were in London. I hope you are better now. Are you any happier than you were? Try to reconcile your mind to circumstances, and exert the quiet fortitude of which I know you are not destitute. Your absence leaves a sort of vacancy in my feelings which nothing has as yet offered of sufficient interest to supply. I do not forget ten o'clock. I remember it every night, and if a sincere petition for your welfare will do you any good you will be benefited. I know the Bible says: "The prayer of the _righteous_ availeth much," and I am _not righteous_. Nevertheless I believe God despises no application that is uttered in sincerity. My own dear E----, good-bye. I can write no more, for I am called to a less pleasant avocation. Dewsbury Moor, Oct. 2, 1836. I should have written to you a week ago, but my time has of late been so wholly taken up that till now I have really not had an opportunity of answering your last letter. I assure you I feel the kindness of so early a reply to my tardy correspondence. It gave me a sting of self-reproach.... My sister Emily is gone into a situation as teacher in a large school of near forty pupils, near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure. It gives an appalling account of her duties. Hard labour from six in the morning till near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she will never stand it. It gives me sincere pleasure, my dear Ellen, to learn that you have at last found a few associates of congenial minds. I cannot conceive a life more dreary than that passed amidst sights, sounds, and companions all alien to the nature within us. From the tenor of your letters it seems that your mind remains fixed as it ever was, in no wise dazzled by novelty or warped by evil example. I am thankful for it. I could not help smiling at the paragraphs which related to ----. There was in them a touch of the genuine unworldly simplicity which forms part of your character. Ellen, depend upon it, all people have their dark side. Though some possess the power of throwing a fair veil over the defects, close acquaintance slowly removes the screen, and one by one the blots appear; till at last we see the pattern of perfection all slurred over with stains which even affection cannot efface. The affectionate commendations of her friend are constantly accompanied by references of a very different character to herself. If I like people--she says in one of her letters--it is my nature to tell them so, and I am not afraid of offering incense to your vanity. It is from religion that you derive your chief charm, and may its influence always preserve you as pure, as unassuming, and as benevolent in thought and deed as you are now. What am I compared to you? I feel my own utter worthlessness when I make the comparison. I'm a very coarse, commonplace wretch! I have some qualities that make me very miserable, some feelings that you can have no participation in--that few, very few people in the world can at all understand. I don't pride myself on these peculiarities. I strive to conceal and suppress them as much as I can, but they burst out sometimes, and then those who see the explosion despise me, and I hate myself for days afterwards. All my notes to you, Ellen, are written in a hurry. I am now snatching an opportunity. Mr. J---- is here; by his means it will be transmitted to Miss E----, by her means to X----, by his means to you. I do not blame you for not coming to see me. I am sure you have been prevented by sufficient reasons; but I do long to see you, and I hope I shall be gratified momentarily, at least, ere long. Next Friday, if all be well, I shall go to G----. On Sunday I hope I shall at least catch a glimpse of you. Week after week I have lived on the expectation of your coming. Week after week I have been disappointed. I have not regretted what I said in my last note to you. The confession was wrung from me by sympathy and kindness, such as I can never be sufficiently thankful for. I feel in a strange state of mind; still gloomy, but not despairing. I keep trying to do right, checking wrong feelings; repressing wrong thoughts--but still, every instant I find myself going astray. I have a constant tendency to scorn people who are far better than I am. A horror at the idea of becoming one of a certain set--a dread lest if I made the slightest profession I should sink at once into Phariseeism, merge wholly in the ranks of the self-righteous. In writing at this moment I feel an irksome disgust at the idea of using a single phrase that sounds like religious cant. I abhor myself; I despise myself. If the doctrine of Calvin be true, I am already an outcast. You cannot imagine how hard, rebellious, and intractable all my feelings are. When I begin to study on the subject I almost grow blasphemous, atheistical in my sentiments. Don't desert me--don't be horrified at me. You know what I am. I wish I could see you, my darling. I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot, tenacious heart upon you. If you grow cold it is over. You will excuse a very brief and meagre answer to your kind note when I tell you that at the moment it reached me, and that just now whilst I am scribbling a reply, the whole house is in the bustle of packing and preparation, for on this day we all _go home_. Your palliation of my defects is kind and charitable, but I dare not trust its truth. Few would regard them with so lenient an eye as you do. Your consolatory admonitions are kind, Ellen; and when I can read them over in quietness and alone, I trust I shall derive comfort from them. But just now, in the unsettled, excited state of mind which I now feel, I cannot enter into the pure scriptural spirit which they breathe. It would be wrong of me to continue the subject. My thoughts are distracted and absorbed by other ideas. You do not mention your visit to Haworth. Have you spoken of it to the family? Have they agreed to let you come? But I will write when I get home. Ever since last Friday I have been as busy as I could be in finishing up the half-year's lessons, which concluded with a terrible fog in geographical problems (think of explaining that to Misses ---- and ----!), and subsequently in mending Miss ----'s clothes. Miss ---- is calling me: something about my _protégée's_ nightcap. Good-bye. We shall meet again ere many days, I trust. Here it will be seen that the religious struggle was renewed. The woman who was afterwards to be accused of "heathenism" was going through tortures such as Cowper knew in his darkest hours, and, like him, was acquiring faith, humility, and resignation in the midst of the conflict. But such letters as this are only episodical; in general she writes cheerfully, sometimes even merrily. [Illustration: THE ROE HEAD SCHOOL.] What would the _Quarterly_ reviewer and the other charitable people, who openly declared their conviction that the author of "Jane Eyre" was an improper person, who had written an improper book, have said had they been told that she had written the following letter on the subject of her first offer of marriage--written it, too, at the time when she was a governess, and in spite of the fact that the offer opened up to her a way of escape from all anxiety as to her future life? You ask me whether I have received a letter from T----. I have about a week since. The contents I confess did a little surprise me; but I kept them to myself, and unless you had questioned me on the subject I would never have adverted to it. T---- says he is comfortably settled at ----, and that his health is much improved. He then intimates that in due time he will want a wife, and frankly asks me to be that wife. Altogether the letter is written without cant or flattery, and in common-sense style which does credit to his judgment. Now there were in this proposal some things that might have proved a strong temptation. I thought if I were to marry so ---- could live with me, and how happy I should be. But again I asked myself two questions: Do I love T---- as much as a woman ought to love her husband? Am I the person best qualified to make him happy? Alas! my conscience answered "No" to both these questions. I felt that though I esteemed T----, though I had a kindly leaning towards him, because he is an amiable, well-disposed man, yet I had not and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him--and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my husband. Ten to one I shall never have the chance again; but _n'importe_. Moreover, I was aware he knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing. Why, it would startle him to see me in my natural home character. He would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed. I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband. I would laugh and satirise, and say whatever came into my head first; and if he were a clever man and loved me, the whole world weighed in the balance against his smallest wish would be light as air. Could I, knowing my mind to be such as that, conscientiously say that I would take a grave, quiet young man like T----? No; it would have been deceiving him, and deception of that sort is beneath me. So I wrote a long letter back in which I expressed my refusal as gently as I could, and also candidly avowed my reasons for that refusal. I described to him, too, the sort of character I thought would suit him for a wife. The girl who could thus calmly decline a more than merely "eligible" offer, and thus honestly state her reasons for doing so to the friend she trusted, was strangely different from the author of "Jane Eyre" pictured by the critics and the public. Perhaps the full cost of the refusal related in the foregoing letter is only made clear when it is brought into contrast with such a confession as the following, made very soon afterwards: I am miserable when I allow myself to dwell on the necessity of spending my life as a governess. The chief requisite for that station seems to me to be the power of taking things easily when they come, and of making oneself comfortable and at home wherever one may chance to be--qualities in which all our family are singularly deficient. I know I cannot live with a person like Mrs. ----; but I hope all women are not like her, and my motto is "Try again." How thoroughly at all times she could sympathise alike with the joys and sorrows of others, is proved by many letters extending over the whole period of her life. The following is neither the earliest nor the most characteristic of those utterances of a tender and heartfelt sympathy with her special friend, which are to be found in her correspondence, but as Mrs. Gaskell has not made use of it, I may quote it here: 1838. We were at breakfast when your note reached me, and I consequently write in great hurry. Your trials seem to thicken. I trust God will either remove them or give you strength to bear them. If I could but come to you and offer you all the little assistance either my head or hands could afford! But that is impossible. I scarcely dare offer to comfort you about ---- lest my consolation should seem like mockery. I know that in cases of sickness strangers cannot measure what relations feel. One thing, however, I need not remind _you_ of. You will have repeated it over and over to yourself before now: God does all for the best; and even should the worst happen, and Death seem finally to destroy hope, remember that this will be but a practical test of the strong faith and calm devotion which have marked you a Christian so long. I would hope, however, that the time for this test is not yet come, that your brother may recover, and all be well. It grieves me to hear that your own health is so indifferent. Once more I wish I were with you to lighten at least by sympathy the burden that seems so unsparingly laid upon you. Let me thank you for remembering me in the midst of such hurry and affliction. We are all apt to grow selfish in distress. This, so far as I have found, is not your case. _When_ shall I see you again? The uncertainty in which the answer to that question must be involved gives me a bitter feeling. Through all changes, through all chances, I trust I shall love you as I do now. We can pray for each other and think of each other. Distance is no bar to recollection. You have promised to write to me, and I do not doubt that you will keep your word. Give my love to M---- and your mother. Take with you my blessing and affection, and all the warmest wishes of a warm heart for your welfare. From one of her situations as governess in a private family (she had long since left the kind shelter of Miss Wooler's house) she writes in 1841 a series of letters showing how little she relished the "cup of life as it is mixed for the class termed governesses." It is twelve o'clock at night; but I must just write you a word before I go to bed. If you think I'm going to refuse your invitation, or if you sent it me with that idea, you're mistaken. As soon as I had read your shabby little note, I gathered up my spirits directly, walked on the impulse of the moment into Mrs. ----'s presence, popped the question, and for two minutes received no answer. "Will she refuse me when I work so hard for her?" thought I. "Ye--e--es," drawled madam in a reluctant, cold tone. "Thank you, madam!" said I with extreme cordiality, and was marching from the room when she recalled me with "You'd better go on Saturday afternoon, then, when the children have holiday, and if you return in time for them to have all their lessons on Monday morning, I don't see that much will be lost." You _are_ a genuine Turk, thought I; but again I assented, and so the bargain was struck. Saturday after next, then, is the day appointed. I'll come, God knows, with a thankful and joyful heart, glad of a day's reprieve from labour. If you don't send the gig I'll walk. I am coming to taste the pleasure of liberty; a bit of pleasant congenial talk, and a sight of two or three faces I like. God bless you! I want to see you again. Huzza for Saturday afternoon after next! Good-night, my lass! During the last three weeks that hideous operation called "a thorough clean" has been going on in the house. It is now nearly completed, for which I thank my stars, as during its progress I have fulfilled the double character of nurse and governess, while the nurse has been transmuted into cook and housemaid. That nurse, by-the-bye, is the prettiest lass you ever saw.... I was beginning to think Mrs. ---- a good sort of body in spite of her bouncing and toasting, her bad grammar and worse orthography; but I have had experience of one little trait in her character which condemns her a long way with me. After treating a person on the most familiar terms of equality for a long time, if any little thing goes wrong, she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner, though in justice no blame could be attached where she ascribed it all. I think passion is the true test of vulgarity or refinement. This place looks exquisitely beautiful just now. The grounds are certainly lovely, and all as green as an emerald. I wish you would just come and look at it. VI. THE TURNING-POINT. The "storm and stress" period of Charlotte Brontë's life was not what the world believes it to have been. Like the rest of our race, she had to fight her own battle in the wilderness, not with one devil, but with many; and it was this sharp contest with the temptations which crowd the threshold of an opening life which made her what she was. The world believes that it was under the parsonage roof that the author of "Jane Eyre" gathered up the precious experiences which were afterwards turned to such good account. Mrs. Gaskell, who was carried away by her honest womanly horror of hardened vice, gives us to understand that the tragic turning-point in the history of the sisters was connected with the disgrace and ruin of their brother. We are even asked to believe that but for the folly of a single woman, whom it is probable that Charlotte never saw, "Currer Bell" would never have taken up her pen, and no halo of glory would have settled on the scarred and rugged brows of prosaic Haworth. It is not so. There may be disappointment among those who have been nurtured on the traditions of the Brontë romance when they find that the reality is different from what they supposed it to be; some shallow judges may even assume that Charlotte herself loses in moral stature when it is shown that it was not her horror at her brother's fall which drove her to find relief in literary speech. But the truth must be told; and for my part I see nothing in that truth which affects, even in an infinitesimal degree, the fame and the honour of the woman of whom I write. It was Charlotte's visit to Brussels, then, first as pupil and afterwards as teacher in the school of Madame Héger, which was the turning-point in her life, which changed its currents, and gave to it a new purpose and a new meaning. Up to the moment of that visit she had been the simple, kindly, truthful Yorkshire girl, endowed with strange faculties, carried away at times by burning impulses, moved often by emotions the nature of which she could not fathom, but always hemmed in by her narrow experiences, her limited knowledge of life and the world. Until she went to Belgium, her sorest troubles had been associated with her dislike to the society of strangers, her heaviest burden had been the necessity under which she lay of tasting that "cup of life as it is mixed for governesses" which she detested so heartily. Under the belief that they could qualify themselves to keep a school of their own if they had once mastered the delicacies of the French and German languages, she and Emily set off for this sojourn in Brussels. One may be forgiven for speculating as to her future lot had she accepted the offer of marriage she received in her early governess days, and settled down as the faithful wife of a sober English gentleman. In that case "Shirley" perhaps might have been written, but "Jane Eyre" and "Villette" never. She learnt much during her two years' sojourn in the Belgian capital; but the greatest of all the lessons she mastered whilst there was that self-knowledge the taste of which is so bitter to the mouth, though so wholesome to the life. Mrs. Gaskell has made such ample use of the letters she penned during the long months which she spent as an exile from England, that there is comparatively little left to cull from them. Everybody knows the outward circumstances of her story at this time. For a brief period she had the company of Emily; and the two sisters, working together with the unremitting zeal of those who have learned that time is money, were happy and hopeful, enjoying the novel sights of the gay foreign capital, gathering fresh experiences every day, and looking forward to the moment when they would return to familiar Haworth, and realise the dream of their lives by opening a school of their own within the walls of the parsonage. But then Emily left, and Charlotte, after a brief holiday at home, returned alone. Years after, writing to her friend, she speaks of her return in these words: "I returned to Brussels after aunt's death against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind." Why did she thus go back "against her conscience?" Her friends declared that her future husband dwelt somewhere within sound of the chimes of St. Gudule, and that she insisted upon returning to Brussels because she was about to be married there. We know now how different was the reality. The husband who awaited her was even then about to begin his long apprenticeship of love at Haworth. Yet none the less had her spirit, if not her heart, been captured and held captive in the Belgian city. It is not in her letters that we find the truth regarding her life at this time. The truth indeed is there, but not all the truth. "In catalepsy and dread trance," says Lucy Snowe, "I studiously held the quick of my nature.... It is on the surface only the common gaze will fall." The secrets of her inner life could not be trusted to paper, even though the lines were intended for no eyes but those of her friend and confidante. There are some things, as we know well, that the heart hides as by instinct, and which even frank and open natures only reveal under compulsion. Writing to her friend from Brussels in October, 1843, she says: "I have much to say, Ellen; many little odd things, queer and puzzling enough, which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day, perhaps, or rather one evening, if ever we should find ourselves again by the fireside at Haworth, or at B----, with our feet on the fender, curling our hair, I may communicate to you." One of the hardest features of the last year she spent at Brussels was the necessity she was under of locking all the deepest emotions of her life within her own breast, of preserving the calm and even cold exterior, which should tell nothing to the common gaze, above the troubled, fevered heart that beat within. When do you think I shall see you?--she cries to her friend within a few days of her final return to Haworth--I have, of course, much to tell you, and I dare say you have much also to tell me--things which we should neither of us wish to commit to paper.... I do not know whether you feel as I do, but there are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be. Something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken. I have fewer illusions. What I wish for now is active exertion--a stake in life. Haworth seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world. I no longer regard myself as young; indeed, I shall soon be twenty-eight, and it seems as if I ought to be working and braving the rough realities of the world, as other people do. It is, however, my duty to restrain this feeling at present, and I will endeavour to do so. Yes; she was "disillusioned" now, and she had brought back from Brussels a heart which could never be quite so light, a spirit which could never again soar so buoyantly, as in those earlier years when the tree of knowledge was still untasted, and the mystery of life still unrevealed. This stay in Belgium was, as I have said, the turning-point in Charlotte Brontë's career, and its true history and meaning is to be found, not in her "Life" and letters, but in "Villette," the master-work of her mind, and the revelation of the most vivid passages in her own heart's history. "I said I disliked Lucy Snowe," is a remark which Mrs. Gaskell innocently repeats in her memoir of Charlotte Brontë. One need not be surprised at it. Lucy Snowe was never meant to be liked--by everybody; but none the less is Lucy Snowe the truest picture we possess of the real Charlotte Brontë; whilst not a few of the fortunes which befell this strange heroine are literal transcripts from the life of her creator. One little incident in "Villette"--Lucy's impulsive visit to a Roman Catholic confessor--is taken direct from Charlotte's own experience. During one of the long lonely holidays in the foreign school, when her mind was restless and disturbed, her heart heavy, her nerves jarred and jangled, she fled from the great empty schoolrooms to seek peace in the street; and she found, not peace perhaps, but sympathy at least, in the counsels of a priest, seated at the Confessional in a church into which she wandered, who took pity on the little heretic, and soothed her troubled spirit without attempting to enmesh it in the folds of Romanism. It was from experiences such as these, with a chastened heart and a nature tamed down, though by no means broken, that she returned to familiar Haworth, to face "the rough realities of the world." Rough, indeed, those realities were in her case. Her brother, once the hope of the family, had now become its burden and its curse; and from that moment he was to be the prodigal for whom no fatted calf would ever be killed. Her father was fast losing his eyesight; she and her sisters were getting on in life, and "something must be done." Charlotte had returned home, but her heart was still in Brussels, and the wings of her spirit began to beat impatiently against the cage in which she found herself imprisoned. It was only the old story. She had gone out into the world, had tasted strange joys, and drunk deep of waters the very bitterness of which seemed to endear them to her. Returning to Haworth she went back a new woman, with tastes and hopes which it was hard to reconcile with the monotony of life in the parsonage which had once satisfied her completely. "If I _could_ leave home I should not be at Haworth," she says soon after her return. "I know life is passing away, and I am doing nothing, earning nothing; a very bitter knowledge it is at moments, but I see no way out of the mist." And then, almost for the first time in her life, something like a cry of despair goes up from her lips: "Probably, when I am free to leave home, I shall neither be able to find place nor employment. Perhaps, too, I shall be quite past the prime of life, my faculties will be wasted, and my few acquirements in a great measure forgotten. These ideas sting me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my conscience, it affirms that I am doing right in staying at home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I yield to an eager desire for release." But this outburst of personal feeling was exceptional, and was uttered in one ear only. Within the walls of her home Charlotte again became the house-mother, busying herself with homely cares, and ever watching for some opportunity of carrying her plan of school-keeping into execution. Nor did she allow either the troubles at home, or that weight at her own heart which she bore in secrecy, to render her spirit morbid and melancholy. Not a few who have read Mrs. Gaskell's work labour under the belief that this was the effect that Charlotte Brontë's trials had upon her. As a matter of fact, however, she was far too strong, brave, cheerful--one had almost said manly--to give way to any such selfish repinings. She never was one of those sickly souls who go about "glooming over the woes of existence, and how unworthy God's universe is to have so distinguished a resident." Even when her own sorrows were deepest, and her lot seemed hardest, she found a lively pleasure in discussing the characters and lots of others, and expended as much pains and time in analysing the inner lives of her friends as our sham Byrons are wont to expend upon the study of their own feelings and emotions. Indeed, of that self-pity which is so common a characteristic of the young, no trace is to be found in her correspondence. Let the following letter, hitherto unpublished, written at the very time when the household clouds were blackest, speak for her freedom from morbid self-consciousness, as well as for her hearty interest in the well-being of those around her: You are a very good girl indeed to send me such a long and interesting letter. In all that account of the young lady and gentleman in the railway carriage I recognise your faculty for observation, which is a rarer gift than you imagine. You ought to be thankful for it. I never yet met with an individual devoid of observation whose conversation was interesting, nor with one possessed of that power in whose society I could not manage to pass a pleasant hour. I was amused with your allusions to individuals at ----. I have little doubt of the truth of the report you mention about Mr. Z---- paying assiduous attention to ----. Whether it will ever come to a match is another thing. _Money_ would decide that point, as it does most others of a similar nature. You are perfectly right in saying that Mr. Z---- is more influenced by opinion than he himself suspects. I saw his lordship in a new light last time I was at ----. Sometimes I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard the stress he laid on wealth, appearance, family, and all those advantages which are the idols of the world. His conversation on marriage (and he talked much about it) differed in no degree from that of any hackneyed fortune-hunter, except that with his own peculiar and native audacity he avowed views and principles which more timid individuals conceal. Of course I raised no argument against anything he said. I listened, and laughed inwardly to think how indignant I should have been eight years since if anyone had accused Z---- of being a worshipper of Mammon and of Interest. Indeed, I still believe that the Z---- of ten years ago is not the Z---- of to-day. The world, with its hardness and selfishness, has utterly changed him. He thinks himself grown wiser than the wisest. In a worldly sense he is wise. His feelings have gone through a process of petrifaction which will prevent them from ever warring against his interest; but Ichabod! all glory of principle, and much elevation of character are gone! I learnt another thing. Fear the smooth side of Z----'s tongue more than the rough side. He has the art of paying peppery little compliments, which he seems to bring out with a sort of difficulty, as if he were not used to that kind of thing, and did it rather against his will than otherwise. These compliments you feel disposed to value on account of their seeming rarity. Fudge! They are at any one's disposal, and are confessedly hollow blarney. Still more significant, however, is the following letter, showing so kindly and careful an interest in the welfare of the friend to whom it is addressed, even whilst it bears the bitter tidings of a great household sorrow: July 31, 1845. I was glad to get your little packet. It was quite a treasure of interest to me. I think the intelligence about G---- is cheering. I have read the lines to Miss ----. They are expressive of the affectionate feelings of his nature, and are poetical, insomuch as they are true. Faults in expression, rhythm, metre, were of course to be expected. All you say about Mr. ---- amused me much. Still, I cannot put out of my mind one fear, viz. that you should think too much about him. Faulty as he is, and as you know him to be, he has still certain qualities which might create an interest in your mind before you were aware. He has the art of impressing ladies by something involuntary in his look and manner, exciting in them the notion that he cares for them, while his words and actions are all careless, inattentive, and quite uncompromising for himself. It is only men who have seen much of life and of the world, and who are become in a measure indifferent to female attractions, that possess this art. So be on your guard. These are not pleasant or flattering words, but they are the words of one who has known you long enough to be indifferent about being temporarily disagreeable, provided she can be permanently useful. I got home very well. There was a gentleman in the railroad carriage whom I recognised by his features immediately as a foreigner and a Frenchman. So sure was I of it that I ventured to say to him, "_Monsieur est français, n'est-ce pas_?" He gave a start of surprise, and answered immediately in his own tongue. He appeared still more astonished and even puzzled when, after a few minutes' further conversation, I inquired if he had not passed the greater part of his life in Germany. He said the surmise was correct. I guessed it from his speaking French with the German accent. It was ten o'clock at night when I got home. I found Branwell ill. He is so very often, owing to his own fault. I was not therefore shocked at first. But when Anne informed me of the immediate cause of his present illness I was very greatly shocked. He had last Thursday received a note from Mr. ---- sternly dismissing him.... We have had sad work with him since. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his distressed mind. No one in the house could have rest, and at last we have been obliged to send him from home for a week with someone to look after him. He has written to me this morning, and expresses some sense of contrition for his frantic folly. He promises amendment on his return, but so long as he remains at home I scarce dare hope for peace in the house. We must all, I fear, prepare for a season of distress and disquietude. I cannot now ask Miss ---- or anyone else. The gloom in the household deepened; but Charlotte was still strong enough and brave enough to meet the world, to retain her accustomed interest in her friends, and to discuss as of yore the characters and lives of those around her. Curious are the glimpses one gets of her circle of acquaintances at this time. Little did many of those with whom she was brought in contact think of the keen eyes which were gazing out at them from under the prominent forehead of the parson's daughter. Yet not the least interesting feature of her correspondence is the evidence it affords that she was gradually gaining that knowledge of character which was afterwards to be lavished upon her books. A string of extracts from letters hitherto unpublished will suffice to show how the current of her life and thoughts ran in those days of domestic darkness, whilst the dawn of her fame was still hidden in the blackest hour of the night: I have just read M----'s letters. They are very interesting, and show the original and vigorous cast of her mind. There is but one thing I could wish otherwise in them, and that is a certain tendency to flightiness. It is not safe, it is not wise; and will often cause her to be misconstrued. Perhaps _flightiness_ is not the right word; but it is a devil-may-care tone, which I do not like when it proceeds from under a hat, and still less from under a bonnet. I return you Miss ----'s notes with thanks. I always like to read them. They appear to me so true an index of an amiable mind, and one not too conscious of its own worth. Beware of awakening in her this consciousness by undue praise. It is a privilege of simple-hearted, sensible, but not brilliant people that they can _be_ and _do_ good without comparing their own thoughts and actions too closely with those of other people, and thence drawing strong food for self-appreciation. Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.... You ask me if we are more comfortable. I wish I could say anything favourable; but how can we be more comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of improving? It has been lately intimated to him that he would be received again on the same railroad where he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily, but he refuses to make an effort. He will not work, and at home he is a drain on every resource, an impediment to all happiness. But there's no use in complaining. I thank you again for your last letter, which I found as full or fuller of interest than either of the preceding ones--it is just written as I wish you to write to me--not a detail too much. A correspondence of that sort is the next best thing to actual conversation, though it must be allowed that between the two there is a wide gulf still. I imagine your face, voice, presence very plainly when I read your letters. Still imagination is not reality, and when I return them to their envelope and put them by in my desk I feel the difference sensibly enough. My curiosity is a little piqued about that countess you mention. What is her name? you have not yet given it. I cannot decide from what you say whether she is really clever or only eccentric. The two sometimes go together, but are often seen apart. I generally feel inclined to fight very shy of eccentricity, and have no small horror of being thought eccentric myself, by which observation I don't mean to insinuate that I class myself under the head clever. God knows a more consummate ass in sundry important points has seldom browsed the green herb of His bounties than I. O Lord, Nell, I'm in danger sometimes of falling into self-weariness. I used to say and to think in former times that X---- would certainly be married. I am not so sanguine on that point now. It will never suit her to accept a husband she cannot love, or at least respect, and it appears there are many chances against her meeting with such a one under favourable circumstances; besides, from all I can hear and see, money seems to be regarded as almost the Alpha and Omega of requisites in a wife. Well, if she is destined to be an old maid I don't think she will be a repining one. I think she will find resources in her own mind and disposition which will help her to get on. As to society, I don't understand much about it, but from the few glimpses I have had of its machinery it seems to me to be a very strange, complicated affair indeed, wherein nature is turned upside down. Your well-bred people appear to me, figuratively speaking, to walk on their heads, to see everything the wrong way up--a lie is with them truth, truth a lie, eternal and tedious botheration is their notion of happiness, sensible pursuits their _ennui_. But this may be only the view ignorance takes of what it cannot understand. I refrain from judging them, therefore, but if I were called upon to _swop_--you know the word, I suppose--to swop tastes and ideas and feelings with ----, for instance, I should prefer walking into a good Yorkshire kitchen fire and concluding the bargain at once by an act of voluntary combustion. I shall scribble you a short note about nothing, just to have a pretext for screwing a letter out of you in return. I was sorry you did not go to W----, firstly, because you lost the pleasure of observation and enjoyment; and secondly, because I lost the second-hand indulgence of hearing your account of what you had seen. I laughed at the candour with which you give your reason for wishing to be there. Thou hast an honest soul as ever animated human carcase, and a clean one, for it is not ashamed of showing its inmost recesses: only be careful with whom you are frank. Some would not rightly appreciate the value of your frankness, and never cast pearls before swine. You are quite right in wishing to look well in the eyes of those whom you desire to please. It is natural to desire to appear to advantage (_honest_ not _false_ advantage of course) before people we respect. Long may the power and the inclination to do so be spared you; long may you look young and handsome enough to dress in white; and long may you have a right to feel the consciousness that you look agreeable. I know you have too much judgment to let an over-dose of vanity spoil the blessing and turn it into a misfortune. After all though, age will come on, and it is well you have something better than a nice face for friends to turn to when that is changed. I hope this excessively cold weather has not harmed you or _yours_ much. It has nipped me severely--taken away my appetite for a while, and given me toothache; in short put me in the ailing condition in which I have more than once had the honour of making myself such a nuisance both at B---- and ----. The consequence is that at this present speaking I look almost old enough to be your mother--gray, sunk, and withered. To-day, however, it is milder, and I hope soon to feel better; indeed, I am not _ill_ now, and my toothache is quite subsided; but I experience a loss of strength and a deficiency of spirit which would make me a sorry companion to you or anyone else. I would not be on a visit now for a large sum of money. June, 1846. I hope all the mournful contingencies of death are by this time removed from ----, and that some little sense of relief is beginning to be experienced by its wearied inmates. ---- suffered greatly, I make no doubt; and I trust, and even believe, that his long sufferings on earth will be taken as sufficient expiation for his errors. One shudders for him, but it is his relations--his mother and sisters--whom I truly and permanently pity. July 10th, 1846. DEAR ELLEN,--Who gravely asked you whether Miss Brontë was not going to be married to ----? I scarcely need say that there never was rumour more unfounded. It puzzles me to think how it could possibly have originated. A cold, far-away sort of civility, are the only terms on which I have ever been with Mr. ----. I could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him, even as a joke. It would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow-curates, for half a year to come. They regard me as an old maid; and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the "coarser sex." VII. AUTHORSHIP AND BEREAVEMENT. The reader has seen that it was not the degradation of Branwell Brontë which formed the turning-point in Charlotte's life. Mrs. Gaskell, anxious to support her own conception of what _should have been_ Charlotte's feelings with regard to her brother's ruin, has scarcely done justice either to herself or to her heroine. Thus she makes use of a passage in one of the letters quoted in the foregoing chapter, but in doing so omits what are perhaps the most characteristic words in it. "He" (Branwell) "has written this morning expressing some sense of contrition; ... but as long as he remains at home I scarce dare hope for peace in the house." This is the form in which the passage appears in the "Biography," whereas Charlotte had written of her brother's having expressed "contrition for his frantic folly," and of his having "promised amendment on his return." Mrs. Gaskell could not bring herself to speak of such flagrant sins as those of which young Brontë had been guilty under the name of "folly," nor could she conceive that there was any possibility of amendment on the part of one who had fallen so low in vice. Moreover, one of her objects was to punish those who had shared the lad's misconduct, and to whom she openly attributed not only his ruin but the premature deaths of his sisters. Thus she felt compelled to take throughout her book a far deeper and more tragic view of this miserable episode in the Brontë story than Charlotte herself took. Having read all her letters written at this period of her life to her two most confidential friends, I am justified in saying that the impression produced on Charlotte by Branwell's degrading fall was not so deep as that which was produced on Mrs. Gaskell, who never saw young Brontë, by the mere recital of the story. Yet Charlotte, though too brave, healthy, and reasonable in all things to be utterly weighed down by the fact that her brother had fallen a victim to loathsome vice, was far from being insensible to the sadness and shamefulness of his condition. What she thought of it she has herself told the world in the story of "The Professor" (p. 198): Limited as had yet been my experience of life, I had once had the opportunity of contemplating near at hand an example of the results produced by a course of interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about this example; I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle; those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple recollection acted as a most wholesome antidote to temptation. They had inscribed on my reason the conviction that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure--its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave for ever. Upon the gentle and sensitive mind of Anne Brontë the effect of Branwell's fall was such as Mrs. Gaskell depicts. She was literally broken down by the grief she suffered in seeing her brother's ruin; but Charlotte and Emily were of stronger fibre than their sister, and their predominant feeling, as expressed in their letters, is one of sheer disgust at their brother's weakness, and of indignation against all who had in any way assisted in his downfall. This may not be consistent with the popular conception of Charlotte's character, but it is strictly true. We must then dismiss from our minds the notion that the brother's fate exercised that paramount influence over the sisters' lives which seems to be believed. Yet, as we have seen, there was a very strong though hidden influence working in Charlotte during those years in which their home was darkened by Branwell's presence. Her yearning for Brussels and the life that now seemed like a vanished dream, continued almost as strong as ever. At Haworth everything was dull, commonplace, monotonous. The school-keeping scheme had failed; poverty and obscurity seemed henceforth to be the appointed lot of all the sisters. Even the source of intercourse with friends was almost entirely cut off; for Charlotte could not bear the shame of exposing the prodigal of the family to the gaze of strangers. It was at this time, and in the mood described in the letters quoted in the preceding chapter, that she took up her pen, and sought to escape from the narrow and sordid cares which environed her by a flight into the region of poetry. She had been accustomed from childhood to write verses, few of which as yet had passed the limits of mediocrity. Now, with all that heart-history through which she had passed at Brussels weighing upon her, she began to write again, moved by a stronger impulse, stirred by deeper thoughts than any she had known before. In this secret exercise of her faculties she found relief and enjoyment; her letters to her friend showed that her mind was regaining its tone, and the dreary out-look from "the hills of Judæa" at Haworth began to brighten. It was a great day in the lives of all the sisters when Charlotte accidentally discovered that Emily also had dared to "commit her soul to paper." The younger sister was keenly troubled when Charlotte made the discovery, for her poems had been written in absolute secrecy. But mutual confessions hastened her reconcilement. Charlotte produced her own poems, and then Anne also, blushing as was her wont, poured some hidden treasures of the same kind into the eldest sister's lap. So it came to pass that in 1846, unknown to their nearest friends, they presented to the world--at their own cost and risk, poor souls!--that thin volume of poetry "by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell," now almost forgotten, the merits of which few readers have recognised and few critics proclaimed. Strong, calm, sincere, most of these poems are; not the spasmodic or frothy outpourings of Byron-stricken girls; not even mere echoes, however skilful, of the grand music of the masters. When we dip into the pages of the book, we see that these women write because they feel. They write because they have something to say; they write not for the world, but for themselves, each sister wrapping her own secret within her own soul. Strangely enough, it is not Charlotte who carries off the palm in these poems. Verse seems to have been too narrow for the limits of her genius; she could not soar as she desired to do within the self-imposed restraints of rhythm, rhyme, and metre. Here and there, it is true, we come upon lines which flash upon us with the brilliant light of genius; but, upon the whole, we need not wonder that Currer Bell achieved no reputation as a poet. Nor is Anne to be counted among great singers. Sweet, indeed her verses are, radiant with the tenderness, resignation, and gentle humility which were the prominent features of her character. One or two of her little poems are now included in popular collections of hymns used in Yorkshire churches; but, as a rule, her compositions lack the vigorous life which belongs to those of her sisters. It is Emily who takes the first place in this volume. Some of her poems have a lyrical beauty which haunts the mind ever after it has become acquainted with them; others have a passionate emphasis, a depth of meaning, an intensity and gravity which are startling when we know who the singer is, and which furnish a key to many passages in "Wuthering Heights" which the world shudders at and hastily passes by. Such lines as these ought to make the name of Emily Brontë far more familiar than it is to the students of our modern English literature: Death! that struck when I was most confiding In my certain faith of joy to be-- Strike again, Time's withered branch dividing From the fresh root of Eternity! Leaves upon Time's branch were growing brightly, Full of sap and full of silver dew; Birds beneath its shelter gathered nightly; Daily round its flowers the wild bees flew. Sorrow passed, and plucked the golden blossom; Guilt stripped off the foliage in its pride; But within its parent's kindly bosom Flowed for ever Life's restoring tide. Little mourned I for the parted gladness, For the vacant nest and silent song-- Hope was there, and laughed me out of sadness, Whispering, "Winter will not linger long!" And behold! with tenfold increase blessing, Spring adorned the beauty-burdened spray; Wind and rain and fervent heat, caressing, Lavished glory on that second May! High it rose--no winged grief could sweep it; Sin was scared to distance by its shine; Love, and its own life, had power to keep it From all wrong--from every blight but thine, Cruel Death! The young leaves droop and languish; Evening's gentle air may still restore-- No! the morning sunshine mocks my anguish-- Time, for me, must never blossom more! Strike it down, that other boughs may flourish Where that perished sapling used to be; Thus at least its mouldering corpse will nourish That from which it sprung--Eternity. The little book was a failure. This first flight ended only in discomfiture; and Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were once more left to face the realities of life in Haworth parsonage, uncheered by literary success. This was in the summer and autumn of 1846; about which time they were compelled to think of cares which came even nearer home than the failure of their volume of poems. Their father's eyesight was now almost gone, and all their thoughts were centred upon the operation which was to restore it. It was to Manchester that Mr. Brontë was taken by his daughters to undergo this operation. Many of the letters which were written by Charlotte at this period have already been published; but the two which I now quote are new, and they serve to show what were the narrow cares and anxieties which nipped the sisters at this eventful crisis in their lives: September 22nd, 1846. DEAR ELLEN,--I have nothing new to tell you, except that papa continues to do well, though the process of recovery appears to me very tedious. I daresay it will yet be many weeks before his sight is completely restored; yet every time Mr. Wilson comes, he expresses his satisfaction at the perfect success of the operation, and assures me papa will, ere long, be able both to read and write. He is still a prisoner in his darkened room, into which, however, a little more light is admitted than formerly. The nurse goes to-day--her departure will certainly be a relief, though she is, I daresay, not the worst of her class. September 29th, 1846. DEAR ELLEN,--When I wrote to you last, our return was uncertain indeed, but Mr. Wilson was called away to Scotland; his absence set us at liberty. I hastened our departure, and now we are at home. Papa is daily gaining strength. He cannot yet exercise his sight much, but it improves, and I have no doubt will continue to do so. I feel truly thankful for the good insured and the evil exempted during our absence. What you say about ---- grieves me much, and surprises me too. I know well the malaria of ----, it is an abominable smell of gas. I was sick from it ten times a day while I stayed there. That they should hesitate to leave from scruples about furnishing new houses, provokes and amazes me. Is not the furniture they have very decent? The inconsistency of human beings passes belief. I wonder what their sister would say to them, if they told her that tale? She sits on a wooden stool without a back, in a log-house without a carpet, and neither is degraded nor thinks herself degraded by such poor accommodation. [Illustration: HAWORTH PARSONAGE AND GRAVEYARD.] It was about the time when this journey to Manchester was first projected, and very shortly after they had become convinced that their poems were a failure, that the sisters embarked upon another and more important literary venture. The pen once taken up could not be laid down. By poetry they had only lost money; but the idea had occurred to them that by prose-writing money was to be made. At any rate, in telling the stories of imaginary people, in opening their hearts freely upon all those subjects on which they had thought deeply in their secluded lives, they would find relief from the solitude of Haworth. Each of the three accordingly began to write a novel. The stories were commenced simultaneously, after a long consultation, in which the outlines of the plots, and even the names of the different characters, were settled. How one must wish that some record of that strange literary council had been preserved! Charlotte, in after life, spoke always tenderly, lovingly, almost reverentially, of the days in which she and her well-beloved sisters were engaged in settling the plan and style of their respective romances. That time seemed sacred to her, and though she learnt to smile at the illusions under which the work was begun, and could see clearly enough the errors and crudities of thought and method which all three displayed, she never allowed any one in her presence to question the genius of Emily and Anne, or to ridicule the prosaic and business-like fashion in which the novel-writing was undertaken by the three sisters. Returning to the old customs of their childhood, they sat round the table of their sitting-room in the parsonage, each busy with her pen. No trace of their occupation at this time is to be found in their letters; and on the rare occasions on which the father or the brother came into their room, nothing was said as to the work that was going on. The novel-writing, like the writing and publishing of the poems, was still kept profoundly secret. "There is no gentleman of the name in this parish," said Mr. Brontë to the village postman, when the latter ventured to ask who the Mr. Currer Bell could be for whom letters came so frequently from London. But every night the three sisters, as they paced the barely-furnished room, or strained their eyes across the tombstones, to the spot where the weather-stained church-tower rose from a bank of nettles, told each other what the work of the day had been, and criticised each other's labours with the freedom of that perfect love which casts out all fear of misconception. And here I may interpolate two letters written whilst the novel-writing was in progress, which are in some respects not altogether insignificant: DEAR NELL,--Your last letter both amused and edified me exceedingly. I could not but laugh at your account of the fall in B----, yet I should by no means have liked to have made a third party in that exhibition. I have endured one fall in your company, and undergone one of your ill-timed laughs, and don't wish to repeat my experience. Allow me to compliment you on the skill with which you can seem to give an explanation, without enlightening one one whit on the question asked. I know no more about Miss R.'s superstition now, than I did before. What is the superstition?--about a dead body? And what is the inference drawn? Do you remember my telling you--or did I ever tell you--about that wretched and most criminal Mr. J. S.? After running an infamous career of vice, both in England and France, abandoning his wife to disease and total destitution in Manchester, with two children and without a farthing, in a strange lodging-house? Yesterday evening Martha came upstairs to say that a woman--"rather lady-like," as she said--wished to speak to me in the kitchen. I went down. There stood Mrs. S., pale and worn, but still interesting-looking, and cleanly and neatly dressed, as was her little girl who was with her. I kissed her heartily. I could almost have cried to see her, for I had pitied her with my whole soul when I heard of her undeserved sufferings, agonies, and physical degradation. She took tea with us, stayed about two hours, and frankly entered into the narrative of her appalling distresses. Her constitution has triumphed over her illness; and her excellent sense, her activity, and perseverance have enabled her to regain a decent position in society, and to procure a respectable maintenance for herself and her children. She keeps a lodging-house in a very eligible part of the suburbs of ---- (which I know), and is doing very well. She does not know where Mr. S. is, and of course can never more endure to see him. She is now staying a few days at E----, with the ----s, who I believe have been all along very kind to her, and the circumstance is greatly to their credit. I wish to know whether about Whitsuntide would suit you for coming to Haworth. We often have fine weather just then. At least I remember last year it was very beautiful at that season. Winter seems to have returned with severity on us at present, consequently we are all in the full enjoyment of a cold. Much blowing of noses is heard, and much making of gruel goes on in the house. How are you all? May 12th, 1847. DEAR ELLEN,--We shall all be glad to see you on the Thursday or Friday of next week, whichever day will suit you best. About what time will you be likely to get here, and how will you come--by coach to Keighley, or by a gig all the way to Haworth? There must be no impediments now. I could not do with them; I want very much to see you. I hope you will be decently comfortable while you stay. Branwell is quieter now, and for a good reason. He has got to the end of a considerable sum of money, of which he became possessed in the spring, and consequently is obliged to restrict himself in some degree. You must expect to find him weaker in mind, and the complete rake in appearance. I have no apprehension of his being at all uncivil to you, on the contrary he will be as smooth as oil. I pray for fine weather, that we may be able to get out while you stay. Good-bye for the present. Prepare for much dulness and monotony. Give my love to all at B----. Is it needful to tell how the three stories--"The Professor," "Wuthering Heights," and "Agnes Grey"--are sent forth at last from the little station at Keighley, to fare as best they may in that unknown London which is still an ideal city to the sisters, peopled not with ordinary human beings, but with creatures of some strangely-different order? Can any one be ignorant of the weary months which passed whilst "The Professor" was going from hand to hand, and the stories written by Emily and Anne were waiting in a publisher's desk until they could be given to the world on the publisher's own terms? Charlotte had failed, but the brave heart was not to be baffled. No sooner had the last page of "The Professor" been finished than the first page of "Jane Eyre" was begun. The whole of that wondrous story passed through the author's busy brain whilst the life around her was clad in these sombre hues, and disappointment, affliction, and gloomy forebodings were her daily companions. The decisive rejection of her first tale by Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. had been accompanied by some kindly words of advice; so it is to that firm that she now entrusts the completed manuscript of "Jane Eyre." The result has already been told. On August 24, 1847, the story is sent from Leeds to London; and before the year is out, all England is ringing with the praises of the novel and its author. Need I defend the sisters from the charge sometimes brought against them that they were unfaithful to their friends in not taking them into their confidence? Surely not. They had pledged themselves to each other that the secret should be sternly guarded as something sacred, kept even from those of their own household. They were not working for fame; for again and again they give proof that personal fame is the last thing to which they aspire. But they had found their true vocation; the call to work was irresistible; they had obeyed it, and all that they sought now was to leave their work to speak for itself, dissevered absolutely from the humble personality of the authors. In a letter from Anne Brontë, written in January, 1848, at which time the literary quidnuncs both of England and America were eagerly discussing contradictory theories as to the authorship of "Jane Eyre," and of the two other stories which had appeared from the pens of Ellis and Acton Bell, I find the following passage: "I have no news to tell you, for we have been nowhere, seen no one, and done nothing (to _speak_ of) since you were here, and yet we contrive to be busy from morning till night." The gentle and scrupulously conscientious girl, whilst hiding the secret from her friend, cannot violate the truth even by a hairbreadth. The italics are her own. Nothing _that can be spoken of_ has been done. The friend had her own suspicions. Staying in a southern house for the winter, the new novel about which everybody was talking was produced, fresh from town. One of the guests was deputed to read it aloud, and before she had proceeded far Charlotte Brontë's schoolfellow had pierced the secret of the authorship. Three months before, Charlotte had been spending a few days at Miss N----'s house, and had openly corrected the proof-sheets of the story in the presence of her hostess; but she had given the latter no encouragement to speak to her on the subject, and nothing had been said. Now, however, in the surprise of the moment, Miss N---- told the company that this must have been written by Miss Brontë; and astute friends at once advised her not to mention the fact that she knew the author of "Jane Eyre" to any one, as her acquaintance with such a person would be regarded as a reflection on her own character! When Charlotte was challenged by her friend, she uttered stormy denials in general terms, which carried a complete confirmation of the truth; and when, in the spring of 1848, Miss N---- visited Haworth, full confession was made, and the poems brought forth and shown to her, in addition to the stories. Those who read Charlotte Brontë's letters will see that even before this avowal of her flight in authorship there is a distinct change in their tone. Not that she is less affectionate towards her early friend, or that she shows the smallest abatement of her interest in the fortunes of her old companions. On the contrary, it would almost seem as though the great event, which had altered the current of her life, had only served to bind her more closely than before to those whom she had known and loved in her obscurity. But there is a perceptible growth of power and independence in her mode of handling the topics, often trivial enough in themselves, which arise in any prolonged correspondence, which shows how much her mind had grown, how greatly her views had been enlarged, by the intellectual labours through which she had passed. The following was the last letter written by her to her schoolfellow whilst the authorship of "Jane Eyre" was still a secret, and it will, I think, bear out what I have said: April 25th, 1848. I was not at all surprised at the contents of your note. Indeed, what part of it was new to us? V---- has his good and bad side, like most others. There is his own original nature, and there are the alterations the world has made in him. Meantime, why do B---- and G---- trouble themselves with matching him? Let him, in God's name, court half the country-side and marry the other half, if such procedure seem good in his eyes, and let him do it all in quietness. He has his own botherations, no doubt; it does not seem to be such very easy work getting married, even for a man, since it is necessary to make up to so many ladies. More tranquil are those who have settled their bargain with celibacy. I like Q----'s letters more and more. Her goodness is indeed better than mere talent. I fancy she will never be married, but the amiability of her character will give her comfort. To be sure, one has only her letters to judge from, and letters often deceive; but hers seem so artless and unaffected. Still, were I in your place I should feel uneasy in the midst of this correspondence. Does a doubt of mutual satisfaction in case you should one day meet never torment you?... Anne says it pleases her to think that you have kept her little drawing. She would rather have done it for you than for a stranger. Very quietly and sedately did "Currer Bell" take her sudden change of fortune. She corresponded freely with her publishers, and with the critics who had written to her concerning her book; she told her father the secret of her authorship, and exhibited to him the draft which was the substantial recompense of her labours; but in her letters to her friend no difference of tone is to be detected. Success was very sweet to her, as we know; but she bore her honours meekly, betraying nothing of the gratified ambition which must have filled her soul. She had not even revealed her identity to the publisher till, by an accident, she became aware of the rumour that the writer had satirised Mr. Thackeray under the character of Rochester, and had even obtruded on the sorrows of his private life. Shocked at this supposition, she went to London by the night train, accompanied by Anne, and having breakfasted at the station, walked to the establishment in Cornhill, where she had much difficulty in penetrating to the head of the house, having stated that he would not know her by her name. At last he came into the shop, saying, with some annoyance: "Young woman, what can you want with me?" "Sir, we have come up from Yorkshire. I wish to speak to you privately. I wrote 'Jane Eyre.'" "_You_ wrote 'Jane Eyre!'" cried the delighted publisher; and taking them into his office, insisted on their coming to the house of his mother, who would take every care of them. Charlotte related afterwards the strange contrast between the desolate waiting at the station in the early morning, and their loneliness in the crowd of the great city, and finding themselves in the evening seated among the brilliant company at the Opera House, listening to the performance of Jenny Lind. But her thoughts were soon turned from her literary triumphs. Branwell, who had been so long the dark shadow in their "humble home," was taken from them without any lengthened preliminary warning. Sharing to the full the eccentricity of the family, he resolved to die as nobody else had ever died before; and when the last agony came on he rose to his feet, as though proudly defying death itself to do its worst, and expired standing. In the following letter, hitherto unpublished, to one of her friends--not to her old schoolfellow--Charlotte thus speaks of the last act in the tragedy of her brother's life: Haworth, October 14th, 1848. The event to which you allude came upon us indeed with startling suddenness, and was a severe shock to us all. My poor brother has long had a shaken constitution, and during the summer his appetite had been diminished and he had seemed weaker; but neither we, nor himself, nor any medical man who was consulted on his case, thought it one of immediate danger: he was out of doors two days before his death, and was only confined to bed one single day. I thank you for your kind sympathy. Many, under the circumstances, would think our loss rather a relief than otherwise; in truth, we must acknowledge, in all humility and gratitude, that God has greatly tempered judgment with mercy; but yet, as you doubtless know from experience, the last earthly separation cannot take place between near relations without the keenest pangs on the part of the survivors. Every wrong and sin is forgotten then; pity and grief share the heart and the memory between them. Yet we are not without comfort in our affliction. A most propitious change marked the few last days of poor Branwell's life; his demeanour, his language, his sentiments, were all singularly altered and softened, and this change could not be owing to the fear of death, for within half an hour of his decease he seemed unconscious of danger. In God's hands we leave him! He sees not as man sees. Papa, I am thankful to say, has borne the event pretty well. His distress was great at first. To lose an only son is no ordinary trial. But his physical strength has not hitherto failed him, and he has now in a great measure recovered his mental composure; my dear sisters are pretty well also. Unfortunately illness attacked me at the crisis, when strength was most needed; I bore up for a day or two, hoping to be better, but got worse; fever, sickness, total loss of appetite and internal pain were the symptoms. The doctor pronounced it to be bilious fever--but I think it must have been in a mitigated form; it yielded to medicine and care in a few days; I was only confined to my bed a week, and am, I trust, nearly well now. I felt it a grievous thing to be incapacitated from action and effort at a time when action and effort were most called for. The past month seems an overclouded period in my life. Alas! the brave woman who felt it to be "a grievous thing" that she could not bear her full share of the family burden, little knew how terribly that burden was to be increased, how much heavier and blacker were the clouds which awaited her than any through which she had yet passed. The storm which even then was gathering upon her path was one which no sunshine of fame or prosperity could dissipate. The one to whom Charlotte's heart had always clung most fondly, the sister who had been nearest to her in age and nearest to her in affection, Emily, the brilliant but ill-fated child of genius, began to fade. "She had never," says Charlotte, speaking in the solitude of her fame, "lingered over any task in her life, and she did not linger now." Yet the quick decline of Emily Brontë is one of the saddest of all the sad features of the story. I have spoken of her reserve. So intense was it that when dying she refused to admit even to her own sisters that she was ill. They saw her fading before their eyes; they knew that the grave was yawning at her feet; and yet they dared not offer her any attention such as an invalid needed, and such as they were longing to bestow upon her. It was the cruellest torture of Charlotte's life. During the brief period of Emily's illness, her sister writes as follows to her friend: I mentioned your coming to Emily as a mere suggestion, with the faint hope that the prospect might cheer her, as she really esteems you perhaps more than any other person out of this house. I found, however, it would not do; any, the slightest excitement or putting out of the way, is not to be thought of, and indeed I do not think the journey in this unsettled weather, with the walk from Keighley and back, at all advisable for yourself. Yet I should have liked to see you, and so would Anne. Emily continues much the same: yesterday I thought her a little better, but to-day she is not so well. I hope still, for I _must_ hope; she is as dear to me as life. If I let the faintness of despair reach my heart I shall become worthless. The attack was, I believe, in the first place, inflammation of the lungs; it ought to have been met promptly in time; but she would take no care, use no means, she is too intractable. I _our_ wish I knew her state and feelings more clearly. The fever is not so high as it was, but the pain in the side, the cough, the emaciation are there still. The days went by in the parsonage, slowly, solemnly, each bringing some fresh burden of sorrow to the broken hearts of Charlotte and Anne. Emily's resolute spirit was unbending to the last. Day after day she refused to own that she was ill, refused to take rest or medicine or stimulants; compelled her trembling hands to labour as of old. And so came the bitter morning in December, the story of which has been told by Mrs. Gaskell with simple pathos, when she "arose and dressed herself as usual, making many a pause, but doing everything for herself," even going on with her sewing as at any time during the years past; until suddenly she laid the unfinished work aside, whispered faintly to her sister: "If you send for a doctor I will see him now," and in two hours passed quietly away. The broken father, supported on either side by his surviving daughters, followed Emily to her grave in the old church. There was one other mourner--the fierce old dog whom she had loved better almost than any human being. Yes--says Charlotte, writing to her friend--there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor wasted mortal frame quietly under the church pavement. We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its prime. But it is God's will, and the place where she is gone is better than that she has left. It was in the very month of December, 1848, when Charlotte passed through this fierce ordeal, and wrote these tender words of love and resignation, that the _Quarterly Review_ denounced her as an improper woman, who "for some sufficient reason" had forfeited the society of her sex! Terrible was the storm of death which in three short months swept off two of the little household at Haworth; but it had not even yet exhausted all its fury. Scarcely had Emily been laid in the grave than Anne, the youngest and gentlest of the three sisters, began to fade. Very slowly did she droop. The winter passed away, and the spring came with a glimmer of hope; but the following unpublished letter, written on the 16th of May, shows with what fears Charlotte set forth on that visit to Scarborough which her sister insisted upon undertaking as a last resource: Next Wednesday is the day fixed for our departure; Ellen accompanies us at her own kind and friendly wish. I would not refuse her society, but dared not urge her to go, for I have little hope that the excursion will be one of pleasure or benefit to those engaged in it. Anne is extremely weak. She herself has a fixed impression that the sea-air will give her a chance of regaining strength. That chance therefore she must have. Having resolved to try the experiment, misgivings are useless, and yet when I look at her misgivings will rise. She is more emaciated than Emily was at the very last, her breath scarcely serves her to mount the stairs, however slowly. She sleeps very little at night, and often passes most of the forenoon in a semi-lethargic state. Still she is up all day, and even goes out a little when it is fine. Fresh air usually acts as a temporary stimulus, but its reviving power diminishes. I am indebted to the faithful friend and companion to whom allusion is made above, for the following account of the sad journey to Scarborough, and of its tragic end: On our way to Scarborough we stopped at York, and after a rest at the George Hotel, and partaking of dinner, which she enjoyed, Anne went out in a bath-chair, and made purchases, along with Charlotte, of bonnets and dresses, besides visiting the minister. The morning after her arrival at Scarborough, she insisted on going to the baths, and would be left there with only the attendant in charge. She walked back alone to her lodgings, but fell exhausted as she reached the garden-gate. She never named this, but it was discovered afterwards. The same day she had a drive in a donkey carriage, and talked with the boy-driver on kindness to animals. On Sunday she wanted again to be left alone, and for us to go to church. Finding we would not leave her, she begged that she might go out, and we walked down towards the saloon, she resting half way, and sending us on with the excuse that she wanted us to see the place, this being _our_ first visit, though not hers. In the evening, after again asking us to go to church, she sat by the sitting-room window, enjoying a very glorious sunset. Next morning (the day she died) she rose by seven o'clock and dressed herself, refusing all assistance. She was the first of the little party to be ready to go downstairs; but when she reached the head of the stairs, she felt fearful of descending. Charlotte went to her and discovered this. I fancying there was some difficulty, left my room to see what it was, when Anne smilingly told me she felt afraid of the steps downward. I immediately said: "Let me try to carry you;" she looked pleased, but feared for me. Charlotte was angry at the idea, and greatly distressed, I could see, at this new evidence of Anne's weakness. Charlotte was at last persuaded to go to her room and leave us. I then went a step or two below Anne, and begged her to put her arms round my neck, and I said: "I will carry you like a baby." She still feared, but on my promising to put her down if I could not do it, she consented to trust herself to me. Strength seemed to be given for the effort, but on reaching the foot of the stairs, poor Anne's head fell like a leaden weight upon the top of mine. The shock was terrible, for I felt it could only be death that was coming. I just managed to bear her to the front of her easy-chair and drop her into it, falling myself on my knees before her, very miserable at the fact, and letting her fall at last, though it was into her chair. She was shaken, but she put out her arms to comfort me, and said: "You know it could not be helped, you did your best." After this she sat at the breakfast-table and partook of a basin of boiled milk prepared for her. As 11 A.M. approached, she wondered if she could be conveyed home in time to die there. At 2 P.M. death had come, and left only her beautiful form in the sweetest peace. She rendered up her soul with that sweetness and resignation of spirit which had adorned her throughout her brief life, even in the last hour crying: "Take courage, Charlotte, take courage!" as she bade farewell to the sister who was left. Before me lie the few letters which remain of Emily and Anne. There is little in them worth preserving. Both make reference to the fact that Charlotte is the great correspondent of the family, and that their brief and uninteresting epistles can have no charm for one who is constantly receiving letters from her. Yet that modest reserve which distinguished the greatest of the three is plainly visible in what little remains of the correspondence of the others. They had discovered before their death the real power that lay within them; they had just experienced the joy which comes from the exercise of this power; they had looked forward to a future which should be sunny and prosperous, as no other part of their lives of toil and patient endurance had been. Suddenly death had confronted them, and they recognised the fact that they must leave their work undone. Each faced the dread enemy in her own way, but neither shrank even from that blow. Emily's proud spirit refused to be conquered, and, as we have seen, up to the last agony she carried herself as one sternly indifferent to the weaknesses of the flesh, including that final weakness which must conquer all of us in the end. Anne found consolation, pure and deep, in her religious faith, and she died cheerfully in the firm belief that she was but entering upon that fuller life which lay beyond the grave. The one was defiant, the other resigned; but courage and fortitude were shown by each in accordance with her own special idiosyncrasy. VIII. "SHIRLEY." Charlotte went back from Scarborough to Haworth alone. Her father met her with unwonted demonstrations of affection, and she "tried to be glad" that she was once more under the familiar roof. "But this time joy was not to be the sensation." Yet the courage which had held her sisters to the end supported her amid the pangs of loneliness and bereavement. Even now there was no bitterness, no morbid gloom in the heart which had suffered so keenly. Quietly but resolutely setting aside her own sorrow, refusing all the invitations of her friend to seek temporary relief in change of scene, she sat down to complete the story which was intended to tell the world what the lost Emily had seemed to be in the eyes of her fond sister. By herself, in the room in which a short year ago three happy sisters had worked together, within the walls which could never again echo with the old voices, or walking on the moors, which would never more be trodden by the firm, elastic step of Emily, she composed the brilliant story of "Shirley"--the brightest and healthiest of her works. As she writes she sometimes sends forth messages to those who love her, which tell us of the spirit of the hero or the martyr burning within the frail frame of the solitary woman. "Submission, courage, exertion when practicable--these seem to be the weapons with which we must fight life's long battle;" and that these are no mere words she proves with all her accustomed honesty and sincerity, by acting up to them to the very letter. But at times the burden presses upon her till it is almost past endurance. Strangely enough, it is a comparative trifle, as the world counts it, the illness of a servant, that occasions her fiercest outburst of open grief: You have to fight your way through labour and difficulty at home, it appears, but I am truly glad now you did not come to Haworth. As matters have turned out you would have found only discomfort and gloom. Both Tabby and Martha are at this moment ill in bed. Martha's illness has been most serious. She was seized with internal inflammation ten days ago; Tabby's lame leg has broken out, she cannot stand or walk. I have one of Martha's sisters to help me, and her mother comes up sometimes. There was one day last week when I fairly broke down for ten minutes, and sat down and cried like a fool. Martha's illness was at its height; a cry from Tabby had called me into the kitchen, and I had found her laid on the floor, her head under the kitchen-grate. She had fallen from her chair in attempting to rise. Papa had just been declaring that Martha was in imminent danger; I was myself depressed with headache and sickness that day; I hardly knew what to do or where to turn. Thank God, Martha is now convalescent; Tabby, I trust, will be better soon. Papa is pretty well. I have the satisfaction of knowing that my publishers are delighted with what I sent them--this supports me, but life is a battle. May we _all_ be enabled to fight it well. This letter is dated September 24, 1849, at which time "Shirley" is written, and in the hands of her publishers. She has painted the character of Emily in that of Shirley herself; and her friend Ellen is shadowed forth to the world in the person of Caroline Helston. When the book, with its vivid pictures of Yorkshire life at the beginning of the century, and its masterly sketches of characters as real as those which Shakespeare brings upon the stage, is published, there is but one outcry of praise, even from the critics who were so eager to condemn "Jane Eyre." Up to this point she had preserved her anonymity, but now she is discovered, and her admirers in London persuade her at last to visit them, and make acquaintance with her peers in the Republic of Letters, the men and women whose names were household words in Haworth Parsonage long before "Currer Bell" had made her first modest appeal to the world. [Illustration: THE "FIELD HEAD" OF SHIRLEY.] A passage from one of the following letters, written during this first sojourn in London, has already been published; but it will well bear reprinting: December, 1849. I have just remembered that as you do not know my address you cannot write to me till you get it. I came to this big Babylon last Thursday, and have been in what seems to me a sort of whirl ever since; for changes, scenes, and stimulus, which would be a trifle to others, are much to me. I found when I mentioned to Mr. ---- my plan of going to Dr. ----'s it would not do at all. He would have been seriously hurt: he made his mother write to me, and thus I was persuaded to make my principal stay at his house. So far I have found no reason to regret this decision. Mrs. ---- received me at first like one who has had the strictest orders to be scrupulously attentive. I had fire in my bedroom evening and morning, two wax candles, &c., and Mrs. ---- and her daughters seemed to look on me with a mixture of respect and alarm. But all this is changed; that is to say, the attention and politeness continue as great as ever, but the alarm and estrangement are quite gone; she treats me as if she liked me, and I begin to like her much. Kindness is a potent heart-winner. I had not judged too favourably of ---- on a first impression--he pleases me much: I like him better as a son and brother than as a man of business. Mr. W---- too is really most gentlemanly and well-informed; his weak points he certainly has, but these are not seen in society. Mr. X---- (the little man) has again shown his parts. Of him I have not yet come to a clear decision. Abilities he has, for he rules his firm and keeps forty young men under strict control by his iron will. His young superior likes him, which, to speak the truth, is more than I do at present. In fact, I suspect that he is of the Helston order of men--rigid, despotic, and self-willed. He tries to be very kind, and even to express sympathy sometimes, and he does not manage it. He has a determined, dreadful nose in the middle of his face, which, when poked into my countenance, cuts into my soul like iron. Still he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious, and with a memory of relentless tenacity: to turn to--after him is to turn from granite to easy down or warm fur. I have seen Thackeray. As to being happy, I am under scenes and circumstances of excitement, but I suffer acute pain sometimes--mental pain, I mean. At the moment Mr. Thackeray presented himself I was thoroughly faint from inanition, having eaten nothing since a very slight breakfast, and it was then seven o'clock in the evening. Excitement and exhaustion together made savage work of me that evening. What he thought of me I cannot tell. This evening I am going to meet Miss Martineau; she has written to me most kindly; she knows me only as Currer Bell; I am going alone; how I shall get on I do not know. If Mrs. ---- were not kind, I should sometimes be miserable; but she treats me almost affectionately, her attentions never flag. I have seen many things; I hope some day to tell you what. Yesterday I went over the new Houses of Parliament with Mr. ----. An attack of rheumatic fever has kept poor Mr. X---- out of the way since I wrote last. I am sorry for _his_ sake. It grows quite dark. I must stop. I shall not stay in London a day longer than I first intended. On those points I form my resolutions, and will not be shaken. The thundering _Times_ has attacked me savagely. The following letters (with one exception not previously published) belong to the spring of 1850, when Charlotte was at home again, engaged in attending to her father and to the household cares which shared her attention with literary work and anxieties. The first, which refers exclusively to her visit to London, was addressed to one of her old friends in Yorkshire: Ellen it seems told you that I spent a fortnight in London last December. They wished me very much to stay a month, alleging that I should in that time be able to secure a complete circle of acquaintance, but I found a fortnight of such excitement quite enough. The whole day was usually devoted to sight-seeing, and often the evening was spent in society; it was more than I could bear for any length of time. On one occasion I met a party of my critics--seven of them. Some of them had been my bitter foes in print, but they were prodigiously civil face to face. These gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, showy, than the few authors I saw. Mr. Thackeray, for example, is a man of very quiet, simple demeanour; he is, however, looked upon with some awe and even distrust. His conversation is very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant. It was proposed to me to see Charles Dickens, Lady Morgan, Mesdames Trollope, Gore, and some others; but I was aware these introductions would bring a degree of notoriety I was not disposed to encounter; I declined therefore with thanks. Nothing charmed me more during my stay in town than the pictures I saw; one or two private collections of Turner's best water-colours were indeed a treat. His later oil paintings are strange things--things that baffle description. I have twice seen Macready act; once in "Macbeth," and once in "Othello." I astounded a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him. It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting; anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style, I could scarcely have imagined. The fact is, the stage system altogether is hollow nonsense. They act farces well enough; the actors comprehend their parts and do them justice. They comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute consternation. I was indeed obliged to dissent on many occasions, and to offend by dissenting. It seems now very much the custom to admire a certain wordy, intricate, obscure style of poetry, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes. Some pieces were referred to, about which Currer Bell was expected to be very rapturous, and failing in this he disappointed. London people strike a provincial as being very much taken up with little matters, about which no one out of particular town circles cares much. They talk too of persons, literary men and women, whose names are scarcely heard in the country, and in whom you cannot get up an interest. I think I should scarcely like to live in London, and were I obliged to live there I should certainly go little into company--especially I should eschew the literary critics. I have, since you went, had a remarkable epistle from Thackeray, long, interesting, characteristic; but it unfortunately concludes with the strict injunction, _Show this letter to no one_; adding that if he thought his letters were seen by others, he would either cease to write, or write only what was conventional. But for this circumstance I should have sent it with the others. I answered it at length. Whether my reply will give satisfaction or displeasure remains yet to be ascertained. Thackeray's feelings are not such as can be gauged by ordinary calculation: variable weather is what I should ever expect from that quarter. Yet in correspondence, as in verbal intercourse, this would torment me. [Illustration: THE "BRIARFIELD" CHURCH OF SHIRLEY.] I believe I should have written to you before, but I don't know what heaviness of spirit has beset me of late, made my faculties dull, made rest weariness, and occupation burdensome. Now and then the silence of the house, the solitude of the room has pressed on me with a weight I found it difficult to bear, and recollection has not failed to be as alert, poignant, obtrusive, as other feelings were languid. I attribute this state of things partly to the weather. Quicksilver invariably falls low in storms and high winds, and I have ere this been warned of approaching disturbance in the atmosphere by a sense of bodily weakness, and deep, heavy mental sadness, which some would call _presentiment_. Presentiment indeed it is, but not at all supernatural. The Haworth people have been making great fools of themselves about "Shirley;" they take it in the enthusiastic light. When they got the volumes at the Mechanics' Institution, all the members wanted them; they cast lots for the whole three, and whoever got a volume was only allowed to keep it two days, and to be fined a shilling _per diem_ for longer detention. It would be mere nonsense and vanity to tell you what they say. I have had no letters from London for a long time, and am very much ashamed of myself to find, now that that stimulus is withdrawn, how dependent upon it I had become. I cannot help feeling something of the excitement of expectation till post-hour comes, and when day after day it brings nothing I get low. This is a stupid, disgraceful, unmeaning state of things. I feel bitterly enraged at my own dependence and folly. It is so bad for the mind to be quite alone, to have none with whom to talk over little crosses and disappointments, and laugh them away. If I could write I daresay I should be better, but I cannot write a line. However (D. V.), I shall contend against the idiocy. I had rather a foolish letter from Miss ---- the other day. Some things in it nettled me, especially an unnecessarily earnest assurance that in spite of all I had gone and done in the writing line I still retained a place in her esteem. My answer took strong and high ground at once. I said I had been troubled by no doubts on the subject, that I neither did myself nor her the injustice to suppose there was anything in what I had written to incur the just forfeiture of esteem. I was aware, I intimated, that some persons thought proper to take exceptions at "Jane Eyre," and that for their own sakes I was sorry, as I invariably found them individuals in whom the animal largely predominated over the intellectual, persons by nature coarse, by inclination sensual, whatever they might be by education and principle. I enclose a slip of newspaper for your amusement. Me it both amused and touched, for it alludes to some who are in this world no longer. It is an extract from an American paper, and is written by an emigrant from Haworth. You will find it a curious mixture of truth and inaccuracy. Return it when you write again. I also send you for perusal an opinion of "Jane Eyre," written by a _working man_ in this village; rather, I should say, a record of the feelings the book excited in the poor fellow's mind; it was not written for my inspection, nor does the writer now know that his little document has by intricate ways come into my possession, and I have forced those who gave it to promise that they will never inform him of this circumstance. He is a modest, thoughtful, feeling, reading being, to whom I have spoken perhaps about three times in the course of my life; his delicate health renders him incapable of hard or close labour; he and his family are often under the pressure of want. He feared that if Miss Brontë saw what he had written she would laugh it to scorn. But Miss Brontë considers it one of the highest, because one of the most truthful and artless tributes her work has yet received. You must return this likewise. I do you great honour in showing it to you. Once more we can see that the healthy, happy interest she takes in the welfare of others is beginning to assert itself. For a time, under the keen smart of the wounds death had inflicted on her, she had found little heart to discuss the affairs of her circle of friends in her correspondence; but now the outer world vindicates its claim to her renewed attention, and she again begins to discuss and analyse the characters of her acquaintances with a skill and minuteness which make them as interesting even to strangers as any of the most closely-studied characters of fiction can be. I return Q----'s letter. The business is a most unpleasant one to be concerned in. It seems to me _now_ altogether unworthy in its beginning, progress, and ending. Q---- is the only pure thing about it; she stands between her coarse father and cold, unloving suitor, like innocence between a pair of world-hardened knaves. The comparison seems rather hard to be applied to V----, but as I see him now he merits it. If V---- has no means of keeping a wife, if he does not possess a sixpence he is sure of, how can he think of marrying a woman from whom he cannot expect she should work to keep herself? V----'s want of candour, the twice-falsified account he gave of the matter, tells painfully and deeply against him. It shows a glimpse of his hidden motives such as I refrain from describing in words. After all he is perhaps only like the majority of men. Certainly those men who lead a gay life in their youth, and arrive at middle life with feelings blunted and passions exhausted, can have but one aim in marriage--the selfish advancement of their interest. And to think that such men take as wives--as second selves--women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence, such sincerity to their own hollowness, such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice! to think this, troubles the soul to its inmost depths. Nature and justice forbid the banns of such wedlock. This note is written under excitement. Q----'s letter seems to have lifted so fraudulent a veil, and to show both father and suitor lurking behind in shadow so dark, acting from motives so poor and low, so conscious of each other's littleness, and consequently so destitute of mutual respect! These things incense me, but I shall cool down. I cannot find your last letter to refer to, and therefore this will be no answer to it. You must write again by return of post if possible, and let me know how you are progressing. What you said in your last confirmed my opinion that your late attack had been coming on for a long time. Your wish for a cold-water bath, &c, is, I should think, the result of fever. Almost everyone has complained lately of some tendency to slow fever. I have felt it in frequent thirst and in frequent appetite. Papa too, and even Martha, have complained. I fear this damp weather will scarcely suit you; but write and say all. Of late I have had many letters to answer; and some very bothering ones from people who want opinions about their books, who seek acquaintance, and who flatter to get it; people who utterly mistake all about me. They are most difficult to answer, put off, and appease, without offending; for such characters are excessively touchy, and when affronted turn malignant. Their books are too often deplorable. In June, 1850, she is induced to pay another visit to London, going upon this occasion whilst the season is at its height, though she has stipulated before going that she is "not to be lionised." I came to London last Thursday. I am staying at ----. Here I feel very comfortable. Mrs. ---- treats me with a serene, equable kindness which just suits me. Her son is as before--genial and friendly. I have seen very few persons, and am not likely to see many, as the agreement was that I was to be very quiet. We have been to the exhibition of the Royal Academy, to the opera, and the Zoological Gardens. The weather is splendid. I shall not stay longer than a fortnight in London; the feverishness and exhaustion beset me somewhat, but I think not quite so badly as before--as indeed I have not yet been so much tired. I am leaving London if all be well on Tuesday, and shall be very glad to come to you for a few days if that arrangement still remains convenient to you. My London visit has much surpassed my expectations this time. I have suffered less, and enjoyed more than before; rather a trying termination yet remains to me. Mrs. ----'s youngest son is at school in Scotland, and her eldest is going to fetch him home for the vacation. The other evening he announced his intention of taking one of his sisters with him, and the evening after he further proposed that Miss Brontë should go down to Edinburgh and join them there, and see that city and its suburbs. I concluded he was joking, laughed and declined. However, it seems he was in earnest, and being always accustomed to have his will, he brooks opposition ill. The thing appearing to me perfectly out of the question, I still refused. Mrs. ---- did not at all favour it, but her worthy son only waxed more determined. This morning she came and entreated me to go; G---- wished it so much, he had begged her to use her influence, &c. &c. Now, I believe that he and I understand each other very well, and respect each other very sincerely. We both know the wide breach time has made between us. We do not embarrass each other, or very rarely. My six or eight years of seniority, to say nothing of lack of all pretensions to beauty, &c, are a perfect safeguard. I should not in the least fear to go with him to China. I like to see him pleased. I greatly _dis_like to ruffle and disappoint him; so he shall have his mind, and if all be well I mean to join him in Edinburgh, after I have spent a few days with you. With his buoyant animal spirits and youthful vigour he will make severe demands on my muscles and nerves; but I daresay I shall get through somehow. IX. LONELINESS AND FAME. Charlotte Brontë's letters during 1850 and 1851 are among the most valuable illustrations of the true character of the woman which we possess. Stricken as she had been by successive bereavements, which had robbed her of her dearest friends and companions, and left her the sole prop of the dull house on the moors and of its aged head, she had yet recovered much of her peace of mind and even of her vitality and cheerfulness. She had now, also, begun to see something of life as it is presented, not to despised governesses, but to successful authoresses. Her visits to London had brought her into contact with some of the leaders of the literary world. Who can have forgotten her interview with Thackeray, when she was "moved to speak to the giant of some of his shortcomings?" Haworth itself had become a point of attraction to curious persons, and not a few visitors found their way under one pretence or another to the old parsonage, to be received with effusive courtesy by Mr. Brontë, and with shy indifference by his daughter. Her correspondence, too, became widely-spread among men and women of distinction in the world and in Society. Altogether it was a different life upon which she now looked out from her remote eyrie among the hills--a life with many new interests in it, with much that was calculated to awaken chords in her heart hitherto untouched, and to bring to light new characteristics of her temper and genius. One would fain speculate upon what might have been, but for the desolation wrought in her home and heart by that tempest of death which raged during the autumn of 1848 and the spring of 1849. As it was, no novelty could make her forget what had been; no new faces, however welcome, could dim the tender visions of the faces that were seen no more, or could weaken in any degree the affection with which she still clung to the friend of her school-days. Simplicity and sincerity are the prevailing features of her letters, during this critical time in her life, as during all the years which had preceded it. They reflect her mind in many moods; they show her in many different situations; but they never fail to give the impression of one whose allegiance to her own conscience and whose reverence for truth and purity remain now what they had been in her days of happy and unworldly obscurity. The letters I now quote are quite new to the public. July 18th, 1850. You must cheer up, for your letter proves to me that you are low-spirited. As for me, what I said is to be taken in this sense: that, under the circumstances, it would be presumptuous in me to calculate on a long life--a truth obvious enough. For the rest, we are all in the hands of Him who apportions His gifts, health or sickness, length or brevity of days, as is best for the receiver: to him who has work to do time will be given in which to do it; for him to whom no task is assigned the season of rest will come earlier. As to the suffering preceding our last sleep, the sickness, decay, the struggle of flesh and spirit, it _must_ come sooner or later to all. If, in one point of view, it is sad to have few ties in the world, in another point of view it is soothing; women who have husbands and children must look forward to death with more pain, more fear, than those who have none. To dismiss the subject, I wish (without cant, and not in any hackneyed sense) that both you and I could always say in this matter, the will of God be done. I am beginning to get settled at home, but the solitude seems heavy as yet. It is a great change, but in looking forward I try to hope for the best. So little faith have I in the power of any temporary excitement to do real good that I put off day by day writing to London to tell them I have come home; and till then it was agreed I should not hear from them. It is painful to be dependent on the small stimulus letters give. I sometimes think I will renounce it altogether, close all correspondence on some quiet pretext, and cease to look forward at post-time for any letters but yours. August 1st, 1850. MY DEAR E.,--I have certainly felt the late wet weather a good deal, and been somewhat bothered with frequently-returning colds, and so has Papa. About him I have been far from happy: every cold seems to make and leave him so weak. It is easy to say this world is only a scene of probation, but it is a hard thing to feel. Your friends the ----s seem to be happy just now, and long may they continue to be so! Give C. Brontë's sincere love to R---- and tell her she hopes Mr. ---- will make her a good husband. If he does not, woe be to him! I wish a similar wish for Q----; and then I do really think there will be a kind of happiness. That proposition about remaining at H---- sounds like beginning life sensibly, with no showy dash--I like it. Are you comfortable amongst all these turtle-doves? I could not maintain your present position for a day; I should feel _de trop_, as the French say; that is in the way. But you are different to me. My portrait is come from London, and the Duke of Wellington's, and kind letters enough. Papa thinks the portrait looks older than I do. He says the features are far from flattered, but acknowledges that the expression is wonderfully good and life-like. I left the book called "Social Aspects" at B----; accept it from me. I may well give it you, for the author has kindly sent me another copy.... You ask for some promise: who that does not know the future can make promises? Not I. September 2nd, 1850. Poor Mrs. A---- it seems is gone; I saw her death in the papers. It is another lesson on the nature of life, on its strange brevity, and in many instances apparent futility.... V---- came here on Saturday last; T----, who was to have accompanied him, was prevented from executing his intention. I regretted his absence, for I by no means coveted the long _tête-à-tête_ with V----. However, it passed off pretty well. He is satisfied now with his own prospects, and this makes him--on the surface--satisfied with other things. He spoke of Q---- with content and approbation. He looks forward to marriage as a sort of harbour where he is to lay up his now somewhat battered vessel in quiet moorings. He has seen all he wants to see of life; now he is prepared to settle. I listened to all with equanimity and cheerfulness--not assumed but real--for Papa is now somewhat better; his appetite and spirits are improved, and that eases my mind of cankering anxiety. My own health, too, is, I think, really benefited by the late changes of air and scene; I fancy, at any rate, that I feel stronger. Still I mused in my own way on V----'s character--its depth and scope, I believe, are ascertained. I saw the governess at ----; she looked a little better and more cheerful. She was almost as pleased to see me as if we had been related; and when I bid her good-bye expressed an earnest hope that I would soon come again. The children seem fond of her, and on the whole obedient--two great alleviations of the inevitable evils of her position. Cheer up, dear Nell, and try not to stagnate; or, when you cannot help it, and when your heart is constricted and oppressed, remember what life is and must be to all: some moments of sunshine alternating with many of overclouded and often tempestuous darkness. Humanity cannot escape its fate, which is to drink a mixed cup. Let us believe that the gall and the vinegar are salutary. Sept. 14th, 1850. I wish, dear Ellen, you would tell me what is the "twaddle" about my marrying, which you hear. If I knew the details I should have a better chance of guessing the quarter from which such gossip comes. As it is I am quite at a loss. Whom am I to marry? I think I have scarcely seen a single man with whom such a union would be possible since I left London. Doubtless there are men whom, if I chose to encourage, I might marry. But no matrimonial lot is even remotely offered me which seems to me truly desirable. And even if that were the case there would be many obstacles. The least allusion to such a thing is most offensive to Papa. An article entitled "Currer Bell" has lately appeared in _The Palladium_, a new periodical published in Edinburgh. It is an eloquent production, and one of such warm sympathy and high appreciation as I had never expected to see. It makes mistakes about authorship, &c, but those I hope one day to set right. Mr. X---- (the little man) first informed me of this article. I was somewhat surprised to receive his letter, having concluded nine months ago that there would be no more correspondence from that quarter. I enclose a note from him received subsequently, in answer to my acknowledgment. Read it, and tell me exactly how it impresses you regarding the writer's character, &c. He is deficient neither in spirit nor sense. October 14th, 1850. I return Q----'s letter. She seems quite happy and fully satisfied of her husband's affection. Is this the usual way of spending the honeymoon? To me it seems as if they overdo it. That travelling, and tugging, and fagging about, and getting drenched and muddled, by no means harmonises with my notions of happiness. Besides, the two meals a day, &c, would do one up. It all reminds me too sharply of the few days I spent with V---- in London nearly ten years since, when I was many a time fit to drop with the fever and the faintness resulting from long fasting and excessive fatigue. However, no doubt a bride can bear such things better than others. I smiled to myself at some passages. She has wondrous faith in her husband's intellectual powers and acquirements. V----'s illusions will soon be over, but Q----'s will not--and therein she is happier than he.... I suppose ---- will probably discover that he, too, wants a wife. But I will say no more. You know I disapprove of jesting and teasing on these matters. Idle words sometimes do unintentional harm. December, 1850. I got home all right yesterday soon after two o'clock, and found Papa, thank God, well and free from cold. To-day some amount of sickliness and headache is bothering me, but nothing to signify.... The Christmas books waiting for me were, as I expected, from Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Mr. Ruskin. No letter from Mr. W----. It is six weeks since I heard from him. I feel uneasy, but do not like to write. _The Examiner_ is very sore about my Preface, because I did not make it a special exception in speaking of the mass of critics. The soreness is unfortunate and gratuitous, for in my mind I certainly excepted it. Another paper shows painful sensitiveness on the same account; but it does not matter, these things are all transitory. The "Preface" to which she alludes in the foregoing letter, was that to her collected edition of Emily and Anne Brontë's works, in which she makes allusion to the fact that the "critics failed to do justice" to "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" when they were published. Jan. 20th, 1851. Thank you heartily for the two letters I owe you. You seem very gay at present, and provided you only take care not to catch cold with coming home at night, I am not sorry to hear it; a little movement, cheerfulness, stimulus, is not only beneficial, but necessary. Your last letter but one made me smile. I think you draw great conclusions from small inferences. I think those "fixed intentions" you fancy are imaginary. I think the "under-current" amounts simply to this, a kind of natural liking and sense of something congenial. Were there no vast barrier of age, fortune, &c, there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which now are impossible. If men and women married because they like each other's temper, look, conversation, nature, and so on--and if, besides, years were more nearly equal--the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance; but other reasons regulate matrimony--reasons of convenience, of connection, of money. Meantime I am content to know him as a friend, and pray God to continue to me the common sense to look on one so young, so rising, and so hopeful in no other light. The hint about the Rhine disturbs me; I am not made of stone and what is mere excitement to others is fever to me. However it is a matter for the future, and long to look forward to. As I see it now, the journey is out of the question--for many reasons--I rather wonder he should think of it. Good-bye. Heaven grant us both some quiet wisdom and strength, not merely to bear the trial of pain, but to resist the lure of pleasure when it comes in such a shape as our better judgment disapproves. Feb. 26th, 1851. You ought always to conclude that when I don't write it is simply because I have nothing particular to say. Be sure that ill news will travel fast enough, and good news too when such commodity comes. If I could often _be_ or _seem_ in brisk spirits, I might write oftener, knowing that my letters would amuse. But as times go, a glimpse of sunshine now and then is as much as one has a right to expect. However, I get on very decently. I am now and then tempted to break through my resolution of not having you to come before summer, and to ask you to come to this Patmos in a week or two. But it would be dull--very dull--for you.... What would you say to coming here the week after next to stay only just so long as you could comfortably bear the monotony? If the weather were dry, and the moors fine, I should not mind it so much--we could walk for change. About this time it is clear that Miss Brontë was suffering from one of her periodical attacks of nervous exhaustion. She makes repeated references in her letters to her ailments, attributing them generally to her liver, and she also mentions frequently an occurrence which had given her not a little anxiety and concern. This was an offer of marriage from a business man in a good position, whom she had already met in London. The following letters, which are inserted here without regard to the precise date, and of which Mrs. Gaskell has merely used half-a-dozen lines, relate to this subject: You are to say no more about "Jupiter" and "Venus." What do you mean by such heathen trash? The fact is no fallacy can be wilder, and I won't have it hinted at, even in jest because my common sense laughs it to scorn. The idea of X---- shocks me less; it would be a more likely match, if "matches" were at all in question, _which they are not_. He still sends his little newspaper, and the other day there came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment, and knowledge, worthy to have been the product of a giant. X---- has been, and is gone; things are just as they were. I only know, in addition to the slight information I possessed before, that this Australian undertaking is necessary to the continued prosperity of his firm, that he alone was pronounced to possess the power and means to carry it out successfully, that mercantile honour, combined with his own sense of duty, obliged him to accept the post of honour and of danger to which he has been appointed, that he goes with great personal reluctance, and that he contemplates an absence of five years. He looked much thinner and older. I saw him very near, and once through my glass. The resemblance to Branwell struck me forcibly; it is marked. He is not ugly, but very peculiar. The lines in his face show an inflexibility, and, I must add, a hardness of character, which does not attract. As he stood near me, as he looked at me in his keen way, it was all I could do to stand my ground tranquilly and steadily, and not to recoil as before. It is no use saying anything if I am not candid. I avow then that on this occasion, predisposed as I was to regard him very favourably, his manners and his personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than at the first interview. He gave me a book at parting, requesting in his brief way that I would keep it for his sake, and adding hastily: "I shall hope to hear from you in Australia; your letters _have_ been and _will_ be a greater refreshment than you can think or I can tell." And so he is gone, and stern and abrupt little man as he is, too often jarring as are his manners, his absence and the exclusion of his idea from my mind, leave me certainly with less support and in deeper solitude than before. You see, dear Nell, we are still precisely on the same level. _You_ are not isolated. I feel that there is a certain mystery about this transaction yet, and whether it will ever be cleared up to me, I do not know. However, my plain duty is to wean my mind from the subject, and if possible to avoid pondering over it.... I feel that in his way he has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its withdrawal leaves a painful blank. I have just got your note. Above, you have all the account of my visitor. I dare not aver that your kind wish that the visit would yield me more pleasure than pain has been fulfilled. Something at my heart aches and gnaws drearily. But I must cultivate fortitude. Thank you for your kind note. It was kind of you to write it, though it _was_ your school-day. I never knew you to let a slight impediment stand in your way when doing a friendly action. Certainly I shall not soon forget last Friday, and never, I think, the evening and night succeeding that morning and afternoon. Evils seldom come singly, and soon after X---- was gone Papa grew much worse. He went to bed early. Was sick and ill for an hour, and when at last he began to doze and I left him, I came down to the dining-room with a sense of weight, fear, and desolation hard to express and harder to endure. A wish that you were with me did cross my mind; but I repelled it as a most selfish wish. Indeed it was only short-lived; my natural tendency in moments of this sort is to get through the struggle alone; to think that one is burdening others makes all worse. You speak to me in soft, consolatory accents; but I hold far sterner language to myself, dear Nell. An absence of five years; a dividing expanse of three oceans; the wide difference between a man's active career and a woman's passive existence. These things are almost equivalent to a life-long separation. But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these. Would X---- and I ever suit? Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept of him as a husband? Friendship, gratitude, esteem, I have; but each moment that he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened upon me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away I feel far more gently towards him; it is only close by that I grow rigid. I did not want to be proud nor intend to be proud, but I was forced to be so. Most true is it that we are overruled by One above us, that in His hands our very will is as clay in the hands of the potter. I trust Papa is not worse; but he varies. He has never been down to breakfast but once since you left. The circumstance of having him to think about just now is good for me in one way; it keeps my thoughts off other matters which have been complete bitterness and ashes; for I do assure you a more entire crumbling away of a seeming foundation of support and prospect of hope than that which I allude to can scarcely be realised. I have heard from X---- to-day, a quiet little note. He returned to London a week since on Saturday. He leaves England next month. His note concludes with asking whether he has any chance of seeing me in London before that time. I must tell him that I have already fixed June for my visit, and, therefore, in all human probability we shall see each other no more. There is still a want of plain mutual understanding in this business, and there is sadness and pain in more ways than one. My conscience, I can truly say, does not _now_ accuse me of having treated X---- with injustice or unkindness. What I once did wrong in this way I have endeavoured to remedy both to himself and in speaking of him to others. I am sure he has estimable and sterling qualities; but with every disposition--with every wish--with every intention even to look on him in the most favourable point of view at his last visit, it was impossible for me in my inmost heart to think of him as one that might one day be acceptable as a husband.... No, if X---- be the only husband fate offers to me, single I must always remain. But yet at times I grieve for him; and perhaps it is superfluous, for I cannot think he will suffer much--a hard nature, occupation, change of scene will befriend him. I have had a long, kind letter from Miss Martineau lately. She says she is well and happy. Also I have had a very long letter from Mr. ----, the first for many weeks. He speaks of X---- with much respect and regret, and says he will be greatly missed by many friends. I discover with some surprise that Papa has taken a decided liking to X----. The marked kindness of his manner to him when he bade him good-bye, exhorting him to be "true to himself, his country, and his God," and wishing him all good wishes, struck me with some astonishment at the time; and whenever he has alluded to him since, it has been with significant eulogy.... You say Papa has penetration. On this subject I believe he has indeed. I have told him nothing, yet he seems to be _au fait_ to the whole business. I could think at some moments his guesses go further than mine. I believe he thinks a prospective union, deferred for five years, with such a decorous, reliable personage, would be a very proper and advisable affair. However I ask no questions, and he asks me none; and if he did I should have nothing to tell him. The summer following this affair of the heart witnessed another visit to London, where she heard Mr. Thackeray's lectures on the humourists. How she enjoyed listening to her idol, in one of his best moods, need not be told. Some there are still living who remember that first lecture, when all London had assembled to listen to the author of "Vanity Fair," and the rumour suddenly ran round the room that the author of "Jane Eyre" was among the audience. Men and women were at fault at first, in their efforts to distinguish "Currer Bell" in that brilliant company of literary and social notabilities; but at last she was discovered hiding under the motherly wing of a chaperon, timid, blushing, but excited and pleased--_not_ at the attention she herself attracted, but at the treat she had in prospect. One or two gentlemen sought and obtained introductions to her--amongst them Lord Carlisle and Mr. Monckton Milnes. They were not particularly impressed by the appearance or the speech of the parson's daughter. Her person was insignificant, her dress somewhat rustic, her language quaintly precise and formal, her manner odd and constrained. Altogether this was a woman whom even London could not lionise; somebody outwardly altogether too plain, simple, unpretending, to admit of hero-worship. Within there was, as we know, something entirely exceptional and extraordinary; but, like Lucy Snowe, she still kept her real self hidden under a veil which no casual friend or chance acquaintance was allowed to lift. It was but a brief visit to the "Big Babylon," and then back to Haworth, to loneliness and duty! In July, 1851, she writes from the parsonage to one of her friends as follows: My first feeling on receiving your note was one of disappointment, but a little consideration sufficed to show me that "all was for the best." In truth it was a great piece of extravagance on my part to ask you and Ellen together; it is much better to divide such good things. To have your visit in prospect will console me when hers is in retrospect. Not that I mean to yield to the weakness of clinging dependently to the society of friends, however dear; but still as an occasional treat I must value and even seek such society as a necessary of life. Let me know then whenever it suits your convenience to come to Haworth, and, unless some change I cannot now foresee occurs, a ready and warm welcome will await you. Should there be any cause rendering it desirable to defer the visit, I will tell you frankly. The pleasures of society I cannot offer you; nor those of fine scenery. But I place very much at your command--the moors, some books, a series of quiet "curling-hair-times," and an old pupil into the bargain. Ellen may have told you that I spent a month in London this summer. When you come you shall ask what questions you like on that point, and I will answer to the best of my stammering ability. Do not press me much on the subject of the Crystal Palace. I went there five times, and certainly saw some interesting things, and the _coup d'oeil_ is striking and bewildering enough. But I never was able to get up any raptures on the subject, and each renewed visit was made under coercion rather than my own free will. It is an excessively bustling place; and after all, its wonders appeal too exclusively to the eye, and rarely touch the heart or head. I make an exception to the last assertion in favour of those who possess a large range of scientific knowledge. Once I went with Sir David Brewster, and perceived that he looked on objects with other eyes than mine. X. "VILLETTE." With the autumn of 1851 another epoch in the life of Charlotte Brontë was ushered in. She began to write "Villette." Something has already been said of the true character of that marvellous book, in which her own deepest experiences and ripest wisdom are given to the world. Of the manner in which it was written her readers know nothing. Yet this, the best-beloved child of her genius, was brought forth with a travail so bitter that more than once she was tempted to lay aside her pen and hush her voice for ever. Every sentence was wrung from her as though it had been a drop of blood, and the book was built up bit by bit, amid paroxysms of positive anguish, occasioned in part by her own physical weakness and suffering, but still more by the torture through which her mind passed as she depicted scene after scene from the darkest chapter in her own life, for the benefit of those for whom she wrote. It is from her letters that at this time also we get the best indications of what she was passing through. Few, perhaps, reading these letters would suppose that their writer was at that very time engaged in the production of a great masterpiece, destined to hold its own among the ripest and finest fruits of English genius. But no one can read them without seeing how true the woman's soul was, how deep her sympathy with those she loved, how keen her criticisms of even the dull and commonplace characters around her, how vivid and sincere her interest in everything which was passing either in the great world which lay afar off, or in the little world the drama of which was being enacted under her own eyes. Even the ordinary incidents mentioned in her letters, the chance expressions which drop from her pen, have an interest when we remember who it is that speaks, and at what hour in her life this speech falls from her. September, 1851. I have mislaid your last letter, and so cannot look it over to see what there is in it to answer; but it is time it was answered in some fashion, whether I have anything to say or not. Miss ----'s note is very like her. All that talk about "friendship," "mutual friends," "auld lang syne," &c., sounds very like palaver. Mrs. ---- wrote to me a week or a fortnight since--a well-meaning, amiable note, dwelling a good deal, excusably perhaps, on the good time that is coming. I mean, to speak plain English, on her expectation of soon becoming a mother. No doubt it is very natural in her to feel as if no woman had ever been a mother before; but I could not help inditing an answer calculated to shake her up a bit. A day or two since I had another note from her, quite as good as usual, but I think a trifle nonplussed by the rather unceremonious fashion in which her terrors and the expected personage were handled.... It is useless to tell you how I live. I endure life; but whether I enjoy it or not is another question. However, I get on. The weather, I think, has not been very good lately; or else the beneficial effects of change of air and scene are evaporating. In spite of regular exercise the old headaches and starting, wakeful nights are coming upon me again. But I _do_ get on, and have neither wish nor right to complain. October, 1851. I am not at all intending to go from home at present. I have just refused successively, Miss Martineau, Mrs. Gaskell, and Mrs. Forster. I could not go if I would. One person after another in the house has been ailing for the last month and more. First Tabby had the influenza, then Martha took it and is ill in bed now, and I grieve to say Papa too has taken cold. So far I keep pretty well, and am thankful for it, for who else would nurse them all? Some painful mental worry I have gone through this autumn; but there is no use in dwelling on all that. At present I seem to have some respite. I feel more disinclined than ever for letter-writing.... Life is a struggle. November, 1851. Papa, Tabby, and Martha are at present all better, but yet none of them well. Martha especially looks feeble. I wish she had a better constitution. As it is, one is always afraid of giving her too much to do; and yet there are many things I cannot undertake myself; and we do not like to change when we have had her so long. The other day I received the enclosed letter from Australia. I had had one before from the same quarter, which is still unanswered. I told you I did not expect to hear thence--nor did I. The letter is long, but it will be worth your while to read it. In its way it has merit--that cannot be denied--abundance of information, talent of a certain kind, alloyed (I think) here and there with errors of taste. This little man with all his long letters remains as much a conundrum to me as ever. Your account of the H---- "domestic joys" amused me much. The good folks seem very happy; long may they continue so! It somewhat cheers me to know that such happiness _does_ exist on earth. November, 1851. All here is pretty much as usual.... The only events of my life consist in that little change occasional letters bring. I have had two from Miss W---- since she left Haworth, which touched me much. She seems to think so much of a little congenial company, a little attention and kindness. She says she has not for many days known such enjoyment as she experienced during the ten days she stayed here. Yet you know what Haworth is--dull enough. Before answering X----'s letter from Australia I got up my courage to write to ---- and beg him to give me an impartial account of X----'s character and disposition, owning that I was very much in the dark on these points and did not like to continue correspondence without further information. I got the answer which I enclose. Since receiving it I have replied to X---- in a calm, civil manner. At the earliest I cannot hear from him again before the spring. December, 1851. I hope you have got on this last week well. It has been very trying here. Papa so far has borne it unhurt; but these winds and changes have given me a bad cold; however, I am better now than I was. Poor old Keeper (Emily's dog) died last Monday morning, after being ill one night. He went gently to sleep; we laid his old faithful head in the garden. Flossy is dull, and misses him. There was something very sad in losing the old dog; yet I am glad he met a natural fate. People kept hinting that he ought to be put away, which neither Papa nor I liked to think of. If I were near a town, and could get cod-liver oil fresh and sweet, I really would most gladly take your advice and try it; but how I could possibly procure it at Haworth I do not see.... You ask about "The Lily and the Bee." If you have read it, you have effected an exploit beyond me. I glanced at a few pages, and laid it down hopeless, nor can I now find courage to resume it. But then, I never liked Warren's writings. "Margaret Maitland" is a good book, I doubt not. At this point the illness of which she makes light in these letters increased to such an extent as to alarm her father, and at last she consented to lay aside her work and allow herself the pleasure and comfort of a visit from her friend. The visit was a source of happiness whilst it lasted; but when it was over the depression returned, and there was a serious relapse. Something of her sufferings at this time--whilst "Villette" was still upon the stocks--will be gathered from the following letter, dated January 1852: I wish you could have seen the coolness with which I captured your letter on its way to Papa, and at once conjecturing its tenor, made the contents my own. Be quiet. Be tranquil. It is, dear Nell, my decided intention to come to B---- for a few days when I _can_ come; but of this last I must positively judge for myself, and I must take my time. I am better to-day--much better; but you can have little idea of the sort of condition into which mercury throws people to ask me to go from home anywhere in close or open carriage. And as to talking--four days ago I could not well have articulated three sentences. Yet I did not need nursing, and I kept out of bed. It was enough to burden myself; it would have been misery to me to have annoyed another. March, 1852. The news of E. T.'s death came to me last week in a letter from M----, a long letter, which wrung my heart so in its simple, strong, truthful emotion, I have only ventured to read it once. It ripped up half-scarred wounds with terrible force--the death-bed was just the same--breath failing, &c. She fears she will now in her dreary solitude become "a stern, harsh, selfish woman." This fear struck home. Again and again I have felt it for myself; and what is _my_ position to M----'s? I should break out in energetic wishes that she would return to England, if reason would permit me to believe that prosperity and happiness would there await her. But I see no such prospect. May God help her as God only can help! To another friend she writes as follows, in reply to an invitation to leave Haworth for a short visit: March 12th, 1852. Your kind note holds out a strong temptation, but one that _must be resisted_. From home I must not go unless health or some cause equally imperative render a change necessary. For nearly four months now (_i.e._ since I first became ill) I have not put pen to paper; my work has been lying untouched, and my faculties have been rusting for want of exercise; further relaxation is out of the question, and _I will not permit myself to think of it_. My publisher groans over my long delays; I am sometimes provoked to check the expression of his impatience with short and crusty answers. Yet the pleasure I now deny myself I would fain regard as only deferred. I heard something about your purposing to visit Scarborough in the course of the summer; and could I by the close of July or August bring my task to a certain point, how glad should I be to join you there for a while!... However, I dare not lay plans at this distance of time; for me so much must depend, first, on Papa's health (which throughout the winter has been, I am thankful to say, really excellent), and, second, on the progress of work--a matter not wholly contingent on wish or will, but lying in a great measure beyond the reach of effort, or out of the pale of calculation. As the summer advanced her sufferings were scarcely abated, and at last, in search of some relief, she made a sudden visit by herself to Filey, inspired in part by her desire to see the memorial-stone erected above her sister's grave at Scarborough. Filey Bay, June, 1852. MY DEAR MISS ----,--Your kind and welcome note reached me at this place, where I have been staying three weeks _quite alone_. Change and sea-air had become necessary. Distance and other considerations forbade my accompanying Ellen to the South, much as I should have liked it had I felt quite free and unfettered. Ellen told me some time ago that you were not likely to visit Scarborough till the autumn, so I forthwith packed my trunk and betook myself here. The first week or ten days I greatly feared the seaside would not suit me, for I suffered almost incessantly from headache and other harassing ailments; the weather, too, was dark, stormy, and excessively--_bitterly_--cold. My solitude under such circumstances partook of the character of desolation; I had some dreary evening hours and night vigils. However, that passed. I think I am now better and stronger for the change, and in a day or two hope to return home. Ellen told me that Mr. W---- said people with my tendency to congestion of the liver should walk three or four hours every day; accordingly, I have walked as much as I could since I came here, and look almost as sunburnt and weather-beaten as a fisherman or a bathing-woman, with being out in the open air. As to my work, it has stood obstinately still for a long while; certainly a torpid liver makes a torpid brain. No spirit moves me. If this state of things does not entirely change, my chance of a holiday in the autumn is not worth much; yet I should be very sorry not to meet you for a little while at Scarborough. The duty to be discharged at Scarborough was the chief motive that drew me to the east coast. I have been there, visited the churchyard, and seen the stone. There were five errors; consequently I had to give directions for its being re-faced and re-lettered. The sea-air did her good; but she was still unable to carry her great work forward, in spite of the urgent pressure put upon her by those who in this respect merely expressed the impatience of the public. Haworth, July, 1852. I am again at home, where (thank God) I found all well. I certainly feel much better than I did, and would fain trust that the improvement may prove permanent.... The first fortnight I was at Filey I had constantly recurring pain in the right side, and sick headache into the bargain. My spirits at the same time were cruelly depressed--prostrated sometimes. I feared the miseries and the suffering of last winter were all returning; consequently I am now indeed thankful to find myself so much better.... You ask about Australia. Let us dismiss the subject in a few words, and not recur to it. All is silent as the grave. Cornhill is silent too; there has been bitter disappointment there at my having no work ready for this season. Ellen, we must not rely upon our fellow-creatures--only on ourselves, and on Him who is above both us and them. My _labours_, as you call them, stand in abeyance, and I cannot hurry them. I must take my own time, however long that time may be. August, 1852. I am thankful to say that Papa's convalescence seems now to be quite confirmed. There is scarcely any remainder of the inflammation in his eyes, and his general health progresses satisfactorily. He begins even to look forward to resuming his duty ere long, but caution must be observed on that head. Martha has been very willing and helpful during Papa's illness. Poor Tabby is ill herself at present with English cholera, which complaint, together with influenza, has lately been almost universally prevalent in this district. Of the last I have myself had a touch; but it went off very gently on the whole, affecting my chest and liver less than any cold has done for the last three years.... I write to you about yourself rather under constraint and in the dark; for your letters, dear Nell, are most remarkably oracular, dropping nothing but hints which tie my tongue a good deal. What, for instance, can I say to your last postscript? It is quite sibylline. I can hardly guess what checks you in writing to me. Perhaps you think that as _I_ generally write with some reserve, you ought to do the same. _My_ reserve, however, has its origin not in design, but in necessity. I am silent because I have literally _nothing to say_. I might, indeed, repeat over and over again that my life is a pale blank, and often a very weary burden, and that the future sometimes appals me; but what end could be answered by such repetition, except to weary you and enervate myself? The evils that now and then wring a groan from my heart lie in my position--not that I am a _single_ woman and likely to remain a _single_ woman, but because I am a lonely woman and likely to be _lonely_. But it cannot be helped, and therefore _imperatively must be borne_, and borne, too, with as few words about it as may be. I write this just to prove to you that whatever you would freely _say_ to me you may just as freely write. Understand that I remain just as resolved as ever not to allow myself the holiday of a visit from you till _I_ have done my work. After labour, pleasure; but while work was lying at the wall undone, I never yet could enjoy recreation. [Illustration: SIMILE LETTER OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË.] Slowly page after page of "Villette" was now being written. The reader sees from these letters that the book was composed in no happy mood. Writing to her publisher a few weeks after the date of the last letter printed above, she says: "I can hardly tell you how I hunger to hear some opinions beside my own, and how I have sometimes desponded and almost despaired, because there was no one to whom to read a line, or of whom to ask a counsel. 'Jane Eyre' was not written under such circumstances, nor were two-thirds of 'Shirley.' I got so miserable about it that I could bear no allusion to the book. It is not finished yet; but now I hope." But though her work pressed so incessantly upon her, and her feverish anxiety to have it done weighed so heavily upon her health and spirits, she could still find time to answer her friend's letters in a way which showed that her interest in the outer world was as keen as ever: September, 1852. Thank you for A----'s notes. I like to read them, they are so full of news, but they are illegible. A great many words I really cannot make out. It is pleasing to hear that M---- is doing so well, and the tidings about ---- seem also good. I get a note from ---- every now and then, but I fear my last reply has not given much satisfaction. It contained a taste of that unpalatable commodity called _advice_--such advice, too, as might be, and I dare say was, construed into faint reproof. I can scarcely tell what there is about ---- that, in spite of one's conviction of her amiability, in spite of one's sincere wish for her welfare, palls upon one, satiates, stirs impatience. She _will_ complacently put forth opinions and tastes as her own which are _not_ her own, nor in any sense natural to her. My patience can really hardly sustain the test of such a jay in borrowed plumes. She prated so much about the fine wilful spirit of her child, whom she describes as a hard, brown little thing, who will do nothing but what pleases himself, that I hit out at last--not very hard, but enough to make her think herself ill-used, I doubt not. Can't help it. She often says she is not "absorbed in self," but the fact is, I have seldom seen anyone more unconsciously, thoroughly, and often weakly egotistic. Then, too, she is inconsistent. In the same breath she boasts her matrimonial happiness and whines for sympathy. Don't understand it. With a paragon of a husband and child, why that whining, craving note? Either her lot is not all she professes it to be, or she is hard to content. In October the resolute determination to allow herself no relaxation until "Villette" was finished broke down. She was compelled to call for help, and to acknowledge herself beaten in her attempt to crush out the yearning for company: October, 1852. Papa expresses so strong a wish that I should ask you to come, and I feel some little refreshment so absolutely necessary myself, that I really must beg you to come to Haworth for one single week. I thought I would persist in denying myself till I had done my work, but I find it won't do. The matter refuses to progress, and this excessive solitude presses too heavily. So let me see your dear face, Nell, just for one reviving week. Could you come on Wednesday? Write to-morrow, and let me know by what train you would reach Keighley, that I may send for you. The visit was a pleasant one in spite of the weariness of body and mind which troubled Charlotte. She laid aside her task for that "one little week," went out upon the moors with her friend, talked as of old, and at last, when she was left alone once more, declared that the change had done her "inexpressible good." Writing to her friend immediately after the latter had left her, she says: Your note came only this morning. I had expected it yesterday, and was beginning actually to feel weary--like you. This won't do. I am afraid of caring for you too much. You must have come upon ---- at an unfavourable moment, seen it under a cloud. Surely they are not always or often thus, or else married life is indeed but a slipshod paradise. I only send _The Examiner_, not having yet read _The Leader_. I was spared the remorse I feared. On Saturday I fell to business, and as the welcome mood is still decently existent, and my eyes consequently excessively tired with scribbling, you must excuse a mere scrawl. Papa was glad to hear you had got home well--as well as we.... I do miss my dear bed-fellow; no more of that calm sleep. Her pen now began to move more quickly, and the closing chapters of "Villette" were written with comparative ease, so that at last she writes thus, on November 22nd: Monday morning. Truly thankful am I to be able to tell you that I finished my long task on Saturday, packed and sent off the parcel to Cornhill. I said my prayers when I had done it. Whether it is well or ill done I don't know. _D. V._, I will now try to wait the issue quietly. The book, I think, will not be considered pretentious, nor is it of a character to excite hostility. As Papa is pretty well, I may, I trust, dear Nell, do as you wish me, and come for a few days to B----. Miss Martineau has also urgently asked me to go and see her. I promised, if all were well, to do so at the close of November or the commencement of December, so that I could go on from B---- to Westmoreland. Would Wednesday suit you? "Esmond" shall come with me--_i.e._ Thackeray's novel. Every reader knows in what fashion "Villette" ends, and most persons also know from Mrs. Gaskell that the reason why the actual issue is left in some uncertainty was the author's filial desire to gratify her father. Charlotte herself was firmly resolved that she would _not_ make Lucy Snowe the happy wife of Paul Emanuel. She never meant to "appoint her lot in pleasant places." Lucy was to bear the storm and stress of life in the same manner as that in which her creator had been compelled to bear it; and she was to be left in the end alone, robbed for ever of the hope of spending the happy afternoon of her existence in the sunshine of love and congenial society. But Mr. Brontë, altogether unconscious of that tragedy of heart-sickness and soul-weariness which was being enacted under his own roof, and which furnished so striking a parallel to the story which ran through "Villette," would not brook a gloomy ending to the tale, and by protestations and entreaties induced his daughter at least so far to alter her plan as to leave the issue in doubt. So "Villette" went its way, as "Jane Eyre" and "Shirley " had done before it, from the secluded parsonage at Haworth up to the busy publishing-house in Cornhill, and thence out into the world. There was some fear on Charlotte's part when the MS. had been despatched. She herself was gradually forming that which remained the fixed conviction of her life--the conviction that in "Villette" she had done her best, and that, for good or for ill, by it her reputation must stand or fall. But she was intensely anxious, as we have seen, to have the opinions of others upon the story. Nor was it only a general verdict on its merits for which she called. She was uneasy upon some minor points. According to her wont, she had taken most of her characters from life, and it was not during her stay at Brussels alone that she had studied the models which she employed when writing the book. Naturally, she was curious to know whether she had painted her portraits too literally. So "Villette" was allowed to pass, whilst still in MS., into the hands of the original of "Dr. John." When that gentleman had read the story, and criticised all the characters with the freedom of unconsciousness, her mind was set at rest, and she knew that she had not transgressed the bounds which divide the story-teller from the biographer. In the meantime, her work done, she hurried away from Haworth to spend a well-earned holiday at B---- with her friend. "Esmond" accompanied her, and the quiet afternoons were spent in reading it aloud. On December 9th she writes from Haworth, announcing her safe return to her own home: I got home safely at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, and, I am most thankful to say, found Papa and all the rest quite well. I did my business satisfactorily in Leeds, getting the head-dress rearranged as I wished. It is now a very different matter to the bushy, tasteless thing it was before. On my arrival I found no proof-sheets, but a letter from Mr. S----, which I would have enclosed, but so many words are scarce legible you would have no pleasure in reading it. He continues to make a mystery of his "reason"; something in the third volume sticks confoundedly in his throat; and as to the "female character" about which I asked, he responds that "she is an odd, fascinating little puss," but affirms that "he is not in love with her." He tells me also that he will answer no more questions about "Villette." This morning I have a brief note from Mr. Williams, intimating that he has not yet been permitted to read the third volume. Also there is a note from Mrs. ----, very kind. I almost wish I could still look on that kindness just as I used to do: it was very pleasant to me once. Write _immediately_, dear Nell, and tell me how your mother is. Give my kindest regards to her and all others at B----. Everybody seemed very good to me this last visit. I remember it with corresponding pleasure. The private reception of "Villette" was not altogether that for which its author had hoped. Her publisher had objections to urge against certain features of the story, and those who saw the book in manuscript were not slow to express their own disapproval. It was evident that there was disappointment at Cornhill; and the proud spirit of Miss Brontë was keenly troubled. The letters in which she dwells on what was passing at that time need not be reproduced here, for their purport is sufficiently indicated by that which has just been given. But it is worth while to notice the scrupulous modesty with which she listened to all that was said by those who found fault, her careful anxiety to understand their objections, such as they were, and her perfect readiness to discuss every point raised with them. Of irritability under this criticism there is no trace, only a certain sadness and sorrow at the discovery that she had not succeeded in impressing others as she had hoped to do. Yet she is scarcely surprised that it is so. Had she not written years before, when "Shirley" was first produced, these words?-- No matter, whether known or unknown, misjudged or the contrary, I am resolved not to write otherwise. I shall bend as my powers tend. The two human beings who understood me, and whom I understood, are gone. I have some that love me yet, and whom I love without expecting, or having a right to expect, that they shall perfectly understand me. I am satisfied, but I must have my own way in the matter of writing.... I am thankful to God who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to profit by its possession. So now she is not astonished at finding herself misunderstood. Nor is she angry. She is perfectly ready to explain her real meaning to those who have misjudged her, but she is resolute in abiding by what she has written. The work wrung from her during those two years of pain and sorrow is not work which can be altered at will to please another. Even to meet the entreaties of her father she had refused to do more than draw a veil over the catastrophe in which the plot ends; and she cannot introduce new incidents, or lay on new colours, because the little circle of critics sitting in judgment on her manuscript have pronounced it to be imperfect. "I fear they" (the readers) "must be satisfied with what is offered. My palette affords no brighter tints; were I to attempt to deepen the reds or burnish the yellows, I should but blotch." Yet she admits that those who judge the book only from the outside have some reason to complain that it is not as other novels are: You say that Lucy Snowe may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more freely given. I consider that she _is_ both morbid and weak at times; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid. It was no impetus of healthy feeling which urged her to the confessional, for instance; it was the semi-delirium of solitary grief and sickness. If, however, the book does not express all this, there must be a great fault somewhere. I might explain away a few other points, but it would be too much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended to be represented. Happily, the heart of the great reading world is bigger and truer as a whole than any part of it is. What those who read the manuscript of "Villette" failed to see at the first glance was seen instantly by the public when the book was placed in its hands. From critics of every school and degree there came up a cry of wonder and admiration, as men saw out of what simple characters and commonplace incidents genius had evoked this striking work of literary art. Popular, perhaps, the book could scarcely hope to be, in the vulgar acceptation of the word. The author had carefully avoided the "flowery and inviting" course of romance, and had written in silent obedience to the stern dictates of an inspiration which, as we have seen, only came at intervals, leaving her between its visits cruelly depressed and pained, but which when it came held her spell-bound and docile. Yet out of the dull record of humble woes, marked by no startling episodes, adorned by few of the flowers of poetry, she had created such a heart-history as remains to this day without a rival in the school of English fiction to which it belongs. I bring together a batch of notes, not all addressed to the same person, which give her account of the reception and success of the book: February 11th, 1853. Excuse a very brief note, for I have time only to thank you for your last kind and welcome letter, and to say that, in obedience to your wishes, I send you by this day's post two reviews--_The Examiner_ and _The Morning Advertiser_--which, perhaps, you will kindly return at your leisure. Ellen has a third--_The Literary Gazette_--which she will likewise send. The reception of the book has been favourable thus far--for which I am thankful--less, I trust, on my own account than for the sake of those few real friends who take so sincere an interest in my welfare as to be happy in my happiness. February 15th. I am very glad to hear that you got home all right, and that you managed to execute your commissions in Leeds so satisfactorily. You do not say whether you remembered to order the Bishop's dessert; I shall know, however, by to-morrow morning. I got a budget of no less than seven papers yesterday and to-day. The import of all the notices is such as to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him who takes note both of suffering and work and motives. Papa is pleased too. As to friends in general, I believe I can love them still without expecting them to take any large share in this sort of gratification. The longer I live, the more plainly I see that gentle must be the strain on fragile human nature. It will not bear much. I have heard from Mrs. Gaskell. Very kind, panegyrical, and so on. Mr. S---- tells me he has ascertained that Miss Martineau _did_ write the notice in _The Daily News_. J. T. offers to give me a regular blowing-up and setting down for £5, but I tell him _The Times_ will probably let me have the same gratis. March 10th, 1853. I only got _The Guardian_ newspaper yesterday morning, and have not yet seen either _The Critic_ or _Sharpe's Magazine_. _The Guardian_ does not wound me much. I see the motive, which, indeed, there is no attempt to disguise. Still I think it a choice little morsel for foes (Mr. ---- was the first to bring the news of the review to Papa), and a still choicer morsel for "friends" who--bless them!--while they would not perhaps positively do one an injury, still take a dear delight in dashing with bitterness the too sweet cup of success. Is _Sharpe's_ small article like a bit of sugar-candy, too, Ellen? or has it the proper wholesome wormwood flavour? Of course I guess it will be like _The Guardian_. My "dear friends" will weary of waiting for _The Times_. "O Sisera! why tarry the wheels of thy chariot so long?" March 22nd. Thank you for sending ----'s notes. Though I have not attended to them lately, they always amuse me. I like to read them; one gets from them a clear enough idea of her sort of life. ----'s attempts to improve his good partner's mind make me smile. I think it all right enough, and doubt not they are happy in their way; only the direction he gives his efforts seems of rather problematic wisdom. Algebra and optics! Why not enlarge her views by a little well-chosen general reading? However, they do right to amuse themselves in their own way. The rather dark view you seem to take of the general opinion about "Villette" surprises me the less, as only the more unfavourable reviews seem to have come in your way. Some reports reach me of a different tendency; but no matter; time will show. As to the character of Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that she should not occupy the pedestal to which "Jane Eyre" was raised by some injudicious admirers. She is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of self-laudation can touch her. XI. MARRIAGE AND DEATH. Every book, as we know, has its secret history, hidden from the world which reads only the printed pages, but legible enough to the author, who sees something more than the words he has set down for the public to read. Thackeray tells us how, reading again one of his smaller stories, written at a sad period of his own life, he brought back all the scene amid which the little tale was composed, and woke again to a consciousness of the pangs which tore his heart when his pen was busy with the imaginary fortunes of the puppets he had placed upon the mimic stage. Between the lines he read quite a different story from that which was laid before the reader. I have tried to show how largely this was the case with Charlotte Brontë's novels. Each was a double romance, having one meaning for the world, and another for the author. Yet she herself, when she wrote "Shirley" and "Villette," had no conception of the strange blending of the secret currents of the two books which was in store for her, or of the unexpected fate which was to befall the real heroine of her last work--to wit, herself. I have told how fixed was her belief that "Lucy Snowe's" fate was to be a tragic one--a life the closing years of which were to be spent in loneliness and anguish, and amid the bitterness of withered hopes. Very few readers can have forgotten the closing passage of "Villette," in which the catastrophe, though veiled, can be readily discovered: The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but--he is coming. Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming. The skies hang full and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings--glorious, royal, purple as a monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest--so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky; I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh! guard it! The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee--"keening" at every window! It will rise--it will swell--it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong: by midnight, all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm.... Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered--not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it; till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some! In darkness such as here is shadowed forth, Charlotte Brontë believed that her own life would close; all sunshine gone, all joys swept clean away by the bitter blast of death, all hopes withered or uprooted. But the end which she pictured was not to be. God was more merciful than her own imaginings; and at eventide there was light and peace upon her troubled path. Those who turn to the closing passage of "Shirley" will find there reference to "a true Christian gentleman," who had taken the place of the hypocrite Malone, one of the famous three curates of the story. This gentleman, a Mr. McCarthy, was, like the rest, no fictitious personage. His original was to be found in the person of Mr. Nicholls, who for several years had lived a simple, unobtrusive life at Haworth, as curate to Mr. Brontë, and whose name often occurs in Charlotte's letters to her friend. In none of these references to him is there the slightest indication that he was more than an honoured friend. Nor was it so. Whilst Mr. Nicholls, dwelling near Miss Brontë, and observing her far more closely than any other person could do, had formed a deep and abiding attachment for her, she herself was wholly unconscious of the fact. Its first revelation came upon her as something like a shock; as something also like a reproach. Whilst she had thought herself alone, doomed to a life of solitude and pain, a tender yet a manly love had all the while been growing round her. It is obvious that the letters which she addressed at this time (December, 1852) to her friend cannot be printed here. Yet no letters more honourable to the woman, the daughter, and the lover have ever been penned. There is no restraint now in the outpourings of her heart. Her friend is taken into her full confidence, and every hope and fear and joy is spoken out as only women who are pure and truthful and entirely noble can venture to speak out. Mrs. Gaskell has briefly but distinctly stated the broad features of this strange love story, giving such promise at the time, so happy and beautiful in its brief fruition, so soon to be quenched in the great darkness. Mr. Brontë resented the attentions of Mr. Nicholls to his daughter in a manner which brought to light all the sternness and bitterness of his character. There had been of late years a certain mellowing of his disposition, which Charlotte had dwelt upon with hopeful joy, as her one comfort in her lonely life at Haworth. How much he owed to her none knew but himself. When he was sinking under the burden of his son's death, she had rescued him; when, for one dark and bitter interval, he had sought refuge from grief and remorse in the coward's solace, her brave heart, her gentleness, her unyielding courage, had brought him back again from evil ways, and sustained and kept him in the path of honour; and now his own ambitions were more than satisfied by her success; he found himself shining in the reflected glory of his daughter's fame, and sunned himself, poor man, in the light and warmth. But all the old jealousy, the intense acerbity of his character, broke out when he saw another person step between himself and her, and that other no idol of the great world of London, but simply the honest man who had dwelt almost under his own roof-tree for years. When, having heard with surprise and emotion, the story of Mr. Nicholls's attachment, Charlotte communicated his offer to her father, "agitation and anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued. My blood boiled with a sense of injustice. But Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with. The veins on his forehead started up like whipcord, and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot. I made haste to promise that on the morrow Mr. Nicholls should have a distinct refusal." It so happened that very soon after this, that is to say when "Villette" was published, Miss Martineau caused deep pain to its writer by condemning the manner in which "all the female characters in all their thoughts and lives" were represented as "being full of one thing--love." The critic not unjustly pointed out that love was not the be-all and the end-all of a woman's life. Perhaps her pen would not have been so sharp in touching on this subject, had she known with what quiet self-sacrifice the author of "Villette" had but a few weeks before set aside her own preferences and inclinations, and submitted her lot to her father's angry will. This truly must be reckoned as another illustration of the extent to which the _Quarterly_ reviewer of 1848 had formed an accurate conception of the character of "Currer Bell." Not only was the struggle which followed sharp and painful, it was also stubborn and prolonged. Mr. Nicholls resigned the curacy he had held so many years, and prepared to leave Haworth. Mr. Brontë not only showed no signs of relenting, but openly exulted in his departure, and lost no opportunity of expressing in bitterly sarcastic language his opinion of his colleague's conduct. How deeply Charlotte suffered at this time is proved by the letters before me. Firmly convinced that her first duty was to the parent whose only remaining stay she was, she never wavered in her determination to sacrifice every wish of her own to his comfort. But her heart was racked with pity for the man who was suffering through his love for her, and her indignation was roused to fever-heat by the gross injustice of her father's conduct. Compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for from Papa than sap from firewood. I never saw a battle more sternly fought with the feelings than Mr. N. fights with his, and when he yields momentarily, you are almost sickened by the sense of the strain upon him. However, he is to go, and I cannot speak to him or look at him or comfort him a whit--and I must submit. Providence is over all; that is the only consolation. In all this--she says, after speaking again of the severity of the struggle--it is not _I_ who am to be pitied at all, and of course nobody pities me. They all think in Haworth that I have disdainfully refused him. If pity would do him any good he ought to have, and I believe has, it. They may abuse me if they will. Whether they do or not I can't tell. I thought of you on New Year's Day, and hope you got well over your formidable tea-making. I am busy, too, in my little way, preparing to go to London this week--a matter which necessitates some little application to the needle. I find it quite necessary I should go to superintend the press, as Mr. S---- seems quite determined not to let the printing get on till I come. I have actually only received three proof-sheets since I was at Brookroyd. Papa wants me to go too, to be out of the way, I suppose; but I am sorry for one other person whom nobody pities but me.... They don't understand the nature of his feelings, but I see now what they are. Mr. N---- is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep, like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel. He continues restless and ill. He carefully performs the occasional duty, but does not come near the church, procuring a substitute every Sunday. A few days since he wrote to Papa requesting permission to withdraw his resignation. Papa answered that he should only do so on condition of giving his written promise never again to broach the obnoxious subject either to him or to me. This he has evaded doing, so the matter remains unsettled. I feel persuaded the termination will be, his departure for Australia. Dear Nell, without loving him, I don't like to think of him suffering in solitude, and wish him anywhere so that he were happier. He and Papa have never met or spoken yet. During this crisis in her life, when suffering had come to her in a new and sharp form, but when happily the black cloud was lit up on the other side by the rays of the sun, she went up to London to spend a few weeks. From the letters written during her visit I make these extracts: January 11th, 1853. I came here last Wednesday. I had a delightful day for my journey, and was kindly received at the close. My time has passed pleasantly enough since I came, yet I have not much to tell you; nor is it likely I shall have. I do not mean to go out much or see many people. Sir J. S---- wrote to me two or three times before I left home, and made me promise to let him know when I should be in town, but I reserve to myself the right of deferring the communication till the latter part of my stay. All in this house appear to be pretty much as usual, and yet I see some changes. Mrs. ---- and her daughter look well enough; but on Mr. ---- hard work is telling early. Both his complexion, his countenance, and the very lines of his features are altered. It is rather the remembrance of what he was than the fact of what he is which can warrant the picture I have been accustomed to give of him. One feels pained to see a physical alteration of this kind; yet I feel glad and thankful that it is _merely_ physical. As far as I can judge, mind and manners have undergone no deterioration--rather, I think, the contrary. January 19th, 1853. I still continue to get on very comfortably and quietly in London, in the way I like, seeing rather things than persons. Being allowed to have my own choice of sights this time I selected the _real_ rather than the _decorative_ side of life. I have been over two prisons, ancient and modern, Newgate and Pentonville; also the Bank, the Exchange, the Foundling Hospital; and to-day, if all be well, I go with Dr. Forbes to see Bethlehem Hospital. Mrs. ---- and her daughters are, I believe, a little amazed at my gloomy tastes; but I take no notice. Papa, I am glad to say, continues well. I enclose portions of two notes of his which will show you better than anything I can say how he treats a certain subject. My book is to appear at the close of this month. Mrs. Gaskell wrote to beg that it should not clash with "Ruth," and it was impossible to refuse to defer the publication a week or two. The visit to London did good; but it could not remove the pain which she suffered during this period of conflict. Haworth, May 19th, 1853. It is almost a relief to hear that you only think of staying at G---- a month; though of course one must not be selfish in wishing you to come home soon.... I cannot help feeling satisfaction in finding that the people here are getting up a subscription to offer a testimonial of respect to Mr. N---- on his leaving the place. Many are expressing both their commiseration and esteem for him. The churchwardens recently put the question to him plainly: Why was he going? Was it Mr. Brontë's fault or his own? His own, he answered. Did he blame Mr. Brontë? No, he did not: if anybody was wrong, it was himself. Was he willing to go? No; it gave him great pain. Yet he is not always right. I must be just. Papa addressed him at the school tea-drinking with _constrained_ civility, but still with _civility_. He did not reply civilly; he cut short further words. This sort of treatment is what Papa never will forget or forgive. It inspires him with a silent bitterness not to be expressed.... It is a dismal state of things. The weather is fine now, dear Nell. We will take these sunny days as a good omen for your visit. May 27th, 1853. You will want to know about the leave-taking. The whole matter is but a painful subject, but I must treat it briefly. The testimonial was presented in a public meeting. Mr. F---- and Mr. G---- were there. Papa was not very well, and I advised him to stay away, which he did. As to the last Sunday, it was a cruel struggle. Mr. N---- ought not to have had to take any duty. He left Haworth this morning at six o'clock. Yesterday evening he called to render into Papa's hands the deeds of the National School, and to say good-bye. They were busy cleaning, washing the paint, &c., so he did not find me there. I would not go into the parlour to speak to him in Papa's presence. He went out, thinking he was not to see me; and indeed till the very last moment I thought it best not. But perceiving that he stayed long before going out at the gate, and remembering his long grief, I took courage, and went out, trembling and miserable. I found him leaning against the garden door.... Of course I went straight to him. Very few words were interchanged; those few barely articulate: several things I should have liked to ask him were swept entirely from my memory. Poor fellow! but he wanted such hope and such encouragement as I _could_ not give him. Still I trust he must know now that I am not cruelly blind and indifferent to his constancy and grief. For a few weeks he goes to the South of England--afterwards he takes a curacy somewhere in Yorkshire, but I don't know where. Papa has been far from strong lately. I dare not mention Mr. N----'s name to him. He speaks of him quietly and without opprobrium to others; but to me he is implacable on the matter. However, he is gone--gone--and there's an end of it! I see no chance of hearing a word about him in future, unless some stray shred of intelligence comes through Mr. G---- or some other second-hand source. The remainder of the year 1853 was a chequered one. Mr. Nicholls left Haworth; Charlotte remained with her father. Those who saw her at this time bear testimony to the unfailing, never-flagging devotion she displayed towards one who was wounding her cruelly. But she bore this sorrow, like those which had preceded it, bravely and cheerfully. To her friend she opened her heart at times, revealing something of what she was suffering; but to all others she was silent. Haworth, April 13th, 1853. MY DEAR MISS ----,--Your last kind letter ought to have been answered long since, and would have been, did I find it practicable to proportion the promptitude of the response to the value I place upon my correspondents and their communications. You will easily understand, however, that the contrary rule often holds good, and that the epistle which importunes often takes precedence of that which interests. My publishers express entire satisfaction with the reception which has been accorded to "Villette." And, indeed, the majority of the reviews has been favourable enough. You will be aware, however, that there is a minority, small in character, which views the work with no favourable eye. "Currer Bell's" remarks on Romanism have drawn down on him the condign displeasure of the High Church party, which displeasure has been unequivocally expressed through their principal organs, _The Guardian_, _The English Churchman_, and _The Christian Remembrancer_. I can well understand that some of the charges launched against me by these publications will tell heavily to my prejudice in the minds of most readers. But this must be borne; and for my part, I can suffer no accusation to oppress me much which is not supported by the inward evidence of Conscience and Reason. "Extremes meet," says the proverb; in proof whereof I would mention that Miss Martineau finds with "Villette" nearly the same fault as the Puseyites. She accuses me of attacking Popery "with virulence," of going out of my way to assault it "passionately." In other respects she has shown, with reference to the work, a spirit so strangely and unexpectedly acrimonious, that I have gathered courage to tell her that the gulf of mutual difference between her and me is so wide and deep, the bridge of union so slight and uncertain, I have come to the conclusion that frequent intercourse would be most perilous and unadvisable, and have begged to adjourn _sine die_ my long-projected visit to her. Of course she is now very angry, but it cannot be helped. Two or three weeks since I received a long and kind letter from Mr. ----, which I answered a short time ago. I believe he thinks me a much better advocate for _change_, and what is called "political progress," than I am. However, in my reply I did not touch on these subjects. He intimated a wish to publish some of his own MSS. I fear he would hardly like the somewhat dissuasive tendency of my answer; but really, in these days of headlong competition, it is a great risk to publish. April 18th, 1853. If all be well, I think of going to Manchester about the close of this week. I only intend staying a few days; but I can say nothing about coming back by B----. Do not expect me; I would rather see you at Haworth by-and-by. Two or three weeks since, Miss Martineau wrote to ask why she did not hear from me, and to press me to go to Ambleside. Explanations ensued; the notes on each side were quite civil; but, having deliberately formed my resolution on substantial grounds, I adhered to it. I have declined being her visitor, and bid her good-bye. It is best so; the antagonism of our natures and principles was too serious to be trifled with. This difference with Miss Martineau is not a thing to dwell on now. The pity is that two women so truthful, so sincere, so bold in their utterances should ever have differed. Charlotte Brontë had known how to stand bravely by Miss Martineau when she believed that the latter was suffering because of her honestly-formed opinions; she had known how to speak on her behalf with timely generosity and force. But her sensitive nature was wounded to the quick by criticisms which she believed to be unjust; and so these two great women parted, and met again no more. To the mental pain which she was now suffering from her father's conduct there was added keen physical torture. During this summer of 1853 many of her letters contain sentences like this: "I have been suffering most severely for ten days with continued pain in the head--on the nerves it is said to be. Blistering at last seems to have done it some good; but I am yet weak and bewildered." A visit from Mrs. Gaskell, who came to see how Haworth looked in its autumn robe of splendour, did her some good; but still more was gained by a journey to the seaside in the company of her old friend and schoolmistress, Miss Wooler, before which she had addressed to her the following letter: Haworth, August 30th, 1853. MY DEAR MISS W.,--I was from home when your kind letter came, and, as it was not forwarded, I did not get it till my return. All the summer I have felt the wish and cherished the intention to join you for a brief period at the seaside; nor do I yet entirely relinquish the purpose, though its fulfilment must depend on my father's health. At present he complains so much of weakness and depressed spirits, that no thoughts of leaving him can be entertained. Should he improve, however, I would fain come to you before autumn is quite gone. My late absence was but for a week, when I accompanied Mr. and Mrs. ---- and baby on a trip to Scotland. They went with the intention of taking up their quarters at Kirkcudbright, or some watering-place on the Solway Firth. We hardly reached that locality, and had stayed but one night, when the baby (that rather despotic member of modern households) exhibited some symptoms of indisposition. To my unskilled perception its ailments appeared very slight, nowise interfering with its appetite or spirits; but parental eyes saw the matter in a different light. The air of Scotland was pronounced unpropitious to the child, and consequently we had to retrace our steps. I own I felt some little reluctance to leave "bonnie Scotland" so soon and so abruptly, but of course I could not say a word, since, however strong on my own mind the impression that the ailment in question was very trivial and temporary (an impression confirmed by the issue), I could not be absolutely certain that such was the case; and had any evil consequences followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself. Ilkley was the next place thought of. We went there, but I only remained three days, for, in the hurry of changing trains at one of the stations, my box was lost, and without clothes I could not stay. I have heard of it twice, but have not yet regained it. In all probability it is now lying at Kirkcudbright, where it was directed. Notwithstanding some minor trials, I greatly enjoyed this little excursion. The scenery through which we travelled from Dumfries to Kirkcudbright (a distance of thirty miles, performed outside a stage-coach) was beautiful, though not at all of a peculiarly Scottish character, being richly cultivated and well wooded. I liked Ilkley, too, exceedingly, and shall long to revisit the place. On the whole, I thought it for the best that circumstances obliged me to return home so soon, for I found Papa far from well. He is something better now, yet I shall not feel it right to leave him again till I see a more thorough re-establishment of health and strength. With some things to regret and smile at, I saw things to admire in the small family party with which I travelled. Mr. ---- makes a most devoted father and husband. I admired his great kindness to his wife; but I rather groaned (inwardly) over the unbounded indulgence of both parents towards their only child. The world does not revolve round the sun; that is a mistake. Certain babies, I plainly perceive, are the important centre of all things. The papa and mamma could only take their meals, rest, and exercise at such times and in such manner as the despotic infant permitted. While Mrs. ---- eat her dinner, Mr. ---- relieved guard as nurse. A nominal nurse, indeed, accompanied the party, but her place was a sort of anxious waiting sinecure, as the child did not fancy her attendance. Tenderness to offspring is a virtue, yet I think I have seen mothers who were most tender and thoughtful, yet in very love for their children would not permit them to become tyrants either over themselves or others. I shall be glad and grateful, my dear Miss W., to hear from you again whenever you have time or inclination to write--though, as I told you before, there is no fear of my misunderstanding silence. Should you leave Hornsea before winter sets in, I trust you will just come straight to Haworth, and pay your long-anticipated visit there before you go elsewhere. Papa and the servants send their respects. I always duly deliver your kind messages of remembrance, because they give pleasure. December came, and she writes to this friend expressing her wonder as to how she is spending the long winter evenings--"alone, probably, like me." It was a dreary winter for her; but the spring was at hand. Mr. Brontë, studying his daughter with keen eyes, could not hide from himself the fact that her health and spirits were drooping now as they had never drooped before. All work with the pen was laid aside; and household cares, attendance upon her father or on the old servant, who now also needed to be waited upon, occupied her time; but her heart was heavy with a burden such as she had never previously known. At last the stern nature of the man was broken down by his genuine affection for his daughter. His opposition to her marriage was suddenly laid aside; he asked her to recall Mr. Nicholls to Haworth, and with characteristic waywardness he now became as anxious that the wedding should take place as he had ever been that it should be prevented. There was a curious misadventure regarding the letter inviting Mr. Nicholls to Haworth, which is explained in the first of the letters I now quote. Haworth, March 28th, 1854. The enclosure in yours of yesterday puzzled me at first, for I did not immediately recognise my own handwriting. When I did, the sensation was one of consternation and vexation, as the letter ought by all means to have gone on Friday. It was intended to relieve him from great anxiety. However, I trust he will get it to-day; and, on the whole, when I think it over, I can only be thankful that the mistake was no worse, and did not throw the letter into the hands of some indifferent and unscrupulous person. I wrote it after some days of indisposition and uneasiness, and when I felt weak and unfit to write. While writing to _him_ I was at the same time intending to answer _your_ note; which I suppose accounts for the confusion of ideas shown in the mixed and blundering address. I wish you could come about Easter rather than at another time, for this reason. Mr. Nicholls, if not prevented, proposes coming over then. I suppose he will be staying at Mr. ----'s, as he has done two or three times before; but he will be frequently coming here, which would enliven your visits a little. Perhaps, too, he might take a walk with us occasionally. Altogether, it would be a little change for you, such as you know I could not always offer. If all be well, he will come under different circumstances to any that have attended his visits before. Were it otherwise, I should not ask you to meet him, for when aspects are gloomy and unpropitious, the fewer there are to suffer from the cloud, the better. He was here in January, and was then received.... I trust it will be a little different now. Papa has breakfasted in bed to-day, and has not yet risen. His bronchitis is still troublesome. I had a bad week last week, but am greatly better now, for my mind is a little relieved, though very sedate, and rising only to expectations the most moderate. Some time, perhaps in May, I may be in your neighbourhood, and shall then hope to come to B.; but, as you will understand from what I have now stated, I could not come before. Think it over, dear E., and come to Haworth if you can. April 11th, 1854. The result of Mr. Nicholls's visit is that Papa's consent is gained and his respect won, for Mr. Nicholls has in all things proved himself disinterested and forbearing. He has shown, too, that, while his feelings are exquisitely keen, he can freely forgive.... In fact, dear Ellen, I am engaged. Mr. Nicholls in the course of a few months will return to the curacy of Haworth. I stipulated that I would not leave Papa, and to Papa himself I proposed a plan of residence which should maintain his seclusion and convenience uninvaded, and in a pecuniary sense bring him gain instead of loss. What seemed at one time impossible is now arranged, and Papa begins really to take a pleasure in the prospect. For myself, dear E----, while thankful to One who seems to have guided me through much difficulty, much and deep distress and perplexity of mind, I am still very calm.... What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless, then, it is the best for me; nor do I shrink from wishing those dear to me one not less happy. It is possible that our marriage may take place in the course of the summer. Mr. Nicholls wishes it to be in July. He spoke of you with great kindness, and said he hoped you would be at our wedding. I said I thought of having no other bridesmaid. Did I say right? I mean the marriage to be literally _as quiet as possible_. Do not mention these things as yet. Good-bye. There is a strange, half-sad feeling in making these announcements. The whole thing is something other than the imagination paints it beforehand--cares, fears, come mixed inextricably with hopes. I trust yet to talk the matter over with you. So at length the day had dawned, and every letter now is filled with the hopes and cares of the expectant bride. April 15th. I hope to see you somewhere about the second week in May. The Manchester visit is still hanging over my head; I have deferred it and deferred it, but have finally promised to go about the beginning of next month. I shall only stay about three days; then I spend two or three days at H., then come to B. The three visits must be compressed into the space of a fortnight, if possible. I suppose I shall have to go to Leeds. My purchases cannot be either expensive or extensive. You must just resolve in your head the bonnets and dresses: something that can be turned to decent use and worn after the wedding-day will be best, I think. I wrote immediately to Miss W----, and received a truly kind letter from her this morning. Papa's mind seems wholly changed about this matter; and he has said, both to me and when I was not there, how much happier he feels since he allowed all to be settled. It is a wonderful relief for me to hear him treat the thing rationally, and quietly and amicably to talk over with him themes on which once I dared not touch. He is rather anxious that things should get forward now, and takes quite an interest in the arrangement of preliminaries. His health improves daily, though this east wind still keeps up a slight irritation in the throat and chest. The feeling which has been disappointed in Papa was _ambition_--paternal pride--ever a restless feeling, as we all know. Now that this unquiet spirit is exorcised, justice, which was once quite forgotten, is once more listened to, and affection, I hope, resumes some power. My hope is that in the end this arrangement will turn out more truly to Papa's advantage than any other it was in my power to achieve. Mr. N. only in his last letter refers touchingly to his earnest desire to prove his gratitude to Papa by offering support and consolation to his declining age. This will not be mere _talk_ with him. He is no talker, no dealer in mere professions. April 28th. Papa, thank God! continues to improve much. He preached twice on Sunday, and again on Wednesday, and was not tired. His mind and mood are different to what they were; so much more cheerful and quiet. I trust the illusions of ambition are quite dissipated, and that he really sees it is better to relieve a suffering and faithful heart, to secure in its fidelity a solid good, than unfeelingly to abandon one who is truly attached to _his_ interests as well as mine, and pursue some vain empty shadow. Hemsworth, May 6th. I came here on Thursday afternoon. I shall stay over Saturday and Sunday, and, if all be well, I hope to come to B. on Monday, after dinner, and just in time for tea. I leave you to judge by your own feelings whether I long to see you or not. ---- tells me you are looking better. She tells me also that I am not--rather ugly, as usual. But never mind that, dear Nell--as, indeed, you never did. On the whole, I _feel_ very decently at present, and within the last fortnight have had much respite from headache. You are kind in being so much in earnest in wishing for Mr. N. to come to B., and I am sorry that circumstances do not favour such a step. But, knowing how matters stood, I did not repeat the proposal to him, for I thought it would be like tempting him to forget duty. In the following letters, in addition to the pleasing side-lights which they throw upon her life in its new aspect, there is another feature which deserves to be noticed--that is, the exceeding tenderness with which the writer watches over her friend. The new love entering into her heart has but made the old love stronger, and she lavishes upon the sole remaining companion of her youth the care and affection which can no longer be bestowed upon sisters of her own blood. Haworth, May 14th. I took the time of the Leeds, Keighley, Skipton trains from the February time-table, and when I got to Leeds found myself all wrong. The trains on that line were changed. One had that moment left the station--indeed, it was just steaming away; there was not another till a quarter after five o'clock; so I had just four hours to sit and twirl my thumbs. I got over the time somehow, but I was vexed to think how much more pleasantly I might have spent it at B. It was just seven o'clock when I reached home. I found Papa well. It seems he has been particularly well during my absence, but to-day he is a little sickly, and only preached once. However, he is better again this evening. I could not leave you, dear Ellen, with a very quiet mind, or take away a satisfied feeling about you. Not that I think that bad cough lodged in a dangerous quarter; but it shakes your system, wears you out, and makes you look ill. _Take care of it, do, dear Ellen. Avoid the evening air for a time_; keep in the house when the weather is cold. Observe these precautions till the cough is quite gone, and you regain strength, and feel better able to bear chill and change. Believe me, it does not suit you at present to be much exposed to variations of temperature. I send the mantle with this, but have made up my mind not to let you have the cushion now, lest you should sit stitching over it too closely. It will do any time, and whenever it comes will be your present all the same. May 22nd. I wonder how you are, and whether that harassing cough is better; but I am afraid the variable weather of last week will not have been favourable to improvement. I _will_ not and _do_ not believe the cough lies on any vital organ. Still it is a mark of weakness, and a warning to be scrupulously careful about undue exposure. Just now, dear Ellen, an hour's inadvertence might derange your whole constitution for years to come--might throw you into a state of chronic ill-health which would waste, fade, and wither you up prematurely. So, once and again, TAKE CARE. If you go to ----, or any other evening party, pack yourself in blankets and a feather-bed to come home, also fold your boa twice over your mouth, to serve as a respirator. Since I came home I have been very busy sketching. The little new room is got into order now, and the green and white curtains are up. They exactly suit the papering, and look neat and clean enough. I had a letter a day or two since, announcing that Mr. N. comes to-morrow. I feel anxious about him, more anxious on one point than I dare quite express to myself. It seems he has again been suffering sharply from his rheumatic affection. I hear this not from himself, but from another quarter. He was ill whilst I was at Manchester and B. He uttered no complaint to me, dropped no hint on the subject. Alas! he was hoping he had got the better of it; and I know how this contradiction of his hopes will sadden him. For unselfish reasons he did so earnestly wish this complaint might not become chronic. I fear--I fear--but, however, I mean to stand by him now, whether in weal or woe. This liability to rheumatic pain was one of the strong arguments used against the marriage. It did not weigh, somehow. If he is doomed to suffer, it seems that so much the more will he need care and help. And yet the ultimate possibilities of such a case are appalling. Well, come what may, God help and strengthen both him and me. I look forward to to-morrow with a mixture of impatience and anxiety. Poor fellow! I want to see with my own eyes how he is. Haworth, June 7th. I am very glad and thankful to hear that you continue better, though I am afraid your cough will have returned a little during the late chilly change in the weather. Are you taking proper care of yourself, and either staying in the house or going out warmly clad, and with a boa doing duty as a respirator? On this last point I incline particularly to insist, for you seemed careless about it, and unconscious how much atmospheric harm the fine thick hairs of the fur might ward off. I was very miserable about Papa again some days ago. While the weather was so sultry and electric, about a week since, he was suddenly attacked with deafness, and complained of other symptoms which showed the old tendency to the head. His spirits, too, became excessively depressed. It was all I could do to keep him up, and I own I was sad and depressed myself. However he took some medicine, which did him good. The change to cooler weather, too, has suited him. The temporary deafness has quite disappeared for the present, and his head is again clear and cool. I can only earnestly trust he will continue better. That unlucky ---- continues his efforts to give what trouble he can, and I am obliged to conceal things from Papa's knowledge as well as I can, to spare him that anxiety which hurts him so much.... I feel compelled to throw the burden of the contest upon Mr. Nicholls, who is younger and can bear it better. The worst of it is, Mr. N. has not Papa's right to speak and act, or he would do it to purpose. I should then have to mediate, not rouse; to play the part of Feather-bed 'twixt castle-wall And heavy brunt of cannon-ball. June 16th. MY DEAR MISS W----,--Owing to certain untoward proceedings, matters have hitherto been kept in such a state of uncertainty that I could not make any approach towards fixing the day; and now, if I would avoid inconveniencing Papa, I must hurry. I believe the commencement of July is the furthest date upon which I can calculate; possibly I may be obliged to accept one still nearer--the close of June. I cannot quite decide till next week. Meantime, will you, my dear Miss W----, come as soon as you possibly can, and let me know at your earliest convenience the day of your arrival. I have written to Ellen, begging her to communicate with you.... Your absence would be a real and grievous disappointment. Papa also seems much to wish your presence. Mr. Nicholls enters with true kindness into my wish to have all done quietly; and he has made such arrangements as will, I trust, secure literal privacy. Yourself, Ellen, and Mr. S. will be the only persons present at the ceremony. Mr. and Mrs. G. are asked to the breakfast afterwards. I know you will kindly excuse this brief note, for I am and have been _very_ busy, and must still be busy up to the very day. Give my sincere love to all Mr. C----'s family. I hope Mr. C. and Mr. Nicholls may meet some day. I believe mutual acquaintance would in time bring mutual respect; but one of them, at least, requires _knowing_ to be _appreciated_. And I must say that I have not yet found him to lose with closer knowledge. I make no grand discoveries, but I occasionally come upon a quiet little nook of character which excites esteem. He is always reliable, truthful, faithful, affectionate; a little unbending, perhaps, but still persuadable and open to kind influence--a man never, indeed, to be driven, but who may be led. [Illustration: HAWORTH CHURCH.] The marriage took place on June 29th, 1854. A neighbouring clergyman read the service; Charlotte's "dear Nell" was the solitary bridesmaid; her old schoolmistress, whose friendship had ever been dear to her, Miss Wooler, gave her away; and visitors to Haworth who are shown the marriage register will see that these two faithful and trusted friends were the only witnesses. Immediately after the marriage the bride and bridegroom started for Ireland, to visit some of the relatives of Mr. Nicholls. "I trust I feel thankful to God for having enabled me to make a right choice; and I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable, unboastful man," are words which appear in the first letter written from Ireland. A month later the bride writes as follows to her friend: Dublin, July 28th, 1854. I really cannot rest any longer without writing you a line, which I have literally not had time to do during the last fortnight. We have been travelling about, with only just such cessation as enabled me to answer a few of the many notes of congratulation forwarded, and which I dared not suffer to accumulate till my return, when I know I shall be busy enough. We have been to Killarney, Glen Gariffe, Tarbert, Tralee, Cork, and are now once more in Dublin again on our way home, where we hope to arrive next week. I shall make no effort to describe the scenery through which we have passed. Some parts have exceeded all I ever imagined. Of course, much pleasure has sprung from all this, and more, perhaps, from the kind and ceaseless protection which has ever surrounded me, and made travelling a different matter to me from what it has heretofore been. Dear Nell, it is written that there shall be no unmixed happiness in this world. Papa has not been well, and I have been longing, _longing intensely_ sometimes, to be at home. Indeed, I could enjoy and rest no more, and so home we are going. It was a new life to which she was returning. Wedded to one who had proved by years of faithfulness and patience how strong and real was his love for her, it seemed as though peace and sunshine, the brightness of affection and the pleasures of home, were at length about to settle upon her and around her. The bare sitting-room in the parsonage, which for six years of loneliness and anguish had been peopled only by the heart-sick woman and the memories of those who had left her, once more resounded with the voices of the living. The husband's strong and upright nature furnished something for the wife to lean against; the painful sense of isolation which had so long oppressed her vanished utterly, and in its place came that "sweet sense of depending" which is the most blessed fruit of a trustful love. A great calm seemed to be breathed over the spirit of her life after the fitful fever which had raged so long; and her friends saw new shoots of tenderness, new blossoms of gentleness and affection, peeping forth in nooks of her character which had hitherto been barren. Of her letters during these happy months of peace and expectation I cannot quote much; they are too closely intertwined with the life of those who survive to permit of this being done; but all of them breathe the same spirit. They show that the courage, the patience, the cheerfulness with which the rude buffetings of fate had been borne in that stormy middle-passage of her history, had brought their own reward; and that joy had come at last, not perhaps in the shape she had imagined in her early youth, but as a substantial reality, and no longer a mocking illusion. August 9th, 1854. ---- will probably end by accepting ----; and judging from what you say, it seems to me that it would be rational to do so. If, indeed, some one else whom she preferred _wished_ to have her, and had duly and sincerely come forward, matters would be different. But this it appears is not the case; and to cherish any _unguarded_ and unsustained preference is neither right nor wise. Since I came home I have not had one unemployed moment. My life is changed indeed; to be wanted continually, to be constantly called for and occupied, seems so strange; yet it is a marvellously good thing. As yet I don't quite understand how some wives grow so selfish. As far as my experience of matrimony goes, I think it tends to draw you out and away from yourself.... Dear Nell, during the last six weeks the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed. I know more of the realities of life than I once did. I think many false ideas are propagated, perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintance to marry, much to blame. For my part I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance, what I always said in theory: Wait God's will. Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's lot is far, far different.... Have I told you how much better Mr. Nicholls is? He looks quite strong and hale. To see this improvement in him has been a great source of happiness to me; and, to speak truth, a source of wonder too. Haworth, September 7th, 1854. I send a French paper to-day. You would almost think I had given them up, it is so long since one was despatched. The fact is they had accumulated to quite a pile during my absence. I wished to look them over before sending them off, and as yet I have scarcely found time. That same _time_ is an article of which I once had a large stock always on hand; where it is all gone to now it would be difficult to say, but my moments are very fully occupied. Take warning, Ellen. The married woman can call but a very small portion of each day her own. Not that I complain of this sort of monopoly as yet, and I hope I never shall incline to regard it as a misfortune, but it certainly exists. We were both disappointed that you could not come on the day I mentioned. I have grudged this splendid weather very much. The moors are in their glory; I never saw them fuller of purple bloom; I wanted you to see them at their best. They are fast turning now, and in another week, I fear, will be faded and sere. As soon as ever you can leave home, be sure to write and let me know.... Papa continues greatly better. My husband flourishes; he begins indeed to express some slight alarm at the growing improvement in his condition. I think I am decent--better certainly than I was two months ago; but people don't compliment me as they do Arthur--excuse the name; it has grown natural to use it now. Haworth, September 16th, 1854. MY DEAR MISS ----,--You kindly tell me not to write while Ellen is with me; I am expecting her this week; and as I think it would be wrong long to defer answering a letter like yours, I will reduce to practice the maxim: "There is no time like the present," and do it at once. It grieves me that you should have had any anxiety about my health; the cough left me before I quitted Ireland, and since my return home I have scarcely had an ailment, except occasional headaches. My dear father, too, continues much better. Dr. B---- was here on Sunday, preaching a sermon for the Jews, and he gratified me much by saying that he thought Papa not at all altered since he saw him last--nearly a year ago. I am afraid this opinion is rather flattering; but still it gave me pleasure, for I had feared that he looked undeniably thinner and older. You ask what visitors we have had. A good many amongst the clergy, &c., in the neighbourhood, but none of note from a distance. Haworth is, as you say, a very quiet place; it is also difficult of access, and unless under the stimulus of necessity, or that of strong curiosity, or finally, that of true and tried friendship, few take courage to penetrate to so remote a nook. Besides, now that I am married, I do not expect to be an object of much general interest. Ladies who have won some prominence (call it either _notoriety_ or celebrity) in their single life, often fall quite into the background when they change their names. But if true domestic happiness replace fame, the change is indeed for the better. Yes, I am thankful to say that my husband is in improved health and spirits. It makes me content and grateful to hear him, from time to time, avow his happiness in the brief but plain phrase of sincerity. My own life is more occupied than it used to be; I have not so much time for thinking: I am obliged to be more practical, for my dear Arthur is a very practical as well as a very punctual, methodical man. Every morning he is in the national school by nine o'clock; he gives the children religious instruction till half-past ten. Almost every afternoon he pays visits amongst the poor parishioners. Of course he often finds a little work for his wife to do, and I hope she is not sorry to help him. I believe it is not bad for me that his bent should be so wholly towards matters of real life and active usefulness--so little inclined to the literary and contemplative. As to his continued affection and kind attentions, it does not become me to say much of them; but as yet they neither change nor diminish. I wish, my dear Miss ----, _you_ had some kind, faithful companion to enliven your solitude at R----, some friend to whom to communicate your pleasure in the scenery, the fine weather, the pleasant walks. You never complain, never murmur, never seem otherwise than thankful; but I know you must miss a privilege none could more keenly appreciate than yourself. There are other letters like the foregoing, all speaking of the constant occupation of time, which once hung heavily, all giving evidence that peace and love had made their home in her heart, all free from that strain of sadness which was so common in other years. One only of these letters, that written on the morrow of her last Christmas Day, need be quoted, however. Haworth, December 26th. I return Mrs. ----'s letter: it is as you say, very genuine, truthful, affectionate, _maternal_, without a taint of sham or exaggeration. She will love her child without spoiling it, I think. She does not make an uproar about her happiness either. The longer I live the more I suspect exaggerations. I fancy it is sometimes a sort of fashion for each to vie with the other in protestations about their wondrous felicity--and sometimes they _fib_! I am truly glad to hear you are all better at B----. In the course of three or four weeks now I expect to get leave to come to you. I certainly long to see you again. One circumstance reconciles me to this delay--the weather. I do not know whether it has been as bad with you as with us; but here for three weeks we have had little else than a succession of hurricanes.... You inquire after Mrs. Gaskell. She has not been here, and I think I should not like her to come now till summer. She is very busy now with her story of "North and South." I must make this note very short. Arthur joins me in sincere good wishes for a happy Christmas and many of them to you and yours. He is well, thank God, and so am I; and he _is_ "my dear boy" certainly--dearer now than he was six months ago. In three days we shall actually have been married that length of time. There was not much time for literary labours during these happy months of married life. The wife, new to her duties, was engaged in mastering them with all the patience, self-suppression, and industry which had characterised her throughout her life. Her husband was now her first thought; and he took the time which had formerly been devoted to reading, study, thought, and writing. But occasionally the pressure she was forced to put upon herself was very severe. Mr. Nicholls had never been attracted towards her by her literary fame; with literary effort, indeed, he had no sympathy, and upon the whole he would rather that his wife should lay aside her pen entirely than that she should gain any fresh triumphs in the world of letters. So she submitted, and with cheerful courage repressed that "gift" which had been her solace in sorrows deep and many. Yet once "the spell" was too strong to be resisted, and she hastily wrote a few pages of a new story called "Emma," in which once more she proposed to deal with her favourite theme--the history of a friendless girl. One would fain have seen how she would have treated her subject, now that "the colour of her thoughts" had been changed, and that a happy marriage had introduced her to a new phase of that life which she had studied so closely and so constantly. But it was not to be. On January 19, when she had returned to Haworth, after a visit to Sir J. K. Shuttleworth's, she wrote to her friend as follows. This letter was the last written in ink to her schoolfellow: Haworth, January 19th, 1855. Since our return from Gawthorpe we have had Mr. B----, one of Arthur's cousins, staying with us. It was a great pleasure. I wish you could have seen him and made his acquaintance: a true gentleman by nature and cultivation is not, after all, an everyday thing.... I very much wish to come to B----, and I hoped to be able to write with certainty and fix Wednesday, the 31st January, as the day; but the fact is I am not sure whether I shall be well enough to leave home. At present I should be a most tedious visitor. My health has really been very good ever since my return from Ireland, till about ten days ago. Indigestion and continual faint sickness have been my portion ever since. I never before felt as I have done lately. I am rather mortified to lose my good looks and grow thin as I am doing, just when I thought of going to B----. Poor J----! I still hope he will get better, but A---- writes grievous though not always clear or consistent accounts. Dear Ellen, I want to see you, and I hope I shall see you well. Those around her were not alarmed at first. They hoped that before long all would be well with her again; they could not believe that the joys of which she had just begun to taste were about to be snatched away. But her weakness grew apace; the sickness knew no abatement; and a deadly fear began to creep into the hearts of husband and father. She was soon so weak that she was compelled to remain in bed, and from that "dreary bed" she wrote two or three faint pencil notes which still exist--the last pathetic chapters in that life-long correspondence from which we have gathered so many extracts. In one of them, which Mrs. Gaskell has published, she says: "I want to give you an assurance which I know will comfort you--and that is that I find in my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights." In another, the last, she says: "I cannot talk--even to my dear, patient, constant Arthur I can say but few words at once." One dreary March morning, when frost still bound the earth and no spring sun had come to gladden the hearts of those who watched for summer, her friend received another letter, written, not in the neat, minute hand of Charlotte Brontë, but in her father's tremulous characters: Haworth, near Keighley, March 30th, 1855. MY DEAR MADAM,--We are all in great trouble, and Mr. Nicholls so much so that he is not sufficiently strong and composed as to be able to write. I therefore devote a few lines to tell you that my dear daughter is very ill, and apparently on the verge of the grave. If she could speak she would no doubt dictate to us whilst answering your kind letter. But we are left to ourselves to give what answer we can. The doctors have no hope of her case, and fondly as we a long time cherished hope, that hope is now gone; and we have only to look forward to the solemn event with prayer to God that He will give us grace and strength sufficient unto our day. Ever truly and respectfully yours, P. Brontë. The following day, March 31st, 1855, the blinds were drawn once again at Haworth Parsonage; the last and greatest of the children of the house had passed away; and the brilliant name of Charlotte Brontë had become a name and nothing more! "We are left to ourselves," said Mr. Brontë in the letter I have just quoted--and so it was. Not the glory only, but the light, had fled from the parsonage where the childless father and the widowed husband sat together beside their dead. Of all the drear and desolate spots upon that wild Yorkshire moorland there was none now so dreary and so desolate as the house which had once been the home of Charlotte Brontë. XII. POSTHUMOUS HONOURS. There is a deeper truth in the maxim which bids us judge no man happy till his death than most of us are apt to perceive. For sometimes the happiness of a life is crowned by death itself; and that which to the superficial gaze seems but the dreary and tragic close of the play, is really the welcome release from the burden which had become too heavy to be borne longer. But where life and breath fail suddenly in the moment of fullest hope, apparently in the moment also of greatest bliss, the strain upon our faith is almost too severe, and blinded and bewildered, we see nothing and feel nothing but the awful stroke of fate which has laid the loved one low, and the great gap which remains at the table and the hearth. It was with such a feeling as this that the outer world heard of that Easter-day tragedy which had been enacted to the bitter end among the Yorkshire hills. Those who knew the little household at Haworth had been watching, as has already been told, for that fulness of joy which seemed close at hand. They had seen the lonely authoress developing into the trustful happy wife, and they looked forward to no distant day when children should be gathered at her knee, and a new generation, born amid happier circumstances, freed from the strain and stress which had been laid upon her, should perpetuate a great name, and perhaps something of a great genius. The announcement that all these hopes had been brought to nothing fell upon the world as a blow not easily to be borne. When it was made known that the author of "Jane Eyre" was dead, there rose up even from those who had been her bitter critics during her lifetime, a cry of pain and regret which would have astonished nobody more than herself had she been able to hear it. The genuine unaffected modesty which had enabled her to preserve the simplicity of her character amid all the temptations which thronged round her at the height of her fame, had prevented her from ever feeling herself to be a person of consequence in the world. What she did in the way of writing she did because she could not escape the commanding authority of her own genius; but the idea that by doing this she had made herself conspicuously great never once occurred to her. There is not a letter extant from her which shows that she thought anything of the fame or the fortune she had acquired. On the contrary everything that remains of her inner life proves that to the very last she esteemed herself as humbly as ever she did during the days of her "governessing" in Yorkshire or at Brussels. She knew of course that she attracted attention wherever she went; but her own unfeigned belief seems to have been that this attention was due solely to curiosity, and to curiosity of a not very pleasant or flattering kind. Brought up as she had been among those who regarded any literary pursuit, and above all the writing of a book, as something beyond the proper limits of the rights and duties of her sex, she had never quite escaped from the notion that in putting pen to paper she was in some vague way offending against the proprieties of society. It has been shown by an extract from one of her letters, how keenly and indignantly she repudiated the notion that she had ever written anything of which she needed to be ashamed. Her pure heart vindicated her absolutely upon that point. But, from first to last, she seemed during her literary career to feel that in writing novels she had sinned against the conventional canons, and that she was in consequence looked upon not as a great woman who had taken a lofty place in the republic of letters, but as a social curiosity who had done something which made her for the time-being notorious. How ready she was to forget her success as a writer is shown by a thousand passages in her correspondence, many of these passages being too tender or sacred for quotation. It is impossible to read her letters without seeing that, with the exception of a solitary friend, the companions of her daily life in Yorkshire did not feel at all drawn towards her by her literary fame. With her accustomed humility she accepted herself at their valuation, and whilst the nations afar off were praising her, she herself was perfectly ready to take a humble place in the circle of her friends at home. The tastes of her husband had unquestionably something to do in maintaining this simple and sincere modesty up to the end of her life. He was resolute in putting aside all thought of her literary achievements; his whole anxiety--an anxiety arising almost entirely from his desire for her happiness--was that she should cease entirely to be the author, and should become the busy, useful, contented wife of the village clergyman. It would be wrong to hide the fact that she was compelled to place a severe strain upon herself in order to comply with her husband's wishes; and once, as we have seen, her strength of self-repression gave way, and she indulged in the forbidden luxury of work with the pen. But it is not surprising that, surrounded by those who, loving her very dearly, yet withheld from her all recognition of her position as one of the great writers of the day, she should have accepted their estimate of her place with characteristic humility, and believed herself to be of little or no account outside the walls of her own home. In this belief she lived and died. Among the letters before me, but from which I must forbear to quote, are not a few written during that last sad illness when the end began to loom before her vision. In these, whilst there are many anxious inquiries after the friends of early days, and many remarks upon their varying fortunes, many allusions, too, to her husband and father, and to parish work at Haworth, there is not a line which speaks of her own feelings as an author, or of the work which she had accomplished during the brief closing years of her life. The novelist has passed entirely out of sight, and only the wife, the friend, the expectant mother, remains. I know nothing which more touchingly shows one how small a thing is great fame, how little even the most marked and marvellous successes can affect the realities of life, than the last chapters of Charlotte Brontë's correspondence do. Her death, all unknown to the great world outside; her quiet funeral, treated only as the funeral of the clergyman's daughter, the curate's wife; the modest announcement of her end sent to the local papers--all these are in keeping with her own low estimate of herself. But death, the great touchstone of humanity, revealed her true position to the world, and to her surviving relatives and friends. Copies of the newspapers of that sad March week in 1855 lie before me, carefully treasured up by loving hands. They speak with an eloquence which is not always that of mere words, of a nation's mourning for a great soul gone prematurely to its account. Of all these tributes of loving admiration, there are two which must be singled out for special mention. One is Miss Martineau's generous though not wholly satisfactory notice of "Currer Bell" in _The Daily News_, and the other the far more sympathetic article by "Shirley," which appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_ a few months later. Her father, her husband, her life-long friend, were wonderfully touched and moved when they found how closely the simple, modest woman, who had been so long a sweet and familiar presence to them, had wound herself round the great heart of the reading public. But they were slow to grasp all the truth. When it was proposed that some record of this noble life should be preserved, and when Mrs. Gaskell was named as the fittest among all Charlotte's literary acquaintances to undertake the office, there was strong and keen opposition on the part of those who had been nearest and dearest to her. With a natural feeling, to which no word of blame can be attached, but which again throws light upon the character of her surroundings in life, they objected to any revelation to the world of the real character and career of the lost member of their household. Happily, their scruples were overcome, and the world was permitted to read the story of the Brontës as told by one who was herself a woman of genius and of the highest moral worth. The reader of this monograph will not, it is to be hoped, imagine that the writer has presumed to set himself up as a rival to Mrs. Gaskell. He can no more pretend to equal her in the treatment of his subject than in the freshness of the interest attaching to it. And if he has found himself obliged to differ from her on some points not wholly unimportant, it must be borne in mind that the writer of to-day is free from not a few of the difficulties and restraints which weighed upon the writer of twenty years ago. Mrs. Gaskell had, indeed, to labour under serious disadvantages in her task. Not only was she unable to obtain full and ready access to all the materials which she needed to employ, but she was also compelled to introduce much irrelevant and even hurtful matter into a delightful and beautiful story. When, after gathering up the bare outline of the life she proposed to write, she complained to Mr. Brontë that there were not incidents enough in the history of his daughter to make an interesting narrative of the ordinary length, his reply was a characteristic one: "If there are not facts enough in Charlotte's life to make a book, madam, you must invent some." There is no need to say that Mrs. Gaskell declined to follow this advice; but none the less was she hampered all through her work by the necessity of introducing topics which had but little to do with her main theme; and we see the result in the fact that the plain unadorned tale of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters has been interwoven with dismal episodes with which properly it had no concern. The publication of Mrs. Gaskell's biography came, however, as a revelation upon the world. Readers everywhere had learned to admire the writings of "Currer Bell," and to mourn over the premature extinction of her genius, but few of them had imagined that the life and personal character of the author of "Jane Eyre" had been what it was. The following letter from Charles Kingsley to Mrs. Gaskell sufficiently indicates the revulsion of feeling wrought in many minds by the publication of the "Memoir:" St. Leonards, May 14, 1857. Let me renew our long-interrupted acquaintance by complimenting you on poor Miss Brontë's "Life." You have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life, is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. "Jane Eyre" I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's, are the only ones I care to open. "Shirley" disgusted me at the opening, and I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written, especially those poems, which ought not to have fallen dead as they did, and which seem to be (from a review in the current _Fraser_) of remarkable, strength and purity.[1] [1] "Charles Kingsley: his Letters and Memories of his Life," vol. ii. p. 24. The effect of the portrait was heightened by the admirable skill with which the background was drawn; and the story of the life gained a popularity which hardly any other recent English biography has attained. Yet, from the first, people were found here and there who, whilst acknowledging the skill, the sympathy, and the entire sincerity displayed by Mrs. Gaskell, yet whispered that the Charlotte Brontë of the story was not in all particulars the Charlotte Brontë they had known. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF HAWORTH CHURCH.] One great change resulted immediately from the publication of Mrs. Gaskell's work. Haworth and its parsonage became the shrine to which hundreds of literary pilgrims from all parts of the globe began to find their way. To see the house in which the three sisters had spent their lives and done their work, to stand at the altar at which Charlotte was married, and beneath which her ashes now rest, and to hear her aged father preach one of his pithy, sensible, but dogmatic sermons, was what all literary lion-hunters aspired to do. In Yorkshire, indeed, the stolid people of the West Riding were not greatly moved by this enthusiasm. Just as Charlotte herself had seemed an ordinary and rather obscure person to her Yorkshire friends, so Haworth was still regarded as being a very dull and dreary village by those who lived near it. But the empire of genius knows no geographical boundaries, and if at her own doors Charlotte Brontë's sway was unrecognised, from far-distant quarters of the world there came the free and full acknowledgment of her power. No other land, however, furnished so many eager and enthusiastic visitors to the Brontë shrine as the United States, and the number of Americans who found their way to Haworth during the ten years immediately following the death of the author of "Jane Eyre" would, if properly recorded, astonish the world. The bleak and lonely house by the side of the moors, with its dismal little garden stretching down to the churchyard, where the village dead of many a generation rest, and its dreary out-look upon the old tower rising from its bank of nettles, the squalid houses of the hamlet, and the bare moorlands beyond, received almost as many visitors from the other side of the Atlantic during those years as Abbotsford or Stratford-upon-Avon. Mr. Brontë and Mr. Nicholls, though they were anxious to avoid the pertinacious intrusion of these curious but enthusiastic guests, could not entirely escape from meeting them. It followed that many an American lady and gentleman wandered through the rooms where the three sisters had dwelt together in love and unity, and where Charlotte had laboured alone after the light of her life had fled from her, and many an American magazine and newspaper contained the record of the impressions which these visits left upon the minds of those who made them. In only one case does it seem necessary to recall those impressions. The late Mr. Raymond, for many years editor of _The New York Times_, visited Haworth, and wrote an account of his visit, some passages of which may well be reproduced here. He tells us how on his railway journey to Keighley, at that time the nearest railway station to Haworth, he "astonished an intelligent, sociable, and very agreeable English lady, his sole companion in the railway carriage, by telling her the errand which had brought him to Yorkshire. She lived in the neighbourhood, had read the 'Jane Eyre' novels, and 'supposed the girls were clever;' but 'she would not go ten steps to see where they lived, nor could she understand how a stranger from America should feel any interest in their affairs.'" Arrived at Haworth, and having satisfied himself as to the appearance of the parsonage and the character of the surrounding neighbourhood, Mr. Raymond went to the Black Bull Inn to dine and sleep. "As I took my candle to go to my chamber, I stepped for a moment into the kitchen, where the landlord and landlady were having a comfortable chat over pipes and ale, with a companionable rustic of the place, who proved to be a nephew of the old servant Tabby, who lived so long, and at last died in the service of the Brontë family. I joined the circle, and sat there till long after midnight. Branwell was clearly the hero of the village worship. A little red-headed fellow, the landlord said, quick, bright, abounding in stories, in jokes, and in pleasant talk of every kind; he was a general favourite in town, and the special wonder of the Black Bull circles. Small as he was, it was impossible to frighten him. They had seen him volunteer during a mill-riot to go in and thrash a dozen fellows, any one of whom could have put him in his pocket and carried him off at a minute's notice. Indeed a characteristic of the whole family seems to have been an entire insensibility to danger and to fear. Emily and Charlotte, these people told me, were one day walking through the street, when their great dog, Keeper, engaged in a fight with another dog of equal size. Whilst everybody else stood aloof and shouted, these girls went in, caught Keeper by the neck, and by dint of tugging, and beating him over the head, succeeded in dragging him away." I extract this passage because of the confirmation which it gives, on the authority of one who made his inquiries very soon after the death of Charlotte Brontë, of the account of some of the family characteristics which appear in these pages; nor will the story of Mr. Raymond's interview with Mr. Brontë, told as it is with American directness, be without its interest and its value. The next morning I prepared to call at the parsonage. I was told that Mr. Brontë and Mr. Nicholls declined to receive strangers, having a great aversion to visits of curiosity, and being exceedingly retiring and reserved in their habits. I sent in my card, however, and was shown into the little library at the right of the entrance, where I was asked to await Mr. Nicholls's appearance. The room was small, very plainly furnished, with small bookcases round the walls, the one between the windows containing copies of the Brontë novels. Mr. Nicholls soon came in and made me welcome. To my apologies for my intrusion he assured me that while they were under the necessity of declining many visits, both he and his father were always happy to see their friends, and that the words "New York" upon my card were quite sufficient to insure me a welcome. Mr. Brontë, he said, was not up when I called, but had desired him to detain me until he could dress and come down, as he did soon after. I had an exceedingly pleasant conversation of half an hour with them both.... Mr. Brontë's personal appearance is striking and peculiar. He is tall, thin, and rather muscular, has a quick energetic manner, a reflective and by no means unpleasant countenance, and a resolute promptness of movement which indicated marked decision and firmness of character. The extraordinary stories told by Mrs. Gaskell of his inflammable temper, of his burning silk dresses belonging to his wife which he did not approve of her wearing, of his sawing chairs and tables, and firing off pistols in the back-yard by way of relieving his superfluous anger, find no warrant certainly in his present appearance, and are generally considered exaggerations. I remarked to him that I had been agreeably disappointed in the face of the country and the general aspect of the town, that they were less sombre and repulsive than Mrs. Gaskell's descriptions led me to expect. Mr. Nicholls and Mr. Brontë smiled at each other, and the latter remarked: "Well, I think Mrs. Gaskell tried to make us all appear as bad as she could." Mr. Brontë wears a very wide white neckcloth, and usually sinks his chin so that his mouth is barely visible over it. This gives him rather a singular expression, which is rendered still more so by spectacles with large round glasses enclosed in broad metallic rims. Though over eighty years old and somewhat infirm, he preaches once every Sunday in his church.... As I rose to take my leave Mr. Nicholls asked me to step into the parlour and look at Charlotte's portrait. It is the one from which the engraving in the "Life" is made; but the latter does no justice to the picture, which Mr. Nicholls said was a perfect likeness of the original. I remarked that the engraving gives to the face, and especially to the eyes, a weird, sinister, and unpleasant expression which did not appear in the portrait. He said he had observed it, and that nothing could be more unjust, for Charlotte's eyes were as soft and affectionate in their expression as could possibly be conceived. Slight as these scraps from the pen of an American "interviewer" may seem, they have their value as contemporary records of scenes and incidents the memory of which is fast fading away. Yet even to-day old men and women are to be found in Haworth who can regale the curious stranger with many a reminiscence, more or less original, of the family which has given so great a glory to the place. Mr. Brontë lived six years after the death of Charlotte. In spite of his great age he preached regularly in the church till within a few months of his death; and when at last he took to his bed, he retained his active interest in the affairs of the world. The newspapers which Charlotte mentions in one of her juvenile lucubrations as being regularly "taken in" at the patronage--_The Leeds Mercury_ and _The Intelligencer_--were still brought to him, and read aloud. Every scrap of political information which he could gather up he cherished as a precious morsel; and any visitor who could tell him how the currents of public life were moving in the great West Riding towns around him, was certain to be welcome. But the chief enjoyment of his later years was connected with the public respect shown for his daughter's memory. The tributes to her virtues and her genius which were poured from the press after the publication of Mrs. Gaskell's work were valued by him to the latest moment of his life; and in the end he at last understood something of the character and the inner life of the child who had dwelt so long a stranger under her father's roof. One point I must notice ere I quit the subject of Charlotte Brontë's father. Some of those who knew him in his later years, including one who is above all others entitled to an opinion on the subject, have objected to the portrait of him presented in these pages, as being over-coloured. So far as his early life and manhood are concerned, I cannot admit the force of the objection; for what has been told of Mr. Brontë in these pages has been gathered from the best of all sources--from the letters of his children and the recollections of those who saw much of him during that period. But it is perfectly true that in old age, after the marriage, and still more after the death of Charlotte, he was wonderfully softened in character. The fierce outburst of opposition to the engagement between his daughter and Mr. Nicholls was almost the last trace of that vehement passion which consumed him during his earlier years; and those visitors who, like Mr. Raymond, first became acquainted with him in the closing days of his life, found it difficult to believe that the stories told of his propensities in youth and middle-age could possibly be true. Time did its work at last, even on his adamantine character, softening the asperities, and wearing away the corners of a disposition, the angular eccentricities of which had long been so noticeable. Nor ought mention of the closing scenes of Mr. Brontë's life to be made without some reference to the part which Mr. Nicholls played at Haworth during those last sad years. The faithful husband remained under the parsonage roof in the character of a faithful son. The two men, bound together by so tender and sacred a tie, were not lightly to be separated, now that the living and visible link had been taken away. To some it may seem strange that Charlotte Brontë should have given her heart to one who was little disposed to sympathise with the overmastering passion inspired by her genius. But if in her husband she had found one who was not likely to have helped her in her literary work, she had also found in him a friend whose steadfastness even to the death was nobly proved. During all these sad and lonely years, whilst the father of the Brontës waited for the summons which should call him once more into their company, Charlotte's husband lived with him, the patient companion of his hours of pain and weariness, the faithful guardian of that living legacy which had been bequeathed to him by the woman whom he loved. And by this self-sacrificing life he did greater honour to the memory of Charlotte Brontë than by the most tender and vivid appreciation of her intellectual greatness. There is a strange sad harmony between the closing chapter of the Brontë story and the earlier ones. The brightness had fled for ever from the parson's house; the gaiety which it had once witnessed was gone; even its fame as the home of one who was a living force in English literature had departed; but there still remained one to bear witness in his own person to the nobleness of that entire devotion to duty of the necessity of which Charlotte was so fully convinced. The friendship by which Mr. Nicholls soothed the last days of Mr. Brontë is a touching episode in the Haworth story, and it is one which cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed. When Mr. Brontë died there was a general wish, not only among those who were impressed by the claims of all connected with his family upon Haworth, but by the parishioners themselves, that his son-in-law should succeed him, and that the relationship of the Brontës to the place where their lives had been spent and their work accomplished, should thus not be absolutely severed. But the bestowal of church patronage is not always influenced by considerations of this kind. The incumbency of Haworth was given to a stranger; Mr. Nicholls returned to Ireland; and new faces and a new life filled the parsonage-house in which "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" were written. [Illustration: THE ORGAN LOFT, OVER THE BRONTË TABLET AND PEW.] XIII. THE BRONTË NOVELS. The Brontë novels continued to sell largely for some time after Charlotte's death. The publication of Mrs. Gaskell's "Life" added not a little to the sale, and both at home and abroad the fame of the three sisters was greatly increased. But in recent years the disposition has been almost to ignore these books; and though fresh editions have recently been issued they have had no circulation worthy of being compared with that which they maintained between 1850 and 1860. Yet though there has not been the same interest in these remarkable performances as that which formerly prevailed, they continue from time to time to attract the attention of literary critics both in this and other countries, the works of "Currer Bell" naturally holding the foremost place in the critiques upon the writings of the sisters. "Wuthering Heights," the solitary prose work of Emily Brontë, is now practically unread. Even those who admire the genius of the family, those who have the highest opinion of the qualities displayed in "Jane Eyre" or "Villette," turn away with something like a shudder from "that dreadful book," as one who knew the Brontës intimately always calls it. But I venture to invite the attention of my readers to this story, as being in its way as marvellous a _tour de force_ as "Jane Eyre" itself. It is true that as a novel it is repulsive and almost ghastly. As one reads chapter after chapter of the horrible chronicles of Heathcliff's crimes, the only literary work that can be recalled for comparison with it is the gory tragedy of "Titus Andronicus." From the first page to the last there is hardly a redeeming passage in the book. The atmosphere is lurid and storm-laden throughout, only lighted up occasionally by the blaze of passion and madness. The hero himself is the most unmitigated villain in fiction; and there is hardly a personage in the story who is not in some shape or another the victim of mental or moral deformities. Nobody can pretend that such a story as this ever ought to have been written; nobody can read it without feeling that its author must herself have had a morbid if not a diseased mind. Much, however, may be said in defence of Emily Brontë's conduct in writing "Wuthering Heights." She was in her twenty-eighth year when it was written, and the reader has seen something of the circumstances of her life, and the motives which led her to take up her pen. The life had been, so far as the outer world could judge, singularly barren and unproductive. Its one eventful episode was the short visit to Brussels. But Brussels had made no such impression upon Emily as it made upon Charlotte. She went back to Haworth quite unchanged; her love for the moors stronger than ever; her self-reserve only strengthened by the assaults to which it had been exposed during her residence among strangers; her whole nature still crying out for the solitary life of home, and the sustenance which she drew from the congenial society of the animals she loved and the servants she understood. When, partly in the forlorn hope of making money by the use of her pen, but still more to give some relief to her pent-up feelings, she began to write "Wuthering Heights," she knew nothing of the world. "I am bound to avow," says Charlotte, "that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasants amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates." Love, except the love for nature and for her own nearest relatives, was a passion absolutely unknown to her--as any one who cares to study the pictures of it in "Wuthering Heights" may easily perceive. Of harsh and brutal, or deliberate crime, she had no personal knowledge. She had before her, it is true, a sad instance of the results of vicious self-indulgence, and from that she drew materials for some portions of her story. But so far as the great movements of human nature were concerned--of those movements which are not to be mastered by book learning, but which must come as the tardy fruits of personal experience--she was in absolute ignorance. Little as Charlotte herself knew at this time of the world, and of men and women, she was an accomplished mistress of the secrets of life, in comparison with Emily. When a woman has lived such a life as that of "Ellis Bell," her first literary effort must be regarded as the attempt of an innocent and ignorant child. It may be full of faults; all the conditions which should govern a work of art may have been neglected; the book itself, so far as story, tone, and execution are concerned, may be an entire mistake; but it will nevertheless give us far more insight into the real character of the author than any more elaborate and successful work, constructed after experience has taught her what to do and what to avoid in order to secure the ear of the public. "Wuthering Heights," then, is the work of one who, in everything but years, was a mere child, and its great and glaring faults are to be forgiven as one forgives the mistakes of childhood. But how vast was the intellectual greatness displayed in this juvenile work! The author seizes the reader at the first moment at which they meet, holds him thrilled, entranced, terrified perhaps, in a grasp which never relaxes, and leaves him at last, after a perusal of the story, shaken and exhausted as by some great effort of the mind. Surely nowhere in modern English fiction can more striking proof be found of the possession of "the creative gift" in an extraordinary degree than is to be obtained in "Wuthering Heights." From what unfathomed recesses of her intellect did this shy, nervous, untrained girl produce such characters as those which hold the foremost place in her story? Mrs. Dean, the faithful domestic, we can understand; for her model was at Emily's elbow in the kitchen at Haworth. Joseph, the quaint High Calvinist, whose fidelity to his creed is unredeemed by a single touch of fellow-feeling with the human creatures around him, was drawn from life; and vigorous and powerful though his portrait is, one can understand it also. But Heathcliff, and the two Catherines, and Hareton Earnshaw--none of these ever came within the ken of Emily Brontë. No persons approaching them in originality or force of character were to be found in her circle of friends. Here and there some psychologist, learned in the secrets of morbid human nature, may have conceived the existence of such persons--evolved them from an inner consciousness which had been enlightened by years of studious labour. But no such slow and painful process guided the pen of Emily Brontë in painting these weird and wonderful portraits. They come forth with all the vigour and freshness, the living reality and impressiveness, which can belong only to the spontaneous creations of genius. They are no copies, indeed, but living originals, owing their lives to her own travail and suffering. Regarded in this light they must, I think, be counted among the greatest curiosities of literature. Their very repulsiveness adds to their force. I have said that Heathcliff is the greatest villain in fiction. The reader of the story is disposed to echo the agonised cry of his wife when she asks: "Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?" It is not pleasant to see such a character obtruded upon us in a novel; but I repeat, it is far more difficult to paint a consummate villain of the Heathcliff type than to draw any of the more ordinary types of humanity. The concentration of power required in performing the task is enormous. At every moment the writer is tempted to turn aside and relieve the darkness by some touch of light; and the risk which the artist must encounter if he gives way to this temptation is that of destroying the whole effect of the picture. Light and shade there must be, or the portrait becomes a mere daub of blackness; and the man whom the author has desired to create stands forth as a monster, unrecognisable as a creature belonging to the same race as ourselves. But unless these lighter shades are introduced with a tact and a self-command which belong rather to genius than to art, there must, as I have said, be complete failure. Now, Emily Brontë has not failed in her portrait of Heathcliff. He stands, indeed, absolutely alone in that great human portrait-gallery which forms one of the chambers in the noble edifice of English literature. We can compare him to nobody else among the creatures of fiction. We cannot even trace his literary pedigree. He is a distinct being, not less original than he is hateful. But this circumstance does not alter the fact that we accept him at once as a real being, not a merely grotesque monster. He stands as much alone as Frankenstein's creature did; but we recognise within him that subtle combination of elements which gives him kinship with the human race. Here, then, Emily Brontë has succeeded; and girl as she was when she wrote, she has succeeded where some of the most practised writers have failed entirely. Compare "Wuthering Heights," for example, with the fantastic horrors of Lord Lytton's "Strange Story," and you feel at once how much more powerful and masterly is the touch of the woman. Lord Lytton's villain, though he has been drawn with so much care and skill, is often absurd and at last entirely wearisome. Emily Brontë's is consistent, terrible, fascinating, from beginning to end. Then, again, the writer never tries to frighten her reader with a bogey. She never hints at the possibility of supernatural agencies being at work behind the scene. Even when she is showing us that Heathcliff is for ever haunted by the dead Catherine, she makes it clear by the words she puts into his own mouth that his belief on the subject is nothing more than the delusion of a disordered brain, worried by a guilty conscience. "I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by," says Heathcliff, describing how he dug down into Catherine's grave on the night after she had been buried; "but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once--unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me; it remained while I refilled the grave and led me home. You may laugh if you will; but I was sure I should see her there. I was sure she was with me, and I could not help talking to her. Having reached the Heights I rushed eagerly to the door. It was fastened; and I remember that accursed Earnshaw and my wife opposed my entrance. I remember stopping to kick the breath out of him, and then hurrying upstairs to my room and hers. I looked round impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I _could not_! I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning--from the fervour of my supplications to have but one glimpse! I had not one. She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me. And, since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture.... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home I hastened to return. She _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night--to be always disappointed!" Here is a picture of a man who is really haunted. No supernatural agency is invoked; no strain is put upon the reader's credulity. We are asked to believe in the suspension of no law of nature. In one word, we can all understand how a wicked man, whose brain has, as it were, been made drunk with the fumes of his own wickedness, can be persecuted throughout his whole life by terrors of this kind; and just because we are able to conceive and understand it, this haunting of Heathcliff by the ghost of his dead mistress is infinitely more terrible than if it had been accompanied either by the paraphernalia of rococo horrors which Mrs. Radcliffe habitually invoked, or by those refined and subtle supernatural phenomena which Lord Lytton employs in his famous ghost story. This strict honesty which refused to allow the writer of the weirdest story in the English language to avail herself of the easiest of all the modes of stimulating a reader's terrors, is shown all through the novel. The workmanship is good from beginning to end, though the art is crude and clumsy. She never allows a date to escape her memory, nor are there any of those broken threads which usually abound in the works of inexperienced writers. All is neatly, clearly, carefully finished off. Every date fits into its place, and so does every incident. The reader is never allowed to wander into a blind alley. Though at the outset he finds himself in a bewildering maze, far too complicated in construction to comply with the canons of literary art, he has only to go straight on, and in the end he will find everything made plain. Emily permits no fact however minute to drop from her grasp. Irrelevant though it may seem at the moment when the reader meets with it, a place has been prepared for it in the edifice which the patient hands are rearing, and in the end it will be fitted into that place. Thus there is no scamped work in the story; nor any sacrifice of details in order to obtain those broad effects in which the tale abounds. Let the reader turn to "Wuthering Heights," and he will find many a simple innocent revelation of the character of the author peeping out from its pages in unexpected places. We know how the story was written, and how day by day it was submitted to the revision of Charlotte and Anne. We may be sure under these circumstances that Emily did not allow too much of her true inner nature to appear in what she wrote. Even from her sisters she habitually concealed some of the strongest and deepest emotions of her heart. But such passages as the following, when read in the light of her history, as we know it now, are of strange and abiding interest: He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up over head, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness. Mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles and blackbirds and linnets and cuckoos, pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace. I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk. I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine. For "he," read "Anne," and accept Emily as speaking for herself, and we have in this passage a vivid description of the opposing tastes of the two sisters. The abhorrence which Charlotte felt for the High Calvinism, which was the favourite creed around her, was felt even more strongly by Emily. Her poems throw not a little light upon this feature of her character; but we also gain some from her solitary novel. Joseph, the old man-servant, was a study from life, and he represented one of a class whom the author thoroughly disliked, but for whom at the same time she entertained a certain respect. Again and again she breaks forth with all the force of sarcasm she can command against "the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours." Yet there is no character in the story over whom she lingers more lovingly than Joseph, and it is only in painting his portrait that she allows herself to be betrayed into the display of any of that humour which, according to her sisters, always lurked very near the surface of her character, ever ready to show itself when no stranger was at hand. Few who have read "Wuthering Heights" can have forgotten Joseph's quaint remark when the boy Heathcliff has disappeared, and the others are speculating on his fate. Nay, nay, he's noan at Gimmerton. I's never wonder but he's at t' bottom of a bog-boile. This visitation worn't for nowt, and I wod hev ye to look out, miss. Yah muh be t' next. Thank Hivin for all! All works togither for gooid to them as is chozzen, and piked out fro' th' rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture ses. There is one passage in the story which furnishes so strange a foreshadowing of Emily's own death, that it is difficult to believe that she did not bear it in her mind during those last hours when she faced the dread enemy with such unwavering resolution. She is writing of the death of Mrs. Earnshaw. Poor soul! till within a week of her death that gay heart never failed her; and her husband persisted doggedly, nay furiously, in affirming her health improved every day. When Kenneth warned him that his medicines were useless at that stage of the malady, and he needn't put him to further expense by attending her, he retorted: "I know you need not. She's well; she does not want any more attendance from you! She never was in a consumption. It was a fever, and it is gone: her pulse is as slow as mine now, and her cheek as cool!" He told his wife the same story, and she seemed to believe him. But one night while leaning on his shoulder, in the act of saying she thought she should be able to get up to-morrow, a fit of coughing took her--a very slight one--he raised her in his arms; she put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead. Strange and inscrutable, indeed, are the mysteries of the human heart! Let the reader turn from the passage I have quoted to that letter in which Charlotte laments that "Emily is too intractable," and let him read how she refused to believe that she was ill until death caught her as suddenly as it did the wife of Earnshaw. The blindness to the approach of danger, which she describes so clearly in her story, was but a few months afterwards displayed even more fully by herself. In this last quotation, which I venture to make from a book now seldom opened, we see the author speaking evidently out of the fulness of her heart on a subject on which in conversation she was specially reserved. I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy when watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the Eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness. I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton's, when he so regretted Catherine's blessed release! To be sure, one might have doubted, after the wayward and impatient existence she had led, whether she merited a haven of peace at last. One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection; but not then in the presence of her corpse. It asserted its own tranquillity, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitant. Even these fragments, culled from the pages of "Wuthering Heights," are sufficient to show how little the story has in common with the ordinary novel. Differing widely in every respect from "Jane Eyre," dealing with characters and circumstances which belong to the romance rather than the reality of life, it is yet stamped by the same originality, the same daring, the same thoughtfulness, and the same intense individuality. It is a marvel to all who know anything of the secrets of literary work, that Haworth Parsonage should have produced "Jane Eyre;" but how is the marvel increased, when we know that at the same time it produced, from the brain of another inmate, the wonderful story of "Wuthering Heights." Brimful of faults as it may be, that book is alone sufficient to prove that a rare and splendid genius was lost to the world when Emily Brontë died. All interested in the story of the Brontës must be curious to know whence Emily derived the materials for this romance. I have said that Heathcliff and the other prominent characters of the story are creations of her own; and indeed the book in its originality is almost unique. But this does not affect the fact that somewhere, and at some period during her life, the seed which brought forth this strange fruit must have been sown. It has been suggested by some--strangely ignorant, surely, of the conditions of West Riding life during the present century--that Emily obtained the skeleton of her plot from her own observation of people around her. But the life round Haworth was really tame and commonplace. Josephs and Mrs. Deans could be found in and about the village in abundance; but there were no people round whose lives hung anything of the mystery which attaches to Heathcliff. It was, so far as I can learn, during her early girlhood that Emily's mind was filled with those grim traditions which she afterwards employed in writing "Wuthering Heights." Mr. Brontë, in addition to his other gifts, had the faculty of storytelling highly developed, and his delight was to use this faculty in order to awaken superstitious terrors in the hearts of his children. Though he habitually took his meals alone, he would often appear at the table where his daughters, with possibly their one female friend, were breakfasting, and, without joining in the repast, would entertain the little company of schoolgirls with wild legends not only relating to life in Yorkshire during the last century, but to that still wilder life which he had left behind him in Ireland. A cold smile would play round his mouth as he added horror to horror in his attempts to move his children; and his keen eyes sparkled with triumph when he found he had succeeded in filling them with alarm. Emily listened to these stories with bated breath, drinking them, in eagerly. She could repeat them afterwards by the hour together to her sisters; and no better proof of the deep root they took in her sensitive nature can be desired, than the fact that they led her to write "Wuthering Heights." Thus the paternal influence, strong as it was in the case of all the daughters, was peculiarly strong as regarded Emily; and we can gauge the nature of that influence in the weird and ghastly story which was brought forth under its shadow. It is with a feeling of curious disappointment that one rises from the perusal of the writings of Anne Brontë. She wrote two novels, "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," neither of which will really repay perusal. In the first she sought to set forth some of the experiences which had befallen her in that patient placid life which she led as a governess. They were not ordinary experiences, the reader should know. I have resolutely avoided, in writing this sketch of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, all unnecessary reference to the tragedy of Branwell Brontë's life. But it is a strange sad feature of that story, that the pious and gentle youngest sister was compelled to be a closer and more constant witness of his sins and his sufferings than either Charlotte or Emily. She was living under the same roof with him when he went astray and was thrust out in deep disgrace. I have said already that the effect of his career upon her own was as strong and deep as Mrs. Gaskell represents it to have been. Branwell's fall formed the dark turning-point in Anne Brontë's life. So it was not unnatural that it should colour her literary labours. Accordingly, whilst "Agnes Grey" gives us some of the scenes of her governess life, dressed up in the fashion of the ordinary romances of thirty years ago, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" presents us with a dreary and repulsive picture of Branwell Brontë's condition after his fall. Charlotte, in her brief memoir of her sisters, does bare justice to Anne when she speaks in these words upon the subject: "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," by "Acton Bell," had likewise an unfavourable reception. At this I cannot wonder. The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer's nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid. She had in the course of her life been called on to contemplate, near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften, or conceal. This well-meant resolution brought on her misconception and some abuse, which she bore, as it was her custom to bear whatever was unpleasant, with mild steady patience. She was a very sincere and practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy communicated a sad hue to her brief blameless life. What a picture one gets of this third and least considered of the Brontë sisters in the passage which I have quoted! A lovable, fair-featured girl, leading a blameless life, lighted up by few hopes of any brighter future--for the one little romance of her own heart had been destroyed ere this by the unrelenting hand of death--and not inspired as her sisters were by the passion of the artist or the creator; a girl whose simple faith was still unmoved from its first foundations; whose delight was in visiting the poor and helping the sick, who had no sustaining conviction of her own strength such as maintained Charlotte and Emily in their darkest hours, and whose very piety was "tinged with melancholy." This is the girl who, not from any of the irresistible impulses which attend the exercise of the creative faculty, but from a simple sense of duty, set herself the hard task of depicting in the pages of a novel the consequences of a shocking vice with which her brother's degradation had brought her into close and abiding contact. Of course she failed. It is not by hands so weak as those of Anne Brontë that effective blows are struck at such sins as she assailed. But whilst we acknowledge her failure, let us do justice both to the self-sacrificing courage and the fervent piety which led her to undertake this painful work. Of Charlotte Brontë's novels, as a whole, I shall say nothing at this point; but something may very properly be said here of the story which she wrote at the time when her sisters were engaged in writing "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey." It was not published until after her death, and after the world had learned from Mrs. Gaskell's pages something of the truth about her life. Its interest to the ordinary reader was to a considerable extent discounted by the fact that the author had so largely used the materials in her last great work, "Villette." But even as a mere novel "The Professor" has striking merits, and would well repay perusal from that point of view alone; whilst as a means of gaining fresh light with regard to the character of the writer, it is not less valuable than "Wuthering Heights" itself. True, "The Professor" is not really a first attempt. "A first attempt it certainly was not," says Charlotte in reference to it, "as the pen which wrote it had previously been worn a good deal in a practice of some years." But the previous writings, of which hardly a trace now remains--those early MSS. having been carefully destroyed, with the exception of the few which Mrs. Gaskell was permitted to see--were in no respect finished productions, nor had they been written with a view to publication. The first occasion on which Charlotte Brontë really began a prose work which she proposed to commit to the press was on that day when, seated by her two sisters, she joined them in penning the first page of a new novel. To all practical intents, therefore, "The Professor" is entitled to be regarded as a first work; and certainly nothing can show Charlotte's peculiar views on the subject of novel-writing more clearly or strikingly than this book does. The world knows how resolutely in all her writings she strove to be true to life as she saw it. In "Jane Eyre" there are, indeed, romantic incidents and situations, but even in that work there is no trespassing beyond the limits always allowed to the writer of fiction; whilst it must not be forgotten that "Jane Eyre" was in part a response to the direct appeal from the publishers for something different in character from "The Professor." In that first story she determined that she would write a man's life as men's lives usually are. Her hero was "never to get a shilling he had not earned;" no sudden turns of fortune were "to lift him in a moment to wealth and high station;" and he was not even to marry "a beautiful girl or a lady of rank." "As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment." Very few novel-readers will share this conception of what a novel ought to be. The writer of fiction is an artist whose accepted duty it is to lift men and women out of the cares of ordinary life, out of the sordid surroundings which belong to every lot in this world, and to show us life under different, perhaps under fantastic, conditions: a life which by its contrast to that we ourselves are leading shall furnish some relief to our mental vision, wearied and jaded by its constant contemplation of the fevers and disappointments, the crosses and long years of weary monotony, which belong to life as it is. We know how a great living writer has ventured to protest against this theory, and how in her finest works of fiction she has shown us life as it is, under the sad and bitter conditions of pain, sorrow, and hopelessness. But Charlotte Brontë wrote "The Professor" long before "George Eliot" took up her pen; and she must at least receive credit for having been in the field as a reformer of fiction before her fellow-labourer was heard of. She was true to the conditions she had laid down for herself in writing "The Professor." Nothing more sober and matter-of-fact than that story is to be found in English literature. And yet, though the landscape one is invited to view is but a vast plain, without even a hillock to give variety to the prospect, it has beauties of its own which commend it to our admiration. The story, as everybody knows, deals with Brussels, from which she had just returned when she began to write it. But it is sad to note the difference between the spirit of "The Professor" and that which is exhibited in "Villette." Dealing with the same circumstances, and substantially with the same story, the author has nevertheless cast each in a mould of its own. Nor is the cause of this any secret to those who know Charlotte Brontë. When she wrote "The Professor," disillusioned though she was, she was still young, and still blessed with that fervent belief in a better future which the youthful heart can never quite cast out, even under the heaviest blows of fate. She had come home restless and miserable, feeling Haworth to be far too small and quiet a place for her; and her mind could not take in the reality that under that modest roof the remainder of her life was destined to be spent. Suffering and unhappy as she was, she could not shut out the hope that brighter days lay before her. The fever of life racked her; but in the very fact that it burnt so high there was proof that love and hope, the capacity for a large enjoyment of existence, still lived within her. So "The Professor," though a sad, monotonous book, has life and hope, and a fair faith in the ultimate blessedness of all sorrowful ones, shining through all its pages; and it closes in a scene of rest and peace. Very different is the case with "Villette." It was written years after the period when "The Professor" was composed, when the hard realities of life had ceased to be veiled under tender mists of sentiment or imagination, and when the lonely present, the future, "which often appals me," made the writer too painfully aware that she had drunk the cup of existence almost to the dregs. As a piece of workmanship there is no comparison between it and the earlier story. On every page we see traces of the artist's hand. Genius flashes forth from both works it is true, but in "Villette" it is genius chastened and restrained by a cultivated taste, or working under that high pressure which only the trained writer can bring to bear upon it. Yet, whilst we must admit the immense superiority of the later over the earlier work, we cannot turn from the one to the other without being painfully touched by the sad, strange difference in the spirit which animates them. The stories, as I have said, are nearly the same. With some curious transformations, in fact, they are practically identical. But they are only the same in the sense in which the portrait of the fair and hopeful girl, with life's romance shining before her eyes, is the same as the portrait of the worn and solitary woman for whom the romance is at an end. A whole world of suffering, of sorrow, of patient endurance, lies between the two. I have spoken of the mood in which "The Professor" was written--Hope still lingered at that time in the heart, breathing its merciful though illusory suggestions of something brighter and better in the future. All who have passed through the ordeal of a life's sorrow will be able to understand the distinction between the temperament of the author at that period in her life, and her temperament when she composed "Villette." For such suffering ones know, how, in the first and bitterest moment of sorrow, the heart cannot shut out the blessed belief that a time of release from the pain will come--a time far off, perhaps, but in which a day bright as that which has suddenly been eclipsed will shine again. It is only as the years go by, and as the first ache of intolerable anguish has been lulled into a dreary rest by habit, that the faith which gave them strength to bear the keenest smart, takes flight, and leaves them to the pale monotony of a twilight which can know no dawn. It was in this later and saddest stage of endurance that "Villette" was written. The sharpest pangs of the heart-experiences at Brussels had vanished. The author, no longer full of the self-consciousness of the girl, could even treat her own story, her own sorrows of that period, with a lighter hand, a more artistic touch, than when she first wrote of them; but through all her work there ran the dreary conviction that in those days of mingled joy and suffering she had tasted life at its best, and that in the future which lay before her there could be nothing which should renew either the strong delights or keen anguish of that time. So the book is pitched, as we know, in a key of almost absolute hopelessness. Nothing but the genius of Charlotte Brontë could have saved such a work from sinking under its own burden of gloom. That this intense and tragic study of a soul should have had power to fascinate, not the psychologist alone, but the vast masses of the reading world, is a triumph which can hardly be paralleled in recent literary efforts. In "The Professor" we move among the same scenes, almost among the same characters and incidents, but the whole atmosphere is a different one. It is a dull, cold atmosphere, if you will, but one feels that behind the clouds the sun is shining, and that sooner or later the hero and heroine will be allowed to bask in his reviving rays. Set the two stories together, and read them in the light of all that passed between the years in which they were written--the death of Branwell, of Emily, and of Anne, the utter shattering of some fair illusions which buoyed up Charlotte's heart in the first years of her literary triumph, the apparent extinction of all hope as to future happiness--and you will get from them a truer knowledge of the author's soul than any critic or biographer could convey to you. Ere I part from "The Professor," which, naturally enough, never gained much attention from the public, I must extract from it one passage, a parallel to which may be found in many of Charlotte Brontë's letters. It describes, as none but one who had suffered could do, one of those seasons of mental depression, arising from bodily illness, by which she was visited at intervals, and under the influence of which not a little of her work was done. Reading it, we get some idea of the true origin of much in her character that was supposed to be morbid and unnatural: Man is ever clogged with his mortality, and it was my mortal nature which now faltered and plained; my nerves which jarred and gave a false sound, because the soul, of late rushing headlong to an aim, had overstrained the body's comparative weakness. A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly but had thought for ever departed. I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria. She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom and holding me with arms of bone. What tales she would tell me at such hours! What songs she would recite in my ears! How she would discourse to me of her own country--the grave--and again and again promise to conduct me there ere long; and drawing me to the very brink of a black sullen river, show me on the other side shores unequal with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight. "Necropolis!" she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add, "it contains a mansion prepared for you." But my boyhood was lonely, parentless; uncheered by brother or sister; and there was no marvel that, just as I rose to youth, a sorceress, finding me lost in vague mental wanderings, with many affections and few objects, glowing aspirations and gloomy prospects, strong desires and tender hopes, should lift up her illusive lamp to me in the distance, and lure me to her vaulted home of horrors. It was when, under the influence of occasional spells of physical suffering such as she here describes, that Miss Brontë gave those who saw her the impresion that her mind was naturally a morbid one; and, as I have said before, the same influence is at times perceptible in her writings. One of the purposes with which this little book has been written is to show the world how much of the gloom and depression which are now associated with her story, must be attributed to purely physical or accidental causes. XIV. CONCLUSION. No apology need be offered for any single feature of Charlotte Brontë's life or character. She was what God made her in the furnace of sore afflictions and yet more sore temptations; her life, instinct with its extraordinary individuality, was, notwithstanding, always subject to exterior influences for the existence of which she was not responsible, and which more than once threatened to change the whole nature and purpose of her being; her genius, which brought forth its first-fruits under the cold shade of obscurity and adversity, was developed far more largely by sorrow, loneliness, and pain, than by the success which she gained in so abundant a degree. There are features of her character which we can scarcely comprehend, for the existence of which we are unable to account; and there are features of her genius which jar upon our sympathies and ruffle our conventional ideas; but for neither will one word of apology or excuse be offered by any who really know and love this great woman. The fashion which exalted her to such a pinnacle of fame, like many another fashion, has lost its vogue; and the present generation, wrapped in admiration of another school of fiction, has consigned the works of "Currer Bell" to a premature sepulchre. But her friends need not despair; for from that dreary tomb of neglect an hour of resurrection must come, and the woman who has given us three of the most masterful books of the century, will again assert her true position in the literature of her country. We hear nothing now of the "immorality" of her writings. Younger people, if they turn from the sparkling or didactic pages of the most popular of recent stories to "Jane Eyre" or "Villette," in the hope of finding there some stimulant which may have power to tickle their jaded palates, will search in vain for anything that even borders upon impropriety--as we understand the word in these enlightened days--and they will form a strange conception of the generation of critics which denounced "Currer Bell" as the writer of immoral works of fiction. But it is said that there is coarseness in her stories, "otherwise so entirely noble." Even Mrs. Gaskell has assented to the charge; and it is generally believed that Charlotte Brontë, as a writer, though not immoral in tone, was rude in language and coarse in thought. The truth, I maintain, is, that this so-called coarseness is nothing more than the simplicity and purity, the straightforwardness and unconsciousness which an unspotted heart naturally displays in dealing with those great problems of life which, alas! none who have drunk deep of the waters of good and evil can ever handle with entire freedom from embarrassment. An American writer[2] has spoken of Charlotte Brontë as "the great pre-Raphaelite among women, who was not ashamed or afraid to utter what God had shown her, and was too single-hearted of aim to swerve one hairbreadth in duplicating nature's outlines." She was more than this however; she was bold enough to set up a standard of right of her own; and when still the unknown daughter of the humble Yorkshire parson, she could stir the hearts of readers throughout the world with the trumpet-note of such a declaration as this: "Conventionality is not morality; self-righteousness is not religion; to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns." Let it be remembered that these words were written nearly thirty years ago, when conventionalism was still a potent influence in checking the free utterance of our inmost opinions; and let us be thankful that in that heroic band to whom we owe the emancipation of English thought, a woman holds an honourable place. [2] Harper's _New Monthly Magazine_, February, 1866. Writing of her life just after it had closed, her friend Miss Martineau said of her: "In her vocation she had, in addition to the deep intuitions of a gifted woman, the strength of a man, the patience of a hero, and the conscientiousness of a saint." Those who know her best will apply to her personal character the epithets which Miss Martineau reserved for her career as an author. It has been my object in these pages to supplement the picture painted in Mrs. Gaskell's admirable biography by the addition of one or two features, slight in themselves perhaps, and yet not unimportant when the effect of the whole as a faithful portrait is considered. Charlotte Brontë was not naturally a morbid person; in youth she was happy and high-spirited; and up to the last moment of her life she had a serene strength and cheerfulness which seldom deserted her, except when acute physical suffering was added to her mental pangs. If her mind could have been freed from the depressing influences exerted on it by her frail and suffering body, it would have been one of the healthiest and most equable minds of our age. As it was, it showed itself able to meet the rude buffetings of fate without shrinking and without bravado; and the woman who is to this day regarded by the world at large as a marvel of self-conscious genius and of unchecked morbidness, was able to her dying hour to take the keenest, liveliest interest in the welfare of her friends, to pour out all her sympathy wherever she believed it was needed and deserved, and to lighten the grim parsonage of Haworth by a presence which, in the sacred recesses of her home, was bright and cheerful, as well as steadfast and calm. "Do not underrate her oddity," said a gifted friend who knew her during her heyday of fame, while these pages were being written. Her oddity, it must be owned, was extreme--so far as the world could judge. But I have striven to show how much this eccentricity was outward and superficial only, due in part to the peculiar conditions of her early life, but chiefly to the excessive shyness in the presence of strangers which she shared with her sisters. At heart, as some of these letters will show, she was one of the truest women who ever breathed; and her own heart-history was by no means so exceptional, so far removed from the heart-history of most women, as the public believes. The key to her character was simple and unflinching devotion to duty. Once she failed,[3] or rather, once she allowed inclination to blind her as to the true direction of the path of duty, and that single failure coloured the whole of her subsequent life. But her own condemnation of herself was more sharp and bitter than any which could have been passed upon her by the world, and from that one venial error she drew lessons which enabled her henceforward to live with a steady, constant power of self-sacrifice at her command such as distinguishes saints and heroes rather than ordinary men and women. Hot, impulsive, and tenacious in her affections, she suffered those whom she loved the most dearly to be torn from her without losing faith in herself or in God; tenderly sensitive as to the treatment which her friends received, she repaid the cruelty and injustice of her father towards the man whose heart she had won, by a depth of devotion and self-sacrifice which can only be fully estimated by those who know under what bitter conditions it was lavished upon an unworthy parent; bound, as all the children of genius are, by the spell of her own imagination, she was yet able during the closing months of her life to lay aside her pen, and give herself up wholly, at the desire of her husband, to those parish duties which had such slight attractions for her. Those who, knowing these facts, still venture to assert that the virtues which distinguished "Currer Bell" the author were lacking in Charlotte Brontë the woman, must have minds warped by deep-rooted and unworthy prejudices. [3] I ought perhaps to point out, as this passage may otherwise be open to misconception, that the failure to which I refer is that confessed by herself in a letter I have quoted on page 59. I have expressed my conviction that the comparative neglect from which "Jane Eyre" and its sister-works now suffer is only temporary. It is true that in some respects these books are not attractive. Though they are written with a terse vigour which must make them grateful to all whose palates are cloyed by the pretty writing of the present generation, they undoubtedly err on the side of a lack of literary polish. And though the portraits presented to us in their pages are wonderful as works of art, unsurpassed as studies of character, the range of the artist is a limited one, and, as a rule, the subjects chosen are not the most pleasing that could have been conceived. Yet one great and striking merit belongs to this masterly painter of men and women, which is lacking in some who, treading to a certain extent in her footsteps, have achieved even a wider and more brilliant reputation. There is no taint of the dissecting-room about her books; we are never invited to admire the supreme cleverness of the operator who, with unsparing knife, lays bare before us the whole cunning mechanism of the soul which is stretched under the scalpel; nor are we bidden to pause and listen to those didactic moralisings which belong rather to the preacher or the lecturer than the novelist. It is the artist, not the anatomist who is instructing us; and after all, we may derive a more accurate knowledge of men and women as they are from the cartoons of a Raphael than from the most elaborate diagrams or sections of the most eminent of physiologists. Perhaps no merit is more conspicuous in Charlotte Brontë's writings than their unswerving honesty. Writing always "under the spell," at the dictation, as it were, of an invisible and superior spirit, she would never write save when "the fit was upon her" and she had something to say. "I have been silent lately because I have accumulated nothing since I wrote last," is a phrase which fell from her on one occasion. Save when she believed that she had accumulated something, some truth which she was bound to convey to the world, she would not touch her pen. She had every temptation to write fast and freely. Money was needed at home, and money was to be had by the mere production of novels which, whether good, bad, or indifferent, were certain to sell. But she withstood the temptation bravely, withstood it even when it came strengthened by the supplications of her friends; and from first to last she gave the world nothing but her best. This honesty--rare enough unfortunately among those whose painful lot it is to coin their brains into money--was carried far beyond these limits. When in writing she found that any character had escaped from her hands--and every writer of fiction knows how easily this may happen--she made no attempt to finish the portrait according to the canons of literary art. She waited patiently for fresh light; studying deeply in her waking hours, dreaming constantly of her task during her uneasy slumbers, until perchance the light she needed came and she could go on. But if it came not she never pretended to supply the place of this inspiration of genius by any clever trick of literary workmanship. The picture was left unfinished--perfect so far as it went, but broken off at the point at which the author's keen intuitions had failed or fled from her. Nor when her work was done would she consent to alter or amend at the bidding of others; for the sake of no applause, of no success, would she change the fate of any of her characters as they had been fixed in the crucible of her genius. Even when her father exerted all his authority to secure another ending to the tale of "Villette," he could only, as we have seen, persuade his daughter to veil the catastrophe. The hero was doomed; and Charlotte, whatever might be her own inclination, could not save him from his fate. Books so true, so honest, so simple, so thorough as these, depend for their ultimate fate upon no transitions of fashion, no caprices of the public taste. They will hold their own as the slow-born fruits of a great genius, long after the productions of a score of facile pens now able to secure the world's attention have been utterly forgotten. The daring and passion of "Jane Eyre," the broad human sympathies, sparkling humour, and graphic portraiture of "Shirley," and the steady, patient, unsurpassed concentration of power which distinguishes "Villette," can hardly cease to command admiration whilst the literature of this century is remembered and studied. But when we turn from the author to the woman, from the written pages to the writer, and when, forgetting the features and fortunes of those who appear in the romances of "Currer Bell," we recall that touching story which will for ever be associated with Haworth Parsonage and with the great family of the Brontës, we see that the artist is greater than her works, that the woman is nobler and purer than the writer, and that by her life, even more than by her labours, the author of "Jane Eyre" must always teach us those lessons of courage, self-sacrifice, and patient endurance of which our poor humanity stands in such pressing and constant need. THE END. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. 
36847	----	_Eminent Women Series_ EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM GEORGE ELIOT [_All Rights Reserved_] GEORGE ELIOT BY MATHILDE BLIND LONDON: W. H. ALLEN AND CO. 13, WATERLOO PLACE 1883. [_All Rights Reserved_] LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. PREFATORY NOTE. Detailed accounts of GEORGE ELIOT'S life have hitherto been singularly scanty. In the dearth of published materials a considerable portion of the information contained in this biographical study has, necessarily, been derived from private sources. In visiting the places connected with GEORGE ELIOT'S early life, I enjoyed the privilege of meeting her brother, Mr. Isaac Evans, and was also fortunate in gleaning many a characteristic fact and trait from old people in the neighbourhood, contemporaries of her father, Mr. Robert Evans. For valuable help in forming an idea of the growth of GEORGE ELIOT'S mind, my warm thanks are especially due to her oldest friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, and Miss Hennell of Coventry. Miss Jenkins, the novelist's schoolfellow, and Mrs. John Cash, also generously afforded me every assistance in their power. A great part of the correspondence in the present volume has not hitherto appeared in print, and has been kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. Bray, Mrs. Gilchrist, Mrs. Clifford, Miss Marks, Mr. William M. Rossetti, and the late James Thomson. I have also quoted from letters addressed to Miss Phelps which were published in _Harper's Magazine_ of March 1882, and from one or two other articles that have appeared in periodical publications. For permission to make use of this correspondence my thanks are due to Mr. C. L. Lewes. By far the most exhaustive published account of GEORGE ELIOT'S life and writings, and the one of which I have most freely availed myself, is Mr. Call's admirable essay in the _Westminster Review_ of July 1881. Although this, as indeed every other article on the subject, states GEORGE ELIOT'S birthplace incorrectly, it contains many important _data_ not mentioned elsewhere. To the article on GEORGE ELIOT in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for February 1881, I owe many interesting particulars, chiefly connected with the beginning of GEORGE ELIOT'S literary career. Amongst other papers consulted may be mentioned a noticeable one by Miss Simcox in the _Contemporary Review_, and an appreciative notice by Mr. Frederick Myers in _Scribner's Magazine_, as well as articles in _Harper's Magazine_ of May 1881, and _The Century_ of August 1882. Two quaint little pamphlets, 'Seth Bede: the Methody,' and 'George Eliot in Derbyshire,' by Guy Roslyn, although full of inaccuracies, have also furnished some curious items of information. MATHILDE BLIND. CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY 1 CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY HOME 9 CHAPTER III. YOUTHFUL STUDIES AND FRIENDSHIPS 22 CHAPTER IV. TRANSLATION OF STRAUSS AND FEUERBACH--TOUR ON THE CONTINENT 44 CHAPTER V. THE "WESTMINSTER REVIEW" 59 CHAPTER VI. GEORGE HENRY LEWES 77 CHAPTER VII. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE 91 CHAPTER VIII. ADAM BEDE 106 CHAPTER IX. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 123 CHAPTER X. SILAS MARNER 137 CHAPTER XI. ROMOLA 148 CHAPTER XII. HER POEMS 161 CHAPTER XIII. FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH 175 CHAPTER XIV. DANIEL DERONDA 192 CHAPTER XV. LAST YEARS 204 GEORGE ELIOT. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Speaking of the contributions made to literature by her own sex, George Eliot, in a charming essay written in 1854, awards the palm of intellectual pre-eminence to the women of France. "They alone," says the great English author, "have had a vital influence on the development of literature. For in France alone the mind of woman has passed, like an electric current, through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history." The reason assigned by George Eliot for this literary superiority of Frenchwomen consists in their having had the courage of their sex. They thought and felt as women, and when they wrote, their books became the fullest expression of their womanhood. And by being true to themselves, by only seeking inspiration from their own life-experience, instead of servilely copying that of men, their letters and memoirs, their novels and pictures have a distinct, nay unique, value, for the student of art and literature. Englishwomen, on the other hand, have not followed the spontaneous impulses of nature. They have not allowed free play to the peculiarly feminine element, preferring to mould their intellectual products on the masculine pattern. For that reason, says George Eliot, their writings are "usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire." This novel theory, concerning a specifically feminine manifestation of the intellect, is doubly curious when one compares it with Madame de Staël's famous saying, "_Le génie n'a pas de sexe._" But an aphorism, however brilliant, usually contains only one half the truth, and there is every reason to think that women have already, and will much more largely, by-and-by, infuse into their works certain intellectual and emotional qualities which are essentially their own. Shall we, however, admit George Eliot's conclusion that Frenchwomen alone have hitherto shown any of this original bias? Several causes are mentioned by her in explanation of this exceptional merit. Among these causes there is one which would probably occur to every one who began to reflect on this subject. The influence of the "Salon" in developing and stimulating the finest feminine talents has long been recognised. In this school for women the gift of expression was carried to the utmost pitch of perfection. By their active co-operation in the discussion of the most vital subjects, thought became clear, luminous, and forcible; sentiment gained indescribable graces of refinement; and wit, with its brightest scintillations, lit up the sombre background of life. But among other causes enumerated as accounting for that more spontaneous productivity of Frenchwomen, attributed to them by George Eliot, there is one which would probably have occurred to no other mind than hers, and which is too characteristic of her early scientific tendencies to be omitted. For according to her, the present superiority of Frenchwomen is mainly due to certain physiological peculiarities of the Gallic race. Namely, to the "small brain and vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system of woman to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual creativeness," whereas "the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and Germans are in the womanly organisation generally dreamy and passive. So that the _physique_ of a woman may suffice as the substratum for a superior Gallic mind, but is too thin a soil for a superior Teutonic one." So knotty and subtle a problem must be left to the scientist of the future to decide. Perhaps some promising young physiologist, profiting by the "George Henry Lewes Studentship" founded by George Eliot, may some day satisfactorily elucidate this question. In the meanwhile it is at least gratifying to reflect that she does not deny the future possibilities of even English and German women. She admits that conditions might arise which in their case also would be favourable to the highest creative effort; conditions which would modify the existing state of things according to which, to speak in her own scientific phraseology: "The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to produce crystallisations." But was the author of 'Adam Bede' not herself destined to be a triumphant refutation of her theory? Or had those more favourable circumstances mentioned as vague possibilities already arisen in her case? Not that we believe, for that matter, in the superior claims of illustrious Frenchwomen. It is true George Eliot enumerates a formidable list of names. But on the whole we may boast of feminine celebrities that need not shrink from the comparison. There is, of course, much truth in the great Englishwoman's generous praise of her French compeers. "Mme. de Sévigné remains," she says, "the single instance of a woman who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of men; Mme. Dacier still reigns the queen of blue-stockings, though women have long studied Greek without shame; Mme. de Staël's name still rises to the lips when we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power; Mme. Roland is still the unrivalled type of the sagacious and sternly heroic yet lovable woman; George Sand is the unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques' eloquence and deep sense of external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic depth of passion." Shall we be forced to admit that the representative women of England cannot justly be placed on as high a level? Is it so certain that they, too, did not speak out of the fulness of their womanly natures? That they too did not feel the genuine need to express modes of thought and feeling peculiar to themselves, which men, if at all, had but inadequately expressed hitherto? Was not Queen Elizabeth the best type of a female ruler, one whose keen penetration enabled her to choose her ministers with infallible judgment? Did not Fanny Burney distil the delicate aroma of girlhood in one of the most delightful of novels? Or what of Jane Austen, whose microscopic fidelity of observation has a well-nigh scientific accuracy, never equalled unless in the pages of the author we are writing of? Sir Walter Scott apparently recognised the eminently feminine inspiration of her writings, as he says: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life, which is for me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now agoing; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the descriptions and the sentiment, is denied to me." Then turning to the Brontës, does not one feel the very heartbeats of womanhood in those powerful utterances that seem to spring from some central emotional energy? Again, does not Mrs. Browning occupy a unique place among poets? Is there not a distinctively womanly strain of emotion in the throbbing tides of her high-wrought melodious song? And, to come to George Eliot herself, will any one deny that, in the combination of sheer intellectual power with an unparalleled vision for the homely details of life, she takes precedence of all writers of this or any other country? To some extent this wonderful woman conforms to her own standard. She undoubtedly adds to the common fund of crystallised human experience, as literature might be called, something which is specifically feminine. But, on the other hand, her intellect excels precisely in those qualities habitually believed to be masculine, one of its chief characteristics consisting in the grasp of abstract philosophical ideas. This faculty, however, by no means impairs those instinctive processes of the imagination by which true artistic work is produced; George Eliot combining in an unusual degree the subtlest power of analysis with that happy gift of genius which enabled her to create such characters as Amos Barton, Hetty, Mrs. Poyser, Maggie, and Tom Tulliver, Godfrey Cass and Caleb Garth, which seem to come fresh from the mould of Nature itself. Indeed, she has hardly a rival among women in this power of objective imagination by which she throws her whole soul into natures of the most varied and opposite types, whereas George Sand only succeeds greatly when she is thoroughly in sympathy with her creations. After George Eliot's eulogium of French women, one feels tempted to institute a comparison between these two great contemporaries, who occupied the same leading position in their respective countries. But it will probably always remain a question of idiosyncracy which of the two one is disposed to rank higher, George Eliot being the greatest realist, George Sand the greatest idealist, of her sex. The works of the French writer are, in fact, prose poems rather than novels. They are not studies of life, but life interpreted by the poet's vision. George Sand cannot give us a description of any scene in nature, of her own feelings, of a human character, without imparting to it some magical effect as of objects seen under the transfiguring influence of moonlight or storm clouds; whereas George Eliot loves to bathe her productions in the broad pitiless midday light, which leaves no room for illusion, but reveals all nature with uncompromising directness. The one has more of that primitive imagination which seizes on the elemental side of life--on the spectacle of the starry heavens or of Alpine solitudes, on the insurrection and tumult of human passion, on the shocks of revolution convulsing the social order--while the other possesses, in a higher degree, the acute intellectual perception for the orderly sequence of life, for that unchangeable round of toil which is the lot of the mass of men, and for the earth in its homelier aspects as it tells on our daily existence. In George Sand's finest work there is a sweet spontaneity, almost as if she were an oracle of Nature uttering automatically the divine message. But, on the other hand, when the inspiration forsakes her, she drifts along on a windy current of words, the fatal facility of her pen often beguiling the writer into vague diffuseness and unsubstantial declamation. In this respect, also, our English novelist is the opposite of George Sand, for George Eliot invariably remains the master of her genius: indeed, she thoroughly fulfils Goethe's demand that if you set up for an artist you must command art. This intellectual self-restraint never forsakes George Eliot, who always selects her means with a thorough knowledge of the ends to be attained. The radical difference in the genius of these two writers, to both of whom applies Mrs. Browning's apt appellation of "large-brained woman and large-hearted man," extends naturally to their whole tone of thought. George Sand is impassioned, turbulent, revolutionary, the spiritual daughter of Rousseau, with an enthusiastic faith in man's future destiny. George Eliot, contemplative, observant, instinctively conservative, her imagination dearly loving to do "a little Toryism on the sly," is as yet the sole outcome of the modern positive spirit in imaginative literature--the sole novelist who has incorporated in an artistic form some of the leading ideas of Comte, of Mazzini, and of Darwin. In fact, underlying all her art there is the same rigorous teaching of the inexorable laws which govern the life of man. The teaching that not liberty but duty is the condition of existence; the teaching of the incalculable effects of hereditary transmission, with the solemn responsibilities it involves; the teaching of the inherent sadness and imperfection in human nature, which render resignation the first virtue of man. In fact, as a moral influence, George Eliot cannot so much be compared with George Sand, or with any other novelist of her generation, as with Carlyle. She had, indeed, a far more explicit ethical code to offer than the author of 'Sartor Resartus.' For though the immense force of the latter's personality, glowing through his writings, had a tonic effect in promoting a healthy moral tone, there was little of positive moral truth to be gathered from them. But the lessons which George Eliot would fain teach to men were most unmistakable in their bearing--the lessons of pitying love towards fellow-men; of sympathy with all human suffering; of unwavering faithfulness towards the social bond, consisting in the claims of race, of country, of family; of unflagging aspiration after that life which is most beneficent to the community, that life, in short, towards which she herself aspired in the now famous prayer to reach "That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty-- Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense." CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY HOME. Mary Ann Evans, better known as "George Eliot," was born on November 22nd, 1819, at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of Colton, in Warwickshire. Both the date and place of her birth have been incorrectly stated, hitherto, in the notices of her life. The family moved to Griff House in March of the following year, when she was only six months old. Her father, Robert Evans, of Welsh origin, was a Staffordshire man from Ellaston, near Ashbourne, and began life as a carpenter. In the kitchen at Griff House may still be seen a beautifully-fashioned oaken press, a sample of his workmanship. A portrait of him, also preserved there, is known among the family as "Adam Bede." It is not as good a likeness as that of a certain carefully painted miniature, the features of which bear an unmistakable resemblance to those of the daughter destined to immortalise his name. A strongly marked, yet handsome face, massive in structure, and with brown eyes, whose shrewd, penetrating glance is particularly noticeable, betoken the man of strong practical intelligence, of rare energy and endurance. His career and character are partially depicted in Adam Bede, Caleb Garth, and Mr. Hackit--portraitures in which the different stages of his life are recorded with a mingling of fact and fiction. A shadowing forth of the same nature is discernible in the devotion of Stradivarius to his noble craft; and even in the tender paternity of Mr. Tulliver there are indications of another phase of the same individuality. Like Adam Bede, Mr. Evans from carpenter rose to be forester, and from forester to be land-agent. It was in the latter capacity alone that he was ever known in Warwickshire. At one time he was surveyor to five estates in the midland counties--those of Lord Aylesford, Lord Lifford, Mr. Bromley Davenport, Mrs. Gregory, and Sir Roger Newdigate. The last was his principal employer. Having early discerned the exceptional capacity of the man, Sir Roger induced him to settle in Warwickshire, and take charge of his estates. Sir Roger's seat, Arbury Hall, is the original of the charming description of Cheverel Manor in 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story.' It is said that Mr. Evans's trustworthiness had become proverbial in the county. But while faithfully serving his employers he also enjoyed great popularity among their tenants. He was gentle, but of indomitable firmness; and while stern to the idle and unthrifty, he did not press heavily on those who might be behindhand with their rent, owing to ill-luck or misfortune, on quarter days. Mr. Evans was twice married. He had lost his first wife, by whom he had a son and a daughter, before settling in Warwickshire. Of his second wife, whose maiden name was Pearson, very little is known. She must, therefore, according to Schiller, have been a pattern of womanhood; for he says that the best women, like the best ruled states, have no history. We have it on very good authority, however, that Mrs. Hackit, in 'Amos Barton,' is a faithful likeness of George Eliot's mother. This may seem startling at first, but, on reflection, she is the woman one might have expected, being a strongly-marked figure, with a heart as tender as her tongue is sharp. She is described as a thin woman, with a chronic liver-complaint, of indefatigable industry and epigrammatic speech; who, "in the utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's self-satisfaction, was never known to spoil a stocking." A notable housewife, whose clockwork regularity in all domestic affairs was such that all her farm-work was done by nine o'clock in the morning, when she would sit down to her loom. "In the same spirit, she brought out her furs on the first of November, whatever might be the temperature. She was not a woman weakly to accommodate herself to shilly-shally proceedings. If the season didn't know what it ought to do, Mrs. Hackit did. In her best days it was always sharp weather at 'Gunpowder Plot,' and she didn't like new fashions." Keenly observant and quick of temper, she was yet full of good nature, her sympathy showing itself in the active helpfulness with which she came to the assistance of poor Milly Barton, and the love she showed to her children, who, however, declined kissing her. Is there not a strong family resemblance between this character and Mrs. Poyser, that masterpiece of George Eliot's art? Mary Ann's gift of pointed speech was therefore mother-wit, in the true sense, and her rich humour and marvellous powers of observation were derived from the same side, while her conscientiousness, her capacity, and that faculty of taking pains, which is so large a factor in the development of genius, came more directly from the father. Mr. Evans had three children by his second wife, Christiana, Isaac, and Mary Ann. "It is interesting, I think," writes George Eliot, in reply to some questions of an American lady, "to know whether a writer was born in a central or border district--a condition which always has a strongly determining influence. I was born in Warwickshire, but certain family traditions connected with more northerly districts made these districts a region of poetry to me in my early childhood." In the autobiographical sonnets, entitled 'Brother and Sister,' we catch a glimpse of the mother preparing her children for their accustomed ramble, by stroking down the tippet and setting the frill in order; then standing on the door-step to follow their lessening figures "with the benediction of her gaze." Mrs. Evans was aware, to a certain extent, of her daughter's unusual capacity, being anxious not only that she should have the best education attainable in the neighbourhood, but also that good moral influences should be brought to bear upon her: still, the girl's constant habit of reading, even in bed, caused the practical mother not a little annoyance. The house, where the family lived at that time, and in which the first twenty years of Mary Ann Evans's life were spent, is situated in a rich verdant landscape, where the "grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedge-rows," blend harmoniously with the red-roofed cottages scattered in a happy haphazard fashion amid orchards and elder-bushes. Sixty years ago the country was much more thickly wooded than now, and from the windows of Griff House might be seen the oaks and elms that had still survived from Shakespeare's forest of Arden. The house of the Evans family, half manor-house, half farm, was an old-fashioned building, two stories high, with red brick walls thickly covered with ivy. Like the Garths, they were probably "very fond of their old house." A lawn, interspersed with trees, stretched in front towards the gate, flanked by two stately Norway firs, while a sombre old yew almost touched some of the upper windows with its wide-spreading branches. A farm-yard was at the back, with low rambling sheds and stables; and beyond that, bounded by quiet meadows, one may still see the identical "leafy, flowery, bushy" garden, which George Eliot so often delighted in describing, at a time when her early life, with all its tenderly hoarded associations, had become to her but a haunting memory of bygone things. A garden where roses and cabbages jostle each other, where vegetables have to make room for gnarled old apple-trees, and where, amid the raspberry bushes and row of currant trees, you expect to come upon Hetty herself, "stooping to gather the low-hanging fruit." Such was the place where the childhood of George Eliot was spent. Here she drew in those impressions of English rural and provincial life, of which one day she was to become the greatest interpreter. Impossible to be in a better position for seeing life. Not only was her father's position always improving, so that she was early brought in contact with different grades of society, but his calling made him more or less acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and, says George Eliot, "I have always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and motives, not by inference from traditional types in literature, or from philosophical theories, but from daily fellowship and observation." And what kind of a child was it who loitered about the farm-yard and garden and fields, noticing everything with grave, watchful eyes, and storing it in a memory of extraordinary tenacity? One of her schoolfellows, who knew her at the age of thirteen, confessed to me that it was impossible to imagine George Eliot as a baby; that it seemed as if she must have come into the world fully developed, like a second Minerva. Her features were fully formed at a very early age, and she had a seriousness of expression almost startling for her years. The records of her child-life may be deciphered, amid some romantic alterations, in the early history of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Isaac and Mary Ann Evans were playmates, like these, the latter having all the tastes of a boy; whereas her sister Chrissy, said to be the original of Lucy Deane, had peculiarly dainty feminine ways, and shrank from out-door rambles for fear of soiling her shoes or pinafore. But Mary Ann and her brother went fishing together, or spinning tops, or digging for earth-nuts; and the twice-told incident of the little girl being left to mind the rod and losing herself in dreamy contemplation, oblivious of her task, is evidently taken from life, and may be quoted as a reminiscence of her own childhood:-- "One day my brother left me in high charge To mind the rod, while he went seeking bait, And bade me, when I saw a nearing barge, Snatch out the line, lest he should come too late. Proud of the task I watched with all my might For one whole minute, till my eyes grew wide, Till sky and earth took on a new strange light And seemed a dream-world floating on some tide. A fair pavilioned boat for me alone, Bearing me onward through the vast unknown. But sudden came the barge's pitch-black prow, Nearer and angrier came my brother's cry, And all my soul was quivering fear, when lo! Upon the imperilled line, suspended high, A silver perch! My guilt that won the prey Now turned to merit, had a guerdon rich Of hugs and praises, and made merry play Until my triumph reached its highest pitch When all at home were told the wondrous feat, And how the little sister had fished well. In secret, though my fortune tasted sweet, I wondered why this happiness befell. 'The little lass had luck,' the gardener said; And so I learned, luck was to glory wed." Unlike Maggie, however, little Mary Ann was as good a hand at fishing as her brother, only differing from him in not liking to put the worms on the hooks. Another incident taken from real life, if somewhat magnified, is the adventure with the gipsies. For the prototype of Maggie also fell among these marauding vagrants, and was detained a little time among them. Whether she also proposed to instruct the gipsies and to gain great influence over them by teaching them something about "geography" and "Columbus," does not transpire. But, indeed, most of Maggie's early experiences are autobiographic, down to such facts as her father telling her to rub her "turnip" cheeks against Sally's to get a little bloom, and to cutting off one side of her hair in a passion. At a very early age Mary Ann and her brother were sent to the village free school at Colton, in the parish of Griff, a not unusual custom in those days, when the means of tuition for little children were much more difficult to procure than now. There are still old men living who used to sit on the same form with little Mary Ann Evans learning her A, B, C, and a certain William Jacques (the original of the delightfully comic Bob Jakins of fiction) remembers carrying her pick-a-back on the lawn in front of her father's house. As the brother and sister grew older they saw less of each other, Mary Ann being sent to a school at Nuneaton, kept by Miss Lewis, for whom she retained an affectionate regard long years afterwards. About the same time she taught at a Sunday-school, in a little cottage adjoining her father's house. When she was twelve years old, being then, in the words of a neighbour, who occasionally called at Griff House, "a queer, three-cornered, awkward girl," who sat in corners and shyly watched her elders, she was placed as boarder with the Misses Franklin at Coventry. This school, then in high repute throughout the neighbourhood, was kept by two sisters, of whom the younger, Miss Rebecca Franklin, was a woman of unusual attainments and ladylike culture, although not without a certain taint of Johnsonian affectation. She seems to have thoroughly grounded Miss Evans in a sound English education, laying great stress in particular on the propriety of a precise and careful manner of speaking and reading. She herself always made a point of expressing herself in studied sentences, and on one occasion, when a friend had called to ask after a dying relative, she actually kept the servant waiting till she had framed an appropriately worded message. Miss Evans, in whose family a broad provincial dialect was spoken, soon acquired Miss Rebecca's carefully elaborated speech, and, not content with that, she might be said to have created a new voice for herself. In later life every one who knew her was struck by the sweetness of her voice, and the finished construction of every sentence, as it fell from her lips; for by that time the acquired habit had become second nature, and blended harmoniously with her entire personality. But in those early days the artificial effort at perfect propriety of expression was still perceptible, and produced an impression of affectation, perhaps reflecting that of her revered instructress. It is also believed that some of the beauty of her intonation in reading English poetry was owing to the same early influence. Mary Ann, or Marian as she came afterwards to be called, remained about three years with the Misses Franklin. She stood aloof from the other pupils, and one of her schoolfellows, Miss Bradley Jenkins, says that she was quite as remarkable in those early days as after she had acquired fame. She seems to have strangely impressed the imagination of the latter, who, figuratively speaking, looked up at her "as at a mountain." There was never anything of the schoolgirl about Miss Evans, for, even at that early age, she had the manners and appearance of a grave, staid woman; so much so, that a stranger, happening to call one day, mistook this girl of thirteen for one of the Misses Franklin, who were then middle-aged women. In this, also, there is a certain resemblance to Maggie Tulliver, who, at the age of thirteen, is described as looking already like a woman. English composition, French and German, were some of the studies to which much time and attention were devoted. Being greatly in advance of the other pupils in the knowledge of French, Miss Evans and Miss Jenkins were taken out of the general class and set to study it together; but, though the two girls were thus associated in a closer fellowship, no real intimacy apparently followed from it. The latter watched the future "George Eliot" with intense interest, but always felt as if in the presence of a superior, though socially their positions were much on a par. This haunting sense of superiority precluded the growth of any closer friendship between the two fellow-pupils. All the more startling was it to the admiring schoolgirl, when one day, on using Marian Evans's German dictionary, she saw scribbled on its blank page some verses, evidently original, expressing rather sentimentally a yearning for love and sympathy. Under this granite-like exterior, then, there was beating a heart that passionately craved for human tenderness and companionship! Inner solitude was no doubt the portion of George Eliot in those days. She must already have had a dim consciousness of unusual power, to a great extent isolating her from the girls of her own age, absorbed as they were in quite other feelings and ideas. Strong religious convictions pervaded her life at this period, and in the fervid faith and spiritual exaltation which characterise Maggie's girlhood, we have a very faithful picture of the future novelist's own state of mind. Passing through many stages of religious thought, she was first simple Church of England, then Low Church, then "Anti-Supernatural." In this latter character she wore an "Anti-Supernatural" cap, in which, so says an early friend, "her plain features looked all the plainer." But her nature was a mixed one, as indeed is Maggie's too, and conflicting tendencies and inclinations pulled her, no doubt, in different directions. The self-renouncing impulses of one moment were checkmated at another by an eager desire for approbation and distinguishing pre-eminence; and a piety verging on asceticism did not exclude, on the other hand, a very clear perception of the advantages and desirability of good birth, wealth, and high social position. Like her own charming Esther in 'Felix Holt,' she had a fine sense, amid somewhat anomalous surroundings, of the highest refinements and delicacies which are supposed to be the natural attributes of people of rank and fashion. She even shared with the above-mentioned heroine certain girlish vanities and weaknesses, such as liking to have all things about her person as elegant as possible. About the age of fifteen Marian Evans left the Misses Franklin, and soon afterwards she had the misfortune of losing her mother, who died in her forty-ninth year. Writing to a friend in after life she says, "I began at sixteen to be acquainted with the unspeakable grief of a last parting, in the death of my mother." Less sorrowful partings ensued, though in the end they proved almost as irrevocable. Her elder sister, and the brother in whose steps she had once followed "puppy-like," married and settled in homes of their own. Their different lots in life, and the far more pronounced differences of their aims and ideas, afterwards divided the "brother and sister" completely. This kind of separation between people who have been friends in youth is often more terrible to endure than the actual loss by death itself, and doth truly "work like madness in the brain." Is there not some reference to this in that pathetic passage in 'Adam Bede:' "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains, blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement ... we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's, averted from us in cold alienation." For some years after this Miss Evans and her father remained alone together at Griff House. He offered to get a housekeeper, as not the house only, but farm matters, had to be looked after, and he was always tenderly considerate of "the little wench" as he called her. But his daughter preferred taking the whole management of the place into her own hands, and she was as conscientious and diligent in the discharge of her domestic duties as in the prosecution of the studies she carried on at the same time. One of her chief beauties was in her large, finely-shaped, feminine hands--hands which she has, indeed, described as characteristic of several of her heroines; but she once pointed out to a friend at Foleshill that one of them was broader across than the other, saying, with some pride, that it was due to the quantity of butter and cheese she had made during her housekeeping days at Griff. It will be remembered that this is a characteristic attributed to the exemplary Nancy Lammeter, whose person gave one the idea of "perfect unvarying neatness as the body of a little bird," only her hands bearing "the traces of butter making, cheese crushing, and even still coarser work." Certainly the description of the dairy in 'Adam Bede,' and all the processes of butter making, is one which only complete knowledge could have rendered so perfect. Perhaps no scene in all her novels stands out with more life-like vividness than that dairy which one could have sickened for in hot, dusty streets: "Such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, grey limestone and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights and hooks and hinges." This life of mixed practical activity and intellectual pursuits came to an end in 1841, when Mr. Evans relinquished Griff House, and the management of Sir Roger Newdigate's estates, to his married son, and removed with his daughter to Foleshill, near Coventry. CHAPTER III. YOUTHFUL STUDIES AND FRIENDSHIPS. The period from about twenty to thirty is usually the most momentous in the lives of illustrious men and women. It is true that the most abiding impressions, those which the future author will reproduce most vividly, have been absorbed by the growing brain previous to this age; but the fusion of these varied impressions of the outward world with the inner life, and the endless combinations in which imagination delights, rarely begin before. Then, as a rule, the ideas are engendered to be carried out in the maturity of life. Alfred de Vigny says truly enough: "Qu'est-ce qu'une grande vie? Une pensée de la jeunesse, exécutée par l'âge mur." Moreover, it is a revolutionary age. Inherited opinions that had been accepted, as the rotation of the seasons, with unhesitating acquiescence, become an object of speculation and passionate questioning. Nothing is taken upon trust. The intellect, stimulated by the sense of expanding and hitherto unchecked capacity, delights in exercising its strength by critically passing in review the opinions, laws, institutions commonly accepted as unalterable. And if the intellect is thus active the heart is still more so. This is emphatically the time of enthusiastic friendship and glowing love, if often also of cruel disenchantment and disillusion. In most biographies, therefore, this phase of life is no less fascinating than instructive. For it shows the individual while still in a stage of growth already reacting on his environment, and becoming a motive power according to the measure of his intellectual and moral endowments. It is on this state of George Eliot's life that we are now entering. At Foleshill she acquired that vast range of knowledge and universality of culture which so eminently distinguished her. The house she now inhabited though not nearly as picturesque or substantial as the former home of the Evanses, was yet sufficiently spacious, with a pleasant garden in front and behind it; the latter, Marian Evans was fond of making as much like the delicious garden of her childhood as was possible under the circumstances. In other respects she greatly altered her ways of life, cultivating an ultra-fastidiousness in her manners and household arrangements. Though so young she was not only entire mistress of her father's establishment but, as his business required him to be abroad the greater part of each week, she was mostly alone. Her life now became more and more that of a student, one of her chief reasons for rejoicing at the change of residence being the freer access to books. She had, however, already amassed quite a library of her own by this time. In addition to her private studies, she was now also able to have masters to instruct her in a variety of subjects. The Rev. T. Sheepshanks, headmaster of the Coventry Grammar-school, gave her lessons in Greek and Latin, as she particularly wished to learn the former language in order to read Æschylus. She continued her study of French, German, and Italian under the tuition of Signor Brezzi, even acquiring some knowledge of Hebrew by her own unassisted efforts. Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michael's, Coventry, instructed her in the pianoforte; and probably Rosamond Vincy's teacher in 'Middlemarch' is a faithful portraiture of him. "Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to a country town with a memorable history that had its relics in church and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be found in the provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of musical celebrity." George Eliot's sympathetic rendering of her favourite composers, particularly Beethoven and Schubert, was always delightful to her friends, although connoisseurs considered her possessed of little or no strictly technical knowledge. Be that as it may, many an exquisite passage scattered up and down her works, bears witness to her heartfelt appreciation of music, which seems to have had a more intimate attraction for her than the fine arts. She shows little feeling for archæological beauties, in which Warwickshire is so rich: in her 'Scenes of Clerical Life' dismissing a fine monument of Lady Jane Grey, a genuine specimen of old Gothic art at Astley Church, with a sneer about "marble warriors, and their wives without noses." In spite of excessive study, this period of Marian's life is not without faint echoes of an early love-story of her own. In the house of one of her married half-sisters she met a young man who promised, at that time, to take a distinguished position in his profession. A kind of engagement, or semi-engagement, took place, which Mr. Evans refused to countenance, and finally his daughter broke it off in a letter, showing both her strong sense and profoundly affectionate nature. At this time she must have often had a painful consciousness of being cut off from that living fellowship with the like-minded so stimulating to the intellectual life. Men are not so subject to this form of soul hunger as women; for at their public schools and colleges they are brought into contact with their contemporaries, and cannot fail to find comrades amongst them of like thoughts and aspirations with themselves. A fresh life, however, at once vivifying to her intellect and stimulating to her heart, now began for Marian Evans in the friendship she formed with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray of Rosehill, Coventry. Rahel--the subtly gifted German woman, whose letters and memoirs are a treasury of delicate observation and sentiment--observes that people of marked spiritual affinities are bound to meet some time or other in their lives. If not entirely true, there is a good deal to be said for this comforting theory; as human beings of similar nature seem constantly converging as by some magnetic attraction. The circle to which Miss Evans now happened to be introduced was in every sense congenial and inspiriting. Mr. Bray, his wife, and his sister-in-law were a trio more like some delightful characters in a first-rate novel than the sober inhabitants of a Warwickshire country town. Living in a house beautifully situated on the outskirts of Coventry, they used to spend their lives in philosophical speculations, philanthropy, and pleasant social hospitality, joining to the ease and _laisser aller_ of continental manners a thoroughly English geniality and trustworthiness. Mr. Bray was a wealthy ribbon manufacturer, but had become engrossed from an early age in religious and metaphysical speculation as well as in political and social questions. Beginning to inquire into the dogmas which formed the basis of his belief, he found, on careful investigation, that they did not stand, in his opinion, the test of reason. His arguments set his brother-in-law, Mr. Charles C. Hennell, a Unitarian, to examine afresh and go carefully over the whole ground of popular theology, the consequence of this close study being the 'Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity,' a work which attracted a good deal of attention when it appeared, and was translated into German at the instance of David Strauss. It was published in 1838, a few years after the appearance of the 'Life of Jesus.' In its critical examination of the miracles, and in the sifting of mythological from historical elements in the Gospels it bears considerable analogy to Strauss's great work, although strictly based on independent studies, being originally nothing more than an attempt to solve the doubts of a small set of friends. Their doubts were solved, but not in the manner originally anticipated. Mrs. Bray, of an essentially religious nature, shared the opinions of her husband and brother, and without conforming to the external rites and ceremonies of a creed, led a life of saintly purity and self-devotion. The exquisite beauty of her moral nature not only attracted Marian to this truly amiable woman, but filled her with reverence, and the friendship then commenced was only ended by death. In Miss Sara Hennell, Marian Evans found another congenial companion who became as a sister to her. This singular being, in most respects such a contrast to her sister, high-strung, nervous, excitable, importing all the ardour of feeling into a life of austere thought, seemed in a manner mentally to totter under the weight of her own immense metaphysical speculations. A casual acquaintance of these two young ladies might perhaps have predicted that Miss Hennell was the one destined to achieve fame in the future, and she certainly must have been an extraordinary mental stimulus to her young friend Marian. These gifted sisters, two of a family, all the members of which were remarkable, by some are identified as the originals of the delightful Meyrick household in 'Daniel Deronda.' Each member of this genial group was already, or ultimately became, an author of more or less repute. A reviewer in the 'Westminster,' writing of Mr. Bray's philosophical publications, some years ago, said: "If he would reduce his many works to one containing nothing unessential, he would doubtless obtain that high place among the philosophers of our country to which his powers of thought entitle him." His most popular book, called 'The Education of the Feelings,' intended for use in secular schools, deals with the laws of morality practically applied. Mrs. Bray's writings, on the same order of subjects, are still further simplified for the understanding of children. She is the authoress of 'Physiology for Schools,' 'The British Empire,' 'Elements of Morality,' etc. Her 'Duty to Animals' has become a class book in the schools of the midland counties, and she was one of the first among those noble-hearted men and women who have endeavoured to introduce a greater degree of humanity into our treatment of animals. George Eliot, writing to Mrs. Bray in March 1873 on this very subject, says: "A very good, as well as very rich, woman, Mrs. S----, has founded a model school at Naples, and has the sympathy of the best Italians in her educational efforts. Of course a chief point in trying to improve the Italians is to teach them kindness to animals, and a friend of Mrs. S---- has confided to her a small sum of money--fifty pounds, I think--to be applied to the translation and publication of some good books for young people, which would be likely to rouse in them a sympathy with dumb creatures. "Will you kindly help me in the effort to further Mrs. S----'s good work by sending me a copy of your book on animals, and also by telling me the periodical in which the parts of the book first appeared, as well as the titles of any other works which you think would be worth mentioning for the purpose in question? "Mrs. S---- (as indeed you may probably know) is the widow of a German merchant of Manchester, as rich as many such merchants are, and as benevolent as only the choicest few. She knows all sorts of good work for the world, and is known by most of the workers. It struck me, while she was speaking of this need of a book to translate, that you had done the very thing." A few days later the following highly interesting letter came from the same source: "Many thanks for the helpful things you have sent me. 'The Wounded Bird' is charming. But now something very much larger of the same kind must be written, and you are the person to write it--something that will bring the emotions, sufferings, and possible consolations of the dear brutes vividly home to the imaginations of children: fitted for children of all countries, as Reineke Fuchs is comprehensible to all nations. A rough notion came to me the other day of supposing a house of refuge, not only for dogs, but for all distressed animals. The keeper of this refuge understands the language of the brutes, which includes differences of dialect not hindering communication even between birds, and dogs, by the help of some Ulysses among them who is versed in the various tongues, and puts in the needed explanations. Said keeper overhears his refugees solacing their evenings by telling the story of their experiences, and finally acts as editor of their autobiographies. I imagine my long-loved fellow-creature, the ugly dog, telling the sorrows and the tender emotions of gratitude which have wrought him into a sensitive soul. The donkey is another cosmopolitan sufferer, and a greater martyr than Saint Lawrence. If we only knew what fine motives he has for his meek endurance, and how he loves a friend who will scratch his nose! "All this is not worth anything except to make you feel how much better a plan you can think of. "Only you must positively write this book which everybody wants--this book which will do justice to the share our 'worthy fellow-labourers' have had in the groaning and travailing of the world towards the birth of the right and fair. "But you must not do it without the 'sustenance of labour'--I don't say 'pay,' since there is no pay for good work. Let Mr. ... be blest with the blessing of the unscrupulous. I want to contribute something towards helping the brutes, and helping the children, especially the southern children, to be good to the creatures who are continually at their mercy. I can't write the needed book myself, but I feel sure that you can, and that you will not refuse the duty." Mrs. Bray's answer to this humorous suggestion may be gathered from George Eliot's amiable reply: "I see at once that you must be right about the necessity for being simple and literal. In fact I have ridiculous impulses in teaching children, and always make the horizon too wide. "'The Wounded Bird' is perfect of its kind, and that kind is the best for a larger work. You yourself see clearly that it is an exceptional case for any one to be able to write books for children without putting in them false morality disguised as devout religion. And you are one of the exceptional cases. I am quite sure, from what you have done, that you can do the thing which is still wanted to be done. As to imagination, 'The Wounded Bird' is full of imagination." These extracts pleasantly illustrate both the writer and recipient of such humane letters; and, though written at a much later period, not only give an idea of the nature of Mrs. Bray's literary pursuits, but of the friendly relations subsisting to the end between her and George Eliot. Of Miss Hennell's work it is more difficult to speak without entering more deeply into her subject-matter than is compatible with the scope of the present work. In one of her best known books, entitled 'Thoughts in Aid of Faith,' she makes the daring attempt to trace the evolution of religion, her mode of thought partaking at once of the scientific and the mystical. For the present she seems to be one of the very few women who have ventured into the arena of philosophy; and, curiously enough, her doctrine is that there should be a feminine method in metaphysics as well as a masculine, the sexes, according to this singular theory, finding their counterpart in religion and science. It may be remembered that George Eliot, in one of her essays, is of opinion that women should endeavour to make some distinctively feminine contributions to the intellectual pursuits they engage in, saying, "Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of happiness." Something of the same idea lies at the root of much in Miss Hennell's mystical disquisitions. This circumstantial account of the circle to which Miss Evans was now introduced has been given, because it consisted of friends who, more than any others, helped in the growth and formation of her mind. No human being, indeed, can be fully understood without some knowledge of the companions that at one time or other, but especially during the period of development, have been intimately associated with his or her life. However vastly a mountain may appear to loom above us from the plain, on ascending to its summit one always finds innumerable lesser eminences which all help in making up the one imposing central effect. And similarly in the world of mind, many superior natures, in varying degrees, all contribute their share towards the maturing of that exceptional intellectual product whose topmost summit is genius. The lady who first introduced Marian Evans to the Brays was not without an object of her own, for her young friend--whose religious fervour, tinged with evangelical sentiment, was as conspicuous as her unusual learning and thoughtfulness--seemed to her peculiarly fitted to exercise a beneficial influence on the Rosehill household, where generally unorthodox opinions were much in vogue. Up to the age of seventeen or eighteen Marian had been considered the most truly pious member of her family, being earnestly bent, as she says, "to shape this anomalous English Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament." "I was brought up," she informs another correspondent, "in the Church of England, and have never joined any other religious society; but I have had close acquaintance with many dissenters of various sects, from Calvinistic Anabaptists to Unitarians." Her inner life at this time is faithfully mirrored in the spiritual experiences of Maggie Tulliver. Marian Evans was not one who could rest satisfied with outward observances and lip-worship: she needed a faith which should give unity and sanctity to the conception of life; which should awaken "that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life." At one time Evangelicalism supplied her with the most essential conditions of a religious life: with all the vehemence of an ardent nature she flung her whole soul into a passionate acceptance of the teaching of Christianity, carrying her zeal to the pitch of asceticism. This was the state of her mind, at the age of seventeen, when her aunt from Wirksworth came to stay with her. Mrs. Elizabeth Evans (who came afterwards to be largely identified with Dinah Morris) was a zealous Wesleyan, having at one time been a noted preacher; but her niece, then a rigid Calvinist, hardly thought her doctrine strict enough. When this same aunt paid her a visit, some years afterwards, at Foleshill, Marian's views had already undergone a complete transformation, and their intercourse was constrained and painful; for the young evangelical enthusiast, who had been a favourite in clerical circles, was now in what she afterwards described as a "crude state of freethinking." It was a period of transition through which she gradually passed into a new religious synthesis. Her intimacy with the Brays began about the time when these new doubts were beginning to ferment in her. Her expanding mind, nourished on the best literature, ancient and modern, began to feel cramped by dogmas that had now lost their vitality; yet a break with an inherited form of belief to which a thousand tender associations bound her, was a catastrophe she shrank from with dread. Hence a period of mental uncertainty and trouble. In consequence of these inward questionings, it happened that the young lady who had been unwittingly brought to convert her new acquaintances was converted by them. In intercourse with them she was able freely to open her mind, their enlightened views helping her in this crisis of her spiritual life; and she found it an intense relief to feel no longer bound to reconcile her moral and intellectual perceptions with a particular form of worship. The antagonism she met with in certain quarters, the social persecution from which she had much to suffer, are perhaps responsible for some of the sharp, caustic irony with which she afterwards assailed certain theological habits of thought. It is not unlikely that in some of her essays for the _Westminster Review_ she mainly expressed the thoughts which were stirred in her by the opposition she encountered at this period of her life--as, for example, in the brilliant paper entitled 'Worldliness and Otherworldliness,' which contains such a scathing passage as the following: "For certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our neighbour's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature, we think it of some importance to contend, that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that to some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality--that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence.... To us it is matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessity of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is ensured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits." It was, of course, inevitable that her changed tone of mind should attract the attention of the family and friends of Marian, and that the backsliding of so exemplary a member should afford matter for scandal in many a clerical circle and evangelical tea-meeting. Close to the Evanses there lived at that time a dissenting minister, whose daughter Mary was a particular favourite of Marian Evans. There had been much neighbourly intimacy between the two young ladies, and though there was only five years' difference between them, Marian always inspired her friend with a feeling of awe at her intellectual superiority. Yet her sympathy--that sympathy with all human life which was the strongest element of her character--was even then so irresistible that every little trouble of Mary's life was entrusted to her keeping. But the sudden discovery of their daughter's friend being an "infidel" came with the shock of a thunderclap on the parents. Much hot argument passed between the minister and this youthful controversialist, but the former clinched the whole question by a triumphant reference to the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world as an irrefutable proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. In spite of this vital difference on religious questions, Miss Evans was suffered to go on giving the minister's daughter lessons in German, which were continued for two or three years, she having generously undertaken this labour of love twice a week, because she judged from the shape of her young friend's head--phrenology being rife in those days--that she must have an excellent understanding. But, better than languages, she taught her the value of time, always cutting short mere random talk by simply ignoring it. Altogether the wonderful strength of her personality manifested itself even at this early period in the indelible impression it left on her pupil's memory, many of her sayings remaining graven on it as on stone. As, for instance, when one day twitting Mary's too great self-esteem she remarked, "We are very apt to measure ourselves by our aspiration instead of our performance." Or when on a friend's asking, "What is the meaning of Faust?" she replied, "The same as the meaning of the universe." While reading _'Wallenstein's Lager_,' with her young pupil, the latter happened to say how life-like the characters seemed: "Don't say _seemed_," exclaimed Marian; "we know that they _are_ true to the life." And she immediately began repeating the talk of labourers, farriers, butchers, and others of that class, with such close imitation as to startle her friend. Is not this a fore-shadowing of the inimitable scene at the 'Rainbow?' By far the most trying consequence of her change of views was that now, for the first time, Marian was brought into collision with her father, whose pet she had always been. He could not understand her inward perplexities, nor the need of her soul for complete inward unity of thought, a condition impossible to her under the limiting conditions of a dogmatic evangelicalism, "where folly often mistakes itself for wisdom, ignorance gives itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness, turning its eyes upwards, calls itself religion." She, on the other hand, after a painful struggle, wanted to break away from the old forms of worship, and refused to go to church. Deeply attached though she was to her father, the need to make her acts conform with her convictions became irresistible. Under such conflicting tendencies a rupture between father and daughter became imminent, and for a short time a breaking up of the home was contemplated, Marian intending to go and live by herself in Coventry. One of the leading traits in her nature was its adhesiveness, however, and the threat of separation proved so painful to her that her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bray, persuaded her to conform to her father's wishes as far as outward observances were implied, and for the rest he did not trouble himself to inquire into her thoughts or occupations. From a letter written at this period it appears that the 'Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity' had made a most powerful impression on her mind. Indeed, she dated from it a new birth. But so earnest and conscientious was she in her studies, that before beginning its longed-for perusal, she and a friend determined to read the Bible through again from beginning to end. The intimacy between the inmates of Rosehill and the girl student at Foleshill meanwhile was constantly growing closer. They met daily, and in their midst the humorous side of her nature expanded no less than her intellect. Although striking ordinary acquaintances by an abnormal gravity, when completely at her ease she at times bubbled over with fun and gaiety, irradiated by the unexpected flashes of a wit whose full scope was probably as yet unsuspected by its possessor. Not but that Miss Evans and her friends must have been conscious, even at that early age, of extraordinary powers in her, destined some day to give her a conspicuous position in the world. For her conversation was already so full of charm, depth, and comprehensiveness, that all talk after hers seemed stale and common-place. Many were the discussions in those days between Mr. Bray and Marian Evans, and though frequently broken off in fierce dispute one evening, they always began again quite amicably the next. Mr. Bray probably exercised considerable influence on his young friend's mind at this impressible period of life; perhaps her attention to philosophy was first roused by acquaintance with him, and his varied acquirements in this department may have helped in giving a positive direction to her own thoughts. Mr. Bray was just then working out his 'Philosophy of Necessity,' the problems discussed being the same as those which have occupied the leading thinkers of the day: Auguste Comte in his 'Positive Philosophy;' Buckle in his 'History of Civilization;' and Mr. Herbert Spencer in his 'Sociology.' The theory that, as an individual and collectively, man is as much subject to law as any of the other entities in nature, was one of those magnificent ideas which revolutionise the world of thought. Many minds, in different countries, of different calibre, were all trying to systematise what knowledge there was on this subject in order to convert hypothesis into demonstration. To what extent Mr. Bray may have based his 'Philosophy of Necessity' on independent research, or how much was merely assimilated from contemporary sources, we cannot here inquire. Enough that the ideas embodied in it represented some of the most vital thought of the age, and contributed therefore not a little to the formation of George Eliot's mind, and to the grip which she presently displayed in the handling of philosophical topics. In 1842 the sensation created by Dr. Strauss's _Leben Jesu_ had even extended to so remote a district as Warwickshire. Some persons of advanced opinions, deeply impressed by its penetrating historical criticism, which was in fact Niebuhr's method applied to the elucidation of the Gospels, were very desirous of obtaining an English translation of this work; meeting at the house of a common friend, the late Mr. Joseph Parkes of Birmingham, they agreed, in the first blush of their enthusiasm, to raise amongst them whatever sum might be required for the purpose. Mr. Hennell, the leading spirit in this enterprise, proposed that the translation should be undertaken by Miss Brabant, the accomplished daughter of Dr. Brabant, a scholar deeply versed in theological matters, who was in friendly correspondence with Strauss and Paulus in Germany and with Coleridge and Grote in England. The lady in question, though still in her teens, was peculiarly fitted for the task, as she had already translated some of Baur's erudite writings on theological subjects into English. But when she had done about one half of the first volume, her learned labours came to an unexpected conclusion, as she became engaged to Mr. Hennell, who to great mental attainments joined much winning buoyancy of manner. And on her marriage with this gentleman she had to relinquish her task as too laborious. Miss Brabant's acquaintance with Marian began in 1843, and in the summer of that year the whole friendly group started on an excursion to Tenby. During their stay at this watering-place the lady who had begun, and the lady destined eventually to accomplish, the enormous labour of translating the 'Life of Jesus' gave tokens of feminine frivolity by insisting on going to a public ball, where, however, they were disappointed, as partners were very scarce. It should be remembered that Marian Evans was only twenty-three years old at this time, but, though she had not yet done anything, her friends already thought her a wonderful woman. She never seems to have had any real youthfulness, and her personal appearance greatly improved with time. It is only to the finest natures, it should be remembered, that age gives an added beauty and distinction; for the most persistent self has then worked its way to the surface, having modified the expression, and to some extent the features, to its own likeness. There exists a coloured sketch done by Mrs. Bray about this period, which gives one a glimpse of George Eliot in her girlhood. In those Foleshill days she had a quantity of soft pale-brown hair worn in ringlets. Her head was massive, her features powerful and rugged, her mouth large but shapely, the jaw singularly square for a woman, yet having a certain delicacy of outline. A neutral tone of colouring did not help to relieve this general heaviness of structure, the complexion being pale but not fair. Nevertheless the play of expression and the wonderful mobility of the mouth, which increased with age, gave a womanly softness to the countenance in curious contrast with its framework. Her eyes, of a grey-blue, constantly varying in colour, striking some as intensely blue, others as of a pale, washed-out grey, were small and not beautiful in themselves, but when she grew animated in conversation, those eyes lit up the whole face, seeming in a manner to transfigure it. So much was this the case, that a young lady, who had once enjoyed an hour's conversation with her, came away under its spell with the impression that she was beautiful, but afterwards, on seeing George Eliot again when she was not talking, she could hardly believe her to be the same person. The charm of her nature disclosed itself in her manner and in her voice, the latter recalling that of Dorothea, in being "like the voice of a soul that has once lived in an Æolian harp." It was low and deep, vibrating with sympathy. Mr. Bray, an enthusiastic believer in phrenology, was so much struck with the grand proportions of her head that he took Marian Evans to London to have a cast taken. He thinks that, after that of Napoleon, her head showed the largest development from brow to ear of any person's recorded. The similarity of type between George Eliot's face and Savonarola's has been frequently pointed out. Some affinity in their natures may have led her, if unconsciously, to select that epoch of Florentine life in which he played so prominent a part. Though not above the middle height Marian gave people the impression of being much taller than she really was, her figure, although thin and slight, being well-poised and not without a certain sturdiness of make. She was never robust in health, being delicately strung, and of a highly nervous temperament. In youth the keen excitability of her nature often made her wayward and hysterical. In fact her extraordinary intellectual vigour did not exclude the susceptibilities and weaknesses of a peculiarly feminine organisation. With all her mental activity she yet led an intensely emotional life, a life which must have held hidden trials for her, as in those days she was known by her friends "to weep bucketfuls of tears." A woman of strong passions, like her own Maggie, deeply affectionate by nature, of a clinging tenderness of disposition, Marian Evans went through much inward struggle, through many painful experiences before she reached the moral self-government of her later years. Had she not, it is hardly likely that she could have entered with so deep a comprehension into the most intricate windings of the human heart. That, of course, was to a great extent due to her sympathy, sympathy being the strongest quality of her moral nature. She flung herself, as it were, into other lives, making their affairs, their hopes, their sorrows, her own. And this power of identifying herself with the people she came near had the effect of a magnet in attracting her fellow-creatures. If friends went to her in their trouble they would find not only that she entered with deep feeling into their most minute concerns, but that, by gradual degrees, she lifted them beyond their personal distress, and that they would leave her presence in an ennobled and elevated frame of mind. This sympathy was closely connected with her faculty of detecting and responding to anything that showed the smallest sign of intellectual vitality. She essentially resembled Socrates in her manner of eliciting whatsoever capacity for thought might be latent in the people she came in contact with: were it only a shoemaker or day-labourer, she would never rest till she had found out in what points that particular man differed from other men of his class. She always rather educed what was in others than impressed herself on them; showing much kindliness of heart in drawing out people who were shy. Sympathy was the key-note of her nature, the source of her iridescent humour, of her subtle knowledge of character, and of her dramatic genius. CHAPTER IV. TRANSLATION OF STRAUSS AND FEUERBACH.--TOUR ON THE CONTINENT. Miss Brabant's marriage to Mr. Charles Hennell occurred some months after this excursion to Tenby. In the meanwhile it was settled that Miss Evans should continue her translation of Dr. Strauss's _Leben Jesu_. Thus her first introduction to literature was in a sense accidental. The result proved her admirably fitted for the task; for her version of this searching and voluminous work remains a masterpiece of clear nervous English, at the same time faithfully rendering the spirit of the original. But it was a vast and laborious undertaking, requiring a large share of patience, will, and energy, quite apart from the necessary mental qualifications. On this occasion, to fit herself more fully for her weighty task, Marian taught herself a considerable amount of Hebrew. But she groaned, at times, under the pressure of the toil which had necessarily to be endured, feeling tempted to relinquish what must often have seemed almost intolerable drudgery. The active interest and encouragement of her friends, however, tided her over these moments of discouragement, and after three years of assiduous application, the translation was finally completed, and brought out by Dr. (then Mr.) John Chapman in 1846. It is probably safe to assume that the composition of none of her novels cost George Eliot half the effort and toil which this translation had done. Yet so badly is this kind of literary work remunerated, that twenty pounds was the sum paid for what had cost three years of hard labour! Indeed, by this time, most of the twelve friends who had originally guaranteed the sum necessary for the translation and publication of the 'Life of Jesus,' had conveniently forgotten the matter; and had it not been for the generosity of Mr. Joseph Parkes, who volunteered to advance the necessary funds, who knows how long the MS. translation might have lain dormant in a drawer at Foleshill? It no sooner saw the light, however, than every one recognised the exceptional merits of the work. And for several years afterwards Miss Evans continued to be chiefly known as the translator of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_. Soon after relieving Miss Brabant from the task of translation, Miss Evans went to stay for a time with her friend's father, Dr. Brabant, who sadly felt the loss of his daughter's intelligent and enlivening companionship. No doubt the society of this accomplished scholar, described by Mr. Grote as "a vigorous self-thinking intellect," was no less congenial than instructive to his young companion; while her singular mental acuteness and affectionate womanly ways were most grateful to the lonely old man. There is something very attractive in this episode of George Eliot's life. It recalls a frequently recurring situation in her novels, particularly that touching one of the self-renouncing devotion with which the ardent Romola throws herself into her afflicted father's learned and recondite pursuits. There exists a letter written to an intimate friend in 1846, soon after the translation of Strauss was finished, which, I should say, already shows the future novelist in embryo. In this delightfully humorous mystification of her friends, Miss Evans pretends that, to her gratification, she has actually had a visit from a real live German professor, whose musty person was encased in a still mustier coat. This learned personage has come over to England with the single purpose of getting his voluminous writings translated into English. There are at least twenty volumes, all unpublished, owing to the envious machinations of rival authors, none of them treating of anything more modern than Cheops, or the invention of the hieroglyphics. The respectable professor's object in coming to England is to secure a wife and translator in one. But though, on inquiry, he finds that the ladies engaged in translation are legion, they mostly turn out to be utterly incompetent, besides not answering to his requirements in other respects; the qualifications he looks for in a wife, besides a thorough acquaintance with English and German, being personal ugliness and a snug little capital, sufficient to supply him with a moderate allowance of tobacco and _Schwarzbier_, after defraying the expense of printing his books. To find this phoenix among women he is sent to Coventry on all hands. In Miss Evans, so she runs on, the aspiring professor finds his utmost wishes realised, and so proposes to her on the spot; thinking that it may be her last chance, she accepts him with equal celerity, and her father, although strongly objecting to a foreigner, is induced to give his consent for the same reason. The lady's only stipulation is that her future husband shall take her out of England, with its dreary climate and drearier inhabitants. This being settled, she invites her friends to come to her wedding, which is to take place next week. This lively little _jeu d'esprit_ is written in the wittiest manner, and one cannot help fancying that this German Dryasdust contained the germ of one of her very subtlest masterpieces in characterisation, that of the much-to-be-pitied Casaubon, the very Sysiphus of authors. In the lady, too, willing to marry her parchment-bound suitor for the sake of co-operating in his abstruse mental labours, we have a faint adumbration of the simple-minded Dorothea. But these sudden stirrings at original invention did not prevent Miss Evans from undertaking another task, similar to her last, if not so laborious. She now set about translating Ludwig Feuerbach's _Wesen des Christenthums_. This daring philosopher, who kept aloof from professional honours, and dwelt apart in a wood, that he might be free to handle questions of theology and metaphysics with absolute fearlessness, had created a great sensation by his philosophical criticism in Germany. Unlike his countrymen, whose writings on these subjects are usually enveloped in such an impenetrable mist that their most perilous ideas pass harmlessly over the heads of the multitude, Feuerbach, by his keen incisiveness of language and luminousness of exposition, was calculated to bring his meaning home to the average reader. Mr. Garnett's account of the 'Essence of Christianity' in the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' admirably concise as it is, may be quoted here, as conveying in the fewest words the gist of this "famous treatise, where Feuerbach shows that every article of Christian belief corresponds to some instinct or necessity of man's nature, from which he infers that it is the creation and embodiment of some human wish, hope, or apprehension.... Following up the hint of one of the oldest Greek philosophers, he demonstrates that religious ideas have their counterparts in human nature, and assumes that they must be its product." The translation of the 'Essence of Christianity' was also published by Mr. Chapman in 1854. It appeared in his 'Quarterly Series,' destined "to consist of works by learned and profound thinkers, embracing the subjects of theology, philosophy, biblical criticism, and the history of opinion." Probably because her former translation had been so eminently successful, Miss Evans received fifty pounds for her present work. But there was no demand for it in England, and Mr. Chapman lost heavily by its publication. About the same period Miss Evans also translated Spinoza's _De Deo_ for the benefit of an inquiring friend. But her English version of the 'Ethics' was not undertaken till the year 1854, after she had left her home at Foleshill. In applying herself to the severe labour of rendering one philosophical work after another into English, Miss Evans, no doubt, was bent on elucidating for herself some of the most vital problems which engage the mind when once it has shaken itself free from purely traditional beliefs, rather than on securing for herself any pecuniary advantages. But her admirable translations attracted the attention of the like-minded, and she became gradually known to some of the most distinguished men of the time. Unfortunately her father's health now began to fail, causing her no little pain and anxiety. At some period during his illness she stayed with him in the Isle of Wight, for in a letter to Mrs. Bray, written many years afterwards, she says, "The 'Sir Charles Grandison' you are reading must be the series of little fat volumes you lent me to carry to the Isle of Wight, where I read it at every interval when my father did not want me, and was sorry that the long novel was not longer. It is a solace to hear of any one's reading and enjoying Richardson. We have fallen on an evil generation who would not read 'Clarissa' even in an abridged form. The French have been its most enthusiastic admirers, but I don't know whether their present admiration is more than traditional, like their set phrases about their own classics." During the last year of her father's life his daughter was also in the habit of reading Scott's novels aloud to him for several hours of each day; she must thus have become deeply versed in his manner of telling the stories in which she continued to delight all her life; and in speaking of the widening of our sympathies which a picture of human life by a great artist is calculated to produce, even in the most trivial and selfish, she gives as an instance Scott's description of Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, and his story of the 'Two Drovers.' But a heavy loss now befell Marian Evans in the death of her father, which occurred in 1849. Long afterwards nothing seemed to afford consolation to her grief. For eight years these two had kept house together, and the deepest mutual affection had always subsisted between them. Marian ever treasured her father's memory. As George Eliot she loved to recall in her works everything associated with him in her childhood; those happy times when, standing between her father's knees, she used to be driven by him to "outlying hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my imagination as if they belonged to different regions of the globe." Miss Evans, however, was not suffered to mourn uncomforted. The tender friends who cared for her as a sister, now planned a tour to the Continent in hopes that the change of scene and associations would soften her grief. So they started on their travels, going to Switzerland and Italy by the approved route, which in those days was not so hackneyed as it now is. To so penetrating an observer as Miss Evans there must have been an infinite interest in this first sight of the Continent. But the journey did not seem to dispel her grief, and she continued in such very low spirits that Mrs. Bray almost regretted having taken her abroad so soon after her bereavement. Her terror, too, at the giddy passes which they had to cross, with precipices yawning on either hand--so that it seemed as if a false step must send them rolling into the abyss--was so overpowering that the sublime spectacle of the snow-clad Alps seemed comparatively to produce but little impression on her. Her moral triumph over this constitutional timidity, when any special occasion arose, was all the more remarkable. One day when crossing the Col de Balme from Martigny to Chamounix, one of the side-saddles was found to be badly fitted, and would keep turning round, to the risk of the rider, if not very careful, slipping off at any moment. Marian, however, insisted on having this defective saddle in spite of the protest of Mrs. Bray, who felt quite guilty whenever they came to any perilous places. How different is this timidity from George Sand's hardy spirit of enterprise! No one who has read that captivating book, her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, can forget the great Frenchwoman's description of a Swiss expedition, during which, while encumbered with two young children, she seems to have borne all the perils, fatigues, and privations of a toilsome ascent with the hardihood of a mountaineer. But it should not be forgotten that, although Miss Evans was just then in a peculiarly nervous and excitable condition, and her frequent fits of weeping were a source of pain to her anxious fellow-travellers. She had, in fact, been so assiduous in attendance on her sick father, that she was physically broken down for a time. Under these circumstances an immediate return to England seemed unadvisable, and, when her friends started on their homeward journey, it was decided that Marian should remain behind at Geneva. Here, amid scenes so intimately associated with genius--where the "self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau," placed the home of his '_Nouvelle Héloïse_,' and the octogenarian Voltaire spent the serene Indian summer of his stirring career; where Gibbon wrote his 'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;' where Byron and Shelley sought refuge from the hatred of their countrymen, and which Madame de Staël complainingly exchanged for her beloved Rue du Bac--here the future author of 'Romola' and 'Middlemarch' gradually recovered under the sublime influences of Nature's healing beauties. For about eight months Miss Evans lived at a boarding-house, "Le Plongeau," near Geneva. But she was glad to find a quieter retreat in the family of an artist, M. d'Albert, becoming much attached to him and his wife. Established in one of the lofty upper stories of this pleasant house, with the blue shimmering waters of the lake glancing far below, and the awful heights of Mont Blanc solemnly dominating the entire landscape, she not only loved to prosecute her studies, but, in isolation from mankind, to plan glorious schemes for their welfare. During this stay she drank deep of Rousseau, whose works, especially _Les Confessions_, made an indelible impression on her. And when inciting a friend to study French, she remarked that it was worth learning that language, if only to read him. At the same period Marian probably became familiarised with the magnificent social Utopias of St. Simon, Proudhon, and other French writers. Having undergone a kind of mental revolution herself not so long ago, she must have felt some sympathy with the thrilling hopes of liberty which had agitated the states of Western Europe in 1849. But, as I have already pointed out, her nature had conservative leanings. She believed in progress only as the result of evolution, not revolution. And in one of her most incisive essays, entitled 'The National History of German Life,' she finely points out the "notable failure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view of abstract democratic and socialistic theories." In the same article she draws a striking parallel between the growth of language and that of political institutions, contending that it would be as unsatisfactory to "construct a universal language on a rational basis"--one that had "no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms 'familiar with forgotten years'"--as abruptly to alter forms of government which are nothing, in fact, but the result of historical growth, systematically embodied by society. Besides the fascinations of study, and the outward glory of nature, the charm of social intercourse was not wanting to this life at Geneva. In M. D'Albert, a very superior man, gentle, refined, and of unusual mental attainments, she found a highly desirable daily companion. He was an artist by profession, and it is whispered that he suggested some of the traits in the character of the delicate-minded Philip Wakem in the 'Mill on the Floss.' The only portrait in oils which exists of George Eliot is one painted by M. D'Albert at this interesting time of her life. She inspired him, like most people who came into personal contact with her, with the utmost admiration and regard, and, wishing to be of some service, he escorted Miss Evans to England on her return thither. Curiously enough, M. D'Albert subsequently translated one of her works, probably 'Adam Bede,' without in the least suspecting who its real author was. It is always a shock when vital changes have occurred in one's individual lot to return to a well-known place, after an absence of some duration, to find it wearing the same unchangeable aspect. One expects somehow that fields and streets and houses would show some alteration corresponding to that within ourselves. But already from a distance the twin spires of Coventry, familiar as household words to the Warwickshire girl, greeted the eyes of the returning traveller. In spite of all love for her native spot of earth, this was a heavy time to Marian Evans. Her father was dead, the home where she had dwelt as mistress for so many years broken up, the present appearing blank and comfortless, the future uncertain and vaguely terrifying. The question now was where she should live, what she should do, to what purposes turn the genius whose untried and partially unsuspected powers were darkly agitating her whole being. As has been already said, Marian Evans had a highly complex nature, compounded of many contradictory impulses, which, though gradually brought into harmony as life matured, were always pulling her, in those days, in different directions. Thus, though she possessed strong family affections, she could not help feeling that to go and take up her abode in the house of some relative, where life resolved itself into a monotonous recurrence of petty considerations, something after the Glegg pattern, would be little short of crucifixion to her, and, however deep her attachment for her native soil may have been, she yet sighed passionately to break away from its associations, and to become "a wanderer and a pilgrim on the face of the earth." For some little time after her return from abroad Marian took up her residence with her brother and his family. But the children who had toddled hand-in-hand in the fields together had now diverged so widely that no memories of a mutual past could bridge over the chasm that divided them. Under these circumstances the family at Rosehill pressed her to make their home permanently hers, and for about a year, from 1850 to 1851, she became the member of a household in fullest sympathy with her. Here Mr. Bray's many-sided mental activity and genial brightness of disposition, and his wife's exquisite goodness of heart, must have helped to soothe and cheer one whose delicately strung nature was just then nearly bending under the excessive strain of thought and feeling she had gone through. One person, indeed, was so struck by the grave sadness generally affecting her, that it seemed to him as if her coming took all the sunshine out of the day. But whether grave or gay, whether meditative or playful, her conversation exercised a spell over all who came within its reach. In the pleasant house at Rosehill distinguished guests were constantly coming and going, so that there was no lack of the needed intellectual friction supplied by clever and original talk. Here in a pleasant garden, planted with rustling acacia trees, and opening on a wide prospect of richly-wooded, undulating country, with the fitful brightness of English skies overhead, and a smooth-shaven lawn to walk or recline upon, many were the topics discussed by men who had made, or were about to make, their mark. Froude was known there. George Combe discussed with his host the principles of phrenology, at that time claiming "its thousands of disciples." Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a lecturing tour in this country, while on a brief visit, made Marian's acquaintance, and was observed by Mrs. Bray engaged in eager talk with her. Suddenly she saw him start. Something said by this quiet, gentle-mannered girl had evidently given him a shock of surprise. Afterwards, in conversation with her friends, he spoke of her "great calm soul." This is no doubt an instance of the intense sympathetic adaptiveness of Miss Evans. If great, she was not by any means calm at this period, but inwardly deeply perturbed, yet her nature, with subtlest response, reflected the transcendental calm of the philosopher when brought within his atmosphere. George Dawson, the popular lecturer, and Mr. Flower, were more intimately associated with the Rosehill household. The latter, then living at Stratford-on-Avon, where he was wont to entertain a vast number of people, especially Americans, who make pilgrimages to Shakespeare's birthplace, is known to the world as the benevolent denouncer of "bits and bearing-reins." One day this whole party went to hear George Dawson, who had made a great sensation at Birmingham, preach one of his thrilling sermons from the text "And the common people heard him gladly." George Eliot, alluding to these days as late as 1876, says, in a letter to Mrs. Bray: "George Dawson was strongly associated for me with Rosehill, not to speak of the General Baptist Chapel, where we all heard him preach for the first time (to us).... I have a vivid recollection of an evening when Mr. and Mrs. F---- dined at your house with George Dawson, when he was going to lecture at the Mechanics' Institute, and you felt compassionately towards him, because you thought the rather riotous talk was a bad preface to his lecture. We have a Birmingham friend, whose acquaintance we made many years ago in Weimar, and from him I have occasionally had some news of Mr. Dawson. I feared, what you mention, that his life has been a little too strenuous in these latter years." On the evening alluded to in this letter Mr. Dawson was dining at Mrs. Bray's house before giving his lecture on 'John Wesley,' at the Mechanics' Institute. His rich sarcasm and love of fun had exhilarated the whole company, and not content with merely "riotous talk," George Dawson and Mr. Flower turned themselves into lions and wild cats for the amusement of the children, suddenly pouncing out from under the table-cloth, with hideous roarings and screechings, till the hubbub became appalling, joined to the delighted half-frightened exclamations of the little ones. Mr. Dawson did the lions, and Mr. Flower, who had made personal acquaintance with the wild cats in the backwoods of America, was inimitable in their peculiar pounce and screech. Thus amid studies and pleasant friendly intercourse did the days pass at Rosehill. Still Marian Evans was restless, tormented, frequently in tears, perhaps unconsciously craving a wider sphere, and more definitely recognised position. However strenuously she, at a maturer time of life, inculcated the necessity of resignation, she had not then learned to resign herself. And now a change was impending--a change which, fraught with the most important consequences, was destined to give a new direction to the current of her life. Dr. John Chapman invited her to assist him in the editorship of the _Westminster Review_, which passed at that time into his hands from John Mill. They had already met, when Marian was passing through London on her way to the Continent, on some matter of business or other connected with one of her translations. Dr. Chapman's proposition was accepted; and although Marian suffered keenly from the wrench of parting with her friends, the prompting to work out her powers to the full overcame the clinging of affection, and in the spring of 1851 she left Rosehill behind her and came to London. CHAPTER V. THE 'WESTMINSTER REVIEW.' Dr. and Mrs. Chapman were at this time in the habit of admitting a few select boarders, chiefly engaged in literary pursuits, to their large house in the Strand, and Miss Evans, at their invitation, made her home with them. Thus she found herself at once in the centre of a circle consisting of some of the most advanced thinkers and brilliant _littérateurs_ of the day; a circle which, partly consisting of contributors to the _Westminster Review_, was strongly imbued with scientific tendencies, being particularly partial to the doctrines of Positive Philosophy. Those were in truth the palmy days of the _Westminster Review_. Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes, John Oxenford, James and Harriet Martineau, Charles Bray, George Combe, and Professor Edward Forbes were among the writers that made it the leading expositor of the philosophic and scientific thought of the age. It occupied a position something midway between that of the _Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly_. Scorning, like the latter, to pander to the frivolous tastes of the majority, it appealed to the most thoughtful and enlightened section of the reading public, giving especial prominence to the philosophy of the Comtist School; and while not so fashionable as the _Nineteenth Century_, it could boast among its contributors names quite as famous, destined as they were to become the foremost of their time and country. With this group of illustrious writers Miss Evans was now associated, and the articles she contributed from the year 1852 to 1858 are among the most brilliant examples of periodical literature. The first notice by her pen is a brief review of Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling' for January 1852, and judging from internal evidence, as regards style and method of treatment, the one on Margaret Fuller, in the next number, must be by the same hand. To the biographer there is a curious interest in what she says in her first notice about this kind of literature, and it would be well for the world if writers were to lay it more generally to heart. "We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of the biographer, that when some great or good personage dies, instead of the dreary three-or five-volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds of the public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have a real "life," setting forth briefly and vividly the man's inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives (chiefly autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any other kind of reading." Then again, speaking of the 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller,' she remarks, in reference to the same topic, "The old-world biographies present their subjects generally as broken fragments of humanity, noticeable because of their individual peculiarities, the new-world biographies present their subjects rather as organic portions of society." George Eliot's estimate of Margaret Fuller (for there can be little doubt that it is hers) possesses too rare an interest for readers not to be given here in her own apposite and pungent words: "We are at a loss whether to regard her as the parent or child of New England Transcendentalism. Perhaps neither the one nor the other. It was essentially an intellectual, moral, spiritual regeneration--a renewing of the whole man--a kindling of his aspirations after full development of faculty and perfect symmetry of being. Of this sect Margaret Fuller was the priestess. In conversation she was as copious and oracular as Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle; gifted with the inspired powers of a Pythoness, she saw into the hearts and over the heads of all who came near her, and, but for a sympathy as boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human race! Her frailty in this respect was no secret either to herself or her friends.... We must say that from the time she became a mother till the final tragedy when she perished with her husband and child within sight of her native shore, she was an altered woman, and evinced a greatness of soul and heroism of character so grand and subduing, that we feel disposed to extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy inspired by the closing scenes. "While her reputation was at its height in the literary circles of Boston and New York, she was so self-conscious that her life seemed to be a studied act, rather than a spontaneous growth; but this was the mere flutter on the surface; the well was deep, and the spring genuine; and it is creditable to her friends, as well as to herself, that such at all times was their belief." In this striking summing-up of a character, the penetrating observer of human nature--taking in at a glance and depicting by a few masterly touches all that helps to make up a picture of the real living being--begins to reveal herself. These essays in the _Westminster Review_ are not only capital reading in themselves, but are, of course, doubly attractive to us because they let out opinions, views, judgments of things and authors, which we should never otherwise have known. Marian Evans had not yet hidden herself behind the mask of George Eliot, and in many of these wise and witty utterances of hers we are admitted behind the scenes of her mind, so to speak, and see her in her own undisguised person--before she had assumed the _rôle_ of the novelist, showing herself to the world mainly through her dramatic impersonations. In these articles, written in the fresh maturity of her powers, we learn what George Eliot thought about many subjects; we learn who were her favourite authors in fiction; what opinions she held on art and poetry; what was her attitude towards the political and social questions of the day; what was her conception of human life in general. There is much here, no doubt, that one might have been prepared to find, but a good deal, too, that comes upon one with the freshness of surprise. A special interest attaches naturally to what she has to say about her own branch of art--the novel. Though she had probably no idea that she was herself destined to become one of the great masters of fiction, she had evidently a special predilection for works of that kind, noticeable because hitherto her bent might have appeared almost exclusively towards philosophy. To the three-volume circulating-library novel of the ordinary stamp she is merciless in her sarcasm. One of her most pithy articles of this time, or rather later, its date being 1856, is directed against "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." "These," she says, "consist of the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these--a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the _mind and millinery_ species. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other 'ladylike' means of getting their bread. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears.... It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen, that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains." After finding fault with what she sarcastically calls the _white neck-cloth_ species of novel, "a sort of medical sweetmeat for Low Church young ladies," she adds, "The real drama of Evangelicalism, and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it, lies among the middle and lower classes. Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of religious life among the negroes?" She who asked that question was herself destined, a few years later, to answer her own demand in most triumphant fashion. Already here and there we find hints and suggestions of the vein that was to be so fully worked out in 'Scenes of Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede.' Her intimate knowledge of English country life, and the hold it had on her imagination, every now and then eats its way to the surface of her writings, and stands out amongst its surrounding matter with a certain unmistakable native force. After censuring the lack of reality with which peasant life is commonly treated in art, she makes the following apposite remarks, suggested by her own experience: "The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the town-bred rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered shade and refresh themselves not immoderately with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund, no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles; the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel, than of the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene 'smiling,' and you think these companions in labour must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer and you will find haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are women among the labourers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart pot. "The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite sure that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass." Every one must see that this is the essay writing of a novelist rather than of a moral philosopher. The touches are put on with the vigour of a Velasquez. Balzac, or Flaubert, or that most terrible writer of the modern French school of fiction, the author of 'Le Sabot Rouge,' never described peasant life with more downright veracity. In the eyes of Miss Evans this quality of veracity is the most needful of all for the artist. Because "a picture of human life, such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of sentiment." For "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of a true one." George Eliot afterwards faithfully adhered to the canons fixed by the critic. Whether this consciousness of a moral purpose was altogether a gain to her art may be more fitly discussed in connection with the analysis of her works of fiction. It is only needful to point out here how close and binding she wished to make the union between ethics and æsthetics. Almost identical views concerning fundamental laws of Art are discussed in an equally terse, vigorous, and pictorial manner in an article called 'Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction.' This article, however, is not by George Eliot, but by George Henry Lewis. It was published in October 1858, and appeared after their joint sojourn in Germany during the spring and summer of that year. I think that if one carefully compares 'Realism in Art' with George Eliot's other articles, there appears something like a marriage of their respective styles in this paper. It seems probable that Lewis, with his flexible adaptiveness, had come under the influence of George Eliot's powerful intellect, and that many of the views he expresses here at the same time render George Eliot's, as they frequently appear, identical with hers. In the article in question the manner as well as the matter has a certain suggestion of the novelist's style. For example she frequently indicates the quality of human speech by its resemblance to musical sounds. She is fond of speaking of "the _staccato_ tones of a voice," "an _adagio_ of utter indifference," and in the above-mentioned essay there are such expressions as the "stately _largo_" of good German prose. Again, in the article in question, we find the following satirical remarks about the slovenly prose of the generality of German writers: "To be gentlemen of somewhat slow, sluggish minds is perhaps their misfortune; but to be writers deplorably deficient in the first principles of composition is assuredly their fault. Some men pasture on platitudes, as oxen upon meadow-grass; they are at home on a dead-level of common-place, and do not desire to be irradiated by a felicity of expression." And in another passage to the same effect the author says sarcastically, "Graces are gifts: it can no more be required of a professor that he should write with felicity than that he should charm all beholders with his personal appearance; but literature requires that he should write intelligibly and carefully, as society requires that he should wash his face and button his waistcoat." Some of these strictures are very similar in spirit to what George Eliot had said in her review of Heinrich Heine, published in 1856, where complaining of the general cumbrousness of German writers, she makes the following cutting remark: "A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author." A passage in this article, which exactly tallies with George Eliot's general remarks on Art, must not be omitted here. "Art is a representation of Reality--a Representation inasmuch as it is not the thing itself, but only represents it, must necessarily be limited by the nature of its medium.... Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism but Falsism.... To misrepresent the forms of ordinary life is no less an offence than to misrepresent the forms of ideal life: a pug-nosed Apollo, or Jupiter in a great-coat, would not be more truly shocking to an artistic mind than are those senseless falsifications of Nature into which incompetence is led under the pretence of 'beautifying' Nature. Either give us true peasants or leave them untouched; either paint no drapery at all, or paint it with the utmost fidelity; either keep your people silent, or make them speak the idiom of their class." Among German novelists (or rather writers of short stories), Paul Heyse is one of the few who is singled out for special praise in this review. And it is curious that there should be a tale by this eminent author called 'The Lonely Ones' (which also appeared in 1858), in which an incident occurs forcibly recalling the catastrophe of Grandcourt's death in 'Daniel Deronda': the incident--although unskilfully introduced--of a Neapolitan fisherman whose momentary murderous hesitation to rescue his drowning friend ends in lifelong remorse for his death. What makes the article in question particularly interesting are the allusions to the German tour, which give it an almost biographical interest. As has been mentioned already, Mr. Lewis and George Eliot were travelling in Germany in the spring of 1858, and in a letter to a friend she writes: "Then we had a delicious journey to Salzburg, and from thence through the Salz-Kammergut to Vienna, from Vienna to Prague, and from Prague to Dresden, where we spent our last six weeks in quiet work and quiet worship of the Madonna." And in his essay on Art Mr. G. H. Lewis alludes to the most priceless art-treasure Dresden contains, "Raphael's marvellous picture, the Madonna di San Sisto," as furnishing the most perfect illustration of what he means by Realism and Idealism. Speaking of the child Jesus he says: "In the never-to-be-forgotten divine babe, we have at once the intensest realism of presentation with the highest idealism of conception: the attitude is at once grand, easy and natural; the face is that of a child, but the child is divine: in those eyes and in that brow there is an indefinable something which, greater than the expression of the angels, grander than that of pope or saint, is to all who see it a perfect _truth_; we feel that humanity in its highest conceivable form is before us, and that to transcend such a form would be to lose sight of the _human_ nature there represented." A similar passage occurs in 'The Mill on the Floss,' where Philip Wakem says: "The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child; he couldn't have told how he did it, and we can't tell why we feel it to be divine." Enough has probably been quoted from George Eliot's articles to give the reader some idea of her views on art. But they are so rich in happy aphorisms, originality of illustration, and raciness of epithet that they not only deserve attentive study because they were the first fruits of the mind that afterwards gave to the world such noble and perfect works as 'The Mill on the Floss' and 'Silas Marner,' but are well worth attention for their own sake. Indeed nothing in George Eliot's fictions excels the style of these papers. And what a clear, incisive, masterly style it was! Her prose in those days had a swiftness of movement, an epigrammatic felicity, and a brilliancy of antithesis which we look for in vain in the over-elaborate sentences and somewhat ponderous wit of 'Theophrastus Such.' A very vapid paper on 'Weimar and its Celebrities,' April 1859, which a writer in the _Academy_ attributes to the same hand, I know not on what authority, does not possess a single attribute that we are in the habit of associating with the writings of George Eliot. That an author who, by that time, had already produced some of her very finest work, namely, the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' and 'Adam Bede,' should have been responsible simultaneously for the trite commonplaces ventilated in this article is simply incredible. It is true that Homer is sometimes found nodding, and the right-hand of the greatest master may forget its cunning, but would George Eliot in her most abject moments have been capable of penning such a sentence as this in connection with Goethe? "Would not Fredricka or Lili have been a more genial companion than Christina Vulpius for that great poet of whom his native land is so justly proud?" It is not worth while to point out other platitudes such as flow spontaneously from the facile pen of a penny-a-liner; but the consistent misspelling of every name may be alluded to in passing. Thus we read "Lily" for "Lely," "Zetter" for "Zelter," "Quintus Filein" for "Fixlein," "Einsedel" for "Einsiedel," etc. etc. This, in itself, would furnish no conclusive argument, supposing George Eliot to have been on the Continent and out of the way of correcting proofs. But as it happened she was in England in April 1859, and it is, therefore, on all grounds impossible that this worthless production should be hers. Perhaps her two most noteworthy articles are the one called 'Evangelical Teaching,' published in 1855, and the other on 'Worldliness and other Worldliness,' which appeared in 1857. This happy phrase, by the way, was first used by Coleridge, who says, "As there is a worldliness or the too much of this life, so there is another _worldliness_ or rather _other worldliness_ equally hateful and selfish with _this worldliness_." These articles are curious because they seem to occupy a midway position between George Eliot's earliest and latest phase of religious belief. But at this period she still felt the recoil from the pressure of a narrowing dogmatism too freshly not to launch back at it some of the most stinging shafts from the armoury of her satire. Not Heine himself, in his trenchant sallies, surpasses the irony with which some of her pages are bristling. To ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history: a history by no means smooth and uneventful, as some times superficially represented, but full of strong contrasts, abrupt transitions, outward and inward changes sympathetically charged with all the meaning of this transitional time. Two extracts from the above-mentioned articles will amply testify to what has just been said. "Given a man with a moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of intellectual mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes, and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic. Let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millenial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the _status quo_. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualising alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin; less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, rival 'Moore's Almanack' in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit; and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as 'the horn that had eyes,' 'the lying prophet,' and the 'unclean spirits.' In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons, and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious 'light reading' the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts, whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander having taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations." Even more scathing than this onslaught on a certain type of the popular evangelical preacher, is the paper on the poet Young, one of the wittiest things from George Eliot's pen, wherein she castigates with all her powers of sarcasm and ridicule that class of believers who cannot vilify this life sufficiently in order to make sure of the next, and who, in the care of their own souls, are careless of the world's need. Her analysis of the 'Night Thoughts' remains one of the most brilliant criticisms of its kind. Young's contempt for this earth, of all of us, and his exaltation of the starry worlds above, especially provoke his reviewer's wrath. This frame of mind was always repulsive to George Eliot, who could never sufficiently insist on the need of man's concentrating his love and energy on the life around him. She never felt much toleration for that form of aspiration that would soar to some shadowy infinite beyond the circle of human fellowship. One of the most epigrammatic passages in this article is where she says of Young, "No man can be better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for 'livings;' he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust, if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for 'an ornament of religion and virtue;' he hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the king's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and 'the skies;' it walks in graveyards, or soars among the stars.... If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent, or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its 'relation to the stars,' and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of deathbeds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next, and by this double process you get the Christian--'the highest style of man.' With all this our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the 'Night Thoughts.'" It has seemed appropriate to quote thus largely from these essays, because, never having been reprinted, they are to all intents and purposes inaccessible to the general reader. Yet they contain much that should not willingly be consigned to the dust and cobwebs, among which obsolete magazines usually sink into oblivion. They may as well be specified here according to their dates. 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling,' January 1852; 'Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,' October 1854; 'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' October 1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine,' January 1856; 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' October 1856; 'The Natural History of German Life,' July 1856; and 'Worldliness and other Worldliness: the Poet Young,' January 1857. Miss Evans's main employment on the _Westminster Review_ was, however, editorial. She used to write a considerable portion of the summary of contemporary literature at the end of each number. But her co-operation as sub-editor ceased about the close of 1853, when she left Dr. Chapman's house, and went to live in apartments in a small house in Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park. Marian Evans was not entirely dependent at this time on the proceeds of her literary work, her father having settled the sum of 80l. to 100l. a year on her for life, the capital of which, however, did not belong to her. She was very generous with her money; and although her earnings at this time were not considerable, they were partly spent on her poor relations. CHAPTER VI. GEORGE HENRY LEWES. Meanwhile, these literary labours were pleasantly diversified by frequent visits to her friends at Rosehill and elsewhere. In October 1852, she stayed with Mr. and Mrs. George Combe at Edinburgh, and on her way back was the guest of Harriet Martineau, at her delightfully situated house in Ambleside. Her acquaintance with Mr. Herbert Spencer had ripened into a cordial friendship. They met constantly both in London and in the country, and their intercourse was a source of mutual intellectual enjoyment and profit. As must already have become evident, it is erroneous to suppose that he had any share in the formation of her mind: for as Mr. Herbert Spencer said, in a letter to the _Daily News_, "Our friendship did not commence until 1851 ... when she was already distinguished by that breadth of culture, and universality of power, which have since made her known to all the world." In a letter to Miss Phelps, George Eliot touches on this rumour, after alluding in an unmistakable manner to another great contemporary: "I never--to answer one of your questions quite directly--I never had any personal acquaintance with" (naming a prominent Positivist); "never saw him to my knowledge, except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his books, especially his 'Logic' and 'Political Economy,' with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life. "Of Mr. ----'s friendship I have had the honour and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought." But there was another acquaintance which Miss Evans made during the first year of her residence in the Strand, destined to affect the whole future tenor of her life--the acquaintance of Mr. George Henry Lewes, then, like her, a contributor to the _Westminster Review_. George Henry Lewes was Marian's senior by two years, having been born in London on the 18th of April, 1817. He was educated at Greenwich in a school once possessing a high reputation for thoroughly "grounding" its pupils in a knowledge of the classics. When his education was so far finished, he was placed as clerk in a merchant's office. This kind of occupation proving very distasteful, he turned medical student for a time. Very early in life he was attracted towards philosophy, for at the age of nineteen we find him attending the weekly meetings of a small club, in the habit of discussing metaphysical problems in the parlour of a tavern in Red Lion Square, Holborn. This club, from which the one in 'Daniel Deronda' is supposed to have borrowed many of its features, was the point of junction for a most heterogeneous company. Here, amicably seated round the fire, a speculative tailor would hob and nob with some medical student deep in anatomy; a second-hand bookseller having devoured the literature on his shelves, ventilated their contents for the general benefit; and a discursive American mystic was listened to in turn with a Jewish journeyman watchmaker deeply imbued with Spinozism. It is impossible not to connect this Jew, named Cohen, and described as "a man of astonishing subtilty and logical force, no less than of sweet personal worth," with the Mordecai of the novel just mentioned. However wide the after divergencies, here evidently lies the germ. The weak eyes and chest, the grave and gentle demeanour, the whole ideality of character correspond. In some respects G. H. Lewes was the "Daniel Deronda" to this "Mordecai." For he not only loved but venerated his "great calm intellect." "An immense pity," says Mr. Lewes, "a fervid indignation filled me as I came away from his attics in one of the Holborn courts, where I had seen him in the pinching poverty of his home, with his German wife and two little black-eyed children." To this pure-spirited suffering watchmaker, Lewes owed his first acquaintance with Spinoza. A certain passage, casually cited by Cohen, awakened an eager thirst for more in the youth. The desire to possess himself of Spinoza's works, still in the odour of pestilential heresy, haunted him like a passion. For he himself, then "suffering the social persecution which embitters any departure from accepted creeds," felt in defiant sympathy with all outcasts. On a dreary November evening, the coveted volumes were at length discovered on the dingy shelves of a second-hand bookseller. By the flaring gaslight, young Lewes, with a beating heart, read on the back of a small brown quarto those thrilling words, 'Spinoza: Opera Posthuma!' He was poor in those days, and the price of the volume was twenty shillings, but he would gladly have sacrificed his last sixpence to secure it. Having paid his money with feverish delight, he hurried home in triumph, and immediately set to work on a translation of the 'Ethics,' which, however, he was too impatient to finish. This little incident is well worth dwelling upon not only as being the first introduction of a notable thinker to philosophy, but as showing the eager impulsive nature of the man. The study of Spinoza led to his publishing an article on his life and works in the _Westminster Review_ of 1843, almost the first account of the great Hebrew philosopher which appeared in this country. This article, afterwards incorporated in the 'Biographical History of Philosophy,' formed the nucleus, I believe, of that "admirable piece of synthetic criticism and exposition," as Mr. Frederic Harrison calls it; a work which, according to him, has influenced the thought of the present generation almost more than any single book except Mr. Mill's 'Logic.' Before the appearance of either article or 'History of Philosophy,' Mr. Lewes went to Germany, and devoted himself to the study of its language and literature, just brought into fashion by Carlyle. Returning to England in 1839, he became one of the most prolific journalists of the day. Witty, brilliant, and many-sided, he seemed pre-eminently fitted by nature for a press writer and _littérateur_. His versatility, was so amazing, that a clever talker once said of him: "Lewes can do everything in the world but paint: and he could do that, too, after a week's study." At this time, besides assisting in the editorship of the _Classical Museum_, he wrote for the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Athenæum_, the _Edinburgh_, _Foreign Quarterly_, _British Quarterly_, _Blackwood_, _Fraser_, and the _Westminster Review_. After publishing 'A Biographical History of Philosophy,' through Mr. Knight's 'Weekly Volumes' in 1846, he wrote two novels, 'Ranthorpe,' and 'Rose, Blanche, and Violet,' which successively appeared in 1847 and 1848. But fiction was not his _forte_, these two productions being singularly crude and immature as compared with his excellent philosophical work. Some jokes in the papers about "rant," killed what little life there was in "Ranthorpe." Nevertheless, Charlotte Brontë, who had some correspondence with Mr. Lewes about 1847, actually wrote about it as follows: "In reading 'Ranthorpe,' I have read a new book, not a reprint, not a reflection of any other book, but a _new book_." Another great writer, Edgar Poe, admired it no less, for he says of the work: "I have lately read it with deep interest, and derived great _consolation_ from it also. It relates to the career of a literary man, and gives a just view of the true aims and the true dignity of the literary character." 'The Spanish Drama;' 'The Life of Maximilian Robespierre, with extracts from his unpublished correspondence;' 'The Noble Heart: a Tragedy;' all followed in close succession from the same inexhaustible pen. The last, it was said, proved also a tragedy to the publishers. But not content with writing dramas, Mr. Lewes was also ambitious of the fame of an actor, the theatre having always possessed a strong fascination for him. Already as a child he had haunted the theatres, and now, while delivering a lecture at the Philosophical Institution in Edinburgh, he shocked its staid _habitués_ not a little by immediately afterwards appearing on the stage in the character of Shylock: so many, and seemingly incompatible, were Lewes's pursuits. But this extreme mobility of mind, this intellectual tripping from subject to subject, retarded the growth of his popularity. The present mechanical subdivision of labour has most unfortunately also affected the judgment passed on literary and artistic products. Let a man once have written a novel typical of the manners and ways of a certain class of English society, or painted a picture with certain peculiar effects of sea or landscape, or composed a poem affecting the very trick and language of some bygone mediæval singer, he will be doomed, to the end of his days, to do the same thing over and over again, _ad nauseam_. Nothing can well be more deadening to any vigorous mental life, and Mr. Lewes set a fine example of intellectual disinterestedness in sacrificing immediate success to the free play of a most variously endowed nature. The public too was a gainer by this. For the life of Goethe could not have been made the rich, comprehensive, many-sided biography it is, had Mr. Lewes himself not tried his hand at such a variety of subjects. This life, begun in 1845, the result partly of his sojourn in Germany, did not appear in print until 1855. Ultimately destined to a great and lasting success, the MS. of the 'Life of Goethe' was ignominiously sent from one publisher to another, until at last Mr. David Nutt, of the Strand, showed his acumen by giving it to the reading world. Some years before the publication of this biography Mr. Lewes had also been one of the founders of that able, but unsuccessful weekly, the _Leader_, of which he was the literary editor from 1849 to 1854. Many of his articles on Auguste Comte were originally written for this paper, and afterwards collected into a volume for Bohn's series. Indeed, after Mr. John Stuart Mill, he is to be regarded as the earliest exponent of Positivism in England. He not only considered the '_Cours de Philosophie Positive_' the greatest work of this century, but believed it would "form one of the mighty landmarks in the history of opinion. No one before M. Comte," he says, "ever dreamed of treating social problems otherwise than upon theological or metaphysical methods. He first showed how possible, nay, how imperative, it was that social questions should be treated on the same footing with all other scientific questions. This being his object, he was forced to detect the law of mental evolution before he could advance. This law is the law of historical progression." But while Mr. Lewes, with his talent for succinct exposition, helped more than any other Englishman to disseminate the principles of Comte's philosophy in this country, he was at the same time violently opposed to his '_Politique Positive_,' with its schemes of social reorganisation. Even so slight a survey as this must show the astonishing discursiveness of Mr. Lewes's intellect. By the time he was thirty he had already tried his hand at criticism, fiction, biography, the drama, and philosophy. He had enlarged his experience of human nature by foreign travel; he had addressed audiences from the lecturer's platform; he had enjoyed the perilous sweets of editing a newspaper; he had even, it is said, played the harlequin in a company of strolling actors. Indeed, Mr. Thackeray was once heard to say that it would not surprise him to meet Lewes in Piccadilly, riding on a white elephant; whilst another wit likened him to the Wandering Jew, as you could never tell where he was going to turn up, or what he was going to do next. In this discursiveness of intellect he more nearly resembled the Encyclopedists of the 18th century than the men of his own time. Indeed his personal appearance, temperament, manners, general tone of thought, seemed rather to be those of a highly-accomplished foreigner than of an Englishman. He was a lightly-built, fragile man, with bushy curly hair, and a general shagginess of beard and eyebrow not unsuggestive of a Skye terrier. For the rest, he had a prominent mouth and grey, deeply-set eyes under an ample, finely-proportioned forehead. Volatile by nature, somewhat wild and lawless in his talk, he in turn delighted and shocked his friends by the gaiety, recklessness, and genial _abandon_ of his manners and conversation. His companionship was singularly stimulating, for the commonest topic served him as a starting-point for the lucid development of some pet philosophical theory. In this gift of making abstruse problems intelligible, and difficult things easy, he had some resemblance to the late W. K. Clifford, with his magical faculty of illuminating the most abstruse subjects by his vivid directness of exposition. As Lewes's life was so soon to be closely united to that of Marian Evans, this cursory sketch of his career will not seem inappropriate. At the time they met at Dr. Chapman's house, Mr. Lewes, who had married early in life, found his conjugal relations irretrievably spoiled. How far the blame of this might attach to one side or to the other does not concern us here. Enough that in the intercourse with a woman of such astonishing intellect, varied acquirements, and rare sympathy, Mr. Lewes discovered a community of ideas and a moral support that had been sadly lacking to his existence hitherto. In many ways these two natures, so opposite in character, disposition, and tone of mind, who, from such different starting-points, had reached the same standpoint, seemed to need each other for the final fruition and utmost development of what was best in each. A crisis was now impending in Marian's life. She was called upon to make her private judgment a law unto herself, and to shape her actions, not according to the recognised moral standard of her country, but in harmony with her own convictions of right and wrong. From a girl, it appears, she had held independent views about marriage, strongly advocating the German divorce laws. On the appearance of 'Jane Eyre,' when every one was talking of this book and praising the exemplary conduct of Jane in her famous interview with Rochester, Marian Evans, then only four-and-twenty, remarked to a friend that in his position she considered him justified in contracting a fresh marriage. And in an article on Madame de Sablé, written as early as 1854, there is this significant passage in reference to the "laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie in France." "Heaven forbid," she writes, "that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with man, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favourable to the manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or retaining its beloved object--to convert indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness into perspicuity." Such a union, formed in the full maturity of thought and feeling, was now contracted by Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes. Legal union, however, there could be none, for though virtually separated from his wife, Mr. Lewes could not get a divorce. Too little has as yet transpired concerning this important step to indicate more than the bare outline of events. Enough that Mr. Lewes appears to have written a letter in which, after a full explanation of his circumstances, he used all his powers of persuasion to win Miss Evans for his life-long companion; that she consented, after having satisfied her conscience that in reality she was not injuring the claims of others; and that henceforth she bore Mr. Lewes's name, and became his wife in every sense but the legal one. This proceeding caused the utmost consternation amongst her acquaintances, especially amongst her friends at Rosehill. The former intimate and affectionate intercourse with Mrs. Bray and her sister was only gradually restored, and only after they had come to realise how perfectly her own conscience had been consulted and satisfied in the matter. Miss Hennell, who had already entered on the scheme of religious doctrine which ever since she has been setting forth in her printed works, "swerved nothing from her own principles that the maintenance of a conventional form of marriage (remoulded to the demands of the present age) is essentially attached to all religion, and pre-eminently so to the religion of the future." In thus defying public opinion, and forming a connection in opposition to the laws of society, George Eliot must have undergone some trials and sufferings peculiarly painful to one so shrinkingly sensitive as herself. Conscious of no wrong-doing, enjoying the rare happiness of completest intellectual fellowship in the man she loved, the step she had taken made a gap between her kindred and herself which could not but gall her clinging, womanly nature. To some of her early companions, indeed, who had always felt a certain awe at the imposing gravity of her manners, this dereliction from what appeared to them the path of duty was almost as startling and unexpected as if they had seen the heavens falling down. How far the individual can ever be justified in following the dictates of his private judgment, in opposition to the laws and prevalent opinions of his time and country, must remain a question no less difficult than delicate of decision. It is precisely the point where the highest natures and the lowest sometimes apparently meet; since to act in opposition to custom may be due to the loftiest motives--may be the spiritual exaltation of the reformer, braving social ostracism for the sake of an idea, or may spring, on the other hand, from purely rebellious promptings of an anti-social egoism, which recognises no law higher than that of personal gratification. At the same time, it seems, that no progress could well be made in the evolution of society without these departures on the part of individuals from the well-beaten tracks, for even the failures help eventually towards a fuller recognition of what is beneficial and possible of attainment. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Sand, the New England Transcendentalists, with their communistic experiment at Brooke Farm, all more or less strove to be path-finders to a better and happier state of society. George Eliot, however, hardly belonged to this order of mind. Circumstances prompted her to disregard one of the most binding laws of society, yet, while she considered herself justified in doing so, her sympathies were, on the whole, more enlisted in the state of things as they are than as they might be. It is certainly curious that the woman, who in her own life had followed such an independent course, severing herself in many ways from her past with all its traditional sanctities, should yet so often inculcate the very opposite teaching in her works--should inculcate an almost slavish adherence to whatever surroundings, beliefs, and family ties a human being may be born to. I need only add here that Mr. Lewes and Marian went to Germany soon after forming this union, which, only ending by death, gave to each what had hitherto been lacking in their lives. Many marriages solemnised in a church, and ushered in with all the ostentation of _trousseau_, bridesmaids, and wedding breakfast, are indeed less essentially such in all the deeper human aspects which this relation implies, than the one contracted in this informal manner. Indeed, to those who saw them together, it seemed as if they could never be apart. Yet, while so entirely at one, each respected the other's individuality, his own, at the same time, gaining in strength by the contact. Mr. Lewes's mercurial disposition now assumed a stability greatly enhancing his brilliant talents, and for the first time facilitating that concentration of intellect so necessary for the production of really lasting philosophic work. On the other hand, George Eliot's still dormant faculties were roused and stimulated to the utmost by the man to whom this union with her formed the most memorable year of his life. By his enthusiastic belief in her he gave her the only thing she wanted--a thorough belief in herself. Indeed, he was more than a husband: he was, as an intimate friend once pithily remarked, a very mother to her. Tenderly watching over her delicate health, cheering the grave tenor of her thoughts by his inexhaustible buoyancy, jealously shielding her from every adverse breath of criticism, Mr. Lewes in a manner created the spiritual atmosphere in which George Eliot could best put forth all the flowers and fruits of her genius. In joining her life with that of Mr. Lewes, the care of his three children devolved upon George Eliot, who henceforth showed them the undeviating love and tenderness of a mother. One of the sons had gone out to Natal as a young man, and contracted a fatal disease, which, complicated with some accident, resulted in an untimely death. He returned home a hopeless invalid, and his tedious illness was cheered by the affectionate tendance of her who had for so many years acted a mother's part towards him. CHAPTER VII. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE. As has already been mentioned, Mr. Lewes and Marian went to Germany in 1854, dividing the year between Berlin, Munich, and Weimar. In the latter pleasant little Saxon city, on which the mighty influence of Goethe seemed still visibly resting, as the reflection of the sun lingers in the sky long after the sun himself has set, Lewes partly re-wrote his 'Life of Goethe.' Here must have been spent many delightful days, wandering in Goethe's track, exploring the beautiful neighbourhood, and enjoying some of the most cultivated society in Germany. Several articles on German life and literature, afterwards published in the _Westminster Review_, were probably written at this time. The translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics' by George Eliot was also executed in the same year. Mr. Lewes, alluding to it in 'Goethe's Life,' says, in a foot-note, "It may interest some readers to learn that Spinoza will ere long appear in English, edited by the writer of these lines." This was a delusive promise, since the translation has not yet made its appearance. But surely its publication would now be warmly welcomed. The time, however, was approaching when George Eliot was at last to discover where her real mastery lay. And this is the way, as the story goes, that she discovered it. They had returned from the Continent and were settled again in London, both actively engaged in literature. But literature, unless in certain cases of triumphant popularity, is perhaps the worst paid of all work. Mr. Lewes and George Eliot were not too well off. The former, infinite in resources, having himself tried every form of literature in turn, could not fail to notice the matchless power of observation, and the memory matching it in power, of the future novelist. One day an idea struck him. "My dear," he said, "I think you could write a capital story." Shortly afterwards there was some dinner engagement, but as he was preparing to go out, she said, "I won't go out this evening, and when you come in don't disturb me. I shall be very busy." And this was how the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' came first to be written! On being shown a portion of the first tale, 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Lewes was fairly amazed. Stories are usually fabricated after the event; but, if not true, they often truly paint a situation. And the general testimony of friends seems to agree that it was Mr. Lewes who first incited the gifted woman, of whose great powers he was best able to form a judgment, to express herself in that species of literature which would afford the fullest scope to the creative and dramatic faculties which she so eminently possessed. Here, however, his influence ended. He helped to reveal George Eliot to herself, and after that there was little left for him to do. But this gift of stimulating another by sympathetic insight and critical appreciation is itself of priceless value. When Schiller died, Goethe said, "The half of my existence is gone from me." A terrible word to utter for one so great. But never again, he knew, would he meet with the same complete comprehension, and, lacking that, his genius itself seemed less his own than before. There is an impression abroad that Mr. Lewes, if anything, did some injury to George Eliot from a literary point of view; that the nature of his pursuits led her to adopt too technical and pedantic a phraseology in her novels. But this idea is unjust to both. In comparing her earliest with her latest style, it is clear that from the first she was apt to cull her illustrations from the physical sciences, thereby showing how much these studies had become part of herself. Indeed, she was far more liable to introduce these scientific modes of expression than Mr. Lewes, as may be easily seen by comparing his 'Life of Goethe,' partly re-written in 1854, with some of her essays of the same date. As to her matter, it is curious how much of it was drawn from the earliest sources of memory--from that life of her childhood to which she may sometimes have turned yearningly as to a long-lost Paradise. Most of her works might, indeed, not inaptly be called 'Looking Backward.' They are a half-pathetic, half-humorous, but entirely tender revivification of the "days that are no more." No one, however intimate, could really intermeddle with the workings of a genius drawing its happiest inspiration from the earliest experiences of its own individual past. Nothing is more characteristic of this obvious tendency than the first of the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.' At Chilvers Coton the curious in such matters may still see the identical church where the incumbent of Shepperton used to preach sermons shrewdly compounded of High Church doctrines and Low Church evangelicalism, not forgetting to note "its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's gallery." There they may still see the little churchyard, though they may look in vain for the "slim black figure" of the Rev. Amos, "as it flits past the pale gravestones," in "the silver light that falls aslant on church and tomb." And among the tombs there is one, a handsome substantial monument, overshadowed by a yew-tree, on which there is this inscription: HERE LIES, WAITING THE SUMMONS OF THE ARCHANGEL'S TRUMPET, ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF THE BELOVED WIFE OF THE REV. JOHN GWYTHER, B.A., CURATE OF THIS PARISH, NOV. 4TH, 1836, AGED THIRTY-FOUR YEARS, LEAVING A HUSBAND AND SEVEN CHILDREN. This Emma Gwyther is none other than the beautiful Milly, the wife of Amos, so touchingly described by George Eliot, whose mother, Mrs. Evans, was her intimate friend. George Eliot would be in her teens when she heard the story of this sweet woman: heard the circumstantial details of her struggles to make the two ends of a ridiculously small income meet the yearly expenses: heard her mother, no doubt (in the words of Mrs. Hackit) blame her weak forbearance in tolerating the presence in her house of the luxurious and exacting countess, who, having ingratiated herself with the gullible Amos by her talk of the "livings" she would get him, gave much scandal in the neighbourhood: heard of the pathetic death-bed, when, worn by care and toil, the gentle life ebbed quietly away, leaving a life-long void in her husband's heart and home. All this was the talk of the neighbourhood when George Eliot was a girl; and her extraordinary memory allowed nothing to escape. On the completion of 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Lewes, who, as already mentioned, was a contributor to 'Maga.' sent the MS. to the editor, the late Mr. John Blackwood, as the work of an anonymous friend. This was in the autumn of 1856. The other scenes of 'Clerical Life' were then unwritten, but the editor was informed that the story submitted to his approval formed one of a series. Though his judgment was favourable, he begged to see some of the other tales before accepting this, freely making some criticisms on the plot and studies of character in 'Amos Barton.' This, however, disheartened the author, whose peculiar diffidence had only been overcome by Mr. Lewes's hearty commendation. When the editor had been made aware of the injurious effect of his objections, he hastened to efface it by accepting the tale without further delay. It appeared soon afterwards in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for January 1857, where it occupied the first place. This story, by some considered as fine as anything the novelist ever wrote, came to an end in the next number. 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,' and 'Janet's Repentance' were written in quick succession, and the series was completed in November of the same year. Although there was nothing sufficiently sensational in these 'Scenes' to arrest the attention of that great public which must be roused by something new and startling, literary judges were not slow to discern the powerful realism with which the author had drawn these uncompromising studies from life. After the appearance of 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Blackwood wrote to the anonymous author: "It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh, so humorous, and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so much in so few words." Soon afterwards he began another letter: "My dear Amos, I forget whether I told you or Lewes that I had shown part of the MS. to Thackeray. He was staying with me, and having been out at dinner, came in about eleven o'clock, when I had just finished reading it. I said to him, 'Do you know that I think I have lighted upon a new author, who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger.' I showed him a page or two, I think the passage where the curate returns home and Milly is first introduced. He would not pronounce whether it came up to my ideas, but remarked afterwards that he would have liked to have read more, which I thought a good sign." Dickens, after the publication of the 'Scenes,' sent a letter to the unknown writer through the editor, warmly expressing the admiration he felt for them. But he was strongly of opinion from the first that they must have been written by a woman. In the meanwhile the tales were reprinted in a collected form, and they were so successful that the editor, writing to Mr. Lewes at the end of January 1858, when the book had hardly been out a month, was able to say, "George Eliot has fairly achieved a literary reputation among judges, and the public must follow, although it may take time." And in a letter to George Eliot herself, he wrote in February: "You will recollect, when we proposed to reprint, my impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the magazine to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often elapses between the two stages of reputation--the literary and the public. Your progress will be _sure_, if not so quick as we could wish." While the sketches were being re-issued in book form, Messrs. Blackwood informed its author that they saw good cause for making a large increase in the forthcoming reprint, and their anticipations were fully justified by its success. All sorts of rumours were abroad as to the real author of these clerical tales. Misled by a hint, calculated to throw him off the real scent, Mr. Blackwood was at first under the impression that they were the work of a clergyman, and perhaps this may have been the origin of a belief which lingered till quite recently, that George Eliot was the daughter of a clergyman, a statement made by several of the leading daily papers after her death. Abandoning the idea of the clergyman, Mr. Blackwood next fixed upon a very different sort of person, to wit, Professor Owen, whom he suspected owing to the similarity of handwriting and the scientific knowledge so exceptional in a novelist. No less funny was the supposition held by others of Lord Lytton--who more than once hoaxed the public under a new literary disguise--having at last surpassed himself in the sterling excellence of these tales. Now that Bulwer has gone the way of all fashions, it seems incredible that the most obtuse and slow-witted of critics should have mistaken for a moment his high-flown sentimental style for the new author's terse, vigorous and simple prose. It was impossible, however, for an author to remain a mere nameless abstraction. An appellation of some kind became an imperative necessity, and, during the passage of 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' through the press, the pseudonym of "George Eliot"--a name destined to become so justly renowned--was finally assumed. The 'Scenes of Clerical Life' were to George Eliot's future works what a bold, spirited sketch is to a carefully elaborated picture. All the qualities that distinguished her genius may be discovered in this, her first essay in fiction. With all Miss Austen's matchless faculty for painting commonplace characters, George Eliot has that other nobler faculty of showing what tragedy, pathos, and humour may be lying in the experience of a human soul "that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." While depicting some commonplace detail of every day life, she has the power to make her reader realise its close relation to the universal life. She never gives you the mere dry bones and fragments of existence as represented in some particular section of society, but always manages to keep before the mind the invisible links connecting it with the world at large. In 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' there is a passage as beautiful as any in her works, and fully illustrating this attitude of her mind. It is where Tina, finding herself deceived in Captain Wybrow, gives way to her passionate grief in solitude. "While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too heavy for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was making brilliant day to busy nations on the other side of the swift earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships were labouring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty." There is rather more incident in this story of Mr. Gilfil than in either of the two other 'Scenes of Clerical Life.' In 'Amos Barton' the narrative is of the simplest, as has already been indicated; and the elements from which 'Janet's Repentance' is composed are as free from any complex entanglement of plot. The author usually describes the most ordinary circumstances of English life, but the powerful rendering of the human emotions which spring from them takes a most vivid hold of the imagination: 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story,' however, seems a little Italian romance dropped on English soil. It is, in brief, the narration of how Sir Christopher Cheverel and his wife, during their residence at Milan, took pity on a little orphan girl, "whose large dark eyes shone from out her queer little face like the precious stones in a grotesque image carved in old ivory." Caterina, or Tina as she is called, taken back to Cheverel Manor, grew up under the care of the Baronet's wife, to whom she became endeared by her exceptional musical talent. Sir Christopher had no children, but had chosen his nephew, Captain Wybrow, for his heir, and planned a marriage between him and Miss Assher, the handsome and accomplished owner of a pretty estate. Another marriage, on which he has equally set his heart, is that between his ward Maynard Gilfil, an open-eyed manly young fellow destined for the Church, and the mellow-voiced, large-eyed Tina, for whom he has long nursed an undeclared passion. But alas, for the futility of human plans! Tina, to whom the elegant Anthony Wybrow has been secretly professing love, suffers tortures of jealousy when he and Miss Assher, to whom he has dutifully become engaged, come on a visit to Cheverel Manor. The treacherous Captain, to lull the suspicions of his betrothed, insinuates that poor Miss Sarti entertains a hopeless passion for him, which puts the poor girl, who gets an inkling of this double-dealing, into a frenzy of indignation. In this state she possesses herself of a dagger, and as she is going to meet the Captain by appointment, dreams of plunging the weapon in the traitor's heart. But on reaching the appointed spot, she beholds the false lover stretched motionless on the ground already--having suddenly died of heart disease. Tina's anguish is indescribable: she gives the alarm to the household, but stung by remorse for a contemplated revenge of which her tender-hearted nature was utterly incapable, she flies unperceived from the premises at night. Being searched for in vain, she is suspected of having committed suicide. After some days of almost unbearable suspense, news is brought that Tina is lying ill at the cottage of a former maid in the household. With reviving hopes her anxious lover rides to the farm, sees the half-stunned, unhappy girl, and, after a while, manages to remove her to his sister's house. She gradually recovers under Mrs. Heron's gentle tendance, and one day a child's accidental striking of a deep bass note on the harpsichord suddenly revives her old passionate delight in music. And 'the soul that was born anew to music was born anew to love.' After a while Tina agrees to become Mr. Gilfil's wife, who has been given the living at Shepperton, where a happy future seems in store for the Vicar. "But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died. "Tina died, and Maynard Gilfil's love went with her into deep silence for evermore." Besides this sympathy with the homeliest characters and situations, or, more properly speaking, springing from it, there already runs through these three tales the delicious vein of humour irradiating George Eliot's otherwise sombre pictures of life with sudden flashes of mirth as of sunlight trembling above dark waters. In this depth and richness of humour George Eliot not only takes precedence of all other distinguished women, but she stands among them without a rival. Hers is that thoughtful outlook on life, that infinite depth of observation which, taking note of the inconsistencies and the blunders, the self-delusions and "fantastic pranks" of her fellow-men, finds the source of laughter very near to tears; never going out of her way for the eccentric and peculiar in human nature, seeing that human nature itself appears to her as the epitome of all incongruity. It is this breadth of conception and unerringness of vision piercing through the external and accidental to the core of man's mixed nature which give certain of her creations something of the life-like complexity of Shakespeare's. Her power of rendering the idiom and manners of peasants, artisans, and paupers, of calling up before us the very gestures and phrases of parsons, country practitioners, and other varieties of inhabitants of our provincial towns and rural districts, already manifests itself fully in these clerical stories. Here we find such types as Mr. Dempster, the unscrupulous, brutal, drunken lawyer; Mr. Pilgrim, the tall, heavy, rough-mannered, and spluttering doctor, profusely addicted to bleeding and blistering his patients; Mr. Gilfil, the eccentric vicar, with a tender love-story hidden beneath his rugged exterior; the large-hearted, unfortunate Janet, rescued from moral ruin by Mr. Tryan, the ascetic evangelical clergyman, whose character, the author remarks, might have been found sadly wanting in perfection by feeble and fastidious minds, but, as she adds, "The blessed work of helping the world forward happily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes of God's making are quite different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience, which they drew in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their own sorrows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they have done genuine work, but the rest is dry, barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay." George Eliot's early acquaintance with many types of the clerical character, and her sympathy with the religious life in all its manifestations, was never more fully shown than in these 'Scenes.' In 'Janet's Repentance' we already discover one of George Eliot's favourite psychological studies--the awakening of a morally mixed nature to a new, a spiritual life. This work of regeneration Mr. Tryan performs for Janet, Felix Holt for Esther, and Daniel Deronda for Gwendolen. Her protest against the application of too lofty a moral standard in judging of our fellow-creatures, her championship of the "mongrel, ungainly dogs who are nobody's pets," is another of the prominent qualities of her genius fully expressed in this firstling work, being, indeed, at the root of her humorous conception of life. One of the finest bits of humour in the present volume is the scene in 'Amos Barton,' which occurs at the workhouse, euphemistically called the "College." Mr. Barton, having just finished his address to the paupers, is thus accosted by Mr. Spratt, "a small-featured, small-statured man, with a remarkable power of language, mitigated by hesitation, who piqued himself on expressing unexceptionable sentiments in unexceptionable language on all occasions. "'Mr. Barton, sir--aw--aw--excuse my trespassing on your time--aw--to beg that you will administer a rebuke to this boy; he is--aw--aw--most inveterate in ill-behaviour during service-time.' "The inveterate culprit was a boy of seven, vainly contending against 'candles' at his nose by feeble sniffing. But no sooner had Mr. Spratt uttered his impeachment than Mrs. Fodge rushed forward, and placed herself between Mr. Barton and the accused. "'That's _my_ child, Muster Barton,' she exclaimed, further manifesting her maternal instincts by applying her apron to her offspring's nose. 'He's aly's a-findin' faut wi' him, and a-poundin' him for nothin'. Let him goo an' eat his roost goose as is a-smellin' up in our noses while we're a-swallering them greasy broth, an' let my boy alooan.' "Mr. Spratt's small eyes flashed, and he was in danger of uttering sentiments not unexceptionable before the clergyman; but Mr. Barton, foreseeing that a prolongation of this episode would not be to edification, said 'Silence!' in his severest tones. "'Let me hear no abuse. Your boy is not likely to behave well, if you set him the example of being saucy.' Then stooping down to Master Fodge, and taking him by the shoulder, 'Do you like being beaten?' "'No--a.' "'Then what a silly boy you are to be naughty. If you were not naughty, you wouldn't be beaten. But if you are naughty, God will be angry, as well as Mr. Spratt; and God can burn you for ever. That will be worse than being beaten.' "Master Fodge's countenance was neither affirmative nor negative of this proposition. "'But,' continued Mr. Barton, 'if you will be a good boy, God will love you, and you will grow up to be a good man. Now, let me hear next Thursday that you have been a good boy.' "Master Fodge had no distinct vision of the benefit that would accrue to him from this change of courses." CHAPTER VIII. ADAM BEDE. Rarely has a novelist come to his task with such a far-reaching culture, such an intellectual grasp, as George Eliot. We have seen her girlhood occupied with an extraordinary variety of studies; we have seen her plunged in abstruse metaphysical speculations; we have seen her translating some of the most laborious philosophical investigations of German thinkers; we have seen her again translating from the Latin the 'Ethics' of Spinoza; and, finally, we have seen her attracting, and attracted by, some of the leaders in science, philosophy, and literature. Compared with such qualifications who among novelists could compete? What could a Dickens, or a Thackeray himself, throw into the opposing scale? Lewes, indeed, was a match for her in variety of attainments, but he had made several attempts at fiction, and the attempts had proved failures. When at last, in the maturity of her powers, George Eliot produced 'Adam Bede,' she produced a novel in which the amplest results of knowledge and meditation were so happily blended with instinctive insight into life and character, and the rarest dramatic imagination, as to stamp it immediately as one of the great triumphs and masterpieces in the world of fiction. It is worth noticing that in 'Adam Bede' George Eliot fulfils to the utmost the demands which she had been theoretically advocating in her essays. In some of these she had not only eloquently enforced the importance of a truthful adherence to nature, but had pointed out how the artist is thus in the very vanguard of social and political reforms; as in familiarising the imagination with the real condition of the people, he did much towards creating that sympathy with their wants, their trials, and their sufferings, which would eventually effect external changes in harmony with this better understanding. Such had been her teaching. And in Dickens she had recognised the one great novelist who, in certain respects, had painted the lower orders with unerring truthfulness. His "Oliver Twists," his "Nancys," his "Joes," were terrible and pathetic pictures of the forlorn outcasts haunting our London streets. And if, as George Eliot says, Dickens had been able to "give us their psychological character, their conception of life and their emotions, with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies." Now George Eliot absolutely does what Dickens aimed at doing. She not merely seizes the outward and accidental traits of her characters: she pierces with unerring vision to the very core of their nature, and enables us to realise the peculiarly subtle relations between character and circumstance. Her primary object is to excite our sympathy with the most ordinary aspects of human life, with the people that one may meet any day in the fields, the workshops, and the homes of England. Her most vivid creations are not exceptional beings, not men or women pre-eminently conspicuous for sublime heroism of character or magnificent mental endowments, but work-a-day folk, "Not too fine or good For human nature's daily food." To this conscientious fidelity of observation and anxious endeavour to report the truth and nothing but the truth, as of a witness in a court of justice, are owing that life-like vividness with which the scenery and people in 'Adam Bede' seem projected on the reader's imagination. The story, indeed, is so intensely realistic as to have given rise to the idea that it is entirely founded on fact. That there is such a substratum is hardly a matter of doubt, and there have been various publications all tending to prove that the chief characters in 'Adam Bede' were not only very faithful copies of living people, but of people closely connected with its author. To some extent this is incontrovertible. But, on the other hand, there is a likelihood of the fictitious events having in their turn been grafted on to actual personages and occurrences, till the whole has become so fused together as to lead some persons to the firm conviction that Dinah Morris is absolutely identical with Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the Derbyshire Methodist. Such a supposition would help to reconcile the conflicting statements respectively made by the great novelist and the writers of two curious little books entitled 'Seth Bede, the Methody, his Life and Labours,' chiefly written by himself, and 'George Eliot in Derbyshire,' by Guy Roslyn. From these brochures one gathers that Hayslope, where the rustic drama of 'Adam Bede' unfolds itself, is the village of Ellaston, not far from Ashbourne in Staffordshire. This village is so little altered that the traveller may still see the sign-board of the "Donnithorne Arms," and the red brick hall, only with windows no longer unpatched. Samuel, William, and Robert Evans (the father of the novelist) were born in this place, and began life as carpenters, as their father before them. Samuel Evans became a zealous Methodist, and was rather laughed at by his family in consequence, for he says, "My elder brothers often tried to tease me; they entertained High Church principles. They told me what great blunders I made in preaching and prayer; that I had more zeal than knowledge." In this, as in other respects, he is the prototype of Seth, as Adam resembles Robert Evans, one of the more secular elder brothers, only that in real life it was Samuel who married Elizabeth, the Dinah Morris of fiction. Much has been written about this Elizabeth Evans (the aunt of George Eliot, already spoken of): indeed, her life was one of such rare devotion to an ideal cause, that even such imperfect fragments of it as have been committed to writing by herself or her friends are of considerable interest. Elizabeth was born at Newbold in Leicestershire, and left her father's house when little more than fourteen years old. She joined the Methodists in 1797, after which she had entirely done with the pleasures of the world and all her old companions. "I saw it my duty," she says, "to leave off all my superfluities of dress; hence I pulled off all my bunches, cut off my curls left off my lace, and in this I found an unspeakable pleasure. I saw I could make a better use of my time and money than to follow the fashions of a vain world." While still a beautiful young girl, attired in a quaker dress and bonnet, she used to walk across those bleak Derbyshire hills looking so strangely mournful in their treeless nudity, with their bare stone fences grey against a greyer sky. Here she trudged from village to village gathering the poor about her, and pouring forth words of such earnest conviction that, as she says, "Many were brought to the Lord." The points of resemblance between her career and that of Dinah Morris cannot fail to strike the reader, even their phraseology being often singularly alike, as when Mrs. Evans writes in the short account of what she calls her "unprofitable life:" "I saw it my duty to be wholly devoted to God, and to be set apart for the Master's use;" while Dinah says: "My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world." It must be borne in mind, however, that these similarities of expression are natural enough when one considers that Dinah is a type of the same old-fashioned kind of Methodism to which Mrs. Evans belonged. What is perhaps stranger is, that the account given by George Eliot of her various meetings with her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, should differ considerably from what the latter herself remembered or has stated about them. Shortly after the appearance of 'Adam Bede,' attention had been publicly called to the identity of the heroine of fiction with the Methodist preacher. This conviction was so strong in Wirksworth, that a number of friends placed a memorial tablet in the Methodist chapel at Wirksworth with the following inscription:-- ERECTED BY GRATEFUL FRIENDS, In Memory of MRS. ELIZABETH EVANS, (KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS "DINAH BEDE ") WHO DURING MANY YEARS PROCLAIMED ALIKE IN THE OPEN AIR, THE SANCTUARY, AND FROM HOUSE TO HOUSE, THE LOVE OF CHRIST: SHE DIED IN THE LORD, MAY 9TH, 1849; AGED 74 YEARS. In order to give a correct notion of the amount of truth in her novel, George Eliot wrote in the following terms to her friend Miss Hennell on the 7th of October, 1859: "I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, _what_ I knew of my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far between visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off native county, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a rich builder) in Staffordshire--but _not_ my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of things--are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood. "But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married, and I was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that _I_ should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the influence of evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavouring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament. I _was_ delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--above sixty--and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now grey--a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference--as you will believe--was not _simply_ physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners, very loving, and (what she must have been from the very first), a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and love of man were fused together. There was nothing rightly distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious dissenters before; the only freshness I found in her talk came from the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and though _she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach_, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister once greatly respected, who, from the action of trouble upon him, had taken to small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. 'But I hope the good man's in heaven for all that,' said my uncle. 'Oh yes,' said my aunt, with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, 'Mr. A.'s in heaven, that's sure.' This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now! "As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed with her all night, and gone with her to execution; and one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed, among the rest, _the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass_. In her account of the prison scenes I remember no word she uttered; I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe, or told me nothing, but that she was a common, coarse girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for years on years, as a dead germ, apparently, till time had made my mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of 'Adam Bede.' "I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage, sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former time; I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my uncle to see me, when father and I were living at Foleshill; _then_ there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of freethinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested 'Dinah;' but it is not possible you should see, as I do, how entirely her individuality differed from 'Dinah's.' How curious it seems to me that people should think 'Dinah's' sermon, prayers, and speeches were _copied_, when they were written with hot tears as they surged up in my own mind! "As to my indebtedness to facts of local and personal history of a small kind connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire, you may imagine of what kind that is, when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I know as facts, and have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times. "As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they _did_ say, that 'Dinah' is a good portrait of my aunt, that is simply the vague, easily-satisfied notion imperfectly-instructed people always have of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women, without pretension to enlightened discrimination, should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great public, so accustomed to be delighted with _mis_-representations of life and character, which they accept as representations, that they are scandalised when art makes a nearer approach to truth. "Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to you, but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years 'Adam Bede,' and all that concerns it, may have become a dim portion of the past, and that I may not be able to recall so much of the truth as I have now told you." Nothing could prove more conclusively how powerful was the impression which 'Adam Bede' created than this controversy concerning the amount of truth which its characters contained. But, as hinted before, it seems very likely that some of the doings and sayings of the fictitious personages should have been attributed, almost unconsciously, to the real people whom they resembled. How quick is the popular imagination in effecting these transformations came only quite recently under my notice, when some English travellers, while visiting Château d'If, were taken by the guide in perfect good faith to see the actual dungeon where Monte Christo was imprisoned! Similarly, one would think, that the moving sermon preached by Dinah on the Green at Hayslope had been afterwards erroneously ascribed to Mrs. Elizabeth Evans. But an account recently published in the _Century Magazine_ by one who had long known the Evanses of Wirksworth, seems irreconcilable with such a supposition. According to this writer it would appear that besides the visits to her aunt at Wirksworth, of which George Eliot speaks in the letter just quoted, there was one other of which no mention is made. This visit, which she paid her cousin, Mr. Samuel Evans, occurred in 1842, when she remained a week at his house in Wirksworth. The aunt and niece were in the habit of seeing each other every day for several hours at this time. They usually met at the house of one of the married daughters of Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, holding long conversations while sitting by themselves in the parlour. "These secret conversations," says the writer of the article, "excited some curiosity in the family, and one day one of the daughters said, 'Mother, I can't think what thee and Mary Ann have got to talk about so much.' To which Mrs. Evans replied: 'Well, my dear, I don't know what she wants, but she gets me to tell her all about my life and my religious experience, and she puts it all down in a little book. I can't make out what she wants it for.'" After her departure, Mrs. Evans is reported to have said to her daughter, "Oh dear, Mary Ann has got one thing I did not mean her to take away, and that is the notes of the first sermon I preached at Ellaston Green." According to the same authority, Marian Evans took notes of everything people said in her hearing: no matter who was speaking, down it went into the note-book, which seemed never out of her hand; and these notes she is said to have transcribed every night before going to bed. Yet this habit was foreign to her whole character, and the friends who knew her most intimately in youth and later life never remember seeing her resort to such a practice. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the novelist very freely used many of the circumstances connected with her aunt's remarkable career. How closely she adhered to nature is shown by the fact that in Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey she retained the actual names of the characters portrayed, as they happened to be both dead. Bartle Massey, the village cynic, had been the schoolmaster of her father, Robert Evans. How accurately the latter, together with all his surroundings, was described is shown by the following anecdote. On its first appearance 'Adam Bede' was read aloud to an old man, an intimate associate of Robert Evans in his Staffordshire days. This man knew nothing concerning either author or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognising so many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring fidelity. He sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless excitement, now and then slapping his knee as he exclaimed, "That's Robert, that's Robert to the life." Although Wirksworth is not the locality described in 'Adam Bede,' it contains features recalling that quaint little market-town, where over the door of one of the old-fashioned houses may be read the name made illustrious by the inimitable Mrs. Poyser. In the neighbourhood, too, are "Arkwright's mills there at Cromford," casually alluded to by Adam Bede; and should the tourist happen to enter one of the cottages of grey stone, with blue-washed door and window-frames, he may still alight on specimens of Methodism, as devout as Seth Bede, eloquently expounding the latest political event by some prophecy of Daniel or Ezekiel. In short, one breathes the atmosphere in which such characters as Dinah and Seth actually lived and had their being. This uncompromising Realism, so far from detracting, only enhances the genius of this powerful novel. A thousand writers might have got hold of these identical materials: a George Eliot alone could have cast these materials into the mould of 'Adam Bede.' Let any one glance at the account of their religious experiences, as given by Elizabeth or Samuel Evans, and he will realise all the more strongly how great was the genius of her who transfused these rambling, commonplace effusions into such an artistic whole. I have entered so minutely into this question of the likeness between the actual characters and those in the novel purely on account of the biographical interest attaching to it. In judging of 'Adam Bede' as a work of art these facts possess next to no importance. If we could trace the characters in any one of Shakespeare's plays to human beings actually connected with the poet, we should consider such a discovery immensely valuable as throwing new light on his own life, though it would hardly affect our critical estimate of the drama itself. So much has been said already about the characters in 'Adam Bede' in connection with the real people they resemble, that little need be added here about them. Dinah Morris--the youthful preacher, whose eloquence is but the natural, almost involuntary manifestation in words, of a beautiful soul; whose spring of love is so abundant that it overflows the narrow limits of private affection, and blesses multitudes of toiling, suffering men and women with its wealth of pity, hope, and sympathy--was a new creation in the world of fiction. Some writer has pointed out a certain analogy between the sweet Derbyshire Methodist and the gentle pietist whose confessions form a very curious chapter of 'Wilhelm Meister.' But the two characters are too dissimilar for comparison. The German heroine is a dreamy, passive, introspective nature, feeling much but doing little; whereas the English preacher does not inquire too curiously into the mysteries of her faith, but moved by the spirit of its teaching goes about actively, participating in the lives of others by her rousing words and her acts of charity. Only a woman would or could have described just such a woman as this: a woman whose heart is centred in an impersonal ideal instead of in any individual object of love; whereas a man's heroine always has her existence rooted in some personal affection or passion, whether for parent or lover, child or husband. This makes Dinah less romantically interesting than Hetty Sorrel, the beautiful, kittenlike, self-involved creature with whom she is so happily contrasted. George Eliot never drew a more living figure than this of Hetty, hiding such a hard little heart under that soft dimpling beauty of hers. Again, I think that only a woman would have depicted just such a Hetty as this. The personal charms of this young girl are drawn in words that have the glow of life itself; yet while intensely conscious of her beauty, we are kept aware all the time that, to use one of the famous Mrs. Poyser's epigrammatic sayings, Hetty is "no better nor a cherry wi' a hard stone inside it." George Eliot is never dazzled or led away by her own bewitching creation as a man would have been. There is a certain pitilessness in her analysis of Hetty's shallow, frivolous little soul, almost as if she were saying--See here, what stuff this beauty which you adore is made of in reality! To quote her own subtle, far-reaching interpretation of beauty: "Hetty's face had a language that transcended her feelings. There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the simple human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations; eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes, perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing, just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it." The sensation created by 'Adam Bede' was shown in other ways besides the claim of some to have discovered the original characters of this striking novel. The curiosity of the public was naturally much exercised as to who the unknown author could possibly be, who had so suddenly leaped into fame. And now there comes on the scene an individual who does not claim to be the living model of one of the characters portrayed, but to be the author of the book himself. And the name of this person was Liggins! While the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' were yet appearing in _Blackwood's Magazine_ the inhabitants of Nuneaton and its neighbourhood were considerably perplexed and excited to find well-known places and persons touched off to the life. In Amos Barton they recognised the incumbent of Coton Church, in Mr. Pilgrim a medical man familiar to every child in the town, and indeed in every one of the characters an equally unmistakable portrait. Clearly no one but a fellow-townsman could have hit off these wonderful likenesses. Literary talent not being too abundant, their choice of an author was limited. The only man who by any stretch of imagination seemed to have the making of a man of letters in him was this above-mentioned Liggins. To have studied at Cambridge, gallantly run through a fortune, and be in very needy circumstances, were exactly the qualifications to be expected in a man of genius. Further evidence seeming unnecessary, the real authorship of the 'Scenes' was now revealed in an Isle of Man paper. At first the reputed author gently denied the impeachment, but on the appearance of 'Adam Bede' he succumbed to the temptation. To be fêted at dinner parties as a successful author, and to have a subscription set on foot by enthusiastic lady-admirers and fellow-townsmen, in whose eyes he was a sadly unrequited genius, proved irresistible. A local clergyman even wrote to the _Times_ stating Liggins to be the real surname of "George Eliot!" The latter wrote, of course, denying the statement, and challenging the pretender to produce some specimen of his writing in the style of 'Adam Bede.' But the confidence of the Nuneaton public in their hero Liggins was not to be so easily shaken. Two dissenting ministers from Coventry went over to Attleborough to call upon the "great author," and to find out if he really did write 'Adam Bede.' Liggins evaded their questions, indirectly admitting that he did; but when they asked him point blank, "Liggins, tell us, _did_ you write 'Adam Bede'?" he said, "If I didn't, the devil did!" and that was all they could get out of him. Another clergyman was much less sceptical, assuring every one that he was positive as to Liggins being the author, as he had seen the MS. of 'Adam Bede' in his hands. To this day there lives in the Isle of Man a certain venerable old gentleman who has never lost his faith in Liggins, but, when George Eliot is mentioned, gravely shakes his head, implying that there is more in the name than meets the eye of the superficial observer. But a heavy retribution befell the poor pseudo-author at last, for when his false pretences to favour were fully manifest he fell into utter neglect and poverty, ending his days in the workhouse. This foolish misrepresentation hastened the disclosure of George Eliot's real personality and name, which occurred on the publication of the 'Mill on the Floss.' Shortly before that, Mr. Blackwood, who had long entertained the wish to know the author of the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' and of 'Adam Bede,' was invited by Lewes to meet him at last. No one was present at the dinner-table besides Mr. Lewes, Marian, and Mr. Blackwood himself. The dinner was an extremely pleasant one, but when it was over, the guest could not help expressing his regret that George Eliot himself should not have been present. "Here he is," said Lewes, introducing the quiet, low-spoken lady who had presided at table, not without enjoyment at the sensation he produced as the astonished publisher shook hands with his contributor. CHAPTER IX. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. While the public had been trying to discover who the mysterious George Eliot could possibly be, one person there was who immediately penetrated the disguise, and felt positive as to the identity of the author. On reading the 'Scenes,' and especially 'Adam Bede,' he was convinced that no one but a member of his own family could have written these stories. He recognised incidents, touches, a saying here or there, just the things that no one outside his own home could by any chance have come upon. But George Eliot's brother kept this discovery closely locked within his own breast. He trembled lest any one else should discover the secret, fearing the outcry of neighbours who might not always feel that the author had represented them in colours sufficiently flattering. When the 'Mill on the Floss' appeared, however, the veil was lifted, and people heard that George Eliot had once been a Miss Marian Evans, who came from the neighbourhood of Nuneaton in Warwickshire. To her brother Isaac alone this was no news, as he had detected his sister in the first of the 'Scenes.' The child-life of Tom and Maggie Tulliver was in many respects an autobiography; and no biographer can ever hope to describe the early history of George Eliot as she herself has done in the 'Mill on the Floss.' How many joys and griefs of those happy careless days must have been recalled to her brother--those days when little Mary Ann had sat poring over Daniel Defoe's 'History of the Devil'--or sought refuge in the attic at Griff house, after a quarrel with him: "This attic was Maggie's favourite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle, that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible." Again, at some fields' distance from their old home there had been a "Round Pool" called "The Moat," "almost a perfect round, framed in with willows and tall reeds, so that the water was only to be seen when you got close to the brink." This was a favourite resort of Isaac and Mary Ann, as also of Tom and his sister when they went fishing together, and "Maggie thought it probable that the small fish would come to her hook and the large ones to Tom's." The "Red Deeps," too, where Maggie loved to walk in June, when the "dog-roses were in their glory," and where she lived through many phases of her shifting inner life was in the same vicinity, and at one time a beloved haunt of the future novelist. But although some of the spots mentioned in the 'Mill on the Floss' have been easily identified as connected with George Eliot's early home, the scenery of that novel is mainly laid in Lincolnshire. St. Oggs, with "its red-fluted roofs and broad warehouse gables," is the ancient town of Gainsborough. The Floss is a tidal river like the Trent, and in each case the spring-tide, rushing up the river with its terrific wave and flooding the land for miles round, is known as the Eagre, a name not a little descriptive of the thing itself. The 'Mill on the Floss' (a title adopted by the author at the suggestion of Mr. Blackwood in preference to 'Sister Maggie') is the most poetical of George Eliot's novels. The great Floss, hurrying between green pastures to the sea, gives a unity of its own to this story, which opens to the roar of waters, the weltering waters which accompany it at the close. It forms the elemental background which rounds the little lives of the ill-starred family group nurtured on its banks. The childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver is inextricably blended with this swift river, the traditions of which have been to them as fairy tales; its haunting presence is more or less with them throughout their chequered existence; and when pride and passion, when shame and sorrow have divided the brother and sister, pursued as by some tragic fate, the Floss seems to rise in sympathy, and submerges them in its mighty waters to unite them once more "in an embrace never to be parted." It cannot fail to strike the reader that in almost every one of George Eliot's novels there occurs a death by drowning: as in the instance of Thias Bede, of Dunstan Cass, of Henleigh Grandcourt, and nearly in that of Tito. This may be accounted for by the fact that as a child the novelist became acquainted with the sudden death of a near relative who had accidentally fallen into a stream: an incident which sunk deeply into her retentive mind. Fate plays a very conspicuous part in this as in most of George Eliot's novels. But it is not the Fate of the Greeks, it is not a power that affects human existence from without: it rather lies at the root of it, more or less shaping that existence according to obscure inherited tendencies, and in the collision between character and circumstance, between passion and law, potent only in proportion as the individual finally issues conquered or a conqueror from the struggle of life. This action of character on circumstance, and of circumstance on character is an ever-recurring _motif_ with George Eliot. We constantly see adverse circumstances modifying and moulding the lives of the actors in her stories. She has hardly, if ever, therefore, drawn a hero or heroine, for these, instead of yielding, make circumstances yield to them. Dorothea and Lydgate in abandoning their striving after the highest kind of life; Tito in invariably yielding to the most pleasurable prompting of the moment; Gwendolen in being mainly influenced by circumstances acting on her, without her reacting on them, are all types of this kind. Maggie belongs, on the whole, to the same type. She, too, is what Goethe calls a problematic nature, a nature which, along with vast possibilities and lofty aspirations, lacks a certain fixity of purpose, and drifting helplessly from one extreme to another, is shattered almost as soon as it has put out of port. In Maggie's case this evil springs from the very fulness of her nature; from the acuteness of an imagination which the many-sidedness of life attracts by turns in the most opposite directions. Tom, on the other hand, with his narrow practical understanding, entirely concentrated on the business in hand, swerves neither to right nor left, because he may be said to resemble a horse with blinkers, in that he sees only the road straight ahead. Maggie, with all her palpable weaknesses and startling inconsistencies, is the most adorable of George Eliot's women. In all poetry and fiction there is no child more delicious than the "little wench" with her loving heart and dreamy ways, her rash impulses and wild regrets, her fine susceptibilities and fiery jets of temper--in a word, her singularly fresh and vital nature. The same charm pervades every phase of her life. In her case the child, if I may so far modify Wordsworth's famous saying, is eminently the mother of the woman. Profoundly affectionate by nature, and sympathising as she does with her father in his calamity, she cannot help rebelling at the sordid narrowness of her daily life, passionately craving for a wider field wherein to develop her inborn faculties. In this state of yearning and wild unrest, her accidental reading of Thomas à Kempis forms a crisis in her life, by bringing about a spiritual awakening in which Christianity, for the first time, becomes a living truth to her. Intense as she is, Maggie now throws all the ardour of her nature into renunciation and self-conquest. She seeks her highest satisfaction in abnegation of all personal desire, and in entire devotion to others. In her young asceticism she relinquishes a world of which she is ignorant, stifling every impulse, however innocent, that seems opposed to her new faith. But Maggie has more actual affinity with poets and artists than with saints and martyrs. Her soul thrills like a finely-touched instrument to the beauty of the world around her, and though she doubts whether there may not even be a sinfulness in the indulgence of this enjoyment, yet the summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight. And then, when, through the intervention of Philip Wakem, the enchantments of romance and poetry are brought within her reach, the glory of the world again lays hold of her imagination, and a fresh conflict is begun in her soul. Thus she drifts from one state into another most opposed to it, and to an outside observer, such as Tom, her abrupt transitions are a sign that she is utterly wanting in moral stamina. Not only Tom, but many eminent critics, who have descanted with fond partiality on Maggie's early life, seem to be shocked by that part of her story in which she allows herself to fall passionately in love with such an ordinary specimen of manhood as Stephen Guest. The author has even been accused of violating the truth of Nature, inasmuch as such a high-minded woman as Maggie could never have inclined to so vulgar, so commonplace a man as her lover. Others, while not questioning the truth of the character, find fault with the poor heroine herself, whom they pronounce an ineffective nature revealing its innate unsoundness by the crowning error of an abject passion for so poor a creature as the dandy of St. Oggs. This contention only proves the singular vitality of the character itself, and nothing is more psychologically true in George Eliot's studies of character than this love of the high-souled heroine for a man who has no corresponding fineness of fibre in his nature, his attraction lying entirely in the magnetism of mutual passion. This vitality places Maggie Tulliver by the side of the Juliets, the Mignons, the Consuelos, the Becky Sharps and other airy inheritors of immortality. It is curious that Mr. Swinburne, in view of such a character as this, or, indeed, bearing in mind a Silas Marner, a Dolly Winthrop, a Tito, and other intrinsically living reproductions of human nature, should describe George Eliot's as intellectually constructed characters in contrast to Charlotte Brontë's creations, the former, according to him, being the result of intellect, the latter of genius. If ever character came simply dropped out of the mould of Nature it is that of Maggie. His assumption, that the 'Mill on the Floss' can in any sense have been suggested by, or partially based upon, Mrs. Gaskell's story of 'The Moorland Cottage,' seems equally baseless. There is certainly the identity of name in the heroines, and some resemblance of situation as regards portions of the story, but both the name and the situation are sufficiently common not to excite astonishment at such a coincidence. Had George Eliot really known of this tale--a tale feebly executed at the best--she would obviously have altered the name so as not to make her obligation too patent to the world. As it is, she was not a little astonished and even indignant, on accidentally seeing this opinion stated in some review, and positively denied ever having seen the story in question. Indeed when one knows how this story grew out of her own experience, how its earlier portions especially are a record of her own and her brother's childhood--how even Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullet were only too faithfully done from the aunts of real life, one need not go far afield to seek for its origin. Every author usually writes one book, which he might more or less justly entitle 'My Confessions,' into which he pours an intimate part of his life under a thin disguise of fiction, a book invariably exciting a unique kind of interest in the reader be he conscious or not of the presence of this autobiographical element. Fielding's 'Amelia,' Thackeray's 'Pendennis,'Dickens's 'David Copperfield,' Charlotte Brontë's 'Villette,' are cases in point. The 'Mill on the Floss' is a work of similar nature. Maggie Tulliver is George Eliot herself, but only one side, one portion, one phase of George Eliot's many-sided, vastly complex nature. It is George Eliot's inner life in childhood and youth as it appeared to her own consciousness. We recognise in it her mental acuteness, her clinging affectionateness, her ambition, her outlook beyond the present, her religious and moral preoccupations, even her genius is not so much omitted as left in an undeveloped, rudimentary state. While her make-believe stories, her thirst for knowledge, her spiritual wrestlings, and the passionate response of her soul to high thinking, noble music, and the beautiful in all its forms, show that the making of genius was there in germ. Much in the same manner Goethe was fond of partitioning his nature, and of giving only the weaker side to his fictitious representatives. Conscious in himself of fluctuations of purpose which he only got the better of by his indomitable will, he usually endowed these characters with his more impulsive, pliant self, as manifested in Werther, in Tasso, in Edward of the 'Elective Affinities.' In this sense also Maggie Tulliver resembles George Eliot. She is her potential self, such as she might have been had there not been counterbalancing tendencies of unusual force, sufficient to hold in check all erratic impulses contrary to the main direction of her life. While tempted to dwell largely on Maggie Tulliver, the central figure of 'The Mill on the Floss,' it would be very unfair to slur over the other admirably drawn characters of this novel. Her brother Tom, already repeatedly alluded to, is in every sense the counterpart of "Sister Maggie." Hard and narrow-minded he was from a boy, "particularly clear and positive on one point, namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn't have minded being punished himself, if he deserved it; but, then, he never _did_ deserve it." This strikes the key-note of a character whose stern inflexibility, combined with much practical insight and dogged persistence of effort, is at the same time dignified by a high, if somewhat narrow, sense of family honour. Conventional respectability, in fact, is Tom Tulliver's religion. He is not in any sense bad, or mean, or sordid; he is only so circumscribed in his perceptive faculties, that he has no standard by which to measure thoughts or feelings that transcend his own very limited conception of life. Both by his good and his bad qualities, by his excellencies and his negations, Tom Tulliver proves himself what he is--a genuine sprig of the Dodson family, a chip of the old block! And the Dodson sisters are, in their way, among the most amazingly living portraitures that George Eliot ever achieved. Realism in art can go no further in this direction. These women, if present in the flesh, would not be so distinctively vivid as when beheld through the transfixing medium of George Eliot's genius. For here we have the personages, with all their quaintnesses, their eccentricities, their odd, old-fashioned twists and ways--only observed by fragments in actual life--successfully brought to a focus for the delight and amusement of generations of readers. There is nothing grotesque, nothing exaggerated, in these humorous figures. The comic effect is not produced, as is often the case with the inventions of Dickens, by some set peculiarity of manner or trick of speech, more in the spirit of caricature. On the contrary, it is by a strict adherence to the just mean of nature, by a conscientious care not to overstep her probabilities, that we owe these matchless types of English provincial life. And the genuine humour of these types verges on the pathetic, in that the infinitely little of their lives is so magnified by them out of all proportion to its real importance. Mrs. Glegg, with her dictatorial ways, her small economies, her anxiety to make a handsome figure in her will, and her invariable reference to what was "the way in our family," as a criterion of right behaviour on all occasions: Mrs. Pullet, the wife of the well-to-do yeoman-farmer, bent on proving her gentility and wealth by the delicacy of her health, and the quantity of doctor's stuff she can afford to imbibe: Mrs. Tulliver, the good, muddle-headed woman, whose husband "picked her from her sisters o' purpose, 'cause she was a bit weak, like," and for whom the climax of misery in bankruptcy is the loss of her china and table-linen: these, as well as the henpecked Mr. Glegg, and the old-maidish Mr. Pullet, are worthy pendants to Mrs. Poyser and Dolly Winthrop. Whether too great a predominance may not be given to the narrow, trivial views of these people, with their prosaic respectability, is a nice question, which one is inclined to answer in the negative on reading such a conjugal scene as that between Mr. and Mrs. Glegg, after the latter's quarrel with Mr. Tulliver: "It was a hard case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using any opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr. Glegg on which to exercise itself. But by-and-by it appeared that his silence would answer the purpose, for he heard himself apostrophised at last in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's bosom. "'Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making you the wife I've made you all these years. If this is the way I'm to be treated, I'd better ha' known it before my poor father died, and then when I'd wanted a home, I should ha' gone elsewhere--as the choice was offered me.' "Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we regard constant mysteries. "'Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?' "'Done now, Mr. Glegg? _done now?_ ... I'm sorry for you.' "Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to his porridge. "'There's husbands in the world,' continued Mrs. Glegg, after a pause, 'as 'ud have known how to do something different to siding with everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong, and you can teach me better. But I've allays heard as it's the husband's place to stand by the wife, instead of rejoicing and triumphing when folks insult her." "'Now what call have you to say that?' said Mr. Glegg rather warmly, for, though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. 'When did I rejoice or triumph over you?' "'There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr. Glegg. I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you make light of me, than try to make as everybody's in the right but me, and come to your breakfast in the morning, as I've hardly slept an hour this night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet.' "'Sulk at you?' said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness. 'You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but himself.' "'Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr. Glegg! It makes you look very small, though you can't see yourself,' said Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. 'A man in your place should set an example, and talk more sensible.'" After a good deal of sparring in the same tone, Mr. Glegg at last bursts forth: "'Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish? A woman with everything provided for her, and allowed to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new stuffed and lined at no end o' expense, and provided for when I die beyond anything she could expect ... to go on i' this way, biting and snapping like a mad dog! It's beyond everything, as God A'mighty should ha' made women _so_.' (These last words were uttered in a tone of sorrowful agitation. Mr. Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped the table with both his hands.) "'Well, Mr. Glegg! if those are your feelings, it's best they should be known,' said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an excited manner. 'But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a many things as I don't find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it's well if you're not cried shame on by the country for your treatment of me, for it's what I can't bear, and I won't bear.'... "Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry, and, breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently. "'Sally,' she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a choked voice, 'light a fire upstairs, and put the blinds down. Mr. Glegg, you'll please order what you like for dinner. I shall have gruel.'" Equally well drawn in their way, though belonging to a different class of character, are Maggie's cousin, the lovely, gentle, and refined Lucy; Philip Wakem, whose physical malformation is compensated by exceptional culture and nobility of nature; Mr. Tulliver, the headstrong, violent, but withal generous, father of Maggie, and his sister Mrs. Moss, whose motherliness and carelessness of appearances form a striking foil to the Dodson sisters. Indeed, 'The Mill on the Floss' is so rich in minor characters that it is impossible to do more than mention such capital sketches as that of Bob Jakin and his dog Mumps, or of Luke, the head miller, who has no opinion of reading, considering that "There's fools enoo--an' rogues enoo--wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em." The distinguishing feature of this novel, however, lies not so much in its wealth of portraiture or freshness of humour as in a certain passionate glow of youth, which emanates from the heroine, and seems to warm the story through and through. For passion, pathos, and poetic beauty of description, 'The Mill on the Floss' is certainly unique among George Eliot's works. CHAPTER X. SILAS MARNER. The 'Mill on the Floss,' which appeared in 1860, fully established George Eliot's popularity with the public. In the same year she published anonymously, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, a short story called the 'Lifted Veil.' This tale is curious as differing considerably from her general style, having a certain mystical turn, which perhaps recommended it more especially to the admiration of Bulwer Lytton; but, indeed, it attracted general attention. In the meanwhile, the relations between author and publisher became more and more friendly; the latter's critical acumen and sound judgment being highly esteemed by George Eliot. "He judged well of writing," she remarked, "because he had learned to judge well of men and things, not merely through quickness of observation and insight, but with the illumination of a heart in the right place." This was the most productive period of George Eliot's life. In three successive years she published 'Adam Bede,' 'The Mill on the Floss,' and 'Silas Marner,' the last story appearing in 1861. When the amount of thought, observation, and wisdom concentrated in these novels is taken into consideration, it must be admitted that her mental energy was truly astonishing. But it was the accumulated experience of her whole past, the first abundant math borne by the springtide of life which was garnered up in these three remarkable works. Afterwards, when she came to write her next book,'Romola,' she turned to entirely fresh fields of inspiration; indeed, already at this date her mind was occupied with the idea of an Italian novel of the time of Savonarola. In the meanwhile she produced her most perfect work. She wrote 'Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe.' I call 'Silas Marner' her most perfect work, not only because of the symmetry with which each part is adjusted in relation to the whole, nor because of the absence of those partly satirical, partly moral reflections with which George Eliot usually accompanies the action of her stories, but chiefly on account of the simple pathos of the central motive into which all the different incidents and characters naturally converge. How homely are the elements from which this work of art is constructed, and how matchless the result! Nothing but the story of a humble weaver belonging to a small dissenting community which assembled in Lantern Yard, somewhere in the back streets of a manufacturing town; of a faithless love and a false friend, and the loss of trust in all things human or divine. Nothing but the story of a lone, bewildered man, shut out from his kind, concentrating every baulked passion into one--the all-engrossing passion for gold. And then the sudden disappearance of the hoard from its accustomed hiding-place, and in its stead the startling apparition of a golden-haired little child, found one snowy winter's night sleeping on the floor in front of the glimmering hearth. And the gradual reawakening of love in the heart of the solitary man, a love "drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money," and once more bringing him into sympathetic relations with his fellow-men. "In old days," says the story, "there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward, and the hand may be a little child's." Curiously enough, I came quite recently upon a story which in its leading features very closely resembles this tale of the 'Weaver of Raveloe.' It is called 'Jermola the Potter,' and is considered the masterpiece of J. I. Kraszewski, the Polish novelist, author of at least one hundred and fifty works in different branches of literature. 'Jermola,' the most popular of them all, has been translated into French, Dutch, and German. It gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of peasant life in a remote Polish village, and not only of peasant life, but of the manners and habits of the landed proprietor, the Jew, the artisan, and the yeoman, in a community whose modes of life have undergone but little modification since the Middle Ages. These pictures, though not elaborated with anything like the minute care of George Eliot's descriptions of English country life, yet from their extreme simplicity produce a most powerful impression on the reader. The story, in brief, is that of Jermola, the body servant of a Polish nobleman in Volhynia, whom he has served with rare devotion during the greater part of his life. Left almost a beggar at his master's death, without a single human tie, all he can get for years of faithful service is a tumble-down, forsaken old inn, where he manages to keep body and soul together in a dismantled room that but partly shelters him from the inclemency of the weather. Hopeless, aimless, loveless, he grows old before his time, and the passing of the days affects him hardly more than it does a stone. But one evening, as he is sitting in front of a scanty fire repeating the Lord's Prayer, the cry as of a little child startles him from his devotion. Going to look what can be the meaning of such unusual sounds, he soon discovers an infant in linen swaddling-clothes wailing under an old oak tree. He takes the foundling home, and from that moment a new life enters the old man's breast. He is rejuvenated by twenty years. He is kept in a constant flutter of hope, fear, and activity. A kind-hearted woman, called the Kozaczicha, tenders him her services, but he is so jealous of any one but himself doing aught for the child, that he checks her advances, and by hook or by crook obtains a goat from an extortionate Jew, by the help of which he rears the boy satisfactorily. Then, wishing to make a livelihood for the child's sake, he inclines at first to the craft of the weaver, but finally turns potter in his old age. Love sharpening his wits, he plies quite a thriving trade in time, and the beautiful boy brings him into more friendly relations with his neighbours. But one day, when Radionek, who has learned Jermola's trade, is about twelve years old, the real parents appear and claim him as their own. They had never dared to acknowledge their marriage till the father, who had threatened to disinherit his son in such an event, had departed this life. Now, having nothing more to fear, they want to have their child back, and to bring him up as befits their station in life. Jermola suffers a deadly anguish at this separation; the boy, too, is in despair, for he clings fondly to the old man who has reared him with more than a father's love. But the parents insisting on their legal rights, Radionek is at last carried off to their house in town, to be turned into a gentleman, being only grudgingly allowed to see Jermola from time to time. The boy pines, however, for the dear familiar presence of his foster-father, and the free outdoor life, and at last, after some years of misery, he appears one day suddenly in Jermola's hut, who has given up his pottery in order to be secretly near the child he is afraid to go and see. The piteous entreaties of Radionek, and the sight of his now sickly countenance, induce the old man to flee into the pathless forests, where the two may escape unseen, and reach some distant part of the country to take up their old pleasant life once more. But the hardships and fatigues of the journey are too much for the boy's enfeebled health, and just as they come within sight of human dwellings, he is seized with a fever which cuts his young life short, leaving Jermola nearly crazy with anguish. Long afterwards a little decrepit old man was to be seen by churchgoers sitting near a grave, whom the children mocked by calling the "bony little man," because he seemed to consist of nothing but bones. Such is the bare outline of a story whose main idea, that of the redemption of a human soul from cold, petrifying isolation, by means of a little child, is unquestionably the same as in 'Silas Marner.' Other incidents, such as that of the peasant woman who initiates Jermola into the mysteries of baby management, and the disclosure of the real parents after a lapse of years, wanting to have their child back suggest parallel passages in the English book. But coincidences of this kind are, after all, natural enough, considering that the circle of human feeling and action is limited, and that in all ages and countries like conditions must give rise to much the same sequence of events. It is therefore most likely that George Eliot never saw, and possibly never even heard of, 'Jermola the Potter.' The monotonous tone in the narrative of this Polish novel is in strong contrast, it may be observed, to George Eliot's vivid and varied treatment of her subject. This monotony, however, suits the local colouring of 'Jermola,' by suggesting the idea of the league-long expanse of ancient forests whose sombre solitudes encompass with a mysterious awe the little temporary dwellings of men. But if the foreign story surpasses 'Silas Marner' in tragic pathos, the latter far excels it in the masterly handling of character and dialogue, in the underlying breadth of thought, and, above all, in the precious salt of its humour. Indeed, for humour, for sheer force, for intense realism, George Eliot, in the immortal scene at the "Rainbow," may be said to rival Shakespeare. Her farriers, her butchers, her wheelwrights, her tailors, have the same startling vitality, the same unmistakable accents of nature, the same distinctive yet unforced individuality, free from either exaggeration or caricature. How delicious is the description of the party assembled in the kitchen of that inn, whose landlord--a strong advocate for compromising whatever differences of opinion may arise between his customers, as beings "all alike in need of liquor"--clinches all arguments by his favourite phrase--"You're both right and you're both wrong, as I say." How admirably comic are these villagers, invariably beginning their nightly sittings by a solemn silence, in which one and all puff away at their pipes, staring at the fire "as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked." And when they begin at last, how rich is the flavour of that talk, given with an unerring precision that forthwith makes one acquainted with the crass ignorance and shrewdness, the mother-wit and superstition, so oddly jumbled together in the villager's mind. What sublime absence of all knowledge of his native land is shown by the veteran parish clerk, Mr. Macey, in speaking of a person from another county which apparently could not be so very different "from this country, for he brought a fine breed o' sheep with him, so there must be pastures there, and everything reasonable." Yet the same man can put down youthful presumption pretty sharply, as when he remarks: "There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has o' himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself." Dolly Winthrop, the wife of the jolly wheelwright who makes one of the company at the "Rainbow," is no less admirable. She is not cut after any particular pattern or type of human nature, but has a distinctive individuality, and is full of a freshness and unexpectedness which sets foregone conclusions at defiance. A notable woman, with a boundless appetite for work, so that, rising at half-past four, she has "a bit o' time to spare most days, for when one gets up betimes i' the morning the clock seems to stan' still tow'rt ten, afore it's time to go about the victual." Yet with all this energy she is not shrewish, but a calm, grave woman, in much request in sick rooms or wherever there is trouble. She is good-looking, too, and of a comfortable temper, being patiently tolerant of her husband's jokes, "considering that 'men would be so,' and viewing the stronger sex' in the light of animals whom it pleased Heaven to make troublesome like bulls or turkey cocks.'" Her vague idea, shared indeed by Silas, that he has quite another faith from herself, as coming from another part of the country, gives a vivid idea of remote rural life, as well as her own dim, semi-pagan but thoroughly reverential religious feelings, prompting her always to speak of the Divinity in the plural, as when she says to Marner: "I've looked for help in the right quarter, and give myself up to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at the last; and if we'n done our part, it isn't to be believed as Them as are above us 'ull be worse nor we are, and come short o' Theirn." The humour shown in these scenes and characters, or, more properly speaking, George Eliot's humour in general, belongs to the highest order, the same as Shakespeare's. It is based on the essential elements of human nature itself, on the pathetic incongruities of which that "quintessence of dust," man, is made up, instead of finding the comic in the purely accidental or external circumstances of life, as is the case with such humourists as Rabelais and Dickens. These latter might find a good subject for their comic vein in seeing the Venus of Milo's broken nose, which a mischievous urchin had again stuck on the wrong side upwards--a sight to send the ordinary spectator into fits of laughter. But the genuine humourist sees something in that feature itself, as nature shaped it, to excite his facetiousness. In 'A Minor Prophet' some lines occur in which a somewhat similar view of the genuine source of humour is pithily put: "My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind. That strain upon my soul's too feeble wing Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall Into short-sighted pity for the men Who, living in those perfect future times, Will not know half the dear imperfect things That move my smiles and tears--will never know The fine old incongruities that raise My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits That like a needless eyeglass or black patch Give those who wear them harmless happiness; The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellowship (I am not myself the finest Parian) With my coevals." Again, in her essay on 'Heinrich Heine,' George Eliot thus defines the difference between humour and wit: "Humour is of earlier growth than wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humour draws its materials from situations and characteristics; wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations.... It is only the ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness which lift some witticisms from reasoning into wit; they are reasoning raised to its highest power. On the other hand, humour, in its higher forms and in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry; nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets." The quality which distinguishes George Eliot's humour may be said to characterise her treatment of human nature generally. In her delineations of life she carefully eschews the anomalous or exceptional, pointing out repeatedly that she would not, if she could, be the writer, however brilliant, who dwells by preference on the moral or intellectual attributes which mark off his hero from the crowd instead of on those which he has in common with average humanity. Nowhere perhaps in her works do we find this tendency so strikingly illustrated as in the one now under consideration; for here we have the study of a human being who, by stress of circumstances, developes into a most abnormal specimen of mankind, yet who is brought back to normal conditions and to wholesome relations with his fellow-men by such a natural process as the re-awakening of benumbed sympathies through his love for the little foundling child. The scene where he finds that child has only been touched on in a passing allusion, yet there is no more powerfully-drawn situation in any of her novels than that where Silas, with the child in his arms, goes out into the dark night, and, guided by the little footprints in the virgin snow, discovers the dead mother, Godfrey Cass's opium-eating wife, lying with "her head sunk low in the furze and half covered with the shaken snow." There is a picture of this subject by the young and singularly gifted artist, the late Oliver Madox Brown, more generally known as a novelist, which is one of the few pictorial interpretations that seem to completely project on the canvas a visible embodiment of the spirit of the original. The pale, emaciated weaver, staring with big, short-sighted eyes at the body of the unconscious young woman stretched on the ground, clutching the lusty, struggling child with one arm, while with the other he holds a lantern which throws a feeble gleam on the snow--is realised with exceptional intensity. The exquisite picture of Eppie's childhood, the dance she leads her soft-hearted foster-father, are things to read, not to describe, unless one could quote whole pages of this delightful idyl, which for gracious charm and limpid purity of description recalls those pearls among prose-poems, George Sand's 'Francois le Champi' and 'La Mare au Diable.' CHAPTER XI. ROMOLA. 'Romola' marks a new departure in George Eliot's literary career. From the present she turned to the past, from the native to the foreign, from the domestic to the historical. Yet in thus shifting her subject-matter, she did not alter the strongly-pronounced tendencies underlying her earlier novels; there was more of spontaneous, humorous description of life in the latter, whereas in 'Romola' the ethical teaching which forms so prominent a feature of George Eliot's art, though the same in essence, was more distinctly wrought out. Touching on this very point, she observes in a letter to an American correspondent: "It is perhaps less irrelevant to say, apropos of a distinction you seem to make between my earlier and later works, that though I trust there is some growth in my appreciation of others and in my self-distrust, there has been no change in the point of view from which I regard our life since I wrote my first fiction, the 'Scenes of Clerical Life.' Any apparent change of spirit must be due to something of which I am unconscious. The principles which are at the root of my effort to paint Dinah Morris are equally at the root of my effort to paint Mordecai." The first section of 'Romola' appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for the summer of 1862, and, running its course in that popular periodical, was finished in the summer of the following year. Mr. Lewes, in a letter written from 16 Blandford Square, July 5, 1862, to some old friends of George Eliot, makes the following remarks in reference to this new form of publication: "My main object in persuading her to consent to serial publication, was not the unheard-of magnificence of the offer, but the advantage to such a work of being read slowly and deliberately, instead of being galloped through in three volumes. I think it quite unique, and so will the public when it gets over the first feeling of surprise and disappointment at the book not being English, and like its predecessor." And some time afterwards he wrote to the same friends: "Marian lives entirely in the fifteenth century, and is much cheered every now and then by hearing indirectly how her book is appreciated by the higher class of minds, and some of the highest; though it is not, and cannot be popular. In Florence we hear they are wild with delight and surprise at such a work being executed by a foreigner; as if an Italian had ever done anything of the kind!" Before writing 'Romola' George Eliot had spent six weeks in Florence in order to familiarise herself with the manners and conversation of its inhabitants, and yet she hardly caught the trick of Italian speech, and for some time afterwards she hung back from beginning her story, as her characters not only refused to speak Italian to her, but would not speak at all, as we can well imagine Mrs. Poyser, Bartle Massey, and Maggie to have done. These recalcitrant spirits were at last brought to order, and she succeeded so well, especially in her delineation of the lower classes, that they have been recognised by Italians as true to the life. It should, however, be mentioned that the greatest modern Italian, Giuseppe Mazzini, found fault with the handling, and, indeed, with the introduction into this novel of the great figure of Savonarola. He considered that it compared unfavourably with 'Adam Bede,' a novel he genuinely admired, all but the marriage of Adam with Dinah Morris, which, he said, shocked his feelings, not having any conception that the taste of the novel-reading public demands a happy ending, whatever may have been the previous course of the three volumes. Another illustrious man, D. G. Rossetti, whose judgment on such a subject carries peculiar weight, considered George Eliot to have been much less successful in 'Romola' than in her novels of English country life. He did not think that the tone and colour of Italian life in the fifteenth century were caught with that intuitive perception of a bygone age characteristic of a Walter Scott or a Meinhold. The Florentine contemporaries of "Fra Girolamo" seemed to him Nineteenth Century men and women dressed up in the costume of the Fifteenth. The book, to use his expression, was not "native." It is a majestic book, however: the most grandly planned of George Eliot's novels. It has a certain architectural dignity of structure, quite in keeping with its Italian nationality, a quality, by the way, entirely absent from the three later novels. The impressive historical background is not unlike one of Mr. Irving's magnificently wrought Italian stage-effects, rich in movement and colour, yet helping to throw the chief figures into greater relief. The erudition shown in this work; the vast yet minute acquaintance with the habits of thought, the manners, the very talk of the Florentines of that day are truly surprising; but perhaps the very fact of that erudition being so perceptible shows that the material has not been absolutely vitalised. The amount of labour George Eliot expended on 'Romola' was so great, that it was the book which, she remarked to a friend, "she began a young woman and ended an old one." The deep impression her works had made upon the public mind heightened her natural conscientiousness, and her gratitude for the confidence with which each fresh contribution from her pen was received, increased her anxiety to wield her influence for the highest ends. But her gratitude to the public by no means extended to the critics. She recoiled from them with the instinctive shrinking of the sensitive plant. These interpreters between author and public were in her eyes a most superfluous modern institution: though at one time she herself had not scorned to sit in the critic's seat. It is well-known that G. H. Lewes acted as a kind of moral screen protecting her from every gust or breath of criticism that was not entirely genial. One lady, after reading 'The Mill on the Floss,' had written off in the heat of the moment, and, with the freedom of old friendship, while expressing the warmest admiration for the beauty of the first two volumes, she had ventured to find fault with part of the third. This letter was returned by Lewes, who begged her at the same time never to write again in this strain to George Eliot, to whom he had not ventured to show it for fear it should too painfully affect her. In a letter to the American lady already mentioned, George Eliot, after referring to this habit of Mr. Lewes, says: "In this way I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.... I have been led into this rather superfluous sort of remark by the mention of a rule which seemed to require explanation." And again on another occasion to the same effect: "But do not expect criticism from me. I hate 'sitting in the seat of judgment,' and I would rather impress the public generally with the sense that they may get the best result from a book without necessarily forming an 'opinion' about it, than I would rush into stating opinions of my own. The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of our times--a chief obstacle to true culture." In spite of these severe strictures on the critics and their opinions, an "opinion" must now be given about 'Romola.' This novel may really be judged from two entirely different points of view, possibly from others besides, but, as it appears to me, from two. One may consider it as an historical work, with its moving pageants, its civic broils, its church festivals, its religious revival, its fickle populace, now siding with the Pope, and now with the would-be reformer of the Papacy. Or again one may regard the conjugal relations between Romola and Tito, the slow spiritual growth of the one, and the swifter moral disintegration of the other, as one of the subtlest studies in psychology in literature. To turn to the scenic details which form a considerable element of this historical picture, I have already hinted that they are not without a taint of cumbrousness and pedantry. The author seems to move somewhat heavily under her weight of learning, and we miss that splendid natural swiftness and ease of movement which Shakespeare, Goethe, and Hugo know how to impart to their crowds and spectacular effects. If, instead of the people, one examines the man who dominated the people, the large, massive, imposing figure of Savonarola, one must admit that the character is very powerfully and faithfully executed but not produced at one throw. He does not take the imagination by storm as he would have done had Carlyle been at his fashioning. With an epithet or two, with a sharp, incisive phrase, the latter would have conjured the great Dominican from his grave, and we should have seen him, or believed at least that we saw him, as he was in the flesh when his impassioned voice resounded through the Duomo, swaying the hearts of the Florentine people with the force of a great conviction. That he stands out thus tangibly in 'Romola' it would be futile to assert: nevertheless, he is a noble, powerful study, although one has laboriously to gather into one's mind the somewhat mechanical descriptions which help to portray his individuality. The idea underlying the working out of this grand character is the same which Goethe had once proposed to himself in his projected, but unfortunately never executed, drama of 'Mahomet.' It is that of a man of moral genius, who, in solitude and obscurity, has conceived some new, profounder aspect of religious truth, and who, stirred by a sublime devotion, now goes forth among men to bless and regenerate them by teaching them this higher life. But in his contact with the multitude, in his efforts at influencing it, the prophet or preacher is in his turn influenced. If he fails to move by the loftiest means, he will gradually resort to the lower in order to effect his purpose. The purity of his spirit is tarnished, ambition has crept in where holiness reigned, and his perfect rectitude of purpose will be sacrificed so that he may but rule. Such are the opposing tendencies co-existing in Savonarola's mixed but lofty nature. For "that dissidence between inward reality and outward seeming was not the Christian simplicity after which he had striven through years of his youth and prime, and which he had preached as a chief fruit of the Divine life. In the heat and stress of the day, with cheeks burning, with shouts ringing in the ears, who is so blest as to remember the yearnings he had in the cool and silent morning, and know that he has not belied them?" And again: "It was the habit of Savonarola's mind to conceive great things, and to feel that he was the man to do them. Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice, purity, and love should triumph, and it should triumph by his voice, by his work, by his blood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless, the sense of self melted in the sense of the Unspeakable, and in that part of his experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in the presence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act, pre-eminence seemed a necessary condition of life." But, as George Eliot says, "Power rose against him, not because of his sins, but because of his greatness; not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured a double agony; not only the reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, 'I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me; yet the light I saw was the true light.'" But after all, in George Eliot's story the chief interest attaching to "Fra Girolamo" consists in his influence on Romola's spiritual growth. This may possibly be a blemish; yet in most novels the fictitious characters eclipse the historical ones. The effect produced by the high-souled Romola is not unlike that of an antique statue, at once splendidly beautiful and imposingly cold. By the side of Tito she reminds one of the pure whiteness of marble sculpture as contrasted with the rich glowing sensuousness of a Venetian picture. It is difficult to analyse why the proud, loving, single-hearted Romola, who has something of the fierceness and impetuosity of the old "Bardo blood" in her, should leave this impression of coldness; for in spite of her acts of magnanimity and self-devotion, such, curiously enough, is the case. Perhaps in this instance George Eliot modelled the character too much according to a philosophical conception, instead of projecting it, complete in its incompleteness, as it might have come from the hand of Nature. Another objection sometimes brought forward, of Romola having but little resemblance to an Italian woman of the fifteenth century, seems to me less relevant. The lofty dignity, the pride, the intense adhesion to family traditions were, on the contrary, very marked attributes of a high national type during the period of Italian supremacy. In fact, the character is not without hints and suggestions of such a woman as Vittoria Colonna, while its didactic tendency slightly recalls "those awful women of Italy who held professorial chairs, and were great in civil and canon law." In one sense Romola is a true child of the Renaissance. Brought up by her father, the enthusiastic old scholar, in pagan ideas, she had remained aloof from Roman Catholic beliefs and superstitions, and even when transformed by the mighty influence of Savonarola into a devoted _Piagnone_, her attitude always remains more or less that of a Protestant, unwilling to surrender the right of private judgment to the Church. The clash of character when a woman like Romola finds herself chained in a life-long bond to such a nature as Tito's--the beautiful, wily, insinuating Greek--is wrought out with wonderful skill and matchless subtlety of analysis. Indeed Tito is not only one of George Eliot's most original creations, he is a unique character in fiction. Novelists, as a rule, only depict the full-blown villain or traitor, their virtuous and wicked people being separated from each other by a hard and fast line much like the goats and sheep. They continually treat character as something permanent and unchangeable, whereas to George Eliot it presents itself as an organism flexible by nature, subject to change under varying conditions, liable on the one hand to disease and deterioration, but on the other hand no less capable of being rehabilitated, refined, or ennobled. This is one of the most distinctive notes of George Eliot's art, and gives a quickening, fructifying quality to her moral teaching. But it is an artistic no less than a moral gain, sharpening the interest felt in the evolution of her fictitious personages. For this reason Tito, the creature of circumstances, is perhaps the most striking of all her characters in the eyes of the psychologist. We seem to see the very pulse of the human machine laid bare, to see the corroding effect of self-indulgence and dread of pain on a nature not intrinsically wicked, to see at last how, little by little, weakness has led to falsehood, and falsehood to infamy. And yet this creature, who, under our eyes, gradually hardens into crime, is one so richly dowered with rare gifts of person and mind, that in spite of his moral degeneracy, he fascinates the reader no less than the men and women supposed to come into actual contact with him. His beauty is described with the same life-like intensity as Hetty's: the warm glow of colour in his perfectly-moulded face, with its dark curls and long agate-like eyes; his sunny brightness of look, the velvet softness of a manner with which he ingratiates himself with young and old, and the airy buoyancy of his whole gracious being, are as vividly portrayed as the quick talent to which everything comes natural, the abundant good-humour, the acuteness of a polished intellect, whose sharp edge, will, at need, cut relentlessly through every tissue of sentiment. From Melema's first uneasy debate with himself, when, in his splendid, unsoiled youth, he enters Florence a shipwrecked stranger--a debate, that is, as to whether he is bound to go in search of Baldassare, who has been as a father to him--to the moment when his already blunted conscience absolves him from such a search, and again, on to that supreme crisis when, suddenly face to face with his benefactor, he denies him, and so is inevitably urged from one act of baseness and cruelty to another still blacker--we have unfolded before us, by an unshrinking analyzer of human nature, what might not inappropriately be called "A Soul's Tragedy." The wonderful art in the working out of this character is shown in the fact that one has no positive impression of Tito's innate badness, but, on the contrary, feels as if, after his first lapses from truth and goodness, there is still a possibility of his reforming, if only his soft, pleasure-loving nature were not driven on, almost in spite of himself, by his shuddering dread of shame or suffering in any form. "For," writes George Eliot, "Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character." The description of the married life of Romola and Tito is unsurpassed in George Eliot's novels for subtlety and depth of insight: notably the young wife's fond striving after complete inner harmony, her first, faint, unavowed sense of something wanting, her instinctive efforts to keep fast hold of her love and trust, and her violent, irrevocable recoil on the discovery of Tito's first faithless action. Perhaps there is something cold, almost stern, in Romola's loathing alienation from her husband, and the instantaneous death of her passionate love. One cannot quite hinder the impression that a softer woman might have forgiven and won from him a confession of his wrong-doing; a confession which would have averted the committal of his worst and basest deeds. Indeed, it is Tito's awe of his grand, noble wife, and his dread of her judgment, which first of all incite him to prevarication and lies. It is curious to compare George Sand's theory of love, in this instance, with George Eliot's. In 'Leon Leoni,' and in many of her novels besides, the Frenchwoman seems to imply that for a woman to love once is to love always, and that there is nothing so base, or mean, or cruel, but she will forgive the man on whom she has placed her affections. In the story mentioned above she has worked out this idea to an extent which, in many of its details, is simply revolting. Love is there described as a magnetic attraction, unresisted and irresistible, to which the heroine absolutely surrenders pride, reason, and conscience. Just the opposite kind of love is that which we find portrayed in 'Romola:' it is a love identical with the fullest belief in the truth and goodness of the beloved object, so that at the first realisation of moral obliquity the repulsion created extinguishes that love, although there is no outward severance of the marriage bond. This great novel closes with these significant words, which Romola addresses to Lillo, Tito's child, but not her own: "And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly, and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of man, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It would have been better for me if I had never been born!'" CHAPTER XII. HER POEMS. Few are the external events to be now recorded of George Eliot's life. The publication of her successive works forms the chief landmarks. But the year 1865 is distinguished by circumstances of some importance. In this year Mr. Lewes, after assisting to found the _Fortnightly Review_, assumed its editorship; and among the contributions to the first number of the new Review was a short article from the pen of George Eliot on Mr. Lecky's important work 'The Influence of Rationalism.' In the course of the same year Mr. and Mrs. Lewes moved from 16 Blandford Square to the Priory, a commodious house in North Bank, St. John's Wood, which has come to be intimately associated with the memory of George Eliot. Here, in the pleasant dwelling-rooms decorated by Owen Jones, might be met, at her Sunday afternoon receptions, some of the most eminent men in literature, art, and science. For the rest, her life flowed on its even tenor, its routine being rigidly regulated. The morning till lunch time was invariably devoted to writing: in the afternoon she either went out for a quiet drive of about two hours, or she took a walk with Lewes in Regent's Park. There the strange-looking couple--she with a certain weird, sibylline air, he not unlike some unkempt Polish refugee of vivacious manners--might be seen, swinging their arms, as they hurried along at a pace as rapid and eager as their talk. Besides these walks, George Eliot's chief recreation consisted in frequenting concerts and picture galleries. To music she was passionately devoted, hardly ever failing to attend at the Saturday afternoon concerts at St. James's Hall, besides frequenting various musical réunions, such as the following extract from one of her letters will show: "The other night we went to hear the Bach choir--a society of ladies and gentlemen got together by Jenny Lind, who sings in the middle of them, her husband acting as conductor. It is pretty to see people who might be nothing but simply fashionables taking pains to sing fine music in tune and time, with more or less success. One of the baritones we know is a G----, who used to be a swell guardsman, and has happily taken to good courses while still quite young. Another is a handsome young G----, not of the unsatisfactory Co., but of the R---- G---- kin. A soprano is Mrs. P----, wife of the Queen's Secretary, General P----, the granddaughter of Earl Grey, and just like him in the face--and so on. These people of 'high' birth are certainly reforming themselves a little." She likewise never omitted to visit the "Exhibition of Old Masters" at Burlington House. To most people few things exercise so great a strain on their mental and physical powers of endurance as the inspection of a picture gallery, with its incessant appeal to the most concentrated attention. Yet, in spite of physical weakness, George Eliot possessed such inexhaustible mental energy that she could go on, hour after hour, looking with the same unflagging interest at whatever possessed any claim to attention, tiring out even vigorous men that were in her company. In her works the allusions to art are much less frequent than to music; but from a few hints here and there, it is possible to form some idea of her taste, one very significant passage in 'Adam Bede' showing her peculiar love of Dutch paintings, and her readiness to turn without shrinking "from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flowerpot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her." Another favourite resort of George Eliot's was the Zoological Gardens. She went there a great deal to study the animals, and was particularly fond of the "poor dear ratel" that used to turn somersaults. In fact her knowledge of, and sympathy with, animals was as remarkable as that which she showed for human nature. Thus she astonished a gentleman farmer by drawing attention to the fine points of his horses. Her intimate acquaintance with the dog comes out in a thousand touches in her novels, and her humorous appreciation of little pigs led her to watch them attentively, and to pick out some particular favourite in every litter. In her country rambles, too, she was fond of turning over stones to inspect the minute insect life teeming in moist, dark places; and she was as interested as Lewes himself in the creatures, frogs, etc., he kept for scientific purposes, and which would sometimes, like the frog in the fairy tale, surprise the household by suddenly making their entrance into the dining-room. Her liking for the "poor brutes," as she calls them, had its origin no doubt in the same source of profound pity which she feels for "the twists and cracks" of imperfect human beings. Her evenings were usually passed at home, and spent in reading, or in playing and singing; but she and Lewes used to go to the theatre on any occasion of special interest, as when Salvini appeared in 'Othello,' a performance attended repeatedly by both with enthusiastic delight. Otherwise they rarely left home, seldom visiting at other people's houses, although they made an exception in the case of a favoured few. They were both fond of travelling, and, whenever it was possible, would take trips to the Continent, or seek some quiet English rural retreat away from the sleepless tumult of London. "For," says Lewes incidentally in a letter, "Mrs. Lewes never seems at home except under a broad sweep of sky and the _greenth_ of the uplands round her." So we find them frequently contriving a change of scene; and the visits to foreign countries, the pleasant sauntering on long summer days through Continental towns, "dozing round old cathedrals," formed delightful episodes in George Eliot's strenuously active life. The residence in Germany in 1854, and again in 1858, has already been alluded to. Now, in the year 1865, they paid a short visit to France, in the course of which they saw Normandy, Brittany, and Touraine, returning much refreshed at the beginning of the autumn. Two years afterwards they went to Spain, a country that must have possessed a peculiar interest for both; for in 1846 Lewes had published a charming, if one-sided, little book on 'The Spanish Drama,' with especial reference to Lope de Vega and Calderon; and in 1864, only a year after the appearance of 'Romola,' George Eliot produced the first draught of 'The Spanish Gypsy.' On becoming personally acquainted with this land of "old romance," however, her impressions were so far modified and deepened that she re-wrote and amplified her poem, which was not published till 1868. The subject of the gypsies was probably suggested to George Eliot by her own memorable adventure in childhood, which thus became the germ of a very impressive poem. Be that as it may, it is worth noticing that the conception of 'The Spanish Gypsy' should have followed so closely on the completion of the Italian novel, both being foreign subjects, belonging to much the same period of history. In both the novelist has departed from her habitual track, seeking for "pastures new" in a foreign soil. After inculcating on the artist the desirability of giving "the loving pains of a life to the faithful representation of commonplace things," she remarks in 'Adam Bede' that "there are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women, few heroes," and that we cannot afford to give all our love and reverence to such rarities. But having followed this rule, and given the most marvellously truthful delineations of her fellow-men as they are ordinarily to be met with, she now also felt prompted to draw the exceptional types of human character, the rare prophets, and the sublime heroes. To her friend Miss Simcox, George Eliot one day mentioned a plan of giving "the world an ideal portrait of an actual character in history, whom she did not name, but to whom she alluded as an object of possible reverence unmingled with disappointment." This idea was never carried out, but at any rate Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Zarca, and Mordecai are all exceptional beings--beings engrossed by an impersonal aim, having the spiritual or national regeneration of their fellow-men for its object. Dinah and Savonarola are more of the nature of prophets; Zarca and Mordecai of that of patriots. Among these the fair Methodist preacher, whose yearning piety is only a more sublimated love of her kind, is the most vividly realised; while Mordecai, the patriot of an ideal country, is but the abstraction of a man, entirely wanting in that indefinable solidity of presentation which gives a life of its own to the creations of art. On the whole, Zarca, the gipsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn of George Eliot's purely ideal characters--characters which never have the flesh-and-blood reality of her Mrs. Poysers, her Silas Marners, and her dear little Totties and Eppies. Yet there is an unmistakable grandeur and power of invention in the heroic figure of Zarca, although, in spite of this power, we miss the convincing stamp of reality in him, and not only in him, but more or less in all the characters of the 'Spanish Gypsy.' George Eliot's feeling for the extraordinary and romantic was very subordinate to that which she entertained for the more familiar aspects of our life. For, although she here chose one of the most romantic of periods and localities, the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, with the mingled horror and magnificence of its national traditions, she does not really succeed in resuscitating the spirit which animated those devout, cruel, fanatical, but ultra-picturesque times. The Castilian noble, the Jewish astrologer, Zarca, and the Spanish Inquisitor, even the bright, gloriously-conceived Fedalma herself, think and speak too much like sublimated modern positivists. For example, would, could, or should any gipsy of the fifteenth century have expressed himself in the following terms: "Oh, it is a faith Taught by no priest, but by this beating heart: Faith to each other: the fidelity Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place, Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share The scanty water: the fidelity Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire, Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands, The speech that even in lying tells the truth Of heritage inevitable as birth, Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel The mystic stirring of a common life Which makes the many one: fidelity To the consecrating oath our sponsor Fate Made through our infant breath when we were born The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life, Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers. Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear, But love it; for the sanctity of oaths Lies not in lightning that avenges them, But in the injury wrought by broken bonds And in the garnered good of human trust." The poetic mode of treatment corresponds to the exalted theme of the 'Spanish Gypsy,' a subject certainly more fitted for drama or romance rather than for the novel, properly so called. Nothing could apparently be better adapted for the purposes of a noble, historical poem than the conception of a great man such as Zarca, whose aim is nothing less than the fusion of the scattered, wandering, lawless gypsy tribes into one nation, with common traditions and a common country: the romantic incident of the discovery of his lost daughter in the affianced bride of Silva, Duke of Bedmar: the supreme conflict in Fedalma's breast between love and duty, her renunciation of happiness in order to cast in her lot with that of her outcast people: Silva's frantic grief, his desertion of his country, his religion, and all his solemn responsibilities to turn gypsy for Fedalma's sake, and having done so, his agony of remorse on seeing the fortress committed to his trust taken by the gypsies he has joined, his dearest friends massacred, his nearest of kin, Isidor, the inquisitor, hanged before his very eyes, a sight so maddening that, hardly conscious of his act, he slays Zarca, and so divides himself for ever, by an impassable gulf, from the woman for whose sake he had turned apostate. Clearly a subject containing the highest capabilities, and, if great thoughts constituted a great poem, this should be one of the greatest. But with all its high merits, its sentiments imbued with rare moral grandeur, its felicitous descriptions, the work lacks that best and incommunicable gift which comes by nature to the poet. Here, as in her novels, we find George Eliot's instinctive insight into the primary passions of the human heart, her wide sympathy and piercing keenness of vision; but her thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically welded into song. This applies to all her poetic work, although some of it, especially the 'Legend of Jubal,' reaches a much higher degree of metrical and rhythmical excellence. But although George Eliot's poems cannot be considered on a par with her prose, they possess a distinctive interest, and should be carefully studied by all lovers of her genius, as affording a more intimate insight into the working of her own mind. Nowhere do we perceive so clearly as here the profound sadness of her view of life; nowhere does she so emphatically reiterate the stern lesson of the duty of resignation and self-sacrifice; or that other doctrine that the individual is bound absolutely to subordinate his personal happiness to the social good, that he has no rights save the right of fulfilling his obligations to his age, his country, and his family. This idea is perhaps more completely incorporated in Fedalma than in any other of her characters--Fedalma, who seems so bountifully endowed with the fullest measure of beauty, love and happiness, that her renunciation may be the more absolute. She who, in her young joy suddenly knows herself as "an aged sorrow," exclaiming: "I will not take a heaven Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery. This deed and I have ripened with the hours: It is a part of me--a wakened thought That, rising like a giant, masters me, And grows into a doom. O mother life, That seemed to nourish me so tenderly, Even in the womb you vowed me to the fire, Hung on my soul the burden of men's hopes, And pledged me to redeem!--I'll pay the debt. You gave me strength that I should pour it all Into this anguish. I can never shrink Back into bliss--my heart has grown too big With things that might be." This sacrifice is the completer for being without hope; for not counting "on aught but being faithful;" for resting satisfied in such a sublime conviction as-- "The grandest death, to die in vain--for love Greater than sways the forces of the world." Limit forbids me dwell longer on this poem, which contains infinite matter for discussion, yet some of the single passages are so full of fine thoughts felicitously expressed that it would be unfair not to allude to them. Such a specimen as this exposition of the eternal dualism between the Hellenic and the Christian ideals, of which Heine was the original and incomparable expounder, should not be left unnoted: "For evermore With grander resurrection than was feigned Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form Of calmly-joyous beauty, marble-limbed, Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs, Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns." And again how full of deep mysterious suggestion is this line-- "Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken." And this grand saying-- "What times are little? To the sentinel That hour is regal when he mounts on guard." Quotations of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied; while showing that exaltation of thought properly belonging to poetry, they at the same time indubitably prove to the delicately-attuned ear the absence of that subtle intuitive music, that "linked sweetness" of sound and sense which is the birthright of poets. If an intimate and profound acquaintance with the laws and structure of metre could bestow this quality, which appertains to the elemental, George Eliot's verse ought to have achieved the highest success. For in mere technical knowledge concerning rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and the manipulation of blank verse according to the most cunning distribution of pauses, she could hold her own with the foremost contemporary poets, being no doubt far more versed than either Shelley or Byron in the laws governing these matters. How incalculable she felt the poet's influence to be, and how fain she would have had him wield this influence only for the loftiest ends, is well shown in a beautiful letter, hitherto unpublished, now possessing an added pathos as addressed to one who has but lately departed, at the very time when his rare poetic gifts were beginning to be more widely recognised. James Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," a poem which appeared first in the pages of the 'National Reformer,' with the signature of "B. V.," was thus addressed by George Eliot: "DEAR POET,--I cannot rest satisfied without telling you that my mind responds with admiration to the distinct vision and grand utterance in the poem which you have been so good as to send me. "Also, I trust that an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains, with a wider embrace of human fellowship, such as will be to the labourers of the world what, the Odes of Tyrtæus were to the Spartans, thrilling them with the sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that would dissolve it. To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate, and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible." These words are of peculiar interest, because, although the writer of them is almost as much of a pessimist as its recipient, they are so with a difference. The pessimism of "The City of Dreadful Night," in its blank hopelessness, paralyses the inmost nerve of life by isolating the individual in cold obstruction. Whereas George Eliot, while recognising to the utmost "the burthen of a world, where even the sunshine has a heart of care," insists the more on the fact that this common suffering binds man more indissolubly to man; that so far from justifying him in ending his life "when he will," the groaning and travailing generations exact that he should stand firm at his post, regardless of personal consideration or requital, so long only as he can help towards making the fate of his fellow mortals less heavy for them to bear. In fact, the one is a theory of life, the other a disease of the soul. The same stoic view, in a different form, finds expression in this answer to a dear friend's query: "I cannot quite agree that it is hard to see what has been the good of your life. It seems to me very clear that you have been a good of a kind that would have been sorely missed by those who have been nearest to you, and also by some who are more distant. And it is this kind of good which must reconcile us to life, and not any answer to the question, 'What would the universe have been without me?' The point one has to care for is, 'Are A, B, and C the better for me?' And there are several letters of the alphabet that could not have easily spared you in the past, and that can still less spare you in the present." This lesson of resignation, which is enforced more and more stringently in her writings, is again dwelt upon with peculiar emphasis in the interesting dramatic sketch entitled 'Armgart.' The problem here is not unlike that in 'Silas Marner.' It is that of an individual, in exceptional circumstances, brought back to the average condition of humanity; but whereas Silas, having sunk below the common standard, is once more united to his fellow-men by love, the magnificently endowed Armgart, who seems something apart and above the crowd, is reduced to the level of the undistinguished million by the loss of her peerless voice. 'Armgart' is the single instance, excepting, perhaps, the Princess Halm-Eberstein, where George Eliot has attempted to depict the woman-artist, to whom life's highest object consists in fame-- "The benignant strength of one, transformed To joy of many." But in the intoxicating flush of success, the singer, who has refused the love of _one_ for that "sense transcendent which can taste the joy of swaying multitudes," loses her glorious gift, and so sinks irretrievably to a "drudge among the crowd." In the first delirium of despair she longs to put an end to herself, "sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life;" but is painfully startled from her defiant mood by the indignant query of Walpurga, her humble cousin-- "Where is the rebel's right for you alone? Noble rebellion lifts a common load; But what is he who flings his own load off And leaves his fellows toiling? Rebel's right? Say rather the deserter's. Oh, you smiled From your clear height on all the million lots Which yet you brand as abject." It may seem singular that having once, in 'Armgart,' drawn a woman of the highest artistic aims and ambitions, George Eliot should imply that what is most valuable in her is not the exceptional gift, but rather that part of her nature which she shares with ordinary humanity. This is, however, one of her leading beliefs, and strongly contrasts her, as a teacher, with Carlyle. To the author of 'Hero Worship' the promiscuous mass--moiling and toiling as factory hands and artisans, as miners and labourers--only represents so much raw material, from which is produced that final result and last triumph of the combination of human forces--the great statesman, great warrior, great poet, and so forth. To George Eliot, on the contrary--and this is the democratic side of her nature--it is the multitude, so charily treated by destiny, which claims deepest sympathy and tenderest compassion; so that all greatness, in her eyes, is not a privilege, but a debt, which entails on its possessor a more strenuous effort, a completer devotion to the service of average humanity. CHAPTER XIII. FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH. In 'Felix Holt,' which was published in 1866, George Eliot returned once more to her own peculiar field, where she stands supreme and unrivalled--the novel of English provincial life. This work, which, however, is not equal to her earlier or later fictions, yet possesses a double interest for us. It is the only one of her writings from which its author's political views may be inferred, if we exclude a paper published in _Blackwood's Magazine_ in January 1868, which, indeed, seems to be part of the novel, seeing that it is entitled, "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt." The paper contains, in a more direct and concise form, precisely the same general views as regards the principles of government which were previously enunciated through Felix the Radical. It was an appeal to the operative classes who had been only recently enfranchised by the Reform Bill. Its advice is mainly to the effect that genuine political and social improvements, to be durable, must be the result of inward change rather than of outward legislation. The writer insists on the futility of the belief that beneficial political changes can be effected by revolutionary measures. She points out the necessity of a just discrimination between what is curable in the body politic and what has to be endured. She dwells once again, with solemn insistence, on the "aged sorrow," the inheritance of evil transmitted from generation to generation, an evil too intimately entwined with the complex conditions of society to be violently uprooted, but only to be gradually eradicated by the persistent cultivation of knowledge, industry, judgment, sobriety, and patience. "This is only one example," she says, "of the law by which human lives are linked together; another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow-countrymen, to the weight of taxation laid on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear the yoke of; the law of no man's making, and which no man can undo. Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. We who are living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of those who lived before us; we are sufferers by each other's wrong-doing; and the children who come after us will be sufferers from the same causes." To remedy this long-standing wrong-doing and suffering, so argues Felix Holt, is not in the power of any one measure, class, or period. It would be childish folly to expect any Reform Bill to possess the magical property whereby a sudden social transformation could be accomplished. On the contrary, abrupt transitions should be shunned as dangerous to order and law, which alone are certain to insure a steady collective progress; the only means to this end consisting in the general spread of education, to secure which, at least for his children, the working man should spare no pains. Without knowledge, the writer continues, no political measures will be of any benefit, ignorance with or without vote always of necessity engendering vice and misery. But, guided by a fuller knowledge, the working classes would be able to discern what sort of men they should choose for their representatives, and instead of electing "platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with," they would confide the chief power to the hands of the truly wise, those who know how to regulate life "according to the truest principles mankind is in possession of." The "Felix Holt" of the story is described by George Eliot as shaping his actions much according to the ideas which are here theoretically expressed. His knowledge and aptitude would enable him to choose what is considered a higher calling. But he scorns the vulgar ambition called "getting on in the world;" his sense of fellowship prompting him to remain a simple artisan that he may exert an elevating influence on the class to which he belongs. Class differences, so argues this Radical-Conservative, being inherent in the constitution of society, it becomes something of a desertion to withdraw what abilities one may have from the medium where they are urgently needed, in order to join, for the sake of selfish aims, some other body of men where they may be superfluous. The other distinctive feature of 'Felix Holt' consists in its elaborate construction, ranking it, so to speak, amongst sensation novels. As a rule, George Eliot's stories have little or no plot, the incidents seeming not so much invented by the writer for the sake of producing an effective work, as to be the natural result of the friction between character and circumstance. This simplicity of narrative belongs, no doubt, to the highest class of novel, the class to which 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Waverley,' and 'Vanity Fair' belong. In 'Felix Holt,' however, the intricate network of incident in which the characters seem to be enmeshed, is not unlike the modern French art of story-telling, with its fertility of invention, as is also the strangely repellent intrigue which forms the nucleus of the whole. All the elements which go to make up a thrilling narrative--such as a dubious inheritance, the disappearance of the rightful claimant, a wife's guilty secret, the involvements of the most desperate human fates in a perplexing coil through sin and error--are interwoven in this story of 'Felix Holt the Radical.' Though ingeniously invented, the different incidents seem not so much naturally to have grown the one from the other as to be constructed with too conscious a seeking for effect. There is something forced, uneasy, and inadequate in the laborious contrivance of fitting one set of events on to another, and the machinery of the disputed Transome claim is so involved that the reader never masters the "ins" and "outs" of that baffling mystery. Still, the groundwork of the story is deeply impressive: its interest is, notwithstanding the complex ramification of events, concentrated with much power upon a small group of personages, such as Mrs. Transome, her son Harold, the little dissenting minister, Rufus Lyon, Esther, and Felix Holt. Here, as elsewhere, the novelist reveals the potent qualities of her genius. Not only does this story contain such genuine humorous portraiture as the lachrymose Mrs. Holt, and the delightfully quaint Job Tudge, but it is also enriched by some descriptions of rural scenery and of homely existence in remote country districts as admirable as any to be found in her writings. Rufus Lyon is a worthy addition to that long gallery of clerical portraits which are among the triumphs of George Eliot's art. This "singular-looking apostle of the meeting in Skipper's Lane"--with his rare purity of heart, his unworldliness, his zeal in the cause of dissent, his restless argumentative spirit, and the moving memories of romance and passion hidden beneath the odd, quaint _physique_ of the little minister encased in rusty black--is among the most loving and lovable of characters, and recalls more particularly that passage in the poem entitled 'A Minor Prophet,' which I cannot but think one of the author's finest, the passage beginning-- "The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms--not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest, So that men put their shoes off; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars, But having shown a little dimpled hand, Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls." Esther, on the other hand, is one of those fortunate beings whose lovely mind is lodged in a form of corresponding loveliness. This charming Esther, though not originally without her feminine vanities and worldly desires, is one of those characters dear to George Eliot's heart, who renounce the allurements of an easy pleasurable existence for the higher satisfactions of a noble love or a nobler ideal. It is curious to notice that Eppie, Esther, Fedalma, and Daniel Deronda are all children that have been reared in ignorance of their real parentage, and that to all of them there comes a day when a more or less difficult decision has to be made, when for good or evil they have to choose, once for all, between two conflicting claims. Like Eppie, Esther rejects the advantages of birth and fortune, and elects to share the hard but dignified life of the high-minded Felix. But this decision in her case shows even higher moral worth, because by nature she is so keenly susceptible to the delicate refinements and graceful elegancies which are the natural accompaniment of rank and wealth. The most curious feature of this book consists, perhaps, in its original treatment of illicit passion. Novelists, as a rule, when handling this subject, depict its fascinations in brilliant contrast to the sufferings and terrors which follow in its train. But George Eliot contents herself with showing us the reverse side of the medal. Youth has faded, joy is dead, love has turned to loathing, yet memory, like a relentless fury, pursues the grey-haired Mrs. Transome, who hides within her breast such a heavy load of shame and dread. The power and intensity with which this character of the haughty, stern, yet inwardly quailing woman is drawn are unsurpassed in their way, and there is tragic horror in the recoil of her finest sensibilities from the vulgar, mean, self-complacent lawyer, too thick-skinned ever to know that in his own person he is a daily judgment on her whose life has been made hideous for his sake. Never more impressively than here does the novelist enforce her teaching that the deed follows the doer, being imbued with an incalculable vitality of its own, shaping all after life, and subduing to its guise the nature that is in bondage to it. Like those fabled dragon's teeth planted by Cadmus, which spring up again as armed men, spreading discord and ruin, so a man's evil actions seem endowed with independent volition, and their consequences extend far beyond the individual life where they originated. If 'Felix Holt' is the most intricately constructed of George Eliot's novels, 'Middlemarch,' which appeared five years afterwards, is, on the other hand, a story without a plot. In fact, it seems hardly appropriate to call it a novel. Like Hogarth's serial pictures representing the successive stages in their progress through life of certain typical characters, so in this book there is unrolled before us, not so much the history of any particular individual, as a whole phase of society portrayed with as daring and uncompromising a fidelity to Nature as that of Hogarth himself. In 'Middlemarch,' English provincial life in the first half of the nineteenth century is indelibly fixed in words "holding a universe impalpable" for the apprehension and delight of the furthest generations of English-speaking nations. Here, as in some kind of panorama, sections of a community and groups of character pass before the mind's eye. To dwell on the separate, strongly-individualised figures which constitute this great crowd would be impossible within the present limits. But from the county people such as the Brookes and Chettams, to respectable middle-class families of the Vincy and Garth type, down to the low, avaricious, harpy-tribes of the Waules and Featherstones, every unit of this complex social agglomeration is described with a life-like vividness truly amazing, when the number and variety of the characters especially are considered. I know not where else in literature to look for a work which leaves such a strong impression on the reader's mind of the intertexture of human lives. Seen thus in perspective, each separate individuality, with its specialised consciousness, is yet as indissolubly connected with the collective life as that of the indistinguishable zoophyte which is but a sentient speck necessarily moved by the same vital agency which stirs the entire organism. Among the figures which stand out most prominently from the crowded background are Dorothea, Lydgate, Casaubon, Rosamond Vincy, Ladislaw, Bulstrode, Caleb, and Mary Garth. Dorothea belongs to that stately type of womanhood, such as Romola and Fedalma, a type which seems to be specifically George Eliot's own, and which has perhaps more in common with such Greek ideals as Antigone and Iphigenia, than with more modern heroines. But Dorothea, however lofty her aspirations, has not the Christian heroism of Romola, or the antique devotion of Fedalma. She is one of those problematic natures already spoken of; ill-adjusted to her circumstances, and never quite adjusting circumstances to herself. It is true that her high aims and glorious possibilities are partially stifled by a social medium where there seems no demand for them: still the resolute soul usually finds some way in which to work out its destiny. "Many 'Theresas'" says George Eliot, "have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet, and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but, after all, to common eyes, their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born 'Theresas' were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. "Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women; if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of woman might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure, and the favourite love stories in prose and verse." Such a life of mistakes is that of the beautiful Dorothea, the ill-starred wife of Casaubon. In his way the character of Casaubon is as great a triumph as that of Tito himself. The novelist seems to have crept into the inmost recesses of that uneasy consciousness, to have probed the most sensitive spots of that diseased vanity, and to lay bare before our eyes the dull labour of a brain whose ideas are stillborn. In an article by Mr. Myers it is stated, however incredible it may sound, that an undiscriminating friend once condoled with George Eliot on the melancholy experience which, from her knowledge of Lewes, had taught her to depict the gloomy character of Casaubon; whereas, in fact, there could not be a more striking contrast than that between the pedant groping amid dim fragments of knowledge, and the vivacious littérateur and thinker with his singular mental energy and grasp of thought. On the novelist's laughingly assuring him that such was by no means the case, "From whom, then," persisted he, "did you draw 'Casaubon'?" With a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, she pointed to her own heart. She confessed, on the other hand, having found the character of Rosamond Vincy difficult to sustain, such complacency of egoism, as has been pointed out, being alien to her own habit of mind. But she laid no claim to any such natural magnanimity as could avert Casaubon's temptations of jealous vanity, and bitter resentment. If there is any character in whom one may possibly trace some suggestions of Lewes, it is in the versatile, brilliant, talented Ladislaw, who held, that while genius must have the utmost play for its spontaneity, it may await with confidence "those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances." But however charming, the impression Ladislaw produces is that of a somewhat shallow, frothy character, so that he seems almost as ill-fitted for Dorothea as the dreary Casaubon himself. Indeed the heroine's second marriage seems almost as much a failure as the stultifying union of Lydgate with Rosamond Vincy, and has altogether a more saddening effect than the tragic death of Maggie, which is how much less pitiful than that death in life of the fashionable doctor, whose best aims and vital purposes have been killed by his wife. Much might be said of Bulstrode, the sanctimonious hypocrite, who is yet not altogether a hypocrite, but has a vein of something resembling goodness running through his crafty character; of Farebrother, the lax, amiable, genuinely honourable vicar of St. Botolph's; of Mrs. Cadwallader, the glib-tongued, witty, meddling rector's wife, a kind of Mrs. Poyser of high life; of Caleb Garth, whose devotion to work is a religion, and whose likeness to Mr. Robert Evans has already been pointed out; of the wholehearted, sensible Mary, and of many other supremely vivid characters, whom to do justice to would carry us too far. 'Middlemarch' is the only work of George Eliot's, I believe, in which there is a distinct indication of her attitude towards the aspirations and clearly formulated demands of the women of the nineteenth century. Her many sarcastic allusions to the stereotyped theory about woman's sphere show on which side her sympathies were enlisted. On the whole, she was more partial to the educational movement than to that other agitation which aims at securing the political enfranchisement of women. How sincerely she had the first at heart is shown by the donation of 50l. "From the author of 'Romola,'" when Girton College was first started. And in a letter to a young lady who studied there, and in whose career she was much interested, she says, "the prosperity of Girton is very satisfactory." Among her most intimate friends, too, were some of the ladies who had initiated and organised the Women's Suffrage movement. Likewise writing to Miss Phelps, she alludes to the Woman's Lectureship in Boston, and remarks concerning the new University: "An office that may make a new precedent in social advance, and which is at the very least an experiment that ought to be tried. America is the seed-ground and nursery of new ideals, where they can grow in a larger, freer air than ours." In 1871, the year when 'Middlemarch' was appearing in parts, George Eliot spent part of the spring and summer months at Shottermill, a quaint Hampshire village situated amid a landscape that unites beauties of the most varied kind. Here we may imagine her and Mr. Lewes, after their day's work was done, either seeking the vast stretch of heath and common only bounded by the horizon, or strolling through the deep-sunk lanes, or finding a soothing repose in "places of nestling green for poets made." They had rented Brookbank, an old-fashioned cottage with tiled roof and lattice-paned windows, belonging to Mrs. Gilchrist, the widow of the distinguished biographer of William Blake. The description of Mrs. Meyrick's house in 'Daniel Deronda' "where the narrow spaces of wall held a world-history in scenes and heads," may have been suggested by her present abode, rich in original drawings by Blake, and valuable prints, and George Eliot writes: "If I ever steal anything in my life, I think it will be the two little Sir Joshuas over the drawing-room mantelpiece." At this time she and Mr. Lewes also found intense interest in reading the 'Life of Blake.' Some correspondence, kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. Gilchrist, passed between this lady and the Leweses in connection with the letting of the house, giving interesting glimpses into the domesticities of the latter. Their habits here, as in London, were of clockwork regularity, household arrangements being expected to run on wheels. "Everything," writes George Eliot, "goes on slowly at Shottermill, and the mode of narration is that typified in 'This is the house that Jack built.' But there is an exquisite stillness in the sunshine and a sense of distance from London hurry, which encourages the growth of patience. "Mrs. G----'s" (their one servant) "pace is proportionate to the other slownesses, but she impresses me as a worthy person, and her cooking--indeed, all her attendance on us--is of satisfactory quality. But we find the awkwardness of having only one person in the house, as well as the advantage (this latter being quietude). The butcher does not bring the meat, everybody grudges selling new milk, eggs are scarce, and an expedition we made yesterday in search of fowls, showed us nothing more hopeful than some chickens six weeks old, which the good woman observed were sometimes 'eaten by the gentry with asparagus.' Those eccentric people, the gentry! "But have we not been reading about the siege of Paris all the winter, and shall we complain while we get excellent bread and butter and many etceteras?... Mrs. S---- kindly sent us a dish of asparagus, which we ate (without the skinny chicken) and had a feast. "You will imagine that we are as fond of eating as Friar Tuck--I am enlarging so on our commissariat. But you will also infer that we have no great evils to complain of, since I make so much of the small." George Eliot rarely went out in the day-time during her stay at Shottermill, but in the course of her rambles she would sometimes visit such cottagers in remote places as were not likely to know who she was. She used also to go and see a farmer's wife living at a short distance from Brookbank, with whom she would freely chat about the growth of fruits and vegetables and the quality of butter, much to the astonishment of the simple farm people. Speaking of her recollection of the great novelist to an American lady by whom these facts are recorded, the old countrywoman remarked: "It were wonderful, just wonderful, the sight o' green peas that I sent down to that gentleman and lady every week." After the lapse of a few months spent in this sweet rural retreat, George Eliot again writes to Mrs. Gilchrist: "I did not imagine that I should ever be so fond of the place as I am now. The departure of the bitter winds, some improvement in my health, and the gradual revelation of fresh and fresh beauties in the scenery, especially under a hopeful sky such as we have sometimes had--all these conditions have made me love our little world here, and wish not to quit it until we can settle in our London home. I have the regret of thinking that it was my original indifference about it (I hardly ever like things until they are familiar) that hindered us from securing the cottage until the end of September." George Eliot's conscientiousness and precision in the small affairs of life are exemplified in her last note to Mrs. Gilchrist: "After Mr. Lewes had written to you, I was made aware that a small dessert or bread-and-butter dish had been broken. That arch-sinner, the cat, was credited with the guilt. I am assured by Mrs. G---- that nothing else has been injured during her reign, and Mrs. L---- confirmed the statement to me yesterday. I wish I could replace the unfortunate dish.... This note, of course, needs no answer, and it is intended simply to make me a clean breast about the crockery." About this time George Eliot was very much out of health: indeed, both she and Lewes repeatedly speak of themselves as "two nervous, dyspeptic creatures, two ailing, susceptible bodies," to whom slight inconveniences are injurious and upsetting. Although it was hot summer weather, Mrs. Lewes suffered much from cold, sitting always with artificial heat to her feet. One broiling day in August, after she had left Brookbank, and taken another place in the neighbourhood, an acquaintance happening to call on her, found her sitting in the garden writing, as was her wont, her head merely shaded by a deodara, on the lawn. Being expostulated with by her visitor for her imprudence in exposing herself to the full blaze of the midday sun, she replied, "Oh, I like it! To-day is the first time I have felt warm this summer." They led a most secluded life, George Eliot being at this time engaged with the continuation of 'Middlemarch;' and Lewes, alluding to their solitary habits, writes at this date: "Work goes on smoothly away from all friendly interruptions. Lord Houghton says that it is incomprehensible how we can live in such Simeon Stylites fashion, as we often do, all alone--but the fact is we never _are_ alone when alone. And I sometimes marvel how it is I have contrived to get through so much work living in London. It's true I'm a London child." Occasionally, however, they would go and see Tennyson, whose house is only three miles from Shottermill, but the road being all uphill made the ride a little tedious and uncomfortable, especially to George Eliot who had not got over her old nervousness. The man who used to drive them on these occasions was so much struck by this that he told the lady who has recorded these details in the _Century Magazine_: "Withal her being such a mighty clever body, she were very nervous in a carriage--allays wanted to go on a smooth road, and seemed dreadful feared of being thrown out." On one of these occasional meetings with Tennyson, the poet got involved in a conversation with the novelist concerning evolution and such weighty questions. They had been walking together in close argument, and as the Poet-Laureate bade George Eliot farewell, he called to her, already making her way down the hill, "Well, good-by, you and your molecules!" And she, looking back, said in her deep low voice (which always got lower when she was at all roused), "I am quite content with my molecules." The country all around Shottermill with its breezy uplands, its pine-clad hills, its undulating tracts of land purpled with heath in the autumn, became more and more endeared to George Eliot, who, indeed, liked it better than any scenery in England. Here she could enjoy to the full that "sense of standing on a round world," which, she writes to Mrs. Gilchrist who had used the phrase, "was precisely what she most cared for amongst out-of-door delights." Some years afterwards we find her and Mr. Lewes permanently taking a house not far off, at Witley in Surrey, which has the same kind of beautiful open scenery. Writing from her town residence about it to her old friend Mrs. Bray, George Eliot says: "We, too, are thinking of a new settling down, for we have bought a house in Surrey about four miles from Godalming on a gravelly hill among the pine-trees, but with neighbours to give us a sense of security. Our present idea is that we shall part with this house and give up London except for occasional visits. We shall be on the same line of railway with some good friends at Weybridge and Guildford." CHAPTER XIV. DANIEL DERONDA. 'Daniel Deronda,' which appeared five years after 'Middlemarch,' occupies a place apart among George Eliot's novels. In the spirit which animates it, it has perhaps the closest affinity with the 'Spanish Gypsy.' Speaking of this work to a young friend of Jewish extraction (in whose career George Eliot felt keen interest), she expressed surprise at the amazement which her choice of a subject had created. "I wrote about the Jews," she remarked, "because I consider them a fine old race who have done great things for humanity. I feel the same admiration for them as I do for the Florentines. Only lately I have heard to my great satisfaction that an influential member of the Jewish community is going to start an emigration to Palestine. You will also be glad to learn that Helmholtz is a Jew." These observations are valuable as affording a key to the leading motive of 'Daniel Deronda.' Mordecai's ardent desire to found a new national state in Palestine is not simply the author's dramatic realisation of the feeling of an enthusiast, but expresses her own very definite sentiments on the subject. The Jewish apostle is, in fact, more or less the mouthpiece of George Eliot's own opinions on Judaism. For so great a master in the art of creating character, this type of the loftiest kind of man is curiously unreal. Mordecai delivers himself of the most eloquent and exalted views and sentiments, yet his own personality remains so vague and nebulous that it has no power of kindling the imagination. Mordecai is meant for a Jewish Mazzini. Within his consciousness he harbours the future of a people. He feels himself destined to become the saviour of his race; yet he does not convince us of his greatness. He convinces us no more than he does the mixed company at the "Hand and Banner," which listens with pitying incredulity to his passionate harangues. Nevertheless the first and final test of the religious teacher or of the social reformer is the magnetic force with which his own intense beliefs become binding on the consciences of others, if only of a few. It is true Mordecai secures one disciple--the man destined to translate his thought into action, Daniel Deronda, as shadowy, as puppet-like, as lifeless as Ezra Mordecai Cohen himself. These two men, of whom the one is the spiritual leader and the other the hero destined to realise his aspirations, are probably the two most unsuccessful of George Eliot's vast gallery of characters. They are the representatives of an idea, but the idea has never been made flesh. A succinct expression of it may be gathered from the following passage: "Which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. For the multitude of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity the Lord of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West; which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race, so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories." This notion that the Jews should return to Palestine in a body, and once more constitute themselves into a distinct nation, is curiously repugnant to modern feelings. As repugnant as that other doctrine, which is also implied in the book, that Jewish separateness should be still further insured by strictly adhering to their own race in marriage--at least Mirah, the most faultless of George Eliot's heroines, whose character expresses the noblest side of Judaism, "is a Jewess who will not accept any one but a Jew." Mirah Lapidoth and the Princess Halm-Eberstein, Deronda's mother, are drawn with the obvious purpose of contrasting two types of Jewish women. Whereas the latter, strictly brought up in the belief and most minute observances of her Hebrew father, breaks away from the "bondage of having been born a Jew," from which she wishes to relieve her son by parting from him in infancy, Mirah, brought up in disregard, "even in dislike of her Jewish origin," clings with inviolable tenacity to the memory of that origin and to the fellowship of her people. The author leaves one in little doubt as towards which side her own sympathies incline to. She is not so much the artist here, impartially portraying different kinds of characters, as the special pleader proclaiming that one set of motives are righteous, just, and praiseworthy, as well as that the others are mischievous and reprehensible. This seems carrying the principle of nationality to an extreme, if not pernicious length. If there were never any breaking up of old forms of society, any fresh blending of nationalities and races, we should soon reduce Europe to another China. This unwavering faithfulness to the traditions of the past may become a curse to the living. A rigidity as unnatural as it is dangerous would be the result of too tenacious a clinging to inherited memories. For if this doctrine were strictly carried out, such a country as America, where there is a slow amalgamation of many allied and even heterogeneous races into a new nation, would practically become impossible. Indeed, George Eliot does not absolutely hold these views. She considers them necessary at present in order to act as a drag to the too rapid transformations of society. In the most interesting paper of 'Theophrastus Such,' that called 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' she remarks: "The tendency of things is towards quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency; all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort." Considering that George Eliot was convinced of this modern tendency towards fusion, it is all the more singular that she should, in 'Daniel Deronda,' have laid such stress on the reconstruction, after the lapse of centuries, of a Jewish state; singular, when one considers that many of the most eminent Jews, so far from aspiring towards such an event, hardly seem to have contemplated it as a desirable or possible prospect. The sympathies of Spinoza, the Mendelssohns, Rahel, Meyerbeer, Heine, and many others, are not distinctively Jewish but humanitarian. And the grandest, as well as truest thing that has been uttered about them is that saying of Heine's: "The country of the Jews is the ideal, is God." Indeed, to have a true conception of Jewish nature and character, of its brilliant lights and deep shadows, of its pathos, depth, sublimity, degradation, and wit; of its infinite resource and boundless capacity for suffering--one must go to Heine and not to 'Daniel Deronda.' In 'Jehuda-ben-Halevy' Heine expresses the love and longing of a Jewish heart for Jerusalem in accents of such piercing intensity that compared with it, "Mordecai's" fervid desire fades into mere abstract rhetoric. Nature and experience were the principal sources of George Eliot's inspiration. And though she knew a great deal about the Jews, her experience had not become sufficiently incorporated with her consciousness. Otherwise, instead of portraying such tame models of perfection as Deronda and Mirah, she would have so mixed her colours as to give us that subtle involvement of motive and tendency--as of cross-currents in the sea--which we find in the characters of nature's making and in her own finest creations, such as Maggie, Silas Marner, Dorothea Casaubon, and others. In turning to the English portion of the story there is at once greater play of spontaneity in the people depicted. Grandcourt, Gascoigne, Rex, Mrs. Davilow, Sir Hugh Mallinger, and especially Gwendolen, show all the old cunning in the psychological rendering of human nature. Curiously enough, this novel consists of two perfectly distinct narratives; the only point of junction being Daniel Deronda himself, who, as a Jew by birth and an English gentleman by education, stands related to both sets of circumstances. The influence he exerts on the spiritual development of Gwendolen seems indeed the true _motif_ of the story. Otherwise there is no intrinsic connection between the group of people clustering round Mordecai, and that of which Gwendolen is the centre: unless it be that the author wished to show the greater intensity of aim and higher moral worth of the Jews as contrasted with these purposeless, worldly, unideal Christians of the nineteenth century. Compared with the immaculate Mirah, Gwendolen Harleth is a very naughty, spoiled, imperfect specimen of maidenhood. But she has life in her; and one speculates as to what she will say and do next, as if she were a person among one's acquaintances. On that account most readers of 'Daniel Deronda' find their interest engrossed by the fate of Gwendolen, and the conjugal relations between her and Grandcourt. This is so much the case, that one suspects her to have been the first idea of the story. She is at any rate its most attractive feature. In Gwendolen, George Eliot once remarked, she had wished to draw a girl of the period. Fascinating, accomplished, of siren-like beauty, she has every outward grace combined with a singular inward vacuity. The deeper aspects of life are undreamed of in her philosophy. Her religion consists in a vague awe of the unknown and invisible, and her ambition in the acquisition of rank, wealth, and personal distinction. She is selfish, vain, frivolous, worldly, domineering, yet not without sudden impulses of generosity, and jets of affection. Something there is in her of Undine before she had a soul--something of a gay, vivacious, unfeeling sprite, who recks nothing of human love or of human misery, but looks down with utter indifference on the poor humdrum mortals around her, whom she inspires at once with fear and fondness: something, also, of the "princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have her breakfast-roll made of the finest bolted flour from the seven thin ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver fork kept out of the baggage." How this bewitching creature, whose "iridescence of character" makes her a psychological problem, is gradually brought to accept Henleigh Grandcourt, in spite of the promise she has given to Lydia Glasher (his discarded victim), and her own fleeting presentiments, is described with an analytical subtlety unsurpassed in George Eliot's works. So, indeed, is the whole episode of the married life of Grandcourt. This territorial magnate, who possesses every worldly advantage that Gwendolen desired, is worthy, as a study of character, to be placed beside that of Casaubon himself. Gwendolen's girlish type of egoism, which loves to be the centre of admiration, here meets with that far other deadlier form of an "exorbitant egoism," conspicuous for its intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, "in proportion as the varied susceptibilities of younger years are stripped away." This cold, negative nature lies with a kind of withering blight on the susceptible Gwendolen. Roused from the complacent dreams of girlhood by the realities of her married life, shrinking in helpless repulsion from the husband whom she meant to manage, and who holds her as in a vice, the unhappy woman has nothing to cling to in this terrible inward collapse of her happiness, but the man, who, from the first moment when his eye arrests hers at the gaming table at Leubronn, becomes, as it were, a conscience visibly incarnate to her. This incident, which is told in the first chapter of the novel, recalls a sketch by Dante Rossetti, where Mary Magdalene, in the flush of joyous life, is held by the Saviour's gaze, and in a sudden revulsion from her old life, breaks away from companions that would fain hold her back, with a passionate movement towards the Man of Sorrow. This impressive conception may have unconsciously suggested a somewhat similar situation to the novelist, for that George Eliot was acquainted with this drawing is shown by the following letter addressed in 1870 to Dante Rossetti: "I have had time now to dwell on the photographs. I am especially grateful to you for giving me the head marked June 1861: it is exquisite. But I am glad to possess every one of them. The subject of the Magdalene rises in interest for me, the more I look at it. I hope you will keep in the picture an equally passionate type for her. Perhaps you will indulge me with a little talk about the modifications you intend to introduce." The relation of Deronda to Gwendolen is of a Christlike nature. He is her only moral hold in the fearful temptations that assail her now and again under the intolerable irritations of her married life, temptations which grow more urgent when Grandcourt leads his wife captive, after his fashion, in a yacht on the Mediterranean. For "the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence, and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance, with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse." The evil wish at last finds fulfilment, the murderous thought is outwardly realised. And though death is not eventually the result of the criminal desire, it yet seems to the unhappy wife as if it had a determining power in bringing about the catastrophe. But it is precisely this remorse which is the redeeming quality of her nature, and awakens a new life within her. In this quickening of the moral consciousness through guilt we are reminded, although in a different manner, of a similar process, full of pregnant suggestions, described in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Transformation.' It will be remembered that Donatello leads a purely instinctive, that is to say animal, existence, till the commission of a crime awakens the dormant conscience, and a soul is born in the throes of anguish and remorse. In 'Daniel Deronda' there is an entire absence of that rich, genial humour which seemed spontaneously to bubble up and overflow her earlier works. Whether George Eliot's conception of the Jews as a peculiarly serious race had any share in bringing about that result, it is difficult to say. At any rate, in one of her essays she remarks that, "The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of a people who went about their business and pleasure as gravely as a society of beavers." Certainly Mordecai, Deronda, and Mirah, are preternaturally solemn; even the Cohen family are not presented with any of those comic touches one would have looked for in this great humorist; only in the boy Jacob are there gleams of drollery, such as in this description of him by Hans Meyrick: "He treats me with the easiest familiarity, and seems in general to look at me as a second-hand Christian commodity, likely to come down in price; remarking on my disadvantages with a frankness which seems to imply some thoughts of future purchase. It is pretty, though, to see the change in him if Mirah happens to come in. He turns child suddenly--his age usually strikes one as being like the Israelitish garments in the desert, perhaps near forty, yet with an air of recent production." A certain subdued vein of humour is not entirely absent from the portraiture of the Meyrick family, a delightful group, who "had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like mediæval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps, and sudden outlooks." But on the whole, instead of the old humour, we find in 'Daniel Deronda' a polished irony and epigrammatic sarcasm, which were afterwards still more fully developed in the 'Impressions of Theophrastus Such.' Soon after the publication of this novel, we find the following allusion to it in one of George Eliot's letters to Mrs. Bray: "I don't know what you refer to in the _Jewish World_. Perhaps the report of Dr. Hermann Adler's lecture on 'Deronda' to the Jewish working-men, given in the _Times_. Probably the Dr. Adler whom you saw is Dr. Hermann's father, still living as Chief Rabbi. I have had some delightful communications from Jews and Jewesses, both at home and abroad. Part of the Club scene in 'D. D.' is flying about in the Hebrew tongue through the various Hebrew newspapers, which have been copying the 'Maga.' in which the translation was first sent to me three months ago. The Jews naturally are not indifferent to themselves." This Club scene gave rise at the time to quite a controversy. It could not fail to be identified with that other club of philosophers out at elbows so vividly described by G. H. Lewes in the 'Fortnightly Review' of 1866. Nor was it possible not to detect an affinity between the Jew Cohen, the poor consumptive journeyman watchmaker, with his weak voice and his great calm intellect, and Ezra Mordecai Cohen, in precisely similar conditions; the difference being that the one is penetrated by the philosophical idea of Spinozism, and the other by the political idea of reconstituting a Jewish State in Palestine. This difference of mental bias, no doubt, forms a contrast between the two characters, without, however, invalidating the surmise that the fictitious enthusiast may have been originally suggested by the noble figure of the living Jew. Be that as it may, Lewes often took the opportunity in conversation of "pointing out that no such resemblance existed, Cohen being a keen dialectician and a highly impressive man, but without any specifically Jewish enthusiasm." When she undertook to write about the Jews, George Eliot was deeply versed in Hebrew literature, ancient and modern. She had taught herself Hebrew when translating the _Leben Jesu_, and this knowledge now stood her in good stead. She was also familiar with the splendid utterances of Jehuda-ben-Halevy; with the visionary speculations of the Cabbalists, and with the brilliant Jewish writers of the Hispano-Arabic epoch. She had read portions of the Talmud, and remarked one day in conversation that Spinoza had really got something from the Cabbala. On her friend humbly suggesting that by ordinary accounts it appeared to be awful nonsense, she said "that it nevertheless contained fine ideas, like Plato and the Old Testament, which, however, people took in the lump, being accustomed to them." CHAPTER XV. LAST YEARS. 'Daniel Deronda' is the last great imaginative work with which George Eliot was destined to enrich the world. It came out in small volumes, the appearance of each fresh number being hailed as a literary event. In allusion to an author's feeling on the conclusion of a weighty task, George Eliot remarks in one of her letters: "As to the great novel which remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future books.... Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I can never again produce anything worth giving to the world. The responsibility of the writer grows heavier and heavier--does it not?--as the world grows older, and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really needed contribution to the poetry of the world--I mean possible to oneself to do it." This singular diffidence, arising from a sense of the tremendous responsibility which her position entailed, was one of the most noticeable characteristics of this great woman, and struck every one who came in contact with her. Her conscientiousness made her even painfully anxious to enter sympathetically into the needs of every person who approached her, so as to make her speech a permanently fruitful influence in her hearer's life. Such an interview, for example, as that between Goethe and Heine--where the younger poet, after thinking all the way what fine things to say to Goethe, was so disconcerted by the awe-inspiring presence of the master, that he could find nothing better to say than that the plums on the road-side between Jena and Weimar were remarkably good--would have been impossible with one so eager always to give of her best. This deep seriousness of nature made her Sunday afternoon receptions, which became more and more fashionable as time went on, something of a tax to one who preferred the intimate converse of a few to that more superficially brilliant talk which a promiscuous gathering brings with it. Among the distinguished visitors to be met more or less frequently at the Priory maybe mentioned Mr. Herbert Spencer, Professor Huxley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor Beesly, Dr. and Mrs. Congreve, Madame Bodichon, Lord Houghton, M. Tourguénief, Mr. Ralston, Sir Theodore and Lady Martin (better known as Helen Faucit), Mr. Burton of the National Gallery, Mr. George Howard and his wife, Mr. C. G. Leland, Mr. Moncure Conway, Mr. Justin McCarthy, Dr. Hueffer, Mr. and Mrs. Buxton Forman, Mr. F. Myers, Mr. Sully, Mr. Du Maurier, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Pattison, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford, Lady Castletown and her daughters, Mr. and Mrs. Burne Jones, Mr. John Everett Millais, Mr. Robert Browning, and Mr. Tennyson. Persons of celebrity were not the only ones, however, that were made welcome at the Priory. The liveliest sympathy was shown by both host and hostess in many young people as yet struggling in obscurity, but in whom they delighted to recognise the promise of some future excellence. If a young man were pursuing some original scientific inquiry, or striking out a new vein of speculation, in all London there was none likely to enter with such zest into his ideas as G. H. Lewes. His generous appreciation of intellectual gifts is well shown in the following lines to the late Professor W. K. Clifford: "Few things have given us more pleasure than the intimation in your note that you had a _fiancée_. May she be the central happiness and motive force of your career, and, by satisfying the affections, leave your _rare_ intellect free to work out its glorious destiny. For, if you don't become a glory to your age and time, it will be a sin and a shame. Nature doesn't often send forth such gifted sons, and when she does, Society usually cripples them. Nothing but marriage--a happy marriage--has seemed to Mrs. Lewes and myself wanting to your future." On the Sunday afternoon receptions just mentioned, G. H. Lewes acted, so to speak, as a social cement. His vivacity, his ready tact, the fascination of his manners, diffused that general sense of ease and _abandon_ so requisite to foster an harmonious flow of conversation. He was inimitable as a _raconteur_, and Thackeray, Trollope, and Arthur Helps were fond of quoting some of the stories which he would dramatise in the telling. One of the images which, on these occasions, recurs oftenest to George Eliot's friends, is that of the frail-looking woman who would sit with her chair drawn close to the fire, and whose winning womanliness of bearing and manners struck every one who had the privilege of an introduction to her. Her long, pale face, with its strongly-marked features, was less rugged in the mature prime of life than in youth, the inner meanings of her nature having worked themselves more and more to the surface, the mouth, with its benignant suavity of expression, especially softening the too prominent under-lip and massive jaw. Her abundant hair, untinged with grey, whose smooth bands made a kind of frame to the face, was covered by a lace or muslin cap, with lappets of rich point or Valenciennes lace fastened under her chin. Her grey-blue eyes, under noticeable eyelashes, expressed the same acute sensitiveness as her long, thin, beautifully-shaped hands. She had a pleasant laugh and smile, her voice being low, distinct, and intensely sympathetic in quality: it was contralto in singing, but she seldom sang or played before more than one or two friends. Though her conversation was perfectly easy, each sentence was as finished, as perfectly formed, as the style of her published works. Indeed, she laid great stress on the value of correct speaking and clearness of enunciation; and in 'Theophrastus Such' she laments "the general ambition to speak every language except our mother English, which persons 'of style' are not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and a pronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels, and jams them between jostling consonants." Besides M. d'Albert's Genevese portrait of George Eliot, we have a drawing by Mr. Burton, and another by Mr. Lawrence, the latter taken soon after the publication of 'Adam Bede.' In criticising the latter likeness, a keen observer of human nature remarked that it conveyed no indication of the infinite depth of her observant eye, nor of that cold, subtle, and unconscious cruelty of expression which might occasionally be detected there. George Eliot had an unconquerable aversion to her likeness being taken: once, however, in 1860, she was photographed for the sake of her "dear sisters" at Rosehill. But she seems to have repented of this weakness, for, after the lapse of years, she writes: "Mr. Lewes has just come to me after reading your letter, and says, 'For God's sake tell her not to have the photograph reproduced!' and I had nearly forgotten to say that the fading is what I desired. I should not like this image to be perpetuated. It needs the friendly eyes that regret to see it fade, and must not be recalled into emphatic black and white for indifferent gazers. Pray let it vanish." Those who knew George Eliot were even more struck by the force of her entire personality than by her writings. Sympathetic, witty or learned in turn, her conversation deeply impressed her hearers, being enriched by such felicities of expression as: "The best lesson of tolerance we have to learn is to tolerate intolerance." In answer to a friend's surprise that a clever man should allow himself to be contradicted by a stupid one, without dropping down on him, she remarked: "He is very liable to drop down as a baked apple would." And of a very plain acquaintance she said: "He has the most dreadful kind of ugliness one can be afflicted with, because it takes on the semblance of beauty." Poetry, music, and art naturally absorbed much attention at the Priory. Here Mr. Tennyson has been known to read 'Maud' aloud to his friends: Mr. Browning expatiated on the most recondite metrical rules: and Rossetti sent presents of poems and photographs. In the following unpublished letters George Eliot thanks the latter for his valued gifts--"We returned only the night before last from a two months' journey to the Continent, and among the parcels awaiting me I found your generous gift. I am very grateful to you both as giver and poet. "In cutting the leaves, while my head is still swimming from the journey, I have not resisted the temptation to read many things as they ought not to be read--hurriedly. But even in this way I have received a stronger impression than any fresh poems have for a long while given me, that to read once is a reason for reading again. The sonnets towards 'The House of Life' attract me peculiarly. I feel about them as I do about a new cahier of music which I have been 'trying' here and there with the delightful conviction that I have a great deal to become acquainted with and to like better and better." And again, in acknowledgment of some photographs: "The 'Hamlet' seems to me perfectly intelligible, and altogether admirable in conception, except in the type of the man's head. I feel sure that 'Hamlet' had a square anterior lobe. "Mr. Lewes says, this conception of yours makes him long to be an actor who has 'Hamlet' for one of his parts, that he might carry out this scene according to your idea. "One is always liable to mistake prejudices for sufficient inductions, about types of head and face, as well as about all other things. I have some impressions--perhaps only prejudices dependent on the narrowness of my experience--about forms of eyebrow and their relation to passionate expression. It is possible that such a supposed relation has a real anatomical basis. But in many particulars facial expression is like the expression of hand-writing: the relations are too subtle and intricate to be detected, and only shallowness is confident." George Eliot read but little contemporary fiction, being usually absorbed in the study of some particular subject. "For my own spiritual good I need all other sort of reading," she says, "more than I need fiction. I know nothing of contemporary English novelists with the exception of ----, and a few of ----'s works. My constant groan is that I must leave so much of the greatest writing which the centuries have sifted for me unread for want of time." For the same reason, on being recommended by a literary friend to read Walt Whitman, she hesitated on the ground of his not containing anything spiritually needful for her, but, having been induced to take him up, she changed her opinion and admitted that he _did_ contain what was "good for her soul." As to lighter reading, she was fond of books of travel, pronouncing "'The Voyage of the Challenger' a splendid book." Among foreign novelists she was very partial to Henry Gréville, and speaks of 'Les Koumiassine' as a pleasant story. Persons who were privileged enough to be admitted to the intimacy of George Eliot and Mr. Lewes could not fail to be impressed by the immense admiration which they had for one another. Lewes's tenderness, always on the watch lest the great writer, with her delicately poised health, should over-exert herself, had something of doglike fidelity. On the other hand, in spite of George Eliot's habitually retiring manner, if any one ever engaged on the opposite side of an argument to that maintained by the brilliant _savant_, in taking his part, she usually had the best of it, although in the most gentle and feminine way. Although there was entire oneness of feeling between them, there was no unanimity of opinion. George Eliot had the highest regard for Lewes's opinions, but held to her own. One of the chief subjects of difference consisted in their attitude towards Christianity: whereas he was its uncompromising opponent, she had the greatest sympathy with its various manifestations, from Roman Catholic asceticism to Evangelical austerity and Methodist fervour. Her reverence for every form of worship in which mankind has more or less consciously embodied its sense of the mystery of all "this unintelligible world" increased with the years. She was deeply penetrated by that tendency of the Positivist spirit which recognises the beneficial element in every form of religion, and sees the close, nay indissoluble, connection between the faith of former generations and the ideal of our own. She herself found ample scope for the needs and aspirations of her spiritual nature in the religion of humanity. As has already been repeatedly pointed out, there runs through all her works the same persistent teaching of "the Infinite Nature of Duty." And with Comte she refers "the obligations of duty, as well as all sentiments of devotion, to a concrete object, at once ideal and real; the Human Race, conceived as a continuous whole, including the past, the present, and the future." Though George Eliot drew many of her ideas of moral cultivation from the doctrines of Comte's _Philosophie Positive_, she was not a Positivist in the strict sense of the word. Her mind was far too creative by nature to give an unqualified adhesion to such a system as Comte's. Indeed, her devotion to the idea of mankind, conceived as a collective whole, is not so much characteristic of Positivists as of the greatest modern minds, minds such as Lessing, Bentham, Shelley, Mill, Mazzini, and Victor Hugo. Inasmuch as Comte co-ordinated these ideas into a consistent doctrine, George Eliot found herself greatly attracted to his system; and Mr. Beesly, after an acquaintance of eighteen years, considered himself justified in stating that her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and that she looked forward to the reorganisation of belief on the lines which he had laid down. Still her adherence, like that of G. H. Lewes, was only partial, and applied mainly to his philosophy, and not to his scheme of social policy. She went farther than the latter, however, in her concurrence. For Mr. Lewes, speaking of the _Politique Positive_ in his 'History of Philosophy,' admits that his antagonistic attitude had been considerably modified on learning from the remark of one very dear to him, "to regard it as an Utopia, presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines--suggestions for future inquiries rather than dogmas for adepts." On the whole, although George Eliot did not agree with Comte's later theories concerning the reconstruction of society, she regarded them with sympathy "as the efforts of an individual to anticipate the work of future generations." This sympathy with the general Positivist movement she showed by subscribing regularly to Positivist objects, especially to the fund of the Central Organisation presided over by M. Laffitte, but she invariably refused all membership with the Positivist community. In conversation with an old and valued friend, she also repeatedly expressed her objection to much in Comte's later speculations, saying on one occasion, "I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte." The fact is that, although George Eliot was greatly influenced by the leading Positivist ideas, her mind was too original not to work out her own individual conception of life. What this conception is has been already indicated, so far as space would permit, in the discussion of her successive works. Perhaps in the course of time her moralising analytical tendency encroached too much on the purely artistic faculty. Her eminently dramatic genius--which enabled her to realise characters the most varied and opposite in type, somewhat in the manner of Shakespeare--became hampered by theories and abstract views of life. This was especially shown in her latest work, 'The Impressions of Theophrastus Such,' a series of essays chiefly satirising the weaknesses and vanities of the literary class. In these unattractive "impressions" the wit is often laboured, and does not play "beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy meadows." Its cutting irony and incisive ridicule are no longer tempered by the humorous laugh, but have the corrosive quality of some acrid chemical substance. One of the papers, however, that entitled 'Debasing the Moral Currency,' expresses a strongly marked characteristic of George Eliot's mind. It is a pithy protest against the tendency of the present generation to turn the grandest deeds and noblest works of art into food for laughter. For she hated nothing so much as mockery and ridicule of what other people reverenced, often remarking that those who considered themselves freest from superstitious fancies were the most intolerant. She carried this feeling to such a pitch that she even disliked a book like 'Alice in Wonderland' because it laughed at the things which children had had a kind of belief in. In censuring this vicious habit of burlesquing the things that ought to be regarded with awe and admiration, she remarks, "Let a greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty, majesty and pathos, and the more you heap up the desecrated symbols, the greater will be the lack of the ennobling emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one with virtue." 'Looking Backward' is the only paper in 'Theophrastus Such' quite free from cynicism. It contains, under a slightly veiled form, pathetically tender reminiscences of her own early life. This volume, not published till May 1879, was written before the incalculable loss which befell George Eliot in the autumn of the preceding year. After spending the summer of 1878 in the pleasant retirement of Witley, Lewes and George Eliot returned to London. A severe cold taken by Lewes proved the forerunner of a serious disorder, and, after a short illness, this bright, many-sided, indefatigable thinker, passed away in his sixty-second year. He had frequently said to his friends that the most desirable end of a well-spent life was a painless death; and although his own could not be called painless, his sufferings were at least of short duration. Concerning the suffering and anguish of her who was left behind to mourn him, one may most fitly say, in her own words, that, "for the first sharp pangs there is no comfort--whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain." In her case, also, the "clinging companionship with the dead" was gradually linked with her living affections, and she found alleviation for her sorrow in resuming those habits of continuous mental occupation which had become second nature with her. In a letter addressed to a friend, who, only a few short months afterwards, suffered a like heavy bereavement, there breathes the spirit in which George Eliot bore her own sorrow: "I understand it all.... There is but one refuge--the having much to do. You have the mother's duties. Not that these can yet make your life other than a burden to be patiently borne. Nothing can, except the gradual adaptation of your soul to the new conditions.... It is among my most cherished memories that I knew your husband, and from the first delighted in him.... All blessing--and even the sorrow that is a form of love has a heart of blessing--is tenderly wished for you." On seeing this lady for the first time after their mutual loss, George Eliot asked her eagerly: "Do the children help? Does it make any difference?" Some help there was for the widowed heart of this sorrowing woman in throwing herself, with all her energies, into the work which Lewes had left unfinished at his death, and preparing it for publication, with the help of an expert. Another subject which occupied her thoughts at this time, was the foundation of the "George Henry Lewes Studentship," in order to commemorate the name of one who had done so much to distinguish himself in the varied fields of literature, science, and philosophy. The value of the studentship is slightly under £200 a year. It is worth noticing that persons of both sexes are received as candidates. The object of the endowment is to encourage the prosecution of original research in physiology, a science to whose study Lewes had devoted himself most assiduously for many years. Writing of this matter to a young lady, one of the Girton students, George Eliot says: "I know ... will be glad to hear also that both in England and Germany the type, or scheme, on which the studentship is arranged has been regarded with satisfaction, as likely to be a useful model." Amid such preoccupations, and the preparation of 'Theophrastus Such' for the press, the months passed on, and George Eliot was beginning to see her friends again, when one day she not only took the world, but her intimate circle by surprise, by her marriage with Mr. John Walter Cross, on the 6th of May, 1880. The acquaintance with this gentleman, dating from the year 1867, had long ago grown into the warmest friendship, and his boundless devotion to the great woman whose society was to him as his daily bread, no doubt induced her to take a step which could not fail to startle even those who loved her the most. But George Eliot's was a nature that needed some one especially to love. And though that precious companionship, at once stimulating and sympathetic, which she had so long enjoyed, was taken from her, she could still find comfort during the remainder of her life in the love, the appreciation, and the tender care which were proffered to her by Mr. Cross. Unfortunately her life was not destined to be prolonged. Although seeming fairly well at this date, George Eliot's health, always delicate, had probably received a shock, from which it never recovered. Only six months before her marriage three eminent medical men were attending her for a painful disease. However, there seemed still a prospect of happiness for her when she and Mr. Cross went for a tour in Italy, settling, on their return, at her favourite country house at Witley. In the autumn they once more made their home in London, at Mr. Cross's town house at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and Mrs. Cross, who was again beginning to receive her friends, seemed, to all appearances, well and happy, with a prospect of domestic love and unimpaired mental activity stretching out before her. But it was not to be. On Friday, the 17th of December, George Eliot attended a representation of the 'Agamemnon,' in Greek, by Oxford undergraduates, and was so stirred by the grand words of her favourite Æschylus, that she was contemplating a fresh perusal of the Greek dramatists with her husband. On the following day she went to the Saturday popular concert, and on returning home played through some of the music she had been hearing. Her fatal cold was probably caught on that occasion, for, although she received her friends, according to custom, on the Sunday afternoon, she felt indisposed in the evening, and on the following day an affection of the larynx necessitated medical advice. There seemed no cause for alarm at first, till on Wednesday it was unexpectedly discovered that inflammation had arisen in the heart, and that no hope of recovery remained. Before midnight of the 22nd of December, 1880, George Eliot, who died at precisely the same age as Lewes, had passed quietly and painlessly away; and on Christmas Eve the announcement of her death was received with general grief. She was buried by the side of George Henry Lewes, in the cemetery at Highgate. George Eliot's career has been habitually described as uniform and uneventful. In reality nothing is more misleading. On the contrary, her life, from its rising to its setting, describes an astonishingly wide orbit. If one turns back in imagination from the little Staffordshire village whence her father sprang, to the simple rural surroundings of her own youth, and traces her history to the moment when a crowd of mourners, consisting of the most distinguished men and women in England, followed her to the grave, one cannot help realising how truly eventful was the life of her who now joined in spirit the "Choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues." LONDON: PRINTED BY WM. CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 
42078	----	[Transcriber's Note: letters that were superscripted in the original are surrounded by brackets and preceded by a caret ^.] _JANE AUSTEN'S WORKS._ SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 2 vols. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 2 vols. MANSFIELD PARK 2 vols. EMMA 2 vols. NORTHANGER ABBEY 1 vol. PERSUASION 1 vol. LADY SUSAN--THE WATSONS WITH A MEMOIR 1 vol. LETTERS 1 vol. [Illustration: J. Austen _From a Painting in the possession of the Rev. Morland Rice, of Bramber._] THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN _Selected from the Compilation of her Great Nephew_ _EDWARD, LORD BRADBOURNE_ BY SARAH CHAUNCEY WOOLSEY BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1908 [Transcriber's Note: While the title page gives credit to Lord Bradbourne, the actual title of Edward was Lord Brabourne.] _Copyright, 1892_, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. Printers S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A. PREFACE. THE recent cult for Miss Austen, which has resulted in no less than ten new editions of her novels within a decade and three memoirs by different hands within as many years, have made the facts of her life familiar to most readers. It was a short life, and an uneventful one as viewed from the standpoint of our modern times, when steam and electricity have linked together the ends of the earth, and the very air seems teeming with news, agitations, discussions. We have barely time to recover our breath between post and post; and the morning paper with its statements of disaster and its hints of still greater evils to be, is scarcely out-lived, when, lo! in comes the evening issue, contradicting the news of the morning, to be sure, but full of omens and auguries of its own to strew our pillows with the seed of wakefulness. To us, publications come hot and hot from the press. Telegraphic wires like the intricate and incalculable zigzags of the lightning ramify above our heads; and who can tell at what moment their darts may strike? In Miss Austen's day the tranquil, drowsy, decorous English day of a century since, all was different. News travelled then from hand to hand, carried in creaking post-wagons, or in cases of extreme urgency by men on horseback. When a gentleman journeying in his own "chaise" took three days in going from Exeter to London, a distance now covered in three hours of railroad, there was little chance of frequent surprises. Love, sorrow, and death were in the world then as now, and worked their will upon the sons of men; but people did not expect happenings every day or even every year. No doubt they lived the longer for this exemption from excitement, and kept their nerves in a state of wholesome repair; but it goes without saying that the events of which they knew so little did not stir them deeply. Miss Austen's life coincided with two of the momentous epochs of history,--the American struggle for independence, and the French Revolution; but there is scarcely an allusion to either in her letters. She was interested in the fleet and its victories because two of her brothers were in the navy and had promotion and prize-money to look forward to. In this connection she mentions Trafalgar and the Egyptian expedition, and generously remarks that she would read Southey's "Life of Nelson" if there was anything in it about her brother Frank! She honors Sir John Moore by remarking after his death that his mother would perhaps have preferred to have him less distinguished and still alive; further than that, the making of the gooseberry jam and a good recipe for orange wine interests her more than all the marchings and countermarchings, the manoeuvres and diplomacies, going on the world over. In the midst of the universal vortex of fear and hope, triumph and defeat, while the fate of Britain and British liberty hung trembling in the balance, she sits writing her letters, trimming her caps, and discussing small beer with her sister in a lively and unruffled fashion wonderful to contemplate. "The society of rural England in those days," as Mr. Goldwin Smith happily puts it, "enjoyed a calm of its own in the midst of the European tempest like the windless centre of a circular storm." The point of view of a woman with such an environment must naturally be circumscribed and narrow; and in this Miss Austen's charm consists. Seeing little, she painted what she saw with absolute fidelity and a dexterity and perfection unequalled. "On her was bestowed, though in a humble form, the gift which had been bestowed on Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Scott, and a few others,--the gift of creative power." Endowed with the keenest and most delicate insight and a vivid sense of humor, she depicted with exactitude what she observed and what she understood, giving to each fact and emotion its precise shade and value. The things she did not see she did not attempt. Affectation was impossible to her,--most of all, affectation of knowledge or feeling not justly her own. "She held the mirror up to her time" with an exquisite sincerity and fidelity; and the closeness of her study brought her intimately near to those hidden springs which underlie all human nature. This is the reason why, for all their skimp skirts, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and bygone impossible bonnets, her characters do not seem to us old-fashioned. Minds and hearts are made pretty much after the same pattern from century to century; and given a modern dress and speech, Emma or Elizabeth or dear Anne Eliot could enter a drawing-room to-day, and excite no surprise except by so closely resembling the people whom they would find there. "Miss Austen's novels are dateless things," Mr. Augustine Birrell tells us. "Nobody in his senses would speak of them as 'old novels.' 'John Inglesant' is an old novel, so is 'Ginx's Baby.' But Emma is quite new, and, like a wise woman, affords few clues to her age." We allude with a special touch of affection to Anne Eliot. "Persuasion," which was written during the last two years of Miss Austen's life, when the refining touch of Eternity was already upon her, has always seemed to us the most perfect of her novels; and Anne, with her exquisite breeding and unselfish straightforwardness, just touched with the tender reserve of memory and regret, one of her best portraitures. But this is a matter of individual taste. Doubtless Elizabeth Bennet is "better fun" as the modern girl would say. Miss Austen herself preferred her. She had a droll and pretty way of talking about her characters which showed how real they were to her own mind, and made them equally real to other people. In 1813 she had the good luck to light upon a portrait of Jane Bennet at an exhibition. "I was very well pleased (pray tell Fanny) with a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her sister, but there was no Mrs. Darcy. Perhaps I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. Mrs. Bingley's is exactly like herself,--size, shaped face, features and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favorite color with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow." And later:-- "We have been both to the exhibition and Sir J. Reynolds'; and I am disappointed, for there was nothing like Mrs. D. at either. I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling,--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy." The letters included in this series comprise about three quarters of the collection in two volumes published in 1884 by her great-nephew Lord Brabourne. The lightness, almost friskiness, of their tone cannot fail to strike the reader. Modern letters written by women are filled more or less with hints and queries; questionings as to the why and the wherefore occur; allusions to the various "fads" of the day, literary or artistic,--Ibsen, Tolstoi, Browning, Esoteric Buddhism, Wagner's Music, the Mind Cure, Social Science, Causes and Reforms. But Cowper and Crabbe were the poetical sensations in Miss Austen's time, Scott and Byron its phenomenal novelties; it took months to get most books printed, and years to persuade anybody to read them. Furthermore the letters, in all probability, are carefully chosen to reveal only the more superficial side of their writer. There are wide gaps of omission, covering important events such as Mr. Austen's death, the long illness through which Jane nursed her brother Henry, and the anxieties and worries which his failure in business caused to the whole family. What is vouchsafed us is a glimpse of the girlish and untroubled moments of Miss Austen's life; and the glimpse is a sweet and friendly one. We are glad to have it, in spite of our suspicion that another and even more interesting part of her personality is withheld from us. A good daughter, a delightful sister, the most perfect of aunts, what better record could there be of a single woman? Her literary work never stood in the way of her home duties, any more than her "quiet, limpid, unimpassioned style" stood between her thought and her readers. Her fame may justly be said to be almost entirely posthumous. She was read and praised to a moderate degree during her lifetime, but all her novels together brought her no more than seven hundred pounds; and her reputation, as it were, was in its close-sheathed bud when, at the early age of forty-one, she died. It would have excited in her an amused incredulity, no doubt, had any one predicted that two generations after her death the real recognition of her powers was to come. Time, which like desert sands has effaced the footprints of so many promising authors, has, with her, served as the desert wind, to blow aside those dusts of the commonplace which for a while concealed her true proportions. She is loved more than she ever hoped to be, and far more widely known. Mrs. Ritchie tells somewhere an anecdote of a party of seven assembled at a dinner-table, where the question arose of the locality of one of Miss Austen's places,--Maple Grove, the residence of Mr. Suckling, if we are not mistaken,--and six of the persons present at once recognized the allusion, and had a formed opinion on the subject. The seventh was a Frenchman who did not read English! Scott, Macaulay, Sir James Mackintosh, Miss Martineau, Mrs. Ritchie, Miss Mitford, and a host of others have vied in their generous tributes of admiration. But most striking of all, to our thinking, is that paid to Miss Austen by Lord Tennyson when, in some visit to Lyme not many years since, those with him pointed out this and the other feature of the place only to be interrupted with--"Never mind all that. Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!" Could non-historical verisimilitude go farther or mean more? S. C. W. NEWPORT, June, 1892. [Illustration] LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN. I. STEVENTON, Thursday (January 16, 1796). I HAVE just received yours and Mary's letter, and I thank you both, though their contents might have been more agreeable. I do not at all expect to see you on Tuesday, since matters have fallen out so unpleasantly; and if you are not able to return till after that day, it will hardly be possible for us to send for you before Saturday, though for my own part I care so little about the ball that it would be no sacrifice to me to give it up for the sake of seeing you two days earlier. We are extremely sorry for poor Eliza's illness. I trust, however, that she has continued to recover since you wrote, and that you will none of you be the worse for your attendance on her. What a good-for-nothing fellow Charles is to bespeak the stockings! I hope he will be too hot all the rest of his life for it! I sent you a letter yesterday to Ibthorp, which I suppose you will not receive at Kintbury. It was not very long or very witty, and therefore if you never receive it, it does not much signify. I wrote principally to tell you that the Coopers were arrived and in good health. The little boy is very like Dr. Cooper, and the little girl is to resemble Jane, they say. Our party to Ashe to-morrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing without him), Buller, who is now staying with us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat. I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last letter, for I write only for fame, and without any view to pecuniary emolument. Edward is gone to spend the day with his friend, John Lyford, and does not return till to-morrow. Anna is now here; she came up in her chaise to spend the day with her young cousins, but she does not much take to them or to anything about them, except Caroline's spinning-wheel. I am very glad to find from Mary that Mr. and Mrs. Fowle are pleased with you. I hope you will continue to give satisfaction. How impertinent you are to write to me about Tom, as if I had not opportunities of hearing from him myself! The last letter that I received from him was dated on Friday, 8th, and he told me that if the wind should be favorable on Sunday, which it proved to be, they were to sail from Falmouth on that day. By this time, therefore, they are at Barbadoes, I suppose. The Rivers are still at Manydown, and are to be at Ashe to-morrow. I intended to call on the Miss Biggs yesterday had the weather been tolerable. Caroline, Anna, and I have just been devouring some cold souse, and it would be difficult to say which enjoyed it most. Tell Mary that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care sixpence. Assure her also, as a last and indubitable proof of Warren's indifference to me, that he actually drew that gentleman's picture for me, and delivered it to me without a sigh. _Friday._--At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. Wm. Chute called here yesterday. I wonder what he means by being so civil. There is a report that Tom is going to be married to a Lichfield lass. John Lyford and his sister bring Edward home to-day, dine with us, and we shall all go together to Ashe. I understand that we are to draw for partners. I shall be extremely impatient to hear from you again, that I may know how Eliza is, and when you are to return. With best love, etc., I am affectionately yours, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, The Rev. Mr. Fowle's, Kintbury, Newbury II. CORK STREET, Tuesday morn (August, 1796). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted. We reached Staines yesterday, I do not (know) when, without suffering so much from the heat as I had hoped to do. We set off again this morning at seven o'clock, and had a very pleasant drive, as the morning was cloudy and perfectly cool. I came all the way in the chaise from Hertford Bridge. Edward[1] and Frank[2] are both gone out to seek their fortunes; the latter is to return soon and help us seek ours. The former we shall never see again. We are to be at Astley's to-night, which I am glad of. Edward has heard from Henry this morning. He has not been at the races at all, unless his driving Miss Pearson over to Rowling one day can be so called. We shall find him there on Thursday. I hope you are all alive after our melancholy parting yesterday, and that you pursued your intended avocation with success. God bless you! I must leave off, for we are going out. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Everybody's love. FOOTNOTES: [1] Miss Austen's second brother. [2] Francis, afterward Sir Francis Austen, Senior Admiral of the Fleet, and K. C. B. III. ROWLING, Monday (September 5). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it. Let me know how many, besides their fourteen selves and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, Michael will contrive to place about their coach, and how many of the gentlemen, musicians, and waiters he will have persuaded to come in their shooting-jackets. I hope John Lovett's accident will not prevent his attending the ball, as you will otherwise be obliged to dance with Mr. Tincton the whole evening. Let me know how J. Harwood deports himself without the Miss Biggs, and which of the Marys will carry the day with my brother James. _We_ were at a ball on Saturday, I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone, and in the evening danced two country-dances and the Boulangeries. I opened the ball with Edward Bridges; the other couples were Lewis Cage and Harriet, Frank and Louisa, Fanny and George. Elizabeth played one country-dance, Lady Bridges the other, which she made Henry dance with her, and Miss Finch played the Boulangeries. In reading over the last three or four lines, I am aware of my having expressed myself in so doubtful a manner that if I did not tell you to the contrary, you might imagine it was Lady Bridges who made Henry dance with her at the same time that she was playing, which, if not impossible, must appear a very improbable event to you. But it was Elizabeth who danced. We supped there, and walked home at night under the shade of two umbrellas. To-day the Goodnestone party begins to disperse and spread itself abroad. Mr. and Mrs. Cage and George repair to Hythe. Lady Waltham, Miss Bridges, and Miss Mary Finch to Dover, for the health of the two former. I have never seen Marianne at all. On Thursday Mr. and Mrs. Bridges return to Danbury; Miss Harriet Hales accompanies them to London on her way to Dorsetshire. Farmer Claringbould died this morning, and I fancy Edward means to get some of his farm, if he can cheat Sir Brook enough in the agreement. We have just got some venison from Godmersham, which the two Mr. Harveys are to dine on to-morrow, and on Friday or Saturday the Goodnestone people are to finish their scraps. Henry went away on Friday, as he purposed, _without fayl_. You will hear from him soon, I imagine, as he talked of writing to Steventon shortly. Mr. Richard Harvey is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, and only known to half the neighborhood, you must not mention it. The lady's name is Musgrave. I am in great distress. I cannot determine whether I shall give Richis half a guinea or only five shillings when I go away. Counsel me, amiable Miss Austen, and tell me which will be the most. We walked Frank last night to Crixhall Ruff, and he appeared much edified. Little Edward was breeched yesterday for good and all, and was whipped into the bargain. Pray remember me to everybody who does not inquire after me; those who do, remember me without bidding. Give my love to Mary Harrison, and tell her I wish, whenever she is attached to a young man, some respectable Dr. Marchmont may keep them apart for five volumes. . . . IV. ROWLING, Thursday (September 15). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--We have been very gay since I wrote last; dining at Nackington, returning by moonlight, and everything quite in style, not to mention Mr. Claringbould's funeral which we saw go by on Sunday. I believe I told you in a former letter that Edward had some idea of taking the name of Claringbould; but that scheme is over, though it would be a very eligible as well as a very pleasant plan, would any one advance him money enough to begin on. We rather expected Mr. Milles to have done so on Tuesday; but to our great surprise nothing was said on the subject, and unless it is in your power to assist your brother with five or six hundred pounds, he must entirely give up the idea. At Nackington we met Lady Sondes' picture over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, and the pictures of her three children in an ante-room, besides Mr. Scott, Miss Fletcher, Mr. Toke, Mr. J. Toke, and the archdeacon Lynch. Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does not become her complexion. There are two traits in her character which are pleasing,--namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea. If you should ever see Lucy, you may tell her that I scolded Miss Fletcher for her negligence in writing, as she desired me to do, but without being able to bring her to any proper sense of shame,--that Miss Fletcher says, in her defence, that as everybody whom Lucy knew when she was in Canterbury has now left it, she has nothing at all to write to her about. By _everybody_, I suppose Miss Fletcher means that a new set of officers have arrived there. But this is a note of my own. Mrs. Milles, Mr. John Toke, and in short everybody of any sensibility inquired in tender strains after you, and I took an opportunity of assuring Mr. J. T. that neither he nor his father need longer keep themselves single for you. We went in our two carriages to Nackington; but how we divided I shall leave you to surmise, merely observing that as Elizabeth and I were without either hat or bonnet, it would not have been very convenient for us to go in the chaise. We went by Bifrons, and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him on whom I once fondly doated. We dine to-day at Goodnestone, to meet my aunt Fielding from Margate and a Mr. Clayton, her professed admirer--at least, so I imagine. Lady Bridges has received very good accounts of Marianne, who is already certainly the better for her bathing. So His Royal Highness Sir Thomas Williams has at length sailed; the papers say "on a cruise." But I hope they are gone to Cork, or I shall have written in vain. Give my love to Jane, as she arrived at Steventon yesterday, I dare say. I sent a message to Mr. Digweed from Edward in a letter to Mary Lloyd which she ought to receive to-day; but as I know that the Harwoods are not very exact as to their letters, I may as well repeat it to you. Mr. Digweed is to be informed that illness has prevented Seward's coming over to look at the repairs intended at the farm, but that he will come as soon as he can. Mr. Digweed may also be informed, if you think proper, that Mr. and Mrs. Milles are to dine here to-morrow, and that Mrs. Joan Knatchbull is to be asked to meet them. Mr. Richard Harvey's match is put off till he has got a better Christian name, of which he has great hopes. Mr. Children's two sons are both going to be married, John and George. They are to have one wife between them, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the Black Hole at Calcutta. I depend on hearing from James very soon; he promised me an account of the ball, and by this time he must have collected his ideas enough after the fatigue of dancing to give me one. Edward and Fly went out yesterday very early in a couple of shooting jackets, and came home like a couple of bad shots, for they killed nothing at all. They are out again to-day, and are not yet returned. Delightful sport! They are just come home, Edward with his two brace, Frank with his two and a half. What amiable young men! _Friday._--Your letter and one from Henry are just come, and the contents of both accord with my scheme more than I had dared expect. In one particular I could wish it otherwise, for Henry is very indifferent indeed. You must not expect us quite so early, however, as Wednesday, the 20th,--on that day se'nnight, according to our present plan, we may be with you. Frank had never any idea of going away before Monday, the 26th. I shall write to Miss Mason immediately, and press her returning with us, which Henry thinks very likely, and particularly eligible. Buy Mary Harrison's gown by all means. You shall have mine for ever so much money, though, if I am tolerably rich when I get home, I shall like it very much myself. As to the mode of our travelling to town, _I_ want to go in a stage-coach, but Frank will not let me. As you are likely to have the Williams and Lloyds with you next week, you would hardly find room for us then. If any one wants anything in town, they must send their commissions to Frank, as _I_ shall merely pass through it. The tallow-chandler is Penlington, at the Crown and Beehive, Charles Street, Covent Garden. Miss AUSTEN, Steventon, Overton, Hants. V. ROWLING, Sunday (September 18). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--This morning has been spent in doubt and deliberation, in forming plans and removing difficulties, for it ushered in the day with an event which I had not intended should take place so soon by a week. Frank has received his appointment on board the "Captain John Gore," commanded by the "Triton," and will therefore be obliged to be in town on Wednesday; and though I have every disposition in the world to accompany him on that day, I cannot go on the uncertainty of the Pearsons being at home, as I should not have a place to go to in case they were from home. I wrote to Miss P. on Friday, and hoped to receive an answer from her this morning, which would have rendered everything smooth and easy, and would have enabled us to leave this place to-morrow, as Frank, on first receiving his appointment, intended to do. He remains till Wednesday merely to accommodate me. I have written to her again to-day, and desired her to answer it by return of post. On Tuesday, therefore, I shall positively know whether they can receive me on Wednesday. If they cannot, Edward has been so good as to promise to take me to Greenwich on the Monday following, which was the day before fixed on, if that suits them better. If I have no answer at all on Tuesday, I must suppose Mary is not at home, and must wait till I do hear, as after having invited her to go to Steventon with me, it will not quite do to go home and say no more about it. My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'. It will hardly be in Frank's power to take me home,--nay, it certainly will not. I shall write again as soon as I get to Greenwich. What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance. If Miss Pearson should return with me, pray be careful not to expect too much beauty. I will not pretend to say that on a first view she quite answered the opinion I had formed of her. My mother, I am sure, will be disappointed if she does not take great care. From what I remember of her picture, it is no great resemblance. I am very glad that the idea of returning with Frank occurred to me; for as to Henry's coming into Kent again, the time of its taking place is so very uncertain that I should be waiting for dead men's shoes. I had once determined to go with Frank to-morrow and take my chance, etc., but they dissuaded me from so rash a step as I really think on consideration it would have been; for if the Pearsons were not at home, I should inevitably fall a sacrifice to the arts of some fat woman who would make me drunk with small beer. Mary is brought to bed of a boy,--both doing very well. I shall leave you to guess what Mary I mean. Adieu, with best love to all your agreeable inmates. Don't let the Lloyds go on any account before I return, unless Miss P. is of the party. How ill I have written! I begin to hate myself. Yours ever, J. AUSTEN. The "Triton" is a new 32 frigate just launched at Deptford. Frank is much pleased with the prospect of having Captain Gore under his command. Miss AUSTEN, Steventon, Overton, Hants. VI. "BULL AND GEORGE," DARTFORD, Wednesday (October 24, 1798). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--You have already heard from Daniel, I conclude, in what excellent time we reached and quitted Sittingbourne, and how very well my mother bore her journey thither. I am now able to send you a continuation of the same good account of her. She was very little fatigued on her arrival at this place, has been refreshed by a comfortable dinner, and now seems quite stout. It wanted five minutes of twelve when we left Sittingbourne, from whence we had a famous pair of horses, which took us to Rochester in an hour and a quarter; the postboy seemed determined to show my mother that Kentish drivers were not always tedious, and really drove as fast as Cax. Our next stage was not quite so expeditiously performed; the road was heavy, and our horses very indifferent. However, we were in such good time and my mother bore her journey so well, that expedition was of little importance to us; and as it was, we were very little more than two hours and a half coming hither, and it was scarcely past four when we stopped at the inn. My mother took some of her bitters at Ospringe, and some more at Rochester, and she ate some bread several times. We have got apartments up two pair of stairs, as we could not be otherwise accommodated with a sitting-room and bed-chambers on the same floor which we wished to be. We have one double-bedded and one single-bedded room; in the former my mother and I are to sleep. I shall leave you to guess who is to occupy the other. We sate down to dinner a little after five, and had some beef-steaks and a boiled fowl, but no oyster sauce. I should have begun my letter soon after our arrival, but for a little adventure which prevented me. After we had been here a quarter of an hour it was discovered that my writing and dressing boxes had been by accident put into a chaise which was just packing off as we came in, and were driven away toward Gravesend in their way to the West Indies. No part of my property could have been such a prize before, for in my writing-box was all my worldly wealth, 7_l._, and my dear Harry's deputation. Mr. Nottley immediately despatched a man and horse after the chaise, and in half an hour's time I had the pleasure of being as rich as ever; they were got about two or three miles off. My day's journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. Your watchfulness with regard to the weather on our accounts was very kind and very effectual. We had one heavy shower on leaving Sittingbourne, but afterwards the clouds cleared away, and we had a very bright _chrystal_ afternoon. My father is now reading the "Midnight Bell," which he has got from the library, and mother sitting by the fire. Our route to-morrow is not determined. We have none of us much inclination for London, and if Mr. Nottley will give us leave, I think we shall go to Staines through Croydon and Kingston, which will be much pleasanter than any other way; but he is decidedly for Clapham and Battersea. God bless you all! Yours affectionately, J. A. I flatter myself that _itty Dordy_ will not forget me at least under a week. Kiss him for me. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham. VII. STEVENTON, Saturday (October 27). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter was a most agreeable surprise to me to-day, and I have taken a long sheet of paper to show my gratitude. We arrived here yesterday between four and five, but I cannot send you quite so triumphant an account of our last day's journey as of the first and second. Soon after I had finished my letter from Staines, my mother began to suffer from the exercise or fatigue of travelling, and she was a good deal indisposed. She had not a very good night at Staines, but bore her journey better than I had expected, and at Basingstoke, where we stopped more than half an hour, received much comfort from a mess of broth and the sight of Mr. Lyford, who recommended her to take twelve drops of laudanum when she went to bed as a composer, which she accordingly did. James called on us just as we were going to tea, and my mother was well enough to talk very cheerfully to him before she went to bed. James seems to have taken to his old trick of coming to Steventon in spite of Mary's reproaches, for he was here before breakfast and is now paying us a second visit. They were to have dined here to-day, but the weather is too bad. I have had the pleasure of hearing that Martha is with them. James fetched her from Ibthorp on Thursday, and she will stay with them till she removes to Kintbury. We met with no adventures at all in our journey yesterday, except that our trunk had once nearly slipped off, and we were obliged to stop at Hartley to have our wheels greased. Whilst my mother and Mr. Lyford were together I went to Mrs. Ryder's and bought what I intended to buy, but not in much perfection. There were no narrow braces for children, and scarcely any notting silk; but Miss Wood, as usual, is going to town very soon, and will lay in a fresh stock. I gave 2_s._ 3_d._ a yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance. I bought some Japan ink likewise, and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend. I am very grand indeed; I had the dignity of dropping out my mother's laudanum last night. I carry about the keys of the wine and closet, and twice since I began this letter have had orders to give in the kitchen. Our dinner was very good yesterday, and the chicken boiled perfectly tender; therefore I shall not be obliged to dismiss Nanny on that account. Almost everything was unpacked and put away last night. Nanny chose to do it, and I was not sorry to be busy. I have unpacked the gloves, and placed yours in your drawer. Their color is light and pretty, and I believe exactly what we fixed on. Your letter was chaperoned here by one from Mrs. Cooke, in which she says that "Battleridge" is not to come out before January, and she is so little satisfied with Cawthorn's dilatoriness that she never means to employ him again. Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband. There has been a great deal of rain here for this last fortnight, much more than in Kent, and indeed we found the roads all the way from Staines most disgracefully dirty. Steventon lane has its full share of it, and I don't know when I shall be able to get to Deane. I hear that Martha is in better looks and spirits than she has enjoyed for a long time, and I flatter myself she will now be able to jest openly about Mr. W. The spectacles which Molly found are my mother's, the scissors my father's. We are very glad to hear such a good account of your patients, little and great. My dear itty Dordy's remembrance of me is very pleasing to me,--foolishly pleasing, because I know it will be over so soon. My attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manner until a few years have turned him into an ungovernable, ungracious fellow. The books from Winton are all unpacked and put away; the binding has compressed them most conveniently, and there is now very good room in the bookcase for all that we wish to have there. I believe the servants were very glad to see us Nanny was, I am sure. She confesses that it was very dull, and yet she had her child with her till last Sunday. I understand that there are some grapes left, but I believe not many; they must be gathered as soon as possible, or this rain will entirely rot them. I am quite angry with myself for not writing closer; why is my alphabet so much more sprawly than yours? Dame Tilbury's daughter has lain in. Shall I give her any of your baby clothes? The laceman was here only a few days ago. How unfortunate for both of us that he came so soon! Dame Bushell washes for us only one week more, as Sukey has got a place. John Steevens' wife undertakes our purification. She does not look as if anything she touched would ever be clean, but who knows? We do not seem likely to have any other maidservant at present, but Dame Staples will supply the place of one. Mary has hired a young girl from Ashe who has never been out to service to be her scrub, but James fears her not being strong enough for the place. Earle Harwood has been to Deane lately, as I think Mary wrote us word, and his family then told him that they would receive his wife, if she continued to behave well for another year. He was very grateful, as well he might; their behavior throughout the whole affair has been particularly kind. Earle and his wife live in the most private manner imaginable at Portsmouth, without keeping a servant of any kind. What a prodigious innate love of virtue she must have, to marry under such circumstances! It is now Saturday evening, but I wrote the chief of this in the morning. My mother has not been down at all to-day; the laudanum made her sleep a good deal, and upon the whole I think she is better. My father and I dined by ourselves. How strange! He and John Bond are now very happy together, for I have just heard the heavy step of the latter along the passage. James Digweed called to-day, and I gave him his brother's deputation. Charles Harwood, too, has just called to ask how we are, in his way from Dummer, whither he has been conveying Miss Garrett, who is going to return to her former residence in Kent. I will leave off, or I shall not have room to add a word to-morrow. _Sunday._--My mother has had a very good night, and feels much better to-day. I have received my aunt's letter, and thank you for your scrap. I will write to Charles soon. Pray give Fanny and Edward a kiss from me, and ask George if he has got a new song for me. 'Tis really very kind of my aunt to ask us to Bath again; a kindness that deserves a better return than to profit by it. Yours ever, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. VIII. STEVENTON, December 1. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am so good as to write to you again thus speedily, to let you know that I have just heard from Frank. He was at Cadiz, alive and well, on October 19, and had then very lately received a letter from you, written as long ago as when the "London" was at St. Helen's. But his _raly_ latest intelligence of us was in one from me of September 1, which I sent soon after we got to Godmersham. He had written a packet full for his dearest friends in England, early in October, to go by the "Excellent;" but the "Excellent" was not sailed, nor likely to sail, when he despatched this to me. It comprehended letters for both of us, for Lord Spencer, Mr. Daysh, and the East India Directors. Lord St. Vincent had left the fleet when he wrote, and was gone to Gibraltar, it was said to superintend the fitting out of a private expedition from thence against some of the enemies' ports; Minorca or Malta were conjectured to be the objects. Frank writes in good spirits, but says that our correspondence cannot be so easily carried on in future as it has been, as the communication between Cadiz and Lisbon is less frequent than formerly. You and my mother, therefore, must not alarm yourselves at the long intervals that may divide his letters. I address this advice to you two as being the most tender-hearted of the family. My mother made her _entrée_ into the dressing-room through crowds of admiring spectators yesterday afternoon, and we all drank tea together for the first time these five weeks. She has had a tolerable night, and bids fair for a continuance in the same brilliant course of action to-day. . . . Mr. Lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither. I was at Deane yesterday morning. Mary was very well, but does not gain bodily strength very fast. When I saw her so stout on the third and sixth days, I expected to have seen her as well as ever by the end of a fortnight. James went to Ibthorp yesterday to see his mother and child. Letty is with Mary[3] at present, of course exceedingly happy, and in raptures with the child. Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one. Elizabeth was really a pretty object with her nice clean cap put on so tidily and her dress so uniformly white and orderly. We live entirely in the dressing-room now, which I like very much; I always feel so much more elegant in it than in the parlor. No news from Kintbury yet. Eliza sports with our impatience. She was very well last Thursday. Who is Miss Maria Montresor going to marry, and what is to become of Miss Mulcaster? I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I hope you do not wear yours too often. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hairdressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering. I have had it cut lately by Mr. Butler. There is no reason to suppose that Miss Morgan is dead after all. Mr. Lyford gratified us very much yesterday by his praises of my father's mutton, which they all think the finest that was ever ate. John Bond begins to find himself grow old, which John Bonds ought not to do, and unequal to much hard work; a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labor, and John himself is to have the care of the sheep. There are not more people engaged than before, I believe; only men instead of boys. I fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters. Lizzie Bond is just apprenticed to Miss Small, so we may hope to see her able to spoil gowns in a few years. My father has applied to Mr. May for an ale-house for Robert, at his request, and to Mr. Deane, of Winchester, likewise. This was my mother's idea, who thought he would be proud to oblige a relation of Edward in return for Edward's accepting his money. He sent a very civil answer indeed, but has no house vacant at present. May expects to have an empty one soon at Farnham, so perhaps Nanny may have the honor of drawing ale for the Bishop. I shall write to Frank to-morrow. Charles Powlett gave a dance on Thursday, to the great disturbance of all his neighbors, of course, who, you know, take a most lively interest in the state of his finances, and live in hopes of his being soon ruined. We are very much disposed to like our new maid; she knows nothing of a dairy, to be sure, which, in our family, is rather against her, but she is to be taught it all. In short, we have felt the inconvenience of being without a maid so long, that we are determined to like her, and she will find it a hard matter to displease us. As yet, she seems to cook very well, is uncommonly stout, and says she can work well at her needle. _Sunday._--My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward's pigs, and desires he may be told, as encouragement to his taste for them, that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in _his_ pigs, has had pigstyes of a most elegant construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises. Affectionately yours, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham. FOOTNOTE: [3] Mrs. James Austen. IX. STEVENTON, Tuesday (December 18). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter came quite as soon as I expected, and so your letters will always do, because I have made it a rule not to expect them till they come, in which I think I consult the ease of us both. It is a great satisfaction to us to hear that your business is in a way to be settled, and so settled as to give you as little inconvenience as possible. You are very welcome to my father's name and to his services if they are ever required in it. I shall keep my ten pounds too, to wrap myself up in next winter. I took the liberty a few days ago of asking your black velvet bonnet to lend me its cawl, which it very readily did, and by which I have been enabled to give a considerable improvement of dignity to cap, which was before too _nidgetty_ to please me. I shall wear it on Thursday, but I hope you will not be offended with me for following your advice as to its ornaments only in part. I still venture to retain the narrow silver round it, put twice round without any bow, and instead of the black military feather shall put in the coquelicot one as being smarter, and besides coquelicot is to be all the fashion this winter. After the ball I shall probably make it entirely black. I am sorry that our dear Charles begins to feel the dignity of ill-usage. My father will write to Admiral Gambier. He must have already received so much satisfaction from his acquaintance and patronage of Frank, that he will be delighted, I dare say, to have another of the family introduced to him. I think it would be very right in Charles to address Sir Thomas on the occasion, though I cannot approve of your scheme of writing to him (which you communicated to me a few nights ago) to request him to come home and convey you to Steventon. To do you justice, however, you had some doubts of the propriety of such a measure yourself. I am very much obliged to my dear little George for his message,--for his love at least; his duty, I suppose, was only in consequence of some hint of my favorable intentions towards him from his father or mother. I am sincerely rejoiced, however, that I ever was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of tea. Give my best love to him. . . . _Wednesday._--I have changed my mind, and changed the trimmings of my cap this morning; they are now such as you suggested. I felt as if I should not prosper if I strayed from your directions, and I think it makes me look more like Lady Conyngham now than it did before, which is all that one lives for now. I believe I _shall_ make my new gown like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect? . . . I have just heard from Martha and Frank: his letter was written on November 12. All well and nothing particular. J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham. X. STEVENTON, Monday night (December 24). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I have got some pleasant news for you which I am eager to communicate, and therefore begin my letter sooner, though I shall not send it sooner than usual. Admiral Gambier, in reply to my father's application, writes as follows: "As it is usual to keep young officers in small vessels, it being most proper on account of their inexperience, and it being also a situation where they are more in the way of learning their duty, your son has been continued in the 'Scorpion;' but I have mentioned to the Board of Admiralty his wish to be in a frigate, and when a proper opportunity offers and it is judged that he has taken his turn in a small ship, I hope he will be removed. With regard to your son now in the 'London' I am glad I can give you the assurance that his promotion is likely to take place very soon, as Lord Spencer has been so good as to say he would include him in an arrangement that he proposes making in a short time relative to some promotions in that quarter." There! I may now finish my letter and go and hang myself, for I am sure I can neither write nor do anything which will not appear insipid to you after this. _Now_ I really think he will soon be made, and only wish we could communicate our foreknowledge of the event to him whom it principally concerns. My father has written to Daysh to desire that he will inform us, if he can, when the commission is sent. Your chief wish is now ready to be accomplished; and could Lord Spencer give happiness to Martha at the same time, what a joyful heart he would make of yours! I have sent the same extract of the sweets of Gambier to Charles, who, poor fellow, though he sinks into nothing but an humble attendant on the hero of the piece, will, I hope, be contented with the prospect held out to him. By what the Admiral says, it appears as if he had been designedly kept in the "Scorpion." But I will not torment myself with conjectures and suppositions; facts shall satisfy me. Frank had not heard from any of us for ten weeks when he wrote to me on November 12 in consequence of Lord St. Vincent being removed to Gibraltar. When his commission is sent, however, it will not be so long on its road as our letters, because all the Government despatches are forwarded by land to his lordship from Lisbon with great regularity. I returned from Manydown this morning, and found my mother certainly in no respect worse than when I left her. She does not like the cold weather, but that we cannot help. I spent my time very quietly and very pleasantly with Catherine. Miss Blackford is agreeable enough. I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal. I found only Catherine and her when I got to Manydown on Thursday. We dined together, and went together to Worting to seek the protection of Mrs. Clarke, with whom were Lady Mildmay, her eldest son, and Mr. and Mrs. Hoare. Our ball was very thin, but by no means unpleasant. There were thirty-one people, and only eleven ladies out of the number, and but five single women in the room. Of the gentlemen present you may have some idea from the list of my partners,--Mr. Wood, G. Lefroy, Rice, a Mr. Butcher (belonging to the Temples, a sailor and not of the 11th Light Dragoons), Mr. Temple (not the horrid one of all), Mr. Wm. Orde (cousin to the Kingsclere man), Mr. John Harwood, and Mr. Calland, who appeared as usual with his hat in his hand, and stood every now and then behind Catherine and me to be talked to and abused for not dancing. We teased him, however, into it at last. I was very glad to see him again after so long a separation, and he was altogether rather the genius and flirt of the evening. He inquired after you. There were twenty dances, and I danced them all, and without any fatigue. I was glad to find myself capable of dancing so much, and with so much satisfaction as I did; from my slender enjoyment of the Ashford balls (as assemblies for dancing) I had not thought myself equal to it, but in cold weather and with few couples I fancy I could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour. My black cap was openly admired by Mrs. Lefroy, and secretly I imagine by everybody else in the room. . . . Poor Edward! It is very hard that he, who has everything else in the world that he can wish for, should not have good health too. But I hope with the assistance of stomach complaints, faintnesses, and sicknesses, he will soon be restored to that blessing likewise. If his nervous complaint proceeded from a suppression of something that ought to be thrown out, which does not seem unlikely, the first of these disorders may really be a remedy, and I sincerely wish it may, for I know no one more deserving of happiness without alloy than Edward is. . . . The Lords of the Admiralty will have enough of our applications at present, for I hear from Charles that he has written to Lord Spencer himself to be removed. I am afraid his Serene Highness will be in a passion, and order some of our heads to be cut off. . . . You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve. . . . God bless you! Yours affectionately, JANE AUSTEN. _Wednesday._--The snow came to nothing yesterday, so I did go to Deane, and returned home at nine o'clock at night in the little carriage, and without being very cold. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XI. STEVENTON, Friday (December 28). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Frank is made. He was yesterday raised to the rank of Commander, and appointed to the "Petterel" sloop, now at Gibraltar. A letter from Daysh has just announced this, and as it is confirmed by a very friendly one from Mr. Mathew to the same effect, transcribing one from Admiral Gambier to the General, we have no reason to suspect the truth of it. As soon as you have cried a little for joy, you may go on, and learn further that the India House have taken _Captain Austen's_ petition into consideration,--this comes from Daysh,--and likewise that Lieutenant Charles John Austen is removed to the "Tamar" frigate,--this comes from the Admiral. We cannot find out where the "Tamar" is, but I hope we shall now see Charles here at all events. This letter is to be dedicated entirely to good news. If you will send my father an account of your washing and letter expenses, etc., he will send you a draft for the amount of it, as well as for your next quarter, and for Edward's rent. If you don't buy a muslin gown now on the strength of this money and Frank's promotion, I shall never forgive you. Mrs. Lefroy has just sent me word that Lady Dorchester meant to invite me to her ball on January 8, which, though an humble blessing compared with what the last page records, I do not consider as any calamity. I cannot write any more now, but I have written enough to make you very happy, and therefore may safely conclude. Yours affectionately, JANE. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park. XII. STEVENTON, Tuesday (January 8, 1799). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--You must read your letters over _five_ times in future before you send them, and then, perhaps, you may find them as entertaining as I do. I laughed at several parts of the one which I am now answering. Charles is not come yet, but he must come this morning, or he shall never know what I will do to him. The ball at Kempshott is this evening, and I have got him an invitation, though I have not been so considerate as to get him a partner. But the cases are different between him and Eliza Bailey, for he is not in a dying way, and may therefore be equal to getting a partner for himself. I believe I told you that Monday was to be the ball night, for which, and for all other errors into which I may ever have led you, I humbly ask your pardon. Elizabeth is very cruel about my writing music, and, as a punishment for her, I should insist upon always writing out all hers for her in future, if I were not punishing myself at the same time. I am tolerably glad to hear that Edward's income is so good a one,--as glad as I can be at anybody's being rich except you and me,--and I am thoroughly rejoiced to hear of his present to you. I am not to wear my white satin cap to-night, after all; I am to wear a mamalone cap instead, which Charles Fowle sent to Mary, and which she lends me. It is all the fashion now; worn at the opera, and by Lady Mildmays at Hackwood balls. I hate describing such things, and I dare say you will be able to guess what it is like. I have got over the dreadful epocha of mantua-making much better than I expected. My gown is made very much like my blue one, which you always told me sat very well, with only these variations: the sleeves are short, the wrap fuller, the apron comes over it, and a band of the same completes the whole. I assure you that I dread the idea of going to Brighton as much as you do, but I am not without hopes that something may happen to prevent it. F---- has lost his election at B----, and perhaps they may not be able to see company for some time. They talk of going to Bath, too, in the spring, and perhaps they may be overturned in their way down, and all laid up for the summer. _Wednesday._--I have had a cold and weakness in one of my eyes for some days, which makes writing neither very pleasant nor very profitable, and which will probably prevent my finishing this letter myself. My mother has undertaken to do it for me, and I shall leave the Kempshott ball for her. You express so little anxiety about my being murdered under Ash Park Copse by Mrs. Hulbert's servant, that I have a great mind not to tell you whether I was or not, and shall only say that I did not return home that night or the next, as Martha kindly made room for me in her bed, which was the shut-up one in the new nursery. Nurse and the child slept upon the floor, and there we all were in some confusion and great comfort. The bed did exceedingly well for us, both to lie awake in and talk till two o'clock, and to sleep in the rest of the night. I love Martha better than ever, and I mean to go and see her, if I can, when she gets home. We all dined at the Harwoods' on Thursday, and the party broke up the next morning. This complaint in my eye has been a sad bore to me, for I have not been able to read or work in any comfort since Friday; but one advantage will be derived from it, for I shall be such a proficient in music by the time I have got rid of my cold, that I shall be perfectly qualified in that science at least to take Mr. Roope's office at Eastwell next summer; and I am sure of Elizabeth's recommendation, be it only on Harriet's account. Of my talent in drawing I have given specimens in my letters to you, and I have nothing to do but to invent a few hard names for the stars. Mary grows rather more reasonable about her child's beauty, and says that she does not think him really handsome; but I suspect her moderation to be something like that of W---- W----'s mamma. Perhaps Mary has told you that they are going to enter more into dinner-parties; the Biggs and Mr. Holder dine there to-morrow, and I am to meet them. I shall sleep there. Catherine has the honor of giving her name to a set, which will be composed of two Withers, two Heathcotes, a Blackford, and no Bigg except herself. She congratulated me last night on Frank's promotion, as if she really felt the joy she talked of. My sweet little George! I am delighted to hear that he has such an inventive genius as to face-making. I admired his yellow wafer very much, and hope he will choose the wafer for your next letter. I wore my green shoes last night, and took my white fan with me; I am very glad he never threw it into the river. Mrs. Knight giving up the Godmersham estate to Edward was no such prodigious act of generosity after all, it seems, for she has reserved herself an income out of it still; this ought to be known, that her conduct may not be overrated. I rather think Edward shows the most magnanimity of the two, in accepting her resignation with such incumbrances. The more I write, the better my eye gets; so I shall at least keep on till it is quite well, before I give up my pen to my mother. Mrs. Bramston's little movable apartment was tolerably filled last night by herself, Mrs. H. Blackstone, her two daughters, and me. I do not like the Miss Blackstones; indeed, I was always determined not to like them, so there is the less merit in it. Mrs. Bramston was very civil, kind, and noisy. I spent a very pleasant evening, chiefly among the Manydown party. There was the same kind of supper as last year, and the same want of chairs. There were more dancers than the room could conveniently hold, which is enough to constitute a good ball at any time. I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about. I danced with Mr. John Wood again, twice with a Mr. South, a lad from Winchester, who, I suppose, is as far from being related to the bishop of that diocese as it is possible to be, with G. Lefroy, and J. Harwood, who, I think, takes to me rather more than he used to do. One of my gayest actions was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured. The Miss Charterises were there, and played the parts of the Miss Edens with great spirit. Charles never came. Naughty Charles! I suppose he could not get superseded in time. Miss Debary has replaced your two sheets of drawing-paper with two of superior size and quality; so I do not grudge her having taken them at all now. Mr. Ludlow and Miss Pugh of Andover are lately married, and so is Mrs. Skeete of Basingstoke, and Mr. French, chemist, of Reading. I do not wonder at your wanting to read "First Impressions" again, so seldom as you have gone through it, and that so long ago. I am much obliged to you for meaning to leave my old petticoat behind you. I have long secretly wished it might be done, but had not courage to make the request. Pray mention the name of Maria Montresor's lover when you write next. My mother wants to know it, and I have not courage to look back into your letters to find it out. I shall not be able to send this till to-morrow, and you will be disappointed on Friday; I am very sorry for it, but I cannot help it. The partnership between Jeffereys, Toomer, and Legge is dissolved; the two latter are melted away into nothing, and it is to be hoped that Jeffereys will soon break, for the sake of a few heroines whose money he may have. I wish you joy of your birthday twenty times over. I shall be able to send this to the post to-day, which exalts me to the utmost pinnacle of human felicity, and makes me bask in the sunshine of prosperity or gives me any other sensation of pleasure in studied language which you may prefer. Do not be angry with me for not filling my sheet, and believe me yours affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham. XIII. STEVENTON, Monday (January 21). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I will endeavor to make this letter more worthy your acceptance than my last, which was so shabby a one that I think Mr. Marshall could never charge you with the postage. My eyes have been very indifferent since it was written, but are now getting better once more; keeping them so many hours open on Thursday night, as well as the dust of the ballroom, injured them a good deal. I use them as little as I can, but you know, and Elizabeth knows, and everybody who ever had weak eyes knows, how delightful it is to hurt them by employment, against the advice and entreaty of all one's friends. Charles leaves us to-night. The "Tamar" is in the Downs, and Mr. Daysh advises him to join her there directly, as there is no chance of her going to the westward. Charles does not approve of this at all, and will not be much grieved if he should be too late for her before she sails, as he may then hope to get into a better station. He attempted to go to town last night, and got as far on his road thither as Dean Gate; but both the coaches were full, and we had the pleasure of seeing him back again. He will call on Daysh to-morrow to know whether the "Tamar" has sailed or not, and if she is still at the Downs he will proceed in one of the night coaches to Deal. I want to go with him, that I may explain the country to him properly between Canterbury and Rowling, but the unpleasantness of returning by myself deters me. I should like to go as far as Ospringe with him very much indeed, that I might surprise you at Godmersham. Martha writes me word that Charles was very much admired at Kintbury, and Mrs. Lefroy never saw any one so much improved in her life, and thinks him handsomer than Henry. He appears to far more advantage here than he did at Godmersham, not surrounded by strangers and neither oppressed by a pain in his face or powder in his hair. James christened Elizabeth Caroline on Saturday morning, and then came home. Mary, Anna, and Edward have left us of course; before the second went I took down her answer to her cousin Fanny. Yesterday came a letter to my mother from Edward Cooper to announce, not the birth of a child, but of a living; for Mrs. Leigh has begged his acceptance of the Rectory of Hamstall-Ridware in Staffordshire, vacant by Mr. Johnson's death. We collect from his letter that he means to reside there, in which he shows his wisdom. Staffordshire is a good way off; so we shall see nothing more of them till, some fifteen years hence, the Miss Coopers are presented to us, fine, jolly, handsome, ignorant girls. The living is valued at 140_l._ a year, but perhaps it may be improvable. How will they be able to convey the furniture of the dressing-room so far in safety? Our first cousins seem all dropping off very fast. One is incorporated into the family, another dies, and a third goes into Staffordshire. We can learn nothing of the disposal of the other living. I have not the smallest notion of Fulwar's having it. Lord Craven has probably other connections and more intimate ones, in that line, than he now has with the Kintbury family. Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple and but twenty-three people in the room; but it was not the ball's fault, for we were deprived of two or three families by the sudden illness of Mr. Wither, who was seized that morning at Winchester with a return of his former alarming complaint. An express was sent off from thence to the family; Catherine and Miss Blackford were dining with Mrs. Russell. Poor Catherine's distress must have been very great. She was prevailed on to wait till the Heathcotes could come from Wintney, and then with those two and Harris proceeded directly to Winchester. In such a disorder his danger, I suppose, must always be great; but from this attack he is now rapidly recovering, and will be well enough to return to Manydown, I fancy, in a few days. It was a fine thing for conversation at the ball. But it deprived us not only of the Biggs, but of Mrs. Russell too, and of the Boltons and John Harwood, who were dining there likewise, and of Mr. Lane, who kept away as related to the family. Poor man!--I mean Mr. Wither--his life is so useful, his character so respectable and worthy, that I really believe there was a good deal of sincerity in the general concern expressed on his account. Our ball was chiefly made up of Jervoises and Terrys, the former of whom were apt to be vulgar, the latter to be noisy. I had an odd set of partners: Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Street, Colonel Jervoise, James Digweed, J. Lyford, and Mr. Briggs, a friend of the latter. I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it. Mary behaved very well, and was not at all fidgetty. For the history of her adventures at the ball I refer you to Anna's letter. When you come home you will have some shirts to make up for Charles. Mrs. Davies frightened him into buying a piece of Irish when we were in Basingstoke. Mr. Daysh supposes that Captain Austen's commission has reached him by this time. _Tuesday._--Your letter has pleased and amused me very much. Your essay on happy fortnights is highly ingenious, and the talobert skin made me laugh a good deal. Whenever I fall into misfortune, how many jokes it ought to furnish to my acquaintance in general, or I shall die dreadfully in their debt for entertainment. It began to occur to me before you mentioned it that I had been somewhat silent as to my mother's health for some time, but I thought you could have no difficulty in divining its exact state,--you, who have guessed so much stranger things. She is tolerably well,--better upon the whole than she was some weeks ago. She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present; but I have not much compassion for colds in the head without fever or sore throat. Our own particular little brother got a place in the coach last night, and is now, I suppose, in town. I have no objection at all to your buying our gowns there, as your imagination has pictured to you exactly such a one as is necessary to make me happy. You quite abash me by your progress in notting, for I am still without silk. You must get me some in town or in Canterbury; it should be finer than yours. I thought Edward would not approve of Charles being a crop, and rather wished you to conceal it from him at present, lest it might fall on his spirits and retard his recovery. My father furnishes him with a pig from Cheesedown; it is already killed and cut up, but it is not to weigh more than nine stone; the season is too far advanced to get him a larger one. My mother means to pay herself for the salt and the trouble of ordering it to be cured by the spareribs, the souse, and the lard. We have had one dead lamb. I congratulate you on Mr. E. Hatton's good fortune. I suppose the marriage will now follow out of hand. Give my compliments to Miss Finch. What time in March may we expect your return in? I begin to be very tired of answering people's questions on that subject, and independent of that, I shall be very glad to see you at home again, and then if we can get Martha and shirk . . . who will be so happy as we? I think of going to Ibthorp in about a fortnight. My eyes are pretty well, I thank you, if you please. _Wednesday, 23d._--I wish my dear Fanny many returns of this day, and that she may on every return enjoy as much pleasure as she is now receiving from her doll's-beds. I have just heard from Charles, who is by this time at Deal. He is to be second lieutenant, which pleases him very well. The "Endymion" is come into the Downs, which pleases him likewise. He expects to be ordered to Sheerness shortly, as the "Tamar" has never been refitted. My father and mother made the same match for you last night, and are very much pleased with it. _He_ is a beauty of my mother's. Yours affectionately, JANE. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XIV. 13 QUEEN'S SQUARE, Friday (May 17). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Our journey yesterday went off exceedingly well; nothing occurred to alarm or delay us. We found the roads in excellent order, had very good horses all the way, and reached Devizes with ease by four o'clock. I suppose John has told you in what manner we were divided when we left Andover, and no alteration was afterwards made. At Devizes we had comfortable rooms and a good dinner, to which we sat down about five; amongst other things we had asparagus and a lobster, which made me wish for you, and some cheesecakes, on which the children made so delightful a supper as to endear the town of Devizes to them for a long time. Well, here we are at Bath; we got here about one o'clock, and have been arrived just long enough to go over the house, fix on our rooms, and be very well pleased with the whole of it. Poor Elizabeth has had a dismal ride of it from Devizes, for it has rained almost all the way, and our first view of Bath has been just as gloomy as it was last November twelvemonth. I have got so many things to say, so many things equally important, that I know not on which to decide at present, and shall therefore go and eat with the children. We stopped in Paragon as we came along, but as it was too wet and dirty for us to get out, we could only see Frank, who told us that his master was very indifferent, but had had a better night last night than usual. In Paragon we met Mrs. Foley and Mrs. Dowdeswell with her yellow shawl airing out, and at the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy, who, on minute examination, turned out to be Dr. Hall--and Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead. These are all of our acquaintance who have yet met our eyes. I have some hopes of being plagued about my trunk; I had more a few hours ago, for it was too heavy to go by the coach which brought Thomas and Rebecca from Devizes; there was reason to suppose that it might be too heavy likewise for any other coach, and for a long time we could hear of no wagon to convey it. At last, however, we unluckily discovered that one was just on the point of setting out for this place, but at any rate the trunk cannot be here till to-morrow; so far we are safe, and who knows what may not happen to procure a further delay? I put Mary's letter into the post-office at Andover with my own hand. We are exceedingly pleased with the house; the rooms are quite as large as we expected. Mrs. Bromley is a fat woman in mourning, and a little black kitten runs about the staircase. Elizabeth has the apartment within the drawing-room; she wanted my mother to have it, but as there was no bed in the inner one, and the stairs are so much easier of ascent, or my mother so much stronger than in Paragon as not to regard the double flight, it is settled for us to be above, where we have two very nice-sized rooms, with dirty quilts and everything comfortable. I have the outward and larger apartment, as I ought to have; which is quite as large as our bedroom at home, and my mother's is not materially less. The beds are both as large as any at Steventon, and I have a very nice chest of drawers and a closet full of shelves,--so full indeed that there is nothing else in it, and it should therefore be called a cupboard rather than a closet, I suppose. Tell Mary that there were some carpenters at work in the inn at Devizes this morning, but as I could not be sure of their being Mrs. W. Fowle's relations, I did not make myself known to them. I hope it will be a tolerable afternoon. When first we came, all the umbrellas were up, but now the pavements are getting very white again. My mother does not seem at all the worse for her journey, nor are any of us, I hope, though Edward seemed rather fagged last night, and not very brisk this morning; but I trust the bustle of sending for tea, coffee, and sugar, etc., and going out to taste a cheese himself, will do him good. There was a very long list of arrivals here in the newspaper yesterday, so that we need not immediately dread absolute solitude; and there is a public breakfast in Sydney Gardens every morning, so that we shall not be wholly starved. Elizabeth has just had a very good account of the three little boys. I hope you are very busy and very comfortable. I find no difficulty in closing my eyes. I like our situation very much; it is far more cheerful than Paragon, and the prospect from the drawing-room window, at which I now write, is rather picturesque, as it commands a prospective view of the left side of Brock Street, broken by three Lombardy poplars in the garden of the last house in Queen's Parade. I am rather impatient to know the fate of my best gown, but I suppose it will be some days before Frances can get through the trunk. In the mean time I am, with many thanks for your trouble in making it, as well as marking my silk stockings, Yours very affectionately, JANE. A great deal of love from everybody. Miss AUSTEN, Steventon, Overton, Hants. XV. 13 QUEEN SQUARE, Sunday (June 2). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am obliged to you for two letters, one from yourself and the other from Mary, for of the latter I knew nothing till on the receipt of yours yesterday, when the pigeon-basket was examined, and I received my due. As I have written to her since the time which ought to have brought me hers, I suppose she will consider herself, as I choose to consider her, still in my debt. I will lay out all the little judgment I have in endeavoring to get such stockings for Anna as she will approve; but I do not know that I shall execute Martha's commission at all, for I am not fond of ordering shoes; and, at any rate, they shall all have flat heels. What must I tell you of Edward? Truth or falsehood? I will try the former, and you may choose for yourself another time. He was better yesterday than he had been for two or three days before,--about as well as while he was at Steventon. He drinks at the Hetling Pump, is to bathe to-morrow, and try electricity on Tuesday. He proposed the latter himself to Dr. Fellowes, who made no objection to it, but I fancy we are all unanimous in expecting no advantage from it. At present I have no great notion of our staying here beyond the month. I heard from Charles last week; they were to sail on Wednesday. My mother seems remarkably well. My uncle overwalked himself at first, and can now only travel in a chair, but is otherwise very well. My cloak is come home. I like it very much, and can now exclaim with delight, like J. Bond at hay-harvest, "This is what I have been looking for these three years." I saw some gauzes in a shop in Bath Street yesterday at only 4_d._ a yard, but they were not so good or so pretty as mine. Flowers are very much worn, and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries, and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, and apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen any of them in hats. A plum or greengage would cost three shillings; cherries and grapes about five, I believe, but this is at some of the dearest shops. My aunt has told me of a very cheap one, near Walcot Church, to which I shall go in quest of something for you. I have never seen an old woman at the pump-room. Elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a pretty style of hat too. It is something like Eliza's, only, instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. I flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! But I must write no more of this. . . . I spent Friday evening with the Mapletons, and was obliged to submit to being pleased in spite of my inclination. We took a very charming walk from six to eight up Beacon Hill, and across some fields, to the village of Charlecombe, which is sweetly situated in a little green valley, as a village with such a name ought to be. Marianne is sensible and intelligent; and even Jane, considering how fair she is, is not unpleasant. We had a Miss North and a Mr. Gould of our party; the latter walked home with me after tea. He is a very young man, just entered Oxford, wears spectacles, and has heard that "Evelina" was written by Dr. Johnson. I am afraid I cannot undertake to carry Martha's shoes home, for, though we had plenty of room in our trunks when we came, we shall have many more things to take back, and I must allow besides for my packing. There is to be a grand gala on Tuesday evening in Sydney Gardens, a concert, with illuminations and fireworks. To the latter Elizabeth and I look forward with pleasure, and even the concert will have more than its usual charm for me, as the gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound. In the morning Lady Willoughby is to present the colors to some corps, or Yeomanry, or other, in the Crescent, and that such festivities may have a proper commencement, we think of going to. . . . I am quite pleased with Martha and Mrs. Lefroy for wanting the pattern of our caps, but I am not so well pleased with your giving it to them. Some wish, some prevailing wish, is necessary to the animation of everybody's mind, and in gratifying this you leave them to form some other which will not probably be half so innocent. I shall not forget to write to Frank. Duty and love, etc. Yours affectionately, JANE. My uncle is quite surprised at my hearing from you so often; but as long as we can keep the frequency of our correspondence from Martha's uncle, we will not fear our own. Miss AUSTEN, Steventon. XVI. 13 QUEEN SQUARE, Tuesday (June 11). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter yesterday made me very happy. I am heartily glad that you have escaped any share in the impurities of Deane, and not sorry, as it turns out, that our stay here has been lengthened. I feel tolerably secure of our getting away next week, though it is certainly possible that we may remain till Thursday the 27th. I wonder what we shall do with all our intended visits this summer! I should like to make a compromise with Adlestrop, Harden, and Bookham, that Martha's spending the summer at Steventon should be considered as our respective visits to them all. Edward has been pretty well for this last week, and as the waters have never disagreed with him in any respect, we are inclined to hope that he will derive advantage from them in the end. Everybody encourages us in this expectation, for they all say that the effect of the waters cannot be negative, and many are the instances in which their benefit is felt afterwards more than on the spot. He is more comfortable here than I thought he would be, and so is Elizabeth, though they will both, I believe, be very glad to get away--the latter especially, which one can't wonder at somehow. So much for Mrs. Piozzi. I had some thoughts of writing the whole of my letter in her style, but I believe I shall not. Though you have given me unlimited powers concerning your sprig, I cannot determine what to do about it, and shall therefore in this and in every other future letter continue to ask your further directions. We have been to the cheap shop, and very cheap we found it, but there are only flowers made there, no fruit; and as I could get four or five very pretty sprigs of the former for the same money which would procure only one Orleans plum--in short, could get more for three or four shillings than I could have means of bringing home--I cannot decide on the fruit till I hear from you again. Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What do you think on that subject? I would not let Martha read "First Impressions"[4] again upon any account, and am very glad that I did not leave it in your power. She is very cunning, but I saw through her design; she means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it. As for "Fitzalbini," when I get home she shall have it, as soon as ever she will own that Mr. Elliott is handsomer than Mr. Lance, that fair men are preferable to black; for I mean to take every opportunity of rooting out her prejudices. Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help putting it down. My mother saw him the other day, but without making herself known to him. I am very glad you liked my lace, and so are you, and so is Martha, and we are all glad together. I have got your cloak home, which is quite delightful,--as delightful at least as half the circumstances which are called so. I do not know what is the matter with me to-day, but I cannot write quietly; I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other. Fortunately I have nothing very particular to say. We walked to Weston one evening last week, and liked it very much. Liked what very much? Weston? No, walking to Weston. I have not expressed myself properly, but I hope you will understand me. We have not been to any public place lately, nor performed anything out of the common daily routine of No. 13 Queen Square, Bath. But to-day we were to have dashed away at a very extraordinary rate, by dining out, had it not so happened that we did not go. Edward renewed his acquaintance lately with Mr. Evelyn, who lives in the Queen's Parade, and was invited to a family dinner, which I believe at first Elizabeth was rather sorry at his accepting; but yesterday Mrs. Evelyn called on us, and her manners were so pleasing that we liked the idea of going very much. The Biggs would call her a nice woman. But Mr. Evelyn, who was indisposed yesterday, is worse to-day, and we are put off. It is rather impertinent to suggest any household care to a housekeeper, but I just venture to say that the coffee-mill will be wanted every day while Edward is at Steventon, as he always drinks coffee for breakfast. Fanny desires her love to you, her love to grandpapa, her love to Anna, and her love to Hannah; the latter is particularly to be remembered. Edward desires his love to you, to grandpapa, to Anna, to little Edward, to Aunt James and Uncle James, and he hopes all your turkeys and ducks and chicken and guinea fowls are very well; and he wishes you very much to send him a printed letter, and so does Fanny--and they both rather think they shall answer it. . . . Dr. Gardiner was married yesterday to Mrs. Percy and her three daughters. Now I will give you the history of Mary's veil, in the purchase of which I have so considerably involved you that it is my duty to economize for you in the flowers. I had no difficulty in getting a muslin veil for half a guinea, and not much more in discovering afterwards that the muslin was thick, dirty, and ragged, and therefore would by no means do for a united gift. I changed it consequently as soon as I could, and, considering what a state my imprudence had reduced me to, I thought myself lucky in getting a black lace one for sixteen shillings. I hope the half of that sum will not greatly exceed what you had intended to offer upon the altar of sister-in-law affection. Yours affectionately, JANE. They do not seem to trouble you much from Manydown. I have long wanted to quarrel with them, and I believe I shall take this opportunity. There is no denying that they are very capricious--for they like to enjoy their elder sister's company when they can. Miss AUSTEN, Steventon, Overton, Hants. FOOTNOTE: [4] The title first chosen for "Pride and Prejudice." XVII. STEVENTON, Thursday (November 20, 1800). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter took me quite by surprise this morning; you are very welcome, however, and I am very much obliged to you. I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error. Naughty Charles did not come on Tuesday, but good Charles came yesterday morning. About two o'clock he walked in on a Gosport hack. His feeling equal to such a fatigue is a good sign, and his feeling no fatigue in it a still better. He walked down to Deane to dinner; he danced the whole evening, and to-day is no more tired than a gentleman ought to be. Your desiring to hear from me on Sunday will, perhaps, bring you a more particular account of the ball than you may care for, because one is prone to think much more of such things the morning after they happen, than when time has entirely driven them out of one's recollection. It was a pleasant evening; Charles found it remarkably so, but I cannot tell why, unless the absence of Miss Terry, towards whom his conscience reproaches him with being now perfectly indifferent, was a relief to him. There were only twelve dances, of which I danced nine, and was merely prevented from dancing the rest by the want of a partner. We began at ten, supped at one, and were at Deane before five. There were but fifty people in the room; very few families indeed from our side of the county, and not many more from the other. My partners were the two St. Johns, Hooper, Holder, and a very prodigious Mr. Mathew, with whom I called the last, and whom I liked the best of my little stock. There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck. The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad-featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago; the other is refined into a nice, composed-looking girl, like Catherine Bigg. I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys, and thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter, and thought her a queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She danced away with great activity. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so _very_ old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice. Miss Debary, Susan, and Sally, all in black, but without any statues, made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as circumstances would allow me. . . . Mary said that I looked very well last night. I wore my aunt's gown and handkerchief, and my hair was at least tidy, which was all my ambition. I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner. . . . Farewell; Charles sends you his best love, and Edward his worst. If you think the distinction improper, you may take the worst yourself. He will write to you when he gets back to his ship, and in the mean time desires that you will consider me as Your affectionate sister, J. A. _Friday._--I have determined to go on Thursday, but of course not before the post comes in. Charles is in very good looks indeed. I had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with long noses were that disturbed me at the First H. ball. They all proved to be Miss Atkinsons of En--[_illegible_]. I rejoice to say that we have just had another letter from our dear Frank. It is to you, very short, written from Larnica in Cyprus, and so lately as October 2. He came from Alexandria, and was to return there in three or four days, knew nothing of his promotion, and does not write above twenty lines, from a doubt of the letter's ever reaching you, and an idea of all letters being opened at Vienna. He wrote a few days before to you from Alexandria by the "Mercury," sent with despatches to Lord Keith. Another letter must be owing to us besides this, one if not two; because none of these are to me. Henry comes to-morrow, for one night only. My mother has heard from Mrs. E. Leigh. Lady Saye and Seale and her daughter are going to remove to Bath. Mrs. Estwick is married again to a Mr. Sloane, a young man under age, without the knowledge of either family. He bears a good character, however. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XVIII. STEVENTON, Saturday (January 3, 1801). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--As you have by this time received my last letter, it is fit that I should begin another; and I begin with the hope, which is at present uppermost in my mind, that you often wore a white gown in the morning at the time of all the gay parties being with you. Our visit at Ash Park, last Wednesday, went off in a _come-cá_ way. We met Mr. Lefroy and Tom Chute, played at cards, and came home again. James and Mary dined here on the following day, and at night Henry set off in the mail for London. He was as agreeable as ever during his visit, and has not lost anything in Miss Lloyd's estimation. Yesterday we were quite alone--only our four selves; but to-day the scene is agreeably varied by Mary's driving Martha to Basingstoke, and Martha's afterwards dining at Deane. My mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the secret. We plan having a steady cook and a young giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter. No children of course to be allowed on either side. You feel more for John Bond than John Bond deserves. I am sorry to lower his character, but he is not ashamed to own himself that he has no doubt at all of getting a good place, and that he had even an offer many years ago from a Farmer Paine of taking him into his service whenever he might quit my father's. There are three parts of Bath which we have thought of as likely to have houses in them,--Westgate Buildings, Charles Street, and some of the short streets leading from Laura Place or Pulteney Street. Westgate Buildings, though quite in the lower part of the town, are not badly situated themselves. The street is broad, and has rather a good appearance. Charles Street, however, I think is preferable. The buildings are new, and its nearness to Kingsmead Fields would be a pleasant circumstance. Perhaps you may remember, or perhaps you may forget, that Charles Street leads from the Queen Square Chapel to the two Green Park Streets. The houses in the streets near Laura Place I should expect to be above our price. Gay Street would be too high, except only the lower house on the left-hand side as you ascend. Towards that my mother has no disinclination; it used to be lower rented than any other house in the row, from some inferiority in the apartments. But above all others her wishes are at present fixed on the corner house in Chapel Row, which opens into Prince's Street. Her knowledge of it, however, is confined only to the outside, and therefore she is equally uncertain of its being really desirable as of its being to be had. In the mean time she assures you that she will do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street, although you have not expressed the fearful presentiment of it which was rather expected. We know that Mrs. Perrot will want to get us into Oxford Buildings, but we all unite in particular dislike of that part of the town, and therefore hope to escape. Upon all these different situations you and Edward may confer together, and your opinion of each will be expected with eagerness. As to our pictures, the battle-piece, Mr. Nibbs, Sir William East, and all the old heterogeneous, miscellany, manuscript, Scriptural pieces dispersed over the house, are to be given to James. Your own drawings will not cease to be your own, and the two paintings on tin will be at your disposal. My mother says that the French agricultural prints in the best bedroom were given by Edward to his two sisters. Do you or he know anything about it? She has written to my aunt, and we are all impatient for the answer. I do not know how to give up the idea of our both going to Paragon in May. Your going I consider as indispensably necessary, and I shall not like being left behind; there is no place here or hereabouts that I shall want to be staying at, and though, to be sure, the keep of two will be more than of one, I will endeavor to make the difference less by disordering my stomach with Bath buns; and as to the trouble of accommodating us, whether there are one or two, it is much the same. According to the first plan, my mother and our two selves are to travel down together, and my father follow us afterwards in about a fortnight or three weeks. We have promised to spend a couple of days at Ibthorp in our way. We must all meet at Bath, you know, before we set out for the sea, and, everything considered, I think the first plan as good as any. My father and mother, wisely aware of the difficulty of finding in all Bath such a bed as their own, have resolved on taking it with them; all the beds, indeed, that we shall want are to be removed,--namely, besides theirs, our own two, the best for a spare one, and two for servants; and these necessary articles will probably be the only material ones that it would answer to send down. I do not think it will be worth while to remove any of our chests of drawers; we shall be able to get some of a much more commodious sort, made of deal, and painted to look very neat; and I flatter myself that for little comforts of all kinds our apartment will be one of the most complete things of the sort all over Bath, Bristol included. We have thought at times of removing the sideboard, or a Pembroke table, or some other piece of furniture, but, upon the whole, it has ended in thinking that the trouble and risk of the removal would be more than the advantage of having them at a place where everything may be purchased. Pray send your opinion. Martha has as good as promised to come to us again in March. Her spirits are better than they were. . . . My mother bargains for having no trouble at all in furnishing our house in Bath, and I have engaged for your willingly undertaking to do it all. I get more and more reconciled to the idea of our removal. We have lived long enough in this neighborhood: the Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline, there is something interesting in the bustle of going away, and the prospect of spending future summers by the sea or in Wales is very delightful. For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with envy in the wives of sailors or soldiers. It must not be generally known, however, that I am not sacrificing a great deal in quitting the country, or I can expect to inspire no tenderness, no interest, in those we leave behind. . . . Yours affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XIX. STEVENTON, Thursday (January 8). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--The "perhaps" which concluded my last letter being only a "perhaps," will not occasion your being overpowered with surprise, I dare say, if you should receive this before Tuesday, which, unless circumstances are very perverse, will be the case. I received yours with much general philanthropy, and still more peculiar good-will, two days ago; and I suppose I need not tell you that it was very long, being written on a foolscap sheet, and very entertaining, being written by you. Mr. Payne has been dead long enough for Henry to be out of mourning for him before his last visit, though we knew nothing of it till about that time. Why he died, or of what complaint, or to what noblemen he bequeathed his four daughters in marriage, we have not heard. I am glad that the Wildmans are going to give a ball, and hope you will not fail to benefit both yourself and me by laying out a few kisses in the purchase of a frank. I believe you are right in proposing to delay the cambric muslin, and I submit with a kind of voluntary reluctance. Mr. Peter Debary has declined Deane curacy; he wishes to be settled near London. A foolish reason! as if Deane were not near London in comparison of Exeter or York. Take the whole world through, and he will find many more places at a greater distance from London than Deane than he will at a less. What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine? I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a piece of preferment, so delightful a situation!--that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the metropolis as any other country villages. As this is the case, however, as Mr. Peter Debary has shown himself a Peter in the blackest sense of the word, we are obliged to look elsewhere for an heir; and my father has thought it a necessary compliment to James Digweed to offer the curacy to him, though without considering it as either a desirable or an eligible situation for him. Unless he is in love with Miss Lyford, I think he had better not be settled exactly in this neighborhood; and unless he is very much in love with her indeed, he is not likely to think a salary of 50_l._ equal in value or efficiency to one of 75_l._ Were you indeed to be considered as one of the fixtures of the house!--but you were never actually erected in it either by Mr. Egerton Brydges or Mrs. Lloyd. . . . You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own. Sidmouth is now talked of as our summer abode. Get all the information, therefore, about it that you can from Mrs. C. Cage. My father's old ministers are already deserting him to pay their court to his son. The brown mare, which, as well as the black, was to devolve on James at our removal, has not had patience to wait for that, and has settled herself even now at Deane. The death of Hugh Capet, which, like that of Mr. Skipsey, though undesired, was not wholly unexpected, being purposely effected, has made the immediate possession of the mare very convenient, and everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner. Martha and I work at the books every day. Yours affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XX. STEVENTON, Wednesday (January 14). POOR Miss Austen! It appears to me that I have rather oppressed you of late by the frequency of my letters. You had hoped not to hear from me again before Tuesday, but Sunday showed you with what a merciless sister you had to deal. I cannot recall the past, but you shall not hear from me quite so often in future. Your letter to Mary was duly received before she left Deane with Martha yesterday morning, and it gives us great pleasure to know that the Chilham ball was so agreeable, and that you danced four dances with Mr. Kemble. Desirable, however, as the latter circumstance was, I cannot help wondering at its taking place. Why did you dance four dances with so stupid a man? Why not rather dance two of them with some elegant brother officer who was struck with your appearance as soon as you entered the room? Martha left you her best love. She will write to you herself in a short time; but trusting to my memory rather than her own, she has nevertheless desired me to ask you to purchase for her two bottles of Steele's lavender water when you are in town, provided you should go to the shop on your own account, otherwise you may be sure that she would not have you recollect the request. James dined with us yesterday, wrote to Edward in the evening, filled three sides of paper, every line inclining too much towards the northeast, and the very first line of all scratched out, and this morning he joins his lady in the fields of Elysium and Ibthorp. Last Friday was a very busy day with us. We were visited by Miss Lyford and Mr. Bayle. The latter began his operations in the house, but had only time to finish the four sitting-rooms; the rest is deferred till the spring is more advanced and the days longer. He took his paper of appraisement away with him, and therefore we only know the estimate he has made of one or two articles of furniture which my father particularly inquired into. I understand, however, that he was of opinion that the whole would amount to more than two hundred pounds, and it is not imagined that this will comprehend the brewhouse and many other, etc., etc. Miss Lyford was very pleasant, and gave my mother such an account of the houses in Westgate Buildings, where Mrs. Lyford lodged four years ago, as made her think of a situation there with great pleasure, but your opposition will be without difficulty decisive, and my father, in particular, who was very well inclined towards the Row before, has now ceased to think of it entirely. At present the environs of Laura Place seem to be his choice. His views on the subject are much advanced since I came home; he grows quite ambitious, and actually requires now a comfortable and a creditable-looking house. On Saturday Miss Lyford went to her long home,--that is to say, it was a long way off,--and soon afterwards a party of fine ladies issuing from a well-known commodious green vehicle, their heads full of Bantam cocks and Galinies, entered the house,--Mrs. Heathcote, Mrs. Harwood, Mrs. James Austen, Miss Bigg, Miss Jane Blachford. Hardly a day passes in which we do not have some visitor or other: yesterday came Mrs. Bramstone, who is very sorry that she is to lose us, and afterwards Mr. Holder, who was shut up for an hour with my father and James in a most awful manner. John Bond _est à lui_. . . . XXI. STEVENTON, Wednesday (January 21). EXPECT a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end. Well, and so Prank's letter has made you very happy, but you are afraid he would not have patience to stay for the "Haarlem," which you wish him to have done as being safer than the merchantman. Poor fellow! to wait from the middle of November to the end of December, and perhaps even longer, it must be sad work; especially in a place where the ink is so abominably pale. What a surprise to him it must have been on October 20, to be visited, collared, and thrust out of the "Petterel" by Captain Inglis. He kindly passes over the poignancy of his feelings in quitting his ship, his officers, and his men. What a pity it is that he should not be in England at the time of this promotion, because he certainly would have had an appointment, so everybody says, and therefore it must be right for me to say it too. Had he been really here, the certainty of the appointment, I dare say, would not have been half so great, but as it could not be brought to the proof, his absence will be always a lucky source of regret. Eliza talks of having read in a newspaper that all the first lieutenants of the frigates whose captains were to be sent into line-of-battle ships were to be promoted to the rank of commanders. If it be true, Mr. Valentine may afford himself a fine Valentine's knot, and Charles may perhaps become first of the "Endymion," though I suppose Captain Durham is too likely to bring a villain with him under that denomination. . . . The neighborhood have quite recovered the death of Mrs. Rider,--so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at it now; her things were so very dear! and Mrs. Rogers is to be all that is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendship of the world. . . . The Wylmots being robbed must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance, and I hope it is as much their pleasure as it seems their avocation to be subjects of general entertainment. I have a great mind not to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, which I have just had the pleasure of reading, because I am so ashamed to compare the sprawling lines of this with it. But if I say all that I have to say, I hope I have no reason to hang myself. . . . Why did not J. D. make his proposals to you? I suppose he went to see the cathedral, that he might know how he should like to be married in it. . . . Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXII. SOUTHAMPTON, Wednesday (January 7, 1807). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--You were mistaken in supposing I should expect your letter on Sunday; I had no idea of hearing from you before Tuesday, and my pleasure yesterday was therefore unhurt by any previous disappointment. I thank you for writing so much; you must really have sent me the value of two letters in one. We are extremely glad to hear that Elizabeth is so much better, and hope you will be sensible of still further amendment in her when you return from Canterbury. Of your visit there I must now speak "incessantly;" it surprises, but pleases me more, and I consider it as a very just and honorable distinction of you, and not less to the credit of Mrs. Knight. I have no doubt of your spending your time with her most pleasantly in quiet and rational conversation, and am so far from thinking her expectations of you will be deceived, that my only fear is of your being so agreeable, so much to her taste, as to make her wish to keep you with her forever. If that should be the case, we must remove to Canterbury, which I should not like so well as Southampton. When you receive this, our guests will be all gone or going; and I shall be left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, and probably to regret that I did not take more pains to please them all. Mrs. J. Austen has asked me to return with her to Steventon; I need not give my answer; and she has invited my mother to spend there the time of Mrs. F. A.'s confinement, which she seems half inclined to do. A few days ago I had a letter from Miss Irvine, and as I was in her debt, you will guess it to be a remonstrance, not a very severe one, however; the first page is in her usual retrospective, jealous, inconsistent style, but the remainder is chatty and harmless. She supposes my silence may have proceeded from resentment of her not having written to inquire particularly after my hooping-cough, etc. She is a funny one. I have answered her letter, and have endeavored to give something like the truth with as little incivility as I could, by placing my silence to the want of subject in the very quiet way in which we live. Phebe has repented, and stays. I have also written to Charles, and I answered Miss Buller's letter by return of post, as I intended to tell you in my last. Two or three things I recollected when it was too late, that I might have told you; one is that the Welbys have lost their eldest son by a putrid fever at Eton, and another that Tom Chute is going to settle in Norfolk. You have scarcely ever mentioned Lizzy since your being at Godmersham. I hope it is not because she is altered for the worse. I cannot yet satisfy Fanny as to Mrs. Foote's baby's name, and I must not encourage her to expect a good one, as Captain Foote is a professed adversary to all but the plainest; he likes only Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, etc. Our best chance is of "Caroline," which in compliment to a sister seems the only exception. He dined with us on Friday, and I fear will not soon venture again, for the strength of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for James; and Captain Foote has a particular dislike to underdone mutton; but he was so good-humored and pleasant that I did not much mind his being starved. He gives us all the most cordial invitation to his house in the country, saying just what the Williams ought to say to make us welcome. Of them we have seen nothing since you left us, and we hear that they are just gone to Bath again, to be out of the way of further alterations at Brooklands. Mrs. F. A. has had a very agreeable letter from Mrs. Dickson, who was delighted with the purse, and desires her not to provide herself with a christening dress, which is exactly what her young correspondent wanted; and she means to defer making any of the caps as long as she can, in hope of having Mrs. D.'s present in time to be serviceable as a pattern. She desires me to tell you that the gowns were cut out before your letter arrived, but that they are long enough for Caroline. The _Beds_, as I believe they are called, have fallen to Frank's share to continue, and of course are cut out to admiration. "Alphonsine" did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure; and we changed it for the "Female Quixote," which now makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it. Mrs. F. A., to whom it is new, enjoys it as one could wish; the other Mary, I believe, has little pleasure from that or any other book. My mother does not seem at all more disappointed than ourselves at the termination of the family treaty; she thinks less of that just now than of the comfortable state of her own finances, which she finds on closing her year's accounts beyond her expectation, as she begins the new year with a balance of 30_l._ in her favor; and when she has written her answer to my aunt, which you know always hangs a little upon her mind, she will be above the world entirely. You will have a great deal of unreserved discourse with Mrs. K., I dare say, upon this subject, as well as upon many other of our family matters. Abuse everybody but me. _Thursday._--We expected James yesterday, but he did not come; if he comes at all now, his visit will be a very short one, as he must return to-morrow, that Ajax and the chair may be sent to Winchester on Saturday. Caroline's new pelisse depended upon her mother's being able or not to come so far in the chair; how the guinea that will be saved by the same means of return is to be spent I know not. Mrs. J. A. does not talk much of poverty now, though she has no hope of my brother's being able to buy another horse next summer. Their scheme against Warwickshire continues, but I doubt the family's being at Stoneleigh so early as James says he must go, which is May. My mother is afraid I have not been explicit enough on the subject of her wealth; she began 1806 with 68_l._ she begins 1807 with 99_l._, and this after 32_l._ purchase of stock. Frank too has been settling his accounts and making calculations, and each party feels quite equal to our present expenses; but much increase of house-rent would not do for either. Frank limits himself, I believe, to four hundred a year. You will be surprised to hear that Jenny is not yet come back; we have heard nothing of her since her reaching Itchingswell, and can only suppose that she must be detained by illness in somebody or other, and that she has been each day expecting to be able to come on the morrow. I am glad I did not know beforehand that she was to be absent during the whole or almost the whole of our friends being with us, for though the inconvenience has not been nothing, I should have feared still more. Our dinners have certainly suffered not a little by having only Molly's head and Molly's hands to conduct them; she fries better than she did, but not like Jenny. We did _not_ take our walk on Friday, it was too dirty, nor have we yet done it; we may perhaps do something like it to-day, as after seeing Frank skate, which he hopes to do in the meadows by the beech, we are to treat ourselves with a passage over the ferry. It is one of the pleasantest frosts I ever knew, so very quiet. I hope it will last some time longer for Frank's sake, who is quite anxious to get some skating; he tried yesterday, but it would not do. Our acquaintance increase too fast. He was recognized lately by Admiral Bertie, and a few days since arrived the Admiral and his daughter Catherine to wait upon us. There was nothing to like or dislike in either. To the Berties are to be added the Lances, with whose cards we have been endowed, and whose visit Frank and I returned yesterday. They live about a mile and three-quarters from S. to the right of the new road to Portsmouth, and I believe their house is one of those which are to be seen almost anywhere among the woods on the other side of the Itchen. It is a handsome building, stands high, and in a very beautiful situation. We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. She was civil and chatty enough, and offered to introduce us to some acquaintance in Southampton, which we gratefully declined. I suppose they must be acting by the orders of Mr. Lance of Netherton in this civility, as there seems no other reason for their coming near us. They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance. You must have heard from Martha by this time. We have had no accounts of Kintbury since her letter to me. Mrs. F. A. has had one fainting fit lately; it came on as usual after eating a hearty dinner, but did not last long. I can recollect nothing more to say. When my letter is gone, I suppose I shall. Yours affectionately, J. A. I have just asked Caroline if I should send her love to her godmamma, to which she answered "Yes." Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXIII. SOUTHAMPTON, February 8. . . . OUR garden is putting in order by a man who bears a remarkably good character, has a very fine complexion, and asks something less than the first. The shrubs which border the gravel walk, he says, are only sweetbrier and roses, and the latter of an indifferent sort; we mean to get a few of a better kind, therefore, and at my own particular desire he procures us some syringas. I could not do without a syringa, for the sake of Cowper's line. We talk also of a laburnum. The border under the terrace wall is clearing away to receive currants and gooseberry bushes, and a spot is found very proper for raspberries. The alterations and improvements within doors, too, advance very properly, and the offices will be made very convenient indeed. Our dressing-table is constructing on the spot, out of a large kitchen table belonging to the house, for doing which we have the permission of Mr. Husket, Lord Lansdown's painter,--domestic painter, I should call him, for he lives in the castle. Domestic chaplains have given way to this more necessary office, and I suppose whenever the walls want no touching up he is employed about my lady's face. The morning was so wet that I was afraid we should not be able to see our little visitor; but Frank, who alone could go to church, called for her after service, and she is now talking away at my side and examining the treasures of my writing-desk drawers,--very happy, I believe. Not at all shy, of course. Her name is Catherine, and her sister's Caroline. She is something like her brother, and as short for her age, but not so well-looking. What is become of all the shyness in the world? Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the progress of time, and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints. . . . _Evening._--Our little visitor has just left us, and left us highly pleased with her; she is a nice, natural, open-hearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility which one sees in the best children in the present day; so unlike anything that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment and shame. Half her time was spent at spillikins, which I consider as a very valuable part of our household furniture, and as not the least important benefaction from the family of Knight to that of Austen. But I must tell you a story. Mary has for some time had notice from Mrs. Dickson of the intended arrival of a certain Miss Fowler in this place. Miss F. is an intimate friend of Mrs. D., and a good deal known as such to Mary. On Thursday last she called here while we were out. Mary found, on our return, her card with only her name on it, and she had left word that she would call again. The particularity of this made us talk, and, among other conjectures, Frank said in joke, "I dare say she is staying with the Pearsons." The connection of the names struck Mary, and she immediately recollected Miss Fowler's having been very intimate with persons so called, and, upon putting everything together, we have scarcely a doubt of her being actually staying with the only family in the place whom we cannot visit. What a _contretemps_! in the language of France. What an unluckiness! in that of Madame Duval. The black gentleman has certainly employed one of his menial imps to bring about this complete, though trifling mischief. Miss F. has never called again, but we are in daily expectation of it. Miss P. has, of course, given her a proper understanding of the business. It is evident that Miss F. did not expect or wish to have the visit returned, and Frank is quite as much on his guard for his wife as we could desire for her sake or our own. We shall rejoice in being so near Winchester when Edward belongs to it, and can never have our spare bed filled more to our satisfaction than by him. Does he leave Eltham at Easter? We are reading "Clarentine," and are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a second reading than at the first, and it does not bear a third at all. It is full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind. Miss Harrison is going into Devonshire, to attend Mrs. Dusantoy, as usual. Miss J. is married to young Mr. G., and is to be very unhappy. He swears, drinks, is cross, jealous, selfish, and brutal. The match makes her family miserable, and has occasioned his being disinherited. The Browns are added to our list of acquaintance. He commands the Sea Fencibles here, under Sir Thomas, and was introduced at his own desire by the latter when we saw him last week. As yet the gentlemen only have visited, as Mrs. B. is ill; but she is a nice-looking woman, and wears one of the prettiest straw bonnets in the place. _Monday._--The garret beds are made, and ours will be finished to-day. I had hoped it would be finished on Saturday, but neither Mrs. Hall nor Jenny was able to give help enough for that, and I have as yet done very little, and Mary nothing at all. This week we shall do more, and I should like to have all the five beds completed by the end of it. There will then be the window-curtains, sofa-cover, and a carpet to be altered. I should not be surprised if we were to be visited by James again this week; he gave us reason to expect him soon, and if they go to Eversley he cannot come next week. There, I flatter myself I have constructed you a smartish letter, considering my want of materials; but, like my dear Dr. Johnson, I believe I have dealt more in notions than facts. I hope your cough is gone, and that you are otherwise well, and remain, with love, Yours affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXIV. GODMERSHAM, Wednesday (June 15, 1808). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first? At half after seven yesterday morning Henry saw us into our own carriage, and we drove away from the Bath Hotel; which, by the by, had been found most uncomfortable quarters,--very dirty, very noisy, and very ill-provided. James began his journey by the coach at five. Our first eight miles were hot; Deptford Hill brought to my mind our hot journey into Kent fourteen years ago; but after Blackheath we suffered nothing, and as the day advanced it grew quite cool. At Dartford, which we reached within the two hours and three-quarters, we went to the Bull, the same inn at which we breakfasted in that said journey, and on the present occasion had about the same bad butter. At half-past ten we were again off, and, travelling on without any adventure reached Sittingbourne by three. Daniel was watching for us at the door of the George, and I was acknowledged very kindly by Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, to the latter of whom I devoted my conversation, while Mary went out to buy some gloves. A few minutes, of course, did for Sittingbourne; and so off we drove, drove, drove, and by six o'clock were at Godmersham. Our two brothers were walking before the house as we approached, as natural as life. Fanny and Lizzy met us in the Hall with a great deal of pleasant joy; we went for a few minutes into the breakfast-parlor, and then proceeded to our rooms. Mary has the Hall chamber. I am in the Yellow room--very literally--for I am writing in it at this moment. It seems odd to me to have such a great place all to myself, and to be at Godmersham without you is also odd. You are wished for, I assure you: Fanny, who came to me as soon as she had seen her Aunt James to her room, and stayed while I dressed, was as energetic as usual in her longings for you. She is grown both in height and size since last year, but not immoderately, looks very well, and seems as to conduct and manner just what she was and what one could wish her to continue. Elizabeth,[5] who was dressing when we arrived, came to me for a minute attended by Marianne, Charles, and Louisa, and, you will not doubt, gave me a very affectionate welcome. That I had received such from Edward also I need not mention; but I do, you see, because it is a pleasure. I never saw him look in better health, and Fanny says he is perfectly well. I cannot praise Elizabeth's looks, but they are probably affected by a cold. Her little namesake has gained in beauty in the last three years, though not all that Marianne has lost. Charles is not quite so lovely as he was. Louisa is much as I expected, and Cassandra I find handsomer than I expected, though at present disguised by such a violent breaking-out that she does not come down after dinner. She has charming eyes and a nice open countenance, and seems likely to be very lovable. Her size is magnificent. I was agreeably surprised to find Louisa Bridges still here. She looks remarkably well (legacies are very wholesome diet), and is just what she always was. John is at Sandling. You may fancy our dinner-party therefore; Fanny, of course, belonging to it, and little Edward, for that day. He was almost too happy, his happiness at least made him too talkative. It has struck ten; I must go to breakfast. Since breakfast I have had a _tête-à-tête_ with Edward in his room; he wanted to know James's plans and mine, and from what his own now are I think it already nearly certain that I shall return when they do, though not with them. Edward will be going about the same time to Alton, where he has business with Mr. Trimmer, and where he means his son should join him; and I shall probably be his companion to that place, and get on afterwards somehow or other. I should have preferred a rather longer stay here certainly, but there is no prospect of any later conveyance for me, as he does not mean to accompany Edward on his return to Winchester, from a very natural unwillingness to leave Elizabeth at that time. I shall at any rate be glad not to be obliged to be an incumbrance on those who have brought me here, for, as James has no horse, I must feel in their carriage that I am taking his place. We were rather crowded yesterday, though it does not become me to say so, as I and my boa were of the party, and it is not to be supposed but that a child of three years of age was fidgety. I need scarcely beg you to keep all this to yourself, lest it should get round by Anna's means. She is very kindly inquired after by her friends here, who all regret her not coming with her father and mother. I left Henry, I hope, free from his tiresome complaint, in other respects well, and thinking with great pleasure of Cheltenham and Stoneleigh. The brewery scheme is quite at an end: at a meeting of the subscribers last week it was by general, and I believe very hearty, consent dissolved. The country is very beautiful. I saw as much as ever to admire in my yesterday's journey. . . . FOOTNOTE: [5] Mrs. Edward Austen. XXV. CASTLE SQUARE, October 13. MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I have received your letter, and with most melancholy anxiety was it expected, for the sad news[6] reached us last night, but without any particulars. It came in a short letter to Martha from her sister, begun at Steventon and finished in Winchester. We have felt, we do feel, for you all, as you will not need to be told,--for you, for Fanny, for Henry, for Lady Bridges, and for dearest Edward, whose loss and whose sufferings seem to make those of every other person nothing. God be praised that you can say what you do of him: that he has a religious mind to bear him up, and a disposition that will gradually lead him to comfort. My dear, dear Fanny, I am so thankful that she has you with her! You will be everything to her; you will give her all the consolation that human aid can give. May the Almighty sustain you all, and keep you, my dearest Cassandra, well; but for the present I dare say you are equal to everything. You will know that the poor boys are at Steventon. Perhaps it is best for them, as they will have more means of exercise and amusement there than they could have with us, but I own myself disappointed by the arrangement. I should have loved to have them with me at such a time. I shall write to Edward by this post. We shall, of course, hear from you again very soon, and as often as you can write. We will write as you desire, and I shall add Bookham. Hamstall, I suppose, you write to yourselves, as you do not mention it. What a comfort that Mrs. Deedes is saved from present misery and alarm! But it will fall heavy upon poor Harriot; and as for Lady B., but that her fortitude does seem truly great, I should fear the effect of such a blow, and so unlooked for. I long to hear more of you all. Of Henry's anguish I think with grief and solicitude; but he will exert himself to be of use and comfort. With what true sympathy our feelings are shared by Martha you need not be told; she is the friend and sister under every circumstance. We need not enter into a panegyric on the departed, but it is sweet to think of her great worth, of her solid principles, of her true devotion, her excellence in every relation of life. It is also consolatory to reflect on the shortness of the sufferings which led her from this world to a better. Farewell for the present, my dearest sister. Tell Edward that we feel for him and pray for him. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. I will write to Catherine. Perhaps you can give me some directions about mourning. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTE: [6] The death of Mrs. Edward Austen. XXVI. CASTLE SQUARE, Saturday night (October 15). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your accounts make us as comfortable as we can expect to be at such a time. Edward's loss is terrible, and must be felt as such, and these are too early days indeed to think of moderation in grief, either in him or his afflicted daughter, but soon we may hope that our dear Fanny's sense of duty to that beloved father will rouse her to exertion. For his sake, and as the most acceptable proof of love to the spirit of her departed mother, she will try to be tranquil and resigned. Does she feel you to be a comfort to her, or is she too much overpowered for anything but solitude? Your account of Lizzy is very interesting. Poor child! One must hope the impression will be strong, and yet one's heart aches for a dejected mind of eight years old. I suppose you see the corpse? How does it appear? We are anxious to be assured that Edward will not attend the funeral, but when it comes to the point I think he must feel it impossible. Your parcel shall set off on Monday, and I hope the shoes will fit; Martha and I both tried them on. I shall send you such of your mourning as I think most likely to be useful, reserving for myself your stockings and half the velvet, in which selfish arrangement I know I am doing what you wish. I am to be in bombazeen and crape, according to what we are told is universal here, and which agrees with Martha's previous observation. My mourning, however, will not impoverish me, for by having my velvet pelisse fresh lined and made up, I am sure I shall have no occasion this winter for anything new of that sort. I take my cloak for the lining, and shall send yours on the chance of its doing something of the same for you, though I believe your pelisse is in better repair than mine. One Miss Baker makes my gown and the other my bonnet, which is to be silk covered with crape. I have written to Edward Cooper, and hope he will not send one of his letters of cruel comfort to my poor brother: and yesterday I wrote to Alethea Bigg, in reply to a letter from her. She tells us in confidence that Catherine is to be married on Tuesday se'nnight. Mr. Hill is expected at Manydown in the course of the ensuing week. We are desired by Mrs. Harrison and Miss Austen to say everything proper for them to yourself and Edward on this sad occasion, especially that nothing but a wish of not giving additional trouble where so much is inevitable prevents their writing themselves to express their concern. They seem truly to feel concern. I am glad you can say what you do of Mrs. Knight and of Goodnestone in general. It is a great relief to me to know that the shock did not make any of them ill. But what a task was yours to announce it! Now I hope you are not overpowered with letter-writing, as Henry and John can ease you of many of your correspondents. Was Mr. Scudamore in the house at the time, was any application attempted, and is the seizure at all accounted for? _Sunday._--As Edward's letter to his son is not come here, we know that you must have been informed as early as Friday of the boys being at Steventon, which I am glad of. Upon your letter to Dr. Goddard's being forwarded to them, Mary wrote to ask whether my mother wished to have her grandsons sent to her. We decided on their remaining where they were, which I hope my brother will approve of. I am sure he will do us the justice of believing that in such a decision we sacrificed inclination to what we thought best. I shall write by the coach to-morrow to Mrs. J. A., and to Edward, about their mourning, though this day's post will probably bring directions to them on that subject from yourselves. I shall certainly make use of the opportunity of addressing our nephew on the most serious of all concerns, as I naturally did in my letter to him before. The poor boys are, perhaps, more comfortable at Steventon than they could be here, but you will understand my feelings with respect to it. To-morrow will be a dreadful day for you all. Mr. Whitfield's will be a severe duty.[7] Glad shall I be to hear that it is over. That you are forever in our thoughts you will not doubt. I see your mournful party in my mind's eye under every varying circumstance of the day; and in the evening especially figure to myself its sad gloom: the efforts to talk, the frequent summons to melancholy orders and cares, and poor Edward, restless in misery, going from one room to another, and perhaps not seldom upstairs, to see all that remains of his Elizabeth. Dearest Fanny must now look upon herself as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend; as the being who is gradually to supply to him, to the extent that is possible, what he has lost. This consideration will elevate and cheer her. Adieu. You cannot write too often, as I said before. We are heartily rejoiced that the poor baby gives you no particular anxiety. Kiss dear Lizzy for us. Tell Fanny that I shall write in a day or two to Miss Sharpe. My mother is not ill. Yours most truly, J. AUSTEN. Tell Henry that a hamper of apples is gone to him from Kintbury, and that Mr. Fowle intended writing on Friday (supposing him in London) to beg that the charts, etc., may be consigned to the care of the Palmers. Mrs. Fowle has also written to Miss Palmer to beg she will send for them. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTE: [7] Mr. Whitfield was the Rector of Godmersham at this time, having come there in 1778. XXVII. CASTLE SQUARE, Monday (October 24). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Edward and George came to us soon after seven on Saturday, very well, but very cold, having by choice travelled on the outside, and with no greatcoat but what Mr. Wise, the coachman, good-naturedly spared them of his, as they sat by his side. They were so much chilled when they arrived, that I was afraid they must have taken cold; but it does not seem at all the case: I never saw them looking better. They behave extremely well in every respect, showing quite as much feeling as one wishes to see, and on every occasion speaking of their father with the liveliest affection. His letter was read over by each of them yesterday, and with many tears; George sobbed aloud, Edward's tears do not flow so easily; but as far as I can judge they are both very properly impressed by what has happened. Miss Lloyd, who is a more impartial judge than I can be, is exceedingly pleased with them. George is almost a new acquaintance to me, and I find him in a different way as engaging as Edward. We do not want amusement: bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable, spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards, with watching the flow and ebb of the river, and now and then a stroll out, keep us well employed; and we mean to avail ourselves of our kind papa's consideration, by not returning to Winchester till quite the evening of Wednesday. Mrs. J. A. had not time to get them more than one suit of clothes; their others are making here, and though I do not believe Southampton is famous for tailoring, I hope it will prove itself better than Basingstoke. Edward has an old black coat, which will save his having a second new one; but I find that black pantaloons are considered by them as necessary, and of course one would not have them made uncomfortable by the want of what is usual on such occasions. Fanny's letter was received with great pleasure yesterday, and her brother sends his thanks and will answer it soon. We all saw what she wrote, and were very much pleased with it. To-morrow I hope to hear from you, and to-morrow we must think of poor Catherine. To-day Lady Bridges is the heroine of our thoughts, and glad shall we be when we can fancy the meeting over. There will then be nothing so very bad for Edward to undergo. The "St. Albans," I find, sailed on the very day of my letters reaching Yarmouth, so that we must not expect an answer at present; we scarcely feel, however, to be in suspense, or only enough to keep our plans to ourselves. We have been obliged to explain them to our young visitors, in consequence of Fanny's letter, but we have not yet mentioned them to Steventon. We are all quite familiarized to the idea ourselves; my mother only wants Mrs. Seward to go out at midsummer. What sort of a kitchen garden is there? Mrs. J. A. expresses her fear of our settling in Kent, and, till this proposal was made, we began to look forward to it here; my mother was actually talking of a house at Wye. It will be best, however, as it is. Anne has just given her mistress warning; she is going to be married; I wish she would stay her year. On the subject of matrimony, I must notice a wedding in the Salisbury paper, which has amused me very much, Dr. Phillot to Lady Frances St. Lawrence. She wanted to have a husband, I suppose, once in her life, and he a Lady Frances. I hope your sorrowing party were at church yesterday, and have no longer that to dread. Martha was kept at home by a cold, but I went with my two nephews, and I saw Edward was much affected by the sermon, which, indeed, I could have supposed purposely addressed to the afflicted, if the text had not naturally come in the course of Dr. Mant's observations on the Litany: 'All that are in danger, necessity, or tribulation,' was the subject of it. The weather did not allow us afterwards to get farther than the quay, where George was very happy as long as we could stay, flying about from one side to the other, and skipping on board a collier immediately. In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home, to which they were very attentive; but you will not expect to hear that they did not return to conundrums the moment it was over. Their aunt has written pleasantly of them, which was more than I hoped. While I write now, George is most industriously making and naming paper ships, at which he afterwards shoots with horse-chestnuts, brought from Steventon on purpose; and Edward equally intent over the "Lake of Killarney," twisting himself about in one of our great chairs. _Tuesday._--Your close-written letter makes me quite ashamed of my wide lines; you have sent me a great deal of matter, most of it very welcome. As to your lengthened stay, it is no more than I expected, and what must be, but you cannot suppose I like it. All that you say of Edward is truly comfortable; I began to fear that when the bustle of the first week was over, his spirits might for a time be more depressed; and perhaps one must still expect something of the kind. If you escape a bilious attack, I shall wonder almost as much as rejoice. I am glad you mentioned where Catherine goes to-day; it is a good plan, but sensible people may generally be trusted to form such. The day began cheerfully, but it is not likely to continue what it should, for them or for us. We had a little water-party yesterday; I and my two nephews went from the Itchen Ferry up to Northam, where we landed, looked into the 74, and walked home, and it was so much enjoyed that I had intended to take them to Netley to-day; the tide is just right for our going immediately after moonshine, but I am afraid there will be rain; if we cannot get so far, however, we may perhaps go round from the ferry to the quay. I had not proposed doing more than cross the Itchen yesterday, but it proved so pleasant, and so much to the satisfaction of all, that when we reached the middle of the stream we agreed to be rowed up the river; both the boys rowed great part of the way, and their questions and remarks, as well as their enjoyment, were very amusing; George's inquiries were endless, and his eagerness in everything reminds me often of his uncle Henry. Our evening was equally agreeable in its way: I introduced speculation, and it was so much approved that we hardly knew how to leave off. Your idea of an early dinner to-morrow is exactly what we propose, for, after writing the first part of this letter, it came into my head that at this time of year we have not summer evenings. We shall watch the light to-day, that we may not give them a dark drive to-morrow. They send their best love to papa and everybody, with George's thanks for the letter brought by this post. Martha begs my brother may be assured of her interest in everything relating to him and his family, and of her sincerely partaking our pleasure in the receipt of every good account from Godmersham. Of Chawton I think I can have nothing more to say, but that everything you say about it in the letter now before me will, I am sure, as soon as I am able to read it to her, make my mother consider the plan with more and more pleasure. We had formed the same views on H. Digweed's farm. A very kind and feeling letter is arrived to-day from Kintbury. Mrs. Fowle's sympathy and solicitude on such an occasion you will be able to do justice to, and to express it as she wishes to my brother. Concerning you, she says: "Cassandra will, I know, excuse my writing to her; it is not to save myself but her that I omit so doing. Give my best, my kindest love to her, and tell her I feel for her as I know she would for me on the same occasion, and that I most sincerely hope her health will not suffer." We have just had two hampers of apples from Kintbury, and the floor of our little garret is almost covered. Love to all. Yours very affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXVIII. CASTLE SQUARE, Sunday (November 21). YOUR letter, my dear Cassandra, obliges me to write immediately, that you may have the earliest notice of Frank's intending, if possible, to go to Godmersham exactly at the time now fixed for your visit to Goodnestone. He resolved, almost directly on the receipt of your former letter, to try for an extension of his leave of absence, that he might be able to go down to you for two days, but charged me not to give you any notice of it, on account of the uncertainty of success. Now, however, I must give it, and now perhaps he may be giving it himself; for I am just in the hateful predicament of being obliged to write what I know will somehow or other be of no use. He meant to ask for five days more, and if they were granted, to go down by Thursday night's mail, and spend Friday and Saturday with you; and he considered his chance of succeeding by no means bad. I hope it will take place as he planned, and that your arrangements with Goodnestone may admit of suitable alteration. Your news of Edward Bridges was quite news, for I have had no letter from Wrotham. I wish him happy with all my heart, and hope his choice may turn out according to his own expectations, and beyond those of his family; and I dare say it will. Marriage is a great improver, and in a similar situation Harriet may be as amiable as Eleanor. As to money, that will come, you may be sure, because they cannot do without it. When you see him again, pray give him our congratulations and best wishes. This match will certainly set John and Lucy going. There are six bedchambers at Chawton; Henry wrote to my mother the other day, and luckily mentioned the number, which is just what we wanted to be assured of. He speaks also of garrets for store-places, one of which she immediately planned fitting up for Edward's man-servant; and now perhaps it must be for our own; for she is already quite reconciled to our keeping one. The difficulty of doing without one had been thought of before. His name shall be Robert, if you please. Before I can tell you of it, you will have heard that Miss Sawbridge is married. It took place, I believe, on Thursday. Mrs. Fowle has for some time been in the secret, but the neighborhood in general were quite unsuspicious. Mr. Maxwell was tutor to the young Gregorys,--consequently, they must be one of the happiest couples in the world, and either of them worthy of envy, for she must be excessively in love, and he mounts from nothing to a comfortable home. Martha has heard him very highly spoken of. They continue for the present at Speen Hill. I have a Southampton match to return for your Kentish one, Captain G. Heathcote and Miss A. Lyell. I have it from Alethea, and like it, because I had made it before. Yes, the Stoneleigh business is concluded, but it was not till yesterday that my mother was regularly informed of it, though the news had reached us on Monday evening by way of Steventon. My aunt says as little as may be on the subject by way of information, and nothing at all by way of satisfaction. She reflects on Mr. T. Leigh's dilatoriness, and looks about with great diligence and success for inconvenience and evil, among which she ingeniously places the danger of her new housemaids catching cold on the outside of the coach, when she goes down to Bath, for a carriage makes her sick. John Binns has been offered their place, but declines it; as she supposes, because he will not wear a livery. Whatever be the cause, I like the effect. In spite of all my mother's long and intimate knowledge of the writer, she was not up to the expectation of such a letter as this; the discontentedness of it shocked and surprised her--but I see nothing in it out of nature, though a sad nature. She does not forget to wish for Chambers, you may be sure. No particulars are given, not a word of arrears mentioned, though in her letter to James they were in a general way spoken of. The amount of them is a matter of conjecture, and to my mother a most interesting one; she cannot fix any time for their beginning with any satisfaction to herself but Mrs. Leigh's death, and Henry's two thousand pounds neither agrees with that period nor any other. I did not like to own our previous information of what was intended last July, and have therefore only said that if we could see Henry we might hear many particulars, as I had understood that some confidential conversation had passed between him and Mr. T. L. at Stoneleigh. We have been as quiet as usual since Frank and Mary left us; Mr. Criswick called on Martha that very morning on his way home again from Portsmouth, and we have had no visitor since. We called on the Miss Lyells one day, and heard a good account of Mr. Heathcote's canvass, the success of which, of course, exceeds his expectations. Alethea in her letter hopes for my interest, which I conclude means Edward's, and I take this opportunity, therefore, of requesting that he will bring in Mr. Heathcote. Mr. Lane told us yesterday that Mr. H. had behaved very handsomely, and waited on Mr. Thistlethwaite, to say that if he (Mr. T.) would stand, he (Mr. H.) would not oppose him; but Mr. T. declined it, acknowledging himself still smarting under the payment of late electioneering costs. The Mrs. Hulberts, we learn from Kintbury, come to Steventon this week, and bring Mary Jane Fowle with them on her way to Mrs. Nune's; she returns at Christmas with her brother. Our brother we may perhaps see in the course of a few days, and we mean to take the opportunity of his help to go one night to the play. Martha ought to see the inside of the theatre once while she lives in Southampton, and I think she will hardly wish to take a second view. The furniture of Bellevue is to be sold to-morrow, and we shall take it in our usual walk, if the weather be favorable. How could you have a wet day on Thursday? With us it was a prince of days, the most delightful we have had for weeks; soft, bright, with a brisk wind from the southwest; everybody was out and talking of spring, and Martha and I did not know how to turn back. On Friday evening we had some very blowing weather,--from six to nine; I think we never heard it worse, even here. And one night we had so much rain that it forced its way again into the store-closet; and though the evil was comparatively slight and the mischief nothing, I had some employment the next day in drying parcels, etc. I have now moved still more out of the way. Martha sends her best love, and thanks you for admitting her to the knowledge of the pros and cons about Harriet Foote; she has an interest in all such matters. I am also to say that she wants to see you. Mary Jane missed her papa and mamma a good deal at first, but now does very well without them. I am glad to hear of little John's being better, and hope your accounts of Mrs. Knight will also improve. Adieu! remember me affectionately to everybody, and believe me, Ever yours, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXIX. CASTLE SQUARE, Friday (December 9). MANY thanks, my dear Cassandra, to you and Mr. Deedes for your joint and agreeable composition, which took me by surprise this morning. He has certainly great merit as a writer; he does ample justice to his subject, and without being diffuse is clear and correct; and though I do not mean to compare his epistolary powers with yours, or to give him the same portion of my gratitude, he certainly has a very pleasing way of winding up a whole, and speeding truth into the world. "But all this," as my dear Mrs. Piozzi says, "is flight and fancy and nonsense, for my master has his great casks to mind and I have my little children." It is you, however, in this instance, that have the little children, and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again; but my meaning really is, that I am extremely foolish in writing all this unnecessary stuff when I have so many matters to write about that my paper will hardly hold it all. Little matters they are, to be sure, but highly important. In the first place, Miss Curling is actually at Portsmouth, which I was always in hopes would not happen. I wish her no worse, however, than a long and happy abode there. Here she would probably be dull, and I am sure she would be troublesome. The bracelets are in my possession, and everything I could wish them to be. They came with Martha's pelisse, which likewise gives great satisfaction. Soon after I had closed my last letter to you we were visited by Mrs. Dickens and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Bertie, the wife of a lately made Admiral. Mrs. F. A.,[8] I believe, was their first object, but they put up with us very kindly, and Mrs. D., finding in Miss Lloyd a friend of Mrs. Dundas, had another motive for the acquaintance. She seems a really agreeable woman,--that is, her manners are gentle, and she knows a great many of our connections in West Kent. Mrs. Bertie lives in the Polygon, and was out when we returned her visit, which are her two virtues. A larger circle of acquaintance, and an increase of amusement, is quite in character with our approaching removal. Yes, I mean to go to as many balls as possible, that I may have a good bargain. Everybody is very much concerned at our going away, and everybody is acquainted with Chawton, and speaks of it as a remarkably pretty village, and everybody knows the house we describe, but nobody fixes on the right. I am very much obliged to Mrs. Knight for such a proof of the interest she takes in me, and she may depend upon it that I will marry Mr. Papillon, whatever may be his reluctance or my own. I owe her much more than such a trifling sacrifice. Our ball was rather more amusing than I expected. Martha liked it very much, and I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour. It was past nine before we were sent for, and not twelve when we returned. The room was tolerably full, and there were, perhaps, thirty couple of dancers. The melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago. I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. We paid an additional shilling for our tea, which we took as we chose in an adjoining and very comfortable room. There were only four dances, and it went to my heart that the Miss Lances (one of them, too, named Emma) should have partners only for two. You will not expect to hear that I was asked to dance, but I was--by the gentleman whom we met that Sunday with Captain D'Auvergne. We have always kept up a bowing acquaintance since, and, being pleased with his black eyes, I spoke to him at the ball, which brought on me this civility; but I do not know his name, and he seems so little at home in the English language that I believe his black eyes may be the best of him. Captain D'Auvergne has got a ship. Martha and I made use of the very favorable state of yesterday for walking, to pay our duty at Chiswell. We found Mrs. Lance at home and alone, and sat out three other ladies who soon came in. We went by the ferry, and returned by the bridge, and were scarcely at all fatigued. Edward must have enjoyed the last two days. You, I presume, had a cool drive to Canterbury. Kitty Foote came on Wednesday; and her evening visit began early enough for the last part, the apple-pie, of our dinner, for we never dine now till five. Yesterday I--or rather, you--had a letter from Nanny Hilliard, the object of which is that she would be very much obliged to us if we would get Hannah a place. I am sorry that I cannot assist her; if you can, let me know, as I shall not answer the letter immediately. Mr. Sloper is married again, not much to Nanny's, or anybody's satisfaction. The lady was governess to Sir Robert's natural children, and seems to have nothing to recommend her. I do not find, however, that Nanny is likely to lose her place in consequence. She says not a word of what service she wishes for Hannah, or what Hannah can do; but a nursery, I suppose, or something of that kind, must be the thing. Having now cleared away my smaller articles of news, I come to a communication of some weight; no less than that my uncle and aunt[9] are going to allow James 100_l._ a year. We hear of it through Steventon. Mary sent us the other day an extract from my aunt's letter on the subject, in which the donation is made with the greatest kindness, and intended as a compensation for his loss in the conscientious refusal of Hampstead living; 100_l._ a year being all that he had at the time called its worth, as I find it was always intended at Steventon to divide the real income with Kintbury. Nothing can be more affectionate than my aunt's language in making the present, and likewise in expressing her hope of their being much more together in future than, to her great regret, they have of late years been. My expectations for my mother do not rise with this event. We will allow a little more time, however, before we fly out. If not prevented by parish business, James comes to us on Monday. The Mrs. Hulberts and Miss Murden are their guests at present, and likely to continue such till Christmas. Anna comes home on the 19th. The hundred a year begins next Lady-day. I am glad you are to have Henry with you again; with him and the boys you cannot but have a cheerful, and at times even a merry, Christmas. Martha is so [_MSS. torn_]. . . . We want to be settled at Chawton in time for Henry to come to us for some shooting in October, at least, or a little earlier, and Edward may visit us after taking his boys back to Winchester. Suppose we name the 4th of September. Will not that do? I have but one thing more to tell you. Mrs. Hill called on my mother yesterday while we were gone to Chiswell, and in the course of the visit asked her whether she knew anything of a clergyman's family of the name of Alford, who had resided in our part of Hampshire. Mrs. Hill had been applied to as likely to give some information of them on account of their probable vicinity to Dr. Hill's living by a lady, or for a lady, who had known Mrs. and the two Miss Alfords in Bath, whither they had removed it seems from Hampshire, and who now wishes to convey to the Miss Alfords some work or trimming which she has been doing for them; but the mother and daughters have left Bath, and the lady cannot learn where they are gone to. While my mother gave us the account, the probability of its being ourselves occurred to us, and it had previously struck herself . . . what makes it more likely, and even indispensably to be us, is that she mentioned Mr. Hammond as now having the living or curacy which the father had had. I cannot think who our kind lady can be, but I dare say we shall not like the work. Distribute the affectionate love of a heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it. Yours ever sincerely, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTES: [8] Frank Austen. [9] Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot. XXX. CASTLE SQUARE, Tuesday (December 27). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I can now write at leisure and make the most of my subjects, which is lucky, as they are not numerous this week. Our house was cleared by half-past eleven on Saturday, and we had the satisfaction of hearing yesterday that the party reached home in safety soon after five. I was very glad of your letter this morning; for, my mother taking medicine, Eliza keeping her bed with a cold, and Choles not coming, made us rather dull and dependent on the post. You tell me much that gives me pleasure, but I think not much to answer. I wish I could help you in your needlework. I have two hands and a new thimble that lead a very easy life. Lady Sondes' match surprises, but does not offend me; had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her, to be happy. Do not imagine that your picture of your _tête-à-tête_ with Sir B. makes any change in our expectations here; he could not be really reading, though he held the newspaper in his hand; he was making up his mind to the deed, and the manner of it. I think you will have a letter from him soon. I heard from Portsmouth yesterday, and as I am to send them more clothes, they cannot be expecting a very early return to us. Mary's face is pretty well, but she must have suffered a great deal with it; an abscess was formed and opened. Our evening party on Thursday produced nothing more remarkable than Miss Murden's coming too, though she had declined it absolutely in the morning, and sitting very ungracious and very silent with us from seven o'clock till half after eleven, for so late was it, owing to the chairmen, before we got rid of them. The last hour, spent in yawning and shivering in a wide circle round the fire, was dull enough, but the tray had admirable success. The widgeon and the preserved ginger were as delicious as one could wish. But as to our black butter, do not decoy anybody to Southampton by such a lure, for it is all gone. The first pot was opened when Frank and Mary were here, and proved not at all what it ought to be; it was neither solid nor entirely sweet, and on seeing it, Eliza remembered that Miss Austen had said she did not think it had been boiled enough. It was made, you know, when we were absent. Such being the event of the first pot, I would not save the second, and we therefore ate it in unpretending privacy; and though not what it ought to be, part of it was very good. James means to keep three horses on this increase of income; at present he has but one. Mary wishes the other two to be fit to carry women, and in the purchase of one Edward will probably be called upon to fulfil his promise to his godson. We have now pretty well ascertained James's income to be eleven hundred pounds, curate paid, which makes us very happy,--the ascertainment as well as the income. Mary does not talk of the garden; it may well be a disagreeable subject to her, but her husband is persuaded that nothing is wanting to make the first new one good but trenching, which is to be done by his own servants and John Bond, by degrees, not at the expense which trenching the other amounted to. I was happy to hear, chiefly for Anna's sake, that a ball at Manydown was once more in agitation; it is called a child's ball, and given by Mrs. Heathcote to Wm. Such was its beginning at least, but it will probably swell into something more. Edward was invited during his stay at Manydown, and it is to take place between this and Twelfth-day. Mrs. Hulbert has taken Anna a pair of white shoes on the occasion. I forgot in my last to tell you that we hear, by way of Kintbury and the Palmers, that they were all well at Bermuda in the beginning of Nov. _Wednesday._--Yesterday must have been a day of sad remembrance at Gm.[10] I am glad it is over. We spent Friday evening with our friends at the boarding-house, and our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and, poor man! is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough. I recommended him to read "Corinna." Miss Hook is a well-behaved, genteelish woman; Mrs. Drew well behaved, without being at all genteel. Mr. Wynne seems a chatty and rather familiar young man. Miss Murden was quite a different creature this last evening from what she had been before, owing to her having with Martha's help found a situation in the morning, which bids very fair for comfort. When she leaves Steventon, she comes to board and lodge with Mrs. Hookey, the chemist--for there is no Mr. Hookey. I cannot say that I am in any hurry for the conclusion of her present visit, but I was truly glad to see her comfortable in mind and spirits; at her age, perhaps, one may be as friendless oneself, and in similar circumstances quite as captious. My mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate,--a whole tablespoon and a whole dessert-spoon, and six whole teaspoons,--which makes our sideboard border on the magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old or useless silver. I have turned the 11_s._ in the list into 12_s._, and the card looks all the better; a silver tea-ladle is also added, which will at least answer the purpose of making us sometimes think of John Warren. I have laid Lady Sondes' case before Martha, who does not make the least objection to it, and is particularly pleased with the name of Montresor. I do not agree with her there, but I like his rank very much, and always affix the ideas of strong sense and highly elegant manners to a general. I must write to Charles next week. You may guess in what extravagant terms of praise Earle Harwood speaks of him. He is looked up to by everybody in all America. I shall not tell you anything more of Wm. Digweed's china, as your silence on the subject makes you unworthy of it. Mrs. H. Digweed looks forward with great satisfaction to our being her neighbors. I would have her enjoy the idea to the utmost, as I suspect there will not be much in the reality. With equal pleasure we anticipate an intimacy with her husband's bailiff and his wife, who live close by us, and are said to be remarkably good sort of people. Yes, yes, we will have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for thirty guineas, and I will practise country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces, when we have the pleasure of their company. Martha sends her love to Henry, and tells him that he will soon have a bill of Miss Chaplin's, about 14_l._, to pay on her account; but the bill shall not be sent in till his return to town. I hope he comes to you in good health, and in spirits as good as a first return to Godmersham can allow. With his nephews he will force himself to be cheerful, till he really is so. Send me some intelligence of Eliza; it is a long while since I have heard of her. We have had snow on the ground here almost a week; it is now going, but Southampton must boast no longer. We all send our love to Edward junior and his brothers, and I hope Speculation is generally liked. Fare you well. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. My mother has not been out of doors this week, but she keeps pretty well. We have received through Bookham an indifferent account of your godmother. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTE: [10] Godmersham, Edward Austen's place. XXXI. CASTLE SQUARE, Tuesday (January 10, 1809). I AM not surprised, my dear Cassandra, that you did not find my last letter very full of matter, and I wish this may not have the same deficiency; but we are doing nothing ourselves to write about, and I am therefore quite dependent upon the communications of our friends, or my own wits. This post brought me two interesting letters, yours and one from Bookham, in answer to an inquiry of mine about your good godmother, of whom we had lately received a very alarming account from Paragon. Miss Arnold was the informant then, and she spoke of Mrs. E. L. having been very dangerously ill, and attended by a physician from Oxford. Your letter to Adlestrop may perhaps bring you information from the spot, but in case it should not, I must tell you that she is better; though Dr. Bourne cannot yet call her out of danger; such was the case last Wednesday, and Mrs. Cooke's having had no later account is a favorable sign. I am to hear again from the latter next week, but not this, if everything goes on well. Her disorder is an inflammation on the lungs, arising from a severe chill taken in church last Sunday three weeks; her mind all pious composure, as may be supposed. George Cooke was there when her illness began; his brother has now taken his place. Her age and feebleness considered, one's fears cannot but preponderate, though her amendment has already surpassed the expectation of the physician at the beginning. I am sorry to add that Becky is laid up with a complaint of the same kind. I am very glad to have the time of your return at all fixed; we all rejoice in it, and it will not be later than I had expected. I dare not hope that Mary and Miss Curling may be detained at Portsmouth so long or half so long; but it would be worth twopence to have it so. The "St. Albans" perhaps may soon be off to help bring home what may remain by this time of our poor army, whose state seems dreadfully critical. The "Regency" seems to have been heard of only here; my most political correspondents make no mention of it. Unlucky that I should have wasted so much reflection on the subject. I can now answer your question to my mother more at large, and likewise more at small--with equal perspicuity and minuteness; for the very day of our leaving Southampton is fixed; and if the knowledge is of no use to Edward, I am sure it will give him pleasure. Easter Monday, April 3, is the day; we are to sleep that night at Alton, and be with our friends at Bookham the next, if they are then at home; there we remain till the following Monday, and on Tuesday, April 11, hope to be at Godmersham. If the Cookes are absent, we shall finish our journey on the 5th. These plans depend of course upon the weather, but I hope there will be no settled cold to delay us materially. To make you amends for being at Bookham, it is in contemplation to spend a few days at Baiton Lodge in our way out of Kent. The hint of such a visit is most affectionately welcomed by Mrs. Birch, in one of her odd pleasant letters lately, in which she speaks of us with the usual distinguished kindness, declaring that she shall not be at all satisfied unless a very handsome present is made us immediately from one quarter. Fanny's not coming with you is no more than we expected; and as we have not the hope of a bed for her, and shall see her so soon afterwards at Godmersham, we cannot wish it otherwise. William will be quite recovered, I trust, by the time you receive this. What a comfort his cross-stitch must have been! Pray tell him that I should like to see his work very much. I hope our answers this morning have given satisfaction; we had great pleasure in Uncle Deedes' packet; and pray let Marianne know, in private, that I think she is quite right to work a rug for Uncle John's coffee urn, and that I am sure it must give great pleasure to herself now, and to him when he receives it. The preference of Brag over Speculation does not greatly surprise me, I believe, because I feel the same myself; but it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage; and, after all, what is there so delightful in a pair royal of Braggers? It is but three nines or three knaves, or a mixture of them. When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its ground against Speculation,--of which I hope Edward is now convinced. Give my love to him if he is. The letter from Paragon before mentioned was much like those which had preceded it, as to the felicity of its writer. They found their house so dirty and so damp that they were obliged to be a week at an inn. John Binns had behaved most unhandsomely, and engaged himself elsewhere. They have a man, however, on the same footing, which my aunt does not like, and she finds both him and the new maid-servant very, very inferior to Robert and Martha. Whether they mean to have any other domestics does not appear, nor whether they are to have a carriage while they are in Bath. The Holders are as usual, though I believe it is not very usual for them to be happy, which they now are at a great rate, in Hooper's marriage. The Irvines are not mentioned. The American lady improved as we went on; but still the same faults in part recurred. We are now in Margiana, and like it very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain. _Wednesday._--Your report of Eliza's health gives me great pleasure, and the progress of the bank is a constant source of satisfaction. With such increasing profits, tell Henry that I hope he will not work poor High-Diddle so hard as he used to do. Has your newspaper given a sad story of a Mrs. Middleton, wife of a farmer in Yorkshire, her sister, and servant, being almost frozen to death in the late weather, her little child quite so? I hope the sister is not our friend Miss Woodd, and I rather think her brother-in-law had moved into Lincolnshire, but their name and station accord too well. Mrs. M. and the maid are said to be tolerably recovered, but the sister is likely to lose the use of her limbs. Charles's rug will be finished to-day, and sent to-morrow to Frank, to be consigned by him to Mr. Turner's care; and I am going to send Marmion out with it,--very generous in me, I think. As we have no letter from Adlestrop, we may suppose the good woman was alive on Monday, but I cannot help expecting bad news from thence or Bookham in a few days. Do you continue quite well? Have you nothing to say of your little namesake? We join in love and many happy returns. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. The Manydown ball was a smaller thing than I expected, but it seems to have made Anna very happy. At her age it would not have done for me. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXXII. CASTLE SQUARE, Tuesday (January 17). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I am happy to say that we had no second letter from Bookham last week. Yours has brought its usual measure of satisfaction and amusement, and I beg your acceptance of all the thanks due on the occasion. Your offer of cravats is very kind, and happens to be particularly adapted to my wants, but it was an odd thing to occur to you. Yes, we have got another fall of snow, and are very dreadful; everything seems to turn to snow this winter. I hope you have had no more illness among you, and that William will be soon as well as ever. His working a footstool for Chawton is a most agreeable surprise to me, and I am sure his grandmamma will value it very much as a proof of his affection and industry, but we shall never have the heart to put our feet upon it. I believe I must work a muslin cover in satin stitch to keep it from the dirt. I long to know what his colors are. I guess greens and purples. Edward and Henry have started a difficulty respecting our journey, which, I must own with some confusion, had never been thought of by us; but if the former expected by it to prevent our travelling into Kent entirely, he will be disappointed, for we have already determined to go the Croydon road on leaving Bookham and sleep at Dartford. Will not that do? There certainly does seem no convenient resting-place on the other road. Anna went to Clanville last Friday, and I have hopes of her new aunt's being really worth her knowing. Perhaps you may never have heard that James and Mary paid a morning visit there in form some weeks ago, and Mary, though by no means disposed to like her, was very much pleased with her indeed. Her praise, to be sure, proves nothing more than Mrs. M.'s being civil and attentive to them, but her being so is in favor of her having good sense. Mary writes of Anna as improved in person, but gives her no other commendation. I am afraid her absence now may deprive her of one pleasure, for that silly Mr. Hammond is actually to give his ball on Friday. We had some reason to expect a visit from Earle Harwood and James this week, but they do not come. Miss Murden arrived last night at Mrs. Hookey's, as a message and a basket announced to us. You will therefore return to an enlarged and, of course, improved society here, especially as the Miss Williamses are come back. We were agreeably surprised the other day by a visit from your beauty and mine, each in a new cloth mantle and bonnet; and I dare say you will value yourself much on the modest propriety of Miss W.'s taste, hers being purple and Miss Grace's scarlet. I can easily suppose that your six weeks here will be fully occupied, were it only in lengthening the waists of your gowns. I have pretty well arranged my spring and summer plans of that kind, and mean to wear out my spotted muslin before I go. You will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feebleness, which with a little care may come to something. Martha and Dr. Mant are as bad as ever; he runs after her in the street to apologize for having spoken to a gentleman while she was near him the day before. Poor Mrs. Mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married daughters'. When William returns to Winchester Mary Jane is to go to Mrs. Nune's for a month, and then to Steventon for a fortnight, and it seems likely that she and her aunt Martha may travel into Berkshire together. We shall not have a month of Martha after your return, and that month will be a very interrupted and broken one, but we shall enjoy ourselves the more when we can get a quiet half-hour together. To set against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got "Ida of Athens," by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body, it might be worth reading in this weather. Adieu! I must leave off to stir the fire and call on Miss Murden. _Evening._--I have done them both, the first very often. We found our friend as comfortable as she can ever allow herself to be in cold weather. There is a very neat parlor behind the shop for her to sit in, not very light indeed, being _à la_ Southampton, the middle of three deep, but very lively from the frequent sound of the pestle and mortar. We afterwards called on the Miss Williamses, who lodge at Durantoy's. Miss Mary only was at home, and she is in very indifferent health. Dr. Hacket came in while we were there, and said that he never remembered such a severe winter as this in Southampton before. It is bad, but we do not suffer as we did last year, because the wind has been more N.E. than N.W. For a day or two last week my mother was very poorly with a return of one of her old complaints, but it did not last long, and seems to have left nothing bad behind it. She began to talk of a serious illness, her two last having been preceded by the same symptoms, but, thank heaven! she is now quite as well as one can expect her to be in weather which deprives her of exercise. Miss M. conveys to us a third volume of sermons, from Hamstall, just published, and which we are to like better than the two others; they are professedly practical, and for the use of country congregations. I have just received some verses in an unknown hand, and am desired to forward them to my nephew Edward at Godmersham. Alas! poor Brag, thou boastful game! What now avails thine empty name? Where now thy more distinguished fame? My day is o'er, and thine the same, For thou, like me, art thrown aside At Godmersham, this Christmastide; And now across the table wide Each game save brag or spec. is tried. Such is the mild ejaculation Of tender-hearted speculation. _Wednesday._--I expected to have a letter from somebody to-day, but I have not. Twice every day I think of a letter from Portsmouth. Miss Murden has been sitting with us this morning. As yet she seems very well pleased with her situation. The worst part of her being in Southampton will be the necessity of one walking with her now and then, for she talks so loud that one is quite ashamed; but our dining hours are luckily very different, which we shall take all reasonable advantage of. The Queen's birthday moves the assembly to this night instead of last, and as it is always fully attended, Martha and I expect an amusing show. We were in hopes of being independent of other companions by having the attendance of Mr. Austen and Captain Harwood; but as they fail us, we are obliged to look out for other help, and have fixed on the Wallops as least likely to be troublesome. I have called on them this morning and found them very willing, and I am sorry that you must wait a whole week for the particulars of the evening. I propose being asked to dance by our acquaintance Mr. Smith, now _Captain_ Smith, who has lately reappeared in Southampton, but I shall decline it. He saw Charles last August. What an alarming bride Mrs. ---- must have been; such a parade is one of the most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine. To attract notice could have been her only wish. It augurs ill for her family; it announces not great sense, and therefore insures boundless influence. I hope Fanny's visit is now taking place. You have said scarcely anything of her lately, but I trust you are as good friends as ever. Martha sends her love, and hopes to have the pleasure of seeing you when you return to Southampton. You are to understand this message as being merely for the sake of a message to oblige me. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Henry never sent his love to me in your last, but I send him mine. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXXIII. CASTLE SQUARE, Tuesday (January 24). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I will give you the indulgence of a letter on Thursday this week, instead of Friday, but I do not require you to write again before Sunday, provided I may believe you and your finger going on quite well. Take care of your precious self; do not work too hard. Remember that Aunt Cassandras are quite as scarce as Miss Beverleys.[11] I had the happiness yesterday of a letter from Charles, but I shall say as little about it as possible, because I know that excruciating Henry will have had a letter likewise, to make all my intelligence valueless. It was written at Bermuda on the 7th and 10th of December. All well, and Fanny still only in expectation of being otherwise. He had taken a small prize in his late cruise,--a French schooner, laden with sugar; but bad weather parted them, and she had not yet been heard of. His cruise ended December 1st. My September letter was the latest he had received. This day three weeks you are to be in London, and I wish you better weather; not but that you may have worse, for we have now nothing but ceaseless snow or rain and insufferable dirt to complain of; no tempestuous winds nor severity of cold. Since I wrote last we have had something of each, but it is not genteel to rip up old grievances. You used me scandalously by not mentioning Edward Cooper's sermons. I tell you everything, and it is unknown the mysteries you conceal from me; and, to add to the rest, you persevere in giving a final "e" to "invalid," thereby putting it out of one's power to suppose Mrs. E. Leigh, even for a moment, a veteran soldier. She, good woman, is, I hope, destined for some further placid enjoyment of her own excellence in this world, for her recovery advances exceedingly well. I had this pleasant news in a letter from Bookham last Thursday; but as the letter was from Mary instead of her mother, you will guess her account was not equally good from home. Mrs. Cooke had been confined to her bed some days by illness, but was then better, and Mary wrote in confidence of her continuing to mend. I have desired to hear again soon. You rejoice me by what you say of Fanny.[12] I hope she will not turn good-for-nothing this ever so long. We thought of and talked of her yesterday with sincere affection, and wished her a long enjoyment of all the happiness to which she seems born. While she gives happiness to those about her she is pretty sure of her own share. I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write, but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning criticism may not hurt my style, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet, it would be charming. We have been in two or three dreadful states within the last week, from the melting of the snow, etc., and the contest between us and the closet has now ended in our defeat. I have been obliged to move almost everything out of it, and leave it to splash itself as it likes. You have by no means raised my curiosity after Caleb. My disinclination for it before was affected, but now it is real. I do not like the evangelicals. Of course I shall be delighted when I read it, like other people; but till I do I dislike it. I am sorry my verses did not bring any return from Edward. I was in hopes they might, but I suppose he does not rate them high enough. It might be partiality, but they seemed to me purely classical,--just like Homer and Virgil, Ovid and Propria que Maribus. I had a nice brotherly letter from Frank the other day, which, after an interval of nearly three weeks, was very welcome. No orders were come on Friday, and none were come yesterday, or we should have heard to-day. I had supposed Miss C. would share her cousin's room here, but a message in this letter proves the contrary. I will make the garret as comfortable as I can, but the possibilities of that apartment are not great. My mother has been talking to Eliza about our future home, and she, making no difficulty at all of the sweetheart, is perfectly disposed to continue with us, but till she has written home for mother's approbation cannot quite decide. Mother does not like to have her so far off. At Chawton she will be nine or ten miles nearer, which I hope will have its due influence. As for Sally, she means to play John Binns with us, in her anxiety to belong to our household again. Hitherto she appears a very good servant. You depend upon finding all your plants dead, I hope. They look very ill, I understand. Your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them waiting in the cold. The room was tolerably full, and the ball opened by Miss Glyn. The Miss Lances had partners, Captain Dauvergne's friend appeared in regimentals, Caroline Maitland had an officer to flirt with, and Mr. John Harrison was deputed by Captain Smith, being himself absent, to ask me to dance. Everything went well, you see, especially after we had tucked Mrs. Lance's neckerchief in behind and fastened it with a pin. We had a very full and agreeable account of Mr. Hammond's ball from Anna last night; the same fluent pen has sent similar information, I know, into Kent. She seems to have been as happy as one could wish her, and the complacency of her mamma in doing the honors of the evening must have made her pleasure almost as great. The grandeur of the meeting was beyond my hopes. I should like to have seen Anna's looks and performance, but that sad cropped head must have injured the former. Martha pleases herself with believing that if I had kept her counsel you would never have heard of Dr. M.'s late behavior, as if the very slight manner in which I mentioned it could have been all on which you found your judgment. I do not endeavor to undeceive her, because I wish her happy, at all events, and know how highly she prizes happiness of any kind. She is, moreover, so full of kindness for us both, and sends you in particular so many good wishes about your finger, that I am willing to overlook a venial fault, and as Dr. M. is a clergyman, their attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air. Adieu, sweet You. This is grievous news from Spain. It is well that Dr. Moore was spared the knowledge of such a son's death. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Anna's hand gets better and better; it begins to be too good for any consequence. We send best love to dear little Lizzy and Marianne in particular. The Portsmouth paper gave a melancholy history of a poor mad woman, escaped from confinement, who said her husband and daughter, of the name of Payne, lived at Ashford, in Kent. Do you own them? Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTES: [11] "Cecilia" Beverley, the heroine of Miss Burney's novel. [12] Fanny Austen, afterward Lady Edward Knatchbull. XXXIV. CASTLE SQUARE, Monday (January 30). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I was not much surprised yesterday by the agreeable surprise of your letter, and extremely glad to receive the assurance of your finger being well again. Here is such a wet day as never was seen. I wish the poor little girls had better weather for their journey; they must amuse themselves with watching the raindrops down the windows. Sackree, I suppose, feels quite broken-hearted. I cannot have done with the weather without observing how delightfully mild it is; I am sure Fanny must enjoy it with us. Yesterday was a very blowing day; we got to church, however, which we had not been able to do for two Sundays before. I am not at all ashamed about the name of the novel, having been guilty of no insult toward your handwriting; the diphthong I always saw, but knowing how fond you were of adding a vowel wherever you could, I attributed it to that alone, and the knowledge of the truth does the book no service; the only merit it could have was in the name of Caleb, which has an honest, unpretending sound, but in Coelebs there is pedantry and affectation. Is it written only to classical scholars? I shall now try to say only what is necessary, I am weary of meandering; so expect a vast deal of small matter, concisely told, in the next two pages. Mrs. Cooke has been very dangerously ill, but is now, I hope, safe. I had a letter last week from George, Mary being too busy to write, and at that time the disorder was called of the typhus kind, and their alarm considerable, but yesterday brought me a much better account from Mary, the origin of the complaint being now ascertained to be bilious, and the strong medicines requisite promising to be effectual. Mrs. E. L. is so much recovered as to get into the dressing-room every day. A letter from Hamstall gives us the history of Sir Tho. Williams's return. The Admiral, whoever he might he, took a fancy to the "Neptune," and having only a worn-out 74 to offer in lieu of it, Sir Tho. declined such a command, and is come home passenger. Lucky man! to have so fair an opportunity of escape. I hope his wife allows herself to be happy on the occasion, and does not give all her thoughts to being nervous. A great event happens this week at Hamstall in young Edward's removal to school. He is going to Rugby, and is very happy in the idea of it; I wish his happiness may last, but it will be a great change to become a raw school-boy from being a pompous sermon-writer and a domineering brother. It will do him good, I dare say. Caroline has had a great escape from being burnt to death lately. As her husband gives the account, we must believe it true. Miss Murden is gone,--called away by the critical state of Mrs. Pottinger who has had another severe stroke, and is without sense or speech. Miss Murden wishes to return to Southampton if circumstances suit, but it must be very doubtful. We have been obliged to turn away Cholles, he grew so very drunken and negligent, and we have a man in his place called Thomas. Martha desires me to communicate something concerning herself which she knows will give you pleasure, as affording her very particular satisfaction,--it is that she is to be in town this spring with Mrs. Dundas. I need not dilate on the subject. You understand enough of the whys and wherefores to enter into her feelings, and to be conscious that of all possible arrangements it is the one most acceptable to her. She goes to Barton on leaving us, and the family remove to town in April. What you tell me of Miss Sharpe is quite new, and surprises me a little; I feel, however, as you do. She is born, poor thing! to struggle with evil, and her continuing with Miss B. is, I hope, a proof that matters are not always so very bad between them as her letters sometimes represent. Jenny's marriage I had heard of, and supposed you would do so too from Steventon, as I knew you were corresponding with Mary at the time. I hope she will not sully the respectable name she now bears. Your plan for Miss Curling is uncommonly considerate and friendly, and such as she must surely jump at. Edward's going round by Steventon, as I understand he promises to do, can be no reasonable objection; Mrs. J. Austen's hospitality is just of the kind to enjoy such a visitor. We were very glad to know Aunt Fanny was in the country when we read of the fire. Pray give my best compliments to the Mrs. Finches, if they are at Gm. I am sorry to find that Sir J. Moore has a mother living, but though a very heroic son he might not be a very necessary one to her happiness. Deacon Morrell may be more to Mrs. Morrell. I wish Sir John had united something of the Christian with the hero in his death. Thank heaven! we have had no one to care for particularly among the troops,--no one, in fact, nearer to us than Sir John himself. Col. Maitland is safe and well; his mother and sisters were of course anxious about him, but there is no entering much into the solicitudes of that family. My mother is well, and gets out when she can with the same enjoyment, and apparently the same strength, as hitherto. She hopes you will not omit begging Mrs. Seward to get the garden cropped for us, supposing she leaves the house too early to make the garden any object to herself. We are very desirous of receiving your account of the house, for your observations will have a motive which can leave nothing to conjecture and suffer nothing from want of memory. For one's own dear self, one ascertains and remembers everything. Lady Sondes is an impudent woman to come back into her old neighborhood again; I suppose she pretends never to have married before, and wonders how her father and mother came to have her christened Lady Sondes. The store-closet, I hope, will never do so again, for much of the evil is proved to have proceeded from the gutter being choked up, and we have had it cleared. We had reason to rejoice in the child's absence at the time of the thaw, for the nursery was not habitable. We hear of similar disasters from almost everybody. No news from Portsmouth. We are very patient. Mrs. Charles Fowle desires to be kindly remembered to you. She is warmly interested in my brother and his family. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXXV. SLOANE ST., Thursday (April 18, 1811). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I have so many little matters to tell you of, that I cannot wait any longer before I begin to put them down. I spent Tuesday in Bentinck Street. The Cookes called here and took me back, and it was quite a Cooke day, for the Miss Rolles paid a visit while I was there, and Sam Arnold dropped in to tea. The badness of the weather disconcerted an excellent plan of mine,--that of calling on Miss Beckford again; but from the middle of the day it rained incessantly. Mary and I, after disposing of her father and mother, went to the Liverpool Museum and the British Gallery, and I had some amusement at each, though my preference for men and women always inclines me to attend more to the company than the sight. Mrs. Cooke regrets very much that she did not see you when you called; it was owing to a blunder among the servants, for she did not know of our visit till we were gone. She seems tolerably well, but the nervous part of her complaint, I fear, increases, and makes her more and more unwilling to part with Mary. I have proposed to the latter that she should go to Chawton with me, on the supposition of my travelling the Guildford road, and she, I do believe, would be glad to do it, but perhaps it may be impossible; unless a brother can be at home at that time, it certainly must. George comes to them to-day. I did not see Theo. till late on Tuesday; he was gone to Ilford, but he came back in time to show his usual nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless civility. Henry, who had been confined the whole day to the bank, took me in his way home, and, after putting life and wit into the party for a quarter of an hour, put himself and his sister into a hackney coach. I bless my stars that I have done with Tuesday. But, alas! Wednesday was likewise a day of great doings, for Manon and I took our walk to Grafton House, and I have a good deal to say on that subject. I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant, and spending all my money, and, what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too; for in a linendraper's shop to which I went for checked muslin, and for which I was obliged to give seven shillings a yard, I was tempted by a pretty-colored muslin, and bought ten yards of it on the chance of your liking it; but at the same time, if it should not suit you, you must not think yourself at all obliged to take it; it is only 3_s._ 6_d._ per yard, and I should not in the least mind keeping the whole. In texture it is just what we prefer, but its resemblance to green crewels, I must own, is not great, for the pattern is a small red spot. And now I believe I have done all my commissions except Wedgwood. I liked my walk very much; it was shorter than I had expected, and the weather was delightful. We set off immediately after breakfast, and must have reached Grafton House by half-past eleven; but when we entered the shop the whole counter was thronged, and we waited full half an hour before we could be attended to. When we were served, however, I was very well satisfied with my purchases,--my bugle trimming at 2_s._ 4_d._ and three pair silk stockings for a little less than 12_s._ a pair. In my way back who should I meet but Mr. Moore, just come from Beckenham. I believe he would have passed me if I had not made him stop, but we were delighted to meet. I soon found, however, that he had nothing new to tell me, and then I let him go. Miss Burton has made me a very pretty little bonnet, and now nothing can satisfy me but I must have a straw hat, of the riding-hat shape, like Mrs. Tilson's; and a young woman in this neighborhood is actually making me one. I am really very shocking, but it will not be dear at a guinea. Our pelisses are 17_s._ each; she charges only 8_s._ for the making, but the buttons seem expensive,--are expensive, I might have said, for the fact is plain enough. We drank tea again yesterday with the Tilsons, and met the Smiths. I find all these little parties very pleasant. I like Mrs. S.; Miss Beaty is good-humor itself, and does not seem much besides. We spend to-morrow evening with them, and are to meet the Coln. and Mrs. Cantelo Smith you have been used to hear of, and, if she is in good humor, are likely to have excellent singing. To-night I might have been at the play; Henry had kindly planned our going together to the Lyceum, but I have a cold which I should not like to make worse before Saturday, so I stay within all this day. Eliza is walking out by herself. She has plenty of business on her hands just now, for the day of the party is settled, and drawing near. Above eighty people are invited for next Tuesday evening, and there is to be some very good music,--five professionals, three of them glee singers, besides amateurs. Fanny will listen to this. One of the hirelings is a Capital on the harp, from which I expect great pleasure. The foundation of the party was a dinner to Henry Egerton and Henry Walter, but the latter leaves town the day before. I am sorry, as I wished her prejudice to be done away, but should have been more sorry if there had been no invitation. I am a wretch, to be so occupied with all these things as to seem to have no thoughts to give to people and circumstances which really supply a far more lasting interest,--the society in which you are; but I do think of you all, I assure you, and want to know all about everybody, and especially about your visit to the W. Friars; _mais le moyen_ not to be occupied by one's own concerns? _Saturday._--Frank is superseded in the "Caledonia." Henry brought us this news yesterday from Mr. Daysh, and he heard at the same time that Charles may be in England in the course of a month. Sir Edward Pollen succeeds Lord Gambier in his command, and some captain of his succeeds Frank; and I believe the order is already gone out. Henry means to inquire further to-day. He wrote to Mary on the occasion. This is something to think of. Henry is convinced that he will have the offer of something else, but does not think it will be at all incumbent on him to accept it; and then follows, what will he do? and where will he live? I hope to hear from you to-day. How are you as to health, strength, looks, etc.? I had a very comfortable account from Chawton yesterday. If the weather permits, Eliza and I walk into London this morning. She is in want of chimney lights for Tuesday, and I of an ounce of darning-cotton. She has resolved not to venture to the play to-night. The D'Entraigues and Comte Julien cannot come to the party, which was at first a grief, but she has since supplied herself so well with performers that it is of no consequence; their not coming has produced our going to them to-morrow evening, which I like the idea of. It will be amusing to see the ways of a French circle. I wrote to Mrs. Hill a few days ago, and have received a most kind and satisfactory answer. Any time the first week in May exactly suits her, and therefore I consider my going as tolerably fixed. I shall leave Sloane Street on the 1st or 2d, and be ready for James on the 9th, and, if his plan alters, I can take care of myself. I have explained my views here, and everything is smooth and pleasant; and Eliza talks kindly of conveying me to Streatham. We met the Tilsons yesterday evening, but the singing Smiths sent an excuse, which put our Mrs. Smith out of humor. We are come back, after a good dose of walking and coaching, and I have the pleasure of your letter. I wish I had James's verses, but they were left at Chawton. When I return thither, if Mrs. K. will give me leave, I will send them to her. Our first object to-day was Henrietta St., to consult with Henry in consequence of a very unlucky change of the play for this very night,--"Hamlet" instead of "King John,"--and we are to go on Monday to "Macbeth" instead; but it is a disappointment to us both. Love to all. Yours affectionately, JANE. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXXVI. SLOANE ST., Thursday (April 25). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I can return the compliment by thanking you for the unexpected pleasure of your letter yesterday, and as I like unexpected pleasure, it made me very happy; and, indeed, you need not apologize for your letter in any respect, for it is all very fine, but not too fine, I hope, to be written again, or something like it. I think Edward will not suffer much longer from heat; by the look of things this morning I suspect the weather is rising into the balsamic north-east. It has been hot here, as you may suppose, since it was so hot with you, but I have not suffered from it at all, nor felt it in such a degree as to make me imagine it would be anything in the country. Everybody has talked of the heat, but I set it all down to London. I give you joy of our new nephew, and hope if he ever comes to be hanged it will not be till we are too old to care about it. It is a great comfort to have it so safely and speedily over. The Miss Curlings must be hard worked in writing so many letters, but the novelty of it may recommend it to them; mine was from Miss Eliza, and she says that my brother may arrive to-day. No, indeed, I am never too busy to think of S. and S.[13] I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child; and I am much obliged to you for your inquiries. I have had two sheets to correct, but the last only brings us to Willoughby's first appearance. Mrs. K. regrets in the most flattering manner that she must wait till May, but I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June. Henry does not neglect it; he has hurried the printer, and says he will see him again to-day. It will not stand still during his absence, it will be sent to Eliza. The Incomes remain as they were, but I will get them altered if I can. I am very much gratified by Mrs. K.'s interest in it; and whatever may be the event of it as to my credit with her, sincerely wish her curiosity could be satisfied sooner than is now probable. I think she will like my Elinor, but cannot build on anything else. Our party went off extremely well. There were many solicitudes, alarms, and vexations beforehand, of course, but at last everything was quite right. The rooms were dressed up with flowers, etc., and looked very pretty. A glass for the mantelpiece was lent by the man who is making their own. Mr. Egerton and Mr. Walter came at half-past five, and the festivities began with a pair of very fine soles. Yes, Mr. Walter--for he postponed his leaving London on purpose--which did not give much pleasure at the time, any more than the circumstance from which it rose,--his calling on Sunday and being asked by Henry to take the family dinner on that day, which he did; but it is all smoothed over now, and she likes him very well. At half-past seven arrived the musicians in two hackney coaches, and by eight the lordly company began to appear. Among the earliest were George and Mary Cooke, and I spent the greatest part of the evening very pleasantly with them. The drawing-room being soon hotter than we liked, we placed ourselves in the connecting passage, which was comparatively cool, and gave us all the advantage of the music at a pleasant distance, as well as that of the first view of every new-comer. I was quite surrounded by acquaintance, especially gentlemen; and what with Mr. Hampson, Mr. Seymour, Mr. W. Knatchbull, Mr. Guillemarde, Mr. Cure, a Captain Simpson, brother to _the_ Captain Simpson, besides Mr. Walter and Mr. Egerton, in addition to the Cookes, and Miss Beckford, and Miss Middleton, I had quite as much upon my hands as I could do. Poor Miss B. has been suffering again from her old complaint, and looks thinner than ever. She certainly goes to Cheltenham the beginning of June. We were all delight and cordiality, of course. Miss M. seems very happy, but has not beauty enough to figure in London. Including everybody we were sixty-six,--which was considerably more than Eliza had expected, and quite enough to fill the back drawing-room and leave a few to be scattered about in the other and in the passage. The music was extremely good. It opened (tell Fanny) with "Poike de Parp pirs praise pof Prapela;" and of the other glees I remember, "In peace love tunes," "Rosabelle," "The Red Cross Knight," and "Poor Insect." Between the songs were lessons on the harp, or harp and pianoforte together; and the harp-player was Wiepart, whose name seems famous, though new to me. There was one female singer, a short Miss Davis, all in blue, bringing up for the public line, whose voice was said to be very fine indeed; and all the performers gave great satisfaction by doing what they were paid for, and giving themselves no airs. No amateur could be persuaded to do anything. The house was not clear till after twelve. If you wish to hear more of it, you must put your questions, but I seem rather to have exhausted than spared the subject. This said Captain Simpson told us, on the authority of some other Captain just arrived from Halifax, that Charles was bringing the "Cleopatra" home, and that she was probably by this time in the Channel; but as Captain S. was certainly in liquor, we must not quite depend on it. It must give one a sort of expectation, however, and will prevent my writing to him any more. I would rather he should not reach England till I am at home, and the Steventon party gone. My mother and Martha both write with great satisfaction of Anna's behavior. She is quite an Anna with variations, but she cannot have reached her last, for that is always the most flourishing and showy; she is at about her third or fourth, which are generally simple and pretty. Your lilacs are in leaf, ours are in bloom. The horse-chestnuts are quite out, and the elms almost. I had a pleasant walk in Kensington Gardens on Sunday with Henry, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Tilson; everything was fresh and beautiful. We did go to the play, after all, on Saturday. We went to the Lyceum, and saw the "Hypocrite," an old play taken from Molière's "Tartuffe," and were well entertained. Dowton and Mathews were the good actors; Mrs. Edwin was the heroine, and her performance is just what it used to be. I have no chance of seeing Mrs. Siddons; she did act on Monday, but as Henry was told by the box-keeper that he did not think she would, the plans, and all thought of it, were given up. I should particularly have liked seeing her in "Constance," and could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me. Henry has been to the Water-Color Exhibition, which opened on Monday, and is to meet us there again some morning. If Eliza cannot go (and she has a cold at present), Miss Beaty will be invited to be my companion. Henry leaves town on Sunday afternoon, but he means to write soon himself to Edward, and will tell his own plans. The tea is this moment setting out. Do not have your colored muslin unless you really want it, because I am afraid I could not send it to the coach without giving trouble here. Eliza caught her cold on Sunday in our way to the D'Entraigues. The horses actually gibbed on this side of Hyde Park Gate: a load of fresh gravel made it a formidable hill to them, and they refused the collar; I believe there was a sore shoulder to irritate. Eliza was frightened, and we got out, and were detained in the evening air several minutes. The cold is in her chest, but she takes care of herself, and I hope it may not last long. This engagement prevented Mr. Walter's staying late,--he had his coffee and went away. Eliza enjoyed her evening very much, and means to cultivate the acquaintance; and I see nothing to dislike in them but their taking quantities of snuff. Monsieur, the old Count, is a very fine-looking man, with quiet manners, good enough for an Englishman, and, I believe, is a man of great information and taste. He has some fine paintings, which delighted Henry as much as the son's music gratified Eliza; and among them a miniature of Philip V. of Spain, Louis XIV.'s grandson, which exactly suited my capacity. Count Julien's performance is very wonderful. We met only Mrs. Latouche and Miss East, and we are just now engaged to spend next Sunday evening at Mrs. L.'s, and to meet the D'Entraigues, but M. le Comte must do without Henry. If he would but speak English, I would take to him. Have you ever mentioned the leaving off tea to Mrs. K.? Eliza has just spoken of it again. The benefit she has found from it in sleeping has been very great. I shall write soon to Catherine to fix my day, which will be Thursday. We have no engagement but for Sunday. Eliza's cold makes quiet advisable. Her party is mentioned in this morning's paper. I am sorry to hear of poor Fanny's state. From that quarter, I suppose, is to be the alloy of her happiness. I will have no more to say. Yours affectionately, J. A. Give my love particularly to my goddaughter. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham. FOOTNOTE: [13] "Sense and Sensibility." XXXVII. SLOANE ST., Tuesday. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I had sent off my letter yesterday before yours came, which I was sorry for; but as Eliza has been so good as to get me a frank, your questions shall be answered without much further expense to you. The best direction to Henry at Oxford will be "The Blue Boar, Cornmarket." I do not mean to provide another trimming for my pelisse, for I am determined to spend no more money; so I shall wear it as it is, longer than I ought, and then--I do not know. My head-dress was a bugle-band like the border to my gown, and a flower of Mrs. Tilson's. I depended upon hearing something of the evening from Mr. W. K., and am very well satisfied with his notice of me--"A pleasing-looking young woman"--that must do; one cannot pretend to anything better now; thankful to have it continued a few years longer! It gives me sincere pleasure to hear of Mrs. Knight's having had a tolerable night at last, but upon this occasion I wish she had another name, for the two _nights_ jingle very much. We have tried to get "Self-control," but in vain. I should like to know what her estimate is, but am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever, and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled. Eliza has just received a few lines from Henry to assure her of the good conduct of his mare. He slept at Uxbridge on Sunday, and wrote from Wheatfield. We were not claimed by Hans Place yesterday, but are to dine there to-day. Mr. Tilson called in the evening, but otherwise we were quite alone all day; and after having been out a good deal, the change was very pleasant. I like your opinion of Miss Atten much better than I expected, and have now hopes of her staying a whole twelvemonth. By this time I suppose she is hard at it, governing away. Poor creature! I pity her, though they are my nieces. Oh! yes, I remember Miss Emma Plumbtree's local consequence perfectly. I am in a dilemma, for want of an Emma, Escaped from the lips of Henry Gipps. But, really, I was never much more put to it than in continuing an answer to Fanny's former message. What is there to be said on the subject? Pery pell, or pare pey? or po; or at the most, Pi, pope, pey, pike, pit. I congratulate Edward on the Weald of Kent Canal Bill being put off till another Session, as I have just had the pleasure of reading. There is always something to be hoped from delay. Between Session and Session The first Prepossession May rouse up the Nation, And the villanous Bill May be forced to lie still Against wicked men's will. There is poetry for Edward and his daughter. I am afraid I shall not have any for you. I forgot to tell you in my last that our cousin Miss Payne called in on Saturday, and was persuaded to stay dinner. She told us a great deal about her friend Lady Cath. Brecknell, who is most happily married, and Mr. Brecknell is very religious, and has got black whiskers. I am glad to think that Edward has a tolerable day for his drive to Goodnestone, and very glad to hear of his kind promise of bringing you to town. I hope everything will arrange itself favorably. The 16th is now to be Mrs. Dundas's day. I mean, if I can, to wait for your return before I have my new gown made up, from a notion of their making up to more advantage together; and as I find the muslin is not so wide as it used to be, some contrivance may be necessary. I expect the skirt to require one-half breadth cut in gores, besides two whole breadths. Eliza has not yet quite resolved on inviting Anna, but I think she will. Yours very affectionately, JANE. XXXVIII. CHAWTON, Wednesday (May 29). IT was a mistake of mine, my dear Cassandra, to talk of a tenth child at Hamstall. I had forgot there were but eight already. Your inquiry after my uncle and aunt were most happily timed, for the very same post brought an account of them. They are again at Gloucester House enjoying fresh air, which they seem to have felt the want of in Bath, and are tolerably well, but not more than tolerable. My aunt does not enter into particulars, but she does not write in spirits, and we imagine that she has never entirely got the better of her disorder in the winter. Mrs. Welby takes her out airing in her barouche, which gives her a headache,--a comfortable proof, I suppose, of the uselessness of the new carriage when they have got it. You certainly must have heard before I can tell you that Col. Orde has married our cousin Margt. Beckford, the Marchess. of Douglas's sister. The papers say that her father disinherits her, but I think too well of an Orde to suppose that she has not a handsome independence of her own. [Illustration: _Chawton Cottage, from the Garden_ LETTERS, 172] The chickens are all alive and fit for the table, but we save them for something grand. Some of the flower seeds are coming up very well, but your mignonette makes a wretched appearance. Miss Benn has been equally unlucky as to hers. She had seed from four different people, and none of it comes up. Our young piony at the foot of the fir-tree has just blown and looks very handsome, and the whole of the shrubbery border will soon be very gay with pinks and sweet-williams, in addition to the columbines already in bloom. The syringas, too, are coming out. We are likely to have a great crop of Orleans plums, but not many greengages--on the standard scarcely any, three or four dozen, perhaps, against the wall. I believe I told you differently when I first came home, but I can now judge better than I could then. I have had a medley and satisfactory letter this morning from the husband and wife at Cowes; and in consequence of what is related of their plans, we have been talking over the possibility of inviting them here in their way from Steventon, which is what one should wish to do, and is, I dare say, what they expect, but, supposing Martha to be at home, it does not seem a very easy thing to accommodate so large a party. My mother offers to give up her room to Frank and Mary, but there will then be only the best for two maids and three children. They go to Steventon about the 22d, and I guess--for it is quite a guess--will stay there from a fortnight to three weeks. I must not venture to press Miss Sharpe's coming at present; we may hardly be at liberty before August. Poor John Bridges! we are very sorry for his situation and for the distress of the family. Lady B., is in one way severely tried. And our own dear brother suffers a great deal, I dare say, on the occasion. I have not much to say of ourselves. Anna is nursing a cold caught in the arbor at Faringdon, that she may be able to keep her engagement to Maria M. this evening, when I suppose she will make it worse. She did not return from Faringdon till Sunday, when H. B. walked home with her, and drank tea here. She was with the Prowtings almost all Monday. She went to learn to make feather trimmings of Miss Anna, and they kept her to dinner, which was rather lucky, as we were called upon to meet Mrs. and Miss Terry the same evening at the Digweeds; and though Anna was of course invited too, I think it always safest to keep her away from the family, lest she should be doing too little or too much. Mrs. Terry, Mary, and Robert, with my aunt Harding and her daughter, came from Dummer for a day and a night,--all very agreeable and very much delighted with the new house and with Chawton in general. We sat upstairs, and had thunder and lightning as usual. I never knew such a spring for thunderstorms as it has been. Thank God! we have had no bad ones here. I thought myself in luck to have my uncomfortable feelings shared by the mistress of the house, as that procured blinds and candles. It had been excessively hot the whole day. Mrs. Harding is a good-looking woman, but not much like Mrs. Toke, inasmuch as she is very brown and has scarcely any teeth; she seems to have some of Mrs. Toke's civility. Miss H. is an elegant, pleasing, pretty-looking girl, about nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter, with flowers in her head and music at her finger-ends. She plays very well indeed. I have seldom heard anybody with more pleasure. They were at Godington four or five years ago. My cousin Flora Long was there last year. My name is Diana. How does Fanny like it? What a change in the weather! We have a fire again now. Harriet Benn sleeps at the Great House to-night, and spends to-morrow with us; and the plan is that we should all walk with her to drink tea at Faringdon, for her mother is now recovered; but the state of the weather is not very promising at present. Miss Benn has been returned to her cottage since the beginning of last week, and has now just got another girl; she comes from Alton. For many days Miss B. had nobody with her but her niece Elizabeth, who was delighted to be her visitor and her maid. They both dined here on Saturday while Anna was at Faringdon; and last night an accidental meeting and a sudden impulse produced Miss Benn and Maria Middleton at our tea-table. If you have not heard it is very fit you should, that Mr. Harrison has had the living of Fareham given him by the Bishop, and is going to reside there; and now it is said that Mr. Peach (beautiful wiseacre) wants to have the curacy of Overton, and if he does leave Wootton, James Digweed wishes to go there. Fare you well. Yours affectionately, JANE AUSTEN. The chimneys at the Great House are done. Mr. Prowting has opened a gravel-pit, very conveniently for my mother, just at the mouth of the approach to his house; but it looks a little as if he meant to catch all his company. Tolerable gravel. Miss AUSTEN, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. XXXIX. CHAWTON, Thursday (June 6). BY this time, my dearest Cassandra, you know Martha's plans. I was rather disappointed, I confess, to find that she could not leave town till after ye 24th, as I had hoped to see you here the week before. The delay, however, is not great, and everything seems generally arranging itself for your return very comfortably. I found Henry perfectly predisposed to bring you to London if agreeable to yourself; he has not fixed his day for going into Kent, but he must be back again before ye 20th. You may therefore think with something like certainty of the close of your Godmersham visit, and will have, I suppose, about a week for Sloane Street. He travels in his gig, and should the weather be tolerable I think you must have a delightful journey. I have given up all idea of Miss Sharpe's travelling with you and Martha, for though you are both all compliance with my scheme, yet as you knock off a week from the end of her visit, and Martha rather more from the beginning, the thing is out of the question. I have written to her to say that after the middle of July we shall be happy to receive her, and I have added a welcome if she could make her way hither directly, but I do not expect that she will. I have also sent our invitation to Cowes. We are very sorry for the disappointment you have all had in Lady B.'s illness; but a division of the proposed party is with you by this time, and I hope may have brought you a better account of the rest. Give my love and thanks to Harriot, who has written me charming things of your looks, and diverted me very much by poor Mrs. C. Milles's continued perplexity. I had a few lines from Henry on Tuesday to prepare us for himself and his friend, and by the time that I had made the sumptuous provision of a neck of mutton on the occasion, they drove into the court; but lest you should not immediately recollect in how many hours a neck of mutton may be certainly procured, I add that they came a little after twelve,--both tall and well, and in their different degrees agreeable. It was a visit of only twenty-four hours, but very pleasant while it lasted. Mr. Tilson took a sketch of the Great House before dinner, and after dinner we all three walked to Chawton Park,[14] meaning to go into it, but it was too dirty, and we were obliged to keep on the outside. Mr. Tilson admired the trees very much, but grieved that they should not be turned into money. My mother's cold is better, and I believe she only wants dry weather to be very well. It was a great distress to her that Anna should be absent during her uncle's visit, a distress which I could not share. She does not return from Faringdon till this evening, and I doubt not has had plenty of the miscellaneous, unsettled sort of happiness which seems to suit her best. We hear from Miss Benn, who was on the Common with the Prowtings, that she was very much admired by the gentlemen in general. I like your new bonnets exceedingly; yours is a shape which always looks well, and I think Fanny's particularly becoming to her. On Monday I had the pleasure of receiving, unpacking, and approving our Wedgwood ware. It all came very safely, and upon the whole is a good match, though I think they might have allowed us rather larger leaves, especially in such a year of fine foliage as this. One is apt to suppose that the woods about Birmingham must be blighted. There was no bill with the goods, but that shall not screen them from being paid. I mean to ask Martha to settle the account. It will be quite in her way, for she is just now sending my mother a breakfast-set from the same place. I hope it will come by the wagon to-morrow; it is certainly what we want, and I long to know what it is like, and as I am sure Martha has great pleasure in making the present, I will not have any regret. We have considerable dealings with the wagons at present: a hamper of port and brandy from Southampton is now in the kitchen. Your answer about the Miss Plumbtrees proves you as fine a Daniel as ever Portia was; for I maintained Emma to be the eldest. We began pease on Sunday, but our gatherings are very small, not at all like the gathering in the "Lady of the Lake." Yesterday I had the agreeable surprise of finding several scarlet strawberries quite ripe; had you been at home, this would have been a pleasure lost. There are more gooseberries and fewer currants than I thought at first. We must buy currants for our wine. The Digweeds are gone down to see the Stephen Terrys at Southampton, and catch the King's birthday at Portsmouth. Miss Papillon called on us yesterday, looking handsomer than ever. Maria Middleton and Miss Benn dine here to-morrow. We are not to enclose any more letters to Abingdon Street, as perhaps Martha has told you. I had just left off writing and put on my things for walking to Alton, when Anna and her friend Harriot called in their way thither; so we went together. Their business was to provide mourning against the King's death, and my mother has had a bombazine bought for her. I am not sorry to be back again, for the young ladies had a great deal to do, and without much method in doing it. Anna does not come home till to-morrow morning. She has written I find to Fanny, but there does not seem to be a great deal to relate of Tuesday. I had hoped there might be dancing. Mrs. Budd died on Sunday evening. I saw her two days before her death, and thought it must happen soon. She suffered much from weakness and restlessness almost to the last. Poor little Harriot seems truly grieved. You have never mentioned Harry; how is he? With love to you all, Yours affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, EDWARD AUSTEN'S, Esq., Godmersham Park, Faversham. FOOTNOTE: [14] A large beech wood extending for a long distance upon a hill about a mile from Chawton: the trees are magnificent. XL. CHAWTON, Friday (January 29, 1813). I HOPE you received my little parcel by J. Bond on Wednesday evening, my dear Cassandra, and that you will be ready to hear from me again on Sunday, for I feel that I must write to you to-day. I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child[15] from London. On Wednesday I received one copy sent down by Falkener, with three lines from Henry to say that he had given another to Charles and sent a third by the coach to Godmersham. . . . The advertisement is in our paper to-day for the first time: 18_s._ He shall ask 1_l._ 1_s._ for my two next, and 1_l._ 8_s._ for my stupidest of all. Miss B. dined with us on the very day of the book's coming, and in the evening we fairly set at it, and read half the first vol. to her, prefacing that, having intelligence from Henry that such a work would soon appear, we had desired him to send it whenever it came out, and I believe it passed with her unsuspected. She was amused, poor soul! _That_ she could not help, you know, with two such people to lead the way; but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like _her_ at least, I do not know. There are a few typical errors; and a "said he," or a "said she," would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but "I do not write for such dull elves" as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves. The second volume is shorter than I could wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part. I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than "Sense and Sensibility" altogether. Now I will try and write of something else. FOOTNOTE: [15] "Pride and Prejudice." XLI. CHAWTON, Thursday (February 4). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Your letter was truly welcome, and I am much obliged to you for all your praise; it came at a right time, for I had had some fits of disgust. Our second evening's reading to Miss B. had not pleased me so well, but I believe something must be attributed to my mother's too rapid way of getting on: though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling: it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story,--an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style. . . . The greatest blunder in the printing that I have met with is in page 220, v. 3, where two speeches are made into one. There might as well be no suppers at Longbourn; but I suppose it was the remains of Mrs. Bennet's old Meryton habits. XLII. FEBRUARY. THIS will be a quick return for yours, my dear Cassandra. I doubt its having much else to recommend it; but there is no saying: it may turn out to be a very long and delightful letter. I am exceedingly pleased that you can say what you do, after having gone through the whole work, and Fanny's praise is very gratifying. My hopes were tolerably strong of her, but nothing like a certainty. Her liking Darcy and Elizabeth is enough. She might hate all the others, if she would. I have her opinion under her own hand this morning; but your transcript of it, which I read first, was not, and is not, the less acceptable. To me it is of course all praise, but the more exact truth which she sends you is good enough. . . . Our party on Wednesday was not unagreeable, though we wanted a master of the house less anxious and fidgety, and more conversable. Upon Mrs. ----'s mentioning that she had sent the rejected addresses to Mrs. H., I began talking to her a little about them, and expressed my hope of their having amused her. Her answer was, "Oh dear, yes, very much, very droll indeed, the opening of the house, and the striking up of the fiddles!" What she meant, poor woman, who shall say? I sought no farther. As soon as a whist-party was formed, and a round table threatened, I made my mother an excuse and came away, leaving just as many for their round table as there were at Mrs. Grant's.[16] I wish they might be as agreeable a set. My mother is very well, and finds great amusement in glove-knitting, and at present wants no other work. We quite run over with books. She has got Sir John Carr's "Travels in Spain," and I am reading a Society octavo, an "Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire," by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers,--a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written and highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan, or even the two Mr. Smiths of the city. The first soldier I ever sighed for; but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit. Yesterday, moreover, brought us "Mrs. Grant's Letters," with Mr. White's compliments; but I have disposed of them, compliments and all, to Miss P., and amongst so many readers or retainers of books as we have in Chawton, I dare say there will be no difficulty in getting rid of them for another fortnight, if necessary. I have disposed of Mrs. Grant for the second fortnight to Mrs. ----. It can make no difference to her which of the twenty-six fortnights in the year the three vols. lie on her table. I have been applied to for information as to the oath taken in former times of Bell, Book, and Candle, but have none to give. Perhaps you may be able to learn something of its origin where you now are. Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick quarto volumes which one always sees in the breakfast-parlor there must be acquainted with everything in the world. I detest a quarto. Captain Pasley's book is too good for their society. They will not understand a man who condenses his thoughts into an octavo. I have learned from Sir J. Carr that there is no Government House at Gibraltar. I must alter it to the Commissioner's. FOOTNOTE: [16] At this time, February, 1813, "Mansfield Park" was nearly finished. XLIII. SLOANE STREET, Thursday, May 20. MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Before I say anything else, I claim a paper full of halfpence on the drawing-room mantelpiece; I put them there myself, and forgot to bring them with me. I cannot say that I have yet been in any distress for money, but I choose to have my due, as well as the Devil. How lucky we were in our weather yesterday! This wet morning makes one more sensible of it. We had no rain of any consequence. The head of the curricle was put half up three or four times, but our share of the showers was very trifling, though they seemed to be heavy all round us, when we were on the Hog's-back, and I fancied it might then be raining so hard at Chawton as to make you feel for us much more than we deserved. Three hours and a quarter took us to Guildford, where we stayed barely two hours, and had only just time enough for all we had to do there; that is, eating a long and comfortable breakfast, watching the carriages, paying Mr. Harrington, and taking a little stroll afterwards. From some views which that stroll gave us, I think most highly of the situation of Guildford. We wanted all our brothers and sisters to be standing with us in the bowling-green, and looking towards Horsham. I was very lucky in my gloves,--got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked at all like a glove-shop, and gave only four shillings for them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything, and their worth certainly remains to be proved; but I think they look very well. We left Guildford at twenty minutes before twelve (I hope somebody cares for these minutiæ), and were at Esher in about two hours more. I was very much pleased with the country in general. Between Guildford and Ripley I thought it particularly pretty, also about Painshill; and from a Mr. Spicer's grounds at Esher, which we walked into before dinner, the views were beautiful. I cannot say what we did _not_ see, but I should think there could not be a wood, or a meadow, or palace, or remarkable spot in England that was not spread out before us on one side or other. Claremont is going to be sold: a Mr. Ellis has it now. It is a house that seems never to have prospered. After dinner we walked forward to be overtaken at the coachman's time, and before he did overtake us we were very near Kingston. I fancy it was about half-past six when we reached this house,--a twelve hours' business, and the horses did not appear more than reasonably tired. I was very tired too, and glad to get to bed early, but am quite well to-day. I am very snug in the front drawing-room all to myself, and would not say "thank you" for any company but you. The quietness of it does me good. I have contrived to pay my two visits, though the weather made me a great while about it, and left me only a few minutes to sit with Charlotte Craven.[17] She looks very well, and her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education. Her manners are as unaffected and pleasing as ever. She had heard from her mother to-day. Mrs. Craven spends another fortnight at Chilton. I saw nobody but Charlotte, which pleased me best. I was shown upstairs into a drawing-room, where she came to me; and the appearance of the room, so totally unschoollike, amused me very much: it was full of modern elegances. Yours very affec^{tly}, J. A. FOOTNOTE: [17] The present Lady Pollen, of Redenham, near Andover, then at a school in London. XLIV. SLOANE STREET, Monday (May 24). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I am very much obliged to you for writing to me. You must have hated it after a worrying morning. Your letter came just in time to save my going to Remnant's, and fit me for Christian's, where I bought Fanny's dimity. I went the day before (Friday) to Layton's as I proposed, and got my mother's gown,--seven yards at 6_s._ 6_d._ I then walked into No. 10, which is all dirt and confusion, but in a very promising way; and after being present at the opening of a new account, to my great amusement, Henry and I went to the exhibition in Spring Gardens. It is not thought a good collection, but I was very well pleased, particularly (pray tell Fanny) with a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley,[1] excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her sister, but there was no Mrs. Darcy.[18] Perhaps, however, I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds's paintings, which is now showing in Pall Mall, and which we are also to visit. Mrs. Bingley's is exactly herself,--size, shaped face, features, and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favorite color with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow. Friday was our worst day as to weather. We were out in a very long and very heavy storm of hail, and there had been others before, but I heard no thunder. Saturday was a good deal better; dry and cold. I gave 2_s._ 6_d._ for the dimity. I do not boast of any bargains, but think both the sarsenet and dimity good of their sort. I have bought your locket, but was obliged to give 18_s._ for it, which must be rather more than you intended. It is neat and plain, set in gold. We were to have gone to the Somerset House Exhibition on Saturday, but when I reached Henrietta Street Mr. Hampson was wanted there, and Mr. Tilson and I were obliged to drive about town after him, and by the time we had done it was too late for anything but home. We never found him after all. I have been interrupted by Mrs. Tilson. Poor woman! She is in danger of not being able to attend Lady Drummond Smith's party to-night. Miss Burdett was to have taken her, and now Miss Burdett has a cough and will not go. My cousin Caroline is her sole dependence. The events of yesterday were, our going to Belgrave Chapel in the morning, our being prevented by the rain from going to evening service at St. James, Mr. Hampson's calling, Messrs. Barlow and Phillips dining here, and Mr. and Mrs. Tilson's coming in the evening _à l'ordinaire_. She drank tea with us both Thursday and Saturday; he dined out each day, and on Friday we were with them, and they wish us to go to them to-morrow evening, to meet Miss Burdett, but I do not know how it will end. Henry talks of a drive to Hampstead, which may interfere with it. I should like to see Miss Burdett very well, but that I am rather frightened by hearing that she wishes to be introduced to me. If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault. There is no change in our plan of leaving London, but we shall not be with you before Tuesday. Henry thinks Monday would appear too early a day. There is no danger of our being induced to stay longer. I have not quite determined how I shall manage about my clothes; perhaps there may be only my trunk to send by the coach, or there may be a band-box with it. I have taken your gentle hint, and written to Mrs. Hill. The Hoblyns want us to dine with them, but we have refused. When Henry returns he will be dining out a great deal, I dare say; as he will then be alone, it will be more desirable; he will be more welcome at every table, and every invitation more welcome to him. He will not want either of us again till he is settled in Henrietta Street. This is my present persuasion. And he will not be settled there--really settled--till late in the autumn; "he will not be come to bide" till after September. There is a gentleman in treaty for this house. Gentleman himself is in the country, but gentleman's friend came to see it the other day, and seemed pleased on the whole. Gentleman would rather prefer an increased rent to parting with five hundred guineas at once, and if that is the only difficulty it will not be minded. Henry is indifferent as to the which. Get us the best weather you can for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. We are to go to Windsor in our way to Henley, which will be a great delight. We shall be leaving Sloane Street about twelve, two or three hours after Charles's party have begun their journey. You will miss them, but the comfort of getting back into your own room will be great. And then the tea and sugar! I fear Miss Clewes is not better, or you would have mentioned it. I shall not write again unless I have any unexpected communication or opportunity to tempt me. I enclose Mr. Herington's bill and receipt. I am very much obliged to Fanny for her letter; it made me laugh heartily, but I cannot pretend to answer it. Even had I more time, I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss D.[19] would write. I hope Miss Benn is got well again, and will have a comfortable dinner with you to-day. _Monday Evening._--We have been both to the exhibition and Sir J. Reynolds's, and I am disappointed, for there was nothing like Mrs. D. at either. I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling,--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy. Setting aside this disappointment, I had great amusement among the pictures; and the driving about, the carriage being open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much, and was ready to laugh all the time at my being where I was. I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a barouche. Henry desires Edward may know that he has just bought three dozen of claret for him (cheap), and ordered it to be sent down to Chawton. I should not wonder if we got no farther than Reading on Thursday evening, and so reach Steventon only to a reasonable dinner-hour the next day; but whatever I may write or you may imagine, we know it will be something different. I shall be quiet to-morrow morning; all my business is done, and I shall only call again upon Mrs. Hoblyn, etc. Love to your much . . . party. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. FOOTNOTES: [18] _Vide_ "Pride and Prejudice." [19] Miss Darcy. XLV. HENRIETTA ST., Wednesday (Sept. 15, ½ past 8). HERE I am, my dearest Cassandra, seated in the breakfast, dining, sitting room, beginning with all my might. Fanny will join me as soon as she is dressed, and begin her letter. We had a very good journey, weather and roads excellent; the three first stages for 1_s._ 6_d._, and our only misadventure the being delayed about a quarter of an hour at Kingston for horses, and being obliged to put up with a pair belonging to a hackney coach and their coachman, which left no room on the barouche box for Lizzy, who was to have gone her last stage there as she did the first; consequently we were all four within, which was a little crowded. We arrived at a quarter-past four, and were kindly welcomed by the coachman, and then by his master, and then by William, and then by Mrs. Pengird, who all met us before we reached the foot of the stairs. Mde. Bigion was below dressing us a most comfortable dinner of soup, fish, bouillée, partridges, and an apple tart, which we sat down to soon after five, after cleaning and dressing ourselves, and feeling that we were most commodiously disposed of. The little adjoining dressing-room to our apartment makes Fanny and myself very well off indeed, and as we have poor Eliza's[20] bed our space is ample every way. Sace arrived safely about half-past six. At seven we set off in a coach for the Lyceum; were at home again in about four hours and a half; had soup and wine and water, and then went to our holes. Edward finds his quarters very snug and quiet. I must get a softer pen. This is harder. I am in agonies. I have not yet seen Mr. Crabbe. Martha's letter is gone to the post. I am going to write nothing but short sentences. There shall be two full stops in every line. Layton and Shear's is Bedford House. We mean to get there before breakfast if it's possible; for we feel more and more how much we have to do and how little time. This house looks very nice. It seems like Sloane Street moved here. I believe Henry is just rid of Sloane Street. Fanny does not come, but I have Edward seated by me beginning a letter, which looks natural. Henry has been suffering from the pain in the face which he has been subject to before. He caught cold at Matlock, and since his return has been paying a little for past pleasure. It is nearly removed now, but he looks thin in the face, either from the pain or the fatigues of his tour, which must have been great. Lady Robert is delighted with P. and P.,[21] and really was so, as I understand, before she knew who wrote it, for of course she knows now. He told her with as much satisfaction as if it were my wish. He did not tell me this, but he told Fanny. And Mr. Hastings! I am quite delighted with what such a man writes about it. Henry sent him the books after his return from Daylesford, but you will hear the letter too. Let me be rational, and return to my two full stops. I talked to Henry at the play last night. We were in a private box,--Mr. Spencer's,--which made it much more pleasant. The box is directly on the stage. One is infinitely less fatigued than in the common way. But Henry's plans are not what one could wish. He does not mean to be at Chawton till the 29th. He must be in town again by Oct. 5. His plan is to get a couple of days of pheasant shooting and then return directly. His wish was to bring you back with him. I have told him your scruples. He wishes you to suit yourself as to time, and if you cannot come till later, will send for you at any time as far as Bagshot. He presumed you would not find difficulty in getting so far. I could not say you would. He proposed your going with him into Oxfordshire. It was his own thought at first. I could not but catch at it for you. We have talked of it again this morning (for now we have breakfasted), and I am convinced that if you can make it suit in other respects you need not scruple on his account. If you cannot come back with him on the 3rd or 4th, therefore, I do hope you will contrive to go to Adlestrop. By not beginning your absence till about the middle of this month I think you may manage it very well. But you will think all this over. One could wish he had intended to come to you earlier, but it cannot be helped. I said nothing to him of Mrs. H. and Miss B., that he might not suppose difficulties. Shall not you put them into our own room? This seems to me the best plan, and the maid will be most conveniently near. Oh, dear me! when I shall ever have done. We did go to Layton and Shear's before breakfast. Very pretty English poplins at 4_s._ 3_d._; Irish, ditto at 6_s._; more pretty, certainly,--beautiful. Fanny and the two little girls are gone to take places for to-night at Covent Garden; "Clandestine Marriage" and "Midas." The latter will be a fine show for L. and M.[22] They revelled last night in "Don Juan," whom we left in hell at half-past eleven. We had scaramouch and a ghost, and were delighted. I speak of them; my delight was very tranquil, and the rest of us were sober-minded. "Don Juan" was the last of three musical things. "Five Hours at Brighton," in three acts,--of which one was over before we arrived, none the worse,--and the "Beehive," rather less flat and trumpery. I have this moment received 5_l._ from kind, beautiful Edward. Fanny has a similar gift. I shall save what I can of it for your better leisure in this place. My letter was from Miss Sharpe,--nothing particular. A letter from Fanny Cage this morning. _Four o'clock._--We are just come back from doing Mrs. Tickars, Miss Hare, and Mr. Spence. Mr. Hall is here, and while Fanny is under his hands, I will try to write a little more. Miss Hare had some pretty caps, and is to make me one like one of them, only white satin instead of blue. It will be white satin and lace, and a little white flower perking out of the left ear, like Harriot Byron's feather. I have allowed her to go as far as 1_l._ 16_s._ My gown is to be trimmed everywhere with white ribbon plaited on somehow or other. She says it will look well. I am not sanguine. They trim with white very much. I learnt from Mrs. Tickars's young lady, to my high amusement, that the stays now are not made to force the bosom up at all; that was a very unbecoming, unnatural fashion. I was really glad to hear that they are not to be so much off the shoulders as they were. Going to Mr. Spence's was a sad business, and cost us many tears; unluckily we were obliged to go a second time before he could do more than just look. We went first at half-past twelve and afterwards at three; papa with us each time; and, alas! we are to go again to-morrow. Lizzy is not finished yet. There have been no teeth taken out, however, nor will be, I believe; but he finds hers in a very bad state, and seems to think particularly ill of their durableness. They have been all cleaned, hers filed, and are to be filed again. There is a very sad hole between two of her front teeth. _Thursday Morning, half-past Seven._--Up and dressed and downstairs in order to finish my letter in time for the parcel. At eight I have an appointment with Madame B., who wants to show me something downstairs. At nine we are to set off for Grafton House, and get that over before breakfast. Edward is so kind as to walk there with us. We are to be at Mr. Spence's again at 11.5: from that time shall be driving about I suppose till four o'clock at least. We are, if possible, to call on Mrs. Tilson. Mr. Hall was very punctual yesterday, and curled me out at a great rate. I thought it looked hideous, and longed for a snug cap instead, but my companions silenced me by their admiration. I had only a bit of velvet round my head. I did not catch cold, however. The weather is all in my favor. I have had no pain in my face since I left you. We had very good places in the box next the stage-box, front and second row; the three old ones behind, of course. I was particularly disappointed at seeing nothing of Mr. Crabbe. I felt sure of him when I saw that the boxes were fitted up with crimson velvet. The new Mr. Terry was Lord Ogleby, and Henry thinks he may do; but there was no acting more than moderate, and I was as much amused by the remembrances connected with "Midas" as with any part of it. The girls were very much delighted, but still prefer "Don Juan;" and I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting character than that compound of cruelty and lust. It was not possible for me to get the worsteds yesterday. I heard Edward last night pressing Henry to come to you, and I think Henry engaged to go there after his November collection. Nothing has been done as to S. and S.[23] The books came to hand too late for him to have time for it before he went. Mr. Hastings never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree. Henry knew nothing of Mr. Trimmer's death. I tell you these things that you may not have to ask them over again. There is a new clerk sent down to Alton, a Mr. Edmund Williams, a young man whom Henry thinks most highly of, and he turns out to be a son of the luckless Williamses of Grosvenor Place. I long to have you hear Mr. H.'s opinion of P. and P. His admiring my Elizabeth so much is particularly welcome to me. Instead of saving my superfluous wealth for you to spend, I am going to treat myself with spending it myself. I hope, at least, that I shall find some poplin at Layton and Shear's that will tempt me to buy it. If I do, it shall be sent to Chawton, as half will be for you; for I depend upon your being so kind as to accept it, being the main point. It will be a great pleasure to me. Don't say a word. I only wish you could choose too. I shall send twenty yards. Now for Bath. Poor F. Cage has suffered a good deal from her accident. The noise of the White Hart was terrible to her. They will keep her quiet, I dare say. She is not so much delighted with the place as the rest of the party; probably, as she says herself, from having been less well, but she thinks she should like it better in the season. The streets are very empty now, and the shops not so gay as she expected. They are at No. 1 Henrietta Street, the corner of Laura Place, and have no acquaintance at present but the Bramstons. Lady Bridges drinks at the Cross Bath, her son at the Hot, and Louisa is going to bathe. Dr. Parry seems to be half starving Mr. Bridges, for he is restricted to much such a diet as James's, bread, water and meat, and is never to eat so much of that as he wishes, and he is to walk a great deal,--walk till he drops, I believe,--gout or no gout. It really is to that purpose. I have not exaggerated. Charming weather for you and us, and the travellers, and everybody. You will take your walk this afternoon, and . . . Henrietta Street, the autumn of 1813. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton. By favor of Mr. Gray. FOOTNOTES: [20] Eliza, Henry Austen's first wife, who had died in the earlier part of this year. [21] "Pride and Prejudice." [22] Lizzy and Marianne. [23] "Sense and Sensibility." XLVI. HENRIETTA STREET, Thursday (Sept. 16, after dinner), THANK you, my dearest Cassandra, for the nice long letter I sent off this morning. I hope you have had it by this time, and that it has found you all well, and my mother no more in need of leeches. Whether this will be delivered to you by Henry on Saturday evening, or by the postman on Sunday morning, I know not, as he has lately recollected something of an engagement for Saturday, which perhaps may delay his visit. He seems determined to come to you soon, however. I hope you will receive the gown to-morrow, and may be able with tolerable honesty to say that you like the color. It was bought at Grafton House, where, by going very early, we got immediate attendance and went on very comfortably. I only forgot the one particular thing which I had always resolved to buy there,--a white silk handkerchief,--and was therefore obliged to give six shillings for one at Crook and Besford's; which reminds me to say that the worsteds ought also to be at Chawton to-morrow, and that I shall be very happy to hear they are approved. I had not much time for deliberation. We are now all four of us young ladies sitting round the circular table in the inner room writing our letters, while the two brothers are having a comfortable coze in the room adjoining. It is to be a quiet evening, much to the satisfaction of four of the six. My eyes are quite tired of dust and lamps. The letter you forwarded from Edward, junr., has been duly received. He has been shooting most prosperously at home, and dining at Chilham Castle and with Mr. Scudamore. My cap is come home, and I like it very much. Fanny has one also; hers is white sarsenet and lace, of a different shape from mine, more fit for morning carriage wear, which is what it is intended for, and is in shape exceedingly like our own satin and lace of last winter; shaped round the face exactly like it, with pipes and more fulness, and a round crown inserted behind. My cap has a peak in front. Large full bows of very narrow ribbon (old twopenny) are the thing. One over the right temple, perhaps, and another at the left ear. Henry is not quite well. His stomach is rather deranged. You must keep him in rhubarb, and give him plenty of port and water. He caught his cold farther back than I told you,--before he got to Matlock, somewhere in his journey from the North; but the ill effects of that I hope are nearly gone. We returned from Grafton House only just in time for breakfast, and had scarcely finished breakfast when the carriage came to the door. From eleven to half-past three we were hard at it; we did contrive to get to Hans Place for ten minutes. Mrs. T. was as affectionate and pleasing as ever. After our return Mr. Tilson walked up from the Compting House and called upon us, and these have been all our visitings. I have rejoiced more than once that I bought my writing-paper in the country; we have not had a quarter of an hour to spare. I enclose the eighteen-pence due to my mother. The rose color was 6_s._ and the other 4_s._ per yard. There was but two yards and a quarter of the dark slate in the shop, but the man promised to match it and send it off correctly. Fanny bought her Irish at Newton's in Leicester Square, and I took the opportunity of thinking about your Irish, and seeing one piece of the yard wide at 4_s._, and it seemed to me very good; good enough for your purpose. It might at least be worth your while to go there, if you have no other engagements. Fanny is very much pleased with the stockings she has bought of Remmington, silk at 12_s._, cotton at 4_s._ 3_d._ She thinks them great bargains, but I have not seen them yet, as my hair was dressing when the man and the stockings came. The poor girls and their teeth! I have not mentioned them yet, but we were a whole hour at Spence's, and Lizzy's were filed and lamented over again, and poor Marianne had two taken out after all, the two just beyond the eye teeth, to make room for those in front. When her doom was fixed, Fanny, Lizzy, and I walked into the next room, where we heard each of the two sharp and hasty screams. The little girls' teeth I can suppose in a critical state, but I think he must be a lover of teeth and money and mischief, to parade about Fanny's. I would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth and double it. It was a disagreeable hour. We then went to Wedgwood's, where my brother and Fanny chose a dinner-set. I believe the pattern is a small lozenge in purple, between lines of narrow gold, and it is to have the crest. We must have been three-quarters of an hour at Grafton House, Edward sitting by all the time with wonderful patience. There Fanny bought the net for Anna's gown, and a beautiful square veil for herself. The edging there is very cheap. I was tempted by some, and I bought some very nice plaiting lace at 3_s._ 4_d._ Fanny desires me to tell Martha, with her kind love, that Birchall assured her there was no second set of Hook's Lessons for Beginners, and that, by my advice, she has therefore chosen her a set by another composer. I thought she would rather have something than not. It costs six shillings. With love to you all, including Triggs, I remain, Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Henrietta St., autumn of 1813. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton. By favor of XLVII. GODMERSHAM PARK, Thursday (Sept. 23). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Thank you five hundred and forty times for the exquisite piece of workmanship which was brought into the room this morning, while we were at breakfast, with some very inferior works of art in the same way, and which I read with high glee, much delighted with everything it told, whether good or bad. It is so rich in striking intelligence that I hardly know what to reply to first. I believe finery must have it. I am extremely glad that you like the poplin. I thought it would have my mother's approbation, but was not so confident of yours. Remember that it is a present. Do not refuse me. I am very rich. Mrs. Clement is very welcome to her little boy, and to my congratulations into the bargain, if ever you think of giving them. I hope she will do well. Her sister in Lucina, Mrs. H. Gipps, does too well, we think. Mary P. wrote on Sunday that she had been three days on the sofa. Sackree does not approve it. Well, there is some comfort in the Mrs. Hulbart's not coming to you, and I am happy to hear of the honey. I was thinking of it the other day. Let me know when you begin the new tea and the new white wine. My present elegances have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse. I am glad you like our caps, but Fanny is out of conceit with hers already; she finds that she has been buying a new cap without having a new pattern, which is true enough. She is rather out of luck to like neither her gown nor her cap, but I do not much mind it, because besides that I like them both myself, I consider it as a thing of course at her time of life,--one of the sweet taxes of youth to choose in a hurry and make bad bargains. I wrote to Charles yesterday, and Fanny has had a letter from him to-day, principally to make inquiries about the time of their visit here, to which mine was an answer beforehand; so he will probably write again soon to fix his week. I am best pleased that Cassy does not go to you. Now, what have we been doing since I wrote last? The Mr. K.'s[24] came a little before dinner on Monday, and Edward went to the church with the two seniors, but there is no inscription yet drawn up. They are very good-natured, you know, and civil, and all that, but are not particularly superfine; however, they ate their dinner and drank their tea, and went away, leaving their lovely Wadham in our arms, and I wish you had seen Fanny and me running backwards and forwards with his breeches from the little chintz to the white room before we went to bed, in the greatest of frights lest he should come upon us before we had done it all. There had been a mistake in the housemaid's preparation, and they were gone to bed. He seems a very harmless sort of young man, nothing to like or dislike in him,--goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning, and plays at whist and makes queer faces in the evening. . . . FOOTNOTE: [24] Knatchbulls. XLVIII. GODMERSHAM PARK, Monday (Oct. 11). [MY DEAREST AUNT CASS.,--I have just asked Aunt Jane to let me write a little in her letter, but she does not like it, so I won't. Good-by!] You will have Edward's letter to-morrow. He tells me that he did not send you any news to interfere with mine, but I do not think there is much for anybody to send at present. We had our dinner-party on Wednesday, with the addition of Mrs. and Miss Milles, who were under a promise of dining here in their return from Eastwell, whenever they paid their visit of duty there, and it happened to be paid on that day. Both mother and daughter are much as I have always found them. I like the mother--first, because she reminds me of Mrs. Birch; and, secondly, because she is cheerful and grateful for what she is at the age of ninety and upwards. The day was pleasant enough. I sat by Mr. Chisholme, and we talked away at a great rate about nothing worth hearing. It was a mistake as to the day of the Sherers going being fixed; they are ready, but are waiting for Mr. Paget's answer. I inquired of Mrs. Milles after Jemima Brydges, and was quite grieved to hear that she was obliged to leave Canterbury some months ago on account of her debts, and is nobody knows where. What an unprosperous family! On Saturday, soon after breakfast, Mr. J. P. left us for Norton Court. I like him very much. He gives me the idea of a very amiable young man, only too diffident to be so agreeable as he might be. He was out the chief of each morning with the other two, shooting and getting wet through. To-morrow we are to know whether he and a hundred young ladies will come here for the ball. I do not much expect any. The Deedes cannot meet us; they have engagements at home. I will finish the Deedes by saying that they are not likely to come here till quite late in my stay,--the very last week perhaps; and I do not expect to see the Moores at all. They are not solicited till after Edward's return from Hampshire. Monday, November 15, is the day now fixed for our setting out. Poor Basingstoke races! There seem to have been two particularly wretched days on purpose for them; and Weyhill week does not begin much happier. We were quite surprised by a letter from Anna at Tollard Royal, last Saturday; but perfectly approve her going, and only regret they should all go so far to stay so few days. We had thunder and lightning here on Thursday morning, between five and seven; no very bad thunder, but a great deal of lightning. It has given the commencement of a season of wind and rain, and perhaps for the next six weeks we shall not have two dry days together. Lizzy is very much obliged to you for your letter and will answer it soon, but has so many things to do that it may be four or five days before she can. This is quite her own message, spoken in rather a desponding tone. Your letter gave pleasure to all of us; we had all the reading of it of course,--I three times, as I undertook, to the great relief of Lizzy, to read it to Sackree, and afterwards to Louisa. Sackree does not at all approve of Mary Doe and her nuts,--on the score of propriety rather than health. She saw some signs of going after her in George and Henry, and thinks if you could give the girl a check, by rather reproving her for taking anything seriously about nuts which they said to her, it might be of use. This, of course, is between our three discreet selves, a scene of triennial bliss. Mrs. Breton called here on Saturday. I never saw her before. She is a large, ungenteel woman, with self-satisfied and would-be elegant manners. We are certain of some visitors to-morrow. Edward Bridges comes for two nights in his way from Lenham to Ramsgate, and brings a friend--name unknown--but supposed to be a Mr. Harpur, a neighboring clergyman; and Mr. R. Mascall is to shoot with the young men, which it is to be supposed will end in his staying dinner. On Thursday, Mr. Lushington, M.P. for Canterbury, and manager of the Lodge Hounds, dines here, and stays the night. He is chiefly young Edward's acquaintance. If I can I will get a frank from him, and write to you all the sooner. I suppose the Ashford ball will furnish something. As I wrote of my nephews with a little bitterness in my last, I think it particularly incumbent on me to do them justice now, and I have great pleasure in saying that they were both at the Sacrament yesterday. After having much praised or much blamed anybody, one is generally sensible of something just the reverse soon afterwards. Now these two boys who are out with the foxhounds will come home and disgust me again by some habit of luxury or some proof of sporting mania, unless I keep it off by this prediction. They amuse themselves very comfortably in the evening by netting; they are each about a rabbit net, and sit as deedily to it, side by side, as any two Uncle Franks could do. I am looking over "Self-Control" again, and my opinion is confirmed of its being an excellently meant, elegantly written work, without anything of nature or probability in it. I declare I do not know whether Laura's passage down the American river is not the most natural, possible, every-day thing she ever does. _Tuesday._--Dear me! what is to become of me? Such a long letter! Two-and-forty lines in the second page. Like Harriot Byron, I ask, what am I to do with my gratitude? I can do nothing but thank you and go on. A few of your inquiries, I think, are replied to _en avance_. The name of F. Cage's drawing-master is O'Neil. We are exceedingly amused with your Shalden news, and your self-reproach on the subject of Mrs. Stockwell made me laugh heartily. I rather wondered that Johncock,[25] the only person in the room, could help laughing too. I had not heard before of her having the measles. Mrs. H. and Alethea's staying till Friday was quite new to me; a good plan, however. I could not have settled it better myself, and am glad they found so much in the house to approve, and I hope they will ask Martha to visit them. I admire the sagacity and taste of Charlotte Williams. Those large dark eyes always judge well. I will compliment her by naming a heroine after her. Edward has had all the particulars of the building, etc., read to him twice over, and seems very well satisfied. A narrow door to the pantry is the only subject of solicitude; it is certainly just the door which should not be narrow, on account of the trays; but if a case of necessity, it must be borne. I knew there was sugar in the tin, but had no idea of there being enough to last through your company. All the better. You ought not to think this new loaf better than the other, because that was the first of five which all came together. Something of fancy, perhaps, and something of imagination. Dear Mrs. Digweed! I cannot bear that she should not be foolishly happy after a ball. I hope Miss Yates and her companions were all well the day after their arrival. I am thoroughly rejoiced that Miss Benn has placed herself in lodgings, though I hope they may not be long necessary. No letter from Charles yet. Southey's "Life of Nelson." I am tired of "Lives of Nelson," being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it. Here am I in Kent, with one brother in the same county and another brother's wife, and see nothing of them, which seems unnatural. It will not last so forever, I trust. I should like to have Mrs. F. A. and her children here for a week, but not a syllable of that nature is ever breathed. I wish her last visit had not been so long a one. I wonder whether Mrs. Tilson has ever lain-in. Mention it if it ever comes to your knowledge, and we shall hear of it by the same post from Henry. Mr. Rob. Mascall breakfasted here; he eats a great deal of butter. I dined upon goose yesterday, which, I hope, will secure a good sale of my second edition. Have you any tomatas? Fanny and I regale on them every day. Disastrous letters from the Plumptres and Oxendens. Refusals everywhere--a blank _partout_--and it is not quite certain whether we go or not; something may depend upon the disposition of Uncle Edward when he comes, and upon what we hear at Chilham Castle this morning, for we are going to pay visits. We are going to each house at Chilham and to Mystole. I shall like seeing the Faggs. I shall like it all, except that we are to set out so early that I have not time to write as I would wish. Edwd. Bridges's friend is a Mr. Hawker, I find, not Harpur. I would not have you sleep in such an error for the world. My brother desires his best love and thanks for all your information. He hopes the roots of the old beech have been dug away enough to allow a proper covering of mould and turf. He is sorry for the necessity of building the new coin, but hopes they will contrive that the doorway should be of the usual width,--if it must be contracted on one side, by widening it on the other. The appearance need not signify. And he desires me to say that your being at Chawton when he is will be quite necessary. You cannot think it more indispensable than he does. He is very much obliged to you for your attention to everything. Have you any idea of returning with him to Henrietta Street and finishing your visit then? Tell me your sweet little innocent ideas. Everything of love and kindness, proper and improper, must now suffice. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton, Alton, Hants. FOOTNOTE: [25] The butler at Godmersham. XLIX. GODMERSHAM PARK, Thursday (Oct. 14). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Now I will prepare for Mr. Lushington, and as it will be wisest also to prepare for his not coming, or my not getting a frank, I shall write very close from the first, and even leave room for the seal in the proper place. When I have followed up my last with this I shall feel somewhat less unworthy of you than the state of our correspondence now requires. I left off in a great hurry to prepare for our morning visits. Of course was ready a good deal the first, and need not have hurried so much. Fanny wore her new gown and cap. I was surprised to find Mystole so pretty. The ladies were at home. I was in luck, and saw Lady Fagg and all her five daughters, with an old Mrs. Hamilton, from Canterbury, and Mrs. and Miss Chapman, from Margate, into the bargain. I never saw so plain a family,--five sisters so very plain! They are as plain as the Foresters, or the Franfraddops, or the Seagraves, or the Rivers, excluding Sophy. Miss Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family. It was stupidish; Fanny did her part very well, but there was a lack of talk altogether, and the three friends in the house only sat by and looked at us. However, Miss Chapman's name is Laura, and she had a double flounce to her gown. You really must get some flounces. Are not some of your large stock of white morning gowns just in a happy state for a flounce--too short? Nobody at home at either house in Chilham. Edward Bridges and his friend did not forget to arrive. The friend is a Mr. Wigram, one of the three-and-twenty children of a great rich mercantile, Sir Robert Wigram, an old acquaintance of the Footes, but very recently known to Edward B. The history of his coming here is, that, intending to go from Ramsgate to Brighton, Edw. B. persuaded him to take Lenham on his way, which gave him the convenience of Mr. W.'s gig, and the comfort of not being alone there; but, probably thinking a few days of Gm. would be the cheapest and pleasantest way of entertaining his friend and himself, offered a visit here, and here they stay till to-morrow. Mr. W. is about five or six-and-twenty, not ill-looking, and not agreeable. He is certainly no addition. A sort of cool, gentlemanlike manner, but very silent. They say his name is Henry, a proof how unequally the gifts of fortune are bestowed. I have seen many a John and Thomas much more agreeable. We have got rid of Mr. R. Mascall, however. I did not like him, either. He talks too much, and is conceited, besides having a vulgarly shaped mouth. He slept here on Tuesday, so that yesterday Fanny and I sat down to breakfast with six gentlemen to admire us. We did not go to the ball. It was left to her to decide, and at last she determined against it. She knew that it would be a sacrifice on the part of her father and brothers if they went, and I hope it will prove that she has not sacrificed much. It is not likely that there should have been anybody there whom she would care for. I was very glad to be spared the trouble of dressing and going, and being weary before it was half over; so my gown and my cap are still unworn. It will appear at last, perhaps, that I might have done without either. I produced my brown bombazine yesterday, and it was very much admired indeed, and I like it better than ever. You have given many particulars of the state of Chawton House, but still we want more. Edward wants to be expressly told that all the round tower, etc., is entirely down, and the door from the best room stopped up; he does not know enough of the appearance of things in that quarter. He heard from Bath yesterday. Lady B. continues very well, and Dr. Parry's opinion is, that while the water agrees with her she ought to remain there, which throws their coming away at a greater uncertainty than we had supposed. It will end, perhaps, in a fit of the gout, which may prevent her coming away. Louisa thinks her mother's being so well may be quite as much owing to her being so much out of doors as to the water. Lady B. is going to try the hot pump, the Cross bath being about to be painted. Louisa is particularly well herself, and thinks the water has been of use to her. She mentioned our inquiries, etc., to Mr. and Mrs. Alex. Evelyn, and had their best compliments and thanks to give in return. Dr. Parry does not expect Mr. E. to last much longer. Only think of Mrs. Holder's being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her. Now, if you please, Hooper must have it in his power to do more by his uncle. Lucky for the little girl. An Anne Ekins can hardly be so unfit for the care of a child as a Mrs. Holder. A letter from Wrotham yesterday offering an early visit here, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore and one child are to come on Monday for ten days. I hope Charles and Fanny may not fix the same time, but if they come at all in October they must. What is the use of hoping? The two parties of children is the chief evil. To be sure, here we are; the very thing has happened, or rather worse,--a letter from Charles this very morning, which gives us reason to suppose they may come here to-day. It depends upon the weather, and the weather now is very fine. No difficulties are made, however, and, indeed, there will be no want of room; but I wish there were no Wigrams and Lushingtons in the way to fill up the table and make us such a motley set. I cannot spare Mr. Lushington either, because of his frank, but Mr. Wigram does no good to anybody. I cannot imagine how a man can have the impudence to come into a family party for three days, where he is quite a stranger, unless he knows himself to be agreeable on undoubted authority. He and Edw. B. are going to ride to Eastwell, and as the boys are hunting, and my brother is gone to Canty., Fanny and I have a quiet morning before us. Edward has driven off poor Mrs. Salkeld. It was thought a good opportunity of doing something towards clearing the house. By her own desire Mrs. Fanny[26] is to be put in the room next the nursery, her baby in a little bed by her; and as Cassy is to have the closet within, and Betsey William's little hole, they will be all very snug together. I shall be most happy to see dear Charles, and he will be as happy as he can with a cross child, or some such care, pressing on him at the time. I should be very happy in the idea of seeing little Cassy again, too, did not I fear she would disappoint me by some immediate disagreeableness. . . . The comfort of the billiard-table here is very great; it draws all the gentlemen to it whenever they are within, especially after dinner, so that my brother, Fanny, and I have the library to ourselves in delightful quiet. There is no truth in the report of G. Hatton being to marry Miss Wemyss. He desires it may be contradicted. Have you done anything about our present to Miss Benn? I suppose she must have a bed at my mother's whenever she dines there. How will they manage as to inviting her when you are gone? and if they invite, how will they continue to entertain her? Let me know as many of your parting arrangements as you can, as to wine, etc. I wonder whether the ink-bottle has been filled. Does butcher's meat keep up at the same price, and is not bread lower than 2_s._ 6_d._? Mary's blue gown! My mother must be in agonies. I have a great mind to have my blue gown dyed some time or other. I proposed it once to you, and you made some objection, I forget what. It is the fashion of flounces that gives it particular expediency. Mrs. and Miss Wildman have just been here. Miss is very plain. I wish Lady B. may be returned before we leave Gm., that Fanny may spend the time of her father's absence at Goodnestone, which is what she would prefer. _Friday._--They came last night at about seven. We had given them up, but I still expected them to come. Dessert was nearly over; a better time for arriving than an hour and a half earlier. They were late because they did not set out earlier, and did not allow time enough. Charles did not aim at more than reaching Sittingbourne by three, which could not have brought them here by dinner-time. They had a very rough passage; he would not have ventured if he had known how bad it would be. However, here they are, safe and well, just like their own nice selves, Fanny looking as neat and white this morning as possible, and dear Charles all affectionate, placid, quiet, cheerful good-humor. They are both looking very well, but poor little Cassy is grown extremely thin, and looks poorly. I hope a week's country air and exercise may do her good. I am sorry to say it can be but a week. The baby does not appear so large in proportion as she was, nor quite so pretty, but I have seen very little of her. Cassy was too tired and bewildered just at first to seem to know anybody. We met them in the hall--the women and girl part of us--but before we reached the library she kissed me very affectionately, and has since seemed to recollect me in the same way. It was quite an evening of confusion, as you may suppose. At first we were all walking about from one part of the house to the other; then came a fresh dinner in the breakfast-room for Charles and his wife, which Fanny and I attended; then we moved into the library, were joined by the dining-room people, were introduced, and so forth; and then we had tea and coffee, which was not over till past ten. Billiards again drew all the odd ones away; and Edward, Charles, the two Fannies, and I sat snugly talking. I shall be glad to have our numbers a little reduced, and by the time you receive this we shall be only a family, though a large family, party. Mr. Lushington goes to-morrow. Now I must speak of him, and I like him very much. I am sure he is clever, and a man of taste. He got a volume of Milton last night, and spoke of it with warmth. He is quite an M. P., very smiling, with an exceeding good address and readiness of language. I am rather in love with him. I dare say he is ambitious and insincere. He puts me in mind of Mr. Dundas. He has a wide smiling mouth, and very good teeth, and something the same complexion and nose. He is a much shorter man, with Martha's leave. Does Martha never hear from Mrs. Craven? Is Mrs. Craven never at home? We breakfasted in the dining-room to-day, and are now all pretty well dispersed and quiet. Charles and George are gone out shooting together, to Winnigates and Seaton Wood. I asked on purpose to tell Henry. Mr. Lushington and Edwd. are gone some other way. I wish Charles may kill something; but this high wind is against their sport. Lady Williams is living at the Rose at Sittingbourne; they called upon her yesterday; she cannot live at Sheerness, and as soon as she gets to Sittingbourne is quite well. In return for all your matches, I announce that her brother William is going to marry a Miss Austen, of a Wiltshire family, who say they are related to us. I talk to Cassy about Chawton; she remembers much, but does not volunteer on the subject. Poor little love! I wish she were not so very Palmery, but it seems stronger than ever. I never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence. Papa and mamma have not yet made up their mind as to parting with her or not; the chief, indeed the only, difficulty with mamma is a very reasonable one, the child's being very unwilling to leave them. When it was mentioned to her she did not like the idea of it at all. At the same time she has been suffering so much lately from sea-sickness that her mamma cannot bear to have her much on board this winter. Charles is less inclined to part with her. I do not know how it will end, or what is to determine it. He desires his best love to you, and has not written because he has not been able to decide. They are both very sensible of your kindness on the occasion. I have made Charles furnish me with something to say about young Kendall. He is going on very well. When he first joined the "Namur," my brother did not find him forward enough to be what they call put in the office, and therefore placed him under the schoolmaster; but he is very much improved, and goes into the office now every afternoon, still attending school in the morning. This cold weather comes very fortunately for Edward's nerves, with such a house full; it suits him exactly; he is all alive and cheerful. Poor James, on the contrary, must be running his toes into the fire. I find that Mary Jane Fowle was very near returning with her brother and paying them a visit on board. I forget exactly what hindered her; I believe the Cheltenham scheme. I am glad something did. They are to go to Cheltenham on Monday se'nnight. I don't vouch for their going, you know; it only comes from one of the family. Now I think I have written you a good-sized letter, and may deserve whatever I can get in reply. Infinities of love. I must distinguish that of Fanny, senior, who particularly desires to be remembered to you all. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. FAVERSHAM, Oct. 15, 1813. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton, Alton, Hants. Per S. R. LUSHINGTON. FOOTNOTE: [26] Mrs. Charles Austen, _née_ Fanny Palmer. L. GODMERSHAM PARK, Oct. 18. MY DEAR AUNT CASSANDRA,--I am very much obliged to you for your long letter and for the nice account of Chawton. We are all very glad to hear that the Adams are gone, and hope Dame Libscombe will be more happy now with her deaffy child, as she calls it, but I am afraid there is not much chance of her remaining long sole mistress of her house. I am sorry you had not any better news to send us of our hare, poor little thing! I thought it would not live long in that _Pondy House_; I don't wonder that Mary Doe is very sorry it is dead, because we promised her that if it was alive when we came back to Chawton, we would reward her for her trouble. Papa is much obliged to you for ordering the scrubby firs to be cut down; I think he was rather frightened at first about the great oak. Fanny quite believed it, for she exclaimed, "Dear me, what a pity, how could they be so stupid!" I hope by this time they have put up some hurdles for the sheep, or turned out the cart-horses from the lawn. Pray tell grandmamma that we have begun getting seeds for her; I hope we shall be able to get her a nice collection, but I am afraid this wet weather is very much against them. How glad I am to hear she has had such good success with her chickens, but I wish there had been more bantams amongst them. I am very sorry to hear of poor Lizzie's fate. I must now tell you something about our poor people. I believe you know old Mary Croucher; she gets _maderer_ and _maderer_ every day. Aunt Jane has been to see her, but it was on one of her rational days. Poor Will Amos hopes your skewers are doing well; he has left his house in the poor Row, and lives in a barn at Builting. We asked him why he went away, and he said the fleas were so starved when he came back from Chawton that they all flew upon him and _eenermost_ eat him up. How unlucky it is that the weather is so wet! Poor Uncle Charles has come home half drowned every day. I don't think little Fanny is quite so pretty as she was; one reason is because she wears short petticoats, I believe. I hope Cook is better; she was very unwell the day we went away. Papa has given me half-a-dozen new pencils, which are very good ones indeed; I draw every other day. I hope you go and whip Lucy Chalcraft every night. Miss Clewes begs me to give her very best respects to you; she is very much obliged to you for your kind inquiries after her. Pray give my duty to grandmamma and love to Miss Floyd. I remain, my dear Aunt Cassandra, your very affectionate niece, ELIZTH. KNIGHT. _Thursday._--I think Lizzy's letter will entertain you. Thank you for yours just received. To-morrow shall be fine if possible. You will be at Guildford before our party set off. They only go to Key Street, as Mr. Street the Purser lives there, and they have promised to dine and sleep with him. Cassy's looks are much mended. She agrees pretty well with her cousins, but is not quite happy among them; they are too many and too boisterous for her. I have given her your message, but she said nothing, and did not look as if the idea of going to Chawton again was a pleasant one. They have Edward's carriage to Ospringe. I think I have just done a good deed,--extracted Charles from his wife and children upstairs, and made him get ready to go out shooting, and not keep Mr. Moore waiting any longer. Mr. and Mrs. Sherer and Joseph dined here yesterday very prettily. Edw. and Geo. were absent,--gone for a night to Eastling. The two Fannies went to Canty. in the morning, and took Lou. and Cass. to try on new stays. Harriet and I had a comfortable walk together. She desires her best love to you and kind remembrance to Henry. Fanny's best love also. I fancy there is to be another party to Canty. to-morrow,--Mr. and Mrs. Moore and me. Edward thanks Henry for his letter. We are most happy to hear he is so much better. I depend upon you for letting me know what he wishes as to my staying with him or not; you will be able to find out, I dare say. I had intended to beg you would bring one of my nightcaps with you, in case of my staying, but forgot it when I wrote on Tuesday. Edward is much concerned about his pond; he cannot now doubt the fact of its running out, which he was resolved to do as long as possible. I suppose my mother will like to have me write to her. I shall try at least. No; I have never seen the death of Mrs. Crabbe. I have only just been making out from one of his prefaces that he probably was married. It is almost ridiculous. Poor woman! I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any. Edw. and Geo. set off this day week for Oxford. Our party will then be very small, as the Moores will be going about the same time. To enliven us, Fanny proposes spending a few days soon afterwards at Fredville. It will really be a good opportunity, as her father will have a companion. We shall all three go to Wrotham, but Edwd. and I stay only a night perhaps. Love to Mr. Tilson. Yours very affectionately, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, 10 Henrietta St., Covent Garden, London. LI. GODMERSHAM PARK, Wednesday (Nov. 3). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I will keep this celebrated birthday by writing to you; and as my pen seems inclined to write large, I will put my lines very close together. I had but just time to enjoy your letter yesterday before Edward and I set off in the chair for Canty., and I allowed him to hear the chief of it as we went along. We rejoice sincerely in Henry's gaining ground as he does, and hope there will be weather for him to get out every day this week, as the likeliest way of making him equal to what he plans for the next. If he is tolerably well, the going into Oxfordshire will make him better, by making him happier. Can it be that I have not given you the minutiæ of Edward's plans? See, here they are: To go to Wrotham on Saturday the 13th, spend Sunday there, and be in town on Monday to dinner, and if agreeable to Henry, spend one whole day with him, which day is likely to be Tuesday, and so go down to Chawton on Wednesday. But now I cannot be quite easy without staying a little while with Henry, unless he wishes it otherwise; his illness and the dull time of year together make me feel that it would be horrible of me not to offer to remain with him, and therefore unless you know of any objection, I wish you would tell him with my best love that I shall be most happy to spend ten days or a fortnight in Henrietta St., if he will accept me. I do not offer more than a fortnight, because I shall then have been some time from home; but it will be a great pleasure to be with him, as it always is. I have the less regret and scruple on your account, because I shall see you for a day and a half, and because you will have Edward for at least a week. My scheme is to take Bookham in my way home for a few days, and my hope that Henry will be so good as to send me some part of the way thither. I have a most kind repetition of Mrs. Cooke's two or three dozen invitations, with the offer of meeting me anywhere in one of her airings. Fanny's cold is much better. By dosing and keeping her room on Sunday, she got rid of the worst of it, but I am rather afraid of what this day may do for her; she is gone to Canty. with Miss Clewes, Liz., and Ma^{rnne}, and it is but roughish weather for any one in a tender state. Miss Clewes has been going to Canty. ever since her return, and it is now just accomplishing. Edward and I had a delightful morning for our drive there, I enjoyed it thoroughly; but the day turned off before we were ready, and we came home in some rain and the apprehension of a great deal. It has not done us any harm, however. He went to inspect the gaol, as a visiting magistrate, and took me with him. I was gratified, and went through all the feelings which people must go through, I think, in visiting such a building. We paid no other visits, only walked about snugly together, and shopped. I bought a concert ticket and a sprig of flowers for my old age. To vary the subject from gay to grave with inimitable address, I shall now tell you something of the Bath party--and still a Bath party they are, for a fit of the gout came on last week. The accounts of Lady B. are as good as can be under such a circumstance; Dr. P. says it appears a good sort of gout, and her spirits are better than usual, but as to her coming away, it is of course all uncertainty. I have very little doubt of Edward's going down to Bath, if they have not left it when he is in Hampshire; if he does, he will go on from Steventon, and then return direct to London, without coming back to Chawton. This detention does not suit his feelings. It may be rather a good thing, however, that Dr. P. should see Lady B. with the gout on her. Harriot was quite wishing for it. The day seems to improve. I wish my pen would too. Sweet Mr. Ogle! I dare say he sees all the panoramas for nothing, has free admittance everywhere; he is so delightful! Now, you need not see anybody else. I am glad to hear of our being likely to have a peep at Charles and Fanny at Christmas, but do not force poor Cass. to stay if she hates it. You have done very right as to Mrs. F. A. Your tidings of S. and S. give me pleasure. I have never seen it advertised. Harriot, in a letter to Fanny to-day, inquires whether they sell cloths for pelisses at Bedford House, and, if they do, will be very much obliged to you to desire them to send her down patterns, with the width and prices; they may go from Charing Cross almost any day in the week, but if it is a ready-money house it will not do, for the _bru_ of _feu_ the Archbishop says she cannot pay for it immediately. Fanny and I suspect they do not deal in the article. The Sherers, I believe, are now really going to go; Joseph has had a bed here the last two nights, and I do not know whether this is not the day of moving. Mrs. Sherer called yesterday to take leave. The weather looks worse again. We dine at Chilham Castle to-morrow, and I expect to find some amusement, but more from the concert the next day, as I am sure of seeing several that I want to see. We are to meet a party from Goodnestone, Lady B., Miss Hawley, and Lucy Foote, and I am to meet Mrs. Harrison, and we are to talk about Ben and Anna. "My dear Mrs. Harrison," I shall say, "I am afraid the young man has some of your family madness; and though there often appears to be something of madness in Anna too, I think she inherits more of it from her mother's family than from ours." That is what I shall say, and I think she will find it difficult to answer me. I took up your letter again to refresh me, being somewhat tired, and was struck with the prettiness of the hand: it is really a very pretty hand now and then,--so small and so neat! I wish I could get as much into a sheet of paper.[27] Another time I will take two days to make a letter in: it is fatiguing to write a whole long one at once. I hope to hear from you again on Sunday and again on Friday, the day before we move. On Monday, I suppose, you will be going to Streatham, to see quiet Mr. Hill and eat very bad baker's bread. A fall in bread by the by. I hope my mother's bill next week will show it. I have had a very comfortable letter from her, one of her foolscap sheets quite full of little home news. Anna was there the first of the two days. An Anna sent away and an Anna fetched are different things. This will be an excellent time for Ben to pay his visit, now that we, the formidables, are absent. I did not mean to eat, but Mr. Johncock has brought in the tray, so I must. I am all alone. Edward is gone into his woods. At this present time I have five tables, eight-and-twenty chairs, and two fires all to myself. Miss Clewes is to be invited to go to the concert with us; there will be my brother's place and ticket for her, as he cannot go. He and the other connections of the Cages are to meet at Milgate that very day, to consult about a proposed alteration of the Maidstone road, in which the Cages are very much interested. Sir Brook comes here in the morning, and they are to be joined by Mr. Deedes at Ashford. The loss of the concert will be no great evil to the Squire. We shall be a party of three ladies therefore, and to meet three ladies. What a convenient carriage Henry's is, to his friends in general! Who has it next? I am glad William's going is voluntary, and on no worse grounds. An inclination for the country is a venial fault. He has more of Cowper than of Johnson in him,--fonder of tame hares and blank verse than of the full tide of human existence at Charing Cross. Oh! I have more of such sweet flattery from Miss Sharp. She is an excellent kind friend. I am read and admired in Ireland too. There is a Mrs. Fletcher, the wife of a judge, an old lady, and very good and very clever, who is all curiosity to know about me,--what I am like, and so forth. I am not known to her by name, however. This comes through Mrs. Carrick, not through Mrs. Gore. You are quite out there. I do not despair of having my picture in the Exhibition at last,--all white and red, with my head on one side; or perhaps I may marry young Mr. D'Arblay. I suppose in the mean time I shall owe dear Henry a great deal of money for printing, etc. I hope Mrs. Fletcher will indulge herself with S. and S. If I am to stay in H. S., and if you should be writing home soon, I wish you would be so good as to give a hint of it, for I am not likely to write there again these ten days, having written yesterday. Fanny has set her heart upon its being a Mr. Brett who is going to marry a Miss Dora Best, of this country. I dare say Henry has no objection. Pray, where did the boys sleep? The Deedes come here on Monday to stay till Friday, so that we shall end with a flourish the last canto. They bring Isabella and one of the grown-ups, and will come in for a Canty. ball on Thursday. I shall be glad to see them. Mrs. Deedes and I must talk rationally together, I suppose. Edward does not write to Henry, because of my writing so often. God bless you. I shall be so glad to see you again, and I wish you many happy returns of this day. Poor Lord Howard! How he does cry about it! Yours very truly, J. A. Miss AUSTEN, 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London. FOOTNOTE: [27] I cannot pass this paragraph over without remarking that it is hardly possible to imagine anything neater or prettier than Jane's own hand. Most of her letters are beautifully written, and the MS. of her "Lady Susan" remarkably so.--_Note by Lord_ BRABOURNE. LII. GODMERSHAM PARK, Saturday (Nov. 6). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Having half an hour before breakfast (very snug, in my own room, lovely morning, excellent fire--fancy me!) I will give you some account of the last two days. And yet, what is there to be told? I shall get foolishly minute unless I cut the matter short. We met only the Bretons at Chilham Castle, besides a Mr. and Mrs. Osborne and a Miss Lee staying in the house, and were only fourteen altogether. My brother and Fanny thought it the pleasantest party they had ever known there, and I was very well entertained by bits and scraps. I had long wanted to see Dr. Breton, and his wife amuses me very much with her affected refinement and elegance. Miss Lee I found very conversable; she admires Crabbe as she ought. She is at an age of reason, ten years older than myself at least. She was at the famous ball at Chilham Castle, so of course you remember her. By the by, as I must leave off being young, I find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like. We had music in the evening: Fanny and Miss Wildman played, and Mr. James Wildman sat close by and listened, or pretended to listen. Yesterday was a day of dissipation all through: first came Sir Brook to dissipate us before breakfast; then there was a call from Mr. Sherer, then a regular morning visit from Lady Honeywood in her way home from Eastwell; then Sir Brook and Edward set off; then we dined (five in number) at half-past four; then we had coffee; and at six Miss Clewes, Fanny, and I drove away. We had a beautiful night for our frisks. We were earlier than we need have been, but after a time Lady B. and her two companions appeared,--we had kept places for them; and there we sat, all six in a row, under a side wall, I between Lucy Foote and Miss Clewes. Lady B. was much what I expected; I could not determine whether she was rather handsome or very plain. I liked her for being in a hurry to have the concert over and get away, and for getting away at last with a great deal of decision and promptness, not waiting to compliment and dawdle and fuss about seeing dear Fanny, who was half the evening in another part of the room with her friends the Plumptres. I am growing too minute, so I will go to breakfast. When the concert was over, Mrs. Harrison and I found each other out, and had a very comfortable little complimentary friendly chat. She is a sweet woman,--still quite a sweet woman in herself, and so like her sister! I could almost have thought I was speaking to Mrs. Lefroy. She introduced me to her daughter, whom I think pretty, but most dutifully inferior to _la Mère Beauté_. The Faggs and the Hammonds were there,--Wm. Hammond the only young man of renown. Miss looked very handsome, but I prefer her little smiling flirting sister Julia. I was just introduced at last to Mary Plumptre, but I should hardly know her again. She was delighted with me, however, good enthusiastic soul! And Lady B. found me handsomer than she expected, so you see I am not so very bad as you might think for. It was twelve before we reached home. We were all dog-tired, but pretty well to-day: Miss Clewes says she has not caught cold, and Fanny's does not seem worse. I was so tired that I began to wonder how I should get through the ball next Thursday; but there will be so much more variety then in walking about, and probably so much less heat, that perhaps I may not feel it more. My china crape is still kept for the ball. Enough of the concert. I had a letter from Mary yesterday. They travelled down to Cheltenham last Monday very safely, and are certainly to be there a month. Bath is still Bath. The H. Bridges must quit them early next week, and Louisa seems not quite to despair of their all moving together, but to those who see at a distance there appears no chance of it. Dr. Parry does not want to keep Lady B. at Bath when she can once move. That is lucky. You will see poor Mr. Evelyn's death. Since I wrote last, my 2nd edit. has stared me in the face. Mary tells me that Eliza means to buy it. I wish she may. It can hardly depend upon any more Fyfield Estates. I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it. Mary heard before she left home that it was very much admired at Cheltenham, and that it was given to Miss Hamilton. It is pleasant to have such a respectable writer named. I cannot tire you, I am sure, on this subject, or I would apologize. What weather, and what news! We have enough to do to admire them both. I hope you derive your full share of enjoyment from each. I have extended my lights and increased my acquaintance a good deal within these two days. Lady Honeywood you know; I did not sit near enough to be a perfect judge, but I thought her extremely pretty, and her manners have all the recommendations of ease and good-humor and unaffectedness; and going about with four horses and nicely dressed herself, she is altogether a perfect sort of woman. Oh, and I saw Mr. Gipps last night,--the useful Mr. Gipps, whose attentions came in as acceptably to us in handing us to the carriage, for want of a better man, as they did to Emma Plumptre. I thought him rather a good-looking little man. I long for your letter to-morrow, particularly that I may know my fate as to London. My first wish is that Henry should really choose what he likes best; I shall certainly not be sorry if he does not want me. Morning church to-morrow; I shall come back with impatient feelings. The Sherers are gone, but the Pagets are not come: we shall therefore have Mr. S. again. Mr. Paget acts like an unsteady man. Dr. Hant, however, gives him a very good character; what is wrong is to be imputed to the lady. I dare say the house likes female government. I have a nice long black and red letter from Charles, but not communicating much that I did not know. There is some chance of a good ball next week, as far as females go. Lady Bridges may perhaps be there with some Knatchbulls. Mrs. Harrison perhaps, with Miss Oxenden and the Miss Papillons; and if Mrs. Harrison, then Lady Fagg will come. The shades of evening are descending, and I resume my interesting narrative. Sir Brook and my brother came back about four, and Sir Brook almost immediately set forward again to Goodnestone. We are to have Edwd. B. to-morrow, to pay us another Sunday's visit,--the last, for more reasons than one; they all come home on the same day that we go. The Deedes do not come till Tuesday; Sophia is to be the comer. She is a disputable beauty that I want much to see. Lady Eliz. Hatton and Annamaria called here this morning. Yes, they called; but I do not think I can say anything more about them. They came, and they sat, and they went. _Sunday._--Dearest Henry! What a turn he has for being ill, and what a thing bile is! This attack has probably been brought on in part by his previous confinement and anxiety; but, however it came, I hope it is going fast, and that you will be able to send a very good account of him on Tuesday. As I hear on Wednesday, of course I shall not expect to hear again on Friday. Perhaps a letter to Wrotham would not have an ill effect. We are to be off on Saturday before the post comes in, as Edward takes his own horses all the way. He talks of nine o'clock. We shall bait at Lenham. Excellent sweetness of you to send me such a nice long letter; it made its appearance, with one from my mother, soon after I and my impatient feelings walked in. How glad I am that I did what I did! I was only afraid that you might think the offer superfluous, but you have set my heart at ease. Tell Henry that I will stay with him, let it be ever so disagreeable to him. Oh, dear me! I have not time on paper for half that I want to say. There have been two letters from Oxford,--one from George yesterday. They got there very safely,--Edwd. two hours behind the coach, having lost his way in leaving London. George writes cheerfully and quietly; hopes to have Utterson's rooms soon; went to lecture on Wednesday, states some of his expenses, and concludes with saying, "I am afraid I shall be poor." I am glad he thinks about it so soon. I believe there is no private tutor yet chosen, but my brother is to hear from Edwd. on the subject shortly. You, and Mrs. H., and Catherine, and Alethea going about together in Henry's carriage seeing sights--I am not used to the idea of it yet. All that you are to see of Streatham, seen already! Your Streatham and my Bookham may go hang. The prospect of being taken down to Chawton by Henry perfects the plan to me. I was in hopes of your seeing some illuminations, and you have seen them. "I thought you would come, and you did come." I am sorry he is not to come from the Baltic sooner. Poor Mary! My brother has a letter from Louisa to-day of an unwelcome nature; they are to spend the winter at Bath. It was just decided on. Dr. Parry wished it, not from thinking the water necessary to Lady B., but that he might be better able to judge how far his treatment of her, which is totally different from anything she had been used to, is right; and I suppose he will not mind having a few more of her Ladyship's guineas. His system is a lowering one. He took twelve ounces of blood from her when the gout appeared, and forbids wine, etc. Hitherto the plan agrees with her. She is very well satisfied to stay, but it is a sore disappointment to Louisa and Fanny. The H. Bridges leave them on Tuesday, and they mean to move into a smaller house; you may guess how Edward feels. There can be no doubt of his going to Bath now; I should not wonder if he brought Fanny Cage back with him. You shall hear from me once more, some day or other. Yours very affectionately, J. A. We do not like Mr. Hampson's scheme. Miss AUSTEN, 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London. LIII. HENRIETTA ST., Wednesday (March 2, 1814). We had altogether a very good journey, and everything at Cobham was comfortable. I could not pay Mr. Harrington! That was the only alas! of the business. I shall therefore return his bill, and my mother's 2_l._, that you may try your luck. We did not begin reading till Bentley Green. Henry's approbation is hitherto even equal to my wishes. He says it is different from the other two, but does not appear to think it at all inferior. He has only married Mrs. R.[28] I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part. He took to Lady B. and Mrs. N.[29] most kindly, and gives great praise to the drawing of the characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny, and, I think, foresees how it will all be. I finished the "Heroine" last night, and was very much amused by it. I wonder James did not like it better. It diverted me exceedingly. We went to bed at ten. I was very tired, but slept to a miracle, and am lovely to-day, and at present Henry seems to have no complaint. We left Cobham at half-past eight, stopped to bait and breakfast at Kingston, and were in this house considerably before two. Nice smiling Mr. Barlowe met us at the door, and, in reply to inquiries after news, said that peace was generally expected. I have taken possession of my bedroom, unpacked my bandbox, sent Miss P.'s two letters to the twopenny post, been visited by M^{d.} B., and am now writing by myself at the new table in the front room. It is snowing. We had some snowstorms yesterday, and a smart frost at night, which gave us a hard road from Cobham to Kingston; but as it was then getting dirty and heavy, Henry had a pair of leaders put on to the bottom of Sloane St. His own horses, therefore, cannot have had hard work. I watched for veils as we drove through the streets, and had the pleasure of seeing several upon vulgar heads. And now, how do you all do?--you in particular, after the worry of yesterday and the day before. I hope Martha had a pleasant visit again, and that you and my mother could eat your beef-pudding. Depend upon my thinking of the chimney-sweeper as soon as I wake to-morrow. Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got; as it is in a front box, however, I hope we shall do pretty well--Shylock, a good play for Fanny--she cannot be much affected, I think. Mrs. Perigord has just been here. She tells me that we owe her master for the silk-dyeing. My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are! They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin. It is evening. We have drank tea, and I have torn through the third vol. of the "Heroine." I do not think it falls off. It is a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style. Henry is going on with "Mansfield Park." He admires H. Crawford: I mean properly, as a clever, pleasant man. I tell you all the good I can, as I know how much you will enjoy it. We hear that Mr. Kean is more admired than ever. There are no good places to be got in Drury Lane for the next fortnight, but Henry means to secure some for Saturday fortnight, when you are reckoned upon. Give my love to little Cass. I hope she found my bed comfortable last night. I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor anybody quite so large as Gogmagolicus. Yours aff^{ly}, J. AUSTEN. FOOTNOTES: [28] Mrs. Rushworth in "Mansfield Park." [29] Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris. LIV. HENRIETTA ST., Wednesday (March 9). WELL, we went to the play again last night, and as we were out a great part of the morning too, shopping, and seeing the Indian jugglers, I am very glad to be quiet now till dressing-time. We are to dine at the Tilsons', and to-morrow at Mr. Spencer's. We had not done breakfast yesterday when Mr. J. Plumptre appeared to say that he had secured a box. Henry asked him to dine here, which I fancy he was very happy to do, and so at five o'clock we four sat down to table together, while the master of the house was preparing for going out himself. The "Farmer's Wife" is a musical thing in three acts, and as Edward was steady in not staying for anything more, we were at home before ten. Fanny and Mr. J. P. are delighted with Miss S., and her merit in singing is, I dare say, very great; that she gave me no pleasure is no reflection upon her, nor, I hope, upon myself, being what Nature made me on that article. All that I am sensible of in Miss S. is a pleasing person and no skill in acting. We had Mathews, Liston, and Emery; of course, some amusement. Our friends were off before half-past eight this morning, and had the prospect of a heavy cold journey before them. I think they both liked their visit very much. I am sure Fanny did. Henry sees decided attachment between her and his new acquaintance. I have a cold, too, as well as my mother and Martha. Let it be a generous emulation between us which can get rid of it first. I wear my gauze gown to-day, long sleeves and all. I shall see how they succeed, but as yet I have no reason to suppose long sleeves are allowable. I have lowered the bosom, especially at the corners, and plaited black satin ribbon round the top. Such will be my costume of vine-leaves and paste. Prepare for a play the very first evening, I rather think Covent Garden, to see Young in "Richard." I have answered for your little companion's being conveyed to Keppel St. immediately. I have never yet been able to get there myself, but hope I shall soon. What cruel weather this is! and here is Lord Portsmouth married, too, to Miss Hanson.[30] Henry has finished "Mansfield Park," and his approbation has not lessened. He found the last half of the last volume extremely interesting. I suppose my mother recollects that she gave me no money for paying Brecknell and Twining, and my funds will not supply enough. We are home in such good time that I can finish my letter to-night, which will be better than getting up to do it to-morrow, especially as, on account of my cold, which has been very heavy in my head this evening, I rather think of lying in bed later than usual. I would not but be well enough to go to Hertford St. on any account. We met only Genl. Chowne to-day, who has not much to say for himself. I was ready to laugh at the remembrance of Frederick, and such a different Frederick as we chose to fancy him to the real Christopher! Mrs. Tilson had long sleeves, too, and she assured me that they are worn in the evening by many. I was glad to hear this. She dines here, I believe, next Tuesday. On Friday we are to be snug with only Mr. Barlowe and an evening of business. I am so pleased that the mead is brewed. Love to all. I have written to Mrs. Hill, and care for nobody. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton. By favor of Mr. GRAY. FOOTNOTE: [30] His second wife. He died in 1853, and was succeeded by his brother, the father of the present earl. LV. CHAWTON, Tuesday (June 13). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--Fanny takes my mother to Alton this morning, which gives me an opportunity of sending you a few lines without any other trouble than that of writing them. This is a delightful day in the country, and I hope not much too hot for town. Well, you had a good journey, I trust, and all that, and not rain enough to spoil your bonnet. It appeared so likely to be a wet evening that I went up to the Gt. House between three and four, and dawdled away an hour very comfortably, though Edwd. was not very brisk. The air was clearer in the evening, and he was better. We all five walked together into the kitchen garden and along the Gosport road, and they drank tea with us. You will be glad to hear that G. Turner has another situation, something in the cow line, near Rumsey, and he wishes to move immediately, which is not likely to be inconvenient to anybody. The new nurseryman at Alton comes this morning to value the crops in the garden. The only letter to-day is from Mrs. Cooke to me. They do not leave home till July, and want me to come to them, according to my promise. And, after considering everything, I have resolved on going. My companions promote it. I will not go, however, till after Edward is gone, that he may feel he has a somebody to give memorandums to, to the last. I must give up all help from his carriage, of course. And, at any rate, it must be such an excess of expense that I have quite made up my mind to it, and do not mean to care. I have been thinking of Triggs and the chair, you may be sure, but I know it will end in posting. They will meet me at Guildford. In addition to their standing claims on me they admire "Mansfield Park" exceedingly. Mr. Cooke says "it is the most sensible novel he ever read," and the manner in which I treat the clergy delights them very much. Altogether, I must go, and I want you to join me there when your visit in Henrietta St. is over. Put this into your capacious head. Take care of yourself, and do not be trampled to death in running after the Emperor. The report in Alton yesterday was that they would certainly travel this road either to or from Portsmouth. I long to know what this bow of the Prince's will produce. I saw Mrs. Andrews yesterday. Mrs. Browning had seen her before. She is very glad to send an Elizabeth. Miss Benn continues the same. Mr. Curtis, however, saw her yesterday, and said her hand was going on as well as possible. Accept our best love. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, 10 Henrietta Street, By favor of Mr. GRAY. LVI. THURSDAY (June 23). DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I received your pretty letter while the children were drinking tea with us, as Mr. Louch was so obliging as to walk over with it. Your good account of everybody made us very happy. I heard yesterday from Frank. When he began his letter he hoped to be here on Monday, but before it was ended he had been told that the naval review would not take place till Friday, which would probably occasion him some delay, as he cannot get some necessary business of his own attended to while Portsmouth is in such a bustle. I hope Fanny has seen the Emperor, and then I may fairly wish them all away. I go to-morrow, and hope for some delays and adventures. My mother's wood is brought in, but, by some mistake, no bavins. She must therefore buy some. Henry at White's! Oh, what a Henry! I do not know what to wish as to Miss B., so I will hold my tongue and my wishes. Sackree and the children set off yesterday, and have not been returned back upon us. They were all very well the evening before. We had handsome presents from the Gt. House yesterday,--a ham and the four leeches. Sackree has left some shirts of her master's at the school, which, finished or unfinished, she begs to have sent by Henry and Wm. Mr. Hinton is expected home soon, which is a good thing for the shirts. We have called upon Miss Dusantoy and Miss Papillon, and been very pretty. Miss D. has a great idea of being Fanny Price,--she and her youngest sister together, who is named Fanny. Miss Benn has drank tea with the Prowtings, and, I believe, comes to us this evening. She has still a swelling about the forefinger and a little discharge, and does not seem to be on the point of a perfect cure, but her spirits are good, and she will be most happy, I believe, to accept any invitation. The Clements are gone to Petersfield to look. Only think of the Marquis of Granby being dead. I hope, if it please Heaven there should be another son, they will have better sponsors and less parade. I certainly do not wish that Henry should think again of getting me to town. I would rather return straight from Bookham; but if he really does propose it, I cannot say No to what will be so kindly intended. It could be but for a few days, however, as my mother would be quite disappointed by my exceeding the fortnight which I now talk of as the outside--at least, we could not both remain longer away comfortably. The middle of July is Martha's time, as far as she has any time. She has left it to Mrs. Craven to fix the day. I wish she could get her money paid, for I fear her going at all depends upon that. Instead of Bath the Deans Dundases have taken a house at Clifton--Richmond Terrace--and she is as glad of the change as even you and I should be, or almost. She will now be able to go on from Berks and visit them without any fears from heat. This post has brought me a letter from Miss Sharpe. Poor thing! she has been suffering indeed, but is now in a comparative state of comfort. She is at Sir W. P.'s, in Yorkshire, with the children, and there is no appearance of her quitting them. Of course we lose the pleasure of seeing her here. She writes highly of Sir Wm. I do so want him to marry her. There is a Dow. Lady P. presiding there to make it all right. The Man is the same; but she does not mention what he is by profession or trade. She does not think Lady P. was privy to his scheme on her, but, on being in his power, yielded. Oh, Sir Wm.! Sir Wm.! how I will love you if you will love Miss Sharpe! Mrs. Driver, etc., are off by Collier, but so near being too late that she had not time to call and leave the keys herself. I have them, however. I suppose one is the key of the linen-press, but I do not know what to guess the other. The coach was stopped at the blacksmith's, and they came running down with Triggs and Browning, and trunks, and birdcages. Quite amusing. My mother desires her love, and hopes to hear from you. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Frank and Mary are to have Mary Goodchild to help as _Under_ till they can get a cook. She is delighted to go. Best love at Streatham. Miss AUSTEN, Henrietta St. By favor of Mr. GRAY. LVII. 23 HANS PLACE, Tuesday morning (August, 1814). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--I had a very good journey, not crowded, two of the three taken up at Bentley being children, the others of a reasonable size; and they were all very quiet and civil. We were late in London, from being a great load, and from changing coaches at Farnham; it was nearly four, I believe, when we reached Sloane Street. Henry himself met me, and as soon as my trunk and basket could be routed out from all the other trunks and baskets in the world, we were on our way to Hans Place in the luxury of a nice, large, cool, dirty hackney coach. There were four in the kitchen part of Yalden, and I was told fifteen at top, among them Percy Benn. We met in the same room at Egham, but poor Percy was not in his usual spirits. He would be more chatty, I dare say, in his way from Woolwich. We took up a young Gibson at Holybourn, and, in short, everybody either did come up by Yalden yesterday, or wanted to come up. It put me in mind of my own coach between Edinburgh and Stirling. Henry is very well, and has given me an account of the Canterbury races, which seem to have been as pleasant as one could wish. Everything went well. Fanny had good partners, Mr. ---- was her second on Thursday, but he did not dance with her any more. This will content you for the present. I must just add, however, that there were no Lady Charlottes, they were gone off to Kirby, and that Mary Oxenden, instead of dying, is going to marry Wm. Hammond. No James and Edward yet. Our evening yesterday was perfectly quiet; we only talked a little to Mr. Tilson across the intermediate gardens; she was gone out airing with Miss Burdett. It is a delightful place,--more than answers my expectation. Having got rid of my unreasonable ideas, I find more space and comfort in the rooms than I had supposed, and the garden is quite a love. I am in the front attic, which is the bedchamber to be preferred. Henry wants you to see it all, and asked whether you would return with him from Hampshire; I encouraged him to think you would. He breakfasts here early, and then rides to Henrietta St. If it continues fine, John is to drive me there by and by, and we shall take an airing together; and I do not mean to take any other exercise, for I feel a little tired after my long jumble. I live in his room downstairs; it is particularly pleasant from opening upon the garden. I go and refresh myself every now and then, and then come back to solitary coolness. There is one maidservant only, a very creditable, clean-looking young woman. Richard remains for the present. _Wednesday morning._--My brother and Edwd. arrived last night. They could not get places the day before. Their business is about teeth and wigs, and they are going after breakfast to Scarman's and Tavistock St., and they are to return to go with me afterwards in the barouche. I hope to do some of my errands to-day. I got the willow yesterday, as Henry was not quite ready when I reached Hena. St. I saw Mr. Hampson there for a moment. He dines here to-morrow, and proposed bringing his son; so I must submit to seeing George Hampson, though I had hoped to go through life without it. It was one of my vanities, like your not reading "Patronage." After leaving H. St. we drove to Mrs. Latouche's; they are always at home, and they are to dine here on Friday. We could do no more, as it began to rain. We dine at half-past four to-day, that our visitors may go to the play, and Henry and I are to spend the evening with the Tilsons, to meet Miss Burnett, who leaves town to-morrow. Mrs. T. called on me yesterday. Is not this all that can have happened or been arranged? Not quite. Henry wants me to see more of his Hanwell favorite, and has written to invite her to spend a day or two here with me. His scheme is to fetch her on Saturday. I am more and more convinced that he will marry again soon, and like the idea of her better than of anybody else at hand. Now I have breakfasted and have the room to myself again. It is likely to be a fine day. How do you all do? Henry talks of being at Chawton about the 1st of Sept. He has once mentioned a scheme which I should rather like,--calling on the Birches and the Crutchleys in our way. It may never come to anything, but I must provide for the possibility by troubling you to send up my silk pelisse by Collier on Saturday. I feel it would be necessary on such an occasion; and be so good as to put up a clean dressing-gown which will come from the wash on Friday. You need not direct it to be left anywhere. It may take its chance. We are to call for Henry between three and four, and I must finish this and carry it with me, as he is not always there in the morning before the parcel is made up. And before I set off, I must return Mrs. Tilson's visit. I hear nothing of the Hoblyns, and abstain from all inquiry. I hope Mary Jane and Frank's gardens go on well. Give my love to them all--Nunna Hat's love to George. A great many people wanted to run up in the Poach as well as me. The wheat looked very well all the way, and James says the same of _his_ road. The same good account of Mrs. C.'s health continues, and her circumstances mend. She gets farther and farther from poverty. What a comfort! Good-by to you. Yours very truly and affectionately, JANE. All well at Steventon. I hear nothing particular of Ben, except that Edward is to get him some pencils. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton. By favor of Mr. GRAY. LVIII. MY DEAR ANNA,[31]--I am very much obliged to you for sending your MS. It has entertained me extremely; indeed all of us. I read it aloud to your grandmamma and Aunt Cass, and we were all very much pleased. The spirit does not droop at all. Sir Thos., Lady Helen, and St. Julian are very well done, and Cecilia continues to be interesting in spite of her being so amiable. It was very fit you should advance her age. I like the beginning of Devereux Forester very much, a great deal better than if he had been very good or very bad. A few verbal corrections are all that I felt tempted to make; the principal of them is a speech of St. Julian to Lady Helen, which you see I have presumed to alter. As Lady H. is Cecilia's superior, it would not be correct to talk of her being introduced. It is Cecilia who must be introduced. And I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person; it is too much like the part of Lord Overtley, and I think it not natural. If you think differently, however, you need not mind me. I am impatient for more, and only wait for a safe conveyance to return this. Yours affectionately, J. A. FOOTNOTE: [31] Miss Anna Austen, at this time engaged to Mr. Lefroy, was writing a novel which she sent to her aunt for criticism. LIX. AUGUST 10, 1814. MY DEAR ANNA,--I am quite ashamed to find that I have never answered some question of yours in a former note. I kept it on purpose to refer to it at a proper time, and then forgot it. I like the name "Which is the Heroine" very well, and I dare say shall grow to like it very much in time; but "Enthusiasm" was something so very superior that my common title must appear to disadvantage. I am not sensible of any blunders about Dawlish; the library was pitiful and wretched twelve years ago, and not likely to have anybody's publications. There is no such title as Desborough, either among dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, or barons. These were your inquiries. I will now thank you for your envelope received this morning. Your Aunt Cass is as well pleased with St. Julian as ever, and I am delighted with the idea of seeing Progillian again. _Wednesday_, 17.--We have now just finished the first of the three books I had the pleasure of receiving yesterday. I read it aloud, and we are all very much amused, and like the work quite as well as ever. I depend on getting through another book before dinner, but there is really a good deal of respectable reading in your forty-eight pages. I have no doubt six would make a very good-sized volume. You must have been quite pleased to have accomplished so much. I like Lord Portman and his brother very much. I am only afraid that Lord P.'s good nature will make most people like him better than he deserves. The whole family are very good; and Lady Anne, who was your great dread, you have succeeded particularly well with. Bell Griffin is just what she should be. My corrections have not been more important than before; here and there we have thought the sense could be expressed in fewer words, and I have scratched out Sir Thos. from walking with the others to the stables, etc. the very day after breaking his arm; for though I find your papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book. Lynn will not do. Lynn is towards forty miles from Dawlish and would not be talked of there. I have put Starcross instead. If you prefer Easton, that must be always safe. I have also scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank; and when Mr. P. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the Honorable. That distinction is never mentioned at such times; at least, I believe not. Now we have finished the second book, or rather the fifth. I do think you had better omit Lady Helena's postscript. To those that are acquainted with "Pride and Prejudice" it will seem an imitation. And your Aunt C. and I both recommend your making a little alteration in the last scene between Devereux F. and Lady Clanmurray and her daughter. We think they press him too much, more than sensible or well-bred women would do; Lady C., at least, should have discretion enough to be sooner satisfied with his determination of not going with them. I am very much pleased with Egerton as yet. I did not expect to like him, but I do, and Susan is a very nice little animated creature; but St. Julian is the delight of our lives. He is quite interesting. The whole of his break-off with Lady Helena is very well done. Yes; Russell Square is a very proper distance from Berkeley Square. We are reading the last book. They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath. They are nearly one hundred miles apart. _Thursday._--We finished it last night after our return from drinking tea at the Great House. The last chapter does not please us quite so well; we do not thoroughly like the play, perhaps from having had too much of plays in that way lately (_vide_ "Mansfield Park"), and we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home. Your Aunt C. does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think Nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort. I should like to have had more of Devereux. I do not feel enough acquainted with him. You were afraid of meddling with him, I dare say. I like your sketch of Lord Clanmurray, and your picture of the two young girls' enjoyment is very good. I have not noticed St. Julian's serious conversation with Cecilia, but I like it exceedingly. What he says about the madness of otherwise sensible women on the subject of their daughters coming out is worth its weight in gold. I do not perceive that the language sinks. Pray go on. LX. CHAWTON, Sept. 9. MY DEAR ANNA,--We have been very much amused by your three books, but I have a good many criticisms to make, more than you will like. We are not satisfied with Mrs. Forester settling herself as tenant and near neighbor to such a man as Sir Thomas, without having some other inducement to go there. She ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her. A woman going with two girls just growing up into a neighborhood where she knows nobody but one man of not very good character, is an awkwardness which so prudent a woman as Mrs. F. would not be likely to fall into. Remember she is very prudent. You must not let her act inconsistently. Give her a friend, and let that friend be invited by Sir Thomas H. to meet her, and we shall have no objection to her dining at the Priory as she does; but otherwise a woman in her situation would hardly go there before she had been visited by other families. I like the scene itself, the Miss Leslie, Lady Anne, and the music very much. Leslie is a noble name. Sir Thomas H. you always do very well. I have only taken the liberty of expunging one phrase of his which would not be allowable,--"Bless my heart!" It is too familiar and inelegant. Your grandmother is more disturbed at Mrs. Forester's not returning the Egertons' visit sooner than by anything else. They ought to have called at the Parsonage before Sunday. You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left. Mrs. Forester is not careful enough of Susan's health. Susan ought not to be walking out so soon after heavy rains, taking long walks in the dirt. An anxious mother would not suffer it. I like your Susan very much; she is a sweet creature, her playfulness of fancy is very delightful. I like her as she is now exceedingly, but I am not quite so well satisfied with her behavior to George R. At first she seems all over attachment and feeling, and afterwards to have none at all; she is so extremely confused at the ball, and so well satisfied apparently with Mr. Morgan. She seems to have changed her character. You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on, and I hope you will do a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favorably arranged. You are but now coming to the heart and beauty of your story. Until the heroine grows up the fun must be imperfect, but I expect a great deal of entertainment from the next three or four books, and I hope you will not resent these remarks by sending me no more. We like the Egertons very well. We see no blue pantaloons or cocks or hens. There is nothing to enchant one certainly in Mr. L. L., but we make no objection to him, and his inclination to like Susan is pleasing. The sister is a good contrast, but the name of Rachel is as much as I can bear. They are not so much like the Papillons as I expected. Your last chapter is very entertaining, the conversation on genius, etc.; Mr. St. Julian and Susan both talk in character, and very well. In some former parts Cecilia is perhaps a little too solemn and good, but upon the whole her disposition is very well opposed to Susan's, her want of imagination is very natural. I wish you could make Mrs. Forester talk more; but she must be difficult to manage and make entertaining, because there is so much good sense and propriety about her that nothing can be made very broad. Her economy and her ambition must not be staring. The papers left by Mrs. Fisher are very good. Of course one guesses something. I hope when you have written a great deal more, you will be equal to scratching out some of the past. The scene with Mrs. Mellish I should condemn; it is prosy and nothing to the purpose, and indeed the more you can find in your heart to curtail between Dawlish and Newton Priors, the better I think it will be,--one does not care for girls until they are grown up. Your Aunt C. quite understands the exquisiteness of that name,--Newton Priors is really a nonpareil. Milton would have given his eyes to have thought of it. Is not the cottage taken from Tollard Royal? [Thus far the letter was written on the 9th, but before it was finished news arrived at Chawton of the death of Mrs. Charles Austen. She died in her confinement, and the baby died also. She left three little girls,--Cassie, Harriet, and Fanny. It was not until the 18th that Jane resumed her letter as follows:[32]] _Sunday._--I am very glad, dear Anna, that I wrote as I did before this sad event occurred. I have only to add that your grandmamma does not seem the worse now for the shock. I shall be very happy to receive more of your work if more is ready; and you write so fast that I have great hopes Mr. Digweed will come back freighted with such a cargo as not all his hops or his sheep could equal the value of. Your grandmamma desires me to say that she will have finished your shoes to-morrow, and thinks they will look very well. And that she depends upon seeing you, as you promise, before you quit the country, and hopes you will give her more than a day. Yours affectionately. J. AUSTEN. FOOTNOTE: [32] Note by Lord Brabourne. LXI. CHAWTON, Wednesday (Sept. 28). MY DEAR ANNA,--I hope you do not depend on having your book again immediately. I kept it that your grandmamma may hear it, for it has not been possible yet to have any public reading. I have read it to your Aunt Cassandra, however, in our own room at night, while we undressed, and with a great deal of pleasure. We like the first chapter extremely, with only a little doubt whether Lady Helena is not almost too foolish. The matrimonial dialogue is very good certainly. I like Susan as well as ever, and begin now not to care at all about Cecilia; she may stay at Easton Court as long as she likes. Henry Mellish will be, I am afraid, too much in the common novel style,--a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young man (such as do not much abound in real life), desperately in love and all in vain. But I have no business to judge him so early Jane Egerton is a very natural, comprehensible girl, and the whole of her acquaintance with Susan and Susan's letter to Cecilia are very pleasing and quite in character. But Miss Egerton does not entirely satisfy us. She is too formal and solemn, we think, in her advice to her brother not to fall in love; and it is hardly like a sensible woman,--it is putting it into his head. We should like a few hints from her better. We feel really obliged to you for introducing a Lady Kenrick; it will remove the greatest fault in the work, and I give you credit for considerable forbearance as an author in adopting so much of our opinion. I expect high fun about Mrs. Fisher and Sir Thomas. You have been perfectly right in telling Ben. Lefroy of your work, and I am very glad to hear how much he likes it. His encouragement and approbation must be "quite beyond everything."[33] I do not at all wonder at his not expecting to like anybody so well as Cecilia at first, but I shall be surprised if he does not become a Susanite in time. Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened. Indeed, I did very much like to know Ben's opinion. I hope he will continue to be pleased with it, and I think he must, but I cannot flatter him with there being much incident. We have no great right to wonder at his not valuing the name of Progillian. That is a source of delight which even he can hardly be quite competent to. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like "Waverley" if I can help it, but fear I must. I am quite determined, however, not to be pleased with Mrs. West's "Alicia De Lacy," should I ever meet with it, which I hope I shall not. I think I can be stout against anything written by Mrs. West. I have made up my mind to like no novels really but Miss Edgeworth's, yours, and my own. What can you do with Egerton to increase the interest for him? I wish you could contrive something, some family occurrence to bring out his good qualities more. Some distress among brothers and sisters to relieve by the sale of his curacy! Something to carry him mysteriously away, and then be heard of at York or Edinburgh in an old greatcoat. I would not seriously recommend anything improbable, but if you could invent something spirited for him, it would have a good effect. He might lend all his money to Captain Morris, but then he would be a great fool if he did. Cannot the Morrises quarrel and he reconcile them? Excuse the liberty I take in these suggestions. Your Aunt Frank's nursemaid has just given her warning, but whether she is worth your having, or would take your place, I know not. She was Mrs. Webb's maid before she went to the Great House. She leaves your aunt because she cannot agree with the other servants. She is in love with the man, and her head seems rather turned. He returns her affection, but she fancies every one else is wanting him and envying her. Her previous service must have fitted her for such a place as yours, and she is very active and cleanly. The Webbs are really gone! When I saw the wagons at the door, and thought of all the trouble they must have in moving, I began to reproach myself for not having liked them better; but since the wagons have disappeared my conscience has been closed again, and I am excessively glad they are gone. I am very fond of Sherlock's sermons, and prefer them to almost any. Your affectionate aunt, J. AUSTEN. If you wish me to speak to the maid, let me know. FOOTNOTE: [33] A phrase always in the mouth of one of the Chawton neighbors, Mrs. H. Digweed. LXII. _To Miss Frances Austen._ CHAWTON, Friday (Nov. 18, 1814). I FEEL quite as doubtful as you could be, my dearest Fanny, as to when my letter may be finished, for I can command very little quiet time at present; but yet I must begin, for I know you will be glad to hear as soon as possible, and I really am impatient myself to be writing something on so very interesting a subject, though I have no hope of writing anything to the purpose. I shall do very little more, I dare say, than say over again what you have said before. I was certainly a good deal surprised at first, as I had no suspicion of any change in your feelings, and I have no scruple in saying that you cannot be in love. My dear Fanny, I am ready to laugh at the idea, and yet it is no laughing matter to have had you so mistaken as to your own feelings. And with all my heart I wish I had cautioned you on that point when first you spoke to me; but though I did not think you then much in love, I did consider you as being attached in a degree quite sufficiently for happiness, as I had no doubt it would increase with opportunity, and from the time of our being in London together I thought you really very much in love. But you certainly are not at all--there is no concealing it. What strange creatures we are! It seems as if your being secure of him had made you indifferent. There was a little disgust, I suspect, at the races, and I do not wonder at it. His expressions then would not do for one who had rather more acuteness, penetration, and taste, than love, which was your case. And yet, after all, I am surprised that the change in your feelings should be so great. He is just what he ever was, only more evidently and uniformly devoted to you. This is all the difference. How shall we account for it? My dearest Fanny, I am writing what will not be of the smallest use to you. I am feeling differently every moment, and shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist your mind. I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next, but as to opinion or counsel I am sure that none will be extracted worth having from this letter. I read yours through the very evening I received it, getting away by myself. I could not bear to leave off when I had once begun. I was full of curiosity and concern. Luckily your At. C. dined at the other house; therefore I had not to manoeuvre away from her, and as to anybody else, I do not care. Poor dear Mr. A.! Oh, dear Fanny! your mistake has been one that thousands of women fall into. He was the first young man who attached himself to you. That was the charm, and most powerful it is. Among the multitudes, however, that make the same mistake with yourself, there can be few indeed who have so little reason to regret it; his character and his attachment leave you nothing to be ashamed of. Upon the whole, what is to be done? You have no inclination for any other person. His situation in life, family, friends, and, above all, his character, his uncommonly amiable mind, strict principles, just notions, good habits, all that you know so well how to value, all that is really of the first importance,--everything of this nature pleads his cause most strongly. You have no doubt of his having superior abilities, he has proved it at the University; he is, I dare say, such a scholar as your agreeable, idle brothers would ill bear a comparison with. Oh, my dear Fanny! the more I write about him the warmer my feelings become,--the more strongly I feel the sterling worth of such a young man, and the desirableness of your growing in love with him again. I recommend this most thoroughly. There are such beings in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county. Think of all this, Fanny. Mr. A. has advantages which we do not often meet in one person. His only fault, indeed, seems modesty. If he were less modest, he would be more agreeable, speak louder, and look impudenter; and is not it a fine character of which modesty is the only defect? I have no doubt he will get more lively and more like yourselves as he is more with you; he will catch your ways if he belongs to you. And as to there being any objection from his goodness, from the danger of his becoming even evangelical, I cannot admit that. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling must be happiest and safest. Do not be frightened from the connection by your brothers having most wit,--wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side; and don't be frightened by the idea of his acting more strictly up to the precepts of the New Testament than others. And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one side of the question, I shall turn round and entreat you not to commit yourself farther, and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection; and if his deficiencies of manner, etc., etc., strike you more than all his good qualities, if you continue to think strongly of them, give him up at once. Things are now in such a state that you must resolve upon one or the other,--either to allow him to go on as he has done, or whenever you are together behave with a coldness which may convince him that he has been deceiving himself. I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time,--a great deal when he feels that he must give you up; but it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody. Your sending the music was an admirable device, it made everything easy, and I do not know how I could have accounted for the parcel otherwise; for though your dear papa most conscientiously hunted about till he found me alone in the dining-parlor, your Aunt C. had seen that he had a parcel to deliver. As it was, however, I do not think anything was suspected. We have heard nothing fresh from Anna. I trust she is very comfortable in her new home. Her letters have been very sensible and satisfactory, with no parade of happiness, which I liked them the better for. I have often known young married women write in a way I did not like in that respect. You will be glad to hear that the first edition of M. P.[34] is all sold. Your Uncle Henry is rather wanting me to come to town to settle about a second edition; but as I could not very conveniently leave home now, I have written him my will and pleasure and unless he still urges it, shall not go. I am very greedy and want to make the most of it; but as you are much above caring about money, I shall not plague you with any particulars. The pleasures of vanity are more within your comprehension, and you will enter into mine at receiving the praise which every now and then comes to me through some channel or other. _Saturday._--Mr. Palmer spent yesterday with us, and is gone off with Cassy this morning. We have been expecting Miss Lloyd the last two days, and feel sure of her to-day. Mr. Knight and Mr. Edwd. Knight are to dine with us, and on Monday they are to dine with us again, accompanied by their respectable host and hostess. _Sunday._--Your papa had given me messages to you; but they are unnecessary, as he writes by this post to Aunt Louisa. We had a pleasant party yesterday; at least we found it so. It is delightful to see him so cheerful and confident. Aunt Cass. and I dine at the Great House to-day. We shall be a snug half-dozen. Miss Lloyd came, as we expected, yesterday, and desires her love. She is very happy to hear of your learning the harp. I do not mean to send you what I owe Miss Hare, because I think you would rather not be paid beforehand. Yours very affectionately, JANE AUSTEN. Miss KNIGHT, Goodnestone Farm, Wingham, Kent. FOOTNOTE: [34] "Mansfield Park." LXIII. CHAWTON, Nov. 21, 1814. MY DEAR ANNA,--I met Harriet Benn yesterday. She gave me her congratulations, and desired they might be forwarded to you, and there they are. The chief news from this country is the death of old Mrs. Dormer. Mrs. Clement walks about in a new black velvet pelisse lined with yellow, and a white bobbin net veil, and looks remarkably well in them. I think I understand the country about Hendon from your description. It must be very pretty in summer. Should you know from the atmosphere that you were within a dozen miles of London? Make everybody at Hendon admire "Mansfield Park." Your affectionate aunt, J. A. LXIV. HANS PLACE, Nov. 28, 1814. MY DEAR ANNA,--I assure you we all came away very much pleased with our visit. We talked of you for about a mile and a half with great satisfaction; and I have been just sending a very good report of you to Miss Benn, with a full account of your dress for Susan and Maria. We were all at the play last night to see Miss O'Neil in "Isabella." I do not think she was quite equal to my expectations. I fancy I want something more than can be. I took two pocket-handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either. She is an elegant creature, however, and hugs Mr. Young delightfully. I am going this morning to see the little girls in Keppel Street. Cassy was excessively interested about your marriage when she heard of it, which was not until she was to drink your health on the wedding-day. She asked a thousand questions in her usual manner, what he said to you and what you said to him. If your uncle were at home he would send his best love, but I will not impose any base fictitious remembrances on you; mine I can honestly give, and remain Your affectionate aunt, J. AUSTEN. LXV. HANS PLACE, Wednesday. MY DEAR ANNA,--I have been very far from finding your book an evil, I assure you. I read it immediately and with great pleasure. I think you are going on very well. The description of Dr. Griffin and Lady Helena's unhappiness is very good, and just what was likely to be. I am curious to know what the end of them will be. The name of Newton Priors is really invaluable; I never met with anything superior to it. It is delightful, and one could live on the name of Newton Priors for a twelvemonth. Indeed, I think you get on very fast. I only wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly. I am pleased with the dog scene and with the whole of George and Susan's love, but am more particularly struck with your serious conversations. They are very good throughout. St. Julian's history was quite a surprise to me. You had not very long known it yourself, I suspect; but I have no objection to make to the circumstance, and it is very well told. His having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an additional interest with him. I like the idea,--a very proper compliment to an aunt! I rather imagine indeed that nieces are seldom chosen but out of compliment to some aunt or another. I dare say Ben was in love with me once, and would never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of scarlet fever. Yes, I was in a mistake as to the number of books. I thought I had read three before the three at Chawton, but fewer than six will not do. I want to see dear Bell Griffin again; and had you not better give some hint of St. Julian's early history in the beginning of the story? We shall see nothing of Streatham while we are in town, as Mrs. Hill is to lie in of a daughter. Mrs. Blackstone is to be with her. Mrs. Heathcote and Miss Bigg[35] are just leaving. The latter writes me word that Miss Blackford is married, but I have never seen it in the papers, and one may as well be single if the wedding is not to be in print. Your affectionate aunt, J. A. LXVI. 23 HANS PLACE, Wednesday (Nov. 30, 1814). I AM very much obliged to you, my dear Fanny, for your letter, and I hope you will write again soon, that I may know you to be all safe and happy at home. Our visit to Hendon will interest you, I am sure; but I need not enter into the particulars of it, as your papa will be able to answer almost every question. I certainly could describe her bedroom and her drawers and her closet better than he can, but I do not feel that I can stop to do it. I was rather sorry to hear that she is to have an instrument; it seems throwing money away. They will wish the twenty-four guineas in the shape of sheets and towels six months hence; and as to her playing, it never can be anything. Her purple pelisse rather surprised me. I thought we had known all paraphernalia of that sort. I do not mean to blame her; it looked very well, and I dare say she wanted it. I suspect nothing worse than its being got in secret, and not owned to anybody. I received a very kind note from her yesterday, to ask me to come again and stay a night with them. I cannot do it, but I was pleased to find that she had the power of doing so right a thing. My going was to give them both pleasure very properly. I just saw Mr. Hayter at the play, and think his face would please me on acquaintance. I was sorry he did not dine here. It seemed rather odd to me to be in the theatre with nobody to watch for. I was quite composed myself, at leisure for all the agitated Isabella could raise. Now, my dearest Fanny, I will begin a subject which comes in very naturally. You frighten me out of my wits by your reference. Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion; your own feelings, and none but your own, should determine such an important point. So far, however, as answering your question, I have no scruple. I am perfectly convinced that your present feelings, supposing that you were to marry now, would be sufficient for his happiness; but when I think how very, very far it is from a "now," and take everything that may be into consideration, I dare not say, "Determine to accept him;" the risk is too great for you, unless your own sentiments prompt it. You will think me perverse, perhaps; in my last letter I was urging everything in his favor, and now I am inclining the other way, but I cannot help it; I am at present more impressed with the possible evil that may arise to you from engaging yourself to him--in word or mind--than with anything else. When I consider how few young men you have yet seen much of, how capable you are (yes, I do still think you very capable) of being really in love, and how full of temptation the next six or seven years of your life will probably be (it is the very period of life for the strongest attachments to be formed),--I cannot wish you, with your present very cool feelings, to devote yourself in honor to him. It is very true that you never may attach another man his equal altogether; but if that other man has the power of attaching you more, he will be in your eyes the most perfect. I shall be glad if you can revive past feelings, and from your unbiassed self resolve to go on as you have done, but this I do not expect; and without it I cannot wish you to be fettered. I should not be afraid of your marrying him; with all his worth you would soon love him enough for the happiness of both; but I should dread the continuance of this sort of tacit engagement, with such an uncertainty as there is of when it may be completed. Years may pass before he is independent; you like him well enough to marry, but not well enough to wait; the unpleasantness of appearing fickle is certainly great; but if you think you want punishment for past illusions, there it is, and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love,--bound to one, and preferring another; that is a punishment which you do not deserve. I know you did not meet, or rather will not meet, to-day, as he called here yesterday; and I am glad of it. It does not seem very likely, at least, that he should be in time for a dinner visit sixty miles off. We did not see him, only found his card when we came home at four. Your Uncle H. merely observed that he was a day after "the fair." We asked your brother on Monday (when Mr. Hayter was talked of) why he did not invite him too; saying, "I know he is in town, for I met him the other day in Bond St." Edward answered that he did not know where he was to be found. "Don't you know his chambers?" "No." I shall be most glad to hear from you again, my dearest Fanny, but it must not be later than Saturday, as we shall be off on Monday long before the letters are delivered; and write something that may do to be read or told. I am to take the Miss Moores back on Saturday, and when I return I shall hope to find your pleasant little flowing scrawl on the table. It will be a relief to me after playing at ma'ams, for though I like Miss H. M. as much as one can at my time of life after a day's acquaintance, it is uphill work to be talking to those whom one knows so little. Only one comes back with me to-morrow, probably Miss Eliza, and I rather dread it. We shall not have two ideas in common. She is young, pretty, chattering, and thinking chiefly, I presume, of dress, company, and admiration. Mr. Sanford is to join us at dinner, which will be a comfort, and in the evening, while your uncle and Miss Eliza play chess, he shall tell me comical things and I will laugh at them, which will be a pleasure to both. I called in Keppel Street and saw them all, including dear Uncle Charles, who is to come and dine with us quietly to-day. Little Harriot sat in my lap, and seemed as gentle and affectionate as ever, and as pretty, except not being quite well. Fanny is a fine stout girl, talking incessantly, with an interesting degree of lisp and indistinctness, and very likely may be the handsomest in time. Cassy did not show more pleasure in seeing me than her sisters, but I expected no better. She does not shine in the tender feelings. She will never be a Miss O'Neil, more in the Mrs. Siddons line. Thank you, but it is not settled yet whether I do hazard a second edition. We are to see Egerton to-day, when it will probably be determined. People are more ready to borrow and praise than to buy, which I cannot wonder at; but though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls "Pewter" too. I hope he continues careful of his eyes, and finds the good effect of it. I cannot suppose we differ in our ideas of the Christian religion. You have given an excellent description of it. We only affix a different meaning to the word _evangelical_. Yours most affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss KNIGHT, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. FOOTNOTE: [35] Sisters to Mrs. Hall. LXVII. CHAWTON, Friday (Sept. 29). MY DEAR ANNA,--We told Mr. B. Lefroy that if the weather did not prevent us we should certainly come and see you to-morrow and bring Cassy, trusting to your being good enough to give her a dinner about one o'clock, that we might be able to be with you the earlier and stay the longer. But on giving Cassy her choice between the Fair at Alton or Wyards, it must be confessed that she has preferred the former, which we trust will not greatly affront you; if it does, you may hope that some little Anne hereafter may revenge the insult by a similar preference of an Alton Fair to her Cousin Cassy. In the mean while we have determined to put off our visit to you until Monday, which we hope will be not less convenient. I wish the weather may not resolve on another put off. I must come to you before Wednesday if it be possible, for on that day I am going to London for a week or two with your Uncle Henry, who is expected here on Sunday. If Monday should appear too dirty for walking, and Mr. Lefroy would be so kind as to come and fetch me, I should be much obliged to him. Cassy might be of the party, and your Aunt Cassandra will take another opportunity. Yours very affectionately, my dear Anna, J. AUSTEN. _Note by Lord Brabourne._ But before the week or two to which she had limited her visit in Hans Place was at an end, her brother fell ill, and on October 22 he was in such danger that she wrote to Steventon to summon her father to town. The letter was two days on the road, and reached him on Sunday the 24th. Even then he did not start immediately. In the evening he and his wife rode to Chawton, and it was not until the next day that he and Cassandra arrived in Hans Place. The malady from which Henry Austen was suffering was low fever, and he was for some days at death's door: but he rallied soon after his brother and sisters arrived, and recovered so quickly that the former was able to leave him at the end of the week. The great anxiety and fatigue which Jane underwent at this time was supposed by some of her family to have broken down her health. She was in a very feeble and exhausted condition when the bank in which her brother Henry was a partner broke, and he not only lost all that he possessed, but most of his relations suffered severely also. Jane was well enough to pay several visits with her sister in the summer of 1816, including one to Steventon,--the last she ever paid to that home of her childhood. The last note which Mrs. Lefroy had preserved is dated,-- LXVIII. JUNE 23, 1816. MY DEAR ANNA,--Cassy desires her best thanks for the book. She was quite delighted to see it. I do not know when I have seen her so much struck by anybody's kindness as on this occasion. Her sensibility seems to be opening to the perception of great actions. These gloves having appeared on the pianoforte ever since you were here on Friday, we imagine they must be yours. Mrs. Digweed returned yesterday through all the afternoon's rain, and was of course wet through; but in speaking of it she never once said "it was beyond everything," which I am sure it must have been. Your mamma means to ride to Speen Hill to-morrow to see the Mrs. Hulberts, who are both very indifferent. By all accounts they really are breaking now,--not so stout as the old jackass. Yours affectionately, J. A. CHAWTON, Sunday, June 23. Uncle Charles's birthday. LXIX. HANS PLACE, Friday (Nov. 24, 1815). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I have the pleasure of sending you a much better account of my affairs, which I know will be a great delight to you. I wrote to Mr. Murray yesterday myself, and Henry wrote at the same time to Roworth. Before the notes were out of the house, I received three sheets and an apology from R. We sent the notes, however, and I had a most civil one in reply from Mr. M. He is so very polite, indeed, that it is quite overcoming. The printers have been waiting for paper,--the blame is thrown upon the stationer; but he gives his word that I shall have no further cause for dissatisfaction. He has lent us Miss Williams and Scott, and says that any book of his will always be at my service. In short, I am soothed and complimented into tolerable comfort. We had a visit yesterday from Edwd. Knight, and Mr. Mascall joined him here; and this morning has brought Mr. Mascall's compliments and two pheasants. We have some hope of Edward's coming to dinner to-day; he will, if he can, I believe. He is looking extremely well. To-morrow Mr. Haden is to dine with us. There is happiness! We really grow so fond of Mr. Haden that I do not know what to expect. He and Mr. Tilson and Mr. Philips made up our circle of wits last night. Fanny played, and he sat and listened and suggested improvements, till Richard came in to tell him that "the doctor was waiting for him at Captn. Blake's;" and then he was off with a speed that you can imagine. He never does appear in the least above his profession or out of humor with it, or I should think poor Captn. Blake, whoever he is, in a very bad way. I must have misunderstood Henry when I told you that you were to hear from him to-day. He read me what he wrote to Edward: part of it must have amused him, I am sure one part, alas! cannot be very amusing to anybody. I wonder that with such business to worry him he can be getting better; but he certainly does gain strength, and if you and Edwd. were to see him now, I feel sure that you would think him improved since Monday. He was out yesterday; it was a fine sunshiny day here (in the country perhaps you might have clouds and fogs. Dare I say so? I shall not deceive you, if I do, as to my estimation of the climate of London), and he ventured first on the balcony and then as far as the greenhouse. He caught no cold, and therefore has done more to-day, with great delight and self-persuasion of improvement. He has been to see Mrs. Tilson and the Malings. By the by, you may talk to Mr. T. of his wife's being better; I saw her yesterday, and was sensible of her having gained ground in the last two days. _Evening._--We have had no Edward. Our circle is formed,--only Mr. Tilson and Mr. Haden. We are not so happy as we were. A message came this afternoon from Mrs. Latouche and Miss East, offering themselves to drink tea with us to-morrow, and, as it was accepted, here is an end of our extreme felicity in our dinner guest. I am heartily sorry they are coming; it will be an evening spoilt to Fanny and me. Another little disappointment: Mr. H. advises Henry's not venturing with us in the carriage to-morrow; if it were spring, he says, it would be a different thing. One would rather this had not been. He seems to think his going out to-day rather imprudent, though acknowledging at the same time that he is better than he was in the morning. Fanny has had a letter full of commissions from Goodnestone; we shall be busy about them and her own matters, I dare say, from twelve to four. Nothing, I trust, will keep us from Keppel Street. This day has brought a most friendly letter from Mr. Fowle, with a brace of pheasants. I did not know before that Henry had written to him a few days ago to ask for them. We shall live upon pheasants,--no bad life! I send you five one-pound notes, for fear you should be distressed for little money. Lizzy's work is charmingly done; shall you put it to your chintz? A sheet came in this moment; 1st and 3rd vols. are now at 144; 2nd at 48. I am sure you will like particulars. We are not to have the trouble of returning the sheets to Mr. Murray any longer; the printer's boys bring and carry. I hope Mary continues to get well fast, and I send my love to little Herbert. You will tell me more of Martha's plans, of course, when you write again. Remember me most kindly to everybody, and Miss Benn besides. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. I have been listening to dreadful insanity. It is Mr. Haden's firm belief that a person not musical is fit for every sort of wickedness. I ventured to assert a little on the other side, but wished the cause in abler hands. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton. LXX. HANS PLACE, Sunday (Nov. 26). MY DEAREST,--The parcel arrived safely, and I am much obliged to you for your trouble. It cost 2_s._ 10_d._, but as there is a certain saving of 2_s._ 4½_d._ on the other side, I am sure it is well worth doing. I send four pair of silk stockings, but I do not want them washed at present. In the three neckhandkerchiefs I include the one sent down before. These things, perhaps, Edwd. may be able to bring, but even if he is not, I am extremely pleased with his returning to you from Steventon. It is much better, far preferable. I did mention the P. R. in my note to Mr. Murray; it brought me a fine compliment in return. Whether it has done any other good I do not know, but Henry thought it worth trying. The printers continue to supply me very well. I am advanced in Vol. III. to my _arra_-root, upon which peculiar style of spelling there is a modest query in the margin. I will not forget Anna's arrowroot. I hope you have told Martha of my first resolution of letting nobody know that I might dedicate, etc., for fear of being obliged to do it, and that she is thoroughly convinced of my being influenced now by nothing but the most mercenary motives. I have paid nine shillings on her account to Miss Palmer; there was no more owing. Well, we were very busy all yesterday; from half-past eleven till four in the streets, working almost entirely for other people, driving from place to place after a parcel for Sandling, which we could never find, and encountering the miseries of Grafton House to get a purple frock for Eleanor Bridges. We got to Keppel St., however, which was all I cared for; and though we could stay only a quarter of an hour, Fanny's calling gave great pleasure, and her sensibility still greater, for she was very much affected at the sight of the children. Poor little F. looked heavy. We saw the whole party. Aunt Harriet hopes Cassy will not forget to make a pincushion for Mrs. Kelly, as she has spoken of its being promised her several times. I hope we shall see Aunt H. and the dear little girls here on Thursday. So much for the morning. Then came the dinner and Mr. Haden, who brought good manners and clever conversation. From seven to eight the harp; at eight Mrs. L. and Miss E. arrived, and for the rest of the evening the drawing-room was thus arranged: on the sofa side the two ladies, Henry, and myself making the best of it; on the opposite side Fanny and Mr. Haden, in two chairs (I believe, at least, they had two chairs), talking together uninterruptedly. Fancy the scene! And what is to be fancied next? Why, that Mr. H. dines here again to-morrow. To-day we are to have Mr. Barlow. Mr. H. is reading "Mansfield Park" for the first time, and prefers it to P. and P. A hare and four rabbits from Gm. yesterday, so that we are stocked for nearly a week. Poor Farmer Andrews! I am very sorry for him, and sincerely wish his recovery. A better account of the sugar than I could have expected. I should like to help you break some more. I am glad you cannot wake early; I am sure you must have been under great arrears of rest. Fanny and I have been to B. Chapel, and walked back with Maria Cuthbert. We have been very little plagued with visitors this last week. I remember only Miss Herries, the aunt, but I am in terror for to-day, a fine bright Sunday; plenty of mortar, and nothing to do. Henry gets out in his garden every day, but at present his inclination for doing more seems over, nor has he now any plan for leaving London before Dec. 18, when he thinks of going to Oxford for a few days; to-day, indeed, his feelings are for continuing where he is through the next two months. One knows the uncertainty of all this; but should it be so, we must think the best, and hope the best, and do the best; and my idea in that case is, that when he goes to Oxford I should go home, and have nearly a week of you before you take my place. This is only a silent project, you know, to be gladly given up if better things occur. Henry calls himself stronger every day, and Mr. H. keeps on approving his pulse, which seems generally better than ever, but still they will not let him be well. Perhaps when Fanny is gone he will be allowed to recover faster. I am not disappointed: I never thought the little girl at Wyards very pretty, but she will have a fine complexion and curly hair, and pass for a beauty. We are glad the mamma's cold has not been worse, and send her our love and good wishes by every convenient opportunity. Sweet, amiable Frank! why does he have a cold too? Like Captain Mirvan to Mr. Duval,[36] "I wish it well over with him." Fanny has heard all that I have said to you about herself and Mr. H. Thank you very much for the sight of dearest Charles's letter to yourself. How pleasantly and how naturally he writes! and how perfect a picture of his disposition and feelings his style conveys! Poor dear fellow! Not a present! I have a great mind to send him all the twelve copies which were to have been dispersed among my near connections, beginning with the P. R.[2] and ending with Countess Morley. Adieu. Yours affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Give my love to Cassy and Mary Jane. Caroline will be gone when this reaches you. Miss AUSTEN. FOOTNOTES: [36] Characters in Miss Burney's "Evelina." [37] Prince Regent. LXXI. HANS PLACE, Saturday (Dec. 2). MY DEAR CASSANDRA,--Henry came back yesterday, and might have returned the day before if he had known as much in time. I had the pleasure of hearing from Mr. T. on Wednesday night that Mr. Seymour thought there was not the least occasion for his absenting himself any longer. I had also the comfort of a few lines on Wednesday morning from Henry himself, just after your letter was gone, giving so good an account of his feelings as made me perfectly easy. He met with the utmost care and attention at Hanwell, spent his two days there very quietly and pleasantly, and being certainly in no respect the worse for going, we may believe that he must be better, as he is quite sure of being himself. To make his return a complete gala, Mr. Haden was secured for dinner. I need not say that our evening was agreeable. But you seem to be under a mistake as to Mr. H. You call him an apothecary. He is no apothecary; he has never been an apothecary; there is not an apothecary in this neighborhood,--the only inconvenience of the situation, perhaps,--but so it is; we have not a medical man within reach. He is a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel, but without the least spice of an apothecary. He is, perhaps, the only person not an apothecary hereabouts. He has never sung to us. He will not sing without a pianoforte accompaniment. Mr. Meyers gives his three lessons a week, altering his days and his hours, however, just as he chooses, never very punctual, and never giving good measure. I have not Fanny's fondness for masters, and Mr. Meyers does not give me any longing after them. The truth is, I think, that they are all, at least music-masters, made of too much consequence, and allowed to take too many liberties with their scholars' time. We shall be delighted to see Edward on Monday, only sorry that you must be losing him. A turkey will be equally welcome with himself. He must prepare for his own proper bedchamber here, as Henry moved down to the one below last week; he found the other cold. I am sorry my mother has been suffering, and am afraid this exquisite weather is too good to agree with her. I enjoy it all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally; and I cannot but selfishly hope we are to have it last till Christmas,--nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close, muggy weather. Oh, thank you very much for your long letter; it did me a great deal of good. Henry accepts your offer of making his nine gallon of mead thankfully. The mistake of the dogs rather vexed him for a moment, but he has not thought of it since. To-day he makes a third attempt at his strengthening plaister, and as I am sure he will now be getting out a great deal, it is to be wished that he may be able to keep it on. He sets off this morning by the Chelsea coach to sign bonds and visit Henrietta St., and I have no doubt will be going every day to Henrietta St. Fanny and I were very snug by ourselves as soon as we were satisfied about our invalid's being safe at Hanwell. By manoeuvring and good luck we foiled all the Malings' attempts upon us. Happily I caught a little cold on Wednesday, the morning we were in town, which we made very useful, and we saw nobody but our precious[38] and Mr. Tilson. This evening the Malings are allowed to drink tea with us. We are in hopes--that is, we wish--Miss Palmer and the little girls may come this morning. You know, of course, that she could not come on Thursday, and she will not attempt to name any other day. God bless you. Excuse the shortness of this, but I must finish it now, that I may save you 2_d._ Best love. Yours affectionately, J. A. It strikes me that I have no business to give the P. R. a binding, but we will take counsel upon the question. I am glad you have put the flounce on your chintz; I am sure it must look particularly well, and it is what I had thought of. Miss AUSTEN, Chawton, Alton, Hants. FOOTNOTE: [38] Probably a playful allusion to Mr. Haden. LXXII. CHAWTON (Feb. 20, 1816). MY DEAREST FANNY,--You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my life. Such letters, such entertaining letters, as you have lately sent! such a description of your queer little heart! such a lovely display of what imagination does! You are worth your weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage. I cannot express to you what I have felt in reading your history of yourself,--how full of pity and concern, and admiration and amusement I have been! You are the paragon of all that is silly and sensible, commonplace and eccentric, sad and lively, provoking and interesting. Who can keep pace with the fluctuations of your fancy, the capprizios of your taste, the contradictions of your feelings? You are so odd, and all the time so perfectly natural!--so peculiar in yourself, and yet so like everybody else! It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately. You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me to have such thorough pictures of your heart. Oh, what a loss it will be when you are married! You are too agreeable in your single state,--too agreeable as a niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of mind is all settled down into conjugal and maternal affections. Mr. B---- frightens me. He will have you. I see you at the altar. I have some faith in Mrs. C. Cage's observation, and still more in Lizzy's; and besides, I know it must be so. He must be wishing to attach you. It would be too stupid and too shameful in him to be otherwise; and all the family are seeking your acquaintance. Do not imagine that I have any real objection; I have rather taken a fancy to him than not, and I like the house for you. I only do not like you should marry anybody. And yet I do wish you to marry very much, because I know you will never be happy till you are; but the loss of a Fanny Knight will be never made up to me. My "affec. niece F. C. B----" will be but a poor substitute. I do not like your being nervous, and so apt to cry,--it is a sign you are not quite well; but I hope Mr. Scud--as you always write his name (your Mr. Scuds amuse me very much)--will do you good. What a comfort that Cassandra should be so recovered! It was more than we had expected. I can easily believe she was very patient and very good. I always loved Cassandra for her fine dark eyes and sweet temper. I am almost entirely cured of my rheumatism,--just a little pain in my knee now and then, to make me remember what it was, and keep on flannel. Aunt Cassandra nursed me so beautifully. I enjoy your visit to Goodnestone, it must be a great pleasure to you; you have not seen Fanny Cage in comfort so long. I hope she represents and remonstrates and reasons with you properly. Why should you be living in dread of his marrying somebody else? (Yet how natural!) You did not choose to have him yourself, why not allow him to take comfort where he can? In your conscience you know that he could not bear a companion with a more animated character. You cannot forget how you felt under the idea of its having been possible that he might have dined in Hans Place. My dearest Fanny, I cannot bear you should be unhappy about him. Think of his principles; think of his father's objection, of want of money, etc., etc. But I am doing no good; no, all that I urge against him will rather make you take his part more,--sweet, perverse Fanny. And now I will tell you that we like your Henry to the utmost, to the very top of the glass, quite brimful. He is a very pleasing young man. I do not see how he could be mended. He does really bid fair to be everything his father and sister could wish; and William I love very much indeed, and so we do all; he is quite our own William. In short, we are very comfortable together; that is, we can answer for ourselves. Mrs. Deedes is as welcome as May to all our benevolence to her son; we only lamented that we could not do more, and that the 50_l._ note we slipped into his hand at parting was necessarily the limit of our offering. Good Mrs. Deedes! Scandal and gossip; yes, I dare say you are well stocked, but I am very fond of Mrs. ---- for reasons good. Thank you for mentioning her praise of "Emma," etc. I have contributed the marking to Uncle H.'s shirts, and now they are a complete memorial of the tender regard of many. _Friday._--I had no idea when I began this yesterday of sending it before your brother went back, but I have written away my foolish thoughts at such a rate that I will not keep them many hours longer to stare me in the face. Much obliged for the quadrilles, which I am grown to think pretty enough, though of course they are very inferior to the cotillons of my own day. Ben and Anna walked here last Sunday to hear Uncle Henry, and she looked so pretty, it was quite a pleasure to see her, so young and so blooming and so innocent, as if she had never had a wicked thought in her life, which yet one has some reason to suppose she must have had, if we believe the doctrine of original sin. I hope Lizzy will have her play very kindly arranged for her. Henry is generally thought very good-looking, but not so handsome as Edward. I think I prefer his face. Wm. is in excellent looks, has a fine appetite, and seems perfectly well. You will have a great break up at Godmersham in the spring. You must feel their all going. It is very right, however! Poor Miss C.! I shall pity her when she begins to understand herself. Your objection to the quadrilles delighted me exceedingly. Pretty well, for a lady irrecoverably attached to one person! Sweet Fanny, believe no such thing of yourself, spread no such malicious slander upon your understanding within the precincts of your imagination. Do not speak ill of your sense merely for the gratification of your fancy; yours is sense which deserves more honorable treatment. You are not in love with him; you never have been really in love with him. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss KNIGHT, Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent. LXXIII. CHAWTON, Thursday (March 13). AS to making any adequate return for such a letter as yours, my dearest Fanny, it is absolutely impossible. If I were to labor at it all the rest of my life, and live to the age of Methuselah, I could never accomplish anything so long and so perfect; but I cannot let William go without a few lines of acknowledgment and reply. I have pretty well done with Mr. ----. By your description, he cannot be in love with you, however he may try at it; and I could not wish the match unless there were a great deal of love on his side. I do not know what to do about Jemima Branfill. What does her dancing away with so much spirit mean? That she does not care for him, or only wishes to appear not to care for him? Who can understand a young lady? Poor Mrs. C. Milles, that she should die on the wrong day at last, after being about it so long! It was unlucky that the Goodnestone party could not meet you; and I hope her friendly, obliging, social spirit, which delighted in drawing people together, was not conscious of the division and disappointment she was occasioning. I am sorry and surprised that you speak of her as having little to leave, and must feel for Miss Milles, though she is Molly, if a material loss of income is to attend her other loss. Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony; but I need not dwell on such arguments with you, pretty dear. To you I shall say, as I have often said before, Do not be in a hurry, the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than any one you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before. Do none of the A.'s ever come to balls now? You have never mentioned them as being at any. And what do you hear of the Gripps, or of Fanny and her husband? Aunt Cassandra walked to Wyards yesterday with Mrs. Digweed. Anna has had a bad cold, and looks pale. She has just weaned Julia. I have also heard lately from your Aunt Harriot, and cannot understand their plans in parting with Miss S., whom she seems very much to value now that Harriot and Eleanor are both of an age for a governess to be so useful to, especially as, when Caroline was sent to school some years, Miss Bell was still retained, though the others even then were nursery children. They have some good reason, I dare say, though I cannot penetrate it; and till I know what it is I shall invent a bad one, and amuse myself with accounting for the difference of measures by supposing Miss S. to be a superior sort of woman, who has never stooped to recommend herself to the master of the family by flattery, as Miss Bell did. I will answer your kind questions more than you expect. "Miss Catherine" is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out; but I have a something ready for publication, which may, perhaps, appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short,--about the length of "Catherine." This is for yourself alone. Neither Mr. Salusbury nor Mr. Wildman is to know of it. I am got tolerably well again, quite equal to walking about and enjoying the air, and by sitting down and resting a good while between my walks I get exercise enough. I have a scheme, however, for accomplishing more, as the weather grows spring-like. I mean to take to riding the donkey; it will be more independent and less troublesome than the use of the carriage, and I shall be able to go about with Aunt Cassandra in her walks to Alton and Wyards. I hope you will think Wm. looking well; he was bilious the other day, and At. Cass. supplied him with a dose at his own request. I am sure you would have approved it. Wm. and I are the best of friends. I love him very much. Everything is so natural about him,--his affections, his manners, and his drollery. He entertains and interests us extremely. Mat. Hammond and A. M. Shaw are people whom I cannot care for in themselves, but I enter into their situation, and am glad they are so happy. If I were the Duchess of Richmond, I should be very miserable about my son's choice. Our fears increase for poor little Harriot; the latest account is that Sir Ev. Home is confirmed in his opinion of there being water on the brain. I hope Heaven, in its mercy, will take her soon. Her poor father will be quite worn out by his feelings for her; he cannot spare Cassy at present, she is an occupation and a comfort to him. LXXIV. CHAWTON, Sunday (March 23). I AM very much obliged to you, my dearest Fanny, for sending me Mr. W.'s conversation; I had great amusement in reading it, and I hope I am not affronted, and do not think the worse of him for having a brain so very different from mine; but my strongest sensation of all is astonishment at your being able to press him on the subject so perseveringly; and I agree with your papa that it was not fair. When he knows the truth, he will be uncomfortable. You are the oddest creature! Nervous enough in some respects, but in others perfectly without nerves! Quite unrepulsable, hardened, and impudent. Do not oblige him to read any more. Have mercy on him, tell him the truth, and make him an apology. He and I should not in the least agree, of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines. Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked; but there is some very good sense in what he says, and I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young ladies; it shows an amiable and a delicate mind. And he deserves better treatment than to be obliged to read any more of my works. Do not be surprised at finding Uncle Henry acquainted with my having another ready for publication. I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it. You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me. Many thanks for your kind care for my health; I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was very poorly. I have had a good deal of fever at times, and indifferent nights; but I am considerably better now, and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough,--black and white, and every wrong color. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again. Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life. Thank you for everything you tell me. I do not feel worthy of it by anything that I can say in return, but I assure you my pleasure in your letters is quite as great as ever, and I am interested and amused just as you could wish me. If there is a Miss _Marsden_, I perceive whom she will marry. _Evening._--I was languid and dull and very bad company when I wrote the above; I am better now, to my own feelings at least, and wish I may be more agreeable. We are going to have rain, and after that very pleasant genial weather, which will exactly do for me, as my saddle will then be completed, and air and exercise is what I want. Indeed, I shall be very glad when the event at Scarlets is over, the expectation of it keeps us in a worry, your grandmamma especially; she sits brooding over evils which cannot be remedied, and conduct impossible to be understood. Now the reports from Keppel St. are rather better; little Harriot's headaches are abated, and Sir Evd. is satisfied with the effect of the mercury, and does not despair of a cure. The complaint I find is not considered incurable nowadays, provided the patient be young enough not to have the head hardened. The water in that case may be drawn off by mercury. But though this is a new idea to us, perhaps it may have been long familiar to you through your friend Mr. Scud. I hope his high renown is sustained by driving away William's cough. Tell Wm. that Triggs is as beautiful and condescending as ever, and was so good as to dine with us to-day, and tell him that I often play at nines and think of him. The Papillons came back on Friday night, but I have not seen them yet, as I do not venture to church. I cannot hear, however, but that they are the same Mr. P. and his sister they used to be. She has engaged a new maidservant in Mrs. Calker's room, whom she means to make also housekeeper under herself. Old Philmore was buried yesterday, and I, by way of saying something to Triggs, observed that it had been a very handsome funeral; but his manner of reply made me suppose that it was not generally esteemed so. I can only be sure of one part being very handsome,--Triggs himself, walking behind in his green coat. Mrs. Philmore attended as chief mourner, in bombazine, made very short, and flounced with crape. _Tuesday._--I have had various plans as to this letter, but at last I have determined that Uncle Henry shall forward it from London. I want to see how Canterbury looks in the direction. When once Uncle H. has left us, I shall wish him with you. London has become a hateful place to him, and he is always depressed by the idea of it. I hope he will be in time for your sick. I am sure he must do that part of his duty as excellently as all the rest. He returned yesterday from Steventon, and was with us by breakfast, bringing Edward with him, only that Edwd. stayed to breakfast at Wyards. We had a pleasant family day, for the Altons dined with us, the last visit of the kind probably which she will be able to pay us for many a month. I hope your own Henry is in France, and that you have heard from him; the passage once over, he will feel all happiness. I took my first ride yesterday, and liked it very much. I went up Mounter's Lane and round by where the new cottages are to be, and found the exercise and everything very pleasant; and I had the advantage of agreeable companions, as At. Cass. and Edward walked by my side. At. Cass. is such an excellent nurse, so assiduous and unwearied! But you know all that already. Very affectionately yours, J. AUSTEN. Miss KNIGHT, Godmersham Park, Canterbury. LXXV. CHAWTON, Sunday (Sept. 8, 1816). MY DEAREST CASSANDRA,--I have borne the arrival of your letter to-day extremely well; anybody might have thought it was giving me pleasure. I am very glad you find so much to be satisfied with at Cheltenham. While the waters agree, everything else is trifling. A letter arrived for you from Charles last Thursday. They are all safe and pretty well in Keppel St., the children decidedly better for Broadstairs; and he writes principally to ask when it will be convenient to us to receive Miss P., the little girls, and himself. They would be ready to set off in ten days from the time of his writing, to pay their visits in Hampshire and Berkshire, and he would prefer coming to Chawton first. I have answered him, and said that we hoped it might suit them to wait till the last week in Septr., as we could not ask them sooner, either on your account or the want of room. I mentioned the 23rd as the probable day of your return. When you have once left Cheltenham, I shall grudge every half-day wasted on the road. If there were but a coach from Hungerford to Chawton! I have desired him to let me hear again soon. He does not include a maid in the list to be accommodated; but if they bring one, as I suppose they will, we shall have no bed in the house even then for Charles himself,--let alone Henry. But what can we do? We shall have the Gt. House quite at our command; it is to be cleared of the Papillons' servants in a day or two. They themselves have been hurried off into Essex to take possession,--not of a large estate left them by an uncle, but to scrape together all they can, I suppose, of the effects of a Mrs. Rawstorn, a rich old friend and cousin suddenly deceased, to whom they are joint executors. So there is a happy end of the Kentish Papillons coming here. No morning service to-day, wherefore I am writing between twelve and one o'clock. Mr. Benn in the afternoon, and likewise more rain again, by the look and the sound of things. You left us in doubt of Mrs. Benn's situation, but she has bespoke her nurse. . . . The F. A.'s dined with us yesterday, and had fine weather both for coming and going home, which has hardly ever happened to them before. She is still unprovided with a housemaid. Our day at Alton was very pleasant, venison quite right, children well behaved, and Mr. and Mrs. Digweed taking kindly to our charades and other games. I must also observe, for his mother's satisfaction, that Edward at my suggestion devoted himself very properly to the entertainment of Miss S. Gibson. Nothing was wanting except Mr. Sweeney; but he, alas! had been ordered away to London the day before. We had a beautiful walk home by moonlight. Thank you, my back has given me scarcely any pain for many days. I have an idea that agitation does it as much harm as fatigue, and that I was ill at the time of your going from the very circumstance of your going. I am nursing myself up now into as beautiful a state as I can, because I hear that Dr. White means to call on me before he leaves the country. _Evening._--Frank and Mary and the children visited us this morning. Mr. and Mrs. Gibson are to come on the 23rd, and there is too much reason to fear they will stay above a week. Little George could tell me where you were gone to, as well as what you were to bring him, when I asked him the other day. Sir Tho. Miller is dead. I treat you with a dead baronet in almost every letter. So you have C. Craven among you, as well as the Duke of Orleans and Mr. Pocock. But it mortifies me that you have not added one to the stock of common acquaintance. Do pray meet with somebody belonging to yourself. I am quite weary of your knowing nobody. Mrs. Digweed parts with both Hannah and old cook: the former will not give up her lover, who is a man of bad character; the latter is guilty only of being unequal to anything. Miss Terry was to have spent this week with her sister, but as usual it is put off. My amiable friend knows the value of her company. I have not seen Anna since the day you left us; her father and brother visited her most days. Edward and Ben called here on Thursday. Edward was in his way to Selborne. We found him very agreeable. He is come back from France, thinking of the French as one could wish,--disappointed in everything. He did not go beyond Paris. I have a letter from Mrs. Perigord; she and her mother are in London again. She speaks of France as a scene of general poverty and misery: no money, no trade, nothing to be got but by the innkeepers, and as to her own present prospects she is not much less melancholy than before. I have also a letter from Miss Sharp, quite one of her letters; she has been again obliged to exert herself more than ever, in a more distressing, more harassed state, and has met with another excellent old physician and his wife, with every virtue under heaven, who takes to her and cures her from pure love and benevolence. Dr. and Mrs. Storer are their Mrs. and Miss Palmer--for they are at Bridlington. I am happy to say, however, that the sum of the account is better than usual. Sir William is returned; from Bridlington they go to Chevet, and she is to have a young governess under her. I enjoyed Edward's company very much, as I said before, and yet I was not sorry when Friday came. It had been a busy week, and I wanted a few days' quiet and exemption from the thought and contrivancy which any sort of company gives. I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the house; and how good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard words, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment. Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb. _Monday._--Here is a sad morning. I fear you may not have been able to get to the Pump. The two last days were very pleasant. I enjoyed them the more for your sake. But to-day it is really bad enough to make you all cross. I hope Mary will change her lodgings at the fortnight's end; I am sure, if you looked about well, you would find others in some odd corner to suit you better. Mrs. Potter charges for the name of the High St. Success to the pianoforte! I trust it will drive you away. We hear now that there is to be no honey this year. Bad news for us. We must husband our present stock of mead, and I am sorry to perceive that our twenty gallons is very nearly out. I cannot comprehend how the fourteen gallons could last so long. We do not much like Mr. Cooper's new sermons. They are fuller of regeneration and conversion than ever, with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible Society. Martha's love to Mary and Caroline, and she is extremely glad to find they like the pelisse. The Debarys are indeed odious! We are to see my brother to-morrow, but for only one night. I had no idea that he would care for the races without Edward. Remember me to all. Yours very affectionately, J. AUSTEN. Miss AUSTEN, Post-Office, Cheltenham. _Note by Lord Brabourne._ I insert here a letter of Jane Austen's written backwards, addressed to her niece "Cassy," daughter of Captain Charles Austen (afterwards Admiral) when a little girl. LXXVI. YM RAED YSSAC,--I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey. Ruoy xis snisuoc emac ereh yadretsey, dna dah hcae a eceip fo ekac. Siht si elttil Yssac's yadhtrib, dna ehs si eerht sraey dlo. Knarf sah nugeb gninrael Nital ew deef eht Nibor yreve gninrom. Yllas netfo seriuqne retfa uoy. Yllas Mahneb sah tog a wen neerg nwog. Teirrah Thgink semoc yreve yad ot daer ot Tnua Ardnassac. Doog eyb ym raed Yssac. Tnua Ardnassac sdnes reh tseb evol, dna os ew od lla. Ruoy etanoitceffa tnua, ENAJ NETSUA. NOTWAHC, Naj. 8. _Note by Lord Brabourne._ In January, 1817, she wrote of herself as better and able to walk into Alton, and hoped in the summer she should be able to walk back. In April her father in a note to Mrs. Lefroy says: "I was happy to have a good account of herself written by her own hand, in a letter from your Aunt Jane; but all who love, and that is all who know her, must be anxious on her account." We all know how well grounded that anxiety was, and how soon her relations had to lament over the loss of the dearest and brightest member of their family. And now I come to the saddest letters of all, those which tell us of the end of that bright life, cut short just at the time when the world might have hoped that unabated intellectual vigor, supplemented by the experience brought by maturer years, would have produced works if possible even more fascinating than those with which she had already embellished the literature of her country. But it was not to be. The fiat had gone forth,--the ties which bound that sweet spirit to earth were to be severed, and a blank left, never to be filled in the family which her loved and loving presence had blessed, and where she had been so well and fondly appreciated. In the early spring of 1817 the unfavorable symptoms increased, and the failure of her health was too visible to be neglected. Still no apprehensions of immediate danger were entertained, and it is probable that when she left Chawton for Winchester in May, she did not recognize the fact that she was bidding a last farewell to "Home." Happy for her if it was so, for there are few things more melancholy than to look upon any beloved place or person with the knowledge that it is for "the last time." In all probability this grief was spared to Jane, for even after her arrival at Winchester she spoke and wrote as if recovery was hopeful; and I fancy that her relations were by no means aware that the end was so near. _Note by Lord Brabourne._ Cassandra's letters tell the tale of the event in words that require no addition from me. They are simple and affecting,--the words of one who had been stricken by a great grief, but whose religion stood her in good stead, and enabled her to bear it with fortitude. The firm and loving bond of union which had ever united the Austen family, naturally intensified their sorrow at the loss of one of their number, and that the one of whom they had been so proud as well as so fond. They laid her within the walls of the old cathedral which she had loved so much, and went sorrowfully back to their homes, with the feeling that nothing could replace to them the treasure they had lost. And most heavily of all must the blow have fallen upon the only sister, the correspondent, the companion, the other self of Jane, who had to return alone to the desolate home, and to the mother to whose comforts the two had hitherto ministered together, but who would henceforward have her alone on whom to rely. . . . _Letters from Miss Cassandra Austen to her niece Miss Knight, after the death of her sister Jane, July 18, 1817._ LXXVII. WINCHESTER, Sunday. MY DEAREST FANNY,--Doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost. She did love you most sincerely, and never shall I forget the proofs of love you gave her during her illness in writing those kind, amusing letters at a time when I know your feelings would have dictated so different a style. Take the only reward I can give you in the assurance that your benevolent purpose was answered; you did contribute to her enjoyment. Even your last letter afforded pleasure. I merely cut the seal and gave it to her; she opened it and read it herself, afterwards she gave it to me to read, and then talked to me a little and not uncheerfully of its contents, but there was then a languor about her which prevented her taking the same interest in anything she had been used to do. Since Tuesday evening, when her complaint returned, there was a visible change, she slept more and much more comfortably; indeed, during the last eight-and-forty hours she was more asleep than awake. Her looks altered and she fell away, but I perceived no material diminution of strength, and though I was then hopeless of a recovery, I had no suspicion how rapidly my loss was approaching. I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed. She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow; I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself. I loved her only too well,--not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to and negligent of others; and I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the Hand which has struck this blow. You know me too well to be at all afraid that I should suffer materially from my feelings; I am perfectly conscious of the extent of my irreparable loss, but I am not at all overpowered and very little indisposed,--nothing but what a short time, with rest and change of air, will remove. I thank God that I was enabled to attend her to the last, and amongst my many causes of self-reproach I have not to add any wilful neglect of her comfort. She felt herself to be dying about half an hour before she became tranquil and apparently unconscious. During that half-hour was her struggle, poor soul! She said she could not tell us what she suffered, though she complained of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death, and some of her words were: "God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me!" Her voice was affected, but as long as she spoke she was intelligible. I hope I do not break your heart, my dearest Fanny, by these particulars; I mean to afford you gratification whilst I am relieving my own feelings. I could not write so to anybody else; indeed you are the only person I have written to at all, excepting your grandmamma,--it was to her, not your Uncle Charles, I wrote on Friday. Immediately after dinner on Thursday I went into the town to do an errand which your dear aunt was anxious about. I returned about a quarter before six, and found her recovering from faintness and oppression; she got so well as to be able to give me a minute account of her seizure, and when the clock struck six she was talking quietly to me. I cannot say how soon afterwards she was seized again with the same faintness, which was followed by the sufferings she could not describe; but Mr. Lyford had been sent for, had applied something to give her ease, and she was in a state of quiet insensibility by seven o'clock at the latest. From that time till half-past four, when she ceased to breathe, she scarcely moved a limb, so that we have every reason to think, with gratitude to the Almighty, that her sufferings were over. A slight motion of the head with every breath remained till almost the last. I sat close to her with a pillow in my lap to assist in supporting her head, which was almost off the bed, for six hours; fatigue made me then resign my place to Mrs. J. A. for two hours and a half, when I took it again, and in about an hour more she breathed her last. I was able to close her eyes myself, and it was a great gratification to me to render her those last services. There was nothing convulsed which gave the idea of pain in her look; on the contrary, but for the continual motion of the head she gave one the idea of a beautiful statue, and even now, in her coffin, there is such a sweet, serene air over her countenance as is quite pleasant to contemplate. This day, my dearest Fanny, you have had the melancholy intelligence, and I know you suffer severely, but I likewise know that you will apply to the fountain-head for consolation, and that our merciful God is never deaf to such prayers as you will offer. The last sad ceremony is to take place on Thursday morning; her dear remains are to be deposited in the cathedral. It is a satisfaction to me to think that they are to lie in a building she admired so much; her precious soul, I presume to hope, reposes in a far superior mansion. May mine one day be reunited to it! Your dear papa, your Uncle Henry, and Frank and Edwd. Austen, instead of his father, will attend. I hope they will none of them suffer lastingly from their pious exertions. The ceremony must be over before ten o'clock, as the cathedral service begins at that hour, so that we shall be at home early in the day, for there will be nothing to keep us here afterwards. Your Uncle James came to us yesterday, and is gone home to-day. Uncle H. goes to Chawton to-morrow morning; he has given every necessary direction here, and I think his company there will do good. He returns to us again on Tuesday evening. I did not think to have written a long letter when I began, but I have found the employment draw me on, and I hope I shall have been giving you more pleasure than pain. Remember me kindly to Mrs. J. Bridges (I am so glad she is with you now), and give my best love to Lizzie and all the others. I am, my dearest Fanny, Most affectionately yours, CASS. ELIZ. AUSTEN. I have said nothing about those at Chawton, because I am sure you hear from your papa. LXXVIII. CHAWTON, Tuesday (July 29, 1817). MY DEAREST FANNY,--I have just read your letter for the third time, and thank you most sincerely for every kind expression to myself, and still more warmly for your praises of her who I believe was better known to you than to any human being besides myself. Nothing of the sort could have been more gratifying to me than the manner in which you write of her; and if the dear angel is conscious of what passes here, and is not above all earthly feelings, she may perhaps receive pleasure in being so mourned. Had she been the survivor, I can fancy her speaking of you in almost the same terms. There are certainly many points of strong resemblance in your characters; in your intimate acquaintance with each other, and your mutual strong affection, you were counterparts. Thursday was not so dreadful a day to me as you imagined. There was so much necessary to be done that there was no time for additional misery. Everything was conducted with the greatest tranquillity, and but that I was determined I would see the last, and therefore was upon the listen, I should not have known when they left the house. I watched the little mournful procession the length of the street; and when it turned from my sight, and I had lost her forever, even then I was not overpowered, nor so much agitated as I am now in writing of it. Never was human being more sincerely mourned by those who attended her remains than was this dear creature. May the sorrow with which she is parted with on earth be a prognostic of the joy with which she is hailed in heaven! I continue very tolerably well,--much better than any one could have supposed possible, because I certainly have had considerable fatigue of body as well as anguish of mind for months back; but I really am well, and I hope I am properly grateful to the Almighty for having been so supported. Your grandmamma, too, is much better than when I came home. I did not think your dear papa appeared unwell, and I understand that he seemed much more comfortable after his return from Winchester than he had done before. I need not tell you that he was a great comfort to me; indeed, I can never say enough of the kindness I have received from him and from every other friend. I get out of doors a good deal, and am able to employ myself. Of course those employments suit me best which leave me most at leisure to think of her I have lost, and I do think of her in every variety of circumstance,--in our happy hours of confidential intercourse, in the cheerful family party which she so ornamented, in her sick-room, on her death-bed, and as (I hope) an inhabitant of heaven. Oh, if I may one day be reunited to her there! I know the time must come when my mind will be less engrossed by her idea, but I do not like to think of it. If I think of her less as on earth, God grant that I may never cease to reflect on her as inhabiting heaven, and never cease my humble endeavors (when it shall please God) to join her there. In looking at a few of the precious papers which are now my property I have found some memorandums, amongst which she desires that one of her gold chains may be given to her god-daughter Louisa, and a lock of her hair be set for you. You can need no assurance, my dearest Fanny, that every request of your beloved aunt will be sacred with me. Be so good as to say whether you prefer a brooch or ring. God bless you, my dearest Fanny. Believe me, most affectionately yours, CASS. ELIZTH. AUSTEN. Miss KNIGHT, Godmersham Park, Canterbury. THE END. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Page 38, "I" did not print in the text and has been added. The space was there but the ink was not. (I dare say, to have another) Page 47, period added to end of sentence. As above, the space was in the text but the character was not. (confusion and great comfort.) Page 107, another letter missing, "r" added to text for "respect" (feelings with respect to it) Page 127, footnote 9, period added to abbreviation (Mrs. Leigh Perrot) Page 137, "leat" changed to "late" (in the late weather) Page 145, period added to end of footnote 11 (heroine of Miss Burney's novel.) Page 150, "Miss" at bottom of letter's address was originally in small capitals. As the rest of the text does not use small capitals this was changed to follow the rest of the text's format. (Miss Austen, Edward Austen's, Esq.) Page 166, repeated word "not" removed from text. Original read: (he did not not think she would) Page 331, "i" did not print in "acquaintance" (acquaintaqnce with each other) 
25853	----	For the reader: Things that were handwritten are denoted in the text as HW: THE LETTERS OF [Illustration: HW: Charles Dickens] THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. EDITED BY HIS SISTER-IN-LAW AND HIS ELDEST DAUGHTER. =In Two Volumes.= VOL. II. 1857 TO 1870. London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1880. [_The Right of Translation is Reserved._] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. ERRATA. VOL. II. Page 84, line 35. For "South Kensington Museum," _read_ "the South Kensington Museum." " 108, line 26. For "frequent contributor," _read_ "a frequent contributor." " 113, lines 6, 7. For "great remonstrance," _read_ "Great Remonstrance." " 130, line 10. For "after," _read_ "afore." " 160, " 32. For "a head," _read_ "ahead." " 247, " 12. For "Shea," _read_ "Shoe." " 292, " 12. For "Mabel's progress," _read_ "Mabel's Progress." =Book II.=--_Continued._ THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1857. NARRATIVE. This was a very full year in many ways. In February, Charles Dickens obtained possession of Gad's Hill, and was able to turn workmen into it. In April he stayed, with his wife and sister-in-law, for a week or two at Wate's Hotel, Gravesend, to be at hand to superintend the beginning of his alterations of the house, and from thence we give a letter to Lord Carlisle. He removed his family, for a summer residence in the house, in June; and he finished "Little Dorrit" there early in the summer. One of his first visitors at Gad's Hill was the famous writer, Hans Christian Andersen. In January "The Frozen Deep" had been played at the Tavistock House theatre with such great success, that it was necessary to repeat it several times, and the theatre was finally demolished at the end of that month. In June Charles Dickens heard, with great grief, of the death of his dear friend Douglas Jerrold; and as a testimony of admiration for his genius and affectionate regard for himself, it was decided to organise, under the management of Charles Dickens, a series of entertainments, "in memory of the late Douglas Jerrold," the fund produced by them (a considerable sum) to be presented to Mr. Jerrold's family. The amateur company, including many of Mr. Jerrold's colleagues on "Punch," gave subscription performances of "The Frozen Deep;" the Gallery of Illustration, in Regent Street, being engaged for the purpose. Charles Dickens gave two readings at St. Martin's Hall of "The Christmas Carol" (to such immense audiences and with such success, that the idea of giving public readings for his _own_ benefit first occurred to him at this time). The professional actors, among them the famous veteran actor, Mr. T. P. Cooke, gave a performance of Mr. Jerrold's plays of "The Rent Day" and "Black-eyed Susan," in which Mr. T. P. Cooke sustained the character in which he had originally made such great success when the play was written. A lecture was given by Mr. Thackeray, and another by Mr. W. H. Russell. Finally, the Queen having expressed a desire to see the play, which had been much talked of during that season, there was another performance before her Majesty and the Prince Consort at the Gallery of Illustration in July, and at the end of that month Charles Dickens read his "Carol" in the Free Trade Hall, at Manchester. And to wind up the "Memorial Fund" entertainments, "The Frozen Deep" was played again at Manchester, also in the great Free Trade Hall, at the end of August. For the business of these entertainments he secured the assistance of Mr. Arthur Smith, of whom he writes to Mr. Forster, at this time: "I have got hold of Arthur Smith, as the best man of business I know, and go to work with him to-morrow morning." And when he began his own public readings, both in town and country, he felt himself most fortunate in having the co-operation of this invaluable man of business, and also of his zealous friendship and pleasant companionship. In July, his second son, Walter Landor, went to India as a cadet in the "Company's service," from which he was afterwards transferred to the 42nd Royal Highlanders. His father and his elder brother went to see him off, to Southampton. From this place Charles Dickens writes to Mr. Edmund Yates, a young man in whom he had been interested from his boyhood, both for the sake of his parents and for his own sake, and for whom he had always an affectionate regard. In September he made a short tour in the North of England, with Mr. Wilkie Collins, out of which arose the "Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices," written by them jointly, and published in "Household Words." Some letters to his sister-in-law during this expedition are given here, parts of which (as is the case with many letters to his eldest daughter and his sister-in-law) have been published in Mr. Forster's book. The letters which follow are almost all on the various subjects mentioned in our notes, and need little explanation. His letter to Mr. Procter makes allusion to a legacy lately left to that friend. The letters to Mr. Dilke, the original and much-respected editor of "The Athenæum," and to Mr. Forster, on the subject of the "Literary Fund," refer, as the letters indicate, to a battle which they were carrying on together with that institution. A letter to Mr. Frank Stone is an instance of his kind, patient, and judicious criticism of a young writer, and the letter which follows it shows how thoroughly it was understood and how perfectly appreciated by the authoress of the "Notes" referred to. Another instance of the same kind criticism is given in a second letter this year to Mr. Edmund Yates. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 2nd, 1857._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I have to thank you for a delightful book, which has given me unusual pleasure. My delight in it has been a little dashed by certain farewell verses, but I have made up my mind (and you have no idea of the obstinacy of my character) not to believe them. Perhaps it is not taking a liberty--perhaps it is--to congratulate you on Kenyon's remembrance. Either way I can't help doing it with all my heart, for I know no man in the world (myself excepted) to whom I would rather the money went. Affectionately yours ever. [Sidenote: Sir James Emerson Tennent.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 9th, 1857._ MY DEAR TENNENT, I must thank you for your earnest and affectionate letter. It has given me the greatest pleasure, mixing the play in my mind confusedly and delightfully with Pisa, the Valetta, Naples, Herculanæum--God knows what not. As to the play itself; when it is made as good as my care can make it, I derive a strange feeling out of it, like writing a book in company; a satisfaction of a most singular kind, which has no exact parallel in my life; a something that I suppose to belong to the life of a labourer in art alone, and which has to me a conviction of its being actual truth without its pain, that I never could adequately state if I were to try never so hard. You touch so kindly and feelingly on the pleasure such little pains give, that I feel quite sorry you have never seen this drama in progress during the last ten weeks here. Every Monday and Friday evening during that time we have been at work upon it. I assure you it has been a remarkable lesson to my young people in patience, perseverance, punctuality, and order; and, best of all, in that kind of humility which is got from the earned knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to do must be done with the heart in it, and in a desperate earnest. When I changed my dress last night (though I did it very quickly), I was vexed to find you gone. I wanted to have secured you for our green-room supper, which was very pleasant. If by any accident you should be free next Wednesday night (our last), pray come to that green-room supper. It would give me cordial pleasure to have you there. Ever, my dear Tennent, very heartily yours. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday Night, Jan, 17th, 1857._ MY DEAR CERJAT, So wonderfully do good (epistolary) intentions become confounded with bad execution, that I assure you I laboured under a perfect and most comfortable conviction that I had answered your Christmas Eve letter of 1855. More than that, in spite of your assertions to the contrary, I still strenuously believe that I did so! I have more than half a mind ("Little Dorrit" and my other occupations notwithstanding) to charge you with having forgotten my reply!! I have even a wild idea that Townshend reproached me, when the last old year was new, with writing to you instead of to him!!! We will argue it out, as well as we can argue anything without poor dear Haldimand, when I come back to Elysée. In any case, however, don't discontinue your annual letter, because it has become an expected and a delightful part of the season to me. With one of the prettiest houses in London, and every conceivable (and inconceivable) luxury in it, Townshend is voluntarily undergoing his own sentence of transportation in Nervi, a beastly little place near Genoa, where you would as soon find a herd of wild elephants in any villa as comfort. He has a notion that he _must_ be out of England in the winter, but I believe him to be altogether wrong (as I have just told him in a letter), unless he could just take his society with him. Workmen are now battering and smashing down my theatre here, where we have just been acting a new play of great merit, done in what I may call (modestly speaking of the getting-up, and not of the acting) an unprecedented way. I believe that anything so complete has never been seen. We had an act at the North Pole, where the slightest and greatest thing the eye beheld were equally taken from the books of the Polar voyagers. Out of thirty people, there were certainly not two who might not have gone straight to the North Pole itself, completely furnished for the winter! It has been the talk of all London for these three weeks. And now it is a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams, canvases, paint-pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas-pipes, and ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks in all my leisure hours, that I feel now shipwrecked--as if I had never been without a play on my hands before. A third topic comes up as this ceases. Down at Gad's Hill, near Rochester, in Kent--Shakespeare's Gad's Hill, where Falstaff engaged in the robbery--is a quaint little country-house of Queen Anne's time. I happened to be walking past, a year and a half or so ago, with my sub-editor of "Household Words," when I said to him: "You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because when I was a small boy down in these parts I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of its famous old cedar-trees) ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man perhaps I might own that house, or such another house. In remembrance of which, I have always in passing looked to see if it was to be sold or let, and it has never been to me like any other house, and it has never changed at all." We came back to town, and my friend went out to dinner. Next morning he came to me in great excitement, and said: "It is written that you were to have that house at Gad's Hill. The lady I had allotted to me to take down to dinner yesterday began to speak of that neighbourhood. 'You know it?' I said; 'I have been there to-day.' 'O yes,' said she, 'I know it very well. I was a child there, in the house they call Gad's Hill Place. My father was the rector, and lived there many years. He has just died, has left it to me, and I want to sell it.' 'So,' says the sub-editor, 'you must buy it. Now or never!'" I did, and hope to pass next summer there, though I may, perhaps, let it afterwards, furnished, from time to time. All about myself I find, and the little sheet nearly full! But I know, my dear Cerjat, the subject will have its interest for you, so I give it its swing. Mrs. Watson was to have been at the play, but most unfortunately had three children sick of gastric fever, and could not leave them. She was here some three weeks before, looking extremely well in the face, but rather thin. I have not heard of your friend Mr. Percival Skelton, but I much misdoubt an amateur artist's success in this vast place. I hope you detected a remembrance of our happy visit to the Great St. Bernard in a certain number of "Little Dorrit"? Tell Mrs. Cerjat, with my love, that the opinions I have expressed to her on the subject of cows have become matured in my mind by experience and venerable age; and that I denounce the race as humbugs, who have been getting into poetry and all sorts of places without the smallest reason. Haldimand's housekeeper is an awful woman to consider. Pray give him our kindest regards and remembrances, if you ever find him in a mood to take it. "Our" means Mrs. Dickens's, Georgie's, and mine. We often, often talk of our old days at Lausanne, and send loving regard to Mrs. Cerjat and all your house. Adieu, my dear fellow; ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _January 28th, 1857._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, Your friend and servant is as calm as Pecksniff, saving for his knitted brows now turning into cordage over Little Dorrit. The theatre has disappeared, the house is restored to its usual conditions of order, the family are tranquil and domestic, dove-eyed peace is enthroned in this study, fire-eyed radicalism in its master's breast. I am glad to hear that our poetess is at work again, and shall be very much pleased to have some more contributions from her. Love from all to your dear sister, and to Katie, and to all the house. We dined yesterday at Frederick Pollock's. I begged an amazing photograph of you, and brought it away. It strikes me as one of the most ludicrous things I ever saw in my life. I think of taking a public-house, and having it copied larger, for the size. You may remember it? Very square and big--the Saracen's Head with its hair cut, and in modern gear? Staring very hard? As your particular friend, I would not part with it on any consideration. I will never get such a wooden head again. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _February 7th, 1857._ MY DEAR MARY, Half-a-dozen words on this, my birthday, to thank you for your kind and welcome remembrance, and to assure you that your Joseph is proud of it. For about ten minutes after his death, on each occasion of that event occurring, Richard Wardour was in a floored condition. And one night, to the great terror of Devonshire, the Arctic Regions, and Newfoundland (all of which localities were afraid to speak to him, as his ghost sat by the kitchen fire in its rags), he very nearly did what he never did, went and fainted off, dead, again. But he always plucked up, on the turn of ten minutes, and became facetious. Likewise he chipped great pieces out of all his limbs (solely, as I imagine, from moral earnestness and concussion of passion, for I never know him to hit himself in any way) and terrified Aldersley[1] to that degree, by lunging at him to carry him into the cave, that the said Aldersley always shook like a mould of jelly, and muttered, "By G----, this is an awful thing!" Ever affectionately. P.S.--I shall never cease to regret Mrs. Watson's not having been there. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Feb. 8th, 1857._ MY DEAR WHITE, I send these lines by Mary and Katey, to report my love to all. Your note about the _Golden Mary_ gave me great pleasure; though I don't believe in one part of it; for I honestly believe that your story, as really belonging to the rest of the narrative, had been generally separated from the other stories, and greatly liked. I had not that particular shipwreck that you mention in my mind (indeed I doubt if I know it), and John Steadiman merely came into my head as a staunch sort of name that suited the character. The number has done "Household Words" great service, and has decidedly told upon its circulation. You should have come to the play. I much doubt if anything so complete will ever be seen again. An incredible amount of pains and ingenuity was expended on it, and the result was most remarkable even to me. When are you going to send something more to H. W.? Are you lazy?? Low-spirited??? Pining for Paris???? Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. C. W. Dilke.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Thursday, March 19th, 1857._ MY DEAR MR. DILKE, Forster has another notion about the Literary Fund. Will you name a day next week--that day being neither Thursday nor Saturday--when we shall hold solemn council there at half-past four? For myself, I beg to report that I have my war-paint on, that I have buried the pipe of peace, and am whooping for committee scalps. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Earl of Carlisle.] GRAVESEND, KENT, _Wednesday, April 15th, 1857._ MY DEAR LORD CARLISLE, I am writing by the river-side for a few days, and at the end of last week ---- appeared here with your note of introduction. I was not in the way; but as ---- had come express from London with it, Mrs. Dickens opened it, and gave her (in the limited sense which was of no use to her) an audience. She did not quite seem to know what she wanted of me. But she said she had understood at Stafford House that I had a theatre in which she could read; with a good deal of modesty and diffidence she at last got so far. Now, my little theatre turns my house out of window, costs fifty pounds to put up, and is only two months taken down; therefore, is quite out of the question. This Mrs. Dickens explained, and also my profound inability to do anything for ---- readings which they could not do for themselves. She appeared fully to understand the explanation, and indeed to have anticipated for herself how powerless I must be in such a case. She described herself as being consumptive, and as being subject to an effusion of blood from the lungs; about the last condition, one would think, poor woman, for the exercise of public elocution as an art. Between ourselves, I think the whole idea a mistake, and have thought so from its first announcement. It has a fatal appearance of trading upon Uncle Tom, and am I not a man and a brother? which you may be by all means, and still not have the smallest claim to my attention as a public reader. The town is over-read from all the white squares on the draught-board; it has been considerably harried from all the black squares--now with the aid of old banjoes, and now with the aid of Exeter Hall; and I have a very strong impression that it is by no means to be laid hold of from this point of address. I myself, for example, am the meekest of men, and in abhorrence of slavery yield to no human creature, and yet I don't admit the sequence that I want Uncle Tom (or Aunt Tomasina) to expound "King Lear" to me. And I believe my case to be the case of thousands. I trouble you with this much about it, because I am naturally desirous you should understand that if I could possibly have been of any service, or have suggested anything to this poor lady, I would not have lost the opportunity. But I cannot help her, and I assure you that I cannot honestly encourage her to hope. I fear her enterprise has no hope in it. In your absence I have always followed you through the papers, and felt a personal interest and pleasure in the public affection in which you are held over there.[2] At the same time I must confess that I should prefer to have you here, where good public men seem to me to be dismally wanted. I have no sympathy with demagogues, but am a grievous Radical, and think the political signs of the times to be just about as bad as the spirit of the people will admit of their being. In all other respects I am as healthy, sound, and happy as your kindness can wish. So you will set down my political despondency as my only disease. On the tip-top of Gad's Hill, between this and Rochester, on the very spot where Falstaff ran away, I have a pretty little old-fashioned house, which I shall live in the hope of showing to you one day. Also I have a little story respecting the manner in which it became mine, which I hope (on the same occasion in the clouds) to tell you. Until then and always, I am, dear Lord Carlisle, Yours very faithfully and obliged. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _May 13th, 1857._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I have gone over Dilke's memoranda, and I think it quite right and necessary that those points should be stated. Nor do I see the least difficulty in the way of their introduction into the pamphlet. But I do not deem it possible to get the pamphlet written and published before the dinner. I have so many matters pressing on my attention, that I cannot turn to it immediately on my release from my book just finished. It shall be done and distributed early next month. As to anything being lost by its not being in the hands of the people who dine (as you seem to think), I have not the least misgiving on that score. They would say, if it were issued, just what they will say without it. Lord Granville is committed to taking the chair, and will make the best speech he can in it. The pious ---- will cram him with as many distortions of the truth as his stomach may be strong enough to receive. ----, with Bardolphian eloquence, will cool his nose in the modest merits of the institution. ---- will make a neat and appropriate speech on both sides, round the corner and over the way. And all this would be done exactly to the same purpose and in just the same strain, if twenty thousand copies of the pamphlet had been circulated. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Friday, May 22nd, 1857._ MY DEAR WHITE, My emancipation having been effected on Saturday, the ninth of this month, I take some shame to myself for not having sooner answered your note. But the host of things to be done as soon as I was free, and the tremendous number of ingenuities to be wrought out at Gad's Hill, have kept me in a whirl of their own ever since. We purpose going to Gad's Hill for the summer on the 1st of June; as, apart from the master's eye being a necessary ornament to the spot, I clearly see that the workmen yet lingering in the yard must be squeezed out by bodily pressure, or they will never go. How will this suit you and yours? If you will come down, we can take you all in, on your way north; that is to say, we shall have that ample verge and room enough, until about the eighth; when Hans Christian Andersen (who has been "coming" for about three years) will come for a fortnight's stay in England. I shall like you to see the little old-fashioned place. It strikes me as being comfortable. So let me know your little game. And with love to Mrs. White, Lotty, and Clara, Believe me, ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Monday, June 1st, 1857._ MY DEAR STONE, I know that what I am going to say will not be agreeable; but I rely on the authoress's good sense; and say it, knowing it to be the truth. These "Notes" are destroyed by too much smartness. It gives the appearance of perpetual effort, stabs to the heart the nature that is in them, and wearies by the manner and not by the matter. It is the commonest fault in the world (as I have constant occasion to observe here), but it is a very great one. Just as you couldn't bear to have an épergne or a candlestick on your table, supported by a light figure always on tiptoe and evidently in an impossible attitude for the sustainment of its weight, so all readers would be more or less oppressed and worried by this presentation of everything in one smart point of view, when they know it must have other, and weightier, and more solid properties. Airiness and good spirits are always delightful, and are inseparable from notes of a cheerful trip; but they should sympathise with many things as well as see them in a lively way. It is but a word or a touch that expresses this humanity, but without that little embellishment of good nature there is no such thing as humour. In this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended to, whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of the earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has made her face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference that the writer can scarcely imagine without trying it. The only relief in the twenty-one slips is the little bit about the chimes. It _is_ a relief, simply because it is an indication of some kind of sentiment. You don't want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don't want any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion that it is there. It makes all the difference between being playful and being cruel. Again I must say, above all things--especially to young people writing: For the love of God don't condescend! Don't assume the attitude of saying, "See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!" Take any shape but that. I observe an excellent quality of observation throughout, and think the boy at the shop, and all about him, particularly good. I have no doubt whatever that the rest of the journal will be much better if the writer chooses to make it so. If she considers for a moment within herself, she will know that she derived pleasure from everything she saw, because she saw it with innumerable lights and shades upon it, and bound to humanity by innumerable fine links; she cannot possibly communicate anything of that pleasure to another by showing it from one little limited point only, and that point, observe, the one from which it is impossible to detach the exponent as the patroness of a whole universe of inferior souls. This is what everybody would mean in objecting to these notes (supposing them to be published), that they are too smart and too flippant. As I understand this matter to be altogether between us three, and as I think your confidence, and hers, imposes a duty of friendship on me, I discharge it to the best of my ability. Perhaps I make more of it than you may have meant or expected; if so, it is because I am interested and wish to express it. If there had been anything in my objection not perfectly easy of removal, I might, after all, have hesitated to state it; but that is not the case. A very little indeed would make all this gaiety as sound and wholesome and good-natured in the reader's mind as it is in the writer's. Affectionately always. [Sidenote: Anonymous.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM, _Thursday, June 4th, 1857._ MY DEAR ---- Coming home here last night, from a day's business in London, I found your most excellent note awaiting me, in which I have had a pleasure to be derived from none but good and natural things. I can now honestly assure you that I believe you will write _well_, and that I have a lively hope that I may be the means of showing you yourself in print one day. Your powers of graceful and light-hearted observation need nothing but the little touches on which we are both agreed. And I am perfectly sure that they will be as pleasant to you as to anyone, for nobody can see so well as you do, without feeling kindly too. To confess the truth to you, I was half sorry, yesterday, that I had been so unreserved; but not half as sorry, yesterday, as I am glad to-day. You must not mind my adding that there is a noble candour and modesty in your note, which I shall never be able to separate from you henceforth. Affectionately yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL, _Saturday, June 6th, 1857._ MY DEAR HENRY, Here is a very serious business on the great estate respecting the water supply. Last night, they had pumped the well dry merely in raising the family supply for the day; and this morning (very little water having been got into the cisterns) it is dry again! It is pretty clear to me that we must look the thing in the face, and at once bore deeper, dig, or do some beastly thing or other, to secure this necessary in abundance. Meanwhile I am in a most plaintive and forlorn condition without your presence and counsel. I raise my voice in the wilderness and implore the same!!! Wild legends are in circulation among the servants how that Captain Goldsmith on the knoll above--the skipper in that crow's-nest of a house--has millions of gallons of water always flowing for him. Can he have damaged my well? Can we imitate him, and have our millions of gallons? Goldsmith or I must fall, so I conceive. If you get this, send me a telegraph message informing me when I may expect comfort. I am held by four of the family while I write this, in case I should do myself a mischief--it certainly won't be taking to drinking water. Ever affectionately (most despairingly). [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, July 13th, 1857._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, Many thanks for your Indian information. I shall act upon it in the most exact manner. Walter sails next Monday. Charley and I go down with him to Southampton next Sunday. We are all delighted with the prospect of seeing you at Gad's Hill. These are my Jerrold engagements: On Friday, the 24th, I have to repeat my reading at St. Martin's Hall; on Saturday, the 25th, to repeat "The Frozen Deep" at the Gallery of Illustration for the last time. On Thursday, the 30th, or Friday, the 31st, I shall probably read at Manchester. Deane, the general manager of the Exhibition, is going down to-night, and will arrange all the preliminaries for me. If you and I went down to Manchester together, and were there on a Sunday, he would give us the whole Exhibition to ourselves. It is probable, I think (as he estimates the receipts of a night at about seven hundred pounds), that we may, in about a fortnight or so after the reading, play "The Frozen Deep" at Manchester. But of this contingent engagement I at present know no more than you do. Now, will you, upon this exposition of affairs, choose your own time for coming to us, and, when you have made your choice, write to me at Gad's Hill? I am going down this afternoon for rest (which means violent cricket with the boys) after last Saturday night; which was a teaser, but triumphant. The St. Martin's Hall audience was, I must confess, a very extraordinary thing. The two thousand and odd people were like one, and their enthusiasm was something awful. Yet I have seen that before, too. Your young remembrance cannot recall the man; but he flourished in my day--a great actor, sir--a noble actor--thorough artist! I have seen him do wonders in that way. He retired from the stage early in life (having a monomaniacal delusion that he was old), and is said to be still living in your county. All join in kindest love to your dear sister and all the rest. Ever, my dearest Macready, Most affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, July 19th, 1857._ MY DEAR YATES, Although I date this ashore, I really write it from Southampton (don't notice this fact in your reply, for I shall be in town on Wednesday). I have come here on an errand which will grow familiar to you before you know that Time has flapped his wings over your head. Like me, you will find those babies grow to be young men before you are quite sure they are born. Like me, you will have great teeth drawn with a wrench, and will only then know that you ever cut them. I am here to send Walter away over what they call, in Green Bush melodramas, "the Big Drink," and I don't at all know this day how he comes to be mine, or I his. I don't write to say this--or to say how seeing Charley, and he going aboard the ship before me just now, I suddenly came into possession of a photograph of my own back at sixteen and twenty, and also into a suspicion that I had doubled the last age. I merely write to mention that Telbin and his wife are going down to Gad's Hill with us, about mid-day next Sunday, and that if you and Mrs. Yates will come too, we shall be delighted to have you. We can give you a bed, and you can be in town (if you have such a savage necessity) by twenty minutes before ten on Monday morning. I was very much pleased (as I had reason to be) with your account of the reading in _The Daily News_. I thank you heartily. [Sidenote: Mr. T. P. Cooke.] IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE LATE MR. DOUGLAS JERROLD. COMMITTEE'S OFFICE, GALLERY OF ILLUSTRATION, REGENT STREET, _Thursday, July 30th, 1857._ MY DEAR MR. COOKE, I cannot rest satisfied this morning without writing to congratulate you on your admirable performance of last night. It was so fresh and vigorous, so manly and gallant, that I felt as if it splashed against my theatre-heated face along with the spray of the breezy sea. What I felt everybody felt; I should feel it quite an impertinence to take myself out of the crowd, therefore, if I could by any means help doing so. But I can't; so I hope you will feel that you bring me on yourself, and have only yourself to blame. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Compton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, _Sunday Night, Aug 2nd, 1857._ MY DEAR MRS. COMPTON, We are going to play "The Frozen Deep" (pursuant to requisition from town magnates, etc.) at Manchester, at the New Free Trade Hall, on the nights of Friday and Saturday, the 21st and 22nd August. The place is out of the question for my girls. Their action could not be seen, and their voices could not be heard. You and I have played, there and elsewhere, so sociably and happily, that I am emboldened to ask you whether you would play my sister-in-law Georgina's part (Compton and babies permitting). We shall go down in the old pleasant way, and shall have the Art Treasures Exhibition to ourselves on the Sunday; when even "he" (as Rogers always called every pretty woman's husband) might come and join us. What do you say? What does he say? and what does baby say? When I use the term "baby," I use it in two tenses--present and future. Answer me at this address, like the Juliet I saw at Drury Lane--when was it?--yesterday. And whatever your answer is, if you will say that you and Compton will meet us at the North Kent Station, London Bridge, next Sunday at a quarter before one, and will come down here for a breath of sweet air and stay all night, you will give your old friends great pleasure. Not least among them, Yours faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, _Monday, Aug. 3rd, 1857._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I write to you in reference to your last note, as soon as I positively know our final movements in the Jerrold matter. We are going to wind up by acting at Manchester (on solemn requisition) on the evenings of Friday and Saturday, the 21st and 22nd (actresses substituted for the girls, of course). We shall have to leave here on the morning of the 20th. You thought of coming on the 16th; can't you make it a day or two earlier, so as to be with us a whole week? Decide and pronounce. Again, cannot you bring Katey with you? Decide and pronounce thereupon, also. I read at Manchester last Friday. As many thousand people were there as you like to name. The collection of pictures in the Exhibition is wonderful. And the power with which the modern English school asserts itself is a very gratifying and delightful thing to behold. The care for the common people, in the provision made for their comfort and refreshment, is also admirable and worthy of all commendation. But they want more amusement, and particularly (as it strikes me) _something in motion_, though it were only a twisting fountain. The thing is too still after their lives of machinery, and art flies over their heads in consequence. I hope you have seen my tussle with the "Edinburgh." I saw the chance last Friday week, as I was going down to read the "Carol" in St. Martin's Hall. Instantly turned to, then and there, and wrote half the article. Flew out of bed early next morning, and finished it by noon. Went down to Gallery of Illustration (we acted that night), did the day's business, corrected the proofs in Polar costume in dressing-room, broke up two numbers of "Household Words" to get it out directly, played in "Frozen Deep" and "Uncle John," presided at supper of company, made no end of speeches, went home and gave in completely for four hours, then got sound asleep, and next day was as fresh as you used to be in the far-off days of your lusty youth. All here send kindest love to your dear good sister and all the house. Ever and ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday Afternoon, Aug. 9th, 1857._ MY DEAR STONE, Now here, without any preface, is a good, confounding, stunning question for you--would you like to play "Uncle John" on the two nights at Manchester? It is not a long part. You could have a full rehearsal on the Friday, and I could sit in the wing at night and pull you through all the business. Perhaps you might not object to being in the thing in your own native place, and the relief to me would be enormous. This is what has come into my head lying in bed to-day (I have been in bed all day), and this is just my plain reason for writing to you. It's a capital part, and you are a capital old man. You know the play as we play it, and the Manchester people don't. Say the word, and I'll send you my own book by return of post. The agitation and exertion of Richard Wardour are so great to me, that I cannot rally my spirits in the short space of time I get. The strain is so great to make a show of doing it, that I want to be helped out of "Uncle John" if I can. Think of yourself far more than me; but if you half think you are up to the joke, and half doubt your being so, then give me the benefit of the doubt and play the part. Answer me at Gad's Hill. Ever affectionately. P.S.--If you play, I shall immediately announce it to all concerned. If you don't, I shall go on as if nothing had happened, and shall say nothing to anyone. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Saturday, Aug. 15th, 1857._ MY DEAR HENRY, At last, I am happy to inform you, we have got at a famous spring!! It rushed in this morning, ten foot deep. And our friends talk of its supplying "a ton a minute for yourself and your family, sir, for nevermore." They ask leave to bore ten feet lower, to prevent the possibility of what they call "a choking with sullage." Likewise, they are going to insert "a rose-headed pipe;" at the mention of which implement, I am (secretly) well-nigh distracted, having no idea of what it means. But I have said "Yes," besides instantly standing a bottle of gin. Can you come back, and can you get down on Monday morning, to advise and endeavour to decide on the mechanical force we shall use for raising the water? I would return with you, as I shall have to be in town until Thursday, and then to go to Manchester until the following Tuesday. I send this by hand to John, to bring to you. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Monday, Aug. 17th, 1857._ MY DEAR STONE, I received your kind note this morning, and write this reply here to take to London with me and post in town, being bound for that village and three days' drill of the professional ladies who are to succeed the Tavistock girls. My book I enclose. There is a slight alteration (which does not affect you) at the end of the first act, in order that the piece may be played through without having the drop curtain down. You will not find the situations or business difficult, with me on the spot to put you right. Now, as to the dress. You will want a pair of pumps, and a pair of white silk socks; these you can get at Manchester. The extravagantly and anciently-frilled shirts that I have had got up for the part, I will bring you down; large white waistcoat, I will bring you down; large white hat, I will bring you down; dressing-gown, I will bring you down; white gloves and ditto choker you can get at Manchester. There then remain only a pair of common nankeen tights, to button below the calf, and blue wedding-coat. The nankeen tights you had best get made at once; my "Uncle John" coat I will send you down in a parcel by to-morrow's train, to have altered in Manchester to your shape and figure. You will then be quite independent of Christian chance and Jewish Nathan, which latter potentate is now at Canterbury with the cricket amateurs, and might fail. A Thursday's rehearsal is (unfortunately) now impracticable, the passes for the railway being all made out, and the company's sailing orders issued. But, as I have already suggested, with a careful rehearsal on Friday morning, and with me at the wing at night to put you right, you will find yourself sliding through it easily. There is nothing in the least complicated in the business. As to the dance, you have only to knock yourself up for a twelvemonth and it will go nobly. After all, too, if you _should_, through any unlucky breakdown, come to be afraid of it, I am no worse off than I was before, if I have to do it at last. Keep your pecker up with that. I am heartily obliged to you, my dear old boy, for your affectionate and considerate note, and I wouldn't have you do it, really and sincerely--immense as the relief will be to me--unless you are quite comfortable in it, and able to enjoy it. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Tuesday, Aug. 18th, 1857._ MY DEAR STONE, I sent you a telegraph message last night, in total contradiction of the letter you received from me this morning. The reason was simply this: Arthur Smith and the other business men, both in Manchester and here, urged upon me, in the strongest manner, that they were afraid of the change; that it was well known in Manchester that I had done the part in London; that there was a danger of its being considered disrespectful in me to give it up; also that there was a danger that it might be thought that I did so at the last minute, after an immense let, whereas I might have done it at first, etc. etc. etc. Having no desire but for the success of our object, and a becoming recognition on my part of the kind Manchester public's cordiality, I gave way, and thought it best to go on. I do so against the grain, and against every inclination, and against the strongest feeling of gratitude to you. My people at home will be miserable too when they hear I am going to do it. If I could have heard from you sooner, and got the bill out sooner, I should have been firmer in considering my own necessity of relief. As it is, I sneak under; and I hope you will feel the reasons, and approve. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Wednesday, Sept. 2nd, 1857._ MY DEAR HENRY, The second conspirator has been here this morning to ask whether you wish the windlass to be left in the yard, and whether you will want him and his mate any more, and, if so, when? Of course he says (rolling something in the form of a fillet in at one broken tooth all the while, and rolling it out at another) that they could wish fur to have the windlass if it warn't any ways a hill conwenience fur to fetch her away. I have told him that if he will come back on Friday he shall have your reply. Will you, therefore, send it me by return of post? He says he'll "look up" (as if he was an astronomer) "a Friday arterdinner." On Monday I am going away with Collins for ten days or a fortnight, on a "tour in search of an article" for "Household Words." We have not the least idea where we are going; but _he_ says, "Let's look at the Norfolk coast," and _I_ say, "Let's look at the back of the Atlantic." I don't quite know what I mean by that; but have a general impression that I mean something knowing. I am horribly used up after the Jerrold business. Low spirits, low pulse, low voice, intense reaction. If I were not like Mr. Micawber, "falling back for a spring" on Monday, I think I should slink into a corner and cry. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ALLONBY, CUMBERLAND, _Wednesday Night, Sept. 9th, 1857._ MY DEAR GEORGY, * * * * * Think of Collins's usual luck with me! We went up a Cumberland mountain yesterday--a huge black hill, fifteen hundred feet high. We took for a guide a capital innkeeper hard by. It rained in torrents--as it only does rain in a hill country--the whole time. At the top, there were black mists and the darkness of night. It then came out that the innkeeper had not been up for twenty years, and he lost his head and himself altogether; and we couldn't get down again! What wonders the Inimitable performed with his compass until it broke with the heat and wet of his pocket no matter; it did break, and then we wandered about, until it was clear to the Inimitable that the night must be passed there, and the enterprising travellers probably die of cold. We took our own way about coming down, struck, and declared that the guide might wander where he would, but we would follow a watercourse we lighted upon, and which must come at last to the river. This necessitated amazing gymnastics; in the course of which performances, Collins fell into the said watercourse with his ankle sprained, and the great ligament of the foot and leg swollen I don't know how big. How I enacted Wardour over again in carrying him down, and what a business it was to get him down; I may say in Gibbs's words: "Vi lascio a giudicare!" But he was got down somehow, and we got off the mountain somehow; and now I carry him to bed, and into and out of carriages, exactly like Wardour in private life. I don't believe he will stand for a month to come. He has had a doctor, and can wear neither shoe nor stocking, and has his foot wrapped up in a flannel waistcoat, and has a breakfast saucer of liniment, and a horrible dabbling of lotion incessantly in progress. We laugh at it all, but I doubt very much whether he can go on to Doncaster. It will be a miserable blow to our H. W. scheme, and I say nothing about it as yet; but he is really so crippled that I doubt the getting him there. We have resolved to fall to work to-morrow morning and begin our writing; and there, for the present, that point rests. This is a little place with fifty houses, five bathing-machines, five girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats, and no other company. The little houses are all in half-mourning--yellow stone on white stone, and black; and it reminds me of what Broadstairs might have been if it had not inherited a cliff, and had been an Irishman. But this is a capital little homely inn, looking out upon the sea; and we are really very comfortably lodged. I can just stand upright in my bedroom. Otherwise, it is a good deal like one of Ballard's top-rooms. We have a very obliging and comfortable landlady; and it is a clean nice place in a rough wild country. We came here haphazard, but could not have done better. We lay last night at a place called Wigton--also in half-mourning--with the wonderful peculiarity that it had no population, no business, no streets to speak of; but five linendrapers within range of our small windows, one linendraper's next door, and five more linendrapers round the corner. I ordered a night-light in my bedroom. A queer little old woman brought me one of the common Child's night-lights, and seeming to think that I looked at it with interest, said: "It's joost a vara keeyourious thing, sir, and joost new coom oop. It'll burn awt hoors a' end, an no gootther, nor no waste, nor ony sike a thing, if you can creedit what I say, seein' the airticle." Of course _I_ shall go to Doncaster, whether or no (please God), and my postage directions to you remain unchanged. Love to Mamey, Katey, Charley, Harry, and the darling Plorn. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] LANCASTER, _Saturday Night, Sept. 12th, 1857._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I received your letter at Allonby yesterday, and was delighted to get it. We came back to Carlisle last night (to a capital inn, kept by Breach's brother), and came on here to-day. We are on our way to Doncaster; but Sabbath observance throws all the trains out; and although it is not a hundred miles from here, we shall have, as well as I can make out the complicated lists of trains, to sleep at Leeds--which I particularly detest as an odious place--to-morrow night. Accustomed as you are to the homage which men delight to render to the Inimitable, you would be scarcely prepared for the proportions it assumes in this northern country. Station-masters assist him to alight from carriages, deputations await him in hotel entries, innkeepers bow down before him and put him into regal rooms, the town goes down to the platform to see him off, and Collins's ankle goes into the newspapers!!! It is a great deal better than it was, and he can get into new hotels and up the stairs with two thick sticks, like an admiral in a farce. His spirits have improved in a corresponding degree, and he contemplates cheerfully the keeping house at Doncaster. I thought (as I told you) he would never have gone there, but he seems quite up to the mark now. Of course he can never walk out, or see anything of any place. We have done our first paper for H. W., and sent it up to the printer's. The landlady of the little inn at Allonby lived at Greta Bridge, in Yorkshire, when I went down there before "Nickleby," and was smuggled into the room to see me, when I was secretly found out. She is an immensely fat woman now. "But I could tuck my arm round her waist then, Mr. Dickens," the landlord said when she told me the story as I was going to bed the night before last. "And can't you do it now," I said, "you insensible dog? Look at me! Here's a picture!" Accordingly, I got round as much of her as I could; and this gallant action was the most successful I have ever performed, on the whole. I think it was the dullest little place I ever entered; and what with the monotony of an idle sea, and what with the monotony of another sea in the room (occasioned by Collins's perpetually holding his ankle over a pail of salt water, and laving it with a milk jug), I struck yesterday, and came away. We are in a very remarkable old house here, with genuine old rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase. I have a state bedroom, with two enormous red four-posters in it, each as big as Charley's room at Gad's Hill. Bellew is to preach here to-morrow. "And we know he is a friend of yours, sir," said the landlord, when he presided over the serving of the dinner (two little salmon trout; a sirloin steak; a brace of partridges; seven dishes of sweets; five dishes of dessert, led off by a bowl of peaches; and in the centre an enormous bride-cake--"We always have it here, sir," said the landlord, "custom of the house.") (Collins turned pale, and estimated the dinner at half a guinea each.) This is the stupidest of letters, but all description is gone, or going, into "The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices." Kiss the darling Plorn, who is often in my thoughts. Best love to Charley, Mamey, and Katie. I will write to you again from Doncaster, where I shall be rejoiced to find another letter from you. Ever affectionately, my dearest Georgy. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ANGEL HOTEL, DONCASTER, _Tuesday, Sept. 15th, 1857._ MY DEAR GEORGY, I found your letter here on my arrival yesterday. I had hoped that the wall would have been almost finished by this time, and the additions to the house almost finished too--but patience, patience! We have very good, clean, and quiet apartments here, on the second floor, looking down into the main street, which is full of horse jockeys, bettors, drunkards, and other blackguards, from morning to night--and all night. The races begin to-day and last till Friday, which is the Cup Day. I am not going to the course this morning, but have engaged a carriage (open, and pair) for to-morrow and Friday. "The Frozen Deep's" author gets on as well as could be expected. He can hobble up and down stairs when absolutely necessary, and limps to his bedroom on the same floor. He talks of going to the theatre to-night in a cab, which will be the first occasion of his going out, except to travel, since the accident. He sends his kind regards and thanks for enquiries and condolence. I am perpetually tidying the rooms after him, and carrying all sorts of untidy things which belong to him into his bedroom, which is a picture of disorder. You will please to imagine mine, airy and clean, little dressing-room attached, eight water-jugs (I never saw such a supply), capital sponge-bath, perfect arrangement, and exquisite neatness. We breakfast at half-past eight, and fall to work for H. W. afterwards. Then I go out, and--hem! look for subjects. The mayor called this morning to do the honours of the town, whom it pleased the Inimitable to receive with great courtesy and affability. He propounded invitation to public _déjeûner_, which it did _not_ please the Inimitable to receive, and which he graciously rejected. That's all the news. Everything I can describe by hook or by crook, I describe for H. W. So there is nothing of that sort left for letters. Best love to dear Mamey and Katey, and to Charley, and to Harry. Any number of kisses to the noble Plorn. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Saturday Evening, Oct. 3rd, 1857._ MY DEAR SIR, I have had the honour and pleasure of receiving your letter of the 28th of last month, informing me of the distinction that has been conferred upon me by the Council of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Allow me to assure you with much sincerity, that I am highly gratified by having been elected one of the first honorary members of that establishment. Nothing could have enhanced my interest in so important an undertaking; but the compliment is all the more welcome to me on that account. I accept it with a due sense of its worth, with many acknowledgments and with all good wishes. I am ever, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday Night, Nov. 16th, 1857._ MY DEAR YATES, I retain the story with pleasure; and I need not tell you that you are not mistaken in the last lines of your note. Excuse me, on that ground, if I say a word or two as to what I think (I mention it with a view to the future) might be better in the paper. The opening is excellent. But it passes too completely into the Irishman's narrative, does not light it up with the life about it, or the circumstances under which it is delivered, and does not carry through it, as I think it should with a certain indefinable subtleness, the thread with which you begin your weaving. I will tell Wills to send me the proof, and will try to show you what I mean when I shall have gone over it carefully. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, Dec. 13th, 1857._ MY DEAR STONE, I find on enquiry that the "General Theatrical Fund" has relieved non-members in one or two instances; but that it is exceedingly unwilling to do so, and would certainly not do so again, saving on some very strong and exceptional case. As its trustee, I could not represent to it that I think it ought to sail into those open waters, for I very much doubt the justice of such cruising, with a reference to the interests of the patient people who support it out of their small earnings. Affectionately ever. FOOTNOTES: [1] The part played in "The Frozen Deep" by its author, Mr. Wilkie Collins. [2] The Earl of Carlisle was at this time Viceroy of Ireland. Book III. 1858 TO 1870. 1858. NARRATIVE. All through this year, Charles Dickens was constantly moving about from place to place. After much and careful consideration, he had come to the determination of, for the future, giving readings for his own benefit. And although in the spring of this year he gave one reading of his "Christmas Carol" for a charity, all the other readings, beginning from the 29th April, and ever after, were for himself. In the autumn of this year he made reading tours in England, Scotland, and Ireland, always accompanied by his friend and secretary, Mr. Arthur Smith. At Newcastle, Charles Dickens was joined by his daughters, who accompanied him in his Scotch tour. The letters to his sister-in-law, and to his eldest daughter, are all given here, and will be given in all future reading tours, as they form a complete diary of his life and movements at these times. To avoid the constant repetition of the two names, the beginning of the letters will be dispensed with in all cases where they follow each other in unbroken succession. The Mr. Frederick Lehmann mentioned in the letter written from Sheffield, had married a daughter of Mr. Robert Chambers, and niece of Mrs. Wills. Coming to settle in London a short time after this date, Mr. and Mrs. Lehmann became intimately known to Charles Dickens and his family--more especially to his eldest daughter, to whom they have been, and are, the kindest and truest of friends. The "pretty little boy" mentioned as being under Mrs. Wills's care, was their eldest son. We give the letter to Mr. Thackeray, not because it is one of very great interest, but because, being the only one we have, we are glad to have the two names associated together in this work. The "little speech" alluded to in this first letter to Mr. Macready was one made by Charles Dickens at a public dinner, which was given in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, in Great Ormond Street. He afterwards (early in April) gave a reading from his "Christmas Carol" for this same charity. The Christmas number of "Household Words," mentioned in a letter to Mr. Wilkie Collins, was called "A House to Let," and contained stories written by Charles Dickens, Mr. Wilkie Collins, and other contributors to "Household Words." [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Jan. 17th, 1858._ MY DEAR WILKIE, I am very sorry to receive so bad an account of the foot. But I hope it is all in the past tense now. I met with an incident the other day, which I think is a good deal in your way, for introduction either into a long or short story. Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Monro went over St. Luke's with me (only last Friday), to show me some distinctly and remarkably developed types of insanity. Among other patients, we passed a deaf and dumb man, now afflicted with incurable madness too, of whom they said that it was only when his madness began to develop itself in strongly-marked mad actions, that it began to be suspected. "Though it had been there, no doubt, some time." This led me to consider, suspiciously, what employment he had been in, and so to ask the question. "Aye," says Dr. Sutherland, "that is the most remarkable thing of all, Mr. Dickens. He was employed in the transmission of electric-telegraph messages; and it is impossible to conceive what delirious despatches that man may have been sending about all over the world!" Rejoiced to hear such good report of the play. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, Feb. 2nd, 1858._ MY DEAR YATES, Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text is _not_ "which his 'owls was organs." When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he never took his hands away from his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby." On encountering that spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution) "took with fits." For this distressing complaint he was medically treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid him on his back upon the airy stones"--please to observe what follows--"and she was told, to ease her mind, his 'owls was organs." That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counterpane, and not yet "put comfortable," hears a noise apparently proceeding from the back-yard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner: "What 'owls are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor, looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs. Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?--no, no, no! What are we thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am, organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls." Yours faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. M. Thackeray.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, Feb. 2nd, 1858._ MY DEAR THACKERAY, The wisdom of Parliament, in that expensive act of its greatness which constitutes the Guild, prohibits that corporation _from doing anything_ until it shall have existed in a perfectly useless condition for seven years. This clause (introduced by some private-bill magnate of official might) seemed so ridiculous, that nobody could believe it to have this meaning; but as I felt clear about it when we were on the very verge of granting an excellent literary annuity, I referred the point to counsel, and my construction was confirmed without a doubt. It is therefore needless to enquire whether an association in the nature of a provident society could address itself to such a case as you confide to me. The prohibition has still two or three years of life in it. But, assuming the gentleman's title to be considered as an "author" as established, there is no question that it comes within the scope of the Literary Fund. They would habitually "lend" money if they did what I consider to be their duty; as it is they only give money, but they give it in such instances. I have forwarded the envelope to the Society of Arts, with a request that they will present it to Prince Albert, approaching H.R.H. in the Siamese manner. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday Night, Feb. 3rd, 1858._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I beg to report two phenomena: 1. An excellent little play in one act, by Marston, at the Lyceum; title, "A Hard Struggle;" as good as "La Joie fait Peur," though not at all like it. 2. Capital acting in the same play, by Mr. Dillon. Real good acting, in imitation of nobody, and honestly made out by himself!! I went (at Marston's request) last night, and cried till I sobbed again. I have not seen a word about it from Oxenford. But it is as wholesome and manly a thing altogether as I have seen for many a day. (I would have given a hundred pounds to have played Mr. Dillon's part). Love to Mrs. Forster. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Dr. Westland Marston.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Wednesday, Feb. 3rd, 1858._ MY DEAR MARSTON, I most heartily and honestly congratulate you on your charming little piece. It moved me more than I could easily tell you, if I were to try. Except "La Joie fait Peur," I have seen nothing nearly so good, and there is a subtlety in the comfortable presentation of the child who is to become a devoted woman for Reuben's sake, which goes a long way beyond Madame de Girardin. I am at a loss to let you know how much I admired it last night, or how heartily I cried over it. A touching idea, most delicately conceived and wrought out by a true artist and poet, in a spirit of noble, manly generosity, that no one should be able to study without great emotion. It is extremely well acted by all concerned; but Mr. Dillon's performance is really admirable, and deserving of the highest commendation. It is good in these days to see an actor taking such pains, and expressing such natural and vigorous sentiment. There is only one thing I should have liked him to change. I am much mistaken if any man--least of all any such man--would crush a letter written by the hand of the woman he loved. Hold it to his heart unconsciously and look about for it the while, he might; or he might do any other thing with it that expressed a habit of tenderness and affection in association with the idea of her; but he would never crush it under any circumstances. He would as soon crush her heart. You will see how closely I went with him, by my minding so slight an incident in so fine a performance. There is no one who could approach him in it; and I am bound to add that he surprised me as much as he pleased me. I think it might be worth while to try the people at the Français with the piece. They are very good in one-act plays; such plays take well there, and this seems to me well suited to them. If you would like Samson or Regnier to read the play (in English), I know them well, and would be very glad indeed to tell them that I sent it with your sanction because I had been so much struck by it. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, W.C., _Thursday, Feb. 11th, 1858._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I want you to read the enclosed little play. You will see that it is in one act--about the length of "La Joie fait Pour." It is now acting at the Lyceum Theatre here, with very great success. The author is Mr. Westland Marston, a dramatic writer of reputation, who wrote a very well-known tragedy called "The Patrician's Daughter," in which Macready and Miss Faucit acted (under Macready's management at Drury Lane) some years ago. This little piece is so very powerful on the stage, its interest is so simple and natural, and the part of Reuben is such a very fine one, that I cannot help thinking you might make one grand _coup_ with it, if with your skilful hand you arranged it for the Français. I have communicated this idea of mine to the author, "_et là-dessus je vous écris_." I am anxious to know your opinion, and shall expect with much interest to receive a little letter from you at your convenience. Mrs. Dickens, Miss Hogarth, and all the house send a thousand kind loves and regards to Madame Regnier and the dear little boys. You will bring them to London when you come, with all the force of the Français--will you not? Ever, my dear Regnier, faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday, Feb. 20th, 1858._ MY DEAR REGNIER, Let me thank you with all my heart for your most patient and kind letter. I made its contents known to Mr. Marston, and I enclose you his reply. You will see that he cheerfully leaves the matter in your hands, and abides by your opinion and discretion. You need not return his letter, my friend. There is great excitement here this morning, in consequence of the failure of the Ministry last night to carry the bill they brought in to please your Emperor and his troops. _I_, for one, am extremely glad of their defeat. "Le vieux P----," I have no doubt, will go staggering down the Rue de la Paix to-day, with his stick in his hand and his hat on one side, predicting the downfall of everything, in consequence of this event. His handwriting shakes more and more every quarter, and I think he mixes a great deal of cognac with his ink. He always gives me some astonishing piece of news (which is never true), or some suspicious public prophecy (which is never verified), and he always tells me he is dying (which he never is). Adieu, my dear Regnier, accept a thousand thanks from me, and believe me, now and always, Your affectionate and faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _March 15th, 1858._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have safely received your cheque this morning, and will hand it over forthwith to the honorary secretary of the hospital. I hope you have read the little speech in the hospital's publication of it. They had it taken by their own shorthand-writer, and it is done verbatim. You may be sure that it is a good and kind charity. It is amazing to me that it is not at this day ten times as large and rich as it is. But I hope and trust that I have happily been able to give it a good thrust onward into a great course. We all send our most affectionate love to all the house. I am devising all sorts of things in my mind, and am in a state of energetic restlessness incomprehensible to the calm philosophers of Dorsetshire. What a dream it is, this work and strife, and how little we do in the dream after all! Only last night, in my sleep, I was bent upon getting over a perspective of barriers, with my hands and feet bound. Pretty much what we are all about, waking, I think? But, Lord! (as I said before) you smile pityingly, not bitterly, at this hubbub, and moralise upon it, in the calm evenings when there is no school at Sherborne. Ever affectionately and truly. [Sidenote: Mrs Hogge.[3]] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday, April 14th, 1858._ MY DEAR MRS. HOGGE, After the profoundest cogitation, I come reluctantly to the conclusion that I do not know that orphan. If you were the lady in want of him, I should certainly offer _myself_. But as you are not, I will not hear of the situation. It is wonderful to think how many charming little people there must be, to whom this proposal would be like a revelation from Heaven. Why don't I know one, and come to Kensington, boy in hand, as if I had walked (I wish to God I had) out of a fairy tale! But no, I do _not_ know that orphan. He is crying somewhere, by himself, at this moment. I can't dry his eyes. He is being neglected by some ogress of a nurse. I can't rescue him. I will make a point of going to the Athenæum on Monday night; and if I had five hundred votes to give, Mr. Macdonald should have them all, for your sake. I grieve to hear that you have been ill, but I hope that the spring, when it comes, will find you blooming with the rest of the flowers. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday, April 28th, 1858._ MY DEAR YATES, For a good many years I have suffered a great deal from charities, but never anything like what I suffer now. The amount of correspondence they inflict upon me is really incredible. But this is nothing. Benevolent men get behind the piers of the gates, lying in wait for my going out; and when I peep shrinkingly from my study-windows, I see their pot-bellied shadows projected on the gravel. Benevolent bullies drive up in hansom cabs (with engraved portraits of their benevolent institutions hanging over the aprons, like banners on their outward walls), and stay long at the door. Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine. My man has been heard to say (at The Burton Arms) "that if it was a wicious place, well and good--_that_ an't door work; but that wen all the Christian wirtues is always a-shoulderin' and a-helberin' on you in the 'all, a-tryin' to git past you and cut upstairs into master's room, why no wages as you couldn't name wouldn't make it up to you." Persecuted ever. [Sidenote: Mrs Yates.] (THE CHARMING ACTRESS, THE MOTHER OF MR. EDMUND YATES.) TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, W.C., _Saturday Evening, May 15th, 1858._ MY DEAR MRS. YATES, Pray believe that I was sorry with all my heart to miss you last Thursday, and to learn the occasion of your absence; also that, whenever you can come, your presence will give me a new interest in that evening. No one alive can have more delightful associations with the lightest sound of your voice than I have; and to give you a minute's interest and pleasure, in acknowledgment of the uncountable hours of happiness you gave me when you were a mysterious angel to me, would honestly gratify my heart. Very faithfully and gratefully yours. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, July 7th, 1858._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I should vainly try to tell you--so I _won't_ try--how affected I have been by your warm-hearted letter, or how thoroughly well convinced I always am of the truth and earnestness of your friendship. I thank you, my dear, dear fellow, with my whole soul. I fervently return that friendship and I highly cherish it. You want to know all about me? I am still reading in London every Thursday, and the audiences are very great, and the success immense. On the 2nd of August I am going away on a tour of some four months in England, Ireland, and Scotland. I shall read, during that time, not fewer than four or five times a week. It will be sharp work; but probably a certain musical clinking will come of it, which will mitigate the hardship. At this present moment I am on my little Kentish freehold (_not_ in top-boots, and not particularly prejudiced that I know of), looking on as pretty a view out of my study window as you will find in a long day's English ride. My little place is a grave red brick house (time of George the First, I suppose), which I have added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas, as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on the summit of Gad's Hill. The robbery was committed before the door, on the man with the treasure, and Falstaff ran away from the identical spot of ground now covered by the room in which I write. A little rustic alehouse, called The Sir John Falstaff, is over the way--has been over the way, ever since, in honour of the event. Cobham Woods and Park are behind the house; the distant Thames in front; the Medway, with Rochester, and its old castle and cathedral, on one side. The whole stupendous property is on the old Dover Road, so when you come, come by the North Kent Railway (not the South-Eastern) to Strood or Higham, and I'll drive over to fetch you. The blessed woods and fields have done me a world of good, and I am quite myself again. The children are all as happy as children can be. My eldest daughter, Mary, keeps house, with a state and gravity becoming that high position; wherein she is assisted by her sister Katie, and by her aunt Georgina, who is, and always has been, like another sister. Two big dogs, a bloodhound and a St. Bernard, direct from a convent of that name, where I think you once were, are their principal attendants in the green lanes. These latter instantly untie the neckerchiefs of all tramps and prowlers who approach their presence, so that they wander about without any escort, and drive big horses in basket-phaetons through murderous bye-ways, and never come to grief. They are very curious about your daughters, and send all kinds of loves to them and to Mrs. Cerjat, in which I heartily join. You will have read in the papers that the Thames in London is most horrible. I have to cross Waterloo or London Bridge to get to the railroad when I come down here, and I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature. Nobody knows what is to be done; at least everybody knows a plan, and everybody else knows it won't do; in the meantime cartloads of chloride of lime are shot into the filthy stream, and do something I hope. You will know, before you get this, that the American telegraph line has parted again, at which most men are sorry, but very few surprised. This is all the news, except that there is an Italian Opera at Drury Lane, price eighteenpence to the pit, where Viardot, by far the greatest artist of them all, sings, and which is full when the dear opera can't let a box; and except that the weather has been exceptionally hot, but is now quite cool. On the top of this hill it has been cold, actually cold at night, for more than a week past. I am going over to Rochester to post this letter, and must write another to Townshend before I go. My dear Cerjat, I have written lightly enough, because I want you to know that I am becoming cheerful and hearty. God bless you! I love you, and I know that you love me. Ever your attached and affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WEST HOE, PLYMOUTH, _Thursday, Aug. 5th, 1858._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I received your letter this morning with the greatest pleasure, and read it with the utmost interest in all its domestic details. We had a most wonderful night at Exeter. It is to be regretted that we cannot take the place again on our way back. It was a prodigious cram, and we turned away no end of people. But not only that, I think they were the finest audience I have ever read to. I don't think I ever read, in some respects, so well; and I never beheld anything like the personal affection which they poured out upon me at the end. It was really a very remarkable sight, and I shall always look back upon it with pleasure. Last night here was not so bright. There are quarrels of the strangest kind between the Plymouth people and the Stonehouse people. The room is at Stonehouse (Tracy says the wrong room; there being a Plymouth room in this hotel, and he being a Plymouthite). We had a fair house, but not at all a great one. All the notabilities come this morning to "Little Dombey," for which we have let one hundred and thirty stalls, which local admiration of local greatness considers very large. For "Mrs. Gamp and the Boots," to-night, we have also a very promising let. But the races are on, and there are two public balls to-night, and the yacht squadron are all at Cherbourg to boot. Arthur is of opinion that "Two Sixties" will do very well for us. I doubt the "Two Sixties" myself. _Mais nous verrons._ The room is a very handsome one, but it is on the top of a windy and muddy hill, leading (literally) to nowhere; and it looks (except that it is new and _mortary_) as if the subsidence of the waters after the Deluge might have left it where it is. I have to go right through the company to get to the platform. Big doors slam and resound when anybody comes in; and all the company seem afraid of one another. Nevertheless they were a sensible audience last night, and much impressed and pleased. Tracy is in the room (wandering about, and never finishing a sentence), and sends all manner of sea-loves to you and the dear girls. I send all manner of land-loves to you from myself, out of my heart of hearts, and also to my dear Plorn and the boys. Arthur sends his kindest love. He knows only two characters. He is either always corresponding, like a Secretary of State, or he is transformed into a rout-furniture dealer of Rathbone Place, and drags forms about with the greatest violence, without his coat. I have no time to add another word. Ever, dearest Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] LONDON, _Saturday, Aug. 7th, 1858._ MY DEAREST MAMEY, The closing night at Plymouth was a very great scene, and the morning there was exceedingly good too. You will be glad to hear that at Clifton last night, a torrent of five hundred shillings bore Arthur away, pounded him against the wall, flowed on to the seats over his body, scratched him, and damaged his best dress suit. All to his unspeakable joy. This is a very short letter, but I am going to the Burlington Arcade, desperately resolved to have all those wonderful instruments put into operation on my head, with a view to refreshing it. Kindest love to Georgy and to all. Ever your affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] SHREWSBURY, _Thursday, Aug. 12th, 1858._ A wonderful audience last night at Wolverhampton. If such a thing can be, they were even quicker and more intelligent than the audience I had in Edinburgh. They were so wonderfully good and were so much on the alert this morning by nine o'clock for another reading, that we are going back there at about our Bradford time. I never saw such people. And the local agent would take no money, and charge no expenses of his own. This place looks what Plorn would call "ortily" dull. Local agent predicts, however, "great satisfaction to Mr. Dickens, and excellent attendance." I have just been to look at the hall, where everything was wrong, and where I have left Arthur making a platform for me out of dining-tables. If he comes back in time, I am not quite sure but that he is himself going to write to Gad's Hill. We talk of coming up from Chester _in the night to-morrow, after the reading_; and of showing our precious selves at an apparently impossibly early hour in the Gad's Hill breakfast-room on Saturday morning. I have not felt the fatigue to any extent worth mentioning; though I get, every night, into the most violent heats. We are going to dine at three o'clock (it wants a quarter now) and have not been here two hours, so I have seen nothing of Clement. Tell Georgy with my love, that I read in the same room in which we acted, but at the end opposite to that where our stage was. We are not at the inn where the amateur company put up, but at The Lion, where the fair Miss Mitchell was lodged alone. We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bed-rooms all together), the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern-windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail, and looks all downhill and slant-wise at the crookedest black and yellow old houses, all manner of shapes except straight shapes. To get into this room we come through a china closet; and the man in laying the cloth has actually knocked down, in that repository, two geraniums and Napoleon Bonaparte. I think that's all I have to say, except that at the Wolverhampton theatre they played "Oliver Twist" last night (Mr. Toole the Artful Dodger), "in consequence of the illustrious author honouring the town with his presence." We heard that the device succeeded very well, and that they got a good many people. John's spirits have been equable and good since we rejoined him. Berry has always got something the matter with his digestion--seems to me the male gender of Maria Jolly, and ought to take nothing but Revalenta Arabica. Bottled ale is not to be got in these parts, and Arthur is thrown upon draught. My dearest love to Georgy and to Katey, also to Marguerite. Also to all the boys and the noble Plorn. Ever your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday Morning, Aug. 18th, 1858._ I write this hurried line before starting, to report that my cold is decidedly better, thank God (though still bad), and that I hope to be able to stagger through to-night. After dinner yesterday I began to recover my voice, and I think I sang half the Irish Melodies to myself, as I walked about to test it. I got home at half-past ten, and mustard-poulticed and barley-watered myself tremendously. Love to the dear girls, and to all. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The same.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Friday Night, Aug. 20th, 1858._ I received your welcome and interesting letter to-day, and I write you a very hurried and bad reply; but it is _after the reading_, and you will take the will for the deed under these trying circumstances, I know. We have had a tremendous night; the largest house I have ever had since I first began--two thousand three hundred people. To-morrow afternoon, at three, I read again. My cold has been oppressive, and is not yet gone. I have been very hard to sleep too, and last night I was all but sleepless. This morning I was very dull and seedy; but I got a good walk, and picked up again. It has been blowing all day, and I fear we shall have a sick passage over to Dublin to-morrow night. Tell Mamie (with my dear love to her and Katie) that I will write to her from Dublin--probably on Sunday. Tell her too that the stories she told me in her letter were not only capital stories in themselves, but _excellently told_ too. What Arthur's state has been to-night--he, John, Berry, and Boylett, all taking money and going mad together--you _cannot_ imagine. They turned away hundreds, sold all the books, rolled on the ground of my room knee-deep in checks, and made a perfect pantomime of the whole thing. He has kept quite well, I am happy to say, and sends a hundred loves. In great haste and fatigue. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Monday, Aug. 23rd, 1858._ We had a nasty crossing here. We left Holyhead at one in the morning, and got here at six. Arthur was incessantly sick the whole way. I was not sick at all, but was in as healthy a condition otherwise as humanity need be. We are in a beautiful hotel. Our sitting-room is exactly like the drawing-room at the Peschiere in all its dimensions. I never saw two rooms so exactly resembling one another in their proportions. Our bedrooms too are excellent, and there are baths and all sorts of comforts. The Lord Lieutenant is away, and the place looks to me as if its professional life were away too. Nevertheless, there are numbers of people in the streets. Somehow, I hardly seem to think we are going to do enormously here; but I have scarcely any reason for supposing so (except that a good many houses are shut up); and I _know_ nothing about it, for Arthur is now gone to the agent and to the room. The men came by boat direct from Liverpool. They had a rough passage, were all ill, and did not get here till noon yesterday. Donnybrook Fair, or what remains of it, is going on, within two or three miles of Dublin. They went out there yesterday in a jaunting-car, and John described it to us at dinner-time (with his eyebrows lifted up, and his legs well asunder), as "Johnny Brooks's Fair;" at which Arthur, who was drinking bitter ale, nearly laughed himself to death. Berry is always unfortunate, and when I asked what had happened to Berry on board the steamboat, it appeared that "an Irish gentleman which was drunk, and fancied himself the captain, wanted to knock Berry down." I am surprised by finding this place very much larger than I had supposed it to be. Its bye-parts are bad enough, but cleaner, too, than I had supposed them to be, and certainly very much cleaner than the old town of Edinburgh. The man who drove our jaunting-car yesterday hadn't a piece in his coat as big as a penny roll, and had had his hat on (apparently without brushing it) ever since he was grown up. But he was remarkably intelligent and agreeable, with something to say about everything. For instance, when I asked him what a certain building was, he didn't say "courts of law" and nothing else, but: "Av you plase, sir, it's the foor coorts o' looyers, where Misther O'Connell stood his trial wunst, ye'll remimber, sir, afore I tell ye of it." When we got into the Phoenix Park, he looked round him as if it were his own, and said: "THAT'S a park, sir, av yer plase." I complimented it, and he said: "Gintlemen tills me as they'r bin, sir, over Europe, and never see a park aqualling ov it. 'Tis eight mile roond, sir, ten mile and a half long, and in the month of May the hawthorn trees are as beautiful as brides with their white jewels on. Yonder's the vice-regal lodge, sir; in them two corners lives the two sicretirries, wishing I was them, sir. There's air here, sir, av yer plase! There's scenery here, sir! There's mountains--thim, sir! Yer coonsider it a park, sir? It is that, sir!" You should have heard John in my bedroom this morning endeavouring to imitate a bath-man, who had resented his interference, and had said as to the shower-bath: "Yer'll not be touching _that_, young man. Divil a touch yer'll touch o' that insthrument, young man!" It was more ridiculously unlike the reality than I can express to you, yet he was so delighted with his powers that he went off in the absurdest little gingerbeery giggle, backing into my portmanteau all the time. My dear love to Katie and to Georgy, also to the noble Plorn and all the boys. I shall write to Katie next, and then to Aunty. My cold, I am happy to report, is very much better. I lay in the wet all night on deck, on board the boat, but am not as yet any the worse for it. Arthur was quite insensible when we got to Dublin, and stared at our luggage without in the least offering to claim it. He left his kindest love for all before he went out. I will keep the envelope open until he comes in. Ever, my dearest Mamie, Your most affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Wednesday, Aug. 25th, 1858._ I begin my letter to you to-day, though I don't know when I may send it off. We had a very good house last night, after all, that is to say, a great rush of shillings and good half-crowns, though the stalls were comparatively few. For "Little Dombey," this morning, we have an immense stall let--already more than two hundred--and people are now fighting in the agent's shop to take more. Through some mistake of our printer's, the evening reading for this present Wednesday was dropped, in a great part of the announcements, and the agent opened no plan for it. I have therefore resolved not to have it at all. Arthur Smith has waylaid me in all manner of ways, but I remain obdurate. I am frightfully tired, and really relieved by the prospect of an evening--overjoyed. They were a highly excitable audience last night, but they certainly did not comprehend--internally and intellectually comprehend--"The Chimes" as a London audience do. I am quite sure of it. I very much doubt the Irish capacity of receiving the pathetic; but of their quickness as to the humorous there can be no doubt. I shall see how they go along with Little Paul, in his death, presently. While I was at breakfast this morning, a general officer was announced with great state--having a staff at the door--and came in, booted and plumed, and covered with Crimean decorations. It was Cunninghame, whom we knew in Genoa--then a captain. He was very hearty indeed, and came to ask me to dinner. Of course I couldn't go. Olliffe has a brother at Cork, who has just now (noon) written to me, proposing dinners and excursions in that neighbourhood which would fill about a week; I being there a day and a half, and reading three times. The work will be very severe here, and I begin to feel depressed by it. (By "here," I mean Ireland generally, please to observe.) We meant, as I said in a letter to Katie, to go to Queenstown yesterday and bask on the seashore. But there is always so much to do that we couldn't manage it after all. We expect a tremendous house to-morrow night as well as to-day; and Arthur is at the present instant up to his eyes in business (and seats), and, between his regret at losing to-night, and his desire to make the room hold twice as many as it _will_ hold, is half distracted. I have become a wonderful Irishman--must play an Irish part some day--and his only relaxation is when I enact "John and the Boots," which I consequently do enact all day long. The papers are full of remarks upon my white tie, and describe it as being of enormous size, which is a wonderful delusion, because, as you very well know, it is a small tie. Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter at Cork, wherein he says that although only forty-six I look like an old man. _He_ is a rum customer, I think. The Rutherfords are living here, and wanted me to dine with them, which, I needn't say, could not be done; all manner of people have called, but I have seen only two. John has given it up altogether as to rivalry with the Boots, and did not come into my room this morning at all. Boots appeared triumphant and alone. He was waiting for me at the hotel-door last night. "Whaa't sart of a hoose, sur?" he asked me. "Capital." "The Lard be praised fur the 'onor o' Dooblin!" Arthur buys bad apples in the streets and brings them home and doesn't eat them, and then I am obliged to put them in the balcony because they make the room smell faint. Also he meets countrymen with honeycomb on their heads, and leads them (by the buttonhole when they have one) to this gorgeous establishment and requests the bar to buy honeycomb for his breakfast; then it stands upon the sideboard uncovered and the flies fall into it. He buys owls, too, and castles, and other horrible objects, made in bog-oak (that material which is not appreciated at Gad's Hill); and he is perpetually snipping pieces out of newspapers and sending them all over the world. While I am reading he conducts the correspondence, and his great delight is to show me seventeen or eighteen letters when I come, exhausted, into the retiring-place. Berry has not got into any particular trouble for forty-eight hours, except that he is all over boils. I have prescribed the yeast, but ineffectually. It is indeed a sight to see him and John sitting in pay-boxes, and surveying Ireland out of pigeon-holes. _Same Evening before Bed-time._ Everybody was at "Little Dombey" to-day, and although I had some little difficulty to work them up in consequence of the excessive crowding of the place, and the difficulty of shaking the people into their seats, the effect was unmistakable and profound. The crying was universal, and they were extraordinarily affected. There is no doubt we could stay here a week with that one reading, and fill the place every night. Hundreds of people have been there to-night, under the impression that it would come off again. It was a most decided and complete success. Arthur has been imploring me to stop here on the Friday after Limerick, and read "Little Dombey" again. But I have positively said "No." The work is too hard. It is not like doing it in one easy room, and always the same room. With a different place every night, and a different audience with its own peculiarity every night, it is a tremendous strain. I was sick of it to-day before I began, then got myself into wonderful train. Here follows a dialogue (but it requires imitation), which I had yesterday morning with a little boy of the house--landlord's son, I suppose--about Plorn's age. I am sitting on the sofa writing, and find him sitting beside me. INIMITABLE. Holloa, old chap. YOUNG IRELAND. Hal-loo! INIMITABLE (_in his delightful way_). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys. YOUNG IRELAND. Air yer? Ye'r right. INIMITABLE. What do you learn, old fellow? YOUNG IRELAND (_very intent on Inimitable, and always childish, except in his brogue_). I lairn wureds of three sillibils, and wureds of two sillibils, and wureds of one sillibil. INIMITABLE (_gaily_). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words of one syllable. YOUNG IRELAND (_laughs heartily_). You may say that it is mostly wureds of one sillibil. INIMITABLE. Can you write? YOUNG IRELAND. Not yet. Things comes by deegrays. INIMITABLE. Can you cipher? YOUNG IRELAND (_very quickly_). Wha'at's that? INIMITABLE. Can you make figures? YOUNG IRELAND. I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond. INIMITABLE. I say, old boy, wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in the hall, in a soldier's cap? You know--in a soldier's cap? YOUNG IRELAND (_cogitating deeply_). Was it a very good cap? INIMITABLE. Yes. YOUNG IRELAND. Did it fit unkommon? INIMITABLE. Yes. YOUNG IRELAND. Dat was me! There are two stupid old louts at the room, to show people into their places, whom John calls "them two old Paddies," and of whom he says, that he "never see nothing like them (snigger) hold idiots" (snigger). They bow and walk backwards before the grandees, and our men hustle them while they are doing it. We walked out last night, with the intention of going to the theatre; but the Piccolomini establishment (they were doing the "Lucia") looked so horribly like a very bad jail, and the Queen's looked so blackguardly, that we came back again, and went to bed. I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course. I send my love to the noble Plorn, and to all the boys. To dear Mamie and Katie, and to yourself of course, in the first degree. I am looking forward to the last Irish reading on Thursday, with great impatience. But when we shall have turned this week, once knocked off Belfast, I shall see land, and shall (like poor Timber in the days of old) "keep up a good heart." I get so wonderfully hot every night in my dress clothes, that they positively won't dry in the short interval they get, and I have been obliged to write to Doudney's to make me another suit, that I may have a constant change. Ever, my dearest Georgy, most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BELFAST, _Saturday, Aug. 28th, 1858._ When I went down to the Rotunda at Dublin on Thursday night, I said to Arthur, who came rushing at me: "You needn't tell me. I know all about it." The moment I had come out of the door of the hotel (a mile off), I had come against the stream of people turned away. I had struggled against it to the room. There, the crowd in all the lobbies and passages was so great, that I had a difficulty in getting in. They had broken all the glass in the pay-boxes. They had offered frantic prices for stalls. Eleven bank-notes were thrust into that pay-box (Arthur saw them) at one time, for eleven stalls. Our men were flattened against walls, and squeezed against beams. Ladies stood all night with their chins against my platform. Other ladies sat all night upon my steps. You never saw such a sight. And the reading went tremendously! It is much to be regretted that we troubled ourselves to go anywhere else in Ireland. We turned away people enough to make immense houses for a week. We arrived here yesterday at two. The room will not hold more than from eighty to ninety pounds. The same scene was repeated with the additional feature, that the people are much rougher here than in Dublin, and that there was a very great uproar at the opening of the doors, which, the police in attendance being quite inefficient and only looking on, it was impossible to check. Arthur was in the deepest misery because shillings got into stalls, and half-crowns got into shillings, and stalls got nowhere, and there was immense confusion. It ceased, however, the moment I showed myself; and all went most brilliantly, in spite of a great piece of the cornice of the ceiling falling with a great crash within four or five inches of the head of a young lady on my platform (I was obliged to have people there), and in spite of my gas suddenly going out at the time of the game of forfeits at Scrooge's nephew's, through some Belfastian gentleman accidentally treading on the flexible pipe, and needing to be relighted. We shall not get to Cork before mid-day on Monday; it being difficult to get from here on a Sunday. We hope to be able to start away to-morrow morning to see the Giant's Causeway (some sixteen miles off), and in that case we shall sleep at Dublin to-morrow night, leaving here by the train at half-past three in the afternoon. Dublin, you must understand, is on the way to Cork. This is a fine place, surrounded by lofty hills. The streets are very wide, and the place is very prosperous. The whole ride from Dublin here is through a very picturesque and various country; and the amazing thing is, that it is all particularly neat and orderly, and that the houses (outside at all events) are all brightly whitewashed and remarkably clean. I want to climb one of the neighbouring hills before this morning's "Dombey." I am now waiting for Arthur, who has gone to the bank to remit his last accumulation of treasure to London. Our men are rather indignant with the Irish crowds, because in the struggle they don't sell books, and because, in the pressure, they can't force a way into the room afterwards to sell them. They are deeply interested in the success, however, and are as zealous and ardent as possible. I shall write to Katie next. Give her my best love, and kiss the darling Plorn for me, and give my love to all the boys. Ever, my dearest Mamie, Your most affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Sunday Night, Aug. 29th, 1858._ I am so delighted to find your letter here to-night (eleven o'clock), and so afraid that, in the wear and tear of this strange life, I have written to Gad's Hill in the wrong order, and have not written to you, as I should, that I resolve to write this before going to bed. You will find it a wretchedly stupid letter; but you may imagine, my dearest girl, that I am tired. The success at Belfast has been equal to the success here. Enormous! We turned away half the town. I think them a better audience, on the whole, than Dublin; and the personal affection there was something overwhelming. I wish you and the dear girls could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask me, as I hurried to the hotel after reading last night, to "do me the honour to shake hands, Misther Dickens, and God bless you, sir; not ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light you've been in mee house, sir (and God love your face), this many a year." Every night, by-the-bye, since I have been in Ireland, the ladies have beguiled John out of the bouquet from my coat. And yesterday morning, as I had showered the leaves from my geranium in reading "Little Dombey," they mounted the platform, after I was gone, and picked them all up as keepsakes! I have never seen _men_ go in to cry so undisguisedly as they did at that reading yesterday afternoon. They made no attempt whatever to hide it, and certainly cried more than the women. As to the "Boots" at night, and "Mrs. Gamp" too, it was just one roar with me and them; for they made me laugh so that sometimes I _could not_ compose my face to go on. You must not let the new idea of poor dear Landor efface the former image of the fine old man. I wouldn't blot him out, in his tender gallantry, as he sat upon that bed at Forster's that night, for a million of wild mistakes at eighty years of age. I hope to be at Tavistock House before five o'clock next Saturday morning, and to lie in bed half the day, and come home by the 10.50 on Sunday. Tell the girls that Arthur and I have each ordered at Belfast a trim, sparkling, slap-up _Irish jaunting-car_!!! I flatter myself we shall astonish the Kentish people. It is the oddest carriage in the world, and you are always falling off. But it is gay and bright in the highest degree. Wonderfully Neapolitan. What with a sixteen mile ride before we left Belfast, and a sea-beach walk, and a two o'clock dinner, and a seven hours' railway ride since, I am--as we say here--"a thrifle weary." But I really am in wonderful force, considering the work. For which I am, as I ought to be, very thankful. Arthur was exceedingly unwell last night--could not cheer up at all. He was so very unwell that he left the hall(!) and became invisible after my five minutes' rest. I found him at the hotel in a jacket and slippers, and with a hot bath just ready. He was in the last stage of prostration. The local agent was with me, and proposed that he (the wretched Arthur) should go to his office and balance the accounts then and there. He went, in the jacket and slippers, and came back in twenty minutes, _perfectly well_, in consequence of the admirable balance. He is now sitting opposite to me ON THE BAG OF SILVER, forty pounds (it must be dreadfully hard), writing to Boulogne. I suppose it is clear that the next letter I write is Katie's. Either from Cork or from Limerick, it shall report further. At Limerick I read in the theatre, there being no other place. Best love to Mamie and Katie, and dear Plorn, and all the boys left when this comes to Gad's Hill; also to my dear good Anne, and her little woman. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Sept. 6th, 1858._ MY DEAR WILKIE, First, let me report myself here for something less than eight-and-forty hours. I come last (and direct--a pretty hard journey) from Limerick. The success in Ireland has been immense. The work is very hard, sometimes overpowering; but I am none the worse for it, and arrived here quite fresh. Secondly, will you let me recommend the enclosed letter from Wigan, as the groundwork of a capital article, in your way, for H. W.? There is not the least objection to a plain reference to him, or to Phelps, to whom the same thing happened a year or two ago, near Islington, in the case of a clever and capital little daughter of his. I think it a capital opportunity for a discourse on gentility, with a glance at those other schools which advertise that the "sons of gentlemen only" are admitted, and a just recognition of the greater liberality of our public schools. There are tradesmen's sons at Eton, and Charles Kean was at Eton, and Macready (also an actor's son) was at Rugby. Some such title as "Scholastic Flunkeydom," or anything infinitely contemptuous, would help out the meaning. Surely such a schoolmaster must swallow all the silver forks that the pupils are expected to take when they come, and are not expected to take away with them when they go. And of course he could not exist, unless he had flunkey customers by the dozen. Secondly--no, this is thirdly now--about the Christmas number. I have arranged so to stop my readings, as to be available for it on _the 15th of November_, which will leave me time to write a good article, if I clear my way to one. Do you see your way to our making a Christmas number of this idea that I am going very briefly to hint? Some disappointed person, man or woman, prematurely disgusted with the world, for some reason or no reason (the person should be young, I think) retires to an old lonely house, or an old lonely mill, or anything you like, with one attendant, resolved to shut out the world, and hold no communion with it. The one attendant sees the absurdity of the idea, pretends to humour it, but really thus to slaughter it. Everything that happens, everybody that comes near, every breath of human interest that floats into the old place from the village, or the heath, or the four cross-roads near which it stands, and from which belated travellers stray into it, shows beyond mistake that you can't shut out the world; that you are in it, to be of it; that you get into a false position the moment you try to sever yourself from it; and that you must mingle with it, and make the best of it, and make the best of yourself into the bargain. If we could plot out a way of doing this together, I would not be afraid to take my part. If we could not, could we plot out a way of doing it, and taking in stories by other hands? If we could not do either (but I think we could), shall we fall back upon a round of stories again? That I would rather not do, if possible. Will you think about it? And can you come and dine at Tavistock House _on Monday, the 20th September, at half-past five_? I purpose being at home there with the girls that day. Answer this, according to my printed list for the week. I am off to Huddersfield on Wednesday morning. I think I will now leave off; merely adding that I have got a splendid brogue (it really is exactly like the people), and that I think of coming out as the only legitimate successor of poor Power. Ever, my dear Wilkie, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] STATION HOTEL, YORK, _Friday, Sept. 10th, 1858._ DEAREST MEERY, First let me tell you that all the magicians and spirits in your employ have fulfilled the instructions of their wondrous mistress to admiration. Flowers have fallen in my path wherever I have trod; and when they rained upon me at Cork I was more amazed than you ever saw me. Secondly, receive my hearty and loving thanks for that same. (Excuse a little Irish in the turn of that sentence, but I can't help it). Thirdly, I have written direct to Mr. Boddington, explaining that I am bound to be in Edinburgh on the day when he courteously proposes to do me honour. I really cannot tell you how truly and tenderly I feel your letter, and how gratified I am by its contents. Your truth and attachment are always so precious to me that I can_not_ get my heart out on my sleeve to show it you. It is like a child, and, at the sound of some familiar voices, "goes and hides." You know what an affection I have for Mrs. Watson, and how happy it made me to see her again--younger, much, than when I first knew her in Switzerland. God bless you always! Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ROYAL HOTEL, SCARBOROUGH, _Sunday, Sept. 11th, 1858._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, We had a very fine house indeed at York. All kinds of applications have been made for another reading there, and no doubt it would be exceedingly productive; but it cannot be done. At Harrogate yesterday; the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper reading, and tables d'hôte. The piety of York obliging us to leave that place for this at six this morning, and there being no night train from Harrogate, we had to engage a special engine. We got to bed at one, and were up again before five; which, after yesterday's fatigues, leaves me a little worn out at this present. I have no accounts of this place as yet, nor have I received any letter here. But the post of this morning is not yet delivered, I believe. We have a charming room, overlooking the sea. Leech is here (living within a few doors), with the partner of his bosom, and his young family. I write at ten in the morning, having been here two hours; and you will readily suppose that I have not seen him. Of news, I have not the faintest breath. I seem to have been doing nothing all my life but riding in railway-carriages and reading. The railway of the morning brought us through Castle Howard, and under the woods of Easthorpe, and then just below Malton Abbey, where I went to poor Smithson's funeral. It was a most lovely morning, and, tired as I was, I couldn't sleep for looking out of window. Yesterday, at Harrogate, two circumstances occurred which gave Arthur great delight. Firstly, he chafed his legs sore with his black bag of silver. Secondly, the landlord asked him as a favour, "If he could oblige him with a little silver." He obliged him directly with some forty pounds' worth; and I suspect the landlord to have repented of having approached the subject. After the reading last night we walked over the moor to the railway, three miles, leaving our men to follow with the luggage in a light cart. They passed us just short of the railway, and John was making the night hideous and terrifying the sleeping country, by _playing the horn_ in prodigiously horrible and unmusical blasts. My dearest love, of course, to the dear girls, and to the noble Plorn. Apropos of children, there was one gentleman at the "Little Dombey" yesterday morning, who exhibited, or rather concealed, the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion. He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in old time. There was a remarkably good fellow of thirty or so, too, who found something so very ludicrous in "Toots," that he _could not_ compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. And whenever he felt "Toots" coming again he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh, and when he came he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll, and made me laugh heartily. Ever, dear Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] SCARBOROUGH ARMS, LEEDS, _Wednesday, Sept. 15th, 1858._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I have added a pound to the cheque. I would recommend your seeing the poor railway man again and giving him ten shillings, and telling him to let you see him again in about a week. If he be then still unable to lift weights and handle heavy things, I would then give him another ten shillings, and so on. Since I wrote to Georgy from Scarborough, we have had, thank God, nothing but success. The Hull people (not generally considered excitable, even on their own showing) were so enthusiastic, that we were obliged to promise to go back there for two readings. I have positively resolved not to lengthen out the time of my tour, so we are now arranging to drop some small places, and substitute Hull again and York again. But you will perhaps have heard this in the main from Arthur. I know he wrote to you after the reading last night. This place I have always doubted, knowing that we should come here when it was recovering from the double excitement of the festival and the Queen. But there is a very large hall let indeed, and the prospect of to-night consequently looks bright. Arthur told you, I suppose, that he had his shirt-front and waistcoat torn off last night? He was perfectly enraptured in consequence. Our men got so knocked about that he gave them five shillings apiece on the spot. John passed several minutes upside down against a wall, with his head amongst the people's boots. He came out of the difficulty in an exceedingly touzled condition, and with his face much flushed. For all this, and their being packed as you may conceive they would be packed, they settled down the instant I went in, and never wavered in the closest attention for an instant. It was a very high room, and required a great effort. Oddly enough, I slept in this house three days last year with Wilkie. Arthur has the bedroom I occupied then, and I have one two doors from it, and Gordon has the one between. Not only is he still with us, but he _has_ talked of going on to Manchester, going on to London, and coming back with us to Darlington next Tuesday!!! These streets look like a great circus with the season just finished. All sorts of garish triumphal arches were put up for the Queen, and they have got smoky, and have been looked out of countenance by the sun, and are blistered and patchy, and half up and half down, and are hideous to behold. Spiritless men (evidently drunk for some time in the royal honour) are slowly removing them, and on the whole it is more like the clearing away of "The Frozen Deep" at Tavistock House than anything within your knowledge--with the exception that we are not in the least sorry, as we were then. Vague ideas are in Arthur's head that when we come back to Hull, we are to come here, and are to have the Town Hall (a beautiful building), and read to the million. I can't say yet. That depends. I remember that when I was here before (I came from Rockingham to make a speech), I thought them a dull and slow audience. I hope I may have been mistaken. I never saw better audiences than the Yorkshire audiences generally. I am so perpetually at work or asleep, that I have not a scrap of news. I saw the Leech family at Scarboro', both in my own house (that is to say, hotel) and in theirs. They were not at either reading. Scarboro' is gay and pretty, and I think Gordon had an idea that we were always at some such place. Kiss the darling Plorn for me, and give him my love; dear Katie too, giving her the same. I feel sorry that I cannot get down to Gad's Hill this next time, but I shall look forward to our being there with Georgy, after Scotland. Tell the servants that I remember them, and hope they will live with us many years. Ever, my dearest Mamie, Your most affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] KING'S HEAD, SHEFFIELD, _Friday, Sept. 17th, 1858._ I write you a few lines to Tavistock House, thinking you may not be sorry to find a note from me there on your arrival from Gad's Hill. Halifax was too small for us. I never saw such an audience though. They were really worth reading to for nothing, though I didn't do exactly that. It is as horrible a place as I ever saw, I think. The run upon the tickets here is so immense that Arthur is obliged to get great bills out, signifying that no more can be sold. It will be by no means easy to get into the place the numbers who have already paid. It is the hall we acted in. Crammed to the roof and the passages. We must come back here towards the end of October, and are again altering the list and striking out small places. The trains are so strange and unintelligible in this part of the country that we were obliged to leave Halifax at eight this morning, and breakfast on the road--at Huddersfield again, where we had an hour's wait. Wills was in attendance on the platform, and took me (here at Sheffield, I mean) out to Frederick Lehmann's house to see Mrs. Wills. She looked pretty much the same as ever, I thought, and was taking care of a very pretty little boy. The house and grounds are as nice as anything _can_ be in this smoke. A heavy thunderstorm is passing over the town, and it is raining hard too. This is a stupid letter, my dearest Georgy, but I write in a hurry, and in the thunder and lightning, and with the crowd of to-night before me. Ever most affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] STATION HOTEL, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, _Sunday, Sept. 26th, 1858._ EXTRACT. The girls (as I have no doubt they have already told you for themselves) arrived here in good time yesterday, and in very fresh condition. They persisted in going to the room last night, though I had arranged for their remaining quiet. We have done a vast deal here. I suppose you know that we are going to Berwick, and that we mean to sleep there and go on to Edinburgh on Monday morning, arriving there before noon? If it be as fine to-morrow as it is to-day, the girls will see the coast piece of railway between Berwick and Edinburgh to great advantage. I was anxious that they should, because that kind of pleasure is really almost the only one they are likely to have in their present trip. Stanfield and Roberts are in Edinburgh, and the Scottish Royal Academy gave them a dinner on Wednesday, to which I was very pressingly invited. But, of course, my going was impossible. I read twice that day. Remembering what you do of Sunderland, you will be surprised that our profit there was very considerable. I read in a beautiful new theatre, and (I thought to myself) quite wonderfully. Such an audience I never beheld for rapidity and enthusiasm. The room in which we acted (converted into a theatre afterwards) was burnt to the ground a year or two ago. We found the hotel, so bad in our time, really good. I walked from Durham to Sunderland, and from Sunderland to Newcastle. Don't you think, as we shall be at home at eleven in the forenoon this day fortnight, that it will be best for you and Plornish to come to Tavistock House for that Sunday, and for us all to go down to Gad's Hill next day? My best love to the noble Plornish. If he is quite reconciled to the postponement of his trousers, I should like to behold his first appearance in them. But, if not, as he is such a good fellow, I think it would be a pity to disappoint and try him. And now, my dearest Georgy, I think I have said all I have to say before I go out for a little air. I had a very hard day yesterday, and am tired. Ever your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, _Sunday, Oct. 10th, 1858._ MY DEAR FORSTER, As to the truth of the readings, I cannot tell you what the demonstrations of personal regard and respect are. How the densest and most uncomfortably-packed crowd will be hushed in an instant when I show my face. How the youth of colleges, and the old men of business in the town, seem equally unable to get near enough to me when they cheer me away at night. How common people and gentlefolks will stop me in the streets and say: "Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my home with so many friends?" And if you saw the mothers, and fathers, and sisters, and brothers in mourning, who invariably come to "Little Dombey," and if you studied the wonderful expression of comfort and reliance with which they hang about me, as if I had been with them, all kindness and delicacy, at their own little death-bed, you would think it one of the strangest things in the world. As to the mere effect, of course I don't go on doing the thing so often without carefully observing myself and the people too in every little thing, and without (in consequence) greatly improving in it. At Aberdeen, we were crammed to the street twice in one day. At Perth (where I thought when I arrived there literally could be nobody to come), the nobility came posting in from thirty miles round, and the whole town came and filled an immense hall. As to the effect, if you had seen them after Lilian died, in "The Chimes," or when Scrooge woke and talked to the boy outside the window, I doubt if you would ever have forgotten it. And at the end of "Dombey" yesterday afternoon, in the cold light of day, they all got up, after a short pause, gentle and simple, and thundered and waved their hats with that astonishing heartiness and fondness for me, that for the first time in all my public career they took me completely off my legs, and I saw the whole eighteen hundred of them reel on one side as if a shock from without had shaken the hall. The dear girls have enjoyed themselves immensely, and their trip has been a great success. I hope I told you (but I forget whether I did or no) how splendidly Newcastle[4] came out. I am reminded of Newcastle at the moment because they joined me there. I am anxious to get to the end of my readings, and to be at home again, and able to sit down and think in my own study. But the fatigue, though sometimes very great indeed, hardly tells upon me at all. And although all our people, from Smith downwards, have given in, more or less, at times, I have never been in the least unequal to the work, though sometimes sufficiently disinclined for it. My kindest and best love to Mrs. Forster. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] ROYAL HOTEL, DERBY, _Friday, Oct. 22nd, 1858._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I am writing in a very poor condition; I have a bad cold all over me, pains in my back and limbs, and a very sensitive and uncomfortable throat. There was a great draught up some stone steps near me last night, and I daresay that caused it. The weather on my first two nights at Birmingham was so intolerably bad--it blew hard, and never left off raining for one single moment--that the houses were not what they otherwise would have been. On the last night the weather cleared, and we had a grand house. Last night at Nottingham was almost, if not quite, the most amazing we have had. It is not a very large place, and the room is by no means a very large one, but three hundred and twenty stalls were let, and all the other tickets were sold. Here we have two hundred and twenty stalls let for to-night, and the other tickets are gone in proportion. It is a pretty room, but not large. I have just been saying to Arthur that if there is not a large let for York, I would rather give it up, and get Monday at Gad's Hill. We have telegraphed to know. If the answer comes (as I suppose it will) before post time, I will tell you in a postscript what we decide to do. Coming to London in the night of to-morrow (Saturday), and having to see Mr. Ouvry on Sunday, and having to start for York early on Monday, I fear I should not be able to get to Gad's Hill at all. You won't expect me till you see me. Arthur and I have considered Plornish's joke in all the immense number of aspects in which it presents itself to reflective minds. We have come to the conclusion that it is the best joke ever made. Give the dear boy my love, and the same to Georgy, and the same to Katey, and take the same yourself. Arthur (excessively low and inarticulate) mutters that he "unites." [We knocked up Boylett, Berry, and John so frightfully yesterday, by tearing the room to pieces and altogether reversing it, as late as four o'clock, that we gave them a supper last night. They shine all over to-day, as if it had been entirely composed of grease.] Ever, my dearest Mamie, Your most affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WOLVERHAMPTON, _Wednesday, Nov. 3rd, 1858._ Little Leamington came out in the most amazing manner yesterday--turned away hundreds upon hundreds of people. They are represented as the dullest and worst of audiences. I found them very good indeed, even in the morning. There awaited me at the hotel, a letter from the Rev. Mr. Young, Wentworth Watson's tutor, saying that Mrs. Watson wished her boy to shake hands with me, and that he would bring him in the evening. I expected him at the hotel before the readings. But he did not come. He spoke to John about it in the room at night. The crowd and confusion, however, were very great, and I saw nothing of him. In his letter he said that Mrs. Watson was at Paris on her way home, and would be at Brighton at the end of this week. I suppose I shall see her there at the end of next week. We find a let of two hundred stalls here, which is very large for this place. The evening being fine too, and blue being to be seen in the sky beyond the smoke, we expect to have a very full hall. Tell Mamey and Katey that if they had been with us on the railway to-day between Leamington and this place, they would have seen (though it is only an hour and ten minutes by the express) fires and smoke indeed. We came through a part of the Black Country that you know, and it looked at its blackest. All the furnaces seemed in full blast, and all the coal-pits to be working. It is market-day here, and the ironmasters are standing out in the street (where they always hold high change), making such an iron hum and buzz, that they confuse me horribly. In addition, there is a bellman announcing something--not the readings, I beg to say--and there is an excavation being made in the centre of the open place, for a statue, or a pump, or a lamp-post, or something or other, round which all the Wolverhampton boys are yelling and struggling. And here is Arthur, begging to have dinner at half-past three instead of four, because he foresees "a wiry evening" in store for him. Under which complication of distractions, to which a waitress with a tray at this moment adds herself, I sink, and leave off. My best love to the dear girls, and to the noble Plorn, and to you. Marguerite and Ellen Stone not forgotten. All yesterday and to-day I have been doing everything to the tune of: And the day is dark and dreary. Ever, dearest Georgy, Your most affectionate and faithful. P.S.--I hope the brazier is intolerably hot, and half stifles all the family. Then, and not otherwise, I shall think it in satisfactory work. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W. C., _Friday, Nov. 5th, 1858._ MY DEAR WHITE, May I entreat you to thank Mr. Carter very earnestly and kindly in my name, for his proffered hospitality; and, further, to explain to him that since my readings began, I have known them to be incompatible with all social enjoyments, and have neither set foot in a friend's house nor sat down to a friend's table in any one of all the many places I have been to, but have rigidly kept myself to my hotels. To this resolution I must hold until the last. There is not the least virtue in it. It is a matter of stern necessity, and I submit with the worst grace possible. Will you let me know, either at Southampton or Portsmouth, whether any of you, and how many of you, if any, are coming over, so that Arthur Smith may reserve good seats? Tell Lotty I hope she does not contemplate coming to the morning reading; I always hate it so myself. Mary and Katey are down at Gad's Hill with Georgy and Plornish, and they have Marguerite Power and Ellen Stone staying there. I am sorry to say that even my benevolence descries no prospect of their being able to come to my native place. On Saturday week, the 13th, my tour, please God, ends. My best love to Mrs. White, and to Lotty, and to Clara. Ever, my dear White, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Monday, Dec. 13th, 1858._ MY DEAR STONE, Many thanks for these discourses. They are very good, I think, as expressing what many men have felt and thought; otherwise not specially remarkable. They have one fatal mistake, which is a canker at the foot of their ever being widely useful. Half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises (as I take it) from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testament as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it--whereof comes all manner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining. But so to resent this miserable error, or to (by any implication) depreciate the divine goodness and beauty of the New Testament, is to commit even a worse error. And to class Jesus Christ with Mahomet is simply audacity and folly. I might as well hoist myself on to a high platform, to inform my disciples that the lives of King George the Fourth and of King Alfred the Great belonged to one and the same category. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, Dec. 18th, 1858._ MY DEAR PROCTER, A thousand thanks for the little song. I am charmed with it, and shall be delighted to brighten "Household Words" with such a wise and genial light. I no more believe that your poetical faculty has gone by, than I believe that you have yourself passed to the better land. You and it will travel thither in company, rely upon it. So I still hope to hear more of the trade-songs, and to learn that the blacksmith has hammered out no end of iron into good fashion of verse, like a cunning workman, as I know him of old to be. Very faithfully yours, my dear Procter. FOOTNOTES: [3] Niece to the Rev. W. Harness. [4] The birthplace of Mr. Forster. 1859. NARRATIVE. During the winter, Charles Dickens was living at Tavistock House, removing to Gad's Hill for the summer early in June, and returning to London in November. At this time a change was made in his weekly journal. "Household Words" became absolutely his own--Mr. Wills being his partner and editor, as before--and was "incorporated with 'All the Year Round,'" under which title it was known thenceforth. The office was still in Wellington Street, but in a different house. The first number with the new name appeared on the 30th April, and it contained the opening of "A Tale of Two Cities." The first letter which follows shows that a proposal for a series of readings in America had already been made to him. It was carefully considered and abandoned for the time. But the proposal was constantly renewed, and the idea never wholly relinquished for many years before he actually decided on making so distant a "reading tour." Mr. Procter contributed to the early numbers of "All the Year Round" some very spirited "Songs of the Trades." We give notes from Charles Dickens to the veteran poet, both in the last year, and in this year, expressing his strong approval of them. The letter and two notes to Mr. (afterwards Sir Antonio) Panizzi, for which we are indebted to Mr. Louis Fagan, one of Sir A. Panizzi's executors, show the warm sympathy and interest which he always felt for the cause of Italian liberty, and for the sufferings of the State prisoners who at this time took refuge in England. We give a little note to the dear friend and companion of Charles Dickens's daughters, "Lotty" White, because it is a pretty specimen of his writing, and because the young girl, who is playfully "commanded" to get well and strong, died early in July of this year. She was, at the time this note was written, first attacked with the illness which was fatal to all her sisters. Mamie and Kate Dickens went from Gad's Hill to Bonchurch to pay a last visit to their friend, and he writes to his eldest daughter there. Also we give notes of loving sympathy and condolence to the bereaved father and mother. In the course of this summer Charles Dickens was not well, and went for a week to his old favourite, Broadstairs--where Mr. Wilkie Collins and his brother, Mr. Charles Allston Collins, were staying--for sea-air and change, preparatory to another reading tour, in England only. His letter from Peterborough to Mr. Frank Stone, giving him an account of a reading at Manchester (Mr. Stone's native town), was one of the last ever addressed to that affectionate friend, who died very suddenly, to the great grief of Charles Dickens, in November. The letter to Mr. Thomas Longman, which closes this year, was one of introduction to that gentleman of young Marcus Stone, then just beginning his career as an artist, and to whom the premature death of his father made it doubly desirable that he should have powerful helping hands. Charles Dickens refers, in a letter to Mrs. Watson, to his portrait by Mr. Frith, which was finished at the end of 1858. It was painted for Mr. Forster, and is now in the "Forster Collection" at South Kensington Museum. The Christmas number of this year, again written by several hands as well as his own, was "The Haunted House." In November, his story of "A Tale of Two Cities" was finished in "All the Year Round," and in December was published, complete, with dedication to Lord John Russell. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Smith.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday, Jan. 26th, 1859._ MY DEAR ARTHUR, Will you first read the enclosed letters, having previously welcomed, with all possible cordiality, the bearer, Mr. Thomas C. Evans, from New York? You having read them, let me explain that Mr. Fields is a highly respectable and influential man, one of the heads of the most classical and most respected publishing house in America; that Mr. Richard Grant White is a man of high reputation; and that Felton is the Greek Professor in their Cambridge University, perhaps the most distinguished scholar in the States. The address to myself, referred to in one of the letters, being on its way, it is quite clear that I must give some decided and definite answer to the American proposal. Now, will you carefully discuss it with Mr. Evans before I enter on it at all? Then, will you dine here with him on Sunday--which I will propose to him--and arrange to meet at half-past four for an hour's discussion? The points are these: First. I have a very grave question within myself whether I could go to America at all. Secondly. If I did go, I could not possibly go before the autumn. Thirdly. If I did go, how long must I stay? Fourthly. If the stay were a short one, could _you_ go? Fifthly. What is his project? What could I make? What occurs to you upon his proposal? I have told him that the business arrangements of the readings have been from the first so entirely in your hands, that I enter upon nothing connected with them without previous reference to you. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, Feb. 1st, 1859._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I received your always welcome annual with even more interest than usual this year, being (in common with my two girls and their aunt) much excited and pleased by your account of your daughter's engagement. Apart from the high sense I have of the affectionate confidence with which you tell me what lies so tenderly on your own heart, I have followed the little history with a lively sympathy and regard for her. I hope, with you, that it is full of promise, and that you will all be happy in it. The separation, even in the present condition of travel (and no man can say how much the discovery of a day may advance it), is nothing. And so God bless her and all of you, and may the rosy summer bring her all the fulness of joy that we all wish her. To pass from the altar to Townshend (which is a long way), let me report him severely treated by Bully, who rules him with a paw of iron; and complaining, moreover, of indigestion. He drives here every Sunday, but at all other times is mostly shut up in his beautiful house, where I occasionally go and dine with him _tête-à-tête_, and where we always talk of you and drink to you. That is a rule with us from which we never depart. He is "seeing a volume of poems through the press;" rather an expensive amusement. He has not been out at night (except to this house) save last Friday, when he went to hear me read "The Poor Traveller," "Mrs. Gamp," and "The Trial" from "Pickwick." He came into my room at St. Martin's Hall, and I fortified him with weak brandy-and-water. You will be glad to hear that the said readings are a greater _furore_ than they ever have been, and that every night on which they now take place--once a week--hundreds go away, unable to get in, though the hall holds thirteen hundred people. I dine with ---- to-day, by-the-bye, along with his agent; concerning whom I observe him to be always divided between an unbounded confidence and a little latent suspicion. He always tells me that he is a gem of the first water; oh yes, the best of business men! and then says that he did not quite like his conduct respecting that farm-tenant and those hay-ricks. There is a general impression here, among the best-informed, that war in Italy, to begin with, is inevitable, and will break out before April. I know a gentleman at Genoa (Swiss by birth), deeply in with the authorities at Turin, who is already sending children home. In England we are quiet enough. There is a world of talk, as you know, about Reform bills; but I don't believe there is any general strong feeling on the subject. According to my perceptions, it is undeniable that the public has fallen into a state of indifference about public affairs, mainly referable, as I think, to the people who administer them--and there I mean the people of all parties--which is a very bad sign of the times. The general mind seems weary of debates and honourable members, and to have taken _laissez-aller_ for its motto. My affairs domestic (which I know are not without their interest for you) flow peacefully. My eldest daughter is a capital housekeeper, heads the table gracefully, delegates certain appropriate duties to her sister and her aunt, and they are all three devotedly attached. Charley, my eldest boy, remains in Barings' house. Your present correspondent is more popular than he ever has been. I rather think that the readings in the country have opened up a new public who were outside before; but however that may be, his books have a wider range than they ever had, and his public welcomes are prodigious. Said correspondent is at present overwhelmed with proposals to go and read in America. Will never go, unless a small fortune be first paid down in money on this side of the Atlantic. Stated the figure of such payment, between ourselves, only yesterday. Expects to hear no more of it, and assuredly will never go for less. You don't say, my dear Cerjat, when you are coming to England! Somehow I feel that this marriage ought to bring you over, though I don't know why. You shall have a bed here and a bed at Gad's Hill, and we will go and see strange sights together. When I was in Ireland, I ordered the brightest jaunting-car that ever was seen. It has just this minute arrived per steamer from Belfast. Say you are coming, and you shall be the first man turned over by it; somebody must be (for my daughter Mary drives anything that can be harnessed, and I know of no English horse that would understand a jaunting-car coming down a Kentish hill), and you shall be that somebody if you will. They turned the basket-phaeton over, last summer, in a bye-road--Mary and the other two--and had to get it up again; which they did, and came home as if nothing had happened. They send their loves to Mrs. Cerjat, and to you, and to all, and particularly to the dear _fiancée_. So do I, with all my heart, and am ever your attached and affectionate friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Antonio Panizzi.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday Night, March 14th, 1859._ MY DEAR PANIZZI, If you should feel no delicacy in mentioning, or should see no objection to mentioning, to Signor Poerio, or any of the wronged Neapolitan gentlemen to whom it is your happiness and honour to be a friend on their arrival in this country, an idea that has occurred to me, I should regard it as a great kindness in you if you would be my exponent. I think you will have no difficulty in believing that I would not, on any consideration, obtrude my name or projects upon any one of those noble souls, if there were any reason of the slightest kind against it. And if you see any such reason, I pray you instantly to banish my letter from your thoughts. It seems to me probable that some narrative of their ten years' suffering will, somehow or other, sooner or later, be by some of them laid before the English people. The just interest and indignation alive here, will (I suppose) elicit it. False narratives and garbled stories will, in any case, of a certainty get about. If the true history of the matter is to be told, I have that sympathy with them and respect for them which would, all other considerations apart, render it unspeakably gratifying to me to be the means of its diffusion. What I desire to lay before them is simply this. If for my new successor to "Household Words" a narrative of their ten years' trial could be written, I would take any conceivable pains to have it rendered into English, and presented in the sincerest and best way to a very large and comprehensive audience. It should be published exactly as you might think best for them, and remunerated in any way that you might think generous and right. They want no mouthpiece and no introducer, but perhaps they might have no objection to be associated with an English writer, who is possibly not unknown to them by some general reputation, and who certainly would be animated by a strong public and private respect for their honour, spirit, and unmerited misfortunes. This is the whole matter; assuming that such a thing is to be done, I long for the privilege of helping to do it. These gentlemen might consider it an independent means of making money, and I should be delighted to pay the money. In my absence from town, my friend and sub-editor, Mr. Wills (to whom I had expressed my feeling on the subject), has seen, I think, three of the gentlemen together. But as I hear, returning home to-night, that they are in your good hands, and as nobody can be a better judge than you of anything that concerns them, I at once decide to write to you and to take no other step whatever. Forgive me for the trouble I have occasioned you in the reading of this letter, and never think of it again if you think that by pursuing it you would cause them an instant's uneasiness. Believe me, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Antonio Panizzi.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Tuesday, March 15th, 1859._ MY DEAR PANIZZI, Let me thank you heartily for your kind and prompt letter. I am really and truly sensible of your friendliness. I have not heard from Higgins, but of course I am ready to serve on the Committee. Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Saturday, March 19th, 1859._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I think the songs are simply ADMIRABLE! and I have no doubt of this being a popular feature in "All the Year Round." I would not omit the sexton, and I would not omit the spinners and weavers; and I would omit the hack-writers, and (I think) the alderman; but I am not so clear about the chorister. The pastoral I a little doubt finding audience for; but I am not at all sure yet that my doubt is well founded. Had I not better send them all to the printer, and let you have proofs kept by you for publishing? I shall not have to make up the first number of "All the Year Round" until early in April. I don't like to send the manuscript back, and I never do like to do so when I get anything that I know to be thoroughly, soundly, and unquestionably good. I am hard at work upon my story, and expect a magnificent start. With hearty thanks, Ever yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Tuesday, March 29th, 1859._ MY DEAR EDMUND, 1. I think that no one seeing the place can well doubt that my house at Gad's Hill is the place for the letter-box. The wall is accessible by all sorts and conditions of men, on the bold high road, and the house altogether is the great landmark of the whole neighbourhood. Captain Goldsmith's _house_ is up a lane considerably off the high road; but he has a garden _wall_ abutting on the road itself. 2. "The Pic-Nic Papers" were originally sold to Colburn, for the benefit of the widow of Mr. Macrone, of St. James's Square, publisher, deceased. Two volumes were contributed--of course gratuitously--by writers who had had transactions with Macrone. Mr. Colburn, wanting three volumes in all for trade purposes, added a third, consisting of an American reprint. Of that volume I didn't know, and don't know, anything. The other two I edited, gratuitously as aforesaid, and wrote the Lamplighter's story in. It was all done many years ago. There was a preface originally, delicately setting forth how the book came to be. 3. I suppose ---- to be, as Mr. Samuel Weller expresses it somewhere in "Pickwick," "ravin' mad with the consciousness o' willany." Under their advertisement in _The Times_ to-day, you will see, without a word of comment, the shorthand writer's verbatim report of the judgment. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Antonio Panizzi.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Thursday, April 7th, 1859._ MY DEAR PANIZZI, If you don't know, I think you should know that a number of letters are passing through the post-office, purporting to be addressed to the charitable by "Italian Exiles in London," asking for aid to raise a fund for a tribute to "London's Lord Mayor," in grateful recognition of the reception of the Neapolitan exiles. I know this to be the case, and have no doubt in my own mind that the whole thing is an imposture and a "do." The letters are signed "Gratitudine Italiana." Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Monday, April 18th, 1859._ MY DEAR LOTTY, This is merely a notice to you that I must positively insist on your getting well, strong, and into good spirits, with the least possible delay. Also, that I look forward to seeing you at Gad's Hill sometime in the summer, staying with the girls, and heartlessly putting down the Plorn You know that there is no appeal from the Plorn's inimitable father. What _he_ says must be done. Therefore I send you my love (which please take care of), and my commands (which please obey). Ever your affectionate. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Tuesday, May 31st, 1859._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, You surprise me by supposing that there is ever latent a defiant and roused expression in the undersigned lamb! Apart from this singular delusion of yours, and wholly unaccountable departure from your usual accuracy in all things, your satisfaction with the portrait is a great pleasure to me. It has received every conceivable pains at Frith's hands, and ought on his account to be good. It is a little too much (to my thinking) as if my next-door neighbour were my deadly foe, uninsured, and I had just received tidings of his house being afire; otherwise very good. I cannot tell you how delighted we shall be if you would come to Gad's Hill. You should see some charming woods and a rare old castle, and you should have such a snug room looking over a Kentish prospect, with every facility in it for pondering on the beauties of its master's beard! _Do_ come, but you positively _must not_ come and go on the same day. We retreat there on Monday, and shall be there all the summer. My small boy is perfectly happy at Southsea, and likes the school very much. I had the finest letter two or three days ago, from another of my boys--Frank Jeffrey--at Hamburg. In this wonderful epistle he says: "Dear papa, I write to tell you that I have given up all thoughts of being a doctor. My conviction that I shall never get over my stammering is the cause; all professions are barred against me. The only thing I should like to be is a gentleman farmer, either at the Cape, in Canada, or Australia. With my passage paid, fifteen pounds, a horse, and a rifle, I could go two or three hundred miles up country, sow grain, buy cattle, and in time be very comfortable." Considering the consequences of executing the little commission by the next steamer, I perceived that the first consequence of the fifteen pounds would be that he would be robbed of it--of the horse, that it would throw him--and of the rifle, that it would blow his head off; which probabilities I took the liberty of mentioning, as being against the scheme. With best love from all, Ever believe me, my dear Mrs. Watson, Your faithful and affectionate. [Sidenote: Mrs. White.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Sunday, June 5th, 1859._ MY DEAR MRS. WHITE, I do not write to you this morning because I have anything to say--I well know where your consolation is set, and to what beneficent figure your thoughts are raised--but simply because you are so much in my mind that it is a relief to send you and dear White my love. You are always in our hearts and on our lips. May the great God comfort you! You know that Mary and Katie are coming on Thursday. They will bring dear Lotty what she little needs with you by her side--love; and I hope their company will interest and please her. There is nothing that they, or any of us, would not do for her. She is a part of us all, and has belonged to us, as well as to you, these many years. Ever your affectionate and faithful. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GAD'S HILL, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, June 11th, 1859._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, On Saturday night I found, very much to my surprise and pleasure, the photograph on my table at Tavistock House. It is not a very pleasant or cheerful presentation of my daughters; but it is wonderfully like for all that, and in some details remarkably good. When I came home here yesterday I tried it in the large Townshend stereoscope, in which it shows to great advantage. It is in the little stereoscope at present on the drawing-room table. One of the balustrades of the destroyed old Rochester bridge has been (very nicely) presented to me by the contractor for the works, and has been duly stonemasoned and set up on the lawn behind the house. I have ordered a sun-dial for the top of it, and it will be a very good object indeed. The Plorn is highly excited to-day by reason of an institution which he tells me (after questioning George) is called the "Cobb, or Bodderin," holding a festival at The Falstaff. He is possessed of some vague information that they go to Higham Church, in pursuance of some old usage, and attend service there, and afterwards march round the village. It so far looks probable that they certainly started off at eleven very spare in numbers, and came back considerably recruited, which looks to me like the difference between going to church and coming to dinner. They bore no end of bright banners and broad sashes, and had a band with a terrific drum, and are now (at half-past two) dining at The Falstaff, partly in the side room on the ground-floor, and partly in a tent improvised this morning. The drum is hung up to a tree in The Falstaff garden, and looks like a tropical sort of gourd. I have presented the band with five shillings, which munificence has been highly appreciated. Ices don't seem to be provided for the ladies in the gallery--I mean the garden; they are prowling about there, endeavouring to peep in at the beef and mutton through the holes in the tent, on the whole, in a debased and degraded manner. Turk somehow cut his foot in Cobham Lanes yesterday, and Linda hers. They are both lame, and looking at each other. Fancy Mr. Townshend not intending to go for another three weeks, and designing to come down here for a few days--with Henri and Bully--on Wednesday! I wish you could have seen him alone with me on Saturday; he was so extraordinarily earnest and affectionate on my belongings and affairs in general, and not least of all on you and Katie, that he cried in a most pathetic manner, and was so affected that I was obliged to leave him among the flowerpots in the long passage at the end of the dining-room. It was a very good piece of truthfulness and sincerity, especially in one of his years, able to take life so easily. Mr. and Mrs. Wills are here now (but I daresay you know it from your aunt), and return to town with me to-morrow morning. We are now going on to the castle. Mrs. Wills was very droll last night, and told me some good stories. My dear, I wish particularly to impress upon you and dear Katie (to whom I send my other best love) that I hope your stay will not be very long. I don't think it very good for either of you, though of course I know that Lotty will be, and must be, and should be the first consideration with you both. I am very anxious to know how you found her and how you are yourself. Best love to dear Lotty and Mrs. White. The same to Mr. White and Clara. We are always talking about you all. Ever, dearest Mamie, your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Rev. James White.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, July 7th, 1859._ MY DEAR WHITE, I send my heartiest and most affectionate love to Mrs. White and you, and to Clara. You know all that I could add; you have felt it all; let it be unspoken and unwritten--it is expressed within us. Do you not think that you could all three come here, and stay with us? You and Mrs. White should have your own large room and your own ways, and should be among us when you felt disposed, and never otherwise. I do hope you would find peace here. Can it not be done? We have talked very much about it among ourselves, and the girls are strong upon it. Think of it--do! Ever your affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday Night, Aug. 25th, 1859._ MY DEAR FORSTER, Heartily glad to get your letter this morning. I cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of our brave and excellent friend the Chief Baron, in connection with that ruffian. I followed the case with so much interest, and have followed the miserable knaves and asses who have perverted it since, with so much indignation, that I have often had more than half a mind to write and thank the upright judge who tried him. I declare to God that I believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and courage can render to society. Of course I saw the beast of a prisoner (with my mind's eye) delivering his cut-and-dried speech, and read in every word of it that no one but the murderer could have delivered or conceived it. Of course I have been driving the girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain without it. Lastly, of course (though a merciful man--because a merciful man I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary (Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise) who should step in between that black scoundrel and the gallows. I can_not_ believe--and my belief in all wrong as to public matters is enormous--that such a thing will be done. I am reminded of Tennyson, by thinking that King Arthur would have made short work of the amiable ----, whom the newspapers strangely delight to make a sort of gentleman of. How fine the "Idylls" are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who can write! I thought nothing could be grander than the first poem till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to be absolutely unapproached and unapproachable. To come to myself. I have written and begged the "All the Year Round" publisher to send you directly four weeks' proofs beyond the current number, that are in type. I hope you will like them. Nothing but the interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the difficulty of the forms of treatment, nothing in the mere way of money, I mean, could also repay the time and trouble of the incessant condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque_ story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than they should express themselves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that _is_ written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway. As to coming to your retreat, my dear Forster, think how helpless I am. I am not well yet. I have an instinctive feeling that nothing but the sea will restore me, and I am planning to go and work at Ballard's, at Broadstairs, from next Wednesday to Monday. I generally go to town on Monday afternoon. All Tuesday I am at the office, on Wednesday I come back here, and go to work again. I don't leave off till Monday comes round once more. I am fighting to get my story done by the first week in October. On the 10th of October I am going away to read for a fortnight at Ipswich, Norwich, Oxford, Cambridge, and a few other places. Judge what my spare time is just now! I am very much surprised and very sorry to find from the enclosed that Elliotson has been ill. I never heard a word of it. Georgy sends best love to you and to Mrs. Forster, so do I, so does Plorn, so does Frank. The girls are, for five days, with the Whites at Ramsgate. It is raining, intensely hot, and stormy. Eighteen creatures, like little tortoises, have dashed in at the window and fallen on the paper since I began this paragraph [Illustration: ink-blot] (that was one!). I am a wretched sort of creature in my way, but it is a way that gets on somehow. And all ways have the same fingerpost at the head of them, and at every turning in them. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens and Miss Katie Dickens.] ALBION, BROADSTAIRS, _Friday, Sept. 2nd, 1859._ MY DEAREST MAMIE AND KATIE, I have been "moved" here, and am now (Ballard having added to the hotel a house we lived in three years) in our old dining-room and sitting-room, and our old drawing-room as a bedroom. My cold is so bad, both in my throat and in my chest, that I can't bathe in the sea; Tom Collin dissuaded me--thought it "bad"--but I get a heavy shower-bath at Mrs. Crampton's every morning. The baths are still hers and her husband's, but they have retired and live in "Nuckells"--are going to give a stained-glass window, value three hundred pounds, to St. Peter's Church. Tom Collin is of opinion that the Miss Dickenses has growed two fine young women--leastwise, asking pardon, ladies. An evangelical family of most disagreeable girls prowl about here and trip people up with tracts, which they put in the paths with stones upon them to keep them from blowing away. Charles Collins and I having seen a bill yesterday--about a mesmeric young lady who did feats, one of which was set forth in the bill, in a line by itself, as THE RIGID LEGS, --were overpowered with curiosity, and resolved to go. It came off in the Assembly Room, now more exquisitely desolate than words can describe. Eighteen shillings was the "take." Behind a screen among the company, we heard mysterious gurglings of water before the entertainment began, and then a slippery sound which occasioned me to whisper C. C. (who laughed in the most ridiculous manner), "Soap." It proved to be the young lady washing herself. She must have been wonderfully dirty, for she took a world of trouble, and didn't come out clean after all--in a wretched dirty muslin frock, with blue ribbons. She was the alleged mesmeriser, and a boy who distributed bills the alleged mesmerised. It was a most preposterous imposition, but more ludicrous than any poor sight I ever saw. The boy is clearly out of pantomime, and when he pretended to be in the mesmeric state, made the company back by going in among them head over heels, backwards, half-a-dozen times, in a most insupportable way. The pianist had struck; and the manner in which the lecturer implored "some lady" to play a "polker," and the manner in which no lady would; and in which the few ladies who were there sat with their hats on, and the elastic under their chins, as if it were going to blow, is never to be forgotten. I have been writing all the morning, and am going for a walk to Ramsgate. This is a beast of a letter, but I am not well, and have been addling my head. Ever, dear Girls, your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday Night, Sept. 16th, 1859._ MY DEAR WILKIE, Just a word to say that I have received yours, and that I look forward to the reunion on Thursday, when I hope to have the satisfaction of recounting to you the plot of a play that has been laid before me for commending advice. Ditto to what you say respecting the _Great Eastern_. I went right up to London Bridge by the boat that day, on purpose that I might pass her. I thought her the ugliest and most unshiplike thing these eyes ever beheld. I wouldn't go to sea in her, shiver my ould timbers and rouse me up with a monkey's tail (man-of-war metaphor), not to chuck a biscuit into Davy Jones's weather eye, and see double with my own old toplights. Turk has been so good as to produce from his mouth, for the wholesome consternation of the family, eighteen feet of worm. When he had brought it up, he seemed to think it might be turned to account in the housekeeping and was proud. Pony has kicked a shaft off the cart, and is to be sold. Why don't you buy her? she'd never kick with you. Barber's opinion is, that them fruit-trees, one and all, is touchwood, and not fit for burning at any gentleman's fire; also that the stocking of this here garden is worth less than nothing, because you wouldn't have to grub up nothing, and something takes a man to do it at three-and-sixpence a day. Was "left desponding" by your reporter. I have had immense difficulty to find a man for the stable-yard here. Barber having at last engaged one this morning, I enquired if he had a decent hat for driving in, to which Barber returned this answer: "Why, sir, not to deceive you, that man flatly say that he never have wore that article since man he was!" I am consequently fortified into my room, and am afraid to go out to look at him. Love from all. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, Oct. 15th, 1859._ MY DEAR REGNIER, You will receive by railway parcel the proof-sheets of a story of mine, that has been for some time in progress in my weekly journal, and that will be published in a complete volume about the middle of November. Nobody but Forster has yet seen the latter portions of it, or will see them until they are published. I want you to read it for two reasons. Firstly, because I hope it is the best story I have written. Secondly, because it treats of a very remarkable time in France; and I should very much like to know what you think of its being dramatised for a French theatre. If you should think it likely to be done, I should be glad to take some steps towards having it well done. The story is an extraordinary success here, and I think the end of it is certain to make a still greater sensation. Don't trouble yourself to write to me, _mon ami_, until you shall have had time to read the proofs. Remember, they are _proofs_, and _private_; the latter chapters will not be before the public for five or six weeks to come. With kind regards to Madame Regnier, in which my daughters and their aunt unite, Believe me, ever faithfully yours. P.S.--The story (I daresay you have not seen any of it yet) is called "A Tale of Two Cities." [Sidenote: Mr. Frank Stone, A.R.A.] PETERBOROUGH, _Wednesday Evening, Oct. 19th, 1859._ MY DEAR STONE, We had a splendid rush last night--exactly as we supposed, with the pressure on the two shillings, of whom we turned a crowd away. They were a far finer audience than on the previous night; I think the finest I have ever read to. They took every word of the "Dombey" in quite an amazing manner, and after the child's death, paused a little, and then set up a shout that it did one good to hear. Mrs. Gamp then set in with a roar, which lasted until I had done. I think everybody for the time forgot everything but the matter in hand. It was as fine an instance of thorough absorption in a fiction as any of us are likely to see ever again. ---- (in an exquisite red mantle), accompanied by her sister (in another exquisite red mantle) and by the deaf lady, (who leaned a black head-dress, exactly like an old-fashioned tea-urn without the top, against the wall), was charming. HE couldn't get at her on account of the pressure. HE tried to peep at her from the side door, but she (ha, ha, ha!) was unconscious of his presence. I read to her, and goaded him to madness. He is just sane enough to send his kindest regards. This is a place which--except the cathedral, with the loveliest front I ever saw--is like the back door to some other place. It is, I should hope, the deadest and most utterly inert little town in the British dominions. The magnates have taken places, and the bookseller is of opinion that "such is the determination to do honour to Mr. Dickens, that the doors _must_ be opened half an hour before the appointed time." You will picture to yourself Arthur's quiet indignation at this, and the manner in which he remarked to me at dinner, "that he turned away twice Peterborough last night." A very pretty room--though a Corn Exchange--and a room we should have been glad of at Cambridge, as it is large, bright, and cheerful, and wonderfully well lighted. The difficulty of getting to Bradford from here to-morrow, at any time convenient to us, turned out to be so great, that we are all going in for Leeds (only three-quarters of an hour from Bradford) to-night after the reading, at a quarter-past eleven. We are due at Leeds a quarter before three. So no more at present from, Yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. R. Sculthorpe.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Thursday, Nov. 10th, 1859._ DEAR SIR, Judgment must go by default. I have not a word to plead against Dodson and Fogg. I am without any defence to the action; and therefore, as law goes, ought to win it. Seriously, the date of your hospitable note disturbs my soul. But I have been incessantly writing in Kent and reading in all sorts of places, and have done nothing in my own personal character these many months; and now I come to town and our friend[5] is away! Let me take that defaulting miscreant into council when he comes back. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday, Nov. 16th, 1859._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I send you ten thousand thanks for your kind and explicit letter. What I particularly wished to ascertain from you was, whether it is likely the Censor would allow such a piece to be played in Paris. In the case of its being likely, then I wished to have the piece as well done as possible, and would even have proposed to come to Paris to see it rehearsed. But I very much doubted whether the general subject would not be objectionable to the Government, and what you write with so much sagacity and with such care convinces me at once that its representation would be prohibited. Therefore I altogether abandon and relinquish the idea. But I am just as heartily and cordially obliged to you for your interest and friendship, as if the book had been turned into a play five hundred times. I again thank you ten thousand times, and am quite sure that you are right. I only hope you will forgive my causing you so much trouble, after your hard work. My girls and Georgina send their kindest regards to Madame Regnier and to you. My Gad's Hill house (I think I omitted to tell you, in reply to your enquiry) is on the very scene of Falstaff's robbery. There is a little _cabaret_ at the roadside, still called The Sir John Falstaff. And the country, in all its general features, is, at this time, what it was in Shakespeare's. I hope you will see the house before long. It is really a pretty place, and a good residence for an English writer, is it not? Macready, we are all happy to hear from himself, is going to leave the dreary tomb in which he lives, at Sherborne, and to remove to Cheltenham, a large and handsome place, about four or five hours' railway journey from London, where his poor girls will at least see and hear some life. Madame Céleste was with me yesterday, wishing to dramatise "A Tale of Two Cities" for the Lyceum, after bringing out the Christmas pantomime. I gave her my permission and the book; but I fear that her company (troupe) is a very poor one. This is all the news I have, except (which is no news at all) that I feel as if I had not seen you for fifty years, and that I am ever your attached and faithful Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. T. Longman.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, Nov. 28th, 1859._ MY DEAR LONGMAN, I am very anxious to present to you, with the earnest hope that you will hold him in your remembrance, young Mr. Marcus Stone, son of poor Frank Stone, who died suddenly but a little week ago. You know, I daresay, what a start this young man made in the last exhibition, and what a favourable notice his picture attracted. He wishes to make an additional opening for himself in the illustration of books. He is an admirable draughtsman, has a most dexterous hand, a charming sense of grace and beauty, and a capital power of observation. These qualities in him I know well of my own knowledge. He is in all things modest, punctual, and right; and I would answer for him, if it were needful, with my head. If you will put anything in his way, you will do it a second time, I am certain. Faithfully yours always. FOOTNOTES: [5] Mr. Edmund Yates. 1860. NARRATIVE. This winter was the last spent at Tavistock House. Charles Dickens had for some time been inclining to the idea of making his home altogether at Gad's Hill, giving up his London house, and taking a furnished house for the sake of his daughters for a few months of the London season. And, as his daughter Kate was to be married this summer to Mr. Charles Collins, this intention was confirmed and carried out. He made arrangements for the sale of Tavistock House to Mr. Davis, a Jewish gentleman, and he gave up possession of it in September. Up to this time Gad's Hill had been furnished merely as a temporary summer residence--pictures, library, and all best furniture being left in the London house. He now set about beautifying and making Gad's Hill thoroughly comfortable and homelike. And there was not a year afterwards, up to the year of his death, that he did not make some addition or improvement to it. He also furnished, as a private residence, a sitting-room and some bedrooms at his office in Wellington Street, to be used, when there was no house in London, as occasional town quarters by himself, his daughter, and sister-in-law. He began in this summer his occasional papers for "All the Year Round," which he called "The Uncommercial Traveller," and which were continued at intervals in his journal until 1869. In the autumn of this year he began another story, to be published weekly in "All the Year Round." The letter to Mr. Forster, which we give, tells him of this beginning and gives him the name of the book. The first number of "Great Expectations" appeared on the 1st December. The Christmas number, this time, was written jointly by himself and Mr. Wilkie Collins. The scene was laid at Clovelly, and they made a journey together into Devonshire and Cornwall, for the purpose of this story, in November. The letter to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton is, unfortunately, the only one we have as yet been able to procure. The present Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, has kindly endeavoured to help us even during his absence from England. But it was found to be impossible without his own assistance to make the necessary search among his father's papers. And he has promised us that, on his return, he will find and lend to us, many letters from Charles Dickens, which are certainly in existence, to his distinguished fellow-writer and great friend. We hope, therefore, it may be possible for us at some future time to be able to publish these letters, as well as those addressed to the present Lord Lytton (when he was Mr. Robert Lytton, otherwise "Owen Meredith," and frequent contributor to "Household Words" and "All the Year Round"). We have the same hope with regard to letters addressed to Sir Henry Layard, at present Ambassador at Constantinople, which, of course, for the same reason, cannot be lent to us at the present time. We give a letter to Mr. Forster on one of his books on the Commonwealth, the "Impeachment of the Five Members;" which, as with other letters which we are glad to publish on the subject of Mr. Forster's own works, was not used by himself for obvious reasons. A letter to his daughter Mamie (who, after her sister's marriage, paid a visit with her dear friends the White family to Scotland, where she had a serious illness) introduces a recent addition to the family, who became an important member of it, and one to whom Charles Dickens was very tenderly attached--her little white Pomeranian dog "Mrs. Bouncer" (so called after the celebrated lady of that name in "Box and Cox"). It is quite necessary to make this formal introduction of the little pet animal (who lived to be a very old dog and died in 1874), because future letters to his daughter contain constant references and messages to "Mrs. Bouncer," which would be quite unintelligible without this explanation. "Boy," also referred to in this letter, was his daughter's horse. The little dog and the horse were gifts to Mamie Dickens from her friends Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Smith, and the sister of the latter, Miss Craufurd. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Monday, Jan. 2nd, 1860._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, A happy New Year to you, and many happy years! I cannot tell you how delighted I was to receive your Christmas letter, or with what pleasure I have received Forster's emphatic accounts of your health and spirits. But when was I ever wrong? And when did I not tell you that you were an impostor in pretending to grow older as the rest of us do, and that you had a secret of your own for reversing the usual process! It happened that I read at Cheltenham a couple of months ago, and that I have rarely seen a place that so attracted my fancy. I had never seen it before. Also I believe the character of its people to have greatly changed for the better. All sorts of long-visaged prophets had told me that they were dull, stolid, slow, and I don't know what more that is disagreeable. I found them exactly the reverse in all respects; and I saw an amount of beauty there--well--that is not to be more specifically mentioned to you young fellows. Katie dined with us yesterday, looking wonderfully well, and singing "Excelsior" with a certain dramatic fire in her, whereof I seem to remember having seen sparks afore now. Etc. etc. etc. With kindest love from all at home to all with you, Ever, my dear Macready, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C., _Saturday Night, Jan. 7th, 1860._ MY DEAR WILKIE, I have read this book with great care and attention. There cannot be a doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing, and most especially in respect of tenderness. In character it is excellent. Mr. Fairlie as good as the lawyer, and the lawyer as good as he. Mr. Vesey and Miss Halcombe, in their different ways, equally meritorious. Sir Percival, also, is most skilfully shown, though I doubt (you see what small points I come to) whether any man ever showed uneasiness by hand or foot without being forced by nature to show it in his face too. The story is very interesting, and the writing of it admirable. I seem to have noticed, here and there, that the great pains you take express themselves a trifle too much, and you know that I always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention, and which I have always observed them to resent when they find it out--as they always will and do. But on turning to the book again, I find it difficult to take out an instance of this. It rather belongs to your habit of thought and manner of going about the work. Perhaps I express my meaning best when I say that the three people who write the narratives in these proofs have a DISSECTIVE property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours; and that my own effort would be to strike more of what is got _that way_ out of them by collision with one another, and by the working of the story. You know what an interest I have felt in your powers from the beginning of our friendship, and how very high I rate them? _I_ know that this is an admirable book, and that it grips the difficulties of the weekly portion and throws them in masterly style. No one else could do it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing; and I am absolutely certain that you never did half so well yourself. So go on and prosper, and let me see some more, when you have enough (for your own satisfaction) to show me. I think of coming in to back you up if I can get an idea for my series of gossiping papers. One of those days, please God, we may do a story together; I have very odd half-formed notions, in a mist, of something that might be done that way. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] 11, WELLINGTON STREET, NORTH STRAND, LONDON, W.C., _Wednesday, May 2nd, 1860._ MY DEAR FORSTER, It did not occur to me in reading your most excellent, interesting, and remarkable book, that it could with any reason be called one-sided. If Clarendon had never written his "History of the Rebellion," then I can understand that it might be. But just as it would be impossible to answer an advocate who had misstated the merits of a case for his own purpose, without, in the interests of truth, and not of the other side merely, re-stating the merits and showing them in their real form, so I cannot see the practicability of telling what you had to tell without in some sort championing the misrepresented side, and I think that you don't do that as an advocate, but as a judge. The evidence has been suppressed and coloured, and the judge goes through it and puts it straight. It is not _his_ fault if it all goes one way and tends to one plain conclusion. Nor is it his fault that it goes the further when it is laid out straight, or seems to do so, because it was so knotted and twisted up before. I can understand any man's, and particularly Carlyle's, having a lingering respect that does not like to be disturbed for those (in the best sense of the word) loyal gentlemen of the country who went with the king and were so true to him. But I don't think Carlyle sufficiently considers that the great mass of those gentlemen _didn't know the truth_, that it was a part of their loyalty to believe what they were told on the king's behalf, and that it is reasonable to suppose that the king was too artful to make known to _them_ (especially after failure) what were very acceptable designs to the desperate soldiers of fortune about Whitehall. And it was to me a curious point of adventitious interest arising out of your book, to reflect on the probability of their having been as ignorant of the real scheme in Charles's head, as their descendants and followers down to this time, and to think with pity and admiration that they believed the cause to be so much better than it was. This is a notion I was anxious to have expressed in our account of the book in these pages. For I don't suppose Clarendon, or any other such man to sit down and tell posterity something that he has not "tried on" in his own time. Do you? In the whole narrative I saw nothing anywhere to which I demurred. I admired it all, went with it all, and was proud of my friend's having written it all. I felt it to be all square and sound and right, and to be of enormous importance in these times. Firstly, to the people who (like myself) are so sick of the shortcomings of representative government as to have no interest in it. Secondly, to the humbugs at Westminster who have come down--a long, long way--from those men, as you know. When the great remonstrance came out, I was in the thick of my story, and was always busy with it; but I am very glad I didn't read it then, as I shall read it now to much better purpose. All the time I was at work on the "Two Cities," I read no books but such as had the air of the time in them. To return for a final word to the Five Members. I thought the marginal references overdone. Here and there, they had a comical look to me for that reason, and reminded me of shows and plays where everything is in the bill. Lastly, I should have written to you--as I had a strong inclination to do, and ought to have done, immediately after reading the book--but for a weak reason; of all things in the world I have lost heart in one--I hope no other--I cannot, times out of calculation, make up my mind to write a letter. Ever, my dear Forster, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] TAVISTOCK HOUSE, _Thursday, May 3rd, 1860._ MY DEAR CERJAT, The date of this letter would make me horribly ashamed of myself, if I didn't know that _you_ know how difficult letter-writing is to one whose trade it is to write. You asked me on Christmas Eve about my children. My second daughter is going to be married in the course of the summer to Charles Collins, the brother of Wilkie Collins, the novelist. The father was one of the most famous painters of English green lanes and coast pieces. He was bred an artist; is a writer, too, and does "The Eye Witness," in "All the Year Round." He is a gentleman, accomplished, and amiable. My eldest daughter has not yet started any conveyance on the road to matrimony (that I know of); but it is likely enough that she will, as she is very agreeable and intelligent. They are both very pretty. My eldest boy, Charley, has been in Barings' house for three or four years, and is now going to Hong Kong, strongly backed up by Barings, to buy tea on his own account, as a means of forming a connection and seeing more of the practical part of a merchant's calling, before starting in London for himself. His brother Frank (Jeffrey's godson) I have just recalled from France and Germany, to come and learn business, and qualify himself to join his brother on his return from the Celestial Empire. The next boy, Sydney Smith, is designed for the navy, and is in training at Portsmouth, awaiting his nomination. He is about three foot high, with the biggest eyes ever seen, and is known in the Portsmouth parts as "Young Dickens, who can do everything." Another boy is at school in France; the youngest of all has a private tutor at home. I have forgotten the second in order, who is in India. He went out as ensign of a non-existent native regiment, got attached to the 42nd Highlanders, one of the finest regiments in the Queen's service; has remained with them ever since, and got made a lieutenant by the chances of the rebellious campaign, before he was eighteen. Miss Hogarth, always Miss Hogarth, is the guide, philosopher, and friend of all the party, and a very close affection exists between her and the girls. I doubt if she will ever marry. I don't know whether to be glad of it or sorry for it. I have laid down my pen and taken a long breath after writing this family history. I have also considered whether there are any more children, and I don't think there are. If I should remember two or three others presently, I will mention them in a postscript. We think Townshend looking a little the worse for the winter, and we perceive Bully to be decidedly old upon his legs, and of a most diabolical turn of mind. When they first arrived the weather was very dark and cold, and kept them indoors. It has since turned very warm and bright, but with a dusty and sharp east wind. They are still kept indoors by this change, and I begin to wonder what change will let them out. Townshend dines with us every Sunday. You may be sure that we always talk of you and yours, and drink to you heartily. Public matters here are thought to be rather improving; the deep mistrust of the gentleman in Paris being counteracted by the vigorous state of preparation into which the nation is getting. You will have observed, of course, that we establish a new defaulter in respect of some great trust, about once a quarter. The last one, the cashier of a City bank, is considered to have distinguished himself greatly, a quarter of a million of money being high game. No, my friend, I have not shouldered my rifle yet, but I should do so on more pressing occasion. Every other man in the row of men I know--if they were all put in a row--is a volunteer though. There is a tendency rather to overdo the wearing of the uniform, but that is natural enough in the case of the youngest men. The turn-out is generally very creditable indeed. At the ball they had (in a perfectly unventilated building), their new leather belts and pouches smelt so fearfully that it was, as my eldest daughter said, like shoemaking in a great prison. She, consequently, distinguished herself by fainting away in the most inaccessible place in the whole structure, and being brought out (horizontally) by a file of volunteers, like some slain daughter of Albion whom they were carrying into the street to rouse the indignant valour of the populace. Lord, my dear Cerjat, when I turn to that page of your letter where you write like an ancient sage in whom the fire has paled into a meek-eyed state of coolness and virtue, I half laugh and half cry! _You_ old! _You_ a sort of hermit? Boh! Get out. With this comes my love and all our loves, to you and Mrs. Cerjat, and your daughter. I add my special and particular to the sweet "singing cousin." When shall you and I meet, and where? Must I come to see Townshend? I begin to think so. Ever, my dear Cerjat, your affectionate and faithful. [Sidenote: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.] GAD'S HILL, _Tuesday, June 5th, 1860._ MY DEAR BULWER LYTTON, I am very much interested and gratified by your letter concerning "A Tale of Two Cities." I do not quite agree with you on two points, but that is no deduction from my pleasure. In the first place, although the surrender of the feudal privileges (on a motion seconded by a nobleman of great rank) was the occasion of a sentimental scene, I see no reason to doubt, but on the contrary, many reasons to believe, that some of these privileges had been used to the frightful oppression of the peasant, quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the doctor's narrative, which, you will remember, dates long before the Terror. And surely when the new philosophy was the talk of the salons and the slang of the hour, it is not unreasonable or unallowable to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out, as his nephew represents the time coming in; as to the condition of the peasant in France generally at that day, I take it that if anything be certain on earth it is certain that it was intolerable. No _ex post facto_ enquiries and provings by figures will hold water, surely, against the tremendous testimony of men living at the time. There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to make out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal dictionary-like minuteness, scattered up and down the pages of which is full authority for my marquis. This is "Mercier's Tableau de Paris." Rousseau is the authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when he had a bit of meat. The tax-taker was the authority for the wretched creature's impoverishment. I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting that canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident is inseparable from the passion and emotion of the character, where it is strictly consistent with the whole design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the character which the whole story has led up to, it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to bring about that catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure, and of opposing that mean death--instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she wouldn't have minded--to the dignity of Carton's wrong or right; this _was_ the design, and seemed to be in the fitness of things. Now, as to the reading. I am sorry to say that it is out of the question this season. I have had an attack of rheumatism--quite a stranger to me--which remains hovering about my left side, after having doubled me up in the back, and which would disable me from standing for two hours. I have given up all dinners and town engagements, and come to my little Falstaff House here, sensible of the necessity of country training all through the summer. Smith would have proposed any appointment to see you on the subject, but he has been dreadfully ill with tic. Whenever I read in London, I will gladly put a night aside for your purpose, and we will plot to connect your name with it, and give it some speciality. But this could not be before Christmas time, as I should not be able to read sooner, for in the hot weather it would be useless. Let me hear from you about this when you have considered it. It would greatly diminish the expenses, remember. Ever affectionately and faithfully. [Sidenote: The Lord John Russell.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, June 17th, 1860._ MY DEAR LORD JOHN RUSSELL, I cannot thank you enough for your kind note and its most welcome enclosure. My sailor-boy comes home from Portsmouth to-morrow, and will be overjoyed. His masters have been as anxious for getting his nomination as though it were some distinction for themselves. Ever your faithful and obliged. [Sidenote: The Earl of Carlisle.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, Aug. 8th, 1860._ MY DEAR LORD CARLISLE, Coming back here after an absence of three days in town, I find your kind and cordial letter lying on my table. I heartily thank you for it, and highly esteem it. I understand that the article on the spirits to which you refer was written by ---- (he played an Irish porter in one scene of Bulwer's comedy at Devonshire House). Between ourselves, I think it must be taken with a few grains of salt, imperial measure. The experiences referred to "came off" at ----, where the spirit of ---- (among an extensive and miscellaneous bodiless circle) _dines_ sometimes! Mr. ----, the high priest of the mysteries, I have some considerable reason--derived from two honourable men--for mistrusting. And that some of the disciples are very easy of belief I know. This is Falstaff's own Gad's Hill, and I live on the top of it. All goes well with me, thank God! I should be thoroughly delighted to see you again, and to show you where the robbery was done. My eldest daughter keeps my house, and it is one I was extraordinarily fond of when a child. My dear Lord Carlisle, ever affectionately yours. P.S.--I am prowling about, meditating a new book. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Sept. 4th, 1860._ MY DEAR WILLS, Your description of your sea-castle makes your room here look uncommonly dusty. Likewise the costermongers in the street outside, and the one customer (drunk, with his head on the table) in the Crown Coffee House over the way, in York Street, have an earthy, and, as I may say, a land-lubberly aspect. Cape Horn, to the best of _my_ belief, is a tremendous way off, and there are more bricks and cabbage-leaves between this office and that dismal point of land than _you_ can possibly imagine. Coming here from the station this morning, I met, coming from the execution of the Wentworth murderer, such a tide of ruffians as never could have flowed from any point but the gallows. Without any figure of speech it turned one white and sick to behold them. Tavistock House is cleared to-day, and possession delivered up. I must say that in all things the purchaser has behaved thoroughly well, and that I cannot call to mind any occasion when I have had money dealings with a Christian that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting. I am ornamented at present with one of my most intensely preposterous and utterly indescribable colds. If you were to make a voyage from Cape Horn to Wellington Street, you would scarcely recognise in the bowed form, weeping eyes, rasped nose, and snivelling wretch whom you would encounter here, the once gay and sparkling, etc. etc. Everything else here is as quiet as possible. Business reports you receive from Holsworth. Wilkie looked in to-day, going to Gloucestershire for a week. The office is full of discarded curtains and coverings from Tavistock House, which Georgina is coming up this evening to select from and banish. Mary is in raptures with the beauties of Dunkeld, but is not very well in health. The Admiral (Sydney) goes up for his examination to-morrow. If he fails to pass with credit, I will never believe in anybody again, so in that case look out for your own reputation with me. This is really all the news I have, except that I am lazy, and that Wilkie dines here next Tuesday, in order that we may have a talk about the Christmas number. I beg to send my kind regard to Mrs. Wills, and to enquire how she likes wearing a hat, which of course she does. I also want to know from her in confidence whether _Crwllm festidiniog llymthll y wodd_? Yesterday I burnt, in the field at Gad's Hill, the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years. They sent up a smoke like the genie when he got out of the casket on the seashore; and as it was an exquisite day when I began, and rained very heavily when I finished, I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the heavens. Ever faithfully. P.S.--Kind regard to Mr. and Mrs. Novelli.[6] I have just sent out for _The Globe_. No news. Hullah's daughter (an artist) tells me that certain female students have addressed the Royal Academy, entreating them to find a place for their education. I think it a capital move, for which I can do something popular and telling in _The Register_. Adelaide Procter is active in the business, and has a copy of their letter. Will you write to her for that, and anything else she may have about it, telling her that I strongly approve, and want to help them myself? [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday Night, Sept. 14th, 1860._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I lose no time in answering your letter; and first as to business, the school in the High Town at Boulogne was excellent. The boys all English, the two proprietors an old Eton master and one of the Protestant clergymen of the town. The teaching unusually sound and good. The manner and conduct developed in the boys quite admirable. But I have never seen a gentleman so perfectly acquainted with boy-nature as the Eton master. There was a perfect understanding between him and his charges; nothing pedantic on his part, nothing slavish on their parts. The result was, that either with him or away from him, the boys combined an ease and frankness with a modesty and sense of responsibility that was really above all praise. Alfred went from there to a great school at Wimbledon, where they train for India and the artillery and engineers. Sydney went from there to Mr. Barrow, at Southsea. In both instances the new masters wrote to me of their own accord, bearing quite unsolicited testimony to the merits of the old, and expressing their high recognition of what they had done. These things speak for themselves. Sydney has just passed his examination as a naval cadet and come home, all eyes and gold buttons. He has twelve days' leave before going on board the training-ship. Katie and her husband are in France, and seem likely to remain there for an indefinite period. Mary is on a month's visit in Scotland; Georgina, Frank, and Plorn are at home here; and we all want Mary and her little dog back again. I have sold Tavistock House, am making this rather complete in its way, and am on the restless eve of beginning a new big book; but mean to have a furnished house in town (in some accessible quarter) from February or so to June. May we meet there. Your handwriting is always so full of pleasant memories to me, that when I took it out of the post-office at Rochester this afternoon it quite stirred my heart. But we must not think of old times as sad times, or regard them as anything but the fathers and mothers of the present. We must all climb steadily up the mountain after the talking bird, the singing tree, and the yellow water, and must all bear in mind that the previous climbers who were scared into looking back got turned into black stone. Mary Boyle was here a little while ago, as affectionate at heart as ever, as young, and as pleasant. Of course we talked often of you. So let me know when you are established in Halfmoon Street, and I shall be truly delighted to come and see you. For my attachments are strong attachments and never weaken. In right of bygones, I feel as if "all Northamptonshire" belonged to me, as all Northumberland did to Lord Bateman in the ballad. In memory of your warming your feet at the fire in that waste of a waiting-room when I read at Brighton, I have ever since taken that watering-place to my bosom as I never did before. And you and Switzerland are always one to me, and always inseparable. Charley was heard of yesterday, from Shanghai, going to Japan, intending to meet his brother Walter at Calcutta, and having an idea of beguiling the time between whiles by asking to be taken as an amateur with the English Chinese forces. Everybody caressed him and asked him everywhere, and he seemed to go. With kind regards, my dear Mrs. Watson, Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Sept. 23rd, 1860._ ON THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER. MY DEAR E. Y., I did not write to you in your bereavement, because I knew that the girls had written to you, and because I instinctively shrunk from making a form of what was so real. _You_ knew what a loving and faithful remembrance I always had of your mother as a part of my youth--no more capable of restoration than my youth itself. All the womanly goodness, grace, and beauty of my drama went out with her. To the last I never could hear her voice without emotion. I think of her as of a beautiful part of my own youth, and this dream that we are all dreaming seems to darken. But it is not to say this that I write now. It comes to the point of my pen in spite of me. "Holding up the Mirror" is in next week's number. I have taken out all this funeral part of it. Not because I disliked it (for, indeed, I thought it the best part of the paper), but because it rather grated on me, going over the proof at that time, as a remembrance that would be better reserved a little while. Also because it made rather a mixture of yourself as an individual, with something that does not belong or attach to you as an individual. You can have the MS.; and as a part of a paper describing your own juvenile remembrances of a theatre, there it is, needing no change or adaption. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Sept. 23rd, 1860._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, If you had been away from us and ill with anybody in the world but our dear Mrs. White, I should have been in a state of the greatest anxiety and uneasiness about you. But as I know it to be impossible that you could be in kinder or better hands, I was not in the least restless about you, otherwise than as it grieved me to hear of my poor dear girl's suffering such pain. I hope it is over now for many a long day, and that you will come back to us a thousand times better in health than you left us. Don't come back too soon. Take time and get well restored. There is no hurry, the house is not near to-rights yet, and though we all want you, and though Boy wants you, we all (including Boy) deprecate a fatiguing journey being taken too soon. As to the carpenters, they are absolutely maddening. They are always at work, yet never seem to do anything. Lillie was down on Friday, and said (his eye fixed on Maidstone, and rubbing his hand to conciliate his moody employer) that "he didn't think there would be very much left to do after Saturday, the 29th." I didn't throw him out of the window. Your aunt tells you all the news, and leaves me no chance of distinguishing myself, I know. You have been told all about my brackets in the drawing-room, all about the glass rescued from the famous stage-wreck of Tavistock House, all about everything here and at the office. The office is really a success. As comfortable, cheerful, and private as anything of the kind can possibly be. I took the Admiral (but this you know too, no doubt) to Dollond's, the mathematical instrument maker's, last Monday, to buy that part of his outfit. His sextant (which is about the size and shape of a cocked hat), on being applied to his eye, entirely concealed him. Not the faintest vestige of the distinguished officer behind it was perceptible to the human vision. All through the City, people turned round and stared at him with the sort of pleasure people take in a little model. We went on to Chatham this day week, in search of some big man-of-war's-man who should be under obligation to salute him--unfortunately found none. But this no doubt you know too, and all my news falls flat. I am driven out of my room by paint, and am writing in the best spare room. The whole prospect is excessively wet; it does not rain now, but yesterday it did tremendously, and it rained very heavily in the night. We are even muddy; and that is saying a great deal in this dry country of chalk and sand. Everywhere the corn is lying out and saturated with wet. The hops (nearly everywhere) look as if they had been burnt. In my mind's eye I behold Mrs. Bouncer, still with some traces of her late anxiety on her faithful countenance, balancing herself a little unequally on her bow fore-legs, pricking up her ears, with her head on one side, and slightly opening her intellectual nostrils. I send my loving and respectful duty to her. To dear Mrs. White, and to White, and to Clara, say anything from me that is loving and grateful. My dearest Mamie, Ever and ever your most affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Monday Night, Sept. 24th, 1860._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, At the Waterloo station we were saluted with "Hallo! here's Dickens!" from divers naval cadets, and Sir Richard Bromley introduced himself to me, who had his cadet son with him, a friend of Sydney's. We went down together, and the boys were in the closest alliance. Bromley being Accountant-General of the Navy, and having influence on board, got their hammocks changed so that they would be serving side by side, at which they were greatly pleased. The moment we stepped on board, the "Hul-lo! here's Dickens!" was repeated on all sides, and the Admiral (evidently highly popular) shook hands with about fifty of his messmates. Taking Bromley for my model (with whom I fraternised in the most pathetic manner), I gave Sydney a sovereign before stepping over the side. He was as little overcome as it was possible for a boy to be, and stood waving the gold-banded cap as we came ashore in a boat. There is no denying that he looks very small aboard a great ship, and that a boy must have a strong and decided speciality for the sea to take to such a life. Captain Harris was not on board, but the other chief officers were, and were highly obliging. We went over the ship. I should say that there can be little or no individuality of address to any particular boy, but that they all tumble through their education in a crowded way. The Admiral's servant (I mean our Admiral's) had an idiotic appearance, but perhaps it did him injustice (a mahogany-faced marine by station). The Admiral's washing apparatus is about the size of a muffin-plate, and he could easily live in his chest. The meeting with Bromley was a piece of great good fortune, and the dear old chap could not have been left more happily. Ever, my dearest Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Power.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Sept. 25th, 1860._ MY DEAR MARGUERITE, I like the article exceedingly, and think the translations _admirable_--spirited, fresh, bold, and evidently faithful. I will get the paper into the next number I make up, No. 78. I will send a proof to you for your correction, either next Monday or this day week. Or would you like to come here next Monday and dine with us at five, and go over to Madame Céleste's opening? Then you could correct your paper on the premises, as they drink their beer at the beer-shops. Some of the introductory remarks on French literature I propose to strike out, as a little too essayical for this purpose, and likely to throw out a large portion of the large audience at starting, as suggesting some very different kind of article. My daring pen shall have imbued its murderous heart with ink before you see the proof. With kind regards, Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, Oct. 4th, 1860._ MY DEAR FORSTER, It would be a great pleasure to me to come to you, an immense pleasure, and to sniff the sea I love (from the shore); but I fear I must come down one morning and come back at night. I will tell you why. Last week, I got to work on a new story. I called a council of war at the office on Tuesday. It was perfectly clear that the one thing to be done was, for me to strike in. I have therefore decided to begin a story, the length of the "Tale of Two Cities," on the 1st of December--begin publishing, that is. I must make the most I can out of the book. When I come down, I will bring you the first two or three weekly parts. The name is, "GREAT EXPECTATIONS." I think a good name? Now the preparations to get ahead, combined with the absolute necessity of my giving a good deal of time to the Christmas number, will tie me to the grindstone pretty tightly. It will be just as much as I can hope to do. Therefore, what I had hoped would be a few days at Eastbourne diminish to a few hours. I took the Admiral down to Portsmouth. Every maritime person in the town knew him. He seemed to know every boy on board the _Britannia_, and was a tremendous favourite evidently. It was very characteristic of him that they good-naturedly helped him, he being so very small, into his hammock at night. But he couldn't rest in it on these terms, and got out again to learn the right way of getting in independently. Official report stated that "after a few spills, he succeeded perfectly, and went to sleep." He is perfectly happy on board, takes tea with the captain, leads choruses on Saturday nights, and has an immense marine for a servant. I saw Edmund Yates at the office, and he told me that during all his mother's wanderings of mind, which were almost incessant at last, she never once went back to the old Adelphi days until she was just dying, when he heard her say, in great perplexity: "I can _not_ get the words." Best love to Mrs. Forster. Ever, my dear Forster, affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Oct. 24th, 1860._ MY DEAR WILKIE, I have been down to Brighton to see Forster, and found your letter there on arriving by express this morning. I also found a letter from Georgina, describing that Mary's horse went down suddenly on a stone, and how Mary was thrown, and had her riding-habit torn to pieces, and has a deep cut just above the knee--fortunately not in the knee itself, which is doing exceedingly well, but which will probably incapacitate her from walking for days and days to come. It is well it was no worse. The accident occurred at Milton, near Gravesend, and they found Mary in a public-house there, wonderfully taken care of and looked after. I propose that we start on Thursday morning, the 1st of November. The train for Penzance leaves the Great Western terminus at a quarter-past nine in the morning. It is a twelve hours' journey. Shall we meet at the terminus at nine? I shall be here all the previous day, and shall dine here. Your account of your passage goes to my heart through my stomach. What a pity I was not there on board to present that green-visaged, but sweet-tempered and uncomplaining spectacle of imbecility, at which I am so expert under stormy circumstances, in the poet's phrase: As I sweep Through the deep, When the stormy winds do blow. What a pity I am not there, at Meurice's, to sleep the sleep of infancy through the long plays where the gentlemen stand with their backs to the mantelpieces. What a pity I am not with you to make a third at the Trois Frères, and drink no end of bottles of Bordeaux, without ever getting a touch of redness in my (poet's phrase again) "innocent nose." But I must go down to Gad's to-night, and get to work again. Four weekly numbers have been ground off the wheel, and at least another must be turned before we meet. They shall be yours in the slumberous railway-carriage. I don't think Forster is at all in good health. He was tremendously hospitable and hearty. I walked six hours and a half on the downs yesterday, and never stopped or sat. Early in the morning, before breakfast, I went to the nearest baths to get a shower-bath. They kept me waiting longer than I thought reasonable, and seeing a man in a cap in the passage, I went to him and said: "I really must request that you'll be good enough to see about this shower-bath;" and it was Hullah! waiting for another bath. Rumours were brought into the house on Saturday night, that there was a "ghost" up at Larkins's monument. Plorn was frightened to death, and I was apprehensive of the ghost's spreading and coming there, and causing "warning" and desertion among the servants. Frank was at home, and Andrew Gordon was with us. Time, nine o'clock. Village talk and credulity, amazing. I armed the two boys with a short stick apiece, and shouldered my double-barrelled gun, well loaded with shot. "Now observe," says I to the domestics, "if anybody is playing tricks and has got a head, I'll blow it off." Immense impression. New groom evidently convinced that he has entered the service of a bloodthirsty demon. We ascend to the monument. Stop at the gate. Moon is rising. Heavy shadows. "Now, look out!" (from the bloodthirsty demon, in a loud, distinct voice). "If the ghost is here and I see him, so help me God I'll fire at him!" Suddenly, as we enter the field, a most extraordinary noise responds--terrific noise--human noise--and yet superhuman noise. B. T. D. brings piece to shoulder. "Did you hear that, pa?" says Frank. "I did," says I. Noise repeated--portentous, derisive, dull, dismal, damnable. We advance towards the sound. Something white comes lumbering through the darkness. An asthmatic sheep! Dead, as I judge, by this time. Leaving Frank to guard him, I took Andrew with me, and went all round the monument, and down into the ditch, and examined the field well, thinking it likely that somebody might be taking advantage of the sheep to frighten the village. Drama ends with discovery of no one, and triumphant return to rum-and-water. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BIDEFORD, NORTH DEVON, _Thursday Night, Nov. 1st, 1860._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I write (with the most impracticable iron pen on earth) to report our safe arrival here, in a beastly hotel. We start to-morrow morning at nine on a two days' posting between this and Liskeard in Cornwall. We are due in Liskeard (but nobody seems to know anything about the roads) on Saturday afternoon, and we purpose making an excursion in that neighbourhood on Sunday, and coming up from Liskeard on Monday by Great Western fast train, which will get us to London, please God, in good time on Monday evening. There I shall hear from you, and know whether dear Mamie will move to London too. We had a pleasant journey down here, and a beautiful day. No adventures whatever. Nothing has happened to Wilkie, and he sends love. We had stinking fish for dinner, and have been able to drink nothing, though we have ordered wine, beer, and brandy-and-water. There is nothing in the house but two tarts and a pair of snuffers. The landlady is playing cribbage with the landlord in the next room (behind a thin partition), and they seem quite comfortable. Ever, my dearest Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, Dec. 28th, 1860._ MY DEAR MARY, I cannot tell you how much I thank you for the beautiful cigar-case, and how seasonable, and friendly, and good, and warm-hearted it looked when I opened it at Gad's Hill. Besides which, it is a cigar-case, and will hold cigars; two crowning merits that I never yet knew to be possessed by any article claiming the same name. For all of these reasons, but more than all because it comes from you, I love it, and send you eighteen hundred and sixty kisses, with one in for the new year. Both excellent stories and perfectly new. Your Joe swears that he never heard either--never a word or syllable of either--after he laughed at 'em this blessed day. I have no news, except that I am not quite well, and am being doctored. Pray read "Great Expectations." I think it is very droll. It is a very great success, and seems universally liked. I suppose because it opens funnily, and with an interest too. I pass my time here (I am staying here alone) in working, taking physic, and taking a stall at a theatre every night. On Boxing Night I was at Covent Garden. A dull pantomime was "worked" (as we say) better than I ever saw a heavy piece worked on a first night, until suddenly and without a moment's warning, every scene on that immense stage fell over on its face, and disclosed chaos by gaslight behind! There never was such a business; about sixty people who were on the stage being extinguished in the most remarkable manner. Not a soul was hurt. In the uproar, some moon-calf rescued a porter pot, six feet high (out of which the clown had been drinking when the accident happened), and stood it on the cushion of the lowest proscenium box, P.S., beside a lady and gentleman, who were dreadfully ashamed of it. The moment the house knew that nobody was injured, they directed their whole attention to this gigantic porter pot in its genteel position (the lady and gentleman trying to hide behind it), and roared with laughter. When a modest footman came from behind the curtain to clear it, and took it up in his arms like a Brobdingnagian baby, we all laughed more than ever we had laughed in our lives. I don't know why. We have had a fire here, but our people put it out before the parish-engine arrived, like a drivelling perambulator, with _the beadle in it_, like an imbecile baby. Popular opinion, disappointed in the fire having been put out, snowballed the beadle. God bless it! Over the way at the Lyceum, there is a very fair Christmas piece, with one or two uncommonly well-done nigger songs--one remarkably gay and mad, done in the finale to a scene. Also a very nice transformation, though I don't know what it means. The poor actors waylay me in Bow Street, to represent their necessities; and I often see one cut down a court when he beholds me coming, cut round Drury Lane to face me, and come up towards me near this door in the freshest and most accidental way, as if I was the last person he expected to see on the surface of this globe. The other day, there thus appeared before me (simultaneously with a scent of rum in the air) one aged and greasy man, with a pair of pumps under his arm. He said he thought if he could get down to somewhere (I think it was Newcastle), he would get "taken on" as Pantaloon, the existing Pantaloon being "a stick, sir--a mere muff." I observed that I was sorry times were so bad with him. "Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir--no one knows it better, sir--there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy, sir!--a boy!" So no more at present, except love to Mrs. Watson and Bedgey Prig and all, from my dear Mary. Your ever affectionate JOE. P.S.--DON'T I pine neither? P.P.S.--I did my best to arouse Forster's worst feelings; but he had got into a Christmas habit of mind, and wouldn't respond. FOOTNOTES: [6] With whom Mr. and Mrs. Wills were staying at Aberystwith. NARRATIVE. 1861. This, as far as his movements were concerned, was again a very unsettled year with Charles Dickens. He hired a furnished house in the Regent's Park, which he, with his household, occupied for some months. During the season he gave several readings at St. James's Hall. After a short summer holiday at Gad's Hill, he started, in the autumn, on a reading tour in the English provinces. Mr. Arthur Smith, being seriously ill, could not accompany him in this tour; and Mr. Headland, who was formerly in office at the St. Martin's Hall, was engaged as business-manager of these readings. Mr. Arthur Smith died in October, and Charles Dickens's distress at the loss of this loved friend and companion is touchingly expressed in many of his letters of this year. There are also sorrowful allusions to the death of his brother-in-law, Mr. Henry Austin, which sad event likewise happened in October. And the letter we give to Mrs. Austin ("Letitia") has reference to her sad affliction. In June of this year he paid a short visit to Sir E. B. Lytton at Knebworth, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, who also during his autumn tour joined him in Edinburgh. But this course of readings was brought rather suddenly to an end on account of the death of the Prince Consort. Besides being constantly occupied with the business of these readings, Charles Dickens was still at work on his story of "Great Expectations," which was appearing weekly in "All the Year Round." The story closed on the 3rd of August, when it was published as a whole in three volumes, and inscribed to Mr. Chauncey Hare Townshend. The Christmas number of "All the Year Round" was called "Tom Tiddler's Ground," to which Charles Dickens contributed three stories. Our second letter in this year is given more as a specimen of the claims which were constantly being made upon Charles Dickens's time and patience, than because we consider the letter itself to contain much public interest; excepting, indeed, as showing his always considerate and courteous replies to such constant applications. "The fire" mentioned in the letter to Mr. Forster was the great fire in Tooley Street. The "Morgan" was an American sea-captain, well known in those days, and greatly liked and respected. It may interest our readers to know that the character of Captain Jorgan, in the Christmas number of the previous year, was suggested by this pleasant sailor, for whom Charles Dickens had a hearty liking. Young Mr. Morgan was, during the years he passed in England, a constant visitor at Gad's Hill. The "Elwin" mentioned in the letter written from Bury St. Edmunds, was the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a Norfolk gentleman, well known in the literary world, and who was for many years editor of "The Quarterly Review." The explanation of the letter to Mr. John Agate, of Dover, we give in that gentleman's own words: "There are few public men with the strain upon their time and energies which he had particularly (and which I know better now that I have read his life), who would have spared the time to have written such a long courteous letter. "I wrote to him rather in anger, and left the letter myself at The Lord Warden, as I and my family were very much disappointed, after having purchased our tickets so long before, to find we could not got into the room, as money was being received, but his kind letter explained all." [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Jan. 9th, 1861._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, "We" are in the full swing of stopping managers from playing "A Message from the Sea." I privately doubt the strength of our position in the Court of Chancery, if we try it; but it is worth trying. I am aware that Mr. Lane of the Britannia sent an emissary to Gad's Hill yesterday. It unfortunately happens that the first man "we" have to assert the principle against is a very good man, whom I really respect. I have no news, except that I really hope and believe I am gradually getting well. If I have no check, I hope to be soon discharged by the medico. Ever affectionately. P.S.--Best love to Mamie, also to the boys and Miss Craufurd. OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," 26, WELLINGTON STREET, W.C., _Tuesday Evening, Jan. 9th, 1861._ DEAR SIR, I feel it quite hopeless to endeavour to present my position before you, in reference to such a letter as yours, in its plain and true light. When you suppose it would have cost Mr. Thackeray "but a word" to use his influence to obtain you some curatorship or the like, you fill me with the sense of impossibility of leading you to a more charitable judgment of Mr. Dickens. Nevertheless, I will put the truth before you. Scarcely a day of my life passes, or has passed for many years, without bringing me some letters similar to yours. Often they will come by dozens--scores--hundreds. My time and attention would be pretty well occupied without them, and the claims upon me (some very near home), for all the influence and means of help that I do and do not possess, are not commonly heavy. I have no power to aid you towards the attainment of your object. It is the simple exact truth, and nothing can alter it. So great is the disquietude I constantly undergo from having to write to some new correspondent in this strain, that, God knows, I would resort to another relief if I could. Your studies from nature appear to me to express an excellent observation of nature, in a loving and healthy spirit. But what then? The dealers and dealers' prices of which you complain will not be influenced by that honest opinion. Nor will it have the least effect upon the President of the Royal Academy, or the Directors of the School of Design. Assuming your supposition to be correct that these authorities are adverse to you, I have no more power than you have to render them favourable. And assuming them to be quite disinterested and dispassionate towards you, I have no voice or weight in any appointment that any of them make. I will retain your packet over to-morrow, and will then cause it to be sent to your house. I write under the pressure of occupation and business, and therefore write briefly. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, Feb. 1st, 1861._ MY DEAR CERJAT, You have read in the papers of our heavy English frost. At Gad's Hill it was so intensely cold, that in our warm dining-room on Christmas Day we could hardly sit at the table. In my study on that morning, long after a great fire of coal and wood had been lighted, the thermometer was I don't know where below freezing. The bath froze, and all the pipes froze, and remained in a stony state for five or six weeks. The water in the bedroom-jugs froze, and blew up the crockery. The snow on the top of the house froze, and was imperfectly removed with axes. My beard froze as I walked about, and I couldn't detach my cravat and coat from it until I was thawed at the fire. My boys and half the officers stationed at Chatham skated away without a check to Gravesend--five miles off--and repeated the performance for three or four weeks. At last the thaw came, and then everything split, blew up, dripped, poured, perspired, and got spoilt. Since then we have had a small visitation of the plague of servants; the cook (in a riding-habit) and the groom (in a dress-coat and jewels) having mounted Mary's horse and mine, in our absence, and scoured the neighbouring country at a rattling pace. And when I went home last Saturday, I innocently wondered how the horses came to be out of condition, and gravely consulted the said groom on the subject, who gave it as his opinion "which they wanted reg'lar work." We are now coming to town until midsummer. Having sold my own house, to be more free and independent, I have taken a very pretty furnished house, No. 3, Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park. This, of course, on my daughter's account. For I have very good and cheerful bachelor rooms here, with an old servant in charge, who is the cleverest man of his kind in the world, and can do anything, from excellent carpentery to excellent cookery, and has been with me three-and-twenty years. The American business is the greatest English sensation at present. I venture to predict that the struggle of violence will be a very short one, and will be soon succeeded by some new compact between the Northern and Southern States. Meantime the Lancashire mill-owners are getting very uneasy. The Italian state of things is not regarded as looking very cheerful. What from one's natural sympathies with a people so oppressed as the Italians, and one's natural antagonism to a pope and a Bourbon (both of which superstitions I do suppose the world to have had more than enough of), I agree with you concerning Victor Emmanuel, and greatly fear that the Southern Italians are much degraded. Still, an united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way, as he very well knows. Therefore the idea must be championed, however much against hope. My eldest boy, just home from China, was descried by Townshend's Henri the moment he landed at Marseilles, and was by him borne in triumph to Townshend's rooms. The weather was snowy, slushy, beastly; and Marseilles was, as it usually is to my thinking, well-nigh intolerable. My boy could not stay with Townshend, as he was coming on by express train; but he says: "I sat with him and saw him dine. He had a leg of lamb, and a tremendous cold." That is the whole description I have been able to extract from him. This journal is doing gloriously, and "Great Expectations" is a great success. I have taken my third boy, Frank (Jeffrey's godson), into this office. If I am not mistaken, he has a natural literary taste and capacity, and may do very well with a chance so congenial to his mind, and being also entered at the Bar. Dear me, when I have to show you about London, and we dine _en garçon_ at odd places, I shall scarcely know where to begin. Only yesterday I walked out from here in the afternoon, and thought I would go down by the Houses of Parliament. When I got there, the day was so beautifully bright and warm, that I thought I would walk on by Millbank, to see the river. I walked straight on _for three miles_ on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames, with immense factories, railway works, and what-not erected on it, and with the strangest beginnings and ends of wealthy streets pushing themselves into the very Thames. When I was a rower on that river, it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public-house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any state of transition, though I suppose myself to know this rather large city as well as anyone in it. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A.] 3, HANOVER TERRACE, REGENT'S PARK, _Saturday Night, March 9th, 1861._ MY DEAR WARD, I cannot tell you how gratified I have been by your letter, and what a splendid recompense it is for any pleasure I am giving you. Such generous and earnest sympathy from such a brother-artist gives me true delight. I am proud of it, believe me, and moved by it to do all the better. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Tuesday, June 11th, 1861._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, There is little doubt, I think, of my reading at Cheltenham somewhere about November. I submit myself so entirely to Arthur Smith's arrangements for me, that I express my sentiments on this head with modesty. But I think there is scarcely a doubt of my seeing you then. I have just finished my book of "Great Expectations," and am the worse for wear. Neuralgic pains in the face have troubled me a good deal, and the work has been pretty close. But I hope that the book is a good book, and I have no doubt of very soon throwing off the little damage it has done me. What with Blondin at the Crystal Palace and Léotard at Leicester Square, we seem to be going back to barbaric excitements. I have not seen, and don't intend to see, the Hero of Niagara (as the posters call him), but I have been beguiled into seeing Léotard, and it is at once the most fearful and most graceful thing I have ever seen done. Clara White (grown pretty) has been staying with us. I am sore afraid that _The Times_, by playing fast and loose with the American question, has very seriously compromised this country. The Americans northward are perfectly furious on the subject; and Motley the historian (a very sensible man, strongly English in his sympathies) assured me the other day that he thought the harm done very serious indeed, and the dangerous nature of the daily widening breach scarcely calculable. Kindest and best love to all. Wilkie Collins has just come in, and sends best regard. Ever most affectionately, my dearest Macready. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, July 1st, 1861._ MY DEAR FORSTER, * * * * * You will be surprised to hear that I have changed the end of "Great Expectations" from and after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there. Bulwer (who has been, as I think I told you, extraordinarily taken by the book), so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his views with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in a very pretty piece of writing, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration. I have not seen Bulwer's changed story. I brought back the first month with me, and I know the nature of his changes throughout; but I have not yet had the revised proofs. He was in a better state at Knebworth than I have ever seen him in all these years, a little weird occasionally regarding magic and spirits, but perfectly fair and frank under opposition. He was talkative, anecdotical, and droll; looked young and well, laughed heartily, and enjoyed some games we played with great zest. In his artist character and talk he was full of interest and matter, but that he always is. Socially, he seemed to me almost a new man. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and so did Georgina and Mary. The fire I did not see until the Monday morning, but it was blazing fiercely then, and was blazing hardly less furiously when I came down here again last Friday. I was here on the night of its breaking out. If I had been in London I should have been on the scene, pretty surely. You will be perhaps surprised to hear that it is Morgan's conviction (his son was here yesterday), that the North will put down the South, and that speedily. In his management of his large business, he is proceeding steadily on that conviction. He says that the South has no money and no credit, and that it is impossible for it to make a successful stand. He may be all wrong, but he is certainly a very shrewd man, and he has never been, as to the United States, an enthusiast of any class. Poor Lord Campbell's seems to me as easy and good a death as one could desire. There must be a sweep of these men very soon, and one feels as if it must fall out like the breaking of an arch--one stone goes from a prominent place, and then the rest begin to drop. So one looks towards Brougham, and Lyndhurst, and Pollock. I will add no more to this, or I know I shall not send it; for I am in the first desperate laziness of having done my book, and think of offering myself to the village school as a live example of that vice for the edification of youth. Ever, my dear Forster, affectionately. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, July 8th, 1861._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I have owed you a letter for so long a time that I fear you may sometimes have misconstrued my silence. But I hope that the sight of the handwriting of your old friend will undeceive you, if you have, and will put that right. During the progress of my last story, I have been working so hard that very, very little correspondence--except enforced correspondence on business--has passed this pen. And now that I am free again, I devote a few of my first leisure moments to this note. You seemed in your last to think that I had forgotten you in respect of the Christmas number. Not so at all. I discussed with them here where you were, how you were to be addressed, and the like; finally left the number in a blank envelope, and did not add the address to it until it would have been absurd to send you such stale bread. This was my fault, but this was all. And I should be so pained at heart if you supposed me capable of failing in my truth and cordiality, or in the warm remembrance of the time we have passed together, that perhaps I make more of it than you meant to do. My sailor-boy is at home--I was going to write, for the holidays, but I suppose I must substitute "on leave." Under the new regulations, he must not pass out of the _Britannia_ before December. The younger boys are all at school, and coming home this week for the holidays. Mary keeps house, of course, and Katie and her husband surprised us yesterday, and are here now. Charley is holiday-making at Guernsey and Jersey. He has been for some time seeking a partnership in business, and has not yet found one. The matter is in the hands of Mr. Bates, the managing partner in Barings' house, and seems as slow a matter to adjust itself as ever I looked on at. Georgina is, as usual, the general friend and confidante and factotum of the whole party. Your present correspondent read at St. James's Hall in the beginning of the season, to perfectly astounding audiences; but finding that fatigue and excitement very difficult to manage in conjunction with a story, deemed it prudent to leave off reading in high tide and mid-career, the rather by reason of something like neuralgia in the face. At the end of October I begin again; and if you are at Brighton in November, I shall try to see you there. I deliver myself up to Mr. Arthur Smith, and I know it is one of the places for which he has put me down. This is all about me and mine, and next I want to know why you never come to Gad's Hill, and whether you are never coming. The stress I lay on these questions you will infer from the size of the following note of interrogation[HW: =?=] I am in the constant receipt of news from Lausanne. Of Mary Boyle, I daresay you have seen and heard more than I have lately. Rumours occasionally reach me of her acting in every English shire incessantly, and getting in a harvest of laurels all the year round. Cavendish I have not seen for a long time, but when I did see him last, it was at Tavistock House, and we dined together jovially. Mention of that locality reminds me that when you DO come here, you will see the pictures looking wonderfully better, and more precious than they ever did in town. Brought together in country light and air, they really are quite a baby collection and very pretty. I direct this to Rockingham, supposing you to be there in this summer time. If you are as leafy in Northamptonshire as we are in Kent, you are greener than you have been for some years. I hope you may have seen a large-headed photograph with little legs, representing the undersigned, pen in hand, tapping his forehead to knock an idea out. It has just sprung up so abundantly in all the shops, that I am ashamed to go about town looking in at the picture-windows, which is my delight. It seems to me extraordinarily ludicrous, and much more like than the grave portrait done in earnest. It made me laugh when I first came upon it, until I shook again, in open sunlighted Piccadilly. Pray be a good Christian to me, and don't be retributive in measuring out the time that shall pass before you write to me. And believe me ever, Your affectionate and faithful. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Aug. 28th, 1861._ MY DEAR WILKIE, I have been going to write to you ever since I received your letter from Whitby, and now I hear from Charley that you are coming home, and must be addressed in the Rue Harley. Let me know whether you will dine here this day week at the usual five. I am at present so addle-headed (having hard Wednesday work in Wills's absence) that I can't write much. I have got the "Copperfield" reading ready for delivery, and am now going to blaze away at "Nickleby," which I don't like half as well. Every morning I "go in" at these marks for two or three hours, and then collapse and do nothing whatever (counting as nothing much cricket and rounders). In my time that curious railroad by the Whitby Moor was so much the more curious, that you were balanced against a counter-weight of water, and that you did it like Blondin. But in these remote days the one inn of Whitby was up a back-yard, and oyster-shell grottoes were the only view from the best private room. Likewise, sir, I have posted to Whitby. "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man." The sun is glaring in at these windows with an amount of ferocity insupportable by one of the landed interest, who lies upon his back with an imbecile hold on grass, from lunch to dinner. Feebleness of mind and head are the result. Ever affectionately. P.S.--The boys have multiplied themselves by fifty daily, and have seemed to appear in hosts (especially in the hottest days) round all the corners at Gad's Hill. I call them the prowlers, and each has a distinguishing name attached, derived from his style of prowling. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Smith.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, 1861._ MY DEAR ARTHUR, I cannot tell you how sorry I am to receive your bad account of your health, or how anxious I shall be to receive a better one as soon as you can possibly give it. If you go away, don't you think in the main you would be better here than anywhere? You know how well you would be nursed, what care we should take of you, and how perfectly quiet and at home you would be, until you become strong enough to take to the Medway. Moreover, I think you would be less anxious about the tour, here, than away from such association. I would come to Worthing to fetch you, I needn't say, and would take the most careful charge of you. I will write no more about this, because I wish to avoid giving you more to read than can be helped; but I do sincerely believe it would be at once your wisest and least anxious course. As to a long journey into Wales, or any long journey, it would never do. Nice is not to be thought of. Its dust, and its sharp winds (I know it well), towards October are very bad indeed. I send you the enclosed letters, firstly, because I have no circular to answer them with, and, secondly, because I fear I might confuse your arrangements by interfering with the correspondence. I shall hope to have a word from you very soon. I am at work for the tour every day, except my town Wednesdays. Ever faithfully. P.S.--Kindest regards from all. [Sidenote: Mr. John Watkins.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday Night, Sept. 28th, 1861._ DEAR MR. WATKINS, In reply to your kind letter I must explain that I have not yet brought down any of your large photographs of myself, and therefore cannot report upon their effect here. I think the "cartes" are all liked. A general howl of horror greeted the appearance of No. 18, and a riotous attempt was made to throw it out of window. I calmed the popular fury by promising that it should never again be beheld within these walls. I think I mentioned to you when you showed it to me, that I felt persuaded it would not be liked. It has a grim and wasted aspect, and perhaps might be made useful as a portrait of the Ancient Mariner. I feel that I owe you an apology for being (innocently) a difficult subject. When I once excused myself to Ary Scheffer while sitting to him, he received the apology as strictly his due, and said with a vexed air: "At this moment, _mon cher_ Dickens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else;" for which I apologised again. In the hope that the pains you have bestowed upon me will not be thrown away, but that your success will prove of some use to you, believe me, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Oct. 6th, 1861._ AFTER THE DEATH OF MR. ARTHUR SMITH. MY DEAR EDMUND, Coming back here to-day, I find your letter. I was so very much distressed last night in thinking of it all, and I find it so very difficult to preserve my composure when I dwell in my mind on the many times fast approaching when I shall sorely miss the familiar face, that I am hardly steady enough yet to refer to the readings like a man. But your kind reference to them makes me desirous to tell you that I took Headland (formerly of St. Martin's Hall, who has always been with us in London) to conduct the business, when I knew that our poor dear fellow could never do it, even if he had recovered strength to go; and that I consulted with himself about it when I saw him for the last time on earth, and that it seemed to please him, and he said: "We couldn't do better." Write to me before you come; and remember that I go to town Wednesday mornings. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, Oct. 10th, 1861._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I received your affectionate little letter here this morning, and was very glad to get it. Poor dear Arthur is a sad loss to me, and indeed I was very fond of him. But the readings must be fought out, like all the rest of life. Ever your affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Oct. 13th, 1861._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, This is a short note. But the moment I know for certain what is designed for me at Cheltenham, I write to you in order that you may know it from me and not by chance from anyone else. I am to read there on the evening of Friday, the 3rd of January, and on the morning of Saturday, the 4th; as I have nothing to do on Thursday, the 2nd, but come from Leamington, I shall come to you, please God, for a quiet dinner that day. The death of Arthur Smith has caused me great distress and anxiety. I had a great regard for him, and he made the reading part of my life as light and pleasant as it _could_ be made. I had hoped to bring him to see you, and had pictured to myself how amused and interested you would have been with his wonderful tact and consummate mastery of arrangement. But it's all over. I begin at Norwich on the 28th, and am going north in the middle of November. I am going to do "Copperfield," and shall be curious to test its effect on the Edinburgh people. It has been quite a job so to piece portions of the long book together as to make something continuous out of it; but I hope I have got something varied and dramatic. I am also (not to slight _your_ book) going to do "Nickleby at Mr. Squeers's." It is clear that both must be trotted out at Cheltenham. With kindest love and regard to all your house, Ever, my dearest Macready, your most affectionate. P.S.--Fourth edition of "Great Expectations" almost gone! [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ANGEL HOTEL, BURY ST. EDMUNDS, _Wednesday, Oct. 13th, 1861._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I have just now received your welcome letter, and I hasten to report (having very little time) that we had a splendid hall last night, and that I think "Nickleby" tops all the readings. Somehow it seems to have got in it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose, and it went last night not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and pleasure that I have never seen surpassed. We are full here for to-night. Fancy this: last night at about six, who should walk in but Elwin! He was exactly in his usual state, only more demonstrative than ever, and had been driven in by some neighbours who were coming to the reading. I had tea up for him, and he went down at seven with me to the dismal den where I dressed, and sat by the fire while I dressed, and was childishly happy in that great privilege! During the reading he sat on a corner of the platform and roared incessantly. He brought in a lady and gentleman to introduce while I was undressing, and went away in a perfect and absolute rapture. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ROYAL HOTEL, NORWICH, _Tuesday, Oct. 29th, 1861._ I cannot say that we began well last night. We had not a good hall, and they were a very lumpish audience indeed. This did not tend to cheer the strangeness I felt in being without Arthur, and I was not at all myself. We have a large let for to-night, I think two hundred and fifty stalls, which is very large, and I hope that both they and I will go better. I could have done perfectly last night, if the audience had been bright, but they were an intent and staring audience. They laughed though very well, and the storm made them shake themselves again. But they were not magnetic, and the great big place was out of sorts somehow. To-morrow I will write you another short note, however short. It is "Nickleby" and the "Trial" to-night; "Copperfield" again to-morrow. A wet day here, with glimpses of blue. I shall not forget Katey's health at dinner. A pleasant journey down. Ever, my dearest Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: The same.] THE GREAT WHITE HORSE, IPSWICH, _Friday, Nov. 1st, 1861._ I cannot quite remember in the whirl of travelling and reading, whether or no I wrote you a line from Bury St. Edmunds. But I think (and hope) I did. We had a fine room there, and "Copperfield" made a great impression. At mid-day we go on to Colchester, where I shall expect the young Morgans. I sent a telegram on yesterday, after receiving your note, to secure places for them. The answer returned by telegraph was: "No box-seats left but on the fourth row." If they prefer to sit on the stage (for I read in the theatre, there being no other large public room), they shall. Meantime I have told John, who went forward this morning with the other men, to let the people at the inn know that if three travellers answering that description appear before my dinner-time, they are to dine with me. Plorn's admission that he likes the school very much indeed, is the great social triumph of modern times. I am looking forward to Sunday's rest at Gad's, and shall be down by the ten o'clock train from town. I miss poor Arthur dreadfully. It is scarcely possible to imagine how much. It is not only that his loss to me socially is quite irreparable, but that the sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me while I was reading is quite gone. And when I come out for the ten minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something cheerful to say, it is forlorn. I cannot but fancy, too, that the audience must miss the old speciality of a pervading gentleman. Nobody I know has turned up yet except Elwin. I have had many invitations to all sorts of houses in all sorts of places, and have of course accepted them every one. Love to Mamie, if she has come home, and to Bouncer, if _she_ has come; also Marguerite, who I hope is by this time much better. Ever, my dear Georgy, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mrs. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL, _Sunday, Nov. 3rd, 1861._ EXTRACT. I am heartily glad to hear that you have been out in the air, and I hope you will go again very soon and make a point of continuing to go. There is a soothing influence in the sight of the earth and sky, which God put into them for our relief when He made the world in which we are all to suffer, and strive, and die. I will not fail to write to you from many points of my tour, and if you ever want to write to me you may be sure of a quick response, and may be certain that I am sympathetic and true. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] FOUNTAIN HOTEL, CANTERBURY, _Windy Night, Nov. 4th, 1861._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, A word of report before I go to bed. An excellent house to-night, and an audience positively perfect. The greatest part of it stalls, and an intelligent and delightful response in them, like the touch of a beautiful instrument. "Copperfield" wound up in a real burst of feeling and delight. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. John Agate.] LORD WARDEN HOTEL, DOVER, _Wednesday, Nov. 6th, 1861._ SIR, I am exceedingly sorry to find, from the letter you have addressed to me, that you had just cause of complaint in being excluded from my reading here last night. It will now and then unfortunately happen when the place of reading is small (as in this case), that some confusion and inconvenience arise from the local agents over-estimating, in perfect good faith and sincerity, the capacity of the room. Such a mistake, I am assured, was made last night; and thus all the available space was filled before the people in charge were at all prepared for that circumstance. You may readily suppose that I can have no personal knowledge of the proceedings of the people in my employment at such a time. But I wish to assure you very earnestly, that they are all old servants, well acquainted with my principles and wishes, and that they are under the strongest injunction to avoid any approach to mercenary dealing; and to behave to all comers equally with as much consideration and politeness as they know I should myself display. The recent death of a much-regretted friend of mine, who managed this business for me, and on whom these men were accustomed to rely in any little difficulty, caused them (I have no doubt) to feel rather at a loss in your case. Do me the favour to understand that under any other circumstances you would, as a matter of course, have been provided with any places whatever that could be found, without the smallest reference to what you had originally paid. This is scanty satisfaction to you, but it is so strictly the truth, that yours is the first complaint of the kind I have ever received. I hope to read in Dover again, but it is quite impossible that I can make any present arrangement for that purpose. Whenever I may return here, you may be sure I shall not fail to remember that I owe you a recompense for a disappointment. In the meanwhile I very sincerely regret it. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BEDFORD HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _Thursday, Nov. 7th, 1861._ MY DEAR GEORGY, * * * * * The Duchess of Cambridge comes to-night to "Copperfield." The bad weather has not in the least touched us, and beyond all doubt a great deal of money has been left untaken at each place. The storm was most magnificent at Dover. All the great side of The Lord Warden next the sea had to be emptied, the break of the sea was so prodigious, and the noise was so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain. All kinds of wreck were washed in. Miss Birmingham and I saw, among other things, a very pretty brass-bound chest being thrown about like a feather. On Tuesday night, the unhappy Ostend packet could not get in, neither could she go back, and she beat about the Channel until noon yesterday. I saw her come in then, _with five men at the wheel_; such a picture of misery, as to the crew (of passengers there were no signs), as you can scarcely imagine. Tho effect at Hastings and at Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual impression, and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad. The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place is Canterbury. The audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously unreserved way; and they really laughed when Squeers read the boys' letters, with such cordial enjoyment, that the contagion extended to me, for one couldn't hear them without laughing too. So, thank God, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every way great. There is rather an alarming breakdown at Newcastle, in respect of all the bills having been, in some inscrutable way, lost on the road. I have resolved to send Berry there, with full powers to do all manner of things, early next week. The amended route-list is not printed yet, because I am trying to get off Manchester and Liverpool; both of which I strongly doubt, in the present state of American affairs. Therefore I can't send it for Marguerite; but I can, and do, send her my love and God-speed. This is addressed to the office because I suppose you will be there to-morrow. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: The Earl of Carlisle.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _November 15th, 1861._ MY DEAR LORD CARLISLE, You know poor Austin, and what his work was, and how he did it. If you have no private objection to signing the enclosed memorial (which will receive the right signatures before being presented), I think you will have no public objection. I shall be heartily glad if you can put your name to it, and shall esteem your doing so as a very kind service. Will you return the memorial under cover to Mr. Tom Taylor, at the Local Government Act Office, Whitehall? He is generously exerting himself in furtherance of it, and so delay will be avoided. My dear Lord Carlisle, faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Nov. 17th, 1861._ MY DEAR MARY, I am perfectly enraptured with the quilt. It is one of the most tasteful, lively, elegant things I have ever seen; and I need not tell you that while it is valuable to me for its own ornamental sake, it is precious to me as a rainbow-hint of your friendship and affectionate remembrance. Please God you shall see it next summer occupying its allotted place of state in my brand-new bedroom here. You shall behold it then, with all cheerful surroundings, the envy of mankind. My readings have been doing absolute wonders. Your Duchess and Princess came to hear first "Nickleby" and the "Pickwick Trial," then "Copperfield," at Brighton. I think they were pleased with me, and I am sure I was with them; for they are the very best audience one could possibly desire. I shall always have a pleasant remembrance of them. On Wednesday I am away again for the longest part of my trip. Yes, Mary dear, I must say that I like my Carton, and I have a faint idea sometimes that if I had acted him, I could have done something with his life and death. Believe me, ever your affectionate and faithful JOE. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] QUEEN'S HEAD, NEWCASTLE, _Friday, Nov. 22nd, 1861._ I received your letter this morning, and grieve to report that the unlucky Headland has broken down most awfully! First, as perhaps you remember, this is the place where the bills were "lost" for a week or two. The consequence has been that the agent could not announce all through the "Jenny Lind" time (the most important for announcing), and could but stand still and stare when people came to ask what I was going to read. Last night I read "Copperfield" to the most enthusiastic and appreciative audience imaginable, but in numbers about half what they might have been. To-night we shall have a famous house; but we might have had it last night too. To-morrow (knowing by this time what can, of a certainty, be done with "Copperfield"), I had, of course, given out "Copperfield" to be read again. Conceive my amazement and dismay when I find the printer to have announced "Little Dombey"!!! This, I declare, I had no more intention of reading than I had of reading an account of the solar system. And this, after a sensation last night, of a really extraordinary nature in its intensity and delight! Says the unlucky Headland to this first head of misery: "Johnson's mistake" (Johnson being the printer). Second, I read at Edinburgh for the first time--observe the day--_next Wednesday_. Jenny Lind's concert at Edinburgh is to-night. This morning comes a frantic letter from the Edinburgh agent. "I have no bills, no tickets; I lose all the announcement I would have made to hundreds upon hundreds of people to-night, all of the most desirable class to be well informed beforehand. I can't announce what Mr. Dickens is going to read; I can answer no question; I have, upon my responsibility, put a dreary advertisement into the papers announcing that he _is_ going to read so many times, and that particulars will shortly be ready; and I stand bound hand and foot." "Johnson's mistake," says the unlucky Headland. Of course, I know that the man who never made a mistake in poor Arthur's time is not likely to be always making mistakes now. But I have written by this post to Wills, to go to him and investigate. I have also detached Berry from here, and have sent him on by train at a few minutes' notice to Edinburgh, and then to Glasgow (where I have no doubt everything is wrong too). Glasgow we may save; Edinburgh I hold to be irretrievably damaged. If it can be picked up at all, it can only be at the loss of the two first nights, and by the expenditure of no end of spirits and force. And this is the harder, because it is impossible not to see that the last readings polished and prepared the audiences in general, and that I have not to work them up in any place where I have been before, but that they start with a London intelligence, and with a respect and preparation for what they are going to hear. I hope by the time you and Mamie come to me, we shall have got into some good method. I must take the thing more into my own hands and look after it from hour to hour. If such a thing as this Edinburgh business could have happened under poor Arthur, I really believe he would have fallen into a fit, or gone distracted. No one can ever know what he was but I who have been with him and without him. Headland is so anxious and so good-tempered that I cannot be very stormy with him; but it is the simple fact that he has no notion of the requirements of such work as this. Without him, and with a larger salary to Berry (though there are objections to the latter as _first_ man), I could have done a hundred times better. As Forster will have a strong interest in knowing all about the proceedings, perhaps you will send him this letter to read. There is no very tremendous harm, indeed, done as yet. At Edinburgh I KNOW what I can do with "Copperfield." I think it is not too much to say that for every one who does come to hear it on the first night, I can get back fifty on the second. And whatever can be worked up there will tell on Glasgow. Berry I shall continue to send on ahead, and I shall take nothing on trust and more as being done. On Sunday morning at six, I have to start for Berwick. From Berwick, in the course of that day, I will write again; to Mamie next time. With best love to her and Mrs. B. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] QUEEN'S HEAD, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, _Saturday, Nov. 23rd, 1861._ A most tremendous hall here last night; something almost terrible in the cram. A fearful thing might have happened. Suddenly, when they were all very still over Smike, my gas batten came down, and it looked as if the room was falling. There were three great galleries crammed to the roof, and a high steep flight of stairs, and a panic must have destroyed numbers of people. A lady in the front row of stalls screamed, and ran out wildly towards me, and for one instant there was a terrible wave in the crowd. I addressed that lady laughing (for I knew she was in sight of everybody there), and called out as if it happened every night, "There's nothing the matter, I assure you; don't be alarmed; pray sit down;" and she sat down directly, and there was a thunder of applause. It took some few minutes to mend, and I looked on with my hands in my pockets; for I think if I had turned my back for a moment there might still have been a move. My people were dreadfully alarmed, Boylett in particular, who I suppose had some notion that the whole place might have taken fire. "But there stood the master," he did me the honour to say afterwards, in addressing the rest, "as cool as ever I see him a-lounging at a railway station." A telegram from Berry at Edinburgh yesterday evening, to say that he had got the bills, and that they would all be up and dispersed yesterday evening under his own eyes. So no time was lost in setting things as right as they can be set. He has now gone on to Glasgow. P.S.--Duty to Mrs. Bouncer. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BERWICK-ON-TWEED, _Monday, Nov. 25th, 1861._ I write (in a gale of wind, with a high sea running), to let you know that we go on to Edinburgh at half-past eight to-morrow morning. A most ridiculous room was designed for me in this odd out-of-the-way place. An immense Corn Exchange made of glass and iron, round, dome-topped, lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering echoes, with a little lofty crow's-nest of a stone gallery breast high, deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put _me_! I instantly struck, of course, and said I would either read in a room attached to this house (a very snug one, capable of holding five hundred people) or not at all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate. Berry has this moment come back from Edinburgh and Glasgow with hopeful accounts. He seems to have done the business extremely well, and he says that it was quite curious and cheering to see how the Glasgow people assembled round the bills the instant they were posted, and evidently with a great interest in them. We left Newcastle yesterday morning in the dark, when it was intensely cold and froze very hard. So it did here. But towards night the wind went round to the S.W., and all night it has been blowing very hard indeed. So it is now. Tell Mamie that I have the same sitting-room as we had when we came here with poor Arthur, and that my bedroom is the room out of it which she and Katie had. Surely it is the oddest town to read in! But it is taken on poor Arthur's principle that a place in the way pays the expenses of a through journey; and the people would seem to be coming up to the scratch gallantly. It was a dull Sunday, though; O it _was_ a dull Sunday, without a book! For I had forgotten to buy one at Newcastle, until it was too late. So after dark I made a jug of whisky-punch, and drowned the unlucky Headland's remembrance of his failures. I shall hope to hear very soon that the workmen have "broken through," and that you have been in the state apartments, and that upholstery measurements have come off. There has been a horrible accident in Edinburgh. One of the seven-storey old houses in the High Street fell when it was full of people. Berry was at the bill-poster's house, a few doors off, waiting for him to come home, when he heard what seemed like thunder, and then the air was darkened with dust, "as if an immense quantity of steam had been blown off," and then all that dismal quarter set up shrieks, which he says were most dreadful. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WATERLOO HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Wednesday, Nov. 27th, 1861._ Mrs. Bouncer must decidedly come with you to Carlisle. She shall be received with open arms. Apropos of Carlisle, let me know _when_ you purpose coming there. We shall be there, please God, on the Saturday in good time, as I finish at Glasgow on the Friday night. I have very little notion of the state of affairs here, as Headland brought no more decisive information from the agents yesterday (he never _can_ get decisive information from any agents), than "the teeckets air joost moving reecht and left." I hope this may be taken as satisfactory. Jenny Lind carried off a world of money from here. Miss Glyn, or Mrs. Dallas, is playing Lady Macbeth at the theatre, and Mr. Shirley Brooks is giving two lectures at the Philosophical Society on the House of Commons and Horace Walpole. Grisi's farewell benefits are (I think) on my last two nights here. Gordon dined with me yesterday. He is, if anything, rather better, I think, than when we last saw him in town. He was immensely pleased to be with me. I went with him (as his office goes anywhere) right into and among the ruins of the fallen building yesterday. They were still at work trying to find two men (brothers), a young girl, and an old woman, known to be all lying there. On the walls two or three common clocks are still hanging; one of them, judging from the time at which it stopped, would seem to have gone for an hour or so after the fall. Great interest had been taken in a poor linnet in a cage, hanging in the wind and rain high up against the broken wall. A fireman got it down alive, and great exultation had been raised over it. One woman, who was dug out unhurt, staggered into the street, stared all round her, instantly ran away, and has never been heard of since. It is a most extraordinary sight, and of course makes a great sensation. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WATERLOO HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Friday, Nov. 29th, 1861._ I think it is my turn to write to you, and I therefore send a brief despatch, like a telegram, to let you know that in a gale of wind and a fierce rain, last night, we turned away a thousand people. There was no getting into the hall, no getting near the hall, no stirring among the people, no getting out, no possibility of getting rid of them. And yet, in spite of all that, and of their being steaming wet, they never flagged for an instant, never made a complaint, and took up the trial upon their very shoulders, to the last word, in a triumphant roar. The talk about "Copperfield" rings through the whole place. It is done again to-morrow night. To-morrow morning I read "Dombey." To-morrow morning is Grisi's "farewell" morning concert, and last night was her "farewell" evening concert. Neither she, nor Jenny Lind, nor anything, nor anybody seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings. I lunch with Blackwood to-day. He was at the reading last night; a capital audience. Young Blackwood has also called here. A very good young fellow, I think. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] CARRICK'S ROYAL HOTEL, GLASGOW, _Tuesday, Dec. 3rd, 1861._ I send you by this post another _Scotsman_. From a paragraph in it, a letter, and an advertisement, you may be able to form some dim guess of the scene at Edinburgh last night. Such a pouring of hundreds into a place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such a rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humour on the whole. I never saw the faintest approach to it. While I addressed the crowd in the room, Gordon addressed the crowd in the street. Fifty frantic men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made speeches to the walls. The whole Blackwood family were borne in on the top of a wave, and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau or gigantic picnic; one pretty girl in full dress lying on her side all night, holding on to one of the legs of my table. It was the most extraordinary sight. And yet from the moment I began to the moment of my leaving off, they never missed a point, and they ended with a burst of cheers. The confusion was decidedly owing to the local agents. But I think it may have been a little heightened by Headland's way of sending them the tickets to sell in the first instance. Now, as I must read again in Edinburgh on Saturday night, your travelling arrangements are affected. So observe carefully (you and Mamie) all that I am going to say. It appears to me that the best course will be for you to come to _Edinburgh_ on Saturday; taking the fast train from the Great Northern station at nine in the morning. This would bring you to the Waterloo at Edinburgh, at about nine or so at night, and I should be home at ten. We could then have a quiet Sunday in Edinburgh, and go over to Carlisle on the Monday morning. The expenditure of lungs and spirits was (as you may suppose) rather great last night, and to sleep well was out of the question; I am therefore rather fagged to-day. And as the hall in which I read to-night is a large one, I must make my letter a short one. My people were torn to ribbons last night. They have not a hat among them, and scarcely a coat. Give my love to Mamie. To her question, "Will there be war with America?" I answer, "Yes;" I fear the North to be utterly mad, and war to be unavoidable. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] VICTORIA HOTEL, PRESTON, _Friday, Dec. 13th, 1861._ MY DEAR WILLS, The news of the Christmas number is indeed glorious, and nothing can look brighter or better than the prospects of the illustrious publication. Both Carlisle and Lancaster have come out admirably, though I doubted both, as you did. But, unlike you, I always doubted this place. I do so still. It is a poor place at the best (you remember?), and the mills are working half time, and trade is very bad. The expenses, however, will be a mere nothing. The accounts from Manchester for to-morrow, and from Liverpool for the readings generally, are very cheering indeed. The young lady who sells the papers at the station is just the same as ever. Has orders for to-night, and is coming "with a person." "_The_ person?" said I. "Never _you_ mind," said she. I was so charmed with Robert Chambers's "Traditions of Edinburgh" (which I read _in_ Edinburgh), that I was obliged to write to him and say so. Glasgow finished nobly, and the last night in Edinburgh was signally successful and positively splendid. Will you give my small Admiral, on his personal application, one sovereign? I have told him to come to you for that recognition of his meritorious services. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Sunday, Dec. 15th, 1861._ MY DEAR WILLS, I sent you a telegram to-day, and I write before the answer has come to hand. I have been very doubtful what to do here. We have a great let for to-morrow night. The Mayor recommends closing to-morrow, and going on on Tuesday and Wednesday, so does the town clerk, so do the agents. But I have a misgiving that they hardly understand what the public general sympathy with the Queen will be. Further, I feel personally that the Queen has always been very considerate and gracious to me, and I would on no account do anything that might seem unfeeling or disrespectful. I shall attach great weight, in this state of indecision, to your telegram. A capital audience at Preston. Not a capacious room, but full. Great appreciation. The scene at Manchester last night was really magnificent. I had had the platform carried forward to our "Frozen Deep" point, and my table and screen built in with a proscenium and room scenery. When I went in (there was a very fine hall), they applauded in the most tremendous manner; and the extent to which they were taken aback and taken by storm by "Copperfield" was really a thing to see. The post closes early here on a Sunday, and I shall close this also without further reference to "a message from the" W. H. W. being probably on the road. Radley is ill, and supposed to be fast declining, poor fellow. The house is crammed, the assizes on, and troops perpetually embarking for Canada, and their officers passing through the hotel. Kindest regards, ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] GAD'S HILL, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, Dec. 28th, 1861._ MY DEAR MARY, On Monday (as you know) I am away again, but I am not sorry to see land and a little rest before me; albeit, these are great experiences of the public heart. The little Admiral has gone to visit America in the _Orlando_, supposed to be one of the foremost ships in the Service, and the best found, best manned, and best officered that ever sailed from England. He went away much gamer than any giant, attended by a chest in which he could easily have stowed himself and a wife and family of his own proportions. Ever and always, your affectionate JOE. 1862. NARRATIVE. At the beginning of this year, Charles Dickens resumed the reading tour which he had commenced at the close of the previous year and continued up to Christmas. The first letter which follows, to Mr. Wills, a New Year's greeting, is written from a railway station between one town and another on this journey. Mr. Macready, who had married for the second time not very long before this, was now settled at Cheltenham. Charles Dickens had arranged to give readings there, chiefly for the pleasure of visiting him, and of having him as one of his audience. This reading tour went on until the beginning of February. One of the last of the series was in his favourite "beautiful room," the St. George's Hall at Liverpool. In February, he made an exchange of houses with his friends Mr. and Mrs. Hogge, they going to Gad's Hill, and he and his family to Mr. Hogge's house in Hyde Park Gate South. In March he commenced a series of readings at St. James's Hall, which went on until the middle of June, when he, very gladly, returned to his country home. A letter beginning "My dear Girls," addressed to some American ladies who happened to be at Colchester, in the same inn with him when he was reading there, was published by one of them under the name of "Our Letter," in the "St. Nicholas Magazine," New York, in 1877. We think it best to explain it in the young lady's own words, which are, therefore, appended to the letter. Mr. Walter Thornbury was one of Charles Dickens's most valuable contributors to "All the Year Round." His letters to him about the subjects of his articles for that journal, are specimens of the minute and careful attention and personal supervision, never neglected or distracted by any other work on which he might be engaged, were it ever so hard or engrossing. The letter addressed to Mr. Baylis we give chiefly because it has, since Mr. Baylis's death, been added to the collection of MSS. in the British Museum. He was a very intimate and confidential friend of the late Lord Lytton, and accompanied him on a visit to Gad's Hill in that year. We give an extract from another letter from Charles Dickens to his sister, as a beautiful specimen of a letter of condolence and encouragement to one who was striving, very bravely, but by very slow degrees, to recover from the overwhelming grief of her bereavement. Mr. Wilkie Collins was at this time engaged on his novel of "No Name," which appeared in "All the Year Round," and was threatened with a very serious breakdown in health. Charles Dickens wrote the letter which we give, to relieve Mr. Collins's mind as to his work. Happily he recovered sufficiently to make an end to his own story without any help; but the true friendship and kindness which suggested the offer were none the less appreciated, and may, very likely, by lessening his anxiety, have helped to restore his health. At the end of October in this year, Charles Dickens, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, went to reside for a couple of months in Paris, taking an apartment in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. From thence he writes to M. Charles Fechter. He had been greatly interested in this fine artist from the time of his first appearance in England, and was always one of his warmest friends and supporters during his stay in this country. M. Fechter was, at this time, preparing for the opening of the Lyceum Theatre, under his own management, at the beginning of the following year. Just before Christmas, Charles Dickens returned to Gad's Hill. The Christmas number for this year was "Somebody's Luggage." [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] AT THE BIRMINGHAM STATION, _Thursday, Jan. 2nd, 1862._ MY DEAR WILLS, Being stationed here for an hour, on my way from Leamington to Cheltenham, I write to you. Firstly, to reciprocate all your cordial and affectionate wishes for the New Year, and to express my earnest hope that we may go on through many years to come, as we have gone on through many years that are gone. And I think we can say that we doubt whether any two men can have gone on more happily and smoothly, or with greater trust and confidence in one another. A little packet will come to you from Hunt and Roskell's, almost at the same time, I think, as this note. The packet will contain a claret-jug. I hope it is a pretty thing in itself for your table, and I know that you and Mrs. Wills will like it none the worse because it comes from me. It is not made of a perishable material, and is so far expressive of our friendship. I have had your name and mine set upon it, in token of our many years of mutual reliance and trustfulness. It will never be so full of wine as it is to-day of affectionate regard. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] CHELTENHAM, _Friday, Jan. 3rd, 1862._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, Mrs. Macready in voice is very like poor Mrs. Macready dead and gone; not in the least like her otherwise. She is perfectly satisfactory, and exceedingly winning. Quite perfect in her manner with him and in her ease with his children, sensible, gay, pleasant, sweet-tempered; not in the faintest degree stiff or pedantic; accessible instantly. I have very rarely seen a more agreeable woman. The house is (on a smaller scale) any house we have known them in. Furnished with the old furniture, pictures, engravings, mirrors, tables, and chairs. Butty is too tall for strength, I am afraid, but handsome, with a face of great power and character, and a very nice girl. Katie you know all about. Macready, decidedly much older and infirm. Very much changed. His old force has gone out of him strangely. I don't think I left off talking a minute from the time of my entering the house to my going to bed last night, and he was as much amused and interested as ever I saw him; still he was, and is, unquestionably aged. And even now I am obliged to cut this letter short by having to go and look after Headland. It would never do to be away from the rest of them. I have no idea what we are doing here; no notion whether things are right or wrong; no conception where the room is; no hold of the business at all. For which reason I cannot rest without going and looking after the worthy man. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] TORQUAY, _Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1862._ You know, I think, that I was very averse to going to Plymouth, and would not have gone there again but for poor Arthur. But on the last night I read "Copperfield," and positively enthralled the people. It was a most overpowering effect, and poor Andrew[7] came behind the screen, after the storm, and cried in the best and manliest manner. Also there were two or three lines of his shipmates and other sailors, and they were extraordinarily affected. But its culminating effect was on Macready at Cheltenham. When I got home after "Copperfield," I found him quite unable to speak, and able to do nothing but square his dear old jaw all on one side, and roll his eyes (half closed), like Jackson's picture of him. And when I said something light about it, he returned: "No--er--Dickens! I swear to Heaven that, as a piece of passion and playfulness--er--indescribably mixed up together, it does--er--no, really, Dickens!--amaze me as profoundly as it moves me. But as a piece of art--and you know--er--that I--no, Dickens! By ----! have seen the best art in a great time--it is incomprehensible to me. How is it got at--er--how is it done--er--how one man can--well? It lays me on my--er--back, and it is of no use talking about it!" With which he put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his pocket-handkerchief, and I felt as if I were doing somebody to his Werner. Katie, by-the-bye, is a wonderful audience, and has a great fund of wild feeling in her. Johnny not at all unlike Plorn. I have not yet seen the room here, but imagine it to be very small. Exeter I know, and that is small also. I am very much used up, on the whole, for I cannot bear this moist warm climate. It would kill me very soon. And I have now got to the point of taking so much out of myself with "Copperfield," that I might as well do Richard Wardour. You have now, my dearest Georgy, the fullest extent of my tidings. This is a very pretty place--a compound of Hastings, Tunbridge Wells, and little bits of the hills about Naples; but I met four respirators as I came up from the station, and three pale curates without them, who seemed in a bad way. Frightful intelligence has just been brought in by Boylett, concerning the small size of the room. I have terrified Headland by sending him to look at it, and swearing that if it's too small I will go away to Exeter. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Tuesday, Jan. 28th, 1862._ The beautiful room was crammed to excess last night, and numbers were turned away. Its beauty and completeness when it is lighted up are most brilliant to behold, and for a reading it is simply perfect. You remember that a Liverpool audience is usually dull, but they put me on my mettle last night, for I never saw such an audience--no, not even in Edinburgh! I slept horribly last night, and have been over to Birkenhead for a little change of air to-day. My head is dazed and worn by gas and heat, and I fear that "Copperfield" and "Bob" together to-night won't mend it. Best love to Mamie and Katie, if still at Gad's. I am going to bring the boys some toffee. [Sidenote: The Misses Armstrong] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Feb. 10th, 1862._ MY DEAR GIRLS, For if I were to write "young friends," it would look like a schoolmaster; and if I were to write "young ladies," it would look like a schoolmistress; and worse than that, neither form of words would look familiar and natural, or in character with our snowy ride that tooth-chattering morning. I cannot tell you both how gratified I was by your remembrance, or how often I think of you as I smoke the admirable cigars. But I almost think you must have had some magnetic consciousness across the Atlantic, of my whiffing my love towards you from the garden here. My daughter says that when you have settled those little public affairs at home, she hopes you will come back to England (possibly in united states) and give a minute or two to this part of Kent. _Her_ words are, "a day or two;" but I remember your Italian flights, and correct the message. I have only just now finished my country readings, and have had nobody to make breakfast for me since the remote ages of Colchester! Ever faithfully yours. OUR LETTER. By M. F. ARMSTRONG. "From among all my treasures--to each one of which some pleasant history is bound--I choose this letter, written on coarse blue paper. The letter was received in answer to cigars sent from America to Mr. Dickens. The 'little public affairs at home' refers to the war of the Rebellion. At Colchester, he read 'The Trial' from 'Pickwick,' and selections from 'Nicholas Nickleby.' The lady, her two sisters, and her brother were Mr. Dickens's guests at the queer old English inn at Colchester. Through the softly falling snow we came back together to London, and on the railway platform parted, with a hearty hand-shaking, from the man who will for ever be enshrined in our hearts as the kindest and most generous, not to say most brilliant of hosts." [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] 16, HYDE PARK GATE, SOUTH KENSINGTON GORE, _Sunday, March 16th, 1862._ MY DEAR CERJAT, My daughter naturally liking to be in town at this time of year, I have changed houses with a friend for three months. My eldest boy is in business as an Eastern merchant in the City, and will do well if he can find continuous energy; otherwise not. My second boy is with the 42nd Highlanders in India. My third boy, a good steady fellow, is educating expressly for engineers or artillery. My fourth (this sounds like a charade), a born little sailor, is a midshipman in H.M.S. _Orlando_, now at Bermuda, and will make his way anywhere. Remaining two at school, elder of said remaining two very bright and clever. Georgina and Mary keeping house for me; and Francis Jeffrey (I ought to have counted him as the third boy, so we'll take him in here as number two and a half) in my office at present. Now you have the family bill of fare. You ask me about Fechter and his Hamlet. It was a performance of extraordinary merit; by far the most coherent, consistent, and intelligible Hamlet I ever saw. Some of the delicacies with which he rendered his conception clear were extremely subtle; and in particular he avoided that brutality towards Ophelia which, with a greater or less amount of coarseness, I have seen in all other Hamlets. As a mere _tour de force_, it would have been very remarkable in its disclosure of a perfectly wonderful knowledge of the force of the English language; but its merit was far beyond and above this. Foreign accent, of course, but not at all a disagreeable one. And he was so obviously safe and at ease, that you were never in pain for him as a foreigner. Add to this a perfectly picturesque and romantic "make up," and a remorseless destruction of all conventionalities, and you have the leading virtues of the impersonation. In Othello he did not succeed. In Iago he is very good. He is an admirable artist, and far beyond anyone on our stage. A real artist and a gentleman. Last Thursday I began reading again in London--a condensation of "Copperfield," and "Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party," from "Pickwick," to finish merrily. The success of "Copperfield" is astounding. It made an impression that _I_ must not describe. I may only remark that I was half dead when I had done; and that although I had looked forward, all through the summer, when I was carefully getting it up, to its being a London sensation; and that although Macready, hearing it at Cheltenham, told me to be prepared for a great effect, it even went beyond my hopes. I read again next Thursday, and the rush for places is quite furious. Tell Townshend this with my love, if you see him before I have time to write to him; and tell him that I thought the people would never let me go away, they became so excited, and showed it so very warmly. I am trying to plan out a new book, but have not got beyond trying. Yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Thornbury.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, April 18th, 1862._ MY DEAR THORNBURY, The Bow Street runners ceased out of the land soon after the introduction of the new police. I remember them very well as standing about the door of the office in Bow Street. They had no other uniform than a blue dress-coat, brass buttons (I am not even now sure that that was necessary), and a bright red cloth waistcoat. The waistcoat was indispensable, and the slang name for them was "redbreasts," in consequence. They kept company with thieves and the like, much more than the detective police do. I don't know what their pay was, but I have no doubt their principal complements were got under the rose. It was a very slack institution, and its head-quarters were The Brown Bear, in Bow Street, a public-house of more than doubtful reputation, opposite the police-office; and either the house which is now the theatrical costume maker's, or the next door to it. Field, who advertises the Secret Enquiry Office, was a Bow Street runner, and can tell you all about it; Goddard, who also advertises an enquiry office, was another of the fraternity. They are the only two I know of as yet existing in a "questionable shape." Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Baylis.] GAD'S HILL, ETC., _Wednesday, July 2nd, 1862._ MY DEAR MR. BAYLIS, I have been in France, and in London, and in other parts of Kent than this, and everywhere but here, for weeks and weeks. Pray excuse my not having (for this reason specially) answered your kind note sooner. After carefully cross-examining my daughter, I do NOT believe her to be worthy of the fernery. Last autumn we transplanted into the shrubbery a quantity of evergreens previously clustered close to the front of the house, and trained more ivy about the wall and the like. When I ask her where she would have the fernery and what she would do with it, the witness falters, turns pale, becomes confused, and says: "Perhaps it would be better not to have it at all." I am quite confident that the constancy of the young person is not to be trusted, and that she had better attach her fernery to one of her châteaux in Spain, or one of her English castles in the air. None the less do I thank you for your more than kind proposal. We have been in great anxiety respecting Miss Hogarth, the sudden decline of whose health and spirits has greatly distressed us. Although she is better than she was, and the doctors are, on the whole, cheerful, she requires great care, and fills us with apprehension. The necessity of providing change for her will probably take us across the water very early in the autumn; and this again unsettles home schemes here, and withers many kinds of fern. If they knew (by "they" I mean my daughter and Miss Hogarth) that I was writing to you, they would charge me with many messages of regard. But as I am shut up in my room in a ferocious and unapproachable condition, owing to the great accumulation of letters I have to answer, I will tell them at lunch that I have anticipated their wish. As I know they have bills for me to pay, and are at present shy of producing them, I wish to preserve a gloomy and repellent reputation. My dear Mr. Baylis, faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL, _Tuesday, Oct. 7th, 1862._ * * * * * I do not preach consolation because I am unwilling to preach at any time, and know my own weakness too well. But in this world there is no stay but the hope of a better, and no reliance but on the mercy and goodness of God. Through those two harbours of a shipwrecked heart, I fully believe that you will, in time, find a peaceful resting-place even on this careworn earth. Heaven speed the time, and do you try hard to help it on! It is impossible to say but that our prolonged grief for the beloved dead may grieve them in their unknown abiding-place, and give them trouble. The one influencing consideration in all you do as to your disposition of yourself (coupled, of course, with a real earnest strenuous endeavour to recover the lost tone of spirit) is, that you think and feel you _can_ do. I do not in the least regard your change of course in going to Havre as any evidence of instability. But I rather hope it is likely that through such restlessness you will come to a far quieter frame of mind. The disturbed mind and affections, like the tossed sea, seldom calm without an intervening time of confusion and trouble. But nothing is to be attained without striving. In a determined effort to settle the thoughts, to parcel out the day, to find occupation regularly or to make it, to be up and doing something, are chiefly to be found the mere mechanical means which must come to the aid of the best mental efforts. It is a wilderness of a day, here, in the way of blowing and raining, and as darkly dismal, at four o'clock, as need be. My head is but just now raised from a day's writing, but I will not lose the post without sending you a word. Katie was here yesterday, just come back from Clara White's (that was), in Scotland. In the midst of her brilliant fortune, it is too clear to me that she is already beckoned away to follow her dead sisters. Macready was here from Saturday evening to yesterday morning, older but looking wonderfully well, and (what is very rare in these times) with the old thick sweep of hair upon his head. Georgina being left alone here the other day, was done no good to by a great consternation among the servants. On going downstairs, she found Marsh (the stableman) seated with great dignity and anguish in an arm-chair, and incessantly crying out: "I am dead." To which the women servants said with great pathos (and with some appearance of reason): "No, you ain't, Marsh!" And to which he persisted in replying: "Yes, I am; I am dead!" Some neighbouring vagabond was impressed to drive a cart over to Rochester and fetch the doctor, who said (the patient and his consolers being all very anxious that the heart should be the scene of affliction): "Stomach." [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday Night, Oct. 14th, 1862._ MY DEAR WILKIE, Frank Beard has been here this evening, of course since I posted my this day's letter to you, and has told me that you are not at all well, and how he has given you something which he hopes and believes will bring you round. It is not to convey this insignificant piece of intelligence, or to tell you how anxious I am that you should come up with a wet sheet and a flowing sail (as we say at sea when we are not sick), that I write. It is simply to say what follows, which I hope may save you some mental uneasiness. For I was stricken ill when I was doing "Bleak House," and I shall not easily forget what I suffered under the fear of not being able to come up to time. Dismiss that fear (if you have it) altogether from your mind. Write to me at Paris at any moment, and say you are unequal to your work, and want me, and I will come to London straight and do your work. I am quite confident that, with your notes and a few words of explanation, I could take it up at any time and do it. Absurdly unnecessary to say that it would be a makeshift! But I could do it at a pinch, so like you as that no one should find out the difference. Don't make much of this offer in your mind; it is nothing, except to ease it. If you should want help, I am as safe as the bank. The trouble would be nothing to me, and the triumph of overcoming a difficulty great. Think it a Christmas number, an "Idle Apprentice," a "Lighthouse," a "Frozen Deep." I am as ready as in any of these cases to strike in and hammer the hot iron out. You won't want me. You will be well (and thankless!) in no time. But there I am; and I hope that the knowledge may be a comfort to you. Call me, and I come. As Beard always has a sense of medical responsibility, and says anything important about a patient in confidence, I have merely remarked here that "Wilkie" is out of sorts. Charley (who is here with Katie) has no other cue from me. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] PARIS, RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ, 27, _Tuesday, Nov. 4th, 1862._ MY DEAR FECHTER, You know, I believe, how our letters crossed, and that I am here until Christmas. Also, you know with what pleasure and readiness I should have responded to your invitation if I had been in London. Pray tell Paul Féval that I shall be charmed to know him, and that I shall feel the strongest interest in making his acquaintance. It almost puts me out of humour with Paris (and it takes a great deal to do that!) to think that I was not at home to prevail upon him to come with you, and be welcomed to Gad's Hill; but either there or here, I hope to become his friend before this present old year is out. Pray tell him so. You say nothing in your note of your Lyceum preparations. I trust they are all going on well. There is a fine opening for you, I am sure, with a good beginning; but the importance of a good beginning is very great. If you ever have time and inclination to tell me in a short note what you are about, you can scarcely interest me more, as my wishes and strongest sympathies are for and with your success--_mais cela va sans dire_. I went to the Châtelet (a beautiful theatre!) the other night to see "Rothomago," but was so mortally _gêné_ with the poor nature of the piece and of the acting, that I came out again when there was a week or two (I mean an hour or two, but the hours seemed weeks) yet to get through. My dear Fechter, very faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] PARIS, RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ, 27, _Friday, Dec. 5th, 1862._ MY DEAR STANNY, We have been here for two months, and I shall probably come back here after Christmas (we go home for Christmas week) and stay on into February. But I shall write and propose a theatre before Christmas is out, so this is to warn you to get yourself into working pantomime order! I hope Wills has duly sent you our new Christmas number. As you may like to know what I myself wrote of it, understand the Dick contributions to be, _his leaving it till called for_, and _his wonderful end_, _his boots_, and _his brown paper parcel_. Since you were at Gad's Hill I have been travelling a good deal, and looking up many odd things for use. I want to know how you are in health and spirits, and it would be the greatest of pleasures to me to have a line under your hand. God bless you and yours with all the blessings of the time of year, and of all times! Ever your affectionate and faithful DICK. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] PARIS, _Saturday, Dec. 6th, 1862._ MY DEAR FECHTER, I have read "The White Rose" attentively, and think it an extremely good play. It is vigorously written with a great knowledge of the stage, and presents many striking situations. I think the close particularly fine, impressive, bold, and new. But I greatly doubt the expediency of your doing _any_ historical play early in your management. By the words "historical play," I mean a play founded on any incident in English history. Our public are accustomed to associate historical plays with Shakespeare. In any other hands, I believe they care very little for crowns and dukedoms. What you want is something with an interest of a more domestic and general nature--an interest as romantic as you please, but having a more general and wider response than a disputed succession to the throne can have for Englishmen at this time of day. Such interest culminated in the last Stuart, and has worn itself out. It would be uphill work to evoke an interest in Perkin Warbeck. I do not doubt the play's being well received, but my fear is that these people would be looked upon as mere abstractions, and would have but a cold welcome in consequence, and would not lay hold of your audience. Now, when you _have_ laid hold of your audience and have accustomed them to your theatre, you may produce "The White Rose," with far greater justice to the author, and to the manager also. Wait. Feel your way. Perkin Warbeck is too far removed from analogy with the sympathies and lives of the people for a beginning. My dear Fechter, ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, Dec. 27th, 1862._ MY DEAR MARY, I must send you my Christmas greeting and happy New Year wishes in return for yours; most heartily and fervently reciprocating your interest and affection. You are among the few whom I most care for and best love. Being in London two evenings in the opening week, I tried to persuade my legs (for whose judgment I have the highest respect) to go to an evening party. But I _could not_ induce them to pass Leicester Square. The faltering presentiment under which they laboured so impressed me, that at that point I yielded to their terrors. They immediately ran away to the east, and I accompanied them to the Olympic, where I saw a very good play, "Camilla's Husband," very well played. Real merit in Mr. Neville and Miss Saville. We came across directly after the gale, with the Channel all bestrewn with floating wreck, and with a hundred and fifty sick schoolboys from Calais on board. I am going back on the morning after Fechter's opening night, and have promised to read "Copperfield" at the Embassy, for a British charity. Georgy continues wonderfully well, and she and Mary send you their best love. The house is pervaded by boys; and every boy has (as usual) an unaccountable and awful power of producing himself in every part of the house at every moment, apparently in fourteen pairs of creaking boots. My dear Mary, ever affectionately your JOE. FOOTNOTES: [7] Lieutenant Andrew Gordon, R.N., son of the Sheriff of Midlothian. 1863. NARRATIVE. At the beginning of this year, Charles Dickens was in Paris for the purpose of giving a reading at the English Embassy. He remained in Paris until the beginning of February, staying with his servant "John" at the Hôtel du Helder. There was a series of readings in London this season at the Hanover Square Rooms. The Christmas number of "All the Year Round" was entitled "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," to which Charles Dickens contributed the first and last chapter. The Lyceum Theatre, under the management of M. Fechter, was opened in January with "The Duke's Motto," and the letter given here has reference to this first night. We regret very much having no letters to Lady Molesworth, who was an old and dear friend of Charles Dickens. But this lady explains to us that she has long ceased to preserve any letters addressed to her. The "Mr. and Mrs. Humphery" (now Sir William and Lady Humphery) mentioned in the first letter for this year, were dear and intimate friends of his eldest daughter, and were frequent guests in her father's house. Mrs. Humphery and her sister Lady Olliffe were daughters of the late Mr. William Cubitt, M.P. We have in this year the first letter of Charles Dickens to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. This gentleman had been a valuable contributor to his journal before he became personally known to Charles Dickens. The acquaintance once made soon ripened into friendship, and for the future Mr. Fitzgerald was a constant and always a welcome visitor to Gad's Hill. The letter to Mr. Charles Reade alludes to his story, "Hard Cash," which was then appearing in "All the Year Round." As a writer, and as a friend, he was held by Charles Dickens in the highest estimation. Charles Dickens's correspondence with his solicitor and excellent friend, Mr. Frederic Ouvry (now a vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries), was almost entirely of a business character; but we are glad to give one or two notes to that gentleman, although of little public interest, in order to have the name in our book of one of the kindest of our own friends. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PARIS, HÔTEL DU HELDER, RUE DU HELDER, _Friday, Jan. 16th, 1863._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, As I send a line to your aunt to-day and know that you will not see it, I send another to you to report my safe (and neuralgic) arrival here. My little rooms are perfectly comfortable, and I like the hotel better than any I have ever put up at in Paris. John's amazement at, and appreciation of, Paris are indescribable. He goes about with his mouth open, staring at everything and being tumbled over by everybody. The state dinner at the Embassy, yesterday, coming off in the room where I am to read, the carpenters did not get in until this morning. But their platforms were ready--or supposed to be--and the preparations are in brisk progress. I think it will be a handsome affair to look at--a very handsome one. There seems to be great artistic curiosity in Paris, to know what kind of thing the reading is. I know a "rela-shon" (with one weak eye), who is in the gunmaking line, very near here. There is a strong family resemblance--but no muzzle. Lady Molesworth and I have not begun to "toddle" yet, but have exchanged affectionate greetings. I am going round to see her presently, and I dine with her on Sunday. The only remaining news is, that I am beset by mysterious adorers, and smuggle myself in and out of the house in the meanest and basest manner. With kind regard to Mr. and Mrs. Humphery, Ever, my dearest Mamey, your affectionate Father. P.S.--_Hommage à Madame B.!_ [Sidenote: Monsieur Regnier.] PARIS, _Sunday, Feb. 1st, 1863._ MY DEAR REGNIER, I was charmed by the receipt of your cordial and sympathetic letter, and I shall always preserve it carefully as a most noble tribute from a great and real artist. I wished you had been at the Embassy on Friday evening. The audience was a fine one, and the "Carol" is particularly well adapted to the purpose. It is an uncommon pleasure to me to learn that I am to meet you on Tuesday, for there are not many men whom I meet with greater pleasure than you. Heaven! how the years roll by! We are quite old friends now, in counting by years. If we add sympathies, we have been friends at least a thousand years. Affectionately yours ever. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] HÔTEL DU HELDER, PARIS, _Sunday, Feb. 1st, 1863._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I cannot give you any idea of the success of the readings here, because no one can imagine the scene of last Friday night at the Embassy. Such audiences and such enthusiasm I have never seen, but the thing culminated on Friday night in a two hours' storm of excitement and pleasure. They actually recommenced and applauded right away into their carriages and down the street. You know your parent's horror of being lionised, and will not be surprised to hear that I am half dead of it. I cannot leave here until Thursday (though I am every hour in danger of running away) because I have to dine out, to say nothing of breakfasting--think of me breakfasting!--every intervening day. But my project is to send John home on Thursday, and then to go on a little perfectly quiet tour for about ten days, touching the sea at Boulogne. When I get there, I will write to your aunt (in case you should not be at home), saying when I shall arrive at the office. I must go to the office instead of Gad's, because I have much to do with Forster about Elliotson. I enclose a short note for each of the little boys. Give Harry ten shillings pocket-money, and Plorn six. The Olliffe girls, very nice. Florence at the readings, prodigiously excited. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] PARIS, _Sunday, Feb. 1st, 1863._ From my hurried note to Mamie, you will get some faint general idea of a new star's having arisen in Paris. But of its brightness you can have no adequate conception. [John has locked me up and gone out, and the little bell at the door is ringing demoniacally while I write.] You have never heard me read yet. I have been twice goaded and lifted out of myself into a state that astonished _me_ almost as much as the audience. I have a cold, but no neuralgia, and am "as well as can be expected." I forgot to tell Mamie that I went (with Lady Molesworth) to hear "Faust" last night. It is a splendid work, in which that noble and sad story is most nobly and sadly rendered, and perfectly delighted me. But I think it requires too much of the audience to do for a London opera house. The composer must be a very remarkable man indeed. Some management of light throughout the story is also very poetical and fine. We had Carvalho's box. I could hardly bear the thing, it affected me so. But, as a certain Frenchman said, "No weakness, Danton!" So I leave off. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] PARIS, _Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 1863._ MY DEAR FECHTER, A thousand congratulations on your great success! Never mind what they say, or do, _pour vous écraser_; you have the game in your hands. The romantic drama, thoroughly well done (with a touch of Shakespeare now and then), is the speciality of your theatre. Give the public the picturesque, romantic drama, with yourself in it; and (as I told you in the beginning) you may throw down your gauntlet in defiance of all comers. It is a most brilliant success indeed, and it thoroughly rejoices my heart! Unfortunately I cannot now hope to see "Maquet," because I am packing up and going out to dinner (it is late in the afternoon), and I leave to-morrow morning when all sensible people, except myself, are in bed; and I do not come back to Paris or near it. I had hoped to see him at breakfast last Monday, but he was not there. Paul Féval was there, and I found him a capital fellow. If I can do anything to help you on with "Maquet"[8] when I come back I will most gladly do it. My readings here have had the finest possible reception, and have achieved a most noble success. I never before read to such fine audiences, so very quick of perception, and so enthusiastically responsive. I shall be heartily pleased to see you again, my dear Fechter, and to share your triumphs with the real earnestness of a real friend. And so go on and prosper, and believe me, as I truly am, Most cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, Feb. 19th, 1863._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have just come back from Paris, where the readings--"Copperfield," "Dombey" and "Trial," and "Carol" and "Trial"--have made a sensation which modesty (my natural modesty) renders it impossible for me to describe. You know what a noble audience the Paris audience is! They were at their very noblest with me. I was very much concerned by hearing hurriedly from Georgy that you were ill. But when I came home at night, she showed me Katie's letter, and that set me up again. Ah, you have the best of companions and nurses, and can afford to be ill now and then for the happiness of being so brought through it. But don't do it again yet awhile for all that. Legouvé (whom you remember in Paris as writing for the Ristori) was anxious that I should bring you the enclosed. A manly and generous effort, I think? Regnier desired to be warmly remembered to you. He looks just as of yore. Paris generally is about as wicked and extravagant as in the days of the Regency. Madame Viardot in the "Orphée," most splendid. An opera of "Faust," a very sad and noble rendering of that sad and noble story. Stage management remarkable for some admirable, and really poetical, effects of light. In the more striking situations, Mephistopheles surrounded by an infernal red atmosphere of his own. Marguerite by a pale blue mournful light. The two never blending. After Marguerite has taken the jewels placed in her way in the garden, a weird evening draws on, and the bloom fades from the flowers, and the leaves of the trees droop and lose their fresh green, and mournful shadows overhang her chamber window, which was innocently bright and gay at first. I couldn't bear it, and gave in completely. Fechter doing wonders over the way here, with a picturesque French drama. Miss Kate Terry, in a small part in it, perfectly charming. You may remember her making a noise, years ago, doing a boy at an inn, in "The Courier of Lyons"? She has a tender love-scene in this piece, which is a really beautiful and artistic thing. I saw her do it at about three in the morning of the day when the theatre opened, surrounded by shavings and carpenters, and (of course) with that inevitable hammer going; and I told Fechter: "That is the very best piece of womanly tenderness I have ever seen on the stage, and you'll find that no audience can miss it." It is a comfort to add that it was instantly seized upon, and is much talked of. Stanfield was very ill for some months, then suddenly picked up, and is really rosy and jovial again. Going to see him when he was very despondent, I told him the story of Fechter's piece (then in rehearsal) with appropriate action; fighting a duel with the washing-stand, defying the bedstead, and saving the life of the sofa-cushion. This so kindled his old theatrical ardour, that I think he turned the corner on the spot. With love to Mrs. Macready and Katie, and (be still my heart!) Benvenuta, and the exiled Johnny (not too attentive at school, I hope?), and the personally-unknown young Parr, Ever, my dearest Macready, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Miss Power.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, Feb. 26th, 1863._ MY DEAR MARGUERITE, I think I have found a first-rate title for your book, with an early and a delightful association in most people's minds, and a strong suggestion of Oriental pictures: "ARABIAN DAYS AND NIGHTS." I have sent it to Low's. If they have the wit to see it, do you in your first chapter touch that string, so as to bring a fanciful explanation in aid of the title, and sound it afterwards, now and again, when you come to anything where Haroun al Raschid, and the Grand Vizier, and Mesrour, the chief of the guard, and any of that wonderful _dramatis personæ_ are vividly brought to mind. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, March 4th, 1863._ MY DEAR CHARLES KNIGHT, At a quarter to seven on Monday, the 16th, a stately form will be descried breathing birthday cordialities and affectionate amenities, as it descends the broken and gently dipping ground by which the level country of the Clifton Road is attained. A practised eye will be able to discern two humble figures in attendance, which from their flowing crinolines may, without exposing the prophet to the imputation of rashness, be predicted to be women. Though certes their importance, absorbed and as it were swallowed up in the illustrious bearing and determined purpose of the maturer stranger, will not enthrall the gaze that wanders over the forest of San Giovanni as the night gathers in. Ever affectionately, G. P. R. JAMES. [Sidenote: Mrs. Dallas.[9]] EXTRACT. THE TIME OF THE PRINCESS ALEXANDRA'S ARRIVAL IN LONDON. It is curious to see London gone mad. Down in the Strand here, the monomaniacal tricks it is playing are grievous to behold, but along Fleet Street and Cheapside it gradually becomes frenzied, dressing itself up in all sorts of odds and ends, and knocking itself about in a most amazing manner. At London Bridge it raves, principally about the Kings of Denmark and their portraits. I have been looking among them for Hamlet's uncle, and have discovered one personage with a high nose, who I think is the man. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Lehmann.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," NO. 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C., _Tuesday, March 10th, 1863._ DEAR MRS. LEHMANN, Two stalls for to-morrow's reading were sent to you by post before I heard from you this morning. Two will always come to you while you remain a Gummidge, and I hope I need not say that if you want more, none could be better bestowed in my sight. Pray tell Lehmann, when you next write to him, that I find I owe him a mint of money for the delightful Swedish sleigh-bells. They are the wonder, awe, and admiration of the whole country side, and I never go out without them. Let us make an exchange of child stories. I heard of a little fellow the other day whose mamma had been telling him that a French governess was coming over to him from Paris, and had been expatiating on the blessings and advantages of having foreign tongues. After leaning his plump little cheek against the window glass in a dreary little way for some minutes, he looked round and enquired in a general way, and not as if it had any special application, whether she didn't think "that the Tower of Babel was a great mistake altogether?" Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Major.[10]] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," A WEEKLY JOURNAL, ETC. ETC., 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, _Thursday, March 12th, 1863._ MY DEAR MARY, I am quite concerned to hear that you and your party (including your brother Willie) paid for seats at my reading last night. You must promise me never to do so any more. My old affections and attachments are not so lightly cherished or so easily forgotten as that I can bear the thought of you and yours coming to hear me like so many strangers. It will at all times delight me if you will send a little note to me, or to Georgina, or to Mary, saying when you feel inclined to come, and how many stalls you want. You may always be certain, even on the fullest nights, of room being made for you. And I shall always be interested and pleased by knowing that you are present. Mind! You are to be exceedingly penitent for last night's offence, and to make me a promise that it shall never be repeated. On which condition accept my noble forgiveness. With kind regard to Mr. Major, my dear Mary, Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, March 31st, 1863._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I mean to go on reading into June. For the sake of the finer effects (in "Copperfield" principally), I have changed from St. James's Hall to the Hanover Square Room. The latter is quite a wonderful room for sound, and so easy that the least inflection will tell anywhere in the place exactly as it leaves your lips; but I miss my dear old shilling galleries--six or eight hundred strong--with a certain roaring sea of response in them, that you have stood upon the beach of many and many a time. The summer, I hope and trust, will quicken the pace at which you grow stronger again. I am but in dull spirits myself just now, or I should remonstrate with you on your slowness. Having two little boys sent home from school "to see the illuminations" on the marriage-night, I chartered an enormous van, at a cost of five pounds, and we started in majesty from the office in London, fourteen strong. We crossed Waterloo Bridge with the happy design of beginning the sight at London Bridge, and working our way through the City to Regent Street. In a by-street in the Borough, over against a dead wall and under a railway bridge, we were blocked for four hours. We were obliged to walk home at last, having seen nothing whatever. The wretched van turned up in the course of the next morning; and the best of it was that at Rochester here they illuminated the fine old castle, and really made a very splendid and picturesque thing (so my neighbours tell me). With love to Mrs. Macready and Katie, Ever, my dearest Macready, your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, April 22nd, 1863._ ON THE DEATH OF MR. EGG. EXTRACT. Ah, poor Egg! I knew what you would think and feel about it. When we saw him in Paris on his way out I was struck by his extreme nervousness, and derived from it an uneasy foreboding of his state. What a large piece of a good many years he seems to have taken with him! How often have I thought, since the news of his death came, of his putting his part in the saucepan (with the cover on) when we rehearsed "The Lighthouse;" of his falling out of the hammock when we rehearsed "The Frozen Deep;" of his learning Italian numbers when he ate the garlic in the carriage; of the thousands (I was going to say) of dark mornings when I apostrophised him as "Kernel;" of his losing my invaluable knife in that beastly stage-coach; of his posting up that mysterious book[11] every night! I hardly know why, but I have always associated that volume most with Venice. In my memory of the dear gentle little fellow, he will be (as since those days he always has been) eternally posting up that book at the large table in the middle of our Venice sitting-room, incidentally asking the name of an hotel three weeks back! And his pretty house is to be laid waste and sold. If there be a sale on the spot I shall try to buy something in loving remembrance of him, good dear little fellow. Think what a great "Frozen Deep" lay close under those boards we acted on! My brother Alfred, Luard, Arthur, Albert, Austin, Egg. Even among the audience, Prince Albert and poor Stone! "I heard the"--I forget what it was I used to say--"come up from the great deep;" and it rings in my ears now, like a sort of mad prophecy. However, this won't do. We must close up the ranks and march on. [Sidenote: Rev. W. Brookfield.] GAD'S HILL, _May 17th, 1863._ MY DEAR BROOKFIELD, It occurs to me that you may perhaps know, or know of, a kind of man that I want to discover. One of my boys (the youngest) now is at Wimbledon School. He is a docile, amiable boy of fair abilities, but sensitive and shy. And he writes me so very earnestly that he feels the school to be confusingly large for him, and that he is sure he could do better with some gentleman who gave his own personal attention to the education of half-a-dozen or a dozen boys, as to impress me with the belief that I ought to heed his conviction. Has any such phenomenon as a good and reliable man in this wise ever come in your way? Forgive my troubling you, and believe me, Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Rev. W. Brookfield.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _May 24th, 1863._ MY DEAR BROOKFIELD, I am most truly obliged to you for your kind and ready help. When I am in town next week, I will call upon the Bishop of Natal, more to thank him than with the hope of profiting by that gentleman of whom he writes, as the limitation to "little boys" seems to stop the way. I want to find someone with whom this particular boy could remain; if there were a mutual interest and liking, that would be a great point gained. Why did the kings in the fairy tales want children? I suppose in the weakness of the royal intellect. Concerning "Nickleby," I am so much of your mind (comparing it with "Copperfield"), that it was a long time before I could take a pleasure in reading it. But I got better, as I found the audience always taking to it. I have been trying, alone by myself, the "Oliver Twist" murder, but have got something so horrible out of it that I am afraid to try it in public. Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, May 28th, 1863._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I don't wonder at your finding it difficult to reconcile your mind to a French Hamlet; but I assure you that Fechter's is a very remarkable performance perfectly consistent with itself (whether it be my particular Hamlet, or your particular Hamlet, or no), a coherent and intelligent whole, and done by a true artist. I have never seen, I think, an intelligent and clear view of the whole character so well sustained throughout; and there is a very captivating air of romance and picturesqueness added, which is quite new. Rely upon it, the public were right. The thing could not have been sustained by oddity; it would have perished upon that, very soon. As to the mere accent, there is far less drawback in that than you would suppose. For this reason, he obviously knows English so thoroughly that you feel he is safe. You are never in pain for him. This sense of ease is gained directly, and then you think very little more about it. The Colenso and Jowett matter is a more difficult question, but here again I don't go with you. The position of the writers of "Essays and Reviews" is, that certain parts of the Old Testament have done their intended function in the education of the world _as it was_; but that mankind, like the individual man, is designed by the Almighty to have an infancy and a maturity, and that as it advances, the machinery of its education must advance too. For example: inasmuch as ever since there was a sun and there was vapour, there _must have_ been a rainbow under certain conditions, so surely it would be better now to recognise that indisputable fact. Similarly, Joshua might command the sun to stand still, under the impression that it moved round the earth; but he could not possibly have inverted the relations of the earth and the sun, whatever his impressions were. Again, it is contended that the science of geology is quite as much a revelation to man, as books of an immense age and of (at the best) doubtful origin, and that your consideration of the latter must reasonably be influenced by the former. As I understand the importance of timely suggestions such as these, it is, that the Church should not gradually shock and lose the more thoughtful and logical of human minds; but should be so gently and considerately yielding as to retain them, and, through them, hundreds of thousands. This seems to me, as I understand the temper and tendency of the time, whether for good or evil, to be a very wise and necessary position. And as I understand the danger, it is not chargeable on those who take this ground, but on those who in reply call names and argue nothing. What these bishops and such-like say about revelation, in assuming it to be finished and done with, I can't in the least understand. Nothing is discovered without God's intention and assistance, and I suppose every new knowledge of His works that is conceded to man to be distinctly a revelation by which men are to guide themselves. Lastly, in the mere matter of religious doctrine and dogmas, these men (Protestants--protestors--successors of the men who protested against human judgment being set aside) talk and write as if they were all settled by the direct act of Heaven; not as if they had been, as we know they were, a matter of temporary accommodation and adjustment among disputing mortals as fallible as you or I. Coming nearer home, I hope that Georgina is almost quite well. She has no attack of pain or flurry now, and is in all respects immensely better. Mary is neither married nor (that I know of) going to be. She and Katie and a lot of them have been playing croquet outside my window here for these last four days, to a mad and maddening extent. My sailor-boy's ship, the _Orlando_, is fortunately in Chatham Dockyard--so he is pretty constantly at home--while the shipwrights are repairing a leak in her. I am reading in London every Friday just now. Great crams and great enthusiasm. Townshend I suppose to have left Lausanne somewhere about this day. His house in the park is hermetically sealed, ready for him. The Prince and Princess of Wales go about (wisely) very much, and have as fair a chance of popularity as ever prince and princess had. The City ball in their honour is to be a tremendously gorgeous business, and Mary is highly excited by her father's being invited, and she with him. Meantime the unworthy parent is devising all kinds of subterfuges for sending her and getting out of it himself. A very intelligent German friend of mine, just home from America, maintains that the conscription will succeed in the North, and that the war will be indefinitely prolonged. _I_ say "No," and that however mad and villainous the North is, the war will finish by reason of its not supplying soldiers. We shall see. The more they brag the more I don't believe in them. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Saturday Night, July 4th_, 1863. MY DEAR MR. FITZGERALD, I have been most heartily gratified by the perusal of your article on my dogs. It has given me an amount and a kind of pleasure very unusual, and for which I thank you earnestly. The owner of the renowned dog Cæsar understands me so sympathetically, that I trust with perfect confidence to his feeling what I really mean in these few words. You interest me very much by your kind promise, the redemption of which I hereby claim, to send me your life of Sterne when it comes out. If you should be in England before this, I should be delighted to see you here on the top of Falstaff's own Gad's Hill. It is a very pretty country, not thirty miles from London; and if you could spare a day or two for its fine walks, I and my two latest dogs, a St. Bernard and a bloodhound, would be charmed with your company as one of ourselves. Believe me, very faithfully yours. _Friday, July 10th, 1863._[12] DEAR MADAM, I hope you will excuse this tardy reply to your letter. It is often impossible for me, by any means, to keep pace with my correspondents. I must take leave to say, that if there be any general feeling on the part of the intelligent Jewish people, that I have done them what you describe as "a great wrong," they are a far less sensible, a far less just, and a far less good-tempered people than I have always supposed them to be. Fagin, in "Oliver Twist," is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew. But surely no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe--firstly, that all the rest of the wicked _dramatis personæ_ are Christians; and secondly, that he is called the "Jew," not because of his religion, but because of his race. If I were to write a story, in which I described a Frenchman or a Spaniard as "the Roman Catholic," I should do a very indecent and unjustifiable thing; but I make mention of Fagin as the Jew, because he is one of the Jewish people, and because it conveys that kind of idea of him which I should give my readers of a Chinaman, by calling him a Chinese. The enclosed is quite a nominal subscription towards the good object in which you are interested; but I hope it may serve to show you that I have no feeling towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or in private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them; and in my "Child's History of England," I have lost no opportunity of setting forth their cruel persecution in old times. Dear Madam, faithfully yours. In reply to this, the Jewish lady thanks him for his kind letter and its enclosure, still remonstrating and pointing out that though, as he observes, "all the other criminal characters were Christians, they are, at least, contrasted with characters of good Christians; this wretched Fagin stands alone as the Jew." The reply to _this_ letter afterwards was the character of Riah, in "Our Mutual Friend," and some favourable sketches of Jewish character in the lower class, in some articles in "All the Year Round." [Sidenote: Mr. Ouvry.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday Night, July 29th, 1863._ MY DEAR OUVRY, I have had some undefined idea that you were to let me know if you were coming to the archæologs at Rochester. (I myself am keeping out of their way, as having had enough of crowding and speech-making in London.) Will you tell me where you are, whether you are in this neighbourhood or out of it, whether you will come here on Saturday and stay till Monday or till Tuesday morning? If you will come, I _know_ I can give you the heartiest welcome in Kent, and I _think_ I can give you the best wine in this part of it. Send me a word in reply. I will fetch you from anywhere, at any indicated time. We have very pretty places in the neighbourhood, and are not uncomfortable people (I believe) to stay with. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Reade.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Sept. 30th, 1863._ MY DEAR READE, I _must_ write you one line to say how interested I am in your story, and to congratulate you upon its admirable art and its surprising grace and vigour. And to hint my hope, at the same time, that you will be able to find leisure for a little dash for the Christmas number. It would be a really great and true pleasure to me if you could. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, Oct. 7th, 1863._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, You will see by to-day's _Times_ that it _was_ an earthquake that shook me, and that my watch showed exactly the same time as the man's who writes from Blackheath so near us--twenty minutes past three. It is a great satisfaction to me to make it out so precisely; I wish you would enquire whether the servants felt it. I thought it was the voice of the cook that answered me, but that was nearly half an hour later. I am strongly inclined to think that there is a peculiar susceptibility in iron--at all events in our part of the country--to the shock, as though there were something magnetic in it. For, whereas my long iron bedstead was so violently shaken, I certainly heard nothing rattle in the room. I will write about my return as soon as I get on with the still unbegun "Uncommercial." Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] GAD'S HILL, _Sunday, Dec. 20th, 1863._ MY DEAR WILLS, I am clear that you took my cold. Why didn't you do the thing completely, and take it away from me? for it hangs by me still. Will you tell Mrs. Linton that in looking over her admirable account (_most_ admirable) of Mrs. Gordon's book, I have taken out the references to Lockhart, not because I in the least doubt their justice, but because I knew him and he liked me; and because one bright day in Rome, I walked about with him for some hours when he was dying fast, and all the old faults had faded out of him, and the now ghost of the handsome man I had first known when Scott's daughter was at the head of his house, had little more to do with this world than she in her grave, or Scott in his, or small Hugh Littlejohn in his. Lockhart had been anxious to see me all the previous day (when I was away on the Campagna), and as we walked about I knew very well that _he_ knew very well why. He talked of getting better, but I never saw him again. This makes me stay Mrs. Linton's hand, gentle as it is. Mrs. Lirriper is indeed a most brilliant old lady. God bless her. I am glad to hear of your being "haunted," and hope to increase your stock of such ghosts pretty liberally. Ever faithfully. FOOTNOTES: [8] Alluding to a translation of a play by M. Maquet, which M. Fechter was then preparing for his theatre. [9] Now Mrs. Dallas Glyn. [10] Formerly Miss Talfourd. [11] His travelling journal. [12] Answer to letter from Jewish lady, remonstrating with him on injustice to the Jews, shown in the character of Fagin, and asking for subscription for the benefit of the Jewish poor. 1864. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens was, as usual, at Gad's Hill, with a family and friendly party, at the opening of this year, and had been much shocked and distressed by the news of the sudden death of Mr. Thackeray, brought to him by friends arriving from London on the Christmas Eve of 1863, the day on which the sad event happened. He writes of it, in the first letter of the year, to Mr. Wilkie Collins, who was passing the winter in Italy. He tells him, also, of his having got well to work upon a new serial story, the first number of which ("Our Mutual Friend") was published on the 1st of May. The year began very sadly for Charles Dickens. On the 7th of February (his own birthday) he received the mournful announcement of the death of his second son, Walter Landor (a lieutenant in the 42nd Royal Highlanders), who had died quite suddenly at Calcutta, on the last night of the year of 1863, at the age of twenty-three. His third son, Francis Jeffrey, had started for India at the end of January. His annual letter to M. de Cerjat contains an allusion to "another generation beginning to peep above the table"--the children of his son Charles, who had been married three years before, to Miss Bessie Evans. In the middle of February he removed to a house in London (57, Gloucester Place, Hyde Park), where he made a stay of the usual duration, up to the middle of June, all the time being hard at work upon "Our Mutual Friend" and "All the Year Round." Mr. Marcus Stone was the illustrator of the new monthly work, and we give a specimen of one of many letters which he wrote to him about his "subjects." His old friend, Mr. Charles Knight, with whom for many years Charles Dickens had dined on his birthday, was staying, this spring, in the Isle of Wight. To him he writes of the death of Walter, and of another sad death which happened at this time, and which affected him almost as much. Clara, the last surviving daughter of Mr. and Mrs. White, who had been happily married to Mr. Gordon, of Cluny, not more than two years, had just died at Bonchurch. Her father, as will be seen by the touching allusion to him in this letter, had died a short time after this daughter's marriage. A letter to Mr. Edmund Ollier has reference to certain additions which Charles Dickens wished him to make to an article (by Mr. Ollier) on Working Men's Clubs, published in "All the Year Round." We are glad to have one letter to the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Frederick Pollock, which shows the great friendship and regard Charles Dickens had for him, and his admiration of his qualities in his judicial capacity. We give a pleasant letter to Mrs. Storrar, for whom, and for her husband, Dr. Storrar, Charles Dickens had affectionate regard, because we are glad to have their names in our book. The letter speaks for itself and needs no explanation. The latter part of the year was uneventful. Hard at work, he passed the summer and autumn at Gad's Hill, taking holidays by receiving visitors at home (among them, this year, Sir J. Emerson Tennent, his wife and daughter, who were kindly urgent for his paying them a return visit in Ireland) and occasional "runs" into France. The last letters we give are his annual one to M. de Cerjat, and a graceful little New Year's note to his dear old friend "Barry Cornwall." The Christmas number was "Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy," the first and last part written by himself, as in the case of the previous year's "Mrs. Lirriper." [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, Jan. 24th, 1864._ EXTRACT. MY DEAR WILKIE, I am horribly behindhand in answering your welcome letter; but I have been so busy, and have had the house so full for Christmas and the New Year, and have had so much to see to in getting Frank out to India, that I have not been able to settle down to a regular long letter, which I mean this to be, but which it may not turn out to be, after all. First, I will answer your enquiries about the Christmas number and the new book. The Christmas number has been the greatest success of all; has shot ahead of last year; has sold about two hundred and twenty thousand; and has made the name of Mrs. Lirriper so swiftly and domestically famous as never was. I had a very strong belief in her when I wrote about her, finding that she made a great effect upon me; but she certainly has gone beyond my hopes. (Probably you know nothing about her? which is a very unpleasant consideration.) Of the new book, I have done the two first numbers, and am now beginning the third. It is a combination of drollery with romance which requires a great deal of pains and a perfect throwing away of points that might be amplified; but I hope it is _very good_. I confess, in short, that I think it is. Strange to say, I felt at first quite dazed in getting back to the large canvas and the big brushes; and even now, I have a sensation as of acting at the San Carlo after Tavistock House, which I could hardly have supposed would have come upon so old a stager. You will have read about poor Thackeray's death--sudden, and yet not sudden, for he had long been alarmingly ill. At the solicitation of Mr. Smith and some of his friends, I have done what I would most gladly have excused myself from doing, if I felt I could--written a couple of pages about him in what was his own magazine. Concerning the Italian experiment, De la Rue is more hopeful than you. He and his bank are closely leagued with the powers at Turin, and he has long been devoted to Cavour; but he gave me the strongest assurances (with illustrations) of the fusion between place and place, and of the blending of small mutually antagonistic characters into one national character, progressing cheeringly and certainly. Of course there must be discouragements and discrepancies in the first struggles of a country previously so degraded and enslaved, and the time, as yet, has been very short. I should like to have a day with you at the Coliseum, and on the Appian Way, and among the tombs, and with the Orvieto. But Rome and I are wide asunder, physically as well as morally. I wonder whether the dramatic stable, where we saw the marionettes, still receives the Roman public? And Lord! when I think of you in that hotel, how I think of poor dear Egg in the long front drawing-room, giving on to the piazza, posting up that wonderful necromantic volume which we never shall see opened! [Sidenote: Mr. Marcus Stone.] 57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, HYDE PARK,, HYDE PARK, _Tuesday, Feb. 23rd, 1864._ MY DEAR MARCUS, I think the design for the cover _excellent_, and do not doubt its coming out to perfection. The slight alteration I am going to suggest originates in a business consideration not to be overlooked. The word "Our" in the title must be out in the open like "Mutual Friend," making the title three distinct large lines--"Our" as big as "Mutual Friend." This would give you too much design at the bottom. I would therefore take out the dustman, and put the Wegg and Boffin composition (which is capital) in its place. I don't want Mr. Inspector or the murder reward bill, because these points are sufficiently indicated in the river at the top. Therefore you can have an indication of the dustman in Mr. Inspector's place. Note, that the dustman's face should be droll, and not horrible. Twemlow's elbow will still go out of the frame as it does now, and the same with Lizzie's skirts on the opposite side. With these changes, work away! Mrs. Boffin, as I judge of her from the sketch, "very good, indeed." I want Boffin's oddity, without being at all blinked, to be an oddity of a very honest kind, that people will like. The doll's dressmaker is immensely better than she was. I think she should now come extremely well. A weird sharpness not without beauty is the thing I want. Affectionately always. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Knight.] 57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, W., _Tuesday, March 1st, 1864._ MY DEAR KNIGHT, We knew of your being in the Isle of Wight, and had said that we should have this year to drink your health in your absence. Rely on my being always ready and happy to renew our old friendship in the flesh. In the spirit it needs no renewal, because it has no break. Ah, poor Mrs. White! A sad, sad story! It is better for poor White that that little churchyard by the sea received his ashes a while ago, than that he should have lived to this time. My poor boy was on his way home from an up-country station, on sick leave. He had been very ill, but was not so at the time. He was talking to some brother-officers in the Calcutta hospital about his preparations for home, when he suddenly became excited, had a rush of blood from the mouth, and was dead. His brother Frank would arrive out at Calcutta, expecting to see him after six years, and he would have been dead a month. My "working life" is resolving itself at the present into another book, in twenty green leaves. You work like a Trojan at Ventnor, but you do that everywhere; and that's why you are so young. Mary and Georgina unite in kindest regard to you, and to Mrs. Knight, and to your daughters. So do I. And I am ever, my dear Knight, Affectionately yours. P.S.--Serene View! What a placid address! [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Ollier.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _March, 1864._ EXTRACT. I want the article on "Working Men's Clubs" to refer back to "The Poor Man and his Beer" in No. 1, and to maintain the principle involved in that effort. Also, emphatically, to show that trustfulness is at the bottom of all social institutions, and that to trust a man, as one of a body of men, is to place him under a wholesome restraint of social opinion, and is a very much better thing than to make a baby of him. Also, to point out that the rejection of beer in this club, tobacco in that club, dancing or what-not in another club, are instances that such clubs are founded on mere whims, and therefore cannot successfully address human nature in the general, and hope to last. Also, again to urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, or better strive to get rid of it from among them, than to make it a hopeless disqualification in all their clubs, and a reason for expulsion. Also, to encourage them to declare to themselves and their fellow working men that they want social rest and social recreation for themselves and their families; and that these clubs are intended for that laudable and necessary purpose, and do not need educational pretences or flourishes. Do not let them be afraid or ashamed of wanting to be amused and pleased. [Sidenote: The Lord Chief Baron.] 57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 15th, 1864._ MY DEAR CHIEF BARON, Many thanks for your kind letter, which I find on my return from a week's holiday. Your answer concerning poor Thackeray I will duly make known to the active spirit in that matter, Mr. Shirley Brooks. Your kind invitation to me to come and see you and yours, and hear the nightingales, I shall not fail to discuss with Forster, and with an eye to spring. I expect to see him presently; the rather as I found a note from him when I came back yesterday, describing himself somewhat gloomily as not having been well, and as feeling a little out of heart. It is not out of order, I hope, to remark that you have been much in my thoughts and on my lips lately? For I really have not been able to repress my admiration of the vigorous dignity and sense and spirit, with which one of the best of judges set right one of the dullest of juries in a recent case. Believe me ever, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. John Forster.] 57, GLOUCESTER PLACE, _Tuesday, March 29th, 1864._ MY DEAR FORSTER, I meant to write to you last night, but to enable Wills to get away I had to read a book of Fitzgerald's through before I went to bed. Concerning Eliot, I sat down, as I told you, and read the book through with the strangest interest and the highest admiration. I believe it to be as honest, spirited, patient, reliable, and gallant a piece of biography as ever was written, the care and pains of it astonishing, the completeness of it masterly; and what I particularly feel about it is that the dignity of the man, and the dignity of the book that tells about the man, always go together, and fit each other. This same quality has always impressed me as the great leading speciality of the Goldsmith, and enjoins sympathy with the subject, knowledge of it, and pursuit of it in its own spirit; but I think it even more remarkable here. I declare that apart from the interest of having been so put into the time, and enabled to understand it, I personally feel quite as much the credit and honour done to literature by such a book. It quite clears out of the remembrance a thousand pitiful things, and sets one up in heart again. I am not surprised in the least by Bulwer's enthusiasm. I was as confident about the effect of the book when I closed the first volume, as I was when I closed the second with a full heart. No man less in earnest than Eliot himself could have done it, and I make bold to add that it never could have been done by a man who was so distinctly born to do the work as Eliot was to do his. Saturday at Hastings I must give up. I have wavered and considered, and considered and wavered, but if I take that sort of holiday, I must have a day to spare after it, and at this critical time I have not. If I were to lose a page of the five numbers I have purposed to myself to be ready by the publication day, I should feel that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy, and write very slowly, and I have so much bad fiction, that _will_ be thought of when I don't want to think of it, that I am forced to take more care than I ever took. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mrs. Storrar.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday Morning, May 15th, 1864._ MY DEAR MRS. STORRAR, Our family dinner must come off at Gad's Hill, where I have improvements to exhibit, and where I shall be truly pleased to see you and the doctor again. I have deferred answering your note, while I have been scheming and scheming for a day between this time and our departure. But it is all in vain. My engagements have accumulated, and become such a whirl, that no day is left me. Nothing is left me but to get away. I look forward to my release from this dining life with an inexpressible longing after quiet and my own pursuits. What with public speechifying, private eating and drinking, and perpetual simmering in hot rooms, I have made London too hot to hold me and my work together. Mary and Georgina acknowledge the condition of imbecility to which we have become reduced in reference to your kind reminder. They say, when I stare at them in a forlorn way with your note in my hand: "What CAN you do!" To which I can only reply, implicating them: "See what you have brought me to!" With our united kind regard to yourself and Dr. Storrar, I entreat your pity and compassion for an unfortunate wretch whom a too-confiding disposition has brought to this pass. If I had not allowed my "cheeild" to pledge me to all manner of fellow-creatures, I and my digestion might have been in a state of honourable independence this day. Faithfully and penitently yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," ETC. ETC. ETC. _Wednesday, July 27th, 1864._ MY DEAR MR. FITZGERALD, First, let me assure you that it gave us all real pleasure to see your sister and you at Gad's Hill, and that we all hope you will both come and stay a day or two with us when you are next in England. Next, let me convey to you the intelligence that I resolve to launch "Miss Manuel," fully confiding in your conviction of the power of the story. On all business points, Wills will communicate with you. I purpose beginning its publication in our first September number, therefore there is no time to be lost. The only suggestion I have to make as to the MS. in hand and type is, that Captain Fermor wants relief. It is a disagreeable character, as you mean it to be, and I should be afraid to do so much with him, if the case were mine, without taking the taste of him, here and there, out of the reader's mouth. It is remarkable that if you do not administer a disagreeable character carefully, the public have a decided tendency to think that the _story_ is disagreeable, and not merely the fictitious person. What do you think of the title, NEVER FORGOTTEN? It is a good one in itself, would express the eldest sister's pursuit, and glanced at now and then in the text, would hold the reader in suspense. I would propose to add the line, BY THE AUTHOR OF BELLA DONNA. Let me know your opinion as to the title. I need not assure you that the greatest care will be taken of you here, and that we shall make you as thoroughly well and widely known as we possibly can. Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Sir James Emerson Tennent.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, Aug. 26th, 1864._ MY DEAR TENNENT, Believe me, I fully intended to come to you--did not doubt that I should come--and have greatly disappointed Mary and her aunt, as well as myself, by not coming. But I do not feel safe in going out for a visit. The mere knowledge that I had such a thing before me would put me out. It is not the length of time consumed, or the distance traversed, but it is the departure from a settled habit and a continuous sacrifice of pleasures that comes in question. This is an old story with me. I have never divided a book of my writing with anything else, but have always wrought at it to the exclusion of everything else; and it is now too late to change. After receiving your kind note I resolved to make another trial. But the hot weather and a few other drawbacks did not mend the matter, for I have dropped astern this month instead of going ahead. So I have seen Forster, and shown him my chains, and am reduced to taking exercise in them, like Baron Trenck. I am heartily pleased that you set so much store by the dedication. You may be sure that it does not make me the less anxious to take pains, and to work out well what I have in my mind. Mary and Georgina unite with me in kindest regards to Lady Tennent and Miss Tennent, and wish me to report that while they are seriously disappointed, they still feel there is no help for it. I can testify that they had great pleasure in the anticipation of the visit, and that their faces were very long and blank indeed when I began to hint my doubts. They fought against them valiantly as long as there was a chance, but they see my difficulty as well as anyone not myself can. Believe me, my dear Tennent, ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] THE ATHENÆUM, _Wednesday, Sept. 21st, 1864._ MY DEAR STANNY, I met George in the street a few days ago, and he gave me a wonderful account of the effect of your natural element upon you at Ramsgate. I expect you to come back looking about twenty-nine, and feeling about nineteen. This morning I have looked in here to put down Fechter as a candidate, on the chance of the committee's electing him some day or other. He is a most devoted worshipper of yours, and would take it as a great honour if you would second him. Supposing you to have not the least objection (of course, if you should have any, I can in a moment provide a substitute), will you write your name in the candidates' book as his seconder when you are next in town and passing this way? Lastly, if you should be in town on his opening night (a Saturday, and in all probability the 22nd of October), will you come and dine at the office and see his new piece? You have not yet "pronounced" in the matter of that new French stage of his, on which Calcott for the said new piece has built up all manner of villages, camps, Versailles gardens, etc. etc. etc. etc., with no wings, no flies, no looking off in any direction. If you tell me that you are to be in town by that time, I will not fail to refresh your memory as to the precise day. With kind regard to Mrs. Stanfield, Believe me, my dear old boy, ever your affectionate DICK. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, _Tuesday, Oct. 25th, 1864._ MY DEAR CERJAT, Here is a limping brute of a reply to your always-welcome Christmas letter! But, as usual, when I have done my day's work, I jump up from my desk and rush into air and exercise, and find letter-writing the most difficult thing in my daily life. I hope that your asthmatic tendencies may not be strong just now; but Townshend's account of the premature winter at Lausanne is not encouraging, and with us here in England all such disorders have been aggravated this autumn. However, a man of your dignity _must_ have either asthma or gout, and I hope you have got the better of the two. In London there is, as you see by the papers, extraordinarily little news. At present the apprehension (rather less than it was thought) of a commercial crisis, and the trial of Müller next Thursday, are the two chief sensations. I hope that gentleman will be hanged, and have hardly a doubt of it, though croakers contrariwise are not wanting. It is difficult to conceive any other line of defence than that the circumstances proved, taken separately, are slight. But a sound judge will immediately charge the jury that the strength of the circumstances lies in their being put together, and will thread them together on a fatal rope. As to the Church, my friend, I am sick of it. The spectacle presented by the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations, and the exemplary unfairness and rancour with which they conduct their differences, utterly repel me. And the idea of the Protestant establishment, in the face of its own history, seeking to trample out discussion and private judgment, is an enormity so cool, that I wonder the Right Reverends, Very Reverends, and all other Reverends, who commit it, can look in one another's faces without laughing, as the old soothsayers did. Perhaps they can't and don't. How our sublime and so-different Christian religion is to be administered in the future I cannot pretend to say, but that the Church's hand is at its own throat I am fully convinced. Here, more Popery, there, more Methodism--as many forms of consignment to eternal damnation as there are articles, and all in one forever quarrelling body--the Master of the New Testament put out of sight, and the rage and fury almost always turning on the letter of obscure parts of the Old Testament, which itself has been the subject of accommodation, adaptation, varying interpretation without end--these things cannot last. The Church that is to have its part in the coming time must be a more Christian one, with less arbitrary pretensions and a stronger hold upon the mantle of our Saviour, as He walked and talked upon this earth. Of family intelligence I have very little. Charles Collins continuing in a very poor way, and showing no signs of amendment. He and my daughter Katie went to Wiesbaden and thence to Nice, where they are now. I have strong apprehensions that he will never recover, and that she will be left a young widow. All the rest are as they were. Mary neither married nor going to be; Georgina holding them all together and perpetually corresponding with the distant ones; occasional rallyings coming off here, in which another generation begins to peep above the table. I once used to think what a horrible thing it was to be a grandfather. Finding that the calamity falls upon me without my perceiving any other change in myself, I bear it like a man. Mrs. Watson has bought a house in town, to which she repairs in the season, for the bringing out of her daughter. She is now at Rockingham. Her eldest son is said to be as good an eldest son as ever was, and to make her position there a perfectly independent and happy one. I have not seen him for some years; her I often see; but he ought to be a good fellow, and is very popular in his neighbourhood. I have altered this place very much since you were here, and have made a pretty (I think an unusually pretty) drawing-room. I wish you would come back and see it. My being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of France, occasion me to cross the Channel perpetually. Whenever I feel that I have worked too much, or am on the eve of overdoing it, and want a change, away I go by the mail-train, and turn up in Paris or anywhere else that suits my humour, next morning. So I come back as fresh as a daisy, and preserve as ruddy a face as though I never leant over a sheet of paper. When I retire from a literary life I think of setting up as a Channel pilot. Pray give my love to Mrs. Cerjat, and tell her that I should like to go up the Great St. Bernard again, and shall be glad to know if she is open to another ascent. Old days in Switzerland are ever fresh to me, and sometimes I walk with you again, after dark, outside the hotel at Martigny, while Lady Mary Taylour (wasn't it?) sang within very prettily. Lord, how the time goes! How many years ago! Affectionately yours. _Wednesday, Nov. 16th, 1864._[13] DEAR MADAM, I have received your letter with great pleasure, and hope to be (as I have always been at heart) the best of friends with the Jewish people. The error you point out to me had occurred to me, as most errors do to most people, when it was too late to correct it. But it will do no harm. The peculiarities of dress and manner are fused together for the sake of picturesqueness. Dear Madam, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, Dec. 31st, 1864._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I have reserved my acknowledgment of your delightful note (the youngest note I have had in all this year) until to-day, in order that I might send, most heartily and affectionately, all seasonable good wishes to you and to Mrs. Procter, and to those who are nearest and dearest to you. Take them from an old friend who loves you. Mamie returns the tender compliments, and Georgina does what the Americans call "endorse them." Mrs. Lirriper is proud to be so remembered, and says over and over again "that it's worth twenty times the trouble she has taken with the narrative, since Barry Cornwall, Esquire, is pleased to like it." I got rid of a touch of neuralgia in France (as I always do there), but I found no old friends in my voyages of discovery on that side, such as I have left on this. My dear Procter, ever your affectionate. FOOTNOTES: [13] In answer to another letter from the "Jewish lady," in which she gives her reasons for still being dissatisfied with the character of Riah. 1865. NARRATIVE. For this spring a furnished house in Somer's Place, Hyde Park, had been taken, which Charles Dickens occupied, with his sister-in-law and daughter, from the beginning of March until June. During the year he paid two short visits to France. He was still at work upon "Our Mutual Friend," two numbers of which had been issued in January and February, when the first volume was published, with dedication to Sir James Emerson Tennent. The remaining numbers were issued between March and November, when the complete work was published in two volumes. The Christmas number, to which Charles Dickens contributed three stories, was called "Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions." Being out of health, and much overworked, Charles Dickens, at the end of May, took his first short holiday trip into France. And on his way home, and on a day afterwards so fatal to him, the 9th of June, he was in that most terrible railway accident at Staplehurst. Many of our letters for this year have reference to this awful experience--an experience from the effects of which his nerves never wholly recovered. His letters to Mr. Thomas Mitton and to Mrs. Hulkes (an esteemed friend and neighbour) are graphic descriptions of this disaster. But they do NOT tell of the wonderful presence of mind and energy shown by Charles Dickens when most of the terrified passengers were incapable of thought or action, or of his gentleness and goodness to the dead and dying. The Mr. Dickenson[14] mentioned in the letter to Mrs. Hulkes soon recovered. He always considers that he owes his life to Charles Dickens, the latter having discovered and extricated him from beneath a carriage before it was too late. Our first letter to Mr. Kent is one of congratulation upon his having become the proprietor of _The Sun_ newspaper. Professor Owen has been so kind as to give us some notes, which we publish for the sake of his great name. Charles Dickens had not much correspondence with Professor Owen, but there was a firm friendship and great mutual admiration between them. The letter to Mrs. Procter is in answer to one from her, asking Charles Dickens to write a memoir of her daughter Adelaide, as a preface to a collected edition of her poems. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Jan. 17th, 1865._ MY DEAR KENT, I meant to have written instantly on the appearance of your paper in its beautiful freshness, to congratulate you on its handsome appearance, and to send you my heartiest good wishes for its thriving and prosperous career. Through a mistake of the postman's, that remarkable letter has been tesselated into the Infernal Pavement instead of being delivered in the Strand. We have been looking and waiting for your being well enough to propose yourself for a mouthful of fresh air. Are you well enough to come on Sunday? We shall be coming down from Charing Cross on Sunday morning, and I shall be going up again at nine on Monday morning. It amuses me to find that you don't see your way with a certain "Mutual Friend" of ours. I have a horrible suspicion that you may begin to be fearfully knowing at somewhere about No. 12 or 13. But you shan't if I can help it. Your note delighted me because it dwelt upon the places in the number that _I_ dwell on. Not that that is anything new in your case, but it is always new to me in the pleasure I derive from it, which is truly inexpressible. Ever cordially yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Procter.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, Feb. 15th, 1865._ MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER, Of course I will do it, and of course I will do it for the love of you and Procter. You can give me my brief, and we can speak about its details. Once again, of course I will do it, and with all my heart. I have registered a vow (in which there is not the least merit, for I couldn't help it) that when I am, as I am now, very hard at work upon a book, I never will dine out more than one day in a week. Why didn't you ask me for the Wednesday, before I stood engaged to Lady Molesworth for the Tuesday? It is so delightful to me to sit by your side anywhere and be brightened up, that I lay a handsome sacrifice upon the altar of "Our Mutual Friend" in writing this note, very much against my will. But for as many years as can be made consistent with my present juvenility, I always have given my work the first place in my life, and what can I do now at 35!--or at least at the two figures, never mind their order. I send my love to Procter, hoping you may appropriate a little of it by the way. Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, March 1st, 1865._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have been laid up here with a frost-bitten foot (from hard walking in the snow), or you would have heard from me sooner. My reply to Professor Agassiz is short, but conclusive. Daily seeing improper uses made of confidential letters in the addressing of them to a public audience that have no business with them, I made not long ago a great fire in my field at Gad's Hill, and burnt every letter I possessed. And now I always destroy every letter I receive not on absolute business, and my mind is so far at ease. Poor dear Felton's letters went up into the air with the rest, or his highly distinguished representative should have had them most willingly. We never fail to drink old P.'s health on his birthday, or to make him the subject of a thousand loving remembrances. With best love to Mrs. Macready and Katie, Ever, my dearest Macready, Your most affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] 16, SOMER'S PLACE, HYDE PARK, _Saturday Night, April 22nd, 1865._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, A thousand thanks for your kind letter, most heartily welcome. My frost-bitten foot, after causing me great inconvenience and much pain, has begun to conduct itself amiably. I can now again walk my ten miles in the morning without inconvenience, but am absurdly obliged to sit shoeless all the evening--a very slight penalty, as I detest going out to dinner (which killed the original old Parr by-the-bye). I am working like a dragon at my book, and am a terror to the household, likewise to all the organs and brass bands in this quarter. Gad's Hill is being gorgeously painted, and we are here until the 1st of June. I wish I might hope you would be there any time this summer; I really _have_ made the place comfortable and pretty by this time. It is delightful to us to hear such good news of Butty. She made so deep an impression on Fechter that he always asks me what Ceylon has done for her, and always beams when I tell him how thoroughly well it has made her. As to _you_, you are the youngest man (worth mentioning as a thorough man) that I know. Oh, let me be as young when I am as----did you think I was going to write "old?" No, sir--withdrawn from the wear and tear of busy life is my expression. Poole still holds out at Kentish Town, and says he is dying of solitude. His memory is astoundingly good. I see him about once in two or three months, and in the meantime he makes notes of questions to ask me when I come. Having fallen in arrear of the time, these generally refer to unknown words he has encountered in the newspapers. His three last (he always reads them with tremendous difficulty through an enormous magnifying-glass) were as follows: 1. What's croquet? 2. What's an Albert chain? 3. Let me know the state of mind of the Queen. When I had delivered a neat exposition on these heads, he turned back to his memoranda, and came to something that the utmost power of the enormous magnifying-glass couldn't render legible. After a quarter of an hour or so, he said: "O yes, I know." And then rose and clasped his hands above his head, and said: "Thank God, I am not a dram-drinker." Do think of coming to Gad's in the summer; and do give my love to Mrs. Macready, and tell her I know she can make you come if she will. Mary and Georgy send best and dearest loves to her, to you, and to Katie, and to baby. Johnny we suppose to be climbing the tree of knowledge elsewhere. My dearest Macready, ever yours most affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, June 12th, 1865._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, [_So far in his own writing._] Many thanks for your kind words of remembrance.[15] This is not all in my own hand, because I am too much shaken to write many notes. Not by the beating and dragging of the carriage in which I was--it did not go over, but was caught on the turn, among the ruins of the bridge--but by the work afterwards to get out the dying and dead, which was terrible. [_The rest in his own writing_.] Ever your affectionate Friend. P.S.--My love to Mrs. Macready. [Sidenote: Mr. Thomas Mitton.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, June 13th, 1865._ MY DEAR MITTON, I should have written to you yesterday or the day before, if I had been quite up to writing. I was in the only carriage that did not go over into the stream. It was caught upon the turn by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner. Two ladies were my fellow-passengers, an old one and a young one. This is exactly what passed. You may judge from it the precise length of the suspense: Suddenly we were off the rail, and beating the ground as the car of a half-emptied balloon might. The old lady cried out, "My God!" and the young one screamed. I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite and the young one on my left), and said: "We can't help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed. Pray don't cry out." The old lady immediately answered: "Thank you. Rely upon me. Upon my soul I will be quiet." We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped. I said to them thereupon: "You may be sure nothing worse can happen. Our danger _must_ be over. Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?" They both answered quite collectedly, "Yes," and I got out without the least notion what had happened. Fortunately I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down I saw the bridge gone, and nothing below me but the line of rail. Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out at window, and had no idea that there was an open swampy field fifteen feet down below them, and nothing else! The two guards (one with his face cut) were running up and down on the down side of the bridge (which was not torn up) quite wildly. I called out to them: "Look at me. Do stop an instant and look at me, and tell me whether you don't know me." One of them answered: "We know you very well, Mr. Dickens." "Then," I said, "my good fellow, for God's sake give me your key, and send one of those labourers here, and I'll empty this carriage." We did it quite safely, by means of a plank or two, and when it was done I saw all the rest of the train, except the two baggage vans, down in the stream. I got into the carriage again for my brandy flask, took off my travelling hat for a basin, climbed down the brickwork, and filled my hat with water. Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage), with such a frightful cut across the skull that I couldn't bear to look at him. I poured some water over his face and gave him some to drink, then gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said, "I am gone," and died afterwards. Then I stumbled over a lady lying on her back against a little pollard-tree, with the blood streaming over her face (which was lead colour) in a number of distinct little streams from the head. I asked her if she could swallow a little brandy and she just nodded, and I gave her some and left her for somebody else. The next time I passed her she was dead. Then a man, examined at the inquest yesterday (who evidently had not the least remembrance of what really passed), came running up to me and implored me to help him find his wife, who was afterwards found dead. No imagination can conceive the ruin of the carriages, or the extraordinary weights under which the people were lying, or the complications into which they were twisted up among iron and wood, and mud and water. I don't want to be examined at the inquest, and I don't want to write about it. I could do no good either way, and I could only seem to speak about myself, which, of course, I would rather not do. I am keeping very quiet here. I have a--I don't know what to call it--constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least fluttered at the time. I instantly remembered that I had the MS. of a number with me, and clambered back into the carriage for it. But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake and am obliged to stop. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Jones.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, June 17th, 1865_.[16] SIR, I beg you to assure the Committee of the Newsvendors' Benevolent and Provident Institution, that I have been deeply affected by their special remembrance of me in my late escape from death or mutilation, and that I thank them with my whole heart. Faithfully yours and theirs. [Sidenote: Mrs. Hulkes.] GAD'S HILL, _Sunday, June 18th, 1865._ MY DEAR MRS. HULKES, I return the _Examiner_ with many thanks. The account is true, except that I _had_ brandy. By an extraordinary chance I had a bottle and a half with me. I slung the half-bottle round my neck, and carried my hat full of water in my hands. But I can understand the describer (whoever he is) making the mistake in perfect good faith, and supposing that I called for brandy, when I really called to the others who were helping: "I have brandy here." The Mr. Dickenson mentioned had changed places with a Frenchman, who did not like the window down, a few minutes before the accident. The Frenchman was killed, and a labourer and I got Mr. Dickenson out of a most extraordinary heap of dark ruins, in which he was jammed upside down. He was bleeding at the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth; but he didn't seem to know that afterwards, and of course I didn't tell him. In the moment of going over the viaduct the whole of his pockets were shaken empty! He had no watch, no chain, no money, no pocket-book, no handkerchief, when we got him out. He had been choking a quarter of an hour when I heard him groaning. If I had not had the brandy to give him at the moment, I think he would have been done for. As it was, I brought him up to London in the carriage with me, and couldn't make him believe he was hurt. He was the first person whom the brandy saved. As I ran back to the carriage for the whole full bottle, I saw the first two people I had helped lying dead. A bit of shade from the hot sun, into which we got the unhurt ladies, soon had as many dead in it as living. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, June 21st, 1865._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, I need not assure you that I regard the unanimous desire of the Town Council Committee as a great honour, and that I feel the strongest interest in the occasion, and the strongest wish to associate myself with it. But, after careful consideration, I most unwillingly come to the conclusion that I must decline. At the time in question I shall, please God, either have just finished, or be just finishing, my present book. Country rest and reflection will then be invaluable to me, before casting about for Christmas. I am a little shaken in my nervous system by the terrible and affecting incidents of the late railway accident, from which I bodily escaped. I am withdrawing myself from engagements of all kinds, in order that I may pursue my story with the comfortable sense of being perfectly free while it is a-doing, and when it is done. The consciousness of having made this engagement would, if I were to make it, render such sense incomplete, and so open the way to others. This is the real state of the case, and the whole reason for my declining. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. Lehmann.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, June 29th, 1865._ DEAR MRS. LEHMANN, Come (with self and partner) on either of the days you name, and you will be heartily welcomed by the humble youth who now addresses you, and will then cast himself at your feet. I am quite right again, I thank God, and have even got my voice back; I most unaccountably brought somebody else's out of that terrible scene. The directors have sent me a Resolution of Thanks for assistance to the unhappy passengers. With kind regards to Lehmann, ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, July 7th, 1865._ MY DEAR FITZGERALD, I shall be delighted to see you at Gad's Hill on Sunday, and I hope you will bring a bag with you and will not think of returning to London at night. We are a small party just now, for my daughter Mary has been decoyed to Andover for the election week, in the Conservative interest; think of my feelings as a Radical parent! The wrong-headed member and his wife are the friends with whom she hunts, and she helps to receive (and _de_ceive) the voters, which is very awful! But in the week after next we shall be in great croquet force. I shall hope to persuade you to come back to us then for a few days, and we will try to make you some amends for a dull Sunday. Turn it over in your mind and try to manage it. Sincerely yours ever. [Sidenote: Professor Owen, F.R.S.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, July 12th, 1865._ MY DEAR OWEN, Studying the gorilla last night for the twentieth time, it suddenly came into my head that I had never thanked you for that admirable treatise. This is to bear witness to my blushes and repentance. If you knew how much interest it has awakened in me, and how often it has set me a-thinking, you would consider me a more thankless beast than any gorilla that ever lived. But happily you do _not_ know, and I am not going to tell you. Believe me, ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The Earl Russell.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, Aug. 16th, 1865._ MY DEAR LORD RUSSELL, Mr. Dallas, who is a candidate for the Scotch professional chair left vacant by Aytoun's death, has asked me if I would object to introduce to you the first volume of a book he has in the press with my publishers, on "The Gay Science of Art and Criticism." I have replied I would _not_ object, as I have read as many of the sheets as I could get, with extreme pleasure, and as I know you will find it a very winning and brilliant piece of writing. Therefore he will send the proofs of the volume to you as soon as he can get them from the printer (at about the end of this week I take it), and if you read them you will not be hard upon me for bearing the responsibility of his doing so, I feel assured. I suppose Mr. Dallas to have some impression that his pleasing you with his book might advance his Scottish suit. But all I know is, that he is a gentleman of great attainments and erudition, much distinguished as the writer of the best critical literary pieces in _The Times_, and thoroughly versed in the subjects which Professor Aytoun represented officially. I beg to send my regard to Lady Russell and all the house, and am ever, my dear Lord Russell, Your faithful and obliged. P.S.--I am happy to report that my sailor-boy's captain, relinquishing his ship on sick leave, departs from the mere form of certificate given to all the rest, and adds that his obedience to orders is remarkable, and that he is a highly intelligent and promising young officer. [Sidenote: Mr. Marcus Stone.] HÔTEL DU HELDER, PARIS, _Wednesday, Sept. 13th, 1865._ MY DEAR MARCUS, I leave here to-morrow, and propose going to the office by tidal train _next Saturday evening_. Through the whole of next week, on and off, I shall be at the office; when not there, at Gad's; but much oftener at the office. The sooner I can know about the subjects you take for illustration the better, as I can then fill the list of illustrations to the second volume for the printer, and enable him to make up his last sheet. Necessarily that list is now left blank, as I cannot give him the titles of the subjects, not knowing them myself. It has been fearfully hot on this side, but is something cooler. Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--On glancing over this note, I find it very like the king's love-letter in "Ruy Blas." "Madam, there is a high wind. I have shot six wolves." I think the frontispiece to the second volume should be the dustyard with the three mounds, and Mr. Boffin digging up the Dutch bottle, and Venus restraining Wegg's ardour to get at him. Or Mr. Boffin might be coming down with the bottle, and Venus might be dragging Wegg out of the way as described. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Saturday, Sept. 23rd, 1865._ MY DEAR FITZGERALD, I cannot thank you too much for Sultan. He is a noble fellow, has fallen into the ways of the family with a grace and dignity that denote the gentleman, and came down to the railway a day or two since to welcome me home (it was our first meeting), with a profound absence of interest in my individual opinion of him which captivated me completely. I am going home to-day to take him about the country, and improve his acquaintance. You will find a perfect understanding between us, I hope, when you next come to Gad's Hill. (He has only swallowed Bouncer once, and temporarily.) Your hint that you were getting on with your story and liked it was more than golden intelligence to me in foreign parts. The intensity of the heat, both in Paris and the provinces, was such that I found nothing else so refreshing in the course of my rambles. With many more thanks for the dog than my sheet of paper would hold, Believe me, ever very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Procter.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sept. 26th, 1865._ MY DEAR MRS. PROCTER, I have written the little introduction, and have sent it to my printer, in order that you may read it without trouble. But if you would like to keep the few pages of MS., of course they are yours. It is brief, and I have aimed at perfect simplicity, and an avoidance of all that your beloved Adelaide would have wished avoided. Do not expect too much from it. If there should be anything wrong in fact, or anything that you would like changed for any reason, _of course you will tell me so_, and of course you will not deem it possible that you can trouble me by making any such request most freely. You will probably receive the proof either on Friday or Saturday. Don't write to me until you have read it. In the meantime I send you back the two books, with the two letters in the bound one. With love to Procter, Ever your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Yates.] HÔTEL DU HELDER, PARIS, _Wednesday, Sept. 30th, 1865._ MY DEAR EDMUND, I leave here to-morrow and purpose being at the office on Saturday night; all next week I shall be there, off and on--"off" meaning Gad's Hill; the office will be my last address. The heat has been excessive on this side of the Channel, and I got a slight sunstroke last Thursday, and was obliged to be doctored and put to bed for a day; but, thank God, I am all right again. The man who sells the _tisane_ on the Boulevards can't keep the flies out of his glasses, and as he wears them on his red velvet bands, the flies work themselves into the ends of the tumblers, trying to get through and tickle the man. If fly life were long enough, I think they would at last. Three paving blouses came to work at the corner of this street last Monday, pulled up a bit of road, sat down to look at it, and fell asleep. On Tuesday one of the blouses spat on his hands and seemed to be going to begin, but didn't. The other two have shown no sign of life whatever. This morning the industrious one ate a loaf. You may rely upon this as the latest news from the French capital. Faithfully ever. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] 26, WELLINGTON STREET, _Monday, Nov. 6th, 1865._ MY DEAR KENT, _No_, I _won't_ write in this book, because I have sent another to the binder's for you. I have been unwell with a relaxed throat, or I should have written to you sooner to thank you for your dedication, to assure you that it heartily, most heartily, gratifies me, as the sincere tribute of a true and generous heart, and to tell you that I have been charmed with your book itself. I am proud of having given a name to anything so picturesque, so sympathetic and spirited. I hope and believe the "Doctor" is nothing but a good 'un. He has perfectly astonished Forster, who writes: "Neither good, gooder, nor goodest, but super-excellent; all through there is such a relish of you at your best, as I could not have believed in, after a long story." I shall be charmed to see you to-night. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _November 13th, 1865._ EXTRACT. MY DEAR CERJAT, Having achieved my book and my Christmas number, and having shaken myself after two years' work, I send you my annual greeting. How are you? Asthmatic, I know you will reply; but as my poor father (who was asthmatic, too, and the jolliest of men) used philosophically to say, "one must have something wrong, I suppose, and I like to know what it is." In England we are groaning under the brigandage of the butcher, which is being carried to that height that I think I foresee resistance on the part of the middle-class, and some combination in perspective for abolishing the middleman, whensoever he turns up (which is everywhere) between producer and consumer. The cattle plague is the butcher's stalking-horse, and it is unquestionably worse than it was; but seeing that the great majority of creatures lost or destroyed have been cows, and likewise that the rise in butchers' meat bears no reasonable proportion to the market prices of the beasts, one comes to the conclusion that the public is done. The commission has ended very weakly and ineffectually, as such things in England rather frequently do; and everybody writes to _The Times_, and nobody does anything else. If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their fault. What with their swagger and bombast, what with their claims for indemnification, what with Ireland and Fenianism, and what with Canada, I have strong apprehensions. With a settled animosity towards the French usurper, I believe him to have always been sound in his desire to divide the States against themselves, and that we were unsound and wrong in "letting I dare not wait upon I would." The Jamaica insurrection is another hopeful piece of business. That platform-sympathy with the black--or the native, or the devil--afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild. Only the other day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection! So we are badgered about New Zealanders and Hottentots, as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell, and were to be bound by pen and ink accordingly. So Exeter Hall holds us in mortal submission to missionaries, who (Livingstone always excepted) are perfect nuisances, and leave every place worse than they found it. Of all the many evidences that are visible of our being ill-governed, no one is so remarkable to me as our ignorance of what is going on under our Government. What will future generations think of that enormous Indian Mutiny being ripened without suspicion, until whole regiments arose and killed their officers? A week ago, red tape, half-bouncing and half pooh-poohing what it bounced at, would have scouted the idea of a Dublin jail not being able to hold a political prisoner. But for the blacks in Jamaica being over-impatient and before their time, the whites might have been exterminated, without a previous hint or suspicion that there was anything amiss. _Laissez aller_, and Britons never, never, never!---- Meantime, if your honour were in London, you would see a great embankment rising high and dry out of the Thames on the Middlesex shore, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars. A really fine work, and really getting on. Moreover, a great system of drainage. Another really fine work, and likewise really getting on. Lastly, a muddle of railways in all directions possible and impossible, with no general public scheme, no general public supervision, enormous waste of money, no fixable responsibility, no accountability but under Lord Campbell's Act. I think of that accident in which I was preserved. Before the most furious and notable train in the four-and-twenty hours, the head of a gang of workmen takes up the rails. That train changes its time every day as the tide changes, and that head workman is not provided by the railway company with any clock or watch! Lord Shaftesbury wrote to me to ask me what I thought of an obligation on railway companies to put strong walls to all bridges and viaducts. I told him, of course, that the force of such a shock would carry away anything that any company could set up, and I added: "Ask the minister what _he_ thinks about the votes of the railway interest in the House of Commons, and about his being afraid to lay a finger on it with an eye to his majority." I seem to be grumbling, but I am in the best of humours. All goes well with me and mine, thank God. Last night my gardener came upon a man in the garden and fired. The man returned the compliment by kicking him in the groin and causing him great pain. I set off, with a great mastiff-bloodhound I have, in pursuit. Couldn't find the evil-doer, but had the greatest difficulty in preventing the dog from tearing two policemen down. They were coming towards us with professional mystery, and he was in the air on his way to the throat of an eminently respectable constable when I caught him. My daughter Mary and her aunt Georgina send kindest regard and remembrance. Katey and her husband are going to try London this winter, but I rather doubt (for they are both delicate) their being able to weather it out. It has been blowing here tremendously for a fortnight, but to-day is like a spring day, and plenty of roses are growing over the labourers' cottages. The _Great Eastern_ lies at her moorings beyond the window where I write these words; looks very dull and unpromising. A dark column of smoke from Chatham Dockyard, where the iron shipbuilding is in progress, has a greater significance in it, I fancy. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Nov. 14th, 1865._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, As you want to know my views of the Sphinx, here they are. But I have only seen it once; and it is so extraordinarily well done, that it ought to be observed closely several times. Anyone who attentively notices the flower trick will see that the two little high tables hung with drapery cover each a trap. Each of those tables, during that trick, hides a confederate, who changes the paper cone twice. When the cone has been changed as often as is required, the trap is closed and the table can be moved. When the curtain is removed for the performance of the Sphinx trick, there is a covered, that is, draped table on the stage, which is never seen before or afterwards. In front of the middle of it, and between it and the audience, stands one of those little draped tables covering a trap; this is a third trap in the centre of the stage. The box for the head is then upon IT, and the conjuror takes it off and shows it. The man whose head is afterwards shown in that box is, I conceive, in the table; that is to say, is lying on his chest in the thickness of the table, in an extremely constrained attitude. To get him into the table, and to enable him to use the trap in the table through which his head comes into the box, the two hands of a confederate are necessary. That confederate comes up a trap, and stands in the space afforded by the interval below the stage and the height of the little draped table! his back is towards the audience. The moment he has assisted the hidden man sufficiently, he closes the trap, and the conjuror then immediately removes the little draped table, and also the drapery of the larger table; when he places the box on the last-named table _with the slide on_ for the head to come into it, he stands with his back to the audience and his face to the box, and masks the box considerably to facilitate the insertion of the head. As soon as he knows the head to be in its place, he undraws the slide. When the verses have been spoken and the trick is done, he loses no time in replacing the slide. The curtain is then immediately dropped, because the man cannot otherwise be got out of the table, and has no doubt had quite enough of it. With kindest regards to all at Penton, Ever your most affectionate. FOOTNOTES: [14] Now Captain E. Newton Dickenson. [15] This was a circular note which he sent in answer to innumerable letters of enquiry, after the accident. [16] This letter was written in reply to the Committee's congratulations upon Mr. Dickens's escape from the accident to the tidal train from Folkestone, at Staplehurst, just previous to this date. 1866. NARRATIVE. The furnished house hired by Charles Dickens in the spring of this year was in Southwick Place, Hyde Park. Having entered into negotiations with the Messrs. Chappell for a series of readings to be given in London, in the English provinces, in Scotland and Ireland, Charles Dickens had no leisure for more than his usual editorial work for "All the Year Round." He contributed four parts to the Christmas number, which was entitled, "Mugby Junction." For the future all his English readings were given in connection with the Messrs. Chappell, and never in all his career had he more satisfactory or more pleasant business relations than those connected with these gentlemen. Moreover, out of this connection sprang a sincere friendship on both sides. Mr. Dolby is so constantly mentioned in future letters, that they themselves will tell of the cordial companionship which existed between Charles Dickens and this able and most obliging "manager." The letter to "Lily" was in answer to a child's letter from Miss Lily Benzon, inviting him to a birthday party. The play alluded to in the letter to M. Fechter was called "A Long Strike," and was performed at the Lyceum Theatre. The "Sultan" mentioned in the letter to Mr. Fitzgerald was a noble Irish bloodhound, presented by this gentleman to Charles Dickens. The story of the dog's death is told in a letter to M. de Cerjat, which we give in the following year. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Saturday, Jan. 6th, 1866._ MY DEAR MARY, Feeling pretty certain that I shall never answer your letter unless I answer it at once (I got it this morning), here goes! I did not dramatise "The Master of Ravenswood," though I did a good deal towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, upon the stage in his own gallant manner. It is _an enormous success_, and increases in attraction nightly. I have never seen the people in all parts of the house so leaning forward, in lines sloping towards the stage, earnestly and intently attractive, as while the story gradually unfolds itself. But the astonishing circumstance of all is, that Miss Leclercq (never thought of for Lucy till all other Lucies had failed) is marvellously good, highly pathetic, and almost unrecognisable in person! What note it touches in her, always dumb until now, I do not pretend to say, but there is no one on the stage who could play the contract scene better, or more simply and naturally, and I find it impossible to see it without crying! Almost everyone plays well, the whole is exceedingly picturesque, and there is scarcely a movement throughout, or a look, that is not indicated by Scott. So you get a life romance with beautiful illustrations, and I do not expect ever again to see a book take up its bed and walk in like manner. I am charmed to learn that you have had a freeze out of my ghost story. It rather did give me a shiver up the back in the writing. "Dr. Marigold" has just now accomplished his two hundred thousand. My only other news about myself is that I am doubtful whether to read or not in London this season. If I decide to do it at all, I shall probably do it on a large scale. Many happy years to you, my dear Mary. So prays Your ever affectionate Jo. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday, Jan. 18th, 1866._ MY DEAR KENT, I cannot tell you how grieved we all are here to know that you are suffering again. Your patient tone, however, and the hopefulness and forbearance of Ferguson's course, gives us some reassurance. Apropos of which latter reference I dined with Ferguson at the Lord Mayor's, last Tuesday, and had a grimly distracted impulse upon me to defy the toast-master and rush into a speech about him and his noble art, when I sat pining under the imbecility of constitutional and corporational idiots. I did seize him for a moment by the hair of his head (in proposing the Lady Mayoress), and derived some faint consolation from the company's response to the reference. O! no man will ever know under what provocation to contradiction and a savage yell of repudiation I suffered at the hands of ----, feebly complacent in the uniform of Madame Tussaud's own military waxers, and almost the worst speaker I ever heard in my life! Mary and Georgina, sitting on either side of me, urged me to "look pleasant." I replied in expressions not to be repeated. Shea (the judge) was just as good and graceful, as he (the member) was bad and gawky. Bulwer's "Lost Tales of Miletus" is a most noble book! He is an extraordinary fellow, and fills me with admiration and wonder. It is of no use writing to you about yourself, my dear Kent, because you are likely to be tired of that constant companion, and so I have gone scratching (with an exceedingly bad pen) about and about you. But I come back to you to let you know that the reputation of this house as a convalescent hospital stands (like the house itself) very high, and that testimonials can be produced from credible persons who have recovered health and spirits here swiftly. Try us, only try us, and we are content to stake the reputation of the establishment on the result. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] GAD'S HILL, _Friday, Feb. 2nd, 1866._ MY DEAR FITZGERALD, I ought to have written to you days and days ago, to thank you for your charming book on Charles Lamb, to tell you with what interest and pleasure I read it as soon as it came here, and to add that I was honestly affected (far more so than your modesty will readily believe) by your intimate knowledge of those touches of mine concerning childhood. Let me tell you now that I have not in the least cooled, after all, either as to the graceful sympathetic book, or as to the part in it with which I am honoured. It has become a matter of real feeling with me, and I postponed its expression because I couldn't satisfactorily get it out of myself, and at last I came to the conclusion that it must be left in. My dear Fitzgerald, faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Friday, Feb. 9th, 1866._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I found your letter here when I came back on Wednesday evening, and was extremely glad to get it. Frank Beard wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an examination of the heart was absolutely necessary, and that I had better make an appointment with him alone for the purpose. This I did. I was not at all disconcerted, for I knew well beforehand that the effect could not possibly be without that one cause at the bottom of it. There seems to be degeneration of some functions of the heart. It does not contract as it should. So I have got a prescription of iron, quinine, and digitalis, to set it a-going, and send the blood more quickly through the system. If it should not seem to succeed on a reasonable trial, I will then propose a consultation with someone else. Of course I am not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved without _some_ penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness--in other words, in my usual "tone." I shall wait to see Beard again on Monday, and shall most probably come down that day. If I should not, I will telegraph after seeing him. Best love to Mamie. [Sidenote: Mrs. Brookfield.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Feb. 20th, 1866._ MY DEAR MRS. BROOKFIELD, Having gone through your MS. (which I should have done sooner, but that I have not been very well), I write these few following words about it. Firstly, with a limited reference to its unsuitability to these pages. Secondly, with a more enlarged reference to the merits of the story itself. If you will take any part of it and cut it up (in fancy) into the small portions into which it would have to be divided here for only a month's supply, you will (I think) at once discover the impossibility of publishing it in weekly parts. The scheme of the chapters, the manner of introducing the people, the progress of the interest, the places in which the principal places fall, are all hopelessly against it. It would seem as though the story were never coming, and hardly ever moving. There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of publication, and I cannot better express the difficulty and labour of it than by asking you to turn over any two weekly numbers of "A Tale of Two Cities," or "Great Expectations," or Bulwer's story, or Wilkie Collins's, or Reade's, or "At the Bar," and notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in these fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole. Of the story itself I honestly say that I think highly. The style is particularly easy and agreeable, infinitely above ordinary writing, and sometimes reminds me of Mrs. Inchbald at her best. The characters are remarkably well observed, and with a rare mixture of delicacy and truthfulness. I observe this particularly in the brother and sister, and in Mrs. Neville. But it strikes me that you constantly hurry your narrative (and yet without getting on) _by telling it, in a sort of impetuous breathless way, in your own person, when the people should tell it and act it for themselves_. My notion always is, that when I have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their business to do it, and not mine. Then, unless you really have led up to a great situation like Basil's death, you are bound in art to make more of it. Such a scene should form a chapter of itself. Impressed upon the reader's memory, it would go far to make the fortune of the book. Suppose yourself telling that affecting incident in a letter to a friend. Wouldn't you describe how you went through the life and stir of the streets and roads to the sick-room? Wouldn't you say what kind of room it was, what time of day it was, whether it was sunlight, starlight, or moonlight? Wouldn't you have a strong impression on your mind of how you were received, when you first met the look of the dying man, what strange contrasts were about you and struck you? I don't want you, in a novel, to present _yourself_ to tell such things, but I want the things to be there. You make no more of the situation than the index might, or a descriptive playbill might in giving a summary of the tragedy under representation. As a mere piece of mechanical workmanship, I think all your chapters should be shorter; that is to say, that they should be subdivided. Also, when you change from narrative to dialogue, or _vice versâ_, you should make the transition more carefully. Also, taking the pains to sit down and recall the principal landmarks in your story, you should then make them far more elaborate and conspicuous than the rest. Even with these changes I do not believe that the story would attract the attention due to it, if it were published even in such monthly portions as the space of "Fraser" would admit of. Even so brightened, it would not, to the best of my judgment, express itself piecemeal. It seems to me to be so constituted as to require to be read "off the reel." As a book in two volumes I think it would have good claims to success, and good chances of obtaining success. But I suppose the polishing I have hinted at (not a meretricious adornment, but positively necessary to good work and good art) to have been first thoroughly administered. Now don't hate me if you can help it. I can afford to be hated by some people, but I am not rich enough to put you in possession of that luxury. Ever faithfully yours. P.S.--The MS. shall be delivered at your house to-morrow. And your petitioner again prays not to be, etc. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, _Friday, April 13th, 1866._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, The reception at Manchester last night was quite a magnificent sight; the whole of the immense audience standing up and cheering. I thought them a little slow with "Marigold," but believe it was only the attention necessary in so vast a place. They gave a splendid burst at the end. And after "Nickleby" (which went to perfection), they set up such a call, that I was obliged to go in again. The unfortunate gasman, a very steady fellow, got a fall off a ladder and sprained his leg. He was put to bed in a public opposite, and was left there, poor man. This is the first very fine day we have had. I have taken advantage of it by crossing to Birkenhead and getting some air upon the water. It was fresh and beautiful. I send my best love to Mamie, and hope she is better. I am, of course, tired (the pull of "Marigold" upon one's energy, in the Free Trade Hall, was great); but I stick to my tonic, and feel, all things considered, in very good tone. The room here (I mean the hall) being my special favourite and extraordinarily easy, is _almost_ a rest! [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] ADELPHI, LIVERPOOL, _Saturday, April 14th, 1866._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, The police reported officially that three thousand people were turned away from the hall last night. I doubt if they were so numerous as that, but they carried in the outer doors and pitched into Dolby with great vigour. I need not add that every corner of the place was crammed. They were a very fine audience, and took enthusiastically every point in "Copperfield" and the "Trial." They made the reading a quarter of an hour longer than usual. One man advertised in the morning paper that he would give thirty shillings (double) for three stalls, but nobody would sell, and he didn't get in. Except that I cannot sleep, I really think myself in much better training than I had anticipated. A dozen oysters and a little champagne between the parts every night, constitute the best restorative I have ever yet tried. John appears low, but I don't know why. A letter comes for him daily; the hand is female; whether Smudger's, or a nearer one still and a dearer one, I don't know. So it may or may not be the cause of his gloom. "Miss Emily" of Preston is married to a rich cotton lord, rides in open carriages in gorgeous array, and is altogether splendid. With this effective piece of news I close. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] GLASGOW, _April 17th, 1866._ We arrived here at ten yesterday evening. I don't think the journey shook me at all. Dolby provided a superb cold collation and "the best of drinks," and we dined in the carriage, and I made him laugh all the way. The let here is very large. Every precaution taken to prevent my platform from being captured as it was last time; but I don't feel at all sure that it will not be stormed at one of the two readings. Wills is to do the genteel to-night at the stalls, and Dolby is to stem the shilling tide _if_ he can. The poor gasman cannot come on, and we have got a new one here who is to go to Edinburgh with us. Of Edinburgh we know nothing, but as its first night has always been shady, I suppose it will stick to its antecedents. I like to hear about Harness and his freshness. The let for the next reading at St. James's is "going," they report, "admirably." Lady Russell asked me to dinner to-morrow, and I have written her a note to-day. The rest has certainly done me good. I slept thoroughly well last night, and feel fresh. What to-night's work, and every night's work this week, may do contrariwise, remains to be seen. I hope Harry's knee may be in the way of mending, from what you relate of it. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WATERLOO HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Wednesday, April 18th, 1866._ We had a tremendous house again last night at Glasgow; and turned away great numbers. Not only that, but they were a most brilliant and delicate audience, and took "Marigold" with a fine sense and quickness not to be surpassed. The shillings pitched into Dolby again, and one man writes a sensible letter in one of the papers this morning, showing to _my_ satisfaction (?) that they really had, through the local agent, some cause of complaint. Nevertheless, the shilling tickets are sold for to-morrow, and it seems to be out of the question to take any money at the doors, the call for all parts is so enormous. The thundering of applause last night was quite staggering, and my people checked off my reception by the minute hand of a watch, and stared at one another, thinking I should never begin. I keep quite well, have happily taken to sleeping these last three nights; and feel, all things considered, very little conscious of fatigue. I cannot reconcile my town medicine with the hours and journeys of reading life, and have therefore given it up for the time. But for the moment, I think I am better without it. What we are doing here I have not yet heard. I write at half-past one, and we have been little more than an hour in the house. But I am quite prepared for the inevitable this first Edinburgh night. Endeavours have been made (from Glasgow yesterday) to telegraph the exact facts out of our local agent; but hydraulic pressure wouldn't have squeezed a straight answer out of him. "Friday and Saturday doing very well, Wednesday not so good." This was all electricity could discover. I am going to write a line this post to Katie, from whom I have a note. I hope Harry's leg will now step out in the manner of the famous cork leg in the song. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] EDINBURGH, _Thursday, April 19th, 1866._ The house was more than twice better than any first night here previously. They were, as usual here, remarkably intelligent, and the reading went _brilliantly_. I have not sent up any newspapers, as they are generally so poorly written, that you may know beforehand all the commonplaces that they will write. But _The Scotsman_ has so pretty an article this morning, and (so far as I know) so true a one, that I will try to post it to you, either from here or Glasgow. John and Dolby went over early, and Wills and I follow them at half-past eleven. It is cold and wet here. We have laid half-crown bets with Dolby, that he will be assaulted to-night at Glasgow. He has a surprising knowledge of what the receipts will be always, and wins half-crowns every night. Chang is living in this house. John (not knowing it) was rendered perfectly drivelling last night, by meeting him on the stairs. The Tartar Dwarf is always twining himself upstairs sideways, and drinks a bottle of whisky per day, and is reported to be a surprising little villain. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WATERLOO HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Friday, April 20th, 1866._ No row at Glasgow last night. Great placards were posted about the town by the anxious Dolby, announcing that no money would be taken at the doors. This kept the crowd off. Two files of policemen and a double staff everywhere did the rest, and nothing could be better-tempered or more orderly. Tremendous enthusiasm with the "Carol" and "Trial." I was dead beat afterwards, that reading being twenty minutes longer than usual; but plucked up again, had some supper, slept well, and am quite right to-day. It is a bright day, and the express ride over from Glasgow was very pleasant. Everything is gone here for to-night. But it is difficult to describe what the readings have grown to be. The let at St. James's Hall is not only immense for next Tuesday, but so large for the next reading afterwards, that Chappell writes: "That will be the greatest house of the three." From Manchester this morning they write: "Send us more tickets instantly, for we are sold out and don't know what to do with the people." Last night the whole of my money under the agreement had been taken. I notice that a great bank has broken at Liverpool, which may hurt us there, but when last heard of it was going as before. And the audience, though so enormous, do somehow express a personal affection, which makes them very strange and moving to see. I have a story to answer you and your aunt with. Before I left Southwick Place for Liverpool, I received a letter from Glasgow, saying, "Your little Emily has been woo'd and married and a'! since you last saw her;" and describing her house within a mile or two of the city, and asking me to stay there. I wrote the usual refusal, and supposed Mrs. ---- to be some romantic girl whom I had joked with, perhaps at Allison's or where not. On the first night at Glasgow I received a bouquet from ----, and wore one of the flowers. This morning at the Glasgow station, ---- appeared, and proved to be the identical Miss Emily, of whose marriage Dolby had told me on our coming through Preston. She was attired in magnificent raiment, and presented the happy ----. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] LIVERPOOL, _Thursday, April 26th, 1866._ We noticed between London and Rugby (the first stoppage) something very odd in our carriage yesterday, not so much in its motion as in its sound. We examined it as well as we could out of both windows, but could make nothing of it. On our arrival at Rugby, it was found to be on fire. And as it was in the middle of the train, the train had to be broken to get it off into a siding by itself and get another carriage on. With this slight exception we came down all right. My voice is much better, I am glad to report, and I mean to try Beard's remedy after dinner to-day. This is all my present news. [Sidenote: The same.] DOWN HOTEL, CLIFTON, _Friday, May 11th, 1866._ I received your note before I left Birmingham this morning. It has been very heavy work getting up at half-past six each morning after a heavy night, and I am not at all well to-day. We had a tremendous hall at Birmingham last night--two thousand one hundred people. I made a most ridiculous mistake. Had "Nickleby" on my list to finish with, instead of "Trial." Read "Nickleby" with great go, and the people remained. Went back again at ten and explained the accident, and said if they liked, I would give them the "Trial." They _did_ like, and I had another half-hour of it in that enormous place. This stoppage of Overend and Gurney in the City will play the ---- with all public gaieties, and with all the arts. My cold is no better. John fell off a platform about ten feet high yesterday, and fainted. He looks all the colours of the rainbow to-day, but does not seem much hurt beyond being puffed up one hand, arm, and side. [Sidenote: Miss Lily Benzon.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, June 18th, 1866._ MY DEAR LILY, I am sorry that I cannot come to read to you "The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn," as you ask me to do; but the truth is, that I am tired of reading at this present time, and have come into the country to rest and hear the birds sing. There are a good many birds, I daresay, in Kensington Palace Gardens, and upon my word and honour they are much better worth listening to than I am. So let them sing to you as hard as ever they can, while their sweet voices last (they will be silent when the winter comes); and very likely after you and I have eaten our next Christmas pudding and mince-pies, you and I and Uncle Harry may all meet together at St. James's Hall; Uncle Harry to bring you there, to hear the "Boots;" I to receive you there, and read the "Boots;" and you (I hope) to applaud very much, and tell me that you like the "Boots." So, God bless you and me, and Uncle Harry, and the "Boots," and long life and happiness to us all! Your affectionate Friend. P.S.--There's a flourish! [Sidenote: Mr. B. W. Procter.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Aug. 13th, 1866._ MY DEAR PROCTER, I have read your biography of Charles Lamb with inexpressible pleasure and interest. I do not think it possible to tell a pathetic story with a more unaffected and manly tenderness. And as to the force and vigour of the style, if I did not know you I should have made sure that there was a printer's error in the opening of your introduction, and that the word "seventy" occupied the place of "forty." Let me, my dear friend, most heartily congratulate you on your achievement. It is not an ordinary triumph to do such justice to the memory of such a man. And I venture to add, that the fresh spirit with which you have done it impresses me as being perfectly wonderful. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Sir James Emerson Tennent.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, Aug. 20th, 1866._ MY DEAR TENNENT, I have been very much interested by your extract, and am strongly inclined to believe that the founder of the Refuge for Poor Travellers meant the kind of man to which it refers. Chaucer certainly meant the Pardonere to be a humbug, living on the credulity of the people. After describing the sham reliques he carried, he says: But with these relikes whawne that he found A poure personne dwelling up on lond Upon a day he gat him more monnie Than that the personne got in monthes time, And thus, with fained flattering and japes He made the personne, and the people, his apes. And the worthy Watts (founder of the charity) may have had these very lines in his mind when he excluded such a man. When I last heard from my boy he was coming to you, and was full of delight and dignity. My midshipman has just been appointed to the _Bristol_, on the West Coast of Africa, and is on his voyage out to join her. I wish it was another ship and another station. She has been unlucky in losing men. Kindest regard from all my house to yours. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] GAD'S HILL, _Tuesday, Sept. 4th, 1866._ MY DEAR FECHTER, This morning I received the play to the end of the telegraph scene, and I have since read it twice. I clearly see the _ground_ of Mr. Boucicault's two objections; but I do not see their _force_. First, as to the writing. If the characters did not speak in a terse and homely way, their idea and language would be inconsistent with their dress and station, and they would lose, as characters, before the audience. The dialogue seems to be exactly what is wanted. Its simplicity (particularly in Mr. Boucicault's part) is often very effective; and throughout there is an honest, straight-to-the-purpose ruggedness in it, like the real life and the real people. Secondly, as to the absence of the comic element. I really do not see how more of it could be got into the story, and I think Mr. Boucicault underrates the pleasant effect of his own part. The very notion of a sailor, whose life is not among those little courts and streets, and whose business does not lie with the monotonous machinery, but with the four wild winds, is a relief to me in reading the play. I am quite confident of its being an immense relief to the audience when they see the sailor before them, with an entirely different bearing, action, dress, complexion even, from the rest of the men. I would make him the freshest and airiest sailor that ever was seen; and through him I can distinctly see my way out of "the Black Country" into clearer air. (I speak as one of the audience, mind.) I should like something of this contrast to be expressed in the dialogue between the sailor and Jew, in the second scene of the second act. Again, I feel Widdicomb's part (which is charming, and ought to make the whole house cry) most agreeable and welcome, much better than any amount in such a story, of mere comicality. It is unnecessary to say that the play is done with a master's hand. Its closeness and movement are quite surprising. Its construction is admirable. I have the strongest belief in its making a great success. But I must add this proviso: I never saw a play so dangerously depending in critical places on strict natural propriety in the manner and perfection in the shaping of the small parts. Those small parts cannot take the play up, but they can let it down. I would not leave a hair on the head of one of them to the chance of the first night, but I would see, to the minutest particular, the make-up of every one of them at a night rehearsal. Of course you are free to show this note to Mr. Boucicault, and I suppose you will do so; let me throw out this suggestion to him and you. Might it not ease the way with the Lord Chamberlain's office, and still more with the audience, when there are Manchester champions in it, if instead of "Manchester" you used a fictitious name? When I did "Hard Times" I called the scene Coketown. Everybody knew what was meant, but every cotton-spinning town said it was the other cotton-spinning town. I shall be up on Saturday, and will come over about mid-day, unless you name any other time. Ever heartily. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Thornbury] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Saturday, Sept. 15th, 1866._ MY DEAR THORNBURY, Many thanks for your letter. In reference to your Shakespeare queries, I am not so much enamoured of the first and third subjects as I am of the Ariosto enquiry, which should be highly interesting. But if you have so got the matter in your mind, as that its execution would be incomplete and unsatisfactory to you unless you write all the three papers, then by all means write the three, and I will most gladly take them. For some years I have had so much pleasure in reading you, that I can honestly warrant myself as what actors call "a good audience." The idea of old stories retold is decidedly a good one. I greatly like the notion of that series. Of course you know De Quincey's paper on the Ratcliffe Highway murderer? Do you know also the illustration (I have it at Gad's Hill), representing the horrible creature as his dead body lay on a cart, with a piece of wood for a pillow, and a stake lying by, ready to be driven through him? I don't _quite_ like the title, "The Social History of London." I should better like some title to the effect, "The History of London's Social Changes in so many Years." Such a title would promise more, and better express your intention. What do you think of taking for a first title, "London's Changes"? You could then add the second title, "Being a History," etc. I don't at all desire to fix a limit to the series of old stories retold. I would state the general intention at the beginning of the first paper, and go on like Banquo's line. Don't let your London title remind people, by so much as the place of the word "civilisation," of Buckle. It seems a ridiculous caution, but the indolent part of the public (a large part!) on such points tumble into extraordinary mistakes. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] GAD'S HILL, _Tuesday, Nov. 6th, 1866._ MY DEAR FITZGERALD, It is always pleasant to me to hear from you, and I hope you will believe that this is not a mere fashion of speech. Concerning the green covers, I find the leaves to be budding--on unquestionable newspaper authority; but, upon my soul, I have no other knowledge of their being in embryo! Really, I do not see a chance of my settling myself to such work until after I have accomplished forty-two readings, to which I stand pledged. I hope to begin this series somewhere about the middle of January, in Dublin. Touching the details of the realisation of this hope, will you tell me in a line as soon as you can--_Is the exhibition room a good room for speaking in?_ Your mention of the late Sultan touches me nearly. He was the finest dog I ever saw, and between him and me there was a perfect understanding. But, to adopt the popular phrase, it was so very confidential that it "went no further." He would fly at anybody else with the greatest enthusiasm for destruction. I saw him, muzzled, pound into the heart of a regiment of the line; and I have frequently seen him, muzzled, hold a great dog down with his chest and feet. He has broken loose (muzzled) and come home covered with blood, again and again. And yet he never disobeyed me, unless he had first laid hold of a dog. You heard of his going to execution, evidently supposing the procession to be a party detached in pursuit of something to kill or eat? It was very affecting. And also of his bolting a blue-eyed kitten, and making me acquainted with the circumstance by his agonies of remorse (or indigestion)? I cannot find out that there is anyone in Rochester (a sleepy old city) who has anything to tell about Garrick, except what is not true. His brother, the wine merchant, would be more in Rochester way, I think. How on earth do you find time to do all these books? You make my hair stand on end; an agreeable sensation, for I am charmed to find that I have any. Why don't you come yourself and look after Garrick? I should be truly delighted to receive you. My dear Fitzgerald, always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, Dec. 28th, 1866._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have received your letter with the utmost pleasure and we all send our most affectionate love to you, Mrs. Macready, Katie, Johnny, and the boy of boys. All good Christmas and New Year greetings are to be understood as included. You will be interested in knowing that, encouraged by the success of summer cricket-matches, I got up a quantity of foot-races and rustic sports in my field here on the 26th last past: as I have never yet had a case of drunkenness, the landlord of The Falstaff had a drinking-booth on the ground. All the prizes I gave were in money, too. We had two thousand people here. Among the crowd were soldiers, navvies, and labourers of all kinds. Not a stake was pulled up, or a rope slackened, or one farthing's-worth of damage done. To every competitor (only) a printed bill of general rules was given, with the concluding words: "Mr. Dickens puts every man upon his honour to assist in preserving order." There was not a dispute all day, and they went away at sunset rending the air with cheers, and leaving every flag on a six hundred yards' course as neat as they found it when the gates were opened at ten in the morning. Surely this is a bright sign in the neighbourhood of such a place as Chatham! "Mugby Junction" turned, yesterday afternoon, the extraordinary number of two hundred and fifty thousand! In the middle of next month I begin a new course of forty-two readings. If any of them bring me within reach of Cheltenham, with an hour to spare, I shall come on to you, even for that hour. More of this when I am afield and have my list, which Dolby (for Chappell) is now preparing. Forster and Mrs. Forster were to have come to us next Monday, to stay until Saturday. I write "were," because I hear that Forster (who had a touch of bronchitis when he wrote to me on Christmas Eve) is in bed. Katie, who has been ill of low nervous fever, was brought here yesterday from London. She bore the journey much better than I expected, and so I hope will soon recover. This is my little stock of news. I begin to discover in your riper years, that you have been secretly vain of your handwriting all your life. For I swear I see no change in it! What it always was since I first knew it (a year or two!) it _is_. This I will maintain against all comers. Ever affectionately, my dearest Macready. 1867. NARRATIVE. As the London and provincial readings were to be resumed early in the year and continued until the end of March, Charles Dickens took no house in London this spring. He came to his office quarters at intervals, for the series in town; usually starting off again, on his country tour, the day after a London reading. From some passages in his letters to his daughter and sister-in-law during this country course, it will be seen that (though he made very light of the fact) the great exertion of the readings, combined with incessant railway travelling, was beginning to tell upon his health, and he was frequently "heavily beaten" after reading at his best to an enthusiastic audience in a large hall. During the short intervals between his journeys, he was as constantly and carefully at work upon the business of "All the Year Round" as if he had no other work on hand. A proof of this is given in a letter dated "5th February." It is written to a young man (the son of a friend), who wrote a long novel when far too juvenile for such a task, and had submitted it to Charles Dickens for his opinion, with a view to publication. In the midst of his own hard and engrossing occupation he read the book, and the letter which he wrote on the subject needs no remark beyond this, that the young writer received the adverse criticism with the best possible sense, and has since, in his literary profession, profited by the advice so kindly given. At this time the proposals to Charles Dickens for reading in America, which had been perpetually renewed from the time of his first abandoning the idea, became so urgent and so tempting, that he found at last he must, at all events, give the subject his most serious consideration. He took counsel with his two most confidential friends and advisers, Mr. John Forster and Mr. W. H. Wills. They were both, at first, strongly opposed to the undertaking, chiefly on the ground of the trial to his health and strength which it would involve. But they could not deny the counterbalancing advantages. And, after much deliberation, it was resolved that Mr. George Dolby should be sent out by the Messrs. Chappell, to take an impression, on the spot, as to the feeling of the United States about the Readings. His report as to the undoubted enthusiasm and urgency on the other side of the Atlantic it was impossible to resist. Even his friends withdrew their opposition (though still with misgivings as to the effect upon his health, which were but too well founded!), and on the 30th September he telegraphed "Yes" to America. The "Alfred" alluded to in a letter from Glasgow was Charles Dickens's fourth son, Alfred Tennyson, who had gone to Australia two years previously. We give, in April, the last letter to one of the friends for whom Charles Dickens had always a most tender love--Mr. Stanfield. He was then in failing health, and in May he died. Another death which affected him very deeply happened this summer. Miss Marguerite Power died in July. She had long been very ill, but, until it became impossible for her to travel, she was a frequent and beloved guest at Gad's Hill. The Mrs. Henderson to whom he writes was Miss Power's youngest sister. Before he started for America it was proposed to wish him God-speed by giving him a public dinner at the Freemasons' Hall. The proposal was most warmly and fully responded to. His zealous friend, Mr. Charles Kent, willingly undertook the whole work of arrangement of this banquet. It took place on the 2nd November, and Lord Lytton presided. On the 8th he left London for Liverpool, accompanied by his daughters, his sister-in-law, his eldest son, Mr. Arthur Chappell, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mr. Kent, and Mr. Wills. The next morning the whole party took a final leave of Charles Dickens on board the _Cuba_, which sailed that day. We give a letter which he wrote to Mr. J. L. Toole on the morning of the dinner, thanking him for a parting gift and an earnest letter. That excellent comedian was one of his most appreciative admirers, and, in return, he had for Mr. Toole the greatest admiration and respect. The Christmas number for this year, "No Thoroughfare," was written by Charles Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins. It was dramatised by Mr. Collins chiefly. But, in the midst of all the work of preparation for departure, Charles Dickens gave minute attention to as much of the play as could be completed before he left England. It was produced, after Christmas, at the Adelphi Theatre, where M. Fechter was then acting, under the management of Mr. Benjamin Webster. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _New Year's Day, 1867._ MY DEAR CERJAT, Thoroughly determined to be beforehand with "the middle of next summer," your penitent friend and remorseful correspondent thus addresses you. The big dog, on a day last autumn, having seized a little girl (sister to one of the servants) whom he knew, and was bound to respect, was flogged by his master, and then sentenced to be shot at seven next morning. He went out very cheerfully with the half-dozen men told off for the purpose, evidently thinking that they were going to be the death of somebody unknown. But observing in the procession an empty wheelbarrow and a double-barrelled gun, he became meditative, and fixed the bearer of the gun with his eyes. A stone deftly thrown across him by the village blackguard (chief mourner) caused him to look round for an instant, and he then fell dead, shot through the heart. Two posthumous children are at this moment rolling on the lawn; one will evidently inherit his ferocity, and will probably inherit the gun. The pheasant was a little ailing towards Christmas Day, and was found dead under some ivy in his cage, with his head under his wing, on the morning of the twenty-seventh of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six. I, proprietor of the remains of the two deceased, am working hard, getting up "Barbox" and "The Boy at Mugby," with which I begin a new series of readings in London on the fifteenth. Next morning I believe I start into the country. When I read, I _don't_ write. I only edit, and have the proof-sheets sent me for the purpose. Here are your questions answered. As to the Reform question, it should have been, and could have been, perfectly known to any honest man in England that the more intelligent part of the great masses were deeply dissatisfied with the state of representation, but were in a very moderate and patient condition, awaiting the better intellectual cultivation of numbers of their fellows. The old insolent resource of assailing them and making the most audaciously wicked statements that they are politically indifferent, has borne the inevitable fruit. The perpetual taunt, "Where are they?" has called them out with the answer: "Well then, if you _must_ know, here we are." The intolerable injustice of vituperating the bribed to an assembly of bribers, has goaded their sense of justice beyond endurance. And now, what they would have taken they won't take, and whatever they are steadily bent upon having they will get. Rely upon it, this is the real state of the case. As to your friend "Punch," you will find him begin to turn at the very selfsame instant when the new game shall manifestly become the losing one. You may notice his shoes pinching him a little already. My dear fellow, I have no more power to stop that mutilation of my books than you have. It is as certain as that every inventor of anything designed for the public good, and offered to the English Government, becomes _ipso facto_ a criminal, to have his heart broken on the circumlocutional wheel. It is as certain as that the whole Crimean story will be retold, whenever this country again goes to war. And to tell the truth, I have such a very small opinion of what the great genteel have done for us, that I am very philosophical indeed concerning what the great vulgar may do, having a decided opinion that they can't do worse. This is the time of year when the theatres do best, there being still numbers of people who make it a sort of religion to see Christmas pantomimes. Having my annual houseful, I have, as yet, seen nothing. Fechter has neither pantomime nor burlesque, but is doing a new version of the old "Trente Ans de la Vie d'un Joueur." I am afraid he will not find his account in it. On the whole, the theatres, except in the articles of scenery and pictorial effect, are poor enough. But in some of the smaller houses there are actors who, if there were any dramatic head-quarters as a school, might become very good. The most hopeless feature is, that they have the smallest possible idea of an effective and harmonious whole, each "going in" for himself or herself. The music-halls attract an immense public, and don't refine the general taste. But such things as they do are well done of their kind, and always briskly and punctually. The American yacht race is the last sensation. I hope the general interest felt in it on this side will have a wholesome interest on that. It will be a woeful day when John and Jonathan throw their caps into the ring. The French Emperor is indubitably in a dangerous state. His Parisian popularity wanes, and his army are discontented with him. I hear on high authority that his secret police are always making discoveries that render him desperately uneasy. You know how we have been swindling in these parts. But perhaps you don't know that Mr. ----, the "eminent" contractor, before he fell into difficulties settled _one million of money_ on his wife. Such a good and devoted husband! My daughter Katie has been very ill of nervous fever. On the 27th of December she was in a condition to be brought down here (old high road and post-horses), and has been steadily getting better ever since. Her husband is here too, and is on the whole as well as he ever is or ever will be, I fear. We played forfeit-games here, last night, and then pool. For a billiard-room has been added to the house since you were here. Come and play a match with me. Always affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Monday, Jan. 21st, 1867._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, First I send you my most affectionate wishes for many, many happy returns of your birthday. That done, from my heart of hearts, I go on to my small report of myself. The readings have produced such an immense effect here that we are coming back for two more in the middle of February. "Marigold" and the "Trial," on Friday night, and the "Carol," on Saturday afternoon, were a perfect furore; and the surprise about "Barbox" has been amusingly great. It is a most extraordinary thing, after the enormous sale of that Christmas number, that the provincial public seems to have combined to believe that it _won't_ make a reading. From Wolverhampton and Leeds we have exactly the same expression of feelings _beforehand_. Exactly as I made "Copperfield"--always to the poorest houses I had with Headland, and against that luminary's entreaty--so I should have to make this, if I hadn't "Marigold" always in demand. It being next to impossible for people to come out at night with horses, we have felt the weather in the stalls, and expect to do so through this week. The half-crown and shilling publics have crushed to their places most splendidly. The enthusiasm has been unbounded. On Friday night I quite astonished myself; but I was taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa at the hall for half an hour. I attribute it to my distressing inability to sleep at night, and to nothing worse. Scott does very well indeed. As a dresser he is perfect. In a quarter of an hour after I go into the retiring-room, where all my clothes are airing and everything is set out neatly in its own allotted space, I am ready; and he then goes softly out, and sits outside the door. In the morning he is equally punctual, quiet, and quick. He has his needles and thread, buttons, and so forth, always at hand; and in travelling he is very systematic with the luggage. What with Dolby and what with this skilful valet, everything is made as easy to me as it possibly _can_ be, and Dolby would do anything to lighten the work, and does everything. There is great distress here among the poor (four thousand people relieved last Saturday at one workhouse), and there is great anxiety concerning _seven mail-steamers some days overdue_. Such a circumstance as this last has never been known. It is supposed that some great revolving storm has whirled them all out of their course. One of these missing ships is an American mail, another an Australian mail. _Same Afternoon._ We have been out for four hours in the bitter east wind, and walking on the sea-shore, where there is a broad strip of great blocks of ice. My hands are so rigid that I write with great difficulty. We have been constantly talking of the terrible Regent's Park accident. I hope and believe that nearly the worst of it is now known. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] CHESTER, _Tuesday, Jan. 22nd, 1867._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, We came over here from Liverpool at eleven this forenoon. There was a heavy swell in the Mersey breaking over the boat; the cold was nipping, and all the roads we saw as we came along were wretched. We find a very moderate let here; but I am myself rather surprised to know that a hundred and twenty stalls have made up their minds to the undertaking of getting to the hall. This seems to be a very nice hotel, but it is an extraordinarily cold one. Our reading for to-night is "Marigold" and "Trial." With amazing perversity the local agent said to Dolby: "They hoped that Mr. Dickens _might_ have given them 'The Boy at Mugby.'" Barton, the gasman who succeeded the man who sprained his leg, sprained _his_ leg yesterday!! And that, not at his work, but in running downstairs at the hotel. However, he has hobbled through it so far, and I hope will hobble on, for he knows his work. I have seldom seen a place look more hopelessly frozen up than this place does. The hall is like a Methodist chapel in low spirits, and with a cold in its head. A few blue people shiver at the corners of the streets. And this house, which is outside the town, looks like an ornament on an immense twelfth cake baked for 1847. I am now going to the fire to try to warm myself, but have not the least expectation of succeeding. The sitting-room has two large windows in it, down to the ground and facing due east. The adjoining bedroom (mine) has also two large windows in it, down to the ground and facing due east. The very large doors are opposite the large windows, and I feel as if I were something to eat in a pantry. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] HEN AND CHICKENS, BIRMINGHAM, _Thursday, Jan. 24th, 1867._ At Chester we read in a snowstorm and a fall of ice. I think it was the worst weather I ever saw. Nevertheless, the people were enthusiastic. At Wolverhampton last night the thaw had thoroughly set in, and it rained heavily. We had not intended to go back there, but have arranged to do so on the day after Ash Wednesday. Last night I was again heavily beaten. We came on here after the reading (it is only a ride of forty minutes), and it was as much as I could do to hold out the journey. But I was not faint, as at Liverpool; I was only exhausted. I am all right this morning; and to-night, as you know, I have a rest. I trust that Charley Collins is better, and that Mamie is strong and well again. Yesterday I had a note from Katie, which seemed hopeful and encouraging. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] HEN AND CHICKENS, BIRMINGHAM, _Thursday, Jan. 24th, 1867._ Since I wrote to your aunt just now, I have received your note addressed to Wolverhampton. We left the men there last night, and they brought it on with them at noon to-day. The maimed gasman's foot is much swollen, but he limps about and does his work. I have doctored him up with arnica. During the "Boy" last night there was an escape of gas from the side of my top batten, which caught the copper-wire and was within a thread of bringing down the heavy reflector into the stalls. It was a very ticklish matter, though the audience knew nothing about it. I saw it, and the gasman and Dolby saw it, and stood at that side of the platform in agonies. We all three calculated that there would be just time to finish and save it; when the gas was turned out the instant I had done, the whole thing was at its very last and utmost extremity. Whom it would have tumbled on, or what might have been set on fire, it is impossible to say. I hope you rewarded your police escort on Tuesday night. It was the most tremendous night I ever saw at Chester. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] LEEDS, _Friday, Feb. 1st, 1867._ We got here prosperously, and had a good (but not great) house for "Barbox" and "Boy" last night. For "Marigold" and "Trial," to-night, everything is gone. And I even have my doubts of the possibility of Dolby's cramming the people in. For "Marigold" and "Trial" at Manchester, to-morrow, we also expect a fine hall. I shall be at the office for next Wednesday. If Charley Collins should have been got to Gad's, I will come there for that day. If not, I suppose we had best open the official bower again. This is a beastly place, with a very good hotel. Except Preston, it is one of the nastiest places I know. The room is like a capacious coal cellar, and is incredibly filthy; but for sound it is perfect. [Sidenote: Anonymous.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Feb. 5th, 1867._ DEAR SIR, I have looked at the larger half of the first volume of your novel, and have pursued the more difficult points of the story through the other two volumes. You will, of course, receive my opinion as that of an individual writer and student of art, who by no means claims to be infallible. I think you are too ambitious, and that you have not sufficient knowledge of life or character to venture on so comprehensive an attempt. Evidences of inexperience in every way, and of your power being far below the situations that you imagine, present themselves to me in almost every page I have read. It would greatly surprise me if you found a publisher for this story, on trying your fortune in that line, or derived anything from it but weariness and bitterness of spirit. On the evidence thus put before me, I cannot even entirely satisfy myself that you have the faculty of authorship latent within you. If you have not, and yet pursue a vocation towards which you have no call, you cannot choose but be a wretched man. Let me counsel you to have the patience to form yourself carefully, and the courage to renounce the endeavour if you cannot establish your case on a very much smaller scale. You see around you every day, how many outlets there are for short pieces of fiction in all kinds. Try if you can achieve any success within these modest limits (I have practised in my time what I preach to you), and in the meantime put your three volumes away. Faithfully yours. P.S.--Your MS. will be returned separately from this office. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] LIVERPOOL, _Friday, Feb. 15th, 1867._ My short report of myself is that we had an enormous turn-away last night, and do not doubt about having a cram to-night. The day has been very fine, and I have turned it to the wholesomest account by walking on the sands at New Brighton all the morning. I am not quite right, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking. There is no doubt of the fact that, after the Staplehurst experience, it tells more and more, instead of (as one might have expected) less and less. The charming room here greatly lessens the fatigue of this fatiguing week. I read last night with no more exertion than if I had been at Gad's, and yet to eleven hundred people, and with astonishing effect. It is "Copperfield" to-night, and Liverpool is the "Copperfield" stronghold. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GLASGOW, _Sunday, Feb. 17th, 1867._ We arrived here this morning at our time to the moment, five minutes past ten. We turned away great numbers on both nights at Liverpool; and Manchester last night was a splendid spectacle. They cheered to that extent after it was over, that I was obliged to huddle on my clothes (for I was undressing to prepare for the journey), and go back again. After so heavy a week, it _was_ rather stiff to start on this long journey at a quarter to two in the morning; but I got more sleep than I ever got in a railway-carriage before, and it really was not tedious. The travelling was admirable, and a wonderful contrast to my friend the Midland. I am not by any means knocked up, though I have, as I had in the last series of readings, a curious feeling of soreness all round the body, which I suppose to arise from the great exertion of voice. It is a mercy that we were not both made really ill at Liverpool. On Friday morning I was taken so faint and sick, that I was obliged to leave the table. On the same afternoon the same thing happened to Dolby. We then found that a part of the hotel close to us was dismantled for painting, and that they were at that moment painting a green passage leading to our rooms, with a most horrible mixture of white lead and arsenic. On pursuing the enquiry, I found that the four lady book-keepers in the bar were all suffering from the poison. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BRIDGE OF ALLAN, _Tuesday, Feb. 19th, 1867._ I was very glad to get your letter before leaving Glasgow this morning. This is a poor return for it, but the post goes out early, and we come in late. Yesterday morning I was so unwell that I wrote to Frank Beard, from whom I shall doubtless hear to-morrow. I mention it, only in case you should come in his way, for I know how perversely such things fall out. I felt it a little more exertion to read afterwards, and I passed a sleepless night after that again; but otherwise I am in good force and spirits to-day. I may say, in the best force. The quiet of this little place is sure to do me good. The little inn in which we are established seems a capital house of the best country sort. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] GLASGOW, _Thursday, Feb. 21st, 1867._ After two days' rest at the Bridge of Allan I am in renewed force, and have nothing to complain of but inability to sleep. I have been in excellent air all day since Tuesday at noon, and made an interesting walk to Stirling yesterday, and saw its lions, and (strange to relate) was not bored by them. Indeed, they left me so fresh that I knocked at the gate of the prison, presented myself to the governor, and took Dolby over the jail, to his unspeakable interest. We then walked back again to our excellent country inn. Enclosed is a letter from Alfred, which you and your aunt will be interested in reading, and which I meant to send you sooner but forgot it. Wonderful as it is to mention, the sun shines here to-day! But to counterbalance that phenomenon I am in close hiding from ----, who has christened his infant son in my name, and, consequently, haunts the building. He and Dolby have already nearly come into collision, in consequence of the latter being always under the dominion of the one idea that he is bound to knock everybody down who asks for me. * * * * * The "Jewish lady," wishing to mark her "appreciation of Mr. Dickens's nobility of character," presented him with a copy of Benisch's Hebrew and English Bible, with this inscription: "Presented to Charles Dickens, in grateful and admiring recognition of his having exercised the noblest quality man can possess--that of atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it." The acknowledgment of the gift is the following letter: [Sidenote: Jewish Lady.] BRADFORD, YORKSHIRE, _Friday, March 1st, 1867._ MY DEAR MRS. ----, I am working through a series of readings, widely dispersed through England, Scotland, and Ireland, and am so constantly occupied that it is very difficult for me to write letters. I have received your highly esteemed note (forwarded from my home in Kent), and should have replied to it sooner but that I had a hope of being able to get home and see your present first. As I have not been able to do so, however, and am hardly likely to do so for two months to come, I delay no longer. It is safely awaiting me on my own desk in my own quiet room. I cannot thank you for it too cordially, and cannot too earnestly assure you that I shall always prize it highly. The terms in which you send me that mark of your remembrance are more gratifying to me than I can possibly express to you; for they assure me that there is nothing but goodwill left between you and me and a people for whom I have a real regard, and to whom I would not wilfully have given an offence or done an injustice for any worldly consideration. Believe me, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, _Wednesday, March 6th, 1867._ The readings have made an immense effect in this place, and it is remarkable that although the people are individually rough, collectively they are an unusually tender and sympathetic audience; while their comic perception is quite up to the high London standard. The atmosphere is so very heavy that yesterday we escaped to Tynemouth for a two hours' sea walk. There was a high north wind blowing and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were being towed in and out over the stormy bar, with prodigious waves breaking on it; and spanning the restless uproar of the waters was a quiet rainbow of transcendent beauty. The scene was quite wonderful. We were in the full enjoyment of it when a heavy sea caught us, knocked us over, and in a moment drenched us, and filled even our pockets. We had nothing for it but to shake ourselves together (like Doctor Marigold) and dry ourselves as well as we could by hard walking in the wind and sunshine! But we were wet through for all that when we came back here to dinner after half an hour's railway ride. I am wonderfully well, and quite fresh and strong. Have had to doctor Dolby for a bad cold; have not caught it (yet), and have set him on his legs again. Scott is striking the tents and loading the baggages, so I must deliver up my writing-desk. We meet, please God, on Tuesday. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] SHELBOURNE HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Friday, March 15th, 1867._ We made our journey through an incessant snowstorm on Wednesday night; at last got snowed up among the Welsh mountains in a tremendous storm of wind, came to a stop, and had to dig the engine out. We went to bed at Holyhead at six in the morning of Thursday, and got aboard the packet at two yesterday afternoon. It blew hard, but as the wind was right astern, we only rolled and did not pitch much. As I walked about on the bridge all the four hours, and had cold salt beef and biscuit there and brandy-and-water, you will infer that my Channel training has not worn out. Our "business" here is _very bad_, though at Belfast it is enormous. There is no doubt that great alarm prevails here. This hotel is constantly filling and emptying as families leave the country, and set in a current to the steamers. There is apprehension of some disturbance between to-morrow night and Monday night (both inclusive), and I learn this morning that all the drinking-shops are to be closed from to-night until Tuesday. It is rumoured here that the Liverpool people are very uneasy about some apprehended disturbance there at the same time. Very likely you will know more about this than I do, and very likely it may be nothing. There is no doubt whatever that alarm prevails, and the manager of this hotel, an intelligent German, is very gloomy on the subject. On the other hand, there is feasting going on, and I have been asked to dinner-parties by divers civil and military authorities. Don't _you_ be uneasy, I say once again. You may be absolutely certain that there is no cause for it. We are splendidly housed here, and in great comfort. Love to Charley and Katey. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] SHELBOURNE HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Saturday, March 16th, 1867._ I daresay you know already that I held many councils in London about coming to Ireland at all, and was much against it. Everything looked as bad here as need be, but we did very well last night after all. There is considerable alarm here beyond all question, and great depression in all kinds of trade and commerce. To-morrow being St. Patrick's Day, there are apprehensions of some disturbance, and croakers predict that it will come off between to-night and Monday night. Of course there are preparations on all sides, and large musters of soldiers and police, though they are kept carefully out of sight. One would not suppose, walking about the streets, that any disturbance was impending; and yet there is no doubt that the materials of one lie smouldering up and down the city and all over the country. [I have a letter from Mrs. Bernal Osborne this morning, describing the fortified way in which she is living in her own house in the County Tipperary.] You may be quite sure that your venerable parent will take good care of himself. If any riot were to break out, I should immediately stop the readings here. Should all remain quiet, I begin to think they will be satisfactorily remunerative after all. At Belfast, we shall have an enormous house. I read "Copperfield" and "Bob" here on Monday; "Marigold" and "Trial" at Belfast, on Wednesday; and "Carol" and "Trial" here, on Friday. This is all my news, except that I am in perfect force. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] SHELBOURNE HOTEL, DUBLIN, _Sunday, March 17th, 1867._ Everything remains in appearance perfectly quiet here. The streets are gay all day, now that the weather is improved, and singularly quiet and deserted at night. But the whole place is secretly girt in with a military force. To-morrow night is supposed to be a critical time; but in view of the enormous preparations, I should say that the chances are at least one hundred to one against any disturbance. I cannot make sure whether I wrote to you yesterday, and told you that we had done very well at the first reading after all, even in money. The reception was prodigious, and the readings are the town talk. But I rather think I did actually write this to you. My doubt on the subject arises from my having deliberated about writing on a Saturday. The most curious, and for facilities of mere destruction, such as firing houses in different quarters, the most dangerous piece of intelligence imparted to me on authority is, that the Dublin domestic men-servants as a class are all Fenians. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BELFAST, _Wednesday, March 20th, 1867._ The post goes out at twelve, and I have only time to report myself. The snow not lying between this and Dublin, we got here yesterday to our time, after a cold but pleasant journey. Fitzgerald came on with us. I had a really charming letter from Mrs. Fitzgerald, asking me to stay there. She must be a perfectly unaffected and genuine lady. There are kind messages to you and Mary in it. I have sent it on to Mary, who will probably in her turn show it to you. We had a wonderful crowd at Dublin on Monday, and the greatest appreciation possible. We have a good let, in a large hall, here to-night. But I am perfectly convinced that the worst part of the Fenian business is to come yet. All about the Fitzgeralds and everything else when we meet. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BELFAST, _Thursday, March 21st, 1867._ In spite of public affairs and dismal weather, we are doing wonders in Ireland. That the conspiracy is a far larger and more important one than would seem from what it has done yet, there is no doubt. I have had a good deal of talk with a certain colonel, whose duty it has been to investigate it, day and night, since last September. That it will give a world of trouble, and cost a world of money, I take to be (after what I have thus learned) beyond all question. One regiment has been found to contain five hundred Fenian soldiers every man of whom was sworn in the barrack-yard. How information is swiftly and secretly conveyed all over the country, the Government with all its means and money cannot discover; but every hour it is found that instructions, warnings, and other messages are circulated from end to end of Ireland. It is a very serious business indeed. I have just time to send this off, and to report myself quite well except for a slight cold. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] NORWICH, _Friday, March 29th, 1867._ The reception at Cambridge last night was something to be proud of in such a place. The colleges mustered in full force from the biggest guns to the smallest, and went far beyond even Manchester in the roars of welcome and the rounds of cheers. All through the readings, the whole of the assembly, old men as well as young, and women as well as men, took everything with a heartiness of enjoyment not to be described. The place was crammed, and the success the most brilliant I have ever seen. What we are doing in this sleepy old place I don't know, but I have no doubt it is mild enough. [Sidenote: Mr. Walter Thornbury] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Monday, April 1st, 1867._ MY DEAR THORNBURY, I am very doubtful indeed about "Vaux," and have kept it out of the number in consequence. The mere details of such a rascal's proceedings, whether recorded by himself or set down by the Reverend Ordinary, are not wholesome for a large audience, and are scarcely justifiable (I think) as claiming to be a piece of literature. I can understand Barrington to be a good subject, as involving the representation of a period, a style of manners, an order of dress, certain habits of street life, assembly-room life, and coffee-room life, etc.; but there is a very broad distinction between this and mere Newgate Calendar. The latter would assuredly damage your book, and be protested against to me. I have a conviction of it, founded on constant observation and experience here. Your kind invitation is extremely welcome and acceptable to me, but I am sorry to add that I must not go a-visiting. For this reason: So incessantly have I been "reading," that I have not once been at home at Gad's Hill since last January, and am little likely to get there before the middle of May. Judge how the master's eye must be kept on the place when it does at length get a look at it after so long an absence! I hope you will descry in this a reason for coming to me again, instead of my coming to you. The extinct prize-fighters, as a body, I take to be a good subject, for much the same reason as George Barrington. Their patrons were a class of men now extinct too, and the whole ring of those days (not to mention Jackson's rooms in Bond Street) is a piece of social history. Now Vaux is not, nor is he even a phenomenon among thieves. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, _Thursday, April 18th, 1867._ MY DEAR STANNY, The time of year reminds me how the months have gone, since I last heard from you through Mrs. Stanfield. I hope you have not thought me unmindful of you in the meanwhile. I have been almost constantly travelling and reading. England, Ireland, and Scotland have laid hold of me by turns, and I have had no rest. As soon as I had finished this kind of work last year, I had to fall to work upon "All the Year Round" and the Christmas number. I was no sooner quit of that task, and the Christmas season was but run out to its last day, when I was tempted into another course of fifty readings that are not yet over. I am here now for two days, and have not seen the place since Twelfth Night. When a reading in London has been done, I have been brought up for it from some great distance, and have next morning been carried back again. But the fifty will be "paid out" (as we say at sea) by the middle of May, and then I hope to see you. Reading at Cheltenham the other day, I saw Macready, who sent his love to you. His face was much more massive and as it used to be, than when I saw him previous to his illness. His wife takes admirable care of him, and is on the happiest terms with his daughter Katie. His boy by the second marriage is a jolly little fellow, and leads a far easier life than the children you and I remember, who used to come in at dessert and have each a biscuit and a glass of water, in which last refreshment I was always convinced that they drank, with the gloomiest malignity, "Destruction to the gormandising grown-up company!" I hope to look up your latest triumphs on the day of the Academy dinner. Of course as yet I have had no opportunity of even hearing of what anyone has done. I have been (in a general way) snowed up for four months. The locomotive with which I was going to Ireland was dug out of the snow at midnight, in Wales. Both passages across were made in a furious snowstorm. The snow lay ankle-deep in Dublin, and froze hard at Belfast. In Scotland it slanted before a perpetual east wind. In Yorkshire, it derived novelty from thunder and lightning. Whirlwinds everywhere I don't mention. God bless you and yours. If I look like some weather-beaten pilot when we meet, don't be surprised. Any mahogany-faced stranger who holds out his hand to you will probably turn out, on inspection, to be the old original Dick. Ever, my dear Stanny, your faithful and affectionate. P.S.--I wish you could have been with me (of course in a snowstorm) one day on the pier at Tynemouth. There was a very heavy sea running, and a perfect fleet of screw merchantmen were plunging in and out on the turn of the tide at high-water. Suddenly there came a golden horizon, and a most glorious rainbow burst out, arching one large ship, as if she were sailing direct for heaven. I was so enchanted by the scene, that I became oblivious of a few thousand tons of water coming on in an enormous roller, and was knocked down and beaten by its spray when it broke, and so completely wetted through and through, that the very pockets in my pocket-book were full of sea. [Sidenote: Mr. George Stanfield.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Sunday, May 19th, 1867._ ON THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER. MY DEAR GEORGE, When I came up to the house this afternoon and saw what had happened, I had not the courage to ring, though I had thought I was fully prepared by what I heard when I called yesterday. No one of your father's friends can ever have loved him more dearly than I always did, or can have better known the worth of his noble character. It is idle to suppose that I can do anything for you; and yet I cannot help saying that I am staying here for some days, and that if I could, it would be a much greater relief to me than it could be a service to you. Your poor mother has been constantly in my thoughts since I saw the quiet bravery with which she preserved her composure. The beauty of her ministration sank into my heart when I saw him for the last time on earth. May God be with her, and with you all, in your great loss. Affectionately yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] _Thursday, June 6th, 1867._ MY DEAR WILLS, I cannot tell you how warmly I feel your letter, or how deeply I appreciate the affection and regard in which it originates. I thank you for it with all my heart. You will not suppose that I make light of any of your misgivings if I present the other side of the question. Every objection that you make strongly impresses me, and will be revolved in my mind again and again. When I went to America in '42, I was so much younger, but (I think) very much weaker too. I had had a painful surgical operation performed shortly before going out, and had had the labour from week to week of "Master Humphrey's Clock." My life in the States was a life of continual speech-making (quite as laborious as reading), and I was less patient and more irritable then than I am now. My idea of a course of readings in America is, that it would involve far less travelling than you suppose, that the large first-class rooms would absorb the whole course, and that the receipts would be very much larger than your estimate, unless the demand for the readings is ENORMOUSLY EXAGGERATED ON ALL HANDS. There is considerable reason for this view of the case. And I can hardly think that all the speculators who beset, and all the private correspondents who urge me, are in a conspiracy or under a common delusion. * * * * * I shall never rest much while my faculties last, and (if I know myself) have a certain something in me that would still be active in rusting and corroding me, if I flattered myself that I was in repose. On the other hand, I think that my habit of easy self-abstraction and withdrawal into fancies has always refreshed and strengthened me in short intervals wonderfully. I always seem to myself to have rested far more than I have worked; and I do really believe that I have some exceptional faculty of accumulating young feelings in short pauses, which obliterates a quantity of wear and tear. My worldly circumstances (such a large family considered) are very good. I don't want money. All my possessions are free and in the best order. Still, at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense consideration.... I repeat the phrase, because there should be something large to set against the objections. I dine with Forster to-day, to talk it over. I have no doubt he will urge most of your objections and particularly the last, though American friends and correspondents he has, have undoubtedly staggered him more than I ever knew him to be staggered on the money question. Be assured that no one can present any argument to me which will weigh more heartily with me than your kind words, and that whatever comes of my present state of abeyance, I shall never forget your letter or cease to be grateful for it. Ever, my dear Wills, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, June 13th, 1867._ MY DEAR WILLS, I have read the first three numbers of Wilkie's story this morning, and have gone minutely through the plot of the rest to the last line. It gives a series of "narratives," but it is a very curious story, wild, and yet domestic, with excellent character in it, and great mystery. It is prepared with extraordinary care, and has every chance of being a hit. It is in many respects much better than anything he has done. The question is, how shall we fill up the blank between Mabel's progress and Wilkie? What do you think of proposing to Fitzgerald to do a story three months long? I daresay he has some unfinished or projected something by him. I have an impression that it was not Silvester who tried Eliza Fenning, but Knowles. One can hardly suppose Thornbury to make such a mistake, but I wish you would look into the Annual Register. I have added a final paragraph about the unfairness of the judge, whoever he was. I distinctly recollect to have read of his "putting down" of Eliza Fenning's father when the old man made some miserable suggestion in his daughter's behalf (this is not noticed by Thornbury), and he also stopped some suggestion that a knife thrust into a loaf adulterated with alum would present the appearance that these knives presented. But I may have got both these points from looking up some pamphlets in Upcott's collection which I once had. Your account of your journey reminds me of one of the latest American stories, how a traveller by stage-coach said to the driver: "Did you ever see a snail, sir?" "Yes, sir." "Where did you meet him, sir?" "I _didn't_ meet him, sir!" "Wa'al, sir, I think you did, if you'll excuse me, for I'm damned if you ever overtook him." Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Mrs. Henderson.] GAD'S HILL, _Thursday, July 4th, 1867._ MY DEAR MRS. HENDERSON, I was more shocked than surprised by the receipt of your mother's announcement of our poor dear Marguerite's death. When I heard of the consultation, and recalled what had preceded it and what I have seen here, my hopes were very slight. Your letter did not reach me until last night, and thus I could not avoid remaining here to-day, to keep an American appointment of unusual importance. You and your mother both know, I think, that I had a great affection for Marguerite, that we had many dear remembrances together, and that her self-reliance and composed perseverance had awakened my highest admiration in later times. No one could have stood by her grave to-day with a better knowledge of all that was great and good in her than I have, or with a more loving remembrance of her through all her phases since she first came to London a pretty timid girl. I do not trouble your mother by writing to her separately. It is a sad, sad task to write at all. God help us! Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] GAD'S HILL, _July 21st, 1867._ MY DEAR FITZGERALD, I am heartily glad to get your letter, and shall be thoroughly well pleased to study you again in the pages of A. Y. R. I have settled nothing yet about America, but am going to send Dolby out on the 3rd of next month to survey the land, and come back with a report on some heads whereon I require accurate information. Proposals (both from American and English speculators) of a very tempting nature have been repeatedly made to me; but I cannot endure the thought of binding myself to give so many readings there whether I like it or no; and if I go at all, am bent on going with Dolby single-handed. I have been doing two things for America; one, the little story to which you refer; the other, four little papers for a child's magazine. I like them both, and think the latter a queer combination of a child's mind with a grown-up joke. I have had them printed to assure correct printing in the United States. You shall have the proof to read, with the greatest pleasure. On second thoughts, why shouldn't I send you the children's proof by this same post? I will, as I have it here, send it under another cover. When you return it, you shall have the short story. Believe me, always heartily yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Percy Fitzgerald.] EXTRACT. _July 28th, 1867._ I am glad you like the children, and particularly glad you like the pirate. I remember very well when I had a general idea of occupying that place in history at the same age. But I loved more desperately than Boldheart. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Friday Night, Aug. 2nd, 1867._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I cannot get a boot on--wear a slipper on my left foot, and consequently am here under difficulties. My foot is occasionally painful, but not very. I don't think it worth while consulting anybody about it as yet. I make out so many reasons against supposing it to be gouty, that I really do not think it is. Dolby begs me to send all manner of apologetic messages for his going to America. He is very cheerful and hopeful, but evidently feels the separation from his wife and child very much. His sister[17] was at Euston Square this morning, looking very well. Sainton too, very light and jovial. With the view of keeping myself and my foot quiet, I think I will not come to Gad's Hill until Monday. If I don't appear before, send basket to Gravesend to meet me, leaving town by the 12.10 on Monday. This is important, as I couldn't walk a quarter of a mile to-night for five hundred pounds. Love to all at Gad's. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, Sept. 2nd, 1867._ MY DEAR WILLS, Like you, I was shocked when this new discovery burst upon me on Friday, though, unlike you, I never could believe in ----, solely (I think) because, often as I have tried him, I never found him standing by my desk when I was writing a letter without trying to read it. I fear there is no doubt that since ----'s discharge, he (----) has stolen money at the readings. A case of an abstracted shilling seems to have been clearly brought home to him by Chappell's people, and they know very well what _that_ means. I supposed a very clear keeping off from Anne's husband (whom I recommended for employment to Chappell) to have been referable only to ----; but now I see how hopeless and unjust it would be to expect belief from him with two such cases within his knowledge. But don't let the thing spoil your holiday. If we try to do our duty by people we employ, by exacting their proper service from them on the one hand, and treating them with all possible consistency, gentleness, and consideration on the other, we know that we do right. Their doing wrong cannot change our doing right, and that should be enough for us. So I have given _my_ feathers a shake, and am all right again. Give _your_ feathers a shake, and take a cheery flutter into the air of Hertfordshire. Great reports from Dolby and also from Fields! But I keep myself quite calm, and hold my decision in abeyance until I shall have book, chapter, and verse before me. Dolby hoped he could leave Uncle Sam on the 11th of this month. Sydney has passed as a lieutenant, and appeared at home yesterday, all of a sudden, with the consequent golden garniture on his sleeve, which I, God forgive me, stared at without the least idea that it meant promotion. I am glad you see a certain unlikeness to anything in the American story. Upon myself it has made the strangest impression of reality and originality!! And I feel as if I had read something (by somebody else), which I should never get out of my mind!!! The main idea of the narrator's position towards the other people was the idea that I _had_ for my next novel in A. Y. R. But it is very curious that I did not in the least see how to begin his state of mind until I walked into Hoghton Towers one bright April day with Dolby. Faithfully ever. [Sidenote: Mr. F. D. Finlay.] CONTRADICTING A NEWSPAPER REPORT OF HIS BEING IN A CRITICAL STATE OF HEALTH. GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Sept. 3rd, 1867._ This is to certify that the undersigned victim of a periodical paragraph-disease, which usually breaks out once in every seven years (proceeding to England by the overland route to India and per Cunard line to America, where it strikes the base of the Rocky Mountains, and, rebounding to Europe, perishes on the steppes of Russia), is _not_ in a "critical state of health," and has _not_ consulted "eminent surgeons," and never was better in his life, and is _not_ recommended to proceed to the United States for "cessation from literary labour," and has not had so much as a headache for twenty years. CHARLES DICKENS. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] "ALL THE YEAR ROUND" OFFICE, _Monday, Sept. 16th, 1867._ MY DEAR FECHTER, Going over the prompt-book carefully, I see one change in your part to which (on Lytton's behalf) I positively object, as I am quite certain he would not consent to it. It is highly injudicious besides, as striking out the best known line in the play. Turn to your part in Act III., the speech beginning Pauline, _by pride Angels have fallen ere thy time_: by pride---- You have made a passage farther on stand: _Then did I seek to rise Out of my mean estate. Thy bright image, etc._ I must stipulate for your restoring it thus: Then did I seek to rise Out of the prison of my mean estate; And, with such jewels as the exploring mind Brings from the caves of knowledge, buy my ransom From those twin jailers of the daring heart-- Low birth and iron fortune. Thy bright image, etc. etc. The last figure has been again and again quoted; is identified with the play; is fine in itself; and above all, I KNOW that Lytton would not let it go. In writing to him to-day, fully explaining the changes in detail, and saying that I disapprove of nothing else, I have told him that I notice this change and that I immediately let you know that it must not be made. (There will not be a man in the house from any newspaper who would not detect mutilations in that speech, moreover.) Ever. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] _Monday, Sept. 30th, 1867._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, The telegram is despatched to Boston: "Yes. Go ahead." After a very anxious consultation with Forster, and careful heed of what is to be said for and against, I have made up my mind to see it out. I do not expect as much money as the calculators estimate, but I cannot set the hope of a large sum of money aside. I am so nervous with travelling and anxiety to decide something, that I can hardly write. But I send you these few words as my dearest and best friend. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," NO. 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C., _Monday, Sept. 30th, 1867._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, You will have had my telegram that I go to America. After a long discussion with Forster, and consideration of what is to be said on both sides, I have decided to go through with it. I doubt the profit being as great as the calculation makes it, but the prospect is sufficiently alluring to turn the scale on the American side. Unless I telegraph to the contrary, I will come to Gravesend (send basket there) by 12 train on Wednesday. Love to all. We have telegraphed "Yes" to Boston. I begin to feel myself drawn towards America, as Darnay, in the "Tale of Two Cities," was attracted to the Loadstone Rock, Paris. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] 26, WELLINGTON STREET, _Saturday, Oct. 19th, 1867._ MY DEAR KENT, In the midst of the great trouble you are taking in the cause of your undersigned affectionate friend, I hope the reading of the enclosed may be a sort of small godsend. Of course it is very strictly private. The printers are not yet trusted with the name, but the name will be, "No Thoroughfare." I have done the greater part of it; may you find it interesting! My solicitor, a man of some mark and well known, is anxious to be on the Committee: Frederic Ouvry, Esquire, 66, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--My sailor son! I forgot him!! Coming up from Portsmouth for the dinner!!! Der--er--oo not cur--ur--urse me, I implore. Penitently. [Sidenote: Mrs. Power.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, Oct. 23rd, 1867._ MY DEAR MRS. POWER, I have a sad pleasure in the knowledge that our dear Marguerite so remembered her old friend, and I shall preserve the token of her remembrance with loving care. The sight of it has brought back many old days. With kind remembrance to Mrs. Henderson, Believe me always, very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. J. L. Toole.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, Nov. 2nd, 1867._ MY DEAR MR. TOOLE, I heartily thank you for your elegant token of remembrance, and for your earnest letter. Both have afforded me real pleasure, and the first-named shall go with me on my journey. Let me take this opportunity of saying that on receipt of your letter concerning to-day's dinner, I immediately forwarded your request to the honorary secretary. I hope you will understand that I could not, in delicacy, otherwise take part in the matter. Again thanking you most cordially, Believe me, always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 26, WELLINGTON STREET, _Sunday, Nov. 3rd, 1867._ MY DEAR WILLS, If you were to write me many such warm-hearted letters as you send this morning, my heart would fail me! There is nothing that so breaks down my determination, or shows me what an iron force I put upon myself, and how weak it is, as a touch of true affection from a tried friend. All that you so earnestly say about the goodwill and devotion of all engaged, I perceived and deeply felt last night. It moved me even more than the demonstration itself, though I do suppose it was the most brilliant ever seen. When I got up to speak, but for taking a desperate hold of myself, I should have lost my sight and voice and sat down again. God bless you, my dear fellow. I am, ever and ever, Your affectionate. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 1867._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, A thousand thanks for your kind letter, and many congratulations on your having successfully attained a dignity which I never allow to be mentioned in my presence. Charley's children are instructed from their tenderest months only to know me as "Wenerables," which they sincerely believe to be my name, and a kind of title that I have received from a grateful country. Alas! I cannot have the pleasure of seeing you before I presently go to Liverpool. Every moment of my time is preoccupied. But I send you my sincere love, and am always truthful to the dear old days, and the memory of one of the dearest friends I ever loved. Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] ABOARD THE "CUBA," QUEENSTOWN HARBOUR, _Sunday, Nov. 10th, 1867._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, We arrived here at seven this morning, and shall probably remain awaiting our mail, until four or five this afternoon. The weather in the passage here was delightful, and we had scarcely any motion beyond that of the screw. We are nearly but not quite full of passengers. At table I sit next the captain, on his right, on the outside of the table and close to the door. My little cabin is big enough for everything but getting up in and going to bed in. As it has a good window which I can leave open all night, and a door which I can set open too, it suits my chief requirements of it--plenty of air--admirably. On a writing-slab in it, which pulls out when wanted, I now write in a majestic manner. Many of the passengers are American, and I am already on the best terms with nearly all the ship. We began our voyage yesterday a very little while after you left us, which was a great relief. The wind is S.E. this morning, and if it would keep so we should go along nobly. My dearest love to your aunt, and also to Katie and all the rest. I am in very good health, thank God, and as well as possible. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ABOARD THE "CUBA," FIVE DAYS OUT, _Wednesday, Nov. 13th, 1867._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, As I wrote to Mamie last, I now write to you, or mean to do it, if the motion of the ship will let me. We are very nearly halfway to-day. The weather was favourable for us until yesterday morning, when we got a head-wind which still stands by us. We have rolled and pitched, of course; but on the whole have been wonderfully well off. I have had headache and have felt faint once or twice, _but have not been sick at all_. My spacious cabin is very noisy at night, as the most important working of the ship goes on outside my window and over my head; but it is very airy, and if the weather be bad and I can't open the window, I can open the door all night. If the weather be fine (as it is now), I can open both door and window, and write between them. Last night, I got a foot-bath under the dignified circumstances of sitting on a camp-stool in my cabin, and having the bath (and my feet) in the passage outside. The officers' quarters are close to me, and, as I know them all, I get reports of the weather and the way we are making when the watch is changed, and I am (as I usually am) lying awake. The motion of the screw is at its slightest vibration in my particular part of the ship. The silent captain, reported gruff, is a very good fellow and an honest fellow. Kelly has been ill all the time, and not of the slightest use, and is ill now. Scott always cheerful, and useful, and ready; a better servant for the kind of work there never can have been. Young Lowndes has been fearfully sick until mid-day yesterday. His cabin is pitch dark, and full of blackbeetles. He shares mine until nine o'clock at night, when Scott carries him off to bed. He also dines with me in my magnificent chamber. This passage in winter time cannot be said to be an enjoyable excursion, but I certainly am making it under the best circumstances. (I find Dolby to have been enormously popular on board, and to have known everybody and gone everywhere.) So much for my news, except that I have been constantly reading, and find that "Pierra" that Mrs. Hogge sent me by Katie to be a very remarkable book, not only for its grim and horrible story, but for its suggestion of wheels within wheels, and sad human mysteries. Baker's second book not nearly so good as his first, but his first anticipated it. We hope to get to Halifax either on Sunday or Monday, and to Boston either on Tuesday or Wednesday. The glass is rising high to-day, and everybody on board is hopeful of an easterly wind. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] _Saturday, 16th._ Last Thursday afternoon a heavy gale of wind sprang up and blew hard until dark, when it seemed to lull. But it then came on again with great violence, and blew tremendously all night. The noise, and the rolling and plunging of the ship, were awful. Nobody on board could get any sleep, and numbers of passengers were rolled out of their berths. Having a side-board to mine to keep me in, like a baby, I lay still. But it was a dismal night indeed, and it was curious to see the change it had made in the faces of all the passengers yesterday. It cannot be denied that these winter crossings are very trying and startling; while the personal discomfort of not being able to wash, and the miseries of getting up and going to bed, with what small means there are all sliding, and sloping, and slopping about, are really in their way distressing. This forenoon we made Cape Race, and are now running along at full speed with the land beside us. Kelly still useless, and positively declining to show on deck. Scott, with an eight-day-old moustache, more super like than ever. My foot (I hope from walking on the boarded deck) in a very shy condition to-day, and rather painful. I shaved this morning for the first time since Liverpool; dodging at the glass, very much like Fechter's imitation of ----. The white cat that came off with us in the tender a general favourite. She belongs to the daughter of a Southerner, returning with his wife and family from a two-years' tour in Europe. _Sunday, 17th._ At four o'clock this morning we got into bad weather again, and the state of things at breakfast-time was unutterably miserable. Nearly all the passengers in their berths--no possibility of standing on deck--sickness and groans--impracticable to pass a cup of tea from one pair of hands to another. It has slightly moderated since (between two and three in the afternoon I write), and the sun is shining, but the rolling of the ship surpasses all imagination or description. We expect to be at Halifax about an hour after midnight, and this letter shall be posted there, to make certain of catching the return mail on Wednesday. Boston is only thirty hours from Halifax. Best love to Mamie, and to Katie and Charley. I know you will report me and my love to Forster and Mrs. Forster. I write with great difficulty, wedged up in a corner, and having my heels on the paper as often as the pen. Kelly worse than ever, and Scott better than ever. My desk and I have just arisen from the floor. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, _Thursday, Nov. 21st, 1867._ I arrived here on Tuesday night, after a very slow passage from Halifax against head-winds. All the tickets for the first four readings here (all yet announced) were sold immediately on their being issued. You know that I begin on the 2nd of December with "Carol" and "Trial"? Shall be heartily glad to begin to count the readings off. This is an immense hotel, with all manner of white marble public passages and public rooms. I live in a corner high up, and have a hot and cold bath in my bedroom (communicating with the sitting-room), and comforts not in existence when I was here before. The cost of living is enormous, but happily we can afford it. I dine to-day with Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, and Agassiz. Longfellow was here yesterday. Perfectly white in hair and beard, but a remarkably handsome and notable-looking man. The city has increased enormously in five-and-twenty years. It has grown more mercantile--is like Leeds mixed with Preston, and flavoured with New Brighton; but for smoke and fog you substitute an exquisitely bright light air. I found my rooms beautifully decorated (by Mrs. Fields) with choice flowers, and set off by a number of good books. I am not much persecuted by people in general, as Dolby has happily made up his mind that the less I am exhibited for nothing the better. So our men sit outside the room door and wrestle with mankind. We had speech-making and singing in the saloon of the _Cuba_ after the last dinner of the voyage. I think I have acquired a higher reputation from drawing out the captain, and getting him to take the second in "All's Well," and likewise in "There's not in the wide world" (your parent taking first), than from anything previously known of me on these shores. I hope the effect of these achievements may not dim the lustre of the readings. We also sang (with a Chicago lady, and a strong-minded woman from I don't know where) "Auld Lang Syne," with a tender melancholy, expressive of having all four been united from our cradles. The more dismal we were, the more delighted the company were. Once (when we paddled i' the burn) the captain took a little cruise round the compass on his own account, touching at the "Canadian Boat Song," and taking in supplies at "Jubilate," "Seas between us braid ha' roared," and roared like the seas themselves. Finally, I proposed the ladies in a speech that convulsed the stewards, and we closed with a brilliant success. But when you dine with Mr. Forster, ask him to read to you how we got on at church in a heavy sea. Hillard has just been in and sent his love "to those dear girls." He has grown much older. He is now District Attorney of the State of Massachusetts, which is a very good office. Best love to your aunt and Katie, and Charley and all his house, and all friends. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, _Monday, Nov. 25th, 1867._ I cannot remember to whom I wrote last, but it will not much matter if I make a mistake; this being generally to report myself so well, that I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night instead of this night week. The tickets being all sold for next week, and no other announcement being yet made, there is nothing new in that way to tell of. Dolby is over at New York, where we are at our wits' end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators. Morgan is staying with me; came yesterday to breakfast, and goes home to-morrow. Fields and Mrs. Fields also dined yesterday. She is a very nice woman, with a rare relish for humour and a most contagious laugh. The Bostonians having been duly informed that I wish to be quiet, really leave me as much so as I should be in Manchester or Liverpool. This I cannot expect to last elsewhere; but it is a most welcome relief here, as I have all the readings to get up. The people are perfectly kind and perfectly agreeable. If I stop to look in at a shop-window, a score of passers-by stop; and after I begin to read, I cannot expect in the natural course of things to get off so easily. But I every day take from seven to ten miles in peace. Communications about readings incessantly come in from all parts of the country. We take no offer whatever, lying by with our plans until after the first series in New York, and designing, if we make a furore there, to travel as little as possible. I fear I shall have to take Canada at the end of the whole tour. They make such strong representations from Montreal and Toronto, and from Nova Scotia--represented by St. John's and Halifax--of the slight it would be to them, if I wound up with the States, that I am shaken. It is sad to see Longfellow's house (the house in which his wife was burnt) with his young daughters in it, and the shadow of that terrible story. The young undergraduates of Cambridge (he is a professor there) have made a representation to him that they are five hundred strong, and cannot get one ticket. I don't know what is to be done for them; I suppose I must read there somehow. We are all in the clouds until I shall have broken ground in New York, as to where readings will be possible and where impossible. Agassiz is one of the most natural and jovial of men. I go out a-visiting as little as I can, but still have to dine, and what is worse, sup pretty often. Socially, I am (as I was here before) wonderfully reminded of Edinburgh when I had many friends in it. Your account and Mamie's of the return journey to London gave me great pleasure. I was delighted with your report of Wilkie, and not surprised by Chappell's coming out gallantly. My anxiety to get to work is greater than I can express, because time seems to be making no movement towards home until I shall be reading hard. Then I shall begin to count and count and count the upward steps to May. If ever you should be in a position to advise a traveller going on a sea voyage, remember that there is some mysterious service done to the bilious system when it is shaken, by baked apples. Noticing that they were produced on board the _Cuba_, every day at lunch and dinner, I thought I would make the experiment of always eating them freely. I am confident that they did wonders, not only at the time, but in stopping the imaginary pitching and rolling after the voyage is over, from which many good amateur sailors suffer. I have hardly had the sensation at all, except in washing of a morning. At that time I still hold on with one knee to the washing-stand, and could swear that it rolls from left to right. The _Cuba_ does not return until Wednesday, the 4th December. You may suppose that every officer on board is coming on Monday, and that Dolby has provided extra stools for them. His work is very hard indeed. Cards are brought to him every minute in the day; his correspondence is immense; and he is jerked off to New York, and I don't know where else, on the shortest notice and the most unreasonable times. Moreover, he has to be at "the bar" every night, and to "liquor up with all creation" in the small hours. He does it all with the greatest good humour, and flies at everybody who waylays the Chief, furiously. We have divided our men into watches, so that one always sits outside the drawing-room door. Dolby knows the whole Cunard line, and as we could not get good English gin, went out in a steamer yesterday and got two cases (twenty-four bottles) out of Cunard officers. Osgood and he were detached together last evening for New York, whence they telegraph every other hour about some new point in this precious sale of tickets. So distracted a telegram arrived at three that I have telegraphed back, "Explain yourselves," and am now waiting for the explanation. I think you know that Osgood is a partner in Ticknor and Fields'. Tuesday morning.--Dolby has come back from New York, where the prospects seem immense. We sell tickets there next Friday and Saturday, and a tremendous rush is expected. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Dickens.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, U.S., _Saturday, Nov. 30th, 1867._ MY DEAR CHARLEY, You will have heard before now how fortunate I was on my voyage, and how I was not sick for a moment. These screws are tremendous ships for carrying on, and for rolling, and their vibration is rather distressing. But my little cabin, being for'ard of the machinery, was in the best part of the vessel, and I had as much air in it, night and day, as I chose. The saloon being kept absolutely without air, I mostly dined in my own den, in spite of my being allotted the post of honour on the right hand of the captain. The tickets for the first four readings here (the only readings announced) were all sold immediately, and many are now re-selling at a large premium. The tickets for the first four readings in New York (the only readings announced there also) were on sale yesterday, and were all sold in a few hours. The receipts are very large indeed; but engagements of any kind and every kind I steadily refuse, being resolved to take what is to be taken myself. Dolby is nearly worked off his legs, is now at New York, and goes backwards and forwards between this place and that (about the distance from London to Liverpool, though they take nine hours to do it) incessantly. Nothing can exceed his energy and good humour, and he is extremely popular everywhere. My great desire is to avoid much travelling, and to try to get the people to come to me, instead of my going to them. If I can effect this to any moderate extent, I shall be saved a great deal of knocking about. My original purpose was not to go to Canada at all; but Canada is so up in arms on the subject that I think I shall be obliged to take it at last. In that case I should work round to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then take the packet for home. As they don't seem (Americans who have heard me on their travels excepted) to have the least idea here of what the readings are like, and as they are accustomed to mere readings out of a book, I am inclined to think the excitement will increase when I shall have begun. Everybody is very kind and considerate, and I have a number of old friends here, at the Bar and connected with the University. I am now negotiating to bring out the dramatic version of "No Thoroughfare" at New York. It is quite upon the cards that it may turn up trumps. I was interrupted in that place by a call from my old secretary in the States, Mr. Putnam. It was quite affecting to see his delight in meeting his old master again. And when I told him that Anne was married, and that I had (unacknowledged) grandchildren, he laughed and cried together. I suppose you don't remember Longfellow, though he remembers you in a black velvet frock very well. He is now white-haired and white-bearded, but remarkably handsome. He still lives in his old house, where his beautiful wife was burnt to death. I dined with him the other day, and could not get the terrific scene out of my imagination. She was in a blaze in an instant, rushed into his arms with a wild cry, and never spoke afterwards. My love to Bessie, and to Mekitty, and all the babbies. I will lay this by until Tuesday morning, and then add a final line to it. Ever, my dear Charley, your affectionate Father. _Tuesday, Dec. 3rd, 1867._ Success last night beyond description or exaggeration. The whole city is quite frantic about it to-day, and it is impossible that prospects could be more brilliant. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, _Sunday, Dec. 1st, 1867._ I received yours of the 18th November, yesterday. As I left Halifax in the _Cuba_ that very day, you probably saw us telegraphed in _The Times_ on the 19th. Dolby came back from another run to New York, this morning. The receipts are very large indeed, far exceeding our careful estimate made at Gad's. I think you had best in future (unless I give you intimation to the contrary) address your letters to me, at the Westminster Hotel, Irving Place, New York City. It is a more central position than this, and we are likely to be much more there than here. I am going to set up a brougham in New York, and keep my rooms at that hotel. The account of Matilda is a very melancholy one, and really distresses me. What she must sink into, it is sad to consider. However, there was nothing for it but to send her away, that is quite clear. They are said to be a very quiet audience here, appreciative but not demonstrative. I shall try to change their character a little. I have been going on very well. A horrible custom obtains in these parts of asking you to dinner somewhere at half-past two, and to supper somewhere else about eight. I have run this gauntlet more than once, and its effect is, that there is no day for any useful purpose, and that the length of the evening is multiplied by a hundred. Yesterday I dined with a club at half-past two, and came back here at half-past eight, with a general impression that it was at least two o'clock in the morning. Two days before I dined with Longfellow at half-past two, and came back at eight, supposing it to be midnight. To-day we have a state dinner-party in our rooms at six, Mr. and Mrs. Fields, and Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow. (He is a friend of Forster's, and was American Minister in Paris). There are no negro waiters here, all the servants are Irish--willing, but not able. The dinners and wines are very good. I keep our own rooms well ventilated by opening the windows, but no window is ever opened in the halls or passages, and they are so overheated by a great furnace, that they make me faint and sick. The air is like that of a pre-Adamite ironing-day in full blast. Your respected parent is immensely popular in Boston society, and its cordiality and unaffected heartiness are charming. I wish I could carry it with me. The leading New York papers have sent men over for to-morrow night with instructions to telegraph columns of descriptions. Great excitement and expectation everywhere. Fields says he has looked forward to it so long that he knows he will die at five minutes to eight. At the New York barriers, where the tickets are on sale and the people ranged as at the Paris theatres, speculators went up and down offering "twenty dollars for anybody's place." The money was in no case accepted. One man sold two tickets for the second, third, and fourth night for "one ticket for the first, fifty dollars" (about seven pounds ten shillings), "and a brandy cocktail," which is an iced bitter drink. The weather has been rather muggy and languid until yesterday, when there was the coldest wind blowing that I ever felt. In the night it froze very hard, and to-day the sky is beautiful. _Tuesday, Dec. 3rd._ Most magnificent reception last night, and most signal and complete success. Nothing could be more triumphant. The people will hear of nothing else and talk of nothing else. Nothing that was ever done here, they all agree, evoked any approach to such enthusiasm. I was quite as cool and quick as if I were reading at Greenwich, and went at it accordingly. Tell your aunt, with my best love, that I have this morning received hers of the 21st, and that I will write to her next. That will be from New York. My love to Mr. and Mrs. Hulkes and the boy, and to Mr. and Mrs. Malleson.[18] [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BOSTON, _Wednesday, Dec. 4th, 1867._ I find that by going off to the _Cuba_ myself this morning I can send you the enclosed for Mary Boyle (I don't know how to address her), whose usual flower for my button-hole was produced in the most extraordinary manner here last Monday night! All well and prosperous. "Copperfield" and "Bob" last night; great success. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] BOSTON, _December 4th, 1867._ MY DEAR MEERY, You can have no idea of the glow of pleasure and amazement with which I saw your remembrance of me lying on my dressing-table here last Monday night. Whosoever undertook that commission accomplished it to a miracle. But you must go away four thousand miles, and have such a token conveyed to _you_, before you can quite appreciate the feeling of receiving it. Ten thousand loving thanks. Immense success here, and unbounded enthusiasm. My largest expectations far surpassed. Ever your affectionate Jo. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK CITY, _Wednesday, Dec 11th, 1867._ Amazing success here. A very fine audience; _far better than that at Boston_. Great reception. Great, "Carol" and "Trial," on the first night; still greater, "Copperfield" and "Bob," on the second. Dolby sends you a few papers by this post. You will see from their tone what a success it is. I cannot pay this letter, because I give it at the latest moment to the mail-officer, who is going on board the Cunard packet in charge of the mails, and who is staying in this house. We are now selling (at the hall) the tickets for the four readings of next week. At nine o'clock this morning there were two thousand people in waiting, and they had begun to assemble in the bitter cold as early as two o'clock. All night long Dolby and our man have been stamping tickets. (Immediately over my head, by-the-bye, and keeping me awake.) This hotel is quite as quiet as Mivart's, in Brook Street. It is not very much larger. There are American hotels close by, with five hundred bedrooms, and I don't know how many boarders; but this is conducted on what is called "the European principle," and is an admirable mixture of a first-class French and English house. I keep a very smart carriage and pair; and if you were to behold me driving out, furred up to the moustache, with furs on the coach-boy and on the driver, and with an immense white, red, and yellow striped rug for a covering, you would suppose me to be of Hungarian or Polish nationality. Will you report the success here to Mr. Forster with my love, and tell him he shall hear from me by next mail? Dolby sends his kindest regards. He is just come in from our ticket sales, and has put such an immense untidy heap of paper money on the table that it looks like a family wash. He hardly ever dines, and is always tearing about at unreasonable hours. He works very hard. My best love to your aunt (to whom I will write next), and to Katie, and to both the Charleys, and all the Christmas circle, not forgetting Chorley, to whom give my special remembrance. You may get this by Christmas Day. _We_ shall have to keep it travelling from Boston here; for I read at Boston on the 23rd and 24th, and here again on the 26th. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK CITY, _Monday, Dec. 16th, 1867._ We have been snowed up here, and the communication with Boston is still very much retarded. Thus we have received no letters by the Cunard steamer that came in last Wednesday, and are in a grim state of mind on that subject. Last night I was getting into bed just at twelve o'clock, when Dolby came to my door to inform me that the house was on fire (I had previously smelt fire for two hours). I got Scott up directly, told him to pack the books and clothes for the readings first, dressed, and pocketed my jewels and papers, while Dolby stuffed himself out with money. Meanwhile the police and firemen were in the house, endeavouring to find where the fire was. For some time it baffled their endeavours, but at last, bursting out through some stairs, they cut the stairs away, and traced it to its source in a certain fire-grate. By this time the hose was laid all through the house from a great tank on the roof, and everybody turned out to help. It was the oddest sight, and people had put the strangest things on! After a little chopping and cutting with axes and handing about of water, the fire was confined to a dining-room in which it had originated, and then everybody talked to everybody else, the ladies being particularly loquacious and cheerful. And so we got to bed again at about two. The excitement of the readings continues unabated, the tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up. They are a wonderfully fine audience, even better than Edinburgh, and almost, if not quite, as good as Paris. Dolby continues to be the most unpopular man in America (mainly because he can't get four thousand people into a room that holds two thousand), and is reviled in print daily. Yesterday morning a newspaper proclaims of him: "Surely it is time that the pudding-headed Dolby retired into the native gloom from which he has emerged." He takes it very coolly, and does his best. Mrs. Morgan sent me, the other night, I suppose the finest and costliest basket of flowers ever seen, made of white camellias, yellow roses, pink roses, and I don't know what else. It is a yard and a half round at its smallest part. I must bring this to a close, as I have to go to the hall to try an enlarged background. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BOSTON, _Sunday, Dec. 22nd, 1867._ Coming here from New York last night (after a detestable journey), I was delighted to find your letter of the 6th. I read it at my ten o'clock dinner with the greatest interest and pleasure, and then we talked of home till we went to bed. Our tour is now being made out, and I hope to be able to send it in my next letter home, which will be to Mamie, from whom I have _not_ heard (as you thought I had) by the mail that brought out yours. After very careful consideration I have reversed Dolby's original plan, and have decided on taking Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, _Chicago_ (!), St. Louis, and a few other places nearer here, instead of staying in New York. My reason is that we are doing immensely, both at New York and here, and that I am sure it is in the peculiar character of the people to prize a thing the more the less easily attainable it is made. Therefore, I want, by absence, to get the greatest rush and pressure upon the five farewell readings in New York in April. All our announced readings are already crammed. When we got here last Saturday night, we found that Mrs. Fields had not only garnished the rooms with flowers, but also with holly (with real red berries) and festoons of moss dependent from the looking-glasses and picture frames. She is one of the dearest little women in the world. The homely Christmas look of the place quite affected us. Yesterday we dined at her house, and there was a plum-pudding, brought on blazing, and not to be surpassed in any house in England. There is a certain Captain Dolliver, belonging to the Boston Custom House, who came off in the little steamer that brought me ashore from the _Cuba_. He took it into his head that he would have a piece of English mistletoe brought out in this week's Cunard, which should be laid upon my breakfast-table. And there it was this morning. In such affectionate touches as this, these New England people are especially amiable. As a general rule, you may lay it down that whatever you see about me in the papers is not true. But although my voyage out was of that highly hilarious description that you first made known to me, you may _generally_ lend a more believing ear to the Philadelphia correspondent of _The Times_. I don't know him, but I know the source from which he derives his information, and it is a very respectable one. Did I tell you in a former letter from here, to tell Anne, with her old master's love, that I had seen Putnam, my old secretary? Grey, and with several front teeth out, but I would have known him anywhere. He is coming to "Copperfield" to-night, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and is in the seventh heaven at having his tickets given him. Our hotel in New York was on fire _again_ the other night. But fires in this country are quite matters of course. There was a large one there at four this morning, and I don't think a single night has passed since I have been under the protection of the Eagle, but I have heard the fire bells dolefully clanging all over the city. Dolby sends his kindest regard. His hair has become quite white, the effect, I suppose, of the climate. He is so universally hauled over the coals (for no reason on earth), that I fully expect to hear him, one of these nights, assailed with a howl when he precedes me to the platform steps. You may conceive what the low newspapers are here, when one of them yesterday morning had, as an item of news, the intelligence: "Dickens's Readings. The chap calling himself Dolby got drunk last night, and was locked up in a police-station for fighting an Irishman." I don't find that anybody is shocked by this liveliness. My love to all, and to Mrs. Hulkes and the boy. By-the-bye, when we left New York for this place, Dolby called my amazed attention to the circumstance that Scott was leaning his head against the side of the carriage and weeping bitterly. I asked him what was the matter, and he replied: "The owdacious treatment of the luggage, which was more outrageous than a man could bear." I told him not to make a fool of himself; but they do knock it about cruelly. I think every trunk we have is already broken. I must leave off, as I am going out for a walk in a bright sunlight and a complete break-up of the frost and snow. I am much better than I have been during the last week, but have a cold. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK CITY, _Thursday, Dec. 26th, 1867._ I got your aunt's last letter at Boston yesterday, Christmas Day morning, when I was starting at eleven o'clock to come back to this place. I wanted it very much, for I had a frightful cold (English colds are nothing to those of this country), and was exceedingly depressed and miserable. Not that I had any reason but illness for being so, since the Bostonians had been quite astounding in their demonstrations. I never saw anything like them on Christmas Eve. But it is a bad country to be unwell and travelling in; you are one of say a hundred people in a heated car, with a great stove in it, and all the little windows closed, and the hurrying and banging about are indescribable. The atmosphere is detestable, and the motion often all but intolerable. However, we got our dinner here at eight o'clock, and plucked up a little, and I made some hot gin punch to drink a merry Christmas to all at home in. But it must be confessed that we were both very dull. I have been in bed all day until two o'clock, and here I am now (at three o'clock) a little better. But I am not fit to read, and I must read to-night. After watching the general character pretty closely, I became quite sure that Dolby was wrong on the length of the stay and the number of readings we had proposed in this place. I am quite certain that it is one of the national peculiarities that what they want must be difficult of attainment. I therefore a few days ago made a _coup d'état_, and altered the whole scheme. We shall go to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, also some New England towns between Boston and this place, away to the falls of Niagara, and off far west to Chicago and St. Louis, before coming back for ten farewell readings here, preceded by farewells at Boston, leaving Canada altogether. This will not prolong the list beyond eighty-four readings, the exact original number, and will, please God, work it all out in April. In my next, I daresay, I shall be able to send the exact list, so that you may know every day where we are. There has been a great storm here for a few days, and the streets, though wet, are becoming passable again. Dolby and Osgood are out in it to-day on a variety of business, and left in grave and solemn state. Scott and the gasman are stricken with dumb concern, not having received one single letter from home since they left. What their wives can have done with the letters they take it for granted they have written, is their stormy speculation at the door of my hall dressing-room every night. If I do not send a letter to Katie by this mail, it will be because I shall probably be obliged to go across the water to Brooklyn to-morrow to see a church, in which it is proposed that I shall read!!! Horrible visions of being put in the pulpit already beset me. And whether the audience will be in pews is another consideration which greatly disturbs my mind. No paper ever comes out without a leader on Dolby, who of course reads them all, and never can understand why I don't, in which he is called all the bad names in (and not in) the language. We always call him P. H. Dolby now, in consequence of one of these graceful specimens of literature describing him as the "pudding-headed." I fear that when we travel he will have to be always before me, so that I may not see him six times in as many weeks. However, I shall have done a fourth of the whole this very next week! Best love to your aunt, and the boys, and Katie, and Charley, and all true friends. _Friday._ I managed to read last night, but it was as much as I could do. To-day I am so very unwell, that I have sent for a doctor; he has just been, and is in doubt whether I shall not have to stop reading for a while. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK, _Monday, Dec. 30th, 1867._ I am getting all right again. I have not been well, been very low, and have been obliged to have a doctor; a very agreeable fellow indeed, who soon turned out to be an old friend of Olliffe's.[19] He has set me on my legs and taken his leave "professionally," though he means to give me a call now and then. In the library at Gad's is a bound book, "Remarkable Criminal Trials," translated by Lady Duff Gordon, from the original by Fauerbach. I want that book, and a copy of Praed's poems, to be sent out to Boston, care of Ticknor and Fields. If you will give the "Criminal Trials" to Wills, and explain my wish, and ask him to buy a copy of Praed's poems and add it to the parcel, he will know how to send the packet out. I think the "Criminal Trials" book is in the corner book-case, by the window, opposite the door. No news here. All going on in the regular way. I read in that church I told you of, about the middle of January. It is wonderfully seated for two thousand people, and is as easy to speak in as if they were two hundred. The people are seated in pews, and we let the pews. I stood on a small platform from which the pulpit will be removed for the occasion!! I emerge from the vestry!!! Philadelphia, Baltimore, and another two nights in Boston will follow this coming month of January. On Friday next I shall have read a fourth of my whole list, besides having had twelve days' holiday when I first came out. So please God I shall soon get to the half, and so begin to work hopefully round. I suppose you were at the Adelphi on Thursday night last. They are pirating the bill as well as the play here, everywhere. I have registered the play as the property of an American citizen, but the law is by no means clear that I established a right in it by so doing; and of course the pirates knew very well that I could not, under existing circumstances, try the question with them in an American court of law. Nothing is being played here scarcely that is not founded on my books--"Cricket," "Oliver Twist," "Our Mutual Friend," and I don't know what else, every night. I can't get down Broadway for my own portrait; and yet I live almost as quietly in this hotel, as if I were at the office, and go in and out by a side door just as I might there. I go back to Boston on Saturday to read there on Monday and Tuesday. Then I am back here, and keep within six or seven hours' journey of hereabouts till February. My further movements shall be duly reported as the details are arranged. I shall be curious to know who were at Gad's Hill on Christmas Day, and how you (as they say in this country) "got along." It is exceedingly cold here again, after two or three quite spring days. FOOTNOTES: [17] Madame Sainton Dolby. [18] The nearest neighbour at Higham, and intimate friends. [19] Dr. Fordyce Barker. 1868. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens remained in America through the winter, returning home from New York in the _Russia_, on the 19th of April. His letters show how entirely he gave himself up to the business of the readings, how severely his health suffered from the climate, and from the perpetual travelling and hard work, and yet how he was able to battle through to the end. These letters are also full of allusions to the many kind and dear friends who contributed so largely to the pleasure of this American visit, and whose love and attention gave a touch of _home_ to his private life, and left such affection and gratitude in his heart as he could never forget. Many of these friends paid visits to Gad's Hill; the first to come during this summer being Mr. Longfellow, his daughters, and Mr. Appleton, brother-in-law of Mr. Longfellow, and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge. For the future, there were to be no more Christmas numbers of "All the Year Round." Observing the extent to which they were now copied in all directions, Charles Dickens supposed them likely to become tiresome to the public, and so determined that in his journal they should be discontinued. While still in America, he made an agreement with the Messrs. Chappell to give a series of farewell readings in England, to commence in the autumn of this year. So, in October, Charles Dickens started off again for a tour in the provinces. He had for some time been planning, by way of a novelty for this series, a reading from the murder in "Oliver Twist," but finding it so very horrible, he was fearful of trying its effect for the first time on a public audience. It was therefore resolved, that a trial of it should be made to a limited private audience in St. James's Hall, on the evening of the 18th of November. This trial proved eminently successful, and "The Murder from Oliver Twist" became one of the most popular of his selections. But the physical exertion it involved was far greater than that of any of his previous readings, and added immensely to the excitement and exhaustion which they caused him. One of the first letters of the year from America is addressed to Mr. Samuel Cartwright, of surgical and artistic reputation, and greatly esteemed by Charles Dickens, both in his professional capacity and as a private friend. The letter written to Mrs. Cattermole, in May, tells of the illness of Mr. George Cattermole. This dear old friend, so associated with Charles Dickens and his works, died soon afterwards, and the letter to his widow shows that Charles Dickens was exerting himself in her behalf. The play of "No Thoroughfare" having been translated into French under the title of "L'Abîme," Charles Dickens went over to Paris to be present at the first night of its production. On the 26th of September, his youngest son, Edward Bulwer Lytton (the "Plorn" so often mentioned), started for Australia, to join his brother Alfred Tennyson, who was already established there. It will be seen by his own words how deeply and how sadly Charles Dickens felt this parting. In October of this year, his son Henry Fielding entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as an undergraduate. The Miss Forster mentioned in the letter to his sister-in-law, and for whom the kind and considerate arrangements were suggested, was a sister of Mr. John Forster, and a lady highly esteemed by Charles Dickens. The illness from which she was then suffering was a fatal one. She died in this same year, a few days before Christmas. Mr. J. C. Parkinson, to whom a letter is addressed, was a gentleman holding a Government appointment, and contributing largely to journalism and periodical literature. As our last letter for this year, we give one which Charles Dickens wrote to his youngest son on his departure for Australia. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK, _Friday, Jan. 3rd, 1868._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, I received yours of the 19th from Gad's and the office this morning. I read here to-night, and go back to Boston to-morrow, to read there Monday and Tuesday. To-night, I read out the first quarter of my list. Our houses have been very fine here, but have never quite recovered the Dolby uproar. It seems impossible to devise any scheme for getting the tickets into the people's hands without the intervention of speculators. The people _will not_ help themselves; and, of course, the speculators and all other such prowlers throw as great obstacles in Dolby's way (an Englishman's) as they possibly can. He may be a little injudicious into the bargain. Last night, for instance, he met one of the "ushers" (who show people to their seats) coming in with Kelly. It is against orders that anyone employed in front should go out during the readings, and he took this man to task in the British manner. Instantly the free and independent usher put on his hat and walked off. Seeing which, all the other free and independent ushers (some twenty in number) put on _their_ hats and walked off, leaving us absolutely devoid and destitute of a staff for to-night. One has since been improvised; but it was a small matter to raise a stir and ill will about, especially as one of our men was equally in fault. We have a regular clerk, a Bostonian whose name is Wild. He, Osgood, Dolby, Kelly, Scott, George the gasman, and perhaps a boy or two, constitute my body-guard. It seems a large number of people, but the business cannot be done with fewer. The speculators buying the front seats to sell at a premium (and we have found instances of this being done by merchants in good position!), and the public perpetually pitching into Dolby for selling them back seats, the result is that they won't have the back seats, send back their tickets, write and print volumes on the subject, and deter others from coming. You may get an idea of the staff's work, by what is in hand now. They are preparing, numbering, and stamping six thousand tickets for Philadelphia, and eight thousand tickets for Brooklyn. The moment those are done, another eight thousand tickets will be wanted for Baltimore, and probably another six thousand for Washington. This in addition to the correspondence, advertisements, accounts, travellings, and the mighty business of the reading four times a week. The Cunard steamers being now removed from Halifax, I have decided _not_ to go there, or to St. John's, New Brunswick. And as there would be a perfect uproar if I picked out such a place in Canada as Quebec or Montreal, and excluded those two places (which would guarantee three hundred pounds a night), and further, as I don't want places, having more than enough for my list of eighty-four, I have finally resolved not to go to Canada either. This will enable me to embark for home in April instead of May. Tell Plorn, with my love, that I think he will find himself much interested at that college,[20] and that it is very likely he may make some acquaintances there that will thereafter be pleasant and useful to him. Sir Sydney Dacres is the best of friends. I have a letter from Mrs. Hulkes by this post, wherein the boy encloses a violet, now lying on the table before me. Let her know that it arrived safely, and retaining its colour. I took it for granted that Mary would have asked Chorley for Christmas Day, and am very glad she ultimately did so. I am sorry that Harry lost his prize, but believe it was not his fault. Let _him_ know _that_, with my love. I would have written to him by this mail in answer to his, but for other occupation. Did I tell you that my landlord made me a drink (brandy, rum, and snow the principal ingredients) called a "Rocky Mountain sneezer"? Or that the favourite drink before you get up is an "eye-opener"? Or that Roberts (second landlord), no sooner saw me on the night of the first fire, than, with his property blazing, he insisted on taking me down into a roomful of hot smoke to drink brandy and water with him? We have not been on fire again, by-the-bye, more than once. There has been another fall of snow, succeeded by a heavy thaw. I have laid down my sledge, and taken up my carriage again, in consequence. I am nearly all right, but cannot get rid of an intolerable cold in the head. No more news. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] PARKER HOUSE, BOSTON, U.S., _Jan. 4th, 1868._ I write to you by this opportunity, though I really have nothing to tell you. The work is hard and the climate is hard. We made a tremendous hit last night with "Nickleby" and "Boots," which the Bostonians certainly on the whole appreciate more than "Copperfield"! Dolby is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa cushion, but it is in reality paper money; and always works like a Trojan. His business at night is a mere nothing, for these people are so accustomed to take care of themselves, that one of these immense audiences will fall into their places with an ease amazing to a frequenter of St. James's Hall. And the certainty with which they are all in, before I go on, is a very acceptable mark of respect. I must add, too, that although there is a conventional familiarity in the use of one's name in the newspapers as "Dickens," "Charlie," and what not, I do not in the least see that familiarity in the writers themselves. An inscrutable tone obtains in journalism, which a stranger cannot understand. If I say in common courtesy to one of them, when Dolby introduces, "I am much obliged to you for your interest in me," or so forth, he seems quite shocked, and has a bearing of perfect modesty and propriety. I am rather inclined to think that they suppose their printed tone to be the public's love of smartness, but it is immensely difficult to make out. All I can as yet make out is, that my perfect freedom from bondage, and at any moment to go on or leave off, or otherwise do as I like, is the only safe position to occupy. Again; there are two apparently irreconcilable contrasts here. Down below in this hotel every night are the bar loungers, dram drinkers, drunkards, swaggerers, loafers, that one might find in a Boucicault play. Within half an hour is Cambridge, where a delightful domestic life--simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate--is seen in an admirable aspect. All New England is primitive and puritanical. All about and around it is a puddle of mixed human mud, with no such quality in it. Perhaps I may in time sift out some tolerably intelligible whole, but I certainly have not done so yet. It is a good sign, may be, that it all seems immensely more difficult to understand than it was when I was here before. Felton left two daughters. I have only seen the eldest, a very sensible, frank, pleasant girl of eight-and-twenty, perhaps, rather like him in the face. A striking-looking daughter of Hawthorn's (who is also dead) came into my room last night. The day has slipped on to three o'clock, and I must get up "Dombey" for to-night. Hence this sudden break off. Best love to Mamie, and to Katie and Charley Collins. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, _Sunday, Jan. 12th, 1868._ MY DEAR WILKIE, First, of the play.[21] I am truly delighted to learn that it made so great a success, and I hope I may yet see it on the Adelphi boards. You have had a world of trouble and work with it, but I hope will be repaid in some degree by the pleasure of a triumph. Even for the alteration at the end of the fourth act (of which you tell me in your letter received yesterday), I was fully prepared, for I COULD NOT see the original effect in the reading of the play, and COULD NOT make it go. I agree with Webster in thinking it best that Obenreizer should die on the stage; but no doubt that point is disposed of. In reading the play before the representation, I felt that it was too long, and that there was a good deal of unnecessary explanation. Those points are, no doubt, disposed of too by this time. We shall do nothing with it on this side. Pirates are producing their own wretched versions in all directions, thus (as Wills would say) anticipating and glutting "the market." I registered one play as the property of Ticknor and Fields, American citizens. But, besides that the law on the point is extremely doubtful, the manager of the Museum Theatre, Boston, instantly announced his version. (You may suppose what it is and how it is done, when I tell you that it was playing within ten days of the arrival out of the Christmas number.) Thereupon, Ticknor and Fields gave him notice that he mustn't play it. Unto which he replied, that he meant to play it and would play it. Of course he knew very well that if an injunction were applied for against him, there would be an immediate howl against my persecution of an innocent, and he played it. Then the noble host of pirates rushed in, and it is being done, in some mangled form or other, everywhere. It touches me to read what you write of your poor mother. But, of course, at her age, each winter counts heavily. Do give her my love, and tell her that I asked you about her. I am going on here at the same great rate, but am always counting the days that lie between me and home. I got through the first fourth of my readings on Friday, January 3rd. I leave for two readings at Philadelphia this evening. Being at Boston last Sunday, I took it into my head to go over the medical school, and survey the holes and corners in which that extraordinary murder was done by Webster. There was the furnace--stinking horribly, as if the dismembered pieces were still inside it--and there are all the grim spouts, and sinks, and chemical appliances, and what not. At dinner, afterwards, Longfellow told me a terrific story. He dined with Webster within a year of the murder, one of a party of ten or twelve. As they sat at their wine, Webster suddenly ordered the lights to be turned out, and a bowl of some burning mineral to be placed on the table, that the guests might see how ghostly it made them look. As each man stared at all the rest in the weird light, all were horrified to see Webster _with a rope round his neck_, holding it up, over the bowl, with his head jerked on one side, and his tongue lolled out, representing a man being hanged! Poking into his life and character, I find (what I would have staked my head upon) that he was always a cruel man. So no more at present from, My dear Wilkie, yours ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, _Sunday, Jan. 12th, 1868._ As I am off to Philadelphia this evening, I may as well post my letter here. I have scarcely a word of news. My cold steadily refuses to leave me; but otherwise I am as right as one can hope to be under this heavy work. My New York readings are over (except four farewell nights in April), and I look forward to the relief of being out of my hardest hall. Last Friday night, though it was only "Nickleby" and "Boots," I was again dead beat at the end, and was once more laid upon a sofa. But the faintness went off after a little while. We have now cold, bright, frosty weather, without snow--the best weather for me. Having been in great trepidation about the play, I am correspondingly elated by the belief that it really _is_ a success. No doubt the unnecessary explanations will have been taken out, and the flatness of the last act fetched up. At some points I could have done wonders to it, in the way of screwing it up sharply and picturesquely, if I could have rehearsed it. Your account of the first night interested me immensely, but I was afraid to open the letter until Dolby rushed in with the opened _Times_. On Wednesday I come back here for my four church readings at Brooklyn. Each evening an enormous ferryboat will convey me and my state carriage (not to mention half-a-dozen waggons, and any number of people, and a few score of horses) across the river, and will bring me back again. The sale of tickets there was an amazing scene. The noble army of speculators are now furnished (this is literally true, and I am quite serious), each man with a straw mattress, a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whisky. With this outfit _they lie down in line on the pavement_ the whole night before the tickets are sold, generally taking up their position at about ten. It being severely cold at Brooklyn, they made an immense bonfire in the street--a narrow street of wooden houses!--which the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place, out of which the people farthest off in the line rushed bleeding when they saw a chance of displacing others near the door, and put their mattresses in those places, and then held on by the iron rails. At eight in the morning Dolby appeared with the tickets in a portmanteau. He was immediately saluted with a roar of "Halloa, Dolby! So Charley has let you have the carriage, has he, Dolby! How is he, Dolby! Don't drop the tickets, Dolby! Look alive, Dolby!" etc. etc. etc., in the midst of which he proceeded to business, and concluded (as usual) by giving universal dissatisfaction. He is now going off upon a little journey "to look over the ground and cut back again." This little journey (to Chicago) is fifteen hundred miles on end, by railway, and back again! We have an excellent gasman, who is well up to that department. We have enlarged the large staff by another clerk, yet even now the preparation of such an immense number of new tickets constantly, and the keeping and checking of the accounts, keep them hard at it. And they get so oddly divided! Kelly is at Philadelphia, another man at Baltimore, two others are stamping tickets at the top of this house, another is cruising over New England, and Osgood will come on duty to-morrow (when Dolby starts off) to pick me up after the reading, and take me to the hotel, and mount guard over me, and bring me back here. You see that even such wretched domesticity as Dolby and self by a fireside is broken up under these conditions. Dolby has been twice poisoned, and Osgood once. Morgan's sharpness has discovered the cause. When the snow is deep upon the ground, and the partridges cannot get their usual food, they eat something (I don't know what, if anybody does) which does not poison _them_, but which poisons the people who eat them. The symptoms, which last some twelve hours, are violent sickness, cold perspiration, and the formation of some detestable mucus in the stomach. You may infer that partridges have been banished from our bill of fare. The appearance of our sufferers was lamentable in the extreme. Did I tell you that the severity of the weather, and the heat of the intolerable furnaces, dry the hair and break the nails of strangers? There is not a complete nail in the whole British suite, and my hair cracks again when I brush it. (I am losing my hair with great rapidity, and what I don't lose is getting very grey.) The _Cuba_ will bring this. She has a jolly new captain--Moody, of the _Java_--and her people rushed into the reading, the other night, captain-headed, as if I were their peculiar property. Please God I shall come home in her, in my old cabin; leaving here on the 22nd of April, and finishing my eighty-fourth reading on the previous night! It is likely enough that I shall read and go straight on board. I think this is all my poor stock of intelligence. By-the-bye, on the last Sunday in the old year, I lost my old year's pocket-book, "which," as Mr. Pepys would add, "do trouble me mightily." Give me Katie's new address; I haven't got it. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PHILADELPHIA, _Monday, Jan. 13th, 1868._ I write you this note, a day later than your aunt's, not because I have anything to add to the little I have told her, but because you may like to have it. We arrived here last night towards twelve o'clock, more than an hour after our time. This is one of the immense American hotels (it is called the Continental); but I find myself just as quiet here as elsewhere. Everything is very good indeed, the waiter is German, and the greater part of the house servants seem to be coloured people. The town is very clean, and the day as blue and bright as a fine Italian day. But it freezes very hard. All the tickets being sold here for six nights (three visits of two nights each), the suite complain of want of excitement already, having been here ten hours! Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams, with a couple of servants, and a pretty little child-daughter, were in the train each night, and I talked with them a good deal. They are reported to have made an enormous fortune by acting among the Californian gold-diggers. My cold is no better, for the cars are so intolerably hot, that I was often obliged to go and stand upon the break outside, and then the frosty air was biting indeed. The great man of this place is one Mr. Childs, a newspaper proprietor, and he is so exactly like Mr. Esse in all conceivable respects except being an inch or so taller, that I was quite confounded when I saw him waiting for me at the station (always called depôt here) with his carriage. During the last two or three days, Dolby and I have been making up accounts, which are excellently kept by Mr. Osgood, and I find them amazing, quite, in their results. I was very much interested in the home accounts of Christmas Day. I think I have already mentioned that we were in very low spirits on that day. I began to be unwell with my cold that morning, and a long day's travel did not mend the matter. We scarcely spoke (except when we ate our lunch), and sat dolefully staring out of window. I had a few affectionate words from Chorley, dated from my room, on Christmas morning, and will write him, probably by this mail, a brief acknowledgment. I find it necessary (so oppressed am I with this American catarrh, as they call it) to dine at three o'clock instead of four, that I may have more time to get voice, so that the days are cut short, and letter-writing is not easy. My best love to Katie, and to Charley, and to our Charley, and to all friends. If I could only get to the point of being able to hold my head up and dispense with my pocket-handkerchief for five minutes, I should be all right. [Sidenote: Mr. Charles Dickens.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK, _Wednesday, Jan. 15th, 1868._ MY DEAR CHARLEY, Finding your letter here this afternoon on my return from Philadelphia (where I have been reading two nights), I take advantage of a spare half-hour in which to answer it at once, though it will not leave here until Saturday. I had previously heard of the play, and had _The Times_. It was a great relief and delight to me, for I had no confidence in its success; being reduced to the confines of despair by its length. If I could have rehearsed it, I should have taken the best part of an hour out of it. Fechter must be very fine, and I should greatly like to see him play the part. I have not been very well generally, and am oppressed (and I begin to think that I probably shall be until I leave) by a true American cold, which I hope, for the comfort of human nature, may be peculiar to only one of the four quarters of the world. The work, too, is very severe. But I am going on at the same tremendous rate everywhere. The staff, too, has had to be enlarged. Dolby was at Baltimore yesterday, is at Washington to-day, and will come back in the night, and start away again on Friday. We find it absolutely necessary for him to go on ahead. We have not printed or posted a single bill here, and have just sold ninety pounds' worth of paper we had got ready for bills. In such a rush a short newspaper advertisement is all we want. "Doctor Marigold" made a great hit here, and is looked forward to at Boston with especial interest. I go to Boston for another fortnight, on end, the 24th of February. The railway journeys distress me greatly. I get out into the open air (upon the break), and it snows and blows, and the train bumps, and the steam flies at me, until I am driven in again. I have finished here (except four farewell nights in April), and begin four nights at Brooklyn, on the opposite side of the river, to-night; and thus oscillate between Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and then cut into New England, and so work my way back to Boston for a fortnight, after which come Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit and Cleveland, and Buffalo, and then Philadelphia, Boston, and New York farewells. I will not pass my original bound of eighty-four readings in all. My mind was made up as to that long ago. It will be quite enough. Chicago is some fifteen hundred miles from here. What with travelling, and getting ready for reading, and reading, the days are pretty fully occupied. Not the less so because I rest very indifferently at night. The people are exceedingly kind and considerate, and desire to be most hospitable besides. But I cannot accept hospitality, and never go out, except at Boston, or I should not be fit for the labour. If Dolby holds out well to the last it will be a triumph, for he has to see everybody, drink with everybody, sell all the tickets, take all the blame, and go beforehand to all the places on the list. I shall not see him after to-night for ten days or a fortnight, and he will be perpetually on the road during the interval. When he leaves me, Osgood, a partner in Ticknor and Fields' publishing firm, mounts guard over me, and has to go into the hall from the platform door every night, and see how the public are seating themselves. It is very odd to see how hard he finds it to look a couple of thousand people in the face, on which head, by-the-bye, I notice the papers to take "Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure" (their great phrase) rather ill, and on the whole to imply that it would be taken as a suitable compliment if I would stagger on to the platform and instantly drop, overpowered by the spectacle before me. Dinner is announced (by Scott, with a stiff neck and a sore throat), and I must break off with love to Bessie and the incipient Wenerableses. You will be glad to hear of your distinguished parent that Philadelphia has discovered that "he is not like the descriptions we have read of him at the little red desk. He is not at all foppish in appearance. He wears a heavy moustache and a Vandyke beard, and looks like a well-to-do Philadelphian gentleman." Ever, my dear Charley, your affectionate Father. P.S.--Your paper is remarkably good. There is not the least doubt that you can write constantly for A. Y. R. I am very pleased with it. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, _Friday, Jan, 18th, 1868._ This will be but a very short report, as I must get out for a little exercise before dinner. My "true American catarrh" (the people seem to have a national pride in it) sticks to me, but I am otherwise well. I began my church readings last night, and it was very odd to see the pews crammed full of people, all in a broad roar at the "Carol" and "Trial." Best love to all. I have written Charley a few lines by this mail, and also Chorley. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, _Tuesday, Jan. 21st, 1868._ I finished my church to-night. It is Mrs. Stowe's brother's, and a most wonderful place to speak in. We had it enormously full last night ("Marigold" and "Trial"), but it scarcely required an effort. Mr. Ward Beecher (Mrs. Stowe's brother's name) being present in his pew. I sent to invite him to come round before he left; and I found him to be an unostentatious, straightforward, and agreeable fellow. My cold sticks to me, and I can scarcely exaggerate what I sometimes undergo from sleeplessness. The day before yesterday I could get no rest until morning, and could not get up before twelve. This morning the same. I rarely take any breakfast but an egg and a cup of tea, not even toast or bread-and-butter. My dinner at three, and a little quail or some such light thing when I come home at night, is my daily fare. At the Hall I have established the custom of taking an egg beaten up in sherry before going in, and another between the parts. I think that pulls me up; at all events, I have since had no return of faintness. As the men work very hard, and always with their hearts cheerfully in the business, I cram them into and outside of the carriage, to bring them back from Brooklyn with me. The other night, Scott (with a portmanteau across his knees and a wideawake hat low down upon his nose) told me that he had presented himself for admission in the circus (as good as Franconi's, by-the-bye), and had been refused. "The only theayter," he said in a melancholy way, "as I was ever in my life turned from the door of." Says Kelly: "There must have been some mistake, Scott, because George and me went, and we said, 'Mr. Dickens's staff,' and they passed us to the best seats in the house. Go again, Scott." "No, I thank you, Kelly," says Scott, more melancholy than before, "I'm not a-going to put myself in the position of being refused again. It's the only theayter as I was ever turned from the door of, and it shan't be done twice. But it's a beastly country!" "Scott," interposed Majesty, "don't you express your opinions about the country." "No, sir," says Scott, "I never do, please, sir, but when you are turned from the door of the only theayter you was ever turned from, sir, and when the beasts in railway cars spits tobacco over your boots, you (privately) find yourself in a beastly country." I expect shortly to get myself snowed up on some railway or other, for it is snowing hard now, and I begin to move to-morrow. There is so much floating ice in the river that we are obliged to leave a pretty wide margin of time for getting over the ferry to read. The dinner is coming in, and I must leave off. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PHILADELPHIA, _Thursday, Jan. 23rd, 1868._ When I wrote to your aunt by the last mail, I accidentally omitted to touch upon the question of helping Anne. So I will begin in this present writing with reference to her sad position. I think it will be best for you to be guided by an exact knowledge of her _wants_. Try to ascertain from herself what means she has, whether her sick husband gets what he ought to have, whether she is pinched in the articles of necessary clothing, bedding, or the like of that; add to this intelligence your own observation of the state of things about her, and supply what she most wants, and help her where you find the greatest need. The question, in the case of so old and faithful a servant, is not one of so much or so little money on my side, but how _most efficiently_ to ease her mind and help _her_. To do this at once kindly and sensibly is the only consideration by which you have to be guided. Take _carte blanche_ from me for all the rest. My Washington week is the first week in February, beginning on Monday, 3rd. The tickets are sold, and the President is coming, and the chief members of the Cabinet, and the leaders of parties, and so forth, are coming; and, as the Holly Tree Boots says: "That's where it is, don't you see!" In my Washington doubts I recalled Dolby for conference, and he joined me yesterday afternoon, and we have been in great discussion ever since on the possibility of giving up the Far West, and avoiding such immense distances and fatigues as would be involved in travelling to Chicago and Cincinnati. We have sketched another tour for the last half of March, which would be infinitely easier for me, though on the other hand less profitable, the places and the halls being smaller. The worst of it is, that everybody one advises with has a monomania respecting Chicago. "Good heaven, sir," the great Philadelphian authority said to me this morning, "if you don't read in Chicago, the people will go into fits." In reference to fatigue, I answered: "Well, I would rather they went into fits than I did." But he didn't seem to see it at all. ---- alone constantly writes me: "Don't go to the West; you can get what you want so much more easily." How we shall finally decide, I don't yet know. My Brooklyn church has been an immense success, and I found its minister was a bachelor, a clever, unparsonic, and straightforward man, and a man with a good knowledge of art into the bargain. We are not a bit too soon here, for the whole country is beginning to be stirred and shaken by the presidential election, and trade is exceedingly depressed, and will be more so. Fanny Kemble lives near this place, but had gone away a day before my first visit here. _She_ is going to read in February or March. Du Chaillu has been lecturing out West about the gorilla, and has been to see me; I saw the Cunard steamer _Persia_ out in the stream, yesterday, beautifully smart, her flags flying, all her steam up, and she only waiting for her mails to slip away. She gave me a horrible touch of home-sickness. When the 1st of March arrives, and I can say "next month," I shall begin to grow brighter. A fortnight's reading in Boston, too (last week of February and first week of March), will help me on gaily, I hope (the work so far off tells). It is impossible for the people to be more affectionately attached to a third, I really believe, than Fields and his wife are to me; and they are a landmark in the prospect. Dolby sends kindest regards, and wishes it to be known that he has not been bullied lately. We do _not_ go West at all, but take the easier plan. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BALTIMORE, _Wednesday, Jan. 29th, 1868._ As I have an hour to spare, before starting to Philadelphia, I begin my letter this morning. It has been snowing hard for four-and-twenty hours, though this place is as far south as Valentia in Spain; and Dolby, being on his way to New York, has a good chance of being snowed up somewhere. They are a bright responsive people here, and very pleasant to read to. I have rarely seen so many fine faces in an audience. I read here in a charming little opera-house built by a society of Germans, quite a delightful place for the purpose. I stand on the stage, with a drop curtain down, and my screen before it. The whole scene is very pretty and complete, and the audience have a "ring" in them that sounds in the ear. I go from here to Philadelphia to read to-morrow night and Friday, come through here again on Saturday on my way to Washington, come back here on Saturday week for two finishing nights, then go to Philadelphia for two farewells, and so turn my back on the southern part of the country. Distances and travelling have obliged us to reduce the list of readings by two, leaving eighty-two in all. Of course we afterwards discovered that we had finally settled the list on a Friday! I shall be halfway through it at Washington, of course, on a Friday also, and my birthday! Dolby and Osgood, who do the most ridiculous things to keep me in spirits (I am often very heavy, and rarely sleep much), have decided to have a walking-match at Boston, on Saturday, February 29th. Beginning this design in joke, they have become tremendously in earnest, and Dolby has actually sent home (much to his opponent's terror) for a pair of seamless socks to walk in. Our men are hugely excited on the subject, and continually make bets on "the men." Fields and I are to walk out six miles, and "the men" are to turn and walk round us. Neither of them has the least idea what twelve miles at a pace is. Being requested by both to give them "a breather" yesterday, I gave them a stiff one of five miles over a bad road in the snow, half the distance uphill. I took them at a pace of four miles and a half an hour, and you never beheld such objects as they were when we got back; both smoking like factories, and both obliged to change everything before they could come to dinner. They have the absurdest ideas of what are tests of walking power, and continually get up in the maddest manner and see _how high they can kick_ the wall! The wainscot here, in one place, is scored all over with their pencil-marks. To see them doing this--Dolby, a big man, and Osgood, a very little one, is ridiculous beyond description. PHILADELPHIA, _Same Night._ We came on here through a snowstorm all the way, but up to time. Fanny Kemble (who begins to read shortly) is coming to "Marigold" and "Trial" to-morrow night. I have written her a note, telling her that if it will at all assist _her_ movements to know _mine_, my list is at her service. Probably I shall see her to-morrow. Tell Mamie (to whom I will write next), with my love, that I found her letter of the 10th of this month awaiting me here. The _Siberia_ that brought it is a new Cunarder, and made an unusually slow passage out. Probably because it would be dangerous to work new machinery too fast on the Atlantic. _Thursday, 30th._ My cold still sticks to me. The heat of the railway cars and their unventilated condition invariably brings it back when I think it going. This morning my head is as stuffed and heavy as ever! A superb sledge and four horses have been offered me for a ride, but I am afraid to take it, lest I should make the "true American catarrh" worse, and should get hoarse. So I am going to give Osgood another "breather" on foot instead. The communication with New York is not interrupted, so we consider the zealous Dolby all right. You may imagine what his work is, when you hear that he goes three times to every place we visit. Firstly, to look at the hall, arrange the numberings, and make five hundred acquaintances, whom he immediately calls by their christian-names; secondly, to sell the tickets--a very nice business, requiring great tact and temper; thirdly, with me. He will probably turn up at Washington next Sunday, but only for a little while; for as soon as I am on the platform on Monday night, he will start away again, probably to be seen no more until we pass through New York in the middle of February. [Sidenote: Mr. Samuel Cartwright] BALTIMORE, _Wednesday, Jan. 29th, 1868._ MY DEAR CARTWRIGHT, As I promised to report myself to you from this side of the Atlantic, and as I have some leisure this morning, I am going to lighten my conscience by keeping my word. I am going on at a great pace and with immense success. Next week, at Washington, I shall, please God, have got through half my readings. The remaining half are all arranged, and they will carry me into the third week of April. It is very hard work, but it is brilliantly paid. The changes that I find in the country generally (this place is the least changed of any I have yet seen) exceed my utmost expectations. I had been in New York a couple of days before I began to recognise it at all; and the handsomest part of Boston was a black swamp when I saw it five-and-twenty years ago. Considerable advances, too, have been made socially. Strange to say, the railways and railway arrangements (both exceedingly defective) seem to have stood still while all other things have been moving. One of the most comical spectacles I have ever seen in my life was "church," with a heavy sea on, in the saloon of the Cunard steamer coming out. The officiating minister, an extremely modest young man, was brought in between two big stewards, exactly as if he were coming up to the scratch in a prize-fight. The ship was rolling and pitching so, that the two big stewards had to stop and watch their opportunity of making a dart at the reading-desk with their reverend charge, during which pause he held on, now by one steward and now by the other, with the feeblest expression of countenance and no legs whatever. At length they made a dart at the wrong moment, and one steward was immediately beheld alone in the extreme perspective, while the other and the reverend gentleman _held on by the mast_ in the middle of the saloon--which the latter embraced with both arms, as if it were his wife. All this time the congregation was breaking up into sects and sliding away; every sect (as in nature) pounding the other sect. And when at last the reverend gentleman had been tumbled into his place, the desk (a loose one, put upon the dining-table) deserted from the church bodily, and went over to the purser. The scene was so extraordinarily ridiculous, and was made so much more so by the exemplary gravity of all concerned in it, that I was obliged to leave before the service began. This is one of the places where Butler carried it with so high a hand in the war, and where the ladies used to spit when they passed a Northern soldier. It still wears, I fancy, a look of sullen remembrance. (The ladies are remarkably handsome, with an Eastern look upon them, dress with a strong sense of colour, and make a brilliant audience.) The ghost of slavery haunts the houses; and the old, untidy, incapable, lounging, shambling black serves you as a free man. Free of course he ought to be; but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye, stretch of his mouth, and bump of his head. I have a strong impression that the race must fade out of the States very fast. It never can hold its own against a striving, restless, shifty people. In the penitentiary here, the other day, in a room full of all blacks (too dull to be taught any of the work in hand), was one young brooding fellow, very like a black rhinoceros. He sat glowering at life, as if it were just endurable at dinner time, until four of his fellows began to sing, most unmelodiously, a part song. He then set up a dismal howl, and pounded his face on a form. I took him to have been rendered quite desperate by having learnt anything. I send my kind regard to Mrs. Cartwright, and sincerely hope that she and you have no new family distresses or anxieties. My standing address is the Westminster Hotel, Irving Place, New York City. And I am always, my dear Cartwright, Cordially yours. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PHILADELPHIA, _Friday, Jan. 31st, 1868._ Since writing to your aunt I have received yours of the 7th, and am truly glad to have the last news of you confirmed by yourself. From a letter Wilkie has written to me, it seems there can be no doubt that the "No Thoroughfare" drama is a real, genuine, and great success. It is drawing immensely, and seems to "go" with great effect and applause. "Doctor Marigold" here last night (for the first time) was an immense success, and all Philadelphia is going to rush at once for tickets for the two Philadelphian farewells the week after next. The tickets are to be sold to-morrow, and great excitement is anticipated in the streets. Dolby not being here, a clerk will sell, and will probably wish himself dead before he has done with it. It appears to me that Chorley[22] writes to you on the legacy question because he wishes you to understand that there is no danger of his changing his mind, and at the bottom I descry an honest desire to pledge himself as strongly as possible. You may receive it in that better spirit, or I am much mistaken. Tell your aunt, with my best love, that I wrote to Chauncey weeks ago, in answer to a letter from him. I am now going out in a sleigh (and four) with unconceivable dignity and grandeur; mentioning which reminds me that I am informed by trusty scouts that ---- intends to waylay me at Washington, and may even descend upon me in the train to-morrow. Best love to Katie, the two Charleys, and all. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] WASHINGTON, _Tuesday, Feb. 4th, 1868._ I began here last night with great success. The hall being small, the prices were raised to three dollars each ticket. The audience was a superior one, composed of the foremost public men and their families. At the end of the "Carol" they gave a great break out, and applauded, I really believe, for five minutes. You would suppose them to be Manchester shillings instead of Washington half-sovereigns. Immense enthusiasm. A devoted adherent in this place (an Englishman) had represented to Dolby that if I were taken to an hotel here it would be impossible to secure me a minute's rest, and he undertook to get one Wheleker, a German, who keeps a little Vérey's, to furnish his private dining-rooms for the illustrious traveller's reception. Accordingly here we are, on the first and second floor of a small house, with no one else in it but our people, a French waiter, and a very good French cuisine. Perfectly private, in the city of all the world (I should say) where the hotels are intolerable, and privacy the least possible, and quite comfortable. "Wheleker's Restaurant" is our rather undignified address for the present week. I dined (against my rules) with Charles Sumner on Sunday, he having been an old friend of mine. Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was there. He is a man of a very remarkable memory, and famous for his acquaintance with the minutest details of my books. Give him any passage anywhere, and he will instantly cap it and go on with the context. He was commander-in-chief of all the Northern forces concentrated here, and never went to sleep at night without first reading something from my books, which were always with him. I put him through a pretty severe examination, but he was better up than I was. The gas was very defective indeed last night, and I began with a small speech, to the effect that I must trust to the brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine; this was taken greatly. In the "Carol," a most ridiculous incident occurred all of a sudden. I saw a dog look out from among the seats into the centre aisle, and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I don't think anybody saw the dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him. He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a very comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle again, in an entirely new place (still looking intently at me) and tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a paroxysm of laughter, that it communicated itself to the audience, and we roared at one another loud and long. The President has sent to me twice, and I am going to see him to-morrow. He has a whole row for his family every night. Dolby rejoined his chief yesterday morning, and will probably remain in the august presence until Sunday night. He and Osgood, "training for the match," are ludicrous beyond belief. I saw them just now coming up a street, each trying to pass the other, and immediately fled. Since I have been writing this, they have burst in at the door and sat down on the floor to blow. Dolby is now writing at a neighbouring table, with his bald head smoking as if he were on fire. Kelly (his great adherent) asked me, when he was last away, whether it was quite fair that I should take Mr. Osgood out for "breathers" when Mr. Dolby had no such advantage. I begin to expect that half Boston will turn out on the 29th to see the match. In which case it will be unspeakably droll. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] WASHINGTON, _my Birthday_, 1868. (_And my cold worse than ever._) This will be but a short letter, as I have been to see the President this morning, and have little time before the post goes. He had sent a gentleman to me, most courteously begging me to make my own appointment, and I did so. A man of very remarkable appearance indeed, of tremendous firmness of purpose. Not to be turned or trifled with. As I mention my cold's being so bad, I will add that I have never had anything the matter with me since I came here _but_ the cold. It is now in my throat, and slightly on my chest. It occasions me great discomfort, and you would suppose, seeing me in the morning, that I could not possibly read at night. But I have always come up to the scratch, have not yet missed one night, and have gradually got used to that. I had got much the better of it; but the dressing-room at the hall here is singularly cold and draughty, and so I have slid back again. The papers here having written about this being my birthday, the most exquisite flowers came pouring in at breakfast time from all sorts of people. The room is covered with them, made up into beautiful bouquets, and arranged in all manner of green baskets. Probably I shall find plenty more at the hall to-night. This is considered the dullest and most apathetic place in America. _My_ audiences have been superb. I mentioned the dog on the first night here. Next night I thought I heard (in "Copperfield") a suddenly suppressed bark. It happened in this wise: Osgood, standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down beheld the dog staring intently at me, and evidently just about to bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands and threw him over his own head out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last night he came again _with another dog_; but our people were so sharply on the look-out for him that he didn't get in. He had evidently promised to pass the other dog free. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BALTIMORE, U.S., _Tuesday, Feb. 11th, 1868._ The weather has been desperately severe, and my cold quite as bad as ever. I couldn't help laughing at myself on my birthday at Washington. It was observed as much as though I were a little boy. Flowers and garlands (of the most exquisite kind) bloomed all over the room; letters radiant with good wishes poured in; a shirt pin, a handsome silver travelling bottle, a set of gold shirt studs, and a set of gold sleeve links were on the dinner-table. After "Boots," at night, the whole audience rose and remained (Secretaries of State, President's family, Judges of Supreme Court, and so forth) standing and cheering until I went back to the table and made them a little speech. On the same august day of the year I was received by the President, a man with a very remarkable and determined face. Each of us looked at each other very hard, and each of us managed the interview (I think) to the satisfaction of the other. In the outer room was sitting a certain sunburnt General Blair, with many evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and then I found he had been out in the prairie with me five-and-twenty years ago. That afternoon my "catarrh" was in such a state that Charles Sumner, coming in at five o'clock and finding me covered with mustard poultice, and apparently voiceless, turned to Dolby and said: "Surely, Mr. Dolby, it is impossible that he can read to-night." Says Dolby: "Sir, I have told the dear Chief so four times to-day, and I have been very anxious. But you have no idea how he will change when he gets to the little table." After five minutes of the little table, I was not (for the time) even hoarse. The frequent experience of this return of force when it is wanted saves me a vast amount of anxiety. I wish you would get from Homan and report to me, as near as he can make, an approximate estimate is the right term in the trade, I believe, of the following work: 1. To re-cover, with red leather, all the dining-room chairs. 2. To ditto, with green leather, all the library chairs and the couch. 3. To provide and lay down new _Brussels_ carpets in the front spare and the two top spares. Quality of carpet, quality of yours and mine. I have some doubts about the state of the hall floor-cloth, and also the floor-cloth in the dining-room. Will you and your aunt carefully examine both (calling in Homan too, if necessary), _and report to me_? It would seem that "No Thoroughfare" has really developed as a drama into an amazing success. I begin to think that I shall see it. Dolby is away this morning, to conquer or die in a terrific struggle with the Mayor of Newhaven (where I am to read next week), who has assailed him on a charge of false play in selling tickets. Osgood, my other keeper, stands at the table to take me out, and have a "breather" for the walking-match, so I must leave off. Think of my dreaming of Mrs. Bouncer each night!!! [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens.] BALTIMORE, U.S., _Tuesday, Feb. 11th, 1868._ MY DEAR HARRY, I should have written to you before now, but for constant and arduous occupation. In reference to the cricket club's not being what it might be, I agree with you in the main. There are some things to be considered, however, which you have hardly taken into account. The first thing to be avoided is, the slightest appearance of patronage (one of the curses of England). The second thing to be avoided is, the deprival of the men of their just right to manage their own affairs. I would rather have no club at all, than have either of these great mistakes made. The way out of them is this: Call the men together, and explain to them that the club might be larger, richer, and better. Say that you think that more of the neighbouring gentlemen could be got to be playing members. That you submit to them that it would be better to have a captain who could correspond with them, and talk to them, and in some sort manage them; and that, being perfectly acquainted with the game, and having long played it at a great public school, you propose yourself as captain, for the foregoing reasons. That you propose to them to make the subscription of the gentlemen members at least double that of the working men, for no other reason than that the gentlemen can afford it better; but that both classes of members shall have exactly the same right of voting equally in all that concerns the club. Say that you have consulted me upon the matter, and that I am of these opinions, and am ready to become chairman of the club, and to preside at their meetings, and to overlook its business affairs, and to give it five pounds a year, payable at the commencement of each season. Then, having brought them to this point, draw up the club's rules and regulations, amending them where they want amendment. Discreetly done, I see no difficulty in this. But it can only be honourably and hopefully done by having the men together. And I would not have them at The Falstaff, but in the hall or dining-room--the servants' hall, an excellent place. Whatever you do, let the men ratify; and let them feel their little importance, and at once perceive how much better the business begins to be done. I am very glad to hear of the success of your reading, and still more glad that you went at it in downright earnest. I should never have made my success in life if I had been shy of taking pains, or if I had not bestowed upon the least thing I have ever undertaken exactly the same attention and care that I have bestowed upon the greatest. Do everything at your best. It was but this last year that I set to and learned every word of my readings; and from ten years ago to last night, I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere. Look at such of my manuscripts as are in the library at Gad's, and think of the patient hours devoted year after year to single lines. * * * * * The weather is very severe here, and the work is very hard. Dolby, having been violently pitched into by the Mayor of Newhaven (a town at which I am to read next week), has gone bodily this morning with defiant written instructions from me to inform the said mayor that, if he fail to make out his case, he (Dolby) is to return all the money taken, and to tell him that I will not set foot in his jurisdiction; whereupon the Newhaven people will probably fall upon the mayor in his turn, and lead him a pleasant life. Ever, my dear Harry, your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] PHILADELPHIA, _Thursday, Feb. 13th, 1868._ We have got into an immense difficulty with the people of Newhaven. I have a strong suspicion that one of our men (who sold there) has been speculating all this while, and that he must have put front seats in his pockets, and sold back ones. He denies what the mayor charges, but the mayor holds on grimly. Dolby set off from Baltimore as soon as we found out what was amiss, to examine and report; but some new feature of difficulty must have come out, for this morning he telegraphs from New York (where he had to sleep last night on his way to Newhaven), that he is coming back for further consultation with the Chief. It will certainly hurt us, and will of course be distorted by the papers into all manner of shapes. My suspicion _may not_ be correct, but I have an instinctive belief that it is. We shall probably have the old New York row (and loss) over again, unless I can catch this mayor tripping in an assertion. In this very place, we are half-distracted by the speculators. They have been holding out for such high prices, that the public have held out too; and now (frightened at what they have done) the speculators are trying to sell their worst seats at half the cost price, so that we are in the ridiculous situation of having sold the room out, and yet not knowing what empty seats there may be. _We_ could sell at our box-office to any extent; but _we_ can't buy back of the speculators, because we informed the public that all the tickets were gone. And if we bought _under_ our own price and _sold_ at our own price, we should at once be in treaty with the speculators, and should be making money by it! Dolby, the much bullied, will come back here presently, half bereft of his senses; and I should be half bereft of mine, if the situation were not comically disagreeable. Nothing will induce the people to believe in the farewells. At Baltimore on Tuesday night (a very brilliant night indeed), they asked as they came out: "When will Mr. Dickens read here again?" "Never." "Nonsense! Not come back, after such houses as these? Come. Say when he'll read again." Just the same here. We could as soon persuade them that I am the President, as that I am going to read here, for the last time, to-morrow night. There is a child of the Barney Williams's in this house--a little girl--to whom I presented a black doll when I was here last. I have seen her eye at the keyhole since I began writing this, and I think she and the doll are outside still. "When you sent it up to me by the coloured boy," she said after receiving it (coloured boy is the term for black waiter), "I gave such a cream that ma came running in and creamed too, 'cos she fort I'd hurt myself. But I creamed a cream of joy." _She_ had a friend to play with her that day, and brought the friend with her, to my infinite confusion. A friend all stockings, and much too tall, who sat on the sofa very far back, with her stockings sticking stiffly out in front of her, and glared at me and never spake word. Dolby found us confronted in a sort of fascination, like serpent and bird. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] NEW YORK, _Monday, Feb. 17th, 1868._ I got your letter of the 3rd of February here this morning. As I am off at seven to-morrow morning, I answer it at once, though indeed I have nothing to say. "True American" still sticking to me. But I am always ready for my work, and therefore don't much mind. Dolby and the Mayor of Newhaven alternately embrace and exchange mortal defiances. In writing out some advertisements towards midnight last night, he made a very good mistake. "The reading will be comprised within two _minutes_, and the audience are earnestly entreated to be seated ten _hours_ before its commencement." The weather has been finer lately, but the streets are in a horrible condition, through half-melted snow, and it is now snowing again. The walking-match (next Saturday week) is already in the Boston papers! I suppose half Boston will turn out on the occasion. As a sure way of not being conspicuous, "the men" are going to walk in flannel! They are in a mingled state of comicality and gravity about it that is highly ridiculous. Yesterday being a bright cool day, I took Dolby for a "buster" of eight miles. As everybody here knows me, the spectacle of our splitting up the fashionable avenue (the only way out of town) excited the greatest amazement. No doubt _that_ will be in the papers to-morrow. I give a gorgeous banquet to eighteen (ladies and gentlemen) after the match. Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Do. Ticknor, Longfellow and his daughter, Lowell, Holmes and his wife, etc. etc. Sporting speeches to be made, and the stakes (four hats) to be handed over to the winner. My ship will not be the _Cuba_ after all. She is to go into dock, and the _Russia_ (a larger ship, and the latest built for the Cunard line) is to take her place. Very glad to hear of Plorn's success. Best love to Mamie. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] WASHINGTON, _February 24th, 1868._ MY DEAR FECHTER, Your letter reached me here yesterday. I have sent you a telegram (addressed to the theatre) this morning, and I write this by the earliest return mail. My dear fellow, consider yourself my representative. Whatever you do, or desire to do, about the play, I fully authorise beforehand. Tell Webster, with my regard, that I think his proposal honest and fair; that I think it, in a word, like himself; and that I have perfect confidence in his good faith and liberality. As to making money of the play in the United States here, Boucicault has filled Wilkie's head with golden dreams that have _nothing_ in them. He makes no account of the fact that, wherever I go, the theatres (with my name in big letters) instantly begin playing versions of my books, and that the moment the Christmas number came over here they pirated it and played "No Thoroughfare." Now, I have enquired into the law, and am extremely doubtful whether I _could_ have prevented this. Why should they pay for the piece as you act it, when they have no actors, and when all they want is my name, and they can get that for nothing? Wilkie has uniformly written of you enthusiastically. In a letter I had from him, dated the 10th of January, he described your conception and execution of the part in the most glowing terms. "Here Fechter is magnificent." "Here his superb playing brings the house down." "I should call even his exit in the last act one of the subtlest and finest things he does in the piece." "You can hardly imagine what he gets out of the part, or what he makes of his passionate love for Marguerite." These expressions, and many others like them, crowded his letter. I never did so want to see a character played on the stage as I want to see you play Obenreizer. As the play was going when I last heard of it, I have some hopes that I MAY see it yet. Please God, your Adelphi dressing-room will be irradiated with the noble presence of "Never Wrong" (if you are acting), about the evening of Monday, the 4th of May! I am doing enormous business. It is a wearying life, away from all I love, but I hope that the time will soon begin to spin away. Among the many changes that I find here is the comfortable change that the people are in general extremely considerate, and very observant of my privacy. Even in this place, I am really almost as much my own master as if I were in an English country town. Generally, they are very good audiences indeed. They do not (I think) perceive touches of art to _be_ art; but they are responsive to the broad results of such touches. "Doctor Marigold" is a great favourite, and they laugh so unrestrainedly at "The Trial" from "Pickwick" (which you never heard), that it has grown about half as long again as it used to be. If I could send you a "brandy cocktail" by post I would. It is a highly meritorious dram, which I hope to present to you at Gad's. My New York landlord made me a "Rocky Mountain sneezer," which appeared to me to be compounded of all the spirits ever heard of in the world, with bitters, lemon, sugar, and snow. You can only make a true "sneezer" when the snow is lying on the ground. There, my dear boy, my paper is out, and I am going to read "Copperfield." Count always on my fidelity and true attachment, and look out, as I have already said, for a distinguished visitor about Monday, the 4th of May. Ever, my dear Fechter, Your cordial and affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BOSTON, _Tuesday, Feb. 25th, 1868._ It is so very difficult to know, by any exercise of common sense, what turn or height the political excitement may take next, and it may so easily, and so soon, swallow up all other things, that I think I shall suppress my next week's readings here (by good fortune not yet announced) and watch the course of events. Dolby's sudden desponding under these circumstances is so acute, that it is actually swelling his head as I glance at him in the glass while writing. The catarrh is no better and no worse. The weather is intensely cold. The walking-match (of which I will send particulars) is to come off on Sunday. Mrs. Fields is more delightful than ever, and Fields more hospitable. My room is always radiant with brilliant flowers of their sending. I don't know whether I told you that the walking-match is to celebrate the extinction of February, and the coming of the day when I can say "next month." [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BOSTON, _Thursday, Feb. 27th, 1868._ This morning at breakfast I received yours of the 11th from Palace Gate House. I have very little news to give you in return for your budget. The walking-match is to come off on Saturday, and Fields and I went over the ground yesterday to measure the miles. We went at a tremendous pace. The condition of the ground is something indescribable, from half-melted snow, running water, and sheets and blocks of ice. The two performers have not the faintest notion of the weight of the task they have undertaken. I give a dinner afterwards, and have just now been settling the bill of fare and selecting the wines. In the first excitement of the presidential impeachment, our houses instantly went down. After carefully considering the subject, I decided to take advantage of the fact that next week's four readings here have not yet been announced, and to abolish them altogether. Nothing in this country lasts long, and I think the public may be heartily tired of the President's name by the 9th of March, when I read at a considerable distance from here. So behold me with a whole week's holiday in view! The Boston audiences have come to regard the readings and the reader as their peculiar property; and you would be at once amused and pleased if you could see the curious way in which they seem to plume themselves on both. They have taken to applauding too whenever they laugh or cry, and the result is very inspiriting. I shall remain here until Saturday, the 7th, but shall not read here, after to-morrow night, until the 1st of April, when I begin my Boston farewells, six in number. _Friday, 28th._ It has been snowing all night, and the city is in a miserable condition. We had a fine house last night for "Carol" and "Trial," and such an enthusiastic one that they persisted in a call after the "Carol," and, while I was out, covered the little table with flowers. The "True American" has taken a fresh start, as if it were quite a novelty, and is on the whole rather worse than ever to-day. The Cunard packet, the _Australasian_ (a poor ship), is some days overdue, and Dolby is anxiously looking out for her. There is a lull in the excitement about the President, but the articles of impeachment are to be produced this afternoon, and then it may set in again. Osgood came into camp last night from selling in remote places, and reports that at Rochester and Buffalo (both places near the frontier), Canada people bought tickets, who had struggled across the frozen river and clambered over all sorts of obstructions to get them. Some of those halls turn out to be smaller than represented, but I have no doubt, to use an American expression, that we shall "get along." To-morrow fortnight we purpose being at the Falls of Niagara, and then we shall turn back and really begin to wind up. I have got to know the "Carol" so well that I can't remember it, and occasionally go dodging about in the wildest manner to pick up lost pieces. They took it so tremendously last night that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor young girl in mourning burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim, and was taken out. This is all my news. Each of the pedestrians is endeavouring to persuade the other to take something unwholesome before starting. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BOSTON, _Monday, March 2nd, 1868._ A heavy gale of wind and a snowstorm oblige me to write suddenly for the Cunard steamer a day earlier than usual. The railroad between this and New York will probably be stopped somewhere. After all the hard weather we have had, this is the worst day we have seen. The walking-match came off on Saturday, over tremendously difficult ground, against a biting wind, and through deep snow-wreaths. It was so cold, too, that our hair, beards, eyelashes, eyebrows, were frozen hard, and hung with icicles. The course was thirteen miles. They were close together at the turning-point, when Osgood went ahead at a splitting pace and with extraordinary endurance, and won by half a mile. Dolby did very well indeed, and begs that he may not be despised. In the evening I gave a very splendid dinner. Eighteen covers, most magnificent flowers, such table decoration as was never seen in these parts. The whole thing was a great success, and everybody was delighted. I am holiday-making until Friday, when we start on the round of travel that is to bring us back here for the 1st of April. My holiday-making is simply thorough resting, except on Wednesday, when I dine with Longfellow. There is still great political excitement, but I hope it may not hurt us very much. My fear is that it may damage the farewell. Dolby is not of my mind as to this, and I hope he may be right. We are not quite determined whether Mrs. Fields did not desert our colours, by coming on the ground in a carriage, and having _bread soaked in brandy_ put into the winning man's mouth as he steamed along. She pleaded that she would have done as much for Dolby, if _he_ had been ahead, so we are inclined to forgive her. As she had done so much for me in the way of flowers, I thought I would show her a sight in that line at the dinner. You never saw anything like it. Two immense crowns; the base, of the choicest exotics; and the loops, oval masses of violets. In the centre of the table an immense basket, overflowing with enormous bell-mouthed lilies; all round the table a bright green border of wreathed creeper, with clustering roses at intervals; a rose for every button-hole, and a bouquet for every lady. They made an exhibition of the table before dinner to numbers of people. P. H. has just come in with a newspaper, containing a reference (in good taste!) to the walking-match. He posts it to you by this post. It is telegraphed that the storm prevails over an immense extent of country, and is just the same at Chicago as here. I hope it may prove a wind-up. We are getting sick of the sound of sleigh-bells even. Your account of Anne has greatly interested me. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] SYRACUSE, U.S. OF AMERICA, _Sunday Night, March 8th, 1868._ MY DEAR FECHTER, I am here in a most wonderful out-of-the-world place, which looks as if it had begun to be built yesterday, and were going to be imperfectly knocked together with a nail or two the day after to-morrow. I am in the worst inn that ever was seen, and outside is a thaw that places the whole country under water. I have looked out of window for the people, and I can't find any people. I have tried all the wines in the house, and there are only two wines, for which you pay six shillings a bottle, or fifteen, according as you feel disposed to change the name of the thing you ask for. (The article never changes.) The bill of fare is "in French," and the principal article (the carte is printed) is "Paettie de shay." I asked the Irish waiter what this dish was, and he said: "It was the name the steward giv' to oyster patties--the Frinch name." These are the drinks you are to wash it down with: "Mooseux," "Abasinthe," "Curacco," "Marschine," "Annise," and "Margeaux"! I am growing very home-sick, and very anxious for the 22nd of April; on which day, please God, I embark for home. I am beginning to be tired, and have been depressed all the time (except when reading), and have lost my appetite. I cannot tell you--but you know, and therefore why should I?--how overjoyed I shall be to see you again, my dear boy, and how sorely I miss a dear friend, and how sorely I miss all art, in these parts. No disparagement to the country, which has a great future in reserve, or to its people, who are very kind to me. I mean to take my leave of readings in the autumn and winter, in a final series in England with Chappell. This will come into the way of literary work for a time, for, after I have rested--don't laugh--it is a grim reality--I shall have to turn my mind to--ha! ha! ha!--to--ha! ha! ha! (more sepulchrally than before)--the--the CHRISTMAS NUMBER!!! I feel as if I had murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its ghost perpetually haunted me. Nevertheless in some blessed rest at Gad's, we will talk over stage matters, and all matters, in an even way, and see what we can make of them, please God. Be sure that I shall not be in London one evening, after disembarking, without coming round to the theatre to embrace you, my dear fellow. I have had an American cold (the worst in the world) since Christmas Day. I read four times a week, with the most tremendous energy I can bring to bear upon it. I travel about pretty heavily. I am very resolute about calling on people, or receiving people, or dining out, and so save myself a great deal. I read in all sorts of places--churches, theatres, concert rooms, lecture halls. Every night I read I am described (mostly by people who have not the faintest notion of observing) from the sole of my boot to where the topmost hair of my head ought to be, but is not. Sometimes I am described as being "evidently nervous;" sometimes it is rather taken ill that "Mr. Dickens is so extraordinarily composed." My eyes are blue, red, grey, white, green, brown, black, hazel, violet, and rainbow-coloured. I am like "a well-to-do American gentleman," and the Emperor of the French, with an occasional touch of the Emperor of China, and a deterioration from the attributes of our famous townsman, Rufus W. B. D. Dodge Grumsher Pickville. I say all sorts of things that I never said, go to all sorts of places that I never saw or heard of, and have done all manner of things (in some previous state of existence I suppose) that have quite escaped my memory. You ask your friend to describe what he is about. This is what he is about, every day and hour of his American life. I hope to be back with you before you write to me! Ever, my dear Fechter, Your most affectionate and hearty Friend. P.S.--Don't let Madame Fechter, or Marie, or Paul forget me! [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] SYRACUSE, _Sunday, March 8th, 1868._ As we shall probably be busy all day to-morrow, I write this to-day, though it will not leave New York until Wednesday. This is a very grim place in a heavy thaw, and a most depressing one. The hotel also is surprisingly bad, quite a triumph in that way. We stood out for an hour in the melting snow, and came in again, having to change completely. Then we sat down by the stove (no fireplace), and there we are now. We were so afraid to go to bed last night, the rooms were so close and sour, that we played whist, double dummy, till we couldn't bear each other any longer. We had an old buffalo for supper, and an old pig for breakfast, and we are going to have I don't know what for dinner at six. In the public rooms downstairs, a number of men (speechless) are sitting in rocking-chairs, with their feet against the window-frames, staring out at window and spitting dolefully at intervals. Scott is in tears, and George the gasman is suborning people to go and clean the hall, which is a marvel of dirt. And yet we have taken considerably over three hundred pounds for to-morrow night! We were at Albany the night before last and yesterday morning; a very pretty town, where I am to read on the 18th and 19th. This day week we hope to wash out this establishment with the Falls of Niagara. And there is my news, except that your _last letters_ to me in America must be posted by the Cunard steamer, which will sail from Liverpool on _Saturday, the 4th of April_. These I shall be safe to get before embarking. I send a note to Katie (addressed to Mamie) by this mail. I wrote to Harry some weeks ago, stating to him on what principles he must act in remodelling the cricket club, if he would secure success. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] _Monday Morning, 9th._ Nothing new. Weather cloudy, and town more dismal than yesterday. It froze again last night, and thaws again this morning. Somebody sent me an Australian newspaper this morning--some citizen of Syracuse I mean--because of a paragraph in it describing the taking of two freebooters, at which taking Alfred was present. Though I do not make out that he had anything in the world to do with it, except having his name pressed into the service of the newspaper. BUFFALO, _Thursday, March 12th, 1868._ I hope this may be in time for next Saturday's mail; but this is a long way from New York, and rivers are swollen with melted snow, and travelling is unusually slow. Just now (two o'clock in the afternoon) I received your sad news of the death of poor dear Chauncey.[23] It naturally goes to my heart. It is not a light thing to lose such a friend, and I truly loved him. In the first unreasonable train of feeling, I dwelt more than I should have thought possible on my being unable to attend his funeral. I know how little this really matters; but I know he would have wished me to be there with real honest tears for his memory, and I feel it very much. I never, never, never was better loved by man than I was by him, I am sure. Poor dear fellow, good affectionate gentle creature. I have not as yet received any letter from Henri, nor do I think he can have written to New York by your mail. I believe that I am--I know that I _was_--one of the executors. In that case Mr. Jackson, his agent, will either write to me very shortly on Henri's information of my address, or enquiry will be made at Gad's or at the office about it. It is difficult for me to write more just now. The news is a real shock at such a distance, and I must read to-night, and I must compose my mind. Let Mekitty know that I received her violets with great pleasure, and that I sent her my best love and my best thanks. On the 25th of February I read "Copperfield" and "Bob" at Boston. Either on that very day, or very close upon it, I was describing his (Townshend's) house to Fields, and telling him about the great Danby picture that he should see when he came to London. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] ROCHESTER, _Sunday, March 16th, 1868._ I found yours of the 28th February, when I came back here last night. We have had two brilliant sunny days at Niagara, and have seen that wonderful place under the finest circumstances. Enclosed I return you Homan's estimate; let all that work be done, including the curtains. As to the hall, I have my doubts whether one of the parqueted floors made by Aaron Smith's, of Bond Street, ought not to be better than tiles, for the reason that perhaps the nature of the house's construction might render the "bed" necessary for wooden flooring more easy to be made than the "bed" necessary for tiles. I don't think you can do better than call in the trusty Lillie to advise. Decide with your aunt on which appears to be better, under the circumstances. Have estimate made for _cash_, select patterns and colours, and let the work be done out of hand. (Here's a prompt order; now I draw breath.) Let it be thoroughly well done--no half measures. There is a great thaw all over the country here, and I think it has done the catarrh good. I am to read at the famous Newhaven on Tuesday, the 24th. I hope without a row, but cannot say. The readings are running out fast now, and we are growing very restless. This is a short letter, but we are pressed for time. It is two o'clock, and we dine at three, before reading. To-morrow we rise at six, and have eleven hours' railway or so. We have now come back from our farthest point, and are steadily working towards home. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] SPRINGFIELD, MASS., _Saturday, March 21st, 1868._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, What with perpetual reading and travelling, what with a "true American catarrh" (on which I am complimented almost boastfully), and what with one of the severest winters ever known, your coals of fire received by the last mail did not burn my head so much as they might have done under less excusatory circumstances. But they scorched it too! You would find the general aspect of America and Americans decidedly much improved. You would find immeasurably greater consideration and respect for your privacy than of old. You would find a steady change for the better everywhere, except (oddly enough) in the railroads generally, which seem to have stood still, while everything else has moved. But there is an exception westward. There the express trains have now a very delightful carriage called a "drawing-room car," literally a series of little private drawing-rooms, with sofas and a table in each, opening out of a little corridor. In each, too, is a large plate-glass window, with which you can do as you like. As you pay extra for this luxury, it may be regarded as the first move towards two classes of passengers. When the railroad straight away to San Francisco (in six days) shall be opened through, it will not only have these drawing-rooms, but sleeping-rooms too; a bell in every little apartment communicating with a steward's pantry, a restaurant, a staff of servants, marble washing-stands, and a barber's shop! I looked into one of these cars a day or two ago, and it was very ingeniously arranged and quite complete. I left Niagara last Sunday, and travelled on to Albany, through three hundred miles of flood, villages deserted, bridges broken, fences drifting away, nothing but tearing water, floating ice, and absolute wreck and ruin. The train gave in altogether at Utica, and the passengers were let loose there for the night. As I was due at Albany, a very active superintendent of works did all he could to "get Mr. Dickens along," and in the morning we resumed our journey through the water, with a hundred men in seven-league boots pushing the ice from before us with long poles. How we got to Albany I can't say, but we got there somehow, just in time for a triumphal "Carol" and "Trial." All the tickets had been sold, and we found the Albanians in a state of great excitement. You may imagine what the flood was when I tell you that we took the passengers out of two trains that had their fires put out by the water four-and-twenty hours before, and cattle from trucks that had been in the water I don't know how long, but so long that the sheep had begun to eat each other! It was a horrible spectacle, and the haggard human misery of their faces was quite a new study. There was a fine breath of spring in the air concurrently with the great thaw; but lo and behold! last night it began to snow again with a strong wind, and to-day a snowdrift covers this place with all the desolation of winter once more. I never was so tired of the sight of snow. As to sleighing, I have been sleighing about to that extent, that I am sick of the sound of a sleigh-bell. I have seen all our Boston friends, except Curtis. Ticknor is dead. The rest are very little changed, except that Longfellow has a perfectly white flowing beard and long white hair. But he does not otherwise look old, and is infinitely handsomer than he was. I have been constantly with them all, and they have always talked much of you. It is the established joke that Boston is my "native place," and we hold all sorts of hearty foregatherings. They all come to every reading, and are always in a most delightful state of enthusiasm. They give me a parting dinner at the club, on the Thursday before Good Friday. To pass from Boston personal to New York theatrical, I will mention here that one of the proprietors of my New York hotel is one of the proprietors of Niblo's, and the most active. Consequently I have seen the "Black Crook" and the "White Fawn," in majesty, from an arm-chair in the first entrance, P.S., more than once. Of these astonishing dramas, I beg to report (seriously) that I have found no human creature "behind" who has the slightest idea what they are about (upon my honour, my dearest Macready!), and that having some amiable small talk with a neat little Spanish woman, who is the _première danseuse_, I asked her, in joke, to let me measure her skirt with my dress glove. Holding the glove by the tip of the forefinger, I found the skirt to be just three gloves long, and yet its length was much in excess of the skirts of two hundred other ladies, whom the carpenters were at that moment getting into their places for a transformation scene, on revolving columns, on wires and "travellers" in iron cradles, up in the flies, down in the cellars, on every description of float that Wilmot, gone distracted, could imagine! I have taken my passage for Liverpool from New York in the Cunarder _Russia_, on the 22nd of April. I had the second officer's cabin on deck coming out, and I have the chief steward's cabin on deck going home, because it will be on the sunny side of the ship. I have experienced nothing here but good humour and cordiality. In the autumn and winter I have arranged with Chappells to take my farewell of reading in the United Kingdom for ever and ever. I am delighted to hear of Benvenuta's marriage, and I think her husband a very lucky man. Johnnie has my profound sympathy under his examinatorial woes. The noble boy will give me Gavazzi revised and enlarged, I expect, when I next come to Cheltenham. I will give you and Mrs. Macready all my American experiences when you come to London, or, better still, to Gad's. Meanwhile I send my hearty love to all, not forgetting dear Katie. Niagara is not at all spoiled by a very dizzy-looking suspension bridge. Is to have another still nearer to the Horse-shoe opened in July. My last sight of that scene (last Sunday) was thus: We went up to the rapids above the Horse-shoe--say two miles from it--and through the great cloud of spray. Everything in the magnificent valley--buildings, forest, high banks, air, water, everything--was _made of rainbow_. Turner's most imaginative drawing in his finest day has nothing in it so ethereal, so gorgeous in fancy, so celestial. We said to one another (Dolby and I), "Let it for evermore remain so," and shut our eyes and came away. God bless you and all dear to you, my dear old Friend! I am ever your affectionate and loving. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PORTLAND, _Sunday, March 29th, 1868._ I should have written to you by the last mail, but I really was too unwell to do it. The writing day was last Friday, when I ought to have left Boston for New Bedford (fifty-five miles) before eleven in the morning. But I was so exhausted that I could not be got up, and had to take my chance of an evening's train producing me in time to read, which it just did. With the return of snow, nine days ago, the "true American" (which had lulled) came back as bad as ever. I have coughed from two or three in the morning until five or six, and have been absolutely sleepless. I have had no appetite besides, and no taste. Last night here I took some laudanum, and it is the only thing that has done me good. But the life in this climate is so very hard. When I did manage to get from Boston to New Bedford, I read with my utmost force and vigour. Next morning, well or ill, I must turn out at seven to get back to Boston on my way here. I dine at Boston at three, and at five must come on here (a hundred and thirty miles or so), for to-morrow night; there being no Sunday train. To-morrow night I read here in a very large place, and Tuesday morning at six I must start again to get back to Boston once more. But after to-morrow night, I have only the Boston and New York farewells, thank God! I am most grateful to think that when we came to devise the details of the tour, I foresaw that it could never be done, as Dolby and Osgood proposed, by one unassisted man, as if he were a machine. If I had not cut out the work, and cut out Canada, I could never have gone there, I am quite sure. Even as it is, I have just now written to Dolby (who is in New York), to see my doctor there, and ask him to send me some composing medicine that I can take at night, inasmuch as without sleep I cannot get through. However sympathetic and devoted the people are about me, they _can not_ be got to comprehend that one's being able to do the two hours with spirit when the time comes round, may be co-existent with the consciousness of great depression and fatigue. I don't mind saying all this, now that the labour is so nearly over. You shall have a brighter account of me, please God, when I close this at Boston. _Monday, March 30th._ Without any artificial aid, I got a splendid night's rest last night, and consequently am very much freshened up to-day. Yesterday I had a fine walk by the sea, and to-day I have had another on the heights overlooking it. BOSTON, _Tuesday, 31st._ I have safely arrived here, just in time to add a line to that effect, and get this off by to-morrow's English mail from New York. Catarrh rather better. Everything triumphant last night, except no sleep again. I suppose Dolby to be now on his way back to join me here. I am much mistaken if the political crisis do not damage the farewells by almost one half. I hope that I am certainly better altogether. My room well decorated with flowers, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Fields coming to dinner. They are the most devoted of friends, and never in the way and never out of it. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BOSTON, _Wednesday, April 1st, 1868._ I received your letter of from the 14th to the 17th of March, here, last night. My New York doctor has prescribed for me promptly, and I hope I am better. I am certainly no worse. We shall do (to the best of my belief) _very well_ with the farewells here and at New York, but not greatly. Everything is at a standstill, pending the impeachment and the next presidential election. I forgot whether I told you that the New York press are going to give me a public dinner, on Saturday, the 18th. I hear (but not from himself) that Wills has had a bad fall in hunting, and is, or has been, laid up. I am supposed, I take it, not to know this until I hear it from himself. _Thursday._ My notion of the farewells is pretty certain now to turn out right. It is not at all probable that we shall do anything enormous. Every pulpit in Massachusetts will resound to violent politics to-day and to-night. You remember the Hutchinson family?[24] I have had a grateful letter from John Hutchinson. He speaks of "my sister Abby" as living in New York. The immediate object of his note is to invite me to the marriage of his daughter, twenty-one years of age. You will see by the evidence of this piece of paper that I am using up my stationery. Scott has just been making anxious calculations as to our powers of holding out in the articles of tooth-powder, etc. The calculations encourage him to believe that we shall just hold out, and no more. I think I am still better to-day than I was yesterday; but I am far from strong, and have no appetite. To see me at my little table at night, you would think me the freshest of the fresh. And this is the marvel of Fields' life. I don't forget that this is Forster's birthday. _Friday Afternoon, 3rd._ Catarrh worse than ever! And we don't know (at four) whether I can read to-night or must stop. Otherwise all well. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BOSTON, _Tuesday, April 7th, 1868._ I not only read last Friday, when I was doubtful of being able to do so, but read as I never did before, and astonished the audience quite as much as myself. You never saw or heard such a scene of excitement. Longfellow and all the Cambridge men urged me to give in. I have been very near doing so, but feel stronger to-day. I cannot tell whether the catarrh may have done me any lasting injury in the lungs or other breathing organs, until I shall have rested and got home. I hope and believe not. Consider the weather. There have been two snowstorms since I wrote last, and to-day the town is blotted out in a ceaseless whirl of snow and wind. I cannot eat (to anything like the ordinary extent), and have established this system: At seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At twelve, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three (dinner time), a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts, the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter-past ten, soup, and anything to drink that I can fancy. I don't eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours, if so much. If I hold out, as I hope to do, I shall be greatly pressed in leaving here and getting over to New York before next Saturday's mail from there. Do not, therefore, _if all be well_, expect to hear from me by Saturday's mail, but look for my last letter from America by the mail of the following Wednesday, the 15th. _Be sure_ that you shall hear, however, by Saturday's mail, if I should knock up as to reading. I am tremendously "beat," but I feel really and unaffectedly so much stronger to-day, both in my body and hopes, that I am much encouraged. I have a fancy that I turned my worst time last night. Dolby is as tender as a woman and as watchful as a doctor. He never leaves me during the reading now, but sits at the side of the platform and keeps his eye upon me all the time. Ditto George, the gasman, steadiest and most reliable man I ever employed. I am the more hopeful of my not having to relinquish a reading, because last night was "Copperfield" and "Bob"--by a quarter of an hour the longest, and, in consideration of the storm, by very much the most trying. Yet I was far fresher afterwards than I have been these three weeks. I have "Dombey" to do to-night, and must go through it carefully; so here ends my report. The personal affection of the people in this place is charming to the last. [Sidenote: The Hon. Mrs. Watson.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, _Monday, May 11th, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. WATSON, I am delighted to have your letter. It comes to me like a faithful voice from dear old Rockingham, and awakens many memories. The work in America has been so very hard, and the winter there has been so excessively severe, that I really have been very unwell for some months. But I had not been at sea three days on the passage home when I became myself again. If you will arrange with Mary Boyle any time for coming here, we shall be charmed to see you, and I will adapt my arrangements accordingly. I make this suggestion because she generally comes here early in the summer season. But if you will propose yourself _anyhow_, giving me a margin of a few days in case of my being pre-engaged for this day or that, we will (as my American friends say) "fix it." What with travelling, reading night after night, and speech-making day after day, I feel the peace of the country beyond all expression. On board ship coming home, a "deputation" (two in number, of whom only one could get into my cabin, while the other looked in at my window) came to ask me to read to the passengers that evening in the saloon. I respectfully replied that sooner than do it, I would assault the captain, and be put in irons. Ever affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. George Cattermole.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Saturday, May 16th, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. CATTERMOLE, On my return from America just now, I accidentally heard that George had been ill. My sister-in-law had heard it from Forster, but vaguely. Until I received your letter of Wednesday's date, I had no idea that he had been very ill; and should have been greatly shocked by knowing it, were it not for the hopeful and bright assurance you give me that he is greatly better. My old affection for him has never cooled. The last time he dined with me, I asked him to come again that day ten years, for I was perfectly certain (this was my small joke) that I should not set eyes upon him sooner. The time being fully up, I hope you will remind him, with my love, that he is due. His hand is upon these walls here, so I should like him to see for himself, and _you_ to see for _yourself_, and in this hope I shall pursue his complete recovery. I heartily sympathise with you in your terrible anxiety, and in your vast relief; and, with many thanks for your letter, am ever, my dear Mrs. Cattermole, Affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, June 10th, 1868._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, Since my return from America, I have been so overwhelmed with business that I have not had time even to write to you. You may imagine what six months of arrear are to dispose of; added to this, Wills has received a concussion of the brain (from an accident in the hunting-field), and is sent away by the doctors, and strictly prohibited from even writing a note. Consequently all the business and money details of "All the Year Round" devolve upon me. And I have had to get them up, for I have never had experience of them. Then I am suddenly entreated to go to Paris, to look after the French version of "No Thoroughfare" on the stage. And I go, and come back, leaving it a great success. I hope Mrs. Macready and you have not abandoned the idea of coming here? The expression of this hope is the principal, if not the only, object of this present note. May the amiable secretary vouchsafe a satisfactory reply! Katie, Mary, and Georgina send their very best love to your Katie and Mrs. Macready. The undersigned is in his usual brilliant condition, and indeed has greatly disappointed them at home here, by coming back "so brown and looking so well." They expected a wreck, and were, at first, much mortified. But they are getting over it now. To my particular friends, the noble boy and Johnny, I beg to be warmly remembered. Ever, my dearest Macready, Your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mrs. Henry Austin.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, July 21st, 1868._ ON THE DEATH OF MR. HENRY AUSTIN.[25] MY DEAR LETITIA, You will have had a telegram from me to-day. I received your sad news by this morning's post. They never, without express explanation, mind "Immediate" on a letter addressed to the office, because half the people who write there on business that does not press, or on no business at all, so mark their letters. On Thursday I have people to see and matters to attend to, both at the office and at Coutts', which, in Wills's absence, I cannot forego or depute to another. But, _between ourselves_, I must add something else: I have the greatest objection to attend a funeral in which my affections are not strongly and immediately concerned. I have no notion of a funeral as a matter of form or ceremony. And just as I should expressly prohibit the summoning to my own burial of anybody who was not very near or dear to me, so I revolt from myself appearing at that solemn rite unless the deceased were very near or dear to me. I cannot endure being dressed up by an undertaker as part of his trade show. I was not in this poor good fellow's house in his lifetime, and I feel that I have no business there when he lies dead in it. My mind is penetrated with sympathy and compassion for the young widow, but that feeling is a real thing, and my attendance as a mourner would not be--to myself. It would be to you, I know, but it would not be to myself. I know full well that you cannot delegate to me your memories of and your associations with the deceased, and the more true and tender they are the more invincible is my objection to become a form in the midst of the most awful realities. With love and condolence from Georgina, Mary, and Katie, Believe me, ever your affectionate Brother. [Sidenote: Mrs. George Cattermole.] GAD'S HILL, _Wednesday, July 22nd, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. CATTERMOLE, Of course I will sign your memorial to the Academy. If you take either of the Landseers, certainly take Edwin (1, St. John's Wood Road, N.W.) But, if you would be content with Frith, I have already spoken to him, and believe that I can answer for him. I shall be at "All the Year Round" Office, 26, Wellington Street, London, to-morrow, from eleven to three. Frith will be here on Saturday, and I shall be here too. I spoke to him a fortnight ago, and I found him most earnest in the cause. He said he felt absolutely sure that the whole profession in its best and highest representation would do anything for George. I sounded him, having the opportunity of meeting him at dinner at Cartwright's. Ever yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] _Friday, July 31st, 1868._ MY DEAR WILLS, I had such a hard day at the office yesterday, that I had not time to write to you before I left. So I write to-day. I am very unwilling to abandon the Christmas number, though even in the case of my little Christmas books (which were immensely profitable) I let the idea go when I thought it was wearing out. Ever since I came home, I have hammered at it, more or less, and have been uneasy about it. I have begun something which is very droll, but it manifestly shapes itself towards a book, and could not in the least admit of even that shadowy approach to a congruous whole on the part of other contributors which they have ever achieved at the best. I have begun something else (aboard the American mail-steamer); but I don't like it, because the stories must come limping in after the old fashion, though, of course, what I _have_ done will be good for A. Y. R. In short, I have cast about with the greatest pains and patience, and I have been wholly unable to find what I want. And yet I cannot quite make up my mind to give in without another fight for it. I offered one hundred pounds reward at Gad's to anybody who could suggest a notion to satisfy me. Charles Collins suggested one yesterday morning, in which there is _something_, though not much. I will turn it over and over, and try a few more starts on my own account. Finally, I swear I will not give it up until August is out. Vow registered. I am clear that a number by "various writers" would not do. If we have not the usual sort of number, we must call the current number for that date the Christmas number, and make it as good as possible. I sit in the Châlet,[26] like Mariana in the Moated Grange, and to as much purpose. I am buying the freehold of the meadow at Gad's, and of an adjoining arable field, so that I shall now have about eight-and-twenty freehold acres in a ring-fence. No more now. I made up a very good number yesterday. You will see in it a very short article that I have called "Now!" which is a highly remarkable piece of description. It is done by a new man, from whom I have accepted another article; but he will never do anything so good again. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, Aug. 26th, 1868._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I was happy to receive your esteemed letter a few days ago. The severity of the winter in America (which was quite exceptional even in that rigorous climate), combined with the hard work I had to do, tried me a good deal. Neuralgia and colds beset me, either by turns or both together, and I had often much to do to get through at night. But the sea voyage home again did wonders in restoring me, and I have been very well indeed, though a little fatigued, ever since. I am now preparing for a final reading campaign in England, Scotland, and Ireland. It will begin on the 6th of October, and will probably last, with short occasional intermissions, until June. The great subject in England for the moment is the horrible accident to the Irish mail-train. It is now supposed that the petroleum (known to be a powerful anæsthetic) rendered the unfortunate people who were burnt almost instantly insensible to any sensation. My escape in the Staplehurst accident of three years ago is not to be obliterated from my nervous system. To this hour I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable. I used to make nothing of driving a pair of horses habitually through the most crowded parts of London. I cannot now drive, with comfort to myself, on the country roads here; and I doubt if I could ride at all in the saddle. My reading secretary and companion knows so well when one of these odd momentary seizures comes upon me in a railway carriage, that he instantly produces a dram of brandy, which rallies the blood to the heart and generally prevails. I forget whether I ever told you that my watch (a chronometer) has never gone exactly since the accident? So the Irish catastrophe naturally revives the dreadful things I saw that day. The only other news here you know as well as I; to wit, that the country is going to be ruined, and that the Church is going to be ruined, and that both have become so used to being ruined, that they will go on perfectly well. * * * * * [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," NO. 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C., _Saturday, Sept. 26th, 1868._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I will add a line to this at the Athenæum, after seeing Plorn off, to tell you how he went away. ATHENÆUM, _Quarter to Six._ I can honestly report that he went away, poor dear fellow, as well as could possibly be expected. He was pale, and had been crying, and (Harry said) had broken down in the railway carriage after leaving Higham station; but only for a short time. Just before the train started he cried a good deal, but not painfully. (Tell dear Georgy that I bought him his cigars.) These are hard, hard things, but they might have to be done without means or influence, and then they would be far harder. God bless him! PARLIAMENT. REPLY TO A PROPOSAL MADE THROUGH ALEXANDER RUSSEL, OF "THE SCOTSMAN," THAT HE SHOULD ALLOW HIMSELF TO BE PUT FORWARD AS A CANDIDATE FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF EDINBURGH. [Sidenote: Mr. F. D. Finlay.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Oct. 4th, 1868._ MY DEAR FINLAY, I am much obliged to you in all friendship and sincerity for your letter. I have a great respect for your father-in-law and his paper, and I am much attached to the Edinburgh people. You may suppose, therefore, that if my mind were not fully made up on the parliamentary question, I should waver now. But my conviction that I am more useful and more happy as I am than I could ever be in Parliament is not to be shaken. I considered it some weeks ago, when I had a stirring proposal from the Birmingham people, and I then set it up on a rock for ever and a day. Do tell Mr. Russel that I truly feel this mark of confidence, and that I hope to acknowledge it in person in Edinburgh before Christmas. There is no man in Scotland from whom I should consider his suggestion a greater honour. Ever yours. [Sidenote: M. Charles Fechter.] * * * * * Poor Plorn is gone to Australia. It was a hard parting at the last. He seemed to me to become once more my youngest and favourite little child as the day drew near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken. You were his idol to the hour of his departure, and he asked me to tell you how much he wanted to bid you good-bye. Kindest love from all. Ever heartily. [Sidenote: The same.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Oct. 7th, 1868._ MY DEAR FECHTER, I got your letter sent to Gad's Hill this morning. Until I received it, I supposed the piece to have been put into English from your French by young Ben. If I understand that the English is yours, then I say that it is extraordinarily good, written by one in another country. I do not read again in London until the 20th; and then "Copperfield." But by that time you will be at work yourself. Let us dine at six to-day, in order that we may not have to hurry for the comic dog. Ever faithfully. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] QUEEN'S HOTEL, MANCHESTER, _Sunday, Oct. 11th, 1868._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, We had a fine audience last night in the Free Trade Hall, though not what we consider a large money-house. The let in Liverpool is extremely good, and we are going over there at half-past one. We got down here pleasantly enough and in good time; so all has gone well you see. Titiens, Santley, and an opera company of that class are at the theatre here. They have been doing very poorly in Manchester. There is the whole of my scanty news. I was in wonderful voice last night, but croak a little this morning, after so much speaking in so very large a place. Otherwise I am all right. I find myself constantly thinking of Plorn. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Monday, Oct. 12th, 1868._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, Our lets here are excellent, and we shall have a great house to-night. We had a very fine and enthusiastic audience in the Free Trade Hall, at Manchester, on Saturday; but our first nights there never count up in money, as the rest do. Yesterday, "Charlotte," Sainton, and Piatti stayed with us here; and they went on to Hull this morning. It was pleasant to be alone again, though they were all very agreeable. The exertion of going on for two hours in that immense place at Manchester being very great, I was hoarse all day yesterday, though I was not much distressed on Saturday night. I am becoming melodious again (at three in the afternoon) rapidly, and count on being quite restored by a basin of turtle at dinner. I am glad to hear about Armatage, and hope that a service begun in a personal attachment to Plorn may go on well. I shall never be over-confident in such matters, I think, any more. The day is delicious here. We have had a blow on the Mersey this morning, and exulted over the American steamers. With kind regard to Sir William and Lady Humphery. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Tuesday, Oct. 13th, 1868._ As I sent a line to Mary yesterday, I enclose you Alfred's letter. Please send it on to her when you next write to Penton. I have just now written to Mrs. Forster, asking her to explain to Miss Forster how she could have an easy-chair or a sofa behind my side screen on Tuesday, without occasioning the smallest inconvenience to anybody. Also, how she would have a door close at hand, leading at once to cool passages and a quiet room, etc. etc. etc. It is a sad story. We had a fine house here last night, and a large turn-away. "Marigold" and "Trial" went immensely. I doubt if "Marigold" were ever more enthusiastically received. "Copperfield" and "Bob" to-night, and a large let. This notwithstanding election meetings and all sorts of things. My favourite room brought my voice round last night, and I am in considerable force. Dolby sends kindest regard, and the message: "Everton toffee shall not be forgotten." [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Thursday, Oct. 15th, 1868._ MY DEAR HARRY, I have your letter here this morning. I enclose you another cheque for twenty-five pounds, and I write to London by this post, ordering three dozen sherry, two dozen port, and three dozen light claret, to be sent down to you. Now, observe attentively. We must have no shadow of debt. Square up everything whatsoever that it has been necessary to buy. Let not a farthing be outstanding on any account, when we begin together with your allowance. Be particular in the minutest detail. I wish to have no secret from you in the relations we are to establish together, and I therefore send you Joe Chitty's letter bodily. Reading it, you will know exactly what I know, and will understand that I treat you with perfect confidence. It appears to me that an allowance of two hundred and fifty pounds a year will be handsome for all your wants, if I send you your wines. I mean this to include your tailor's bills as well as every other expense; and I strongly recommend you to buy nothing in Cambridge, and to take credit for nothing but the clothes with which your tailor provides you. As soon as you have got your furniture accounts in, let us wipe all those preliminary expenses clean out, and I will then send you your first quarter. We will count in it October, November, and December; and your second quarter will begin with the New Year. If you dislike, at first, taking charge of so large a sum as sixty-two pounds ten shillings, you can have your money from me half-quarterly. You know how hard I work for what I get, and I think you know that I never had money help from any human creature after I was a child. You know that you are one of many heavy charges on me, and that I trust to your so exercising your abilities and improving the advantages of your past expensive education, as soon to diminish _this_ charge. I say no more on that head. Whatever you do, above all other things keep out of debt and confide in me. If you ever find yourself on the verge of any perplexity or difficulty, come to me. You will never find me hard with you while you are manly and truthful. As your brothers have gone away one by one, I have written to each of them what I am now going to write to you. You know that you have never been hampered with religious forms of restraint, and that with mere unmeaning forms I have no sympathy. But I most strongly and affectionately impress upon you the priceless value of the New Testament, and the study of that book as the one unfailing guide in life. Deeply respecting it, and bowing down before the character of our Saviour, as separated from the vain constructions and inventions of men, you cannot go very wrong, and will always preserve at heart a true spirit of veneration and humility. Similarly I impress upon you the habit of saying a Christian prayer every night and morning. These things have stood by me all through my life, and remember that I tried to render the New Testament intelligible to you and lovable by you when you were a mere baby. And so God bless you. Ever your affectionate Father. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Monday, Nov. 16th, 1868._ MY DEAR KENT, I was on the eve of writing to you. We thought of keeping the trial private; but Oxenford has suggested to Chappell that he would like to take the opportunity of to-morrow night's reading, of saying something about "Oliver" in _Wednesday's paper_. Chappell has told Levy of this, and also Mr. Tompkin, of _The Post_, who was there. Consequently, on Wednesday evening your charming article can come out to the best advantage. You have no idea of the difficulty of getting in the end of Sikes. As to the man with the invaluable composition! my dear fellow, believe me, no audience on earth could be held for ten minutes after the girl's death. Give them time, and they would be revengeful for having had such a strain put upon them. Trust me to be right. I stand there, and I know. Concerning Harry, I like to guide the boys to a distinct choice, rather than to press it on them. That will be my course as to the Middle Temple, of which I think as you do. With cordial thanks for every word in your letter, Affectionately yours always. [Sidenote: Mrs. F. Lehmann.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Sunday, Dec. 6th, 1868._ MY DEAR MRS. LEHMANN, I hope you will see Nancy with the light of a great audience upon her some time between this and May; always supposing that she should not prove too weird and woeful for the general public. You know the aspect of this city on a Sunday, and how gay and bright it is. The merry music of the blithe bells, the waving flags, the prettily-decorated houses with their draperies of various colours, and the radiant countenances at the windows and in the streets, how charming they are! The usual preparations are making for the band in the open air, in the afternoon; and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument, preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice, with which the diversions invariably close. It is pleasant to think that these customs were themselves of the early Christians, those early birds who _didn't_ catch the worm--and nothing else--and choke their young with it. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Sunday, Dec. 6th, 1868._ We got down here to our time to the moment; and, considering the length of the journey, very easily. I made a calculation on the road, that the railway travelling over such a distance involves something more than thirty thousand shocks to the nerves. Dolby didn't like it at all. The signals for a gale were up at Berwick, and along the road between there and here. It came on just as we arrived, and blew tremendously hard all night. The wind is still very high, though the sky is bright and the sun shining. We couldn't sleep for the noise. We are very comfortably quartered. I fancy that the "business" will be on the whole better here than in Glasgow, where trade is said to be very bad. But I think I shall be pretty correct in both places as to the run being on the final readings. We are going up Arthur's Seat presently, which will be a pull for our fat friend. Scott, in a new Mephistopheles hat, baffles imagination and description. [Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Tuesday, Dec. 8th, 1868._ MY DEAR WILKIE, I am hard at it here as usual, though with an audience so finely perceptive that the labour is much diminished. I have got together in a very short space the conclusion of "Oliver Twist" that you suggested, and am trying it daily with the object of rising from that blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush for the end. As yet I cannot make a certain effect of it; but when I shall have gone over it as many score of times as over the rest of that reading, perhaps I may strike one out. I shall be very glad to hear when you have done your play, and I _am_ glad to hear that you like the steamer. I agree with you about the reading perfectly. In No. 3 you will see an exact account of some places I visited at Ratcliffe. There are two little instances in it of something comic rising up in the midst of the direst misery, that struck me very humorously at the time. As I have determined not to do the "Oliver Murder" until after the 5th of January, when I shall ascertain its effect on a great audience, it is curious to notice how the shadow of its coming affects the Scotch mind. There was such a disposition to hold back for it here (until I return to finish in February) that we had next to no "let" when we arrived. It all came with a rush yesterday. They gave me a most magnificent welcome back from America last night. I am perpetually counting the weeks before me to be "read" through, and am perpetually longing for the end of them; and yet I sometimes wonder whether I shall miss something when they are over. It is a very, very bad day here, very dark and very wet. Dolby is over at Glasgow, and I am sitting at a side window looking up the length of Prince's Street, watching the mist change over the Castle and murdering Nancy by turns. Ever affectionately. P.S.--I have read the whole of Fitzgerald's "Zero," and the idea is exceedingly well wrought out. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Saturday, Dec. 12th, 1868._ I send another _Scotsman_ by this post, because it is really a good newspaper, well written, and well managed. We had an immense house here last night, and a very large turn-away. We have four guests to dinner to-day: Peter Fraser, Ballantyne, John Blackwood, and Mr. Russel. Immense preparations are making in the establishment, "on account," Mr. Kennedy says, "of a' four yon chiels being chiels wha' ken a guid dinner." I enquired after poor Doctor Burt, not having the least idea that he was dead. My voice holds out splendidly so far, and I have had no return of the American. But I sleep very indifferently indeed. It blew appallingly here the night before last, but the wind has since shifted northward, and it is now bright and cold. The _Star of Hope_, that picked up those shipwrecked people in the boat, came into Leith yesterday, and was received with tremendous cheers. Her captain must be a good man and a noble fellow. [Sidenote: The same.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Monday, Dec. 14th, 1868._ The dinner-party of Saturday last was an immense success. Russel swore on the occasion that he would go over to Belfast expressly to dine with me at the Finlays'. Ballantyne informed me that he was going to send you some Scotch remembrance (I don't know what) at Christmas! The Edinburgh houses are very fine. The Glasgow room is a big wandering place, with five prices in it, which makes it the more aggravating, as the people get into knots which they can't break, as if they were afraid of one another. Forgery of my name is becoming popular. You sent me, this morning, a letter from Russell Sturgis, answering a supposed letter of mine (presented by "Miss Jefferies"), and assuring me of his readiness to give not only the ten pounds I asked for, but any contribution I wanted, towards sending that lady and her family back to Boston. I wish you would take an opportunity of forewarning Lady Tennent that the first night's reading she will attend is an experiment quite out of the way, and that she may find it rather horrible. The keeper of the Edinburgh Hall, a fine old soldier, presented me, on Friday night, with the finest red camellia for my button-hole that ever was seen. Nobody can imagine how he came by it, as the florists had had a considerable demand for that colour from ladies in the stalls, and could get no such thing. The day is dark, wet, and windy. The weather is likely to be vile indeed at Glasgow, where it always rains, and where the sun is never seen through the smoke. We go over there to-morrow at ten. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] CARRICK'S ROYAL HOTEL, GLASGOW, _Tuesday, Dec. 15th, 1868._ It occurs to me that my table at St. James's Hall might be appropriately ornamented with a little holly next Tuesday. If the two front legs were entwined with it, for instance, and a border of it ran round the top of the fringe in front, with a little sprig by way of bouquet at each corner, it would present a seasonable appearance. If you will think of this, and will have the materials ready in a little basket, I will call for you at the office at half-past twelve on Tuesday, and take you up to the hall, where the table will be ready for you. No news, except that we had a great crush and a wonderful audience in Edinburgh last night. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] CARRICK'S ROYAL HOTEL, GLASGOW, _Wednesday, Dec. 16th, 1868._ This is to report all well, except that I have wretched nights. The weather is diabolical here, and times are very bad. I cut "Copperfield" with a bold dexterity that amazed myself and utterly confounded George at the wing; knocking off that and "Bob" by ten minutes to ten. I don't know anything about the Liverpool banquet, except from _The Times_. As I don't finish there in February (as they seem to have supposed), but in April, it may, perhaps, stand over or blow over altogether. Such a thing would be a serious addition to the work, and yet refusal on my part would be too ungracious. The density and darkness of this atmosphere are fearful. I shall be heartily glad to start for Edinburgh again on Friday morning. [Sidenote: The same.] KENNEDY'S HOTEL, EDINBURGH, _Friday, Dec. 18th, 1868._ I am heartily glad to get back here this afternoon. The day is bright and cheerful, and the relief from Glasgow inexpressible. The affectionate regard of the people exceeds all bounds, and is shown in every way. The manager of the railway being at the reading the other night, wrote to me next morning, saying that a large saloon should be prepared for my journey up, if I would let him know when I purposed making the journey. On my accepting the offer he wrote again, saying that he had inspected "our Northern saloons," and not finding them so convenient for sleeping in as the best English, had sent up to King's Cross for the best of the latter; which I would please consider my own carriage as long as I wanted it. The audiences do everything but embrace me, and take as much pains with the readings as I do. I find your Christmas present (just arrived) to be a haggis and shortbread! [Sidenote: Mr. J. C. Parkinson.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Christmas Day, 1868._ MY DEAR PARKINSON, When your letter was delivered at "All the Year Round" Office yesterday, I was attending a funeral. It comes to hand here consequently to-day. I am diffident of addressing Mr. Gladstone on the subject of your desire to be appointed to the vacant Commissionership of Inland Revenue, because, although my respect for him and confidence in him are second to those of no man in England (a bold word at this time, but a truthful one), my personal acquaintance with him is very slight. But you may make, through any of your friends, any use you please of this letter, towards the end of bringing its contents under Mr. Gladstone's notice. In expressing my conviction that you deserve the place, and are in every way qualified for it, I found my testimony upon as accurate a knowledge of your character and abilities as anyone can possibly have acquired. In my editorship both of "Household Words" and "All the Year Round," you know very well that I have invariably offered you those subjects of political and social interest to write upon, in which integrity, exactness, a remarkable power of generalising evidence and balancing facts, and a special clearness in stating the case, were indispensable on the part of the writer. My confidence in your powers has never been misplaced, and through all our literary intercourse you have never been hasty or wrong. Whatever trust you have undertaken has been so completely discharged, that it has become my habit to read your proofs rather for my own edification than (as in other cases) for the detection of some slip here or there, or the more pithy presentation of the subject. That your literary work has never interfered with the discharge of your official duties, I may assume to be at least as well known to your colleagues as it is to me. It is idle to say that if the post were in my gift you should have it, because you have had, for some years, most of the posts of high trust that have been at my disposal. An excellent public servant in your literary sphere of action, I should be heartily glad if you could have this new opportunity of distinguishing yourself in the same character. And this is at least unselfish in me, for I suppose I should then lose you? Always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens.] LETTER TO HIS YOUNGEST SON ON HIS DEPARTURE FOR AUSTRALIA IN 1868.[27] MY DEAREST PLORN, I write this note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind, and because I want you to have a few parting words from me to think of now and then at quiet times. I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne. It is my comfort and my sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are beat fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than any experiment in a study or office would ever have been; and without that training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation. What you have already wanted until now has been a set, steady, constant purpose. I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do whatever you have to do as well as you can do it. I was not so old as you are now when I first had to win my food, and do this out of this determination, and I have never slackened in it since. Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to others, as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by our Saviour, than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books, for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child; because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of men. You will remember that you have never at home been wearied about religious observances or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. I hope you will always be able to say in after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty. Your affectionate Father. FOOTNOTES: [20] The Agricultural College, Cirencester. [21] "No Thoroughfare." [22] The Mr. H. F. Chorley so often mentioned was the well-known musical critic, and a dear and intimate friend of Charles Dickens and his family. We have no letters to him, Mr. Chorley having destroyed all his correspondence before his death. [23] Mr. Chauncey Hare Townshend. He was one of the dearest friends of Charles Dickens and a very constant correspondent; but no letters addressed to him are in existence. [24] An American family of brothers and a sister who came to London to give a musical entertainment shortly after Charles Dickens's return from his first visit to America. He had a great interest in, and liking for, these young people. [25] Cousin and adopted child of Mr. and Mrs. Austin. [26] A model of a Swiss châlet, and a present from M. Charles Fechter, used by Charles Dickens as a summer writing-room. [27] This letter has been already published by Mr. Forster in his "Life." 1869. NARRATIVE. The "Farewell Readings" in town and country were resumed immediately after the beginning of this year, and were to have been continued until the end of May. The work was even harder than it had ever been. Charles Dickens began his country tour in Ireland early in January, and read continuously in all parts of England and Scotland until the end of April. A public dinner (in commemoration of his last readings in the town) was given to him at Liverpool on the 10th April. Besides all this severe country work, he was giving a series of readings at St. James's Hall, and reading the "Murder" from "Oliver Twist," in London and in the country, frequently four times a week. In the second week of February, a sudden and unusually violent attack of the old trouble in his foot made it imperatively necessary to postpone a reading at St. James's Hall, and to delay for a day or two his departure for Scotland. The foot continued to cause him pain and inconvenience, but, as will be seen from his letters, he generally spoke of himself as otherwise well, until he arrived at Preston, where he was to read on the 22nd of April. The day before this appointed reading, he writes home of some grave symptoms which he had observed in himself, and had reported to his doctor, Mr. F. Carr Beard. That gentleman, taking alarm at what he considered "indisputable evidences of overwork," wisely resolved not to content himself with written consultations, but went down to Preston on the day appointed for the reading there, and, after seeing his patient, peremptorily stopped it, carried him off to Liverpool, and the next day to London. There he consulted Sir Thomas Watson, who entirely corroborated Mr. Beard's opinion. And the two doctors agreed that the course of readings must be stopped for this year, and that reading, _combined with travelling_, must be stopped _for ever_. Charles Dickens had no alternative but to acquiesce in this verdict; but he felt it keenly, not only for himself, but for the sake of the Messrs. Chappell, who showed the most disinterested kindness and solicitude on the occasion. He at once returned home to Gad's Hill, and the rest and quiet of the country restored him, for the time, to almost his usual condition of health and spirits. But it was observed, by all who loved him, that from this time forth he never regained his old vigour and elasticity. The attack at Preston was the "beginning of the end!" During the spring and summer of this year, he received visits from many dearly valued American friends. In May, he stayed with his daughter and sister-in-law for two or three weeks at the St. James's Hotel, Piccadilly, having promised to be in London at the time of the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Fields, of Boston, who visited Europe, accompanied by Miss Mabel Lowell (the daughter of the famous American poet) this year. Besides these friends, Mr. and Mrs. Childs, of Philadelphia--from whom he had received the greatest kindness and hospitality, and for whom he had a hearty regard--Dr. Fordyce Barker and his son, Mr. Eytinge (an illustrator of an American edition of Charles Dickens's works), and Mr. Bayard Taylor paid visits to Gad's Hill, which were thoroughly enjoyed by Charles Dickens and his family. This last summer was a very happy one. He had the annual summer visitors and parties of his friends in the neighbourhood. He was, as usual, projecting improvements in his beloved country home; one, which he called the "crowning improvement of all," was a large conservatory, which was to be added during the absence of the family in London in the following spring. The state of Mr. Wills's health made it necessary for him now to retire altogether from the editorship of "All the Year Round." Charles Dickens's own letters express the regret which he felt at the dissolution of this long and always pleasant association. Mr. Wills's place at the office was filled by Charles Dickens's eldest son, now sole editor and proprietor of the journal. In September Charles Dickens went to Birmingham, accompanied by his son Harry, and presided at the opening of the session of (what he calls in his letter to Mr. Arthur Ryland, "_our_ Institution") the Midland Institute. He made a speech on education to the young students, and promised to go back early in the following year and distribute the prizes. In one of the letters which we give to Mr. Ryland, he speaks of himself as "being in full force again," and "going to finish his farewell readings soon after Christmas." He had obtained the sanction of Sir Thomas Watson to giving twelve readings, _in London only_, which he had fixed for the beginning of the following year. The letter to his friend Mr. Finlay, which opens the year, was in reply to a proposal for a public banquet at Belfast, projected by the Mayor of that town, and conveyed through Mr. Finlay. This gentleman was at that time proprietor of _The Northern Whig_ newspaper at Belfast, and he was son-in-law to Mr. Alexander Russel, editor of _The Scotsman_. Charles Dickens's letter this New Year to M. de Cerjat was his last. That faithful and affectionate friend died very shortly afterwards. To Miss Mary Boyle he writes to acknowledge a New Year's gift, which he had been much touched by receiving from her, at a time when he knew she was deeply afflicted by the sudden death of her brother, Captain Cavendish Boyle, for whom Charles Dickens had a true regard and friendship. While he was giving his series of London readings in the spring, he received a numerously signed circular letter from actors and actresses of the various London theatres. They were very curious about his new reading of the "Oliver Twist" murder, and representing to him the impossibility of their attending an evening, requested him to give a morning reading, for their especial benefit. We give his answer, complying with the request. And the occasion was, to him, a most gratifying and deeply interesting one. The letter to Mr. Edmund Ollier was in answer to an invitation to be present at the inauguration of a bust of Mr. Leigh Hunt, which was to be placed over his grave at Kensal Green. The letter to Mr. Shirley Brooks, the well-known writer, who succeeded Mr. Mark Lemon as editor of "Punch," and for whom Charles Dickens had a cordial regard, was on the subject of a memorial on behalf of Mrs. Peter Cunningham, whose husband had recently died. The "remarkable story," of which he writes to his daughter in August, was called "An Experience." It was written by a lady (who prefers to be anonymous) who had been a contributor to "Household Words" from its first starting, and was always highly valued in this capacity by Charles Dickens. Our latest letters for this year are in October. One to Mr. Charles Kent, sympathising with him on a disappointment which he had experienced in a business undertaking, and one to Mr. Macready, in which he tells him of his being in the "preliminary agonies" of a new book. The first number of "Edwin Drood" was to appear before the end of his course of readings in March; and he was at work so long beforehand with a view to sparing himself, and having some numbers ready before the publication of the first one. [Sidenote: Mr. F. D. Finlay.] THE ATHENÆUM (CLUB), _New Year's Day, 1869._ MY DEAR FINLAY, First my heartfelt wishes for many prosperous and happy years. Next, as to the mayor's kind intentions. I feel really grateful to him and gratified by the whole idea, but acceptance of the distinction on my part would be impracticable. My time in Ireland is all anticipated, and I could not possibly prolong my stay, because I _must_ be back in London to read on Tuesday fortnight, and then must immediately set forth for the West of England. It is not likely, besides, that I shall get through these farewells before the end of May. And the work is so hard, and my voice is so precious, that I fear to add an ounce to the fatigue, or I might be overweighted. The avoidance of gas and crowds when I am not in the act of being cooked before those lights of mine, is an essential part of the training to which (as I think you know) I strictly adhere, and although I have accepted the Liverpool invitation, I have done so as an exception; the Liverpool people having always treated me in our public relations with a kind of personal affection. I am sincerely anxious that the Mayor of Belfast should know how the case stands with me. If you will kindly set me straight and right, I shall be truly obliged to you. My sister-in-law has been very unwell (though she is now much better), and is recommended a brisk change. As she is a good sailor, I mean to bring her to Ireland with me; at which she is highly delighted. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: M. de Cerjat.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Jan. 4th, 1869._ MY DEAR CERJAT, I will answer your question first. Have I done with my farewell readings? Lord bless you, no; and I shall think myself well out of it if I get done by the end of May. I have undertaken one hundred and six, and have as yet only vanquished twenty-eight. To-morrow night I read in London for the first time the "Murder" from "Oliver Twist," which I have re-arranged for the purpose. Next day I start for Dublin and Belfast. I am just back from Scotland for a few Christmas holidays. I go back there next month; and in the meantime and afterwards go everywhere else. Take my guarantee for it, you may be quite comfortable on the subject of papal aspirations and encroachments. The English people are in unconquerable opposition to that church. They have the animosity in the blood, derived from the history of the past, though perhaps unconsciously. But they do sincerely want to win Ireland over if they can. They know that since the Union she has been hardly used. They know that Scotland has _her_ religion, and a very uncomfortable one. They know that Scotland, though intensely anti-papal, perceives it to be unjust that Ireland has not _her_ religion too, and has very emphatically declared her opinion in the late elections. They know that a richly-endowed church, forced upon a people who don't belong to it, is a grievance with these people. They know that many things, but especially an artfully and schemingly managed institution like the Romish Church, thrive upon a grievance, and that Rome has thriven exceedingly upon this, and made the most of it. Lastly, the best among them know that there is a gathering cloud in the West, considerably bigger than a man's hand, under which a powerful Irish-American body, rich and active, is always drawing Ireland in that direction; and that these are not times in which other powers would back our holding Ireland by force, unless we could make our claim good in proving fair and equal government. Poor Townshend charged me in his will "to publish without alteration his religious opinions, which he sincerely believed would tend to the happiness of mankind." To publish them without alteration is absolutely impossible; for they are distributed in the strangest fragments through the strangest note-books, pocket-books, slips of paper and what not, and produce a most incoherent and tautological result. I infer that he must have held some always-postponed idea of fitting them together. For these reasons I would certainly publish nothing about them, if I had any discretion in the matter. Having none, I suppose a book must be made. His pictures and rings are gone to the South Kensington Museum, and are now exhibiting there. Charley Collins is no better and no worse. Katie looks very young and very pretty. Her sister and Miss Hogarth (my joint housekeepers) have been on duty this Christmas, and have had enough to do. My boys are now all dispersed in South America, India, and Australia, except Charley, whom I have taken on at "All the Year Round" Office, and Henry, who is an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, and I hope will make his mark there. All well. The Thames Embankment is (faults of ugliness in detail apart) the finest public work yet done. From Westminster Bridge to near Waterloo it is now lighted up at night, and has a fine effect. They have begun to plant it with trees, and the footway (not the road) is already open to the Temple. Besides its beauty, and its usefulness in relieving the crowded streets, it will greatly quicken and deepen what is learnedly called the "scour" of the river. But the Corporation of London and some other nuisances have brought the weirs above Twickenham into a very bare and unsound condition, and they already begin to give and vanish, as the stream runs faster and stronger. Your undersigned friend has had a few occasional reminders of his "true American catarrh." Although I have exerted my voice very much, it has not yet been once touched. In America I was obliged to patch it up constantly. I like to read your patriarchal account of yourself among your Swiss vines and fig-trees. You wouldn't recognise Gad's Hill now; I have so changed it, and bought land about it. And yet I often think that if Mary were to marry (which she won't) I should sell it and go genteelly vagabondising over the face of the earth. Then indeed I might see Lausanne again. But I don't seem in the way of it at present, for the older I get, the more I do and the harder I work. Yours ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Miss Mary Boyle.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Jan. 6th, 1869._ MY DEAR MARY, I was more affected than you can easily believe, by the sight of your gift lying on my dressing-table on the morning of the new year. To be remembered in a friend's heart when it is sore is a touching thing; and that and the remembrance of the dead quite overpowered me, the one being inseparable from the other. You may be sure that I shall attach a special interest and value to the beautiful present, and shall wear it as a kind of charm. God bless you, and may we carry the friendship through many coming years! My preparations for a certain murder that I had to do last night have rendered me unfit for letter-writing these last few days, or you would have heard from me sooner. The crime being completely off my mind and the blood spilled, I am (like many of my fellow-criminals) in a highly edifying state to-day. Ever believe me, your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] TORQUAY, _Wednesday, Jan. 27th, 1869._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, We have been doing immensely. This place is most beautiful, though colder now than one would expect. This hotel, an immense place, built among picturesque broken rocks out in the blue sea, is quite delicious. There are bright green trees in the garden, and new peas a foot high. Our rooms are _en suite_, all commanding the sea, and each with two very large plate-glass windows. Everything good and well served. A _pantomime_ was being done last night, in the place where I am to read to-night. It is something between a theatre, a circus, a riding-school, a Methodist chapel, and a cow-house. I was so disgusted with its acoustic properties on going in to look at it, that the whole unfortunate staff have been all day, and now are, sticking up baize and carpets in it to prevent echoes. I have rarely seen a more uncomfortable edifice than I thought it last night. At Clifton, on Monday night, we had a contagion of fainting. And yet the place was not hot. I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies borne out, stiff and rigid, at various times. It became quite ridiculous. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] BATH, _Friday, Jan. 29th, 1869._ MY DEAREST GEORGY, You must not trust blank places in my list, because many have been, and will be, gradually filled up. After the Tuesday's reading in London, I have TWO for that same week in the country--Nottingham and Leicester. In the following week I have none; but my arrangements are all at sea as yet, for I must somehow and somewhere do an "Uncommercial" in that week, and I also want to get poor Chauncey's "opinions" to the printer. This mouldy old roosting-place comes out mouldily as to let of course. I hate the sight of the bygone assembly-rooms, and the Bath chairs trundling the dowagers about the streets. As to to-morrow morning in the daylight!---- I have no cold to speak of. Dolby sends kindest regard. [Sidenote: Mrs. Lehmann.] OFFICE, _Wednesday, Feb. 3rd, 1869._ DEAR MRS. LEHMANN, Before getting your kind note, I had written to Lehmann, explaining why I cannot allow myself any social pleasure while my farewell task is yet unfinished. The work is so very hard, that every little scrap of rest _and silence_ I can pick up is precious. And even those morsels are so flavoured with "All the Year Round," that they are not quite the genuine article. Joachim[28] came round to see me at the hall last night, and I told him how sorry I was to forego the pleasure of meeting him (he is a noble fellow!) at your pleasant table. I am glad you are coming to the "Murder" on the 2nd of March. (The house will be prodigious.) Such little changes as I have made shall be carefully presented to your critical notice, and I hope will be crowned with your approval. But you are always such a fine audience that I have no fear on that head. I saw Chorley yesterday in his own room. A sad and solitary sight. The widowed Drake, with a certain _gin_coherence of manner, presented a blooming countenance and buxom form in the passage; so buxom indeed that she was obliged to retire before me like a modest stopper, before I could get into the dining decanter where poor Chorley reposed. Faithfully yours always. P.S.--My love to Rudie. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] GLASGOW, _Thursday, Feb. 25th, 1869._ I received your letter at Edinburgh this morning. I did not write to you yesterday, as there had been no reading on the previous night. The foot bears the fatigue wonderfully well, and really occasions me no inconvenience beyond the necessity of wearing the big work of art. Syme saw me again this morning, and utterly scouted the gout notion altogether. I think the Edinburgh audience understood the "Murder" better last night than any audience that has heard it yet. "Business" is enormous, and Dolby jubilant. It is a most deplorable afternoon here, deplorable even for Glasgow. A great wind blowing, and sleet driving before it in a storm of heavy blobs. We had to drive our train dead in the teeth of the wind, and got in here late, and are pressed for time. Strange that in the North we have had absolutely no snow. There was a very thin scattering on the Pentlands for an hour or two, but no more. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] EDINBURGH, _Friday, Feb. 26th, 1869._ Writing to-morrow morning would be all but impracticable for me; would be quite so for Dolby, who has to go to the agents and "settle up" in the midst of his breakfast. So I write to-day, in reply to your note received at Glasgow this morning. The foot conducts itself splendidly. We had a most enormous cram at Glasgow. Syme saw me again yesterday (before I left here for Glasgow), and repeated "Gout!" with the greatest indignation and contempt, several times. The aching is going off as the day goes on, if it be worth mentioning again. The ride from Glasgow was charming this morning; the sun shining brilliantly, and the country looking beautiful. I told you what the Nortons were. Mabel Lowell is a charming little thing, and very retiring in manner and expression. We shall have a scene here to-night, no doubt. The night before last, Ballantyne, unable to get in, had a seat behind the screen, and was nearly frightened off it by the "Murder." Every vestige of colour had left his face when I came off, and he sat staring over a glass of champagne in the wildest way. I have utterly left off _my_ champagne, and, I think, with good results. Nothing during the readings but a very little weak iced brandy-and-water. I hope you will find me greatly improved on Tuesday. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] BIRMINGHAM, _Friday, March 5th, 1869._ This is to send you my best love, and to wish you many and many happy returns of to-morrow, which I miraculously remember to be your birthday. I saw this morning a very pretty fan here. I was going to buy it as a remembrance of the occasion, when I was checked by a dim misgiving that you had a fan not long ago from Chorley. Tell me what you would like better, and consider me your debtor in that article, whatever it may be. I have had my usual left boot on this morning, and have had an hour's walk. It was in a gale of wind and a simoom of dust, but I greatly enjoyed it. Immense enthusiasm at Wolverhampton last night over "Marigold." Scott made a most amazing ass of himself yesterday. He reported that he had left behind somewhere three books--"Boots," "Murder," and "Gamp." We immediately telegraphed to the office. Answer, no books there. As my impression was that he must have left them at St. James's Hall, we then arranged to send him up to London at seven this morning. Meanwhile (though not reproached), he wept copiously and audibly. I had asked him over and over again, was he sure he had not put them in my large black trunk? Too sure, too sure. Hadn't opened that trunk after Tuesday night's reading. He opened it to get some clothes out when I went to bed, and there the books were! He produced them with an air of injured surprise, as if we had put them there. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] QUEEN'S HOTEL, MANCHESTER, _Sunday, March 7th, 1869._ We have had our sitting-room chimney afire this morning, and have had to turn out elsewhere to breakfast; but the chamber has since been cleaned up, and we are reinstated. Manchester is (_for_ Manchester) bright and fresh. Tell Russell that a crop of hay is to be got off the meadow this year, before the club use it. They did not make such use of it last year as reconciles me to losing another hay-crop. So they must wait until the hay is in, before they commence active operations. Poor Olliffe! I am truly sorry to read those sad words about his suffering, and fear that the end is not far off. We are very comfortably housed here, and certainly that immense hall is a wonderful place for its size. Without much greater expenditure of voice than usual, I a little enlarged the action last night, and Dolby (who went to all the distant points of view) reported that he could detect no difference between it and any other place. As always happens now--and did not at first--they were unanimously taken by Noah Claypole's laugh. But the go, throughout, was enormous. Sims Reeves was doing Henry Bertram at the theatre, and of course took some of our shillings. It was a night of excitement for Cottonopolis. I received from Mrs. Keeley this morning a very good photograph of poor old Bob. Yesterday I had a letter from Harry, reminding me that our intended Cambridge day is the day next after that of the boat-race. Clearly it must be changed. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] QUEEN'S HOTEL, MANCHESTER, _Saturday, March 20th, 1869._ Getting yours and its enclosure, Mary's note, at two this afternoon, I write a line at once in order that you may have it on Monday morning. The Theatre Royal, Liverpool, will be a charming place to read in. Ladies are to dine at the dinner, and we hear it is to be a very grand affair. Dolby is doubtful whether it may not "hurt the business," by drawing a great deal of money in another direction, which I think possible enough. Trade is very bad _here_, and the gloom of the Preston strike seems to brood over the place. The Titiens Company have been doing wretchedly. I should have a greater sympathy with them if they were not practising in the next room now. My love to Letitia and Harriette,[29] wherein Dolby (highly gratified by being held in remembrance) joins with the same to you. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] MANCHESTER, _Sunday, March 21st, 1869._ Will you tell Mary that I have had a letter from Frith, in which he says that he will be happy to show her his pictures "any day in the first week of April"? I have replied that she will be proud to receive his invitation. His object in writing was to relieve his mind about the "Murder," of which he cannot say enough. Tremendous enthusiasm here last night, calling in the most thunderous manner after "Marigold," and again after the "Trial," shaking the great hall, and cheering furiously. Love to all. [Sidenote: Mr. John Clarke.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, March 24th, 1869._ LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I beg to assure you that I am much gratified by the desire you do me the honour to express in your letter handed to me by Mr. John Clarke. Before that letter reached me, I had heard of your wish, and had mentioned to Messrs. Chappell that it would be highly agreeable to me to anticipate it, if possible. They readily responded, and we agreed upon having three morning readings in London. As they are not yet publicly announced, I add a note of the days and subjects: Saturday, May 1st. "Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn," and "Sikes and Nancy" from "Oliver Twist." Saturday, May 8th. "The Christmas Carol." Saturday, May 22nd. "Sikes and Nancy" from "Oliver Twist," and "The Trial" from "Pickwick." With the warmest interest in your art, and in its claims upon the general gratitude and respect, Believe me, always faithfully your Friend. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, _Sunday, April 4th, 1869._ By this post I send to Mary the truly affecting account of poor dear Katie Macready's death. It is as sorrowful as anything so peaceful and trustful can be! Both my feet are very tender, and often feel as though they were in hot water. But I was wonderfully well and strong, thank God! and had no end of voice for the two nights running in that great Birmingham hall. We had enormous houses. So far as I understand the dinner arrangements here, they are much too long. As to the acoustics of that hall, and the position of the tables (both as bad as bad can be), my only consolation is that, if anybody can be heard, _I_ probably can be. The honorary secretary tells me that six hundred people are to dine. The mayor, being no speaker and out of health besides, hands over the toast of the evening to Lord Dufferin. The town is full of the festival. The Theatre Royal, touched up for the occasion, will look remarkably bright and well for the readings, and our lets are large. It is remarkable that our largest let as yet is for Thursday, not Friday. I infer that the dinner damages Friday, but Dolby does not think so. There appears to be great curiosity to hear the "Murder." (On Friday night last I read to two thousand people, and odd hundreds.) I hear that Anthony Trollope, Dixon, Lord Houghton, Lemon, Esquiros (of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_), and Sala are to be called upon to speak; the last, for the newspaper press. All the Liverpool notabilities are to muster. And Manchester is to be represented by its mayor with due formality. I had been this morning to look at St. George's Hall, and suggest what can be done to improve its acoustics. As usually happens in such cases, their most important arrangements are already made and unchangeable. I should not have placed the tables in the committee's way at all, and could certainly have placed the daïs to much greater advantage. So all the good I could do was to show where banners could be hung with some hope of stopping echoes. Such is my small news, soon exhausted. We arrived here at three yesterday afternoon; it is now mid-day; Chorley has not yet appeared, but he had called at the local agent's while I was at Birmingham. It is a curious little instance of the way in which things fit together that there is a ship-of-war in the Mersey, whose flags and so forth are to be brought up to St. George's Hall for the dinner. She is the _Donegal_, of which Paynter told me he had just been captain, when he told me all about Sydney at Bath. One of the pleasantest things I have experienced here this time, is the manner in which I am stopped in the streets by working men, who want to shake hands with me, and tell me they know my books. I never go out but this happens. Down at the docks just now, a cooper with a fearful stutter presented himself in this way. His modesty, combined with a conviction that if he were in earnest I would see it and wouldn't repel him, made up as true a piece of natural politeness as I ever saw. [Sidenote: Miss Hogarth.] IMPERIAL HOTEL, BLACKPOOL, _Wednesday, April 21st, 1869._ I send you this hasty line to let you know that I have come to this sea-beach hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am much better than I was on Sunday, but shall want careful looking to, to get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all _on the left side_, and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank Beard; he recognises, in the exact description I have given him, indisputable evidences of overwork, which he would wish to treat immediately. So I have said: "Go in and win." I have had a delicious walk by the sea to-day, and I sleep soundly, and have picked up amazingly in appetite. My foot is greatly better too, and I wear my own boot. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] PRESTON, _Thursday Evening, April 22nd, 1869._ _Don't be in the least alarmed._ Beard has come down, and instantly echoes my impression (perfectly unknown to him), that the readings must be _stopped_. I have had symptoms that must not be disregarded. I go to Liverpool to-night with him (to get away from here), and proceed to the office to-morrow. [Sidenote: The Lord John Russell.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Wednesday, May 26th, 1869._ MY DEAR LORD RUSSELL, I have delayed answering your kind letter, in order that you might get home before I wrote. I am happy to report myself quite well again, and I shall be charmed to come to Pembroke Lodge on any day that may be most convenient to Lady Russell and yourself after the middle of June. You gratify me beyond expression by your reference to the Liverpool dinner. I made the allusion to you with all my heart at least, and it was most magnificently received. I beg to send my kind regard to Lady Russell, with many thanks for her remembrance, and am ever, My dear Lord Russell, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, June 24th, 1869._ MY DEAR WILLS, At a great meeting[30] compounded of your late "Chief," Charley, Morley, Grieve, and Telbin, your letter was read to-day, and a very sincere record of regret and thanks was placed on the books of the great institution. Many thanks for the suggestion about the condition of churches. I am so aweary of church questions of all sorts that I am not quite clear as to tackling this. But I am turning it in my mind. I am afraid of two things: firstly, that the thing would not be picturesquely done; secondly, that a general cucumber-coolness would pervade the mind of our circulation. Nothing new here but a speaking-pipe, a post-box, and a mouldy smell from some forgotten crypt--an extra mouldy smell, mouldier than of yore. Lillie sniffs, projects one eye into nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, and does no more. I have been to Chadwick's, to look at a new kind of cottage he has built (very ingenious and cheap). We were all much disappointed last Saturday afternoon by a neighbouring fire being only at a carpenter's, and not at Drury Lane Theatre. Ellen's[31] child having an eye nearly poked out by a young friend, and being asked whether the young friend was not very sorry afterwards, replied: "No. _She_ wasn't. _I_ was." London execrable. Ever affectionately yours. P.S.--Love to Mrs. Wills. [Sidenote: Mr. Shirley Brooks.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, July 12th, 1869._ MY DEAR BROOKS, I have appended my sign manual to the memorial, which I think is very discreetly drawn up. I have a strong feeling of sympathy with poor Mrs. Cunningham, for I remember the pretty house she managed charmingly. She has always done her duty well, and has had hard trials. But I greatly doubt the success of the memorial, I am sorry to add. It was hotter here yesterday on this Kentish chalk than I have felt it anywhere for many a day. Now it is overcast and raining hard, much to the satisfaction of great farmers like myself. I am glad to infer from your companionship with the Cocked Hats, that there is no such thing as gout within several miles of you. May it keep its distance. Ever, my dear Brooks, faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL, _Tuesday, July 20th, 1869._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I have received your letter here to-day, and deeply feel with you and for you the affliction of poor dear Katie's loss. I was not unprepared for the sad news, but it comes in such a rush of old remembrances and withered joys that strikes to the heart. God bless you! Love and youth are still beside you, and in that thought I take comfort for my dear old friend. I am happy to report myself perfectly well and flourishing. We are just now announcing the resumption and conclusion of the broken series of farewell readings in a London course of twelve, beginning early in the new year. Scarcely a day has gone by this summer in which we have not talked of you and yours. Georgina, Mary, and I continually speak of you. In the spirit we certainly are even more together than we used to be in the body in the old times. I don't know whether you have heard that Harry has taken the second scholarship (fifty pounds a year) at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The bigwigs expect him to do a good deal there. Wills having given up in consequence of broken health (he has been my sub-editor for twenty years), I have taken Charley into "All the Year Round." He is a very good man of business, and evinces considerable aptitude in sub-editing work. This place is immensely improved since you were here, and really is now very pretty indeed. We are sorry that there is no present prospect of your coming to see it; but I like to know of your being at the sea, and having to do--_from the beach_, as Mrs. Keeley used to say in "The Prisoner of War"--with the winds and the waves and all their freshening influences. I dined at Greenwich a few days ago with Delane. He asked me about you with much interest. He looks as if he had never seen a printing-office, and had never been out of bed after midnight. Great excitement caused here by your capital news of Butty. I suppose Willy has at least a dozen children by this time. Our loves to the noble boy and to dear Mrs. Macready. Ever, my dearest Macready, Your attached and affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. Edmund Ollier.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Tuesday, Aug. 3rd, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. OLLIER, I am very sensible of the feeling of the Committee towards me; and I receive their invitation (conveyed through you) as a most acceptable mark of their consideration. But I have a very strong objection to speech-making beside graves. I do not expect or wish my feeling in this wise to guide other men; still, it is so serious with me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I must decline to officiate. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Miss Dickens.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," NO. 26, WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C., _Tuesday, Aug. 3rd, 1869._ MY DEAREST MAMIE, I send you the second chapter of the remarkable story. The printer is late with it, and I have not had time to read it, and as I altered it considerably here and there, I have no doubt there are some verbal mistakes in it. However, they will probably express themselves. But I offer a prize of six pairs of gloves--between you, and your aunt, and Ellen Stone, as competitors--to whomsoever will tell me what idea in this second part is mine. I don't mean an idea in language, in the turning of a sentence, in any little description of an action, or a gesture, or what not in a small way, but an idea, distinctly affecting the whole story _as I found it_. You are all to assume that I found it in the main as you read it, with one exception. If I had written it, I should have made the woman love the man at last. And I should have shadowed that possibility out, by the child's bringing them a little more together on that holiday Sunday. But I didn't write it. So, finding that it wanted something, I put that something in. What was it? Love to Ellen Stone. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Friday, Aug. 13th, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, Many thanks for your letter. I have very strong opinions on the subject of speechification, and hold that there is, everywhere, a vast amount too much of it. A sense of absurdity would be so strong upon me, if I got up at Birmingham to make a flourish on the advantages of education in the abstract for all sorts and conditions of men, that I should inevitably check myself and present a surprising incarnation of the soul of wit. But if I could interest myself in the practical usefulness of the particular institution; in the ways of life of the students; in their examples of perseverance and determination to get on; in their numbers, their favourite studies, the number of hours they must daily give to the work that must be done for a livelihood, before they can devote themselves to the acquisition of new knowledge, and so forth, then I could interest others. This is the kind of information I want. Mere holding forth "I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure." I fear I shall not be in London next week. But if you will kindly send me here, at your leisure, the roughest notes of such points as I have indicated, I shall be heartily obliged to you, and will take care of their falling into shape and order in my mind. Meantime I "make a note of" Monday, 27th September, and of writing to you touching your kind offer of hospitality, three weeks before that date. I beg to send my kind regard to Mrs. and Miss Ryland, and am always, Very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Frederic Ouvry.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Sunday, Aug. 22nd, 1869._ MY DEAR OUVRY, I will expect a call from you at the office, on Thursday, at your own most convenient hour. I admit the soft impeachment concerning Mrs. Gamp: I likes my payments to be made reg'lar, and I likewise likes my publisher to draw it mild. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Arthur Ryland.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Monday, Sept. 6th, 1869._ MY DEAR MR. RYLAND, I am sorry to find--I had a foreshadowing of it some weeks ago--that I shall not be able to profit by your kind offer of hospitality when I come to Birmingham for _our_ Institution. I must come down in time for a quiet dinner at the hotel with my "Readings" secretary, Mr. Dolby, and must away next morning. Besides having a great deal in hand just now (the title of a new book among other things), I shall have visitors from abroad here at the time, and am severely claimed by my daughter, who indeed is disloyal to Birmingham in the matter of my going away at all. Pray represent me to Mrs. Ryland as the innocent victim of circumstances, and as sacrificing pleasure to the work I have to do, and to the training under which alone I can do it without feeling it. You will see from the enclosed that I am in full force, and going to finish my readings, please God, after Christmas. I am in the hope of receiving your promised notes in due course, and continue in the irreverent condition in which I last reported myself on the subject of speech-making. Now that men not only make the nights of the session hideous by what the Americans call "orating" in Parliament, but trouble the peace of the vacation by saying over again what they said there (with the addition of what they _didn't_ say there, and never will have the courage to say there), I feel indeed that silence, like gold across the Atlantic, is a rarity at a premium. Faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Thursday, Oct. 7th, 1869._ MY DEAR KENT, I felt that you would be deeply disappointed. I thought it better not to make the first sign while you were depressed, but my mind has been constantly with you. And not mine alone. You cannot think with what affection and sympathy you have been made the subject of our family dinner talk at Gad's Hill these last three days. Nothing could exceed the interest of my daughters and my sister-in-law, or the earnestness of their feeling about it. I have been really touched by its warm and genuine expression. Cheer up, my dear fellow; cheer up, for God's sake. That is, for the sake of all that is good in you and around you. Ever your affectionate Friend. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] GAD'S HILL, _Monday, Oct. 18th, 1869._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, I duly received your letter nearly a fortnight ago, with the greatest interest and pleasure. Above all things I am delighted with the prospect of seeing you here next summer; a prospect which has been received with nine times nine and one more by the whole house. You will hardly know the place again, it is so changed. You are not expected to admire, but there _is_ a conservatory building at this moment--be still, my soul! This leaves me in the preliminary agonies of a new book, which I hope to begin publishing (in twelve numbers, not twenty) next March. The coming readings being all in London, and being, after the first fortnight, only once a week, will divert my attention very little, I hope. Harry has just gone up to Cambridge again, and I hope will get a fellowship in good time. Wills is much gratified by your remembrance, and sends you his warm regard. He wishes me to represent that he is very little to be pitied. That he suffers no pain, scarcely inconvenience, even, so long as he is idle. That he likes idleness exceedingly. He has bought a country place by Welwyn in Hertfordshire, near Lytton's, and takes possession presently. My boy Sydney is now a second lieutenant, the youngest in the Service, I believe. He has the highest testimonials as an officer. You may be quite sure there will be no international racing in American waters. Oxford knows better, or I am mistaken. The Harvard crew were a very good set of fellows, and very modest. Ryland of Birmingham doesn't look a day older, and was full of interest in you, and asked me to remind you of him. By-the-bye, at Elkington's I saw a pair of immense tea-urns from a railway station (Stafford), sent there to be repaired. They were honeycombed within in all directions, and had been supplying the passengers, under the active agency of hot water, with decomposed lead, copper, and a few other deadly poisons, for heaven knows how many years! I must leave off in a hurry to catch the post, after a hard day's work. Ever, my dearest Macready, Your most affectionate and attached. FOOTNOTES: [28] Herr Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist. [29] His sister-in-law, Mrs. Augustus Dickens, always a welcome visitor at Gad's Hill. [30] Of the Guild of Literature and Art. [31] The housekeeper at the office. 1870. NARRATIVE. Charles Dickens passed his last Christmas and New Year's Day at Gad's Hill, with a party of family and friends, in the usual way, except that he was suffering again from an attack of the foot trouble, particularly on Christmas Day, when he was quite disabled by it and unable to walk at all--able only to join the party in the evening by keeping his room all day. However, he was better in a day or two, and early in January he went to London, where he had taken the house of his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Milner Gibson, for the season. His series of "Farewell Readings" at St. James's Hall began in January, and ended on the 16th March. He was writing "Edwin Drood" also, and was, of course, constantly occupied with "All the Year Round" work. In the beginning of January, he fulfilled his promise of paying a second visit to Birmingham and making a speech, of which he writes in his last letter to Mr. Macready. For his last reading he gave the "Christmas Carol" and "The Trial" from "Pickwick," and at the end of the evening he addressed a few farewell words to his audience. It was a memorable and splendid occasion. He was very deeply affected by the loving enthusiasm of his greeting, and it was a real sorrow to him to give up for ever the personal associations with thousands of the readers of his books. But when the pain, mingled with pleasure, of this last reading was over, he felt greatly the relief of having undisturbed time for his own quieter pursuits, and looked forward to writing the last numbers of "Edwin Drood" at Gad's Hill, where he was to return in June. The last public appearance of any kind that he made was at the Royal Academy dinner in May. He was at the time far from well, but he made a great effort to be present and to speak, from his strong desire to pay a tribute to the memory of his dear old friend Mr. Maclise, who died in April. Her Majesty having expressed a wish, conveyed through Mr. Helps (afterwards Sir Arthur Helps), to have a personal interview with Charles Dickens, he accompanied Mr. Helps to Buckingham Palace one afternoon in March. He was most graciously and kindly received by her Majesty, and came away with a hope that the visit had been mutually agreeable. The Queen presented him with a copy of her "Journal in the Highlands," with an autograph inscription. And he had afterwards the pleasure of requesting her acceptance of a set of his books. He attended a levée held by the Prince of Wales in April, and the last time he dined out in London was at a party given by Lord Houghton for the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales, who had both expressed a desire to meet Charles Dickens. All through the season he had been suffering, at intervals, from the swollen foot, and on this occasion it was so bad, that up to the last moment it was very doubtful whether he could fulfil his engagement. We have very few letters for this year, and none of any very particular interest, but we give them all, as they are _the last_. Mr. S. L. Fildes was his "new illustrator," to whom he alludes in a note to Mr. Frith; we also give a short note to Mr. Fildes himself. The correspondence of Charles Dickens with Mrs. Dallas Glyn, the celebrated actress, for whom he had a great friendship, is so much on the subject of her own business, that we have only been able to select two notes of any public interest. In explanation of _the last letter_, we give an extract from a letter addressed to _The Daily News_ by Mr. J. M. Makeham, soon after the death of Charles Dickens, as follows: "That the public may exactly understand the circumstances under which Charles Dickens's letter to me was written, I am bound to explain that it is in reply to a letter which I addressed to him in reference to a passage in the tenth chapter of "Edwin Drood," respecting which I ventured to suggest that he had, perhaps, forgotten that the figure of speech alluded to by him, in a way which, to my certain knowledge, was distasteful to some of his admirers, was drawn from a passage of Holy Writ which is greatly reverenced by a large number of his countrymen as a prophetic description of the sufferings of our Saviour." The MS. of the little "History of the New Testament" is now in the possession of his eldest daughter. She has (together with her aunt) received many earnest entreaties, both from friends and strangers, that this history might be allowed to be published, for the benefit of other children. These many petitions have his daughter's fullest sympathy. But she knows that her father wrote this history ONLY for his own children, that it was his particular wish that it never should be published, and she therefore holds this wish as sacred and irrevocable. [Sidenote: Mr. W. H. Wills.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, LONDON, W., _Sunday, Jan. 23rd, 1870._ MY DEAR WILLS, In the note I had from you about Nancy and Sikes, you seem to refer to some other note you had written me. Therefore I think it well merely to mention that I have received no other note. I do not wonder at your not being up to the undertaking (even if you had had no cough) under the wearing circumstances. It was a very curious scene. The actors and actresses (most of the latter looking very pretty) mustered in extraordinary force, and were a fine audience. I set myself to carrying out of themselves and their observation, those who were bent on watching how the effects were got; and I believe I succeeded. Coming back to it again, however, I feel it was madness ever to do it so continuously. My ordinary pulse is seventy-two, and it runs up under this effort to one hundred and twelve. Besides which, it takes me ten or twelve minutes to get my wind back at all; I being, in the meantime, like the man who lost the fight--in fact, his express image. Frank Beard was in attendance to make divers experiments to report to Watson; and although, as you know, he stopped it instantly when he found me at Preston, he was very much astonished by the effects of the reading on the reader. So I hope you may be able to come and hear it before it is silent for ever. It is done again on the evenings of the 1st February, 15th February, and 8th March. I hope, now I have got over the mornings, that I may be able to work on my book. But up to this time the great preparation required in getting the subjects up again, and the twice a week besides, have almost exclusively occupied me. I have something the matter with my right thumb, and can't (as you see) write plainly. I sent a word to poor Robert Chambers,[32] and I send my love to Mrs. Wills. Ever, my dear Wills, affectionately yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. Dallas.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Jan. 16th, 1870._ MY DEAR MRS. DALLAS, It is perfectly delightful to me to get your fervent and sympathetic note this morning. A thousand thanks for it. I will take care that two places on the front row, by my daughter, are reserved for your occasion next time. I cannot see you in too good a seat, or too often. Believe me, ever very faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. S. L. Fildes.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, Jan. 16th, 1870._ DEAR SIR, I beg to thank you for the highly meritorious and interesting specimens of your art that you have had the kindness to send me. I return them herewith, after having examined them with the greatest pleasure. I am naturally curious to see your drawing from "David Copperfield," in order that I may compare it with my own idea. In the meanwhile, I can honestly assure you that I entertain the greatest admiration for your remarkable powers. Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Thursday, Feb. 17th, 1870._ MY DEAR HARRY, I am extremely glad to hear that you have made a good start at the Union. Take any amount of pains about it; open your mouth well and roundly, speak to the last person visible, and give yourself time. Loves from all. Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. W. C. Macready.] _Wednesday, March 2nd, 1870._ MY DEAREST MACREADY, This is to wish you and yours all happiness and prosperity at the well-remembered anniversary to-morrow. You may be sure that loves and happy returns will not be forgotten at _our_ table. I have been getting on very well with my book, and we are having immense audiences at St. James's Hall. Mary has been celebrating the first glimpses of spring by having the measles. She got over the disorder very easily, but a weakness remains behind. Katie is blooming. Georgina is in perfect order, and all send you their very best loves. It gave me true pleasure to have your sympathy with me in the second little speech at Birmingham. I was determined that my Radicalism should not be called in question. The electric wires are not very exact in their reporting, but at all events the sense was there. Ryland, as usual, made all sorts of enquiries about you. With love to dear Mrs. Macready and the noble boy my particular friend, and a hearty embrace to you, I am ever, my dearest Macready, Your most affectionate. [Sidenote: Mr. ----.] OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," _Wednesday, March 9th, 1870._ MY DEAR ----, You make me very uneasy on the subject of your new long story here, by sowing your name broadcast in so many fields at once, and undertaking such an impossible amount of fiction at one time. Just as you are coming on with us, you have another story in progress in "The Gentleman's Magazine," and another announced in "Once a Week." And so far as I know the art we both profess, it cannot be reasonably pursued in this way. I think the short story you are now finishing in these pages obviously marked by traces of great haste and small consideration; and a long story similarly blemished would really do the publication irreparable harm. These considerations are so much upon my mind that I cannot forbear representing them to you, in the hope that they may induce you to take a little more into account the necessity of care and preparation, and some self-denial in the quantity done. I am quite sure that I write fully as much in your interest as in that of "All the Year Round." Believe me, always faithfully yours. [Sidenote: The same.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Friday, March 11th, 1870._ MY DEAR ----, Of course the engagement between us is to continue, and I am sure you know me too well to suppose that I have ever had a thought to the contrary. Your explanation is (as it naturally would be, being yours) manly and honest, and I am both satisfied and hopeful. Ever yours. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Saturday, March 26th, 1870._ MY DEAR KENT, I received both copies of _The Sun_, with the tenderest pleasure and gratification. Everything that I can let you have in aid of the proposed record[33] (which, _of course_, would be far more agreeable to me if done by you than by any other hand), shall be at your service. Dolby has all the figures relating to America, and you shall have for reference the books from which I read. They are afterwards going into Forster's collection.[34] Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Tuesday, March 29th, 1870._ MY DEAR HARRY, Your next Tuesday's subject is a very good one. I would not lose the point that narrow-minded fanatics, who decry the theatre and defame its artists, are absolutely the advocates of depraved and barbarous amusements. For wherever a good drama and a well-regulated theatre decline, some distorted form of theatrical entertainment will infallibly arise in their place. In one of the last chapters of "Hard Times," Mr. Sleary says something to the effect: "People will be entertained thomehow, thquire. Make the betht of uth, and not the wortht." Ever affectionately. [Sidenote: Mr. Shirley Brooks.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Friday, April 1st, 1870._ MY DEAR SHIRLEY BROOKS, I have written to Mr. Low, expressing my regret that I cannot comply with his request, backed as it is by my friend S. B. But I have told him what is perfectly true--that I leave town for the peaceful following of my own pursuits, at the end of next month; that I have excused myself from filling all manner of claims, on the ground that the public engagements I could make for the season were very few and were all made; and that I cannot bear hot rooms when I am at work. I have smoothed this as you would have me smooth it. With your longing for fresh air I can thoroughly sympathise. May you get it soon, and may you enjoy it, and profit by it half as much as I wish! Ever faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Saturday, April 16th, 1870._ MY DEAR FRITH, I shall be happy to go on Wednesday evening, if convenient. You please me with what you say of my new illustrator, of whom I have great hopes. Faithfully yours ever. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] _Monday Morning, April 25th, 1870._ MY DEAR KENT, I received your book[35] with the greatest pleasure, and heartily thank you for it. It is a volume of a highly prepossessing appearance, and a most friendly look. I felt as if I should have taken to it at sight; even (a very large even) though I had known nothing of its contents, or of its author! For the last week I have been most perseveringly and ding-dong-doggedly at work, making headway but slowly. The spring always has a restless influence over me; and I weary, at any season, of this London dining-out beyond expression; and I yearn for the country again. This is my excuse for not having written to you sooner. Besides which, I had a baseless conviction that I should see you at the office last Thursday. Not having done so, I fear you must be worse, or no better? If you _can_ let me have a report of yourself, pray do. [Sidenote: Mrs. Frederick Pollock.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Monday, May 2nd, 1870._ MY DEAR MRS. POLLOCK, Pray tell the illustrious Philip van Artevelde, that I will deal with the nefarious case in question if I can. I am a little doubtful of the practicability of doing so, and frisking outside the bounds of the law of libel. I have that high opinion of the law of England generally, which one is likely to derive from the impression that it puts all the honest men under the diabolical hoofs of all the scoundrels. It makes me cautious of doing right; an admirable instance of its wisdom! I was very sorry to have gone astray from you that Sunday; but as the earlier disciples entertained angels unawares, so the later often miss them haphazard. Your description of La Font's acting is the complete truth in one short sentence: Nature's triumph over art; reversing the copy-book axiom! But the Lord deliver us from Plessy's mechanical ingenuousness!! And your petitioner will ever pray. And ever be, Faithfully yours. [Sidenote: Mrs. E. M. Ward.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Wednesday, May 11th, 1870._ MY DEAR MRS. WARD, I grieve to say that I am literally laid by the heels, and incapable of dining with you to-morrow. A neuralgic affection of the foot, which usually seizes me about twice a year, and which will yield to nothing but days of fomentation and horizontal rest, set in last night, and has caused me very great pain ever since, and will too clearly be no better until it has had its usual time in which to wear itself out. I send my kindest regard to Ward, and beg to be pitied. Believe me, faithfully yours always. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] 5, HYDE PARK PLACE, W., _Tuesday, May 17th, 1870._ MY DEAR KENT, Many, many thanks! It is only my neuralgic foot. It has given me such a sharp twist this time that I have not been able, in its extreme sensitiveness, to put any covering upon it except scalding fomentations. Having viciously bubbled and blistered it in all directions, I hope it now begins to see the folly of its ways. Affectionately ever. P.S.--I hope the Sun shines. [Sidenote: Mrs. Bancroft.] GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT, _Thursday, May 31st, 1870._ MY DEAR MRS. BANCROFT,[36] I am most heartily obliged to you for your kind note, which I received here only last night, having come here from town circuitously to get a little change of air on the road. My sense of your interest cannot be better proved than by my trying the remedy you recommend, and that I will do immediately. As I shall be in town on Thursday, my troubling you to order it would be quite unjustifiable. I will use your name in applying for it, and will report the result after a fair trial. Whether this remedy succeeds or fails as to the neuralgia, I shall always consider myself under an obligation to it for having indirectly procured me the great pleasure of receiving a communication from you; for I hope I may lay claim to being one of the most earnest and delighted of your many artistic admirers. Believe me, faithfully yours. FOOTNOTES: [32] On the death of his second wife. [33] Of the Readings. The intention was carried out. Mr. Kent's book, "Charles Dickens as a Reader," was published in 1872. [34] No doubt Charles Dickens intended to add the Reading Books to the legacy of his MSS. to Mr. Forster. But he did not do so, therefore the "Readings" are not a part of the "Forster Collection" at the South Kensington Museum. [35] A new collective edition of "Kent's Poems," dedicated to his cousin, Colonel Kent, of the 77th Regiment. [36] Miss Marie Wilton. TWO LAST LETTERS. [Sidenote: Mr. William Charles Kent.] [Illustration: Gad's Hill Place, Higham by Rochester, Kent.[37] HW: Wednesday Eighth June 1870 HW: Dear Kent Tomorrow is a very bad day for me to make a call, as, in addition to my usual office business, I have a mass of accounts to settle with Wills. But I hope I may be ready for you at 3 o'clock. If I can't be--why, then I shan't be. You must really get rid of those Opal enjoyments. They are too overpowering: "These violent delights have violent ends." I think it was a father of your churches who made the wise remark to a young gentleman who got up early (or stayed out late) at Verona? Ever affectionately Signature: ChD] [Sidenote: Mr. John M. Makeham.] =Gad's Hill Place,= =Higham by Rochester, Kent.= [Illustration: HW: Wednesday Eighth June 1870 Dear Sir It would be quite inconceivable I think--but for your letter--that any reasonable reader could possibly attach a scriptural reference to a passage in a book of mine, reproducing a much abused social figure of speech, impressed into all sorts of service on all sorts of inappropriate occasions, without the faintest connexion of it with its original source. I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour; because I feel it; and because I re-wrote that history for my children--every one of whom knew it from having it repeated to them--long before they could read, and almost as soon as they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the house tops Faithfully Yours, Charles Dickens John M. Markham Esq.] All through this spring in London, Charles Dickens had been ailing in health, and it was remarked by many friends that he had a weary look, and was "aged" and altered. But he was generally in good spirits, and his family had no uneasiness about him, relying upon the country quiet and comparative rest at Gad's Hill to have their usual influence in restoring his health and strength. On the 2nd June he attended a private play at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Freake, where his two daughters were among the actresses. The next day he went back to Gad's Hill. His daughter Kate (whose home was there at all times when she chose, and almost always through the summer months) went down on Sunday, the 5th June, for a day's visit, to see the "great improvement of the conservatory." Her father laughingly assured her she had now seen "the last" improvement at Gad's Hill. At this time he was tolerably well, but she remarked to her sister and aunt how strangely he was tired, and what a curious grey colour he had in his face after a very short walk on that Sunday afternoon. However, he seemed quite himself again in the evening. The next day his daughter Kate went back, accompanied by her sister, who was to pay her a short visit, to London. Charles Dickens was very hard at work on the sixth number of "Edwin Drood." On the Monday and Tuesday he was well, but he was unequal to much exercise. His last walk was one of his greatest favourites--through Cobham Park and Wood--on the afternoon of Tuesday. On the morning of Wednesday, the 8th (one of the loveliest days of a lovely summer), he was very well; in excellent spirits about his book, of which he said he _must_ finish his number that day--the next (Thursday) being the day of his weekly visit to "All the Year Round" office. Therefore, he would write all day in the Châlet, and take no walk or drive until the evening. In the middle of the day he came to the house for an hour's rest, and smoked a cigar in the conservatory--out of which new addition to the house he was taking the greatest personal enjoyment--and seemed perfectly well, and exceedingly cheerful and hopeful. When he came again to the house, about an hour before the time fixed for the early dinner, he seemed very tired, silent, and absorbed. But this was so usual with him after a day of engrossing work, that it caused no alarm or surprise to his sister-in-law--the only member of his household who happened to be at home. He wrote some letters--among them, these last letters which we give--in the library of the house, and also arranged many trifling business matters, with a view to his departure for London the next morning. He was to be accompanied, on his return at the end of the week, by Mr. Fildes, to introduce the "new illustrator" to the neighbourhood in which many of the scenes of this last book of Charles Dickens, as of his first, were laid. It was not until they were seated at the dinner-table that a striking change in the colour and expression of his face startled his sister-in-law, and on her asking him if he was ill, he said, "Yes, very ill; I have been very ill for the last hour." But on her expressing an intention of sending instantly for a doctor, he stopped her, and said: "No, he would go on with dinner, and go afterwards to London." And then he made an effort to struggle against the fit that was fast coming on him, and talked, but incoherently, and soon very indistinctly. It being now evident that he _was_ ill, and very seriously ill, his sister-in-law begged him to come to his own room before she sent off for medical help. "Come and lie down," she entreated. "Yes, on the ground," he said, very distinctly--these were the last words he spoke--and he slid from her arm, and fell upon the floor. The servants brought a couch into the dining-room, where he was laid. A messenger was despatched for Mr. Steele, the Rochester doctor, and with a telegram to his doctor in London, and to his daughters. This was a few minutes after six o'clock. His daughters arrived, with Mr. Frank Beard, this same evening. His eldest son the next morning, and his son Henry and his sister Letitia in the evening of the 9th--too late, alas! All through the night, Charles Dickens never opened his eyes, or showed a sign of consciousness. In the afternoon of the 9th, Dr. Russell Reynolds arrived at Gad's Hill, having been summoned by Mr. Frank Beard to meet himself and Mr. Steele. But he could only confirm their hopeless verdict, and made his opinion known with much kind sympathy, to the family, before returning to London. Charles Dickens remained in the same unconscious state until the evening of this day, when, at ten minutes past six, the watchers saw a shudder pass over him, heard him give a deep sigh, saw one tear roll down his cheek, and he was gone from them. And as they saw the dark shadow steal across his calm, beautiful face, not one among them--could they have been given such a power--would have recalled his sweet spirit back to earth. As his family were aware that Charles Dickens had a wish to be buried near Gad's Hill, arrangements were made for his burial in the pretty churchyard of Shorne, a neighbouring village, of which he was very fond. But this intention was abandoned in consequence of a pressing request from the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral that his remains might be placed there. A grave was prepared and everything arranged, when it was made known to the family, through Dean Stanley, that there was a general and very earnest desire that Charles Dickens should find his resting-place in Westminster Abbey. To such a fitting tribute to his memory they could make no possible objection, although it was with great regret that they relinquished the idea of laying him in a place so closely identified with his life and his works. His name, notwithstanding, is associated with Rochester, a tablet to his memory having been placed by his executors on the wall of Rochester Cathedral. With regard to Westminster Abbey, his family only stipulated that the funeral might be made as private as possible, and that the words of his will, "I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," should be religiously adhered to. And so they were. The solemn service in the vast cathedral being as private as the most thoughtful consideration could make it. The family of Charles Dickens were deeply grateful to all in authority who so carried out his wishes. And more especially to Dean Stanley and to the (late) Lady Augusta Stanley, for the tender sympathy shown by them to the mourners on this day, and also on Sunday, the 19th, when the Dean preached his beautiful funeral sermon. As during his life Charles Dickens's fondness for air, light, and gay colours amounted almost to a passion, so when he lay dead in the home he had so dearly loved, these things were not forgotten. The pretty room opening into the conservatory (from which he had never been removed since his seizure) was kept bright with the most beautiful of all kinds of flowers, and flooded with the summer sun: "And nothing stirred in the room. The old, old fashion. The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion--death! "Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of immortality!" FOOTNOTES: [37] This letter has lately been presented by Mr. Charles Kent to the British Museum. INDEX. A'Beckett, Gilbert, i. 134 Actors, Dickens a friend to poor, ii. 134 Affidavit, a facetious, i. 101 Agassiz, Professor, ii. 226, 309 Agate, John, ii. 136; letter to, ii. 154 Ainsworth, W. H., letters to, i. 43, 75, 92 Alison, Sir Archibald, i. 170 "All the Year Round," commencement of, ii. 83; "The Uncommercial Traveller" in, ii. 107; Christmas Numbers of: "The Haunted House," ii. 84; "A Message from the Sea," ii. 108, 137; "Tom Tiddler's Ground," ii. 136; "Somebody's Luggage," ii. 171; "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," ii. 187; "Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy," ii. 209, 210; "Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions," ii. 224, 239, 246; "Mugby Junction," ii. 244, 265; "No Thoroughfare," ii. 268, 300, 327, 332, 334, 338, 350, 356, 361, 362, 384; and see ii. 386, and see Charles Dickens as an Editor America, feeling for Dickens in the backwoods of, i. 40, 41; Dickens's first visit to, i. 53; his welcome in, i. 59; his opinion of, i. 60-64; freedom of opinion in, i. 61; Dickens's levées in, i. 66; change of temperature in, i. 66; hotel charges in, i. 67; midnight rambles in New York, i. 67; descriptions of Niagara, i. 69, 70; ii. 372, 377; a maid's views on Niagara, i. 72; copyright in, i. 71, 73, 74; Dickens's tribute to Mrs. Trollope's book on, i. 81; press-ridden, i. 97; absence of quiet in, i. 98; criticisms of Dickens in, i. 151; the great war in, ii. 142, 143; feeling between England and, ii. 240; Dickens's second visit to--the journey, ii. 302-306; Dickens's letters on, ii. 306-382; fires in, ii. 317, 320; treatment of luggage in, ii. 321; drinks in, ii. 329, 363; literary piracy in, ii. 332; walking-match between Dolby and Osgood in, ii. 346, 352, 353, 360, 361, 364, 366, 377; changes and improvements in since Dickens's first visit, ii. 348, 374; the negroes in, ii. 349; personal descriptions of Dickens in, ii. 369; travelling in, ii. 375; and see Readings "American Notes," publication of, i. 54 Andersen, Hans Christian, ii. 3 "Animal Magnetism," tag to, written by Dickens, i. 238 Anne, Mrs. Dickens's maid, i. 72, 414; ii. 18, 25, 28, 343 "Apprentices, The Tour of the Two Idle," ii. 5, 32, 33 "Arabian Nights," a mistake in the, i. 88, 89 Armatage, Isaac, ii. 391 Armstrong, the Misses, letter to, ii. 175; and see ii. 176 Astley's Theatre, description of a clown at, i. 116 Austin, Henry, i. 240; ii. 135, 157; and see Letters Austin, Mrs. Henry, ii. 447; letters to, ii. 154, 180, 384 Author, the highest reward of an, i. 41 Autobiography, a concise, of Dickens, i. 437 Autograph of Dickens in 1833, i. 2; Dickens leaves his in Shakespeare's room, i. 13; of Boz, i. 43; of Dickens as Bobadil, i. 195; facsimile of Dickens's handwriting in 1856, i. 421; facsimile letters of Dickens written the day before his death, ii. 443-445 Babbage, Charles, letters to, i. 86, 87, 186 Ballantyne, ii. 415 Bancroft, Mrs., letter to, ii. 441 Banks, G., i. 273; letter to, i. 296 Barber, Dickens's gardener, ii. 102 Barker, Dr. Fordyce, ii. 378, 405 "Barnaby Rudge" written and published, i. 36; Dickens's descriptions of the illustrations of: the raven, i. 38; the locksmith's house, i. 39; rioters in The Maypole, i. 45; scene in the ruins of the Warren, i. 46; abduction of Dolly Varden, i. 48; Lord George Gordon in the Tower, the duel, frontispiece, i. 50; Hugh taken to gaol, i. 51 "Battle of Life, The," dedication of, i. 147, 157; Dickens superintends rehearsals of the play of, i. 163, 165, 167; sale of, i. 166, 176; reception of the play of, i. 167 Baylis, Mr., ii. 170; letter to, ii. 179 Beadle, a, in office, ii. 134 Beard, Frank, ii. 182, 405, 421, 434, 447 Beaucourt, M., i. 297, 357, 439 Bedstead, a German, i. 128 Beecher, Ward, ii. 341 Begging letters, Dickens's answers to, i. 148-150 Belgians, the King of the, ii. 432 Benzon, Miss Lily, letter to, ii. 258 Berry, one of Dickens's readings men, ii. 54, 159, 160 Bicknell, Henry, i. 215; letter to, i. 229 Biographers, Dickens on, i. 190; his opinion of John Forster as a biographer, i. 188-191 Birthday wishes, i. 51 "Black-eyed Susan," Dickens as T. P. Cooke in, i. 113; a new version of, i. 114 Blackwood, Mr., ii. 165 Blair, General, ii. 355 Blanchard, Laman, letter to, i. 99 "Bleak House," commenced, i. 241; publication of, i. 272; Dickens's opinion of, i. 279; circulation of, i. 289, 309, 317 Blessington, Lady, i. 171 Bobadil, Captain, Dickens plays, i. 134; Dickens's remarks on, i. 144; a letter after, i. 195 Book-backs, Dickens's imitation, i. 265, 266 Book Clubs, established, i. 94; Dickens on, i. 104 Boucicault, Dion, ii. 260, 261 Boulogne, Dickens at, i. 271, 297, 304-312, 341, 414, 439-448; a Shakespearian performance at, i. 308; _en fête_, i. 315; illuminations at, on the occasion of the Prince Consort's visit, i. 362; fire at, i. 364; condition of, during the Crimean war, i. 365; letters descriptive of, i. 305, 306, 309, 312, 357, 358, 360, 372 Bouncer, Mrs., Miss Dickens's dog, ii. 109, 126, 189, 356 Bow Street Runners, ii. 178 Boxall, Sir William, i. 233, 237 Boyle, Captain Cavendish, ii. 407 Boyle, Miss Mary, i. 211, 214, 227, 414; ii. 123, 145, 315, 406; and see Letters Breach of Promise, a new sort of, i. 179 Breakfast, a Yorkshire, i. 9 Broadstairs, Dickens at, i. 4, 6, 17, 28, 36, 53, 134, 170, 185, 213, 240; ii. 84, 99; description of lodgings at, i. 33; amusements of, i. 180, 182; size of Fort House at, i. 254 Bromley, Sir Richard, ii. 126 Brookfield, Mrs., letter to, ii. 249 Brookfield, The Rev. W., letters to, ii. 199, 200 Brooks, Shirley, ii. 407; letters to, ii. 423, 438 Brougham, Lord, i. 182; ii. 144 Browne, H. K., i. 6, 13 Buckstone, J. B., i. 360 Burnett, Mrs., i. 185 Cabin, a, on board ship, i. 56 Campbell, Lord, ii, 144 Capital punishment, Dickens's views on, i. 209 Carlisle, the Earl of, letters to, i. 253, 281; ii. 12, 118, 157 Carlyle, Thomas, ii. 112 Cartwright, Samuel, ii. 326; letter to, ii. 348 Castlereagh, Lord, i. 245 Cat-hunting, i. 449 Cattermole, George, i. 42, 143; ii. 327, 383; and see Letters Cattermole, Mrs., letters to, ii. 383, 385 Céleste, Madame, ii. 106 Cerjat, M. de, i. 147; ii. 406; and see Letters Chambers, Robert, ii. 167, 434 Chancery, Dickens on the Court of, i. 450 Chapman and Hall, Messrs., i. 3; letter to, i. 55 Chappell, Messrs., ii. 244, 245, 267, 309, 326, 405 Charities, Dickens's sufferings from public, ii. 47 Children, stories of, i. 223, 365, 420; ii. 196, 359, 423 Childs, Mr., ii. 337, 405 "Chimes, The," written, i. 95; an attack on cant, i. 118, 129; Dickens's opinion of, i. 129, 133; Dickens gives a private reading of, i. 133 Chorley, H. F., ii. 338, 350 "Christmas Carol, The," publication of, i. 85; criticisms on, i. 99 Christmas greetings, i. 167 Church, Dickens on the, ii. 221; service on board ship, ii. 348; Dickens on the Romish, ii. 409, 410 Circumlocution, Dickens on, ii. 241, 270 Clarke, John, letter to, ii. 418 Cockspur Street Society, the, i. 85-87 Cold, effects of a, i. 92, 93; remedy for a, i. 168 Colden, David, i. 64 Collins, C. A., ii. 84, 100, 113, 221, 242, 387, 410 Collins, Wilkie, i. 241, 272, 297, 332, 359, 376, 385, 388, 413, 414, 447; ii. 33, 84, 108, 170, 268, 292; and see Letters Comedy, Mr. Webster's offer for a prize, Dickens an imaginary competitor, i. 86, 90 Compton, Mrs., letter to, ii. 22 Conjuring feats, i. 96; and see ii. 243 Cooke, T. P., i. 113; ii. 4; letter to, ii. 21 Copyright, i. 13; Dickens's struggles to secure English, in America, i. 71, 73, 74 Costello, Dudley, i. 241; letters to, i. 104, 205 Cottage, a cheap, i. 18 Coutts, Miss, i. 410 Covent Garden Theatre, Macready retires from management of, i. 18; ruins of, i. 430; a scene at, ii. 133 "Cricket on the Hearth, The," i. 135, 145 Croker, J. Crofton, i. 272; letter to, i. 275 Cruikshank, George, i. 170 Cunningham, Mrs., ii. 423 Cunningham, Peter, i. 186, 407; letters to, i. 195, 270, 312, 356 Dacres, Sir Sydney, ii. 329 _Daily News, The_, started, i. 135 Dallas, Mrs., letters to, ii. 195, 434 Dallas, Mr., ii. 235 "David Copperfield," dedication of, i. 147; purpose of Little Emily in, i. 211; success of, i. 211; reading of, i. 377, 382; Dickens's favourite work, i. 382; and see i. 204, 221, 227, 279 Deane, F. H., letter to, i. 68 Delane, John, i. 298; ii. 425; letter to, i. 314 De la Rue, Mr., ii. 210 Devonshire, the Duke of, letters to, i. 437, 443, 457 Devrient, Emil, i. 277 Dickens, Charles, at Furnival's Inn, i. 1; his marriage, i. 1; employed as a parliamentary reporter, i. 1; spends his honeymoon at Chalk, Kent, i. 1; employed on _The Morning Chronicle_, i. 2; removes to Doughty Street, i. 4; writes for the stage, i. 4, 5, 7, 16, 17; his visit to the Yorkshire schools, i. 6; at Twickenham Park, i. 6; his visits to Broadstairs, see Broadstairs; his visit to Stratford-on-Avon and Kenilworth, i. 6, 12; in Shakespeare's room, i. 13; elected at the Athenæum Club, i. 12; removes to Devonshire Terrace, i. 17; portraits of, see Portraits; visits to Scotland, i. 36, ii. 39, and see ii. 395; personal feeling of for his characters, i. 36, 37, 42; declines to enter Parliament, i. 37, 44; ii. 389; public dinners to, i. 36, 53, 273; ii. 268, 301, 404, 406, 417, 419, 420; an enemy of cant, i. 88, 118, 129; visits of to America, see America; expedition of to Cornwall, i. 54; his travels in Italy, see Italy; political opinions of, i. 62, 63, 88, 104; fancy signatures to letters of, i. 91, 146, 152, 181, 206, 237, 425; ii. 195; takes the chair at the opening of the Liverpool Mechanics' Institute, i. 94, and see i. 100-102; his theatrical performances, see Theatrical Performances; effects of work on, i. 121,; ii. 248, 266, 325; _The Daily News_, started by, i. 135; his visits to Lausanne and Switzerland, i. 147, 297, and see Switzerland; his visits to Paris, see Paris; as a stage, manager, i. 163, 167, 231, 232, 237; ii. 26; at Chester Place, Regent's Park, i. 169; takes the chair at the opening of the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, and of the Glasgow Athenæum, i. 170; at Brighton, i. 185, 213; at Bonchurch, i, 204; purchases Tavistock House, i. 240, and see Tavistock House; as an editor, i. 246, 259, 269, 270, 285; ii. 127, 217, 262, 286, 292; his readings, see Readings; illnesses of, i. 14, 297; ii. 404, 405, 421, 446; in America, ii. 338, 341, 347, 353, 355, 360, 365, 373, 377, 380, 381; his visits to Boulogne, see Boulogne; presentation of plate to, at Birmingham, i. 348; purchases Gad's Hill, i. 377, 414, and see Gad's Hill; delivers a speech on Administrative Reform, i. 377; at Folkestone, i. 377, 378; restlessness of, when at work, i. 402, 425; tour of, in the North, ii. 5, 29-32; his kindly criticisms of young writers, ii. 16, 34, 267, 277, for other criticisms see i. 152, 188; ii. 14, 43, 215, 249; elected a member of the Birmingham Institute, ii. 34; religious views of, ii. 82, 202, 221, 394, 403, 444; visit of, to Cornwall, ii. 108; at Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, ii. 135; visits Lord Lytton at Knebworth, ii. 136; at Hyde Park Gate South, ii. 170; at 57, Gloucester Place, Hyde Park, ii. 208; at Somer's Place, Hyde Park, ii. 224; in the Staplehurst accident, ii. 224; at Southwick Place, Hyde Park, ii. 224; his energy, ii. 291; one of the secrets of the success of, ii. 357, 392; the Midland Institute at Birmingham opened by, ii. 406, and see ii. 427; his last speech, at the Royal Academy dinner, ii. 432; his interview with the Queen, ii. 432; attends a levée of the Prince of Wales, ii. 432; his last illness, ii. 446; his death, ii. 448; funeral of, ii. 448, 449; and see Letters of Dickens, Mrs. Charles, marriage of, i. 1; visit of, to America, i. 53; at Rome, i. 135; accident to, i. 215; at Malvern, i. 239; present to, at Birmingham, i. 298; and see Letters Dickens, Charles, jun., birth of, i. 4; nickname of, i. 76; at Eton, i. 212, 240, 243, 255, 258; at Leipsic, i. 297, 310, 319; at Barings', i. 455; marriage of, ii. 208; on "All the Year Round," ii. 406, 410, 424; and see i. 169, 233, 237, 243, 255, 258, 290, 347, 378, 405, 426; ii. 88, 114, 123, 140, 145, 176, 447; letters to, ii. 310, 338 Dickens, Kate, nickname of, i. 76; marriage of, ii. 107, 113; illness of, ii. 266, 271; and see ii. 39, 75, 77, 84, 221, 410, 436, 446; letters to, i. 178; ii. 99 Dickens, Mamie, nickname of, i. 76; illnesses of, i. 363, 436; accident to, ii. 129; and see ii. 39, 49, 55, 75, 77, 84, 87, 114, 116, 120, 145, 179, 234, 411, 447, and Letters Dickens, Walter, nickname of, i. 76; goes to India, ii. 19, 21; attached to the 42nd Highlanders, ii. 114, 176; death of, ii. 208, 212; and see i. 268, 314, 378, 443; ii. 4 Dickens, Frank, nickname of, i. 126; letter of, to Dickens, ii. 93; in India, ii. 208, 212; and see ii. 114, 131, 140, 177 Dickens, Alfred, at Wimbledon School, ii. 122; settles in Australia, ii. 327; and see ii. 177, 371 Dickens, Sydney, birth of, i. 169; nickname of, i. 170; death of, i. 171; story of, i. 223; a naval cadet, ii. 125, 126, 145, 167; on board H.M.S. _Orlando_, ii. 169; and see i. 363; ii. 114, 118, 122, 177, 202, 236, 260, 296, 430 Dickens, Henry, entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, ii. 327; wins a scholarship, ii. 424, 430; and see i. 363; ii. 177, 190, 254, 255, 329, 371, 389, 395, 406, 410, 447; letters to, ii. 356, 392, 435, 438 Dickens, Edward, nicknames of, i. 322, 338; goes to Australia, ii. 327, 329; Dickens's love for, ii. 389-391; and see i. 353, 359, 365, 403, 420, 426, 439; ii. 53, 76, 79, 92, 95, 153, 190, 199; letter to, ii. 402 Dickens, Dora, birth of, i. 213; death of, i. 240 Dickens, Alfred, sen., i. 184, 410; ii. 199 Dickens, Mrs. Augustus, ii. 418 Dickens, Fanny, see Mrs. Burnett Dickens, Frederick, i. 9 Dickens, John, i. 240, 437; ii. 240 Dickens, Mrs. John, ii. 333 Dickens, Letitia, see Mrs. Henry Austin Dickenson, Captain, ii. 224, 232 Dickson, David, letter to, i. 89 Diezman, S. A., letter to, i. 32 Dilke, C. W., ii. 5; letter to, ii. 12 Dillon, C., ii. 42 Dinner, a search for a, i. 326; ladies at public dinners, i. 103 Dogs, Dickens's, i. 67, 109, 110; ii. 50, 96, 101; ii. 203, 237, 242, 245, 264, 269; a plague of, i. 292; stories of, i. 109, 352, 354, 455 Dolby, George, ii. 245, 252-255, 267, 273, 280, 295, 296, 308, 310, 311, 317-323, 328, 330, 335, 336, 340, 345-347, 352-360, 363, 367, 381 "Dombey and Son," i. 147; success of, i. 156, 176; sale of, i. 162 D'Orsay, Comte, i. 171, 244 Driver, Dickens's estimate of himself as a, i. 2 Drury Lane Theatre, the saloon at, i. 37; suggestions for the saloon at, i. 52, 53 Dufferin, Lord, ii. 419 Dwarf, the Tartar, ii. 255 Earthquake, an, in England, ii. 206 Edinburgh on a Sunday, ii. 395 Education, Dickens an advocate of, for the people, i. 104 "Edwin Drood," ii. 407, 431, 432, 446 Eeles, Mr., letters to, i. 265, 269 Egg, Augustus, i. 170, 172, 226, 297, 320, 332; ii. 198 Eliot, Sir John, Dickens on Forster's life of, ii. 215 Elliotson, Dr., i. 37, 149, ii. 99 Elton, Mr., i. 85, 92 Elwin, Rev. W., ii. 136, 151 Ely, Miss, letter to, i. 153 Emerson, Mr., ii. 306 Emery, Mr., i. 429 England, state of, in 1855, i. 391; politically, i. 406 Epitaph, Dickens's, on a little child, i. 68 Executions, Dickens on public, i. 209, 212 Exhibition, an infant school at the, i. 257 Eytinge, Mr., ii. 405 Fairy Tales, Dickens on, i. 307 "Faust," Gounod's, ii. 191, 193 Fechter, Charles, ii. 171, 177, 187, 193, 201, 219, 270, 386; and see Letters Felton, Mr., ii. 85 Ferguson, Sir William, ii. 246, 247 Féval, Paul, ii. 183, 192 Fielding, Henry, i. 394 Fields, Cyrus W., ii. 85, 308, 344, 361, 364, 379, 405 Fields, Mrs., ii. 306, 308, 319, 344, 361, 364, 367, 379, 405 Fildes, S. L., ii. 432, 447; letter to, ii. 435 Finlay, F. D., ii. 406; letters to, ii. 297, 389, 408 Fitzgerald, Mrs., ii. 285 Fitzgerald, Percy, ii. 187, 397; and see Letters Flunkeydom, scholastic, ii. 68 Forgues, M., i. 415, 421 Forster, Miss, ii. 327 Forster, John, i. 7, 10, 134, 143, 225, 240, 268, 428; ii. 108, 130, 265; and see Letters Franklin, Sir John, i. 373 Freake, Mr. and Mrs., ii. 446 French portraits of the English, i. 175 Friday, Dickens's lucky day, i. 414, 429 Frith, W. P., ii. 84, 93, 385, 418; letters to, i. 79; ii. 439 Frost, the great, of 1861, ii. 139 Funerals, Dickens on state, i. 290; ii. 385 Gad's Hill, purchase of, i. 377, 378, 414; Dickens takes possession of, ii. 3; his childish impressions of, ii. 8; improvements in, ii. 107, 373, 406, 446; sports at, ii. 205; cricket club at, ii. 356; letters concerning, i. 384, 410, 429; ii. 15, 18, 25, 28, 49, 106, 119, 227 Gaskell, Mrs., i. 214; and see Letters Germany, esteem felt for Dickens in, i. 32 Ghost, stalking a, ii. 131 Gibson, M., i. 315; ii. 121 Gibson, Mr. and Mrs. Milner, ii. 431 Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E., ii. 401 Goldsmith, Oliver, Dickens on Forster's Life of, i. 188; on the works of, i. 380 Gordon, Andrew, ii. 131 Gordon, Mr. Sheriff, ii. 164 "Great Expectations," commenced, ii. 108, 136; letters concerning, ii. 128, 133, 140, 142, 143, 151 Grief, the perversity of, exemplified, i. 18 Grimaldi, Life of, edited by Dickens, i. 4 Guild of Literature and Art, i. 239; theatrical performances in aid of the, i. 239, 241, 248, 252, 268, 271; and see ii. 41 Haldimand, Mr., i. 147, 169, 212, 380; letters to, i. 157, 254 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, i. 59 "Hard Times," i. 341; satire of, explained, i. 349; letters concerning, i. 355, 371 Harley, J. P., letters to, i. 5, 23 Harness, Rev. W., ii. 253; letters to, i. 37, 76, 361 "Haunted Man, The," i. 170, 185, 241; subjects for illustrations in, described, i. 200, 201; dramatisation of, i. 203 Headland, Mr., ii. 135, 149, 158, 160 Helps, Sir Arthur, ii. 432 Henderson, Mrs., letter to, ii. 293 Hewett, Captain, i. 57 "History of England, The Child's," i. 297 Hogarth, Mary, i. 4, 9 Hogarth, Georgina, i. 425; ii. 50, 114, 145, 179, 202, 408, 436; and see Letters Hogge, Mrs., letter to, ii. 46 Holland, Lady, i. 11 Holmes, Mr., ii. 306 Home, longings for, i. 64, 70 Hood, Tom, i. 287; letter to, i. 80 Horne, Mrs., letter to, i. 456 Horne, R. H., letter to, i. 93 Hospital, a dinner at a, i. 88; Great Ormond Street, ii. 40, 46 Houghton, Lord, ii. 432; letter to, i. 41 "Household Words," i. 148; scheme of, i. 216; suggested titles for, i. 219; success of, i. 221; Christmas numbers of, i. 241, 288; "The Golden Mary," i. 414; ii. 11, "A House to Let," ii. 40; incorporated with "All the Year Round," ii. 83; letters concerning, i. 219, 221, 250, 285, 286, 291-293, 295, 299, 301, 334, 335, 353, 423, 452; ii. 68 Hughes, Master Hastings, letter to, i. 14 Hulkes, Mrs., ii. 224, 315, 329; letter to, ii. 232 Hullah, John, i. 5; ii. 131 Humphery, Mr. and Mrs., afterwards Sir W. and Lady, ii. 187 Hunt, Leigh, ii. 407 Hutchinson, John, ii. 380 _Illustrated London News_, offers to Dickens from, i. 150 Illustrations of Dickens's works, his descriptions for, i. 38-40, 45, 46, 50, 51, 200-203; ii. 237 Impeachment of the Five Members, Dickens on Forster's, ii. 14 Ireland, a dialogue in, ii. 61; feeling for Dickens in, ii. 65; Fenianism in, ii. 282-286; proposed banquet to Dickens in, ii. 406; Dickens on the Established Church in, ii. 409; and see ii. 57, 60, 64 Italy, Dickens's first visit to, i. 94; the sky of, i. 106; the colouring of, i. 106; a sunset in, i. 106; twilight in, i. 107; frescoes in, i. 107; churches in, i. 108; fruit in, i. 109; climate of, i. 111; a coastguard in, i. 116; Dickens at Albaro, i. 105-117; at Genoa, i. 120-122, 134, 321; at Venice and Verona, i. 119-121, 337; at Naples, i. 134-141, 322; an ascent of Vesuvius, i. 137-141; at Rome, i. 134, 135, 325-333; Dickens on the unity of, ii. 84, 89, 90, 140, 211; and see i. 297, 346 Jamaica, the insurrection in, ii. 241 Jeffrey, Lord, i. 184, 218 Jerrold, Douglas, i. 134, 225, 268, 390; ii. 3, 4, 19; and see Letters Jews, Dickens's friendly feeling for, ii. 204, 223, 280 Joachim, Joseph, ii. 413 John, Dickens's manservant, ii. 54, 56, 57, 72, 153, 187, 188, 255 Joll, Miss, letter to, i. 209 Jones, Walter, letter to, ii. 232 Keeley, Mrs., ii. 417 Keeley, Robert, i. 165; letter to, i. 105 Kelly, Miss, i. 302, 303 Kelly, one of Dickens's readings men, ii. 305, 306, 342 Kemble, Fanny, ii. 344, 346 Kent, W. Charles, i. 186; ii. 225, 268, 407; and see Letters Kinkel, Dr., i. 230 Knight, Charles, i. 94; ii. 208; and see Letters Knowles, Sheridan, i. 214; letter to, i. 215 "Lady of Lyons, The," ii. 298 La Font, ii. 440 Lamartine, i. 187 Landor, Walter Savage, i. 268, 337; ii. 66; and see Letters Landseer, Edwin, letter to, i. 103 Landseer, Tom, i. 27 Lansdowne, Lord, i. 275 Law, Dickens's opinion of English, ii. 440 Layard, A. H., i. 377; ii. 108; letters to, i. 390, 391 Leclercq, Miss, ii. 246 Lectures, Dickens on public, i. 97 Leech, John, i. 134, 186, 225, 226, 239 Le Gros, Mr., i. 140, 332 Lehmann, Mrs., ii. 39, 75; and see Letters Lehmann, F., ii. 39, 75 Lemaître, M., i. 386 Lemon, Mark, i. 134, 186, 225, 226, 376, 390; and see Letters Lemon, Mrs., i. 419 Léotard, ii. 142 LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS TO: Agate, John, ii. 154 Ainsworth, W. H., i. 43, 75, 92 Anonymous, i. 277; ii. 276 Armstrong, the Misses, ii. 175 Austin, Henry, i. 2, 69-73, 76, 262-264, 266, 361; ii. 18, 25, 28 Austin, Mrs., ii. 154, 180, 384 Babbage, Charles, i. 86, 87, 186 Bancroft, Mrs., ii. 441 Banks, G., i. 296 Baylis, Mr., ii. 179 Benzon, Miss, ii. 258 Bicknell, H., i. 229 Blanchard, Laman, i. 99 Boyle, Miss, i. 224, 225, 227, 245, 265, 279, 345, 381, 423; ii. 10, 132, 157, 169, 186, 245, 315, 411 Brookfield, Mrs., ii. 249 Brookfield, Rev. W., ii. 199, 200 Brooks, Shirley, ii. 423, 438 Carlisle, the Earl of, i. 253, 281; ii. 12, 118, 157 Cartwright, Samuel, ii. 348 Cattermole, Mrs., ii. 383, 385 Cattermole, George, i. 22, 28-30, 31, 33-36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45-48, 50, 51, 81, 143 Cerjat, M. de, i. 161, 210, 346, 378; ii. 7, 48, 86, 113, 138, 176, 200, 220, 240, 268, 387, 409 Chapman and Hall, i. 55 Clarke, John, ii. 418 Collins, Wilkie, i. 294, 358, 362, 397, 400, 403, 419, 437, 448; ii. 40, 67, 101, 110, 129, 146, 182, 198, 209, 332, 397 Compton, Mrs., ii. 22 Cooke, T. P., ii. 21 Costello, Dudley, i. 104, 205 Croker, J. Crofton, i. 275 Cunningham, Peter, i. 195, 270, 312, 356 Dallas, Mrs., ii. 195, 434 Deane, F. H., i. 68 Delane, John, i. 314 Devonshire, the Duke of, i. 437, 443, 457 Dickens, Mrs. Charles, i. 12, 100, 123, 127, 130, 132, 165, 166, 206, 223, 244, 249, 267, 330, 406, 433 Dickens, Charles, ii. 310, 338 Dickens, Edward, ii. 402 Dickens, Henry, ii. 356, 392, 435, 438 Dickens, Miss Kate, i. 178; ii. 99 Dickens, Miss, i. 176, 178, 182, 199, 205, 453; ii. 52, 53, 56, 63, 72, 78, 95, 99, 124, 150, 161, 163, 165, 188, 190, 243, 252, 254, 256, 273, 275, 276, 278, 279, 283, 285, 299, 302, 306, 313, 316, 321, 324, 337, 341, 343, 350, 351, 354, 363, 366, 372, 377, 380, 389, 391, 399, 412, 415, 421, 426 Dickson, David, i. 89 Diezman, S. A., i. 32 Dilke, C. W., ii. 12 Eeles, Mr., i. 265, 269 Ely, Miss, i. 153 Fechter, Charles, ii. 183, 185, 191, 260, 297, 361, 368, 390 Fildes, S. L., ii. 435 Finlay, F. D., ii. 297, 389, 408 Fitzgerald, Percy, ii. 203, 217, 234, 237, 247, 263, 293, 294 Forster, John, i. 167, 188, 393; ii. 14, 42, 76, 97, 111, 128, 142, 215 Frith, W. P., i. 79; ii. 439 Gaskell, Mrs., i. 216, 269, 270, 292, 293, 301, 355, 360, 381 Haldimand, Mr., i. 157 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, i. 59 Harley, J. P., i. 5, 23 Harness, Rev. W., i. 37, 76, 361 Henderson, Mrs., ii. 293 Hogarth, Catherine, i. 3 Hogarth, Miss, i. 135, 177, 183, 319, 320, 322, 325, 337, 359, 385, 426, 428, 429, 435; ii. 28, 31, 33, 51, 55, 58, 61, 65, 70, 74, 75, 79, 126, 132, 137, 151, 152, 156, 158, 162, 165, 172-174, 190, 206, 248, 251, 253, 255, 257, 272, 274, 277, 279, 281, 282, 284-286, 295, 298, 303, 304, 307, 315, 317, 319, 327, 330, 334, 341, 345, 353, 358, 360, 364, 370, 371, 379, 391, 392, 396, 398, 400, 413-419, 421 Hogge, Mrs., ii. 46 Hood, Tom, i. 80 Horne, Mrs., i. 456 Horne, R. H., i. 93 Hughes, Master, i. 14 Hulkes, Mrs., ii. 232 Jerrold, Douglas, i. 87, 90, 118, 154, 427 Jewish Lady, a, ii. 204, 223, 280 Joll, Miss, i. 209 Jones, Walter, ii. 232 Keeley, Robert, i. 105 Kent, W. Charles, i. 188, 461; ii. 225, 239, 246, 299, 394, 429, 437, 439, 441, 443 Knight, Charles, i. 104, 152, 218, 259, 277, 280, 349, 351; ii. 195, 212 Knowles, Sheridan, i. 215 Landor, Walter Savage, i. 157, 230, 313, 343, 441 Landseer, Edwin, i. 103 Layard, A. H., i. 390, 391 Lehmann, Mrs. F., ii. 196, 234, 395, 413 Lemon, Mark, i. 192, 203, 207, 243, 281, 394, 396, 416, 439, 440 Longman, Thomas, i. 73; ii. 106 Longman, William, i. 24 Lovejoy, G., i. 44 Lytton, Sir E. B., ii. 116 Maclise, Daniel, i. 33, 105 Macready, W. C., i. 5, 16, 17, 18, 24, 26, 27, 49, 52, 60, 77, 79, 95, 117, 129, 141, 144, 146, 154, 183, 187, 194, 195, 198, 247, 252, 273, 283, 300, 307, 368, 399, 404, 430, 431, 446, 451, 459; ii. 10, 19, 22, 46, 109, 141, 150, 192, 197, 226, 227, 229, 265, 373, 383, 424, 429, 436 Major, Mrs., ii. 196 Makeham, John, ii. 444 Marston, Dr. Westland, ii. 43 Milnes, R. Monckton, i. 41 Mitton, Thomas, i. 10, 19, 56, 58, 65, 121, 136, 458; ii. 229 Morpeth, Viscount, i. 92, 146, and see Carlisle, The Earl of Ollier, Edmund, ii. 213, 425 Ouvry, F., ii. 205, 427 Owen, Professor, ii. 235 Panizzi, Antonio, ii. 89, 90, 92 Pardoe, Miss, i. 73 Parkinson, J. C., ii. 401 Pollock, Mrs. F., ii. 440 Pollock, Sir F., ii. 214 Poole, John, i. 236 Power, Miss, i. 179, 181, 460; ii. 127, 194 Power, Mrs., ii. 300 Procter, Adelaide, i. 374 Procter, B. W., i. 354; ii. 5, 82, 90, 223, 259 Procter, Mrs., ii. 226, 238 Reade, Charles, ii. 206 Regnier, Monsieur, i. 302, 303, 383, 411; ii. 44, 45, 102, 105, 189 Roberts, David, i. 215, 246, 248, 389 Russell, Lord John, i. 277, 316; ii. 118, 235, 422 Ryland, Arthur, i. 349, 382, 388; ii. 34, 233, 426, 428 Sandys, William, i. 178 Saunders, John, i. 366 Sculthorpe, W. R., ii. 104 Smith, Arthur, ii. 85, 147 Smith, H. P., i. 74, 179, 181 Stanfield, Clarkson, i. 92, 102, 113, 144, 151, 205, 299, 373, 394, 395, 398; ii. 184, 219, 287 Stanfield, George, ii. 289 Stone, Marcus, i. 340; ii. 211, 236 Stone, Frank, i. 199-201, 206, 259, 261, 295, 305, 355, 365, 396, 397; ii. 16, 24, 25, 27, 35, 82, 103 Storrar, Mrs., ii. 216 "_Sun, The_," the editor of, i. 187 Tagart, Edward, i. 111, 173 Talfourd, Miss Mary, i. 51 Talfourd, Serjeant, i. 10 Tennent, Sir James Emerson, i. 329; ii. 6, 218, 259 Thackeray, W. M., ii. 41 Thornbury, Walter, ii. 178, 262, 286 Tomlin, John, i. 40 Toole, J. L., ii. 300 Trollope, Mrs., i. 81, 397 Viardot, Madame, i. 412 Ward, E. M., ii. 141 Ward, Mrs., ii. 441 Watkins, John, i. 287; ii. 148 Watson, Hon. Mrs., i. 171, 196, 209, 226, 228, 231, 234, 237, 242, 254, 276, 282, 289, 309, 317, 343, 370, 402, 412, 453; ii. 93, 121, 144, 301, 382 Watson, Hon. R., i. 159 White, Mrs., ii. 94 White, Miss, ii. 92 White, Rev. James, i. 149, 193, 208, 217, 220, 288, 291, 292, 350; ii. 11, 15, 81, 97 Wills, W. H., i. 148-150, 219, 221, 222, 244, 250, 285, 286, 292, 295, 299, 303, 304, 307, 315, 333, 334, 352, 357, 384, 387, 401, 407, 408, 410, 415, 433, 450, 452; ii. 119, 167, 168, 171, 207, 290, 292, 295, 301, 386, 422, 433 Wilson, Effingham, i. 199 Yates, Edmund, ii. 20, 34, 41, 47, 91, 123, 149, 238 Yates, Mrs., ii. 48 Lewes, G. H., i. 170 "Lighthouse, The," the play of, i. 337; Dickens's prologue to, i. 461; Dickens's "Song of the Wreck" in, i. 461; and see ii. 198 Linton, Mrs., ii. 207 Lion, a chained, i. 144 Literary Fund, the, ii. 5, 12 "Little Dorrit," i. 378, 413, 415; proposed name of, i. 402; sale of, i. 426; letters concerning, i. 402, 403, 406, 426 Lockhart, Mr., ii. 207 London, the Mayor of, from a French point of view, i. 175; in September, i. 318; Dickens's opinion of the Corporation of, i. 389; ii. 411; facetious advice to country visitors to, i. 252 Longfellow, W. H., ii. 306, 308, 312, 326, 333, 361, 375 Longman, Thomas, letters to, i. 73; ii. 106 Longman, William, letter to, i. 24 Lovejoy, G., i. 44 Lowell, Miss Mabel, ii. 405, 415 Lyceum Theatre under Fechter, ii. 187, 191, 245; and see Fechter Lyndhurst, Lord, i. 147; ii. 144 Lynn, Miss, i. 378 Lyttelton, Hon. Spencer, i. 239, 245 Lytton, the first Lord, i. 214, 239; ii. 108, 135, 143, 247, 268; letter to, ii. 116 Lytton, Lord, ii. 108 Maclise, Daniel, i. 18, 23, 80, 177, 370; ii. 432; letters to, i. 33, 105 Macready, W. C., i. 94, 133, 239, 413; ii. 169, 172, 173; and see Letters Macready, Benvenuta, i. 431; ii. 194 Macready, Kate, i. 415; ii. 193 Macready, Mrs., ii. 172, 288 Macready, Jonathan, ii. 376 Macready, Nina, i. 195 Macready, W., ii. 425 Major, Mrs., letter to, ii. 196 Makeham, J. M., ii. 432; Dickens's last letter written to, ii. 444 Malleson, Mr. and Mrs., ii. 315 Marsh, Dickens's coachman, a story of, ii. 181 Marston, Dr. Westland, ii. 42, 44, 45; letter to, ii. 43 Martineau, i. 61, 229 "Martin Chuzzlewit," i. 53; dramatised, i. 95, 105; a story of Mrs. Harris, ii. 41 "Master Humphrey's Clock," i. 28; the plan of, described, i. 29; letters concerning illustrations for, i. 29-31, 33-36, 38-40, 45-47, 50-51 "Mémoires du Diable, Les," i. 444 Mesmerism, a séance of, ii. 100 Missionaries, Dickens on, i. 227; ii. 241 Mitton, Thomas, see Letters Molesworth, Lady, ii. 187, 189 Monuments, Dickens on, i. 287, 356 Moore, Tom, i. 163 Morgan, Captain, ii. 136, 143 Morgan, W., ii. 308, 336 Morley, Mr., i. 399 Morpeth, Viscount, letters to, i. 92, 146; and see Carlisle, The Earl of Motley, Mr., ii. 142 Mountain, a hazardous ascent of a, ii. 29 Mulgrave, Earl of, i. 57 Narrative, i. 1, 4, 6, 17, 28, 36, 53, 57, 85, 94, 134, 147, 169, 185, 204, 213, 239, 271, 296, 341, 376, 413; ii. 3, 39, 83, 107, 135, 169, 187, 208, 224, 244, 266, 325, 404, 431, 446 Nathan, Messrs. H. and L., i. 232, 233, 235 Neville, Mr., ii. 186 Newsvendors' Benevolent Institution, ii. 232 New Testament, Dickens's love for the, ii. 394, 403; Dickens writes a history of the, for his children, ii. 433 "Nicholas Nickleby," publication of, i. 6; rewards and punishments of characters in, i. 14; Dickens at work on, i. 16; dedication of, i, 26; the Kenwigs in, i, 25; and see ii. 200 Nicknames, Dickens's, of George Cattermole, i. 42, 143; of his children, i. 76, 126, 170, 322, 338, 453; nautical, i. 152; of himself, i. 198, 206, 307, 362; of Frank Stone, i. 214, 305 Norton, C. E., ii. 326 Noviomagians, the, i. 272 "Old Curiosity Shop, The," Dickens engaged on, i. 28; scenes in, described by Dickens for illustration, i. 21, 33-37, 42; Dickens heartbroken over the story, i. 36, 37, 42 "Oliver Twist," publication of, i. 4; Dickens at work on, i. 11; the reading of "The Murder" from, ii. 326, 395, 397, 399 Ollier, Edmund, ii. 209, 407; letters to, ii. 213, 425 Olliffe, Lady, ii. 187, 190 Olliffe, Sir J., ii. 417 Olliffe, the Misses, ii. 190 Organs, street, i. 104 Osgood, Mr., ii. 310, 336, 337, 340, 346, 352, 356, 366 "Our Mutual Friend," ii. 208, 210, 224; and as to illustrations for, see ii. 211, 237 Ouvry, Frederic, ii. 188, 300; letters to, ii. 205, 427 Overs, i. 37, 49 Owen, Professor, ii. 235 Panizzi, Antonio, ii. 84; letters to, ii. 89, 90, 92 Pardoe, Miss, letter to, i. 73 Paris, Dickens at, i. 130, 131, 147, 157-161, 169, 174, 239, 376, 378, 385-387, 413, 406-425, 430, 431; ii. 171, 187; house-hunting in, i. 158; description of Dickens's house in, i. 159; state of, in 1846, i. 160, 161; feeling of people of, for Dickens, i. 411; Dickens's reading at, ii. 187-190, 192 Parkinson, J. C., ii. 327; letter to, ii. 401 Parrots, human, i. 87, 121 "Patrician's Daughter, The," prologue to, written by Dickens, i. 55, 77 Patronage, the curse of England, ii. 213, 356 Paxton, Sir Joseph, i. 446 Phelps, J., i. 366 "Pickwick," origin and publication of, i. 1, 3; first mention of Jingle, i. 3; conclusion of, celebrated, i. 5; the design of the Shepherd in, explained, i. 85, 89 Picnic, a, of the elements, i, 116; with Eton boys, i. 255, 258 "Picnic Papers," Dickens's share of the, ii. 91 Plessy, Madame, i. 412; ii. 440 Pollock, Sir F., ii. 97, 144, 209; letter to, ii. 10, 214 Pollock, Mrs. F., letter to, ii. 440 Poole, John, i. 298, 317; ii. 228; letter to, i. 236 "Poor Travellers, The," i. 378; sale of, i. 379 Portraits of Dickens, by Maclise, i. 18, 23; by Frith, ii. 84, 93; by Ary Scheffer, i. 414, 434; by John Watkins, ii. 148; a caricature, ii. 146 Postman, an Albaro, i. 112, 117 Power, Miss, i. 442; ii. 82, 293, 300; and see Letters Power, Nelly, i. 443 Power, Mrs., letter to, ii. 300 Presence of mind of Dickens, ii. 161, 224, 230 Press, the, freedom of, i. 49; in America, i. 97; taxation of the, i. 274 Procter, Adelaide, i. 341; ii. 238; letter to, i. 374 Procter, B. W., i. 341; ii. 83, 91; and see Letters Procter, Mrs., letter to, ii. 226, 238 Publishing system, how to improve the, i. 86 Purse, the power of the, i. 88 Putnam, Mr., ii. 312 Queen, the, Dickens's theatrical performance before, i. 239; his feeling for, ii. 168; his interview with, ii. 432 Rae, Dr., i. 373 Railways, ii. 242 Reade, Charles, ii. 188; letter to, ii. 206 Reader, Charles Dickens as a, ii. 437 Readings, Dickens's public, for charities, i. 297, 341, 377; ii. 4, 169, 170; first reading for his own benefit, ii. 39; at Paris, ii. 187, 189, 192; in America, ii. 267; farewell series of readings in England, ii. 326, 404, 405; trial reading of "The Murder" from "Oliver Twist," ii. 326; reading to the actors, ii. 407, 418; farewell reading, ii. 431; effects of "The Murder" reading on Dickens, ii. 434; books of the, ii. 438; letters concerning the readings in England, Scotland, and Ireland, i. 344, 348, 369, 371, 379, 382, 388, 413, 424; ii. 20, 49, 51-67, 70-80, 87, 103, 145, 147, 151-168, 174, 178, 197, 200, 251-258, 272-286; letters concerning American, ii. 83, 85, 290, 294, 298, 299, 306-382; letters concerning the farewell series of, ii. 391, 392, 395-400, 412-421 Reform, Dickens speaks on Administrative, i. 377, 399; association for, i. 399; Dickens on Parliamentary, ii. 87, 269 Refreshment rooms, i. 424 Regnier, M., i. 298; and see Letters Reynolds, Dr. Russell, ii. 448 Richardson, Samuel, Dickens's opinion of, i. 175 "Rivals, The," a scene from, rewritten, i. 345 Roberts, David, i. 214; ii. 75; letters to, i. 215, 246, 248, 389 "Robinson Crusoe," Dickens on, i. 443 Robson, F., i. 451 Roche, Dickens's courier, i. 95, 122-126, 139 Rochester Cathedral, proposed burial of Dickens in, ii. 448 Royal Academy, female students at the, ii. 121; Dickens's last public appearance, at the dinner of the, ii. 431 Russel, Alexander, ii. 389, 390, 398, 406 Russell, Lord John, i. 272; ii. 85; and see Letters Russell, W. H., ii. 4 Ryland, Arthur, ii. 4, 430; and see Letters Sainton-Dolby, Madame, ii. 295, 391 Sanatorium for art-students, i. 102 Sand, Georges, i. 420 Sandys, William, letter to, i. 178 Saunders, John, i. 341; letter to, i. 366 Savage, i. 271 Saville, Miss, ii. 186 Scheffer, Ary, i. 414, 434; ii. 149 Schoolmistress, a Yorkshire, i. 8 Scott, Sir Walter, i. 22, 254 Scott, Dickens's dresser, ii. 272, 305, 306, 317, 321, 342, 370, 416 Scribe, Eugène, i. 430, 432 Sculthorpe, W. R., letter to, ii. 104 Seaside, the, in wet weather, i. 90 Sea voyage, a, i. 322 Shaftesbury, Lord, ii. 242 Shakespeare, Dickens in room of, i. 13; Dickens's criticisms of Charles Knight's biography of, i. 152; and see i. 178 Shea, Mr. Justice, ii. 247 Shower-bath, a perpetual, i. 207 "Sketches," publication of the, i. 1 Smith, Arthur, ii. 4, 39, 52, 53, 56-60, 64-67, 71, 72, 78, 80, 104, 109, 135, 145, 149-153; letters to, ii. 85, 147 Smith, H. P., letters to, i. 74, 179, 181 Smith, Sydney, i. 24 Smollett, Dickens on the works of, i. 356 Snevellicci, Miss, in real life, i. 13 Snore, a mighty, i. 158 Songs by Dickens: on Mark Lemon, i. 207; of "The Wreck" in "The Lighthouse," i. 461 Speaking, Dickens on public, ii. 426, 428; advice to his son Henry on public, ii. 435 Spencer, Lord, i. 242 Spider, a fearful, i. 180 Spiritualism, Dickens on, i. 350, 397 Stage-coach, American story of a, ii. 292 Stage suggestions, i. 79; a stage mob, i. 174; a piece of stage business, i. 156 Stanfield, Clarkson, i. 370, 377, 429, 435, 454; ii. 75, 194, 267; and see Letters Stanfield, George, letter to, ii. 289 Stanley, Dean, ii. 448, 449 Stanley, Lady Augusta, ii. 449 Staplehurst, Dickens in the railway accident at, ii. 224; description of the accident, ii. 229-233; effects of the accident on Dickens, ii. 388 Staunton, Mr. Secretary, ii. 351 Steele, Sir Richard, Dickens on Forster's essay on, i. 393 Steele, Mr., ii. 447, 448 Stone, Arthur, i. 436 Stone, Ellen, ii. 81 Stone, Frank, i. 134, 143, 225, 240; ii. 84; and see Letters Stone, Marcus, i. 299; ii. 84, 106, 208; letters to, i. 340; ii. 211, 236 Storrar, Mrs., ii. 209; letter to, ii. 216 "Strange Gentleman, The," farce written by Dickens and produced, i. 4; price of, i. 5; sent to Macready, i. 16 Strikes, Dickens on, i. 416 Sumner, Charles, ii. 351, 355 _Sun, The_, newspaper, ii. 225; letter to editor of, i. 187 Switzerland, the Simplon Pass in, i. 127; pleasant recollections of, i. 197, 218; Dickens at Lausanne in, i. 147; a revolution in, i. 155, 175; friends in, i. 157; Dickens's love for, i. 158; letters concerning Lausanne in, i. 147, 154, 160, 172, 179 Sympathy, letters of, i. 193, 265, 282, 283, 394; ii. 94, 97, 123, 154, 180, 289, 293 Tagart, Edward, letters to, i. 111, 173 "Tale of Two Cities, A," ii. 83, 84, 158; letters concerning, ii. 98, 102, 105, 106, 116 Talfourd, Miss Mary, letter to, i. 51 Talfourd, Mr. Justice, i. 7; letter to, i. 10 Taüchnitz, Baron, i. 188, 195 Tavistock House, purchase of, i. 240; sale of, ii. 107; letters concerning, i. 259, 261-266 Taxation, Dickens on, i. 218; of newspapers, i. 273 Taylor, Bayard, ii. 405 Telegraph, the dramatic side of the, i. 417 Tennent, Sir James Emerson, i. 298; ii. 209, 224; letters to, i. 329; ii. 218, 259 Tenniel, John, i. 241 Tennyson, Alfred, Dickens's admiration for, ii. 98 Terry, Miss Kate, ii. 193 Thackeray, W. M., ii. 4, 39, 137, 208, 210, 214; letter to, ii. 41 Thames, drainage of the, ii. 50; embankment of the, ii. 410 Theatre, Dickens at the, i. 13; Phiz's laughter at the, i. 13; the saloon at Drury Lane, i. 37, 52; scents of a, i. 96; story of a, i. 144; proposal for a national, i. 199; Dickens on the, ii. 271, 438 Theatrical Fund, the, ii. 35 Theatrical performances of Charles Dickens: at Montreal, i. 72; at Miss Kelly's Theatre, i. 134; "Fortunio" at Tavistock House, i. 376, 381; "The Lighthouse," i. 377, 394-397; "The Frozen Deep," i. 414; for the Jerrold Memorial Fund, ii. 19, 23; before the Queen, i. 239; and see i. 170, 185, 239, 241, 271, 376, 377, 414; ii. 3; letters concerning the, i. 141, 143, 144, 146, 181, 192, 196, 224-228, 231, 232, 234, 244, 268, 398, 433, 453, 454, 457, 459, 460; ii. 6, 11, 198 Thornbury, Walter, ii. 170, 292; letters to, ii. 178, 262, 286 Tomlin, John, letter to, i. 40 Toole, J. L., ii. 54, 268; letter to, ii. 300 Topham, F. W., i. 241, 269 Townshend, Chauncey Hare, ii. 7, 86, 96, 115, 136, 140, 371, 410 Trollope, Mrs., letters to, i. 80, 397 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Dickens on, i. 289 "Uncommercial Traveller, The," ii. 107 Viardot, Madame, ii. 193; letter to, i. 412 "Village Coquettes, The," operetta written by Dickens, i. 5; and see i. 93 Volunteers, Dickens on the, ii. 115 Waistcoat, a wonderful, i. 102; the loan by Dickens of Macready's, i. 146 Wales, the Prince of, popularity of, ii. 203; Dickens attends levée of, ii. 432 Wales, the Princess of, her arrival in England, ii. 195; the illuminations in honour of, ii. 198; popularity of, ii. 203 War, Dickens on the Russian, i. 379 Ward, E. M., i. 341; letter to, ii. 141 Ward, Mrs., letter to, ii. 441 Watkins, John, i. 415; letters to, i. 287; ii. 148 Watson, Hon. R., i. 147, 280; letter to, i. 159 Watson, Hon. Mrs., i. 147; ii. 9, 70; and see Letters Watson, Sir Thomas, ii. 405, 407 Watson, Wentworth, ii. 79 Watts's refuge for poor travellers, ii. 259 Webster, Benjamin, i. 85, 90, 434; ii. 361 Webster, a story of the murderer, ii. 333 Welcome home, a, i. 117 Westminster Abbey, burial of Dickens in, ii. 448 Whewell, Dr., i. 372 White, Clara, ii. 142, 181, 208 White, Rev. James, i. 149, 413; ii. 209; and see Letters White, Mrs., ii. 212; letter to, ii. 94 White, Miss, ii. 81, 84, 96; letter to, ii. 92 White, Richard Grant, ii. 85 Wigan, Alfred, i. 429 Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Barney, ii. 337, 359 Wills, W. H., i. 148, 241, 375; ii. 83, 379, 383, 406, 430; and see Letters Wills, Mrs., ii. 75, 96, 120 Wilson, Effingham, letter to, i. 199 Working men, clubs for, ii. 209, 213; Dickens on the management of such clubs, ii. 356; feeling of, for Dickens, ii. 420 Yates, Edmund, i. 414, 426; ii. 5, 129; and see Letters Yates, Mrs., ii. 129; letter to, ii. 48 THE END. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Page 142, "Leotard" changed to "Léotard" twice (Palace and Léotard) and (into seeing Léotard) Page 181, "shefound" changed to "she found" (she found Marsh) Page 432, "levee" changed to "levée" (a levée held) Page 453, "Celeste" changed to "Céleste" (Céleste, Madame) Page 454-455, entries for "Dickens, Mamie" and "Dickens, Kate" were originally not in alphabetically order. This was corrected. Page 456, "Fitzgreene" changed to "Fitz-Greene" (Halleck, Fitz-Greene) Page 458, "Fitzgreene" changed to "Fitz-Greene" (Halleck, Fitz-Greene) Page 460, "Lyttleton" changed to "Lyttelton" (Lyttleton, Hon. Spencer) Page 462, "Shee" changed to "Shea" (Shea, Mr. Justice) 
43044	----	Transcriber's Note: This is Volume II of a three volume set: Volume I--Unknown Volume II--Famous Volume III--Sunset A combined index to the entire set is located at the end of Volume III. Narrative content written by J. Cross and material quoted from writers other than George Eliot are interspersed throughout the text. Their content is placed in block quotes. Remaining transcriber's notes are located at the end of the text. * * * * * GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE VOL. II.--FAMOUS "OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY" [Illustration: Portrait of George Eliot. Engraved by G. J. Stodart.] GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE _as related in her Letters and Journals_ ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND J. W. CROSS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME II NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS. _LIBRARY EDITION._ ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ESSAYS and LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ROMOLA. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. For other editions of George Eliot's works published by Harper & Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_. CONTENTS OF VOL. II. CHAPTER VIII. JANUARY, 1858, TO DECEMBER, 1858. Success of "Scenes of Clerical Life"--"Adam Bede" Page 1 CHAPTER IX. JANUARY, 1859, TO MARCH, 1860. "The Mill on the Floss" 58 CHAPTER X. MARCH TO JUNE, 1860. First Journey to Italy 120 CHAPTER XI. JULY, 1860, TO DECEMBER, 1861. "Silas Marner"--"Romola" begun 185 CHAPTER XII. JANUARY, 1862, TO DECEMBER, 1865. "Romola"--"Felix Holt" 238 CHAPTER XIII. JANUARY, 1866, TO DECEMBER, 1866. Tour in Holland and on the Rhine 303 ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. II. PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ELIOT. Engraved by G. J. Stodart _Frontispiece._ THE PRIORY--DRAWING-ROOM _To face p._ 266 FAC-SIMILE OF GEORGE ELIOT'S HAND-WRITING " 280 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE. CHAPTER VIII. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Jan. 2._--George has returned this evening from a week's visit to Vernon Hill. On coming up-stairs he said, "I have some very pretty news for you--something in my pocket." I was at a loss to conjecture, and thought confusedly of possible opinions from admiring readers, when he drew the _Times_ from his pocket--to-day's number, containing a review of the "Scenes of Clerical Life." He had happened to ask a gentleman in the railway carriage, coming up to London, to allow him to look at the _Times_, and felt quite agitated and tremulous when his eyes alighted on the review. Finding he had time to go into town before the train started, he bought a copy there. It is a highly favorable notice, and, as far as it goes, appreciatory. When G. went into town he called at Nutt's, and Mrs. Nutt said to him, "I think you don't know our curate. _He_ says the author of 'Clerical Scenes' is a High Churchman; for though Mr. Tryan is said to be Low Church, his feelings and _actions_ are those of a High Churchman." (The curate himself being of course High Church.) There were some pleasant scraps of admiration also gathered for me at Vernon Hill. Doyle happening to mention the treatment of children in the stories, Helps said, "Oh, he is a great writer!" I wonder how I shall feel about these little details ten years hence, if I am alive. At present I value them as grounds for hoping that my writing may succeed, and so give value to my life; as indications that I can touch the hearts of my fellow-men, and so sprinkle some precious grain as the result of the long years in which I have been inert and suffering. But at present fear and trembling still predominate over hope. _Jan. 5._--To-day the "Clerical Scenes" came in their two-volume dress, looking very handsome. _Jan. 8._--News of the subscription--580, with a probable addition of 25 for Longmans. Mudie has taken 350. When we used to talk of the probable subscription, G. always said, "I dare say it will be 250!" (The final number subscribed for was 650.) I ordered copies to be sent to the following persons: Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Ruskin, Faraday, the author of "Companions of my Solitude," Albert Smith, Mrs. Carlyle. On the 20th of January I received the following letter from Dickens: [Sidenote: Letter from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, 17th Jan. 1858.] "TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, _Monday, 17th Jan. 1858_. "MY DEAR SIR,--I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me, through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humor and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try. "In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one: but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seemed to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began. "You will not suppose that I have any vulgar wish to fathom your secret. I mention the point as one of great interest to me--not of mere curiosity. If it should ever suit your convenience and inclination to show me the face of the man, or woman, who has written so charmingly, it will be a very memorable occasion to me. If otherwise, I shall always hold that impalpable personage in loving attachment and respect, and shall yield myself up to all future utterances from the same source, with a perfect confidence in their making me wiser and better.--Your obliged and faithful servant and admirer, "CHARLES DICKENS. "GEORGE ELIOT, ESQ." [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Jan. 21._--To-day came the following letter from Froude: [Sidenote: Letter from J. A. Froude to George Eliot, 17th Jan. 1858.] "NORTHDOWN HOUSE, BIDEFORD, _17th Jan. 1858_. "DEAR SIR,--I do not know when I have experienced a more pleasant surprise than when, on opening a book parcel two mornings ago, I found it to contain 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' 'From the author.' I do not often see _Blackwood_; but in accidental glances I had made acquaintance with 'Janet's Repentance,' and had found there something extremely different from general magazine stories. When I read the advertisement of the republication, I intended fully, at my leisure, to look at the companions of the story which had so much struck me, and now I find myself sought out by the person whose workmanship I had admired, for the special present of it. "You would not, I imagine, care much for flattering speeches, and to go into detail about the book would carry me farther than at present there is occasion to go. I can only thank you most sincerely for the delight which it has given me; and both I myself, and my wife, trust that the acquaintance which we seem to have made with you through your writings may improve into something more tangible. I do not know whether I am addressing a young man or an old--a clergyman or a layman. Perhaps, if you answer this note, you may give us some information about yourself. But at any rate, should business or pleasure bring you into this part of the world, pray believe that you will find a warm welcome if you will accept our hospitality.--Once more, with my best thanks, believe me, faithfully yours, J. A. FROUDE." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 17th Jan. 1858.] I have long ceased to feel any sympathy with mere antagonism and destruction; and all crudity of expression marks, I think, a deficiency in subtlety of thought as well as in breadth of moral and poetic feeling. Mr. William Smith, the author of "Thorndale," is an old acquaintance of Mr. Lewes's. I should say an old _friend_, only I don't like the too ready use of that word. Mr. Lewes admires and esteems him very highly. He is a very accomplished man--a bachelor, with a small independent income; used to write very effective articles on miscellaneous subjects in _Blackwood_. I shall like to know what you think of "Thorndale." I don't know whether you look out for Ruskin's books whenever they appear. His little book on the "Political Economy of Art" contains some magnificent passages, mixed up with stupendous specimens of arrogant absurdity on some economical points. But I venerate him as one of the great teachers of the day. The grand doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way. The two last volumes of "Modern Painters" contain, I think, some of the finest writing of the age. He is strongly akin to the sublimest part of Wordsworth--whom, by-the-bye, we are reading with fresh admiration for his beauties and tolerance for his faults. Our present plans are: to remain here till about the end of March, then to go to Munich, which I long to see. We shall live there several months, seeing the wonderful galleries in leisure moments. Our living here is so much more expensive than living abroad that we save more than the expenses of our journeying; and as our work can be as well done there as here for some months, we lay in much more capital, in the shape of knowledge and experience, by going abroad. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Jan. 18._--I have begun the "Eumenides," having finished the "Choephoræ." We are reading Wordsworth in the evening. At least G. is reading him to me. I am still reading aloud Miss Martineau's History. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Jan. 1858.] I am sure you will be interested in Dickens's letter, which I enclose, begging you to return it as soon as you can, and not to allow any one besides yourself and Major Blackwood to share in the knowledge of its contents. There can be no harm, of course, in every one's knowing that Dickens admires the "Scenes," but I should not like any more specific allusion made to the words of a private letter. There can hardly be any climax of approbation for me after this; and I am so deeply moved by the finely felt and finely expressed sympathy of the letter, that the iron mask of my _incognito_ seems quite painful in forbidding me to tell Dickens how thoroughly his generous impulse has been appreciated. If you should have an opportunity of conveying this feeling of mine to him in any way, you would oblige me by doing so. By-the-bye, you probably remember sending me, some months ago, a letter from the Rev. Archer Gurney--a very warm, simple-spoken letter--praising me for qualities which I most of all care to be praised for. I should like to send him a copy of the "Scenes," since I could make no acknowledgment of his letter in any other way. I don't know his address, but perhaps Mr. Langford would be good enough to look it out in the Clergy List. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Jan. 23._--There appeared a well-written and enthusiastic article on "Clerical Scenes" in the _Statesman_. We hear there was a poor article in the _Globe_--of feebly written praise--the previous week, but beyond this we have not yet heard of any notices from the press. _Jan. 26._--Came a very pleasant letter from Mrs. Carlyle, thanking the author of "Clerical Scenes" for the present of his book, praising it very highly, and saying that her husband had promised to read it when released from his mountain of history. [Sidenote: Letter from Mrs. Carlyle to George Eliot, 21st Jan. 1858.] "5 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, _21st Jan. 1858_. "DEAR SIR,--I have to thank you for a surprise, a pleasure, and a--consolation (!) all in one book! And I do thank you most sincerely. I cannot divine what inspired the good thought to send _me_ your book; since (if the name on the title-page be your real name) it could not have been personal regard; there has never been a George Eliot among my friends or acquaintance. But neither, I am sure, could _you_ divine the circumstances under which I should read the book, and the particular benefit it should confer on me! I read it--at least the first volume--during one of the most (physically) wretched nights of my life--sitting up in bed, unable to get a wink of sleep for fever and sore throat--and it helped me through that dreary night as well--better than the most sympathetic helpful friend watching by my bedside could have done! "You will believe that the book needed to be something more than a 'new novel' for me; that I _could_ at my years, and after so much reading, read it in positive torment, and be beguiled by it of the torment! that it needed to be the one sort of book, however named, that still takes hold of me, and that grows rarer every year--a _human_ book--written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author--full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle--a book that makes one _feel friends_ at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it! "In guessing at why you gave me this good gift, I have thought amongst other things, 'Oh, perhaps it was a delicate way of presenting the novel to my husband, he being over head and ears in _history_.' If that was it, I compliment you on your _tact_! for my husband is much likelier to read the 'Scenes' on _my_ responsibility than on a venture of his own--though, as a general rule, never opening a novel, he has engaged to read this one whenever he has some leisure from his present task. "I hope to know some day if the person I am addressing bears any resemblance in external things to the idea I have conceived of him in my mind--a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful _feminine_ touches in his book--a good many children, and a dog that he has as much fondness for as I have for my little Nero! For the rest--not just a clergyman, but brother or first cousin to a clergyman! How ridiculous all this _may_ read beside the reality. Anyhow--I honestly confess I am very curious about you, and look forward with what Mr. Carlyle would call 'a good, healthy, genuine desire' to shaking hands with you some day.--In the meanwhile, I remain, your obliged JANE W. CARLYLE." [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Jan. 30._--Received a letter from Faraday, thanking me very gracefully for the present of the "Scenes." Blackwood mentions, in enclosing this letter, that Simpkin & Marshall have sent for twelve additional copies--the first sign of a move since the subscription. The other night we looked into the life of Charlotte Brontë, to see how long it was before "Jane Eyre" came into demand at the libraries, and we found it was not until six weeks after publication. It is just three weeks now since I heard news of the subscription for my book. [Sidenote: Letter from M. Faraday to George Eliot, 28th Jan. 1858.] "ROYAL INSTITUTION, _28th Jan. 1858_. "SIR,--I cannot resist the pleasure of thanking you for what I esteem a great kindness: the present of your thoughts embodied in the two volumes you have sent me. They have been, and will be again, a very pleasant relief from mental occupation among my own pursuits. Such rest I find at times not merely agreeable, but essential.--Again thanking you, I beg to remain, your very obliged servant, M. FARADAY. "GEORGE ELIOT, Esq., &c., &c." [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Feb. 3._--Gave up Miss Martineau's History last night, after reading some hundred pages in the second volume. She has a sentimental, rhetorical style in this history which is fatiguing and not instructive. But her history of the Reform movement is very interesting. _Feb. 4._--Yesterday brought the discouraging news, that though the book is much talked of, it moves very slowly. Finished the "Eumenides." Bessie Parkes has written asking me to contribute to the _Englishwoman's Journal_--a new monthly which, she says, "We are beginning with £1000, and great social interest." _Feb. 16._--To-day G. went into the City and saw Langford, for the sake of getting the latest news about our two books--his "Sea-side Studies" having been well launched about a fortnight or ten days ago, with a subscription of 800. He brought home good news. The "Clerical Scenes" are moving off at a moderate but steady pace. Langford remarked, that while the press had been uniformly favorable, not one _critical_ notice had appeared. G. went to Parker's in the evening, and gathered a little gossip on the subject. Savage, author of the "Falcon Family," and now editor of the _Examiner_, said he was reading the "Scenes"--had read some of them already in _Blackwood_--but was now reading the volume. "G. Eliot was a writer of great merit." A barrister named Smythe said he had seen "the Bishop" reading them the other day. As a set-off against this, Mrs. Schlesinger "Couldn't bear the book." She is a regular novel reader; but hers is the first unfavorable opinion we have had. _Feb. 26._--We went into town for the sake of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Call, and having our photographs taken by Mayall. _Feb. 28._--Mr. John Blackwood called on us, having come to London for a few days only. He talked a good deal about the "Clerical Scenes" and George Eliot, and at last asked, "Well, am I to see George Eliot this time?" G. said, "Do you wish to see him?" "As he likes--I wish it to be quite spontaneous." I left the room, and G. following me a moment, I told him he might reveal me. Blackwood was kind, came back when he found he was too late for the train, and said he would come to Richmond again. He came on the following Friday and chatted very pleasantly--told us that Thackeray spoke highly of the "Scenes," and said _they were not written by a woman_. Mrs. Blackwood is _sure_ they are not written by a woman. Mrs. Oliphant, the novelist, too, is confident on the same side. I gave Blackwood the MS. of my new novel, to the end of the second scene in the wood. He opened it, read the first page, and smiling, said, "This will do." We walked with him to Kew, and had a good deal of talk. Found, among other things, that he had lived two years in Italy when he was a youth, and that he admires Miss Austen. Since I wrote these last notes several encouraging fragments of news about the "Scenes" have come to my ears--especially that Mrs. Owen Jones and her husband--two very different people--are equally enthusiastic about the book. But both have detected the woman. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d March, 1858.] Perhaps we may go to Dresden, perhaps not: we leave room for the _imprévu_, which Louis Blanc found so sadly wanting in Mr. Morgan's millennial village. You are among the exceptional people who say pleasant things to their friends, and don't feel a too exclusive satisfaction in their misfortunes. We like to hear of your interest in Mr. Lewes's books--at least, _I_ am very voracious of such details. I keep the pretty letters that are written to him; and we have had some really important ones from the scientific big-wigs about the "Sea-side Studies." The reception of the book in that quarter has been quite beyond our expectations. Eight hundred copies were sold at once. There is a great deal of close hard work in the book, and every one who knows what scientific work is necessarily perceives this; happily many have been generous enough to express their recognition in a hearty way. I enter so deeply into everything you say about your mother. To me that old, old popular truism, "We can never have but one mother," has worlds of meaning in it, and I think with more sympathy of the satisfaction you feel in at last being allowed to wait on her than I should of anything else you could tell me. I wish we saw more of that sweet human piety that feels tenderly and reverently towards the aged. [_Apropos_ of some incapable woman's writing she adds.] There is something more piteous almost than soapless poverty in this application of feminine incapacity to literature. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours with Mr. and Mrs. Call last Friday. It was worth a journey on a cold dusty day to see two faces beaming kindness and happiness. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th March, 1858.] I enclose a letter which will interest you. It is affecting to see how difficult a matter it often is for the men who would most profit by a book to purchase it, or even get a reading of it, while stupid Jopling of Reading or elsewhere thinks nothing of giving a guinea for a work which he will simply put on his shelves. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, March, 1858.] When do you bring out your new poem? I presume you are already in the sixth canto. It is true you never told me you intended to write a poem, nor have I heard any one say so who was likely to know. Nevertheless I have quite as active an imagination as you, and I don't see why I shouldn't suppose you are writing a poem as well as you suppose that I am writing a novel. Seriously, I wish you would not set rumors afloat about me. They are injurious. Several people, who seem to derive their notions from Ivy Cottage,[1] have spoken to me of a supposed novel I was going to bring out. Such things are damaging to me. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st March, 1858.] Thanks for your disclaimer. It shows me that you take a right view of the subject. There is no undertaking more fruitful of absurd mistakes than that of "guessing" at authorship; and as I have never communicated to any one so much as an _intention_ of a literary kind, there can be none but imaginary data for such guesses. If I withhold anything from my friends which it would gratify them to know, you will believe, I hope, that I have good reasons for doing so, and I am sure those friends will understand me when I ask them to further my object--which is not a whim but a question of solid interest--by complete silence. I can't afford to indulge either in vanity or sentimentality about my work. I have only a trembling anxiety to do what is in itself worth doing, and by that honest means to win very necessary profit of a temporal kind. "There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed" in due time. But till that time comes--till I tell you myself, "This is the work of my hand and brain"--don't believe anything on the subject. There is no one who is in the least likely to know what I can, could, should, or would write. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _April 1, 1858._--Received a letter from Blackwood containing warm praise of "Adam Bede," but wanting to know the rest of the story in outline before deciding whether it should go in the Magazine. I wrote in reply refusing to tell him the story. On Wednesday evening, April 7th, we set off on our journey to Munich, and now we are comfortably settled in our lodgings, where we hope to remain three months at least. I sit down in my first leisure moments to write a few recollections of our journey, or rather of our twenty-four hours' stay at Nürnberg; for the rest of our journey was mere endurance of railway and steamboat in cold and sombre weather, often rainy. I ought to except our way from Frankfort to Nürnberg, which lay for some distance--until we came to Bamberg--through a beautifully varied country. Our view both of Würzburg and Bamberg, as we hastily snatched it from our railway carriage, was very striking--great old buildings, crowning heights that rise up boldly from the plain in which stand the main part of the towns. From Bamberg to Nürnberg the way lay through a wide rich plain sprinkled with towns. We had left all the hills behind us. At Bamberg we were joined in our carriage by a pleasant-looking elderly couple, who spoke to each other and looked so affectionately that we said directly, "Shall we be so when we are old?" It was very pretty to see them hold each other's gloved hands for a minute like lovers. As soon as we had settled ourselves in our inn at Nürnberg--the Baierische Hof--we went out to get a general view of the town. Happily it was not raining, though there was no sun to light up the roof and windows. [Sidenote: Journal, April, 1858.] How often I had thought I should like to see Nürnberg, and had pictured to myself narrow streets with dark quaint gables! The reality was not at all like my picture, but it was ten times better. No sombre coloring, except the old churches: all was bright and varied, each _façade_ having a different color--delicate green, or buff, or pink, or lilac--every now and then set off by the neighborhood of a rich reddish brown. And the roofs always gave warmth of color with their bright red or rich purple tiles. Every house differed from its neighbor, and had a physiognomy of its own, though a beautiful family likeness ran through them all, as if the burghers of that old city were of one heart and one soul, loving the same delightful outlines, and cherishing the same daily habits of simple ease and enjoyment in their balcony-windows when the day's work was done. The balcony window is the secondary charm of the Nürnberg houses; it would be the principal charm of any houses that had not the Nürnberg roofs and gables. It is usually in the centre of the building, on the first floor, and is ornamented with carved stone or wood, which supports it after the fashion of a bracket. In several of these windows we saw pretty family groups--young fair heads of girls or of little children, with now and then an older head surmounting them. One can fancy that these windows are the pet places for family joys--that papa seats himself there when he comes home from the warehouse, and the little ones cluster round him in no time. But the glory of the Nürnberg houses is the roofs, which are no blank surface of mere tiling, but are alive with lights and shadows, cast by varied and beautiful lines of windows and pinnacles and arched openings. The plainest roof in Nürnberg has its little windows lifting themselves up like eyelids, and almost everywhere one sees the pretty hexagonal tiles. But the better houses have a central, open sort of pavilion in the roof, with a pinnacle surmounted by a weathercock. This pavilion has usually a beautifully carved arched opening in front, set off by the dark background which is left by the absence of glass. One fancies the old Nürnbergers must have gone up to these pavilions to smoke in the summer and autumn days. There is usually a brood of small windows round this central ornament, often elegantly arched and carved. A wonderful sight it makes to see a series of such roofs surmounting the tall, delicate-colored houses. They are always high-pitched, of course, and the color of the tiles was usually of a bright red. I think one of the most charming vistas we saw was the Adler-Gasse, on the St. Lorenz side of the town. Sometimes, instead of the high-pitched roof, with its pavilion and windows, there is a richly ornamented gable fronting the street; and still more frequently we get the gables at right angles with the street at a break in the line of houses. Coming back from the Burg we met a detachment of soldiers, with their band playing, followed by a stream of listening people; and then we reached the market-place, just at the point where stands "The Beautiful Fountain"--an exquisite bit of florid Gothic which has been restored in perfect conformity with the original. Right before us stood the Frauen-Kirche, with its fine and unusual _façade_, the chief beauty being a central chapel used as the choir, and added by Adam Krafft. It is something of the shape of a mitre, and forms a beautiful gradation of ascent towards the summit of _façade_. We heard the organ and were tempted to enter, for this is the one Catholic Church in Nürnberg. The delicious sound of the organ and voices drew us farther and farther in among the standing people, and we stayed there I don't know how long, till the music ceased. How the music warmed one's heart! I loved the good people about me, even to the soldier who stood with his back to us, giving us a full view of his close-cropped head, with its pale yellowish hair standing up in bristles on the crown, as if his hat had acted like a forcing-pot. Then there was a little baby in a close-fitting cap on its little round head, looking round with bright black eyes as it sucked its bit of bread. Such a funny little complete face--rich brown complexion and miniature Roman nose. And then its mother lifted it up that it might see the rose-decked altar, where the priests were standing. How music, that stirs all one's devout emotions, blends everything into harmony--makes one feel part of one whole which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate self. Nothing could be more wretched as art than the painted St. Veronica opposite me, holding out the sad face on her miraculous handkerchief. Yet it touched me deeply; and the thought of the Man of Sorrows seemed a very close thing--not a faint hearsay. We saw Albert Dürer's statue by Rauch, and Albert Dürer's house--a striking bit of old building, rich dark-brown, with a truncated gable and two wooden galleries running along the gable end. My best wishes and thanks to the artists who keep it in repair and use it for their meetings. The vistas from the bridges across the muddy Pegnitz, which runs through the town, are all quaint and picturesque; and it was here that we saw some of the _shabbiest_-looking houses--almost the only houses that carried any suggestion of poverty, and even here it was doubtful. The town has an air of cleanliness and well-being, and one longs to call one of those balconied apartments one's own home, with their flower-pots, clean glass, clean curtains, and transparencies turning their white backs to the street. It is pleasant to think there is such a place in the world where many people pass peaceful lives. On arriving at Munich, after much rambling, we found an advertisement of "Zwei elegant möblirte Zimmer," No. 15 Luitpold Strasse; and to our immense satisfaction found something that looked like cleanliness and comfort. The bargain was soon made--twenty florins per month. So here we came last Tuesday, the 13th April. We have been taking sips of the Glyptothek and the two Pinacotheks in the morning, not having settled to work yet. Last night we went to the opera--Fra Diavolo--at the Hof-Theatre. The theatre ugly, the singing bad. Still, the orchestra was good, and the charming music made itself felt in spite of German throats. On Sunday, the 11th, we went to the Pinacothek, straight into the glorious Rubens Saal. Delighted afresh in the picture of "Samson and Delilah," both for the painting and character of the figures. Delilah, a magnificent blonde, seated in a chair, with a transparent white garment slightly covering her body, and a rich red piece of drapery round her legs, leans forward, with one hand resting on her thigh, the other, holding the cunning shears, resting on the chair--a posture which shows to perfection the full, round, living arms. She turns her head aside to look with sly triumph at Samson--a tawny giant, his legs caught in the red drapery, shorn of his long locks, furious with the consciousness that the Philistines are upon him, and that this time he cannot shake them off. Above the group of malicious faces and grappling arms a hand holds a flaming torch. Behind Delilah, and grasping her arm, leans forward an old woman, with hard features full of exultation. This picture, comparatively small in size, hangs beside the "Last Judgment," and in the corresponding space, on the other side of the same picture, hangs the sublime "Crucifixion." Jesus alone, hanging dead on the Cross, darkness over the whole earth. One can desire nothing in this picture--the grand, sweet calm of the dead face, calm and satisfied amidst all the traces of anguish, the real, livid flesh, the thorough mastery with which the whole form is rendered, and the isolation of the supreme sufferer, make a picture that haunts one like a remembrance of a friend's death-bed. _April 12 (Monday)._--After reading Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich and Overbeck on Greek art, we turned out into the delicious sunshine to walk in the Theresien Wiese, and have our first look at the colossal "Bavaria," the greatest work of Schwanthaler. Delightful it was to get away from the houses into this breezy meadow, where we heard the larks singing above us. The sun was still too high in the west for us to look with comfort at the statue, except right in front of it, where it eclipsed the sun; and this front view is the only satisfactory one. The outline made by the head and arm on a side view is almost painfully ugly. But in front, looking up to the beautiful, calm face, the impression it produces is sublime. I have never seen anything, even in ancient sculpture, of a more awful beauty than this dark, colossal head, looking out from a background of pure, pale-blue sky. We mounted the platform to have a view of her back, and then walking forward, looked to our right hand and saw the snow-covered Alps! Sight more to me than all the art in Munich, though I love the _art_ nevertheless. The great, wide-stretching earth and the all-embracing sky--the birthright of us all--are what I care most to look at. And I feel intensely the new beauty of the sky here. The blue is so exquisitely clear, and the wide streets give one such a broad canopy of sky. I felt more inspirited by our walk to the Theresien Platz than by any pleasure we have had in Munich. _April 16._--On Wednesday we walked to the Theresien Wiese to look at the "Bavaria" by sunset, but a shower came on and drove us to take refuge in a pretty house built near the Ruhmeshalle, whereby we were gainers, for we saw a charming family group: a mother with her three children--the eldest a boy with his book, the second a three-year-old maiden, the third a sweet baby-girl of a year and a half; two dogs, one a mixture of the setter and pointer, the other a turn-spit; and a relation or servant ironing. The baby cried at the sight of G. in beard and spectacles, but kept her eyes turning towards him from her mother's lap, every now and then seeming to have overcome her fears, and then bursting out crying anew. At last she got down and lifted the table-cloth to peep at his legs, as if to see the monster's nether parts. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 17th April, 1858.] We have been just to take a sip at the two Pinacotheks and at the Glyptothek. At present the Rubens Saal is what I most long to return to. Rubens gives me more pleasure than any other painter, whether that is right or wrong. To be sure, I have not seen so many pictures, and pictures of so high a rank, by any other great master. I feel sure that when I have seen as much of Raphael I shall like him better; but at present Rubens, more than any one else, makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real, breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing and grimacing, and posing in mere aping of passion! What a grand, glowing, forceful thing life looks in his pictures--the men such grand-bearded, grappling beings, fit to do the work of the world; the women such real mothers. We stayed at Nürnberg only twenty-four hours, and I felt sad to leave it so soon. A pity the place became Protestant, so that there is only one Catholic church where one can go in and out as one would. We turned into the famous St. Sebald's for a minute, where a Protestant clergyman was reading in a cold, formal way under the grand Gothic arches. Then we went to the Catholic church, the Frauen-Kirche, where the organ and voices were giving forth a glorious mass; and we stood with a feeling of brotherhood among the standing congregation till the last note of the organ had died out. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _April 23._--Not being well enough to write, we determined to spend our morning at the Glyptothek and Pinacothek. A glorious morning--all sunshine and blue sky. We went to the Glyptothek first, and delighted ourselves anew with the "Sleeping Faun," the "Satyr and Bacchus," and the "Laughing Faun" (Fauno colla Macchia). Looked at the two young satyrs reposing with the pipe in their hands--one of them charming in the boyish, good-humored beauty of the face, but both wanting finish in the limbs, which look almost as if they could be produced by a turning-machine. But the conception of this often-repeated figure is charming: it would make a garden seem more peaceful in the sunshine. Looked at the old Silenus too, which is excellent. I delight in these figures, full of droll animation, flinging some nature, in its broad freedom, in the eyes of small-mouthed, mincing narrowness. We went into the modern Saal also, glancing on our way at the Cornelius frescoes, which seem to me stiff and hideous. An Adonis, by Thorwaldsen, is very beautiful. Then to the Pinacothek, where we looked at Albert Dürer's portrait again, and many other pictures, among which I admired a group by Jordaens: "A satyr eating, while a peasant shows him that he can blow hot and cold at the same time;" the old grandmother nursing the child, the father with the key in his hand, with which he has been amusing baby, looking curiously at the satyr, the handsome wife, still more eager in her curiosity, the quiet cow, the little boy, the dog and cat--all are charmingly conceived. _April 24._--As we were reading this afternoon Herr Oldenbourg came in, invited us to go to his house on Tuesday, and chatted pleasantly for an hour. He talked of Kaulbach, whom he has known very intimately, being the publisher of the "Reineke Fuchs." The picture of the "Hunnen Schlacht" was the first of Kaulbach's on a great scale. It created a sensation, and the critics began to call it a "Weltgeschichtliches Bild." Since then Kaulbach has been seduced into the complex, wearisome, symbolical style, which makes the frescoes at Berlin enormous puzzles. When we had just returned from our drive in the Englische Garten, Bodenstedt pleasantly surprised us by presenting himself. He is a charming man, and promises to be a delightful acquaintance for us in this strange town. He chatted pleasantly with us for half an hour, telling us that he is writing a work, in five volumes, on the "Contemporaries of Shakspeare," and indicating the nature of his treatment of the Shakspearian drama--which is historical and analytical. Presently he proposed that we should adjourn to his house and have tea with him; and so we turned out all together in the bright moonlight, and enjoyed his pleasant chat until ten o'clock. His wife was not at home, but we were admitted to see the three sleeping children--one a baby about a year and a half old, a lovely waxen thing. He gave the same account of Kaulbach as we had heard from Oldenbourg; spoke of Genelli as superior in genius, though he has not the fortune to be recognized; recited some of Hermann Lingg's poetry, and spoke enthusiastically of its merits. There was not a word of detraction about any one--nothing to jar on one's impression of him as a refined, noble-hearted man. _April 27._--This has been a red-letter day. In the morning Professor Wagner took us over his "Petrifacten Sammlung," giving us interesting explanations; and before we left him we were joined by Professor Martius, an animated, clever man, who talked admirably, and invited us to his house. Then we went to Kaulbach's studio, talked with him, and saw with especial interest the picture he is preparing as a present to the New Museum. In the evening, after walking in the Theresien Wiese, we went to Herr Oldenbourg's, and met Liebig the chemist, Geibel and Heyse the poets, and Carrière, the author of a work on the Reformation. Liebig is charming, with well-cut features, a low, quiet voice, and gentle manners. It was touching to see his hands, the nails black from the roots, the skin all grimed. Heyse is like a painter's poet, ideally beautiful; rather brilliant in his talk, and altogether pleasing. Geibel is a man of rather coarse texture, with a voice like a kettledrum, and a steady determination to deliver his opinions on every subject that turned up. But there was a good deal of ability in his remarks. _April 30._--After calling on Frau Oldenbourg, and then at Professor Bodenstedt's, where we played with his charming children for ten minutes, we went to the theatre to hear Prince Radziwill's music to the "Faust." I admired especially the earlier part, the Easter morning song of the spirits, the Beggar's song, and other things, until after the scene in Auerbach's cellar, which is set with much humor and fancy. But the scene between Faust and Marguerite is bad--"Meine Ruh ist hin" quite pitiable, and the "König im Thule" not good. Gretchen's second song, in which she implores help of the Schmerzensreiche, touched me a good deal. _May 1._--In the afternoon Bodenstedt called, and we agreed to spend the evening at his house--a delightful evening. Professor Löher, author of "Die Deutschen in America," and another much younger _Gelehrter_, whose name I did not seize, were there. _May 2._--Still rainy and cold. We went to the Pinacothek, and looked at the old pictures in the first and second Saal. There are some very bad and some fine ones by Albert Dürer: of the latter, a full length figure of the Apostle Paul, with the head of Mark beside him, in a listening attitude, is the one that most remains with me. There is a very striking "Adoration of the Magi," by Johannes van Eyck, with much merit in the coloring, perspective, and figures. Also, "Christ carrying his Cross," by Albert Dürer, is striking. "A woman raised from the dead by the imposition of the Cross" is a very elaborate composition, by Böhms, in which the faces are of first-rate excellence. In the evening we went to the opera and saw the "Nord Stern." _May 10._--Since Wednesday I have had a wretched cold and cough, and been otherwise ill, but I have had several pleasures nevertheless. On Friday, Bodenstedt called with Baron Schack to take us to Genelli's, the artist of whose powers Bodenstedt had spoken to us with enthusiastic admiration. The result to us was nothing but disappointment; the sketches he showed us seemed to us quite destitute of any striking merit. On Sunday we dined with Liebig, and spent the evening at Bodenstedt's, where we met Professor Bluntschli, the jurist, a very intelligent and agreeable man, and Melchior Meyr, a maker of novels and tragedies, otherwise an ineffectual personage. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th May, 1858.] Our life here is very agreeable--full of pleasant novelty, although we take things quietly and observe our working hours just as if we were at Richmond. People are so kind to us that we feel already quite at home, sip _baierisch Bier_ with great tolerance, and talk bad German with more and more _aplomb_. The place, you know, swarms with professors of all sorts--all _gründlich_, of course, and one or two of them great. There is no one we are more charmed with than Liebig. Mr. Lewes had no letter to him--we merely met him at an evening party; yet he has been particularly kind to us, and seems to have taken a benevolent liking to me. We dined with him and his family yesterday, and saw how men of European celebrity may put up with greasy cooking in private life. He lives in very good German style, however; has a handsome suite of apartments, and makes a greater figure than most of the professors. His manners are charming--easy, graceful, benignant, and all the more conspicuous because he is so quiet and low spoken among the loud talkers here. He looks best in his laboratory, with his velvet cap on, holding little phials in his hand, and talking of Kreatine and Kreatinine in the same easy way that well-bred ladies talk scandal. He is one of the professors who has been called here by the present king--Max--who seems to be a really sensible man among kings; gets up at five o'clock in the morning to study, and every Saturday evening has a gathering of the first men in science and literature, that he may benefit by their opinions on important subjects. At this _Tafel-rund_ every man is required to say honestly what he thinks; every one may contradict every one else; and if the king suspects any one of a polite insincerity, the too polished man is invited no more. Liebig, the three poets--Geibel, Heyse, and Bodenstedt--and Professor Löher, a writer of considerable mark, are always at the _Tafel-rund_ as an understood part of their functions; the rest are invited according to the king's direction. Bodenstedt is one of our best friends here--enormously instructed, after the fashion of Germans, but not at all stupid with it. We were at the Siebolds' last night to meet a party of celebrities, and, what was better, to see the prettiest little picture of married life--the great comparative anatomist (Siebold) seated at the piano in his spectacles playing the difficult accompaniments to Schubert's songs, while his little round-faced wife sang them with much taste and feeling. They are not young. Siebold is gray, and probably more than fifty; his wife perhaps nearly forty; and it is all the prettier to see their admiration of each other. She said to Mr. Lewes, when he was speaking of her husband, "Ja, er ist ein netter Mann, nicht wahr?"[2] We take the art in very small draughts at present--the German hours being difficult to adjust to our occupations. We are obliged to dine at _one!_ and of course when we are well enough must work till then. Two hours afterwards all the great public exhibitions are closed, except the churches. I _cannot_ admire much of the modern German art. It is for the most part elaborate lifelessness. Kaulbach's great compositions are huge charades; and I have seen nothing of his equal to his own "Reineke Fuchs." It is an unspeakable relief, after staring at one of his pictures--the "Destruction of Jerusalem," for example, which is a regular child's puzzle of symbolism--to sweep it all out of one's mind--which is very easily done, for nothing grasps you in it--and call up in your imagination a little Gerard Dow that you have seen hanging in a corner of one of the cabinets. We have been to his _atelier_, and he has given us a proof of his "Irrenhaus,"[3] a strange sketch, which he made years ago--very terrible and powerful. He is certainly a man of great faculty, but is, I imagine, carried out of his true path by the ambition to produce "Weltgeschichtliche Bilder," which the German critics may go into raptures about. His "Battle of the Huns," which is the most impressive of all his great pictures, was the first of the series. He painted it simply under the inspiration of the grand myth about the spirits of the dead warriors rising and carrying on the battle in the air. Straightway the German critics began to smoke furiously that vile tobacco which they call _æsthetik_, declared it a "Weltgeschichtliches Bild," and ever since Kaulbach has been concocting these pictures in which, instead of taking a single moment of reality and trusting to the infinite symbolism that belongs to all nature, he attempts to give you at one view a succession of events--each represented by some group which may mean "Whichever you please, my little dear." I must tell you something else which interested me greatly, as the first example of the kind that has come under my observation. Among the awful mysterious names, hitherto known only as marginal references whom we have learned to clothe with ordinary flesh and blood, is Professor Martius (Spix and Martius), now an old man, and rich after the manner of being rich in Germany. He has a very sweet wife--one of those women who remain pretty and graceful in old age--and a family of three daughters and one son, all more than grown up. I learned that she is Catholic, that her daughters are Catholic, and her husband and son Protestant--the children having been so brought up according to the German law in cases of mixed marriage. I can't tell you how interesting it was to me to hear her tell of her experience in bringing up her son conscientiously as a Protestant, and then to hear her and her daughters speak of the exemplary priests who had shown them such tender fatherly care when they were in trouble. They are the most harmonious, affectionate family we have seen; and one delights in such a triumph of human goodness over the formal logic of theorists. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _May 13._--Geibel came and brought me the two volumes of his poems, and stayed chatting for an hour. We spent the evening quietly at home. _May 14._--After writing, we went for an hour to the Pinacothek, and looked at some of the Flemish pictures. In the afternoon we called at Liebig's, and he went a long walk with us--the long chain of snowy mountains in the hazy distance. After supper I read Geibel's "Junius Lieder." _May 15._--Read the 18th chapter of "Adam Bede" to G. He was much pleased with it. Then we walked in the Englische Garten, and heard the band, and saw the Germans drinking their beer. The park was lovely. _May 16._--We were to have gone to Grosshesselohe with the Siebolds, and went to Frühstück with them at 12, as a preliminary. Bodenstedt was there to accompany us. But heavy rain came on, and we spent the time till 5 o'clock in talking, hearing music, and listening to Bodenstedt's "Epic on the destruction of Novgorod." About seven, Liebig came to us and asked us to spend the evening at his house. We went and found Voelderndorff, Bischoff and his wife, and Carrière and Frau. _May 20._--As I had a feeble head this morning, we gave up the time to seeing pictures, and went to the _Neue Pinacothek_. A "Lady with Fruit, followed by three Children," pleased us more than ever. It is by Wichmann. The two interiors of Westminster Abbey by Ainmueller admirable. Unable to admire Rothmann's Greek Landscapes, which have a room to themselves. Ditto Kaulbach's "Zerstörung von Jerusalem." We went for the first time to see the collection of porcelain paintings, and had really a rich treat. Many of them are admirable copies of great pictures. The sweet "Madonna and Child," in Raphael's early manner; a "Holy Family," also in the early manner, with a Madonna the exact type of the St. Catherine; and a "Holy Family" in the later manner, something like the Madonna Delia Sedia, are all admirably copied. So are two of Andrea del Sarto's--full of tenderness and calm piety. _May 23._--Through the cold wind and white dust we went to the Jesuits' Church to hear the music. It is a fine church in the Renaissance style, the vista terminating with the great altar very fine, with all the crowd of human beings covering the floor. Numbers of men! In the evening we went to Bodenstedt's, and saw his wife for the first time--a delicate creature who sang us some charming Bavarian _Volkslieder_. On Monday we spent the evening at Löher's--Baumgarten, _ein junger Historiker_, Oldenbourg, and the Bodenstedts meeting us. Delicious _Mai-trank_, made by putting the fresh _Waldmeister_--a cruciferous plant with a small white flower, something like Lady's Bedstraw--into mild wine, together with sugar, and occasionally other things. _May 26._--This evening I have read aloud "Adam Bede," chapter xx. We have begun Ludwig's "Zwischen Himmel und Erde." _May 27._--We called on the Siebolds to-day, then walked in the Theresien Wiese, and saw the mountains gloriously. Spent the evening at Prof. Martius's, where Frau Erdl played Beethoven's Andante and the Moonlight Sonata admirably. _May 28._--We heard from Blackwood this morning. Good news in general, but the sale of our books not progressing at present. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th May, 1858.] It is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come to their knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole. That is amusing enough to the author, who knows from what widely sundered portions of experience--from what a combination of subtle, shadowy suggestions, with certain actual objects and events, his story has been formed. It would be a very difficult thing for me to furnish a key to my stories myself. But where there is no exact memory of the past, any story with a few remembered points of character or of incident may pass for a history. We pay for our sight of the snowy mountains here by the most capricious of climates. English weather is steadfast compared with Munich weather. You go to dinner here in summer and come away from it in winter. You are languid among trees and feathery grass at one end of the town, and are shivering in a hurricane of dust at the other. This inconvenience of climate, with the impossibility of dining (well) at any other hour than one o'clock is not friendly to the stomach--that great seat of the imagination. And I shall never advise an author to come to Munich except _ad interim_. The great Saal, full of Rubens's pictures, is worth studying; and two or three precious bits of sculpture, and the sky on a fine day, always puts one in a good temper--it is so deliciously clear and blue, making even the ugliest buildings look beautiful by the light it casts on them. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _May 30._--We heard "William Tell"--a great enjoyment to me. _June 1._--To Grosshesselohe with a party. Siebold and his wife, Prof. Löher, Fräulein von List, Fräulein Thiersch, Frau von Schaden and her pretty daughter. It was very pretty to see Siebold's delight in nature--the Libellulæ, the Blindworm, the crimson and black Cicadæ, the Orchidæ. The strange whim of Schwanthaler's--the Burg von Schwaneck--was our destination. _June 10._--For the last week my work has been rather scanty owing to bodily ailments. I am at the end of chapter xxi., and am this morning going to begin chapter xxii. In the interim our chief pleasure had been a trip to Starnberg by ourselves. _June 13._--This morning at last free from headache, and able to write. I am entering on my history of the birthday with some fear and trembling. This evening we walked, between eight and half-past nine, in the Wiese, looking towards Nymphenburg. The light delicious--the west glowing; the faint crescent moon and Venus pale above it; the larks filling the air with their songs, which seemed only a little way above the ground. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th June, 1858.] Words are very clumsy things. I like less and less to handle my friends' sacred feelings with them. For even those who call themselves intimate know very little about each other--hardly ever know just _how_ a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises. And so I feel I have no right to say that I know _how_ the loss of your mother--"the only person who ever leaned on you"--affects you. I only know that it must make a deeply-felt crisis in your life, and I know that the better from having felt a great deal about my own mother and father, and from having the keenest remembrance of all that experience. But for this very reason I know that I can't measure what the event is to you; and if I were near you I should only kiss you and say nothing. People talk of the feelings dying out as one gets older; but at present my experience is just the contrary. All the serious relations of life become so much more real to me--pleasure seems so slight a thing, and sorrow and duty and endurance so great. I find the least bit of real human life touch me in a way it never did when I was younger. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _June 17._--This evening G. left me to set out on his journey to Hofwyl to see his boys. _June 18._--Went with the Siebolds to Nymphenburg; called at Professor Knapp's, and saw Liebig's sister, Frau Knapp--a charming, gentle-mannered woman, with splendid dark eyes. _June 22._--Tired of loneliness, I went to the Frau von Siebold, chatted with her over tea, and then heard some music. _June 23._--My kind little friend (Frau von Siebold) brought me a lovely bouquet of roses this morning, and invited me to go with them in the evening to the theatre to see the new comedy, the "Drei Candidaten," which I did: a miserably poor affair. _June 24._--G. came in the evening, at 10 o'clock--after I had suffered a great deal in thinking of the possibilities that might prevent him from coming. _June 25._--This morning I have read to G. all I have written during his absence, and he approves it more than I expected. _July 7._--This morning we left Munich, setting out in the rain to Rosenheim by railway. The previous day we dined, and sat a few hours with the dear, charming Siebolds, and parted from them with regret--glad to leave Munich, but not to leave the friends who had been so kind to us. For a week before I had been ill--almost a luxury, because of the love that tended me. But the general languor and sense of depression produced by Munich air and way of life was no luxury, and I was glad to say a last good-bye to the quaint pepper-boxes of the Frauen-Kirche. [Sidenote: Munich to Dresden, 1858.] At the Rosenheim station we got into the longest of omnibuses, which took us to the _Gasthof_, where we were to dine and lunch, and then mount into the _Stell-wagen_, which would carry us to Prien, on the borders of the Chiem See. Rosenheim is a considerable and rather quaint-looking town, interrupted by orchards and characterized in a passing glance by the piazzas that are seen everywhere fronting the shops. It has a grand view of the mountains, still a long way off. The afternoon was cloudy, with intermittent rain, and did not set off the landscape. Nevertheless, I had much enjoyment in this four or five hours' journey to Prien. The little villages, with picturesque, wide gables, projecting roofs, and wooden galleries--with abundant orchards--with felled trunks of trees and stacks of fir-wood, telling of the near neighborhood of the forest--were what I liked best in this ride. We had no sooner entered the steamboat to cross the Chiem See than it began to rain heavily, and I kept below, only peeping now and then at the mountains and the green islands, with their monasteries. From the opposite bank of the See we had a grand view of the mountains, all dark purple under the clouded sky. Before us was a point where the nearer mountains opened and allowed us a view of their more distant brethren receding in a fainter and fainter blue--a marsh in the foreground, where the wild-ducks were flying. Our drive from this end of the lake to Traunstein was lovely--through fertile, cultivated land, everywhere married to bits of forest. The green meadow or the golden corn sloped upward towards pine woods, or the bushy greenness seemed to run with wild freedom far out into long promontories among the ripening crops. Here and there the country had the aspect of a grand park from the beautiful intermingling of wood and field, without any line of fence. Then came the red sunset, and it was dark when we entered Traunstein, where we had to pass the night. Among our companions in the day's journey had been a long-faced, cloaked, slow and solemn man, whom George called the author of "Eugene Aram," and I Don Quixote, he was so given to serious remonstrance with the vices he met on the road. We had been constantly deceived in the length of our stages--on the principle, possibly, of keeping up our spirits. The next morning there was the same tenderness shown about the starting of the _Stell-wagen_: at first it was to start at seven, then at half-past, then when another _Wagen_ came with its cargo of passengers. This was too much for Don Quixote; and when the stout, red-faced _Wirth_ had given him still another answer about the time of starting, he began, in slow and monotonous indignation, "Warum lügen sie so? Sie werden machen dass kein Mensch diesen Weg kommen wird,"[4] etc. Whereupon the _Wirth_ looked red-faced, stout, and unwashed as before, without any perceptible expression of face supervening. The next morning the weather looked doubtful, and so we gave up going to the König See for that day, determining to ramble on the Mönchsberg and enjoy the beauties of Salzburg instead. The morning brightened as the sun ascended, and we had a delicious ramble on the Mönchsberg--looking down on the lovely, peaceful plain, below the grand old Untersberg, where the sleeping Kaiser awaits his resurrection in that "good time coming;" watching the white mist floating along the sides of the dark mountains, and wandering under the shadow of the plantation, where the ground was green with luxuriant hawkweed, as at Nymphenburg, near Munich. The outline of the castle and its rock is remarkably fine, and reminded us of Gorey in Jersey. But we had a still finer view of it when we drove out to Aigen. On our way thither we had sight of the Watzmann, the highest mountain in Bavarian Tyrol--emerging from behind the great shoulder of the Untersberg. It was the only mountain within sight that had snow on its summit. Once at Aigen, and descended from our carriage, we had a delicious walk, up and up, along a road of continual steps, by the course of the mountain-stream, which fell in a series of cascades over great heaps of bowlders; then back again, by a round-about way, to our vehicle and home, enjoying the sight of old Watzmann again, and the grand mass of Salzburg Castle on its sloping rock. We encountered a _table-d'hôte_ acquaintance who had been to Berchtesgaden and the König See, driven through the salt-mine, and had had altogether a perfect expedition on this day, when we had not had the courage to set off. Never mind! we had enjoyed our day. We thought it wisest the next morning to renounce the König See, and pursue our way to Ischl by the _Stell-wagen_. We were fortunate enough to secure two places in the _coupé_, and I enjoyed greatly the quiet outlook, from my comfortable corner, on the changing landscape--green valley and hill and mountain; here and there a picturesque Tyrolese village, and once or twice a fine lake. The greatest charm of charming Ischl is the crystal Traun, surely the purest of streams. Away again early the next morning in the _coupé_ of the _Stell-wagen_, through a country more and more beautiful--high, woody mountains sloping steeply down to narrow, fertile, green valleys, the road winding amongst them so as to show a perpetual variety of graceful outlines where the sloping mountains met in the distance before us. As we approached the Gmunden See the masses became grander and more rocky, and the valley opened wider. It was Sunday, and when we left the _Stell-wagen_ we found quite a crowd in Sunday clothes standing round the place of embarkation for the steamboat that was to take us along the lake. Gmunden is another pretty place at the head of the lake, but apart from this one advantage inferior to Ischl. We got on to the slowest of railways here, getting down at the station near the falls of the Traun, where we dined at the pleasant inn, and fed our eyes on the clear river again hurrying over the rocks. Behind the great fall there is a sort of inner chamber, where the water rushes perpetually over a stone altar. At the station, as we waited for the train, it began to rain, and the good-natured looking woman asked us to take shelter in her little station-house--a single room not more than eight feet square, where she lived with her husband and two little girls all the year round. The good couple looked more contented than half the well-lodged people in the world. He used to be a _drozchky_ driver; and after that life of uncertain gains, which had many days quite penniless and therefore dinnerless, he found his present position quite a pleasant lot. On to Linz, when the train came, gradually losing sight of the Tyrolean mountains and entering the great plain of the Danube. Our voyage the next day in the steamboat was unfortunate: we had incessant rain till we had passed all the finest parts of the banks. But when we had landed, the sun shone out brilliantly, and so our entrance into Vienna, through the long suburb, with perpetual shops and odd names (Prschka, for example, which a German in our omnibus thought not at all remarkable for consonants!) was quite cheerful. We made our way through the city and across the bridge to the Weissen Ross, which was full; so we went to the Drei Rosen, which received us. The sunshine was transient; it began to rain again when we went out to look at St. Stephen's, but the delight of seeing that glorious building could not be marred by a little rain. The tower of this church is worth going to Vienna to see. The aspect of the city is that of an inferior Paris; the shops have an elegance that one sees nowhere else in Germany; the streets are clean, the houses tall and stately. The next morning we had a view of the town from the Belvedere Terrace; St. Stephen's sending its exquisite tower aloft from among an almost level forest of houses and inconspicuous churches. It is a magnificent collection of pictures at the Belvedere; but we were so unfortunate as only to be able to see them once, the gallery being shut up on the Wednesday; and so, many pictures have faded from my memory, even of those which I had time to distinguish. Titian's Danae was one that delighted us; besides this I remember Giorgione's Lucrezia Borgia, with the cruel, cruel eyes; the remarkable head of Christ; a proud Italian face in a red garment, I think by Correggio; and two heads by Denner, the most wonderful of all his wonderful heads that I have seen. There is an Ecce Homo by Titian which is thought highly of, and is splendid in composition and color, but the Christ is abject, the Pontius Pilate vulgar: amazing that they could have been painted by the same man who conceived and executed the Christo della Moneta! There are huge Veroneses, too, splendid and interesting. The Liechtenstein collection we saw twice, and that remains with me much more distinctly--the room full of Rubens's history of Decius, more magnificent even than he usually is in color; then his glorious Assumption of the Virgin, and opposite to it the portraits of his two boys; the portrait of his lovely wife going to the bath with brown drapery round her; and the fine portraits by Vandyke, especially the pale, delicate face of Wallenstein, with blue eyes and pale auburn locks. Another great pleasure we had at Vienna--next after the sight of St. Stephen's and the pictures--was a visit to Hyrtl, the anatomist, who showed us some of his wonderful preparations, showing the vascular and nervous systems in the lungs, liver, kidneys, and intestinal canal of various animals. He told us the deeply interesting story of the loss of his fortune in the Vienna revolution of '48. He was compelled by the revolutionists to attend on the wounded for three days' running. When at last he came to his house to change his clothes he found nothing but four bare walls! His fortune in Government bonds was burned along with the house, as well as all his precious collection of anatomical preparations, etc. He told us that since that great shock his nerves have been so susceptible that he sheds tears at the most trifling events, and has a depression of spirits which often keeps him silent for days. He only received a very slight sum from Government in compensation for his loss. One evening we strolled in the Volksgarten and saw the "Theseus killing the Centaur," by Canova, which stands in a temple built for its reception. But the garden to be best remembered by us was that at Schönbrunn, a labyrinth of stately avenues with their terminal fountains. We amused ourselves for some time with the menagerie here, the lions especially, who lay in dignified sleepiness till the approach of feeding-time made them open eager eyes and pace impatiently about their dens. We set off from Vienna in the evening with a family of Wallachians as our companions, one of whom, an elderly man, could speak no German, and began to address G. in Wallachian, as if that were the common language of all the earth. We managed to sleep enough for a night's rest, in spite of intense heat and our cramped positions, and arrived in very good condition at Prague in the fine morning. Out we went after breakfast, that we might see as much as possible of the grand old city in one day; and our morning was occupied chiefly in walking about and getting views of striking exteriors. The most interesting things we saw were the Jewish burial-ground (the Alter Friedhof) and the old synagogue. The Friedhof is unique--with a wild growth of grass and shrubs and trees, and a multitude of quaint tombs in all sorts of positions, looking like the fragments of a great building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake. We saw a lovely dark-eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue, with its smoked groins, and lamp forever burning. An intelligent Jew was our _cicerone_, and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the law. After dinner we took a carriage and went across the wonderful bridge of St. Jean Nepomuck, with its avenue of statues, towards the Radschin--an ugly, straight-lined building, but grand in effect from its magnificent site, on the summit of an eminence crowded with old, massive buildings. The view from this eminence is one of the most impressive in the world--perhaps as much from one's associations with Prague as from its visible grandeur and antiquity. The cathedral close to the Radschin is a melancholy object on the outside--left with unfinished sides like scars. The interior is rich, but sadly confused in its ornamentation, like so many of the grand old churches--hideous altars of bastard style disgracing exquisite Gothic columns--cruellest of all in St. Stephen's at Vienna! We got our view from a _Damen Stift_[5] (for ladies of family), founded by Maria Theresa, whose blond beauty looked down on us from a striking portrait. Close in front of us, sloping downwards, was a pleasant orchard; then came the river, with its long, long bridge and grand gateway; then the sober-colored city, with its surrounding plain and distant hills. In the evening we went to the theatre--a shabby, ugly building--and heard Spohr's Jessonda. [Sidenote: Dresden, 1858.] The next morning early by railway to Dresden--a charming journey, for it took us right through the Saxon Switzerland, with its castellated rocks and firs. At four o'clock we were dining comfortably at the Hotel de Pologne, and the next morning (Sunday) we secured our lodgings--a whole apartment of six rooms, all to ourselves, for 18_s._ per week! By nine o'clock we were established in our new home, where we were to enjoy six weeks' quiet work, undisturbed by visits and visitors. And so we did. We were as happy as princes--are not--George writing at the far corner of the great _salon_, I at my _Schrank_ in my own private room, with closed doors. Here I wrote the latter half of the second volume of "Adam Bede" in the long mornings that our early hours--rising at six o'clock--secured us. Three mornings in the week we went to the Picture Gallery from twelve till one. The first day we went was a Sunday, when there is always a crowd in the Madonna Cabinet. I sat down on the sofa opposite the picture for an instant, but a sort of awe, as if I were suddenly in the living presence of some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably, and we hurried out of the room. On subsequent mornings we always came in, the last minutes of our stay, to look at this sublimest picture, and while the others, except the Christo della Moneta and Holbein's Madonna, lost much of their first interest, this became harder and harder to leave. Holbein's Madonna is very exquisite--a divinely gentle, golden haired blonde, with eyes cast down, in an attitude of unconscious, easy grace--the loveliest of all the Madonnas in the Dresden Gallery except the Sistine. By the side of it is a wonderful portrait by Holbein, which I especially enjoyed looking at. It represents nothing more lofty than a plain, weighty man of business, a goldsmith; but the eminently fine painting brings out all the weighty, calm, good sense that lies in a first-rate character of that order. We looked at the Zinsgroschen (Titian's), too, every day, and after that at the great painter's Venus, fit for its purity and sacred loveliness to hang in a temple with Madonnas. Palma's Venus, which hangs near, was an excellent foil, because it is pretty and pure in itself; but beside the Titian it is common and unmeaning. Another interesting case of comparison was that between the original Zinsgroschen and a copy by an Italian painter, which hangs on the opposite wall of the cabinet. This is considered a fine copy, and would be a fine picture if one had never seen the original; but all the finest effects are gone in the copy. The four large Correggios hanging together--the _Nacht_; the Madonna with St. Sebastian, of the smiling graceful character, with the little cherub riding astride a cloud; the Madonna with St. Hubert; and a third Madonna, very grave and sweet--painted when he was nineteen--remained with me very vividly. They are full of life, though the life is not of a high order; and I should have surmised, without any previous knowledge, that the painter was among the first masters of _technique_. The Magdalen is sweet in conception, but seems to have less than the usual merit of Correggio's pictures as to painting. A picture we delighted in extremely was one of Murillo's--St. Rodriguez, fatally wounded, receiving the Crown of Martyrdom. The attitude and expression are sublime, and strikingly distinguished from all other pictures of saints I have ever seen. He stands erect in his scarlet and white robes, with face upturned, the arms held simply downward, but the hands held open in a receptive attitude. The silly cupid-like angel holding the martyr's crown in the corner spoils all. I did not half satisfy my appetite for the rich collection of Flemish and Dutch pictures here--for Teniers, Ryckart, Gerard Dow, Terburg, Mieris, and the rest. Rembrandt looks great here in his portraits, but I like none of the other pictures by him; the Ganymede is an offence. Guido is superlatively odious in his Christs, in agonized or ecstatic attitudes--much about the level of the accomplished London beggar. Dear, grand old Rubens does not show to great advantage, except in the charming half-length Diana returning from Hunting, the Love Garden, and the sketch of his Judgment of Paris. The most popular Murillo, and apparently one of the most popular Madonnas in the gallery, is the simple, sad mother with her child, without the least divinity in it, suggesting a dead or sick father, and imperfect nourishment in a garret. In that light it is touching. A fellow-traveller in the railway to Leipzig told us he had seen this picture in 1848 with nine bullet holes in it! The firing from the hotel of the Stadt Rom bore directly on the Picture Gallery. Veronese is imposing in one of the large rooms--the Adoration of the Magi, the Marriage at Cana, the Finding of Moses, etc., making grand masses of color on the lower part of the walls; but to me he is ignoble as a painter of human beings. It was a charming life--our six weeks at Dresden. There were the open-air concerts at the Grosser Garten and the Brühl'sche Terrace; the Sommer Theater, where we saw our favorite comic actor Merbitz; the walks into the open country, with the grand stretch of sky all round; the Zouaves, with their wondrous make-ups as women; Räder, the humorous comedian at the Sink'sche Bad Theater; our quiet afternoons in our pleasant _salon_--all helping to make an agreeable fringe to the quiet working time. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th July, 1858.] Since I wrote to you last I have lived through a great deal of exquisite pleasure. First an attack of illness during our last week at Munich, which I reckon among my pleasures because I was nursed so tenderly. Then a fortnight's unspeakable journey to Salzburg, Ischl, Linz, Vienna, Prague, and finally Dresden, which is our last resting-place before returning to Richmond, where we hope to be at the beginning of September. Dresden is a proper climax; for all other art seems only a preparation for feeling the superiority of the Madonna di San Sisto the more. We go three days a week to the gallery, and every day--after looking at other pictures--we go to take a parting draught of delight at Titian's Zinsgroschen and the _Einzige_ Madonna. In other respects I am particularly enjoying our residence here--we are so quiet, having determined to know no one and give ourselves up to work. We both feel a happy change in our health from leaving Munich, though I am reconciled to our long stay there by the fact that Mr. Lewes gained so much from his intercourse with the men of science there, especially Bischoff, Siebold, and Harless. I remembered your passion for autographs, and asked Liebig for his on your account. I was not sure that you would care enough about the handwriting of other luminaries; for there is such a thing as being European and yet obscure--a fixed star visible only from observatories. You will be interested to hear that I saw Strauss at Munich. He came for a week's visit before we left. I had a quarter of an hour's chat with him alone, and was very agreeably impressed by him. He looked much more serene, and his face had a far sweeter expression, than when I saw him in that dumb way at Cologne. He speaks with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language. Will you undertake to tell Mrs. Call from me that he begged me to give his kindest remembrances to her and to her father,[6] of whom he spoke with much interest and regard as his earliest English friend? I dare not begin to write about other things or people that I have seen in these crowded weeks. They must wait till I have you by my side again, which I hope will happen some day. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] From Dresden, one showery day at the end of August, we set off to Leipzig, the first stage on our way home. Here we spent two nights; had a glimpse of the old town with its fine market; dined at Brockhaus's; saw the picture-gallery, carrying away a lasting delight in Calame's great landscapes and De Dreux's dogs, which are far better worth seeing than De la Roche's "Napoleon at Fontainebleau"--considered the glory of the gallery; went with Victor Carus to his museum and saw an Amphioxus; and finally spent the evening at an open-air concert in Carus's company. Early in the morning we set off by railway, and travelled night and day till we reached home on the 2d September. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Sept. 1858.] Will you not write to the author of "Thorndale" and express your sympathy? He is a very diffident man, who would be susceptible to that sort of fellowship; and one should give a gleam of happiness where it is possible. I shall write you nothing worth reading for the next three months, so here is an opportunity for you to satisfy a large appetite for generous deeds. You can write to me a great many times without getting anything worth having in return. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Oct. 1858.] Thanks for the verses on Buckle. I'm afraid I feel a malicious delight in them, for he is a writer who inspires me with a personal dislike; not to put too fine a point on it, he impresses me as an irreligious, conceited man. Long ago I had offered to write about Newman, but gave it up again. The second volume of "Adam Bede" had been sent to Blackwood on 7th September, the third had followed two months later, and there are the following entries in the Journal in November: [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Nov. 1._--I have begun Carlyle's "Life of Frederic the Great," and have also been thinking much of my own life to come. This is a moment of suspense, for I am awaiting Blackwood's opinion and proposals concerning "Adam Bede." _Nov. 4._--Received a letter from Blackwood containing warm praise of my third volume, and offering £800 for the copyright of "Adam Bede" for four years. I wrote to accept. _Nov. 10._--Wilkie Collins and Mr. Pigott came to dine with us after a walk by the river. I was pleased with Wilkie Collins--there is a sturdy uprightness about him that makes all opinion and all occupation respectable. _Nov. 16._--Wrote the last word of "Adam Bede" and sent it to Mr. Langford. _Jubilate._ [Sidenote: History of "Adam Bede."] The germ of "Adam Bede" was an anecdote told me by my Methodist Aunt Samuel (the wife of my father's younger brother)--an anecdote from her own experience. We were sitting together one afternoon during her visit to me at Griff, probably in 1839 or 1840, when it occurred to her to tell me how she had visited a condemned criminal--a very ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and refused to confess; how she had stayed with her praying through the night, and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears and confessed her crime. My aunt afterwards went with her in the cart to the place of execution; and she described to me the great respect with which this ministry of hers was regarded by the official people about the jail. The story, told by my aunt with great feeling, affected me deeply, and I never lost the impression of that afternoon and our talk together; but I believe I never mentioned it, through all the intervening years, till something prompted me to tell it to George in December, 1856, when I had begun to write the "Scenes of Clerical Life." He remarked that the scene in the prison would make a fine element in a story; and I afterwards began to think of blending this and some other recollections of my aunt in one story, with some points in my father's early life and character. The problem of construction that remained was to make the unhappy girl one of the chief _dramatis personæ_, and connect her with the hero. At first I thought of making the story one of the series of "Scenes," but afterwards, when several motives had induced me close these with "Janet's Repentance," I determined on making what we always called in our conversation "My Aunt's Story" the subject of a long novel, which I accordingly began to write on the 22d October, 1857. The character of Dinah grew out of my recollections of my aunt, but Dinah is not at all like my aunt, who was a very small, black-eyed woman, and (as I was told, for I never heard her preach) very vehement in her style of preaching. She had left off preaching when I knew her, being probably sixty years old, and in delicate health; and she had become, as my father told me, much more gentle and subdued than she had been in the days of her active ministry and bodily strength, when she could not rest without exhorting and remonstrating in season and out of season. I was very fond of her, and enjoyed the few weeks of her stay with me greatly. She was loving and kind to me, and I could talk to her about my inward life, which was closely shut up from those usually round me. I saw her only twice again, for much shorter periods--once at her own home at Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, and once at my father's last residence, Foleshill. The character of Adam and one or two incidents connected with him were suggested by my father's early life; but Adam is not my father any more than Dinah is my aunt. Indeed, there is not a single portrait in Adam Bede--only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations. When I began to write it, the only elements I had determined on, besides the character of Dinah, were the character of Adam, his relation to Arthur Donnithorne, and their mutual relations to Hetty--_i.e._, to the girl who commits child-murder--the scene in the prison being, of course, the climax towards which I worked. Everything else grew out of the characters and their mutual relations. Dinah's ultimate relation to Adam was suggested by George, when I had read to him the first part of the first volume: he was so delighted with the presentation of Dinah, and so convinced that the reader's interest would centre in her, that he wanted her to be the principal figure at the last. I accepted the idea at once, and from the end of the third chapter worked with it constantly in view. The first volume was written at Richmond, and given to Blackwood in March. He expressed great admiration of its freshness and vividness, but seemed to hesitate about putting it in the Magazine, which was the form of publication he as well as myself had previously contemplated. He still _wished_ to have it for the Magazine, but desired to know the course of the story. At _present_ he saw nothing to prevent its reception in "Maga," but he would like to see more. I am uncertain whether his doubts rested solely on Hetty's relation to Arthur, or whether they were also directed towards the treatment of Methodism by the Church. I refused to tell my story beforehand, on the ground that I would not have it judged apart from my _treatment_, which alone determines the moral quality of art; and ultimately I proposed that the notion of publication in "Maga" should be given up, and that the novel should be published in three volumes at Christmas, if possible. He assented. I began the second volume in the second week of my stay at Munich, about the middle of April. While we were at Munich George expressed his fear that Adam's part was too passive throughout the drama, and that it was important for him to be brought into more direct collision with Arthur. This doubt haunted me, and out of it grew the scene in the wood between Arthur and Adam; the fight came to me as a _necessity_ one night at the Munich opera, when I was listening to "William Tell." Work was slow and interrupted at Munich, and when we left I had only written to the beginning of the dance on the Birthday Feast; but at Dresden I wrote uninterruptedly and with great enjoyment in the long, quiet mornings, and there I nearly finished the second volume--all, I think, but the last chapter, which I wrote here in the old room at Richmond in the first week of September, and then sent the MS. off to Blackwood. The opening of the third volume--Hetty's journey--was, I think, written more rapidly than the rest of the book, and was left without the slightest alteration of the first draught. Throughout the book I have altered little; and the only cases I think in which George suggested more than a verbal alteration, when I read the MS. aloud to him, were the first scene at the Farm, and the scene in the wood between Arthur and Adam, both of which he recommended me to "space out" a little, which I did. When, on October 29, I had written to the end of the love-scene at the Farm between Adam and Dinah, I sent the MS. to Blackwood, since the remainder of the third volume could not affect the judgment passed on what had gone before. He wrote back in warm admiration, and offered me, on the part of the firm, £800 for four years' copyright. I accepted the offer. The last words of the third volume were written and despatched on their way to Edinburgh, November the 16th, and now on the last day of the same month I have written this slight history of my book. I love it very much, and am deeply thankful to have written it, whatever the public may say to it--a result which is still in darkness, for I have at present had only four sheets of the proof. The book would have been published at Christmas, or rather early in December, but that Bulwer's "What will he do with it?" was to be published by Blackwood at that time, and it was thought that this novel might interfere with mine. The manuscript of "Adam Bede" bears the following inscription: "To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give the MS. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Nov. 1858.] I shall be much obliged if you will accept for me Tauchnitz's offer of £30 for the English reprint of "Clerical Scenes." And will you also be so good as to desire that Tauchnitz may register the book in Germany, as I understand that is the only security against its being translated without our knowledge; and I shudder at the idea of my books being turned into hideous German by an incompetent translator. I return the proofs by to-day's post. The dialect must be toned down all through in correcting the proofs, for I found it impossible to keep it subdued enough in writing. I am aware that the spelling which represents a dialect perfectly well to those who know it by the ear, is likely to be unintelligible to others. I hope the sheets will come rapidly and regularly now, for I dislike lingering, hesitating processes. Your praise of my ending was very warming and cheering to me in the foggy weather. I'm sure, if I have written well, your pleasant letters have had something to do with it. Can anything be done in America for "Adam Bede?" I suppose not--as my name is not known there. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Nov. 25._--We had a visit from Mr. Bray, who told us much that interested us about Mr. Richard Congreve, and also his own affairs. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th Nov. 1858.] I am very grateful to you for sending me a few authentic words from your own self. They are unspeakably precious to me. I mean that quite literally, for there is no putting into words any feeling that has been of long growth within us. It is easy to say how we love _new_ friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old. I have been thinking of you incessantly in the waking hours, and feel a growing hunger to know more precise details about you. I am of a too sordid and anxious disposition, prone to dwell almost exclusively on fears instead of hopes, and to lay in a larger stock of resignation than of any other form of confidence. But I try to extract some comfort this morning from my consciousness of this disposition, by thinking that nothing is ever so bad as my imagination paints it. And then I know there are incommunicable feelings within us capable of creating our best happiness at the very time others can see nothing but our troubles. And so I go on arguing with myself, and trying to live inside _you_ and looking at things in all the lights I can fancy you seeing them in, for the sake of getting cheerful about you in spite of Coventry. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, Christmas Day, 1858.] The well-flavored mollusks came this morning. It was very kind of you; and if you remember how fond I am of oysters, your good-nature will have the more pleasure in furnishing my _gourmandise_ with the treat. I have a childish delight in any little act of genuine friendliness towards us--and yet not childish, for how little we thought of people's goodness towards us when we were children. It takes a good deal of experience to tell one the rarity of a thoroughly disinterested kindness. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Dec. 1858.] I see with you entirely about the preface: indeed I had myself anticipated the very effects you predict. The deprecatory tone is not one I can ever take willingly, but I am conscious of a shrinking sort of pride which is likely to warp my judgment in many personal questions, and on that ground I distrusted my own opinion. Mr. Lewes went to Vernon Hill yesterday for a few days' change of air, but before he went he said, "Ask Mr. Blackwood what he thinks of putting a mere advertisement at the beginning of the book to this effect: As the story of 'Adam Bede' will lose much of its effect if the development is foreseen, the author requests those critics who may honor him with a notice to abstain from telling the story." I write my note of interrogation accordingly "?" Pray do not begin to read the second volume until it is all in print. There is necessarily a lull of interest in it to prepare for the crescendo. I am delighted that you like my Mrs. Poyser. I'm very sorry to part with her and some of my other characters--there seems to be so much more to be done with them. Mr. Lewes says she gets better and better as the book goes on; and I was certainly conscious of writing her dialogue with heightening gusto. Even in our imaginary worlds there is the sorrow of parting. I hope the Christmas weather is as bright in your beautiful Edinburgh as it is here, and that you are enjoying all other Christmas pleasures too without disturbance. I have not yet made up my mind what my next story is to be, but I must not lie fallow any longer when the new year is come. [Sidenote: Journal, 1858.] _Dec. 25 (Christmas Day)._--George and I spent this wet day very happily alone together. We are reading Scott's life in the evenings with much enjoyment. I am reading through Horace in this pause. _Dec. 31._--The last day of the dear old year, which has been full of expected and unexpected happiness. "Adam Bede" has been written, and the second volume is in type. The first number of George's "Physiology of Common Life"--a work in which he has had much happy occupation--is published to-day; and both his position as a scientific writer and his inward satisfaction in that part of his studies have been much heightened during the past year. Our double life is more and more blessed--more and more complete. I think this chapter cannot more fitly conclude than with the following extract from Mr. G. H. Lewes's Journal, with which Mr. Charles Lewes has been good enough to furnish me: _Jan. 28, 1859._--Walked along the Thames towards Kew to meet Herbert Spencer, who was to spend the day with us, and we chatted with him on matters personal and philosophical. I owe him a debt of gratitude. My acquaintance with him was the brightest ray in a very dreary, _wasted_ period of my life. I have given up all ambition whatever, lived from hand to mouth, and thought the evil of each day sufficient. The stimulus of his intellect, especially during our long walks, roused my energy once more and revived my dormant love of science. His intense theorizing tendency was contagious, and it was only the stimulus of a _theory_ which could then have induced me to work. I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I learned to know Marian--to know her was to love her--and since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God bless her! _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1858, TO DECEMBER, 1858. _Times_ reviews "Scenes of Clerical Life"--Helps's opinion--Subscription to the "Scenes"--Letter from Dickens, 18th Jan. 1858--Letter from Froude, 17th Jan.--Letter to Miss Hennell--Mr. Wm. Smith, author of "Thorndale"--Ruskin--Reading the "Eumenides" and Wordsworth--Letter to John Blackwood on Dickens's Letter--Letter from Mrs. Carlyle--Letter from Faraday--"Clerical Scenes" moving--John Blackwood calls, and George Eliot reveals herself--Takes MS. of first part of "Adam Bede"--Letters to Charles Bray on reports of authorship--Visit to Germany--Description of Nürnberg--The Frauen-Kirche--Effect of the music--Albert Dürer's house--Munich--Lodgings--Pinacothek--Rubens--Crucifixion--Theresien Wiese--Schwanthaler's "Bavaria"--The Alps--Letter to Miss Hennell--Contrast between Catholic and Protestant worship--Glyptothek--Pictures--Statues--Cornelius frescoes--Herr Oldenburg--Kaulbach--Bodenstedt--Professor Wagner--Martius--Liebig--Geibel--Heyse--Carrière--Prince Radziwill's "Faust"--Professor Löher--Baron Schack--Genelli--Professor Bluntschli--Letter to Miss Hennell--Description of Munich life--Kaulbach's pictures--The Siebolds--The Neue Pinacothek--Pictures and porcelain painting--Mme. Bodenstedt--Letter to Blackwood--Combinations of artist in writing--Hears "William Tell"--Expedition to Grosshesselohe--Progress with "Adam Bede"--Letter to Miss Hennell on death of her mother--Mr. Lewes goes to Hofwyl--Frau Knapp--Mr. Lewes returns--Leave Munich for Traunstein--Salzburg--Ischl--Linz--By Danube to Vienna--St. Stephen's--Belvedere pictures--Liechtenstein collection--Hyrtl the anatomist--Prague--Jewish burial-ground and the old synagogue--To Dresden--Latter half of second volume of "Adam Bede" written--First impression of Sistine Madonna--The Tribute money--Holbein's Madonna--The Correggios--Dutch school--Murillo--Letter to Miss Hennell--Description of life at Dresden--Health improved--Mention of Strauss at Munich--Dresden to Leipzig--Home to Richmond--Letter to Miss Hennell--Opinion of Buckle--Blackwood offers £800 for "Adam Bede"--Wilkie Collins and Mr. Pigott--History of "Adam Bede"--Letter to Charles Bray--Disinterested kindness--Letter to Blackwood suggesting preface to "Adam Bede"--Reading Scott's Life and Horace--Review of year--Extract from G. H. Lewes's Journal. FOOTNOTES: [1] The Brays' new house. [2] He is really a charming man, is he not? [3] Picture of interior of a Lunatic Asylum. [4] "Why do you tell such lies? The result of it will be that no one will travel this way." [5] Charitable Institution for Ladies. [6] Dr. Brabant. CHAPTER IX. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Jan. 12._--We went into town to-day and looked in the "Annual Register" for cases of _inundation_. Letter from Blackwood to-day, speaking of renewed delight in "Adam Bede," and proposing 1st Feb. as the day of publication. Read the article in yesterday's _Times_ on George's "Sea-side Studies"--highly gratifying. We are still reading Scott's life with great interest; and G. is reading to me Michelet's book "De l'Amour." _Jan. 15._--I corrected the last sheets of "Adam Bede," and we afterwards walked to Wimbledon to see our new house, which we have taken for seven years. I hired the servant--another bit of business done: and then we had a delightful walk across Wimbledon Common and through Richmond Park homeward. The air was clear and cold--the sky magnificent. _Jan. 31._--Received a check for £400 from Blackwood, being the first instalment of the payment for four years' copyright of "Adam Bede." To-morrow the book is to be subscribed, and Blackwood writes very pleasantly--confident of its "great success." Afterwards we went into town, paid money into the bank, and ordered part of our china and glass towards house-keeping. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 31st Jan. 1859.] Enclosed is the formal acknowledgment, bearing my signature, and with it let me beg you to accept my thanks--_not_ formal but heartfelt--for the generous way in which you have all along helped me with words and with deeds. The impression "Adam Bede" has made on you and Major Blackwood--of whom I have always been pleased to think as concurring with your views--is my best encouragement, and counterbalances, in some degree, the depressing influences to which I am peculiarly sensitive. I perceive that I have not the characteristics of the "popular author," and yet I am much in need of the warmly expressed sympathy which only popularity can win. A good subscription would be cheering, but I can understand that it is not decisive of success or non-success. Thank you for promising to let me know about it as soon as possible. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Feb. 6._--Yesterday we went to take possession of Holly Lodge, Wandsworth, which is to be our dwelling, we expect, for years to come. It was a deliciously fresh bright day--I will accept the omen. A letter came from Blackwood telling me the result of the subscription to "Adam Bede," which was published on the 1st: 730 copies, Mudie having taken 500 on the publisher's terms--_i.e._, ten per cent. on the sale price. At first he had stood out for a larger reduction, and would only take 50, but at last he came round. In this letter Blackwood told me the first _ab extra_ opinion of the book, which happened to be precisely what I most desired. A cabinet-maker (brother to Blackwood's managing clerk) had read the sheets, and declared that the writer must have been brought up to the business, or at least had listened to the workmen in their workshop. _Feb. 12._--Received a cheering letter from Blackwood, saying that he finds "Adam Bede" making just the impression he had anticipated among his own friends and connections, and enclosing a parcel from Dr. John Brown "to the author of 'Adam Bede.'" The parcel contained "Rab and his Friends," with an inscription. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 13th Feb. 1859.] Will you tell Dr. John Brown that when I read an account of "Rab and his Friends" in a newspaper, I wished I had the story to read at full length; and I thought to myself the writer of "Rab" would perhaps like "Adam Bede." When you have told him this, he will understand the peculiar pleasure I had on opening the little parcel with "Rab" inside, and a kind word from Rab's friend. I have read the story twice--once aloud, and once to myself, very slowly, that I might dwell on the pictures of Rab and Ailie, and carry them about with me more distinctly. I will not say any commonplace words of admiration about what has touched me so deeply; there is no adjective of that sort left undefiled by the newspapers. The writer of "Rab" _knows_ that I must love the grim old mastiff with the short tail and the long dewlaps--that I must have felt present at the scenes of Ailie's last trial. Thanks for your cheering letter. I will be hopeful--if I can. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Feb. 1859.] You have the art of writing just the sort of letters I care for--sincere letters, like your own talk. We are tolerably settled now, except that we have only a temporary servant; and I shall not be quite at ease until I have a trustworthy woman who will manage without incessant dogging. Our home is very comfortable, with far more of vulgar indulgences in it than I ever expected to have again; but you must not imagine it a snug place, just peeping above the holly bushes. Imagine it rather as a tall cake, with a low garnish of holly and laurel. As it is, we are very well off, with glorious breezy walks, and wide horizons, well ventilated rooms, and abundant water. If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from palaces--Crystal or otherwise--with an orchard behind me full of old trees, and rough grass and hedge-row paths among the endless fields where you meet nobody. We talk of such things sometimes, along with old age and dim faculties, and a small independence to save us from writing drivel for dishonest money. In the mean time the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancements, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing. Pretty Arabella Goddard we heard play at Berlin--play the very things you heard as a _bonne bouche_ at the last--none the less delightful from being so unlike the piano playing of Liszt and Clara Schumann, whom we had heard at Weimar--both great, and one the greatest. Thank you for sending me that authentic word about Miss Nightingale. I wonder if she would rather rest from her blessed labors, or live to go on working? Sometimes, when I read of the death of some great, sensitive human being, I have a triumph in the sense that they are at rest; and yet, along with that, such deep sadness at the thought that the rare nature is gone forever into darkness, and we can never know that our love and reverence can reach him, that I seem to have gone through a personal sorrow when I shut the book and go to bed. I felt in that way the other night when I finished the life of Scott aloud to Mr. Lewes. He had never read the book before, and has been deeply stirred by the picture of Scott's character, his energy and steady work, his grand fortitude under calamity, and the spirit of strict honor to which he sacrificed his declining life. He loves Scott as well as I do. We have met a pleasant-faced, bright-glancing man, whom we set down to be worthy of the name, Richard Congreve. I am curious to see if our _Ahnung_ will be verified. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 24th Feb. 1859.] One word of gratitude to _you_ first before I write any other letters. Heaven and earth bless you for trying to help me. I have been blasphemous enough sometimes to think that I had never been good and attractive enough to win any little share of the honest, disinterested friendship there is in the world: one or two examples of late had given that impression, and I am prone to rest in the least agreeable conviction the premisses will allow. I need hardly tell you what I want, you know it so well: a servant who will cause me the least possible expenditure of time on household matters. I wish I were not an anxious, fidgety wretch, and could sit down content with dirt and disorder. But anything in the shape of an _anxiety_ soon grows into a monstrous vulture with me, and makes itself more present to me than my rich sources of happiness--such as too few mortals are blessed with. You know me. Since I wrote this, I have just had a letter from my sister Chrissey--ill in bed, consumptive--regretting that she ever ceased to write to me. It has ploughed up my heart. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Feb. 1859.] Mrs. Carlyle's ardent letter will interest and amuse you. I reckon it among my best triumphs that she found herself "in charity with the whole human race" when she laid the book down. I want the philosopher himself to read it, because the _pre_-philosophic period--the childhood and poetry of his life--lay among the furrowed fields and pious peasantry. If he _could_ be urged to read a novel! I should like, if possible, to give him the same sort of pleasure he has given me in the early chapters of "Sartor," where he describes little Diogenes eating his porridge on the wall in sight of the sunset, and gaining deep wisdom from the contemplation of the pigs and other "higher animals" of _Entepfuhl_. Your critic was _not_ unjustly severe on the "Mirage Philosophy"--and I confess the "Life of Frederic" was a painful book to me in many respects; and yet I shrink, perhaps superstitiously, from any written or spoken word which is as strong as my inward criticism. I needed your letter very much--for when one lives apart from the world, with no opportunity of observing the effect of books except through the newspapers, one is in danger of sinking into the foolish belief that the day is past for the recognition of genuine, truthful writing, in spite of recent experience that the newspapers are no criterion at all. One such opinion as Mr. Caird's outweighs a great deal of damnatory praise from ignorant journalists. It is a wretched weakness of my nature to be so strongly affected by these things; and yet how is it possible to put one's best heart and soul into a book and be hardened to the result--be indifferent to the proof whether or not one has really a vocation to speak to one's fellow-men in that way? Of course one's vanity is at work; but the main anxiety is something entirely distinct from vanity. You see I mean you to understand that my feelings are very respectable, and such as it will be virtuous in you to gratify with the same zeal as you have always shown. The packet of newspaper notices is not come yet. I will take care to return it when it _has_ come. The best news from London hitherto is that Mr. Dallas is an enthusiastic admirer of Adam. I ought to except Mr. Langford's reported opinion, which is that of a person who has a voice of his own, and is not a mere echo. Otherwise, Edinburgh has sent me much more encouraging breezes than any that have come from the sweet South. I wonder if all your other authors are as greedy and exacting as I am. If so, I hope they appreciate your attention as much. Will you oblige me by writing a line to Mrs. Carlyle for me. I don't like to leave her second letter (she wrote a very kind one about the "Clerical Scenes") without any sort of notice. Will you tell her that the sort of effect she declares herself to have felt from "Adam Bede" is just what I desire to produce--gentle thoughts and happy remembrances; and I thank her heartily for telling me, so warmly and generously, what she has felt. That is not a pretty message: revise it for me, pray, for I am weary and ailing, and thinking of a sister who is slowly dying. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1859.] The folio of notices duly came, and are returned by to-day's post. The friend at my elbow ran through them for me, and read aloud some specimens to me, some of them ludicrous enough. The _Edinburgh Courant_ has the ring of sincere enjoyment in its tone; and the writer there makes himself so amiable to me that I am sorry he has fallen into the mistake of supposing that Mrs. Poyser's original sayings are remembered proverbs! I have no stock of proverbs in my memory; and there is not one thing put into Mrs. Poyser's mouth that is not fresh from my own mint. Please to correct that mistake if any one makes it in your hearing. I have not ventured to look into the folio myself; but I learn that there are certain threatening marks, in ink, by the side of such stock sentences as "best novel of the season," or "best novel we have read for a long time," from such authorities as the _Sun_, or _Morning Star_, or other orb of the newspaper firmament--as if these sentences were to be selected for reprint in the form of advertisement. I shudder at the suggestion. Am I taking a liberty in entreating you to keep a sharp watch over the advertisements, that no hackneyed puffing phrase of this kind may be tacked to my book? One sees them garnishing every other advertisement of trash: surely no being "above the rank of an idiot" can have his inclination coerced by them? and it would gall me, as much as any trifle could, to see my book recommended by an authority who doesn't know how to write decent English. I believe that your taste and judgment will concur with mine in the conviction that no quotations of this vulgar kind can do credit to a book; and that unless something looking like the real opinion of a tolerably educated writer, in a respectable journal, can be given, it would be better to abstain from "opinions of the press" altogether. I shall be grateful to you if you will save me from the results of any agency but your own--or at least of any agency that is not under your rigid criticism in this matter. Pardon me if I am overstepping the author's limits in this expression of my feelings. I confide in your ready comprehension of the irritable class you have to deal with. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Feb. 26._--Laudatory reviews of "Adam Bede" in the _Athenæum_, _Saturday_, and _Literary Gazette_. The _Saturday_ criticism is characteristic: Dinah is not mentioned! The other day I received the following letter, which I copy, because I have sent the original away: [Sidenote: Letter from E. Hall to George Eliot.] "To the Author of 'Adam Bede,' "CHESTER ROAD, SUNDERLAND. "DEAR SIR,--I got the other day a hasty read of your 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' and since that a glance at your 'Adam Bede,' and was delighted more than I can express; but being a poor man, and having enough to do to make 'ends meet,' I am unable to get a read of your inimitable books. "Forgive, dear sir, my boldness in asking you to give us a cheap edition. You would confer on us a great boon. I can get plenty of trash for a few pence, but I am sick of it. I felt so different when I shut your books, even though it was but a kind of 'hop-skip-and-jump' read. "I feel so strongly in this matter that I am determined to risk being thought rude and officious, and write to you. "Many of my working brethren feel as I do, and I express their wish as well as my own. Again asking your forgiveness for intruding myself upon you, I remain, with profoundest respect, yours, etc., "E. HALL." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Feb. 1859.] I have written to Chrissey, and shall hear from her again. I think her writing was the result of long, quiet thought--the slow return of a naturally just and affectionate mind to the position from which it had been thrust by external influence. She says: "My object in writing to you is to tell you how very sorry I have been that I ceased to write, and neglected one who, under all circumstances, was kind to me and mine. _Pray believe_ me when I say it will be the greatest comfort I can receive to know that you are _well_ and _happy_. Will you write once more?" etc. I wrote immediately, and I desire to avoid any word of reference to anything with which she associates the idea of alienation. The past is abolished from my mind. I only want her to feel that I love her and care for her. The servant trouble seems less mountainous to me than it did the other day. I was suffering physically from unusual worrit and muscular exertion in arranging the house, and so was in a ridiculously desponding state. I have written no end of letters in answer to servants' advertisements, and we have put our own advertisement in the _Times_--all which amount of force, if we were not philosophers and therefore believers in the conservation of force, we should declare to be lost. It is so pleasant to know these high doctrines--they help one so much. Mr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve have called on us. We shall return the call as soon as we can. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _March 8._--Letter from Blackwood this morning saying that "'Bedesman' has turned the corner and is coming in a winner." Mudie has sent for 200 additional copies (making 700), and Mr. Langford says the West End libraries keep sending for more. _March 14._--My dear sister wrote to me about three weeks ago, saying she regretted that she had ever ceased writing to me, and that she has been in a consumption for the last eighteen months. To-day I have a letter from my niece Emily, telling me her mother had been taken worse, and cannot live many days. _March 14._--Major Blackwood writes to say "Mudie has just made up his number of 'Adam Bede' to 1000. Simpkins have sold their subscribed number, and have had 12 to-day. Every one is talking of the book." _March 15._--Chrissey died this morning at a quarter to 5. _March 16._--Blackwood writes to say I am "a popular author as well as a great author." They printed 2090 of "Adam Bede," and have disposed of more than 1800, so that they are thinking about a second edition. A very feeling letter from Froude this morning. I happened this morning to be reading the 30th Ode, B. III. of Horace--"Non omnis moriar." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th March, 1859.] The news you have sent me is worth paying a great deal of pain for, past and future. It comes rather strangely to me, who live in such unconsciousness of what is going on in the world. I am like a deaf person, to whom some one has just shouted that the company round him have been paying him compliments for the last half hour. Let the best come, you will still be the person outside my own home who _first_ gladdened me about "Adam Bede;" and my success will always please me the better because you will share the pleasure. Don't think I mean to worry you with many such requests--but will you copy for me the enclosed short note to Froude? I know you will, so I say "thank you." [Sidenote: Letter to J. A. Froude from George Eliot.] DEAR SIR,--My excellent friend and publisher, Mr. Blackwood, lends me his pen to thank you for your letter, and for his sake I shall be brief. Your letter has done me real good--the same sort of good as one has sometimes felt from a silent pressure of the hand and a grave look in the midst of smiling congratulations. I have nothing else I care to tell you that you will not have found out through my books, except this one thing: that, so far as I am aware, you are only the _second_ person who has shared my own satisfaction in Janet. I think she is the least popular of my characters. You will judge from that, that it was worth your while to tell me what you felt about her. I wish I could help you with words of equal value; but, after all, am I not helping you by saying that it was well and generously done of you to write to me?--Ever faithfully yours, GEORGE ELIOT. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st March, 1859.] It was worth your while to write me those feeling words, for they are the sort of things that I keep in my memory and feel the influence of a long, long while. Chrissey's death has taken from the possibility of many things towards which I looked with some hope and yearning in the future. I had a very special feeling towards her--stronger than any third person would think likely. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _March 24._--Mr. Herbert Spencer brought us word that "Adam Bede" had been quoted by Mr. Charles Buxton in the House of Commons: "As the farmer's wife says in 'Adam Bede,' 'It wants to be hatched over again and hatched different.'" _March 26._--George went into town to-day and brought me home a budget of good news that compensated for the pain I had felt in the coldness of an old friend. Mr. Langford says that Mudie "thinks he must have another hundred or two of 'Adam'--has read the book himself, and is delighted with it." Charles Reade says it is "the finest thing since Shakespeare"--placed his finger on Lisbeth's account of her coming home with her husband from their marriage--praises enthusiastically the style--the way in which the author handles the Saxon language. Shirley Brooks also delighted. John Murray says there has never been such a book. Mr. Langford says there must be a second edition, in 3 vols., and they will print 500: whether Mudie takes more or not, they will have sold all by the end of a month. Lucas delighted with the book, and will review it in the _Times_ the first opportunity. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th March, 1859.] I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer. I see well he is a man whose experience and study enable him to relish parts of my book, which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in London back drawing-rooms. He has gratified me keenly by laying his finger on passages which I wrote either with strong feeling or from intimate knowledge, but which I had prepared myself to find entirely passed over by reviewers. Surely I am not wrong in supposing him to be a clergyman? There was one exemplary lady Mr. Langford spoke of, who, after reading "Adam," came the next day and bought a copy both of that and the "Clerical Scenes." I wish there may be three hundred matrons as good as she! It is a disappointment to me to find that "Adam" has given no impulse to the "Scenes," for I had sordid desires for money from a second edition, and had dreamed of its coming speedily. About my new story, which will be a novel as long as "Adam Bede," and a sort of companion picture of provincial life, we must talk when I have the pleasure of seeing you. It will be a work which will require time and labor. Do write me good news as often as you can. I owe thanks to Major Blackwood for a very charming letter. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 10th April, 1859.] The other day I received a letter from an old friend in Warwickshire, containing some striking information about the author of "Adam Bede." I extract the passage for your amusement: "I want to ask you if you have read 'Adam Bede,' or the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' and whether you know that the author is Mr. Liggins?... A deputation of dissenting parsons went over _to ask him to write for the 'Eclectic,'_ and they found him washing his slop-basin at a pump. He has no servant, and does everything for himself; but one of the said parsons said that he inspired them with a reverence that would have made any impertinent question impossible. The son of a baker, of no mark at all in his town, so that it is possible you may not have heard of him. You know he calls himself 'George Eliot.' It sounds strange to hear the _Westminster_ doubting whether he is a woman, when _here he is so well known_. But I am glad it has mentioned him. _They say he gets no profit out of 'Adam Bede,' and gives it freely to Blackwood, which is a shame._ We have not read him yet, but the extracts are irresistible." Conceive the real George Eliot's feelings, conscious of being a base worldling--not washing his own slop-basin, and _not_ giving away his MS.! not even intending to do so, in spite of the reverence such a course might inspire. I hope you and Major Blackwood will enjoy the myth. Mr. Langford sent me a letter the other day from Miss Winkworth, a grave lady, who says she never reads novels, except a few of the most famous, but that she has read "Adam" three times running. One likes to know such things--they show that the book tells on people's hearts, and may be a real instrument of culture. I sing my Magnificat in a quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy; but few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success. I think I should soon begin to believe that _Liggins_ wrote my books--it is so difficult to believe what the world does _not_ believe, so easy to believe what the world keeps repeating. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th April, 1859.] The very day you wrote we were driving in an open carriage from Ryde to the Sandrock Hotel, taking in a month's delight in the space of five hours. Such skies--such songs of larks--such beds of primroses! _I_ am quite well now--set up by iron and quinine, and polished off by the sea-breezes. I have lost my _young_ dislike to the spring, and am as glad of it as the birds and plants are. Mr. Lewes has read "Adam Bede," and is as dithyrambic about it as others appear to be, so _I_ must refresh my soul with it now as well as with the spring-tide. Mr. Liggins I remember as a vision of my childhood--a tall, black-coated, genteel young clergyman-in-embryo. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th April, 1859.] Mr. Lewes is "making himself into four" in writing answers to advertisements and other exertions which he generously takes on himself to save me. A model husband! We both like your literal title, "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," very much, and hope to see a little book under that title before the year is out--a book as thorough and effective in its way as "Christianity and Infidelity." _Re_writing is an excellent process, frequently both for the book and its author; and to prevent you from grudging the toil, I will tell you that so old a writer as Mr. Lewes now _re_writes everything of _importance_, though in all the earlier years of his authorship he would never take that trouble. We are so happy in the neighborhood of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve. She is a sweet, intelligent, gentle woman. I already love her: and his fine, beaming face does me good, like a glimpse of an Olympian. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _April 17._--I have left off recording the history of "Adam Bede" and the pleasant letters and words that came to me--the success has been so triumphantly beyond anything I had dreamed of that it would be tiresome to put down particulars. Four hundred of the second edition (of 750) sold in the first week, and twenty besides ordered when there was not a copy left in the London house. This morning Hachette has sent to ask my terms for the liberty of translation into French. There was a review in the _Times_ last week, which will naturally give a new stimulus to the sale; and yesterday I sent a letter to the _Times_ denying that Mr. Liggins is the author, as the world and Mr. Anders had settled it. But I must trust to the letters I have received and preserved for giving me the history of the book if I should live long enough to forget details. Shall I ever write another book as true as "Adam Bede?" The weight of the future presses on me, and makes itself felt even more than the deep satisfaction of the past and present. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th April, 1859.] This myth about Liggins is getting serious, and must be put a stop to. We are bound not to allow sums of money to be raised on a false supposition of this kind. Don't you think it would be well for _you_ to write a letter to the _Times_, to the effect that, as you find in some stupid quarters my letter has not been received as a _bonâ-fide_ denial, you declare Mr. Liggins not to be the author of "Clerical Scenes" and "Adam Bede;" further, that any future applications to you concerning George Eliot will not be answered, since that writer is not in need of public benevolence. Such a letter might save us from future annoyance and trouble, for I am rather doubtful about Mr. Liggins's character. The last report I heard of him was that he spent his time in smoking and drinking. I don't know whether that is one of the data for the Warwickshire logicians who have decided him to be the author of my books. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _April 29._--To-day Blackwood sent me a letter from Bulwer, which I copy because I have to send back the original, and I like to keep in mind the generous praise of one author for another. [Sidenote: Letter from E. B. Lytton to John Blackwood.] "MALVERN, _April 24, 1859_. "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought long since to have thanked you for 'Adam Bede.' But I never had a moment to look at it till arriving here, and ordered by the doctors to abstain from all 'work.' "I owe the author much gratitude for some very pleasing hours. The book indeed is worthy of great admiration. There are touches of beauty in the conception of human character that are exquisite, and much wit and much poetry embedded in the 'dialect,' which nevertheless the author over-uses. "The style is remarkably good whenever it is English and not provincial--racy, original, and nervous. "I congratulate you on having found an author of such promise, and published one of the very ablest works of fiction I have read for years.-- Yours truly, E. B. L. "I am better than I was, but thoroughly done up." [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _April 29._--Finished a story--"The Lifted Veil"--which I began one morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work. Resumed my new novel, of which I am going to rewrite the two first chapters. I shall call it provisionally "The Tullivers," for the sake of a title _quelconque_, or perhaps "St. Ogg's on the Floss." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th April, 1859.] Thank you for sending me Sir Edward Lytton's letter, which has given me real pleasure. The praise is doubly valuable to me for the sake of the generous feeling that prompted it. I think you judged rightly about writing to the _Times_. I would abstain from the remotest appearance of a "dodge." I am anxious to know of any _positive_ rumors that may get abroad; for while I would willingly, if it were possible--which it clearly is not--retain my _incognito_ as long as I live, I can suffer no one to bear my arms on his shield. There is _one_ alteration, or rather an addition--merely of a sentence--that I wish to make in the 12_s._ edition of "Adam Bede." It is a sentence in the chapter where Adam is making the coffin at night, and hears the willow wand. Some readers seem not to have understood what I meant--namely, that it was in Adam's peasant blood and nurture to believe in this, and that he narrated it with awed belief to his dying day. That is not a fancy of my own brain, but a matter of observation, and is, in my mind, an important feature in Adam's character. There is nothing else I wish to touch. I will send you the sentence some day soon, with the page where it is to be inserted. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _May 3._--I had a letter from Mrs. Richard Congreve, telling me of her safe arrival, with her husband and sister,[7] at Dieppe. This new friend, whom I have gained by coming to Wandsworth, is the chief charm of the place to me. Her friendship has the same date as the success of "Adam Bede"--two good things in my lot that ought to have made me less sad than I have been in this house. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th May, 1859.] Your letter came yesterday at tea-time, and made the evening happier than usual. We had thought of you not a little as we listened to the howling winds, especially as the terrible wrecks off the Irish coast had filled our imaginations disagreeably. _Now_ I can make a charming picture of you all on the beach, except that I am obliged to fancy _your_ face looking still too languid after all your exertion and sleeplessness. I remember the said face with peculiar vividness, which is very pleasant to me. "Rough" has been the daily companion of our walks, and wins on our affections, as other fellow mortals do, by a mixture of weaknesses and virtues--the weaknesses consisting chiefly in a tendency to become invisible every ten minutes, and in a forgetfulness of reproof, which, I fear, is the usual accompaniment of meekness under it. All this is good discipline for us selfish solitaries, who have been used to stroll along, thinking of nothing but ourselves. We walked through your garden to-day, and I gathered a bit of your sweetbrier, of which I am at this moment enjoying the scent as it stands on my desk. I am enjoying, too, another sort of sweetness, which I also owe to you--of that subtle, haunting kind which is most like the scent of my favorite plants--the belief that you do really care for me across the seas there, and will associate me continually with your home. Faith is not easy to me, nevertheless I believe everything you say and write. Write to me as often as you can--that is, as often as you feel any prompting to do so. You were a dear presence to me, and will be a precious thought to me all through your absence. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _May 4._--To-day came a letter from Barbara Bodichon, full of joy in my success, in the certainty that "Adam Bede" was mine, though she had not read more than extracts in reviews. This is the first delight in the book as _mine_, over and above the fact that the book is good. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th May, 1859.] God bless you, dearest Barbara, for your love and sympathy. You are the first friend who has given any symptom of knowing me--the first heart that has recognized me in a book which has come from my heart of hearts. But keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it; and give way to no impulses of triumphant affection. You have sense enough to know how important the _incognito_ has been, and we are anxious to keep it up a few months longer. Curiously enough my old Coventry friends, who have certainly read the _Westminster_ and the _Times_, and have probably by this time read the book itself, have given no sign of recognition. But a certain Mr. Liggins, whom rumor has fixed on as the author of my books, and whom _they_ have believed in, has probably screened me from their vision. I am a very blessed woman, am I not, to have all this reason for being glad that I have lived? I have had no time of exultation; on the contrary, these last months have been sadder than usual to me, and I have thought more of the future and the much work that remains to be done in life than of anything that has been achieved. But I think your letter to-day gave me more joy--more heart-glow--than all the letters or reviews or other testimonies of success that have come to me since the evenings when I read aloud my manuscript to my dear, dear husband, and he laughed and cried alternately, and then rushed to me to kiss me. He is the prime blessing that has made all the rest possible to me, giving me a response to everything I have written--a response that I could confide in, as a proof that I had not mistaken my work. [Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 6th May, 1859.] You must not think me too soft-hearted when I tell you that it would make me uneasy to leave Mr. Anders without an assurance that his apology is accepted. "Who with repentance is not satisfied," etc.; that doctrine is bad for the sinning, but good for those sinned against. Will you oblige me by allowing a clerk to write something to this effect in the name of the firm?--"We are requested by George Eliot to state, in reply to your letter of the 16th, that he accepts your assurance that the publication of your letter to the reviewer of 'Adam Bede' in the _Times_ was unintentional on your part." Yes, I _am_ assured now that "Adam Bede" was worth writing--worth living through long years to write. But now it seems impossible to me that I shall ever write anything so good and true again. I have arrived at faith in the past, but not at faith in the future. A friend in Algiers[8] has found me out--"will go to the stake on the assertion that I wrote 'Adam Bede'"--simply on the evidence of a few extracts. So far as I know, this is the first case of detection on purely internal evidence. But the secret is safe in that quarter. I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again during some visit that you will pay to town before very long. It would do me good to have you shake me by the hand as the ascertained George Eliot. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _May 9._--We had a delicious drive to Dulwich, and back by Sydenham. We stayed an hour in the gallery at Dulwich, and I satisfied myself that the St. Sebastian is no exception to the usual "petty prettiness" of Guido's conceptions. The Cuyp glowing in the evening sun, the Spanish beggar boys of Murillo, and Gainsborough's portrait of Mrs. Sheridan and her sister, are the gems of the gallery. But better than the pictures was the fresh greenth of the spring--the chestnuts just on the verge of their flowering beauty, the bright leaves of the limes, the rich yellow-brown of the oaks, the meadows full of buttercups. We saw for the first time Clapham Common, Streatham Common, and Tooting Common--the two last like parks rather than commons. _May 19._--A letter from Blackwood, in which he proposes to give me another £400 at the end of the year, making in all £1200, as an acknowledgment of "Adam Bede's" success. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th May, 1859.] Mrs. Congreve is a sweet woman, and I feel that I have acquired a friend in her--after recently declaring that we would never have any _friends_ again, only _acquaintances_. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st May, 1859.] Thank you: first, for acting with that fine integrity which makes part of my faith in you; secondly, for the material sign of that integrity. I don't know which of those two things I care for most--that people should act nobly towards me, or that I should get honest money. I certainly care a great deal for the money, as I suppose all anxious minds do that love independence and have been brought up to think debt and begging the two deepest dishonors short of crime. I look forward with quite eager expectation to seeing you--we have so much to say. Pray give us the first day at your command. The excursion, as you may imagine, is not ardently longed for in this weather, but when "merry May" is quite gone, we may surely hope for some sunshine; and then I have a pet project of rambling along by the banks of a river, not without artistic as well as hygienic purposes. Pray bring me all the Liggins Correspondence. I have an amusing letter or two to show you--one from a gentleman who has sent me his works; happily the only instance of the kind. For, as Charles Lamb complains, it is always the people whose books _don't_ sell who are anxious to send them to one, with their "foolish autographs" inside. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st May, 1859.] We don't think of going to the festival, not for want of power to enjoy Handel--there are few things that I care for more in the way of music than his choruses, performed by a grand orchestra--but because we are neither of us fit to encounter the physical exertion and inconveniences. It is a cruel thing the difficulty and dearness of getting any music in England--concerted music, which is the only music I care for much now. At Dresden we could have thoroughly enjoyable instrumental music every evening for two-pence; and I owed so many thoughts and inspirations of feeling to that stimulus. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _May 27._--Blackwood came to dine with us on his arrival in London, and we had much talk. A day or two before he had sent me a letter from Professor Aytoun, saying that he had neglected his work to read the first volume of "Adam Bede;" and he actually sent the other two volumes out of the house to save himself from temptation. Blackwood brought with him a correspondence he has had with various people about Liggins, beginning with Mr. Bracebridge, who will have it that Liggins is the author of "Adam Bede" in spite of all denials. _June 5._--Blackwood came, and we concocted two letters to send to the _Times_, in order to put a stop to the Liggins affair. [Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 6th June, 1859.] The "Liggins business" _does_ annoy me, because it subjects you and Mr. John Blackwood to the reception of insulting letters, and the trouble of writing contradictions. Otherwise, the whole affair is really a subject for a Molière comedy--"The Wise Men of Warwickshire," who might supersede "The Wise Men of Gotham." The letter you sent me was a very pleasant one from Mrs. Gaskell, saying that since she came up to town she has had the compliment paid her of being suspected to have written "Adam Bede." "I have hitherto denied it; but really, I think, that as you want to keep your real name a secret, it would be very pleasant for me to blush acquiescence. Will you give me leave?" I hope the inaccuracy with which she writes my name is not characteristic of a genius for fiction, though I once heard a German account for the bad spelling in Goethe's early letters by saying that it was "genial"--their word for whatever is characteristic of genius. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 8th June, 1859.] I was glad you wrote to me from Avignon of all the places you have visited, because Avignon is one of my most vivid remembrances from out the dimness of ten years ago. Lucerne would be a strange region to me but for Calame's pictures. Through them I have a vision of it, but of course when I see it 'twill be another Luzern. Mr. Lewes obstinately nurses the project of carrying me thither with him, and depositing me within reach of you while he goes to Hofwyl. But at present I say "No." We have been waiting and waiting for the skies to let us take a few days' ramble by the river, but now I fear we must give it up till all the freshness of young summer is gone. July and August are the two months I care least about for leafy scenery. However, we are kept at home this month partly by pleasures: the Handel Festival, for which we have indulged ourselves with tickets, and the sight of old friends--Mrs. Bodichon among the rest, and for her we hope to use your kind loan of a bedroom. We are both of us in much better condition than when you said good-bye to us, and I have many other sources of gladness just now--so I mean to make myself disagreeable no longer by caring about petty troubles. If one could but order cheerfulness from the druggist's! or even a few doses of coldness and distrust, to prevent one from foolish confidence in one's fellow-mortals! I want to get rid of this house--cut cables and drift about. I dislike Wandsworth, and should think with unmitigated regret of our coming here if it were not for you. But you are worth paying a price for. There! I have written about nothing but ourselves this time! _You_ do the same, and then I think I will promise ... not to write again, but to ask you to go on writing to me without an answer. How cool and idle you are this morning! I am warm and busy, but always, at all temperatures, yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _June 20._--We went to the Crystal Palace to hear the "Messiah," and dined afterwards with the Brays and Sara Hennell. I told them I was the author of "Adam Bede" and "Clerical Scenes," and they seemed overwhelmed with surprise. This experience has enlightened me a good deal as to the ignorance in which we all live of each other. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th June, 1859.] There is always an after sadness belonging to brief and interrupted intercourse between friends--the sadness of feeling that the blundering efforts we have made towards mutual understanding have only made a new veil between us--still more, the sadness of feeling that some pain may have been given which separation makes a permanent memory. We are quite unable to represent ourselves truly. Why should we complain that our friends see a false image? I say this because I am feeling painfully this morning that, instead of helping you when you brought before me a matter so deeply interesting to you, I have only blundered, and that I have blundered, as most of us do, from too much egoism and too little sympathy. If my mind had been more open to receive impressions, instead of being in over-haste to give them, I should more readily have seen what your object was in giving me that portion of your MS., and we might have gone through the necessary part of it on Tuesday. It seems no use to write this now, and yet I can't help wanting to assure you that if I am too imperfect to do and feel the right thing at the right moment, I am not without the slower sympathy that becomes all the stronger from a sense of previous mistake. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th June, 1859.] I am told peremptorily that I am to go to Switzerland next month, but now I have read your letter, I can't help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live in past pain. We shall not arrive at Lucerne till the 12th, at the earliest, I imagine, so I hope we are secured from the danger of alighting precisely on the days of your absence. That would be cruel, for I shall only be left at Lucerne for three days. You must positively have nothing more interesting to do than to talk to me and let me look at you. Tell your sister I shall be all ears and eyes and no tongue, so she will find me the most _amiable_ of conversers. I think it must be that the sunshine makes your absence more conspicuous, for this place certainly becomes drearier to me as the summer advances. The dusty roads are all longer, and the shade is farther off. No more now about anything--except that Mr. Lewes commands me to say he has just read the "Roman Empire of the West" with much interest, and is going now to flesh his teeth in the "Politique" (Auguste Comte's). [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday evening, end of June, 1859.] "DEAR FRIENDS,--All three of you--thanks for your packet of heartfelt kindness. That is the best of your kindness--there is no sham in it. It was inevitable to me to have that outburst when I saw you for a little while after the long silence, and felt that I must tell you then or be forestalled, and leave you to gather the truth amidst an inextricable mixture of falsehood. But I feel that the influence of talking about my books, even to you and Mrs. Bodichon, has been so bad to me that I should like to be able to keep silence concerning them for evermore. If people were to buzz round me with their remarks, or compliments, I should lose the repose of mind and truthfulness of production without which no good, healthy books can be written. Talking about my books, I find, has much the same malign effect on me as talking of my feelings or my religion. "I should think Sara's version of my brother's words concerning 'Adam Bede' is the correct one--_'that there are things in it about my father'_ (_i.e._, being interpreted, things my father told us about his early life), not 'portrait' of my father. There is not a single portrait in the book, nor will there be in any future book of mine. There are portraits in the 'Clerical Scenes;' but that was my first bit of art, and my hand was not well in. I did not know so well how to manipulate my materials. As soon as the Liggins falsehood is annihilated, of course there will be twenty new ones in its place; and one of the first will be that I was not the sole author. The only safe thing for my mind's health is to shut my ears and go on with my work. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 5th July, 1859.] "Thanks for your letters. They have given me one pleasure--that of knowing that Mr. Liggins has not been _greatly_ culpable--though Mr. Bracebridge's statement, that only 'some small sums' have been collected, does not accord with what has been written to Mr. Blackwood from other counties. But 'O, I am sick!' Take no more trouble about me--and let every one believe--as they will, in spite of your kind efforts--_what they like to believe_. I can't tell you how much melancholy it causes me that people are, for the most part, so incapable of comprehending the state of mind which cares for that which is essentially human in all forms of belief, and desires to exhibit it under all forms with loving truthfulness. Freethinkers are scarcely wider than the orthodox in this matter--they all want to see themselves and their own opinions held up as the true and the lovely. On the same ground that an idle woman, with flirtations and flounces, likes to read a French novel, because she can imagine herself the heroine, grave people, with opinions, like the most admirable character in a novel to be their mouth-piece. If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. I have had heart-cutting experience that _opinions_ are a poor cement between human souls: and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is, that those who read them should be better able to _imagine_ and to _feel_ the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th July, 1859.] "We shall not start till Saturday, and shall not reach Lucerne till the _evening_ of the 11th. There is a project of our returning through Holland, but the attractions of Lucerne are sure to keep us there as long as possible. We have given up Zurich in spite of Moleschott and science. The other day I said to Mr. Lewes, 'Every now and then it comes across me, like the recollection of some precious little store laid by, that there is Mrs. Congreve in the world.' That is how people talk of you in your absence." [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _July 9._--We started for Switzerland. Spent a delightful day in Paris. To the Louvre first, where we looked chiefly at the Marriage at Cana, by Paul Veronese. This picture, the greatest I have seen of his, converted me to high admiration of him. _July 12._--Arrived at Lucerne in the evening. Glad to make a home at the charming Schweizerhof on the banks of the Lake. G. went to call on the Congreves, and in the afternoon Mrs. Congreve came to chat with us. In the evening we had a boat on the Lake. _July 13._--G. set off for Hofwyl at five o'clock, and the three next days were passed by me in quiet chat with the Congreves and quiet resting on my own sofa. _July 19._--Spent the morning in Bâle, chiefly under the chestnut-trees, near the Cathedral, I reading aloud Flourens's sketch of Cuvier's labors. In the afternoon to Paris. _July 21._--Holly Lodge, Wandsworth. Found a charming letter from Dickens, and pleasant letters from Blackwood; nothing to annoy us. Before we set off we had heard the excellent news that the fourth edition of "Adam Bede" (5000) had all been sold in a fortnight. The fifth edition appeared last week. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 23d July, 1859.] We reached here last evening, and though I was a good deal overdone in getting to Lucerne, I have borne the equally rapid journey back without headache--a proof that I am strengthened. I had three quiet days of talk with the Congreves at Lucerne, while Mr. Lewes went to Hofwyl. Mrs. Congreve is one of those women of whom there are few--rich in intelligence, without pretension, and quivering with sensibility, yet calm and quiet in her manners. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d July, 1859.] I thank you for your offer about the money for "Adam," but I have intentions of stern thrift, and mean to want as little as possible. When "Maggie" is done, and I have a month or two of leisure, I should like to transfer our present house, into which we were driven by haste and economy, to some one who likes houses full of eyes all round him. I long for a house with some shade and grass close round it--I don't care how rough--and the sight of Swiss houses has heightened my longing. But at present I say Avaunt to all desires. While I think of it, let me beg of you to mention to the superintendent of your printing-office, that in case of another reprint of "Adam," I beg the word "sperrit" (for "spirit") may be particularly attended to. Adam never said "speerit," as he is made to do in the cheaper edition, at least in one place--his speech at the birthday dinner. This is a small matter, but it is a point I care about. Words fail me about the not impossible Pug, for some compunction at having mentioned my unreasonable wish will mingle itself paradoxically with the hope that it may be fulfilled. I hope we shall have other interviews to remember this time next year, and that you will find me without aggravated symptoms of the "author's malady"--a determination of talk to my own books, which I was alarmingly conscious of when you and the Major were here. After all, I fear authors must submit to be something of monsters--not quite simple, healthy human beings; but I will keep my monstrosity within bounds if possible. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th July, 1859.] The things you tell me are just such as I need to know--I mean about the help my book is to the people who read it. The weight of my future life--the self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual production, presses upon me almost continually in a way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the _work done_. Buoyancy and exultation, I fancy, are out of the question when one has lived so long as I have. But I am the better for every word of encouragement, and am helped over many days by such a note as yours. I often think of my dreams when I was four or five and twenty. I thought then how happy fame would make me! I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses and given me reason for gladness that such an unpromising woman-child was born into the world. I ought not to care about small annoyances, and it is chiefly egoism that makes them annoyances. I had quite an _enthusiastic_ letter from Herbert Spencer the other day about "Adam Bede." He says he feels the better for reading it--really words to be treasured up. I can't bear the idea of appearing further in the papers. And there is no one now except people who would not be convinced, though one rose from the dead, to whom any statement _apropos_ of Liggins would be otherwise than superfluous. I dare say some "investigator" of the Bracebridge order will arise after I am dead and revive the story--and perhaps posterity will believe in Liggins. Why not? A man a little while ago wrote a pamphlet to prove that the Waverley novels were chiefly written, not by Walter Scott, but by Thomas Scott and his wife Elizabeth. The main evidence being that several people thought Thomas cleverer than Walter, and that in the list of the Canadian regiment of Scots to which Thomas belonged many of the _names_ of the Waverley novels occurred--among the rest _Monk_--and in "Woodstock" there is a _General Monk_! The writer expected to get a great reputation by his pamphlet, and I think it might have suggested to Mr. B. his style of critical and historical inference. I must tell you, _in confidence_, that Dickens has written to me the noblest, most touching words about "Adam"--not hyperbolical compliments, but expressions of deep feeling. He says the reading made an epoch in his life. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1859.] Pug is come! come to fill up the void left by false and narrow-hearted friends. I see already that he is without envy, hatred, or malice--that he will betray no secrets, and feel neither pain at my success nor pleasure in my chagrin. I hope the photograph does justice to his physiognomy. It is expressive: full of gentleness and affection, and radiant with intelligence when there is a savory morsel in question--a hopeful indication of his mental capacity. I distrust all intellectual pretension that announces itself by obtuseness of palate! I wish you could see him in his best _pose_--when I have arrested him in a violent career of carpet-scratching, and he looks at me with fore-legs very wide apart, trying to penetrate the deep mystery of this arbitrary, not to say capricious, prohibition. He is snoring by my side at this moment, with a serene promise of remaining quiet for any length of time; he couldn't behave better if he had been expressly educated for me. I am too lazy a lover of dogs and all earthly things to like them when they give me much trouble, preferring to describe the pleasure other people have in taking trouble. Alas! the shadow that tracks all earthly good--the possibility of loss. One may lose one's faculties, which will not always fetch a high price; how much more a _Pug_ worth unmentionable sums--a PUG which some generous-hearted personage in some other corner of Great Britain than Edinburgh may even now be sending emissaries after, being bent on paying the kindest, most delicate attention to a sensitive mortal not sufficiently reticent of wishes. All I can say of that generous-hearted personage No. 2 is, that I wish he may get--somebody else's Pug, not mine. And all I will say of the sensitive, insufficiently reticent mortal No. 2 is, that I hope he may be as pleased and as grateful as George Eliot. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 30th July, 1859.] I look forward to playing duets with you as one of my future pleasures; and if I am able to go on working, I hope we shall afford to have a fine grand-piano. I have none of Mozart's Symphonies, so that you can be guided in your choice of them entirely by your own taste. I know Beethoven's Sonata in E flat well; it is a very charming one, and I shall like to hear you play it. That is one of my luxuries--to sit still and hear some one playing my favorite music; so that you may able sure you will find willing ears to listen to the fruits of your industrious practising. There are ladies in the world, not a few, who play the violin, and I wish I were one of them, for then we could play together sonatas for the piano and violin, which make a charming combination. The violin gives that _keen edge_ of tone which the piano wants. I like to know that you were gratified by getting a watch so much sooner than you expected; and it was the greater satisfaction to me to send it you, because you had earned it by making good use of these precious years at Hofwyl. It is a great comfort to your father and me to think of that, for we, with our old grave heads, can't help talking very often of the need our boys will have for all sorts of good qualities and habits in making their way through this difficult life. It is a world, you perceive, in which cross-bows _will_ be _launisch_ sometimes, and frustrate the skill of excellent marksmen--how much more of lazy bunglers? The first volume of the "Physiology of Common Life" is just published, and it is a great pleasure to see so much of your father's hard work successfully finished. He has been giving a great deal of labor to the numbers on the physiology of the nervous system, which are to appear in the course of two or three months, and he has enjoyed the labor in spite of the drawback of imperfect health, which obliges him very often to leave the desk with a hot and aching head. It is quite my worst trouble that he has so much of this discomfort to bear; and we must all try and make everything else as pleasant to him as we can, to make up for it. Tell Thornton he shall have the book he asks for, if possible--I mean the book of moths and butterflies; and tell Bertie I expect to hear about the wonderful things he has done with his pocket-knife. Tell him he is equipped well enough to become king of a desert island with that pocket-knife of his; and if, as I think I remember, it has a corkscrew attached, he would certainly have more implements than he would need in that romantic position. We shall hope to hear a great deal of your journey, with all its haps and mishaps. The mishaps are just as pleasant as the haps when they are past--that is one comfort for tormented travellers. You are an excellent correspondent, so I do not fear you will flag in writing to me; and remember, you are always giving a pleasure when you write to me. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Aug. 11._--Received a letter from an American--Mr. J. C. Evans--asking me to write a story for an American periodical. Answered that I could not write one for less than £1000, since, in order to do it, I must suspend my actual work. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 11th Aug. 1859.] I do wish much to see more of human life: how can one see enough in the short years one has to stay in the world? But I meant that at present my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked through before I can begin to use, _artistically_, any material I may gather in the present. Curiously enough, _apropos_ of your remark about "Adam Bede," there is much less "out of my own life" in that book--_i.e._, the materials are much more a combination from imperfectly known and widely sundered elements than the "Clerical Scenes." I'm so glad you have enjoyed these--so thankful for the words you write me. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Aug. 12._--Mr. J. C. Evans wrote again, declaring his willingness to pay the £1000, and asking for an interview to arrange preliminaries. _Aug. 15._--Declined the American proposition, which was to write a story of twelve parts (weekly parts) in the _New York Century_ for £1200. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Aug. 1859.] I have re-read your whole proof, and feel that every serious reader will be impressed with the indications of real truth-seeking and heart-experience in the tone. Beginnings are always troublesome. Even Macaulay's few pages of introduction to his Introduction in the English History are the worst bit of writing in the book. It was no trouble to me to read your proof, so don't talk as if it had been. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Aug. 17._--Received a letter from Blackwood, with check for £200 for second edition of "Clerical Scenes." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th Aug. 1859.] I'm glad my story cleaves to you. At present I have no hope that it will affect people as strongly as "Adam" has done. The characters are on a lower level generally, and the environment less romantic. But my stories grow in me like plants, and this is only in the leaf-bud. I have faith that the flower will come. Not enough faith, though, to make me like the idea of beginning to print till the flower is fairly out--till I know the end as well as the beginning. Pug develops new charms every day. I think, in the prehistoric period of his existence, before he came to me, he had led a sort of Caspar Hauser life, shut up in a kennel in Bethnal Green; and he has had to get over much astonishment at the sight of cows and other rural objects on a large scale, which he marches up to and surveys with the gravity of an "Own Correspondent," whose business it is to observe. He has absolutely no bark; but, _en revanche_, he sneezes powerfully, and has speaking eyes, so the _media_ of communication are abundant. He sneezes at the world in general, and he looks affectionately at me. I envy you the acquaintance of a genuine non-bookish man like Captain Speke. I wonder when men of that sort will take their place as heroes in our literature, instead of the inevitable "genius?" [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Aug. 20._--Letter from the troublesome Mr. Quirk of Attleboro, still wanting satisfaction about Liggins. I did not leave it unanswered, because he is a friend of Chrissey's, but G. wrote for me. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Aug. 1859.] Our great difficulty is _Time_. I am little better than a sick nigger with the lash behind him at present. If we go to Penmaenmawr we shall travel all through by night, in order not to lose more than one day; and we shall pause at Lichfield on our way back. To pause at Coventry would be a real pleasure to me; but I think, even if we could do it on our way home, it would be better economy to wait until the sense of hurry is past, and make it a little reward for work done. The going to the coast seems to be a wise measure, quite apart from indulgence. We are both so feeble; but otherwise I should have kept my resolution and remained quiet here for the next six months. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Aug. 25._--In the evening of this day we set off on our journey to Penmaenmawr. We reached Conway at half-past three in the morning; and finding that it was hopeless to get a bed anywhere, we walked about the town till the morning began to dawn, and we could see the outline of the fine old castle's battlemented walls. In the morning we went to Llandudno, thinking that might suit us better than Penmaenmawr. We found it ugly and fashionable. Then we went off to Penmaenmawr, which was beautiful to our hearts' content--or rather discontent--for it would not receive us, being already filled with visitors. Back again in despair to Conway, where we got temporary lodgings at one of the numerous Joneses. This particular Jones happened to be honest and obliging, and we did well enough for a few days in our in-door life, but out-of-doors there were cold winds and rain. One day we went to Abergele and found a solitary house called Beach House, which it seemed possible we might have at the end of a few days. But no! And the winds were so cold on this northerly coast that George was not sorry, preferring rather to take flight southward. So we set out again on 31st, and reached Lichfield about half-past five. Here we meant to pass the night, that I might see my nieces--dear Chrissey's orphan children--Emily and Kate. I was much comforted by the sight of them, looking happy, and apparently under excellent care in Miss Eborall's school. We slept at the "Swan," where I remember being with my father and mother when I was a little child, and afterwards with my father alone, in our last journey into Derbyshire. The next morning we set off again, and completed our journey to Weymouth. Many delicious walks and happy hours we had in our fortnight there. A letter from Mr. Langford informed us that the subscription for the sixth edition of "Adam Bede" was 1000. Another pleasant incident was a letter from my old friend and school-fellow, Martha Jackson, asking if the author of "Adam Bede" was _her_ Marian Evans. _Sept. 16._--We reached home, and found letters awaiting us--one from Mr. Quirk, finally renouncing Liggins!--with tracts of an ultra-evangelical kind for me, and the Parish Mag., etc., from the Rev. Erskine Clark of St. Michael's, Derby, who had written to me to ask me to help him in this sort of work. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th Sept. 1859.] I have just been reading, with deep interest and heart-stirring, the article on the Infant Seamstresses in the _Englishwoman's Journal_. I am one among the grateful readers of that moving description--moving because the writer's own soul was moved by love and pity in the writing of it. These are the papers that will make the "Journal" a true organ with a _function_. I am writing at the end of the day, on the brink of sleep, too tired to think of anything but that picture of the little sleeping slop-worker who had pricked her tiny finger so. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Sept. 18._--A volume of devotional poetry from the authoress of "Visiting my Relations," with an inscription admonishing me not to be beguiled by the love of money. _In much anxiety and doubt about my new novel._ _Oct. 7._--Since the last entry in my Journal various matters of interest have occurred. Certain "new" ideas have occurred to me in relation to my novel, and I am in better hope of it. At Weymouth I had written to Blackwood to ask him about terms, supposing I published in "Maga." His answer determined me to decline. On Monday, the 26th, we set out on a three days' journey to Lincolnshire and back--very pleasant and successful both as to weather and the object I was in search of. A less pleasant business has been a correspondence with a _crétin_--a Warwickshire magistrate, who undertakes to declare the process by which I wrote my books--and who is the chief propagator and maintainer of the story that Liggins is at the bottom of the "Clerical Scenes" and "Adam Bede." It is poor George who has had to conduct the correspondence, making his head hot by it, to the exclusion of more fructifying work. To-day, in answer to a letter from Sara, I have written her an account of my interviews with my Aunt Samuel. This evening comes a letter from Miss Brewster, full of well-meant exhortation. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 7th Oct. 1859.] The very best bit of news I can tell you to begin with is that your father's "Physiology of Common Life" is selling remarkably well, being much in request among medical students. You are not to be a medical student, but I hope, nevertheless, you will by-and-by read the work with interest. There is to be a new edition of the "Sea-side Studies" at Christmas, or soon after--a proof that this book also meets with a good number of readers. I wish you could have seen to-day, as I did, the delicate spinal cord of a dragon-fly--like a tiny thread with tiny beads on it--which your father had just dissected! He is so wonderfully clever now at the dissection of these delicate things, and has attained this cleverness entirely by devoted practice during the last three years. I hope _you_ have some of his resolution and persistent regularity in work. I think you have, if I may judge from your application to music, which I am always glad to read of in your letters. I was a very idle practiser, and I often regret now that when I had abundant time and opportunity for hours of piano playing I used them so little. I have about eighteen Sonatas and Symphonies of Beethoven, I think, but I shall be delighted to find that you can play them better than I can. I am very sensitive to blunders and wrong notes, and instruments out of tune; but I have never played much from ear, though I used to play from memory a great deal. The other evening Mr. Pigott, whom you remember, Mr. Redford, another friend of your father's, and Mr. Wilkie Collins dined with us, and we had a charming musical evening. Mr. Pigott has a delicious tenor voice, and Mr. Redford a fine barytone. The latter sings "Adelaide," that exquisite song of Beethoven's, which I should like you to learn. Schubert's songs, too, I especially delight in; but, as you say, they are difficult. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Oct. 1859.] It is pleasant to have to tell you that Mr. Bracebridge has been at last awakened to do the right thing. This morning came a letter enclosing the following to me: "Madame, I have much pleasure on receiving your declaration that 'etc., etc.,' in replying that I frankly accept your declaration as the truth, and I shall repeat it if the contrary is again asserted to me." This is the first symptom we have had from him of common-sense. I am very thankful--for it ends transactions with him. Mr. Lewes is of so sensitive a temperament, and so used to feeling more angry and more glad on my behalf than his own, that he has been made, several mornings, quite unable to go on with his work by this irritating correspondence. It is all my fault, for if he didn't see in the first instance that I am completely upset by anything that arouses unloving emotions, he would never feel as he does about outer sayings and doings. No one is more indifferent than he is to what is said about himself. No more about my business, let us hope, for a long while to come! The Congreves are settled at home again now--blessing us with the sight of kind faces--Mr. Congreve beginning his medical course. Delicious confusion of ideas! Mr. Lewes, walking in Wandsworth, saw a good woman cross over the street to speak to a blind man. She accosted him with, "Well, _I_ knew you, _though you are dark_!" [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th Oct. 1859.] I wish you had read the letter you enclosed to me; it is really curious. The writer, an educated person, asks me to perfect and extend the benefit "Adam Bede" has "conferred on society" by writing a _sequel_ to it, in which I am to tell all about Hetty after her reprieve, "Arthur's efforts to obtain the reprieve, and his desperate ride after obtaining it--Dinah on board the convict ship--Dinah's letters to Hetty--and whatever the author might choose to reveal concerning Hetty's years of banishment. Minor instances of the incompleteness which induces an unsatisfactory feeling may be alleged in the disposal of the _locket and earrings_--which everybody expects to re-appear--and in the incident of the pink silk neckerchief, of which all would like to hear a little more!!" I do feel more than I ought about outside sayings and doings, and I constantly rebuke myself for all that part of my susceptibility, which I know to be weak and egoistic; still what is said about one's art is not merely a personal matter--it touches the very highest things one lives for. _Truth_ in art is so startling that no one can believe in it as art, and the specific forms of religious life which have made some of the grandest elements in human history are looked down upon as if they were not within the artist's sympathy and veneration and intensely dramatic reproduction. "I do well to be angry" on that ground, don't I? The simple fact is, that I never saw anything of my aunt's writing, and Dinah's words came from me "as the tears come because our heart is full, and we can't help them." If you were living in London instead of at Edinburgh, I should ask you to read the first volume of "Sister Maggie" at once, for the sake of having your impression, but it is inconvenient to me to part with the MS. The great success of "Adam" makes my writing a matter of more anxiety than ever. I suppose there is a little sense of responsibility mixed up with a great deal of pride. And I think I should worry myself still more if I began to print before the thing is essentially complete. So on all grounds it is better to wait. How clever and picturesque the "Horsedealer in Syria" is! I read him with keen interest, only wishing that he saw the seamy side of things rather less habitually. Excellent Captain Speke can't write so well, but one follows him out of grave sympathy. That a man should live through such things as that beetle in his ear! Such papers as that make the _specialité_ of _Blackwood_--one sees them nowhere else. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Oct. 16._--Yesterday came a pleasant packet of letters: one from Blackwood, saying that they are printing a seventh edition of "Adam Bede" (of 2000), and that "Clerical Scenes" will soon be exhausted. I have finished the first volume of my new novel, "Sister Maggie;" have got my legal questions answered satisfactorily, and when my headache has cleared off must go at it full speed. _Oct. 25._--The day before yesterday Herbert Spencer dined with us. We have just finished reading aloud "Père Goriot"--a hateful book. I have been reading lately and have nearly finished Comte's "Catechism." _Oct. 28._--Received from Blackwood a check for £400, the last payment for "Adam Bede" in the terms of the agreement. But in consequence of the great success, he proposes to pay me £800 more at the beginning of next year. Yesterday Smith, the publisher, called to make propositions to G. about writing in the _Cornhill Magazine_. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Oct. 1859.] I beg that you and Major Blackwood will accept my thanks for your proposal to give me a further share in the success of "Adam Bede," beyond the terms of our agreement, which are fulfilled by the second check for £400, received this morning. Neither you nor I ever calculated on half such a success, thinking that the book was too quiet, and too unflattering to dominant fashion, ever to be very popular. I hope that opinion of ours is a guarantee that there is nothing hollow or transient in the reception "Adam" has met with. Sometimes when I read a book which has had a great success, and am unable to see any valid merits of an artistic kind to account for it, I am visited with a horrible alarm lest "Adam," too, should ultimately sink into the same class of outworn admirations. But I always fall back on the fact that no shibboleth and no vanity is flattered by it, and that there is no novelty of mere form in it which can have delighted simply by startling. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Nov. 10._--Dickens dined with us to-day, for the first time, and after he left I went to the Congreves, where George joined me, and we had much chat--about George Stephenson, religion, etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th Nov. 1859.] A very beautiful letter--beautiful in feeling--that I have received from Mrs. Gaskell to-day, prompts me to write to you and let you know how entirely she has freed herself from any imputation of being unwilling to accept the truth when it has once clearly presented itself as truth. Since she has known "on authority" that the two books are mine, she has re-read them, and has written to me, apparently on the prompting they gave in that second reading: very sweet and noble words they are that she has written to me. Yesterday Dickens dined with us, on _his_ return from the country. That was a great pleasure to me: he is a man one can thoroughly enjoy talking to--there is a strain of real seriousness along with his keenness and humor. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Nov. 1859.] The Liggins affair is concluded so far as any _action_ of ours is concerned, since Mr. Quirk (the inmost citadel, I presume) has surrendered by writing an apology to Blackwood, saying he now believes he was imposed on by Mr. Liggins. As to Miss Martineau, I respect her so much as an authoress, and have so pleasant a recollection of her as a hostess for three days, that I wish that distant impression from herself and her writings to be disturbed as little as possible by mere personal details. Anything she may do or say or feel concerning me personally is a matter of entire indifference: I share her bitterness with a large number of far more blameless people than myself. It can be of no possible benefit to me, or any one else, that I should know more of those things, either past, present, or to come. "I do owe no man anything" except to write honestly and religiously what comes from my inward promptings; and the freer I am kept of all knowledge of that comparatively small circle who mingle personal regards or hatred with their judgment or reception of my writings, the easier it will be to keep my motives free from all indirectness and write truly. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Nov. 18._--On Monday Dickens wrote, asking me to give him, after I have finished my present novel, a story to be printed in _All the Year Round_--to begin four months after next Easter, and assuring me of my own terms. The next day G. had an interview by appointment with Evans (of Bradbury & Evans), and Lucas, the editor of _Once a Week_, who, after preliminary pressing of G. himself to contribute, put forward their wish that I should give them a novel for their Magazine. They were to write and make an offer, but have not yet done so. We have written to Dickens, saying that _time_ is an insurmountable obstacle to his proposition, as he puts it. I am reading Thomas à Kempis. _Nov. 19._--Mr. Lockhart Clarke and Mr. Herbert Spencer dined with us. _Nov. 22._--We have been much annoyed lately by Newby's advertisement of a book called "Adam Bede, Junior," a sequel; and to-day Dickens has written to mention a story of the tricks which are being used to push the book under the pretence of its being mine. One librarian has been forced to order the book against his will, because the public have demanded it. Dickens is going to put an article on the subject in _Household Words_, in order to scarify the rascally bookseller. _Nov. 23._--We began Darwin's book on "The Origin of Species" to-night. Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation. _Nov. 24._--This morning I wrote the scene between Mrs. Tulliver and Wakem. G. went into town and saw young Evans (of Bradbury & Evans), who agreed that it would be well to have an article in _Punch_ on this scoundrelly business of "Adam Bede, Junior." A divine day. I walked out, and Mrs. Congreve joined me. Then music, "Arabian Nights," and Darwin. _Nov. 25._--I am reading old Bunyan again, after the long lapse of years, and am profoundly struck with the true genius manifested in the simple, vigorous, rhythmic style. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 25th Nov. 1859.] Thanks for _Bentley_. Some one said the writer of the article on "Adam Bede" was a Mr. Mozeley, a clergyman, and a writer in the _Times_; but these reports about authorship are as often false as true. I think it is, on the whole, the best review we have seen, unless we must except the one in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Emile Montégut. I don't mean to read _any_ reviews of my next book; so far as they would produce any effect, they would be confusing. Everybody admires something that somebody else finds fault with; and the miller with his donkey was in a clear and decided state of mind compared with the unfortunate writer who should set himself to please all the world of review writers. I am compelled, in spite of myself, to be annoyed with this business of "Adam Bede, Junior." You see I am well provided with thorns in the flesh, lest I should be exalted beyond measure. To part with the copyright of a book which sells 16,000 in one year--to have a Liggins and an unknown writer of one's "Sequel" all to one's self--is excellent discipline. We are reading Darwin's book on Species, just come out after long expectation. It is an elaborate exposition of the evidence in favor of the Development Theory, and so makes an epoch. Do you see how the publishing world is going mad on periodicals? If I could be seduced by such offers, I might have written three poor novels, and made my fortune in one year. Happily, I have no need to exert myself when I say "Avaunt thee, Satan!" Satan, in the form of bad writing and good pay, is not seductive to me. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Nov. 26._--Letter from Lucas, editor of _Once a Week_, anxious to come to terms about my writing for said periodical. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 26th Nov. 1859.] It was very pretty and generous of you to send me a nice long letter out of your turn, and I think I shall give you, as a reward, other opportunities of being generous in the same way for the next few months, for I am likely to be a poor correspondent, having my head and hands full. We have the whole of Vilmar's "Literatur Geschichte," but not the remainder of the "Deutsche Humoristik." I agree with you in liking the history of German literature, especially the earlier ages--the birth-time of the legendary poetry. Have you read the "Nibelungenlied" yet? Whereabouts are you in algebra? It would be very pleasant to study it with you, if I could possibly find time to rub up my knowledge. It is now a good while since I looked into algebra, but I was very fond of it in old days, though I dare say I never went so far as you have now gone. Tell me your latitude and longitude. I have no memory of an autumn so disappointing as this. It is my favorite season. I delight especially in the golden and red tints under the purple clouds. But this year the trees were almost stripped of their leaves before they had changed color--dashed off by the winds and rain. We have had _no_ autumnal beauty. I am writing at night--very tired--so you must not wonder if I have left out words, or been otherwise incoherent. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Nov. 29._--Wrote a letter to the _Times_, and to Delane about Newby. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Dec. 1859.] I took no notice of the extract you sent me from a letter of Mrs. Gaskell's, being determined not to engage in any writing on the topic of my authorship, except such as was absolutely demanded of us. But since then I have had a very beautiful letter from Mrs. Gaskell, and I will quote some of her words, because they do her honor, and will incline you to think more highly of her. She begins in this way: "Since I heard, on authority, that you were the author of 'Scenes of Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede,' I have read them again, and I must once more tell you how earnestly, fully, and _humbly_ I admire them. I never read anything so complete and beautiful in fiction in my life before." Very sweet and noble of her, was it not? She went on to speak of her having held to the notion of Liggins, but she adds, "I was never such a goose as to believe that books like yours were a mosaic of real and ideal." The "Seth Bede" and "Adam Bede, Junior," are speculations of those who are always ready to fasten themselves like leeches on a popular fame. Such things must be endured: they are the shadow to the bright fact of selling 16,000 in one year. As to the silly falsehoods and empty opinions afloat in some petty circles, I have quite conquered my temporary irritation about them--indeed, I feel all the more serene now for that very irritation; it has impressed on me more deeply how entirely the rewards of the artist lie apart from everything that is narrow and personal: there is no peace until that lesson is thoroughly learned. I shall go on writing from my inward promptings--writing what I love and believe, what I feel to be true and good, if I can only render it worthily--and then leave all the rest to take its chance: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be" with those who are to produce any art that will lastingly touch the generations of men. We have been reading Darwin's book on the "Origin of Species" just now: it makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development--and not the adhesion of an anonym like the author of the "Vestiges," but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The book is sadly wanting in illustrative facts--of which he has collected a vast number, but reserves them for a future book, of which this smaller one is the _avant-coureur_. This will prevent the work from becoming popular as the "Vestiges" did, but it will have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes. It is nice to think of you reading our great, great favorite Molière, while, for the present, we are not taking him down from the shelves--only talking about him, as we do very often. I get a good deal of pleasure out of the sense that some one I love is reading and enjoying my best-loved writers. I think the "Misanthrope" the finest, most complete production _of its kind_ in the world. I know you enjoy the "sonnet" scene, and the one between Arsinoé and Célimène. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Monday evening, 5th Dec. 1859.] In opposition to most people who love to _read_ Shakspeare, I like to see his plays acted better than any others; his great tragedies thrill me, let them be acted how they may. I think it is something like what I used to experience in old days in listening to uncultured preachers--the emotions lay hold of one too strongly for one to care about the medium. Before all other plays I find myself cold and critical, seeing nothing but actors and "properties." I like going to those little provincial theatres. One's heart streams out to the poor devils of actors who get so little clapping, and will go home to so poor a supper. One of my pleasures lately has been hearing repeatedly from my Genevese friends M. and Mme. d'Albert, who were so good to me during my residence with them. M. d'Albert had read the "Scenes of Clerical Life" before he knew they were mine, and had been so much struck with them that he had wanted to translate them. One likes to feel old ties strengthened by fresh sympathies. The _Cornhill Magazine_ is going to lead off with great spirit, and promises to eclipse all the other new-born periodicals. Mr. Lewes is writing a series of papers for it--"Studies in Animal Life"--which are to be subsequently published in a book. It is quite as well that your book should not be ready for publication just yet. February is a much better time than Christmas. I shall be one of your most eager readers--for every book that comes from the heart of hearts does me good, and I quite share your faith that what you yourself feel so deeply and find so precious will find a home in some other minds. Do not suspect that I impose on you the task of writing letters to answer my _dilettante_ questions. "Am I on a bed of roses?" I have four children to correspond with--the three boys in Switzerland, and Emily at Lichfield. [Sidenote: Journal, 1859.] _Dec. 15._--Blackwood proposes to give me for "The Mill on the Floss" £2000 for 4000 copies of an edition at 31_s._ 6_d._, and after the same rate for any more that may be printed at the same price: £150 for 1000 at 12_s._, and £60 for 1000 at 6_s._ I have accepted. _Dec. 25._--Christmas-day. We all, including Pug, dined with Mr. and Mrs. Congreve, and had a delightful day. Mr. Bridges was there too. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 30th Dec. 1859.] I don't like Christmas to go by without sending you a greeting, though I have really nothing to say beyond that. We spent our Christmas-day with the Congreves, shutting up our house and taking our servant and Pug with us. And so we ate our turkey and plum-pudding in very social, joyous fashion with those charming friends. Mr. Bridges was there too. We are meditating flight to Italy when my present work is done, as our last bit of vagrancy for a long, long while. We shall only stay two months, doing nothing but absorb. I don't think I have anything else to tell, except that we, being very happy, wish all mortals to be in like condition, and especially the mortals we know in the flesh. Human happiness is a web with many threads of pain in it--that is always _sub auditum_--Twist ye, twine ye, even so, etc., etc. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 3d Jan. 1860.] I never before had so pleasant a New Year's greeting as your letter containing a check for £800, for which I have to thank you to-day. On every ground--including considerations that are not at all of a monetary kind--I am deeply obliged to you and to Major Blackwood for your liberal conduct in relation to "Adam Bede." As, owing to your generous concession of the copyright of "Adam Bede," the three books will be henceforth on the same footing, we shall be delivered from further discussion as to terms. We are demurring about the title. Mr. Lewes is beginning to prefer "The House of Tulliver; or, Life on the Floss," to our old notion of "Sister Maggie." "The Tullivers; or, Life on the Floss," has the advantage of slipping easily off the lazy English tongue, but it is after too common a fashion ("The Newcomes," "The Bertrams," etc., etc.). Then there is "The Tulliver Family; or, Life on the Floss." Pray meditate, and give us your opinion. I am very anxious that the "Scenes of Clerical Life" should have every chance of impressing the public with its existence: first, because I think it of importance to the estimate of me as a writer that "Adam Bede" should not be counted as my only book; and secondly, because there are ideas presented in these stories about which I care a good deal, and am not sure that I can ever embody again. This latter reason is my private affair, but the other reason, if valid, is yours also. I must tell you that I had another cheering letter to-day besides yours: one from a person of mark in your Edinburgh University,[9] full of the very strongest words of sympathy and encouragement, hoping that my life may long be spared "to give pictures of the deeper life of this age." So I sat down to my desk with a delicious confidence that my audience is not made up of reviewers and literary clubs. If there is any truth in me that the world wants, nothing will hinder the world from drinking what it is athirst for. And if there is no needful truth in me, let me, howl as I may in the process, be hurled into the Dom Daniel, where I wish all other futile writers to sink. Your description of the "curling" made me envy you the sight. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 4th Jan. 1860.] The sun is shining with us too, and your pleasant letter made it seem to shine more brightly. I am not going to be expansive in this appendix to your father's chapter of love and news, for my head is tired with writing this morning--it is not so young as yours, you know, and, besides, is a feminine head, supported by weaker muscles and a weaker digestive apparatus than that of a young gentleman with a broad chest and hopeful whiskers. I don't wonder at your being more conscious of your attachment to Hofwyl now the time of leaving is so near. I fear you will miss a great many things in exchanging Hofwyl, with its snowy mountains and glorious spaces, for a very moderate home in the neighborhood of London. You will have a less various, more arduous life: but the time of _Entbehrung_ or _Entsagung_ must begin, you know, for every mortal of us. And let us hope that we shall all--father and mother and sons--help one another with love. What jolly times you have had lately! It did us good to read of your merrymaking. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Jan. 1860.] "The Mill on the Floss" be it then! The only objections are, that the mill is not _strictly_ on the Floss, being on its small tributary, and that the title is of rather laborious utterance. But I think these objections do not deprive it of its advantage over "The Tullivers; or, Life on the Floss"--the only alternative, so far as we can see. Pray give the casting-vote. Easter Monday, I see, is on the 8th April, and I wish to be out by the middle or end of March. Illness apart, I intend to have finished Vol. III. by the beginning of that month, and I hope no obstacle will impede the rapidity of the printing. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Jan. 11._--I have had a very delightful letter of sympathy from Professor Blackie of Edinburgh, which came to me on New Year's morning, and a proposal from Blackwood to publish a third edition of "Clerical Scenes" at 12_s._ George's article in the _Cornhill Magazine_--the first of a series of "Studies in Animal Life"--is much admired, and in other ways our New Year opens with happy omens. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 12th Jan. 1860.] Thank you for letting me see the specimen advertisements; they have helped us to come to a decision--namely, for "The Mill on the Floss." I agree with you that it will be well not to promise the book in March--not because I do not desire and hope to be ready, but because I set my face against all pledges that I am not _sure_ of being able to fulfil. The third volume is, I fancy, always more rapidly written than the rest. The third volume of "Adam Bede" was written in six weeks, even with headaching interruptions, because it was written under a stress of emotion, which first volumes cannot be. I will send you the first volume of "The Mill" at once. The second is ready, but I would rather keep it as long as I can. Besides the advantage to the book of being out by Easter, I have another reason for wishing to have done in time for that. We want to get away for two months to Italy, if possible, to feed my mind with fresh thoughts, and to assure ourselves of that fructifying holiday before the boys are about us, making it difficult for us to leave home. But you may rely on it that no amount of horse-power would make me _hurry_ over my book, so as not to do my best. If it is written fast, it will be because I can't help writing it fast. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Jan. 16._--Finished my second volume this morning, and am going to send off the MS. of the first volume to-morrow. We have decided that the title shall be "The Mill on the Floss." We have been reading "Humphrey Clinker" in the evenings, and have been much disappointed in it, after the praise of Thackeray and Dickens. _Jan. 26._--Mr. Pigott, Mr. Redford, and Mr. F. Chapman dined with us, and we had a musical evening. Mrs. Congreve and Miss Bury[10] joining us after dinner. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Jan. 1860.] Thanks for your letter of yesterday, with the Genevese enclosure. No promise, alas! of smallest watch expressing largest admiration, but a desire for "permission to translate." I have been invalided for the last week, and, of course, am a prisoner in the castle of Giant Despair, who growls in my ear that "The Mill on the Floss" is detestable, and that the last volume will be the climax of that general detestableness. Such is the elation attendant on what a self-elected lady correspondent of mine from Scotland calls my "exciting career!" I have had a great pleasure this week. Dr. Inman of Liverpool has dedicated a new book ("Foundation for a New Theory and Practice of Medicine") "to G. H. Lewes, as an acknowledgment of benefit received from noticing his close observation and clear inductive reasoning in 'Sea-side Studies' and the 'Physiology of Common Life.'" That is really gratifying, coming from a _physician_ of some scientific mark, who is _not_ a personal friend. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Feb. 4._--Came this morning a letter from Blackwood announcing the despatch of the first eight sheets of proof of "The Mill on the Floss," and expressing his delight in it. To-night G. has read them, and says, "_Ganz famos!_" Ebenezer! _Feb. 23._--Sir Edward Lytton called on us. Guy Darrell in _propriâ personâ_. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d Feb. 1860.] Sir Edward Lytton called on us yesterday. The conversation lapsed chiefly into monologue, from the difficulty I found in making him hear, but under all disadvantages I had an agreeable impression of his kindness and sincerity. He thinks the two defects of "Adam Bede" are the dialect and Adam's marriage with Dinah; but, of course, I would have my teeth drawn rather than give up either. Jacobi told Jean Paul that unless he altered the _dénouement_ of his Titan he would withdraw his friendship from him; and I am preparing myself for your lasting enmity on the ground of the tragedy in my third volume. But an unfortunate duck can only lay blue eggs, however much white ones may be in demand. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Feb. 29._--G. has been in the town to-day, and has agreed for £300 for "The Mill on the Floss" from Harpers of New York. This evening, too, has come a letter from Williams & Norgate, saying that Tauchnitz will give £100 for the German reprint; also, that "Bede Adam" is translated into Hungarian. _March 5._--Yesterday Mr. Lawrence, the portrait-painter, lunched with us, and expressed to G. his wish to take my portrait. _March 9._--Yesterday a letter from Blackwood, expressing his strong delight in my third volume, which he had read to the beginning of "Borne on the tide." To-day young Blackwood called, and told us, among other things, that the last copies of "Clerical Scenes" had gone to-day--twelve for export. Letter came from Germany, announcing a translation of G.'s "Biographical History of Philosophy." _March 11._--To-day the first volume of the German translation of "Adam Bede" came. It is done by Dr. Frese, the same man who translated the "Life of Goethe." _March 20._--Professor Owen sent me his "Palæontology" to-day. Have missed two days of work from headache, and so have not yet finished my book. _March 21._--Finished this morning "The Mill on the Floss," writing from the moment when Maggie, carried out on the water, thinks of her mother and brother. We hope to start for Rome on Saturday, 24th. _Magnificat anima mea!_ The manuscript of "The Mill on the Floss" bears the following inscription: "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS. of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life together, at Holly Lodge, South Field, Wandsworth, and finished 21st March, 1860." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 22d March, 1860.] Your letter yesterday morning helped to inspire me for the last eleven pages, if they have any inspiration in them. They were written in a _furor_, but I dare say there is not a word different from what it would have been if I had written them at the slowest pace. We expect to start on Saturday morning, and to be in Rome by Palm Sunday, or else by the following Tuesday. Of course we shall write to you when we know what will be our address in Rome. In the meantime news will gather. I don't mean to send "The Mill on the Floss" to any one except to Dickens, who has behaved with a delicate kindness in a recent matter, which I wish to acknowledge. I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished--sad that I shall live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But it is time that I should go and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1859, TO MARCH, 1860. Looking for cases of _inundation_ in _Annual Register_--New House--Holly Lodge, Wandsworth--Letter to John Blackwood--George Eliot fears she has not characteristics of "the popular author"--Subscription to "Adam Bede" 730 copies--Appreciation by a cabinet-maker--Dr. John Brown sends "Rab and his Friends" with an inscription--Letter to Blackwood thereon--Tries to be hopeful--Letters to Miss Hennell--Description of Holly Lodge--Miss Nightingale--Thoughts on death--Scott--Mrs. Clarke writes--Mr. and Mrs. Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Bray on effects of anxiety--Mrs. Clarke dying--Letter to John Blackwood--Wishes Carlyle to read "Adam Bede"--"Life of Frederic" painful--Susceptibility to newspaper criticism--Edinburgh more encouraging than London--Letter to Blackwood to stop puffing notices--Letter from E. Hall, working-man, asking for cheap editions--Sale of "Adam Bede"--Death of Mrs. Clarke--1800 copies of "Adam Bede" sold--Letter to Blackwood--Awakening to fame--Letter to Froude--Mrs. Poyser quoted in House of Commons by Mr. Charles Buxton--Opinions of Charles Reade, Shirley Brooks, and John Murray--Letter to John Blackwood--Warwickshire correspondent insists that Liggins is author of "Adam Bede"--Not flushed with success--Visit to Isle of Wight--Letter to Miss Hennell on rewriting, and pleasure in Mr. and Mrs. Congreve--Letter to _Times_, denying that Liggins is the author--Letter to Blackwood--The Liggins myth--Letter from Bulwer--Finished "The Lifted Veil"--Writing "The Tullivers"--Mrs. Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Faith in her--Letter from Madame Bodichon--Reply breathing joy in sympathy--Letter to Major Blackwood--Mr. Anders's apology for the Liggins business--"Adam Bede" worth writing--Dulwich gallery--Blackwood gives £400 more in acknowledgment of "Adam Bede's" success--Letter to Miss Hennell on Mrs. Congreve--On difficulty of getting cheap music in England--Professor Aytoun on "Adam Bede"--Letter to Major Blackwood--Liggins--Mrs. Gaskell--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Dislike of Wandsworth--To Crystal Palace to hear "Messiah," and reveals herself to Brays as author of "Adam Bede"--Letter to Brays--Bad effect of talking of her books--Letter to Charles Bray--Melancholy that her writing does not produce effect intended--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--To Switzerland by Paris--At Schweizerhof, Lucerne, with Congreves--Mr. Lewes goes to Hofwyl--Return to Richmond by Bâle and Paris--Fourth edition of "Adam Bede" (5000) sold in a fortnight--Letter to Mrs. Bray on Mrs. Congreve--On the effect of her books and fame--Herbert Spencer on "Adam Bede"--Pamphlet to prove that Scott's novels were written by Thomas Scott--Letter from Dickens on "Adam Bede" referred to--Letter to John Blackwood on "Pug"--Letter to Charles Lewes--"The Physiology of Common Life"--American proposition for a story for £1200--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Distance from experience artistically necessary--Letter to John Blackwood--Development of stories--Visit to Penmaenmawr--Return by Lichfield to Weymouth--Sixth edition of "Adam Bede"--Back to Richmond--Anxiety about new novel--Journey to Gainsboro', Lincolnshire--Letter to Miss Hennell--End of Liggins business--Letter to John Blackwood--A correspondent suggests a sequel to "Adam Bede"--Susceptibility to outside opinion--Seventh edition of "Adam Bede"--Blackwood proposes to pay £800 beyond the bargain for success of "Adam Bede"--Dickens dines at Holly Lodge--Letter to Miss Hennell--Quotes letter from Mrs. Gaskell--Miss Martineau--Dickens asks for story for _All the Year Round_--"Adam Bede, Junior"--Reading Darwin on "Origin of Species"--Bunyan--Letter to Mr. Bray--Article on "Adam Bede" in _Bentley_--In _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Emile Montégut--Reviews generally--16,000 of "Adam Bede" sold in year--Darwin's book--Letter to Charles Lewes--Mentions fondness of algebra--Letter to Madame Bodichon quoting Mrs. Gaskell's letter--Rewards of the artist lie apart from everything personal--Darwin's book--Molière--Letter to Miss Hennell--Likes to see Shakspeare acted--Hears from M. and Mme. d'Albert--_Cornhill Magazine_--Blackwood's terms for "Mill on the Floss"--Christmas-day with Congreves--Letter of sympathy from Professor Blackie--Third edition of "Clerical Scenes"--Letters to Blackwood--Thanks for concession of copyright of "Adam Bede"--Title of new novel considered--Suggestion of the "Mill on the Floss" accepted--The third volume of "Adam Bede" written in six weeks--Depression with the "Mill"--Sir Edward Lytton--"Adam Bede" translated into Hungarian and German--"Mill on the Floss" finished--Letter to Blackwood--Sad at finishing--Start for Italy. FOOTNOTES: [7] Miss Emily Bury, now Mrs. Geddes. [8] Madame Bodichon. [9] Professor Blackie. [10] Mrs. Congreve's sister. CHAPTER X. [Sidenote: Italy, 1860.] We have finished our journey to Italy--the journey I had looked forward to for years, rather with the hope of the new elements it would bring to my culture than with the hope of immediate pleasure. Travelling can hardly be without a continual current of disappointment, if the main object is not the enlargement of one's general life, so as to make even weariness and annoyances enter into the sum of benefit. One great deduction to me from the delight of seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness which tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough, and that, when higher enjoyment comes with the reproduction of the scenes in my imagination, I shall have lost some of the details, which impress me too feebly in the present, because the faculties are not wrought up into energetic action. I have no other journal than the briefest record of what we did each day, so I shall put down my recollections whenever I happen to have leisure and inclination--just for the sake of making clear to myself the impressions I have brought away from our three months' travel. The first striking moment in our journey was when we arrived, I think about eleven o'clock at night, at the point in the ascent of the Mont Cenis where we were to quit the diligences and take to the sledges. After a hasty drink of hot coffee in the roadside inn, our large party--the inmates of three diligences--turned out into the starlight to await the signal for getting into the sledges. That signal seemed to be considerably on in the future--to be arrived at through much confusion of luggage-lifting, voices, and leading about of mules. The human bustle and confusion made a poetic contrast with the sublime stillness of the starlit heavens spread over the snowy table-land and surrounding heights. The keenness of the air contributed strongly to the sense of novelty; we had left our every-day, conventional world quite behind us, and were on a visit to Nature in her private home. Once closely packed in our sledge, congratulating ourselves that, after all, we were no more squeezed than in our diligence, I gave myself up to as many naps as chose to take possession of me, and actually slept without very considerable interruption till we were near the summit of the mighty pass. Already there was a faint hint of the morning in the starlight, which showed us the vast, sloping snow-fields as we commenced the descent. I got a few glimpses of the pure, far-stretching whiteness before the sharpening edge of cold forced us to close the window. Then there was no more to be seen till it was time to get out of the sledge and ascend the diligence once more; not, however, without a preliminary struggle with the wind, which fairly blew me down on my slippery standing-ground. The rest of our descent showed us fine, varied scenes of mountain and ravine till we got down at Susa, where breakfast and the railway came as a desirable variety after our long mountain journey and long fast. One of our companions had been a gigantic French soldier, who had in charge a bag of government money. He was my _vis-à-vis_ for some time, and cramped my poor legs not a little with his precious bag, which he would by no means part from. The approach to Turin by the railway gave us a grand view of snowy mountains surrounding the city on three sides. A few hours of rest spent there could leave no very vivid impression. A handsome street, well broken by architectural details, with a glimpse of snowy mountains at the end of the vista, colonnades on each side, and flags waving their bright colors in sign of political joy, is the image that usually rises before me at the mention of Turin. I fancy the said street is the principal one, but in our walk about the town we saw everywhere a similar character of prosperous, well-lodged town existence--only without the colonnades and without the balconies and other details, which make the principal street picturesque. This is the place that Alfieri lived in through many of his young follies, getting tired of it at last for the Piedmontese pettiness of which it was the centre. And now, eighty years later, it is the centre of a widening life which may at last become the life of resuscitated Italy. At the railway station, as we waited to take our departure for Genoa, we had a sight of the man whose name will always be connected with the story of that widening life--Count Cavour--"imitant son portrait," which we had seen in the shops, with unusual closeness. A man pleasant to look upon, with a smile half kind, half caustic; giving you altogether the impression that he thinks of "many matters," but thanks Heaven and makes no boast of them. He was there to meet the Prince de Carignan, who was going to Genoa on his way towards Florence by the same train as ourselves. The prince is a notability with a thick waist, bound in by a gold belt, and with a fat face, predominated over by a large mustache--"Non ragionam di lui." The railway journey from Turin was chiefly distinguished by dust; but I slept through the latter half, without prejudice, however, to the satisfaction with which I lay down in a comfortable bedroom in the Hotel Feder. In Genoa again on a bright, warm spring morning! I was here eleven years ago, and the image that visit had left in my mind was surprisingly faithful, though fragmentary. The outlook from our hotel was nearly the same as before--over a low building with a colonnade, at the masts of the abundant shipping. But there was a striking change in the interior of the hotel. It was like the other, a palace adapted to the purposes of an inn; but be-carpeted and be-furnished with an exaggeration of English fashion. We lost no time in turning out, after breakfast, into the morning sunshine. George was enchanted with the aspect of the place, as we drove or walked along the streets. It was his first vision of anything corresponding to his preconception of Italy. After the Adlergasse, in Nürnberg, surely no streets can be more impressive than the Strada Nuova and Strada Nuovissima, at Genoa. In street architecture I can rise to the highest point of the admiration given to the Palladian style. And here in these chief streets of Genoa the palaces have two advantages over those of Florence: they form a series, creating a general impression of grandeur of which each particular palace gets the benefit; and they have the open gateway, showing the _cortile_ within--sometimes containing grand stone staircases. And all this architectural splendor is accompanied with the signs of actual prosperity. Genova la Superba is not a name of the past merely. We ascended the tower of Santa Maria di Carignano to get a panoramic view of the city, with its embosoming hills and bay--saw the cathedral, with its banded black-and-white marble--the churches of the Annunziata and San Ambrogio, with their wealth of gilding and rich pink-brown marbles--the Palazzo Rosso, with its collection of eminently forgettable pictures--and the pretty gardens of the Palazzo Doria, with their flourishing green close against the sea. A drive in the direction of the Campo Santo, along the dry, pebbly bed of the river, showed us the terraced hills planted with olives, and many picturesque groups of the common people with mules or on carts; not to mention what gives beauty to every corner of the inhabited world--the groups of children squatting against walls or trotting about by the side of their elders or grinning together over their play. One of the personages we were pleased to encounter in the streets here was a quack--a Dulcamara--mounted on his carriage and holding forth with much _brio_ before proceeding to take out the tooth of a negro, already seated in preparation. We left Genoa on the second evening--unhappily, a little too long after sundown, so that we did not get a perfect view of the grand city from the sea. The pale starlight could bring out no color. We had a prosperous passage to Leghorn. Leghorn on a brilliant, warm morning, with five or six hours before us to fill as agreeably as possible! Of course, the first thought was to go to Pisa, but the train would not start till eleven; so, in the meantime, we took a drive about the prosperous-looking town, and saw the great reservoir which receives the water brought from the distant mountains; a beautiful and interesting sight--to look into the glassy depth and see columns and grand arches reflected as if in mockery and frustration of one's desire to see the bottom. But in one corner the light fell so as to reveal that reality instead of the beautiful illusion. On our way back we passed the Hebrew synagogue, and were glad of our coachman's suggestion that we should enter, seeing it was the Jews' Sabbath. At Pisa we took a carriage and drove at once to the cathedral, seeing as we went the well-looking lines of building on each side of the Arno. A wonderful sight is that first glimpse of the cathedral, with the leaning campanile on one side and the baptistery on the other, green turf below, and a clear, blue sky above! The structure of the campanile is exquisitely light and graceful--tier above tier of small circular arches, supported by delicate, round pillars narrowing gradually in circumference, but very slightly, so that there is no striking difference of size between the base and summit. The campanile is all of white marble, but the cathedral has the bands of black and white, softened in effect by the yellowing which time has given to the white. There is a family likeness among all these structures: they all have the delicate little colonnades and circular arches. But the baptistery has stronger traits of the Gothic style in the pinnacles that crown the encircling colonnade. After some dusty delay outside the railway station we set off back again to Livorno, and forthwith got on board our steamboat again--to awake next morning (being Palm-Sunday) at Civita Vecchia. Much waiting before we were allowed to land; and again much waiting for the clumsy process of "visiting" our luggage. I was amused while sitting at the _Dogana_, where almost every one was cross and busy, to see a dog making his way quietly out with a bone in his mouth. Getting into our railway carriage, our _vis-à-vis_--a stout, amiable, intelligent Livornian, with his wife and son, named Dubreux--exclaimed, "C'en est fini d'un peuple qui n'est pas capable de changer une bêtise comme ça!" George got into pleasant talk with him, and his son, about Edinburgh and the scientific men there--the son having been there for some time in order to go through a course of practical science. The father was a naturalist--an entomologist, I think. It was an interesting journey from Civita Vecchia to Rome: at first, a scene of rough, hilly character, then a vast plain, frequently marshy, crowded with asphodels, inhabited by buffaloes; here and there a falcon or other slow, large-winged bird floating and alighting. At last we came in sight of Rome, but there was nothing imposing to be seen. The chief object was what I afterwards knew to be one of the aqueducts, but which I then, in the vagueness of my conceptions, guessed to be the ruins of baths. The railway station where we alighted looked remote and countrified; only the omnibuses and one family carriage were waiting, so that we were obliged to take our chance in one of the omnibuses--that is, the chance of finding no place left for us in the hotels. And so it was. Every one wanted to go to the Hotel d'Angleterre, and every one was disappointed. We, at last, by help of some fellow-travellers, got a small room _au troisième_ at the Hotel d'Amérique; and as soon as that business was settled we walked out to look at Rome--not without a rather heavy load of disappointment on our minds from the vision we had of it from the omnibus windows. A weary length of dirty, uninteresting streets had brought us within sight of the dome of St. Peter's, which was not impressive, seen in a peeping, makeshift manner, just rising above the houses; and the Castle of St. Angelo seemed but a shabby likeness of the engravings. Not one iota had I seen that corresponded with my preconceptions. Our hotel was in the Strada Babuino, which leads directly from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna. We went to the latter for our first walk, and arriving opposite the high, broad flights of stone steps which lead up to the Trinità di Monte, stopped for the first time with a sense that here was something not quite common and ugly. But I think we got hardly any farther, that evening, than the tall column at the end of the piazza, which celebrates the final settlement by Pius IX. of the Virgin's Immaculate Conception. Oh, yes; I think we wandered farther among narrow and ugly streets, and came into our hotel again still with some dejection at the probable relation our "Rome visited" was to bear to our "Rome unvisited." Discontented with our little room at an extravagant height of stairs and price, we found and took lodgings the next day in the Corso opposite St. Carlo, with a well-mannered Frenchman named Peureux and his little, dark, Italian wife--and so felt ourselves settled for a month. By this time we were in better spirits; for in the morning we had been to the Capitol (Campidoglio, the modern variant for Capitolium), had ascended the tower, and had driven to the Coliseum. The scene, looking along the Forum to the Arch of Titus, resembled strongly that mixture of ruined grandeur with modern life which I had always had in my imagination at the mention of Rome. The approach to the Capitol from the opposite side is also impressive: on the right hand the broad, steep flight of steps leading up to the Church and Monastery of Ara Coeli, placed, some say, on the site of the Arx; in the front a less steep flight of steps _à cordon_ leading to that lower, flatter portion of the hill which was called the _Intermontium_, and which now forms a sort of piazza, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre, and on three sides buildings designed, or rather modified, by Michael Angelo--on the left the Museum, on the right the Museo dei Conservatori, and, on the side opposite the steps, the building devoted to public offices (Palazzo dei Senatori), in the centre of which stands the tower. On each hand, at the summit of the steps, are the two Colossi, less celebrated but hardly less imposing in their calm grandeur than the Colossi of the Quirinal. They are strangely streaked and disfigured by the blackening weather; but their large-eyed, mild might gives one a thrill of awe, half like what might have been felt by the men of old who saw the divine twins watering their steeds when they brought the news of victory. Perhaps the world can hardly offer a more interesting outlook than that from the tower of the Capitol. The eye leaps first to the mountains that bound the Campagna--the Sabine and Alban Hills and the solitary Soracte farther on to the left. Then, wandering back across the Campagna, it searches for the Sister Hills, hardly distinguishable now as hills. The Palatine is conspicuous enough, marked by the ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, and rising up beyond the extremity of the Forum. And now, once resting on the Forum, the eye will not readily quit the long area that begins with the Clivus Capitolinus and extends to the Coliseum--an area that was once the very focus of the world. The Campo Vaccino, the site probably of the Comitium, was this first morning covered with carts and animals, mingling a simple form of actual life with those signs of the highly artificial life that had been crowded here in ages gone by: the three Corinthian pillars at the extremity of the Forum, said to have belonged to the Temple of Jupiter Stator; the grand temple of Antoninus and Faustina; the white arch of Titus; the Basilica of Constantine; the temple built by Adrian, with its great, broken granite columns scattered around on the green, rising ground; the huge arc of the Coliseum and the arch of Constantine. The scenes of these great relics remained our favorite haunt during our stay at Rome; and one day, near the end of it, we entered the enclosure of the Clivus Capitolinus and the excavated space of the Forum. The ruins on the Clivus--the façade of massive columns on the right, called the temple of Vespasian; the two Corinthian columns, called the temple of Saturn, in the centre; and the arch of Septimius Severus on the left--have their rich color set off by the luxuriant green, clothing the lower masonry, which formed the foundations of the crowded buildings on this narrow space, and, as a background to them all, the rough solidity of the ancient wall forming the back of the central building on the Intermontium, and regarded as one of the few remains of Republican constructions. On either hand, at another angle from the arch, the ancient road forming the double ascent of the Clivus is seen, firm and level, with its great blocks of pavement. The arch of Septimius Severus is particularly rich in color; and the poorly executed bas-reliefs of military groups still look out in the grotesque completeness of attitude and expression, even on the sides exposed to the weather. From the Clivus a passage, underneath the present road, leads into the Forum, whose immense pinkish granite columns lie on the weather-worn white marble pavement. The column of Phocas, with its base no longer "buried," stands at the extreme corner nearest the Clivus; and the three elegant columns of the temple (say some) of Jupiter Stator, mark the opposite extremity; between lie traces, utterly confused to all but erudite eyes, of marble steps and of pedestals stripped of their marble. Let me see what I most delighted in, in Rome. Certainly this drive from the Clivus to the Coliseum was, from first to last, one of the chief things; but there are many objects and many impressions of various kinds which I can reckon up as of almost equal interest: the Coliseum itself, with the view from it; the drive along the Appian Way to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the view from thence of the Campagna bridged by the aqueduct; the baths of Titus, with the remnants of their arabesques, seen by the light of torches, in the now damp and gloomy spaces; the glimpse of the Tarpeian rock, with its growth of cactus and rough herbage; the grand, bare arch brickwork of the Palace of the Cæsars rising in huge masses on the Palatine; the theatre of Marcellus bursting suddenly into view from among the crowded mean houses of the modern city, and still more the Temple of Minerva and Temple of Nerva, also set in the crowded city of the present; and the exterior of the Pantheon, if it were not marred by the Papal belfries--these are the traces of ancient Rome that have left the strongest image of themselves in my mind. I ought not to leave out Trajan's column, and the forum in which it stands; though the severe cold tint of the gray granite columns, or fragments of columns, gave this forum rather a dreary effect to me. For vastness there is perhaps nothing more impressive in Rome than the Baths of Caracalla, except the Coliseum; and I remember that it was among them that I first noticed the lovely effect of the giant fennel, luxuriant among the crumbling brickwork. Among the ancient sculptures I think I must place on a level the Apollo, the Dying Gladiator, and the Lateran Antinous: they affected me equally in different ways. After these I delighted in the Venus of the Capitol, and the Kissing Children in the same room; the Sophocles at the Lateran Museum; the Nile; the black, laughing Centaur at the Capitol; the Laughing Faun in the Vatican; and the _Sauroktonos_, or Boy with the Lizard, and the sitting statue called Menander. The Faun of Praxiteles, and the old Faun with the infant Bacchus, I had already seen at Munich, else I should have mentioned them among my first favorites. Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight--all the more impressive because it was our first sight of the Vatican. Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls, with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. Wonderfully grand these halls of the Vatican are; and there is but one complaint to be made against the home provided for this richest collection of antiquities--it is that there is no historical arrangement of them, and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a system of helter-skelter. Of Christian Rome, St. Peter's is, of course, the supreme wonder. The piazza, with Bernini's colonnades, and the gradual slope upward to the mighty temple, gave me always a sense of having entered some millennial new Jerusalem, where all small and shabby things were unknown. But the exterior of the cathedral itself is even ugly; it causes a constant irritation by its partial concealment of the dome. The first impression from the interior was, perhaps, at a higher pitch than any subsequent impression, either of its beauty or vastness; but then, on later visits, the lovely marble, which has a tone at once subdued and warm, was half-covered with hideous red drapery. There is hardly any detail one cares to dwell on in St. Peter's. It is interesting, for once, to look at the mosaic altar-pieces, some of which render with marvellous success such famous pictures as the Transfiguration, the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Entombment or Disentombment of St. Petronilla. And some of the monuments are worth looking at more than once, the chief glory of that kind being Canova's Lions. I was pleased one day to watch a group of poor people looking with an admiration that had a half-childish terror in it at the sleeping lion, and with a sort of daring air thrusting their fingers against the teeth of the waking "mane-bearer." We ascended the dome near the end of our stay, but the cloudy horizon was not friendly to our distant view, and Rome itself is ugly to a bird's-eye contemplation. The chief interest of the ascent was the vivid realization it gave of the building's enormous size, and after that the sight of the inner courts and garden of the Vatican. Our most beautiful view of Rome and the Campagna was one we had much earlier in our stay, before the snow had vanished from the mountains; it was from the terrace of the Villa Pamfili Doria. Of smaller churches I remember especially Santa Maria degli Angeli, a church formed by Michael Angelo by additions to the grand hall in the Baths of Diocletian--the only remaining hall of ancient Rome; and the Church of San Clemente, where there is a chapel painted by Masaccio, as well as a perfect specimen of the ancient enclosure near the tribune, called the presbytery, with the _ambones_ or pulpits from which the lessons and gospel were read. Santa Maria Maggiore is an exquisitely beautiful basilica, rich in marbles from a pagan temple; and the reconstructed San Paolo fuori le Mura is a wonder of wealth and beauty, with its lines of white-marble columns--if one could possibly look with pleasure at such a perverted appliance of money and labor as a church built in an unhealthy solitude. After St. Peter's, however, the next great monument of Christian art is the Sistine Chapel; but since I care for the chapel solely for the sake of its ceiling, I ought rather to number it among my favorite paintings than among the most memorable buildings. Certainly this ceiling of Michael Angelo's is the most wonderful fresco in the world. After it come Raphael's School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, so far as Rome is concerned. Among oil-paintings there I like best the Madonna di Foligno, for the sake of the cherub who is standing and looking upward; the Perugino also, in the Vatican, and the pretty Sassoferrato, with the clouds budding angels; at the Barberini Palace, Beatrice Cenci, and Una Schiava, by Titian; at the Sciarra Palace, the Joueurs de Violon, by Raphael, another of Titian's golden-haired women, and a sweet Madonna and Child with a bird, by Fra Bartolomeo; at the Borghese Palace, Domenichino's Chase, the Entombment, by Raphael, and the Three Ages--a copy of Titian, by Sassoferrato. We should have regretted entirely our efforts to get to Rome during the Holy Week, instead of making Florence our first resting-place, if we had not had the compensation for wearisome, empty ceremonies and closed museums in the wonderful spectacle of the illumination of St. Peter's. That, really, is a thing so wondrous, so magically beautiful, that one can't find in one's heart to say it is not worth doing. I remember well the first glimpse we had as we drove out towards it, of the outline of the dome like a new constellation on the black sky. I thought _that_ was the final illumination, and was regretting our tardy arrival, from the _détour_ we had to make, when, as our carriage stopped in front of the cathedral, the great bell sounded, and in an instant the grand illumination flashed out and turned the outline of stars into a palace of gold. Venus looked out palely. One of the finest positions in Rome is the Monte Cavallo (the Quirinal), the site of the pope's palace, and of the fountain against which are placed the two Colossi--the Castor and Pollux, ascribed, after a lax method of affiliation, to Phidias and Praxiteles. Standing near this fountain one has a real sense of being on a hill; city and distant ridge stretching below. Close by is the Palazzo Rospigliosi, where we went to see Guido's Aurora. Another spot where I was struck with the view of modern Rome (and _that_ happened rarely) was at San Pietro in Vincoli, on the Esquiline, where we went to see Michael Angelo's Moses. Turning round before one enters the church, a palm-tree in the high foreground relieves very picturesquely the view of the lower distance. The Moses did not affect me agreeably; both the attitude and the expression of the face seemed to me, in that one visit, to have an exaggeration that strained after effect without reaching it. The failure seemed to me of this kind: Moses was an angry man trying to frighten the people by his mien, instead of being rapt by his anger, and terrible without self-consciousness. To look at the statue of Christ, after the other works of Michael Angelo at Rome, was a surprise; in this the fault seems to incline slightly to the namby-pamby. The Pietà in St. Peter's has real tenderness in it. The visit to the Farnesina was one of the most interesting among our visits to Roman palaces. It is here that Raphael painted the Triumph of Galatea, and here this wonderful fresco is still bright upon the wall. In the same room is a colossal head, drawn by Michael Angelo with a bit of charcoal, by way of _carte-de-visite_, one day that he called on Daniele di Volterra, who was painting detestably in this room, and happened to be absent. In the entrance-hall, preceding the Galatea room, are the frescoes by Raphael representing the story of Cupid and Psyche; but we did not linger long to look at them, as they disappointed us. We visited only four artists' studios in Rome: Gibson's, the sculptor; Frey's, the landscape painter; Riedel's, genre painter, and Overbeck's. Gibson's was entirely disappointing to me, so far as his own sculptures are concerned; except the Cacciatore, which he sent to the Great Exhibition, I could see nothing but feeble imitations of the antique--no spontaneity and no vigor. Miss Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci is a pleasing and new conception; and her little Puck a bit of humor that one would like to have if one were a grand seigneur. Frey is a very meritorious landscape painter--finished in execution and poetic in feeling. His Egyptian scenes--the Simoon, the Pair in the Light of Sunset, and the Island of Philæ--are memorable pictures; so is the View of Athens, with its blue, island-studded sea. Riedel interested us greatly with his account of the coincidence between the views of light and colors at which he had arrived through his artistic experience, and Goethe's theory of colors, with which he became acquainted only after he had thought of putting his own ideas into shape for publication. He says the majority of painters continue their work when the sun shines from the north--they paint with _blue_ light. But it was our visit to Overbeck that we were most pleased not to have missed. The man himself is more interesting than his pictures: a benevolent calm and quiet conviction breathes from his person and manners. He has a thin, rather high-nosed face, with long gray hair, set off by a maroon velvet cap, and a gray scarf over his shoulders. Some of his cartoons pleased me: one large one of our Saviour passing from the midst of the throng who were going to cast him from the brow of the hill at Capernaum--one foot resting on a cloud borne up by cherubs; and some smaller round cartoons representing the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and applying it to the function of the artist. We drove about a great deal in Rome, but were rather afflicted in our drives by the unending walls that enclose everything like a garden, even outside the city gates. First among our charming drives was that to the Villa Pamfili Doria--a place which has the beauties of an English park and gardens, with views such as no English park can show; not to speak of the columbarium or ancient Roman burying-place, which has been disinterred in the grounds. The compactest of all burying-places must these columbaria be: little pigeon-holes, tier above tier, for the small urns containing the ashes of the dead. In this one traces of peacocks and other figures in fresco, ornamenting the divisions between the rows, are still visible. We sat down in the sunshine by the side of the water, which is made to fall in a cascade in the grounds fronting the house, and then spreads out into a considerable breadth of mirror for the plantation on the slope which runs along one side of it. On the opposite side is a broad, grassy walk, and here we sat on some blocks of stone, watching the little green lizards. Then we walked on up the slope on the other side, and through a grove of weird ilexes, and across a plantation of tall pines, where we saw the mountains in the far distance. A beautiful spot! We ought to have gone there again. Another drive was to the Villa Albani, where, again, the view is grand. The precious sculptures once there are all at Munich now; and the most remarkable remnants of the collection are the bas-relief of Antinous, and the Æsop. The Antinous is the least beautiful of all the representations of that sad loveliness that I have seen--be it said in spite of Winckelmann; attitude and face are strongly Egyptian. In an outside pavilion in the garden were some interesting examples of Greek masks. Our journey to Frascati by railway was fortunate. The day was fine, except, indeed, for the half hour that we were on the heights of Tusculum, and longed for a clear horizon. But the weather was so generally gloomy during our stay in Rome that we were "thankful for small mercies" in the way of sunshine. I enjoyed greatly our excursion up the hill on donkey-back to the ruins of Tusculum--in spite of our loquacious guide, who exasperated George. The sight of the Campagna on one side, and of Mount Algidus, with its snow-capped fellows, and Mount Albano, with Rocca di Papa on its side, and Castel Gandolfo below on the other side, was worth the trouble--to say nothing of the little theatre, which was the most perfect example of an ancient theatre I had then seen in that pre-Pompeian period of my travels. After lunching at Frascati we strolled out to the Villa Aldobrandini, and enjoyed a brighter view of the Campagna in the afternoon sunlight. Then we lingered in a little croft enclosed by plantations, and enjoyed this familiar-looking bit of grass with wild-flowers perhaps more, even, than the greatest novelties. There are fine plantations on the hill behind the villa, and there we wandered till it was time to go back to the railway. A literally grotesque thing in these plantations is the opening of a grotto in the hillside, cut in the form of a huge Greek comic mask. It was a lovely walk from the town downward to the railway station--between the olive-clad slopes looking towards the illimitable plain. Our best view of the aqueducts was on this journey, but it was the tantalizing sort of view one gets from a railway carriage. Our excursion to Tivoli, reserved till nearly the end of our stay, happened on one of those cruel, seductive days that smile upon you at five o'clock in the morning, to become cold and cloudy at eight, and resolutely rainy at ten. And so we ascended the hill through the vast, venerable olive grove, thinking what would be the effect of sunshine among those gray, fantastically twisted trunks and boughs; and paddled along the wet streets under umbrellas to look at the Temple of the Sibyl, and to descend the ravine of the waterfalls. Yet it was enjoyable; for the rain was not dense enough to shroud the near view of rock and foliage. We looked for the first time at a rock of Travertine, with its curious petrified vegetable forms, and lower down at a mighty cavern, under which the smaller cascade rushes--an awful hollow in the midst of huge, rocky masses. But--rain, rain, rain! No possibility of seeing the Villa of Hadrian, chief wonder of Tivoli: and so we had our carriage covered up and turned homeward in despair. The last week of our stay we went for the first time to the picture-gallery of the Capitol, where we saw the famous Guercino--the Entombment of Petronilla--which we had already seen in mosaic at St. Peter's. It is a stupendous piece of painting, about which one's only feeling is that it might as well have been left undone. More interesting is the portrait of Michael Angelo, by himself--a deeply melancholy face. And there is also a picture of a bishop, by Giovanni Bellini, which arrested us a long while. After these, I remember most distinctly Veronese's Europa, superior to that we afterwards saw at Venice; a delicious mythological Poussin, all light and joy; and a Sebastian, by Guido, exceptionally beautiful among the many detestable things of his in this gallery. The Lateran Museum, also, was a sight we had neglected till this last week, though it turned out to be one of the most memorable. In the classical museum are the great Antinous, a Bacchus, and the Sophocles; besides a number of other remains of high interest, especially in the department of architectural decoration. In the museum of Christian antiquities there are, besides sculptures, copies of the frescoes in the Catacombs--invaluable as a record of those perishable remains. If we ever go to Rome again the Lateran Museum will be one of the first places I shall wish to revisit. We saw the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, on the Appian Way--the long, dark passages, with great oblong hollows in the rock for the bodies long since crumbled, and the one or two openings out of the passages into a rather wider space, called chapels, but no indications of paintings or other detail--our monkish guide being an old man, who spoke with an indistinct grunt that would not have enlightened us if we had asked any questions. In the church through which we entered there is a strangely barbarous reclining statue of St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking all over it. A spot that touched me deeply was Shelley's grave. The English cemetery in which he lies is the most attractive burying-place I have seen. It lies against the old city walls, close to the Porta San Paolo and the pyramid of Caius Cestius--one of the quietest spots of old Rome. And there, under the shadow of the old walls on one side, and cypresses on the other, lies the _Cor cordium_, forever at rest from the unloving cavillers of this world, whether or not he may have entered on other purifying struggles in some world unseen by us. The grave of Keats lies far off from Shelley's, unshaded by wall or trees. It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription on the stone, which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave.[11] [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1860.] A wet day for the first time since we left Paris! That assists our consciences considerably in urging us to write our letters on this fourth day at Rome, for I will not pretend that writing a letter, even to you, can be anything more alluring than a duty when there is a blue sky over the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, and all the other marvels of this marvellous place. Since our arrival, in the middle of Sunday, I have been gradually rising from the depth of disappointment to an intoxication of delight; and that makes me wish to do for you what no one ever did for me--warn you that you must expect no grand impression on your first entrance into Rome, at least, if you enter it from Civita Vecchia. My heart sank, as it would if you behaved shabbily to me, when I looked through the windows of the omnibus as it passed through street after street of ugly modern Rome, and in that mood the dome of St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo--the only grand objects on our way--could only look disappointing to me. I believe the impression on entering from the Naples side is quite different; there one must get a glimpse of the broken grandeur and Renaissance splendor that one associates with the word "Rome." So keep up your spirits in the omnibus when your turn comes, and believe that you will mount the Capitol the next morning, as we did, and look out on the Forum and the Coliseum, far on to the Alban mountains, with snowy Apennines behind them, and feel--what I leave you to imagine, because the rain has left off, and my husband commands me to put on my bonnet. (Two hours later.) Can you believe that I have not had a headache since we set out? But I would willingly have endured more than one to be less anxious than I am about Mr. Lewes's health. Now that we are just come in from our walk to the Pantheon he is obliged to lie down with terrible oppression of the head; and since we have been in Rome he has been nearly deaf on one side. That is the dark "crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air" just now; everything else in our circumstances here is perfect. We are glad to have been driven into apartments, instead of remaining at the hotel, as we had intended; for we enjoy the abundance of room and the quiet that belong to this mode of life, and we get our cooking and all other comforts in perfection at little more than a third of the hotel prices. Most of the visitors to Rome this season seem to come only for a short stay; and, as apartments can't be taken for less than a month, the hotels are full and the lodgings are empty. Extremely unpleasant for the people who have lodgings to let, but very convenient for us, since we get excellent rooms in a good situation for a moderate price. We have a good little landlady, who can speak nothing but Italian, so that she serves as a _parlatrice_ for us, and awakens our memory of Italian dialogue--a memory which consists chiefly of recollecting Italian words without knowing their meaning, and English words without knowing the Italian for them. I shall tell you nothing of what we have seen. Have you not a husband who has seen it all, and can tell you much better? Except, perhaps, one sight which might have had some interest for him, namely, Count Cavour, who was waiting with other eminences at the Turin station to receive the Prince de Carignan, the new Viceroy of Tuscany. A really pleasant sight--not the prince, who is a large, stout "mustache," squeezed in at the waist with a gold belt, looking like one of those dressed-up personages who are among the chessmen that the Cavours of the world play their game with. The pleasant sight was Count Cavour, in plainest dress, with a head full of power, mingled with _bonhomie_. We had several fellow-travellers who belonged to Savoy, and were full of chagrin at the prospect of the French annexation. Our most agreeable companion was a Baron de Magliano, a Neapolitan who has married a French wife with a large fortune, and has been living in France for years, but has now left his wife and children behind for the sake of entering the Sardinian army, and, if possible, helping to turn out the Neapolitan Bourbons. I feel some stirrings of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose Mrs. Browning could explain to me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the modern saviour, Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the story of the French Revolution. Oh, the beautiful men and women and children here! Such wonderful babies with wise eyes! such grand-featured mothers nursing them! As one drives along the streets sometimes, one sees a madonna and child at every third or fourth upper window; and on Monday a little crippled girl, seated at the door of a church, looked up at us with a face full of such pathetic sweetness and beauty that I think it can hardly leave me again. Yesterday we went to see dear Shelley's tomb, and it was like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats's tombstone, with that despairing, bitter inscription, is almost as painful to think of as Swift's. And what have you been doing, being, or suffering in these long twelve days? While we were standing with weary impatience in the custom-house at Civita Vecchia, Mr. Congreve was delivering his third lecture, and you were listening. And what else? _Friday._--Since I wrote my letter we have not been able to get near the post-office. Yesterday was taken up with seeing ceremonies, or, rather, with waiting for them. I knelt down to receive the pope's blessing, remembering what Pius VII. said to the soldier--that he would never be the worse for the blessing of an old man. But, altogether, these ceremonies are a melancholy, hollow business, and we regret bitterly that the Holy Week has taken up our time from better things. I have a cold and headache this morning, and in other ways am not conscious of improvement from the pope's blessing. I may comfort myself with thinking that the King of Sardinia is none the worse for the pope's curse. It is farcical enough that the excommunication is posted up at the Church of St. John Lateran, out of everybody's way, and yet there are police to guard it. [Sidenote: Italy, 1860.] How much more I have to write about Rome! How I should like to linger over every particular object that has left an image in my memory! But here I am only to give a hasty sketch of what we saw and did at each place at which we paused in our three months' life in Italy. It was on the 29th of April that we left Rome, and on the morning of the 30th we arrived at Naples--under a rainy sky, alas! but not so rainy as to prevent our feeling the beauty of the city and bay, and declaring it to surpass all places we had seen before. The weather cleared up soon after our arrival at the Hotel des Étrangers, and after a few days it became brilliant, showing us the blue sea, the purple mountains, and bright city, in which we had almost disbelieved as we saw them in the pictures. Hardly anything can be more lovely than Naples seen from Posilippo under a blue sky: the irregular outline with which the town meets the sea, jutting out in picturesque masses, then lifted up high on a basis of rock, with the grand Castle of St. Elmo and the monastery on the central height crowning all the rest; the graceful outline of purple Vesuvius rising beyond the Molo, and the line of deeply indented mountains carrying the eye along to the Cape of Sorrento; and, last of all, Capri sleeping between sea and sky in the distance. Crossing the promontory of Posilippo, another wonderful scene presents itself: white Nisida on its island rock; the sweep of bay towards Pozzuoli; beyond that, in fainter colors of farther distance, the Cape of Miseno and the peaks of Ischia. Our first expedition was to Pozzuoli and Miseno, on a bright, warm day, with a slipshod Neapolitan driver, whom I christened Baboon, and who acted as our charioteer throughout our stay at Naples. Beyond picturesque Pozzuoli, jutting out with precipitous piles of building into the sea, lies Baiæ. Here we halted to look at a great circular temple, where there was a wonderful echo that made whispers circulate and become loud on the opposite side to that on which they were uttered. Here, for our amusement, a young maiden and a little old man danced to the sound of a tambourine and fife. On our way to Baiæ we had stopped to see the Lake Avernus, no longer terrible to behold, and the amphitheatre of Cumæ, now grown over with greensward, and fringed with garden stuff. From Baiæ we went to Miseno--the Misenum where Pliny was stationed with the fleet--and looked out from the promontory on the lovely isles of Ischia and Procida. On the approach to this promontory lies the Piscina Mirabilis, one of the most striking remains of Roman building. It is a great reservoir, into which one may now descend dryshod and look up at the lofty arches festooned with delicate plants, while the sunlight shoots aslant through the openings above. It was on this drive, coming back towards Pozzuoli, that we saw the Mesembryanthemum in its greatest luxuriance--a star of amethyst with its golden tassel in the centre. The amphitheatre at Pozzuoli is the most interesting in Italy after the Coliseum. The seats are in excellent preservation, and the subterranean structures for water and for the introduction of wild beasts are unique. The temple of Jupiter Serapis is another remarkable ruin, made more peculiar by the intrusion of the water, which makes the central structure, with its great columns, an island to be approached by a plank bridge. In the views from Capo di Monte--the king's summer residence--and from St. Elmo one enjoys not only the view towards the sea, but the wide, green plain sprinkled with houses and studded with small towns or villages, bounded on the one hand by Vesuvius, and shut in, in every other direction, by the nearer heights close upon Naples, or by the sublimer heights of the distant Apennines. We had the view from St. Elmo on a clear, breezy afternoon, in company with a Frenchman and his wife, come from Rome with his family after a two years' residence there--worth remembering for the pretty bondage the brusque, stern, thin father was under to the tiny, sickly looking boy. It was a grand drive up to Capo di Monte--between rich plantations, with glimpses, as we went up, of the city lying in picturesque irregularity below; and as we went down, in the other direction, views of distant mountain rising above some pretty accident of roof or groups of trees in the foreground. One day we went, from this drive, along the Poggio Reale to the cemetery--the most ambitious burying-place I ever saw, with building after building of elaborate architecture, serving as tombs to various _Arci-confraternità_ as well as to private families, all set in the midst of well-kept gardens. The humblest kind of tombs there were long niches for coffins, in a wall bordering the carriage-road, which are simply built up when the coffin is once in--the inscription being added on this final bit of masonry. The lines of lofty sepulchres suggested to one very vividly the probable appearance of the Appian Way when the old Roman tombs were in all their glory. Our first visit to the Museo Borbonico was devoted to the sculpture, of which there is a precious collection. Of the famous Balbi family, found at Herculaneum, the mother, in grand drapery, wound round her head and body, is the most unforgetable--a really grand woman of fifty, with firm mouth and knitted brow, yet not unbenignant. Farther on in this transverse hall is a Young Faun with the Infant Bacchus--a different conception altogether from the fine Munich statue, but delicious for humor and geniality. Then there is the Aristides--more real and speaking and easy in attitude even than the Sophocles at Rome. Opposite is a lovely Antinous, in no mythological character, but in simple, melancholy beauty. In the centre of the deep recess, in front of which these statues are placed, is the colossal Flora, who holds up her thin dress in too finicking a style for a colossal goddess; and on the floor--to be seen by ascending a platform--is the precious, great mosaic representing the Battle of the Issus, found at Pompeii. It is full of spirit, the _ordonnance_ of the figures is very much after the same style as in the ancient bas-reliefs, and the colors are still vivid enough for us to have a just idea of the effect. In the halls on each side of this central one there are various Bacchuses and Apollos, Atlas groaning under the weight of the Globe, the Farnese Hercules, the Toro Farnese, and, among other things less memorable, a glorious Head of Jupiter. The bronzes here are even more interesting than the marbles. Among them there is Mercury Resting, the Sleeping Faun, the little Dancing Faun, and the Drunken Faun snapping his fingers, of which there is a marble copy at Munich, with the two remarkable Heads of Plato and Seneca. But our greatest treat at the Museo Borbonico could only be enjoyed after our visit to Pompeii, where we went, unhappily, in the company of some Russians whose acquaintance G. had made at the _table d'hôte_. I hope I shall never forget the solemnity of our first entrance into that silent city, and the walk along the street of tombs. After seeing the principal houses we went, as a proper climax, to the Forum, where, among the lines of pedestals and the ruins of temples and tribunal, we could see Vesuvius overlooking us; then to the two theatres, and finally to the amphitheatre. This visit prepared us to enjoy the collection of _piccoli bronzi_, of paintings and mosaics at the Museo. Several of the paintings have considerable positive merit. I remember particularly a large one of Orestes and Pylades, which in composition and general conception might have been a picture of yesterday. But the most impressive collection of remains found at Pompeii and Herculaneum is that of the ornaments, articles of food and domestic utensils, pieces of bread, loaves with the bakers' names on them, fruits, corn, various seeds, paste in the vessel, imperfectly mixed, linen just wrung in washing, eggs, oil consolidated in a glass bottle, wine mixed with the lava, and a piece of asbestos; gold lace, a lens, a lantern with sides of talc, gold ornaments of Etruscan character, patty-pans (!), moulds for cakes; ingenious portable cooking apparatus, urn for hot water, portable candelabrum, to be raised or lowered at will, bells, dice, theatre-checks, and endless objects that tell of our close kinship with those old Pompeians. In one of the rooms of this collection there are the Farnese cameos and engraved gems, some of them--especially of the latter--marvellously beautiful, complicated, and exquisitely minute in workmanship. I remember particularly one splendid yellow stone engraved with an elaborate composition of Apollo and his chariot and horses--a masterpiece of delicate form. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th May, 1860.] We left Rome a week ago, almost longing, at last, to come southward in search of sunshine. Every one likes to boast of peculiar experience, and we can boast of having gone to Rome in the very worst spring that has been known for the last twenty years. Here, at Naples, we have had some brilliant days, though the wind is still cold, and rain has often fallen heavily in the night. It is the very best change for us after Rome; there is comparatively little art to see, and there is nature in transcendent beauty. We both think it the most beautiful place in the world, and are sceptical about Constantinople, which has not had the advantage of having been seen by us. That is the fashion of travellers, as you know: for you must have been bored many times in your life by people who have insisted on it that you _must_ go and see the thing _they_ have seen--there is nothing like it. We shall bore you in that way, I dare say--so prepare yourself. Our plan at present is to spend the next week in seeing Pæstum, Amalfi, Castellamare, and Sorrento, and drinking in as much of this Southern beauty, in a quiet way, as our souls are capable of absorbing. The calm blue sea, and the mountains sleeping in the afternoon light, as we have seen them to-day from the height of St. Elmo, make one feel very passive and contemplative, and disinclined to bustle about in search of meaner sights. Yet I confess Pompeii, and the remains of Pompeian art and life in the Museum, have been impressive enough to rival the sea and sky. It is a thing never to be forgotten--that walk through the silent city of the past, and then the sight of utensils and eatables and ornaments and half-washed linen and hundreds of other traces of life so startlingly like our own in its minutest details, suddenly arrested by the fiery deluge. All that you will see some day, and with the advantage of younger eyes than mine. We expect to reach Florence (by steamboat, alas!) on the 17th, so that if you have the charity to write to me again, address to me there. We thought the advance to eighteen in the number of hearers was very satisfactory, and rejoiced over it. The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life--the work at home after the holiday is done--is to help in some small, nibbling way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation, and misery on the face of this beautiful earth. I am writing at night--Mr. Lewes is already asleep, else he would say, "Send my kind regards to them all." We have often talked of you, and the thought of seeing you again makes the South Fields look brighter in our imagination than they could have looked from the dreariest part of the world if you had not been living in them. [Sidenote: Italy, 1860.] The pictures at Naples are worth little: the Marriage of St. Catherine, a small picture by Correggio; a Holy Family, by Raphael, with a singularly fine St. Ann, and Titian's Paul the Third, are the only paintings I have registered very distinctly in all the large collection. The much-praised frescoes of the dome in a chapel of the cathedral, and the oil-paintings over the altars, by Domenichino and Spagnoletto, produced no effect on me. Worth more than all these are Giotto's frescoes in the choir of the little old Church of l'Incoronata, though these are not, I think, in Giotto's ripest manner, for they are inferior to his frescoes in the Santa Croce at Florence--more uniform in the type of face. We went to a Sunday-morning service at the cathedral, and saw a detachment of silver busts of saints ranged around the tribune, Naples being famous for gold and silver sanctities. When we had been a week at Naples we set off in our carriage with Baboon on an expedition to Pæstum, arriving the first evening at Salerno--beautiful Salerno, with a bay as lovely, though in a different way, as the bay of Naples. It has a larger sweep; grander piles of rocky mountain on the north and northeast; then a stretch of low plain, the mountains receding; and, finally, on the south, another line of mountain coast extending to the promontory of Sicosa. From Salerno we started early in the morning for Pæstum, with no alloy to the pleasure of the journey but the dust, which was capable of making a simoon under a high wind. For a long way we passed through a well-cultivated plain, the mountains on our left and the sea on our right; but farther on came a swampy, unenclosed space of great extent, inhabited by buffaloes, who lay in groups, comfortably wallowing in the muddy water, with their grand, stupid heads protruding horizontally. On approaching Pæstum, the first thing one catches sight of is the Temple of Vesta, which is not beautiful either for form or color, so that we began to tremble lest disappointment were to be the harvest of our dusty journey. But the fear was soon displaced by almost rapturous admiration at the sight of the great Temple of Neptune--the finest thing, I verily believe, that we had yet seen in Italy. It has all the requisites to make a building impressive: First, _form_. What perfect satisfaction and repose for the eye in the calm repetition of those columns; in the proportions of height and length, of front and sides; the right thing is _found_--it is not being sought after in uneasy labor of detail or exaggeration. Next, _color_. It is built of Travertine, like the other two temples; but while they have remained, for the most part, a cold gray, this Temple of Neptune has a rich, warm, pinkish brown, that seems to glow and deepen under one's eyes. Lastly, _position_. It stands on the rich plain, covered with long grass and flowers, in sight of the sea on one hand, and the sublime blue mountains on the other. Many plants caress the ruins; the acanthus is there, and I saw it in green life for the first time; but the majority of the plants on the floor, or bossing the architrave, are familiar to me as home flowers--purple mallows, snapdragons, pink hawksweed, etc. On our way back we saw a herd of buffaloes clustered near a pond, and one of them was rolling himself in the water like a gentleman enjoying his bath. The next day we went in the morning from Salerno to Amalfi. It is an unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the sea below; and Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a romantic site for a city that once made itself famous in the world. We stupidly neglected seeing the cathedral, but we saw a macaroni-mill and a paper-mill from among the many that are turned by the rushing stream, which, with its precipitous course down the ravine, creates an immense water-power; and we climbed up endless steps to the Capuchin Monastery, to see nothing but a cavern where there are barbarous images and a small cloister with double Gothic arches. Our way back to La Cava gave us a repetition of the grand drive we had had in the morning by the coast, and beyond that an inland drive of much loveliness, through Claude-like scenes of mountain, trees, and meadows, with picturesque accidents of building, such as single round towers, on the heights. The valley beyond La Cava, in which our hotel lay, is of quite paradisaic beauty; a rich, cultivated spot, with mountains behind and before--those in front varied by ancient buildings that a painter would have chosen to place there; and one of pyramidal shape, steep as an obelisk, is crowned by a monastery, famous for its library of precious MSS. and its archives. We arrived too late for everything except to see the shroud of mist gather and gradually envelop the mountains. In the morning we set off, again in brightest weather, to Sorrento, coasting the opposite side of the promontory to that which we had passed along the day before, and having on our right hand Naples and the distant Posilippo. The coast on this side is less grand than on the Amalfi side, but it is more friendly as a place for residence. The most charming spot on the way to Sorrento, to my thinking, is Vico, which I should even prefer to Sorrento, because there is no town to be traversed before entering the ravine and climbing the mountain in the background. But I will not undervalue Sorrento, with its orange-groves embalming the air, its glorious sunsets over the sea, setting the gray olives aglow on the hills above us, its walks among the groves and vineyards out to the solitary coast. One day of our stay there we took donkeys and crossed the mountains to the opposite side of the promontory, and saw the Siren Isles--very palpable, unmysterious bits of barren rock now. A great delight to me, in all the excursions round about Naples, was the high cultivation of the soil and the sight of the vines, trained from elm to elm, above some other precious crop carpeting the ground below. On our way back to Naples we visited the silent Pompeii again. That place had such a peculiar influence over me that I could not even look towards the point where it lay on the plain below Vesuvius without a certain thrill. Amid much dust we arrived at Naples again on Sunday morning, to start by the steamboat for Leghorn on the following Tuesday. But before I quit Naples I must remember the Grotto of Posilippo, a wonderful monument of ancient labor; Virgil's tomb, which repaid us for a steep ascent only by the view of the city and bay; and a villa on the way to Posilippo, with gardens gradually descending to the margin of the sea, where there is a collection of animals, both stuffed and alive. It was there we saw the flying-fish, with their lovely blue fins. One day and night voyage to Civita Vecchia, and another day and night to Leghorn--wearisome to the flesh that suffers from nausea even on the summer sea! We had another look at dear Pisa under the blue sky, and then on to Florence, which, unlike Rome, looks inviting as one catches sight from the railway of its cupolas and towers and its embosoming hills--the greenest of hills, sprinkled everywhere with white villas. We took up our quarters at the Pension Suisse, and on the first evening we took the most agreeable drive to be had round Florence--the drive to Fiesole. It is in this view that the eye takes in the greatest extent of green, billowy hills, besprinkled with white houses, looking almost like flocks of sheep; the great, silent, uninhabited mountains lie chiefly behind; the plain of the Arno stretches far to the right. I think the view from Fiesole the most beautiful of all; but that from San Miniato, where we went the next evening, has an interest of another kind, because here Florence lies much nearer below, and one can distinguish the various buildings more completely. It is the same with Bellosguardo, in a still more marked degree. What a relief to the eye and the thought, among the huddled roofs of a distant town, to see towers and cupolas rising in abundant variety, as they do at Florence! There is Brunelleschi's mighty dome, and close by it, with its lovely colors not entirely absorbed by distance, Giotto's incomparable Campanile, beautiful as a jewel. Farther on, to the right, is the majestic tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the flag waving above it; then the elegant Badia and the Bargello close by; nearer to us the grand Campanile of Santo Spirito and that of Santa Croce; far away, on the left, the cupola of San Lorenzo and the tower of Santa Maria Novella; and, scattered far and near, other cupolas and campaniles of more insignificant shape and history. Even apart from its venerable historical glory, the exterior of the Duomo is pleasant to behold when the wretched, unfinished _façade_ is quite hidden. The soaring pinnacles over the doors are exquisite; so are the forms of the windows in the great semicircle of the apsis; and on the side where Giotto's Campanile is placed, especially, the white marble has taken on so rich and deep a yellow that the black bands cease to be felt as a fault. The entire view on this side, closed in by Giotto's tower, with its delicate pinkish marble, its delicate Gothic windows with twisted columns, and its tall lightness carrying the eye upward, in contrast with the mighty breadth of the dome, is a thing not easily to be forgotten. The Baptistery, with its paradisaic gates, is close by; but, except in those gates, it has no exterior beauty. The interior is almost awful, with its great dome covered with gigantic early mosaics--the pale, large-eyed Christ surrounded by images of paradise and perdition. The interior of the cathedral is comparatively poor and bare; but it has one great beauty--its colored lanceolate windows. Behind the high-altar is a piece of sculpture--the last under Michael Angelo's hand, intended for his own tomb, and left unfinished. It represents Joseph of Arimathea holding the body of Jesus, with Mary, his mother, on one side, and an apparently angelic form on the other. Joseph is a striking and real figure, with a hood over the head. For external architecture it is the palaces, the old palaces of the fifteenth century, that one must look at in the streets of Florence. One of the finest was just opposite our hotel, the Palazzo Strozzi, built by Cronaca; perfect in its massiveness, with its iron cressets and rings, as if it had been built only last year. This is the palace that the Pitti was built to outvie (so tradition falsely pretends), and to have an inner court that would contain it. A wonderful union is that Pitti Palace of cyclopean massiveness with stately regularity. Next to the Pitti, I think, comes the Palazzo Riccardi--the house of the Medici--for size and splendor. Then that unique Laurentian library, designed by Michael Angelo; the books ranged on desks in front of seats, so that the appearance of the library resembles that of a chapel with open pews of dark wood. The precious books are all chained to the desk; and here we saw old manuscripts of exquisite neatness, culminating in the Virgil of the fourth century, and the Pandects, said to have been recovered from oblivion at Amalfi, but falsely so said, according to those who are more learned than tradition. Here, too, is a little chapel covered with remarkable frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli. Grander still, in another style, is the Palazzo Vecchio, with its unique _cortile_, where the pillars are embossed with arabesque and floral tracery, making a contrast in elaborate ornament with the large simplicity of the exterior building. Here there are precious little works in ivory by Benvenuto Cellini, and other small treasures of art and jewelry, preserved in cabinets in one of the great upper chambers, which are painted all over with frescoes, and have curious inlaid doors showing buildings or figures in wooden mosaic, such as is often seen in great beauty in the stalls of the churches. The great council-chamber is ugly in its ornaments--frescoes and statues in bad taste all round it. Orcagna's Loggia de' Lanzi is disappointing at the first glance, from its sombre, dirty color; but its beauty grew upon me with longer contemplation. The pillars and groins are very graceful and chaste in ornamentation. Among the statues that are placed under it there is not one I could admire, unless it were the dead body of Ajax with the Greek soldier supporting it. Cellini's Perseus is fantastic. The Bargello, where we went to see Giotto's frescoes (in lamentable condition) was under repair, but I got glimpses of a wonderful inner court, with heraldic carvings and stone stairs and gallery. Most of the churches in Florence are hideous on the outside--piles of ribbed brickwork awaiting a coat of stone or stucco--looking like skinned animals. The most remarkable exception is Santa Maria Novella, which has an elaborate facing of black and white marble. Both this church and San Lorenzo were under repair in the interior, unfortunately for us; but we could enter Santa Maria so far as to see Orcagna's frescoes of Paradise and Hell. The Hell has been repainted, but the Paradise has not been maltreated in this way; and it is a splendid example of Orcagna's powers--far superior to his frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Some of the female forms on the lowest range are of exquisite grace. The splendid chapel in San Lorenzo, containing the tombs of the Medici, is ugly and heavy, with all its precious marbles; and the world-famous statues of Michael Angelo on the tombs in another smaller chapel--the Notte, the Giorno, and the Crepuscolo--remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original as in copies and casts. The two churches we frequented most in Florence were Santa Croce and the Carmine. In this last are the great frescoes of Masaccio--chief among them the Raising of the Dead Youth. In the other are Giotto's frescoes revealed from under the whitewash by which they were long covered, like those in the Bargello. Of these the best are the Challenge to Pass through the Fire, in the series representing the history of St. Francis, and the rising of some saint (unknown to me) from his tomb, while Christ extends his arms to receive him above, and wondering venerators look on, on each side. There are large frescoes here of Taddeo Gaddi's also, but they are not good; one sees in him a pupil of Giotto, and nothing more. Besides the frescoes, Santa Croce has its tombs to attract a repeated visit; the tombs of Michael Angelo, Dante, Alfieri, and Machiavelli. Even those tombs of the unknown dead under our feet, with their effigies quite worn down to a mere outline, were not without their interest. I used to feel my heart swell a little at the sight of the inscription on Dante's tomb--"Onorate l'altissimo poeta." In the Church of the Trinità also there are valuable frescoes by the excellent Domenico Ghirlandajo, the master of Michael Angelo. They represent the history of St. Francis, and happily the best of them is in the best light; it is the death of St. Francis, and is full of natural feeling, with well-marked gradations from deepest sorrow to indifferent spectatorship. The frescoes I cared for most in all Florence were the few of Fra Angelico's that a _donna_ was allowed to see, in the Convent of San Marco. In the chapter-house, now used as a guard-room, is a large Crucifixion, with the inimitable group of the fainting mother, upheld by St. John and the younger Mary, and clasped round by the kneeling Magdalene. The group of adoring, sorrowing saints on the right hand are admirable for earnest truthfulness of representation. The Christ in this fresco is not good, but there is a deeply impressive original crucified Christ outside in the cloisters; St. Dominic is clasping the cross and looking upward at the agonized Saviour, whose real, pale, calmly enduring face is quite unlike any other Christ I have seen. I forgot to mention, at Santa Maria Novella, the chapel which is painted with very remarkable frescoes by Simone Memmi and Taddeo Gaddi. The best of these frescoes is the one in which the Dominicans are represented by black and white dogs--_Domini Canes_. The human groups have high merit for conception and lifelikeness; and they are admirable studies of costume. At this church, too, in the sacristy, is the Madonna della Stella,[12] with an altar-step by Fra Angelico--specimens of his minuter painting in oil. The inner part of the frame is surrounded with his lovely angels, with their seraphic joy and flower-garden coloring. Last of all the churches we visited San Michele, which had been one of the most familiar to us on the outside, with its statues in niches, and its elaborate Gothic windows, designed by the genius of Orcagna. The great wonder of the interior is the shrine of white marble made to receive the miracle-working image which first caused the consecration of this mundane building, originally a corn-market. Surely this shrine is the most wonderful of all Orcagna's productions; for the beauty of the reliefs he deserves to be placed along with Nicolo Pisano, and for the exquisite Gothic design of the whole he is a compeer of Giotto. For variety of treasures the Uffizi Gallery is pre-eminent among all public sights in Florence; but the variety is in some degree a cause of comparative unimpressiveness, pictures and statues being crowded together and destroying each other's effect. In statuary it has the great Niobe group; the Venus de Medici; the Wrestlers; the admirable statue of the Knife-Sharpener, supposed to represent the flayer of Marsyas; the Apollino; and the Boy taking a Thorn out of his Foot; with numerous less remarkable antiques. And besides these it has what the Vatican has not--a collection of early Italian sculpture, supreme among which is Giovanni di Bologna's Mercury.[13] Then there is a collection of precious drawings; and there is the cabinet of gems, quite alone in its fantastic, elaborate minuteness of workmanship in rarest materials; and there is another cabinet containing ivory sculptures, cameos, intaglios, and a superlatively fine Niello, as well as Raffaelle porcelain. The pictures here are multitudinous, and among them there is a generous proportion of utterly bad ones. In the entrance gallery, where the early paintings are, is a great Fra Angelico--a Madonna and Child--a triptych, the two side compartments containing very fine figures of saints, and the inner part of the central frame a series of unspeakably lovely angels.[14] Here I always paused with longing, trying to believe that a copyist there could make an imitation angel good enough to be worth buying. Among the other paintings that remain with me, after my visit to the Uffizi, are the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, by himself; the portrait of Dante, by Filippino Lippi;[15] the Herodias of Luini; Titian's Venus, in the Tribune; Raphael's Madonna and Child with the Bird; and the portrait falsely called the Fornarina; the two remarkable pictures by Ridolfo Ghirlandajo; and the Salutation, by Albertinelli, which hangs opposite; the little prince in pink dress, with two recent teeth, in the next room, by Angelo Bronzino (No. 1155); the small picture of Christ in the Garden, by Lorenzo Credi; Titian's Woman with the Golden Hair, in the Venetian room; Leonardo's Medusa head; and Michael Angelo's ugly Holy Family--these, at least, rise up on a rapid retrospect. Others are in the background; for example, Correggio's Madonna adoring the Infant Christ, in the Tribune. For pictures, however, the Pitti Palace surpasses the Uffizi. Here the paintings are more choice and not less numerous. The Madonna della Sedia leaves me, with all its beauty, impressed only by the grave gaze of the Infant; but besides this there is another Madonna of Raphael--perhaps the most beautiful of all his earlier ones--the Madonna del Gran Duca, which has the sweet grace and gentleness of its sisters without their sheeplike look. Andrea del Sarto is seen here in his highest glory of oil-painting. There are numerous large pictures of his--Assumptions and the like--of great technical merit; but better than all these I remember a Holy Family, with a very fine St. Ann, and the portraits of himself and his fatal, auburn-haired wife. Of Fra Bartolomeo there is a Pietà of memorable expression,[16] a Madonna enthroned with saints, and his great St. Mark. Of Titian, a Marriage of St. Catherine, of supreme beauty; a Magdalen, failing in expression; and an exquisite portrait of the same woman, who is represented as Venus at the Uffizi. There is a remarkable group of portraits by Rubens--himself, his brother, Lipsius, and Grotius--and a large landscape by him. The only picture of Veronese's that I remember here is a portrait of his wife when her beauty was gone. There is a remarkably fine sea-piece by Salvator Rosa; a striking portrait of Aretino, and a portrait of Vesalius, by Titian; one of Inghirami, by Raphael; a delicious, rosy baby--future cardinal--lying in a silken bed;[17] a placid, contemplative young woman, with her finger between the leaves of a book, by Leonardo da Vinci;[18] a memorable portrait of Philip II., by Titian; a splendid Judith, by Bronzino; a portrait of Rembrandt, by himself, etc., etc. Andrea del Sarto is seen to advantage at the Pitti Palace; but his _chef-d'oeuvre_ is a fresco, unhappily much worn--the Madonna del Sacco--in the cloister of the Annunziata. For early Florentine paintings the most interesting collection is that of the Accademia. Here we saw a Cimabue, which gave us the best idea of his superiority over the painters who went before him: it is a colossal Madonna enthroned. And on the same wall there is a colossal Madonna by Giotto, which is not only a demonstration that he surpassed his master, but that he had a clear vision of the noble in art. A delightful picture--very much restored, I fear--of the Adoration of the Magi made me acquainted with Gentile da Fabriano. The head of Joseph in this picture is masterly in the delicate rendering of the expression; the three kings are very beautiful in conception; and the attendant group, or rather crowd, shows a remarkable combination of realism with love of the beautiful and splendid. There is a fine Domenico Ghirlandajo--the Adoration of the Shepherds; a fine Lippo Lippi; and an Assumption, by Perugino, which I like well for its cherubs and angels, and for some of the adoring figures below. In the smaller room there is a lovely Pietà by Fra Angelico; and there is a portrait of Fra Angelico himself by another artist. One of our drives at Florence, which I have not mentioned, was that to Galileo's Tower, which stands conspicuous on one of the hills close about the town. We ascended it for the sake of looking out over the plain from the same spot as the great man looked from, more than two centuries ago. His portrait is in the Pitti Palace--a grave man with an abbreviated nose, not unlike Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope. One fine day near the end of our stay we made an expedition to Siena--that fine old town built on an abrupt height overlooking a wide, wide plain. We drove about a couple of hours or more, and saw well the exterior of the place--the peculiar piazza or campo in the shape of a scallop-shell, with its large old Palazzo _publico_, the Porta Ovile and Porta Romana, the archbishop's palace, and the cemetery. Of the churches we saw only the cathedral, the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, and San Domenico. The cathedral has a highly elaborate Gothic façade, but the details of the upper part are unsatisfactory--a square window in the centre shocks the eye, and the gables are not slim and aspiring enough. The interior is full of interest: there is the unique pavement in a sort of marble Niello, presenting Raffaellesque designs by Boccafumi, carrying out the example of the older portions, which are very quaint in their drawing; there is a picture of high interest in the history of early art--a picture by Guido of Siena, who was rather earlier than Cimabue; fine carved stalls and screens in dark wood; and in an adjoining chapel a series of frescoes by Pinturicchio, to which Raphael is said to have contributed designs and workmanship, and wonderfully illuminated old choir-books. The Chapel of St. John the Baptist has a remarkable Gothic façade, and a baptismal font inside, with reliefs wrought by Ghiberti and another Florentine artist. To San Domenico we went for the sake of seeing the famous Madonna by Guido da Siena; I think we held it superior to any Cimabue we had seen. There is a considerable collection of the Siennese artists at the Accademia, but the school had no great genius equal to Giotto to lead it. The Three Graces--an antique to which Canova's modern triad bears a strong resemblance in attitude and style--are also at the Accademia. An interesting visit we made at Florence was to Michael Angelo's house--Casa Buonarotti--in the Via Ghibellina. This street is striking and characteristic: the houses are all old, with broad eaves, and in some cases with an open upper story, so that the roof forms a sort of pavilion supported on pillars. This is a feature one sees in many parts of Florence. Michael Angelo's house is preserved with great care by his descendants--only one could wish their care had not been shown in giving it entirely new furniture. However, the rooms are the same as those he occupied, and there are many relics of his presence there--his stick, his sword, and many of his drawings. In one room there is a very fine Titian of small size--the principal figure a woman fainting. The Last Supper--a fresco believed to be by Raphael--is in a room at the Egyptian Museum.[19] The figure of Peter--of which, apparently, there exists various sketches by Raphael's hand--is memorable. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th May, 1860.] Things really look so threatening in the Neapolitan kingdom that we begin to think ourselves fortunate in having got our visit done. Tuscany is in the highest political spirits for the moment, and of course Victor Emanuel stares at us at every turn here, with the most loyal exaggeration of mustache and intelligent meaning. But we are selfishly careless about dynasties just now, caring more for the doings of Giotto and Brunelleschi than for those of Count Cavour. On a first journey to the greatest centres of art one must be excused for letting one's public spirit go to sleep a little. As for me, I am thrown into a state of humiliating passivity by the sight of the great things done in the far past--it seems as if life were not long enough to learn, and as if my own activity were so completely dwarfed by comparison that I should never have courage for more creation of my own. There is only one thing that has an opposite and stimulating effect: it is the comparative rarity, even here, of great and truthful art, and the abundance of wretched imitation and falsity. Every hand is wanted in the world that can do a little genuine, sincere work. We are at the quietest hotel in Florence, having sought it out for the sake of getting clear of the stream of English and Americans, in which one finds one's self in all the main tracks of travel, so that one seems at last to be in a perpetual, noisy picnic, obliged to be civil, though with a strong inclination to be sullen. My philanthropy rises several degrees as soon as we are alone. [Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 27th May, 1860.] I am much obliged to you for writing at once, and so scattering some clouds which had gathered over my mind in consequence of an indication or two in Mr. John Blackwood's previous letter. The _Times_ article arrived on Sunday. It is written in a generous spirit, and with so high a degree of intelligence that I am rather alarmed lest the misapprehensions it exhibits should be due to my defective presentation, rather than to any failure on the part of the critic. I have certainly fulfilled my intention very badly if I have made the Dodson honesty appear "mean and uninteresting," or made the payment of one's debts appear a contemptible virtue in comparison with any sort of "Bohemian" qualities. So far as my own feeling and intention are concerned, no one class of persons or form of character is held up to reprobation or to exclusive admiration. Tom is painted with as much love and pity as Maggie; and I am so far from hating the Dodsons myself that I am rather aghast to find them ticketed with such very ugly adjectives. We intend to leave this place on Friday (3d), and in four days after that we shall be at Venice, in a few days from that time at Milan, and then, by a route at present uncertain, at Berne, where we take up Mr. Lewes's eldest boy, to bring him home with us. We are particularly happy in our weather, which is unvaryingly fine without excessive heat. There has been a crescendo of enjoyment in our travels; for Florence, from its relation to the history of modern art, has roused a keener interest in us even than Rome, and has stimulated me to entertain rather an ambitious project, which I mean to be a secret from every one but you and Mr. John Blackwood. Any news of "Clerical Scenes" in its third edition? Or has its appearance been deferred? The smallest details are acceptable to ignorant travellers. We are wondering what was the last good article in _Blackwood_, and whether Thackeray has gathered up his slack reins in the _Cornhill_. Literature travels slowly even to this Italian Athens. Hawthorne's book is not to be found here yet in the Tauchnitz edition. [Sidenote: Italy, 1860.] We left Florence on the evening of the 1st of June, by diligence, travelling all night and until eleven the next morning to get to Bologna. I wish we could have made that journey across the Apennines by daylight, though in that case I should have missed certain grand, startling effects that came to me in my occasional wakings. Wonderful heights and depths I saw on each side of us by the fading light of the evening. Then, in the middle of the night, while the lightning was flashing and the sky was heavy with threatening storm-clouds, I waked to find the six horses resolutely refusing or unable to move the diligence--till, at last, two meek oxen were tied to the axle, and their added strength dragged us up the hill. But one of the strangest effects I ever saw was just before dawn, when we seemed to be high up on mighty mountains, which fell precipitously, and showed us the awful, pale horizon far, far below. The first thing we did at Bologna was to go to the Accademia, where I confirmed myself in my utter dislike of the Bolognese school--the Caraccis and Domenichino _et id genus omne_--and felt some disappointment in Raphael's St. Cecilia. The pictures of Francia here, to which I had looked forward as likely to give me a fuller and higher idea of him, were less pleasing to me than the smaller specimens of him that I had seen in the Dresden and other galleries. He seems to me to be more limited even than Perugino; but he is a faithful, painstaking painter, with a religious spirit. Agostino Caracci's Communion of St. Jerome is a remarkable picture, with real feeling in it--an exception among all the great pieces of canvas that hang beside it. Domenichino's figure of St. Jerome is a direct plagiarism from that of Agostino; but in other points the two pictures are quite diverse. The following morning we took a carriage and were diligent in visiting the churches. San Petronio has the melancholy distinction of an exquisite Gothic façade, which is carried up only a little way above the arches of the doorways; the sculptures on these arches are of wonderful beauty. The interior is of lofty, airy, simple Gothic, and it contains some curious old paintings in the various side-chapels--pre-eminent among which are the great frescoes by the so-called Buffalmacco. The Paradise is distinguished in my memory by the fact that the blessed are ranged in seats like the benches of a church or chapel. At Santa Cecilia--now used as a barrack or guard-room--there are two frescoes by Francia, the Marriage and Burial of St. Cecilia, characteristic, but miserably injured. At the great Church of San Domenico the object of chief interest is the tomb of the said saint, by the ever-to-be-honored Nicolo Pisano. I believe this tomb was his first great work, and very remarkable it is; but there is nothing on it equal to the Nativity on the pulpit at Pisa. On this tomb stands a lovely angel, by Michael Angelo. It is small in size, holding a small candle-stick, and is a work of his youth; it shows clearly enough how the feeling for grace and beauty were strong in him, only not strong enough to wrestle with his love of the grandiose and powerful. The ugly, painful leaning towers of Bologna made me desire not to look at them a second time; but there are fine bits of massive palatial building here and there in the colonnaded streets. We trod the court of the once famous university, where the arms of the various scholars ornament the walls above and below an interior gallery. This building is now, as far as I could understand, a communal school, and the university is transported to another part of the town. We left Bologna in the afternoon, rested at Ferrara for the night, and passed the Euganean Mountains on our left hand as we approached Padua in the middle of the next day. After dinner and rest from our dusty journeying we took a carriage and went out to see the town, desiring most of all to see Giotto's Chapel. We paused first, however, at the great Church of San Antonio, which is remarkable both externally and internally. There are two side chapels opposite each other, which are quite unique for contrasted effect. On the one hand is a chapel of oblong form, covered entirely with white marble _relievi_, golden lamps hanging from the roof; while opposite is a chapel of the same form, covered with frescoes by Avanzi, the artist who seems to have been the link of genius between Giotto and Masaccio. Close by, in a separate building, is the Capella di San Giorgio, also covered with Avanzi's frescoes; and here one may study him more completely, because the light is better than in the church. He has quite a Veronese power of combining his human groups with splendid architecture. The Arena Chapel stands apart, and is approached, at present, through a pretty garden. Here one is uninterruptedly with Giotto. The whole chapel was designed and painted by himself alone; and it is said that, while he was at work on it, Dante lodged with him at Padua. The nave of the chapel is in tolerably good preservation, but the apsis has suffered severely from damp. It is in this apsis that the lovely Madonna, with the Infant at her breast, is painted in a niche, now quite hidden by some altar-piece or woodwork, which one has to push by in order to see the tenderest bit of Giotto's painting. This chapel must have been a blessed vision when it was fresh from Giotto's hand--the blue, vaulted roof; the exquisite bands of which he was so fond, representing inlaid marble, uniting roof and walls, and forming the divisions between the various frescoes which cover the upper part of the wall. The glory of Paradise at one end, and the histories of Mary and Jesus on the two sides; and the subdued effect of the series of monochromes representing the Virtues and Vices below. There is a piazza with a plantation and circular public walk, with wildly affected statues of small and great notorieties, which remains with one as a peculiarity of Padua; in general the town is merely old and shabbily Italian, without anything very specific in its aspect. From Padua to Venice! It was about ten o'clock on a moonlight night--the 4th of June--that we found ourselves apparently on a railway in the midst of the sea; we were on the bridge across the Lagoon. Soon we were in a gondola on the Grand Canal, looking out at the moonlit buildings and water. What stillness! What beauty! Looking out from the high window of our hotel on the Grand Canal I felt that it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romances had feigned. And that was the impression that remained, and even deepened, during our stay of eight days. That quiet which seems the deeper because one hears the delicious dip of the oar (when not disturbed by clamorous church bells) leaves the eye in full liberty and strength to take in the exhaustless loveliness of color and form. We were in our gondola by nine o'clock the next morning, and, of course, the first point we sought was the Piazza di San Marco. I am glad to find Ruskin calling the Palace of the Doges one of the two most perfect buildings in the world; its only defects, to my feeling, are the feebleness or triviality of the frieze or cornice, and the want of length in the Gothic windows with which the upper wall is pierced. This spot is a focus of architectural wonders; but the palace is the crown of them all. The double tier of columns and arches, with the rich sombreness of their finely outlined shadows, contrast satisfactorily with the warmth and light and more continuous surface of the upper part. Even landing on the Piazzetta, one has a sense, not only of being in an entirely novel scene, but one where the ideas of a foreign race have poured themselves in without yet mingling indistinguishably with the pre-existent Italian life. But this is felt yet more strongly when one has passed along the Piazzetta and arrived in front of San Marco, with its low arches and domes and minarets. But perhaps the most striking point to take one's stand on is just in front of the white marble guard-house flanking the great tower--the guard-house with Sansovino's iron gates before it. On the left is San Marco, with the two square pillars from St. Jean d'Acre standing as isolated trophies; on the right the Piazzetta extends between the Doge's Palace and the Palazzo Reale to the tall columns from Constantinople; and in front is the elaborate gateway leading to the white marble Scala di Giganti, in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace. Passing through this gateway and up this staircase, we entered the gallery which surrounds the court on three sides, and looked down at the fine sculptured vase-like wells below. Then into the great Sala, surrounded with the portraits of the doges; the largest oil-painting here--or perhaps anywhere else--is the Gloria del Paradiso, by Tintoretto, now dark and unlovely. But on the ceiling is a great Paul Veronese--the Apotheosis of Venice--which looks as fresh as if it were painted yesterday, and is a miracle of color and composition--a picture full of glory and joy of an earthly, fleshly kind, but without any touch of coarseness or vulgarity. Below the radiant Venice on her clouds is a balcony filled with upward-looking spectators; and below this gallery is a group of human figures with horses. Next to this Apotheosis, I admire another Coronation of Venice on the ceiling of another Sala, where Venice is sitting enthroned above the globe with her lovely face in half shadow--a creature born with an imperial attitude. There are other Tintorettos, Veroneses, and Palmas in the great halls of this palace; but they left me quite indifferent, and have become vague in my memory. From the splendors of the palace we crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the prisons, and saw the horrible, dark, damp cells that would make the saddest life in the free light and air seem bright and desirable. The interior of St. Mark's is full of interest, but not of beauty; it is dark and heavy, and ill-suited to the Catholic worship, from the massive piers that obstruct the view everywhere, shut out the sight of ceremony and procession, as we witnessed at our leisure on the day of the great procession of Corpus Christi. But everywhere there are relics of gone-by art to be studied, from mosaics of the Greeks to mosaics of later artists than the Zuccati; old marble statues, embrowned like a meerschaum pipe; amazing sculptures in wood; Sansovino doors, ambitious to rival Ghiberti's; transparent alabaster columns; an ancient Madonna, hung with jewels, transported from St. Sophia, in Constantinople; and everywhere the venerable pavement, once beautiful with its starry patterns in rich marble, now deadened and sunk to unevenness, like the mud floor of a cabin. Then outside, on the archway of the principal door, there are sculptures of a variety that makes one renounce the study of them in despair at the shortness of one's time--blended fruits and foliage, and human groups and animal forms of all kinds. On our first morning we ascended the great tower, and looked around on the island city and the distant mountains and the distant Adriatic. And on the same day we went to see the Pisani palace--one of the grand old palaces that are going to decay. An Italian artist who resides in one part of this palace interested us by his frank manner, and the glimpse we had of his domesticity with his pretty wife and children. After this we saw the Church of San Sebastiano, where Paul Veronese is buried, with his own paintings around, mingling their color with the light that falls on his tombstone. There is one remarkably fine painting of his here: it represents, I think, some saints going to martyrdom, but, apart from that explanation, is a composition full of vigorous, spirited figures, in which the central ones are two young men leaving some splendid dwelling, on the steps of which stands the mother, pleading and remonstrating--a marvellous figure of an old woman with a bare neck. But supreme among the pictures at Venice is the Death of Peter the Martyr,[20] now happily removed from its original position as an altar-piece, and placed in a good light in the sacristy of San Giovanni and Paolo (or San Zani Polo, as the Venetians conveniently abbreviate it). In this picture, as in that of the Tribute-money at Dresden, Titian seems to have surpassed himself, and to have reached as high a point in expression as in color. In the same sacristy there was a Crucifixion, by Tintoretto, and a remarkable Madonna with Saints, by Giovanni Bellini; but we were unable to look long away from the Titian to these, although we paid it five visits during our stay. It is near this church that the famous equestrian statue stands, by Verocchio. Santa Maria della Salute, built as an _ex voto_ by the Republic on the cessation of the plague, is one of the most conspicuous churches in Venice, lifting its white cupolas close on the Grand Canal, where it widens out towards the Giudecca. Here there are various Tintorettos, but the only one which is not blackened so as to be unintelligible is the _Cena_, which is represented as a bustling supper party, with attendants and sideboard accessories, in thoroughly Dutch fashion! The great scene of Tintoretto's greatness is held to be the Scuola di San Rocco, of which he had the painting entirely to himself, with his pupils; and here one must admire the vigor and freshness of his conceptions, though I saw nothing that delighted me in expression, and much that was preposterous and ugly. The Crucifixion here is certainly a grand work, to which he seems to have given his best powers; and among the smaller designs, in the two larger halls, there were several of thorough originality--for example, the Annunciation, where Mary is seated in a poor house, with a carpenter's shop adjoining; the Nativity, in the upper story of a stable, of which a section is made so as to show the beasts below; and the Flight into Egypt, with a very charming (European) landscape. In this same building of San Rocco there are some exquisite iron gates, a present from Florence, and some singularly painstaking wood-carving, representing, in one compartment of wainscot, above the seats that surrounded the upper hall, a bookcase filled with old books, an inkstand and pen set in front of one shelf _à s'y méprendre_. But of all Tintoretto's paintings the best preserved, and perhaps the most complete in execution, is the Miracle of St. Mark, at the Accademia. We saw it the oftener because we were attracted to the Accademia again and again by Titian's Assumption, which we placed next to Peter the Martyr among the pictures at Venice. For a thoroughly rapt expression I never saw anything equal to the Virgin in this picture; and the expression is the more remarkable because it is not assisted by the usual devices to express spiritual ecstasy, such as delicacy of feature and temperament, or pale meagreness. Then what cherubs and angelic heads bathed in light! The lower part of the picture has no interest; the attitudes are theatrical; and the Almighty above is as unbeseeming as painted Almighties usually are; but the middle group falls short only of the Sistine Madonna. Among the Venetian painters Giovanni Bellini shines with a mild, serious light that gives one an affectionate respect towards him. In the Church of the Scalzi there is an exquisite Madonna by him--probably his _chef-d'oeuvre_--comparable to Raphael's for sweetness. And Palmo Vecchio, too, must be held in grateful reverence for his Santa Barbara, standing in calm, grand beauty above an altar in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is an almost unique presentation of a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with serious conviction. We made the journey to Chioggia, but with small pleasure, on account of my illness, which continued all day. Otherwise that long floating over the water, with the forts and mountains looking as if they were suspended in the air, would have been very enjoyable. Of all dreamy delights that of floating in a gondola along the canals and out on the Lagoon is surely the greatest. We were out one night on the Lagoon when the sun was setting, and the wide waters were flushed with the reddened light. I should have liked it to last for hours; it is the sort of scene in which I could most readily forget my own existence and feel melted into the general life. Another charm of evening-time was to walk up and down the Piazza of San Marco as the stars were brightening and look at the grand, dim buildings, and the flocks of pigeons flitting about them; or to walk on to the Bridge of La Paglia and look along the dark canal that runs under the Bridge of Sighs--its blackness lit up by a gaslight here and there, and the plash of the oar of blackest gondola slowly advancing. One of our latest visits was to the Palazzo Mamfrini, where there are still the remains of a magnificent collection of pictures--remains still on sale. The young proprietor was walking about transacting business in the rooms as we passed through them--a handsome, refined-looking man. The chief treasure left--the Entombment, by Titian--is perhaps a superior duplicate of the one in the Louvre. After this we went to a private house (once the house of Bianca Capello) to see a picture which the joint proprietors are anxious to prove to be a Leonardo da Vinci. It is a remarkable--an unforgetable--picture. The subject is the Supper at Emmaus; and the Christ, with open, almost tearful eyes, with loving sadness spread over the regular beauty of his features, is a masterpiece. This head is _not_ like the Leonardo sketch at Milan; and the rest of the picture impressed me strongly with the idea that it is of German, not Italian, origin. Again, the head is not like that of Leonardo's Christ in the National Gallery--it is far finer, to my thinking. Farewell, lovely Venice! and away to Verona, across the green plains of Lombardy, which can hardly look tempting to an eye still filled with the dreamy beauty it has left behind. Yet I liked our short stay at Verona extremely. The Amphitheatre had the disadvantage of coming after the Coliseum and the Pozzuoli Amphitheatre, and would bear comparison with neither; but the Church of San Zenone was equal in interest to almost any of the churches we had seen in Italy. It is a beautiful specimen of Lombard architecture, undisguised by any modern barbarisms in the interior; and on the walls--now that they have been freed from their coat of whitewash--there are early frescoes of high historical value, some of them--apparently of the Giotto school--showing a remarkable striving after human expression. More than this, there is in one case an under layer of yet older frescoes, partly laid bare, and showing the lower part of figures in mummy-like degradation of drawing; while above these are the upper portion of the later figures in striking juxtaposition with the dead art from which they had sprung with the vitality of a hidden germ. There is a very fine crypt to the church, where the fragments of some ancient sculptures are built in wrong way upwards. This was the only church we entered at Verona; for we contented ourselves with a general view of the town, driving about to get _coups d'oeil_ of the fine old walls, the river, the bridges, and surrounding hills, and mounting up to a high terrace for the sake of a bird's-eye view; this, with a passing sight of the famous tombs of the Scaligers, was all gathered in our four or five hours at Verona. Heavy rain came on our way to Milan, putting an end to the brilliant weather we had enjoyed ever since our arrival at Naples. The line of road lies through a luxuriant country, and I remember the picturesque appearance of Bergamo--half of it on the level, half of it lifted up on the green hill. In this second visit of mine to Milan my greatest pleasures were the Brera Gallery and the Ambrosian Library, neither of which I had seen before. The cathedral no longer satisfied my eye in its exterior; and though the interior has very grand effects, there are still disturbing elements. At the Ambrosian Library we saw MSS. surpassing in interest any even of those we had seen in the Laurentian Library at Florence--illuminated books, sacred and secular, a little Koran, rolled up something after the fashion of a measuring-tape, private letters of Tasso, Galileo, Lucrezia Borgia, etc., and a book full of Leonardo da Vinci's engineering designs. Then, up-stairs, in the picture-gallery, we saw a delicious Holy Family by Luini, of marvellous perfection in its execution, the Cartoon for Raphael's School of Athens, and a precious collection of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. Among Leonardo's are amazingly grotesque faces, full of humor; among Michael Angelo's is the sketch of the unfortunate Biagio, who figures with ass's ears, in the lower corner of the Last Judgment. At the Brera, among a host of pictures to which I was indifferent, there were several things that delighted me. Some of Luini's frescoes--especially the burial or transportation of the body of St. Catherine by angels--some single figures of young cherubs, and Joseph and Mary going to their Marriage; the drawing in pastel by Leonardo of the Christ's head, supposed to be a study for the _Cena_; the Luini Madonna among trellises--an exquisite oil-painting; Gentile Bellini's picture of St. Mark preaching at Alexandria; and the Sposalizio by Raphael. At the Church of San Maurizio Maggiore we saw Luini's power tested by an abundant opportunity. The walls are almost covered with frescoes by him; but the only remarkable felicity he has is his female figures, which are eminently graceful. He has not power enough for a composition of any high character. We visited, too, the interesting old Church of San Ambrogio, with its court surrounded by cloisters, its old sculptured pulpit, chair of St. Ambrose, and illuminated choir-books; and we drove to look at the line of old Roman columns, which are almost the solitary remnant of antiquity left in this ancient city--ancient, at least, in its name and site. We left Milan for Como on a fine Sunday morning, and arrived at beautiful Bellagio by steamer in the evening. Here we spent a delicious day--going to the Villa Somma Riva in the morning, and in the evening to the Serbellone Gardens, from the heights of which we saw the mountain-peaks reddened with the last rays of the sun. The next day we reached lovely Chiavenna, at the foot of the Splügen Pass, and spent the evening in company with a glorious mountain torrent, mountain peaks, huge bowlders, with rippling miniature torrents and lovely young flowers among them, and grassy heights with rich Spanish chestnuts shadowing them. Then, the next morning, we set off by post and climbed the almost perpendicular heights of the Pass--chiefly in heavy rain that would hardly let us discern the patches of snow when we reached the table-land of the summit. About five o'clock we reached grassy Splügen and felt that we had left Italy behind us. Already our driver had been German for the last long post, and now we had come to a hotel where host and waiters were German. Swiss houses of dark wood, outside staircases and broad eaves, stood on the steep, green, and flowery slope that led up to the waterfall; and the hotel and other buildings of masonry were thoroughly German in their aspect. In the evening we enjoyed a walk between the mountains, whose lower sides down to the torrent bed were set with tall, dark pines. But the climax of grand--nay, terrible--scenery came the next day as we traversed the Via Mala. After this came open green valleys, dotted with white churches and homesteads. We were in Switzerland, and the mighty wall of the Valtelline Alps shut us out from Italy on the 21st of June. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d June, 1860, from Berne.] Your letter to Florence reached me duly, and I feel as if I had been rather unconscionable in asking for another before our return; but to us, who have been seeing new things every day, a month seems so long a space of time that we can't help fancying there must be a great accumulation of news for us at the end of it. We had hoped to be at home by the 25th; but we were so enchanted with Venice that we were seduced into staying there a whole week instead of three or four days, and now we must not rob the boys of their two days' holiday with us. We have had a wonderful journey. From Florence we went to Bologna, Ferrara, and Padua, on our way to Venice; and from Venice we have come by Verona, Milan, and Como, and across the Splügen to Zurich, where we spent yesterday, chiefly in the company of Moleschott the physiologist--an interview that has helped to sharpen Mr. Lewes's appetite for a return to his microscope and dissecting-table. We ought to be forever ashamed of ourselves if we don't work the better for this great holiday. We both feel immensely enriched with new ideas and new veins of interest. I don't think I can venture to tell you what my great project is by letter, for I am anxious to keep it secret. It will require a great deal of study and labor, and I am athirst to begin. As for "The Mill," I am in repose about it now I know it has found its way to the great public. Its comparative rank can only be decided after some years have passed, when the judgment upon it is no longer influenced by the recent enthusiasm about "Adam," and by the fact that it has the misfortune to be written by me instead of by Mr. Liggins. I shall like to see Bulwer's criticism, if you will be kind enough to send it me; but I particularly wish _not_ to see any of the newspaper articles. _SUMMARY._ MARCH TO JUNE, 1860.--FIRST JOURNEY TO ITALY. Crossing Mont Cenis by night in diligence--Turin--Sees Count Cavour--Genoa--Leghorn--Pisa--Civita Vecchia--Disappointment with first sight of Rome--Better spirits after visit to Capitol--View from Capitol--Points most struck with in Rome--Sculpture at Capitol--Sculpture at Vatican first seen by torchlight--St. Peter's--Other churches--Sistine Chapel--Paintings--Illumination of St. Peter's--Disappointment with Michael Angelo's Moses--Visits to artists' studios--Riedel and Overbeck--Pamfili Doria Gardens--Frascati--Tivoli--Pictures at Capitol--Lateran Museum--Shelley's and Keats's graves--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Pope's blessing--Easter ceremonies--From Rome to Naples--Description--Museo Borbonico--Visit to Pompeii--Solemnity of street of tombs--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--From Naples to Salerno and Pæstum--Temple of Vesta--Temple of Neptune fulfils expectations--Amalfi--Drive to Sorrento--Back to Naples--By steamer to Leghorn--To Florence--Views from Fiesole and Bellosguardo--The Duomo--Baptistery--Palaces--Churches--Dante's tomb--Frescoes--Pictures at the Uffizi--Pictures at the Pitti--Pictures at the Accademia--Expedition to Siena--Back to Florence--Michael Angelo's house--Letter to Blackwood--Dwarfing effect of the past--Letter to Major Blackwood on _Times'_ criticism of "The Mill on the Floss," and first mention of an Italian novel--Leave Florence for Bologna--Churches and pictures--To Padua by Ferrara--The Arena Chapel--Venice by moonlight--Doge's Palace--St. Mark's--Pictures--Scuola di San Rocco--Accademia--Gondola to Chioggia--From Venice to Verona--Milan--Brera Gallery and Ambrosian Library--Disappointment with cathedral--Bellagio--Over Splügen to Switzerland--Letter to Blackwood--Saw Moleschott at Zurich--Home by Berne and Geneva. FOOTNOTES: [11] "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." [12] Now in cell No. 33 in the Museo di San Marco. [13] Now in the Museo Nazionale. [14] Now in Sala Lorenzo Monaco, Uffizi. [15] The only portraits of Dante in the Uffizi are No. 1207 in the room opening out of the Tribune, by an unknown painter (Scuola Toscana); and No. 553, in the passage to the Pitti--also by an unknown painter. [16] No. 81. Pitti Gallery. [17] No. 49, by Tiberio Titti. Pitti Gallery. [18] No. 140. Pitti Gallery. [19] No. 56 Via de Faenza, Capella di Foligno. [20] Since burned. CHAPTER XI. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _July 1._--We found ourselves at home again, after three months of delightful travel. From Berne we brought our eldest boy Charles, to begin a new period in his life, after four years at Hofwyl. During our absence "The Mill on the Floss" came out (April 4), and achieved a greater success than I had ever hoped for it. The subscription was 3600 (the number originally printed was 4000); and shortly after its appearance, Mudie having demanded a second thousand, Blackwood commenced striking off 2000 more, making 6000. While we were at Florence I had the news that these 6000 were all sold, and that 500 more were being prepared. From all we can gather, the votes are rather on the side of "The Mill" as a better book than "Adam." [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st July, 1860.] We reached home by starlight at one o'clock this morning; and I write in haste, fear, and trembling lest you should already be gone to Surrey. You know what I should like--that you and your husband should come to us the first day possible, naming any hour and conditions. We would arrange meals and everything else as would best suit you. Of course I would willingly go to London to see _you_, if you could not come to me. But I fear lest neither plan should be practicable, and lest this letter should have to be sent after you. It is from your note only that I have learned your loss.[21] It has made me think of you with the sense that there is more than ever a common fund of experience between us. But I will write nothing more now. I am almost ill with fatigue, and have only courage to write at all because of my anxiety not to miss you. Affectionate regards from both of _us_ to both of _you_. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d July, 1860.] I opened your letters and parcel a little after one o'clock on Sunday morning, for that was the unseasonable hour of our return from our long, long journey. Yesterday was almost entirely employed in feeling very weary indeed, but this morning we are attacking the heap of small duties that always lie before one after a long absence. It is pleasant to see your book[22] fairly finished after all delays and anxieties; but I will say nothing to you about _that_ until I have read it. I shall read it the first thing before plunging into a course of study which will take me into a different region of thought. We have had an unspeakably delightful journey--one of those journeys that seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new veins of interest they open. We went to Geneva, and spent two days with my old, kind friends, the d'Alberts--a real pleasure to me, especially as Mr. Lewes was delighted with "Maman," as I used to call Madame d'Albert. She is as bright and upright as ever; the ten years have only whitened her hair--a change which makes her face all the softer in coloring. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 3d July, 1860.] We did not reach home till past midnight on Saturday, when you, I suppose, had already become used to the comfort of having fairly got through your London season. Self-interest, rightly understood of course, prompts us to a few virtuous actions in the way of letter-writing to let the few people we care to hear from know at once of our whereabouts; and you are one of the first among the few. At Berne Mr. Lewes supped with Professors Valentin and Schiff, two highly distinguished physiologists, and I was much delighted to find how much attention and interest they had given to his views in the "Physiology of Common Life." A French translation of "Adam Bede," by a Genevese gentleman[23] well known to me, is now in the press; and the same translator has undertaken "The Mill on the Floss." He appears to have rendered "Adam" with the most scrupulous care. I think these are all the incidents we gathered on our homeward journey that are likely to interest you. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th July, 1860.] I have finished my first rather rapid reading of your book, and now I thank you for it: not merely for the special gift of the volume and inscription, but for that of which many others will share the benefit with me--the "thoughts" themselves. So far as my reading in English books of similar character extends, yours seems to me quite unparalleled in the largeness and insight with which it estimates Christianity as an "organized experience"--a grand advance in the moral development of the race. I especially delight in the passage, p. 105, beginning, "And how can it be otherwise," and ending with, "formal rejection of it."[24] On this and other supremely interesting matters of thought--perhaps I should rather say of experience--your book has shown me that we are much nearer to each other than I had supposed. At p. 174, again, there is a passage beginning, "These sentiments," and ending with "heroes,"[25] which, for me, expresses the one-half of true human piety. That thought is one of my favorite altars where I oftenest go to contemplate, and to seek for invigorating motive. Of the work as a whole I am quite incompetent to judge on a single cursory reading. I admire--I respect--the breadth and industry of mind it exhibits; and I should be obliged to give it a more thorough study than I can afford at present before I should feel warranted to urge, in the light of a criticism, my failure to perceive the logical consistency of your language in some parts with the position you have adopted in others. In many instances your meaning is obscure to me, or at least lies wrapped up in more folds of abstract phraseology than I have the courage or the industry to open for myself. I think you told me that some one had found your treatment of great questions "cold-blooded." I am all the more delighted to find, for my own part, an unusual fulness of sympathy and heart experience breathing throughout your book. The ground for that epithet perhaps lay in a certain professorial tone which could hardly be avoided, in a work filled with criticism of other people's theories, except by the adoption of a simply personal style of presentation, in which you would have seemed to be looking up at the oracles, and trying to reconcile their doctrines for your own behoof, instead of appearing to be seated in a chair above them. But you considered your own plan more thoroughly than any one else can have considered it for you; and I have no doubt you had good reasons for preferring the more impersonal style. Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards, and when Du Bois Reymond's book on Johannes Müller, with other preoccupations of a like thrilling kind, no longer stand in the way, he will open _his_ copy of the "Thoughts in Aid of Faith." He has felt a new interest aroused towards it since he has learned something about it from me and the reviewer in the _Westminster_. Madame Bodichon, who was here the other day, told me that Miss Nightingale and Miss Julia Smith had mentioned their pleasure in your book; but you will hear further news of all that from themselves. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th July, 1860.] I return Sir Edward Lytton's critical letter, which I have read with much interest. On two points I recognize the justice of his criticism. First, that Maggie is made to appear too passive in the scene of quarrel in the Red Deeps. If my book were still in MS. I should--now that the defect is suggested to me--alter, or rather expand, that scene. Secondly, that the tragedy is not adequately prepared. This is a defect which I felt even while writing the third volume, and have felt ever since the MS. left me. The _Epische Breite_ into which I was beguiled by love of my subject in the two first volumes, caused a want of proportionate fulness in the treatment of the third, which I shall always regret. The other chief point of criticism--Maggie's position towards Stephen--is too vital a part of my whole conception and purpose for me to be converted to the condemnation of it. If I am wrong there--if I did not really know what my heroine would feel and do under the circumstances in which I deliberately placed her, I ought not to have written this book at all, but quite a different book, if any. If the ethics of art do not admit the truthful presentation of a character essentially noble, but liable to great error--error that is anguish to its own nobleness--then, it seems to me, the ethics of art are too narrow, and must be widened to correspond with a widening psychology. But it is good for me to know how my tendencies as a writer clash with the conclusions of a highly accomplished mind, that I may be warned into examining well whether my discordance with those conclusions may not arise rather from an idiosyncrasy of mine than from a conviction which is argumentatively justifiable. I hope you will thank Sir Edward on my behalf for the trouble he has taken to put his criticism into a form specific enough to be useful. I feel his taking such trouble to be at once a tribute and a kindness. If printed criticisms were usually written with only half the same warrant of knowledge, and with an equal sincerity of intention, I should read them without fear of fruitless annoyance. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 10th July, 1860.] The little envelope with its address of "Marian" was very welcome, and as Mr. Lewes is sending what a Malaproprian friend once called a "missile" to Sara, I feel inclined to slip in a word of gratitude--less for the present than for the past goodness, which came back to me with keener remembrance than ever when we were at Genoa and at Como--the places I first saw with you. How wretched I was then--how peevish, how utterly morbid! And how kind and forbearing you were under the oppression of my company. I should like you now and then to feel happy in the thought that you were always perfectly good to me. That I was not good to you is my own disagreeable affair; the bitter taste of that fact is mine, not yours. Don't you remember Bellagio? It is hardly altered much except in the hotels, which the eleven years have wondrously multiplied and bedizened for the accommodation of the English. But if I begin to recall the things we saw in Italy, I shall write as long a letter as Mr. Lewes's, which, by-the-bye, now I have read it, seems to be something of a "missile" in another sense than the Malaproprian. But Sara is one of the few people to whom candor is acceptable as the highest tribute. And private criticism has more chance of being faithful than public. We must have mercy on critics who are obliged to make a figure in printed pages. They must by all means say striking things. Either we should not read printed criticisms at all (_I don't_), or we should read them with the constant remembrance that they are a fugitive kind of work which, in the present stage of human nature, can rarely engage a very high grade of conscience or ability. The fate of a book, which is not entirely ephemeral, is never decided by journalists or reviewers of any but an exceptional kind. Tell Sara her damnation--if it ever comes to pass--will be quite independent of Nationals and Westminsters. Let half a dozen competent people read her book, and an opinion of it will spread quite apart from either praise or blame in reviews and newspapers. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Tuesday evening, July, 1860.] Our big boy is a great delight to us, and makes our home doubly cheery. It is very sweet as one gets old to have some young life about one. He is quite a passionate musician, and we play Beethoven duets with increasing appetite every evening. The opportunity of hearing some inspiring music is one of the chief benefits we hope for to counterbalance our loss of the wide common and the fields. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 14th July, 1860.] We shall certainly read the parts you suggest in the "Education of the Feelings,"[26] and I dare say I shall read a good deal more of it, liking to turn over the leaves of a book which I read first in our old drawing-room at Foleshill, and then lent to my sister, who, with a little air of maternal experience, pronounced it "very sensible." There is so much that I want to do every day--I had need cut myself into four women. We have a great extra interest and occupation just now in our big boy Charlie, who is looking forward to a Government examination, and wants much help and sympathy in music and graver things. I think we are quite peculiarly blest in the fact that this eldest lad seems the most entirely lovable human animal of seventeen and a half that I ever met with or heard of: he has a sweetness of disposition which is saved from weakness by a remarkable sense of duty. We are going to let our present house, if possible--that is, get rid of it altogether on account of its inconvenient situation--other projects are still in a floating, unfixed condition. The water did not look quite so green at Como--perhaps, as your remark suggests, because there was a less vivid green to be reflected from my personality as I looked down on it. I am eleven years nearer to the sere and yellow leaf, and my feelings are even more autumnal than my years. I have read no reviews of the "Mill on the Floss" except that in the _Times_ which Blackwood sent me to Florence. I abstain not from superciliousness, but on a calm consideration of the probable proportion of benefit on the one hand, and waste of thought on the other. It was certain that in the notices of my first book, after the removal of my _incognito_, there would be much _ex post facto_ wisdom, which could hardly profit me since _I_ certainly knew who I was beforehand, and knew also that no one else knew who had not been told. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 18th July, 1860.] We are quite uncertain about our plans at present. Our second boy, Thornie, is going to leave Hofwyl, and to be placed in some more expensive position, in order to the carrying on of his education in a more complete way, so that we are thinking of avoiding for the present any final establishment of ourselves, which would necessarily be attended with additional outlay. Besides, these material cares draw rather too severely on my strength and spirits. But until Charlie's career has taken shape we frame no definite projects. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Aug. 1860.] If Cara values the article on Strikes in the _Westminster Review_, she will be interested to know--if she has not heard it already--that the writer is _blind_. I dined with him the other week, and could hardly keep the tears back as I sat at table with him. Yet he is cheerful and animated, accepting with graceful quietness all the minute attentions to his wants that his blindness calls forth. His name is Fawcett, and he is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. I am sitting for my portrait--for the last time, I hope--to Lawrence, the artist who drew that chalk-head of Thackeray, which is familiar to you. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Friday, Aug. 1860.] I know you will rejoice with us that Charlie has won his place at the Post-office, having been at the head of the list in the examination. The dear lad is fairly launched in life now. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Saturday evening, Aug. 1860.] I am thoroughly vexed that we didn't go to Lawrence's to-day. We made an effort, but it was raining too hard at the only time that would serve us to reach the train. That comes of our inconvenient situation, so far off the railway; and alas! no one comes to take our house off our hands. We may be forced to stay here after all. One of the things I shall count upon, if we are able to get nearer London, is to see more of your schools and other good works. That would help me to do without the fields for many months of the year. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Aug. 1860.] I am very sorry that anything I have written should have pained you. _That_, certainly, is the result I should seek most to avoid in the very slight communication which we are able to keep up--necessarily under extremely imperfect acquaintance with each other's present self. My first letter to you about your book, after having read it through, was as simple and sincere a statement of the main impressions it had produced on me as I knew how to write in few words. My second letter, in which I unhappily used a formula in order to express to you, in briefest phrase, my difficulty in discerning the justice of your _analogical_ argument, _as I understood it_, was written from no other impulse than the desire to show you that I did not neglect your abstract just sent to me. The said formula was entirely deprived of its application by the statement in your next letter that you used the word "essence" in another sense than the one hitherto received in philosophical writing, on the question as to the nature of our knowledge; and the explanation given of your meaning in your last letter shows me--unless I am plunging into further mistake--that you mean nothing but what I fully believe. My offensive formula was written under the supposition that your conclusion meant something which it apparently did _not_ mean. It is probable enough that I was stupid; but I should be distressed to think that the discipline of life had been of so little use to me as to leave me with a tendency to leap at once to the attitude of a critic, instead of trying first to be a learner from every book written with sincere labor. Will you tell Mr. Bray that we are quitting our present house in order to be _nearer_ town for Charlie's sake, who has an appointment in the Post-office, and our time will be arduously occupied during the next few weeks in arrangements to that end, so that our acceptance of the pleasant proposition to visit Sydenham for a while is impossible. We have advertised for a house near Regent's Park, having just found a gentleman and lady ready to take our present one off our hands. They want to come in on quarter-day, so that we have no time to spare. I have been reading this morning for my spiritual good Emerson's "Man the Reformer," which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning. My heart goes out with venerating gratitude to that mild face, which I dare say is smiling on some one as beneficently as it one day did on me years and years ago. Do not write again about opinions on large questions, dear Sara. The liability to mutual misconception which attends such correspondence--especially in my case, who can only write with brevity and haste--makes me dread it greatly; and I think there is no benefit derivable to you to compensate for the presence of that dread in me. You do not know me well enough as I _am_ (according to the doctrine of development which you have yourself expounded) to have the materials for interpreting my imperfect expressions. I think you would spare yourself some pain if you would attribute to your friends a larger comprehension of ideas, and a larger acquaintance with them, than you appear to do. I should imagine that many of them, or at least _some_ of them, share with you, much more fully than you seem to suppose, in the interest and hope you derive from the doctrine of development, with its geometrical progression towards fuller and fuller being. Surely it is a part of human piety we should all cultivate, not to form conclusions, on slight and dubious evidence, as to other people's "tone of mind," or to regard particular mistakes as a proof of general moral incapacity to understand us. I suppose such a tendency (to large conclusions about others) is part of the original sin we are all born with, for I have continually to check it in myself. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Aug. 1860.] I think I must tell you the secret, though I am distrusting my power to make it grow into a published fact. When we were in Florence I was rather fired with the idea of writing an historical romance--scene, Florence; period, the close of the fifteenth century, which was marked by Savonarola's career and martyrdom. Mr. Lewes has encouraged me to persevere in the project, saying that I should probably do something in historical romance rather different in character from what has been done before. But I want first to write another English story, and the plan I should like to carry out is this: to publish my next English novel when my Italian one is advanced enough for us to begin its publication a few months afterwards in "Maga." It would appear without a name in the Magazine, and be subsequently reprinted with the name of George Eliot. I need not tell you the wherefore of this plan. You know well enough the received phrases with which a writer is greeted when he does something else than what was expected of him. But just now I am quite without confidence in my future doings, and almost repent of having formed conceptions which will go on lashing me now until I have at least tried to fulfil them. I am going to-day to give my last sitting to Lawrence, and we were counting on the Major's coming to look at the portrait and judge of it. I hope it will be satisfactory, for I am quite set against going through the same process a second time. We are a little distracted just now with the prospect of removal from our present house, which some obliging people have at last come to take off our hands. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Sept. 1860.] My fingers have been itching to write to you for the last week or more, but I have waited and waited, hoping to be able to tell you that we had decided on our future house. This evening, however, I have been reading your description of Algiers, and the desire to thank you for it moves me too strongly to be resisted. It is admirably written, and makes me _see_ the country. I am so glad to think of the deep draughts of life you get from being able to spend half your life in that fresh, grand scenery. It must make London and English green fields all the more enjoyable in their turn. As for us, we are preparing to renounce the delights of roving, and to settle down quietly, as old folks should do, for the benefit of the young ones. We have let our present house. Is it not cheering to have the sunshine on the corn, and the prospect that the poor people will not have to endure the suffering that comes on them from a bad harvest? The fields that were so sadly beaten down a little while ago on the way to town are now standing in fine yellow shocks. I wish you could know how much we felt your kindness to Charley. He is such a dear good fellow that nothing is thrown away upon him. Write me a scrap of news about yourself, and tell me how you and the doctor are enjoying the country. I shall get a breath of it in that way. I think I love the fields and shudder at the streets more and more every month. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Sept. 27._--To-day is the third day we have spent in our new home here at 10 Harewood Square. It is a furnished house, in which we do not expect to stay longer than six months at the utmost. Since our return from Italy I have written a slight tale, "Mr. David Faux, Confectioner" ("Brother Jacob"), which G. thinks worth printing. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th Sept. 1860.] The precious check arrived safely to-day. I am much obliged to you for it, and also for the offer to hasten further payments. I have no present need of that accommodation, as we have given up the idea of buying the house which attracted us, dreading a step that might fetter us to town, or to a more expensive mode of living than might ultimately be desirable. I hope Mr. Lewes will bring us back a good report of Major Blackwood's progress towards re-established health. In default of a visit from him, it was very agreeable to have him represented by his son,[27] who has the happy talent of making a morning call one of the easiest, pleasantest things in the world. I wonder if you know who is the writer of the article in the _North British_, in which I am reviewed along with Hawthorne. Mr. Lewes brought it for me to read this morning, and it is so unmixed in its praise that if I had any friends I should be uneasy lest a friend should have written it. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Oct. 1860.] Since there is no possibility of my turning in to see you on my walk, as in the old days, I cannot feel easy without writing to tell you my regret that I missed you when you came. In changing a clearer sky for a foggy one we have not changed our habits, and we walk after lunch, as usual; but I should like very much to stay indoors any day with the expectation of seeing you, if I could know beforehand of your coming. It is rather sad not to see your face at all from week to week, and I hope you know that I feel it so. But I am always afraid of falling into a disagreeable urgency of invitation, since we have nothing to offer beyond the familiar, well-worn entertainment of our own society. I hope you and Mr. Congreve are quite well now and free from cares. Emily, I suppose, is gone with the sunshine of her face to Coventry. There is sadly little sunshine except that of young faces just now. Still we are flourishing, in spite of damp and dismalness. We were glad to hear that the well-written article in the _Westminster_ on the "Essays and Reviews" was by your friend Mr. Harrison.[28] Though I don't quite agree with his view of the case, I admired the tone and style of the writing greatly. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Oct. 1860.] There is no objection to Wednesday but this--that it is our day for hearing a course of lectures, and the lecture begins at eight. Now, since you can't come often, we want to keep you as long as we can, and we have a faint hope that Mr. Congreve might be able to come from his work and dine with us and take you home. But if that were impossible, could you not stay all night? There is a bed ready for you. Think of all that, and if you can manage to give us the longer visit, choose another day when our evening will be unbroken. I will understand by your silence that you can only come for a shorter time, and that you abide by your plan of coming on Wednesday. I am really quite hungry for the sight of you. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d Nov. 1860.] I agree with you in preferring to put simply "New Edition;" and I see, too, that the practice of advertising numbers is made vulgar and worthless by the doubtful veracity of some publishers, and the low character of the books to which they affix this supposed guarantee of popularity. _Magna est veritas_, etc. I can't tell you how much comfort I feel in having publishers who believe that. You have read the hostile article in the _Quarterly_, I dare say. I have not seen it; but Mr. Lewes's report of it made me more cheerful than any review I have heard of since "The Mill" came out. You remember Lord John Russell was once laughed at immensely for saying that he felt confident he was right, because all parties found fault with him. I really find myself taking nearly the same view of my position, with the Freethinkers angry with me on one side and the writer in the _Quarterly_ on the other--_not_ because my representations are untruthful, but because they are impartial--because I don't _load_ my dice so as to make their side win. The parenthetical hint that the classical quotations in my books might be "more correctly printed," is an amusing sample of the grievance that belongs to review-writing in general, since there happens to be only _one_ classical quotation in them all--the Greek one from the Philoctetes in "Amos Barton." By-the-bye, will you see that the readers have not allowed some error to creep into that solitary bit of pedantry? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Nov. 1860.] I understand your paradox of "expecting disappointments," for that is the only form of hope with which I am familiar. I should like, for your sake, that you should rather see us in our _own_ house than in this; for I fear your carrying away a general sense of _yellow_ in connection with us--and I am sure that is enough to set you against the thought of us. There are some staring yellow curtains which you will hardly help blending with your impression of our moral sentiments. In our own drawing-room I mean to have a paradise of greenness. I have lately re-read your "Thoughts," from the beginning of the "Psychical Essence of Christianity" to the end of the "History of Philosophy," and I feel my original impression confirmed--that the "Psychical Essence" and "General Review of the Christian System" are the most valuable portions. I think you once expressed your regret that I did not understand the analogy you traced between Feuerbach's theory and Spencer's. I don't know what gave you that impression, for _I_ never said so. I see your meaning distinctly in that parallel. If you referred to something in Mr. Lewes's letter, let me say, once for all, that you must not impute _my_ opinions to _him_ nor _vice versâ_. The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as he--that difference of opinion rouses no egoistic irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the moment his intellect recognizes it. I am glad to see Mr. Bray contributing his quota to the exposure of that odious trickery--spirit-rapping. It was not headache that I was suffering from when Mr. Bray called, but extreme languor and unbroken fatigue from morning to night--a state which is always accompanied in me, psychically, by utter self-distrust and despair of ever being equal to the demands of life. We should be very pleased to hear some news of Mr. and Mrs. Call. I feel their removal from town quite a loss to us. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Nov. 28._--Since I last wrote in this Journal I have suffered much from physical weakness, accompanied with mental depression. The loss of the country has seemed very bitter to me, and my want of health and strength has prevented me from working much--still worse, has made me despair of ever working well again. I am getting better now by the help of tonics, and shall be better still if I could gather more bravery, resignation, and simplicity of striving. In the meantime my cup is full of blessings: my home is bright and warm with love and tenderness, and in more material, vulgar matters we are very fortunate. Last Tuesday--the 20th--we had a pleasant evening. Anthony Trollope dined with us, and made me like him very much by his straightforward, wholesome _Wesen_. Afterwards Mr. Helps came in, and the talk was extremely agreeable. He told me the queen had been speaking to him in great admiration of my books--especially "The Mill on the Floss." It is interesting to know that royalty can be touched by that sort of writing, and I was grateful to Mr. Helps for his wish to tell me of the sympathy given to me in that quarter. To-day I have had a letter from M. d'Albert, saying that at last the French edition of "Adam Bede" is published. He pleases me very much by saying that he finds not a sentence that he can retrench in the first volume of "The Mill." I am engaged now in writing a story--the idea of which came to me after our arrival in this house, and which has thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating. It is "Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe." I am still only at about the 62d page, for I have written slowly and interruptedly. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 7th Dec. 1860.] The sight of sunshine usually brings you to my mind, because you are my latest association with the country; but I think of you much oftener than I see the sunshine, for the weather in London has been more uninterruptedly dismal than ever for the last fortnight. Nevertheless _I_ am brighter; and since I believe your goodness will make that agreeable news to you, I write on purpose to tell it. Quinine and steel have at last made me brave and cheerful, and I really don't mind a journey up-stairs. If you had not repressed our hope of seeing you again until your sister's return, I should have asked you to join us for the Exeter Hall performance of the "Messiah" this evening, which I am looking forward to with delight. The Monday Popular Concerts at St. James's Hall are our easiest and cheapest pleasures. I go in my bonnet; we sit in the shilling places in the body of the hall, and hear to perfection for a shilling! That is agreeable when one hears Beethoven's quartets and sonatas. Pray bear in mind that these things are to be had when you are more at liberty. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Dec. 17._--We entered to-day our new home--16 Blandford Square--which we have taken for three years, hoping by the end of that time to have so far done our duty by the boys as to be free to live where we list. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Dec. 1860.] Your vision of me as "settled" was painfully in contrast with the fact. The last virtue human beings will attain, I am inclined to think, is scrupulosity in promising and faithfulness in fulfilment. We are still far off our last stadium of development, and so it has come to pass that, though we were in the house on Monday last, our curtains are not up and our oilcloth is not down. Such is life, seen from the furnishing point of view! I can't tell you how hateful this sort of time-frittering work is to me, who every year care less for houses and detest shops more. To crown my sorrows, I have lost my pen--my old, favorite pen, with which I have written for eight years--at least, it is not forth-coming. We have been reading the proof of Mr. Spencer's second part, and I am supremely gratified by it, because he brings his argument to a point which I did not anticipate from him. It is, as he says, a result of his riper thought. After all the bustle of Monday I went to hear Sims Reeves sing "Adelaide"--that _ne plus ultra_ of passionate song--and I wish you had been there for one quarter of an hour, that you might have heard it too. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 26th Dec. 1860.] The bright point in your letter is that you are in a happy state of mind yourself. For the rest, we must wait, and not be impatient with those who have their inward trials, though everything outward seems to smile on them. It seems to those who are differently placed that the time of freedom from strong ties and urgent claims must be very precious for the ends of self-culture and good, helpful work towards the world at large. But it hardly ever is so. As for the forms and ceremonies, I feel no regret that any should turn to them for comfort if they can find comfort in them; sympathetically I enjoy them myself. But I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls--their intellect as well as their emotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The "highest calling and election" is to _do without opium_, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance. We have no sorrow just now, except my constant inward "worrit" of unbelief in any future of good work on my part. Everything I do seems poor and trivial in the doing; and when it is quite gone from me, and seems no longer my own, then I rejoice in it and think it fine. That is the history of my life. I have been wanting to go to your school again, to refresh myself with the young voices there, but I have not been able to do it. My walks have all been taken up with shopping errands of late; but I hope to get more leisure soon. We both beg to offer our affectionate remembrances to the doctor. Get Herbert Spencer's new work--the two first quarterly parts. It is the best thing he has done. [Sidenote: Journal, 1860.] _Dec. 31._--This year has been marked by many blessings, and, above all, by the comfort we have found in having Charles with us. Since we set out on our journey to Italy on 25th March, the time has not been fruitful in work: distractions about our change of residence have run away with many days; and since I have been in London my state of health has been depressing to all effort. May the next year be more fruitful! [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 12th Jan. 1861.] I am writing a story which came _across_ my other plans by a sudden inspiration. I don't know at present whether it will resolve itself into a book short enough for me to complete before Easter, or whether it will expand beyond that possibility. It seems to me that nobody will take any interest in it but myself, for it is extremely unlike the popular stories going; but Mr. Lewes declares that I am wrong, and says it is as good as anything I have done. It is a story of old-fashioned village life, which has unfolded itself from the merest millet-seed of thought. I think I get slower and more timid in my writing, but perhaps worry about houses and servants and boys, with want of bodily strength, may have had something to do with that. I hope to be quiet now. [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _Feb. 1._--The first month of the New Year has been passed in much bodily discomfort, making both work and leisure heavy. I have reached page 209 of my story, which is to be in one volume, and I want to get it ready for Easter, but I dare promise myself nothing with this feeble body. The other day I had charming letters from M. and Mme. d'Albert, saying that the French "Adam" goes on very well, and showing an appreciation of "The Mill" which pleases me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Feb. 1861.] I was feeling so ill on Friday and Saturday that I had not spirit to write and thank you for the basket of eggs--an invaluable present. I was particularly grateful this morning at breakfast, when a fine large one fell to my share. On Saturday afternoon we were both so utterly incapable that Mr. Lewes insisted on our setting off forthwith into the country. But we only got as far as Dorking, and came back yesterday. I felt a new creature as soon as I was in the country; and we had two brilliant days for rambling and driving about that lovely Surrey. I suppose we must keep soul and body together by occasional flights of this sort; and don't you think an occasional flight to town will be good for you? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 8th Feb. 1861.] I have destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me, because they were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them to remain till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which is venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common temper of mind. But enough of that. The reminders I am getting from time to time of Coventry distress have made me think very often yearningly and painfully of the friends who are more immediately affected by it, and I often wonder if more definite information would increase or lessen my anxiety for them. Send me what word you can from time to time, that there may be some reality in my image of things round your hearth. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Feb. 1861.] I send you by post to-day about two hundred and thirty pages of MS. I send it because, in my experience, printing and its preliminaries have always been rather a slow business; and as the story--if published at Easter at all--should be ready by Easter week, there is no time to lose. We are reading "Carlyle's Memoirs" with much interest; but, so far as we have gone, he certainly does seem to me something of a "Sadducee"--a very handsome one, judging from the portrait. What a memory and what an experience for a novelist! But, somehow, experience and finished faculty rarely go together. Dearly beloved Scott had the greatest combination of experience and faculty, yet even he never made the most of his treasures, at least in his _mode_ of presentation. Send us better news of Major Blackwood, if you can. We feel so old and rickety ourselves that we have a peculiar interest in invalids. Mr. Lewes is going to lecture for the Post-office this evening, by Mr. Trollope's request. I am rather uneasy about it, and wish he were well through the unusual excitement. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Feb. 1861.] I have been much relieved by Mr. Lewes having got through his lecture at the Post-office[29] with perfect ease and success, for I had feared the unusual excitement for him. _I_ am better. I have not been working much lately; indeed, this year has been a comparatively idle one. I think my _malaise_ is chiefly owing to the depressing influence of town air and town scenes. The Zoological Gardens are my one outdoor pleasure now, and we can take it several times a week, for Mr. Lewes has become a fellow. My love is often visiting you. Entertain it well. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Feb. 1861.] I am glad to hear that Mr. Maurice impressed you agreeably. If I had strength to be adventurous on Sunday I should go to hear him preach as well as others. But I am unequal to the least exertion or irregularity. My only pleasure away from our own hearth is going to the Zoological Gardens. Mr. Lewes is a fellow, so we turn in there several times a week; and I find the birds and beasts there most congenial to my spirit. There is a Shoebill, a great bird of grotesque ugliness, whose topknot looks brushed up to a point with an exemplary deference to the demands of society, but who, I am sure, has no idea that he looks the handsomer for it. I cherish an unrequited attachment to him. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 23d Feb. 1861.] If you are in London this morning, in this fine, dun-colored fog, you know how to pity me. But I feel myself wicked for implying that I have any grievances. Only last week we had a circular from the clergyman at Attleboro, where there is a considerable population entirely dependent on the ribbon-trade, telling us how the poor weavers are suffering from the effects of the Coventry strike. And these less-known, undramatic tales of want win no wide help, such as has been given in the case of the Hartley colliery accident. Your letter was a contribution towards a more cheerful view of things, for whatever may be the minor evils you hint at, I know that Mr. Congreve's better health, and the satisfaction you have in his doing effective work, will outweigh them. We have had a Dr. Wyatt here lately, an Oxford physician, who was much interested in hearing of Mr. Congreve again, not only on the ground of Oxford remembrances, but from having read his writings. I was much pleased with the affectionate respect that was expressed in all the notices of Mr. Clough[30] that I happened to see in the newspapers. They were an indication that there must be a great deal of private sympathy to soothe poor Mrs. Clough, if any soothing is possible in such cases. That little poem of his which was quoted in the _Spectator_ about parted friendships touched me deeply. You may be sure we are ailing, but I am ashamed of dwelling on a subject that offers so little variety. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Feb. 1861.] I don't wonder at your finding my story, as far as you have read it, rather sombre; indeed, I should not have believed that any one would have been interested in it but myself (since Wordsworth is dead) if Mr. Lewes had not been strongly arrested by it. But I hope you will not find it at all a sad story, as a whole, since it sets--or is intended to set--in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations. The Nemesis is a very mild one. I have felt all through as if the story would have lent itself best to metrical rather than to prose fiction, especially in all that relates to the psychology of Silas; except that, under that treatment, there could not be an equal play of humor. It came to me first of all quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his back; but, as my mind dwelt on the subject, I became inclined to a more realistic treatment. My chief reason for wishing to publish the story now is that I like my writings to appear in the order in which they are written, because they belong to successive mental phases, and when they are a year behind me I can no longer feel that thorough identification with them which gives zest to the sense of authorship. I generally like them better at that distance, but then I feel as if they might just as well have been written by somebody else. It would have been a great pleasure to me if Major Blackwood could have read my story. I am very glad to have the first part tested by the reading of your nephew and Mr. Simpson, and to find that it can interest them at all. [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _March 10._--Finished "Silas Marner," and sent off the last thirty pages to Edinburgh. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Mch. 1861, from Hastings.] Your letter came to me just as we were preparing to start in search of fresh air and the fresh thoughts that come with it. I hope you never doubt that I feel a deep interest in knowing all facts that touch you nearly. I should like to think that it was some small comfort to Cara and you to know that, wherever I am, there is one among that number of your friends--necessarily decreasing with increasing years--who enter into your present experience with the light of memories; for kind feeling can never replace fully the sympathy that comes from memory. My disposition is so faultily anxious and foreboding that I am not likely to forget anything of a saddening sort. Tell Sara we saw Mr. William Smith, author of "Thorndale," a short time ago, and he spoke of her and her book with interest; he thought her book "suggestive." He called on us during a visit to London, made for the sake of getting married. The lady is, or rather was, a Miss Cumming, daughter of a blind physician of Edinburgh. He said they had talked to each other for some time of the "impossibility" of marrying, because they were both too poor. "But," he said, "it is dangerous, Lewes, to talk even of the impossibility." The difficulties gradually dwindled, and the advantages magnified themselves. She is a nice person, we hear; and I was particularly pleased with _him_--he is modest to diffidence, yet bright and keenly awake. I am just come in from our first good blow on the beach, and have that delicious sort of numbness in arms and legs that comes from walking hard in a fresh wind. "Silas Marner" is in one volume. It was quite a sudden inspiration that came across me in the midst of altogether different meditations. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Mch. 1861.] The latest number I had heard of was three thousand three hundred, so that your letter brought me agreeable information. I am particularly gratified, because this spirited subscription must rest on my character as a writer generally, and not simply on the popularity of "Adam Bede." There is an article on "The Mill" in _Macmillan's Magazine_ which is worth reading. I cannot, of course, agree with the writer in all his regrets; if I could have done so I should not have written the book I did write, but quite another. Still, it is a comfort to me to read any criticism which recognizes the high responsibilities of literature that undertakes to represent life. The ordinary tone about art is that the artist may do what he will, provided he pleases the public. I am very glad to be told--whenever you can tell me--that the major is not suffering heavily. I know so well the preciousness of those smiles that tell one the mind is not held out of all reach of soothing. We are wavering whether we shall go to Florence this spring or wait till the year and other things are more advanced. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st April, 1861.] It gave me pleasure to have your letter, not only because of the kind expressions of sympathy it contains, but also because it gives me an opportunity of telling you, after the lapse of years, that I remember gratefully how you wrote to me with generous consideration and belief at a time when most persons who knew anything of me were disposed (naturally enough) to judge me rather severely. Only a woman of rare qualities would have written to me as you did on the strength of the brief intercourse that had passed between us. It was never a trial to me to have been cut off from what is called the world, and I think I love none of my fellow-creatures the less for it; still, I must always retain a peculiar regard for those who showed me any kindness in word or deed at that time, when there was the least evidence in my favor. The list of those who did so is a short one, so that I can often and easily recall it. For the last six years I have ceased to be "Miss Evans" for any one who has personal relations with me--having held myself under all the responsibilities of a married woman. I wish this to be distinctly understood; and when I tell you that we have a great boy of eighteen at home, who calls me "mother," as well as two other boys, almost as tall, who write to me under the same name, you will understand that the point is not one of mere egoism or personal dignity, when I request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me by my maiden name. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th April, 1861.] I am much obliged to you for your punctuality in sending me my precious check. I prize the money fruit of my labor very highly as the means of saving us dependence, or the degradation of writing when we are no longer able to write well, or to write what we have not written before. Mr. Langford brought us word that he thought the total subscription (including Scotland and Ireland) would mount to five thousand five hundred. That is really very great. And letters drop in from time to time, giving me words of strong encouragement, especially about "The Mill;" so that I have reason to be cheerful, and to believe that where one has a large public, one's words must hit their mark. If it were not for that, special cases of misinterpretation might paralyze me. For example, pray notice how one critic attributes to me a disdain for Tom; as if it were not _my_ respect for Tom which infused itself into my reader; as if he could have respected Tom if I had not painted him with respect; the exhibition of the right on both sides being the very soul of my intention in the story. However, I ought to be satisfied if I have roused the feeling that does justice to both sides. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th April, 1861.] I feel more at ease in omitting formalities with you than I should with most persons, because I know you are yourself accustomed to have other reasons for your conduct than mere fashion, and I believe you will understand me without many words when I tell you what Mr. Lewes felt unable to explain on the instant when you kindly expressed the wish to see us at your house; namely, that I have found it a necessity of my London life to make the rule of _never_ paying visits. Without a carriage, and with my easily perturbed health, London distances would make any other rule quite irreconcilable for me with any efficient use of my days; and I am obliged to give up the _few_ visits which would be really attractive and fruitful in order to avoid the _many_ visits which would be the reverse. It is only by saying, "I never pay visits," that I can escape being ungracious or unkind--only by renouncing all social intercourse but such as comes to our own fireside, that I can escape sacrificing the chief objects of my life. I think it very good of those with whom I have much fellow-feeling, if they will let me have the pleasure of seeing them without their expecting the usual reciprocity of visits; and I hope I need hardly say that you are among the visitors who would be giving me pleasure in this way. I think your imagination will supply all I have left unsaid, all the details that run away with our hours when our life extends at all beyond our own homes; and I am not afraid of your misinterpreting my stay-at-home rule into churlishness. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th April, 1861.] We went to hear Beethoven's "Mass in D" last night, and on Wednesday to hear Mendelssohn's "Walpurgis Nacht" and Beethoven's "Symphony in B," so that we have had two musical treats this week; but the enjoyment of such things is much diminished by the gas and bad air. Indeed, our long addiction to a quiet life, in which our daily walk among the still grass and trees was a _fête_ to us, has unfitted us for the sacrifices that London demands. Don't think about reading "Silas Marner" just because it is come out. I hate _obligato_ reading and _obligato_ talk about my books. _I never send them to any one_, and never wish to be spoken to about them, except by an unpremeditated, spontaneous prompting. They are written out of my deepest belief, and, as well as I can, for the great public, and every sincere, strong word will find its mark in that public. Perhaps the annoyance I suffered (referring to the Liggins' affair) has made me rather morbid on such points; but, apart from my own weaknesses, I think the less an author hears about himself the better. Don't mistake me: I am writing a general explanation, _not_ anything applicable to you. [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _April 19._--We set off on our second journey to Florence, through France and by the Cornice Road. Our weather was delicious, a little rain, and we suffered neither from heat nor from dust. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 25th April, 1861.] We have had a paradisaic journey hitherto. It does one good to look at the Provençals--men and women. They are quite a different race from the Northern French--large, round-featured, full-eyed, with an expression of _bonhomie_, calm and suave. They are very much like the pleasantest Italians. The women at Arles and Toulon are remarkably handsome. On Tuesday morning we set out about ten on our way to Nice, hiring a carriage and taking post-horses. The sky was gray, and after an hour or so we had rain; nevertheless our journey to Vidauban, about half-way to Nice, was enchanting. Everywhere a delicious plain, covered with bright green corn, sprouting vines, mulberry-trees, olives, and here and there meadows sprinkled with buttercups, made the nearer landscapes, and, in the distance, mountains of varying outline. _Mutter_ felt herself in a state of perfect bliss from only looking at this peaceful, generous nature; and you often came across the green blades of corn, and made her love it all the better. We had meant to go on to Fréjus that night, but no horses were to be had; so we made up our minds to rest at Vidauban, and went out to have a stroll before our six-o'clock dinner. Such a stroll! The sun had kindly come out for us, and we enjoyed it all the more for the grayness of the morning. There is a crystally clear river flowing by Vidauban, called the Argent: it rushes along between a fringe of aspens and willows; and the sunlight lay under the boughs, and fell on the eddying water, making Pater and me very happy as we wandered. The next morning we set off early, to be sure of horses before they had been used up by other travellers. The country was not quite so lovely, but we had the sunlight to compensate until we got past Fréjus, where we had our first view of the sea since Toulon, and where the scenery changes to the entirely mountainous, the road winding above gorges of pine-clad masses for a long way. To heighten the contrast, a heavy storm came, which thoroughly laid the dust for us, if it had no other advantage. The sun came out gloriously again before we reached Cannes, and lit up the yellow broom, which is now in all its splendor, and clothes vast slopes by which our road wound. We had still a four-hours' journey to Nice, where we arrived at six o'clock, with headaches that made us glad of the luxuries to be found in a great hotel. [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _May 5._--Dear Florence was lovelier than ever on this second view, and ill-health was the only deduction from perfect enjoyment. We had comfortable quarters in the Albergo della Vittoria, on the Arno; we had the best news from England about the success of "Silas Marner;" and we had long letters from our dear boy to make us feel easy about home. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th May, 1861.] Your pleasant news had been ripening at the post-office several days before we enjoyed the receipt of it; for our journey lasted us longer than we expected, and we didn't reach this place till yesterday evening. We have come with _vetturino_ from Toulon--the most delightful (and the most expensive) journey we have ever had. I dare say you know the Cornice; if not, _do_ know it some time, and bring Mrs. Blackwood that way into Italy. Meanwhile I am glad to think that you are having a less fatiguing change to places where you can "carry the comforts o' the Saut Market" with you, which is not quite the case with travellers along the Mediterranean coast. I hope I shall soon hear that you are thoroughly set up by fresh air and fresh circumstances, along with pleasant companionship. Except a thunderstorm, which gave a grand variety to the mountains, and a little gentle rain, the first day from Toulon, which made the green corn all the fresher, we have had unbroken sunshine, without heat and without dust. I suppose this season and late autumn must be the perfect moments for taking this supremely beautiful journey. We must be forever ashamed of ourselves if we don't work the better for it. It was very good of you to write to me in the midst of your hurry, that I might have good news to greet me. It really did lighten our weariness, and make the noisy streets that prevented sleep more endurable. I was amused with your detail about Professor Aytoun's sovereigns. There can be no great paintings of misers under the present system of paper money--checks, bills, scrip, and the like--nobody can handle that dull property as men handled the glittering gold. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 17th May, 1861.] The Florentine winds, being of a grave and earnest disposition, have naturally a disgust for trivial _dilettanti_ foreigners, and seize on the peculiarly feeble and worthless with much virulence. In consequence we had a sad history for nearly a week--Pater doing little else than nurse me, and I doing little else but feel eminently uncomfortable, for which, as you know, I have a faculty "second to none." I feel very full of thankfulness for all the creatures I have got to love--all the beautiful and great things that are given me to know; and I feel, too, much younger and more hopeful, as if a great deal of life and work were still before me. Pater and I have had great satisfaction in finding our impressions of admiration more than renewed in returning to Florence; the things we cared about when we were here before seem even more worthy than they did in our memories. We have had delightful weather since the cold winds abated; and the evening lights on the Arno, the bridges, and the quaint houses, are a treat that we think of beforehand. Your letters, too, are thought of beforehand. We long for them, and when they come they don't disappoint us: they tell us everything, and make us feel at home with you after a fashion. I confess to some dread of Blandford Square in the abstract. I fear London will seem more odious to me than ever; but I think I shall bear it with more fortitude. After all, that is the best place to live in where one has a strong reason for living. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 19th May, 1861.] We have been industriously foraging in old streets and old books. I feel very brave just now, and enjoy the thought of work--but don't set your mind on my doing just what I have dreamed. It may turn out that I can't work freely and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent, so that I may feel that it was something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work. I am very much cheered by the way in which "Silas" is received. I hope it has made some slight pleasure for you too, in the midst of incomparably deeper feelings of sadness.[31] Your quiet tour among the lakes was the best possible thing for you. What place is not better "out of the season"?--although I feel I am almost wicked in my hatred of being where there are many other people enjoying themselves. I am very far behind Mr. Buckle's millennial prospect, which is, that men will be more and more congregated in cities and occupied with human affairs, so as to be less and less under the influence of Nature--_i.e._, the sky, the hills, and the plains; whereby superstition will vanish and statistics will reign for ever and ever. Mr. Lewes is kept in continual distraction by having to attend to my wants--going with me to the Magliabecchian Library, and poking about everywhere on my behalf--I having very little self-help about me of the pushing and inquiring kind. I look forward with keen anxiety to the next outbreak of war--longing for some turn of affairs that will save poor Venice from being bombarded by those terrible Austrian forts. Thanks for your letters: we both say, "More--give us more." [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 27th May, 1861.] Florence is getting hot, and I am the less sorry to leave it because it has agreed very ill with the dear Paterculus. This evening we have been mounting to the top of Giotto's tower--a very sublime getting up-stairs, indeed--and our muscles are much astonished at the unusual exercise; so you must not be shocked if my letter seems to be written with dim faculties as well as with a dim light. We have seen no one but Mrs. Trollope and her pretty little girl Beatrice, who is a musical genius. She is a delicate fairy, about ten years old, but sings with a grace and expression that make it a thrilling delight to hear her. We have had glorious sunsets, shedding crimson and golden lights under the dark bridges across the Arno. All Florence turns out at eventide, but we avoid the slow crowds on the Lung' Arno, and take our way "up all manner of streets." [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _May_ and _June_.--At the end of May Mr. T. Trollope came back and persuaded us to stay long enough to make the expedition to Camaldoli and La Vernia in his company. We arrived at Florence on the 4th May, and left it on the 7th June--thirty-four days of precious time spent there. Will it be all in vain? Our morning hours were spent in looking at streets, buildings, and pictures, in hunting up old books at shops or stalls, or in reading at the Magliabecchian Library. Alas! I could have done much more if I had been well; but that regret applies to most years of my life. Returned by Lago Maggiore and the St. Gothard; reached home June 14. Blackwood having waited in town to see us, came to lunch with us, and asked me if I would go to dine at Greenwich on the following Monday, to which I said "Yes," by way of exception to my resolve that I will go nowhere for the rest of this year. He drove us there with Colonel Stewart, and we had a pleasant evening--the sight of a game at golf in the park, and a hazy view of the distant shipping, with the Hospital finely broken by trees in the foreground. At dinner Colonel Hamley and Mr. Skene joined us; Delane, who had been invited, was unable to come. The chat was agreeable enough, but the sight of the gliding ships darkening against the dying sunlight made me feel chat rather importunate. _June 16._--This morning, for the first time, I feel myself quietly settled at home. I am in excellent health, and long to work steadily and effectively. If it were possible that I should produce _better_ work than I have yet done! At least there is a possibility that I may make greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure. _June 19._--This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book, in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th June, 1861.] Some of one's first thoughts on coming home after an absence of much length are about the friends one had left behind--what has happened to them in the meantime, and how are they now? And yet, though we came home last Friday evening, I have not had the quiet moment for writing these thoughts until this morning. I know I need put no questions to you, who always divine what I want to be told. We have had a perfect journey except as regards health--a large, large exception. The cold winds alternating with the hot sun, or some other cause, laid very unkind hold on Mr. Lewes early after our arrival at Florence, and he was ailing with sore throat and cough continually, so that he has come back looking thin and delicate, though the ailments seem to be nearly passed away. I wish you could have shared the pleasures of our last expedition from Florence--to the Monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia; I think it was just the sort of thing you would have entered into with thorough zest. Imagine the Franciscans of La Vernia, which is perched upon an abrupt rock rising sheer on the summit of a mountain, turning out at midnight (and when there is deep snow for their feet to plunge in), and chanting their slow way up to the little chapel perched at a lofty distance above their already lofty monastery! This they do every night throughout the year, in all weathers. Give my loving greeting to Cara and Mr. Bray, and then sit down and write me one of your charming letters, making a little picture of everybody and everything about you. God bless you! is the old-fashioned summing up of sincere affection, without the least smirk of studied civility. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th July, 1861.] Your letter gave me a pleasant vision of Sunday sunshine on the flowers, and you among them, with your eyes brightened by busy and enjoyable thoughts. Yes, I hope we are well out of that phase in which the most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could sympathize with no age but the age to come. When I received your Monday packet I was fresh from six quarto volumes on the history of the monastic orders, and had just begun a less formidable modern book on the same subject--Montalembert's "Monks of the West." Our reading, you see, lay in very different quarters, but I fancy our thoughts sometimes touched the same ground. I am rather puzzled and shocked, however, by your high admiration of the articles on the "Study of History," in the _Cornhill_. I should speak with the reserve due to the fact that I have only read the second article; and this, I confess, did not impress me as exhibiting any mastery of the question, while its tone towards much abler thinkers than the writer himself is to me extremely repulsive. Such writing as, "We should not be called upon to believe that every crotchet which tickled the insane vanity of a conceited Frenchman was an eternal and self-evident truth," is to me simply disgusting, though it were directed against the father of lies. It represents no fact except the writer's own desire to be bitter, and is worthily finished by the dull and irreverent antithesis of "the eternal truth and infernal lie." I quite agree with you--so far as I am able to form a judgment--in regarding Positivism as one-sided; but Comte was a great thinker, nevertheless, and ought to be treated with reverence by all smaller fry. I have just been reading the "Survey of the Middle Ages" contained in the fifth volume of the "Philosophie Positive," and to my apprehension few chapters can be fuller of luminous ideas. I am thankful to learn from it. There may be more profundity in the _Cornhill's_ exposition than I am able to penetrate, or, possibly, the first article may contain weightier matter than the second. Mrs. Bodichon is near us now, and one always gets good from contact with her healthy, practical life. Mr. Lewes is gone to see Mrs. Congreve and carry his net to the Wimbledon ponds. I hope he will get a little strength as well as grist for his microscope. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 18th July, 1861.] The English "Imitation" I told you of, which is used by the Catholics, is Challoner's. I have looked into it again since I saw you, and I think, if you want to give the book away, this translation is as good as any you are likely to get among current editions. If it were for yourself, an old bookstall would be more likely to furnish what you want. Don't ever think of me as valuing either you or Mr. Congreve less instead of more. You naughtily implied something of that kind just when you were running away from me. How could any goodness become less precious to me unless my life had ceased to be a growth, and had become mere shrinking and degeneracy? I always imagine that if I were near you now I should profit more by the gift of your presence--just as one feels about all past sunlight. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _July 24._--Walked with George over Primrose Hill. We talked of Plato and Aristotle. _July 26._--In the evening went to see Fechter as Hamlet, and sat next to Mrs. Carlyle. _July 30._--Read little this morning--my mind dwelling with much depression on the probability or improbability of my achieving the work I wish to do. I struck out two or three thoughts towards an English novel. I am much afflicted with hopelessness and melancholy just now, and yet I feel the value of my blessings. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th July, 1861.] Thornie, our second boy, is at home from Edinburgh for his holidays, and I am apt to give more thought than is necessary to any little change in our routine. We had a treat the other night which I wished you could have shared with us. We saw Fechter in Hamlet. His conception of the part is very nearly that indicated by the critical observations in "Wilhelm Meister," and the result is deeply interesting--the naturalness and sensibility of the _Wesen_ overcoming in most cases the defective intonation. And even the intonation is occasionally admirable; for example, "And for my soul, what can he do to that?" etc., is given by Fechter with perfect simplicity, whereas the herd of English actors imagine themselves in a pulpit when they are saying it. _À propos_ of the pulpit, I had another failure in my search for edification last Sunday. Mme. Bodichon and I went to Little Portland Street Chapel, and lo! instead of James Martineau there was a respectable old Unitarian gentleman preaching about the dangers of ignorance and the satisfaction of a good conscience, in a tone of amiable propriety which seemed to belong to a period when brains were untroubled by difficulties, and the lacteals of all good Christians were in perfect order. I enjoyed the fine selection of collects he read from the Liturgy. What an age of earnest faith, grasping a noble conception of life and determined to bring all things into harmony with it, has recorded itself in the simple, pregnant, rhythmical English of those collects and of the Bible! The contrast when the good man got into the pulpit and began to pray in a borrowed, washy lingo--extempore in more senses than one! [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Aug. 1._--Struggling constantly with depression. _Aug. 2._--Read Boccaccio's capital story of Fra Cipolla--one of his few good stories--and the Little Hunchback in the "Arabian Nights," which is still better. _Aug. 10._--Walked with G. We talked of my Italian novel. In the evening, Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford. _Aug. 12._--Got into a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my story that I became desperate, and suddenly burst my bonds, saying, I will not think of writing! [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1861.] That doctrine which we accept rather loftily as a commonplace when we are quite young--namely, that our happiness lies entirely within, in our own mental and bodily state, which determines for us the influence of everything outward--becomes a daily lesson to be learned, and learned with much stumbling, as we get older. And until we know our friends' private thoughts and emotions we hardly know what to grieve or rejoice over for them. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Aug. 17._--Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford came, who gave us some music. _Aug. 20._--This morning I conceived the plot of my novel with new distinctness. _Aug. 24._--Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford came, and we had music. These have been placid, ineffective days, my mind being clouded and depressed. _Aug. 26._--Went with Barbara to her school, and spent the afternoon there. _Aug. 31._--In the evening came Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford, and we had some music. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 11th Sept. 1861, from Malvern.] Your letter was a great delight to us, as usual; and the check, too, was welcome to people under hydropathic treatment, which appears to stimulate waste of coin as well as of tissue. Altogether, we are figures in keeping with the landscape when it is well damped or "packed" under the early mist. We thought rather contemptuously of the hills on our arrival; like travelled people, we hinted at the Alps and Apennines, and smiled with pity at our long-past selves, that had felt quite a thrill at the first sight of them. But now we have tired our limbs by walking round their huge shoulders we begin to think of them with more respect. We simply looked at them at first; we feel their presence now, and creep about them with due humility--whereby, you perceive, there hangs a moral. I do wish you could have shared for a little while with us the sight of this place. I fear you have never seen England under so lovable an aspect. On the southeastern side, where the great green hills have their longest slope, Malvern stands, well nestled in fine trees--chiefly "sounding sycamores"--and beyond there stretches to the horizon, which is marked by a low, faint line of hill, a vast level expanse of grass and cornfields, with hedge-rows everywhere plumed with trees, and here and there a rolling mass of wood; it is one of the happiest scenes the eyes can look on--_freundlich_, according to the pretty German phrase. On the opposite side of this main range of hills there is a more undulated and more thickly wooded country which has the sunset all to itself, and is bright with departing lights when our Malvern side is in cold evening shadow. We are so fortunate as to look out over the wide southeastern valley from our sitting-room window. Our landlady is a quaint old personage, with a strong Cheshire accent. She is, as she tells us, a sharp old woman, and "can see most things pretty quick;" and she is kind enough to communicate her wisdom very freely to us less crisply baked mortals. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Sept. 11._--Yesterday we returned from Malvern (having gone there on 4th). During our stay I read Mrs. Jameson's book on the "Legends of the Monastic Orders," corrected the first volume of "Adam Bede" for the new edition, and began Marchese's "Storia di San Marco." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Sept. 1861.] I enter into your and Cara's furniture-adjusting labors and your enjoyment of church and chapel afterwards. One wants a temple besides the outdoor temple--a place where human beings do not ramble apart, but _meet_ with a common impulse. I hope you have some agreeable lens through which you can look at circumstances--good health, at least. And really I begin to think people who are robust are in a position to pity all the rest of the world--except, indeed, that there are certain secrets taught only by pain, which are, perhaps, worth the purchase. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Sept. 23._--I have been unwell ever since we returned from Malvern, and have been disturbed, from various causes, in my work, so that I have scarcely done anything except correct my own books for a new edition. To-day I am much better, and hope to begin a more effective life to-morrow. _Sept. 28._--In the evening Mr. Spencer, Mr. Pigott, and Mr. Redford came. We talked with Mr. Spencer about his chapter on the "Direction of Force"--_i.e._, line of least resistance. _Sept. 29_ (Sunday).--Finished correcting "Silas Marner." I have thus corrected all my books for a new and cheaper edition, and feel my mind free for other work. Walked to the Zoo with the boys. _Oct. 3._--To-day our new grand piano came--a great addition to our pleasures. _Oct. 4._--My mind still worried about my plot--and without any confidence in my ability to do what I want. _Oct. 5._--In the evening Mr. Redford and Mr. Spencer came, and we had much music. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Oct. 1861.] We are enjoying a great pleasure, a new grand piano, and last evening we had a Beethoven night. We are looking out for a violinist: we have our violoncello, who is full of sensibility, but with no negative in him--_i.e._, no obstinate sense of time--a man who is all assent and perpetual _rallentando_. We can enjoy the pleasure the more because Mr. Lewes's health is promising. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Oct. 7._--Began the first chapter of my novel ("Romola"). _Oct. 9._--Read Nerli. _Oct. 11._--Nardi's "History of Florence." In the afternoon walked with Barbara, and talked with her from lunch till dinner-time. _Oct. 12._--In the evening we had our usual Saturday mixture of visitors, talk, and music; an agreeable addition being Dr. M'Donnell of Dublin. _Oct. 14._--Went with Barbara to her school to hear the children sing. _Oct. 18._--Walked with G. and Mr. Spencer to Hampstead, and continued walking for more than five hours. In the evening we had music. Mrs. Bodichon and Miss Parkes were our additional visitors. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 23d Oct. 1861.] I am rather jealous of the friends who get so much of you--especially when they are so unmeritorious as to be evangelical and spoil your rest. But I will not grumble. I am in the happiest, most contented mood, and have only good news to tell you. I have hardly any trouble nearer to me than the American War and the prospects of poor cotton weavers. While you were shivering at Boulogne we were walking fast to avoid shivering at Malvern, and looking slightly blue after our sitz baths. Nevertheless that discipline answered admirably, and Mr. Lewes's health has been steadily improving since our Malvern expedition. As for me, imagine what I must be to have walked for five hours the other day! Or, better still, imagine me always cheerful, and infer the altered condition of my mucous membrane. The difference must be there; for it is not in my moral sentiments or in my circumstances, unless, indeed, a new grand piano, which tempts me to play more than I have done for years before, may be reckoned an item important enough to have contributed to the change. We talk of you very often, and the image of you is awakened in my mind still oftener. You are associated by many subtile, indescribable ties with some of my most precious and most silent thoughts. I am so glad you have the comfort of feeling that Mr. Congreve is prepared for his work again. I am hoping to hear, when we see you, that the work will be less and less fagging, now the introductory years are past. Charley is going to Switzerland for his holiday next month. We shall enjoy our dual solitude; yet the dear boy is more and more precious to us from the singular rectitude and tenderness of his nature. Make signs to us as often as you can. You know how entirely Mr. Lewes shares my delight in seeing you and hearing from you. [Sidenote: Diary, 1861.] _Oct. 28_ and _30_.--Not very well. Utterly desponding about my book. _Oct. 31._--Still with an incapable head--trying to write, trying to construct, and unable. _Nov. 6._--So utterly dejected that, in walking with G. in the Park, I almost resolved to give up my Italian novel. _Nov. 10_ (Sunday).--New sense of things to be done in my novel, and more brightness in my thoughts. Yesterday I was occupied with ideas about my next English novel; but this morning the Italian scenes returned upon me with fresh attraction. In the evening read "Monteil." A marvellous book; crammed with erudition, yet not dull or tiresome. _Nov. 14._--Went to the British Museum reading-room for the first time--looking over costumes. _Nov. 20._--Mrs. Congreve, Miss Bury, and Mr. Spencer to lunch. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1861.] Your loving words of remembrance find a very full answer in my heart--fuller than I can write. The years seem to _rush_ by now, and I think of death as a fast-approaching end of a journey--double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day. We went to see Fechter's Othello the other night. It is lamentably bad. He has not weight and passion enough for deep tragedy; and, to my feeling, the play is so degraded by his representation that it is positively demoralizing--as, indeed, all tragedy must be when it fails to move pity and terror. In this case it seems to move only titters among the smart and vulgar people who always make the bulk of a theatre audience. We had a visit from our dear friend Mrs. Congreve on Wednesday--a very infrequent pleasure now; for between our own absences from home and hers, and the fatigue of London journeying, it is difficult for us to manage meetings. Mr. Congreve is, as usual, working hard in his medical studies--toiling backward and forward daily. What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything! [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _Nov. 30._--In the evening we had Wilkie Collins, Mr. Pigott, and Mr. Spencer, and talked without any music. _Dec. 3-7._--I continued very unwell until Saturday, when I felt a little better. In the evening Dr. Baetcke, Mr. Pigott, and Mr. Redford. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Dec. 1861.] Miss Marshall came to see us yesterday. That is always a pleasure to me, not only from the sense I have of her goodness, but because she stirs so many remembrances. The first time I saw her was at Rufa's[32] wedding; and don't you remember the evening we spent at Mrs. Dobson's? How young we all were then--how old now! She says you are all under the impression that Mr. Lewes is still very ailing. Thank all good influences it is not so. He has been mending ever since we went to Malvern, and is enjoying life and work more than he has done before for nearly a year. He has long had it in his mind to write a history of science--a great, great undertaking, which it is happiness to both of us to contemplate as possible for him. And now he is busy with Aristotle, and works with all the zest that belongs to fresh ideas. Strangely enough, after all the ages of writing about Aristotle, there exists no fair appreciation of his position in natural science. I am particularly grumbling and disagreeable to myself just now, and I think no one bears physical pain so ill as I do, or is so thoroughly upset by it mentally. Bulwer has behaved very nicely to me, and I have a great respect for the energetic industry with which he has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently in very various departments for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers. I'm sorry you feel any degeneracy in Mr. George Dawson. There was something very winning about him in old days, and even what was not winning, but the reverse, affected me with a sort of kindly pity. With such a gift of tongue as he had, it was inevitable that speech should outrun feeling and experience, and I could well imagine that his present self might look back on that self of 21-27 with a sort of disgust. It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow. It would interest me a good deal to know just how Mr. Dawson preaches now. I am writing on my knees with my feet on the fender, and in that attitude I always write very small--but I hope your sight is not teased by small writing. Give my best love to Cara, and sympathy with her in the pleasure of grasping an old friend by the hand, and having long talks after the distance of years. I know Mr. Bray will enjoy this too--and the new house will seem more like the old one for this warming. [Sidenote: Journal, 1861.] _Dec. 8_ (Sunday).--G. had a headache, so we walked out in the morning sunshine. I told him my conception of my story, and he expressed great delight. Shall I ever be able to carry out my ideas? Flashes of hope are succeeded by long intervals of dim distrust. Finished the eighth volume of Lastri and began the ninth chapter of Varchi, in which he gives an accurate account of Florence. _Dec. 12._--Finished writing my plot, of which I must make several other draughts before I begin to write my book. _Dec. 13._--Read Poggiana. In the afternoon walked to Molini's and brought back Savonarola's "Dialogus de Veritate Prophetica," and "Compendium Revelationum," for £4! _Dec. 14._--In the evening came Mr. Huxley, Mr. Pigott, and Mr. Redford. _Dec. 17._--Studied the topography of Florence. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 31st Dec. 1861.] It was pleasant to have a greeting from you at this season, when all signs of human kindness have a double emphasis. As one gets older epochs have necessarily some sadness, even for those who have, as I have, much family joy. The past, that one would like to mend, spreads behind one so lengthily, and the years of retrieval keep shrinking--the terrible _peau de chagrin_ whose outline narrows and narrows with our ebbing life. I hardly know whether it would be agreeable to you, or worth your while, ever to come to us on a Saturday evening, when we are always at home to any friend who may be kind enough to come to us. It would be very pleasant to us if it were pleasant to you. During the latter half of 1861, I find the following among the books read: "Histoire des Ordres Religieux," Sacchetti's "Novelle," Sismondi's "History of the Italian Republics," "Osservatore Fiorentino," Tennemann's "History of Philosophy," T. A. Trollope's "Beata," Sismondi's "Le Moyen Age Illustré," "The Monks of the West," "Introduction to Savonarola's Poems," by Audin de Réans, Renan's "Études d'Histoire Religieuse," Virgil's "Eclogues," Buhle's "History of Modern Philosophy," Hallam on the "Study of Roman Law in the Middle Ages," Gibbon on the "Revival of Greek Learning," Nardi, Bulwer's "Rienzi," Burlamacchi's "Life of Savonarola," Pulci, Villari's "Life of Savonarola," Mrs. Jameson's "Sacred and Legendary Art," "Hymni and Epigrammati" of Marullus, Politian's "Epistles," Marchese's Works, Tiraboschi, Rock's "Hierurgia," Pettigrew "On Medical Superstition," Manni's "Life of Burchiello," Machiavelli's Works, Ginguené, Muratori "On Proper Names," Cicero "De Officiis," Petrarch's Letters, Craik's "History of English Literature," "Conti Carnivaleschi," Letters of Filelfo, Lastri, and Varchi, Heeren on the Fifteenth Century. _SUMMARY._ JULY, 1860, TO DECEMBER, 1861. Return from Italy to Wandsworth, accompanied by Charles Lewes--"Mill on the Floss" success--6000 sold--Letter to John Blackwood--French translation of "Adam Bede," by M. d'Albert of Geneva--Letter to Miss Hennell on her "Thoughts in Aid of Faith"--Letter to John Blackwood on Sir Edward Lytton's criticism of "The Mill on the Floss"--Letter to Mrs. Bray, recalling feelings on journey to Italy in 1849--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell--Article on Strikes, by Henry Fawcett, in _Westminster_--Sitting to Lawrence for portrait--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Interest in her schools--Letter to Miss Hennell, explaining criticism of "Thoughts in Aid of Faith"--Reading Emerson's "Man the Reformer"--Deprecates writing about opinions on large questions in letters--Letter to John Blackwood--Italian novel project--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Love of the country--Removal to 10 Harewood Square--"Brother Jacob" written--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Frederic Harrison's article in _Westminster_ on "Essays and Reviews"--Letter to John Blackwood--Religious party standpoint--Classical quotations--Letter to Miss Hennell on re-reading "Thoughts in Aid of Faith"--Tribute to Mr. Lewes's dispassionate judgment--Suffering from loss of the country--Independence secured--Anthony Trollope and Arthur Helps--Queen's admiration of "Mill on the Floss"--Writing "Silas Marner" a sudden inspiration--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Monday Popular Concerts--Moved to 16 Blandford Square--Waste of time in furnishing--Letter to Madame Bodichon--On religious forms and ceremonies--Herbert Spencer's new work, the best thing he has done--Letter to John Blackwood--"Silas Marner"--Letters to Mrs. Congreve--Zoological Gardens--Visit to Dorking--Letter to John Blackwood--Scott--Letters to Miss Hennell--Private correspondence--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Arthur Clough's death--Letter to John Blackwood--"Silas Marner"--Books belong to successive mental phases--"Silas Marner" finished--Visit to Hastings--Letter to Charles Bray--Marriage of Mr. William Smith--Letter to John Blackwood--Subscription to "Silas Marner" 3300--Article in _Macmillan_ on "The Mill"--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Position--Letter to John Blackwood--Total Subscription to "Silas Marner" 5500--Criticism on "The Mill"--Letter to Mrs. P. Taylor--Never pays visits--Letter to Miss Hennell--Hearing Beethoven and Mendelssohn music--Start on second journey to Italy--Letter to Charles Lewes, describing drive from Toulon to Nice--Arrival at Florence--Letter to John Blackwood--No painting of misers with paper money--Letter to Charles Lewes--Feels hopeful about future work--Letter to John Blackwood--Italian novel simmering--Letter to Charles Lewes--Beatrice Trollope--Expedition to Camaldoli and La Vernia with Mr. T. A. Trollope--Return home by Lago Maggiore and St. Gothard--Dinner at Greenwich with John Blackwood, Colonel Hamley, etc.--Reflections on waste of youth--Letters to Miss Hennell describing La Vernia--Improvement in general philosophic attitude--Articles on "Study of History" in the _Cornhill_--Positivism one-sided--Admiration of Comte--Letter to Miss Hennell--Fechter in Hamlet--The Liturgy of the English Church--Depression--Musical Evenings with Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford--Trip to Malvern--Letter to Miss Hennell--New grand piano--Began "Romola"--Saturday visitors--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Better spirits--Renewed depression--Letter to Miss Hennell--Time flying--Fechter as Othello--Letter to Miss Hennell--Lewes busy with Aristotle--Bulwer--George Dawson--Reading towards "Romola"--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on the Past--Books read. FOOTNOTES: [21] Death of Madame Bodichon's father. [22] "Thoughts in Aid of Faith." [23] M. d'Albert. [24] "And how can it be otherwise than real to us, this belief that has nourished the souls of us all, and seems to have moulded actually anew their internal constitution, as well as stored them up with its infinite variety of external interests and associations! What other than a very real thing has it been in the life of the world--sprung out of, and again causing to spring forth, such volumes of human emotion--making a current, as it were, of feeling, that has drawn within its own sphere all the moral vitality of so many ages! In all this reality of influence there is indeed the testimony of Christianity having truly formed an integral portion of the organic life of humanity. The regarding it as a mere excrescence, the product of morbid, fanatical humors, is a reaction of judgment, that, it is to be hoped, will soon be seen on all hands to be in no way implied of necessity in the formal rejection of it."--_Thoughts in Aid of Faith_, p. 105. [25] "These sentiments, which are born within us, slumbering as it were in our nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they are roused by hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of the whole of previous human existence. They constitute our treasured inheritance out of all the life that has been lived before us, to which no age, no human being who has trod the earth and laid himself to rest, with all his mortal burden upon her maternal bosom, has failed to add his contribution. No generation has had its engrossing conflict, sorely battling out the triumphs of mind over material force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with its birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual powers--no single soul has borne itself through its personal trial--without bequeathing to us of its fruit. There is not a religious thought that we take to ourselves for secret comfort in our time of grief, that has not been distilled out of the multiplicity of the hallowed tears of mankind; not an animating idea is there for our fainting courage that has not gathered its inspiration from the bravery of the myriad armies of the world's heroes."--_Thoughts in Aid of Faith_, p. 174. [26] "Education of the Feelings." By Charles Bray. Published 1839. [27] Mr. William Blackwood. [28] Mr. Frederic Harrison, the now well-known writer, and a member of the Positivist body. [29] Lecture on Cell Forms. [30] Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet. [31] The death of Major Blackwood. [32] Mrs. Charles Hennell (now Mrs. Call). CHAPTER XII. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _January 1._--Mr. Blackwood sent me a note enclosing a letter from Montalembert about "Silas Marner." _I began again my novel of "Romola."_ [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 7th Jan. 1862.] It is not unlikely that our thoughts and wishes met about New-year's Day, for I was only prevented from writing to you in that week by the fear of saying decidedly that we could _not_ go to you, and yet finding afterwards that a clear sky, happening to coincide with an absence of other hinderances, would have made that pleasure possible for us. I think we believe in each other's thorough affection, and need not dread misunderstanding. But you must not write again, as you did in one note, a sort of apology for coming to us when you were tired, as if we didn't like to see you anyhow and at any time! And we especially like to think that our house can be a rest to you. For the first winter in my life I am hardly ever free from cold. As soon as one has departed with the usual final stage of stuffiness, another presents itself with the usual introduction of sore throat. And Mr. Lewes just now is a little ailing. But we have nothing serious to complain of. You seemed to me so bright and brave the last time I saw you, that I have had cheerful thoughts of you ever since. Write to me always when anything happens to you, either pleasant or sad, that there is no reason for my not knowing, so that we may not spend long weeks in wondering how all things are with you. And do come to us whenever you can, without caring about my going to you, for this is too difficult for me in chill and doubtful weather. Are you not looking anxiously for the news from America? [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 13th Jan. 1862.] As for the brain being useless after fifty, that is no general rule; witness the good and hard work that has been done in plenty after that age. I wish I could be inspired with just the knowledge that would enable me to be of some good to you. I feel so ignorant and helpless. The year _is_ opening happily for us, except--alas! the exception is a great one--in the way of health. Mr. Lewes is constantly ailing, like a delicate headachy woman. But we have abundant blessings. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Jan. 1862.] I hope you are able to enjoy Max Müller's great and delightful book during your imprisonment. It tempts me away from other things. I have read most of the numbers of "Orley Farm," and admire it very much, with the exception of such parts as I have read about Moulder & Co. Anthony Trollope is admirable in the presentation of even average life and character, and he is so thoroughly wholesome-minded that one delights in seeing his books lie about to be read. Have you read "Beata" yet--the first novel written by his brother at Florence, who is our especial favorite? Do read it when you can, if the opportunity has not already come. I am going to be taken to a pantomime in the daytime, like a good child, for a Christmas treat, not having had my fair share of pantomime in the world. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Jan. 18_ (Saturday).--We had an agreeable evening. Mr. Burton[33] and Mr. Clark[34] of Cambridge made an acceptable variety in our party. _Jan. 19-20._--Head very bad--producing terrible depression. _Jan. 23._--Wrote again, feeling in brighter spirits. Mr. Smith the publisher called and had an interview with G. He asked if I were open to "a magnificent offer." This made me think about money--but it is better for me not to be rich. _Jan. 26_ (Sunday).--Detained from writing by the necessity of gathering particulars: 1st, about Lorenzo de Medici's death; 2d, about the possible retardation of Easter; 3d, about Corpus Christi day; 4th, about Savonarola's preaching in the Quaresima of 1492. Finished "La Mandragola"--second time reading for the sake of Florentine expressions--and began "La Calandra." _Jan. 31._--Have been reading some entries in my note-book of past times in which I recorded my _malaise_ and despair. But it is impossible to me to believe that I have ever been in so unpromising and despairing a state as I now feel. After writing these words I read to G. the Proem and opening scene of my novel, and he expressed great delight in them. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Feb. 1862.] I was taken to see my pantomime. How pretty it is to see the theatre full of children! Ah, what I should have felt in my real child days to have been let into the further history of Mother Hubbard and her Dog! George Stephenson is one of my great heroes--has he not a dear old face? [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 3d Feb. 1862.] I think yours is the instinct of all delicate natures--not to speak to authors about their writings. It is better for us all to hear as little about ourselves as possible; to do our work faithfully, and be satisfied with the certainty that if it touches many minds, it cannot touch them in a way quite aloof from our intention and hope. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Feb. 7._--A week of February already gone! I have been obliged to be very moderate in work from feebleness of head and body; but I have rewritten, with additions, the first chapter of my book. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 8th Feb. 1862.] I am wondering whether you could spare me, _for a few weeks_, the Tempest music, and any other vocal music of that or of a kindred species? I don't want to buy it until our singers have experimented upon it. Don't think of sending me anything that you are using at all, but if said music be lying idle, I should be grateful for the loan. We have several operas--Don Giovanni, Figaro, the Barbiere, Flauto Magico, and also the music of Macbeth; but I think that is all our stock of concerted vocal music. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Feb. 11._--We set off to Dorking. The day was lovely, and we walked through Mr. Hope's park to Betchworth. In the evening I read aloud Sybel's "Lectures on the Crusades." _Feb. 12._--The day was gray, but the air was fresh and pleasant. We walked to Wootton Park--Evelyn's Wootton--lunched at a little roadside inn there, and returned to Dorking to dine. During stay at Dorking finished the first twelve cantos of Pulci. _Feb. 13._--Returned home. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th Feb. 1862.] I think it is a reasonable law that the one who takes wing should be the first to write--not the bird that stays in the old cage, and may be supposed to be eating the usual seed and groundsel, and looking at the same slice of the world through the same wires. I think the highest and best thing is rather to suffer with real suffering than to be happy in the imagination of an unreal good. I would rather know that the beings I love are in some trouble, and suffer because of it, even though I can't help them, than be fancying them happy when they are not so, and making myself comfortable on the strength of that false belief. And so I am impatient of all ignorance and concealment. I don't say "that is wise," but simply "that is my nature." I can enter into what you have felt, for serious illness, such as seems to bring death near, makes one feel the simple human brother and sisterhood so strongly that those we were apt to think almost indifferent to us before, touch the very quick of our hearts. I suppose if we happened only to hold the hand of a hospital patient when she was dying, her face, and all the memories along with it, would seem to lie deeper in our experience than all we knew of many old friends and blood relations. We have had no troubles but the public troubles--anxiety about the war with America and sympathy with the poor Queen. My best consolation is that an example on so tremendous a scale (as the war) of the need for the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid, narrow antagonism which, in some quarters, is held to be the only form of liberal thought. George has fairly begun what we have long contemplated as a happiness for him--a History of Science, and has written so thorough an analysis and investigation of Aristotle's Natural Science that he feels it will make an epoch for the men who are interested at once in the progress of modern science and in the question how far Aristotle went both in the observation of facts and in their theoretic combination--a question never yet cleared up after all these ages. This work makes him "very jolly," but his dear face looks very pale and narrow. Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love. God bless you--that is not a false word, however many false ideas may have been hidden under it. No--not false ideas, but temporary ones--caterpillars and chrysalids of future ideas. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Feb. 17._--I have written only the two first chapters of my novel besides the Proem, and I have an oppressive sense of the far-stretching task before me, health being feeble just now. I have lately read again with great delight Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows." It contains, amongst other admirable things, a very noble expression of what I believe to be the true relation of the religious mind to the past. _Feb. 26._--I have been very ailing all this last week, and have worked under impeding discouragement. I have a distrust in myself, in my work, in others' loving acceptance of it, which robs my otherwise happy life of all joy. I ask myself, without being able to answer, whether I have ever before felt so chilled and oppressed. I have written now about sixty pages of my romance. Will it ever be finished? Ever be worth anything? _Feb. 27._--George Smith, the publisher, brought the proof of G.'s book, "Animal Studies," and laid before him a proposition to give me £10,000 for my new novel--_i.e._, for its appearance in the _Cornhill_, and the entire copyright at home and abroad. _March 1._--The idea of my novel appearing in the _Cornhill_ is given up, as G. Smith wishes to have it commenced in May, and I cannot consent to begin publication until I have seen nearly to the end of the work. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 10th March, 1862, from Englefield Green.] We had agreeable weather until yesterday, which was wet and blustering, so that we could only snatch two short walks. Pater is better, I think; and I, as usual, am impudently flourishing in country air and idleness. On Friday Mr. Bone, our landlord, drove us out in his pony carriage to see the "meet" of the stag-hounds, and on Saturday ditto to see the fox-hunters; so you perceive we have been leading rather a grand life. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _March 11._--On Wednesday last, the 5th, G. and I set off to Englefield Green, where we have spent a delightful week at the Barley Mow Inn. I have finished Pulci there, and read aloud the "Château d'If." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th March, 1862.] We returned from our flight into the country yesterday, not without a sigh at parting with the pure air and the notes of the blackbirds for the usual canopy of smoke and the sound of cab-wheels. I am not going out again, and our life will have its old routine--lunch at half-past one, walk till four, dinner at five. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _March 24._--After enjoying our week at Egham, I returned to protracted headache. Last Saturday we received as usual, and our party was joined by Mr. and Mrs. Noel. I have begun the fourth chapter of my novel, but have been working under a weight. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th March, 1862.] I congratulate you on being out of London, which is more like a pandemonium than usual. The fog and rain have been the more oppressive because I have seen them through Mr. Lewes's almost constant discomfort. I think he has had at least five days of sick headache since you saw him. But then he is better tempered and more cheerful _with_ headache than most people are without it; and in that way he lightens his burden. Have you noticed in the _Times_ Mr. Peabody's magnificent deed?--the gift of £150,000 for the amelioration (body and soul, I suppose) of the poorer classes in London. That is a pleasant association to have with an American name. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _April 1._--Much headache this last week. _April 2._--Better this morning; writing with enjoyment. At the seventy-seventh page. Read Juvenal this morning and Nisard. _April 16._--As I had been ailing for a fortnight or more, we resolved to go to Dorking, and set off to-day. _May 6._--We returned from Dorking after a stay of three weeks, during which we have had delicious weather. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, May, 1862.] Our life is the old accustomed duet this month. We enjoy an interval of our double solitude. Doesn't the spring look lovelier every year to eyes that want more and more light? It was rather saddening to leave the larks and all the fresh leaves to come back to the rolling of cabs and "the blacks;" but in compensation we have all our conveniences about us. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _May 23._--Since I wrote last, very important decisions have been made. I am to publish my novel of "Romola" in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for £7000, paid in twelve monthly payments. There has been the regret of leaving Blackwood, who has written me a letter in the most perfect spirit of gentlemanliness and good-feeling. _May 27._--Mr. Helps, Mr. Burton, and Mr. T. A. Trollope dined with us. _May 31._--Finished the second part, extending to page 183. _June 30._--I have at present written only the scene between Romola and her brother in San Marco towards Part IV. This morning I had a delightful, generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about "Romola." _July 6._--The past week has been unfruitful from various causes. The consequence is that I am no further on in my MS., and have lost the excellent start my early completion of the third part had given me. _July 10._--A dreadful palsy has beset me for the last few days. I have scarcely made any progress. Yet I have been very well in body. I have been reading a book often referred to by Hallam--Meiners's "Lives of Mirandula and Politian." They are excellent. They have German industry, and are succinctly and clearly written. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Sept. 1862, from Littlehampton.] Imagine me--not fuming in imperfect resignation under London smoke, but--with the wide sky of the coast above me, and every comfort positive and negative around me, even to the absence of staring eyes and crinolines. Worthing was so full that it rejected us, and, to our great good-fortune, sent us here. We were pleased to hear that you had seen Mr. Spencer. We always feel him particularly welcome when he comes back to town; there is no one like him for talking to about certain things. You will come and dine or walk with us whenever you have nothing better to do in your visit to town. I take that for granted. We lie, you know, on the way _between_ the Exhibition and Mr. Noel's. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Sept. 23._--Returned from our stay in the country, first at the Beach Hotel, Littlehampton, and for the last three days at Dorking. _Sept. 26._--At page 62, Part VI. Yesterday a letter came from Mr. T. A. Trollope, full of encouragement for me. _Ebenezer._ _Oct. 2._--At page 85. Scene between Tito and Romola. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 2d Oct. 1862.] Welcome to your letter, and welcome to the hope of seeing you again! I have an engagement on Monday from lunch till dinner. Apart from that, I know of nothing that will take us farther than for our daily walk, which, you know, begins at two. But we will alter the order of any day for the sake of seeing you. Mr. Lewes's absence of a fortnight at Spa was a great success. He has been quite brilliant ever since. Ten days ago we returned from a stay of three weeks in the country--chiefly at Littlehampton, and we are both very well. Everything is prosperous with us; and we are so far from griefs that if we had a wonderful emerald ring we should perhaps be wise to throw it away as a propitiation of the envious gods. So much in immediate reply to your kind anxiety. Everything else when we meet. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Oct. 31._--Finished Part VII., having determined to end at the point where Romola has left Florence. _Nov. 14._--Finished reading "Boccaccio" through for the second time. _Nov. 17._--Read the "Orfeo and Stanze" of Poliziano. The latter are wonderfully fine for a youth of sixteen. They contain a description of a Palace of Venus, which seems the suggestion of Tennyson's Palace of Art in many points. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Nov. 1862.] I wish I knew that this birthday has found you happier than any that went before. There are so many things--best things--that only come when youth is past that it may well happen to many of us to find ourselves happier and happier to the last. We have been to a Monday Pop. this week to hear Beethoven's Septett, and an amazing thing of Bach's, played by the amazing Joachim. But there is too much "Pop." for the thorough enjoyment of the chamber music they give. You will be interested to know that there is a new muster of scientific and philosophic men lately established, for the sake of bringing people who care to know and speak the truth, as well as they can, into regular communication. Mr. Lewes was at the first meeting at Clunn's Hotel on Friday last. The plan is to meet and dine moderately and cheaply, and no one is to be admitted who is not "thorough" in the sense of being free from the suspicion of temporizing and professing opinions on official grounds. The plan was started at Cambridge. Mr. Huxley is president and Charles Kingsley is vice. If they are sufficiently rigid about admissions, the club may come to good--bringing together men who think variously, but have more hearty feelings in common than they give each other credit for. Mr. Robert Chambers (who lives in London now) is very warm about the matter. Mr. Spencer, too, is a member. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 26th Nov. 1862.] Pray don't ever ask me again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now. That speech of Carlyle's,[35] which sounds so odious, must, I think, have been provoked by something in the _manner_ of the statement to which it came as an answer--else it would hurt me very much that he should have uttered it. You left a handkerchief at our house. I will take care of it till next summer. I look forward with some longing to that time when I shall have lightened my soul of one chief thing I wanted to do, and be freer to think and feel about other people's work. We shall see you oftener, I hope, and have a great deal more talk than ever we have had before to make amends for our stinted enjoyment of you this summer. God bless you, dear Barbara. You are very precious to us. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Nov. 30_ (Sunday).--Finished Part VIII. Mr. Burton came. _Dec. 16._--In the evening Browning paid us a visit for the first time. _Dec. 17._--At page 22 only. I am extremely spiritless, dead, and hopeless about my writing. The long state of headache has left me in depression and incapacity. The constantly heavy-clouded and often wet weather tend to increase the depression. I am inwardly irritable, and unvisited by good thoughts. Reading the "Purgatorio" again, and the "Compendium Revelationum" of Savonarola. After this record I read aloud what I had written of Part IX. to George, and he, to my surprise, entirely approved of it. _Dec. 24._--Mrs. F. Malleson brought me a beautiful plant as a Christmas offering. In the evening we went to hear the Messiah at Her Majesty's Theatre. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 24th Dec. 1862.] I am very sensitive to words and looks and all signs of sympathy, so you may be sure that your kind wishes are not lost upon me. As you will have your house full, the wish for a "Merry Christmas" may be literally fulfilled for you. We shall be quieter, with none but our family trio, but that is always a happy one. We are going to usher in the day by hearing the Messiah to-night at Her Majesty's. Evening will be a pleasanter time for a little genial talk than "calling hours;" and if you will come to us without ceremony, you will hardly run the risk of not finding us. We go nowhere except to concerts. We are longing to run away from London, but I dare say we shall not do so before March. Winter is probably yet to come, and one would not like to be caught by frost and snow away from one's own hearth. Always believe, without my saying it, that it gladdens me to know when anything I do has value for you. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1862.] It is very sweet to me to have any proof of loving remembrance. That would have made the book-marker precious even if it had been ugly. But it is perfectly beautiful--in color, words, and symbols. Hitherto I have been discontented with the Coventry book-marks; for at the shop where we habitually see them they have all got--"Let the people praise Thee, O God," on them, and nothing else. But I can think of no motto better than those three words. I suppose no wisdom the world will ever find out will make Paul's words obsolete--"Now abide, etc., but the greatest of these is Charity." Our Christmas, too, has been quiet. Mr. Lewes, who talks much less about goodness than I do, but is always readier to do the right thing, thinks it rather wicked for us to eat our turkey and plum-pudding without asking some forlorn person to eat it with us. But I'm afraid we were glad, after all, to find ourselves alone with "the boy." On Christmas-eve a sweet woman, remembering me as you have done, left a beautiful plant at the door, and after that we went to hear the Messiah at Her Majesty's. We felt a considerable _minus_ from the absence of the organ, contrary to advertisement: nevertheless it was good to be there. What pitiable people those are who feel no poetry in Christianity! Surely the acme of poetry hitherto is the conception of the suffering Messiah and the final triumph, "He shall reign for ever and for ever." The Prometheus is a very imperfect fore-shadowing of that symbol wrought out in the long history of the Jewish and Christian ages. Mr. Lewes and I have both been in miserable health during all this month. I have had a fortnight's incessant _malaise_ and feebleness; but as I had had many months of tolerable health, it was my turn to be uncomfortable. If my book-marker were just a little longer, I should keep it in my beautiful Bible in large print, which Mr. Lewes bought for me in prevision for my old age. He is not fond of reading the Bible himself, but "sees no harm" in my reading it. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 29th Dec. 1862.] I am not quite sure what you mean by "charity" when you call it humbug. If you mean that attitude of mind which says "I forgive my fellow-men for not being as good as I am," I agree with you in hoping that it will vanish, as also the circumstantial form of alms-giving. But if you are alluding to anything in my letter, I meant what charity meant in the elder English, and what the translators of the Bible meant in their rendering of the thirteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians--_Caritas_, the highest love or fellowship, which I am happy to believe that no philosophy will expel from the world. [Sidenote: Journal, 1862.] _Dec. 31_ (Last day of the kind old year).--Clear and pleasantly mild. Yesterday a pleasant message from Mr. Hannay about "Romola." We have had many blessings this year. Opportunities which have enabled us to acquire an abundant independence; the satisfactory progress of our two eldest boys; various grounds of happiness in our work; and ever-growing happiness in each other. I hope with trembling that the coming year may be as comforting a retrospect--with trembling because my work is not yet done. Besides the finishing of "Romola," we have to think of Thornie's passing his final examination, and, in case of success, his going out to India; of Bertie's leaving Hofwyl, and of our finding a new residence. I have had more than my average amount of comfortable health until this last month, in which I have been constantly ailing, and my work has suffered proportionately. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Feb. 1863.] The letter with the one word in it, like a whisper of sympathy, lay on my plate when I went down to lunch this morning. The generous movement that made you send it has gladdened me all day. I have had a great deal of pretty encouragement from immense big-wigs--some of them saying "Romola" is the finest book they ever read; but the opinion of big-wigs has one sort of value, and the fellow-feeling of a long known friend has another. One can't do quite well without both. _En revanche_, I am a feeble wretch, with eyes that threaten to get bloodshot on the slightest provocation. We made a rush to Dorking for a day or two, and the quiet and fresh air seemed to make a new creature of me; but when we get back to town, town sensations return. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th March, 1863.] That scheme of a sort of Philosophical Club that I told you of went to pieces before it was finished, like a house of cards. So it will be to the end, I fancy, with all attempts at combinations that are not based either on material interests or on opinions that are not merely opinions but _religion_. Doubtless you have been interested in the Colenso correspondence, and perhaps in Miss Cobbe's rejoinder to Mrs. Stowe's remonstrating answer to the women of England. I was glad to see how free the answer was from all tartness or conceit. Miss Cobbe's introduction to the new edition of Theodore Parker is also very honorable to her--a little too metaphorical here and there, but with real thought and good feeling. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 18th April, 1863.] It is a comfort to hear of you again, and to know that there is no serious trouble to mar the spring weather for you. I must carry that thought as my consolation for not seeing you on Tuesday--not quite a sufficient consolation, for my eyes desire you very much after these long months of almost total separation. The reason I cannot have that pleasure on Tuesday is that, according to a long arranged plan, I am going on Monday to Dorking again for a fortnight. I should be still more vexed to miss you if I were in better condition, but at present I am rather like a shell-less lobster, and inclined to creep out of sight. I shall write to you, or try to see you, as soon as I can after my return. I wish you could have told me of a more decided return to ordinary health in Mr. Congreve, but I am inclined to hope that the lecturing may rather benefit than injure him, by being a moral tonic. How much there is for us to talk about! But only to look at dear faces that one has seen so little of for a long while seems reason enough for wanting to meet. Mr. Lewes is better than usual just now, and you must not suppose that there is anything worse the matter with me than you have been used to seeing in me. Please give my highest regards to Mr. Congreve, and love to Emily, who, I hope, has quite got back the roses which had somewhat paled. My pen straggles as if it had a stronger will than I. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 28th April, 1863, from Dorking.] Glad you enjoyed "Esmond." It is a fine book. Since you have been interested in the historical suggestions, I recommend you to read Thackeray's "Lectures on the English Humorists," which are all about the men of the same period. There is a more exaggerated estimate of Swift and Addison than is implied in "Esmond;" and the excessive laudation of men who are considerably below the tip-top of human nature, both in their lives and genius, rather vitiates the Lectures, which are otherwise admirable, and are delightful reading. The wind is high and cold, making the sunshine seem hard and unsympathetic. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _May 6._--We have just returned from Dorking, whither I went a fortnight ago to have solitude while George took his journey to Hofwyl to see Bertie. The weather was severely cold for several days of my stay, and I was often ailing. That has been the way with me for a month and more, and in consequence I am backward with my July number of "Romola"--the last part but one. I remember my wife telling me, at Witley, how cruelly she had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The writing of "Romola" ploughed into her more than any of her other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I finished it an old woman." [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 12th May, 1863.] Yes! we shall be in town in June. Your coming would be reason good enough, but we have others--chiefly, that we are up to the ears in boydom and imperious parental duties. All is as happy and prosperous with us as heart can lawfully desire, except my health. I have been a mere wretch for several months past. You will come to me like the morning sunlight, and make me a little less of a flaccid cabbage-plant. It is a very pretty life you are leading at Hastings, with your painting all morning, and fair mothers and children to look at the rest of the day. I am terribly frightened about Mrs. ----. She wrote to me, telling me that we were sure to suit each other, neither of us holding the opinions of the _Moutons de Panurge_. Nothing could have been more decisive of the opposite prospect to me. If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. However, she will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _May 16._--Finished Part XIII. Killed Tito in great excitement. _May 18._--Began Part XIV.--the last! Yesterday George saw Count Arrivabene, who wishes to translate "Romola," and says the Italians are indebted to me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 1st June, 1863.] Health seems, to those who want it, enough to make daylight a gladness. But the explanation of evils is never consoling except to the explainer. We are just as we were, thinking about the questionable house (The Priory), and wondering what would be the right thing to do; hardly liking to lock up any money in land and bricks, and yet frightened lest we should not get a quiet place just when we want it. But I dare say we shall have it after all. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _June 6._--We had a little evening party with music, intended to celebrate the completion of "Romola," which, however, is not absolutely completed, for I have still to alter the epilogue. _June 9._--Put the last stroke to "Romola." _Ebenezer!_ Went in the evening to hear La Gazza Ladra. The manuscript of "Romola" bears the following inscription: "To the Husband whose perfect love has been the best source of her insight and strength, this manuscript is given by his devoted wife, the writer." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th June, 1863.] How impossible it is for strong, healthy people to understand the way in which bodily _malaise_ and suffering eats at the root of one's life! The philosophy that is true--the religion that is strength to the healthy--is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _June 16._--George and I set off to-day to the Isle of Wight, where we had a delightful holiday. On Friday, the 19th, we settled for a week at Niton, which, I think, is the prettiest place in all the island. On the following Friday we went on to Freshwater, and failed, from threatening rain, in an attempt to walk to Alum Bay, so that we rather repented of our choice. The consolation was that we shall know better than to go to Freshwater another time. On the Saturday morning we drove to Ryde, and remained there until Monday the 29th. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st June, 1863.] Your letter was a welcome addition to our sunshine this Sabbath morning. For in this particular we seem to have been more fortunate than you, having had almost constant sunshine since we arrived at Sandown, on Tuesday evening. This place is perfect, reminding me of Jersey, in its combination of luxuriant greenth with the delights of a sandy beach. At the _end_ of our week, if the weather is warmer, we shall go on to Freshwater for our remaining few days. But the wind at present is a little colder than one desires it, when the object is to get rid of a cough, and unless it gets milder we shall go back to Shanklin. I am enjoying the hedge-row grasses and flowers with something like a released prisoner's feeling--it is so long since I had a bit of real English country. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 21st June, 1863.] I am very happy in my holiday, finding quite a fresh charm in the hedge-row grasses and flowers after my long banishment from them. We have a flower-garden just round us, and then a sheltered grassy walk, on which the sun shines through the best part of the day; and then a wide meadow, and beyond that trees and the sea. Moreover, our landlady has cows, and we get the quintessence of cream--excellent bread and butter also, and a young lady, with a large crinoline, to wait upon us--all for 25_s._ per week; or, rather, we get the apartment in which we enjoy those primitive and modern blessings for that moderate sum. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _July 4._--Went to see Ristori in Adrienne Lecouvreur and did not like it. I have had hemicrania for several days, and have been almost idle since my return home. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th July, 1863.] Constant languor from the new heat has made me shirk all exertion not imperative. And just now there are not only those excitements of the season, which even we quiet people get our share of, but there is an additional boy to be cared for--Thornie, who is this week passing his momentous examination. A pretty thing has happened to an acquaintance of mine, which is quite a tonic to one's hope. She has all her life been working hard in various ways, as house-keeper, governess, and several et ceteras that I can't think of at this moment--a dear little dot, about four feet eleven in height; pleasant to look at, and clever; a working-woman, without any of those epicene queernesses that belong to the class. Her life has been a history of family troubles, and she has that susceptible nature which makes such troubles hard to bear. More than once she has told me that courage quite forsook her. She felt as if there were no good in living and striving; it was difficult to discern or believe in any results for others, and there seemed none worth having for herself. Well! a man of fortune and accomplishments has just fallen in love with her, now she is thirty-three. It is the prettiest story of a swift decided passion, and made me cry for joy. Madame Bodichon and I went with her to buy her wedding-clothes. The future husband is also thirty-three--old enough to make his selection an honor. Fond of travelling and science and other good things, such as a man deserves to be fond of who chooses a poor woman in the teeth of grand relatives: brought up a Unitarian, just turned Catholic. If you will only imagine everything I have not said, you will think this a very charming fairy tale. We are going this evening to see the French actress in Juliet (Stella Colas), who is astonishing the town. Last week we saw Ristori, the other night heard the Faust, and next week we are going to hear the Elisir d'Amore and Faust again! So you see we are trying to get some compensation for the necessity of living among bricks in this sweet summer time. I can bear the opera better than any other evening entertainment, because the house is airy and the stalls are comfortable. The opera is a great, great product--pity we can't always have fine _Weltgeschichtliche_ dramatic motives wedded with fine music, instead of trivialities or hideousnesses. Perhaps this last is too strong a word for anything except the Traviata. Rigoletto is unpleasant, but it is a superlatively fine tragedy in the Nemesis. I think I don't know a finer. We are really going to buy the Priory after all. You would think it very pretty if you saw it now, with the roses blooming about it. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _July 12._--I am now in the middle of G.'s "Aristotle," which gives me great delight. _July 23._--Reading Mommsen and Story's "Roba di Roma;" also Liddell's "Rome," for a narrative to accompany Mommsen's analysis. _July 29._--In the evening we went to Covent Garden to hear Faust for the third time. On our return we found a letter from Frederick Maurice--the greatest, most generous tribute ever given to me in my life.[36] [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 30th July, 1863.] I have wanted for several days to make some feeble sign in writing that I think of your trouble. But one claim after another has arisen as a hinderance. Conceive us, please, with three boys at home, all bigger than their father! It is a congestion of youthfulness on our mature brains that disturbs the course of our lives a little, and makes us think of most things as good to be deferred till the boys are settled again. I tell you so much to make you understand that "omission" is not with me equivalent to "neglect," and that I _do_ care for what happens to you. Renan is a favorite with me. I feel more kinship with his mind than with that of any other living French author. But I think I shall not do more than look through the Introduction to his "Vie de Jésus"--unless I happen to be more fascinated by the constructive part than I expect to be from the specimens I have seen. For minds acquainted with the European culture of this last half-century, Renan's book can furnish no new result; and they are likely to set little store by the too facile construction of a life from materials of which the biographical significance becomes more dubious as they are more closely examined. It seems to me the soul of Christianity lies not at all in the facts of an individual life, but in the ideas of which that life was the meeting-point and the new starting-point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ either in its historical influence or its great symbolic meanings. Still, such books as Renan's have their value in helping the popular imagination to feel that the sacred past is, of one woof with that human present, which ought to be sacred too. You mention Renan in your note, and the mention has sent me off into rather gratuitous remarks, you perceive. But such scrappy talk about great subjects may have a better excuse than usual, if it just serves to divert your mind from the sad things that must be importuning you now. [Sidenote: Letter to R. H. Hutton, 8th Aug. 1863.] After reading your article on "Romola," with careful reference to the questions you put to me in your letter, I can answer sincerely that I find nothing fanciful in your interpretation. On the contrary, I am confirmed in the satisfaction I felt, when I first listened to the article, at finding that certain chief elements of my intention have impressed themselves so strongly on your mind, notwithstanding the imperfect degree in which I have been able to give form to my ideas. Of course, if I had been called on to expound my own book, there are other things that I should want to say, or things that I should say somewhat otherwise; but I can point to nothing in your exposition of which my consciousness tells me that it is erroneous, in the sense of saying something which I neither thought nor felt. You have seized with a fulness which I had hardly hoped that my book could suggest, what it was my effort to express in the presentation of Bardo and Baldasarre; and also the relation of the Florentine political life to the development of Tito's nature. Perhaps even a judge so discerning as yourself could not infer from the imperfect result how strict a self-control and selection were exercised in the presentation of details. I believe there is scarcely a phrase, an incident, an allusion, that did not gather its value to me from its supposed subservience to my main artistic objects. But it is likely enough that my mental constitution would always render the issue of my labor something excessive--wanting due proportion. It is the habit of my imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself. The psychological causes which prompted me to give such details of Florentine life and history as I have given, are precisely the same as those which determined me in giving the details of English village life in "Silas Marner," or the "Dodson" life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor Tom and Maggie. But you have correctly pointed out the reason why my tendency to excess in this effort after artistic vision makes the impression of a fault in "Romola" much more perceptibly than in my previous books. And I am not surprised at your dissatisfaction with Romola herself. I can well believe that the many difficulties belonging to the treatment of such a character have not been overcome, and that I have failed to bring out my conception with adequate fulness. I am sorry she has attracted you so little; for the great problem of her life, which essentially coincides with a chief problem in Savonarola's, is one that readers need helping to understand. But with regard to that and to my whole book, my predominant feeling is--not that I have achieved anything, but--that great, great facts have struggled to find a voice through me, and have only been able to speak brokenly. That consciousness makes me cherish the more any proof that my work has been seen to have some true significance by minds prepared not simply by instruction, but by that religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man which is the larger half of culture. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _Aug. 10._--Went to Worthing. A sweet letter from Mrs. Hare, wife of Julius Hare, and Maurice's sister. _Aug. 18._--Returned home much invigorated by the week of change, but my spirits seem to droop as usual now I am in London again. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 19th Aug. 1863.] I was at Worthing when your letter came, spending all my daylight hours out-of-doors, and trying with all my might to get health and cheerfulness. I will tell you the true reason why I did not go to Hastings. I thought you would be all the better for not having that solicitation of your kindness that the fact of my presence there might have caused. What you needed was precisely to get away from people to whom you would inevitably want to be doing something friendly, instead of giving yourself up to passive enjoyment. Else, of course, I should have liked everything you write about and invite me to. We only got home last night, and I suppose we shall hardly be able to leave town again till after the two younger boys have left us, and after we have moved into the new house. Since I saw you I have had some sweet woman's tenderness shown me by Mrs. Hare, the widow of Archdeacon Hare, and the sister of Frederick Maurice. I _know_ how you are enjoying the country. I have just been having the joy myself. The wide sky, the _not_ London, makes a new creature of me in half an hour. I wonder, then, why I am ever depressed--why I am so shaken by agitations. I come back to London, and again the air is full of demons. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray and Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Sept. 1863.] I think I get a little freshness from the breeze that blows on you--a little lifting of heart from your wide sky and Welsh mountains. And the edge of autumn on the morning air makes even London a place in which one can believe in beauty and delight. Delicate scent of dried rose-leaves and the coming on of the autumnal airs are two things that make me feel happy before I know why. The Priory is all scaffolding and paint; and we are still in a nightmare of uncertainty about our boys. But then I have by my side a dear companion, who is a perpetual fountain of courage and cheerfulness, and of considerate tenderness for my lack of those virtues. And besides that I have Roman history! Perhaps that sounds like a bitter joke to you, who are looking at the sea and sky and not thinking of Roman history at all. But this too, read aright, has its gospel and revelation. I read it much as I used to read a chapter in the Acts or Epistles. Mommsen's "History of Rome" is so fine that I count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Oct. 1863.] I cannot be quite easy without sending this little sign of love and good wishes on the eve of your journey. I shall think of you with all the more delight, because I shall imagine you winding along the Riviera and then settling in sight of beautiful things not quite unknown to me. I hope your life will be enriched very much by these coming months; but above all, I hope that Mr. Congreve will come back strong. Tell him I have been greatly moved by the "Discours Préliminaire."[37] [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Oct. 1863.] If I wait to write until I have anything very profitable to say, you will have time to think that I have forgotten you or else to forget me--and both consequences would be unpleasant to me. Well, our poor boy Thornie parted from us to-day and set out on his voyage to Natal. I say "poor," as one does about all beings that are gone away from us for a long while. But he went away in excellent spirits, with a large packet of recommendatory letters to all sorts of people, and with what he cares much more for, a first-rate rifle and revolver--and already with a smattering of Dutch Zulu, picked up from his grammars and dictionaries. What are you working at, I wonder? Cara says you are writing; and, though I desire not to ask prying questions, I should feel much joy in your being able to tell me that you are at work on something which gives you a life apart from circumstantial things. I am taking a deep bath of other people's thoughts, and all doings of my own seem a long way off me. But my bath will be sorely interrupted soon by the miserable details of removal from one house to another. Happily Mr. Owen Jones has undertaken the ornamentation of the drawing-room, and will prescribe all about chairs, etc. I think, after all, I like a clean kitchen better than any other room. We are far on in correcting the proofs of the new edition of "Goethe," and are about to begin the printing of the "Aristotle," which is to appear at Christmas or Easter. [Sidenote: Journal, 1863.] _Nov. 5._--We moved into our new house--The Priory, 21 North Bank, Regent's Park. _Nov. 14._--We are now nearly in order, only wanting a few details of furniture to finish our equipment for a new stage in our life's journey. I long very much to have done thinking of upholstery, and to get again a consciousness that there are better things than that to reconcile one with life. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 14th Nov. 1863.] At last we are in our new home, with only a few details still left to arrange. Such fringing away of precious life, in thinking of carpets and tables, is an affliction to me, and seems like a nightmare from which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for things quite apart from upholstery. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th Nov. 1863.] I have kissed your letter in sign of my joy at getting it. But the cold draughts of your Florentine room came across my joy rather harshly. I know you have good reasons for what you do, yet I cannot help saying, Why do you stay at Florence, the city of draughts rather than of flowers? Mr. Congreve's suffering during the journey and your suffering in watching him saddens me as I think of it. For a long while to come I suppose human energy will be greatly taken up with resignation rather than action. I wish my feeling for you could travel by some helpful vibrations good for pains. For ourselves, we have enough ease now to be able to give some of it away. But our removal into our new home on the 5th of November was not so easy as it might have been, seeing that I was only half recovered from a severe attack of influenza, which had caused me more terrible pains in the head and throat than I have known for years. However, the crisis is past now, and we think our little home altogether charming and comfortable. Mr. Owen Jones has been unwearied in taking trouble that everything about us may be pretty. He stayed two nights till after twelve o'clock, that he might see every engraving hung in the right place; and as you know I care even more about the fact of kindness than its effects, you will understand that I enjoy being grateful for all this friendliness on our behalf. But so tardy a business is furnishing, that it was not until Monday last that we had got everything in its place in preparation for the next day--Charlie's twenty-first birthday--which made our house-warming a doubly interesting epoch. I wish your sweet presence could have adorned our drawing-room and made it look still more agreeable in the eyes of all beholders. You would have liked to hear Jansa play on his violin, and you would perhaps have been amused to see an affectionate but dowdy friend of yours splendid in a gray moire antique--the consequence of a severe lecture from Owen Jones on her general neglect of personal adornment. I am glad to have got over this crisis of maternal and house-keeping duty. My soul never flourishes on attention to details which others can manage quite gracefully without any conscious loss of power for wider thoughts and cares. Before we began to move I was swimming in Comte and Euripides and Latin Christianity: _now_ I am sitting among puddles, and can get sight of no deep water. _Now_ I have a mind made up of old carpets fitted in new places, and new carpets suffering from accidents; chairs, tables, and prices; muslin curtains and down draughts in cold chimneys. I have made a vow never to think of my own furniture again, but only of other people's. [Illustration: Drawing-room at the Priory.] [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Dec. 1863.] The book[38] is come, with its precious inscription, and I have read a great piece of it already (11 A.M.), besides looking through it to get an idea of its general plan. See how fascination shifts its quarter as our life goes on! I cannot be induced to lay aside my regular books for half an hour to read "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," but I pounce on a book like yours, which tries to tell me as much as it can in brief space of the "natural order," and am seduced into making it my after-breakfast reading instead of the work I had prescribed for myself in that pleasant quiet time. I read so slowly and read so few books that this small fact among my small habits seems a great matter to me. I thank you, dear Cara, not simply for giving me the book, but for having put so much faithful labor in a worthy direction, and created a lasting benefit which I can share with others. Whether the circulation of a book be large or small, there is always this supreme satisfaction about solid honest work, that as far as it goes its effect must be good, and as all effects spread immeasurably, what we have to care for is _kind_ and not quantity. I am a shabby correspondent, being in ardent practice of the piano just now, which makes my days shorter than usual. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 4th Dec. 1863.] I am rather ashamed to hear of any one trying to be useful just now, for I am doing nothing but indulging myself--enjoying being petted very much, enjoying great books, enjoying our new, pretty, quiet home, and the study of Beethoven's sonatas for piano and violin, with the mild-faced old Jansa, and not being at all unhappy as you imagine me. I sit taking deep draughts of reading--"Politique Positive," Euripides, Latin Christianity, and so forth, and remaining in glorious ignorance of "the current literature." Such is our life; and you perceive that instead of being miserable, I am rather following a wicked example, and saying to my soul, "Soul, take thine ease." I am sorry to think of you without any artistic society to help you and feed your faith. It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind. I fancy that to do without that guarantee one must be rather insane--one must be a bad poet, or a spinner of impossible theories, or an inventor of impossible machinery. However, it is but brief space either of time or distance that divides you from those who thoroughly share your cares and joys--always excepting that portion which is the hidden private lot of every human being. In the most entire confidence even of husband and wife there is always the unspoken residue--the _undivined_ residue--perhaps of what is most sinful, perhaps of what is most exalted and unselfish. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1863.] I get less and less inclined to write any but the briefest letters. My books seem to get so far off me when once I have written them, that I should be afraid of looking into "The Mill;" but it was written faithfully and with intense feeling when it was written, so I will hope that it will do no mortal any harm. I am indulging myself frightfully; reading everything except the "current literature," and getting more and more out of _rapport_ with the public taste. I have read Renan's book, however, which has proved to be eminently _in_ the public taste. It will have a good influence on the whole, I imagine; but this "Vie de Jésus," and still more, Renan's "Letter to Berthelot" in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, have compelled me to give up the high estimate I had formed of his mind. Judging from the indications in some other writings of his, I had reckoned him among the finest thinkers of the time. Still, his "Life of Jesus" has so much artistic merit that it will do a great deal towards the culture of ordinary minds, by giving them a sense of unity between that far off past and our present. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th Dec. 1863.] We are enjoying our new house--enjoying its quiet and freedom from perpetual stair-mounting--enjoying also the prettiness of coloring and arrangement; all of which we owe to our dear good friend, Mr. Owen Jones. He has determined every detail, so that we can have the pleasure of admiring what is our own without vanity. And another magnificent friend has given me the most splendid reclining chair conceivable, so that I am in danger of being envied by the gods, especially as my health is thoroughly good withal. I should like to be sure that you are just as comfortable externally and internally. I dare say you are, being less of a cormorant in your demands on life than I am; and it is _that_ difference which chiefly distinguishes human lots when once the absolute needs are satisfied. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 28th Dec. 1863.] Your affectionate greeting comes as one of the many blessings that are brightening this happy Christmas. We have been giving our evenings up to parental duties--_i.e._, to games and music for the amusement of the youngsters. I am wonderfully well in body, but rather in a self-indulgent state mentally, saying, "Soul, take thine ease," after a dangerous example. Of course I shall be glad to see your fair face whenever it can shine upon me; but I can well imagine, with your multitudinous connections, Christmas and the New Year are times when all _unappointed_ visits must be impossible to you. All good to you and yours through the coming year! and amongst the good may you continue to feel some love for me; for love is one of the conditions in which it is even better to give than to receive. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Jan. 1864.] According to your plans you must be in Rome. I have been in good spirits about you ever since I last heard from you, and the foggy twilight which, for the last week, has followed the severe frost, has made me rejoice the more that you are in a better climate and amongst lovelier scenes than we are groping in. I please myself with thinking that you will all come back with stores of strength and delightful memories. Only, if this were the best of all possible worlds, Mr. Lewes and I should be able to meet you in some beautiful place before you turn your backs on Italy. As it is, there is no hope of such a meeting. March is Charlie's holiday month, and when he goes out we like to stay at home for the sake of recovering for that short time our unbroken _tête-à-tête_. We have every reason to be cheerful if the fog would let us. Last night I finished reading the last proofs of the "Aristotle," which makes an octavo volume of rather less than 400 pages. I think it is a book which will be interesting and valuable to the few, but perhaps _only_ to the few. However, George's happiness in writing his books makes him less dependent than most authors on the audience they find. He felt that a thorough account of Aristotle's science was a bit of work which needed doing, and he has given his utmost pains to do it worthily. These are the two most important conditions of authorship; all the rest belong to the "less modifiable" order of things. I have been playing energetically on the piano lately, and taking lessons in accompanying the violin from Herr Jansa, one of the old Beethoven Quartette players. It has given me a fresh kind of muscular exercise, as well as nervous stimulus, and, I think, has done its part towards making my health better. In fact I am very well physically. I wish I could be as clever and active as you about our garden, which might be made much prettier this spring if I had judgment and industry enough to do the right thing. But it is a native vice of mine to like all such matters attended to by some one else, and to fold my arms and enjoy the result. Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough. But pray make a point of liking me in spite of my deficiencies. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 21st Jan. 1864.] I comfort myself with the belief that your nature is less rebellious under trouble than mine--less craving and discontented. Resignation to trial, which can never have a _personal_ compensation, is a part of our life task which has been too much obscured for us by unveracious attempts at universal consolation. I think we should be more tender to each other while we live, if that wretched falsity which makes men quite comfortable about their fellows' troubles were thoroughly got rid of. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Jan. 1864.] I often imagine you, not without a little longing, turning out into the fields whenever you list, as we used to do in the old days at Rosehill. That power of turning out into the fields is a great possession in life--worth many luxuries. Here is a bit of news not, I think, too insignificant for you to tell Cara. The other day Mr. Spencer, senior (Herbert Spencer's father), called on us, and knowing that he has been engaged in education all his life, that he is a man of extensive and accurate knowledge, and that, on his son's showing, he is a very able teacher, I showed him Cara's "British Empire." Yesterday Herbert Spencer came, and on my inquiring told me that his father was pleased with Cara's book, and thought highly of it. Such testimonies as this, given apart from personal influence and by a practised judge, are, I should think, more gratifying than any other sort of praise to all faithful writers. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _Jan. 30._--We had Browning, Dallas, and Burton to dine with us, and in the evening a gentlemen's party. _Feb. 14._--Mr. Burton dined with us, and asked me to let him take my portrait. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 3d March, 1864.] It was pleasant to have news of you through the fog, which reduces my faith in all good and lovely things to its lowest ebb. I hope you are less abjectly under the control of the skyey influences than I am. The soul's calm sunshine in me is half made up of the outer sunshine. However, we are going on Friday to hear the Judas Maccabæus, and Handel's music always brings me a revival. I have had a great personal loss lately in the death of a sweet woman,[39] to whom I have sometimes gone, and hoped to go again, for a little moral strength. She had long been confined to her room by consumption, which has now taken her quite out of reach except to memory, which makes all dear human beings undying to us as long as we ourselves live. I am glad to know that you have been interested in "David Gray."[40] It is good for us all that these true stories should be well told. Even those to whom the power of helping rarely comes, have their imaginations instructed so as to be more just and tender in their thoughts about the lot of their fellows. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th March, 1864.] I felt it long since I had had news from you, but my days go by, each seeming too short for what I must do, and I don't like to molest you with mere questions. I have been spoiled for correspondence by Mr. Lewes's goodness in always writing letters for me where a proxy is admissible. And so it has come to be a great affair with me to write even a note, while people who keep up a large correspondence, and set apart their hour for it, find it easy to cover reams of paper with talk from the end of the pen. You say nothing of yourself, which is rather unkind. We are enjoying a perfect _tête à tête_. On Friday we are going to hear the Judas Maccabæus, and try if possible to be stirred to something heroic by "Sound an alarm." I was more sorry than it is usually possible to be about the death of a person utterly unknown to me, when I read of Maria Martineau's death. She was a person whose office in life seemed so thoroughly defined and so valuable. For an invalid like Harriet Martineau to be deprived of a beloved nurse and companion, is a sorrow that makes one ashamed of one's small grumblings. But, oh dear, oh dear! when _will_ people leave off their foolish talk about all human lots being equal; as if anybody with a sound stomach ever knew misery comparable to the misery of a dyspeptic. Farewell, dear Sara; be generous, and don't always wait an age in silence because I don't write. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 8th March, 1864.] If you were anybody but yourself I should dislike you, because I have to write letters to you. As it is, your qualities triumph even over the vice of being in Italy (too far off for a note of three lines), and expecting to hear from me, though I fear I should be graceless enough to let you expect in vain if I did not care very much to hear from _you_, and did not find myself getting uneasy when many weeks have been passed in ignorance about you. I do hope to hear that you got your fortnight of sight-seeing before leaving Rome--at least, you would surely go well over the great galleries. If not, I shall be vexed with you, and I shall only be consoled for your not going to Venice by the chance of the Austrians being driven or bought out of it--on no slighter grounds. For I suppose you will not go to Italy again for a long, long while, so as to leave any prospect of the omission being made up for by-and-by. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th March, 1864.] We run off to Scotland for the Easter week, setting out on Sunday evening; so if the spring runs away again, I hope it will run northward. We shall return on Monday, the 4th April. Some news of your inwards and outwards would be acceptable; but don't write unless you really _like_ to write. You see Strauss has come out with a _popular_ "Life of Jesus." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 25th March, 1864.] Fog, east wind, and headache: there is my week's history. But this morning, when your letter came to me, I had got up well and was reading the sorrows of the aged Hecuba with great enjoyment. I wish an immortal drama could be got out of _my_ sorrows, that people might be the better for them two thousand years hence. But fog, east wind, and headache are not great dramatic motives. Your letter was a reinforcement of the delicious sense of _bien être_ that comes with the departure of bodily pain; and I am glad, retrospectively, that beyond our fog lay your moonlight and your view of the glorious sea. It is not difficult to me to believe that you look a new creature already. Mr. Lewes tells me the country air has always a magical effect on me, even in the first hour; but it is not the air alone, is it? It is the wide sky, and the hills, and the wild-flowers which are linked with all calming thoughts, just as every object in town has its perturbing associations. I share your joy in the Federal successes--with that check that attends all joy in a war not absolutely ended. But you have worked and earned more joy than those who have been merely passives. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _April 6._--Mr. Spencer called for the first time after a long correspondence on the subject of his relation to Comte. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th April, 1864.] Yes! I am come back from Scotland--came back last Saturday night. I was much pleased to see Cara so wonderfully well and cheerful. She seems to me ten times more cheerful than in the old days. I am interested to know more about your work which is filling your life now, but I suppose I shall know nothing until it is in print--and perhaps that is the only form in which one can do any one's work full justice. It is very disappointing to me to hear that Cara has at present so little promise of monetary results from her conscientious labor. I fear the fatal system of half profits is working against her as against others. We are going to the opera to-night to hear the Favorita. It was the first opera I ever _saw_ (with you I saw it!), and I have never seen it since--that is the reason I was anxious to go to-night. This afternoon we go to see Mulready's pictures--so the day will be a full one. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _April 18._--We went to the Crystal Palace to see Garibaldi. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th April, 1864.] Only think! next Wednesday morning we start for Italy. The move is quite a sudden one. We need a good shake for our bodies and minds, and must take the spring-time, before the weather becomes too hot. We shall not be away more than a month or six weeks at the utmost. Our friend Mr. Burton, the artist, will be our companion for at least part of the time. He has just painted a divine picture, which is now to be seen at the old Water-Color Exhibition. The subject is from a Norse legend; but that is no matter--the picture tells its story. A knight in mailed armor and surcoat has met the fair, tall woman he (secretly) loves, on a turret stair. By an uncontrollable movement he has seized her arm and is kissing it. She, amazed, has dropped the flowers she held in her other hand. The subject might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world--the artist has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion. The kiss is on the fur-lined _sleeve_ that covers the arm, and the face of the knight is the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament. How I should like a good long talk with you! From what you say of your book that is to come, I expect to be very much interested in it. I think I hardly ever read a book of the kind you describe without getting some help from it. It is to this strong influence that is felt in all personal statements of inward experience that we must perhaps refer the excessive publication of religious journals. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _May 4._--We started for Italy with Mr. Burton. _June 20._--Arrived at our pretty home again after an absence of seven weeks. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th June, 1864.] Your letter has affected me deeply. Thank you very much for writing it. It seems as if a close view of almost every human lot would disclose some suffering that makes life a doubtful good--except perhaps at certain epochs of fresh love, fresh creative activity, or unusual power of helping others. One such epoch we are witnessing in a young life that is very near to us. Our "boy" Charles has just become engaged, and it is very pretty to see the happiness of a pure first love, full at present of nothing but promise. It will interest you to know that the young lady who has won his heart, and seems to have given him her own with equal ardor and entireness, is the grand-daughter of Dr. Southwood Smith, whom he adopted when she was three years old, and brought up under his own eye. She is very handsome, and has a splendid contralto voice. Altogether Pater and I rejoice--for though the engagement has taken place earlier than we expected, or should perhaps have chosen, there are counterbalancing advantages. I always hoped Charlie would be able to choose or rather find the other half of himself by the time he was twenty-three; the event has only come a year and a half sooner. This is the news that greeted us on our return! We had seen before we went that the acquaintance, which was first made eighteen months or more ago, had become supremely interesting to Charlie. Altogether we rejoice. Our journey was delightful in spite of Mr. Lewes's frequent _malaise_; for his cheerful nature is rarely subdued even by bodily discomfort. We saw only one place that we had not seen before--namely, Brescia; but all the rest seemed more glorious to us than they had seemed four years ago. Our course was to Venice, where we stayed a fortnight, pausing only at Paris, Turin and Milan on our way thither, and taking Padua, Verona, Brescia, and again Milan, as points of rest on our way back. Our friend Mr. Burton's company was very stimulating, from his great knowledge, not of pictures only, but of almost all other subjects. He has had the advantage of living in Germany for five or six years, and has gained those large, serious views of history which are a special product of German culture, and this was his first visit to Italy, so you may imagine his eager enjoyment in finding it beautiful beyond his hopes. We crossed the Alps by the St. Gothard, and stayed a day or two at Lucerne; and this, again, was a first sight of Switzerland to him. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, July, 1864.] Looking at my little mats this morning while I was dressing, I felt very grateful for them, and remembered that I had not shown my gratitude when you gave them to me. If I were a "conceited" poet, I should say your presence was the sun, and the mats were the tapers; but now you are away, I delight in the tapers. How pretty the pattern is--and your brain counted it out! They will never be worn quite away while I live, or my little purse for coppers either. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _July 17._--Horrible scepticism about all things paralyzing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again? _July 19._--Reading Gibbon, Vol. I., in connection with Mosheim, also Gieseler on the condition of the world at the appearance of Christianity. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Aug. 1864.] I am distressed to find that I have let a week pass without writing in answer to your letter, which made me very glad when I got it. Remembering you just a minute ago, I started up from Max Müller's new volume, with which I was consoling myself under a sore throat, and rushed to the desk that I might not risk any further delay. It was just what I wanted to hear about you that you were having some change, and I think the freshness of the companionship must help other good influences, not to speak of the "Apologia," which breathed much life into me when I read it. Pray mark that beautiful passage in which he thanks his friend Ambrose St. John. I know hardly anything that delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a reality in the world. I envy you your opportunity of seeing and hearing Newman, and should like to make an expedition to Birmingham for that sole end. My trouble now is George's delicate health. He gets thinner and thinner. He is going to try what horseback will do, and I am looking forward to that with some hope. Our boy's love-story runs smoothly, and seems to promise nothing but good. His attraction to Hampstead gives George and me more of our dear old _tête-à-tête_, which we can't help being glad to recover. Dear Cara and Mr. Bray! I wish they too had joy instead of sadness from the young life they have been caring for these many years. When you write to Cara, or see her, assure her that she is remembered in my most affectionate thoughts, and that I often bring her present experience before my mind--more or less truly--for we can but blunder about each other, we poor mortals. Write to me whenever you can, dear Sara; I should have answered immediately but for sickness, visitors, business, etc. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _Sept. 6.--I am reading about Spain, and trying a drama on a subject that has fascinated me--have written the prologue, and am beginning the First Act. But I have little hope of making anything satisfactory._ _Sept. 13_ to _30_.--Went to Harrogate and Scarborough, seeing York Minster and Peterborough. [Illustration: Fac-simile of George Eliot's hand-writing.] [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Sept. 1864, from Harrogate.] We journeyed hither on Tuesday, and found the place quite as pretty as we expected. The great merit of Harrogate is that one is everywhere close to lovely open walks. Your "plan" has been a delightful reference for Mr. Lewes, who takes it out of his pocket every time we walk. At present, of course, there is not much improvement in health to be boasted of, but we hope that the delicious bracing air, and also the chalybeate waters, which have not yet been tried, will not be without good effect. The journey was long. How hideous those towns of Holbeach and Wakefield are! It is difficult to keep up one's faith in a millennium within sight of this modern civilization which consists in "development of industries." Egypt and her big calm gods seems quite as good. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Sept. 1864, from Scarborough.] We migrated on Friday last from delightful Harrogate, pausing at York to see the glorious Cathedral. The weather is perfect, the sea blue as a sapphire, so that we see to utmost advantage the fine line of coast here and the magnificent breadth of sand. Even the Tenby sands are not so fine as these. Better than all, Mr. Lewes, in spite of a sad check of a few days, is strengthened beyond our most hopeful expectations by this brief trial of fresh conditions. He is wonderful for the rapidity with which he "picks up" after looking alarmingly feeble and even wasted. We paid a visit to Knaresborough the very last day of our stay at Harrogate, and were rejoiced that we had not missed the sight of that pretty characteristic northern town. There is a ruined castle here too, standing just where one's eyes would desire it on a grand line of cliff; but perhaps you know the place. Its only defect is that it is too large, and therefore a little too smoky; but except in Wales or Devonshire I have seen no sea-place on our English coast that has greater natural advantages. I don't know quite why I should write you this note all about ourselves--except that your goodness having helped us to the benefit we have got, I like you to know of the said benefit. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Sunday, Oct. (?) 1864.] The wished-for opportunity is coming very soon. Next Saturday Charlie will go to Hastings, and will not return till Sunday evening. Will you--can you--arrange to come to us on Saturday to lunch or dinner, and stay with us till Sunday evening? We shall be very proud and happy if you will consent to put up with such travelling quarters as we can give you. You will be rejoicing our hearts by coming, and I know that for the sake of cheering others you would endure even large privations as well as small ones. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Monday-week following.] What a pure delight it was to have you with us! I feel the better for it in spite of a cold which I caught yesterday--perhaps owing to the loss of your sunny presence all of a sudden. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Oct. 1864.] It makes me very, very happy to see George so much better, and to return with that chief satisfaction to the quiet comforts of home. We register Harrogate among the places to be revisited. I have had a fit of Spanish history lately, and have been learning Spanish grammar--the easiest of all the Romance grammars--since we have been away. Mr. Lewes has been rubbing up his Spanish by reading Don Quixote in these weeks of _idlesse_; and I have read aloud and translated to him, like a good child. I find it so much easier to learn anything than to feel that I have anything worth teaching. All is perfectly well with us, now the "little Pater" is stronger, and we are especially thankful for Charlie's prospect of marriage. We could not have desired anything more suited to his character and more likely to make his life a good one. But this blessing which has befallen us only makes me feel the more acutely the cutting off of a like satisfaction from the friends I chiefly love. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _Oct. 5._--Finished the first draught of the First Act of my drama, and read it to George. _Oct. 15._--Went to the Maestro (Burton) for a sitting. _Nov. 4._--Read my Second Act to George. It is written in verse--my first serious attempt at blank verse. G. praises and encourages me. _Nov. 10._--I have been at a very low ebb, body and mind, for the last few days, sticking in the mud continually in the construction of my 3d, 4th, and 5th Acts. Yesterday Browning came to tell us of a bust of Savonarola in terra-cotta, just discovered at Florence. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d Nov. 1864.] I believe I have thought of you every day for the last fortnight, and I remembered the birthday--and "everything." But I was a little cross, because I had heard nothing of you since Mr. Bray's visit. And I said to myself, "If she wanted to write she _would_ write." I confess I was a little ashamed when I saw the outside of your letter ten minutes ago, feeling that I should read within it the proof that you were as thoughtful and mindful as ever. Yes, I do heartily give my greeting--_had_ given it already. And I desire very much that the work which is absorbing you may give you some happiness besides that which belongs to the activity of production. It is very kind of you to remember Charlie's date too. He is as happy as the day is long, and very good--one of those creatures to whom goodness comes naturally--not any exalted goodness, but every-day serviceable goodness, such as wears through life. Whereas exalted goodness comes in brief inspirations, and requires a man to die lest he should spoil his work. I have been ill, but now am pretty well, with much to occupy and interest me, and with no trouble except those bodily ailments. I could chat a long while with you--but I restrain myself, because I must not carry on my letter-writing into the "solid day." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Christmas-day, 1864.] Your precious letter _did_ come last night, and crowned the day's enjoyment. Our family party went off very well, entirely by dint of George's exertions. I wish you had seen him acting charades, and heard him make an after-supper speech. You would have understood all the self-forgetful goodness that lay under the assumption of boyish animal spirits. A horrible German whom I have been obliged to see has been talking for two hours, with the hardest eyes, blind to all possibilities that he was boring us, and so I have been robbed of all the time I wanted for writing to you. I can only say now that I bore you on my heart--you and all yours known to me--even before I had had your letter yesterday. Indeed you are not apart from any delight I have in life: I long always that you should share it, if not otherwise, at least by knowing of it, which to you is a sort of sharing. Our double loves and best wishes for all of you--Rough being included, as I trust you include Ben. Are they not idlers with us? Also a title to regard as well as being _collaborateurs_. [Sidenote: Journal, 1864.] _Dec. 24._--A family party in the evening. _Dec. 25._--I read the Third Act of my drama to George, who praised it highly. We spent a perfectly quiet evening, intending to have our Christmas-day's jollity on Tuesday when the boys are at home. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Jan. 1._--The last year has been unmarked by any trouble except bad health. The bright spots in the year have been the publication of "Aristotle" and our journey to Venice. With me the year has not been fruitful. I have written three Acts of my drama, and am now in a condition of body and mind to make me hope for better things in the coming year. The last quarter has made an epoch for me, by the fact that, for the first time in my serious authorship I have written verse. In each other we are happier than ever. I am more grateful to my dear husband for his perfect love, which helps me in all good and checks me in all evil--more conscious that in him I have the greatest of blessings. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Jan. 1865.] I hope the wish that this New Year may be a happy one to you does not seem to be made a mockery by any troubles or anxieties pressing on you. I enclose a check, which I shall be obliged if you will offer to Mr. Congreve, as I know he prefers that payments should be made at the beginning of the year. I shall think of you on the nineteenth. I wonder how many there really were in that "small upper room" 1866 years ago. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Jan. 8._--Mrs. Congreve staying with us for a couple of nights. Yesterday we went to Mr. Burton's to see my portrait, with which she was much pleased. Since last Monday I have been writing a poem, the matter of which was written in prose three or four years ago--"My Vegetarian Friend." _Jan. 15_ to _25_.--Visit to Paris. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Friday (?), 27th Jan. 1865.] Are we not happy to have reached home on Wednesday before this real winter came? We enjoyed our visit to Paris greatly, in spite of bad weather, going to the theatre or opera nearly every night, and seeing sights all day long. I think the most interesting sight we saw was Comte's dwelling. Such places, that knew the great dead, always move me deeply; and I had an unexpected sight of interest in the photograph taken at the very last. M. Thomas was very friendly, and pleasant to talk to because of his simple manners. We gave your remembrances to him, and promised to assure you of his pleasure in hearing of you. I wish some truer representation of Mr. Congreve hung up in the Salon instead of that (to me) exasperating photograph. We thought the apartment very _freundlich_, and I flattered myself that I could have written better in the little study there than in my own. Such self-flattery is usually the most amiable phase of discontent with one's own inferiority. I am really stronger for the change. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Jan. 28._--Finished my poem on "Utopias." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Feb. 1865.] I suspect you have come to dislike letters, but until you say so, I must write now and then to gratify myself. I want to send my love, lest all the old messages shall have lost their scent, like old lavender bags. Since I wrote to you last we have actually been to Paris! A little business was an excuse for getting a great deal of pleasure; and I, for whom change of air and scene is always the best tonic, am much brightened by our wintry expedition, which ended just in time for us to escape the heavy fall of snow. We are very happy, having almost recovered our old _tête-à-tête_, of which I am so selfishly fond that I am beginning to feel it an heroic effort when I make up my mind to invite half a dozen visitors. But it is necessary to strive against this unsocial disposition, so we are going to have some open evenings. There is great talk of a new periodical--a fortnightly apparition, partly on the plan of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Mr. Lewes has consented to become its editor, if the preliminaries are settled so as to satisfy him. _Ecco!_ I have told you a little of our news, not daring to ask you anything about yourself, since you evidently don't want to tell me anything. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Feb. 1865.] The party was a "mull." The weather was bad. Some of the invited were ill and sent regrets, others were not ardent enough to brave the damp evening--in fine, only twelve came. We had a charade, which, like our neighbors, was no better than it should have been, and some rather languid music, our best musicians half failing us--so ill is merit rewarded in this world! If the severest sense of fulfilling a duty could make one's parties pleasant, who so deserving as I? I turn my inward shudders into outward smiles, and talk fast, with a sense of lead on my tongue. However, Mr. Pigott made a woman's part in the charade so irresistibly comic that I tittered at it at intervals in my sleepless hours. I am rather uncomfortable about you, because you seemed so much less well and strong the other day than your average. Let me hear before long how you and Mr. Congreve are. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Feb. 21._--Ill and very miserable. George has taken my drama away from me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th Feb. 1865.] The sun shone through my window on your letter as I read it, adding to its cheeriness. It was good of you to write it. I was ill last week, and had mental troubles besides--happily such as are unconnected with any one's experience except my own. I am still ailing, but striving hard "not to mind," and not to diffuse my inward trouble, according to Madame de Vaux's excellent maxim. I shall not, I fear, be able to get to you till near the end of next week--towards the 11th. I think of you very often, and especially when my own _malaise_ reminds me how much of your time is spent in the same sort of endurance. Mr. Spencer told us yesterday that Dr. Ransom said he had cured himself of dyspepsia by leaving off stimulants--the full benefit manifesting itself after two or three months of abstinence. I am going to try. All best regards to Mr. Congreve and tenderest sisterly love to yourself. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _March 1._--I wrote an article for the _Pall Mall Gazette_--"A Word for the Germans." _March 12._--Went to Wandsworth, to spend the Sunday and Monday with Mr. and Mrs. Congreve. Feeling very ailing; in constant dull pain, which makes all effort burdensome. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th March, 1865.] I did not promise, like Mr. Collins, that you should receive a letter of thanks for your kind entertainment of me; but I feel the need of writing a word or two to break the change from your presence to my complete absence from you. It was really an enjoyment to be with you, in spite of the bodily uneasiness which robbed me of half my mind. One thing only I regret--that in my talk with you I think I was rather merciless to other people. Whatever vices I have seem to be exaggerated by my _malaise_--such "chastening" not answering the purpose of purification in my case. Pray set down any unpleasant notions I have suggested about others to my account--_i.e._, as being _my_ unpleasantness, and not theirs. When one is bilious, other people's complexions look yellow, and one of their eyes higher than the other--all the fault of one's own evil interior. I long to hear from you that you are better, and if you are not better, still to hear from you before too long an interval. Mr. Congreve's condition is really cheering, and he goes about with me as a pleasant picture--like that Raphael the Tuscan duke chose always to carry with him. I got worse after I left you; but to-day I am better, and begin to think there is nothing serious the matter with me except the "weather," which every one else is alleging as the cause of their symptoms. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 18th March, 1865.] I believe you are one of the few who can understand that in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy. If I could have been with you in bodily presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign of feeling that speech, trying to be wise, must always spoil. The truest things one can say about great Death are the oldest, simplest things that everybody knows by rote, but that no one knows really till death has come very close. And when that inward teaching is going on, it seems pitiful presumption for those who are outside to be saying anything. There is no such thing as consolation when we have made the lot of another our own. I don't know whether you strongly share, as I do, the old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now life has become more complex, and more and more difficult problems have to be worked out. Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than they are. To me early death takes the aspect of salvation; though I feel, too, that those who live and suffer may sometimes have the greater blessedness of _being_ a salvation. But I will not write of judgments and opinions. What I want my letter to tell you is that I love you truly, gratefully, unchangeably. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _March 25._--I am in deep depression, feeling powerless. I have written nothing but beginnings since I finished a little article for the _Pall Mall_, on the Logic of Servants. Dear George is all activity, yet is in very frail health. How I worship his good humor, his good sense, his affectionate care for every one who has claims on him! That worship is my best life. _March 29._--Sent a letter on "Futile Lying," from Saccharissa to the _Pall Mall_. I have begun a novel ("Felix Holt"). [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 11th April, 1865.] We are wondering if, by any coincidence or condition of things, you could come to us on Thursday, when we have our last evening party--wondering how you are--wondering everything about you, and knowing nothing. Could you resolve some of our wonderings into cheering knowledge? It is ages since you made any sign to us. Are _we_ to be blamed or you? I hope you are not unfavorably affected by the sudden warmth which comes with the beautiful sunshine. Some word of you, in pity! [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d April, 1865.] If the sun goes on shining in this glorious way, I shall think of your journey with pleasure. The sight of the country _must_ be a good when the trees are bursting into leaf. But I will remember your warning to Emily, and not insist too much on the advantages of paying visits. Let us hear of you sometimes, and think of us as very busy and very happy, but always including you in our world, and getting uneasy when we are left too much to our imaginations about you. Tell Emily that Ben and I are the better for having seen her. He has added to his store of memories, and will recognize her when she comes again. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _May 4._--Sent an article on Lecky's "History of Rationalism" for the _Fortnightly_. For nearly a fortnight I have been ill, one way or other. _May 10._--Finished a letter of Saccharissa for the _Pall Mall_. Reading Æschylus, "Theatre of the Greeks," Klein's "History of the Drama," etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 11th May, 1865.] This note will greet you on your return, and tell you that we were glad to hear of you in your absence, even though the news was not of the brightest. Next week we are going away--I don't yet know exactly where; but it is firmly settled that we start on Monday. It will be good for the carpets, and it will be still better for us, who need a wholesome shaking, even more than the carpets do. The first number of the _Review_ was done with last Monday, and will be out on the 15th. You will be glad to hear that Mr. Harrison's article is excellent, but the "mull" which George declares to be the fatality with all first numbers is so far incurred with regard to this very article that, from overwhelming alarm at its length, George put it (perhaps too hastily) into the smaller type. I hope the importance of the subject and the excellence of the treatment will overcome that disadvantage. Nurse all pleasant thoughts in your solitude, and count our affection among them. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th May, 1865.] We have just returned from a five days' holiday at the coast, and are much invigorated by the tonic breezes. We have nothing to do with the _Fortnightly_ as a money speculation. Mr. Lewes has simply accepted the post of editor, and it was seemly that I should write a little in it. But do not suppose that I am going into periodical writing. And your friendship is not required to read one syllable for our sakes. On the contrary, you have my full sympathy in abstaining. Rest in peace, dear Sara, and finish your work, that you may have the sense of having spoken out what was within you. That is really a good--I mean, when it is done in all seriousness and sincerity. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _May 28._--Finished Bamford's "Passages from the Life of a Radical." Have just begun again Mill's "Political Economy," and Comte's "Social Science," in Miss Martineau's edition. _June 7._--Finished _Annual Register_ for 1832. Reading Blackstone. Mill's second article on "Comte," to appear in the _Westminster_, lent me by Mr. Spencer. My health has been better of late. _June 15._--Read again Aristotle's "Poetics" with fresh admiration. _June 20._--Read the opening of my novel to G. Yesterday we drove to Wandsworth. Walked together on Wimbledon Common, in outer and inner sunshine, as of old; then dined with Mr. and Mrs. Congreve, and had much pleasant talk. _June 25._--Reading English History, reign of George III.; Shakespeare's "King John." Yesterday G. dined at Greenwich with the multitude of so-called writers for the _Saturday_. He heard much commendation of the _Fortnightly_, especially of Bagehot's articles, which last is reassuring after Mr. Trollope's strong objections. _July 3._--Went to hear the "Faust" at Covent Garden: Mario, Lucca, and Graziani. I was much thrilled by the great symbolical situations, and by the music--more, I think, than I had ever been before. _July 9_ (Sunday).--We had Browning, Huxley, Mr. Warren, Mr. Bagehot, and Mr. Crompton, and talk was pleasant. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, Sunday, 10th July, 1865.] Success to the canvassing! It is "very meet and right and your bounden duty" to be with Mr. Taylor in this time of hard work, and I am glad that your health has made no impediment. I should have liked to be present when you were cheered. The expression of a common feeling by a large mass of men, when the feeling is one of good-will, moves me like music. A public tribute to any man who has done the world a service with brain or hand has on me the effect of a great religious rite, with pealing organ and full-voiced choir. I agree with you in your feeling about Mill. Some of his works have been frequently my companions of late, and I have been going through many _actions de grâce_ towards him. I am not anxious that he should be in Parliament: thinkers can do more outside than inside the House. But it would have been a fine precedent, and would have made an epoch, for such a man to have been asked for and elected solely on the ground of his mental eminence. As it is, I suppose it is pretty certain that he will _not_ be elected. I am glad you have been interested in Mr. Lewes's article. His great anxiety about the _Fortnightly_ is to make it the vehicle for sincere writing--real contributions of opinion on important topics. But it is more difficult than the inexperienced could imagine to get the sort of writing which will correspond to that desire of his. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _July 16._--Madame Bohn, niece of Professor Scherer, called. She said certain things about "Romola" which showed that she had felt what I meant my readers to feel. She said she knew the book had produced the same effect on many others. I wish I could be encouraged by this. _July 22._--Sat for my portrait--I suppose for the last time. _July 23._--I am going doggedly to work at my novel, seeing what determination can do in the face of despair. Reading Neale's "History of the Puritans." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st Aug. 1865.] I received yesterday the circular about the Mazzini Fund. Mr. Lewes and I would have liked to subscribe to a tribute to Mazzini, or to a fund for his use, of which the application was defined and guaranteed by his own word. As it is, the application of the desired fund is only intimated in the vaguest manner by the Florentine committee. The reflection is inevitable that the application may ultimately be the promotion of conspiracy, the precise character of which is necessarily unknown to subscribers. Now, though I believe there are cases in which conspiracy may be a sacred, necessary struggle against organized wrong, there are also cases in which it is hopeless, and can produce nothing but misery; or needless, because it is not the best means attainable of reaching the desired end; or unjustifiable, because it resorts to acts which are more unsocial in their character than the very wrong they are directed to extinguish; and in these three supposable cases it seems to me that it would be a social crime to further conspiracy even by the impulse of a little finger, to which one may well compare a small money subscription. I think many persons to whom the circular might be sent would take something like this view, and would grieve, as we do, that a proposition intended to honor Mazzini should come in a form to which they cannot conscientiously subscribe. I trouble you and Mr. Taylor with this explanation, because both Mr. Lewes and I have a real reverence for Mazzini, and could not therefore be content to give a silent negative. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 1st Aug. 1865.] I fear that my languor on Saturday prevented me from fairly showing you how sweet and precious your presence was to me then, as at all times. We have almost made up our minds to start some time in this month for a run in Normandy and Brittany. We both need the change, though when I receive, as I did yesterday, a letter from some friend, telling me of cares and trials from which I am quite free, I am ashamed of wanting anything. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Aug. 2._--Finished the "Agamemnon" second time. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Aug. 1865.] When I wrote to you last I quite hoped that I should see you and Emily before we left home, but now it is settled that we start on Thursday morning, and I have so many little things to remember and to do that I dare not set apart any of the intervening time for the quiet enjoyment of a visit from you. It is not quite so cheerful a picture as I should like to carry with me, that of you and Emily so long alone, with Mr. Congreve working at Bradford. But your friends are sure to think of you, and want to see you. I hope you did not suffer so severely as we did from the arctic cold that rushed in after the oppressive heat. Mr. T. Trollope came from Italy just when it began. He says it is always the same when he comes to England, people always say it has just been very hot, and he believes that means they had a few days in which they were not obliged to blow on their fingers. When you write to Mr. Congreve pray tell him that we were very grateful for his Itinerary, which is likely useful to us--indeed, has already been useful in determining our route. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Sept. 7._--We returned home after an expedition into Brittany. Our course was from Boulogne to St. Valéry, Dieppe, Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, St. Lô, Vire, Avranches, Dol, St. Malo, Rennes, Avray, and Carnac--back by Nantes, Tours, Le Mans, Chartres, Paris, Rouen, Dieppe, Abbeville, and so again to Boulogne. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Sept. 1865.] We came home again on Thursday night--this day week--after a month's absence in Normandy and Brittany. I have been thinking of you very often since, but believed that you did not care to have the interruption of letters just now, and would rather defer correspondence till your mind was freer. If I had _suspected_ that you would feel any want satisfied by a letter I should certainly have written. I had not heard of Miss Bonham Carter's death, else I should have conceived something of your state of mind. I think you and I are alike in this, that we can get no good out of pretended comforts, which are the devices of self-love, but would rather, in spite of pain, grow into the endurance of all "naked truths." So I say no word about your great loss, except that I love you, and sorrow with you. The circumstances of life--the changes that take place in ourselves--hem in the expression of affections and memories that live within us, and enter almost into every day, and long separations often make intercourse difficult when the opportunity comes. But the delight I had in you, and in the hours we spent together, and in all your acts of friendship to me, is really part of my life, and can never die out of me. I see distinctly how much poorer I should have been if I had never known you. If you had seen more of me in late years, you would not have such almost cruel thoughts as that the book into which you have faithfully put your experience and best convictions could make you "repugnant" to me. Whatever else my growth may have been, it has not been towards irreverence and ready rejection of what other minds can give me. You once unhappily mistook my feeling and point of view in something I wrote _à propos_ of an argument in your "Aids to Faith," and _that_ made me think it better that we should not write on large and difficult subjects in hasty letters. But it has often been painful to me--I should say, it has constantly been painful to me--that you have ever since inferred me to be in a hard and unsympathetic state about your views and your writing. But I am habitually disposed myself to the same unbelief in the sympathy that is given me, and am the last person who should be allowed to complain of such unbelief in another. And it is very likely that I may have been faulty and disagreeable in my expressions. Excuse all my many mistakes, dear Sara, and never believe otherwise than that I have a glow of joy when you write to me, as if my existence were some good to you. I know that I am, and can be, very little practically; but to have the least value for your thought is what I care much to be assured of. Perhaps, in the cooler part of the autumn, when your book is out of your hands, you will like to move from home a little and see your London friends? Our travelling in Brittany was a good deal marred and obstructed by the emperor's _fête_, which sent all the world on our track towards Cherbourg and Brest. But the Norman churches, the great cathedrals at Le Mans, Tours, and Chartres, with their marvellous painted glass, were worth much scrambling to see. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Oct. 1865.] I have read Mr. Masson's book on "Recent Philosophy." The earlier part is a useful and creditable survey, and the classification ingenious. The later part I thought poor. If, by what he says of Positivism, you mean what he says at p. 246, I should answer it is simply "stuff"--he might as well have written a dozen lines of jargon. There are a few observations about Comte, scattered here and there, which are true and just enough. But it seems to me much better to read a man's own writing than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the "others" are third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "Ich zog immer vor von dem Menschen zu erfahren _wie er dachte_ als von einem anderen zu hören _wie er hätte denken sollen_."[41] However, I am not fond of expressing criticism or disapprobation. The difficulty is to digest and live upon any valuable truth one's self. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Nov. 15._--During the last three weeks George has been very poorly, but now he is better. I have been reading Fawcett's "Economic Condition of the Working Classes," Mill's "Liberty," looking into Strauss's second "Life of Jesus," and reading Neale's "History of the Puritans," of which I have reached the fourth volume. Yesterday the news came of Mrs. Gaskell's death. She died suddenly, while reading aloud to her daughter. _Nov. 16._--Writing Mr. Lyon's story, which I have determined to insert as a narrative. Reading the Bible. _Nov. 24._--Finished Neale's "History of the Puritans." Began Hallam's "Middle Ages." _Dec. 4._--Finished second volume of Hallam. The other day read to the end of chapter nine of my novel to George, who was much pleased and found no fault. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th Dec. 1865.] We send to-day "Orley Farm," "The Small House at Allington," and the "Story of Elizabeth." The "Small House" is rather lighter than "Orley Farm." "The Story of Elizabeth" is by Miss Thackeray. It is not so cheerful as Trollope, but is charmingly written. You can taste it and reject it if it is too melancholy. I think more of you than you are likely to imagine, and I believe we talk of you all more than of any other mortals. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Dec. 1865.] It is worth your while to send for the last _Fortnightly_ to read an article of Professor Tyndall's "On the Constitution of the Universe." It is a splendid piece of writing on the higher physics, which I know will interest you. _À propos_ of the feminine intellect, I had a bit of experience with a superior woman the other day, which reminded me of Sydney Smith's story about his sermon on the Being of a God. He says, that after he had delivered his painstaking argument, an old parishioner said to him, "I don't agree wi' you, Mr. Smith; _I think there be a God_." [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Dec. 11._--For the last three days I have been foundering from a miserable state of head. I have written chapter ten. This evening read again Macaulay's Introduction. _Dec. 15._--To-day is the first for nearly a week on which I have been able to write anything fresh. I am reading Macaulay and Blackstone. This evening we went to hear "The Messiah" at Exeter Hall. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Dec. 1865.] "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" is a sort of hieroglyph for I love you and wish you well all the year round. Christmas to me is like a great many other pleasures, which I am glad to imagine as enjoyed by others, but have no delight in myself. Berried holly and smiling faces and snap-dragon, grandmamma and the children, turkey and plum-pudding--they are all precious things, and I would not have the world without them; but they tire me a little. I enjoy the common days of the year more. But for the sake of those who are stronger I rejoice in Christmas. [Sidenote: Journal, 1865.] _Dec. 24._--For two days I have been sticking in the mud from doubt about my construction. I have just consulted G., and he confirms my choice of incidents. _Dec. 31._--The last day of 1865. I will say nothing but that I trust--I will strive--to add more ardent effort towards a good result from all the outward good that is given to me. My health is at a lower ebb than usual, and so is George's. Bertie is spending his holidays with us, and shows hopeful characteristics. Charles is happy. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1862, TO DECEMBER, 1865. Begins "Romola" again--Letter to Miss Hennell--Max Müller's book--"Orley Farm"--Anthony Trollope--T. A. Trollope's "Beata"--Acquaintance with Mr. Burton and Mr. W. G. Clark--George Smith, publisher, suggests a "magnificent offer"--Depression about "Romola"--Letter to Mrs. Bray asking for loan of music--Pantomime--First visit to Dorking--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Impatience of concealment--Anxiety about war with America--Sympathy with queen--Mr. Lewes begins "History of Science"--Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows"--Depression--George Smith offers £10,000 for "Romola" for the _Cornhill_--Idea given up--Visit to Englefield Green--Working under a weight--Second visit to Dorking for three weeks--Delight in spring--Accepts £7000 for "Romola" in _Cornhill_--Regret at leaving Blackwood--Palsy in writing--Visit to Littlehampton and to Dorking third time--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes at Spa--George Eliot in better spirits--Letter to Miss Hennell--Joachim's playing--New Literary Club--Reading Poliziano--Suggestion of Tennyson's "Palace of Art"--Visit from Browning--Depression--Letter to Madame Bodichon--No negative propaganda--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--"The Messiah" on Christmas day--Letter to Miss Hennell--St. Paul's "Charity"--The Poetry of Christianity--The Bible--Adieu to year 1862--Letter to Miss Hennell--Encouragement about "Romola"--Literary Club dissolves--Miss Cobbe--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Depression--Fourth visit to Dorking for fortnight--Letter to Charles Lewes on Thackeray's Lectures--The effect of writing "Romola"--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Odiousness of intellectual superciliousness--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Thinking of the Priory--"Romola" finished--Inscription--Visit to Isle of Wight--Ristori--Letter to Miss Hennell--Thornton Lewes--London amusements--Opera--Reading Mommsen, Liddell's "Rome," and "Roba di Roma"--Letter from Frederick Maurice referred to as most generous tribute ever given--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Renan's "Vie de Jésus"--Visit to Worthing--Mrs. Hare--Return to London--Depression--Letter to R. H. Hutton on "Romola"--The importance of the medium in which characters move--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Effect of London on health--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Delight in autumn--Mommsen's History--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--The "Discours Préliminaire"--Removal to the Priory--Mr. Owen Jones decorates the house--Jansa the violinist--Letter to Mrs. Bray--"Physiology for Schools"--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Enjoying rest, and music with Jansa--Letter to Miss Hennell--Renan--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Enjoyment of Priory--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes's "Aristotle" finished--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Compensation--Letter to Mrs. P. A. Taylor--Effect of sunshine--Death of Mrs. Hare--"David Gray"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Dislike of note-writing--Visit to Glasgow--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Joy in Federal successes--Crystal Palace to see Garibaldi--Mr. Burton's picture of a Legendary Knight in Armor--Third visit to Italy with Mr. Burton for seven weeks--Return to London--Charles Lewes's engagement to Miss Gertrude Hill--Pleasure in Mr. Burton's companionship in travel--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Present of mats--Depression--Reading Gibbon--Gieseler--Letter to Miss Hennell--Reading Max Müller--Reference to the "Apologia"--Newman--Reading about Spain--Trying a drama--Letter to Miss Hennell--Harrogate--Development of Industries--Scarborough--Letters to Mrs. Congreve--Pleasure in her visit--Letter to Miss Hennell--Learning Spanish--Two acts of drama written--Sticking in construction of remainder--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Christmas greeting--Retrospect of year 1864--Letter to Mrs. Congreve, first payment to Positivist Fund--Comparison with "small upper room" 1866 years ago--Mrs. Congreve staying at the Priory--Poem "My Vegetarian Friend" written--Visit to Paris--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Visit to Comte's apartment in Paris--Finished poem on "Utopias"--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell--Delight in dual solitude--_Fortnightly Review_--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Charades--Depression--Mr. Lewes takes away drama--Article for the _Pall Mall_, "A Word for the Germans"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Visit to Wandsworth--Depression--Letter to Mrs. Congreve after visit--Letter to Mrs. Bray on a young friend's death--Deep depression--Admiration of Mr. Lewes's good spirits--"Felix Holt" begun--Article on Lecky's "History of Rationalism" in _Fortnightly_--Reading Æschylus, "Theatre of the Greeks"--Klein's "History of the Drama"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--First number of the _Fortnightly_--Frederic Harrison's article--Reading Mill, Comte, and Blackstone--Aristotle's "Poetics"--Dine with Congreves at Wandsworth--"Faust" at Covent Garden--Sunday reception--Browning, Huxley, and Bagehot--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on J. S. Mill--The _Fortnightly Review_--Mr. Burton's portrait finished--Mazzini subscription--Letter of adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Expedition to Brittany for month--Letter to Miss Hennell--"Pretended comforts"--Recollection of early feelings--Delight in her friendship--Masson's "Recent Philosophy"--Comte--Goethe on Spinoza--Reading Fawcett's "Economic Condition of Working Classes"--Mill's "Liberty"--Strauss's second "Life of Jesus"--Neale's "History of the Puritans"--Hallam's "Middle Ages"--Letter to Miss Hennell on Tyndall's article on "The Constitution of the Universe"--View of Christmas day--Retrospect of 1865. FOOTNOTES: [33] Now Sir Frederic Burton, Director of the National Gallery, to whom we are indebted for the drawing of George Eliot now in the National Portrait Gallery, South Kensington, and who was a very intimate and valued friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes. [34] Mr. W. G. Clark, late Public Orator at Cambridge, well known as a scholar, and for his edition of Shakspeare in conjunction with Mr. Aldis Wright. [35] Some general remark of Carlyle's--Madame Bodichon cannot remember exactly what it was. [36] I regret that I have not been able to find this letter. [37] Auguste Comte's. [38] "Physiology for Schools." By Mrs. Bray. [39] Mrs. Julius Hare, who gave her Maurice's book on the Lord's Prayer. [40] A story by Mr. Robert Buchanan in the _Cornhill_, Feb. 1864. [41] "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hear from some one else what _he ought to have thought_." CHAPTER XIII. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 5th Jan. 1866.] I have had it in my mind to write to you for many days, wanting to tell you, yet feeling there might be some impertinence in doing so, of the delight and gratitude I felt in reading your article on "Industrial Co-operation." Certain points admirably brought out in that article would, I think, be worth the labor of a life if one could help in winning them thorough recognition. I don't mean that my thinking so is of any consequence, but simply that it is of consequence to me when I find your energetic writing confirm my own faith. It would be fortunate for us if you had nothing better to do than look in on us on Tuesday evening. Professor Huxley will be with us, and one or two others whom you know, and your presence would make us all the brighter. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Jan. 9._--Professors Huxley and Beesley, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Spencer dined with us. Mr. Harrison in the evening. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 12th Jan. 1866.] The ample and clear statement you have sent me with kind promptness has put me in high spirits--as high spirits as can belong to an unhopeful author. Your hypothetical case of a settlement suits my needs surprisingly well. I shall be thankful to let Sugden alone, and throw myself entirely on your goodness, especially as what I want is simply a basis of legal possibilities and not any command of details. I want to be sure that my chords will not offend a critic accomplished in thorough bass--not at all to present an exercise in thorough bass. I was going to write you a long story, but, on consideration, it seems to me that I should tax your time less, and arrive more readily at a resolution of my doubts on various points not yet mentioned to you, if you could let me speak instead of writing to you. On Wednesday afternoons I am always at home; but on any day when I could be sure of your coming I would set everything aside for the sake of a consultation so valuable to me. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Jan. 20._--For the last fortnight I have been unusually disabled by ill-health. I have been consulting Mr. Harrison about the law in my book, with satisfactory result. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 22d Jan. 1866.] I had not any opportunity, or not enough presence of mind, to tell you yesterday how much I felt your kindness in writing me that last little note of sympathy. In proportion as compliments (always beside the mark) are discouraging and nauseating, at least to a writer who has any serious aims, genuine words from one capable of understanding one's conceptions are precious and strengthening. Yet I have no confidence that the book will ever be worthily written. And now I have something else to ask. It is that if anything strikes you as untrue in cases where my drama has a bearing on momentous questions, especially of a public nature, you will do me the great kindness to tell me of your doubts. On a few moral points, which have been made clear to me by my experience, I feel sufficiently confident--without such confidence I could not write at all. But in every other direction I am so much in need of fuller instruction as to be constantly under the sense that I am more likely to be wrong than right. Hitherto I have read my MS. (I mean of my previous books) to Mr. Lewes, by forty or fifty pages at a time, and he has told me if he felt an objection to anything. No one else has had any knowledge of my writings before their publication. (I except, of course, the publishers.) But now that you are good enough to incur the trouble of reading my MS., I am anxious to get the full benefit of your participation. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th Jan. 1866.] We arrived here on Tuesday, and have been walking about four hours each day, and the walks are so various that each time we have turned out we have found a new one. George is already much the better for the perfect rest, quiet, and fresh air. Will you give my thanks to Mr. Congreve for the "Synthèse" which I have brought with me and am reading? I expect to understand three chapters well enough to get some edification. George had talked of our taking the train to Dover to pay you a "morning call." He observes that it would have been a "dreadful sell" if we had done so. Your letter, therefore, was providential--and without doubt it came from a dear little Providence of mine that sits in your heart. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 31st Jan. 1866.] I have received both your precious letters--the second edition of the case, and the subsequent note. The story is sufficiently in the track of ordinary probability; and the careful trouble you have so generously given to it has enabled me to feel a satisfaction in my plot which beforehand I had sighed for as unattainable. There is still a question or two which I shall want to ask you, but I am afraid of taxing your time and patience in an unconscionable manner. So, since we expect to return to town at the end of next week, I think I will reserve my questions until I have the pleasure and advantage of an interview with you, in which _pros_ and _cons_ can be more rapidly determined than by letter. It seems to me that you have fitted my phenomena with a _rationale_ quite beautifully. If there is any one who could have done it better, I am sure I know of no man who _would_. Please to put your help of me among your good deeds for this year of 1866. To-day we have resolute rain, for the first time since we came down. You don't yet know what it is to be a sickly wretch, dependent on these skyey influences. But Heine says illness "spiritualizes the members." It had need do some good in return for one's misery. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Feb. 1866.] Thanks for your kind letter. Alas! we had chiefly bad weather in the country. George was a little benefited, but only a little. He is too far "run down" to be wound up in a very short time. We enjoyed our return to our comfortable house, and, perhaps, that freshness of home was the chief gain from our absence. You see, to counterbalance all the great and good things that life has given us beyond what our fellows have, we hardly know now what it is to be free from bodily _malaise_. After the notion I have given you of my health you will not wonder if I say that I don't know when anything of mine will appear. I can never reckon on myself. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _March 7._--I am reading Mill's "Logic" again. Theocritus still, and English History and Law. _March 17._--To St. James's Hall hearing Joachim, Piatti, and Hallé in glorious Beethoven music. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th April, 1866.] Don't think any evil of me for not writing. Just now the days are short, and art is long to artists with feeble bodies. If people don't say expressly that they want anything from me, I easily conclude that they will do better without me, and have a good weight of idleness, or, rather, bodily fatigue, which puts itself into the scale of modesty. I torment myself less with fruitless regrets that my particular life has not been more perfect. The young things are growing, and to me it is not melancholy but joyous that the world will be brighter after I am gone than it has been in the brief time of my existence. You see my pen runs into very old reflections. The fact is, I have no details to tell that would much interest you. It is true that I am going to bring out another book, but just _when_ is not certain. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 10th April, 1866.] The happiness in your letter was delightful to me, as you guessed it would be. See how much better things may turn out for all mankind, since they mend for single mortals even in this confused state of the bodies social and politic. As soon as we can leave we shall go away, probably to Germany, for six weeks or so. But that will not be till June. I am finishing a book which has been growing slowly, like a sickly child, because of my own ailments; but now I am in the later acts of it I can't move till it is done. You know all the news, public and private--all about the sad cattle plague, and the reform bill, and who is going to be married and who is dead--so I need tell you nothing. You will find the English world extremely like what it was when you left it--conversation more or less trivial and insincere, literature just now not much better, and politics worse than either. Bring some sincerity and energy to make a little draught of pure air in your particular world. I shall expect you to be a heroine in the best sense, now you are happier after a time of suffering. See what a talent I have for telling other people to be good! We are getting patriarchal, and think of old age and death as journeys not far off. All knowledge, all thought, all achievement seems more precious and enjoyable to me than it ever was before in life. But as soon as one has found the key of life, "it opes the gates of death." Youth has not learned the _art_ of living, and we go on bungling till our experience can only serve us for a very brief space. That is the "external order" we must submit to. I am too busy to write except when I am tired, and don't know very well what to say, so you must not be surprised if I write in a dreamy way. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _April 21._--Sent MS. of two volumes to Blackwood. _April 25._--Blackwood has written to offer me £5000 for "Felix Holt." I have been ailing, and uncertain in my strokes, and yesterday got no further than p. 52 of Vol. III. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th April, 1866.] It is a great pleasure to me to be writing to you again, as in the old days. After your kind letters, I am chiefly anxious that the publication of "Felix Holt" may be a satisfaction to you from beginning to end. Mr. Lewes writes about other business matters, so I will only say that I am desirous to have the proofs as soon and as rapidly as will be practicable. They will require correcting with great care, and there are large spaces in the day when I am unable to write, in which I could be attending to my proofs. I think I ought to tell you that I have consulted a legal friend about my law, to guard against errors. The friend is a Chancery barrister, who "ought to know." After I had written the first volume, I applied to him, and he has since read through my MS. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th April, 1866.] How very good it was of you to write me a letter which is a guarantee to me of the pleasantest kind that I have made myself understood. The tone of the prevalent literature just now is not encouraging to a writer who at least wishes to be serious and sincere; and, owing to my want of health, a great deal of this book has been written under so much depression as to its practical effectiveness that I have sometimes been ready to give it up. Your letter has made me feel, more strongly than any other testimony, that it would have been a pity if I had listened to the tempter Despondency. I took a great deal of pains to get a true idea of the period. My own recollections of it are childish, and of course disjointed, but they help to illuminate my reading. I went through the _Times_ of 1832-33 at the British Museum, to be sure of as many details as I could. It is amazing what strong language was used in those days, especially about the Church. "Bloated pluralists," "Stall-fed dignitaries," etc., are the sort of phrases conspicuous. There is one passage of prophecy which I longed to quote, but I thought it wiser to abstain. "Now, the beauty of the Reform Bill is that, under its mature operation, the people must and will become free agents"--a prophecy which I hope is true, only the maturity of the operation has not arrived yet. Mr. Lewes is well satisfied with the portion of the third volume already written; and, as I am better in health just now, I hope to go on with spirit, especially with the help of your cordial sympathy. I trust you will see, when it comes, that the third volume is the natural issue prepared for by the first and second. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 27th April, 1866.] A thousand thanks for your note. Do not worry yourself so much about those two questions that you will be forced to hate me. On Tuesday next we are to go to Dorking for probably a fortnight. I wished you to read the first hundred pages of my third volume; but I fear now that I must be content to wait and send you a duplicate proof of a chapter or two that are likely to make a lawyer shudder by their poetic license. Please to be in great distress sometime for want of my advice, and tease me considerably to get it, that I may prove my grateful memory of these days. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th April, 1866.] To-morrow we go--Mr. Lewes's bad health driving us--to Dorking, where everything will reach me as quickly as in London. I am in a horrible fidget about certain points which I want to be sure of in correcting my proofs. They are chiefly two questions. I wish to know, 1. Whether, in Napoleon's war with England, after the breaking-up of the Treaty of Amiens, the seizure and imprisonment of civilians was exceptional, or whether it was continued throughout the war? 2. Whether, in 1833, in the case of transportation to one of the colonies, when the sentence did not involve hard labor, the sentenced person might be at large on his arrival in the colony? It is possible you may have some one near at hand who will answer these questions. I am sure you will help me if you can, and will sympathize in my anxiety not to have even an allusion that involves practical impossibilities. One can never be perfectly accurate, even with one's best effort, but the effort must be made. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _May 31._--Finished "Felix Holt." The manuscript bears the following inscription: "From George Eliot to her dear Husband, this thirteenth year of their united life, in which the deepening sense of her own imperfectness has the consolation of their deepening love." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th June, 1866.] My last hope of seeing you before we start has vanished. I find that the things urged upon me to be done in addition to my own small matters of preparation will leave me no time to enjoy anything that I should have chosen if I had been at leisure. Last Thursday only I finished writing, in a state of nervous excitement that had been making my head throb and my heart palpitate all the week before. As soon as I had finished I felt well. You know how we had counted on a parting sight of you; and I should have particularly liked to see Emily and witness the good effect of Derbyshire. But send us a word or two if you can, just to say how you _all three_ are. We start on Thursday evening for Brussels. Then to Antwerp, the Hague, and Amsterdam. Out of Holland we are to find our way to Schwalbach. Let your love go with us, as mine will hover about you and all yours--that group of three which the word "Wandsworth" always means for us. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th June, 1866.] I finished writing ("Felix Holt") on the last day of May, after days and nights of throbbing and palpitation--chiefly, I suppose, from a nervous excitement which I was not strong enough to support well. As soon as I had done I felt better, and have been a new creature ever since, though a little overdone with visits from friends and attention (_miserabile dictu!_) to petticoats, etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 6th June, 1866.] I can't help being a little vexed that the course of things hinders my having the great delight of seeing you again, during this visit to town. Now that my mind is quite free, I don't know anything I should have chosen sooner than to have a long, long quiet day with you. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _June 7._--Set off on our journey to Holland. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 25th June, 1866, from Schwalbach.] I wish you could know how idle I feel, how utterly disinclined to anything but mere self-indulgence; because that knowledge would enable you to estimate the affection and anxiety which prompt me to write in spite of disinclination. June is so far gone, that by the time you get this letter you will surely have some result of the examination to tell me of; and I can't bear to deprive myself of that news by not letting you know where we are. "In Paradise," George says; but the Paradise is in the fields and woods of beech and fir, where we walk in uninterrupted solitude in spite of the excellent roads and delightful resting-places, which seem to have been prepared for visitors in general. The promenade, where the ladies--chiefly Russian and German, with only a small sprinkling of English and Americans--display their ornamental petticoats and various hats, is only the outskirt of Paradise; but we amuse ourselves there for an hour or so in the early morning and evening, listening to the music and learning the faces of our neighbors. There is a deficiency of men, children, and dogs, otherwise the winding walks, the luxuriant trees and grass, and the abundant seats of the promenade have every charm one can expect at a German bath. We arrived here last Thursday, after a fortnight spent in Belgium and Holland; and we still fall to interjections of delight whenever we walk out--first at the beauty of the place, and next at our own happiness in not having been frightened away from it by the predictions of travellers and hotel-keepers, that we should find no one here--that the Prussians would break up the railways, etc., etc.--Nassau being one of the majority of small states who are against Prussia. I fear we are a little in danger of becoming like the Bürger in "Faust," and making it too much the entertainment of our holiday to have a "Gespräch von Krieg und Kriegsgeschrei Wenn hinten, weit, in der Türkei, Die Völker auf einander schlagen." Idle people are so eager for newspapers that tell them of other people's energetic enthusiasm! A few soldiers are quartered here, and we see them wisely using their leisure to drink at the Brunnen. They are the only suggestion of war that meets our eyes among these woody hills. Already we feel great benefit from our quiet journeying and repose. George is looking remarkably well, and seems to have nothing the matter with him. You know how magically quick his recoveries seem. I am too refined to say anything about our excellent quarters and good meals; but one detail, I know, will touch your sympathy. We dine in our own room! It would have marred the _Kur_ for me if I had had every day to undergo a _table d'hôte_ where almost all the guests are English, presided over by the British chaplain. Please don't suspect me of being scornful towards my fellow countrymen or women: the fault is all mine that I am miserably _gênée_ by the glances of strange eyes. We want news from you to complete our satisfaction, and no one can give it but yourself. Send us as many matter-of-fact details as you have the patience to write. We shall not be here after the 4th, but at Schlangenbad. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Aug. 1866.] We got home last night, after a rough passage from Ostend. You have been so continually a recurrent thought to me ever since I had your letter at Schwalbach, that it is only natural I should write to you as soon as I am at my old desk again. The news of Mr. Congreve's examination being over made me feel for several days that something had happened which caused me unusual lightness of heart. I would not dwell on the possibility of your having to leave Wandsworth, which, I know, would cause you many sacrifices. I clung solely to the great, cheering fact that a load of anxiety had been lifted from Mr. Congreve's mind. May we not put in a petition for some of his time now? And will he not come with you and Emily to dine with us next week, on any day except Wednesday and Friday? The dinner-hour seems more propitious for talk and enjoyment than lunch-time; but in all respects choose what will best suit your health and habits--only let us see you. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 4th Aug. 1866.] We returned from our health-seeking journey on Thursday evening, and your letter was the most delightful thing that awaited me at home. Be sure it will be much read and meditated; and may I not take it as an earnest that your help, which has already done so much for me, will be continued? I mean, that you will help me by your thoughts and your sympathy--not that you will be teased with my proofs. I meant to write you a long letter about the æsthetic problem; but Mr. Lewes, who is still tormented with headachy effects from our rough passage, comes and asks me to walk to Hampstead with him, so I send these hasty lines. Come and see us soon. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Aug. 1866.] We got home on Thursday evening, and are still feeling some unpleasant effects from our very rough passage--an inconvenience which we had waited some days at Ostend to avoid. But the wind took no notice of us, and went on blowing. I was much pleased with the handsome appearance of the three volumes which were lying ready for me. My hatred of bad paper and bad print, and my love of their opposites, naturally get stronger as my eyes get weaker; and certainly that taste could hardly be better gratified than it is by Messrs. Blackwood & Sons. Colonel Hamley's volume is another example of that fact. It lies now on my revolving desk as one of the books I mean first to read. I am really grateful to have such a medium of knowledge, and I expect it to make some pages of history much less dim to me. My impression of Colonel Hamley, when we had that pleasant dinner at Greenwich, and afterwards when he called in Blandford Square, was quite in keeping with the high opinion you express. Mr. Lewes liked the article on "Felix" in the Magazine very much. He read it the first thing yesterday morning, and told me it was written in a nice spirit, and the extracts judiciously made. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Aug. 1866.] I have had a delightful holiday, and find my double self very much the better for it. We made a great round in our journeying. From Antwerp to Rotterdam, the Hague, Leyden, Amsterdam, Cologne; then up the Rhine to Coblentz, and thence to Schwalbach, where we stayed a fortnight. From Schwalbach to Schlangenbad, where we stayed till we feared the boats would cease to go to and fro; and, in fact, only left just in time to get down the Rhine to Bonn by the Dutch steamer. From Bonn, after two days, we went to Aix; then to dear old Liége, where we had been together thirteen years before; and, to avoid the King of the Belgians, ten minutes backwards to the baths of pretty Chaudfontaine, where we remained three days. Then to Louvain, Ghent, and Bruges; and, last of all, to Ostend, where we waited for a fine day and calm sea, until we secured--a very rough passage indeed. Ought we not to be a great deal wiser and more efficient personages, or else to be ashamed of ourselves? Unhappily, this last alternative is not a compensation for wisdom. I thought of you--to mention one occasion among many--when we had the good fortune, at Antwerp, to see a placard announcing that the company from the Ober-Ammergau, Bavaria, would represent, that Sunday evening, the _Lebensgeschichte_ of our Saviour Christ, at the Théatre des Variétés. I remembered that you had seen the representation with deep interest--and these actors are doubtless the successors of those you saw. Of course we went to the theatre. And the Christ was, without exaggeration, beautiful. All the rest was inferior, and might even have had a painful approach to the ludicrous; but both the person and the action of the Jesus were fine enough to overpower all meaner impressions. Mr. Lewes, who, you know, is keenly alive to everything "stagey" in physiognomy and gesture, felt what I am saying quite as much as I did, and was much moved. Rotterdam, with the grand approach to it by the broad river; the rich red brick of the houses; the canals, uniformly planted with trees, and crowded with the bright brown masts of the Dutch boats--is far finer than Amsterdam. The color of Amsterdam is ugly; the houses are of a chocolate color, almost black (an artificial tinge given to the bricks), and the woodwork on them screams out in ugly patches of cream-color; the canals have no trees along their sides, and the boats are infrequent. We looked about for the very Portuguese synagogue where Spinoza was nearly assassinated as he came from worship. But it no longer exists. There are no less than three Portuguese synagogues now--very large and handsome. And in the evening we went to see the worship there. Not a woman was present, but of devout men not a few--a curious reversal of what one sees in other temples. The chanting and the swaying about of the bodies--almost a wriggling--are not beautiful to the sense; but I fairly cried at witnessing this faint symbolism of a religion of sublime, far-off memories. The skulls of St. Ursula's eleven thousand virgins seem a modern suggestion compared with the Jewish Synagogue. At Schwalbach and Schlangenbad our life was led chiefly in the beech woods, which we had all to ourselves, the guests usually confining themselves to the nearer promenades. The guests, of course, were few in that serious time; and between war and cholera we felt our position as health--and pleasure--seekers somewhat contemptible. There is no end to what one could say, if one did not feel that long letters cut pieces not to be spared out of the solid day. I think I have earned that you should write me one of those perfect letters in which you make me see everything you like about yourself and others. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Aug. 30._--I have taken up the idea of my drama, "The Spanish Gypsy," again, and am reading on Spanish subjects--Bouterwek, Sismondi, Depping, Llorante, etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 15th Aug. 1866.] I have read several times your letter of the 19th, which I found awaiting me on my return, and I shall read it many times again. Pray do not even say, or inwardly suspect, that anything you take the trouble to write to me will not be valued. On the contrary, please to imagine as well as you can the experience of a mind morbidly desponding, of a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement--and then consider how such a mind must need the support of sympathy and approval from those who are capable of understanding its aims. I assure you your letter is an evidence of a fuller understanding than I have ever had expressed to me before. And if I needed to give emphasis to this simple statement, I should suggest to you all the miseries one's obstinate egoism endures from the fact of being a writer of novels--books which the dullest and silliest reader thinks himself competent to deliver an opinion on. But I despise myself for feeling any annoyance at these trivial things. That is a tremendously difficult problem which you have laid before me; and I think you see its difficulties, though they can hardly press upon you as they do on me, who have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit. I think æsthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching, because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely æsthetic--if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram--it becomes the most offensive of all teaching. Avowed Utopias are not offensive, because they are understood to have a scientific and expository character: they do not pretend to work on the emotions, or couldn't do it if they did pretend. I am sure, from your own statement, that you see this quite clearly. Well, then, consider the sort of agonizing labor to an English-fed imagination to make out a sufficiently real background for the desired picture--to get breathing, individual forms, and group them in the needful relations, so that the presentation will lay hold on the emotions as human experience--will, as you say, "flash" conviction on the world by means of aroused sympathy. I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write "Romola"--neglecting nothing I could find that would help me to what I may call the "idiom" of Florence, in the largest sense one could stretch the word to; and then I was only trying to give _some_ out of the normal relations. I felt that the necessary idealization could only be attained by adopting the clothing of the past. And again, it is my way (rather too much so, perhaps) to urge the human sanctities through tragedy--through pity and terror, as well as admiration and delight. I only say all this to show the tenfold arduousness of such a work as the one your problem demands. On the other hand, my whole soul goes with your desire that it should be done; and I shall at least keep the great possibility (or impossibility) perpetually in my mind, as something towards which I must strive, though it may be that I can do so only in a fragmentary way. At present I am going to take up again a work which I laid down before writing "Felix." It is--_but, please, let this be a secret between ourselves_--an attempt at a drama, which I put aside at Mr. Lewes's request, after writing four acts, precisely because it was in that stage of creation--or _Werden_--in which the idea of the characters predominates over the incarnation. Now I read it again, I find it impossible to abandon it; the conceptions move me deeply, and they have never been wrought out before. There is not a thought or symbol that I do not long to use: but the whole requires recasting; and, as I never recast anything before, I think of the issue very doubtfully. When one has to work out the dramatic action for one's self, under the inspiration of an idea, instead of having a grand myth or an Italian novel ready to one's hand, one feels anything but omnipotent. Not that I should have done any better if I had had the myth or the novel, for I am not a good user of opportunities. I think I have the right _locus_ and historic conditions, but much else is wanting. I have not, of course, said half what I meant to say; but I hope opportunities of exchanging thoughts will not be wanting between us. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Sept. 1866.] It is so long since we exchanged letters, that I feel inclined to break the silence by telling you that I have been reading with much interest the "Operations of War," which you enriched me with. Also that I have had a pretty note, in aged handwriting, from Dean Ramsay, with a present of his "Reminiscences of Scottish Life." I suppose you know him quite well, but I never heard you mention him. Also--what will amuse you--that my readers take quite a tender care of my text, writing to me to tell me of a misprint, or of "one phrase" which they entreat to have altered, that no blemish may disfigure "Felix." Dr. Althaus has sent me word of a misprint which I am glad to know of--or, rather, of a word slipped out in the third volume. "She _saw_ streaks of light, etc. ... _and_ sounds." It must be corrected when the opportunity comes. We are very well, and I am swimming in Spanish history and literature. I feel as if I were molesting you with a letter without any good excuse, but you are not bound to write again until a wet day makes golf impossible, and creates a dreariness in which even letter-writing seems like a recreation. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th Sept. 1866.] I am glad to know that Dean Ramsay is a friend of yours. His sympathy was worth having, and I at once wrote to thank him. Another wonderfully lively old man--Sir Henry Holland--came to see me about two Sundays ago, to bid me good-bye before going on an excursion to--North America!--and to tell me that he had just been re-reading "Adam Bede" for the fourth time. "I often read in it, you know, besides. But this is the fourth time quite through." I, of course, with the mother's egoism on behalf of the youngest born, was jealous for "Felix." Is there any possibility of satisfying an author? But one or two things that George read out to me from an article in _Macmillan's Magazine_, by Mr. Mozley, did satisfy me. And yet I sicken again with despondency under the sense that the most carefully written books lie, both outside and inside people's minds, deep undermost in a heap of trash. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Sept. 15._--Finished Depping's "Juifs au Moyen Âge." Reading Chaucer, to study English. Also reading on Acoustics, Musical Instruments, etc. _Oct. 15._--Recommenced "The Spanish Gypsy," intending to give it a new form. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1866.] For a wonder I remembered the day of the month, and felt a delightful confidence that I should have a letter from her who always remembers such things at the right moment. You will hardly believe in my imbecility. I can never be quite sure whether your birthday is the 21st or the 23d. I know every one must think the worse of me for this want of retentiveness that seems a part of affection; and it is only justice that they should. Nevertheless I am not quite destitute of lovingness and gratitude, and perhaps the consciousness of my own defect makes me feel your goodness the more keenly. I shall reckon it part of the next year's happiness for me if it brings a great deal of happiness to you. That will depend somewhat--perhaps chiefly--on the satisfaction you have in giving shape to your ideas. But you say nothing on that subject. We knew about Faraday's preaching, but not of his loss of faculty. I begin to think of such things as very near to me--I mean, decay of power and health. But I find age has its fresh elements of cheerfulness. Bless you, dear Sara, for all the kindness of many years, and for the newest kindness that comes to me this morning. I am very well now, and able to enjoy my happiness. One has happiness sometimes without being able to enjoy it. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Nov. 22._--Reading Renan's "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques"--Ticknor's "Spanish Literature." _Dec. 6._--We returned from Tunbridge Wells, where we have been for a week. I have been reading Cornewall Lewis's "Astronomy of the Ancients," Ockley's "History of the Saracens," "Astronomical Geography," and Spanish ballads on Bernardo del Carpio. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Dec. 1866.] We have been to Tunbridge Wells for a week, hoping to get plenty of fresh air, and walking in that sandy, undulating country. But for three days it rained incessantly. No; I don't feel as if my faculties were failing me. On the contrary, I enjoy all subjects--all study--more than I ever did in my life before. But that very fact makes me more in need of resignation to the certain approach of age and death. Science, history, poetry--I don't know which draws me most, and there is little time left me for any one of them. I learned Spanish last year but one, and see new vistas everywhere. That makes me think of time thrown away when I was young--time that I should be so glad of now. I could enjoy everything, from arithmetic to antiquarianism, if I had large spaces of life before me. But instead of that I have a very small space. Unfeigned, unselfish, cheerful resignation is difficult. But I strive to get it. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Dec. 11._--Ill ever since I came home, so that the days seem to have made a muddy flood, sweeping away all labor and all growth. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Dec. 1866.] Just before we received Dr. Congreve's letter we had changed our plans. George's increasing weakness and the more and more frequent intervals in which he became unable to work, made me at last urge him to give up the idea of "finishing," which often besets us vainly. It will really be better for the work as well as for himself that he should let it wait. However, I care about nothing just now except that he should be doing all he can to get better. So we start next Thursday for Bordeaux, staying two days in Paris on our way. Madame Mohl writes us word that she hears from friends of the delicious weather--mild, sunny weather--to be had now on the French southwestern and southeastern coast. You will all wish us well on our journey, I know. But _I_ wish I could carry a happier thought about you than that of your being an invalid. I shall write to you when we are at Biarritz or some other place that suits us, and when I have something good to tell. No; in any case I shall write, because I shall want to hear all about you. Tell Dr. Congreve we carry the "Politique" with us. Mr. Lewes gets more and more impressed by it, and also by what he is able to understand of the "Synthèse." I am writing in the dark. Farewell. With best love to Emily, and dutiful regards to Dr. Congreve. [Sidenote: Journal, 1866.] _Dec. 27._--Set off in the evening on our journey to the south. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1866, TO DECEMBER, 1866. Letters to Frederic Harrison on Industrial Co-operation--Consults him about law in "Felix Holt"--Asks his opinion on other questions--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Visit to Tunbridge Wells--Reading Comte's "Synthèse"--Letter to F. Harrison on "case" for "Felix Holt"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Joy in the world getting better--Letter to Madame Bodichon--"Felix Holt" growing like a sickly child--Want of sincerity in England--Desire for knowledge increases--Blackwood offers £5000 for "Felix Holt"--Letters to John Blackwood renewing correspondence--Thanks for encouragement--Painstaking with "Felix Holt"--Letter to F. Harrison on legal points--The book finished--Inscription--Letter of adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Excitement of finishing "Felix Holt"--Journey to Holland and Germany--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Schwalbach--Return to the Priory--Letter to F. Harrison asking for sympathy--Letter to John Blackwood--Colonel Hamley--Letter to Miss Hennell describing German trip--Miracle play at Antwerp--Amsterdam synagogue--Takes up drama "The Spanish Gypsy" again--Reading on Spanish subjects--Letter to F. Harrison--Need of sympathy--Æsthetic teaching--Tells him of the proposed drama--Letters to John Blackwood--Dean Ramsay--Sir Henry Holland--Article on "Felix Holt" in _Macmillan's Magazine_--"The Spanish Gypsy" recommenced--Reading Renan's "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques" and Ticknor's "Spanish Literature"--Visit to Tunbridge Wells for a week--Reading Cornewall Lewis's "Astronomy of the Ancients"--Ockley's "History of the Saracens," and Spanish Ballads--Letter to Miss Hennell--Enjoyment of study--Depression--Letter of adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Set off on journey to Spain. END OF VOL. II. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors were repaired. Duplicate sidenotes (repeated at the top of continuation pages) were deleted. Latin-1 file: _underscores_ enclose italicized content. Sidenote at the bottom of p. 215, and repeated on continuation p. 216, "Letter to Miss Sara Hennell"--p. 215 sidenote (retained) shows "18th April," but continuation sidenote on p. 216 (deleted) shows "13th April." Sidenote p. 227, "Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1861"--original reads "1860." 
43045	----	Transcriber's Note: This is Volume III of a three volume set: Volume I--Unknown Volume II--Famous Volume III--Sunset A combined index to the entire set is located at the end of Volume III. Narrative content written by J. Cross and material quoted from writers other than George Eliot are interspersed throughout the text. Their content is placed in block quotes. Remaining transcriber's notes are located at the end of the text. * * * * * GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE VOL. III.--SUNSET "OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY" [Illustration: No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.] GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE _as related in her Letters and Journals_ ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND J. W. CROSS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME III NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS. _LIBRARY EDITION._ ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ESSAYS and LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ROMOLA. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. For other editions of George Eliot's works published by Harper & Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_. CONTENTS OF VOL. III. CHAPTER XIV. JANUARY, 1867, TO DECEMBER, 1867. Tour in Spain Page 1 CHAPTER XV. JANUARY, 1868, TO DECEMBER, 1868. "The Spanish Gypsy" 24 CHAPTER XVI. JANUARY, 1869, TO DECEMBER, 1872. Poems--"Middlemarch" 55 CHAPTER XVII. JANUARY, 1873, TO DECEMBER, 1875. "Brewing," "Deronda" 138 CHAPTER XVIII. MARCH, 1876, TO NOVEMBER, 1878. "Daniel Deronda"--Illness and Death of Mr. Lewes 197 CHAPTER XIX. JANUARY, 1879, TO 22D DECEMBER, 1880. "Theophrastus Such"--Marriage with Mr. Cross--Death 249 ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. III. NO. 4 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA _Frontispiece._ THE HEIGHTS, WITLEY. From a Sketch by Mrs. Allingham _To face p. 216._ GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE. CHAPTER XIV. The new year of 1867 opens with the description of the journey to Spain. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Jan. 1867, from Bordeaux.] We prolonged our stay in Paris in order to see Madame Mohl, who was very good to us; invited the Scherers and other interesting people to meet us at dinner on the 29th, and tempted us to stay and breakfast with her on the 31st, by promising to invite Renan, which she did successfully, and so procured us a bit of experience that we were glad to have, over and above the pleasure of seeing a little more of herself and M. Mohl. I like them both, and wish there were a chance of knowing them better. We paid for our pleasure by being obliged to walk in the rain (from the impossibility of getting a carriage) all the way from the Rue de Rivoli--where a charitable German printer, who had taken us up in his _fiacre_, was obliged to set us down--to the Hôtel du Helder, through streets literally jammed with carriages and omnibuses, carrying people who were doing the severe social duties of the last day in the year. The rain it raineth every day, with the exception of yesterday; we can't travel away from it, apparently. But we start in desperation for Bayonne in half an hour. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Jan. 1867, from Biarritz.] Snow on the ground here, too--more, we are told, than has been seen here for fifteen years before. But it has been obliging enough to fall in the night, and the sky is glorious this morning, as it was yesterday. Sunday was the one exception since the 6th, when we arrived here to a state of weather which has allowed us to be out of doors the greater part of our daylight. We think it curious that, among the many persons who have talked to us about Biarritz, the Brownings alone have ever spoken of its natural beauties; yet these are transcendent. We agree that the sea never seemed so magnificent to us before, though we have seen the Atlantic breaking on the rocks at Ilfracombe and on the great granite walls of the Scilly Isles. In the southern division of the bay we see the sun set over the Pyrenees; and in the northern we have two splendid stretches of sand, one with huge fragments of dark rock scattered about for the waves to leap over, the other an unbroken level, firm to the feet, where the hindmost line of wave sends up its spray on the horizon like a suddenly rising cloud. This part of the bay is worthily called the Chambre de l'Amour; and we have its beauties all to ourselves, which, alas! in this stage of the world, one can't help feeling to be an advantage. The few families and bachelors who are here (chiefly English) scarcely ever come across our path. The days pass so rapidly, we can hardly believe in their number when we come to count them. After breakfast we both read the "Politique"--George one volume and I another--interrupting each other continually with questions and remarks. That morning study keeps me in a state of enthusiasm through the day--a moral glow, which is a sort of _milieu subjectif_ for the sublime sea and sky. Mr. Lewes is converted to the warmest admiration of the chapter on language in the third volume, which about three years ago he thought slightly of. I think the first chapter of the fourth volume is among the finest of all, and the most finely written. My gratitude increases continually for the illumination Comte has contributed to my life. But we both of us study with a sense of having still much to learn and to understand. About ten or half-past ten we go out for our morning walk; and then, while we plunge about in the sand or march along the cliff, George draws out a book and tries my paces in Spanish, demanding a quick-as-light translation of nouns and phrases. Presently I retort upon him, and prove that it is easier to ask than to answer. We find this system of _vivâ-voce_ mutual instruction so successful that we are disgusted with ourselves for not having used it before through all our many years of companionship; and we are making projects for giving new interest to Regent's Park by pursuing all sorts of studies in the same way there. We seldom come indoors till one o'clock, and we turn out again at three, often remaining to see the sunset. One other thing I have been reading here which I must tell you of. It is a series of three papers by Saveney, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of last year, on "La Physique Moderne," an excellent summary, giving a glimpse of the great vista opened in that region. I think you would like to read them when you are strong enough for that sort of exertion. We stayed three days in Paris, and passed our time very agreeably. The first day we dined with Madame Mohl, who had kindly invited Professor Scherer and his wife, Jules Simon, Lomenie, Lavergne, "and others" to meet us. That was on the Saturday, and she tempted us to stay the following Monday by saying she would invite Renan to breakfast with us. Renan's appearance is something between the Catholic priest and the dissenting minister. His manners are very amiable, his talk pleasant, but not distinguished. We are entertaining great projects as to our further journeying. It will be best for you to address _Poste Restante_, Barcelona. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d Feb. 1867.] Are you astonished to see our whereabouts? We left Biarritz for San Sebastian, where we stayed three days; and both there and all our way to Barcelona our life has been a succession of delights. We have had perfect weather, blue skies, and a warm sun. We travelled from San Sebastian to Saragossa, where we passed two nights; then to Lerida for one night, and yesterday to Barcelona. You know the scenery from San Sebastian to Alsasua, through the lower Pyrenees, because it lies on the way to Burgos and Madrid. At Alsasua we turned off through Navarre into Aragon, seeing famous Pampeluna, looking as beautiful as it did ages ago among the grand hills. At Saragossa the scene was thoroughly changed; all through Aragon, as far as we could see, I should think the country resembles the highlands of Central Spain. There is the most striking effect of hills, flanking the plain of Saragossa, I ever saw. They are of palish clay, washed by the rains into undulating forms, and some slight herbage upon them makes the shadows of an exquisite blue. These hills accompanied us in the distance all the way through Aragon, the snowy mountains topping them in the far distance. The land is all pale brown, the numerous towns and villages just match the land, and so do the sheepfolds, built of mud or stone. The herbage is all of an ashy green. Perhaps if I had been in Africa I should say, as you do, that the country reminded me of Africa; as it is, I think of all I have read about the East. The men who look on while others work at Saragossa also seem to belong to the East, with a great striped blanket wrapped grandly round them, and a kerchief tied about their hair. But though Aragon was held by the Moors longer than any part of Northern Spain, the features and skins of the people seem to me to bear less traces of the mixture there must have been than one would fairly expect. Saragossa has a grand character still, in spite of the stucco with which the people have daubed the beautiful small brick of which the houses are built. Here and there one sees a house left undesecrated by stucco; and all of them have the fluted tiles and the broad eaves beautifully ornamented. Again, one side of the old cathedral still shows the exquisite inlaid work which, in the _façade_, has been overlaid hideously. Gradually, as we left Aragon and entered Catalonia, the face of the country changed, and we had almost every sort of beauty in succession; last of all, between Monserrat and Barcelona, a perfect garden, with the richest red soil--blossoms on the plum and cherry trees, aloes thick in the hedges. At present we are waiting for the Spanish hardships to begin. Even at Lerida, a place scarcely at all affected by foreign travellers, we were perfectly comfortable--and such sights! The people scattered on the brown slopes of rough earth round the fortress--the women knitting, etc., the men playing at cards, one wonderful, gaudily dressed group; another of handsome gypsies. We are actually going by steam-boat to Alicante, and from Alicante to Malaga. Then we mean to see Granada, Cordova, and Seville. We shall only stay here a few days--if this weather continues. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 18th Feb. 1867, from Granada.] Your kind letter, written on the 5th, reached me here this morning. I had not heard of the criticism in the _Edinburgh_. Mr. Lewes read the article, but did not tell me of the reviewer's legal wisdom, thinking that it would only vex me to no purpose. However, I had felt sure that something of that sort must have appeared in one review article or another. I am heartily glad and grateful that you have helped justice in general, as well as justice to me in particular, by getting the vindication written for the _Pall Mall_. It was the best possible measure to adopt. Since we left Barcelona, a fortnight ago, we have seen no English papers, so that we have been in the dark as to English news. Were you not surprised to hear that we had come so far? The journey from San Sebastian by Saragossa and Lerida turned out to be so easy and delightful that we ceased to tremble, and determined to carry out our project of going by steamer to Alicante and Malaga. You cannot do better than follow our example; I mean, so far as coming to Spain is concerned. Believe none of the fictions that bookmakers get printed about the horrors of Spanish hotels and cookery, or the hardships of Spanish travel--still less about the rudeness of Spaniards. It is true that we have not yet endured the long railway journeys through Central Spain, but wherever we have been hitherto we have found nothing formidable, even for our rickety bodies. We came hither from Malaga in the _berlina (coupé)_ of the diligence, and have assured ourselves that Mr. Blackburne's description of a supposed hen-roost, overturned in the Alameda at Malaga, which proved to be the Granada diligence, is an invention. The vehicle is comfortable enough, and the road is perfect; and at the end of it we have found ourselves in one of the loveliest scenes on earth. We shall remain here till the 23d, and then go to Cordova first, to Seville next, and finally to Madrid, making our way homeward from thence by easy stages. We expect to be in the smoky haze of London again soon after the middle of March, if not before. I wish I could believe that you were all having anything like the clear skies and warm sun which have cheered our journeying for the last month. At Alicante we walked among the palm-trees with their golden fruit hanging in rich clusters, and felt a more delightful warmth than that of an English summer. Last night we walked out and saw the towers of the Alhambra, the wide Vega, and the snowy mountains, by the brilliant moonlight. You see, we are getting a great deal of pleasure, but we are not working, as you seem charitably to imagine. We tire ourselves, but only with seeing or going to see unforgetable things. You will say that we ought to work to better purpose when we get home. Amen. But just now we read nothing but Spanish novels--and not much of those. We said good-bye to philosophy and science when we packed up our trunks at Biarritz. Please keep some friendship warm for us, that we may not be too much chilled by the English weather when we get back. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Feb. 1867.] We are both heartily rejoiced that we came to Spain. It was a great longing of mine, for, three years ago, I began to interest myself in Spanish history and literature, and have had a work lying by me, partly written, the subject of which is connected with Spain. Whether I shall ever bring it to maturity so as to satisfy myself sufficiently to print it is a question not settled; but it is a work very near my heart. We have had perfect weather ever since the 27th of January--magnificent skies and a summer sun. At Alicante, walking among the palm-trees, with the bare brown rocks and brown houses in the background, we fancied ourselves in the tropics; and a gentleman who travelled with us assured us that the aspect of the country closely resembled Aden, on the Red Sea. Here, at Granada, of course, it is much colder, but the sun shines uninterruptedly; and in the middle of the day, to stand in the sunshine against a wall, reminds me of my sensations at Florence in the beginning of June. The aspect of Granada as we first approached it was a slight disappointment to me, but the beauty of its position can hardly be surpassed. To stand on one of the towers of the Alhambra and see the sun set behind the dark mountains of Loja, and send its after-glow on the white summits of the Sierra Nevada, while the lovely Vega spreads below, ready to yield all things pleasant to the eye and good for food, is worth a very long, long journey. We shall start to-morrow evening for Cordova; then we shall go to Seville, back to Cordova, and on to Madrid. During our short stay in Paris we went a little into society, and saw, among other people who interested us, Professor Scherer, of whom you know something. He charmed me greatly. He is a Genevese, you know, and does not talk in ready-made epigrams, like a clever Frenchman, but with well-chosen, moderate words, intended to express what he really thinks and feels. He is highly cultivated; and his wife, who was with him, is an Englishwoman of refined, simple manners. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 10th Mch. 1867, from Biarritz.] At Biarritz again, you see, after our long, delightful journey, in which we have made a great loop all round the east and through the centre of Spain. Mr. Lewes says he thinks he never enjoyed a journey so much, and you will see him so changed--so much plumper and ruddier--that if pity has entered much into your regard for him he will be in danger of losing something by his bodily prosperity. We crowned our pleasures in Spain with the sight of the pictures in the Madrid gallery. The skies were as blue at Madrid as they had been through the previous part of our journeying, but the air was bitterly cold; and naughty officials receive money for warming the museum, but find other uses for the money. I caught a severe cold the last day of our visit, and, after an uncomfortable day and night's railway journey, arrived at Biarritz, only fit for bed and coddling. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _March 16._--This evening we got home after a journey to the south of Spain. I go to my poem and the construction of two prose works--if possible. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Mch. 1867.] We got home on Saturday evening, after as fine a passage from Calais to Dover as we ever had, even in summer. Your letter was among the pleasant things that smiled at me on my return, and helped to reconcile me to the rather rude transition from summer to winter which we have made in our journey from Biarritz. This morning it is snowing hard and the wind is roaring--a sufficiently sharp contrast to the hot sun, the dust, and the mosquitoes of Seville. We have had a glorious journey. The skies alone, both night and day, were worth travelling all the way to see. We went to Cordova and Seville, but we feared the cold of the central lands in the north, and resisted the temptation to see Toledo, or anything else than the Madrid pictures, which are transcendent. Among the letters awaiting me was one from an American travelling in Europe, who gives me the history of a copy of "Felix Holt," which, he says, has been read by no end of people, and is now on its way through Ireland, "where he found many friends anxious but unable to get it." It seems people nowadays economize in nothing but books. I found also the letter of a "Conveyancer" in the _Pall Mall_, justifying the law of "Felix Holt" in answer to the _Edinburgh_ reviewer. I did not know, before I was told of this letter in reply, that the _Edinburgh_ reviewer had found fault with my law. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _March 21._--Received from Blackwood a check for £2166 13_s._ 4_d._, being the second instalment of £1666 13_s._ 4_d._ towards the £5000 for "Felix Holt," together with £500 as the first instalment of £1000 for ten years' copyright of the cheap edition of my novels. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Mch. 1867.] Your letters, with the valuable enclosure of a check for £2166 13_s._ 4_d._, have come to me this morning, and I am much obliged to you for your punctual attention. I long to see a specimen of the cheap edition of the novels. As to the illustrations, I have adjusted my hopes so as to save myself from any great shock. When I remember my own childish happiness in a frightfully illustrated copy of the "Vicar of Wakefield," I can believe that illustration may be a great good relatively, and that my own present liking has no weight in the question. I fancy that the placarding at railway stations is an effective measure, for Ruskin was never more mistaken than in asserting that people have no spare time to observe anything in such places. I am a very poor reader of advertisements, but even I am forced to get them unpleasantly by heart at the stations. It is rather a vexatious kind of tribute when people write, as my American correspondent did, to tell me of one paper-covered American copy of "Felix Holt" brought to Europe and serving for so many readers that it was in danger of being worn away under their hands. He, good man, finds it easy "to urge greater circulation by means of cheap sale," having "found so many friends in Ireland anxious but unable to obtain the book." I suppose putting it in a yellow cover with figures on it, reminding one of the outside of a show, and charging a shilling for it, is what we are expected to do for the good of mankind. Even then I fear it would hardly bear the rivalry of "The Pretty Milliner," or of "The Horrible Secret." The work connected with Spain is not a romance. It is--prepare your fortitude--it is--a poem. I conceived the plot, and wrote nearly the whole as a drama in 1864. Mr. Lewes advised me to put it by for a time and take it up again, with a view to recasting it. He thinks hopefully of it. I need not tell you that I am _not_ hopeful, but I am quite sure the subject is fine. It is not historic, but has merely historic connections. The plot was wrought out entirely as an incorporation of my own ideas. Of course, if it is ever finished to my satisfaction, it is not a work for us to get money by, but Mr. Lewes urges and insists that it shall be done. I have also my private projects about an English novel, but I am afraid of speaking as if I could depend on myself; at present I am rather dizzy, and not settled down to home habits of regular occupation. I understand that the conveyancer who wrote to the _Pall Mall_ is an excellent lawyer in his department, and the lecturer on Real Property at the Law Institution. If a reviewer ever checked himself by considering that a writer whom he thinks worth praising would take some pains to know the truth about a matter which is the very hinge of said writer's story, review articles would cut a shrunken figure. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _May 5._--We went to Bouverie Street to hear the first of a course of lectures on Positivism, delivered by Dr. Congreve. There were present seventy-five people, chiefly men. _May 11._--We had Mr. and Mrs. Call to dine with us, and an evening party afterwards. _May 12._--We went to hear Dr. Congreve's second lecture. The morning was thoroughly wet; the audience smaller, but still good. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th May, 1867.] Yesterday we went to the second of a course of lectures which Dr. Congreve is delivering on Positivism in Bouverie Street. At the first lecture on the 5th there was a considerable audience--about seventy-five, chiefly men--of various ranks, from lords and M.P.'s downwards, or upwards, for what is called social distinction seems to be in a shifting condition just now. Yesterday the wet weather doubtless helped to reduce the audience; still it was good. Curiosity brings some, interest in the subject others, and the rest go with the wish to express adhesion more or less thorough. I am afraid you have ceased to care much about pictures, else I should wish that you could see the Exhibition of Historical Portraits at Kensington. It is really worth a little fatigue to see the English of past generations in their habit as they lived--especially when Gainsborough and Sir Joshua are the painters. But even Sir Godfrey Kneller delights me occasionally with a finely conceived portrait carefully painted. There is an unforgetable portrait of Newton by him. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _May 27._--Went with G. to the Academy Exhibition. _May 29._--Went to the Exhibition of French Pictures--very agreeable and interesting. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 30th May, 1867.] I do sympathize with you most emphatically in the desire to see women socially elevated--educated equally with men, and secured as far as possible, along with every other breathing creature, from suffering the exercise of any unrighteous power. That is a broader ground of sympathy than agreement as to the amount and kind of result that may be hoped for from a particular measure. But on this special point I am far from thinking myself an oracle, and on the whole I am inclined to hope for much good from the serious presentation of women's claims before Parliament. I thought Mill's speech sober and judicious from his point of view--Karslake's an abomination. _À propos_ of what you say about Mr. Congreve, I think you have mistaken his, or rather Comte's, position. There is no denial of an unknown cause, but only a denial that such a conception is the proper basis of a practical religion. It seems to me pre-eminently desirable that we should learn not to make our personal comfort a standard of truth. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _June 1_ (Saturday).--Wrote up to the moment when Fedalma appears in the Plaça. _June 5._--Blackwood dined with us, and I read to him my poem down to page 56. He showed great delight. _June 26._--We went to Niton for a fortnight, returning July 10. _July 16._--Received £2166 13_s._ 4_d._ from Blackwood, being the final instalment for "Felix Holt," and (£500) copyright for ten years. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th July, 1867.] Again we take flight! To North Germany this time, and chiefly to Dresden, where we shall be accessible through the _Poste Restante_. I am ashamed of saying anything about our health--we are both "objects" for compassion or contempt, according to the disposition of the subject who may contemplate us. Mr. Beesley (I think it was he) sent us Dr. Congreve's pamphlet last night, and I read it aloud to George. We both felt a cordial satisfaction in it. We have been a good deal beset by little engagements with friends and acquaintances lately, and these, with the preparations for our journey, have been rather too much for me. Mr. Lewes is acting on the advice of Sir Henry Holland in giving up zoologizing for the present, because it obliges him to hang down his head. That is the reason we go inland, and not to the coast, as I think I hinted to you that we expected to do. You are sympathetic enough to be glad to hear that we have had thoroughly cheerful and satisfactory letters from both our boys in Natal. They are established in their purchased farm, and are very happy together in their work. Impossible for mortals to have less trouble than we. I should have written to you earlier this week--for we start to-morrow--but that I have been laid prostrate with crushing headache one half of my time, and always going out or seeing some one the other half. Farewell, dear. Don't write unless you have a real desire to gossip with me a little about yourself and our mutual friends. You know I always like to have news of you, but I shall not think it unkind--I shall only think you have other things to do--if you are silent. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _July 29._--We went to Dover this evening as the start on a journey into Germany (North). _Oct. 1._--We returned home after revisiting the scenes of cherished memories--Ilmenau, Dresden, and Berlin. Of new places we have seen Wetzlar, Cassel, Eisenach, and Hanover. At Ilmenau I wrote Fedalma's soliloquy after her scene with Silva, and the following dialogue between her and Juan. At Dresden I rewrote the whole scene between her and Zarca. _Oct. 9._--Reading "Los Judios en Espâna," Percy's "Reliques," "Isis," occasionally aloud. _Oct. 10._--Reading the "Iliad," Book III. Finished "Los Judios en Espâna," a wretchedly poor book. _Oct. 11._--Began again Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella." _Oct. 19._--George returned last evening from a walking expedition in Surrey with Mr. Spencer. This entry is an interesting one to me, as it fixes the date of the first acquaintance with my family. Mr. Herbert Spencer was an old friend of ours, and in the course of their walk he and Mr. Lewes happened to pass through Weybridge, where my mother at that time lived. They came to dinner. Mr. Lewes, with his wonderful social powers, charmed all, and they passed a delightful evening. I was myself in America at the time, where I was in business as a banker at New York. My eldest sister had just then published a little volume of poems,[1] which was kindly received by the press. On the invitation of Mr. Lewes she went shortly afterwards to see George Eliot, then in the zenith of her fame; nor did she ever forget the affectionate manner in which the great author greeted her. This was the beginning of a close friendship between the families, which lasted, and increased in intimacy, to the end. Mr. Spencer, in writing to tell me that it was he who first made Mr. Lewes acquainted with George Eliot, adds, "You will perhaps be struck by the curious coincidence that it was also by me that Lewes was introduced to your family at Weybridge and remoter issues entailed." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Oct. 1867.] Before I got your letter I was about to write to you and direct your attention to an article in the forthcoming (October) number of the _Quarterly Review_, on the Talmud. You really must go out of your way to read it. It is written by one of the greatest Oriental scholars, the man among living men who probably knows the most about the Talmud; and you will appreciate the pregnancy of the article. There are also beautiful, soul-cheering things selected for quotation. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _Oct. 31._--I have now inserted all that I think of for the first part of the "Spanish Gypsy." On Monday I wrote three new Lyrics. I have also rewritten the first scenes in the gypsy camp, to the end of the dialogue between Juan and Fedalma. But I have determined to make the commencement of the second part continue the picture of what goes forward in Bedmar. _Nov. 1._--Began this morning Part II. "Silva was marching homeward," etc. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th Nov. 1867.] About putting Fedalma in type. There would be advantages, but also disadvantages; and on these latter I wish to consult you. I have more than three thousand lines ready in the order I wish them to stand in, and it would be good to have them in print to read them critically. Defects reveal themselves more fully in type, and emendations might be more conveniently made on proofs, since I have given up the idea of copying the MS. as a whole. On the other hand, _could the thing be kept private when it had once been in the printing-office_? And I particularly wish not to have it set afloat, for various reasons. Among others, I want to keep myself free from all inducements to premature publication; I mean, publication before I have given my work as much revision as I can hope to give it while my mind is still nursing it. Beyond this, delay would be useless. The theory of laying by poems for nine years may be a fine one, but it could not answer for me to apply it. I could no more live through one of my books a second time than I can live through last year again. But I like to keep checks on myself, and not to create external temptations to do what I should think foolish in another. If you thought it possible to secure us against the oozing out of proofs and gossip, the other objections would be less important. One difficulty is, that in my MS. I have frequently two readings of the same passage, and, being uncertain which of them is preferable, I wish them both to stand for future decision. But perhaps this might be managed in proof. The length of the poem is at present uncertain, but I feel so strongly what Mr. Lewes insists on, namely, the evil of making it too long, that I shall set it before me as a duty not to make it more than nine thousand lines, and shall be glad if it turns out a little shorter. Will you think over the whole question? I am sure your mind will supply any prudential considerations that I may have omitted. I am vexed by the non-success of the serial edition of the works. It is not, Heaven knows, that I read my own books or am puffed up about them, but I have been of late quite astonished by the strengthening testimonies that have happened to come to me of people who care about every one of my books, and continue to read them--especially young men, who are just the class I care most to influence. But what sort of data can one safely go upon with regard to the success of editions? "Felix Holt" is immensely tempted by your suggestion,[2] but George Eliot is severely admonished by his domestic critic not to scatter his energies. Mr. Lewes sends his best regards. He is in high spirits about the poem. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _Nov. 22._--Began an "Address to the Working Men, by Felix Holt," at Blackwood's repeated request. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1867.] Yes, indeed--when I do _not_ reciprocate "chaos is come again." I was quite sure your letter would come, and was grateful beforehand. There is a scheme on foot for a Woman's College, or, rather, University, to be built between London and Cambridge, and to be in connection with the Cambridge University, sharing its professors, examinations, and degrees! _Si muove._ [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st Dec. (?) 1867.] I have written to Miss Davies to ask her to come to see me on Tuesday. I am much occupied just now, but the better education of women is one of the objects about which I have _no doubt_, and shall rejoice if this idea of a college can be carried out. I see Miss Julia Smith's beautiful handwriting, and am glad to think of her as your guardian angel. The author of the glorious article on the Talmud _is_ "that bright little man" Mr. Deutsch--a very dear, delightful creature. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _Dec. 4._--Sent off the MS. of the "Address" to Edinburgh. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Dec. 1867.] I agree with you about the phrase "Masters of the country."[3] I wrote that part twice, and originally I distinctly said that the epithet was false. Afterwards I left that out, preferring to make a stronger _argumentum ad hominem_, in case any workman believed himself a future master. I think it will be better for you to write a preliminary note, washing your hands of any over-trenchant statements on the part of the well-meaning Radical. I much prefer that you should do so. Whatever you agree with will have the advantage of not coming from one who can be suspected of being a special pleader. What you say about Fedalma is very cheering. But I am chiefly anxious about the road still untravelled--the road I have still _zurück zu legen_. Mr. Lewes has to request several proofs of Fedalma, to facilitate revision. But I will leave him to say how many. We shall keep them strictly to ourselves, you may be sure, so that three or four will be enough--one for him, one for me, and one for the resolution of our differences. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood 12th Dec. 1867.] I am very grateful to you for your generous words about my work. That you not only feel so much sympathy, but are moved to express it so fully, is a real help to me. I am very glad to have had the revise of the "Address." I feel the danger of not being understood. Perhaps, by a good deal longer consideration and gradual shaping, I might have put the ideas into a more concrete, easy form. Mr. Lewes read the proof of the poem all through to himself for the first time last night, and expressed great satisfaction in the impression it produced. Your suggestion of having it put into type is a benefit for which we have reason to be obliged to you. I cannot help saying again that it is a strong cordial to me to have such letters as yours, and to know that I have such a _first reader_ as you. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _Dec. 21._--Finished reading "Averroës and Averroisme" and "Les Médicins Juifs." Reading "First Principles." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Dec. 1867.] Our Christmas will be very quiet. On the 27th Mr. Lewes means to start on a solitary journey to Bonn, and perhaps to Würzburg, for anatomical purposes. I don't mean that he is going to offer himself as an anatomical subject, but that he wants to get answers to some questions bearing on the functions of the nerves. It is a bad time for him to travel in, but he hopes to be at home again in ten days or a fortnight, and _I_ hope the run will do him good rather than harm. [Sidenote: Journal, 1867.] _Dec. 25._--George and I dined happily alone; he better for weeks than he has been all the summer before; I more ailing than usual, but with much mental consolation, part of it being the delight he expresses in my poem, of which the first part is now in print. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1867.] Thanks for the pretty remembrance. You were not unthought of before it came. Now, however, I rouse all my courage under the thick fog to tell you my inward wish--which is that the new year, as it travels on towards its old age, may bring you many satisfactions undisturbed by bodily ailment. Mr. Lewes is going to-morrow on an unprecedented expedition--a rapid run to Bonn, to make some anatomical researches with Professor Schutze there. If he needs more than he can get at Bonn, he may go to Heidelberg and Würzburg. But in any case he will not take more than a fortnight. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Dec. 1867.] Public questions which, by a sad process of reduction, become piteous private questions, hang cloudily over all prospects. The state of Europe, the threat of a general war, the starvation of multitudes--one can't help thinking of these things at one's breakfast. Nevertheless, there is much enjoyment going on, and abundance of rosy children's parties. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 30th Dec. 1867.] It is very good and sweet of you to propose to come round for me on Sunday, and I shall cherish particularly the remembrance of that kindness. But, on our reading your letter, Mr. Lewes objected, on grounds which I think just, to my going to any public manifestation without him, since his absence could not be divined by outsiders. I am companioned by dyspepsia, and feel life a struggle under the leaden sky. Mme. Bodichon writes that in Sussex the air is cold and clear, and the woods and lanes dressed in wintry loveliness of fresh, grassy patches, mingled with the soft grays and browns of the trees and hedges. Mr. Harrison shed the agreeable light of his kind eyes on me yesterday for a brief space; but I hope I was more endurable to my visitors than to myself, else I think they will not come again. I object strongly to myself, as a bundle of unpleasant sensations with a palpitating heart and awkward manners. Impossible to imagine the large charity I have for people who detest me. But don't you be one of them. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Dec. 1867.] I am much obliged to you for your handsome check, and still more gratified that the "Address" has been a satisfaction to you. I am very glad to hear of your projected visit to town, and shall hope to have a good batch of MS. for you to carry back. Mr. Lewes is in an unprecedented state of delight with the poem, now that he is reading it with close care. He says he is astonished that he can't find more faults. He is especially pleased with the sense of variety it gives; and this testimony is worth the more because he urged me to put the poem by (in 1865) on the ground of monotony. He is really exultant about it now, and after what you have said to me I know this will please you. Hearty wishes that the coming year may bring you much good, and that the "Spanish Gypsy" may contribute a little to that end. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1867, TO DECEMBER, 1867. Letter to Madame Bodichon from Bordeaux--Madame Mohl--Scherer--Renan--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Biarritz--Delight in Comte's "Politique"--Gratitude to him for illumination--Learning Spanish--Papers in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Saveney--Letter to Madame Bodichon from Barcelona--Description of scenery--Pampeluna--Saragossa--Lerida--Letter to F. Harrison from Granada--The vindication of the _law_ in "Felix Holt"--Spanish travelling--Letter to John Blackwood from Granada--Alicante--Granada--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Biarritz--Delight of the journey--Madrid pictures--Return to the Priory--Letter to John Blackwood--"Felix Holt"--Cheap edition of novels--"Spanish Gypsy"--Dr. Congreve's Lectures on Positivism--Letter to Miss Hennell--Historical Portraits at South Kensington--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Women's claims--Comte's position--Fortnight's Visit to the Isle of Wight--Letter of adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Two months' visit to North Germany--Return to England--Reading on Spanish subjects--Mr. Lewes and Mr. Spencer at Weybridge--Acquaintance with Mrs. Cross and family--Letter to Miss Hennell--Deutsch's article on the Talmud--Letter to Blackwood about putting "Spanish Gypsy" in type--"Address to Workingmen, by Felix Holt"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Girton College--Letter to Madame Bodichon--The higher education of women--Letter to John Blackwood on the "Address"--Christmas day at the Priory--Letter to Miss Hennell--Visit of Mr. Lewes to Bonn--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Depression--Letter to John Blackwood--Mr. Lewes on "Spanish Gypsy." FOOTNOTES: [1] "An Old Story and Other Poems," by Elizabeth D. Cross. [2] "Address to the Working Men." [3] In the "Address to the Working Men." CHAPTER XV. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 9th Jan. 1868.] There is a good genius presiding over your gifts--they are so felicitous. You always give me something of which I have felt the want beforehand, and can use continually. It is eminently so with my pretty mittens; there was no little appendage I wanted more; and they are just as warm at the wrist as I could have wished them to be--warming, too, as a mark of affection at a time when all cheering things are doubly welcome. Mr. Lewes came home last night, and you may imagine that I am glad. Between the bad weather, bad health, and solitude, I have been so far unlike the wicked that I have not flourished like the green bay-tree. To make amends, he--Mr. Lewes, not the wicked--has had a brilliant time, gained great instruction, and seen some admirable men, who have received him warmly. I go out of doors very little, but I shall open the drawer and look at my mittens on the days when I don't put them on. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _Jan._--Engaged in writing Part III. of "Spanish Gypsy." _Feb. 27._--Returned last evening from a very pleasant visit to Cambridge.[4] I am still only at p. 5 of Part IV., having had a wretched month of _malaise_. _March 1._--Finished Guillemin on the "Heavens," and the 4th Book of the "Iliad." I shall now read Grote. _March 6._--Reading Lubbock's "Prehistoric Ages." _March 8._--Saturday concert. Joachim and Piatti, with Schubert's Ottett. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 17th Mch. 1868.] We go to-morrow morning to Torquay for a month, and I can't bear to go without saying a word of farewell to you. How sadly little we have seen each other this winter! It will not be so any more, I hope, will it? We are both much in need of the change, for Mr. Lewes has got rather out of sorts again lately. When we come back I shall ask you to come and look at us before the bloom is off. I should like to know how you all are; but you have been so little inspired for note-writing lately that I am afraid to ask you to send me a line to the post-office at Torquay. I really deserve nothing of my friends at present. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Mch. 1868.] I don't know whether you have ever seen Torquay. It is pretty, but not comparable to Ilfracombe; and, like all other easily accessible sea-places, it is sadly spoiled by wealth and fashion, which leave no secluded walks, and tattoo all the hills with ugly patterns of roads and villa gardens. Our selfishness does not adapt itself well to these on-comings of the millennium. I am reading about savages and semi-savages, and think that our religious oracles would do well to study savage ideas by a method of comparison with their own. Also, I am studying that semi-savage poem, the "Iliad." How enviable it is to be a classic. When a verse in the "Iliad" bears six different meanings, and nobody knows which is the right, a commentator finds this equivocalness in itself admirable! [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, end of Mch. 1868.] Mr. Lewes quite agrees with you, that it is desirable to announce the poem. His suggestion is, that it should be simply announced as "a poem" first, and then a little later as "The Spanish Gypsy," in order to give a new detail for observation in the second announcement. I chose the title, "The Spanish Gypsy," a long time ago, because it is a little in the fashion of the elder dramatists, with whom I have perhaps more cousinship than with recent poets. Fedalma might be mistaken for an Italian name, which would create a definite expectation of a mistaken kind, and is, on other grounds, less to my taste than "The Spanish Gypsy." This place is becoming a little London, or London suburb. Everywhere houses and streets are being built, and Babbacombe will soon be joined to Torquay. I almost envy you the excitement of golf, which helps the fresh air to exhilarate, and gives variety of exercise. Walking can never be so good as a game--if one loves the game. But when a friend of Mr. Lewes's urges him angrily to play rackets for his health, the prospect seems dreary. We are afraid of being entangled in excursion trains, or crowds of Easter holiday-makers, in Easter week, and may possibly be driven back next Wednesday. But we are loath to have our stay so curtailed. Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards, and pities all of us who are less interested in ganglionic cells. He is in a state of beatitude about the poem. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1868.] We find a few retired walks, and are the less discontented because the weather is perfect. I hope you are sharing the delights of sunshine and moonlight. There are no waves here, as you know; but under such skies as we are having, sameness is so beautiful that we find no fault, and there is a particular hill at Babbacombe of the richest Spanish red. On the whole, we are glad we came here, having avoided all trouble in journeying and settling. But we should not come again without special call, for in a few years all the hills will be parts of a London suburb. How glorious this weather is for the hard workers who are looking forward to their Easter holiday! But for ourselves, we are rather afraid of the railway stations in holiday time. Certainly, we are ill prepared for what Tennyson calls the "To-be," and it is good that we shall soon pass from this objective existence. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th April, 1868.] I think Ruskin has not been encouraged about women by his many and persistent attempts to teach them. He seems to have found them wanting in real scientific interest--bent on sentimentalizing in everything. What I should like to be sure of, as a result of higher education for women--a result that will come to pass over my grave--is their recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labor which needs to be done by women, and which is now either not done at all or done wretchedly. No good can come to women, more than to any class of male mortals, while each aims at doing the highest kind of work, which ought rather to be held in sanctity as what only the few can do well. I believe, and I want it to be well shown, that a more thorough education will tend to do away with the odious vulgarity of our notions about functions and employment, and to propagate the true gospel, that the deepest disgrace is to insist on doing work for which we are unfit--to do work of any sort badly. There are many points of this kind that want being urged, but they do not come well from me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 17th April, 1868.] Your letter came just at the right time to greet us. Thanks for that pretty remembrance. We are glad to be at home again with our home comforts around us, though we became deeply in love with Torquay in the daily heightening of spring beauties, and the glory of perpetual blue skies. The eight hours' journey (one hour more than we paid for) was rather disturbing; and, I think, Mr. Lewes has got more zoological experience than health from our month's delight--but a delight it really has been to us to have perfect quiet with the red hills, the sunshine, and the sea. I shall be absorbed for the next fortnight, so that I cannot allow myself the sort of pleasure you kindly project for us; and when May begins, I want you to come and stay a night with us. I shall be ready by and by for such holiday-making, and you must be good to me. Will you give Dr. Congreve my thanks for his pamphlet, which I read at Torquay with great interest? All protests tell, however slowly and imperceptibly, and a protest against the doctrine that England is to keep Ireland under all conditions was what I had wished to be made. But in this matter he will have much more important concurrence than mine. I am bearing much in mind the great task of the translation. When it is completed we shall be able and glad to do what we were not able to do in the case of the "Discours Préliminaire," namely, to take our share, if we may, in the expenses of publication. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _April 16._--Returned home, bringing Book IV. finished. _April 18._--Went with Mr. Pigott to see Holman Hunt's great picture, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st April, 1868.] I send you by to-day's post the MS. of Book IV., that it may be at hand whenever there is opportunity for getting it into print, and letting me have it in that form for correction. It is desirable to get as forward as we can, in case of the Americans asking for delay after their reception of the sheets--if they venture to make any arrangement. I shall send the MS. of Book V. (the last) as soon as headache will permit, but that is an uncertain limit. We returned from Torquay on the 16th, leaving the glorious weather behind us. We were more in love with the place on a better acquaintance: the weather, and the spring buds, and the choirs of birds, made it seem more of a paradise to us every day. The poem will be less tragic than I threatened: Mr. Lewes has prevailed on me to return to my original conception, and give up the additional development, which I determined on subsequently. The poem is rather shorter in consequence. Don't you think that my artistic deference and pliability deserve that it should also be better in consequence? I now end it as I determined to end it when I first conceived the story. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _April 25._--Finished the last dialogue between Silva and Fedalma. Mr. and Mrs. Burne Jones dined with us. _April 29._--Finished "The Spanish Gypsy." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th Aug. 1868.] I send you by to-day's post the conclusion of the poem in MS., and the eighteen sheets of revise. The last book is brief, but I may truly use the old epigram--that it would have taken less time to make it longer. It is a great bore that the name of my heroine is wrongly spelled in all the earlier sheets. It is a fresh proof of the fallibility of our impressions as to our own doings, that I would have confidently affirmed the name to be spelled Fedalma (as it ought to be) in my manuscript. Yet I suppose I should have affirmed falsely, for the _i_ occurs in the slips constantly. As I shall not see these paged sheets again, will you charitably assure me that the alterations are safely made? Among my wife's papers were four or five pages of MS. headed, "Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General." There is no evidence as to the date at which this fragment was written, and it seems to have been left unfinished. But there was evidently some care to preserve it; and as I think she would not have objected to its presentation, I give it here exactly as it stands. It completes the history of the poem. [Sidenote: Notes on "The Spanish Gypsy."] The subject of "The Spanish Gypsy" was originally suggested to me by a picture which hangs in the Scuola di' San Rocco at Venice, over the door of the large Sala containing Tintoretto's frescoes. It is an Annunciation, said to be by Titian. Of course I had seen numerous pictures of this subject before; and the subject had always attracted me. But in this my second visit to the Scuola di' San Rocco, this small picture of Titian's, pointed out to me for the first time, brought a new train of thought. It occurred to me that here was a great dramatic motive of the same class as those used by the Greek dramatists, yet specifically differing from them. A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life--marriage--about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from that of ordinary womanhood. She is chosen, not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions: she obeys. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." Here, I thought, is a subject grander than that of Iphigenia, and it has never been used. I came home with this in my mind, meaning to give the motive a clothing in some suitable set of historical and local conditions. My reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax, and when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her among the gypsies. I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage. I could not use the Jews or the Moors, because the facts of their history were too conspicuously opposed to the working-out of my catastrophe. Meanwhile the subject had become more and more pregnant to me. I saw it might be taken as a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions; for even in cases of just antagonism to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the whole background of the particular struggle is made up of our inherited nature. Suppose for a moment that our conduct at great epochs was determined entirely by reflection, without the immediate intervention of feeling, which supersedes reflection, our determination as to the right would consist in an adjustment of our individual needs to the dire necessities of our lot, partly as to our natural constitution, partly as sharers of life with our fellow-beings. Tragedy consists in the terrible difficulty of this adjustment-- "The dire strife of poor Humanity's afflicted will, Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny." Looking at individual lots, I seemed to see in each the same story, wrought out with more or less of tragedy, and I determined the elements of my drama under the influence of these ideas. In order to judge properly of the dramatic structure it must not be considered first in the light of doctrinal symbolism, but in the light of a tragedy representing some grand collision in the human lot. And it must be judged accordingly. A good tragic subject must represent a possible, sufficiently probable, not a common, action; and to be really tragic, it must represent irreparable collision between the individual and the general (in differing degrees of generality). It is the individual with whom we sympathize, and the general of which we recognize the irresistible power. The truth of this test will be seen by applying it to the greatest tragedies. The collision of Greek tragedy is often that between hereditary, entailed Nemesis and the peculiar individual lot, awakening our sympathy, of the particular man or woman whom the Nemesis is shown to grasp with terrific force. Sometimes, as in the Oresteia, there is the clashing of two irreconcilable requirements, two duties, as we should say in these times. The murder of the father must be avenged by the murder of the mother, which must again be avenged. These two tragic relations of the individual and general, and of two irreconcilable "oughts," may be--will be--seen to be almost always combined. The Greeks were not taking an artificial, entirely erroneous standpoint in their art--a standpoint which disappeared altogether with their religion and their art. They had the same essential elements of life presented to them as we have, and their art symbolized these in grand schematic forms. The Prometheus represents the ineffectual struggle to redeem the small and miserable race of man, against the stronger adverse ordinances that govern the frame of things with a triumphant power. Coming to modern tragedies, what is it that makes Othello a great tragic subject? A story simply of a jealous husband is elevated into a most pathetic tragedy by the hereditary conditions of Othello's lot, which give him a subjective ground for distrust. Faust, Rigoletto (Le Roi s'Amuse), Brutus. It might be a reasonable ground of objection against the whole structure of "The Spanish Gypsy" if it were shown that the action is outrageously improbable--lying outside all that can be congruously conceived of human actions. It is _not_ a reasonable ground of objection that they would have done better to act otherwise, any more than it is a reasonable objection against the Iphigenia that Agamemnon would have done better not to sacrifice his daughter. As renunciations coming under the same great class, take the renunciation of marriage, where marriage cannot take place without entailing misery on the children. A tragedy has not to expound why the individual must give way to the general; it has to show that it is compelled to give way; the tragedy consisting in the struggle involved, and often in the entirely calamitous issue in spite of a grand submission. Silva presents the tragedy of entire rebellion; Fedalma of a grand submission, which is rendered vain by the effects of Silva's rebellion. Zarca, the struggle for a great end, rendered vain by the surrounding conditions of life. Now, what is the fact about our individual lots? A woman, say, finds herself on the earth with an inherited organization; she may be lame, she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease; she may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive in the community where she is born, etc. One may go on for a long while without reaching the limits of the commonest inherited misfortunes. It is almost a mockery to say to such human beings, "Seek your own happiness." The utmost approach to well-being that can be made in such a case is through large resignation and acceptance of the inevitable, with as much effort to overcome any disadvantage as good sense will show to be attended with a likelihood of success. Any one may say, that is the dictate of mere rational reflection. But calm can, in hardly any human organism, be attained by rational reflection. Happily, we are not left to that. Love, pity, constituting sympathy, and generous joy with regard to the lot of our fellow-men comes in--has been growing since the beginning--enormously enhanced by wider vision of results, by an imagination actively interested in the lot of mankind generally; and these feelings become piety--_i.e._, loving, willing submission and heroic Promethean effort towards high possibilities, which may result from our individual life. There is really no moral "sanction" but this inward impulse. The will of God is the same thing as the will of other men, compelling us to work and avoid what they have seen to be harmful to social existence. Disjoined from any perceived good, the divine will is simply so much as we have ascertained of the facts of existence which compel obedience at our peril. Any other notion comes from the supposition of arbitrary revelation. That favorite view, expressed so often in Clough's poems, of doing duty in blindness as to the result, is likely to deepen the substitution of egoistic yearnings for really moral impulses. We cannot be utterly blind to the results of duty, since that cannot be duty which is not already judged to be for human good. To say the contrary is to say that mankind have reached no inductions as to what is for their good or evil. The art which leaves the soul in despair is laming to the soul, and is denounced by the healthy sentiment of an active community. The consolatory elements in "The Spanish Gypsy" are derived from two convictions or sentiments which so conspicuously pervade it that they may be said to be its very warp, on which the whole action is woven. These are: (1) The importance of individual deeds. (2) The all-sufficiency of the soul's passions in determining sympathetic action. In Silva is presented the claim of fidelity to social pledges. In Fedalma the claim constituted by an hereditary lot less consciously shared. With regard to the supremacy of love: if it were a fact without exception that man or woman never did renounce the joys of love, there could never have sprung up a notion that such renunciation could present itself as a duty. If no parents had ever cared for their children, how could parental affection have been reckoned among the elements of life? But what are the facts in relation to this matter? Will any one say that faithfulness to the marriage tie has never been regarded as a duty, in spite of the presence of the profoundest passion experienced after marriage? Is Guinivere's conduct the type of duty? [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 7th May, 1868.] Yes, I am at rest now--only a few pages of revise to look at more. My chief excitement and pleasure in the work are over: for when I have once written anything, and it is gone out of my power, I think of it as little as possible. Next to the doing of the thing, of course, Mr. Lewes's delight in it is the cream of all sympathy, though I care enough about the sympathy of others to be very grateful for any they give me. Don't you imagine how the people who consider writing simply as a money-getting profession will despise me for choosing a work by which I could only get hundreds, where for a novel I could get thousands? I cannot help asking you to admire what my husband is, compared with many possible husbands--I mean, in urging me to produce a poem rather than anything in a worldly sense more profitable. I expect a good deal of disgust to be felt towards me in many quarters for doing what was not looked for from me, and becoming unreadable to many who have hitherto found me readable and debatable. Religion and novels every ignorant person feels competent to give an opinion upon, but _en fait de poésie_, a large number of them "only read Shakespeare." But enough of that. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 25th May, 1868.] Before we set off to Germany I want to tell you that a copy of "The Spanish Gypsy" will be sent to you. If there had been time before our going away I should have written on the fly-leaf that it was offered by the author "in grateful remembrance." For I especially desire that you should understand my reasons for asking you to accept the book to be retrospective and not prospective. And I am going out of reach of all letters, so that you are free from any need to write to me, and may let the book lie till you like to open it. I give away my books only by exception, and in venturing to make you an exceptional person in this matter, I am urged by the strong wish to express my value for the help and sympathy you gave me two years ago. The manuscript of "The Spanish Gypsy" bears the following inscription: "To my dear--every day dearer--Husband." [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 26th (?) May, 1868.] Yes, indeed, I not only remember your letter, but have always kept it at hand, and have read it many times. Within these latter months I have seemed to see in the distance a possible poem shaped on your idea. But it would be better for you to encourage the growth towards realization in your own mind, rather than trust to transplantation. My own faint conception is that of a frankly Utopian construction, freeing the poet from all local embarrassments. Great epics have always been more or less of this character--only the construction has been of the past, not of the future. Write to me _Poste Restante_, Baden-Baden, within the next fortnight. My head will have got clearer then. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _May 26._--We set out this evening on our journey to Baden, spending the night at Dover. Our route was by Tournay, Liége, Bonn, and Frankfort, to Baden, where we stayed nine days; then to Petersthal, where we stayed three weeks; then to Freiburg, St. Märgen, Basle, Thun, and Interlaken. From Interlaken we came by Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Dijon, to Paris and Folkestone. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th July, 1868.] We got your letter yesterday here among the peaceful mountain-tops. After ascending gradually (in a carriage) for nearly four hours, we found ourselves in a region of grass, corn, and pine woods, so beautifully varied that we seem to be walking in a great park laid out for our special delight. The monks, as usual, found out the friendly solitude, and this place of St. Märgen was originally nothing but an Augustinian monastery. About three miles off is another place of like origin, called St. Peter's, formerly a Benedictine monastery, and still used as a place of preparation for the Catholic priesthood. The monks have all vanished, but the people are devout Catholics. At every half-mile by the roadside is a carefully kept crucifix; and last night, as we were having our supper in the common room of the inn, we suddenly heard sounds that seemed to me like those of an accordion. "Is that a zittern?" said Mr. Lewes to the German lady by his side. "No--it is prayer." The servants, by themselves--the host and hostess were in the same room with us--were saying their evening prayers, men's and women's voices blending in unusually correct harmony. The same loud prayer is heard at morning, noon, and evening, from the shepherds and workers in the fields. We suppose that the believers in Mr. Home and in Madame Rachel would pronounce these people "grossly superstitious." The land is cultivated by rich peasant proprietors, and the people here, as in Petersthal, look healthy and contented. This really adds to one's pleasure in seeing natural beauties. In North Germany, at Ilmenau, we were constantly pained by meeting peasants who looked underfed and miserable. Unhappily, the weather is too cold and damp, and our accommodations are too scanty, under such circumstances, for us to remain here and enjoy the endless walks and the sunsets that would make up for other negatives in fine, warm weather. We return to Freiburg to-morrow, and from thence we shall go on by easy stages through Switzerland, by Thun and Vevay to Geneva, where I want to see my old friends once more. We shall be so constantly on the move that it might be a vain trouble on your part to shoot another letter after such flying birds. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _July 23._--Arrived at home (from Baden journey). [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1868.] We got home last night--sooner than we expected, because we gave up the round by Geneva, as too long and exciting. I dare say the three weeks since we heard from you seem very short to you, passed amid your usual occupations. To us they seem long, for we have been constantly changing our scene. Our two months have been spent delightfully in seeing fresh natural beauties, and with the occasional cheering influence of kind people. But I think we were hardly ever, except in Spain, so long ignorant of home sayings and doings, for we have been chiefly in regions innocent even of _Galignani_. The weather with us has never been oppressively hot; and storms or quiet rains have been frequent. But our bit of burned-up lawn is significant of the dryness here. I believe I did not thank you for the offer of "Kinglake," which we gratefully accept. And will you kindly order a copy of the poem to be sent to Gerald Massey, Hemel-Hempstead. A friendly gentleman at Belfast sends me a list of emendations for some of my verses, which are very characteristic and amusing. I hope you have kept well through the heat. We are come back in great force, for such feeble wretches. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th July, 1868.] As to the reviews, we expected them to be written by omniscient personages, but we did _not_ expect so bad a review as that Mr. Lewes found in the _Pall Mall_. I have read no notice except that in the _Spectator_, which was modest in tone. A very silly gentleman, Mr. Lewes says, undertakes to admonish me in the _Westminster_; and he thinks the best _literary_ notice of the poem that has come before him is in the _Athenæum_. After all, I think there would have been good reason to doubt that the poem had either novelty or any other considerable intrinsic reason to justify its being written, if the periodicals had cried out "Hosanna!" I am sure you appreciate all the conditions better than I can, after your long experience of the relations between authors and critics. I am serene, because I only expected the unfavorable. To-day the heat is so great that it is hardly possible even to read a book that requires any thought. London is a bad exchange for the mountains. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1868.] I enclose a list of corrections for the reprint. I am indebted to my friendly correspondent from Belfast for pointing out several oversights, which I am ashamed of, after all the proof-reading. But, among the well-established truths of which I never doubt, the fallibility of my own brain stands first. I suppose Mudie and the other librarians will not part with their copies of the poems quite as soon as they would part with their more abundant copies of a novel. And this supposition, if warranted, would be an encouragement to reprint another moderate edition at the same price. Perhaps, before a cheaper edition is prepared, I may add to the corrections, but at present my mind resists strongly the effort to go back on its old work. I think I never mentioned to you that the occasional use of irregular verses, and especially verses of twelve syllables, has been a principle with me, and is found in all the finest writers of blank verse. I mention it now because, as you have a certain _solidarité_ with my poetical doings, I would not have your soul vexed by the detective wisdom of critics. Do you happen to remember that saying of Balzac's, "When I want the world to praise my novels I write a drama; when I want them to praise my drama I write a novel"? On the whole, however, I should think I have more to be grateful for than to grumble at. Mr. Lewes read me out last night some very generous passages from the _St. Paul's Magazine_. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _August._--Reading 1st book of Lucretius, 6th book of the "Iliad," "Samson Agonistes," Warton's "History of English Poetry," Grote, 2d volume, "Marcus Aurelius," "Vita Nuova," vol. iv. chap. i. of the "Politique Positive," Guest on "English Rhythms," Maurice's "Lectures on Casuistry." _Sept. 19._--We returned from a visit to Yorkshire. On Monday we went to Leeds, and were received by Dr. Clifford Allbut, with whom we stayed till the middle of the day on Wednesday. Then we went by train to Ilkley, and from thence took a carriage to Bolton. The weather had been gray for two days, but on this evening the sun shone out, and we had a delightful stroll before dinner, getting our first view of the Priory. On Thursday we spent the whole day in rambling through the woods to Barden Tower and back. Our comfortable little inn was the Red Lion, and we were tempted to lengthen our stay. But on Friday morning the sky was threatening, so we started for Newark, which we had visited in old days on our expedition to Gainsborough. At Newark we found our old inn, the Ram, opposite the ruins of the castle, and then we went for a stroll along the banks of the Trent, seeing some charming, quiet landscapes. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 20th Sept. 1868.] This note comes to greet you on your return home, but it cannot greet you so sweetly as your letter did me on our arrival from Leeds last night. I think it gave me a deeper pleasure than any I have had for a long while. I am very grateful to you for it. We went to Leeds on Monday, and stayed two days with Dr. Allbut. Dr. Bridges dined with us one day, and we had a great deal of delightful chat. But I will tell you everything when we see you. Let that be soon--will you not? We shall be glad of any arrangement that will give us the pleasure of seeing you, Dr. Congreve, and Emily, either separately or all together. Please forgive me if I seem very fussy about your all coming. I want you to understand that we shall feel it the greatest kindness in you if you will all choose to come, and also choose _how_ to come--either to lunch or dinner, and either apart or together. I hope to find that you are much the better for your journey--better both in body and soul. One has immense need of encouragement, but it seems to come more easily from the dead than from the living. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Sept. 1868.] Your letter gave an additional gusto to my tea and toast this morning. The greater confidence of the trade in subscribing for the second edition is, on several grounds, a satisfactory indication; but, as you observe, we shall be still better pleased to know that the copies are not slumbering on the counters, but having an active life in the hands of readers. I am now going carefully through the poem for the sake of correction. I have read it through once, and have at present found some ten or twelve _small_ alterations to be added to those already made. But I shall go through it again more than once, for I wish to be able to put "revised" to the third edition, and to leave nothing that my conscience is not ready to swear by. I think it will be desirable for me to see proofs. It is possible, in many closely consecutive readings, not to see errors which strike one immediately on taking up the pages after a good long interval. We are feeling much obliged for a copy of "Kinglake," which I am reading aloud to Mr. Lewes as a part of our evening's entertainment and edification, beginning again from the beginning. This week we have had perfect autumnal days, though last week, when we were in Yorkshire, we also thought that the time of outside chills and inside fires was beginning. We do not often see a place which is a good foil for London, but certainly Leeds is in a lower circle of the great town--_Inferno_. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 25th Sept. 1868.] I can imagine how delicious your country home has been under the glorious skies we have been having--glorious even in London. Yesterday we had Dr. and Mrs. Congreve, and went with them to the Zoological Gardens, and on our return, about 5 o'clock, I could not help pausing and exclaiming at the exquisite beauty of the light on Regent's Park, exalting it into something that the young Turner would have wanted to paint. We went to Leeds last week--saw your favorite, David Cox, and thought of you the while. Certainly there was nothing finer there in landscape than that Welsh funeral. Among the figure-painters, Watts and old Philip are supreme. We went on from Leeds to Bolton, and spent a day in wandering through the grand woods on the banks of the Wharfe. Altogether, our visit to Yorkshire was extremely agreeable. Our host, Dr. Allbut, is a good, clever, graceful man, enough to enable one to be cheerful under the horrible smoke of ugly Leeds; and the fine hospital, which, he says, is admirably fitted for its purpose, is another mitigation. You would like to see the tasteful, subdued ornamentation in the rooms which are to be sick wards. Each physician is accumulating ornamental objects for his own ward--chromo-lithographs, etc.--such as will soothe sick eyes. It was quite cold in that northerly region. Your picture keeps a memory of sunshine on my wall even on this dark morning. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Oct. 1868.] I have gone through the poem twice for the sake of revision, and have a crop of small corrections--only in one case extending to the insertion of a new line. But I wish to see the proof-sheets, so that "Revised by the Author" may be put in the advertisement and on the title-page. Unhappily, my health has been unusually bad since we returned from abroad, so that the time has been a good deal wasted on the endurance of _malaise_; but I am brooding over many things, and hope that coming months will not be barren. As to the criticisms, I suppose that better poets than I have gone through worse receptions. In spite of my reason and of my low expectations, I am too susceptible to all discouragement not to have been depressingly affected by some few things in the shape of criticism which I have been obliged to know. Yet I am ashamed of caring about anything that cannot be taken as strict evidence against the value of my book. So far as I have been able to understand, there is a striking disagreement among the reviewers as to what is best and what is worst; and the weight of agreement, even on the latter point, is considerably diminished by the reflection that three different reviews may be three different phases of the same gentleman, taking the opportunity of earning as many guineas as he can by making easy remarks on George Eliot. But, as dear Scott's characters say, "Let that fly stick in the wa'--when the dirt's dry, it'll rub out." I shall look at "Doubles and Quits," as you recommend. I read the two first numbers of "Madame Amelia," and thought them promising. I sympathize with your melancholy at the prospect of quitting the country; though, compared with London, beautiful Edinburgh is country. Perhaps some good, thick mists will come to reconcile you with the migration. We have been using the fine autumn days for flights into Kent between Sundays. The rich woods about Sevenoaks and Chislehurst are a delight to the eyes, and the stillness is a rest to every nerve. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _Oct. 22._--Received a letter from Blackwood, saying that "The Spanish Gypsy" must soon go into a third edition. I sent my corrections for it. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th Oct. 1868.] At last I have spirit enough in me to thank you for your valuable gift, which Emily kindly brought me in her hand. I am grateful for it--not only because the medallion[5] is a possession which I shall always hold precious, but also because you thought of me among those whom you would choose to be its owners. I hope you are able to enjoy some walking in these sunshiny mornings. We had a long drive round by Hendon and Finchley yesterday morning, and drank so much clear air and joy from the sight of trees and fields that I am quite a new-old creature. I think you will not be sorry to hear that the "Spanish Gypsy" is so nearly out of print again that the publishers are preparing a new, cheaper edition. The second edition was all bought up (subscribed for) by the booksellers the first day. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 30th Oct. 1868.] Your pretty letter is irresistible. May we then be with you on Tuesday somewhere about twelve, and return home on Wednesday by afternoon daylight? If the weather should be very cold or wet on Tuesday we must renounce or defer our pleasure, because we are both too rickety to run the risk of taking cold. So you see we are very much in need of such sweet friendliness as yours gives us faith in, to keep us cheerful under the burden of the flesh. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _Nov. 3._--Went to dine and sleep at the Congreves, at Wandsworth. _Nov. 4._--We set off for Sheffield, where we went over a great iron and steel factory under the guidance of Mr. Benzon. On Saturday, the 7th, we went to Matlock and stayed till Tuesday. I recognized the objects which I had seen with my father nearly thirty years before--the turn of the road at Cromford, the Arkwrights' house, and the cottages with the stone floors chalked in patterns. The landscape was still rich with autumn leaves. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Thursday evening, 12th Nov. 1868.] We got home last night after delicious days spent at Matlock. I was so renovated that my head was clearer, and I was more unconscious of my body than at the best of times for many months. But it seemed suddenly colder when we were in London, and old uneasy sensations are revisiting us both to-day. I wonder whether you will soon want to come to town, and will send me word that you will come and take shelter with us for the night? The bed is no softer and no broader; but will you not be tempted by a new carpet and a new bit of matting for your bath?--perhaps there will even be a new fender? If you want to shop, I will take you in the brougham. I think you will be just able to make out this note, written by a sudden impulse on my knee over the fire. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 16th Nov. 1868.] No oracle would dare to predict what will be our next migration. Don't be surprised if we go to the borders of the White Sea, to escape the fitful fast and loose, hot and cold, of the London climate. We enjoyed our journey to the north. It was a great experience to me to see the stupendous iron-works at Sheffield; and then, for a variety, we went to the quiet and beauty of Matlock, and I recognized all the spots I had carried in my memory for more than five-and-twenty years. I drove through that region with my father when I was a young grig--not very full of hope about my woman's future. I am one of those perhaps exceptional people whose early, childish dreams were much less happy than the real outcome of life. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1868.] I think your birthday comes after mine; but I am determined to write beforehand to prove to you that I bear you in my thoughts without any external reminder. I suppose we are both getting too old to care about being wished _many_ happy returns of the day. We shall be content to wish each other as many more years as can carry with them some joy and calm satisfaction in the sense of living. But there is one definite prospect for you which I may fairly hope for, as I do most tenderly--the prospect that this time next year you will be looking back on your achieved work as a good seed-sowing. Some sadness there must always be in saying good-bye to a work which is done with love; but there may--I trust there _will_--be a compensating good in feeling that the thing you yearned to do is gone safely out of reach of casualties that might have cut it short. We have been to Sheffield at the seducing invitation of a friend, who showed us the miraculous iron-works there; and afterwards we turned aside to beautiful Matlock, where I found again the spots, the turns of road, the rows of stone cottages, the rushing river Derwent, and the Arkwright mills--among which I drove with my father when I was in my teens. We had glorious weather, and I was quite regenerated by the bracing air. Our friend Mr. Spencer is growing younger with the years. He really looks brighter and more enjoying than he ever did before, since he was in the really young, happy time of fresh discussion and inquiry. His is a friendship which wears well, because of his truthfulness. He always asks with sympathetic interest how you are going on. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _Nov. 22._--The return of this St. Cecilia's Day finds me in better health than has been usual with me in these last six months. But I am not yet engaged in any work that makes a higher life for me--a life that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and decaying. It is a day for resolves and determinations. I am meditating the subject of Timoleon. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 30th Nov. 1868.] I like to think of you painting the physiological charts, although they tire your eyes a little; for you must be sure that the good of such work is of a kind that goes deep into young lives. "Fearfully and wonderfully made" are words quite unshaken by any theory as to the making; and I think a great awe in the contemplation of man's delicate structure, freighted with terrible destinies, is one of the most important parts of education. A much-writing acquaintance of ours one day expressed his alarm for "the masses" at the departure of a religion which had _terror_ in it. Surely terror is provided for sufficiently in this life of ours--if only the dread could be directed towards the really dreadful. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 12th Dec. 1868.] We have been having a little company, and are rejoicing to think that our duties of this sort are done for the present. We like our studies and our dual solitude too well to feel company desirable more than one day a-week. I wish our affection may be with you as some little cheering influence through the dark months. We hardly estimate enough the difference of feeling that would come to us if we did not imagine friendly souls scattered here and there in places that make the chief part of the world so far as we have known it. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Dec. 1868.] Tell Dr. Congreve that the "mass of positivism," in the shape of "The Spanish Gypsy," is so rapidly finding acceptance with the public that the second edition, being all sold, the third, just published, has already been demanded to above 700. Do not think that I am becoming an egotistical author. The news concerns the doctrine, not the writer. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Dec. 1868.] I am moved to congratulate you on writing against the ballot with such admirably good sense--having just read your "slip" at the breakfast-table. It has been a source of amazement to me that men acquainted with practical life can believe in the suppression of bribery by the ballot, as if bribery in all its Protean forms could ever disappear by means of a single external arrangement. They might as well say that our female vanity would disappear at an order that women should wear felt hats and cloth dresses. It seems to me that you have put the main unanswerable arguments against the ballot with vigorous brevity. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 29th Dec. 1868.] Thanks for letting me know about the meeting. I shall not be able to join it bodily, but I am glad always to have the possibility of being with you in thought. I have a twofold sympathy on the occasion, for I cannot help entering specially into your own wifely anxieties, and I shall be glad to be assured that Dr. Congreve has borne the excitement without being afterwards conscious of an excessive strain. [Sidenote: Journal, 1868.] _Dec. 30._--I make to-day the last record that I shall enter of the old year 1868. It has been as rich in blessings as any preceding year of our double life, and I enjoy a more and more even cheerfulness and continually increasing power of dwelling on the good that is given to me and dismissing the thought of small evils. The chief event of the year to us has been the publication and friendly reception by the public of "The Spanish Gypsy." The greatest happiness (after our growing love) which has sprung and flowed onward during the latter part of the year is George's interest in his psychological inquiries. I have, perhaps, gained a little higher ground and firmer footing in some studies, notwithstanding the yearly loss of retentive power. We have made some new friendships that cheer us with the sense of new admiration of actual living beings whom we know in the flesh, and who are kindly disposed towards us. And we have had no real trouble. I wish we were not in a minority of our fellow-men! I desire no added blessing for the coming year but this--that I may do some good, lasting work, and make both my outward and inward habits less imperfect--that is, more directly tending to the best uses of life. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 31st Dec. 1868.] Many thanks for the check, which I received yesterday afternoon. Mr. Lewes is eminently satisfied with the sales; and, indeed, it does appear from authoritative testimony that the number sold is unusually large even for what is called a successful poem. The cheap edition of the novels is so exceptionally attractive in print, paper, and binding, for 3_s._ 6_d._, that I cannot help fretting a little at its not getting a more rapid sale. The fact rather puzzles me, too, in presence of the various proofs that the books really are liked. I suppose there is some mystery of reduced prices accounting for the abundant presentation of certain works and series on the bookstalls at the railways, and the absence of others, else surely those pretty volumes would have a good chance of being bought by the travellers whose taste shrinks from the diabolical red-and-yellow-pictured series. I am sure you must often be in a state of wonderment as to how the business of the world gets done so as not to ruin two thirds of the people concerned in it; for, judging from the silly propositions and requests sometimes made to me by bald-headed, experienced men, there must be a very thin allowance of wisdom to the majority of their transactions. Mr. Lewes is attracted by the biographical studies of George the Second's time; but last night, after he had done reading about Berkeley, I heard him laughing over "Doubles and Quits." It is agreeable to think that I have that bit of cheerful reading in store. Our first snow fell yesterday, and melted immediately. This morning the sun is warm on me as I write. The doctors say that the season has been horribly unhealthy, and that they have been afraid to perform some operations from the low state of vitality in the patients, due to the atmospheric conditions. This looks like very wise writing, and worthy of Molière's "Médecin." Mr. Lewes joins me in sincere good wishes to Mr. William Blackwood, as well as yourself, for the coming year--wishes for general happiness. The chief, particular wish would be that we should all in common look back next Christmas on something achieved in which we share each other's satisfaction. [Sidenote: Letter to Hon. Robert Lytton (now Lord Lytton). No date. Probably in 1868.] I am much obliged to you for mentioning, in your letter to Mr. Lewes, the two cases of inaccuracy (I fear there may be more) which you remembered in the "Spanish Gypsy." How I came to write Zincálo instead of Zíncalo is an instance which may be added to many sadder examples of that mental infirmity which makes our senses of little use to us in the presence of a strong prepossession. As soon as I had conceived my story with its gypsy element, I tried to learn all I could about the names by which the gypsies called themselves, feeling that I should occasionally need a musical name, remote from the vulgar English associations which cling to "gypsy." I rejected Gitana, because I found that the gypsies themselves held the name to be opprobrious; and Zíncalo--which, with a fine capacity for being wrong, I at once got into my head as Zincálo--seemed to be, both in sound and meaning, just what I wanted. Among the books from which I made notes was "Pott, die Zigeuner," etc.; and in these notes I find that I have copied the sign of the tonic accent in Romanó, while in the very same sentence I have not copied it in Zíncalo, though a renewed reference to Pott shows it in the one word as well as the other. But "my eyes were held"--by a demon prepossession--"so that I should not see it." Behold the fallibility of the human brain, and especially of George Eliot's. I have been questioned about my use of Andalus for Andalusia, but I had a sufficient authority for that in the "Mohammedan Dynasties," translated by Gayangos. It may interest you, who are familiar with Spanish literature, to know that after the first sketch of my book was written I read Cervantes' novel "La Gitanélla," where the hero turns gypsy for love. The novel promises well in the earlier part, but falls into sad commonplace towards the end. I have written my explanation partly to show how much I value your kind help towards correcting my error, and partly to prove that I was not careless, but simply stupid. For in authorship I hold carelessness to be a mortal sin. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1868, TO DECEMBER, 1868. Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes's return from Bonn--First visit to Cambridge--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Month's visit to Torquay--Letter to Miss Hennell--Reading the "Iliad"--Letter to John Blackwood--Title of "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Women's work--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--England and Ireland--Translation of the "Politique"--Return to London from Torquay--Letter to John Blackwood--Ending of "Spanish Gypsy"--The poem finished--George Eliot's "Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in general"--Suggestion of the poem an Annunciation by Titian, at Venice--Motive--Hereditary conditions--Gypsy race--Determination of conduct--Nature of tragedy--Collision between the individual and the general--Greek tragedy--Hereditary misfortunes--Growth of human sympathy--Moral sanction is obedience to facts--Duty what tends to human good--Letter to Mrs. Bray on the writing of poetry instead of novels--Letter to F. Harrison presenting copy of "Spanish Gypsy"--Inscription on MS. of "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to F. Harrison on suggestion of a poem--Six weeks' journey to Baden, etc.--Letter to John Blackwood from St. Märgen--Catholic worship--Return to London--Letters to John Blackwood--_Pall Mall_ review of "Spanish Gypsy"--Saying of Balzac--Letter to William Blackwood--Versification--Reading Lucretius, Homer, Milton, Warton, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Comte, Guest, Maurice--Visit to Dr. Clifford Allbut at Leeds--Visit to Newark--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Letters to John Blackwood--Second edition of "Spanish Gypsy"--"Kinglake"--Criticisms on "Spanish Gypsy"--Visit to the Congreves--Visit to Sheffield with Mr. Benzon--Matlock--Letters to Madame Bodichon and Miss Hennell on Sheffield journey--Herbert Spencer--Meditating subject of Timoleon--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Physiological charts--Letter to Madame Bodichon on influence of friends--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Positivism in "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Charles Bray on vote by ballot--Retrospect of 1868--Letter to John Blackwood--The cheap edition of novels--Letter to the Hon. Robert Lytton--Pronunciation in "Spanish Gypsy"--Cervantes' "La Gitanélla." FOOTNOTES: [4] Visit to Mr. W. G. Clark. [5] Of Comte. CHAPTER XVI. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _Jan. 1._--I have set myself many tasks for the year--I wonder how many will be accomplished?--a novel called "Middlemarch," a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems. _Jan. 23._--Since I wrote last I have finished a little poem on old Agatha. But the last week or two I have been so disturbed in health that no work prospers. I have made a little way in constructing my new tale; have been reading a little on philology; have finished the 24th Book of the "Iliad," the 1st Book of the "Faery Queene," Clough's poems, and a little about Etruscan things, in Mrs. Grey and Dennis. Aloud to G. I have been reading some Italian, Ben Jonson's "Alchemist" and "Volpone," and Bright's speeches, which I am still reading, besides the first four cantos of "Don Juan." But the last two or three days I have seemed to live under a leaden pressure--all movement, mental or bodily, is grievous to me. In the evening read aloud Bright's fourth speech on India, and a story in Italian. In the _Spectator_ some interesting facts about loss of memory and "double life." In the _Revue des Cours_, a lecture by Sir W. Thomson, of Edinburgh, on the retardation of the earth's motion round its axis. _Jan. 27._--The last two days I have been writing a rhymed poem on Boccaccio's story of "Lisa." Aloud I have read Bright's speeches, and "I Promessi Sposi." To myself I have read Mommsen's "Rome." _Feb. 6._--We went to the third concert. Madame Schumann played finely in Mendelssohn's quintet, and a trio of Beethoven's. As a solo she played the sonata in D minor. In the evening I read aloud a short speech of Bright's on Ireland, delivered twenty years ago, in which he insists that nothing will be a remedy for the woes of that country unless the Church Establishment be annulled: after the lapse of twenty years the measure is going to be adopted. Then I read aloud a bit of the "Promessi Sposi," and afterwards the _Spectator_, in which there is a deservedly high appreciation of Lowell's poems. _Feb. 14._--Finished the poem from Boccaccio. We had rather a numerous gathering of friends to-day, and among the rest came Browning, who talked and quoted admirably _à propos_ of versification. The Rector of Lincoln thinks the French have the most perfect system of versification in these modern times! _Feb. 15._--I prepared and sent off "How Lisa Loved the King" to Edinburgh. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Feb. 1869.] I have looked back to the verses in Browning's poem about Elisha, and I find no mystery in them. The foregoing context for three pages describes that function of genius which revivifies the past. Man, says Browning (I am writing from recollection of his general meaning), cannot create, but he can restore: the poet gives forth of his own spirit, and reanimates the forms that lie breathless. His use of Elisha's story is manifestly symbolical, as his mention of Faust is--the illustration which he abandons the moment before to take up that of the Hebrew seer. I presume you did not read the context yourself, but only had the two concluding verses pointed out or quoted to you by your friends. It is one of the afflictions of authorship to know that the brains which should be used in understanding a book are wasted in discussing the hastiest misconceptions about it; and I am sure you will sympathize enough in this affliction to set any one right, when you can, about this quotation from Browning. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _Feb. 20._--A glorious concert: Hallé, Joachim, and Piatti winding up with Schubert's trio. _Feb. 21._--Mr. Deutsch and Mrs. Pattison lunched with us--he in farewell before going to the East. A rather pleasant gathering of friends afterwards. _Feb. 24._--I am reading about plants, and Helmholtz on music. A new idea of a poem came to me yesterday. _March 3._--We started on our fourth visit to Italy, viâ France and the Cornice. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th May, 1869, from Paris.] I found your letter at Florence on our arrival there (on the 23d); but until now bodily ease and leisure enough to write to you have never happened to me in the same moments. Our long journey since we left home on the 3d March, seen from a point of view which, happily, no one shares with me, has been a history of ailments. In shunning the English March, we found one quite as disagreeable, without the mitigation of home comforts; and though we went even as far as Naples in search of warmth, we never found it until we settled in Rome, at the beginning of April. Here we had many days of unbroken sunshine, and enjoyed what we were never able to enjoy during our month's stay in 1860--the many glorious views of the city and the mountains. The chief novelty to us in our long route has been the sight of Assisi and Ravenna; the rest has been a revisiting of scenes already in our memories; and to most of them we have probably said our last good-bye. Enough of us and our travels. The only remarkable thing people can tell of their doings in these days is that they have stayed at home. The _Fortnightly_ lay uncut at Mr. Trollope's, and Mr. Lewes had nothing more pressing to do than to cut it open at the reply to Professor Huxley.[6] He presently came to me, and said it was excellent. It delighted him the more because he had just before, at Rome, alighted on the _Pall Mall_ account of the article, which falsely represented it as entirely apologetic. At the first spare moment I plunged into an easy-chair, and read, with thorough satisfaction in the admirable temper and the force of the reply. We intend to start for Calais this evening; and as the rain prevents us from doing anything agreeable out of doors, I have nothing to hinder me from sitting, with my knees up to my chin, and scribbling, now that I am become a little sounder in head and in body generally than beautiful Italy allowed me to be. As beautiful as ever--more beautiful--it has looked to me on this last visit; and it is the fault of my _physique_ if it did not agree with me. Pray offer my warmest sympathy to Dr. Congreve in the anxieties of his difficult task. What hard work it seems to go on living sometimes! Blessed are the dead. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _May 5._--We reached home after our nine weeks' absence. In that time we have been through France to Marseilles, along the Cornice to Spezia, then to Pisa, Florence, Naples, Rome, Assisi, Perugia, Florence again, Ravenna, Bologna, Verona; across the Brenner Pass to Munich; then to Paris _viâ_ Strasburg. In such a journey there was necessarily much interest both in renewing old memories and recording new; but I never had such continuous bad health in travelling as I have had during these nine weeks. On our arrival at home I found a delightful letter from Mrs. H. B. Stowe, whom I have never seen, addressing me as her "dear friend." It was during this journey that I, for the first time, saw my future wife, at Rome. My eldest sister had married Mr. W. H. Bullock (now Mr. W. H. Hall), of Six-Mile-Bottom, Cambridgeshire, and they were on their wedding journey at Rome when they happened to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lewes by chance in the Pamfili Doria Gardens. They saw a good deal of one another, and when I arrived, with my mother and another sister, we went by invitation to call at the Hôtel Minerva, where Mr. Lewes had found rooms on their first arrival in Rome. I have a very vivid recollection of George Eliot sitting on a sofa with my mother by her side, entirely engrossed with her. Mr. Lewes entertained my sister and me on the other side of the room. But I was very anxious to hear also the conversation on the sofa, as I was better acquainted with George Eliot's books than with any other literature. And through the dimness of these fifteen years, and all that has happened in them, I still seem to hear, as I first heard them, the low, earnest, deep, musical tones of her voice; I still seem to see the fine brows, with the abundant auburn-brown hair framing them, the long head, broadening at the back, the gray-blue eyes, constantly changing in expression, but always with a very loving, almost deprecating, look at my mother, the finely-formed, thin, transparent hands, and a whole _Wesen_ that seemed in complete harmony with everything one expected to find in the author of "Romola." The next day Mr. and Mrs. Lewes went on to Assisi and we to Naples, and we did not meet again till the following August at Weybridge. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th May, 1869.] I value very highly the warrant to call you friend which your letter has given me. It lay awaiting me on our return, the other night, from a nine weeks' absence in Italy, and it made me almost wish that you could have a momentary vision of the discouragement--nay, paralyzing despondency--in which many days of my writing life have been passed, in order that you might fully understand the good I find in such sympathy as yours--in such an assurance as you give me that my work has been worth doing. But I will not dwell on any mental sickness of mine. The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet, generous feeling in you which dictated them, and I shall always be the richer because you have in this way made me know you better. I must tell you that my first glimpse of you as a woman came through a letter of yours, and charmed me very much. The letter was addressed to Mrs. Follen; and one morning when I called on her in London (how many years ago![7]) she was kind enough to read it to me because it contained a little history of your life, and a sketch of your domestic circumstances. I remember thinking that it was very kind of you to write that long letter in reply to the inquiries of one who was personally unknown to you; and looking back with my present experience I think it was still kinder than it then appeared. For at that time you must have been much oppressed with the immediate results of your fame. I remember, too, that you wrote of your husband as one who was richer in Hebrew and Greek than in pounds or shillings; and as the ardent scholar has always been a character of peculiar interest to me, I have rarely had your image in my mind without the accompanying image (more or less erroneous) of such a scholar by your side. I shall welcome the fruit of his Goethe studies, whenever it comes. In the meantime let me assure you that whoever else gave you that description of my husband's "History of Philosophy"--namely, "that it was to solve and settle all things"--he himself never saw it in that light. The work has been greatly altered, as well as enlarged, in three successive editions; and his mind is so far from being a captive to his own written words that he is now engaged in physiological and psychological researches which are leading him to issues at variance in some important respects with the views expressed in some of his published works. He is one of the few human beings I have known who will often, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. I have good hopes that your fears are groundless as to the obstacles your new book may find here from its thorough American character. Most readers who are likely to be really influenced by writing above the common order will find that special aspect an added reason for interest and study, and I dare say you have long seen, as I am beginning to see with new clearness, that if a book which has any sort of exquisiteness happens also to be a popular, widely circulated book, its power over the social mind for any good is, after all, due to its reception by a few appreciative natures, and is the slow result of radiation from that narrow circle. I mean, that you can affect a few souls, and that each of these in turn may affect a few more, but that no exquisite book tells properly and directly on a multitude, however largely it may be spread by type and paper. Witness the things the multitude will say about it, if one is so unhappy as to be obliged to hear their sayings. I do not write this cynically, but in pure sadness and pity. Both travelling abroad, and staying at home among our English sights and sports, one must continually feel how slowly the centuries work towards the moral good of men. And that thought lies very close to what you say as to your wonder or conjecture concerning my religious point of view. I believe that religion, too, has to be modified--"developed," according to the dominant phrase--and that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent must express less care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot. I do not find my temple in Pantheism, which, whatever might be its value speculatively, could not yield a practical religion, since it is an attempt to look at the universe from the outside of our relations to it (that universe) as human beings. As healthy, sane human beings, we must love and hate--love what is good for mankind, hate what is evil for mankind. For years of my youth I dwelt in dreams of a pantheistic sort, falsely supposing that I was enlarging my sympathy. But I have travelled far away from that time. Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary, and, when one writes on wide subjects, are liable to create more misunderstanding than illumination. But I have little anxiety of that kind in writing to you, dear friend and fellow-laborer, for you have had longer experience than I as a writer, and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and known the mother's history from the beginning. I trust your quick and long-taught mind as an interpreter little liable to mistake me. When you say, "We live in an orange grove and are planting many more," and when I think that you must have abundant family love to cheer you, it seems to me that you must have a paradise about you. But no list of circumstances will make a paradise. Nevertheless, I must believe that the joyous, tender humor of your books clings about your more immediate life, and makes some of that sunshine for yourself which you have given to us. I see the advertisement of "Old Town Folk," and shall eagerly expect it. That and every other new link between us will be reverentially valued. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _May 8_ (Saturday).--Poor Thornie arrived from Natal, sadly wasted by suffering. _May 24._--Sold "Agatha" to Fields & Osgood, for the _Atlantic Monthly_, for £300. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 26th May, 1869.] That "disturbance" in my favorite work, with which you and Dr. Congreve are good enough to sympathize, is unhappily greater now than it has been for years before. Our poor Thornie came back to us about seventeen days ago. We can never rejoice enough that we were already at home, seeing that we held it impossible for him to set out on his voyage until at least six weeks later than he did. Since he arrived our lives have been chiefly absorbed by cares for him; and though we now have a nurse to attend on him constantly, we spend several hours of the day by his side. There is joy in the midst of our trouble, from the tenderness towards the sufferer being altogether unchecked by anything unlovable in him. Thornie's disposition seems to have become sweeter than ever with the added six years; and there is nothing that we discern in his character or habits to cause us grief. Enough of our troubles. I gather from your welcome letter, received this morning, that there is a good deal of enjoyment for you in your temporary home, in spite of bad weather and faceache, which I hope will have passed away when you read this. Mr. Beesley[8] wrote to me to tell me of his engagement, and on Sunday we had the pleasure of shaking him by the hand and seeing him look very happy. His is one of a group of prospective marriages which we have had announced to us since we came home. Besides Mr. Harrison's, there is Dr. Allbut's, our charming friend at Leeds. I told Mr. Beesley that I thought myself magnanimous in really rejoicing at the engagements of men friends, because, of course, they will be comparatively indifferent to their old intimates. Dear Madame Bodichon is a precious help to us. She comes twice a week to sit with Thornie, and she is wonderfully clever in talking to young people. One finds out those who have real practical sympathy in times of trouble. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 9th June, 1869.] Your letter has fulfilled two wishes of mine. It shows me that you keep me in your kind thoughts, and that you are very happy. I had been told by our friends, the Nortons, of your engagement, but I knew nothing more than that bare fact, and your letter gives me more of a picture. A very pretty picture--for I like to think of your love having grown imperceptibly along with sweet family affections. I do heartily share in your happiness, for however space and time may keep us asunder, you will never to my mind be lost in the distance, but will hold a place of marked and valued interest quite apart from those more public hopes about you which I shall not cease to cherish. Both Mr. Lewes and I shall be delighted to see you any evening. I imagine that when you are obliged to stay in town the evening will be the easiest time for you to get out to us. Any time after eight you will find us thoroughly glad to shake hands with you. Do come when you can. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _July 3._--Finished my reading in Lucretius. Reading Victor Hugo's "L'homme qui rit;" also the Frau von Hillern's novel, "Ein Arzt der Seele." This week G. and I have been to Sevenoaks, but were driven home again by the cold winds and cloudy skies. "Sonnets on Childhood"--five--finished. _July 10._--I wrote to Mrs. Stowe, in answer to a second letter of hers, accompanied by one from her husband. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 11th July, 1869.] I hoped before this to have seen our friend, Mrs. Fields, on her return from Scotland, and to have begged her to send you word of a domestic affliction which has prevented me from writing to you since I received your and your husband's valued letters. Immediately on our return from Italy, Mr. Lewes's second son, a fine young man of five-and-twenty, returned to us from Natal, wasted by suffering from a long-standing spinal injury. This was on the 8th of May, and since then we have both been absorbed in our duties to this poor child, and have felt our own health and nervous energy insufficient for our needful activity of body and mind. He is at present no better, and we look forward to a long trial. Nothing but a trouble so great as this would have prevented me from writing again to you, not only to thank you and Professor Stowe for your letters, but also to tell you that I have received and read "Old Town Folks." I think few of your many readers can have felt more interest than I have felt in that picture of an elder generation; for my interest in it has a double root--one, in my own love for our old-fashioned provincial life, which had its affinities with a contemporary life, even all across the Atlantic, and of which I have gathered glimpses in different phases, from my father and mother, with their relations; the other is, my experimental acquaintance with some shades of Calvinistic orthodoxy. I think your way of presenting the religious convictions which are not your own, except by indirect fellowship, is a triumph of insight and true tolerance. A thorough comprehension of the mixed moral influence shed on society by dogmatic systems is rare even among writers, and one misses it altogether in English drawing-room talk. I thank you sincerely for the gift (in every sense) of this book, which, I can see, has been a labor of love. Both Mr. Lewes and I are deeply interested in the indications which the Professor gives of his peculiar psychological experience, and we should feel it a great privilege to learn much more of it from his lips. It is a rare thing to have such an opportunity of studying exceptional experience in the testimony of a truthful and in every way distinguished mind. He will, I am sure, accept the brief thanks which I can give in this letter, for all that he has generously written to me. He says, "I have had no connection with any of the modern movements, except as father confessor;" and I can well believe that he must be peculiarly sensitive to the repulsive aspects which those movements present. Your view as to the cause of that "great wave of spiritualism" which is rushing over America--namely, that it is a sort of Rachel-cry of bereavement towards the invisible existence of the loved ones, is deeply affecting. But so far as "spiritualism" (by which I mean, of course, spirit-communication, by rapping, guidance of the pencil, etc.) has come within reach of my judgment on our side of the water, it has appeared to me either as degrading folly, imbecile in the estimate of evidence, or else as impudent imposture. So far as my observation and experience have hitherto gone, it has even seemed to me an impiety to withdraw from the more assured methods of studying the open secret of the universe any large amount of attention to alleged manifestations which are so defiled by low adventurers and their palpable trickeries, so hopelessly involved in all the doubtfulness of individual testimonies as to phenomena witnessed, which testimonies are no more true objectively because they are honest subjectively, than the Ptolemaic system is true because it seemed to Tycho Brahé a better explanation of the heavenly movements than the Copernican. This is a brief statement of my position on the subject, which your letter shows me to have an aspect much more compulsory on serious attention in America than I can perceive it to have in England. I should not be as simply truthful as my deep respect for you demands, if I did not tell you exactly what is my mental attitude in relation to the phenomena in question. But whatever you print on the subject and will send me I shall read with attention, and the idea you give me of the hold which spiritualism has gained on the public mind in the United States is already a fact of historic importance. Forgive me, dear friend, if I write in the scantiest manner, unworthily responding to letters which have touched me profoundly. You have known so much of life, both in its more external trials and in the peculiar struggles of a nature which is made twofold in its demands by the yearnings of the author as well as of the woman, that I can count on your indulgence and power of understanding my present inability to correspond by letter. May I add my kind remembrances to your daughter to the high regard which I offer to your husband? [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _July 14._--Returned from Hatfield, after two days' stay. _July 15._--Began Nisard's "History of French Literature"--Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Christine de Pisan, Philippe de Comines, Villers. _July 16._--Read the articles Phoenicia and Carthage in "Ancient Geography." Looked into Jewitt's "Universal History" again for Carthaginian religion. Looked into Sismondi's "Littérature du Midi" for Roman de la Rose; and ran through the first chapter about the formation of the Romance languages. Read about _Thallogens_ and _Acrogens_ in the "Vegetable World." Read Drayton's "Nymphidia"--a charming poem--a few pages of his "Polyolbion." Re-read Grote, v.-vii., on Sicilian affairs, down to rise of Dionysius. _July 18._--Miss Nannie Smith came, after a long absence from England; Professor Masson and Dr. Bastian, Madame Bodichon, and Dr. Payne. Some conversation about Saint-Simonism, _à propos_ of the meeting on Woman's Suffrage the day before, M. Arles Dufour being uneasy because Mill did not in his speech recognize what women owed to Saint-Simonism. _July 19._--Writing an introduction to "Middlemarch." I have just re-read the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, and have written three more sonnets. My head uneasy. We went in the afternoon to the old water-colors, finding that the exhibition was to close at the end of the week. Burne-Jones's Circe and St. George affected me, by their colors, more than any of the other pictures--they are poems. In the evening read Nisard on Rabelais and Marot. _July 22._--Read Reybaud's book on "Les Réformateurs Modernes." In the afternoon Mrs. P. Taylor came and saw Thornie, who has been more uneasy this week, and unwilling to move or come out on the lawn. _July 23._--Read Theocritus, Id. 16. Meditated characters for "Middlemarch." Mrs. F. Malleson came. _July 24._--Still not quite well and clear-headed, so that little progress is made. I read aloud Fourier and Owen, and thought of writing something about Utopists. _July 25._--Read Plato's "Republic" in various parts. After lunch Miss Nannie Smith, Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Deutsch. In the evening I read Nisard, and Littré on Comte. _Aug. 1._--Since last Sunday I have had an uncomfortable week from mental and bodily disturbance. I have finished eleven sonnets on "Brother and Sister," read Littré, Nisard, part of 22d Idyll of Theocritus, Sainte-Beuve, aloud to G. two evenings. Monday evening looked through Dickson's "Fallacies of the Faculty." On Tuesday afternoon we went to the British Museum to see a new bronze, and I was enchanted with some fragments of glass in the Slade collection, with dyes of sunset in them. Yesterday, sitting in Thornie's room, I read through all Shakespeare's "Sonnets." Poor Thornie has had a miserably unsatisfactory week, making no progress. After lunch came Miss N. Smith and Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr. Sanderson. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 1st Aug. 1869.] My last words to you might appear to imply something laughably opposed to my real meaning. "Think of me only as an example" meant--an example to be avoided. It was an allusion in my mind to the servant-girl who, being arrested for theft, said to her fellow-servant, "Take example by me, Sally." With the usual caprice of language, we say. "Make an example of her," in that sense of holding up for a warning, which the poor girl and I intended. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _Aug. 2._--Began "Middlemarch" (the Vincy and Featherstone parts). _Aug. 5._--Thornie during the last two or three days gives much more hopeful signs: has been much more lively, with more regular appetite and quieter nights. This morning I finished the first chapter of "Middlemarch." I am reading Renouard's "History of Medicine." _Aug. 31._--We went to Weybridge, walked on St. George's Hill, and lunched with Mrs. Cross and her family. This visit to Weybridge is a very memorable one to me, because there my own first intimacy with George Eliot began, and the bonds with my family were knitted very much closer. Mr. and Mrs. Bullock were staying with us; and my sister, who had some gift for music, had set one or two of the songs from the "Spanish Gypsy." She sang one of them--"On through the woods, the pillared pines"--and it affected George Eliot deeply. She moved quickly to the piano, and kissed Mrs. Bullock very warmly, in her tears. Mr. and Mrs. Lewes were in deep trouble owing to the illness of Thornton Lewes; we were also in much anxiety as to the approaching confinement of my sister with her first child; and I was on the eve of departure for America. Sympathetic feelings were strong enough to overleap the barrier (often hard to pass) which separates acquaintanceship from friendship. A day did the work of years. Our visitors had come to the house as acquaintances, they left it as lifelong friends. And the sequel of that day greatly intensified the intimacy. For within a month my sister had died in childbirth, and her death called forth one of the most beautiful of George Eliot's letters. A month later Thornton Lewes died. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _Sept. 1._--I meditated characters and conditions for "Middlemarch," which stands still in the beginning of chapter iii. _Sept. 2._--We spent the morning in Hatfield Park, arriving at home again at half-past three. _Sept. 10._--I have achieved little during the last week, except reading on medical subjects--Encyclopædia about the "Medical Colleges," "Cullen's Life," Russell's "Heroes of Medicine," etc. I have also read Aristophanes' "Ecclesiazusoe," and "Macbeth." _Sept. 11._--I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of "Middlemarch." I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me were begun under the same cloud. G. has been reading "Romola" again, and expresses profound admiration. This is encouraging. _Sept. 15._--George and I went to Sevenoaks for a couple of nights, and had some delicious walks. _Sept. 21._--Finished studying again Bekker's "Charikles." I am reading Mandeville's Travels. As to my work, _im Stiche gerathen_. Mrs. Congreve and Miss Bury came; and I asked Mrs. Congreve to get me some information about provincial hospitals, which is necessary to my imagining the conditions of my hero. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Sept. 1869.] As to the Byron subject, nothing can outweigh to my mind the heavy social injury of familiarizing young minds with the desecration of family ties. The discussion of the subject in newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets is simply odious to me, and I think it a pestilence likely to leave very ugly marks. One trembles to think how easily that moral wealth may be lost which it has been the work of ages to produce in the refinement and differencing of the affectionate relations. As to the high-flown stuff which is being reproduced about Byron and his poetry, I am utterly out of sympathy with it. He seems to me the most _vulgar-minded_ genius that ever produced a great effect in literature. [Sidenote: Journal, 1869.] _Sept. 22._--We went down to Watford for a change. _Sept. 24._--Returned home this morning because of the unpromising weather. It is worth while to record my great depression of spirits, that I may remember one more resurrection from the pit of melancholy. And yet what love is given to me! What abundance of good I possess! All my circumstances are blessed; and the defect is only in my own organism. Courage and effort! _Oct. 5._--Ever since the 28th I have been good for little, ailing in body and disabled in mind. On Sunday an interesting Russian pair came to see us--M. and Mme. Kovilevsky: she, a pretty creature, with charming modest voice and speech, who is studying mathematics (by allowance, through the aid of Kirchhoff) at Heidelberg; he, amiable and intelligent, studying the concrete sciences apparently--especially geology; and about to go to Vienna for six months for this purpose, leaving his wife at Heidelberg! I have begun a long-meditated poem, "The Legend of Jubal," but have not written more than twenty or thirty verses. _Oct. 13._--Yesterday Mr. W. G. Clark of Cambridge came to see us, and told of his intention to give up his oratorship and renounce his connection with the Church. I have read rapidly through Max Müller's "History of Sanskrit Literature," and am now reading Lecky's "History of Morals." I have also finished Herbert Spencer's last number of his "Psychology." My head has been sadly feeble, and my whole body ailing of late. I have written about one hundred verses of my poem. Poor Thornie seems to us in a state of growing weakness. _Oct. 19._--This evening at half-past six our dear Thornie died. He went quite peacefully. For three days he was not more than fitfully and imperfectly conscious of the things around him. He went to Natal on the 17th October, 1863, and came back to us ill on the 8th May, 1869. Through the six months of his illness his frank, impulsive mind disclosed no trace of evil feeling. He was a sweet-natured boy--still a boy, though he had lived for twenty-five years and a half. On the 9th of August he had an attack of paraplegia, and although he partially recovered from it, it made a marked change in him. After that he lost a great deal of his vivacity, but he suffered less pain. This death seems to me the beginning of our own. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1869.] The day after our dear boy's funeral we went into the quietest and most beautiful part of Surrey, four miles and a half from any railway station. I was very much shaken in mind and body, and nothing but the deep calm of fields and woods would have had a beneficent effect on me. We both of us felt, more than ever before, the blessedness of being in the country, and we are come back much restored. It will interest you, I think, to know that a friend of ours, Mr. W. G. Clark, the public orator at Cambridge, laid down his oratorship as a preparatory step to writing a letter to his bishop renouncing, or, rather, claiming to be free from, his clerical status, because he no longer believes what it presupposes him to believe. Two other men whom we know are about to renounce Cambridge fellowships on the same ground. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 31st Dec. 1869.] We shall be delighted to have you on Monday. I hope you will get your business done early enough to be by a good fire in our drawing-room before lunch. Mr. Doyle is coming to dine with us, but you will not mind that. He is a dear man, a good Catholic, full of varied sympathies and picturesque knowledge. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 15th Jan. 1870.] I am moved to write to you rather by the inclination to remind you of me than by the sense of having anything to say. On reading "The Positivist Problem"[9] a second time, I gained a stronger impression of its general value, and I also felt less jarred by the more personal part at the close. Mr. Lewes would tell you that I have an unreasonable aversion to personal statements, and when I come to like them it is usually by a hard process of _con_-version. But my second reading gave me a new and very strong sense that the last two or three pages have the air of an appendix, added at some distance of time from the original writing of the article. Some more thoroughly explanatory account of your non-adhesion seems requisite as a nexus--since the statement of your non-adhesion had to be mentioned after an argument for the system against the outer Gentile world. However, it is more important for me to say that I felt the thorough justice of your words, when, in conversation with me, you said, "I don't see why there should be any mystification; having come to a resolution after much inward debate, it is better to state the resolution." Something like that you said, and I give a hearty "Amen," praying that I may not be too apt myself to prefer the haze to the clearness. But the fact is, I shrink from decided "deliverances" on momentous subjects from the dread of coming to swear by my own "deliverances," and sinking into an insistent echo of myself. That is a horrible destiny--and one cannot help seeing that many of the most powerful men fall into it. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Mch. 1870.] Cara has told me about your republication of the "Inquiry," and I have a longing to write--not intrusively, I hope--just to say "thank you" for the good it does me to know of your being engaged in that act of piety to your brother's memory. I delight in the act itself, and in the satisfaction which I know you have in performing it. When I remember my own obligation to the book, I must believe that among the many new readers a cheap edition will reach there must be minds to whom it will bring welcome light in studying the New Testament--sober, serious help towards a conception of the past, instead of stage-lights and make-ups. And this value is, I think, independent of the opinions that might be held as to the different degrees of success in the construction of probabilities or in particular interpretations. Throughout there is the presence of grave sincerity. I would gladly have a word or two directly from yourself when you can scribble a note without feeling me a bore for wanting it. People who write many letters without being forced to do so are fathomless wonders to me, but you have a special faculty for writing such letters as one cares to read, so it is a pity that the accomplishment should lie quite unused. I wonder if you have read Emerson's new essays. I like them very much. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d April, 1870.] We shall leave Berlin on Tuesday, so that I must ask you to send me the much-desired news of you to Vienna, addressed to the Hon. Robert Lytton, British Embassy. We do not yet know the name of the hotel where rooms have been taken for us. Our journey has not been unfortunate hitherto. The weather has been cold and cheerless, but we expected this, and on the 1st of April the sun began to shine. As for my _Wenigkeit_, it has never known a day of real bodily comfort since we got to Berlin: headache, sore throat, and _Schnupfen_ have been alternately my companions, and have made my enjoyment very languid. But think of this as all past when you get my letter; for this morning I have a clearer head, the sun is shining, and the better time seems to be come for me. Mr. Lewes has had a good deal of satisfaction in his visits to laboratories and to the _Charité_, where he is just now gone for the third time to see more varieties of mad people, and hear more about Psychiatrie from Dr. Westphal, a quiet, unpretending little man, who seems to have been delighted with George's sympathetic interest in this (to me) hideous branch of practice. I speak with all reverence: the world can't do without hideous studies. People have been very kind to us, and have overwhelmed us with attentions, but we have felt a little weary in the midst of our gratitude, and since my cold has become worse we have been obliged to cut off further invitations. We have seen many and various men and women, but except Mommsen, Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond, hardly any whose names would be known to you. If I had been in good health I should probably have continued to be more amused than tired of sitting on a sofa and having one person after another brought up to bow to me, and pay me the same compliment. Even as it was, I felt my heart go out to some good women who seemed really to have an affectionate feeling towards me for the sake of my books. But the sick animal longs for quiet and darkness. The other night, at Dr. Westphal's, I saw a young English lady marvellously like Emily in face, figure, and voice. I made advances to her on the strength of that external resemblance, and found it carried out in the quickness of her remarks. But new gentlemen to be introduced soon divided us. Another elegant, pretty woman there was old Boeckh's daughter. One enters on all subjects by turns in these evening parties, which are something like reading the Conversations-Lexicon in a nightmare. Among lighter entertainments we have been four times to the opera, being tempted at the very beginning of our stay by Gluck, Mozart, and an opportunity of hearing Tannhäuser for the second time. Also we have enjoyed some fine orchestral concerts, which are to be had for sixpence! Berlin has been growing very fast since our former stay here, and luxury in all forms has increased so much that one only here and there gets a glimpse of the old-fashioned German housekeeping. But though later hours are becoming fashionable, the members of the Reichstag who have other business than politics complain of having to begin their sitting at eleven, ending, instead of beginning, at four, when the solid day is almost gone. We went to the Reichstag one morning, and were so fortunate as to hear Bismarck speak. But the question was one of currency, and his speech was merely a brief winding-up. Now I shall think that I have earned a letter telling me all about you. May there be nothing but good to tell of! Pray give my best love to Emily, and my earnest wishes to Dr. Congreve, that he may have satisfaction in new work. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th May, 1870.] I gladly and gratefully keep the portrait.[10] For my own part, I should have said, without hesitation, "Prefix it to the 'Inquiry.'" One must not be unreasonable about portraits. How can a thing which is always the same be an adequate representation of a living being who is always varying--especially of a living being who is sensitive, bright, many-sided, as your brother was? But I think the impression which this portrait gives excites interest. I am often sorry for people who lose half their possible good in the world by being more alive to deficiencies than to positive merits. I like to know that you have felt in common with me while you read "Jubal." Curiously enough, Mr. Lewes, when I first read it to him, made just the remark you make about the scene of Jubal coming with the lyre. We laughed at Mr. Bray's sharp criticism. Tell him it is not the fashion for authors ever to be in the wrong. They have always justifying reasons. But also it is the fashion for critics to know everything, so that the authors don't think it needful to tell their reasons. [Sidenote: Journal, 1870.] _May 20._--I am fond of my little old book in which I have recorded so many changes, and shall take to writing in it again. It will perhaps last me all through the life that is left to me. Since I wrote in it last, the day after Thornie's death, the chief epochs have been our stay at Limpsfield, in Surrey, till near the beginning of December; my writing of "Jubal," which I finished on the 13th of January; the publication of the poem in the May number of _Macmillan's Magazine_; and our journey to Berlin and Vienna, from which we returned on the 6th of this month, after an absence of eight weeks. This is a fortnight ago, and little has been done by me in the interim. My health is in an uncomfortable state, and I seem to be all the weaker for the continual depression produced by cold and sore throat, which stretched itself all through our long journey. These small bodily grievances make life less desirable to me, though every one of my best blessings--my one perfect love, and the sympathy shown towards me for the sake of my works, and the personal regard of a few friends--have become much intensified in these latter days. I am not hopeful about future work. I am languid, and my novel languishes too. But to-morrow may be better than to-day. _May 25._--We started for Oxford, where we were to stay with the Rector of Lincoln and his wife. After luncheon G. and I walked alone through the town, which, on this first view, was rather disappointing to me. Presently we turned through Christ Church into the meadows, and walked along by the river. This was beautiful to my heart's content. The buttercups and hawthorns were in their glory, the chestnuts still in sufficiently untarnished bloom, and the grand elms made a border towards the town. After tea we went with Mrs. Pattison and the rector to the croquet-ground near the Museum. On our way we saw Sir Benjamin Brodie, and on the ground Professor Rawlinson, the "narrow-headed man;" Mrs. Thursfield and her son, who is a Fellow (I think, of Corpus); Miss Arnold, daughter of Mr. Thomas Arnold, and Professor Phillips, the geologist. At supper we had Mr. Bywater and Miss Arnold, and in chat with them the evening was passed. _May 26._--G. and I went to the Museum, and had an interesting morning with Dr. Rolleston, who dissected a brain for me. After lunch we went again to the Museum, and spent the afternoon with Sir Benjamin Brodie, seeing various objects in his laboratories; among others, the method by which weighing has been superseded in delicate matters by _measuring_ in a graduated glass tube. Afterwards Mrs. Pattison took me a drive in her little pony carriage round by their country refuge, the Firs, Haddington, and by Littlemore, where I saw J. H. Newman's little conventual dwelling. Returning, we had a fine view of the Oxford towers. To supper came Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie. _May 27._--In the morning we walked to see the two Martyrs' Memorial, and then to Sir Benjamin Brodie's pretty place near the river and bridge. Close by their grounds is the original ford whence the place took its name. The Miss Gaskells were staying with them, and, after chatting some time, we two walked with Sir Benjamin to New College, where we saw the gardens surrounded by the old city wall; the chapel where William of Wykeham's crosier is kept; and the cloisters, which are fine, but gloomy, and less beautiful than those of Magdalen, which we saw in our walk on Thursday before going to the Museum. After lunch we went to the Bodleian, and then to the Sheldonian Theatre, where there was a meeting _à propos_ of Palestine Exploration. Captain Warren, conductor of the Exploration at Jerusalem, read a paper, and then Mr. Deutsch gave an account of the interpretation, as hitherto arrived at, of the Moabite Stone. I saw squeezes of this stone for the first time, with photographs taken from the squeezes. After tea Mrs. Thursfield kindly took us to see a boat-race. We saw it from the Oriel barge, under the escort of Mr. Crichton, Fellow of Merton, who, on our return, took us through the lovely gardens of his college. At supper were Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Miss Smith, his sister, Mr. Fowler, author of "Deductive Logic," etc. _May 28._--After a walk to St. John's College we started by the train for London, and arrived at home about two o'clock. _May 29._--Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr. Crompton came. I read aloud No. 3 of "Edwin Drood." _May 30._--We went to see the autotypes of Michael Angelo's frescoes, at 36 Rathbone Place. I began Grove on the "Correlation of the Physical Forces"--needing to read it again--with new interest, after the lapse of years. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th June, 1870.] Dr. Reynolds advises Mr. Lewes to leave London again, and go to the bracing air of the Yorkshire coast. I said that we should be here till the beginning of August, but the internal order proposes and the external order disposes--if we are to be so priggish as to alter all our old proverbs into agreement with new formulas! Dickens's death came as a great shock to us. He lunched with us just before we went abroad, and was telling us a story of President Lincoln having told the Council, on the day he was shot, that something remarkable would happen, because he had just dreamt, for the third time, a dream which twice before had preceded events momentous to the nation. The dream was, that he was in a boat on a great river, all alone, and he ended with the words, "I drift--I drift--I drift." Dickens told this very finely. I thought him looking dreadfully shattered then. It is probable that he never recovered from the effect of the terrible railway accident. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 23d June, 1870, from Cromer.] We have been driven away from home again by the state of Mr. Lewes's health. Dr. Reynolds recommended the Yorkshire coast; but we wanted to know Cromer, and so we came here first, for the sake of variety. To me the most desirable thing just now seems to be to have one home, and stay there till death comes to take me away. I get more and more disinclined to the perpetual makeshifts of a migratory life, and care more and more for the order and habitual objects of home. However, there are many in the world whose whole existence is a makeshift, and perhaps the formula which would fit the largest number of lives is "a doing without, more or less patiently." The air just now is not very invigorating anywhere, I imagine, and one begins to be very anxious about the nation generally, on account of the threatening drought. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton (now Lady Lytton), 8th July, 1870, from Harrogate.] I did not like to write to you[11] until Mr. Lytton sent word that I might do so, because I had not the intimate knowledge that would have enabled me to measure your trouble; and one dreads, of all things, to speak or write a wrong or unseasonable word when words are the only signs of interest and sympathy that one has to give. I know now, from what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt by you, that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is like an increase of property--it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm. I find myself often thinking of you with that sort of proprietor's anxiety, wanting you to have gentle weather all through your life, so that your face may never look worn and storm-beaten, and wanting your husband to be and do the very best, lest anything short of that should be disappointment to you. At present the thought of you is all the more with me because your trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some one who is nearest in love and duty with all one's motives. I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity--possible for us to gain much more independence than is usually believed of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality. I don't know why I should say this to you, except that my pen is chatting as my tongue would if you were here. We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections, and though our affections are, perhaps, the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life--some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed; because all their teaching has been that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men. Just under the pressure of grief, I do not believe there is any consolation. The word seems to me to be drapery for falsities. Sorrow must be sorrow, ill must be ill, till duty and love towards all who remain recover their rightful predominance. Your life is so full of those claims that you will not have time for brooding over the unchangeable. Do not spend any of your valuable time now in writing to me, but be satisfied with sending me news of you through Mr. Lytton when he has occasion to write to Mr. Lewes. I have lately finished reading aloud Mendelssohn's "Letters," which we had often resolved and failed to read before. They have been quite cheering to us from the sense they give of communion with an eminently pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art. In the evening we have always a concert to listen to--a concert of modest pretensions, but well conducted enough to be agreeable. I hope this letter of chit-chat will not reach you at a wrong moment. In any case, forgive all mistakes on the part of one who is always yours sincerely and affectionately. [Sidenote: Journal, 1870.] _Aug. 4._--Two months have been spent since the last record! Their result is not rich, for we have been sent wandering again by G.'s want of health. On the 15th June we went to Cromer, on the 30th to Harrogate, and on the 18th July to Whitby, where Mrs. Burne-Jones also arrived on the same day. On Monday, August 1, we came home again for a week only, having arranged to go to Limpsfield next Monday. To-day, under much depression, I begin a little dramatic poem,[12] the subject of which engaged my interest at Harrogate. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1870.] We, too, you see, have come back to a well-tried refuge--the same place that soothed us in our troubles last October--and we especially delight in this deep country after the fuss which belongs even to quiet watering-places, such as Cromer, Harrogate, and Whitby, which are, after all, "alleys where the gentle folks live." We are excited, even among the still woods and fields, by the vicissitudes of the war, and chiefly concerned because we cannot succeed in getting the day's _Times_. We have entered into the period which will be marked in future historical charts as "The period of German ascendency." But how saddening to think of the iniquities that the great harvest-moon is looking down on! I am less grieved for the bloodshed than for the hateful trust in lies which is continually disclosed. Meanwhile Jowett's "Translation of Plato" is being prepared for publication, and he has kindly sent us the sheets of one volume. So I pass from discussions of French lying and the Nemesis that awaits it to discussions about rhetorical lying at Athens in the fourth century before Christ. The translations and introductions to the "Dialogues" seem to be charmingly done. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 25th Aug. 1870.] We shall return to town on Monday, various small reasons concurring to make us resolve on quitting this earthly paradise. I am very sorry for the sufferings of the French nation; but I think these sufferings are better for the moral welfare of the people than victory would have been. The war has been drawn down on them by an iniquitous government; but in a great proportion of the French people there has been nourished a wicked glorification of selfish pride, which, like all other conceit, is a sort of stupidity, excluding any true conception of what lies outside their own vain wishes. The Germans, it seems, were expected to stand like toy-soldiers for the French to knock them down. It is quite true that the war is in some respects the conflict of two differing forms of civilization. But whatever charm we may see in the southern Latin races, this ought not to blind us to the great contributions which the German energies have made in all sorts of ways to the common treasure of mankind. And who that has any spirit of justice can help sympathizing with them in their grand repulse of the French project to invade and divide them? If I were a Frenchwoman, much as I might wail over French sufferings, I cannot help believing that I should detest the French talk about the "Prussians." They wanted to throttle the electric eel for their own purposes. But I imagine that you and the doctor would not find us in much disagreement with you in these matters. One thing that is pleasant to think of is the effort made everywhere to help the wounded. [Sidenote: Journal, 1870.] _Oct. 27._--On Monday the 8th August we went to our favorite Surrey retreat--Limpsfield--and enjoyed three weeks there reading and walking together. The weather was perfect, and the place seemed more lovely to us than before. Aloud I read the concluding part of Walter Scott's Life, which we had begun at Harrogate; two volumes of Froude's "History of England," and Comte's "Correspondence with Valat." We returned on Monday the 29th. During our stay at Limpsfield I wrote the greater part of "Armgart," and finished it at intervals during September. Since then I have been continually suffering from headache and depression, with almost total despair of future work. I look into this little book now to assure myself that this is not unprecedented. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Nov. 1870.] Yesterday, for the first time, we went to hear A. (a popular preacher). I remembered what you had said about his vulgar, false emphasis; but there remained the fact of his celebrity. I was glad of the opportunity. But my impressions fell below the lowest judgment I ever heard passed upon him. He has the gift of a fine voice, very flexible and various; he is admirably fluent and clear in his language, and every now and then his enunciation is effective. But I never heard any pulpit reading and speaking which in its level tone was more utterly common and empty of guiding intelligence or emotion; it was as if the words had been learned by heart and uttered without comprehension by a man who had no instinct of rhythm or music in his soul. And the doctrine! It was a libel on Calvinism that it should be presented in such a form. I never heard any attempt to exhibit the soul's experience that was more destitute of insight. The sermon was against fear, in the elect Christian, as being a distrust of God; but never once did he touch the true ground of fear--the doubt whether the signs of God's choice are present in the soul. We had plenty of anecdotes, but they were all poor and pointless--Tract Society anecdotes of the feeblest kind. It was the most superficial grocer's-back-parlor view of Calvinistic Christianity; and I was shocked to find how low the mental pitch of our society must be, judged by the standard of this man's celebrity. Mr. Lewes was struck with some of his tones as good actor's tones, and was not so wroth as I was. But just now, with all Europe stirred by events that make every conscience tremble after some great principle as a consolation and guide, it was too exasperating to sit and listen to doctrine that seemed to look no further than the retail Christian's tea and muffins. He said "Let us approach the throne of God" very much as he might have invited you to take a chair; and then followed this fine touch--"We feel no love to God because he hears the prayers of others; it is because he hears my prayer that I love him." You see I am relieving myself by pouring out my disgust to you. Oh, how short life--how near death--seems to me! But this is not an uncheerful thought. The only great dread is the protraction of life into imbecility or the visitation of lingering pain. That seems to me the insurmountable calamity, though there is an ignorant affectation in many people of underrating what they call bodily suffering. I systematically abstain from correspondence, yet the number of acquaintances and consequent little appeals so constantly increases that I often find myself inwardly rebelling against the amount of note-writing that I cannot avoid. Have the great events of these months interfered with your freedom of spirit in writing? One has to dwell continually on the permanent, growing influence of ideas in spite of temporary reactions, however violent, in order to get courage and perseverance for any work which lies aloof from the immediate wants of society. You remember Goethe's contempt for the Revolution of '30 compared with the researches on the Vertebrate Structure of the Skull? "My good friend, I was not thinking of those people." But the changes we are seeing cannot be doffed aside in that way. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Nov. 1870.] Lying awake early in the morning, according to a bad practice of mine, I was visited with much compunction and self-disgust that I had ever said a word to you about the faults of a friend whose good qualities are made the more sacred by the endurance his lot has in many ways demanded. I think you may fairly set down a full half of any alleged grievances to my own susceptibility, and other faults of mine which necessarily call forth less agreeable manifestations from others than as many virtues would do, if I had them. I trust to your good sense to have judged well in spite of my errors in the presentation of any matter. But I wish to protest against myself, that I may, as much as possible, cut off the temptation to what I should like utterly to purify myself from for the few remaining years of my life--the disposition to dwell for a moment on the faults of a friend. Tell the flower and fern giver, whoever it may be, that some strength comes to me this morning from the pretty proof of sympathy. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 2d Dec. 1870.] I have it on my conscience that I may not have given you a clear impression of my wishes about the poor pensioner who was in question between us to-day, so I write at once to secure us both against a possible misunderstanding. I would rather not apply any more money in that direction, because I know of other channels[13]--especially a plan which is being energetically carried out for helping a considerable group of people without almsgiving, and solely by inducing them to work--into which I shall be glad to pour a little more aid. The repugnance to have relief from the parish was a feeling which it was good to encourage in the old days of contra-encouragement to sturdy pauperism; but I question whether one ought now to indulge it, and not rather point out the reasons why, in a case of real helplessness, there is no indignity in receiving from a public fund. After you had left me, it rang in my ears that I had spoken of my greater cheerfulness as due to a reduced anxiety about myself and my doings, and had not seemed to recognize that the deficit or evil in other lives could be a cause of depression. I was not really so ludicrously selfish while dressing myself up in the costume of unselfishness. But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy, which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal craving which age is bringing. That is the utmost I have to boast of, and, really, to be cheerful in these times could only be a virtue in the sense in which it was felt to be so by the old Romans when they thanked their general for not despairing of the republic. I have been reading aloud to Mr. Lewes this evening Mr. Harrison's article on "Bismarckism," which made me cry--it is in some passages movingly eloquent. [Sidenote: Journal, 1870.] _Dec. 2._--I am experimenting in a story ("Miss Brooke") which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily. It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development. I am to-day at p. 44. I am reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to Homer." In the evening, aloud, "Wilhelm Meister" again! _Dec. 12._--George's mother died this morning quite peacefully as she sat in her chair. _Dec. 17._--Reading "Quintus Fixlein" aloud to G. in the evening. Grote on Sicilian history. _Dec. 31._--On Wednesday the 21st we went to Ryde to see Madame Bodichon at Swanmore Parsonage, a house which she had taken for two months. We had a pleasant and healthy visit, walking much in the frosty air. On Christmas Day I went with her to the Ritualist Church which is attached to the parsonage, and heard some excellent intoning by the delicate-faced, tenor-voiced clergyman. On Wednesday last, the 28th, Barbara came up to town with us. We found the cold here more severe than at Ryde; and the papers tell us of still harder weather about Paris, where our fellow-men are suffering and inflicting horrors. Here is the last day of 1870. I have written only one hundred pages--good printed pages--of a story which I began about the opening of November, and at present mean to call "Miss Brooke." Poetry halts just now. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Jan. 1871.] We spent our Christmas in the Isle of Wight, and on Christmas Day I went to a Ritualist church and heard some fine intoning of the service by a clear, strong, tenor voice, sweet singing from boys' throats, and all sorts of Catholic ceremonial in a miniature way. It is good to see what our neighbors are doing. To live in seclusion with one's own thoughts is apt to give one very false notions as to the possibilities of the present time in the matter of conversion either to superstition or anti-superstition. In this cruel time, I no sooner hear of an affliction than I see it multiplied in some one of the endless forms of suffering created by this hellish war. In the beginning I could feel entirely with the Germans, and could say of that calamity called "victory," I am glad. But now I can be glad of nothing. No people can carry on a long, fierce war without being brutalized by it, more or less, and it pains me that the educated voices have not a higher moral tone about national and international duties and prospects. But, like every one else, I feel that the war is too much with me, and am rather anxious to avoid unwise speech about it than to utter what may seem to me to be wisdom. The pain is that one can _do_ so little. I have not read "Sir Harry Hotspur," but as to your general question, I reply that there certainly are some women who love in that way, but "their sex as well as I may chide them for it." Men are very fond of glorifying that sort of dog-like attachment. It is one thing to love because you falsely imagine goodness--that belongs to the finest natures--and another to go on loving when you have found out your mistake. But married constancy is a different affair. I have seen a grandly heroic woman who, out of her view as to the responsibilities of the married relation, condoned everything, took her drunken husband to her home again, and at last nursed and watched him into penitence and decency. But there may be two opinions even about this sort of endurance--_i.e._, about its ultimate tendency, not about the beauty of nature which prompts it. This is quite distinct from mere animal constancy. It is duty and human pity. [Sidenote: Letter to Colonel Hamley (now General Sir Edward Hamley), 24th Jan. 1871.] I write to say God bless you for your letter to the _Times_, of this morning. It contains the best expression of right principle--I was almost ready to say, the only good, sensible words--that I have yet seen on the actual state of things between the Germans and the French. You will not pause, I trust, but go on doing what can be done only by one who is at once a soldier, a writer, and a clear-headed man of principle. [Sidenote: Journal, 1871.] _March 19_ (Sunday).--It is grievous to me how little, from one cause or other, chiefly languor and occasionally positive ailments, I manage to get done. I have written about two hundred and thirty-six pages (print) of my novel, which I want to get off my hands by next November. My present fear is that I have too much matter--too many _momenti_. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d April, 1871.] I happened to-day to be talking to a very sweet-faced woman (the sister of Dr. Bridges, whom I think you know something of), and she mentioned, _à propos_ of educating children in the love of animals, that she had felt the want of some good little book as a help in this matter. I told her of yours, and when I said that it was written by Mrs. Bray, the author of "Physiology for Schools," she said, "Oh, I know that book well." I have made her a present of my copy of "Duty to Animals," feeling that this was a good quarter in which to plant that offset. For she had been telling me of her practical interest in the infant and other schools in Suffolk, where she lives. We have had a great pleasure to-day in learning that our friend Miss Bury is engaged to be married to Mr. Geddes, a Scotch gentleman. There is a streak of sadness for her family in the fact that she is to go to India with her husband next November, but all else is bright in her prospect. It is very sweet to see, and think of, the happiness of the young. I am scribbling with an infirm head, at the end of the day, just for the sake of letting you know one proof, in addition doubtless to many others which you have already had, that your pretty little book is likely to supply a want. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 19th April, 1871.] We are very much obliged to you for your kind, methodical thoughtfulness as to all which is necessary for our accommodation at Brookbank, and also for your hints about the points of beauty to be sought for in our walks. That "sense of standing on a round world," which you speak of, is precisely what I most care for among out-of-door delights. The last time I had it fully was at St. Märgen, near Freiburg, on green hilltops, whence we could see the Rhine and poor France. The garden has been, and is being, attended to, and I trust we shall not find the commissariat unendurable. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th June, 1871.] It seems like a resurrection of a buried-alive friendship once more to have a letter from you. Welcome back from your absorption in the Franchise! Somebody else ought to have your share of work now, and you ought to rest. Ever since the 1st of May we have been living in this queer cottage, which belongs to Mrs. Gilchrist, wife of the Gilchrist who wrote the life of William Blake the artist. We have a ravishing country round us, and pure air and water; in short, all the conditions of health, if the east wind were away. We have old prints for our dumb companions--charming children of Sir Joshua's, and large-hatted ladies of his and Romney's. I read aloud--almost all the evening--books of German science, and other gravities. So, you see, we are like two secluded owls, wise with unfashionable wisdom, and knowing nothing of pictures and French plays. I confess that I should have gone often to see Got act if I had been in town, he is so really great as an actor. And yet one is ashamed of seeking amusement in connection with anything that belongs to poor, unhappy France. I am saved from the shame by being safely shut out from the amusement. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th June, 1871.] How about Madame Mohl and her husband? I have been wondering through all the horrors whether M. Mohl had returned to Paris, and whether their house, containing, too probably, the results of much studious work, lies buried among ruins. But I will not further recall the sorrows in that direction. I am glad to see the words "very satisfactory" in connection with the visit to Hitchin and Cambridge. Ely Cathedral I saw last year, but too cursorily. It has more of the massive grandeur that one adores in Le Mans and Chartres than most of our English cathedrals, though I am ready to recall the comparison as preposterous. I don't know how long we shall stay here; perhaps, more or less, till the end of August, for I have given up the idea of going to the Scott Festival at Edinburgh, to which I had accepted an invitation. The fatigue of the long journey, with the crowd at the end, would be too much for me. Let us know beforehand when you are about coming. George is gloriously well, and studying, writing, walking, eating, and sleeping with equal vigor. He is enjoying the life here immensely. Our country could hardly be surpassed in its particular kind of beauty--perpetual undulation of heath and copse, and clear views of hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine wood, steep, wood-clothed promontories, and gleaming pools. If you want delightful reading get Lowell's "My Study Windows," and read the essays called "My Garden Acquaintances" and "Winter." Get the volumes of a very cheap publication--the "Deutscher Novellenschatz." Some of the tales are remarkably fine. I am reading aloud the last three volumes, which are even better than the others. I have just been so deeply interested in one of the stories--"Diethelm von Buchenberg"--that I want everybody to have the same pleasure who can read German. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 3d July, 1871.] We are greatly obliged to you for the trouble you have so sympathetically taken on our behalf, and we shall prepare to quit our quiet shelter on Wednesday, the 2d of August. During the first weeks of our stay I did not imagine that I should ever be so fond of the place as I am now. The departure of the bitter winds, some improvement in my health, and the gradual revelation of fresh and fresh beauties in the scenery, especially under a hopeful sky such as we have sometimes had--all these conditions have made me love our little world here and wish not to quit it until we can settle in our London home. I have the regret of thinking that it was my original indifference about it (I hardly ever like things until they are familiar) that hindered us from securing the cottage until the end of September, for the chance of coming to it again after a temporary absence. But all regrets ought to be merged in thankfulness for the agreeable weeks we have had, and probably shall have till the end of July. And among the virtues of Brookbank we shall always reckon this, that our correspondence about it has been with you rather than with any one else, so that, along with the country, we have had a glimpse of your ready, quick-thoughted kindness. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 13th July, 1871.] One word to you in response to Emily's note, which comes to me this morning, and lets me know that by this time she is probably in the last hour of her unmarried life. My thoughts and love and tender anxiety are with her and with all of you. When you receive this she will, I suppose, be far away, and it is of little consequence that I can make no new sign to her of my joy in her joy. For the next few weeks my anxiety will be concentrated on you and yours at Yarmouth. Pray, when your mind and body are sufficiently free from absorbing occupation, remember my need of news about you, and write to me. The other day I seemed to get a glimpse of you through Mrs. Call, who told me that you looked like a new creature--so much stronger than you were wont; and she told me of Dr. Congreve's address at the school, which raised my keenest sympathy, and made me feel myself a very helpless friend. Please give my love to the children, and tell Sophy especially that I think her happy in this--that there is a place made for all the effort of her young life to fill it with something like the goodness and brightness which she has known and has just now to part with. I expect her to be your guardian angel, perhaps in a new way--namely, in saving you from some fatigue about details. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th July, 1871.] I still feel that I owe you my thanks for your kind letter, although Mr. Lewes undertook to deliver them in the first instance. You certainly made a seat at the Commemoration Table[14] look more tempting to me than it had done before; but I think that prudence advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long railway journey, with a great gathering at the end of it. If there is a chance that "Middlemarch" will be good for anything, I don't want to break down and die without finishing it. And whatever "the tow on my distaff" may be, my strength to unwind it has not been abundant lately. _À propos_ of bodily prosperity, I am sincerely rejoiced to know, by your postscript this morning, that Mr. Simpson is recovered. I hope he will not object to my considering him a good friend of mine, though it is so long since I saw him. The blank that is left when thorough workers like him are disabled is felt not only near at hand, but a great way off. I often say--after the fashion of people who are getting older--that the capacity for good work, of the kind that goes on without trumpets, is diminishing in the world. The continuous absence of sunshine is depressing in every way, and makes one fear for the harvest, and so grave a fear that one is ashamed of mentioning one's private dreariness. You cannot play golf in the rain, and I cannot feel hopeful without the sunlight; but I dare say you work all the more, whereas when my spirits flag my work flags too. I should have liked to see Principal Tulloch again, and to have made the acquaintance of Captain Lockhart, whose writing is so jaunty and cheery, yet so thoroughly refined in feeling. Perhaps I may still have this pleasure in town, when he comes up at the same time with you. Please give my kind regards to Mr. William Blackwood. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1871.] Thanks for the prompt return of the MS., which arrived this morning. I don't see how I can leave anything out, because I hope there is nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional, and to show this in some directions which have not been from time immemorial the beaten path--the Cremorne walks and shows of fiction. But the best intentions are good for nothing until execution has justified them. And you know I am always compassed about with fears. I am in danger in all my designs of parodying dear Goldsmith's satire on Burke, and think of refining when novel-readers only think of skipping. We are obliged to turn out of this queer cottage next week; but we have been fortunate enough to get the more comfortable house on the other side of the road, so that we can move without any trouble. Thus our address will continue to be the same until the end of August. Tennyson, who is one of the "hill-folk" about here, has found us out. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton[15] (now Lady Lytton), 25th July, 1871.] This morning your husband's letter came to us, but if I did not know that it would be nearly a week before any words of mine could reach you, I should abstain from writing just yet, feeling that in the first days of sorrowing it is better to keep silence. For a long while after a great bereavement our only companionship is with the lost one. Yet I hope it will not be without good to you to have signs of love from your friends, and to be reminded that you have a home in their affections, which is made larger for you by your trouble. For weeks my thought has been continually going out to you, and the absence of news has made me so fearful that I have mourned beforehand. I have been feeling that probably you were undergoing the bitterest grief you had ever known. But under the heart-stroke, is there anything better than to grieve? Strength will come back for the duty and the fellowship which gradually bring new contentments, but at first there is no joy to be desired that would displace sorrow. What is better than to love and live with the loved? But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury. You see, I make myself a warrant out of my regard for you, to write as if we had long been near each other. And I cannot help wishing that we were physically nearer--that you were not on the other side of Europe. We shall trust in Mr. Lytton's kindness to let us hear of you by and by. But you must never write except to satisfy your own longing. May all true help surround you, dear Mrs. Lytton, and whenever you can think of me, believe in me as yours with sincere affection. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Cross, 31st July, 1871.] I read your touching story[16] aloud yesterday to Mr. Lewes, and we both cried over it. Your brother wrote to me that you had doubts about giving your name. My faith is, that signature is right in the absence of weighty special reasons against it. We think of you all very often, and feel ourselves much the richer for having a whole dear family to reckon among our friends. We are to stay here till the end of the month. When the trees are yellow, I hope you will be coming to see us in St. John's Wood. How little like the woods we have around us! I suppose Weybridge is more agreeable than other places at present, if it has any of its extra warmth in this arctic season. Our best love, to your dear mother supremely, and then to all. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1871.] I always say that those people are the happiest who have a peremptory reason for staying in one place rather than another. Else I should be sorry for you that you are kept in London--by Parliamentary business, of course. There is sunshine over our fields now, but the thermometer is only 64° in the house, and in the warmest part of the day I, having a talent for being cold, sit shivering, sometimes even with a warm-water bottle at my feet. I wonder if you went to the French plays to see the supreme Got? That is a refined pleasure which I enjoyed so much in Paris a few years ago that I was sorry to be out of reach of it this spring. About the Crystal Palace music I remember feeling just what you mention--the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total futility of the solos. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1871.] Thanks for your little picture of things. Eminently acceptable in place of vague conjectures. I am a bitter enemy to make-believe about the human lot, but I think there is a true alleviation of distress in thinking of the intense enjoyment which accompanies a spontaneous, confident, intellectual activity. This may not be a counterpoise to the existing evils, but it is at least a share of mortal good, and good of an exquisite kind. Are you not happy in the long-wished-for sunshine? I have a pretty lawn before me, with hills in the background. The train rushes by every now and then to make one more glad of the usual silence. A good man writes to me from Scotland this morning, asking me if he is not right in pronouncing Rom[)o]la, in defiance of the world around him (not a large world, I hope) who _will_ say Rom[=o]la. Such is correspondence in these days; so that quantity is magnificent _en gros_ but shabby _en détail_--_i.e._, in single letters like this. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 14th Aug. 1871.] We shall stay here only till the end of this month--at least, I have no hope that our _propriétaires_ will be induced to protract their absence; and if the lingering smell of paint does not drive us away from the Priory again, we expect to stay there from the first of September, without projects of travel for many, many months. We enjoy our roomy house and pretty lawn greatly. Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a veranda, with flower-beds and lawn and pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm-water bottle, and my writing on my knees. In that attitude my mornings are passed. We dine at two; and at four, when the tea comes in, I begin to read aloud. About six or half-past we walk on to the commons and see the great sky over our head. At eight we are usually in the house again, and fill our evening with physics, chemistry, or other wisdom if our heads are at par; if not, we take to folly, in the shape of Alfred de Musset's poems, or something akin to them. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th Oct. 1871.] Yesterday we returned from Weybridge, where, for a few days, I have been petted by kind friends (delightful Scotch people), and have had delicious drives in the pure autumn air. That must be my farewell to invalidism and holiday making. I am really better--not robust or fat, but perhaps as well as I am likely to be till death mends me. Your account of Mr. Main[17] sets my mind at ease about him; for in this case I would rather have your judgment than any opportunity of forming my own. The one thing that gave me confidence was his power of putting his finger on the right passages, and giving emphasis to the right idea (in relation to the author's feeling and purpose). Apart from that, enthusiasm would have been of little value. One feels rather ashamed of authoresses this week after the correspondence in the _Times_. One hardly knows which letter is in the worst taste. However, if we are to begin with marvelling at the little wisdom with which the world is governed, we can hardly expect that much wisdom will go to the making of novels. I should think it quite a compliment if the general got through "Miss Brooke." Mr. Lewes amused himself with the immeasurable contempt that Mr. Casaubon would be the object of in the general's mind. I hardly dare hope that the second part will take quite so well as the first, the effects being more subtile and dispersed; but Mr. Lewes seems to like the third part better than anything that has gone before it. But can anything be more uncertain than the reception of a book by the public? I am glad to see that the "Coming Race" has got into a fourth edition. Let us hope that the Koom Posh may be at least mitigated by the sale of a good book or two. As for me, I get more and more unable to be anything more than a feeble sceptic about all publishing plans, and am thankful to have so many good heads at work for me. _Allah illah allah!_ [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1871.] We who are getting old together have the tie of common infirmities. But I don't find that the young troubles seem lighter on looking back. I prefer my years now to any that have gone before. I wish you could tell me the same thing about yourself. And, surely, writing your book is, on the whole, a joy to you--it is a large share in the meagre lot of mankind. All hail for the morrow! How many sweet laughs, how much serious pleasure in the great things others have done, you and I have had together in a past islet of time that remains very sunny in my remembrance. [Sidenote: Journal, 1871.] _Dec. 1._--This day the first part of "Middlemarch" was published. I ought by this time to have finished the fourth part, but an illness which began soon after our return from Haslemere has robbed me of two months. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1871.] If you have not yet fallen in with Dickens's "Life" be on the lookout for it, because of the interest there is in his boyish experience, and also in his rapid development during his first travels in America. The book is ill organized, and stuffed with criticism and other matter which would be better in limbo; but the information about the childhood, and the letters from America, make it worth reading. We have just got a photograph of Dickens, taken when he was writing, or had just written, "David Copperfield"--satisfactory refutation of that keepsakey, impossible face which Maclise gave him, and which has been engraved for the "Life" in all its odious beautification. This photograph is the young Dickens, corresponding to the older Dickens whom I knew--the same face, without the unusually severe wear and tear of years which his latest looks exhibited. [Sidenote: Journal, 1872.] _Dec. 20._--My health has become very troublesome during the last three weeks, and I can get on but tardily. Even now I am only at page 227 of my fourth part. But I have been also retarded by construction, which, once done, serves as good wheels for progress. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Jan. 1872.] Your good wishes and pleasant bits of news made the best part of my breakfast this morning. I am glad to think that, in desiring happiness for you during the new year, I am only desiring the continuance of good which you already possess. I suppose we two, also, are among the happiest of mortals, yet we have had a rather doleful Christmas, the one great lack, that of health, having made itself particularly conspicuous in the surrounding fog. Having no grandchildren to get up a Christmas-tree for, we had nothing to divert our attention from our headaches. Mr. Main's book broke the clouds a little, and now the heavens have altogether cleared, so that we are hoping to come back from a visit of three days to Weybridge with our strength renewed--if not like the eagle's, at least like a convalescent tomtit's. The "Sayings" are set off by delightful paper and print, and a binding which opens with inviting ease. I am really grateful to every one concerned in the volume, and am anxious that it should not be in any way a disappointment. The selections seem to me to be made with an exquisite sensibility to the various lights and shades of life; and all Mr. Main's letters show the same quality. It is a great help to me to have such an indication that there exist careful readers for whom no subtilest intention is lost. We have both read the story of the "Megara" with the deepest interest; indeed, with a quite exceptional enjoyment of its direct, unexaggerated painting. The prescription of two days' golfing per week will, I hope, keep up your condition to the excellent pitch at which it was on your return from Paris. Good news usually acts as a tonic when one's case is not too desperate; and I shall be glad if you and we can get it in the form of more success for "Middlemarch." Dickens's "Life," you see, finds a large public ready to pay more. But the British mind has long entertained the purchase of expensive biographies. The proofs lately given that one's books don't necessarily go out like lucifer matches, never to be taken up again, make one content with moderate immediate results, which perhaps are as much as can reasonably be expected for any writing which does not address itself either to fashions or corporate interests of an exclusive kind. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Jan. 1872.] It is like your kindness to write me your encouraging impressions on reading the third book. I suppose it is my poor health that just now makes me think my writing duller than usual. For certainly the reception of the first book by my old readers is quite beyond my most daring hopes. One of them, who is a great champion of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," told Mr. Lewes yesterday that he thought "Middlemarch" surpassed them. All this is very wonderful to me. I am thoroughly comforted as to the half of the work which is already written; but there remains the terror about the _un_written. Mr. Lewes is much satisfied with the fourth book, which opens with the continuation of the Featherstone drama. We went yesterday to the Tichborne trial, which was an experience of great interest to me. We had to come away after the third hour of Coleridge's speaking; but it was a great enjoyment to me to hear what I did. Coleridge is a rare orator--not of the declamatory, but of the argumentative order. Thanks, not formal, but sincerely felt, for the photographs. This likeness will always carry me back to the first time I saw you, in our little Richmond lodging, when I was thinking anxiously of "Adam Bede," as I now am of "Middlemarch." I felt something like a shudder when Sir Henry Maine asked me last Sunday whether this would not be a very long book; saying, when I told him it would be four good volumes, that that was what he had calculated. However, it will not be longer than Thackeray's books, if so long. And I don't see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly. I have to be grateful for the gift of "Brougham's Life," which will be a welcome addition to my means of knowing the time "when his ugliness had not passed its bloom." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Jan. 1872.] Your letter seems to pierce the rainy fog with a little sunlight. Cold and clearness are the reverse of what we are usually having here. Until the last few days my chief consciousness has been that of struggling against inward as well as outward fog; but I am now better, and have only been dragged back into headachiness by a little too much fatigue from visitors. I give you this account as a preface to my renunciation of a journey to Dover, which would be very delightful, if I had not already lost too much time to be warranted in taking a holiday. Next Saturday we are going to have a party--six to dine, and a small rush of people after dinner, for the sake of music. I think it is four years at least since we undertook anything of that kind. A great domestic event for us has been the arrival of a new dog, who has all Ben's virtues, with more intelligence, and a begging attitude of irresistible charm. He is a dark-brown spaniel. You see what infantine innocence we live in! Glad you are reading my demigod Milton! We also are rather old-fashioned in our light reading just now; for I have rejected Heyse's German stories, brand new, in favor of dear old Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," which I read aloud in my old age with a delicious revival of girlish impressions. [Sidenote: Journal, 1872.] _Jan. 29._--It is now the last day but one of January. I have finished the fourth part--_i.e._, the second volume--of "Middlemarch." The first part, published on December 1, has been excellently well received; and the second part will be published the day after to-morrow. About Christmas a volume of extracts from my works was published, under the title, "Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse." It was proposed and executed by Alexander Main, a young man of thirty, who began a correspondence with me by asking me how to pronounce Romola, in the summer, when we were at Shottermill. Blackwood proposed that we should share the profits, but we refused. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Jan. 1872.] I do lead rather a crawling life under these rainy fogs and low behavior of the barometer. But I am a little better, on the whole, though just now overdone with the fatigue of company. We have been to hear Coleridge addressing the jury on the Tichborne trial--a very interesting occasion to me. He is a marvellous speaker among Englishmen; has an exquisitely melodious voice, perfect gesture, and a power of keeping the thread of his syntax to the end of his sentence, which makes him delightful to follow. We are going some other day, if possible, to hear a cross-examination of Ballantyne's. The digest of the evidence which Coleridge gives is one of the best illustrations of the value or valuelessness of testimony that could be given. I wonder if the world, which retails Guppy anecdotes, will be anything the wiser for it. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Feb. 1872.] To hear of a friend's illness after he has got well through it is the least painful way of learning the bad news. I hope that your attack has been a payment of insurance. You probably know what it grieved us deeply to learn the other day--that our excellent friend Mr. William Smith is dangerously ill. They have been so entirely happy and wrapped up in each other that we cannot bear to think of Mrs. Smith's grief. Thanks for the list of sales since February 12th. Things are encouraging, and the voices that reach us are enthusiastic. But you can understand how people's interest in the book heightens my anxiety that the remainder should be up to the mark. It has caused me some uneasiness that the third part is two sheets less than the first. But Mr. Lewes insisted that the death of old Featherstone was the right point to pause at; and he cites your approbation of the part as a proof that effectiveness is secured in spite of diminished quantity. Still it irks me to ask 5_s._ for a smaller amount than that already given at the same price. Perhaps I must regard the value as made up solely by effectiveness, and certainly the book will be long enough. I am still below par in strength, and am too much beset with visitors and kind attentions. I long for the quiet spaces of time and the absence of social solicitations that one enjoys in the country, out of everybody's reach. I am glad to hear of the pleasure "Middlemarch" gives in your household: that makes quite a little preliminary public for me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th Mch. 1872.] I can understand very easily that the two last years have been full for you of other and more imperative work than the writing of letters not absolutely demanded either by charity or business. The proof that you still think of me affectionately is very welcome now it is come, and all the more cheering because it enables me to think of you as enjoying your retreat in your orange orchard--your western Sorrento--the beloved Rabbi still beside you. I am sure it must be a great blessing to you to bathe in that quietude--as it always is to us when we go out of reach of London influences, and have the large space of country days to study, walk, and talk in. Last year we spent our summer months in Surrey, and did not leave England. Unhappily, the country was not so favorable to my bodily health as to my spiritual, and on our return to town I had an illness which was the climax of the summer's _malaise_. That illness robbed me of two months, and I have never quite recovered a condition in which the strict duties of the day are not felt as a weight. But just now we are having some clear spring days, and I am in hope of prospering better, the sunshine being to me the greatest visible good of life--what I call the wealth of life, after love and trust. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th Mch. 1872.] When I am more at liberty I will certainly read Mr. Owen's books, if he is good enough to send them to me. I desire on all subjects to keep an open mind, but hitherto the various phenomena reported or attested in connection with ideas of spirit-intercourse, "psychion," and so on, have come before me here in the painful form of the lowest _charlatanerie_. Take Mr. H. as an example of what I mean. I could not choose to enter a room where he held a _séance_. He is an object of moral disgust to me; and nothing of late reported by Mr. Crookes, Lord Lindsay, and the rest carries conviction to my mind that Mr. H. is not simply an impostor, whose professedly abnormal manifestations have varied their fashion in order to create a new market, just as if they were _papier mâché_ wares or pomades for the idle rich. But apart from personal contact with people who get money by public exhibitions as mediums, or with semi-idiots, such as those who make a court for a Mrs. Guppy or other feminine personage of that kind, I would not willingly place any barriers between my mind and any possible channel of truth affecting the human lot. The spirit in which you have written in the paper you kindly sent me is likely to teach others--to rouse them, at least, to attention in a case where you have been deeply impressed. I write to you quite openly, dear friend, but very imperfectly, for my letters are always written in shreds of time. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1872.] Thanks for the budget of this morning. The sales, we think, are very cheering, and we may well be content if they continue in the same ratio. But the Greek proverb about the beginning being the half of the whole wants as much defining and excepting from as most other proverbs. I have just had sent me a copy of the magazine _Für die Literatur des Auslander_, containing a review of "Miss Brooke," which will be good for Asher's edition, and is otherwise satisfactory as an intelligent appreciation. It mentions at the end the appearance of Mr. Main's book, "The Sayings." A Frenchman, apparently accomplished, a M. Landolphe, who has made some important translations, is going to translate the whole of "Middlemarch;" and one of the contributors to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ has written for leave to extract Dorothea's history. I fancy we have done a good turn to English authors generally by setting off Asher's series, for we have heard that Tauchnitz has raised his offers. There is another way in which benefit might come that would be still more desirable--namely, to make him more careful in his selections of books for reprint. But I fear that this effect is not so certain. You see Franz Duncker, who publishes the German translation of "Middlemarch," has also begun an English series. This is really worth while, for the Germans are excellent readers of our books. I was astonished to find so many in Berlin who really knew one's books, and did not merely pay compliments after the fashion of the admirers who made Rousseau savage--running after him to pay him visits, and not knowing a word of his writing. You and other good readers have spoiled me, and made me rather shudder at being read only once; and you may imagine how little satisfaction I get from people who mean to please me by saying that they shall wait till "Middlemarch" is finished, and then sit up to read it "at one go-off." We are looking for a country retreat not too far from town, so that we may run up easily. There is nothing wanting to our happiness except that "Middlemarch" should be well ended without growing signs of its author's debility. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 17th March, 1872.] Before I received your letter this morning, I was going to write you a word of sympathy, knowing how deeply you would be feeling the death of Mazzini. Such a man leaves behind him a wider good than the loss of his personal presence can take away. "The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero." I must be excused for quoting my own words, because they are my _credo_. I enter thoroughly into your sense of wealth in having known him. Brighton does not suit Mr. Lewes. But he was near going there for a night a little while ago to see our friends, Mr. and Mrs. William Smith. He (the author of "Thorndale," etc.) is, I fear, wasting fatally with organic disease, and we grieve much at the too-probably near parting of a husband and wife who have been among the perfectly happy couples of the world. She is a charming woman, and I wish that you may happen to know her. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d March, 1872.] Owing to my loss of two months in illness, and my infirm health ever since, I have not yet finished the writing of "Middlemarch." This payment of wintry arrears makes one prefer the comforts of a London home; but we are obliged to see more company than my health is equal to, and for this reason I dare say we shall soon migrate. To-day we have been to our last morning concert--or Saturday Pop.--held on a Friday because of the University boat-race to-morrow. These concerts are an easy pleasure which we are sorry to part with. This is one of my bad weeks, owing probably to the change in the weather, and I am constantly struggling with hemicrania and _malaise_. Even writing this scrap of a note is the feather too much, and I must leave off. You have known too much of nervous weakness not to understand this. [Sidenote: Journal, 1872.] _May 8._--I have been reposing for more than a week in the hope of getting stronger, my life having been lately a swamp of illness, with only here and there a bit of firm walking. In consequence of this incessant interruption (almost every week having been half nullified for me so far as my work has been concerned) I have only finished the fifth book, and have still three books to write--equal to a large volume and a half. The reception of the book hitherto has been quite beyond what I could have believed beforehand, people exalting it above everything else I have written. Kohn is publishing an English edition in Germany; Duncker is to publish a translation; and Harpers pay me £1200 for reprinting it in America. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 4th June, 1872.] I am glad to know that you are having a time of refreshing in fine scenery, with entire freedom to paint. I am in a corresponding state of relief from the noises and small excitements that break up the day and scatter one's nervous energy in London. We have been in our hiding-place about twelve days now, and I am enjoying it more and more--getting more bodily ease and mental clearness than I have had for the last six months. Our house is not in the least beautiful, but it is well situated and comfortable, perfectly still in the middle of a garden surrounded by fields and meadows, and yet within reach of shops and civilization. We managed to get to the Academy one day before leaving town. I was delighted with Walker's picture--were you?--and Mason's unfinished Reaper, and a few, very few, others. Also we went twice to the opera in order to save ourselves from any yearnings after it when we should have settled in the country. We tell no one our address, and have our letters sent on from the Priory. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th June, 1872.] We too are in a country refuge, you see, and this bit of Surrey, as I dare say you know, is full of beauty of the too garden-like sort for which you pity us. How different from your lodge in the wilderness! I have read your description three or four times--it enchants me so thoroughly--and Mr. Lewes is just as much enamoured of it. We shall never see it, I imagine, except in the mirror of your loving words; but thanks, many and warm, dear friend, for saying that our presence would be welcome. I have always had delight in descriptions of American forests since the early days when I read "Atala," which I believe that you would criticise as half unveracious. I dwelt on the descriptions in "Dred" with much enjoyment. Pray give my special thanks to the Professor for his letter. His handwriting, which does really look like Arabic--a very graceful character, surely--happens to be remarkably legible to me, and I did not hesitate over a single word. Some of the words, as expressions of fellowship, were very precious to me, and I hold it very good of him to write to me that best sort of encouragement. I was much impressed with the fact--which you had told me--that he was the original of the "visionary boy" in "Old Town Folk;" and it must be deeply interesting to talk with him on his experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts, physiological and psychological, which have been gathered of late years, to give larger place to the interpretation of vision-seeing as _subjective_ than the Professor would approve. It seems difficult to limit--at least to limit with any precision--the possibility of confounding sense by impressions, derived from inward conditions, with those which are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the division between within and without in this sense seems to become every year a more subtle and bewildering problem. _Your_ experience with the _planchette_ is amazing; but that the words which you found it to have written were dictated by the spirit of Charlotte Brontë is to me (whether rightly or not) so enormously improbable, that I could only accept it if every condition were laid bare, and every other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë--if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help, then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a particular phase of human society. Others who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion. I am comforted to think that you partly agree with me there. I have not time to write more than this very imperfect fragmentary sketch of _only one_ aspect which the question of spirit-communications wears to me at present--being always rather brain-weary after my morning's work, and called for by my husband to walk with him and read aloud to him. I spend nearly three hours every day in this exercise of reading aloud, which, happily, I can carry on without fatigue of lungs. Yet it takes strength as well as time. Mr. Lewes is gone into town to-day, so I have an additional hour at liberty, and have been glad to be able to send you a letter which is not worth anything, indeed, but which satisfies my need to thank you and the Professor for your sweet friendliness--very sweet to me, I assure you. Please accept my entire frankness as a proof of that high value I set on you. And do not call anything I may have written a prejudice--it is simply a statement of how certain things appear to my inward eyesight, which I am ready to have rectified by more light. About photographs--I have _no_ photograph of myself, having always avoided having one taken. That makes me seem very selfish in being particularly glad to get yours. Mrs. Fields, with the beautiful face and charming manners, sent me a letter a little while ago, inviting us in the most tempting way to go to Boston. She said that this pretty action was done at your prompting, which is just like you as you have always shown yourself to me. Dear friend, how much you have lived through, both in the flesh and in the spirit! My experience has been narrow compared with yours. I assure you I feel this, so do not misinterpret anything I say to you as being written in a flippant or critical spirit. One always feels the want of the voice and eyes to accompany a letter and give it the right tone. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th July, 1872.] You were very good and dear to want to give me the pleasure of knowing that the news was good, instead of leaving me to my small stock of hopefulness. Ask Emily to care a little even now, with baby on her mind, that her old friends are the better for hearing that she is well. Four or five months ago it happens that I was writing some playfulness about a baby and baby's hair, which is now in print, to appear next month. I am not afraid that Emily should be revolted by my blasphemy! Mr. Lewes had "a lovely time" from Saturday to Monday at Weybridge. He was feeling languid, and yet was tempted to sit at his desk. The little change has been very serviceable, and he is now bright. Our first book, read aloud by me after we came down, was Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago," which, I think, you had spoken well of to Mr. Lewes. It is delightful. The biography of the infant ourang-outang alone is worth getting the book for. We are now in the middle of Tylor's "Primitive Culture," which is worth studying, and useful for reference on special points, if you happen to want knowledge about the ideas of the savage tribes. Our days go by in delicious peace, unbroken except by my little inward anxieties about all unfinished work. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th July, 1872.] This morning came the joyful news that Gertrude has a fine healthy baby--a daughter. We have just been saying in our walk that by the end of this century our one-day-old granddaughter will probably be married and have children of her own, while we are pretty sure to be at rest. This obvious kind of wisdom does very well for discourse in the delicious sunshine, as we wander over a hilly, half fern-clad, half grassy wilderness called South Park, from which we can overlook two fertile bosky valleys. We like this bit of country better and better. As to health, I am not quite so prosperous as I was at first, but to make amends, Mr. Lewes is in a good average condition, and only now and then has a morning in which he is forced to wander about instead of going to his beloved work. We have had much happiness here, much sympathy in letters from far-off friends unknown in the flesh, and peaceful enjoyment of our occupations. But we have longed for more continuous warmth and brightness, and to-day may perhaps be the beginning of that one wanting condition. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Aug. 1872(?).] The death of that honored, good creature, Mr. William Smith, touched us particularly, because of the perfect marriage-bond which had made the last eleven years of his life unspeakably precious both to him and his wife. Mr. Lewes offered to go to Brighton to see him; but he was so reduced, so very feeble in body, though he kept to the last much brightness of mind, that Mrs. Smith feared for him the excitement of seeing friends who came, specially, from a distance. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Aug. 1872.] I like to think that your journey was a success. But I had felt sure, that unless bad health or bad weather overtook you, both Mrs. Blackwood and you must have great happiness in taking that bright, lovely daughter abroad and watching her fresh impressions. I imagine her laudable indignation at the crushing of the little lizard! Those little creatures darting about the stones seem part of the happiness of Italian sunshine, as the small birds hopping after the rain seem part of the moist happiness at home. I shall send Part VII. in a few days. Since Mr. Lewes tells me that the _Spectator_ considers me the most melancholy of authors, it will perhaps be a welcome assurance to you that there is no unredeemed tragedy in the solution of the story. Mr. Lewes examines the newspapers before I see them, and cuts out any criticisms which refer to me, so as to save me from these spiritual chills--though, alas! he cannot save me from the physical chills which retard my work more seriously. I had hoped to have the manuscript well out of my hands before we left this place at the end of the month, but the return of my dyspeptic troubles makes me unable to reckon on such a result. It will be a good plan, I think, to quicken the publication towards the end; but we feel convinced that the slow plan of publication has been of immense advantage to the book in deepening the impression it produces. Still I shudder a little to think what a long book it will be--not so long as "Vanity Fair" or "Pendennis," however, according to my calculation. How good the articles on French manners and domestic life are in "Maga." The spirit in which they are written is excellent. The manuscript of "Middlemarch" bears the following inscription: "To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, Sept. 1872.] I am tired of behaving like an ungrateful wretch--making no sign in answer to affectionate words which have come to me with cheering effect. And I want to tell you and Mr. Hall (alas! for the dear old name[18] which had such cherished associations) that I long too much to see you all at Six-Mile Bottom, to give up utterly the prospect of that good. We imagine that the place is near Ipswich, which is no more than an hour and fifty minutes from London. If so, the journey would be easily managed, and would be worth taking for the sake of one whole day and two half days with you--just as if you were the hour nearer, at Weybridge--before we set our faces towards Germany. I am not hopeless that we might do that in the second week of September, if you are not quite disgusted with the thought of me as a person who is always claiming pity for small ailments, and also if Mr. Hall can secure me against being shot from the other side of the hedge by the Prince of Wales,[19] while we are discussing plantations. I dare not count much on fulfilling any project, my life for the last year having been a sort of nightmare, in which I have been scrambling on the slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above water. But I shall be the happier for having told you that I delight in the double invitation for the sake of the love it assures me of, and that I do want to see you all. You are all gloriously well, I hope, and Alkie looking more and more cherubic, and Emily and Florence blooming. My best love to all. Particular regards to J., and regrets that we were not on his route from Brindisi. I read his paper on New York with much interest and satisfaction. You are often among my imaged companions both in dreaming and waking hours. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, Oct. 1872, from Homburg.] It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting when we went to inquire at the _Poste Restante_. We had, on the whole, a fortunate journey, and are especially grateful to Mr. Hall for suggesting the route by Trèves, where we spent two nights and an exquisite day. I was continually reminded of Rome when we were wandering in the outskirts in search of the antiquities, and the river banks are a loveliness into the bargain which Rome has not. We had even an opportunity of seeing some dissipation, for there happened to be an excellent circus, where we spent our evening. The pretty country through which we passed had an additional interest for us about Libramont. The air, the waters, the plantations here are all perfect--"only man is vile." I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming-tables, the raking up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs--all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it. I get some satisfaction in looking on, from the sense that the thing is going to be put down. Hell is the only right name for such places. It was cruel to find the bitter cold just set in as we arrived. For two days we were as cold as in clear winter days at Berlin. There are no amusements for the evening here, and the pleasure of listening to the excellent band in the afternoons is diminished by the chillness which makes one fear to sit down in the open air. But we like being idle, and the days pass easily. It is good to have in our memories the two happy days at Six-Mile Bottom; and the love that surrounded me and took care of me there is something very precious to believe in among hard-faced strangers. Much gratitude for the anticipated letter that will come to tell us more news of you by-and-by. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Oct. 1872.] At last I begin a letter which is intended not as a payment but as an acknowledgment of debt. It will have at least the recommendation of requiring no answer. After some perfect autumnal days we are languishing with headache from two days' damp and mugginess, and feel it almost as much work as we are equal to to endure our _malaise_. But on the whole we are not sorry that we came to this place rather than any other. On dry days the air is perfect, and the waters are really an enticing drink. Then there is a wood close by where we can wander in delicious privacy: which is really better than the company here, save and except a few friends whom we found at first, and who have now moved off to Baden. The Kursaal is to me a hell, not only for the gambling but for the light and heat of the gas, and we have seen enough of its monstrous hideousness. There is very little dramatic _Stoff_ to be picked up by watching or listening. The saddest thing to be witnessed is the play of a young lady, who is only twenty-six years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-making demon. It made me cry to see her young, fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her. Next year, when the gambling has vanished, the place will be delightful; there is to be a subvention from Government to keep up the beautiful grounds; and it is likely that there will be increase enough in the number of decent visitors to keep the town tolerably prosperous. One attraction it has above other German baths that I have seen is the abundance of pleasant apartments to be had, where one can be as peaceful as the human lot allows in a world of pianos. Asher's cheap editions are visible everywhere by the side of Tauchnitz, but the outside is not, I think, quite equally recommendable and recommending. We brought no books with us, but have furnished our table with German books which we bought at Frankfort, from learned writing about Menschlich Sprache and Vernunft down to Kotzebue's comedies, so that we have employment for the rainy hours when once our heads are clear of aches. The certainty that the weather is everywhere else bad will help our resolution to stay here till the 12th at least. In the mean time we hope to have the proof of the finale to "Middlemarch." I am rejoiced to learn from Mr. William's letter that Mr. Simpson has returned from his excursion in good condition. That must be a comfort to you, both for friendship and for work's sake. We mean to return by Paris, and hope that the weather will not drive us away from health and pleasure-seeking until the end of the month. I fear, from the accounts of your Scottish weather, that you will have enjoyed Strathtyrum less than usual, and will be resigned to Edinburgh before your proper time. How one talks about the weather! It is excusable here where there is no grave occupation, and no amusement for us, who don't gamble, except seeking health in walks and water drinking. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 27th Oct. 1872, from Boulogne.] I had meant to write to you again from Germany, but I was hindered from doing so by the uncertainty of our plans, which vacillated between further wanderings in South Germany and the usual dreary railway journeying by Strasburg to Paris. As it was, we left Homburg on the 13th and had ten days of delicious autumnal weather and quietude at Stuttgart and Carlsruhe--ten days which made the heart of our enjoyment. We still hesitated whether we should go to Augsburg, and even Munich, making our way home through Germany and Belgium, and turning our shoulders on Paris. Our evil genius persuaded us to go to Paris and to make the journey by night--whence came headache and horrible disgust with the shops of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard. After going to Versailles in the rain, seeing the sad ruins of the Hotel de Ville, missing the Theatre Français, and getting "Patrie" in exchange, we rushed away to this place, where we are trying to recover the sense of benefit from our change, which forsook us on quitting old Germany. We have an affinity for what the world calls "dull places," and always prosper best in them. We are sure to be at home next week, and I hope before long to have some news of you there--some dear faces coming to bring it. We shall linger here a few days and take a favorable time for crossing, but our patience will hardly last beyond Friday. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st Nov. 1872.] We returned yesterday evening from six weeks' absence in Germany, and I found your dear, sad letter among the many awaiting me. I prize very highly the fact that you like to write to me and bear me in your mind as one who has a certain fellowship in your sorrow; and I do trust that this letter may reach you in time to prevent you from thinking, even for a moment, that I could be indifferent about responding to any word you send me. I shall address it to the care of Blackwood & Sons, because I imagine you to be by this time in Edinburgh with that delightful friend, Mrs. Stirling, whom I had much kindness from many years ago when I was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. George Combe. She took me to hear Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Candlish, and through her I saw Craigcrook. I like to think of those hours and her pleasant talk. Mr. Lewes, I am thankful to say, has been getting more robust for the last two years, and is very bright and active. I think there is hardly any one left to whom he would so willingly have written or talked about the subjects which are filling his mind as that dear one who is gone from your side, but is perpetually present in your consciousness. To-day I have been reading the memorial article in _Blackwood_, and have been hoping that there is nothing in it which jars on your feeling. Everybody will think as I do--that the bits from your pen are worth all the rest. I have been especially moved, though, by the two stanzas quoted at the end. Mr. Lewes judges that the writer of the article did not personally know your husband, and wishes that more special touches had been given. I know, dear friend, that the sorrow is irremediable; but the pain--the anguish--will become less sharp and life will be less difficult. You will think of things to do such as he would approve of your doing, and every day will be sacred with his memory--nay, his presence. There is no pretence or visionariness in saying that he is still part of you. Mr. Lewes sends his affectionate regards, which you will not reject. We mention your name to each other with a certain tenderness, as if your sorrow somehow belonged to our love for each other. But I hardly dare to think of what these words which I have written mean. Sometimes in the midst of happiness I cry suddenly at the thought that there must come a parting. Are not you and I very near to one another? I mean in feeling. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Nov. 1872.] I found a letter from dear Mrs. William Smith on my return, and I have had another since in answer to mine. It is inevitable that her sense of loss should deepen for some time to come. I am hoping that by-and-by active interests will arise to make her feel that her life is useful. The article in _Blackwood_ was chiefly valuable for the extracts it contained from Mrs. Smith's own memoir. One felt that the writer of the article had not known Mr. William Smith personally; but her sketches did something to supply that defect. Mr. Lewes felt a peculiar attachment to him. He had always been thoroughly sympathetic, both morally and intellectually, and it was a constant regret to us that he and Mrs. Smith were so far away. There was no man with whom Mr. Lewes would have found it so pleasant to discuss questions of science and philosophy--his culture was so rare and his disposition so free from littleness: and his wife was worthy of him. Gertrude's little Blanche is a charming young lady--fat, cooing, and merry. It is a great comfort to see her with this hope fulfilled--I mean to see Gertrude with her hope fulfilled, and not Blanche, as the grammar seemed to imply. That small person's hopes are at present easy of fulfilment. We have made but one expedition since our return, and that was to see the pictures at Bethnal Green--altogether a cheering and delightful sight. Of course you saw them long ago. The Troyon is my favorite. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Nov. 1872.] I will impute your total silence towards me for many, many months to your preoccupation with the work now announced, and will not believe that a greeting from me at this time of the year will be less welcome than of old. I remember that last year one of your prettily-expressed wishes was that I should write another book and--I think you added--send it to you to read. On the strength of this remembrance, you will be one of the three exceptional people to whom we order "Middlemarch" to be sent. But do not write to me about it, because until a book has quite gone away from me and become entirely of the _non-ego_--gone thoroughly from the wine-press into the casks--I would rather not hear or see anything that is said about it. Cara sent me word that you were looking, as usual, very pretty, and showing great energy on interesting occasions. But this was two months ago, and some detailed news from yourself would be a delightful gift. I am getting stronger, and showing some meagre benefit from being indulged in all possible ways. Mr. Lewes makes a martyr of himself in writing all my notes and business letters. Is not that being a sublime husband? For all the while there are studies of his own being put aside--studies which are a seventh heaven to him. Is there any one who does not need patience? For when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing. You are never long without entering into my thoughts, though you may send nothing fresh to feed them. But I am ashamed of expressing regard for my friends, since I do no earthly thing for them. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1872.] A kiss to you on your birthday! with gratitude for your delightful letter, such as only you can write me. How impossible it is to _feel_ that we are as old as we are! Sometimes it seems a little while since you and I were walking over the Radford fields, with the youth in our limbs, talking and laughing with that easy companionship which it is difficult to find in later life. I am busy now reading Mr. Lewes's manuscript, which has been accumulating fast during my "Middlemarch" time. Did I tell you that in the last two years he has been mastering the principles of mathematics? That is an interesting fact, impersonally, at his age. Old Professor Stowe--Mrs. H. B. Stowe's husband--sent me this story, which is almost better than Topsy. He heard a school-master asking a little black girl the usual questions about creation--who made the earth, the sea, etc. At last came, "And who made you?" Some deliberation was necessary, after which she said, "Nobody; _I was so afore_." Expect to be immensely disappointed with the close of "Middlemarch." But look back to the Prelude. I wish I could take the wings of the morning every now and then to cheer you with an hour's chat, such as you feel the need of, and then fly back on the wings of the wind. I have the most vivid thoughts of you, almost like a bodily presence; but these do you no good, since you can only believe that I have them--and you are tired of believing after your work is done. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Dec. 1872.] Before your letter came, Mr. Lewes had been expressing to me his satisfaction (and he is very hard to satisfy with articles on me) in the genuineness of judgment, wise moderation, and excellent selection of points in "Maga's" review of "Middlemarch." I have just now been reading the review myself--Mr. Lewes had meant at first to follow his rule of not allowing me to see what is written about myself--and I am pleased to find the right moral note struck everywhere, both in remark and quotation. Especially I am pleased with the writer's sensibility to the pathos in Mr. Casaubon's character and position, and with the discernment he shows about Bulstrode. But it is a perilous matter to approve the praise which is given to our own doings. I think that such an article as that which you hint at on the tone of the Bar is very desirable. We are usually at one on points of feeling. Is it not time now to insist that ability and not lying is the force of a barrister--that he has not to make himself a bad actor in order to put a case well, but to get the clearness and breadth of vision which will enable him to handle the evidence effectively? Untruthfulness usually ends by making men foolish. I have never read "Spiritual Wives," but judging from the extracts which have come before me, it must be a nasty book. Still, if people will be censors, let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by the disproportionateness of the condemnation which everybody with some conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of distributive justice in the kicking. I shall be agreeably surprised if there is a respectable subscription for the four volumes. Already the numbers taken have been satisfactorily large, considering the indisposition of the public to buy books by comparison with other wares, and especially to buy novels at a high price. I fancy every private copy has done duty for a circle. Friends of mine in the country have implied that they lent their copies to all the readers in their neighborhood. A little fuss of advertisement, together with the reviews, will perhaps create a few more curious inquirers after the book, and impress its existence on the slower part of the reading world. But really the reading world is, after all, very narrow, as, according to the _Spectator_, the "comfortable" world also is--the world able to give away a sovereign without pinching itself. Those statistics just given about incomes are very interesting. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 11th Dec. 1872.] A thousand thanks for your kind interest in our project, and for the trouble you have taken in our behalf. I fear the land buying and building[20] is likely to come to nothing, and our construction to remain entirely of the aerial sort. It is so much easier to imagine other people doing wise things than to do them one's self! Practically, I excel in nothing but paying twice as much as I ought for everything. On the whole, it would be better if my life could be done for me, and I could look on. However, it appears that the question of the land at Shere may remain open until we can discuss it with you at Weybridge; and there is no telling what we may not venture on with your eyes to see through. But, oh dear, I don't like anything that is troublesome under the name of pleasure. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 12th Dec. 1872.] I have had the news that you are safely landed at Pooree, so now I can write with some courage. I have got some comfort--I trust it is not false comfort--out of the probability that there will be much good mingled with the evil of this winter's exile for you. You must be the richer for it mentally, and your health may be the better--and then, you will be back again in the late spring. In this way I make myself contented under the incompleteness of our life without you, and I am determined not to grumble at my share of the loss which falls so sadly on Dr. Congreve and the children. Dr. Congreve kindly let me know when you had got through the trials of the Red Sea, rather better than might have been expected; and Sophie tells me that you speak of the brilliant coloring in your new world as quite equal to any description you had read. Beyond that all is a blank to me except the fact of your arrival at Pooree, and all my feeling is taken up with the joy there must have been in the meeting with Mr. Geddes. You find it very difficult to write in the heat--so don't make the thought of me disagreeable by associating it with a claim on you for a letter. I will be grateful for scraps from your correspondence with home, and wait for my turn when you come back to us. For ourselves, we think our little granddaughter, Blanche, the perfection of a baby. She is, dispassionately speaking, very pretty, and has a cooing, chanting song of her own which it makes me happy to hear. Mr. Lewes goes on at his writing with as much interest as ever, and is bringing the first part of his work into its final shape. Since we came home I have been reading his manuscript, which has been piling itself up in preparation for my leisure, and I have been wearing my gravest philosophic cap. Altogether we are dangerously happy. You remember Mrs. Blank of Coventry? You know hers was another name for astonishing cleverness in that town. Now, of course, she is old, and her cleverness seems to have a mouldy flavor. _Apropos_ of the seventh book of "Middlemarch"--which you may not have read, but never mind--Mrs. Blank, having lain awake all night from compassion for Bulstrode, said, "Poor, dear creature, after he had done so much for that wretch, sitting up at night and attending on him! _and I don't believe it was the brandy that killed him_--and what is to become of Bulstrode now, he has nobody left but Christ!" I think this is worth sending to India, you see; it is a little bit of old Coventry life that may make you and Emily laugh with all the more lively memory in the midst of your strange scenery. But there is a hovering terror while I write to you from far off, lest my trivialities should find you when you are ill or have some cause for being sad. In any case, however, you will take my letter for a simple proof that I dwell on you and Emily as images constantly present in my mind, and very often moving to the foreground in my contemplation. Mr. Lewes is one with me in many affectionate thoughts about you, and your names are often on our lips. We are going to pass the Christmas week with our friends at Weybridge; and I shall be glad to escape the London aspects of that season--aspects that are without any happy association for me. Mr. Lewes has just been in to speak to me, and begs me to say that he hopes baby is raised to the _n_^{th} power. You see the lofty point of view from which he regards the world at present. But there is enough of the sap of affection in him to withstand all the dryness of the dryest mathematics, and he has very hearty regards for you all, including Mr. Geddes, not as a matter of course, but with special emphasis. Good-bye, dear, dear friend. May it give you some little satisfaction to think of me as yours always lovingly. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 18th Dec. 1872.] Your letter was very welcome to me. I wanted to know how you were; and I think that I discern in your words some growth of courage to face the hard task--it is a hard task--of living a separate life. I reckon it a great good to me that any writing of mine has been taken into companionship by you, and seemed to speak with you of your own experience. Thank you for telling me of that. This weather, which is so melancholy in the privation it must cause to those who are worst off in the world, adds a little weight to everybody's griefs. But I trust that you find it a comfort, not an oppression, to be among friends who make a little claim on your attention. When you go to How, please tell me all about the place, and whom you have near you, because I like to be able to imagine your circumstances. I have been, and am still, reading Mr. Lewes's manuscript--and I often associate this with your dear husband, to whom I imagine mine would have liked to send his proofs when the matter had reached the printing stage. We are both very well, and Mr. Lewes is enjoying his morning at his desk. He likes very much to be included in your love, and has always thought you one of the most charming women among our acquaintance. Please not to say that he has bad taste in women. We both cherish very tender thoughts of your sorrow, dear friend. Let me always be assured that you think of me as yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Simpson, 18th Dec. 1872.] We have to thank you for two things especially. First, for the good bargain you have made for "Middlemarch" with Australia; and secondly, for the trouble you have kindly taken with the MS., which has come to us safely in its fine Russian coat. The four volumes, we imagine, must have been subscribed long ago; and we should be glad to know, if it were convenient--perhaps even if it were _in_convenient--what are the figures representing the courage of "the trade" in the matter of a 42_s._ novel, which has already been well distributed. We both hope that your health is well confirmed, and that you are prepared for Christmas pleasures, among which you would probably, like Caleb Garth, reckon the extra "business" which the jolly season carries in its hinder wallet. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1869, TO DECEMBER, 1872. Poem on Agatha--Reading on Philology, "Iliad," "Faery Queen," Clough's Poems, Bright's Speeches, "Volpone," Lecture by Sir Wm. Thomson--Writing "How Lisa Loved the King"--Browning and Rector of Lincoln on Versification--Letter to Miss Hennell--Browning's "Elisha"--Fourth visit to Italy--Two months away--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Paris--Dr. Congreve's Reply to Professor Huxley in _Fortnightly_--Meeting in Rome with Mrs. Bullock and Mr. and Mrs. Cross--Letter to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe--Effect of books--Religion of the future--Arrival of Thornton Lewes from Natal--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Marriage engagements of Mr. Beesley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and Dr. Clifford Allbut--Finished five "Sonnets on Childhood"--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--"Old Town Folks"--Presentation of alien religious convictions--Spiritualism--Reading Drayton and Grote--Writing Introduction to "Middlemarch"--Reading Theocritus--Burne-Jones's Pictures--Reading Littré on Comte--Sainte Beuve--Thornton Lewes's continued illness--Visit to Mrs. Cross at Weybridge--Reading for "Middlemarch"--Asks Mrs. Congreve to get information about provincial hospitals--Letter to Miss Hennell--The Byron scandal--Byron a vulgar-minded genius--The Kovilevskys--"Legend of Jubal" begun--Mr. W. G. Clark--Reading Max Müller--Lecky and Herbert Spencer--Death of Thornton Lewes--Letter to Miss Hennell describing month's visit to Limpsfield--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Doyle--Letter to F. Harrison on the Positivist Problem--Aversion to personal statements--Shrinking from deliverances--Letter to Miss Hennell on Charles Hennell's "Inquiry"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Berlin--Sees Mommsen, Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond--Visit to Vienna--Return to London--Three days' visit to the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Mrs. Pattison--Meets Sir Benjamin Brodie--Professor Rawlinson and Professor Phillips--Dr. Rolleston and the Miss Gaskells, and Miss Arnold--Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Mr. Fowler--Re-reading Grove "On the Correlation of the Physical Forces"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Dickens's Death, and his story of President Lincoln--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Visit to Cromer--Growing dislike of migratory life--Letter to Mrs. Lytton on the death of Lord Clarendon--Danger of women living too exclusively in the affections--Reading Mendelssohn's letters--From Cromer to Harrogate and Whitby--Meets Mrs. Burne-Jones there--"Armgart" begun--Three weeks' visit to Limpsfield--Letter to Miss Hennell on the beginning of the war between Germany and France--Jowett's "Plato"--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--The French nation--"Armgart" finished at Limpsfield--Return to the Priory--Letter to Miss Hennell--A popular preacher--Growing influence of ideas--Goethe's contempt for revolution of 1830--Letter to Mme. Bodichon on the faults of one's friends--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Industrial schemes--Greater cheerfulness--Frederic Harrison on Bismarckism--Writing "Miss Brooke"--Reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to Homer" and "Wilhelm Meister"--Visit to Mme. Bodichon at Ryde--Letter to Miss Hennell--Ritualism at Ryde--Brutalizing effect of German war--Trollope's "Sir Harry Hotspur"--Limits of woman's constancy--Miss Bury's engagement to Mr. Geddes--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Three and a half months' visit to Petersfield--Mode of life--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Lowell's "My Study Windows"--"Diethelm von Buchenberg" in _Deutschen Novellenschatz_--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mrs. Geddes's marriage--Letter to John Blackwood--Relinquishment of Scott Commemoration--Captain Lockhart--Letter to John Blackwood on MS. of "Middlemarch"--Visit from Tennyson--Letter to Mrs. Lytton on death of her son--Letter to Miss Mary Cross on story in _Macmillan's Magazine_--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Suffering from cold--Got's acting--Crystal Palace music--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Delight in intellectual activity--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Enjoyment of Cherrimans--Letter to John Blackwood--Visit to Weybridge--Mr. Main, the collector of the "Sayings"--Reception of "Middlemarch"--Letters to Miss Hennell--Foster's "Life of Dickens"--Low health--Tichborne trial--Letters to John Blackwood: pleased with the "Sayings"--Visit to Weybridge--Length of "Middlemarch"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Reading Johnson's "Lives of the Poets"--Finished second volume of "Middlemarch"--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Spiritualistic phenomena--Letter to John Blackwood--German and French interest in "Middlemarch"--Asher's edition--German readers--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on death of Mazzini--Letter to Miss Hennell--Low health--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Spirit communications--Letter to Mrs. Congreve on Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago"--Tylor's "Primitive Culture"--Letter to John Blackwood--"Middlemarch" finished--Letter to Mrs. Cross on invitation to Six-Mile Bottom, Cambridge--Month's visit to Homburg--Letter to Mrs. Cross--Trèves--On gambling at Homburg--Letter to John Blackwood--Play of a young lady at Homburg--German reading--Letter to Mrs. Cross from Boulogne--Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith of condolence on loss of her husband--Memorial article on Mr. Wm. Smith--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on Mr. Wm. Smith--Letters to Miss Hennell--Presentation copies of "Middlemarch"--Mr. Lewes studying mathematics--Letter to John Blackwood--"Maga's" review of "Middlemarch"--Tone of the Bar--Letter to J. W. Cross on building a house at Shere--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Happiness--Story of Coventry lady and Bulstrode--Letter to Mr. Simpson--MS. of "Middlemarch." FOOTNOTES: [6] Dr. Congreve's article, "Mr. Huxley on M. Comte," in _Fortnightly Review_, April, 1869. [7] See _ante_, vol. i. p. 220. [8] Professor Edmund Spenser Beesley, a well-known member of the Positivist body, who married Miss Crompton, daughter of Mr. Justice Crompton. [9] An article by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the _Fortnightly Review_ of November, 1869. [10] Portrait of Charles Hennell. [11] Written after the death of Lord Clarendon, who, Lady Lytton tells me, had been like a father to her. [12] "Armgart." [13] Miss Octavia Hill. Walmer Street Industrial Experiment, tried by Canon Fremantle under Miss Hill's supervision. [14] Scott Commemoration. [15] Written just before the death of Mrs. Lytton's eldest boy. [16] "Marie of Villefranche." _Macmillan's Magazine_, August, 1871. [17] The collector of "The Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot." [18] Mr. W. H. Bullock--changed his name to Hall. [19] The Six-Mile Bottom shooting had been let to H. R. H. that year. [20] A site offered near Shere, in Surrey. CHAPTER XVII. [Sidenote: Journal, 1873.] _Jan. 1._--At the beginning of December the eighth and last book of "Middlemarch" was published, the three final numbers having been published monthly. No former book of mine has been received with more enthusiasm--not even "Adam Bede;" and I have received many deeply affecting assurances of its influence for good on individual minds. Hardly anything could have happened to me which I could regard as a greater blessing than the growth of my spiritual existence when my bodily existence is decaying. The merely egoistic satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by toothache, and _that_ has made my chief consciousness for the last week. This morning, when I was in pain, and taking a melancholy breakfast in bed, some sweet-natured creature sent a beautiful bouquet to the door for me, bound round with the written wish that "Every year may be happier and happier, and that God's blessing may ever abide with the immortal author of 'Silas Marner.'" Happily my dear husband is well, and able to enjoy these things for me. That he rejoices in them is my most distinct personal pleasure in such tributes. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 3d Jan. 1873.] It was very pleasant to have your greeting on the New Year, though I was keeping its advent in melancholy guise. I am relieved now from the neuralgic part of my ailment, and am able to write something of the hearty response I feel to your good wishes. We both hope that the coming year may continue to you all the family joys which must make the core of your happiness, without underrating golf and good contributors to "Maga." Health has to be presupposed as the vehicle of all other good, and in this respect you may be possibly better off in '73 than in '72, for I think you have had several invalidings within the last twelve months. Mr. Langford wrote yesterday that he knew of an article on "Middlemarch" being in preparation for the _Times_, which certainly was never before so slow in noticing a book of mine. Whether such an article will affect the sale favorably seems eminently uncertain, and can only complicate Mr. Simpson's problem. We have been glad to welcome our good friend, Mr. Anthony Trollope, after his long absence. He is wonderfully full of life and energy, and will soon bring out his two thick volumes on Australian colonies. My friendly Dutch publishers lately sent us a handsome row of volumes--George Eliot's "Romantische Werke," with an introduction, in which comparisons are safely shrouded for me in the haze of Dutch, so that if they are disadvantageous, I am not pained. Please give my best wishes for the coming year to Mr. William Blackwood. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 4th Jan. 1873.] At last I break my silence, and thank you for your kind care about me. I am able to enjoy my reading at the corner of my study fire, and am at that unpitiable stage of illness which is counterbalanced by extra petting. I have been fearing that you too may be undergoing some _malaise_ of a kindred sort, and I should like to be assured that you have quite got through the troubles which threatened you. How good you have all been to me, and what a disappointing investment of affection I have turned out! But those evening drives, which perhaps encouraged the faceache, have left me a treasure of picture and poetry in my memory quite worth paying for, and in these days all prices are high. The new year began very prettily for me at half-past eight in the morning with a beautiful bouquet, left by an unknown at our door, and an inscription asking that "God's blessing might ever abide with the immortal author of 'Silas Marner.'" [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1873.] I am much pleased with the color and the lettering of the guinea edition, and the thinner paper makes it delightfully handy. Let us hope that some people still want to read it, since a friend of ours, in one short railway bit to and fro, saw two persons reading the paper-covered numbers. Now is the moment when a notice in the _Times_ might possibly give a perceptible impulse. Kohn, of Berlin, has written to ask us to allow him to reprint the "Spanish Gypsy" for £50, and we have consented. Some Dresdener, who has translated poems of Tennyson's, asked leave to translate the "Spanish Gypsy" in 1870, but I have not heard of his translation appearing. The rain this morning is welcome, in exchange for the snow, which in London has none of its country charms left to it. Among my books, which comfort me in the absence of sunshine, is a copy of the "Handy Royal Atlas" which Mr. Lewes has got for me. The glorious index is all the more appreciable by me, because I am tormented with German historical atlases which have no index, and are covered with names swarming like ants on every map. The catalogue coming in the other day renewed my longing for the cheap edition of Lockhart's novels, though I have some compunction in teasing your busy mind with my small begging. I should like to take them into the country, where our days are always longer for reading. I have a love for Lockhart because of Scott's Life, which seems to me a perfect biography. How different from another we know of! [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Feb. 1873.] After your kind words I will confess that I should very much like to have the "Manual of Geography" by Mackay, and Bayne's "Port Royal Logic." _À propos_ of the "Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: "Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers, save the growing heritage That makes completer manhood." But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition. I am looking forward with interest to "Kenelm Chillingly," and thinking what a blessed lot it is to die on just finishing a book, if it could be a good one. I mean, it is blessed only to quit activity when one quits life. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st Mch. 1873.] If I had been quite sure of your address I should have written to you even before receiving your dear letter, over which I have been crying this morning. The prompting to write to you came from my having ten days ago read your Memoir--brief yet full--of the precious last months before the parting. Mrs. P. Taylor brought me her copy as a loan. But may I not beg to have a copy of my own? It is to me an invaluable bit of writing; the inspiration of a great sorrow, born of a great love, has made it perfect; and ever since I read it I have felt a strengthening companionship from it. You will perhaps think it strange when I tell you that I have been more cheerful since I read the record of his sweet, mild heroism, which threw emphasis on every blessing left in his waning life, and was silent over its pangs. I have even ventured to lend this copy, which is not my own, to a young married woman of whom I am very fond, because I think it is an unforgetable picture of that union which is the ideal of marriage, and which I desire young people to have in their minds as a goal. It is a comfort in thinking of you that you have two lovable young creatures with you. I have found quite a new interest in young people since I have been conscious that I am getting older; and if all personal joy were to go from me as it has gone from you, I could perhaps find some energy from that interest, and try to teach the young. I wish, dear friend, it were possible to convey to you the sense I have of a great good in being permitted to know of your happiness, and of having some communion with the sorrow which is its shadow. Your words have a consecration for me, and my husband shares my feeling. He sends his love along with mine. He sobbed with something which is a sort of grief better worth having than any trivial gladness, as he read the printed record of your love. He, too, is capable of that supreme, self-merging love. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1873.] This is good news about the guinea edition, but I emphatically agree with you that it will be well to be cautious in further printing. I wish you could see a letter I had from California the other day, apparently from a young fellow, and beginning, "Oh, you dear lady! I who have been a Fred Vincy ever so long ... have played vagabond and ninny ever since I knew the meaning of such terms," etc., etc. I am sorry to infer, from what you say about being recommended to go to a German bath, that you have been out of health lately. There really is a good deal of curative virtue in the air, waters, and exercise one gets at such places, and if the boredom were not strong enough to counteract the better influences, it would be worth while to endure. That phrase of Miss Stuart's--"fall flat on the world"--is worth remembering. I should think it is not likely to prove prophetic, if she is at all like her cousin, whose fair, piquant face remains very vividly before me. The older one gets, the more one delights in these young things, rejoicing in their joys. The ministerial crisis interests me, though it does not bring me any practical need for thinking of it, as it does to you. I wish there were some solid, philosophical Conservative to take the reins--one who knows the true functions of stability in human affairs, and, as the psalm says, "Would also practice what he knows." [Sidenote: Letter to Edward Burne-Jones, 20th Mch. 1873.] I suppose my hesitation about writing to you to tell you of a debt I feel towards you is all vanity. If you did not know me, you might think a great deal more of my judgment than it is worth, and I should feel bold in that possibility. But when judgment is understood to mean simply one's own impression of delight, one ought not to shrink from making one's small offering of burnt clay because others can give gold statues. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch. And I want in gratitude to tell you that your work makes life larger and more beautiful to me. I mean that historical life of all the world, in which our little personal share often seems a mere standing-room from which we can look all round, and chiefly backward. Perhaps the work has a strain of special sadness in it--perhaps a deeper sense of the tremendous outer forces which urge us, than of the inner impulse towards heroic struggle and achievement--but the sadness is so inwrought with pure, elevating sensibility to all that is sweet and beautiful in the story of man and in the face of the earth that it can no more be found fault with than the sadness of mid-day, when Pan is touchy, like the rest of us. Don't you agree with me that much superfluous stuff is written on all sides about purpose in art? A nasty mind makes nasty art, whether for art or any other sake; and a meagre mind will bring forth what is meagre. And some effect in determining other minds there must be, according to the degree of nobleness or meanness in the selection made by the artist's soul. Your work impresses me with the happy sense of noble selection and of power determined by refined sympathy. That is why I wanted to thank you in writing, since lip-homage has fallen into disrepute. I cannot help liking to tell you a sign that my delight must have taken a little bit of the same curve as yours. Looking, _à propos_ of your picture, into the "Iphigenia in Aulis," to read the chorus you know of, I found my blue pencil-marks made seven years ago (and gone into that forgetfulness which makes my mind seem very large and empty)--blue pencil-marks made against the dance--loving Kithara and the footsteps of the muses and the nereids dancing on the shining sands. I was pleased to see that my mind had been touched in a dumb way by what has touched yours to fine utterance. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 15th April, 1873] Welcome back to Europe! What a comfort to see your handwriting dated from San Remo--to think that Dr. Congreve's anxieties about your voyage are at an end, and that you are once more in the post which is more specially and permanently yours! Mr. Lewes finds fault with your letter for not telling enough; but the mere fact of your safety seems to fill it quite full for me, and I can think of no drawbacks--not even of the cold, which I hope is by this time passing away for you, as it is for us. You must be so rich in memories that we and our small ordinary news must appear very flat to you, but we will submit to be a little despised by you if only we can have you with us again. I have never lost the impression of Dr. Congreve's look when he paid us his farewell visit, and spoke of his anxiety about your voyage, fearing that you had started too late; and that impression gives me all the keener sympathy with the repose I trust he is feeling. About ourselves I have only good news to tell. We are happier than ever, and have no troubles. We are searching for a country-house to go to at the end of May or earlier. I long for the perfect peace and freedom of the country again. The hours seem to stretch themselves there, and to hold twice as much thought as one can get into them in town, where acquaintances and small claims inevitably multiply. Imagine us nearly as we were when we last saw you--only a little older--with unchanged affection for you and undimmed interest in whatever befalls you. Do not tax yourself to write unless you feel a pleasure in that imperfect sort of communication. I will try not to fear evil if you are silent, but you know that I am glad to have something more than hope to feed on. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 25th April, 1873.] It was a cordial to me this morning to learn that you have the project of going with your young friend to Cambridge at the end of the autumn. I could not have thought of anything better to wish for on your behalf than that you should have the consciousness of helping a younger life. I know, dear friend, that so far as you directly are concerned with this life the remainder of it can only be patience and resignation. But we are not shut up within our individual life, and it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite, intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them. I am very much interested in the fact of young women studying at Cambridge, and I have lately seen a charming specimen of the pupils at Hitchin--a very modest, lovely girl, who distinguished herself in the last examination. One is anxious that, in the beginning of a higher education for women--the immediate value of which is chiefly the social recognition of its desirableness--the students should be favorable subjects for experiment, girls or young women whose natures are large and rich enough not to be used up in their efforts after knowledge. Mr. Lewes is very well and goes on working joyously. Proofs come in slowly, but he is far from being ready with all the manuscript which will be needed for his preliminary volume--the material, which has long been gathered, requiring revision and suggesting additions. Do think it a privilege to have that fine _physique_ of yours instead of a headachy, dyspeptic frame such as many women drag through life. Even in irremediable sorrow it is a sort of blasphemy against one's suffering fellow-beings to think lightly of any good which they would be thankful for in exchange for something they have to bear. [Sidenote: Journal, 1873.] _May 19._--We paid a visit to Cambridge at the invitation of Mr. Frederick Myers, and I enjoyed greatly talking with him and some others of the "Trinity Men." In the evenings we went to see the boat-race, and then returned to supper and talk--the first evening with Mr. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. Jebb, Mr. Edmund Gurney; the second, with young Balfour, young Lyttelton, Mr. Jackson, and Edmund Gurney again. Mrs. and Miss Huth were also our companions during the visit. On the Tuesday morning we breakfasted at Mr. Henry Sidgwick's with Mr. Jebb, Mr. W. G. Clark, Mr. Myers, and Mrs. and Miss Huth. _May 22._--We went to the French play at the Princess's and saw Plessy and Desclée in "Les Idées de Madame Aubray." I am just finishing again Aristotle's "Poetics," which I first read in 1856. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 25th May, 1873.] Our plans have been upset by the impossibility of finding a house in the country that is suitable to us, and weariness of being deluded into journeys of investigation by fanciful advertisements has inclined Mr. Lewes for the present to say that we will go abroad. Still, I have nothing to tell that is absolutely settled, and I must ask you, when you return, to send a note to this house. If I am in England it will be forwarded to me, and you will get a prompt answer. If I am silent you will conclude that I am gone abroad. I think it is at the end of June that you are to come home? Here we have been wearing furs and velvet, and having fires all through the past week, chiefly occupied by Mr. Lewes and me in a visit to Cambridge. We were invited ostensibly to see the boat-race, but the real pleasure of the visit consisted in talking with a hopeful group of Trinity young men. On Monday we had a clear, cold day, more like the fine weather of mid-winter than any tradition of May time. I hope that you have had no such revisiting of winter at San Remo. How much we should enjoy having you with us to narrate everything that has happened to you in the last eventful half year! I shall feel the loss of this, as an immediate prospect, to be the greatest disadvantage in our going abroad next month--if we go. Your last news of Emily and of "baby's teeth" is cheerful. "Baby's teeth" is a phrase that enters much into our life just now. Little Blanche had a sad struggle with her first little bit of ivory, but she has been blooming again since, and is altogether a ravishing child. To-day we have had a large collection of visitors, and I have the usual Sunday evening condition of brain. But letters are so constantly coming and claiming my time to answer them, that I get fidgety lest I should neglect to write to you; and I was determined not to let another day pass without letting you have a proof that I think of you. When I am silent please believe that the silence is due to feebleness of body, which narrows my available time. Mr. Lewes often talks of you, and will value any word from you about yourself as much as I shall. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 2d June, 1873.] Thanks for sending me word of poor Miss Rebecca Franklin's death. It touches me deeply. She was always particularly good and affectionate to me, and I had much happiness in her as my teacher. In September a house near Chislehurst will be open to us--a house which we think of ultimately making our sole home, turning our backs on London. But we shall be allowed to have it, furnished, for a year on trial. [Sidenote: Journal, 1873.] _June._--In the beginning of June we paid a visit to Mr. Jowett at Oxford, meeting there Mr. and Mrs. Charles Roundell, then newly married. We stayed from Saturday to Monday, and I was introduced to many persons of interest. Professor T. Green, Max Müller, Thomson, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Mr. Wordsworth, the grandson of the poet, who had spent some time in India, and a host of others. _June 23._--Started for the Continent. Fontainebleau, Plombières, etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 9th Aug. 1873.] I feel myself guilty that I have allowed the vicissitudes of travelling to hinder me from writing to you, for the chance that a letter from me might be welcome to you in what I have been imagining as the first weeks of your return to England and the house in Mecklenburgh Square. I am sure that I should not have been guilty in this way if I had been at any time able to say where you should send me an answer which I could call for at a _Poste Restante_. But we have been invariably uncertain as to the length of our stay in any one place and as to our subsequent route; and I confess that I shrink from writing a letter full of my own doings, without the prospect of getting some news in return. I am usually in a state of fear rather than of hope about my absent friends; and I dread lest a letter written in ignorance about them should be ill-timed. But at last all fears have become weaker than the uneasy sense that I have omitted to send you a sign of your loved presence in my thoughts, and that you may have lost a gleam of pleasure through my omission. We left home on the 23d of June, with a sketch of a journey in our minds, which included Grenoble, the Grande Chartreuse, Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry, and Geneva. The last place I wished to get to, because my friend Mme. d'Albert is not likely to live much longer, and I thought that I should like to see her once more. But during a short stay at Fontainebleau I began to feel that lengthy railway journeys were too formidable for us old, weak creatures, and, moreover, that July and August were not the best months for those southern regions. We were both shattered, and needed quiet rather than the excitement of seeing friends and acquaintances--an excitement of which we had been having too much at home--so we turned aside by easy stages to the Vosges, and spent about three weeks at Plombières and Luxeuil. We shall carry home many pleasant memories of our journey--of Fontainebleau, for example, which I had never seen before. Then of the Vosges, where we count on going again. Erckmann-Chatrian's books had been an introduction to the lovely region; and several of them were our companions there. But what small experiences these are compared with yours; and how we long for the time when you will be seated with us at our country-house (Blackbrook, near Bromley, is the name of the house), and tell us as much as you can think of about this long year in which we have been deprived of you. If you receive this letter in time to write me a line, which would reach me by the 15th, I shall be most grateful if you will give me that undeserved indulgence. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Aug. 1873.] On our return yesterday from our nine-weeks' absence I found a letter from Mr. Main, in which he shows some anxiety that I should write you the "formal sanction" you justly require before admitting extracts from "Middlemarch" in the new edition of the "Sayings." I have no objection, if you see none, to such an enlargement of the volume, and I satisfy our good Mr. Main's promptitude by writing the needed consent at once. We used our plan of travel as "a good thing to wander from," and went to no single place (except Fontainebleau) to which we had beforehand projected going. Our most fortunate wandering was to the Vosges--to Plombières and Luxeuil--which have made us in love with the mode of life at the _Eaux_ of France, as greatly preferable to the ways of the German _Bad_. We happened to be at Nancy just as the Germans were beginning to quit it, and we saw good store of _tricolores_ and paper lanterns ready in the shop windows for those who wished to buy the signs of national rejoicing. I can imagine that, as a Prussian lady told us, the Germans themselves were not at all rejoiced to leave that pretty town for "les bords de la Spree," where, in French dialogue, all Germans are supposed to live. [Sidenote: Journal, 1873.] _Sept. 4._--Went to Blackbrook, near Bickley. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 17th Sept. 1873.] Thanks, dear friend, for the difficult exertion you gave to the telling of what I so much wished to know--the details of the trouble[21] which you have all had to go through either directly or sympathetically. But I will not dwell now on what it cost you, I fear, too much pain to recall so as to give me the vivid impressions I felt in reading your letter. The great practical result of such trouble is to make us all more tender to each other; this is a world in which we must pay heavy prices for love, as you know by experience much deeper than mine. I will gossip a little about ourselves now. We gave up our intention of going far southward, fearing the fatigue of long railway journeys, and the heat (which hardly ever came) of July and August in the region we had thought of visiting. So, after staying a very enjoyable time at Fontainebleau, we went to the Vosges, and at Plombières and Luxeuil we should have felt ourselves in paradise if it had not been for a sad deafness of George's, which kept us uneasy and made us hurry to that undesirable place, Frankfort, in order to consult Spiess. At Frankfort the nearest bath was the also undesirable Homburg; so we spent or wasted a fortnight there, winning little but the joy of getting away again. The journey home, which we took very easily, was interesting--through Metz, Verdun, Rheims, and Amiens. As to our house, spite of beautiful lawn, tall trees, fine kitchen-garden, and good, invigorating air, we have already made up our minds that it will not do for our home. Still, we have many things to enjoy, but we shall not probably remain here longer than to the end of October. My motherly love to all such young ones as may be around you. I do not disturb George in order to ask for messages from him, being sure that his love goes with mine. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 19th Sept. 1873.] I quite assent to your proposal that there should be a new edition of "Middlemarch" in one volume, at 7_s._ 6_d._--to be prepared at once, but not published too precipitately. I like your project of an illustration; and the financial arrangements you mention are quite acceptable to me. For one reason especially I am delighted that the book is going to be reprinted--namely, _that I can see the proof-sheets and make corrections_. Pray give orders that the sheets be sent to me. I should like the binding to be of a rich, sober color, with very plain Roman lettering. It might be called a "revised edition." Thanks for the extract from Mr. Collins's letter. I did not know that there was really a Lowick, in a Midland county too. Mr. Collins has my gratitude for feeling some regard towards Mr. Casaubon, in whose life _I_ lived with much sympathy. When I was at Oxford, in May, two ladies came up to me after dinner: one said, "How could you let Dorothea marry _that_ Casaubon?" The other, "Oh, I understand her doing that, but why did you let her marry the other fellow, whom I cannot bear?" Thus two "ardent admirers" wished that the book had been quite different from what it is. I wonder whether you have abandoned--as you seemed to agree that it would be wise to do--the project of bringing out my other books in a cheaper form than the present 3_s._ 6_d._, which, if it were not for the blemish of the figure illustrations, would be as pretty an edition as could be, and perhaps as cheap as my public requires. Somehow, the cheap books that crowd the stalls are always those which look as if they were issued from Pandemonium. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 11th Oct. 1873.] I am rather ashamed of our grumblings. We are really enjoying the country, and have more than our share of everything. George has happy mornings at his desk now, and we have fine bracing air to walk in--air which I take in as a sort of nectar. We like the bits of scenery round us better and better as we get them by heart in our walks and drives. The house, with all its defects, is very pretty, and more delightfully secluded, without being remote from the conveniences of the world, than any place we have before thought of as a possible residence for us. I am glad that you have been seeing the Cowper Temples. My knowledge of them has not gone beyond dining with them at Mrs. Tollemache's, and afterwards having a good conversational call from them, but they both struck me very agreeably. Mr. Henry Sidgwick is a chief favorite of mine--one of whom his friends at Cambridge say that they always expect him to act according to a higher standard than they think of attributing to any other chief man, or of imposing on themselves. "Though we kept our own fellowships without believing more than he did," one of them said to me, "we should have felt that Henry Sidgwick had fallen short if he had not renounced his." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 12th Oct. 1873.] Our plan is not to give up our London house, but to have a country place as a retreat. We want a good house in a lovely country, _away from rows of villas_, but within easy reach of all conveniences. This seems an immodest requirement in a world where one good is hardly to be got without renunciation of another. You perceive that we are getting very old and fastidious. I like to interpret your enjoyment of Brighton and its evening skies as a proof that you flourish there physically. All things are to be endured and counted even as a fuller life, with a body free from pain and depressing sensations of weakness; but illness is a partial death, and makes the world dim to us. We have no great strength to boast of; but we are so unspeakably happy in all other respects that we cannot grumble at this tax on us as elderly mortals. Our little Blanche grows in grace, and her parents have great delight in her--Charles being quite as fond a father as if he had beforehand been an idolizer of babies. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, Sunday, 20th Oct. 1873.] The chances of conversation were against my being quite clear to you yesterday as to the cases in which it seems to me that conformity is the higher rule. What happened to be said or not said is of no consequence in any other light than that of my anxiety not to appear what I should _hate to be_--which is surely not an ignoble, egoistic anxiety, but belongs to the worship of the Best. All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel constantly for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith may often more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of society by a conformity, based on the recognized good in the public belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. _Not_, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of view from which conformity may be regarded to hinder a ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to believe, in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about which you feel that "necessity is laid upon you" to declare them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have the worse. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th Nov. 1873.] It was a cheerful accompaniment to breakfast this morning to have a letter from you, with the pretty picture you suggested of Miss Blackwood's first ball. I am glad that I have seen the "little fairy," so as to be able to imagine her. We are both the better for the delicious air and quiet of the country. We, too, like you, were sorry to quit the woods and fields for the comparatively disturbed life which even we are obliged to lead in town. Letters requesting interviews can no longer be made void by one's absence; and I am much afflicted by these interruptions, which break up the day without any adequate result of good to any mortal. In the country the days have broad spaces, and the very stillness seems to give a delightful roominess to the hours. Is it not wonderful that the world can absorb so much "Middlemarch" at a guinea the copy? I shall be glad to hear particulars, which, I imagine, will lead to the conclusion that the time is coming for the preparation of a 7_s._ 6_d._ edition. I am not fond of reading proofs, but I am anxious to correct the sheets of this edition, both in relation to mistakes already standing, and to prevent the accumulation of others in the reprinting. I am slowly simmering towards another big book; but people seem so bent on giving supremacy to "Middlemarch" that they are sure not to like any future book so well. I had a letter from Mr. Bancroft (the American ambassador at Berlin) the other day, in which he says that everybody in Berlin reads "Middlemarch." He had to buy two copies for his house; and he found the rector of the university, a stupendous mathematician, occupied with it in the solid part of the day. I am entertaining you in this graceful way about myself because you will be interested to know what are the chances for our literature abroad. That Ashantee business seems to me hideous. What is more murderous than stupidity? To have a husband gone on such an expedition is a trial that passes my imagination of what it is possible to endure in the way of anxiety. We are looking forward to the "Inkerman" volume as something for me to read aloud. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 11th Nov. 1873.] During the latter part of our stay at Blackbrook we had become very fond of the neighborhood. The walks and drives round us were delightfully varied--commons, wooded lanes, wide pastures--and we felt regretfully that we were hardly likely to find again a country-house so secluded in a well-inhabited region. We have seen few people at present. The George Howards are come from a delicious, lonely _séjour_ in a tower of Bamborough Castle!--and he has brought many sketches home. That lodging would suit you, wouldn't it? A castle on a rock washed by the sea seems to me just a paradise for you. We have been reading John Mill's "Autobiography," like the rest of the world. The account of his early education and the presentation of his father are admirable; but there are some pages in the latter half that one would have liked to be different. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 6th Dec. 1873.] Our wish to see you after all the long months since June, added to your affectionate invitation, triumphs over our disinclination to move. So, unless something should occur to make the arrangement inconvenient to you, we will join the dear party on your hearth in the afternoon of the 24th, and stay with you till the 26th. Notwithstanding my trust in your words, I feel a lingering uneasiness lest we should be excluding some one else from enjoying Christmas with you. J.'s friend, Dr. Andrew Clark, has been prescribing for Mr. Lewes--ordering him to renounce the coffee which has been a chief charm of life to him, but being otherwise mild in his prohibitions. I hear with much comfort that you are better, and have recovered your usual activity. Please keep well till Christmas, and then love and pet me a little, for that is always very sweet. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 22d Dec. 1873.] In writing any careful presentation of human feelings, you must count on that infinite stupidity of readers who are always substituting their crammed notions of what ought to be felt for any attempt to recall truly what they themselves have felt under like circumstances. We are going to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with our friends at Weybridge. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 28th Dec. 1873.] We have been spending our Christmas in the country, and it is only on my return that I got your kind note, with its pretty symbols of remembrance. Such little signs are very sweet, coming from those whom one loves well in spite of long separation. I am very glad to have seen you in your new home, and to be able to imagine you among your household treasures--especially to imagine both you and your husband in enjoyable health. We have been invalidish lately, and have put ourselves under the discipline of Dr. Andrew Clark, who is not one of the "three meat-meals and alcohol" physicians, but rather one of those who try to starve out dyspepsia. We both send our kind regards to Mr. Taylor, and hope that he may remain robust for his parliamentary campaign. Life, I trust, will deal gently with you in future, dear friend, and give you years of peace after your period of anxiety and of parting from old places and habits. [Sidenote: Journal, 1874.] _Jan. 1._--The happy old year, in which we have had constant enjoyment of life, notwithstanding much bodily _malaise_, is gone from us forever. More than in any former year of my life love has been poured forth to me from distant hearts, and in our home we have had that finish to domestic comfort which only faithful, kind servants can give. Our children are prosperous and happy--Charles evidently growing in mental efficiency; we have abundant wealth for more than our actual needs; and our unspeakable joy in each other has no other alloy than the sense that it must one day end in parting. My dear husband has a store of present and prospective good in the long work which is likely to stretch through the remaining years of his intellectual activity; and there have not been wanting signs that what he has already published is being appreciated rightly by capable persons. He is thinner than ever, but still he shows wonderful elasticity and nervous energy. I have been for a month rendered almost helpless for intellectual work by constant headache, but am getting a little more freedom. Nothing is wanting to my blessings but the uninterrupted power of work. For as to all my unchangeable imperfections I have resigned myself. _Jan. 17._--I received this morning, from Blackwood, the account of "Middlemarch" and of "The Spanish Gypsy" for 1873. Of the guinea edition of "Middlemarch," published in the spring, 2434 copies have been sold. Of "The Spanish Gypsy" 292 copies have been sold during 1873, and the remaining copies are only 197. Thus, out of 4470 which have been printed, 4273 have been distributed. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 12th Feb. 1874.] We have received the volume--your kind and valuable gift--and I have read it aloud with Mr. Lewes, all except the later pages, which we both feel too much to bear reading them in common. You have given a deeply interesting and, we think, instructive picture, and Mr. Lewes has expressed his wish that it had not been restricted to a private circulation. But I understand your shrinking from indiscriminate publicity, at least in the first instance. Perhaps, if many judges on whom you rely concur with Mr. Lewes, you will be induced to extend the possible benefit of the volume. I care so much for the demonstration of an intense joy in life on the basis of "plain living and high thinking" in this time of more and more eager scrambling after wealth and show. And then there are exquisite bits which you have rescued from that darkness to which his self-depreciation condemned them. I think I never read a more exquisite little poem than the one called "Christian Resignation;" and Mr. Lewes, when I read it aloud, at once exclaimed, "How very fine--read it again!" I am also much impressed with the wise mingling of moderation with sympathy in that passage, given in a note, from the article on Greg's "Political Essays." What must have been the effort which the writing cost you I can--not fully, but almost--imagine. But believe, dear friend, that in our judgment you have not poured out these recollections in a cry of anguish all in vain. I feel roused and admonished by what you have told, and if I--then others. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th Feb. 1874.] I imagined you absorbed by the political crisis, like the rest of the world except the Lord Chief-justice, who must naturally have felt his summing-up deserving of more attention. I, who am no believer in salvation by ballot, am rather tickled that the first experiment with it has turned against its adherents. I have been making what will almost certainly be my last corrections of the "Spanish Gypsy," and that causes me to look forward with special satisfaction to the probable exhaustion of the present edition. The corrections chiefly concern the quantity of the word Zincálo, which ought to be Zíncalo; but there are some other emendations; and, altogether, they make a difference to more than seventy pages. But it would still be worth while to retain the stereotypes, replacing simply the amended pages, there being about 400 in the whole book. I am sadly vexed that I did not think of having these corrections ready for the German reprint. I have been compunctious lately about my having sprinkled cold water on the proposal suggested by Mr. Simpson, of bringing out my novels in a cheaper way--on thinner paper and without illustrations. The compunction was roused by my happening, in looking at old records, to alight on some letters, one especially, written by a working-man, a certain E. Hall,[22] more than ten years ago, begging me to bring out my books in a form cheap enough to let a poor man more easily "get a read of them." Hence, if you and Mr. Simpson see good to revive the design in question, I am perfectly in accord. You did send me a copy of Lord Lytton's "Fables"--many thanks for doing so. Mr. Lewes had seen several of them in manuscript, and thought well of their merits. I am reading them gradually. They are full of graceful fancies and charming verse. So far as cleverness goes it seems to me he can do almost anything; and the leanings of his mind are towards the best things. The want I feel is of more definiteness and more weight. The two stanzas to his wife, placed before "Far and Near," are perfect. I think I have never written to you since I wanted to tell you that I admired very much the just spirit in which the notice of Mill's "Autobiography" was written in the Magazine. Poor Dickens's latter years wear a melancholy aspect, do they not? But some of the extracts from his letters in the last volume have surprisingly more freshness and naturalness of humor than any of the letters earlier given. Still, something should be done by dispassionate criticism towards the reform of our national habits in the matter of literary biography. Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to re-read his books? "He gave the people of his best. His worst he kept, his best he gave;" but there is a certain set, not a small one, who are titillated by the worst and indifferent to the best. I think this fashion is a disgrace to us all. It is something like the uncovering of the dead Byron's club-foot. Mr. Lewes is in a more flourishing condition than usual, having been helped by Dr. Andrew Clark, who ministers to all the brain-workers. I have been ill lately: weeks of _malaise_ having found their climax in lumbar-neuralgia, or something of that sort, which gave fits of pain severe enough to deserve even a finer name. My writing has not been stimulated as Scott's was under circumstances of a like sort, and I have nothing to tell you securely. Please give an expression of my well-founded sympathy to Mr. William Blackwood. My experience feelingly convinces me of the hardship there must be in his. I trust I shall hear of the lameness as a departed evil. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Mch. 1874.] I send you by this post a small collection of my poems, which Mr. Lewes wishes me to get published in May. Such of them as have been already printed in a fugitive form have been received with many signs of sympathy, and every one of those I now send you represents an idea which I care for strongly, and wish to propagate as far as I can. Else I should forbid myself from adding to the mountainous heap of poetical collections. The form of volume I have in my eye is a delightful duodecimo edition of Keats's poems (without the "Endymion") published during his life: just the volume to slip in the pocket. Mine will be the least bit thicker. I should like a darkish green cover, with Roman lettering. But you will consider the physique and price of the book, and kindly let me know your thoughts. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 25th Mch. 1874.] I fear the fatal fact about your story[23] is the absence of God and hell. "My dear madam, you have not presented motives to the children!" It is really hideous to find that those who sit in the scribes' seats have got no further than the appeal to selfishness, which they call God. The old Talmudists were better teachers. They make Rachel remonstrate with God for his hardness, and remind him that she was kinder to her sister Leah than he to his people--thus correcting the traditional God by human sympathy. However, we must put up with our contemporaries, since we can neither live with our ancestors nor with posterity. It is cheering to see the programme of your new society. There certainly is an awakening of conscience about animals in general as our fellow-creatures--even the vogue of Balaam's ass is in that sense a good sign. A lady wrote to me the other day that when she went to church in the island of Sark the sermon turned on that remonstrant hero or heroine. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Mch. 1874.] I can imagine how great an encouragement you feel from the enthusiasm generously expressed in Mr. C.'s letter. It is always an admirable impulse to express deeply felt admiration, but it is also possible that you have some grateful readers who do not write to you. I have heard men whose greatest delight is literature, say that they should never dream of writing to an author on the ground of his books alone. Poor Mr. Francis Newman must be aged now and rather weary of the world and explanations of the world. He can hardly be expected to take in much novelty. I have a sort of affectionate sadness in thinking of the interest which, in far-off days, I felt in his "Soul" and "Phases of Faith," and of the awe I had of him as a lecturer on mathematics at the Ladies' College. How much work he has done in the world which has left no deep, conspicuous mark, but has probably entered beneficially into many lives! [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d April, 1874.] How glorious this opening spring is! At this moment even London is so beautiful that I come home filled with the Park landscapes, and see them as a background to all my thoughts. Your account of Mr. George Dawson is rather melancholy. I remember him only as a bright, vigorous, young man--such as perhaps his sons are now. I imagine it is his fortune, or, rather, misfortune, to have talked too much and too early about the greatest things. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Cross, 11th May, 1874.] I could not dwell on your sweet gift[24] yesterday--I should perhaps have begun to cry, which would not have been _convenable_ in a hostess. For I have been in a suffering, depressed condition lately, so your good, loving deed has come just at the right time--when I need the helpfulness that love brings me--and my heart turns to you with grateful blessing this Monday morning. I have been looking at the little paintings with a treble delight, because they were done for _me_, because you chose for them subjects of my "making," and because they are done with a promising charm of execution (which Mr. Lewes feels as well as I). It gives me special gladness that you have this sort of work before you. Some skill or other with the hands is needful for the completeness of the life, and makes a bridge over times of doubt and despondency. Perhaps it will please you to know that nineteen years ago, when Mr. Lewes and I were looking at a print of Goethe's statue by Ritzchl, which stands on a pedestal ornamented with _bassi relievi_ of his characters, I said (little believing that my wish would ever be fulfilled), "How I should like to be surrounded with creatures of my own making!" And yesterday, when I was looking at your gift, that little incident recurred to me. Your love seemed to have made me a miniature pedestal. I was comforted yesterday that you and J. had at least the pleasure of hearing Bice Trollope sing, to make some amends for the long, cold journey. Please do not any of you, forget that we shall only be three weeks more in this corner of the world, and that we want to see you as often as you care to come. Best love to all, the mother being chief among the all. [Sidenote: Journal, 1874.] _May 19._--This month has been published a volume of my poems--"Legend of Jubal, and other Poems." On the 1st of June we go into the country to the cottage, Earlswood Common, for four months, and I hope there to get deep shafts sunk in my prose book. My health has been a wretched drag on me during this last half-year. I have lately written "a symposium." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 14th June, 1874.] I have so much trust in your love for us that I feel sure you will like to know of our happiness in the secure peace of the country, and the good we already experience in soul and body from the sweet breezes over hill and common, the delicious silence, and the unbroken spaces of the day. Just now the chill east wind has brought a little check to our pleasure in our long afternoon drives; and I could wish that Canon Kingsley and his fellow-worshippers of that harsh divinity could have it reserved entirely for themselves as a tribal god. We think the neighborhood so lovely that I must beg you to tell J. we are in danger of settling here unless he makes haste to find us a house in your "country-side"--a house with undeniable charms, on high ground, in a strictly rural neighborhood (water and gas laid on, nevertheless), to be vacant precisely this autumn! My philosopher is writing away with double _verve_ in a projecting window, where he can see a beautiful green slope crowned and studded with large trees. I, too, have an agreeable corner in another room. Our house has the essentials of comfort, and we have reason to be contented with it. I confess that my chief motive for writing about ourselves is to earn some news of you, which will not be denied me by one or other of the dear pairs of hands always ready to do us a kindness. Our Sunday is really a Sabbath now--a day of thorough peace. But I shall get hungry for a sight of some of the Sunday visitors before the end of September. I include all your family in a spiritual embrace, and am always yours lovingly. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th June, 1874.] We are revelling in the peace of the country, and have no drawback to our delight except the cold winds, which have forced us to put on winter clothing for the last four or five days. Our wide common is very breezy, and the wind makes mournful music round our walls. But I should think it is not possible to find a much healthier region than this round Reigate and Redhill; and it is prettier than half the places one crosses the Channel to see. We have been hunting about for a permanent country home in the neighborhood, but no house is so difficult to get as one which has at once seclusion and convenience of position, which is neither of the suburban-villa style nor of the grand hall and castle dimensions. The restoration of the empire (in France), which is a threatening possibility, seems to me a degrading issue. In the restoration of the monarchy I should have found something to rejoice at, but the traditions of the empire, both first and second, seem to my sentiment bad. Some form of military despotism must be, as you say, the only solution where no one political party knows how to behave itself. The American pattern is certainly being accepted as to senatorial manners. I dare say you have been to Knebworth and talked over French matters with Lord Lytton. We are grieved to hear from him but a poor account of sweet Lady Lytton's health and spirits. She is to me one of the most charming types of womanliness, and I long for her to have all a woman's best blessings. The good news about the small remainder of "Jubal" is very welcome, and I will write at once to Mr. Simpson to send him my two or three corrections, and my wishes about the new edition. The price of the book will well bear a thicker and a handsomely tinted paper, especially now it has proved movable; and I felt so much the difference to the eye and touch of the copies on rich tinted paper, that I was much vexed with myself for having contributed to the shabby appearance of the current edition by suggesting the thin Keats volume as a model. People have become used to more luxurious editions; and I confess to the weakness of being affected by paper and type in something of the same subtile way I am affected by the odor of a room. Many thanks for Lord Neaves's pleasant little book, which is a capital example of your happily planned publication. I came down here half poisoned by the French theatre, but I am flourishing now, and am brewing my future big book with more or less (generally less) belief in the quality of the liquor which will be drawn off. The secured peacefulness and the pure air of the country make our time of double worth; and we mean to give no invitations to London friends desirous of change. We are selfishly bent on dual solitude. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st July, 1874.] I am so glad to know from your kind letter that you are interesting yourself, with Madame Belloc, in the poor workhouse girls. You see my only social work is to rejoice in the labors of others, while I live in luxurious remoteness from all turmoil. Of course you have seen Mrs. Senior's report. I read it, and thought it very wise, very valuable in many ways, and since then she has sent me word how much she has been worried about it by (as I imagine) obstructive officials. We are revelling in our country peacefulness, in spite of the chills and rain, driving about every day that the weather will allow, and finding in each drive new beauties of this loveliest part of a lovely country. We are looking out for a house in this neighborhood as a permanent retreat; not with the idea of giving up our London house, at least for some years, but simply of having a place to which we may come for about six months of the year, and perhaps finally shrink into altogether. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st July, 1874.] Only the day before your letter came to me I had been saying, "I wonder how our dear Mrs. William Smith is?" so that your impulse to write to me satisfied a need of mine. I cannot help rejoicing that you are in the midst of lovely scenery again, for I had had a presentiment that Cambridge was antipathetic to you; and, indeed, I could not have imagined that you would be in the right place there but for the promised helpfulness of your presence to a young friend. You tell me much that is interesting. Your picture of Mr. and Mrs. Stirling, and what you say of the reasons why one may wish even for the anguish of being _left_ for the sake of waiting on the beloved one to the end--all that goes to my heart of hearts. It is what I think of almost daily. For death seems to me now a close, real experience, like the approach of autumn or winter, and I am glad to find that advancing life brings this power of imagining the nearness of death I never had till of late years. I remember all you told me of your niece's expected marriage, and your joy in the husband who has chosen her. It is wealth you have--that of several sweet nieces to whom being with you is a happiness. You can feel some sympathy in their cheerfulness, even though sorrow is always your only private good--can you not, dear friend?--and the time is short at the utmost. The blessed reunion, if it may come, must be patiently waited for; and such good as you can do others, by loving looks and words, must seem to you like a closer companionship with the gentleness and benignity which you justly worshipped while it was visibly present, and still more, perhaps, now it is veiled, and is a memory stronger than vision of outward things. We are revelling in the sweet peace of the country, and shall remain here till the end of September. Mr. Lewes sends his affectionate remembrances with mine. I am scribbling while he holds my bed-candle, so pray forgive any incoherency. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th July, 1874.] I have two questions to ask of your benevolence. First, was there not some village near Stonehenge where you stayed the night, nearer to Stonehenge than Amesbury? Secondly, do you know anything specific about Holmwood _Common_ as a place of residence? It is ravishingly beautiful; is it in its higher part thoroughly unobjectionable as a site for a dwelling? It seems that they have been having the heat of Tophet in London, whereas we have never had more than agreeable sunniness, this common being almost always breezy. And the country around us must, I think, be the loveliest of its undulating, woody kind in all England. I remember, when we were driving together last, something was said about my disposition to melancholy. I ought to have said then, but did not, that I am no longer one of those whom Dante found in hell border because they had been sad under the blessed sunlight.[25] I am uniformly cheerful now--feeling the preciousness of these moments, in which I still possess love and thought. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d Aug. 1874.] It was sweet of you to write me that nice long letter. I was athirst for some news of you. Life, as you say, is a big thing. No wonder there comes a season when we cease to look round and say, "How shall I enjoy?" but, as in a country which has been visited by the sword, pestilence, and famine, think only how we shall help the wounded, and how find seed for the next harvest--how till the earth and make a little time of gladness for those who are being born without their own asking. I am so glad of what you say about the Latin. Go on conquering and to conquer a little kingdom for yourself there. We are, as usual, getting more than our share of peace and other good, except in the matter of warmth and sunshine. Our common is a sort of ball-room for the winds, and on the warmest days we have had here we have found them at their music and dancing. They roar round the corners of our house in a wintry fashion, while the sun is shining on the brown grass. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 8th Aug. 1874.] Thanks for sending me the good news. The sale of "Middlemarch" is wonderful "out of all whooping," and, considered as manifesting the impression made by the book, is more valuable than any amount of immediate distribution. I suppose there will be a new edition of the "Spanish Gypsy" wanted by Christmas; and I have a carefully corrected copy by me, containing my final alterations, to which I desire to have the stereotyped plates adjusted. As to confidence in the work to be done I am somewhat in the condition suggested to Armgart, "How will you bear the poise of eminence with dread of falling?" And the other day, having a bad headache, I did what I have sometimes done before at intervals of five or six years--looked into three or four novels to see what the world was reading. The effect was paralyzing, and certainly justifies me in that abstinence from novel-reading which, I fear, makes me seem supercilious or churlish to the many persons who send me their books, or ask me about their friends' books. To be delivered from all doubts as to one's justification in writing at this stage of the world, one should have either a plentiful faith in one's own exceptionalness, or a plentiful lack of money. Tennyson said to me, "Everybody writes so well now;" and if the lace is only machine-made, it still pushes out the hand-made, which has differences only for a fine, fastidious appreciation. To write indifferently after having written well--that is, from a true, individual store which makes a special contribution--is like an eminent clergyman spoiling his reputation by lapses, and neutralizing all the good he did before. However, this is superfluous stuff to write to you. It is only a sample of the way in which depression works upon me. I am not the less grateful for all the encouragement I get. I saw handsome Dean Liddell at Oxford. He is really a grand figure. They accuse him of being obstructive to much-needed reforms. For my own part I am thankful to him for his share in "Liddell and Scott" and his capital little Roman History. _À propos_ of books and St. Andrews, I have read aloud to Mr. Lewes Professor Flint's volume, and we have both been much pleased with its conscientious presentation and thorough effort at fairness. We have enjoyed the country, as we always do; but we have been, for our constitutions, a little unfortunate in the choice of a spot which is the windiest of the windy. That heat which we have read and heard of has hardly been at all felt by us; and we have both suffered a little from chills. You will perceive from my letter I am just now possessed by an evil spirit in the form of headache; but on the whole I am much the stronger for the peace and the delicious air, which I take in as a conscious addition to the good of living. We have been near buying a little country hermitage on Holmwood Common--a grand spot, with a view hard to match in our flat land. But we have been frightened away by its windiness. I rather envy Major Lockhart and the rest of the golfian enthusiasts; to have a seductive idleness which is really a healthy activity is invaluable to people who have desk-work. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 11th Nov. 1874.] I feel rather disgraced by the fact that I received your last kind letter nearly two months ago. But a brief note of mine, written immediately on hearing of you from Mrs. Fields, must have crossed yours and the Professor's kind letters to me; and I hope it proved to you that I love you in my heart. We were in the country then, but soon afterwards we set out on a six-weeks' journey, and we are but just settled in our winter home. Those unspeakable troubles in which I necessarily felt more for _you_ than for any one else concerned, are, I trust, well at an end, and you are enjoying a time of peace. It was like your own sympathetic energy to be able, even while the storm was yet hanging in your sky, to write to me about my husband's books. Will you not agree with me that there is one comprehensive Church whose fellowship consists in the desire to purify and ennoble human life, and where the best members of all narrower Churches may call themselves brother and sister in spite of differences? I am writing to your dear husband as well as to you, and in answer to his question about Goethe, I must say, for my part, that I think he had a strain of mysticism in his soul--of so much mysticism as I think inevitably belongs to a full, poetic nature--I mean the delighted bathing of the soul in emotions which overpass the outlines of definite thought. I should take the "Imitation" as a type (it is one which your husband also mentions), but perhaps I might differ from him in my attempt to interpret the unchangeable and universal meanings of that great book. Mr. Lewes, however, who has a better right than I to a conclusion about Goethe, thinks that he entered into the experience of the mystic--as in the confessions of the _Schöne Seele_--simply by force of his sympathetic genius, and that his personal individual bent was towards the clear and plastic exclusively. Do not imagine that Mr. Lewes is guided in his exposition by theoretic antipathies. He is singularly tolerant of difference, and able to admire what is unlike himself. He is busy now correcting the proofs of his second volume. I wonder whether you have headaches and are rickety as we are, or whether you have a glorious immunity from those ills of the flesh. Your husband's photograph looks worthy to represent one of those wondrous Greeks who wrote grand dramas at eighty or ninety. I am decidedly among the correspondents who may exercise their friends in the virtue of giving and hoping for nothing again. Otherwise I am unprofitable. Yet believe me, dear friend, I am always with lively memories of you, yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1874.] We have spent this year in much happiness, and are sorry to part with it. From the beginning of June to the end of September we had a house in Surrey, and enjoyed delicious quiet with daily walks and drives in the lovely scenery round Reigate and Dorking. October we spent in a country visit to friends (Six-Mile Bottom) and in a journey to Paris, and through the Ardennes homeward, finishing off our travels by some excursions in our own country, which we are ready to say we will never quit again--it is so much better worth knowing than most places one travels abroad to see. We make ourselves amends for being in London by going to museums to see the wonderful works of men; and the other day I was taken over the Bank of England and to Woolwich Arsenal--getting object-lessons in my old age, you perceive. Mr. Lewes is half through the proof-correcting of his second volume; and it will be matter of rejoicing when the other half is done, for we both hate proof-correcting (do you?)--the writing always seems worse than it really is when one reads it in patches, looking out for mistakes. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 10th Dec. 1874.] My books have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you--a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life--namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (_i.e._, an exaltation of the human). Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them as individualities of immortal duration, in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures?--that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable? And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of quality in actions, all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate, all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious, all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the well-being of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods, or encourage that vision of others' needs which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense--I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy. This seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for color, now you know the laws of the spectrum. As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition, have they, _in fact_, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know that you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history, which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms. The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of "culture of the intellect" is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity?--which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue, wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods?--or figures to itself an æsthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers? "And this," says Socrates, "was the return the Muses made them." With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from _us_. The progress of the world--which you say can only come at the right time--can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world; and that we can say to ourselves with effect, "There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions," seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action as a reason why he could not possibly take that course? As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that, since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you? Difficulties of thought--acceptance of what is, without full comprehension--belong to every system of thinking. The question is to find the least incomplete. When I wrote the first page of this letter I thought I was going to say that I had not courage to enter on the momentous points you had touched on in the hasty, brief form of a letter. But I have been led on sentence after sentence--not, I fear, with any inspiration beyond that of my anxiety. You will at least pardon any ill-advised things I may have written on the prompting of the moment. [Sidenote: Journal, 1875.] _Jan. 13._--Here is a great gap since I last made a record. But the time has been filled full of happiness. A second edition of "Jubal" was published in August; and the fourth edition of the "Spanish Gypsy" is all sold. This morning I received a copy of the fifth edition. The amount of copies sold of "Middlemarch" up to 31st December is between nineteen and twenty thousand. Yesterday I also received the good news that the engagement between Emily Cross and Mr. Otter is settled. The last year has been crowded with proofs of affection for me and of value for what work I have been able to do. This makes the best motive or encouragement to do more; but, as usual, I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing, and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books. I am now just beginning the part about "Deronda," at page 234. [Sidenote: Letter to Francis Otter, 13th (?) Jan. 1875.] Your letter was a deeply felt pleasure to me last night; and I have one from Emily this morning, which makes my joy in the prospect of your union as thorough as it could well be. I could not wish either her words or yours to be in the least different. Long ago, when I had no notion that the event was probable, my too hasty imagination had prefigured it and longed for it. To say this is to say something of the high regard with which all I have known of you has impressed me--for I hold our sweet Emily worthy of one who may be reckoned among the best. The possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our mortal life; and the believing hope that you and she will experience that blessedness seems to enrich me for the coming years. I shall count it among my strengthening thoughts that you both think of me with affection, and care for my sympathy. Mr. Lewes shares in all the feelings I express, and we are rejoicing together. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 15th Jan. 1875.] Please never wonder at my silence, or believe that I bear you in any the less lively remembrance because I do not write to you. Writing notes is the _crux_ of my life. It often interferes with my morning hours (before 1 o'clock), which is the only time I have for quiet work. For certain letters are unavoidable demands, and though my kind husband writes them for me whenever he can, they are not all to be done by proxy. That glorious bit of work of yours about the Home for Girls[26] is delightful to hear of. Hardly anything is more wanted, I imagine, than homes for girls in various employments--or, rather, for unmarried women of all ages. I heard also the other day that your name was among those of the ladies interested in the beginning of a union among the bookbinding women, which one would like to succeed and spread. I hope, from your ability to work so well, that you are in perfect health yourself. Our friend Barbara, too, looks literally the pink of well-being, and cheers one's soul by her interest in all worthy things. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 30th Jan. 1875.] I should urge you to consider your early religious experience as a portion of valid knowledge, and to cherish its emotional results in relation to objects and ideas which are either substitutes or metamorphoses of the earlier. And I think we must not take every great physicist--or other "ist"--for an apostle, but be ready to suspect him of some crudity concerning relations that lie outside his special studies, if his exposition strands us on results that seem to stultify the most ardent, massive experience of mankind, and hem up the best part of our feelings in stagnation. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Feb. 1875.] Last night I finished reading aloud to Mr. Lewes the "Inkerman" volume, and we both thank you heartily for the valuable present. It is an admirable piece of writing; such pure, lucid English is what one rarely gets to read. The masterly marshalling of the material is certainly in contrast with the movements described. To my non-military mind the Inkerman affair seems nothing but a brave blundering into victory. Great traits of valor--Homeric movements--but also a powerful lack of brains in the form of generalship. I cannot see that the ordering up of the two 18-pounder guns was a vast mental effort, unless the weight of the guns is to be counted in the order as well as in the execution. But the grand fact of the thousands beaten by the hundreds remains under all interpretation. Why the Russians, in their multitudinous mass, should have chosen to retreat into Sebastopol, moving at their leisure, and carrying off all their artillery, seems a mystery in spite of General Dannenberg's memorable answer to Mentschikoff. There are some splendid movements in the story--the tradition of the "Minden Yell," the "Men, remember Albuera," and the officer of the 77th advancing with, "Then I will go myself," with what followed, are favorite bits of mine. My mind is in the anomalous condition of hating war and loving its discipline, which has been an incalculable contribution to the sentiment of duty. I have not troubled myself to read any reviews of the book. My eye caught one in which the author's style was accused of affectation. But I have long learned to apply to reviewers an aphorism which tickled me in my childhood--"There must be some such to be some of all sorts." Pray tell Mr. Simpson that I was much pleased with the new dress of the "Spanish Gypsy." The first part of "Giannetto" raised my interest, but I was disappointed in the unravelling of the plot. It seems to me neither really nor ideally satisfactory. But it is a long while since I read a story newer than "Rasselas," which I re-read two years ago, with a desire to renew my childish delight in it, when it was one of my best-loved companions. So I am a bad judge of comparative merits among popular writers. I am obliged to fast from fiction, and fasting is known sometimes to weaken the stomach. I ought to except Miss Thackeray's stories--which I cannot resist when they come near me--and bits of Mr. Trollope, for affection's sake. You would not wonder at my fasting, if you knew how deplorably uncalled-for and "everything-that-it-should-not-be" my own fiction seems to me in times of inward and outward fog--like this morning, when the light is dim on my paper. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 11th Feb. 1875.] _Do_ send me the papers you have written--I mean as a help and instruction to me. I need very much to know how ideas lie in other minds than my own, that I may not miss their difficulties while I am urging only what satisfies myself. I shall be deeply interested in knowing exactly what you wrote at that particular stage. Please remember that I don't consider myself a teacher, but a companion in the struggle of thought. What can consulting physicians do without pathological knowledge? and the more they have of it, the less absolute--the more tentative--are their procedures. You will see by the _Fortnightly_, which you have not read, that Mr. Spencer is very anxious to vindicate himself from neglect of the logical necessity that the evolution of the abstraction "society" is dependent on the modified action of the units; indeed, he is very sensitive on the point of being supposed to teach an enervating fatalism. Consider what the human mind _en masse_ would have been if there had been no such combination of elements in it as has produced poets. All the philosophers and _savants_ would not have sufficed to supply that deficiency. And how can the life of nations be understood without the inward light of poetry--that is, of emotion blending with thought? But the beginning and object of my letter must be the end--please send me your papers. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 10th May, 1875.] We cannot believe that there is reason to fear any painful observations on the publication of the memoir in one volume with "Gravenhurst" and the essays. The memoir is written with exquisite judgment and feeling; and without estimating too highly the taste and carefulness of journalists in their ordinary treatment of books, I think that we may count on their not being impressed otherwise than respectfully and sympathetically with the character of your dear husband's work, and with the sketch of his pure, elevated life. I would also urge you to rely on the fact that Mr. Blackwood thinks the publication desirable, as a guarantee that it will not prove injudicious in relation to the outer world--I mean, the world beyond the circle of your husband's especial friends and admirers. I am grieved to hear of your poor eyes having been condemned to an inaction which, I fear, may have sadly increased the vividness of that inward seeing, already painfully strong in you. There has been, I trust, always some sympathetic young companionship to help you--some sweet voice to read aloud to you, or to talk of those better things in human lots which enable us to look at the good of life a little apart from our own particular sorrow. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 11th May, 1875.] The doctors have decided that there is nothing very grave the matter with me: and I am now so much better that we even think it possible I may go to see Salvini, in the Gladiator, to-morrow evening. This is to let you know that there is no reason against your coming, with or without Margaret, at the usual time on Friday. Your words of affection in the note you sent me are very dear to my remembrance. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 14th May, 1875.] You are right--there is no time, but only the sense of not having time; especially when, instead of filling the days with useful exertion, as you do, one wastes them in being ill, as I have been doing of late. However, I am better now, and will not grumble. Thanks for all the dear words in your letter. Be sure I treasure the memory of your faithful friendship, which goes back--you know how far. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 1st June, 1875.] If you could, some day this week or the beginning of next, allow me half an hour's quiet _tête-à-tête_, I should be very much obliged by such a kindness. The trivial questions I want to put could hardly be shapen in a letter so as to govern an answer that would satisfy my need. And I trust that the interview will hardly be more troublesome to you than writing. I hope, when you learn the pettiness of my difficulties, you will not be indignant, like a great doctor called in to the favorite cat. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 9th Aug. 1875, from Rickmansworth.] We admire our bit of Hertfordshire greatly; but I should be glad of more breezy common land and far-reaching outlooks. For fertility, wealth of grand trees, parks, mansions, and charming bits of stream and canal, our neighborhood can hardly be excelled. And our house is a good old red-brick Georgian place, with a nice bit of garden and meadow and river at the back. Perhaps we are too much in the valley, and have too large a share of mist, which often lies white on our meadows in the early evening. But who has not had too much moisture in this calamitously wet, cold summer? Mr. Lewes is very busy, but not in zoologizing. We reserve that for October, when we mean to go to the coast for a few weeks. It is a long while since I walked on broad sands and watched the receding tide; and I look forward agreeably to a renewal of that old pleasure. I am not particularly flourishing in this pretty region, probably owing to the low barometer. The air has been continually muggy, and has lain on one's head like a thick turban. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 14th Aug. 1875.] What a comfort that you are at home again and well![27] The sense of your nearness had been so long missing to us that we had begun to take up with life as inevitably a little less cheerful than we remembered it to have been formerly, without thinking of restoration. My box is quite dear to me, and shall be used for stamps, as you recommend, unless I find another use that will lead me to open it and think of you the oftener. It is very precious to me that you bore me in your mind, and took that trouble to give me pleasure--in which you have succeeded. Our house here is rather a fine old brick Georgian place, with a lovely bit of landscape; but I think we have suffered the more from the rainy, close weather, because we are in a valley, and can see the mists lie in a thick, white stratum on our meadows. Mr. Lewes has been, on the whole, flourishing and enjoying--writing away with vigor, and making a discovery or theory at the rate of one per diem. Of me you must expect no good. I have been in a piteous state of debility in body and depression in mind. My book seems to me so unlikely ever to be finished in a way that will make it worth giving to the world, that it is a kind of glass in which I behold my infirmities. That expedition on the Thames would be a great delight, if it were possible to us. But our arrangements forbid it. Our loving thanks to Mr. Druce, as well as to you, for reviving the thought. We are to remain here till the 23d of September; then to fly through town, or at least only perch there for a night or so, and then go down to the coast, while the servants clean our house. We expect that Bournemouth will be our destination. Let us have news of you all again soon. Let us comfort each other while it is day, for the night cometh. I hope this change of weather, in which we are glorying both for the country's sake and our own, will not make Weybridge too warm for Mrs. Cross. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, 19th Aug. 1875.] I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over. Please take it as a proof of special feeling that I declined answering your kind inquiries by proxy. This corner of Hertfordshire is as pretty as it can be of the kind. There are really rural bits at every turn. But for my particular taste I prefer such a region as that round Haslemere--with wide, furzy commons and a grander horizon. Also I prefer a country where I don't make bad blood by having to see one public house to every six dwellings--which is literally the case in many spots around us. My gall rises at the rich brewers in Parliament and out of it, who plant these poison shops for the sake of their million-making trade, while probably their families are figuring somewhere as refined philanthropists or devout Evangelicals and Ritualists. You perceive from this that I am dyspeptic and disposed to melancholy views. In fact, I have not been flourishing, but I am getting a little better; grateful thanks that you will care to know it. On the whole the sins of brewers, with their drugged ale and devil's traps, depress me less than my own inefficiency. But every fresh morning is an opportunity that one can look forward to for exerting one's will. I shall not be satisfied with your philosophy till you have conciliated necessitarianism--I hate the ugly word--with the practice of willing strongly, willing to will strongly, and so on, that being what you certainly can do and have done about a great many things in life, whence it is clear that there is nothing in truth to hinder you from it--except, you will say, the absence of a motive. But that absence I don't believe in in your case--only in the case of empty, barren souls. Are you not making a transient confusion of intuitions with innate ideas? The most thorough experientialists admit intuition--_i.e._, direct impressions of sensibility underlying all proof, as necessary starting-points for thought. [Sidenote: Journal, 1875.] _Oct. 10._--On the 15th June, we went to a house we had taken at Rickmansworth. Here, in the end of July, we received the news that our dear Bertie had died on June 29th. Our stay at Rickmansworth, though otherwise peaceful, was not marked by any great improvement in health from the change to country instead of town--rather the contrary. We left on 23d September, and then set off on a journey into Wales, which was altogether unfortunate on account of the excessive rain. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 10th Oct. 1875.] I behaved rather shabbily in not thanking you otherwise than by proxy for the kind letter you sent me to Rickmansworth, but I had a bad time down there, and did less of everything than I desired. Last night we returned from our trip--a very lively word for a journey made in the worst weather; and since I am, on the whole, the better for a succession of small discomforts in hotels, and struggling walks taken under an umbrella, I have no excuse for not writing a line to my neglected correspondents. You will laugh at our nervous caution in depositing our MSS. at the Union Bank before we set out. We could have borne to hear that our house had been burned down, provided no lives were lost, and our unprinted matter, our _oeuvres inédites_, were safe out of it. About _my_ unprinted matter, Mr. Lewes thinks it will not be well to publish the first part till February. The four first monthly parts are ready for travelling now. It will be well to begin the printing in good time, so that I may not be hurried with the proofs; and I must beg Mr. Simpson to judge for me in that matter with kind carefulness. I can't say that I am at all satisfied with the book, or that I have a comfortable sense of doing in it what I want to do; but Mr. Lewes _is_ satisfied with it, and insists that since he is as anxious as possible for it to be fine, I ought to accept his impressions as trustworthy. So I resign myself. I read aloud the "Abode of Snow" at Rickmansworth, to our mutual delight; and we are both very much obliged to you for the handsome present. But what an amazing creature is this Andrew Wilson to have kept pluck for such travelling while his body was miserably ailing! One would have said that he had more than the average spirit of hardy men to have persevered even in good health after a little taste of the difficulties he describes. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 20th Oct. 1875.] The arrangements as to the publication of my next book are already determined on. Ever since "Adam Bede" appeared I have been continually having proposals from the proprietors or editors of periodicals, but I have always declined them, except in the case of "Romola," which appeared in the _Cornhill_, and was allowed to take up a varying and unusual number of pages. I have the strongest objection to cutting up my work into little bits; and there is no motive to it on my part, since I have a large enough public already. But, even apart from that objection, it would not now be worth the while of any magazine or journal to give me a sum such as my books yield in separate publication. I had £7000 for "Romola," but the mode in which "Middlemarch" was issued brings in a still larger sum. I ought to say, however, that the question is not entirely one of money with me: if I could gain _more_ by splitting my writing into small parts, I would not do it, because the effect would be injurious as a matter of art. So much detail I trouble you with to save misapprehension. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Nov. 1875.] Your enjoyment of the proofs cheers me greatly; and pray thank Mrs. Blackwood for her valuable hints on equine matters. I have not only the satisfaction of using those hints, I allow myself the inference that where there is no criticism on like points I have made no mistake. I should be much obliged to Mr. Simpson--whom I am glad that Gwendolen has captivated--if he would rate the printers a little about their want of spacing. I am anxious that my poor heroes and heroines should have all the advantage that paper and print can give them. It will perhaps be a little comfort to you to know that poor Gwen is spiritually saved, but "so as by fire." Don't you see the process already beginning? I have no doubt you do, for you are a wide-awake reader. But what a climate to expect good writing in! Skating in the morning and splashy roads in the afternoon is just typical of the alternation from frigid to flaccid in the author's bodily system, likely to give a corresponding variety to the style. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1875.] I got my head from under the pressure of other matters, like a frog from under the water, to send you my November greeting. My silence through the rest of the months makes you esteem me the more, I hope, seeing that you yourself hate letter-writing--a remarkable exception to the rule that people like doing what they can do well, if one can call that a rule of which the reverse seems more frequent--namely, that they like doing what they do ill. We stayed till nearly the end of September at the house we had taken in Hertfordshire. After that we went into Wales for a fortnight, and were under umbrellas nearly the whole time. I wonder if you all remember an old governess of mine who used to visit me at Foleshill--a Miss Lewis? I have found her out. She is living at Leamington, very poor as well as old, but cheerful, and so delighted to be remembered with gratitude. How very old we are all getting! But I hope you don't mind it any more than I do. One sees so many contemporaries that one is well in the fashion. The approach of parting is the bitterness of age. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Dec. 1875.] Your letter is an agreeable tonic, very much needed, for that wretched hinderance of a cold last week has trailed after it a series of headaches worse than itself. An additional impression, like Mr. Langford's, of the two volumes is really valuable, as a sign that I have not so far failed in relation to a variety of readers. But you know that in one sense I count nothing done as long as anything remains to do; and it always seems to me that the worst difficulty is still to come. In the sanest, soberest judgment, however, I think the third volume (which I have not yet finished) would be regarded as the difficult bridge. I will not send you any more MS. until I can send the whole of vol. iii. We think that Mr. Simpson has conducted our Australian business admirably. Remembering that but for his judgment and consequent activity we might have got no publication at all in that quarter, we may well be content with £200. Mr. Lewes has not got the Life of Heine, and will be much pleased and obliged by your gift. Major Lockhart's lively letter gives one a longing for the fresh, breezy life and fine scenery it conjures up. You must let me know when there is a book of his, because when I have done my own I shall like to read something else by him. I got much pleasure out of the two books I did read. But when I am writing, or only thinking of writing, fiction of my own, I cannot risk the reading of other English fiction. I was obliged to tell Anthony Trollope so when he sent me the first part of his "Prime Minister," though this must seem sadly ungracious to those who don't share my susceptibilities. Apparently there are wild reports about the subject-matter of "Deronda"--among the rest, that it represents French life! But that is hardly more ridiculous than the supposition that after refusing to go to America, I should undertake to describe society there! It is wonderful how "Middlemarch" keeps afloat in people's minds. Somebody told me that Mr. Henry Sidgwick said it was a bold thing to write another book after "Middlemarch," and we must prepare ourselves for the incalculableness of the public reception in the first instance. I think I have heard you say that the chief result of your ample experience has been to convince you of that incalculableness. What a blow for Miss Thackeray--the death of that sister to whom she was so closely bound in affection. [Sidenote: Journal, 1875.] _Dec. 25._--After our return from Wales in October I grew better and wrote with some success. For the last three weeks, however, I have been suffering from a cold and its effects so as to be unable to make any progress. Meanwhile the two first volumes of "Daniel Deronda" are in print, and the first book is to be published on February 1st. I have thought very poorly of it myself throughout, but George and the Blackwoods are full of satisfaction in it. Each part as I see it before me _im werden_ seems less likely to be anything else than a failure; but I see on looking back this morning--Christmas Day--that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about "Romola;" and, so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of "Middlemarch." I have finished the fifth book, but am not far on in the sixth, as I hoped to have been; the oppression under which I have been laboring having positively suspended my power of writing anything that I could feel satisfaction in. _SUMMARY._ JANUARY, 1873, TO DECEMBER, 1875. Reception of "Middlemarch"--Letter to John Blackwood--Mr. Anthony Trollope--Dutch translation of George Eliot's novels--Letter to Mrs. Cross--Evening drives at Weybridge--Letter to John Blackwood--German reprint of "Spanish Gypsy"--"The Lifted Veil"--"Kenelm Chillingly"--Letter to Mrs. William Smith on her Memoir of her husband--Pleasure in young life--Letter to John Blackwood--Want of a Conservative leader--Letter to Mr. Burne-Jones--The function of art--Purpose in art--"Iphigenia in Aulis"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Welcoming her home--Letter to Mrs. William Smith on women at Cambridge--Visit to Mr. Frederic Myers at Cambridge--Meets Mr. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. Jebb, Mr. Edmund Gurney, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Lyttelton, and Mrs. and Miss Huth--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Death of Miss Rebecca Franklin--Visit to the Master of Balliol--Meets Mr. and Mrs. Charles Roundell--Professor Green--Max Müller--Thomson, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge--Nine-weeks' trip to the Continent--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Homburg--Fontainebleau, Plombières, and Luxeuil--Two months' stay at Bickley--Letter to Mrs. Cross on journey abroad and Blackbrook--Letter to John Blackwood--New edition of "Middlemarch"--A real Lowick in a Midland county--Cheap editions--Letter to Mrs. Cross on the pleasures of the country and on Mr. Henry Sidgwick--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--House in the country--Letter to J. W. Cross on conformity--Letter to John Blackwood--Interruptions of town life--Simmering towards another book--Berlin reading "Middlemarch"--Ashantee war--Letter to Madame Bodichon--The George Howards--John Stuart Mill's Autobiography--Letter to Mrs. Cross on Christmas invitation--Dr. Andrew Clark--Letter to Mrs. Bray on stupidity of readers--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Retrospect of 1873--Sales of "Middlemarch" and "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Mrs. William Smith--"Plain living and high thinking"--Letter to John Blackwood--Conservative reaction--Cheaper edition of novels--Lord Lytton's "Fables"--Dickens's Life and biography in general--Letter to John Blackwood--Volume of poems--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Motives for children--Letter to Miss Hennell--Francis Newman--George Dawson--"The Legend of Jubal and other Poems" published--"Symposium" written--Letter to Miss Mary Cross thanking her for a vase--Letter to Mrs. Cross--Delight in country--Letter to John Blackwood--Threatened restoration of the empire in France--"Brewing" "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on Mrs. Nassau Senior's report--Letter to Mrs. William Smith on consolations in loss--Letter to Madame Bodichon--No disposition to melancholy--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones--The serious view of life--Letter to John Blackwood--Justifications for writing--Dean Liddell--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Goethe's mysticism--Letter to Miss Hennell--Visit to Six-Mile Bottom--Paris and the Ardennes--Bank of England and Woolwich Arsenal--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--The idea of God an exaltation of human goodness--Vision of others' needs--Ground of moral action--Need of altruism--The power of the will--Difficulties of thought--Sales of books--Retrospect of 1874--Letter to Francis Otter on his engagement--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Note-writing--Home for girls--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--Value of early religious experience--Limitations of scientists--Letter to John Blackwood--Kinglake's "Crimea"--Discipline of war--"Rasselas"--Miss Thackeray--Anthony Trollope--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--Desire to know the difficulties of others--Companion in the struggle of thought--Mr. Spencer's teaching--The value of poets--Emotion blending with thought--Letter to Mrs. William Smith--Her memoir--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones--The world of light and speech--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Rickmansworth--Letter to F. Harrison asking for consultation--Letter to J. W. Cross--"The Elms"--Depression--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--The Brewing interest--Conciliation of necessitarianism with will--Innate ideas--Death of Herbert Lewes--Trip to Wales--Letter to John Blackwood--Not satisfied with "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Mode of publication of books--Letter to John Blackwood--Gwendolen--Letter to Miss Hennell--Miss Lewis--Letter to John Blackwood--Impressions of "Deronda"--Major Lockhart--Depression about "Deronda." FOOTNOTES: [21] Death of Mrs. Cross's sister of cholera, at Salzburg. [22] See _ante_, p. 66. [23] "Paul Bradley." [24] A vase with paintings from "Romola" on tiles. [25] "Tristi fummo Nell'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra." _Inferno_, cant. vii. 121, 122. [26] Bessborough Gardens. [27] I had been abroad for six weeks. CHAPTER XVIII. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th March, 1876.] We have just come in from Weybridge, but are going to take refuge there again on Monday for a few days more of fresh air and long, breezy afternoon walks. Many thanks for your thoughtfulness in sending me the cheering account of sales. Mr. Lewes has not heard any complaints of not understanding Gwendolen, but a strong partisanship for and against her. My correspondence about the misquotation of Tennyson has quieted itself since the fifth letter. But one gentleman has written me a very pretty note, taxing me with having wanted insight into the technicalities of Newmarket, when I made Lush say, "I will _take_ odds." He judges that I should have written, "I will lay odds." On the other hand, another expert contends that the case is one in which Lush would be more likely to say, "I will take odds." What do you think? I told my correspondent that I had a dread of being righteously pelted with mistakes that would make a cairn above me--a monument and a warning to people who write novels without being omniscient and infallible. Mr. Lewes is agitating himself over a fifth reading of revise, Book VI., and says he finds it more interesting than on any former reading. It is agreeable to have a home criticism of this kind! But I am deep in the fourth volume, and cannot any longer care about what is past and done for--the passion of the moment is as much as I can live in. We had beautiful skies with our cold, and only now and then a snow shower. It is grievous to read of the suffering elsewhere from floods. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 30th March, 1876.] I am well pleased that "Deronda" touches you. I _wanted_ you to prefer the chapter about Mirah's finding, and I hope you will also like her history in Part III., which has just been published. We want very much to get away, but I fear we shall hardly be able to start till the end of May. At present we think of the Maritime Alps as a destination for the warm summer--if we have such a season this year; but we shall wander a little on our way thither, and not feel bound to accomplish anything in particular. Meanwhile we are hearing some nice music occasionally, and we are going to see Tennyson's play, which is to be given on the 15th. The occasion will be very interesting, and I should be very sorry to miss it. We have been getting a little refreshment from two flights between Sundays to Weybridge. But we have had the good a little drained from us by going out to dinner two days in succession. At Sir James Paget's I was much interested to find that a gentle-looking, clear-eyed, neatly-made man was Sir Garnet Wolseley; and I had some talk with him, which quite confirmed the impression of him as one of those men who have a power of command by dint of their sweet temper, calm demeanor, and unswerving resolution. The next subject that has filled our chat lately has been the Blue Book on Vivisection, which you would like to look into. There is a great deal of matter for reflection in the evidence on the subject, and some good points have been lately put in print, and conversation that I should like to tell you of if I had time. Professor Clifford told us the other Sunday that Huxley complained of his sufferings from "the profligate lying of virtuous women." [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _April 12._--On February 1st began the publication of "Deronda," and the interest of the public, strong from the first, appears to have increased with Book III. The day before yesterday I sent off Book VII. The success of the work at present is greater than that of "Middlemarch" up to the corresponding point of publication. What will be the feeling of the public as the story advances I am entirely doubtful. The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody. I am in rather better health--having, perhaps, profited by some eight days' change at Weybridge. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th April, 1876.] Your sympathetic letter is a welcome support to me in the rather depressed condition which has come upon me from the effect, I imagine, of a chill taken in the sudden change from mildness to renewed winter. You can understand how trying it is to have a week of incompetence at the present stage of affairs. I am rather concerned to see that the part is nearly a sheet smaller than any of the other parts. But Books V. and VI. are proportionately thick. It seemed inadmissible to add anything after the scene with Gwendolen; and to stick anything in not necessary to development between the foregoing chapters is a form of "matter in the wrong place" particularly repulsive to my authorship's sensibility. People tell us that the book is enormously discussed, and I must share with you rather a neat coincidence which pleased us last week. Perhaps you saw what Mr. Lewes told me of--namely, that [a critic] opined that the scenes between Lush and Grandcourt were not _vraisemblable_--were of the imperious feminine, not the masculine, character. Just afterwards Mr. Lewes was chatting with a friend who, without having read the [criticism] or having the subject in the least led up to by Mr. Lewes, said that he had been at Lady Waldegraves', where the subject of discussion had been "Deronda;" and Bernal Osborne, delivering himself on the book, said that the very best parts were the scenes between Grandcourt and Lush. Don't you think that Bernal Osborne has seen more of the Grandcourt and Lush life than that critic has seen? But several men of experience have put their fingers on those scenes as having surprising verisimilitude; and I naturally was peculiarly anxious about such testimony, where my construction was founded on a less direct knowledge. We are rather vexed, now it is too late, that I did not carry out a sort of incipient intention to expunge a motto from Walt Whitman which I inserted in Book IV. Of course the whole is irrevocable by this time; but I should have otherwise thought it worth while to have a new page, not because the motto itself is objectionable to me--it was one of the finer things which had clung to me from among his writings--but because, since I quote so few poets, my selection of a motto from Walt Whitman might be taken as a sign of a special admiration, which I am very far from feeling. How imperfectly one's mind acts in proof-reading! Mr. Lewes had taken up Book IV. yesterday to re-read it for his pleasure merely; and though he had read it several times before, he never till yesterday made a remark against taking a motto from Walt Whitman. I, again, had continually had an _appetency_ towards removing the motto, and had never carried it out--perhaps from that sort of flaccidity which comes over me about what _has been_ done, when I am occupied with what _is being_ done. People in their eagerness about my characters are quite angry, it appears, when their own expectations are not fulfilled--angry, for example, that Gwendolen accepts Grandcourt, etc., etc. One reader is sure that Mirah is going to die very soon, and, I suppose, will be disgusted at her remaining alive. Such are the reproaches to which I make myself liable. However, that you seem to share Mr. Lewes's strong feeling of Book VII. being no falling off in intensity makes me brave. Only endings are inevitably the least satisfactory part of any work in which there is any merit of development. I forgot to say that the "tephillin" are the small leather bands or phylacteries, inscribed with supremely sacred words, which the Jew binds on his arms and head during prayer. Any periphrasis which would be generally intelligible would be undramatic; and I don't much like explanatory foot-notes in a poem or story. But I must consider what I can do to remedy the unintelligibility. The printers have sadly spoiled the beautiful Greek name Kalonymos, which was the name of a celebrated family of scholarly Jews, transplanted from Italy into Germany in mediæval times. But my writing was in fault. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 6th May, 1876.] Your letter was one of the best cordials I could have. Is there anything that cheers and strengthens more than the sense of another's worth and tenderness? And it was that sense that your letter stirred in me, not only by the words of fellowship and encouragement you give directly to me, but by all you tell me of your own feeling under your late painful experience. I had felt it long since I had heard of your and the Professor's well being; but I need not say one word to you of the reasons why I am not active towards my distant friends except in thought. I _do_ think of them, and have a tenacious memory of every little sign they have given me. Please offer my reverential love to the Professor, and tell him I am ruthlessly proud that I kept him out of his bed. I hope that both you and he will continue to be interested in my spiritual children. My cares for them are nearly at an end, and in a few weeks we expect to set out on a Continental journey, as the sort of relaxation which carries one most thoroughly away from studies and social claims. You rightly divine that I am a little overdone, but my fatigue is due not to any excess of work so much as to the vicissitudes of our long winter, which have affected me severely as they have done all delicate people. It is true that some nervous wear, such as you know well, from the excitement of writing, may have made me more susceptible to knife-like winds and sudden chills. Though you tenderly forbade me to write in answer to your letter, I like to do it in these minutes when I happen to be free, lest hinderances should come in the indefinite future. I am the happier for thinking that you will have had this little bit of a letter to assure you that the sweet rain of your affection did not fall on a sandy place. I make a delightful picture of your life in your orange-grove--taken care of by dear daughters. Climate enters into _my_ life with an influence the reverse of what I like to think of in yours. Sunlight and sweet air make a new creature of me. But we cannot bear now to exile ourselves from our own country, which holds the roots of our moral and social life. One fears to become selfish and emotionally withered by living abroad, and giving up the numerous connections with fellow countrymen and women whom one can further a little towards both public and private good. I wonder whether you ever suffered much from false writing (about your biography and motives) in the newspapers. I dare say that pro-slavery prints did not spare you. But I should be glad to think that there was less impudent romancing about you as a _citoyenne_ of the States than there appears to be about me as a stranger. But it is difficult for us English, who have not spent any time in the United States, to know the rank that is given to the various newspapers; and we may make the mistake of giving emphasis to some American journalism which is with you as unknown to respectable minds as any low-class newspaper with us. When we come back from our journeying, I shall be interesting myself in the MS. and proofs of my husband's third volume of his Problems, which will then go to press, and shall plunge myself into the mysteries of our nervous tissue as the Professor has been doing into the mysteries of the Middle Ages. I have a cousinship with him in that taste--but how to find space in one's life for all the subjects that solicit one? My studies have lately kept me away from the track of my husband's researches, and I feel behindhand in my wifely sympathies. You know the pleasure of such interchange--husband and wife each keeping to their own work, but loving to have cognizance of the other's course. God bless you, dear friend. Beg the Professor to accept my affectionate respect, and believe me always yours with love. [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _June 3._--Book V. published a week ago. Growing interest in the public, and growing sale, which has from the beginning exceeded that of "Middlemarch;" the Jewish part apparently creating strong interest. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 3d June, 1876.] The useful "companion," which your loving care has had marked with my initials, will go with me, and be a constant sign of the giver's precious affection, which you have expressed in words such as I most value. Even success needs its consolations. Wide effects are rarely other than superficial, and would breed a miserable scepticism about one's work if it were not now and then for an earnest assurance such as you give me that there are lives in which the work has done something "to strengthen the good and mitigate the evil." I am pursued to the last with some bodily trouble--this week it has been sore throat. But I am emerging, and you may think of me next week as raising my "Ebenezer." Love and blessings to you all. The manuscript of "Daniel Deronda" bears the following inscription: "To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes. "Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, * * * * * Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising Haply I think on thee--and then my state Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings." [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _June 10._--We set off on our journey, intending to go to San Martino Lantosc in the Maritime Alps. But I was ill at Aix, where the heat had become oppressive, and we turned northwards after making a pilgrimage to Les Charmettes--stayed a few days at Lausanne, then at Vevey, where again I was ill; then by Berne and Zurich to Ragatz, where we were both set up sufficiently to enjoy our life. After Ragatz to Heidelberg, the Klönthal, Schaffhausen, St. Blasien in the Black Forest, and then home by Strasburg, Nancy, and Amiens, arriving September 1. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th July, 1876, from Ragatz.] After much travelling we seem to have reached the right place for our health and comfort, and as we hope to stay here for at least a fortnight, I have begun to entertain selfish thoughts about you and the possibility of having news from you. Our month's absence seems long to us--filled with various scenes and various ailments--but to you, I dare say, the request for a letter to tell us what has happened will seem to have come before there is anything particular to tell. On our arriving at Aix the effect of railway travelling and heat on me warned us to renounce our project of going to the Maritime Alps and to turn northward; so after resting at Aix we went to Chambéry, just to make a pilgrimage to Les Charmettes, and then set our faces northward, staying at beautiful Lausanne and Vevey for a week, and then coming on by easy stages to this nook in the mountains. In spite of illness we have had much enjoyment of the lovely scenery we have been dwelling in ever since we entered Savoy, where one gets what I most delight in--the combination of rich, well-cultivated land, friendly to man, and the grand outline and atmospheric effect of mountains near and distant. This place seems to be one of the quietest baths possible. Such fashion as there is, is of a German, unimposing kind; and the King of Saxony, who is at the twin hotel with this, is, I imagine, a much quieter kind of eminence than a London stock-broker. At present the company seems to be almost exclusively Swiss and German, but all the appliances for living and carrying on the "cure" are thoroughly generous and agreeable. We rose at five this morning, drank our glasses of warm water, and walked till a quarter to seven, then breakfasted; and from half-past eight to eleven walked to Bad Pfeffers and back again, along a magnificent ravine where the Tamine boils down beneath a tremendous wall of rock, and where it is interesting to see the electric telegraph leaping from the summit, crossing the gulf, and then quietly running by the roadside till it leaps upward again to the opposite summit. You may consider us as generally ill-informed, and as ready to make much of a little news as any old provincial folk in the days when the stage-coach brought a single London paper to the village Crown or Red Lion. We have known that Servia has declared war against Turkey, and that Harriet Martineau is dead as well as George Sand. Our weather has been uniformly splendid since we left Paris, with the exception of some storms, which have conveniently laid the dust. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d Sept. 1876.] We reached home only last night, and had scarcely taken our much-needed dinner before a parcel was brought in which proved to be "Daniel Deronda" in the four bound volumes, and various letters with other "missiles"--as an acquaintance of mine once quite naively called his own favors to his correspondents--which have at present only gone to swell a heap that I mean to make acquaintance with very slowly. Mr. Lewes, however, is more eager than I, and he has just brought up to me a letter which has certainly gratified me more than anything else of the sort I ever received. It is from Dr. Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi here, expressing his "warm appreciation of the fidelity with which some of the best traits of the Jewish character have been depicted by" etc., etc. I think this will gratify you. We are both the better for our journey, and I consider myself in as good case as I can ever reasonably expect. We can't be made young again, and must not be surprised that infirmities recur in spite of mineral waters and air 3000 feet above the sea-level. After Ragatz, we stayed at Stachelberg and Klönthal--two lovely places, where an English face is seldom seen. Another delicious spot, where the air is fit for the gods of Epicurus, is St. Blasien, in the Schwarzwald, where also we saw no English or American visitors, except such as _übernachten_ there and pass on. We have done exploits in walking, usually taking four or five hours of it daily. I hope that you and yours have kept well and have enjoyed the heat rather than suffered from it. I confess myself glad to think that this planet has not become hopelessly chilly. Draughts and chills are my enemies, and but for them I should hardly ever be ailing. The four volumes look very handsome on the outside. Please thank Mr. William Blackwood for many kind notes he wrote me in the days of MS. and proofs--not one of which I ever answered or took notice of except for my own behoof. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th Sept. 1876.] We got home again last Friday, much strengthened by our journey, notwithstanding vicissitudes. I suppose you will not be in town for ages to come, but I let you know that I am here in case you have anything to say to me by letter--about "objects." After leaving Ragatz we still kept in eastern Switzerland, in high valleys unvisited by the English; and in our homeward line of travel we paused in the Schwarzwald at St. Blasien, which is a _Luft-kur_, all green hills and pines, with their tops as still as if it were the abode of the gods. But imagine how we enjoy being at home again in our own chairs, with the familiar faces giving us smiles which are not expecting change in franc pieces! We are both pretty well, but of course not cured of all infirmities. Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years. Still we are thoroughly lively and "spry." I hope that the hot summer has passed agreeably for you and not been unfavorable to your health or comfort. Of course a little news of you will be welcome, even if you don't particularly want to say anything to me. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d Oct. 1876.] My blessing on you for your sweet letter, which I count among the blessings given to me. Yes. Women can do much for the other women (and men) to come. My impression of the good there is in all unselfish efforts is continually strengthened. Doubtless many a ship is drowned on expeditions of discovery or rescue, and precious freights lie buried. But there was the good of manning and furnishing the ship with a great purpose before it set out. We are going into Cambridgeshire this week, and are watching the weather with private views.[28] I have had some very interesting letters both from Jews and from Christians about "Deronda." Part of the scene at the club is translated into Hebrew in a German-Jewish newspaper. On the other hand, a Christian (highly accomplished) thanks me for embodying the principles by which Christ wrought and will conquer. This is better than the laudation of readers who cut the book up into scraps, and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there. I quite enter into Miss Jekyll's view of negative beauty. Life tends to accumulate "messes" about one, and it is hard to rid one's self of them because of the associations attached. I get impatient sometimes, and long, as Andrew Fairservice would say, to "kaim off the fleas," as one does in a cathedral spoiled by monuments out of keeping with the pillars and walls. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 14th Oct. 1876.] I had felt it long before you let me have some news of you. How could you repeat deliberately that bad dream of your having made yourself "objectionable?" I will answer for it that you were never objectionable to any creature except perhaps to your own self--a too modest and shrinking self. I trusted in your understanding last spring that I was glad to hear from my friends without having to make the effort of answering, when answering was not demanded for practical purposes. My health was not good, and I was absorbed as to my working power, though not as to my interest and sympathy. You have been in my mind of late, not only on your own account but in affectionate association with our dear Mrs. Ruck, whose acquaintance I owe to you. On my return from abroad I found among my heap of letters a delightful one from her, written, I think, at the end of June, as bright and cheering as the hills under the summer sky. And only a day or two after we saw that sad news in the _Times_. I think of her beautiful, open face, with the marks of grief upon it. Why did you write me such a brief letter, telling me nothing about your own life? I am a poor correspondent, and have to answer many letters from people less interesting to me than you are. Will you not indulge me by writing more to me than you expect me to write to you? That would be generous. We both came back the better for our three months' journeying, though I was so ill after we had got to the south that we thought of returning, and went northward in that expectation. But Ragatz set me up, so far as I expect to be set up, and we greatly enjoyed our fresh glimpses of Swiss scenery. Mr. Lewes is now printing his third volume of "Problems of Life and Mind," and is, as usual, very happy over his work. He shares my interest in everything that relates to you; and be assured--will you not?--that such interest will always be warm in us. I shall not, while I live, cease to be yours affectionately. [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _Oct. 20._--Looking into accounts _apropos_ of an offer from Blackwood for another ten years of copyright, I find that before last Christmas there had been distributed 24,577 copies of "Middlemarch." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe,[29] 29th Oct. 1876.] "Evermore thanks" for your last letter, full of generous sympathy that can afford to be frank. The lovely photograph of the grandson will be carefully preserved. It has the sort of beauty which seems to be peculiarly abundant in America, at once rounded and delicate in form. I do hope you will be able to carry out your wish to visit your son at Bonn, notwithstanding that heavy crown of years that your dear Rabbi has to carry. If the sea voyage could be borne without much disturbance, the land journey might be made easy by taking it in short stages--the plan we always pursue in travelling. You see I have an interested motive in wishing you to come to Europe again, since I can't go to America. But I enter thoroughly into the disinclination to move when there are studies that make each day too short. If we were neighbors, I should be in danger of getting troublesome to the revered Orientalist, with all kinds of questions. As to the Jewish element in "Deronda," I expected from first to last, in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is--I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we western people, who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called "educated" making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness--in plain English, the stupidity--which is still the average mark of our culture. Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily independent in material things, and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in what seemed to me most needful to be done, and I sum up with the writer of the Book of Maccabees--"If I have done well and as befits the subject, it is what I desired; and if I have done ill, it is what I could attain unto." You are in the middle of a more glorious autumn than ours, but we, too, are having now and then a little sunshine on the changing woods. I hope that I am right in putting the address from which you wrote to me on the 25th September, so that my note may not linger away from you, and leave you to imagine me indifferent or negligent. Please offer my reverent regard to Mr. Stowe. We spent three months in East Switzerland, and are the better for it. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1876.] Any one who knows from experience what bodily infirmity is--how it spoils life even for those who have no other trouble--gets a little impatient of healthy complainants, strong enough for extra work and ignorant of indigestion. I at least should be inclined to scold the discontented young people who tell me in one breath that they never have anything the matter with them, and that life is not worth having, if I did not remember my own young discontent. It is remarkable to me that I have entirely lost my _personal_ melancholy. I often, of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow creatures, but I am never in that _mood_ of sadness which used to be my frequent visitant even in the midst of external happiness; and this, notwithstanding a very vivid sense that life is declining and death close at hand. We are waiting with some expectation for Miss Martineau's Autobiography, which, I fancy, will be charming so far as her younger and less renowned life extends. All biography diminishes in interest when the subject has won celebrity--or some reputation that hardly comes up to celebrity. But autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called "Memoirs." It would be nice if we could be a trio--I mean you, Cara, and I--chatting together for an hour as we used to do when I had walked over the hill to see you. But that pleasure belongs to "the days that are no more." Will you believe that an accomplished man some years ago said to me that he saw no place for the exercise of _resignation_ when there was no personal divine will contemplated as ordaining sorrow or privation? He is not yet aware that he is getting old and needing that unembittered compliance of soul with the inevitable which seems to me a full enough meaning for the word "resignation." [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _Dec. 1._--Since we came home at the beginning of September I have been made aware of much repugnance or else indifference towards the Jewish part of "Deronda," and of some hostile as well as adverse reviewing. On the other hand, there have been the strongest expressions of interest, some persons adhering to the opinion, started during the early numbers, that the book is my best. Delightful letters have here and there been sent to me; and the sale both in America and in England has been an unmistakable guarantee that the public has been touched. Words of gratitude have come from Jews and Jewesses, and these are certain signs that I may have contributed my mite to a good result. The sale hitherto has exceeded that of "Middlemarch," as to the £2 2_s._ four-volume form, but we do not expect an equal success for the guinea edition which has lately been issued. _Dec. 11._--We have just bought a house in Surrey, and think of it as making a serious change in our life--namely, that we shall finally settle there and give up town. This was a charming house--The Heights, Witley, near Godalming. It stands on a gentle hill overlooking a lovely bit of characteristic English scenery. In the foreground green fields, prettily timbered, undulate up to the high ground of Haslemere in front, with Blackdown (where Tennyson lives) on the left hand, and Hind Head on the right--"Heights that laugh with corn in August, or lift the plough-team against the sky in September." Below, the white steam-pennon flies along in the hollow. The walks and drives in the neighborhood are enchanting. A land of pine-woods and copses, village greens and heather-covered hills, with the most delicious old red or gray brick, timbered cottages nestling among creeping roses; the sober-colored tiles of their roofs, covered with lichen, offering a perpetual harmony to the eye. The only want in the landscape is the want of flowing water. About the house there are some eight or nine acres of pleasure ground and gardens. It quite fulfilled all expectations, as regards beauty and convenience of situation, though I am not quite sure that it was bracing enough for health. [Sidenote: Journal, 1876.] _Dec. 15._--At the beginning of this week I had deep satisfaction from reading in the _Times_ the report of a lecture on "Daniel Deronda," delivered by Dr. Hermann Adler to the Jewish working-men--a lecture showing much insight and implying an expectation of serious benefit. Since then I have had a delightful letter from the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau, written by an American Jew named Isaacs, who excuses himself for expressing his feeling of gratitude on reading "Deronda," and assures me of his belief that it has even already had an elevating effect on the minds of some among his people--predicting that the effect will spread. I have also had a request from Signor Bartolommeo Aquarone, of Siena, for leave to translate "Romola," and declaring that as one who has given special study to the history of San Marco, and has written a life of Fra Jeronimo Savonarola, he cares that "Romola" should be known to his countrymen, for their good. _Magnificat anima mea!_ And last night I had a letter from Dr. Benisch, editor of the _Jewish Chronicle_, announcing a copy of the paper containing an article written by himself on reading "Deronda" (there have long ago been two articles in the same journal reviewing the book), and using strong words as to the effect the book is producing. I record these signs, that I may look back on them if they come to be confirmed. _Dec. 31._--We have spent the Christmas with our friends at Weybridge, but the greater part of the time I was not well enough to enjoy greatly the pleasures their affection prepared for us. Farewell 1876. [Illustration: The Heights, Witley. From a Sketch by Mrs. Allingham.] [Sidenote: Journal, 1877.] _Jan. 1._--The year opens with public anxieties. First, about the threatening war in the East; and next, about the calamities consequent on the continued rains. As to our private life, all is happiness, perfect love, and undiminished intellectual interest. G.'s third volume is about half-way in print. [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 19th Jan. 1877.] I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word "meliorist" except myself. But I begin to think that there is no good invention or discovery that has not been made by more than one person. The only good reason for referring to the "source" would be that you found it useful for the doctrine of meliorism to cite one unfashionable confessor of it in the face of the fashionable extremes. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Jan. 1877.] What are we to do about "Romola?" It ought to range with the cheap edition of my books--which, _exceptis excipiendis_, is a beautiful edition--as well as with any handsomer series which the world's affairs may encourage us to publish. The only difficulty lies in the illustrations required for uniformity. The illustrations in the other volumes are, as Mr. Lewes says, not queerer than those which amuse us in Scott and Miss Austin, with one exception--namely, that where Adam is making love to Dinah, which really enrages me with its unctuousness. I would gladly pay something to be rid of it. The next worst is that of Adam in the wood with Arthur Donnithorne. The rest are endurable to a mind well accustomed to resignation. And the vignettes on the title-pages are charming. But if an illustrator is wanted, I know one whose work is exquisite--Mrs. Allingham. This is not a moment for new ventures, but it will take some time to prepare "Romola." I should like to see proofs, feeling bound to take care of my text; and I have lately been glancing into a book on Italian things, where almost every citation I alighted on was incorrectly printed. I have just read through the cheap edition of "Romola," and though I have only made a few alterations of an unimportant kind--the printing being unusually correct--it would be well for me to send this copy to be printed from. I think it must be nearly ten years since I read the book before, but there is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I could swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable. It has made me often sob with a sort of painful joy as I have read the sentences which had faded from my memory. This helps one to bear false representations with patience; for I really don't love any gentleman who undertakes to state my opinions well enough to desire that I should find myself all wrong in order to justify his statement. I wish, whenever it is expedient, to add "The Lifted Veil" and "Brother Jacob," and so fatten the volume containing "Silas Marner," which would thus become about 100 pages thicker. [Sidenote: Letter to William Allingham, 8th March, 1877.] Mr. Lewes feels himself innocent of dialect in general, and of Midland dialect in especial. Hence I presume to take your reference on the subject as if it had been addressed to me. I was born and bred in Warwickshire, and heard the Leicestershire, North Staffordshire, and Derbyshire dialects during visits made in my childhood and youth. These last are represented (mildly) in "Adam Bede." The Warwickshire talk is broader, and has characteristics which it shares with other Mercian districts. Moreover, dialect, like other living things, tends to become mongrel, especially in a central, fertile, and manufacturing region, attractive of migration; and hence the Midland talk presents less interesting relics of elder grammar than the more northerly dialects. Perhaps, unless a poet has a dialect ringing in his ears, so as to shape his metre and rhymes according to it at one jet, it is better to be content with a few suggestive touches; and, I fear, that the stupid public is not half grateful for studies in dialect beyond such suggestions. I have made a few notes, which may perhaps be not unacceptable to you in the absence of more accomplished aid: 1. The vowel always a double sound, the _y_ sometimes present, sometimes not; either _aäl_ or _yaäl_. _Hither_ not heard except in _c'moother_, addressed to horses. 2. _Thou_ never heard. In general, the 2d person singular not used in Warwickshire except occasionally to young members of a family, and then always in the form of _thee_--_i.e._, _'ee_. For the _emphatic_ nominative, _yo_, like the Lancashire. For the accusative, _yer_, without any sound of the _r_. The demonstrative _those_ never heard among the common people (unless when caught by infection from the parson, etc.). _Self_ pronounced _sen_. The _f_ never heard in _of_, nor the _n_ in _in_. 3. Not year but 'ear. On the other hand, with the usual "compensation," head is pronounced _y_ead. 4. "A gallows little chap as e'er ye see." 5. Here's _to_ you, maäster. Saäm to yo. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 20th March, 1877.] You must read Harriet Martineau's "Autobiography." The account of her childhood and early youth is most pathetic and interesting; but as in all books of the kind, the charm departs as the life advances, and the writer has to tell of her own triumphs. One regrets continually that she felt it necessary not only to tell of her intercourse with many more or less distinguished persons--which would have been quite pleasant to everybody--but also to pronounce upon their entire merits and demerits, especially when, if she had died as soon as she expected, these persons would nearly all have been living to read her gratuitous rudenesses. Still I hope the book will do more good than harm. Many of the most interesting little stories in it about herself and others she had told me (and Mr. Atkinson) when I was staying with her, almost in the very same words. But they were all the better for being told in her silvery voice. She was a charming talker, and a perfect lady in her manners as a hostess. We are only going to bivouac in our Surrey home for a few months, to try what alterations are necessary. We shall come back to this corner in the autumn. We don't think of giving up London altogether at present, but we may have to give up life before we come to any decision on that minor point. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th May, 1877.] Pray bring Madame Mario to see us again. But bear in mind that on Sunday the 27th--which probably will be our last Sunday in London--Holmes the violinist is coming to play, with Mrs. Vernon Lushington to accompany him. Don't mention to any one else that they are coming, lest the audience should be larger than he wishes. We are working a little too hard at "pleasure" just now. This morning we are going for the third time to a Wagner rehearsal at 10 o'clock. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th May, 1877.] I have not read, and do not mean to read, Mrs. Chapman's volume, so that I can judge of it only by report. You seem to me to make a very good case for removing the weight of blame from her shoulders and transferring it to the already burdened back of Harriet Martineau. But I confess that the more I think of the book and all connected with it, the more it deepens my repugnance--or, rather, creates a new repugnance in me--to autobiography, unless it can be so written as to involve neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others. I like that the "He, being dead, yet speaketh," should have quite another meaning than that. But however the blame may be distributed, it remains a grievously pitiable thing to me that man, or woman, who has cared about a future life in the minds of a coming generation or generations, should have deliberately, persistently mingled with that prospect the ignoble desire to perpetuate personal animosities, which can never be rightly judged by those immediately engaged in them. And Harriet Martineau, according to the witness of those well acquainted with facts which she represents in her Autobiography, was quite remarkably apt to have a false view of her relations with others. In some cases she gives a ridiculously inaccurate account of the tenor or bearing of correspondence held with her. One would not for a moment want to dwell on the weakness of a character on the whole valuable and beneficent, if it were not made needful by the ready harshness with which she has inflicted pain on others. No; I did not agree with you about the Byron case. I understand by the teaching of my own egoism--and therefore I can sympathize with--any act of self-vindicating or vindictive rage under the immediate infliction of what is felt to be a wrong or injustice. But I have no sympathy with self-vindication, or the becoming a proxy in vindication, deliberately bought at such a price as that of vitiating revelations--which may even possibly be false. To write a letter in a rage is very pardonable--even a letter full of gall and bitterness, meant as a sort of poisoned dagger. We poor mortals can hardly escape these sins of passion. But I have no pity to spare for the rancor that corrects its proofs and revises, and lays it by chuckling with the sense of its future publicity. [Sidenote: Letter to Professor Dr. David Kaufmann, 31st May, 1877.] Hardly, since I became an author, have I had a deeper satisfaction--I may say, a more heartfelt joy--than you have given me in your estimate of "Daniel Deronda." I must tell you that it is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in me. For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion of good and evil in our work, is the painful impression that we write for a public which has no discernment of good and evil. Certainly if I had been asked to choose _what_ should be written about my books, and _who_ should write it, I should have sketched--well, not anything so good as what you have written, but an article which must be written by a Jew who showed not merely a sympathy with the best aspirations of his race, but a remarkable insight into the nature of art and the processes of the artistic mind. Believe me, I should not have cared to devour even ardent praise if it had not come from one who showed the discriminating sensibility, the perfect response to the artist's intention, which must make the fullest, rarest joy to one who works from inward conviction and not in compliance with current fashions. Such a response holds for an author not only what is best in "the life that now is," but the promise of "that which is to come." I mean that the usual approximative narrow perception of what one has been intending and profoundly feeling in one's work, impresses one with the sense that it must be poor perishable stuff, without roots to take any lasting hold in the minds of men; while any instance of complete comprehension encourages one to hope that the creative prompting has foreshadowed and will continue to satisfy a need in other minds. Excuse me that I write but imperfectly, and perhaps dimly, what I have felt in reading your article. It has affected me deeply, and though the prejudice and ignorant obtuseness which has met my effort to contribute something towards the ennobling of Judaism in the conceptions of the Christian community, and in the consciousness of the Jewish community, has never for a moment made me repent my choice, but rather has been added proof that the effort was needed--yet I confess that I had an unsatisfied hunger for certain signs of sympathetic discernment which you only have given. I may mention as one instance your clear perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish elements and those of English social life. I write under the pressure of small hurries; for we are just moving into the country for the summer, and all things are in a vagrant condition around me. But I wished not to defer answering your letter to an uncertain opportunity. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 14th June, 1877.] I am greatly indebted to you for your letter. It has done something towards rousing me from what I will not call self-despair but resignation to being of no use. I wonder whether you at all imagine the terrible pressure of disbelief in my own {duty/right} to speak to the public, which is apt with me to make all beginnings of work like a rowing against tide. Not that I am without more than my fair ounce of self-conceit and confidence that I know better than the critics, whom I don't take the trouble to read, but who seem to fill the air as with the smoke of bad tobacco. But I will not dwell on my antithetic experiences. I only mention them to show why your letter has done me a service, and also to help in the explanation of my mental attitude towards your requests or suggestions. I do not quite understand whether you have in your mind any plan of straightway constructing a liturgy to which you wish me to contribute in a direct way. That form of contribution would hardly be within my powers. But your words of trust in me as possibly an organ of feelings which have not yet found their due expression is as likely as any external call could be to prompt such perfectly unfettered productions as that which you say has been found acceptable. I wasted some time, three years ago, in writing (what I do not mean to print) a poetic dialogue embodying or rather shadowing very imperfectly the actual contest of ideas. Perhaps what you have written to me may promote and influence a different kind of presentation. At any rate all the words of your letter will be borne in mind, and will enter into my motives. We are tolerably settled now in our camping, experimental fashion. Perhaps, before the summer is far advanced, you may be in our neighborhood, and come to look at us. I trust that Mrs. Harrison is by this time in her usual health. Please give my love to her, and believe me always, with many grateful memories, yours sincerely. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d July, 1877.] It was a draught of real comfort and pleasure to have a letter written by your own hand, and one altogether cheerful.[30] I trust that you will by-and-by be able to write me word of continued progress. Hardly any bit of the kingdom, I fancy, would suit your taste better than your neighborhood of the Land's End. You are not fond of bushy midland-fashioned scenery. We are enjoying the mixture of wildness and culture extremely, and so far as landscape and air go we would not choose a different home from this. But we have not yet made up our minds whether we shall keep our house or sell it. Some London friends are also occasional dwellers in these parts. The day before yesterday we had Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Harrison, whose parents have a fine old Tudor house--Sutton Place--some three miles beyond Guildford. And do you remember Edmund Gurney? He and his graceful bride lunched with us the other day. And Miss Thackeray is married to-day to young Ritchie. I saw him at Cambridge, and felt that the nearly twenty years' difference between them was bridged hopefully by his solidity and gravity. This is one of several instances that I have known of lately, showing that young men with even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life's companion a woman whose attractions are chiefly of the spiritual order. I often see you enjoying your sunsets and the wayside flowers. [Sidenote: Letter to William Allingham, 26th Aug. 1877.] I hope that this letter may be sent on to you in some delicious nook where your dear wife is by your side preparing to make us all richer with store of new sketches. I almost fear that I am implying unbecoming claims in asking you to send me a word or two of news about your twofold, nay, fourfold self. But you must excuse in me a presumption which is simply a feeling of spiritual kinship, bred by reading in the volume you gave me before we left town. That tremendous tramp--"Life, Death; Life, Death"[31]--makes me care the more, as age makes it the more audible to me, for those younger ones who are keeping step behind me. [Sidenote: Letter to Professor Kaufmann, 12th Oct. 1877.] I trust it will not be otherwise than gratifying to you to know that your stirring article on "Daniel Deronda" is now translated into English by a son of Professor Ferrier, who was a philosophical writer of considerable mark. It will be issued in a handsomer form than that of the pamphlet, and will appear within this autumnal publishing season, Messrs. Blackwood having already advertised it. Whenever a copy is ready we shall have the pleasure of sending it to you. There is often something to be borne with in reading one's own writing in a translation, but I hope that in this case you will not be made to wince severely. In waiting to send you this news, I seem to have deferred too long the expression of my warm thanks for your kindness in sending me the Hebrew translations of Lessing and the collection of Hebrew poems--a kindness which I felt myself rather presumptuous in asking for, since your time must be well filled with more important demands. Yet I must further beg you, when you have an opportunity, to assure Herr Bacher that I was most gratefully touched by the sympathetic verses with which he enriched the gift of his work. I see by your last letter that your Theological Seminary was to open on the 4th of this month, so that this too retrospective letter of mine will reach you when you are in the midst of your new duties. I trust that this new institution will be a great good to professor and students, and that your position is of a kind that you contemplate as permanent. To teach the young personally has always seemed to me the most satisfactory supplement to teaching the world through books; and I have often wished that I had such a means of having fresh, living spiritual children within sight. One can hardly turn one's thought towards Eastern Europe just now without a mingling of pain and dread, but we mass together distant scenes and events in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that the present troubles will not at any time press on you in Hungary with more external misfortune than on us in England. Mr. Lewes is happily occupied in his psychological studies. We both look forward to the reception of the work you kindly promised us, and he begs me to offer you his best regards. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, 17th Oct. 1877.] I like to know that you have been thinking of me and that you care to write to me, and though I will not disobey your considerate prohibition so far as to try to answer your letter fully, I must content my soul by telling you that we shall be settled in the old place by the end of the first week in November, and that I shall be delighted to see you then. There are many subjects that I shall have a special pleasure in talking of with you. Let me say now that the passage quoted from your friend's letter is one that I am most glad to find falling in with your own attitude of mind. The view is what I have endeavored to represent in a little poem called "Stradivarius," which you may not have happened to read. I say, not God Himself can make man's best Without best men to help Him. And next: I think direct personal portraiture--or caricature--is a bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. Do you know that pretty story about Bishop Thirlwall? When somebody wanted to bring to him Forchhammer as a distinguished German writer, he replied, "No; I will never receive into my house the man who justified the death of Socrates!" "O that we were all of one mind, and that mind good!" is an impossible-to-be-realized wish: and I don't wish it at all in its full extent. But I think it would be possible that men should differ speculatively as much as they do now, and yet be "of one mind" in the desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, in the desire to do an honest part towards the general well-being, which has made a comfortable _nidus_ for themselves, in the resolve not to sacrifice another to their own egoistic promptings. Pity and fairness--two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life--seem to me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on facts quite as irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not stand on its apex. I am so glad you have been enjoying Ireland in quiet. We love our bit of country and are bent on keeping it as a summer refuge. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 6th Nov. 1877, from the Priory.] _Apropos_ of authorship, I was a little uneasy on Sunday because I had seemed in the unmanageable current of talk to echo a too slight way of speaking about a great poet. I did not mean to say Amen when the "Idylls of the King" seemed to be judged rather _de haut en bas_. I only meant that I should value for my own mind "In Memoriam" as the chief of the larger works; and that while I feel exquisite beauty in passages scattered through the "Idylls," I must judge some smaller wholes among the lyrics as the works most decisive of Tennyson's high place among the immortals. Not that my deliverance on this matter is of any moment, but that I cannot bear to fall in with the sickening fashion of people who talk much about writers whom they read little, and pronounce on a great man's powers with only half his work in their mind, while if they remembered the other half they would find their judgments as to his limits flatly contradicted. Then, again, I think Tennyson's dramas such as the world should be glad of--and would be, if there had been no prejudgment that he could not write a drama. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 10th Nov. 1877.] Never augur ill because you do not hear from me. It is, you know, my profession _not_ to write letters. Happily I can meet your kind anxiety by contraries. I have for two months and more been in better health than I have known for several years. This pleasant effect is due to the delicious air of the breezy Surrey hills; and, further, to a friend's insistence on my practising lawn-tennis as a daily exercise. We are in love with our Surrey house, and only regret that it hardly promises to be snug enough for us chilly people through the winter, so that we dare not think of doing without the warmer nest in town. [Sidenote: Journal, 1877.] _Nov. 10._--We went to the Heights, Witley, at the beginning of June, after a delightful visit to Cambridge, and returned to this old home on the 29th October. We are at last in love with our Surrey house, and mean to keep it. The air and abundant exercise have quite renovated my health, and I am in more bodily comfort than I have known for several years. But my dear husband's condition is less satisfactory, his headaches still tormenting him. Since the year began several little epochs have marked themselves. Blackwood offered for another ten years' copyright of my works, the previous agreement for ten years having expired. I declined, choosing to have a royalty. G.'s third volume has been well received, and has sold satisfactorily for a book so little in the popular taste. A pleasant correspondence has been opened with Professor Kaufmann, now Principal of the Jewish Theological Seminary at Pesth; and his "Attempt at an Appreciation of 'Daniel Deronda'" has been translated into English by young Ferrier, son of Professor Ferrier. A new Cabinet edition of my works, including "Romola," has been decided on, and is being prepared; and there have been multiplied signs that the spiritual effect of "Deronda" is growing. In America the book is placed above all my previous writings. Our third little Hampstead granddaughter has been born, and was christened Saturday--the 3d--Elinor. Yesterday Mr. Macmillan came to ask me if I would undertake to write the volume on Shakespeare, in a series to be issued under the title "Men of Letters." I have declined. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Nov. 1877.] Having a more secure freedom than I may have next week, I satisfy my eagerness to tell you that I am longing for the news of you which you have accustomed me to trust in as sure to come at this time of the year. You will give me, will you not, something more than an affectionate greeting? You will tell me how and where you have been, and what is the actual state of your health and spirits--whether you can still interest yourself in writing on great subjects without too much fatigue, and what companionship is now the most precious to you? We returned from our country home (with which we are much in love) at the beginning of this month, leaving it earlier than we wished because of the need to get workmen into it. Our bit of Surrey has the beauties of Scotland wedded to those of Warwickshire. During the last two months of our stay there I was conscious of more health and strength than I have known for several years. Imagine me playing at lawn-tennis by the hour together! The world I live in is chiefly one that has grown around me in these later years, since we have seen so little of each other. Doubtless we are both greatly changed in spiritual as well as bodily matters, but I think we are unchanged in the friendship founded on early memories. I, for my part, feel increasing gratitude for the cheering and stimulus your companionship gave me, and only think with pain that I might have profited more by it if my mind had been more open to good influences. [Sidenote: Journal, 1877.] _Nov. 26._--The other day we saw in the _Times_ that G.'s name had been proposed for the Rectorship of St. Andrews. Blackwood writes me that in less than a month they have sold off all but 400 of the 5250 printed; and in October were sold 495 of the 3_s._ 6_d._ edition of "Adam Bede." Our friend Dr. Allbut came to see us last week, after we had missed each other for three or four years. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d Dec. 1877.] I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a dark, shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family, and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves, only on simple black-letter days when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning. I am not afraid of your misunderstanding one word. You know that it is not a little love with which I am yours ever. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 13th Dec. 1877.] Your note yesterday gave me much comfort, and I thank you for sparing the time to write it. The world cannot seem quite the same to me as long as you are all in anxiety about her who is most precious to you[32]--in immediate urgent anxiety that is. For love is never without its shadow of anxiety. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. [Sidenote: Journal, 1877.] _Dec. 31._--To-day I say a final farewell to this little book, which is the only record I have made of my personal life for sixteen years and more. I have often been helped, in looking back in it, to compare former with actual states of despondency, from bad health or other apparent causes. In this way a past despondency has turned to present hopefulness. But of course, as the years advance, there is a new rational ground for the expectation that my life may become less fruitful. The difficulty is to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state. Many conceptions of work to be carried out present themselves, but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must have already done my best. In fact, my mind is embarrassed by the number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging vista that each brings with it. I shall record no more in this book, because I am going to keep a more business-like diary. Here ends 1877. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th Jan. 1878.] Yes, it is a comfort to me, in the midst of so many dispiriting European signs, that France has come so far through her struggle. And no doubt you are rejoicing too that London University has opened all its degrees to women. I think we know no reading more amusing than the _Times_ just now. We are deep among the gravities. I have been reading aloud Green's first volume of his new, larger "History of the English People;" and this evening have begun Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth Century"--in fact, we are dull old fogies, who are ill-informed about anything that is going on of an amusing kind. On Monday we took a youth to the pantomime, but I found it a melancholy business. The dear old story of Puss in Boots was mis-handled in an exasperating way, and every incident as well as pretence of a character turned into a motive for the most vulgar kind of dancing. I came away with a headache, from which I am only to-day recovered. It is too cruel that one can't get anything innocent as a spectacle for the children! Mr. Lewes sends his best love, but is quite barren of suggestions about books--buried in pink and lilac periodicals of a physiological sort, and preoccupied with the case of a man who has an artificial larynx, with which he talks very well. What do you say to the phonograph, which can report gentlemen's bad speeches with all their stammering? [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 26th Jan. 1878.] I like to think of you and Mrs. Blackwood taking your daughter to Rome. It will be a delightful way of reviving memories, to mingle and compare them with her fresh impressions, and in a spiritual sense to have what Shakespeare says is the joy of having offspring--"to see your blood warm while you feel it cold." I wish that and all other prospects were not marred by the threat of widening war. Last night I finished reading Principal Tulloch's small but full volume on "Pascal"--a present for which I am much obliged. It is admirably fair and dispassionate, and I should think will be an acceptable piece of instruction to many readers. The brief and graphic way in which he has made present and intelligible the position of the Port Royalists is an example of just what is needed in such a series as the Foreign Classics. But of course they are the most fortunate contributors who have to write about the authors, less commonly treated of, and especially when they are prepared to write by an early liking and long familiarity--as in the present case. I have read every line of appreciation with interest. My first acquaintance with Pascal came from his "Pensées" being given to me, as a school prize, when I was fourteen; and I am continually turning to them now to revive my sense of their deep though broken wisdom. It is a pity that "La Bruyère" cannot be done justice to by any merely English presentation. There is a sentence of his which touches with the finest point the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time--"Le plaisir de la critique nous ôté celui d'être vivement touchés de tres belles choses." We see that our present fashions are old, but there is this difference, that they are followed by a greater multitude. You may be sure I was very much cheered by your last despatch--the solid unmistakable proof that my books are not yet superfluous. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 23d March, 1878.] As to my enjoyment of the "Two Grenadiers," it would have been impossible but for the complete reduction of it to symbolism in my own mind, and my belief that it really touches nobody now, as enthusiasm for the execrable Napoleon I. But I feel that the devotion of the common soldier to his leader (the sign for him of hard duty) is the type of all higher devotedness, and is full of promise to other and better generations. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 7th June, 1878.] The royalties did themselves much credit.[33] The Crown Prince is really a grand-looking man, whose name you would ask for with expectation, if you imagined him no royalty. He is like a grand antique bust--cordial and simple in manners withal, shaking hands, and insisting that I should let him know when we next came to Berlin, just as if he had been a Professor Gruppe, living _au troisième_. _She_ is equally good-natured and unpretending, liking best to talk of nursing soldiers, and of what her father's taste was in literature. She opened the talk by saying, "You know my sister Louise"--just as any other slightly embarrassed mortal might have done. We had a picked party to dinner--Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Peterborough, Lord and Lady Ripon, Dr. Lyon Playfair, Kinglake (you remember "Eothen"--the old gentleman is a good friend of mine), Froude, Mrs. Ponsonby (Lord Grey's granddaughter), and two or three more "illustrations;" then a small detachment coming in after dinner. It was really an interesting occasion. We go to Oxford to-morrow (to the Master of Balliol). [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th June, 1878, from Witley.] I hope we are not wrong in imagining you settled at Strathtyrum, with a fresh power of enjoying the old scenes after your exile, in spite of the abstinence from work--the chief sweetness of life. Mr. Lewes, too, is under a regimen for gout, which casts its threatening shadow in the form of nightly cramps and inward _malaise_. He wants me to tell you something amusing--a bit of Baboo English, from an Indian journal sent us by Lord Lytton. _Apropos_ of Sir G. Campbell's rash statement that India was no good to England, the accomplished writer says, "But British House of Commons stripped him to pieces, and exposed his _cui bono_ in all its naked hideousness!" After all, I think the cultivated Hindoo writing what he calls English, is about on a par with the authors of leading articles on this side of the globe writing what _they_ call English--accusing or laudatory epithets and phrases, adjusted to some dim standard of effect quite aloof from any knowledge or belief of their own. Letter-writing, I imagine, is counted as "work" from which you must abstain; and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence, hence you have nothing to answer. How glad I shall be of an announcement that "No further bulletins will be sent, Mr. Blackwood having gone to golf again." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 18th July, 1878.] I thought you understood that I have grave reasons for not speaking on certain public topics. No request from the best friend in the world--even from my own husband--ought to induce me to speak when I judge it my duty to be silent. If I had taken a contrary decision, I should not have remained silent till now. My function is that of the _æsthetic_, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge. It is one thing to feel keenly for one's fellow-beings; another to say, "This step, and this alone, will be the best to take for the removal of particular calamities." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1878.] I did hope that by the time your military evolutions were over, we might see our way to enjoying the kind welcome which you and Mrs. Blackwood have offered us. No expedition attracts us more than the projected visit to Strathtyrum. Unhappily, Mr. Lewes continues to be troubled and depressed by symptoms that, with the recollection upon us of the crippling gout which once followed them, quite rob us of the courage to leave home. The journey and the excitement, which would be part of his pleasure if he were tolerably well, seem to him now dangerous to encounter--and I am not myself robust enough to venture on a risk of illness to him; so that I cannot supply the daring he needs. We begin to think that we shall be obliged to defer our pleasure of seeing you in your own home--so promising of walks and talks, such as we can never have a chance of in London--until we have the disadvantage of counting ourselves a year older. I am very sorry. But it is better to know that you are getting well, and we unable to see you, than to think of you as an invalid, unable to receive us. We must satisfy ourselves with the good we have--including the peace, and the promise of an abundant wheat harvest. Please ask Mrs. and Miss Blackwood to accept my best regards, and assure them that I counted much on a longer, quieter intercourse with them in a few sunny days away from hotels and callers. Do not write when writing seems a task. Otherwise you know how well I like to have a letter from you. [Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 15th Aug. 1878.] We have certainly to pay for all our other happiness, which is a Benjamin's share, by many small bodily miseries. Mr. Lewes continues ailing, and I am keeping him company with headache. "Rejoice, O young man, in the days of thy youth," and keep a reserve of strength for the more evil days. Especially avoid breaking your neck in hunting. Mr. Lewes did once try horseback, some years ago, but found the exercise too violent for him. I think a Highland sheltie would be the suitable nag, only he is very fond of walking; and between that and lawn-tennis he tires himself sufficiently. I shall hope by and by to hear more good news about your uncle's health. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 26th Aug. 1878.] Shall you mind the trouble of writing me a few words of news about you and yours? just to let me know how things are with you, and deliver me from evil dreams. We have been so ailing in the midst of our country joys that I need to hear of my friends being well as a ground for cheerfulness--a bit of sugar in the cup of resignation. Perhaps this fine summer has been altogether delightful to you. Let me know this good, and satisfy the thirsty sponge of my affection. If you object to my phrase, please to observe that it is Dantesque--which will oblige you to find it admirable. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 26th Aug. 1878.] You remember the case of the old woman of whom her murderers confessed that they had beaten her to death, "partly with crowbars and partly with their fists." Well, I have been beaten into silence since your kind letter, partly by visitors and partly by continual headache. I am a shade or two better this morning, and my soul has half awaked to run its daily stage of duty. Happily I was temporarily relieved from headache during our friends' (the Tom Trollopes') visit. We took them to see Tennyson, and they were delighted with the reading which he very amiably gave us. Then the Du Mauriers came to dine with us on the Thursday, and so the time was not, I hope, too languid for our visitors. Mr. Lewes continues to show improvement in health, so that the balance of good is not much altered by my deficit. We shall be pleased to have any news of you, whether by post or person. At this time I was in the habit of going over occasionally from Weybridge on Sundays. The shadow of trouble was on both our houses. My mother was in her last illness, and Mr. Lewes was constantly ailing, though none of us then thought that he would be taken first. But the sharing of a common anxiety contributed to make our friendship much more intimate. In our drives in the neighborhood of Witley, Mr. Lewes used sometimes to be suddenly seized with severe cramping pains. I think he was himself aware that something was far wrong, but the moment the pain ceased the extraordinary buoyancy of his spirits returned. Nothing but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion, between two bouts of pain, he sang through, with great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of the tenor part in the "Barber of Seville"--George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun. They led a very secluded life at Witley--as always in their country retreats--but enjoyed the society of some of their neighbors. Sir Henry and Lady Holland, who lived next door; charming Mrs. Thellusson and her daughter, Mrs. Greville, who lived between Witley and Godalming, were especial friends. The Tennysons, too, and the Du Mauriers and Allinghams, were all within easy visiting distance. George Eliot's dislike of London life continued to increase with the increasing number of her acquaintance, and consequent demands on time. The Sunday receptions, confined to a small number of intimate friends in 1867, had gradually extended themselves to a great variety of interesting people. These receptions have been so often and so well described that they have hitherto occupied rather a disproportionate place in the accounts of George Eliot's life. It will have been noticed that there is very little allusion to them in the letters; but, owing to the seclusion of her life, it happened that the large majority of people who knew George Eliot as an author never met her elsewhere. Her _salon_ was important as a meeting-place for many friends whom she cared greatly to see, but it was not otherwise important in her own life. For she was eminently _not_ a typical mistress of a _salon_. It was difficult for her, mentally, to move from one person to another. Playing around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested her nor amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the effort of entertaining compensated by the gain. Fortunately Mr. Lewes supplied any qualities lacking in the hostess. A brilliant talker, a delightful _raconteur_, versatile, full of resource in the social difficulties of amalgamating diverse groups, and bridging over awkward pauses, he managed to secure for these gatherings most of the social success which they obtained. Many of the _réunions_ were exceedingly agreeable and interesting, especially when they were not too crowded, when general conversation could be maintained. But the larger the company grew the more difficult it was to manage. The English character does not easily accommodate itself to the exigencies of a _salon_. There is a fatal tendency to break up into small groups. The entertainment was frequently varied by music when any good performer happened to be present. I think, however, that the majority of visitors delighted chiefly to come for the chance of a few words with George Eliot alone. When the drawing-room door of the Priory opened, a first glance revealed her always in the same low arm-chair on the left-hand side of the fire. On entering, a visitor's eye was at once arrested by the massive head. The abundant hair, streaked with gray now, was draped with lace, arranged mantilla-fashion, coming to a point at the top of the forehead. If she were engaged in conversation her body was usually bent forward with eager, anxious desire to get as close as possible to the person with whom she talked. She had a great dislike to raising her voice, and often became so wholly absorbed in conversation that the announcement of an incoming visitor sometimes failed to attract her attention; but the moment the eyes were lifted up, and recognized a friend, they smiled a rare welcome--sincere, cordial, grave--a welcome that was felt to come straight from the heart, not graduated according to any social distinction. Early in the afternoon, with only one or two guests, the talk was always general and delightful. Mr. Lewes was quite as good in a company of three as in a company of thirty. In fact, he was better, for his _verve_ was not in the least dependent on the number of his audience, and the flow was less interrupted. Conversation was no effort to him; nor was it to her so long as the numbers engaged were not too many, and the topics were interesting enough to sustain discussion. But her talk, I think, was always most enjoyable _à deux_. It was not produced for effect, nor from the lip, but welled up from a heart and mind intent on the one person with whom she happened to be speaking. She was never weary of giving of her best so far as the wish to give was concerned. In addition to the Sundays "at home" the Priory doors were open to a small circle of very intimate friends on other days of the week. Of evening entertainments there were very few, I think, after 1870. I remember some charming little dinners--never exceeding six persons--and one notable evening when the Poet Laureate read aloud "Maud," "The Northern Farmer," and parts of other poems. It was very interesting on this occasion to see the two most widely known representatives of contemporary English literature sitting side by side. George Eliot would have enjoyed much in her London life if she had been stronger in health, but, with her susceptible organization, the _atmosphere_ oppressed her both physically and mentally. She always rejoiced to escape to the country. The autumn days were beginning to close in now on the beautiful Surrey landscape, not without some dim, half-recognized presage to her anxious mind of impending trouble. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Sept. 1878.] I am not inclined to let you rest any longer without asking you to send me some account of yourself, for it is long since I got my last news from Edinburgh. I should like to know that you have continued to gather strength, and that you have all been consequently more and more enjoying your life at Strathtyrum. It is an ugly theory that happiness wants the contrast of illness and anxiety, but I know that Mrs. Blackwood must have a new comfort in seeing you once more with your usual strength. We have had "a bad time" in point of health, and it is only quite lately that we have both been feeling a little better. The fault is all in our own frames, not in our air or other circumstances; for we like our house and neighborhood better and better. The general testimony and all other arguments are in favor of this district being thoroughly healthy. But we both look very haggard in the midst of our blessings. Are you not disturbed by yesterday's Indian news? One's hopes for the world's getting a little rest from war are continually checked. Every day, after reading the _Times_, I feel as if all one's writing were miserably trivial stuff in the presence of this daily history. Do you think there are persons who admire Russia's "mission" in Asia as they did the mission in Europe? Please write me anything that comes easily to the end of your pen, and make your world seem nearer to me. Good Mr. Simpson, I hope, lets you know that he is prospering in his pursuit of pleasure without work--which seems a strange paradox in association with my idea of him. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th Oct. 1878.] The days pass by without my finding time to tell you what I want to tell you--how delighted I was to have a good account of you. But every bright day, and we have had many such, has made me think the more of you, and hope that you were drawing in strength from the clear, sweet air. I miss so much the hope that I used always to have of seeing you in London and talking over everything just as we used to do--in the way that will never exactly come with any one else. How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends! The new are comparatively foreigners, with whom one's talk is hemmed in by mutual ignorance. The one cannot express, the other cannot divine. We are intensely happy in our bit of country, as happy as the cloudy aspect of public affairs will allow any one who cares for them to be, with the daily reading of the _Times_. A neighbor of ours was reciting to me yesterday some delicious bits of dialogue with a quaint Surrey woman; _e.g._, "O ma'am, what I have gone through with my husband! He is so uneddicated--he never had a tail-coat in his life!" [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d Nov. 1878, from the Priory.] When Mr. Lewes sent you my MS.[34] the other morning he was in that state of exhilarated activity which often comes with the sense of ease after an attack of illness which had been very painful. In the afternoon he imprudently drove out, and undertook, with his usual eagerness, to get through numerous details of business, over-fatigued himself, and took cold. The effect has been a sad amount of suffering from feverishness and headache, and I have been in deep anxiety, am still very unhappy, and only comforted by Sir James Paget's assurances that the actual trouble will be soon allayed. I have been telling the patient about your letter and suggestion that he should send a form of slip as advertisement for the Magazine. He says--and the answer seems to have been a matter of premeditation with him--that it will be better not to announce the book in this way at once--"the Americans and Germans will be down on us." I cannot question him further at present, but I have no doubt he has been thinking about the matter, and we must not cross his wish in any way. I have thought that a good form of advertisement, to save people from disappointment in a book of mine not being a story, would be to print the list of contents, which, with the title, would give all but the very stupid a notion to what form of writing the work belongs. But this is a later consideration. I am glad you were pleased with the opening. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday evening, 24th Nov. 1878.] For the last week I have been in deep trouble. Mr. Lewes has been alarmingly ill. To-day Sir James Paget and Dr. Quain pronounce him in all respects better, and I am for the first time comforted. You will not wonder now at my silence. Thanks for your affectionate remembrances. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Nov. 1878.] Mr. Lewes continues sadly ill, and I am absorbed in nursing him. When he wrote about Parliament meeting, he was thinking that it would be called together at the usual time--perhaps February. The book can be deferred without mischief. I wish to add a good deal, but, of course, I can finish nothing now, until Mr. Lewes is better. The doctors pronounced him in every respect better yesterday, and he had a quiet night, but since five o'clock this morning he has had a recurrence of trouble. You can feel for him and me, having so lately known what severe illness is. Mr. Lewes died on the 28th November, 1878. _SUMMARY._ MARCH, 1876, TO NOVEMBER, 1878. Letter to John Blackwood--Visit to Weybridge--"Daniel Deronda"--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Meets Sir Garnet Wolseley--Vivisection--Letter to John Blackwood--Public discussion of "Deronda"--Motto from Walt Whitman--Inscription on the MS. of "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Thanks for sympathy--Drawbacks to going too much abroad--Mr. Lewes's "Problems"--Letter to J. W. Cross on the effect of her writing--Three-months' trip to Continent--Letter to John Blackwood--Visit to Chambéry and Les Charmettes--Lausanne and Vevey--Ragatz--Return to London--Letter to John Blackwood--Dr. Hermann Adler--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--St. Blasien--Women's work--Visit to Six-Mile Bottom--Meets Turguenieff--Jewish appreciation of "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. William Smith--Mrs. Ruck--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Jewish element in "Deronda"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Miss Martineau's "Autobiography," and biography in general--Resignation--Gratitude of Jews for "Deronda"--Purchase of house at Witley, near Godalming--Dr. Hermann Adler's lectures on "Daniel Deronda"--Application to translate "Romola" into Italian--Christmas at Weybridge--Opening of year 1877--Letter to James Sully--The word "meliorism"--Letter to John Blackwood--Illustrations of cheap editions--"Romola"--Letter to William Allingham--Warwickshire dialect--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Harriet Martineau's "Autobiography"--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Holmes and Mrs. Vernon Lushington playing--Letter to Miss Hennell--Mrs. Chapman on Harriet Martineau--Mrs. Stowe and the Byron case--Letter to Professor Kaufmann--Gratitude for his estimate of "Deronda"--Letter to F. Harrison--Sympathy incentive to production--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Miss Thackeray's marriage--Letter to W. Allingham on his poems--Letter to Professor Kaufmann--Translation of his article by Mr. Ferrier--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--Reference to Stradivarius--Pity and fairness--Letter to J. W. Cross--Appreciation of Tennyson's poems and dramas--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Improvement in health at Witley--Proposal to write on Shakespeare for "Men of Letters" series--Letter to Miss Hennell--Gain of health and strength at Witley--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones--Christmas plans--Farewell to Journal and to year 1877--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--State of France--London University opening degrees to women--Reading Green's "History of the English People" and Lecky--The phonograph--Letter to John Blackwood--"Pascal"--"La Bruyère"--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones on the "Two Grenadiers"--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Meeting with Crown Prince and Princess of Germany at Mr. Goschen's--Visit to Oxford to the Master of Balliol--Letter to John Blackwood--Indian story of Lord Lytton's--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Function the æsthetic not the doctrinal teacher--Letter to John Blackwood--Mr. Lewes's ill-health--Letter to William Blackwood--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones complaining of health--Letter to J. W. Cross--Mr. Lewes's continued illness--Life at Witley--Effect of receptions at the Priory--Description of receptions--Letter to John Blackwood--Complaining of health--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Delight in old friends--Letters to John Blackwood--MS. of "Theophrastus Such"--Mr. Lewes's last illness--Postponement of publication of "Theophrastus"--Mr. Lewes's death. FOOTNOTES: [28] This was a visit to Six-Mile Bottom, where M. Turguenieff, who was a very highly valued friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes, had come to compare his experiences of Russian and English sport. I remember George Eliot telling me that she had never met any literary man whose society she enjoyed so thoroughly and so unrestrainedly as she did that of M. Turguenieff. They had innumerable bonds of sympathy. [29] This letter is in acknowledgment of a letter from Mrs. Beecher Stowe on "Daniel Deronda." [30] Mme. Bodichon had been dangerously ill. [31] Refers to a poem by W. Allingham, "The General Chorus," with a burden: "Life, Death; Life, Death; Such is the song of human breath." [32] The beginning of my mother's last illness. [33] Dinner at Mr. Goschen's. [34] "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such." CHAPTER XIX. For many weeks after Mr. Lewes's death, George Eliot saw no one except Mr. Charles Lewes, and the very few persons she was obliged to receive on necessary business. She read no letters, and wrote none, but at once began to occupy herself busily with Mr. Lewes's unfinished MSS., in which work Mr. Charles Lewes was able to assist her in the arrangement. The only entry in her diary on the 1st January, 1879, is "Here I and sorrow sit." At the end of two months this desolation had told terribly on her health and spirits; and on the last day of January she was greatly comforted by a visit from Sir James Paget--a friend for whom she had always had the highest and most cordial regard during the many years she had known him. Meantime she had begun to write a few short notes, and she mentions in her journal of 2d January, "A kind letter from Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge, offering to help me on any physiological point;" and on the 19th January, "Ruminating on the founding of some educational instrumentality as a memorial to be called by his name." There are the following letters in January and February. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 7th Jan. 1879.] I bless you for all your goodness to me, but I am a bruised creature, and shrink even from the tenderest touch. As soon as I feel able to see anybody I will see _you_. Please give my love to Bessie[35] and thank her for me--I mean, for her sweet letter. I was a long while before I read any letters, but tell her I shall read hers again and again. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 13th Jan. 1879.] It was a long while before I read any letters, and as yet I have written none, except such as business required of me. You will believe that this has not been for want of gratitude to all my friends for their goodness to me. I can trust to your understanding of a sorrow which has broken my life. I write now because I ought not to allow any disproportionate expense to be incurred about my printed sheets. To me, now, the writing seems all trivial stuff, but since he wished it to be printed, and you seem to concur, I will correct the sheets (if you will send me the remainder) gradually as I am able, and they can be struck off and laid by for a future time. I submit this proposition to your judgment, not knowing what may be most expedient for your printing-office. Thank you for all your kind words. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 22d Jan. 1879.] Sometime, if I live, I shall be able to see you--perhaps sooner than any one else--but not yet. Life seems to get harder instead of easier. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 30th Jan. 1879.] When I said "sometime" I meant still a distant time. I want to live a little time that I may do certain things for his sake. So I try to keep up my strength, and I work as much as I can to save my mind from imbecility. But that is all at present. I can go through anything that is mere business. But what used to be joy is joy no longer, and what is pain is easier because he has not to bear it. I bless my friends for all their goodness to me. Please say so to all of them that you know, especially Mr. Hall. Tell him I have read his letter again and again. If you feel prompted to say anything, write it to me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 4th Feb. 1879.] Do not believe that your love is lost upon me, dear. I bless you for all your goodness to me, and keep every sign of it in my memory. I have been rather ill lately, but my head is clearer this morning. The world's winter is going, I hope, but my everlasting winter has set in. You know that and will be patient with me. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th Feb. 1879.] Bless you for your loving thought. But for all reasons, bodily and mental, I am unable to move. I am entirely occupied with his manuscripts, and must be on this spot among all the books. Then, I am in a very ailing condition of body--cannot count on myself from day to day--and am not fit to undertake any sort of journey. I have never yet been outside the gate. Even if I were otherwise able, I could not bear to go out of sight of the things he used and looked on. Bless you once more. If I could go away with _anybody_ I could go away with you. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 7th Feb. 1879.] I do need your affection. Every sign of care for me from the beings I respect and love is a help to me. In a week or two I think I shall want to see you. Sometimes, even now, I have a longing, but it is immediately counteracted by a fear. The perpetual mourner--the grief that can never be healed--is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning--a new acquaintance with grief. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, Saturday, 22d Feb. 1879.] If you happen to be at liberty to-morrow, or the following Friday, or to-morrow week, I hope I shall be well enough to see you. Let me know which day. On Sunday, the 23d February, I saw her for the first time, and there is the following letter next day. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 24th Feb. 1879.] A transient absence of mind yesterday made me speak as if it were possible for me to entertain your thoughtful, kind proposal that I should move to Weybridge for a short time. But I cannot leave this house for the next two months--if for no other reason, I should be chained here by the need of having all the books I want to refer to. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1879.] Pray do not announce "Theophrastus" in any way. It would be intolerable to my feelings to have a book of my writing brought out for a long while to come. What I wish to do is, to correct the sheets thoroughly, and then have them struck off and laid by till the time of publication comes. One reason which prompted me to set about the proofs--in addition to my scruples about occupying the type--was that I was feeling so ill, I thought there was no time to be lost in getting done everything which no one else would do if I left it undone. But I am getting better, I think; and my doctors say there is nothing the matter with me to urge more haste than the common uncertainty of life urges on us all. There is a great movement now among the Jews towards colonizing Palestine, and bringing out the resources of the soil. Probably Mr. Oliphant is interested in the work, and will find his experience in the West not without applicability in the East. It is a satisfaction to you, I hope, that your son is about to be initiated in George Street. I trust he will one day carry on the good traditions of the name "John Blackwood." [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Mch. 1879.] Your letter, which tells me that you are benefiting by the clear, sunny air, is very welcome. Yes, here too the weather is more merciful, and I drive out most days. I am better bodily, but I never feel thoroughly comfortable in that material sense, and I am incredibly thin. As to my mind, I am full of occupation, but the sorrow deepens down instead of diminishing. I mean to go to Witley in a few months, that I may look again on the spots that he enjoyed, and that we enjoyed together, but I cannot tell beforehand whether I shall care to go again afterwards. Everybody is very kind to me, and by and by I shall begin to see a few intimate friends. I can do or go through anything that is business or duty, but time and strength seem lacking for everything else. You must excuse my weakness, remembering that for nearly twenty-five years I have been used to find my happiness in his. I can find it nowhere else. But we can live and be helpful without happiness, and I have had more than myriads who were and are better fitted for it. I am really very busy, and have been sadly delayed by want of health. One project I have entered on is to found a studentship, which will be called after his name. I am getting help from experienced men. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th Mch. 1879.] I send the corrected sheets of "Theophrastus," and shall be much obliged if you will order a complete revise to be sent me before they are struck off. Whenever the book is published (I cannot contemplate its appearing before June, and if that is a bad time it must stand over till the autumn season) I beg you kindly to write for me a notice, to be printed on the fly-leaf, that the MS. was placed in your hands last November, or simply last year. I think you will enter into my feeling when I say that to create a notion on the part of the public of my having been occupied in writing "Theophrastus" would be repugnant to me. And I shrink from putting myself forward in any way. I hope you are benefiting by the milder weather. I drive out a little now, but you must be prepared to see me a much changed creature. I think I should hardly know myself. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _March 8._--Gertrude[36] and the children came to tea. _March 9._--Mr. Henry Sidgwick came to discuss the plan of the studentship. _March 13._--Professor Michael Foster came to discuss the studentship, and we arrived at a satisfactory clearness as to the conditions. He mentioned as men whom he thought of as suitable trustees, Huxley, Pye Smith, Thiselton Dyer, Francis Balfour, and Henry Sidgwick. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 20th Mch. 1879.] DEAR FRIEND,--When you have time to come to me about six o'clock I shall love to see you. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _March 22._--Mrs. Congreve came again. Mrs. Burne-Jones came. [Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 25th Mch. 1879.] I am so dissatisfied with "Theophrastus" on reading the revise that I have proposed to suppress it in this original form, and regenerate it whenever--if ever--I recover the power to do so. You see the cruel weather has travelled after you. It makes one feel every grievance more grievously in some respects, though to me the sunshine is in one sense sadder. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _March 30._--Mr. Bowen (now Lord Justice Bowen) came, Mr. Spencer, and J. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th April, 1879.] After weighing what you have said, I agree to the publication of "Theophrastus" in May. If you had at all suspected that the book would injure my influence, you would not have wished me to give it forth in its present form, and in the uncertainty of one's inner and outer life it is not well to depend on future capabilities. There are some things in it which I want to get said, and if the book turned out to be effective in proportion to my other things, the form would lend itself to a "second series"--supposing I lived and kept my faculties. As to the price for the right of translating, you will judge. If you will kindly undertake these negotiations for me, I shall be thankful. And pray remember that I don't _want_ the book to be translated, so that it will be well to wait for the application, and to ask a sufficient sum to put the publisher on his guard as to the selection of a translator. But, of course, this little book cannot be paid for according to the difficulty of translation. You see, I have been so used to have all trouble spared me that I am ready to cast it on any willing shoulders. But I am obliged now to think of business in many ways. I am so glad to know that Mrs. Blackwood has the comfort of a good report about you from the doctors. Perhaps it may seem to you the wrong order of sympathy to be glad for your sake in the _second_ place. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _April 8._--Mrs. Stuart came. Mrs. Stuart was a devoted friend whose acquaintance had been formed some years before through the presentation of some beautiful wood-carving which she had executed as an offering to George Eliot. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 8th April, 1879.] DEAR FRIENDS,--Will you come to see me some day? I am always in from my drive and at liberty by half-past four. Please do not say to any one that I am receiving visitors generally. Though I have been so long without making any sign, my heart has been continually moved with gratitude towards you. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 8th April, 1879.] Your letter was very welcome this morning, for I do not like to be very long without having some picture of you, and your words of affection are always sweet. The studentship I mention is to supply an income to a young man who is qualified and eager to carry on physiological research, and would not otherwise have the means of doing so. Mr. H. Sidgwick, Michael Foster, and other men of kindred mind are helping me in settling the scheme. I have been determined in my choice of the studentship by the idea of what would be a sort of prolongation of _his_ life. That there should always, in consequence of his having lived, be a young man working in the way he would have liked to work, is a memorial of him that comes nearest my feeling. It is to be at Cambridge to begin with, and we thought at first of affiliating it to the university; but now the notion is that it will be well to keep it free, so that the trustees may move it where and when they will. But the scheme is not yet drafted. I am going to bring out one of "The Problems" in a separate volume at the beginning of May, and am now correcting the proofs. My going to Witley is an experiment. I don't know how I shall bear being there, but I hope there will be nothing to hinder my _having you_ there if you will undertake the troublous journey for my sake. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th April, 1879.] I enclose the proof of title-page and motto. Whether the motto (which is singularly apt and good) should be on the title-page or fly-leaf I leave you to judge. Certainly, everybody who does not read Latin will be offended by its claiming notice, and will consider that only the deepest-dyed pedantry could have found the motive for it. But I will not leave it out altogether. I have had such various letters from time to time, asking me to reprint or write essays, that, perhaps, some of the public will not be disappointed that the volume is not a story. But that must be as it may; and if you think the acceptance dubious, it is much the better plan not to stereotype. What energy there is in Mr. Kinglake in spite of the somewhat shattered health that his _Wesen_ gives one the impression of! Among incidents of war that one can dwell on with anything like gladness, that account of the rescue of the colors at Isandlana is memorable, is it not? I go out every day, drive beyond the ranks of hideous houses in the Kilburn outskirts, and get to lanes where I can walk, in perfect privacy, among the fields and budding hedgerows. I hope Mr. Julian Sturgis will take care of his writing and do something lasting. He seems to me to have a strain above the common in him; and he is not writing for his bread, or even his butter. I don't know why I say this just now, except that I had it in my mind to say long ago, and it has just come upper-most as I was thinking of the Magazine. [Sidenote: Letter to Professor Kaufmann, 17th April, 1879.] Your kind letter has touched me very deeply. I confess that my mind had, more than once, gone out to you as one from whom I should like to have some sign of sympathy with my loss. But you were rightly inspired in waiting till now, for during many weeks I was unable even to listen to the letters which my generous friends were continually sending me. Now, at last, I am eagerly interested in every communication that springs out of an acquaintance with my husband and his works. I thank you for telling me about the Hungarian translation of his "History of Philosophy;" but what would I not have given if the volumes could have come, even only a few days, before his death! For his mind was perfectly clear, and he would have felt some joy in that sign of his work being effective. I do not know whether you will enter into the comfort I feel that he never knew he was dying, and fell gently asleep after ten days of illness, in which the suffering was comparatively mild. One of the last things he did at his desk was to despatch a manuscript of mine to the publishers. The book (not a story, and not bulky) is to appear near the end of May, and, as it contains some words I wanted to say about the Jews, I will order a copy to be sent to you. I hope that your labors have gone on uninterruptedly for the benefit of others, in spite of public troubles. The aspect of affairs with us is grievous--industry languishing, and the best part of our nation indignant at our having been betrayed into an unjustifiable war in South Africa. I have been occupied in editing my husband's MSS., so far as they are left in sufficient completeness to be prepared for publication without the obtrusion of another mind instead of his. A brief volume on "The Study of Psychology" will appear immediately, and a further volume of psychological studies will follow in the autumn. But his work was cut short while he still thought of it as the happy occupation of far-stretching months. Once more let me thank you for remembering me in my sorrow. [Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 22d April, 1879.] I am in dreadful need of your counsel. Pray come to me when you can--morning, afternoon, or evening. From this time forward I saw George Eliot constantly. My mother had died in the beginning of the previous December, a week after Mr. Lewes; and, as my life had been very much bound up with hers, I was trying to find some fresh interest in taking up a new pursuit. Knowing very little Italian, I began Dante's "Inferno" with Carlyle's translation. The first time I saw George Eliot afterwards, she asked me what I was doing, and, when I told her, exclaimed, "Oh, I must read that with you." And so it was. In the following twelve months we read through the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio" together; not in a _dilettante_ way, but with minute and careful examination of the construction of every sentence. The prodigious stimulus of such a teacher (_cotanto maestro_) made the reading a real labor of love. Her sympathetic delight in stimulating my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante did something to distract her mind from sorrowful memories. The divine poet took us into a new world. It was a renovation of life. At the end of May I induced her to play on the piano at Witley for the first time; and she played regularly after that whenever I was there, which was generally once or twice a week, as I was living at Weybridge, within easy distance. Besides Dante, we read at this time a great many of Sainte-Beuve's "Causeries," and much of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth. But I am anticipating. We will return to the correspondence in its order. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 22d April, 1879.] When I shall be able to get to Witley is altogether uncertain. The cold winds make one less hungry for the country, but still it will be a relief to me, in some respects, to get away from town. I am much stronger than I was, and am again finding interest in this wonderful life of ours. But I am obliged to keep my doors closed against all but the few until I go away. You, however, I shall hope to see. I am founding a studentship of Physiology, to be called "The George Henry Lewes Studentship." It will be placed, in the first instance, at Cambridge, where there is the best physiological school in the kingdom. But the trustees (with my consent during my life) will have the power of moving it where they judge best. This idea, which I early conceived, has been a great stay to me. But I have plenty to think of, plenty of creatures depending on me, to make my time seem of some value. And there are so many in the world who have to live without any great enjoyment. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _April 26._--Mr. and Mrs. Hall came. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d May, 1879.] If you can come to me next week for a parting word, will you try to learn beforehand whether and when your husband can give me half an hour at the end of his working-day? I should like to see him before I go, which I hope to do soon after the 13th. [Sidenote: Journal, 1879.] _May 6._--Mr. and Mrs. Call, Eleanor and Florence (Cross) came. _May 8._--Mr. Burne-Jones came. _May 10._--Edith Simcox and Mr. Pigott came. _May 13._--Dr. Andrew Clark came and gave me important suggestions about the studentship. _May 21._--Saw Mr. Anthony Trollope. _May 22._--Came down to Witley--lovely mild day. [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 28th May, 1879.] Mr. Lewes always wrote the dramatic criticisms in the _Leader_, and for a year or two he occasionally wrote such criticisms in the _Pall Mall_. Of the latter, the chief were reprinted in the little book on "Actors, and the Art of Acting." What was written in the _Fortnightly_ (1865-66) is marked by signature. The most characteristic contributions to the _Cornhill_ (1864-65) were "The Mental Condition of Babies," "Dangers and Delights of Tobacco," "Was Nero a Monster?" "Shakespeare in France," and "Miseries of a Dramatic Author." But after 1866 his contributions to any periodical were very scanty--confined to a few articles in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, one on "The Reign of Law," in the _Fortnightly_, and the series on Darwin, now incorporated in "The Physical Basis of Mind." After these, his sole contributions were an article on Dickens (1872), two on "Spiritualism" and "Mesmerism" (1876), and one on "The Dread and Dislike of Science" (1878). Charles, I think, mentioned to you my desire that you should do me the valuable service of looking over the proofs of the remaining volume of "Problems," and you were so generous as to express your willingness to undertake that labor. The printing will not begin till after the 16th--Dr. Michael Foster, who has also kindly offered to help me in the same way, not being sufficiently at leisure till after that date. I have been rather ill again lately, but am hoping to benefit by the country quietude. You, too, I am sorry to hear, are not over strong. This will make your loan of mind and eyesight all the more appreciated by me. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d June, 1879.] Your letter, full of details--just the sort of letter I like to have--has been among my comforts in these last damp, chill days. The first week I was not well, and had a troublesome attack of pain, but I am better, and try to make life interesting by always having something to do. I am wishing Margaret many happy returns of this day, and am making a picture of you all keeping the little _fête_. A young birthday, when the young creature is promising, is really a happy time; one can hope reasonably; and the elder ones may be content that gladness has passed onward from them into newer vessels. I should like to see the blue-eyed maid with her bangles on her arms. Please give my love to all and sundry who make any sign of love for me; and any amount you like is ready for you to draw upon. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 10th June, 1879.] I am greatly obliged to you for sending me the paper you are to read to-day; and I appreciate it the more highly because your diligence is in contrast with the general sluggishness of readers about any but idle reading. It is melancholy enough that to most of our polite readers the social factor in psychology would be a dull subject; for it is certainly no conceit of ours which pronounces it to be the supremely interesting element in the thinking of our time. I confess the word factor has always been distasteful to me as the name for the grandest of forces. If it were only mathematical I should not mind, but it has many other associated flavors which spoil it for me. Once more--ever more--thanks. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 10th June, 1879.] You will like to know that Mr. Frederic Harrison has sent me a brief paper, which is to be read to-day at the Metaphysical Society, on the "Social Factor in Psychology," opening with a quotation from the "Study of Psychology," and marking throughout his high appreciation of your father's work. Also the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, kindly sent (with his initials only) to Trübner four errata which he had found in reading the "Study of Psychology." Trübner did not know who was the kind corrector, and very properly sent the paper to me, offering to have the corrections made on the plates if I wished it. I said, "By all means," and have written to thank the Rector. What a blessing to find a man who really reads a book! I have received the enclosed letter, with other papers (about country lodgings at Sevenoaks for poor children). Will you look out a single copy of as many of my books (poems included) as you can find, and send them in a parcel, saying that they come from me for the Free Library? Please not to mind this trouble, as it is for the _impecunious_ readers. (You know I am nothing if not "sesquipedalian" and scientific; and a word of five syllables will do for both qualities.) I wish you could see Coquelin in Tabourin. He is a wonderful actor, when he gets the right part for him. He has a penetrating personality that one cannot be indifferent to, though possibly it may be unpleasant to some people. [Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 12th June, 1879.] I was beginning, with my usual apprehensiveness, to fear that you had no good news to tell me, since I did not hear from you, and I should have gone on fearing till to-morrow morning if I had not happened to drive to Godalming and ask for the second post. We only get one post a day at the benighted Witley, so that if you want me to get a letter quickly it must be posted early at Edinburgh. I am heartily glad to know that the invalid is going on well, and I trust that the softer air we are having now will help him forward. "Theophrastus" seems to be really welcomed by the public. Mr. Blackwood will be amused to hear that one gentleman told Charles, or implied, that "Theophrastus" was a higher order of book, and _more difficult to write_ than a novel. Wait long enough, and every form of opinion will turn up. However, poor "Theophrastus" is certainly not composed of "chips" any more than my other books. Another amusing bit of news is, that the other day Mrs. Pattison sent me an extract from the _livret_ of the Paris _Salon_, describing a picture painted by a French artist from "The Lifted Veil," and representing the moment when the resuscitated woman, fixing her eyes on her mistress, accuses her of having poisoned her husband. I call this amusing--I ought rather to have said typical of the relation my books generally have with the French mind. Thank you for sending me the list of orders. It does interest me to see the various country demands. I hope the movement will continue to cheer us all, and you are sure to let me know everything that is pleasant, so I do not need to ask for that kindness. The weather is decidedly warmer, and Tuesday was a perfectly glorious day. But rain and storm have never let us rest long together. I am not very bright, and am ready to interpret everything in the saddest sense, but I have no definite ailment. My best regards to the convalescent, who, I have no doubt, will write to me when he is able to do so. But I am only one of many who will be glad to hear from him. [Sidenote: Letter from Madame Bodichon to Miss Bonham-Carter, 12th June, 1879.] "I spent an hour with Marian (5th June). She was more delightful than I can say, and left me in good spirits for her--though she is wretchedly thin, and looks, in her long, loose, black dress, like the black shadow of herself. She said she had so much to do that she must keep well--'the world was so _intensely interesting_.' She said she would come _next year_ to see me. We both agreed in the great love we had for life. In fact, I think she will do more for us than ever." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th June, 1879.] I have been having my turn of illness of rather a sharp kind. Yesterday, when your letter came, I was in more acute pain than I have ever known in my life before, but before the morning was over I was sufficiently relieved to read your pleasant news. I am writing in bed, but am in that most keenly conscious ease which comes after unusual suffering. The way in which the public takes "Theophrastus" is really a comfort to me. I have had some letters, not of the complimentary, but of the grateful kind, which are an encouragement to believe in the use of writing. But you would be screamingly amused with one, twenty-three pages long (from an Edinburgh man, by-the-bye), who has not read the book, but has read of it, and thinks that his own case is still more worthy of presentation than Merman's. I think a valuable series (or couple of volumes) might be made up from "Maga" of articles written _hot_ by travellers and military men, and not otherwise republished--chronicles and descriptions by eye-witnesses--which might be material for historians. What a comfort that the Afghan war is concluded! But on the back of it comes the black dog of Indian finance, which means, alas! a great deal of hardship to poor Hindûs. Let me hear more news of you before long. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 29th June, 1879.] Your description of the effects you feel from the restless, tormenting winds would serve well to represent my experience too. It seems something incredible written in my memory that when I was a little girl I loved the wind--used to like to walk about when it was blowing great guns. And now the wind is to me what it was to early peoples--a demon-god, cruelly demanding all sorts of human sacrifices. Thank you, dear, for caring whether I have any human angels to guard me. None are permanently here except my servants, but Sir James Paget has been down to see me, I have a very comfortable country practitioner to watch over me from day to day, and there is a devoted friend who is backward and forward continually to see that I lack nothing. It is a satisfaction to me that you felt the need for "Debasing the Moral Currency" to be written. I was determined to do it, though it might make me a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to all the comic tribe. Do not rate my illness too high in the scale of mortal misery. I am prone to make much of my ailments, and am among the worst at enduring pain. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th June, 1879.] Thank you for sending me the pretty little book.[37] I am deeply touched by the account of its origin, and I remember well everything you said to me of Mr. Brown in old days when he was still with you. I had only cut a very little way into the volume when a friend came and carried it off, but my eyes had already been arrested by some remarks on the character of Harold Transome, which seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed comment on my own writing. When my friend brings back the volume I shall read it reverentially, and most probably with a sense of being usefully admonished. For praise and sympathy arouse much more self-suspicion and sense of shortcoming than all the blame and depreciation of all the Pepins. I am better, and I hope on the way to complete recovery, but I am still at some distance from that goal. Perhaps if the winds would give one some rest from their tormenting importunity, both you and I should get on faster. I am looking forward to reading the "Recollections of Ekowe" in "Maga," which came to me yesterday, with its list of my own doings and misdoings on the cover. Does not this Zulu war seem to you a horribly bad business? [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 30th June, 1879.] Sir Henry Maine has sent me the one letter that has rejoiced my heart about the "Study of Psychology." He says: "In this branch of Mr. Lewes's studies I am almost as one of the ignorant, but I think I have understood every sentence in the book, and I believe I have gained great knowledge from it. It has been the most satisfactory piece of work I have done for a long time." I have written to tell him that he has rescued me from my scepticism as to any one's reading a serious book except the author or editor. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d July, 1879.] The sight of your handwriting on the pamphlet sent me urges me to do the sooner what I should have already done but for a rather sharp illness, which has kept me chiefly in bed for nearly a fortnight, and from which I am not yet quite free. I enclose a copy of Michael Foster's draft of conditions for the studentship, which I put into the lawyer's hands some ten or twelve days ago, and which is now come to me drawn up in legal form. You said it would interest you to see the draft, and I have been bearing this in mind, but have not been able to go to the desk where the copy lay. I hope to hear that you have been going on well despite the cruel, restless winds and sad intermittence of sunshine. On the 12th I am going to have two daughters-in-law, _five_ grandchildren, and servant for a week--if I can get well enough, as I have good hope now that I shall. The strawberries will be ripe then, and as I don't eat any myself it would be dolorous not to be able to have the children, and see them enjoy the juicy blessing. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th July, 1879.] I was beginning to want some news of you, and was almost ready to ask for it. It is the more welcome for having had time to ripen into a decidedly good report of your condition. About myself I have a very poor story to tell, being now in the fifth week of a troublesome illness, in which, like you, I have been partly fed on "poisonous decoctions." To-day, however, happens to show a considerable improvement in my symptoms, and I have been walking in the warmer air with more ease than hitherto. Driving I have not been able to manage for some time, the motion of the carriage shaking me too much. The best of care has been taken of me. I have an excellent country doctor (Mr. Parsons of Godalming) who watches me daily; and Sir James Paget and Dr. Andrew Clark have been down to add their supervision. I begin to think that if I can avoid any evil condition, such as a chill that would bring on a relapse, I may soon be pretty well again. The point to be achieved is to stop the wasting of my not too solid flesh. I am glad to hear that the third edition of "Theophrastus" has had so lively a movement. If the remainder should be sold off I think it would be well just to print a small number of copies to carry on, and avoid bringing out a cheaper edition too soon after people have been paying for the expensive one. I have been always able to write my letters and read my proofs, usually in bed before the fatigue of dressing, but the rest of my time has been very unprofitable--spent chiefly in pain and languor. I am feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being eloquent about themselves. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 22d July, 1879.] I feel a perhaps too selfish need to tell you that things have gone ill with me since I last wrote to you. Why do I want to let you know this not agreeable news about myself? Chiefly because I want you to be quite clear that if I do not write to say, "When can you come to me?" it is not from indifference, but from misfortune of another sort. Meanwhile it will do me good to have little items of news from you, when you can find half an hour for the kind deed of writing me a letter. What helps me most is to be told things about others, and your letters are just of the sort I like to have. I am just now in one of my easier hours, and the demon wind has abated. He seems to enter into my pains with hideous rejoicing. [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 7th Aug. 1879.] Thank you for your kind note. There are to be more than as many proofs as you have already had, for which I must crave the valuable aid of your reading. You will understand all the better how much comfort it is to me to have your help as well as Professor Foster's, when I tell you that for the last eight weeks I have been seriously out of health, and have often been suffering much pain--a state which I imagine you know by experience to heighten all real anxieties, and usually to create unreal. It cheers me to be told by you that you think the volume interesting. In reading the MS. again and again I had got into a state of tremor about it which deprived me of judgment--just as if it were writing of my own, which I could not trust myself to pronounce upon. I hope that your own health, and Mrs. Sully's too, will have been benefited by your change from south to north. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 11th Aug. 1879.] I think that I am really getting better, and shall have to stay among the minority in this world a little longer than I had expected. Will you send me word how long you shall be at liberty, and whether you would think it worth while to come down to me one morning and stay till the afternoon of the following day? Your letter is delightful to me. Several spiritual kisses for it. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Aug. 1879.] Thank you for your sweet affection. I have had rather a trying illness, which lasted, without great relief, for nearly eight weeks. But I hope that I am now out of it--that is, so far established that I may go on without a relapse. The cold weather was against me, as it was and is against much more important matters. The days of warmth and sunlight which have now and then blessed us have been my best medicine, though I acknowledge the benefit of pepsin and steel, and many other drugs. The gray skies and recurring rain are peculiarly dispiriting to me, and one seems to feel their influence all the more for the wide, beautiful view of field and hill which they sadden and half conceal. In town one thinks less of the sky. If you are ever writing to our dear Mrs. William Smith do give my love to her, and tell her I am very grateful to her for the letter she wrote me with the postmark _Ventnor_ upon it. With her usual delicacy of feeling she did not send her address, so that I could not write in return. [Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 3d Sept. 1879.] I am much obliged to you for writing me your letter of pleasant news. It is wonderful how "Theophrastus" goes on selling in these bad times, and I have only to hope in addition that the buyers will be the better for it. Apparently we shall get through this last edition before Christmas, and then perhaps you will think of adding the volume to the Cabinet Edition. I am especially rejoiced to hear that your uncle is better again, and I trust that Strathtyrum is sharing our sunshine, which will be the best cure for him as for me. I am getting strong, and also am gaining flesh on my moderate scale. It really makes a difference to one's spirits to think that the harvest may now possibly be got in without utter ruin to the produce and unhappy producers. But this year will certainly prove a serious epoch, and initiate many changes in relation to farming. I fear, from what I have read, that the rich Lothians will have to be called compassionately the poor Lothians. By the way, if you happen to want any translation done from the French, and have not just the right person to do it, I think I can recommend a Miss Bradley Jenkins, of 50 Cornwall Road, Wesbourne Park, as one who has an unusually competent knowledge of French. We sat side by side on the same form translating Miss Edgeworth into French when we were girls. I have not seen her for many years, but I know that she has been engaged in a high order of teaching, and I have lately heard from her that she is anxious to get work of the kind in question. She already spoke French well when we were pupils together, and she has since been an unintermitting student. I wonder, talking of translators, how the young Mr. Ferrier is going on, who translated Kaufmann's pamphlet on "Deronda." What Mr. Blackwood told me of him interested me about his future. Oblige us all by not falling into another accident when the next hunting season comes. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 3d Sept. 1879.] Before I received your letter the other day I was intending to write to you to ask whether, now that I am stronger and the fine weather shows some signs of permanence, you feel any revival of the inclination to come and see me for a couple of days. I hardly like to propose your taking the journey, now that you are not being brought near me by other visits--for the railway from you to us is, I think, rather tiresome. But if your inclination really lies towards coming you will be affectionately welcomed. About the sea-side I am hopeless. The latter part of October is likely to be too cold for me to move about without risk of chills; and I hope to be back in town before the end of the month. I am not very fond of the sea-side, and this year it is likely to be crowded with people who have been hindered by the bad weather from going earlier. I prefer the Surrey hills and the security from draughts in one's own home. The one attraction of a coast place to me is a great breadth of sand to pace on when it is in its fresh firmness after the fall of the tide. But the sea itself is melancholy to me, only a little less so under warm sunlight, with plenty of fishing-smacks changing their shadows. All this is to let you know why I do not yield to the attraction of being with you, where we could chat as much or as little as we liked. I feel very much your affectionateness in wishing to have me near you. Write me word soon whether you feel able to come as far as this for my sake. [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 10th Sept. 1879.] I have read the article[38] with very grateful feelings. I think that he would himself have regarded it as a generally just estimate. And I am much obliged to you for sending it to me in proof. Your selection of subjects for remark, and the remarks themselves, are in accordance with my feeling to a comforting extent; and I shall always remain your debtor for writing the article. I trust you will not be forced to omit anything about his scientific and philosophical work, because that is the part of his life's labor which he most valued. Perhaps you a little underrate the (original) effect of his "Life of Goethe in Germany." It was received with enthusiasm, and an immense number of copies, in both the English and German form, have been sold in Germany since its appearance in 1854. I wish you were allowed to put your name to the article. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 17th Sept. 1879.] I am getting strong now after a long spell of medical discipline. All these long months I have been occupied with my husband's manuscripts: also with the foundation of a Physiological Studentship, which is my monument to his memory, and which is now all settled, as you may perhaps have seen by advertisements.[39] But I am not yet through the proof-reading of the final volume of "Problems of Life and Mind," which will contain the last sheets he ever wrote. I hear very good accounts of Madame Bodichon, who is coming to me for a couple of days on the 29th. You are wonderful for life and energy, in spite of your delicate looks. May you have all the strength you need for your sympathetic tasks! [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 7th Oct. 1879.] I have not yet thanked you--and I do so now very gratefully--for the help you have given me in my sad and anxious task. Your eyes have been a most precious aid, not only as a matter of fact, but as a ground of confidence. For I am not at all a good proof-reader, and have a thorough distrust of myself. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 18th Oct. 1879.] I cannot wish not to have been cheered by your triple letter, even though I have caused you to rise earlier in the morning, and to feel a disproportionate remorse. "Maggior difetto men vergogna lava," as says Virgil to the blushing Dante. And you have given me the fuller measure because I had to wait a little. Your legend of "Fair Women" interests me very much. I feel a citizen of the world again, knowing all the news. But the core of good news in your letter is that your husband is well again, and again happy in his work. Your collapse is what I feared for you; and you must call the getting change of air and scene--I was going to say "a duty," but are you one of those wonderful beings who find everything easier under that name? But at least one prefers doing a hard duty to grimacing with a pretence of pleasure in things that are no pleasure. I am greatly comforted this morning by the fact that the (apparently) right man is found for the George Henry Lewes Studentship--an ardent worker, who could not have carried on his pursuit without this help. I know you are not unmindful of what touches me deeply. Go on your visit, dear, and come back well--then show yourself without unnecessary delay to your loving friend. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, Saturday, 20th Oct. 1879.] I have had a delightful bit of news from Dr. Foster this morning. He had mentioned to me before that there was an Edinburgh student whom he had in his mind as the right one to elect. This morning he writes: "The trustees meet to-morrow to receive my nomination. I have chosen Dr. Charles Roy, an Edinburgh man, and Scotchman--not one of my own pupils. He is, I think, the most promising--by far the most promising--of our young physiologists, putting aside those who do not need the pecuniary assistance of the studentship. And the help comes to him just when it is most needed--he is in full swing of work, and was casting about for some means of supporting himself which would least interfere with his work, when I called his attention to the studentship. I feel myself very gratified that I can, at the very outset, recommend just the man, as it appears to me, for the post." This is a thing your father would have chosen as a result of his life. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, Tuesday, 27th Oct. 1879.] I have just had some news that grieves me. Mr. Blackwood is dangerously ill, and I fear, from Mr. William's letter, that there is little hope of recovery. He will be a heavy loss to me. He has been bound up with what I most cared for in my life for more than twenty years; and his good qualities have made many things easy to me that, without him, would often have been difficult.[40] I wrote to Mr. Trübner to tell him that the printing of the "Problems" being finished, I should be glad if he would arrange with you about the conditions of publication. Bear in mind your father's wish that the volumes should not be made dearer than necessary. I am going to Weybridge on Friday, and I intend to be at the Priory by Saturday before dusk. But it is _just possible_ I may be detained till Monday morning. So if you have any good occupation for Sunday you had better call on your way home on Monday. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 29th Oct. 1879.] Your affectionate note would quite have determined me to do what, when your brother kindly proposed it, raised a certain longing in me. I thought that I should like to see you all in the remembered home again. But I have had a little check in health, and I am feeling so depressed that I shrink from making any engagement which involves others. A visitor to-day and my own languor threatens to throw me backward in my arrangements for leaving, and I have a sense of impossibility about everything that, under other conditions, would be a pleasure. I am afraid lest a fit of sadness should make me an oppression to you all; and my conclusion this morning is that I must give up the few hours' happiness of feeling your family love around me as I used to do, and simply go straight up to town with my servants. But if Friday morning brings me better hopes I will telegraph to you, since you allow me to wait till the eleventh hour. If you receive no telegram you will understand that I am still too downhearted to venture on a visit even to those who are among the best-loved of my friends. In that case you must all make me amends for my loss by coming to see me in the old place in town. Came to Weybridge on 31st October, and returned to the Priory on 1st November. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 8th Nov. 1879.] I came here just a week ago, and I had a superstition that you would come to me yesterday. But I used no enchantments--and so you didn't come. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1879, from the Priory.] I am very grateful to you for your kind letter. News about you all had been much desired by me; but I have now so many business letters to write that I am apt to defer such as are not absolutely necessary. The careful index is a sign of your effective industry, and I have no doubt that it will be a great help to yourself as well as to your readers. One very often needs an index to one's own writing. My chief objects are quite completed now. The Dr. Roy appointed to the studentship is held by competent persons to be the most hopeful of our young physiologists: and there is a volume of 501 pages (the last) of "Problems of Life and Mind" ready to appear next month. I am quite recovered from the ailment which made me good for little in the summer, and indeed am stronger than I ever expected to be again. People are very good to me, and I am exceptionally blessed in many ways; but more blessed are the dead who rest from their labors, and have not to dread a barren, useless survival. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th Dec. 1879, from the Priory.] I am very well, dear kind friend, all things considered. One cannot help getting occasional chills and headaches in this hard, wintry time. Oh, yes, I read the _Times_ with great interest, and am much concerned to know what my contemporaries are doing. My time is very fully occupied, for I have now to write a great many letters, such as used to be written for me, and I would willingly spend the time thus taken up in another sort of reading and writing. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 5th Jan. 1880.] Thank you a thousand times, my dear friend, for your tender New Year's greeting and inquiries. I have passed well from "under the saws and harrows" of the severe cold, and am better, both in apparent organic soundness and in strength for all occupation, than I once thought was possible for me. Our dear Barbara is painting in water colors again from her window--just as of old. I know you will be glad to hear of this. And I am now seeing many other friends, who interest me and bring me reports of their several worlds. The great public calamities of the past year have helped to quiet one's murmuring spirit in relation to private sorrows, and the prospect for the future is not yet very bright. One thinks of mothers like Mrs. Ruck, whose best-loved sons are in Afghanistan. But we must live as much as we can for human joy, dwelling on sorrow and pain only so far as the consciousness of it may help us in striving to remedy them. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 19th Jan. 1880.] Life has seemed worse without my glimpses of you. And now I have not the amends of thinking that you are out of our Egyptian darkness and getting health in the country. I must drive over to ask about you as soon as I can. As the year went on, George Eliot began to see all her old friends again. But her life was nevertheless a life of heart-loneliness. Accustomed as she had been for so many years to solitude _à deux_, the want of close companionship continued to be very bitterly felt. She was in the habit of going with me very frequently to the National Gallery, and to other exhibitions of pictures, to the British Museum sculptures, and to South Kensington. This constant association engrossed me completely, and was a new interest to her. A bond of mutual dependence had been formed between us. On the 28th March she came down to Weybridge and stayed till the 30th; and on the 9th April it was finally decided that our marriage should take place as soon, and as privately, as might be found practicable. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 13th April, 1880.] You can hardly think how sweet the name sister is to me, that I have not been called by for so many, many years. Without your tenderness I do not believe it would have been possible for me to accept this wonderful renewal of my life. Nothing less than the prospect of being loved and welcomed by you all could have sustained me. But now I cherish the thought that the family life will be the richer and not the poorer through your brother's great gift of love to me. Yet I quail a little in facing what has to be gone through--the hurting of many whom I care for. You are doing everything you can to help me, and I am full of gratitude to you all for his sake as well as my own. The springs of affection are reopened in me, and it will make me better to be among you--more loving and trustful. I valued Florence's little visit very much. You and she will come again--will you not?--to your sister. [Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 19th April, 1880.] I have found the spot in "The Prelude" where the passage I mentioned occurs. It is in book viii., "The Retrospect," towards the end: "The human nature unto which I felt That I belonged, and reverenced with love, Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space, with aid derived Of evidence from monuments, erect, Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime Of vanished nations." The bit of brickwork in the rock is "With aid derived from evidence." I think you would find much to suit your purpose in "The Prelude," such as-- "There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead." Except for travelling, and for popular distribution, I prefer Moxon's one-volumed edition of Wordsworth to any selection. No selection gives you the perfect gems to be found in single lines, or in half a dozen lines which are to be found in the "dull" poems. I am sorry Matthew Arnold has not included the sonnet beginning-- "I griev'd for Buonaparté with a vain And an unthinking grief--" and which has these precious lines, "'Tis not in battles that from youth we train The governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. _Wisdom doth live with children round her knees._" Has he the magnificent sonnet on Toussaint l'Ouverture? I don't know where there is anything finer than the last eight lines of it. Please don't acknowledge this note, else you will neutralize my pleasure in sending it by making me feel that I have given you trouble. [Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Lady Lytton, 24th April, 1880.] The beautiful photograph has reached me safely, and I am very grateful to you for your kindness in sending it to me. In comparing it with the photograph which you gave me seven or eight years ago I see the effect of a saddening experience which the years must bring to us all, but, to my feeling, the face is the more endearing because of that effect. You have been very often in my thoughts, because I have associated you with public affairs, and have imagined sympathetically how they must have affected your private life. I am sure that this momentous experience in India has been a hard discipline both for you and for Lord Lytton. I can imagine he has often been sick at heart with the near vision, which his post forces on him, of human meanness and rancor. You, too, must have gathered some melancholy knowledge of that sort, which has perhaps changed a little the curves of the mouth and the glance of the eyes since those Vienna days, when the delightful M. de Villers helped to make the hours pleasant to us. I saw the photographs of your daughters, which gave me an idea how fast the dramatic authoress has developed physically as well as mentally. When I first saw her at Vienna she was the prettiest little rosebud. Mrs. Strachey called the other day when I was out, and among other reasons for my being sorry not to have seen her, was the having missed some authentic news about your probable movements. What happens to you will always have interest for me, since I have long been, with sincere regard, yours most truly. On the 24th April George Eliot came down to Weybridge, and stayed till the 26th. [Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 26th April, 1880.] I am deeply obliged to you for the care with which you have treated the final volume of "The Problems" in the _Academy_, which you have kindly sent me. I think you could hardly have written more effectively towards exciting an interest in the work in the minds of the comparatively few who really care for the study of psychology. You have added one more to the obligations which will make me always yours gratefully. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th May, 1880.] I have something to tell you which will doubtless be a great surprise to you; but since I have found that other friends, less acquainted with me and my life than you are, have given me their sympathy, I think that I can count on yours. I am going to do what not very long ago I should myself have pronounced impossible for me, and therefore I should not wonder at any one else who found my action incomprehensible. By the time you receive this letter I shall (so far as the future can be matter of assertion) have been married to Mr. J. W. Cross, who, you know, is a friend of years, a friend much loved and trusted by Mr. Lewes, and who, now that I am alone, sees his happiness in the dedication of his life to me. This change in my position will make no change in my care for Mr. Lewes's family, and in the ultimate disposition of my property. Mr. Cross has a sufficient fortune of his own. We are going abroad for a few months, and I shall not return to live at this house. Mr. Cross has taken the lease of a house, No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where we shall spend the winter and early spring, making Witley our summer home. I indulge the hope that you will some day look at the river from the windows of our Chelsea house, which is rather quaint and picturesque. Please tell Bessie[41] for me, with my love to her. I cannot write to more than two or three persons. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th May, 1880.] A great, momentous change is going to take place in my life. My indisposition last week and several other subsequent circumstances have hindered me from communicating it to you, and the time has been but short since the decision was come to. But with your permission Charles will call on you and tell you what he can on Saturday. Yours and Emily's ever, with unchanging love. [Sidenote: Journal, 1880.] _May 6._--Married this day at 10.15 to John Walter Cross, at St. George's, Hanover Square. Present, Charles, who gave me away, Mr. and Mrs. Druce, Mr. Hall, William, Mary, Eleanor, and Florence Cross. We went back to the Priory, where we signed our wills. Then we started for Dover and arrived there a little after five o'clock. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 9th May, 1880.] Your letter was a sweet greeting to us on our arrival here yesterday. We had a millennial cabin on the deck of the Calais-Douvres, and floated over the strait as easily as the saints float upward to heaven (in the pictures). At Amiens we were very comfortably housed, and paid two enraptured visits, evening and morning, to the cathedral. I was delighted with J.'s delight in it. And we read our dear old cantos of the "Inferno" that we were reading a year ago, declining afterwards on "Eugénie Grandet." The nice woman who waited on us made herself very memorable to me by her sketch of her own life. She went to England when she was nineteen as a lady's maid--had been much _ennuyée de sa mère_, detested _les plaisirs_, liked only her regular every-day work and _la paix_. Here we have a very fair _appartement_, and plenty of sunlight, _au premier_. Before dinner we walked up to the Arc de l'Étoile and back again, enjoying the lovely greenth and blossoms of the horse-chestnuts, which are in their first glory, innocent of dust or of one withered petal. This morning at twelve o'clock we are going to the Russian church, where J. has never been, and where I hope we shall hear the wonderful intoning and singing as I heard it years ago. This is the chronicle of our happy married life, three days long--all its happiness conscious of a dear background in those who are loving us at Weybridge, at Thornhill, and at Ranby. You are all inwoven into the pattern of my thoughts, which would have a sad lack without you. I like to go over again in imagination all the scene in the church and in the vestry, and to feel every loving look from the eyes of those who were rejoicing for us. Besides Professor Sellar's letter, which touched J. with grateful surprise, we have had one to him from Mr. Frederic Harrison, saying everything affectionate, and two very finely felt letters from Edith Simcox--one to him enclosing the one to me. Certainly, she has a rare generosity and elevation which find their easy channel in writing. My love to Henry and to the gentle Berthe,[42] who was an invisible presence at our wedding. I think I must thank Florence, too, for her letter to J.; for we accept to the full the principle of "what is mine is thine" on each side. What most comforted him this morning was a letter from Albert Druce about the Chelsea house. His usual exclamation over anything from Albert is that his brother-in-law is the most satisfactory of men! Write us word about everything, and consider yourselves all very much loved and spiritually petted by your loving sister. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 21st May, 1880, from Grenoble.] This place is so magnificently situated, in a smiling valley, with the Isère flowing through it, and surrounded by grand and various lines of mountains, and we were so enraptured by our expedition yesterday to the Grande Chartreuse that we congratulate ourselves greatly on our choice of route. I think it unlikely that we shall want to wander beyond the second week in July. We shall begin to long for home just when the rest of the London world are longing for travel. We are seeing nature in her happiest moment now--the foliage on all the tremendous heights, the soft slopes, and the richly clad valleys on the way to the Chartreuse is all fresh and tender, shone through by a sunlight which cherishes and does not burn us. I had but one regret in seeing the sublime beauty of the Grande Chartreuse. It was that the Pater had not seen it. I would still give up my own life willingly if he could have the happiness instead of me. But marriage has seemed to restore me to my old self. I was getting hard, and if I had decided differently, I think I should have become very selfish. To feel daily the loveliness of a nature close to me, and to feel grateful for it, is the fountain of tenderness and strength to endure. Glorious weather always, and I am very well--quite amazingly able to go through fatigue. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Florence Cross, 25th May, 1880.] Our life since we wrote to you has been a chapter of delights--Grenoble--Grande Chartreuse--Chambéry--paradisiacal walk to Les Charmettes--roses gathered in Jean Jacques' garden--Mont Cenis Tunnel and emergence into Italian sunshine. Milan, comfortable _appartement_, delicious privacy, and great minds condescending to relax themselves! We got here yesterday, and of course our first walk was to the post, where we found your delightful budget and other letters, which we took to a _café_ in the grand _galleria_ and read at our ease to the accompaniment of tea. Two of my letters yesterday touched me very gratefully. One was from "Brother Jimmy"--the prettiest letter possible. The other letter that moved me was one from my own brother. Then J. had a graceful letter of congratulation from Mr. Henry James, who is still at Florence. I think you did not send that letter of Mr. Edmund Gurney's which you mention. I am fond of seeing the letters which put my friends in an amiable light for my imagination. And now that I have had that charming letter from my new brother in America, I feel that my family initiation is complete. No woman was ever more sweetly received by brothers and sisters than I have been; and it is a happy, new longing in my life that I may return into their bosoms some of the gladness they have poured into mine. I have been uninterruptedly well, and feel quite strong with all sorts of strength except strong-mindedness. We are going to hear the music in the Duomo at eleven, and after that we intend to pay our first visit to the Brera gallery. It is our present plan to stay here for some days, and we enjoy the thought of a little stationary life such as we have not had since we left Paris. We often talk of our sisters, oftener think of them. You are our children, you know. [Sidenote: Letter to Isaac P. Evans, 26th May, 1880.] Your letter was forwarded to me here, and it was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones. My husband, too, was much pleased to read your letter. I have known his family for eleven years, and they have received me among them very lovingly. The only point to be regretted in our marriage is that I am much older than he; but his affection has made him choose this lot of caring for me rather than any other of the various lots open to him. Emily Clarke has lately sent me rather a sad account of Sarah's[43] health. I trust that it is now better, for I think it is her lungs that chiefly trouble her, and summer may act beneficently on them. Please give my love to her, and tell her that I like the assurance of her share in the good wishes you send me. I have often heard of Frederick[44] through the admiration of those who have heard him preach; and it has been a happy thought to me that you and Sarah must feel it a great comfort to have him as well as Walter settled near you. Edith is the only one of your children whom I have seen since they have been grown up, and I thought her a noble-looking woman. We are going to remain abroad until some time in July, and shall then return to the Heights, Witley, Surrey. Our home in London will be 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, looking on a very picturesque bit of the river. I hope that your own health is quite good now, and that you are able to enjoy the active life which I know you are fond of. Always your affectionate sister. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 28th May, 1880.] Many thanks for your delightful letter, which came to me yesterday, with a loving though brief letter from Mrs. Congreve to keep it company in making the day agreeable. We arrived here on Monday, and have been induced by a nice quiet apartment and pleasant attendance to carry out our plan of resting here and deliberately seeing what is to be seen in this cheerful, prosperous city. I am glad to find that the Luini pictures come up to my remembrance, and that J. is much impressed by his introduction to them. I continue remarkably well, and am every day surprising myself by the amount of walking, standing, and looking that I can go through. To-morrow or the next day we intend to go on to Verona, then, after a sufficient pause to enjoy that glorious place, we shall move on to Padua and Venice, where it will be best for you to send anything you may have to send. I like to see the letters. They make one realize the fact of one's home and little world there amid the dreaminess of foreign travel. We take our meals in our own apartment and see nothing of our fellow-guests in the hotel--only hear their British and American voices when they air themselves in the _cortile_ after their dinner. The weather has hitherto been delicious, not excessively warm, always with a pleasant movement in the air; but this morning there is a decided advance in heat, and we shall both have our theory of great heat being the best thing for us well tested in the next month. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 29th May and 1st June, 1880, from Verona.] The change I make in the date of this letter is a sign of the difficulty you well know that one finds in writing all the letters one wants to write while travelling. Ever since Charles forwarded to me your dear letter while I was in Paris I have been meaning to write to you. That letter was doubly sweet to me because it was written before you received mine, _intended_ to inform you of my marriage before it appeared in the newspapers. Charles says that my friends are chiefly hurt because I did not tell them of the approaching change in my life. But I really did not finally, absolutely, decide--I was in a state of doubt and struggle--until only a fortnight before the event took place, so that at last everything was done in the utmost haste. However, there were four or five friends, of whom you were one, to whom I was resolved to write, so that they should at least get my letter on the morning of the 6th. I had more than once said to Mr. Cross that you were that one of my friends who required the least explanation on the subject--who would spontaneously understand our marriage. But Charles sends me word that my friends in general are very sympathetic, and I should like to mention to you that Bessie[45] is one whose very kind words he has sent to me, for you may have an opportunity of giving my love to her, and telling her that it is very sweet to me to feel that her affection is constant to me in this as it was in other crises of my life. I wish, since you can no longer come in and out among us as you used to do, that you already knew my husband better. His family welcome me with the uttermost tenderness. All this is wonderful blessing falling to me beyond my share, after I had thought that my life was ended, and that, so to speak, my coffin was ready for me in the next room. Deep down below there is a hidden river of sadness, but this must always be with those who have lived long--and I am able to enjoy my newly reopened life. I shall be a better, more loving creature than I could have been in solitude. To be constantly, lovingly grateful for the gift of a perfect love is the best illumination of one's mind to all the possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous little planet. We leave Verona to-day, and stay a little at Padua on our way to Venice. Hitherto we have had delightful weather, and just the temperature we rejoice in. We are both fond of warmth, and could bear more heat than we have the prospect of at present. Yesterday we had a drive on the skirting heights of Verona, and saw the vast fertile plain around, with the Euganean hills, blue in the distance, and the Apennines just dimly visible on the clear margin of the horizon. I am always made happier by seeing well-cultivated land. We came into Italy by way of Grenoble (seeing the Grande Chartreuse), Chambéry, and the Mont Cenis Tunnel; since then we have been staying at Milan and enjoying the Luini frescoes and a few other great things there. The great things are always by comparison few, and there is much everywhere one would like to help seeing, after it has once served to give one a notion of historical progression. We shall stay at Venice for ten days or a fortnight; so if you have a scribe, or would write yourself, to tell me that all is going on well with you, the letter would not, as the Scotch say, "go amissing." [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 9th June, 1880, from Venice.] We both enjoyed reading your letter on the morning after our arrival at this enchanting city, where the glorious light, with comparative stillness and total absence of dust, makes a paradise much more desirable than that painted by Tintoretto on the wall of the Consiglio Maggiore. Nothing but the advent of mosquitoes would make it easy for us to tear ourselves away from this place, where every prospect pleases, but also where one is obliged to admit that man is somewhat vile. I am sadly disappointed in the aspect of the Venetian populace. Even physically they look less endowed than I thought them when we were here under the Austrian dominion. We have hardly seen a sweet or noble woman's face since we arrived; but the men are not quite so ill-looking as the women. The singing here (by itinerant performers in gondolas) is disgraceful to Venice and to Italy. Coarse voices, much out of tune, make one shudder when they strike suddenly under the window. Our days here are passed quite deliciously. We see a few beautiful pictures or other objects of interest, and dwell on them sufficiently every morning, not hurrying ourselves to do much; and afterwards we have a _giro_ in our gondola, enjoying the air and the sight of marvellous Venice from various points of view and under various aspects. Hitherto we have had no _heat_, only warmth, with a light breeze. To-day, for the first time, one thinks that violent exercise must be terribly trying for our red-skinned fellow-mortals at work on the gondolas and the barges. But for us it is only pleasant to find the air warm enough for sitting out in the evening. We shall not soon run away from Venice unless some plague--_e.g._, mosquitoes--should arise to drive us. We edify ourselves with what Ruskin has written about Venice, in an agreeable pamphlet shape, using his knowledge gratefully, and shutting our ears to his wrathful innuendoes against the whole modern world. And we are now nearly at the end of Alfieri's autobiography, which is a deeply interesting study of character. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 10th June, 1880.] It may well seem incredible to you, for it is hardly credible to myself, that while I have been longing to write to you ever since I received your dear letter, I have not found the time to satisfy my longing. Perhaps you are more able than most people to conceive the difficulty of getting a clear half-hour between the business of travelling and the attention to little details of packing and toilet, over and above the companionship of talk and reading. Certainly I have thought of you all the more, but you have not known that, and I have lost my claim to hear about you--a use and wont which I would not willingly part with. I wonder whether you have imagined--I believe that you are quick to imagine for the benefit of others--all the reasons why it was left at last to Charles to tell you of the great, once undreamed-of change in my life. The momentous decision, in fact, was not made till scarcely more than a fortnight before my marriage; and even if opportunity had lent itself to my confiding everything to you, I think I could hardly have done it at a time when your presence filled me rather with a sense of your and Emily's trouble[46] than with my own affairs. Perhaps Charles will have told you that the marriage deprives no one of any good I felt bound to render before--it only gives me a more strenuous position, in which I cannot sink into the self-absorption and laziness I was in danger of before. The whole history is something like a miracle-legend. But instead of any former affection being displaced in my mind, I seem to have recovered the loving sympathy that I was in danger of losing. I mean, that I had been conscious of a certain drying-up of tenderness in me, and that now the spring seems to have risen again. Who could take your place within me or make me amends for the loss of you? And yet I should not take it bitterly if you felt some alienation from me. Such alienation is very natural where a friend does not fulfil expectations of long standing. We have already been ten days at Venice, but we hope to remain as long again, not fearing the heat, which has hitherto been only a false alarm in the minds of English travellers. If you could find time to send me word how you all are--yourself, Dr. Congreve after his holiday, and Emily, with all her cares about removal--a letter sent to the _Poste Restante_ here would reach me, even if we had left before the next ten days were over. We shall hardly be at Witley before the middle of July: but the sense of neighborhood to you at Witley is sadly ended now. We thought too little of the heat, and rather laughed at English people's dread of the sun. But the mode of life at Venice has its peculiar dangers. It is one thing to enjoy heat when leading an active life, getting plenty of exercise in riding or rowing in the evenings; it is another thing to spend all one's days in a gondola--a delicious, dreamy existence--going from one church to another--from palaces to picture-galleries--sight-seeing of the most exhaustively interesting kind--traversing constantly the _piccoli rei_, which are nothing more than drains, and with bedroom-windows always open on the great drain of the Grand Canal. The effect of this continual bad air, and the complete and sudden deprivation of all bodily exercise, made me thoroughly ill. As soon as I could be moved we left Venice, on the 23d of June, and went to Innspruck, where we stayed for a week, and in the change to the pure, sweet, mountain air I soon regained strength. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 7th July, 1880, from Stuttgart.] I was made very glad by Gertrude's letter, which assured me that Witley had been enjoyed by you and the little ones. We stayed six days at Innspruck, finding it more and more beautiful under the sunshine which had been wanting to it during our first two days. Then we went on to Munich, and yesterday we arrived here, as a temporary resting-place on our way to Wildbad, which, we hope, will put the finishing-touch to J.'s recovery of his usual health. I wish I had been able to let you know in time that you could have remained a little longer at Witley, as I think we shall hardly be at home before the 20th if we find Wildbad what we want. Your _Mutter_ is marvellously well and strong. It seems more natural to her to have anxiety than to be free from it. Let us hope that she will not run down like a jelly-fish now that her anxiety is over. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 13th July, 1880, from Wildbad.] I received your welcome letter yesterday morning, and felt inclined to answer it the next minute. J. is quite well again, but is inclined to linger a little in the sweet air of the Schwarzwald, which comes to one on gently stirred wings, laden with the scent of the pine forests. We mean to drive from here to Baden, which is within easy distance. Yesterday we sallied forth for a walk over the mountain, to a place where we could rest and lunch, returning in the afternoon. The sky was brilliant. But in half an hour the clouds gathered and threatened a storm. We were prudent enough to turn back, and by the time we were in the hotel again the thunder was rolling and the rain pouring down. This continued till about two o'clock, and then again the sky became clear. I never saw so incalculable a state of weather as we have in this valley. One quarter of an hour the blue sky is only flecked by lightest cirrus clouds, the next it is almost hidden by dark rain clouds. But we are going to start on our promised expedition this morning, the sunshine flattering us that it is quite confirmed. I think you had better address your next letter _Poste Restante_, Strasburg, as I am uncertain how long we shall rest at Baden. Left Wildbad on the 17th July, and had a delightful drive through the Black Forest by Herrenalb to Baden, and thence by Strasburg, Metz, Luxemburg, and Brussels, arriving at Witley on Monday the 26th of July. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st Aug. 1880.] We arrived here in all safety last Monday, and if I had not had your welcome little note this morning I think I should soon have written to you without any such extra stimulus. Mr. Cross had a sharp but brief attack at Venice, due to the unsanitary influences of that wondrous city in the later weeks of June. We stayed a little too long there, with a continuous sirocco blowing, and bad smells under the windows of the hotel; and these conditions found him a little below par from long protracted anxiety before our marriage. But ever since we left Venice (on the 23d of June) he has been getting strong again, and we have enjoyed a leisurely journey through Germany in constant warmth and sunshine, save for an occasional thunderstorm. The climate in this beloved country of ours is a sad exchange, and makes one think of a second bad harvest, with all its consequences. Still, it is a delight to be at home and enjoy perfect stillness, after the noisiness of foreign bells and foreign voices indoors and out. It would be very pretty to pay you a visit next April, if we are all alive, and I think Mr. Cross would like it very much. He sends you, hoping you will accept them, his best remembrances, which have been kept up by our often talking about you. I have been amazingly well through all the exertion of our travels, and in the latter half of the time have done a great deal of walking. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1880.] How sweet of you to write me a little welcome as soon as you knew that I was at home again. Yes, we are both well now, and _glad_ to be at home again, though the change of climate is not of the exhilarating sort. One is so sorry for all the holiday-makers, whose best enjoyment of these three days would have been in the clear air and sunshine. Do not reproach me for not telling you of my marriage beforehand. It is difficult to speak of what surprises ourselves, and the decision was sudden, though not the friendship which led to the decision. My heart thoroughly responds to your remembrance of our long--our thirty-years' relation to each other. Let me tell you this once what I have said to others--that I value you as one of the purest-minded, gentlest-hearted women I have ever known, and where such a feeling exists, friendship can live without much aid from sight. We shall probably not be in town again till the beginning of November. Our address then will be 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where we shall have an outlook on the river and meadows beyond. Just now we have the prospect of going on family visits to married sisters, which prevents us from feeling quite settled. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 12th Aug. 1880.] I expected your letter, and expected, too, just the sort of letter I have received, telling me everything delightfully. I can follow you everywhere in your journeying except to Ober Wesel. I hope you will have enjoyed St. Blasien and some of the walks there consecrated by the beloved Pater's footsteps. We reversed your drive and went to Freiburg, so that I can enter into your enjoyment of the Höllenthal. I am glad that your weather has been temperate. Here we have now had four sunny and really hot days, and this morning promises to be the fifth. That is consolatory as to the harvest, and is very agreeable as to our private life. The last two evenings we have walked in the garden after eight o'clock--the first time by starlight, the second under a vapory sky, with the red moon setting. The air was perfectly still and warm, and I felt no need of extra clothing. Our life has had no more important events than calls from neighbors and our calls in return. To-morrow we pay our visit to the Druces at Sevenoaks, where, you may remember, Mr. Druce has built a beautiful house. At the beginning of September we are to visit Mr. and Mrs. Otter at Ranby, and after that we shall go to Six-Mile Bottom for a day or two. Then our wanderings will be over. I went to the Priory the other day, and found a treatise on Blood Pressure, by Dr. Roy, which he had sent me there, and which he has published as the "George Henry Lewes Student." I imagine that he has come to pursue his studies in England, as he intended to do. Delbeuf's article on the last volume of the "Problems" (in the Belgian _Athenæum_) is very nicely done. He has read the book. I am pretty well, but find myself more languid than I was when abroad. I think the cause is perhaps the moisture of the climate. There is something languorous in this climate, or, rather, in its effects. J. gets a little better every day, and so each day is more enjoyable. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 9th Sept. 1880.] We have just come home after paying family visits in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, else I should have answered your letter earlier. The former one reached me in Venice, when I was in great trouble on account of Mr. Cross's illness. I had had reason to believe that my letters, ordered to be posted on the 5th of May, had not been delivered; so I asked Charles to inquire about the letter I wrote to you--not because it demanded an answer, but because I wished you to know that I had written. I am so glad to know that you have been enjoying our brief English summer. The good harvest makes the country everywhere cheerful, and we have been in great, even districts where the fields, full of sheaves or studded with ricks, stretch wide as a prairie. Now, we hope not to leave this place again till November, when we intend to go to Chelsea for the winter and earliest spring. I almost envy you the opportunity of seeing Wombwell's Menagerie. I suppose I got more delight out of that itinerant institution when I was nine or ten years old than I have ever got out of the Zoological Gardens. The smells and the sawdust mingled themselves with my rapture. Everything was good. It was very dear of you to write to me before you finished your holiday. My love attends you all. [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 14th Sept. 1880.] Your letter this morning is a welcome assurance about you. We have been away in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, paying visits to the Otters and the Halls. The weather, which is now broken, was glorious through all our wandering, which we made very interesting by pausing to see Ely, Peterborough, and Lincoln cathedrals. The Otters have a very pretty, happy household. He is a country gentleman now, acting as a magistrate, and glancing towards Parliament. But he keeps up his reading, and is delightful to talk to. Emily looks very pretty in her matronly position, with three little children. The Halls, too, are very pleasant to behold in their home life. He has done wonders in building nice cottages and schools, and sinking wells where they were wanted, and founding a co-operative store--and, in general, doing whatever opportunity allows towards slowly improving this confused world. We saw (at Six-Mile Bottom) Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick. Perhaps you know that they have had, and have, the admirable public spirit to let their house and arrange to live for a year in the new Newnham House, in order to facilitate matters for the double institution. We are very well. Mr. Cross gets stronger and brighter every day. We often mention you, because you are associated with so many of my memories. Our only bugbear--it is a very little one--is the having to make preliminary arrangements towards settling ourselves in the new house (4 Cheyne Walk). It is a quaint house; and a Mr. Armitage of Manchester, of whom you may have heard, has been superintending the decoration and furnishing, but not to the exclusion of old things, which we must carry and stow, especially wallings of books. I am become so lazy that I shrink from all such practical work. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 23d Sept. 1880.] I have been and am suffering under an attack of a comparatively mild sort, but I expect to be well in two or three days, and am just going to drive to Godalming to meet my husband. Hence I write this hurriedly. We should like to see you and Gertrude from Saturday to Monday some week next month if it would be pleasant to you. This attack was a recurrence of the renal disorder of the previous year. On the 29th September we went for ten days to Brighton as the most accessible place for a bracing change. The first effects of the sea breezes were encouraging, but the improvement was not maintained. Shortly after our return to Witley Dr. Andrew Clark,[47] "the beloved physician," came down to consult with Mr. Parsons of Godalming--on 22d October. From that time there was gradual but slow improvement, and, during November, a decided recovery of strength. But an English autumn was not favorable to the invalid. Her sensibility to climatic influences was extreme. It will have been noticed in the preceding letters how constantly change of air and scene was required. I had never seen my wife out of England, previous to our marriage, except the first time at Rome, when she was suffering. My general impression, therefore, had been that her health was always very low, and that she was almost constantly ailing. Moreover, I had been with her very frequently during her long, severe illness at Witley in 1879. I was the more surprised, after our marriage, to find that from the day she set her foot on Continental soil till the day she returned to Witley she was never ill--never even unwell. She began at once to look many years younger. During the eleven years of our acquaintance I had never seen her so strong in health. The greater dryness and lightness of the atmosphere seemed to have a magical effect. At Paris we spent our mornings at the Louvre or the Luxembourg, looking at pictures or sculpture, or seeing other sights--always fatiguing work. In the afternoons we took long walks in the Bois, and very often went to the theatre in the evening. Reading and writing filled in all the interstices of time; yet there was no consciousness of fatigue. And we had the same experience at all the places we stayed at in Italy. On our way home she was able to take a great deal of walking exercise at Wildbad and Baden. Decrease of physical strength coincided exactly with the time of our return to the damper climate of England. The specific form of illness did not declare itself until two months later, but her health was never again the same as it had been on the Continent. Towards the middle of October she was obliged to keep her bed, but without restriction as to amount of reading and talking, which she was always able to enjoy, except in moments of acute pain. During her illness I read aloud, among other books, Comte's "Discours Préliminaire," translated by Dr. Bridges. This volume was one of her especial favorites, and she delighted in making me acquainted with it. For all Comte's writing she had a feeling of high admiration, intense interest, and very deep sympathy. I do not think I ever heard her speak of any writer with a more grateful sense of obligation for enlightenment. Her great debt to him was always thankfully acknowledged. But the appreciation was thoroughly selective, so far as I was able to judge. Parts of his teaching were accepted and other parts rejected. Her attitude towards him, as the founder of a new religion, may be gathered from the references and allusions in the foregoing correspondence, and from the fact that for many years, and up to the time of her death, she subscribed to the Comtist Fund, but never, so far as I am aware, more directly associated herself with the members of the Positivist Church. It was a limited adherence. We generally began our reading at Witley with some chapters of the Bible, which was a very precious and sacred book to her, not only from early associations, but also from the profound conviction of its importance in the development of the religious life of man. She particularly enjoyed reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. With a naturally rich, deep voice, rendered completely flexible by constant practice; with the keenest perception of the requirements of emphasis, and with the most subtile modulations of tone, her reading threw a glamour over indifferent writing, and gave to the greatest writing fresh meanings and beauty. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the organ-like tones of her voice, which required, for their full effect, a certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm. Her reading of Milton was especially fine; and I shall never forget four great lines of the "Samson Agonistes" to which it did perfect justice-- "But what more oft in nations grown corrupt, And by their vices brought to servitude, Than to love bondage more than liberty, Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty." The delighted conviction of justice in the thought--the sense of perfect accord between thought, language, and rhythm--stimulated the voice of the reader to find the exactly right tone. Such reading requires for its perfection a rare union of intellectual, moral, and physical qualities. It cannot be imitated. It is an art, like singing--a personal possession that dies with the possessor, and leaves nothing behind except a memory. Immediately before her illness we had read, together, the first part of "Faust." Reading the poem in the original with such an interpreter was the opening of a new world to me. Nothing in all literature moved her more than the pathetic situation and the whole character of Gretchen. It touched her more than anything in Shakespeare. During the time that we were reading the "Faust" we were also constantly reading, together, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth: some of Scott's novels and Lamb's essays too, in which she greatly delighted. For graver study we read through Professor Sayce's "Introduction to the Science of Language." Philology was a subject in which she was most deeply interested; and this was my first experience of what seemed to me a limitless persistency in application. I had noticed the persistency before, while looking at pictures, or while hearing her play difficult music; for it was characteristic of her nature that she took just as great pains to play her very best to a single unlearned listener as most performers would do to a room full of critical _cognoscenti_. Professor Sayce's book was the first which we had read together requiring very sustained attention ("The Divina Commedia" we had read in very short bits at a time), and it revealed to me more clearly the depth of George Eliot's mental concentration. Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour: the body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied. Her memory held securely her great stores of reading. Even of light books her recollections were always crisp, definite, and vivid. On our way home from Venice, after my illness, we were reading French novels of Cherbuliez, Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Droz, George Sand. Most of these books she had read years before, and I was astonished to find what clear-cut, accurate impressions had been retained, not only of all the principal characters, but also of all the subsidiary personages--even their names were generally remembered. But, on the other hand, her verbal memory was not always to be depended on. She never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it. In foreign languages George Eliot had an experience more unusual among women than among men. With a complete literary and scholarly knowledge of French, German, Italian, and Spanish, she _spoke_ all four languages with difficulty, though accurately and grammatically; but the mimetic power of catching intonation and accent was wanting. Greek and Latin she could read with thorough delight to herself; and Hebrew was a favorite study to the end of her life. In her younger days, especially at Geneva, inspired by Professor de la Rive's lectures, she had been greatly interested in mathematical studies. At one time she applied herself heartily and with keen enjoyment to geometry, and she thought that she might have attained to some excellence in that branch if she had been able to pursue it. In later days the map of the heavens lay constantly on her table at Witley, and she longed for deeper astronomical knowledge. She had a passion for the stars; and one of the things to which we looked forward on returning to London was a possible visit to Greenwich Observatory, as she had never looked through a great telescope of the first class. Her knowledge of wild-flowers gave a fresh interest each day to our walks in the Surrey lanes, as every hedgerow is full of wonders--to "those who know;" but she would, I think, have disclaimed for herself real botanical knowledge, except of an elementary sort. This wide and varied culture was accompanied with an unaffected distrust of her own knowledge, with the sense of how little she really knew, compared with what it was possible for her to have known, in the world. Her standard was always abnormally high--it was the standard of an expert; and she believed in the aphorism that to know any subject well we must know the details of it. During our short married life our time was so much divided between travelling and illness that George Eliot wrote very little, so that I have but slight personal experience of how the creative effort affected her. But she told me that, in all that she considered her best writing, there was a "not herself," which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting. Particularly she dwelt on this in regard to the scene in "Middlemarch" between Dorothea and Rosamond, saying that, although she always knew they had, sooner or later, to come together, she kept the idea resolutely out of her mind until Dorothea was in Rosamond's drawing-room. Then, abandoning herself to the inspiration of the moment, she wrote the whole scene exactly as it stands, without alteration or erasure, in an intense state of excitement and agitation, feeling herself entirely possessed by the feelings of the two women. Of all the characters she had attempted she found Rosamond's the most difficult to sustain. With this sense of "possession" it is easy to imagine what the cost to the author must have been of writing books, each of which has its tragedy. We have seen the suffering alluded to in the letters on the "Mill on the Floss," "Felix Holt," and "Romola." For those who would know the length and the breadth of George Eliot's intellectual capacity she has written her books. Here I am only putting down some of my own personal impressions or recollections, which must be taken for what they are worth. In doing this I should like to dwell on the catholicity of her judgment. Singularly free from the spirit of detraction, either in respect of her contemporaries or her predecessors, she was always anxious to see the best and the most noble qualities of human beings or of books, in cases where she felt some general sympathy notwithstanding particular disagreements. And it was this wide sympathy, this understanding of so many points of view, that gained for her the passionate devotion not only of personal friends, but also of literary admirers, from the most widely sundered sections of society. Probably few people have ever received so many intimate confidences from confidants of such diverse habits of thought. This many-sidedness, however, makes it exceedingly difficult to ascertain, either from her books or from the closest personal intimacy, what her exact relation was to any existing religious creed or to any political party. Yet George Eliot's was emphatically a religious mind. My own impression is that her whole soul was so imbued with, and her imagination was so fired by, the scientific spirit of the age--by the constant rapid development of ideas in the Western world--that she could not conceive that there was, as yet, any religious formula sufficient nor any known political system likely to be final. She had great hope for the future, in the improvement of human nature by the gradual development of the affections and the sympathetic emotions, and "by the slow, stupendous teaching of the world's events," rather than by means of legislative enactments. Party measures and party men afforded her no great interest. Representative government, by numerical majorities, did not appeal to her as the last word of political wisdom. Generally speaking, she had little patience with talk about practical politics, which seemed to her under our present system to be too often very unpractically handled by ignorant amateurs. The amateur was always a "stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence." Her wrath used often to be roused, in late years, by the increased bitterness in the language of parties, and by the growing habit of attributing, for political effect, the most shameful motives to distinguished statesmen. She was keenly anxious to redress injustices to women, and to raise their general status in the community. This, she thought, could best be effected by women improving their work--ceasing to be amateurs. But it was one of the most distinctly marked traits in her character that she particularly disliked everything generally associated with the idea of a "masculine woman." She was, and as a woman she wished to be, above all things, feminine--"so delicate with her needle, and an admirable musician." She was proud, too, of being an excellent housekeeper--an excellence attained from knowing how things ought to be done, from her early training, and from an inborn habit of extreme orderliness. Nothing offended her more than the idea that because a woman had exceptional intellectual powers therefore it was right that she should absolve herself, or be absolved, from her ordinary household duties. It will have been seen from the letters that George Eliot was deeply interested in the higher education of women, and that she was among the earliest contributors to Girton College. After meeting Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, in September, 1880, when they had gone to reside at the new hall of Newnham College for a time, she was anxious to be associated in that work also, but she did not live to carry out the plan herself. The danger she was alive to in the system of collegiate education was the possible weakening of the bonds of family affection and family duties. In her view, the family life holds the roots of all that is best in our mortal lot; and she always felt that it is far too ruthlessly sacrificed in the case of English _men_ by their public school and university education, and that much more is such a result to be deprecated in the case of women. But, the absolute good being unattainable in our mixed condition of things, those women especially who are obliged to earn their own living must do their best with the opportunities at their command, as "they cannot live with posterity," when a more perfect system may prevail. Therefore, George Eliot wished God-speed to the women's colleges. It was often in her mind and on her lips that the only worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is, that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for culture's sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of producing at best a shrivelled branch. In her general attitude towards life George Eliot was neither optimist nor pessimist. She held to the middle term, which she invented for herself, of "meliorist." She was cheered by the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the mass; for in her view each individual must find the better part of happiness in helping another. She often thought it wisest not to raise too ambitious an ideal, especially for young people, but to impress on ordinary natures the immense possibilities of making a small home circle brighter and better. Few are born to do the great work of the world, but all are born to this. And to the natures capable of the larger effort the field of usefulness will constantly widen. In her personal bearing George Eliot was seldom moved by the hurry which mars all dignity in action. Her commanding brows and deep, penetrating eyes were seconded by the sweet, restrained, impressive speech, which claimed something like an awed attention from strangers. But to those very near to her there was another side of her nature, scarcely suspected by outside friends and acquaintances. No one could be more capable of enjoying and of communicating genuine, loving, hearty, uncontrollable laughter. It was a deep-seated wish, expressed in the poem of "Agatha"--"I would have young things merry." And I remember, many years ago, at the time of our first acquaintance, how deeply it pained her when, in reply to a direct question, I was obliged to admit that, with all my admiration for her books, I found them, on the whole, profoundly sad. But sadness was certainly not the note of her intimate converse. For she had the distinctively feminine qualities which lend a rhythm to the movement of life. The quick sympathy that understands without words; the capacity for creating a complete atmosphere of loving interest; the detachment from outside influences; the delight in everything worthy--even the smallest thing--for its own sake; the readiness to receive as well as to give impressions; the disciplined mental habit which can hold in check and conquer the natural egoism of a massive, powerful personality; the versatility of mind; the varied accomplishments--these are characteristics to be found more highly developed among gifted women than among gifted men. Add to these the crowning gift of genius, and, in such companionship, we may possess the world without belonging to it. The November days had come now--cold and clear. My wife was able again to enjoy the daily drives and walks on which she was very dependent for health. The letters continue. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Nov. 1880.] Since I wrote to you I have been much more ill, and have only, during the last few days, begun to feel myself recovering strength. But I have been cared for with something much better than angelic tenderness. The fine, clear air, if it lasts, will induce us to linger in the country; and, indeed, I am not yet quite fit to move; for, though I appear to be quite cured of my main ailment, half my bodily self has vanished. We are having deliciously clear days here, and I get out for short drives and walks. I really have nothing to complain of now except a little lack of strength. I play on the piano again, and walk with perfect ease. There is a long chapter about myself! [Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 7th Nov. 1880.] Three weeks ago I had a rather troublesome attack, but I am getting well now, though still reduced and comparatively weak. We shall probably linger here till near the end of the month, for the autumnal landscape is very beautiful, and I am not yet quite fit for the exertion of moving. It is a comfort to think that you can be very snug through the winter in your nice house. What a pity we are not within an easy driving distance from you! Mr. Hall is here to-day. He gave a lecture on Leclaire, the house-painter in Paris who initiated an excellent plan of co-operative sharing for his workmen. It has been printed, and when I have another copy I will send it you. Leclaire is mentioned by John S. Mill in the notes to his "Political Economy," but had not been otherwise taken much notice of. Still, you may know all about him. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 18th Nov. 1880.] Thanks for your loving remembrance of me. We have been kept in the country by two sufficient causes: I have been ill, and the house at Cheyne Walk has not been ready to receive us. I suppose we shall not be there till the end of the month instead of the beginning. One of the good things I look forward to is the sight of your dear face again. You will see little more than half of me, for nearly half has been consumed. But I have been nursed with supreme tenderness, and am daily gaining some strength. Much love to both. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 23d Nov. 1880.] We are lingering here for three reasons: the beauty of the weather, the unreadiness of the house, and my unfitness to bear the hurry of moving. I am getting better, but have not yet been able to bear much exertion. Thanks for your pretty letter. I do not think I shall have many returns of Novembers, but there is every prospect that such as remain to me will be as happy as they can be made by the devoted tenderness which watches over me. Your years will probably be many, and it is cheering to me to think that you have many springs of happiness in your lot that are likely to grow fuller with advancing time. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 28th Nov. 1880.] I have thought of you all the more because I have not even heard anything of you for several months. You will wonder less why I have not written, as a consequence of those thoughts, when I tell you that I have been ill, and not allowed to do anything but indulge myself and receive indulgence. I am very well now, and am every day consciously gathering strength, so that, if I could like giving trouble, I should look back on my illness as a great opportunity of enjoying the tenderest watching and nursing. I kept my bed only about a week, and have always been equal, except at short intervals, to much reading and talking, so that there is no fair cause for any grumbling on my part. It has not been so bad an illness as that of last summer. You see we are not yet at Cheyne Walk, but we are to be settled there by the end of next week. I have had no trouble, but have remained here on my cushions while Mr. Cross has gone early for several mornings running to superintend the removal. It is difficult to give you materials for imagining my "world." Think of me as surrounded and cherished by family love; by brothers and sisters whose characters are admirable to me, and who have for years been my friends. But there is no excessive visiting among us, and the life of my own hearth is chiefly that of dual companionship. If it is any good for me that my life has been prolonged till now, I believe it is owing to this miraculous affection which has chosen to watch over me. [Sidenote: Journal, 1880.] _Dec. 3._--Came to 4 Cheyne Walk. _Dec. 4._--Went to Popular Concert at St. James's Hall. Heard Madame Neruda, Piatti, and Miss Zimmermann. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Dec. 1880.] Only on Friday evening did we get into this new house, and I had deferred writing to you till I could say "Come and see me." I can say so now, but on reflection I have come to the conclusion that you would like yourself to fix a time beforehand, the journey here being rather long. Perhaps you will like to choose a day on which you could go to Emily also, her house being less formidably distant--across the park and down Sloane Street would be an easy way to us. This week we shall be much engaged in household matters, such as the reduction to order of the chaos which still reigns in certain places least obvious to visitors, and the procuring of small objects, either necessary or desirable. But after this week I shall be most glad if you and Dr. Congreve will come to see us just _as_ and _when_ you would find the least inconvenience in doing so--either at lunch-time (half-past one) or at a later hour. I find myself in a new climate here--the London air and this particular house being so warm compared with Witley. I hope that you too find the air mild, for I know that suits you best. Dr. and Mrs. Congreve paid their promised visit the week after this letter was written; and Madame Belloc lunched with us the following day. Order was beginning to reign in the new house. The books had all been arranged as nearly as possible in the same order that they had occupied at the Priory, Mr. Radermacher of the Pantechnicon having given his personal attention to this arrangement of some thousands of volumes, for which George Eliot was particularly grateful. Notwithstanding all this care, however, there were many unforeseen details of furnishing still to be completed, which caused a considerable expenditure of time. We continued reading aloud Max Müller's "Lectures on the Science of Language," and Duffield's translation of "Don Quixote;" we were also reading "Hermann and Dorothea," Tennyson's last volume of poems, just published, and Mr. Frederic Myers's volume on Wordsworth. In the evenings we had always a little feast of music, and were becoming in every way reconciled to town life, notwithstanding the loss of country quiet, light, and beauty. On the afternoon of Friday, the 17th December, we went to see the "Agamemnon" performed in Greek by Oxford undergraduates. The representation was a great enjoyment--an exciting stimulus--and my wife proposed that during the winter we should read together some of the great Greek dramas. The following afternoon we went to the Saturday Popular Concert at St. James's Hall. It was a cold day. The air in the hall was overheated, and George Eliot allowed a fur cloak which she wore to slip from her shoulders. I was conscious of a draught, and was afraid of it for her, as she was very sensitive to cold. I begged her to resume the cloak, but, smiling, she whispered that the room was really too hot. In the evening she played through several of the pieces that we had heard at the concert, with all her accustomed enjoyment of the piano, and with a touch as true and as delicate as ever. On Sunday there was very slight trouble in the throat, but not sufficient to prevent her from coming down-stairs to breakfast as usual. In the afternoon she was well enough to receive visits from Mr. Herbert Spencer and one or two other friends. Afterwards she began the following letter to Mrs. Strachey. It was left unfinished in her writing-case, and is printed as it stands. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Strachey, 19th Dec. 1880.] I have been thinking so much of Lady Colvile, and yet I shrank from troubling even your more indirect sympathetic sorrow with a letter. I am wondering how far her health is in a state to endure this loss--a loss which extends even to me, who only occasionally saw, but was always cheered by, the expression of a wise and sweet nature, which clearly shone in Sir James Colvile's manner and conversation. One great comfort I believe she has--that of a sister's affection. Here the letter is broken off. The pen which had delighted and comforted so many minds and hearts here made its last mark. The spring, which had broadened out into so wide a river of speech, ceased to flow. Little more remains to be told. On Monday the doctor treated the case as one of laryngeal sore throat; and when Dr. Andrew Clark came for consultation on Wednesday evening the pericardium was found to be seriously affected. While the doctors were at her bedside she had just time to whisper to me, "Tell them I have great pain in the left side," before she became unconscious. Her long illness in the autumn had left her no power to rally. She passed away, about ten o'clock at night, on the 22d December, 1880. She died, as she would herself have chosen to die, without protracted pain, and with every faculty brightly vigorous. Her body rests in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to Mr. Lewes. In sleet and snow, on a bitter day--the 29th December--very many whom she knew, very many whom she did not know, pressed to her grave-side with tributes of tears and flowers. Her spirit joined that choir invisible "whose music is the gladness of the world." FOOTNOTES: [35] Madame Belloc. [36] Mrs. Charles Lewes. [37] "The Ethics of George Eliot's Works," by J. C. Brown. Blackwood: 1879. [38] Article on G. H. Lewes.--_New Quarterly Review_, Oct. 1879. [39] "George Henry Lewes Studentship."--This studentship has been founded in memory of Mr. George Henry Lewes, for the purpose of enabling the holder for the time being to devote himself wholly to the prosecution of original research in physiology. The studentship, the value of which is slightly under £200 per annum, paid quarterly in advance, is tenable for three years, during which time the student is required to carry on, under the guidance of a director, physiological investigations, to the complete exclusion of all other professional occupations. No person will be elected as a "George Henry Lewes Student" who does not satisfy the trustees and director, first, as to the promise of success in physiological inquiry; and, second, as to the need of pecuniary assistance. Otherwise all persons of both sexes are eligible. Applications, together with such information concerning ability and circumstances as the candidate may think proper, should be sent to the present director, Dr. Michael Foster, New Museums, Cambridge, not later than October 15, 1879. The appointment will be made and duly advertised as soon as possible after that date. [40] Mr. John Blackwood died on 29th October, 1879. [41] Madame Belloc. [42] Mrs. Hall. [43] Mrs. Isaac Evans (since deceased). [44] Rev. Frederick Evans, Rector of Bedworth. [45] Madame Belloc. [46] Mr. Geddes's death. [47] Now Sir Andrew Clark. INDEX. "Abode of Snow," by Andrew Wilson, iii. 190. A breezy common, iii. 108. "Adam Bede," progress of, i. 338; second volume finished in Dresden, ii. 42; £800 offered for copyright for four years, 47; its history, 48-52; author's love of, 51; subscription to, 59; cheap edition suggested by working man, 66; sale increasing, 67, 68; quoted in House of Commons, 69; French translation proposed, 73; additional £400 from publishers, 80; fourth edition (5000) sold in a fortnight, 88; sixth edition, 96; seventh edition (2000), 101; Blackwoods propose to pay £800 above agreed price, 101; 16,000 copies sold in one year, 105; copyright conceded, 111; third volume written in six weeks, 113. "Adam Bede, Junior," a sequel, advertised, ii. 104. "Address to the Working Men," by Felix Holt, iii. 18. Adler, Dr. Hermann, appreciation of Jewish character in "Deronda," iii. 207; lecture on "Deronda" by, 215. Æsthetic teaching the highest of all teaching, ii. 318. Æsthetic, the, not a doctrinal teacher, iii. 237. Afghanistan, effect of the sad news from, iii. 278. "Agatha" sold to Fields & Osgood for _Atlantic Monthly_, iii. 63. Aix to Vevey, journey to, iii. 205. Allbut, Dr. Clifford, Leeds, iii. 41, 42. Allingham, William, letter to, on Midland dialect, iii. 218; on his poems, 226. Altruism, the need of, iii. 178, 179. Amalfi, grand drive, ii. 153. America, interest in, i. 219; the war in, anxiety regarding, ii. 242; delight in descriptions of, iii. 115; invited to visit, 118. Amsterdam, Jewish synagogues in, ii. 317. "An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity," by Charles Hennell, influence of, on George Eliot, i. 68; read again with admiration, 119. Anders, Mr., apologizes for the Liggins business, ii. 78. Antwerp, pictures at, i. 239, 240. Apennines, across the, ii. 168. Application, persistence in, iii. 304. Appreciation of Dickens's letter, ii. 6. Ardennes, journey to the, iii. 176. "Aristotle," by G. H. Lewes, ii. 271. "Armgart," a dramatic poem, iii. 85. Art, the function of, iii. 144; purpose in, 144. Articles written by Mr. Lewes, iii. 260, 261; by military men, 265. Ashantee War, the, iii. 157. Asher's cheap editions of "George Eliot," iii. 124. Atkinson, Mr., i. 193. Australia, proposed visit to, i. 221. Authors and booksellers, meeting of, i. 201. Authorship acknowledged to the Brays and Miss Hennell, ii. 83. Autobiography, repugnance to, iii. 221. Autumn, love for, i. 67; ii. 263, 264. "A Word for the Germans," ii. 288. Aytoun, Professor, admiration of "Gilfil's Love-Story," i. 326; on "Adam Bede," ii. 81. Bâle, a morning in, ii. 87. Ballot, dislike of the, iii. 49; the first experiment of the, 161. Balzac, a saying of, iii, 41. Bancroft, American Minister, Berlin, on "Middlemarch," iii. 157. Bank of England visited, iii. 176. "Beata," by T. A. Trollope, ii. 239. Bedworth, country about, i. 5-7. Beesley, Professor Edmund Spencer, iii. 64. Bellagio and the Splügen Pass, ii. 181. Benisch, Dr., editor of _Jewish Chronicle_, iii. 216. Berlin, popularity of "Middlemarch" in, iii. 157. Berlin, visit to the _Charité_, iii. 77; society and music at, 77; increase in luxury in, 78. Berlin recollections: meets Varnhagen, i. 251, 252; impressions of the city, 251; new acquaintances, 253; portrait of Kleist, 253; Fräulein Solmar's _salon_, 253; General Pfuhl, 254; Baron Sternberg, 254; "Lisez les Chroniques," 254; Professor Gruppe, 255, 263; Waagen on Goethe, 256; Edward Magnus, 257; celebrities, 258; Professor Stahr, 258, 263; Schiller's portrait, 258; Rauch the sculptor, 258; his atelier, 259, 260; Dessoir the actor, 260; "Nathan der Weise," 261; Johanna Wagner, 261; Gluck's "Orpheus," 261; Roger and Arabella Goddard, 264; Vivier anecdotes, 264, 265; works of art, 265; evenings in, 266; _table d'hôte_, reading between the courses, 266; work at and books read, 268; translating Spinoza's "Ethics," 268; remarks on books read, 270; return to England, 271. Bethnal Green, pictures at, iii. 128. Biarritz, its natural beauties, iii. 2; the Chambre de l'Amour, 2; journey to Barcelona from, 4. Bible and the Liturgy of the English Church, ii. 226. Bible reading, iii. 302. Bickley, country-house at, iii. 152. Birthday greetings, iii. 47. Bishop Steignton, visit to, i. 185. Blackie, Professor, Edinburgh, letter of sympathy from, ii. 111, 113. _Blackwood's Magazine_ on "Adam Bede," ii. 70. Blackwood, John, his favorable opinion of "Amos Barton," i. 302; accepts it for "Maga," 304; receives kind letter from author, 307; cautions regarding "huddling up stories," 319; not enthusiastic about "Janet's Repentance," 326; calls on Lewes, and George Eliot reveals herself, ii. 10; letter from George Eliot on artistic combination, 31; offers £800 for copyright of "Adam Bede" for four years, 47; letter to, regarding Liggins, 73; his liberal treatment of George Eliot, 102; proposals for "Mill on the Floss," 110; concedes copyright of "Adam Bede," 111; suggests title of "Mill on the Floss," 112; letter from author on finishing "Mill on the Floss," 114; letter to, from George Eliot at Berne, 182, 183; do. from Florence, 218; offers £5000 for "Felix Holt," 308; letters to, about "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 16, 26; about Scott Commemoration, 97; "Middlemarch," 103; his favorable impressions of "Middlemarch," 106; letter to, from Homburg, 123; New Year's greetings from George Eliot, 138; letter on "Middlemarch," 153; on another book simmering in her head, 157; on corrected edition of "Spanish Gypsy," 161, 162; letter to, with volume of poems, 164; on printing of "Deronda," 190, 191, 197; on re-reading "Romola," 217, 218; offers for second ten-years' copyright, 230; letter to, declining invitation to Strathtyrum, 237; on her continued ill-health, 244; his death, 276. Blackwood, Major, his opinion of "Amos Barton," i. 306; hopeful about the "Scenes," 342; calls on Lewes, and suspects identity of George Eliot, 342; letter regarding the Liggins affair, ii. 81; letter from author on "Mill on the Floss," 167. Blackwood, William, his favorable news of "Clerical Life," ii. 116; letter to, on Mr. Lewes's illness, iii. 239; on "Theophrastus Such," 254, 263, 271. Blanc, Louis, anecdote of, i. 195. Bodichon, Madame, discovers author of "Adam Bede," ii. 77; letters to: on artistic combinations, 93; on Mrs. Gaskell's letter, 107; the rewards of the artist, 107; on settling in London, 198; on religious forms and ceremonies, 205; on the necessity of sympathy, 268; on her Spanish tour, iii. 4; on cheerfulness, 172; on "Deronda," 198; on woman's work, 208; on her illness, 225; on improvement in health, 252; letter regarding "Lewes Studentship," 267; letter announcing her marriage, 283; on sympathy with marriage, 289. Bohn, Madame, visit from, ii. 293. Bologna, its pictures and churches, ii. 169; the leaning towers, 170. Bonham-Carter, Miss, letter to, from Madame Bodichon, iii. 264. Bonheur, Rosa, her pictures, i. 333. Books belong to successive mental phases, ii. 211. Books read at Malvern, 1861, ii. 228-230, 234-236. Books read, with remarks on, i. 268-271, 322, 341, 344; ii. 58, 299; iii. 25, 41, 68, 71, 72. Booksellers and authors, meeting of, i. 201. Bookstalls, literary taste at, iii. 51. Brabant, Miss, i. 85. Bracebridge, Mr., and Liggins, ii. 99. Bray, Charles, his work, "The Philosophy of Necessity," i. 67; influence of his opinions, 68; words of affection in time of depression, 135; letter to, on rumors of authorship, ii. 13. Bray, Mrs., letters to: on favorite books, i. 86; reading and music, 87; poetry of Christianity, 93; chameleon-like nature, 158; orthodox friends, 162; anxiety for letters, 164; need of encouragement, 165; life in Geneva, 169, 170; Christmas wishes, 174; severe winter, 175; yearning for friends at home, 175; a singular advertisement, 195; _Westminster_ reviewers, 199; love for music, 202; feels well and "plucky," 207; in Edinburgh again, 211; pleasant travelling, 213; a Saturday's work, 214; work in the Strand, 215; domestic grievances, 229; view of union with Mr. Lewes, 235; on careless cooking, 316; on the charms of Richmond Park, 326; unbelief in others' love, 337; authorship acknowledged to, ii. 83; recollections of journey of 1849, 191; asking for music, 241; on her "Physiology for Schools," 267; on writing poetry instead of novels, iii. 31; on happiness in recovery, 313. Bremer, Frederica, i. 188, 190. Brewing interest in Parliament, the, iii. 188, 189. Brewster, Sir David, i. 190. Bridges, Dr., Leeds, iii. 42. Bright on Ireland, iii. 56. Brittany, trip to, ii. 296. Broadstairs, delight with, i. 205. Brodie, Sir Benjamin, iii. 80. Brontë, Charlotte, life of, i. 317. Brooks, Shirley, delighted with "Adam Bede," ii. 70. "Brother Jacob" written, ii. 199. "Brother and Sister," sonnets, iii. 70. Brougham, Lord, a delicious _non sequitur_, i. 214. Brown, Dr. John, sends "Rab and his Friends" to author of "Adam Bede," ii. 60; kindly letter in reply, 60. Brown, J. C., "Ethics of George Eliot's Works," iii. 266. Browne, Dr., chemist, Edinburgh, i. 195. Browning, first visit from, ii. 249; "Elisha," iii. 56. Browning, Mrs., her "Casa Guidi Windows", ii. 243. Buchanan, Robert, his "David Grey," ii. 273. Buckle, personal dislike to, ii. 47. Buckle's "History of Civilization," i. 341, 345. Buckle's ideal not George Eliot's, ii. 220. Bulstrode, new view of, iii. 133. Bunyan, reading again with pleasure, ii. 105. Burne-Jones, Edward, letter to, on the function of art, iii. 144. Burne-Jones, Mrs., iii. 29; letter to, on the serious view of life, 172; on her illness, 185; on Christmas plans, 232; on her sense of depression, 239. Burton, Mr., wishes to take portrait, ii. 273; his picture of a knight in armor, 277. Burton, Sir Frederick, Director of the National Gallery, ii. 240. Byron, a vulgar-minded genius, iii. 72. Call, Mr., author of "Reverberations and other Poems," i. 335. Calvinism, a libel on, iii. 88. Camaldoli, expedition to, ii. 221. Cambridge, a visit to, iii. 147; a group of "Trinity" men, 147. Cambridgeshire, visit to, iii. 299. Caricature, a bastard kind of satire, iii. 228. _Caritas_, the highest love, ii. 252. Carlyle, Mrs., pleasant letter from, ii. 7; her conception of George Eliot, 8. Carlyle, on the Glasgow artisan, i. 55; eulogium on Emerson, 140; "Life of Sterling," 189; anecdotes of, 190, 257; his denunciation of the opera, 192; letter to George Eliot on "Frederic," 343; G. A. anxious he should read her novels, ii. 63. "Carlyle's Memoirs," ii. 208. Catholicity of judgment, iii. 307. Cavour, Count, ii. 122, 143. Cerebellum, function of the, i. 210. Chapman, Mrs., on Harriet Martineau, iii. 220. Charade party, failure of, ii. 287. Charity of the Apostle Paul, the, ii. 251. Chart of Ecclesiastical History, i. 45. Cheap books, opinion of, iii. 154. Cheap edition of "Adam Bede" suggested by working man, ii. 66. Cheap editions of novels, arrangements for, iii. 10. Cheap music in England, ii. 81. Cheerful, now uniformly, iii. 172. Chiem See, journey by, ii. 34. Childhood's real feelings, i. 91. Child's idea of God, a, i. 153, 154. Chills, spiritual and physical, iii. 120. Chioggia, journey to, ii. 177. "Christianity and Infidelity," Baillie Prize Essay, i. 311. Chronological order in writing, ii. 211. Church-going resumed, i. 82. Clark, Sir James, pleasant evening with, i. 222; meeting with, 226, 230. Clark, W. G., late public orator at Cambridge, ii. 240; visit to, at Cambridge, iii. 24; resigns his oratorship, 74. "Clerical Tutor," discouraged to proceed with, i. 336. Club criticism of "Amos Barton," i. 308. Coaching days, i. 7. Cobbe, Miss, her introduction to Theodore Parker, ii. 253. Cobden, disappointed with, i. 196. Cologne, journey to, i. 267. Colossians, Epistle to the, i. 51. Combe, George, friendship with, i. 186; on the _Westminster_, 204; visit to, in Edinburgh, 211. Comprehensive Church, one, iii. 175. Comte and his critics, ii. 224; admiration of, 224; delight in his "Politique," iii. 2. Comte's "Discours Préliminaire," ii. 264. Comte's works, reading, iii. 302. Conceptions of new work, iii. 233. Confidence, desire for, i. 128. Conformity, letter to J. W. Cross on, iii. 155. Congreve, Mrs., letters to, ii. 82, 84, 141; visits George Eliot in London, 232; letter to, on Thornton Lewes's illness, iii. 63; leaves for India, 132; returns to Europe, 145; letter to, after marriage with Mr. Cross, 292; invited to Cheyne Walk, 314. Congreve, Richard, ii. 62, 67, 73; friendship of Mr. and Mrs., 76, 80; Christmas Day with, 110; his lectures on Positivism, iii. 12; his article Huxley on Comte, 58. Conolly, Dr., i. 233. Conscience in work, iii. 27. Conservative reaction, on the, iii. 143. Contemporary fiction, iii. 183. Continent, start for, visiting Fontainebleau, Plombières, iii. 149; three months' trip to the, 205. Continental tour, six weeks' journey to Baden, etc., iii. 37; St. Märgen, 37; peasant proprietors in the Black Forest, 38. Continental trip with the Brays, i. 150. Coquelin's acting, iii. 263. Correggio's Madonnas, ii. 43. Correspondence, views on, i. 134. Country, delight in the, iii. 154. Country districts, remoteness of, i. 5. Country-house, visions of a, ii. 61. Country life, monotony of, i. 25; enjoyment of, ii. 275. Country quiet, the benefits of, iii. 110. Critical attitude, the, iii. 79. Criticism, sensibility to, ii. 63. Critics, indifference to opinions of, iii. 224. Cross, J. W., first meeting at Rome with George Eliot, iii. 59; meet again at Weybridge, 71; letter to, on buying a house, 131; on conformity, 155; on depression, 187; on effect of her writing, 204; on Tennyson, 229; letters to, after Lewes's death, 250-252; his engagement, 279; his marriage, 282; illness in Venice, 294. Cross, Miss Eleanor, letter to, iii. 276; on her engagement to Mr. Cross, 279; on her marriage tour, 283. Cross, Miss Elizabeth D., "An Old Story and other Poems," iii. 15. Cross, Miss Florence, letter to from Milan on the enjoyment of travel, iii. 286. Cross, Miss Mary, her "Marie of Villefranche," iii. 100; letter to, on gift of a vase, 166. Cross, Mrs., letters to, accepting invitation to Six-Mile Bottom, iii. 121; letter to, from Homburg, 122; on return home, 125; on journey abroad, and country-house at Bickley, 152; on the pleasures of the country, 154; on Christmas invitation, 158; on silence of the country, 167. Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, dinner with, iii. 236; their simple manner, 236; guests at table, 236. Cruikshank, George, i. 202. Cumming, article on, in the _Westminster_, i. 277. D'Albert, M. and Mme. _See_ Durade. Dallas, Mr., an admirer of "Adam Bede," ii. 64. Daniel, the prophecies of, i. 122. "Daniel Deronda," writing, iii. 180; fear for MS. being burned, 190; anticipations of, 193, 194; public interest in, 199, 214; finished, 204; Jewish element in, 211. Darwin's "Origin of Species," ii. 104, 105, 108. Dawson, Mr. George, lecturer, i. 129; ii. 233; iii. 165. Dean Ramsay, letter from, with his "Reminiscences of Scottish Life," ii. 320. Death, imagining the nearness of, iii. 170. "Debasing the Moral Currency," iii. 266. Delight in the country, iii. 154; in old friends, 245. Depression from damp, iii. 187. Derbyshire, memories of, iii. 47. Deutsch, his article on the Talmud, iii. 18. "Deutscher Novellenschatz," iii. 96. "Development of Industries," effect of, ii. 281. Development of religion, iii. 62. Dialect in "Adam Bede," ii. 72; iii. 219. Dickens, Charles, meeting with, i. 201; letter from, ii. 2; recognizes woman's hand in "Clerical Life," 3; dines at Wandsworth, 102; asks for a story for "All the Year Round," 104; his death, iii. 82; his "Life" by Forster, 104. Dinah Morris, the character of, ii. 49. Dinner at Greenwich, with Blackwood, Colonel Stewart, Colonel Hamley, and Mr. Skene, ii. 222. Discontent of the young, iii. 213. Discouraged with her writings, ii. 86. D'Israeli's "Tancred," i. 118, 123; his theory of races, 124; funeral oration on the Duke of Wellington, 215. Distrust of her own knowledge, iii. 305. "Divina Commedia," reading the, with Mr. Cross, iii. 259. Dorking, fourth visit to, ii. 254. Doyle, Mr., iii. 74. Drama, trying a, ii. 280. Drawbacks to living abroad, iii. 203. Drawings from "Romola," iii. 166. Dresden: end of vol. ii. of "Adam Bede" written, ii. 42; Holbein's "Madonna," 42; the "Sistine Madonna," 43; the Correggios, 43; Murillo's "St. Rodriguez," 43; Dutch and Flemish pictures, 44; Veronese, 44; the theatres and concerts, 45. Druce, Mr., visit to, at Sevenoaks, iii. 297. Dulwich Picture-gallery, ii. 79. Durade, M. d'Albert, i. 164; residence with, 165; their household, 166; affection to, 173; paints her portrait, 178; visits England, 181; wished to translate the "Scenes," ii. 109; two days with, 186; translates the "Scenes," 187. Dürer, Albert, his paintings, ii. 24. Dutch translation of George Eliot's novels, iii. 139. Dutch and Flemish pictures in Dresden, ii. 44. Dwelling on faults, abstention from, iii. 89. Dying in harness, on, iii. 141. Dyspeptic troubles and their cure, ii. 288. Early death, thoughts on, ii. 290. Edinburgh criticisms more favorable than London, ii. 64. Edinburgh, enjoyment of, i. 211; visit to Craigcrook, 212. Editor's life, i. 215, 221. Education of Women, iii. 27; the higher, 146. Effect of talking of her own books, ii. 85. Effect of writing, the, iii. 306. Egotism, cure for, i. 128. "Elijah," delight in hearing, i. 112, 118. Ellis, Mr. and Mrs., i. 191. Emerson, first meeting with, i. 139; Carlyle's eulogium on, 140; his "Man the Reformer," ii. 196. Empire in France, the, iii. 168. Englefield Green, delightful week at, ii. 244. English, attitude of the, towards Orientals, iii. 212; ignorance of the Jews, 212. English domestic life _versus_ German, i. 271. English and French working classes, difference between, i. 131. "Englishwoman's Journal" on the Infant Seamstresses, ii. 97. Enjoying the thought of work, ii. 219. Enriched with new ideas after journey to Italy, ii. 182. "Ethics of George Eliot's Works," by J. C. Brown, iii. 266. Evans, Christiana (sister), married to Mr. Edward Clark, surgeon, i. 22; relations between the sisters, 22, 23; her husband's death, 216; plans for her family, 217; letter to her brother Isaac regarding, 318; visit to her sister, ii. 96. Evans, Isaac (brother), recollections of his sister, i. 11; her susceptibility to terror, 12; their happy childhood, 12; his marriage, 61; renewed correspondence with his sister on her marriage with Mr. Cross, iii. 287; notice of his family, 287. Evans, J. C., offers £1000 for a story for American periodical, ii. 94. Evans, Mrs. Samuel (aunt), the Dinah Morris of "Adam Bede," i. 33. Evans, Robert (father), his career, i. 1, 2; removed to Griff, 2; influence of his ideas on his daughter, 4; his position, 8; his wife, partly represented in Mrs. Poyser, 10; her death, 22; removal to Foleshill Road, Coventry, 61; strong disapproval of his daughter's religious views, 75; she visits her brother at Griff, 79; regrets her impetuosity, and returns to Foleshill, 81; his illness, 100; visits Dover with his daughter, 107; trip to Isle of Wight, 120; illness increases, and visits St. Leonards, 135; returns to Coventry, 139; his death, 148. Evidence, the value of, iii. 109. Evil-speaking, contrition for, i. 141. "Fables," by Lord Lytton, iii. 162. Fairness and pity, where necessary, iii. 228. Fame in dreams, ii. 89. Family reunion, iii. 268; joys, iii. 286. Faraday, letter from, acknowledging presentation copy of "Clerical Life," ii. 9. Farming, an epoch in, iii. 271. Faucit, Helen, admiration of, i. 222. Faults, abstention from dwelling on, iii. 89. "Faust," reading in the original, iii. 303. Faux, David, Confectioner (Brother Jacob), written, ii. 199. Fawcett, Henry, articles on Strikes by, ii. 194. "Fawn of Sertorius," i. 108. Fechter in "Hamlet," ii. 225; his "Othello," 232. Feeling old for her years, ii. 193. "Felix Holt," writing commenced, ii. 290; reading for, 292; Blackwood offers £5000 for, 308; pains taken with, 309; finished in excitement, 311; final instalment received from Blackwood, iii. 13; payment for copyright, 13. Feminine characteristics, iii. 310, 311. Ferrier, Mr., translates Kaufmann's article on "Deronda," iii. 216. Feuerbach, translation of, published; first and only time her real name appeared in print, i. 233. Fiction, contemporary, iii. 183. Fiction-reading condemned, i. 36. Fiction-writing, first mention of, i. 296; how I came to write, 298-300. First authorship, i. 42. First novel, i. 298; title of, 299. Flemish and Dutch pictures in Dresden, ii. 44. Florence: view from Fiesole and Bellasguardo, ii. 155; the Duomo and Campanile, 156; the palaces and libraries, 157; the Loggia di Lanza, 158; Santa Maria Novella, 158; Santa Croce and the Carmine, 159; the frescoes, 159; S. Maria Novella, 160; San Michele, the shrine, 160; the Uffizi Gallery, 161; and pictures, 162; Pitti pictures, 162; paintings at the Accademia, 163; Galileo's tower, 164; Michael Angelo's house, 165, 166. Flower, Mr., i. 191. Fontainebleau, visit to, iii. 150. Forster, W. E., his article on Slavery, i. 218; "Life of Dickens," iii. 104. Foster, Professor Michael, his draught of conditions for Lewes scholar studentship, iii. 267, 269. France, the Empire in, iii. 168. Franco-German war, iii. 86, 92. Franklin, Miss Rebecca, her school at Coventry, i. 17; her death, iii. 149. Freethinkers, little sympathy with, as a class, ii. 249. French and English working classes, difference between, i. 131. French revolution of 1848, i. 129. Froude's "Shadows of the Clouds," i. 146. Fuller, Margaret, her Journal, i. 198. Function of art, the, iii. 144. Furnishing, on troubles of, ii. 267. "Futile Lying," letter on, ii. 290. Gambler, a girl, iii. 124. Garibaldi at the Crystal Palace, ii. 276. Gaskell, Mrs., suspected to have written "Adam Bede," ii. 82; letter from, 102; expresses admiration of "Scenes" and "Adam Bede," 107. Gaskell's, Mrs., "Ruth," i. 219. Geneva, life at Campagne Plongeon, i. 151-157; Genevese preachers, 153, 154; _Fête_ of Navigation, 157; effect of change of life, 159; plans for lessons, 160; Baronne de Ludwigsdorff, 161; home remembrances, 170; beauty of scenery, 171; delight in town life, 171; the Juras, 178; last days in, 179. Genevese preachers, i. 153, 154. Genoa, the cathedral, ii. 124. George Eliot.--1819-37: Birth at Arbury farm, i. 1; removal to Griff, 2; anecdotes of father, 9; character of mother, 10; at Dame's school, 10; at Miss Lathom's school at Attleboro, 11; happy childhood, 12; first books read, 13; first journey to Staffordshire, 15; Miss Wallington's school at Nuneaton, 15; writes out "Waverley," 16; favorite books, 17; charade-acting, 17; riot at Nuneaton, 20; first letter to Miss Lewis, 21; mother's illness and death, 22; housekeeper at Griff, 24; life and studies there, 24. 1838-41: First visit to London, i. 28; religious asceticism, 29; nineteenth birthday, 32; religious objections to music, 32; religious reflections, 34; besetting sin, ambition, 35; objections to fiction-reading, 36; first poem, 42; books read and studies pursued, 44; German lessons begun, 45; chart of ecclesiastical history, 46; Italian studies, 49; dislike to housekeeping work, 50; reads Isaac Taylor, 51; visits Birmingham to hear "Messiah," 53; translates German poem, 54; her reading, 57; removal to Foleshill Road, Coventry, 59. 1841-46: Coventry life, i. 61; mental depression, 64; friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 67; reads Charles Hennell's "Inquiry," 67, 68; effect of this book, 74; gives up going to church, 75; family difficulties, 79; regrets her impetuosity, 81; resumes going to church, 82; intimacy with Miss Sara Hennell and Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 83; attitude towards immortality, 84; excursion to Stratford and Malvern, 85; meets Robert Owen, 86; studies German and music, 86, 87; opinion in regard to conformity, 89; translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," 90; despair about publication of Strauss, 94; trip to the Highlands, 97. 1846-49: Strauss translation published, i. 107; classical books wanted, 108; suspected of novel-writing, 108; reading Foster's life, 109; thoughts on Jesus at Emmaus, 110; a child's idea of God, 111, 112; visits London and hears "Elijah," 112; re-reading Hennell's "Inquiry," 119; visit to Isle of Wight with father, 120; admiration of Richardson, 121; delight in George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," 122; dislike to Jews, 125; supremacy of Hebrew poetry, 125; admiration of Roberts and Creswick, 127; opinion of Mr. Dawson the lecturer, 129; sympathy with revolution, 130; France and England contrasted, 131; sympathy with nonconformity, 133; visit to St. Leonards, 135; father's illness, 135; mental depression, 136; how to be overcome, 136; admiration of Louis Blanc, 137; recovery from depression, 138; opinion of "Jane Eyre," 138; meets Emerson, 138; again suffering from depression, 141; contrition for evil-speaking, 141; reading Macaulay's "History," 142; bodily suffering, 143; on the influence of Sand's and Rousseau's writings, 143, 144; writes review of the "Nemesis of Faith," 145; translates Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus," 147; father's death, 148. 1849-50: Goes abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 150; Geneva, life at Campagne Plongeon, 151,152; prophetic anticipation of position seven years later, 158; effect of change of life, 159; plans for lessons, 160; finds apartments in Geneva, 164; enjoyment of society, 165; need of encouragement, 165; life in Geneva, 169, 170; yearning for friends at home, 170; remarks on translations of Spinoza, 172; desire for a woman's duty, 173; portrait by M. d'Albert, 178; remarks on education of children, 179; leaving Geneva, 180. 1850-54: Return to England, 181; reviews Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" in _Westminster_, 184; assistant editor of _Westminster Review_, 186; introduced to Mr. Lewes, 189; intimacy begins, 192; help in despondency, 198; growing intimacy with Mr. Herbert Spencer, 201; dislike of scrap-work, 203; visit to Edinburgh, 211; an editor's life, 214, 215; ill with rheumatism, 218; interest in America, 219; growing intimacy with Mr. Lewes, 221, 232; contemplates publishing "The Idea of a Future Life," 229; union with Mr. Lewes, 234, 235; letter to Mrs. Bray, 235, 236. 1854-55: Visits Antwerp with Mr. Lewes, i. 239; extracts from journal, 239 _et seq._; Weimar, i. 240-251; Berlin recollections, 251-268; work at Weimar and Berlin, 268; remarks on books read, 268-271; return to England, 271. 1855-57: Articles written, i. 275; effect of article on Cumming, 278; reading on physiology, 279; miscellaneous writing, 280; Spinoza's "Ethics," translation finished, 281; wishes not to be known as translator, 283; articles on Young and Riehl, 286; tendency to scientific accuracy, 287; naturalistic experiences, 288; first mention of fiction-writing, 296; "how I came to write fiction," 298; correspondence about "Amos Barton," 300; "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305; Blackwood's high admiration of the story, 307; name of George Eliot assumed, 309; artistic bent, 310; Caterina and the dagger scene, 313; trip to the Scilly Isles, 313; social life at St. Mary's, 316; on conclusions of stories, 319; Jersey recollections, 319-322; Mr. Liggins, 323; opinions of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story," 324, 325; happiness in her life, 328; Blackwood's opinion of "Janet's Repentance," 329; haunted by new story, 334; "Adam Bede" begun, 337; receives £120 for first edition of "Clerical Life," 337; unbelief in others' love, 337; sympathy with individuals, 339; objection to theism, 339; evening studies, 342; Major Blackwood suspects identity of George Eliot, 324; review of the year 1857. 1858: The _Times_ reviews of "Scenes of Clerical Life," ii. 1; letter from Charles Dickens, recognizing woman's hand, 3; from Froude, 3; from Mrs. Carlyle, 7; reveals herself to John Blackwood, 10; visit to Germany, 14-46; progress with "Adam Bede," 32; latter half written, 42; description of life at Dresden, 45; history of "Adam Bede," 48-52; retrospect of year, 55. 1859-60: Reading up for "Mill on the Floss," ii. 58; letter to John Blackwood on "Adam Bede," 58; wishes Carlyle to read her novels, 63; awakening to fame, 68; Mr. Liggins said to be author of "Adam Bede," 71; finished the "Lifted Veil," 75; reveals herself to Brays as author of "Adam Bede," 83; trip to Switzerland, 87; fourth edition (5000) of "Adam Bede" sold in a fortnight, 88; receives £800 beyond bargain for success, 102; 16,000 sold in one year, 107; Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 115; "Mill on the Floss" finished, 116; start for Italy, 116. 1860: First journey to Italy, ii. 120; Rome, first sight of, 126; description of Naples, 144, 145; visit to Pompeii, 148; Florence, 155; first mention of Italian novel, 168; Venice, 172; home by Berne and Geneva, 181; enriched with new ideas, 182. 1860-61: "Mill on the Floss" success, ii. 185; sitting to Lawrence for portrait, 194; independence secured, 203; the queen's admiration of "Mill on the Floss," 203; success of "Silas Marner," 214; second journey to Italy, 216; hopeful about future work, 220; began "Romola," 230; studying for, 235, 236. 1862-65: Begins "Romola" again, ii. 238; offered £10,000 for "Romola" for the _Cornhill_, but idea given up, 244; £7000 accepted under new terms, 245; the effect of writing "Romola," 255; continued ill-health, 256, 258; letter from Frederick Maurice, 259; third visit to Italy, 278; trying a drama, 280; retrospect of year 1864, 282; "A Word for the Germans" written, 288; "Felix Holt" begun, 290; readings, 292; expedition to Brittany, 296; retrospect of 1865, 299. 1866: Mr. Harrison's legal help in "Felix Holt," ii. 303, 304, 310; offered £5000 for "Felix Holt" by Blackwood, 308; visit to Holland and Germany, 312; "The Spanish Gypsy" taken up again, 317; reading for, 321; start for Spain, 324. 1867: Journey to Spain, iii. 1; learning Spanish, 3; letters from Spain, 4-9; return to the Priory, 9; two months' visit to North Germany, 14; acquaintance with Mrs. Cross and family, 15; "Address to the Working Men," 19. 1868: Month's visit to Torquay, iii. 25; "Spanish Gypsy" finished, 29; notes on the "Spanish Gypsy," 30; on the writing of poetry instead of novels, 36; six weeks' journey to Baden, 37; meditating subject of Timoleon, 49; retrospect of the year, 50; cheap edition of novels, 51. 1869-72: Poem on "Agatha," iii. 55; writing "How Lisa Loved the King," 56; fourth visit to Italy, 57; religion of the future, 62; "Sonnets on Childhood" finished, 65; the phenomena of spiritualism, 67; the Byron scandal, 72; "Legend of Jubal" begun, 73; letter on the Positivist problem, 75; visit to Germany, 76; three days' visit to Oxford, 80; growing dislike of migratory life, 82; "Armgart" begun, 85; industrial schemes, 90; visit to Petersfield, 94; visit from Tennyson, 99; delight in intellectual activity, 101; reception of "Middlemarch," 103; Foster's "Life of Dickens," 104; "Middlemarch" finished, 121; a month's visit to Homburg, 122; a girl gambler, 124; memorial article on author of "Thorndale," 126; "Maga" on "Middlemarch," 130. 1873-75: Reception of "Middlemarch," iii. 138; Dutch translation of novels, 139; German reprints, 140; visit to Cambridge, 147; visit to the Master of Balliol, 149; nine weeks' trip to the Continent, 150; another book simmering in her thoughts, 157; retrospect of 1873, 160; cheaper edition of novels, 162; "Legend of Jubal" published, 167; journey to the Ardennes, 176; sales of her books, 180; value of early religious experience, 182; not satisfied with "Deronda," 193; depression in finishing, 194. 1876-78: Public interest in "Deronda," iii. 199; Mrs. Stowe's admiration of "Deronda," 202; letter to J. W. Cross, 204; trip to the Continent, 205; Jewish appreciation of "Deronda," 209; Dr. Adler's lecture on, 216; Mrs. Stowe and the Byron case, 221; appreciation of Tennyson, 229; gaining strength at Witley, 231; meets Crown Prince and Princess of Germany, 236; visit to Oxford, 236; Mr. Lewes's ill-health, 239; reception at the Priory, 241; Mr. Lewes's last illness and death, 245-247. 1879-80: First weeks of loneliness, iii. 249; announcement of "Theophrastus Such" delayed, 252; project of Physiological Studentship, 254; dissatisfied with "Theophrastus," 254; letter to J. W. Cross asking counsel, 258; reception of "Theophrastus" by the public, 263, 264; serious renal attack, 265; conditions for the studentship, 267; renewed interest in social news, 270; Dr. Roy appointed to studentship, 275; death of John Blackwood, 276; engagement to Mr. Cross, 279; married at St. George's, Hanover Square, 283; left for the Continent, 283; letters from France and Italy, 284-294; Mr. Cross's illness in Venice, 294; arrival in England, 295; recurrence of illness, 300; recovery of strength, 313; settled in Cheyne Walk, 313; first appearance of sore throat, 315; letter to Mrs. Strachey (unfinished), 316; sudden death, 316. German editions of "Middlemarch," iii. 114. German poem, translation of, i. 54. German reading, iii. 124. German Revolution of '48 caused by real oppression, i. 258. German translation of "Adam Bede," ii. 116; first volume received, 116. Germans, Vivier's anecdotes of, i. 264, 265; domestic life of, 271. Germany, North, journey to, iii. 14; places revisited and new scenes, 15. Germany, second visit to, 1854: Munich, ii. 14-34; Ischl, 37; Vienna, 38; Prague, 40; Dresden, 45; Leipzig, 46. Germany, visit to, in 1854; extracts from journal: Weimar, i. 240; Berlin, 251, 252. Gift of a vase from Miss Mary Cross, iii. 166. Girl gambler, a, iii. 124. Girton College scheme, iii. 18. Goethe on Spinoza, ii. 298. Goschen, Mr., dinner with, iii. 236; meets Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, 236. Got's acting, iii. 101. Granada, the Alhambra, iii. 7; view from, 8. Grand Chartreuse, expedition to the, iii. 285. Grandcourt and Lush, iii. 200. Grandison, Sir Charles, i. 121. Green, Professor T., iii. 149. Ground of moral action, iii. 178. Gurney, Mr. Edmund, iii. 147. Gurney, Rev. Archer, on "Scenes of Clerical Life," i. 324. Guthrie, Dr., address by, i. 230. Hamilton, Sir William, valuable contributions, i. 278. Hamley, Colonel (now General Sir Edward Hamley), impressions of, ii. 315; thanks for letter to the _Times_, iii. 93. Handel Festival, the, ii. 82. Hannay, Mr., on "Romola," ii. 252. Happiness in recovery of health, iii. 313. Hare, Mrs. Julius, ii. 263; her death, 273. Harrison, Frederic, letter to, on industrial co-operation, ii. 303; his legal advice in "Felix Holt," 303; more consultations with, 305, 306; letter to, on æsthetic teaching, etc., 318; receives a copy of "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 36; consultation with, 186. Harrogate, its lovely walks, ii. 281. Haughton, Mrs., letters to: on contrition for evil-speaking, i. 141; on friends at home, 159; on the bondage of luxuries, 177; on her proof-reading, 231. Haunted by new story, i. 334. Hawthorne, admiration of, i. 208. Heine, article on, in _Westminster_, i. 279. Helps, Arthur, dinner with, i. 230; incident in Spain, 242; on "Clerical Life," ii. 2. Hemans's "The Forest Sanctuary," i. 57. Hennell, Charles, analysis of "An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity," i. 68-74; his marriage, 85. Hennell, Miss Mary, author of "An Outline of the various Social Systems founded on the Principle of Co-operation," her death, i. 84. Hennell, Miss Sara, first meeting with, i. 82; letters to, on mental characteristics, 84; dangers of nonconformity, 89, 90; translating Strauss, 92; Strauss difficulties, 96; title of translation, 98; finishing translation, 101; longing for idleness, 102; thankfulness for help in translation, 103; visit to Mrs. Hennell, 107; desire for classics, 108; relief from work, 109; admiration of "Heliados," 111; philosophy and religion, 121; "Live and teach," 122; "sweet uses" of adversity, 135; depression by father's illness, 136; the "Romanticist," 139; a longing for sympathy, 141; bodily suffering, 143; return to England, 180, 181; Mr. Chapman's soirées, 190; delight with change of life, 206; letter from Berlin, 262; on essay "Christianity and Infidelity," 311; peacefully busy, 334; delight in Mr. Lewes's books, ii. 11; on the death of a mother, 12; admiration of Liebig, 25; sympathy with, on her mother's death, 32; letter from Dresden, 45; about Mrs. Clarke, 66, 67; recollections of Mr. Liggins, 72; authorship acknowledged to, 83; "expecting disappointments," 201, 202; settled in new house, 204, 205; on the blessings of good health, 229; old remembrances, 233; on her low health, 306; a birthday letter, iii. 129. Hereditary misfortunes, iii. 34. Hereford, Dean of, i. 227. Herts, country-house in, iii. 186. Higher education of women, iii. 13, 146. History of "Adam Bede," ii. 48-52. "History of Europe," Alison's, i. 282. History reading, iii. 234. Holbein's Madonna, ii. 42. Holland and Germany, journey to, ii. 312; the route taken, 315. Holland, Sir Henry, visit from, ii. 321. Holmwood Common, iii. 174. Homburg, the gaming-tables, iii. 122. Home, enjoyment of, iii. 208. Home for Girls, iii. 181. Home life, i. 13; iii. 107, 108. "Horsedealer in Syria," ii. 101. Housekeeping work, dislike of, i. 50. How I came to write fiction, i. 298-300. Hungarian, "Adam Bede" translated into, ii. 115. Hunt, Leigh, his "The Religion of the Heart," i. 226. Huth, Mrs. and Miss, iii. 147. Hutton, R. H., letter to, on "Romola," ii. 261. "Huxley on M. Comte," Dr. Congreve's article on, iii. 58. Huxley, Mr., an agreeable evening with, i. 220. Hyrtl, the German anatomist, ii. 39. "Idea of a Future Life," contemplates publishing, i. 229. Ilfracombe recollections: journey to, i. 285; naturalistic experiences, 288; zoological expeditions, 289; Devonshire lanes, 289; Rev. Mr. Tugwell, 290; the scientific spirit, 291; leave for Tenby, 292. Illness a partial death, iii. 155. Illustrations in cheap edition, not _queerer_ than in other books, iii. 217. Impetuosity regretted, i. 81. "Impossibility of marrying," dangers of speaking of, ii. 212. Incentive to production, iii. 224. Independence of external good, i. 81. Indian newspaper-writing, iii. 237. Individual versus the general, the, iii. 33. Industrious poor, helping the, iii. 90. Inkermann, battle of, a mere brave blundering, iii. 182. Inman, Dr., Liverpool, ii. 114. Innspruck and Wildbad, iii. 294, 295. Intellectual activity, enjoyment of, iii. 101. Intellectual superciliousness, ii. 255. "Introduction to the Science of Language," iii. 303. "Iphigenia in Aulis," iii. 145. Irregular verses, the use of, iii. 40. Ischl, the Gmunden See, ii. 37; voyage down the Danube, 38. Isle of Wight, trip to the, ii. 72, 256. Italian novel, first mention of, ii. 168. Italian studies, i. 49. Italy, first journey to, 1860: Turin, ii. 122; Genoa, 123; Leghorn, 124; Pisa, 125; Rome, 126-144; Naples, 144; Salerno, 151; Pæstum, 152; Amalfi, 153; Sorrento, 153, 154; Florence, 155; Bologna, 168; Padua, 170; Venice, 172; Verona, 179; Milan, 179-181. Italy, second journey to, ii. 216; stay at Florence, 217; renewed delight in, 219; work during the visit, 221. Italy, third visit to, ii. 277; Mr. Burton's companionship, 278; the Alps by the St. Gothard, 278. Italy, fourth visit to, iii. 57; places visited, 58. Italy, fifth visit to: Milan, iii. 288; Verona, 289; Venice, 291. "Jane Eyre," opinion of, i. 138. Jansa, Herr, takes lessons from, ii. 271. Jersey recollections, 1857: scenery, i. 319; inland walks, 320, 321; coast beauties, 321; books read, 322. Jesus at Emmaus, thoughts on, i. 110. Jewish appreciation of "Deronda," iii. 207, 216. Jews, dislike of, i. 125; English ignorance of the, iii. 212. Jones, Mr. Owen, decorates the new house, ii. 265, 266. Journal, 1855: Third book of "Ethics," preface written, i. 273; _Westminster Review_, 274; wrote for the _Leader_, 275. 1856: Working at Spinoza, i. 281; first mention of fiction-writing, 296; "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305. 1857: Pleasant letters regarding "Gilfil," i. 323, 324; finished "Janet's Repentance," 336; began "Adam Bede," 336; books read, 342; the year's work, 344. 1858: News from the city regarding "Clerical Life," ii. 12; visit to Germany, 14-46; "Adam Bede" finished, 48. 1859: A trip to Lucerne, ii. 87; return to England, 88; declined American offer for new story, 94; anxiety and doubt about new novel, 97. 1860: Seeing friends, ii. 114; first journey to Italy, 120-182. 1861: Second journey, ii. 216; struggling constantly with depression, 227; continued ill-health, 243-245; despondency, 279. 1868: Books, reading, iii. 25; retrospect of year, 50. 1869: Work in prospect, iii. 55; beginning "Middlemarch," 69; "Legend of Jubal" begun, 73. 1870: In languid health, iii. 79. 1871: First part of "Middlemarch" published, iii. 104. 1873: Success of "Middlemarch," iii. 138; retrospect of year, 159. 1875: Sales of books, iii. 180. 1876: Depression in writing "Deronda," iii. 194. 1877: Cabinet edition decided on, iii. 230; declined to renew copyright agreement, 230; close of her journal, 233. 1879: Seeing visitors, iii. 260. 1880: Her marriage with Mr. Cross, iii. 283; came to 4 Cheyne Walk, 311. Jowett, Mr., Master of Balliol, visit to, iii. 149. Julian the Apostate, Strauss's pamphlet on, i. 139. Justification in writing, iii. 173. Kaufmann, Dr. David, letter to, on his estimate of "Daniel Deronda," iii. 222; on the function of the teacher, 226; on Lewes's death, 257. Kenelm Chillingly, iii. 141. Knight, Charles, i. 202. La Bruyère's wisdom, iii. 235. Lamartine as a poet, i. 130. Languages, her knowledge of, iii. 305. La Vernia, description of, ii. 223. Lawrence wishes to take her portrait, ii. 115; sits for it, 194. Lecky's "History of Rationalism," ii. 291. Lecture on "Daniel Deronda," by Dr. Adler, iii. 216. Leeds, the horrible smoke of, iii. 43; its fine hospital, 44. "Legend of Jubal," some verses written, iii. 73; published as "Legend of Jubal, and other Poems," 167; new edition of, 169. Leghorn, the Jewish synagogue, ii. 125; to Civita Vecchia, 125; a pleasant companion, 126. Leipzig, two days at, ii. 45; its picture-gallery, 45. Leroux, Pierre, his theories, i. 194. Letters to her friends almost all destroyed, ii. 207. "Letter to Berthelot," Renan's, ii. 269. Lewes, Charles, first letter to, ii. 91; on musical parties, 98; on liking for algebra, 106; returns from Hofwyl, 185; receives appointment in Post-office, 194; letters from Florence to, 216, 219, 221; from Isle of Wight, 257; his engagement, 278; letters to, on Harrison's paper, iii. 262; on printing the "Problems," 276; from Grenoble, 285; from Milan, 288; from Venice, 291; from Stuttgart and Wildbad, 294, 295; on his visit to St. Blasien, 297; on recurrence of illness, 300. Lewes, George H., i. 188; first introduction to Miss Evans, 189; meet at the theatre, 192; article on "Julia von Krüdener," 192; his Comte papers, 209; growing intimacy, 221; his "History of Philosophy," 227; illness, 231; intimate relations with Miss Evans, 232; their union, 235; completed life of Goethe at Weimar, 267; estimation of George Eliot, 277; necessity for hard work, 277; proposes sending boys to Hofwyl, 284; goes to Switzerland with them, 297; highly pleased with "Amos Barton," 300; letter to John Blackwood with MS. of "Scenes of Clerical Life," 300; George Eliot revealed to John Blackwood, ii. 10; suggestions in "Adam Bede," 49, 50; extract from Journal, 55; "Physiology of Common Life," 92; "Studies in Animal Life," 113; dispassionate judgment, 202; delicate health, 223; busy with Aristotle, 233; "History of Science" begun, 243; views of Bible-reading, 251; buoyant nature, 290; walking expedition with Mr. Spencer, iii. 15; acquaintance with Mrs. Cross, 15; visits Bonn, 20; death of his mother, 91; proposed for Rectorship of St. Andrews, 232; continued illness, 240; his death, 247. Lewes, Herbert, his death, iii. 189. Lewes Studentship proposed, iii. 253; plans for, and trustees, 254. Lewes, Thornton, leaves for Natal, ii. 264; returns, iii. 63; his death, 73. Lewis, Miss, Leamington, iii. 192. Lewis, Miss, letters to: On first visit to London, i. 28; on living for eternity, 30; emulation of Wilberforce, 31; oratorios, 32; bad effect of novels, 37; religious controversies, 39; first authorship, 42; studies pursued, 44; Italian studies, 49; Mrs. Somerville's "Connection of the Physical Sciences," 50; opinions of Isaac Taylor, 51; German translation, 54; a walled-in world, 55; sensitiveness, 57; war's purgations, 59; satisfaction with new life, 62; depression of mind, 64; mind requiring rest, 65; desire for brain waves, 66; religious doubts and difficulties, 74, 75; on self-denial, 78. Lichfield, recollections of, ii. 96. Liddell, Dean, Oxford, iii. 173. Liebig, Professor, ii. 23; admiration of, 25, 29. "Life of Goethe," i. 275. "Lifted Veil," finished April, 1859, ii. 75; the idea of the story, iii. 141. Liggins, Mr., first mention of, i. 323; calls himself George Eliot, ii. 71; some recollections of, 72; Mr. Anders's apology, 78; Mr. Bracebridge's letter regarding, 99. Limitations of scientists, iii. 182. Lincoln, President, anecdote of, iii. 82. Lincoln, the Rector of, iii. 81. Lincolnshire, visits to, iii. 288. "Lisa," writing rhymed poem on, iii. 55. Literary biography, iii. 163. Literary taste at bookstalls, iii. 51. Littlehampton, trip to, ii. 247. Liturgy of the English Church and the Bible, ii. 226. Living abroad, drawbacks to, iii. 203. Lockhart, Captain, his writings, iii. 98, 193. Lonely days: "here I and sorrow sit," iii. 249. Louis Blanc, admiration of, i. 138. Louis Philippe and his sons, i. 130. Lowell's "My Study Windows," iii. 96. Lucerne, a trip to, ii. 87; visit from Mrs. Congreve, 87. Lush and Grandcourt, iii. 200. Lushington, Mrs. Vernon, iii. 220. Lyrics for "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 16. Lytton, Hon. Mrs. Robert (now Lady Lytton), letter of sympathy to, iii. 83; on thoughts of death, 99, 100; on Lord Lytton's Indian experiences, 281. Lytton, Hon. Robert (now Lord Lytton), on pronunciation in "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 52; explanation of errors, 52. Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, letter from, thanking author of "Adam Bede," ii. 74, 75; visit from, 115; criticises "Adam Bede," 115; his criticisms of "Maggie," 190. Macaulay, interest in, i. 142. Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" reviewed, i. 183; extracts from, 183-185, 190. "Macmillan," article on "The Mill on the Floss" in, ii. 212. Macmillan, Mr., his proposal for volume on Shakespeare, iii. 231. Madrid, the Gallery, iii. 9. Madonna di San Sisto, first impression of, ii. 43. Main, Mr., collector of "The Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot," iii. 103; opinions of, 105. Maine, Sir Henry, on Lewes's "Physiology," iii. 267. Malvern, trip to, ii. 228; improved health from, 230, 231. "Man's Nature and Development," i. 187. "Marie of Villefranche," by Miss Mary Cross, iii. 100. Marriage, possibilities in, iii. 181. Marriage, the ideal, iii. 142. Martineau, Harriet, "The Crofton Boys," i. 93; meeting with, 94, 193; invitation from, 197; article on "Niebuhr," 203; visit to, at Ambleside, 212; respect for her, ii. 103; her autobiography, iii. 214, 219. Martineau, James, i. 192; critique of Kingsley's "Phaethon," 219; on Sir William Hamilton, 223; invitation from, 54; "Comte," 55. Martineau, Maria, her death, ii. 274. "Masculine woman," dislike of the, iii. 308. Masson, Mr., on Recent Philosophy, ii. 298. Mathematics, her love for, iii. 305. Matlock, recollections of, iii. 47. Maurice, Frederick, generous tribute from, ii. 259. Mazzini, asked to write on "Freedom _v._ Despotism," i. 194; his speeches, 198. Mazzini Fund, the, ii. 294. Mazzini's death, iii. 113. "Meliorist," the word, iii. 217. Memorial article on author of "Thorndale," iii. 126. Mendelssohn's "Letters," iii. 84. Mental characteristics described, i. 84. "Middlemarch," writing introduction, iii. 69; reading for, 71, 72; the design of, 99; anticipations of, 103; first part published, 104; French and German interest in, 112; delayed by ill-health, 113; £1200 from Harpers for reprint, 114; finished, 121; reviewed in _Blackwood's Magazine_, 130; new edition called for, 153; number sold in 1873, 160; December, 1874, 20,000 sold, 180. Milan, the Ambrosian Library, ii. 180; the "Brera," 180; Church of San Ambrogio, 181; the "Luini" pictures, iii. 288. Military men, articles by, iii. 265. Mill, John Stuart, his "Autobiography," iii. 158. "Mill on the Floss," first volume finished as "Sister Maggie," ii. 101; Blackwood's proposals for, 110; discussions as to title, 111; Blackwood's suggestion adopted, 112; Harpers, New York, give £300 for American edition, 115; third volume finished, 116; inscription on, 116; sad at finishing, 117; first and second editions (6000) sold, 185. Miracle play at Antwerp, the, ii. 316. Miscellaneous writing, i. 280. Misconception of others, on, ii. 197. "Miss Brooke," experimenting on, iii. 91. Mixed marriages in Germany, ii. 28. Modern German art, ii. 27. Mohl, Madame, dinner with, iii. 1. Moleschott, of Zurich, ii. 182. Molière's "Misanthrope," ii. 108. Mommsen's "History of Rome," ii. 264. Mont Cenis, passage of, ii. 120. Moral action, ground of, iii. 178. Moral sanction is obedience to facts, iii. 34. Morality with the "Bible shut," i. 230. More, Mrs. Hannah, her letters, i. 123. Müller, Max, ii. 239; iii. 149. Munich, the opera, ii. 18; Samson and Delilah, 18; Schwanthaler's "Bavaria," 19; appreciation of Rubens, 20; Catholic and Protestant worship, 21; the Glyptothek and Pinnacothek, 21; Kaulbach, Bodenstedt, and Genelli, 22, 23; Professor Wagner, 23; Professor Martius, 23; Liebig, 23, 25; Heyse and Geibel, 23; music of the "Faust," 24; Professor Löher, 24; Albert Dürer's paintings, 24; Bluntschli and Melchior Meyr, 25; the _Tafel-rund_, 26; the Siebolds, 26, 33; Kaulbach's pictures, 27; mixed marriages, 28; porcelain-painting, 30; Madame Bodenstedt, 30; visit to Grosshesselohe, 31; Lewes leaves for Switzerland, 33; leaves for Dresden, 33. Murillo's St. Rodriguez, ii. 43. Music, cheap, inconveniences connected with, in England, ii. 81. Musical evenings with Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford, ii. 227, 229, 230. Musical parties, ii. 99. Myers, Mr. Frederick, Cambridge, iii. 147. "My Vegetarian Friend," written, ii. 285. Nancy, the Germans at, iii. 151. Naples: first impressions, ii. 144; visits to Baiæ, Avernus, and Misena, 145; to Pozzuoli and Capo di Monte, 146; the Cemetery, 147; Museo Borbonico, 147; Pompeii, 148; its remains, 149; beauty of, 150; the pictures at, 151; Giotto's frescoes, 151; leave for Florence, 154. Nearness of death, imagining the, iii. 170. Negative attitude unsatisfactory, iii. 156. "Nemesis of Faith," reviews the, i. 145; note from Froude, 145. New house, enjoyment of, ii. 269, 270. Newman, Francis, i. 140; iii. 165. Newman's "Apologia," ii. 280. Newman's, J. H., "Lectures on the Position of Catholics," i. 192. New misery in writing, i. 227. New Year's wishes, iii. 139. Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens," i. 65. Nightingale, Miss Florence, note from, i. 206; ii. 61. Noel, Mr., i. 191. Nonconformity, effect of, i. 79; dangers of, 90. Normandy, trip to, ii. 296. _North British_, favorable review, ii. 199. Notes on the "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 30, 31. Novel-writing, suspected of, i. 108. Nuneaton, riot at, i. 20. Nürnberg, description of, ii. 14; its roofs and balconies, 15; the Frauen-Kirche, 16; effect of Catholic "Function," 17; Albert Dürer's house, 17. Old people's judgments, i. 118. "Old Town Folks," appreciation of, iii. 66. Oliphant, Lawrence, and the colonizing of Palestine, iii. 252. Oliphant, Mrs., the novelist, ii. 11. _Once a Week_, a story requested for, ii. 104, 106. Oratorios at Birmingham, i. 53. Oratorios condemned, i. 32. Orientals, English attitude towards, iii. 211. Osborne, Bernal, on "Deronda," iii. 200. Otter, Francis, letter to, on his engagement, iii. 180, 181. Owen, Professor, i. 202; on the cerebellum, 210; sends his "Palæontology," ii. 116. Owen, Robert, i. 86. Oxford, first visit to, iii. 80; people met with, 80. Oxford Tracts and Christian Year, i. 48. Padua, Church of San Antonio, ii. 170; the Arena Chapel, 171; Giotto's painting, 171. Pæstum, the Temple of Neptune, ii. 152. Paris, visit to Comte's apartment, ii. 286. Parkes, Miss (Madame Belloc), friendship with, i. 195; iii. 289. "Pascal," by Principal Tulloch, iii. 235. Passionate affliction, defence against, iii. 84. Patience, the need of, iii. 128. "Paul Bradley," by Mrs. Bray, iii. 164. Pays no visits in London, ii. 215. Peabody, George, his magnificent gift, ii. 245. Pears, Mrs., letters to: on religious difficulties, i. 76; on desire for truth, 77; on her impetuosity, 81; her friendship with Mr. Robert Evans, 147. Penmaenmawr, ii. 96. Permanent influence of ideas, the, iii. 89. Persistence in application, iii. 304. Personal bearing, her, iii. 310. Personal portraiture objected to, iii. 228. Personality, independence of our, iii. 84. Phenomena of spiritualism, the, iii. 67. Philosophical Club, first meeting of, ii. 248; dissolution of, 253. "Philosophy of Necessity," the, i. 339. Phrenological indications, i. 78. Phrenology, the position of, i. 340. Physiological reading, i. 279. Physiological Studentship, the purpose of, iii. 256. "Physiology for Schools," Mrs. Bray's, ii. 267. Pigott, Mr. Edward Smith, i. 293. Pisa, description of, ii. 125; the cathedral, 125. Pity and fairness, where requisite, iii. 228. Plain living and high thinking, iii. 161. Plombières and the Vosges, iii. 150. Poem in _Christian Observer_, i. 43. Poetry instead of novels, on writing, iii. 36. Poetry of Christianity, i. 93; ii. 251. Poets, the value of, iii. 184. Political and religious standpoint, iii. 308. Pompeii and its remains, ii. 149, 150, 154. Ponsonby, Hon. Mrs. (now Lady Ponsonby), letter to, on the idea of God an exaltation of human goodness, etc., iii. 176; on the desire to know the difficulties of others, 184; on excess of public-houses, 188; on pity and fairness, 228. Poor, helping industrious, iii. 90. "Popular author," characteristics of the, ii. 59. Popular Concerts, Monday, ii. 204, 248. Popular judgment of books, iii. 62. Popular preacher, a, iii. 87. Positivism in "The Spanish Gypsy," iii. 49. Positivism regarded as one-sided, ii. 224. Possession, the sense of, iii. 306. Power of the will, the, iii. 179. Poyser, Mrs., her dialogue, ii. 54; quoted in House of Commons, 69. Prague: the Jewish burial-ground, ii. 40; impressive view, 41. Preacher, a popular, criticised, iii. 87. Presentation copies never sent, ii. 216. Press notices of "Adam Bede," ii. 60. "Pretended comforts," ii. 296. Prince Albert, admiration of, i. 202. Printed rancor, on, iii. 221. Priory, receptions at the, iii. 241. Private correspondence almost all destroyed, ii. 207. Private theatricals, i. 176, 178. "Problems of Life and Mind," by G. H. Lewes, iii. 203, 210. _Prospective Review_, i. 219; on Goethe, 224. Psychical troubles, i. 232. Public-houses, excess of, iii. 188. Public interest in "Deronda," iii. 199. Public school and University education, iii. 309. Publishing books, on different methods of, iii. 190, 191. "Pug," letter to John Blackwood on, ii. 91. Quackery of infidelity, i. 89. _Quarterly_ on "The Mill on the Floss," ii. 201. Queen's admiration of "The Mill on the Floss," ii. 203. Quiet joy in success, ii. 72. Quirk, Mr., finally renounces Liggins, ii. 96. Race characteristics, i. 125. Ragatz, "The Cure" at, iii. 206; gain in health from, 210. Rancor, on printed, iii. 221. Rawlinson, Professor, iii. 80. Reade, Charles, on "Adam Bede," ii. 70. Reading aloud, the effect of her, iii. 302, 303. Reading world very narrow, iii. 131. Reeves, Sims, singing "Adelaide," ii. 205. Religion and art, i. 126; the development of, iii. 62. Religious controversies, i. 39, 47; aspirations, 63; doubts and difficulties, 74, 76; forms and ceremonies, ii. 205; assemblies, the need of, iii. 156; and political standpoint, 308. Renan, estimate of, ii. 269; his appearance, iii. 3. Renan's "Vie de Jésus," ii. 260. Renunciation, on, iii. 35. Repugnance to autobiography, iii. 221. Responsibility of authorship, ii. 89. Retrospect of year 1819, i. 4, 5; of 1857, 346; of 1858, ii. 55; of 1864, 285; of 1865, 300; of 1868, iii. 50; of year 1873, 159. Reviews, effect of, ii. 192; abstains from reading, 193. Reviews of "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 40, 44. Revolution, sympathy with, i. 130. Revolutionary spirit, i. 138. "Revue des Deux Mondes," review of "Adam Bede," ii. 105; Lewes accepts editorship of periodical on plan of, ii. 287. Rewards of the artist, the, ii. 107. Richmond Park, the charms of, i. 326; sunset effects, 341. Riehl's "Die Familie," i. 344. Ritualistic services at Ryde, iii. 91. Rive, M. le Professeur de la, his lectures, i. 175, 177. Romance in real life, a, ii. 258, 259. Rome: from Civita Vecchia to, ii. 126; first sight of, 126; disappointed with, 127; view from the Capitol, 128; the Sabine and Alban hills, 128; the temples and palaces, 129; the arches and columns, 129, 130; the Coliseum and baths, 130; the Lateran and Vatican sculptures, 131; St. Peter's, 132; mediæval churches, 133; Sistine chapel, 133; palaces, 133, 134; illumination of St. Peter's, 134; the Quirinal, 134; San Pietro in Vincoli, 134; Michael Angelo's "Moses," 135; modern artists, 135; Riedel and Overbeck, 136; Pamfili Doria gardens, 137; Villa Albani and Frascati, 137; Tivoli, 138; pictures at the Capitol, 139; the Lateran Museum, 139; Shelley's and Keats's graves, 140; removal to apartments, 142; the French occupation, 143; beautiful mothers and children, 143; the Pope's blessing, 144. "Romola," first conception of, ii. 197; began the first chapter, 230; studying for, 234; begins it again, 238; Smith offers £10,000 for it to appear in the _Cornhill_, 244; £7000 accepted, 245; slow progress in writing, 246, 250; opinions of, 252; strain of writing, 255; finished Part XIII., 255; completion of, 256; application to translate into Italian, iii. 216. Rosehill, visit to, i. 193. Roundell, Mr. and Mrs. Charles, iii. 149. Roy, Dr. Charles, elected Lewes Physiological student, iii. 275; his treatise on "Blood Pressure," 298. Rubens, appreciation of, ii. 20. Rumors of authorship, ii. 13. Ruskin and Alfieri, reading, iii. 292. Ruskin's Works, opinion of, ii. 5. Ryde, visit to, iii. 91; ritualistic service at, 91. Salerno, visit to, ii. 151. Salzburg, description of scenery, ii. 36. Sand's, George, "Lettres d'un Voyageur," i. 122. Saragossa, the old cathedral, iii. 5. Saturday Popular Concerts, last visit to, iii. 315. _Saturday Review_, the, i. 281. Saveney on "La Physique Moderne," iii. 3. Scarborough, visit to, ii. 281. "Scenes of Clerical Life:" "Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton," i. 299; offered to Blackwood, 300; accepted, 304; sensitiveness of author, 304; "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305; "Amos Barton," published in January (1856) Magazine, 305; opinions regarding authorship, 308, 309; assumes the name of George Eliot, 310; Caterina and the dagger scene, 313; "Mr. Gilfil" finished, 319; epilogue to, 319; opinions of, 324; "Janet's Repentance" begun, 326; Blackwood's opinion of, 328; increased circulation, 342; favorable opinions of, ii. 10. Scherer, Professor, Geneva, iii. 8. School-fellows, excels her, i, 19. Schwalbach, description of, ii. 312. Scientists, limitations of, iii. 182. Scilly Islands, recollections of: St. Mary's, i. 314; Beauties of the coast, 314; sunlight on the waves, 315; social life, 316. Scotch Reign of Terror, disbelief in a, i. 132. Scotland, trip to, i. 97; visit to, ii. 275. Scott Commemoration, afraid of journey to, iii. 97, 98. Scott, Life of Sir Walter, ii. 61. Scrap-work, dislike of, i. 203. Sculpture and painting, i. 127. Sensibility to criticism, ii. 63. Sequel to "Adam Bede" proposed, ii. 100. Shakespeare's "Passionate Pilgrim," i. 273. Shakespeare, the acting preferred to the reading, ii. 109. Shakespeare, volume on, requested by Macmillan, iii. 231. Sheffield, visit to, iii. 46; early recollections of, 46. Shelley's "Cloud," i. 53. Shottermill, life at, iii. 94. Sibree, John, letters to, i. 123; on "Tancred" and D'Israeli, 123, 124; race characteristics, 125; religion and art, 126; painting and sculpture, 127; sympathy with him, 128; necessity of utterance, 132; desire for a change, 133. Sibree, Miss Mary (Mrs. John Cash), her recollections of Miss Evans at Coventry, i. 113-116; letter to, 327. Sidgwick, Mr. Henry, iii. 147. Siebold the anatomist, ii. 26. Siena, expedition to, ii. 164; the Cathedral, 164, 165; its paintings, 165. "Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe," a sudden inspiration, ii. 204; story begun, 207; its sombre character, 210; subscription to, 5500, 212. Silence of the country, iii. 107. "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," article on, finished, i. 297. Simpson, Mr. George, Edinburgh, letter to, iii. 135; proposed a yet cheaper edition of novels, 162; author's regret at not adopting the plan, 162. "Small upper room" 1866 years ago, comparison with, ii. 285. Smith, Albert, on "Amos Barton," i. 308. Smith, Barbara (Madame Bodichon), i. 205, 295. _See_ Madame Bodichon. Smith, Mr. George, offers £10,000 for "Romola," to appear in the _Cornhill_, ii. 244; accepted for £7000, 245. Smith, Mrs. William, letters to, on the Memoir of her husband, iii. 126, 142; on the higher education of women, 146; on her poems, 160. Smith, Sydney, anecdote of, ii. 299. Smith, William, author of "Thorndale," ii. 5, 212; his illness, iii. 109; his death, 119; memoir of, 185. Social dangers, i. 56. Somerville's, Mrs., "Connection of the Physical Sciences," i. 50. "Sonnets on Childhood," iii. 65. Sorrento, visit to, ii. 153; its neighborhood, Vico, and the Syren Isles, 154. Spain, set off on journey to, ii. 324; return home, iii. 9. "Spanish Gypsy," reading for, ii. 280; first act finished, 283; taken up again, 317; reading for, 321; recommenced in new form, 321; reading for, iii. 15; Mr. Lewes's opinion of, 22; shortening of, 29; finished, 29; notes on, 30; the _motif_ of the poem, 30; reviews of, 39, 40; second and third editions, 42, 45; reprinted in Germany, 140; number sold in 1873, 160; fifth edition published, 180. Spanish grammar, studying, ii. 282. Spanish, new system of learning, iii. 3; scenery, 4; travelling, 6. Speke, Captain, the African traveller, ii. 95, 101. Spencer, Herbert, first meeting with, i. 187; intimacy with, 201, 203; "Universal Postulate," 225; "Genesis of Science," 234; Essays, 371; his influence on Lewes, ii. 55, 56; enthusiastic letter from, 89; his new work, 206; visit from, 276; introduces Lewes to Mrs. Cross, iii. 15; his teaching, 184; last visit from, 315. Spencer, Mr., senior, teacher, ii. 272. Spinoza's "Ethics," desires not to be known as translator, i. 283. Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus," i. 147, 172. Spiritualistic evidence, iii. 111; phenomena, 116. "Spiritual Wives," a nasty book, iii. 130. Spiritualism, the phenomena of, iii. 67; one aspect of, 117. Splügen Pass, journey across, ii. 181. Springs of affection reopened, iii. 280. Stachelberg and Klönthal, iii. 207. Staffordshire, first journey to, i. 15. Stanley, Lord, his opinion of the "Scenes," i. 325. _Statesman_ review of "Clerical Life," ii. 6. Stella Collas in "Juliet," ii. 259. Stephenson, George, one of her heroes, ii. 241. St. Blasien, in the Schwarz Wald, iii. 207. St. Leonards, visit to, i. 223. St. Paul's, charity children singing, i. 203. Stories, on conclusions of, i. 319. Stowe, Mrs., Miss Cobbe's rejoinder to, ii. 253; letters to, iii. 60; on early memories of, 60; the popular judgment of books, 61; the development of religion, 62; a woman's experience, 63; on appreciation of "Old Town Folks," 66; Professor Stowe's psychological experience, 67; phenomena of spiritualism, 67; on the benefits of country quiet, 110; on spiritualistic phenomena, 116; on Goethe, 175; on her admiration for "Deronda," 202; on the Jewish element in "Deronda," 211. Stowe, Mrs., letter to Mrs. Follen, i. 220. Stowe, Professor, his psychological experience, iii. 66; a story by, iii. 129. Strachey, Mrs., letter to (unfinished), iii. 315. "Stradivarius," referred to, iii. 228. Strain of writing "Romola," ii. 255. Strauss, translation of, i. 90, 94; delay in publication, 95; difficulties, 96; title, 98; finishing translation, 101; Miss Hennell's help in translation, 103; review of, 109; interview with, 240; renewed acquaintance with, ii. 46. Strength while abroad, iii. 301. Stuart, Mrs., visit from, iii. 255. Study, enjoyment of, ii. 322. Studying for "Romola," ii. 234, 240, 246, 249, 250. Sturgis, Julian, high opinion of, iii. 257. Sully, James, letter to, on Mr. Lewes's articles, iii. 260, 269, 273; thanking him for proof-reading, 274. "Sunshine through the Clouds," i. 233. Surrey, enjoyment, iii. 170. Surrey hills preferred to the sea-side, iii. 272. Swansea, cockle-women at, i. 292. Swayne, Rev. Mr., his delight with "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," i. 311. Switzerland, letters during residence in 1849, i. 151-179. Sympathy, with other women, iii. 100; the necessity of, ii. 269; recovery of, iii. 293. Tauchnitz offers for "Clerical Life," ii. 52; offers £100 for German reprint of "Adam Bede," 115. Taylor, Isaac, influence of, i. 51. Taylor, Mrs. Peter, i. 196; sympathy with, 197; letters to, 218, 219; generous letter from, with reply, 293, 294; on her domestic position, ii. 213, 214; letter to, on Christmas at Weybridge, iii. 159; on difficulties of note writing, 181; on the Lewes Studentship, 273. Taylor, Professor Tom, i. 201. Tenby, zoological delights, i. 293; St. Catherine's Rock, 295; work done here, 295; Mr. Pigott's visit, 296; leave and return to Richmond, 297. Tennyson, appreciation of, iii. 229. "Terror" in religious education, iii. 48. Thackeray, Miss, "The Story of Elizabeth," ii. 299; her marriage, iii. 225. Thackeray's "Esmond," i. 214; opinion of "Gilfil's Love-Story," 323; favorable opinion of "Clerical Life," ii. 10. "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such," MS. sent to publishers, iii. 245; publication postponed, 252; third edition about sold out, 268. Theism, objection to, i. 339, 340. Thirlwall, Bishop, story of, iii. 228. Thompson, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, iii. 149. Thorns in actual fame, ii. 90. Thorwaldsen's Christ scourged, i. 126. "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," by Miss Hennell, ii. 186, 188, 195; favorable view of, by Miss Nightingale and Miss Julia Smith, 190. "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," ii. 73. Thoughts on death, iii. 100; on early death, ii. 290. Tichborne trial, the, iii. 106; Coleridge's address, 107. _Times_ reviews "Adam Bede," ii. 73; letter to, denying Liggin's authorship, 74. Titian's paintings, ii. 43, 45. "Too good to be true," i. 140. Torquay, visit to, iii. 25. Toulon to Nice, drive from, ii. 216, 217. Town life, depression of, ii. 203. Tragedy, notes on, iii. 32. Translator's difficulties, a, i. 99. Traunstein, our fellow-travellers at, ii. 35. Trèves, a visit to, iii. 122. Trollope, Anthony, his "Orley Farm," delightful letter from, ii. 246. Truth, desire for, i. 77. Truth of feeling a bond of union, i. 88. Tryan, Rev. Mr., an ideal character, i. 332. Tulloch, Principal, his "Pascal," iii. 235. Turguenieff, M., iii. 209. Turin: Count Cavour, ii. 122; Prince de Carignan, 122. Tylor's "Primitive Culture," iii. 118. Tyndall, Professor, "On the Constitution of the Universe," ii. 299. University and public school education, iii. 309. Use of irregular verses, iii. 40. "Utopias," poem on, ii. 286. Venice: the Grand Canal by moonlight, ii. 172; San Marco and Doge's Palace, 173; pictures in the palace, 173; interior of St. Mark's, 174; "Death of Peter the Martyr," 175; the Scuola di San Rocco, 176; Tintoretto and Titian, 176; Giovanni Bellini and Palma Vecchio, 177; sunset on the Lagoon, 177; Piazza of San Marco, 178; a remarkable picture, 178. Verona, the church of San Zenone, ii. 179; the tombs of the Scaligers, 179. Veronese, his "Finding of Moses," etc., ii. 44. Via Mala, its grand scenery, ii. 182. Vienna: Belvedere pictures, ii. 39; the Liechtenstein collection, 39; Hyrtl, the anatomist, 39; journey to Prague, 40. "Villette," i. 220. Vision of others' needs, iii. 177. Vision-seeing subjective, iii. 116. "Visiting my Relations," a volume of poetry from the authoress of, ii. 97. Wales, visit to, iii. 189. Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago," iii. 118. Wallington, Miss, her school at Nuneaton, i. 15. Walt Whitman, motto from, iii. 200. Wandsworth, takes new house at, ii. 59. Warwickshire magistrate, correspondence with, ii. 97. "Waverley," writes out, i. 16. Weimar recollections: interview with Strauss, i. 240; the Dichter Zimmer, 240; Scholl, 240; excursion to Ettersburg, 241; Arthur Helps, 242; Goethe's beech, 242; expedition to Ilmenau, 242; Wagner's operas, 243; "Der Freischütz," 243; Schiller's house, 244; Goethe's house, 244; his study, 245; the _Gartenhaus_, 246; the _Webicht_, 247; Marquis de Ferrière, 247; Liszt on Spontoni, 248; breakfast with, 249; his playing, 250; his trophies, 250; our expenses, 251; work at and books read, 268-271; wrote article on "Madame de Sablé," 268; remarks on books read, 269-271; return to England, 271. _Westminster_, the, on "Essays and Reviews," ii. 200. _Westminster Review_, assistant editor of, i. 186; heavy work, 193; its difficulties, 227; wishes to give up editorship, 229. _Westminster_ reviewers, i. 199, 200, 205, 210. Weybridge, Christmas visit to, iii. 71, 140, 159. Wharton's "Summary of the Laws relating to Women," i. 220. Whitby, visit to, iii. 85. Wicksteed's review of Strauss's translation in "Prospective," i. 109. Wilberforce, emulation of, i. 31. Wildbad to Brussels, iii. 295. Will, power of the, iii. 179. Wilson, Andrew, the "Abode of Snow," iii. 190. Witley, house bought at, iii. 215; life at, 240; Sunday receptions, 241. Wolseley, Sir Garnet, iii. 198. Woman's duty, yearning for a, i. 173; earnings, 282; full experience, iii. 63; constancy, on, 92, 93. Womanhood, her ideal of, iii. 308. Women's Colleges, iii. 309. Woolwich Arsenal, a visit to, iii. 176. Wordsworth's Poems, i. 45. Wordsworth's Thoughts on Humanity, iii. 280. Work at Weimar and Berlin, i. 268. World of light and speech, iii. 185. Writing under difficulties, ii. 307. Young, discontent of the, iii. 213. Young Englandism, no sympathy with, i. 124. Young men, desire to influence, iii. 18. Yorkshire, visit to, iii. 41. Zoological Gardens, pleasure in, ii. 209; friendship with the Shoebill, 209. THE END. GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS. 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9820	----	A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME I BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD Published November, 1918 [Illustration: DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OF RUGBY] _To T. H. W. (In memory of April 6, 1872)_ CONTENTS CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS II. FOX HOW III. THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW IV. OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW V. THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW VI. YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD VII. BALLIOL AND LINCOLN VIII. EARLY MARRIED LIFE IX. THE BEGINNINGS OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ILLUSTRATIONS DR. THOMAS ARNOLD OP RUGBY _Frontispiece_ MATTHEW ARNOLD JOHN HENRY NEWMAN J FOX HOW, THE WESTMORLAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS BENJAMIN JOWETT A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us?--the one advantage of _time!_ After all, it is not disputable that we have lived longer than they. When they talk of past poets, or politicians, or novelists, whom the young still deign to remember, of whom for once their estimate agrees with ours, we can sometimes put in a quiet, "I saw him"--or, "I talked with him"--which for the moment wins the conversational race. And as we elders fall back before the brilliance and glitter of the New Age, advancing "like an army with banners," this mere prerogative of years becomes in itself a precious possession. After all, we cannot divest ourselves of it, if we would. It is better to make friends with it--to turn it into a kind of _panache_--to wear it with an air, since wear it we must. So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us. I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it. I can only attempt it with any success, if my readers will allow me a large psychological element. The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we _must_ have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it--thought "furiously" often. And it is out of the many "thinkings" of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows. For progress surely, whether in men or nations, means only a richer knowledge; the more impressions, therefore, on the human intelligence that we can seize and record, the more sensitive becomes that intelligence itself. But of course the difficulty lies in the seizing and recording--in the choice, that is, of what to say, and how to say it. In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow--and trust--the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction. I shall be telling what is primarily true, or as true as I can make it, as distinguished from what is primarily imagination, built on truth. But the truth one uses in fiction must be interesting! Milton expresses that in the words "sensuous" and "passionate," which he applies to poetry in the _Areopagitica_. And the same thing applies to autobiography, where selection is even more necessary than in fiction. Nothing ought to be told, I think, that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds. And this means that one ought to handle things broadly, taking only the salient points in the landscape of the past, and of course with as much detachment as possible. Though probably in the end one will have to admit--egotists that we all are!--that not much detachment _is_ possible. For me, the first point that stands out is the arrival of a little girl of five, in the year 1856, at a gray-stone house in a Westmorland valley, where, fourteen years earlier, the children of Arnold of Rugby, the "Doctor" of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, had waited on a June day, to greet their father, expected from the South, only to hear, as the summer day died away, that two hours' sharp illness, that very morning, had taken him from them. Of what preceded my arrival as a black-haired, dark-eyed child, with my father, mother, and two brothers, at Fox How, the holiday house among the mountains which the famous headmaster had built for himself in 1834, I have but little recollection. I see dimly another house in wide fields, where dwarf lilies grew, and I know that it was a house in Tasmania, where at the time of my birth my father, Thomas Arnold, the Doctor's second son, was organizing education in the young colony. I can just recall, too, the deck of a ship which to my childish feet seemed vast--but the _William Brown_ was a sailing-ship of only 400 tons!--in which we made the voyage home in 1856. Three months and a half we took about it, going round the Horn in bitter weather, much run over by rats at night, and expected to take our baths by day in two huge barrels full of sea water on the deck, into which we children were plunged shivering by our nurse, two or three times a week. My father and mother, their three children, and some small cousins, who were going to England under my mother's care, were the only passengers. I can remember, too, being lifted--weak and miserable with toothache--in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt was my godmother, Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter--then the young wife of William Edward Forster, a Quaker manufacturer, who afterward became the well-known Education Minister of 1870, and was Chief Secretary for Ireland in the terrible years 1880-82. To my mother and her children, Fox How and its inmates represented much that was new and strange. My mother was the granddaughter of one of the first Governors of Tasmania, Governor Sorell, and had been brought up in the colony, except for a brief schooling at Brussels. Of her personal beauty in youth we children heard much, as we grew up, from her old Tasmanian friends and kinsfolk who would occasionally drift across us; and I see as though I had been there a scene often described to me--my mother playing Hermione in the "Winter's Tale," at Government House when Sir William Denison was Governor--a vision, lovely and motionless, on her pedestal, till at the words, "Music! awake her! Strike!" she kindled into life. Her family were probably French in origin. Governor Sorell had been a man of promise in his youth. His father, General William Alexander Sorell, of the Coldstream Guards, was a soldier of some eminence, whose two sons, William and Thomas, both served under Sir John Moore and at the Cape. But my great-grandfather ruined his military career, while he was Deputy Adjutant-General at the Cape, by a love-affair with a brother officer's wife, and was banished or promoted--whichever one pleases to call it--to the new colony of Tasmania, of which he became Governor in 1816. His eldest son, by the wife he had left behind him in England, went out as a youth of twenty-one or so, to join his father, the Governor, in Tasmania, and I possess a little calf-bound diary of my grandfather written in a very delicate and refined hand, about the year 1823. The faint entries in it show him to have been a devoted son. But when, in 1830 or so, the Governor left the colony, and retired to Brussels, my grandfather remained in Van Diemen's Land, as it was then generally called, became very much attached to the colony, and filled the post of Registrar of Deeds for many years under its successive Governors. I just remember him, as a gentle, affectionate, upright being, a gentleman of an old, punctilious school, strictly honorable and exact, content with a small sphere, and much loved within it. He would sometimes talk to his children of early days in Bath, of his father's young successes and promotions, and of his grandfather, General Sorell, who, as Adjutant of the Coldstream Guards from 1744 to 1758, and associated with all the home and foreign service of that famous regiment during those years, through the Seven Years' War, and up to the opening of the American War of Independence, played a vaguely brilliant part in his grandson's recollections. But he himself was quite content with the modest affairs of an infant colony, which even in its earliest days achieved, whether in its landscape or its life, a curiously English effect; as though an English midland county had somehow got loose and, drifting to the Southern seas, had there set up--barring a few black aborigines, a few convicts, its mimosas, and its tree-ferns--another quiet version of the quiet English life it had left behind. But the Sorells, all the same, had some foreign and excitable blood in them. Their story of themselves was that they were French Huguenots, expelled in 1685, who had settled in England and, coming of a military stock, had naturally sought careers in the English army. There are points in this story which are puzzling; but the foreign touch in my mother, and in the Governor--to judge from the only picture of him which remains--was unmistakable. Delicate features, small, beautifully shaped hands and feet, were accompanied in my mother by a French vivacity and quickness, an overflowing energy, which never forsook her through all her trials and misfortunes. In the Governor, the same physical characteristics make a rather decadent and foppish impression--as of an old stock run to seed. The stock had been reinvigorated in my mother, and one of its original elements which certainly survived in her temperament and tradition was of great importance both for her own life and for her children's. This was the Protestant--the _French_ Protestant--element; which no doubt represented in the family from which she came a history of long suffering at the hands of Catholicism. Looking back upon her Protestantism, I see that it was not the least like English Evangelicalism, whether of the Anglican or dissenting type. There was nothing emotional or "enthusiastic" in it--no breath of Wesley or Wilberforce; but rather something drawn from deep wells of history, instinctive and invincible. Had some direct Calvinist ancestor of hers, with a soul on fire, fought the tyranny of Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon, before--eternally hating and resenting "Papistry"--he abandoned his country and kinsfolk, in the search for religious liberty? That is the impression which--looking back upon her life--it often makes upon me. All the more strange that to her it fell, unwittingly, imagining, indeed, that by her marriage with a son of Arnold of Rugby she was taking a step precisely in the opposite direction, to be, by a kind of tragic surprise, which yet was no one's fault, the wife of a Catholic. And that brings me to my father, whose character and story were so important to all his children that I must try and draw them, though I cannot pretend to any impartiality in doing so--only to the insight that affection gives; its one abiding advantage over the critic and the stranger. He was the second son of Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and the younger brother--by only eleven months--of Matthew Arnold. On that morning of June 12, 1842, when the headmaster who in fourteen years' rule at Rugby had made himself so conspicuous a place, not merely in the public-school world, but in English life generally[1] arose, in the words of his poet son--to tread-- In the summer morning, the road-- Of death, at a call unforeseen-- Sudden-- My father, a boy of eighteen, was in the house, and witnessed the fatal attack of _angina pectoris_ which, in two hours, cut short a memorable career, and left those who till then, under a great man's shelter and keeping, had-- Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak.... Bare, unshaded, alone. [Footnote 1: At the moment of correcting these proofs, my attention has been called to a foolish essay on my grandfather by Mr. Lytton Strachey, none the less foolish because it is the work of an extremely clever man. If Mr. Strachey imagines that the effect of my grandfather's life and character upon men like Stanley and Clough, or a score of others who could be named, can be accounted for by the eidolon he presents to his readers in place of the real human being, one can only regard it as one proof the more of the ease with which a certain kind of ability outwits itself.] He had been his father's special favorite among the elder children, as shown by some verses in my keeping addressed to him as a small boy, at different times, by "the Doctor." Those who know their _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ will perhaps remember the various passages in the book where the softer qualities of the man whom "three hundred reckless childish boys" feared with all their hearts, "and very little besides in heaven or earth," are made plain in the language of that date. Arthur's illness, for instance, when the little fellow, who has been at death's door, tells Tom Brown, who is at last allowed to see him: "You can't think what the Doctor's like when one's ill. He said such brave and tender and gentle things to me--I felt quite light and strong after it, and never had any more fear." Or East's talk with the Doctor, when the lively boy of many scrapes has a moral return upon himself, and says to his best friend: "You can't think how kind and gentle he was, the great grim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, he lifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know all I'd felt, and to have gone through it all." This tenderness and charm of a strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned as growing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was always there for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, when my father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnold says, trying to steel himself against the bitterness of coming loss, "I might have loved him, had he lived, too dearly--you know how deeply I do love him now." And three years later, when "little Tom," on his eighth birthday, had just said, wistfully--with a curious foreboding instinct, "I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of my life," Arnold, painfully struck by the words, wrote some verses upon them which I still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of his historical prose--the well-known passage in the Roman History, for instance, on the death of Marcellus--has some of the essential notes of poetry--passion, strength, music. But the gentle Wordsworthian quality of his few essays in verse will be perhaps interesting to those who are aware of him chiefly as the great Liberal fighter of eighty years ago. He replies to his little son: Is it that aught prophetic stirred Thy spirit to that ominous word, Foredating in thy childish mind The fortune of thy Life's career-- That naught of brighter bliss shall cheer What still remains behind? Or is thy Life so full of bliss That, come what may, more blessed than this Thou canst not be again? And fear'st thou, standing on the shore, What storms disturb with wild uproar The years of older men? * * * * * At once to enjoy, at once to hope-- That fills indeed the largest scope Of good our thoughts can reach. Where can we learn so blest a rule, What wisest sage, what happiest school, Art so divine can teach? The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope. The passages in Arnold's most intimate diary, discovered after his death, and published by Dean Stanley, show what the Christian faith was to my grandfather, how closely bound up with every action and feeling of his life. The impression made by his conception of that faith, as interpreted by his own daily life, upon a great school, and, through the many strong and able men who went out from it, upon English thought and feeling, is a part of English religious history. [Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN. From a drawing in possession of H. E. Wilberforce, Esq.] But curiously enough the impression upon his own sons _appeared_, at any rate, to be less strong and lasting than in the case of others. I mean, of course, in the matter of opinion. The famous father died, and his children had to face the world without his guiding hand. Matthew and Tom, William and Edward, the eldest four sons, went in due time to Oxford, and the youngest boy into the Navy. My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died. The devotion of all the nine children to their mother, to one another, and to the common home was never weakened for a moment by the varieties of opinion that life was sure to bring out in the strong brood of strong parents. But the development of the elder two sons at the University was probably very different from what it would have been had their father lived. Neither of them, indeed, ever showed, while there, the smallest tendency to the "Newmanism" which Arnold of Rugby had fought with all his powers; which he had denounced with such vehemence in the Edinburgh article on "The Oxford Malignants." My father was at Oxford all through the agitated years which preceded Newman's secession from the Anglican communion. He had rooms in University College in the High Street, nearly opposite St. Mary's, in which John Henry Newman, then its Vicar, delivered Sunday after Sunday those sermons which will never be forgotten by the Anglican Church. But my father only once crossed the street to hear him, and was then repelled by the mannerism of the preacher. Matthew Arnold occasionally went, out of admiration, my father used to say, for that strange Newmanic power of words, which in itself fascinated the young Balliol poet, who was to produce his first volume of poems two years after Newman's secession to the Church of Rome. But he was never touched in the smallest degree by Newman's opinions. He and my father and Arthur Clough, and a few other kindred spirits, lived indeed in quite another world of thought. They discovered George Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle, and orthodox Christianity no longer seemed to them the sure refuge that it had always been to the strong teacher who trained them as boys. There are many allusions of many dates in the letters of my father and uncle to each other, as to their common Oxford passion for George Sand. _Consuelo_, in particular, was a revelation to the two young men brought up under the "earnest" influence of Rugby. It seemed to open to them a world of artistic beauty and joy of which they had never dreamed; and to loosen the bands of an austere conception of life, which began to appear to them too narrow for the facts of life. _Wilhelm Meister_, read in Carlyle's translation at the same time, exercised a similar liberating and enchanting power upon my father. The social enthusiasms of George Sand also affected him greatly, strengthening whatever he had inherited of his father's generous discontent with an iron world, where the poor suffer too much and work too hard. And this discontent, when the time came for him to leave Oxford, assumed a form which startled his friends. He had done very well at Oxford, taking his two Firsts with ease, and was offered a post in the Colonial Office immediately on leaving the University. But the time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein should dwell equality and righteousness. The storm of 1848 was preparing in Europe; the Corn Laws had fallen; the Chartists were gathering in England. To settle down to the old humdrum round of Civil Service promotion seemed to my father impossible. This revolt of his, and its effect upon his friends, of whom the most intimate was Arthur Clough, has left its mark on Clough's poem, the "Vacation Pastoral," which he called "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich," or, as it runs in my father's old battered copy which lies before me, "Tober-na-Fuosich." The Philip of the poem, the dreamer and democrat, who says to Adam the Tutor-- Alas, the noted phrase of the prayer-book Doing our duty in that state of life to which God has called us, Seems to me always to mean, when the little rich boys say it, Standing in velvet frock by Mama's brocaded flounces, Eying her gold-fastened book, and the chain and watch at her bosom, Seems to me always to mean, Eat, drink, and never mind others-- was in broad outline drawn from my father, and the impression made by his idealist, enthusiastic youth upon his comrades. And Philip's migration to the Antipodes at the end--when he rounded the sphere to New Zealand, There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit-- was certainly suggested by my father's similar step in 1847, the year before the poem appeared. Only in my father's life there had been as yet no parallel to the charming love-story of "The Bothie." His love-story awaited him on the other side of the world. At that moment, New Zealand, the land of beautiful mountain and sea, with its even temperate climate, and its natives whom English enthusiasm hoped not only to govern, but to civilize and assimilate, was in the minds of all to whom the colonies seemed to offer chances of social reconstruction beyond any that were possible in a crowded and decadent Europe. "Land of Hope," I find it often called in these old letters. "The gleam" was on it, and my father, like Browning's Waring, heard the call. After it; follow it. Follow the gleam! He writes to his mother in August, 1847, from the Colonial Office: Every one whom I meet pities me for having to return to London at this dull season, but to my own feelings, it is not worse than at other times. The things which would make me loathe the thought of passing my life or even several years in London, do not depend on summer or winter. It is the chronic, not the acute ills of London life which are real ills to me. I meant to have talked to you again before I left home about New Zealand, but I could not find a good opportunity. I do not think you will be surprised to hear that I cannot give up my intention--though you may think me wrong, you will believe that no cold-heartedness towards home has assisted me in framing my resolution. Where or how we shall meet on this side the grave will be arranged for us by a wiser will than our own. To me, however strange and paradoxical it may sound, this going to New Zealand is become a work of faith, and I cannot but go through with it. And later on when his plans are settled, he writes in exultation to his eldest sister: The weather is gusty and rainy, but no cheerlessness without can repress a sort of exuberant buoyancy of spirit which is supplied to me from within. There is such an indescribable blessedness in looking forward to a manner of life which the heart and conscience approve, and which at the same time satisfies the instinct for the heroic and beautiful. Yet there seems little enough in a homely life in a New Zealand forest; and indeed there is nothing in the thing itself, except in so far as it flows from a principle, a faith. And he goes on to speak in vague exalted words of the "equality" and "brotherhood" to which he looks forward in the new land; winding up with an account of his life in London, its daily work at the Colonial Office, his walks, the occasional evenings at the opera where he worships Jenny Lind, his readings and practisings in his lodgings. My poor father! He little knew what he was giving up, or the real conditions of the life to which he was going. For, though the Philip of "The Bothie" may have "hewed and dug" to good purpose in New Zealand, success in colonial farming was a wild and fleeting dream in my father's case. He was born for academic life and a scholar's pursuits. He had no practical gifts, and knew nothing whatever of land or farming. He had only courage, youth, sincerity, and a charming presence which made him friends at sight. His mother, indeed, with her gentle wisdom, put no obstacles in his way. On the contrary, she remembered that her husband had felt a keen imaginative interest in the colonies, and had bought small sections of land near Wellington, which his second son now proposed to take up and farm. But some of the old friends of the family felt and expressed consternation. In particular, Baron Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador to England, Arnold of Rugby's dear and faithful friend, wrote a letter of earnest and affectionate remonstrance to the would-be colonist. Let me quote it, if only that it may remind me of days long ago, when it was still possible for a strong and tender friendship to exist between a Prussian and an Englishman! Bunsen points out to "young Tom" that he has only been eight or nine months in the Colonial Office, not long enough to give it a fair trial; that the drudgery of his clerkship will soon lead to more interesting things; that his superiors speak well of him; above all, that he has no money and no practical experience of farming, and that if he is going to New Zealand in the hope of building up a purer society, he will soon find himself bitterly disillusioned. Pray, my dear young friend, do not reject the voice of a man of nearly sixty years, who has made his way through life under much greater difficulties perhaps than you imagine--who was your father's dear friend--who feels deeply attached to all that bears the honored and blessed name of Arnold--who in particular had _your father's promise_ that he would allow me to offer to _you_, after I had seen you in 1839, something of that care and friendship he had bestowed upon Henry [Bunsen's own son]--do not reject the warning voice of that man, if he entreats you solemnly not to take a _precipitate_ step. Give yourself time. Try a change of scene. Go for a month or two to France or Germany. I am sure you wish to satisfy your friends that you are acting wisely, considerately, in giving up what you have. _Spartam quam nactus es, orna_--was Niebuhr's word to me when once, about 1825, wearied with diplomatic life, I resolved to throw up my place and go--not to New Zealand, but to a German University. Let me say that concluding word to you and believe me, my dear young friend, Your sincere and affectionate friend BUNSEN. P.S.--If you feel disposed to have half an hour's quiet conversation with me alone, pray come to-day at six o'clock, and then dine with us quietly at half-past six. I go to-morrow to Windsor Castle for four days. Nothing could have been kinder, nothing more truly felt and meant. But the young make their own experience, and my father, with the smiling open look which disarmed opposition, and disguised all the time a certain stubborn independence of will, characteristic of him through life, took his own way. He went to New Zealand, and, now that it was done, the interest and sympathy of all his family and friends followed him. Let me give here the touching letter which Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, wrote to him the night before he left England. UNIV. COLL., OXFORD, _Nov. 4, 1847._ Farewell!--(if you will let me once again recur to a relation so long since past away) farewell--my dearest, earliest, best of pupils. I cannot let you go without asking you to forgive those many annoyances which I fear I must have unconsciously inflicted upon you in the last year of your Oxford life--nor without expressing the interest which I feel, and shall I trust ever feel, beyond all that I can say, in your future course. You know--or perhaps you hardly can know--how when I came back to Oxford after the summer of 1842, your presence here was to me the stay and charm of my life--how the walks--the lectures--the Sunday evenings with you, filled up the void which had been left in my interests[1], and endeared to me all the beginnings of my College labors. That particular feeling, as is natural, has passed away--but it may still be a pleasure to you to feel in your distant home that whatever may be my occupations, nothing will more cheer and support me through them than the belief that in that new world your dear father's name is in you still loved and honored, and bringing forth the fruits which he would have delighted to see. Farewell, my dear friend. May God in whom you trust be with you. Do not trouble yourself to answer this--only take it as the true expression of one who often thinks how little he has done for you in comparison with what he would. Ever yours, A. P. STANLEY. [Footnote 1: By the sudden death of Doctor Arnold.] But, of course, the inevitable happened. After a few valiant but quite futile attempts to clear his land with his own hands, or with the random labor he could find to help him, the young colonist fell back on the education he had held so cheap in England, and bravely took school-work wherever in the rising townships of the infant colony he could find it. Meanwhile his youth, his pluck, and his Oxford distinctions had attracted the kindly notice of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who offered him his private secretaryship--one can imagine the twinkle in the Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his own hut on his section outside Wellington! The offer was gratefully refused. But another year of New Zealand life brought reconsideration. The exile begins to speak of "loneliness" in his letters home, to realize that it is "collision" with other kindred minds that "kindles the spark of thought," and presently, after a striking account of a solitary walk across unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses that he is not sufficient for himself, and that the growth and vigor of the intellect were, for him, at least, "not compatible with loneliness." A few months later, Sir William Denison, the newly appointed Governor of Van Diemen's Land, hearing that a son of Arnold of Rugby, an Oxford First Class man, was in New Zealand, wrote to offer my father the task of organizing primary education in Van Diemen's Land. He accepted--yet not, I think, without a sharp sense of defeat at the hands of Mother Earth!--set sail for Hobart, and took possession of a post that might easily have led to great things. His father's fame preceded him, and he was warmly welcomed. The salary was good and the field free. Within a few months of his landing he was engaged to my mother. They were married in 1850, and I, their eldest child, was born in June, 1851. And then the unexpected, the amazing thing happened. At the time of their marriage, and for some time after, my mother, who had been brought up in a Protestant "scriptural" atmosphere, and had been originally drawn to the younger "Tom Arnold," partly because he was the son of his father, as Stanley's _Life_ had now made the headmaster known to the world, was a good deal troubled by the heretical views of her young husband. She had some difficulty in getting him to consent to the baptism of his elder children. He was still in many respects the Philip of the "Bothie," influenced by Goethe, and the French romantics, by Emerson, Kingsley, and Carlyle, and in touch still with all that Liberalism of the later 'forties in Oxford, of which his most intimate friend, Arthur Clough, and his elder brother, Matthew Arnold, were to become the foremost representatives. But all the while, under the surface, an extraordinary transformation was going on. He was never able to explain it afterward, even to me, who knew him best of all his children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself. But he who had only once crossed the High Street to hear Newman preach, and felt no interest in the sermon, now, on the other side of the world, surrendered to Newman's influence. It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each other at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for years the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly transformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now, reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnold himself was no longer there to fight it. A general reaction against the negations and philosophies of his youth set in for "Philip," as inevitable in his case as the revolt against St. Sulpice was for Ernest Renan. For my father was in truth born for religion, as his whole later life showed. In that he was the true son of Arnold of Rugby. But his speculative Liberalism had carried him so much farther than his father's had ever gone, that the recoil was correspondingly great. The steps of it are dim. He was "struck" one Sunday with the "authoritative" tone of the First Epistle of Peter. Who and what was Peter? What justified such a tone? At another time he found a _Life of St. Brigit of Sweden_ at a country inn, when he was on one of his school-inspecting journeys across the island. And he records a mysterious influence or "voice" from it, as he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian bush. Last of all, he "obtained"--from England, no doubt--the _Tracts for the Times_. And as he went through them, the same documents, and the same arguments, which had taken Newman to Rome, nine years before, worked upon his late and distant disciple. But who can explain "conversion"? Is it not enough to say, as was said of old, "The Holy Ghost fell on them that believed"? The great "Malignant" had indeed triumphed. In October, 1854, my father was received at Hobart, Tasmania, into the Church of Rome; and two years later, after he had reached England, and written to Newman asking the new Father of the Oratory to receive him, Newman replied: How strange it seems! What a world this is! I knew your father a little, and I really think I never had any unkind feeling toward him. I saw him at Oriel on the Purification before (I think) his death (January, 1842). I was glad to meet him. If I said ever a harsh thing against him I am very sorry for it. In seeing you, I should have a sort of pledge that he at the moment of his death made it all up with me. Excuse this. I came here last night, and it is so marvelous to have your letter this morning. So, for the moment, ended one incident in the long bout between two noble fighters, Arnold and Newman, each worthy of the other's steel. For my father, indeed, this act of surrender was but the beginning of a long and troubled history. My poor mother felt as though the earth had crumbled under her. Her passionate affection for my father endured till her latest hour, but she never reconciled herself to what he had done. There was in her an instinctive dread of Catholicism, of which I have suggested some of the origins--ancestral and historical. It never abated. Many years afterward, in writing _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, I drew upon what I remembered of it in describing some traits in Laura Fountain's inbred, and finally indomitable, resistance to the Catholic claim upon the will and intellect of men. And to this trial in the realm of religious feeling there were added all the practical difficulties into which my father's action plunged her and his children. The Tasmanian appointment had to be given up, for the feeling in the colony was strongly anti-Catholic; and we came home, as I have described, to a life of struggle, privation, and constant anxiety, in which my mother suffered not only for herself, but for her children. But, after all, there were bright spots. My father and mother were young; my mother's eager, sympathetic temper brought her many friends; and for us children, Fox How and its dear inmates opened a second home, and new joys, which upon myself in particular left impressions never to be effaced or undone. Let me try and describe that house and garden and those who lived in it, as they were in 1856. CHAPTER II FOX HOW The gray-stone house stands now, as it stood then, on a "how" or rising ground in the beautiful Westmorland valley leading from Ambleside to Rydal. The "Doctor" built it as a holiday paradise for himself and his children, in the year 1833. It is a modest building, with ten bedrooms and three sitting-rooms. Its windows look straight into the heart of Fairfield, the beautiful semicircular mountain which rears its hollowed front and buttressing scaurs against the north, far above the green floor of the valley. That the house looked north never troubled my grandfather or his children. What they cared for was the perfect outline of the mountain wall, the "pensive glooms," hovering in that deep breast of Fairfield, the magic never-ending chase of sunlight and cloud across it on fine days, and the beauty of the soft woodland clothing its base. The garden was his children's joy as it became mine. Its little beck with its mimic bridges, its encircling river, its rocky knolls, its wild strawberries and wild raspberries, its queen of birch-trees rearing a stately head against the distant mountain, its rhododendrons growing like weeds on its mossy banks, its velvet turf, and long silky grass in the parts left wild--all these things have made the joy of three generations. Inside, Fox How was comfortably spacious, and I remember what a palace it appeared to my childish eyes, fresh from the tiny cabin of a 400-ton sailing-ship, and the rough life of a colony. My grandmother, its mistress, was then sixty-one. Her beautiful hair was scarcely touched with gray, her complexion was still delicately clear, and her soft brown eyes had the eager, sympathetic look of her Cornish race. Charlotte Brontë, who saw her a few years earlier, while on a visit to Miss Martineau, speaks of her as having been a "very pretty woman," and credits her and her daughters with "the possession of qualities the most estimable and endearing." In another letter, however, written to a less familiar correspondent, to whom Miss Brontë, as the literary lady with a critical reputation to keep up, expresses herself in a different and more artificial tone, she again describes my grandmother as good and charming, but doubts her claim to "power and completeness of character." The phrase occurs in a letter describing a call at Fox How, and its slight pomposity makes the contrast with the passage in which Matthew Arnold describes the same visit the more amusing. At seven came Miss Martineau, and Miss Brontë (Jane Eyre); talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the Church of England, and, wretched man that I am, promised to go and see her cow-keeping miracles to-morrow, I who hardly know a cow from a sheep. I talked to Miss Brontë (past thirty and plain, with expressive gray eyes, though) of her curates, of French novels, and her education in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at half-past nine. No one, indeed, would have applied the word "power" to my grandmother, unless he had known her very well. The general impression was always one of gentle sweetness and soft dignity. But the phrase, "completeness of character," happens to sum up very well the impression left by her life both on kindred and friends. What Miss Brontë exactly meant by it it is difficult to say. But the widowed mother of nine children, five of them sons, and all of them possessed of strong wills and quick intelligence, who was able so to guide their young lives that to her last hour, thirty years after her husband's death had left her alone with her task, she possessed their passionate reverence and affection, and that each and all of them would have acknowledged her as among the dearest and noblest influences in their lives, can hardly be denied "completeness of character." Many of her letters lie before me. Each son and daughter, as he or she went out into the world, received them with the utmost regularity. They knew that every incident in their lives interested their mother; and they in their turn were eager to report to her everything that came to them, happy or unhappy, serious or amusing. And this relation of the family to their mother only grew and strengthened with years. As the daughters married, their husbands became so many new and devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-natured woman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and the grandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life I trace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, to my engagement and marriage; and I have never ceased to feel a pang of disappointment that she died before my children were born. Matthew Arnold adored her, and wrote to her every week of his life. So did her other children. William Forster, throughout his busy life in Parliament, vied with her sons in tender consideration and unfailing loyalty. And every grandchild thought of a visit to Fox How as not only a joy, but an honor. Indeed, nothing could have been more "complete," more rounded, than my grandmother's character and life as they developed through her eighty-three years. She made no conspicuous intellectual claim, though her quick intelligence, her wide sympathies, and clear judgment, combined with something ardent and responsive in her temperament, attracted and held able men; but her personality was none the less strong because it was so gently, delicately served by looks and manner. Perhaps the "completeness" of my grandmother's character will be best illustrated by one of her family letters, a letter which may recall to some readers Stevenson's delightful poem on the mother who sits at home, watching the fledglings depart from the nest. So from the hearth the children flee, By that almighty hand Austerely led; so one by sea Goes forth, and one by land; Nor aught of all-man's sons escapes from that command. * * * * * And as the fervent smith of yore Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons that he made, But in the tower at home still plied his ringing trade; So like a sword the son shall roam On nobler missions sent; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent, So sits the while at home the mother well content. The letter was written to my father in New Zealand in the year 1848, as a family chronicle. The brothers and sisters named in it are Walter, the youngest of the family, a middy of fourteen, on board ship, and not very happy in the Navy, which he was ultimately to leave for Durham University and business; Willy, in the Indian Army, afterward the author of _Oakfield_, a novel attacking the abuses of Anglo-Indian life, and the first Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab--commemorated by his poet brother in "A Southern Night"; Edward, at Oxford; Mary, the second daughter, who at the age of twenty-two had been left a widow after a year of married life; and Fan, the youngest daughter of the flock, who now, in 1917, alone represents them in the gray house under the fells. The little Westmorland farm described is still exactly as it was; and has still a Richardson for master, though of a younger generation. And Rydal Chapel, freed now from the pink cement which clothed it in those days, and from the high pews familiar to the children of Fox How, still sends the cheerful voice of its bells through the valley on Sunday mornings. The reader will remember, as he reads it, that he is in the troubled year of 1848, with Chartism at home and revolution abroad. The "painful interest" with which the writer has read Clough's "Bothie" refers, I think, to the fact that she has recognized her second son, my father, as to some extent the hero of the poem. Fox How, _Nov. 19, 1848._ My Dearest Tom,--... I am always intending to send you something like a regular journal, but twenty days of the month have now passed away, and it is not done. Dear Matt, who was with us at the beginning, and who I think bore a part in our last letters to you, has returned to his post in London, and I am not without hope of hearing by to-morrow's post that he has run down to Portsmouth to see Walter before he sails on a cruise with the Squadron, which I believe he was to do to-day. But I should think they would hardly leave Port in such dirty weather, when the wind howls and the rain pours, and the whole atmosphere is thick and lowering as I suppose you rarely or never see it in New Zealand. I wish the more that Matt may get down to Spithead, because the poor little man has been in a great ferment about leaving his Ship and going into a smaller one. By the same post I had a letter from him, and from Captain Daws, who had been astonished and grieved by Walter's coming to him and telling him he wished to leave the ship. It was evident that Captain D. was quite distressed about it. She then discusses, very shrewdly and quietly, the reasons for her boy's restlessness, and how best to meet it. The letter goes on: Certainly there is great comfort in having him with so true and good a friend as Captain D. and I could not feel justified in acting against his counsel. But as he gets to know Walter better, I think it very likely that he will himself think it better for him to be in some ship not so likely to stay about in harbor as the _St. Vincent_; and will judge that with a character like his it might be better for him to be on some more distant stations. I write about all this as coolly as if he were not my own dear youngest born, the little dear son whom I have so cherished, and who was almost a nursling still, when the bond which kept us all together was broken. But I believe I do truly feel that if my beloved sons are good and worthy of the name they bear, are in fact true, earnest, Christian men, I have no wish left for them--no selfish longings after their companionship, which can for a moment be put in comparison with such joy. Thus it almost seemed strange to me when, in a letter the other day from Willy to Edward, in reference to his--E's--future destination--Willy rather urged upon him a home, domestic life, on _my_ account, as my sons were already so scattered. As I say, those loving words seemed strange to me; because I have such an overpowering feeling that the all-in-all to me is that my sons should be in just that vocation in life most suited to them, and most bringing out what is highest and best in them; whether it might be in England, or at the furthest extremity of the world. * * * * * _November 24, 1848._--I have been unwell for some days, dearest Tom, and this makes me less active in all my usual employments, but it shall not, if I can help it, prevent my making some progress in this letter, which in less than a week may perhaps be on its way to New Zealand. I have just sent Fan down-stairs, for she nurses her Mother till I begin to think some change good for her. She has been reading aloud to me, and now, as the evening advances I have asked some of them to read to me a long poem by Clough--(the "Bothie") which I have no doubt will reach you. It does not _look_ attractive to me, for it is in English Hexameters, which are to me very cumbrous and uninviting; but probably that may be for some want of knowledge in my own ear and taste. The poem is addressed to his pupils of last summer, and in scenery, etc., will have, I suppose, many touches from his Highland residence; but, in a brief Preface, he says that the tale itself is altogether fiction. * * * * * To turn from things domestic to things at large, what a state of things is this at Berlin! a state of siege declared, and the King at open issue with his representatives!--from the country districts, people flocking to give him aid, while the great towns are almost in revolt. "Always too late" might, I suppose, have been his motto; and when things have been given with one hand, he has seemed too ready to withdraw them with the other. But, after all, I must and do believe that he has noble qualities, so to have won Bunsen's love and respect. _November 25._--Mary is preparing a long letter, and it will therefore matter the less if mine is not so long as I intended. I have not yet quite made up the way I have lost in my late indisposition, and we have such volumes of letters from dear Willy to answer, that I believe this folio will be all I can send to you, my own darling; but you do not dwell in my heart or my thoughts less fondly. I long inexpressibly to have some definite ideas of what you are now--after some eight months of residence--doing, thinking, feeling; what are your occupations in the present, what your aims and designs for the future. The assurance that it is your first and heartful desire to please God, my dear son; that you have struggled to do this and not allowed yourself to shrink from whatever you felt to be involved in it, this is, and will be my deepest and dearest comfort, and I pray to Him to guide you into all truth. But though supported by this assurance, I do not pretend to say that often and often I do not yearn over you in my thoughts, and long to bestow upon you in act and word, as well as in thought, some of that overflowing love which is cherished for you in your home. And here follows a tender mother-word in reference to an early and unrequited attachment of my father's, the fate of which may possibly have contributed to the restlessness which sent him beyond the seas. But, dear Tom, I believe that though the hoped for flower and fruit have faded, yet that the plant has been strengthened and purified.... It would be a grief to me not to believe that you will yet be most happy in married life; and when you can make to yourself a home I shall perhaps lose some of my restless longing to be near you and ministering to your comfort, and sharing in your life--if I can think of you as cheered and helped by one who loved you as I did your own beloved father. _Sunday, November 26._--Just a year, my son, since you left England! But I really must not allow myself to dwell on this, and all the thoughts it brings with it; for I found last night that the contrast between the fulness of thought and feeling, and my own powerlessness to express it weighed on me heavily; and not having yet quite recovered my usual tone, I could not well bear it. So I will just try to collect for you a few more home Memoranda, and then have done.... Our new tenant, James Richardson, is now fairly established at his farm, and when I went up there and saw the cradle and the happy childish faces around the table, and the rows of oatmeal cake hanging up, and the cheerful, active Mother going hither and thither--now to her Dairy--now guiding the steps of the little one that followed her about--and all the time preparing things for her husband's return from his work at night, I could not but feel that it was a very happy picture of English life. Alas! that there are not larger districts where it exists! But I hope there is still much of it; and I feel that while there is an awful undercurrent of misery and sin--the latter both caused by the first and causing it--and while, on the surface, there is carelessness, and often recklessness and hardness and trifling, yet that still, in our English society, there is, between these two extremes, a strength of good mixed with baser elements, which must and will, I fully believe, support us nationally in the troublous times which are at hand--on which we are actually entered. But again I am wandering, and now the others have gone off to the Rydal Chapel without me this lovely Sunday morning. There are the bells sounding invitingly across the valley, and the evergreens are white and sparkling in the sun. I have a note from Clough.... His poem is as remarkable, I think, as you would expect, coming from him. Its _power_ quite overcame my dislike to the measure--so far at least as to make me read it with great interest--often, though, a painful one. And now I must end. As to Miss Brontë's impressions of Matthew Arnold in that same afternoon call of 1850, they were by no means flattering. She understands that he was already the author of "a volume of poems" (_The Poems by A,_ 1849), remarks that his manner "displeases from its seeming foppery," but recognizes, nevertheless, in conversation with him, "some genuine intellectual aspirations"! It was but a few years later that my uncle paid his poet's homage to the genius of the two sisters--to Charlotte of the "expressive gray eyes"--to Emily of the "chainless soul." I often try to picture their meeting in the Fox How drawing-room: Matthew Arnold, tall, handsome, in the rich opening of his life, his first poetic honors thick upon him, looking with a half-critical, half-humorous eye at the famous little lady whom Miss Martineau had brought to call upon his mother; and beside him that small, intrepid figure, on which the worst storms of life had already beaten, which was but five short years from its own last rest. I doubt whether, face to face, they would ever have made much of each other. But the sister who could write of a sister's death as Charlotte wrote, in the letter that every lover of great prose ought to have by heart-- Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now, she never will suffer more in this world. She is gone, after a hard, short conflict.... We are very calm at present, why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. _Emily does not feel them_.-- must have stretched out spiritual hands to Matthew Arnold, had she lived to read "A Southern Night"--that loveliest, surely, of all laments of brother for brother. CHAPTER III THE FAMILY OF FOX HOW Doctor Arnold's eldest daughter, Jane Arnold, afterward Mrs. W.E. Forster, my godmother, stands out for me on the tapestry of the past, as one of the noblest personalities I have ever known. She was twenty-one when her father died, and she had been his chief companion among his children for years before death took him from her. He taught her Latin and Greek, he imbued her with his own political and historical interests, and her ardent Christian faith answered to his own. After his death she was her mother's right hand at Fox How; and her letters to her brothers--to my father, especially, since he was longest and farthest away--show her quick and cultivated mind, and all the sweetness of her nature. We hear of her teaching a younger brother Latin and Greek; she goes over to Miss Martineau on the other side of the valley to translate some German for that busy woman; she reads Dante beside her mother, when the rest of the family have gone to bed; she sympathizes passionately with Mazzini and Garibaldi; and every week she walks over Loughrigg through fair weather and foul, summer and winter, to teach in a night school at Skelwith. Then the young Quaker manufacturer, William Forster, appears on the scene, and she falls happily and completely in love. Her letters to the brother in New Zealand become, in a moment, all joy and ardor, and nothing could be prettier than the account, given by one of the sisters, of the quiet wedding in Rydal Chapel, the family breakfast, the bride's simple dress and radiant look, Matthew Arnold giving his sister away--with the great fells standing sentinel. And there exists a delightful unpublished letter by Harriet Martineau which gives some idea of the excitement roused in the quiet Ambleside valley by Jane Arnold's engagement to the tall Yorkshireman who came from surroundings so different from the academic and scholarly world in which the Arnolds had been brought up. Then followed married life at Rawdon near Bradford, with supreme happiness at home, and many and growing interests in the manufacturing, religious, and social life around the young wife. In 1861 William Forster became member for Bradford, and in 1869 Gladstone included him in that Ministry of all the talents, which foundered under the onslaughts of Disraeli in 1874. Forster became Vice-President of the Council, which meant Minister for Education, with a few other trifles like the cattle-plague thrown in. The Education Bill, which William Forster brought in in 1870 (as a girl of eighteen, I was in the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons on the great day to hear his speech), has been the foundation-stone ever since of English popular education. It has always been clear to me that the scheme of the bill was largely influenced by William Forster's wife, and, through her, by the convictions and beliefs of her father. The compromise by which the Church schools, with the creeds and the Church catechism, were preserved, under a conscience clause, while the dissenters got their way as to the banishment of creeds and catechisms, and the substitution for them of "simple Bible-teaching," in the schools founded under the new School Boards, which the bill set up all over England, has practically--with, of course, modifications--held its ground for nearly half a century. It was illogical; and the dissenters have never ceased to resent the perpetuation of the Church school which it achieved. But English life is illogical. It met the real situation; and it would never have taken the shape it did--in my opinion--but for the ardent beliefs of the young and remarkable woman, at once a strong Liberal and a devoted daughter of the English Church, as Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice understood it, who had married her Quaker husband in 1850, and had thereby been the innocent cause of his automatic severance from the Quaker body. His respect for her judgment and intellectual power was only equaled by his devotion to her. And when the last great test of his own life came, how she stood by him!--through those terrible days of the Land League struggle, when, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Forster carried his life in his hand month after month, to be worn out finally by the double toil of Parliament and Ireland, and to die just before Mr. Gladstone split the Liberal party in 1886, by the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, in which Forster would not have followed him. I shall, however, have something to say later on in these Reminiscences about those tragic days. To those who watched Mrs. Forster through them, and who knew her intimately, she was one of the most interesting figures of that crowded time. Few people, however, outside the circle of her kindred, knew her intimately. She was, of course, in the ordinary social and political world, both before and after her husband's entrance upon office, and admission to the Cabinet; dining out and receiving at home; attending Drawing-rooms and public functions; staying at country houses, and invited to Windsor, like other Ministers' wives, and keenly interested in all the varying fortunes of Forster's party. But though she was in that world, she was never truly of it. She moved through it, yet veiled from it, by that pure, unconscious selflessness which is the saint's gift. Those who ask nothing for themselves, whose whole strength is spent on affections that are their life, and on ideals at one with their affections, are not easily popular, like the self-seeking, parti-colored folk who make up the rest of us; who flatter, caress, and court, that we in our turn may be flattered and courted. Their gentleness masks the indomitable soul within; and so their fellows are often unaware of their true spiritual rank. It is interesting to recall the instinctive sympathy with which a nature so different from Charlotte Brontë's as that of Arnold's eldest daughter, met the challenge of the Brontë genius. It would not have been wonderful--in those days--if the quiet Fox How household, with its strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for _The Christian Year_, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out in all the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of _Jane Eyre_; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth--the literary rank, in fact--of _Jane Eyre_. Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband went over to Haworth to see Charlotte Brontë. My aunt's letter, describing the visit to the dismal parsonage and church, is given without her name in Mrs. Gaskell's _Life_, and Mr. Shorter, in reprinting it in the second of his large volumes, does not seem to be aware of the identity of the writer. Miss Brontë put me so in mind of her own Jane Eyre [wrote my godmother]. She looked smaller than ever, and moved about so quietly and noiselessly, just like a little bird, as Rochester called her; except that all birds are joyous, and that joy can never have entered that house since it was built. And yet, perhaps, when that old man (Mr. Brontë) married and took home his bride, and children's voices and feet were heard about the house, even that desolate graveyard and biting blast could not quench cheerfulness and hope. Now (i.e. since the deaths of Emily and Anne) there is something touching in the sight of that little creature entombed in such a place, and moving about herself there like a spirit; especially when you think that the slight still frame incloses a force of strong, fiery life, which nothing has been able to freeze or extinguish. This letter was written before my birth and about six years before the writer of it appeared, as an angel of help, in the dingy dock-side inn, where we tired travelers had taken shelter on our arrival from the other side of the world, and where I was first kissed by my godmother. As I grew up into girlhood, "Aunt K." (K. was the pet name by which Matthew Arnold always wrote to her) became for me part of the magic of Fox How, though I saw her, of course, often in her own home also. I felt toward her a passionate and troubled affection. She was to me "a thing enskied" and heavenly--for all her quick human interests, and her sweet ways with those she loved. How could any one be so good!--was often the despairing reflection of the child who adored her, caught herself in the toils of a hot temper and a stubborn will; but all the same, to see her enter a room was joy, and to sit by her the highest privilege. I don't know whether she could be strictly called beautiful. But to me everything about her was beautiful--her broad brow, her clear brown eyes and wavy brown hair, the touch of stately grace with which she moved, the mouth so responsive and soft, yet, at need, so determined, the hand so delicate, yet so characteristic. She was the eldest of nine. Of her relation to the next of them--her brother Matthew--there are many indications in the collection of my uncle's letters, edited by Mr. George Russell. It was to her that "Resignation" was addressed, in recollection of their mountain walks and talks together; and in a letter to her, the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," "Others abide our question--thou art free," was first written out. Their affection for each other, in spite of profound differences of opinion, only quickened and deepened with time. Between my father and his elder brother Matthew Arnold there was barely a year's difference of age. The elder was born in December, 1822, and the younger in November, 1823. They were always warmly attached to each other, and in spite of much that was outwardly divergent--sharply divergent--they were more alike fundamentally than was often suspected. Both had derived from some remoter ancestry--possibly through their Cornish mother, herself the daughter of a Penrose and a Trevenen--elements and qualities which were lacking in the strong personality of their father. Imagination, "rebellion against fact," spirituality, a tendency to dream, unworldliness, the passionate love of beauty and charm, "ineffectualness" in the practical competitive life--these, according to Matthew Arnold, when he came to lecture at Oxford on "The Study of Celtic Literature," were and are the characteristic marks of the Celt. They were unequally distributed between the two brothers. "Unworldliness," "rebellion against fact," "ineffectualness" in common life, fell rather to my father's share than my uncle's; though my uncle's "worldliness," of which he was sometimes accused, if it ever existed, was never more than skin-deep. Imagination in my father led to a lifelong and mystical preoccupation with religion; it made Matthew Arnold one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. There is a sketch of my father made in 1847, which preserves the dreamy, sensitive look of early youth, when he was the center of a band of remarkable friends--Clough, Stanley, F.T. Palgrave, Alfred Domett (Browning's Waring), and others. It is the face--nobly and delicately cut--of one to whom the successes of the practical, competitive life could never be of the same importance as those events which take place in thought, and for certain minds are the only real events. "For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping ever more and more out of the Celt's grasp," wrote Matthew Arnold. But all the while the Celt has great compensations. To him belongs another world than the visible; the world of phantasmagoria, of emotion, the world of passionate beginnings, rather than of things achieved. After the romantic and defiant days of his youth, my father, still pursuing the same natural tendency, found all that he needed in Catholicism, and specially, I think, in that endless poetry and mystery of the Mass which keeps Catholicism alive. Matthew Arnold was very different in outward aspect. The face, strong and rugged, the large mouth, the broad lined brow, and vigorous coal-black hair, bore no resemblance, except for that fugitive yet vigorous something which we call "family likeness," to either his father or mother--still less to the brother so near to him in age. But the Celtic trace is there, though derived, I have sometimes thought, rather from an Irish than a Cornish source. Doctor Arnold's mother, Martha Delafield, according to a genealogy I see no reason to doubt, was partly of Irish blood; one finds, at any rate, Fitzgeralds and Dillons among the names of her forebears. And I have seen in Ireland faces belonging to the "black Celt" type--faces full of power and humor, and softness, visibly molded out of the good common earth by the nimble spirit within, which have reminded me of my uncle. Nothing, indeed, at first sight could have been less romantic or dreamy than his outer aspect. "Ineffectualness" was not to be thought of in connection with him. He stood four-square--a courteous, competent man of affairs, an admirable inspector of schools, a delightful companion, a guest whom everybody wanted and no one could bind for long; one of the sanest, most independent, most cheerful and lovable of mortals. Yet his poems show what was the real inner life and genius of the man; how rich in that very "emotion," "love of beauty and charm," "rebellion against fact," "spirituality," "melancholy" which he himself catalogued as the cradle gifts of the Celt. Crossed, indeed, always, with the Rugby "earnestness," with that in him which came to him from his father. It is curious to watch the growing perception of "Matt's" powers among the circle of his nearest kin, as it is reflected in these family letters to the emigrant brother, which reached him across the seas from 1847 to 1856, and now lie under my hand. The _Poems by A._ came out, as all lovers of English poetry know, in 1849. My grandmother writes to my father in March of that year, after protesting that she has not much news to give him: But the little volume of Poems!--that is indeed a subject of new and very great interest. By degrees we hear more of public opinion concerning them, and I am very much mistaken if their power both in thought and execution is not more and more felt and acknowledged. I had a letter from dear Miss Fenwick to-day, whose first impressions were that they were by _you_, for it seems she had heard of the volume as much admired, and as by one of the family, and she had hardly thought it could be by one so moving in the busy haunts of men as dear Matt.... Matt himself says: "I have learned a good deal as to what is _practicable_ from the objections of people, even when I thought them not reasonable, and in some degree they may determine my course as to publishing; e.g., I had thoughts of publishing another volume of short poems next spring, and a tragedy I have long had in my head, the spring after: at present I shall leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them when I cannot help it, and try to get on with my Tragedy ('Merope'), which however will not be a very quick affair. But as that must be in a regular and usual form, it may perhaps, if it succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation,' and poems of that stamp, which is what I like." "The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course." The sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if, "The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and "Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same generation, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing their poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which befell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him by then--leaving out of count the later development of his influence both in the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history of English literature. But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and already a widow, after a tragic year of married life during which her young husband had developed paralysis of the brain. She was living in London, attending Bedford College, and F.D. Maurice's sermons, much influenced, like her brothers, by Emerson and Carlyle, and at this moment a fine, restless, immature creature, much younger than her years in some respects, and much older in others--with worlds hitherto unsuspected in the quiet home life. She writes: I have been in London for several months this year, and I have seen a good deal of Matt, considering the very different lives we lead. I used to breakfast with him sometimes, and then his Poems seemed to make me know Matt so much better than I had ever done before. Indeed it was almost like a new Introduction to him. I do not think those Poems could be read--quite independently of their poetical power--without leading one to expect a great deal from Matt; without raising I mean the kind of expectation one has from and for those who have, in some way or other, come face to face with life and asked it, in real earnest, what it means. I felt there was so much more of this practical questioning in Matt's book than I was at all prepared for; in fact that it showed a knowledge of life and conflict which was _strangely like experience_ if it was not the thing itself; and this with all Matt's great power I should not have looked for. I do not yet know the book well, but I think that "Mycerinus" struck me most, perhaps, as illustrating what I have been speaking of. And again, to another member of the family: It is the moral strength, or, at any rate, the _moral consciousness_ which struck and surprised me so much in the poems. I could have been prepared for any degree of poetical power, for there being a great deal more than I could at all appreciate; but there is something altogether different from this, something which such a man as Clough has, for instance, which I did not expect to find in Matt; but it is there. Of course when I speak of his Poems I only speak of the impression received from those I understand. Some are perfect riddles to me, such as that to the Child at Douglas, which is surely more poetical than true. _Strangely like experience!_ The words are an interesting proof of the difficulty we all have in seeing with accuracy the persons and things which are nearest to us. The astonishment of the sisters--for the same feeling is expressed by Mrs. Forster--was very natural. In these early days, "Matt" often figures in the family letters as the worldling of the group--the dear one who is making way in surroundings quite unknown to the Fox How circle, where, under the shadow of the mountains, the sisters, idealists all of them, looking out a little austerely, for all their tenderness, on the human scene, are watching with a certain anxiety lest Matt should be "spoiled." As Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, very much liked by his chief, he goes among rich and important people, and finds himself, as a rule, much cleverer than they; above all, able to amuse them, so often the surest road to social and other success. Already at Oxford "Matt" had been something of an exquisite--or, as Miss Brontë puts it, a trifle "foppish"; and (in the manuscript) _Fox How Magazine_, to which all the nine contributed, and in which Matthew Arnold's boyish poems may still be read, there are many family jests leveled at Matt's high standard in dress and deportment. But how soon the nascent dread lest their poet should be somehow separated from them by the "great world" passes away from mother and sisters--forever! With every year of his life Matthew Arnold, besides making the sunshine of his own married home, became a more attached, a more devoted son and brother. The two volumes of his published letters are there to show it. I will only quote here a sentence from a letter of Mrs. Arnold's, written in 1850, a year after the publication of the _Poems by A._ She and her eldest daughter, then shortly to become William Forster's wife, were at the time in London. "K" had been seriously ill, and the marriage had been postponed for a short time. Matt [says Mrs. Arnold] has been with us almost every day since we came up--now so long ago!--and it is pleasant indeed to see his dear face, and to find him always so affectionate, and so unspoiled by his being so much sought after in a kind of society entirely different from anything we can enter into. But, indeed, the time saved, day after day, for an invalid sister, by a run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death--kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, a school-boy. It was not possible to "spoil" Matthew Arnold. Meredith's "Comic Spirit" in him, his irrepressible humor, would alone have saved him from it. And as to his relation to "society," and the great ones in it, no one more frankly amused himself--within certain very definite limits--with the "cakes and ale" of life, and no one held more lightly to them. He never denied--none but the foolish ever do deny--the immense personal opportunities and advantages of an aristocratic class, wherever it exists. He was quite conscious--none but those without imagination can fail to be conscious--of the glamour of long descent and great affairs. But he laughed at the "Barbarians," the materialized or stupid holders of power and place, and their "fortified posts"--i.e., the country houses--just as he laughed at the Philistines and Mr. Bottles; when he preached a sermon in later life, it was on Menander's motto, "Choose Equality"; and he and Clough--the Republican--were not really far apart. He mocked even at Clough, indeed, addressing his letters to him, "Citizen Clough, Oriel Lyceum, Oxford"; but in the midst of the revolutionary hubbub of 1848 he pours himself out to Clough only--he and "Thyrsis," to use his own expression in a letter, "agreeing like two lambs in a world of wolves," and in his early sonnet (1848) "To a Republican Friend" (who was certainly Clough) he says: If sadness at the long heart-wasting show Wherein earth's great ones are disquieted; If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow The armies of the homeless and unfed-- If these are yours, if this is what you are, Then I am yours, and what you feel, I share. Yet, as he adds, in the succeeding sonnet, he has no belief in sudden radical change, nor in any earthly millennium-- Seeing this vale, this earth, whereon we dream, Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we dream. On the eagerness with which Matthew Arnold followed the revolutionary spectacle of 1848, an unpublished letter written--piquantly enough!--from Lansdowne House itself, on February 28th, in that famous year, to my father in New Zealand, throws a vivid light. One feels the artist in the writer. First, the quiet of the great house and courtyard, the flower-pricked grass, the "still-faced babies"; then the sudden clash of the street-cries! "Your uncle's description of this house," writes the present Lord Lansdowne, in 1910, "might almost have been written yesterday, instead of in 1848. Little is changed, Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf are still on the top of the bookcase, and the clock is still hard by; but the picture of the Jewish Exiles...has been given to a local School of Art in Wiltshire! The green lawn remains, but I am afraid the crocuses, which I can remember as a child, no longer come up through the turf. And lastly one of the 'still-faced babies' [i.e., Lord Lansdowne himself] is still often to be seen in the gravel court! He was three years old when the letter was written." Here, then, is the letter: LANSDOWNE HOUSE, _Feb. 8, 1848._ MY DEAREST TOM,--...Here I sit, opposite a marble group of Romulus and Remus and the wolf; the two children fighting like mad, and the limp-uddered she-wolf affectionately snarling at the little demons struggling on her back. Above it is a great picture, Rembrandt's Jewish Exiles, which would do for Consuelo and Albert resting in one of their wanderings, worn out upon a wild stony heath sloping to the Baltic--she leaning over her two children who sleep in their torn rags at her feet. Behind me a most musical clock, marking now 24 Minutes past 1 P.M. On my left two great windows looking out on the court in front of the house, through one of which, slightly opened, comes in gushes the soft damp breath, with a tone of spring-life in it, which the close of an English February sometimes brings--so different from a November mildness. The green lawn which occupies nearly half the court is studded over with crocuses of all colors--growing out of the grass, for there are no flower-beds; delightful for the large still-faced white-robed babies whom their nurses carry up and down on the gravel court where it skirts the green. And from the square and the neighboring streets, through the open door whereat the civil porter moves to and fro, come the sounds of vehicles and men, in all gradations, some from near and some from far, but mellowed by the time they reach this backstanding lordly mansion. But above all cries comes one whereat every stone in this and other lordly mansions may totter and quake for fear: "Se...c...ond Edition of the Morning _Herald_--L...a...test news from Paris:--arrival of the King of the French." I have gone out and bought the said portentous _Herald_, and send it herewith, that you may read and know. As the human race forever stumbles up its great steps, so it is now. You remember the Reform Banquets [in Paris] last summer?--well!--the diners omitted the king's health, and abused Guizot's majority as corrupt and servile: the majority and the king grew excited; the Government forbade the Banquets to continue. The king met the Chamber with the words "_passions aveugles_" to characterize the dispositions of the Banqueters: and Guizot grandly declared against the spirit of Revolution all over the world. His practice suited his words, or seemed to suit them, for both in Switzerland and Italy, the French Government incurred the charge of siding against the Liberals. Add to this the corruption cases you remember, the Praslin murder, and later events, which powerfully stimulated the disgust (moral indignation that People does not feel!) entertained by the lower against the governing class. Then Thiers, seeing the breeze rising, and hoping to use it, made most telling speeches in the debate on the Address, clearly defining the crisis as a question between revolution and counter-revolution, and declaring enthusiastically for the former. Lamartine and others, the sentimental and the plain honest, were very damaging on the same side. The Government were harsh-- abrupt--almost scornful. They would not yield--would not permit banquets: would give no Reform till they chose. Guizot spoke (alone in the Chamber, I think) to this effect. With decreasing Majorities the Government carried the different clauses of the address, amidst furious scenes; opposition members crying that they were worse than Polignac. It was resolved to hold an Opposition banquet in Paris in spite of the Government, last Tuesday, the 22d. In the week between the close of the debate and this day there was a profound, uneasy excitement, but nothing I think to appall the rulers. They had the fortifications; all kinds of stores; and 100,000 troops of the line. To be quite secure, however, they determined to take a formal legal objection to the banquet at the doors; but not to prevent the procession thereto. On that the Opposition published a proclamation inviting the National Guard, who sympathized, to form part of the procession in uniform. Then the Government forbade the meeting altogether--absolutely--and the Opposition resigned themselves to try the case in a Court of Law. _So did not the people!_ They gathered all over Paris: the National Guard, whom Ministers did not trust, were not called out: the Line checked and dispersed the mob on all points. But next day the mob were there again: the Ministers in a constitutional fright called out the National Guard: a body of these hard by the Opéra refused to clear the street, they joined the people. Troops were brought up: the Mob and the National Guard refused to give them passage down the Rue le Pelletier, which they occupied: after a moment's hesitation, they were marched on along the Boulevard. This settled the matter! Everywhere the National Guard fraternized with the people: the troops stood indifferent. The King dismissed the Ministers: he sent for Molé; a shade better: not enough: he sent for Thiers--a pause; this was several shades better--still not enough: meanwhile the crowd continued, and attacks on different posts, with slight bloodshed, increased the excitement: finally _the King abdicated_ in favor of the Count of Paris, and fled. The Count of Paris was taken by his mother to the Chamber--the people broke in; too late--not enough:--a republic--an appeal to the people. The royal family escaped to all parts, Belgium, Eu, England: _a Provisional Government named_. You will see how they stand: they have adopted the last measures of Revolution.--News has just come that the National Guard have declared against a Republic, and that a collision is inevitable. If possible I will write by the next mail, and send you a later paper than the _Herald_ by this mail. Your truly affectionate, dearest Tom, M. ARNOLD. To this let me add here two or three other letters or fragments, all unpublished, which I find among the papers from which I have been drawing, ending, for the present, with the jubilant letter describing his election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, in 1857. Here, first of all, is an amusing reference, dated 1849, to Keble, then the idol of every well-disposed Anglican household: I dined last night with a Mr. Grove,[1] a celebrated man of science: his wife is pretty and agreeable, but not on a first interview. The husband and I agree wonderfully on some points. He is a bad sleeper, and hardly ever free from headache; he equally dislikes and disapproves of modern existence and the state of excitement in which everybody lives: and he sighs after a paternal despotism and the calm existence of a Russian or Asiatic. He showed me a picture of Faraday, which is wonderfully fine: I am almost inclined to get it: it has a curious likeness to Keble, only with a calm, earnest look unlike the latter's Flibbertigibbet, fanatical, twinkling expression. [Footnote 1: Afterward Sir William Grove, F.R.S., author of the famous essay on "The Correlation of Physical Force."] Did ever anybody apply such adjectives to John Keble before! Yet if any one will look carefully at the engraving of Keble so often seen in quiet parsonages, they will understand, I think, exactly what Matthew Arnold meant. In 1850 great changes came upon the Arnold family. The "Doctor's" elder three children--Jane, Matthew, and my father--married in that year, and a host of new interests sprang up for every member of the Fox How circle. I find in a letter to my father from Arthur Stanley, his father's biographer, and his own Oxford tutor, the following reference to "Matt's" marriage, and to the second series of Poems--containing "Sohrab and Rustum"--which were published in 1854. "You will have heard," writes Stanley, "of the great success of Matt's poems. He is in good heart about them. He is also--I must say so, though perhaps I have no right to say so--greatly improved by his marriage--retaining all the genius and nobleness of mind which you remember, with all the lesser faults pruned and softened down." Matt himself wrote to give news of his wedding, to describe the bride--Judge Wightman's daughter, the dear and gracious little lady whom we grandchildren knew and loved as "Aunt Fanny Lucy"--and to wish my father joy of his own. And then there is nothing among the waifs and strays that have come to me worth printing, till 1855, when my uncle writes to New Zealand: I hope you have got my book by this time. What you will like best, I think, will be the "Scholar Gipsy." I am sure that old Cumner and Oxford country will stir a chord in you. For the preface I doubt if you will care, not having much before your eyes the sins and offenses at which it is directed: the first being that we have numbers of young gentlemen with really wonderful powers of perception and expression, but to whom there is wholly wanting a "_bedeutendes Individuum"_--so that their productions are most unedifying and unsatisfactory. But this is a long story. As to Church matters. I think people in general concern themselves less with them than they did when you left England. Certainly religion is not, to all appearance at least, losing ground here: but since the great people of Newman's party went over, the disputes among the comparatively unimportant remains of them do not excite much interest. I am going to hear Manning at the Spanish Chapel next Sunday. Newman gives himself up almost entirely to organizing and educating the Roman Catholics, and is gone off greatly, they say, as a preacher. God bless you, my dearest Tom: I cannot tell you the almost painful longing I sometimes have to see you once more. The following year the brothers met again; and there followed, almost immediately, my uncle's election to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford. He writes, in answer to my father's congratulations: HAMPTON, _May 16, 1857._ MY DEAR TOM,--My thoughts have often turned to you during my canvass for the Professorship--and they have turned to you more than ever during the last few days which I have been spending at Oxford. You alone of my brothers are associated with that life at Oxford, the _freest_ and most delightful part, perhaps, of my life, when with you and Clough and Walrond I shook off all the bonds and formalities of the place, and enjoyed the spring of life and that unforgotten Oxfordshire and Berkshire country. Do you remember a poem of mine called "The Scholar Gipsy"? It was meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced--and as such Clough and Walrond accepted it, and it has had much success at Oxford, I am told, as was perhaps likely from its _couleur locale_. I am hardly ever at Oxford now, but the sentiment of the place is overpowering to me when I have leisure to feel it, and can shake off the interruptions which it is not so easy to shake off now as it was when we were young. But on Tuesday afternoon I smuggled myself away, and got up into one of our old coombs among the Cumner hills, and into a field waving deep with cowslips and grasses, and gathered such a bunch as you and I used to gather in the cowslip field on Lutterworth road long years ago. You dear old boy, I love your congratulations although I see and hear so little of you, and, alas! _can_ see and hear but so little of you. I was supported by people of all opinions, the great bond of union being, I believe, the affectionate interest felt in papa's memory. I think it probable that I shall lecture in English: there is no direction whatever in the Statute as to the language in which the lectures shall be: and the Latin has so died out, even among scholars, that it seems idle to entomb a lecture which, in English, might be stimulating and interesting. On the same occasion, writing to his mother, the new Professor gives an amusing account of the election day, when my uncle and aunt came up to town from Hampton, where they were living, in order to get telegraphic news of the polling from friends at Oxford. "Christ Church"--i.e., the High Church party in Oxford--had put up an opposition candidate, and the excitement was great. My uncle was by this time the father of three small boys, Tom, Trevenen--_alias_ Budge--and Richard--"Diddy." We went first to the telegraph station at Charing Cross. Then, about 4, we got a message from Walrond--"nothing certain is known, but it is rumored that you are ahead." Then we went to get some toys for the children in the Lowther Arcade, and could scarcely have found a more genuine distraction than in selecting wagons for Tom and Trev, with horses of precisely the same color, not one of which should have a hair more in his tail than the other--and a musical cart for Diddy. A little after five we went back to the telegraph office, and got the following message--"Nothing declared, but you are said to be quite safe. Go to Eaton Place." ["Eaton Place" was then the house of Judge Wightman, Mrs. Matthew Arnold's father.] To Eaton Place we went, and then a little after 6 o'clock we were joined by the Judge in the highest state of joyful excitement with the news of my majority of 85, which had been telegraphed to him from Oxford after he had started and had been given to him at Paddington Station.... The income is £130 a year or thereabouts: the duties consist as far as I can learn in assisting to look over the prize compositions, in delivering a Latin oration in praise of founders at every alternate commemoration, and in preparing and giving three Latin lectures on ancient poetry in the course of the year. _These lectures I hope to give in English_. The italics are mine. The intention expressed here and in the letter to my father was, as is well known, carried out, and Matthew Arnold's Lectures at Oxford, together with the other poetic and critical work produced by him during the years of his professorship, became so great a force in the development of English criticism and English taste, that the lifelike detail of this letter acquires a kind of historical value. As a child of fourteen I first made acquaintance with Oxford while my uncle was still Professor. I remember well some of his lectures, the crowded lecture-hall, the manner and personality of the speaker, and my own shy pride in him--from a great distance. For I was a self-conscious, bookish child, and my days of real friendship with him were still far ahead. But during the years that followed, the ten years that he held his professorship, what a spell he wielded over Oxford, and literary England in general! Looking back, one sees how the first series of _Essays in Criticism_, the _Lectures on Celtic Literature_, or _On Translating Homer, Culture, and Anarchy_ and the rest, were all the time working on English taste and feeling, whether through sympathy or antagonism; so that after those ten years, 1857-1867, the intellectual life of the country had absorbed, for good and all, an influence, and a stimulus, which had set it moving on new paths to new ends. With these thoughts in mind, supplying a comment on the letter which few people could have foreseen in 1857, let me quote a few more sentences: Keble voted for me after all. He told the Coleridges he was so much pleased with my letter (to the electors) that he could not refrain. ... I had support from all sides. Archdeacon Denison voted for me, also Sir John Yarde Buller, and Henley, of the high Tory party. It was an immense victory--some 200 more voted than have ever, it is said, voted in a Professorship election before. It is a great lesson to Christ Church, which was rather disposed to imagine it could carry everything by its great numbers. Good-by, my dearest mother.... I have just been up to see the three dear little brown heads on their pillows, all asleep.... My affectionate thanks to Mrs. Wordsworth and Mrs. Fletcher for their kind interest in my success. It is pleasant to think of Wordsworth's widow, in her "old age serene and bright," and of the poet's old friend, Mrs. Fletcher, watching and rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer. So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectual sense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ and certain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectual passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure, as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essays in Criticism._ It is not too much to say that the book set for me the currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of kinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring love of France and of French literature, which played the part of schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not died so soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to him would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were never said! CHAPTER IV OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, together with a few of the intimate friends who mingled with it frequently, and very soon became names of power to the Tasmanian child also. Let me take first Doctor Arnold's third son, "Uncle Willy"--my father's junior by some four years. William Delafield Arnold is secure of long remembrance, one would fain think, if only as the subject of Matthew Arnold's two memorial poems--"A Southern Night" and "Stanzas from Carnac." But in truth he had many and strong claims of his own. His youth was marked by that "restlessness," which is so often spoken of in the family letters as a family quality and failing. My father's "restlessness" made him throw up a secure niche in English life, for the New Zealand adventure. The same temperament in Mary Twining, the young widow of twenty-two, took her to London, away from the quiet of the Ambleside valley, and made her an ardent follower of Maurice, Kingsley, and Carlyle. And in Willy, the third son, it showed itself first in a revolt against Oxford, while he was still at Christ Church, leading to his going out to India and joining the Indian Army, at the age of twenty, only to find the life of an Indian subaltern all but intolerable, and to plunge for a time at least into fresh schemes of change. Among the early photographs at Fox How there is a particularly fine daguerreotype of a young officer in uniform, almost a boy, slim and well proportioned, with piled curly hair, and blue eyes, which in the late 'fifties I knew as "Uncle Willy"; and there were other photographs on glass of the same young man, where this handsome face appeared again, grown older--much older--the boyish look replaced by an aspect of rather grave dignity. In the later pictures he was grouped with children, whom I knew as my Indian cousins. But him, in the flesh, I had never seen. He was dead. His wife was dead. On the landing bookcase of Fox How there was, however, a book in two blue volumes, which I soon realized as a "novel," called _Oakfield_, which had been written by the handsome young soldier in the daguerreotype. I tried to read it, but found it was about things and persons in which I could then take no interest. But its author remained to me a mysteriously attractive figure; and when the time came for me to read my Uncle Matthew's poems, "A Southern Night," describing the death at Gibraltar of this soldier uncle, became a great favorite with me. I could see it all as Matthew Arnold described it--the steamer approaching Gibraltar, the landing, and the pale invalid with the signs on him of that strange thing called "death," which to a child that "feels its life in every limb" has no real meaning, though the talk of it may lead vaguely to tears, as that poem often did with me. Later on, of course, I read _Oakfield_, and learned to take a more informed pride in the writer of it. But it was not until a number of letters written from India by William Arnold to my father in New Zealand between 1848 and 1855, with a few later ones, came into my possession, at my father's death, that I really seemed to know this dear vanished kinsman, though his orphaned children had always been my friends. [Illustration: FOX HOW, THE WESTMORELAND HOME OF THE ARNOLDS.] The letters of 1848 and 1849 read like notes for _Oakfield_. They were written in bitterness of soul by a very young man, with high hopes and ideals, fresh from the surroundings of Oxford and Rugby, from the training of the Schoolhouse and Fox How, and plunged suddenly into a society of boys--the subalterns of the Bengal Native Infantry--living for the most part in idleness, often a vicious idleness, without any restraining public opinion, and practically unshepherded, amid the temptations of the Indian climate and life. They show that the novel is, indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes, changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby "earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in the story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told with force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more detached and mature in the way of novel-writing. But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote the phrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happiness and his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature. Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and sea. The fact that one learns first in India [he says, bitterly] is the profound ignorance which exists in England about it. You know how one hears it spoken of always as a magnificent field for exertion, and this is true enough in one way, for if a man does emerge at all, he emerges the more by contrast--he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom one meets _a happy man_. I came out here with three great advantages [he adds]. First, being twenty instead of seventeen; secondly not having been at Addiscombe; third, having been at Rugby and Christ Church. This gives me a sort of position--but still I know the danger is awful--for constitutionally I believe I am as little able to stand the peculiar trials of Indian life as anybody. And he goes on to say that if ever he feels himself in peril of sinking to the level of what he loathes--"I will go at once." By coming out to India he had bound himself to one thing only--"to earn my own bread." But he is not bound to earn it "as a gentleman." The day may come-- when I shall ask for a place on your farm, and if you ask how I am to get there, you, Tom, are not the person to deny that a man who is in earnest and capable of forming a resolution can do more difficult things than getting from India to New Zealand! And he winds up with yearning affection toward the elder brother so far away. I think of you very often--our excursion to Keswick and Greta Hall, our walk over Hardknot and Wrynose, our bathes in the old Allen Bank bathing-place [Grasmere], our parting in the cab at the corner of Mount St. One of my pleasantest but most difficult problems is when and where we shall meet again. In another letter, written a year later, the tone is still despondent. "It is no affectation to say that I feel my life, in one way, cannot now be a happy one." He feels it his duty for the present to "lie still," as Keble says, to think, it may be to suffer. "But in my castle-buildings I often dream of coming to you." He appreciates, more fully than ever before, Tom's motives in going to New Zealand--the desire that may move a man to live his own life in a new and freer world. "But when I am asked, as I often am, why you went, I always grin and let people answer themselves; for I could not hope to explain without preaching a sermon. An act of faith and conviction cannot be understood by the light of worldly motives and interests; and to blow out this light, and bring the true one, is not the work of a young man with his own darkness to struggle through; so I grin as aforesaid." "God is teaching us," he adds--i.e., the different members of the family--"by separation, absence, and suffering." And he winds up--"Good-by. I never like finishing a letter to you--it seems like letting you fall back again to such infinite distance. And you are often very near me, and the thought of you is often cheery and helpful to me in my own conflict." Even up to January, 1850, he is still thinking of New Zealand, and signing himself, "ever, dear Tom, whether I am destined to see you soon, or never again in this world--Your most truly affectionate brother." Alack! the brothers never did meet again, in this world which both took so hardly. But for Willy a transformation scene was near. After two years in India, his gift and his character had made their mark. He had not only been dreaming of New Zealand; besides his daily routine, he had been working hard at Indian languages and history. The Lawrences, both John and Henry, had found him out, and realized his quality. It was at Sir Henry Lawrence's house in the spring of 1850 that he met Miss Fanny Hodgson, daughter of the distinguished soldier and explorer, General Hodgson, discoverer of the sources of the Ganges, and at that time the Indian Surveyor-General. The soldier of twenty-three fell instantly in love, and tumult and despondency melted away. The next letter to New Zealand is pitched in quite another key. He still judges Indian life and Indian government with a very critical eye. "The Alpha and Omega of the whole evil in Indian Society" is "the regarding India as a rupee-mine, instead of a Colony, and ourselves as Fortune-hunters and Pension-earners rather than as emigrants and missionaries." And outside his domestic life his prospects are still uncertain. But with every mail one can see the strained spirit relaxing, yielding to the spell of love and to the honorable interests of an opening life. "To-day, my Thomas [October 2, 1850], I sit, a married man in the Bengal army, writing to a brother, it may be a married man, in Van Diemen's Land." (Rumors of Tom's courtship of Julia Sorell had evidently just reached him.) He goes on to describe his married home at Hoshyarpore, and his work at Indian languages. He has been reading Carlyle's _Cromwell_, and marveling at the "rapid rush of thought which seems more and more to be engrossing people in England!" "In India you will easily believe that the torpor is still unbroken." (The Mutiny was only seven short years ahead!) And he is still conscious of the "many weights which do beset and embitter a man's life in India." But a new stay within, the reconciliation that love brings about between a man and the world, upholds him. "'To draw homeward to the general life,' which you, and dear Matt himself, and I, and all of us, are--or at least may be--living, independent of all the accidents of time and circumstance--this is a great alleviation." The "_fundamentals"_ are safe. He dwells happily on the word--"a good word, in which you and I, so separated, as far as accidents go, it may be for all time, can find great comfort, speaking as it does of Eternity." One sees what is in his mind--the brother's "little book of poems" published a year before: Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from chance, have conquered fate, They, winning room to see and hear, And to men's business not too near Though clouds of individual strife Draw homeward to the general life. * * * * * To the wise, foolish; to the world Weak;--yet not weak, I might reply, Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye, To whom each moment in its race, Crowd as we will its neutral space, Is but a quiet watershed Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed. Six months later the younger brother has heard "as a positive fact" of Tom's marriage, and writes, with affectionate "chaff": I wonder whether it has changed you much?--not made a Tory of you, I'll undertake to say! But it is wonderfully sobering. After all, Master Tom, it is not the very exact _finale_ which we should have expected to your Republicanism of the last three or four years, to find you a respectable married man, holding a permanent appointment! Matt's marriage, too, stands pre-eminent among the items of family news. What blind judges, sometimes, the most attached brothers are of each other! I hear too by this mail of Matt's engagement, which suggests many thoughts. I own that Matt is one of the very last men in the world whom I can fancy happily married--or rather happy in matrimony. But I dare say I reckon without my host, for there was such a "_longum intervallum"_ between dear old Matt and me, that even that last month in town, when I saw so much of him, though there was the most entire absence of elder-brotherism on his part, and only the most kind and thoughtful affection, for which I shall always feel grateful, yet our intercourse was that of man and boy; and though the difference of years was not so formidable as between "Matthew" and Wordsworth, yet we were less than they a "pair of Friends," though a pair of very loving brothers. But even in this gay and charming letter one begins to see the shadows cast by the doom to come. The young wife has gone to Simla, having been "delicate" for some time. The young husband stays behind, fighting the heat. The hot weather, old boy, is coming on like a tiger. It is getting on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at gun-fire, about half-past four A.M. and drive down to the civil station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our own corps ... who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account, write a letter or so, and lie down with _Don Quixote_ under a punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep- inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as the natives say. The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855. There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the old childish Fox How days, and already shown in _Oakfield_, was becoming more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the _Times_, the _Economist_, and _Fraser_, and was presently offered the editorship of the _Economist_. But just as he was about to accept it, came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to organize the whole of native education in the Punjaub, and he did it so well during the short time that remained to him before the Mutiny broke out, that during all that time of terror, education in the Punjaub was never interrupted, the attendances at the schools never dropped, and the young Director went about his work, not knowing often, indeed, whether the whole province might not be aflame within twenty-four hours, and its Anglo-Indian administration wiped out, but none the less undaunted and serene. To this day, three portrait medals in gold and silver are given every year to the best pupils in the schools of the Punjaub, the product of a fund raised immediately after his death by William Arnold's fellow-workers there, in order to commemorate his short heroic course in that far land, and to preserve, if they could, some record of that "sweet stateliness" of aspect, to use the expression of one who loved him, which "had so fascinated his friends." The Mutiny passed. Sir John Lawrence paid public and flattering tribute to the young official who had so amply justified a great man's choice. And before the storm had actually died away, within a fortnight of the fall of Delhi, while it was not yet certain that the troops on their way would arrive in time to prevent further mischief, my uncle, writing to my father of the awful days of suspense from the 14th to the 30th of September, says: A more afflicted country than this has been since I returned to it in November. 1855--afflicted by Dearth--Deluge--Pestilence--far worse than war, it would be hard to imagine. _In the midst of it all, the happiness of our domestic life has been almost perfect_. With that touching sentence the letters to my father, so far, at least, as I possess them, come to an end. Alas! In the following year the gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the Himalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, sent his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the overland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die. From Cairo he had written to the beloved mother who was waiting for him in that mountain home he so longed to reach, that he hoped to be able to travel in a fortnight. But do not trust to this.... Do not in fact expect me till you hear that I am in London. I much fear that it may be long before I see dear, dear Fox How. In London I must have advice, and I feel sure I shall be ordered to the South of England till the hot weather is well advanced. I must wait too in London for the darling children. But once in London, I cannot but think my dearest mother will manage to see me, and I have even had visions of your making one of your spring tours, and going with me to Torquay or wherever I may go.... Plans--plans--plans! They will keep. And a few days later: As I said before, do not expect me in England till you hear I am there. Perhaps I was too eager to get home. Assuredly I have been checked, and I feel as if there were much trouble between me and home yet.... I see in the papers the death of dear Mrs. Wordsworth.... Ever my beloved mother ... Your very loving son, W.D. ARNOLD. He started for England, but at Gibraltar, a dying man, was carried ashore. His younger brother, sent out from England in post haste, missed him by ill chance at Alexandria and Malta, and arrived too late. He was buried under the shelter of the Rock of Spain and the British flag. His intimate friend, Meredith Townsend, the joint editor and creator of the _Spectator_, wrote to the _Times_ shortly after his death: William Arnold did not live long enough (he was thirty-one) to gain his true place in the world, but he had time enough given him to make himself of importance to a Government like that of Lord Dalhousie, to mold the education of a great province, and to win the enduring love of all with whom he ever came in contact. It was left, however, for his poet-brother to build upon his early grave "the living record of his memory." A month after "Willy's" death, "Matt" was wandering where-- beneath me, bright and wide Lay the low coast of Brittany-- with the thought of "Willy" in his mind, as he turns to the sea that will never now bring the wanderer home. O, could he once have reached the air Freshened by plunging tides, by showers! Have felt this breath he loved, of fair Cool northern fields, and grain, and flowers. He longed for it--pressed on!--In vain! At the Straits failed that spirit brave, The south was parent of his pain, The south is mistress of his grave. Or again, in "A Southern Night"--where he muses on the "two jaded English," man and wife, who lie, one under the Himalayas, the other beside "the soft Mediterranean." And his first thought is that for the "spent ones of a work-day age," such graves are out of keeping. In cities should we English lie Where cries are rising ever new, And men's incessant stream goes by!-- * * * * * Not by those hoary Indian hills, Not by this gracious Midland sea Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills Should our graves be! Some Eastern sage pursuing "the pure goal of being"--"He by those Indian mountains old, might well repose." Crusader, troubadour, or maiden dying for love-- Such by these waters of romance 'Twas meet to lay! And then he turns upon himself. For what is beauty, what wisdom, what romance if not the tender goodness of women, if not the high soul of youth? Mild o'er her grave, ye mountains, shine! Gently by his, ye waters, glide! To that in you which is divine They were allied. * * * * * Only a few days after their father's death, the four orphan children of the William Arnolds arrived at Fox How. They were immediately adopted as their own by William and Jane Forster, who had no children; and later they added the name of Forster to that of Arnold. At that moment I was at school at Ambleside, and I remember well my first meeting with the Indian children, and how I wondered at their fair skins and golden hair and frail, ethereal looks. By this time Fox How was in truth a second home to me. But I have still to complete the tale of those who made it so. Edward Penrose, the Doctor's fourth son, who died in 1878, on the threshold of fifty, was a handsome, bearded man of winning presence and of many friends. He was at Balliol, then a Fellow of All Souls, and in Orders. But he first found his real vocation as an Inspector of Schools in Devon and Cornwall, and for eighteen years, from 1860 to 1878, through the great changes in elementary education produced by his brother-in-law's Education Act, he was the ever-welcome friend of teachers and children all over the wide and often remote districts of the West country which his work covered. He had not the gifts of his elder brothers--neither the genius of Matthew nor the restless energy and initiative of William Delafield, nor the scholarly and researching tastes of my father; and his later life was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness, and Matthew's humor--the "chaff" between the two brothers was endless!--and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talk in his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them before him in the country school-rooms, where his coming--the coming of "the tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes," as an eye-witness describes him--was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more nor less than the cause of _the international intelligence_, and its sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the Cinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to be taught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields. But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward. "Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near Loughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest, and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult"; the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir, where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very graciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lasting memories of life. Mrs. Herrick became identified in my imagination with each successive Scott heroine,--Rowena, Isabella, Rose Bradwardine, the White Lady of Avenel, and the rest. But it was Aunt Mary herself, after all, who held the scene. In that Leicestershire world of High Toryism, she raised the Liberal flag--her father's flag--with indomitable courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it--a golden and pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a quiet laughter, of which the causes were not always clear to the bystanders, her strong face with its points of likeness to her father's, and all her warm and most human personality--they are still vividly present to me, though it is nearly thirty years since, after an hour or two's pain, she died suddenly and unexpectedly, of the same malady that killed her father. Consumed in her youth by a passionate idealism, she had accepted at the hands of life, and by the age of four and twenty, a lot by no means ideal--a home in the depths of the country, among neighbors often uncongenial, and far from the intellectual pleasures she had tasted during her young widowhood in London. But out of this lot she made something beautiful, and all her own--by sheer goodness, conscience, intelligence. She had her angles and inconsistencies; she often puzzled those who loved her; but she had a large brain and a large heart; and for us colonial children, conscious of many disadvantages beside our English-born cousins, she had a peculiar tenderness, a peculiar laughing sympathy, that led us to feel in "Aunt Maria" one of our best friends. Susan Arnold, the Doctor's fourth daughter, married Mr. John Cropper in 1858, and here, too, in her house beside the Mersey, among fields and trees that still maintain a green though besmutted oasis in the busy heart of Liverpool, that girdles them now on all sides, and will soon engulf them, there were kindness and welcome for the little Tasmanians. She died a few years ago, mourned and missed by her own people--those lifelong neighbors who know truly what we are. Of the fifth daughter, Frances, "Aunt Fan," I may not speak, because she is still with us in the old house--alive to every political and intellectual interest of these darkened days, beloved by innumerable friends in many worlds, and making sunshine still for Arnold's grandchildren and their children's children. But it was to her that my own stormy childhood was chiefly confided, at Fox How; it was she who taught the Tasmanian child to read, and grappled with her tempers; and while she is there the same magic as of old clings about Fox How for those of us who have loved it, and all it stands for, so long. CHAPTER V THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How and my father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up. Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my grandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge," says my grandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poet sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's _Life_ my grandfather mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount. Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold. The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's left stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it. He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back toward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw back his head with a laugh of enjoyment.--"What _beautiful_ English the old man talks!" The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing passage in the letter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his neighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so surrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running round and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his constant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by him during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the house are said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which still possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning-- Wansfell, this household has a favored lot Living with liberty on thee to gaze-- a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines that Wordsworth ever wrote. It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here, for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a letter from my grandmother to my father: Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat on the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, he talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of Coleridge, etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than he has often done lately. But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of _The Reign of Law_--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes "celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian. On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after drove to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little languid in manner. He became less so as he talked. ... He talked incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I looked at him often and asked myself if that was the man who had stamped the impress of his own mind so decidedly on a great part of the literature of his age! He took us to see a waterfall near his house, and talked and chattered, but said nothing remarkable or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all this was only that we were on the surface, and did not indicate any decay of mental powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression than the vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so well-- and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which spoke through them. On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never be forgotten while literature lasts. In the evening, however-- ... after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as before, seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner. Again he awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming in, we rose to go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so soon, and said he would walk out with us. We went to the mound in front, and the Duchess then asked if he would repeat some of his own lines to us. He said he hardly thought he could do that, but that he would have been glad to read some to us. We stood looking at the view for some time, when Mrs. Wordsworth came out and asked us back to the house to take some tea. This was just what we wanted. We sat for about half an hour at tea, during which I tried to direct the conversation to interesting subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded--his remarks forcible and decided--with some tendency to run off to irrelevant anecdote. When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us. He said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we chose. He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the "Excursion." He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days to compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel that we were to hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years before. He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low, clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective lines, his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and almost passion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I observed that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the reading. The strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to the person to whom the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural at the time. "My DEAR, DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild eyes." It was not till after the reading was over that we found out that the poor paralytic invalid we had seen in the morning was the _sister_ to whom "Tintern Abbey" was addressed, and her condition, now, accounted for the fervor with which the old Poet read lines which reminded him of their better days. But it was melancholy to think that the vacant gaze we had seen in the morning was from the "wild eyes" of 1798. ... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in his reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it was impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs. Wordsworth told me it was the first time he had read since his daughter's death, and that she was thankful to us for having made him do it, as he was apt to fall into a listless, languid state. We asked him to come to Inverary. He said he had not courage; as he had last gone through that country with his daughter, and he feared it would be too much for him. Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughrigg which overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great poet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through the April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and, suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew down the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life of Wordsworth had gone out. Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace and dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tender enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs. Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the house no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have always remembered. A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs. Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and near the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--a store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by "James," the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures. Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's great-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--the Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as she wrote it down for me the following morning. RYDAL MOUNT, _September 14, 1911._ Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window. The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed, looking toward the window. Very bright moonlight was shining into the room and I could just see the corner of Loughrigg out in the distance. My first impression was of bright moonlight, but then I became strongly conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window. I said to myself, "That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand resting on the arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent, and he seemed to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt expression. He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The moonlight lit up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed that the hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something solemn and beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I looked-- I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I became aware of the empty chair.--I lay back again, and thought for a moment in a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth." And almost immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my knowledge, been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had been reading Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of Knight's _Wordsworthiana_, before I fell asleep. I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house. Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his poetic youth. In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid which my own childhood was passed I have already said something of my father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend of his youth: I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly than any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to "Philip," something that he saw in me helped to suggest the character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself, and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom--for trampling on ceremony and palaver, for trying experiments in equality, being common to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand; and in the two years before I sailed (December, 1847) Clough and I were a great deal together. It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John Campbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--_Qui laborat oral_--was found by my father one morning on the table of his bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought availeth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and the original copy--_tibi primo confisum_, of the pretty, though unequal verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called _Ambarvalia,_ and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the _Poems by A_. Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just received Matt's volume: At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes go forth together. Otherwise you won't read mine--_Ambarvalia_, at any rate--at all. Froude also has published a new book of religious biography, auto or otherwise (_The Nemesis of Faith_), and therewithal resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of Exeter) talks of not accepting the resignation, but having an expulsion--fire and fagot fashion. _Quo usque_? But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with affectionate welcome indeed of the _Poems by A_, but with enthusiasm of the "Bothie." It greatly surpasses my expectations! It is on the whole a noble poem, well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of promise. With joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening like a strong man out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks"; and if he remains true and works, I think there is nothing too high or too great to be expected from him. "True," and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his short life. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity of philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie," its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human feeling and passion. The "music" of his "rustic flute". Kept not for long its happy, country tone; Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note Of men contention-tost, of men who groan. The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day," and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in triumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of 1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year later--February 24, 1849: To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of '48, whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics, nor in any constitution of man! God be praised for the downfall of Louis Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last year's scream of "_� bas Guizot_!" seems to be the sum total. Or are we to salute the rising sun, with "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ and the green liveries? President for life I think they'll make him, and then begin to tire of him. Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the Pope and crush the renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini has just been declared a citizen! A few months later, the writer--at Rome--"was in at the death" of this same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness of soul. I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come our grand Lib. Eq. and Frat. revolution! And then I went to Naples-- and home. I am full of admiration for Mazzini.... But on the whole--"Farewell Politics!" utterly!--What can I do? Study is much more to the purpose. So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was remarkable, and will be long read--whether it be poetry or no--by those who find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature and thought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at the age of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those who had talked and lived with him. To a boon southern country he is fled, And now in happier air, Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine (And purer or more subtle soul than thee, I trow the mighty Mother doth not see) Within a folding of the Apennine, Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!-- But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of English hills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of a little school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister, afterward the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisest leader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Ambleside children of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending my Sundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at long intervals, when my father came for me, with "Mr. Clough," and the two old friends, who, after nine years' separation, had recently met again, walked up the Sweden Bridge lane into the heart of Scandale Fell, while I, paying no more attention to them than they--after a first ten minutes--did to me, went wandering and skipping and dreaming by myself. In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wild stream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony shallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam-- were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight." Should I find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by heart?--or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, or streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quite safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no account, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings--male tongues, besides, being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper, rising and falling along the stream, or--positively--a fat brown trout in hiding under that shady bank?--or that a buzzard, hovering overhead. Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy as the "beck" itself. It was a point of honor with me to get to Sweden Bridge--a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head of the valley--before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over the unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on a summer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream, the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up to regions beyond the ken of thought; and of myself, queening it there on the weather-worn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical joy of each contented sense--the sun on my cotton dress, the scents from grass and moss, the marvelous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, the brilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on its tiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the stream or on the mountain-side. How did they come there--those big rocks? I puzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in the walks we had to ourselves, would sometimes try and teach me a little geology. I have used the words "physical joy," because, although such passionate pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense of the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, no doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse the famous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," between the "haunting passion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of later years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods and memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we feel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, that "in our life alone doth Nature live." No one can answer for the changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so far, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary and inbred; independent--often selfishly independent--of the real human experience. I have been sometimes ashamed--pricked even with self- contempt--to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in the garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me--even for the moment--intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things-- colors, forms, scents--when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended--"as though of hemlock one had drunk." Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But it is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to the end. The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole--except in first youth--without this correspondence between some constant pleasure-sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot, therefore, be anything to be proud of. But it is certainly something to be glad of--"amid the chances and changes of this mortal life"; it is one of the joys "in widest commonalty spread"--and that may last longest. It is therefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself and in children; and that, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, or infrahuman, in it, as though the earth-gods in us all--Pan, or Demeter-- laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense that nobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them. In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another companion--a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shall one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur Stanley? There are many--very many--still living, in whom the sense of it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say? That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the old Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy and a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose _Life_ he wrote, so that it stands out among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that he was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman and the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, and Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at least kept alive--by his power of turning all he knew into image and color--that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly let die; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all the Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend and champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None of the old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as of so many others: Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat-- He was, no doubt, the friend of kings and princes, and keenly conscious, always, of things long-descended, with picturesque or heroic associations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey, after his excommunication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop of Cape Town; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of the Revisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament of Christ's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore with unflinching courage the idle tumult which followed; it was he, too, who first took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men, and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He was not a social reformer in the modern sense; that was not his business. But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the _interesting_-- the _dramatic_--in any human lot, soon brought him into relation with men of callings and types the most different from his own; and for the rest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty--"the duty to our equals"--on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestive sermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, and student after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man who eagerly understood them and chivalrously fought for them. And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure, miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory--only that ivory is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the features of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying with every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the clear eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends, though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on a former page, written on the night before my father left England for New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking in the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling in the ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men as Stanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, and without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument cannot meet the strain. Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I should like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had entered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the humorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusing instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and a few days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding breakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms and epitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all things were welcome. My personal memory of him goes back to much earlier days. As a child at Fox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen to him quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascination; to find his eye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting toward one, as he asked a sudden historical question--"Where did Edward the First die?"--"Where was the Black Prince buried?"--was terror, lest, at seven years old, one should not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his to Fox How, when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burials kept us--myself in particular--in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think, have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost with the zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones lie hid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands--"fallen from the ruined sides of Kings"--that this passion of deaths and dates was upon him. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside the drawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of delight and fear, as to what "Doctor Stanley" might ask me when the door was opened; then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the slight figure, writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of "little Mary"--and the expected thunderbolt: "_Where did Henry the Fourth die_?" Confusion--and blank ignorance! But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when my father and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and the little Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round--sees "Tom," and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile; he remembers instantly, though it is some years since he and "little Mary" met. He holds out both his hands to the little girl-- "Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died!" And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber. CHAPTER VI YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD I How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it was to be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. The games, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music, together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or literature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl of to-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the German, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage to be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to be relearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it ever possible for me-who married at twenty--to get that firm hold on the structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which my brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his six years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What I learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds. English girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women with whom, in many cases, education--the shaping of the immature human creature to noble ends--is the sincerest of passions; who find, indeed, in the task that same creative joy which belongs to literature or art, or philanthropic experiment. The schoolmistress to whom money is the sole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rare to-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern "academies" of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date--fashionable, exclusive, and luxurious--where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before the war!) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But I have not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England and America, at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls of the middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870, are genuine products of that Women's Movement, as we vaguely call it, in the early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged; whereof the results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. If one tracks it back to somewhere near its origins, its superficial origins, at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of so much else, against one leading cause--_railways_! With railways and a cheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there came in, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations, answering to the old physical disabilities and inconveniences. And the break-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world of women, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselves what the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would have made of the keen school-girl and college girl of the present day, to feel how vast is the change through which some of us have lived. Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives in all generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sort of self-education from that of Harriet Martineau; but she has not thought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much as that stanch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file--the average woman--for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelation of her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has brought about is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forces set in action by the scientific and mechanical development of the nineteenth century. It rests still with that world "after the war," to which we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, to determine the new forms, sociological and political, through which this capacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically express itself. In the years when I was at school, however--1858 to 1867--these good days were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and, in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physical care of girls--these things were common in my school-time. I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child. I had few tools and little grounding; and I was much more childish than I need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years: the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets of Edgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of the Oratory School; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly into a quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory of the pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it; the haunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole the books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commons in 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer beauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase in which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told stories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry and fiction, which make me laugh and blush when I compare them to-day with similar efforts of my own grandchildren. But on the whole they were starved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parents were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best he could. With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change. It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the very middle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford. My father, after some five years as Doctor Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had then become the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Catholicism. He left the Roman Church in 1865, to return to it again, for good, eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford, produced a very successful _Manual of English Literature,_ edited the works of Wycliffe for the Clarendon Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great Rolls Series. To look at the endless piles of his note-books is to realize how hard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destined field; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of life. And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately, imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for some years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholic haven in 1876, never to wander more. But when he first showed me Oxford he was in the ardor of what seemed a permanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxford street, and a hansom coming up it--myself and my father inside it. I was returning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people, they were living near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and I remember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to side as we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that this was "no mean city." As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then "new Balliol" in front of us, and a jutting window. "There lives the arch-heretic!" said my father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. He was not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying- cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time, he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit; it was not till a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured to ask him to preach in Westminster Abbey; and his salary as Greek Professor, due to him from the revenues of Christ Church, and withheld from him on theological grounds for years, had only just been wrung--at last--from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained Canon Liddon and Doctor Pusey. To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind and helpful friend; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother; and as I grew up he became my friend, too, so that as I look back upon my Oxford years both before and after my marriage, the dear Master--he became Master in 1870--plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shall ever remember it. It was not, however, till two years later that I left school, and slipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen, beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions, keenly alive to the spell of Oxford and to the good fortune which had brought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a real hunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people. But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, and everything I learned came to me from persons--and books--sporadically, without any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage of discovery, organized mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men and women very much older, who took an interest in me and were endlessly kind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been. It was in 1868 or 1869--I think I was seventeen--that I remember my first sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between gray college walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated--a lady in a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver, who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, as I watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearly thirty years older than herself, whom I knew to be her husband, was standing near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused and admiring court round the lady. The elderly man--he was then fifty- three--was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet- player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in 1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst of the divorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliant political career; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in 1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can ever think of the "Frances Pattison" of Oxford days without a strange stirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never left me. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on the Riviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs. Pat," with her gaiety, her picturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums, her sharp, restless wit, her determination _not_ to be academic, to hold on to the greater world of affairs outside--mattered more to me perhaps than anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired of going there; though I was much puzzled by their ways, and--while my Evangelical phase lasted--much scandalized often by the speculative freedom of the talk I heard. Sometimes my rather uneasy conscience protested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though they never said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper at Lincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, unceremonious meal, at which Mrs. Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date began to be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or gray, with various ornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for so long to the rough-and-tumble of school life, marvels of delicacy and prettiness; so that I was sharply conscious, on these occasions, of the graceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But some last stubborn trace in me of the Evangelical view of Sunday declared that while one might talk--and one _must_ eat!--on Sunday, one mustn't put on evening dress, or behave as though it were just like a week-day. So while every one else was in evening dress, I more than once--at seventeen--came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening, purposely, in a high woolen frock, sternly but uncomfortably conscious of being sublime--if only one were not ridiculous! The Rector, "Mrs. Pat," Mr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates--often a bewildered and silent couple--I see that little vanished company in the far past so plainly! Three of them are dead--and for me the gray walls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts. The historian of French painting and French decorative art was already in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which both the French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked their best. And up-stairs, in "Mrs. Pat's" own working-room, there were innumerable things that stirred my curiosity--old French drawings and engravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilliant owner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband counted scholarship; together with the tools and materials for etching, a mysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand, and which, as often as not, during the application of the acid to the plate, ended in dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and in the helpless laughter of both artist and assistant. The Rector himself was an endless study to me--he and his frequent companion, Ingram Bywater, afterward the distinguished Greek Professor. To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in Paris or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scorn on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol, which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with the researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the Rector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes at Christ Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful Church party of the University--was to watch the doors of new worlds gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence. The Rector would walk up and down, occasionally taking a book from his crowded shelves, while Mr. By water and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after- luncheon coffee--and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity in England--and sometimes, at a caustic _mot_ of the former's there would break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt, but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To me he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of a literary stock and had literary ambitions; and he tried to direct me. "Get to the bottom of something," he would say. "Choose a subject, and know _everything_ about it!" I eagerly followed his advice, and began to work at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was wrong--I venture to think so!--though, as his half-melancholy, half-satirical look comes back to me, I realize how easily he would defend himself, if one could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take a history examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half the exploring joy of those early years would, no doubt, have been cut away. Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelier Rector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum, and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly. Presently I married, and his interest in me changed; though our friendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion my last sight of him lying, a white and dying man, on his sofa in London-- the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad, haunting eyes. When his _Memoirs_ appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and more tenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood why in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglican ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert as Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name of John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On the other hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend brought him from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had been a follower of Newman's in the Tractarian days, and no one who ever came near to Newman could afterward lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley, and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that the whole course of English religious history might have been different if Newman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he had it would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mere expression of a sober and indisputable truth. Alas!--merely to quote it, nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood--a Germany of small States, a land of scholars and thinkers; a Germany that would surely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep and hideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success, were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe. One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln is that of meeting George Eliot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870, when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George Eliot sat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her; on my left was George Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dislike. He and Mrs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. Bywater, on the other side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked very little, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Eliot was in truth entirely occupied in watching or listening to Mrs. Lewes. I was disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye may have divined it, for, after supper, as we were going up the interesting old staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which led direct from the dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me: "The Rector tells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would you care to hear something of our Spanish journey?"--the journey which had preceded the appearance of _The Spanish Gypsy,_ then newly published. My reply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimly lit drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond, George Eliot sat down in the darkness, and I beside her. Then she talked for about twenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word or dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in the presence of a great writer. Not a great _talker_. It is clear that George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, or evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de Staël. She was too self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts for that. But in tête-à-tête, and with time to choose her words, she could--in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keep it going--produce on a listener exactly the impression of some of her best work. As the low, clear voice flowed on in Mrs. Pattison's drawing- room, I _saw_ Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the description was particularly vivid--in talking of famous places John Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success; but it was singularly complete and accomplished. When it was done the effect was there--the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes, and it all comes back--the darkened room, the long, pallid face, set in black lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl. Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, the Pattisons took their guests to see the "eights" races from Christ Church meadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterward the beloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her on the barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Merton garden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of early summer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, one splendor from top to toe; the laburnums; the lilacs; the hawthorns, red and white; the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpet round the college walls; a May sky overhead, and through the trees glimpses of towers and spires, silver gray, in the sparkling summer air--the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before the spectator at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she has only to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George Eliot stood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower-laden chestnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surrounding city, saying little--that she left to Mr. Lewes!--but drinking it in, storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterward when Mr. Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she, and I walked back to Lincoln, I remember another little incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of the novelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln--suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes. It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, _blond-cendrée_; the delicate, smiling features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches--Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that flower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see her consciously and deliberately committing them both to memory. But I do not believe that she ever meant to describe the Rector in "Mr. Casaubon." She was far too good a scholar herself to have perpetrated a caricature so flagrantly untrue. She knew Mark Pattison's quality, and could never have meant to draw the writer of some of the most fruitful and illuminating of English essays, and one of the most brilliant pieces of European biography, in the dreary and foolish pedant who overshadows _Middlemarch_. But the fact that Mark Pattison was an elderly scholar with a young wife, and that George Eliot knew him, led later on to a legend which was, I am sure, unwelcome to the writer of _Middlemarch_, while her supposed victim passed it by with amused indifference. As to the relation between the Rector and the Squire of _Robert Elsmere_ which has been often assumed, it was confined, as I have already said (in the introduction to the library edition of _Robert Elsmere_ published in 1909), to a likeness in outward aspect--"a few personal traits, and the two main facts of great learning and a general impatience of fools." If one could imagine Mark Pattison a landowner, he would certainly never have neglected his estates, or tolerated an inefficient agent. Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagement to Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. But those three years seem to me now to have been extraordinarily full. Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the Bodleian Library, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand in the forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animated scene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living and inspiring presence. When I think of it as it then was, I am, aware of a medley of beautiful things--pale sunlight on book-lined walls, or streaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows; spaces and distances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed the motto of the University--_Dominus illuminatio mea_; gowned figures moving silently about the spaces; the faint scents of old leather and polished wood; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm, through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck each successive quarter from Oxford's many towers, seemed to breathe a certain eternal reminder of the past and the dead. But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary reader sees now. Mr. Coxe--the well-known, much-loved Bodley's Librarian of those days--took kindly notice of the girl reader, and very soon, probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, made me free of the lower floors, where was the "Spanish room," with its shelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin or vellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I might wander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasional librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish Room one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasures beyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissance printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands of illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and flower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room. That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to be the mingled product of all the delicate browns and yellows and golds in the bindings of the books, of the brass lattice-work that covered them, and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the Schools Quadrangle outside. It was in these noble surroundings that, with far too little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciplined wandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sank deep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of the recorded past from which the generations rise and into which they fall back. And that in itself was a great boon--almost, one might say, a training, of a kind. But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term. In _Miss Bretherton_, my earliest novel, and in _Lady Connie_, so far my latest,[1] will be found, by those who care to look for it, the reflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape, not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford, but from the lively, laughing present which every day renews it. For six months of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most part between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it was not also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women--girls especially--were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses were married; the Professors were mostly married; but married tutors had scarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invaded by women--by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June, to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers' friends, to be danced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on a summer night from Nuneham up the long, fragrant reaches of the lower river, or of "sitting out" in historic gardens where Philip Sidney or Charles I had passed. [Footnote 1: These chapters were written before the appearance of _Missing_ in the autumn of 1917.] At the "eights" and "Commem." the old, old place became a mere background for pretty dresses and college luncheons and river picnics. The seniors groaned often, as well they might; for there was little work done in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for any nation to possess such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting as these Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoiled by ugly and sordid things--betting and drink, greed and display! Here, all there is to see is a competition of boats, manned by England's best youth, upon a noble river, flowing, in Virgilian phrase, "under ancient walls"; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure of the young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting note; a stately ceremony--the Encaenia--going back to the infancy of English learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or classical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us." My own recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, the dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water, now, as always, "float double, swan and shadow"--these things I hope will be with me to the end. To have lived through them is to have tasted youth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as little alloyed with baser things, as the high gods allow to mortals. Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married life which began in 1872--my first sight of Taine, the great French historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, and while he was actually in Oxford, delivering his six lectures, the terrible news of the last days of May, the burning of the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beaten revolution, let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day and hour by hour, like so many horrible explosions in the heavy air of Europe, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war. How well I remember the effect in Oxford!--the newspaper cries in the streets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might have fallen on civilization, the intense fellow-feeling in a community of students and scholars for the students and scholars of France! When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his published Correspondence, Vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show her sympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May 25th: I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Ville, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a kind of pitying sympathy. Oxford residents, indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded the first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that I must have confided in him not a little--as to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me--examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in the English _cuisine_. From English cooking--which showed ill in the Oxford of those days--he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of his great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spoken English clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-house cook. Professor Max Müller, who had induced him to give the lectures, and watched over him during his stay, told me that on his first visit to the historian in his Beaumont Street rooms he found him sitting bewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of a huge beefsteak, served in the unappetizing, slovenly English way, and--a large plate of buttered toast. Nothing else. "But I ordered bif-tek and pott-a-toes!" cried the puzzled historian to his visitor! Another guest of the Master's on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and of him, too, I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on the side next the fire, his small lower features and slender neck overweighted by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could not think why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetually beckoning to the waiters; then, when they came, holding peremptory conversation with them; while I from my side of the table could see them going away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked for the impossible. At last, with a kind of bound, Swinburne leaped from his chair and seized a copy of the _Times_ which he seemed to have persuaded one of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behind him, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the very marrow out of a long-suffering poet. And, alack! in that house without a mistress the small conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, were often overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperation Swinburne folded the _Times_ over the back of his chair and sat down again. Vain was the effort! The room was narrow, the party large, and the servants, pushing by, had soon dislodged the _Times_. Again and again did Swinburne in a fury replace it; and was soon reduced to sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chair and the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate. Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my uncle standing talking with M. Taine, with whom he then and there made a lasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that moment of the heresies of the English critic who had ventured only a few years before to speak of "the exaggerated French estimate of Racine," and even to indorse the judgment of Joubert--"_Racine est le Virgile des ignorants"!_ Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edge than he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on the critical faculty of the English. "In all that I read and hear," he says to Madame Taine, "I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means the gift--or the art--of understanding the souls and passions of the past." And again, "I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audience appreciate some _finesses_ of Racine." There is a note of resigned exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionate feeling of another French critic--Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve's best successor--ten years later. _� propos_ of some judgment of Matthew Arnold--whom Scherer delighted in--on Racine, of the same kind as those I have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me, almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all, was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bywater, which had nurtured Matthew Arnold and Swinburne--Swinburne with his wonderful knowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue and the French literature--merely "_solide and positif_," as Taine declares? The judgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man of formulas--often so brilliant and often so mistaken--who, in the famous _History of English Literature_, taught his English readers as much by his blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And what critic does more? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successive Penelopes, each unraveling the web of the one before? The point is that the web should be eternally remade and eternally unraveled. II I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father's friend, my grandfather's pupil and biographer, Dean Stanley. For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. They were years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity. Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879. We had many friends, all pursuing the same kind of life as ourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. Nobody under the rank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors, possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the new race of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we all gave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, old chests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple and short. At our own early efforts of the kind there certainly was not enough to eat. But we all improved with time; and on the whole I think we were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us were very anxious to be up-to-date and in the fashion, whether in esthetics, in housekeeping, or in education. But our fashion was not that of Belgravia or Mayfair, which, indeed, we scorned! It was the fashion of the movement which sprang from Morris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffs very plain in line, but elaborately "smocked," were greatly in vogue, and evening dresses, "cut square," or with "Watteau pleats," were generally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London "low dress," which Oxford--young married Oxford--thought both ugly and "fast." And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner, the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancient member of an ancient and close fraternity--the "chairmen" of old Oxford. Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road lived Walter Pater and his sisters. The exquisiteness of their small house, and the charm of the three people who lived in it, will never be forgotten by those who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the _Studies in the Renaissance_ (1873) their author had just become famous. I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "passion" in the intellectual sense--as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford. The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a cry of "Neo-paganism," and various attempts at persecution. The author of the book was quite unmoved. In those days Walter Pater's mind was still full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just as much himself, as that later hesitating and wistful return toward Christianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type, which is embodied in _Marius the Epicurean_, the most beautiful of the spiritual romances of Europe since the _Confessions_. I can remember a dinner-party at his house, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his made to the High Church wife of a well-known Professor. Pater had been in some way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and had said suddenly that no reasonable person could govern his life by the opinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. The Professor and his wife--I look back to them both with the warmest affection--departed hurriedly, in agitation; and the rest of us only gradually found out what had happened. But before we left Oxford in 1881 this attitude of mind had, I think, greatly changed. Mr. Gosse, in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, says that before 1870 he had gradually relinquished all belief in the Christian religion--and leaves it there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentle and almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it had left bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned to Christianity in the orthodox or intellectual sense. But his heart returned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, and haunted by the "something" in it which he thought inexplicable. A remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the later 'seventies, I once said to him in tête-à-tête, reckoning confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against its assailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, and that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked rather troubled. "I don't think so," he said. Then, with hesitation: "And we don't altogether agree. You think it's all plain. But I can't. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying, 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden.' How can you explain that? There is a mystery in it--something supernatural." A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer of the modern critic would be, "The words you quote are in all probability from a lost Wisdom book; there are very close analogies in Proverbs and in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may represent on the Lord's lips either a quotation or the text of a discourse. Wisdom is speaking--the Wisdom 'which is justified of her children.'" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not have affected the mood in Pater, of which this conversation gave me my first glimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite passages of _Marius_. Turn to the first time when Marius--under Marcus Aurelius--is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the first time, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed." The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away.... They had faced life and were glad, by some science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a message of hope ... already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and here? Or again to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death: At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose to write there. _Marius_ was published twelve years after the _Studies in the Renaissance_, and there is a world between the two books. Some further light will be thrown on this later phase of Mr. Pater's thought by a letter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of Amiel's _From Journal Intime_. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me, and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger, a fact which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful little house across the road, with its two dear mistresses, drew me perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room, which runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind, was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There were a Morris paper; spindle-legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were always foraging, to return, often, with treasures of which the very memory now stirs a half-amused envy of one's own past self, that had such chances and lost them; framed embroidery of the most delicate design and color, the work of Mr. Pater's elder sister; engravings, if I remember right, from Botticelli, or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors, and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious art. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polished surfaces of wood and brass and china, and bringing out its pure, bright color. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister, Clara--a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. Clara Pater, whose grave and noble beauty in youth has been preserved in a drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a "rare and dedicated spirit." When I first knew her she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, sympathetic, with a delightful humor and a strong judgment, but without much positive acquirement. Then after some years she began to learn Latin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford she became Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and friend. Her point of view, her opinion, had always the crispness, the savor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved many, as they loved her. She loved animals, too, as all the household did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and sisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save-- in vain! When, later, I came across in _Marius_ the account of Marcus Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus--"pressed closely to his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress"--I remembered the absorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in the suffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feel tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past experience in mind. After Walter Pater's death, Clara, with her elder sister, became the vigilant and joint guardians of their brother's books and fame, till, four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in her brother's words, the "unclouded and receptive soul." CHAPTER VII BALLIOL AND LINCOLN When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name and influence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, and Greek professor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not be without full means of finding out what made that slight figure (whereof he will be able to study the outward and visible presence in some excellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and so representative. The _Life_ of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, is to me one of the most interesting biographies of our generation. It is long--for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, too long; and it is cumbered with the echoes of old controversies, theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly, passed into a dusty limbo. But it is one of the rare attempts that English biography has seen to paint a man as he really was; and to paint him not with the sub-malicious strokes of a Purcell, but in love, although in truth. [Illustration: BENJAMIN JOWETT] The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strong will and his dominating personality; the Master, as he appeared, on the one hand, to the upholders of "research," of learning, that is, as an end in itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High- Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all their clan--pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful--here he is to the life. This is the Master whose personality could never be forgotten in any room he chose to enter; who brought restraint rather than ease to the gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his own account, of a shyness he could never overcome; whose company on a walk was too often more of a torture than an honor to the undergraduate selected for it; whose lightest words were feared, quoted, chuckled over, or resented, like those of no one else. Of this Master I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing- room full of rather tongue-tied, embarrassed guests, some Oxford residents, some Londoners; and the Master among them, as a stimulating-- but disintegrating!--force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious. The circle was wide, the room bare, and the Balliol arm-chairs were not placed for conversation. On a high chair against the wall sat a small boy of ten--we will call him Arthur--oppressed by his surroundings. The talk languished and dropped. From one side of the large room, the Master, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side. "Well, Arthur, so I hear you've begun Greek. How are you getting on?" To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awful grownups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed upon his answer. "I--I'm reading the Anabasis," he said, desperately. The false quantity sent a shock through the room. Nobody laughed, out of sympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful had happened. The boy's miserable parents, Londoners, who were among the twenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled. "The Anábasis, Arthur," he said, cheerfully. "You'll get it right next time." And he went across to the boy, evidently feeling for him and wishing to put him at ease. But after thirty years the boy and his parents still remember the incident with a shiver. It could not have produced such an effect except in an atmosphere of tension; and that, alas! too often, was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master. I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half-hours in the Master's study--such a privilege, yet such an ordeal!--when, after our migration to London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master's week-end visitors. "Come and talk to me a little in my study," the Master would say, pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so many years, as the interpreter of Greek thought to the English world, one would take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I have described my fireside tête-à-têtes, as a girl, with another head of a College--the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a far more strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none!--no relief from the breathless adventure of trying to please him and doing one's best. The Rector once, being a little invalidish, allowed me to make up the fire, and, after watching the process sharply, said: "Good! Does it drive _you_ distracted, too, when people put on coals the wrong way?" An interruption which made for human sympathy! The Master, as far as I can remember, had no "nerves"; and "nerves" are a bond between many. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I remember once after we had been discussing a religious book which had interested us both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, and said, with a curious impatience, "But one can't be always thinking of these things!" and changed the subject. So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was, according to his biographers, "often painful." But there were at least two other Masters in the "Mr. Jowett" we reverenced. And they, too, are fully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends and thought no pains too great to take for them, including the very rare pains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plain speaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whose sympathies were always with social reform and with the poor, whose hidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite of his difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and conditions of men--and women--in all circles of life, by politicians and great ladies, by diplomats and scholars and poets, by his secretary and his servants-- there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen recorded by his biographers. And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the Introduction to the _Phoedrus_: "Under the marble exterior of Greek literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion," says the Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior; but the placid and yet shrewd cheerfulness of his delicately rounded face, with its small mouth and chin, its great brow and frame of snowy hair, gave but little clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was _Gottbetrunken_, it was the Master, many of whose meditations and passing thoughts, withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet written down--in thirty or forty volumes!--for his own discipline and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of the _Life_, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the Master's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind, especially toward the end of his life, was always in an attitude of Prayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College business in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, slightly and silently, and know what it meant." The records of him which his death revealed-- and his closest friends realized it in life--show a man perpetually conscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship; which is the mark of the religious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was the man who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters at Christ Church, under the flag of Doctor Pusey and Canon Liddon, was the symbol and embodiment of all heresy; whose University salary as Greek professor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld for years by the same High-Churchmen, because of their inextinguishable wrath against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to the test-abolishing legislation of 1870--legislation by which Oxford, in Liddon's words, was "logically lost to the Church of England." Yet no doubt they had their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, in a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer that "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put together!"--who scornfully asks himself in his diary, _à propos_ of the Bishops' condemnation of _Essays and Reviews_, "What is Truth against an _esprit de corps_?"--and drops out the quiet dictum, "Half the books that are published are religious books, and what trash this religious literature is!" Nor did the Evangelicals escape. The Master's dislike for many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was never concealed. "How cocky they are!" he would say, contemptuously. "'When upward I fly--Quite justified I'--who can repeat a thing like that?" How the old war-cries ring again in one's ears as one looks back! Those who have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, I think, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln--the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp--with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour-- they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces still visibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol _versus_ Christ Church--Jowett _versus_ Pusey and Liddon--while Lincoln despised both, and the new scientific forces watched and waited--that was how we saw the field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was always providing. But Balliol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas Hill Green--"Green of Balliol"--was no less representative in our days of the spiritual and liberating forces of the great college; and the time which has now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophic work and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the history of nineteenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimate friends, and in the Grey of _Robert Elsmere_ I tried to reproduce a few of those traits--traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also one of the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men--which Oxford will never forget, so long as high culture and noble character are dear to her. His wife--so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tells us--once compared him to Sir Bors in "The Holy Grail": A square-set man and honest; and his eyes, An outdoor sign of all the wealth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud, But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one! A quotation in which the mingling of a cheerful, practical, humorous temper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavy tasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him, indeed, and before the publication of the _Prolegomena to Ethics_ and the Introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume had led to his appointment as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Mr. Green was not only a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both of the Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies; a helper in all the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford, and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boys of Oxford--a man, in other words, preoccupied, just as the Master was, and, for all his philosophic genius, with the need of leading "a useful life." Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of the best men whom Balliol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. The Master, Green, Toynbee--their minds were full, half a century ago, of the "condition of the people" question, of temperance, housing, wages, electoral reform; and within the University, and by the help of the weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural allies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through politics and Parliament. "Usefulness," "social reform," the bettering of daily life for the many--these ideas are stamped on all their work and on all the biographies of them that remain to us. And the significance of it is only to be realized when we turn to the rival group, to Christ Church, and the religious party which that name stood for. Read the lives of Liddon, of Pusey, or--to go farther back-- of the great Newman himself. Nobody will question the personal goodness and charity of any of the three. But how little the leading ideas of that seething time of social and industrial reform, from the appearance of _Sybil_ in 1843 to the Education Bill of 1870, mattered either to Pusey or to Liddon, compared with the date of the Book of Daniel or the retention of the Athanasian Creed? Newman, at a time when national drunkenness was an overshadowing terror in the minds of all reformers, confesses with a pathetic frankness that he had never considered "whether there were too many public-houses in England or no"; and in all his religious controversies of the 'thirties and the 'forties, you will look in vain for any word of industrial or political reform. So also in the _Life_ of that great rhetorician and beautiful personality, Canon Liddon, you will scarcely find a single letter that touches on any question of social betterment. How to safeguard the "principle of authority," how to uphold the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, and of the Book of Daniel, against "infidel" criticism; how to stifle among the younger High-Churchmen like Mr. (now Bishop) Gore, then head of the Pusey House, the first advances toward a reasonable freedom of thought; how to maintain the doctrine of Eternal Punishment against the protest of the religious consciousness itself--it is on these matters that Canon Liddon's correspondence turns, it was to them his life was devoted. How vainly! Who can doubt now which type of life and thought had in it the seeds of growth and permanence--the Balliol type, or the Christ Church type? There are many High-Churchmen, it is true, at the present day, and many Ritualist Churches. But they are alive to-day, just in so far as they have learned the lesson of social pity, and the lesson of a reasonable criticism, from the men whom Pusey and Liddon and half the bishops condemned and persecuted in the middle years of the nineteenth century. When we were living in Oxford, however, this was not exactly the point of view from which the great figure of Liddon presented itself, to us of the Liberal camp. We were constantly aware of him, no doubt, as the rival figure to the Master of Balliol, as the arch wire-puller and ecclesiastical intriguer in University affairs, leading the Church forces with a more than Roman astuteness. But his great mark was made, of course, by his preaching, and that not so much by the things said as by the man saying them. Who now would go to Liddon's famous Bamptons, for all their learning, for a still valid defense of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation? Those wonderful paragraphs of subtle argumentation from which the great preacher emerged, as triumphantly as Mr. Gladstone from a Gladstonian sentence in a House of Commons debate-- what remains of them? Liddon wrote of Stanley that he--Stanley--was "more entirely destitute of the logical faculty" than any educated man he knew. In a sense it was true. But Stanley, if he had been aware of the criticism, might have replied that, if he lacked logic, Liddon lacked something much more vital--i.e., the sense of history--and of the relative value of testimony! Newman, Pusey, Liddon--all three, great schoolmen, arguing from an accepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric-- history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work of all three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them-- Newman--which is the preserving salt of all literature--i.e., the magic of personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been their own spiritual children. As was fitting! For the Tractarian movement, with its appeal to the primitive Church, was in truth, and quite unconsciously, one of the agencies in a great process of historical inquiry which is still going on, and of which the end is not yet. But to me, in my twenties, these great names were not merely names or symbols, as they are to the men and women of the present generation. Newman I had seen in my childhood, walking about the streets of Edgbaston, and had shrunk from him in a dumb, childish resentment as from some one whom I understood to be the author of our family misfortunes. In those days, as I have already recalled in an earlier chapter, the daughters of a "mixed marriage" were brought up in the mother's faith, and the sons in the father's. I, therefore, as a schoolgirl under Evangelical influence, was not allowed to make friends with any of my father's Catholic colleagues. Then, in 1880, twenty years later, Newman came to Oxford, and on Trinity Monday there was a great gathering at Trinity College, where the Cardinal in his red, a blanched and spiritual presence, received the homage of a new generation who saw in him a great soul and a great master of English, and cared little or nothing for the controversies in which he had spent his prime. As my turn came to shake hands, I recalled my father to him and the Edgbaston days. His face lit up--almost mischievously. "Are you the little girl I remember seeing sometimes--in the distance?" he said to me, with a smile and a look that only he and I understood. On the Sunday preceding that gathering I went to hear his last sermon in the city he had loved so well, preached at the new Jesuit church in the suburbs; while little more than a mile away, Bidding Prayer and sermon were going on as usual in the University Church where in his youth, week by week, he had so deeply stirred the hearts and consciences of men. The sermon in St. Aloysius's was preached with great difficulty, and was almost incoherent from the physical weakness of the speaker. Yet who that was present on that Sunday will ever forget the great ghost that fronted them, the faltering accents, the words from which the life-blood had departed, yet not the charm? Then--Pusey! There comes back to me a bowed and uncouth figure, whom one used to see both in the Cathedral procession on a Sunday, and--rarely-- in the University pulpit. One sermon on Darwinism, which was preached, if I remember right, in the early 'seventies, remains with me, as the appearance of some modern Elijah, returning after long silence and exile to protest against an unbelieving world. Sara Coleridge had years before described Pusey in the pulpit with a few vivid strokes. He has not one of the graces of oratory [she says]. His discourse is generally a rhapsody describing with infinite repetition the wickedness of sin, the worthlessness of earth, and the blessedness of Heaven. He is as still as a statue all the time he is uttering it, looks as white as a sheet, and is as monotonous in delivery as possible. Nevertheless, Pusey wielded a spell which is worth much oratory--the spell of a soul dwelling spiritually on the heights; and a prophet, moreover, may be as monotonous or as incoherent as he pleases, while the world is still in tune with his message. But in the 'seventies, Oxford, at least, was no longer in tune with Pusey's message, and the effect of the veteran leader, trying to come to terms with Darwinism, struggling, that is, with new and stubborn forces he had no further power to bind, was tragic, or pathetic, as such things must always be. New Puseys arise in every century. The "sons of authority" will never perish out of the earth. But the language changes and the argument changes; and perhaps there are none more secretly impatient with the old prophet than those younger spirits of his own kind who are already stepping into his shoes. Far different was the effect of Liddon, in those days, upon us younger folk! The grace and charm of Liddon's personal presence were as valuable to his party in the 'seventies as that of Dean Stanley had been to Liberalism at an earlier stage. There was indeed much in common between the aspect and manner of the two men, though no likeness, in the strict sense, whatever. But the exquisite delicacy of feature, the brightness of eye, the sensitive play of expression, were alike in both. Saint Simon says of Fenelon: He was well made, pale, with eyes that showered intelligence and fire--and with a physiognomy that no one who had seen it once could forget. It had both gravity and polish, seriousness and gaiety; it spoke equally of the scholar, the bishop, and the _grand seigneur_, and the final impression was one of intelligence, subtlety, grace, charm; above all, of dignity. One had to tear oneself from looking at him. Many of those who knew Liddon best could, I think, have adapted this language to him; and there is much in it that fitted Arthur Stanley. But the love and gift for managing men was of course a secondary thing in the case of our great preacher. The University politics of Liddon and his followers are dead and gone; and as I have ventured to think, the intellectual force of Liddon's thoughts and arguments, as they are presented to us now on the printed page, is also a thing of the past. But the vision of the preacher in those who saw it is imperishable. The scene in St. Paul's has been often described, by none better than by Doctor Liddon's colleague, Canon Scott Holland. But the Oxford scene, with all its Old World setting, was more touching, more interesting. As I think of it, I seem to be looking out from those dark seats under the undergraduates' gallery--where sat the wives of the Masters of Arts--at the crowded church, as it waited for the preacher. First came the stir of the procession; the long line of Heads of Houses, in their scarlet robes as Doctors of Divinity--all but the two heretics, Pattison and Jowett, who walked in their plain black, and warmed my heart always thereby! And then the Vice-Chancellor, with the "pokers" and the preacher. All eyes were fixed on the slender, willowy figure, and the dark head touched with silver. The bow to the Vice-Chancellor as they parted at the foot of the pulpit stairs, the mounting of the pulpit, the quiet look out over the Church, the Bidding Prayer, the voice--it was all part of an incomparable performance which cannot be paralleled to- day. The voice was high and penetrating, without much variety, as I remember it; but of beautiful quality, and at times wonderfully moving. And what was still more appealing was the evident strain upon the speaker of his message. It wore him out visibly as he delivered it. He came down from the pulpit white and shaken, dripping with perspiration. Virtue had gone out of him. Yet his effort had never for a moment weakened his perfect self-control, the flow and finish of the long sentences, or the subtle interconnection of the whole! One Sunday I remember in particular. Oxford had been saddened the day before by the somewhat sudden death of a woman whom everybody loved and respected--Mrs. Acland, the wife of the well-known doctor and professor. And Liddon, with a wonderfully happy instinct, had added to his sermon a paragraph dealing with Mrs. Acland's death, which held us all spellbound till the beautiful words died into silence. It was done with a fastidious literary taste that is rather French than English; and yet it came from the very heart of the speaker. Looking back through my many memories of Doctor Liddon as a preacher, that tribute to a noble woman in death remains with me as the finest and most lasting of them all. CHAPTER VIII EARLY MARRIED LIFE How many other figures in that vanished Oxford world I should like to draw!--Mandell or "Max" Creighton, our lifelong friend, then just married to the wife who was his best comrade while he lived, and since his death has made herself an independent force in English life. I first remember the future Bishop of London when I was fifteen, and he was reading history with my father on a Devonshire reading-party. The tall, slight figure in blue serge, the red-gold hair, the spectacles, the keen features and quiet, commanding eye--I see them first against a background of rocks on the Lynton shore. Then again, a few years later, in his beautiful Merton rooms, with the vine tendrils curling round the windows, the Morris paper, and the blue willow-pattern plates upon it, that he was surely the first to collect in Oxford. A luncheon-party returns upon me--in Brasenose--where the brilliant Merton Fellow and tutor, already a power in Oxford, first met his future wife; afterward, their earliest married home in Oxford so near to ours, in the new region of the Parks; then the Vicarage on the Northumberland coast where Creighton wrestled with the north-country folk, with their virtues and their vices, drinking deep draughts thereby from the sources of human nature; where he read and wrote history, preparing for his _magnum opus_, the history of the Renaissance Popes; where he entertained his friends, brought up his children, and took mighty walks--always the same restless, energetic, practical, pondering spirit, his mind set upon the Kingdom of God, and convinced that in and through the English Church a man might strive for the Kingdom as faithfully and honestly as anywhere else. The intellectual doubts and misgivings on the subject of taking orders, so common in the Oxford of his day, Creighton had never felt. His life had ripened to a rich maturity without, apparently, any of those fundamental conflicts which had scarred the lives of other men. The fact set him in strong contrast with another historian who was also our intimate friend--John Richard Green. When I first knew him, during my engagement to my husband, and seven years before the _Short History_ was published, he had just practically--though not formally--given up his orders. He had been originally curate to my husband's father, who held a London living, and the bond between him and his Vicar's family was singularly close and affectionate. After the death of the dear mother of the flock, a saintly and tender spirit, to whom Mr. Green was much attached, he remained the faithful friend of all her children. How much I had heard of him before I saw him! The expectation of our first meeting filled me with trepidation. Should I be admitted, too, into that large and generous heart? Would he "pass" the girl who had dared to be his "boy's" fiancée? But after ten minutes all was well, and he was my friend no less than my husband's, to the last hour of his fruitful, suffering life. And how much it meant, his friendship! It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership. My first published story, written when I was eighteen, had appeared in the _Churchman's Magazine_ in 1870, and an article on the "Poema del Cid," the first-fruits of my Spanish browsings in the Bodleian, appeared in _Macmillan_ early in 1872. My husband was already writing in the _Saturday Review_ and other quarters, and had won his literary spurs as one of the three authors of that _jeu d'esprit_ of no small fame in its day, the _Oxford Spectator_. Our three children arrived in 1874, 1876, and 1879, and all the time I was reading, listening, talking, and beginning to write in earnest--mostly for the _Saturday Review_. "J.R.G.," as we loved to call him, took up my efforts with the warmest encouragement, tempered, indeed, by constant fears that I should become a hopeless bookworm and dryasdust, yielding day after day to the mere luxury of reading, and putting nothing into shape! Against this supposed tendency in me he railed perpetually. "Any one can read!" he would say; "anybody of decent wits can accumulate notes and references; the difficulty is to _write_--to make something!" And later on, when I was deep in Spanish chronicles and thinking vaguely of a History of Spain--early Spain, at any rate--he wrote, almost impatiently: "_Begin_--and begin your _book_. Don't do 'studies' and that sort of thing--one's book teaches one everything as one writes it." I was reminded of that letter years later when I came across, in _Amiel's Journal_, a passage almost to the same effect: "It is by writing that one learns--it is by pumping that one draws water into one's well." But in J.R.G.'s case the advice he gave his friend was carried out by himself through every hour of his short, concentrated life. "He died learning," as the inscription on his grave testifies; but he also died _making_. In other words, the shaping, creative instinct wrestled in him with the powers of death through long years, and never deserted him to the very end. Who that has ever known the passion of the writer and the student can read without tears the record of his last months? He was already doomed when I first saw him in 1871, for signs of tuberculosis had been discovered in 1869, and all through the 'seventies and till he died, in 1883, while he was writing the _Short History_, the expanded Library Edition in four volumes, and the two brilliant monographs on _The Making of England_ and _The Conquest of England_, the last of which was put together from his notes, and finished by his devoted wife and secretary after his death, he was fighting for his life, in order that he might finish his work. He was a dying man from January, 1881, but he finished and published _The Making of England_ in 1882, and began _The Conquest of England_. On February 25th, ten days before his death, his wife told him that the end was near. He thought a little, and said that he had still something to say in his book "which is worth saying. I will make a fight for it. I will do what I can, and I must have sleeping-draughts for a week. After that it will not matter if they lose their effect." He worked on a little longer---but on March 7th all was over. My husband had gone out to see him in February, and came home marveling at the miracle of such life in death. I have spoken of the wonderful stimulus and encouragement he could give to the young student. But he was no flatterer. No one could strike harder or swifter than he, when he chose. It was to me--in his eager friendship for "Humphry's" young wife--he first intrusted the task of that primer of English literature which afterward Mr. Stopford Brooke carried out with such astonishing success. But I was far too young for such a piece of work, and knew far too little. I wrote a beginning, however, and took it up to him when he was in rooms in Beaumont Street. He was entirely dissatisfied with it, and as gently and kindly as possible told me it wouldn't do and that I must give it up.[1] Then throwing it aside, he began to walk up and down his room, sketching out how such a general outline of English literature might be written and should be written. I sat by enchanted, all my natural disappointment charmed away. The knowledge, the enthusiasm, the _shaping_ power of the frail human being moving there before me--with the slight, emaciated figure, the great brow, the bright eyes; all the physical presence instinct, aflame, with the intellectual and poetic passion which grew upon him as he traced the mighty stream of England's thought and song--it was an experience never forgotten, one of those by which mind teaches mind, and the endless succession is carried on. [Footnote 1: Since writing these lines, I have been amused to discover the following reference in the brilliant biography of Stopford Brooke, by his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, to my unlucky attempt. "The only advantage," says Mr. Brooke in his diary for May 8, 1899, "the older writer has over the younger is that he knows what to leave out and has a juster sense of proportion. I remember that when Green wanted the Primer of English Literature to be done, Mrs. ---- asked if she might try her hand at it. He said 'Yes,' and she set to work. She took a fancy to _Beowulf_, and wrote twenty pages on it! At this rate the book would have run to more than a thousand pages."] There is another memory from the early time, which comes back to me--of J.R.G. in Notre Dame. We were on our honeymoon journey, and we came across him in Paris. We went together to Notre Dame, and there, as we all lingered at the western end, looking up to the gleaming color of the distant apse, the spirit came upon him. He began to describe what the Church had seen, coming down through the generations, from vision to vision. He spoke in a low voice, but without a pause or break, standing in deep shadow close to the western door. One scarcely saw him, and I almost lost the sense of his individuality. It seemed to be the very voice of History--Life telling of itself. Liberty and the passion for liberty were the very breath of his being. In 1871, just after the Commune, I wrote him a cry of pity and horror about the execution of Rossel, the "heroic young Protestant who had fought the Versaillais because they had made peace, and prevented him from fighting the Prussians." J.R.G. replied that the only defense of a man who fought for the Commune was that he believed in it, while Rossel, by his own statement, did not. People like old Delescluze are more to my mind, men who believe, rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of '93), and cling to their faith through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to die--as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the fatal barricade. His place in the ranks of history is high and safe. That was abundantly shown by the testimony of the large gathering of English scholars and historians at the memorial meeting held in his own college some years ago. He remains as one of the leaders of that school (there is, of course, another and a strong one!) which holds that without imagination and personality a man had better not write history at all; since no recreation of the past is really possible without the kindling and welding force that a man draws from his own spirit. But it is as a friend that I desire--with undying love and gratitude--to commemorate him here. To my husband, to all the motherless family he had taken to his heart, he was affection and constancy itself. And as for me, just before the last visit that we paid him at Mentone in 1882, a year before he died, he was actually thinking out schemes for that history of early Spain which it seemed, both to him and me, I must at last begin, and was inquiring what help I could get from libraries on the Riviera during our stay with him. Then, when we came, I remember our talks in the little Villa St. Nicholas--his sympathy, his enthusiasm, his unselfish help; while all the time he was wrestling with death for just a few more months in which to finish his own work. Both Lord Bryce and Sir Leslie Stephen have paid their tribute to this wonderful talk of his later years. "No such talk," says Lord Bryce, "has been heard in our generation." Of Madame de Staël it was said that she wrote her books out of the talk of the distinguished men who frequented her _salon_. Her own conversation was directed to evoking from the brains of others what she afterward, as an artist, knew how to use better than they. Her talk-- small blame to her!--was plundering and acquisitive. But J.R.G.'s talk _gave_ perpetually, admirable listener though he was. All that he had he gave; so that our final thought of him is not that of the suffering invalid, the thwarted workman, the life cut short, but rather that of one who had richly done his part and left in his friends' memories no mere pathetic appeal, but much more a bracing message for their own easier and longer lives. Of the two other historians with whom my youth threw me into contact, Mr. Freeman and Bishop Stubbs, I have some lively memories. Mr. Freeman was first known to me, I think, through "Johnny," as he was wont to call J.R.G., whom he adored. Both he and J.R.G. were admirable letter- writers, and a volume of their correspondence--much of it already published separately--if it could be put together--like that of Flaubert and George Sand--would make excellent reading for a future generation. In 1877 and 1878, when I was plunged in the history of West-Gothic Kings, I had many letters from Mr. Freeman, and never were letters about grave matters less grave. Take this outburst about a lady who had sent him some historical work to look at. He greatly liked and admired the lady; but her work drove him wild. "I never saw anything like it for missing the point of everything.... Then she has no notion of putting a sentence together, so that she said some things which I fancy she did not mean to say--as that 'the beloved Queen Louisa of Prussia' was the mother of M. Thiers. When she said that the Duke of Orleans's horses ran away, 'leaving two infant sons,' it may have been so: I have no evidence either way." Again, "I am going to send you the Spanish part of my Historical Geography. It will be very bad, but--when I don't know a thing I believe I generally know that I don't know it, and so manage to wrap it up in some vague phrase which, if not right, may at least not be wrong. Thus I have always held that the nursery account of Henry VIII-- "'And Henry the Eighth was as fat as a pig--' "is to be preferred to Froude's version. For, though certainly an inadequate account of the reign, it is true as far as it goes." Once, certainly, we stayed at Somerleaze, and I retain the impression of a very busy, human, energetic man of letters, a good Churchman, and a good citizen, brimful of likes and dislikes, and waving his red beard often as a flag of battle in many a hot skirmish, especially with J.R.G., but always warm-hearted and generally placable--except in the case of James Anthony Froude. The feud between Freeman and Froude was, of course, a standing dish in the educated world of half a century ago. It may be argued that the Muse of History has not decided the quarrel quite according to justice; that Clio has shown herself something of a jade in the matter, as easily influenced by fair externals as a certain Helen was long ago. How many people now read the _Norman Conquest_-- except the few scholars who devote themselves to the same period? Whereas Froude's History, with all its sins, lives, and in my belief will long live, because the man who wrote it was a _writer_ and understood his art. Of Bishop Stubbs, the greatest historical name surely in the England of the last half of the nineteenth century, I did not personally see much while we lived in Oxford and he was Regius Professor. He had no gifts-- it was his chief weakness as a teacher--for creating a young school around him, setting one man to work on this job, and another on that, as has been done with great success in many instances abroad. He was too reserved, too critical, perhaps too sensitive. But he stood as a great influence in the background, felt if not seen. A word of praise from him meant everything; a word of condemnation, in his own subjects, settled the matter. I remember well, after I had written a number of articles on early Spanish Kings and Bishops, for a historical Dictionary, and they were already in proof, how on my daily visits to the Bodleian I began to be puzzled by the fact that some of the very obscure books I had been using were "out" when I wanted them, or had been abstracted from my table by one of the sub-librarians. _Joannes Biclarensis_--he was missing! Who in the world could want that obscure chronicle of an obscure period but myself? I began to envisage some hungry German _Privatdozent_, on his holiday, raiding my poor little subject, and my books, with a view to his Doctor's thesis. Then one morning, as I went in, I came across Doctor Stubbs, with an ancient and portly volume under his arm. _Joannes Biclarensis_ himself!--I knew it at once. The Professor gave me a friendly nod, and I saw a twinkle in his eye as we passed. Going to my desk, I found another volume gone--this time the _Acts of the Councils of Toledo_. So far as I knew, not the most ardent Churchman in Oxford felt at that time any absorbing interest in the Councils of Toledo. At any rate, I had been left in undisturbed possession of them for months. Evidently something was happening, and I sat down to my work in bewilderment. Then, on my way home, I ran into a fellow-worker for the Dictionary--a well-known don and history tutor. "Do you know what's happened?" he said, in excitement. "_Stubbs_ has been going through our work! The Editor wanted his imprimatur before the final printing. Can't expect anybody but Stubbs to know all these things! My books are gone, too." We walked up to the Parks together in a common anxiety, like a couple of school-boys in for Smalls. Then in a few days the tension was over; my books were on my desk again; the Professor stopped me in the Broad with a smile, and the remark that Joannes Biclarensis was really quite an interesting fellow, and I received a very friendly letter from the Editor of the Dictionary. And perhaps I may be allowed, after these forty years, one more recollection, though I am afraid a proper reticence would suppress it! A little later "Mr. Creighton" came to visit us, after his immigration to Embleton and the north; and I timidly gave him some lives of West-Gothic Kings and Bishops to read. He read them--they were very long and terribly minute--and put down the proofs, without saying much. Then he walked down to Oxford with my husband, and sent me back a message by him: "Tell M. to go on. There is nobody but Stubbs doing such work in Oxford now." The thrill of pride and delight such words gave me may be imagined. But there were already causes at work why I should not "go on." I shall have more to say presently about the work on the origins of modern Spain. It was the only thorough "discipline" I ever had; it lasted about two years--years of incessant, arduous work, and it led directly to the writing of _Robert Elsmere_. But before and after, how full life was of other things! The joys of one's new home, of the children that began to patter about it, of every bit of furniture and blue pot it contained, each representing some happy _chasse_ or special earning--of its garden of half an acre, where I used to feel as Hawthorne felt in the garden of the Concord Manse--amazement that Nature should take the trouble to produce things as big as vegetable marrows, or as surprising as scarlet runners that topped one's head, just that we might own and eat them. Then the life of the University town, with all those marked antagonisms I have described, those intellectual and religious movements, that were like the meeting currents of rivers in a lake; and the pleasure of new friendships, where everybody was equal, nobody was rich, and the intellectual average was naturally high. In those days, too, a small group of women of whom I was one were laying the foundations of the whole system of women's education in Oxford. Mrs. Creighton and I, with Mrs. Max Müller, were the secretaries and founders of the first organized series of lectures for women in the University town; I was the first secretary of Somerville Hall, and it fell to me, by chance, to suggest the name of the future college. My friends and I were all on fire for women's education, including women's medical education, and very emulous of Cambridge, where the movement was already far advanced. But hardly any of us were at all on fire for woman suffrage, wherein the Oxford educational movement differed greatly from the Cambridge movement. The majority, certainly, of the group to which I belonged at Oxford were at that time persuaded that the development of women's power in the State--or rather, in such a state as England, with its far- reaching and Imperial obligations, resting ultimately on the sanction of war--should be on lines of its own. We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress. However, I shall return to this subject on some future occasion, in connection with the intensified suffragist campaign which began about ten years ago (1907-08) and in which I took some part. I will only note here my first acquaintance with Mrs. Fawcett. I see her so clearly as a fresh, picturesque figure--in a green silk dress and a necklace of amber beads, when she came down to Oxford in the mid-'seventies to give a course of lectures in the series that Mrs. Creighton and I were organizing, and I remember well the atmosphere of sympathy and admiration which surrounded her as she spoke to an audience in which many of us were well acquainted with the heroic story of Mr. Fawcett's blindness, and of the part played by his wife in enabling him to continue his economic and Parliamentary work. But life then was not all lectures!--nor was it all Oxford. There were vacations, and vacations generally meant for us some weeks, at least, of travel, even when pence were fewest. The Christmas vacation of 1874 we were in Paris. The weather was bitter, and we were lodged, for cheapness' sake, in an old-fashioned hotel, where the high canopied beds with their mountainous duvets were very difficult to wake up in on a cold morning. But in spite of snow and sleet we filled our days to the brim. We took with us some introductions from Oxford--to Madame Mohl, the Renans, the Gaston Parises, the Boutmys, the Ribots, and, from my Uncle Matthew, to the Scherers at Versailles. Monsieur Taine was already known to us, and it was at their house, on one of Madame Taine's Thursdays, that I first heard French conversation at its best. There was a young man there, dark-eyed, dark-haired, to whom I listened--not always able to follow the rapid French in which he and two other men were discussing some literary matter of the moment, but conscious, for the first time, of what the conversation of intellectual equals might be, if it were always practised as the French are trained to practise it from their mother's milk, by the influence of a long tradition. The young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was soon to become. M. Bourget did not then speak English, and my French conversation, which had been wholly learned from books, had a way at that time--and, alack! has still--of breaking down under me, just as one reached the thing one really wanted to say. So that I did not attempt to do more than listen. But I seem to remember that those with whom he talked were M. Francis Charmes, then a writer on the staff of the _Débats_, and afterward the editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ in succession to M. Brunetière; and M. Gaston Paris, the brilliant head of French philology at the Collège de France. What struck me then, and through all the new experiences and new acquaintanceships of our Christmas fortnight, was that strenuous and passionate intensity of the French temper, which foreign nations so easily lose sight of, but which, in truth, is as much part of the French nature as their gaiety, or as what seems to us their frivolity. The war of 1870, the Commune, were but three years behind them. Germany had torn from them Alsace-Lorraine; she had occupied Paris; and their own Jacobins had ruined and burned what even Germany had spared. In the minds of the intellectual class there lay deep, on the one hand, a determination to rebuild France; on the other, to avenge her defeat. The blackened ruins of the Tuileries and of the Cour des Comptes still disfigured a city which grimly kept them there as a warning against anarchy; while the statue of the Ville de Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde had worn for three years the funeral garlands, which, as France confidently hopes, the peace that will end this war will, after nearly half a century, give way once more to the rejoicing tricolor. At the same time reconstruction was everywhere beginning--especially in the field of education. The corrupt, political influence of the Empire, which had used the whole educational system of the country for the purpose of keeping itself and its supporters in power, was at an end. The recognized "�cole Normale" was becoming a source of moral and mental strength among thousands of young men and women; and the "�cole des Sciences politiques," the joint work of Taine, Renan, and M. Boutmy, its first director, was laying foundations whereof the results are to be seen conspicuously to-day, in French character, French resource, French patience, French science, as this hideous war has revealed them. I remember an illuminating talk with M. Renan himself on this subject during our visit. We had never yet seen him, and we carried an introduction to him from Max Müller, our neighbor and friend in Oxford. We found him alone, in a small working-room crowded with books, at the College de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his large library for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him was something of a shock--of the large, ungainly figure, the genial face with its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with its scanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest in the two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims to his shrine, and, realizing that our French was not fluent and our shyness great, he filled up the time--and the gaps--by a monologue, lit up by many touches of Renanesque humor, on the situation in France. First, as to literature--"No, we have no genius, no poets or writers of the first rank just now--at least so it seems to me. But we _work--nous travaillons beaucoup! Ce sera noire salut_." It was the same as to politics. He had no illusions and few admirations. "The Chamber is full of mediocrities. We are governed by _avocats_ and _pharmaciens_. But at least _Ils ne feront pas la guerre_!" He smiled, but there was that in the smile and the gesture which showed the smart within; from which not even his scholar's philosophy, with its ideal of a world of cosmopolitan science, could protect him. At that moment he was inclined to despair of his country. The mad adventure of the Commune had gone deep into his soul, and there were still a good many pacifying years to run, before he could talk of his life as "_cette charmante promenade à travers la realité_"--for which, with all it had contained of bad and good, he yet thanked the Gods. At that time he was fifty-one; he had just published _L'Antichrist,_ the most brilliant of all the volumes of the "Origines"; and he was not yet a member of the French Academy. I turn to a few other impressions from that distant time. One night we were in the Théâtre Français, and Racine's "Phèdre" was to be given. I at least had never been in the Maison de Molière before, and in such matters as acting I possessed, at twenty-three, only a very raw and country-cousinish judgment. There had been a certain amount of talk in Oxford of a new and remarkable French actress, but neither of us had really any idea of what was before us. Then the play began. And before the first act was over we were sitting, bent forward, gazing at the stage in an intense and concentrated excitement such as I can scarcely remember ever feeling again, except perhaps when the same actress played "Hernani" in London for the first time in 1884. Sarah Bernhardt was then--December, 1874--in the first full tide of her success. She was of a ghostly and willowy slenderness. Each of the great speeches seemed actually to rend the delicate frame. When she fell back after one of them you felt an actual physical terror lest there should not be enough life left in the slight, dying woman to let her speak again. And you craved for yet more and more of the _voix d'or_ which rang in one's ears as the frail yet exquisite instrument of a mighty music. Never before had it been brought home to me what dramatic art might be, or the power of the French Alexandrine. And never did I come so near quarreling with "Uncle Matt" as when, on our return, after having heard my say about the genius of Sarah Bernhardt, he patted my hand indulgently with the remark, "But, my dear child, you see, you never saw Rachel!" As we listened to Sarah Bernhardt we were watching the outset of a great career which had still some forty years to run. On another evening we made acquaintance with a little old woman who had been born in the first year of the Terror, who had spent her first youth in the _salon_ of Madame Récamier, valued there, above all, for her difficult success in drawing a smile from that old and melancholy genius, Châteaubriand; and had since held a _salon_ of her own, which deserves a special place in the history of _salons_. For it was held, according to the French tradition, and in Paris, by an Englishwoman. It was, I think, Max Müller who gave us an introduction to Madame Mohl. She sent us an invitation to one of her Friday evenings, and we duly mounted to the top of the old house in the Rue du Bac which she made famous for so long. As we entered the room I saw a small disheveled figure, gray-headed, crouching beside a grate, with a kettle in her hand. It was Madame Mohl--then eighty- one--who was trying to make the fire burn. She just raised herself to greet us, with a swift investigating glance; and then returned to her task of making the tea, in which I endeavored to help her. But she did not like to be helped, and I soon subsided into my usual listening and watching, which, perhaps, for one who at that time was singularly immature in all social respects, was the best policy. I seem still to see the tall, substantial form of Julius Mohl standing behind her, with various other elderly men who were no doubt famous folk, if one had known their names. And in the corner was the Spartan tea-table, with its few biscuits, which stood for the plain living whereon was nourished the high thinking and high talking which had passed through these rooms. Guizot, Cousin, Ampère, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men of the middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and the artists, but the politicians, the historians, and the _savants_. The little Fairy Blackstick, incredibly old, kneeling on the floor, with the shabby dress and tousled gray hair, had made a part of the central scene in France, through the Revolution, the reign of the Citizen king, and the Second Empire--playing the rôle, through it all, of a good friend of freedom. If only one had heard her talk! But there were few people in the room, and we were none of us inspired. I must sadly put down that Friday evening among the lost opportunities of life. For Mrs. Simpson's biography of Madame Mohl shows what a wealth of wit and memory there was in that small head! Her social sense, her humor, never deserted her, though she lived to be ninety. When she was dying, her favorite cat, a tom, leaped on her bed. Her eyes lit up as she feebly stroked him. "He is so distinguished!" she whispered. "But his wife is not distinguished at all. He doesn't know it. But many men are like that." It was one of the last sayings of an expert in the human scene. Madame Mohl was twenty-one when the Allies entered Paris in 1814. She had lived with those to whom the fall of the _Ancien Régime_, the Terror, and the Revolutionary wars had been the experience of middle life. As I look back to the _salon_ in the Rue du Bac, which I saw in such a flash, yet where my hand rested for a moment in that of Madame Récamier's pet and protegée, I am reminded, too, that I once saw, at the Forsters', in 1869, when I was eighteen, the Doctor Lushington who was Lady Byron's adviser and confidant when she left her husband, and who, as a young man, had stayed with Pitt and ridden out with Lady Hester Stanhope. One night, in Eccleston Square, we assembled for dinner in the ground-floor library instead of the drawing-room, which was up-stairs. I slipped in late, and saw in an arm-chair, his hands resting on a stick, an old, white-haired man. When dinner was announced--if I remember right--he was wheeled into the dining-room, to a place beside my aunt. I was too far away to hear him talk, and he went home after dinner. But it was one of the guests of the evening, a friend of his, who said to me-- with a kindly wish, no doubt, to thrill the girl just "out": "You ought to remember Doctor Lushington! What are you?--eighteen?--and he is eighty-six. He was in the theater on the night when the news reached London of Marie Antoinette's execution, and he can remember, though he was only a boy of eleven, how it was given out from the stage, and how the audience instantly broke up." Doctor Lushington, of course, carries one farther back than Madame Mohl. He was born in 1782, four years after the deaths of Rousseau and Voltaire, two years before the death of Diderot. He was only six years younger than Lady Hester Stanhope, whose acquaintance he made during the three years--1803-1806--when she was keeping house for her uncle, William Pitt. But on my right hand at the same dinner-party there sat a guest who was to mean a good deal more to me personally than Doctor Lushington--young Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, as he then was, Lord Macaulay's nephew, already the brilliant author of _A Competition Wallah, Ladies in Parliament_, and much else. We little thought, as we talked, that after thirty-five years his son was to marry my daughter. CHAPTER IX THE BEGINNINGS OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_ If these are to be the recollections of a writer, in which perhaps other writers by profession, as well as the more general public, may take some interest, I shall perhaps be forgiven if I give some account of the processes of thought and work which led to the writing of my first successful novel, _Robert Elsmere_. It was in 1878 that a new editor was appointed for one of the huge well- known volumes, in which under the aegis of the John Murray of the day, the _Nineteenth Century_ was accustomed to concentrate its knowledge-- classical, historical, and theological--in convenient, if not exactly handy, form. Doctor Wace, now a Canon of Canterbury, was then an indefatigable member of the _Times_ staff. Yet he undertook this extra work, and carried it bravely through. He came to Oxford to beat up recruits for Smith's _Dictionary of Christian Biography_, a companion volume to that of _Classical Biography_, and dealing with the first seven centuries of Christianity. He had been told that I had been busying myself with early Spain, and he came to me to ask whether I would take the Spanish lives for the period, especially those concerned with the West-Goths in Spain; while at the same time he applied to various Oxford historians for work on the Ostrogoths and the Franks. I was much tempted, but I had a good deal to consider. The French and Spanish reading it involved was no difficulty. But the power of reading Latin rapidly, both the degraded Latin of the fifth and sixth centuries and the learned Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth, was essential; and I had only learned some Latin since my marriage, and was by no means at home in it. I had long since found out, too, in working at the Spanish literature of the eleventh to the fourteenth century, that the only critics and researches worth following in that field were German; and though I had been fairly well grounded in German at school, and had read a certain amount, the prospect of a piece of work which meant, in the main, Latin texts and German commentaries, was rather daunting. The well-trained woman student of the present day would have felt probably no such qualms. But I had not been well trained; and the Pattison standards of what work should be stood like dragons in the way. However, I took the plunge, and I have always been grateful to Canon Wace. The sheer, hard, brain-stretching work of the two or three years which followed I look back to now with delight. It altered my whole outlook and gave me horizons and sympathies that I have never lost, however dim all the positive knowledge brought me by the work has long since become. The strange thing was that out of the work which seemed both to myself and others to mark the abandonment of any foolish hopes of novel-writing I might have cherished as a girl, _Robert Elsmere_ should have arisen. For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures. J. R. G. dealt very faithfully with me on the subject; and I could only conclude that the instinct to tell stories which had been so strong in me as a child and girl meant nothing, and was to be suppressed. I did, indeed, write a story for my children, which came out in 1880--_Milly and Olly_; but that wrote itself and was a mere transcript of their little lives. And yet I venture to think it was, after all, the instinct for "making out," as the Brontës used to call their own wonderful story-telling passion, which rendered this historical work so enthralling to me. Those far-off centuries became veritably alive to me--the Arian kings fighting an ever-losing battle against the ever-encroaching power of the Catholic Church, backed by the still lingering and still potent ghost of the Roman Empire; the Catholic Bishops gathering, sometimes through winter snow, to their Councils at Seville and Toledo; the centers of culture in remote corners of the peninsula, where men lived with books and holy things, shrinking from the wild life around them, and handing on the precious remnants and broken traditions of the older classical world; the mutual scorn of Goth and Roman; martyrs, fanatics, heretics, nationalists, and cosmopolitans; and, rising upon, enveloping them all, as the seventh and eighth centuries drew on, the tide of Islam, and the menace of that time when the great church of Cordova should be half a mosque and half a Christian cathedral. I lived, indeed, in that old Spain, while I was at work in the Bodleian and at home. To spend hours and days over the signatures to an obscure Council, identifying each name so far as the existing materials allowed, and attaching to it some fragment of human interest, so that gradually something of a picture emerged, as of a thing lost and recovered-- dredged up from the deeps of time--that, I think, was the joy of it all. I see, in memory, the small Oxford room, as it was on a winter evening, between nine and midnight, my husband in one corner preparing his college lectures, or writing a "Saturday" "middle"; my books and I in another; the reading-lamp, always to me a symbol of peace and "recollection"; the Oxford quiet outside. And yet, it was not so tranquil as it looked. For beating round us all the time were the spiritual winds of an agitated day. The Oxford of thought was not quiet; it was divided, as I have shown, by sharper antagonisms and deeper feuds than exist to-day. Darwinism was penetrating everywhere; Pusey was preaching against its effects on belief; Balliol stood for an unfettered history and criticism, Christ Church for authority and creeds; Renan's _Origines_ were still coming out, Strauss's last book also; my uncle was publishing _God and the Bible_ in succession to _Literature and Dogma_; and _Supernatural Religion_ was making no small stir. And meanwhile what began to interest and absorb me were _sources_--_testimony_. To what--to whom--did it all go back, this great story of early civilization, early religion, which modern men could write and interpret so differently? And on this question the writers and historians of four early centuries, from the fifth to the ninth, as I lived with them, seemed to throw a partial, but yet a searching, light. I have expressed it in _Robert Elsmere_. Langham and Robert, talking in the Squire's library on Robert's plans for a history of Gaul during the breakdown of the Empire and the emergence of modern France, come to the vital question: "History depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and virtue of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences?-- and what are the deductions to be made from them?" Robert replies that his work has not yet dug deep enough to make him answer the question. "It is enormously important, I grant--enormously," he repeated, reflectively. On which Langham says to himself, though not to Elsmere, that the whole of "orthodoxy" is in it, and depends on it. And in a later passage, when Elsmere is mastering the "Quellen" of his subject, he expresses himself with bewilderment to Catherine on this same subject of "testimony." He is immersed in the chronicles and biographies of the fifth and sixth centuries. Every history, every biography, is steeped in marvel. A man divided by only a few years from the bishop or saint whose life he is writing reports the most fantastic miracles. What is the psychology of it all? The whole age seems to Robert "non-sane." And, meanwhile, across and beyond the medieval centuries, behind the Christian era itself, the modern student looks back inevitably, involuntarily, to certain Greeks and certain Latins, who "represent a forward strain," who intellectually "belong to a world ahead of them." "You"--he says to them--"_you_ are really my kindred." That, after all, I tried to express this intellectual experience--which was, of course, an experience of my own--not in critical or historical work, but in a novel, that is to say in terms of human life, was the result of an incident which occurred toward the close of our lives in Oxford. It was not long after the appearance of _Supernatural Religion_, and the rise of that newer school of Biblical criticism in Germany expressed by the once-honored name of Doctor Harnack. Darwinian debate in the realm of natural science was practically over. The spread of evolutionary ideas in the fields of history and criticism was the real point of interest. Accordingly, the University pulpit was often filled by men endeavoring "to fit a not very exacting science to a very grudging orthodoxy"; and the heat of an ever-strengthening controversy was in the Oxford air. In 1881, as it happened, the Bampton Lectures were preached by the Rev. John Wordsworth, then Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose, and, later, Bishop of Salisbury. He and my husband--who, before our marriage, was also a Fellow of Brasenose--were still tutorial colleagues, and I therefore knew him personally, and his first wife, the brilliant daughter of the beloved Bodley's Librarian of my day, Mr. Coxe. We naturally attended Mr. Wordsworth's first Bampton. He belonged, very strongly, to what I have called the Christ Church camp; while we belonged, very strongly, to the Balliol camp. But no one could fail to respect John Wordsworth deeply; while his connection with his great-uncle, the poet, to whom he bore a strong personal likeness, gave him always a glamour in my eyes. Still, I remember going with a certain shrinking; and it was the shock of indignation excited in me by the sermon which led directly--though after seven intervening years--to _Robert Elsmere._ The sermon was on "The present unsettlement in religion"; and it connected the "unsettlement" definitely with "sin." The "moral causes of unbelief," said the preacher, "were (1) prejudice; (2) severe claims of religion; (3) intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice." The sermon expounded and developed this outline with great vigor, and every skeptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fashion that now scarcely survive. I sat in the darkness under the gallery. The preacher's fine ascetic face was plainly visible in the middle light of the church; and while the confident priestly voice flowed on, I seemed to see, grouped around the speaker, the forms of those, his colleagues and contemporaries, the patient scholars and thinkers of the Liberal host, Stanley, Jowett, Green of Balliol, Lewis Nettleship, Henry Sidgwick, my uncle, whom he, in truth--though perhaps not consciously-- was attacking. My heart was hot within me. How could one show England what was really going on in her midst? Surely the only way was through imagination; through a picture of actual life and conduct; through something as "simple, sensuous, passionate" as one could make it. Who and what were the persons of whom the preacher gave this grotesque account? What was their history? How had their thoughts and doubts come to be? What was the effect of them on conduct? The _immediate_ result of the sermon, however, was a pamphlet called _Unbelief and Sin: a Protest addressed to those who attended the Bampton Lecture of Sunday, March 6th_. It was rapidly written and printed, and was put up in the windows of a well-known shop in the High Street. In the few hours of its public career it enjoyed a very lively sale. Then an incident--quite unforeseen by its author--slit its little life! A well-known clergyman walked into the shop and asked for the pamphlet. He turned it over, and at once pointed out to one of the partners of the firm in the shop that there was no printer's name upon it. The booksellers who had produced the pamphlet, no doubt with an eye to their large clerical _clientèle_, had omitted the printer's name, and the omission was illegal. Pains and penalties were threatened, and the frightened booksellers at once withdrew the pamphlet and sent word of what had happened to my much-astonished self, who had neither noticed the omission nor was aware of the law. But Doctor Foulkes, the clergyman in question--no one that knew the Oxford of my day will have forgotten his tall, militant figure, with the defiant white hair and the long clerical coat, as it haunted the streets of the University!--had only stimulated the tare he seemed to have rooted up. For the pamphlet thus easily suppressed was really the germ of the later book; in that, without attempting direct argument, it merely sketched two types of character: the character that either knows no doubts or has suppressed them, and the character that fights its stormy way to truth. The latter was the first sketch of _Robert Elsmere_. That same evening, at a College party, Professor Green came up to me. I had sent him the pamphlet the night before, and had not yet had a word from him. His kind brown eyes smiled upon me as he said a hearty "thank you," adding "a capital piece of work," or something to that effect; after which my spirits were quite equal to telling him the story of Doctor Foulkes's raid. * * * * * The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events of quite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband's acceptance of a post on the staff of the _Times_, and a visit that we paid to the W.E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost the blackest moment of the Irish land-war. Of Renan's visit I have mingled memories--all pleasant, but some touched with comedy. Gentle Madame Renan came with her famous husband and soon won all hearts. Oxford in mid-April was then, as always, a dream of gardens just coming into leaf, enchasing buildings of a silvery gray, and full to the brim of the old walls with the early blossom--almond, or cherry, or flowering currant. M. Renan was delivering the Hibbert Lectures in London, and came down to stay for a long week-end with our neighbors, the Max Müllers. Doctor Hatch was then preaching the Bampton Lectures, that first admirable series of his on the debt of the Church to Latin organization, and M. Renan attended one of them. He had himself just published _Marc Aurèle_, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closely akin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emerge from the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantly dreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "_Mais oui_!" said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I might have preached his sermon! _(Nous aurions du changer de cahiers_!)" Renan in the pulpit of Pusey, Newman, and Burgon would indeed have been a spectacle of horror to the ecclesiastical mind. I remember once, many years after, following the _parroco_ of Castel Gandolfo, through the dreary and deserted rooms of the Papal villa, where, before 1870, the Popes used to make _villegiatura_, on that beautiful ridge overlooking the Alban lake. All the decoration of the villa seemed to me curiously tawdry and mean. But suddenly my attention was arrested by a great fresco covering an entire wall. It represented the triumph of the Papacy over the infidel of all dates. A Pope sat enthroned, wearing the triple crown, with angels hovering overhead; and in a huge brazier at his feet burned the writings of the world's heretics. The blazing volumes were inscribed--Arius--Luther--Voltaire--_Renan_! We passed on through the empty rooms, and the _parroco_ locked the door behind us. I thought, as we walked away, of the summer light fading from the childish picture, painted probably not long before the entry of the Italian troops into Rome, and of all that was symbolized by it and the deserted villa, to which the "prisoner of the Vatican" no longer returns. But at least Rome had given Ernest Renan no mean place among her enemies--Arius, Luther, Voltaire--_Renan_! But in truth, Renan, personally, was not the enemy of any church, least of all of the great Church which had trained his youth. He was a born scholar and thinker, in temper extremely gentle and scrupulous, and with a sense of humor, or rather irony, not unlike that of Anatole France, who has learned much from him. There was, of course, a streak in him of that French paradox, that impish trifling with things fundamental, which the English temperament dislikes and resents; as when he wrote the _Abbesse de Jouarre_, or threw out the whimsical doubt in a passing sentence of one of his latest books, whether, after all, his life of labor and self-denial had been worth while, and whether, if he had lived the life of an Epicurean, like Théophile Gautier, he might not have got more out of existence. "He was really a good and great man," said Jowett, writing after his death. But "I regret that he wrote at the end of his life that strange drama about the Reign of Terror." There are probably few of M. Renan's English admirers who do not share the regret. At the same time, there, for all to see, is the long life as it was lived--of the ever-toiling scholar and thinker, the devoted husband and brother, the admirable friend. And certainly, during the Oxford visit I remember, M. Renan was at his best. He was in love-- apparently--with Oxford, and his charm, his gaiety, played over all that we presented to him. I recall him in Wadham Gardens, wandering in a kind of happy dream--"Ah, if one had only such places as this to work in, in France! What pages--and how perfect!--one might write here!" Or again, in a different scene, at luncheon in our little house in the Parks, when Oxford was showing, even more than usual, its piteous inability to talk decently to the great man in his own tongue. It is true that he neither understood ours--in conversation--nor spoke a word of it. But that did not at all mitigate our own shame--and surprise! For at that time, in the Oxford world proper, everybody, probably, read French habitually, and many of us thought we spoke it. But a mocking spirit suggested to one of the guests at this luncheon-party--an energetic historical tutor--the wish to enlighten M. Renan as to how the University was governed, the intricacies of Convocation and Congregation, the Hebdomadal Council, and all the rest. The other persons present fell at first breathlessly silent, watching the gallant but quite hopeless adventure. Then, in sheer sympathy with a good man in trouble, one after another we rushed in to help, till the constitution of the University must have seemed indeed a thing of Bedlam to our smiling but much- puzzled guest; and all our cheeks were red. But M. Renan cut the knot. Since he could not understand, and we could not explain, what the constitution of Oxford University _was_, he suavely took up his parable as to what it should be. He drew the ideal University, as it were, in the clouds; clothing his notion, as he went on, in so much fun and so much charm, that his English hosts more than forgot their own defeat in his success. The little scene has always remained with me as a crowning instance of the French genius for conversation. Throw what obstacles in the way you please; it will surmount them all. To judge, however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot, written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as we thought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is the strangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of its colleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise." (I see from the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And he describes the education given as "purely humanist and clerical," administered to "a gilded youth that comes to chapel in surplices. There is an almost total absence of the scientific spirit." And the letter further contains a mild gibe at All Souls, for its absentee Fellows. "The lawns are admirable, and the Fellows eat up the college revenues, hunting and shooting up and down England. Only one of them works--my kind host, Max Müller." At that moment the list of the Fellows of All Souls contained the names of men who have since rendered high service to England; and M. Renan was probably not aware that the drastic reforms introduced by the two great University Commissions of 1854 and 1877 had made the sarcastic picture he drew for his friend not a little absurd. No doubt a French intellectual will always feel that the mind-life of England is running at a slower pace than that of his own country. But if Renan had worked for a year in Oxford, the old priestly training in him, based so solidly on the moral discipline of St. Nicholas and St. Sulpice, would have become aware of much else. I like to think that he would have echoed the verdict on the Oxford undergraduate of a young and brilliant Frenchman who spent much time at Oxford fifteen years later. "There is no intellectual _élite_ here so strong as ours (i.e., among French students)," says M. Jacques Bardouz, "but they undoubtedly have a political _élite_, and, a much rarer thing, a moral _élite_.... What an environment!--and how full is this education of moral stimulus and force!" Has not every word of this been justified to the letter by the experience of the war? After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have to improve and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new, let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old! It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were starting for a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband a letter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that my husband should take work on the _Times_ as a member of the editorial staff. We read it in amazement, and walked on to Port Meadow. It was a fine day. The river was alive with boats; in the distance rose the towers and domes of the beautiful city; and the Oxford magic blew about us in the summer wind. It seemed impossible to leave the dear Oxford life! All the drawbacks and difficulties of the new proposal presented themselves; hardly any of the advantages. As for me, I was convinced we must and should refuse, and I went to sleep in that conviction. But the mind travels far--and mysteriously--in sleep. With the first words that my husband and I exchanged in the morning, we knew that the die was cast and that our Oxford days were over. The rest of the year was spent in preparation for the change; and in the Christmas vacation of 1880-81 my husband wrote his first "leaders" for the paper. But before that we went for a week to Dublin to stay with the Forsters, at the Chief Secretary's Lodge. A visit I shall never forget! It was the first of the two terrible winters my uncle spent in Dublin as Chief Secretary, and the struggle with the Land League was at its height. Boycotting, murder, and outrage filled the news of every day. Owing to the refusal of the Liberal Government to renew the Peace Preservation Act when they took office in 1880--a disastrous but perhaps intelligible mistake--the Chief Secretary, when we reached Dublin, was facing an agrarian and political revolt of the most determined character, with nothing but the ordinary law, resting on juries and evidence, as his instrument--an instrument which the Irish Land League had taken good care to shatter in his hands. Threatening letters were flowing in upon both himself and my godmother; and the tragedy of 1882, with the revelations as to the various murder plots of the time, to which it led, were soon to show how terrible was the state of the country and how real the danger in which he personally stood. But, none the less, social life had to be carried on; entertainments had to be given; and we went over, if I remember right, for the two Christmas balls to be given by the Chief Secretary and the Viceroy. On myself, fresh from the quiet Oxford life, the Irish spectacle, seen from such a point of view, produced an overwhelming impression. And the dancing, the visits and dinner-parties, the keeping up of a brave social show--quite necessary and right under the circumstances!--began to seem to me, after only twenty-four hours, like some pageant seen under a thunder-cloud. Mr. Forster had then little more than five years to live. He was on the threshold of the second year of his Chief-Secretary ship. During the first year he had faced the difficulties of the position in Ireland, and the perpetual attacks of the Irish Members in Parliament, with a physical nerve and power still intact. I can recall my hot sympathy with him during 1880, while with one hand he was fighting the Land League and with the other--a fact never sufficiently recognized--giving all the help he could to the preparation of Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act. The position then was hard, sometimes heartbreaking; but it was not beyond his strength. The second year wore him out. The unlucky Protection Act-- an experiment for which the Liberal Cabinet and even its Radical Members, Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain, were every whit as chargeable as himself--imposed a personal responsibility on him for every case out of the many hundreds of prisoners made under the Act, which was in itself intolerable. And while he tried in front to dam back the flood of Irish outrage, English Radicalism at his heels was making the task impossible. What he was doing satisfied nobody, least of all himself. The official and land-owning classes in Ireland, the Tories in England, raged because, in spite of the Act, outrage continued; the Radical party in the country, which had always disliked the Protection Act, and the Radical press, were on the lookout for every sign of failure; while the daily struggle in the House with the Irish Members while Parliament was sitting, in addition to all the rest, exhausted a man on whose decision important executive acts, dealing really with a state of revolution, were always depending. All through the second year, as it seemed to me, he was overwhelmed by a growing sense of a monstrous and insoluble problem, to which no one, through nearly another forty years--not Mr. Gladstone with his Home Rule Acts, as we were soon to see, nor Mr. Balfour's wonderful brain-power sustained by a unique temperament--was to find the true key. It is not found yet. Twenty years of Tory Government practically solved the Land Question and agricultural Ireland has begun to be rich. But the past year has seen an Irish rebellion; a Home Rule Act has at last, after thirty years, been passed, and is dead before its birth; while at the present moment an Irish Convention is sitting.[1] Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walked with William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, a year later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. And still the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Government to Government. When will the Furies of the past become the "kind goddesses" of the future--and the Irish and English peoples build them a shrine of reconciliation? [Footnote 1: These words were written in the winter of 1917. At the present moment (June, 1918) we have just seen the deportation of the Sinn Feiners, and are still expecting yet another Home Rule Bill!] With such thoughts one looks back over the past. Amid its darkness, I shall always see the pathetic figure of William Forster, the man of Quaker training, at grips with murder and anarchy; the man of sensitive, affectionate spirit, weighed down under the weight of rival appeals, now from the side of democracy, now from the side of authority; bitterly conscious, as an English Radical, of his breach with Radicalism; still more keenly sensitive, as a man responsible for the executive government of a country, in which the foundations had given way, to that atmosphere of cruelty and wrong in which the Land League moved, and to the hideous instances poured every day into his ears. He bore it for more than a year after we saw him in Ireland at his thankless work. It was our first year in London, and we were near enough to watch closely the progress of his fight. But it was a fight not to be won. The spring of 1882 saw his resignation--on May 2d--followed on May 6th by the Phoenix Park murders and the long and gradual disintegration of the powerful Ministry of 1880, culminating in the Home Rule disaster of 1886. Mr. Churchill in the _Life_ of his father, Lord Randolph, says of Mr. Forster's resignation, "he passed out of the Ministry to become during the rest of Parliament one of its most dangerous and vigilant opponents." The physical change, indeed, caused by the Irish struggle, which was for a time painfully evident to the House of Commons, seemed to pass away with rest and travel. The famous attack he made on Parnell in the spring of 1883, as the responsible promoter of outrage in Ireland, showed certainly no lack of power--rather an increase. I happened to be in the House the following day, to hear Parnell's reply. I remember my uncle's taking me down with him to the House, and begging a seat for me in Mrs. Brand's gallery. The figure of Parnell; the speech, nonchalant, terse, defiant, without a single grace of any kind, his hands in the pockets of his coat; and the tense silence of the crowded House, remain vividly with me. Afterward my uncle came up-stairs for me, and we descended toward Palace Yard through various side- passages. Suddenly a door communicating with the House itself opened in front of us, and Parnell came out. My uncle pressed my arm and we held back, while Parnell passed by, somberly absorbed, without betraying by the smallest movement or gesture any recognition of my uncle's identity. In other matters--Gordon, Imperial Federation, the Chairmanship of the Manchester Ship Canal, and the rest--William Forster showed, up till 1885, what his friends fondly hoped was the promise of renewed and successful work. But in reality he never recovered Ireland. The mark of those two years had gone too deep. He died in April, 1886, just before the introduction of the Home Rule Bill, and I have always on the retina of the inward eye the impression of a moment at the western door of Westminster Abbey, after the funeral service. The flower-heaped coffin had gone through. My aunt and her adopted children followed it. After them came Mr. Gladstone, with other members of the Cabinet. At the threshold Mr. Gladstone moved forward, and took my aunt's hand, bending over it bareheaded. Then she went with the dead, and he turned away toward the House of Commons. To those of us who remembered what the relations of the dead and the living had once been, and how they had parted, there was a peculiar pathos in the little scene. A few days later Mr. Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill, and the two stormy months followed which ended in the Liberal Unionist split and the defeat of the Bill on June 7th by thirty votes, and were the prelude to the twenty years of Tory Government. If William Forster had lived, there is no doubt that he must have played a leading part in the struggles of that and subsequent sessions. In 1888 Mr. Balfour said to my husband, after some generous words on the part played by Forster in those two terrible years: "Forster's loss was irreparable to us [i.e., to the Unionist party]. If he and Fawcett had lived, Gladstone could not have made head." It has been, I think, widely recognized by men of all parties in recent years that personally William Forster bore the worst of the Irish day, whatever men may think of his policy. But, after all, it is not for this, primarily, that England remembers him. His monument is everywhere--in the schools that have covered the land since 1870, when his great Act was passed. And if I have caught a little picture from the moment when death forestalled that imminent parting between himself and the great leader he had so long admired and followed, which life could only have broadened, let me match it by an earlier and happier one, borrowed from a letter of my own, written to my father when I was eighteen, and describing the bringing in of the Education Act. He sat down amidst loud cheering.... _Gladstone pulled him down with a sort of hug of delight._ It is certain that he is very much pleased with the Bill, and, what is of great consequence, that he thinks the Government has throughout been treated with great consideration in it. After the debate he said to Uncle F., "Well, I think our pair of ponies will run through together!" Gladstone's "pony" was, of course, the Land Act of 1870. THE END OF VOL. I 
9821	----	Proofreading Team A WRITER'S RECOLLECTIONS (IN TWO VOLUMES), VOLUME II BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD Published November, 1918 [Illustration: HENRY JAMES] CONTENTS CHAPTER I. LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES II. LONDON FRIENDS III. THE PUBLICATION OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" IV. FIRST VISITS TO ITALY V. AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND "MARCELLA" VI. "HELBECK OF BANNISDALE" VII. THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES VIII. ROMAN FRIENDS. "ELEANOR" EPILOGUE ILLUSTRATIONS HENRY JAMES ARTHUR BALFOUR GOLDWIN SMITH M. JUSSERAND CHAPTER I LONDON IN THE 'EIGHTIES The few recollections of William Forster that I have put together in the preceding volume lead naturally, perhaps, to some account of my friendship and working relations at this time with Forster's most formidable critic in the political press--Mr. John Morley, now Lord Morley. It was in the late 'seventies, I think, that I first saw Mr. Morley. I sat next him at the Master's dinner-table, and the impression he made upon me was immediate and lasting. I trust that a great man, to whom I owed much, will forgive me for dwelling on some of the incidents of literary comradeship which followed! My husband and I, on the way home, compared notes. We felt that we had just been in contact with a singular personal power combined with a moral atmosphere which had in it both the bracing and the charm that, physically, are the gift of the heights. The "austere" Radical, indeed, was there. With regard to certain vices and corruptions of our life and politics, my uncle might as well have used Mr. Morley's name as that of Mr. Frederick Harrison, when he presented us, in "Friendship's Garland," with Mr. Harrison setting up a guillotine in his back garden. There was something--there always has been something--of the somber intensity of the prophet in Mr. Morley. Burke drew, as we all remember, an ineffaceable picture of Marie Antoinette's young beauty as he saw it in 1774, contrasting it with the "abominable scenes" amid which she perished. Mr. Morley's comment is: But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage and forget the dying bird? ... It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the French cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel death. The cry of the poor, indeed, against the rich and tyrannous, the cry of the persecuted Liberal, whether in politics or religion, against his oppressors--it used to seem to me, in the 'eighties, when, to my pleasure and profit, I was often associated with Mr. Morley, that in his passionate response to this double appeal lay the driving impulse of his life and the secret of his power over others. While we were still at Oxford he had brought out most of his books: _On Compromise_--the fierce and famous manifesto of 1874--and the well-known volumes on the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot. It was not for nothing that he had been a member of Pattison's college; and a follower of John Stuart Mill. The will to look the grimmest facts of life and destiny in the face, without flinching, and the resolve to accept no "anodyne" from religion or philosophy, combined with a ceaseless interest in the human fate and the human story, and a natural, inbred sympathy for the many against the few, for the unfortunate against the prosperous; it was these ardors and the burning sincerity with which he felt them, that made him so great a power among us, his juniors by half a generation. I shall never lose the impression that _Compromise_, with its almost savage appeal for sincerity in word and deed, made upon me--an impression which had its share in _Robert Elsmere_. But together with this tragic strenuousness there was always the personal magic which winged it and gave it power. Mr. Morley has known all through his life what it was to be courted, by men and women alike, for the mere pleasure of his company; in which he resembled another man whom both he and I knew well--Sir Alfred Lyall. It is well known that Mr. Gladstone was fascinated by the combination in his future biographer of the Puritan, the man of iron conviction, and the delightful man of letters. And in my own small sphere I realized both aspects of Mr. Morley during the 'eighties. Just before we left Oxford I had begun to write reviews and occasional notes for the _Pall Mall_, which he was then editing; after we settled in London, and he had become also editor of _Macmillan_, he asked me, to my no little conceit, to write a monthly _causerie_ on a book or books for that magazine. I never succeeded in writing nearly so many; but in two years I contributed perhaps eight or ten papers--until I became absorbed in _Robert Elsmere_ and Mr. Morley gave up journalism for politics. During that time my pleasant task brought me into frequent contact with my editor. Nothing could have been kinder than his letters; at the same time there was scarcely one of them that did not convey some hint, some touch of the critical goad, invaluable to the recipient. I wrote him a letter of wailing when he gave up the editorship and literature and became Member for Newcastle. Such a fall it seemed to me then! But Mr. Morley took it patiently. "Do not lament over your friend, but pray for him!" As, indeed, one might well do, in the case of one who for a few brief months--in 1886--was to be Chief Secretary for Ireland, and again in 1892-95. It was, indeed, in connection with Ireland that I became keenly and personally aware of that other side of Mr. Morley's character--the side which showed him the intransigent supporter of liberty at all costs and all hazards. It was, I suppose, the brilliant and pitiless attacks in the _Pall Mall_ on Mr. Forster's Chief-Secretaryship, which, as much as anything else, and together with what they reflected in the Cabinet, weakened my uncle's position and ultimately led to his resignation in the spring of 1882. Many of Mr. Forster's friends and kinsfolk resented them bitterly; and among the kinsfolk, one of them, I have reason to know, made a strong private protest. Mr. Morley's attitude in reply could only have been that which is well expressed by a sentence of Darmesteter's about Renan: "So pliant in appearance, so courteous in manner, he became a bar of iron as soon as one sought to wrest from him an act or word contrary to the intimate sense of his conscience." But no man has a monopoly of conscience. The tragedy was that here were two men, both democrats, both humanitarians, but that an executive office, in a time of hideous difficulty, had been imposed upon the one, from which the other--his critic--was free. Ten years later, when Mr. Morley was Chief Secretary, it was pointed out that the same statesman who had so sincerely and vehemently protested in the case of William Forster and Mr. Balfour against the revival of "obsolete" statutes, and the suppression of public meetings, had himself been obliged to put obsolete statutes in operation sixteen times, and to prohibit twenty-six public meetings. These, however, are the whirligigs of politics, and no politician escapes them. In my eyes Lord Morley's crowning achievement in literature is his biography of Mr. Gladstone. How easy it would have been to smother Mr. Gladstone in stale politics!--and how stale politics may become in that intermediate stage before they pass finally into history! English political literature is full of biography of this kind. The three notable exceptions of recent years which occur to me are Mr. Churchill's _Life_ of his father, the Disraeli biography still in progress, and the _Gladstone_. But it would be difficult indeed to "stale" the story of either Lord Randolph or Dizzy. A biographer would have to set about it of malice prepense. In the case, however, of Mr. Gladstone, the danger was more real. Anglican orthodoxy, eminent virtue, unfailing decorum; a comparatively weak sense of humor, and a literary gift much inferior to his oratorical gift, so that the most famous of his speeches are but cold reading now; interminable sentences, and an unfailing relish for detail all important in its day, but long since dead and buried; the kind of biography that, with this material, half a dozen of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues might have written of him, for all his greatness, rises formidably on the inward eye. The younger generation waiting for the historian to come--except in the case of those whose professional duty as politicians it would have been to read it--might quite well have yawned and passed by. But Mr. Morley's literary instinct, which is the artistic instinct, solved the problem. The most interesting half of the book will always, I think, be the later half. In the great matters of his hero's earlier career--Free Trade, the Crimean War, the early budgets, the slow development of the Liberal leader from the Church and State Conservative of 1832, down to the franchise battle of the 'sixties and the "great Ministry," as Mr. Morley calls it, of 1868, the story is told, indeed, perhaps here and there at too great length, yet with unfailing ease and lucidity. The teller, however, is one who, till the late 'seventies, was only a spectator, and, on the whole, from a distance, of what he is describing, who was indeed most of the time pursuing his own special aims--i.e., the hewing down of orthodoxy and tradition, together with the preaching of a frank and uncompromising agnosticism, in the _Fortnightly Review_; aims which were, of all others, most opposed to Mr. Gladstone's. But with the 'eighties everything changes. Mr. Morley becomes a great part of what he tells. During the intermediate stage--marked by his editorship of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--the tone of the biography grows sensibly warmer and more vivid, as the writer draws nearer and nearer to the central scene; and with Mr. Morley's election to Newcastle and his acceptance of the Chief-Secretaryship in 1885, the book becomes the fascinating record of not one man, but two, and that without any intrusion whatever on the rights of the main figure. The dreariness of the Irish struggle is lightened by touch after touch that only Mr. Morley could have given. Take that picture of the somber, discontented Parnell, coming, late in the evening, to Mr. Morley's room in the House of Commons, to complain of the finance of the Home Rule Bill--Mr. Gladstone's entrance at 10.30 P.M., after an exhausting day--and he, the man of seventy-seven, sitting down to work between the Chief Secretary and the Irish leader, till at last, with a sigh of weariness at nearly 1 A.M., the tired Prime Minister pleads to go to bed. Or that most dramatic story, later on, of Committee Room No. 15, where Mr. Morley becomes the reporter to Mr. Gladstone of that moral and political tragedy, the fall of Parnell; or a hundred other sharp lights upon the inner and human truth of things, as it lay behind the political spectacle. All through the later chapters, too, the happy use of conversations between the two men on literary and philosophical matters relieves what might have been the tedium of the end. For these vivid notes of free talk not only bring the living Gladstone before you in the most varied relation to his time; they keep up a perpetually interesting comparison in the reader's mind between the hero and his biographer. One is as eager to know what Mr. Morley is going to say as one is to listen to Mr. Gladstone. The two men, with their radical differences and their passionate sympathies, throw light on each other, and the agreeable pages achieve a double end, without ever affecting the real unity of the book. Thus handled, biography, so often the drudge of literature, rises into its high places and becomes a delight instead of an edifying or informing necessity. I will add one other recollection of this early time--i.e., that in 1881 the reviewing of Mr. Morley's _Cobden_ in the _Times_ fell to my husband, and as those were the days of many-column reviews, and as the time given for the review was _exceedingly_ short, it could only be done at all by a division of labor. We divided the sheets of the book, and we just finished in time to let my husband rush off to Printing House Square and correct the proofs as they went through the press for the morning's issue. In those days, as is well known, the _Times_ went to press much later than now, and a leader-writer rarely got home before 4, and sometimes 5, A.M. * * * * * I find it extremely difficult, as I look back, to put any order into the crowding memories of those early years in London. They were extraordinarily stimulating to us both, and years of great happiness. At home our children were growing up; our own lives were branching out into new activities and bringing us always new friends, and a more interesting share in that "great mundane movement" which Mr. Bottles believed would perish without him. Our connection with the _Times_ and with the Forsters, and the many new acquaintances and friends we made at this time in that happy meeting-ground of men and causes--Mrs. Jeune's drawing-room--opened to us the world of politicians; while my husband's four volumes on _The English Poets_, published just as we left Oxford, volumes to which all the most prominent writers of the day had contributed, together with the ever-delightful fact that Matthew Arnold was my uncle, brought us the welcome of those of our own _métier_ and way of life; and when in 1884 my husband became art critic of the paper, a function which he filled for more than five and twenty years, fresh doors opened on the already crowded scene, and fresh figures stepped in. The setting of it all was twofold--in the first place, our dear old house in Russell Square, and, in the next, the farm on Rodborough Common, four miles from Godalming, where, amid a beauty of gorse and heather that filled every sense on a summer day with the mere joy of breathing and looking, our children and we spent the holiday hours of seven goodly years. The Russell Square house has been, so to speak, twice demolished and twice buried, since we lived in it. Some of its stones must still lie deep under the big hotel which now towers on its site. That it does not still exist somewhere, I can hardly believe. The westerly sun seems to me still to be pouring into the beautiful little hall, built and decorated about 1750, with its panels of free scrollwork in blue and white, and to be still glancing through the drawing-rooms to the little powder-closet at the end, my tiny workroom, where I first sketched the plan of _Robert Elsmere_ for my sister Julia Huxley, and where, after three years, I wrote the last words. If I open the door of the back drawing-room, there, to the right, is the children's school-room. I see them at their lessons, and the fine plane-trees that look in at the window. And up-stairs there are the pleasant bedrooms and the nurseries. It was born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those--of Oedipus or Atreus--in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always poisoning the present. As to Borough Farm--now the head-quarters of the vast camp which stretches to Hindhead--it stood then in an unspoiled wilderness of common and wood, approached only by what we called "the sandy track" from the main Portsmouth Road, with no neighbors for miles but a few scattered cottages. Its fate had been harder than that of 61 Russell Square. The old London house has gone clean out of sight, translated, whole and fair, into a world of memory. But Borough and the common are still here--as war has made them. Only--may I never see them again! It was in 1882, the year of Tel-el-Kebir, when we took Peperharrow Rectory (the Murewell Vicarage of _Robert Elsmere_) for the summer, that we first came across Borough Farm. We left it in 1889. I did a great deal of work, there and in London, in those seven years. The _Macmillan_ papers I have already spoken of. They were on many subjects--Tennyson's "Becket," Mr. Pater's "Marius," "The Literature of Introspection," Jane Austen, Keats, Gustavo Becquer, and various others. I still kept up my Spanish to some extent, and I twice examined--in 1882 and 1888--for the Taylorian scholarship in Spanish at Oxford, our old friend, Doctor Kitchin, afterward Dean of Durham, writing to me with glee that I should be "making history" as "the first woman examiner of men at either University." My colleague on the first occasion was the old Spanish scholar, Don Pascual de Gayangos, to whom the calendaring of the Spanish MSS. in the British Museum had been largely intrusted; and the second time, Mr. York Powell of Christ Church--I suppose one of the most admirable Romance scholars of the time--was associated with me. But if I remember right, I set the papers almost entirely, and wrote the report on both occasions. It gave me a feeling of safety in 1888, when my knowledge, such as it was, had grown very rusty, that Mr. York Powell overlooked the papers, seeing that to set Scholarship questions for postgraduate candidates is not easy for one who has never been through any proper "mill"! But they passed his scrutiny satisfactorily, and in 1888 we appointed as Taylorian Scholar a man to whom for years I confidently looked for _the_ history of Spain--combining both the Spanish and Arabic sources--so admirable had his work been in the examination. But, alack! that great book has still to be written. For Mr. Butler Clarke died prematurely in 1904, and the hope died with him. For the _Times_ I wrote a good many long, separate articles before 1884, on "Spanish Novels," "American Novels," and so forth; the "leader" on the death of Anthony Trollope; and various elaborate reviews of books on Christian origins, a subject on which I was perpetually reading, always with the same vision before me, growing in clearness as the years passed. But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short story of _Miss Bretherton_, published in 1884, and then the translation of Amiel's _Journal Intime_, which appeared in 1885. _Miss Bretherton_ was suggested to me by the brilliant success in 1883 of Mary Anderson, and by the controversy with regard to her acting--as distinct from her delightful beauty and her attractive personality--which arose between the fastidious few and the enchanted many. I maintained then, and am quite sure now, that Isabel Bretherton was in no sense a portrait of Miss Anderson. She was to me a being so distinct from the living actress that I offered her to the world with an entire good faith, which seems to myself now, perhaps thirty years later, hardly less surprising than it did to the readers of the time. For undoubtedly the situation in the novel was developed out of the current dramatic debate. But it became to me just _a_ situation--_a_ problem. It was really not far removed from Diderot's problem in the _Paradoxe sur le Comédien_. What is the relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is plain--Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful--Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison with certain others? Is there a dramatic _art_--exacting, difficult, supreme--or is there not? The choice of the subject, at that time, was, it may be confessed, a piece of naïveté, and the book itself was young and naïve throughout. But something in it has kept it in circulation all this while; and for me it marks with a white stone the year in which it appeared. For it brought me my first critical letter from Henry James; it was the first landmark in our long friendship. Beloved Henry James! It seems to me that my original meeting with him was at the Andrew Langs' in 1882. He was then forty-two, in the prime of his working life, and young enough to be still "Henry James, Junior," to many. I cannot remember anything else of the Langs' dinner-party except that we were also invited to meet the author of _Vice Versa_, "which Mr. Lang thinks"--as I wrote to my mother--"the best thing of its kind since Dickens." But shortly after that, Mr. James came to see us in Russell Square and a little incident happened which stamped itself for good on a still plastic memory. It was a very hot day; the western sun was beating on the drawing-room windows, though the room within was comparatively dark and cool. The children were languid with the heat, and the youngest, Janet, then five, stole into the drawing-room and stood looking at Mr. James. He put out a half-conscious hand to her; she came nearer, while we talked on. Presently she climbed on his knee. I suppose I made a maternal protest. He took no notice, and folded his arm round her. We talked on; and presently the abnormal stillness of Janet recalled her to me and made me look closely through the dark of the room. She was fast asleep, her pale little face on the young man's shoulder, her long hair streaming over his arm. Now Janet was a most independent and critical mortal, no indiscriminate "climber up of knees"; far from it. Nor was Mr. James an indiscriminate lover of children; he was not normally much at home with them, though _always_ good to them. But the childish instinct had in fact divined the profound tenderness and chivalry which were the very root of his nature; and he was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on one's hand. From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about _Miss Bretherton_ is dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of a hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witness to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge. The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But [and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who worships herself, but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement, the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that abominable sentence.) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel her, see her, enough, as the pushing actress, the _cabotine_! She lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out a great success. No!--she wouldn't have thought so much of him at such a time as that--though very possibly she would have come back to him later. The whole letter, indeed, is full of admirable criticism, sprung from a knowledge of life, which seemed to me, his junior by twelve years, unapproachably rich and full. But how grateful I was to him for the criticism!--how gracious and chivalrous was his whole attitude toward the writer and the book! Indeed, as I look over the bundle of letters which concern this first novel of mine, I am struck by the good fortune which brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such long letters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, Walter Pater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor at Cambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer--they are all there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one reads them, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was taken for so slight a cause! Are there similar friends nowadays to help the first steps of a writer? Or is there no leisure left in this choked life of ours? The decisive criticism, perhaps, of all, is that of Mr. Creighton: "I find myself carried away by the delicate feeling with which the development of character is traced." But--"You wrote this book as a critic not as a creator. It is a sketch of the possible worth of criticism in an unregenerate world. This was worth doing once; but if you are going on with novels you must throw criticism overboard and let yourself go, as a partner of common joys, common sorrows, and common perplexities. There--I have told you what I think, just as I think it." * * * * * _Miss Bretherton_ was a trial trip, and it taught me a good deal. When it came out I had nearly finished the translation of Amiel, which appeared in 1885, and in March of that year some old friends drove me up the remote Westmorland valley of Long Sleddale, at a moment when the blackthorn made lines of white along the lanes; and from that day onward the early chapters of _Robert Elsmere_ began to shape themselves in my mind. All the main ideas of the novel were already there. Elsmere was to be the exponent of a freer faith; Catharine had been suggested by an old friend of my youth; while Langham was the fruit of my long communing with the philosophic charm and the tragic impotence of Amiel. I began the book in the early summer of 1885, and thenceforward it absorbed me until its appearance in 1888. The year 1885, indeed, was one of expanding horizons, of many new friends, of quickened pulses generally. The vastness of London and its myriad interests seemed to be invading our life more and more. I can recall one summer afternoon, in particular, when, as I was in a hansom driving idly westward toward Hyde Park Gate, thinking of a hundred things at once, this consciousness of _intensification_, of a heightened meaning in everything--the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and carriages, the houses looking down upon it--seized upon me with a rush. "Yes, it is good--the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new powers in oneself--all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes of reverie--if one can apply such a word to an experience so vivid. And meanwhile the same intensity of pleasure from nature that I had always been capable of flowed in upon me from new scenes; above all, from solitary moments at Borough Farm, in the heart of the Surrey commons, when the September heather blazed about me; or the first signs of spring were on the gorse and the budding trees; or beside some lonely pool; and always heightened now by the company of my children. It was a stage--a normal stage, in normal life. But I might have missed it so easily! The Fates were kind to us in those days. As to the social scene, let me gather from it first a recollection of pure romance. One night at a London dinner-party I found myself sent down with a very stout gentleman, an American Colonel, who proclaimed himself an "esoteric Buddhist," and provoked in me a rapid and vehement dislike. I turned my back upon him and examined the table. Suddenly I became aware of a figure opposite to me, the figure of a young girl who seemed to me one of the most ravishing creatures I had ever seen. She was very small, and exquisitely made. Her beautiful head, with its mass of light-brown hair; the small features and delicate neck; the clear, pale skin, the lovely eyes with rather heavy lids, which gave a slight look of melancholy to the face; the grace and fire of every movement when she talked; the dreamy silence into which she sometimes fell, without a trace of awkwardness or shyness. But how vain is any mere catalogue to convey the charm of Laura Tennant--the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton--to those who never saw her! I asked to be introduced to her as soon as we left the dining-room, and we spent the evening in a corner together. I fell in love with her there and then. The rare glimpses of her that her busy life and mine allowed made one of my chief joys thenceforward, and her early death was to me--as to so many, many others!--a grief never forgotten. The recent biography of Alfred Lyttelton--War Minister in Mr. Balfour's latest Cabinet--skilfully and beautifully done by his second wife, has conveyed to the public of thirty years later some idea of Laura's imperishable charm. And I greatly hope that it may be followed some day by a collection of her letters, for there are many in existence, and, young as she was, they would, I believe, throw much light upon a crowded moment in our national life. Laura was the fourth daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, a rich Glasgow manufacturer, and the elder sister of Mrs. Asquith. She and her sisters came upon the scene in the early 'eighties; and without any other extrinsic advantage but that of wealth, which in this particular case would not have taken them very far, they made a conquest--the younger two, Laura and Margot, in particular--of a group of men and women who formed a kind of intellectual and social _élite_; who were all of them accomplished; possessed, almost all of them, of conspicuous good looks, or of the charm that counts as much; and among whom there happened to be a remarkable proportion of men who have since made their mark on English history. My generation knew them as "The Souls." "The Souls" were envied, mocked at, caricatured, by those who were not of them. They had their follies--why not? They were young, and it was their golden day. Their dislike of convention and routine had the effect on many--and those not fools--of making convention and routine seem particularly desirable. But there was not, I think, a young man or woman admitted to their inner ranks who did not possess in some measure a certain quality very difficult to isolate and define. Perhaps, to call it "disinterestedness" comes nearest. For they were certainly no seekers after wealth, or courters of the great. It might be said, of course, that they had no occasion; they had as much birth and wealth as any one need want, among themselves. But that does not explain it. For push and greed are among the commonest faults of an aristocracy. The immortal pages of Saint Simon are there to show it. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," says the Gospel. Now the "treasure" among The Souls was, ultimately--or at least tended to be--something spiritual. The typical expression of it, at its best, is to be found in those exquisite last words left by Laura Lyttelton for her husband, which the second Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton has, as I think, so rightly published. That unique "will," which for thirty years before it appeared in print was known to a wide circle of persons, many of whom had never seen the living Laura, was the supreme expression of a quality which, in greater or lesser degree, The Souls seemed to demand of one another, and of those who wished to join their band. Yet, combined with this passion, this poetry, this religious feeling, was first the maddest delight in simple things--in open air and physical exercise; then, a headlong joy in literature, art, music, acting; a perpetual spring of fun; and a hatred of all the solemn pretenses that too often make English society a weariness. No doubt there is something--perhaps much--to be said on the other side. But I do not intend to say it. I was never a Soul, nor could have been. I came from too different a world. But there were a certain number of persons--of whom I was one--who were their "harborers" and spectators. I found delight in watching them. They were quite a new experience to me; and I saw them dramatically, like a scene in a play, full of fresh implications and suggestions. I find in an old letter to my mother an account of an evening at 40 Grosvenor Square, where the Tennants lived. It was not an evening party--we joined a dinner party there, after dining somewhere else. So that the rooms were empty enough to let one see the pretty creatures gathered in it, to perfection. In the large drawing-room, which is really a ball-room with a polished floor, people were dancing, or thought-reading, or making music, as it pleased them. Mr. Balfour was there, with whom we had made friends, as fellow-guests, on a week-end visit to Oxford, not long before; Alfred Lyttelton, then in the zenith of his magnificent youth; Lord Curzon, then plain Mr. Curzon, and in the Foreign Office; Mr. Harry Gust; Mr. Rennell Rodd, now the British Ambassador in Rome, and many others--a goodly company of young men in their prime. And among the women there was a very high proportion of beauty, but especially of grace. "The half-lit room, the dresses and the beauty," says my letter, "reminded one of some _festa_ painted by Watteau or Lancret." But with what a difference! For, after all, it was English, through and through. A little after this evening, Laura Tennant came down to spend a day at Borough Farm with the children and me. Another setting! Our principal drawing-room there in summer was a sand-pit, shaded by an old ash-tree and haunted by innumerable sand-martins. It was Ascension Day, and the commons were a dream of beauty. Our guest, I find, was to have come down "with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Burne-Jones." But in the end she came down alone; and we talked all day, sitting under hawthorns white with bloom, wandering through rushy fields ablaze with marsh marigold and orchis. She wrote to me the same evening after her return to London: I sit with my eyes resting on the medieval purple of the sweet-breathing orchis you gave me, and my thoughts feasting on the wonderful beauty of the snowy blossom against the blue.... This has been a real Ascension Day. Later in the year--in November--she wrote to me from Scotland--she was then twenty-one: I am still in Scotland, but don't pity me, for I love it more than anything else in the wide world. If you could only hear the wind throwing his arm against my window, and sobbing down the glen. I think I shall never have a Lover I am so fond of as the wind. None ever serenaded me so divinely. And when I open my window wide and ask him what he wants, and tell him I am quite ready to elope with him now--this moment--he only moans and sighs thro' my outblown hair--and gives me neuralgia.... I read all day, except when I am out with my Lover, or playing with my little nephew and niece, both of whom I adore--for they are little poets. We have had a houseful ever since August, so I am delighted to get a little calm. It is so dreadful never, never to be alone--and really the housemaid would do just as well! and yet, whenever I go to my sanctum I am routed out as if I was of as much use as plums to plum pudding, and either made to play lawn-tennis or hide-and-seek, or to talk to a young man whose only idea of the Infinite is the Looking-glass. All these are the trials that attend the "young lady" of the house. Poor devil! Forgive strong language--but really my sympathy is deep. I have, however, some really nice friends here, and am not entirely discontented. Mr. Gerald Balfour left the other day. He is very clever--and quite beautiful--like a young god. I wonder if you know him. I know you know Arthur.... Lionel Tennyson, who was also here with Gerald Balfour, has a splendid humor--witty and "fin," which is rare in England. Lord Houghton, Alfred Lyttelton, Godfrey Webb, George Curzon, the Chesterfields, the Hayters, Mary Gladstone, and a lot more have been here. I went north, too, to the land of Thule and was savagely happy. I wore no hat--no gloves--I bathed, fished, boated, climbed, and kissed the earth, and danced round a cairn. It was opposite Skye at a Heaven called Loch Ailsa.... Such beauty--such weather--such a fortnight will not come again. Perhaps it would be unjust to the crying world for one human being to have more of the Spirit of Delight; but one is glad to have tasted of the cup, and while it was in my hands I drank deeply. I have read very little. I am hungering for a month or two's silence. But there was another lover than the west wind waiting for this most lovable of mortals. A few days afterward she wrote to me from a house in Hampshire, where many of her particular friends were gathered, among them Alfred Lyttelton. The conversation is pyrotechnic--and it is all quite delightful. A beautiful place--paradoxical arguments--ideals raised and shattered--temples torn and battered--temptations given way to--newspapers unread--acting--rhyming--laughing--_ad infinitum_. I wish you were here! Six weeks afterward she was engaged to Mr. Lyttelton. She was to be married in May, and in Easter week of that year we met her in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau, enjoying it like a child, making friends with all her dressmakers, and bubbling over with fun about it. "It isn't 'dressing,'" she said, "unless you apply main force to them. What they _want_ is always--_presque pas de corsage, et pas du tout de manches!_" One day she and Mr. Lyttelton and Mr. Balfour and one or two others came to tea with us at the Hotel Chatham to meet Victor Cherbuliez. The veteran French novelist fell in love with her, of course, and their talk--Laura's French was as spontaneous and apparently as facile as her English--kept the rest of us happy. Then she married in May, with half London to see, and Mr. Gladstone--then Prime Minister--mounted on the chair to make the wedding-speech. For by her marriage Laura became the great man's niece, since Alfred Lyttelton's mother was a sister of Mrs. Gladstone. Then in the autumn came the hope of a child--to her who loved children so passionately. But all through the waiting time she was overshadowed by a strangely strong presentiment of death. I went to see her sometimes toward the end of it, when she was resting on her sofa in the late evening, and used to leave her listening for her husband's step, on his return from his work, her little weary face already lit up with expectation. The weeks passed, and those who loved her began to be anxious. I went down to Borough Farm in May, and there, just two years after she had sat with us under the hawthorn, I heard the news of her little son's birth, and then ten days later the news of her death. With that death a ray of pure joy was quenched on earth. But Laura Lyttelton was not only youth and delight--she was also embodied love. I have watched her in a crowded room where everybody wanted her, quietly seek out the neglected person there, the stranger, the shy secretary or governess, and make her happy--bring her in--with an art that few noticed, because in her it was nature. When she died she left an enduring mark in the minds of many who have since governed or guided England; but she was mourned also by scores of humble folk, and by disagreeable folk whom only she befriended. Mrs. Lyttelton quotes a letter written by the young wife to her husband: Tell me you love me and always will. Tell me, so that when I dream I may dream of Love, and when I sleep dreamless Love may be holding me in his wings, and when I wake Love may be the spirit in my feet, and when I die Love may be the Angel that takes me home. And in the room of death, when the last silence fell on those gathered there, her sister Margot--by Laura's wish, expressed some time before--read aloud the "will," in which she spoke her inmost heart. Since its publication it belongs to those records of life and feeling which are part of our common inheritance. "She was a flame, beautiful, dancing, ardent," writes the second Mrs. Lyttelton. "The wind of life was too fierce for such a spirit; she could not live in it." I make no apology for dwelling on the life and earthly death of this young creature who was only known to a band--though a large band--of friends during her short years. Throughout social and literary history there have been a few apparitions like hers, which touch with peculiar force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which "make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death--they are the great themes with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected whose who knew her like the finest things in poetry. CHAPTER II LONDON FRIENDS It was in 1874, as I have already mentioned, that on an introduction from Matthew Arnold we first made friends with M. Edmond Scherer, the French writer and Senator, who more than any other person--unless, perhaps, one divides the claim between him and M. Faguet--stepped into the critical chair of Sainte Beuve, after that great man's death. For M. Scherer's weekly reviews in the _Temps_ (1863-78) were looked for by many people over about fifteen years, as persons of similar tastes had looked for the famous "Lundis," in the _Constitutionnel_ of an earlier generation. We went out to call upon the Scherers at Versailles, coupling with it, if I remember right, a visit to the French National Assembly then sitting in the Chateau. The road from the station to the palace was deep in snow, and we walked up behind two men in ardent conversation, one of them gesticulating freely. My husband asked a man beside us, bound also, it seemed, for the Assembly, who they were. "M. Gambetta and M. Jules Favre," was the answer. So there we had in front of us the intrepid organizer of the Government of National Defense, whose services to France France will never forget, and the unfortunate statesman to whom it fell, under the tyrannic and triumphant force of Germany (which was to prove, as we now know, in the womb and process of time, more fatal to herself than to France!), to sign away Alsace-Lorraine. And we had only just settled ourselves in our seats when Gambetta was in the tribune, making a short but impassioned speech. I but vaguely remember what the speech was about, but the attitude of the lion head thrown back, and the tones of the famous voice, remain with me--as it rang out in the recurrent phrase: _"Je proteste!--Messieurs, je proteste!"_ It was the attitude of the statue in the Place du Carrousel, and of the _meridional_, Numa Roumestan, in Daudet's well-known novel. Every word said by the speaker seemed to enrage the benches of the Right, and the tumult was so great at times that we were still a little dazed by it when we reached the quiet of the Scherers' drawing-room. M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the "French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that when French people _did_ make a serious study of England, and English books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes about us than English writers make about France. Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale [i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great many. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seen the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day. But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the _Journal Intime_ of Henri Frédéric Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his daughter Jeanne--a _schöne Seele_, if ever there was one--and we spent hours in the Russell Square drawing-room, turning and twisting the most crucial sentences this way and that. But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and the English book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both here and in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholy charm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the French temper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spread widely, and has maintained its place till now. The _Journal_ is very interesting to me [wrote the Master of Balliol]. It catches and detains many thoughts that have passed over the minds of others, which they rarely express, because they must take a sentimental form, from which most thinkers recoil. It is all about "self," yet it never leaves an egotistical or affected impression. It is a curious combination of skepticism and religious feeling, like Pascal, but its elements are compounded in different proportions and the range of thought is far wider and more comprehensive. On the other hand, Pascal is more forcible, and looks down upon human things from a higher point of view. Why was he unhappy? ... But, after all, commentaries on the lives of distinguished men are of very doubtful value. There is the life--take it and read it who can. Amiel was a great genius, as is shown by his power of style.... His _Journal_ is a book in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.... There are strange forms of mysticism, which the poetical intellect takes. I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one. For myself [wrote Walter Pater], I shall probably think, on finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have added to those elements of natural religion which he was able to accept at times with full belief and always with the sort of hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs and the function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we give to any assumptions, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts are real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the _natural_ questions of the human mind. A passage, it seems to me, of considerable interest as throwing light upon the inner mind of one of the most perfect writers, and most important influences of the nineteenth century. Certainly there is no sign in it, on Mr. Pater's part, of "dropping Christianity"; very much the contrary. * * * * * But all this time, while literary and meditative folk went on writing and thinking, how fast the political world was rushing! Those were the years, after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill, and the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone, of Lord Salisbury's Government and Mr. Balfour's Chief-Secretaryship. As I look back upon them--those five dramatic years culminating first in the Parnell Commission, and then in Parnell's tragic downfall and death, I see everything grouped round Mr. Balfour. From the moment when, in succession to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Balfour took over the Chief-Secretaryship, his sudden and swift development seemed to me the most interesting thing in politics. We had first met him, as I have said, on a week-end visit to the Talbots at Oxford. It was then a question whether his health would stand the rough and tumble of politics. I recollect he came down late and looked far from robust. We traveled up to London with him, and he was reading Mr. Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which, if I remember right, he was to review for _Mind_. He was then a member of the Fourth Party, and engaged--though in a rather detached fashion--in those endless raids and excursions against the "Goats"--i.e., the bearded veterans of his own party, Sir Stafford Northcote in particular, of which Lord Randolph was the leader. But compared to Lord Randolph he had made no Parliamentary mark. One thought of him as the metaphysician, the lover of music, the delightful companion, always, I feel now, in looking back, with a prevailing consciousness of something reserved and potential in him, which gave a peculiar importance and value to his judgments of men and things. He was a leading figure among "The Souls," and I remember some delightful evenings in his company before 1886, when the conversation was entirely literary or musical. Then, with the Chief-Secretaryship there appeared a new Arthur Balfour. The courage, the resource, the never-failing wit and mastery with which he fought the Irish members in Parliament, put down outrage in Ireland, and at the same time laid the foundation in a hundred directions of that social and agrarian redemption of Ireland on which a new political structure will some day be reared--is perhaps even now about to rise--these things make one of the most brilliant, one of the most dramatic, chapters in our modern history. [Illustration: ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR] It was in 1888, two years after Mr. Forster's death, that we found ourselves for a Sunday at Whittinghame. It was, I think, not long before the opening of the Special Commission which was to inquire into the charges brought by the _Times_ against the Parnellites and the Land League. Nothing struck me more in Mr. Balfour than the absence in him of any sort of excitement or agitation, in dealing with the current charges against the Irishmen. It seemed to me that he had quietly accepted the fact that he was fighting a revolution, and, while perfectly clear as to his own course of action, wasted no nervous force on moral reprobation of the persons concerned. His business was to protect the helpless, to punish crime, and to expose the authors of it, whether high or low. But he took it as a job to be done--difficult--unpleasant--but all in the way of business. The tragic or pathetic emotion that so many people were ready to spend upon it he steadily kept at a distance. His nerve struck me as astonishing, and the absence of any disabling worry about things past. "One can only do one's best at the moment," he said to me once, _à propos_ of some action of the Irish government which had turned out badly--"if it doesn't succeed, better luck next time! Nothing to be gained by going back upon things." After this visit to Whittinghame, I wrote to my father: I came away more impressed and attracted by Arthur Balfour than ever. If intelligence and heart and pure intentions can do anything for Ireland, he at least has got them all. Physically he seems to have broadened and heightened since he took office, and his manner, which was always full of charm, is even brighter and kindlier than it was--or I fancied it. He spoke most warmly of Uncle Forster. And the interesting and remarkable thing was the contrast between an attitude so composed and stoical, and his delicate physique, his sensitive, sympathetic character. All the time, of course, he was in constant personal danger. Detectives, much to his annoyance, lay in wait for us as we walked through his own park, and went with him in London wherever he dined. Like my uncle, he was impatient of being followed and guarded, and only submitted to it for the sake of other people. Once, at a dinner-party at our house, he met an old friend of ours, one of the most original thinkers of our day, Mr. Philip Wicksteed, economist, Dante scholar, and Unitarian minister. He and Mr. Balfour were evidently attracted to each other, and when the time for departure came, the two, deep in conversation, instead of taking cabs, walked off together in the direction of Mr. Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens. The detectives below-stairs remained for some time blissfully unconscious of what had happened. Then word reached them; and my husband, standing at the door to see a guest off, was the amused spectator of the rush in pursuit of two splendid long-legged fellows, who had, however, no chance whatever of catching up the Chief Secretary. Thirty years ago, almost! And during that time the name and fame of Arthur Balfour have become an abiding part of English history. Nor is there any British statesman of our day who has been so much loved by his friends, so little hated by his opponents, so widely trusted by the nation. * * * * * As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the _Times_ attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the _Times_ brought us, of course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up, half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the early hours of the morning my husband came back from the _Times_, brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband, however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries, the Commission came to the _Times_ witnesses, I well remember the dismay with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was that _all_? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great. The _Times_ attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound, how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters-- certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go, and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of Irish disaffection was invaluable to those who were actually grappling day by day with the problems of Irish government. It was probably at Mrs. Jeune's that I first saw Mr. Goschen, and we rapidly made friends. His was a great position at that time. Independent of both parties, yet trusted by both; at once disinterested and sympathetic; a strong Liberal in some respects, an equally strong Conservative in others--he never spoke without being listened to, and his support was eagerly courted both by Mr. Gladstone, from whom he had refused office in 1880, without, however, breaking with the Liberal party, and by the Conservatives, who instinctively felt him their property, but were not yet quite clear as to how they were to finally capture him. That was decided in 1886, when Mr. Goschen voted in the majority that killed the Home Rule Bill, and more definitely in the following year when Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer in a fit of pique, thinking himself indispensable, and not at all expecting Lord Salisbury to accept his resignation. But, in his own historic phrase, he "forgot Goschen," and Mr. Goschen stepped easily into his shoes and remained there. I find from an old diary that the Goschens dined with us in Russell Square two nights before the historic division on the Home Rule Bill, and I remember how the talk raged and ranged. Mr. Goschen was an extremely agreeable talker, and I seem still to hear his husky voice, with the curious deep notes in it, and to be looking into the large but short-sighted and spectacled eyes--he refused the Speakership mainly on the grounds of his sight--of which the veiled look often made what he said the more racy and unexpected. A letter he wrote me in 1886, after his defeat at Liverpool, I kept for many years as the best short analysis I had ever read of the Liberal Unionist position, and the probable future of the Liberal party. Mrs. Goschen was as devoted a wife as Mrs. Gladstone or Mrs. Disraeli, and the story of the marriage was a romance enormously to Mr. Goschen's credit. Mr. Goschen must have been a most faithful lover, and he certainly was a delightful friend. We stayed with them at Seacox, their home in Kent, and I remember one rainy afternoon there, the greater part of which I spent listening to his talk with John Morley, and--I think--Sir Alfred Lyall. It would have been difficult to find a trio of men better worth an audience. Mrs. Goschen, though full of kindness and goodness, was not literary, and the house was somewhat devoid of books, except in Mr. Goschen's study. I remember J.R.G.'s laughing fling when Mrs. Goschen complained that she could not get _Pride and Prejudice_, which he had recommended to her, "from the library." "But you could have bought it for sixpence at the railway bookstall," said J.R.G. Mr. Goschen himself, however, was a man of wide cultivation, as befitted the grandson of the intelligent German bourgeois who had been the publisher of both Schiller and Goethe. His biography of his grandfather in those happy days before the present life-and-death struggle between England and Germany has now a kind of symbolic value. It is a study by a man of German descent who had become one of the most trusted of English statesmen, of that earlier German life--with its measure, its kindness, its idealism--on which Germany has turned its back. The writing of this book was the pleasure of his later years, amid the heavy work which was imposed upon him as a Free-Trader, in spite of his personal friendship for Mr. Chamberlain, by the Tariff Reform campaign of 1903 onward; and the copy which he gave me reminds me of many happy talks with him, and of my own true affection for him. I am thankful that he did not live to see 1914. Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the 'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the _Home and Foreign Review_, long before he and I knew each other. Was there ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than Lord Acton's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases, to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one of the most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, in reading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the new series of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome light is shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. The perpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrast between Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning; and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicity of his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed. Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century. There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you will come to tolerate them in the present and future. It was in 1885 that Mr.--then recently made Professor--Creighton, showed me at Cambridge an extraordinarily interesting summary, in Lord Acton's handwriting, of what should be the principles--the ethical principles--of the modern historian in dealing with the past. They were, I think, afterward embodied in an introduction to a new edition of _Machiavelli_. The gist of them, however, is given in a letter written to Bishop Creighton in 1887, and printed in the biography of the Bishop. Here we find a devout Catholic attacking an Anglican writer for applying the epithets "tolerant and enlightened" to the later medieval Papacy. These men [i.e., the Popes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] [he says] instituted a system of persecution.... The person who authorizes the act shares the guilt of the person who commits it.... Now the Liberals think persecution a crime of a worse order than adultery, and the acts done by Ximenes [through the agency of the Spanish Inquisition] considerably worse than the entertainment of Roman courtesans by Alexander VIth. These lines, of course, point to the Acton who was the lifelong friend of Dollinger and fought, side by side with the Bavarian scholar, the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, at the Vatican Council of 1870. But while Dollinger broke with the Church, Lord Acton never did. That was what made the extraordinary interest of conversation with him. Here was a man whose denunciation of the crimes and corruption of Papal Rome--of the historic Church, indeed, and the clergy in general--was far more unsparing than that of the average educated Anglican. Yet he died a devout member of the Roman Church in which he was born; after his death it was revealed that he had never felt a serious doubt either of Catholic doctrine or of the supernatural mission of the Catholic Church; and it was to a dearly loved daughter on her death-bed that he said, with calm and tender faith, "My child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ." All his friends, except the very few who knew him most intimately, must, I think, have been perpetually puzzled by this apparent paradox in his life and thought. Take the subject of Biblical criticism. I had many talks with him while I was writing _Robert Elsmere_, and was always amazed at his knowledge of what Liddon would have called "German infidel" books. He had read them all, he possessed them all, he knew a great deal about the lives of the men who had written them, and he never spoke of them, both the books and the writers, without complete and, as it seemed to me, sympathetic tolerance. I remember, after the publication of the dialogue on "The New Reformation," in which I tried to answer Mr. Gladstone's review of _Robert Elsmere_ by giving an outline of the history of religious inquiry and Biblical criticism from Lessing to Harnack, that I met Lord Acton one evening on the platform of Bletchley station, while we were both waiting for a train. He came up to me with a word of congratulation on the article. "I only wish," I said, "I had been able to consult you more about it." "No, no," he said. "_Votre siège est faite_! But I think you should have given more weight to so-and-so, and you have omitted so-and-so." Whereupon we walked up and down in the dusk, and he poured out that learning of his, in that way he had--so courteous, modest, thought-provoking--which made one both wonder at and love him. As to his generosity and kindness toward younger students, it was endless. I asked him once, when I was writing for _Macmillan_, to give me some suggestions for an article on Chateaubriand. The letter I received from him the following morning is a marvel of knowledge, bibliography, and kindness. And not only did he give me such a "scheme" of reading as would have taken any ordinary person months to get through, but he arrived the following day in a hansom, with a number of the books he had named, and for a long time they lived on my shelves. Alack! I never wrote the article, but when I came to the writing of _Eleanor_, for which certain material was drawn from the life of Chateaubriand, his advice helped me. And I don't think he would have thought it thrown away. He never despised novels! Once on a visit to us at Stocks, there were nine books of different sorts in his room which I had chosen and placed there. By Monday morning he had read them all. His library, when he died, contained about 60,000 volumes--all read; and it will be remembered that Lord Morley, to whom Mr. Carnegie gave it, has handed it on to the University of Cambridge. In 1884, when I first knew him, however, Lord Acton was every bit as keen a politician as he was a scholar. As is well known, he was a poor speaker, and never made any success in Parliament; and this was always, it seemed to me, the drop of gall in his otherwise happy and distinguished lot. But if he was never in an English Cabinet, his influence over Mr. Gladstone through the whole of the Home Rule struggle gave him very real political power. He and Mr. Morley were the constant friends and associates to whom Mr. Gladstone turned through all that critical time. But the great split was rushing on, and it was also in 1884 that, at Admiral Maxse's one night at dinner, I first saw Mr. Chamberlain, who was to play so great a part in the following years. It was a memorable evening to me, for the other guest in a small party was M. Clémenceau. M. Clémenceau was then at the height of his power as the maker and unmaker of French Ministries. It was he more than any other single man who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884, was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral Maxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described the interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me a light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!" [Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French destiny (January, 1918).] In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any other course than that they did take." Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the rupture of 1886. * * * * * I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a Kensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning. _À propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out: "_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!" breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which is worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire. Browning repeated the French in an undertone, kindling as he went, I urging him on, our two heads close together. Every now and then he would look up to see if the plague outside was done, and, finding it still went on, would plunge again into the seclusion of our tête-à-tête; till the _chanson_ itself--"_Si le roi m'avoit donné--Paris, sa grand' ville"_--had been said, to his delight and mine. The recitation lasted through several courses, and our hostess once or twice threw uneasy glances toward us, for Browning was the "lion" of the evening. But, once launched, he was not to be stopped; and as for me, I shall always remember that I heard Browning--spontaneously, without a moment's pause to remember or prepare--recite the whole, or almost the whole, of one of the immortal things in literature. He was then seventy-two or seventy-three. He came to see us once or twice in Russell Square, but, alack! we arrived too late in the London world to know him well. His health began to fail just about the time when we first met, and early in 1889 he died in the Palazzo Rezzonico. He did not like _Robert Elsmere_, which appeared the year before his death; and I was told a striking story by a common friend of his and mine, who was present at a discussion of the book at a literary house. Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after ranging through literature and philosophy, Lamb added: "But without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of mortality ... there is only one other Person. If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should rise up to meet him; but if that Person was to come into it, we should fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment." Some fourteen years after his death I seemed to be brought very near in spirit to this great man, and--so far as a large portion of his work is concerned--great poet. We were in Venice. I was writing the _Marriage of William Ashe_, and, being in want of a Venetian setting for some of the scenes, I asked Mr. Pen Browning, who was, I think, at Asolo, if he would allow me access to the Palazzo Rezzonico, which was then uninhabited. He kindly gave me free leave to wander about it as I liked; and I went most days to sit and write in one of the rooms of the _mezzanin_. But when all chance of a tourist had gone, and the palace was shut, I used to walk all about it in the rich May light, finding it a little creepy! but endlessly attractive and interesting. There was a bust of Mr. Browning, with an inscription, in one of the rooms, and the place was haunted for me by his great ghost. It was there he had come to die, in the palace which he had given to his only son, whom he adored. The _concierge_ pointed out to me what he believed to be the room in which he passed away. There was very little furniture in it. Everything was chill and deserted. I did not want to think of him there. I liked to imagine him strolling in the stately hall of the palace with its vast chandelier, its pillared sides and Tiepolo ceiling, breathing in the Italian spirit which through such long years had passed into his, and delighting, as a poet delights--not vulgarly, but with something of a child's adventurous pleasure--in the mellow magnificence of the beautiful old place. * * * * * Mr. Lowell is another memory of these early London days. My first sight of him was at Mr. and Mrs. Westlake's house--in a temper! For some one had imprudently talked of "Yankeeisms," perhaps with some "superior" intonation. And Mr. Lowell--the Lowell of _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_--had flashed out: "It's you English who don't know your own language and your own literary history. Otherwise you would realize that most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you have thrown away." Afterward, I find records of talks with him at Russell Square, then of Mrs. Lowell's death in 1885, and finally of dining with him in the spring of 1887, just before his return to America. At that dinner was also the German Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, a handsome man, with a powerful, rather somber face. I remember some talk with him after dinner on current books and politics. Just thirty years ago! Mr. Lowell had then only four years to live. He and all other diplomats had just passed through an anxious spring. The scare of another Franco-German war had been playing on the nerves of Europe, started by the military party in Germany, merely to insure the passing of the famous Army law of that year--the first landmark in that huge military expansion of which we see the natural fruit in the present Armageddon. A week or two before this dinner the German elections had given the Conservatives an enormous victory. Germany, indeed, was in the full passion of economic and military development--all her people growing rich--intoxicated, besides, with vague dreams of coming power. Yet I have still before me the absent, indecipherable look of her Ambassador--a man clearly of high intelligence--at Mr. Lowell's table. Thirty years--and at the end of them America was to be at grips with Germany, sending armies across the Atlantic to fight in Europe. It would have been as impossible for any of us, on that May evening in Lowndes Square, even to imagine such a future, as it was for Macbeth to credit the absurdity that Birnam wood would ever come to Dunsinane! A year later Mr. Lowell came back to London for a time in a private capacity, and I got to know him better and to like him much.... Here is a characteristic touch in a note I find among the old letters: I am glad you found something to like in my book and much obliged to you for saying so. Nobody but Wordsworth ever got beyond need of sympathy, and he started there! CHAPTER III THE PUBLICATION OF _ROBERT ELSMERE_ It was in 1885, after the completion of the Amiel translation, that I began _Robert Elsmere_, drawing the opening scenes from that expedition to Long Sleddale in the spring of that year which I have already mentioned. The book took me three years, nearly, to write. Again and again I found myself dreaming that the end was near and publication only a month or two away, only to sink back on the dismal conviction that the second, or the first, or the third volume--or some portion of each--must be rewritten, if I was to satisfy myself at all. I actually wrote the last words of the last chapter in March, 1887, and came out afterward, from my tiny writing-room at the end of the drawing-room, shaken with tears, and wondering, as I sat alone on the floor, by the fire, in the front room, what life would be like, now that the book was done! But it was nearly a year after that before it came out, a year of incessant hard work, of endless rewriting, and much nervous exhaustion. For all the work was saddened and made difficult by the fact that my mother's long illness was nearing its end and that I was torn incessantly between the claim of the book and the desire to be with her whenever I could possibly be spared from my home and children. Whenever there was a temporary improvement in her state, I would go down to Borough alone to work feverishly at revision, only to be drawn back to her side before long by worse news. And all the time London life went on as usual, and the strain at times was great. The difficulty of finishing the book arose first of all from its length. I well remember the depressed countenance of Mr. George Smith--who was to be to me through fourteen years afterward the kindest of publishers and friends--when I called one day in Waterloo Place, bearing a basketful of typewritten sheets. "I am afraid you have brought us a perfectly unmanageable book!" he said; and I could only mournfully agree that so it was. It was far too long, and my heart sank at the thought of all there was still to do. But how patient Mr. Smith was over it! and how generous in the matter of unlimited fresh proofs and endless corrections. I am certain that he had no belief in the book's success; and yet, on the ground of his interest in _Miss Bretherton_ he had made liberal terms with me, and all through the long incubation he was always indulgent and sympathetic. The root difficulty was of course the dealing with such a subject in a novel at all. Yet I was determined to deal with it so, in order to reach the public. There were great precedents--Froude's _Nemesis of Faith_, Newman's _Loss and Gain_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_--for the novel of religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I should add another. Does it make in the long run for _beauty_? Beauty taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it? But at any rate, no one will deny that _interest_ is the crucial matter. There are five and twenty ways Of constructing tribal lays-- And every single one of them is right! always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects, the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great. I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fine of the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two such tendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, and especially the life of two people who loved each other. Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robert must be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, all novel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadly human situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in following it unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of the effect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in the reader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on common experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than analysis. Take the paragraph in Turguénieff's _Lisa_--it was pointed out to me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after much suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long believed dead, is alive. Turguénieff, instead of setting out the situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark. Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn." That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read the novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky or his creator were to spend pages on explaining. But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what produced the _story_--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious use of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through history and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, it only applies to a small minority of the human race. Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion, produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little share--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process. Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part in it. The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their true life. It was this problem which made _Robert Elsmere_ take three years to write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the book--only if he had, I fear he would never have read it!--he would hardly have complained of lack of argument on either side, whatever he might have thought of its quality. Again and again I went on writing for hours, satisfying the logical sense in oneself, trying to put the arguments on both sides as fairly as possible, only to feel despairingly at the end that it must all come out. It might be decent controversy; but life, feeling, charm, _humanity_, had gone out of it; it had ceased, therefore, to be "making," to be literature. So that in the long run there was no other method possible than suggestion--and, of course, _selection_!--as with all the rest of one's material. That being understood, what one had to aim at was so to use suggestion as to touch the two zones of thought--that of the scholar and that of what one may call the educated populace; who, without being scholars, were yet aware, more or less clearly, of what the scholars were doing. It is from these last that "atmosphere" and "diffusion" come; the atmosphere and diffusion which alone make wide penetration for a book illustrating an intellectual motive possible. I had to learn that, having read a great deal, I must as far as possible wipe out the traces of reading. All that could be done was to leave a few sign-posts as firmly planted as one could, so as to recall the real journey to those who already knew it, and, for the rest, to trust to the floating interest and passion surrounding a great controversy--the _second_ religious battle of the nineteenth century--with which it had seemed to me, both in Oxford and in London, that the intellectual air was charged. I grew very weary in the course of the long effort, and often very despairing. But there were omens of hope now and then; first, a letter from my dear eldest brother, the late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904, leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague. He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the history of the Empire. His monograph on _Roman Provincial Administration_, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English verse. I sent him the first volume in proof, about a year before the book came out, and awaited his verdict with much anxiety. It came one May day in 1889. I happened to be very tired and depressed at the moment, and I remember sitting alone for a little while with the letter in my hand, without courage to open it. Then at last I opened it. Warm congratulation--Admirable!--Full of character and color.... _Miss Bretherton_ was an intellectual exercise. This is quite a different affair, and has interested and touched me deeply, as I feel sure it will all the world. The biggest thing that--with a few other things of the same kind--has been done for years. Well!--that was enough to go on with, to carry me through the last wrestle with proofs and revision. But by the following November nervous fatigue made me put work aside for a few weeks, and we went abroad for rest, only to be abruptly summoned home by my mother's state. Thenceforward I lived a double life--the one overshadowed by my mother's approaching death, the other amid the agitation of the book's appearance and all the incidents of its rapid success. I have already told the story in the Introduction to the Library Edition of _Robert Elsmere_, and I will only run through it here as rapidly as possible, with a few fresh incidents and quotations. There was never any doubt at all of the book's fate, and I may repeat again that, before Mr. Gladstone's review of it, the three volumes were already in a third edition, the rush at all the libraries was in full course, and Matthew Arnold--so gay and kind, in those March weeks before his own sudden death!--had clearly foreseen the rising boom. "I shall take it with me to Bristol next week and get through it there, I hope [but he didn't achieve it!]. It is one of my regrets not to have known the Green of your dedication." And a week or two later he wrote an amusing letter to his sister, describing a country-house party at beautiful Wilton, Lord Pembroke's home near Salisbury, and the various stages in the book reached by the members of the party, including Mr. Goschen, who were all reading it, and all talking of it. I never, however, had any criticism of it from him, except of the first volume, which he liked. I doubt very much whether the second and third volumes would have appealed to him. My uncle was a Modernist long before the time. In _Literature and Dogma_ he threw out in detail much of the argument suggested in _Robert Elsmere_, but to the end of his life he was a contented member of the Anglican Church, so far as attendance at her services was concerned, and belief in her mission of "edification" to the English people. He had little sympathy with people who "went out." Like Mr. Jowett, he would have liked to see the Church slowly reformed and "modernized" from within. So that with the main theme of my book--that a priest who doubts must depart--he could never have had full sympathy. And in the course of years--as I showed in a later novel written twenty-four years after _Robert Elsmere_--I feel that I have very much come to agree with him! These great national structures that we call churches are too precious for iconoclast handling, if any other method is possible. The strong assertion of individual liberty within them, as opposed to the attempt to break them down from without; that seems to me now the hopeful course. A few more heresy trials like those which sprang out of _Essays and Reviews_, or the persecution of Bishop Colenso, would let in fresh life and healing nowadays, as did those old stirrings of the waters. The first Modernist bishop who stays in his place forms a Modernist chapter and diocese around him, and fights the fight where he stands, will do more for liberty and faith in the Church, I now sadly believe, than those scores of brave "forgotten dead" who have gone out of her for conscience' sake, all these years. But to return to the book. All through March the tide of success was rapidly rising; and when I was able to think of it I was naturally carried away by the excitement and astonishment of it. But with the later days of March a veil dropped between me and the book. My mother's suffering and storm-beaten life was coming rapidly to its close, and I could think of nothing else. In an interval of slight improvement, indeed, when it seemed as though she might rally for a time, I heard Mr. Gladstone's name quoted for the first time in connection with the book. It will be remembered that he was then out of office, having been overthrown on the Home Rule Question in 1886, and he happened to be staying for an Easter visit with the Warden of Keble, and Mrs. Talbot, who was his niece by marriage. I was with my mother, about a mile away, and Mrs. Talbot, who came to ask for news of her, reported to me that Mr. Gladstone was deep in the book. He was reading it, pencil in hand, marking all the passages he disliked or quarreled with, with the Italian "_Ma_!"--and those he approved of with mysterious signs which she who followed him through the volumes could not always decipher. Mr. Knowles, she reported, the busy editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, was trying to persuade the great man to review it. But "Mr. G." had not made up his mind. Then all was shut out again. Through many days my mother asked constantly for news of the book, and smiled with a flicker of her old brightness when anything pleased her in a letter or review. But finally there came long hours when to think or speak of it seemed sacrilege. And on April 7th she died. * * * * * The day after her death I saw Mr. Gladstone at Keble. We talked for a couple of hours, and then when I rose to go he asked if I would come again on the following morning before he went back to town. I had been deeply interested and touched, and I went again for another long visit. My account, written down at the time, of the first day's talk, has been printed as an appendix to the Library Edition of the book. Of the second conversation, which was the more interesting of the two since we came to much closer quarters in it, my only record is the following letter to my husband: I have certainly had a wonderful experience last night and this morning! Last night two hours' talk with Gladstone, this morning, again an hour and a half's strenuous argument, during which the great man got quite white sometimes and tremulous with interest and excitement.... The talk this morning was a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences. He was _very_ charming personally, though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on--the drawn brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of "trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him, and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler, and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing interest and--sometimes--irritation. His own autobiographical reminiscences were wonderfully interesting, and his repetition of the 42d psalm--"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks"--_grand_! He said that he had never read any book on the hostile side written in such a spirit of, "generous appreciation" of the Christian side. Yes, those were hours to which I shall always look back with gratitude and emotion. Wonderful old man! I see him still standing, as I took leave of him, one hand leaning on the table beside him, his lined, pallid face and eagle eyes framed in his noble white hair, shining amid the dusk of the room. "There are still two things left for me to do!" he said, finally, in answer to some remark of mine. "One is to carry Home Rule; the other is to prove the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations!" Could any remark have been more characteristic of that double life of his--the life of the politician and the life of the student--which kept him fresh and eager to the end of his days? Characteristic, too, of the amateurish element in all his historical and literary thinking. In dealing "with early Greek mythology, genealogy, and religion," says his old friend, Lord Bryce, Mr. Gladstone's theories "have been condemned by the unanimous voice of scholars as fantastic." Like his great contemporary, Newman--on whom a good deal of our conversation turned--he had no critical sense of evidence; and when he was writing on _The Impregnable Rock of Scripture_ Lord Acton, who was staying at Hawarden at the time, ran after him in vain, with Welhausen or Kuenen under his arm, if haply he might persuade his host to read them. But it was not for that he was born; and those who look back to the mighty work he did for his country in the forty years preceding the Home Rule split can only thank the Powers "that hold the broad Heaven" for the part which the passion of his Christian faith, the eagerness of his love for letters--for the Homer and the Dante he knew by heart--played in refreshing and sustaining so great a soul. I remember returning, shaken and uplifted, through the April air, to the house where my mother lay in death; and among my old papers lies a torn fragment of a letter thirty years old, which I began to write to Mr. Gladstone a few days later, and was too shy to send. This morning [says the letter, written from Fox How, on the day of my mother's funeral] we laid my dear Mother to rest in her grave among the mountains, and this afternoon I am free to think a little over what has befallen me personally and separately during this past week. It is not that I wish to continue our argument--quite the contrary. As I walked home from Keble on Monday morning, I felt it a hard fate that I should have been arguing, rather than listening.... Argument, perhaps, was inevitable, but none the less I felt afterward as though there were something incongruous and unfitting in it. In a serious discussion it seemed to me right to say plainly what I felt and believed; but if in doing so I have given pain, or expressed myself on any point with a too great trenchancy and confidence, please believe that I regret it very sincerely. I shall always remember our talks. If consciousness lasts "beyond these voices"--my inmost hope as well as yours--we shall know of all these things. Till then I cherish the belief that we are not so far apart as we seem. But there the letter abruptly ended, and was never sent. I probably shrank from the added emotion of sending it, and I found it again the other day in a packet that had not been looked at for many years. I print it now as evidence of the effect that Mr. Gladstone's personality could produce on one forty years younger than himself, and in sharp rebellion at that time against his opinions and influence in two main fields--religion and politics. * * * * * Four days later, Monday, April 16th, my husband came into my room with the face of one bringing ill tidings. "Matthew Arnold is dead!" My uncle, as many will remember, had fallen suddenly in a Liverpool street while walking with his wife to meet his daughter, expected that day from America, and without a sound or movement had passed away. The heart disease which killed so many of his family was his fate also. A merciful one it always seemed to me, which took him thus suddenly and without pain from the life in which he had played so fruitful and blameless a part. That word "blameless" has always seemed to me particularly to fit him. And the quality to which it points was what made his humor so sharp-tipped and so harmless. He had no hidden interest to serve--no malice--not a touch, not a trace of cruelty--so that men allowed him to jest about their most sacred idols and superstitions and bore him no grudge. To me his death at that moment was an irreparable personal loss. For it was only since our migration to London that we had been near enough to him to see much of him. My husband and he had become fast friends, and his visits to Russell Square, and our expeditions to Cobham, where he lived, in the pretty cottage beside the Mole, are marked in memory with a very white stone. The only drawback to the Cobham visits were the "dear, dear boys!"--i.e., the dachshunds, Max and Geist, who, however adorable in themselves, had no taste for visitors and no intention of letting such intruding creatures interfere with their possession of their master. One would go down to Cobham, eager to talk to "Uncle Matt" about a book or an article--covetous, at any rate, of _some_ talk with him undisturbed. And it would all end in a breathless chase after Max, through field after field where the little wretch was harrying either sheep or cows, with the dear poet, hoarse with shouting, at his heels. The dogs were always _in the party_, talked to, caressed, or scolded exactly like spoiled children; and the cat of the house was almost equally dear. Once, at Harrow, the then ruling cat--a tom--broke his leg, and the house was in lamentation. The vet was called in, and hurt him horribly. Then Uncle Matt ran up to town, met Professor Huxley at the Athenaeum, and anxiously consulted him. "I'll go down with you," said Huxley. The two traveled back instanter to Harrow, and, while Uncle Matt held the cat, Huxley--who had begun life, let it be remembered, as surgeon to the _Rattlesnake_!--examined him, the two black heads together. There is a rumor that Charles Kingsley was included in the consultation. Finally the limb was put in splints and left to nature. All went well. Nobody who knew the modest Cobham cottage while its master lived will ever forget it; the garden beside the Mole, where every bush and flower-bed had its history; and that little study-dressing-room where some of the best work in nineteenth-century letters was done. Not a great multitude of books, but all cherished, all read, each one the friend of its owner. No untidiness anywhere; the ordinary litter of an author's room was quite absent. For long after his death the room remained just as he had left it, his coat hanging behind the door, his slippers beside his chair, the last letters he had received, and all the small and simple equipment of his writing-table ready to his hand, waiting for the master who would never know "a day of return." In that room--during fifteen years, he wrote _God and the Bible_, the many suggestive and fruitful Essays, including the American addresses, of his later years--seeds, almost all of them, dropped into the mind of his generation for a future harvesting; a certain number of poems, including the noble elegiac poem on Arthur Stanley's death, "Geist's Grave" and "Poor Matthias"; a mass of writing on education which is only now, helped by the war, beginning to tell on the English mind; and the endlessly kind and gracious letters to all sorts and conditions of men--and women--the literary beginner, the young teacher wanting advice, even the stranger greedy for an autograph. Every little playful note to friends or kinsfolk he ever wrote was dear to those who received it; but he--the most fastidious of men--would have much disliked to see them all printed at length in Mr. Russell's indiscriminate volumes. He talked to me once of his wish to make a small volume--"such a little one!"--of George Sand's best letters. And that is just what he would have wished for himself. Among the letters that reached me on my uncle's death was one from Mr. Andrew Lang denouncing almost all the obituary notices of him. "Nobody seems to know that he _was a poet_!" cries Mr. Lang. But his poetic blossoming was really over with the 'sixties, and in the hubbub that arose round his critical and religious work--his attempts to drive "ideas" into the English mind, in the 'sixties and 'seventies--the main fact that he, with Browning and Tennyson, _stood for English poetry_, in the mid-nineteenth century, was often obscured and only slowly recognized. But it was recognized, and he himself had never any real doubt of it, from the moment when he sent the "Strayed Reveller" to my father in New Zealand in 1849, to those later times when his growing fame was in all men's ears. He writes to his sister in 1878: It is curious how the public is beginning to take my poems to its bosom after long years of comparative neglect. The wave of thought and change has rolled on until people begin to find a significance and an attraction in what had none for them formerly. But he had put it himself in poetry long before--this slow emergence above the tumult and the shouting of the stars that are to shine upon the next generation. Mr. Garnett, in the careful and learned notice of my uncle's life and work in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, says of his poetry that "most of it" is "immortal." This, indeed, is the great, the mystic word that rings in every poet's ear from the beginning. And there is scarcely any true poet who is not certain that sooner or later his work will "put on immortality." Matthew Arnold expressed, I think, his own secret faith, in the beautiful lines of his early poem, "The Bacchanalia--or the New Age": The epoch ends, the world is still. The age has talk'd and work'd its fill-- * * * * * And in the after-silence sweet, Now strife is hush'd, our ears doth meet, Ascending pure, the bell-like fame Of this or that down-trodden name, Delicate spirits, push'd away In the hot press of the noonday. And o'er the plain, where the dead age Did its now silent warfare wage-- O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Where many a splendor finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen nights-- The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky To shine there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still. * * * * * It was on the way home from Laleham, after my uncle's burial there, that Mr. George Smith gave me fresh and astonishing news of _Robert Elsmere's_ success. The circulating libraries were being fretted to death for copies, and the whirlwind of talk was constantly rising. A little later in the same month of April, if I remember right, I was going from Waterloo to Godalming and Borough Farm, when, just as the train was starting, a lady rushed along the platform, waving a book aloft and signaling to another lady who was evidently waiting to see her off. "I've got it--I've got it!" she said, triumphantly. "Get in, ma-am--get in!" said the porter, bundling her into the compartment where I sat alone. Then she hung out of the window, breathlessly talking. "They told me no chance for weeks--not the slightest! Then--just as I was standing at the counter, who should come up but somebody bringing back the first volume. Of course it was promised to somebody else; but as I was _there_, I laid hands on it, and here it is!" The train went off, my companion plunged into her book, and I watched her as she turned the pages of the familiar green volume. We were quite alone. I had half a mind to say something revealing; but on the whole it was more amusing to sit still! And meanwhile letters poured in. "I try to write upon you," wrote Mr. Gladstone; "wholly despair of satisfying myself--cannot quite tell whether to persevere or desist." Mr. Pater let me know that he was writing on it for the _Guardian_. "It is a _chef d'oeuvre_ after its kind, and justifies the care you have devoted to it." "I see," said Andrew Lang, on April 30th, "that _R.E._ is running into as many editions as _The Rights of Man_ by Tom Paine.... You know he is not _my_ sort (at least unless you have a ghost, a murder, a duel, and some savages)." Burne-Jones wrote, with the fun and sweetness that made his letters a delight: Not one least bitter word in it!--threading your way through intricacies of parsons so finely and justly.... As each new one came on the scene, I wondered if you would fall upon him and rend him--but you never do.... Certainly I never thought I should devour a book about parsons--my desires lying toward--"time upon once there was a dreadful pirate"--but I am back again five and thirty years and feeling softened and subdued with memories you have wakened up so piercingly--and I wanted to tell you this. And in the same packet lie letters from the honored and beloved Edward Talbot, now Bishop of Winchester, Stopford Brooke--the Master of Balliol--Lord Justice Bowen--Professor Huxley--and so many, many more. Best of all, Henry James! His two long letters I have already printed, naturally with his full leave and blessing, in the Library Edition of the novel. Not his the grudging and faultfinding temper that besets the lesser man when he comes to write of his contemporaries! Full of generous honor for what he thought good and honest work, however faulty, his praise kindled--and his blame no less. He appreciated so fully _your_ way of doing it; and his suggestion, alongside, of what would have been _his_ way of doing it, was so stimulating--touched one with so light a Socratean sting, and set a hundred thoughts on the alert. Of this delightful critical art of his his letters to myself over many years are one long illustration. And now--"There is none like him--none!" The honeyed lips are silent and the helping hand at rest. With May appeared Mr. Gladstone's review--"the refined criticism of _Robert Elsmere_"--"typical of his strong points," as Lord Bryce describes it--certainly one of the best things he ever wrote. I had no sooner read it than, after admiring it, I felt it must be answered. But it was desirable to take time to think how best to do it. At the moment my one desire was for rest and escape. At the beginning of June we took our eldest two children, aged eleven and thirteen, to Switzerland for the first time. Oh! the delight of Glion! with its hay-fields thick with miraculous spring flowers, the "peak of Jaman delicately tall," and that gorgeous pile of the Dent du Midi, bearing up the June heaven, to the east!--the joy of seeing the children's pleasure, and the relief of the mere physical rebound in the Swiss air, after the long months of strain and sorrow! My son, a slip of a person in knickerbockers, walked over the Simplon as though Alps were only made to be climbed by boys of eleven; and the Defile of Gondo, Domo d'Ossola, and beautiful Maggiore--they were all new and heavenly to each member of the party. Every year now there was growing on me the spell of Italy, the historic, the Saturnian land; and short as this wandering was, I remember, after it was over, and we turned homeward across the St. Gothard, leaving Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave. Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!" (Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American copyright.) Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat": "One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may possibly have heard of--_Elsie Venner_--'a medicated novel,' and such she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it titillated more than it tingled. _Robert Elsmere_ I suppose we should all agree is 'a medicated novel'--but it is, I think, beyond question, the most effective and popular novel we have had since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_." A man of science, apparently an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the popularity of _Robert Elsmere_ in this country. Our Western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the progress of rationalism." Another student and thinker from one of the universities of the West, after a brilliant criticism of the novel, written about a year after its publication, winds up, "The book, here, has entered into the evolution of a nation." Goldwin Smith--my father's and uncle's early friend--wrote me from Canada: The Grange, Toronto, _Oct. 31, 1888._ My dear Mrs. Ward,--You may be amused by seeing what a stir you are making even in this sequestered nook of the theological world, and by learning that the antidote to you is _Ben-Hur_. I am afraid, if it were so, I should prefer the poison to the antidote. The state of opinion on this Continent is, I fancy, pretty much that to which Robert Elsmere would bring us--Theism, with Christ as a model of character, but without real belief in the miraculous part of Christianity. Churches are still being everywhere built, money is freely subscribed, young men are pressing into the clerical profession, and religion shows every sign of vitality. I cannot help suspecting, however, that a change is not far off. If it comes, it will come with a vengeance; for over the intellectual dead level of this democracy opinion courses like the tide running in over a flat. As the end of life draws near I feel like the Scotchman who, being on his death-bed when the trial of O'Connell was going on, desired his Minister to pray for him that he might just live to see what came of O'Connell. A wonderful period of transition in all things, however, has begun, and I should like very much to see the result. However, it is too likely that very rough times may be coming and that one will be just as well out of the way. * * * * * Yours most truly, GOLDWIN SMITH. Exactly twenty years from the date of this letter I was in Toronto for the first time, and paid my homage to the veteran fighter who, living as he did amid a younger generation, hotly resenting his separatist and anti-Imperial views and his contempt for their own ideal of an equal and permanent union of free states under the British flag, was yet generously honored throughout the Dominion for his services to literature and education. He had been my father's friend at Oxford--where he succeeded to Arthur Stanley's tutorship at University College--and in Dublin. And when I first began to live in Oxford he was still Regius Professor, inhabiting a house very near that of my parents, which was well known to me afterward through many years as the house of the Max Müllers. I can remember the catastrophe it seemed to all his Oxford friends when he deserted England for America, despairing of the republic, as my father for a while in his youth had despaired, and sick of what seemed to him the forces of reaction in English life. I was eighteen when _Endymion_ came out, with Dizzy's absurd attack on the "sedentary" professor who was also a "social parasite." It would be difficult to find two words in the English language more wholly and ludicrously inappropriate to Goldwin Smith; and the furious letter to the _Times_ in which he denounced "the stingless insults of a coward" might well have been left unwritten. But I was living then among Oxford Liberals, and under the shadow of Goldwin Smith's great reputation as historian and pamphleteer, and I can see myself listening with an angry and sympathetic thrill to my father as he read the letter aloud. Then came the intervening years, in which one learned to look on Goldwin Smith as _par excellence_ the great man "gone wrong," on that vital question, above all, of a sane Imperialism. It was difficult, after a time, to keep patience with the Englishman whose most passionate desire seemed to be to break up the Empire, to incorporate Canada in the United States, to relieve us of India, that "splendid curse," to detach from us Australia and South Africa, and thereby to wreck forever that vision of a banded commonwealth of free nations which for innumerable minds at home was fast becoming the romance of English politics. So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908, walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though it was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside a bright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clear remembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier days. This was like his phantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveled and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--still delivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listeners in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would see the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best it should be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as though perfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did not agree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talk to slip back to old Oxford days. [Illustration: GOLDWIN SMITH] Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it. The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world. But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations. As to the circulation of _Robert Elsmere_, I have never been able to ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000 copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book. Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-known editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of the Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in his _Revue_. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could it possibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And _now_--after fifteen years?" But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first appeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest in it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very little impression on the general Catholic world for many years. But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism has arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in the streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at any rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that _now_--the French public would be interested. The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the plan fell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not a little stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its many faults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed a certain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent, at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it. CHAPTER IV FIRST VISITS TO ITALY I have already mentioned in these papers that I was one of the examiners for the Spanish Taylorian scholarship at Oxford in 1883, and again in 1888. But perhaps before I go farther in these _Recollections_ I may put down here--somewhat out of its place--a reminiscence connected with the first of these examinations, which seems to me worth recording. My Spanish colleague in 1883 was, as I have said, Don Pascual Gayangos, well known among students for his _History of Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain_, for his edition of the Correspondence of Cardinal Cisneros, and other historical work. _À propos_ of the examination, he came to see me in Russell Square, and his talk about Spain revived in me, for the time, a fading passion. Señor Gayangos was born in 1809, so that in 1883 he was already an old man, though full of vigor and work. He told me the following story. Unfortunately, I took no contemporary note. I give it now as I remember it, and if any one who knew Don Pascual, or any student of Shakespearian lore, can correct and amplify it, no one will be better pleased than I. He said that as quite a young man, somewhere in the thirties of the last century, he was traveling through Spain to England, where, if I remember right, he had relations with Sir Thomas Phillipps, the ardent book and MSS. collector, so many of whose treasures are now in the great libraries of Europe. Sir Thomas employed him in the search for Spanish MSS. and rare Spanish books. I gathered that at the time to which the story refers Gayangos himself was not much acquainted with English or English literature. On his journey north from Madrid to Burgos, which was, of course, in the days before railways, he stopped at Valladolid for the night, and went to see an acquaintance of his, the newly appointed librarian of an aristocratic family having a "palace" in Valladolid. He found his friend in the old library of the old house, engaged in a work of destruction. On the floor of the long room was a large _brasero_ in which the new librarian was burning up a quantity of what he described as useless and miscellaneous books, with a view to the rearrangement of the library. The old sheepskin or vellum bindings had been stripped off, while the printed matter was burning steadily and the room was full of smoke. There was a pile of old books whose turn had not yet come lying on the floor. Gayangos picked one up. It was a volume containing the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, and published in 1623. In other words, it was a copy of the First Folio, and, as he declared to me, in excellent preservation. At that time he knew nothing about Shakespeare bibliography. He was struck, however, by the name of Shakespeare, and also by the fact that, according to an inscription inside it, the book had belonged to Count Gondomar, who had himself lived in Valladolid and collected a large library there. But his friend the librarian attached no importance to the book, and it was to go into the common holocaust with the rest. Gayangos noticed particularly, as he turned it over, that its margins were covered with notes in a seventeenth-century hand. He continued his journey to England, and presently mentioned the incident to Sir Thomas Phillipps, and Sir Thomas's future son-in-law, Mr. Halliwell--afterward Halliwell-Phillipps. The excitement of both knew no bounds. A First Folio--which had belonged to Count Gondomar, Spanish Ambassador to England up to 1622--and covered with contemporary marginal notes! No doubt a copy which had been sent out to Gondomar from England; for he was well acquainted with English life and letters and had collected much of his library in London. The very thought of such a treasure perishing barbarously in a bonfire of waste paper was enough to drive a bibliophile out of his wits. Gayangos was sent back to Spain posthaste. But, alack! he found a library swept and garnished; no trace of the volume he had once held there in his hand, and on the face of his friend the librarian only a frank and peevish wonder that anybody should tease him with questions about such a trifle. But just dream a little! Who sent the volume? Who wrote the thick marginal notes? An English correspondent of Gondomar's? Or Gondomar himself, who arrived in England three years before Shakespeare's death, was himself a man of letters, and had probably seen most of the plays? In the few years which intervened between his withdrawal from England and his own death (1626), did he annotate the copy, storing there what he could remember of the English stage, and of "pleasant Willy" himself, perhaps, during his two sojourns in London? And was the book overlooked as English and of no importance in the transfer of Gondomar's own library, a hundred and sixty years after his death, to Charles III of Spain? And had it been sold, perhaps, for an old song, and with other remnants of Gondomar's books, just for their local interest, to some Valladolid grandee? Above all, did those marginal notes which Gayangos had once idly looked through contain, perhaps--though the First Folio does not, of course, include the Poems--some faint key to the perennial Shakespeare mysteries--to Mr. W.H., and the "dark lady," and all the impenetrable story of the Sonnets? If so, the gods themselves took care that the veil should not be rent. The secret remains. Others abide our question--Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou standest and art still, Outtopping knowledge. * * * * * One other recollection of the _Robert Elsmere_ year may fitly end my story of it. In September we spent an interesting afternoon at Hawarden--the only time I ever saw "Mr. G." at leisure, amid his own books and trees. We drove over with Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, Mr. Gladstone's neighbors on the Welsh border, with whom we were staying. Sir Robert, formerly an ardent Liberal, had parted from Mr. Gladstone in the Home Rule crisis of 1886, and it was the first time they had called at Hawarden since the split. But nothing could have been kinder than the Gladstones' reception of them and of us. "Mr. G." and I let theology alone!--and he was at his best and brightest, talking books and poetry, showing us the octagonal room he had built out for his 60,000 selected letters--among them "hundreds from the Queen"--his library, the park, and the old keep. As I wrote to my father, his amazing intellectual and physical vigor, and the alertness with which, leading the way, he "skipped up the ruins of the keep," were enough "to make a Liberal Unionist thoughtful." Ulysses was for the time in exile, but the "day of return" was not far off. Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel Louis XV." I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr. Gladstone's article and to the attack on _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly_; but it took me longer than I expected, and it was not till March in the following year (1889) that I published "The New Reformation," a Dialogue, in the _Nineteenth Century_. Into that dialogue I was able to throw the reading and the argument which had been of necessity excluded from the novel. Mr. Jowett was nervous about it, and came up on purpose from Oxford to persuade me, if he could, not to write it. His view--and that of Mr. Stopford Brooke--was that a work of art moves on one plane, and historical or critical controversy on another, and that a novel cannot be justified by an essay. But my defense was not an essay; I put it in the form of a conversation, and made it as living and varied as I could. By using this particular form, I was able to give the traditional as well as the critical case with some fullness, and I took great pains with both. From a recently published letter, I see that Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that the rôle played by the orthodox anti-rational and wholly fanatical Newcome in the novel belonged "to the infancy of art," so little could he be taken as representing the orthodox case. I wonder! I had very good reasons for Newcome. There are plenty of Newcomes in the theological literature of the last century. To have provided a more rational and plausible representative of orthodoxy would, I think, have slackened the pace and chilled the atmosphere of the novel. After all, what really supplied "the other side" was the whole system of things in which the readers of the book lived and moved--the ideas in which they had been brought up, the books they read, the churches in which they worshiped, the sermons to which they listened every week. The novel challenged this system of things; but it was always there to make reply. It was the eternal _sous-entendu_ of the story, and really gave the story all its force. But in the dialogue I could put the underlying conflict of thought into articulate and logical form, and build up, in outline at least, the history of "a new learning." When it was published, the dear Master, with a sigh of relief, confessed that it had "done no harm," and "showed a considerable knowledge of critical theology." I, too, felt that it had done no harm--rather that it had vindicated my right to speak, not as an expert and scholar--to that I never pretended for a moment--but as the interpreter of experts and scholars who had something to say to the English world, and of whom the English world was far too little aware. In the preface to one of the latest editions of his Bampton Lectures, Canon Liddon wrote an elaborate answer to it, which, I think, implies that it was felt to have weight; and if Lord Acton had waited for its appearance he might not, perhaps, have been so ready to condemn the character of Newcome as belonging "to the infancy of art." That Newcome's type might have been infinitely better presented is indeed most true. But in the scheme of the book, it is _right_. For the ultimate answer to the critical intellect, or, as Newman called it, the "wild living intellect of man," when it is dealing with Christianity and miracle, is that reason is _not_ the final judge--is, indeed, in the last resort, the enemy, and must at some point go down, defeated and trampled on. "Ideal Ward," and Archdeacon Denison, and Mr. Spurgeon--and not Doctor Figgis or Doctor Creighton--are the apologists who in the end hold the fort. But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, which was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _Robert Elsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something "more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the earlier book. A visit to Derbyshire in the autumn gave me some of the setting for the story. Then I took the first chapters abroad during the winter to Valescure, and worked them in that fragrant, sunny spot, making acquaintance the while with a new and delightful friend, Emily Lawless, the author of _Hurrish_ and _Grania_, and of some few poems that deserve, I think, a long life in English anthologies. She and her most racy, most entertaining mother, old Lady Cloncurry, were spending the winter at Valescure, and my young daughter and I found them a great resource. Lady Cloncurry, who was a member of an old Galway family, the Kirwans of Castle Hackett, seemed to me a typical specimen of those Anglo-Irish gentry who have been harshly called the "English garrison" in Ireland, but who were really in the last century the most natural and kindly link between the two countries. So far as I knew them, they loved both, with a strong preference for Ireland. All that English people instinctively resent in Irish character--its dreamy or laughing indifference toward the ordinary business virtues, thrift, prudence, tidiness, accuracy--they had been accustomed to, even where they had not been infected with it, from their childhood. They were not Catholics, most of them, and, so far as they were landlords, the part played by the priests in the Land League agitation tried them sore. But Miss Lawless's _Grania_ is there to show how delicate and profound might be their sympathy with the lovely things in Irish Catholicism, and her best poems--"The Dirge of the Munster Forest" and "After Aughrim"--give a voice to Irish suffering and Irish patriotism which it would be hard to parallel in the Nationalist or rebel literature of recent years. The fact that they had both nations in their blood, both patriotisms in their hearts, infused a peculiar pathos often into their lives. Pathos, however, was not a word that seemed--at first sight, at any rate--to have much to do with Lady Cloncurry. She was the most energetic and sprightly _grande dame_ as I remember her, small, with vivid black eyes and hair, her head always swathed in a becoming black lace coif, her hands in black mittens. She and her daughter Emily amused each other perennially, and were endless good company, besides, for other people. Lady Cloncurry's clothes varied very little. She had an Irish contempt for too much pains about your appearance, and a great dislike for _grande tenue_. When she arrived at an Irish country-house, of which the hostess told me the story, she said to the mistress of the house, on being taken to her room: "My dear, you don't want me to come down smart? I'm sure you don't! Of course I've brought some smart gowns. _They_ [meaning her daughters] make me buy them. But they'll just do for my maid to show your maid!" And there on the wardrobe shelves they lay throughout her visit. At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday from the _Times: "Go to Rome_! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But _three days_!" We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something infinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about like a _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned here--Contessa Maria Pasolini. Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after 1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died. Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated _women_ of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts, which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out. Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to friendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her general attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and its institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most interesting _salon_ in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring _success_, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the _Magna parens_, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen, who live in the country and care for their own people, also possess. But I was to see much more of Contessa Maria and Roman society in later years, especially when we were at the Villa Barberini and I was writing _Eleanor_, in 1899. Now I will only recall a little saying of the Contessa's at our first meeting, which lodged itself in memory. She did not then talk English fluently, as she afterward came to do; but she was learning English, with her two boys, from a delightful English tutor, and evidently pondering English character and ways--"Ah, you English!"--I can see the white arm and hand, with its cigarette, waving in the darkness of the old Roman apartment; the broad brow, the smiling eyes, and glint of white teeth. "You English! Why don't you _talk_?--why _won't_ you talk? If French people come here, there is no trouble. If I just tear up an envelope and throw down the pieces, they will talk about it a whole evening, and so _well_! But you English!--you begin, and then you stop; one must always start you again--always wind you up!" Terribly true! But in her company, even we halting English learned to talk, in our bad French, or whatever came along. The summer of 1889 was filled with an adventure to which I still look back with unalloyed delight, which provided me, moreover, with the setting and one of the main themes of _Marcella_. We were at that time half-way through the building of a house at Haslemere, which was to supersede Borough Farm. We had grown out of Borough and were for the moment houseless, so far as summer quarters were concerned. And for my work's sake, I felt that eagerness for new scenes and suggestions which is generally present, I think, in the story-teller of all shades. Suddenly, in a house-agent's catalogue, we came across an astonishing advertisement. Hampden House, on the Chiltern Hills, the ancestral home of John Hampden, of ship-money fame, was to let for the summer, and for a rent not beyond our powers. The new Lord Buckinghamshire, who had inherited it, was not then able to live in it. It had, indeed, as we knew, been let for a while, some years earlier, to our old friends, Sir Mountstuart and Lady Grant Duff, before his departure for the Governorship of Madras. The agents reported that it was scantily furnished, but quite habitable; and without more ado we took it! I have now before me the letter in which I reported our arrival, in mid-July, to my husband, detained in town by his _Times_ work. Hampden is enchanting!--more delightful than even I thought it would be, and quite comfortable enough. Of course we want a multitude of things--(baths, wine-glasses, tumblers, cans, etc.!) but those I can hire from Wycombe. Our great deficiency is lamps! Last night we crept about in this vast house, with hardly any light.... As to the ghost, Mrs. Duval (the housekeeper) scoffs at it! The ghost-room is the tapestry-room, from which there is a staircase down to the breakfast-room. A good deal of the tapestry is loose, and when there is any wind it flaps and flaps. Hence all the tales.... The servants are rather bewildered by the size of everything, and--like me--were almost too excited to sleep.... The children are wandering blissfully about, exploring everything. And what a place to wander in! After we left it, Hampden was restored, beautified, and refurnished. It is now, I have no doubt, a charming and comfortable country-house. But when we lived in it for three months--in its half-finished and tatterdemalion condition--it was Romance pure and simple. The old galleried hall, the bare rooms, the neglected pictures--among them the "Queen Elizabeth," presented to the owner of Hampden by the Queen herself after a visit; the gray walls of King John's garden, and just beyond it the little church where Hampden lies buried; the deserted library on the top floor, running along the beautiful garden-front, with books in it that might have belonged to the patriot himself, and a stately full-length portrait--painted about 1600--which stood up, torn and frameless, among lumber of various kinds, the portrait of a beautiful lady in a flowered dress, walking in an Elizabethan garden; the locked room, opened to us occasionally by the agent of the property, which contained some of the ancestral treasures of the house--the family Bible among them, with the births of John Hampden and his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, recorded on the same fly-leaf; the black cedars outside, and the great glade in front of the house, stretching downward for half a mile toward the ruined lodges, just visible from the windows--all this mingling of nature and history with the slightest, gentlest touch of pathos and decay, seen, too, under the golden light of a perfect summer, sank deep into mind and sense. Whoever cares to turn to the first chapters of _Marcella_ will find as much of Hampden as could be transferred to paper--Hampden as it was then--in the description of Mellor. Our old and dear friend, Mrs. J.R. Green, the widow of the historian, and herself the most distinguished woman-historian of our time, joined us in the venture. But she and I both went to Hampden to work. I set up in one half-dismantled room, and she in another, with the eighteenth-century drawing-room between us. Here our books and papers soon made home. I was working at _David Grieve_; she, if I remember right, at the brilliant book on _English Town Life_ she brought out in 1891. My husband came down to us for long week-ends, and as soon as we had provided ourselves with the absolute necessaries of life, visitors began to arrive: Professor and Mrs. Huxley; Sir Alfred Lyall; M. Jusserand, then _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, now the French Ambassador to Washington; Mr. and Mrs. Lyulph Stanley, now Lord and Lady Sheffield; my first cousin, H. O. Arnold-Forster, afterward War Minister in Mr. Balfour's Cabinet, and his wife; Mrs. Graham Smith, Laura Lyttelton's sister, and many kinsfolk. In those days Hampden was six miles from the nearest railway station; the Great Central Railway which now passes through the valley below it was not built, and all round us stretched beechwoods and commons and lanes, untouched since the days of Roundhead and Cavalier, where the occasional sound of wood-cutters in the beech solitudes was often, through a long walk, the only hint of human life. What good walks and talks we had in those summer days! My sister had married Professor Huxley's eldest son, so that with him and his wife we were on terms always of the closest intimacy and affection. "Pater" and "Moo," as all their kith and kin and many of their friends called them, were the most racy of guests. He had been that year pursuing an animated controversy in the _Nineteenth Century_ with Doctor Wace, now Dean of Canterbury, who had also--about a year before--belabored the author of _Robert Elsmere_ in the _Quarterly Review_. The Professor and I naturally enjoyed dancing a little on our opponents--when there was none to make reply!--as we strolled about Hampden; but there was never a touch of bitterness in Huxley's nature, and there couldn't have been much in mine at that moment, life was so interesting, and its horizon so full of light and color! Of his wife, "Moo," who outlived him many years, how much one might say! In this very year, 1889, Huxley wrote to her from the Canaries, whither he had gone alone for his health: Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things. They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines from a privately printed volume she gave me: If you were here,--and I were where you lie, Would you, beloved, give your little span Of life remaining unto tear and sigh? No!--setting every tender memory Within your breast, as faded roses kept For giver's sake, of giver when bereft, Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn For purpose high, nor any moment spurn. So, as you would have done, I fain would do In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try, Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length The scent of those dead roses steals my strength. As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of _Asiatic Studies_ contain the intellectual analysis of that background of thought from which the poems spring. Yet no one was shrewder, more acute, than Sir Alfred in dealing with the men and politics of the moment. He swore to no man's words, and one felt in him not only the first-rate administrator, as shown by his Indian career, but also the thinker's scorn for the mere party point of view. He was an excellent gossip, of a refined and subtle sort; he was the soul of honor; and there was that in his fragile and delicate personality which earned the warm affection of many friends. So gentle, so absent-minded, so tired he often seemed; and yet I could imagine those gray-blue eyes of Sir Alfred's answering inexorably to any public or patriotic call. He was a disillusioned spectator of the "great mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight, because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us we know well that he has long since sharpened on himself. When I think of M. Jusserand playing tennis on the big lawn at Hampden, and determined to master it, like all else that was English, memory leads one back behind that pleasant scene to earlier days still. We first knew the future Ambassador as an official of the French Foreign Office, who spent much of his scanty holidays in a scholarly pursuit of English literature. In Russell Square we were close to the British Museum, where M. Jusserand, during his visits to London, was deep in Chaucerian and other problems, gathering the learning which he presently began to throw into a series of books on the English centuries from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Who introduced him to us I cannot remember, but during his work at the Museum he would drop in sometimes for luncheon or tea; so that we soon began to know him well. Then, later, he came to London as _Conseiller d'Ambassade_ under M. Waddington, an office which he filled till he became French Minister to Denmark in 1900. Finally, in 1904, he was sent as French Ambassador to the United States, and there we found him in 1908, when we stayed for a delightful few days at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce. It has always been a question with me, which of two French friends is the more wonderful English scholar--M. Jusserand or André Chevrillon, Taine's nephew and literary executor, and himself one of the leaders of French letters; with whom, as with M. Jusserand, I may reckon now some thirty years of friendship. No one could say that M. Jusserand speaks our tongue exactly like an Englishman. He does much better. He uses it--always, of course, with perfect correctness and fluency--to express French ideas and French wits, in a way as nearly French as the foreign language will permit. The result is extraordinarily stimulating to our English wits. The slight differences both in accent and in phrase keep the ear attentive and alive. New shades emerge; old _clichés_ are broken up. M. Chevrillon has much less accent, and his talk is more flowingly and convincingly English; for which, no doubt, a boyhood partly spent in England accounts. While for vivacity and ease there is little or nothing to choose. But to these two distinguished and accomplished men England and America owe a real debt of gratitude. They have not by any means always approved of _our_ national behavior. M. Jusserand during his official career in Egypt was, I believe, a very candid critic of British administration and British methods, and in the days of our early acquaintance with him I can remember many an amusing and caustic sally of his at the expense of our politicians and our foreign policy. [Illustration: JEAN JULES JUSSERAND] M. Chevrillon took the Boer side in the South African war, and took it with passion. All the same, the friendship of both the diplomat and the man of letters for this country, based upon their knowledge of her, and warmly returned to them by many English friends, has been a real factor in the growth of that broad-based sympathy which we now call the Entente. M. Chevrillon's knowledge of us is really uncanny. He knows more than we know ourselves. And his last book about us--_L'Angleterre et la Guerre_--is not only photographically close to the facts, but full of a spiritual sympathy which is very moving to an English reader. Men of such high gifts are not easily multiplied in any country. But, looking to the future of Europe, the more that France and England--and America--can cultivate in their citizens some degree, at any rate, of that intimate understanding of a foreign nation which shines so conspicuously in the work of these two Frenchmen the safer will that future be. CHAPTER V AMALFI AND ROME. HAMPDEN AND _MARCELLA_ It was in November, 1891, that I finished _David Grieve_, after a long wrestle of more than three years. I was tired out, and we fled south for rest to Rome, Naples, Amalfi, and Ravello. The Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi, Madame Palumbo's inn at Ravello, remain with me as places of pure delight, shone on even in winter by a more than earthly sun. Madame Palumbo was, as her many guests remember, an Englishwoman, and showed a special zeal in making English folk comfortable. And can one ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and olive-gardens, to the blue water. Flaming over the mountains rose an unclouded sun, shining on the purple coast, with its innumerable rock-towns--"_tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis_"--and sending broad paths over the "wine-dark" sea. Never, I think, have I felt the glory and beauty of the world more rapturously, more _painfully_--for there is pain in it!--than when one was standing alone on a December morning, at a window which seemed to make part of the precipitous rock itself, looking over that fairest of scenes. From Ravello we went back to Rome, and a short spell of its joys. What is it makes the peculiar pleasure of society in Rome? A number of elements, of course, enter in. The setting is incomparable; while the clashing of great world policies, represented by the diplomats, and of the main religious and Liberal forces of Europe, as embodied in the Papacy and modern Italy, kindles a warmth and animation in the social air which matches the clearness of the Roman day, when the bright spells of the winter weather arrive, and the omnipresent fountains of the Eternal City flash the January or February sun through its streets and piazzas. Ours, however, on this occasion, was only a brief stay. Again we saw Contessa Maria, this time in the stately setting of the Palazzo Sciarra; and Count Ugo Balzani, an old friend of ours and of the Creightons since Oxford days, historian and thinker, and, besides, one of the kindest and truest of men. But the figure, perhaps, which chiefly stands out in memory as connected with this short visit is that of Lord Dufferin, then our Ambassador in Rome. Was there ever a greater charmer than Lord Dufferin? In the sketch of the "Ambassador" in _Eleanor_, there are some points caught from the living Lord Dufferin, so closely, indeed, that before the book came out I sent him the proofs and asked his leave--which he gave at once, in one of the graceful little notes of which he was always master. For the diplomatic life and successes of Lord Dufferin are told in many official documents and in the biography of him by Sir Alfred Lyall; but the key to it all lay in cradle gifts that are hard to put into print. In the first place, he was--even at sixty-five--wonderfully handsome. He had inherited the beauty, and also the humor and the grace, of his Sheridan ancestry. For his mother, as all the world knows, was Helen Sheridan, one of the three famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglinton Tournament--then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of Somerset--was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his Ulster home,--in "Helen's Tower"--he had formed a collection of memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made friends. "You must come to Clandeboye and let me show you Helen's Tower," he would say, eagerly, and one would answer with hopeful vagueness. But for me the time never came. My personal recollections of him, apart from letters, are all connected with Rome, or Paris, whither he was transferred the year after we saw him at the Roman Embassy, in December, 1891. It was, therefore, his last winter at Rome, and he had only been Ambassador there a little more than two years--since he ceased to be Viceroy of India in 1889. But he had already won everybody's affection. The social duties of the British Embassy in Rome--what with the Italian world in all its shades, the more or less permanent English colony, and the rush of English tourists through the winter and spring--seemed to me by no means easy. But Lady Dufferin's dignity and simplicity, and Lord Dufferin's temperament, carried them triumphantly through the tangle. Especially do I remember the informal Christmas dance to which we took, by the Ambassador's special wish, our young daughter of seventeen, who was not really "out." And no sooner was she in the room, shyly hiding behind her elders, than he discovered her. I can see him still, as he made her a smiling bow, his noble gray head and kind eyes, the blue ribbon crossing his chest. "You promised me a dance!" And so for her first waltz, in her first grown-up dance, D. was well provided, nervous as the moment was. There is a passage in _Eleanor_ which commemorates first this playful sympathy and tact which made Lord Dufferin so delightful to all ages, and next, an amusing conversation with him that I remember a year or two later in Paris. As to the first--Lucy Foster, the young American girl, is lunching at the Embassy. "Ah! my dear lady!" said the Ambassador, "how few things in this world one does to please one's self! This is one of them." Lucy flushed with a young and natural pleasure. She was on the Ambassador's left, and he had just laid his wrinkled hand for an instant on hers--with a charming and paternal freedom. "Have you enjoyed yourself?--have you lost your heart to Italy?" said her host stooping to her.... "I have been in fairyland," said she, shyly, opening her blue eyes upon him. "Nothing can ever be like it again." "No--because one can never be twenty again," said the old man, sighing. "Twenty years hence, you will wonder where the magic came from. Never mind--just now, anyway, the world's your oyster." Then he looked at her a little more closely.... He missed some of that quiver of youth and enjoyment he had felt in her before; and there were some very dark lines under the beautiful eyes. What was wrong? Had she met the man--the appointed one? He began to talk to her with a kindness that was at once simple and stately. "We must all have our ups and downs," he said to her, presently. "Let me just give you a word of advice. It'll carry you through most of them. Remember you are very young, and I shall soon be very old." He stopped and surveyed her. His eyes blinked through their blanched lashes. Lucy dropped her fork and looked back at him with smiling expectancy. "Learn Persian!" said the old man, in an urgent whisper--"and get the dictionary by heart!" Lucy still looked--wondering. "I finished it this morning," said the Ambassador, in her ear. "To-morrow I shall begin it again. My daughter hates the sight of the thing. She says I overtire myself, and that when old people have done their work they should take a nap. But I know that if it weren't for my dictionary I should have given up long ago. When too many tiresome people dine here in the evening--or when they worry me from home--I take a column. But generally half a column's enough--good tough Persian roots, and no nonsense. Oh! of course I can read Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, and all that kind of thing. But that's the whipped cream. That don't count. What one wants is something to set one's teeth in. Latin verse will do. Last year I put half Tommy Moore into hendecasyllables. But my youngest boy, who's at Oxford, said he wouldn't be responsible for them--so I had to desist. And I suppose the mathematicians have always something handy. But, one way or another, one must learn one's dictionary. It comes next to cultivating one's garden." The pretty bit of kindness to a very young girl, in 1892, which I have described, suggested part of this conversation; and I find the foundation of the rest in a letter written to my father from Paris in 1896. We had a very pleasant three days in Paris ... including a most agreeable couple of hours with the Dufferins. Lord Dufferin showed me a number of relics of his Sheridan ancestry, and wound up by taking me into his special little den and telling me Persian stories with excellent grace and point! He is wild about Persian just now, and has just finished learning the whole dictionary by heart. He looks upon this as his chief _délassement_ from official work. Lady Dufferin, however, does not approve of it at all! His remarks to Humphry as to the ignorance and inexperience of the innumerable French Foreign Ministers with whom he has to do, were amusing. An interview with Berthelot (the famous French chemist and friend of Renan) was really, he said, a deplorable business. Berthelot (Foreign Minister 1891-92) knew _everything_ but what he should have known as French Foreign Minister. And Jusserand's testimony was practically the same! He is now acting head of the French Foreign Office, and has had three Ministers in bewildering succession to instruct in their duties, they being absolutely new to everything. Now, however, in Hanotaux he has got a strong chief at last. I recollect that in the course of our exploration of the Embassy, we passed through a room with a large cheval-glass, of the Empire period. Lord Dufferin paused before it, reminding me that the house had once belonged to Pauline Borghese. "This was her room and this glass was hers. I often stand before it and evoke her. She is there somewhere--if one had eyes to see!" And I thought, in the darkening room, as one looked into the shadows of the glass, of the beautiful, shameless creature as she appears in the Canova statue in the Villa Borghese, or as David has fixed her, immortally young, in the Louvre picture. But before I leave this second Roman visit of ours, let me recall one more figure in the _entourage_ of the Ambassador--a young attaché, fair-haired, with all the good looks and good manners that belong to the post, and how much else of solid wit and capacity the years were then to find out. I had already seen Mr. Rennell Rodd in the Tennant circle, where he was everybody's friend. Soon we were to hear of him in Greece, whence he sent me various volumes of poems and an admirable study of the Morea, then in Egypt, and afterward in Sweden; while through all these arduous years of war (I write in 1917) he has been Ambassador in that same Rome where we saw him as second Secretary in 1891. The appearance of _David Grieve_ in February, 1892, four years after _Robert Elsmere_, was to me the occasion of very mixed feelings. The public took warmly to the novel from the beginning; in its English circulation and its length of life it has, I think, very nearly equaled _Robert Elsmere_; only after twenty-five years has it now fallen behind its predecessor. It has brought me correspondence from all parts and all classes, more intimate and striking, perhaps, than in the case of any other of my books. But of hostile reviewing at the moment of its appearance there was certainly no lack! It was violently attacked in the _Scots Observer_, then the organ of a group of Scotch Conservatives and literary men, with W.E. Henley at their head, and received unfriendly notice from Mrs. Oliphant in _Blackwood_. The two _Quarterlies_ opened fire upon it, and many lesser guns. A letter from Mr. Meredith Townsend, the very able, outspoken, and wholly independent colleague of Mr. Hutton in the editorship of the _Spectator_, gave me some comfort under these onslaughts! I have read every word of _David Grieve_. Owing to the unusual and unaccountable imbecility of the reviewing--(the _Athenaeum_ man, for example, does not even comprehend that he is reading a biography!)--it may be three months or so before the public fully takes hold, but I have no doubt of the ultimate verdict.... The consistency of the leading characters is wonderful, and there is not one of the twenty-five, except possibly Dora--who is not human enough--that is not the perfection of lifelikeness.... Louie is a vivisection. I have the misfortune to know her well ... and I am startled page after page by the accuracy of the drawing. Walter Pater wrote, "It seems to me to have all the forces of its predecessor at work in it, with perhaps a mellower kind of art." Henry James reviewed it--so generously!--so subtly!--in the _English Illustrated_. Stopford Brooke and Bishop Creighton wrote to me with a warmth and emphasis that soon healed the wounds of the _Scots Observer_; and that the public was with them, and not with my castigators, was quickly visible from the wide success of the book. Some of the most interesting letters that reached me about it were from men of affairs who were voracious readers, but not makers of books--such as Mr. Goschen, who "could stand an examination on it"; Sir James, afterward Lord Hannen, one of the Judges of the Parnell Commission; and Lord Derby, the Minister who seceded, with Lord Carnarvon, from Disraeli's Government in 1878. We had made acquaintance not long before with Lord Derby, through his niece, Lady Winifred Byng (now Lady Burghclere), to whom we had all lost our hearts--children and parents--at Lucerne in 1888. There are few things I regret more in relation to London social life than the short time allowed me by fate wherein to see something more of Lord Derby. If I remember right, we first met him at a small dinner-party at Lady Winifred's in 1891, and he died early in 1893. But he made a very great impression upon me, and, though he was generally thought to be awkward and shy in general society, in the conversations I remember with him nothing could have been more genial or more attractive than his manner. He had been at Rugby under my grandfather, which was a link to begin with; though he afterward went to Cambridge, and never showed, that I know of, any signs of the special Rugby influence which stamped men like Dean Stanley and Clough. And yet of the moral independence and activity which my grandfather prized and cultivated in his boys, there was certainly no lack in Lord Derby's career. For the greater part of his political life he was nominally a Conservative, yet the rank and file of his party only half trusted a mind trained by John Stuart Mill and perpetually brooding on social reform. As Lord Stanley, his close association and personal friendship with Disraeli during the Ministries and politics of the mid-nineteenth century have been well brought out in Mr. Buckle's last volume of the Disraeli _Life_. But the ultimate parting between himself and Dizzy was probably always inevitable. For his loathing of adventurous policies of all kinds, and of any increase whatever in the vast commitments of England, was sure at some point to bring him into conflict with the imagination or, as we may now call it, the prescience, of Disraeli. It was strange to remember, as one watched him at the dinner-table, that he had been offered the throne of Greece in 1862. If he accepts the charge [wrote Dizzy to Mrs. Bridges Williams] I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the House of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon, and Lancashire to the Attic plain. It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered like a fairy-tale. Sixteen years later came his famous resignation, in 1878, when the Fleet was ordered to the Dardanelles, and Lord Derby, as he had now become, then Foreign Secretary, refused to sanction a step that might lead to war. That, for him, was the end as far as Toryism was concerned. In 1880 he joined Mr. Gladstone, but only to separate from him on Home Rule in 1886; and when I first knew him, in 1891, he was leader of the Liberal Unionist peers in the House of Lords. A little later he became President of the great Labor Commission in 1892, and before he could see Gladstone's fresh defeat in 1893, he died. Speculatively he was as open-minded as a reader and follower of Mill might be expected to be. He had been interested in _Robert Elsmere_, and the discussion of books and persons, to which it led him in conversation with me, showed him fully aware of the new forces abroad in literature and history. Especially interested, too, as to what Labor was going to make of Christianity, and well aware--how could he fail to be, as Chairman of that great, that epoch-making Commission of 1892?--of the advancing strength of organized labor on all horizons. He appeared to me, too, as a typical North-countryman--a son of Lancashire, proud of the great Lancashire towns, and thoroughly at home in the life of the Lancashire countryside. He could tell a story in dialect admirably. And I realized that he had thought much--in his balanced, reticent way--on matters in which I was then groping: how to humanize the relations between employer and employed, how to enrich and soften the life of the workman, how, in short, to break down the barrier between modern industrialism and the stored-up treasures--art, science, thought--of man's long history. So that when _David Grieve_ was finished I sent it to Lord Derby, not long after our first meeting, in no spirit of empty compliment, and I have always kept his letter in return as a memento of a remarkable personality. Some day I hope there may be a Memoir of him; for none has yet appeared. He had not the charm, the versatility, the easy classical culture, of his famous father--"the Rupert of debate." But with his great stature--he was six feet two--his square head, and strong, smooth-shaven face, he was noticeable everywhere. He was a childless widower when I first knew him, and made the impression of a lonely man, for all his busy political life and his vast estates. But he was particularly interesting to me as representing a type I have once or twice tried to draw--of the aristocrat standing between the old world, before railways and the first Reform Bill, which saw his birth, and the new world and new men of the later half of the century. He was traditionally with the old world; by conviction and conscience, I think, with the new; yet not sorry, probably, that he was to see no more than its threshold! The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American copyright: and the great success of _David Grieve_ in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of _Robert Elsmere_, in its pirated editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of _Robert Elsmere;_ but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in one or two chapters of _Marcella_. But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general. With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of _Marcella_. I wrote the sketch of the book in September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else that had been happening to me. For the New Brotherhood of _Robert Elsmere_ had become in some sort a realized dream; so far as any dream can ever take to itself the practical garments of this puzzling world. To show that the faith of Green and Martineau and Stopford Brooke was a faith that would wear and work--to provide a home for the new learning of a New Reformation, and a practical outlet for its enthusiasm of humanity--were the chief aims in the minds of those of us who in 1890 founded the University Hall Settlement in London. I look back now with emotion on that astonishing experiment. The scheme had taken shape in my mind during the summer of 1889, and in the following year I was able to persuade Doctor Martineau, Mr. Stopford Brooke, my old friend Lord Carlisle, and a group of other religious Liberals, to take part in its realization. We held a crowded meeting in London, and an adequate subscription list was raised without difficulty. University Hall in Gordon Square was taken as a residence for young men, and was very soon filled. Continuous teaching by the best men available, from all the churches, on the history and philosophy of religion, was one half the scheme; the other half busied itself with an attempt to bring about some real contact between brain and manual workers. We took a little dingy hall in Marchmont Street, where the residents of the Hall started clubs and classes, Saturday mornings, for children and the like. The foundation of Toynbee Hall--the Universities Settlement--in East London, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, was then a fresh and striking fact in social history. A spirit of fraternization was in the air, an ardent wish to break down the local and geographical barriers that separated rich from poor, East End from West End. The new venture in which I was interested attached itself, therefore, to a growing movement. The work in Marchmont Street grew and prospered. Men and women of the working class found in it a real center of comradeship, and the residents at the Hall in Gordon Square, led by a remarkable man of deeply religious temper and Quaker origin, the late Mr. Alfred Robinson, devoted themselves in the evenings to a work marked by a very genuine and practical enthusiasm. Soon it was evident that larger premises were wanted. It was in the days when Mr. Passmore Edwards was giving large sums to institutions of different kinds in London, but especially to the founding of public libraries. He began to haunt the shabby hall in Marchmont Street, and presently offered to build us a new hall there for classes and social gatherings. But the scheme grew and grew, in my mind as in his. And when the question of a site arose we were fortunate enough to interest the practical and generous mind of the chief ground landlord of Bloomsbury, the Duke of Bedford. With him I explored various sites in the neighborhood, and finally the Duke offered us a site in Tavistock Place, on most liberal terms, he himself contributing largely to the building, granting us a 999 years' lease, and returning us the ground rent. And there the Settlement now stands, the most beautiful and commodious Settlement building in London, with a large garden behind it, made by the Duke out of various old private gardens, and lent to the Settlement for its various purposes. Mr. Passmore Edwards contributed £14,000 to its cost, and it bears his name. It was opened in 1898 by Lord Peel and Mr. Morley, and for twenty years it has been a center of social work and endeavor in St. Pancras. From it have sprung the Physically Defective Schools under the Education Authority, now so plentiful in London, and so frequent in our other large towns. The first school of the kind was opened at this Settlement in 1898; and the first school ambulance in London was given to us by Sir Thomas Barlow for our Cripple Children. The first Play Center in England began there in 1898; and the first Vacation School was held there in 1902. During those twenty years the Settlement has played a large part in my life. We have had our failures and our successes; and the original idea has been much transformed with time. The Jowett Lectureship, still devoted to a religious or philosophical subject, forms a link with the religious lecturing of the past; but otherwise the Settlement, like the Master himself, stands for the liberal and spiritual life, without definitions or exclusions. Up to 1915 it was, like Toynbee Hall, a Settlement for University and professional men who gave their evenings to the work. Since 1915 it has been a Women's Settlement under a distinguished head--Miss Hilda Oakeley, M.A., formerly Warden of King's College for Women. It is now full of women residents and full of work. There is a Cripple School building belonging to the Settlement, to the East; our cripples still fill the Duke's garden with the shouts of their play; and hundreds of other children crowd into the building every evening in the winter, or sit under the plane-trees in summer. The charming hall of the Settlement is well attended every winter week by people to whom the beautiful music that the Settlement gives is a constant joy; the Library, dedicated to the memory of T. H. Green, has 400 members; the classes and popular lectures have been steadily held even during this devastating war; the Workers' Educational Association carry on their work under our roof; mothers bring their babies to the Infant Welfare Center in the afternoon; there are orchestral and choral classes, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. Only one club has closed down--the Men's Club, which occupied the top floor of the Invalid Children's School before the war. Their members are scattered over France, Salonika, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and the Roll of Honor is a long one. Twenty years! How clearly one sees the mistakes, the lost opportunities, of such an enterprise! But so much is certain--that the Settlement has been an element of happiness in many, many lives. It has had scores of devoted workers, in the past--men and women to whom the heart of its founder goes out in gratitude. And I cannot imagine a time when the spacious and beautiful house and garden, with all the activities that have a home there, will not be necessary and welcome to St. Pancras. I see it, in my dreams, at least, half a century hence, when all those who first learned from it and in it have gone their way, still serving "the future hour" of an England reborn. To two especially among the early friends of the Settlement let me turn back with grateful remembrance--George Howard, Lord Carlisle, whom I have already mentioned, and Stopford Brooke. Lord Carlisle was one of the most liberal and most modest of men, an artist himself, and the friend of artists. On a Sunday in Russell Square, when the drawing-room door opened to reveal his fine head and shy, kind eyes, one felt how well worth while it was to stay at home on Sunday afternoons! I find a little note from him in 1891, the year in which we left Russell Square to move westward, regretting the "interesting old house" "with which I associate you in my mind." He was not an easy talker, but his listening had the quality that makes others talk their best; while the sudden play of humor or sarcasm through the features that were no less strong than refined, and the impression throughout of a singularly upright and humane personality, made him a delightful companion. There were those who would gladly have seen him take a more prominent part in public life. Perhaps a certain natural indolence held him back; perhaps a wonderful fairness of mind which made him slow to judge, and abnormally sensitive to "the other side." It is well known that as a landlord he left the administration of his great estates in the north almost wholly to his wife, and that, except in the great matter of temperance, he and she differed in politics, Lady Carlisle--who was a Stanley of Alderley--going with Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, while Lord Carlisle joined the Liberal Unionists. Both took a public part, and the political differences of the parents were continued in their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great land-owning noble, had little or no attraction for him. In the years, at any rate, when I saw him often, I was drawn to him by our common interest in the liberalizing of religion, and by a common love of Italy and Italian art. I remember him once in the incomparable setting of Naworth; but more often in London, and in Stopford Brooke's company. For he was an intimate friend and follower of Mr. Brooke's, and I came very early under the spell of that same strong and magnetic personality. While we were still at Oxford, through J.R.G. we made acquaintance with Mr. Brooke, and with the wife whose early death in 1879 left desolate one of the most affectionate of men. I remember well Mr. Brooke's last sermon in the University pulpit, before his secession, on grounds of what we should now call Modernism, from the Church of England. Mrs. Brooke, I think, was staying with us, while Mr. Brooke was at All Souls, and the strong individuality of both the husband and wife made a deep impression upon one who was then much more responsive and recipient than individual. The sermon was a great success; but it was almost Mr. Brooke's latest utterance within the Anglican Church. The following year came the news of Mrs. Brooke's mortal illness. During our short meeting in 1877 I had been greatly attracted by her, and the news filled me with unbearable pain. But I had not understood from it that the end itself was near, and I went out into our little garden, which was a mass of summer roses, and in a bewilderment of feeling gathered all I could find--a glorious medley of bloom--that they might surround her, if only for a day, with the beauty she loved. Next day, or the day after, she died; and that basket of roses, arriving in the house of death--belated, incongruous offering!--has stayed with me as the symbol of so much else that is too late in life, and of our human helplessness and futility in the face of sorrow. After our move to London, my children and I went for a long time regularly to hear Mr. Brooke at Bedford Chapel. At the time, I often felt very critical of the sermons. Looking back, I cannot bring myself to say a critical word. If only one could still go and hear him! Where are the same gifts, the same magnetism, the same compelling personality to be found to-day, among religious leaders? I remember a sermon on Elijah and the priests of Baal, which for color and range, for modernness, combined with ethical force and power, remains with me as perhaps the best I ever heard. And then, the service. Prayers simplified, repetitions omitted, the Beatitudes instead of the Commandments, a dozen jarring, intolerable things left out; but for the rest, no needless break with association. And the relief and consolation of it! The simple Communion service, adapted very slightly from the Anglican rite, and administered by Mr. Brooke with a reverence, an ardor, a tenderness one can only think of with emotion, was an example of what _could_ be done with our religious traditions, for those who want new bottles for new wine, if only the courage and the imagination were there. The biography of Mr. Brooke, which his son-in-law, Principal Jacks, has just brought out, will, I think, reveal to many what made the spell of Stopford Brooke, to a degree which is not common in biography. For _le papier est bête_!--and the charm of a man who was both poet and artist, without writing poems or painting pictures, is very hard to hand on to those who never knew him. But, luckily, Stopford Brooke's diaries and letters reflect him with great fullness and freedom. They have his faults, naturally. They are often exuberant or hasty--not, by any means, always fair to men and women of a different temperament from his own. Yet, on the whole, there is the same practical, warm-hearted wisdom in them that many a friend found in the man himself when they went to consult him in his little study at the back of Bedford Chapel, where he wrote his sermons and books, and found quiet, without, however, barring out the world, if it wanted him. And there breathes from them also the enduring, eager passion for natural and artistic beauty which made the joy of his own life, and which his letters and journals may well kindle in others. His old age was a triumph in the most difficult of arts. He was young to the end, and every day of the last waiting years was happy for himself, and precious to those about him. He knew what to give up and what to keep, and his freshness of feeling never failed. Perhaps his best and most enduring memorial will be the Wordsworth Cottage at Grasmere, which he planned and carried out. And I like to remember that my last sight of him was at a spot only a stone's-throw from that cottage on the Keswick Road, his gray hair beaten back by the light breeze coming from the pass, and his cheerful eyes, full often, as it seemed to me, of a mystical content, raised toward the evening glow over Helm Crag and the Easedale fells. On the threshold also of the Settlement's early history there stands the venerable figure of James Martineau--thinker and saint. For he was a member of the original Council, and his lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke, in the old "Elsmerian" hall, marked the best of what we tried to give in those first days. I knew Harriet Martineau in my childhood at Fox How. Well I remember going to tea with that tremendous woman when I was eight years old; sitting through a silent meal, in much awe of her cap, her strong face, her ear-trumpet; and then being taken away to a neighboring room by a kind niece, that I might not disturb her further. Once or twice, during my growing up, I saw her. She lived only a mile from Fox How, and was always on friendly terms with my people. Matthew Arnold had a true admiration for her--sturdy fighter that she was in Liberal causes. So had W.E. Forster; only he suffered a good deal at her hands, as she disapproved of the Education Bill, and contrived so to manage her trumpet when he came to see her as to take all the argument and give him all the listening! When my eldest child was born, a cot-blanket arrived, knitted by Miss Martineau's own hands--the busy hands (soon then to be at rest) that wrote the _History of the Peace_, _Feats on the Fiord_, the _Settlers at Home_, and those excellent biographical sketches of the politicians of the Reform and Corn Law days in the _Daily News_, which are still well worth reading. Between Harriet Martineau and her brother James, as many people will remember, there arose an unhappy difference in middle life which was never mended or healed. I never heard him speak of her. His standards were high and severe, for all the sensitive delicacy of his long, distinguished face and visionary eyes; and neither he nor she was of the stuff that allows kinship to supersede conscience. He published a somewhat vehement criticism of a book in which she was part author, and she never forgave it. And although to me, in the University Hall venture, he was gentleness and courtesy itself, and though his presence seemed to hallow a room directly he entered it, one felt always that he was _formidable_. The prophet and the Puritan lay deep in him. Yet in his two famous volumes of Sermons there are tones of an exquisite tenderness and sweetness, together with harmonies of prose style, that remind me often how he loved music and how his beautiful white head might be seen at the Monday Popular Concerts, week after week, his thinker's brow thrown back to catch the finest shades of Joachim's playing. The year after _David Grieve_ appeared, Mr. Jowett died. His long letter to me on the book contained some characteristic passages, of which I quote the following: I should like to have a good talk with you. I seldom get any one to talk on religious subjects. It seems to me that the world is growing rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it nearly all that it is capable of giving. To me it appears one of the most hopeful signs of the present day that we are coming back to the old, old doctrine, "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right." Yet this has to be taught in a new way, adapted to the wants of the age. We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men, beginning with the life of Christ, instead. And the best words of men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets, will be our Bible. At the end of the year we spent a weekend with him at Balliol, and that was my last sight of my dear old friend. The year 1893 was for me one of illness, and of hard work both in the organization of the new Settlement and in the writing of _Marcella_. But that doesn't reconcile me to the recollection of how little I knew of his failing health till, suddenly, in September the news reached me that he was lying dangerously ill in the house of Sir Robert Wright, in Surrey. "Every one who waited on him in his illness loved him," wrote an old friend of his and mine who was with him to the end. What were almost his last words--"I bless God for my life!--I bless God for my life!"--seemed to bring the noble story of it to a triumphant close; and after death he lay "with the look of a little child on his face.... He will live in the hearts of those who loved him, as well as in his work." He lives indeed; and as we recede farther from him the originality and greatness of his character will become more and more clear to Oxford and to England. The men whom he trained are now in the full stream of politics and life. His pupils and friends are or have been everywhere, and they have borne, in whatever vocation, the influence of his mind or the mark of his friendship. Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Asquith, Lord Justice Bowen, Lord Coleridge, Lord Milner, Sir Robert Morier, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Lord Goschen, Miss Nightingale, and a hundred others of the nation's leaders--amid profoundest difference, the memory of "the Master" has been for them a common and a felt bond. No other religious personality of the nineteenth century--unless it be that of Newman--has stood for so much. In his very contradictions and inconsistencies of thought he was the typical man of a time beset on all sides by new problems to which Jowett knew very well there was no intellectual answer; while through the passion of his faith in a Divine Life, which makes itself known to man, not in miracle or mystery, but through the channels of a common experience, he has been a kindling force in many hearts and minds, and those among the most important to England. Meanwhile, to these great matters the Jowettan oddities and idiosyncrasies added just that touch of laughter and surprise that makes a man loved by his own time and arrests the eye and ear of posterity. CHAPTER VI _HELBECK OF BANNISDALE_ The coming out of _Marcella_, in April, 1894, will always mark for me perhaps the happiest date in my literary life. The book, for all the hard work that had gone to it, had none the less been a pleasure to write; and the good-will that greeted it made the holiday I had earned--which again was largely spent in Rome--a golden time. Not long after we left England, "Piccadilly," my sister wrote me, was "placarded with _Marcella_," the name appearing on the notice-boards of most of the evening papers--a thing which never happened to me before or since; and when we arrived in Rome, the content-bills of the London newspapers, displayed in the Piazza di Spagna, announced her no less flamingly. The proof-sheets of the book had been tried on various friends, as usual, with some amusing results. Bishop Creighton, with only the first two-thirds of the book before him, wrote me denunciations of Marcella. I am greatly interested in the book and pine for the _dénoûment_. So far Marcella, though I know her quite well, does not in the least awaken my sympathy. She is an intolerable girl--but there are many of them.... I only hope that she may be made to pay for it. Mr. and Mrs. Boyce are good and original, so is Wharton. I hope that condign vengeance awaits him. He is the modern politician entirely.... I really hope Marcella may be converted. It would serve her right to marry her to Wharton; he would beat her. Another old friend, one of the industrial leaders of the north, carried off half the proofs to read on his journey to Yorkshire. I so ravened on them that I sat still at Blosworth instead of getting out! The consequence is that all my plans are disarranged. I shall not get to M---- in time for my meeting, and for all this Marcella is to blame.... The station-master assured me he called out "Change for Northampton," but I was much too deep in the scene between Marcella, Lord Maxwell, and Raeburn to heed anything belonging to the outer world. Mr. Goschen wrote: I don't know how long it is since I have enjoyed reading anything so much. I can't satisfy myself as to the physical appearance of Wharton.... I do know some men of a _character_ not quite unlike him, but they haven't the boyish face with curls. Marcella I see before me. Mrs. Boyce and Lord Maxwell both interested me very much....Alack! I must turn from Marcella's enthusiasm and aspirations to Sir W. Harcourt's speech--a great transition. And dear Alfred Lyttelton wrote: I feel a ridiculous pride in her triumphs which I have had the joy of witnessing on every side.... At least permit an expert to tell you that his heart beat over the ferrets (in the poaching scene) and at the intense vividness and truth of the legal episodes. But there is no one letter in this old packet which moves me specially. It was on the 1st of March, 1894, that Mr. Gladstone said "Good-by" to his Cabinet in the Cabinet room at Downing Street, and a little later in the afternoon walked away for the last time from the House of Commons. No one who has read it will forget the telling of that episode, in Mr. Morley's biography, with what concentration, what dignity!--worthy alike of the subject and of the admirable man of letters--himself an eye-witness--who records it. While Lord Kimberley and Sir William Harcourt, on behalf of the rest of their colleagues, were bidding their great chief farewell, "Mr. Gladstone sat composed and still as marble, and the emotion of the Cabinet did not gain him for an instant." When the spokesmen ceased, he made his own little speech of four or five minutes in reply: "then hardly above a breath, but every accent heard, he said, 'God bless you all.' He rose slowly and went out of one door, while his colleagues with minds oppressed filed out by the other." On this moving scene there followed what Mr. Gladstone himself described as the first period of comparative leisure he had ever known, extending to four and a half months. They were marked first by increasing blindness, then by an operation for cataract, and finally by a moderate return of sight. In July he notes that "during the last months of partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so much as one letter a day." In this faded packet of mine lies one of these rare letters, written with his own hand--a full sheet--from Dollis Hill, on April 27th. When _Marcella_ arrived my thankfulness was alloyed with a feeling that the state of my eyesight made your kindness for the time a waste. But Mr. Nettleship has since then by an infusion supplied a temporary stimulus to the organ, such that I have been enabled to begin, and am reading the work with great pleasure and an agreeable sense of congeniality which I do not doubt I shall retain to the close. Then he describes a book--a novel--dealing with religious controversy, which he had lately been reading, in which every character embodying views opposed to those of the author "is exhibited as odious." With this he warmly contrasts the method and spirit of _David Grieve_, and then continues: Well, I have by my resignation passed into a new state of existence. And in that state I shall be very glad when our respective stars may cause our paths to meet. I am full of prospective work; but for the present a tenacious influenza greatly cripples me and prevents my making any definite arrangement for an expected operation on my eye. Eighty-five!--greatly crippled by influenza and blindness--yet "full of prospective work"! The following year, remembering _Robert Elsmere_ days, and _à propos_ of certain passages in his review of that book, I ventured to send him an Introduction I had contributed to my brother-in-law Leonard Huxley's translation of Hausrath's _New Testament Times._ This time the well-known handwriting is feebler and the old "fighter" is not roused. He puts discussion by, and turns instead to kind words about a near relative of my own who had been winning distinctions at Oxford. It is one of the most legitimate interests of the old to watch with hope and joy these opening lives, and it has the secondary effect of whispering to them that they are not yet wholly frozen up.... I am busy as far as my limited powers of exertion allow upon a new edition of Bishop Butler's Works, which costs me a good deal of labor and leaves me, after a few hours upon it, good for very little else. And my perspective, dubious as it is, is filled with other work, in the Homeric region lying beyond. I hope it will be very long before you know anything of compulsory limitations on the exercise of your powers. Believe me always, Sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE. But it was not till 1897, as he himself records, that the indomitable spirit so far yielded to these limitations as to resign--or rather contemplate resigning--the second great task of which he had spoken to me at Oxford, nine years before. "I have begun seriously to ask myself whether I shall ever be able to face--_The Olympian Religion_." It was, I think, in the winter of 1895 that I saw him for the last time at our neighbors', the Rothschilds, at Tring Park. He was then full of animation and talk, mainly of things political, and, indeed, not long before he had addressed a meeting at Chester on the Turkish massacres in Armenia, and was still to address a large audience at Liverpool on the same subject--his last public appearance--a year later. When _George Tressady_ appeared he sent me a message through Mrs. Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of _us_--the Liberal Unionists." Then came the last months when, amid a world's sympathy and reverence, the great life, in weariness and pain, wore to its end. The "lying in state" in Westminster Hall seemed to me ill arranged. But the burying remains with me as one of those perfect things, which only the Anglican Church at its best, in combination with the immemorial associations of English history, can achieve. After it, I wrote to my son: I have now seen four great funerals in the Abbey--Darwin, Browning, Tennyson, and the funeral service for Uncle Forster, which was very striking, too. But no one above forty of those in the Abbey yesterday will ever see the like again. It was as beautiful and noble as the "lying in state" was disappointing and ugly. The music was exquisite, and fitting in every respect; and when the high sentence rang out, "and their name liveth for evermore," the effect was marvelous. One seemed to hear the voice of the future already pealing through the Abbey--as though the verdict were secured, the judgment given. We saw it all, admirably, from the Muniment Room, which is a sort of lower Triforium above the south Transept. To me, perhaps, the most thrilling moment was when, bending forward, one saw the white-covered coffin disappear amid the black crowd round it, and knew that it had sunk forever into its deep grave, amid that same primeval clay of Thorny Island on which Edward's Minister was first reared and the Red King built his hall of judgment and Council. The statue of Dizzy looked down on him--"So you have come at last!"--and all the other statues on either side seemed to welcome and receive him.... The sloping seats for Lords and Commons filled the transepts, a great black mass against the jeweled windows, the Lords on one side, the Commons on the other; in front of each black multitude was the glitter of a mace, and in the hollow between, the whiteness of the pall--perhaps you can fancy it so. But the impetus of memory has carried me on too fast. There are some other figures and scenes to be gathered from these years--1893-98--that may still interest this present day. Of the most varied kind! For, as I turn over letters and memoranda, a jumble of recollections passes through my mind. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, on the one hand, a melancholy, kindly man, amid the splendors of Waddesden; a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation in a cellar in Lisson Grove; days of absorbing interest in the Jewish East End, and in sweaters' workshops, while _George Tressady_ was in writing; a first visit to Mentmore while Lady Rosebery was alive; a talk with Lord Rosebery some time after her death, in a corner of a local ball-room, while _Helbeck_ was shaping itself about the old Catholic families of England, which revealed to me yet another and unsuspected vein of knowledge in one of the best furnished of minds; the Asquith marriage in 1894; new acquaintances and experiences in Lancashire towns, again connected with _George Tressady_, and in which I was helped by that brilliant writer, worker, and fighter, Mrs. Sidney Webb; a nascent friendship with Sir William Harcourt, one of the most racy of all possible companions; happy evenings in the Tadema and Richmond studios with music and good talk; occasional meetings with and letters from "Pater," the dear and famous Professor, who, like my uncle, fought half the world and scarcely made an enemy; visits to Oxford and old friends--such are the scenes and persons that come back to me as I read old letters, while all through it ran the continual strain of hard literary work mingled with the new social and religious interests which the foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement had brought me. We have been at Margot Tennant's wedding to-day [I wrote to my son on May 10, 1894]--a great function, very tiring, but very brilliant and amusing--occasionally dramatic, too, as, when after the service had begun, the sound of cheering in the street outside drowned the voice of the Bishop of Rochester, and warned us that Mr. Gladstone was arriving. Afterward at the house we shook hands with three Cabinet Ministers on the door-step, and there were all the rest of them inside! The bride carried herself beautifully and was as composed and fresh as though it were any ordinary party. From our seat in the church one saw the interior of the vestry and Mr. Gladstone's white head against the window as he sat to sign the register; and the greeting between him and Mr. Balfour when he had done. This was written while Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour, still free, until the following year, from the trammels of office, was finishing his brilliant _Foundations of Belief_, which came out in 1895. In acknowledging the copy which he sent me, I ventured to write some pages on behalf of certain arguments of the Higher Criticism which seemed to me to deserve a fuller treatment than Mr. Balfour had been willing to give them--in defense also of our English idealists, such as Green and Caird, in their relation to orthodoxy. A year or two earlier I find I had been breaking a lance on behalf of the same school of writers with a very different opponent. In the controversy between Professor Huxley and Doctor Wace, in 1889, which opened with the famous article on "The Gadarene Swine," the Professor had welcomed me as an ally, because of "The New Reformation," which appeared much about the same time; and the word of praise in which he compared my reply to Mr. Gladstone, to the work "of a strong housemaid brushing away cobwebs," gave me a fearful joy! I well remember a thrilling moment in the Russell Square drawing-room in 1889, when "Pater" and I were in full talk, he in his raciest and most amusing form, and suddenly the door opened, and "Doctor Wace" was announced--the opponent with whom at that moment he was grappling his hardest in the _Nineteenth Century_. Huxley gave me a merry look--and then how perfectly they both behaved! I really think the meeting was a pleasure to both of them, and when my old chief in the _Dictionary of Christian Biography_ took his departure, Huxley found all kinds of pleasant personal things to say about him. But the Professor and I were not always at one. Caird and Green--and, for other reasons, Martineau--were to me names "of great pith and moment," and Christian Theism was a reasonable faith. And Huxley, in controversy, was no more kind to my _sacra_ than to other people's. Once I dared a mild remonstrance--in 1892--only to provoke one of his most vigorous replies: MY DEAR M.--Thanks for your pleasant letter. I do not know whether I like the praise or the scolding better. They, like pastry, need to be done with a light hand--especially praise--and I have swallowed all yours, and feel it thoroughly agrees with me. As to the scolding I am going to defend myself tooth and nail. In the first place, by all my Gods and No Gods, neither Green, nor Martineau, nor the Cairds were in my mind when I talked of "Sentimental Deism," but the "Vicaire Savoyard," and Charming, and such as Voysey. There are two chapters of "Rousseauism," I have not touched yet--Rousseauism in Theology, and Rousseauism in Education. When I write the former I shall try to show that the people of whom I speak as "sentimental deists" are the lineal descendants of the Vicaire Savoyard. I was a great reader of Channing in my boyhood, and was much taken in by his theosophic confectionery. At present I have as much (intellectual) antipathy to him as St. John had to the Nicolaitans. ... Green I know only from his Introduction to Hume--which reminds me of nothing so much as a man with a hammer and chisel knocking out bits of bad stone in the Great Pyramid, with the view of bringing it down.... As to Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, I will get it and study it. But as a rule "Philosophies of Religion" in my experience turn out to be only "Religions of Philosophers"--quite another business, as you will admit. And if you please, Ma'am, I wish to add that I think I am _not_ without sympathy for Christian feeling--or rather for what you mean by it. Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism, and the Lord knows what might happen to me, in case a moral earthquake cracked the superincumbent deposit, and permitted an eruption of the demonic element below.... Luckily I am near 70, and not a G.O.M.--so the danger is slight. One must stick to one's trade. It is my business to the best of my ability to fight for scientific clearness--that is what the world lacks. Feeling Christian or other, is superabundant.... Ever yours affectionately, T. H. HUXLEY. A few more letters from him--racy, and living as himself--and then in 1895, just after his first article on the "Foundations of Belief," we heard with dismay of the illness which killed him. There was never a man more beloved--more deeply mourned. The autumn of 1896 brought me a great loss in the death of an intimate friend, Lady Wemyss--as marked a personality in her own circle as was her indomitable husband, the famous Lord Elcho, of the Volunteer movement, on the bigger stage. It was at Balliol, at the Master's table, and in the early Oxford days, that we first made friends with Lord and Lady Wemyss, who were staying with the Master for the Sunday. I was sitting next to Lord Wemyss, and he presently discovered that I was absent-minded. And I found him so attractive and so human that I soon told him why. I had left a sick child at home, with a high temperature, and was fidgeting to get back to him. "What is the matter?--Fever?--throat? Aconite, of course! You're a homeopath, aren't you? All sensible people are. Look here--I've got a servant with me. I'll send him with some aconite at once. Where do you live?--in the Parks? All right. Give me your address." Out came an envelope and a pencil. A message was sent round the dinner-table to Lady Wemyss, whose powerful dreaming face beside the Master lit up at once. The aconite was sent; the child's temperature went down; and, if I remember right, either one or both of his new medical advisers walked up to the Parks the next day to inquire for him. So began a friendship which for just twenty years, especially from about 1885 to 1896, meant a great deal to me. How shall I describe Lady Wemyss? An unfriendly critic has recently allowed me the power of "interesting fashionable ladies in things of the mind." Was Lady Wemyss a "fashionable lady"? She was the wife, certainly, of a man of high rank and great possessions; but I met her first as a friend--a dear and intimate friend, as may be seen from his correspondence--of Mr. Jowett's; and Mr. Jowett was not very tolerant of "fashionable ladies." She was in reality a strong and very simple person, with a natural charm working through a very reserved and often harsh manner, like the charm of mountain places in spring. She was a Conservative, and I suppose an aristocrat, whatever that word may mean. She thought the Harcourt death-duties "terrible" because they broke up old families and old estates, and she had been brought up to think that both were useful. Yet I never knew anybody with a more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious to the bystander, that would lighten through them; her stately ways; and yet, withal, her childlike love of loving and being loved by the few to whom she gave her deepest affection--in some such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way. I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me: "Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what the beauty of her youth had been. She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and gratefully acknowledged it. The _Commonplace Book_, privately printed after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its adventures were of its own seeking. It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of _George Tressady_, that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale._ The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations. The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ was more or less clear to me. I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my father, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never have written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had to begin. But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the chance at once. Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other. Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic. Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people. We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests. At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself. ... The drawback of the house at present is certainly _the cold_! Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the _Helbeck_ made steady progress. But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of _Bessie Costrell_, I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate. My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the _intellectual_ case against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home for the book's publication in June. The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget. George Meredith wrote: Your _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ held me firmly in the reading and remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book. J.M. Barrie's generous, enthusiastic note delights and inspires me again as I read it over. Mr. Morley, my old editor and critic, wrote: "I find it intensely interesting and with all the elements of beauty, power, and pathos." For Leslie Stephen, with whom I had only lately made warm and close friends, I had a copy bound, without the final chapter, that the book might not, by its tragic close, depress one who had known so much sorrow. Sir Alfred Lyall thought--"the story reaches a higher pitch of vigor and dramatic presentation than is to be found even in your later books"; while Lord Halifax's letter--"how lovable they both are, each in his way, and how true to the ideal on both sides!"--and others, from Mr. Godkin, of the American _Nation_, from Frederic Harrison, Lord Goschen, Lord Dufferin, and many, many more, produced in me that curious mood which for the artist is much nearer dread than boasting--dread that the best is over and that one will never earn such sympathy again. One letter not written to myself, from Mr. George Wyndham to Mr. Wilfred Ward, I have asked leave to print as a piece of independent criticism: On Sunday I read _Helbeck of Bannisdale_, and I confess that the book moved me a great deal. It is her best book. It is a true tragedy, because the crash is inevitable. This is not so easy to effect in Art as many suppose. There are very few characters and situations which lead to inevitable crashes. It is a thousand to one that a woman who thinks she ought not to marry a man, but loves him passionately, will, in fact, marry him. She will either discover an ingenious way out of her woods or else just shut her eyes and "go it blind," relying on his strength and feeling that it is really right to relinquish to him her sense of responsibility. In choosing a girl with nothing left her in the world but loyalty to a dead father and memory of his attitude toward religion, without knowledge of his arguments for that attitude, I think that Mrs. Ward has hit on the only possible _persona_. Had Laura, herself, been a convinced rationalist, or had her father been still alive, she would have merged herself and her attitude in Helbeck's strength of character. Being a work of art, self-consistent and inevitable, the book becomes symbolic. It is a picture of incompatibility, but, being a true picture, it is a symbolic index to the incompatible which plays so large a part in the experience of man. For the rest, I remember vividly the happy holiday of that summer at Stocks; the sense of having come through a great wrestle, and finding everything--my children, the garden, my little Huxley nephews, books and talk, the Settlement where we were just about to open our Cripple School, and all else in life, steeped in a special glamour. It faded soon, no doubt, "into the light of common day"; but if I shut my thoughts and eyes against the troubles of these dark hours of war, I can feel my way back into the "wind-warm space" and look into the faces that earth knows no more--my father, Leslie Stephen, Alfred Lyall, Mr. Goschen, Alfred Lyttelton, H. O. Arnold-Forster, my sister, Julia Huxley, my eldest brother--a vanished company! And in the following year, to complete the story, I owed to _Helbeck_ a striking and unexpected hour. A message reached me in November, 1898, to the effect that the Empress Frederick, who had just arrived at Windsor, admired the book and would like to see the writer of it. A tragic figure at that moment--the Empress Frederick! That splendid Crown Prince, in his white uniform, whom we had seen at Schwalbach in 1872, had finished early in 1890 with his phantom reign and tortured life, and his son reigned in his stead. Bismarck, "the Englishwoman's" implacable enemy, had died some four months before I saw the Empress, after eight years' exclusion from power. The Empress herself was on the verge of the terrible illness which killed her two years later. To me her life and personality--or, rather, the little I knew of them--had always been very interesting. She had, of course, the reputation of being the ablest of her family, and the bitterness of her sudden and irreparable defeat at the hands of Fate and her son, in 1889-90, had often struck me as one of the grimmest stories in history. One incident in it, not, I think, very generally known, I happened to hear from an eye-witness of the scene, before 1898. It was as follows: The Empress Frederick in the midst of the Bismarck crisis of March, 1890, when it was evident that the young Emperor William II was bent on getting rid of his Chancellor, and so "dropping the pilot" of his House, was sitting at home one afternoon, with the companion from whom I heard the story, when a servant, looking a good deal scared, announced that Prince Bismarck had called and wished to know whether her Majesty would receive him. "Prince Bismarck!" said the Empress, in amazement. She had probably not seen him since the death of her husband, and relations between herself and him had been no more than official for years. Turning to her companion, she said, "What can he possibly want with me!" She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing." In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children: D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs. M----'s little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out.) Presently we saw the Queen's little pony-carriage pass along beyond the windows with the Empress Frederick, and the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge walking beside it, and the Indians behind. Then in a little while the Empress Frederick came hurrying back alone, and almost directly came my summons. Countess Perponcher, her lady in waiting, took me up through the Long Corridor, past the entrance to the Queen's rooms on one side, and Gordon's Bible, in its glass case, on the other, till we turned to the left, and I was in a small sitting-room, where a lady, gray-haired and in black, came forward to meet me.... We talked for about 50 minutes:--of German books and Universities--Harnack--Renan, for whom she had the greatest admiration--Strauss, of whom she told me various interesting things--German colonies, that she thought were "all nonsense"--Dreyfus, who in her eyes is certainly innocent--reaction in France--the difference between the Greek Church in Russia and the Greek Church in Greece, the hopes of Greece, and the freeing of Crete. It is evident that her whole heart is with Greece and her daughter there [the young Queen Sophia, on whose character recently deciphered documents have thrown so strong a light], and she spoke bitterly, as she always does, about the English hanging-back, and the dawdling of the European Concert. Then she described how she read _George Tressady_ aloud to her invalid daughter till the daughter begged her to stop, lest she should cry over it all night--she said charming things of _Helbeck_, talked of Italy, D'Annunzio, quoted "my dear old friend Minghetti" as to the fundamental paganism in the Italian mind, asked me to write my name in her book, and to come and see her in Berlin--and it was time to go.... She is a very attractive, sensitive, impulsive woman, more charming than I had imagined, and, perhaps, less intellectual--altogether the very woman to set up the backs of Bismarck and his like. Never was there a more thorough Englishwoman! I found myself constantly getting her out of focus, by that confusion of mind which made one think of her as German. And to my father I wrote: The Empress began by asking after Uncle Matt, and nothing could have been kinder and more sympathetic than her whole manner. But of course Bismarck hated her. She is absolutely English, parliamentary, and anti-despotic.... When I ventured to say in bidding her Good-by, that I had often felt great admiration and deep sympathy for her, which is true--she threw up her hands with a little sad or bitter gesture--"Oh!--admiration!--for _me_!"--as if she knew very well what it was to be conscious of the reverse. A touching, intelligent, impulsive woman, she seemed to me--no doubt often not a wise one--but very attractive. Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has made of it. CHAPTER VII THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the love-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of _Eleanor_. Madame de Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for _villegiatura_ in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched. The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal wondering whether we could possibly stay it out. But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering _bambini_; its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circæan promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea. And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work. Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and sympathies. Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid _connaissances_ and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful illustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which _tour de force_ was the more difficult. But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people. His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you knew it all; then to walk _with you_ round and round the subject, turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult strain on attention. I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast _salone_ of the villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the magnificent bathos--"_un dolce come si deve_!"--which has ever since been the word with us for the tiptop thing. With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the _fattoria_, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking, as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature." Mr. James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled with the _fragole_ in the rich alluvial earth. It was a wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for treasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake, wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What a name! What a place!" On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by the combination of learning with _le sport_ which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party: Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being _the_ top authority in his profession with a kindness and _bonhomie_ which make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest love for _flânerie_ and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only _dig_!"--and saying with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. _Here_, Madame, beneath our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!" And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his _Eleanor_ letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, though the _Robert Elsmere_ letters, already published, run it hard. That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end. It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His passionate sympathy for England and France, his English naturalization--a _beau geste_ indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene. It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They _know_ they can't win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do." The American further reported that after his formal business had been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude of President Wilson. Colonel ---- listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--" And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war with America, you can have it to-morrow!" Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, his hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of him in a typical representative moment. Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr. Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the impressions and information that were afterward embodied in _England's Effort_. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us. "_A mortal, a mortal is dead_!" I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their fight and suffered in their pain. One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America! * * * * * Yes!-- ... He was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad. For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in _The Wings of a Dove_--the most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St. George, the woman doctor in the _Bostonians,_ the French family in the _Reverberation_, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation of character in a chapter of the _Bostonians,_ a story he thought little of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. _Ann Veronica_ and the _New Machiavelli_, and several other tales by the same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of nature, which does not mix her molds. As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In _The Wings of a Dove_, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two fiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is in some ways a _tour de force_ of construction. It is the central point on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here writing as a _virtuoso_, and not as the great artist we know him to be. And the same, I think, is true of _The Golden Bowl._ That again is a wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at any rate, among the later novels--is _The Ambassador_. There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when the "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his garden, on the _rive gauche_, for example; or the summer afternoon on the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its center. _The Ambassador_ is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work and manner, just as _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the masterpiece of the earlier. And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from _What Maisie Knew_ onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the _pros_ and _cons_ of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to come after. But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder to the accomplished work. To the _wealth_ of it, above all--the deep draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and Turguénieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art. And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be _learned_ in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, that decides. CHAPTER VIII ROMAN FRIENDS. _ELEANOR_ The spring of the following year (1900) saw us again in Rome. We spent our April fortnight there, of which I specially remember some amusing hours with Sir William Harcourt. I see myself, for instance, as a rather nervous tourist in his wake and that of the very determined wife of a young diplomat, storming the Vatican library at an hour when a bland _custode_ assured us firmly it was _not_ open to visitors. But Sir William's great height and bulk, aided by his pretty companion's self-will, simply carried us through the gates by their natural momentum. Father Ehrle was sent for and came, and we spent a triumphant and delightful hour. After all, one is not an ex-British Cabinet Minister for nothing. Sir William was perfectly civil to everybody, with a blinking smile like that of the Cheshire cat; but nothing stopped him. I laugh still at the remembrance. On the way home it was wet, and he and I shared a _legno_. I remember we talked of Mr. Chamberlain, with whom at that moment--May, 1899--Sir William was not in love; and of Lord Hartington. "Hartington came to me one day when we were both serving under Mr. G., and said to me in a temper, 'I wish I could get Gladstone to answer letters.' 'My dear fellow, he always answers letters.' 'Well, I have been trying to do something and I can't get a word out of him.' 'What have you been trying to do?' 'Well, to tell the truth, I've been trying to make a bishop.' 'Have you? Not much in your line, I should think. Now if it had been something about a horse--' 'Don't be absurd. He would have made a very good bishop. C---- and S---- [naming two well-known Liberals] told me I must--so I wrote--- and not a word! Very uncivil, I call it.' 'Who was it?' 'Oh, I can't remember. Let me think. Oh yes, it was a man with a double name--Llewellyn-Davies.' Sir William, with a shout of laughter, 'Why, it took me five years to get him made a Canon!'" The following year I sent him _Eleanor_, as a reminder of our meeting in Rome, and he wrote: To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest spot of the day-dreams of life, and I treasure all its recollections. After the disappointment of the day when we were to have seen Albano and Nemi under your guidance, we managed the expedition, and were entranced with the scene even beyond our hopes, and since that time I have lived through it again in the pages of _Eleanor_, which I read with greediness, waiting each number as it appeared. Now about Manisty. What a fortunate beggar, to have two such charming women in love with him! It is always so. The less a man deserves it the more they adore him. That is the advantage you women writers have. You always figure men as they are and women as they ought to be. If I had the composition of the history I should never represent two women behaving so well to one another under the circumstances. Even American girls, according to my observation, do not show so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end they carry off their man.... Your sincerely attached W. V. HARCOURT. Let me detach a few other figures from a gay and crowded time, the ever-delightful and indefatigable Boni--Commendatore Boni--for instance. To hear him talk in the Forum or hold forth at a small gathering of friends on the problems of the earliest Italian races, and the causes that met in the founding and growth of Rome, was to understand how no scholar or archeologist can be quite first-rate who is not also something of a poet. The sleepy blue eyes, so suddenly alive; the apparently languid manner which was the natural defense against the outer world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the fun, simplicity, _bonhomie_ he showed with those who knew him well--all these are vividly present to me. So, too, are the very different characteristics of Monseigneur Duchesne, the French Lord Acton; like him, a Liberal, and a man of vast learning, tarred with the Modernist brush in the eyes of the Vatican, but at heart also like Lord Acton, by the testimony of all who know, a simple and convinced believer. When we met Monseigneur Duchesne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, _fin_, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself had preached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audience were greatly moved, Monsignore." Duchesne bowed, with just a touch of irony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between him and Duchesne, said, with _malice prepense_, "Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore?" Duchesne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette. "_Non, Monsieur_," he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, not at all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard the question. For a second, Duchesne's eyes laughed, too, and were then as impenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of a small party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese which were painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious and communicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly the cosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, and the origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of all faiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, an Englishman who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me the impressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt on some learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations of intimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in the Englishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious passion in his companion, the devotion of his daily mass, the rigor and simplicity of his personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism could produce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, and yet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life of Catholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe. Let me, however, contrast with Monseigneur Duchesne another Catholic personality--that of Cardinal Vaughan. I remember being asked to join a small group of people who were to meet Cardinal Vaughan on the steps of St. Peter's, and to go with him, and Canon Oakley, an English convert to Catholicism, through the famous crypt and its monuments. We stood for some twenty minutes outside St. Peter's, while Cardinal Vaughan, in the manner of a cicerone reeling off his task, gave us _in extenso_ the legendary stories of St. Peter's and St. Paul's martyrdoms. Not a touch of criticism, of knowledge, of insight--a childish tale, told by a man who had never asked himself for a moment whether he really believed it. I stood silently by him, inwardly comparing the performance with certain pages by the Abbe Duchesne, which I had just been reading. Then we descended to the crypt, the Cardinal first kneeling at the statue of St. Peter. The crypt, as every one knows, is full of fragments from Christian antiquity, sarcophagi of early Popes, indications of the structures that preceded the present building, fragments from papal tombs, and so on. But it was quite useless to ask the Cardinal for an explanation or a date. He knew nothing, and he had never cared to know. Again and again, I thought, as we passed some shrine or sarcophagus bearing a name or names that sent a thrill through one's historical sense--"If only J.R. Green were here!--how these dead bones would live!" But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the Roman Church passed ignorantly and heedlessly by. A little while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at a luncheon-party, where the case of Doctor Schell, the Rector of the Catholic University of Würzburg, who had published a book condemned by the Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Doctor Schell's book, _Catholicismus und Fortschritt_, was a plea on behalf of the Catholic Universities of Bavaria against the Jesuit seminaries which threatened to supplant them; and he had shown with striking clearness the disastrous results which the gradual narrowing of Catholic education had had on the Catholic culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Rome had procured the condemnation of the book. Doctor Schell at first submitted; then, just before the luncheon-party at which I was present, withdrew his submission. I saw the news given to the Cardinal. He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, poor fellow!" he said. "Poor fellow!" It was not said unkindly, rather with a kind of easy pity; but the recollection came back to me in the crypt of St. Peter's, and I seemed to see the man who could not shut his ear to knowledge and history struggling in the grip of men like the Cardinal, who knew no history. Echoes and reflections from these incidents will be found in _Eleanor_, and it was the case of Doctor Schell that suggested Father Benecke. So the full weeks passed on. Half _Eleanor_ had been written, and in June we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the Villa Barberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, a special and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrived to spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardent Catholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Rome or kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was to climb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whence Europe received her civilization and the vast system of the Catholic Church. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whom Horace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greater portion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. I remember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, he vanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappeared with shining eyes. "I have been on the Appian Way--I have walked where Horace walked!" In his own autobiography he writes: "In proportion to a man's good sense and soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing with his years, which he bears toward Horace." An old-world judgment, some will say, which to us, immersed in this deluge of war which is changing the face of all things, may sound, perhaps, as a thin and ghostly voice from far away. It comes from the Oxford of Newman and Matthew Arnold, of Jowett and Clough; and for the moment, amid the thunder and anguish of our time, it is almost strange to our ears. But when the tumult and the shouting die, and "peace has calmed the world," whatever else may have passed, the poets and the thinkers will be still there, safe in their old shrines, for they are the "ageless mouths" of all mankind, when men are truly men. The supposed reformers, who thirst for the death of classical education, will not succeed, because man doth not live by bread alone, and certain imperishable needs in him have never been so fully met as by some Greeks and some Latins, writing in a vanished society, which yet, by reason of their thought and genius, is still in some real sense ours. More science? More foreign languages? More technical arts? Yes! All these. But if democracy is to mean the disappearance of the Greek and Latin poets from the minds of the future leaders of our race, the history of three thousand years is there to show what the impoverishment will be. As to this, a personal experience, even from one who in Greek literature is only a "proselyte of the gate," may not be without interest. I shall never forget the first time, when, in middle life, I read in the Greek, so as to understand and enjoy, the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus. The feeling of sheer amazement at the range and power of human thought--and at such a date in history--which a leisurely and careful reading of that play awakened in me, left deep marks behind. It was as though for me, thenceforward, the human intellect had been suddenly related, much more clearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, "not itself." So that, in realizing the greatness of the mind of Aeschylus, the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful way touched my own; with both new light on the human Past, and mysterious promise for the Future. Now, for many years, the daily reading of Greek and Latin has been not only a pleasure, but the only continuous bit of mental discipline I have been able to keep up. I do not believe this will seem exaggerated to those on whom Greek poetry and life have really worked. My father, or the Master, or Matthew Arnold, had any amateur spoken in similar fashion to them, would have smiled, but only as those do who are in secure possession of some precious thing, on the eagerness of the novice who has just laid a precarious hold upon it. At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labor and many baffled hopes, there are at least two bright lights upon the scene. He had the comfort of religious faith, and the double joy of the scholar and of the enthusiast for letters. He would not have bartered these great things, these seeming phantoms-- Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew-- for any of the baser goods that we call real. A year and a half after his visit to Rome, he died in Dublin, where he had been for years a Fellow and Professor of the Irish University, occupied in lecturing on English literature, and in editing some of the most important English Chronicles for the Rolls Series. His monument, a beautiful medallion by Mr. Derwent Wood, which recalls him to the life, hangs on the wall of the University Church, in Stephen's Green, which was built in Newman's time and under his superintendence. The only other monument in the church is that to the great Cardinal himself. So once more, as in 1886, they--the preacher and his convert--are together. "_Domine, Deus meus, in Te speravi_." So, on my father's tablet, runs the text below the quiet, sculptured face. It expresses the root fact of his life. A few weeks before my father's death _Eleanor_ appeared. It had taken me a year and a quarter to write, and I had given it full measure of work. Henry James wrote to me, on receipt of it, that it gave him . . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as--I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor--and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to foot--which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her. I think her, less obscurely--a thing of rare beauty, a large and noble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having _mené à bonne fin_ so intricate and difficult a problem, and on having seen your subject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has Beauty--the book, the theme and treatment alike, is magnificently mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do--to have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve well of her. I can't "criticize"--though I _could_ (that is, I _did_--but can't do it again)--rewrite. The thing's infinitely delightful and distinguished, and that's enough. The success of it, specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the "high-note" way, without a break or a drop. She is a very exquisite and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will doubt of my intelligence. It _has_ one, and in this way, to my troubled sense: that the anti-thesis on which your subject rests isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject, by your intention, of course, on one; but the one you chose seems to me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence. Lucy has in respect to Eleanor--that is, the image of Lucy that you have tried to teach yourself to see--has no true, no adequate, no logical antithetic force--and this is not only, I think, because the girl is done a little more _de chic_ than you would really have liked to do her, but because the _nearer_ you had got to her type the less she would have served that particular condition of your subject. You went too far for her, or, going so far, should have brought her back--roughly speaking--stronger. (Irony--and various things!--should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that more imperfectly, I recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or critic in your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it! And when a book's beautiful, nothing _does_ matter! I hope greatly to see you after the New Year. Good night. It's my usual 1.30 A.M. Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always, HENRY JAMES. I could not but feel, indeed, that the book had given great pleasure to those I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention and delight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite sure that it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one of the most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction." And Charles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one who never praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad: "It would be easier to write about the book to any one else but you.... You have added to the treasures of English imaginative literature, and no higher reward than this can any writer hope to gain." The well-known and much-loved editor of the _Century_, Richard Watson Gilder, "on this the last Sunday of the nineteenth century"--so he headed his letter--sat down to give a long hour of precious time to _Eleanor's_ distant author. How can you reconcile it to your conscience to write a book like _Eleanor_ that keeps a poor fellow reading it to a finish till after three in the morning? Not only that--but that keeps him sobbing and sighing "like a furnace," that charms him and makes him angry--that hurts and delights him, and will not let him go till all is done! Yes, there are some things I might quarrel with--but, ah, how much you give of Italy--of the English, of the American--three nations so well-beloved; and how much of things deeper than peoples or countries. Imagine me at our New England farm--with the younger part of the family--in my annual "retreat." Last year at this time I was here, with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero; now it is milder, but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel through the ice at Hayes's Pond--in a wilderness where fox abound--and where bear and deer make rare appearances--all within a few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The farmer's family is at one end of the long farm-house--I am at the other. It is a great place to read--one reads here with a sort of lonely passion. You know the landscape--it is in _Eleanor_. Last night (or this morning) I wanted to talk with you about your book--or telegraph--but here I am calmly trying to thank you both for sending us the copy--and, too, for writing it. Of the "deeper things" I can really say nothing--except that I feel their truth, and am grateful for them. But may I not applaud (even the Pope is "applauded," you know) such a perfect touch as--for instance--in Chapter XVI--"the final softening of that sweet austerity which hid Lucy's heart of gold"; and again "Italy without the _forestieri_" "like surprising a bird on its nest"; and the scene beheld of Eleanor--Lucy pressing the terra-cotta to her lips;--and Italy "having not enough faith to make a heresy"--(true, too, of France, is it not?) and Chapter XXIII--"a base and plundering happiness"; and the scene of the confessional; and that sudden phrase of Eleanor's in her talk with Manisty that makes the whole world--and the whole book--right, "_She loves you!"_ That is art.... But, above all, my dear lady, acknowledgments and praise for the hand that created "Lucy"--that recreated, rather--my dear countrywoman! Truly, that is an accomplishment and one that will endear its author to the whole new world. And again one asks whether the readers that now are write such generous, such encouraging things to the makers of tales, as the readers of twenty years ago! If not, I cannot but think it is a loss. For praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best. * * * * * It was during our stay on the Alban hills that I first became conscious in myself, after a good many springs spent in Italy, of a deep and passionate sympathy for the modern Italian State and people; a sympathy widely different from that common temper in the European traveler which regards Italy as the European playground, picture-gallery, and curiosity-shop, and grudges the smallest encroachment by the needs of the new nation on the picturesque ruin of the past. Italy in 1899 was passing through a period of humiliation and unrest. The defeats of the luckless Erythrean expedition were still hot in Italian memory. The extreme Catholic party at home, the sentimental Catholic tourist from abroad, were equally contemptuous and critical; and I was often indignantly aware of a tone which seemed to me ungenerous and unjust toward the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who had really most cause to be grateful for all that the youngest--and oldest--of European Powers had done in the forty years since 1860 to furnish itself with the necessary equipment, moral, legal, and material, of a modern democracy. This vein of feeling finds expression in _Eleanor_. Manisty represents the scornful dilettante, the impatient accuser of an Italy he does not attempt to understand; while the American Lucy, on the other side draws from her New England tradition a glowing sympathy for the Risorgimento and its fruits, for the efforts and sacrifices from which modern Italy arose, that refuses to be chilled by the passing corruptions and scandals of the new _régime_. Her influence prevails and Manisty recants. He spends six solitary weeks wandering through middle Italy, in search of the fugitives--Eleanor and Lucy--who have escaped him--and at the end of it he sees the old, old country and her people with new eyes--which are Lucy's eyes. "What rivers--what fertility--what a climate! And the industry of the people! Catch a few English farmers and set them to do what the Italian peasant does, year in and year out, without a murmur! Look at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it, scarcely, that hasn't been made by human hands. Look at the hill towns; and think of the human toil that has gone to the making and maintaining of them since the world began.... _Ecco!_--there they are"--and he pointed down the river to the three or four distant towns, each on its mountain spur, that held the valley between them and Orvieto, pale jewels on the purple robe of rock and wood--"So Virgil saw them. So the latest sons of time shall see them--the homes of a race that we chatter about without understanding--the most laborious race in the wide world.... Anyway, as I have been going up and down their country, ... prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the mischief of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper--incredibly, primevally old!--that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race--only now fully let loose--that will remake Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men! The Pope--and Crispi!--waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth 'with equal mind'; and that 'with equal mind' will sweep them both to its own goal--not theirs! ... No--there are plenty of dangers ahead.... Socialism is serious; Sicily is serious; the economic difficulties are serious; the House of Savoy will have a rough task, perhaps, to ride the seas that may come.--But _Italy_ is safe. You can no more undo what has been done than you can replace the child in the womb. The birth is over. The organism is still weak, but it lives. And the forces behind it are, indefinitely, mysteriously stronger than its adversaries think." In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book." "_Comrade of our future_." As one looks out to-day upon the Italian fighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy and France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against the attack of Italy's old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concerned not only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, I wonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, suggested these words written eighteen years ago? EPILOGUE And here, for a time at least, I bring these _Recollections_ to an end with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. Since _Eleanor_ appeared, and my father died, eighteen years have gone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the one hand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing to personal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, the English rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my home gates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in _Lady Rose's Daughter_, _The Marriage of William Ashe_, and _Fenwick's Career;_ in _Richard Meynell_ I attempted the vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not--as in _Robert Elsmere_--an exile, for a hero; _Lady Connie_ is a picture of Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can now make it; _Eltham House_ is a return to the method of _William Ashe_, and both _Lady Connie_ and _Missing_ have been written since the war. _Missing_ takes for its subject a fragment from the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real life in future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two years of the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literature of imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"! There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of the great catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the world behind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked to Aeneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls in a blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way into existence as it terribly _is_, had still to taste reality and pain. We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our life, and will be so for years after the signing of peace. As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I look back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my thoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and social experiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment of mind. When we came up to London in 1881, George Eliot was just dead (December, 1880); Browning and Carlyle passed away in the course of the 'eighties; Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this of Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great multitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge's setting, of "Crossing the Bar" by the Abbey Choir sent the "wild echoes" of the dead man's verse flying up and on through the great arches overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of the poet was waning when he died, and has been hotly disputed since; though, as it seems to me, these later years have seen the partial return of an ebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; the difficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind had wrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far more vital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which he clothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The "Idylls," so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the narrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been said a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict is emerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alike by young lovers and the "drooping old." I only remember seeing Tennyson twice--once in a crowded drawing-room, and once on the slopes of Blackdown, in his big cloak. The strong set face under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentle face of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a passing glimpse--a gesture--of George Meredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison's house at Hampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsome curly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. He was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical presence scarcely marred. We had some passing talk that day, but--to my infinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work and his genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp's Career"--a much truncated version--was coming out in the _Fortnightly_ in 1874. I had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both the Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith's quality; but I was at the time and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity and clarity, and the Meredithian manner repelled me. About the same time, when I was no more than three or four and twenty, I remember a visit to Cambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guests by day of Frederic Myers, and some of his Trinity and King's friends. Those two days of endless talk in beautiful College rooms with men like Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearth whereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedom than at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharp religious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up like balls in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pass them on. And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electric atmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in George Meredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men were already giving to _Richard Feverel_, which had been published some fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest with myself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was not till _Diana of the Crossways_ came out, after we had moved to London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day the saturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle's influence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and a great master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there is no doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. The man behind is _great enough_, and rewards the reader's effort to understand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle is strengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; we are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that without it we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as in Alpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself. Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist's thought fashions for itself a manner more intimate and personal than in prose. George Meredith's poetry is still only the possession of a minority, even among those who form the poetic audience of a generation. There are many of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--the young and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of the poetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, its music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward ear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping. Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite of common friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert Louis Stevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of his generation touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. And that by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written. Stevenson's hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since his death have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to approach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid great difference--to the hold of the Brontës on their day and ours. The sense of an unsurpassable courage--against great odds--has been the same in both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In Stevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the Brontës did not possess--the element of charm, the _petit carillon,_ to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme.[1] There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most intellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, _The Master of Ballantrae_. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far future Stevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he will enter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as a letter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with their wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their _vision_--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of us more than his stories, dear to us as these are. He died in his forty-fifth year, at the height of his power. If he had lived ten--twenty--years longer, he might well have done work that would have set him with Scott in the history of letters. As it is, he remains the most graceful and appealing, the most animated and delightful, figure in the literary history of the late nineteenth century. He is sure of his place. "Myriad-footed Time will discover many other inventions; but mine are mine!" And to that final award his poems no less than his letters will richly contribute--the haunting beauty of the "Requiem," the noble lines "To my Father," the lovely verses "In memory of F.A.S."--surely immortal, so long as mother-hearts endure. [Footnote 1: Greek: Ti gar chariton agapaton Anthropois apaneuthen;] Another great name was steadily finding its place during our first London years. Thomas Hardy had already published some of his best novels in the 'seventies, and was in full production all through the 'eighties and 'nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected me was the _Return of the Native_, and I did not read it till some time after its publication. Although there had been a devoted and constantly growing audience for Mr. Hardy's books for twenty years before the publication of _Tess of the Durbervilles,_ my own recollection is that Tess marked the conversion of the larger public, who then began to read all the earlier books, in that curiously changed mood which sets in when a writer is no longer on trial, but has, so to speak, "made good." And since that date how intimately have the scenes and characters of Mr. Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees--I count myself among this tardy company--to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written _Jude the Obscure!_ On the other hand, in the three volumes of _The Dynasts_ he has given us one of the noblest, and possibly one of the most fruitful, experiments in recent English letters. Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade later than Mr. Hardy's earlier novels. It thrills one's literary pulse now to look back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, a boy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting to hundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds also of a life's work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent! The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, past calculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the True Romance." It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit of his work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has accumulated on this wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higher imagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, or Kim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the Roman Wall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lends actual life and speech, he carries through all the great company the flag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance." It was Meredith's flag, and Stevenson's and Scott's--it comes handed down in an endless chain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have taken undisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most that literary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watch and rejoice in Rudyard Kipling's work may be counted among those gifts of the gods which bring no Nemesis with them. Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--was rising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling's. _The Window in Thrums_ appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the French masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, _Pêcheur d'Islande._ Barrie's gift, also, has been a gift making for the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the True Romance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service. And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels; though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteen years--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--of that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and stimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. The New Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day it appears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels of Mr. Wells. Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellent story-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; _Kipps_ was almost a masterpiece; _Tono-Bungay_ a piece of admirable fooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely rare in Mr. Wells's books; while _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ is perhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because the subject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast an audience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life nor joints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whose names one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this time on a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarily well. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modern literature than the pages describing Mr. Britling's motor-drive on the night of the declaration of war. They compare with the description of the Thames in _Tono-Bungay_. These, and a few others like them, will no doubt appear among the _morceaux choisis_ of a coming day. But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, ill-written, undigested pages of _The New Machiavelli_ again--or of half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony both of plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The only thing which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--_charm_. Diderot, the prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the phrase "_sous le charme_" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"_C'est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je réfléchis, que j'écris_"--Mr. Wells for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up. _Le Neveu de Rameau_ is a masterpiece of satire; yet there is no ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr. Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the _à peu près_ of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become literature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot. Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an _excitateur d'idées_. Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, a preacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to say that his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who has most general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in his three principal books, the _Old Wives' Tale_, _Clayhanger_, and _Hilda Lessways_, has the solidity and relief--the ugliness also!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. But the _Comédie Humaine_ has a breadth and magnificence of general conception which govern all its details, and Stendhal's work is linked to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects its teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett's work seems to many readers to be choked by detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detail as he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennett succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in _War and Peace_, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in _Anna Karénin_, or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method--with all its _longueurs_. Has he justified it yet? One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail he likes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence which presents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is the master, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands and foreign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with any personal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his best work he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make the English mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italian mind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flung responsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written and unwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad's slightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without this background, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at one with Mr. Kipling. Only the tone and accent are wholly different. Mr. Conrad's extraordinary intelligence seems to stand outside his subject, describing what he sees, as though he were crystal-gazing at figures and scenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr. Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what he tells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at command every detail and every accessory that he needs. Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has written such vivid, such moving pages (I know! for in some of its scenes--on the Somme battle-fields, for instance--I have stood where he has stood), has still the harvest of his literary life before him. Since _The Country House_ it does not seem to me that he has ever found a subject that really suits him--and "subject is everything." But he has passion and style, and varied equipment, whether of training or observation; above all, an individuality it is abundantly worth while to know. On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find but little that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There are ferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselves in a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of them representing some greater concession to modern critical and historical knowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped the hearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamental problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive criticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead us far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more melancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how the loosening and vivifying action of the war will express itself religiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty" movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is endeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among the young; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself has brought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silently providing the "pile of gray heather" from which, when the moment comes, the beacon-light may spring. The greatest figure in the twenty years before the war seems to me to have been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with all their absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect of his books. _A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla and Charybdis_, and _Christianity at the Cross-Roads_ have settled nothing. What book of real influence does? They present many contradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For one leading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another a good deal too far. But they contain passages drawn straight from a burning spiritual experience, passages also of a compelling beauty, which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as Father Tyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be. Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausible systems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible and shapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, the men of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and George Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" that lights human thought a little farther on its way. Meanwhile, it must often seem to any one who ponders these past years, as if what is above all wanting to our religious moment is courage and imagination. If only Bishop Henson had stood his trial for heresy!--there would have been a seed of new life in this lifeless day. If only, instead of deserting the churches, the Modernists of to-day would have the courage _to claim them!_--there again would be a stirring of the waters. Is it not possible that Christianity, which we have thought of as an old faith, is only now, with the falling away of its original sheath-buds, at the beginning of its true and mightier development? A religion of love, rooted in and verified by the simplest experiences of each common day, possessing in the Life of Christ a symbol and rallying cry of inexhaustible power, and drawing from its own corporate life of service and aspiration, developed through millions of separate lives, the only reasonable hope of immortality, and the only convincing witness to a Divine and Righteous Will at work in the universe;--it is under some such form that one tries to dream the future. The chaos into which religious observance has fallen at the present day is, surely, a real disaster. Religious services in which men and women cannot take part, either honestly or with any spiritual gain, are better let alone. Yet the ideal of a common worship is an infinitely noble one. Year after year the simplest and most crying reforms in the liturgy of the Church of England are postponed, because nobody can agree upon them. And all the time the starving of "the hungry sheep" goes on. But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it is plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of transformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history with the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northern races upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution. In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions of British men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their former ways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything they have ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere change of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of themselves and the world, cannot pass away without permanently affecting the life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to each other. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years can watch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us who are nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future had fallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a coming world which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under the Derby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now in Mesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. His family and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risen immeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, on the "peak in Darien," the veil has been drawn aside from wonders and secrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died without even guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; his speech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesome boy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officer of whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken of any one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another social world, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a hell of fire and torment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and has learned that a "swell" can reckon _his_ life--his humble, insignificant life as it used to be--as worth more than his own. And there are thousands on whom the mere excitement of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible ink, bringing out a hundred unexpected aptitudes, developing a mental energy that surprises themselves. "On my farm," says a farmer I know, "I have both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come back for agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They were all much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who have been to the front are worth twice the others. I don't think they _know_ that they are doing more work, and doing it better than they used to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men they were." And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centers, I know something of the London boy, how the discipline, the food, the open air, the straining and stimulating of every power and sense that the war has brought about, seems to be transforming and hardening the race! In the noble and Pauline sense, I mean. These lanky, restless lads have indeed "endured hardness." Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they are facts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and all the hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat of intelligence, a new passion of sympathy and justice, has been roused in our midst by this vast and terrible effort, which, when the war is over, will burn out of itself the rotten things in our social structure, and make reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder. Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the ears of all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, seems to have been urging the same message. More life--more opportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the masses of plain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are now putting forth their just and ardent claim on the future. Let me recall a few more personal landmarks in the eighteen years that have passed since _Eleanor_ appeared, before I close. Midway in the course of them, 1908 was marked out for me, for whom a yearly visit to Italy or France, and occasionally to Germany, made the limits of possible travel, by the great event of a spring spent in the United States and Canada. We saw nothing more in the States than every tourist sees--New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and a few other towns; but the interest of every hour seemed to renew in me a nervous energy and a capacity for enjoyment that had been flagging before. Our week at Washington at the British Embassy with Mr. and Mrs. Bryce, as they then were, our first acquaintance with Mr. Roosevelt, then at the White House, and with American men of politics and affairs, like Mr. Root, Mr. Garfield, and Mr. Bacon--set all of it in spring sunshine, amid a sheen of white magnolias and May leaf--will always stay with me as a time of pleasure, unmixed and unspoiled, such as one's fairy godmother seldom provides without some medicinal drawback! And to find the Jusserands there so entirely in their right place--he so unchanged from the old British Museum days when we knew him first--was one of the chief items in the delightful whole. So, too, was the discussion of the President, first with one Ambassador and then with another. For who could help discussing him! And what true and admiring friends he had in both these able men who knew him through and through, and were daily in contact with him, both as diplomats and in social life. Then Philadelphia, where I lectured on behalf of the London Play Centers; Boston, with Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett--a pair of friends, gentle, eager, distinguished, whom none who loved them will forget; Cambridge, and our last sight of Charles Eliot Norton, standing to bid us farewell on the steps of Shady Hill; Hawthorne's house at Concord; and the lovely shore of Newport. The wonderful new scenes unrolled themselves day by day; kind faces and welcoming voices were always round us, and it was indeed hard to tear ourselves away. But at the end of April we went north to Canada for yet another chapter of quickened life. A week at Montreal, first with Sir William van Horne, then Ottawa, and a week with Lord and Lady Grey; and finally the never-to-be-forgotten experience of three weeks in the "Saskatchewan," Sir William's car on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which took us first from Toronto to Vancouver, and then from Vancouver to Quebec. So in a swallow's flight from sea to sea I saw the marvelous land wherein, perhaps, in a far hidden future, lies the destiny of our race. Of all this--of the historic figures of Sir William van Home, of beloved Lord Grey, of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Sir Robert Borden, as they were ten years ago, there would be much to say. But my present task is done. Nor is there any room here for those experiences of the war, and of the actual fighting front, to which I have already given utterance in _England's Effort_ and _Towards the Goal._ Some day, perhaps, if these _Recollections_ find an audience, and when peace has loosened our tongues and abolished that very necessary person, the Censor, there will be something more to be written. But now, at any rate, I lay down my pen. For a while these _Recollections_, during the hours I have been at work on them, have swept me out of the shadow of the vast and tragic struggle in which we live, into days long past on which there is still sunlight--though it be a ghostly sunlight; and above them the sky of normal life. But the dream and the illusion are done. The shadow descends again, and the evening paper comes in, bringing yet another mad speech of a guilty Emperor to desecrate yet another Christmas Eve. The heart of the world is set on peace. But for us, the Allies, in whose hands lies the infant hope of the future, it must be a peace worthy of our dead and of their sacrifice. "Let us gird up the loins of our minds. In due time we shall reap, if we faint not." And meanwhile across the western ocean America, through these winter days, sends incessantly the long procession of her men and ships to the help of the Old World and an undying cause. Silently they come, for there are powers of evil lying in wait for them. But "still they come." The air thickens, as it were with the sense of an ever-gathering host. On this side, and on that, it is the Army of Freedom, and of Judgment. _Christmas Eve, 1917._ THE END OF VOLUME II 
6042	----	This eBook was produced by Marjorie Fulton. THE DIARY AND LETTERS OF MADAME D'ARBLAY (FRANCES BURNEY.) WITH NOTES BY W. C. WARD, AND PREFACED BY LORD MACAULAY'S ESSAY. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. 2. (1787-1792.) WITH AN ENGRAVING OF GEORGE III., QUEEN CHARLOTTE, AND THEIR FAMILY. LONDON: VIZETELLY & CO., 16, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1891. PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE & COMPANY, LONDON, CITY ROAD. 10. (1787) COURT DUTIES AT ST. JAMES'S AND WINDSOR --9-48 The Queen's Birthday Drawing Room--A Serious Dilemma--Counsels of a Court Official--Mr. Turbulent's Anxiety to Introduce Mr. Wellbred--Colonel Wellbred is received at Tea--Eccentric Mr. Bryant--Mr. Turbulent in a New Character--Bantering a Princess- -Mr. Turbulent meets with a Rebuff--A Surprise at the Play--The King's Birthday--The Equerries: Colonel Manners--The Duchess de Polignac at Windsor--Colonel Manners' Musical Accomplishments- -Mrs. Schwellenberg's "Lump of Leather"--Mrs. Schwellenberg's Frogs--Mr. Turbulent's Antics. 11 (1787-8) COURT DUTIES: SOME VARIATIONS IN THEIR ROUTINE--49-85 Meeting of the two Princes--Bunbury, the Caricaturist--Mrs. Siddons proves disappointing on near acquaintance--Mr. Fairly's Bereavement--Troublesome Mr. Turbulent--A Conceited Parson--Mr. Turbulent becomes a Nuisance--Dr. Herschel and his Sister--Gay and Entertaining Mr. Bunbury--The Prince of Wales at Windsor again--False Rumours of Miss Burney's Resignation--Tyrannical Mrs. Schwellenberg--Mrs. Schwellenberg's Capriciousness--New Year's Day--Chatty Mr. Bryant again--Dr. Johnson's Letters to Mrs. Thrale discussed--A Pair of Paragons--Mr. Turbulent's Self Condemnation--Miss Burney among her Old Friends--Some Trivial Court Incidents. 12 (1788) THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS--86-153 Westminster Hall at the opening of the Hastings Trial--Warren Hastings appears at the Bar--The Lord Chancellor's Speech--The Reading of the Charges commenced--An Old Acquaintance--William Windham, Esq., M.P.--Windham inveighs against Warren Hastings- -Miss Burney Battles for the Accused--A Wearied M.P.--Mr. Crutchley reappears--Mr. Windham discusses the Impeachment- -Windham affects to commiserate Hastings--Miss Burney is again present at Hastings's Trial--Burke's Speech in support of the Charges--Further Conversation with Mr. Windham--Miss Fuzilier likely to become Mrs. Fairly--The Hastings Trial again: Mr. Fox in a Rage--Mrs. Crewe, Mr. Burke and Mr. Windham--Miss Burney's Unbiassed Sentiments--Burke and Sheridan meet with Cold Receptions--At Windsor again--Death of Mrs. Delany--The page vi Hastings Trial and Mr. Windham again--"The Queen is so kind"-- Personal Resemblance between Windham and Hastings--Death of Young Lady Mulgrave--Again at Windsor--Another Meeting with Mr. Crutchley--Mr. Turbulent's troublesome Pleasantries--Colonel Fairly and Second Attachments. 13. (1788) ROYAL VISIT TO CHELTENHAM--154--219 The Royal Party and their Suite--Loyalty not Damped by the Rain- -Arrival at Fauconberg Hall--The Tea-Table Difficulty--A t`ete-`a-t`ete wit" Colonel Fairly--The King's Gentlemen and the Queen's Ladies--Royalty Crowded at Fauconberg Hall--At the wells--Conversation and Flirtation with Colonel Fairly--Miss Burney meets an old Friend--Colonel Fairly again--A Visit to miss Palmer--"Original Love Letters"--The Founder of Sunday Schools criticised--On the Walks--An Unexpected Visitor-- Courts and Court Life--The Vindictive Baretti--speculations upon Colonel Fairly's Re-marrying--Colonel Fairly again presents Himself--The Colonel and the "Original Love Letters"--The Gout and the Love Letters again--A Dinner with Colonel Fairly and Miss Planta--Royal Concern for the Colonel's Gout--young Republicans Converted--The Princes' Animal Spirits--The Duke of York: Royal Visit to the Theatre--An uncourtly visitor--Mr. Fairly reads "Akenside" to Miss Burney--The Doctor's Embarrassment--From Grave to Gay--A Visit to Worcester--The Queen and Mr. Fairly--Mr. Fairly Moralizes--Major Price is tired of Retirement--The Return to Windsor--At Windsor again: The Canon and Mrs. Schwellenberg-- Compliments from a famous Foreign Astronomer--The Prince eyes miss Burney curiously--Colonel manners's Beating--mr. Fairly is Discussed by his Brother Equerries--Baron Trenck: Mr. Turbulent's Raillery--Amiable Mrs. Schwellenberg again--A Royal Joke--Colonel Goldsworthy's Breach of Etiquette--Illness of Mrs. Schwellenberg- -General Grenville's Regiment at Drill. 14. (1788-9) THE KING'S ILLNESS--220-299 Uncertain State of the King's Health--The King complains of Want of Sleep--Distress of the Queen--First Outburst of the King's Delirium--An Anxious Night--The King's Delirious Condition-The King refuses to see Dr. Warren--The Queen's anxiety to hear Dr. Warren's opinion--The Queen removes to more distant Apartments--A Visit from Mr. Fairly--The King's Night Watchers--A Change in Miss Burney's Duties--Mr. Fairly Succeeds in Soothing the King--New Arrangements--The Princess Augusta's Birthday-- Strange Behaviour of the First Gentleman in Europe--Stringent New Regulations--Mrs. Schwellenberg is back again--Public Prayers for the King decided upon--Sir Lucas Pepys On the King's Condition- Further Changes at the Lodge--Mr. Fairly and the Learned Ladies-- Reports on the King's Condition--Mr. Fairly thinks the King Page vii needs Stricter Management--Mr. Fairly wants a Change--Removal of the King to Kew determined upon--A Privy Council held--The Removal to Kew--A Mysterious Visitor--The King's Arrival--The Arrangements at Kew Palace--A Regency hinted at--Mr. Fairly's Kind Offices--Mrs. Schwellenberg's Parlour--A new Physician Summoned--Mrs. Schwellenberg's Opinion of Mr. Fairly--The King's varying Condition--Dr. Willis and his Son--Learning in Women--The Queen and Mr. Fairly's Visits-A Melancholy Birthday--Mr. Fairly on Fans--Mr. Fairly continues his Visits: the Queen again Remarks upon them--The Search for Mr. Fairly--Miss Burney's Alarm on being chased by the King--A Royal Salute and Royal Confidences-- Curiosity regarding Miss Burney's meeting with the King--The Regency Bill--Infinitely Licentious!--Miss Burney is taxed with Visiting Gentlemen--Improvement in the King's Health--Mr. Fairly and Mr. Windham--The King continues to improve--The King's Health is completely Restored. 15. (1789) THE KING'S RECOVERY: ROYAL VISIT TO WEYMOUTH--300-333 The King's Reappearance--An Airing and its Consequences-- Illuminations on the King's Recovery--Mr. Fairly on Miss Burney's Duties--A Visit from Miss Fuzilier--A Command from Her Majesty- -Colonel Manners mystifies Mrs. Schwellenberg--The Sailor Prince--Loyal Reception of the King in the New Forest--The Royal journey to Weymouth--Welcome to Weymouth--The Royal Plunge with Musical honours--"You must Kneel, Sir!"--Royal doings in and about Weymouth--A Patient Audience--A Fatiguing but Pleasant Day--Lulworth Castle--The Royal Party at the Assembly Rooms--A journey to Exeter and Saltram--May "One" come in?--An Excursion to Plymouth Dockyard--A Visit to a Seventy-four--A Day at Mount Edgecumbe--Mr. Fairly on a Court Life--A Brief Sojourn at Longleat--Tottenham Court: Return to Windsor. 16. (1789-90) MR. FAIRLY'S MARRIAGE: THE HASTINGS TRIAL--334-365 Rumours of Mr. Fairly's impending Marriage--A Royal Visit to the Theatre: jammed in the Crowd--In the Manager's Box--Mr. Fairly's Marriage imminent--Court Duties discussed--Mr. Fairly's Strange Wedding--Renewal of the Hastings Trial: A Political Impromptu--An Illbred Earl of Chesterfield--Miss Burney in a New Capacity--The long-forgotten Tragedy: Miss Burnei again as Reader--Colonel Manners in his Senatorial Capacity--A Conversation with Mr. Windham at the Hastings Trial--A Glimpse of Mrs. Piozzi--Captain Burney wants a Ship to go to Court--Captain Burney and Mr. Windham--Mr. Windham speaks on a Legal Point--An Emphatic Peroration-An Aptitude for Logic and for Greek--More Talk with Mr. Windham. Page viii 17. (1790-1) MISS BURNEY RESIGNS HER PLACE AT COURT--366-409 A Melancholy Confession--Captain Burney's Laconic Letter and Interview--Burke's Speech on the French Revolution--An Awkward Meeting--A New Visit from Mrs. Fairly--One Tragedy Finished and Another Commenced--Miss Burney's Resignation Memorial--Mr. Windham Intervenes--An Amusing Interview with Mr. Boswell--Ill, Unsettled, and Unhappy--A Medical Opinion on Miss Burney's Condition--Miss Burney breaks the Matter to the Queen--The Memorial and Explanatory Note--The Keeper of the Robes' Consternation--Leave of Absence is Suggested--A Royal Gift to the Master of the Horse--Conferences with the Queen--Miss Burney determines on Seclusion--The Hastings Trial Resumed: The Accused makes his Defence--Mr. Windham is Congratulated on his Silence-- Miss Burney makes her Report--Prince William insists on the King's Health being Drunk--The Queen's Health--The Procession to the Ball-room: Absence of the Princes--Boswell's Life of johnson--The Close of Miss Burney's Court Duties--Miss Burney's Successor: A Pension from the Queen--Leavetakings--Farewell to Kew--The Final Parting. 18. (1791-2) REGAINED LIBERTY--410-468 Released from Duty--A Western journey: Farnham Castle--A Party of French Fugitives--Winchester Cathedral--Stonehenge, Wilton, and Milton Abbey--Lyme and Sidmouth--Sidmouth Loyalty--Powderham Castle and Collumpton Church--Glastonbury Abbey--Wells Cathedral--Bath Revisited--A Visit from Lady Spencer--Bath Sunday Schools--Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire--Bishop Percy--The Duchess of Devonshire again--Dr. Burney's Conversation with Mr. Burke: Remarks by Miss Burney--Literary Recreation--Sir Joshua Reynoldsls Blindness--Among Old Friends--A Summons from the Queen--Mr. Hastings's Defence--Diverse Views--Mr. Law's Speech Discussed--Mr. Windham on the French National Assembly--"A Barbarous Business!"--Death of Sir Joshua Reynolds--Mr. Windham twitted on his Lack of Compassion--A Point of Ceremonial--Mrs. Schwellenberg and Mlle. Jacobi--A Long Talk with the King and Queen--Madame de Genlis: a Woeful Change--The Weeping Beauty Again--Madame de la Fite and Mrs. Hastings--The Impetuous Orator- -Mimicry of Dr. Johnson--The King's Birthday--Mr. Hastings's Speech--A Well-preserved Beauty--The Burkes--Burke's Conversational Powers--A Wild Irish Girl--Erskine's Egotism-- Caen-wood---An Adventure with Mrs. Crewe--An Invitation from Arthur Young. SECTION 10. (1787) COURT DUTIES AT ST. JAMES'S AND WINDSOR. THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY DRAWING ROOM. January. Go back to the 16th, when I went to town, accompanied only by Mr. de Luc. I saw my dear father the next morning, who gave me a poem on the queen's birthday, to present. It was very pretty; but I felt very awkward in offering it to her, as it was from so near a relation, and without any particular reason or motive. Mr. Smelt came and stayed with me almost all the morning, and soothed and solaced me by his charming converse. The rest of the day was devoted to milliners, mantua-makers, and such artificers, and you may easily conjecture how great must be my fatigue. Nevertheless, when, in the midst of these wasteful toils, the Princess Augusta entered my room, and asked me, from the queen, if I should wish to see the ball the next day, I preferred running the risk of that new fatigue, to declining an honour so offered: especially as the Princess Augusta was herself to open the ball. A chance question this night from the queen, whom I now again attended as usual, fortunately relieved me from my embarrassment about the poem. She inquired of me if my father was still writing? "A little," I answered, and the next morning, Thursday, the 18th, when the birth-day was kept, I found her all sweetness and serenity; mumbled out my own little compliment, which she received as graciously as if she had understood and heard it; and then, Page 10 when she was dressed, I followed her through the great rooms, to get rid of the wardrobe woman, and there taking the poem from my pocket, I said "I told your majesty that my father had written a little!--and here--the little is!" She took it from me with a smile and a curtsey, and I ran off. She never has named it since; but she has spoken of my father with much sweetness and complacency. The modest dignity of the queen, upon all subjects of panegyric, is truly royal and noble. I had now, a second time, the ceremony of being entirely new dressed. I then went to St. James's, where the queen gave a very gracious approbation of my gewgaws, and called upon the king to bestow the same; which his constant goodhumour makes a matter of great ease to him. The queen's dress, being for her own birthday, was extremely simple, the style of dress considered. The king was quite superb, and the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth were ornamented with much brilliancy. Not only the princess royal was missed at this exhibition, but also the Prince of Wales. He wrote, however, his congratulations to the queen, though the coldness then subsisting between him and his majesty occasioned his absence from Court. I fear it was severely felt by his royal mother, though she appeared composed and content. The two princesses spoke very kind words, also, about my frippery on this festival; and Princess Augusta laid her positive commands upon me that I should change my gown before I went to the lord chamberlain's box, where only my head could be seen. The counsel proved as useful as the consideration was amiable. When the queen was attired, the Duchess of Ancaster was admitted to the dressing room, where she stayed, in conversation with their majesties and the princesses, till it was time to summon the bed-chamber women. During this, I had the office of holding the queen's train. I knew, for me, it was a great honour, yet it made me feel, once more, so like a mute upon the stage, that I could scarce believe myself only performing my own real character. Mrs. Stainforth and I had some time to stand upon the stairs before the opening of the doors. We joined Mrs. Fielding and her daughters, and all entered together, but the crowd parted us - they all ran on, and got in as they could, and I Page 11 remained alone by the door. They soon found me out, and made signs to me, which I saw not, and then they sent me messages that they had kept room for me just by them. I had received orders from the queen to go out at the end of the second country dance ; I thought, therefore, that as I now was seated by the door, I had better be content, and stay where I could make my exit in a moment, and without trouble or disturbance. A queer-looking old lady sat next me, and I spoke to her now and then, by way of seeming to belong to somebody. She did not appear to know whether it were advisable for her to answer me or not, seeing me alone, and with high head ornaments; but as I had no plan but to save appearances to the surrounders, I was perfectly satisfied that my very concise propositions should meet with yet more laconic replies. Before we parted, however, finding me quiet and inoffensive, she became voluntarily sociable, and I felt so much at home, by being still in a part of the palace, that I needed nothing further than just so much notice as not to seem an object to be avoided. The sight which called me to that spot perfectly answered all my expectations: the air, manner, and countenance of the queen, as she goes round the circle, are truly graceful and engaging: I thought I could understand, by the motion of her lips, and the expression of her face, even at the height and distance of the chamberlain's box, the gracious and pleasant speeches she made to all whom she approached. With my glass, you know, I can see just as other people see with the naked eye. The princesses looked extremely lovely, and the whole Court was in the utmost splendour. A SERIOUS DILEMMA. At the appointed moment I slipped through the door, leaving my old lady utterly astonished at my sudden departure, and I passed, alone and quietly, to Mr. Rhamus's apartment, which was appropriated for the company to wait in. Here I desired a servant I met with to call my man: he was not to be found. I went down the stairs, and made them call him aloud, by my name; all to no purpose. Then the chairmen were called, but called also in vain! What to do I knew not ; though I was still in a part of the Page 12 palace, it was separated by many courts, avenues, passages, and alleys, from the queen's or my own apartments- and though I had so lately passed them, I could not remember the way, nor at that late hour could I have walked, dressed as I then was, and the ground wet with recent rain, even if I had had a servant: I had therefore ordered the chair allotted me for these days; but chair and chairmen and footmen were alike out of the way. My fright lest the queen should wait for me was very serious. I believe there are state apartments through which she passes, and therefore I had no chance to know when she retired from the ball-room. Yet could I not stir, and was forced to return to the room whence I came, in order to wait for John, that I might be out of the way of the cold winds which infested the hall. I now found a young clergyman, standing by the fire. I suppose my anxiety was visible, for he instantly inquired if he could assist me. I declined his offer, but walked up and down, making frequent questions about my chair and John. He then very civilly said, "You seem distressed, ma'am; would you permit me the honour to see for your chair, or, if it is not come, as you seem hurried, would you trust me to see you home?" I thanked him, but could not accept his services. He was sorry, he said, that I refused him, but could not wonder, as he was a stranger. I made some apologising answer, and remained in that unpleasant situation till, at length, a hackneychair was procured me. My new acquaintance would take no denial to handing me to the chair. When I got in, I told the men to carry me to the palace. "We are there now!" cried they; "what part of the palace?" I was now in a distress the most extraordinary : I really knew not my own direction! I had always gone to my apartment in a chair, and had been carried by chairmen officially appointed; and, except that it was in St. James's palace, I knew nothing of my own situation. "Near the park," I told them, and saw my new esquire look utterly amazed at me. "Ma'am," said he, " half the palace is in the park." "I don't know how to direct," cried I, in the greatest embarrassment, "but it is somewhere between Pall Mall and the park." Page 13 "I know where the lady lives well enough," cried one of the chairmen, "'tis in St. James's street." "No, no," cried I, "'tis in St. James's palace." "Up with the chair!" cried the other man, "I know best--'tis in South Audley-street; I know the lady well enough." Think what a situation at the moment! I found they had both been drinking the queen's health till they knew not what they said and could with difficulty stand. Yet they lifted me up, and though I called in the most terrible fright to be let out, they carried me down the steps. I now actually screamed for help, believing they would carry me off to South Audley-street; and now my good genius, who had waited patiently in the crowd, forcibly stopped the chairmen, who abused him violently, and opened the door himself, and I ran back to the hall. You may imagine how earnestly I returned my thanks for this most seasonable assistance, without which I should almost have died with terror, for where they might have taken or dropped me, or how or where left me, who could say? He begged me to go again upstairs, but my apprehension about the queen prevented me. I knew she was to have nobody but me, and that her jewels, though few, were to be intrusted back to the queen's house to no other hands. I must, I said, go, be it in what manner it might. All I could devise was to summon Mr. Rhamus, the page. I had never seen him, but my attendance upon the queen would be an apology for the application, and I determined to put myself under his immediate protection. Mr. Rhamus was nowhere to be found ; he was already supposed to be gone to the queen's house, to wait the arrival of his majesty. This news redoubled my fear; and now my new acquaintance desired me to employ him in making inquiries for me as to the direction I wanted. It was almost ridiculous, in the midst of my distress, to be thus at a loss for an address to myself! I felt averse to speaking my name amongst so many listeners, and only told him he would much oblige me by finding out a direction to Mrs. Haggerdorn's rooms. He went upstairs ; and returning, said he could now direct the chairmen, if I did not fear trusting them. I did fear--I even shook with fear; yet my horror of disappointing the queen upon such a night prevailed over all my reluctance, and I ventured once more into the chair, thanking this excellent Samaritan, and begging him to give the direction very particularly. Page 14 Imagine, however, my gratitude and my relief, when, instead of hearing the direction, I heard only these words, " Follow me." And then did this truly benevolent young man himself play the footman, in walking by the side of the chair till we came to an alley, when he bid them turn; but they answered him with an oath, and ran on with me, till the poles ran against a wall, for they had entered a passage in which there was no outlet! I would fain have got out, but they would not hear me; they would only pull the chair back, and go on another way. But my guardian angel told them to follow him, or not, at their peril ; and then walked before the chair. We next came to a court where we were stopped by the sentinels. They said they had orders not to admit any hackney chairs. The chairmen vowed they would make way; I called out aloud to be set down; the sentinels said they would run their bayonets through the first man that attempted to dispute their orders. I then screamed out again to be set down, and my new and good friend peremptorily forced them to stop, and opening the door with violence, offered me his arm, saying, "You had better trust yourself with me, ma'am!" Most thankfully I now accepted what so fruitlessly I had declined, and I held by his arm, and we walked on together, but neither of us knew whither, nor the right way from the wrong 1 It was really a terrible situation. The chairmen followed us, clamorous for money, and full of abuse. They demanded half a crown - my companion refused to listen to such an imposition : my shaking hand could find no purse, and I begged him to pay them what they asked, that they might leave us. He did ; and when they were gone, I shook less, and was able to pay that one part of the debt I was now contracting. We wandered about, heaven knows where, in a way the most alarming and horrible to myself imaginable: for I never knew where I was.--It was midnight. I concluded the queen waiting for me.--It was wet. My head was full dressed. I was under the care of a total stranger; and I knew not which side to take, wherever we came. Inquiries were vain. The sentinels alone were in sight, and they are so continually changed that they knew no more of Mrs. Haggerdorn than if she had never resided here. At length I spied a door open, and I begged to enter it at a venture, for information. Fortunately a person stood in the passage who instantly spoke to me by my name; I never Page 15 heard that sound with more glee: to me he was a stranger, but I suppose he had seen me in some of the apartments. I begged him to direct me straight to the queen's rooms: he did ; and I then took leave of my most humane new friend, with a thousand acknowledgments for his benevolence and services. Was it not a strange business ? I can never say what an agony Of fright it cost me at the time, nor ever be sufficiently grateful for the kind assistance, so providentially afforded me.' COUNSELS OF A COURT OFFICIAL. The general directions and counsel of Mr. Smelt, which I have scrupulously observed ever since, were, in abridgment, these:- That I should see nobody at all but by appointment. This, as he well said, would obviate, not only numerous personal inconveniences to myself, but prevent alike surprises from those I had no leave to admit, and repetitions of visits from others who might inadvertently come too often. He advised me to tell this to my father, and beg it might be spread, as a settled part of my situation, among all who inquired for me. That I should see no fresh person whatsoever without an immediate permission from the queen, nor any party, even amongst those already authorised, without apprising her of such a plan. That I should never go out without an immediate application to her, so that no possible inquiry for me might occasion surprise or disappointment. These, and other similar ties, perhaps, had my spirits been better, I might less readily have acceded to : as it was, I would have bound myself to as many more. At length, however, even then, I was startled when Mr. Smelt, with some earnestness, said, "And, with respect to your parties, such as you may occasionally have here, you have but one rule for keeping all things smooth, and all partisans unoffended, at a distance--which is, to have no men--none! I stared a little, and made no answer. "Yes," cried he, "Mr. Locke may be admitted; but him only. Your father, you know, is of course." Still I was silent: after a pause of some length, he plumply Yet with an evidently affected unmeaningness, said, "Mr. Cambridge-- as to Mr. Cambridge--" I stopped him short at once; I dared not trust to what Page 16 might follow, and eagerly called Out, "Mr. Cambridge, Sir, I cannot exclude! So much friendship and kindness I owe, and have long owed him, that he would go about howling at my ingratitude, could I seem so suddenly to forget it!" My impetuosity in uttering this surprised, but silenced him; he said not a word more, nor did I. MR. TURBULENT's ANXIETY TO INTRODUCE MR. WELLBRED. Windsor, Sunday, Jan. 28.-I was too ill to go to church. I was now, indeed, rarely well enough for anything but absolute and unavoidable duties ; and those were still painfully and forcibly performed. I had only Miss Planta for my guest, and when she went to the princesses I retired for a quiet and solitary evening to my own room. But here, while reading, I was interrupted by a tat-tat at my door. I opened it and saw Mr. Turbulent. . . . He came forward, and began a gay and animated conversation, with a flow of spirits and good humour which I had never observed in him before. His darling colonel(230) was the subject that he still harped upon; but it was only with a civil and amusing raillery, not, as before, with an overpowering vehemence to conquer. Probably, however, the change in myself might be as observable as in him,-- since I now ceased to look upon him with that distance and coldness which hitherto he had uniformly found in me. I must give you a little specimen of him in this new dress. After some general talk, "When, ma'am," he said, "am I to have the honour of introducing Colonel Wellbred to you?" "Indeed, I have not settled that entirely!" "Reflect a little, then, ma'am, and tell me. I only wish to know when." "Indeed to tell you that is somewhat more than I am able to do; I must find it out myself, first." " Well, ma'am, make the inquiry as speedily as possible, I beg. What say you to now? shall I call him up? "No, no,--pray let him alone." "But will you not, at least, tell me your reasons for this conduct?" Page 17 "Why, frankly, then, if you will hear them and be quiet, I will confess them." I then told him, that I had so little time to myself, that to gain even a single evening was to gain a treasure; and that I had no chance but this. "Not," said I, "that I wish to avoid him, but to break the custom of constantly meeting with the equerries." "But it is impossible to break the custom, ma'am; it has been so always: the tea-table has been the time of uniting the company, ever since the king came to Windsor." " Well, but everything now is upon a new construction. I am not positively bound to do everything Mrs. Haggerdorn did, and his having drank tea with her will not make him conclude he must also drink tea with me." No, no, that is true, I allow. Nothing that belonged to her can bring conclusions round to you. But still, why begin with Colonel Wellbred? You did not treat Colonel Goldsworthy so?" "I had not the power of beginning with him. I did what I could, I assure you." "Major Price, ma'am?--I never heard you avoided him." "No; but I knew him before I came, and he knew much of my family, and indeed I am truly sorry that I shall now see no more of him. But Colonel Wellbred and I are mutually strangers." "All people are so at first, every acquaintance must have a beginning." "But this, if you are quiet, we are most willing should have none." "Not he, ma'am--he is not so willing; he wishes to come. He asked me, to-day, if I had spoke about it." I disclaimed believing this; but he persisted in asserting it, adding "For he said if I had spoke he would come." "He is very condescending," cried I, "but I am satisfied he would not think of it at all, if you did not put it in his head." "Upon my honour, You are mistaken; we talk just as much of it down there as up here." "you would much oblige me if you would not talk of it,- neither there nor here." "Let me end it, then, by bringing him at once!" "No, no, leave us both alone: he has his resources and his engagements as much as I have; we both are best as we now are." Page 18 "But what can he say, ma'am? Consider his confusion and disgrace! It is well known, in the world, the private life that the royal family live at Windsor, and who are the attendants that belong to them; and when Colonel Wellbred quits his waiting--three months' waiting and is asked how he likes Miss Burney, he must answer he has never seen her! And what, ma'am, has Colonel Wellbred done to merit such a mortification?" It was impossible not to laugh at such a statement of the case; and again he requested to bring him directly. "One quarter of an hour will content me ; I only wish to introduce him--for the sake of his credit in the world; and when once you have met, you need meet no more; no consequences whatever need be drawn to the detriment of your solitude." I begged him to desist, and let us both rest. "But have you, yourself, ma'am, no curiosity--no desire to see Colonel Wellbred?" "None in the world." "If, then, hereafter you admit any other equerry--" "No, no, I intend to carry the new construction throughout." "Or if you suffer anyone else to bring you Colonel Wellbred." "Depend upon it I have no such intention." "But if any other more eloquent man prevails--" " Be assured there is no danger." "Will you, at least, promise I shall be present at the meet--?" " There will be no meeting." "You are certainly, then, afraid of him?" I denied this, and, hearing the king's supper called, he took his leave ; though not before I very seriously told him that, however amusing all this might be as pure badinage, I Should be very earnestly vexed if he took any steps in the matter without my consent. COLONEL WELLBRED IS RECEIVED AT TEA. Feb. 2.-MISS Planta came to tea, and we went together to the eating-parlour, which we found quite empty. Mr. Turbulent's studious table was all deserted, and his books laid waste; but in a very few minutes he entered again, with his arms spread wide, his face all glee, and his voice all triumph, calling out, Page 19 "Mr. Smelt and Colonel Wellbred desire leave to wait upon miss Burney to tea!" A little provoked at this determined victory over my will and my wish, I remained silent,- but Miss Planta broke forth into open upbraidings: "Upon my word, Mr. Turbulent, this is really abominable it is all your own doing--and if I was Miss Burney I would not bear it!" and much more, till he fairly gave her to understand she had nothing to do with the matter. Then, turning to me, "What am I to say, ma'am? am I to tell Colonel Wellbred you hesitate?" He protested he came upon the embassy fairly employed. "Not fairly, I am sure, Mr. Turbulent The whole is a device and contrivance of your own! Colonel Wellbred would have been as quiet as myself, had you left him alone." "Don't throw it all upon me, ma'am; 'tis Mr. Smelt. But what are they to think of this delay? are they to suppose it requires deliberation whether or not you can admit a gentleman to your tea-table?" I begged him to tell me, at least, how it had passed, and in what manner he had brought his scheme about. But he would give me no satisfaction; he only said "You refuse to receive him, ma'am?-- shall I go and tell him you refuse to receive him?" "O No, This was enough -. he waited no fuller consent, but ran off. Miss Planta began a good-natured repining for me. I determined to fetch some work before they arrived; and in coming for it to my own room, I saw Mr. Turbulent, not yet gone downstairs. I really believe, by the strong marks of laughter on his countenance, that he had stopped to compose himself before he could venture to appear in the equerryroom! I looked at him reproachfully, and passed on; he shook his head at me in return, and hied downstairs. I had but just time to rejoin Miss Planta when he led the way to the two Other gentlemen: entering first, with the most earnest curiosity, to watch the scene. Mr. Smelt followed, introducing the colonel. I could almost have laughed, so ridiculous had the behaviour of Mr. Turbulent, joined to his presence and watchfulness, rendered this meeting; and I saw in Colonel Wellbred the most evident marks of similar sensations: for he coloured Page 20 violently on his entrance, and seemed in an embarrassment that, to any one who knew not the previous tricks of Mr. Turbulent, must have appeared really distressing. And, in truth, Mr. Smelt himself, little imagining what had preceded the interview, was so much struck with his manner and looks, that he conceived him to be afraid of poor little me, and observed, afterwards, with what "blushing diffidence" he had begun the acquaintance! I, who saw the true cause through the effect, felt more provoked than ever with Mr. Turbulent, since I was now quite satisfied he had been as busy with the colonel about me, as with me about the colonel. He is tall, his figure is very elegant, and his face very handsome: he is sensible, well-bred, modest, and intelligent. I had always been told he was very amiable and accomplished, and the whole of his appearance confirmed the report. The discourse was almost all Mr. Smelt's, the colonel was silent and reserved, and Mr. Turbulent had resolved to be a mere watchman. The king entered early and stayed late, and took away with him, on retiring, all the gentlemen. Feb. 3.-As the tea hour approached, to-day, Mr. Turbulent grew very restless. I saw what was passing in his mind, and therefore forbore ordering tea; but presently, and suddenly, as if from some instant impulse, he gravely came up to me, and said "Shall I go and call the colonel, ma'am?" "No, sir!" was my johnsonian reply. "What, ma'am!--won't you give him a little tea?" "No, no, no!--I beg you will be at rest!" He shrugged his shoulders, and walked away; and Mr. Smelt, smiling, said, "Will you give us any?" "O yes, surely cried I, and was going away to ring for the man. I believe I have already mentioned that I had no bell at all, except in my bedroom, and that only for my maid, whom I was obliged to summon first, like Smart's monkey-- "Here, Betty!--Nan!-- Go, call the maid, to call the man!" For Mrs. Haggerdorn had done without, twenty-six years, by always keeping her servant in waiting at the door. I could never endure inflicting such a hardship, and therefore had always to run to my bedroom, and wait the progress of the maid's arrival, and then of her search of the man, ere ever Page 21 I could give him an order. A mighty tiresome and inconvenient ceremony. Mr Turbulent insisted upon saving me this trouble, and went 'out himself to speak to John. But you will believe me a little amazed, when, in a very few minutes, he returned again, accompanied by his colonel! My surprise brought the colour both into my own cheeks and those of my guests. Mr. Smelt looked pleased; and Mr. Turbulent, though I saw he was half afraid of what he was doing, could by no means restrain a most exulting smile, which was constantly in play during the whole evening. Mr. Smelt instantly opened a conversation, with an ease and good breeding which drew every one into sharing it. The colonel was far less reserved and silent, and I found him very pleasing, very unassuming, extremely attentive, and sensible and obliging. The moment, however, that we mutually joined in the discourse, Mr. Turbulent came to my side, and seating himself there, whispered that he begged my pardon for the step he had taken. I made him no answer, but talked on with the colonel and Mr. Smelt. He. then whispered me again, "I am now certain of your forgiveness, since I see your approbation!" And when still I said nothing, he interrupted every speech to the colonel with another little whisper, saying that his end was obtained, and he was now quite happy, since he saw he had obliged me! At length he proceeded so far, with so positive a determination to be answered, that he absolutely compelled me to say I forgave him, lest he should go on till the colonel heard him. ECCENTRIC MR. BRYANT. Feb. 9-This morning, soon after my breakfast, the princess royal came to fetch me to the queen. She talked of Mrs. Delany all the way, and in terms of affection that can never fail to raise her in the minds of all who hear her. The queen was alone; and told me she had been so much struck with the Duke of Suffolk's letter to his son, in the Paston collection,(231) Page 22 that she wished to hear my opinion of it. She then condescended to read it to me. It is indeed both instructive and interesting. She was so gracious, when she dismissed me, as to lend me the book, desiring me to have it sent back to her apartment when I went to dinner. I had invited Mr. Bryant to dinner. He came an hour before, and I could not read "Paston," but rejoiced the more in his living intelligence. We talked upon the "Jew's Letters," which he had lent me. Have I mentioned them? They are a mighty well written defence of the Mosaic law and mission, and as orthodox for Christians as for Jews, with regard to their main tenor, which is to refute the infidel doctrine of Voltaire up to the time of our Saviour. Before our dinner we were joined by 'Mr. Smelt ; and the conversation was then very good. The same subject was continued, except where it was interrupted by Mr. Bryant's speaking of his own works, which was very frequently, and with a droll sort of simplicity that had a mixture of nature and of humour extremely amusing. He told us, very frankly his manner of writing; he confessed that what he first committed to paper seldom could be printed without variation or correction, even to a single line: he copied everything over, he said, himself, and three transcribings were the fewest he could ever make do; but, generally, nothing went from him to the press under seven. Mr. Turbulent and Miss Planta came to dinner, and it was very cheerful. Ere it was over John told me somebody wanted me. I desired they might be shewn to my room till the things were removed; but, as these were some time taking away, I called John to let me know who it was. "The princess royal, ma'am," was his answer, with perfect ease. Up I started, ashamed and eager, and flew to her royal highness instantly : and I found her calmly and quietly waiting, shut up in my room, without any candles, and almost wholly in the dark, except from the light of the fire! I made all possible apologies, and doubled and trebled them upon her Smilingly saying "I would not let them tell you who it was, nor hurry you, for I know 'tis so disagreeable to be called Page 23 away in the middle of dinner." And then, to reconcile me to the little accident, she took hold of both my hands. She came to me from the queen, about the "Paston Letters," which John had not carried to the right page. Very soon after came the king, who entered into a gay disquisition with Mr. Bryant upon his school achievements to which he answered with a readiness and simplicity highly entertaining. "You are an Etonian, Mr. Bryant," said the king, "but pray, for what were you most famous at school?" We all expected, from the celebrity of his scholarship, to hear him answer his Latin Exercises but no such thing. "Cudgelling, Sir. I was most famous for that." While a general laugh followed this speech, he very gravely proceeded to particularize his feats though unless you could see the diminutive figure, the weak, thin, feeble, little frame, whence issued the proclamation of his prowess, you can but very Inadequately judge the comic effect of his big talk. "Your majesty, sir, knows General Conway? I broke his head for him, sir." The shout which ensued did not at all interfere with the steadiness of his further detail. "And there's another man, Sir, a great stout fellow, Sir, as ever you saw--Dr. Gibbon, of the Temple: I broke his head too, sir.--I don't know if he remembers it." The king, afterwards, inquired after his present family, meaning his dogs, which he is famed for breeding and preserving. "Why, sir," he answered, "I have now only twelve. Once, I recollect, when your majesty was so gracious as to ask me about them, I happened to have twenty-two; and so I told you, sir. Upon my word, Sir, it made me very uneasy afterwards when I came to reflect upon it: I was afraid your majesty might think I presumed to joke!" The king then asked him for some account of the Marlborough family, with which he is very particularly connected and desired to know which among the young Lady Spencers was his favourite. "Upon my word, sir, I like them all! Lady Elizabeth is a charming young lady--I believe, Sir, I am most in her favour; I don't know why, Sir. But I happened to write a letter to the duke, sir, that she took a fancy to; I don't know the reason, sir, but she begged it. I don't know what was in the letter, Page 24 sir-I could never find out; but she took a prodigious fancy to it, sir." The king laughed heartily, and supposed there might be some compliments to herself in it. "Upon my word' sir," cried he, "I am afraid your majesty will think I was in love with her! but indeed, sir, I don't know what was in the letter." The converse went on in the same style, and the king was so much entertained by Mr. Bryant, that he stayed almost the whole evening, MR TURBULENT IN A NEW CHARACTER. Friday, Feb. 16.-The instant I was left alone with Mr. Turbulent he demanded to know my "project for his happiness;" and he made his claim in a tone so determined, that I saw it would be fruitless to attempt evasion or delay. "Your captivity, then, sir," cried I-"for such I must call your regarding your attendance to be indispensable is at an end: the equerry-coach is now wholly in your power. I have spoken myself upon the subject to the queen, as you bid--at least, braved me to do; and I have now her consent to discharging you from all necessity of travelling in our coach."(232) He looked extremely provoked, and asked if I really meant to inform him I did not choose his company? I laughed the question off, and used a world of civil argument to persuade him I had only done him a good office: but I was fain to make the whole debate as sportive as possible, as I saw him disposed to be seriously affronted. A long debate ensued. I had been, he protested, excessively ill-natured to him. "What an impression," cried he, "must this make upon the queen! After travelling, with apparent content, six years With that oyster Mrs. Haggerdorn--now--now that travelling is become really agreeable--in that coach --I am to be turned out of it! How must it disgrace me in her opinion!" She was too partial, I said, to "that oyster," to look upon the matter in such a degrading light nor would she think of it Page 25 at all, but as an accidental matter. I then added, that the reason that he had hitherto been destined to the female coach was, that Mrs. Schwellenberg and Mrs. Haggerdorn were always afraid of travelling by themselves; but that as I had more courage, there was no need of such slavery. "Slavery!"--repeated he, with an emphasis that almost startled me,--"Slavery is pleasure--is happiness--when directed by our wishes!" And then, with a sudden motion that made me quite jump, he cast himself at my feet, on both his knees-- "Your slave," he cried, "I am content to be! your slave I am ready to live and die!" I begged him to rise, and be a little less rhapsodic. "I have emancipated you," I cried; "do not, therefore, throw away the freedom you have been six years sighing to obtain. You are now your own agent--a volunteer--" "If I am," cried he, impetuously, "I dedicate myself to you!--A volunteer, ma'am, remember that! I dedicate myself to you, therefore, of my own accord, for every journey! You shall not get rid of me these twenty years." I tried to get myself away-but he would not let me move and he began, with still increasing violence of manner, a most fervent protestation that he would not be set aside, and that he devoted himself to me entirely. And, to say the simple truth, ridiculous as all this was, I really began to grow a little frightened by his vehemence and his posture - till, at last, in the midst of an almost furious vow, in which he dedicated himself to me for ever, he relieved me, by suddenly calling upon Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Hercules, and every god, and every goddess, to witness his oath. And then, content with his sublimity, he arose. Was it not a curious scene? and have I not a curious fellow traveller for my little journeys? Monday, Feb. 19.-This morning I Proposed to my fellow travellers that we should begin our journey on foot. The wonderment with which they heard a proposal so new was diverting : but they all agreed to it; and though they declared that my predecessor, Mrs. Haggerdorn, would have thought the person fit for Bedlam who should have suggested such plan, no one could find any real objection, and off we set, ordering the coach to proceed slowly after us. The weather was delightful, and the enterprise served to shorten and enliven the expedition, and pleased them all, Page 26 Mr. Turbulent began, almost immediately, an attack about his colonel : upon quite a new ground, yet as restless and earnest as upon the old one. He now reproached my attention to him, protesting I talked to him continually, and spun out into an hour's discourse what might have been said in three minutes. "And was it my spinning?" I could not forbear saying. "Yes, ma'am: for you might have dropped it." "How?--by not answering when spoken to?" "by not talking to him, ma'am, more than to any one else." "And pray, Mr. Turbulent, solve me, then, this difficulty; what choice has a poor female with whom she may converse? Must she not, in company as in dancing, take up with those Who choose to take up with her?" He was staggered by this question, and while he wavered how to answer it, I pursued my little advantage-- "No man, Mr. Turbulent, has any cause to be flattered that a woman talks with him, while it is only in reply; for though he may come, go, address or neglect, and do as he will,-- she, let her think and wish what she may, must only follow as he leads." He protested, with great warmth, he never heard any thing so proudly said in Ins life. But I would not retract. "And now, ma'am," he continued, "how wondrous intimate you are grown! After such averseness to a meeting--such struggles to avoid him; what am I to think of the sincerity of that pretended reluctance?" "You must think the truth," said I, "that it was not the colonel, but the equerry, I wished to avoid; that it was not the individual, but the official necessity of receiving company, that I wished to escape." BANTERING A PRINCESS. March 1.- With all the various humours in which I had already seen Mr. Turbulent, he gave me this evening a surprise, by his behaviour to one of the princesses, nearly the same that I had experienced from him myself. The Princess Augusta came, during coffee, for a knotting shuttle of the queen's. While she was speaking to me, he stood behind and exclaimed, `a demi voix, as if to himself, "Comme elle est jolie ce soir, son Altesse Royale!" And then, seeing her blush extremely, he clasped his hands, in high pretended confusion, Page 27 and hiding his head, called Out, "Que ferai-je? The princess has heard me!" "Pray, Mr. Turbulent," cried she, hastily, "what play are you to read to-night?" "You shall choose, ma'am; either 'La Coquette corrigée,' or--" [he named another I have forgotten.] "O no!" cried she, "that last is shocking! don't let me hear that!" "I understand you, ma'am. You fix, then, upon 'La Coquette?' 'La Coquette' is your royal highness's taste?" "No, indeed, I am sure I did not say that." "Yes, ma'am, by implication. And certainly, therefore, I will read it, to please your royal highness!" "No, pray don't; for I like none of them." "None of them, ma'am?" "No, none;--no French plays at all!" And away she was running, with a droll air, that acknowledged she had said something to provoke him. "This is a declaration, ma'am, I must beg you to explain!" cried he, gliding adroitly between the princess and the door, and shutting it With his back. "No, no, I can't explain it;--so pray, Mr. Turbulent, do open the door." "Not for the world, ma'am, with such a stain uncleared upon your royal highness's taste and feeling!" She told him she positively could not stay, and begged him to let her pass instantly. But he would hear her no more than he has heard me, protesting he was too much shocked for her, to suffer her to depart without clearing her own credit! He conquered at last, and thus forced to speak, she turned round to us and said, "Well--if I must, then--I will appeal to these ladies, who understand such things far better than I do, and ask them if it is not true about these French plays, that they are all so like to one another, that to hear them in this manner every night is enough to tire one?" "Pray, then, madam," cried he, "if French plays have the misfortune to displease you, what national plays have the honour Of your preference?" I saw he meant something that she understood better than me, for she blushed again, and called out "Pray open the door at once! I can stay no longer; do let me go, Mr. Turbulent!" Page 28 "Not till you have answered that question, ma'am' what country has plays to your royal highness's taste?" "Miss Burney," cried she impatiently, yet laughing, "pray do you take him away!--Pull him!" He bowed to me very invitingly for the office but I frankly answered her, "Indeed, ma'am, I dare not undertake him! I cannot manage him at all." "The country! the country! Princess Augusta! name the happy country!" was all she could gain. "Order him away, Miss Burney," cried she. "It is your room: order him away from the door." "Name it, ma'am, name it!" exclaimed he; "name but the chosen nation!" And then, fixing her with the most provoking eyes, "Est-ce la Danemarc?" he cried. She coloured violently, and quite angry with him, called out, "Mr. Turbulent, how can you be such a fool!" And now I found . . . the prince royal of Denmark was in his meaning, and in her understanding! He bowed to the ground, in gratitude for the term "fool," but added with pretended Submission to her will, "Very well, ma'am, s'il ne faut lire que les comédies Danoises." " Do let me go!" cried she, seriously; and then he made way, with a profound bow as she passed, saying, "Very well, ma'am, 'La Coquette,' then? your royal highness chooses 'La Coquette corrigée?'" "Corrigée? That never was done!" cried she, with all her sweet good-humour, the moment she got out - and off she ran, like lightning, to the queen's apartments. What say you to Mr. Turbulent now? For my part, I was greatly surprised. I had not imagined any man, but the king or Prince of Wales, had ever ventured at a badinage of this sort with any of the princesses; nor do I suppose any other man ever did. Mr. Turbulent is so great a favourite with all the royal family that he safely ventures upon whatever he pleases, and doubtless they find, in his courage and his rhodomontading, a novelty extremely amusing to them. MR. TURBULENT MEETS WITH A REBUFF. March--I must now, rather reluctantly I own, come to recite a quarrel, a very serious quarrel, in which I have been involved with my most extraordinary fellow-traveller. One evening at Windsor Miss Planta left the room, while I was Page 29 winding some silk. I was content to stay and finish the skein, though my remaining companion was in a humour too flighty to induce me to continue with him a moment longer. Indeed I had avoided pretty successfully all tête-à-têetes with him since the time when his eccentric genius led to such eccentric conduct in our long conference in the last month. This time, however, when I had done my work, he protested I should stay and chat with him. I pleaded business--letters-- hurry--all in vain: he would listen to nothing, and when I tried to move was so tumultuous in his opposition, that I was obliged to re-seat myself to appease him. A flow of compliments followed, every one of which I liked less and less; but his spirits seemed uncontrollable, and, I suppose, ran away with all that ought to check them. I laughed and rallied as long as I possibly could, and tried to keep him in order, by not seeming to suppose he wanted aid for that purpose: yet still, every time I tried to rise, he stopped me, and uttered at last Such expressions of homage--so like what Shakspeare says of the school-boy, who makes "a sonnet on his mistress' eyebrow," which is always his favourite theme--that I told him his real compliment was all to my temper, in imagining it could brook such mockery. This brought him once more on his knees, with such a volley of asseverations of his sincerity, uttered with such fervour and eloquence, that I really felt uneasy, and used every possible means to get away from him, rallying him however all the time, and disguising the consciousness I felt of my inability to quit him. More and more vehement, however, he grew, till I could be no longer passive, but forcibly rising, protested I would not stay another minute. But you may easily imagine my astonishment and provocation, when, hastily rising himself, he violently seized hold of me, and compelled me to return to my chair, with a force and a freedom that gave me as much surprise as offence. All now became serious. Raillery, good-humour, and even pretended ease and unconcern, were at an end. The positive displeasure I felt I made positively known; and the voice manner, and looks with which I insisted upon an immediate' release were so changed from what he had ever heard or observed in me before, that I saw him quite thunderstruck with the alteration; and all his own violence subsiding, he begged my pardon with the mildest humility. He had made me too angry to grant it, and I only desired Page 30 him to let me instantly go to my room. He ceased all personal opposition, but going to the door, planted himself before it, and said, "Not in wrath! I cannot let you go away in wrath!" "You must, sir," cried I, "for I am in wrath!" He began a thousand apologies, and as many promises of the most submissive behaviour in future; but I stopped them all, with a peremptory declaration that every minute he detained me made me but the more seriously angry. His vehemence now was all changed into strong alarm, and he opened the door, profoundly bowing, but not speaking, as I passed him. I am sure I need not dwell upon the uncomfortable sensations I felt, in a check so rude and violent to the gaiety and entertainment of an acquaintance which had promised me my best amusement during our winter campaigns. I was now to begin upon quite a new system, and instead of encouraging, as hitherto I had done, everything that could lead to vivacity and spirit, I was fain to determine upon the most distant and even forbidding demeanour with the only life of our parties, that he might not again forget himself. This disagreeable conduct I put into immediate practice. I stayed in my own room till I heard every one assembled in the next : I was then obliged to prepare for joining them, but before I opened the door a gentle rap at it made me call out "Who's there?" and Mr. Turbulent looked in. I hastily said I was coming instantly, but he advanced softly into the room, entreating forgiveness at every step. I made no other answer than desiring he would go, and saying I should follow. He went back to the door, and, dropping on one knee, said, "Miss Burney! surely you cannot be seriously angry?-'tis so impossible you should think I meant to offend you!" I said nothing, and did not look near him, but opened the door, from which he retreated to make way for me, rising a little mortified, and exclaiming, "Can you then have such real ill-nature? How little I suspected it in you!" "'Tis you," cried I, as I passed on, "that are ill-natured!" I meant for forcing me into anger; but I left him to make the meaning out, and walked into the next room. He did not immediately follow, and he then appeared so much disconcerted that I saw Miss Planta incessantly eyeing him, to find out what was the matter. I assumed an unconcern I did not Page 31 feel for I was really both provoked and sorry, foreseeing what a breach this folly must make in the comfort of my Windsor expeditions, He sat down a little aloof, and entered into no conversation all the evening; but just as tea was over, the hunt of the next being mentioned he suddenly, asked Miss Planta to request leave for him of the queen to ride out with the party. "I shall not see the queen," cried she; "you had much better ask Miss Burney." This was very awkward. I was in no humour to act for him at this time, nor could he muster courage to desire it; but upon Miss Planta's looking at each of us with some surprise, and repeating her amendment to his proposal, he faintly said, "Would Miss Burney be so good as to take that trouble?" An opportunity offering favourably, I spoke at night to the queen, and she gave leave for his attending the chase. I intended to send this permission to Miss Planta, but I had scarce returned to my own room from her majesty, before a rap at my door was followed by his appearance. He stood quite aloof, looking grave and contrite. I Immediately called out "I have spoken, sir, to the queen, and you have her leave to go." He bowed very profoundly, and thanked me, and was retreating, but came back again, and advancing, assumed an air of less humility, and exclaimed, "Allons donc, Mademoiselle, j'espère que vous n'êtes plus si méchante qu'hier au soir!" I said nothing; he came nearer, and, bowing upon his own hand, held it out for mine, with a look of most respectful Supplication. I had no intention of cutting the matter so short, yet from shame to sustain resentment, I was compelled to hold out a finger: he took it with a look of great gratitude, and very reverently touching the tip of my glove with his lip, instantly let it go, and very solemnly said, "Soyez sûr que je n'ai jamais eu la moindre idée de vous offenser." and then he thanked me again for his licence, and went his way. A SURPRISE AT THE PLAY. I had the pleasure of two or three visits from Mr. Bryant, whose loyal regard for the king and queen makes him eagerly accept every invitation, from the hope of seeing them in my room; and one of the days they both came in to speak to him, and were accompanied by the two eldest princesses, who stood Page 32 chatting with me by the door the whole time, and saying comical things upon royal personages in tragedies, particularly Princess Augusta, who has a great deal of sport in her disposition. She very gravely asserted she thought some of those princes on the stage looked really quite as well as some she knew off it. Once about this time I went to a play myself, which surely I may live long enough and never forget. It was "Seduction," a very clever piece, but containing a dreadful picture of vice and dissipation in high life, written by Mr. Miles Andrews, with an epilogue--O, such an epilogue! I was listening to it with uncommon attention, from a compliment paid in it to Mrs. Montagu, among other female writers; but imagine what became of my attention when I suddenly was struck with these lines, or something like them:-- Let sweet Cecilia gain your just applause, Whose every passion yields to Reason's laws." To hear, wholly unprepared and unsuspicious, such lines in a theatre--seated in a royal box--and with the whole royal family and their suite immediately opposite me--was it not a singular circumstance? To describe my embarrassment would be impossible. My whole head was leaning forward, with my opera glass in my hand, examining Miss Farren, who spoke the epilogue. Instantly I shrank back, so astonished and so ashamed of my public situation, that I was almost ready to take to my heels and run, for it seemed as if I were there purposely in that conspicuous place-- "To list attentive to my own applause." The king immediately raised his opera-glass to look at me, laughing heartily--the queen's presently took the same direction--all the princesses looked up, and all the attendants, and all the maids of honour! I protest I was never more at a loss what to do with myself: nobody was in the front row with me but Miss Goldsworthy, who instantly seeing how I was disconcerted, prudently and good-naturedly forbore taking any notice of me. I sat as far back as I could, and kept my fan against the exposed profile for the rest of the night, never once leaning forward, nor using my glass. None of the royal family spoke to me on this matter till a few days after; but I heard from Mrs. Delany they had all declared Page 33 themselves sorry for the confusion it had caused me. And some time after the queen could not forbear saying, "I hope, Miss Burney, YOU minded the epilogue the other night?" And the king, very comically, said, "I took a peep at you!--I could not help that. I wanted to see how you looked when your father first discovered your writing--and now I think I know!" THE KING's BIRTHDAY. St. James's Palace, June 4-Take a little of the humours of this day, with respect to myself, as they have arisen. I quitted my downy pillow at half-past six o'clock, for bad habits in sickness have lost me half an hour of every morning; and then, according to an etiquette I discovered but on Friday night, I was quite new dressed: for I find that, on the king's birthday, and on the queen's, both real and nominal, two new attires, one half, the other full dressed, are expected from all attendants that come into the royal presence. This first labour was happily achieved in such good time, that I was just seated to my breakfast--a delicate bit of roll half-eaten, and a promising dish of tea well stirred--when I received my summons to attend the queen. She was only with her wardrobe-woman, and accepted most graciously a little murmuring congratulation upon the- day, which I ventured to whisper while she looked another way. Fortunately for me, she is always quick in conceiving what is meant, and never wastes time in demanding what is said. She told me she had bespoke Miss Planta to attend at the grand toilette at St. James's, as she saw my strength still diminished by my late illness. Indeed it still is, though in all other respects I am perfectly well. The queen wore a very beautiful dress, of a new manufacture, of worked muslin, thin, fine, and clear, as the chambery gauze. I attended her from the blue closet, in which she dresses, through the rooms that lead to the breakfast apartment. In One of these while she stopped for her hair-dresser to finish her head-dress, the king joined her. She spoke to him in German, and he kissed her hand. The three elder princesses came in soon after: they all went up, with congratulatory smiles and curtsies, to their royal father, who kissed them very affectionately; they then, as usual every Morning, kissed the queen's hand. The door was thrown open Page 34 to the breakfast-room, which is a noble apartment, fitted up with some of Vandyke's best works; and the instant the king, who led the way, entered, I was surprised by a sudden sound of music, and found that a band of musicians were stationed there to welcome him. The princesses followed, but Princess Elizabeth turned round to me to say she could hardly bear the sound: it was the first morning of her coming down to breakfast for many months, as she had had that repast in her own room ever since her dangerous illness. It overcame her, she said, more than the dressing, more than the early rising, more than the whole of the hurry and fatigue of all the rest of a public birthday. She loves the king most tenderly; and there is a something in receiving any person who is loved, by sudden music, that I can easily conceive to be very trying to the nerves. Princess Augusta came back to cheer and counsel her; she begged her to look out at the window, to divert her thoughts, and said she would place her where the sound might be less affecting to her. A lively "How d'ye do, Miss Burney? I hope you are quite well now?" from the sweet Princess Mary, who was entering the ante-room, made me turn from her two charming sisters; she passed on to the breakfast, soon followed by Princess Sophia, and then a train of their governesses, Miss Goldsworthy, Mademoiselle Montmoulin, and Miss Gomme, all in full dress, with fans. We reciprocated little civilities, and I had then the pleasure to see little Princess Amelia, with Mrs. Cheveley, who brought up the rear. Never, in tale or fable, were there six sister princesses more lovely. As I had been extremely distressed upon the queen's birthday, in January, where to go or how to act, and could obtain no information from my coadjutrix, I now resolved to ask for directions from the queen herself; and she readily gave them, in a manner to make this day far more comfortable to me than the last. She bade me dress as fast as I could, and go to St. James', by eleven o'clock; but first come into the room to her. Then followed my grand toilette. The hair-dresser was waiting for me, and he went to work first, and I second, with all our might and main. When my adorning tasks were accomplished, I went to the blue closet. No one was there, I then hesitated whether to go back or seek the queen. I have a dislike insuperable to entering a royal presence, except by an Page 35 immediate Summons: however, the directions I had had prevailed, and I- went into the adjoining apartment. There stood Madame de la Fite! she was talking in a low voice with M. de Luc. They told me the queen was in the next room, and on I went. She was seated at a glass, and the hair-dresser was putting on her jewels, while a clergyman in his canonicals was standing near and talking to her. I imagined him some bishop unknown to me, and stopped; the queen looked round, and called out "it's Miss Burney!--come in, Miss Burney." in I came, curtseying respectfully to a bow from the canonicals, but I found not out till he answered something said by the queen, that it was no other than Mr. Turbulent. Madame de la Fite then presented herself at the door (which was open for air) of the ante-room. The queen bowed to her, and said she would see her presently: she retired, and her majesty, in a significant low voice, said to me, "Do go to her, and keep her there a little!" I obeyed, and being now in no fright nor hurry, entered into conversation with her sociably and comfortably. I then went to St. James's. The queen was most brilliant in attire; and when she was arrayed, Mr. West(233) was allowed to enter the dressing-room, in order to give his opinion of the disposition -of her jewels, which indeed were arranged with great taste and effect. The three princesses, Princess Royal, Augusta, and Elizabeth, were all very splendidly decorated, and looked beautiful. They are indeed uncommonly handsome, each in their different Way-the princess royal for figure, the Princess Augusta for countenance, and the Princess Elizabeth for face. THE EQUERRIES: COLONEL MANNERS. Friday, June 8-This day we came to Windsor for the Summer, during which we only go to town for a Drawing-room once a fortnight, and to Kew in the way. Mrs. Schwellenberg remained in town, not well enough to move. The house now was quite full, the king having ordered a party to it for the Whitsun holidays. This party was Colonel page 36 Manners, the equerry in waiting; Colonel Ramsden, a good-humoured and well-bred old officer of the king's household; Colonels Wellbred and Goldsworthy, and General Budé. Colonel Ramsden is gentle and pleasing, but very silent; General Budé is always cheerful, but rises not above a second; Colonel Hotham has a shyness that looks haughty, and therefore distances; Colonel Goldsworthy reserves his sport and humour for particular days and particular favourites; and Colonel Wellbred draws back into himself unless the conversation promises either instruction or quiet pleasure; nor would any one of these, during the whole time, speak at all, but to a next neighbour, nor even then, except when that neighbour suited his fancy. You must not, however, imagine we had no public speakers; M. del Campo harangued aloud to whoever was willing to listen, and Colonel Manners did the same, without even waiting for that proviso. Colonel Manners, however, I must introduce to you by a few specimens: he is so often, in common with all the equerries, to appear on the scene, that I wish you to make a particular acquaintance with him. One evening, when we were all, as usual, assembled, he began a discourse upon the conclusion of his waiting, which finishes with the end of June:--"Now I don't think," cried he, "that it's well managed: here we're all in waiting for three months at a time, and then for nine months there's nothing!" "Cry your mercy!" cried Colonel Goldsworthy, "if three months- -three whole months--are not enough for you, pray take a few more from mine to make up your market!" "No, no, I don't mean that;--but why can't we have our waitings month by month?--would not that be better?" "I think not!--we should then have no time unbroken." "Well, but would not that be better than what it is now? Why, we're here so long, that when one goes away nobody knows one!-- one has quite to make a new acquaintance! Why, when I first come out of waiting, I never know where to find anybody!" The Ascot races were held at this time; the royal family were to be at them one or two of the days. Colonel Manners earnestly pressed Miss Port to be there. Colonel Goldsworthy said it was quite immaterial to him who was there, for when he was attending royalty he never presumed to think of any private comfort. "Well, I don't see that!" cried Colonel Manners,--"for if Page 37 I was you, and not in my turn for waiting, I should go about just as I liked;--but now, as for me, as it happens to be my own turn, Why I think it right to be civil to the king." We all looked round;--but Colonel Goldsworthy broke forth aloud-- "Civil, quotha?" cried he; "Ha! ha! civil, forsooth!--You're mighty condescending!--the first equerry I ever heard talk of his civility to the king!--'Duty,' and 'respect,' and 'humble reverence,'--those are words we are used to,--but here come you with Your civility!----Commend me to such affability!" you see he is not spared; but Colonel Goldsworthy is the wag professed of their community, and privileged to say what he pleases. The other, with the most perfect good-humour, accepted the joke, without dreaming of taking offence at the sarcasm. Another evening the king sent for Colonel Ramsden to play at backgammon. "Happy, happy man!" exclaimed Colonel Goldsworthy, exultingly; but scarce had he uttered the words ere he was summoned to follow himself. "What! already!" cried he,--"without even my tea! Why this is worse and worse!--no peace in Israel!--only one half hour allowed for comfort, and now that's swallowed! Well, I must go;--make my complaints aside, and my bows and smiles in full face!" Off he went, but presently, in a great rage, came back, and, while he drank a hot dish of tea which I instantly presented him, kept railing at his stars for ever bringing him under a royal roof. "If it had not been for a puppy," cried he, "I had never got off even to scald my throat in this manner But they've just got a dear little new ugly dog: so one puppy gave Way to t'other, and I just left them to kiss and hug it, while I stole off to drink this tea! But this is too much!---no peace for a moment!-- no peace in Israel!" When this was passed, Colonel Wellbred renewed some of the conversation of the preceding day with me; and, just as he named Dr. Herschel Colonel Manners broke forth with his dissenting opinions. "I don't give up to Dr. Herschel at all," cried he; "he is all system; and so they are all: and if they can but make out their systems, they don't care a pin for anything else. As to Herschel, I liked him well enough till he came to his volcanoes in the moon, and then I gave him up, I saw he was just like the rest. How should he know anything Of the matter? There's no such thing as pretending to measure, at such a distance as that?" Page 38 Colonel Wellbred, to whom I looked for an answer, instead of making any, waited in quiet silence till he had exhausted all he had to say upon the subject, and then, turning to me, made some inquiry about the Terrace, and went on to other general matters. But, some time after, when all were engaged, and this topic seemed quite passed, he calmly began, in general terms, to lament that the wisest and best of people were always so little honoured or understood in their own time, and added that he had no doubt but Sir Isaac Newton had been as much scoffed and laughed at formerly as Herschel was now; but concluded, in return, Herschel, hereafter, would be as highly reverenced as Sir Isaac was at present. . . . We had then some discourse upon dress and fashions. Virtuosos being next named, Colonel Manners inveighed against them quite violently, protesting they all wanted common honour and honesty; and to complete the happy subject, he instanced, in particular, Sir William Hamilton, who, he declared, had absolutely robbed both the king and state of Naples! After this, somebody related that, upon the heat in the air being mentioned to Dr. Heberden, he had answered that he supposed it proceeded from the last eruption in the volcano in the moon: "Ay," cried Colonel Manners, "I suppose he knows as much of the matter as the rest of them: if you put a candle at the end of a telescope, and let him look at it, he'll say, what an eruption there is in the moon! I mean if Dr, Herschel would do it to him; I don't say he would think so from such a person as me." "But Mr. Bryant himself has seen this volcano from the telescope." "Why, I don't mind Mr. Bryant any more than Dr. Heberden: he's just as credulous as t'other." I wanted to ask by what criterion he settled these points in so superior a manner:--but I thought it best to imitate the silence of Colonel Wellbred, who constantly called a new subject, upon every pause, to avoid all argument and discussion while the good-humoured Colonel Manners was just as ready to start forward in the new subject, as he had been in that which had been set aside. One other evening I invited Madame de la Fite: but it did not prove the same thing; they have all a really most undue dislike of her, and shirk her conversation and fly to one another, to discourse on hunting and horses. Page 39 THE DUCHESS DE POLIGNAC AT WINDSOR. The following Sunday, June 17, I was tempted to go on the Terrace, in order to se the celebrated Madame de Polignac,(234) and her daughter, Madame de Guiche. They were to be presented, with the Duke de Polignac, to their majesties, upon the Terrace. Their rank entitled them to this distinction; and the Duchess of Ancaster, to whom they had been extremely courteous abroad, came to Windsor to introduce them. They were accompanied to the Terrace by Mrs. Harcourt and the general 'with whom they were also well acquainted. They went to the place of rendezvous at six o'clock; the royal party followed about seven, and was very brilliant upon the occasion. The king and queen led the way, and the Prince of Wales, who came purposely to honour the interview, appeared at it also, in the king's Windsor uniform. Lady Weymouth was in waiting upon the queen. The Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Charlotte Bertie, and Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, with some other ladies, I think, attended: but the two eldest princesses, to the very great detriment of the scenery, were ill, and remained at home. Princess Elizabeth and Mary were alone in the queen's suite. I went with Miss Port and Mrs. and Miss Heberden. The crowd was so great, it was difficult to move. Their majesties and their train occupied a large space, and their attendants Page 40 had no easy task in keeping them from being incommoded by the pressing of the people. They stopped to converse with these noble travellers for more than an hour. Madame la Duchesse de Polignac is a very well-looking woman, and Madame de Guiche is very pretty. There were other ladies and gentlemen in their party. But I was much amused by their dress, which they meant should be entirely `a l'Angloise--for which purpose they had put on plain undress gowns, with close ordinary black silk bonnets! I am sure they must have been quite confused when they saw the queen and princesses, with their ladies, who were all dressed with uncommon care, and very splendidly. But I was glad, at least, they should all witness, and report, the reconciliation of the king and the Prince of Wales, who frequently spoke together, and were both in good spirits. COLONEL MANNERS' MUSICAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Miss Port and myself had, afterwards, an extremely risible evening with Colonels Goldsworthy, Wellbred, and Manners the rest were summoned away to the king, or retired to their own apartments. Colonel Wellbred began the sport, undesignedly, by telling me something new relative to Dr. Herschel's volcanoes. This was enough for Colonel Manners, who declared aloud his utter contempt for such pretended discoveries. He was deaf to all that could be said in answer, and protested he wondered how any man of common sense could ever listen to such a pack of stuff. Mr. de Luc's opinion upon the subject being then mentioned--he exclaimed, very disdainfully, "O, as to Mr. de Luc, he's another man for a system himself, and I'd no more trust him than anybody: if you was only to make a little bonfire, and put it upon a hill a little way off, you might make him take it for a volcano directly!--And Herschel's not a bit better. Those sort of philosophers are the easiest taken in in the world." Our next topic was still more ludicrous. Colonel Manners asked me if I had not heard something, very harmonious at church in the morning? I answered I was too far off, if he meant from himself. "Yes," said he; "I was singing with Colonel Wellbred; and he said he was my second.--How did I do that song?" "Song?--Mercy!" exclaimed Colonel Goldsworthy, "a song at church!--why it was the 104th Psalm!" Page 41 "But how did I do it, Wellbred; for I never tried at it before?" "why--pretty well," answered Colonel Wellbred, very composedly; "Only now and then you run me a little into 'God save the king.'" This dryness discomposed every muscle but of Colonel Manners, who replied, with great simplicity, "Why, that's because that's the tune I know best!" "At least," cried I, "'twas a happy mistake to make so near their majesties." "But: pray, now, Colonel Wellbred, tell me sincerely)--could you really make out what I was singing?" "O yes," answered Colonel Wellbred; "with the words." "Well, but pray, now, what do you call my voice?" "Why--a--a--a counter-tenor." "Well, and is that a good voice?" There was no resisting,-even the quiet Colonel Wellbred could not resist laughing out here. But Colonel Manners, quite at his ease, continued his self-discussion. "I do think, now, if I was to have a person to play over a thing to me again and again, and then let me sing it, and stop me every time I was wrong, I do think I should be able to sing 'God save the king' as well as some ladies do, that have always people to show them." "You have a good chance then here," cried I, "of singing some pieces of Handel, for I am sure you hear them again and again!" "Yes, but that is not the thing for though I hear them do it' so often over, they don't stop for me to sing it after them, and then to set me right. Now I'll try if you'll know what this is." He then began humming aloud, "My soul praise," etc., so very horribly, that I really found all decorum at an end, and laughed, with Miss Port, `a qui mieux mieux. Too much engaged to mind this, he very innocently, when he had done, applied to us all round for our opinions. Miss Port begged him to sing another, and asked for that he had spouted the other day, "Care, thou bane of love and joy." He instantly complied; and went on, in such shocking, discordant and unmeaning sounds, that nothing in a farce could be more risible: in defiance however of all interruptions, he Continued till he had finished one stanza; when Colonel Goldsworthy loudly called out,--"There,--there's enough!--have mercy!" Page 42 "Well, then, now I'll try something else." "O, no!" cried Colonel Goldsworthy, hastily, "thank you, thank you for this,-but I won't trouble you for more--I'll not bear another word." Colonel Wellbred then, with an affected seriousness, begged to know, since he took to singing, what he should do for a shake, which was absolutely indispensable. "A shake?" he repeated, "what do you mean?" "Why--a shake with the voice, such as singers make." "Why, how must I do it?" "O, really, I cannot tell you." "Why, then, I'll try myself--is it so?" And he began such a harsh hoarse noise, that Colonel Goldsworthy exclaimed, between every other sound,--"No, no,--no more!" While Colonel Wellbred professed teaching him, and gave such ridiculous lessons and directions,-now to stop short, now to swell,-now to sink the voice, etc., etc., that, between the master and the scholar, we were almost demolished. MRS. SCHWELLENBERG'S "LUMP OF LEATHER." Tuesday, June 19.-We were scarcely all arranged at tea when Colonel Manners eagerly said, "Pray, Mrs. Schwellenberg, have you lost anything?" "Me?--no, not I "No?--what, nothing?" "Not I!" "Well, then, that's very odd! for I found something that had your name writ upon it." "My name? and where did you find that?" "Why--it was something I found in my bed." "In your bed?--O, very well! that is reelly comeecal?" "And pray what was it?" cried Miss Port. "Why--a great large, clumsy lump of leather." "Of leadder, sir?--of leadder? What was that for me?" "Why, ma'am, it was so big and so heavy, it was as much as I could do to lift it!" "Well, that was nothing from me! when it was so heavy, you might let it alone!" "But, ma'am, Colonel Wellbred said it was somewhat of yours." Page 43 "Of mine?--O, ver well! Colonel Wellbred might not say such thing! I know nothing, Sir, from your leadder, nor from your bed, sir,--not I!" "Well, ma'am, then your maid does. Colonel Wellbred says he supposes it was she." "Upon my vord! Colonel Wellbred might not say such things from my maid! I won't not have it so!" "O yes, ma'am; Colonel Wellbred says she often does SO. He says she's a very gay lady." She was quite too much amazed to speak: one of her maids, Mrs. Arline, is a poor humble thing, that would not venture to jest, I believe, with the kitchen maid, and the other has never before been at Windsor. "But what was it?" cried Miss Port. "Why, I tell you--a great, large lump of leather, with 'Madame Schwellenberg' wrote upon it. However, I've ordered it to be sold." "To be sold? How will you have it sold, Sir? You might tell me that, when you please." "Why, by auction, ma'am." "By auction, Sir? What, when it had my name upon it? Upon my vord!--how come you to do dat, sir? Will you tell me, once?" "Why, I did it for the benefit of my man, ma'am, that he might have the money." "But for what is your man to have it, when it is mine?" "Because, ma'am, it frightened him so." "O, ver well! Do you rob, sir? Do you take what is not your own, but others', sir, because your man is frightened?" "O yes, ma'am! We military men take all we can get!" "What! in the king's house, Sir!" "Why then, ma'am, what business had it in my bed? My room's my castle: nobody has a right there. My bed must be my treasury; and here they put me a thing into it big enough to be a bed itself."---- "O! vell! (much alarmed) it might be my bed-case, then!" (Whenever Mrs. Schwellenberg travels, she carries her bed in a large black leather case, behind her servants' carriage.) " Very likely, ma'am." "Then, sir," very angrily, "how Come you by it?" "Why, I'll tell you, ma'am. I was just going to bed; so MY servant took one candle, and I had the other. I had just had my hair done, and my curls were just rolled up, and he Page 44 was going away; but I turned about, by accident, and I saw a great lump in my bed; so I thought it was my clothes. 'What do you put them there for?' says I. 'Sir,' says he, 'it looks as if there was a drunken man in the bed.' 'A drunken man?' says I; 'Take the poker, then, and knock him on the head!'" "Knock him on the head?" interrupted Mrs. Schwellenberg, "What! when it might be some innocent person? Fie! Colonel Manners. I thought you had been too good-natured for such thing--to poker the people in the king's house!" "Then what business have they to get into my bed, ma'am? So then my man looked nearer, and he said, 'Sir, why, here's your night-cap and here's the pillow!--and here's a great, large lump of leather!' 'Shovel it all out!' says I. 'Sir,' says he, 'It's Madame Schwellenberg's! here's her name on it.' 'Well, then,' says I, 'sell it, to-morrow, to the saddler.'" "What! when you knew it was mine, sir? Upon my vord, you been ver good!" (bowing very low). "Well, ma'am, it's all Colonel Wellbred, I dare say; so, suppose you and I were to take the law of him?" "Not I, sir!" (Scornfully). "Well, but let's write him a letter, then, and frighten him: let's tell him it's sold, and he must make it good. You and I'll do it together." "No, sir; you might do it yourself. I am not so familiar to write to gentlemens." "Why then, you shall only sign it, and I'll frank it." Here the entrance of some new person stopped the discussion. Happy in his success, he began, the next day, a new device: he made an attack in politics, and said, he did not doubt but Mr. Hastings would come to be hanged; though, he assured us, afterwards, he was firmly his friend, and believed no such thing.(236) Even with this not satisfied, he next told her that he had just heard Mr. Burke was in Windsor. Mr. Burke is the name Page 45 in the world most obnoxious, both for his Reform bill,(237) which deeply affected all the household, and for his prosecution of Mr. Hastings; she therefore declaimed against him very warmly. "Should you like to know him, ma'am?" cried he. "Me?--No; not I." "Because, I dare say, ma'am, I have interest enough with him to procure you his acquaintance. Shall I bring him to the Lodge to see you?" "When you please, sir, you might keep him to yourself!" Well, then, he shall come and dine with me,'and after it drink tea with you." "No, no, not I! You might have him all to yourself." "but if he comes, you must make his tea." "There is no such 'must,' sir! I do it for my pleasure--only when I please, sir!" At night, when we were separating, he whispered Miss Port that he had something else in store for the next meeting, when he intended to introduce magnetising. MRS. SCHWELLENBERG's FROGS. July 2.-What a stare was drawn from our new equerry(238) by Major Price's gravely asking Mrs. Schwellenberg, after the health of her frogs? She answered they were very well, and the major said, " You must know, Colonel Gwynn, Mrs. Schwellenberg keeps a pair of frogs," "Of frogs?--pray what do they feed upon?" "Flies, sir," she answered. "And pray, ma'am, what food have they in winter?" "Nothing other." The stare was now still wider. "But I can make them croak when I will," she added, "when I only go so to my snuff-box, knock, knock, knock, they croak all what I please." Page 46 "Very pretty, indeed!" exclaimed Colonel Goldsworthy. "I thought to have some spawn," she continued; "but then Maria Carlton, what you call Lady Doncaster, came and frightened them; I was never so angry!" "I am sorry for that," cried the major, very seriously, "for else I should have begged a pair." "So you meant, ma'am, to have had a breed of them," cried Colonel Goldsworthy; "a breed of young frogs? Vastly clever, indeed!; Then followed a formal enumeration of their virtues and endearing little qualities, which made all laugh except the new equerry, who sat in perfect amaze. Then, suddenly, she stopped short, and called out, "There! now I have told you all this, you might tell something to me. I have talked enoff; now you might amuse me." July 19.-In the afternoon, while I was working in Mrs. Schwellenberg's room, Mr. Turbulent entered, to summon Miss Planta to the princesses; and, in the little while of executing that simple commission, he made such use of his very ungovernable and extraordinary eyes, that the moment he was gone, Mrs. Schwellenberg demanded "for what he looked so at me?" I desired to know what she meant. "Why, like when he was so cordial with you? Been you acquainted?" "O, yes!" cried I, "I spent three hours twice a-week upon the road with him and Miss Planta, all the winter; and three or four dinners and afternoons besides." "O that's nothing! that's no acquaintance at all. I have had people to me, to travel and to dine, fourteen and fifteen years, and yet they been never so cordial!" This was too unanswerable for reply; but it determined me to try at some decided measure for restraining or changing looks and behaviour that excited such comments. And I thought my safest way would be fairly and frankly to tell him this very inquiry. It might put him upon his guard from such foolishness, without any more serious effort. July 20.-This evening Mrs. Schwellenberg was not well, and sent to desire I would receive the gentlemen to tea, and make her apologies. I immediately summoned my lively, and lovely young companion, Miss Port, who hastens at every call with good-humoured delight. Page 47 We had really a pleasant evening, though simply from the absence of spleen and jealousy, which seemed to renew and invigorate the spirits of all present: namely, General Budé, Signor del Campo, and Colonel Gwynn. They all stayed very late but when they made their exit, I dismissed my gay assistant and thought it incumbent on me to show myself upstairs; a reception was awaiting me!--so grim! But, what O heaven! how depressing, how cruel, to be fastened thus on an associate so exigeante, so tyrannical, and so ill-disposed! I feared to blame the equerries for having detained me, as they were already so much out of favour. I only, therefore, mentioned M. del Campo, who, as a foreign minister, might be allowed so much civility as not to be left to himself: for I was openly reproached- that I had not quitted them to hasten to her! Nothing, however, availed; and after vainly trying to appease her, I was obliged to go to my own room, to be in attendance for my royal summons. July 21.-I resolved to be very meek and patient, as I do, now and then, when I am good, and to bear this hard trial of causeless offence without resentment; and, therefore, I went this afternoon as soon as I had dined, and sat and worked, and forced conversation, and did my best, but with very indifferent success; when, most perversely, who should be again announced -but Mr. Turbulent. As I believe the visit was not, just after those "cordial" looks, supposed to be solely for the lady of the apartment, his reception was no better than mine had been the preceding days! He did not, however, regard it, but began a talk, in which he made it his business to involve me, by perpetual reference to my opinion. This did not much conciliate matters; and his rebuffs, from time to time, were so little ceremonious, that nothing but the most confirmed contempt could have kept off an angry resentment. I could sometimes scarcely help laughing at his utterly careless returns to an imperious haughtiness, vainly meant to abash and distance him. I took the earliest moment in my power to quit the room and the reproach with which he looked at my exit, for leaving him to such a tête-à-tête, was quite risible. He knew he could not, in decency, run away immediately, to and he seemed ready to commit some desperate act for having drawn himself into such a difficulty. I am always rejoiced when his flights and follies bring their own punishment. Page 48 MR. TURBULENT'S ANTICS. July 25-Mr. Turbulent amused himself this morning with giving me yet another panic. He was ordered to attend the queen during her hair-dressing, as was Mr. de Luc. I remained in the room the queen conversed with us all three, as occasions arose, with the utmost complacency; but this person, instead of fixing there his sole attention, contrived, by standing behind her chair, and facing me, to address a language of signs to me the whole time, casting up his eyes, clasping ],is hands, and placing himself in various fine attitudes, and all with a humour so burlesque, that it was impossible to take it either ill or seriously. Indeed, when I am on the very point of the most alarmed displeasure with him, he always falls upon some such ridiculous devices of affected homage, that I grow ashamed of my anger, and hurry it over, lest he should perceive it, and attribute it to a misunderstanding he might think ridiculous in his turn. How much should I have been discountenanced had her majesty turned about and perceived him! (230) Colonel Greville, called in the "Diary" "Colonel Wellbred," one of the king's equerries, whom M. de Guiffardiere ("Mr. Turbulent") was particularly anxious to introduce to Miss Burney.-ED. (231) I "The Paston Letters" were first published, from the original manuscripts, in 1787. They were chiefly written by or to members of the Paston family in Norfolk during the reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., Richard III., and Henry VII. The letter above alluded to is No. 91 in the collection. It is a letter of good Counsel to his young son, written in a very tender and religious strain, by the Duke of Suffolk, on the 30th of April, 1450, the day on which he quitted England to undergo his five years' banishment. The duke had been impeached of high treason, and condemned to this term of banishment, through the king's interposition, to save him from a worse fate. But his fate was not to be eluded. He set sail on the 30th of April, was taken on the sea by his enemies, and beheaded on the 2nd of May following.-ED. (232) Miss Burney had obtained the tacit consent of the queen that M. de Guiffardiere should travel occasionally with the equerries, instead of taking his usual place in the coach assigned to the keepers of the robes. Her real motive in making the application had been a desire to see less of this boisterous gentleman, but she had put it upon his attachment to Colonel Greville-ED. (233) Benjamin -west, R.A., who succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy, on the death of the latter in 1792. This mediocre painter was a prodigious favourite with George III., for whom many of his works were executed.-ED. (234) The Duchess Jules de Polignac, the celebrated favourite of Marie Antoinette. She and her husband, who had been raised by the queen from a condition of positive poverty, were hated in France, both as Court favourites, and on account of the wealth which, it was believed, they had taken advantage of their position to amass. "Mille 6cus," cried Mirabeau, "A la famille d'Assas pour avoir sauv6 l'etat; un million a la famille Polignac pour l'avoir perdu!" The ostensible object of the duches,'s visit to England was to drink the Bath Waters, but there are good grounds for believing that her real purpose was to make an arrangement with M. de la Motte for the suppression of some scurrilous Memoirs which it was rumoured his wife had written, and in which, among other things, Marie Antoinette was accused of being the principal culprit in the notorious Diamond Necldace fraud. M. de la Motte states in his autobiography that he met the Duchess Jules and her Sister-in-law, the Countess Diane, at the Duchess of Devonshire's (the beautiful Georgiana), at the request of the latter, when certain overtures were made to him, and trustworthy authorities assert that a large sum of money was afterwards paid to the De la Mottes, to suppress the Memoirs which were however eventually published. When the French Revolution broke out the Polignacs were among the first to emigrate. The duchess died at Vienna in December, 1793, a few months after Marie Antoinette had perished on the scaffold.-ED. (235) Mrs. Schwellenberg had returned to Windsor the day before.-ED. (236) The storm had been gathering round Hastings ever since his return to England in June, 1785, within a week of which Burke had given notice in the House of Commons of a motion affecting the conduct of the late Governor-General in India. His impeachment was voted in May, 1787, and preparations for his trial were now going actively forward. We shall find hereafter, in the Diary, some sketches, from Fanny's point of view, of scenes in this famous trial, which commenced in February, 1788.-ED. (237) This was an old grievance. In 1780 Burke had introduced a hill "for the better regulation of his majesty's civil establishments, and of certain public offices; for the limitation of pensions, and the suppression of sundry useless, expensive and inconvenient places; and for applying the monies saved thereby to the public service." The bill was defeated at the time, but was re-introduced with certain alterations, and finally passed both houses by a large majority in 1782.-ED. (238) Colonel Gwynn who had just arrived at Windsor to succeed Colonel Manners in the office of equerry in waiting to the King. Colonel Gwynn was the husband of Mary Horneck, Goldsmith's "Jessamy Bride."-ED. Page 49 SECTION 11. (1787-8.) COURT DUTIES: SOME VARIATIONS IN THEIR ROUTINE. MEETING OF THE TWO PRINCES. To-day, after a seven years' absence, arrived the Duke of York. I saw him alight from his carriage, with an eagerness, a vivacity, that assured me of the affectionate joy with which he returned to his country and family. But the joy of his excellent father!-O, that there is no describing It was the glee of the first youth--nay, of ai ardent and innocent infancy,--so pure it seemed, so warm, so open, so unmixed! Softer joy was the queen's--mild, equal, and touching while all the princesses were in one universal rapture. To have the pleasure of seeing the royal family in this happy assemblage, I accompanied Miss Port on the Terrace. It was indeed an affecting sight to view the general content; but that of the king went to my very heart, so delighted he looked-so proud Of his son--so benevolently pleased that every one should witness his satisfaction. The Terrace was very full; all Windsor and its neighbourhood poured in upon it, to see the prince whose whole demeanour seemed promising to merit his flattering reception--gay yet grateful--modest, yet unembarrassed...... Early the next morning arrived the Prince of Wales, who had travelled all night from Brighthelmstone. The day was a day Of complete happiness to the whole of the royal family; the king was in one transport of delight, unceasing, invariable; Page 50 and though the newly-arrived duke was its source and Support the kindness of his heart extended and expanded to his eldest' born, whom he seemed ready again to take to his paternal breast; indeed, the whole world seemed endeared to him by the happiness he now felt in it. Sunday, Aug. 5.-General Grenville brought in the duke this evening to the tea-room. I was very much pleased with his behaviour, which was modest, dignified, and easy. Might he but escape the contagion of surrounding examples, he seems promising of all his fond father expects and merits. . . . Kew, Aug. 7-The next day the now happy family had the delight of again seeing the two princes in its circle. They dined here; and the Princess Augusta, who came to Mrs. Schwellenberg's room in the evening, on a message, said, "There never had been so happy a dinner since the world was created," The king, In the evening, again drove out the queen and princesses. The Prince of Wales, seeing Mr. Smelt in our room (which, at Kew, is in the front of the house, as well as at Windsor), said he would come in and ask him how he did. Accordingly, in he came, and talked to Mr. Smelt for about a quarter of an hour; his subjects almost wholly his horses and his rides. He gave some account of his expedition to town to meet his brother. He was just preparing, at Brighton, to give a supper entertainment to Madame La Princesse de Lamballe,--when he perceived his courier. "I dare say," he cried, "my brother's come!" set off instantly to excuse himself to the princess, and arrived at Windsor by the time of early prayers, at eight o'clock the next morning. "To-day, again," he said, "I resolved to be in town to meet my brother; we determined to dine somewhere together, but had not settled where; so hither we came. When I went last to Brighton, I rode one hundred and thirty miles, and then danced at the ball,. I am going back directly; but I shall ride to Windsor again for the birthday, and shall stay there till my brother's, and then back on Friday. We are going now over the way: my brother wants to see the old mansion." The Prince of Wales's house is exactly opposite to the Lodge The duke then came in, and bowed to every one present, very attentively; and presently after, they went over the way, arm in arm; and thence returned to town. I had a long and painful discourse afterwards with Mr. Smelt, deeply interested in these young princes , upon the many dangers awaiting the newly-arrived, who seemed alike Page 51 unfitted and unsuspicious for encountering them. Mr. Smelt's heart ached as if he had been their parent, and the regard springing from his early and long care of them seemed all revived in his hopes and fears of what might ensue from this reunion. I rejoiced at the public reconciliation with the Prince of Wales, which had taken place during my illness, and which gave the greater reason for hope that there might not now be a division! BUNBURY, THE CARICATURIST. Windsor, Aug. 14.-General Budé came in, with two strangers, whom he introduced to us by the names of Bunbury and Crawfurd. I was very curious to know if this was the Bunbury;(239) and I conjectured it could be no other. When Colonel Gwynn joined us, he proposed anew the introduction; but nothing passed to ascertain my surmise. The conversation was general And good-humoured, but without anything striking, or bespeaking character or genius. Almost the whole consisted of inquiries what to do, whither to go, and how to proceed; which, though natural and sensible for a new man, were undistinguished by any humour, or keenness of expression or manner. Mr. Crawfurd spoke not a word. He is a very handsome young man, just appointed equerry to the Duke of York. I whispered my inquiry to Colonel Gwynn as soon as I found an opportunity, and heard, "Yes,--'tis Harry Bunbury, sure enough!" So now we may all be caricatured at his leisure! He is made another of the equerries to the Duke. A man with such a turn, and with talents so inimitable in displaying it, was rather a dangerous character to be brought within a Court! Aug. 15.-My sole conversation this evening was with Mr. Bunbury, who drew a chair next mine, and chatted incessantly, with great good humour, and an avidity to discuss the subjects he started, which were all concerning plays and Players. Presently the voice of the Duke of York was heard, calling aloud for Colonel Goldsworthy. Off he ran. Mr. Bunbury laughed, but declared he would not take the hint: "What," cried he, "if I lose the beginning?(240)--I think I know it pretty Page 52 well by heart'-'Why did I marry' '"--And then he began to spout, and act, and rattle away, with all his might,-till the same voice called out "Bunbury !--you'll be too late!"--And off he flew, leaving his tea untasted--so eager had he been in discourse. MRS. SIDDONS PROVES DISAPPOINTING ON NEAR ACQUAINTANCE. Wednesday, Aug. 15.-Mrs. Schwellenberg's illness occasioned my attending the queen alone; and when my official business was ended, she graciously detained me, to read to me a new paper called "Olla Podrida," which is now Publishing periodically. Nothing very bright--nothing very deficient. In the afternoon, while I was drinking coffee with Mrs. Schwellenberg,--or, rather, looking at it, since I rarely, swallow any,--her majesty came Into the room, and soon after a little German discourse with Mrs. Schwellenberg told me Mrs. Siddons had been ordered to the Lodge, to read a play, and desired I would receive her in my room I felt a little queer in the office ; I had only seen her twice or thrice, in large assemblies, at Miss Monckton's, and at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, and never had been introduced to her, nor spoken with her. However, in this dead and tame life I now lead, such an interview was by no means undesirable. I had just got to the bottom of the stairs, when she entered the passage gallery. I took her into the tea-room, and endeavoured to make amends for former distance and taciturnity, by an open and cheerful reception. I had heard from sundry people (in old days) that she wished to make the acquaintance; but I thought it then one of too conspicuous a sort for the quietness I had so much difficulty to preserve in my ever increasing connections. Here all was changed; I received her by the queen's commands, and was perfectly well inclined to reap some pleasure from the meeting. But, now that we came so near, I was much disappointed in my expectations. I know not if my dear Fredy has met with her in private, but I fancy approximation is not highly in her favour. I found her the heroine of a tragedy,--sublime, elevated, and solemn. In face and person truly noble and commanding; in manners quiet and stiff; in voice deep and dragging; and in conversation, formal, sententious, calm, and Page 53 dry. I expected her to have been all that is interesting; the delicacy and sweetness with which she seizes every opportunity to strike and to captivate upon the stage had persuaded me that her mind was formed with that peculiar susceptibility which, in different modes, must give equal powers to attract and to delight in common life. But I was very much mistaken. As a stranger I must have admired her noble appearance and beautiful countenance, and have regretted that nothing in her conversation kept pace with their promise and, as a celebrated actress I had still only to do the same. Whether fame and success have spoiled her, or whether she only possesses the skill of representing and embellishing materials with which she is furnished by others, I know not but still I remain disappointed. She was scarcely seated, and a little general discourse begun, before she told me--at once--that "There was no part she had ever so much wished to act as that of Cecilia." I made some little acknowledgment, and hurried to ask when she had seen Sir Joshua Reynolds, Miss Palmer, and others with whom I knew her acquainted. The play she was to read was "The Provoked Husband." She appeared neither alarmed nor elated by her summons, but calmly to look upon it as a thing of course, from her celebrity. I should very much have liked to have heard her read the play, but my dearest Mrs. Delany spent the whole evening with me, and I could therefore take no measures for finding out a convenient adjoining room. Mrs. Schwellenberg, I heard afterwards, was so accommodated, though not well enough for the tea-table. MR. FAIRLY'S BEREAVEMENT. Aug. 23.-At St. James's I read in the newspapers a paragraph that touched me much for the very amiable Mr. Fairly: it was the death of his wife, which happened on the Duke of York's birth-day, the 16th.(242) Mr. Fairly has devoted his whole time, strength, thoughts, and cares solely to nursing and attending her during a long and most painful illness which she sustained. They speak of her here as being amiable, but so Page 54 cold and reserved, that she was little known, and by no means in equal favour with her husband, who stands, upon the whole the highest in general esteem and regard of any individual of the household. I find every mouth open to praise and pity, love and honour him. TROUBLESOME MR. TURBULENT. Upon returning to Kew, I had a scene for which I was little enough, indeed, prepared, though willing, and indeed, earnest to satisfy Mr. Turbulent, I wished him to make an alteration of behaviour. After hastily changing my dress, I went, as usual, to the parlour, to be ready for dinner; but found there no Mrs. Schwellenberg; she was again unwell; Miss Planta was not ready, and Mr. Turbulent was reading by himself. Away he flung his book in a moment, and hastening to shut the door lest I should retreat, he rather charged than desired me to explain my late "chilling demeanour." Almost startled by his apparent entire ignorance of deserving it, I found an awkwardness I had not foreseen in making myself understood. I wished him rather to feel than be told the improprieties I meant to obviate - and I did what was possible by half evasive, half expressive answers, to call back his own recollection and consciousness. In vain, however, was the attempt; he protested himself wholly innocent, and that he would rather make an end of his existence than give me offence. He saw not these very protestations were again doing it, and he grew so vehement in his defence, and so reproachful in his accusation of unjust usage, that I was soon totally in a perplexity how to extricate myself from a difficulty I had regarded simply as his own. The moment he saw I grew embarrassed, he redoubled his challenges to know the cause of my "ill-treatment." I assured him, then, I could never reckon silence ill-treatment. "Yes," he cried, "yes, from you it is ill-treatment, and it has given me the most serious uneasiness." "I am sorry," I said, "for that, and did not mean it." "Not mean it?" cried be. "Could you imagine I should miss your conversation, your ease, your pleasantness, your gaiety, and take no notice of the loss?" Then followed a most violent flow of compliments, ending with a fresh demand for an explanation, made with an energy Page 55 that, to own the truth, once more quite frightened me. I endeavoured to appease him, by general promises of becoming more voluble - and I quite languished to say to him the truth at once; that his sport, his spirit, and his society would all be acceptable to me, would he but divest them of that redundance of -gallantry which rendered them offensive : but I could only think how to say this--I could not bring it out. This promised volubility, though it softened him, he seemed to receive as a sort of acknowledgment that I owed him some reparation for the disturbance I had caused him. I stared enough at such an interpretation, which I could by no means allow; but no sooner did I disclaim it than all his violence was resumed, and he urged me to give in my charge against him with an impetuosity that almost made me tremble. I made as little answer as possible, finding everything I said seemed but the more to inflame his violent spirit; but his emotion was such, and the cause so inadequate, and my uncertainty so unpleasant what to think of him altogether, that I was seized with sensations so nervous, I Could almost have cried. In the full torrent of his offended justification against my displeasure towards him, he perceived my increasing distress how to proceed, and, suddenly stopping, exclaimed in quite another tone, "Now, then, ma'am, I see your justice returning; you feel that you have used me very ill!" To my great relief entered Miss Planta. He contrived to say, "Remember, you promise to explain all this." I made him no sort of answer, and though he frequently, in the course of the evening, repeated, "I depend upon your promise! I build upon a conference," I sent his dependence and his building to Coventry, by not seeming to hear him. I determined, however, to avoid all tête-à-têtes with him whatsoever, as much as was in my power. How very few people are fit for them, nobody living in trios and quartettos can imagine! A CONCEITED PARSON. Windsor.-Who should find me out now but Dr. Shepherd.(243) He is here as canon, and was in residence. He told me he had long wished to come, but had never been able to find the Page 56 way of entrance before. He made me an immense length of visit, and related to me all the exploits of his life,-so far as they were prosperous. In no farce did a man ever more floridly open upon his own perfections. He assured me I should be delighted to know the whole of his life; it was equal to anything; and everything he had was got by his own address and ingenuity. "I could tell the king," cried he, "more than all the chapter. I want to talk to him, but he always gets out of my way; he does not know me; he takes me for a mere common person, like the rest of the canons here, and thinks of me no more than if I were only fit for the cassock;--a mere Scotch priest! Bless 'em!--they know nothing about me. You have no conception what things I have done! And I want to tell 'em all this;--It's fitter for them to hear than what comes to their ears. What I want is for somebody to tell them what I am." They know it already, thought I. Then, when he had exhausted this general panegyric, he descended to some few particulars; especially dilating upon his preaching, and applying to me for attesting its excellence. "I shall make one sermon every year, precisely for you!" he cried; "I think I know what will please you. That on the creation last Sunday was just to your taste. You shall have such another next residence. I think I preach in the right tone--not too slow, like that poor wretch Grape, nor too fast like Davis and the rest of 'em; but yet fast enough never to tire them. That's just my idea of good preaching." Then he told me what excellent apartments he had here and how much he should like my opinion in fitting them up. MR. TURBULENT BECOMES A NUISANCE. Aug.30.-Mrs. Schwellenberg invited Mr. Turbulent to dinner, for she said he had a large correspondence, and might amuse her. He came early; and finding nobody in the eating-parlour, begged to wait in mine till Mrs. Schwellenberg came downstairs. This was the last thing I wished; but he required no answer, and instantly resumed the Kew discussion, entreating me to tell him what he had done. I desired him to desist--in vain, he affirmed I had promised him an explanation, and he had therefore a right to it. "You fully mistook me, then," cried I, "for I meant no Page 57 such thing then; I mean no such thing now; and I never shall mean any such thing in future. Is this explicit? I think it best to tell you so at once, that you may expect nothing more, but give over the subject, and talk of something else. What is the news?" "I'll talk of nothing else!--it distracts me;--pray No, no, tell Me!--I call upon your good-nature!" "I have none--about this! " "Upon your goodness of heart!" "'Tis all hardness here!" "I will cast myself at your feet,--I will kneel to you!" And he was preparing his immense person for prostration, when Goter(244) opened the door. Such an interruption to his heroics made me laugh heartily; nor could he help joining himself; though the moment she was gone he renewed his importunity with unabated earnestness. "I remember," he cried, "it was upon the Terrace you first shewed me this disdain; and there, too, you have shown it me repeatedly since, with public superciliousness. . . . You well know you have treated me ill,--you know and have acknowledged it!" "And when?" cried I, amazed and provoked; "when did I do what could never be done?" "At Kew, ma'am, you were full of concern--full of remorse for the treatment you had given me!--and you owned it!" "Good heaven, Mr. Turbulent, what can induce you to say this?" "Is it not true?" "Not a word of it! You know it is not!" "Indeed," cried he, "I really and truly thought so--hoped so;--I believed you looked as if you felt your own ill-usage,- and it gave to me a delight inexpressible!" This was almost enough to bring back the very same supercilious Distance of which he complained; but, in dread of fresh explanations, I forbore to notice this flight, and only told him he might be perfectly satisfied, since I no longer Persevered in the taciturnity to which he objected. "But how," cried he, "do you give up, without deigning to assign one reason for It"? "The greater the compliment!" cried I, laughing; "I give up to your request." "Yes, ma'am, upon my speaking,-but why did you keep Me so long in that painful suspense?" Page 58 "Nay," cried I, "could I well be quicker? Till you spoke could I know if you heeded it?" "Ah, ma'am--is there no language but of words? Do you pretend to think there is no other?'--Must I teach it you,,--teach it to Miss Burney who speaks, who understands it so well?--who is never silent, and never can b silent?" And then came his heroic old homage to the poor eyebrows vehemently finishing with, "Do you, can you affect to know no language but speech?" " Not," cried I, coolly, " without the trouble of more investigation than I had taken here." He called this "contempt," and, exceedingly irritated, de sired me, once more, to explain, from beginning to end, how he had ever offended me. "Mr. Turbulent," cried I, "will you be satisfied if I tell you it shall all blow over?" "Make me a vow, then, you will never more, never while you live, resume that proud taciturnity." "No, no,--certainly not; I never make vows; it is a rule with me to avoid them." "Give me, then, your promise,--your solemn promise,--at least I may claim that?" "I have the same peculiarity about promises; I never make them." He was again beginning to storm, but again I assured him I would let the acquaintance take its old course, if he would but be appeased, and say no more; and, after difficulties innumerable, he at length gave up the point: but to this he was hastened, if not driven, by a summons to dinner. DR. HERSCHEL AND HIS SISTER. Sept.-Dr. Herschel is a delightful man; so unassuming with his great knowledge, so willing to dispense it to the ignorant, and so cheerful and easy in his general manners, that were he no genius it would be impossible not to remark him as a pleasing and sensible man. I was equally pleased with his sister, whom I had wished to see very much, for her great celebrity in her brother's science. She is very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenious; and her manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world, yet desirous to meet Page 59 and to return its smiles. I love not the philosophy that braves it. This brother and sister seem gratified with its favour, at the same time that their own pursuit is all-sufficient to them without it. I inquired of Miss Herschel if she was still comet-hunting, or content now with the moon? The brother answered that he had the charge of the moon, but he left to his sister to sweep the heavens for comets. Their manner of working together is most ingenious and curious. While he makes his observations without-doors, he has a method of communicating them to his sister so immediately, that she can instantly commit them to paper, with the precise moment in which they are made. By this means he loses not a minute, when there is anything particularly worth observing, by writing it down, but can still proceed, yet still have his accounts and calculations exact. The methods he has contrived to facilitate this commerce I have not the terms to explain, though his simple manner of showing them made me, fully, at the time, comprehend them. The night, unfortunately, was dark, and I could not see the moon with the famous new telescope. I mean not the great telescope through which I had taken a walk, for that is still incomplete, but another of uncommon powers. I saw Saturn, however, and his satellites, very distinctly, and their appearance was very beautiful. GAY AND ENTERTAINING MR. BUNBURY. Sept.-I saw a great deal of Mr. Bunbury in the course of this month, as he was in waiting upon the Duke of York, who spent great part of it at Windsor, to the inexpressible delight of his almost idolising father. Mr. Bunbury did not open upon me with that mildness and urbanity that might lead me to forget the strokes of his pencil, and power of his caricature: he early avowed a general disposition to laugh at, censure, or despise all around him. He began talking of everybody and everything about us, with the decisive freedom of a confirmed old intimacy. "I am in disgrace here, already!" he cried almost exultingly. "In disgrace?" I repeated. "Yes,--for not riding out this morning!--I was asked--what Could I have better to do?--Ha! ha!" The next time that I saw him after your departure from Page 60 Windsor,(245) he talked a great deal of painting and painters, and then said, "The draftsman of whom I think the most highly of any in the world was in this room the other day, and I did not know it, and was not introduced to him!" I immediately assured him I never held the honours of the room when its right mistress was in it, but that I would certainly have named them to each other had I known he desired it. "O, yes,"' cried he, "of all things I wished to know him. He draws like the old masters. I have seen fragments in the style of many of the very best and first productions of the greatest artists of former times. He could deceive the most critical judge. I wish greatly for a sight of his works, and for the possession of one of them, to add to my collection, as I have something from almost everybody else and a small sketch of his I should esteem a greater curiosity than all the rest put together."(246) Moved by the justness of' this praise, I fetched him the sweet little cadeaux so lately left me by Mr. William's kindness. He was very much pleased, and perhaps thought I might bestow them. O, no--not one stroke of that pencil could I relinquish! Another evening he gave us the history, of his way of life at Brighthelmstone. He spoke highly of the duke, but with much satire of all else, and that incautiously, and evidently with an innate defiance of consequences, from a consciousness of secret powers to overawe their hurting him. Notwithstanding the general reverence I pay to extraordinary talents, which lead me to think it even a species of impertinence to dwell upon small failings in their rare possessors, Mr. Bunbury did not gain my good-will. His serious manner is supercilious and haughty, and his easy conversation wants rectitude in its principles. For the rest, he is entertaining and gay, full of talk, sociable, willing to enjoy what is going forward, and ready to speak his opinion with perfect unreserve. Plays and players seem his darling theme; he can rave about them from morning to night, and yet be ready to rave again when morning returns, He acts as he talks, spouts as Page 61 he recollects, and seems to give his whole soul to dramatic feeling and expression. This is not, however, his only subject Love and romance are equally clear to his discourse, though they cannot be introduced with equal frequency. Upon these topics he loses himself wholly--he runs into rhapsodies that discredit him at once as a father, a husband, and a moral man. He asserts that love Is the first principle of life, and should take place of every other; holds all bonds and obligations as nugatory that would claim a preference; and advances such doctrines of exalted sensations in the tender passion as made me tremble while I heard them. He adores Werter, and would scarce believe I had not read it- -still less that I had begun It and left it off, from distaste at its evident tendency. I saw myself sink instantly in his estimation, though till this little avowal I had appeared to Stand in it very honourably. THE PRINCE OF WALES AT WINDSOR AGAIN. One evening, while I was sitting with Mrs. Delany, and her fair niece, when tea was over, and the gentlemen all withdrawn, the door was Opened, and a star entered, that I perceived presently to be the Prince of Wales. He was here to hunt with his royal father and brother. With great politeness he made me his first bow, and then advancing to Mrs. Delany, insisted, very considerately, on her sitting still, though he stood himself for half an hour--all the time he stayed. He entered into discourse very good-humouredly, and with much vivacity; described to her his villa at Brighthelmstone, told several anecdotes of adventures there, and seemed desirous to entertain both her and myself . . . . . NOV. 8.-At near one o'clock in the morning, while the wardrobe woman was pinning up the queen's hair, there was a sudden rap-tap at the dressing-room door. Extremely surprised, I looked at the queen, to see what should be done; she did not speak. I had never heard such a sound before, for at the royal doors there Is always a peculiar kind of scratch used, instead of tapping. I heard it, however, again,--and the queen called out, "What is that?" I Was really startled, not conceiving who could take so strange a liberty as to come to the queen's apartment without the announcing of a page - and no page, I was very sure, would make such a noise. Page 62 Again the sound was repeated, and more smartly. I grew quite alarmed, imagining some serious evil at hand--either regarding the king or some of the princesses. The queen, however, bid me open the door. I did--but what was MY surprise to see there a large man, in an immense wrapping great coat, buttoned up round his chin, so that he was almost hid between cape and hat! I stood quite motionless for a moment--but he, as if also surprised, drew back; I felt quite sick with sudden terror--I really thought some ruffian had broke into the house, or a madman. "Who is it?" cried the queen. "I do not know, ma'am," I answered. "Who is it?" she called aloud; and then, taking off his hat, entered the Prince of Wales! The queen laughed very much, so did I too, happy in this unexpected explanation. He told her, eagerly, he merely came to inform her there were the most beautiful northern lights to be seen that could possibly be imagined, and begged her to come to the gallery windows. FALSE RUMOURS OF Miss BURNEY'S RESIGNATION. Wednesday, Sept. 14--We went to town for the drawing-room, and I caught a most severe cold, by being oblige to have the glass down on my side, to suit Mrs. Schwellenberg, though the sharpest wind blew in that ever attacked a poor phiz. However, these are the sort of desagremens I can always best bear; and for the rest, I have now pretty constant civility. My dear father drank tea with me - but told me of a paragraph in "The World," that gave me some uneasiness; to this effect:--"We hear that Miss Burney has resigned her place about the queen, and is now promoted to attend the princesses, an office far more suited to her character and abilities, which will now be called forth as they merit."--Or to that purpose. As "The World" is not taken in here, I flattered myself it would not be known; for I knew how little pleasure such a paragraph would give, and was very sorry for it. The next day, at St. James's, Miss Planta desired to speak to me, before the queen arrived. She acquainted me Of the same "news," and said, "Everybody spoke of it;" and the queen might receive twenty letters of recommend, to Page 63 my place before night. Still I could only be sorry. Another paragraph had now appeared, she told me, contradicting the first, and saying, "The resignation of Miss Burney is premature; it only arose from an idea of the service the education of the princesses might reap from her virtues and accomplishments." I was really concerned - conscious how little gratified my royal mistress would be by the whole :-and, presently, Miss Planta came to me again, and told me that the princesses had mentioned it! They never read any newspapers; but they had heard of it from the Duke of York. I observed the queen was most particularly gracious with me, softer, gentler, more complacent than ever; and, while dressing, she dismissed her wardrobe-woman, and, looking at me very steadfastly, said, "Miss Burney, do you ever read newspapers?" "Sometimes," I answered, "but not often: however. I believe I know what your majesty means!" I could say no less; I was so sure of her meaning. "Do you?" she cried. "Yes, ma'am, and I have been very much hurt by it: that is, if your majesty means anything relative to myself?" "I do!" she answered, still looking at me with earnestness. "My father, ma'am," cried I, "told me of it last night, with a good deal of indignation." "I," cried she, "did not see it myself: you know how little I read the newspapers." "Indeed," cried I, "as it was in a paper not taken in here, I hoped it would quite have escaped your majesty." ".So it did: I only heard of it." I looked a little curious, and she kindly explained herself. "When the Duke of York came yesterday to dinner, he said almost immediately, 'Pray, ma'am, what has Miss Burney left You for?' 'Left me?' 'Yes, they say she's gone; pray what's the reason?' 'Gone?' 'Yes, it's at full length in all the newspapers: is not she gone?' 'Not that I know of.'" "All the newspapers" was undoubtedly a little flourish of the duke; but we jointly censured and lamented the unbridled liberty of the press, in thus inventing, contradicting, and bringing on and putting off, whatever they pleased. I saw, however, she had really been staggered: she concluded, I fancy, that the paragraph arose from some latent Muse, which might end in matter of fact; for she talked to me of Mrs. Dickenson, and of all that related to her retreat, and Page 64 dwelt upon the subject with a sort of solicitude that seemed apprehensive--if I may here use such a word-of a similar action. It appeared to me that she rather expected some further assurance on my part that no such view or intention had given rise to this pretended report; and therefore, when I had again the honour of her conversation alone, I renewed the subject, and mentioned that my father had had some thoughts of contradicting the paragraph himself. "And has he done it ? " cried she quite eagerly. "No, ma'am; for, upon further consideration, he feared it might only excite fresh paragraphs, and that the whole would sooner die, if neglected." "So," said she, "I have been told; for, some years ago, there was a paragraph in the papers I wanted myself to have had contradicted, but they acquainted me it was best to be patient, and it would be forgot the sooner." "This, however, ma'am, has been contradicted this morning." "By your father?" cried she, again speaking eagerly. "No, ma'am; I know not by whom." She then asked how it was done. This was very distressing but I was forced to repeat It as well as I could, reddening enough, though omitting, you may believe, the worst. just then there happened an interruption; which was vexatious, as it prevented a concluding speech, disclaiming all thoughts of resignation, which I saw was really now become necessary for the queen's satisfaction; and since it was true--why not say it? And, accordingly, the next day, when she was most excessively kind to me, I seized an opportunity, by attending her through the apartments to the breakfast-room, to beg, permission to speak to her. It was smilingly granted me. "I have now, ma'am, read both the paragraphs." "Well?" with a look of much curiosity. "And indeed I thought them both very impertinent. They say that the idea arose from a notion of my being promoted to a place about the princesses!" "I have not seen either of the paragraphs," she answered, "but the Prince of Wales told me of the second yesterday." "They little know me, ma'am," I cried, "who think I should regard any other place as a promotion that removed me from your majesty." Page 65 "I did not take it ill, I assure you," cried she, gently. "Indeed, ma'am, I am far from having a wish for any such promotion--far from it! your majesty does not bestow a smile upon me that does not secure and confirm my attachment." one of her best smiles followed this, with a very condescending little bow, and the words, "You are very good," uttered in a most gentle Voice; and she went on to her breakfast. I am most glad this complete explanation passed. Indeed it is most true I would not willingly quit a place about the queen for any place; and I was glad to mark that her smiles were to me the whole estimate of its value. This little matter has proved, in the end, very gratifying to me for it has made clear beyond all doubt her desire of retaining me, and a considerably increased degree of attention and complacency have most flatteringly shown a wish I should be retained by attachment. TYRANNICAL MRS. SCHWELLENBERG. Nov. 27-I had a terrible journey indeed to town, Mrs. Schwellenberg finding it expedient to have the glass down on my side, whence there blew in a sharp wind, which so painfully attacked my eyes that they were inflamed even before we -arrived in town. Mr. de Luc and Miss Planta both looked uneasy, but no one durst speak; and for me, it was among the evils that I can always best bear yet before the evening I grew so ill that I could not propose going to Chelsea, lest I should be utterly unfitted for Thursday's drawing-room. The next day, however, I received a consolation that has been some ease to my mind ever since. My dear father spent the evening with me, and was so incensed at the state of my eyes, which were now as piteous to behold as to feel, and at the relation of their usage, that he charged me, another time, to draw up my 'glass in defiance of all opposition, and to abide by all consequences, since my place was wholly immaterial when put in competition with my health. I was truly glad of this permission to rebel, and it has given Me an internal hardiness in all similar assaults, that has at least relieved my mind from the terror of giving mortal offence where most I owe implicit obedience, should provocation overpower my capacity of forbearance. When we assembled to return to Windsor, Mr. de Luc was Page 66 in real consternation at sight of my eyes; and I saw an indignant glance at my coadjutrix, that could scarce content itself without being understood. Miss Planta ventured not at such a glance, but a whisper broke out, as we were descending the stairs, expressive of horror against the same poor person--poor person indeed--to exercise a power productive only of abhorrence, to those who view as well as to those who feel it! Some business of Mrs. Schwellenberg's occasioned a delay of the journey, and we all retreated back; and when I returned to my room, Miller, the old head housemaid, came to me, with a little neat tin saucepan in her hand, saying, "Pray, ma'am, use this for your eyes; 'tis milk and butter, much as I used to make for Madame Haggerdorn when she travelled in the winter with Mrs. Schwellenberg." Good heaven! I really shuddered when she added, that all that poor woman's misfortunes with her eyes, which, from inflammation after inflammation, grew nearly blind, were attributed by herself to these journeys, in which she was forced to have the glass down at her side in all weathers, and frequently the glasses behind her also! Upo n my word this account of my predecessor was the least exhilarating intelligence I could receive! Goter told me, afterwards, that all the servants in the house had remarked I was going just the same way! Miss Planta presently ran into my room, to say she had hopes we should travel without this amiable being; and she had left me but a moment when Mrs. Stainforth succeeded her, exclaiming, "O, for heaven's sake, don't leave her behind; for heaven's sake, Miss Burney, take her with you!" 'Twas impossible not to laugh at these opposite' interests, both, from agony of fear, breaking through all restraint. Soon after, however, we all assembled again, and got into the coach. Mr.' de Luc, who was my vis-`a-vis, instantly pulled up the glass. "Put down that glass!" was the immediate order. He affected not to hear her, and began conversing. She enraged quite tremendously, calling aloud to be obeyed without delay. He looked compassionately at me, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, "But, ma'am-" "Do it, Mr. de Luc, when I tell you! I will have it! When you been too cold, you might bear it!" ""It is not for me, ma'am, but poor Miss Burney." "O, poor Miss Burney might bear it the same! put it down, Mr. de Luc! without, I will get out! put it down, when I tell Page 67 you! It is my coach! I will have it selfs! I might go alone in it, or with one, or with what you call nobody, when I please!" Frightened for good Mr. de Luc, and the more for being much obliged to him, I now interfered, and begged him to let down the glass. Very reluctantly he complied, and I leant back in the coach, and held up my muff to my eyes. What a journey ensued! To see that face when lighted up with fury is a sight for horror! I was glad to exclude it by my muff. Miss Planta alone attempted to speak. I did not think it incumbent on me to "make the agreeable," thus used; I was therefore wholly dumb : for not a word, not an apology, not one expression of being sorry for what I suffered, was uttered. The most horrible ill-humour, violence, and rudeness, were all that were shown. Mr. de Luc was too much provoked to take his usual method of passing all off by constant talk and as I had never seen him venture to appear provoked before, I felt a great obligation to his kindness. When we were about half way, we stopped to water the horses. He then again pulled up the glass, as if from absence. A voice of fury exclaimed, "Let it down! without I won't go!" "I am sure," cried he, "all Mrs. de Luc's plants will be killed by this frost For the frost was very severe indeed. Then he proposed my changing places with Miss Planta, who sat opposite Mrs. Schwellenberg, and consequently on the sheltered side. "Yes!" cried Mrs. Schwellenberg, "MISS Burney might sit there, and so she ought!" I told her, briefly, I was always sick in riding backwards. "O, ver well! when you don't like it, don't do it. You might bear it when you like it? what did the poor Haggerdorn bear it! when the blood was all running down from her eyes!" This was too much! "I must take, then," I cried, "the more warning!" After that I spoke not a word. I ruminated all the rest of the way upon my dear father's recent charge and permission. I was upon the point continually of availing myself of both, but alas! I felt the deep disappointment I should give him, and I felt the most cruel repugnance to owe a resignation to a quarrel. These reflections powerfully forbade the rebellion to which this unequalled arrogance and cruelty excited me; and after revolving them again and again, I----accepted a bit of cake which she suddenly offered me as we reached Windsor, and Page 68 determined, since I submitted to my monastic destiny from motives my serious thoughts deemed right, I would not be prompted to oppose it from mere feelings of resentment to one who, strictly, merited only contempt. . . . I gulped as well as I could at dinner; but all civil fits are again over. Not a word was said to me: yet I was really very ill all the afternoon; the cold had seized my elbows, from holding them up so long, and I was stiff and chilled all over. In the evening, however, came my soothing Mrs. Delany. Sweet soul ! she folded me in her arms, and wept over my shoulder! Too angry to stand upon ceremony she told Mrs. Schwellenberg, after our public tea, she must retire to my room, that she might speak with me alone. This was highly resented, and I was threatened, afterwards, that she would come to tea no more, and we might talk our secrets always. Mr. de Luc called upon me next morning, and openly avowed his indignation, protesting it was an oppression he could not bear to see used, and reproving me for checking him when he would have run all risks. I thanked him most cordially; but assured him the worst of all inflammations to me was that of a quarrel, and I entreated him, therefore, not to interfere. But we have been cordial friends from that time forward. Miss Planta also called, kindly bringing me some eye-water, and telling me she had "Never so longed to beat anybody in her life; and yet, I assure you," she added, "everybody remarks that she behaves, altogether, better to you than to any body!" O heavens! MRS. SCHWELLENBERG'S CAPRICIOUSNESS. Saturday, Dec. 1.-'Tis strange that two feelings so very opposite as love and resentment should have nearly equal power in inspiring courage for or against the object that excites them yet so it is. In former times I have often, on various occasions, felt it raised to anything possible, by affection, and now I have found it mount to the boldest height, by disdain For, be it known, such gross and harsh usage I experienced at the end of last month, since the inflammation of the eyes which I bore much more composedly than sundry personal indignities that followed, that I resolved upon a new mode of Page 69 conduct--namely, to go out every evening, in Order to show that I by no means considered myself as bound to stay at home after dinner, if treated very ill; and this most courageous plan I flattered myself must needs either procure me a liberty of absence, always so much wished, or occasion a change of behaviour to more decency and endurability. I had received for to-day an invitation to meet Lady Bute and Lady Louisa Stuart at my dearest Mrs. Delany's, and I should have wished it at all times, so much I like them both. I had no opportunity to speak first to my royal mistress, but I went to her at noon, rather more dressed than usual, and when I saw her look a little surprised, I explained my reason. She seemed very well satisfied with it, but my coadjutrix appeared in an astonishment unequalled, and at dinner, when we necessarily met again, new testimonies of conduct quite without example were exhibited: for when Mrs. Thackeray and Miss Planta were helped, she helped herself, and appeared publicly to send me to Coventry--though the sole provocation was intending to forego her society this evening! I sat quiet and unhelped a few minutes, considering what to do: for so little was my appetite, I was almost tempted to go without dinner entirely. However, upon further reflection, I concluded it would but harden her heart still more to have this fresh affront so borne, and so related, as it must have been, through Windsor, and therefore I calmly begged some greens from Miss Planta. The weakness of my eyes, which still would not bear the light, prevented me from tasting animal food all this time. A little ashamed, she then anticipated Miss Planta's assistance, by offering me some French beans. To curb my own displeasure, I obliged myself to accept them. Unfortunately, however, this little softening was presently worn out, by some speeches which it encouraged from Mrs. Thackeray, who seemed to seize the moment of permission to acknowledge that I was in the room, by telling me she had lately met some of my friends in town, among whom Mrs. Chapone and the Burrows family had charged her with a thousand regrets for My Seclusion from their society, and as many kind compliments and good wishes. This again sent me to Coventry for the rest of the dinner. When it was over, and we were all going upstairs to coffee, I spoke to Columb,(247) in passing, to have a chair for me at seven o'clock. Page 70 "For what, then," cried a stern voice behind me, "for What go you upstairs at all, when you don't drink coffee? Did she imagine I should answer "For your society, ma'am"? No--I turned back quick as lightning, and only saying, "Very well, ma'am," moved towards my own room. Again a little ashamed of herself, she added, rather more civilly, "For what should you have that trouble?" I simply repeated my "Very well, ma'am," in a voice of, I believe, rather pique than calm acquiescence, and entered my own apartment, unable to enjoy this little release, however speedy to obtain it, from the various, the grievous emotions of my mind, that this was the person, use me how she might, with whom I must chiefly pass my time! So unpleasant were the sensations that filled me, that I could recover no gaiety, even at the house of my beloved friend, though received there by her dear self, her beautiful niece, and Lady Bute and Lady Louisa, in the most flattering manner. . . . The behaviour of my coadjutrix continued in the same strain-- -really shocking to endure. I always began, at our first meeting, some little small speech, and constantly received so harsh a rebuff at the second word, that I then regularly seated myself by a table, at work, and remained wholly silent the rest of the day. I tried the experiment of making my escape; but I was fairly conquered from pursuing it. The constant black reception depressed me out of powers to exert for flight; and therefore I relinquished this plan, and only got off, as I could, to my own room, or remained dumb in hers. To detail the circumstances of the tyranny and the grossieret`e I experienced at this time would be afflicting to my beloved friends, and oppressive to myself, I am fain, however, to confess they vanquished me. I found the restoration of some degree of decency quite necessary to my quiet, since such open and horrible ill-will from one daily in my sight even affrighted me: it pursued me in shocking visions even when I avoided her presence; and therefore I was content to put upon myself the great and cruel force of seeking to conciliate a person who had no complaint against me, but that she had given me an inflammation of the eyes, which had been witnessed and resented by her favourite Mr. de Luc. I rather believe that latter circumstance was what incensed her so inveterately. Page 71 The next extraordinary step she took was one that promised me amends for all: she told me that there was no occasion we should continue together after coffee, unless by her invitation. I eagerly exclaimed that this seemed a most feasible way of producing some variety in our intercourse, and that I would adopt it most readily. She wanted instantly to call back her words : she had expected I should be alarmed, and solicit her leave to be buried -with her every evening! When she saw me so eager in acceptance, she looked mortified and disappointed ; but I would not suffer her to retract, and I began, at once, to retire to my room the moment coffee was over. This flight of the sublime, which, being her own, she could not resent, brought all round: for as she saw me every evening prepare to depart with the coffee, she constantly began, at that period, some civil discourse to detain me. I always suffered it to succeed, while civil, and when there was a failure, or a pause, I retired. By this means I recovered such portion of quiet as is compatible with a situation like mine: for she soon returned entirely to such behaviour as preceded the offence of my eyes; and I obtained a little leisure at which she could not repine, as a caprice of her own bestowed it. . . . To finish, however, with respect to the présidente, I must now acquaint you that, as my eyes entirely grew -well, her incivility entirely wore off, and I became a far greater favourite than I had ever presumed to think myself till that time! I was obliged to give up my short-lived privilege of retirement, and live on as before, making only my two precious little visits to my beloved comforter and supporter, and to devote the rest of my wearisome time to her presence--better satisfied, however, since I now saw that open war made me wretched, even When a victor, beyond what any subjection could do that had peace for its terms. This was not an unuseful discovery, for it has abated all propensity to experiment in shaking off a yoke which, however hard to bear, is so annexed to my place, that I must take one with the other, and endure them as I can. My favour, now, was beyond the favour of all others; I was "good Miss Berner," at every other word, and no one else was listened to if I would speak, and no one else was Accepted for a partner if I would play! I found no cause to Which I could attribute this change. I believe the whole mere Matter of caprice. Page 72 New YEAR's DAY. Queen's Lodge, Windsor, Tuesday, Jan. 1, 1788-I began the new year, as I ended the old one, by seizing the first moment it presented to my own disposal, for flying to Mrs. Delany, and begging her annual benediction. She bestowed it with the sweetest affection, and I spent, as usual all the time with her I had to spare. . . . In the evening, by long appointment, I was to receive Mr. Fisher and his bride.(248) Mrs. Schwellenberg, of her own accord desired me to have them in my room, and said she would herself make tea for the equerries in the eating-parlour. Mrs. Delany and Miss Port came to meet them. Mrs. Fisher seems good-natured, cheerful, and obliging, neither well nor ill in appearance, and, I fancy, not strongly marked in any way. But she adores Mr. Fisher, and has brought him a large fortune. The Princess Amelia was brought by Mrs. Cheveley, to fetch Mrs. Delany to the queen. Mrs. Fisher was much delighted in seeing her royal highness, who, when in a grave humour, does 'the honours of her rank with a seriousness extremely entertaining. She commands the company to sit down, holds out her little fat hand to be kissed, and makes a distant courtesy, with an air of complacency and encouragement that might suit any princess of five times her age. I had much discourse, while the rest were engaged, with Mr. Fisher, about my ever-valued, ever-regretted Mrs. Thrale. Can I call her by another name, loving that name so long, so well, for her and her sake? He gave me concern by information that she is now publishing, not only the "Letters " of Dr. Johnson, but her own. How strange! Jan. 4.-In the morning, Mrs. Schwellenberg presented me, from the queen, with a new year's gift. It is plate, and very elegant. The queen, I find, makes presents to her whole household every year: more or less, according to some standard of their claims which she sets up, very properly, in her own mind. CHATTY MR. BRYANT AGAIN. Jan. 8.-I met Mr. Bryant, who came, by appointment to give me that pleasure. He was in very high spirits, full Of anecdote and amusement. He has as much good-humoured Page 73 chit-chat and entertaining gossiping as if he had given no time to the classics and his studies, instead of having nearly devoted his life to them. One or two of his little anecdotes I will try to recollect. in the year thirty-three of this century, and in his own memory, there was a cause brought before a judge, between two highwaymen, who had quarrelled about the division of their booty; and these men had the effrontery to bring their dispute to trial. "In the petition of the plaintiff," said Mr. Bryant, "he asserted that he had been extremely ill-used by the defendant: that they had carried on a very advantageous trade together, upon Black-heath, Hounslow-heath, Bagshot-heath, and other places; that their business chiefly consisted in watches, wearing apparel, and trinkets of all sorts, as well as large concerns between them in cash; that they had agreed to an equitable partition of all profits, and that this agreement had been violated. So impudent a thing, the judge said, was never before brought out in a court, and so he refused to pass sentence in favour of either of them, and dismissed them from the court." Then he told us a great number of comic slip-slops, of the first Lord Baltimore, who made a constant misuse of one word for another: for instance, "I have been," says he, "upon a little excoriation to see a ship lanced; and there is not a finer going vessel upon the face of God's earth: you've no idiom how well it sailed." Having given us this elegant specimen of the language of one lord, he proceeded to give us one equally forcible of the understanding of another. The late Lord Plymouth, meeting in a country town with a puppet-show, was induced to see it; and, from the high entertainment he received through Punch, he determined to buy him, and accordingly asked his price, and paid it, and carried the puppet to his country-house, that he might be diverted with him at any odd hour. Mr. Bryant protests he met the same troop Just as the purchase had been made, and went himself to the puppet-show, which was exhibited senza punch! Next he spoke upon the Mysteries, or origin of our theatrical entertainments, and repeated the plan and conduct Of several Of these strange compositions, in particular one he remembered which was called "Noah's Ark," and in which that patriarch and his sons, just previous to the Deluge, made it all their delight to speed themselves into the ark without Mrs. Noah, Page 74 whom they wished to escape; but she surprised them just as they had embarked, and made so prodigious a racket against the door that, after a long and violent contention, she forced them to open it, and gained admission, having first content, them by being kept out till she was thoroughly wet to the skin. These most eccentric and unaccountable dramas filled up the chief of our conversation. DR. JOHNSON's LETTERS To MRS. THRALE DISCUSSED. Wednesday, Jan. 9.-To-day Mrs. Schwellenberg did me a real favour, and with real good nature; for she sent me the "Letters" of my poor lost friends, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale,(249) which she knew me to be almost pining to procure. The book belongs to the Bishop of Carlisle, who lent it to Mr. Turbulent, from whom it was again lent to the queen, and so passed on to Mrs. Schwellenberg. It is still unpublished.(249) With what a sadness have I been reading!--what scenes in it revived!--what regrets renewed! These letters have not been more improperly published in the whole, than they are injudiciously displayed in their several parts. She has all--every word--and thinks that, perhaps, a justice to Dr. Johnson, which, in fact, is the greatest injury to his memory. The few she has selected of her own do her, indeed, much credit; she has discarded all that were trivial and merely local, and given only such as contain something instructive, amusing, or ingenious. About four of the letters, however, of my ever-revered Dr. Johnson are truly worthy his exalted powers: one is upon death, in considering its approach as we are surrounded, or not by mourners; another, upon the sudden and premature loss of poor Mrs. Thrale's darling and only son.(250) Our name once occurs: how I started at its sight It is to mention the party that planned the first visit to our house: Miss Owen, Mr. Seward, Mrs. and Miss Thrale, and Dr. Johnson. How well shall we ever, my Susan, remember that morning! I have had so many attacks upon her subject, that at last I fairly begged quarter,--and frankly owned to Mrs. Schwellenberg that I could not endure to speak any more upon the matter, endeavouring, at the same time, to explain to her my Page 75 long and intimate connection with the family. Yet nothing I could say put a stop to "How can you defend her in this?--how can you justify her in that?"" etc. Alas! that I cannot defend her is precisely the reason I can so ill bear to speak of her. How differently and how sweetly has the queen conducted herself -upon this occasion! Eager to see the "Letters," she began reading them with the utmost avidity : a natural curiosity arose to be informed of several names and several particulars, which she knew I could satisfy; yet, when she perceived how tender a string she touched, she soon suppressed her inquiries, or only made them with so much gentleness towards the parties mentioned, that I could not be distressed in my answers; and even In a short time I found her questions made so favourable a disposition, that I began secretly to rejoice in them, as the means by which I reaped opportunity of clearing several points that had been darkened by calumny, and of softening others that had been viewed wholly through false lights. Jan. 10.-When we were summoned to the tea-room I met Miss de Luc coming out. I asked if she did not stay tea? "O How can I," cried she, in a voice of distress, "when already, as there is company here without me, Mrs. Schwellenberg has asked me what I came for?" I was quite shocked for her, and could only shrug in dismay and let her pass. When there is no one else she is courted to stay! Mr. and Mrs. Fisher came soon after; and the Princesses Augusta and Amelia fetched away Mrs. Delany. Soon after Colonel Wellbred came, ushering in Mr. Fairly and his young son, who is at Eton school. I had seen Mr. F. but once since his great and heavy loss, though now near half a year had elapsed. So great a personal alteration in a few months I have seldom seen: thin, haggard, worn with care, grief, and watching-- his hair turned grey--white, rather, and some of his front teeth vanished. He seemed to have suffered, through his feelings, the depredations suffered by Others through age and time. His demeanour, upon this trying occasion, filled me with as much admiration as his countenance did with compassion : calm, composed, and gentle, he seemed bent on appearing not only resigned, but cheerful. I might even have supposed him verging on being happy, had not the havoc of grief on his face, and the tone of deep melancholy in his voice, assured me his Solitude was all sacred to his sorrows. Page 76 Mr. Fisher was very sad himself, grieving at the death of Dr. Harley, Dean of Windsor and Bishop of Hereford. He began, however, talking to me of these "Letters," and, with him, I could speak of them, and of their publisher, without reserve: but the moment they were named Mrs. Schwellenberg uttered such hard and harsh things, that I could not keep my seat and the less, because, knowing my strong friendship there in former days, I was sure it was meant I should be hurt, I attempted not to speak, well aware all defence is irritation, where an attack is made from ill-nature, not justice. The gentle Mr. Fisher, sorry for the cause and the effect of this assault, tried vainly to turn it aside: what began with censure soon proceeded to invective; and at last, being really sick from crowding recollections of past scenes, where the person now thus vilified had been dear and precious to my very heart, I was forced, abruptly, to walk out of the room. It was indifferent to me whether or not my retreat was noticed. I have never sought to disguise the warm friendship that once subsisted between Mrs. Thrale and myself, for I always hoped that, where it was known, reproach might be spared to a name I can never hear without a secret pang, even when simply mentioned. Oh, then, how severe a one is added, when its sound is accompanied by the hardest aspersions! I returned when I could, and the subject was over. When all were gone Mrs. Schwellenberg said, "I have told it Mr. Fisher that he drove you out from the room, and he says he won't not do it no more." She told me next--that in the second volume I also was mentioned. Where she may have heard this I cannot gather, but it has given me a sickness at heart inexpressible. It is not that I expect severity: for at the time of that correspondence--at all times, indeed, previous to the marriage with Piozzi, if Mrs. Thrale loved not F. B., where shall we find faith in words, or give credit to actions? But her present resentment, however unjustly incurred, of my constant disapprobation of her conduct, may prompt some note, or other mark, to point out her change of sentiments--but let me try to avoid such painful expectations; at least, not to dwell upon them. O, little does she know how tenderly at this moment I could run again into her arms, so often opened to receive me with a cordiality I believed inalienable. And it was sincere then, I am satisfied: pride, resentment of disapprobation, and consciousness of unjustifiable proceedings --- these have now Page 77 changed her: but if we met, and she saw and believed my faithful regard, how would she again feel all her own return! Well, what a dream am I making! Jan. 11.-Upon this ever-interesting subject, I had to-day a very sweet scene with the queen. While Mrs. Schwellenberg and myself were both in our usual attendance at noon, her majesty inquired of Mrs. Schwellenberg if she had yet read any of the "Letters"? "No," she answered, "I have them not to read." I then said she had been so obliging as to lend them to me, to whom they were undoubtedly of far greater personal value. "That is true," said the queen; "for I think there is but little in them that can be of much consequence or value to the public at large." "Your majesty, you will hurt Miss Burney if you speak about that; poor Miss Burney will be quite hurt by that." The queen looked much surprised, and I hastily exclaimed, "O, no!--not with the gentleness her majesty names it." Mrs. Schwellenberg then spoke in German; and, I fancy, by the names she mentioned, recounted how Mr. Turbulent and Mr. Fisher had "driven me out of the room." The queen seemed extremely astonished, and I was truly vexed at this total misunderstanding; and that the goodness she has exerted upon this occasion should seem so little to have succeeded. But I could not explain, lest it should seem to reproach what was meant as kindness in Mrs. Schwellenberg, who had not yet discovered that it was not the subject, but her own manner of treating it, that was so painful to me. However, the instant Mrs. Schwellenberg left the room, and we remained alone, the queen, approaching me in the softest manner, and looking earnestly in my face, said, "You could not be offended, surely, at what I said." "O no, ma'am," cried I, deeply indeed penetrated by such unexpected condescension. "I have been longing to make a speech to your majesty upon this matter; and it was but yesterday that I entreated Mrs. Delany to make it for me, and to express to your majesty the very deep sense I feel of the lenity with which this Subject has been treated in my hearing." "Indeed," cried she, with eyes strongly expressive of the complacency with which she heard me, "I have always spoke as little as possible upon this affair. I remember but twice that I have named it: once I said to the Bishop of Carlisle, Page 78 that I thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to Mr. Langton, at the Drawing-room, I said, 'Your friend Dr. Johnson, sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, and his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but I think he wanted one friend more.' 'What for? ma'am,' cried he; 'A friend to suppress them,' I answered. And, indeed, this is all I ever said about the business." A PAIR OF PARAGONS. .....I was amply recompensed in spending an evening the most to my natural taste of any I have spent officially under the royal roof. How high Colonel Wellbred stands with me you know; Mr. Fairly., with equal gentleness, good breeding, and delicacy, adds a far more general turn for conversation, and seemed not only ready, but pleased, to open upon subjects of such serious import as were suited to his state of mind, and could not but be edifying, from a man of such high moral character, to all who heard him. Life and death were the deep themes to which he .led; and the little space between them, and the little value of that space were the subject of his comments. The unhappiness of man at least after the ardour of his first youth, and the near worthlessness of the world, seemed so deeply impressed on his mind, that no reflection appeared to be consolatory to it, save the necessary shortness of our mortal career. . . . "Indeed," said he, "there is no time--I know of none--in which life is well worth having. The prospect before us is never such as to make it worth preserving, except from religious motives." I felt shocked and sorry. Has he never tasted happiness, who so deeply drinks of sorrow? He surprised me, and filled me, indeed, with equal wonder and pity. At a loss how to make an answer sufficiently general, I made none at all, but referred to Colonel Wellbred: perhaps he felt the same difficulty, for he said nothing; and Mr. Fairly then gathered an answer for himself, by saying, "Yes, it may, indeed, be attainable in the only actual as well as only right way to seek it,--that of doing good!" "If," cried Colonel Wellbred, afterwards, "I lived always in London, I should be as tired of life as you are: I always sicken of it there, if detained beyond a certain time." Page 79 They then joined in a general censure of dissipated life, and a general distaste of dissipated characters, which seemed, however, to comprise almost all their acquaintance; and this presently occasioned Mr. Fairly to say, "It is, however, but fair for you and me to own, Wellbred, that if people in general ,'are bad, we live chiefly amongst those who are the worst." Whether he meant any particular set to which they belong, or whether his reflection went against people in high life, such 'as constitute their own relations and connexions in general, I cannot say, as he did not explain himself. Mr. Fairly, besides the attention due to him from all, in consideration of his late loss, merited from me peculiar deference, in return for a mark I received of his disposition to think favourably of me from our first acquaintance: for not more was I surprised than pleased at his opening frankly upon the character of my coadjutrix, and telling me at once, that when first he saw me here, just before the Oxford expedition, he had sincerely felt for and pitied me. . . . Sunday, Jan. 13.-There is something in Colonel Wellbred so elegant, so equal, and so pleasing, it is impossible not to see him with approbation, and to speak of him with praise. But I found in Mr. Fairly a much greater depth of understanding, and all his sentiments seem formed upon the most perfect basis of religious morality. During the evening, in talking over plays and players, we all three united warmly in panegyric of Mrs. Siddons; but when Mrs. Jordan was named, Mr. Fairly and myself were left to make the best of her. Observing the silence of Colonel Wellbred, we called upon him to explain it. "I have seen her," he answered, quietly, "but in one part." "Whatever it was," cried Mr. Fairly, "it must have been well done." "Yes," answered the colonel, "and so well that it seemed to be her real character: and I disliked her for that very reason, for it was a character that, off the stage or on, is equally distasteful to me--a hoyden." I had had a little of this feeling myself when I saw her in "The Romp,"(251) where she gave me, in the early part, a real disgust; but afterwards she displayed such uncommon humour that it brought me to pardon her assumed vulgarity, in favour of a representation of nature, which, In its particular class, seemed to me quite perfect. Page 80 MR. TURBULENT'S SELF CONDEMNATION. At the usual tea-time I sent Columb, to see if anybody had come upstairs. He brought me word the eating-parlour was empty. I determined to go thither at once, with my work, that there might be no pretence to fetch me when the party assembled; but upon opening the door I saw Mr. Turbulent there, and alone! I entered with readiness into discourse with him, and showed a disposition to placid good-will, for with so irritable a spirit resentment has much less chance to do good than an appearance of not supposing it deserved. Our conversation was in the utmost gravity. He told me he was not happy, though owned he had everything to make him so; but he was firmly persuaded that happiness in this world was a real stranger. I combated this misanthropy in general terms; but he assured me that such was his unconquerable opinion of human life. How differently did I feel when I heard an almost similar sentiment from Mr. Fairly! In him I imputed it to unhappiness of circumstances, and was filled with compassion for his fate: in this person I impute it to something blameable within, and I tried by all the arguments I could devise to give him better notions. For him, however, I soon felt pity, though not of the same composition : for he frankly said he was good enough to be happy-that he thought human frailty incompatible with happiness, and happiness with human frailty, and that he had no wish so strong as to turn monk! I asked him if he thought a life of uselessness and of goodness the same thing? "I need not be useless," he said; "I might assist by my counsels. I might be good in a monastery--in the world I cannot! I am not master of my feelings: I am run away by passions too potent for control!" This was a most unwelcome species of confidence, but I affected to treat it as mere talk, and answered it only slightly, telling him he spoke from the gloom of the moment. "No," he answered, "I have tried in vain to conquer them. I have made vows--resolutions--all in vain! I cannot keep them!" "Is not weakness," cried I, "sometimes fancied, merely to save the pain and trouble of exerting fortitude." "No, it is with me inevitable. I am not formed for success in self-conquest. I resolve--I repent--but I fall! I blame-- Page 81 reproach--I even hate myself--I do everything, in short, yet cannot save myself! Yet do not," he continued, seeing me shrink, "think worse of me than I deserve: nothing of injustice, of ill-nature, of malignancy--I have nothing of these to reproach myself with." "I believe you," I cried, "and surely, therefore, a general circumspection, an immediate watchfulness---" "No, no, no--'twould be all to no purpose." "'Tis that hopelessness which is most your enemy. If you would but exert your better reason--" "No, madam, no!--'tis a fruitless struggle. I know myself too well--I can do nothing so right as to retire--to turn monk-- hermit." "I have no respect," cried I, "for these selfish seclusions. I can never suppose we were created in the midst of society, in order to run away to a useless solitude. I have not a doubt but you may do well, if you will do well." Some time after he suddenly exclaimed, "Have you--tell me--have you, ma'am, never done what you repent?" O "yes!--at times." "You have?" he cried, eagerly. "O yes, alas!--yet not, I think, very often--for it is not very often I have done anything!" "And what is it has saved you?" I really did not know well what to answer him; I could say nothing that would not sound like parade, or implied superiority. I suppose he was afraid himself of the latter ; for, finding me silent, he was pleased to answer for me. "Prejudice, education, accident!--those have saved you." "Perhaps so," cried I. "And one thing more, I acknowledge myself obliged to, on various occasions--fear. I run no risks that I see--I run--but it is always away from all danger that I perceive." "You do not, however, call that virtue, ma'am--you do not call that the rule of right?" "No--I dare not--I must be content that it is certainly not the rule of wrong." He began then an harangue upon the universality of depravity and frailty that I heard with much displeasure; for, it seems to me, those most encourage such general ideas of general worthlessness who most wish to found upon them partial excuses for their own. Page 82 MISS BURNEY AMONG HER OLD FRIENDS. Jan. 31.--And now I must finish my account of this month by my own assembly at my dear Mrs. Ord's. I passed through the friendly hands of Miss Ord to the most cordial ones of Mrs. Garrick,(252) who frankly embraced me, saying, "Do I see you, once more, before I die, my tear little spark? for your father is my flame, all my life, and you are a little spark of that flame!" She added how much she had wished to visit me at the queen's house, when she found I no longer came about the world; but that she was too discreet, and I did not dare say "Do come!" unauthorized. Then came Mr. Pepys, and he spoke to me instantly, of the 'Streatham Letters.' He is in agony as to his own fate, but said there could be no doubt of my faring well. Not, I assured him, to my own content, if named at all. We were interrupted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. I was quite glad to see him; and we began chatting with all our old spirit, and he quite raved against my present life of confinement, an the invisibility it had occasioned, etc., etc. The approach of Mrs. Porteus stopped this. She is always most obliging and courteous, and she came to inquire whether now she saw I really was not wholly immured, there was any chance of a more intimate cultivation of an acquaintance long begun, but stopped in its first progress. I could only make a general answer of acknowledgment to her kindness. Her bishop, whom I had not seen since his preferment from Chester to London, joined us, and most good-naturedly entered into discourse upon my health. I was next called to Mrs. Montagu, who was behind with no one in kind speeches, and who insisted upon making me a visit at the queen's house, and would take no denial to my fixing my own time, whenever I was at leisure, and sending her word; and she promised to put off any and every engagement for that Purpose. I could make no other return to such Page 83 civility, but to desire to postpone it till my dear Mr. and Mrs. Locke came to town, and could meet her. Mrs. Boscawen(253) was my next little t`ete-`a-t`ete, but I had only begun it when Mr. Cambridge came to my side. "I can't get a word!" cried he, with a most forlorn look, "and yet I came on purpose!" I thanked him, and felt such a real pleasure in his sight, from old and never-varying regard, that I began to listen to him with my usual satisfaction. He related to me a long history of Lavant, where the new-married Mrs. Charles Cambridge is now very unwell: and then he told me many good things of his dear and deserving daughter; and I showed him her muff, which she had worked for me, in embroidery, and we were proceeding a little in the old way, when I saw Mrs. Pepys leaning forward to hear us; and then Lady Rothes, who also seemed all attention to Mr. Cambridge and his conversation. The sweet Lady Mulgrave came for only a few words, not to take me, she said, from older claimants; the good and wise Mrs. Carter(254) expressed herself with equal kindness and goodness on our once more meeting; Miss Port, looking beautiful as a little angel, only once advanced to shake hands, and say, "I can see you another time, so I won't be unreasonable now." Mr. Smelt, who came from Kew for this party, made me the same speech, and no more, and I had time for nothing beyond a "how do do " with Mr. Langton, his Lady Rothes,(255) Mr. Batt, Mr. Cholmondoley, Lord Mulgrave, Sir Lucas Pepys, and Lady Herries. Then up came Mrs. Chapone, and, after most cordially shaking hands with me, "But I hope," she cried, "you are not always to appear only as a comet, to be stared at, and then vanish? If you are, let me beg at least to be brushed by your tail, and not hear you have disappeared before my telescope is ready for looking at you!" When at last I was able to sit down, after a short conference with every one, it was next to Mr. Walpole,(256) who had secured Page 84 me a place by his side ; and with him was my longest conversation, for he was in high spirits, polite, ingenious, entertaining, quaint, and original. But all was so short!--so short!--I was forced to return home so soon! 'Twas, however, a very great regale to me, and the sight of so much kindness, preserved so entire after so long an absence, warmed my whole heart with pleasure and satisfaction. My dearest father brought me home. SOME TRIVIAL COURT INCIDENTS. Friday, Feb. 1.-To-day I had a summons in the morning to Mrs. Schwellenberg, who was very ill; so ill as to fill me with compassion. She was extremely low-spirited, and spoke to me with quite unwonted kindness of manner, and desired me to accept a sedan-chair, which had been Mrs. Haggerdorn's, and now devolved to her, saying, I might as well have it while she lived as when she was dead, which would soon happen. I thanked her, and wished her, I am sure very sincerely, better. Nor do I doubt her again recovering, as I have frequently seen her much worse. True, she must die at last, but who must not? Feb. 2.-The king always makes himself much diversion with Colonel Goldsworthy, whose dryness of humour and pretended servility of submission, extremely entertain him. He now attacked him upon the enormous height of his collar, which through some mistake of his tailor, exceeded even the extremity of fashion. And while the king, who was examining and pulling it about, had his back to us, Colonel Wellbred had the malice to whisper me, "Miss Burney, I do assure you it is nothing to what it was; he has had two inches cut off since morning! Fortunately, as Colonel Wellbred stood next me, this was not heard for the king would not easily have forgotten. He soon after went away, but gave no summons to his gentlemen. And now Colonel Wellbred gave me another proof of his extraordinary powers of seeing. You now know, my dear friends, that in the king's presence everybody retreats back, as far as they can go, to leave him the room to himself. In all this, through the disposition of the chairs, I was placed so much behind Colonel Wellbred as to conclude myself out of his sight; but the moment the king retired, he said, as Page 85 we all dropped on Our seats, "Everybody is tired--Miss Burney the most--for she has stood the stillest. Miss Planta has leant on her chair, Colonel Goldsworthy against the wall, myself occasionally on the screen, but Miss Burney has stood perfectly still--I perceived that without looking." 'Tis, indeed, to us standers, an amazing addition to fatigue to keep still. We returned to town next day. In the morning I had had a very disagreeable, though merely foolish, embarrassment. Detained, by the calling in of a poor woman about a subscription, from dressing myself, I was forced to run to the queen, at her summons, without any cap. She smiled, but said nothing. Indeed, she is all indulgence in those points of externals, which rather augments than diminishes my desire of showing apparent as well as my feeling of internal respect but just as I had assisted her with her peignoir, Lady Effingham was admitted, and the moment she sat down, and the hair-dresser began his office, a page announced the Duke of York, who instantly followed his name. I would have given the world to have run away, but the common door of entrance and exit was locked, unfortunately, on account of the coldness of the day; and there was none to pass, but that by which his royal highness entered, and was standing. I was forced. therefore, to remain, and wait for dismission. Yet I was pleased, too, by the sight of his affectionate manner to his royal mother. He flew to take and kiss her hand, but she gave him her cheek; and then he began a conversation with her, so open and so gay, that he seemed talking to the most intimate associate. His subject was Lady Augusta Campbell's elopement from. the masquerade. The Duchess of Ancaster had received masks at her house on Monday, and sent tickets to all the queen's household. I, amongst the rest, had one; but it was impossible I could be spared at such an hour, though the queen told me that she had thought of my going, but could not manage it, as Mrs. Schwellenberg was so ill. Miss Planta went, and I had the entire equipment of her. I started the Project of dressing her at Mrs. Delany's, in all the most antique and old-fashioned things we could borrow; and this was Put very happily in execution, for she was, I have heard, one of the best and most grotesque figures in the room. (239) Henry William Bunbury, the well-known caricaturist. He was connected by marriage with Colonel Gwynn, having married, in 1771, Catherine, the "Little Comedy," sister of the "Jessamy Bride."-ED. (240) i.e., of the Play which was to be read by Mrs. Siddons. See P- 55.-ED. (241) This excellent comedy was completed by Colley Cibber, from an unfinished play of Sir John Vanbrugh's.-ED. (242) See note 210, ante, vol. 1, P. 370.-ED. (243) Mr. Anthony Shepherd, Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge. We meet with him occasionally in the "Early Diary:" "dullness itself" Fanny once calls him (in 1774).-ED. (244) Fanny's maid.-ED. (245) Susan Phillips and the Lockes had stayed at Windsor from the 10th to the 17th of September.-ED. (246) This magnificent panegyric relates to a young amateur, William Locke, the son of Fanny's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Locke. But there was more than a little of the amateur about Mr. Bunbury himself. His works bear no comparison with those of the great masters of caricatured Rowlandson and Gulray.-ED. (247) Fanny's man-servant, a Swiss.-ED. (248) Mr. Fisher was a canon at Windsor, and an amateur landscape-painter. He had recently married.-ED. (249) "Letters to and from Dr. Johnson," published by Mrs. Piozzi in 1788.-ED. (250) Thrale's only son died, a child, in March, 1776.--ED. (251) A farce, adapted from Bickerstaff's opera, "Love in the City."-ED. (252) Eva Maria Feigel, a Viennese dancer, whom Garrick married in 1749. Fanny writes of her in 1771: "Mrs. Garrick is the most attentively polite and perfectly well-bred woman in the world; her speech is all softness; her manners all elegance; her smiles all sweetness. There is something so peculiarly graceful in her motion, and pleasing in her address, that the most trifling words have weight and power, when spoken by her, to oblige and even delight." ("Early Diary," vol. i. p. 111.) She died in 1822; her husband in 1779.-ED. (253) The Hon. Mrs. Boscawen, widow of Admiral Boscawen.-ED. (254) Elizabeth Carter, the celebrated translator of Epictetus. She was now in her seventieth year, and had been for many years an esteemed friend of Dr. Johnson. She died in 1806.-ED. , ' (255) Mr. Langton's wife was the Countess dowager of Rothes, widow of the eighth earl. Lady Jane Leslie, who married Sir Lucas Pepys, the physician, also enjoyed, in her own right, the title of Countess of Rothes.-ED. (256) Horace Walpole. -E D. Page 86 SECTION 12. (1788.) THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. [Probably few events in the history of England are more familiar to the general reader than the trial of Warren Hastings. If nowhere else, at least in the best known and, perhaps, most brilliant of Macaulay's essays every one has read of the career of that extraordinary man, and of the long contest in Westminster Hall, from which he came forth acquitted, after an ordeal of seven years' duration. We shall, accordingly, confine our remarks upon this subject within the narrowest limits consistent with intelligibility: Fanny's experiences of the trial, recorded in the following pages, rendering some review of the proceedings which caused it here indispensable. Warren Hastings was a lad of seventeen when, in 1750, he was first sent out to India as a writer in the East India Company's service. His abilities attracted the notice of Clive, and, after the downfall of the Nawab Suraj-u-Dowlah, Hastings was chosen to represent the Company at the Court of Mir Jafir, the new Nawab of Bengal. In 1761 he was appointed Member of Council at Calcutta, and he returned to England in 1765, unknown as yet to fame, but with an excellent reputation both for efficiency and integrity. He left Bengal in a state of anarchy. The actual power was in the possession of a trading company, whose objects were at once to fill their coffers, and to avoid unnecessary political complications. The show of authority was invested in a Nawab who was a mere puppet in the hands of the English company. Disorder was rampant throughout the provinces, and the unhappy Hindoos, unprotected by their native princes, were left a helpless prey to the rapacity of their foreign tyrants. At a time when to enrich himself with the plunder of the natives was the aim of every servant of the East India Company, it is much to the honour of Hastings that he returned home a comparatively poor man. In England he indulged his taste for literary society, busied himself with a scheme for introducing at Page 87 oxford the study of the Persian language and literature, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson. But generosity and imprudence together soon reduced his small means. He applied to the Directors of the Company for employment, was appointed to a seat on the Council at Madras, and made his second voyage to India in 1769. Among his fellow-passengers on board the "Duke of Grafton" was Madame Imhoff, whom he afterwards married. At Madras Hastings managed the export business of the Company with conspicuous success, and so completely to the satisfaction of the Directors, that, two years later, he was promoted to the governorship of Bengal, and sent to exercise his administrative ability and genius for reform -%N here they were then 'greatly needed-at Calcutta. With this appointment his historic career may be said to commence. He found himself at the outset in a situation of extreme difficulty. He was required to establish something- resembling a stable government in place of the prevailing anarchy, and, above all things, with disordered finances, to satisfy the expectations of his' employers by constant remittances of money. Both these tasks he accomplished, but the difficulties in the way of the latter led him to the commission of those acts for which he was afterwards denounced by his enemies as a monster of injustice and barbarity. Hastings's conduct with respect to the Great Mogul has been sketched by Macaulay in words which imply a reprehension in reality undeserved. Little remained at this time of the magnificent empire of Aurungzebe beyond a title and a palace at Delhi. In 1765 Lord Clive had ceded to the titular master of the Mogul empire the districts of Corah and Allahabad, lying to the south of Oude, and westwards of Benares. The cession had been made in pursuance of the same policy which Hastings afterwards followed; that, namely, of sheltering the British possessions behind a barrier of friendly states, which should be sufficiently strong to withstand the incursions of their hostile neighbours, and particularly of the Mahrattas, the most warlike and dreaded of the native powers. But Clive's purpose had been completely frustrated; for the Mogul, far from shielding the English, had not been able to hold his own against the Mahrattas, to whom he had actually ceded the very territories made over to him by the Company. Under these circumstances the English authorities can hardly be blamed for causing their troops to re-occupy the districts in question, nor can it fairly be imputed as a crime to Hastings that in September, 1773, he concluded with the Vizier of Oude the treaty of Benares, by which he sold Allahabad and Corah to that friendly potentate for about half a million sterling. But the next act of foreign policy on the part of the Governor of Bengal--his share in the subjugation of the Rohillas--does not admit of so favourable an interpretation. The Rohillas occupied territory lying under the southern slopes of the Himalayas, to the north-west of Oude. The dominant race in Rohilcund was of Page 88 Afghan origin, although the majority of the population was Hindoo. Of the rulers of Rohilcund Hastings himself wrote, in terms which we may accept as accurate, "They are a tribe of Afghans or Pathans, freebooters who conquered the country about sixty years ago, and have ever since lived upon the fruits of it, without contributing either to its cultivation or manufactures, or even mixing with the native inhabitants."(257) In 1772, the Rohillas, hard pressed by their foes, the Mahrattas, sought the assistance of the Vizier of Oude, Shuja-u-Dowlah, to whom they agreed to pay, in return for his aid, a large sum of money. This agreement was signed in the presence of an English general, and an English brigade accompanied the vizier's army, which co-operated with the Rohilla forces, and obliged the Mahrattas to withdraw. But when Shula-u-Dowlah demanded his promised hire, he received from the Rohillas plenty of excuses but no money. Hereupon he resolved to annex Rohilcund to his own dominions, and, to ensure success, he concerted measures with Hastings, who, willing at once to strengthen a friendly power and to put money into his own exchequer, placed an English brigade at the vizier's disposal for a consideration Of 400,000 pounds. In the spring of 1774 the invasion took place. The desperate bravery of the Rohillas was of no avail against English discipline, and the country was so reduced to submission. Macaulay's stirring account of the barbarities practised by the invaders has been proved to be greatly exaggerated. Disorders, however, there were: the people were plundered, and some of the villages were burnt by the vizier's troops. Many of the Rohilla families were exiled, but the Hindoo inhabitants of Rohilcund were left to till their fields as before, and were probably not greatly affected by their change of master. Hastings's conduct in this affair is, from the most favourable point of view, rather to be excused than applauded. It may have been politic under the circumstances, but it was hardly in accordance with a high standard of morality to let out on hire an English force for the subjugation of a people who, whatever grounds of complaint the Vizier of Oude might have had against them, had certainly given no provocation whatsoever to the English Government. As to the plea which has been put forward in his favour, that the Rohillas were merely the conquerors, and not the original owners of Rohilcund, it is sufficiently answered, by Macaulay's query, "What were the English themselves?" In 1773 Lord North's "Regulating Act" introduced considerable changes in the constitution of the Indian government, and marked the first step in the direction of a transfer of the control over Indian affairs from the Company to the Crown. By this act "the governorship of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa was vested in the Governor-General, with four Councillors, having authority over Page 89 Madras and Bombay ; and all correspondence relating to civil government or military affairs was to be laid by the Directors of the Company in London before his -Majesty's Ministers, who Could disapprove or cancel any rules or orders. A Supreme Court of judicature, appointed by the Crown, was established in Calcutta."(258) The Governor-General was appointed for a term of five years, and the first Governor-General was Hastings. Of the four councillors with whom he was associated, three were sent out from England to take their places at the board, and landed at Calcutta, together with the judges of the Supreme Court, in October, 1771. Indisputably the ablest, and, as it proved, historically the most noteworthy of these three, was Philip Francis, the supposed author of "Junius's Letters." Even before the council commenced its duties dissensions arose. The newcomers, Francis, Clavering, and Monson, were in constant opposition to the Governor-General. Indeed, the hostility between Hastings and Francis rose by degrees to such a height that, some years later, they met in a duel, in which Francis was severely wounded. For the present, however, the opponents of Hastings formed a majority on the council, and his authority was in eclipse. His ill-wishers in the country began to bestir themselves, and a scandalous and, there is no doubt, utterly untrue charge of accepting bribes was brought against him by an old enemy, the Maharajah Nuncomar. Hastings replied by prosecuting Nuncomar and his allies for conspiracy. The accused were admitted to bail, but a little later Nuncomar was arrested on a charge of having forged a bond some years previously, tried before an English jury, condemned to death, and hanged, August 5, 1775, his application for leave to appeal having been rejected by the Chief justice, Sir Elijah Impey. Hastings solemnly declared his innocence of any share in this transaction, nor is there any evidence directly implicating him. On the other hand, it must he remembered that Nuncomar had preferred a most serious charge against Hastings; that the majority on the council were only too ready to listen to any charge, well or ill founded, against the Governor-General; and that Nuncomar's triumph would, in all probability, have meant Hastings's ruin. Even Mr. Forrest admits that "it is extremely probable, as Francis stated, that if Nuncomar had never stood forth in politics, his other offences would not have hurt him."(259) Macaulay comments upon the scandal of this stringent enforcement Of the English law against forgery under circumstances so peculiar, and in a country where the English law was totally unknown.(260) That Nuncomar was fairly tried and convicted Page 90 in the ordinary course of law is now beyond doubt, but we still hold that it was Impey's clear duty to respite his prisoner. That he did not do so is a fact which, beyond all others, gave colour to the assertion of Hastings's enemies, that the execution of Nuncomar was the result of a secret understanding between the Governor-General of Bengal and the Chief justice of the Supreme Court. But, however brought about, the death of Nuncomar was to the opponents of Hastings a blow from which they never recovered. The death of Monson, in September, 1776, and that of Clavering, a year later, placed him in a majority on the council ; his authority was more undisputed than ever ; and at the expiration of his term he was re-appointed Governor-General. During the years 1780 and 1781 British rule in India passed through the most dangerous crisis that had befallen it since the days of Clive. A formidable confederacy had been formed between the Nizam, the Mahrattas, and the famous Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore, with the object of crushing their common enemy, the English. The hostility of these powerful states had been provoked by the blundering and bad faith of the governments of Bombay and Madras, which had made, and broken, treaties with each of them in turn. "As to the Mahrattas," to quote the words of Burke, "they had so many cross treaties with the states general of that nation, and with each of the chiefs, that it was notorious that no one of these agreements could be kept without grossly violating the rest."(261) The war in which the Bombay Government had engaged with the Mahrattas had been as unsuccessful in its prosecution as it was impolitic in its commencement, until, early in 1780, a force under General Goddard was dispatched from Bengal to co-operate with the Bombay troops. Goddard's arrival turned the tide of events. The province of Gujerat was reduced, the Mahratta chiefs, Sindia and Holkar, were defeated, and everything portended a favourable termination of the war, when the whole face of affairs was changed by news from the south. Hyder Ali, the most able and warlike of the native princes, swept down upon the Carnatic in July, 1780, at the head of a disciplined army of nearly 100,000 men. He was now an old man, but age had not broken his vigour. He rapidly overran the country; an English force, under Colonel Baillie, which opposed him, was cut to pieces, and Madras itself was threatened. The prompt measures adopted by Hastings on this occasion saved the colony. Reinforcements were hurried to Madras; the veteran, Sir Eyre Coote, was entrusted with the command of the army; and the triumphant Page 91 career of Hyder Ali was checked by the victory of Porto Novo, July 1st, 1781. The end of the war, however, was yet far off. Peace was concluded with the Mahrattas, on terms honourable to them, in 1782, but in the south the struggle was still maintained by Hyder Ali and his French allies, and after Hyder Ali's death, in December of that year, by his son Tippoo; nor was it brought to a termination until after the general peace Of 1783. To support the financial strain of these wars Hastings had recourse to measures which, with the colouring given to them by his enemies, gave subsequent rise to two of the heaviest charges brought forward by the managers of his impeachment. His first victim was Cheyt Sing, the Rajah of Benares, a tributary of the English Government. Cheyt Sing had been formerly a vassal of the Vizier of Oude, and when, in 1775, the vizier transferred his sovereign rights over Benares to the English, the Bengal Government confirmed the possession of the city and its dependencies to Cheyt Sing and his heirs for ever, stipulating only for the payment of an annual tribute, and undertaking that the regular payment of this tribute should acquit the Rajah of further obligations. It was afterwards contended on behalf of Hastings that this undertaking did not annul the right of the superior power to call upon its vassal for extraordinary aid on extraordinary occasions, and this view was upheld by Pitt. Hastings began operations in 1778 by demanding of the Rajah, in addition to his settled tribute, a large contribution towards the war expenses. The sum was paid, but similar requisitions in the following years were met with procrastination or evasion, and a demand that the Rajah should furnish a contingent of cavalry was not complied with. This conduct on the part of Cheyt Sing appeared to the Governor-General and his Council "to require early punishment, and, as his wealth was great and the Company's exigencies pressing," in 1781 a fine of fifty lakhs, of rupees (500,000 pounds) was laid upon the unlucky Rajah; Hastings himself proceeding to Benares, with a small escort, to enforce payment. Cheyt Sing received his unwelcome visitor with due respect, but with ambiguous answers, and Hastings, most imprudently, gave the order for the Rajah's arrest. The Rajah submitted, but his troops and the population of Benares rose to the rescue : a portion of Hastings's little force was massacred, the Rajah regained his liberty, and the Governor-General found safety only in flight. The insurrection rapidly spread to the country around, and assumed dangerous proportions, but the promptitude and vigour of-Hastings soon restored order. Cheyt Sing was deposed, compelled to flee his country, his estates were confiscated, and a new Rajah of Benares was appointed in his stead. The charge subsequently preferred against Hastings in connection with this affair turned upon the question whether Cheyt Sing Was, as the prosecutors affirmed, a sovereign prince who owed no duty to the Bengal government beyond the payment (which he Page 92 had regularly performed) of a fixed annual tribute; or as Hastings contended, a mere feudal vassal, bound to furnish aid when called upon by his over-lord. Pitt, as we have said, took the latter view, yet he gave his support to the charge on the ground that the fine imposed upon the Rajah of Benares was excessive., Upon the whole, it would appear that Hastings was acting within his rights in demanding an extraordinary subsidy from the Rajah but the enormous amount of the fine, and the harshness and in' dignity with which Cheyt Sing was treated, point to a determination on the part of the Governor-General to ruin a subject prince, with whom, moreover, it was known he had personal grounds of pique. The deposition of Cheyt Sing was followed by an act on which was afterwards founded the most sensational of all the charges brought against Warren Hastings. Shuja-u-Dowlah, the Nawab Vizier of Oude, to whom Hastings had sold the Rohillas, died in 1775, and was succeeded by his son Asaph-u-Dowlah. At the time of his death Shuja-u-Dowlah was deeply in debt, both to his own army and to the Bengal Government. The treasure which he left was estimated at two millions sterling, but this vast sum of money and certain rich estates were appropriated by his mother and widow, the begums, or princesses, of Oude, under the pretence of a will which may possibly have existed, but was certainly never Produced. With this wealth at their disposal the begums enjoyed a practical independence of the new vizier, who was no match in energy and resolution for his mother and grandmother. A small portion, however, of the money was paid over to the vizier, on the understanding, guaranteed by the Bengal Government, that the begums should be left in undisturbed enjoyment of the remainder of their possessions. Hastings believed, and, it would seem, on good grounds, that the younger begum had busied herself actively in fomenting the insurrection which broke out upon the arrest of Cheyt Sing at Benares. He conceived a plan by which he might at once punish the rebellious princesses, and secure for the exchequer at Calcutta the arrears of debt due from the Government of Oude. He withdrew the guarantee, and urged the Vizier to seize upon the estates possessed by the begums. Asaph-u-Dowlah came willingly into the arrangement, but, when it became necessary to act, his heart failed him. Hastings, however, was not to be trifled with. English troops were employed: the begums were closely confined in their palace at Fyzabad; and, to the lasting disgrace of Hastings, their personal attendants were starved and even tortured, until they consented to surrender their money and estates. Hastings's conduct in withdrawing the guarantee was not without justification ; the means which he suffered to be employed in carrying out his purpose, and for the employment of which he must be held primarily responsible, were utterly indefensible. Page 93 Long before his return to England, the Governor-General's proceedings had engaged no little share of public attention in this country. In Parliament the attack was led by Burke and Fox; Hastings's chief defender was one Major Scott, an Indian officer whom he had sent over to England as his agent in 1780, and who maintained his patron's cause by voice and pen, in Parliament and in the press, with far more energy than discretion. In 1784 Mrs. Hastings arrived in England, bringing home with her, says Wraxall, "about 40,000 pounds, acquired without her husband's privity or approval;" and a year later her husband followed her, having resigned his Governor-Generalship. The fortune which he now possessed was moderate, his opportunities considered, and had been honourably acquired; for his motives had never been mercenary, and the money which he had wrung from Indian princes had invariably been applied to the service of the Company or the necessities of his administration. He was received with honour by the Directors and with favour by the Court. There was talk of a peerage for him, and he believed himself not only beyond danger, but in the direct road to reward and distinction. But all this was the calm which preceded the storm. The enemies of Hastings were active and bitterly in earnest, and they were receiving invaluable assistance from his old opponent in council, Francis, who had returned to England in 1781. In April, 1786, the charges, drawn up by Burke, were laid on the table of the House of Commons. The first charge, respecting the Rohilla war, was thrown out by the House, ministers siding with the accused. But on the second charge, relating to the Rajah of Benares, the Prime Minister, Pitt, declared against Hastings on the ground that, although the Governor-General had the right to impose a fine upon his vassal, the amount of the fine was excessive, and the motion was affirmed by a majority of forty votes. Early the next session, in February, 1787, Sheridan moved the third charge, touching the begums of Oude, in a speech which was pronounced the most brilliant ever delivered in the House of Commons. The majority against Hastings was on this occasion increased to one hundred and seven, Pitt, as before, supporting the motion. Other charges of oppression and corruption were then gone into and affirmed, and in May, by order of the House, Burke formally impeached Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanours at the bar of the House of Lords. The accused was admitted to bail, himself in 20,000 pounds, and two sureties in 10,000 pounds each. The Committee of Management, elected by the Commons to conduct the impeachment, included Burke and Fox, Sheridan and Windham, and the trial was opened before the Lords, in Westminster Hall, on the 13th of February, 1788. After two days occupied in reading the charges and the defendant's replies, Burke arose and opened the case for the prosecution in a speech full of eloquent exaggeration and honourable Page 94 zeal in the cause of an oppressed people. He spoke during days, after which the Benares charge was brought forward by Fox and Grey (afterwards Earl Grey), the youngest of the managers, and that relating to the Begums by Adam and Sheridan. The court then adjourned to the next session. But it is unnecessary here to follow the details of this famous trial which "dragged its slow length along" for seven years. In the spring of 1795 Hastings was acquitted, by a large majority, on all counts; and, although his conduct had, in some particulars, been far from faultless, and the sincerity of his principal accusers was beyond question, his acquittal must be owned as just as it was honourable, especially when we remember that his action had been entirely uninfluenced by considerations of private advantage, that he had endured for so many anxious years the burden of an impeachment, that he was ruined in fortune by the expenses of the trial, and that his great services to his country had been left wholly without reward. His poverty, however, was relieved by the Directors of the East India Company, who bestowed upon him a pension of 4,000 a year, and he passed the remainder of his long life in honourable retirement. He died in 1818, his wife, to whom he was always devotedly attached, surviving him by a few Years. The following section contains little besides the account of Fanny's visits to Westminster Hall during the early days of the trial. One other event, however, it relates, of sorrowful significance to the diarist. By the death of Mrs. Delany, on the 11th of April, 17; she lost at once a dear and venerated friend, and her only occasional refuge from the odious tyranny of Court routine.-ED.] Page 95 WESTMINSTER HALL AT THE OPENING OF THE HASTINGS TRIAL. February 13th. O what an interesting transaction does this day open! a day, indeed, of strong emotion to me, though all upon matters foreign to any immediate concern of my own--if anything may be called foreign that deeply interests us, merely because it is not personal. The trial, so long impending, of Mr. Hastings, opened to-day. The queen yesterday asked me if I wished to be present at the beginning, or had rather take another day. I was greatly obliged by her condescension, and preferred the opening. I thought it would give me a general view of the court, and the manner of proceeding, and that I might read hereafter the speeches and evidence. She then told me she had six tickets from Sir Peter Burrell, the grand chamberlain, for every day; that three were for his box, and three for his gallery. She asked me who I would go with, and promised me a box-ticket not only for myself, but my companion. Nor was this consideration all she showed me for she added, that as I might naturally wish for my father, she would have me send him my other ticket. I thanked her very gratefully, and after dinner went to St. Martin's-street; but all there was embarrassing: my father could not go; he was averse to be present at the trial, and he was a little lame from a fall. In the end I sent an express to Hammersmith, to desire Charles(262) to come to me the next morning by eight o'clock. I was very sorry not to have my father, as he had been named by the queen; but I was glad to have Charles. I told her majesty at night the step I had ventured to take, and she was perfectly content with it. "But I must trouble you," she said, "with Miss Gomme, who has no other way to go." This morning the queen dispensed with all attendance from me after her first dressing, that I might haste away. Mrs. Schwellenberg was fortunately well enough to take the whole duty, and the sweet queen not only hurried me off, but sent me some cakes from her own breakfast-table, that I might Page 96 carry them, in my pocket, lest I should have no time for eating before I went. Charles was not in time, but we all did well in the end We got to Westminster Hall between nine and ten O'clock; and, as I know my dear Susan, like my-self, was never at a trial, I will give some account of the place and arrangements'; and whether the description be new to her or old, my partial Fredy will not blame it. The grand chamberlain's box Is in the centre of the upper end of the Hall: there we sat, Miss Gomme and myself, immediately behind the chair placed for Sir Peter Burrell. To the left, on the same level, were the green benches for the House of Commons, which occupied a third of the upper end of the Hall, and the whole of the left side: to the right of us, on the same level, was the grand chamberlain's gallery. The right side of the Hall, opposite to the green benches for the commons, was appropriated to the peeresses and peers' daughters. The bottom of the Hall contained the royal family's box and the lord high steward's, above which was a large gallery appointed for receiving company with peers' tickets. A gallery also was run along the left side of the Hall, above the green benches, which is called the Duke of Newcastle's box, the centre of which was railed off into a separate apartment for the reception of the queen and four eldest princesses, who were then incog., not choosing to appear in state, and in their own box. Along the right side of the Hall ran another gallery, over the seats of the peeresses, and this was divided into boxes for various people--the lord chamberlain, (not the great chamberlain,) the surveyor, architect, etc. So much for all the raised buildings ; now for the disposition of the Hall itself, or ground. In the middle was placed a large table, and at the head of it the seat for the chancellor, and round it seats for the judges, the masters in chancery, the clerks, and all who belonged to the law; the upper end, and the right side of the room, was allotted to the peers in their robes; the left side to the bishops and archbishops. Immediately below the great chamberlain's box was the place allotted for the prisoner. On his right side was a box for his own counsel, on his left the box for the managers, or committee, for the prosecution; and these three most important of all the divisions in the Hall were all directly adjoining to where I was seated. Almost the moment I entered I was spoken to by a lady I Page 97 did not recollect, but found afterwards to be Lady Claremont and this proved very agreeable, for she took Sir Peter's place: and said she would occupy it till he claimed it; and then, when just before me, she named to me all the order of the buildings, and all the company, pointing out every distinguished person, and most obligingly desiring me to ask her any questions I wanted to have solved, as she knew, she said, "all those creatures that filled the green benches, looking so little like gentlemen, and so much like hair-dressers," These were the Commons. In truth, she did the honours of the Hall to me with as much good nature and good breeding as if I had been a foreigner of distinction, to whom she had dedicated her time and attention. My acquaintance with her had been made formerly at Mrs. Vesey's. The business did not begin till near twelve o'clock. The opening to the whole then took place, by the entrance of the managers of the prosecution; all the company were already long in their boxes or galleries. I shuddered, and drew Involuntarily back, when, as the doors were flung open, I saw Mr. Burke, as head of the committee, make his solemn entry. He held a scroll in his hand, and walked alone, his brow knit with corroding care and deep labouring thought,---a brow how different to that which had proved so alluring to my warmest admiration when first I met him! so highly as he had been my favourite, so captivating as I had found his manners; and conversation in our first acquaintance, and so much as I had owed to his zeal and kindness to me and my affairs in its progress! How did I grieve to behold him now the cruel prosecutor (such to me he appeared) of an injured and innocent man! Mr. Fox followed next, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Windham, Messrs. Anstruther, Grey, Adam, Michael Angelo Taylor, Pelham, Colonel North, Mr. Frederick Montagu, Sir Gilbert Elliot, General Burgoyne, Dudley Long, etc. They were all named over to me by Lady Claremont, or I should not have recollected even those of my acquaintance, from the shortness of my sight, When the committee box was filled the House of Commons at large took their seats on their green benches, which stretched, as I have said, along the whole left side of the Hall, and, taking in a third of the upper end, joined to the great Chamberlain's box, from which nothing separated them but a Partition of about two feet in height. Then began the procession, the clerks entering first, then Page 98 the lawyers according to their rank, and the peers, bishops, and officers, all in their coronation robes; concluding with the princes of the blood,--Prince William, son to the Duke of Gloucester, coming first, then the Dukes of Cumberland, Gloucester, and York, then the Prince of Wales; and the whole ending by the chancellor, with his train borne. They then all took their seats. WARREN HASTINGS APPEARS AT THE BAR. A sergeant-at- arms arose, and commanded silence in court, on pain of imprisonment. Then some other officer, in a loud voice, called out, as well as I can recollect, words to this purpose:-- "Warren Hastings, esquire, come forth! Answer to the charges brought against you; save your bail, or forfeit your recognizance." Indeed I trembled at these words, and hardly Could keep my place when I found Mr. Hastings was being brought to the bar. He came forth from some place immediately under the great chamberlain's box, and was preceded by Sir Francis Molyneux, gentleman-usher of the black rod; and at each side of him walked his bail, Messrs. Sulivan and Sumner. The moment he came in sight, which was not for full ten minutes after his awful summons, he made a low bow to the chancellor and court facing him. I saw not his face, as he was directly under me. He moved on slowly, and, I think, supported between his two bails, to the opening of his own box; there, lower still, he bowed again; and then, advancing to the bar, he leant his hands upon it, and dropped on his knees; but a voice in the same minute proclaiming he had leave to rise, he stood up almost instantaneously, and a third time, profoundly bowed to the court. What an awful moment this for such a man!--a man fallen from such height of power to a situation so humiliating--from the almost unlimited command of so large a part of the eastern World to be cast at the feet of his enemies, of the great tribunal of his country, and of the nation at large, assembled thus in a body to try and to judge him! Could even his prosecutors at that moment look on--and not shudder at least, if they did not blush? The crier, I think it was, made, in a loud and hollow voice, a public proclamation, "That Warren Hastings, esquire, late governor-general of Bengal, was now on his trial for high Page 99 crimes and misdemeanours, with which he was charged by the commons of Great Britain; and that all persons whatsoever who had aught to allege against him were now to stand forth." A general silence followed, and the chancellor, Lord Thurlow, now made his speech. I will give it you to the best of my power from memory; the newspapers have printed it far less accurately than I have retained it, though I am by no means exact or secure. THE LORD CHANCELLOR'S SPEECH. Warren Hastings, you are now brought into this court to answer to the charge, brought against you by the knights, esquires, burgesses, and commons of Great Britain--charges now standing only as allegations, by them to be legally proved, or by you to be disproved. Bring forth your answer and defence, with that seriousness, respect, and truth, due to accusers so respectable. Time has been allowed you for preparation, proportioned to the intricacies in which the transactions are involved, and to the remote distances whence your documents may have been searched and required. You will be allowed bail, for the better forwarding your defence, and-whatever you can require will still be yours, of time, witnesses, and all things else you may hold necessary. This is not granted you as any indulgence: it is entirely your due: it is the privilege which every British subject has a right to claim, and which is due to every one who is brought before this high tribunal." This speech, uttered in a calm, equal, solemn manner, and in a voice mellow and penetrating, with eyes keen and black, yet softened into some degree of tenderness while fastened full upon the prisoner--this speech, its occasion, its portent, and its object, had an effect upon every hearer of producing the most respectful attention, and, out of the committee box at least, the strongest emotions in the cause of Mr. Hastings. Again Mr. Hastings made the lowest reverence to the court, and, leaning over the bar answered, with much agitation, through evident efforts to suppress it, "My lords --Impressed--deeply impressed-- I come before your lordships, equally confident in my own integrity, and in the justice of the court before which I am to clear it." "Impressed" and "deeply impressed," too, was my mind, by this short yet comprehensive speech, and all my best wishes Page 100 for his clearance and redress rose warmer than ever in my heart. THE READING OF THE CHARGES COMMENCED. A general silence again ensued, and then one of the lawyers opened the cause. He began by reading from an immense roll of parchment the general charges against Mr. Hastings, but he read in so monotonous a chant that nothing more could I hear or understand than now and then the name of Warren Hastings. During this reading, to which I vainly lent all my attention, Mr. Hastings, finding it, I presume, equally impossible to hear a word, began to cast his eyes around the house, and having taken a survey of all in front and at the sides, he turned about and looked up; pale looked his face--pale, ill, and altered. I was much affected by the sight of that dreadful harass which was written on his countenance. Had I looked at him without restraint, it could not have been without tears. I felt shocked, too, shocked and ashamed, to be seen by him in that place. I had wished to be present from an earnest interest in the business, joined to a firm confidence in his powers of defence; but his eyes were not those I wished to meet in Westminster Hall. I called upon Miss Gomme and Charles to assist me in looking another way, and in conversing with me as I turned aside, and I kept as much aloof as possible till he had taken his survey, and placed himself again in front. >From this time, however, he frequently looked round, and I was soon without a doubt that he must see me. . . . In a few minutes more, while this reading was still continued, I perceived Sir Joshua Reynolds in the midst of the committee. He, at the same moment, saw me also, and not only bowed, but smiled and nodded with his usual good-humour and intimacy, making at the same time a sign to his ear, by which I understood he had no trumpet; whether he had forgotten or lost it I know not. I would rather have answered all this dumb show anywhere else, as my last ambition was that of being noticed from such a box. I again entreated aid in turning away; but Miss Gomme, who is a friend of Sir Gilbert Elliot, one of the managers and an ill-wisher, for his sake, to the opposite cause, would only laugh, and ask why I should not be owned by them. I did not, however, like it, but had no choice from my near Page 101 situation; and in a few seconds I had again a bow, and a profound one, and again very ridiculously I was obliged to inquire of Lady Claremont who my own acquaintance might be. Mr. Richard Burke, senior, she answered. He is a brother of the great--great in defiance of all drawbacks--Edmund Burke. Another lawyer now arose, and read so exactly in the same manner, that it was utterly impossible to discover even whether it was a charge or an answer. Such reading as this, you may well suppose, set every body pretty much at their ease and but for the interest I took in looking from time to time at Mr. Hastings, and watching his countenance, I might as well have been away. He seemed composed after the first half-hour, and calm; but he looked with a species of indignant contempt towards his accusers, that could not, I think, have been worn had his defence been doubtful. Many there are who fear for him; for me, I own myself wholly confident in his acquittal. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE. Soon after, a voice just by my side, from the green benches, said, "Will Miss Burney allow me to renew my acquaintance with her?" I turned about and saw Mr. Crutchley. All Streatham rose to my mind at sight of him. I have never beheld him since the Streatham society was abolished. We entered instantly upon the subject of that family, a Subject ever to me the most Interesting. He also had never seen poor Mrs. Thrale since her return to England; but he joined with me very earnestly in agreeing that, since so unhappy a step was now past recall, it became the duty, however painful a one, of the daughters, to support, not cast off and contemn, one who was now as much their mother as when she still bore their own name. "But how," cried he, "do you stand the fiery trial of this Streatham book that is coming upon us?" I acknowledged myself very uneasy about it, and he assured me all who had ever been at Streatham were in fright and consternation. We talked all these matters over more at length, till I was called away by an "How d'ye do, Miss Burney?" from the committee box! And then I saw young Mr. Burke, who had jumped up on the nearest form to speak to me. Pleasant enough! I checked my vexation as well as I was able, since the least shyness on my part to those with whom Page 102 formerly I had been social must instantly have been attributed to Court influence; and therefore, since I could not avoid the notice, I did what I could to talk with him as heretofore. He is besides so amiable a young man that I could not be sorry to see him again, though I regretted it should be Just In that place, and at this time. While we talked together, Mr. Crutchley went back to his more distant seat, and the moment I was able to withdraw from young Mr. Burke, Charles, who sat behind me, leant down and told me a gentleman had just desired to be presented to me. "Who?" quoth I. " Mr. Windham," he answered. I really thought he was laughing, and answered accordingly, but he assured me he was in earnest, and that Mr. Windham had begged him to make the proposition. What could I do? There was no refusing; yet a planned meeting with another of the committee, and one deep in the prosecution, and from whom one of the hardest charges has come(263)--could anything be less pleasant as I was then situated? The great chamberlain's box is the only part of the Hall that has any communication with either the committee box or the House of Commons, and it is also the very nearest to the prisoner. WILLIAM WINDHAM) ESQ., M.P. Mr. Windham I had seen twice before-both times at Miss Monckton's; and anywhere else I should have been much gratified by his desire of a third meeting, as he is one of the most agreeable, spirited, well-bred, and brilliant conversers I have ever spoken with. He is a neighbour, too, now, of Page 103 Charlotte's. He is member for Norwich, and a man of family and fortune, with a very pleasing though not handsome face, a very elegant figure, and an air of fashion and vivacity. The conversations I had had with him at Miss Monckton's had been, wholly- by his own means, extremely spirited and entertaining. I was sorry to see him make one of a set that appeared so inveterate against a man I believe so injuriously treated; and my concern was founded upon the good thoughts I had conceived of him, not merely from his social talents, which are yet very uncommon, but from a reason clearer to my remembrance. He loved Dr. Johnson,-and Dr. Johnson returned his affection. Their political principles and connexions were opposite, but Mr. Windham respected his venerable friend too highly to discuss any points that could offend him ; and showed for him so true a regard, that, during all his late illnesses, for the latter part of his life, his carriage and himself were alike at his service, to air, visit, or go out, whenever he was disposed to accept them. Nor was this all; one tender proof he gave of warm and generous regard, that I can never forget, and that rose instantly to my mind when I heard his name, and gave him a welcome in my eyes when they met his face : it is this: Dr. Johnson, in his last visit to Lichfield, was taken ill, and waited to recover strength for travelling back to town in his usual vehicle, a stage-coach-- as soon as this reached the ears of Mr. Windham, he set off for Lichfield in his own carriage, to offer to bring hint back to town in it, and at his own time. For a young man of fashion, such a trait towards an old, however dignified philosopher, must surely be a mark indisputable of an elevated mind and character; and still the more strongly it marked a noble way of thinking, as it was done in favour of a person in open opposition to his own party, and declared prejudices. Charles soon told me he was it my elbow. He had taken the place Mr. Crutchley had just left. The abord was, oil my , part, very awkward, from the distress I felt lest Mr. Hastings should look up, and from a conviction that I must not name Page 104 that gentleman, of whom alone I could then think, to a person in a committee against him. He, however, was easy, having no embarrassing thoughts, since the conference was of his own seeking. 'Twas so long since I had seen him, that I almost wonder he remembered me. After the first compliments he looked around him, and exclaimed "What an assembly is this! How striking a spectacle! I had not seen half its splendour down there. You have it here to great advantage; you lose some of the lords, but you gain all the ladies. You have a very good place here," "Yes and I may safely say I make a very impartial use of it for since here I have sat, I have never discovered to which side I have been listening!" He laughed, but told me they were then running through the charges. "And is it essential," cried I, "that they should so run them through that nobody can understand them? Is that a form of law?" He agreed to the absurdity - and then, looking still at the spectacle, which indeed is the most splendid I ever saw, arrested his eyes upon the chancellor. "He looks very well from hence," cried he; "and how well he acquits himself on these solemn occasions! With what dignity, what loftiness, what high propriety, he comports himself!" This praise to the chancellor, who is a known friend to Mr. Hastings, though I believe he would be the last to favour him unjustly now he is on trial, was a pleasant sound to my ear, and confirmed my original idea of the liberal disposition of my new associate. i joined heartily in the commendation, and warmly praised his speech. "Even a degree of pompousness," cried I, "in such a court as this, seems a propriety." "Yes," said he "but his speech had one word that might as well have been let alone: 'mere allegations' he called the charges; the word 'mere,' at least, might have been spared, especially as it is already strongly suspected on which side he leans!" I protested, and with truth, I had not heard the word in his speech; but he still affirmed it. "Surely," I said, "he was as fair and impartial as possible: he called the accusers 'so respectable!'" "Yes, but 'mere--mere' was no word for this occasion and it could not be unguarded, for he would never come to Page 105 speak in such a court as this, without some little thinking beforehand. However, he is a fine fellow,--a very fine fellow! and though, in his private life, guilty of so many inaccuracies, in his public capacity I really hold him to be unexceptionable." This fairness, from an oppositionist professed, brought me at once to easy terms with him. I begged him to inform me for what reason, at the end of the chancellor's speech, there had been a cry of "Hear! hear! hear him!" which had led me to expect another speech, when I found no other seemed intended. He laughed very much, and confessed that, as a parliament man, he was so used to that absurdity, that he had ceased to regard it; for that it was merely a mark of approbation to a speech already spoken; "And, in fact, they only," cried he, "say 'Hear!' when there is nothing more to be heard!" Then, still looking at the scene before him, he suddenly laughed, and said, "I must not, to Miss Burney, make this remark, but-it is observable that in the king's box sit the Hawkesbury family, while, next to the Speaker, who is here as a sort of representative of the king, sits Major Scott!" I knew his inference, of Court influence in favour of Mr. Hastings, but I thought it best to let it pass quietly. I knew, else, I should only be supposed under the same influence myself. Looking still on, he next noticed the two archbishops. "And see," cried he, "the Archbishop of York, Markham,--see how he affects to read the articles of impeachment, as if he was still open to either side! My good lord archbishop! your grace might, with perfect safety, spare your eyes, for your mind has been made up upon this subject before ever it was investigated. He holds Hastings to be the greatest man in the world--for Hastings promoted the interest of his son in the East Indies!" WINDHAM INVEIGHS AGAINST WARREN HASTINGS. Somewhat sarcastic, this - but I had as little time as power for answering, since now, and suddenly, his eye dropped down upon poor Mr. Hastings; the expression of his face instantly lost the gaiety and ease with which it had addressed me; he stopped short in his remarks; he fixed his eyes steadfastly on this new, and but too interesting object, and after viewing him 106 some time in a sort of earnest silence, he suddenly exclaimed as if speaking to himself, and from an impulse irresistible "What a sight is that! to see that man, that small portion of human clay, that poor feeble machine of earth, enclosed now in that little space, brought to that bar, a prisoner in a spot six foot square--and to reflect on his late power! Nations at his command! Princes prostrate at his feet!--What a change! how Must he feel it!--" He stopped, and I said not a word. I was glad to see him thus impressed; I hoped it might soften his enmity. I found, by his manner, that he had never, from the committee box, looked at him. He broke forth again, after a pause of Some length,--"Wonderful indeed! almost past credibility, is such a reverse! He that, so lately, had the Eastern world nearly at his beck; he, under whose tyrant power princes and potentates sunk and trembled; he, whose authority was without the reach of responsibility!--" Again he stopped, seeming struck, almost beyond the power of speech, with meditative commiseration ; but then, suddenly rousing himself, as if recollecting his "almost blunted purpose," he passionately exclaimed, "Oh could those--the thousands, the millions, who have groaned and languished under the iron rod of his oppressions- -could they but--whatever region they inhabit-- be permitted one dawn of light to look into this Hall, and see him there! There--where he now stands--It might prove, perhaps, some recompense for their sufferings!" I can hardly tell you, my dearest Susan, how shocked I felt at these words! words so hard, and following sensations so much more pitying and philosophic! I cannot believe Mr. Hastings guilty; I feel in myself a strong internal evidence of his innocence, drawn from all I have seen of him; I can only regard the prosecution as a party affair; but yet, since his adversaries now openly stake their names, fame, and character against him, I did not think it decent to intrude such an opinion. I could only be sorry, and silent. Still he looked at him, earnest in rumination, and as if unable to turn away his eyes; and presently he again exclaimed, "How wonderful an instance of the instability of mortal power is presented ]In that object! From possessions so extensive, from a despotism so uncontrolled. to see him, now there, in that small circumference! In the history Of human nature how memorable will be the records of this day! Page 107 a day that brings to the great tribunal of the nation a man whose power, so short a time since, was of equal magnitude with his crimes!" Good heaven! thought I, and do you really believe all this? Can Mr. Hastings appear to you such a monster? and are you not merely swayed by party? I could not hear him without shuddering, nor see him thus in earnest without alarm. I thought myself no longer bound to silence, since I saw, by the continuance as well as by the freedom of his exclamations, he conceived me of the same sentiments with himself; and therefore I hardily resolved to make known to him that mistake, which, indeed, was a liberty that seemed no longer impertinent, but a mere act of justice and honesty. His very expressive pause, his eyes still steadfastly fixed on Mr. Hastings, gave me ample opportunity for speaking - though I had some little difficulty how to get out what I wished to say. However, in the midst of his reverie, I broke forth, but not without great hesitation, and, very humbly, I said, "Could you pardon me, Mr. Windham, If I should forget, for a moment, that you are a committee man, and speak to you frankly?" He looked surprised, but laughed at the question, and very eagerly called out "Oh yes, yes, pray speak out, I beg it!" "Well, then, may I venture to say to you that I believe it utterly impossible for any one, not particularly engaged on the contrary side, ever to enter a court of justice, and not instantly, and involuntarily, wish well to the prisoner!" His surprise subsided by this general speech, which I had not courage to put in a more pointed way, and he very readily answered, "'Tis natural, certainly, and what must almost unavoidably be the first impulse; yet, where justice--" I stopped him; I saw I was not comprehended, and thought else he might say something to stop me. "May I," I said, " go yet a little farther ? "Yes," cried he, with a very civil smile, "and I feel an assent beforehand." " Supposing then, that even you, if that may be supposed, could be divested of all knowledge of the particulars of this affair, and in the same state of general Ignorance that I confess myself to be, and could then, like me, have seen Mr. Hastings make his entrance into this court, and looked at him when he was brought to that bar; not even you, Mr. Windham, could then have reflected on such a vicissitude for him, on all he has Page 108 left and all he has lost, and not have given him, like me, all your best wishes the moment you beheld him." The promised assent came not, though he was too civil to contradict me ; but still I saw he Understood me only in a general sense. I feared going farther : a weak advocate is apt to be a mischievous one and, as I knew nothing, it was not to a professed enemy I could talk of what I only believed. Recovering, now, from the strong emotion with which the sight of Mr. Hastings had filled him, he looked again around the court, and pointed out several of the principal characters present, with arch and striking remarks upon each of them, all uttered with high spirit, but none with ill-nature. ("Pitt," cried he, "is not here!--a noble stroke that for the annals of his administration! A trial is brought on by the whole House of Commons In a body, and he is absent at the very opening! However," added he, with a very meaning laugh, "I'm glad of it, for 'tis to his eternal disgrace!" Mercy! thought I, what a friend to kindness Is party! "Do you see Scott?" cried he. "No, I never saw him; pray show him to me," "There he is, in green; just now by the Speaker, now moved by the committee; in two minutes more he will be somewhere else, skipping backwards and forwards; what a grasshopper it is!" "I cannot look at him," cried I, "without recollecting a very extraordinary letter from him, that I read last summer in the newspaper, where he answers some attack that he says has been made upon him, because the term is used of 'a very insignificant fellow,' and he printed two or three letters in 'The Public Advertiser,' in following days, to prove, with great care and pains, that he knew it was all meant as an abuse of himself, from those words!" "And what," cried he, laughing, "do you say to that notion now you see him?" "That no one," cried I, examining him with my glass, "can possibly dispute his claim!" What pity that Mr. Hastings should have trusted his cause to so frivolous an agent! I believe, and indeed it is the general belief, both of foes and friends, that to his officious and injudicious zeal the present prosecution is wholly owing. Next, Mr. Windham pointed out Mr. Francis to me. 'TIS a singular circumstance, that the friend who most loves and the enemy Who most hates Mr. Hastings should bear the same Page 109 name!(264) Mr. Windham, with all the bias of party, gave me then the highest character of this Mr. Francis, whom he called one of the most ill-used of men. Want of documents how to answer forced me to be silent, oppositely as I thought. But it was a very unpleasant situation to me, as I saw that Mr. Windham still conceived me to have no other interest than a common, and probably to his mind, a weak compassion for the prisoner--that prisoner who, frequently looking around, saw me, I am certain, and saw with whom I was engaged. The subject of Mr. Francis again drew him back to Mr. Hastings, but with more severity of mind. "A prouder heart," cried he, "an ambition more profound, were never, I suppose, lodged in any mortal mould than in that man! With what a port he entered! did you observe him? his air! I saw not his face, but his air his port!" "Surely there," cried I, "he could not be to blame! He comes upon his defence; ought he to look as if he gave himself up?" "Why no; 'tis true he must look what vindication to himself he can; we must not blame him there." Encouraged by this little concession, I resolved to venture farther, and once more said "May I again, Mr. Windham, forget that you are a committee-man, and say something not fit for a committee man to hear?" "O yes!" cried he, laughing very much, and looking extremely curious. "I must fairly, then, own myself utterly ignorant upon this subject, and--and--may I go on?" "I beg you will!" "Well, then,--and originally prepossessed in favour of the object!" He quite started, and with a look of surprise from which all pleasure was separated, exclaimed--"Indeed!" "Yes!" cried I, "'tis really true, and really out, now!" "For Mr. Hastings, prepossessed!" he repeated, in a tone that seemed to say--do you not mean Mr. Burke? Page 110 "Yes," I said, "for Mr. Hastings! But I should not have presumed to own it just at this time,--so little as I am able to do honour to my prepossession by any materials to defend it,--but that you have given me courage, by appearing so free from all malignity in the business. Tis, therefore, Your own fault!" "But can you speak seriously," cried he, " "when You say you know nothing of this business?" "Very seriously: I never entered into it at all; it was always too intricate to tempt me." "But, surely you must have read the charges?" "No; they are so long, I had never the courage to begin." The conscious look with which he heard this, brought--all too late--to my remembrance, that one of them was drawn up, and delivered in the House, by himself! I was really very sorry to have been so unfortunate; but I had no way to call back the words, so was quiet, perforce. "Come then," cried he, emphatically, "to hear Burke! come and listen to him, and you will be mistress of the whole. Hear Burke, and read the charges of the Begums, and then you will form your judgment without difficulty." I would rather (thought I) hear him upon any other subject: but I made no answer; I only said, "Certainly, I can gain nothing by what is going forward to-day. I meant to come to the opening now, but it seems rather like the shutting up!" He was not to be put off. "You will come, however, to hear Burke? To hear truth, reason, justice, eloquence! You will then see, in other colours, 'That man!' There is more cruelty, more oppression, more tyranny, in that little machine, with an arrogance, a self-confidence, unexampled, unheard of!" MISS BURNEY BATTLES FOR THE ACCUSED. "Indeed, sir!" cried I; "that does not appear, to those who know him and--I--know him a little." "Do you?" cried he earnestly; "personally, do you know him?" "Yes; and from that knowledge arose this prepossession I have confessed." "Indeed, what you have seen of him have you then so much approved?" "Yes, very much! I must own the truth!" "But you have not seen much of him?" Page 111 "No, not lately. My first knowledge of him was almost immediately upon his coming from India; I had heard nothing of all these accusations; I had never been in the way of hearing them, and knew not even that there were any to be heard. I saw him, therefore, quite without prejudice, for or against him ; and indeed, I must own, he soon gave me a strong interest in his favour." The surprise with which he heard me must have silenced me on the subject, had it not been accompanied with an attention so earnest as to encourage me still to proceed. It is evident to me that this committee live so much shut Lip with one another, that they conclude all the world of the same opinions with themselves, and universally imagine that the tyrant they think themselves pursuing is a monster in every part of his life, and held in contempt and abhorrence by all mankind. Could I then be sorry, seeing this, to contribute my small mite towards clearing, at least, so very wide a mistake? On the contrary, when I saw he listened, I was most eager to give him all I could to hear, "I found him," I continued, "so mild, so gentle, so extremely pleasing in his manners--" "Gentle!" cried he, with quickness. "Yes, Indeed; gentle even to humility--" "Humility? Mr. Hastings and humility!" "Indeed it is true; he is perfectly diffident in the whole of his manner, when engaged in conversation; and so much struck was I, at that very time, by seeing him so simple, so unassuming, when just returned from a government that had accustomed him to a power superior to our monarchs here, that it produced an effect upon my mind in his favour which nothing can erase!" "Yes, Yes!" cried he, with great energy, "you will give it up! you must lose it, must give it up! it will be plucked away, rooted wholly out of your mind ." "Indeed, sir," cried I, steadily, "I believe not!" "You believe not?" repeated he, with added animation; "then there will be the more glory in making you a convert!" If "conversion" is the word, thought I, I would rather make than be made. "But --Mr. Windham," cried I, "all my amazement now is at your condescension in speaking to me upon this business at all, when I have confessed to you my total ignorance of the subject, and my original prepossession in favour of the object. Why Page 112 do you not ask me when I was at the play ? and how I liked the last opera?" He laughed; and we talked on a little while in that strain, till again, suddenly fixing his eyes on poor Mr. Hastings, his gaiety once more vanished, and he gravely and severely examined his countenance. "'Tis surely," cried he, "an unpleasant one. He does not know, I suppose, 'tis reckoned like his own!" "How should he," cried I, "look otherwise than unpleasant here?" "True," cried he; "yet still, I think, his features, his look, his whole expression, unfavourable to him. I never saw him but once before; that was at the bar of the House of Commons and there, as Burke admirably said, he looked, when first he glanced an eye against him, like a hungry tiger, ready to howl for his prey!" "Well," cried I, "I am sure he does not look fierce now! Contemptuous, a little, I think he does look!" I was sorry I used this word; yet its truth forced it to escape me. He did not like it; he repeated it; he could not but be sure the contempt could only be levelled at his prosecutors. I feared discussion, and flew off as fast as I could, to softer ground. "It was not," cried I, "with that countenance he gave me my prepossession! Very differently, indeed, he looked then!" "And can he ever look pleasant? can that face ever obtain an expression that is pleasing?" "Yes, indeed and in truth, very pleasant! It was in the country I first saw him, and without any restraint on his part; I saw him, therefore, perfectly natural and easy. And no one, let me say, could so have seen him without being pleased with him--his quietness and serenity, joined to his intelligence and information--" "His information?--in what way?" "In such a way as suited his hearer: not upon committee business--of all that I knew nothing. The only conversation in which I could mix was upon India, considered simply as, a country in which he had travelled; and his communications upon the people, the customs, habits, cities, and whatever I could name, were so instructive as well as entertaining, that I think I never recollect gaining more intelligence, or more pleasantly conveyed, from any conversation in which I ever have been engaged." Page 113 To this he listened with an attention that, but for the secret zeal which warmed me must have silenced and shamed me. I am satisfied this committee have concluded Mr. Hastings a mere man of blood, with slaughter and avarice for his sole ideas! The surprise with which he heard this just testimony to his social abilities was only silent from good-breeding, but his eyes expressed what his tongue withheld; something that satisfied me he concluded I had undesignedly been duped by him. I answered this silence by saying "There was no object for hypocrisy, for it was quite in retirement I met with him : it was not lately ; it is near two years since I have seen him; he had therefore no point to gain with me, nor was there any public character, nor any person whatever, that Could induce him to act a part; yet was he all I have said-informing, Communicative, instructive, and at the same time, gentle and highly pleasing." "Well," said he, very civilly, "I begin the less to wonder, now, that You have adhered to his side; but--" "To see him, then," cried I, stopping his 'but,'--"to see him brought to that bar! and kneeling at it!--indeed, Mr. Windham, I must own to you, I could hardly keep my seat--hardly forbear rising and running out of the Hall." "Why, there," cried he, "I agree with you! 'Tis certainly a humiliation not to be wished or defended: it is, indeed, a mere ceremony, a mere formality; but it is a mortifying one, and so obsolete, so unlike the practices of the times, so repugnant from a gentleman to a gentleman, that I myself looked another way: it hurt me, and I wished it dispensed with." "O, Mr. Windham," cried I, surprised and pleased, "and can you be so liberal?" "Yes," cried he, laughing, "but 'tis only to take you in!" Afterwards he asked what his coat was, whether blue Or purple; and said, "is it not customary for a prisoner to come black?" "Whether or not," quoth I, "I am heartily glad he has not done it; why should he seem so dismal, so shut out from hope?" "Why, I believe he is in the right. I think he has judged that not ill." "O, don't be so candid," cried I, "I beg you not." "Yes, yes, I must; and you know the reason," cried he, gaily; but presently exclaimed, "one unpleasant thing belong- Page 114 ing to being a manager is that I must now go and show myself in the committee." And then he very civilly bowed, and went down to his box, leaving me much persuaded that I had never yet been engaged in a conversation so curious, from its circumstances, in my life. The warm well-wisher myself of the prisoner, though formerly the warmest admirer of his accuser, engaged, even at his trial and in his presence, in so open a discussion with one of his principal prosecutors; and the queen herself in full view, unavoidably beholding me in close and eager conference with an avowed member of the opposition! These circumstances made me at first enter into discourse with Mr. Windham with the utmost reluctance ; but though I wished to shun him, I could not, when once attacked, decline to converse with him. It would but injure the cause of Mr. Hastings to seem to fear hearing the voice of his accusers; and it could but be attributed to undue court-influence had I avoided any intercourse with an acquaintance so long ago established as a member of the opposition. A WEARIED M.P.-MR. CRUTCHLEY REAPPEARS. In the midst of the opening of a trial such as this, so important to the country as well as to the individual who is tried, what will you say to a man--a member of the House of Commons who kept exclaiming almost perpetually, just at my side, "What a bore!- -when will it be over?--Must one come any more?--I had a great mind not to have come at all.--Who's that?--Lady Hawkesbury and the Copes?--Yes.--A pretty girl, Kitty.--Well, when will they have done?--I wish they'd call the question--I should vote it a bore at once! just such exclamations as these were repeated, without intermission, till the gentleman departed: and who should it be that spoke with so much legislative wisdom but Mr. W---! In about two or three hours--this reading still lasting--Mr. Crutchley came to me again. He, too, was so wearied, that he was departing; but he stayed some time to talk over our constant topic--my poor Mrs. Thrale. How little does he suspect the interest I unceasingly take in her--the avidity with which I seize every opportunity to gather the smallest intelligence concerning her! One little trait of Mr. Crutchley, so characteristic of that queerness which distinguishes him, I must mention. He said Page 115 he questioned whether he should comme any more: I told him I had imagined the attendance of every member to be indispensable. "No," cried he, "ten to one if another day they are able to make a house!" "The Lords, however, I suppose, must come?" "Not unless they like it." " But I hear if they do not attend they have no tickets." "Why, then, Miss Primrose and Miss Cowslip must stay away too!" I had the pleasure to find him entirely for Mr. Hastings, and to hear he had constantly voted on his side through every stage of the business. He is a very independent man, and a man of real good character, and, with all his oddity, of real understanding. We compared notes very amicably upon this subject, and both agreed that those who looked for every flaw in the conduct of a man in so high and hazardous a station, ought first to have weighed his merits and his difficulties. MR. WINDHAM DISCUSSES THE IMPEACHMENT. A far more interesting conference, however, was now awaiting me. Towards the close of the day Mr. Windham very unexpectedly came again from the committee-box, and seated himself by my side. I was glad to see by this second visit that my frankness had not offended him. He began, too, in so open and social a manner, that I was satisfied he forgave it. "I have been," cried he, "very busy since I left you.--writing-- reading--making documents." I saw he was much agitated ; the gaiety which seems natural to him was flown, and had left in its place the most evident and unquiet emotion. I looked a little surprised, and rallying himself, in a few moments he inquired if I wished for any refreshment, and proposed fetching me some. But, well as I liked him for a conspirator, I could not break bread with him! I thought now all was over of communication between us, but I was mistaken. He spoke for a minute or two upon the crowd--early hour of coming--hasty breakfasting and such general nothings; and then, as if involuntarily, he returned to the sole subject on his mind. "Our plan," cried he, "is all changing: we have all been busy--we are coming into a new method. I have been making preparations--I did not intend speaking for a considerable time--not till after the circuit, but now, I may be called upon, I know not how soon." Page 116 Then he stopped--ruminating--and I let him ruminate without interruption for some minutes, when he broke forth with these reflections: "How strange, how infatuated a frailty has man with respect to the future! Be our views, our designs, our anticipations what they may, we are never prepared for it!--It always takes us by surprise--always comes before we look for it!" He stopped; but I waited his explanation without speaking, and, after pausing thoughtfully for some time, he went on: "This day--for which we have all been waiting so anxiously, so earnestly--the day for which we have fought, for which we have struggled--a day, indeed, of national glory, in bringing to this great tribunal a delinquent from so high an office--this day, so much wished, has seemed to me, to the last moment, so distant, that now--now that it Is actually arrived, it takes me as if I had never thought of it before--it comes upon me all unexpected, and finds me unready!" Still I said nothing, for I did not fully comprehend him, till he added, "I will not be so affected as to say to you that I have made no preparation--that I have not thought a little upon what I have to do; yet now that the moment is actually come--" Again he broke off. but a generous sentiment was, bursting from him, and would not be withheld. "It has brought me," he resumed, "a feeling of which I am not yet quite the master! What I have said hitherto, when I have spoken in the house, has been urged and stimulated by the idea of pleading for the injured and the absent, and that gave me spirit. Nor do I tell you (with a half-conscious smile) that the ardour of the prosecution went for nothing--a prosecution in favour of oppressed millions! But now,. when I am to speak here, the thought of that man, close to my side--culprit as he is--that man on whom all the odium is to fall--gives me, I own, a sensation that almost disqualifies me beforehand!" . . . "That this day was ever brought about," continued he, "must ever remain a noble memorial of courage and perseverance in the Commons. Every possible obstacle has been thrown in our way-- every art of government has been at work to impede us--nothing has been left untried to obstruct us--every check and clog of power and influence." "Not by him," cried I, looking at poor Mr. Hastings; "he has raised no impediments--he has been wholly careless." Page 117 "Come," cried he, with energy, "come and hear Burke!--Come but and hear him!--'tis an eloquence irresistible!--a torrent that sweeps all before it with the force of a whirlwind! It will Cure You, indeed, of your prepossession, but it will give you truth and right in its place. What discoveries has he not made!--what gulfs has he not dived into! Come and hear him, and your conflict will end!" I could hardly stand this, and, to turn it off', asked him if Mr. Hastings was to make his own defence? "No," he answered, "he will only speak by counsel. But do not regret that, for his own sake, as he is not used to public speaking, and has some impediment in his speech besides. He writes wonderfully--there he shines--and with a facility quite astonishing. Have you ever happened to see any of his writings?" "No: only one short account, which he calls 'Memoirs relative to some India transactions,' and that struck me to be extremely unequal--in some places strong and finely expressed, In others obscure and scarce intelligible." "That is just the case--that ambiguity runs through him in everything. Burke has found an admirable word for it in the Persian tongue, for which we have no translation, but it means an intricacy involved so deep as to be nearly unfathomable--an artificial entanglement." I inquired how it was all to end--whether this reading was to continue incessantly, or any speaking was to follow it? "I have not inquired how that is," he answered, "but I believe you will now soon be released." "And will the chancellor speak to adjourn?" "I cannot tell what the form may be, or how we are to be dissolved. I think myself there is nothing more difficult than how to tell people they may go about their business. I remember, when I was in the militia, it was just what I thought the most awkward, when I had done with my men. Use gives one the habit; and I found, afterwards, there was a regular mode for it: but, at first, I found it very embarrassing how to get rid of them." Nothing excites frankness like frankness ; and I answered him in return with a case of my own. "When first I came to my present residence I was perpetually," I said, "upon the point of making a blunder with the queen; for when, after she had honoured me with any conversation, she used to say 'Now I won't keep you--now I will detain you no longer,' . Page 118 I was always ready to answer, 'Ma'am, I am in no haste,- ma'am, I don't wish to go!' for I was not, at first, aware that it was only her mode of dismissing people from her presence." WINDHAM AFFECTS TO COMMISERATE HASTINGS. Again he was going: but glancing his eyes once more down upon Mr. Hastings, he almost sighed--he fetched, at least, a deep breath, while he exclaimed with strong emotion, "What a place for a man to stand in to hear what he has to hear!--'tis almost too much!" It would not be easy to tell you how touching at such a time was the smallest concession from an avowed opponent, and I could not help exclaiming again, "O, Mr. Windham, you must not be so liberal!" "O!" cried he, smiling, and recovering himself, "'tis all the deeper malice, only to draw you in!" Still, however, he did not go : he kept gazing upon Mr. Hastings till he seemed almost fascinated to the spot; and presently after, growing more and more open in his discourse, he began to talk to me of Sir Elijah Impey. I presume my dearest friends, little as they hear of politics and state business, must yet know that the House of Commons is threatening Sir Elijah with an impeachment, to succeed that of Mr. Hastings, and all upon East India transactions of the same date.(265) When he had given me his sentiments upon this subject, which I had heard with that sort of quietness that results from total ignorance of the matter, joined to total ignorance of the person concerned, he drew a short comparison, which, nearly, from him, and at such a moment, drew the tears from my eyes--nearly do I say?--Indeed more than that! "Sir Elijah," cried he, "knows how to go to work, and by getting the lawyers to side with him professionally, has set Page 119 about his defence in the most artful manner. He is not only wicked, but a very pitiful fellow. Let him but escape fine or imprisonment, and he will pocket all indignity, and hold himself happy in getting off: but Hastings (again looking steadfastly at him)--Hastings has feeling--'tis a proud feeling, an ambitious feeling--but feeling he has! Hastings--come to him what may-- fine, imprisonment, whatsoever is inflicted--all will be nothing. The moment of his punishment--I think it, upon my honour!--was the moment that brought him to that bar!" When he said "I think it, upon my honour," he laid his hand on his breast, as if he implied, "I acquit him henceforward." Poor Mr. Hastings! One generous enemy he has at least, who pursues him with public hate, but without personal malignity! yet sure I feel he can deserve neither! I did not spare to express my sense of this liberality from a foe; for, indeed, the situation I was in, and the sight of Mr. Hastings, made it very affecting to me. He was affected too, himself; but presently, rising, he said with great quickness, "I must shake all. this off; I must have done with it--dismiss it-- forget that he is there." "O, no," cried I, earnestly, "do not forget it!" "Yes, yes; I must." " No, remember it rather," cried I; "I could almost (putting up my hands as if praying) do thus and then, like poor Mr. Hastings just now to the house, drop down on my knees to you, to call out 'Remember it.'" "Yes, Yes," cried he, precipitately, "how else shall I go on? I must forget that he is there, and that you are here." And then he hurried down to his committee. Was it not a most singular scene ? I had afterwards to relate great part of this to the queen herself. She saw me engaged in such close discourse, and with such apparent interest on both sides, with Mr. Windham, that I knew she must else form conjectures innumerable. So candid, so liberal is the mind of the queen, that she not only heard me with the most favourable attention towards Mr. Windham, but was herself touched even to tears by the relation. We stayed but a short time after this last conference ; for nothing more was attempted than reading on the charges and answers, in the same useless manner, 120 MISS BURNEY IS AGAIN PRESENT AT HASTINGS'S TRIAL.. The interest of this trial was so much upon my mind, that I have not kept even a memorandum of what passed from the 13th of February to the day when I went again to Westminster Hall; nor, except renewing the Friday Oratorios with Mrs. Ord, do I recollect one circumstance. The second time that the queen, who saw my wishes, indulged me with one of her tickets, and a permission of absence for the trial, was to hear Mr. Burke, for whom my curiosity and my interest stood the highest. One ticket, however, would not do; I could not go alone, and the queen had bestowed all her other' tickets before she discovered that this was a day in my particular wishes. She entered into my perplexity with a sweetness the most gracious, and when I knew not how to obviate it, commanded me to write to the Duchess of Ancaster, and beg permission to be put under the wing of her grace, or any of her friends that were going to the Hall. The duchess, unluckily, did not go, from indisposition, nor any of her family; but she sent me a very obliging letter, and another ticket from Sir Peter Burrell, to use for a companion. I fixed upon James, who, I knew, wished to hear Mr. Burke for once, and we went together very comfortably. When the managers, who, as before, made the first procession, by entering their box below us, were all arranged, one from among them, whom I knew not, came up into the seats of the House of Commons by our side, and said, "Captain Burney, I am very glad to see you." "How do you do, sir ?" answered James; "here I am, come to see the fine show." Upon this the attacker turned short upon his heel, and abruptly walked away, descending into the box, which he did not quit any more. I inquired who he was; General Burgoyne, James told me. "A manager!" cried I, "and one of the chargers! and you treat the business of the Hall with such contempt to his face!" James laughed heartily at his own uncourtly address, but I would not repent, though he acknowledged he saw the offence his slight and slighting speech had given. Fearful lest he should proceed in the same style with my friend Mr. Windham, I kept as aloof as possible, to avoid his notice, entreating James at the same time to have the complaisance to be silent upon this subject, should he discover me Page 121 and approach. My own sentiments were as opposite to those of the managers as his, and I had not scrupled to avow honestly my dissent; but I well knew Mr. Windham might bear, and even respect, from a female, the same openness of opposition that might be highly offensive to him from a man. But I could obtain no positive promise; he would only compromise with my request, and agree not to speak unless applied to first. This, however, contented me, as Mr. Windham was too far embarked in his undertaking to solicit any opinion upon it from accidentally meeting any common acquaintance. >From young Burke and his uncle Richard I had bows from the committee box. Mr. Windham either saw me not, or was too much engaged in business to ascend. BURKE'.S SPEECH IN SUPPORT OF THE CHARGES. At length the peers' procession closed, the prisoner was brought in, and Mr. Burke began his speech. It was the second day of his harangue;(266) the first I had not been able to attend. All I had heard of his eloquence, and all I had conceived of his great abilities, was more than answered by his performance. Nervous, clear, and striking was almost all that he uttered: the main business, indeed, of his coming forth was frequently neglected, and not seldom wholly lost , but his excursions were so fanciful, so entertaining, and so ingenious, that no miscellaneous hearer, like myself, could blame them. It is true he was unequal, but his inequality produced an effect which, in so long a speech, was perhaps preferable to greater consistency since, though it lost attention in its falling off, it recovered it with additional energy by some ascent unexpected and wonderful. When he narrated, he was easy, flowing, and natural; when he declaimed, energetic, warm, and brilliant. The sentiments he interspersed were as nobly conceived as they were highly coloured; his satire had a poignancy of wit that made it as entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious - and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and perfectly irresistible. Were talents such as these exercised in the service of truth, Page 122 unbiased by party and prejudice, how could we sufficiently applaud their exalted possessor? But though frequently he made me tremble by his strong and horrible representations, his own violence recovered me, by stigmatizing his assertions with personal ill-will and designing illiberality. Yet, at times I confess, with all that I felt, wished, and thought concerning Mr. Hastings, the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex. I give no particulars of the speech, because they will all be printed. The observations and whispers of our keen as well as honest James, during the whole, were highly characteristic and entertaining. "When will he come to the point?"-"These are mere words!"--"This is all sheer detraction!"--"All this is nothing to the purpose!" etc., etc. "Well, ma'am, what say you to all this? how have you been entertained?" cried a voice at my side; and I saw Mr. Crutchley, who came round to speak to me. "Entertained?" cried I, "indeed, not at all, it is quite too serious and too horrible for entertainment: you ask after my amusement as if I were at an opera or a comedy." "A comedy?" repeated he, contemptuously, "no, a farce! It is not high enough for a comedy. To hear a man rant such stuff. But you should have been here the first day he spoke; this is milk and honey to that. He said then, ' His heart was as black--as-- black!' and called him the captain-general of iniquity." "Hush! hush!" cried I, for he spoke very loud; "that young man you see down there, who is looking up, is his son." "I know it," cried he, "and what do I care?" How I knew Mr. Crutchley again, by his ready talent of defiance, and disposition to contempt ! I was called aside from him by James. Mr. Crutchley retired, and Mr. Windham quitted his den, and approached me, with a smile of good-humour and satisfaction that made me instantly exclaim, "No exultation, Mr. Windham, no questions; don't ask me what I think of the speech; I can bear no triumph just now." "No, indeed," cried he, very civilly, "I will not, I promise you, and you may depend upon me." He then spoke to James, regretting with much politeness that he had seen so little of him when he was his neighbour in Norfolk, and attributing it to the load of India business he had carried into the country to study. I believe I have mentioned Page 123 that Felbrig, Mr. Windham's seat, is within a few miles of my brother-in-law, Mr. Francis's house at Aylsham. After this, however, ere we knew where we were, we began commenting upon the speech. It was impossible to refuse applause to its able delivery and skilful eloquence; I, too, who so long had been amongst the warmest personal admirers of Mr. Burke, could least of all withhold from him the mite of common justice. In talking over the speech, therefore, while I kept clear of its purpose, I gave to its execution the amplest praise; and I secretly grieved that I held back more blame than I had commendation to bestow. He had the good breeding to accept it just as I offered it, without claiming more, or endeavouring to entangle me in my approbation. He even checked himself, voluntarily, when he was asking me some question of my conversion, by stopping short, and saying, "But, no, it is not fair to press you; I must not do that." "You cannot," cried I, "press me too much, with respect to my admiration of the ability of the speaker; I never more wished to have written short-hand. I must content myself, however, that I have at least a long memory." He regretted very much that I had missed the first opening of the speech, and gave me some account of it, adding, I might judge what I had lost then by what I had heard now. I frankly confessed that the two stories which Mr. Burke had narrated had nearly overpowered me; they were pictures of cruelty so terrible. "But General Caillot," cried he, smiling, "the hero of one of them, you would be tempted to like: he is as mild, as meek, as gentle in his manners--" I saw he was going to say "As your Mr. Hastings;" but I interrupted him hastily, calling out, "Hush! hush! Mr. Windham; would you wish me in future to take to nothing but lions? FURTHER CONVERSATION WITH MR. WINDHAM. We then went into various other particulars of the speech, till Mr. Windham observed that Mr. Hastings was looking up, and, after examining him some time, said he did not like his countenance. I could have told him that he is generally reckoned extremely like himself but after such an observation I would not venture, and only said, "Indeed, he is cruelly altered: it Page 124 was not so he looked when I conceived for him that prepossession I have owned to you." "Altered, is he?" cried he, biting his lips and looking somewhat shocked. "Yes, and who can wonder? Indeed, it is quite affecting to see him sit there to hear such things." "I did not see him," cried he, eagerly "I did not think it right to look at him during the speech, nor from the committeebox; and, therefore, I constantly kept my eyes another way." I -had a great inclination to beg he would recommend a little of the same decency to some of his colleagues, among whom are three or four that even stand on the benches to examine him, during the severest strictures, with opera-glasses. Looking at him again now, myself, I could not see his pale face and haggard eye without fresh concern, nor forbear to exclaim, "Indeed, Mr. Windham, this is a dreadful business!" He seemed a little struck with this exclamation; and, lest it should offend him, I hastened to add, in apology, "You look so little like a bloody-minded prosecutor, that I forget I ought not to say these things to you." "Oh!" cried he, laughing, "we are only prosecutors there--(pointing to the committee-box), we are at play up here." . . . I wished much to know when he was himself to speak, and made sundry inquiries relative to the progress of the several harangues, but all without being comprehended, till at length I cried, "In short, Mr. Windham, I want to know when everybody speaks." He started, and cried with precipitancy, "Do you mean me?" "Yes." "No, I hope not; I hope you have no wants about my miserable speaking?" I Only laughed, and we talked for some time of other things; and then, suddenly, he burst forth with, "But you have really made me a little uneasy by what you dropped just now." "And what was that?" "Something like an intention of hearing me." "Oh, if that depended wholly on myself, I should certainly do it." "No, I hope not! I would not have you here on any account. If you have formed any expectations, it will give me great concern." "Pray don't be uneasy about that; for whatever expectations Page 125 I may have formed, I had much rather have them disappointed." " Ho! ho!--you come, then," cried he, pointedly, "to hear me, by way of soft ground to rest upon, after the hard course you will have been run with these higher-spirited speakers?" . . . He desired me not to fail to come and hear Fox. My chances, I told him, were very uncertain, and Friday was the earliest of them. "He speaks on Thursday," cried he, "and indeed you should hear him." "Thursday is my worst chance of all," I answered, "for it is the Court-day." "And is there no dispensation ? " cried he ; and then, recollecting himself, and looking very archly at Mr. Fox, who was just below us, he added, "No,--true--not for him!" "Not for any body!" cried I; "on a Court-day my attendance is as necessary, and I am dressed out as fine, and almost as stiff, as those heralds are here." I then told him what were my Windsor days, and begged he would not seize one of them to speak himself. "By no means," cried he, quite seriously, "would I have you here!--stay away, and only let me hope for your good wishes." " I shall be quite sincere," cried I, laughing, "and own to you that stay away I shall not, if I can possibly come; but as to my good wishes, I have not, in this case, one to give you!" He heard this with a start that was almost a jump. "What!" he exclaimed, "would you lay me under your judgment without your mercy?--Why this is heavier than any penal statute." He spoke this with an energy that made Mr. Fox look up, to see to whom he addressed his speech: but before I could answer it, poor James, tired of keeping his promised circumspection, advanced his head to join the conversation; and so much was I alarmed lest he should burst forth into some unguarded expression of his vehement hatred to the cause, which could not but have irritated its prosecutors, that the moment I perceived his motion and intention, I abruptly took my leave of Mr. Windham, and surprised poor James into a necessity of following me. Indeed I was now most eager to depart, from a circumstance that made me feel infinitely awkward. Mr. Burke himself was just come forward, to speak to a lady a little below me; Mr. Windham had instantly turned towards me, with a look of congratulation that seemed rejoicing for me, that the orator Page 126 of the day, and of the cause, was approaching,; but I retreated involuntarily back, and shirked meeting his eyes. He perceived in an instant the mistake he was making, and went on with his discourse as if Mr. Burke was out of the Hall. In a minute, however, Mr. Burke himself saw me, and he bowed with the most marked civility of manner; my courtesy was the most ungrateful, distant, and cold ; I could not do otherwise ; so hurt I felt to see him the head of such a cause, so impossible I found it to titter one word of admiration for a performance whose nobleness was so disgraced by its tenour, and so conscious was I the whole time that at such a moment to say nothing must seem almost an affront, that I hardly knew which way to look, or what to do with myself.(267) ' In coming downstairs I met Lord Walsingham and Sir Lucas Pepys. "Well, Miss Burney," cried the first, "what say you to a governor-general of India now?" "Only this," cried I, "that I do not dwell much upon any question till I have heard its answer!" Sir Lucas then attacked me too. All the world against poor Mr. Hastings, though without yet knowing what his materials may be for clearing away these aspersions! Miss FUZILIER LIKELY TO PECONIE MRS, FAIRLY, February.-Her majesty at this time was a little indisposed, and we missed going to Windsor for a fortnight, during which I received visits of inquiry from divers of her ladies--Mrs. Brudenell, bed-chamber woman; Miss Brudenell, her daughter, and a maid of honour elect, would but one of that class please to marry or die; Miss Tryon and Miss Beauclerk, maids of honour, neither of them in a firm way to oblige Miss Brudenell, being nothing approaching to death, though far advanced from marriage; and various others. Miss Brudenell's only present hope is said to be in Miss Fuzilier,(268) who is reported, with what foundation I know not, Page 127 to be likely to become Mrs. Fairly. She is pretty, learned, and accomplished ; yet, from the very little I have seen of her, I should not think she had heart enough to satisfy Mr. Fairly, in whose character the leading trait is the most acute sensibility, However, I have heard he has disclaimed all such intention, with high indignation at the report, as equally injurious to the delicacy both of Miss Fuzilier and himself, so recently after his loss. THE HASTINGS TRIAL AGAIN: MR. FOX IN A RAGE. And now for my third Westminster Hall, which, by the queen's own indulgent order, was with dear Charlott and Sarah. It was also to hear Mr. Fox, and I was very glad to let Mr. Windham see a "dispensation" was attainable, though the cause was accidental, since the queen's cold prevented the Drawing-room.(269) We went early, yet did not get very good places. The managers at this time were all in great wrath at a decision made the night before by the Lords, upon a dispute between them and the counsel for Mr. Hastings, which turned entirely in favour of the latter.(270) When they entered their committee-box, led on as usual by Mr. Burke, they all appeared in the extremest and most angry emotion. When they had caballed together some time, Mr. Windham came up among the Commons, to bow to some ladies of his acquaintance, and then to speak to me ; but he was so agitated and so disconcerted, he could name nothing but their recent provocation from the Lords. He seemed quite enraged, and broke forth with a vehemence I should not much have liked to have excited. They had experienced, he said, in the late decision, the Most injurious treatment that could be offered them: the Lords had resolved upon saving Mr. Hastings, and the chancellor had taken him under the grossest protection. Page 128 "In short," said he, "the whole business is taken out of our hands, and they have all determined to save him." "Have they indeed?" cried I, with Involuntary eagerness. "Yes," answered he, perceiving how little I was shocked for him, "it is now all going your way." I could not pretend to be sorry, and only inquired if Mr. Fox was to speak. "I know not," cried he, hastily, "what is to be done, who will speak, or what will be resolved. Fox is in a rage! Oh, a rage!" "But yet I hope he will speak. I have never heard him." "No? not the other day?" "No; I was then at Windsor." "Oh yes, I remember you told me you were going. You have lost every thing by it! To-day will be nothing, he is all rage! On Tuesday he was great indeed. You should have heard him then. And Burke, You should have heard the conclusion of Burke's speech; 'twas the noblest ever uttered by man!" "So I have been told." "To-day you will hear nothing--know nothing,--there will be no opportunity,- Fox is all fury." I told him he almost frightened me; for he spoke in a tremor himself that was really unpleasant. "Oh!" cried he, looking at me half reproachfully, half goodhumouredly, "Fox's fury is with the Lords--not there!" pointing to Mr. Hastings. I saw by this he entered into my feelings in the midst of his irritability, and that gave me courage to cry out, "I am glad of that at least!: Mr. Fox spoke five hours, and with a violence that did not make me forget what I had heard of his being in such a fury but I shall never give any account of these speeches, as they will all be printed. I shall only say a word of the speakers as far as relates to my own feelings about them, and that briefly will be to say that I adhere to Mr. Burke, whose oratorical powers appear to me far more gentleman-like, scholar-like, and fraught with true genius than those of Mr. Fox. it may be I am prejudiced by old kindnesses of Mr. Burke, and it may be that the countenance of Mr. Fox may have turned me against him, for it struck me to have a boldness in it quite hard and callous. However, it is little matter how much my judgment in this point may err. With you, my dear friends, I have Page 129 nothing further to do than simply to give it ; and even should it be wrong, it will not very essentially injure you in your politics. MRS. CREWE, MR. BURKE, AND MR. WINDHAM. Again, on the fourth time of my attendance at Westminster Hall, honest James was my esquire. We were so late from divers accidents that we did not enter till the same moment with the prisoner. In descending the steps I heard my name exclaimed with surprise, and looking before me, I saw myself recognised by Mrs. Crewe. "Miss Burney," she cried, "who could have thought of seeing you here!" Very obligingly she made me join her immediately, which, as I was with no lady, was a very desirable circumstance; and though her political principles are well known, and, of course, lead her to side with the enemies of Mr. Hastings, she had the good sense to conclude me on the other side, and the delicacy never once to distress me by any discussion of the prosecution. I was much disappointed to find nothing intended for this day's trial but hearing evidence; no speaker was preparing; all the attention was devoted to the witnesses. Mr. Adam, Mr. Dudley Long, and others that I know not, Came from the committee to chat with Mrs. Crewe; but soon after one came not so unknown to me--Mr. Burke; and Mrs. Crewe, seeing him ascend, named him to me, but was herself a little surprised to see it was his purpose to name himself, for he immediately made up to me, and with an air of such frank kindness that, could I have forgot his errand in that Hall, would have made me receive him as formerly, when I was almost fascinated with him. But far other were my sensations. I trembled as he approached me, with conscious change of sentiments, and with a dread of his pressing from me a disapprobation he might resent, but which I knew not how to disguise. "Near-sighted as I am," cried he, "I knew you immediately. I knew you from our box the moment I looked up; yet how long it is, except for an instant here, since I have seen you!" "Yes," I hesitatingly answered, "I live in a monastery now." He said nothing to this. He felt, perhaps, it was meant to express my inaccessibility. Page 130 I inquired after Mrs. Burke. He recounted to me the particulars of his sudden seizure when he spoke last, from the cramp in his stomach, owing to a draught of cold water which he drank in the midst of the heat of his oration. I could not even wear a semblance of being sorry for him on this occasion; and my cold answers made him soon bend down to speak with Mrs. Crewe. I was seated in the next row to her, just above. Mr. Windham was now talking with her. My whole curiosity and desire being to hear him, which had induced me to make a point of coming this time, I was eager to know if my chance was wholly gone. "You are aware," I cried, when he spoke to me, "what brings me here this morning No;" he protested he knew not. Mrs. Crewe, again a little surprised, I believe, at this second opposition acquaintance, began questioning how often I had attended this trial. Mr. Windham, with much warmth of regret, told her very seldom, and that I had lost Mr. Burke on his best day. I then turned to speak to Mr. Burke, that I might not seem listening, for they interspersed various civilities upon my peculiar right to have heard all the great speeches, but Mr. Burke was in so profound a reverie he did not hear me. I wished Mr. Windham had not either, for he called upon him aloud, "Mr. Burke, Miss Burney speaks to you!" He gave me his immediate attention with an air so full of respect that it quite shamed me. "Indeed," I cried, " I had never meant to speak to Mr. Burke again after hearing him in Westminster Hall. I had meant to keep at least that " geographical timidity." I alluded to an expression in his great speech of "geographical morality" which had struck me very much. He laughed heartily, instantly comprehending me, and assured me it was an idea that had occurred to him on the moment he had uttered it, wholly without study. A little general talk followed; and then, one of the lords rising to question some of the evidence, he said he must return to his committee and business,-very flatteringly saying, in quitting his post, "This is the first time I have played truant from the manager's box." However I might be obliged to him, which sincerely I felt, I was yet glad to have him go. My total ill will to all he was about made his conversation merely a pain to me. Page 131 I did not feel the same With regard to Mr. Windham. He is not the prosecutor, and seems endowed with so much liberality and candour that it not Only encourages me to speak to him what I think, but leads me to believe he will one day or other reflect upon joining a party so violent as a stain to the independence of his character. Almost instantly he came forward, to the place Mr. Burke had vacated. "Are you approaching," I cried, "to hear my upbraidings?" "Why--I don't know," cried he, looking half alarmed. "Oh! I give you warning, if you come you must expect them; so my invitation is almost as pleasant as the man's in 'Measure for Measure,' who calls to Master Barnardine, 'Won't you come down to be hanged?'" "But how," cried he, "have I incurred your upbraidings?" " By bringing me here," I answered, "only to disappoint me." "Did I bring you here?" "Yes, by telling me you were to speak to-day." He protested he could never have made such an assertion. I explained myself, reminding him he had told me he was certainly to speak before the recess; and that, therefore, when I was informed this was to be the last day of trial till after the recess, I concluded I should be right, but found myself so utterly wrong as to hear nothing but such evidence as I Could not even understand, because it was so uninteresting I could not even listen to it. "How strangely," he exclaimed, "are we all moulded, that nothing ever in this mortal life, however pleasant in itself, and however desirable from its circumstances, can come to us without alloy-- not even flattery; for here, at this moment, all the high gratification I should feel, and I am well disposed to feel it thoroughly in supposing you could think it worth your while to come hither in order to hear me, is kept down and subdued by the consciousness how much I must disappoint you." "Not at all," cried I; "the worse you speak, the better for my side of the question." He laughed, but confessed the agitation of his spirits was so great in the thought of that speech, whenever he was to make it, that it haunted him in fiery dreams in his sleep. "Sleep!" cried I; "do you ever sleep?" He stared a little, but I added with pretended dryness, "Do any of you that live down there in that prosecutor's den ever sleep in your beds? I should have imagined that, had you Page 132 even attempted it, the anticipating ghost of Mr. Hastings would have appeared to you in the dead of the night, and have drawn your curtains, and glared ghastly in your eyes. I do heartily wish Mr. Tickell would send You that 'Anticipation' at once!" This idea furnished us with sundry images, till, looking down upon Mr. Hastings, with an air a little moved, he said, "I am afraid the most insulting thing we do by him is coming up hither to show ourselves so easy and disengaged, and to enter into conversation with the ladies." "But I hope," cried I, alarmed, "he does not see that." "Why your caps," cried he, "are much in your favour for concealment; they are excellent screens to all but the first row!" I saw him, however, again look at the poor, and, I sincerely believe, much-injured prisoner, and as I saw also he still bore With my open opposition, I could not but again seize a favourable moment for being more serious With him. "Ah, Mr. Windham," I cried, "I have not forgot what dropped from you on the first day of this trial." He looked a little surprised. "You," I continued, "probably have no remembrance of it, for you have been living ever since down there; but I was more touched with what you said then, than with all I have since heard from all the others, and probably than with all I shall hear even from you again when you mount the rostrum." "You conclude," cried he, looking very sharp, "I shall then be better steeled against that fatal candour?" "In fact," cried I, "Mr. Windham, I do really believe your steeling to he factitious; notwithstanding you took pains to assure me your candour was but the deeper malice; and yet I will own, when once I have heard your speech, I have little expectation of ever having the honour of conversing with you again." "And why?" cried- he, starting back "what am I to say that you denounce such a forfeit beforehand?" I could not explain; I left him to imagine; for, should he prove as violent and as personal as the rest, I had no objection to his previously understanding I could have no future pleasure in discoursing with him. "I think, however," I continued, with a laugh, "that since I have settled this future taciturnity, I have a fair right in the meanwhile to say whatever comes uppermost." Page 133 He agreed to this with great approvance. "Molière, you know, in order to obtain a natural opinion of his plays, applied to an old woman: you upon the same principle, to obtain a natural opinion of political matters, should apply to an ignorant one--for you will never, I am sure, gain it down there." He smiled, whether he would or not, but protested this was the severest stricture upon his committee that had ever yet been uttered. MISS BURNEY'S UNBIASED SENTIMENTS. I told him as it was the last time he was likely to hear unbiased sentiments upon this subject, it was right they should be spoken very intelligibly. " And permit me," I said, " to begin with what strikes me the most. Were Mr. Hastings really the culprit he is represented, he would never stand there." "Certainly," cried he, with a candour he could not suppress, "there seems something favourable in that; it has a Pod look; but assure yourself he never expected to see this day." "But would he, if guilty, have waited its chance? Was not all the world before him? Could he not have chosen any other place of residence ?" "Yes--but the shame, the disgrace of a flight?" "What is it all to the shame and disgrace of convicted guilt?" He made no answer. "And now," I continued, "shall I tell you, just in the same simple style, how I have been struck with the speakers and speeches I have yet heard?" He eagerly begged me to go on. "The whole of this public speaking is quite new to me. I was never in the House of Commons. It is all a new creation to me." "And what a creation it is he exclaimed. "how noble, how elevating! and what an inhabitant for it!" I received his compliment with great courtesy, as an encouragement. for me to proceed. I then began upon Mr. Burke; but I must give you a very brief summary of my speech, as it could only be intelligible at full length from your having heard his. I told him that his opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language, with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and every purpose to which rhetoric Page 134 could lead. "And when he came to his two narratives," I continued, "whence he related the particulars of those dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me; I felt my cause lost. I Could hardly keep on my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself; not another wish in his favour remained. But When from this narration Mr. Burke proceeded to his own comments and declamation--when the charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny were general, and made with all the violence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated without any further fact or illustration; then there appeared more of study than of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in short, so little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, my eyes were indifferent which way they looked, or what object caught them; and before I was myself aware of the declension of Mr. Burke's powers over my feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, and looking all around it, with my opera-glass in my hand." His eyes sought the ground on hearing this, and with no other comment than a rather uncomfortable shrug of the shoulders, he expressively and concisely said--"I comprehend you perfectly!" This was a hearing too favourable to stop me; and Mr. Hastings constantly before me was an animation to my spirits which nothing less could have given me, to a manager of such a committee. I next, therefore, began upon Mr. Fox; and I ran through the general matter of his speech, with such observations as had occurred to me in hearing it. "His violence," I said, "had that sort of monotony that seemed to result from its being factitious, and I felt less pardon for that than for any extravagance in Mr. Burke, whose excesses seemed at least to be unaffected, and, if they spoke against his judgment, spared his probity. Mr. Fox appeared to have no such excuse; he looked all good humour and negligent ease the instant before he began a speech of uninterrupted passion and vehemence, and he wore the same careless and disengaged air the very instant he had finished. A display of talents in which the inward man took so little share could have no powers of persuasion to those who saw them in that light and therefore. Page 135 however their brilliancy might be admired, they were useless to their cause, for they left the mind of the hearer in the same state that they found it." After a short vindication of his friends, he said, "You have never heard Pitt? You would like him beyond any other competitor." And then he made his panegyric in very strong terms, allowing him to be equal, ready, splendid, wonderful!--he was in constant astonishment himself at his powers and success;--his youth and inexperience never seemed against him: though he mounted to his present height after and in opposition to such a vortex of splendid abilities, yet, alone and unsupported, he coped with them all! And then, with conscious generosity, he finished a most noble éloge with these words: "Take--you may take--the testimony of an enemy--a very confirmed enemy of Mr. Pitt's!" Not very confirmed, I hope! A man so liberal can harbour no enmity of that dreadful malignancy that sets mitigation at defiance for ever. He then asked me if I had heard Mr. Grey? " No," I answered ; " I can come but seldom, and therefore I reserved myself for to-day." "You really fill me with compunction," he cried. "But if, indeed, I have drawn you into so cruel a waste of your time, the only compensation I can make you will be carefully to keep from you the day when I shall really speak." "No," I answered, "I must hear you; for that is all I now wait for to make up my final opinion." "And does it all rest with me?--'Dreadful responsibility'--as Mr. Hastings powerfully enough expresses himself in his narrative." "And can you allow an expression of Mr. Hastings's to be powerful?--That is not like Mr. Fox, who, in acknowledging some one small thing to be right, in his speech, checked himself for the acknowledgment by hastily saying 'Though I am no great admirer of the genius and abilities of the gentleman at the bar;'--as if he had pronounced a sentence in a parenthesis, between hooks,--so rapidly he flew off to what he could positively censure." " And hooks they were indeed he cried. "Do not inform against me," I continued, "and I will give you a little more of Molière's old woman." He gave me his parole, and looked very curious, Page 136 "Well then,--amongst the things most striking to an unbiased spectator was that action of the orator that led him to look full at the prisoner upon every hard part of the charge. There was no courage in it, since the accused is so situated he must make no answer; and, not being courage, to Molière's old woman it could only seem cruelty!" He quite gave up this point without a defence, except telling me it was from the habit of the House of Commons, as Fox, who chiefly had done this, was a most good-humoured man, and by nothing but habit would have been betrayed into such an error. "And another thing," I cried, "which strikes those ignorant of senatorial licence, is this,--that those perpetual repetitions, from all the speakers, of inveighing against the power, the rapacity, the tyranny, the despotism of the gentleman at the bar, being uttered now, when we see him without any power, without even liberty-con fined to that spot, and the only person in this large assembly who may not leave it when he will--when we see such a contrast to all we hear we think the simplest relation would be sufficient for all purposes of justice, as all that goes beyond plain narrative, instead of sharpening indignation, only calls to mind the greatness of the fall, and raises involuntary commiseration!" "And you wish," he cried, "to hear me? How you add to my difficulties!--for now, instead of thinking of Lords, Commons, bishops, and judges before me, and of the delinquent and his counsel at my side, I shall have every thought and faculty swallowed up in thinking of who is behind me!" This civil speech put an end to Molière's old woman and her comments; and not to have him wonder at her unnecessarily, I said, "Now, then, Mr. Windham, shall I tell you fairly what it is that induced me to say all this to you?--Dr. Johnson!--what I have heard from him of Mr. Windham has been the cause of all this hazardous openness." "'Twas a noble cause," cried he, well pleased, "and noble has been its effect! I loved him, indeed, sincerely. He has left a chasm in my heart-a chasm in the world ! There was in him what I never saw before, what I never shall find again! I lament every moment as lost, that I might have spent in his society, and yet gave to any other." How it delighted me to hear this just praise, thus warmly uttered!--I could speak from this moment upon no other subject. I told him how much it gratified me; and we agreed Page 137 in comparing notes upon the very few opportunities his real remaining friends could now meet with of a similar indulgence, since so little was his intrinsic worth understood, while so deeply all his foibles had been felt, that in general it was merely a matter of pain to hear him even named. How did we then emulate each other in calling to mind all his excellences! "His abilities," cried Mr. Windham, "were gigantic, and always at hand no matter for the subject, he had information ready for everything. He was fertile,--he was universal." My praise of him was of a still more solid kind,--his principles, his piety, his kind heart under all its rough coating: but I need not repeat what I said,--my dear friends know every word. I reminded him of the airings, in which he gave his time with his carriage for the benefit of Dr. Johnson's health. "What an advantage!" he cried, "was all that to myself! I had not merely an admiration, but a tenderness for him,--the more I knew him, the stronger it became. We never disagreed ; even in politics, I found it rather words than things in which we differed." "And if you could so love him," cried I, "knowing him only in a general way, what would you have felt for him had you known him at Streatham?" I then gave him a little history of his manners and way of life, there,--his good humour, his sport, his kindness, his sociability, and all the many excellent qualities that, in the world at large, were by so many means obscured. He was extremely interested in all I told him, and regrettingly said he had only known him in his worst days, when his health was upon its decline, and infirmities were crowding- fast upon him. "Had he lived longer," he cried, "I am satisfied I should have taken to him almost wholly. I should have taken him to my heart! have looked up to him, applied to him, advised with him in all the most essential occurrences of my life! I am sure, too,-- though it is a proud assertion,--he would have liked me, also, better, had we mingled more. I felt a mixed fondness and reverence growing so strong upon me, that I am satisfied the closest union would have followed his longer life." I then mentioned how kindly he had taken his visit to him at Lichfield during a severe illness, "And he left you," I said, "a book ? " Page 138 "Yes," he answered, "and he gave me one, also, just before he died. 'You will look into this Sometimes,' he said, 'and not refuse to remember whence you had it.' "(271) And then he added he had heard him speak of me,--and with so much kindness, that I was forced not to press a recapitulation: yet now I wish I had heard it. just before we broke up, "There Is nothing," he cried, with energy, "for which I look back upon myself with severer discipline than the time I have thrown away in other pursuits, that might else have been devoted to that wonderful man!" He then said he must be gone,--he was one in a committee of the House, and could keep away no longer. BURKE AND SHERIDAN MEET WITH COLD RECEPTIONS. I then again joined in with Mrs. Crewe, who, meantime, had had managers without end to converse with her. But, very soon after, Mr. Burke mounted to the House of Commons(272) again, and took the place left by Mr. Windham. I inquired very much after Mrs. Burke, and we talked of the spectacle, and its fine effect; and I ventured to mention, allusively, some of the digressive parts of the great speech in which I had heard him: but I saw him anxious for speaking more to the point, and as I could not talk to him--the leading prosecutor--with that frankness of opposing sentiments which I used to Mr. Windham, I was anxious only to avoid talking at all; and so brief was my speech, and so long my silences, that, of course, he was soon wearied into a retreat. Had he not acted such a part, with what pleasure should I have exerted myself to lengthen his stay! Yet he went not in wrath: for, before the close, he came yet a third time, to say "I do not pity you for having to sit there so long, for, with you, sitting can now be no punishment." "No," cried I, "I may take rest for a twelvemonth back." His son also came to speak to me; but, not long after, Page 139 Mrs. Crewe called upon me to say, "Miss Burney, Mr. Sheridan begs me to introduce him to you, for he thinks you have forgot him." I did not feel very comfortable in this; the part he acts would take from me all desire for his notice, even were his talents as singular as they are celebrated. Cold, therefore, was my reception of his salutations, though as civil as I could make it. He talked a little over our former meeting at Mrs. Cholmondeley's, and he reminded me of what he had there urged and persuaded with all his might, namely, that I would write a comedy; and he now reproached me for my total disregard of his counsel and opinion. I made little or no answer, for I am always put out by such sort of discourse, especially when entered upon with such abruptness. Recollecting, then, that "Cecilia" had been published since that time, he began a very florid flourish, saying he was in my debt greatly, not only for reproaches about what I had neglected, but for fine speeches about what I had performed. I hastily interrupted him with a fair retort, exclaiming,--"O if fine speeches may now be made, I ought to begin first---but know not where I should end!" I then asked after Mrs. Sheridan, and he soon after left me. Mrs. Crewe was very obligingly solicitous our renewed acquaintance should not drop here; she asked me to name any day for dining with her, or to send to her at any time when I could arrange a visit: but I was obliged to decline it, on the general score of wanting time. In the conclusion of the day's business there was much speaking, and I heard Mr. Fox, Mr. Burke, and several others; but the whole turned extremely in favour of the gentleman at the bar, to the great consternation of the accusers, whose own witnesses gave testimony, most unexpectedly, on the side of Mr. Hastings. We came away very late; my dear James quite delighted with this happy catastrophe. AT WINDSOR AGAIN. March.-In our first journey to Windsor this month Mrs. Schwellenberg was still unable to go, and the party was Miss Planta, Colonel Wellbred, Mr. Fairly, Sir Joseph Banks, and Mr. Turbulent. Page 140 Sir Joseph was so exceedingly shy that we made no sort of acquaintance. If instead of going round the world he had only fallen from the moon, he could not appear less versed in the usual modes of a tea-drinking party. But what, you will say, has a tea-drinking party to do with a botanist, a man of science, a president of the Royal Society? I left him , however, to the charge of Mr. Turbulent, the two colonels becoming, as usual, my joint supporters. And Mr. Turbulent, in revenge, ceased not one moment to watch Colonel Wellbred, nor permitted him to say a word, or to hear an answer, without some most provoking grimace. Fortunately, upon this subject he cannot confuse me; I have not a sentiment about Colonel Wellbred, for or against, that shrinks from examination. To-night, however, my conversation was almost wholly with him. I would not talk with Mr. Turbulent; I could not talk with Sir Joseph Banks - and Mr. Fairly did not talk with me : he had his little son with him; he was grave and thoughtful, and seemed awake to no other pleasure than discoursing with that sweet boy. I believe I have forgotten to mention that Mrs. Gwynn had called upon me one morning, in London, and left me a remarkably fine impression of Mr. Bunbury's "Propagation of a Lie," which I had mentioned when she was at Windsor, with regret at having never seen it. This I had produced here a month ago, to show to our tea-party, and just as it was in the hands of Colonel Wellbred, his majesty entered the room; and, after looking at it a little while, with much entertainment, he took it away to show it to the queen and princesses. I thought it lost; for Colonel Wellbred said he concluded it would be thrown amidst the general hoard of curiosities, which, when once seen, are commonly ever after forgotten, yet which no one has courage to name and to claim. This evening, however, the colonel was successful, and recovered me my print. It is so extremely humorous that I was very glad to receive it, and in return I fetched my last sketches, which Mr. William Locke had most kindly done for me when here last autumn, and indulged Colonel Wellbred with looking at them, charging him at the same time to guard them from a similar accident. I meant to show them myself to my royal mistress, who is all care, caution, and delicacy, to restore to the right owner whatever she receives with a perfect knowledge who the right owner is, Page 141 The second volume of the "Letters" of my reverenced Dr. Johnson was now lent me by her majesty; I found in them very frequent mention of our name, but nothing to alarm in the reading it. DEATH OF MRS. DELANY. April.-I have scarce a memorandum of this fatal month, in which I was bereft of the most revered of friends, and, perhaps, the most perfect of women.(273) I am yet scarce able to settle whether to glide silently and resignedly--as far as I can--past all this melancholy deprivation, or whether to go back once more to the ever-remembered, ever-sacred scene that closed the earthly pilgrimage of my venerable, my sainted friend. I believe I heard the last words she uttered : I cannot learn that she spoke after my reluctant departure. She finished with that cheerful resignation, that lively hope, which always broke forth when this last--awful--but, to her, most happy change seemed approaching. Poor Miss Port and myself were kneeling by her bedside. She had just given me her soft hand; without power to see either of us, she felt and knew us. O, never can I cease to cherish the remembrance of the sweet, benign, holy voice with which she pronounced a blessing upon us both! We kissed her--and, with a smile all beaming--I thought it so--of heaven, she seemed then to have taken leave of all earthly solicitudes. Yet then, even then, short as was her time on earth, the same soft human sensibility filled her for poor human objects. She would not bid us farewell--would not tell us she should speak with us no more-- she only said, as she turned gently away from us, "And now--I'll go to sleep!"--But, O, in what a voice she said it! I felt what the sleep would be; so did poor Miss Port. Poor, sweet, unfortunate girl! what deluges of tears did she shed over me! I promised her in that solemn moment my eternal regard, and she accepted this, my first protestation of any kind made to her, as some solace to her sufferings. Sacred shall I hold it!--sacred to my last hour. I believe, indeed, that angelic being had no other wish equally fervent. How full of days and full of honours was her exit! I should blush at the affliction of my heart in losing her, could I ever Page 142 believe excellence was given us here to love and to revere, yet gladly to relinquish. No, I cannot think it: the deprivation may be a chastisement, but not a joy. We may submit to it with patience; but we cannot have felt it with warmth where we lose it without pain, Outrageously to murmur, or sullenly to refuse consolation--there, indeed, we are rebels against the dispensations of providence--and rebels yet more weak than wicked; for what and whom is it we resist? what and who are we for such resistance ? She bid me--how often did she bid me not grieve to lose her! Yet she said, in my absence, she knew I must, and sweetly regretted how much I must miss her. I teach myself to think of her felicity; and I never dwell upon that without faithfully feeling I would not desire her return. But, in every other channel in which my thoughts and feelings turn, I miss her with so sad a void! She was all that I dearly loved that remained within my reach; she was become the bosom repository of all the livelong day's transactions, reflections, feelings, and wishes. Her own exalted mind was all expanded when we met. I do not think she concealed from me the most secret thought of her heart; and while every word that fell from her spoke wisdom, piety, and instruction, her manner had an endearment, her spirits a native gaiety, and her smile, to those she loved, a tenderness so animated. Blessed spirit! sweet, fair, and beneficent on earth!--O, gently mayest thou now be at rest in that last home to which fearfully I look forward, yet not hopeless; never that--and sometimes with fullest, fairest, sublimest expectations! If to her it be given to plead for those she left, I shall not be forgotten in her prayer. Rest to her sweet soul! rest and everlasting peace to her gentle spirit! I saw my poor lovely Miss Port twice in every day, when in town, till after the last holy rites had been performed. I had no peace away from her; I thought myself fulfilling a wish of that sweet departed saint, in consigning all the time I had at my own disposal to solacing and advising with her beloved niece, who received this little offering with a sweetness that once again twined her round my heart. . . . Poor Mrs. Astley, the worthy humble friend, rather than servant, of the most excellent departed, was the person whom, next to the niece, I most pitied. She was every way to be lamented: unfit for any other service, but unprovided for in this, by the utter and most regretted inability of her much Page 143 attached mistress, who frequently told me that leaving poor Astley unsettled hung heavy on her mind. My dearest friends know, the success I had in venturing to represent her worth and situation to my royal mistress. In the moment when she came to my room to announce his majesty's gracious intention to pension Mrs. Astley here as housekeeper to the same house, I really could scarce withhold myself from falling prostrate at her feet : I never felt such a burst of gratitude but where I had no ceremonials to repress it. Joseph, too, the faithful footman, I was most anxious to secure in some good service-- and I related my wishes for him to General Cary, who procured for him a place with his daughter, Lady Amherst. I forget if I have ever read you the sweet words that accompanied to me the kind legacies left me by my honoured friend. I believe not. They were ordered to be sent me with the portrait of Sacharissa, and two medallions of their majesties: they were originally written to accompany the legacy to the Bishop of Worcester, Dr. Hurd, as you may perceive by the style, but it was desired they might also be copied:-- "I take this liberty, that my much esteemed and respected friend may sometimes recollect a person who was so sensible of the honour of her friendship and who delighted so much in her conversation and works." Need I--O, I am sure I need not say with what tender, grateful, sorrowing joy I received these sweet pledges of her invaluable regard! To these, by another codicil, was added the choice of one of her mosaic flowers. And verbally, on the night but one before she died, she desired I might have her fine quarto edition of Shakespeare, sweetly saying she had never received so much pleasure from him in any other way as through my reading. THE HASTINGS TRIAL AND MR. WINDHAM AGAIN. The part of this month in which my Susanna was in town I kept no journal at all. And I have now nothing to add but to copy those memorandums I made of the trial on the day I went to Westminster Hall with my two friends,(274) previously to Page 144 the deep calamity on which I have dwelt. They told me they could not hear what Mr. Windham said; and there is a spirit in his discourse more worth their hearing than any other thing I have now to write. You may remember his coming straight from the managers, in their first procession to their box, and beginning at once a most animated attack--scarcely waiting first to say "How do!"--before he exclaimed "I have a great quarrel with you--I am come now purposely to quarrel with you--you have done me mischief irreparable--you have ruined me!" "Have I?" "Yes: and not only with what passed here, even setting that aside, though there was mischief enough here; but you have quite undone me since!" I begged him to let me understand how. "I will," he cried. "When the trial broke up for the recess I went into the country, purposing to give my whole time to study and business; but, most unfortunately, I had just sent for a new set of 'Evelina;' and intending only to look at it, I was so cruelly caught that I could not let it out of my hands, and have been living with nothing but the Branghtons ever since." I could not but laugh, though on this subject 'tis always awkwardly. "There was no parting with it," he continued. "I could not shake it off from me a moment!--see, then, every way, what mischief you have done me!" He ran on to this purpose much longer, with great rapidity, and then, suddenly, stopping, again said, "But I have yet another quarrel with you, and one you must answer. How comes it that the moment you have attached us to the hero and the heroine--the instant you have made us cling to them so that there is no getting disengaged--twined, twisted, twirled them round our very heart-strings--how is it that then you make them undergo such persecutions? There is really no enduring their distresses, their Suspenses, their perplexities. Why are you so cruel to all around--to them and their readers?" I longed to say--Do you object to a persecution?--but I know he spells it prosecution. I could make no answer: I never can. Talking over one's own writings seems to me always ludicrous, because it cannot be impartially, either by author or commentator; one feeling, Page 145 the other fearing, too much for strict truth and unaffected candour. When we found the subject quite hopeless as to discussion, he changed it, and said "I have lately seen some friends of yours, and I assure you I gave you an excellent character to them: I told them you were firm, fixed, and impenetrable to all conviction." An excellent character, indeed! He meant to Mr. Francis and Charlotte. Then he talked a little of the business of the day and he told me that Mr. Anstruther was to speak. "I was sure of it," I cried,, "by his manner when he entered the managers' box. I shall know when you are to speak, Mr. Windham, before I hear you.," He shrugged his shoulders a little uncomfortably. I asked him to name to me the various managers. He did ; adding, "Do you not like to sit here, where you can look down upon the several combatants before the battle?" When he named Mr. Michael Angelo Taylor, I particularly desired he might be pointed out to me, telling him I had long wished to see him, from the companion given to him in one of the "Probationary Odes," where they have coupled him with my dear father, most impertinently and unwarrantably. "That, indeed," he cried, "is a licentiousness in the press quite intolerable--to attack and involve private characters in their public lampoons! To Dr. Burney they could have no right; but Mr. Michael Angelo Taylor is fair game enough, and likes that or any other way whatever of obtaining notice. You know what Johnson said to Boswell of preserving fame?" "No." "There were but two ways," he told him, "of preserving; one was by sugar, the other by salt. 'Now,' says he, 'as the sweet way, Bozzy, you are but little likely to attain, I would have you plunge into vinegar, and get fairly pickled at once.' And such has been the plan of Mr. Michael Angelo Taylor. With the sweet he had, indeed, little chance, so he soused into the other, head over ears." We then united forces in repeating passages from various of the "Probationary Odes," and talking over various of the managers, till Mr. Anstruther was preparing to speak, and Mr. Windham went to his cell. I am sure you will remember that Mr. Burke came also, Page 146 and the panic with which I saw him, doubled by my fear lest he should see that panic. When the speech was over, and evidence was filling up the day's business, Mr. Windham returned. Some time after, but I have forgotten how, we were agreeing in thinking suspense, and all obscurity, in expectation or in opinion, almost the thing's most trying to bear in this mortal life, especially where they lead to some evil construction. "But then," cried he, "on the other hand, there is nothing so pleasant as clearing away a disagreeable prejudice; nothing SO exhilarating as the dispersion of a black mist, and seeing all that had been black and gloomy turn out bright and fair." "That, Sir," cried I, "is precisely what I expect from thence," pointing to the prisoner. What a look he gave me, yet he laughed irresistibly. "However," I continued, "I have been putting my expectations from your speech to a kind of test." "And how, for heaven's sake?" "Why, I have been reading--running over, rather--a set of speeches, in which almost the whole House made a part, upon the India bill ; and in looking over those I saw not one that had not in it something positively and pointedly personal, except Mr. Windham's." "O, that was a mere accident." "But it was just the accident I expected from Mr. Windham. I do not mean that there was invective in all the others, for in some there was panegyric--plenty! but that panegyric was always so directed as to convey more of severe censure to one party than of real praise to the other. Yours was all to the business, and hence I infer you will deal just so by Mr. Hastings." "I believe," cried he, looking at me very sharp, "you only want to praise me down. You know what it is to skate a man down?" "No, indeed." "Why, to skate a man down is a very favourite diversion among a certain race Of wags. It is only to praise, and extol, and stimulate him to double and treble exertion and effort, till, in order to show his desert of such panegyric, the poor dupe makes so many turnings and windings, and describes circle after circle with such hazardous dexterity, that, at last, down he drops in the midst of his flourishes, to his own eternal disgrace, and their entire content." page 147 I gave myself no vindication from this charge but a laugh; and we returned to discuss speeches and speakers, and I expressed again my extreme repugnance against all personality in these public harangues, except in simply stating facts. " What say you, then," cried he, " to Pitt?" He then repeated a warm and animated praise of his powers and his eloquence, but finished with this censure: "He takes not," cried he, "the grand path suited to his post as prime minister, for he is personal beyond all men ; pointed, sarcastic, cutting ; and it is in him peculiarly unbecoming. The minister should be always conciliating; the attack, the probe, the invective, belong to the assailant." Then he instanced Lord North, and said much more on these political matters and maxims than I can possibly write, or could at the time do more than hear; for, as I told him, I not only am no politician, but have no ambition to become one, thinking it by no means a female business. "THE QUEEN IS so KIND." When he went to the managers' box, Mr. Burke again took his place, but he held it a very short time, though he was in high good humour and civility. The involuntary coldness that results from internal disapprobation must, I am sure, have been seen, so thoroughly was it felt. I can only talk on this matter with Mr. Windham, who, knowing my opposite principles, expects to hear them, and gives them the fairest play by his good humour, candour, and politeness. But there is not one other manager with whom I could venture such openness. That Mr. Windham takes it all in good part is certainly amongst the things he makes plainest, for again, after Mr. Burke's return to the den, he came back. "I am happy," cried I, "to find you have not betrayed me." "Oh, no; I would not for the world." "I am quite satisfied you have kept my counsel; for Mr. Burke has been with me twice, and speaking with a good humour I could not else have expected from him. He comes to tell me that he never pities me for sitting here, whatever is going forward, as the sitting must be rest; and, indeed, it seems as if my coming hither was as much to rest my frame as to exercise my mind." Page 148 "That's a very good idea, but I do not like to realize it ; I do not like to think of you and fatigue together. Is it so? Do you really want rest?" "O, no." "O, I am well aware yours is not a mind to turn complainer but yet I fear, and not for your rest only, but your time. How is that; have you it, as you Ought, at your own disposal?" "Why not quite," cried I, laughing. Good heaven! what a question, in a situation like mine! "Well, that is a thing I cannot bear to think of--that you should want time." "But the queen," cried I, is so kind." "That may be," interrupted he, "and I am very glad of it but still, time--and to you!" "Yet, after all, in the whole, I have a good deal, though always Uncertain. for, if sometimes I have not two minutes when I expect two hours, at other times I have two hours where I expected only two minutes." "All that is nothing, if you have them not with certainty. Two hours are of no more value than two minutes, if you have them not at undoubted command." Again I answered, "The queen is so kind;" determined to sound that sentence well and audibly into republican ears. "Well, well," cried he, "that may be some compensation to you, but to us, to all others, what compensation is there for depriving you of time?" "Mrs. Locke, here," cried I, "always wishes time could be bought, because there are so many who have more than they know what to do with, that those who have less might be supplied very reasonably." "'Tis an exceeding good idea," cried he, "and I am sure, if it could be purchased, it ought to be given to YOU by act of parliament, as a public donation and tribute." There was a fine flourish! PERSONAL RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN WINDHAM AND HASTINGS. A little after, while we were observing Mr. Hastings, Mr. Windham exclaimed, "He's looking up; I believe he is looking for you." I turned hastily away, fairly saying, "I hope not." Page 149 "Yes, he is; he seems as if he wanted to bow to you." I shrank back. "No, he looks off; he thinks you in too bad company!" "Ah, Mr. Windham," cried I, "you should not be so hardhearted towards him, whoever else may; and I could tell you, and I will tell you if you please, a very forcible reason." He assented. "You must know, then, that people there are in this world who scruple not to assert that there is a very strong personal resemblance between Mr. Windham and Mr. Hastings; nay, in the profile, I see it myself at this moment and therefore ought not you to be a little softer than the rest, if merely in sympathy?" He laughed very heartily; and owned he had heard of the resemblance before. "I could take him extremely well," I cried, "for your uncle." "No, no; if he looks like my elder brother, I aspire at no more." "No, no; he is more like your uncle; he has just that air; he seems just of that time of life. Can You then be so unnatural as to prosecute him with this eagerness?" And then, once again, I ventured to give him a little touch of Molière's old woman, lest he should forget that good and honest dame; and I told him there was one thing she particularly objected to in all the speeches that had yet been made, and hoped his speech would be exempt from. He inquired what that was. "Why, she says she does not like to hear every orator compliment another; every fresh speaker say, he leaves to the superior ability of his successor the prosecution of the business." "O, no," cried he, very readily, "I detest all that sort of adulation. I hold it in the utmost contempt." "And, indeed, it will be time to avoid it when your turn comes, for I have heard it in no less than four speeches already." And then he offered his assistance about servants and carriages, and we all came away, our different routes; but my Fredy and Susan must remember my meeting with Mr. Hastings in coming out, and his calling after me, and saying, with a very comic sort of politeness, "I must come here to have the pleasure of seeing Miss Burney, for I see her nowhere else." What a strange incident would have been formed had this rencontre happened thus if I had accepted Mr. Windham's offered services ! I am most glad I had not ; I should have felt myself a conspirator, to have been so met by Mr. Hastings. Page 150 DEATH OF YOUNG LADY MULGRAVE. May.-On the 17th of this month Miss Port bade her sad reluctant adieu to London. I gave what time I could command from Miss Port's departure to my excellent and maternal Mrs. Ord, who supported herself with unabating fortitude and resignation. But a new calamity affected her much, and affected me greatly also, though neither she nor I were more than distant spectators in comparison with the nearer mourners; the amiable and lovely Lady Mulgrave gave a child to her lord, and died, in the first dawn of youthful beauty and sweetness, exactly a year after she became his wife. 'Twas, indeed, a tremendous blow. It was all our wonder that Lord Mulgrave kept his senses, as he had not been famed for patience or piety; but I believe he was benignly inspired with both, from his deep admiration of their excellence in his lovely wife. AGAIN AT WINDSOR. I must mention a laughable enough circumstance. Her majesty inquired of me if I had ever met with- Lady Hawke? "Oh yes," I cried, "and Lady Say and Sele too." " She has just desired permission to send me a novel of her own Writing," answered her majesty. "I hope," cried I, "'tis not the 'Mausoleum of Julia!'" But yes, it proved no less ! and this she has now published and sends about. You must remember Lady Say and Sele's quotation from it.(275) Her majesty was so gracious as to lend it me, for I had some curiosity to read it. It is all of a piece: all love, love, love, unmixed and unadulterated with any more worldly materials. I read also the second volume of the "Paston Letters," and found their character the same as in the first, and therefore read them with curiosity and entertainment. The greater part of the month was spent, alas! at Windsor, with what a dreary vacuity of heart and of pleasure I need not say. The only period of it in which my spirits could be commanded to revive was during two of the excursions in which Mr. Fairly was of the party; and the sight of him, calm, mild, nay cheerful, under such superior sorrows-- --struck me with that sort of edifying admiration that led me, perforce, to the best Page 151 exertion in my power for the conquest of my deep depression. If I did this from conscience in private, from a sense of obligation to him in public I reiterated my efforts, as I received from him all the condoling softness and attention he could possibly have bestowed upon me had my affliction been equal or even greater than his own. ANOTHER MEETING WITH MR. CRUTCHLEY. On one of the Egham race days the queen sent Miss Planta and me on the course, in one of the royal coaches, with Lord Templeton and Mr. Charles Fairly,(276) for our beaux. Lady Templeton was then at the Lodge, and I had the honour of two or three conferences with er during her stay. On the course, we were espied by Mr. Crutchley, who instantly devoted himself to my service for the morning--taking care of our places, naming jockeys, horses, bets, plates, etc., and talking between times of Streatham and all the Streathamites. We were both, I believe, very glad of this discourse. He pointed out to me where his house stood, in a fine park, within sight of the race-ground, and proposed introducing me to his sister, who was his housekeeper, and asking me if, through her invitation, I would come to Sunning Hill park. I assured him I lived so completely in a monastery that I could make no new acquaintance. He then said he expected soon Susan and Sophy Thrale on a visit to his sister, and he presumed I would not refuse coming to see them. I truly answered I should rejoice to do it if in my power, but that most probably I must content myself with meeting them on the Terrace. He promised to bring them there with his sister, though he had given up that walk these five years. It will give me indeed great pleasure to see them again. MR. TURBULENT'S TROUBLESOME PLEASANTRIES. My two young beaux Stayed dinner with us, and I afterwards strolled upon the lawn with them till tea-time. I could not go on the Terrace, nor persuade them to go on by themselves. We backed as the royal party returned home; and when they had all entered the house, Colonel Wellbred, who had stood aloof, quitted the train to join our little society. "Miss Page 152 Burney," he cried, "I think I know which horse you betted upon! Cordelia!" "For the name's sake you think it," I cried; and he began some questions and comments upon the races, when suddenly the window of the tea-room opened, and the voice of Mr. Turbulent, with a most sarcastic tone, called out, "I hope Miss Burney and Colonel Wellbred are well!" We could neither Of us keep a profound gravity, though really he deserved it from us both. I turned from the Colonel, and said I was coming directly to the tea-room. Colonel Wellbred would have detained me to finish Our race discourse, for he had shut the window when he had made his speech, but I said it was time to go in. "Oh no," cried he, laughing a little, "Mr. Turbulent only wants his own tea, and he does not deserve it for this!" In, however, I went, and Colonel Manners took the famous chair the instant I was seated. We all began race talk, but Mr. Turbulent, approaching very significantly, said, "Do you want a chair On the other side, ma'am? Shall I tell the colonel-to bring one?" "No, indeed cried I, half seriously, lest he should do it. . . . Colonel Wellbred, not knowing what had passed, came to that same other side, and renewed his conversation. In the midst of all this Mr. Turbulent hastily advanced with a chair, saying, "Colonel Wellbred, I cannot bear to see you standing so long." I found it impossible not to laugh under My hat, though I really wished to bid him stand in a corner for a naughty boy. The colonel, I suppose, laughed too, whether he would or not, for I heard no answer. However, he took the chair, and finding me wholly unembarrassed by this polissonnerie, though not wholly unprovoked by it, he renewed his discourse, and kept his seat till the party, very late, broke up; but Colonel Manners, who knew not what to make of all this, exclaimed, "Why, ma'am, you cannot keep Mr. Turbulent in much order." June.-Mrs. Schwellenberg came to Windsor with us after the birthday, for the rest of the summer. Mr. Turbulent took a formal leave of me at the same time, as his wife now came to settle at Windsor, and he ceased to belong to our party. He only comes to the princesses at stated hours, and then returns to his own home. He gave me many serious thanks for the time passed with me, spoke in flourishing Page 153 terms of its contrast to former times, and vowed no compensation could ever be made him for the hours he had thrown away by compulsion on "The Oyster."(277) His behaviour altogether was very well--here and there a little eccentric, but, in the main, merely good-humoured and high-spirited. COLONEL FAIRLY AND SECOND ATTACHMENTS. I am persuaded there is no manner of truth in the report relative to Mr. Fairly and Miss Fuzilier, for he led me into a long conversation with him one evening when the party was large, and all were otherwise engaged, upon subjects of this nature, in the course of which he asked me if I thought any second attachment could either be as strong or as happy as a first. I was extremely surprised by the question, and quite unprepared how to answer it, as I knew not with what feelings or intentions I might war by any unwary opinions. I did little, therefore, but evade and listen, though he kept up the discourse in a very animated manner, till the party all broke up. Had I spoken without any consideration but what was general and genuine, I should have told him that my idea was simply this, that where a first blessing was withdrawn by providence, not lost by misconduct, it seemed to me most consonant to reason, nature, and mortal life, to accept what could come second, in this as in all other deprivations. Is it not a species of submission to the divine will to make ourselves as happy as we can in what is left us to obtain, where bereft of what we had sought? My own conflict for content in a life totally adverse to my own inclinations, is all built on this principle, and when it succeeds, to this owes its success. I presumed not, however, to talk in this way to Mr. Fairly, for I am wholly ignorant in what manner or to what degree his first attachment may have rivetted his affections; but by the whole of what passed it seemed to me very evident that he was not merely entirely without any engagement, but entirely at this time without any plan or scheme of forming any; and probably he never may. (257) "Selections from the State Papers preserved in the Foreign Department of the Government of India, 1772-1785," Edited by G. W. Forrest, VOL i. P, 178. (258) "Warren Hastings," by Sir Alfred Lyall, p. 54. (259) Selections from State Papers," vol. i. p. xlviii. (260) In his defence at the bar of the House of Commons, (Feb. 4th, 1788) Sir Elijah Impey attempted to justify his conduct by precedent, but the single precedent on which he relied does not prove much in his favour. A Hindoo, named Radachund Metre, was condemned to death for forgery in 1765, but was pardoned on this very ground, that capital punishment for such a crime was unheard of in India. (261) Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill, Dec. 1st, 1783, (262) Fanny's brother, the scholar. He was, at this time, master of a school at Hammersmith-ED. (263) Windham had introduced and carried through the House of Commons the charge respecting Fyzoolla Khan, the Nawab of Rampore; but this charge, with many others of the original articles of impeachment, was not proceeded upon at the trial. Fyzoolla Khan was one of the Rohilla chiefs, who, more fortunate than the rest, had been permitted by treaty, after the conquest of Rohilcund in 17 74, to retain possession of Rampore as a vassal of the Vizier of Oude. By this treaty the Nawab of Rampore was empowered to maintain an army of 5,000 horse and foot in all and in return he bound himself to place from 2,000 to 3,000 troops at the disposal of the Vizier whenever that assistance might be required. In November, 1780, the Vizier, or rather, Hastings, speaking by the mouth of the Vizier, called upon Fyzoolla Khan to furnish forthwith a contingent of 5,000 horse. The unhappy Nawab offered all the assistance in his power, but not only Was the demand unwarranted by the terms of the treaty, but the number of horse required was far greater than he had the means to furnish. Thereupon Mr. Hastings gave permission to the Vizier to dispossess his vassal of his dominions. This iniquitous scheme, however, was never carried out, and in 1782, Fyzoolla Khan made his peace with the Governor-General, and procured his own future exemption from military service, by payment of a large sum of money.-ED. (264) Mr. Hastings's enemy was Mr. afterwards Sir Philip Francis, by some people supposed to have been the author of "Junius's Letters." The best friend of Mr. Hastings here alluded to was Clement Francis, Esq. of Aylsham, in Norfolk, who married Charlotte, fourth daughter of Dr. Burney. [Francis, though an active supporter of the impeachment, was not one of the "managers." He had been nominated to the committee by Burke, but rejected by the House, on the ground of his well-known animosity to Hastings.-ED.) (265) After all, Impey escaped impeachment. In December, 1787, Sir Gilbert Elliot, one of the managers of Hastings' impeachment, brought before the House of Commons six charges against Impey, of which the first, and most serious, related to the death of Nuncomar. The charges were referred to a committee, before which Impey made his defence, February 4, 1788. On May 9, a division was taken on the first charge, and showed a majority of eighteen in favour of Impey. The subject was resumed, May 27, and finally disposed of by the rejection of sir Gilbert Elliot's motion without a division-ED. (266) Saturday, February 16, 1788.-ED. (267) Macaulay attributes perhaps too exclusively to Court influence Fanny's prepossession in favour of Hastings. It should be remembered that her family and many of her friends were, equally with herself, partisans of Hastings, to whom, moreover, she had been first introduced by a much valued friend, Mr. Cambridge (see ante, vol. i., P. 326).-ED. (268) "Miss Fuzilier" is the name given in the "Diary" to Miss Charlotte Margaret Gunning, daughter of Sir Robert Gunning. She married Colonel Digby ("Mr. Fairly") in 1790.-ED. (269) This would seem to fix the date as Thursday, February 21, Thursday being mentioned by Fanny as the Court-day (see ante, p. 125). According, however, to Debrett's "History of the Trial," Fox spoke on the charge relating to Cheyt Sing on Friday, February 22, the first day of the Court's sitting since the preceding Tuesday.-ED. ' (270) The managers had desired that each charge should be taken separately, and replied to, before proceeding to the next. Hastings's counsel, on the other hand, demanded that all the charges should be presented before the defence was opened. The Lords, by a large majority, decided against the managers.-ED. (271) Windham relates that when he called upon Dr. Johnson, six days before his death, Johnson put into his hands a copy of the New Testament, saying "Extremum hoc mumus morientis habeto." See the extracts from Windham's journal in Croker's "Boswell," v., 326. In a codicil to Johnson's will, dated Dec. 9, 1784, we find, among other bequests of books, "to Mr. Windham, Poete Greci Henrici per Henriculum Stephanum."-ED. (272) i.e. to the benches assigned to the Commons in Westminster Hall. These immediately adjoined the chamberlain's box in which Miss Burney was seated.-ED. (273) Mrs. Delany died on the 15th of April, 1788.-ED. (274) Her sister Susan and Mrs. Locke. The day referred to must have been Friday, April 11th, on which day Mr. Anstruther spoke on the charge relating to Cheyt Sing.-ED. (275) See ante, vol. 1, p. 220.-ED. (276) The young son of Colonel Digby.-ED. (277) Mrs. Haggerdorn, Fanny's predecessor in office. See ante, p. 26.-ED. Page 154 SECTION 13 (1788.) ROYAL VISIT TO CHELTENHAM. (Since her establishment at Court we have not yet found Fanny so content with her surroundings as she shows herself in the following section of the " Diary." The comparative quiet of country life at Cheltenham was far more to her taste than the tiresome splendours of Windsor and St. James's. She had still, it is true, her official duties to perform : it was Court life still, but Court life en déshabille. But her time was otherwise more at her own disposal, and, above all things, the absence of "Cerbera," as she nicknamed the amiable Mrs. Schwellenberg and the presence of Colonel Digby, contributed to restore to her harassed mind that tranquillity which is so pleasantly apparent in the following pages. In the frequent society of Colonel Digby Fanny seems to have found an enjoyment peculiarly adapted to her reserved and sensitive disposition. The colonel was almost equally retiring and sensitive with herself, and his natural seriousness was deepened by sorrow for the recent loss of his wife. A similarity of tastes, as well as (in some respects) of disposition, drew him continually to Fanny's tea-table, and the gentleness of his manners, the refined and intellectual character of his conversation, so unlike the Court gossip to which she was usually condemned to remain a patient listener, caused her more and more to welcome his visits and to regret his departure. "How unexpected an indulgence," she writes, "a luxury, I may say, to me, are these evenings now becoming!" The colonel reads to her- -poetry, love-letters, even sermons, and while she listens to such reading, and such a reader, her work goes on with an alacrity that renders it all pleasure. The friendship which grew up between them was evidently, at least on the part of Fanny, of a more than ordinarily tender description. Whether, had circumstances permitted, it might have ripened into a feeling yet more tender, must remain a matter of speculation. Circumstances did not permit, and in after years both married elsewhere.-ED.] Page 155 THE ROYAL PARTY AND THEIR SUITE. July.-Early in this month the king's indisposition occasioned the plan of his going to Cheltenham, to try the effect of the waters drank upon the spot. It was settled that the party should be the smallest that was possible, as his majesty was to inhabit the house of Lord Fauconberg, vacated for that purpose, which was very small. He resolved upon only taking his equerry in waiting and pages, etc. Lord Courtown, his treasurer of the household, was already at Cheltenham, and therefore at hand to attend. The queen agreed to carry her lady of the bedchamber in waiting, with Miss Planta and F. B., and none others but wardrobe-women for herself and the princesses. Mr. Fairly was here almost all the month previously to our departure. At first it was concluded he and Colonel Gwynn, the equerry in waiting, were to belong wholly to the same table with Miss Planta and me, and Mr. Fairly threatened repeatedly how well we should all know one another, and how well he would study and know us all au fond. But before we set out the plan was all changed, for the king determined to throw aside all state, and make the two gentlemen dine at his own table. "We shall have, therefore," said Mr. Fairly, with a very civil regret, "no tea-meetings at Cheltenham." This, however, was an opening- to me of time and leisure such as I had never yet enjoyed. Now, my dearest friends, I open an account which promises at least all the charms of novelty, and which, if it fulfils its promise, will make this month rather an episode than a continuation of my prosaic performance. So now for yesterday, Saturday, July 12. We were all up at five o'clock; and the noise and confusion reigning through the house, and resounding all around it, from the quantities of people stirring, boxes nailing, horses neighing, and dogs barking, was tremendous. I must now tell you the party:--Their majesties; the princesses Royal, Augusta, and Elizabeth; Lady Weymouth, Mr. Fairly, Colonel Gwynn, Miss Planta, and a person you have sometimes met; pages for king, queen, and princesses, ward- Page 156 robe-women for ditto, and footmen for all. A smaller party for a royal excursion cannot well be imagined. How we shall all manage heaven knows. Miss Planta and myself are allowed no maid; the house would not hold one. The royal party set off first, to stop and breakfast at Lord Harcourt's at Nuneham. You will easily believe Miss Planta and myself were not much discomfited in having orders to proceed straight forward. You know we have been at Nuneham! Mrs. Sandys, the queen's wardrobe-woman, and Miss Macentomb, the princesses', accompanied us. At Henley-on-Thames, at an inn beautifully situated, we stopped to breakfast, and at Oxford to take a sort of half dinner. LOYALTY NOT DAMPED BY THE RAIN. The crowd gathered together upon the road, waiting for the king and queen to pass, was immense, and almost unbroken from Oxford to Cheltenham. Every town and village within twenty miles seemed to have been deserted, to supply all the pathways with groups of anxious spectators. Yet, though so numerus, so quiet were they, and so new to the practices of a hackneyed mob, that their curiosity never induced them to venture within some yards of the royal carriage, and their satisfaction never broke forth into tumult and acclamation. In truth, I believe they never were aware of the moment in which their eagerness met its gratification. Their majesties travelled wholly without guards or state; and I am convinced, from the time we advanced beyond Oxford, they were taken only for their own attendants. All the towns through which we passed were filled with people, as closely fastened one to another as they appear in the pit of the playhouse. Every town seemed all face; and all the way upon the road we rarely proceeded five miles without encountering a band of most horrid fiddlers, scraping "God save the king" with all their might, out of tune, out of time, and all in the rain; for, most unfortunately, there were continual showers falling all the day. This was really a subject for serious regret, such numbers of men, women, and children being severely sufferers; yet standing it all through with such patient loyalty, that I am persuaded not even a hail or thunder storm would have dispersed them. The country, for the most part, that we traversed, was ex- Page 157 tremely pretty; and, as we advanced nearer to our place Of destination, it became quite beautiful. ARRIVAL AT FAUCONBERG HALL. When we arrived at Cheltenham, which is almost all one street, extremely long, clean and well paved, we had to turn out of the public way about a quarter of a mile, to proceed to Fauconberg Hall, which my Lord Fauconberg has lent for the king's use during his stay at this place. it is, indeed, situated on a most sweet spot, surrounded with lofty hills beautifully variegated, and bounded, for the principal object, with the hills of Malvern, Which, here barren, and there cultivated, here all chalk, and there all verdure, reminded me of How hill, and gave Me an immediate sensation of reflected as well as of visual pleasure, from giving to my new habitation some resemblance of NorbUry park. When we had mounted the gradual ascent on which the house stands, the crowd all around it was as one head! We stopped within twenty yards of the door, uncertain how to proceed. All the royals were at the windows; and to pass this multitude--to wade through it, rather,--was a most disagreeable operation. However, we had no choice: we therefore got out, and, leaving the wardrobe-women to find the way to the back-door, Miss Planta and I glided on to the front one, where we saw the two gentlemen and where, as soon as we got up the steps, we encountered the king. He inquired most graciously concerning our journey; and Lady Weymouth came down-stairs to summon me to the queen, who was in excellent spirits, and said she would show me her room. "This, ma'am!" cried I, as I entered it--"is this little room for your majesty?" "O stay," cried she, laughing, "till you see your own before you call it 'little'." Soon after, she sent me upstairs for that purpose ; and then, to be sure, I began to think less diminutively of that I had just quitted. Mine, with one window, has just space to crowd in a bed, a chest of drawers, and three small chairs. The prospect from the window, is extremely pretty, and all IS new and clean. So I doubt not being very comfortable, as I am senza Cerbera,(278)--though having no maid is a real evil to Page 158 one so little her own mistress as myself. I little wanted the fagging of my own clothes and dressing, to add to my daily fatigues. I began a little unpacking and was called to dinner. Columb, happily, is allowed me, and he will be very useful, I am sure. Miss alone dined with me, and we are to be companions constant at all meals, and t`ete-`a-t`ete, during this sejour. She is friendly and well disposed, and I am perfectly content; and the more, as I know she will not take up my leisure Unnecessarily, for she finds sauntering in the open air very serviceable to her health, and she has determined to make that her chief occupation. Here, therefore, whenever I am not in attendance, or at meals, I expect the singular comfort of having my time wholly unmolested, and at my own disposal. THE TEA-TABLE DIFFICULTY. A little parlour, which formerly had belonged to Lord Fauconberg's housekeeper, is now called mine, and here Miss Planta and myself are to breakfast and dine. But for tea we formed a new plan: as Mr. Fairly had himself told me he understood there would be no tea-table at Cheltenham, I determined to stand upon no ceremony with Colonel Gwynn, but fairly and at once take and appropriate my afternoons to my own inclinations. To prevent, therefore, any surprise or alteration, we settled to have our tea upstairs. But then a difficulty arose as to where ? We had each equally small bed-rooms, and no dressing-room; but, at length, we fixed on the passage, near a window looking over Malvern hills and much beautiful country. This being arranged, we went mutually on with our unpackings, till we were both too thirsty to work longer. Having no maid to send, and no bell to ring for my man, I then made out my way downstairs, to give Columb directions for our teaequipage. After two or three mistakes, of peering into royal rooms, I at length got safe to my little parlour, but still was at a loss where to find Columb; and while parading in and out, in hopes of meeting with some assistant, I heard my name inquired for from the front door. I looked out, and saw Mrs. Tracy, senior bedchamber-woman to the queen. She is at Cheltenham for her health, and came to pay her duty in inquiries, and so forth. Page 159 I conducted her to my little store-room, for such it looks, from its cupboards and short checked window curtains; and we chatted upon the place and the expedition, till Columb came to tell me that Mr. Fairly desired to speak with me. I waited upon him immediately, in the passage leading to the kitchen stairs, for that was my salle d'audience. He was with Lord Courtown; they apologised for disturbing me, but Mr. Fairly said he came to solicit leave that they might join my tea-table for this night only, as they would give orders to be supplied in their own apartments the next day, and not intrude upon me any more, nor break into my time and retirement. This is literally the first instance I have met, for now two whole years, of being understood as to my own retiring inclinations; and it is singular I should first meet with it from the only person who makes them waver. I begged them to come in, and ordered tea. They are well acquainted with Mrs. Tracy, and I was very glad she happened to stay. Poor Miss Planta, meanwhile, I was forced to leave in the lurch; for I could not propose the bed-room passage to my present company, and she was undressed and unpacking. Very soon the king, searching for his gentlemen, found out my room, and entered. He admired It prodigiously, and inquired concerning all our accommodations. He then gave Mr. Fairly a commission to answer an address, or petition, or some such thing to the master of the ceremonies, and, after half an hour's chat, retired. Colonel Gwynn found us out also, but was eager to find out more company, and soon left us to go and look over the books at the rooms, for the list of the company here. A TETE-A-TETE WITH COLONEL FAIRLY. After tea Mrs. Tracy went, and the king sent for Lord Courtown. Mr. Fairly was going too, and I was preparing to return upstairs to my toils; but he presently changed his design, and asked leave to stay a little longer, if I was at leisure. At leisure I certainly was not but I was most content to work double tides for the pleasure of his company, especially where given thus voluntarily, and not accepted officially. Page 160 What creatures are we all for liberty and freedom! Rebels partout! "Soon as the life-blood warms the heart, The love of liberty awakes!" Ah, my dear friends! I wrote that with a sigh that might have pierced through royal walls! >From this circumstance we entered into discourse with no little spirit. I felt flattered, and he knew he had given me de quoi: so we were both in mighty good humour. Our sociability, however, had very soon an interruption. The king re-entered ; he started back at sight of our diminished party, and exclaimed, with a sort of arch surprise, "What! only You two?" Mr. Fairly laughed a little, and Ismiled ditto! But I had rather his majesty had made such a comment on any other of his establishment, if make it he must; since I am sure Mr. Fairly's aversion to that species of raillery is equal to my Own. The king gave some fresh orders about the letter, and instantly went away. As soon as he was gone, Mr. Fairly,--perhaps to show himself superior to that little sally,--asked me whether he might write his letter in my room? "O yes," cried I, with all the alacrity of the same superiority. He then went in search of a page, for pen and ink, and told me, on returning, that the king had just given orders for writing implements for himself and Colonel Gwynn to be placed in the dining-parlour, of which they were, henceforth, to have the use as soon as the dinner-party had separated; and after to-night, therefore, he should intrude himself upon me no more. I had half a mind to say I was very sorry for it! I assure you I felt so. He pretended to require my assistance in his letter, and consulted and read over all that he writ. So I gave my opinion as he went on, though I think it really possible he might have done without me! Away then he went with it, to dispatch it by a royal footman; and I thought him gone, and was again going myself, when he returned,--surprising me not a little by saying. as he held the door in his hand, "Will there be any--impropriety--in my staying here a little logger?" I must have said no, if I had thought yes; but it would not have been so plump and ready a no! and I should not, with Page 161 quite so courteous a grace, have added that his stay could do me nothing but honour. On, therefore, we sat, discoursing on various subjects, till the twilight made him rise to take leave. He was in much better spirits than I have yet seen him, and I know not when I have spent an hour more socially to my taste. Highly cultivated by books, and uncommonly fertile in stores of internal resource, he left me nothing to wish, for the time I spent with him, but that "the Fates, the Sisters Three, and suchlike branches of learning," would interfere against the mode of future separation planned for the remainder of our expedition. Need I more strongly than this mark the very rare pleasure I received from his conversation? Not a little did poor Miss Planta marvel what had become of me; and scarce less was her marvel when she had heard my adventures. She had told me how gladly the gentlemen would seize the opportunity of a new situation, to disengage themselves from the joint tea-table, and we had mutually agreed to use all means possible for seconding this partition; but I had been too well satisfied this night, to make any further efforts about the matter, and I therefore inwardly resolved to let the future take care of itself--certain it could not be inimical to me, since either it must give me Mr. Fairly in a party, or time for my own disposal in solitude. This pleasant beginning has given a spirit to all my expectations and my fatigues in this place; and though it cost me near two hours from my downy pillow to recover lost time, I stole them without repining, and arose--dead asleep--this morning, without a murmur. THE KING's GENTLEMEN AND THE QUEEN's LADIES. Sunday, July 13--I was obliged to rise before six o'clock, that I might play the part of dresser to myself, before I played it to the queen; so that did not much recruit the fatigues of yesterday's rising and journey! Not a little was I surprised to be told, this morning, by her majesty, that the gentlemen were to breakfast with Miss Planta and me, every morning, by the king's orders. When I left the queen, I found them already in my little parlour. Mr. Fairly came to the door to meet me, and hand me into the room, telling me of the new arrangement of the king, with an air of very civil satisfaction. Colonel Gwynn Page 162 appeared precisely as I believe he felt,-perfectly indifferent to the matter. Miss Planta joined us, and Columb was hurried to get ready, lest the king should summon his esquires before they had broken their fast. Mr. Fairly undertook to settle our seats, and all the etiquette of the tea-table; and I was very well content, for when he had placed me where he conceived I should be most commodiously situated, he fixed upon the place next me for himself, and desired we might all keep to our posts. It was next agreed, that whoever came first to the room should order and make the tea; for I must often be detained by my waiting, and the king is so rapid in his meals, that whoever attends him must be rapid also, or follow fasting. Mr. Fairly said he should already have hastened Columb, had he not apprehended it might be too great a liberty ; for they had waited near half an hour, and expected a call every half minute. I set him perfectly at his ease upon this subject, assuring him I should be very little at mine if he had ever the same scruple again. He had been in waiting, he said, himself, ever since a quarter after five o'clock in the morning, at which time he showed himself under the king's window, and walked before the house till six! I was beginning to express my compassion for this harass, but he interrupted me with shrewdly saying, " "O, this will save future fatigue, for it will establish me such a character for early rising and punctuality, that I may now do as I will: 'tis amazing what privileges a man obtains for taking liberties, when once his character is established for taking none." Neither Miss Planta nor myself could attempt going to church, we had both so much actual business to do for ourselves, in unpacking, and fitting up our rooms, etc. The rest of the day was all fasting, till the evening, and then--who should enter my little parlour, after all the speechifying Of only one night," made yesterday, but Mr. Fairly, Colonel Gwynn, and Lord Courtown! Whether this, again, is by the king's command, or in consequence of the morning arrangement, I know not: but not a word more has dropped of "no evening tea-table;" so, whether we are to unite, or to separate, in future, I know not, and, which is far more extraordinary, I care not! Nobody but you could imagine what a compliment that is, from me! I had made Miss Planta promise, in case such a thing should happen, to come down; and she was very ready, and Page 163 we had a very cheerful evening. Great difficulties, however, arose about our tea-equipage, So few things are brought, or at least are yet arrived, that Columb is forced to be summoned every other moment, and I have no bell, and dare not, for this short time, beg for one, as my man herds with the King's men; besides, I have no disposition to make a fuss here, where every body takes up with every thing that they get. In lamenting, however, the incessant trouble I was obliged to give the gentlemen, of running after Columb, I told Mr. Fairly my obligation, at Windsor, to Colonel Wellbred, for my bell there. "O yes," cried he, laughing, "I am not surprised; Colonel Wellbred is quite the man for a 'belle!'" "Yes," cried I, "that he is indeed, and for a 'beau' too." "O ho! you think him so, do you?" quoth he: to which my prompt assent followed. ROYALTY CROWDED AT FAUCONBERG HALL. The royal family had all been upon the walks. I have agreed with myself not to go thither till they have gone through the news- mongers' drawing up of them and their troop. I had rather avoid all mention and after a few days, I may walk there as if not belonging to them, as I am not of place or rank to follow in their train. But let me give you, now, an account of the house and accommodation. On the ground-floor there is one large and very pleasant room, which is made the dining-parlour. The king and royal family also breakfast in it, by themselves, except the lady-in-waiting, Lady Weymouth. They sup there also, in the same manner. The gentlemen only dine with them, I find. They are to breakfast with us, to drink tea where they will, and to sup--where they can; and I rather fancy, from what I have yet seen, it will be commonly with good Duke Humphrey. A small, but very neat dressing-room for his majesty is on the other side of the hall, and my little parlour is the third and only other room on the ground-floor: so you will not think our monarch, his consort and offspring, take up too much of the land called their own ! Over this eating- parlour, on the first floor, is the queen's drawing-room, in which she is also obliged to dress and to un- Page 164 dress for she has no toilette apartment! Who, after that, can repine at any inconvenience here for the household? Here, after breakfast, she sits, with her daughters and her lady and Lady Courtown, who, with her lord, is lodged in the town of Cheltenham. And here they drink tea, and live till suppertime. Over the king's dressing-room is his bed-room, and over my store-room is the bed-room of the princess-royal. And here ends the first floor. The second is divided and sub-divided into bed-rooms, which are thus occupied:--Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth sleep in two beds, in the largest room. Lady Weymouth occupies that next in size. Miss Planta and myself have two little rooms, built over the king's bed-room and Mrs. Sandys and Miss Macentomb, and Lady Weymouth's maid, have the rest. This is the whole house! Not a man but the king sleeps In it. A house is taken in the town for Mr. Fairly and Colonel Gwynn, and there lodge several of the servants, and among them Columb. The pages sleep in outhouses. Even the house-maids lodge in the town, a quarter of a mile or more from the house! Lord Courtown, as comptroller of the household, acts here for the king, in distributing his royal bounty to the Wells, rooms, library, and elsewhere. He has sent around very magnificently. We are surrounded by pleasant meadows, in which I mean to walk a great deal. They are so quiet and so safe, I can go quite alone; and when I have not a first-rate companion, my second best is- -none at all! But I expect, very soon, my poor Miss Port, and I shall have her with me almost constantly. AT THE WELLS. Monday, July 14-This morning I was again up at five o'clock, Miss Planta having asked me to accompany her to the wells. The queen herself went this morning, at six o'clock, with his majesty. It is distant about a quarter of a mile from Lord Fauconberg's. I tasted the water, for once; I shall spare myself any such future regale, for it is not prescribed to me, and I think it very unpleasant. This place and air seem very healthy; but the very early Page 165 hours, and no maid! I almost doubt how this will do. The fatigue is very great indeed. We were too soon for the company, except the royals. We met them all, and were spoken to most graciously by every one. We all came back to breakfast much at the same time, and it was very cheerful. I spent all the rest of the day in hard fagging, at work and business, and attendance; but the evening amply recompensed it all. Lord Courtown, Mr. Fairly, Colonel Gwynn, and Miss Planta, came to tea. My Lord and Colonel Gwynn retired after it, to go to the rooms; Mr. Fairly said he Would wait to make his bow to his majesty, and see if there were any commands for him. CONVERSATION AND FLIRTATION WITH COLONEL FAIRLY. And then we had another very long conversation, and if I did not write in so much haste, my dear friends would like to read it. Our subject to-night--his subject, rather--was, the necessity of participation, to every species of happiness. "His" subject, you may easily believe; for to him should I never have dared touch on one so near and so tender to him. Fredy, however, could join With him more feelingly--though he kept perfectly clear of all that was personal, to which I Would not have led for a thousand worlds. He seems born with the tenderest social affections; and, though religiously resigned to his loss--which, I have been told, the hopeless sufferings of Lady - rendered, at last, even a release to be desired--he thinks life itself, single and unshared, a mere melancholy burthen, and the wish to have done with it appears the only wish he indulges. I could not perceive this without the deepest commiseration, but I did what was possible to conceal it; as it is much more easy, both to the hearer and the speaker, to lead the discourse to matters more lively, under an appearance of being ignorant of the state of a sad heart, than with a betrayed consciousness. We talked of books, and not a little I astonished him by the discovery I was fain to make, of the number of authors I have never yet read. Particularly he instanced Akenside, and quoted from him some passages I have heard selected by Mr, Locke. Page 166 Then we talked of the country, of landscapes, of walking, and then, again, came back the favourite proposition,--participation! That, he said, could make an interest in anything,--everything; and O, how did I agree with him! There is sympathy enough, heaven knows, in our opinions on this subject But not in what followed. I am neither good nor yet miserable enough to join with him in what he added, -that life, taken all in all, was of so little worth and value, it could afford its thinking possessor but one steady wish,--that its duration might be short! Alas! thought I, that a man so good should be so unhappy! We then came back again to books, and he asked us if we had read a little poem called the "Shipwreck"?(279) Neither of us had even heard of it. He said it was somewhat too long, and somewhat too technical, but that it contained many beautiful passages. He had it with him, he said, and proposed sending Columb for it, to his house, if we should like to read it. We thanked him, and off marched Columb. It is in a very small duodecimo volume, and he said he would leave it with me. Soon after, Miss Planta said she would stroll round the house for a little exercise. When she was gone, he took up the book, and said, "Shall I read some passages to you? I most gladly assented, and got my work,--of which I have no small store, believe me!-- morning caps, robins, etc., all to prepare from day to day; which, with my three constant and long attendances, and other official company ceremonies, is no small matter. The passages he selected were really beautiful: they were chiefly from an episode, of Palemon and Anna, excessively delicate, yet tender in the extreme, and most touchingly melancholy. One line he came to, that he read with an emotion extremely affecting-- 'tis a sweet line-- "He felt the chastity of silent woe." He stopped upon it, and sighed so deeply that his sadness quite infected me. Then he read various characters of the ship's company, Page 167 which are given with much energy and discrimination. I could not but admire every passage he chose, and I was sensible each of them owed much obligation to his reading, which was full of feeling and effect. How unwillingly did I interrupt him, to go upstairs and wait my night's summons! But the queen has no bell for me, except to my bed-room. He hastily took the hint, and rose to go. "Shall I leave the poem," he cried, "or take it with me, in case there should be any leisure to go on with it to-morrow?" "Which you please," cried I, a little stupidly, for I did not, at the moment, comprehend his meaning which, however, he immediately explained by answering, "Let me take it, then;--let me make a little interest in it to myself, by reading it with you." And then he put it in his pocket, and went to his home in the town, and up stairs went I to my little cell, not a little internally simpering to see a trait so like what so often I have done myself,--carrying off a favourite book, when I have begun it with my Susanna, that we might finish it together, without leaving her the temptation to peep beforehand, MISS BURNEY MEETS AN OLD FRIEND. Tuesday, July 15--While the royals were upon the walks, Miss Planta and I strolled in the meadows, and who should I meet there--but Mr. Seward! This was a great pleasure to me. I had never seen him since the first day of my coming to St. jades's, when he handed me into my father's coach, in my sacque and long ruffles. You may think how much we had to talk over. He had a gentleman with him, fortunately, who was acquainted with Miss Planta's brother, so that we formed two parties, without difficulty. All my aim was to inquire about Mrs. Piozzi,--I must, at last, call her by her now real name!--and of her we conversed incessantly. He told me Mr. Baretti's late attack upon her, which I heard with great concern.(280) It seems he has broken off all intercourse with her, and Page 168 not from his own desire, but by her evident wish to drop him. This is very surprising ; but many others of her former friends, once highest in her favour, make the same complaint. We strolled so long, talking over this ever- interesting subject, that the royals were returned before us, and we found Mr. Fairly waiting in my parlour. The rest soon joined. Mr. Seward had expected to be invited; but it is impossible for me to invite any body while at Cheltenham, as there is neither exit nor entrance but by passing the king's rooms, and as I have no place but this little common parlour in which I can sit, except my own room. Neither could I see Mr. Seward anywhere else, as my dear friends will easily imagine, when they recollect all that has passed, on the subject of my visitors, with her majesty and with Mr. Smelt. He told me he had strolled in those meadows every day, to watch if I were of the party. COLONEL FAIRLY AGAIN. Mr. Fairly again out-stayed them all. Lord Courtown generally is summoned to the royal party after tea, and Colonel Gwynn goes to the town in quest of acquaintance and amusement. Mr. Fairly has not spirit for such researches ; I question, indeed, if he ever had taste for them. When Miss Planta, went off for her exercise, he again proposed a little reading, which again I thankfully accepted. He took out the little poem, and read on the mournful tale of Anna, with a sensibility that gave pathos to every word. How unexpected an indulgence--a luxury, I may say, to me, are these evenings now becoming! While I listen to such reading and such a reader, all my work goes on with an alacrity that renders it all pleasure to me. I have had no regale like this for many and many a grievous long evening ! never since I left Norbury park,-never since my dear Fredy there read Madame de S6vign6. And how little could I expect, in a royal residence, a relief of this sort! Indeed, I much question if there is one other person, in the whole establishment, that, in an equal degree, could afford it. Miss Planta, though extremely friendly, is almost wholly absorbed in the cares of her royal duties, and the solicitude Page 169 of her ill-health : she takes little interest in anything else, whether for conversation or action. We do together perfectly well, for she is good, and sensible, and prudent, and ready for any kind office: but the powers of giving pleasure are not widely bestowed: we have no right to repine that they are wanting where the character that misses them has intrinsic worth but, also, we have no remedy against weariness, where that worth is united with nothing attractive. I was forced again, before ten o'clock, to interrupt his interesting narrative, that I might go to my room. He now said he would leave me the book to look over and finish at my leisure, upon one condition, which he begged me to observe: this was, that I would read with a pen or pencil In my hand, and mark the passages that pleased me most as I went on. I readily promised this. He then gave it me, but desired I would keep it to myself, frankly acknowledging that he did not wish to have it seen by any other, at least not as belonging to him. There was nothing, he said of which he had less ambition than a character for bookism and pedantry, and he knew if it was spread that he was guilty of carrying a book from one house to another, it would be a circumstance sufficient for branding him with these epithets. I could not possibly help laughing a little at this caution, but again gave him my ready promise. A VISIT TO MISS PALMER. Wednesday, July 16.-This morning we had the usual breakfast, and just as it was over I received a note from Miss Palmer, saying she was uncertain whether or not I was at Cheltenham, by not meeting me on the walks or at the play, but wrote to mention that she was with Lady D'Oyley, and hoped, if I was one of the royal suite, my friends might have some chance to see me here, though wholly denied it in town. I sent for answer that I would call upon her; and as no objection was made by her majesty, I went to Sir John D'Oyley's as soon as the royal party rode out. I found Miss Palmer quite thoroughly enraged. We had never met since I left the paternal home, though I am always much indebted to her warm zeal. Sir John and Lady D'Oyley are a mighty gentle pair. Miss Palmer could make them no better present than a little of her vivacity. Miss Elizabeth Page 170 Johnson, her cousin, is of their party : She is pretty, soft, and pleasing; but, unhappily, as deaf as her uncle, Sir Joshua which, in a young female, is a real misfortune. To quiet Miss Palmer as much as I was able, I agreed tonight that I would join her on the walks. Accordingly, at the usual time I set out with Miss Planta, whom I was to introduce to the D'Oyleys. Just as we set out we perceived the king and his three gentlemen, for Lord Courtown is a constant attendant every evening. We were backing on as well as we Could, but his majesty perceived us, and called to ask whither we were going. We met Mr. Seward, who joined us. There is nothing to describe in the walks : they are straight, clay, and sided by common trees, without any rich foliage, or one beautiful opening. The meadows, and all the country around, are far preferable: yet here everybody meets. All the D'Oyley party came, and Miss Planta slipped away. The king and queen walked in the same state as on the Terrace at Windsor, followed by the three princesses and their attendants. Everybody stopped and stood up as they passed, or as they stopped themselves to speak to any of the company. In one of these stoppings, Lord Courtown backed a little from the suite to talk with us, and he said he saw what benefit I reaped from the waters! I told him I Supposed I might be the better for the excursion, according to the definition of a water-drinking person by Mr. Walpole, who says people go to those places well, and then return cured! Mr. Fairly afterwards also joined us a little while, and Miss Palmer said she longed to know him more, there was something so fine in his countenance. They invited me much to go home with them to tea, but I was engaged. We left the walks soon after the royal family, and they carried me near the house in Sir John D'Oyley's coach. I walked, however, quietly in by myself; and in my little parlour I found Mr. Fairly. The others were gone off to the play without tea, and the moment it was over Miss Planta hurried to her own stroll. "ORIGINAL LOVE LETTERS." This whole evening I spent t`ete-`a-t`ete with Mr. Fairly. There is something singular in the perfect trust he seems to have in my discretion, for he speaks to me when we are alone with a frankness unequalled and something very flattering in the Page 171 apparent relief he seems to find in dedicating what time he has to dispose of to my little parlour. In the long conference of this evening I found him gifted with the justest way of thinking and the most classical taste. I speak that word only as I may presume 'to judge it by English literature. "I have another little book," he said, "here, which I am sure you would like, but it has a title so very silly that nobody reads or names it: 'Original Love-Letters;(281)--from which you might expect mere nonsense and romance, though, on the contrary, you would find in them nothing but good sense, moral reflections, and refined ideas, clothed in the most expressive and elegant language." How I longed to read a book that had such a character!--yet, laughable and prudish as it may seem to you, I could not bring myself to accept the half-offer, or make any other reply than to exclaim against the injudiciousness of the title-page. Yet, whatever were our subjects, books, life, or persons, all concluded with the same melancholy burthen--speed to his existence here, and welcome to that he is awaiting! I fear he has been unfortunate from his first setting out.' THE FOUNDER OF SUNDAY SCHOOLS CRITICIZED. July 19.--The breakfast missed its best regale Mr. Fairly was ill, and confined to his room all day. The royal party went to Lord Bathurst's, at Cirencester, and the queen commanded Miss Planta and me to take an airing to Gloucester, and amuse ourselves as well as we could. Miss Planta had a previous slight acquaintance with Mr. Raikes and to his house, therefore, we drove. Mr. Raikes(282) was the original founder of the Sunday-school, an institution so admirable, so fraught, I hope, with future good and mercy to generations yet unborn, that I saw almost with reverence the man who had first suggested it. He lives at Page 172 Gloucester with his wife and a large family. They all received us with open arms. I was quite amazed, but soon found some of the pages had been with them already, and announced our design; and as we followed the pages, perhaps they concluded we also were messengers, or avant-courieres, of what else might be expected. Mr. Raikes is not a man that, without a previous disposition towards approbation, I should greatly have admired. He is somewhat too flourishing, somewhat too forward, somewhat too voluble ; but he is worthy, benevolent, good-natured, and good-hearted, and therefore the overflowing of successful spirits and delighted vanity must meet with some allowance. His wife is a quiet and unpretending woman: his daughters common sort of country misses. They seem to live with great hospitality, plenty, and good cheer. They gave us a grand breakfast, and then did the honours of their city to us with great patriotism. They carried us to their fine old cathedral, where we saw the tomb of poor Edward II., and many more ancient. Several of the Saxon princes were buried in the original cathedral, and their monuments are preserved. Various of the ancient nobility, whose names and families were extinct from the Wars of the Roses, have here left their worldly honours and deposited their last remains. It was all interesting to see, though I will not detail it, for any "Gloucester guide" would beat me hollow at that work. Next they carried us to the jail, to show in how small a space, I suppose, human beings can live, as well as die or be dead. This jail is admirably constructed for its proper purposes-- confinement and punishment. Every culprit is to have a separate cell; every cell is clean, neat, and small, looking towards a wide expanse of country, and, far more fitted to his speculation, a wide expanse of the heavens. Air, cleanliness, and health seem all considered, but no other indulgence. A total seclusion of all commerce from accident, and an absolute impossibility of all intercourse between themselves, must needs render the captivity secure from all temptation to further guilt, and all Stimulus to hardihood in past crimes, and makes the solitude become so desperate that it not only seems to leave no opening, for any comfort save in repentance, but to make that almost unavoidable. After this they carried us to the Infirmary, where I was yet more pleased, for the sick and the destitute awaken an interest far less painful than the wicked and contemned. We went Page 173 entirely over the house, and then over the city, which has little else to catch notice. The pin manufactory we did not see, as they discouraged us by an account of its dirt. Mr. Raikes is a very principal man in all these benevolent institutions; and while I poured forth my satisfaction in them very copiously and warmly, he hinted a question whether I could name them to the queen. "Beyond doubt," I answered; "for these were precisely the things which most interested her majesty's humanity." The joy with which he heard this was nothing short of rapture. ON THE WALKS. Sunday, July 20-Colonel Gwynn again brought but a bad account of his companion, who was now under the care of the Cheltenham apothecary, Mr. Clerke. I had appointed in the evening to go on the walks with Miss Palmer. I scarce ever passed so prodigious a crowd as was assembled before the house when I went out. The people of the whole county seemed gathered together to see their majesties; and so quiet, so decent, so silent, that it was only by the eye they could be discovered, though so immense a multitude. How unlike a London mob! The king, kindly to gratify their zealous and respectful curiosity, came to his window, and seeing me go out, he called me to speak to him, and give an account of my intentions. The people, observing this graciousness, made way for me on every side, so that I passed through them with as much facility as if the meadows had been empty. The D'Oyleys and Miss Johnson and Miss Palmer made the walking party, and Mr. Seward joined us. Mr. Raikes and all his family were come from Gloucester to see the royal family on the walks, which were very much crowded, but with the same respectful multitude, who never came forward, but gazed and admired at the most humble distance, Mr. Raikes introduced me to the Bishop of Gloucester, Dr. Halifax, and afterwards, much more to my satisfaction, to the Dean of Gloucester, Dr. Tucker, the famous author of "Cui bono."(283) I was very glad to see him: he is past eighty, and has a most shrewd and keen old face. Page 174 I went afterwards to tea with the D'Oyleys and Miss Palmer, and Mr. Seward again accompanied us. Miss Palmer brought me home in Sir John's carriage, making it drive as near as possible to the house. But just before we quitted the walks I was run after by a quick female step :--"Miss Burney, don't you know me? have you forgot Spotty?"--and I saw Miss Ogle. She told me she had longed to come and see me, but did not know if she might. She is here with her mother and two younger sisters. I promised to wait on them. Mrs. Oake was daughter to the late Bishop of Winchester, who was a preceptor of the king's: I knew, therefore, I might promise with approbation. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR. Monday, July 21.-I was very much disappointed this morning to see Colonel Gwynn come again alone to breakfast, and to hear from him that his poor colleague was still confined. The royal party all went at ten o'clock to Tewkesbury. About noon, while I was writing a folio letter to my dear father, of our proceedings, Mr. Alberts, the queen's page, came into my little parlour, and said "If you are at leisure, ma'am, Mr. Fairly begs leave to ask you how you do." I was all amazement, for I had concluded his confinement irremediable for the present. I was quite happy to receive him; he looked very ill, and his face is still violently swelled. He had a handkerchief held to it, and was muffled up in a great coat; and indeed he seemed unfit enough for coming out. He apologised for interrupting me. I assured him I should have ample time for my letter. "What a letter!" cried he, looking at its size, "it is just such a one as I should like to receive, and not--" "Read," cried I. "No, no !--and not answer!" He then sat down, and I saw by his manner he came with design to make a sociable visit to me. He was serious almost to sadness, but with a gentleness that could not but raise in whomsoever he had addressed an implicit sympathy. He led almost immediately to those subjects on which he loves to Page 175 dwell--Death and Immortality, and the assured misery of all stations and all seasons in this vain and restless world. I ventured not to contradict him with my happier sentiments, lest I should awaken some fresh pain. I heard him, therefore, in quiet and meditative silence, or made but such general answers as could hazard no allusions. Yet, should I ever see him in better spirits, I shall not scruple to discuss, in such a way as I can, this point, and to vindicate as well as I am able my opposite opinion. He told me he had heard a fifth week was to be now added to this excursion, and he confessed a most anxious solicitude to be gone before that time. He dropped something, unexplained, yet very striking, of a peculiar wish to be away ere some approaching period. I felt his meaning, though I had no key to it; I felt that he coveted to spend in quiet the anniversary of the day on which he lost his lady. You may believe I could say nothing to it; the idea was too tender for discussion; nor can I divine whether or not he wishes to open more on this subject, or is better pleased by my constant silence to his own allusions. I know not, indeed, whether he thinks I even understand them. COURTS AND COURT LIFE. We then talked over Cheltenham and our way of life, and then ran into discourse upon Courts and Court life in general. I frankly said I liked them not, and that, if I had the direction of any young person's destination, I would never risk them into such a mode of living; for, though Vices may be as well avoided there as anywhere 'and in this Court particularly, there were mischiefs of a smaller kind, extremely pernicious to all nobleness of character, to which this Court, with all its really bright examples, was as liable as any other,--the mischiefs of jealousy, narrowness, and selfishness. He did not see, he said, when there was a place of settled income and appropriated business why it might not be filled both with integrity and content in a Court as well as elsewhere. Ambition, the desire of rising, those, he said, were the motives that envy which set such little passions in motion. One situation, however, there was, he said, which he looked upon as truly dangerous, and as almost certain to pervert the fairest disposition- it was one in which he would not place any person for whom he had the smallest regard, as he looked upon it to Page 176 be the greatest hazard a character could run. This was, being maid of honour. THE VINDICTIVE BARETTI. Tuesday, July 22-To-day, at noon, I had a surprise with which I was very well pleased. His majesty opened the door of my little parlour, called out, "Come, Come in -," and was followed by Major Price. He was just arrived from his little farm in Herefordshire, and will stay here some days. It is particularly fortunate just now, when another gentleman was really required to assist in attendance upon the royal party. Mr. Seward, with a good-humoured note, sent me the magazine with Baretti's strictures on Mrs. Thrale. Good heaven, how abusive! It can hardly hurt her--it is so palpably meant to do it. I could not have suspected him, with all his violence, of a bitterness of invective so cruel, so ferocious! I well remember his saying to me, when first I saw him after the discovery of "Evelina"...... I see what it is you can do, you little witch--it is, that you can hang us all up for laughing- stocks; but hear me this one thing--don't meddle with me. I see what they are, your powers; but remember, when you provoke an Italian you run a dagger into your own breast!" I half shuddered at the fearful caution from him, because the dagger was a word of unfortunate recollection:(284) but, good heaven! it could only be a half Shudder when the caution was against an offence I could sooner die than commit, and which, I may truly say, if personal attack was what he meant, never even in sport entered my mind, and was ever, in earnest, a thing I have held in the deepest abhorrence. I must do, however, the justice to his candour to add, that upon a newer acquaintance with me, which immediately followed, he never repeated his admonition; and when "Cecilia" came out, and he hastened to me with every species of extravagant encomium, he never hinted at any similar idea, and it seemed evident he concluded me, by that time, incapable Page 177 meriting such a suspicion; though, to judge by his own conduct, a proceeding of this sort may to him appear in a very different light. He thinks, at least, a spirit of revenge may authorize any attack, any insult. How unhappy and how strange! to join to so much real good nature as this man possesses when pleased, a disposition so savagely vindictive when offended. SPECULATIONS UPON COLONEL FAIRLY'S RE-MARRYING. Thursday, July 24--"Pray, Miss Burney," cried Colonel Gwynn, "do you think Mr. Fairly will ever marry again?" "I think it very doubtful," I answered, "but I hope he will, for, whether he is happy or not in marrying, I am sure he will be wretched in singleness; the whole turn of his mind is so social and domestic. He is by no means formed for going always abroad for the relief of society; he requires it more at hand." "And what do you think of Miss Fuzilier?" "That he is wholly disengaged with her and with everybody." "Well, I think it will be, for I know they correspond ; and what should he correspond with her for else?" "Because, I suppose, he has done it long before this could be suggested as the motive. And, indeed, the very quickness of the report makes me discredit it; 'tis so utterly impossible for a man whose feelings are so delicate to have taken any steps towards a second connexion at so early a period." "Why, I know he's very romantic,--but I should like to know your opinion." "I have given it you," cried I, "very exactly." COLONEL FAIRLY AGAIN PRESENTS HIMSELF. Not long after, when all the party was broke up from my little parlour, though not yet set out for Gloucester, who should again surprise me by entering but Mr. Fairly! I was quite rejoiced by his sight. He was better, though not well. His face is almost reduced to its natural size. He had a letter for her majesty from Lord Aylesbury, and had determined to venture bringing it himself. He said he would carry it in to the queen, and then return to my parlour, if I would give him some breakfast. You may suppose I answered "No!" But, afterwards, fearing he might Page 178 be detained and fatigued, he asked me to present it for him, and only say he was waiting in my room for commands. I was forced to say "Yes," though I had rather not. Her majesty was much surprised to hear he was again out so unexpectedly, and asked if he thought of going to Gloucester? "No," I said, "I believed he was not equal to that." She bid me tell him she would see him before she went. I returned with this message, and would then have ordered him fresh breakfast; but he declared if I was fidgety he should have no comfort, and insisted on my sitting quietly down, while he drew a chair by my side, and made his own cold tea, and drank it weak and vapid, and eat up all the miserable scraps, without suffering me to call for plate, knife, bread, butter, or anything for replenishment. And when he had done, and I would have made some apology, he affected me for him a good deal by gravely saying, "Believe me, this is the pleasantest breakfast I have made these six days." He then went on speaking of his late confinement, and its comfortless circumstances, in very strong terms, dwelling on its solitude and its uselessness, as if those only formed its disagreeability, and the pain went for nothing. Social and kind is his heart, and finely touched to the most exquisite sensations of sympathy; and, as I told Colonel Gwynn, I must needs wish he may yet find some second gentle partner fitted to alleviate his sorrows, by giving to him an object whose happiness would become his first study. He brought me back the few books I had procured him but I had no fresh supply. He spoke again of the favourite "Letters," and said he felt so sure I should be pleased with them, that he was desirous I should look at them, adding There is no person into whose hands I would not put them not even my daughter's." It was now impossible to avoid saying I should be glad to see them: it would seem else to doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I have the highest opinion of both. In talking them over he told me he believed them to be genuine; "But the woman," he said, "throughout the whole correspondence, is too much the superior. She leaves the man far behind. She is so collected, so composed, so constantly mistress of herself, so unbiased by her passions, so rational, and so dignified, that I would even recommend her as an example to any young woman in similar circumstances to follow." Page 179 He was summoned to her majesty, in the dining-parlour. But when they were all set out on the Gloucester expedition, he returned to my little parlour, and stayed with me a considerable time. Grave he came back--grave quite to solemnity, and almost wholly immersed in deep and sad reflections, He spoke little, and that little with a voice so melancholy, yet so gentle, that it filled me with commiseration. At length, after much silence and many pauses, which I never attempted to interrupt or to dissipate, continuing my work as if not heeding him, he led himself distantly, yet intelligibly--to open upon the immediate state of his mind. I now found that the king's staying on at Cheltenham a fifth week was scarcely supportable to him; that the 16th of next month was the mournful anniversary of his loss, and that he had planned to dedicate it in some peculiar manner to her memory, with his four children. Nothing of this was positively said; for "He feels the chastity of silent woe." But all of it was indubitably comprised in the various short but pointed sentences which fell from him. THE COLONEL AND THE "ORIGINAL LOVE LETTERS." Friday, July 25.-Again, to a very late breakfast came Mr. Fairly, which again he made for himself, when the rest were dispersed, of all the odd remnants, eatable and drinkable. He was much better, and less melancholy. He said he should be well enough to join the royal party to-morrow, who were to dine and spend the whole day at Lord Coventry's at Coombe. . . . In the afternoon, while Miss Planta and myself were Sitting over our dessert, a gentle rap at the parlour-door preceded Mr. Fairly. How we both started! He was muffled up in a great coat, and said he came quite incog., as he was not well enough to dine anywhere but in his private apartment, nor to attend the royals to the walks, whither they go every evening. He had only strolled out for a walk by himself. I could not persuade him to sit down; he said he must be gone immediately, lest he should be seen, and the king, not aware of his unfitness, should order his attendance. Miss Planta, presently, was obliged to go to the princesses, Page 180 and wait with them till the promenade took place. Quietly, then, he drew a chair to the table, and I saw he had something to say; but, after a little general talk he rose and was going : when, hearing by the dogs the royal family were just in motion, he pulled off his great coat and seated himself again. And then, he took from his pocket a small volume, which he said he had taken this opportunity to bring me. You Will be sure it was the "Original Letters.;" I took them, and thanked him: he charged me with a very grave air to keep them safe, and I put them into my work-box--my dear Fredy's work-box--which here is my universal repository of small goods and chattels, and useful past all thanks. By the time they Were set off, however, we were entered into conversation, and he said he would venture to stay tea; "though, as I tell you," he added, "what I do not tell everybody, I must confess I have upon me some certain symptoms that make me a little suspect these Cheltenham waters are going to bring me to a fit of the gout." And then he told me that that dreadful disorder had been frequently and dangerously in his family, though he had himself never had it but once, which was after a very bad fall from his horse when hunting with the king. Miss Planta now joined us, looking not a little surprised to find Mr. Fairly still here, and I ordered tea. After it was over, she went to take her usual evening exercise; and then Mr. Fairly, pointing to my work-box, said, "Shall I read a little to you?" Certainly, I said, if it would not too much fatigue him; and then, with the greatest pleasure in renewing again a mode in which I had taken so much delight, I got my work and gave him his book. Unluckily, however, it was the second volume; the first, having read, he had left in town. "It is quite, however," he said, "immaterial whether You begin with the first volume or the second; the story is nothing; the language and the sentiments are all you can care for." I did not quite agree in this, but would not say so, lest he should think of me as Colonel Gwynn does of him, "that I am very romantic which, however, I am not, though I never like to anticipate an end ere I know a beginning. Indeed, he had not praised them too highly, nor raised my expectations beyond what could answer them, They are full Page 181 of beauties-moral, elegant, feeling, and rational. He seemed most unusually gratified by seeing me so much pleased with them. I am so glad," he cried, "You like them, for I thought you would!" But we began so late that he could only, get through two letters, when the time of my retiring arrived. I was sorry also to have him out so late after his long confinement; but he wrapped himself up in his great coat, and did not seem to think he should suffer from it. Miss Planta came to my room upstairs, to Inquire how long Mr. Fairly had stayed, and I was quite happy to appease her astonishment that he should come without sending in to the king, by assuring her he was only nursing for the next day, when he meant to attend the Coombe party. I thought it so absolutely right to mention his visit to the queen, lest, hearing of it from the princesses through Miss Planta, she Should wonder yet more, that I put aside the disagreeable feel of exciting that wonder myself, and told her he had drank tea here, when I attended her at night. She seemed much more surprised than pleased, till I added that he was preparing and hardening himself for the Coombe expedition the next day, and then she was quite satisfied.(285) THE GOUT AND THE LOVE LETTERS, AGAIN. Saturday, July 26.-The royal party were to be Out the whole day, and I had her majesty's permission to go to the play at night with Miss Port and her friends, and to introduce MISS Planta to them for the same purpose. The breakfast was at seven o'clock ; we were all up at half after five. How sorry was I to see Colonel Gwynn enter alone, and to hear that Mr. Fairly was again ill Soon after the king came into the room and said, "So, no Mr. Fairly again?" "No, sir; he's very bad this morning." "What's the matter? His face?" "No, sir; he has got the gout. These waters., he thinks, have brought it on." "What, in his foot?" "Yes, sir; he is quite lame, his foot is swelled prodigiously." Page 182 "So he's quite knocked up! Can't he come out?" "No, sir; he's obliged to order a gouty shoe and stay at home and nurse." The king declared the Cheltenham waters were admirable friends to the constitution, by bringing disorders out of the habit. Mr. Fairly, he said, had not been well some time, and a smart fit of the gout might set him all to rights again. Alas, thought I, a smart fit of the gout in a lonely lodging at a water-drinking place! They all presently set off; and so fatigued was my poor little frame, I was glad to go and lie down; but I never can sleep when I try for it in the daytime; the moment I cease all employment, my thoughts take such an ascendance over my morphetic faculty, that the attempt always ends in a deep and most Wakeful meditation. About twelve o'clock I was reading In my private loan book, when, hearing the step of Miss Planta on the stairs, I put it back in my work-box, and Was just taking thence some other employment, when her voice struck my ear almost in a scream "Is it possible? Mr. Fairly!" My own with difficulty refrained echoing it when I heard his voice answer her, and in a few minutes they parted, and he rapped at the door and entered my little parlour. He came in hobbling, leaning on a stick, and with a large cloth shoe over one of his feet, which was double the size of the other. We sat down together, and he soon inquired what I had done with his little book. I had only, I answered, read two more letters. "Have you read two?" he cried, in a voice rather disappointed; and I found he was actually come to devote the morning, which he knew to be unappropriated on my part, to reading it on to me himself. Then he took up the book and read on from the fifth letter. But he read at first with evident uneasiness, throwing down the book at every noise, and stopping to listen at every sound. At last he asked me if anybody was likely to come? Not a soul, I said, that I knew or expected. He laughed a little at his question and apparent anxiety but with an openness that singularly marks his character, he frankly added, I must put the book away, pure as it is, if any one comes or, without knowing a word of the contents, they will run away with the title alone, exclaiming, 'Mr. Fairly Page 183 reading love letters to Miss Burney!' A fine story that would make!" 'Pon honour, thought I, I would not hear such a tale for the world. However, he now pursued his reading more at his ease. I will not tell you what we said of them in talking them over. Our praise I have chiefly given--our criticism must wait till you have read them yourselves. They are well worth your seeking. I am greatly mistaken if you do not read them with delight. in the course of the discussion he glided, I know not how, upon the writings of another person, saying he never yet had talked them over with me. "It is much kinder not," cried I hastily. . . . "Well, but," cried he laughing, "may I find a fault? Will you hear a criticism, if nothing of another sort?" I was forced to accede to this. He told me, then, there was one thing he wholly disallowed and wished to dispute, which was, Cecilia's refusing to be married on account of the anonymous prohibition to the ceremony. He could not, he said, think such an implied distrust of Delvile, after consenting to be his, was fair or generous. "To that," cried I, "I cannot judge what a man may think, but I will own it is what most precisely and indubitably I could not have resisted doing myself. An interruption so mysterious and so shocking I could never have had the courage to pass over." This answer rather silenced him from politeness than convinced him from reason, for I found he thought the woman who had given her promise was already married, and ought to run every risk rather than show the smallest want of confidence in the man of her choice. Columb now soon came in to inquire what time I should dine, but a ghost could not have made him stare more than Mr. Fairly, whose confinement with the gout had been spread all over the house by Colonel Gwynn. I ordered an early dinner on account of the play." "Will you invite me," cried Mr. Fairly, laughing, "to dine with you?" "Oh yes!" I cried, "with the greatest pleasure." and he said he would go to his home and dress, and return to my hour. Page 184 A DINNER WITH COLONEL FAIRLY AND MISS PLANTA, As he was at leisure, I had bespoke the queen's hairdresser, on account of the play; but Miss Planta came to inform me that she could not be of that party, as she had received a letter from Lady Charlotte Finch, concerning Princess Mary, that she must stay to deliver herself. I told her she would have a beau at dinner. "Well," she exclaimed, "'tis the oddest thing in the world He should come so when the king and queen are away! I am sure, if I was you, I would not mention it." "Oh yes, I shall," cried I; "I receive no visitors in private; and I am sure if I did, Mr. Fairly is the last who would condescend to make one of them." Such was my proud, but true speech, for him and for myself. At dinner we all three met; Mr. Fairly in much better spirits than I have yet seen him at Cheltenham. He attacks Miss Planta upon all her little prejudices, and rallies her into a defence of them, in a manner so sportive 'tis impossible to hurt her, yet so nearly sarcastic that she is frequently perplexed whether to take it in good or ill part. But his intentions are so decidedly averse to giving pain, that even when she is most alarmed at finding the laugh raised against her, some suddenly good-humoured or obliging turn sets all to rights, and secures any sting from remaining, even where the bee has been most menacing to fix itself. I believe Mr. Fairly to possess from nature high animal spirits, though now curbed by misfortune - and a fine vein of satire, though constantly kept in order by genuine benevolence. He is still, in mixed company, gay, shrewd, and arch ; foremost in badinage, and readiest for whatever may promote general entertainment. But in chosen society his spirits do not rise above cheerfulness; he delights in moral discourse, on grave and instructive subjects, and though always ready to be led to the politics or business of the day, in which he is constantly well versed and informing I never observe him to lead but to themes of religion, literature, or moral life. When dinner and a very sociable dessert were over, we proposed going to the king's dining-parlour, while the servants removed the things, etc., against tea. But the weather was so very fine we were tempted by the open door to go out into the air. Miss Planta said she would take a walk; Mr. Fairly could not, but all without was so beautiful he would not go into the Page 185 parlour, and rather risked the fatigue of standing, as he leant against the porch, to losing the lovely prospect of sweet air. And here, for near two hours, on the steps of Fauconberg Hall, we remained; and they were two hours of such pure serenity, without and within, as I think, except in Norbury park, with its loved inhabitants and my Susan, I scarce ever remember to have spent. Higher gaiety and greater happiness many and many periods of my life have at different times afforded me; but a tranquillity more perfect has only, I think, been lent to me in Norbury park, where, added to all else that could soothe and attract, every affection of my heart could be expanded and indulged. But what have I to do with a comparison no longer cherished but by memory The time I have mentioned being past, Miss Planta returned from her walk, and we adjourned to the little parlour, where I made tea, and then I equipped myself for the play. The sweet Miss Port received me with her usual kind joy, and introduced me to her friends, who are Mr. Delabere, the master of the house, and chief magistrate of Cheltenham, and his family. We all proceeded to the play-house, which is a very pretty little theatre. Mrs. Jordan played the "Country Girl," most admirably; but the play is so disagreeable in Its whole plot and tendency, that all the merit of her performance was insufficient to ward off disgust.(286) My principal end, however, was wholly answered, in spending the evening with my poor M-----. . . . Lady Harcourt is come to take the place of Lady Weymouth, whose waiting is over; and Lord Harcourt will lodge in the town of Cheltenham. We have no room here for double accommodations. ROYAL CONCERN FOR THE COLONEL's GOUT. Sunday, July 27.-This morning in my first attendance I seized a moment to tell her majesty of yesterday's dinner. Page 186 "So I hear!" she cried; and I was sorry any one had anticipated my information, nor can I imagine who it might be. "But pray, ma'am," very gravely, how did it happen ? I understood Mr. Fairly was confined by the gout." "He grew better, ma'am, and hoped by exercise to prevent a serious fit." She said no more, but did not seem pleased. The fatigues of a Court attendance are so little comprehended, that persons known to be able to quit their room and their bed are Instantly concluded to be qualified for all the duties of their office. We were again very early, as their majesties meant to go to the cathedral at Gloucester, where the Bishop of Gloucester, Dr. Halifax, was to Preach to them. But I -was particularly glad, before our breakfast, was over, to see Mr. Fairly enter my little parlour. He was Still In his gouty Shoe, and assisted by a stick, but he had not suffered from his yesterday's exertion. Before the things were removed, a page opened the door, and all the royal family--king, queen, and three princesses--came into the room to see Mr. Fairly and Inquire how he did. I hardly know with which of the five he is most in favour, or by which most respected, and they all expressed their concern for this second attack, in the kindest terms. The king, however, who has a flow of spirits at this time quite unequalled, would fain have turned the whole into ridicule, and have persuaded him he was only fanciful. "Fanciful, Sir?" he repeated, a little displeased; and the good king perceiving it, graciously and good-humouredly drew back his words, by saying "Why I should wonder indeed if you were to be that!" When they all decamped I prepared for church. I had appointed to go with Miss Port, and to meet her on the road. Mr. Fairly said, if I would give him leave, he would stay and write letters in my little parlour. I supplied him with materials, and emptied my queen's writing-box for a desk, as we possess nothing here but a low dining-table. So away went journals, letters, memorandums, etc., into the red portfolio given me by my dear father. page 187 As soon as I presented him with this, not at all aware of the goods and chattels removed for the occasion, he said it was so very comfortable he should now write all his letters here, for at his lodgings he had such a miserable low table he had been forced to prop it up by brick-bats! Mr. Fairly sealed and made up his dispatches, and then said he would stroll a little out to put his foot in motion. "And what," he asked, "shall you do?" I had a great mind to say, Why, stroll with you; for that, I think, was the meaning OF his question; but I feared it might prevent my being dressed against the return Of the queen, and I do not think she would have thought it an adequate excuse. YOUNG REPUBLICANS CONVERTED. Monday, July 28.--Miss Ogle acquainted me that this was the last day of her remaining at Cheltenham, and I promised to drink tea with her in the afternoon; and the queen honoured me with a commission to bring Mrs. Ogle on the walks, as his majesty wished again to see her. . . . I found Mrs. Ogle and her daughters all civility and good humour. Poor Mrs. Ogle has lately (by what means I do not know) wholly lost her eye-sight; but she is perfectly resigned to this calamity, and from motives just such as suit a bishop's daughter. When I told her who desired her to be on the walks, she was extremely gratified. Spotty is a complete rebel, according to the principles of her republican father, and protested it would only be a folly and fuss to go, for their notice. The younger sisters are bred rebels too; but the thought of guiding their mother, when such royal distinction was intended her, flattered and fluctuated them. There was another lady with them, who told me that Dr. Warton, of Winchester, had desired her to make acquaintance with me; but I have forgotten her name, and have no time to refresh my memory with it. To the walks we went, the good and pious Mrs. Ogle between her two young daughters, and Spotty and I together. Spotty begged me to go to the ball with her, but I had neither licence nor inclination. The queen immediately espied Mrs. Ogle, by seeing me, as I heard her say to the king; and they approached the spot where we stood, in the most gracious manner. The king spoke with such kindness to Mrs. Ogle, and with such great regard Page 188 of her late father, that the good lady was most deeply affected with pleasure. I believe they stayed half an hour with her, talking over old scenes and circumstances. Spotty kept pulling me all the time, to decamp; but I kept "invincible,"--not quite like Mr. Pitt, yet "invincible." At last the king spoke to her: this confused her so much, between the pleasure of the notice, and the shame of feeling that pleasure, that she knew not what she either did or said, answered everything wrong, and got out of the line, and stood with her back to the queen, and turned about she knew not why, and behaved like one who had lost her wits. When they left us, Mrs. Ogle expressed her grateful sense of the honour done her, almost with tears ; the two young ones said, they had never conceived the king and queen could be such sweet people and poor Spotty was so affected and so constrained in denying them praise, and persisting that she thought it "all a bore," that I saw the republican heart was gone, though the tongue held its ground. A second time, after a few more turns, the same gracious party approached, with fresh recollections and fresh questions concerning interesting family matters. This was more than could be withstood; Mrs. Ogle was almost overpowered by their condescension; the young ones protested they should never bear to hear anything but praise of them all their lives to come and poor Spotty was quite dumb! She could not, for shame, join the chorus of praise, and to resist it she had no longer any power. We did not, however, stop here; for still a third time they advanced, and another conference ensued, in which Mrs. Ogle's sons were inquired for, and their way of life, and designs and characters. This ended and completed the whole; Mrs. Ogle no longer restrained the tears of pleasure from flowing; her little daughters declared, aloud, the king and queen were the two most sweet persons in the whole world, and they would say so as long as they lived; and poor Spotty, colouring and conscious, said-- "But I hope I did not behave so bad this time as the first?" Nay, so wholly was she conquered, that, losing her stubbornness more and more by reflection, she would not let me take leave till she obliged me to promise I would either call the next morning, before their departure, or write her a little note, to say if they found out or mentioned her ungraciousness. I was too well pleased in the convert to refuse her this satis- page 189 action; and so full was her mind of her new loyalty, that when she found me steady in declining to go with her to the ball, she gave it up herself, and said she would go home with her mother and sisters, to talk matters over. THE PRINCES' ANIMAL SPIRITS. July 31.---Miss Planta said the Duke of York was expected the next day. This led to much discourse on the princes, in which Mr. Fairly, with his usual but Most uncommon openness, protested there was something in the violence of their animal spirits that Would make him accept no post and no pay to live with them. Their very voices, he said, had a loudness and force that wore him. Immediately after he made a little attack--a gentle one, Indeed-- upon me, for the contrary extreme, of hardly speaking, among strangers at least, so as to be heard. "And why," cried he, "do you speak so low? I used formerly not to catch above a word in a sentence from you." In talking about the princes, he asked me how I managed with them. Not at all, I said, for since I had resided under the royal roof they were rarely there, and I had merely seen them two or three times. He congratulated me that I had not been in the family in earlier days, when they all lived together; and Miss Planta enumerated various of their riots, and the distresses and difficulties they caused in the household. I was very glad, I said, to be out of the way, though I did not doubt but I might have kept clear of them had I been even then a resident. "O no, no," cried Mr. Fairly; "they would have come to you, I promise you; and what could you have done--what would have become of you?--with Prince William in particular? Do you not think, Miss Planta, the Prince of Wales and Prince William would have been quite enough for Miss Burney? Why she would have been quite subdued." I assured him I had not a fear but I might always have avoided them. "Impossible! They would have come to your tea-room." "I would have given up tea." "Then they would have followed you--called for you--sent for you--the Prince of Wales would have called about him, 'Here ! where's Miss Burney?"' Page 190 "O, no, no, no!" cried I; "I would have kept wholly out of the way, and then they would never have thought about me." "O, ho!" cried he, laughing, "never think of seeing Miss Burney Prince William, too! what say you to that, Miss Planta? She agreed there was no probability of such escape. I was only the more glad to have arrived in later times. Here a page came to call Mr. Fairly to backgammon with his majesty. THE DUKE OF YORK: ROYAL VISIT TO THE THEATRE. Friday, Aug. 1.-This was a very busy day; the Duke of York was expected, and his fond father had caused a portable wooden house to be moved from the further end of Cheltenham town up to join to Fauconber, Hall. The task had employed twenty or thirty men almost ever since our arrival, and so laborious, slow, difficult, and all but impracticable had it proved, that it was barely accomplished before it was wanted. There was no room, however, in the king's actual dwelling, and he could not endure not to accommodate his son immediately next himself. His joy upon his arrival was such joy as I have only seen here when he arrived first from Germany; I do not mean it was equally violent, or, alas! equally unmixed, but yet it was next and nearest to that which had been most perfect. Mr. Bunbury attended his royal highness. We had all dispersed from breakfast, but the king came in, and desired me to make him some. Mr. Fairly had brought him to my little parlour, and, having called Columb, and assisted in arranging a new breakfast, he left us, glad, I suppose, of a morning to himself, for his majesty was wholly engrossed by the duke. We talked over his usual theme--plays and players--and he languished to go to the theatre and see Mrs. Jordan. Nor did he languish in vain: his royal master, the duke, imbibed his wishes, and conveyed them to the king; and no sooner were they known than an order was hastily sent to the play-house, to prepare a royal box. The queen was so gracious as to order Miss Planta and myself to have the same entertainment. The delight of the people that their king and queen should visit this country theatre was the most disinterested I ever witnessed; for though they had not even a glance of their royal countenances, they shouted, huzzaed, and clapped, for Page 191 many minutes. The managers had prepared the front boxes for their reception, and therefore the galleries were over them. They made a very full and respectable appearance in this village theatre. The king, queen, Duke of York, and three princesses, were all accommodated with front seats ; Lord Harcourt stood behind the king, Lady Harcourt and Mr. Fairly behind the queen; Lord and Lady Courtown and Lady Pembroke behind the princesses; and at the back, Colonel Gwynn and Mr. Bunbury; Mr. Boulby and Lady Mary were also in the back group. I was somewhat taken up in observing a lady who sat opposite to me, Miss W---. My Susanna will remember that extraordinary young lady at Bath, whose conduct and conversation I have either written or repeated to her.(287) I could not see her again without being much struck by another recollection, of more recent and vexatious date. Mrs. Thrale, in one of the letters she has published, and which was written just after I had communicated to her my singular rencontre with this lady, says to Dr. Johnson, "Burney has picked up an infidel, and recommended to her to read 'Rasselas.' This has a strange sound, but when its circumstances are known, its strangeness ceases; it meant Miss W--- and I greatly fear, from the date and the book, she cannot but know the "infidel" and herself are one. I was truly Concerned in reading it, and I now felt almost ashamed as well as concerned in facing her, though her infidelity at that time, was of her own public avowal. Mr. Bunbury is particularly intimate with her, and admires her beyond all women. AN UN-COURTLY VISITOR. Miss Planta and myself, by the queen's direction, went in a chaise to see Tewkesbury. We were carried to several very beautiful points of view, all terminating with the noble hills of Malvern; and we visited the cathedral. . . . The pews seem the most unsafe, strange, and irregular that were ever constructed; they are mounted up, story after story, without any order, now large, now small, now projecting out wide, now almost indented in back, nearly to the very roof of the building. They look as if, ready-made, they had been thrown up, and stuck wherever they could, entirely by chance. We returned home just in time to be hastily dressed before Page 192 the royals came back. I was a little, however, distressed on being told, as I descended to dinner, that Mr. Richard Burney(288) was in my parlour. The strict discipline observed here, in receiving no visits, made this a very awkward circumstance, for I as much feared hurting him by such a hint, as concurring in an impropriety by detaining him. Miss Planta suffers not a soul to approach her to this house ; and Lady Harcourt has herself told me she thinks it would be wrong to receive even her sisters, Miss Vernons, so much all-together is now the house and household! My difficulty was still increased, when, upon entering the parlour, I found him in boots, a riding dress, and hair wholly without curl or dressing. Innocently, and very naturally, he had called upon me in his travelling garb, never suspecting that in visiting me he was at all in danger of seeing or being seen by any one else. Had that indeed been the case, I should have been very glad to see him; but I knew, now, his appearance must prove every way to his disadvantage, and I felt an added anxiety to acquaint him with my situation. Miss Planta looked all amazement; but he was himself all ease and sprightly unconsciousness. We were obliged to sit down to dinner; he had dined. I was quite in a panic the whole time, lest any of the royals should come in before I could speak - but, after he had partaken of our dessert, as much en badinage as I could, I asked him if he felt stout enough to meet the king? and then explained to him, as concisely as I had power, that I had here no room whatsoever at my own disposal, in such a manner as to enable my having the happiness to receive any of my private friends even Miss Port, though known to all the royal family,, I could never venture to invite, except when they were abroad: such being, at present, the universal practice and forbearance of all the attendants in this tour. He heard me with much surprise, and much laughter at his own elegant equipment for such encounters as those to which he now found himself liable; but he immediately proposed decamping, and I could not object, Yet, to soften this disagreeable explanation, I kept him a few minutes longer, settling concerning our further meeting at the concerts- at Worcester, and, in this little interval, we were startled by a rap at my door. He laughed, and started back; and I, alarmed, Page 193 also retreated. Miss Planta opened the door, and called out "'Tis Mr. Fairly." I saw him in amaze at sight of a gentleman; and he was himself immediately retiring, concluding, I suppose, that nothing less than business very urgent could have induced me to break through rules so rigidly observed by himself and all others. I would not, however, let him go . but as I continued talking with Richard about the music meeting and my cousins, he walked up to the window with Miss Planta. I now kept Richard as long as I well could, to help off his own embarrassment at this interruption; at length he went. MR. FAIRLY READS "AKENSIDE" TO MISS BURNEY. Hearing now the barking of the dogs, I knew the royals must be going forth to their promenade; but I found Mr. Fairly either did not hear or did not heed them. While I expected him every moment to recollect himself, and hasten to the walks, he quietly said, "They are all gone but me. I shall venture, to-night, to shirk;--though the king will soon miss me. But what will follow? He will say--'Fairly is tired! How shabby!' Well! let him say so; I am tired!" Miss Planta went off, soon after, to her walk. He then said, "Have you done with my little book?" "O yes!" I cried, "and this morning I have sent home the map of Gloucester you were so good as to send us. Though, I believe, I have kept both so long, You will not again be in any haste to lend me either a map of the land, or a poem of the sea." I then gave him back "The Shipwreck." "Shall I tell you," cried I, "a design I have been forming upon you?" "A design upon me?" "Yes; and I may as well own it, for I shall be quite as near success as if I disguise it." I then went to my little drawer and took out Akenside." "Here," I cried, "I intended to have had this fall in your way, by pure accident, on the evening you were called to the conjurer, and I have planned the same ingenious project every evening since, but it has never taken, and so now I produce it fairly!" "That," cried he, taking it, with a very pleased smile, "is the only way in all things!" Page 194 He then began reading "The Pleasures of the Imagination," and I took some work, for which I was much in haste, and my imagination was amply gratified. He only looked out for favourite passages, as he has the poem almost by heart, and he read them with a feeling and energy that showed his whole soul penetrated with their force and merit. After the first hour, however, he grew uneasy'; he asked me when I expected the king and queen from their walk, and whether they were likely to come into my room? "All," I said, "was uncertain." "Can nobody," he cried, "let you know when they are coming?" "Nobody," I answered, "would know till they were actually arrived." "But," cried he, "can you not bid somebody watch?" 'Twas rather an awkward commission, but I felt it would be an awkwardness still less pleasant to me to decline it, and therefore I called Columb, and desired he would let me know when the queen returned. He was then easier, and laughed a little, while he explained himself, "Should they come in and find me reading here before I could put away my book, they would say we were two blue stockings!" At tea Miss Planta again joined us, and instantly behind him went the book. He was very right; for nobody would have thought it more odd--or more blue. During this repast they returned home, but all went straight upstairs, the duke wholly occupying the king - and Mr. Bunbury went to the play. When Miss Planta, therefore, took her evening stroll, "Akenside" again came forth, and with more security. "There is one ode here," he cried, "that I wish to read to you, and now I think I can." I told him I did not in general like Akenside's odes, at least what I had chanced to read, for I thought they were too inflated, and filled with "liberty cant." "But this, however," cried he, "I must read to you, it is so pretty, though it is upon love!" 'Tis addressed to Olympia: I dare say my dearest Fredy recollects it.(289) It is, indeed, most feelingly written; but we Page 195 had only got through the first stanza when the door Suddenly opened, and enter Mr. Bunbury. After all the precautions taken, to have him thus appear at the very worst moment! Vexed as I was, I could really have laughed; but Mr. Fairly was ill disposed to take it so merrily. He started, threw the book forcibly behind him, and instantly took up his hat, as if decamping. I really believe he was afraid Mr. Bunbury would caricature us "The sentimental readers!" or what would he have called us? Luckily this confusion passed unnoticed. Mr. Bunbury had run away from the play to see after the horses, etc., for his duke, and was fearful of coming too late. plays and players now took up all the discourse, with Miss W--, till the duke was ready to go. They then left me together, Mr. Fairly smiling drolly enough in departing, and looking at "Akenside" with a very arch shrug, as who should say "What a scrape you had nearly drawn me into, Mr. Akenside!" THE DOCTOR's EMBARRASSMENT. Sunday, Aug. 3.-This morning I was so violently oppressed by a cold, which turns out to be the influenza, it was with the utmost difficulty I could dress myself. I did indeed now want some assistant most wofully. The princess royal has already been some days disturbed with this influenza. When the queen perceived it in me she told his majesty, who came into the room just as she was going to breakfast. Without making any answer, he himself went immediately to call Mr. Clerk, the apothecary, who was then with the princess royal. "Now, Mr. Clerk," cried he, "here's another patient for you." Mr. Clerk, a modest, sensible man, concluded, by the king himself having called him, that it was the queen he had Page 196 now to attend, and he stood bowing profoundly before her but soon observing she did not notice him, he turned in some confusion to the Princess Augusta, who was now in the group. "No, no! it's not me, Mr. Clerk, thank God!" cried the gay Princess Augusta. Still more confused, the poor man advanced to Princess Elizabeth. "No, no; it's not her!" cried the king. I had held back, having scarce power to open my eyes, from a vehement head-ache, and not, indeed, wishing to go through my examination till there were fewer witnesses. But his majesty now drew me out. "Here, Mr. Clerk," he cried, "this is your new patient!" He then came bowing up to me, the king standing close by, and the rest pretty near. "You--you are not well, ma'am?" he cried in the greatest embarrassment, "No, sir, not quite," I answered in ditto. "O, Mr. Clerk will cure you!" cried the king. "Are-are you feverish, ma'am?" "Yes, sir, a little." "I--I will send you a saline draught, ma'am." "If you please." And then he bowed and decamped. Did you ever hear a more perfectly satisfactory examination? The poor modest man was overpowered by such royal listeners and spectators, and I could not possibly relieve him, for I was little better myself. I went down to breakfast, but was so exceedingly oppressed I could not hold up my head, and as soon as I could escape I went to my own room, and laid down till my noon attendance, which I performed with so much difficulty I was obliged to return to the same indulgence the moment I was at liberty. FROM GRAVE TO GAY. Down at last I went, slow and wrapped up. I found Mr. Fairly alone in the parlour, reading letters with such intentness that he did not raise his head, and with an air of the deepest dejection. I remained wholly unnoticed a considerable time; but at last he looked up, and with some surprise, but a voice OF Page 197 of extreme sadness, he said, "Is that Miss Burney? I thought it had been Miss Planta." I begged him to read on, and not mind me; and I called for tea. When we had done tea, "See, ma'am," he cried, "I have brought You 'Carr,' and here is a sermon upon the text I mean, when I preach, to choose 'Keep innocency, and take heed to the thing that is right; for that will bring a man peace at the last.'" Sincerely I commended his choice ; and we had a most solemn discussion of happiness, not such as coincides with gaiety here, but hope of salvation hereafter. His mind has so religious a propensity, that it seems to me, whenever he leaves it to its natural bent, to incline immediately and instinctively to subjects of that holy nature. Humility, he said, in conclusion, humility was all in all for tranquillity of mind; with that, little was expected and much was borne, and the smallest good was a call for gratitude and content. How could this man be a soldier? Might one not think he was bred in the cloisters? "Well," cried he, again taking up the volume of "Carr," "I will just sit and read this sermon, and then quietly go home." He did so, feelingly, forcibly, solemnly; it is an excellent sermon; yet so read--he so sad, and myself so ill--it was almost too much for me, and I had some difficulty to behave with proper propriety. To him subjects of this sort, ill or well, bring nothing, I believe, but strength as well as comfort. The voice of dejection with which he began changed to one of firmness ere he had read three pages. Something he saw of unusual sinking, notwithstanding what I hid; and, with a very kind concern, when he had finished the sermon, he said, "Is there anything upon your spirits?" "No," I assured him, "but I was not well; and mind and body seemed to go together sometimes, when they did not." "But they do go together," cried he, "and will." However, he took no further- notice: he is like me, for myself, in that--that whatever he thinks only bodily is little worth attention; and I did not care to risk explaining to his strong and virtuous mind the many fears and mixed sensations of mine, when brought to a close disquisition of awaiting eternity. I never, but with Mrs. Delany and Dr. Johnson, have entered so fully and so frequently upon this awful subject as Page 198 with Mr. Fairly. My dear and most revered Mrs. Delany dwelt upon it continually, with joy, and pure, yet humble hope. My ever-honoured Dr. Johnson recurred to it perpetually, with a veneration compounded of diffidence and terror, and an incessant, yet unavailing plan, of amending all errors, and rising into perfection. Mr. Fairly leans upon it as the staff of his strength--the trust, the hope, the rest of his soul--too big for satisfaction in aught this world has given, or can reserve for him. ' He did not, however, "go quietly home," when he had finished the sermon; on the contrary, he revived in his spirits, and animated in his discourse, and stayed on. In speaking of the king he suddenly recollected some very fine lines of Churchill, made on his accession to the throne. I wish I could transcribe them, they are so applicable to that good king, from that moment of promise to the present of performance. But I know not in what part of Churchill's works they may be found. Finding me unacquainted with his poems he then repeated several passages, all admirably chosen ; but among them his memory called forth some that were written upon Lord H--, which were of the bitterest severity I ever heard:--whether deserved or not, Heaven knows; but Mr. Fairly said he would repeat them, for the merit of the composition. There was no examining his opinion of their veracity, and he made no comments; but this: Lord H-- was the famous man so often in the House of Commons accused of expending, or retaining, unaccounted millions Having run through all he could immediately recollect, he said, with a very droll smile, "Come, now I'll finish our ode," and went to my drawer for "Akenside." His fears of surprise, however, again came upon him so strongly while reading it, that he flung away the book in the utmost commotion at every sound, lest any one was entering, always saying in excuse, "We must not be called two blue stockings;" and, "They are so glad to laugh; the world is so always on the watch for ridicule." . . . I know not by what means, but after this we talked over Mr. Hastings's trial. I find he is very much acquainted with Mr. Windham, and I surprised him not a little, I saw, by what I told him of part Of My conferences with that gentleman. This matter having led us from our serious subjects, he took Page 199) up "Akenside" once more, and read to me the first book throughout, What a very, very charming poem is the "Pleasures of the Imagination!" He stayed to the last moment, and left me all the better for the time he thus rescued from feverish lassitude and suffering. A VISIT TO WORCESTER. Tuesday, Aug. 5-The journey to Worcester was very pleasant, and the country through which we passed extremely luxuriant and pretty. We did not go in by the Barborne road ; but all the road, and all avenues leading to it, were lined with people, and when we arrived at the city we could see nothing but faces ; they lined the windows from top to bottom, and the pavement from end to end. We drove all through the city to come to the palace of Bishop Hurd, at which we were to reside. Upon stopping there, the king had an huzza that seemed to vibrate through the whole town ; the princess royal's carriage had a second, and the equerries a third; the mob then, as ours drew on in succession, seemed to deliberate whether or not we also should have a cheer: but one of them soon decided the matter by calling out, "These are the maids of honour!" and immediately they gave us an huzza that made us quite ashamed, considering its vicinity. Mr. Fairly and Colonel Goldsworthy having performed the royal attendance, waited to hand us out of the carriage ; and then the former said he believed he should not be wanted, and would go and make a visit in the town. I should have much liked walking off also, and going to my cousins at Barborne Lodge; but I was no free agent, and obliged to wait for commands. The house is old and large; part of it looks to the Severn but the celebrated "Fair Sabrina" was so thick and muddy, that at this time her vicinity added but little to the beauty of the situation. My bed-room is pleasant, with a view of the distant country and the Severn beneath it; but it is through that of the princess royal; which is an inconvenience her royal highness submits to with a grace that would make me ashamed to call it one to myself. The parlour for our eating is large and dark, and old-fashioned. I made tea in it to-night for Lord Courtown and the two colonels, and Miss Planta, and was so much the Page 200 better for my journey, that I felt the influenza nearly conquered. Wednesday, Aug. 6.-I had the pleasure to arrange going to the music meeting with my own family. Notes were immediately interchanged from and to Barborne Lodge, and the queen was very well pleased that I should have this opportunity of joining my friends. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins and Betsy called for me at the bishop's. I was heartily glad to see Betsy and Mrs. Hawkins I introduced Miss Planta to them, who was of our party. We sat in what are called the steward's places, immediately under their majesties. The performance was very long, and tolerably tedious, consisting of Handel's gravest pieces and fullest choruses, and concluding with a sermon concerning the institution of the charity, preached by Dr. Langhorne. I was, however, so glad to be with my cousins, that the morning was very comfortable and pleasant to me. Richard and James joined us occasionally.; the rest of the family are at Shrewsbury. It was over very late, and we then went about the church, to see King John's tomb, etc, They were very earnest with me to go to Barborne but it was impossible. I promised, however, to accompany them to the concert at night, and be of their party to all the morning meetings at the cathedral. ' My parlour at the bishop's afforded me a good deal of entertainment, from observing the prodigious concourse of people from all the tops of houses, and looking over the walls to watch his majesty's entrance into the court-yard. Poor Lord Courtown, on account of his star, was continually taken for the king, and received so many huzzas and shouts, that he hardly dared show himself except when in attendance. THE QUEEN AND MR. FAIRLY. Saturday, Aug. 9.-Her majesty this morning a little surprised me by gravely asking me what were Mr. Fairly's designs with regard to his going away ? I could not tell her I did not know what I was really acquainted with; yet I feared it might seem odd to her that I should be better informed than herself, and it was truly unpleasant to me to relate anything he had told me without his leave. Her question, therefore, gave me a painful sensation; but it was spoken with an air so strongly denoting a belief that I had power to answer it, that I felt no choice in making a plain reply. Simply, then, "I understand, Page 201 ma'am," I said, "that he means to go to-morrow morning early." "Will he stay on to-night, then, at Worcester?" "N-o, ma'am, I believe not." "I thought he meant to leave us to-day? He said so." "He intended it, ma'am,--he would else not have said it." "I know I understood so, though he has not spoke to me of his designs this great while." I saw an air bordering upon displeasure as this was said and how sorry I felt!--and how ashamed of being concluded the person better informed! Yet, as he had really related to me his plan, and I knew it to be what he had thought most respectful to herself, I concluded it best, thus catechised, to speak it all, and therefore, after some hesitation uninterrupted by her, I said, "I believe, ma'am, Mr. Fairly had intended fully to begin his journey to-day, but, as Your majesty is to go to the play to-night, he thinks it his duty to defer setting out till to-morrow, that he may have the honour to attend your majesty as usual." This, which was the exact truth, evidently pleased her. Here the inquiry dropped; but I was very uneasy to relate it to Mr. Fairly, that the sacrifice I knew he meant to make of another day might not lose all its grace by wanting to be properly revealed. MR. FAIRLY MORALIZES. Our journey back to Cheltenham was much more quiet than it had been to Worcester, for the royal party too], another route to see Malvern hills, and we went straight forward. Miss Planta having now caught the influenza, suffered very much all the way, and I persuaded her immediately to lie down when we got to Fauconberg Hall. She could not come down to dinner, which I had alone. The Princess Elizabeth came to me after it, with her majesty's permission that I might go to the play with my usual party ; but I declined it, that I might make some tea for poor Miss Planta, as she had no maid, nor any creature to help her. The princess told me they were all going first upon the walks, to promener till the play time. I sat down to make my solitary tea, and had just sent up a basin to Miss Planta, when, to my equal surprise and pleasure, Mr. Fairly entered the room. "I come now," he said, "to take my leave." They were all, he added, gone to the walks, whither he must Page 202 in a few minutes follow them, and thence attend to the play, and the next morning, by five o'clock, be ready for his post-chaise. Seeing me, however, already making tea, with his Usual and invariable sociability he said he would venture to stay and partake, though he was only come, he gravely repeated, to take his leave. "And I must not say," cried I, "that I am sorry you are going, because I know so well you wish to be gone that it makes me wish it for you myself." "No," answered he, "you must not be sorry; when our friends are going to any joy. We must think of them, and be glad to part with them." Readily entering the same tone, with similar plainness of truth I answered, No, I will not be sorry you go, though miss you at Cheltenham I certainly must." "Yes," was his unreserved assent, "you will miss me here, because I have spent my evenings with you; but You Will not long remain at Cheltenham." Oim`e!" thought I, you little think how much Worse will be the quitting it. He owned that the bustle and fatigue of this life was too much both for his health and his spirits. I told him I Wished it might be a gratification to him, in his toils, to hear how the queen always spoke of him; With what evident and constant complacency and distinction. "And you may credit her sincerity," I added, "Since it is to so little a person as me she does this, and when no one else is present." He was not insensible to this, though he passed it over without much answer. He showed me a letter from his second son, very affectionate and natural. I congratulated him, most sincerely, on his approaching happiness in collecting them all together. "Yes he answered, "my group will increase, like a snow-ball, as I roll along, and they will soon all four be as happy as four little things know how to be." This drew him on into some reflections upon affection and upon happiness. "There is no happiness," he said, "without participation; no participation without affection. There is, indeed, in affection a charm that leaves all things behind it, and renders even every calamity that does not interfere with it inconsequential and there is no difficulty, no toil, no labour, no exertion, that will not be endured where there is a view of reaping it." He ruminated some time, and then told me of a sermon he had heard preached some months ago, sensibly demonstrating Page 203 the total vanity and insufficiency, even for this world, of all our best affections, and proving their fallibility from our most infirm humanity. My concurrence did not here continue: I cannot hold this doctrine to be right, and I am most sure it is not desirable. our best affections, I must and do believe, were given us for the best purposes, for every stimulation to good, and every solace in evil. But this was not a time for argument. I said nothing, while he, melancholy and moralizing, continued in this style as long as he could venture to stay. He then rose and took his hat, saying, " Well, so much for the day; what may come to-morrow I know not; but, be it what it may, I stand prepared." I hoped, I told him, that his little snowball would be all he could wish it, and I was heartily glad he would so soon collect it. "We will say," cried he, "nothing of any regrets," and bowed, and was hastening off. The "we," however, had an openness and simplicity that drew from me an equally open and simple reply. "No," I cried, "but I will say-for that you will have pleasure in hearing that you have lightened my time here in a manner that no one else could have done, of this party." To be sure this was rather a circumscribed compliment, those he left considered - but it was strict and exact truth, and therefore like his own dealing. He said not a word of answer, but bowed, and went away, leaving me firmly impressed with a belief that I shall find in him a true, an honourable, and even an affectionate friend, for life. MAJOR PRICE IS TIRED OF RETIREMENT. Sunday, Aug. 10.-Major Price was of the breakfast party this morning, to my great contentment. I heartily wish he was again in the king's household, he is so truly attached to his majesty, and he so earnestly himself wishes for a restoration, not to the equerryship, which is too laborious an office, but to any attendance upon the king's person of less fatigue. He opened to me very much upon his situation and wishes. he has settled himself in a small farm near the house of his eldest brother, but I could see too plainly he has not found there the contentment that satisfies him. He sighs for society ; he owns books are insufficient for everything, and his evenings Page 204 begin already to grow wearisome. He does not wish it to be talked of publicly, but he is solicitous to return to the king, in any place attached to his person, of but mild duty. Not only the king, he said, he loved, but all his society, and the way of life in general; and he had no tie whatsoever to Herefordshire that would make him hesitate a moment in quitting it, if another place could be made adequate to his fortune. His income was quite too small for any absence from his home of more than a few weeks, in its present plight; and therefore it could alone be by some post under government that he must flatter himself with ever returning to the scenes he had left. How rarely does a plan of retirement answer the expectations upon which it is raised! He fears having this suspected, and therefore keeps the matter to himself; but I believe he so much opened it to me, in the hope I might have an opportunity to make it known where it might be efficacious; for he told me, at the same time, he apprehended his majesty had a notion his fondness for Herefordshire, not his inability to continue equerry, had occasioned his resignation. I shall certainly make it my business to hint this to the queen. So faithful and attached a servant ought not to be thrown aside, and, after nine years' service, left unrewarded, and seem considered as if superannuated. MR. FAIRLY'S LITTLE NOTE. When I came from her majesty, just before she went down to dinner, I was met by a servant who delivered me a letter, which he told me was just come by express. I took it in some alarm, fearing that ill news alone could bring it by such haste, but, before I could open it, he said, "'Tis from Mr. Fairly, ma'am." I hastened to read, and will now copy it:- "Northleach, Aug. 10, 1788. "Her majesty may possibly not have heard that Mr. Edmund Waller died on Thursday night. He was master of St. Catherine's, which is in her majesty's gift. It may be useful to her to have this early intelligence of this circumstance, and you will have the goodness to mention it to her. Mr. W. was at a house upon his own estate within a mile and a half of this place, Very truly and sincerely yours, "S. Fairly." "Miss Burney, Fauconberg Hall." Page 205 How to communicate this news, however, was a real distress to me. I know her majesty is rather scrupulous that all messages immediately to herself should be conveyed by the highest channels, and I feared she would think this ought to have been sent through her lady then in waiting, Lady Harcourt. Mr. Fairly, too, however superior to such small matters for himself, is most punctiliously attentive to them for her. I could attribute this only to haste. But my difficulty was not alone to have received the intelligence-the conclusion of the note I was sure would surprise her. The rest, as a message to herself, being without any beginning, would not strike her; but the words "very truly and sincerely yours," come out with such an abrupt plainness, and to her, who knows not with what intimacy of intercourse we have lived together so much during this last month, I felt quite ashamed to show them. While wavering how to manage, a fortunate circumstance seemed to come to my relief; the Princess Elizabeth ran up hastily to her room, which is just opposite to mine, before she followed the queen down to dinner; I flew after her, and told her I had just heard of the death of Mr. Waller, the Master of St. Catherine's, and I begged her to communicate it to her majesty. She undertook it, with her usual readiness to oblige, and I was quite delighted to have been so speedy without producing my note, which I determined now not even to mention unless called upon, and even then not to produce; for now, as I should not have the first telling, it might easily be evaded by not having it in my pocket. The moment, however, that the dinner was over, Princess Elizabeth came to summon me to the queen. This was very unexpected, as I thought I should not see her till night; but I locked up my note and followed. She was only with the princesses. I found the place was of importance, by the interest she took about it. She asked me several questions relative to Mr. Waller. I answered her all I could collect from my note, for further never did I hear; but the moment I was obliged to stop she said, "Pray have you known him long?" "I never knew him at all, ma'am." "No? Why, then, how came you to receive the news about his death?" Was not this agreeable? I was forced to say, "I heard of it only from Mr. Fairly, ma'am." Page 206 Nothing Could exceed the surprise with which she now lifted up her eyes to look at me. "From Mr. Fairly?--Why did he not tell it me?" O, worse and worse! I was now compelled to answer, "He did not know It when he was here, ma'am; he heard it at Northleach, and, thinking it might be of use to your majesty to have the account immediately, he sent it over express." A dead silence so uncomfortable ensued, that I thought it best presently to go on further, though unasked. "Mr. Fairly, ma'am, wrote the news to me, on such small paper, and in such haste, that it is hardly fit to he shown to your majesty; but I have the note upstairs." No answer; again all silent; and then Princess Augusta said, "Mamma, Miss Burney says she has the note upstairs." "If your majesty pleases to see it"-- She looked up again, much more pleasantly, and said, "I shall be glad to see it," with a little bow. Out I went for it, half regretting I had not burned it, to make the producing it impossible. When I brought it to her, she received it with the most gracious smile, and immediately read it aloud, with great complacency, till she came to the end and then, with a lowered and somewhat altered tone, the "very truly and sincerely yours," which she seemed to look at for a moment with some doubt if it were not a mistake, but in returning it she bowed again, and simply said, "I am very much obliged to Mr. Fairly." You will be sure how much I was pleased during this last week to hear that the place of the Master of St. Catherine's was given by her majesty to Mr. Fairly. It is reckoned the best in her gift, as a sinecure. What is the income I know not: reports differ from 400 to 500 per annum. THE RETURN TO WINDSOR. Saturday, Aug. 16.-We left Cheltenham early this morning. Major Price breakfasted with us, and was so melancholy at the king's departure he could hardly speak a word. All Cheltenham was drawn out into the High-street, the gentles on one side and the commons on the other, and a band, and "God save the king," playing and singing. My dear Port, with all her friends, was there for a last look, and a sorrowful one we interchanged; Mr. Seward also, whom again I am not likely to meet for another two years at least. Page 207 The journey was quite without accident or adventure. And thus ends the Cheltenham episode. May I not justly call it so, different as it is to all the mode of life I have hitherto lived here, or alas I am in a way to live henceforward? melancholy--most melancholy-was the return to Windsor destitute of all that could solace, compose, or delight ; replete with whatever could fatigue, harass, and depress! Ease, leisure, elegant society, and interesting communication, were now to give place to arrogant manners, contentious disputation, and arbitrary ignorance! Oh, heaven! my dearest friends, what scales could have held and have weighed the heart of your F.B. as she drove past the door of her revered, lost comforter, to enter the apartment inhabited by such qualities! But before I quit this journey let me tell one very pleasant anecdote. When we stopped to change horses at Burford I alighted and went into the inn, to meet Mrs. Gast, to whom I had sent by Mrs. Frodsham a request to be there as we passed through the town. I rejoiced indeed to see again the sister of our first and wisest friend. My Susanna, who knows her too enthusiastic character, will easily suppose my reception. I was folded in her arms, and bathed in her tears all my little stay, and my own, from reflected tenderness for her ever-honoured, loved, and lamented brother, would not be kept quite back; 'twas a species of sorrowful joy--painful, yet pleasing--that seemed like a fresh tribute to his memory and my affection, and made the meeting excite an emotion that occupied my mind and reflections almost all the rest of my journey. She inquired most kindly after my dear father and my Susanna, and separately and with interest of all the rest of the family; but her surprise to see me now, by this most un expected journey, when she had concluded me inevitably shut up from her sight for the remainder of her life, joined to the natural warmth of her disposition, seemed almost to suffocate her. I was very sorry to leave her, but my time was unavoidably short and hurried. I inquired after Chesington, and heard very good accounts. AT WINDSOR AGAIN THE CANON AND MRS. SCHWELLENBERG. Windsor, Sunday, Aug. 17.-This day, after our arrival, began precisely the same as every day preceding our journey. The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood could not awake more completely to the same scene; yet I neither have been asleep, nor Page 208 am quite a beauty! O! I wish I were as near to the latter as the former at this minute! We had all the set assembled to congratulate his majesty on his return--generals and colonels without end. I was very glad while the large party lasted, its diminution into a solitary pair ending in worse than piquet--a tête-à-tête!--and such a one, too! after being so spoiled! Monday, Aug. 18.-Well, now I have a new personage to introduce to you, and no small one; ask else the stars, moon and planets! While I was surrounded with bandboxes, and unpacking, Dr. Shepherd was announced. Eager to make his compliments on the safe return, he forced a passage through the back avenues and stairs, for he told me he did not like being seen coming to me at the front door, as it might create some jealousies amongst the other canons! A very commendable circumspection! but whether for my sake or his own he did not particularize. M. de Lalande, he said, the famous astronomer,(290) was just arrived in England, and now at Windsor, and he had expressed a desire to be introduced to me. Well, while he was talking this over, and I was wondering and evading, entered Mr. Turbulent. What a surprise at sight of the reverend canon! The reverend canon, also, was interrupted and confused, fearing, possibly, the high honour he did me might now transpire amongst his brethren, notwithstanding his generous efforts to spare them its knowledge. Mr. Turbulent, who looked big with heroics, was quite provoked to see he had no chance of giving them vent. They each outstayed the patience of the other, and at last both went off together. Some hours after, however, while I was dressing, the canon returned. I could not admit him, and bid Goter tell him at the door I was not visible. He desired he might wait till I was ready, as he had business of importance. I would not let him into the next room, but said he might stay in the eating-parlour. When I was dressed I sent Goter to bring him in. She came back, grinning and colouring,; she had not found him, she said, but only Mrs. Schwellenberg, who was there alone, and had Page 209 called her in to know what she wanted. She answered she came to seek for a gentleman. "There's no gentleman," she cried, "to come into my parlour. it is not permit. When he comes I will have it locked up." O, ho, my poor careful canon! thought I. However, soon after a tap again at my door introduced him. He said he had been waiting below in the passage, as he saw Madame Schwellenberg in the parlour, and did not care to have her know him; but his business was to settle bringing M. de Lalande to see me in the evening. I told him I was much honoured, and so forth, but that I received no evening company, as I was officially engaged. He had made the appointment, he said, and could not break it without affronting him; besides, he gave me to understand it would be an honour to me for ever to be visited by so great an astronomer. I agreed as to that, and was forced, moreover, to agree to all the rest, no resource remaining I mentioned to her majesty the state of the case. She thought the canon very officious, and disapproved the arrangement, but saw it was unavoidable. But when the dinner came I was asked by the présidente, "What for send you gentlemen to my parlour?" " I was dressing, ma'am, and could not possibly receive company in mine, and thought the other empty." "Empty or full is the same! I won't have it. I will lock up the room when it is done so. No, no, I won't have no gentlemen here; it is not permit, perticklere when they Nvon't not speak to me!" I then heard that "a large man, what you call," had entered that sacred domain, and seeing there a lady, had quitted it "bob short!" I immediately explained all that had passed, for I had no other way to save myself from an imputation of favouring the visits and indiscretion of this most gallant canon. "Vell, when he comes so often he might like you. For what won't you not marry him?" This was coming to the point, and so seriously, I found myself obliged to be serious in answer, to avoid misconstruction, and to assure her, that were he Archbishop of Canterbury, and actually at my feet, I would not become archbishopess. "Vell, you been right when you don't not like him; I don't not like the men neither: not one from them!" Page 210 So this settled us very amicably till tea-time, and in the midst of that, with a room full of people, I was called out by Westerhaults to Dr. Shepherd! Mrs. Schwellenberg herself actually te-he'd at this, and I could not possibly help laughing myself, but I hurried into the next room, where I found him with his friend, M. de Lalande. What a reception awaited me! how unexpected a one from a famed and great astronomer. COMPLIMENTS FROM A FAMOUS FOREIGN ASTRONOMER. M. de Lalande advanced to meet me---I will not be quite positive it was on tiptoe, but certainly with a mixture of jerk and strut that could not be quite flat-footed. He kissed my hand with the air of a petit-maître, and then broke forth into such an harangue of éloges, so solemn with regard to its own weight and importance, and so fade(291) with respect to the little personage addressed, that I could not help thinking it lucky for the planets, stars, and sun, they were not bound to hear his comments, though obliged to undergo his calculations. On my part sundry profound reverences, with now and then an "O, monsieur!" or "c'est trop d'honneur," acquitted me so well, that the first harangue being finished, on the score of general and grand reputation, éloge the second began, on the excellency with which "cette célèbre demoiselle" spoke French! This may surprise you, my dear friends; but You must consider M. de Lalande is a great discoverer. Well, but had you seen Dr. Shepherd! he looked lost in sleek delight and wonder, that a person to whom he had introduced M. de Lalande should be an object for such fine speeches. This gentleman's figure, meanwhile, corresponds no better with his discourse than his scientific profession, for he is an ugly little wrinkled old man, with a fine showy waistcoat, rich lace ruffles, and the grimaces of a dentist. I believe he chose to display that a Frenchman of science could be also a man of gallantry. I was seated between them, but the good doctor made no greater interruption to the florid professor than I did myself; he only grinned applause, with placid, but ineffable satisfaction. Nothing therefore intervening, éloge the third followed, after a pause no longer than might be necessary for due admiration Page 211 of éloge the second. This had for sujet the fair female sex; how the ladies were now all improved; how they could write, and read, and spell; how a man now-a-days might talk with them and be understood, and how delightful it was to see such pretty creatures turned rational! And all this, of course, interspersed with particular observations and most pointed applications; nor was there in the whole string of compliments which made up the three bouquets, one single one amongst them that might have disgraced any petit maître to utter, or any petite maîtresse to hear. The third being ended, a rather longer pause ensued. I believe he was dry, but I offered him no tea. I would not voluntarily be accessory to detaining such great personages from higher avocations. I wished him next to go and study the stars: from the moon he seemed so lately arrived there was little occasion for another journey. I flatter myself he was of the same opinion, for the fourth éloge was all upon his unhappiness in tearing himself away from so much merit, and ended in as many bows as had accompanied his entrance. I suppose, in going, he said, with a shrug, to the canon, "M. le docteur, c'est bien gênant, mais il faut dire des jolies choses aux dames!"(293) He was going the next day to see Dr. Maskelyne's observatory. Well! I have had him first in mine! I was obliged on my return to the tea-room to undergo much dull raillery from my fair companion, and Much of wonder that "since the canon had such good preferment" I did not "marry him at once," for he "would not come so often if he did not want it." THE PRINCE EYES MISS BURNEY CURIOUSLY. Tuesday, Aug. 18.--The Duke of York's birthday was kept this day, instead of Saturday, that Sunday morning might not interfere with the ball. The Prince of Wales arrived early, while I was yet with the queen. He kissed her hand, and she sent for the princesses. Only Princess Elizabeth and Princess Sophia were dressed. Her majesty went into the next room with Mrs. Sandys, to have her shoes put on, with which she always finishes. The prince and princesses then chatted away most fluently. Page 212 Princess Elizabeth frequently addressed me with great sweetness but the prince only with curious eyes. Do not, however, understand that his looks were either haughty or impertinent far from it ; they were curious, however, in the extreme. COLONEL MANNERS'S BEATING. Colonel Manners made me laugh as If I had been at a farce, by his history of the late Westminster election, in which Lord John Townshend conquered Lord Hood. Colonel Manners is a most eager and active partisan on the side of the government, but so indiscreet, that he almost regularly gets his head broke at every contested election; and he relates it as a thing of course. I inquired if he pursued his musical studies, so happily begun with Colonel Wellbred? "Why," answered he, "not much, because of the election; but the thing is, to get an ear: however, I think I have got one, because I know a tune when I hear it, if it's one that I've heard before a good many times so I think that's a proof. but I can never get asked to a concert, and that keeps me a little behind." "Perhaps," cried I, "your friends conclude you have music enough in your three months' waiting to satisfy you for all the year?" "O, ma'am, as to that, I'd just as lief hear so many pots and pans rattled together; one noise is just as well as another to me." I asked him whether his electioneering with so much activity did not make his mother, Lady Robert, a little uneasy?--N.B. She is a methodist. "O, it does her a great deal of good," cried he;"for I could never get her to meddle before ; but when I'd had my head broke, it provoked her so, she went about herself canvassing among the good people,--and she got us twenty votes." "So then," cried Colonel Goldsworthy, "there are twenty good people in the world? That's your calculation, is it?" Mr. Fisher, who just then came in, and knew nothing of what had passed, starting the election, said to Colonel Manners, "So, sir, you have been beat, I hear!" He meant only his party ; but his person having shared the same fate, occasioned a violent shout among the rest at this innocent speech, and its innocent answer - for Colonel Man- Page 213 ners, looking only a little surprised, simply said, "Yes, I was beat, a little." "A little, sir?" exclaimed Mr. Fisher, "no, a great deal you were shamefully beat--thrashed thoroughly." In the midst of a violent second shout, Colonel Manners only said, "Well, I always hated all that party, and now I hate them worse than ever." "Ay, that I'll be bound for you," cried Colonel Goldsworthy. "Yes for having been so drubbed by them," cried Mr. Fisher. As I now, through all his good humour, saw Colonel Manners colour a little, I said in a low voice to Mr. Fisher, "Pray is it in innocence, or in malice, that you use these terms." I saw his innocence by his surprise, and I whispered him the literal state of all he said; he was quite shocked, and coloured in his turn, apologising instantly to Colonel Manners, and protesting he had never heard of his personal ill usage, but only meant the defeat of his party. MR. FAIRLY IS DISCUSSED BY HIS BROTHER EQUERRIES. Everybody was full of Mr. Fairly's appointment, and spoke of it with pleasure. General Budé had seen him in town, where he had remained some days, to take the oaths, I believe, necessary for his place. General Budé has long been intimate with him, and spoke of his character exactly as it has appeared to me; and Colonel Goldsworthy, who was at Westminster with him, declared he believed a better man did not exist. "This, in particular," cried General Budé, "I must say of Fairly: whatever he thinks right he pursues straightforward and I believe there is not a sacrifice upon earth that he would not make, rather than turn a moment out of the path that he had an opinion it was his duty to keep in." They talked a good deal of his late lady; none of them knew her but very slightly, as she was remarkably reserved. "More than reserved," cried General Budé, "she was quite cold. Yet she loved London and public life, and Fairly never had any taste for them; in that they were very mal assortis, but in all other things very happy." "Yes," cried Colonel Goldsworthy, "and how shall we give praise enough to a man that would be happy himself, and make Page 214 his wife so too, for all that difference of opinion ? for it was all his management, and good address, and good temper. I hardly know such another man." General Budé then related many circumstances of his most exemplary conduct during the illness of his poor suffering wife, and after her loss; everybody, indeed, upon the occasion of this new appointment, has broke forth to do justice to his deserving it. Mrs. Ariana Egerton, who came twice to drink tea with me on my being sensa Cerbera, told me that her brother-in-law, Colonel Masters, who had served with him at Gibraltar, protested there was not an officer in the army of a nobler and higher character, both professional and personal. She asked me a thousand questions of what I thought about Miss Fuzilier? She dislikes her so very much, she cannot bear to think of her becoming Mrs. Fairly. She has met with some marks of contempt from her in their official meetings at St. James's, that cannot be pardoned. Miss Fuziller, indeed, seemed to me formerly, when I used to meet her in company, to have an uncertainty of disposition that made her like two persons; now haughty, silent, and supercilious--and then gentle, composed, and interesting. She Is, however, very little liked, the worst being always what most spreads abroad. BARON TRENCK: MR. TURBULENT"S RAILLERY. Sept. 1.-Peace to the manes of the poor slaughtered partridges! I finished this morning the "Memoirs of Baron Trenck," which have given me a great deal of entertainment; I mean in the first volume, the second containing not more matter than might fill four pages. But the singular hardiness, gallantry, ferocity, and ingenuity of this copy of the knights of ancient times, who has happened to be born since his proper epoch, have wonderfully drawn me on, and I could not rest without finishing his adventures. They are reported to be chiefly of his own invention; but I really find an air of self-belief in his relations, that inclines me to think he has but narrated what he had persuaded himself was true. His ill-usage is such as to raise the utmost indignation in every reader and if it really affected his memory and imagination, and became thence the parent of some few embellishments and episodes, I can neither wonder nor feel the interest of his narrative diminished. Sept. 2.-Mr. Turbulent was in high rage that I was utterly Page 215 invisible since my return from Cheltenham; he protested he had called seven times at my door without gaining admission, and never was able to get in but when " Dr. Shepherd had led the way. He next began a mysterious attack upon the proceedings of Cheltenham. He had heard, he said, strange stories of flirtations there. I could not doubt what he meant, but I would not seem to understand him: first, because I know not from whom he has been picking up this food for his busy spirit, since no one there appeared collecting it for him ; and secondly, because I would not degrade an acquaintance which I must hope will prove as permanent as it is honourable, by conceiving the word flirtation to be possibly connected with it. By every opportunity, in the course of the day, he renewed this obscure raillery; but I never would second it, either by question or retort, and therefore it cannot but die away unmeaningly as it was born. Some effect, however, it seems to have had upon him, who has withdrawn all his own heroics, while endeavouring to develop what I have received elsewhere. AMIABLE MRS. SCHWELLENBERG AGAIN. Sept. 4.-To-day there was a Drawing-room, and I had the blessing of my dearest father while it lasted; but not solus; he was accompanied by my mother; and my dear Esther and her little innocent Sophy spent part of the time with us. I am to be god-mother to the two little ones, Esther's and James's. Heaven bless them! We returned to Kew to a late dinner; and, indeed, I had one of the severest evenings I ever passed, where my heart took no share in unkindness and injustice. I was wearied in the extreme, as I always am on these drawing-room days, which begin with full hair-dressing at six o'clock in the morning, and hardly ever allow any breakfast time, and certainly only standing, except while frizzing, till the drawing-room commences; and then two journeys in that decked condition--and then another dressing, with three dressing attendances--and a dinner at near seven o'clock. Yet, not having power to be very amusing after all this, I was sternly asked by Mrs. Schwellenberg, "For what I did not talk?" I answered simply, "Because I was tired." "You tired!--what have you done? when I used to do so much more- -you tired! what have you to do but to be happy: Page 216 --have you the laces to buy? have you the wardrobe to part? have you--you tired? Vell, what will become next, when you have every happiness!--you might not be tired. No, I can't bear It." This, and so much more than it would be possible to write, all uttered with a haughtiness and contempt that the lowest servant could not have brooked receiving, awoke me pretty completely, though before I was scarce able to keep my eyelids a moment open; but so sick I turned, that indeed it was neither patience nor effort that enabled me to hear her; I had literally hardly strength, mental or bodily, to have answered her. Every happiness mine!--O gracious heaven! thought I, and is this the companion of my leisure--the associate of my life! Ah, my dear friends, I will not now go on--I turn sick again. A ROYAL JOKE. Sept. 29.-The birth-day of our lovely eldest princess. It happens to be also the birth-day of Miss Goldsworthy; and her majesty, in a sportive humour, bid me, as soon as she was dressed, go and bring down the two "Michaelmas geese." I told the message to the Princess Augusta, who repeated It in its proper words. I attended them to the queen's dressing- room, and there had the pleasure to see the cadeaux presentations. The birth-days in this house are made extremely interesting at the moment, by the reciprocations of presents and congratulations in this affectionate family. Were they but attended with less of toil (I hate to add ette, for I am sure it is not little toil), I should like them amazingly. COLONEL GOLDSWORTHY'S BREACH OF ETIQUETTE. Mrs. Schwellenberg has become both colder and fiercer. I cannot now even meet her eyes-they are almost terrifying. Nothing upon earth having passed between us, nor the most remote subject of offence having occurred, I have only one thing on which to rest my conjectures, for the cause of this newly-awakened evil spirit, and this is from the gentlemen. They had all of late been so wearied that they could not submit even for a quarter of an hour to her society : they had swallowed a dish of tea and quitted the room all in five minutes, and Colonel Goldsworthy in particular, when without any companion in his waiting, had actually always fallen asleep, Page 217 even during that short interval, or at least shut his eyes, to save himself the toil of speaking. This she brooked very ill, but I was esteemed innocent, and therefore made, occasionally, the confidant of her complaints. But lately, that she has been ill, and kept upstairs every night, she has always desired me to come to her as soon as tea was over, which, she observed, "need not keep me five minutes." On the contrary, however, the tea is now at least an hour, and often more. I have been constantly received with reproaches for not coming sooner, and compelled to declare I had not been sooner at liberty. This has occasioned a deep and visible resentment, all against them, yet vented upon me, not in acknowledged displeasure--pride there interfered--but in constant ill-humour, ill-breeding, and ill-will. At length, however, she has broken out into one inquiry, which, if favourably answered, might have appeased all; but truth was too strongly in the way. A few evenings after her confinement she very gravely said, "Colonel Goldsworthy always sleeps with me! sleeps he with you the same?" In the midst of all my irksome discomfort, it was with difficulty I could keep my countenance at this question, which I was forced to negative. The next evening she repeated it. "Vell, sleeps he yet with you- -Colonel Goldsworthy?" "Not yet, ma'am," I hesitatingly answered. "O! ver vell! he will sleep with nobody but me! O, i von't come down." And a little after she added, "I believe he vill marry you." "I believe not, ma'am," I answered. And then, very gravely,, she proposed him to me, saying he only wanted a little encouragement, for he was always declaring he wished for a wife, and yet wanted no fortune-" so for what won't you not have him?" I assured her we were both perfectly well satisfied apart, and equally free from any thoughts of each other. "Then for what," she cried, "won't you have Dr. Shepherd?" She Is now in the utmost haste to dispose of me! And then she added she had been told that Dr. Shepherd would marry me! She is an amazing woman ! Alas, I might have told her I knew too well what it was to be tied to a companion ill-assorted and unbeloved, where I could not help myself, to Page 218 make any such experiment as a volunteer! If she asks me any more about Colonel Goldsworthy and his sleeping, I think I will answer I am too near-sighted to be sure if he is awake or not! However, I cannot but take this stroke concerning the table extremely ill; for though amongst things of the very least consequence in itself, it is more openly designed as an affront than any step that has been taken with me yet. I have given the colonel a hint, however,-that he may keep awake in future. . . . ILLNESS OF MRS. SCHWELLENBERG. Oct. 2.-Mrs. Schwellenberg, very ill indeed, took leave of the queen at St. James's, to set off for Weymouth, in company with Mrs. Hastings. I was really very sorry for her; she was truly in a situation Of suffering, from bodily pain, the most pitiable. I thought, as I looked at her, that if the ill-humours I so often experience could relieve her, I would consent to bear them unrepining, in preference to seeing or knowing her so ill. But it is just the contrary; spleen and ill-temper only aggravate disease, and while they involve others in temporary participation of their misery, twine it around themselves in bandages almost stationary. She was civil, too, poor woman. I suppose when absent she could not well tell why she had ever been otherwise. GENERAL GRENVILLE'S REGIMENT AT DRILL. Oct. 9.-I go on now pretty well; and I am so much acquainted with my party, that when no strangers are added, I begin to mind nothing but the first entree of my male visitants. My royal mistress is all sweetness to me; Miss Planta is most kind and friendly; General Budé is ever the same, and ever what I do not wish to alter; Colonel Goldsworthy seems coming round to good-humour; and even General Grenville begins to grow sociable. He has quitted the corner into which he used to cast his long figure, merely to yawn and lounge ; and though yawn and lounge he does still, and must, I believe, to the end of the chapter, he yet does it in society, and mixes between it loud sudden laughter at what is occasionally said, and even here and there a question relative to what is going forward. Nay-yesterday he even seated himself at the tea Page 219 table, and amused himself by playing with my work-box, and making sundry inquiries about its contents. Oct. 10.-This evening, most unwittingly, I put my new neighbour's good-humour somewhat to the test. He asked me whether I had walked out in the morning? Yes, I answered, I always walked. "And in the Little park?" cried he. Yes, I said, and to Old Windsor, and round the park wall, and along the banks of the Thames, and almost to Beaumont Lodge, and in the avenue of the Great park, and in short, in all the vicinage of Windsor. "But in the Little park?" he cried. Still I did not understand him, but plainly answered, "Yes, this morning,; and indeed many mornings." "But did you see nothing--remark nothing there? No, not that I recollect, except some soldiers drilling." You never heard such a laugh as now broke forth from all for, alas for my poor eyes, there had been in the Little park General Grenville's whole regiment, with all his officers, and himself at their head! Fortunately it is reckoned one of the finest in the king's service : this I mentioned, adding that else I could never again appear before him. He affected to be vehemently affronted, but hardly knew how, even in joke, to appear so ; and all the rest helped the matter on, by saying that they should know now how to distinguish his regiment, which henceforth must always be called " the drill." The truth is, as soon as I perceived a few red-coats I had turned another way, to avoid being marched at, and therefore their number and splendour had all been thrown away upon me. (278) "Cerbera" was Fanny's not inappropriate name for Mrs. Schwellenberg.-ED. (279) By William Falconer, born at Edinburgh in 1730. His poem, "The Shipwreck," was suggested by his own experience at sea, and was first published in 1762. Falconer sailed for Bengal in 1769, the vessel touched at the Cape in December, and was never heard of more.-ED. (280) In the "European Magazine" for May 1788, appeared an article from the pen of Baretti, headed "On Signora Piozzi's publication of Dr. Johnson's Letters, Stricture the First." It is filled with coarse, personal abuse of the lady, whom the author terms "the frontless female, who goes now by the mean appellation of Piozzi." "Stricture the Second," in the same tone, appeared the following month, and the "Third," which closed the series, in August of the same year. In the last number Baretti comments, with excessive bitterness, on Mrs. Piozzi's second marriage.-ED. (281) "Original Love-letters between a Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Station." Dublin, 1784. Though by no means devoid of "nonsense and romance," the little book is not altogether undeserving of Colonel Digby's encomium. The story is very slight, and concludes, quite unnecessarily and rather unexpectedly, with the death of the gentleman, just as his good fortune seems assured.-ED. (282) Robert Raikes, who was born at Gloucester in 1735, was a printer and the son of a printer. His father was proprietor of the "Gloucester journal." In conjunction with the Rev. Mr. Stocks, Raikes founded the institution of Sunday Schools in 1781. He died at Gloucester in 1811.-ED. (283) "Cui Bono? or, an Inquiry what Benefits can arise either to the English or the Americans, the French, Spaniards, or Dutch, from the greatest victories, or successes, in the present War, being a Series of Letters, addressed to Monsieur Necker, late Controller- General of the Finances of France," By Josiah Tucker, D.D., published at Gloucester, 1781. The pamphlet was written in the advocacy of a general peace, and attracted much attention. The third edition appeared in 1782.-ED, (284) Fanny alludes to an old adventure of Baretti's. He was accosted in the Haymarket by a prostitute, October 6, 1769. The woman was importunate, and the irritable Italian struck her on the hand; upon which three men came up and attacked him. He then drew a dagger in self defence, and mortally wounded one of his assailants. Baretti was tried at the Old Bailey for murder, October 20, and acquitted; Johnson, Burke, and Garrick appearing as witnesses to his character.-ED. (285) With all Fanny's partiality for the "sweet queen," the evidences of that sweet creature's selfishness keep turning up in a very disagreeable manner-ED. (286)) "The Country Girl," Which is still occasionally performed, is an adaptation by Garrick of one of the most brilliant, and most indecent, of Restoration comedies--Wycherley's "Country Wife." Mrs. Jordan played the part of "Peggy," the "Margery Punchwife" of Wycherley's play. It was in this part that she made her first appearance in London, at Drury Lane, October 18, 1785. She was one of the most admired actresses of her time. Genest, who saw her, writes of her, "As an actress she never had a superior in her proper line Mrs. Jordan's Country Girl, Romp, Miss Hoyden, and all characters of that description were exquisite--in breeches parts no actress can be put in competition with her but Mrs. Woffington, and to Mrs. Woffington she was as superior in point of voice as Mrs. Woffington was superior to her in beauty" (viii. p. 430). Mrs. Jordan died at St. Cloud, July 5, 1816, aged fifty. There is an admirable portrait of her by Romney in the character of the "Country Girl."-ED. (287) See ante, vol. i., p. 151.-ED. (288) Fanny's cousin, the son of Dr. Burney's brother, Richard Burney of Worcester.-ED. (289) The poem in question is the "Ode to the Evening Star," the fifteenth of the first hook of Odes. Mr. Akenside, having paid his tear on fair Olympia's virgin tomb, roams in quest of Philomela's bower, and desires the evening star to send its golden ray to guide him. it is pretty, however. The first stanza runs as follows:-- "To night retired, the queen of heaven With young Endymion strays; And now to Hesper it is given Awhile to rule the vacant sky, Till she shall to her lamp supply A stream of lighter rays."-ED. (290) Joseph jérome le Français de Lalande, one of the most distinguished of French astronomers. He was born in 1732, and died in 1807.-ED. (291) Silly: insipid. (292) 'Tis too much honour." (293) "'Tis very troublesome, but one must say pretty things to ladies." Page 220 SECTION 14 (1788-9.) THE KING'S ILLNESS. [Fanny's vivid account of the king's illness, from the autumn of 1788 to the spring of 1789, needs no recommendation to the reader. It requires only to be supplemented by a very brief sketch of the consequent proceedings in Parliament, which excited so much foolish indignation in the royal household, and in Fanny herself. That she should display more feeling than judgment under circumstances so affecting, was, perhaps, only to be expected, but it is none the less evident, from certain passages in the " Diary, that the tainted Court atmosphere had already clouded, to some extent, her naturally clear understanding. The insanity of a sovereign is, to her, a purely private and personal matter, with respect to which the only business of the public is to offer up prayers for his majesty's speedy recovery. That ministers should take steps to provide for the performance of the royal functions in government, during the period of the king's incapacity, is an act of effrontery at which she wants words to express her indignation. Mrs. Schwellenberg, who thought it treason to say that the King was ever at all indisposed, was scarcely more unreasonable in this particular than Miss Fanny Burney, who shuddered, with sentimental horror, at the mention of a Regency Bill. About the commencement of November, 1788, there was no longer any doubt as to the serious nature of the king's malady. At the meeting of Parliament the prime minister, Mr. Pitt, Moved that a committee be appointed to examine the physicians attendant upon his majesty. This motion was agreed to, and on the 10th of December the report of the committee was laid upon the table of the House. The physicians agreed that his Majesty was then totally incapable of attending to public business. They agreed also in holding Out strong hopes of his ultimate recovery, but none of them would venture to give any opinion as to the probable duration of his derangement. Upon this, Mr. Pitt Page 221 moved for a committee to examine and report upon such precedents as might be found of proceedings in cases of the interruption, from any cause, of the personal exercise of the royal authority. The motion was strenuously resisted by the opposition, headed by Mr. Fox, who argued that whenever the sovereign was incapacitated from performing the functions of his office, the heir-apparent, if of full age and capacity, had an inalienable right to act as his substitute. This doctrine seems certainly inconsistent with the liberal principles professed by the opposition, but it will be remembered that at this time the Prince of Wales was politically in alliance with that party, and that he was on terms of friendship with Mr. Fox himself. On the other hand, Pitt protested that in such circumstances the heir-apparent had no more claim to exercise, as a matter of right, the royal functions, than any other Subject of the crown ; and that it belonged only to the two Houses of Parliament to make such provision for supplying the deficiency in the government as they should think proper. As to the person of the Regent there was no dispute ; the question was, simply, whether the Prince of Wales should assume the Regency in his own right, or by the authority of Parliament. Pitt's motion being carried, the committee was accordingly appointed, and proceeded at once to make their examination and report. The prime minister then (December 16) moved two resolutions, declaring, firstly, that the king was incapable of performing the functions of his office, and, secondly, that it was the duty of Parliament to provide for the exercise of those functions. In spite of Fox's opposition both resolutions were carried, and a third resolution was moved by Pitt, and passed (December 23), empowering the lord chancellor to affix the great seal to the intended Regency Bill. Early in January, 1789, a fresh examination of the physicians Was voted, but gave no more definite hopes of an early recovery. Pitt now wrote to the Prince of Wales, informing him of the plan intended to be pursued : that the prince should be invested with the authority of Regent, under certain restrictions, regarding especially the granting of peerages, offices, or pensions ; and that the care of the king's person and the control of the royal household should remain with the queen. The prince, in reply, expressed his readiness to accept the Regency, while protesting strongly against the proposed limitations of his authority ; and on the 16th of January, a bill, in which the prime ministers scheme was embodied, was introduced into the House. The question was actively debated in both Houses, until, in the latter part of February, the king's recovery put a stop to further proceedings.-ED.] Page 222 UNCERTAIN STATE OF THE KING's HEALTH. Kew, Friday, Oct. 17.-Our return to Windsor is postponed till to- morrow. The king is not well; he has not been quite well some time, yet nothing I hope alarming, though there is an uncertainty as to his complaint not very satisfactory; so precious, too, is his health. Oct. 18.-The king was this morning better. My royal mistress told me Sir George Baker(294) was to settle whether we returned to Windsor to-day or to-morrow. Sunday, Oct. 19.-The Windsor journey is again postponed, and the king is but very indifferent. Heaven preserve him! there is something unspeakably alarming in his smallest indisposition. I am very much with the queen, who, I see, is very uneasy, but she talks not of it. We are to stay here some time longer, and so unprepared were we for more than a day or two, that our distresses are prodigious, even for clothes to wear; and as to books, there are not three amongst us; and for company only Mr. de Luc and Miss Planta; and so, in mere desperation for employment, I have just begun a tragedy.(295) We are now in so spiritless a situation that my mind would bend to nothing less sad, even in fiction. But I am very glad something of this kind has occurred to me; it may while away the tediousness of this unsettled, unoccupied, unpleasant period. Oct. 20.-The king was taken very ill in the night, and we have all been cruelly frightened - but it went off, and, thank heaven! he is now better. I had all my morning devoted to receiving inquiring visits. Lady Effingham, Sir George Howard, Lady Frances Howard, all came from Stoke to obtain news of the king; his least illness spreads in a moment. Lady Frances Douglas came also. She is wife of the Archibald Douglas who caused the famous Hamilton trial in the House of Peers, for his claim to the Douglas name.(296) She is fat, and dunch, and heavy, and ugly; otherwise, they say, agreeable enough. Page 223 Mr. Turbulent has been sent for, and he enlivens the scene somewhat. He is now all he should be, and so altered ! scarce a flight left. Oct. 21.-The good and excellent king is again better, and we expect to remove to Windsor in a day or two. Oct. 23.-The king continues to mend, thank God! Saturday we hope to return to Windsor. Had not this composition fit seized me, societyless, and bookless, and viewless as I am, I know not how I could have whiled away my being; but my tragedy goes on, and fills up all vacancies. Oct. 25.-Yesterday was so much the same, I have not marked it; not so to-day. The king was so much better that our Windsor journey at length took place, with permission of Sir George Baker, the only physician his majesty will admit. Miss Cambridge was with me to the last moment. I have been hanging up a darling remembrance of my revered, incomparable Mrs. Delany. Her "Sacharissa" is now over my chimney. I could not at first bear it, but now I look at it, and call her back to my eye's mind perpetually. This, like the tragedy I have set about, suits the turn of things in this habitation. I had a sort of conference with his Majesty, or rather I was the object to whom he spoke, with a manner so uncommon, that a high fever alone could account for it, a rapidity, a hoarseness of voice, a volubility, an earnestness--a vehemence, rather--it startled me inexpressibly; yet with a graciousness exceeding even all I ever met with before--it was almost kindness! Heaven--Heaven preserve him! The queen grows more Page 224 and more uneasy. She alarms me sometimes for herself, at other times she has a sedateness that wonders me still more. Sunday, Oct. 26-The king was prevailed upon not to go to chapel this morning. I met him in the passage from the queen's room; he stopped me, and conversed upon his health near half-an-hour, still with that extreme quickness of Speech and manner that belongs to fever; and he hardly sleeps, he tells me, one minute all night; indeed, if he recovers not his rest, a most delirious fever seems to threaten him. He is all agitation, all emotion, yet all benevolence and goodness, even to a degree that makes it touching to hear him speak. He assures everybody of his health; he seems only fearful to give uneasiness to others, yet certainly he is better than last night. Nobody speaks of his illness, nor what they think of it. Oct. 29.-The dear and good king again gains ground, and the queen becomes easier. To-day Miss Planta told me she heard Mr. Fairly was confined at Sir R- F--'s, and therefore she would now lay any wager he was to marry Miss F--.(297) In the evening I inquired what news of him of General Bude: he told me he was still confined at a friend's house, but avoided naming where--probably from suggesting that, however little truth there may yet have been in the report, more may belong to it from this particular intercourse. THE KING COMPLAINS OF WANT OF SLEEP. Nov. 1.-Our king does not advance in amendment; he grows so weak that he walks like a gouty man, yet has such spirits that he has talked away his voice, and is so hoarse it is painful to hear him. The queen is evidently in great uneasiness. God send him better! She read to me to-day a lecture of Hunter's. During the reading, twice, at pathetic passages, my poor queen shed tears. "How nervous I am?" she cried; "I am quite a fool! Don't you think so?" No, ma'am," was all I dared answer. She revived, however, finished the lecture, and went upstairs and played upon the Princess Augusta's harpsichord. The king was hunting. Her anxiety for his return was Page 225 greater than ever. The moment he arrived he sent a page to desire to have coffee and take his bark in the queen's dressing- room. She said she would pour it out herself, and sent to inquire how he drank it. The king is very sensible of the great change there is in himself, and of her disturbance at it. It seems, but heaven avert it! a threat of a total breaking up of the constitution. This, too, seems his own idea. I was present at his first seeing Lady Effingham on his return to Windsor this last time. "My dear Effy," he cried, "you see me, all at once, an old man." I was so much affected by this exclamation, that I wished to run out of the room. Yet I could not but recover when Lady Effingham, in her well-meaning but literal way, composedly answered, "We must all grow old, sir,- -I am sure I do." He then produced a walking-stick which he had just ordered. "He could not," he said, "get on without it; his strength seemed diminishing hourly." He took the bark, he said But the queen," he cried, "is my physician, and no man need have a better; she is my friend, and no Man can have a better." How the queen commanded herself I cannot conceive; but there was something so touching in this speech, from his hoarse voice and altered countenance, that it overset me very much. Nor can I ever forget him in what passed this night. When I came to the queen's dressing-room he was still with her. He constantly conducts her to it before he retires to his own. He was begging her not to speak to him when he got to his room, that he might fall asleep, as he felt great want of that refreshment. He repeated this desire, I believe, at least a hundred times, though, far enough from need Ing it, the poor queen never uttered one syllable! He then applied to me, saying he was really very well, except in that one particular, that he could not sleep. The kindness and benevolence of his manner all this time was most penetrating: he seemed to have no anxiety but to set the queen at rest, and no wish but to quiet and give pleasure to all around him, To me, he never yet spoke with such excess of benignity: he appeared even solicitous to satisfy me that he should do well, and to spare all alarm; but there was a hurry in his manner and voice that indicated sleep to be page 226 indeed wanted. Nor could I, all night, forbear foreseeing "He sleeps now, or to-morrow he will be surely delirious!" Sunday, Nov. 2.-The king was better, and prevailed upon to give up going to the early prayers. The queen and princesses went. After they were gone, and I was following towards my room, the king called after me, and he kept me in discourse a full half hour nearly all the time they were away. It was all to the same purport; that he was well, but wanted more rest ; yet he said he had slept the last night like a child. But his manner, still, was so touchingly kind, so softly gracious, that it doubled my concern to see him so far from well. DISTRESS OF THE QUEEN. Nov. 3.--We are all here in a most uneasy state. The king is better and worse so frequently, and changes so, daily, backwards and forwards, that everything is to be apprehended, if his nerves are not some way quieted. I dreadfully fear he is on the eve of some severe fever. The queen is almost overpowered with some secret terror. I am affected beyond all expression in her presence, to see what struggles she makes to support serenity. To-day she gave up the conflict when I was alone with her, and burst into a violent fit of tears. It was very, very terrible to see! How did I wish her a Susan or a Fredy! To unburthen her loaded mind would be to relieve it from all but inevitable affliction. O, may heaven in its mercy never, never drive me to that solitary anguish more!- I have tried what it would do; I speak from bitter recollection of past melancholy experience. Sometimes she walks up and down the room without uttering a word, but shaking her head frequently, and in evident distress and irresolution. She is often closeted with Miss Goldsworthy, of whom, I believe, she makes inquiry how her brother has found the king, from time to time. The princes both came to Kew, in several visits to the king. The Duke of York has also been here, and his fond father could hardly bear the pleasure of thinking him anxious for his health. "So good," he says "is Frederick!" To-night, indeed, at tea-time, I felt a great shock, in hearing, from General Budé, that Dr, Heberden had been called in. It is true more assistance seemed much wanting, yet the king's rooted aversion to physicians makes any new-comer tremen- Page 227 dous. They said, too, it was merely for counsel, not that his majesty was worse. Nov. 4.-Passed much the same as the days preceding it, the queen in deep distress, the king in a state almost incomprehensible, and all the house uneasy and alarmed. The Drawing-room was again put off, and a steady residence seemed fixed at Windsor. Nov. 5.-I found my poor royal mistress, in the morning, sad and sadder still; something horrible seemed impending, and I saw her whole resource was in religion. We had talked lately much upon solemn Subjects, and she appeared already preparing herself to be resigned for whatever might happen. I was still wholly unsuspicious of the greatness of the cause she had for dread. Illness, a breaking up of the constitution, the payment of sudden infirmity and premature old age for the waste of unguarded health and strength,--these seemed to me the threats awaiting her; and great and grievous enough, yet how short of the fact! I had given up my walks some days; I was too uneasy to quit the house while the queen remained at home, and she now never left it. Even Lady Effingham, the last two days, could not obtain admission; She Could only hear from a page how the royal family went on. At noon the king went out in his chaise, with the princess royal, for an airing. I looked from my window to see him; he was all smiling benignity, but gave so many orders to the postilions, and got in and out of the carriage twice, with such agitation, that again my fear of a great fever hanging over him grew more and more powerful. Alas! how little did I imagine I should see him no more for so long--so black a period! When I went to my poor queen, still worse and worse I found her spirits. She had been greatly offended by some anecdote in a newspaper--the "Morning Herald"--relative to the king's indisposition. She declared the printer should be called to account. She bid me burn the paper, and ruminated upon who could be employed to represent to the editor that he must answer at his peril any further such treasonable paragraphs. I named to her Mr. Fairly, her own servant, and one so peculiarly fitted for any office requiring honour and discretion. "Is he here, then?" she cried. "No," I answered, but he was expected in a few days. I saw her concurrence with this proposal. The princess royal soon returned. She came in cheerfully, and gave, in Page 228 German, a history of the airing, and one that seemed Comforting. Soon after, suddenly arrived the Prince of Wales. He came into the room.- He had just quitted Brighthelmstone. Something passing within seemed to render this meeting awfully distant on both sides. She asked if he should not return to Brighthelmstone? He answered yes, the next day, He desired to speak with her they retired together. FIRST OUTBURST OF THE KING's DELIRIUM. I had but just reached my own room, deeply musing on the state of' things, when a chaise stopped at the rails; and I saw Mr. Fairly and his son Charles alight, and enter the house. He walked lamely, and seemed not yet recovered from his late attack. Though most happy to see him at this alarming time, when I knew he could be most useful, as there is no one to whom the queen opens so confidentially upon her affairs, I had yet a fresh stair to see, by his anticipated arrival, though still lame, that he must have been sent for, and hurried hither. Only Miss Planta dined with me. We were both nearly silent: I was shocked at I scarcely knew what, and she seemed to know too much for speech. She stayed with me till six o'clock, but nothing passed, beyond general solicitude that the king might get better. Meanwhile, a stillness the most uncommon reigned over the whole house. Nobody stirred ; not a voice was heard - not a step, not a motion. I could do nothing but watch, without knowing for what : there seemed a strangeness in the house most extraordinary. At seven o'clock Columb came to tell me that the music was all forbid, and the musicians ordered away ! This was the last step to be expected, so fond as his majesty is -of his concert, and I thought it might have rather soothed him: I could not understand the prohibition; all seemed stranger and stranger. Very late came General Budé. He looked extremely uncomfortable. Later still came Colonel Goldsworthy: his countenance all gloom, and his voice scarce articulating no or yes. General Grenville was gone to town. General Bud asked me if I had seen Mr. Fairly; and last Of all, at length, he also entered. How grave he looked, how shut up in himself! A silent bow was his only salutation Page 229 how changed I thought it,--and how fearful a meeting, SO long expected as a solace! Colonel Goldsworthy was called away: I heard his voice whispering some time in the passage, but he did not return. Various small speeches now dropped, by which I found the house was all in disturbance, and the king in some strange way worse, and the queen taken ill! At length, General Budé said he would go and see if any one was in the music-room. Mr. Fairly said he thought he had better not accompany him, for as he had not yet been seen, his appearance might excite fresh emotion. The general agreed, and went. We were now alone. But I could not speak: neither did Mr. Fairly. I worked---I had begun a hassock for my Fredy. A long and serious pause made me almost turn sick with anxious wonder and fear, and an inward trembling totally disabled me from asking the actual situation of things; if I had not had my work, to employ my eyes and hands, I must have left the room to quiet myself. I fancy he penetrated into all this, though, at first, he had concluded me informed of everything; but he now, finding me silent, began an inquiry whether I was yet acquainted how bad all was become, and how ill the king? I really had no utterance for very alarm, but my look was probably sufficient; he kindly saved me any questions, and related to me the whole of the mysterious horror! O my dear friends, what a history! The king, at dinner, had broken forth into positive delirium, which long had been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics. All the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears. No one knew what was to follow-- no one could conjecture the event. He spoke of the poor queen, in terms of the most tender compassion; he pitied her, he said, from the bottom of his soul; and all her sweet daughters, the lovely princesses--there was no knowing to what we might look forward for them all! I was an almost silent listener ; but, having expressed himself very warmly for all the principal sufferers, he kindly, and with interest, examined me. "How," he cried, "are You? Are you strong? are you stout? can you go through such scenes as these? you do not look much fitted for them." Page 230 "I shall do very well," I cried, "for, at a time such as this, I shall surely forget myself utterly. The queen will be all to me. I shall hardly, I think, feel myself at liberty to be unhappy!" . . . AN ANXIOUS NIGHT. Mr. Fairly stayed with me all the evening, during which we heard no voice, no sound! all was deadly still! At ten o'clock I said, " I must go to my own room, to be in waiting." He determined upon remaining downstairs, in the equerries' apartment, there to wait some intelligence. We parted in mutual expectation of dreadful tidings. In separating, he took my hand, and earnestly recommended me to keep myself stout and firm. If this beginning of the night was affecting, what did it not grow afterwards Two long hours I waited-alone, in silence, in ignorance, in dread! I thought they would never be over; at twelve o'clock I seemed to have spent two whole days in waiting. I then opened my door, to listen, in the passage, if anything seemed stirring. Not a sound could I hear. My apartment seemed wholly separated from life and motion. Whoever was in the house kept at the other end, and not even a servant crossed the stairs or passage by my rooms. I would fain have crept on myself, anywhere in the world, for some inquiry, or to see but a face, and hear a voice, but I did not dare risk losing a sudden summons. I re-entered my room and there passed another endless hour, in conjectures too horrible to relate. A little after one, I heard a step--my door opened--and a page said I must come to the queen. I could hardly get along--hardly force myself into the room. dizzy I felt, almost to falling. But, the first shock passed, I became more collected. Useful, indeed, proved the previous lesson of the evening : it had stilled, If not fortified my mind, which had else, in a scene Such is this, been all tumult and emotion. My poor royal mistress! never can I forget her countenance--pale, ghastly pale she looked; she was seated to be undressed, and attended by Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave and Miss Goldsworthy ; her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet. These two ladies assisted me to undress her, or rather I assisted them, for they were firmer, from being Page 231 longer present; my shaking hands and blinded eyes could scarce be of any use. I gave her some camphor julep, which had been ordered her by Sir George Baker. "How cold I am!" she cried, and put her hand on mine; marble it felt! and went to my heart's core! The king, at the instance of Sir George Baker, had consented to sleep in the next apartment, as the queen was ill. For himself, he would listen to nothing. Accordingly, a bed was put up for him, by his own order, in the queen's second dressing-room, immediately adjoining to the bed-room. He would not be further removed. Miss Goldsworthy was to sit up with her, by the king's direction. I would fain have remained in the little dressing-room, on the other side the bed-room, but she would not permit it. She ordered Sandys, her wardrobe-woman, in the place of Mrs. Thielky, to sit up there. Lady Elizabeth also pressed to stay; but we were desired to go to our own rooms. How reluctantly did I come away ! how hardly to myself leave her! Yet I went to bed, determined to preserve my strength to the utmost of my ability, for the service of my unhappy mistress. I could not, however, sleep. I do not suppose an eye was closed in the house all night. Nov. 6.-I rose at six, dressed in haste by candle-light, and unable to wait for my summons in a suspense so awful, I stole along the passage in the dark, a thick fog intercepting all faint light, to see if I could meet with Sandys, or any one, to tell me how the night had passed. When I came to the little dressing-room, I stopped, irresolute what to do. I heard men's voices; I was seized with the most cruel alarm at such a sound in her majesty's dressing-room. I waited some time, and then the door opened, and I saw Colonel Goldsworthy and Mr. Batterscomb.(298) I was relieved from my first apprehension, yet shocked enough to see them there at this early hour. They had both sat up there all night, as well as Sandys. Every page, both of the king and queen, had also sat up, dispersed in the passages and ante-rooms! and O what horror in every face I met! I waited here, amongst them, till Sandys was ordered by the queen to carry her a pair of gloves. I could not resist Page 232 the opportunity to venture myself before her. I glided into the room, but stopped at the door: she was in bed, sitting up; Miss Goldsworthy was on a stool by her side! I feared approaching without permission, yet could not prevail with myself to retreat. She was looking down, and did not see me. Miss Goldsworthy, turning round, said, "'Tis Miss Burney, ma'am." She leaned her head forward, and in a most soft manner, said, "Miss Burney, how are you?" Deeply affected, I hastened up to her, but, in trying to speak, burst into an irresistible torrent of tears. My dearest friends, I do it at this moment again, and can hardly write for them; yet I wish you to know all this piercing history right. She looked like death--colourless and wan; but nature is infectious; the tears gushed from her own eyes, and a perfect agony of weeping ensued, which, once begun, she could not stop; she did not, indeed, try; for when it subsided, and she wiped her eyes, she said, "I thank you, Miss Burney--you have made me cry-- it is a great relief to me--I had not been able to cry before, all this night long." O, what a scene followed! what a scene was related! The king, in the middle of the night, had insisted upon seeing if his queen was not removed from the house and he had come into her room, with a candle in his hand, opened the bed- curtains, and satisfied himself she was there, and Miss Goldsworthy by her side. This observance of his directions had much soothed him; but he stayed a full half hour, and the depth of terror during that time no words can paint. The fear of such another entrance was now so strongly upon the nerves of the poor queen, that she could hardly support herself. THE KING'S DELIRIOUS CONDITION. The king-the royal sufferer-was still in the next room, attended by Sir George Baker and Dr. Heberden, and his pages, with Colonel Goldsworthy occasionally, and as he called for him. He kept talking unceasingly; his voice was so lost in hoarseness and weakness, it was rendered almost inarticulate; but its tone was still all benevolence--all kindness--all touching graciousness. It was thought advisable the queen should not rise, lest the king should be offended that she did not go to him; at present Page 233 he was content, because he conceived her to be nursing for her illness. But what a situation for her! She would not let me leave her now; she made me remain In the room, and ordered me to sit down. I was too trembling to refuse. Lady Elizabeth soon joined us. We all three stayed with her; she frequently bid me listen, to hear what the king was saying or doing. I did, and carried the best accounts I could manage, without deviating from truth, except by some omissions. Nothing could be so afflicting as this task; even now, it brings fresh to my ear his poor exhausted voice. "I am nervous," he cried; "I am not ill, but I am nervous: if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous. But I love you both very well; if you would tell me truth: I love Dr. Heberden best, for he has not told me a lie: Sir George has told me a lie--a white lie, he says, but I hate a white lie. If you will tell me a lie, let it be a black lie!" This was what he kept saying almost constantly, mixed in with other matter, but always returning, and in a voice that truly will never cease vibrating in my recollection. The queen permitted me to make her breakfast and attend her, and was so affectingly kind and gentle in her distress, that I felt a tenderness of sorrow for her that almost devoted my whole mind to her alone! Miss Goldsworthy was a fixture at her side; I, therefore, provided her breakfast also. Lady Elizabeth was sent out on inquiries of Colonel Goldsworthy, and Mr. Batterscomb, and the pages, every ten minutes; while I, at the same intervals, was ordered to listen to what passed in the room, and give warning if anything seemed to threaten another entrance. . . . The queen bid me bring the prayer book and read the morning service to her. I could hardly do it, the poor voice from the next room was so perpetually in my ears. When I came to my room, about twelve o'clock, for some breakfast, I found a letter from Lady Carmarthen. It was an answer to my congratulation upon her marriage, and written with honest happiness and delight. She frankly calls herself the luckiest of all God's creatures ; and this, if not elegant, is sincere, and I hope will be permanently her opinion. While swallowing my breakfast, standing and in haste, and the door ajar, I heard Mr. Fairly's voice, saying, "Is Miss Burney there? is she alone?" and then he sent in Columb, to inquire if he might come and ask me how I did. Page 234 I received him with as much gladness as I could then feel, but it was a melancholy reception. I consulted with him upon many points in which I wanted counsel : he is quick and deep at once in expedients where anything, is to be done, and simple and clear in explaining himself where he thinks it is best to do nothing. Miss Goldsworthy herself had once stolen out to Consult with him. He became, indeed, for all who belonged to the queen, from this moment the oracle. THE KING REFUSES TO SEE DR. WARREN. Dr. Warren(299) had been sent for express, in the middle of the night, at the desire of Sir George Baker, because he had been taken ill himself, and felt unequal to the whole toll. I returned speedily to the room of woe. The arrival of the physicians was there grievously awaited, for Dr. Heberden and Sir George would now decide upon nothing till Dr. Warren came. The poor queen wanted something very positive to pass, relative to her keeping away, which seemed thought essential at this time, though the courage to assert it was wanting In everybody. The princesses sent to ask leave to come to their mother. She burst into tears, and declared she could neither see them, nor pray, while in this dreadful situation, expecting every moment to be broken in upon, and quite uncertain in what manner, yet determined not to desert her apartment, except by express direction from the physicians. Who could tell to what height the delirium might rise? There was no constraint, no power: all feared the worst, yet none dared take any measures for security. The princes also sent word they were at her majesty's command, but she shrunk still more from this Interview: it filled her with a thousand dreadful sensations, too obvious to be wholly hid. At length news was brought that Dr. Warren was arrived. I never felt so rejoiced: I could have run out to welcome him with rapture. With what cruel impatience did we then wait to hear his sentence! An impatience how fruitless! It ended in information that he had not seen the king, who refused him admittance. Page 235 This was terrible. But the king was never so despotic; no one dared oppose him. He would not listen to a word, though, when unopposed, he was still all gentleness and benignity to every one around him. Dr. Warren was then planted where he could hear his voice, and all that passed, and receive Intelligence concerning his pulse, etc., from Sir George Baker. THE QUEEN'S ANXIETY TO HEAR DR. WARREN'S OPINION. We now expected every moment Dr. Warren would bring her majesty his opinion ; but he neither came nor sent. She waited in dread incessant. She sent for Sir George--he would not speak alone: she sent for Mr. Hawkins, the household surgeon; but all referred to Dr. Warren. Lady Elizabeth and Miss Goldsworthy earnestly pressed her to remove to a more distant apartment, where he might not hear the unceasing voice of the unhappy king ; but she would only rise and go to the 'little dressing-room, there to wait in her night-clothes Dr. Warren's determination what step she should take. At length Lady Elizabeth learnt among the pages that Dr. Warren had quitted his post of watching. The poor queen now, in a torrent of tears, prepared herself for seeing him. He came not. All astonished and impatient, Lady Elizabeth was sent out on inquiries. She returned, and said Dr. Warren was gone. "Run! stop him!" was the queen's next order. "Let him but let me know what I am to do." Poor, poor queen! how I wept to hear those words! Abashed and distressed, poor Lady Elizabeth returned. She had seen Colonel Goldsworthy, and heard Dr. Warren, -with the other two physicians, had left the house too far to be recalled they were gone over to the Castle, to the Prince of Wales. I think a deeper blow I have never witnessed. Already to become but second, even for the king! The tears were now wiped; indignation arose, with pain, the severest pain, of every species. THE QUEEN REMOVES TO MORE DISTANT APARTMENTS. In about a quarter of an hour Colonel Goldsworthy sent in to beg an audience. It was granted, a long cloak only being thrown over the queen. He now brought the opinion of all the physicians in consultation, " That her majesty would re- Page 236 move to a more distant apartment, since the king would undoubtedly be worse from the agitation of seeing her, and there Could be no possibility to prevent it while she remained so near." She instantly agreed, but with what bitter anguish! Lady Elizabeth, Miss Goldsworthy, and myself attended her; she went to an apartment in the same row, but to which there Was no entrance except by its own door. It consisted of only two rooms, a bed-chamber and a dressing-room. They are appropriated to the lady-in-waiting, when she is here. At the entrance into this new habitation the poor wretched queen once more gave way to a perfect agony of grief and affliction; while the words "What will become of me! What will become of me ! " uttered with the most piercing lamentation, struck deep and hard into all our hearts. Never can I forget their desponding sound ; they implied such complicated apprehensions. Instantly now the princesses were sent for. The three elder hastened down. O, what a meeting! They all, from a habit that has become a second nature, struggling to repress all outward grief, though the queen herself, wholly overcome, wept even aloud. They all went into the bedroom, and the queen made a slight dressing, but only wore a close gauze cap, and her long dressing gown, which is a dimity chemise. I was then sent back to the little dressing-room, for something that was left; as I opened the door, I almost ran against a gentleman close to it in the passage. "Is the queen here?" he cried, and I then saw the Prince of Wales. "Yes," I answered, shuddering at this new scene for her "should I tell her majesty your royal highness is here?" This I said lest he should surprise her. But he did not intend that: he was profoundly respectful, and consented to wait at the door while I went in, but called me back, as I turned away, to add, "You will be so good to say I am come by her orders." She wept a deluge of tears when I delivered my commission, but instantly admitted him. I then retreated. The other two ladies went to Lady Elizabeth's room, which is next the queen's new apartments. In the passage I was again stopped; it was by Mr. Fairly. I would have hurried on, scarce able to speak, but he desired to know how the queen did. "Very bad," was all I could say, Page 237 and on I hastened to my own room, which, the next minute, I would as eagerly have hastened to quit, from its distance from all that was going forward ; but now once the prince had entered the queen's rooms, I could go thither no more unsummoned. Miserable, lonely, and filled with dreadful conjectures, I remained here till a very late dinner brought Miss Planta to the dining-parlour, where I joined her. After a short and dismal meal we immediately parted : she to wait in the apartments of the princesses above-stairs, in case of being wanted; I to my own solitary parlour. The Prince of Wales and Duke of York stayed here all the day, and were so often in and out of the queen's rooms that no one could enter them but by order. The same etiquette is observed when the princes are with the queen as when the king is there-no interruption whatever is made. I now, therefore, lost my only consolation at this calamitous time, that of attending my poor royal mistress. A VISIT FROM MR. FAIRLY. Alone wholly, without seeing a human being, or gathering any, the smallest intelligence of what was going forwards, I remained till tea-time. Impatient then for information, I planted myself in the eating-parlour; but no one came. Every minute seemed an hour. I grew as anxious for the tea society as heretofore I had been anxious to escape it; but so late it grew, and so hopeless, that Columb came to propose bringing in the water. No; for I could swallow nothing voluntarily. In a few minutes he came again, and with the compliments of Mr. Fairly, who desired him to tell me he would wait Upon me to tea whenever I pleased. A little surprised at this single message, but most truly rejoiced, I returned my compliments, with an assurance that all time was the same to me. He came directly, and indeed his very sight, at this season of still horror and silent suspense, was a repose to my poor aching eyes. "You will see," he said, "nobody else. The physicians being now here, Colonel Goldsworthy thought it right to order tea for the whole party in the music-room, which we have now agreed to make the general waiting-room for us all. It is near the king, and we ought always to be at hand." Page 238 Our tea was very sad. He gave me no hope Of a short seizure ; he saw it, in perspective, as long as it was dreadful : perhaps even worse than long, he thought it--but that he said not. He related to me the whole of the day's transactions, but my most dear and most honourable friends will be the first to forgive me when I promise that I shall commit nothing to paper on this terrible event that is told me in confidence. He did not stay long--he did not think it right to leave his waiting friends for any time, nor could I wish it, valued as I know he is by them all, and much as they need his able counsel. He left me plunged in a deep gloom, yet he was not gloomy himself; he sees evils as things of course, and bears them, therefore, as things expected. But he was tenderly touched for the poor queen and the princesses. THE KING'S NIGHT WATCHERS. Not till one in the morning did I see another face, and then I attended my poor unhappy queen. She was now fixed in her new apartments, bed-room and dressing-room, and stirred not a step but from one to the other. Fortunately all are upon the ground-floor, both for king and queen; so are the two Lady Waldegraves' and mine; the princesses and Miss Planta, as usual, are upstairs, and the gentlemen lodge above them. Miss Goldsworthy had now a bed put up in the queen's new bed-room. She had by no means health to go on sitting up, and it had been the poor king's own direction that she should remain with the queen. It was settled that Mrs. Sandys and Mrs. Macenton should alternately sit up in the dressing-room. The queen would not permit me to take that office, though most gladly I would have taken any that would have kept me about her. But she does; not think my strength sufficient. She allowed me however to stay with her till she was in bed, which I had never done till now; I never, indeed, had even seen her in her bed-room till the day before. She has always had the kindness and delicacy, to dismiss me from her dressing-room as soon as I have assisted her with her night-clothes; the wardrobe-woman then was summoned, and I regularly made my courtesy. it was a satisfaction to me, however, now to leave her the last, and to come to her the first. Her present dressing-room is also her dining-room, her Page 239 drawing-room, her sitting-room; she has nothing else but her bed-room! I left her with my fervent prayers for better times, and saw her nearer to composure than I had believed possible in such a calamity. She called to her aid her religion, and without it what, indeed, must have become of her? It was near two in the morning when I quitted her. In passing through the dressing-room to come away, I found Miss Goldsworthy in some distress how to execute a commission of the queen's: it was to her brother, who was to sit up in a room adjoining to the king's ; and she was undressed, and knew not how to go to him, as the princes were to and fro everywhere. I offered to call him to her she thankfully accepted the proposal. I cared not, just then, whom I encountered, so I could make myself of any use. When I gently opened the door of the apartment to which I was directed, I found it was quite filled with gentlemen and attendants, arranged round it on chairs and sofas in dead silence. It was a dreadful start, with which I retreated; for anything more alarming and shocking could not be conceived! the poor king within another door, unconscious any one was near him, and thus watched, by dread necessity, at such an hour of the night! I pronounced the words "Colonel Goldsworthy," however, before I drew back, though I could not distinguish one gentleman from another, except the two princes, by their stars. I waited in the next room; but instead of Colonel Goldsworthy, my call was answered by Mr. Fairly. I acquainted him with my errand. He told me he had himself insisted that Colonel Goldsworthy should go to bed, as he had sat up all the preceding night and he had undertaken to supply his place. I went back to Miss Goldsworthy with this account. She begged me to entreat Mr. Fairly would come to her, as she must now make the commission devolve on him, and could less than ever appear, herself, as they were all assembled in such a party. Mr. Fairly, most considerately, had remained in this quiet room to see if anything more might be wanted, which spared me the distress of again intruding into the public room. I begged him to follow, and we were proceeding to the dressing-room, when I was stopped by a gentleman, who said, "Does the queen want anybody?" Page 240 It was the Prince of Wales. "Not the queen, sir," I answered, " but Miss Goldsworthy, has desired to see Mr. Fairly." He let me pass, but stopped Mr. Fairly; and, as he seemed inclined to detain him some time, I only told Miss Goldsworthy what had retarded him, and made off to my own room, and soon after two o'clock, I believe, I was in bed. A CHANGE IN MISS BURNEYs DUTIES. Friday, Nov. 7.-I was now arrived at a sort of settled regularity of life more melancholy than can possibly be described. I rose at six, dressed, and hastened to the queen's apartments, uncalled, and there waited in silence and in the dark till I heard her move or speak with Miss Goldsworthy, and then presented myself to the sad bedside of the unhappy queen. She sent Miss Goldsworthy early every morning, to make inquiry what sort of night his majesty had passed; and in the middle of the night she commonly Also sent for news by the wardrobe-woman, or Miss Macenton, whichever sat up. She dismissed Miss Goldsworthy, on my arrival, to dress herself. Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave accommodated her with her own room for that purpose. I had then a long conference with this most patient sufferer - and equal forbearance and quietness during a period of suspensive unhappiness never have I seen, never could I have imagined. At noon now I never saw her, which I greatly regretted but she kept on her dressing-gown all day, and the princes were continually about the passages, so that no one unsummoned dared approach the queen's apartments. It was only therefore at night and morning I could see her - but my heart was with her the livelong day. And how long, good heaven! how long that day became! Endless I used to think it, for nothing could I do--to wait and to watch--starting at every sound, yet revived by every noise. MR. FAIRLY SUCCEEDS IN SOOTHING THE KING. While I was yet with my poor royal sufferer this morning the Prince of Wales came hastily into the room. He apologized for his intrusion, and then gave a very energetic history of the preceding night. It had been indeed most affectingly dreadful ! The king had risen in the middle of the night, and Page 241 would take no denial to walking into the next room. There he saw the large congress I have mentioned : amazed and in consternation, he demanded what they did there--Much followed that I have heard since, particularly the warmest éloge on his dear son Frederick--his favourite, his friend. "Yes," he cried, "Frederick is my friend!" and this son was then present amongst the rest, but not seen! Sir George Baker was there, and was privately exhorted by the gentlemen to lead the king back to his room; but he had not courage: he attempted only to speak, and the king penned him in a corner, told him he was a mere old woman--that he wondered he had ever followed his advice, for he knew nothing of his complaint, which was only nervous! The Prince of Wales, by signs and whispers, would have urged others to have drawn him away, but no one dared approach him, and he remained there a considerable time. "Nor do I know when he would have been got back," continued the prince, "if at last Mr. Fairly had not undertaken him. I am extremely obliged to Mr. Fairly indeed. He came boldly up to him, and took him by the arm, and begged him to go to bed, and then drew him along, and said he must go. Then he said he would not, and cried 'Who are you?' 'I am Mr. Fairly, sir,' he answered, 'and your majesty has been very good to me often, and now I am going to be very good to you, for you must come to bed, sir: it is necessary to your life.' And then he was so surprised, that he let himself be drawn along just like a child; and so they got him to bed. I believe else he would have stayed all night. Mr. Fairly has had some melancholy experience in a case of this sort, with a very near connexion of his own. How fortunate he was present! NEW ARRANGEMENTS. At noon I had the most sad pleasure of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Smelt. They had heard in York of the illness of the king, and had travelled -post to Windsor. Poor worthy, excellent couple!--Ill and infirm, what did they not suffer from an attack like this--so wonderfully unexpected upon a patron so adored! They wished the queen to be acquainted with their arrival, yet would not let me risk meeting the princes in carrying the news. Mr. Smelt I saw languished to see his king: he was Page 242 persuaded he might now repay a part of former benefits, and he wished to be made his page during his illness, that he might watch and attend him hourly. I had had a message in the morning by Mr. Gorton, the clerk of the kitchen, to tell me the Prince of Wales wished our dining-parlour to be appropriated to the physicians, both for their dinner and their consultations. I was therefore obliged to order dinner for Miss Planta, and myself in my own Sitting-parlour, which was now unmaterial, as the equerries did not come to tea, but continued +altogether in the music-room. In the evening, of course, came Mr. Fairly, but then it was only to let me know it would be of course no longer. He then rang the bell for my tea-urn, finding I had waited, though he 0 declined drinking tea with me; but he sat down, and staved half an hour, telling me the long story he had promised which Was a full detail of the terrible preceding night. The transactions of the day also he related to me, and the designs for the future. How alarming were they all! yet many particulars, he said, he omitted, merely because they were yet more affecting, and could be dwelt upon to no purpose. THE PRINCESS AUGUSTA'S BIRTHDAY. Saturday, Nov. 8-This was, if possible, the saddest day yet passed: it was the birthday of Princess Augusta, and Mrs. Siddons had been invited to read a play, and a large party of company to form the audience. What a contrast from such an intention was the event! When I went, before seven o'clock in the morning, to my most unhappy royal mistress, the princes were both in the room. I retreated to the next apartment till they had finished their conference. The Prince of Wales upon these occasions has always been extremely well-bred and condescending in his manner, which, in a situation such as mine, is no immaterial circumstance. The poor queen then spoke to me of the birthday present she had designed for her most amiable daughter. She hesitated a little whether or not to produce it, but at length meekly said, "Yes, go to Miss Planta and bring it. Do you think there can be any harm in giving it now?" "O, no!" I said, happy to encourage whatever was a little less gloomy, and upstairs I flew. I was met by all the poor princesses and the Duke of York, who inquired if he might go Page 243 again to the queen. I begged leave first to execute my commission. I did; but so engrossed was my mind with the whole of this living tragedy, that I so little noticed what it was I carried as to be now unable to recollect it. I gave it, however, to the queen, who then sent for the princesses, and carried her gift to her daughter, weeping, who received it with a silent courtesy, kissing and wetting with her gentle tears the hand of her afflicted mother. STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF THE FIRST GENTLEMAN IN EUROPE. During my mournful breakfast poor Mr. Smelt arrived from Kew, where he had now settled himself. Mr. de Luc also joined us, and they could neither prevail upon themselves to go away all the morning. Mr. Smelt had some thoughts of taking up his abode in Windsor till the state of things should be more decisive. The accounts of the preceding night had been most cruel, and to quit the spot was scarce supportable to him. Yet he feared the princes might disapprove his stay, and he well knew his influence and welcome at Court was all confined to the sick-room: thence, there could now issue no mandate. Yet I encouraged him to stay; so did Mr. de Luc; and while he was still wavering he saw Dr. Warren in the courtyard, and again hastened to speak with him. Before he returned the Prince of Wales went out and met him; and you may imagine how much I was pleased to observe from the window that he took him by the arm, and walked up and down with him. When he came to us he said the prince had told him he had better stay, that he might see the queen. He determined, therefore, to send off an express to Mrs. Smelt, and go and secure an apartment at the inn. This was very soothing to me, who so much needed just such consolation as he could bestow - and I begged he would come back to dinner, and spend the whole day in my room, during his stay. What, however, was my concern and amaze, when, soon after, hastily returning, he desired to speak to me alone, and, as Mr. de Luc moved off, told me he was going back immediately to Kew! He spoke with a tremor that alarmed me. I entreated to know why such a change? He then informed me that the porter, Mr. Humphreys, had refused him re-entrance, and sent him his great coat ! He had resented this Page 244 impertinence, and was told it was by the express order of the prince! In utter astonishment he then only desired admittance for one moment to my room, and having acquainted me with this circumstance, he hurried off, in a state of distress, and indignation that left me penetrated with both. >From this time, as the poor king grew worse, general hope seemed universally to abate; and the Prince of Wales now took the government of the house into his own hands. Nothing was done but by his orders, and he was applied to in every difficulty. The queen interfered not in anything - she lived entirely in her two new rooms, and spent the whole day in patient sorrow and retirement with her daughters. STRINGENT NEW REGULATIONS. The next news that reached me, through Mr. de Luc, was, that the prince had sent his commands to the porter, to admit only four persons into the house on any pretence whatever these were Mr. Majendie, Mr. Turbulent, General Harcourt, and Mr. de Luc himself; and these were ordered to repair immediately to the equerry-room below stairs, while no one whatsoever was to be allowed to go to any other apartment. >From this time commenced a total banishment from all intercourse out of the house, and an unremitting confinement within its walls. Poor Mr. de Luc, however, could not forego coming to my room. He determined to risk that, since he was upon the list of those who might enter the house. I was glad, because he is a truly good man, and our sentiments upon this whole melancholy business were the same. But otherwise, the weariness of a great length of visit daily from a person so slow and methodical in discourse, so explanatory of everything and of nothing, at this agitating period, was truly painful to endure. He has often talked to me till my poor burthened head has seemed lost to all understanding. I had now, all tea-meetings being over, no means of gaining any particulars of what was passing, which added so much to the horror of the situation, that by the evening I was almost petrified. Imagine, then, alike my surprise and satisfaction at a visit from Mr. Fairly. He had never come to me so unexpectedly. I eagerly begged an account of what was going on, and, with his usual readiness and accuracy, he gave it me in full detail. And nothing could be more tragic than all the Page 245 particulars every species of evil seemed now hanging over this unhappy family. He had had his son with him in his room upstairs; "And I had a good mind," he said, "to have brought him to visit YOU." I assured him he would have been a very welcome guest; and when he added that he could no longer have him at the Equerry table to dinner, as the Prince of Wales now presided there, I invited him for the next day to mine. He not only instantly accepted the proposal, but cried, with great vivacity, "I wish you would invite me too." I thought he was laughing, but said, "Certainly, if such a thing might be allowed;" and then, to my almost speechless surprise, he declared, If I would give him permission, he would dine with me next day. He then proceeded to say that the hurry, and fatigue, and violent animal spirits of the other table quite overpowered him, and a respite of such a quiet sort would be of essential service to him. Yet he paused a little afterwards, upon the propriety of leaving the Prince of Wales's table, and said "He would first consult with General Budé, and hear his opinion." Sunday, Nov. 9.-No one went to church - not a creature now quits the house: but I believe devotion never less required the aid and influence of public worship. For me, I know, I spent almost my whole time between prayer and watching. Even my melancholy resource, my tragedy, was now thrown aside ; misery so actual, living, and present, was knit too closely around me to allow my depressed imagination to fancy any woe beyond what my heart felt. In coming early from the queen's apartment this morning I was addressed by a gentleman who inquired how I did, by my name; but my bewilderment made him obliged to tell his own before I could recollect him. It was Dr. Warren. I eagerly expressed my hopes and satisfaction in his attendance upon the poor king, but he would not enter upon that subject. I suppose he feared, from my zeal, some indiscreet questions concerning his opinion of the case; for he passed by all I could start, to answer only with speeches relative to myself-of his disappointment in never meeting me, though residing under the same roof, his surprise in not dining with me when told he was to dine in my room, and the strangeness of never seeing me when so frequently he heard my name. I could not bring myself to ask him to my apartment, when Page 246 I saw, by his whole manner, e held it imprudent to speak with me about the only subject on which I wished to talk--the king; and just then seeing the Duke of York advancing, I hastily retreated. While I was dressing, Mr. Fairly rapped at my door. I sent out Goter, who brought me his compliments, and, if it would not be inconvenient to me, he and his son would have the pleasure of dining with me. I answered, I should be very glad of their company, as would Miss Planta. Miss Goldsworthy had now arranged herself with the Lady Waldegraves. Our dinner was as pleasant as a dinner at such a season could be. Mr. Fairly holds cheerfulness as a duty in the midst of every affliction that can admit it; and, therefore,, whenever his animal spirits have a tendency to rise, he encourages and sustains them, So fond, too, is he of his son, that his very sight is a cordial to him - and that mild, feeling, amiable boy quite idolizes his father, looking up to him, hanging on his arm, and watching his eye to smile and be smiled upon, with a fondness like that of an infant to its maternal nurse. Repeatedly Mr. Fairly exclaimed, "What a relief is this, to dine thus quietly!" What a relief should I, too, have found it, but for a little circumstance, which I will soon relate, MRS. SCHWELLENBERG IS BACK AGAIN. We were still at table, with the dessert, when Columb entered and announced the sudden return from Weymouth of Mrs. Schwellenberg. Up we all started; Miss Planta flew out to receive her, and state the situation of the house; Mr. Fairly, expecting, I believe, she was coming into my room, hastily made his exit without a word; his son eagerly scampered after him, and I followed Miss Planta upstairs. My reception, however, was such as to make me deem it most proper to again return to my room. What an addition this to the gloom of all ! and to begin at once with harshness and rudeness! I could hardly tell how to bear it. Nov. 10.-This was a most dismal day. The dear and most suffering king was extremely ill, the queen very wretched, poor Mrs. Schwellenberg all spasm and horror, Miss Planta all restlessness, the house all mystery, and my only informant and Page 247 comforter distanced. Not a word, the whole day through, did I hear of what was passing or intending. Our dinner was worse than an almost famished fasting; we parted after it, and met no more. Mrs. Schwellenberg, who never drinks tea herself, hearing the general party was given up, and never surmising there had ever been any particular one, neither desired me to come to her, nor proposed returning to me. She took possession of the poor queen's former dressing-room, and between that and the adjoining apartments she spent all the day, except during dinner. Nov. 11.-This day passed like the preceding; I only saw her majesty in the morning, and not another human being from that hour till Mrs. Schwellenberg and Miss Planta came to dinner. Nor could I then gather any information of the present state of things, as Mrs. Schwellenberg announced that nothing must be talked of. To give any idea of the dismal horror of passing so many hours in utter ignorance, where every interest of the mind was sighing for intelligence, would not be easy: the experiment alone could give it its full force; and from that, Heaven ever guard my loved readers! Nov. 12.-To-day a little brightened upon us some change appeared in the loved royal sufferer, and though it was not actually for the better in itself, yet any change was pronounced to be salutary, as, for some days pas'' there had been a monotonous continuation of the same bad symptoms, that had doubly depressed us all. My spirits rose immediately ; indeed, I thank God, I never desponded, though many times I stood nearly alone in my hopes. In the passage, in the morning, I encountered Colonel Gwynn. I had but just time to inform him I yet thought all would do well, ere the princes appeared. All the equerries are now here except Major Garth, who is ill; and they have all ample employment in watching and waiting. From time to time they have all interviews; but it is only because the poor king will not be denied seeing them: it is not thought light. But I must enter into nothing of this sort-it is all too closely connected with private domestic concerns for paper. After dinner, my chief guest, la Présidente, told me, " If my room was not so warm, she would stay a little with me." I felt this would be rather too superlative an obligation; and therefore I simply answered that "I was too chilly to sit in a Page 248 cold room;" and I confess I took no pains to temper it according to this hint. PUBLIC PRAYERS FOR THE KING DECIDED UPON. Finding there was now no danger Of disagreeable interviews, Mr. Fairly renewed his visits as usual. He came early this evening, and narrated the state of things; and then, with a laugh, he Inquired What I had done With my head companion, and how I got rid of her? I fairly told him my malice about the temperature. He could not help laughing, though he instantly remonstrated against an expedient that might prove prejudicial to my health. "You had better not," he cried, "try any experiments of this sort: if you hurt Your nerves, it may prove a permanent evil; this other can only be temporary." He took up the "Task" again; but he opened, by ill luck, upon nothing striking or good; and soon, with distaste, flung the book down, and committed himself wholly to conversation. He told me he wished much he had been able to consult with me on the preceding morning, when he had the queen's orders to write, in her majesty's name, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to issue out public prayers for the poor king, for all the churches. I assured him I fancied it might do very well without my aid. There was to be a privy council summoned, in consequence of the letter, to settle the mode of compliance. How right a step in my ever-right royal mistress is this! If you hear less of her now, my dearest friends, and of the internal transactions, it is only because I now rarely saw her but alone, and all that passed, therefore, was in promised confidence. And, for the rest, the whole of my information concerning the princes, and the plans and the proceedings of the house, was told me in perfect reliance on my secrecy and honour. I know this is saying enough to the most honourable of all confidants and friends to whom I am writing. All that passes with regard to myself is laid completely before them. Nov. 13- This was the fairest day we have passed since the first seizure of the most beloved of monarchs. He was considerably better. O what a ray of joy lightened us, and how mildly did my poor queen receive it Page 249 Nov. 14--Still all was greatly amended, and better spirits reigned throughout the house. Mr. Fairly--I can write of no one else, for no one else did I see--called early, to tell me he had received an answer relative to the prayer for his majesty's recovery, in consequence of which he had the queen's commands for going to town the next day, to see the archbishop. This was an employment so suited to the religious cast of his character, that I rejoiced to see it fall into his hands. He came again in the evening, and said he had now got the prayer. He did not entirely approve it, nor think it sufficiently warm and animated. I petitioned to hear it, and he readily complied, and read it with great reverence, but very unaffectedly and quietly. I was very, very much touched by It ; yet not, I own, quite so much as once before by another, which was read to me by Mr. Cambridge, and composed by his son, for the sufferings of his excellent daughter Catherine. It was at once so devout, yet so concise--so fervent, yet so simple, and the many tender relations concerned in it--father, brother, sister,--so powerfully affected me, that I had no command over the feelings then excited, even though Mr. Cambridge almost reproved me for want of fortitude; but there was something so tender in a prayer of a brother for a sister. Here, however, I was under better control - for though my whole heart was filled with the calamitous state of this unhappy monarch, and with deepest affliction for all his family, I yet knew so well my reader was one to severely censure all failure in calmness and firmness, that I struggled, and not ineffectually, to hear him with a steadiness like his own. But, fortunately for the relief of this force, he left the room for a few minutes to see if he was wanted, and I made use of his absence to give a little vent to those tears which I had painfully restrained in his presence. When he returned we had one of the best (on his part) conversations in which I have ever been engaged, upon the highest and most solemn of all subjects, prayers and supplications to heaven. He asked my opinion with earnestness, and gave his own with unbounded openness. Nov. 15-This morning my poor royal mistress herself presented me with one of the prayers for the king. I shall always keep it -- how--how fervently did I use it! Whilst I was at breakfast Mr. Fairly once more called before he set off for town and he brought me also a copy of the Page 250 prayer. He had received a large packet of them from the archbishop, Dr. Moore, to distribute in the house. The whole day the king continued amended. Sunday, Nov. 16.-This morning I ventured out to church. I did not like to appear abroad, but yet I had a most irresistible earnestness to join the public congregation in the prayer for the king. Indeed nothing could be more deeply moving: the very sound of the cathedral service, performed in his own chapel, overset me at once; and every prayer in the service in which he was mentioned brought torrents of tears from all the suppliants that joined in them. I could scarcely keep my place, scarce command my voice from audible sobs. To come to the House of prayer from such a house of woe! I ran away when the service was over, to avoid inquiries. Mrs. Kennedy ran after me, with swollen eyes; I could not refuse her a hasty answer, but I ran the faster after it, to avoid any more. The king was worse. His night had been very bad ; all the fair promise of amendment was shaken; he had now some symptoms even dangerous to his life. O good heaven, what a day did this prove! I saw not a human face, save at dinner and then, what faces! gloom and despair in all, and silence to every species of intelligence. . . . It was melancholy to see the crowds of former welcome visitors who were now denied access. The prince reiterated his former orders; and I perceived from my window those who had ventured to the door returning back in deluges of tears. Amongst them to-day I perceived poor Lady Effingham, the Duchess of Ancaster, and Mr. Bryant ; the last sent me In, afterwards, a mournful little letter, to which he desired no answer. Indeed I was not at liberty to write a word. SIR LuCAS PEPYS ON THE KING's CONDITION. Nov. 19.-The account of the dear king this morning was rather better. Sir Lucas Pepys was now called in, and added to Dr. Warren, Dr. Heberden, and Sir George Baker. I earnestly wished to see him, and I found my poor royal mistress was secretly anxious to know his opinion. I sent to beg to speak with him, as soon as the consultation was over; determined, however, to make that request no more if he was as shy of giving information as Dr. Warren, Page 251 poor Mr. de Luc was with me wen he came ; but it was necessary I should see Sir Lucas alone, that I might have a better claim upon his discretion : nevertheless I feared he would have left me, without the smallest intelligence, before I was able to make my worthy, but most slow companion comprehend the necessity of his absence. The moment we were alone, Sir Lucas opened upon the subject in the most comfortable manner. He assured me there was nothing desponding in the case, and that his royal patient would certainly recover, though not immediately. Whilst I was in the midst of the almost speechless joy with which I heard this said, and ready to kiss the very feet of Sir Lucas for words of such delight, a rap at my door made me open it to Mr. Fairly, who entered, saying, "I must come to ask you how you do, though I have no good news to bring you; but--" He then, with the utmost amaze, perceived Sir Lucas. In so very many visits he had constantly found me alone, that I really believe he had hardly thought it possible he should see me in any other way. They then talked over the poor king's situation, and Sir Lucas was very open and comforting. How many sad meetings have I had with him heretofore ; first in the alarming attacks of poor Mr. Thrale, and next in the agonizing fluctuations of his unhappy widow! Sir Lucas wished to speak with me alone, as he had something he wanted, through me, to communicate to the queen; but as he saw Mr. Fairly not disposed to retire first, by his manner of saying "Sir Lucas, you will find all the breakfast ready below stairs," he made his bow, and said he would see me again. Mr. Fairly then informed me he was quite uneasy at the recluse life led by the queen and the princesses, and that he was anxious to prevail with them to take a little air, which must be absolutely necessary to their health. He was projecting a scheme for this purpose, which required the assistance of the Duke of York, and he left me, to confer upon it with his royal highness, promising to return and tell its success. Sir Lucas soon came back, and then gave me such unequivocal assurances of the king's recovery, that the moment he left me I flew to demand a private audience of the queen, that I might relate such delightful prognostics. The Duke of York was with her, I waited in the passage, Page 252 where I met Lady Charlotte Finch, and tried what I could to instil into her mind the hopes I entertained: this, however, was not possible; a general despondency prevailed throughout the house, and Lady Charlotte was infected by it very deeply. At length I gained admission and gave my account, which was most meekly received by the most patient of sorrowers. At night came Mr. Fairly again; but, before he entered into any narrations he asked "DO you expect Sir Lucas?" "No," I said, "he had been already." "I saw him rise early from table," he added, "and I thought he was coming to YOU." He has taken no fancy to poor Sir Lucas, and would rather, apparently, avoid meeting him. However, it is to me so essential a comfort to hear his opinions, that I have earnestly entreated to see him by every opportunity. FURTHER CHANGES AT THE LODGE. The equerries now had their own table as usual, to which the physicians were regularly invited, downstairs, and our eating-party was restored. The princes established a table of their own at the Castle, to which they gave daily invitations to such as they chose, from time to time, to select from the Lodge. The noise of so large a party just under the apartment of the queen occasioned this new regulation, which took place by her majesty's own direction. Nov. 20.-Poor Miss Goldsworthy was now quite ill, and forced to retire and nurse. No wonder, for she had suffered the worst sort of fatigue, that of fearing to sleep, from the apprehension the queen might speak, and want her. Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave now took her place Of sleeping in the queen's room, but the office of going for early intelligence how his majesty had passed the night devolved upon me. Exactly at seven o'clock I now went to the queen's apartment - Lady Elizabeth then rose and went to her own room to dress, and I received the queen's commands for my inquiries. I could not, however, go myself into the room where they assembled, which Miss Goldsworthy, who always applied to her brother, had very properly done : I sent in a message to beg to speak with General Bud, or whoever could bring an account. Mr. Charles Hawkins came; he had sat up. O, how terrible a narrative did he drily give of the night!--short, abrupt, Page 253 peremptorily bad, and indubitably hopeless! I did not dare alter, but I greatly softened this relation, in giving it to my poor queen. I had been, indeed, too much shocked by the hard way in which I had been told it, to deliver it in the same manner; neither did I, in my own heart, despair. I saw Sir Lucas afterwards, who encouraged all my more sanguine opinions. He told me many new regulations had been made. His majesty was to be kept as quiet as possible, and see only physicians, except for a short and stated period in every day, during which he might summon such among his gentlemen as he pleased. Mr. Fairly came also early, and wrote and read letters of great consequence relative to the situation of affairs ; and he told me he was then to go to the king, who had refused his assent to the new plan, and insisted upon seeing him when he came in from his ride, which, to keep him a little longer quiet, they had made him believe he was then taking. The gentlemen had agreed to be within call alternately, and he meant to have his own turn always in the forenoon, that his evenings might have some chance for quiet, The rest of the day was comfortless; my coadjutrix was now grown so fretful and affronting that, though we only met at dinner, it was hard to support her most unprovoked harshness. MR. FAIRLY AND THE LEARNED LADIES. At night, while I was just sealing a short note to my dear Miss Cambridge, who had an anxiety like that of my own Susan and Fredy lest I should suffer from my present fatigues, I heard the softest tap at my door, which, before I could either put down my letter or speak, was suddenly but most gently opened. I turned about and saw a figure wrapped up in a great, coat, with boots and a hat on, who cautiously entered, and instantly closed the door. I stared, and looked very hard, but the face was much hid by the muffling of the high collar to the great coat. I wondered, and could not conceive who it could be. The figure then took off his hat and bowed, but he did not advance, and the light was away from him. I courtsied, and wondered more, and then a surprised voice exclaimed, "Don't you know me?" and I found it was Mr. Fairly. "I cannot," he said, "stop now, but I will come again; however, you know it, perhaps, already? Page 254 "Know what?" "Why--the--news." "What news?" "Why--that the king is much better, and--" "Yes, Sir Lucas said so, but I have seen nobody since." "No? And have you heard nothing more?" "Nothing at all; I cannot guess what you mean." "What, then, have not you heard--how Much the king has talked? And--and have not you heard the charge." "No; I have heard not a word of any charge." "Why, then, I'll tell you." A long preamble, uttered very rapidly, of "how much the king had been talking," seemed less necessary to introduce his intelligence than to give him time to arrange it; and I was so much struck with this, that I could not even listen to him, from impatience to have him proceed. Suddenly, however, breaking off, evidently from not knowing how to go on, he exclaimed, "Well, I shall tell it you all by and by; you come in for your share!" Almost breathless now with amaze, I could hardly cry, "Do I?" "Yes, I'll tell you," cried he; but again he stopped, and, hesitatingly, said, "You--you won't be angry?" "No," I answered, still more amazed, and even almost terrified, at what I had now to expect. "Well, then," cried he, instantly resuming his first gay and rapid manner, "the king has been calling them all to order for staying so long away from him. 'All the equerries and gentlemen here,' he said, 'lost their whole time at the table, by drinking so much wine and sitting so long over their bottle, which constantly made them all so slow in returning to their waiting, that when he wanted them in the afternoon they were never ready; and-and-and Mr. Fairly,' says he, 'is as bad as any of them; not that he stays so long at table, or is so fond of wine, but he's just as late as the rest; for he's so fond of the company of learned ladies, that he gets to the tea-table with Miss Burney, and there he stays and spends his whole time.'" He spoke all this like the velocity of lightning- but, had it been with the most prosing slowness, I had surely never interrupted him, so vexed I was, so surprised, so completely disconcerted. Finding me silent, he began again, and as rapidly as ever; "I know exactly," he cried, "what it all means--what Page 255 the king has in his head--exactly what has given rise to the idea--'tis Miss Fuzilier." Now, indeed, I stared afresh, little expecting to hear her named by him. He went on in too much hurry for me to recollect his precise words, but he spoke of her very highly, and mentioned her learning, her education, and her acquirements, with great praise, yet with that sort of general commendation that disclaims all peculiar interest; and then, with some degree of displeasure mixed in his voice, mentioned the report that had been spread concerning- them, and its having reached the ears of the king before his Illness. He then lightly added something I could not completely hear, of its utter falsehood, in a way that seemed to hold even a disavowal too important for it, and then concluded with saying, "And this in the present confused state of his mind is altogether, I know, what he means by the learned ladies." When he had done he looked earnestly for my answer, but finding I made none, he said, with some concern, "You won't think any more of it?" "No," I answered, rather faintly. In a lighter manner then, as if to treat the whole as too light for a thought, he said, as he was leaving the room to change his dress, "Well, since I have now got the character of being so fond of such company, I shall certainly"--he stopped short, evidently at a loss how to go on; but quickly after, with a laugh, he hastily added, "come and drink tea with you very often;" and then, with another laugh, which he had all to himself, he hurried away. He left me, however, enough to think upon and the predominant thought was an immediate doubt whether or not, since his visits had reached the king, his majesty's observation upon them ought to stop their continuance? Upon the whole, however, when I summed up all, I found not cause sufficient for any change of system. No raillery had passed upon me; and, for him, he had stoutly evinced a determined contempt of it. Nothing of flirtation had been mentioned for either; I had merely been called a learned lady, and he had merely been accused Of liking such company. I had no other social comfort left me but Mr. Fairly, and I had discomforts past all description or suggestion. Should I drive him from me, what would pay me, and how had he deserved it? and which way could it be worth while? His friendship offered me a solace without hazard; it was held out to me Page 256 when all else was denied me; banished from every friend, confined almost to a state of captivity, harrowed to the very soul with surrounding afflictions, and without a glimpse of light as to when or how all might terminate, it seemed to me, in this situation, that providence had benignly sent in my way a character of so much worth and excellence, to soften the rigour of my condition, by kind sympathy and most honourable confidence. This idea was sufficient; and I thence determined to follow as he led, in disdaining any further notice, or even remembrance, if possible, of this learned accusation. Nov. 21.-All went better and better to-day, and I received from the king's room a more cheering account to carry to my poor queen. We had now hopes of a speedy restoration : the king held long conferences with all his gentlemen, and, though far from composed, was so frequently rational as to- make any resistance to his will nearly impossible. Innumerable difficulties attended this state, but the general promise it gave of a complete recovery recompensed them all. Sir Lucas Pepys came to me in the morning and acquainted me with the rising hopes of amendment. But he disapproved the admission of so many gentlemen, and would have limited the license to only the equerry in waiting, Colonel Goldsworthy, and Mr. Fairly, who was now principal throughout the house, in universal trust for his superior judgment. The king, Sir Lucas said, now talked of everybody and everything he could recollect or suggest. So I have heard, thought I. And, presently after, he added, "No one escapes; you will have your turn." Frightened lest he knew I had had it, I eagerly exclaimed, "O, no; I hope not." "And why?" cried he, good-humouredly; "what need you care? He can say no harm of you." I ventured then to ask if yet I had been named? He believed not yet. This doubled my curiosity to know to whom the "learned ladies" had been mentioned, and whether to Mr. Fairly himself, or to someone who related it; I think the latter, but there is no way to inquire. Very early in the evening I heard a rap at my door. I was in my inner room, and called out, "Who's there?" The door opened and Mr, Fairly appeared. Page 257 He had been so long in attendance this morning with our poor sick monarch, that he was too much fatigued to join the dinner-party. He had stood five hours running, besides the concomitant circumstances of attention. He had instantly laid down when he procured his dismission, and had only risen to eat some cold chicken before he came to my room. During that repast he had again been demanded, but he charged the gentleman to make his excuse, as he could go through nothing further. I hope the king did not conclude him again with the learned; This was the most serene, and even cheerful evening,, I had passed since the poor king's first seizure. REPORTS ON THE KING'S CONDITION. Nov. 22.-When I went for my morning inquiries, Colonel Manners came out to me. He could give me no precise account, as the sitters-up had not yet left the king, but he feared the night had been bad. We mutually bewailed the mournful state of the house. He is a very good creature at heart, though as unformed as if he had just left Eton or Westminster. But he loves his master with a true and faithful heart, and is almost as ready to die as to live for him, if any service of that risk was proposed to him. While the queen's hair was dressing, though only for a close cap, I was sent again. Colonel Manners came out to me, and begged I would enter the music-room, as Mr. Keate, the surgeon, had now just left the king, and was waiting to give me an account before he laid down. I found him in his night-cap: he took me up to a window, and gave me but a dismal history : the night had been very unfavourable, and the late amendment very transient. I heard nothing further till the evening, when my constant companion came to me. All, he said, was bad: he had been summoned and detained nearly all the morning, and had then rode to St. Leonard's to get a little rest, as he would not return till after dinner. He had but just begun his tea when his name was called aloud in the passage: up he started, seized his hat, and with a hasty bow, decamped. I fancy it was one of the princes; and the more, as he did not come back. Sunday, Nov. 23.-A sad day this! I was sent as usual for Page 258 the night account, which I had given to me by Mr. Fairly, and a very dismal one indeed. Yet I never, upon this point, yield implicitly to his opinion, as I see him frequently of the despairing side, and as for myself, I thank God, my hopes never wholly fall. A certain faith in his final recovery has uniformly supported my spirits from the beginning. . . In the evening, a small tap at my door, with, "Here I am again," ushered in Mr. Fairly. He seemcd much hurried and disturbed, and innately uncomfortable; and very soon he entered into a detail of the situation of affairs that saddened me in the extreme. The poor king was very ill indeed, and so little aware of his own condition, that he would submit to no rule, and chose to have company with him from morning till night, sending out for the gentlemen one after another without intermission, and chiefly for Mr. Fairly, who, conscious it was hurtful to his majesty, and nearly worn out himself, had now no chance of respite or escape but by leaving the house and riding out. . . . I have never seen him so wearied, or so vexed, I know not which. "How shall I rejoice," he cried, "when all this is over, and I can turn my back to this scene!" I should rejoice, I said, for him when he could make his escape; but his use here, in the whole round, is infinite; almost nothing is done without consulting him. "I wish," he cried, while he was making some memorandums, "I could live without sleep; I know not now how to spare my night." He then explained to me various miscellaneous matters of occupation, and confessed himself forced to break from the confused scene of action as much as possible, where the tumult and bustle were as overpowering, as the affliction, in the more quiet apartments, was dejecting. Then, by implication, what credit did he not give to my Poor still room, which he made me understand was his only refuge and consolation in this miserable house! MR. FAIRLY THINKS THE KING NEEDS STRICTER MANAGEMENT. Nov. 24.-Very bad again was the night's account, which I received at seven o'clock this morning from Mr. DUndas. I returned with it to my Poor royal mistress, who heard it with her usual patience. Page 259 While I was still with her, Lady Elizabeth came with a request from Mr. Fairly, for an audience before her majesty's breakfast. As soon as she was ready she ordered me to tell Lady Elizabeth to bring him. . . . Soon after,--with a hasty rap, came Mr. Fairly. He brought his writing to my table, where I was trying to take off impressions of plants. I Saw he meant to read me his letter; but before he had finished it Lady Charlotte Finch came in search of him. It was not for the queen, but herself; she wished to speak and consult with him upon the king's seeing his children, which was now his vehement demand. He was writing for one of the king's messengers, and could not stop till he had done. Poor Lady Charlotte, overcome with tenderness and compassion, wept the whole time he was at his pen; and when he had put it down, earnestly remonstrated on the cruelty of the present regulations, which debarred his majesty the sight of the princesses. I joined with her, though more firmly, believe me; my tears I suppress for my solitude. I have enough of that to give them vent, and, with all my suppression, my poor aching eyes can frequently scarce see one object from another. When Mr. Fairly left off writing he entered very deeply into argument with Lady Charlotte. He was averse to her request; he explained the absolute necessity of strong measures, and of the denial of dangerous indulgences, while the poor king was in this wretched state. The disease, he said, was augmented by every agitation, and the discipline of forced quiet was necessary till he was capable of some reflection. At present he spoke everything that occurred to him, and in a manner so wild, unreasonable, and dangerous, with regard to future constructions, that there could be no kindness so great to him as to suffer him only to see those who were his requisite attendants. He then enumerated many instances very forcibly, in which he showed how much more properly his majesty might have been treated, by greater strength of steadiness in his management. He told various facts which neither of us had heard, and, at last, in speaking of the most recent occurrences, he fell into a narrative relating to himself. The king, he said, had almost continually demanded him of late, and with the most extreme agitation; he had been as much with him as it was possible for his health to bear. "Five hours,,, continued he, "I spent with him on Friday, and four Page 260 on Saturday, and three and a half yesterday; yet the moment I went to him last night, he accused me of never coming near him. He said I gave him up entirely; that I was always going out, always dining out, always going to Mrs. Harcourt's--riding to St. Leonard's; but he knew why--'twas to meet Miss Fuzilier." . . . Poor Lady Charlotte was answered, and, looking extremely sorry, went away. He then read me his messenger's letter. 'Twas upon a very delicate affair, relative to the Prince of Wales, in whose service, he told me, he first began his Court preferment. When he had made up his packet he returned to the subject of the king's rage, with still greater openness. He had attacked him, he said, more violently than ever about Miss Fuzilier which, certainly, as there had been such a report, was very unpleasant. "And when I seriously assured him," he added, "that there was nothing in it, he said 'I had made him the happiest of men."' Nov. 25.---My morning account was from General Bud, and a very despairing one. He has not a ray of hope for better days. My poor queen was so much pleased with a sort of hymn for the king, which she had been reading In the newspapers, that I scrupled not to tell her of one in manuscript, which, of course, she desired to read; but I stipulated for its return, though I could not possibly stay in the room while she looked at it. MR. FAIRLY WANTS A CHANGE. In the evening Mr. Fairly came, entering with a most gently civil exclamation of "How long it is since I have seen you!" I could not answer, it was only one evening missed; for, in truth, a day at this time seems liberally a week, and a very slow one too. He had been to town, suddenly sent by the queen last night, and had returned only at noon. he gave me a full account of all that was passing and projecting; and awfully critical everything seemed. "He should now soon," he said, "quit the tragic scene, and go to relax and recruit, with his children, in the country. He regarded his service here as nearly over, since an entirely new regulation was planning, in which the poor king was no longer to be allowed the sight of any of his gentlemen. His continual long conversations with them were judged utterly improper, and Page 261 he was only to be attended by the medical people and his pages." He then gave into my hands the office of hinting to the queen his intention, if he could be dispensed with by her majesty, to go into the Country on the 12th of next month (December), with his boy Charles, who then left Eton for the Christmas holidays. I knew this would be unwelcome intelligence, but I wished to forward his departure, and would not refuse the commission. When this was settled he said he would go and take a circuit, and see how matters stood; and then, if he could get away after showing himself, return--if I would give him leave to drink his tea with me. He had not been gone ten minutes before Lady Charlotte came in search of him. She had been told, she said, that he was with me. I laughed, but could not forbear asking if I passed for his keeper, since whenever he was missing I was always called to account for him. Again, however, he came and drank his tea, and stayed an hour, in most confidential discourse. When the new regulation is established, only one gentleman is to remain--which will be the equerry in waiting. This is now Colonel Goldsworthy. The rest will disperse. REMOVAL OF THE KING To KEW DETERMINED UPON. Nov. 26.-I found we were all speedily to remove to Kew. This was to be kept profoundly secret till almost the moment of departure. The king will never consent to quit Windsor and to allure him away by some stratagem occupies all the physicians, who have proposed and enforced this measure. Mr. Fairly is averse to it: the king's repugnance he thinks insurmountable, and that it ought not to be opposed. But the princes take part with the physicians. He left me to ride out, but more cordial and with greater simplicity of kindness than ever, he smilingly said in going, "Well, good bye, and God bless you." "Amen," quoth I, after he had shut the door. Nov. 27.-This morning and whole day were dreadful My early account was given me by Mr. Charles Hawkins, and with such determined decision of incurability, that I left him quite in horror. All that I dared, I softened to my poor queen, who was now harassed to death with state affairs, and impending storms of state dissensions, I would have given Page 262 the world to have spent the whole day by her side, and poured in what balm of hope I could, since it appeared but too Visibly she scarce received a ray from any other. Universal despondence now pervaded the whole house. Sir Lucas, indeed, sustained his original good opinion, but he was nearly overpowered by standing alone, and was forced to let the stream take its course with but little opposition. Even poor Mr. de Luc was silenced ; Miss Planta easily yields to fear; and Mrs. Schwellenberg--who thinks it treason to say the king is ever at all indisposed--not being able to say all was quite well, forbade a single word being uttered upon the subject The dinners, therefore, became a time of extremest pain; all was ignorance, mystery, and trembling expectation of evil. In the evening, thank heaven! came again my sole relief, Mr. Fairly. He brought his son. and they entered with such serene aspects, that I soon shook off a little of my gloom; and I heard there was no new cause, for though all was bad, nothing was worse. We talked over everything; and that always opens the mind, and softens the bitterness of sorrow. The prospect before us, with respect to Kew, is indeed terrible. There is to be a total seclusion from all but those within the walls, and those are to be contracted to merely necessary attendants. Mr. Fairly disapproved the scheme, though a gainer by it of leisure and liberty. Only the equerry in waiting Is to have a room in the house; the rest of the gentlemen are to take their leave. He meant, therefore, himself, to go into the country with all speed. Nov. 28.-How woful-how bitter a day, in every part, was this! My early account was from the king's page, Mr. Stillingfleet, and the night had been extremely bad. I dared not sink the truth to my poor queen, though I mixed in it whatever I Could devise of cheer and hope; and she bore it with the most wonderful calmness. Dr. Addington was now called in: a very old physician, but peculiarly experienced in disorders such as afflicted our poor king, though not professedly a practitioner in them. Sir Lucas made me a visit, and informed me of all the medical proceedings; and told me, in confidence, we were to go to Kew to-morrow, though the queen herself had not yet concurred in the measure; but the physicians joined to desire Page 263 it, and they were supported by the princes. The difficulty how to get the king away from his favourite abode was all that rested. If they even attempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance would call up the whole country to his fancied rescue! Yet how, at such a time, prevail by persuasion? He moved me even to tears, by telling me that none of their own lives would be safe if the king did not recover so Prodigiously high ran the tide of affection and loyalty. All the physicians received threatening letters daily to answer for the safety of their monarch with their lives! Sir George Baker had already been Stopped in his carriage by the mob to give an account of the king; and when he said it Was a bad one, they had furiously exclaimed, "The more shame for you!" A PRIVY COUNCIL HELD. After he left me, a privy council was held at the Castle, with the Prince of Wales; the chancellor,(300) Mr. Pitt, and all the officers of state were summoned, to sign a Permission for the king's removal. The poor queen gave an audience to the chancellor--it was necessary to sanctify their proceedings. The princess royal and Lady Courtown attended her. It was a tragedy the most dismal! The queen's knowledge of the king's aversion to Kew made her consent to this measure with the extremest reluctance yet it was not to be opposed: It Was stated as much the best for him, on account of the garden: as here there is none but what Is Public to spectators from the terrace or tops of houses. I believe they were perfectly right though the removal was so tremendous. The physicians were summoned to the privy Council, to give their Opinions, upon oath, that this step was necessary. Inexpressible was the alarm of everyone, lest the king, if he recovered, should bear a lasting resentment against the authors and promoters of this Journey. To give it, therefore, every possible sanction it was decreed that he should be seen, both by the chancellor and Mr. Pitt. The chancellor went in to his presence with a tremor such as, before, he had been only accustomed to inspire; and when he came out, he was so extremely affected by the state in which he Page 264 saw his royal master and patron that the tears ran down his cheeks, and his feet had difficulty to support him. Mr. Pitt was more composed, but expressed his grief with so much respect and attachment, that it added new weight to the universal admiration with which he is here beheld. All these circumstances, with various others, of equal sadness which I must not relate, came to my knowledge from Sir Lucas, Mr. de Luc, and my noon attendance upon her majesty, who was compelled to dress for her audience of the chancellor. And, altogether, with the horror of the next day's removal, an([ the gloom of the ensuing Kew residence, I was so powerfully depressed, that when Mr. Fairly came in the evening, not all my earnestness to support my firmness could re-animate me, and I gave him a most solemn reception, and made the tea directly, and almost in silence. He endeavoured, at first, to revive me by enlivening discourse, but finding that fail, he had recourse to more serious means. He began his former favourite topic-the miseries of life-the inherent miseries, he thinks them, to which we are so universally born and bred, that it was as much consonant with our reason to expect as with our duty to support them. I heard him with that respect his subject and his character alike merited; but I could not answer--my heart was sunk--my spirits were all exhausted: I knew not what to expect next, nor how I might be enabled to wade through the dreadful winter. . . . He had not, I saw, one ray of hope to offer me of better times, yet he recommended me to cheer myself; but not by more sanguine expectations--simply and solely by religion. To submit, he said, to pray and to submit, were all we had to do. . . . The voice of the Prince of Wales, in the passage, carried him away. They remained together, in deep conference, all the rest of the evening, consulting upon measures for facilitating the king's removal, and obtaining his consent. I went very late to the queen, and found her in deep sorrow but nothing confidential passed: I found her not alone, nor alone did I leave her. But I knew what was passing in her mind--the removing the king!-Its difficulty and danger at present, and the dread of his permanent indignation hereafter. Page 265 THE REMOVAL To KEW. Nov. 29.-Shall I ever forget the varied emotions of this dreadful day! I rose with the heaviest of hearts, and found my poor royal mistress in the deepest dejection: she told me now of our intended expedition to Kew. Lady Elizabeth hastened away to dress, and I was alone with her for some time. Her mind, she said, quite misgave her about Kew: the king's dislike was terrible to think of, and she could not foresee in what it might end. She would have resisted the measure herself, hut that she had determined not to have upon her own mind any opposition to the opinion of the physicians. The account of the night was still more and more discouraging: it was related to me by one of the pages, Mr. Brawan; and though a little I softened or omitted particulars, I yet most sorrowfully conveyed it to the queen. Terrible was the morning!--uninterruptedly terrible! all spent in hasty packing up, preparing for we knew not what, nor for how long, nor with what circumstances, nor scarcely with what view! We seemed preparing for captivity, without having committed any offence; and for banishment, without the least conjecture when we might be recalled from it. The poor queen was to get off in private: the plan settled, between the princes and the physicians, was, that her majesty and the princesses should go away quietly, and then that the king should be told that they were gone, which was the sole method they could devise to prevail with him to follow. He was then to be allured by a promise of seeing them at Kew again, as they knew he would doubt their assertion, he was to go through the rooms and examine the house himself. I believe it was about ten o'clock when her majesty departed drowned in tears, she glided along the passage, and got softly into her carriage, with two weeping princesses, and Lady Courtown, who was to be her lady-in-waiting during this dreadful residence. Then followed the third princess, With Lady Charlotte Finch. They went off without any state or parade, and a more melancholy Scene cannot be imagined. There was not a dry eye in the house. The footmen, the house-maids, the porter, the sentinels--all cried even bitterly as they looked on. The three younger princesses were to wait till the event was known. Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave and Miss Goldsworthy had their royal highnesses in charge, Page 266 It was settled the king was to be attended by three of his gentlemen, in the carriage, and to be followed by the physicians, and preceded by his pages. But all were to depart on his arrival at Kew, except his own equerry-in-waiting. It Was not very pleasant to these gentlemen to attend his majesty at such a time, and upon such a plan, so adverse to his inclination, without any power of assistance : however, they would rather have died than refused, and it was certain the king would no other way travel but by compulsion, which no human being dared even mention. Miss Planta and I were to go as soon as the packages could be ready, with some of the queen's things. Mrs. Schwellenberg was to remain behind, for one day, in order to make arrangements about the jewels. In what a confusion was the house! Princes, equerries, physicians, pages--all conferring, whispering, plotting, and caballing, how to induce the king to set off! At length we found an opportunity to glide through the passage to the coach; Miss Planta and myself, with her maid and Goter. But the heaviness of heart with which we began this journey, and the dreadful prognostics of the duration of misery to which it led us--who can tell? We were almost wholly silent all the way. When we arrived at Kew, we found the suspense with which the king was awaited truly terrible. Her majesty had determined to return to Windsor at night, if he came not. We were all to forbear unpacking in the mean while. The house was all now regulated by express order of the Prince of Wales, who rode over first, and arranged all the apartments, and writ, with chalk, the names of the destined inhabitants on each door. My own room he had given to Lady Courtown ; and for me, he had fixed on one immediately adjoining to Mrs. Schwellenberg's; a very pleasant room, looking into the garden, but by everybody avoided, because the partition is so thin of the next apartment, that not a word can be spoken in either that is not heard in both. A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. While I was surveying this new habitation, the princess royal came into it, and, with a cheered countenance, told me that the queen had just received intelligence that the king was rather better, and would come directly, and therefore I was Page 267, commissioned to issue orders to Columb to keep out of sight, and to see that none of the servants were in the way when the king passed. Eagerly, and enlivened, downstairs I hastened, to speak to Columb. I flew to the parlour to ring the bell for him, as In my new room I had no bell for either man or maid; but judge my surprise, when, upon opening the door, and almost rushing in, I perceived a Windsor uniform! I was retreating with equal haste, when the figure before me started, in so theatric an attitude of astonishment, that it forced me to look again. The arms were then wide opened, while the figure fell back, in tragic paces. Much at a loss, and unable to distinguish the face, I was again retiring, when the figure advanced, but in such measured steps as might have suited a march upon a stage. I now suspected it was Mr. Fairly; yet so unlikely I thought it, I could not believe it without speech. "Surely," I cried, " it is not--it is not--" I stopped, afraid to make a mistake. With arms yet more sublimed, he only advanced, in silence and dumb heroics. I now ventured to look more steadily at the face, and then to exclaim-" "Is it Mr. Fairly?" The laugh now betrayed him: he could hardly believe I had really not known him. I explained that my very little expectation of seeing him at Kew had assisted my near-sightedness to perplex me. But I was glad to see him so sportive, which I found was Owing to the good spirits of bringing good news; he had mounted his horse as soon as he had heard the king had consented to the journey, and he had galloped to Kew, to acquaint her majesty with the welcome tidings. I rang and gave my orders to Columb and he then begged me not to hurry away, and to give him leave to wait, in this parlour, the king's arrival. He then explained to me the whole of the intended proceedings and arrangements, with details innumerable and most interesting. He meant to go almost immediately into the country--all was settled with the queen. I told him I was most cordially glad his recruit was so near at hand. "I shall, however," he said, "be in town a few days longer, and come hither constantly to pay you all a little visit." Miss Planta then appeared. A more general conversation now took place, though in its course Mr. Fairly had the malice to give me a start I little expected from him. We were talk- Page 268 ing of our poor king, and wondering at the delay of his arrival, when Mr. Fairly said, "The king now, Miss Planta, mentions everybody and everything that he knows or has heard mentioned in his whole life. Pray does he know any Of your secrets? he'll surely tell them if he does!" "So I hear," cried she, "but I'm sure he can't tell anything of Me! But I wonder what he says of everybody?" "Why, everything," cried he. "Have you not heard of yourself?" "Dear, no! Dear me, Mr. Fairly!" "And, dear Miss Planta! why should not you have your share? Have you not heard he spares nobody?" "Yes, I have; but I can't think what he says of them!" Fearful of anything more, I arose and looked at the Window to see if any sign of approach appeared, but he dropped the subject without coming any nearer, and Miss Planta dropped it too. I believe he wished to discover if she had heard of his learned ladies! THE KING's ARRIVAL. Dinner went on, and still no king. We now began to grow very anxious, when Miss Planta exclaimed that she thought she heard a carriage. We all listened. "I hope!" I cried. "I see you do!" cried he, "you have a very face of hope at this moment!"--and it was not disappointed. The sound came nearer, and presently a carriage drove into the front court. I could see nothing, it was so dark; but I presently heard the much-respected voice of the dear unhappy king, speaking rapidly to the porter, as he alighted from the coach. Mr. Fairly flew instantly upstairs, to acquaint the queen with the welcome tidings. The poor king had been prevailed upon to quit Windsor with the utmost difficulty: he was accompanied by General Harcourt, his aide-de-camp, and Colonels Goldsworthy and Wellbred--no one else! He had passed all the rest with apparent composure, to come to his carriage, for they lined the passage, eager to see him once more! and almost all Windsor was collected round the rails, etc. to witness the mournful spectacle of his departure, which left them in the deepest despondence, with scarce a ray of hope ever to see him again. Page 269 The bribery, however, which brought, was denied him!--he was by no means to see the queen When I went to her at night, she was all graciousness, and kept me till very late. I had not seen her alone so long, except for a few minutes in the morning, that I had a thousand things I wished to say to her. You may be sure they were all, as far as they went, consolatory. Princess Augusta had a small tent-bed put up in the queen's bed-chamber: I called her royal highness when the queen dismissed me. She undressed in an adjoining apartment. THE ARRANGEMENTS AT KEW PALACE. I must now tell you how the house is disposed. The whole of the ground-floor that looks towards the 'garden is appropriated to the king, though he is not indulged with its range. In the side wing is a room for the physicians, destined to their consultations; adjoining to that is the equerry's dining-room. Mrs. Schwellenberg's parlours, which are in the front of the house, one for dining, the other for coffee and tea, are still allowed us. The other front rooms below are for the pages to dine, and the rest of the more detached buildings are for the servants of various sorts. All the rooms immediately over those which are actually occupied by the king are locked up; her majesty relinquishes them, that he may never be tantalized by footsteps overhead. She has retained only the bed-room, the drawing-room, which joins to it, and the gallery, in which she eats. Beyond this gallery are the apartments of the three elder princesses, in one .of which rooms Miss Planta sleeps. There is nothing more on the first floor. On the second a very large room for Mrs. Schwellenberg, and a very pleasant one for myself, are over the queen's rooms. Farther on are three bed-rooms, one for the surgeon or apothecary in waiting, the next for the equerry, and the third, lately mine, for the queen's lady--all written thus with chalk by the prince. Then follows a very long dark passage, with little bed-rooms on each side, for the maids, and one of the pages. These look like so many little cells of a convent. Mrs. Sandys has a room nearer the queen's, and Goter has one nearer to mine. At the end of this passage there is a larger room, formerly appropriated to Mr. de Luc, but now Page 270 chalked "The physicians'." One physician, one equerry, and one surgeon or apothecary, are regularly to sleep in the house. This is the general arrangement. The prince very properly has also ordered that one of his majesty's grooms of' the bedchamber should be in constant waiting; he is to reside in the prince's house, over the way, which is also fitting up for some others. This gentleman is to receive all inquiries about the king's health. The same regulation had taken place at Windsor, in the Castle, where the gentlemen waited in turn. Though, as the physicians send their account to St. James's, this is now become an almost useless ceremony, for everybody goes thither to read the bulletin. The three young princesses are to be in a house belonging to the king on Kew green, commonly called Princess Elizabeth's, as her royal highness has long inhabited it in her illness. There will lodge Miss Goldsworthy, Mlle. Montmoulin, and Miss Gomme. Lady Charlotte Finch is to be at the Prince of Wales's. I could not sleep all night----I thought I heard the poor king. He was under the same range of apartments, though far distant, but his indignant disappointment haunted me. The queen, too, was very angry at having promises made in her name which could not be kept. What a day altogether was this! A REGENCY HINTED AT. Sunday, Nov. 30.-Here, in all its dread colours, dark as its darkest prognostics, began the Kew campaign. I went to my poor queen at seven o'clock: the Princess Augusta arose and went away to dress, and I received her majesty's commands to go down for inquiries. She had herself passed a wretched night, and already lamented leaving Windsor. I waited very long in the cold dark passages below, before I could find any one of whom to ask intelligence. The parlours were without fires, and washing. I gave directions afterwards, to have a fire in one of them by seven o'clock every morning. At length I procured the speech of one of the pages, and heard that the night had been the most violently bad of any yet passed!--and no wonder! I hardly knew how to creep upstairs, frozen both within and without, to tell such news; but it was not received as if unexpected, and I omitted whatever was not essential to be known. Page 271 Afterwards arrived Mrs: Schwellenberg, so oppressed between her spasms and the house's horrors, that the oppression she inflicted ought perhaps to be pardoned. It was, however, difficult enough to bear! Harshness, tyranny, dissension, and even insult, seemed personified. I cut short details upon this subject-they would but make you sick. . . . My dear Miss Cambridge sent to me immediately. I saw she had a secret hope she might come and sit with me now and then in this confinement. It would have been my greatest possible solace in this dreary abode: but I hastened to acquaint her of the absolute seclusion, and even to beg she would not send her servant to the house - for I found it was much desired to keep off all who might carry away any intelligence. She is ever most reasonable, and never thenceforward hinted upon the subject. But she wrote continually long letters, and filled with news and anecdotes of much interest, relating to anything she could gather of "out-house proceedings," which now became very important--the length of the malady threatening a regency!-- a Word which I have not yet been able to articulate. MR. FAIRLY'S KIND OFFICES. Kew, Monday, Dec. 1.-Mournful was the opening of the month! My account of the night from Gezewell, the page, was very alarming, and my poor royal mistress began to sink more than I had ever yet seen. No wonder; the length of the malady so uncertain, the steps which seemed now requisite so shocking: for new advice, and such as suited only disorders that physicians in general relinquish, was now proposed, and compliance or refusal were almost equally tremendous. In sadness I returned from her, and, moping and unoccupied, I was walking up and down my room, when Columb came to say Mr. Fairly desired to know if I could see him. Certainly, I said, I would come to him in the parlour. He was not at all well, nor did he seem at all comfortable. He had undertaken, by his own desire, to purchase small carpets for the princesses, for the house is in a state of cold and discomfort past all imagination. It has never been a winter residence, and there was nothing prepared for its becoming one. He could not, he told me, look at the rooms of their royal highnesses without shuddering for them; and he longed, he said, to cover all the naked, cold boards, to render them Page 272 more habitable. He had obtained permission to execute this as a commission: for so miserable is the house at present that no general orders to the proper people are either given Or thought about; and every one is so absorbed in the general calamity, that they would individually sooner perish than offer up complaint or petition. I Should never end were I to explain the reasons there are for both. What he must next, he said, effect, was supplying them with sand-bags for windows and doors, which he intended to fill and to place himself. The wind which blew in upon those lovely princesses, he declared, was enough to destroy them. When he had informed me of these kind offices, he began an inquiry into how I was lodged. Well enough, I said; but he would not accept so general an answer. He insisted upon knowing what was my furniture, and in particular if I had any carpet; and when I owned I had none, he smiled, and said he would bring six, though his commission only extended to three. He did not at all like the parlour, which, indeed, is wretchedly cold and miserable: he wished to bring it a carpet, and new fit it up with warm winter accommodations. He reminded me of my dearest Fredy, when she brought me a decanter of barley-water and a bright tin saucepan, under her hoop. I Could not tell him that history in detail, but I rewarded his good-nature by hinting at the resemblance it bore, in its active zeal, to my sweet Mrs. Locke. . . . The queen afterwards presented me with a very pretty little new carpet; only a bed-side slip, but very warm. She knew not how much I was acquainted with its history, but I found she had settled for them all six. She gave another to Mrs. Schwellenberg. MRS. SCHWELLENBERG'S PARLOUR. Dec. 3.-Worse again to-day was the poor king: the little fair gleam, how soon did it pass away! I was beginning to grow ill myself, from the added fatigue of disturbance in the night, unavoidably occasioned by the neighbourhood to an invalid who summoned her maids at all hours; and my royal mistress issued orders for a removal to take place. My new apartment is at the end of the long dark passage mentioned, with bed-room cells on each side it. It is a Page 273 very comfortable room, carpeted all over, with one window looking- to the front of the house and two into a court-yard. It is the most distant from the queen, but in all other respects is very desirable. I must now relate briefly a new piece of cruelty. I happened to mention to la première présidente my waiting for a page to bring the morning accounts. "And where do you wait?" "In the parlour, ma'am." "In my parlour? Oh, ver well! I will see to that!" "There is no other place, ma'am, but the cold passages, which, at that time in the morning, are commonly wet as well as dark." "O, ver well! When everybody goes to my room I might keep an inn--what you call hotel." All good humour now again vanished; and this morning, when I made my seven o'clock inquiry, I found the parlour doors both locked! I returned so shivering to my queen, that she demanded the cause, which I simply related; foreseeing inevitable destruction from continuing to run such a hazard. She instantly protested there should be a new arrangement. Dec. 4.-No opportunity offered yesterday for my better security, and therefore I was again exposed this morning to the cold dark damp of the miserable passage. The account was tolerable, but a threat of sore-throat accelerated the reform. It was now settled that the dining-parlour should be made over for the officers of state who came upon business to the house, and who hitherto had waited in the hall; and the room which was next to Mrs. Schwellenberg's, and which had first been mine, was now made our salle à manger. By this means, the parlour being taken away for other people, and by command relinquished, I obtained once again the freedom of entering it, to 'gather my account for her majesty. But the excess of ill-will awakened by my obtaining this little privilege, which was actually necessary to my very life, was so great, that more of personal offence and harshness could not have been shown to the most guilty of culprits. One of the pages acquainted me his majesty was not worse, and the night had been as usual. As usual, too, was my day sad and solitary all the morning--not solitary but worse during dinner and coffee. just after it, however, came the good and sweet Mr. Smelt. Page 274 The Prince of Wales sent for him, and condescended to apologise for the Windsor transaction, and to order he might regain admission. How this was brought about I am not clear: I only know it is agreed by all parties that the prince has the faculty of making his peace, where he wishes it, with the most captivating grace In the world. A NEW PHYSICIAN SUMMONED. Mr. Fairly told me this evening that Dr. Willis, a physician of Lincoln, of peculiar skill and practice in intellectual maladies, had been sent for by express. The poor queen had most painfully concurred in a measure which seemed to fix the nature of the king's attack in the face of the world; but the necessity and strong advice had prevailed over her repugnance. Dec. 6.-Mr. Fairly came to me, to borrow pen and ink for a few memorandums. Notwithstanding much haste. he could not, he said, go till he had acquainted me with the opening of Dr. Willis with his royal patient. I told him there was nothing I more anxiously wished to hear. He then gave me the full narration, interesting, curious, extraordinary; full of promise and hope. He is extremely pleased both with the doctor and his son, Dr. John, he says they are fine, lively, natural, independent characters. Sunday, Dec. 7.-Very bad Was this morning's account. Lady Charlotte Finch read prayers to the queen and princess, and Lady Courtown, and the rest for themselves. M r. Fairly wishes her majesty would summon a chaplain, and let the house join in congregation. I think he is right, as far as the house extends to those who are still admitted into her majesty's presence. Dec. 8.-The accounts began mending considerably, and hope broke in upon all. Dec. 9.---All gets now into a better channel, and the dear royal invalid gives every symptom of amendment. God be praised! Dec. 11.-To-day We have had the fairest hopes: the king took his first walk in Kew garden! There have been impediments to this trial hitherto, that have been thought insurmountable, though, in fact, they were most frivolous. The walk seemed to do him good, and we are all in better Page 275 spirits about him than for this many and many a long day past. MRS. SCHWELLENBERG'S OPINION OF MR. FAIRLY. Dec. 12.-This day passed in much the same manner. Late in the evening, after Mr. Smelt was gone, Mrs. Schwellenberg began talking about Mr. Fairly, and giving free vent to all her strong innate aversion to him. She went back to the old history of the "newseepaper," and gave to his naming it every unheard motive of spite, disloyalty, and calumny! three qualities which I believe equally and utterly unknown to him. He was also, she said, "very onfeeling, for she had heard him laugh prodigious with the Lady Waldegraves, Perticleer with lady Carlisle, what you call Lady Elizabeth her sister, and this in the king's illness." And, in fine, she could not bear him. Such gross injustice I could not hear quietly. I began a warm defence, protesting I knew no one whose heart was more feelingly devoted to the royal family, except, perhaps, Mr. Smelt; and that as to his laughing, it must have been at something of passing and accidental amusement, since he was grave even to melancholy, except when he exerted his spirits for the relief or entertainment of others. Equally amazed and provoked, she disdainfully asked me what I knew of him? I made no answer. I was not quite prepared for the interrogatory, and feared she might next inquire when and where I had seen him? My silence was regarded as self-conviction of error, and she added, "I know you can't not know him; I know he had never seen you two year and half ago; when you came here he had not heard your name." "Two years and a half," I answered coolly, "I did not regard as a short time for forming a judgment of any one's character." "When you don't not see them ? You have never seen him, I am sure, but once, or what you call twice." I did not dare let this pass, it was so very wide from the truth; but calmly said I had seen him much oftener than once or twice. "And where? when have you seen him?" "Many times; and at Cheltenham constantly; but never to observe in him anything but honour and goodness." "O ver well! you don't not know him like me, you can't Page 276 not know him; he is not from your acquaintance--I know that ver well!" She presently went on by herself. "You could not know such a person--he told me the same himself: he told me he had not never seen you when you first came. You might see him at Cheltenham, that is true; but nothing others, I am sure. At Windsor there was no tea, not wonce, so you can't not have seen him, only at Cheltenham." I hardly knew whether to laugh or be frightened at this width of error; nor, indeed, whether it was not all some artifice to draw me out, from pique, into some recital: at all events I thought it best to say nothing, for she was too affronting to deserve to be set right. She went on to the same purpose some time, more than insinuating that a person such as Mr. Fairly could never let him self down to be acquainted with me; till finding me too much offended to think her assertions worth answering, she started, at last, another subject. I then forced myself to talk much as usual. But how did I rejoice when the clock struck ten--how wish it had been twelve! THE KING'S VARYING CONDITION. Dec. 15.-This whole day was passed in great internal agitation throughout the house, as the great and important business of the Regency was to be discussed to-morrow in Parliament. All is now too painful and intricate for writing a word. I begin to confine my memorandums almost wholly to my own personal proceedings. Dec. 16.-Whatsoever might pass in the House on this momentous subject, it sat so late that no news could arrive. Sweeter and better news, however, was immediately at hand than any the whole senate could transmit; the account from the pages was truly cheering. With what joy did I hasten with it to the queen, who immediately ordered me to be its welcome messenger to the three princesses. And when Mr. Smelt came to my breakfast, with what rapture did he receive it! seizing and kissing my hand, while his eyes ran over, and joy seemed quite to bewitch him. He flew away in a very few minutes, to share his happiness with his faithful partner. After breakfast I had a long conference in the parlour with Sir Lucas Pepys, who justly gloried in the advancement of his original prediction; but there had been much dissension Page 277 amongst the physicians, concerning the bulletin to go to St. James's, no two agreeing in the degree of better to be announced to the world. Dr. Willis came in while we were conversing, but instantly retreated, to leave us undisturbed. He looks a very fine old man. I wish to be introduced to him. Mr. Smelt and Mr. Fairly are both quite enchanted with all the family; for another son now, a clergyman, Mr. Thomas Willis, has joined their forces. Dec. 17.-MY account this morning was most afflictive once more: it was given by Mr. Hawkins, and was cruelly subversive of all our rising hopes. I carried it to the queen in trembling but she bore it most mildly. What resignation is hers! Dec. 22.-With what joy did I carry, this morning, an exceeding good account of the king to my royal mistress! It was trebly welcome., as much might depend upon it in the resolutions of the House concerning the Regency, which was of to-day's discussion. Mr. Fairly took leave, for a week, he said, wishing me my health, while I expressed my own wishes for his good journey But, in looking forward to a friendship the most permanent, saw the eligibility of rendering it the most open. I therefore went back to Mrs. Schwellenberg; and the moment I received a reproach for staying so long, I calmly answered, "Mr. Fairly had made me a visit, to take leave before he went into the country." Amazement was perhaps never more indignant. Mr. Fairly to take leave of me! while not once he even called upon her! This offence swallowed up all other comments upon the communication. I seemed not to understand it; but we had a terrible two hours and a-half. Yet to such, now, I may look forward without any mixture, any alleviation, for evening after evening in this sad abode. N.B. My own separate adventures for this month, and year, concluded upon this day. The king went on now better, now worse, in a most fearful manner; but Sir Lucas Pepys never lost sight of hope, and the management of Dr. Willis and his two sons was most wonderfully acute and successful. Yet so much were they perplexed and tormented by the interruptions given to their plans and methods, that they were frequently almost tempted to resign the undertaking from anger and confusion. Page 278 DR. WILLIS AND His SON. Kew Palace, Thursday, Jan. 1, 1789.-The year opened with an account the most promising of our beloved king. I saw Dr, Willis, and he told me the night had been very tranquil and he sent for his son, Dr. John Willis, to give me a history of the morning. Dr. John's narration was in many parts very affecting: the dear and excellent king had been praying for his own restoration! Both the doctors told me that such strong symptoms of true piety had scarce ever been discernible through so dreadful a malady. How I hastened to my queen!--and with what alacrity I besought permission to run next to the princesses! It was so sweet, so soothing, to open a new year with the solace of anticipated good! Jan. 3.-I have the great pleasure, now, of a change in my morning's historiographers; I have made acquaintance with Dr. Willis and his son, and they have desired me to summon one of them constantly for my information. I am extremely struck with both these physicians. Dr. Willis is a man of ten thousand; open, holiest, dauntless, lighthearted, innocent, and high minded: I see him impressed with the most animated reverence and affection for his royal patient; but it is wholly for his character,--not a whit for his rank. Dr. John, his eldest son, is extremely handsome, and inherits, in a milder degree, all the qualities of his father; but living more in the general world, and having his fame and fortune still to settle, he has not yet acquired the same courage, nor is he, by nature, quite so sanguine in his opinions. The manners of both are extremely pleasing, and they both proceed completely their own way, not merely unacquainted with court etiquette, but wholly, and most artlessly, unambitious to form any such acquaintance. Jan. 11.-This morning Dr. John gave me but a bad account of the poor king. His amendment is not progressive; it fails, and goes back, and disappoints most grievously; yet it would be nothing were the case and its circumstances less discussed, and were expectation more reasonable. Jan. 12.-A melancholy day: news bad both at home and abroad. At home the dear unhappy king still worse--abroad new examinations voted of the physicians! Good heaven! what an insult does this seem from parliamentary power, to investigate and bring forth to the world every circumstance Of Page 279 such a malady as is ever held sacred to secrecy in the most private families! How indignant we all feel here no words can say. LEARNING IN WOMEN. Jan. 13.-The two younger Willises, Dr. John and Mr. Thomas, came upstairs in the afternoon, to make a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg. I took the opportunity to decamp to my own room, where I found Mr. Fairly in waiting. In the course of conversation that followed, Mrs. Carter was named: Mr. Smelt is seriously of opinion her ode is the best in our language.(301) I spoke of her very highly, for indeed I reverence her. Learning in women was then Our theme. I rather wished to hear than to declaim upon this subject, yet I never seek to disguise that I think it has no recommendation of sufficient value to compensate its evil excitement of envy and satire. He spoke with very uncommon liberality on the female powers and intellects, and protested he had never, in his commerce with the world, been able to discern any other inferiority in their parts than what resulted from their Pursuits -and yet, with all this, he doubted much whether he had ever seen any woman who might not have been rather better without than with the learned languages, one only excepted. He was some time silent, and I could not but suppose he meant his correspondent, Miss Fuzilier; but, with a very tender sigh, he said, "And she was my mother,--who neglected nothing else, while she cultivated Latin, and who knew it very well, and would have known it very superiorly, but that her brother disliked her studying, and one day burnt all her books!" This anecdote led to one in return, from myself. I told him, briefly the history of Dr. Johnson's most kind condescension, in desiring to make me his pupil, and beginning to give me regular lessons of the Latin language, and i proceeded to the speedy conclusion--my great apprehension,-- conviction rather,--that what I learnt of so great a man could never be private, and that he himself would contemn concealment, if any Page 280 progress should be made; which to Me was sufficient motive for relinquishing the scheme, and declining the honour, highly as I valued it, of obtaining Such a master--"and this," I added, "though difficult to be done without offending, was yet the better effected, as my father himself likes and approves all accomplishments for women better than the dead languages." THE QUEEN AND MR. FAIRLY'S VISITS. Jan. 14.-I must now mention a rather singular conversation. I had no opportunity last night to name, as usual, my visitor; but I have done it so often, so constantly indeed, that I was not uneasy In the omission. But this morning, while her hair was dressing, my royal Mistress suddenly said, "Did you see any body yesterday?" I could not but be sure of her meaning, and though vexed to be anticipated in my avowal, which had but waited the departure of the wardrobe-woman, Sandys, I instantly answered, "Yes, ma'am; Mr, Smelt in the morning and Mr. Fairly in the evening." "O! Mr. Fairly was here, then?" I was now doubly sorry she should know this only from me! He had Mentioned being just come from town, but I had concluded Lady Charlotte Finch, as usual, knew of his arrival, and had made it known to her Majesty. A little while after,--"Did he go away from you early?" she said. "No, ma'am," I Immediately answered, "not early: he drank tea with Me, as he generally does, I believe, when he is here for the night." "Perhaps," cried she after a pause, "the gentlemen below do not drink tea." "I cannot tell, ma'am, I never heard him say; I only know he asked me if I would give him some, and I told him yes, with great pleasure." Never did I feel so happy in unblushing consciousness of internal liberty as in this little catechism! However, I soon found I had Mistaken the Motive of the catechism: it was not on account of Mr. Fairly and his visit; it was all for Mrs. Schwellenberg and her no visits; for she soon dropped something of "poor Mrs. Schwellenberg" and her Miserable state, that opened her whole meaning. Page 281 A MELANCHOLY BIRTHDAY. Sunday, Jan. 18.-The public birthday of my poor royal mistress. How sadly did she pass it; and how was I filled With sorrow for her reflections upon this its first anniversary for these last twenty-eight years in which the king and the nation have not united in its celebration! All now was passed over in silence and obscurity; all observance of the day was prohibited, both abroad and at home. The poor king whose attention to times and dates is unremittingly exact, knew the day, and insisted upon seeing the queen and three of the princesses; but--it was not a good day. MR. FAIRLY ON FANS. Jan. 21.-I came to my room; and there, in my own corner, sat poor Mr. Fairly, looking a little forlorn, and telling me he had been there near an hour. I made every apology that could mark in the strongest manner how little I thought his patience worth such exertion. . . . He was going to spend the next day at St. Leonard's, where he was to meet his son; and he portrayed to me the character of Mrs. Harcourt so fairly and favourably, that her flightiness sunk away on the rise of her good qualities. He spoke of his chapel of St. Catherine's, its emoluments, chaplain, brothers, sisters, and full establishment. Finding I entered into nothing, he took up a fan which lay on my table, and began playing off various imitative airs with it, exclaiming, "How thoroughly useless a toy!" "No," I said; "on the contrary, taken as an ornament, it was the most useful ornament of any belonging to full dress, occupying the hands, giving the eyes something to look at, and taking away stiffness and formality from the figure and deportment." "Men have no fans," cried he, "and how do they do?" "Worse," quoth I, plumply. He laughed quite out, saying, "That's ingenuous, however; and, indeed, I must confess they are reduced, from time to time, to shift their hands from one pocket to another." "Not, to speak of lounging about in their chairs from one side to another." "But the real use of a fan," cried he, "if there is any, is it not--to hide a particular blush that ought not to appear?" Page 282 "O, no; it Would rather make it the sooner noticed." "Not at all; it may be done under pretence of absence--rubbing the cheek, or nose--putting it up accidentally to the eye--in a thousand ways." He went through all these evolutions comically enough, and then, putting aside his toy, came back to graver matters. MR. FAIRLY CONTINUES HIS VISITS: THE QUEEN AGAIN REMARKS UPON THEM. Jan. 26.-In the evening Mr. Fairly came to tea. He was grave, and my reception did not make him gayer. General discourse took place till Mrs. Dickenson happened to be named. He knew her very well as Miss Hamilton. Her conjugal conduct, in displaying her Superior power over her husband, was our particular theme, till in the midst of it he exclaimed, "How well you will be trained in by Mrs. Schwellenberg--if you come to trial!" Ah! thought I, the more I suffer through her, the less and less do I feel disposed to run any new and more lasting risk, But I said not this. I only protested I was much less her humble servant than might be supposed. "How can that be," cried he, "when you never contest any one point with her?" Not, I said, in positive wrangling, which could never answer its horrible pain; but still I refused undue obedience when exacted with indignity, and always hastened to retire when offended and affronted. He took up Mrs. Smith's "Emmeline,"(302) which is just lent me by the queen; but he found it not piquant and putting it down, begged me to choose him a Rambler." I had a good deal of difficulty In my decision, as he had already seen almost all I could particularly wish to recommend; and, when he saw me turn over leaf after leaf with some hesitation, he began a serious reproach to me of inflexible reserve. And then away he went. I hastened immediately to Mrs. Schwellenberg; and found all in a tumult. She had been, she said, alone all the evening, and was going to have sent for me, but found I had my company. She sent for Mlle. Montmoulin but she had a cold; for Miss Gomme, but she could not come because of the snow; Page 283 for Miss Planta but she was ill with a fever, "what you call head-ache:" she had then "sent to princess royal, who had been to her, and pitied her ver moch, for princess royal was really sensible." And all this was communicated with a look of accusation, and a tone of menace, that might have suited an attack upon some hardened felon. . . . I made no sort of apology nor any other answer than that I had had the honour of Mr. Fairly's company to tea, which was always a pleasure to me. I believe something like consciousness whispered her here, that it might really be possible his society was as pleasant as I had found hers, for she then dropped her lamentation, and said she thanked God she wanted nobody, not one; she could always amuse herself, and was glad enough to be alone. Were it but true! I offered cards: she refused, because it was too late, though we yet remained together near two hours. If this a little disordered me, You will not think what followed was matter of composure. While the queen's hair was rolling up, by the wardrobe woman, at night, Mrs. Schwellenberg happened to leave the room, and almost instantly her majesty, in a rather abrupt manner, said "Is Mr. Fairly here to-night?" "Yes, ma'am." "When did he come back?" I could not recollect. "I did not know he was here." This thunderstruck me; that he should come again, or stay, at least, without apprising his royal mistress, startled me inwardly, and distressed me outwardly. "I knew, indeed," she then added, "he was here in the morning, but I understood he went away afterwards." The idea of connivance now struck me with a real disdain, that brought back my courage and recollection in full force, and I answered, "I remember, ma'am, he told me he had rode over to Richmond park at noon, and returned here to dinner with Colonel Wellbred, and in the evening he drank tea with me, and said he should sup with General Harcourt." All this, spoken with an openness that rather invited than shunned further investigation, seemed to give an immediate satisfaction ; the tone of voice_ changed to its usual com- Page 284 placency, and she inquired various things concerning the Stuart family, and then spoke upon more common topics. I concluded it now all over; but soon after Mrs. Sandys went away, and then, very unexpectedly, the queen renewed the subject. "The reason," she said, "that I asked about Mr. Fairly was that the Schwellenberg sent to ask Miss Planta to come to her, because Mr. Fairly was--no, not with her--he never goes to her." She stopped; but I was wholly silent. I felt instantly with how little propriety I could undertake either to defend or to excuse Mr. Fairly, whom I determined to consider as a visitor,, over whom, having no particular influence, I could be charged with no particular responsibility. After waiting a few minutes,-"With you," she said, "Mr. Fairly was and the Schwellenberg was alone." My spirits quite panted at this moment to make a full Confession of the usage I had endured from the person thus compassionated; but I had so frequently resolved, in moments Of cool deliberation, not even to risk doing mischief to a favourite old servant, that I withstood the impulse ; but the inward conflict silenced me from saying anything else. I believe she was surprised but she added, after a long pause, "I believe--he comes to you every evening when here." "I do not know, ma'am, always, when he is here or away; but I am always very glad to see him, for indeed his visits make all the little variety that--" I hastily stopped, lest she should think me discontented with this strict confinement during this dreadful season ; and that I can never be, when it is not accompanied by tyranny and injustice. She immediately took up the word, but without the slightest displeasure. "Why here there might be more variety than anywhere, from the nearness to town, except for--" " The present situation of things." I eagerly interrupted her to say, and went on: "Indeed, ma'am, I have scarce a wish to break into the present arrangement, by seeing anybody while the house is in this state; nor have I, from last October, seen one human being that does not live here, except Mr. Smelt, Mr. Fairly, and Sir Lucas Pepys; and they all come upon their own calls, and not for me." "The only objection," she gently answered, "to seeing anybody, is that every one who comes carries some sort of information away with them." Page 285 I assured her I was perfectly content to wait for better times, Here the matter dropped ; she appeared satisfied with what I said, and became soft and serene as before the little attack. Jan. 27.-The intelligence this morning was not very pleasant. I had a conference afterwards with Sir Lucas Pepys, who keeps up undiminished hope. We held our council in the physicians' room, which chanced to be empty; but before it broke up Colonel Wellbred entered. It was a pleasure to me to see him, though somewhat an embarrassment to hear him immediately lament that we never met, and add that he knew not in what manner to procure himself that pleasure. I joined in the lamentation, and its cause, which confined us all to our cells. Sir Lucas declared my confinement menaced my health, and charged me to walk out, and take air and exercise very sedulously, if I would avoid an illness. Colonel Wellbred instantly offered me a key of Richmond gardens, which opened into them by a nearer door than what was used in common. I accepted his kindness, and took an hour's walk,-for the first time since last October; ten minutes in Kew gardens are all I have spent without doors since the middle of that month. THE SEARCH FOR MR. FAIRLY. Jan. 30.-To-day my poor royal mistress received the address of the Lords and Commons, of condolence, etc., upon his majesty's illness. What a painful, but necessary ceremony! It was most properly presented by but few members, and those almost all chosen from the household: a great propriety. Not long after came Mr. Fairly, looking harassed. "May I," he cried, "come in?--and-for an hour? Can you allow me entrance and room for that time?" Much Surprised, for already it was three o'clock, I assented: he then told me he had something to copy for her majesty, which was of the highest importance, and said he could find no quiet room in the house but mine for such a business. I gave him every accommodation in my power. When he had written a few lines, he asked if I was very busy, or could help him ? Most readily I offered my services, and then I read to him the original, sentence by sentence, to facilitate his copying; receiving his assurances of my "great assistance" every two lines. In the midst of this occupation, Page 286 a tap at my door made me precipitately put down the paper to receive-lady Charlotte Finch! "Can you," she cried, "have the goodness to tell me any thing of Mr. Fairly?" The screen had hidden him; but, gently,--though, I believe ill enough pleased,--he called out himself, "Here is Mr. Fairly." She flew up to him, crying, "O, Mr. Fairly, what a search has there been for you, by the queen's orders ! She has wanted you extremely, and no one knew where to find you. They have been to the waiting-room, to the equerries', all over the garden, to the prince's house, in your own room, and could find you nowhere, and at last they thought you were gone back to town." He calmly answered, while he still wrote on, he was sorry they had had so much trouble, for he had only been executing her majesty's commands. She then hesitated a little, almost to stammering, in adding "So--at last--I said--that perhaps--you might be here!" He now raised his head from the paper, and bowing it towards me, "Yes," he cried, "Miss Burney is so good as to give me leave, and there is no other room in the house in Which I can be at rest." "So I told her majesty," answered Lady Charlotte, "though she said she was sure you could not be here ; but I said there was really no room of quiet here for any business, and so then I came to see." "Miss Burney," he rejoined, "has the goodness also to help me-- she has taken the trouble to read as I go on, which forwards me very much." Lady Charlotte stared, and I felt sorry at this confession of a confidence she could not but think too much, and I believe he half repented it, for he added, "This, however, you need not perhaps mention, though I know where I trust!" He proceeded again with his writing, and she then recollected her errand. She told him that what he was copying was to be carried to town by Lord Aylesbury, but the queen desired to see it first. She then returned to her majesty. She soon, however, returned again. She brought the queen's seal, and leave that he might make up the packet, and give it to Lord Aylesbury, without showing it first to her majesty, who was just gone to dinner. With her customary good-humour Page 287 and good-breeding, she then chatted with me some time, and again departed. We then went to work with all our might, reading and copying. The original was extremely curious--I am sorry I must make it equally secret. Miss BURNEY's ALARM ON BEING CHASED BY THE KING. Kew Palace, Monday, Feb. 2.-What an adventure had I this morning! one that has occasioned me the severest personal terror I ever experienced in my life. Sir Lucas Pepys still persisting that exercise and air were absolutely necessary to save me from illness, I have continued my walks, varying my gardens from Richmond to Kew, according to the accounts I received of the movements of the king. For this I had her majesty's permission, on the representation of Sir Lucas. This morning, when I received my intelligence of the king from Dr. John Willis, I begged to know where I might walk in safety? "In Kew gardens," he said, "as the king would be in Richmond." "Should any unfortunate circumstance," I cried, "at any time, occasion my being seen by his majesty, do not mention my name, but let me run off without call or notice." This he promised. Everybody, indeed, is ordered to keep out of sight. Taking, therefore, the time I had most at command, I strolled into the gardens. I had proceeded, in my quick way, nearly half the round, when I suddenly perceived, through some trees, two or three figures. Relying on the instructions of Dr. John, I concluded them to be workmen and gardeners; yet tried to look sharp, and in so doing, as they were less shaded, I thought I saw the person of his majesty! Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not to know more, but turning back, ran off with all my might. But what was my terror to hear myself pursued!--to hear the voice of the king himself loudly and hoarsely calling after me, "MISS Burney! Miss Burney! I protest I was ready to die. I knew not in what state he might be at the time; I only knew the orders to keep out of his way were universal; that the queen would highly disapprove any unauthorized meeting, and that the very action of my running away might deeply, in his present irritable state, offend him. Nevertheless, on I ran, too terrified to stop, and Page 288 In search Of some short passage, for the g)arden is full of labyrinths, by which I might escape. The steps still pursued me, and Still the poor hoarse and altered voice rang in my ears:--more and more footsteps sounded frightfully behind me,--the attendants all running to catch their eager master, and the voices of the two Doctor Willises loudly exhorting him not to heat himself so unmercifully. Heavens, how I ran! I do not think I should have felt the hot lava from Vesuvius--at least not the hot cinders--hadd I so run during its eruption. My feet were not sensible that they even touched the ground. Soon after, I heard other voices, shriller, though less nervous, call out "Stop! stop! stop!" I could by no means consent: I knew not what was purposed, but I recollected fully my agreement with Dr. John that very morning, that I should decamp if Surprised, and not b named. My own fears and repugnance, also, after a flight and disobedience like this, were doubled in the thought of not escaping; I knew not to what I might be exposed, should the malady be then high, and take the turn of resentment. Still, therefore, on I flew; and such was my speed, so almost incredible to relate or recollect, that I fairly believe no one of the whole party could have overtaken me, if these words, from one of the attendants, had not reached me, "Doctor Willis begs you to stop!" "I cannot! I cannot!" I answered, still flying on, when he called out, "You must, ma'am; it hurts the king to run." Then, indeed, I stopped--in a state of fear really amounting to agony. I turned round, I saw the two doctors had got the king between them, and three attendants of Dr. Willis's were hovering about. They all slackened their pace, as they saw me stand still; but such was the excess of my alarm, that I was wholly insensible to the effects of a race which, at any other time, would have required an hour's recruit. As they approached, some little presence of mind happily came to my command it occurred to me that, to appease the wrath of my flight, I must now show some confidence: I therefore faced them as undauntedly as I was able, only charging the nearest of the attendants to stand by my side. When they were within a few yards of me, the king called out, "Why did you run away?" Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little Page 289 assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward, to meet him, though the internal sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most proper, to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so violently combated by the tremor of my nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of personal courage-I have ever made. A ROYAL SALUTE AND ROYAL CONFIDENCES. The effort answered : I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of countenance, though something still of wildness in his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders, and then kiss my cheek ! * I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when I saw him spread out his arms! Involuntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me: but the Willises, who have never seen him till this fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing, perhaps, it was his customary salutation! I believe, however, it was but the joy of a heart unbridled, now, by the forms and proprieties of established custom and sober reason. To see any of his household thus by accident, seemed such a near approach to liberty and recovery, that who can wonder it should serve rather to elate than lessen what yet remains of his disorder! He now spoke in such terms of his pleasure in seeing me, that I soon lost the whole of my terror; astonishment to find him so nearly well, and gratification to see him so pleased, removed every uneasy feeling, and the joy that succeeded, in my conviction of his recovery, made me ready to throw myself at his feet to express it. What conversation followed! When he saw me fearless, he grew more and more alive, and made me walk close by his side, away from the attendants, and even the Willises themselves, who, to indulge him, retreated. I own myself not completely composed, but alarm I could entertain no more. Everything that came uppermost in his mind he mentioned; he seemed to have just such remains of his flightiness as heated his imagination without deranging his reason, and robbed him of all control over his speech, though nearly in his perfect state Of mind as to his opinions. What did he not say !--He opened Page 290 his whole heart to me,--expounded all his sentiments, and acquainted me with all his intentions. The heads of his discourse I must give you briefly, as I am sure you will be highly curious to hear them, and as no accident can render of much consequence what a man says in such a state of physical intoxication. He assured me he was quite well--as well as he had ever been in his life ; and then inquired how I did, and how I went on? and whether I was more comfortable? If these questions, in their implications, surprised me, imagine how that surprise must increase when he proceeded to explain them! He asked after the coadjutrix, laughing, and saying "Never mind her!--don't be oppressed--I am your friend! don't let her cast you down!--I know you have a hard time of it--but don't mind her!" Almost thunderstruck with astonishment, I merely curtsied to his kind "I am your friend," and said nothing. Then presently he added, "Stick to your father--stick to your own family--let them be your objects." How readily I assented! Again he repeated all I have just written, nearly in the same words, but ended it more seriously: He suddenly stopped, and held me to stop too, and putting his hand on his breast. in the most solemn manner, he gravely and slowly said, "I will protect you!-- I promise you that--and therefore depend upon me!" I thanked him ; and the Willises, thinking him rather too elevated, came to propose my walking on. "No, no, no!" he cried, a hundred times in a breath and their good humour prevailed, and they let him again walk on with his new Companion. He then gave me a history of his pages, animating almost into a rage, as he related his subjects of displeasure with them, particularly with Mr. Ernst, who he told me had been brought up by himself. I hope his ideas upon these men are the result of the mistakes of his malady. Then he asked me some questions that very greatly &stressed me, relating to information given him in his illness, from various motives, but which he suspected to be false, and which I knew he had reason to suspect: yet was It most dangerous to set anything right, as I was not aware what might be the views of their having been stated wrong. I was as discreet as I knew how to be, and I hope I did no mischief; but this was the worst part of the dialogue. Page 291 He next talked to me a great deal of my dear father, and made a thousand inquiries concerning his "History of Music." This brought him to his favourite theme, Handel; and he told me innumerable anecdotes of him, and particularly that celebrated tale of Handel's saying of himself, when a boy, "While that boy lives, my music will never want a protector." And this, he said, I might relate to my father. Then he ran over most of his oratorios, attempting to sing the subjects of several airs and choruses, but so dreadfully hoarse that the sound was terrible. Dr. Willis, quite alarmed at this exertion, feared he would do himself harm, and again proposed a separation. " "No! no! no!" he exclaimed, "not yet; I have something I must just mention first." Dr. Willis, delighted to comply, even when uneasy at compliance, again gave way. The good king then greatly affected me. He began upon my revered old friend, Mrs. Delany and he spoke of her with such warmth--such kindness! "She was my friend!" he cried, "and I loved her as a friend! I have made a memorandum when I lost her--I will show it YOU." He pulled out a pocket-book, and rummaged some time, but to no purpose. The tears stood in his eyes--he wiped them, and Dr. Willis again became very anxious. "Come, sir," he cried, "now do you come in and let the lady go on her walk,-come, now you have talked a long while,-so we'll go in,--if your majesty pleases." "No, no!" he cried, "I want to ask her a few questions ; --I have lived so long out of the world, I know nothing!" This touched me to the heart. We walked on together, and he inquired after various persons, particularly Mrs. Boscawen, because she was Mrs. Delany's friend! Then, for the same reason, after Mr. Frederick Montagu,(303) of whom he kindly said, "I know he has a great regard for me, for all he joined the opposition." Lord Grey de Wilton, Sir Watkin Wynn, the Duke of Beaufort, and various others, followed. He then told me he was very much dissatisfied with several of his state officers, and meant to form an entire new establishment. He took a paper out of his pocket-book, and showed me his new list. Page 292 This was the wildest thing that passed ; and Dr. John Willis now seriously urged our separating; but he would not consent he had only three more words to say, he declared, and again he conquered. He now spoke of my father, with still more kindness, and told me he ought to have had the post of master of the band, and not that little poor musician Parsons, who was not fit for it: "But Lord Salisbury," he cried, "used your father vary ill in that business, and so he did me! However, I have dashed out his name, and I shall put your father's in,--as soon as I get loose again!" This again--how affecting was this! "And what," cried he,"has your father got, at last? nothing but that poor thing at Chelsea?(304) O fie! fie! fie! But never mind! I will take care of him. I will do it myself!" Then presently he added, "As to Lord Salisbury, he is out already, as this memorandum will Show you, and so are many more. I shall be much better served and when once I get away, I shall rule with a rod of iron!" This was very unlike himself, and startled the two good doctors, who could not bear to cross him, and were exulting at seeing his great amendment, but yet grew quite uneasy at his earnestness and volubility. Finding we now must part, he stopped to take leave, and renewed again his charges about the coadjutrix. "Never mind her!" he cried, "depend upon me! I will be your friend as long as I live--I here pledge myself to be your friend!" And then he saluted me again just as at the meeting, and suffered me to go on. What a scene! how variously was I affected by it! but, upon the whole, how inexpressibly thankful to see him so nearly himself-- so little removed from recovery! CURIOSITY REGARDING Miss BURNEY'S MEETING WITH THE KING. I went very soon after to the queen to whom I was most eager to avow the meeting, and how little I could help it. Her astonishment, and her earnestness to hear every particular, were very great. I told her almost all. Some few things relating to the distressing questions I could not repeat nor Page 293 many things said of Mrs. Schwellenberg, which would much, very needlessly, have hurt her. This interview, and the circumstances belonging to it, excited general curiosity, and all the house watched for opportunities to beg a relation of it. How delighted was I to tell them all my happy prognostics! But the first to hasten to hear of it was Mr. Smelt; eager and enchanted was the countenance and attention of that truly loyal and most affectionate adherent to his old master. He wished me to see Lady Harcourt and the general, and to make them a brief relation of this extraordinary rencounter but for that I had not effort enough left. I did what I Could, however, to gratify the curiosity of Colonel Wellbred, which I never saw equally excited. I was passing him on the stairs, and he followed me, to say he had heard what had happened--I imagine from the Willises. I told him, with the highest satisfaction, the general effect produced upon my mind by the accident, that the king seemed so nearly, himself, that patience itself could have but little longer trial. He wanted to hear more particulars: I fancy the Willises had vaguely related some: "Did he not," he cried, "promise to do something for you?" I only laughed, and answered, "O yes! if you want any thing, apply to me;--now is my time!" Feb. 3.--I had the great happiness to be assured this morning, by both the Dr. Willises, that his majesty was by no means the worse for our long conference. Those good men are inexpressibly happy themselves in the delightful conviction given me, and by me spread about, of the near recovery of their royal patient. While I was dressing came Mr. Fairly: I could not admit him, but he said he would try again in the evening. I heard by the tone of his voice a peculiar eagerness, and doubted not he was apprized of my adventure. He came early, before I could leave my fair companion, and sent on Goter. I found him reading a new pamphlet of Horne Tooke: "How long," he cried, "it is since I have been here!" I was not flippantly disposed, or I would have said I had thought the time he spent away always short, by his avowed eagerness to decamp. He made so many inquiries of how I had gone on and what I had done since I saw him, that I was soon satisfied he was Page 294 not uninformed of yesterday's transaction. I told him so; he could not deny it, but wished to hear the whole from myself. I most readily complied. He listened with the most eager, nay, anxious attention, scarce breathing: he repeatedly ex_ claimed, when I had finished, "How I wish I had been there! how I should have liked to have seen you!" I assured him he would not wish that, if he knew the terror I had suffered. He was quite elated with the charges against Cerberic tyranny, and expressed himself gratified by the promises of favour and protection. THE REGENCY BILL. Feb. 6.-These last three days have been spent very unpleasantly indeed: all goes hardly and difficultly with my poor royal mistress. Yet his majesty is now, thank heaven, so much better, that he generally sees his gentlemen in some part of the evening; and Mr. Fairly, having no particular taste for being kept in waiting whole hours for this satisfaction of a few minutes, yet finding himself, if in the house, indispensably required to attend with the rest, has changed his Kew visits from nights to mornings. He brought me the "Regency Bill!"--I shuddered to hear it named. It was just printed, and he read it to me, with comments and explanations, which took up all our time, and in a manner, at present, the most deeply interesting in which it could be occupied. 'Tis indeed a dread event!--and how it may terminate who can say? My poor royal mistress is much disturbed. Her daughters behave like angels - they seem content to reside in this gloomy solitude for ever, if it prove of comfort to their mother, or mark their duteous affection for their father. INFINITELY LICENTIOUS! Feb. 9.-I now walk on the road-side, along the park-wall, every fair morning, as I shall venture no more into either of the gardens. In returning this morning, I was overtaken by Mr. Fairly, who rode up to me, and, dismounting, gave his horse to his groom, to walk on with me. About two hours after I was, however, surprised by a visit from him in my own room, He came, he said, only to ask Page 295 me a second time how I did, as he should be here now less and less, the king's amendment rendering his services of smaller and smaller importance. He brought me a new political parody of Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard," from Mr. Eden to Lord Hawkesbury. It is a most daring, though very clever imitation. It introduces many of the present household. Mrs. Schwellenberg is now in eternal abuse from all these scribblers; Lady Harcourt, and many others, less notorious to their attacks, are here brought forward. How infinitely licentious! MISS BURNEY IS TAXED WITH VISITING GENTLEMEN. Feb. 10.-The amendment of the king is progressive, and without any reasonable fear, though not without some few drawbacks. The Willis family were surely sent by heaven to restore peace, and health, and prosperity to this miserable house Lady Charlotte Finch called upon me two days ago, almost purposely, to inquire concerning the report of my young friend's marriage; and she made me promise to acquaint her when I received any further news: at noon, therefore, I went to her apartment at the Prince of Wales's, with this information. Mr. Fairly, I knew, was with the equerries in our lodge. Lady Charlotte had the Duchess of Beaufort and all the Fieldings with her, and therefore I only left a message, by no means, feeling spirits for encountering any stranger. At noon, when I attended her majesty, she inquired if I had walked?--Yes.--Where?--In Richmond gardens.--And nowhere else?-- No. She looked thoughtful,--and presently I recollected my intended visit to Lady Charlotte, and mentioned it. She cleared up, and said, "O!--you. went to Lady Charlotte?" "Yes, ma'am," I answered, thinking her very absent,--which I thought with sorrow, as that is so small a part of her character, that I know not I ever saw any symptom of it before. Nor, in fact, as I found afterwards, did I see it now. It was soon explained. Miss Gomme, Mlle. Montmoulin, and Miss Planta, all dined with Mrs. Schwellenberg to-day. The moment I joined them, Mrs. Schwellenberg called out,--"Pray, Miss Berner, for what visit you the gentlemen?" "Me?" "Yes, you,--and for what, I say?" Page 296 Amazed, I declared I did not know what she meant. "O," cried she, scoffingly, "that won't not do!--we all saw you,--princess royal the same,--so don't not say that." I stared,-and Miss Gomme burst out in laughter, and then Mrs. Schwellenberg added,--"For what go you over to the Prince of Wales his house?--nobody lives there but the gentlemen,--nobody others." I laughed too, now, and told her the fact. "O," cried she, "Lady Charlotte!--ver true. I had forgot Lady Charlotte!" "O, very well, imagine," cried I,--"so only the gentlemen were remembered!" I then found this had been related to the queen; and Mlle. Montmoulin said she supposed the visit had been to General Gordon!--He is the groom now in waiting. Then followed an open raillery from Mlle. Montmoulin of Mr. Fairly's visits; but I stood it very well, assuring her I should never seek to get rid of my two prison-visitors, Mr. Smelt and Mr. Fairly, till I Could replace them by better, or go abroad for others IMPROVEMENT IN THE KING'S, HEALTH. Feb. 14.-The king is infinitely better. O that there were patience in the land ! and this Regency Bill postponed Two of the princesses regularly, and in turn, attend their royal mother in her evening visits to the king. Some of those who stay behind now and then spend the time in Mrs. Schwellenberg's room. They all long for their turn of going to the king, and count the hours till it returns. Their dutiful affection is truly beautiful to behold. This evening the Princesses Elizabeth and Mary came into Mrs. Schwellenberg's room while I was yet there. They sang songs in two parts all the evening, and vary prettily in point of voice. Their good humour, however, and inherent condescension and sweetness of manners, would make a much worse performance pleasing. Feb. 16-All well, and the king is preparing for an interview with the chancellor Dr. Willis now confides in me all his schemes and notions; we are growing the best of friends and his son Dr. John is nearly as trusty. Excellent people! how I love and honour them all! I had a visit at noon from Mr. Fairly. He hastened to tell Page 297 me the joyful news that the king and queen were just gone out, to walk in Richmond gardens, arm in arm.--what a delight to all the house! When I came to tea, I found Mr. Fairly waiting in my room. He had left Kew for Richmond park, but only dined there. We had much discussion of state business. The king is SO much himself, that he is soon to be informed of the general situation of the kingdom. O what an information!--how we all tremble in looking forward to it., Mr. Fairly thinks Mr. Smelt the fittest man for this office; Mr. Smelt thinks the same of Mr. Fairly: both have told me this. MR. FAIRLY AND MR. WINDHAM. Mr. Fairly began soon to look at his watch, complaining very much of the new ceremony imposed, of this attendance of handing the Queen, which, he said, broke into his whole evening. Yet he does as little as possible. "The rest of them," he said, " think it necessary to wait in an adjoining apartment during the whole interview, to be ready to show themselves when it is over! He now sat with his watch in his hand, dreading to pass his time, but determined not to anticipate its occupation, till half past nine o'clock, when he drew on his white gloves, ready for action. But then, stopping short, he desired me to guess whom, amongst my acquaintance, he had met in London this last time of his going thither. I could not guess whom he meant--but I saw it was no common person, by his manner. He then continued--"A tall, thin, meagre, sallow, black-eyed, penetrating, keen-looking figure." I could still not guess,-and he named Mr. Windham. "Mr. Windham!" I exclaimed, "no, indeed,--you do not describe him fairly,-he merits better colouring." He accuses me of being very partial to him: however, I am angry enough with him just now, though firmly persuaded still, that whatever has fallen from him, that is wrong and unfeeling on the subject of the Regency, has been the effect of his enthusiastic friendship for Mr. Burke: for he has never risen, on this cruel business, but in Support of that most misguided of Vehement and wild orators. This I have observed in the debates, and felt that Mr. Burke was not more run away with by violence of temper, and passion, than Mr. Windham by excess of friendship and admiration. Page 298 Mr. Fairly has, I fancy, been very intimate with him, for he told me he observed he was passing him, in Queen Anne Street, and stopped his horse, to call out, "O ho, Windham! so I see you will not know me with this servant!" He was on business of the queen's, and had one of the royal grooms with him. Mr. Windham laughed, and said he was very glad to see who it was, for, on looking at the royal servant, he had just been going to make his lowest bow. "O, I thank you!" returned Mr. Fairly, "you took me, then, for the Duke of Cumberland," THE KING CONTINUES TO IMPROVE. Feb. 17.-The times are now most interesting and critical. Dr. Willis confided to me this morning that to-day the king is to see the chancellor. How important will be the result of his appearance!--the whole national fate depends upon it! Feb. 18.-I had this morning the highest gratification, the purest feelings of delight, I have been regaled with for many months: I saw, from the road, the king and queen, accompanied by Dr. Willis, walking in Richmond gardens, near the farm, arm in arm!-- It was a pleasure that quite melted me, after a separation so bitter, scenes so distressful-to witness such harmony and security! Heaven bless and preserve them was all I could incessantly say while I kept in their sight. I was in the carriage with Mrs. Schwellenberg at the time. They saw us also, as I heard afterwards from the queen. In the evening Mrs. Arline, Mrs. Schwellenberg's maid, came into Mrs. Schwellenberg's room, after coffee, and said to me, "If you please, ma'am, somebody wants you." I concluded this somebody my shoemaker, or the like; but in my room I saw Mr. Fairly. He was in high spirits. He had seen his majesty; Dr. Willis had carried him in. He was received with open arms, and embraced; he found nothing now remaining of the disorder, but too in much hurry of spirits. When he had related the particulars of the interview, he suddenly exclaimed, "How amazingly well you have borne all this!" I made some short answers, and would have taken-refuge in some other topic: but he seemed bent upon pursuing his own, and started various questions and surmises, to draw me on, In vain, however; I gave but general, or evasive answers, Page 299 THE KING'S HEALTH IS COMPLETELY RESTORED. This was a sweet, and will prove a most memorable day: Regency was put off, in the House of Lords, by a motion from the chancellor!--huzza! huzza! And this evening, for the first time, the king came upstairs, to drink tea with the queen and princesses in the drawing-room! My heart was so full of joy and thankfulness, I could hardly breathe! Heaven--heaven be praised! What a different house is this house become!--sadness and terror, that wholly occupied it so lately, are now flown away, or rather are now driven out ; and though anxiety still forcibly prevails, 'tis in so small a proportion to joy and thankfulness, that it is borne as if scarce an ill! Feb. 23.-This morning opened wofully to me, though gaily to the house; for as my news of his majesty was perfectly comfortable, I ventured, in direct words, to ask leave to receive my dear friends Mr. and Mrs. Locke, who were now in town:--in understood sentences, and open looks, I had already failed again and again. My answer was-" I have no particular objection, only you'll keep them to your room." Heavens!--did they ever, unsummoned, quit it? or have they any wish to enlarge their range of visit? I was silent, and then heard a history of some imprudence in Lady Effingham, who had received some of her friends. My resolution, upon this, I need not mention: I preferred the most lengthened absence to such a permission. But I felt it acutely! and I hoped, at least, that by taking no steps, something more favourable might soon pass. . . . The king I have seen again in the queen's dressing-room. On opening the door, there he stood! He smiled at my start, and saying he had waited on purpose to see me, added, "I am quite well now,--I was nearly so when I saw you before, but I could overtake you better now." And then he left the room. I was quite melted with joy and thankfulness at this so entire restoration. End of February, 1789. Dieu merci! (294) Physician-in-ordinary to the king-ED. (295) Her tragedy of "Edwy and Elgiva," which was produced at Drury Lane in 1795. See note ante, vol. i., p. xlv.--ED. (296) The "Douglas cause" was one of the causes celebres of its tine. Its history is briefly as follows. In 1746 Lady Jane Douglas married Sir John Stewart. At Paris, in July, 1748, she gave birth to twins, Archibald and Sholto, of whom the latter died an infant. Lady Jane herself died in 1753. The surviving child, Archibald, was always recognized as their son by Lady Jane and Sir John. In 1760 the Duke of Douglas, the brother of Lady Jane, being childless, recognised his sister's son as his heir, and bequeathed to him by will the whole of the Douglas estates, revoking, for that purpose, a previous testament which he had made in favour of the Hamilton family. The Duke died in 1761, and Archibald, who had assumed his mother's, name of Douglas, duly succeeded to the estates. His right, however, Was disputed at law by the Duke of Hamilton, on the pretence, which he sought to establish, that Archibald Douglas was not in fact the son of his reputed mother. The Lords of Session in Scotland decided in favour of the Duke of Hamilton, whereupon Mr. Douglas appealed to the House of Lords, which reversed the decision of the Scottish court (February 2-, 1769), 1, "thereby confirming to Mr. Douglas his Filiation and his Fortune."-ED. (297) "Miss Fuzilier," the Diary-name for Miss Gunning, whom Colonel Digby did subsequently marry. "Sir R- F-" is her father, Sir Robert Gunning.-ED, (298) One of the apothecaries to the royal household.-ED. (299) Dr. Richard Warren, one of the physicians in ordinary to the king and the Prince of Wales.-ED. (300) The Lord chancellor Thurlow.-ED. (301) Mrs. Elizabeth Carter's "Ode to Wisdom," printed in "Clarissa Harlowe" (vol. ii., letter x.), with a musical setting, given as the composition of Clarisa herself. The Ode is by no means without merit of a modest kind, but can scarcely be ranked the production of a genuine poet.-ED. (302) "Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle," a novel in four volumes, by Charlotte Smith. Published 1788.-ED. (303) Mr. Frederick Montagu was not only a member of the opposition but One of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings.-ED. (304) Burke's last act before quitting office at the close of 1783, had been to procure for Dr. Burney the post of organist to Chelsea hospital, to which was attached a salary of fifty pounds a year.-ED. Page 300 SECTION 15. (1789-) THE KING'S RECOVERY: ROYAL VISIT To WEYMOUTH. THE KING'S REAPPEARANCE. Kew Palace, Sunday, March 1.-What a pleasure was mine this morning! how solemn, but how grateful! The queen gave me the "Prayer of Thanksgiving" upon the king's recovery. It was this morning read in all the churches throughout the metropolis, and by this day week it will reach every church in the kingdom. It kept me in tears all the morning,--that such a moment should actually arrive! after fears so dreadful, scenes so terrible. The queen gave me a dozen to distribute among the female servants: but I reserved one of them for dear Mr. Smelt, who took it from me in speechless extacy--his fine and feeling eyes swimming in tears of joy. There is no describing--and I will not attempt it--the fullness, the almost overwhelming fullness of this morning's thankful feelings! I had the great gratification to see the honoured object of this joy, for a few minutes, in the queen's dressing-room. He was all calmness and benevolent graciousness. I fancied my strong emotion had disfigured me; or perhaps the whole of this long confinement and most affecting winter may have somewhat marked my countenance; for the king presently said to me, "Pray, are you quite well to-day?" " I think not quite, sir," I answered, Page 301 "She does not look well," said he to the queen; "she looks a little yellow, I think." How kind, to think of anybody and their looks, at this first moment of reappearance! AN AIRING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. Wednesday, March 4.-A message from Mrs. Schwellenberg this morning, to ask me to air with her, received my most reluctant acquiescence; for the frost is so severe that any air, without exercise, is terrible to me; though, were her atmosphere milder, the rigour of the season I might not regard. When we came to the passage the carriage was not ready. She murmured most vehemently; and so bitterly cold was I, I could heartily have joined, had it answered any purpose. In this cold passage we waited in this miserable manner a full quarter of an hour; Mrs. Schwellenberg all the time scolding the servants, threatening them With exile, sending message after message, repining, thwarting, and contentious. Now we were to go, and wait in the king's rooms--now in the gentlemen's--now in Dr. Willis's--her own--and this, in the end, took place. In our way we encountered Mr. Fairly. He asked where we were going. "To my own parlour!" she answered. He accompanied us in; and, to cheer the gloom, seized some of the stores of Dr. Willis,--sandwiches, wine and water, and other refreshments,--and brought them to us, one after another in a sportive manner, recommending to us to break through common rules, on such an occasion, and eat and drink to warm ourselves. Mrs. Schwellenberg stood in stately silence, and bolt upright, scarce deigning to speak even a refusal; till, upon his saying, while he held a glass of wine in his hand, "Come, ma'am, do something eccentric for once--it will warm you," she angrily answered, "You been reely--what you call--too much hospital!" Neither of us could help laughing. "Yes," cried he, "with the goods of others;--that makes a wide difference in hospitality!" Then he rattled away upon the honours the room had lately received, of having had Mr. Pitt, the Chancellor, Archbishop of Canterbury, etc., to wait in it. This she resented highly, as seeming to think it more honoured in her absence than presence. Page 302 At length we took our miserable airing, in which I was treated with as much fierce harshness as if I was being conveyed to some place of confinement for the punishment Of some dreadful offence! She would have the glass down on my side; the piercing wind cut my face; I put my muff up to it: this incensed her so much, that she vehemently declared "she never, no never would trobble any won to air with her again but go always selfs."--And who will repine at that? thought I. Yet by night I had caught a violent cold, which flew to my face, and occasioned me dreadful pain. March 10.-I have been in too much pain to write these last five days; and I became very feverish, and universally ill, affected with the fury of the cold. My royal mistress, who could not but observe me very unwell, though I have never omitted my daily three attendances, which I have performed with a difficulty all but insurmountable, concluded I had been guilty of some imprudence: I told the simple fact of the glass,--but quite simply, and without one circumstance. She instantly said she was surprised I could catch cold in an airing, as it never appeared that it disagreed with me when I took it with Mrs. Delany. "No, ma'am," I immediately answered, "nor with Mrs, Locke; nor formerly with Mrs. Thrale:--but they left me the regulation of the glass on my own side to myself; or, if they interfered, it was to draw it up for me." This I could not resist. I can be silent; but when challenged to speak at all, it must be plain truth. I had no answer. Illness here--till of late--has been so unknown, that it is commonly supposed it must be wilful, and therefore meets little notice, till accompanied by danger, or incapacity of duty. This is by no means from hardness of heart-far otherwise ; there is no hardness of heart in any one of them ; but it is prejudice and want of personal experience. ILLUMINATIONS ON THE KING's RECOVERY. March 10.-This was a day of happiness indeed!---a day of such heartfelt public delight as Could not but suppress all private disturbance. The general illumination of all London proved the universal joy of a thankful and most affectionate people, who have shown so largely, on this trying occasion, how well they merited the monarch thus benignantly preserved. Page 303 The queen, from the privy purse, gave private orders for a Splendid illumination at this palace.(305) The King-- Providence--Health--and Britannia, were displayed with elegant devices; the queen and princesses, all but the youngest, went to town to see the illumination there; and Mr. Smelt was to conduct the surprise.--It was magnificently beautiful. When it was lighted and prepared, the Princess Amelia went to lead her papa to the front window: but first she dropped on -her knees, and presented him a paper with these lines-which, at the queen's desire, I had scribbled in her name, for the happy occasion:-- TO THE KING. Amid a rapt'rous nation's praise That sees Thee to their prayers restor'd, Turn gently from the gen'ral blaze,-- Thy Charlotte woos her bosom's lord. Turn and behold where, bright and clear, Depictur'd with transparent art, The emblems of her thoughts appear, The tribute of a grateful heart. O! small the tribute, were it weigh'd With all she feels--or half she owes! But noble minds are best repaid >From the pure spring whence bounty flows. PS. The little bearer begs a kiss >From dear papa for bringing this. I need not, I think, tell you, the little bearer begged not in vain. The king was extremely pleased. He came into a room belonging to the princesses, in which we had a party to look at the illuminations, and there he stayed above an hour; cheerful, composed, and gracious! all that could merit the great national testimony to his worth this day paid him. MR FAIRLY ON MISS BURNEY's DUTIES. Windsor, March 18.-A little rap announced Mr. Fairly, who came in, saying, "I am escaped for a little while, to have some quiet conversation with you, before the general assemblage and storm of company." He then gravely said, "Tomorrow I shall take leave of you--for a long time Page 304 He intended setting off to-morrow morning for town, by the opportunity of the equerries' coach, which would convey him to Kew, where his majesty was to receive an address. He told me, with a good deal of humour, that he suspected me of being rather absent in my official occupation, from little natural care about toilettes and such things. I could not possibly deny this,--on the contrary, I owned I had, at first, found my attention unattainable, partly from flutter and embarrassment, and partly from the reasons he so discerningly assigned. "I have even," I added, "and not seldom, handed her fan before her gown, and her gloves before her cap but I am better in all that now!" "I should think all that very likely," cried he, smiling; "yet it is not very trifling with her majesty, who is so exact and precise, such things seem to her of moment." This is truth itself. I said, "No,--she is more gracious, more kind, indeed, to me than ever: she scarce speaks, scarce turns to me without a smile." " Well," cried he, extremely pleased, "this must much soften your employment and confinement. And, indeed, it was most natural to expect this time of distress should prove a cement." A VISIT FROM MISS FUZILIER. I think I need not mention meeting my beloved Fredy in town, on our delightful excursion thither for the grand restoration Drawing-room, in which the queen received the compliments and congratulations of almost all the Court part of the nation. Miss Cambridge worked me, upon this occasion, a suit, in silks upon tiffany, most excessively delicate and pretty, and much admired by her majesty. All I shall mention of this town visit is, that, the day after the great Drawing-room, Miss Fuzilier, for the first time since I have been in office, called upon me to inquire after the queen. Miss Tryon, and Mrs. Tracey, and Mrs. Fielding were with her. She looked serious, sensible, interesting. I thought instantly of the report concerning Mr. Fairly, and of his disavowal : but it was singular that the only time she opened her mouth to speak was to name him! Miss Tryon, who chatted incessantly, had spoken of the great confusion at the Drawing-room, from the crowd: "It was intended to be better regulated," said Miss Page 305 F., "Mr. Fairly told me." She dropped her eye the moment she had spoken his name. After this, as before it, she said nothing. . . . Mr. George Villiers, a younger brother of Lord Clarendon, was now here as groom of the bedchamber. He is very clever, somewhat caustigue, but so loyal and vehement in the king's cause, that he has the appellation, from his party, of "The Tiger." He would not obtain it for his person, which is remarkably slim, slight, and delicate. A COMMAND FROM HER MAJESTY. Kew, April, 1789. My dearest friends, - I have her majesty's commands to inquire--whether you have any of a certain breed of poultry? N.B. What breed I do not remember. And to say she has just received a small group of the same herself. N.B. The quantity I have forgotten. And to add, she is assured they are something very rare and scarce, and extraordinary and curious. N.B. By whom she was assured I have not heard. And to subjoin, that you must send word if you have any of the same sort. N.B. How you are to find that out, I cannot tell. And to mention, as a corollary, that, if you have none of them, and should like to have some, she has a cock and a hen she can spare, and will appropriate them to Mr. Locke and my dearest Fredy. This conclusive stroke so pleased and exhilarated me, that forthwith I said you would both be enchanted, and so forgot all the preceding particulars. And I said, moreover, that I knew you would rear them, and cheer them, and fondle them like your children. So now-pray write a very fair answer fairly, in fair hand, and to her fair purpose. COLONEL MANNERS MYSTIFIES MRS. SCHWELLENBERG. Queen's Lodge, Windsor, April.-Mrs. Schwellenberg is softened into nothing but civility and courtesy to me. To what the change is owing I cannot conjecture; but I do all that in me lies Page 306 to support it, preferring the entire sacrifice of every moment, from our dinner to twelve at night, to her harshness and horrors. Nevertheless, a lassitude of existence creeps sensibly upon me. Colonel Manners, however, for the short half-hour of tea-time, is irresistibly diverting. He continues my constant friend and neighbour, and, while he affects to play off the coadjutrix to advantage, he nods at me, to draw forth my laughter or approbation, with the most alarming undisguise. I often fear her being affronted ; but naturally she admires him very much for his uncommon share of beauty, and makes much allowance for his levity. However, the never-quite-comprehended affair of the leather bed-cover,(306) has in some degree intimidated her ever since, as she constantly apprehends that, if he were provoked, he would play her some trick. He had been at White's ball, given in town upon his majesty's recovery. We begged some account of it: he ranted away with great fluency, uttering little queer sarcasms at Mrs, Schwellenberg by every opportunity, and colouring when he had done, with private fear of enraging her. This, however, she suspected not, or all his aim had been lost; for to alarm her is his delight. "I liked it all," he said, in summing up his relation, "very well, except the music, and I like any caw-caw-caw, better than that sort of noise,--only you must not tell the king I say that, ma'am, because the king likes it." She objected to the words " must not," and protested she would not be directed by no one, and would tell it, if she pleased. Upon this, he began a most boisterous threatening of the evil consequences which would accrue to herself, though in so ludicrous a manner, that how she could suppose him serious was my wonder. "Take care of yourself, ma'am," he cried, holding up his finger as if menacing a child; "take care of yourself! I am not to be provoked twice!" This, after a proud resistance, conquered her - and, really frightened at she knew not what, she fretfully exclaimed, "Ver well, sir!--I wish I had not come down! I won't no more! you might have your tea when you can get It." Returning to his account, he owned he had been rather a little musical himself for once, which was when they all sang "God save the king," after the supper; for then he joined in Page 307 the chorus, as well and as loud as any of them, "though some of the company," he added, "took the liberty to ask me not to be so loud, because they pretended I was out of tune; but it was In such a good cause that I did not mind that." She was no sooner recovered than the attack became personal again; and so it has continued ever since: he seems bent upon "playing her off" in all manners; he braves her, then compliments her, assents to her opinion, and the next moment contradicts her; pretends uncommon friendship for her, and then laughs in her face. But his worst manoeuvre is a perpetual application to me, by looks and sly glances, which fill me with terror of passing for an accomplice; and the more, as I find it utterly impossible to keep grave during these absurdities. And yet, the most extraordinary part of the story is that she really likes him! though at times she is so angry, she makes vows to keep to her own room. Mr. George Villiers, with far deeper aim, sneers out his own more artful satire, but is never understood ; while Colonel Manners domineers with so high a hand, he carries all before him; and whenever Mrs. Schwellenberg, to lessen her mortification, draws me into the question, he instantly turns off whatever she begins into some high-flown compliment, so worded also as to convey some comparative reproach. This offends more than all. When she complains to me of him, in his absence, I answer he is a mere schoolboy, for mischief, without serious design of displeasing: but she tells me she sees he means to do her some harm, and she will let the king know, if he goes on at that rate, for she does not choose such sort of familiarness. Once she apologised suddenly for her English, and Colonel Manners said, "O, don't mind that, ma'am, for I take no particular notice as to your language." "But," says she, "Miss Berner might tell me, when I speak it sometimes not quite right, what you call." "O dear no, ma'am!" exclaimed he; "Miss Burney is of too mild a disposition for that: she could not correct you strong enough to do you good." "Oh!-ver well, sir!" she cried, confounded by his effrontery. One day she lamented she had been absent when there was so much agreeable company in the house; "And now," she Page 308 added, "now that I am comm back, here is nobody.--not one!--no society!" . He protested this was not to be endured, and told her that to reckon all us nobody was so bad, he should resent it. "What will you do, my good colonel?" she cried. "O ma'am, do?--I will tell Dr. Davis." "And who bin he?" "Why, he's the master of Eton school, ma'am," with a thundering bawl in her ears, that made her stop them. "No, sir!" she cried, indignantly, "I thank you for that, I won't have no Dr. schoolmaster, what you call! I bin too old for that." "But, ma'am, he shall bring you a Latin oration upon this subject, and you must hear it!" "O, 'tis all the same! I shan't not understand it, so I won't not hear it." "But you must, ma'am. If I write it, I shan't let you off so:-- you must hear it!" "No, I won't!--Miss Berner might,--give it her." "Does Miss Burney know Latin?" cried Mr. G. Villiers. "Not one word," quoth I. "I believe that cried she "but she might hear it the sam!" THE SAILOR PRINCE. On the 2nd of May I met Colonel Manners, waiting at the corner of a passage leading towards the queen's apartments. "Is the king, ma'am," he cried, "there? because Prince William(307) is come." I had heard he was arrived in town,-and with much concern, since it was without leave of the king. It was in the illness, indeed, of the king he sailed to England, and when he had probably all the excuse of believing his royal father incapable of further governance. How did I grieve for the feelings of that royal father, in this idea! yet it certainly offers for Prince William his best apology. In the evening, while Mrs. Schwellenberg, Mrs. Zachary and myself were sitting in the eating parlour, the door was suddenly opened by Mr. Alberts, the queen's page, and "prince William" was announced. He came to see Mrs. Schwellenberg. He is handsome, as Page 309 are all the royal family, though he is not of a height to be called a good figure. He looked very hard at the two strangers, but made us all sit, very civilly, and drew a chair for himself, and began to discourse with the most unbounded openness and careless ease, of everything that Occurred to him. Mrs. Schwellenberg said she had pitied him for the grief he must have felt at the news of the king's illness : "Yes," cried he, "I was very sorry, for his majesty, very sorry indeed, -no man loves the king better ; of that be assured. but all sailors love their king. And I felt for the queen, too,--I did, faith. I was horridly agitated when I saw the king first. I could hardly stand." Then Mrs. Schwellenberg suddenly said, "Miss Berner, now you might see his royal highness; you wanted it so moch, and now you might do it. Your royal highness, that is Miss Berner." He rose very civilly, and bowed, to this strange freak of an introduction; and, of course, I rose and Curtsied low, and waited his commands to sit again; which were given instantly, with great courtesy. "Ma'am," cried he, "you have a brother in the service?" "Yes, sir," I answered, much pleased with this professional attention. He had not, he civilly said, the pleasure to know him, but he had heard of him. Then, turning suddenly to Mrs. Schwellenberg, "Pray," cried he, " what is become of Mrs.--Mrs.--Mrs. Hogentot?" "O, your royal highness!" cried she, stifling much offence, "do you mean the poor Haggerdorn?--O your royal highness! have you forgot her?" "i have, upon my word!" cried he, plumply "upon my soul, I have!" Then turning again to me, "I am very happy, ma'am," he cried, "to see you here; it gives me great pleasure the queen should appoint the sister of a sea-officer to so eligible a situation. As long as she has a brother in the service, ma'am,, cried he to Mrs. Schwellenberg, "I look upon her as one of us. O, faith I do! I do indeed! she is one of the corps." Then he said he had been making acquaintance with a new princess, one he did not know nor remember-Princess Amelia. "Mary, too,"-- he said, "I had quite forgot; and they did not tell me who she was; so I went up to her, and, without in the least recollecting her, she's so monstrously grown, I said, 'Pray, ma'am, are you one of the attendants?'" Princess Sophia is his professed favourite. "I have had the Page 310 honour," he cried, "of about an hour's conversation with that young lady, in the old style; though I have given up my mad frolics now. To be sure, I had a few in that style formerly; upon my word I am almost ashamed;--Ha! ha! ha!" Then, recollecting particulars, he laughed vehemently; but Mrs. Schwellenberg eagerly interrupted his communications. I fancy some of them might have related to our own sacred person! "Augusta," he said "looks very well,--a good face and countenance,--she looks interesting,--she looks as if she knew more than she Would say; and I like that character." He stayed a full hour, chatting in this good-humoured and familiar manner. LOYAL RECEPTION OF THE KING IN THE NEW FOREST. Thursday, June 25.-This morning I was called before five o'clock, though various packages and business had kept me up till near three. The day was rainy, but the road was beautiful; Windsor great park, in particular, is charming. The crowds increased as we advanced, and at Winchester the town was one head. I saw Dr. Warton, but could not stop the carriage. The king was everywhere received with acclamation. His popularity is greater than ever. Compassion for his late sufferings seems to have endeared him now to all conditions of men. At Romsey, on the steps of the town-hall, an orchestra was formed, and a band of musicians, in common brown coarse cloth and red neckcloths, and even in carters' loose gowns, made a chorus of "God save the king," In which the countless multitude joined, in such loud acclamation, that their loyalty and heartiness, and natural joy, almost surprised me into a sob before I knew myself at all affected by them. The New Forest Is all beauty, and when we approached Lyndhurst the crowds wore as picturesque an appearance as the landscapes ; They were all in decent attire, and, the great space giving them full room, the cool beauty of the verdure between the groups took away all idea of inconvenience, and made their live gaiety a scene to joy beholders. Carriages of all sorts lined the road-side :-chariots, chaises, landaus, carts, waggons, whiskies, gigs, phatons--mixed and intermixed, filled Within and surrounded without by faces all glee and delight. Page 311 Such was the scenery for miles before we reached Lyndhurst. The old law of the forest, that his majesty must be presented with two milk-white greyhounds, peculiarly decorated, upon his entrance into the New Forest, gathered together multitudes to see the show. A party, also, of foresters, habited in green, and each with a bugle-horn, met his majesty at the same time. Arrived at Lyndhurst, we drove to the Duke of Gloucester's. The royal family were just before us, but the two colonels came and handed us through the crowd. The house, intended for a mere hunting-seat, was built by Charles II., and seems quite unimproved and unrepaired from its first foundation. It is the king's, but lent to the Duke of Gloucester. It is a straggling, inconvenient, old house, but delightfully situated, in a village,--looking, indeed, at present, like a populous town, from the amazing concourse of people that have crowded into it. The bow-men and archers and bugle-horns are to attend the king while he stays here, in all his rides. The Duke of Gloucester was ready to receive the royal family, who are all in the highest spirits and delight. I have a small old bed-chamber, but a large and commodious parlour, in which the gentlemen join Miss Planta and me to breakfast and to drink tea. They dine at the royal table. We are to remain here some days. During the king's dinner, which was in a parlour looking into the garden, he permitted the people to come to the window; and their delight and rapture in seeing their monarch at table, with the evident hungry feeling it occasioned, made a contrast of admiration and deprivation, truly comic. They crowded, however, so excessively, that this can be permitted them no more. They broke down all the paling, and much of the hedges, and some of the windows, and all by eagerness and multitude, for they were perfectly civil and well-behaved. In the afternoon the royal party came into my parlour; and the moment the people saw the star, they set up such a shout as made a ring all around the village; for my parlour has the same view with the royal rooms into the garden, where this crowd was assembled, and the new rapture was simply at seeing the king in a new apartment! They all walked out, about and around the village, in the evening, and the delighted mob accompanied them. The Page 312 moment they stepped out of the house, the people, With voice, struck up "God save the king!" I assure you I cried like a child twenty times in the day, at the honest and rapturous effusions of such artless and disinterested loyalty. The king's illness and recovery make me tender, as Count Mannuccia said, upon every recollection. These good villagers continued singing this loyal song during the whole walk, without any intermission, except to shout "huzza!" at the end of every stanza. They returned so hoarse, that I longed to give them all some lemonade. Probably they longed for something they would have called better! 'Twas well the king could walk no longer; I think, if he had, they would have died singing around him. June 30.-We continued at Lyndhurst five days and the tranquillity of the life, and the beauty of the country, would have made it very regaling to me indeed, but for the fatigue of having no maid, yet being always in readiness to play the part of an attendant myself. I went twice to see the house of Sir Phillip Jennings Clerke, my old acquaintance at Streatham. I regretted he was no more; he would so much have prided and rejoiced in shewing his place. His opposition principles would not have interfered with that private act of duty from a subject to a sovereign. How did I call to mind Mrs. Thrale, upon this spot! not that I had seen it with her, or ever before; but that its late owner was one of her sincerest admirers. Miss Planta and myself drove also to Southampton, by the queen's direction. It is a pretty clean town, and the views from the Southampton water are highly picturesque : but all this I had seen to far greater advantage, with Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Thrale. Ah, Mrs. Thrale!--In thinking her over, as I saw again the same spot, how much did I wish to see with it the same--once so dear-- companion! On the Sunday we all went to the parish church ; and after the service, instead of a psalm, imagine our surprise to hear the whole congregation join in "God save the king!" Misplaced as this was in a church, its intent was so kind, loyal, and affectionate, that I believe there was not a dry eye amongst either singers or hearers. The king's late dreadful illness has rendered this song quite melting to me. This day we quitted Lyndhurst; not without regret, for so private is its situation, I could stroll about in its beautiful neighbourhood quite alone. Page 313 THE ROYAL JOURNEY TO WEYMOUTH. The journey to Weymouth was one scene of festivity and rejoicing. The people were everywhere collected, and everywhere delighted. We passed through Salisbury, where a magnificent arch was erected, of festoons of flowers, for the king's carriage to pass under, and mottoed with "The king restored," and "Long live the king," in three divisions. The green bowmen accompanied the train thus far; and the clothiers and manufacturers here met it, dressed out in white loose frocks, flowers, and ribbons, with sticks or caps emblematically decorated from their several manufactories. And the acclamations with which the king was received amongst them--it was a rapture past description. At Blandford there was nearly the same ceremony. At every gentleman's seat which we passed, the owners and their families stood at the gate, and their guests Or neighbours were in carriages all round. At Dorchester the crowd seemed still increased. The city had so antique an air, I longed to investigate its old buildings. The houses have the most ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to see: and inhabited they were indeed! every window-sash was removed, for face above face to peep Out, and every old balcony and all the leads of the houses seemed turned into booths for fairs. It seems, also, the most populous town I have seen; I judge by the concourse of the young and middle-aged--those we saw everywhere alike, as they may gather together from all quarters-but from the amazing quantity of indigenous residers; old women and young children. There seemed families of ten or twelve of the latter in every house; and the old women were so numerous, that they gave the whole scene the air of a rural masquerade. Girls, with chaplets, beautiful young creatures, strewed the entrance of various villages with flowers. WELCOME TO WEYMOUTH. Gloucester House, which we now inhabit, at Weymouth, is Situated in front of the sea, and the sands of the bay before it are perfectly smooth and soft. The whole town, and Melcomb Regis, and half the county of Dorset, seemed assembled to welcome their majesties. I have here a very good parlour, but dull, from its aspect. Page 314 Nothing but the sea at Weymouth affords any life Or Spirit. My bed-room is in the attics. Nothing like living at a Court for exaltation. Yet even with this gratification, which extends to Miss Planta, the house will only hold the females of the party. The two adjoining houses are added, for the gentlemen, an(] the pages, and some other of the suite, cooks, etc.--but the footmen are obliged to lodge still farther off. The bay is very beautiful, after its kind; a peninsula shuts out Portland island and the broad ocean. The king, and queen, and princesses, and their suite, walked out in the evening; an immense crowd attended them--sailors bargemen, mechanics, countrymen; and all united with so vociferous a volley of "God save the king," that the noise was stunning. At near ten o'clock Lord Courtown came into my parlour, as it is called, and said the town was all illuminated, and invited Miss Planta and me to a walk upon the sands. Their majesties were come in to supper. We took a stroll under his escort, and found it singularly beautiful, the night being very fine, and several boats and small vessels lighted up, and in motion upon the sea. The illumination extended through Melcomb Regis and Weymouth. Gloucester-row, in which we live, is properly in Melcomb Regis; but the two towns join each other, and are often confounded. The preparations of festive loyalty were universal. Not a child could we meet that had not a bandeau round its head, cap, or hat, of "God save the king;" all the bargemen wore it in cockades and even the bathing-women had it in large coarse girdles round their waists. It is printed in golden letters upon most of the bathing-machines, and in various scrolls and devices it adorns every shop and almost every house in the two towns. THE ROYAL PLUNGE WITH MUSICAL HONOURS. "YOU MUST KNEEL, SIR!" Gloucester House, Weymouth, Wednesday, July 9.-We are settled here comfortably enough. Miss Planta and I breakfast as well as dine together alone; the gentlemen have a breakfast parlour in the adjoining house, and we meet only at tea, and seldom then. They have all acquaintance here, in this Gloucester-row, and stroll from the terrace or the sands, to visit them during the tea vacation time. Page 315.' I like this much: I see them just enough to keep up sociability, without any necessary constraint; for I attend the tea-table only at my own hour, and they come, or not, according to chance or their convenience. The king bathes, and with great success; a machine follows the royal one into the sea, filled with fiddlers, who play "God save the king," as his majesty takes his plunge! I am delighted with the soft air and soft footing upon the sands, and stroll up and down them morning, noon, and night. As they are close before the house, I can get to and from them in a moment. Her majesty has graciously hired a little maid between Miss Planta and me, who comes for the day. We have no accommodation for her sleeping here; but it is an unspeakable relief to our personal fatigues. Dr. Gisburne is here, to attend his majesty; and the queen has ordered me to invite him to dine at my table. He comes regularly. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Gloucester Rowe, Weymouth, July 13, 1789. My dearest padre's kind letter was most truly welcome to me. When I am so distant, the term of absence or of silence seems always doubly long to me. The bay here is most beautiful; the sea never rough, generally calm and gentle, and the sands perfectly smooth and pleasant. I have not bathed, for I have had a cold in my head, which I caught at Lyndhurst, and which makes me fear beginning; but I have hopes to be well enough to-morrow, and thenceforward to ail nothing more. It is my intention to cast away all superfluous complaints into the main ocean, which I think quite sufficiently capacious to hold them ; and really my little frame will find enough to carry and manage without them. . . . His majesty is in delightful health, and much-improved spirits. All agree he never looked better. The loyalty of all this place is excessive; they have dressed out every street with labels of "God save the king:" all the shops have it over the doors: all the children wear it in their caps, all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors in their voices, for they never approach the house without shouting it aloud, nor see the king, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers. Page 316 The bathing-machines make it their motto over the windows; and those bathers that belong to the royal dippers wear it in bandeaus on their bonnets, to go into the sea; and have it again, in large letters, round their waists, to encounter the waves. Flannel dresses, tucked up, and no shoes nor stockings, with bandeaus and girdles, have a most singular appearance, and when first I surveyed these loyal nymphs it was with some difficulty I kept my features in order. Nor is this all. Think but Of the Surprise of his majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine, struck up "God save great George our king." One thing, however, was a little unlucky ,--when the mayor and burgesses came with the address, they requested leave to kiss hands: this was graciously accorded; but, the mayor advancing, in a common way, to take the queen's hand, as he might that of any lady mayoress, Colonel Gwynn, who stood by, whispered, "You must kneel, sir!" He found, however, that he took no notice of this hint, but kissed the queen's hand erect. As he passed him, in his way back, the colonel Said, "You should have knelt, Sir!" "Sir," answered the poor mayor, "I cannot." "Everybody does, sir." "Sir,--I have a wooden leg!" Poor man! 'twas such a surprise! and such an excuse as no one could dispute. But the absurdity of the matter followed--all the rest did the same; taking the same privilege, by the example, without the same or any cause! ROYAL DOINGS IN AND ABOUT WEYMOUTH. July 15.-The Magnificent, a man-of-war Of 74 guns, commanded by an old captain of James's (Onslow), is now stationed at the entrance of the bay, for the security at once and pleasure of the king; and a fine frigate, the Southampton, Captain Douglas, is nearer in, and brought for the king to cruise about. Captain Douglas is nephew to Sir Andrew Snape Hammond, who married a cousin of our Mr. Crisp. The king and royal party have been to visit the frigate. Miss Planta and myself went to see the ceremony from a place called the Look-out,--a beautiful spot. But I have not much taste for sea receptions and honours: the firing a salute is SO strange a mode of hospitality and politeness. . . . Page 317 Mrs. Gwynn(308) is arrived, and means to spend the royal season here. She lodges at the hotel just by, and we have met several times. She is very soft and pleasing, and still as beautiful as an angel. We have had two or three long tête-Š- têtes and talked over, with great pleasure, anecdotes Of Our former mutual acquaintances--Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Thrale, Baretti, Miss Reynolds, Miss Palmer, and her old admirer, Dr. Goldsmith, of whom she relates--as who does not?--a thousand ridiculous traits. The queen is reading Mrs. Piozzi's tour(309) to me, instead of my reading it to her. She loves reading aloud, and in this work finds me an able commentator. How like herself, how characteristic is every line--Wild, entertaining, flighty, inconsistent, and clever! July 16.-Yesterday we all wen to the theatre. The king has taken the centre front box for himself, family, and attendants. The side boxes are too small. The queen ordered places for Miss Planta and me, which are in the front row of a box next but one to the royals. Thus, in this case, Our want of rank to be in their public suite gives us better seats than those high enough to stand behind them, Lady Sydney, Lady Courtown's sister, and Miss Townshend, her daughter, are in the intermediate box, and were very sociable. I have met them here occasionally, and like them very well. 'Tis a pretty little theatre: but its entertainment was quite in the barn style a mere medley,--songs, dances, imitations,- and all very bad. But Lord Chesterfield, who is here, and who seems chief director, promises all will be better. This morning the royal party went to Dorchester, and I strolled upon the sands with Mrs. Gwynn. We overtook a lady, of a very majestic port and demeanour, who solemnly returned Mrs. Gwynn's salutation, and then addressed herself to me with similar gravity. I saw a face I knew, and of very uncommon beauty; but did not immediately recollect it was Mrs. Siddons. She is come here, she says, solely for her health : she has spent some days with Mrs. Gwynn, at General Harcourt's. Her husband was with her, and a sweet child. I wished to have tried if her solemnity would have worn away Page 318 by length of conversation ; but I was obliged to hasten home. But my dearest Fredy's opinion, joined to that of my Sister Esther, satisfies me I was a loser by this necessary forbearance. Sunday, July 26.-Yesterday we wen again to the play, and saw "The Midnight Hour" and "The Commissary." The latter from the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," is comic to convulsion and the burlesque of Quick and Mrs. Wells united made ne laugh quite immoderately.(310) July 29.-We went to the play, and saw Mrs. Siddons in Rosalind. She looked beautifully, but too large for that shepherd's dress; and her gaiety sits not naturally upon her,--it seems more like disguised gravity. I must own my admiration for her confined to her tragic powers; and there it is raised so high that I feel mortified, in a degree, to see her so much fainter attempts and success in comedy. A PATIENT AUDIENCE. Monday, Aug. 3.-The whole royal party went to see Lulworth Castle, intending to be back to dinner, and go to the play at night, which their majesties had ordered, with Mrs. Siddons to play Lady Townly.(311) Dinner-time, however, came and passed, and they arrived not. They went by sea, and the wind proved contrary; and about seven o'clock a hobby groom was despatched thither by land, with intelligence that they had only reached Lulworth Castle at five o'clock. They meant to be certainly back by eight ; but sent their commands that the farce might be performed first, and the play wait them. The manager repeated this to the audience,--already waiting and wearied but a loud applause testified their agreeability to whatever could be proposed. The farce, however, was much sooner over than the passage from Lulworth Castle. It was ten o'clock when they landed! And all this time the audience--spectators rather--quietly waited! They landed, just by the theatre, and went to the house of Lady Pembroke, who is now here in attendance upon the queen : and there they Sent home for the king's page, with Page 319 a wig, etc.; and the queen's wardrobe woman, with similar decorations; and a message to Miss Planta and me, that we might go at once to the theatre. We obeyed; and soon after they appeared, and were received with the most violent gusts of joy and huzzas, even from the galleries over their heads, whose patience had not the reward of seeing them at last. Is not this a charming trait of provincial popularity? Mrs. Siddons, in her looks, and the tragic part, was exquisite. A FATIGUING BUT PLEASANT DAY. Aug. 4.-To-day all the royals went to Sherborne Castle. My day being perfectly at liberty, Mrs. Gwynn stayed and spent it with me. The weather was beautiful; the sea-breezes here keep off intense heat in the warmest season. We walked first to see the shrubbery and plantation of a lady, Mrs. B--, who has a very pretty house about a mile and a half out of the town. Here we rested, and regaled ourselves with sweet flowers, and then proceeded to the old castle,-its ruins rather,- which we most completely examined, not leaving one stone' untrod, except such as must have precipitated us into the sea. This castle is built almost in the sea, upon a perpendicular rock, and its situation, therefore, is nobly bold and striking. It is little more now than walls, and a few little winding staircases at its four corners. I had not imagined my beautiful companion could have taken so much pleasure from an excursion so romantic and ,lonely ; but she enjoyed it very much, clambered about as unaffectedly as if she had lived in rural scenes all her life, and left nothing unexamined. We then prowled along the sands at the foot of the adjoining rocks, and picked up sea-weeds and shells - but I do not think they were such as to drive Sir Ashton Lever,(312) or the Museum keepers, to despair! We had the queen's two little dogs, Badine and Phillis, for our guards and associates. We returned home to a very late tea, thoroughly tired, but very much pleased. To me it was the only rural excursion I had taken for more than three years. Page 320 The royal party came not home till past eleven o'clock. The queen was much delighted with Sherborne Castle, which abounds with regal curiosities, honourably acquired by the family. LULWORTH CASTLE. Aug. 8.--To-day we went to Lulworth Castle; but not with Mrs. Gwynn. Her majesty ordered our royal coach and four, and directed me to take the two De Lucs. Lulworth Castle is beautifully situated, with a near and noble view of the sea, It has a spacious and very fine park, and commands a great extent of prospect. It is the property of Mr. Weld, a Roman Catholic, whose eldest brother was first husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert.(313) A singular circumstance, that their majesties should visit a house in which, so few years ago, she might have received them. There is in it a Roman Catholic chapel that is truly elegant,--a Pantheon in miniature,--and ornamented with immense expense and richness. The altar is all of finest variegated marbles, and precious stones are glittering from every angle. The priests' vestments, which are very superb, and all the sacerdotal array, were shown us as particular favours: and Colonel Goldsworthy comically said he doubted not they had incense and oblations for a week to come, by way of purification for our heretical curiosity. The castle is built with four turrets. It is not very ancient, and the inside is completely modern, and fitted up with great elegance. It abounds in pictures of priests, saints, monks, and nuns, and is decorated with crosses and Roman Catholic devices without end. They show one room in which two of our kings have slept; Charles II. and poor James II. We returned home to dinner, and in the evening went to the Page 321 play. Mrs. Siddons performed Mrs. Oakley.(313) What pity thus to throw away her talents ! but the queen dislikes tragedy, and the honour to play before the royal family blinds her to the little credit acquired by playing comedy. THE ROYAL PARTY AT THE ASSEMBLY Rooms. Sunday, Aug 9.-The king had a council yesterday, which brought most of the great officers of state to Weymouth. In the evening, her majesty desired Miss Planta and me to go to the rooms, whither they commonly go themselves on Sunday evenings, and, after looking round them, and speaking where they choose, they retire to tea in an inner apartment with their own party, but leave the door wide open, both to see and be seen. The rooms are convenient and spacious : we found them very full. As soon as the royal party came, a circle was formed, and they moved round it, just as before the ball at St. James's, the king one way with his chamberlain, the new-made Marquis of Salisbury, and the queen the other with the princesses, Lady Courtown, etc. The rest of the attendants planted themselves round in the circle. I had now the pleasure, for the first time, to see Mr. Pitt but his appearance is his least recommendation ; it is neither noble nor expressive. Lord Chatham, the Duke of Richmond, Mr. Villiers, Lord Delawarr, etc., were in the circle, and spoken to a long time each. A JOURNEY To EXETER AND SALTRAM. Thursday, Aug. 13.-We began our Western tour. We all went in the same order as we set out from Windsor. We arrived at Exeter to a very late dinner. We were lodged at the Deanery; and Dr. Buller, the dean, desired a conference with me, for we came first, leaving the royals at Sir George Young's. He was very civil, and in highest glee: I had never seen him before; but he told me he introduced himself, by this opportunity, at the express desire of Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Castle, who were both his relations, as well as of Dr. Warton. I was glad to hear myself yet remembered by them. The crowds, the rejoicings, the hallooing, and singing, and garlanding, and decorating of all the inhabitants of this old Page 322 city, and of all the country through which we passed, made the journey quite charming : such happy loyalty as beamed from all ranks and descriptions of men carried close to the heart in sympathetic joy. We passed all the next day at the Deanery, which was insufficient to our party, that not only the gentlemen, one an(l all, lodged at the hotel, but even Lady Courtown and the two Lady Waldegraves. I saw nothing of any of them while we stayed at Exeter. I strolled with Miss Planta about the town, which is populous and busy enough, but close and ugly. The principal parade for company, however, takes in a fine view of the country; and the cathedral is old and curious. The next morning, Saturday the 15th, we quitted Exeter, in which there had been one constant mob surrounding the Deanery from the moment of our entrance. We proceeded through a country the most fertile, varied, rural, and delightful, in England, till we came to the end of our aim, Saltram. We passed through such beautiful villages, and so animated a concourse of people, that the whole journey proved truly delectable. Arches of flowers were-erected for the royal family to pass under at almost every town, with various loyal devices, expressive of their satisfaction in this circuit. How happy must have been the king!-how deservedly ! The greatest conqueror could never pass through his dominions with fuller acclamations of joy from his devoted subjects than George III. experienced, simply from having won their love by the even tenor of an unspotted life, which, at length, has vanquished all the hearts of all his subjects. Our entrance at Saltram was, personally to Miss Planta and me, very disagreeable: we followed immediately after the royals and equerries and so many of the neighbouring gentry, the officers, etc., were assembled to receive them, that we had to make our way through a crowd of starers the most tremendous, while the royals all stood at the windows, and the other attendants in the hall. The house is one of the most magnificent in the kingdom. It accommodated us all, even to every footman, without by any means filling the whole. The state apartments on the ground floor are superb, hung with crimson damask, and ornamented with pictures, some few of the Spanish school, the rest by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica, and some few by other artists. Its view is noble; it extends to Plymouth, Mount-Edge- Page 323 cumbe, and the neighbouring fine country. The sea at times fills up a part of the domain almost close to the house, and then its prospect is Complete. MAY "ONE" COME IN? Sunday, Aug. 16.-Lord Courtown brought me a very obliging message from Lady Mount-Edgecumbe, who had been here at noon to kiss hands, on becoming a countess from a baroness. She sent to invite me to see her place, and contrive to dine and spend the day there. Her majesty approves the Mount-Edgecumbe invitation. Aug. 18.-This morning the royals were all at a grand naval review. I spent the time very serenely in my favourite wood, which abounds in seats of all sorts - and then I took a fountain Pen, and wrote my rough journal for copying to my dear Sorelle.(314) In the evening, Lord Courtown, opening my parlour door, called out, "May one come in?" "May one?" exclaimed Colonel Goldsworthy; "may two, may three,--may four?--I like your one, indeed!" And in they all entered, and remained in sociable conversation till they were all called, late, to cards. AN EXCURSION To PLYMOUTH DOCKYARD. Aug. 19.-Again this morning was spent by the royals at Plymouth dock--by me in strolls round the house. The wood here is truly enchanting--the paths on the slant down to the water resemble those of sweet Norbury park. The tea, also, was too much the same to be worth detailing. I will only mention a speech which could not but divert me, of Mr. Alberts, the queen's page. He said nobody dared represent to the king the danger of his present continual exertion in this hot weather,--"unless it is Mr. Fairly," he added, "who can say anything, in his genteel roundabout way." Aug. 21.-To-day the royals went to Mount-Edgecumbe, and her majesty had commissioned Lady Courtown to arrange a plan for Miss Planta and me to see Plymouth Dock. According, therefore, to her ladyship's directions, we set off for that place, and, after a dull drive of about five miles, arrived at the house of the commissioner, Admiral La Forey. Here Page 324 Mrs. La Forey and her daughters were prepared to expect us, and take the trouble of entertaining us for the day. Three large and populous towns, Plymouth, Stockton, and Dock,(315) nearly join each other. Plymouth is long, dirty, ill built, and wholly unornamented with any edifice worth notice. Stockton is rather neater,-nothing more. Dock runs higher and Is newer, and looks far cleaner and more habitable. The commissioner's is the best-situated house in Dock: it is opposite a handsome quay, on an arm of the sea, with a pretty paved walk, or terrace, before the house, which seems used as a mall by the inhabitants, and is stored with naval offices innumerable. The two ladies received us very pleasantly. Mrs. La Forey Is well bred, in the formal way ; but her eldest daughter, Mrs. Molloy, is quite free from stiffness, yet perfectly obliging, very easy, very modest, and very engaging, and, when dressed for a ball in the evening, very handsome. She does not become a déshabille, but cannot look otherwise than pleasing and agreeable, from her manners and countenance. Captain Molloy, her husband, was gone to attend in the naval procession that conducted the royals to Mount-Edgecumbe, where he expected to dine ; but he had left a younger officer, Lieutenant Gregory, to do the honours of the naval show to us. The commissioner himself is yet more formal than his lady, but equally civil. An unmarried daughter appeared next, who seems sensible and good humoured, but very plain. We sallied forth to the dockyard, with these two daughters, and Lieutenant Gregory, a very pleasing and well-bred young officer. How often I wished my dear James had happened to be here, in any employment, at this time! The dockyard you will dispense with my describing. It is a noble and tremendous sight, and we were shown it with every advantage of explanation. It was a sort of sighing satisfaction to see such numerous stores of war's alarms !-ropes, sails, masts, anchors,--and all in the finest symmetry, divided and subdivided, as if placed only for show, The neatness and exactness of all the arrangement of those stores for tempest, filled me with admiration; so did the whole scene--though not with pleasure. All assurances, however well to be depended upon, of safety, are but so many indications of danger. Page 325 While we were seeing the anchor business,--which seemed performed by Vulcanic demons, so black they looked, so savage was their howl in striking the red-hot iron, and so coarse and slight their attire,--we were saluted with three cheers, from the accidental entrance of Lord Stopford, Lord Courtown's son, and Mr. Townshend, his nephew, a son of Lord Sydney, just made a lord of the Admiralty. And the sound, in those black regions, where all the light was red-hot fire, had a Very fine demoniac effect. In beating the anchor they all strike at the same instant, giving about three quick strokes to one slow stroke; and were they not to time them with the most perfect conformity, they must inevitably knock out one another's brains. The sight of this apparently continual danger gave to the whole the appearance of some wild rite performed from motives of superstition in some uncivilised country. While we were yet ]it the dockyard we were joined by two sea-captains, Captain Molloy and Captain Duckworth. Captain Molloy is a sensible and agreeable man, but somewhat haughty, and of conscious consequence. Captain Duckworth is both sensible and amiable in his style of conversation, and has a most perfect and kind openness of manner and countenance; but he greatly amused me by letting me see how much I amused him. I never surprised him looking near me, without seeing on his face so irresistible a simper, that I expected him every moment to break forth; never even trying to keep a grave face, except when I looked at him in full front. I found he knew "Burney, of the Bristol," as he called our James, and I named and conversed about him by every opportunity. . A VISIT TO A SEVENTY-FOUR. Captain Molloy invited us, when we had exhausted the show on land, to see his ship. I dislike going anywhere beyond the reach of the Humane society, but could not be left without breaking up the party: this was my first water-excursion, though two had been proposed to me at Weymouth, which I had begged leave to decline. All, however, was smooth and calm, and we had the best possible navigators. We went to the ship in Captain Molloy's large boat, which was very trim and neat, and had all its rowers new dressed and smart for royal attendance, as it followed the king in all his water-excursions. Page 326 The Ship is the Bombay Castle, of seventy-four guns. It had the Admiralty flag hoisted, as Lord Chatham had held a board there in the morning. It is a very fine ship, and I was truly edified by the sight of all its accommodations, ingenuity, utility, cleanliness, and contrivances. A man-of-war, fitted out and manned,- is a glorious and a fearful sight! In going over the ship we came to the midshipmen's mess, and those young officers were at dinner, but we were taken in: they were lighted by a few candles fastened to the wall in sockets. Involuntarily I exclaimed, "Dining by candle-light at noon-day!" A midshipman, starting forward, said, "Yes', ma'am, and Admiral Lord Hood did the same for seven years following!" I liked his spirit so much that I turned to him, and said I was very glad they looked forward to such an example, for I had a brother in the service, which gave me a warm interest in its prosperity. This made the midshipman so much my friend, that we entered into a detailed discourse upon the accommodations of their cabin, mess, etc., and various other matters. I liked him much, though I know not his name; but my constant Captain Duckworth kept me again wholly to his own cicerone-ing, when I turned out of the cabin. A little, however, he was mortified to find me a coward upon the water. I assured him he should cure me if he could convince me there was no reason for fear. He would not allow of any, but could not disprove it. "Tell me," I said, "and honestly,--should we be overturned in the boat while out at sea, what would prevent our being drowned?" He would not suppose such an accident possible. I pressed him, however, upon the possibility it might happen once in a century, and he could not help laughing, and answered, "O, we should pick you all up!" --I desired to know by what means. "Instruments," he said. I forced him, after a long and comic resistance, to show me them. Good heaven! they were three-pronged iron forks,--very tridents of Neptune! I exclaimed with great horror, "These!---why, they would tear the body to pieces!" "O," answered he calmly, "one must not think of legs and arms when life is in danger." I would not, however, under such protection, refuse sailing round Mount-Edgecumbe, which we did in Captain Molloy's boat, and just at the time when the royals, in sundry garden- Page 327 chairs, were driving about the place. It was a beautiful view the situation is delightful. But Captain Molloy was not in the best harmony with its owners, as they had disappointed his expectations of an Invitation to dinner. A DAY AT MOUNT-EDGECUMBE. Aug. 24.-To-day the royals went to Marystow, Colonel Heywood's, and Miss Planta and myself to Mount-Edgecumbe. The queen had desired me to take Miss Planta, and I had written to prepare Lady Mount-Edgecumbe for a companion. We went in a chaise to the ferry, and thence in a boat. I did not like this part of the business, for we had no pilot we knew, nor any one to direct us. They would hardly believe, at Mount-Edgecumbe, we had adventured in so unguarded a manner: but our superior is too high to discover difficulties, or know common precautions ; and we fare, therefore, considerably worse in all these excursions, from belonging to crowned heads, than we should do in our own private stations, if visiting at any part of the kingdom. Safe, however, though not pleasantly, we arrived on the opposite shore ; when we found a gardener and a very commodious garden-chair waiting for us. We drove through a sweet park to the house, at the gate of which stood Lord and Lady Mount-Edgecumbe, who told us that they had just heard an intention of their majesties to sail the next day up the River Tamer, and therefore they thought it their duty to hasten off to a seat they have near its banks, Coteil, with refreshments and accommodations, in case they should be honoured with a visit to see the place, which was very ancient and curious. They should leave Lord Valletort to do the honours, and expressed much civil regret in the circumstance: but the distance was too great to admit of the journey, over bad roads, if they deferred it till after dinner. We then proceeded, in the chair, to see the place: it is truly noble; but I shall enter into no description from want of time: take a list simply of its particular points. The sea, in some places, shows itself in its whole vast and unlimited expanse; at others, the jutting land renders it merely a beautiful basin or canal: the borders down to the sea are in some parts flourishing with the finest evergreens and most vivid verdure, and in others are barren, rocky, and perilous. In one moment you might suppose yourself cast on a desert island, Page 328 and the next find yourself in the most fertile and luxurious country. In different views we were shown Cawsand bay, the Hamoaze, the rocks called "the Maker," etc.,--Dartmoor hills, Plymouth, the dockyard, Saltram, and St. George's channel. Several noble ships, manned and commissioned -were in the Hamoaze amongst them our Weymouth friends' the Magnificent and Southampton. A very beautiful flower-garden is enclosed in one part of the grounds ; and huts, seats, and ornaments in general, were well adapted to the scenery of the place. A seat is consecrated to Mrs. Damer,(316) with an acrostic on her name by Lord Valletort. It is surprising to see the state of vegetation at this place, so close to the main. Myrtles, pomegranates, everg.reens, and flowering shrubs, all thrive, and stand the cold blast, when planted in a southern aspect, as safely as in an inland country. As it is a peninsula, it has all aspects, and the plantations and dispositions of the ground are admirably and skilfully assorted to them. The great open view, however, disappointed me : the towns it shows have no prominent features, the country is as flat as it is extensive, and the various branches of the sea which run into it give, upon their retreat, a marshy, muddy, unpleasant appearance. There is, besides, a want of some one striking object to arrest the eye, and fix the attention, which wearies from the general glare. Points, however, there are, both of the sublime and beautiful, that merit all the fame which this noble place has acquired. In our tour around it we met Lord Stopford, Mr. Townshend, and Captain Douglas ; and heard a tremendous account of the rage of the sea-captains, on being disappointed of a dinner at the royal visit to Mount-Edgecumbe. We did not quit these fine grounds till near dinner-time. The housekeeper then showed us the house, and a set of apartments newly fitted up for the royals, had they chosen to sleep at Mount-Edgecumbe. The house is old, and seems pleasant and convenient. Page 329 In a very pretty circular parlour, which had the appearance of being the chief living room, I saw amongst a small collection of books, "Cecilia." I immediately laid a wager with myself the first volume would open upon Pacchierotti; and I won it very honestly, though I never expect to be paid it. The chapter, "An Opera Rehearsal," was so well read, the leaves always flew apart to display it. The library is an exceeding good room, and seems charmingly furnished. Here Lord Valletort received us. His lady was confined to her room by indisposition. He is a most neat little beau, and his face has the roses and lilies as finely blended as that of his pretty young wife. He was extremely civil and attentive, and appears to be really amiable in his disposition. Mr. Brett, a plain, sensible, conversible man, who has an estate in the neighbourhood, dined with us; and a young Frenchman. The dinner was very cheerful: my lord, at the head of the table, looked only like his lady in a riding-dress. However, he received one mortifying trial of his temper - he had sent to request sailing up the Tamer next day with Sir Richard Bickerton; and he had a blunt refusal, in a note, during our repast. Not an officer in the fleet would accommodate him; their resentment of the dinner slight is quite vehement. We returned home the same way we came; the good-natured little lord, and Mr. Brett also, quite shocked we had no better guard or care taken of us. MR. FAIRLY ON A COURT LIFE. Weymouth, Sunday, Sept. 6.-This evening, the royals and their train all went again to the rooms to drink their tea. Miss Planta and myself were taking ours quietly together, and I was finishing a charming sermon of Blair while she was running over some old newspapers, when, suddenly, but very gently, the room-door was opened, and then I heard, "Will Miss Burney permit me to come in, and give me a dish of tea?" 'Twas Mr. Fairly. He said we were to go on Monday se'nnight to Lord Bath's, on Wednesday to Lord Aylesbury's, and on Friday to return to Windsor. He was himself to be discharged some days sooner, as he should not be wanted on the road. He said many things relative - to Court lives and situations: with respect, deference, and regard invariable, mentioned the leading individuals ; but said nothing could be so weak as to Page 330 look there, in such stations, for such impossibilities as sympathy, friendship, or cordiality ! And he finished with saying, "People forget themselves who look for them!" Such, however, is not my feeling ; and I am satisfied he has met with some unexpected coldness. Miss Planta being present, he explained only in generals. A BRIEF SOJOURN AT LONGLEAT. Monday, Sept. 14.-We all left Weymouth. All possible honours were paid the king on his departure; lords, ladies, and sea- officers, lined the way that he passed, the guns of the Magnificent and Southampton fired the parting salute, and the ships were under sail. We all set out as before, but parted on the road. The royals went to breakfast at Redlinch, the seat of Lord Ilchester, where Mr, Fairly(317) was in waiting for them, and thence proceeded to a collation at Sherborne Castle, whither he was to accompany them, and then resign his present attendance, which has been long and troublesome and irksome, I am sure. Miss Planta and myself proceeded to Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, late Lord Weymouth; where we were all to dine, sleep, and spend the following day and night. Longleat was formerly the dwelling of the Earl of Lansdowne, uncle to Mrs. Delany; and here, at this seat, that heartless uncle, to promote some political views, sacrificed his incomparable niece, at the age of seventeen, marrying her to an unwieldly, uncultivated, country esquire, near sixty years of age, and scarce ever sober-- his name Pendarves. With how sad an awe, in recollecting her submissive unhappiness, did I enter these doors!--and with what indignant hatred did I look at the portrait of the unfeeling earl, to whom her gentle repugnance, shown by almost incessant tears, was thrown away, as if she, her person, and her existence were nothing in the scale, where the disposition of a few boroughs opposed them! Yet was this the famous Granville--the poet, the fine gentleman, the statesman, the friend and patron of Pope, of whom he wrote-- "What Muse for Granville can refuse to sing?" Mine, I am sure, for one. Page 331 Lady Bath showed us our rooms, to which we repaired immediately, to dress before the arrival of the royals. We dined with the gentlemen, all but the marquis, who was admitted, in his own house, to dine with the king and queen, as were all the ladies of his family. Lord Weymouth, the eldest son, was our president; and two of his brothers, Lords George and John, with Lord Courtown and the two colonels, made the party. The Weymouths, Thynnes rather, are silent, and we had but little talk or entertainment. The house is very magnificent, and of in immense magnitude. It seems much out of repair, and by no means cheerful or comfortable. Gloomy grandeur seems the proper epithet for the building and its fitting-up. It had been designed for a monastery, and as such was nearly completed when Henry VIII. dissolved those seminaries. It was finished as a- dwelling-house in the reign of his son, by one of the Thynnes, who was knighted in a field of battle by the protector Somerset.(318) Many things in the house, and many queer old portraits, afforded me matter of Speculation, and would have filled up more time than I had to bestow. There are portraits of Jane Shore and Fair Rosamond, which have some marks of originality, being miserable daubs, yet from evidently beautiful subjects. Arabella Stuart is also at full length, and King Charleses and Jameses in abundance, with their queens, brethren, and cousins. There are galleries in this house of the dimensions of college halls. The state rooms on the ground floor are very handsome but the queer antique little old corners, cells, recesses, "passages that lead to nothing," unexpected openings, and abrupt stoppages, with the quaint devices of various old-fashioned ornaments, amused me the most. Page 332 My bed-room was furnished with crimson velvet, bed included, yet so high, though only the second story, that it made me giddy to look into the park, and tired to wind up the flight of stairs. It was formerly the favourite room, the housekeeper told me, of Bishop Ken, who put on his shroud in it before he died. Had I fancied I had seen his ghost, I might have screamed my voice away, unheard by any assistant to lay it; for so far was I from the rest of the habitable part of the mansion, that not the lungs of Mr. Bruce could have availed me.(319) The park is noble and spacious. It was filled with country folks, permitted to enter that they might see their sovereigns, and it looked as gay without as it seemed gloomy within. The people were dressed in their best, as if they came to a fair ; and such shouts and hallooings ensued, whenever the king appeared at a window, that the whole building rang again with the vibration. Nothing upon earth can be more gratifying than the sight of this dear and excellent king thus loved and received by all descriptions of his subjects. TOTTENHAM COURT: RETURN TO WINDSOR. Sept. 16.-We set out, amidst the acclamations of a multitude, from Longleat for Tottenham park, the seat of Lord Aylesbury. The park is of great extent and moderate beauty. The house is very well. We had only our own party, the three gentlemen, at dinner and breakfast. These gentlemen only dine with the king when he keeps house, and keeps it incog. himself. At Tottenham park, only my Lord Aylesbury, as master of the house, was admitted. He and his lady were both extremely desirous to make all their guests comfortable ; and Lady Aylesbury very politely offered me the use of her own collection of books. But I found, at the top of the house, a very large old library, in which there were sundry uncommon and curious old English tracts, that afforded me much entertainment. 'Tis a library of long standing. Here are many original portraits also, that offer enough for speculation. A "Bloody Mary," by Sir Anthony More, which I saw with much curiosity, and liked better than I expected. The beautiful Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth, I fancy Page 333 by Kneller; but we had no cicerone. A very fine picture of a lady in black, that I can credit to be Vandyke, but who else can I know not. Several portraits by Sir Peter Lely, extremely soft and pleasing, and of subjects uncommonly beautiful; many by Sir Godfrey Kneller, well enough; and many more by Sir Something Thornhill,(320) very thick and heavy. The good lord of the mansion put up a new bed for the king and queen that cost him nine hundred pounds. Two things I heard here with concern-that my godmother, Mrs. Greville, was dead; and that poor Sir Joshua Reynolds had lost the sight of one of his eyes.(321) Sept. 18.-We left Tottenham Court, and returned to Windsor. The royals hastened to the younger princesses, and I to Mrs. Schwellenberg. I was civilly received, however. But deadly dead sunk my heart as I entered her apartment. The next day I had a visit from my dear brother Charles full of business, letters, etc. I rejoiced to see him, and to confab over all his affairs, plans, and visions, more at full length than for a long time past. I was forced to introduce him to Mrs. Schwellenberg, and he flourished away successfully enough; but it was very vexatious, as he had matters innumerable for discussion. (305) The palace of Kew.-ED. (306) See ante, p. 44.-ED. (307) The Duke of Clarence, third son of George III.; afterwards William IV.-ED. (308) The Jessamy Bride." See ante, vol. i, p. 111.-ED. (309) "Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany," by published in 1789. (310) "The Midnight Hour," a comedy by Mrs. Inchbald, well known as the authoress of "A Simple Story," and "Nature and Art," was originally produced at Covent Garden, May 22, 1787. "The Commissary," a comedy by Samuel Foote, partly taken from "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," was first performed at the Haymarket in June, 1765. Mr. Quick and Mrs. Wells were popular comedians of the time.-ED. (311) In "The Provoked Husband," by Vanbrugh and Cibber.-ED. (312) Sir Ashton Lever was noted for his extensive and valuable collection of objects of natural history. In 1775 he opened a museum in Leicester Square, in which his collection was shown to the public; but ten years later he was compelled to dispose of it. The new proprietor exhibited the collection for some years, but it was finally sold and dispersed.-ED. (312) Maria Anne Smythe was born in 1756, and married, in 1775, Edward Weld of Lulworth Castle. He died within a year, and she married, in 1778, Thomas Fitzherbert of Swinnerton, Staffordshire, who died in 1781. In December, 1785, Mrs. Fitzherbert was privately married to the Prince of Wales. The marriage was never publicly recognised, and its legality was perhaps disputable: for by the Act of 1772 the marriage of any member of the Royal family under the age of twenty-five without the king's consent, was declared invalid, and at the date of his marriage with the beautiful Mrs Fitzherbert, the Prince was but twenty-three years of age. he always treated her as his wife, however, and she was received in society. She continued to live with him even after his marriage with the Princess Caroline, and finally parted from him in 1803, retiring with an allowance of 6,000 pounds a year to Brighton, where she died in 1837.-ED. (313) A character in Colman's comedy of "The Jealous Wife."-ED. (314) Sisters--the Italian word.-ED. (315) Dock is now called Devonport.-ED. (316) The lady-sculptor, the Hon. Mrs. Damer, daughter of General Conway and kinswoman of Horace Walpole, who bequeathed to her, for the term of her life, his villa at Strawberry Hill. Her performances in sculpture were of no great merit, but were prodigiously admired by Horace Walpole, who had a notorious weakness for the works of persons of quality. Mrs. Damer was a staunch whig, and canvassed Westminster on behalf of Charles Fox at the election of 1784, in company with the Duchess of Devonshire and Mrs. Crewe.-ED. (317) His late wife, it will be remembered, was a daughter of Lord Ilchester.-ED. (318) Longleat, in Wiltshire, was never intended for a monastery, but Was built from a design, it is said, by John of Padua, for Sir John Thynne, who was knighted by Somerset on the field, after the battle of Pinkie. Sir John's descendant, Thomas Thynne, Esq., of Longleat, the wealthy friend of Monmouth, and the "wise Issachar" of Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," was murdered in his coach in Pall-Mall (February 12, 1682), by the contrivance of Count Koenigsmark, who was tried for the murder and acquitted, although his confederates, the actual perpetrators of the crime, were hanged for it. Thomas Thynne was succeeded in his estates by his cousin, Sir Thomas Thynne, who was the same year created Baron Thynne and Viscount Weymouth, titles which have descended in the family, and to which that of Marquis of Bath has since been added." (See "Count Koenigsmark and Tom of Ten Thousand," by H. Vizetelly, London, 1890.)-ED. (319) James Bruce, the famous African traveller, made the acquaintance of the Burney family in 1775. He was about seven feet in height. In her early letters to Mr. Crisp, Fanny calls him the "man-mountain."-ED. (320) Sir James Thornhill, the father-in-law of Hogarth.-ED. (321) "One day, in the month of July, 1789, while finishing the portrait of the Marchioness of Hereford, he felt a sudden decay of sight in his left eye. He laid down the pencil, sat a little while in mute consideration, and never lifted it more. His sight gradually darkened, and within ten weeks of the first attack his left eye was wholly blind." (Allan Cunningham.) For some time after this he attended to his duties as President of the Royal Academy, and he delivered his last address to the students in 1790. Sir Joshua died in his sixty-ninth year, February 23, 1792-ED. Page 334 SECTION 16. (1789-90.) MR. FAIRLY'S'MARRIAGE: THE HASTINGS TRIAL, RUMOURS OF MR. FAIRLY'S IMPENDING MARRIAGE. Colonel Gwynn told us, at tea-time, of the wonderful recovery of Colonel Goldsworthy, who has had an almost desperate illness; and then added that he had dined the preceding day with him, and met Mr. Fairly, who was coming to Windsor, and all prepared, when he was suddenly stopped, on the very preceding evening, by a fresh attack of the gout. I heard this with much concern, and made many inquiries, which were presently interrupted by an exclamation of Major Garth, who was now in waiting: "The gout?" he cried: "nay, then, it is time he should get a nurse; and, indeed, I hear he has one in view." Colonel Gwynn instantly turned short, with a very significant smile of triumph, towards me, that seemed to confirm this assertion, while it exulted in his own prediction at Cheltenham. The following morning, while I was alone with my royal mistress, she mentioned Mr. Fairly for the first time since we left Weymouth. It was to express much displeasure against him: e had misled Lord Aylesbury about the ensuing Drawing-room, by affirming there would be none this month. After saying how wrong this was, and hearing me venture to answer I could not doubt but he must have had some reason, which, if known, might account for his mistake, she suddenly, and with some severity of accent, said, "He will not come Page 335 here! For some reason or other he does not choose it! He cannot bear to come!" How was I amazed! and silenced pretty effectually She then added, "He has set his head against coming. I know he has been in town some considerable time, but he has desired it may not be told here. I know, too, that when he has been met in the streets, he has called out, 'For heaven's sake, if you are going to Windsor, do not say you have seen me.'" Nov. 18.-We were to go to town: but while I was taking my hasty breakfast Miss Planta flew into the room, eagerly exclaiming, "Have you heard the news?" I saw, instantly, by her eyes and manner, what she meant and therefore answered, "I believe so." "Mr. Fairly is going to be married! I resolved I would tell you." I heard the rumour," I replied, "the other day, from Colonel Gwynn." "O, it's true!" she cried; "he has written to ask leave; but for heaven's sake don't say so!" I gave her my ready promise, for I believed not a syllable of the matter; but I would not tell her that. A ROYAL VISIT TO THE THEATRE: JAMMED IN THE CROWD. We went to town not only for the Drawing-room on the next day, but also for the play on this Wednesday night,(322) and the party appointed to sit in the queen's private box, as, on these occasions, the balcony-box opposite to the royals is called, dined with Mrs. Schwellenberg,--namely, Mrs. Stainforth, Miss Planta, Mr. de Luc, and Mr. Thomas Willis, When we arrived at the playhouse(323) we found the lobby and all the avenues so crowded, that it was with the utmost difficulty we forced our way up the stairs. It was the first appearance of the good king at the theatre since his illness. When we got up stairs, we were stopped effectually: there was not room for a fly ; and though our box was not only taken and kept, but partitioned off, to get to it was wholly impracticable. Mr. Willis and Miss Planta protested they would go down Page 336 again, and remonstrate with Mr. Harris, the manager; and I must own the scene that followed was not unentertaining. Mrs. Stainforth and myself were fast fixed in an angle at the corner of the stairs, and Mr. de Luc stood in the midst of the crowd, where he began offering so many grave arguments, with such deliberation and precision, every now and then going back in his reasoning to correct his own English, representing our right to proceed, and the wrong of not making way for us, that it was irresistibly comic to see the people stare, as they pushed On, and to see his unconscious content in their passing him, so long as he completed his expostulations on their indecorum. Meanwhile, poor Mrs. Stainforth lost her cloak, and in her loud lamentations, and calls upon all present to witness her distress (to which, for enhancing its importance, she continually added, "Whoever has found it should bring it to the Queen's house"), she occupied the attention of all upon the stairs as completely as it was occupied by Mr. de Luc for all in 'the passages : but, alas! neither the philosophic harangue of the one, nor the royal dignity of the other, prevailed; and while there we stood, expecting an avenue to be formed, either for our eloquence or our consequence, not an inch of ground did we gain, and those who had neither made their way, and got on in multitudes. Offended, at length, as well as tired, Mrs. Stainforth proposed our going down, and waiting in the lobby, till Mr. Harris arrived. Here we were joined by a gentleman, whose manner of fixing me showed a half-recollection of my face, which I precisely returned him, without being able to recollect where I had seen him before. He spoke to Mrs. Stainforth, who answered as if she knew him, and then he came to me and offered to assist in getting me to my box. I told him the manager had already been sent to. He did not, however, go off, but entered into conversation upon the crowd, play, etc., with the ease of an old acquaintance. I took the first opportunity to inquire of Mrs. Stainforth who he was, and heard--Lord Mountmorres, whom you may remember I met with at the theatre at Cheltenham. What, however, was ridiculous though was, that, after a considerable length of time, he asked me who Mrs. Stainforth was, and I afterwards heard he had made the same inquiry of herself about me! The difference of a dressed and undressed head had occasioned, I suppose, the doubt. The moment, Page 337 however, he had completely satisfied himself in this, he fairly joined me, as if he had naturally belonged to our party. And it turned out very acceptable, for we were involved in all such sort of difficulties as our philosopher was the least adapted to remove. We now went about, in and out, up and down, but without any power to make way, the crowd every instant thickening. We then were fain to return to our quiet post, behind the side-boxes in the lobby, where we remained till the arrival of the king, and then were somewhat recompensed for missing the sight of his entrance, by hearing the sound of his reception: for so violent an huzzaing commenced, such thundering clapping, knocking with sticks, and shouting, and so universal a chorus of "God save the king," that not all the inconveniences of my situation could keep my heart from beating with joy, nor my eyes from running over with gratitude for its occasion. Lord Mountmorres, who joined in the stick part of the general plaudit, exclaimed frequently, "What popularity is this! how fine to a man's feelings! yet he Must find it embarrassing." Indeed I should suppose he could with difficulty bear it, 'Twas almost adoration! How much I lament that I lost the sight of his benign countenance, during such glorious moments as the most favoured monarchs can scarce enjoy twice in the longest life! Miss Planta and Mr. Willis now returned: they had had no success; Mr. Harris said they might as well stem the tide of the ocean as oppose or rule such a crowd. The play now began ; and Lord Mountmorres went away to reconnoitre, but, presently returning, said, "If you will trust yourselves with me I will show you your chance." And then he conducted me to the foot of the stairs leading to our box, which exhibited such a mass of living creatures, that the insects of an ant-hill could scarce be more compact. We were passed by Lord Stopford, Captain Douglas, and some other of our acquaintance, who told us of similar distresses; and in this manner passed the first act! The boxkeeper came and told Lord Mountmorres he could now give his lordship one seat: but the humours of the lobby he now preferred, and refused the place: though I repeatedly begged that we might not detain him. But he was determined to see us safe landed before he left us. Page 338 Mr. Harris now came again, and proposed taking us another way, to try to get up some back-stairs. We then went behind the scenes for this purpose : but here Mr. Harris was called away, and we were left upon the stage. Lord Mountmorres led me to various peep-holes, where I could at least have the satisfaction of seeing the king and royal family, as well as the people, and the whole was a sight most grateful to my eyes. So civil, however, and so attentive he was, that a new perplexity now occurred to me : he had given up his place, and had taken so much trouble, that I thought, if we at last got to our box, he would certainly expect to be accommodated. in it. And to take any one, without previous permission, into the queen's private box, and immediately facing their majesties, was a liberty I knew not how to risk ; and, in truth, I knew not enough of his present politics to be at all sure if they might not be even peculiarly obnoxious. This consideration, therefore, began now so much to reconcile me to this emigrant evening, that I ceased even to wish for recovering our box. IN THE MANAGER's Box. When Mr. Harris came back, he said he had nothing to propose but his own box, which was readily accepted. To this our access was easy, as it was over the king and queen, and consequently not desirable to those who came to see them. I too now preferred it, as it was out of their sight, and enabled me to tell Lord Mountmorres, who led me to it through the crowd with unceasing trouble and attention, that till he could get better accommodated a place was at his service. He closed instantly with the offer, placing himself behind me ; but said he saw some of his relations in the opposite stage-box, Lady Mornington and her beautiful daughter Lady Ann Wellesley, and, as soon as the act was over, he would go down and persuade them to make room for him. I was shocked, however, after all this, to hear him own himself glad to sit down, as he was still rather lame, from a dreadful overturn in a carriage, in which his leg had been nearly crushed by being caught within the coach-door, which beat down upon it, and almost demolished it. This anecdote, however, led to another more pleasant; for it brought on a conversation which showed me his present principles, at least, were all on the government side. The accident had happened during a Journey to Chester, in his way to Page 339 Ireland, whither he was hastening upon the Regency business, last winter: and he went to the Irish House of Peers the first time he quitted his room, after a confinement of three weeks from this terrible bruise. "But how," cried I, "could you stand?" "I did not stand," he answered; "they indulged me with leave to speak sitting." "What a useful opening, then, my lord," cried I, "did you lose for every new paragraph!" I meant, the cant of "Now I am upon my legs." He understood it instantly, and laughed heartily, protesting it was no small detriment to his oratory. The play was the "Dramatist,"(324) written with that species of humour in caricature that resembles O'Keefe's performances; full of absurdities, yet laughable in the extreme. We heard very ill, and, missing the beginning, we understood still worse: so that, in fact, I was indebted to my new associate for all the entertainment I received the whole evening. When the act was over, the place on which he had cast his eye, near Lady Mornington, was seized; he laughed, put down his hat, and composed himself quietly for remaining where he was. He must be a man of a singular character, though of what sort I know not: but in his conversation he showed much information, and a spirited desire of interchanging ideas with those who came in his way. We talked a great deal of France, and he related to me a variety of anecdotes just fresh imported thence. He was there at the first assembling of the Notables, and he saw, he said impending great events from that assemblage. The two most remarkable things that had struck him, he told me, in this wonderful revolution, were--first, that the French guards should ever give up their king; and secondly, that the chief spirit and capacity hither-to shown amongst individuals had come from the ecclesiastics. He is very much of the opinion the spirit of the times will come round to this island. In what, I asked, could be its pretence?-- The game-laws, he answered, and the tithes. He told me, also, a great deal of Ireland, and enlarged my political knowledge abundantly,--but I shall not be so generous, my dear friends, as to let you into all these state matters. But I must tell you a good sort of quirk of Mr. Wilkes, who, when the power of the mob and their cruelty were first reciting, Page 340 quarrelled with a gentleman for saying the French government was become a democracy and asserted it was rather a mobocracy. The pit, he said, reminded him of a sight he once saw in Westminster Hall,--a floor of faces. He was a candidate for Westminster at that time, with Charles Fox!--thus do we veer about. At the end of the farce, "God save the king" was most vociferously called for from all parts of the theatre, and all the singers of the theatre came on the stage to sing it, joined by the whole audience, who kept it up till the sovereign of his people's hearts left the house. It was noble and heart-melting at once to hear and see such loyal rapture, and to feel and know it so deserved. MR. FAIRLY'S MARRIAGE IMMINENT. NOV. 20.-Some business sent me to speak with Miss Planta before our journey back to Windsor. When it was executed and I was coming away, she called out, "O! Špropos--it's all declared, and the princesses wished Miss Fuzilier joy yesterday in the Drawing-room. She looked remarkably well ; but said Mr. Fairly had still a little gout, and could not appear." Now first my belief followed assertion;--but it was only because it was inevitable, since the princesses could not have proceeded so far without certainty. . . . . . We returned to Windsor as usual, and there I was, just as usual, obliged to finish every evening with picquet !--and to pass all and every afternoon, from dinner to midnight, in picquet company. Nov. 28.-The queen, after a very long airing, came * in to dress, and summoned me immediately; and in two minutes the princess royal entered, and said something in German, and then added, "And Mr. Fairly, ma'am, begs he may see you a moment, now, if possible." This is his first coming to the house since her royal highness's birthday, just two months ago. "I am very sorry," was answered coolly, "but I am going to dress." "He won't keep you a moment, mamma, only he wants to get on to St. Leonards to dinner," Miss Fuzilier is now there." "Well, then," she answered, "I'll slip on my powdering-gown, and see him." Page 341 I found, however, they had already met, probably in the passage, for the queen added, "How melancholy he looks, does not he, princess royal?" "Yes, indeed, mamma!"--They then again talked ' German. The princess then went to call him ; and I hastened into the next room, with some caps just then inspecting. Mr. Turbulent again dined with us, and said, "I find Mr. Fairly is here to-day? when is he to be married?" Mrs. Schwellenberg reproved him for talking of "soch things:" she holds it petty treason to speak of it, as they are both in office about the Court; though she confessed it would be in a fortnight. At tea, when the gentlemen--General Budé, Majors Price and Garth, and Mr. Willis--appeared, she said, "Where be Mr. Fairly?" They all exclaimed, "Is he here?" "O, certain, if he ben't gone!" I then said he had gone on to St. Leonards. They all expressed the utmost surprise that he should come, and go, and see none of them. When they retired, Mrs. Schwellenberg exclaimed, "For what not stay one night? For what not go to the gentlemen? It looks like when he been ashamed.--O fie! I don't not like soch ting. And for what always say contrarie?--always say to everybody he won't not have her!--There might be something wrong in all that--it looks not well." I saw a strong desire to have me enter into the merits of the case; but I constantly answer to these exclamations, that these sort of situations are regarded in the world as licensing denials first, and truancy from all others afterwards. COURT DUTIES DISCUSSED. December.-Let me now, to enliven you a little, introduce to you a new acquaintance, self-made, that I meet at the chapel, and who always sits next me when there is room,-- Mrs. J--, wife to the Bishop of K--: and before the service begins, she enters into small talk, with a pretty tolerable degree of frankness, not much repressed by scruples of delicacy. Take a specimen. She opened, the other morning, upon my situation and occupation, and made the most plump inquiries into its particulars, with a sort of hearty good humour Page 342 that removed all impertinence, whatever it left of inelegance and then began her comments. "Well; the queen, to be sure, is a great deal better dressed than she used to be; but for all that, I really think it is but an odd thing for you!--Dear! I think it's something so out of the way for you!--I can't think how you set about it. It must have been very droll to you at first. A great deal of honour, to be sure, to serve a queen, and all that: but I dare say a lady's-maid could do it better,--though to be called about a queen, as I say, is a great deal of honour: but, for my part, I should not like it; because to be always obliged to go to a person, whether one was in the humour or not, and to get up in a morning, if one was never so sleepy!--dear! it must be a mighty hurry-skurry life! you don't look at all fit for it, to judge by appearances, for all its great honour, and all that." Is not this a fit bishop's wife? is not here primitive candour and veracity? I laughed most heartily,--and we have now commenced acquaintance for these occasional meetings. If this honest dame does not think me fit for this part of my business, there is another person, Mlle. Montmoulin, who, with equal simplicity, expresses her idea of my unfitness for another part.-- How you bear it," she cries, "living with Mrs. Schwellenberg!--I like it better living in prison!--'pon m'honneur, I prefer it bread and water; I think her so cross never was. If I you, I won't bear it--poor Miss Burney!--I so sorry!--'pon m'honneur, I think to you oftens!--you so confined, you won't have no pleasures!--" Miss Gomme, less plaintive, but more solemn, declared the other day, "I am sure you must go to heaven for living this life!"---So, at least, you see, though in a court, I am not an object of envy. MR. FAIRLY'S STRANGE WEDDING. January, 1790.-Mr. Fairly was married the 6th--I must wish happiness to smile on that day, and all its anniversaries, it gave a happiness to me unequalled, for it was the birthday of my Susanna! One evening, about this time, Mr. Fisher, now Doctor, drank tea with us at Windsor, and gave me an account of Mr. Fairly's marriage that much amazed me. He had been called upon to perform the ceremony. It was by special licence, and at the house of Sir R- G-.(325) @ Page 343 So religious, so strict in all ceremonies, even, of religion, as he always appeared, his marrying out of a church was to me very unexpected. Dr. Fisher was himself surprised, when called upon, and said he supposed it must be to please the lady. Nothing, he owned, could be less formal or solemn than the whole. Lady C., Mrs. and Miss S., and her father and brother and sister, were present. They all dined together at the usual hour,'and then the ladies, as usual, retired. Some time after, the clerk was sent for, and then, with the gentlemen, joined the ladies, who were in the drawing-room, seated on sofas, just as at any other time, Dr. Fisher says he is not sure they were working, but the air of common employment was such, that he rather thinks it, and everything of that sort was spread about as on any common day--workboxes, netting-cases, etc. Mr. Fairly then asked Dr. Fisher what they were to do? He answered, he could not tell; for he had never married anybody in a room before. Upon this, they agreed to move a table to the upper end of the room, the ladies still sitting quietly, and then Put on it candles and a prayer-book. Dr. Fisher says he hopes it was not a card-table, and rather believes it was only a Pembroke work-table. The lady and Sir R. then came forward, and Dr. Fisher read the service. So this, methinks, seems the way to make all things easy! Yet--with so little solemnity-without even a room prepared and empty--to go through a business of such portentous seriousness!-- 'Tis truly amazing from a man who seemed to delight so much in religious regulations and observances. Dr. Fisher himself was dissatisfied, and wondered at his compliance, though he attributed the plan to the lady. The bride behaved extremely well, he said, and was all smile and complacency. He had never seen her to such advantage, or in such soft looks, before; and perfectly serene, though her sister was so much moved as to go into hysterics. Afterwards, at seven o'clock, the bride and bride-groom set off for a friend's house in Hertfordshire by themselves, attended by servants with white favours. The rest of the party, father, sister, and priest included, went to the play, which happened to be Benedict. Page 344 A VISIT FROM THE BRIDE. I shall say nothing of the queen's birthday, but that I had a most beautiful trimming worked me for it by Miss Cambridge, who half fatigued herself to death, for the kind pleasure that I should have my decorations from her hands. If in some points my lot has been unenviable, what a constant solace, what sweet and soft amends, do I find and feel in the almost unexampled union of kindness and excellence in my chosen friends! The day after the birthday produced a curious scene. To soften off, by the air, a violent headache, I determined upon walking to Chelsea to see my dear father. I knew I should thus avoid numerous visitors of the household, who might pay their devoirs to Mrs. Schwellenberg. I missed my errand, and speedily returned, and found many cards from bed-chamber women and maids of honour; and, while still reading them, I was honoured with a call from the Bishop of Salisbury; and in two minutes my dear father came himself. A pleasant conversation was commencing, when Columb opened the door, and said, "Colonel Fairly begs leave to ask you how you do." He had been married but a week before he came into the midst of all the Court bustle, which he had regularly attended ever since! It was a good while before the door opened again - and I heard a buzz of voices in the passage: but when it was thrown open, there appeared--the bride herself--and alone! She looked quite brilliant in smiles and spirits. I never saw a countenance so enlivened. I really believe she has long cherished a passionate regard for Mr. Fairly, and brightens now from its prosperity. I received her with all' the attention in my power, immediately wishing her joy: she accepted it with a thousand dimples, and I seated her on the sofa, and myself by her side. Nobody followed; and I left the bishop to my father, while we entered into conversation, upon the birthday, her new situation in being exempt from its fatigues, and other matters of the time being. I apologised to Mrs. Fairly for my inability to return the honour of her visit, but readily undertook to inform her majesty of her inquiries, which she earnestly begged from me, Page 345 RENEWAL OF THE HASTINGS TRIAL: A POETICAL IMPROMPTU. Feb. 16-Mr. Hastings's trial re-commenced; and her majesty graciously presented me with tickets for Mr. Francis, Charlotte, and myself. She acknowledged a very great curiosity to know whether my old friends amongst the managers would renew their intercourse with a Court friend, or include me in the distaste conceived against herself, and drop their visits. I had not once been to the trial the preceding year, nor seen any of the set since the king's illness. We were there hours before they entered, all spent in a harmony of converse and communication I never for three hours following can have elsewhere: no summons impending--no fear of accidental delay drawing off attention to official solicitude. At the stated time they entered in the usual form, Mr. Burke first. I felt so grieved a resentment of his late conduct,(326) that I was glad to turn away from his countenance. I looked elsewhere during the whole procession, and their subsequent arrangement, that I might leave totally to themselves and their consciences whether to notice a friend from Court or not. Their consciences said not. No one came; I only heard through Charlotte that Mr. Windham was of the set. Mr. Anstruther spoke, and all others took gentle naps! I don't believe he found it out. When all was concluded, I saw one of them ascending towards our seats : and presently heard the voice of Mr. Burke. I wished myself many miles off! 'tis so painful to see with utter disapprobation those faces we have met, with joy and pleasure! He came to speak to some relations of Mr. Anstruther. I was next them, and, when recovered from my first repugnance, I thought it better to turn round, not to seem leading the way myself to any breach. I met his eyes immediately, and curtsied. He only said, "O! is it you?" then asked how I did, said something in praise of Mr. Anstruther, partly to his friends and partly to me--heard from me no reply--and hurried away, coldly, and with a look dissatisfied and uncordial. I was much concerned; and we came away soon after. Here is an impromptu, said to have been written by Mr. Page 346 Hastings during Mr. Grey's speech, which was a panegyric on Mr, Philip Francis:-- "It hurts me not, that Grey,, as Burke's assessor, Proclaims me Tyrant, Robber, and Oppressor, Tho' for abuse alone meant: For when he call'd himself the bosom friend, The Friend of Philip Francis,--I con'end He made me full atonement." I was called upon, on my return, to relate the day's business. Heavy and lame was the relation - but their majesties were curious, and nothing better suited truth. AN ILLBRED EARL OF CHESTERFIELD. Our tea-party was suddenly enlarged by the entrance of the Lords Chesterfield, Bulkley, and Fortescue. Lord Chesterfield brought in the two latter without any ceremony, and never introduced nor named them, but chatted off with them apart, as if they were in a room to themselves: and Colonel Wellbred, to whom all gentlemen here belong, was out of the room ]if search of a curious snuff-box that he had promised to show to us. Major Price, who by great chance was seated next me, jumped up as if so many wild beasts had entered, and escaped to the other side of the room, and Mr. Willis was only a sharp looker-on. This was awkward enough for a thing so immaterial, as I could not even ask them to have any tea, from uncertainty how to address them; and I believe they were entirely ignorant whither Lord Chesterfield was bringing them, as they came In only to wait for a royal summons. How would that quintessence of high ton, the late Lord Chesterfield, blush to behold his successor! who, with much share of humour, and of good humour also, has as little good breeding as any mail I ever met with. Take an instance.-Lord Bulkley, who is a handsome man, is immensely tall; the major, who is middle-sized, was standing by his chair, in close conference with him--"Why, Bulkley," cried Lord Chesterfield, "you are just the height sitting that Price is standing." Disconcerted a little, they slightly laughed; but Lord Bulkley rose, and they walked off to a greater distance. Lord Chesterfield, looking after them, exclaimed, "What a Page 347 walking steeple he is!--why, Bulkley, you ought to cut off your legs to be on a level with society!" When they were all summoned away, except Mr. Willis, who has never that honour but in private, he lifted up his hands and eyes, and called out, "I shall pity those men when the book comes out!--I would not be in their skins!" I understood him perfectly,--and answered, truly, that I was never affronted more than a minute with those by whom I could never longer be pleased. Miss BURNEY IN A NEW CAPACITY. March 2.- In one of our Windsor excursions at this time, while I was in her majesty's dressing-room, with only Mr. de Luc present, she suddenly said, "Prepare yourself, Miss Burney, with all your spirits, for to-night you must be reader." She then added that she recollected what she had been told by my honoured Mrs. Delany, of my reading- Shakspeare to her, and was desirous that I should read a play to herself and the princesses; and she had lately heard, from Mrs. Schwellenberg, "nobody could do it better, when I would." I assured her majesty it was rather when I could, as any reading Mrs. Schwellenberg had heard must wholly have been better or worse according to my spirits, as she had justly seemed to suggest. The moment coffee was over the Princess Elizabeth came for me. I found her majesty knotting, the princess royal drawing, Princess Augusta spinning, and Lady Courtown I believe in the same employment, but I saw none of them perfectly well. "Come, Miss Burney," cried the queen, " how are your spirits?-- How is your voice?" ' "She says, ma'am," cried the kind Princess Elizabeth, "she shall do her best!" This had been said in attending her royal highness back. I could only confirm it, and that cheerfully-to hide fearfully. I had not the advantage of choosing my play, nor do I know what would have been my decision had it fallen to my lot. Her majesty, had just begun Colman's works, and "Polly Honeycomb" was to open my campaign. "I think," cried the queen most graciously, "Miss Burney will read the better for drawing a chair and sitting down,". Page 348 " yes, mamma! I dare say so!" cried Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth, both in a moment. The queen then told me to draw my chair close to her side. I made no scruples. Heaven knows I needed not the addition of standing! but most glad I felt in being placed thus near, as it saved a constant painful effort of loud reading. "Lady Courtown," cried the queen, "you had better draw nearer, for Miss Burney has the misfortune of reading rather low at first." Nothing could be more amiable than this opening. Accordingly, I did, as I had promised, my best; and, indifferent as that was, it would rather have surprised you, all things considered, that it was not yet worse. But I exerted all the courage I possess, and, having often read to the queen, I felt how much it behoved me not to let her surmise I had any greater awe to surmount. It is but a vulgar performance; and I was obliged to omit, as well as I could at sight, several circumstances very unpleasant for reading, and ill enough fitted for such hearers. it went off pretty flat. Nobody is to comment, nobody is to interrupt; and even between one act and another not a moment's pause is expected to be made. I had been already informed of this etiquette by Mr. Turbulent and Miss Planta; nevertheless, it is not only oppressive to the reader, but loses to the hearers so much spirit and satisfaction, that I determined to endeavour, should I again be called upon, to introduce a little break into this tiresome and unnatural profundity of respectful solemnity. My own embarrassment, however, made it agree with me for the present uncommonly well. Lady Courtown never uttered one single word the whole time; yet is she one of the most loquacious of our establishment. But such is the settled etiquette. The queen has a taste for conversation, and the princesses a good-humoured love for it, that doubles the regret of such an annihilation of all nature and all pleasantry. But what will not prejudice and education inculcate? They have been brought up to annex silence to respect and decorum: to talk, therefore, unbid, or to differ from any given opinion even when called upon, are regarded as high improprieties, if not presumptions. They none of them do justice to their own minds, while they enforce this subjection upon the minds of others. I had not Page 349 experienced it before ; for when reading alone with the queen, or listening to her reading to me, I have always frankly spoken almost whatever has occurred to me. But there I had no other examples before me, and therefore I might inoffensively be guided by myself; and her majesty's continuance of the same honour has shown no disapprobation of my proceeding. But here it was not easy to make any decision for myself: to have done what Lady Courtown forbore doing would have been undoubtedly a liberty. So we all behaved alike - and easily can I now conceive the disappointment and mortification of poor Mr. Garrick when he read "Lethe" to a royal audience. Its tameness must have tamed even him, and I doubt not he never acquitted himself so ill. THE LONG-FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY: MISS BURNEY AGAIN AS READER. On Easter Sunday, the 4th of April, when I left my beloved Susan at St. James's, I left with her all spirit for any voluntary employment, and it occurred to me I could best while away the leisure allowed me by returning to my long-forgotten tragedy. This I have done, in those moments as yet given to my journal, and it is well I had so sad a resource, since any merrier I must have aimed at in vain. It was a year and four months since I had looked at or thought of it. I found nothing but unconnected speeches, and hints, and ideas, though enough in quantity, perhaps, for a whole play. I have now begun planning and methodising, and have written three or four regular scenes. I mention all these particulars of my progress, in answer to certain queries in the comments of my Susan and Fredy, both of old date. Well (for that is my hack, as "however" is my dear Susanna's), we set off rather late for Windsor,-Mr. de Luc, Miss Planta, and myself; Mrs. Schwellenberg stayed in town. . . . I invited my old beau, as her majesty calls Mr. Bryant, to dinner, and he made me my best day out of the ten days of our Windsor sojourn. He has insisted upon lending me some more books, all concerning the most distant parts of the earth, or on subjects the most abstruse. His singular simplicity in constantly conceiving that, because to him such books alone are new, they must have the same recommendation to me, is Page 350 extremely amusing; and though I do all that is possible to clear up the distinction, he never remembers it. The king, for which I was very sorry, did not come Into the room. He made it but one visit, indeed, during this week. He then conversed almost wholly with General Grenville upon the affairs of France; and in a manner so unaffected, open and manly, so highly superior to all despotic principles, even while most condemning the unlicensed fury of the Parisian mob, that I wished all the nations of the world to have heard him, that they might have known the real existence of a patriot king. Another reading took place, and much more comfortably; it was to the queen and princesses, without any lady-in-waiting. The queen, as before, condescended to order me to sit close to her side; and as I had no model before me, I scrupled much less to follow the bent of my own ideas by small occasional comments. And these were of use both to body and mind; they rested the lungs from one invariable exertion, as much as they saved the mind from one strain of attention. Our play was "The Man of Business," a very good comedy, but too local for long life. And another of Colman's which I read afterwards has the same defect. Half the follies and peculiarities it satirises are wholly at an end and forgotten. Humour springing from mere dress, or habits, or phraseology, is quickly obsolete; when it sinks deeper, and dives into character, it may live for ever. I dedicated my Wednesday evening to a very comfortable visit to our dear James, whose very good and deserving wife, and fine little fat children, with our Esther and her fair Marianne and Fanny, all cordially conspired to make me happy. We read a good deal of Captain Bligh's interesting narrative,(327) Page 351 every word Of which James has taken as much to heart as if it were his own production. I go on, occasionally, with my tragedy. It does not much enliven, but it soothes me. COLONEL MANNERS IN HIS SENATORIAL CAPACITY. April 23.--I shall add nothing at present to my Journal but the summary of a conversation I have had with Colonel Manners, who, at our last excursion, was here without any other gentleman. Knowing he likes to be considered as a senator, I thought the best subject for our discussion would be the House of Commons; I therefore made sundry political inquiries, so foreign to My Usual mode, that you would not a little have smiled to have heard them. I had been informed he had once made an attempt to speak, during the Regency business, last winter ; I begged to know how the matter stood, and he made a most frank display of its whole circumstances. "Why, they were speaking away," he cried, "upon the Regency, and so,---and they were saying if the king could not reign, and recover; and Burke was making some of his eloquence, and talking; and, says he, 'hurled from his throne,'---and so I put out my finger in this manner, as if I was in a great passion, for I felt myself very red, and I was in a monstrous passion I suppose, but I was only going to say 'Hear! Hear!' but I happened to lean one hand down upon my knee, in this way, just as Mr. Pitt does when he wants to speak.- and I stooped forward, just as if I was going to rise up and begin but just then I caught Mr. Pitt's eye, looking at me so pitifully; he thought I was going to speak, and he was frightened to death, for he thought--for the thing was, he got up himself, and he said over all I wanted to say; and the thing is, he almost always does; for just as I have something particular to say, Mr. Pitt begins, and goes through it all, so that he don't leave anything more to be said about it; and so, I suppose, as he looked at me so pitifully, he thought I should say it first, or else that I Page 352 should get into some scrape, because I was so warm and looking so red." Any comment would disgrace this; I will therefore only tell you his opinion, in his own words, of one of our late taxes. "There's only one tax, ma'am, that ever I voted for against my conscience, for I've always been very particular about that; but that is the bacheldor's tax, and that I hold to be very unconstitutional, and I am very sorry I voted for it, because it's very unfair; for how can a man help being a bacheldor, if nobody will have him? and besides, it's not any fault to be taxed for, because We did not make ourselves bacheldors, for we were made so by God, for nobody was born married, and so I think it's a very unconstitutional tax." A CONVERSATION WITH MR. WINDHAM AT THE HASTINGS TRIAL. April 27.-I had the happiness of my dearest Fredy's society in Westminster Hall--if happiness and that place may be named together. The day was mixed: Evidence and Mr. Anstruther weighing it down, and Mr. Burke speaking from time to time, and lighting it up. O, were his purpose worthy his talents, what an effect would his oratory produce! I always hear him with so much concern, I can scarce rejoice even in being kept awake by him. The day was nearly passed, and I was eating a biscuit to prevent an absolute doze while Mr. Anstruther was talking, when, raising myself from a listening bend, I turned to the left, and perceived Mr. Windham, who had quietly placed himself by my side without speaking. My surprise was so great, and so totally had I given up all idea of renewing our conferences, that I could scarce refrain expressing it. Probably it was visible enough, for he said, as if apologising for coming up, that so to do was the only regale their toils allowed them. He then regretted that it was a stupid day, and, with all his old civility about me and my time, declared he was always sorry to see me there when nothing worth attention was going forward. This soon brought us round to our former intimacy of converse ; and, the moment I was able, I ventured at my usual inquiry about his own speaking, and if it would soon take place. Page 353 "No," he answered, with a look of great pleasure, "I shall now not speak at all.--I have cleared myself from that task, and never with such satisfaction did I get rid of any!" Amazed, yet internally glad, I hazarded some further inquiry into the reason of this change of plan. They were drawing, he said, to a conclusion, and the particular charge which he had engaged himself to open was relinquished.(328) "I have therefore," he cried, "washed my hands of making a speech, yet satisfied my conscience, my honour, my promises, and my intentions; for I have declined undertaking anything new, and no claim therefore remains upon me." "Well," quoth I, "I am at a loss whether to be glad or sorry." He comprehended instantly,--glad for Mr. Hastings, or sorry for not hearing him. He laughed, but said something a little reproachful, upon my continued interest for that gentleman. I would not pretend it was diminished; I determined he should find me as frank as heretofore, and abscond, or abide, as his nerves stood the firmness. "You are never, then" (I said afterwards), "to speak here?" "Once," he answered, "I said a few words--" "O when?" I cried; "I am very sorry I did not know it, and hear you,--as you did speak!" "O," cried he, laughing, "I do not fear this flattery now, as I shall speak no more." "But what," cried I, "was the occasion that drew you forth?" "Nothing very material but I saw Burke run hard, and I wished to help him." "That was just," cried I, "what I should have expected from you-- and just what I have not been able not to honour, on some other occasions, even where I have most blamed the matter that has drawn forth the assistance." This was going pretty far:--he could not but instantly feel I meant the Regency discussions. He neither made me any answer, nor turned his head, even obliquely, my way. I was not sorry, however. 'Tis always best to be sincere. Finding him quite silent, to soften matters as well as I could with honesty, I began an éloge of Mr. Burke, both warm and true, as far as regards his wonderful abilities. But he soon Page 354 distinguished the rigorous precision with which, Involuntarily, I praised the powers without adverting to their Use. Suddenly then, and with a look of extreme keenness, he turned his eyes upon me, and exclaimed, "Yes,--and he has very highly, also the faculty of being right!" I would the friendship that dictated this assertion were as unwarped as it is animated. I could not help saying rather faintly, "Has he?" Not faintly he answered, "He has!--but not the world alone, even his friends, are apt to misjudge him. What he enters upon, however with earnestness, YOU will commonly find turn out as he represents it." His genius, his mental faculties, and the natural goodness of his heart, I then praised as warmly as Mr. Windham could have praised them himself; but the subject ran me aground a second time, as, quite undesignedly, I concluded my panegyric with declaring that I found it impossible not to admire,--nay, love him, through all his wrong. Ending another total silence and averted head, I started something more general upon the trial. His openness then returned, with all its customary vivacity, and he expressed himself extremely irritated upon various matters which had been carried against the managers by the judges. "But, Mr. Windham!" exclaimed I, "the judges!--is it possible you can enter into such a notion as to suppose Mr. Hastings capable of bribing them?" "O, for capable," cried he, "I don't know--" "Well, leave that word out, and suppose him even willing--can you imagine all the judges and all the lords--for they must concur-- disposed to be bribed?" "No; but I see them all determined to acquit Mr. Hastings." "Determined?--nay, that indeed is doing him very little honour." "O, for honour!--if he is acquitted--" He stopped,--as if that were sufficient. I ventured to ask why the judges and the lords-should make such a determination. "From the general knavery and villainy of mankind." was his hard answer, "which always wishes to abet successful guilt." "Well!" cried I, shaking my head, "you have not, Page 355 relinquished your speech from having nothing to say. But I am glad you have relinquished it, for I have always been most afraid of you ; and the reason is, those who know how to hold back will not for nothing come forward. There is one down there, who, if he knew how ever to hold back, would be great indeed!" He could not deny this, but would not affirm it. Poor Mr. Burke!--so near to being wholly right, while yet wholly wrong! When Mr. Burke mounted the rostrum, Mr. Windham stopped short, saying, "I won't interrupt you-" and, in a moment, glided back to the managers' box; where he stood behind Mr. Burke, evidently at hand to assist in any difficulty. His affection for him seems to amount to fondness. This is not for me to wonder at. Who was so captivated as myself by that extraordinary man, till he would no longer suffer me to reverence the talents I must still ever admire? A GLIMPSE OF MRS. PIOZZI. Sunday, May 2.-This morning, in my way to church, just as I arrived at the iron gate of our courtyard, a well-known voice called out, "Ah, there's Miss Burney!" I started, and looked round--and saw--Mrs. Piozzi! I hastened up to her; she met my held-out hand with both hers: Mr. Piozzi an Cecilia(329) were with her--all smiling and good-humoured. "You are going," she cried, "to church?--so, am I. I must run first to the inn: I suppose one--may sit--anywhere one pleases?" "Yes," I cried, "but you must be quick, or you will sit nowhere, there will be such a throng." This was all;--she hurried on,--so did I. I received exceeding great satisfaction in this little and unexpected meeting. She had been upon the Terrace, and was going to change her hat, and haste on both sides prevented awkwardness on either. Yet I saw she had taken in good part my concluding hand- presentation at my dear Mr. Locke's:(330) she met me no more 356 with that fiert`e of defiance: it was not-nor can it ever be with her old cordiality, but it was with some degree of pleasure, and that species of readiness which evinces a consciousness of meeting with a good reception. CAPTAIN BURNEY WANTS A SHIP AND TO GO TO COURT. May 6.-This being the last Pantheon, I put in my long intended claim; and it was greatly facilitated by the circumstance of a new singer, Madame Benda, making her first appearance. My dearest father fetched me from the Queen's house. Esther and Marianne kept me places between them. Marianne never looked so pretty; I saw not a face there I thought equally lovely. And, oh, how Pacchierotti sung!--How -with what exquisite feeling, what penetrating pathos! I could almost have cried the whole time, that this one short song was all I should be able to hear ! At the beginning of the second act I was obliged to decamp. James, who had just found me out, was my esquire. "Well," he cried, in our way to the chair, "will there be war with Spain?" I assured him I thought not. "So I am afraid!" answered the true English tar. " "However, if there is, I should be glad of a frigate of thirty-two guns. Now, if you ask for it, don't say a frigate, and get me one of twenty-eight!" Good heaven!--poor innocent James!-- And just as I reached the chair--"But how shall you feel," he cried, "when I ask you to desire a guard-ship for me, in about two years' time?" I could make no precise answer to that! He then added that he intended coming to Court! Very much frightened, I besought him first to come and drink tea with me--which he promised. In my way home, as I went ruminating upon this apparently but just, though really impracticable demand, I weighed well certain thoughts long revolving, and of late nearly bursting forth and the result was this--to try all, while yet there is time. Reproach else may aver, when too late, greater courage Would have had greater success. This idea settled my resolutions, and they all bent to one point, risking all risks. Page 357 May 10.-This evening, by appointment came our good James and his wife, and soon afterwards, to my great pleasure, Captain Phillips joined us. I take it, therefore, for granted, he will have told all that passed in the business way. I was very anxious to gather more intelligibly the wishes and requests of poor James, and to put a stop to his coming to Court without taking such previous steps as are customary. I prevailed, and promised, in return, to make known his pretensions. You may believe, my dear friends, this promise was the result of the same wish of experiment, and sense of claim upon me of my family to make it while I may, that I have mentioned. I did-- this very evening. I did it gaily, and in relating such anecdotes as were amusingly characteristic of a sailor's honest but singular notions of things: yet I have done it completely; his wishes and his claims are now laid open--Heaven knows to what effect! The Court scheme I have also told; and my royal mistress very graciously informed me, that if presented by some superior officer there could be no objection; but otherwise, unless he had some promotion, it was not quite usual. CAPTAIN BURNEY AND MR. WINDHAM. May 11.-This morning my royal mistress had previously arranged for me that I should go to the trial, and had given me a ticket for my little Sarah(331) to accompany me; and late last night, I believe after twelve o'clock, she most graciously gave me another for James. just at this time she could not more have gratified me than by a condescension to my dear brother. Poor Columb was sent with the intelligence, and directions for our meeting at seven o'clock this morning, to Norton-street. Sarah came early; but James was so late we were obliged to leave word for him to follow us. He did,--two hours afterwards! by way of being our esquire; and then told me he knew it would be in good time, and so he had stopped to breakfast at Sir Joseph Banks's. I suppose the truth is, it saved him a fresh puff of powder for some other day. We talked over all affairs, naval and national, very comfortably. The trial is my only place for long dialogues! I gave him a new and earnest charge that he would not speak home concerning the prosecution to Mr. Winndham, should he join 358 us. He made me a less reluctant promise than heretofore, for when last with Charlotte at Aylsham he had frequently visited Mr. Windham, and had several battles at draughts or backgammon with him; and there is no Such good security against giving offence as seeing ourselves that our opponents are worth pleasing. Here, too, as I told James, however we might think all the managers in the wrong, they were at least open enemies, and acting a public part, and therefore they must fight it Out, as he would do with the Spaniards, if, after all negotiation, they came to battle. He allowed this; and promised to leave him to the attacks of the little privateer, without falling foul of him with a broadside. Soon after the trial began Mr. Windham came up to us, and after a few minutes' chat with me addressed himself to James about the approaching war. "Are you preparing," he cried, "for a campaign?" "Not such one," cried James, "as we had last summer at Aylsham!" "But what officers you are!" he cried, "you men of Captain Cook; you rise upon us in every trial! This Captain Bligh,--what feats, what wonders he has performed! What difficulties got through! What dangers defied! And with such cool, manly skill!" They talked the narrative over as far as Mr. Windham had in Manuscript seen its sketch; but as I had not read it, I could not enter into its detail. MR. WINDHAM SPEAKS ON A LEGAL POINT. Mr. Windham took his seat by my elbow, and renewed one of his old style of conversations about the trial ; each of us firmly maintaining our original ground. I believe he has now relinquished his expectation of making me a convert. He surprised me soon by saying, "I begin to fear, after all, that what you have been talking about to me will come to pass." I found he meant his own speaking upon a new charge, which, when I last saw him, he exultingly told me was given up. He explained the apparent inconsistency by telling me that some new change of plan had taken place, and that Mr. Burke was extremely urgent with him to open the next charge: "And I cannot," he cried emphatically, "leave Burke in the lurch!" I both believed and applauded him so far; but why )Page 59 are either of them engaged in a prosecution so uncoloured by necessity? One chance he had still of escaping this tremendous task, he told me, which was that it might devolve upon Grey but Burke, he did not disavow, wished it to be himself. "However," he laughingly added, "I think we may toss up In that case, how I wish he may lose! not only from believing him the abler enemy, but to reserve his name from amongst the active list in such a cause. He bewailed,---with an arch look that showed his consciousness I should like the lamentation,--that he was now all unprepared,-- all fresh to begin in documents and materials, the charge being wholly new and unexpected, and that which he had considered relinquished. "I am glad, however," cried I, "your original charge is given up; for I well remember what you said of it." "I might be flattered," cried he, "and enough, that you should remember anything I say--did I not know it was only for the sake of its subject,"--looking down upon Mr. Hastings. I could not possibly deny this but added that I recollected he had acknowledged his charge was to prove Mr. Hastings mean, pitiful, little, and fraudulent." The trial this day consisted almost wholly in dispute upon evidence - the managers offered such as the counsel held improper, and the judges and lords at last adjourned to debate the matter in their own chamber. Mr. Burke made a very fine speech upon the rights of the prosecutor to bring forward his accusation, for the benefit of justice, in such mode as appeared most consonant to his own reason and the nature of things, according to their varying appearances as fresh and fresh matter Occurred. The counsel justly alleged the hardship to the client, if thus liable to new allegations and suggestions, for which he came unprepared, from a reliance that those publicly given were all against which he need arm himself, and that, if those were disproved, he was cleared; while the desultory and shifting charges of the managers put him out in every method of defence, by making it impossible to him to discern where he might be attacked. In the course of this debate I observed Mr. Windham so agitated and so deeply attentive, that it prepared me for what soon followed : he mounted the rostrum-for the third time only since this trial commenced. Page 360 His speech was only to a point Of law respecting evidence he kept close to his subject, with a clearness and perspicuity very uncommon indeed amongst these orators. His voice, however, is greatly in his disfavour ; for he forces it so violently, either from earnestness or a fear of not being heard, that, though it answered the purpose of giving the most perfect distinctness to what he uttered, its sound had an unpleasing and crude quality that amazed and disappointed me. The command of his language and fluency of his delivery, joined to the compact style of his reasoning and conciseness of his arguments, were all that could answer my expectations: but his manner--whether from energy or secret terror--lost all its grace, and by no means seemed to belong to the elegant and high-bred character that had just quitted me. In brief,--how it may happen I know not,--but he certainly does not do justice to his own powers and talents in public. He was excessively agitated: when he had done and dismounted, I saw his pale face of the most fiery red. Yet he had uttered nothing in a passion. It must have been simply from internal effort. The counsel answered him, and he mounted to reply. Here, indeed, he did himself honour; his readiness of answer, the vivacity of his objections, and the instantaneous command of all his reasoning faculties, were truly striking. Had what he said not fallen in reply to a speech but that moment made, I must have concluded it the result Of Study, and all harangue learnt by heart. He was heard with the most marked attention. The second speech, like the first, was wholly upon the laws of evidence, and Mr. Hastings was not named in either. He is certainly practising against his great day. And, in truth, I hold still to my fear of it; for, however little his manner in public speaking may keep pace with its promise in private conversation, his matter was tremendously pointed and severe. The trial of the day concluded by an adjournment to consult upon the evidence in debate, with the judges, in the House of Lords. Mr. Windham came up to the seats of the Commons in my neighbourhood, but not to me; he spoke to the Misses Francis,--daughters of Mr. Hastings's worst foe,--and hurried down. On my return I was called upon to give an account of the Page 361 trial to their majesties and the princesses, and a formidable business, I assure you, to perform. AN EMPHATIC PERORATION. May 18.-This morning I again went to the trial of poor Mr. Hastings. Heavens! who can see him sit there unmoved? not even those who think him guilty,--if they are human. I took with me Mrs. Bogle. She had long since begged a ticket for her husband, which I could never before Procure. We now went all three. And, indeed, her original speeches and remarks made a great part of my entertainment. Mr. Hastings and his counsel were this day most victorious. I never saw the prosecutors so dismayed. Yet both Mr. Burke and Mr. Fox spoke, and before the conclusion so did Mr. Windham. They were all in evident embarrassment. Mr. Hastings's counsel finished the day, with a most noble appeal to justice and innocence, protesting that, if his client did not fairly claim the one, by proving the other, he wished himself that the prosecutors-that the lords--that the nation at large--that the hand of God--might fall heavy upon him! This had a great and sudden effect,-- not a word was uttered. The prosecutors looked dismayed and astonished ; and the day closed. Mr. Windham came up to speak to Misses Francis about a dinner: but he only, bowed to me, and with a look so conscious---so much saying, "'TiS your turn to triumph now!: that I had not the spite to attack him. But when the counsel had uttered this animated speech, Mrs. Bogle was so much struck, she hastily arose, and, clapping her hands, called out audibly, in a broad Scotch accent, "O, charming!" I could hardly, quiet her till I assured her we should make a paragraph for the newspapers. I had the pleasure to deliver this myself to their majesties, and the princesses--and as I was called upon while it was fresh in my memory, I believe but little of the general energy was forgotten. It gave me great pleasure to repeat so striking an affirmation of the innocence of so high, so injured I believe, a character. The queen eagerly declared I should go again the next sitting. Wednesday, May 19.--The real birthday of my royal mistress, to whom may Heaven grant many, many and prosperous! Dressing, and so forth, filled up all the morning Page 362 and at night I had a t`ete-`a-t`ete with Charles, till twelve. I got to bed about five in the morning. The sweet princesses had a ball, and I could not lament my fatigue. AN APTITUDE FOR LOGIC AND FOR GREEK. May 20.-To-day again to the trial, to which I took MISS Young, her majesty having given me two tickets very late overnight. Miss Young is singularly, as far as I can see, the reverse of her eccentric parents she is moderation personified. Mr. Windham again spoke in the course of this morning's business, which was chiefly occupied in debating on the admissibility of the evidence brought forward by the prosecutors. The quickness and aptness of his arguments, with the admirable facility and address with which he seized upon those of his opponents, the counsel, were strong marks of that high and penetrating capacity so strikingly his characteristic. The only defect in his speaking is the tone of his voice, which, from exertion, loses all its powers of modulation, and has a crude accent and expression very disagreeable. During the examination of Mr. Anderson, one of Mr. Hastings's best friends,--a sensible, well-bred, and gentlemanlike man,--Mr. Windham came up to my elbow. "And can this man," cried he, presently, "this man--so gentle---be guilty?" I accused him of making a point to destroy all admiration of gentleness in my opinion. "But you are grown very good now!" I added, "No, very bad I mean!" He knew I meant for speaking ; and I then gave him burlesqued, various definitions of good, which had fallen from Mr. Fox in my hearing, the most contradictory, and, taken out of their place, the most ridiculous imaginable. He laughed very much, but seriously confessed that technical terms and explanations had better have been wholly avoided by them all, as the counsel were sure to out-technicalise them, and they were then exposed to greater embarrassments than by steering clear of the attempt, and resting only upon their common forces. "There is one praise," I cried, "which I am always sure to meet in the newspapers whenever I meet with your name; and I begin to quite tire of seeing it for you,-your skill in logic!" Page 363 "O, I thank you," he cried, earnestly "I am indeed quite ashamed of the incessant misappropriation of that word." "No, no," cried I; "I only tire of it because they seem to think, when once the word logic and your name are combined, they have completely stated all. However, in what little I have heard, I could have suspected you to have been prepared with a speech ready written, had I not myself heard just before all the arguments which it answered." I then added that I was the less surprise(! at this facility of language, from having heard my brother declare he knew no man who read Greek with that extraordinary rapidity--no, not Dr. Parr, nor any of the professed Grecians, whose peculiar study it had been through life. This could be nothing, he said, but partiality. "Not mine, at least," cried I, laughing, "for Greek excellence is rather Out Of my sphere of panegyric!" " Well," cried he, laughing too at my disclaiming, "'Tis' your brother's partiality. However, 'tis one I must try not to lose. I must take to my Greek exercises again." They will do you a world of good, thought I, if they take you but from your prosecution-exercises. MORE TALK WITH MR. WINDHAM. We then talked of Mr. Burke. "How finely," I cried, "he has spoken! with what fullness of intelligence, and what fervour!" He agreed, with delighted concurrence. "Yet,--so much so long!" I added. "True!" cried he, ingenuously, yet concerned. "What pity he can never stop!" And then I enumerated some of the diffuse and unnecessary paragraphs which had weakened his cause, as well as his speech. He was perfectly candid, though always with some reluctance. "But a man who speaks in public," he said, "should never forget what will do for his auditors: for himself alone, it is not enough to think ; but for what is fitted, and likely to be interesting to them." "He wants nothing," cried I, "but a flapper." "Yes, and he takes flapping inimitably." "You, then," I cried, "should be his flapper." "And sometimes," said he, smiling, "I am." "O, I often see," said I, "of what use you are to him. I Page 364 see you watching him,--reminding, checking him in turn,--at least, I fancy all this as I look into the managers' box, which is no small amusement to me,--when there is any commotion there!" He bowed; but I never diminished from the frank unfriendliness to the cause with which I began. But I assured him I saw but too well how important and useful he was to them, even without speaking. "Perhaps," cried he, laughing, "more than with speaking." "I am not meaning to talk Of that now," said I, "but yet, one thing I will tell you: I hear you more distinctly than any one; the rest I as often miss as catch, except when they turn this way,--a favour Which you never did me!" "No, no, indeed!" cried he; "to abstract myself from all, is all that enables me to get on." And then, with his native candour, he cast aside prejudice, and very liberally praised several points in this poor persecuted great man. I had seen, I said, an initiation from Horace, which had manifested, I presumed, his scholarship." "O, ay," cried he, "an Ode to Mr. Shore, who is one of the next witnesses. Burke was going to allude to it, but I begged him not. I do not like to make their lordships smile in this grave business." "That is so right!: cried I: "Ah, you know it IS you and your attack I have feared most all along!" "This flattery"--cried he. "Do not use that word any more, Mr. Windham," interrupted I; "if you do, I shall be tempted to make a very shocking speech to you--the very reverse of flattery, I assure you." He stared,-- and I went on. "I shall say,--that those who think themselves flattered--flatter themselves.!" "What?--hey?--How?" cried he. "Nay, they cannot conclude themselves flattered, without concluding they have de quoi to make it worth while!" "Why, there--there may be something In that but not here!--no, here it must flow simply front general benevolence,--from a wish to give comfort or pleasure." I disclaimed all and turned his attention again to Mr. Hastings. "See!" I cried, "see but how thin--how ill--looks that poor little uncle of yours!"(332) Again I upbraided him with being unnatural; and lamented Mr. Hastings's Page 365 change since I had known him in former days. "And shall I tell you," I added, "something in which you had nearly been involved with him?" "Me?--with Mr. Hastings?" "Yes ! and I regret it did not happen ! You may recollect my mentioning my original acquaintance with him, before I lived where I now do." ' "Yes, but where you now....I understand you,--expect ere long you may see him!" He meant from his acquittal, and reception at the Queen's house. And I would not contradict him. But, however," I continued, "my acquaintance and regard began very fairly while I lived at home at my father's and indeed I regret you could not then and so have known him, as I am satisfied you would have been pleased with him, which now you cannot judge. He is so gentle-mannered, so intelligent, so unassuming, yet so full-minded." I have Understood that," he answered; "yet 'tis amazing how little unison there may be between mariners and characters, and how softly gentle a man may appear without, whose nature within is all ferocity and cruelty. This is a part of mankind of which you cannot judge--of which, indeed, you can scarce form an idea." After a few comments I continued what I had to say, which, in fact, was nothing but another malice of my own against him. I reminded him of one day in a former year of this trial, when I had the happiness of sitting at it with my dearest Mrs. Locke, in which he had been so obliging, with reiterated offers, as to propose seeing for my servant, etc.-" "Well," I continued, "I was afterwards extremely sorry I had not accepted your kindness; for just as we were going away, who should be passing, and turn back to speak to me, but Mr. Hastings!" 'O!' he cried, 'I must come here to see you, I find!' Now, had you but been with me at that moment! I own it would have been the greatest pleasure to me to have brought you together though I am quite at a loss to know whether I ought, in that case, to have presented you to each other." He laughed most heartily,-half, probably, with joy at his escape; but he had all his wits about him in his answer. "If you," he cried, "had been between US, we might, for once, have coalesced-- in both bowing to the same shrine!" (322) Wednesday, November 18.-ED. (323) Covent Garden.-ED. (324) A comedy by Reynolds, originally produced at Covent Garden, May 15, 1789.-ED. (325) Sir Robert Gunning, the bride's father.-ED. (326) Fanny refers to Burke's attitude during the Regency debates, in which, as a member of the opposition, he had supported Mr. Fox.-ED, (327) "A Narrative of the mutiny on board his majesty's ship Bounty; and the subsequent Voyage of part of the Crew, in the ship's boat, from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch settlement in the East Indies. Written by Lieutenant William Bligh." London, 1790. Lieutenant (afterwards Admiral) Bligh was appointed to the command of the Bounty in August, 1787. He sailed from England in December, and arrived at Otaheite, October 26, 1788, the object of his voyage being to transplant the bread fruit tree from the South Sea Islands to the British colonies in the West Indies, with a view to its acclimatisation there. A delay of more than five months at Otaheite demoralized the crew, to whom the dolce far mente of life in a Pacific island, and the Charms of the Otaheitan women, offered greater attractions than the toils of sea-faring under a somewhat tyrannical captain. The Bounty left Otaheite April 4, 1789, and on the 28th of the same month a mutiny broke out under the leadership of the mater's mate, Fletcher Christian. Captain Bligh and eighteen of his men were set adrift in the ship's boat, in which they sailed for nearly three months, undergoing terrible privations, and reaching the Dutch settlement at Timor, an island off the east coast of Java, June 14. Bligh arrived in England, March 14, 1790. The mutineers finally settled in Pitcairn's island, where their descendants are still living.-ED. (328) See note ante 263, p. 102.-ED. (329) Mrs. Piozzi's youngest daughter, who had accompanied her mother and step-father abroad.-ED. 2 It appears from a note in (330) It appears from a note in the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney" (vol. iii. p. 199), that Fanny had once before met Mrs Piozzi since her marriage, at an assembly at Mrs. Locke's. This meeting must have taken place Soon after the marriage, as Mrs. Piozzi went abroad with her husband shortly afterwards.-ED. (331) Fanny's half-sister.-ED. (332) An allusion to the personal resemblance between Windham and Hastings. See ante, p. 149.-ED. Page 366 SECTION 17. (1790-1) MISS BURNEY RESIGNS HER PLACE AT COURT. [The following section concludes the story of Fanny's life at Court. Her entire unfitness for the position which she there occupied had been, from the commencement, no secret to herself; but her tenderness for her father had determined her to endure to the utmost before resigning a place to which her appointment had been to him, in his short-sighted folly, a source of such extreme gratification. But now she could endure no longer. The occasional relief which she had found in the society of Mrs. Delany and Colonel Digby had been brought to an end by the death of the one and the marriage of the other ; her spirits were broken, her state of health was becoming daily more alarming and she at last summoned up courage to consult her father on the subject, and to make known to him her desire of resigning. Blind as he had shown himself to the true interests of his daughter, Dr. Burney was still the most affectionate of parents. He heard Fanny's complaint with grief and disappointment, but with instant acquiescence in her wishes. His consent to her plan being obtained, Fanny for some months took no further steps in the matter. She was willing to remain at her post so long as she was capable, with whatever difficulty, of supporting its fatigues. But her health failed more and more, and the memorial was at last (December, 1790) presented to the queen. Even yet the day of release was far distant. The "sweet queen" was in no hurry to part with so faithful a servant, and although she had accepted the resignation, she did not conceal her displeasure at being reminded of it. Meanwhile the unfortunate victim of royal selfishness was growing daily weaker. Her friends were seriously alarmed: even her fellow-slaves at Court commiserated her, and urged her retirement. A successor was at length appointed, and on the 7th of July, 1791, Fanny found herself once more free. Page 367 During the interval which elapsed between the consultation with Dr. Burney and the presentation of the memorial, an incident occurred which occasioned to Fanny much distress and not a little annoyance. Her own narrative of the affair we have not thought it necessary to include in our selection from the "Diary," but here a few words on the subject may be not unacceptable. Fanny's man-servant, a Swiss named Jacob Columb, had fallen dangerously ill in the summer of 1790, and was sent, in August, to St. George's Hospital. He was much attached to his mistress, who, he said, had treated him with greater kindness than father, mother, or any of his relatives, and on leaving Windsor he begged her to hold in trust for him the little money in his possession, amounting to ten guineas. She offered him a receipt for the money, but he refused it, and when she insisted, exclaimed, "No, ma'am, I won't take it! You know what it is, and I know what it is; and if I live I'm sure you won't wrong me: and if I don't, nobody else sha'n't have it!" Moved to tears by the poor fellow's earnestness, Fanny complied with his request. In the following month he died at the hospital, desiring, in his last moments, to leave everything to his sisters in Switzerland. "He certainly meant," writes Fanny, "everything of his wearing apparel, watches, etc., for what money he had left in my hands he would never tell anybody." She was preparing, accordingly, to transmit Columb's effects, including, of course, the ten guineas, to Switzerland, when a claimant appeared in the person of Peter Bayond, a countryman of the deceased. This man produced a will, purporting to be Columb's, by which the property was left to be divided between Bayond himself and James Columb, a cousin of the pretended testator, then in service with Horace Walpole. Fanny's instant conviction was that the will was a forgery, and the appearance and behaviour of Bayond confirmed her in this belief. James Columb, moreover, concurred in her opinion, and she had decided to ignore this new claim, when she received an attorney's letter, desiring her to pay to Bayond the sum in her hands of the late Jacob Columb. She then wrote to Walpole, who offered her his assistance, with many expressions of warm regard. But finally, after much trouble, and threats of a lawsuit, she was advised that her best plan would be to let the will take its course, and to pay over to the claimant the sum in question ; and thus the matter was settled, "in a manner," she writes, "the most mortifying to Mr. Walpole and myself."-ED.) Page 368 A MELANCHOLY CONFESSION. May 25.-The Princess Augusta condescended to bring me a most gracious message from the king, desiring to know if I wished to go to Handel's Commemoration, and if I should like the "Messiah," or prefer any other day? With my humble acknowledgments for his goodness, I fixed instantly on the "Messiah" and the very amiable princess came smiling back to me, bringing me my ticket from the king. This would not, indeed, much have availed me, but that I fortunately knew my dear father meant to go to the Abbey. I despatched Columb to Chelsea, and he promised to call for me the next morning. My "Visions" I had meant to produce in a few days; and to know their chance before I left town for the summer.(333) But I thought the present opportunity not to be slighted, for some little opening, that might lighten the task of the exordium upon the day of attempt. He was all himself--all his native self- -kind, gay, open, and full fraught with converse. Chance favoured me: we found so little room, that we were fain to accept two vacant places at once, though they separated us from my uncle, Mr. Burney, and his brother James, who were all there, and all meant to be of the same party. I might not, at another time, have rejoiced in this disunion, but it was now most opportune: it gave me three hours' conference with my dearest father--the only conference of that length I have had in four years. Fortune again was kind ; for my father began relating various anecdotes of attacks made upon him for procuring to sundry strangers some acquaintance with his daughter,(334) particularly with the Duchesse de Biron, and the Mesdames de Boufflers(335) to whom he answered, he had no power; but was somewhat Page 369 struck by the question of Madame de B. in return, who exclaimed, "Mais, monsieur, est-ce possible! Mademoiselle votre fille n'a-t- elle point de vacance?"(336) This led to much interesting discussion, and to many confessions and explanations on my part, never made before; which induced him to enter more fully into the whole of the situation, and its circumstances, than he had ever yet had the leisure or the spirits to do; and he repeated sundry speeches of discontent at my seclusion from the world. All this encouraged me to much detail: I spoke my high and constant veneration for my royal mistress, her merits, her virtues, her condescension, and her even peculiar kindness towards me. But I owned the species of life distasteful to me; I was lost to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment; I was worn with want of rest, and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance. My time was devoted to official duties; and all that in life was dearest to me--my friends, my chosen society, my best affections--lived now in my mind only by recollection, and rested upon that with nothing but bitter regret. With relations the most deservedly dear, with friends of almost unequalled goodness, I lived like an orphan-like one who had no natural ties, and must make her way as she could by those that were factitious. Melancholy was the existence where happiness was excluded, though not a complaint could be made! where the illustrious personages who were served possessed almost all human excellence, yet where those who were their servants, though treated with the most benevolent condescension, could never, in any part of the live-long day, command liberty, or social intercourse, or repose. The silence of my dearest father now silencing myself, I turned to look at him; but how was I struck to see his honoured head bowed down almost into his bosom with dejection and discomfort!-- we were both perfectly still a few moments; but when he raised his head I could hardly keep my seat, to see his eyes filled with tears!--"I have long," he cried, "been uneasy, though I have not spoken; but if you wish to resign, my house, my purse, my arms, shall be open to receive you, back;" Page 370 The emotion of my whole heart at this speech-this sweet, this generous speech--O my dear friends, I need not say it We were mutually forced to break up Our conference. I could only instantly accept his paternal offer, and tell him it was my guardian angel, it was Providence in its own benignity, that inspired him with such goodness. I begged him to love the day in which he had given me such comfort, and assured him it would rest upon my heart with grateful pleasure till it ceased to beat. He promised to drink tea with me before I left town, and settle all our proceedings. I acknowledged my intention to have ventured to solicit this very permission of resigning.- "But I," cried he, smiling with the sweetest kindness, "have spoken first myself." What a joy to me, what a relief, this very circumstance! it will always lighten any evil that may, unhappily, follow this proposed step. CAPTAIN BURNEY's LACONIC LETTER AND INTERVIEW. June.-I went again to the trial of poor Mr. Hastings : Mrs. Ord received from me my companion ticket, kindly giving up the Duke of Newcastle's box to indulge me with her company. But I must mention an extraordinary circumstance that happened in the last week. I received in a parcel--No, I will recite it you as I told it to Mr. Windham, who, fortunately, saw and came up to me--fortunately, I say, as the business of the day was very unedifying, and as Mrs. Ord much wished to hear some of his conversation. He inquired kindly about James and his affairs, and if he had yet a ship; and, to let him see a person might reside in a Court, and yet have no undue influence, I related his proceedings with Lord Chatham, and his laconic letter and interview. The first running thus:-- "My Lord,--I should be glad of an audience; if your Lordship will be so good to appoint a time, I will wait upon you. I am, my Lord, your humble servant, "James Burney." "And pray," quoth I to James, when he told me this, "did you not say the honour of an audience?" Page 371 "No," answered he, "I was civil enough without that; I said, If you will be so good--that was very civil--and honour is quite left off now." How comic! to run away proudly from forms and etiquettes, and then pretend it was only to be more in the last mode. Mr. Windham enjoyed this characteristic trait very much; and he likes James so well that he deserved it, as well as the interview which ensued. "How do you do, Captain Burney?" "My lord, I should be glad to be employed." " You must be sensible, Captain Burney, we have many claimants just now, and more than it is possible to satisfy immediately." "I am very sensible of that, my lord; but, at the same time, I wish to let your lordship know what I should like to have--a frigate of thirty-two guns." "I am very glad to know what you wish, sir." He took out his pocket-book, made a memorandum, and wished James a good morning. Whether or not it occurred to Mr. Windham, while I told this, that there seemed a shorter way to Lord Chatham, and one more in his own style, I know not: he was too delicate to let such a hint escape, and I would not for the world intrust him with my applications and disappointments. BURKE'S SPEECH ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. But I have found," cried I afterwards, "another newspaper praise for you now, 'Mr. Windham, with his usual vein of irony."' "O, yes," cried he, "I saw that! But what can it mean?--I use no 'vein of irony;'--I dislike it, except for peculiar purposes, keenly handled, and soon passed over." " Yet this is the favourite panegyric you receive continually,-- this, or logic, always attends your name in the newspapers." "But do I use it?" "Nay, not to me, I own. As a manner, I never found it out, at least. However, I am less averse now than formerly to the other panegyric--close logic,--for I own the more frequently I come hither the more convinced I find myself that that is no character of commendation to be given universally." He could say nothing to this; and really the dilatory, Page 372 desultory style of these prosecutors in general deserved a much deeper censure. "If a little closeness of logic and reasoning were observed by one I look at now, what a man would he be, and who could compare with him!" Mr. Burke you are sure was here my object; and his entire, though silent and unwilling, assent was obvious. "What a speech," I continued, "has he lately made!(337) how noble, how energetic, how enlarged throughout!" "O," cried he, very unaffectedly, "upon the French Revolution?" "Yes; and any party might have been proud of it, for liberality, for feeling, for all in one--genius. I, who am only a reader of detached speeches, have read none I have thought its equal." "Yet, such as you have seen it, it does not do him justice. I was not in the House that day ; but I am assured the actual speech, as he spoke it at the moment, was highly superior to what has since been printed. There was in it a force--there were shades of reflection so fine--allusions so quick and so happy-- and strokes of satire and observation so pointed and so apt,-- that it had ten times more brilliancy when absolutely extempore than when transmitted to paper." "Wonderful, wonderful! He is a truly wonderful creature!" And, alas, thought I, as wonderful in inconsistency as in greatness! In the course of a discussion more detailed upon faculties, I ventured to tell him what impression they had made upon James, who was with me during one of the early long speeches. "I was listening," I said, " with the most fer- Page 373 vent attention to such strokes of eloquence as, while I heard them, carried all before them, when my brother pulled me by the sleeve to exclaim, 'When will he come to the point?"' The justness, notwithstanding his characteristic conciseness, of this criticism, I was glad thus to convey. Mr. Windham however, would not subscribe to it; but, with a significant smile, coolly said, "Yes, 'tis curious to hear a man of war's ideas of rhetoric." "Well," quoth I, to make a little amends, "shall I tell you a compliment he paid you?" "Me?" "Yes. 'He speaks to the purpose,' he cried." AN AWKWARD MEETING. Some time after, with a sudden recollection, he eagerly exclaimed, "O, I knew I had something I wished to tell you! I was the other day at a place to see Stuart's Athenian architecture, and whom do you think I met in the room?" I could not guess. "Nay, 'tis precisely what you will like--Mr. Hastings!" "Indeed!" cried I, laughing; "I must own I am extremely glad to hear it. I only wish you could both meet without either knowing the other." "Well, we behaved extremely well, I assure you ; and looked each as if we had never seen one another before. I determined to let you know it." . . . A NEW VISIT FROM MRS. FAIRLY. The day after the birthday I had again a visit from Mrs. Fairly. I was in the midst of packing, and breakfasting, and confusion - for we left town immediately, to return no more till next year, except to St. James's for the Drawing-room. However, I made her as welcome as I was able, and she was more soft and ingratiating in her manners than I ever before observed her. I apologised two or three times for not waiting upon her, representing my confined abilities for visiting. ONE TRAGEDY FINISHED AND ANOTHER COMMENCED. August.-As I have only my almanac memorandums for this month, I shall hasten immediately to what I think my dear partial lecturers will find most to their taste in the course of it. Page 374 Know then, fair ladies, about the middle of this August, 17 90, the author finished the rough first draft and copy of her first tragedy. What species of a composition it may prove she is very unable to tell; she only knows it was an almost spontaneous work, and soothed the melancholy of imagination for a while, though afterwards it impressed it with a secret sensation of horror, so like real woe, that she believes it contributed to the injury her sleep received about this period. Nevertheless, whether well or ill, she is pleased to have done something at last, she had so long lived in all ways as nothing. You will smile, however, at my next trust; but scarce was this completed,-as to design and scenery I mean, for the whole is in its first rough state, and legible only to herself,- scarce, however, had this done with imagination, to be consigned over to correction, when imagination seized upon another subject for another tragedy. The first therefore I have deposited in my strong-box, in all its imperfections, to attend to the other; I well know correction may always be summoned, Imagination never will come but by choice. I received her, therefore, a welcome guest,--the best adapted for softening weary solitude, where only coveted to avoid irksome exertion. MISS BURNEY's RESIGNATION MEMORIAL. October.-I now drew up my memorial, or rather, showed it to my dearest father. He so much approved it, that he told me he would not have a comma of it altered. I will copy it for you. It is as respectful and as grateful as I had words at command to make it, and expressive of strong devotion and attachment; but it fairly and firmly states that my strength is inadequate to the duties of my charge, and, therefore, that I humbly crave permission to resign it and retire into domestic life. It was written in my father's name and my own. I had now that dear father's desire to present it upon the first auspicious moment: and O! with what a mixture of impatience and dread unspeakable did I look forward to such an opportunity! The war was still undecided : still I inclined to wait its issue, as I perpetually brought in my wishes for poor James, though without avail. Major Garth, our last equerry, was raised to a high post in the West Indies, and the rank of colonel, I recommended James to his notice and regard if Page 375 they met; and a promise most readily and pleasantly made to seek him out and present him to his brother, the general, if they ever served in the same district, was all, I think, that my Court residence obtained for my marine department of interest! Meanwhile, one morning at Kew, Miss Cambridge was so much alarmed at my declining state of health that she would take no denial to my seeing and consulting Mr. Dundas. He ordered me the bark, and it strengthened me so much for awhile, that I was too much recruited for presenting my sick memorial, which I therefore cast aside. Mrs. Ord spent near a week at Windsor in the beginning of this month. I was ill, however, the whole time, and suffered so much from my official duties, that my good Mrs. Ord, day after day, evidently lost something more and more of her partiality to my station, from witnessing fatigues of which she had formed no idea, and difficulties and disagreeabilities in carrying on a week's intercourse, even with so respectable a friend, which I believe she had thought impossible. Two or three times she burst forth into ejaculations strongly expressive of fears for my health and sorrow at its exhausting calls. I could not but be relieved in my own mind that this much-valued, most maternal friend should thus receive a conviction beyond all powers of representation, that my place was of a sort to require a strength foreign to my make. She left me in great and visible uneasiness, and wrote to me continually for bills of health, I never yet so much loved her, for, kind as I have always found her, I never yet saw in her so much true tenderness. MR. WINDHAM INTERVENES. In this month, also, I first heard of the zealous exertions and chivalrous intentions of Mr. Windham. Charles told me they never met without his demounting the whole thunders of his oratory against the confinement by which he thought my health injured; with his opinion that it must be counteracted speedily by elopement, no other way seeming effectual. But with Charlotte he came more home to the point. Their vicinity in Norfolk occasions their meeting, though very seldom at the house of Mr. Francis, who resents his prosecution of Mr. Hastings, and never returns his visits; but at assemblies at Aylsham and at Lord Buckingham's dinners they are certain of now and then encountering. Page 376 This summer, when Mr. Windham went to Felbrig, his Norfolk seat, they soon met at an assembly, and he immediately opened upon his disapprobation of her sister's monastic life, adding, "I do not venture to speak thus freely upon this subject to everybody, but to you I think I may; at least, I hope it." Poor dear Charlotte was too full-hearted for disguise, and they presently entered into a confidential cabal, that made her quite disturbed and provoked when hurried away. From this time, whenever they met, they were pretty much of a mind. "I cannot see you," he always cried, "without recurring to that painful subject--your sister's situation." He then broke forth in an animated offer of his own services to induce Dr. Burney to finish such a captivity, if he could flatter himself he might have any influence. Charlotte eagerly promised him the greatest, and he gave her his promise to go to work. O What a noble Quixote! How much I feel obliged to him! How happy, when I may thank him! He then pondered upon ways and means. He had already sounded my father: "but it is resolution," he added, "not inclination, Dr. Burney wants." After some further reflection, he then fixed upon a plan : "I will set the Literary Club(338) upon him!" he cried: "Miss Burney has some very true admirers there, and I am sure they will all eagerly assist. We will present him a petition--an address." Much more passed: Mr. Windham expressed a degree of interest and kindness so cordial, that Charlotte says she quite longed to shake hands with him; and if any success ever accrues, she certainly must do it. Frightened, however, after she returned home, she feared our dearest father might unfairly be overpowered, and frankly wrote him a recital of the whole, counselling him to see Mr. Windham in private before a meeting at the club should take place. AN AMUSING INTERVIEW WITH MR. BOSWELL. And now for a scene a little surprising. The beautiful chapel of St. George, repaired and finished by the best artists at an immense expense, which was now opened after a very long shutting up for its preparations, brought in- Page 377 numerable strangers to Windsor, and, among others, Mr. Boswell. This I heard, in my way to the chapel, from Mr. Turbulent, who overtook me, and mentioned having met Mr. Boswell at the Bishop of Carlisle's the evening, before. He proposed bringing him to call upon me; but this I declined, certain how little satisfaction would be given here by the entrance of a man so famous for compiling anecdotes. But yet I really wished to see him again, for old acquaintance sake, and unavoidable amusement from his oddity and good humour, as well as respect for the object of his constant admiration, my revered Dr. Johnson. I therefore told Mr. Turbulent I should be extremely glad to speak with him after the service was over. Accordingly, at the gate of the choir, Mr. Turbulent brought him to me. We saluted With mutual glee: his comic-serious face and manner have lost nothing of their wonted singularity nor yet have his mind and language, as you will soon confess. "I am extremely glad to see you indeed," he cried, "but very sorry to see you here. My dear ma'am, why do you stay ?--it won't do, ma'am! You must resign!--we can put up with it no longer. I told my good host the bishop so last night; we are all grown quite outrageous!" Whether I laughed the most, or stared the most, I am at a loss to say, but i hurried away from the cathedral, not to have such treasonable declarations overheard, for We Were surrounded by a multitude. He accompanied me, however, not losing one moment in continuing his exhortations: "If you do not quit, ma'am, very soon, some violent measures, I assure you, will be taken. We shall address Dr. Burney in a body; I am ready to make the harangue myself. We shall fall upon him all at once." I stopped him to inquire about Sir Joshua; he said he saw him very often, and that his spirits were very good. I asked about Mr. Burke's book.(339) "O," cried he "it Will come Out next week: 'tis the first book in the World, except my own, and that's coming out also very soon; only I want your help." "My help?" "Yes, madam,--you must give me some of your choice little notes of the doctor's; we have seen him long enough upon Page 378 stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam,--all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam; so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself." I evaded this by declaring I had not any stores at hand. He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get at them, but I was invincible. Then I was hurrying on, lest I should be too late. He followed eagerly, and again exclaimed, "But, ma'am, as I tell you, this won't do; you must resign off hand! Why, I would farm you out myself for double, treble the money! I wish I had the regulation of such a farm,--yet I am no farmer-general. But I should like to farm you, and so I will tell Dr. Burney. I mean to address him; I have a speech ready for the first opportunity." He then told me his " Life of Dr. Johnson " was nearly printed, and took a proof-sheet out of his pocket to show me; with crowds passing and repassing, knowing me well, and staring well at him: for we were now at the iron rails of the Queen's lodge. I stopped; I could not ask him in : I saw he expected it, and was reduced to apologise, and tell him I must attend the queen immediately. He uttered again stronger and stronger exhortations for my retreat, accompanied by expressions which I was obliged to check in their bud. But finding he had no chance for entering, he stopped me again at the gate, and said he would read me a part of his work. There was no refusing this: and he began with a letter of Dr. Johnson's to himself. He read it in strong imitation of the doctor's manner, very well, and not caricature. But Mrs. Schwellenberg was at her window, a crowd was gathering to stand round the rails, and the king and queen and royal family now approached from the Terrace. I made a rather quick apology, and, with a step as quick as my now weakened limbs have left in my power, I hurried to my apartment. You may suppose I had inquiries enough, from all around, of "Who was the gentleman I was talking to at the rails? And an injunction rather frank not to admit him beyond those limits. However, I saw him again the next morning, in coming Page 379 from early prayers, and he again renewed his remonstrances, and his petition for my letters of Dr. Johnson. I cannot consent to print private letters, even of a man so justly celebrated, when addressed to myself: no, I shall hold sacred those revered and but too scarce testimonies of the high honour his kindness conferred upon me. One letter I have from him that is a masterpiece of elegance and kindness united. 'Twas his last, ILL, UNSETTLED, AND UNHAPPY. November.-This month will be very brief of annals; I was so ill, so unsettled, so unhappy during every day, that I kept not a memorandum. All the short benefit I had received from the bark was now at an end : languor, feverish nights, and restless days were incessant. My memorial was always in my mind ; my courage never rose to bringing it from my letter-case. Yet the war was over, the hope of a ship for my brother demolished, and my health required a change of life equally with my spirits and my happiness. The queen was all graciousness; and her favour and confidence and smiles redoubled my difficulties. I saw she had no suspicion but that I was hers for life ; and, unimportant as I felt myself to her, in any comparison with those for whom I quitted her, I yet knew not how to give her the unpleasant surprise of a resignation for which I saw her wholly unprepared. . It is true, my depression of spirits and extreme alteration of person might have operated as a preface; for I saw no one, except my royal mistress and Mrs. Schwellenberg, who noticed not the change, or who failed to pity and question me upon my health and my fatigues; but as they alone saw it not, or mentioned it not, that afforded me no resource. And thus, with daily intention to present my petition and conclude this struggle, night always returned with the effort unmade, and the watchful morning arose fresh to new purposes that seemed only formed for demolition. And the month expired as it began, with a desire the most strenuous of liberty and peace, combated by reluctance unconquerable to give pain, displeasure, or distress to my very gracious royal mistress. December.-My loss of health was now so notorious, that no part of the house could wholly avoid acknowledging it; yet was the terrible picquet the catastrophe of every evening, Page 380 though frequent pains in my side forced me, three or four times in a game, to creep to my own room for hartshorn and for rest. And so weak and faint I was become, that I was compelled to put my head out into the air, at all hours, and in all weathers, from time to time, to recover the power of breathing, which seemed not seldom almost withdrawn. Her majesty was very kind during this time, and the princesses interested themselves about me with a sweetness very grateful to me; indeed, the whole household showed compassion and regard, and a general opinion that I was falling into a decline ran through the establishment. . . . Thus there seemed about my little person a universal commotion ; and it spread much farther, amongst those I have never or slightly mentioned. There seemed, indeed, but one opinion, that resignation of place or of life was the only remaining alternative. There seemed now no time to be lost - when I saw my dear father he recommended to me to be speedy,, and my mother was very kind in urgency for immediate measures. I could not, however, summon courage to present my memorial; my heart always failed me, from seeing the queen's entire freedom from such an expectation: for though I was frequently so ill in her presence that I could hardly stand, I saw she concluded me, while life remained, inevitably hers. A MEDICAL OPINION ON MISS BURNEY'S CONDITION. Finding my inability unconquerable, I at length determined upon consulting Mr. Francis. I wrote to Charlotte a faithful and Minute account of myself', with all my attacks--cough, pain In the side, weakness, sleeplessness, etc.,--at full length, and begged Mr. Francis's opinion how I must proceed. Very kindly he wrote directly to my father, exhorting instantaneous resignation, as all that stood before me to avert some dangerous malady. The dear Charlotte at the same time wrote to me conjuring my prompt retreat with the most affecting earnestness. The uneasiness that preyed upon my spirits in a task so difficult to perform for myself, joined to my daily declension in health, was now so apparent, that, though I could go no farther, I paved the way for an opening, by owning to the queen that Mr. Francis had been consulted upon my health. The queen now frequently inquired concerning his answer; Page 381 but as I knew he had written to my father, I deferred giving the result till I had had a final conference with that dear parent. I told her majesty my father Would show me the letter when I saw him. This I saw raised for the first time a surmise that something was in agitation, though I am certain the suspicion did not exceed an expectation that leave would be requested for a short absence to recruit. My dearest father, all kindness and goodness, yet all alarm, thought time could never be more favourable; and when next I saw him at Chelsea, I wrote a second memorial to enclose the original one. With a beating heart, and every pulse throbbing, I returned thus armed to the Queen's house. Mrs. Schwellenberg sent for me to her room. I could hardly articulate a word to her. My agitation was so great that I was compelled to acknowledge something very awful was impending in my affairs, and to beg she would make no present inquiries. I had not meant to employ her in the business, nor to name it to her, but I was too much disturbed for concealment or evasion. She seemed really sorry, and behaved with a humanity I had not had much reason to expect. I spent a terrible time till I went to the queen at night, spiriting myself up for my task, and yet finding apprehension gain ground every moment. Mrs. Schwellenberg had already been some time with her majesty when I was summoned. I am sure she had already mentioned the little she had gathered. I could hardly perform my customary offices from excess of trepidation. The queen looked at me with the most inquisitive solicitude. When left with her a moment I tried vainly to make an opening: I could not. She was too much impressed herself by my manner to wait long. She soon inquired what answer had arrived from Mr. Francis? That he could not, I said, prescribe at a distance. I hoped this would be understood, and said no more. The queen looked much perplexed, but made no answer. MISS BURNEY BREAKS THE MATTER TO THE QUEEN. The next morning I was half dead with real illness, excessive nervousness, and the struggle of what I had to force myself to perform. The queen again was struck with my appearance, which I believe indeed to have been shocking. When I was alone with her, she began upon Mr. Francis with more inquiry. I then tried to articulate that I had something of Page 382 deep consequence to myself to lay before her majesty; but that I was so unequal in my weakened state to speak it, that I had ventured to commit it to Writing, and entreated Permission to produce it. She could hardly hear me, yet understood enough to give immediate consent. I then begged to know if I might present it -myself, or whether I should give it to Mrs. Schwellenberg. "O, to me! to me!" she cried, with kind eagerness. She added, however, not then; as she was going to breakfast. This done was already some relief, terrible as was all that remained; but I now knew I must go on, and that all my fears and horrors were powerless to stop me. This was a Drawing-room day. I saw the king at St. James's, and he made the most gracious inquiries about my health: so did each of the princesses. I found they were now all aware of its failure. The queen proposed to me to see Dr. Gisburne: the king seconded the proposition. There was no refusing; yet, just now, it was distressing to comply. The next morning, Friday, when again I was alone with the queen, she named the subject, and told me she would rather I should give the paper to the Schwellenberg, who had been lamenting to her my want of confidence in her, and saying I confided and told everything to the queen. "I answered," continued her majesty, "that you were always very good; but that, with regard to confiding, you seemed so happy with all your family, and to live so well together, that there was nothing to say." I now perceived Mrs. Schwellenberg suspected some dissension at home was the cause of my depression. I was sorry not to deliver my memorial to the Principal person, and yet glad to have it to do where I felt so much less compunction in giving pain. THE MEMORIAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTE. I now desired an audience of Mrs. Schwellenberg. With what trembling agitation did I deliver her my paper, requesting her to have the goodness to lay it at the feet of the queen before her majesty left town ! We were then to set out for Windsor before twelve o'clock. Mrs. Schwellenberg herself remained in town. Here let me copy the memorial. Page 383 Most humbly presented to Her Majesty. "Madam, "With the deepest sense of your Majesty's goodness and condescension, amounting even to sweetness--to kindness who can wonder I should never have been able to say what I know not how to write--that I find my strength and health unequal to my duty? "Satisfied that I have regularly been spared and favoured by your Majesty's humane consideration to the utmost, I could never bring myself to the painful confession of my secret disquietude ; but I have long felt creeping upon me a languor, a feebleness, that makes, at times, the most common attendance a degree of capital pain to me, and an exertion that I could scarce have made, but for the revived alacrity with which your Majesty's constant graciousness has inspired me, and would still, I believe, inspire me, even to my latest hour, while in your Majesty's immediate presence. I kept this to myself while I thought it might wear away,-or, at least, I only communicated it to obtain some medical advice: but the weakness, though it comes only in fits, has of late so much Increased, that I have hardly known how, many days, to keep myself about--or to rise up in the morning, or to stay up at night. "At length, however, as my constitution itself seems slowly, yet surely, giving way, my father became alarmed. "I must not enter, here, upon his mortification and disappointment: the health and preservation of his daughter could alone be more precious to him than your Majesty's protection. "With my own feelings upon the subject it would ill become me to detain your Majesty, and the less, as I am fully sensible my place, in point of its real business, may easily he far better supplied;--In point of sincere devotion to your majesty, I do not so readily yield. I can only, therefore, most humbly entreat that your Majesty will deign to accept from my father and myself the most dutiful acknowledgments for the uniform benignity so graciously shown to me during the whole of my attendance. My father had originally been apprehensive of my inability, with regard to strength, for sustaining any but the indulgence of a domestic life : but your Majesty's justice and liberality will make every allowance for the flattered feelings of a parent's heart, which could not endure, untried, to relinquish for his daughter so high an honour as a personal office about your Majesty. Page 384 I dare not, Madam, presume to hope that Your Majesty's condescension will reach to the smallest degree of concern at parting with me; but permit me, Madam, humbly, earnestly, and fervently, to solicit that I may not be deprived of the mental benevolence of your Majesty, which so thankfully I have experienced, and so gratefully must for ever remember. That every blessing, every good, may light upon your Majesties here, and await a future and happier period hereafter, will be always amongst the first prayers of, "Madam, your Majesty's ever devoted, ever grateful, most attached, and most dutiful subject and servant, "Frances Burney." With this, though written so long ago, I only wrote an explanatory note to accompany it, which I will also copy:-- "Madam, "May I yet humbly presume to entreat your Majesty's patience for a few added lines, to say that the address which I now most respectfully lay at your Majesty's feet was drawn up two months ago, when first I felt so extreme a weakness as to render the smallest exertion a fatigue? While I waited, however, for firmness to present it, I took the bark, and found myself, for some time, so much amended, that I put it aside, and my father, perceiving me better, lost his anxious uneasiness for my trying a new mode of life. But the good effect has, of late, so wholly failed, that an entire change of air and manner of living are strongly recommended as the best chance for restoring my shattered health. We hold it, therefore, a point of that grateful duty we owe to your Majesty's goodness and graciousness, to make this melancholy statement at once, rather than to stay till absolute incapacity might disable me from offering one small but sincere tribute of profound respect to your Majesty,--the only one in my power--that of continuing the high honour of attending your Majesty, till your Majesty's own choice, time, and convenience nominate a successor." THE KEEPER OF THE ROBES' CONSTERNATION. Mrs. Schwellenberg took the memorial, and promised me her services, but desired to know its contents. I begged vainly to be excused speaking them. She persisted, and I then was compelled to own they contained my resignation. How aghast she looked!--how inflamed with wrath!--how Page 385 Petrified with astonishment! It was truly a dreadful moment to me. She expostulated on such a step, as if it led to destruction : she offered to save me from it, as if the peace of my life depended on averting it and she menaced me with its bad consequences, as it life itself, removed from these walls, would become an evil. I plainly recapitulated the suffering state in which I had lived for the last three months; the difficulty with which I had waded through even the most common fatigues of the day; the constraint of attendance, however honourable, to an invalid; and the impracticability of pursuing such a life, when thus enfeebled, with the smallest chance of ever recovering the health and strength which it had demolished. To all this she began a vehement eulogium on the superior happiness and blessing of my lot, while under such a protection ; and angrily exhorted me not to forfeit what I could never regain. I then frankly begged her to forbear SO painful a discussion, and told her that the memorial was from my father as well as myself--that I had no right or authority to hesitate in delivering it--that the queen herself was prepared to expect it -and that I had promised my father not to go again to Windsor till it was presented. I entreated her, therefore, to have the goodness to show it at once. This was unanswerable, and she left me with the paper in her hand, slowly conveying it to its place of destination. just as she was gone, I was called to Dr. Gisburne or, rather, without being called, I found him in my room, as I returned to it. Think If my mind, now, wanted not medicine the most I told him, however, my corporeal complaints and he ordered me opium and three glasses of wine in the day, and recommended rest to me, and an application to retire to my friends for some weeks, as freedom from anxiety was as necessary to my restoration as freedom from attendance. LEAVE OF ABSENCE IS SUGGESTED. During this consultation I was called to Mrs. Schwellenberg. Do you think I breathed as I went along?--No! She received me, nevertheless, with complacency and smiles; she began a laboured panegyric of her own friendly zeal and goodness, and then said she had a proposal to make to me, which she con- Page 386 sidered as the most fortunate turn my affairs could take, and a,, a proof that I should find her the best friend I had in the world. She then premised that she had shown the paper,--that the queen had read it, and said it was very modest, and nothing improper. Her proposal was, that I should have leave of absence for six weeks, to go about and change the air, to Chelsea, and Norbury Park, and Capitan Phillips, and Mr. Francis, and Mr. Cambrick, which would get me quite well; and, during that time, she would engage Mlle. Montmoulin to perform my office. I was much disturbed at this; and though rejoiced and relieved to understand that the queen had read my memorial without displeasure, I was grieved to see it was not regarded as final. I only replied I would communicate her plan to my father. Soon after this we set out for Windsor. Here the first presenting myself before the queen was a task the heaviest, if possible, of any. Yet I was ill enough, heaven knows, to carry the apology of my retreat in my countenance. However, it was a terrible effort. I could hardly enter her room. She spoke at once, and with infinite softness, asking me how I did after my journey ? "Not well, indeed," I simply answered. "But better?" she cried; "are you not a little better?" I only shook my head; I believe the rest of my frame shook without my aid. "What! not a little?--not a little bit better?" she cried, in the most soothing voice. "To-day, ma'am," I said, "I did indeed not expect to be better." I then muttered something indistinctly enough, of the pain I had suffered in what I had done: she opened, however, upon another subject immediately, and no more was said upon this. But she was kind, and sweet, and gentle, and all consideration with respect to my attendance. I wrote the proposal to my poor father, I received by return of post, the most truly tender letter he ever wrote me. He returns thanks for the clemency With which my melancholy memorial has been received, and is truly sensible of the high honour shown me In the new proposition; but he sees my health so impaired, my strength so decayed, my whole frame so nearly demolished, that he apprehends anything short of a permanent resignation, that would ensure lasting rest and recruit, might prove fatal. He quotes a letter from Mr. Francis, Page 387 containing his opinion that I must even be speedy in my retiring or risk the utmost danger - and he finishes a letter filled with gratitude towards the queen and affection to his daughter, with his decisive opinion that I cannot go on, and his prayers and blessings on my retreat. The term "speedy," in Mr. Francis's opinion, deterred me from producing this letter, as it seemed indelicate and unfair to hurry the queen, after offering her the fullest time. I therefore waited till Mrs. Schwellenberg came to Windsor before I made any report of my answer. A scene almost horrible ensued, when I told Cerbera the offer was declined. She was too much enraged for disguise, and uttered the most furious expressions of indignant contempt at our proceedings. I am sure she would gladly have confined us both in the Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves, from a daring so outrageous against imperial wishes. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney) January, 1791-......I thank heaven, there was much softness in the manner of naming you this morning. I see no ill-will mixed with the reluctance, which much consoles me. I do what is possible to avoid all discussion; I see its danger still so glaring. How could I resist, should the queen condescend to desire, to ask, that I would yet try another year?--and another year would but be uselessly demolishing me; for never could I explain to her that a situation which unavoidably casts all my leisure into the presence of Mrs. Schwellenberg must necessarily be subversive of my health, because incompatible with my peace, my ease, my freedom, my spirits, and my affections. The queen is probably kept from any suspicion Of the true nature of the case, by the praises of Mrs. Schwellenberg, who, with all her asperity and persecution, is uncommonly partial to my society; because, in order to relieve myself from sullen gloom, or apparent dependency, I generally make my best exertions to appear gay and chatty; for when I can do this, she forbears both rudeness and imperiousness. She then, I have reason to believe, says to the queen, as I know She does to some others, "The Bernan bin reely agribble"; and the queen, not knowing the incitement that forces my elaborate and painful efforts, may suppose I am lively at heart, when she hears I am so in discourse. And there is no developing this without giving the queen the severest embarrassment as well as chagrin. Page 388 I would not turn Informer for the world. Mrs. Schwellenberg too, with all her faults, is heart and soul devoted to her roil mistress, with the truest faith and loyalty. I hold, therefore, silence on this subject to be a sacred duty. To return to you, my dearest padre, is the only road that has open for my return to strength and comfort, bodily and mental. I m inexpressibly grateful to the queen, but I burn to be delivered from Mrs. Schwellenberg, and I pine to be again in the arms of my padre. A ROYAL GIFT TO THE MASTER OF THE HORSE. What will you give me, fair ladies, for a copy of verse, written between the Queen of Great Britain and your most small little journalist? The morning of the ball the queen sent for me, and said she had a fine pair of old-fashioned gloves, white, with stiff tops and a deep gold fringe, which she meant to send to her new master of the horse, Lord Harcourt, who was to be at the dance, She wished to convey them in a copy of verses, of which she had composed three lines, but could not get on. She told me her ideas, and I had the honour to help her in the metre and now I have the honour to copy them from her own royal hand:-- "TO THE EARL OF HARCOURT. "Go, happy gloves, bedeck Earl Harcourt's hand, And let him know they come from fairy-land, Where ancient customs still retain their reign; To modernize them all attempts were vain. Go, cries Queen Mab, some noble owner seek, Who has a proper taste for the antique." Now, no criticising, fair ladies !-the assistant was neither allowed a pen nor a moment, but called upon to help finish, as she might have been to hand a fan. The earl, you may suppose, was sufficiently enchanted. CONFERENCES WITH THE QUEEN. April.-In the course of this month I had two conferences with my royal mistress upon my resignation, in which I spoke with all possible openness upon its necessity. She condescended to speak very honourably of my dear father to me,--and, in a long discourse upon my altered health with Mrs. de Page 389 Luc, she still further condescended to speak most graciously of his daughter, saying in particular, these strong words, in answer to something kind uttered by that good friend in my favour. "O, as to character, she is what we call in German 'true as gold' and, in point of heart, there is not, all the world over, one better"--and added something further upon sincerity very forcibly. This makes me very happy. She deigned, also, in one of these conferences, to consult with me openly upon my successor, stating her difficulties, and making me enumerate various requisites. It would be dangerous, she said, to build upon meeting in England with one who would be discreet in point of keeping off friends and acquaintances from frequenting the palace; and she graciously implied much commendation of my discretion, in her statement of what she feared from a new person. May.-As no notice whatever was taken, all this time, of my successor, or my retirement, after very great harass of suspense, and sundry attempts to conquer it, I had at length again a conference with my royal mistress. She was evidently displeased at again being called upon, but I took the courage to openly remind her that the birthday was her majesty's own time, and that my father conceived it to be the period of my attendance by her especial appointment. And this was a truth which flashed its own conviction on her recollection. She paused, and then, assentingly, said, "Certainly." I then added, that as, after the birthday, their majesties went to Windsor, and the early prayers began immediately, I must needs confess I felt myself wholly unequal to encountering the fatigue of rising for them in my present weakened state. She was now very gracious again, conscious all this was fair and true. She told me her own embarrassments concerning the successor, spoke confidentially of her reasons for not engaging an Englishwoman, and acknowledged a person was fixed upon, though something yet remained unarranged. She gave me, however, to understand that all would be expedited: and foreign letters were despatched, I know, immediately. MISS BURNEY DETERMINES ON SECLUSION. >From Sunday, May 15 to May 22.-The trial of the poor persecuted Mr. Hastings being now again debating and arranging for continuance, all our house, I found, expected me now to come forth, and my royal mistress and Mrs. Schwellenberg Page 390 thought I should find it irresistible. indeed it nearly was so, from my anxious interest in the approaching defence; but when I considered the rumours likely to be raised after my retreat, by those terrifying watchers of Court transactions who inform the public of their conjectures, I dreaded the probable assertion that I must needs be disgusted or discontented, for health could not be the true motive of my resignation, since I was in public just before it took place. I feared, too, that even those who promoted the enterprise might reproach me with my ability to do what I wished. These considerations determined me to run no voluntary risks - especially as I should so ill know how to parry Mr. Windham, should he now attack me upon a subject concerning which he merits thanks so nobly, that I am satisfied my next interview with him must draw them forth from me. Justice, satisfaction in his exertions, and gratitude for their spirited willingness, all call upon me to give him that poor return. The danger of it, however, now, is too great to be tried, if avoidable : and I had far rather avoid seeing him, than either gratify myself by expressing my sense of his kindness, or unjustly withhold from him what I think of it. These considerations determined me upon relinquishing all public places, and all private visits, for the present. The trial, however, was delayed, and the Handelian Commemoration came on. My beloved Mr. and Mrs. Locke will have told my Susan my difficulties in this business, and I will now tell all three how they ended. The queen, unexpectedly, having given me a ticket, and enjoined me to go the first day, that I might have longer time to recruit against the king's birthday, I became, as you will have heard, much distressed what course to pursue. I took the first moment I was alone with her majesty to express my father's obligation to her for not suffering me to sit up on her own birthday, in this week, and I besought her permission to lay before her my father's motives for hitherto wishing me to keep quiet this spring, as well as my own, adding I was sure her majesty would benignly wish this business to be done as peaceably and unobserved as possible. She looked extremely earnest, and bid me proceed. I then briefly stated that whoever had the high honour of belonging to their majesties were liable to comments upon all their actions, that, if the comment was only founded in truth, we had nothing to fear, but that, as the world was much less Page 391 addicted to veracity, than to mischief, my father and myself had an equal apprehension that, if I should now be seen in public so quickly before the impending change, reports might be spread, as soon as I went home, that it could not be for health I resigned. She listened very attentively and graciously, and instantly, acquiesced. When the trial actually recommenced, the queen grew anxious for my going to it : she condescended to intimate that my accounts of it were the most faithful and satisfactory she received, and to express much Ill-will to giving them up. The motives I had mentioned, however, were not merely personal she could not but see any comments must involve more than myself, and therefore I abided steadily by her first agreement to my absenting myself from all public places, and only gently joined in her regret, which I forcibly enough felt in this instance, Without venturing any offer of relinquishing the prudential plan previously arranged. She gave me tickets for Charles for every day that the hall was opened, and I collected what I could of information from him for her satisfaction. THE HASTINGS TRIAL RESUMED: 'THE ACCUSED MAKES HIS DEFENCE. Queen's House, London, June.-the opening of this month her majesty told me that the next day Mr. Hastings was to make his defence, and warmly added, "I would give the world you could go to it!" This was an expression so unusual in animation, that I instantly told her I would write to my father, who could not possibly, in that case, hesitate. "Surely," she cried, "you may wrap up, so as not to catch cold that once?" I told her majesty that, as my father had never thought going out would be really prejudicial to my health, he had only wished to have his motive laid fairly before her majesty, and then to leave it to her own command. Her majesty accepted this mode of consent, and gave me tickets for Charles and Sarah to accompany me, and gave leave and another ticket for Mr. de Luc to be of the party. Thursday, June 2.-I went once more to Westminster Hall. Charles and Sarah came not to their time, and I left directions and tickets, and set off with only Mr. de Luc, to secure our Page 392 own, and keep places for them. The Hall was more crowded than on any day since the trial commenced, except the first. Peers, commoners, and counsel, peeresses, commoneresses, and the numerous indefinites crowded every part, with a just and fair curiosity to hear one day's defence, after seventy-three of accusation. Unfortunately I sat too high up to hear the opening, and when, afterwards, the departure of some of my obstacles removed me lower, I was just behind some of those unfeeling enemies who have not even the decorum due to themselves, of appearing to listen to what is offered against their own side. I could only make out that this great and persecuted man upon a plan all his own, and at a risk impossible to ascertain) was formally making his own defence, not with retaliating declamation, but by a simple, concise, and most interesting statement of facts, and of the necessities accompanying them in the situation to which the House then impeaching had five times called him. He spoke with most gentlemanly temper of his accusers, his provocation considered, yet with a firmness of disdain of the injustice with which he had been treated in return for his services, that was striking and affecting, though unadorned and manly. His spirit, however, and the injuries which raised it, rested not quietly upon his particular accusers: he arraigned the late minister, Lord North, of ingratitude and double-dealing, and the present minister, Mr. Pitt, of unjustifiably and unworthily forbearing to Sustain him. Here Mr. Fox, artfully enough, interrupted to say the king's ministers were not to be arraigned for what passed in the House of Parliament. Mr. Burke arose also' to enter his protest. But Mr. Hastings then lost his patience and his temper: he would not suffer the interruption; he had never, he said, interrupted their long speeches; and when Mr. Burke again attempted to speak, Mr. Hastings, in an impassioned but affecting manner, extended his arms, and called out loudly, "I throw myself Upon the protection of your lordships:--I am not used to public speaking, and cannot answer them. what I wish to submit to your lordships I have committed to paper; but, if I am punished for what I say, I must insist upon being heard--I call upon you, my lords, to protect me from this violence!" This animated appeal prevailed; the managers were silenced by an almost universal cry of "Hear, hear, hear!" from the Page 393 lords; and by Lord Kenyon, who represented the chancellor, and said, "Mr. Hastings, proceed." The angry orators, though with a very ill grace, were then silenced. They were little aware what a compliment this intemperate eagerness was paying to Mr. Hastings, who for so many long days manifested that fortitude against attack, and that patience against abuse, which they could not muster, Without any parallel in provocation, even for three short hours. I rejoiced with all my heart to find Mr. Windham was not in their box. He did not enter with them in procession, nor appear as a manager or party concerned, further than as a member of the House of Commons. I could not distinguish him in so large a group, and he either saw not, or knew not, me. The conclusion of the defence I heard better, as Mr. Hastings spoke considerably louder from this time; the spirit of indignation animated his manner and gave strength to his voice. You will have seen the chief parts of his discourse In the newspapers and you cannot, I think, but grow more and more his friend as you peruse it. He called pathetically and solemnly for instant judgment; but the Lords, after an adjournment decided to hear his defence by evidence, and order, the next sessions. How grievous such continual delay to a man past sixty, and sighing for such a length of time for redress from a prosecution as yet unparalleled in our annals. When it was over, Colonel Manners came round to speak to -me and talk over the defence. He is warmly for Mr. Hastings. He inquired about Windsor; I should have made him stare a little had I told him I never expected to see him there again. MR. WINDHAM IS CONGRATULATED ON HIS SILENCE. When he came down-stairs into the large waiting-hall, Mr. de Luc went in search of William and chairs. Sally then immediately discerned Mr. Windham with some ladies. He looked at me without at first knowing me. . . . Sarah whispered me Mr. Windham was looking harder and harder; and presently he came up to me, and in a tone of very deep concern, and with a look that fully concurred with 'it, he said, "Do I see Miss Burney?" I could not but feel the extent of the interrogation, and my assent acknowledged my comprehension. "Indeed," he cried, "I was going to make a speech--not Very gallant!" Page 394 , "But it is what I should like better," I cried, " for it is kind if you were going to say I look miserably ill, as that is but a necessary consequence of feeling so,--and miserably ill enough I have felt this long time past." He would not allow quite that, he said; but I flew from the subject, to tell him I had been made very happy by him. HE gave me one of his starts,--but immediately concluded it was by no good, and therefore would not speak in inquiry. "Why, I did not see you in the box," I cried, "and I had been very much afraid I should have seen you there. But now my fears are completely over, and you have made me completely happy!" He protested, with a comic but reproachful smile, he knew not how to be glad, if it was still only in the support of a bad cause, and if still I really supported it. And then he added he had gone amongst the House of Commons instead of joining the managers, because that enabled him to give his place to a friend, who was not a member. "You must be sure," said I, "you would see me here to-day." I had always threatened him with giving fairest play to the defence, and always owned I had been most afraid Of his harangue; therefore to find the charges end without his making it saved me certainly a shake,--either for Mr. Hastings or himself,--for one of them must thenceforth have fallen in my estimation. I believe, however, this was a rather delicate point, as he made me no answer, but a grave smile; but I am sure he instantly understood his relinquishing his intended charge was my subject of exultation. And, to make it plainer, I then added, "I am really very generous to be thus made happy, considering how great has been my curiosity." "But, to have gratified that curiosity," cried he, "would have been no very particular inducement with me; though I have no right to take it for a compliment, as there are two species of curiosity,--yours, therefore, you leave wholly ambiguous." "O, I am content with that," cried I so long as I am gratified, I give you leave to take it which way you please." He murmured something I could not distinctly hear, of concern at my continued opinion upon this subject; but I do not think, by his manner, it much surprised him. "You know," cried I, "why, as well as what, I feared--that fatal candour, of which so long ago you warned me to beware. Page 395 to the very last moment And, indeed, I was kept n alarm for at every figure I saw start up, just now,--Mr. Fox, Mr. Burke, Mr. Grey,--I concluded yours would be the next." "You were prepared, then," cried he, with no little malice, "for a voice issuing from a distant pew."(340) Miss BURNEY MAKES HER REPORT. When we came home I was immediately summoned to her majesty, to whom I gave a full and fair account of all I had heard of the defence; and it drew tears from her expressive eyes as I repeated Mr. Hastings's own words, upon the hardship and injustice of the treatment he had sustained. Afterwards, at night, the king called upon me to repeat my account and I was equally faithful, sparing nothing of what had dropped from the persecuted defendant relative to his majesty's ministers. I thought official accounts might be less detailed there than against the managers, who, as open enemies, excite not so much my "high displeasure" as the friends of government, who so insidiously elected and panegyrised him while they wanted his assistance, and betrayed and deserted him when he was no longer in a capacity to serve them. Such, at least, is the light in which the defence places them. The king listened with much earnestness and a marked compassion. He had already read the account sent him officially, but he was as eager to hear all I could recollect, as if still uninformed of what had passed. The words may be given to the eye, but the impression they make can only be conveyed by the ear; and I came back so eagerly interested, that my memory was not more stored with the very words than my voice with the intonations of all that had passed. With regard to My bearing this sole unofficial exertion since my illness, I can only say the fatigue I felt bore not any parallel with that of every Drawing--room day, because I was seated. PRINCE WILLIAM INSISTS ON THE KING'S HEALTH BEING DRUNK. June 4.-Let me now come to the 4th, the last birthday of the good, gracious, benevolent king I shall ever, in all human probability, pass under his royal roof. Page 396 The thought was affecting to me, in defiance of MY volunteer conduct, and I could scarce speak to the queen when I first went to her, and wished to say something upon a day So interesting. The king was most gracious and kind when he came into the state dressing-room at St. James's, and particularly inquired about my health and strength, and if they would befriend me for the day. I longed again to tell him how hard I would work them, rather than let them, on such a day, drive me from my office; but I found it better suited me to be quiet; It was safer not to trust to any expression of loyalty, with a mind so full, and on a day so critical. At dinner Mrs. Schwellenberg presided, attired magnificently. Miss Goldsworthy, Mrs. Stainforth, Messrs. de Luc and Stanhope dined with us; and, while we were still eating fruit, the Duke of Clarence entered. He was just risen from the king's table, and waiting for his equipage to go home and prepare for the ball. To give you an idea of the energy of his royal highness's language, I ought to set apart a "general objection to writing, or rather intimating, certain forcible words, and beg leave to show you, in genuine colours, a royal sailor. We all rose, of course, upon his entrance, and the two gentlemen placed themselves behind their chairs while the footmen left the room ; but he ordered us all to sit down, and called the men back to hand about some wine. He was in exceeding high spirits and in the utmost good humour. He placed himself at the head of the table, next Mrs. Schwellenberg, and looked remarkably well, gay, and full of sport and mischief, yet clever withal as well as comical. "Well, this is the first day I have ever dined with the king at St. James's on his birthday. Pray, have you all drunk his majesty's health?" "No, your roy'l highness: your roy'l highness might make dem do dat," said Mrs. Schwellenberg. "O, by --- will I! Here, you (to the footman), bring champagne! I'll drink the king's health again, if I die for it Yet, I have done pretty well already: so has the king, I promise you! I believe his majesty was never taken such good care of before. We have kept his spirits up, I promise you: we have enabled him to go through his fatigues; and I should have done more still, but for the ball and Mary--I have promised to dance with Mary!" Princess Mary made her first appearance at Court to-day She looked most interesting and unaffectedly lovely - she is a Page 397, Sweet creature, and perhaps, in point of beauty, the first of this truly beautiful race, of which Princess Mary may be called pendant to the Prince of Wales. Champagne being now brought for the duke, he ordered it all round. When it came to me I whispered to Westerhaults to carry it on: the duke slapped his hand violently on the table, and called out, "O, by ----, you shall drink it!" There was no resisting this. We all stood up, and the duke sonorously gave the royal toast. "And now," cried he, making us all sit down again, "where are my rascals of servants? I sha'n't be in time for the ball; besides, I've got a deuced tailor waiting to fix on my epaulette! Here, you, go and see for my servants! d'ye hear? Scamper off!" Off ran William. "Come, let's have the king's health again. De Luc, drink it. Here, champagne to De Luc!" I wish you could have seen Mr. de Luc's mixed simper half pleased, half alarmed. However, the wine came and he drank it, the duke taking a bumper for himself at the same time." Poor Stanhope!" cried he; "Stanhope shall have a glass too. Here, champagne! what are you all about? Why don't YOU give champagne to poor Stanhope?" Mr. Stanhope, with great pleasure, complied, and the duke again accompanied him. "Come hither, do you hear?" cried the duke to the servants; and on the approach, slow and submissive, of Mrs. Stainforth's man, he hit him a violent slap on the back, calling out, "Hang you! why don't you see for my rascals?" Away flew the man, and then he called out to Westerhaults, "Hark'ee! bring another glass of champagne to Mr. de Luc!" Mr. de Luc knows these royal youths too well to venture at so vain an experiment as disputing with them, so he only shrugged his shoulders and drank the wine. The duke did the same. "And now, poor Stanhope," cried the duke, "give another glass to poor Stanhope, d'ye hear?" "Is not your royal highness afraid," cried Mr. Stanhope, displaying the full circle of his borrowed teeth, "I shall be apt to be rather up in the world, as the folks say, if I tope on at this rate?" "Not at all! you can't get drunk in a better cause, I'd get Page 398 drunk myself' if it was not for the ball. Here, champagne! another glass for the philosopher! I keep sober for Mary." "O, your royal highness cried Mr. de Luc, gaining courage as he drank, "you will make me quite droll Of it if you make me go on,--quite droll!" "So much the better! so much the better! it will do you a monstrous deal of good. Here, another glass of- champagne for the queen's philosopher!" Mr. de Luc obeyed, and the duke then addressed Mrs. Schwellenberg's George. "Here! you! you! why, where is my carriage? run and see, do you hear?" Off hurried George, grinning irrepressibly. "If it was not for that deuced tailor, I would not stir. I shall dine at the Queen's house on Monday, Miss Goldsworthy; I shall come to dine with the princess royal. I find she does not go to Windsor with the queen." The queen meant to spend one day at Windsor, on account of a review which carried the king that way. Some talk then ensued upon the duke's new carriage, which they all agreed to be the most beautiful that day, at court. I had not seen it, which, to me, was some impediment against praising it. THE QUEEN's HEALTH. He then said it was necessary to drink the queens health. The gentlemen here made no demur, though Mr. de Luc arched his eyebrows in expressive fear of consequences. "A bumper," cried the duke, "to the queen's gentleman-usher." They all stood up and drank the queen's health. "Here are three of us," cried the duke, "all belonging to the queen: the queen's philosopher, the queen's gentlemanusher, and the queen's son; but, thank heaven, I'm the nearest!" "Sir," cried Mr. Stanhope, a little affronted, "I am not now the queen's gentleman-usher; I am the queen's equerry, sir." "A glass more of champagne here! What are you all so slow for? Where are all my rascals gone? They've put me in one passion already this morning. Come, a glass of champagne for the queen's gentleman-usher!" laughing heartily. "No, sir," repeated Mr. Stanhope; "I am equerry, sir." "And another glass to the queen's philosopher!" Neither gentleman objected; but Mrs. Schwellenberg, who Page 399 had sat laughing and happy all this time, now grew alarmed, and said, "Your royal highness, I am afraid for the ball!" "Hold your potato-jaw, my dear," cried the duke, patting her - but, recollecting himself, he took her hand and pretty abruptly kissed it, and then, flinging it away hastily, laughed aloud, and called out, "There, that will make amends for anything, so now I may say what I will. So here! a glass of champagne for the queen's philosopher and the queen's gentleman-usher! Hang me if it will not do them a monstrous deal of good!" Here news was brought that the equipage was in order. He started up, calling out, "Now, then, for my deuced tailor." "O, your royal highness," cried Mr. de Luc, in a tone of expostulation, "now you have made us droll, you go!" Off! however, he went. And is it not a curious scene? All my amaze is, how any of their heads bore such libations. THE PROCESSION TO THE BALL-ROOM: ABSENCE OF THE PRINCES. In the evening I had by no means strength to encounter the ball-room. I gave my tickets to Mrs. and Miss Douglas. Mrs. Stainforth was dying to see the Princess Mary in her Court dress. Mr. Stanhope offered to conduct her to a place of prospect. She went with him. I thought this preferable to an unbroken evening with my fair companion, and Mr. de Luc, thinking the same, we both left Mrs. Schwellenberg to unattire, and followed. But we were rather in a scrape by trusting to Mr. Stanhope after all this champagne: he had carried Mrs. Stainforth to the very door of the ball-room, and there fixed her--in a place which the king, queen, and suite must brush past in order to enter the ball-room. I had followed, however, and the crowds of beef-eaters, officers, and guards that lined all the state-rooms through which we exhibited ourselves, prevented my retreating alone. I stood, therefore, next to Mrs. Stainforth, and saw the ceremony. The passage was made so narrow by attendants, that they were all forced to go one by one. First, all the king's great state-officers, amongst whom I recognised Lord Courtown, a treasurer of the household; Lord Salisbury carried a candle!-- 'tis an odd etiquette.--These being passed, came the king--he saw us and laughed; then the queen's master of the horse, Lord Harcourt, who did ditto; then some more. Page 400 The vice-chamberlain carries the queen's candle, that she may have the arm of the lord chamberlain to lean on; accordingly, Lord Aylesbury, receiving that honour, now preceded the queen: she looked amazed at sight of us. The kind princesses one by one acknowledged us. I spoke to sweet Princess Mary, wishing her royal highness joy: she looked in a delight and an alarm nearly equal. She was to dance her first minuet. Then followed the ladies of the bedchamber, and Lady Harcourt was particularly civil. Then the maids of honour, every one of whom knew and spoke to us. I peered vainly for the Duke of Clarence, but none of the princes passed us.(341) What a crowd brought up the rear! I was vexed not to see the Prince of Wales. Well, God bless the king! and many and many such days may he know! I was now so tired as to be eager to go back; but the queen's philosopher, the good and most sober and temperate of men, was really a little giddy with all his bumpers, and his eyes, which were quite lustrous, could not fix any object steadily; while the poor gentleman-usher--equerry, I mean--kept his Mouth so wide open with one continued grin,-I suppose from the sparkling beverage,--that I was every minute afraid its pearly ornaments, which never fit their case, would have fallen at our feet. Mrs. Stainforth gave me a significant look of making the same observation, and, catching me fast by the arm, said, "Come, Miss Burney, let's you and I take care of one another"; and then she safely toddled me back to Mrs. Schwellenberg, who greeted us with saying, "Vell! bin you Much amused? Dat Prince Villiam--oders de Duke de Clarrence--bin raelly ver merry--oders vat you call tipsy!" BOSWELL's LIFE OF JOHNSON. Mr, Turbulent had been reading, like all the rest of the world, Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson," and the preference there expressed of Mrs. Lenox to all other females had filled Page 401 him with astonishment, as he had never even heard her name.(342) These occasional sallies of Dr. Johnson, uttered from local causes and circumstances, but all retailed verbatim by Mr. Boswell, are filling all sort of readers with amaze, except the small part to whom Dr. Johnson was known, and who, by acquaintance with the power of the moment over his unguarded conversation, know how little of his solid opinion was- to be gathered from his accidental assertions. The king, who was now also reading this work, applied to me for explanations without end. Every night at his period he entered the queen's dressing-room, and detained her majesty's proceedings by a length of discourse with me upon this subject. All that flowed from himself was constantly full of the goodness and benevolence of his character - and I was never so happy as in the opportunity thus graciously given me of vindicating, in instances almost innumerable, the serious principles and various excellences of my revered Dr. Johnson from the clouds so frequently involving and darkening them, in narrations so little calculated for any readers who were strangers to his intrinsic worth, and therefore worked upon and struck by what was faulty in his temper and manners. I regretted not having strength to read this work to her majesty myself. It was an honour I should else have certainly received _; for so much wanted clearing! so little was understood! However, the queen frequently condescended to read over passages and anecdotes which perplexed or offended her; and there were none I had not a fair power to soften or to justify. THE CLOSE OF MISS BURNEY'S COURT DUTIES. Her majesty, the day before we left Windsor, gave me to understand my attendance Would be yet one more fortnight Page 402 requisite, though no longer. I heard this with a fearful presentiment I should surely never go through another fortnight in so weak and languishing and painful a state of health. However, I could but accede, though I fear with no very Courtly grace. So melancholy indeed was the state of my mind, from the weakness of my frame, that I was never alone but to form scenes of "foreign woe," where my own disturbance did not occupy me wholly. I began--almost whether I would or not--another tragedy! The other three all unfinished! not one read! and one of them, indeed, only generally sketched as to plan and character. But I could go on With nothing; I could only suggest and invent. The power of composition has to me indeed proved a blessing! When incapable of all else, that, unsolicited, unthought of, has presented itself to my solitary leisure, and beguiled me of myself, though it has not of late regaled me with gayer associates. July.-I come now to write the last week of my royal residence. The queen honoured me with the most uniform graciousness, and though, as the time of separation approached, her cordiality rather diminished, and traces of internal displeasure appeared sometimes, arising from an opinion I ought rather to have struggled on, live or die, than to quit her, yet I am sure she saw how poor was my own chance, except by a change in the mode of life, and at least ceased to wonder, though she could not approve. The king was more Courteous, more communicative, more amiable, at very meeting: and he condescended to hold me in conversation with him by every opportunity, and with an air of such benevolence and goodness, that I never felt such ease and pleasure in his notice before. He talked over all Mr. Boswell's book, and I related to him sundry anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, all highly to his honour, and such as I was eager to make known, He always heard me with the utmost complacency and encouraged me to proceed in my accounts by every mark of attention and interest. He told me once, laughing heartily, that, having seen my name in the index, he was eager to come to what was said of me, but which he found so little, he was surprised and disappointed. I ventured to assure him how much I had myself been rejoiced at this very circumstance, and with what satisfaction had reflected upon having very seldom met Mr. Boswell, as I Page 403 new there was no other security against all manner of risks in his relations. About this time Mr. Turbulent made me a visit at tea-time when the gentlemen were at the Castle and the moment William left the room he eagerly said, "Is this true, Miss Burney, that I hear? Are we going to lose you?" I was much surprised, but Could not deny the charge. He, very good-naturedly, declared himself much pleased at a release which he protested he thought necessary to my life's preservation. I made him tell me the channel through which a business I had guarded SO scrupulously Myself had reached him; but it Is too full of windings for writing. With Mr. de Luc I was already in confidence upon my resignation, and with the knowledge of the queen, as he had received the intelligence from Germany, whence my successor was now arriving. I then also begged the indulgence of writing to Mr. Smelt upon the subject, which was accorded me. My next attack was from Miss Planta. She expressed herself in the deepest concern at my retiring, though she not only acknowledged its necessity, but confessed she had not thought I could have performed my official duty even one year! She broke from me while we talked, leaving me abruptly in a violent passion of tears. MISS BURNEY'S SUCCESSOR. A PENSION FROM THE QUEEN. I had soon the pleasure to receive Mlle. jacobi.(343) She brought with her a young German, as her maid, who proved to be her niece, but so poor she could not live when her aunt left Germany! Mr. Best, a messenger of the king's, brought her to Windsor, and Mrs. Best, his wife, accompanied him. I was extremely pleased with Mlle. Jacobi, who is tall, well made, and nearly handsome, and of a humour so gay, an understanding so lively, and manners so frank and ingenuous, that I felt an immediate regard for her, and we grew mutual good friends. She is the daughter of a dignified clergyman of Hanover, high in theological fame. They all dined with me, - and, indeed, Mlle. Jacobi, wanting a thousand informations in her new situation, which I was most happy to give her, seldom quitted me an instant. Tuesday morning I had a conversation, very long and very affecting to me, with her majesty. I cannot pretend to detail Page 404 it. I will only tell you she began by speaking of Mlle. Jacobi, whom I had the satisfaction to praise, as far as had appeared, very warmly and then she led me to talk at large upon the nature and requisites and circumstances of the situation I was leaving. I said whatever I could suggest that would tend to render my Successor more comfortable, and had the great happiness to represent with success the consolation and very innocent pleasure she might reap from the society of the young relation she had brought over, if she might be permitted to treat her at once as a companion, and not as a servant. This was heard with the most humane complacency, and I had leave given me to forward the plan in various ways. She then conversed upon sundry Subjects, all of them confidential in their nature, for near an hour; and then, after a pause, said, "Do I owe you anything, my dear Miss Burney?" I acquainted her with a debt or two amounting to near seventy pounds. She said she would settle it in the afternoon, and then paused again, after which, with a look full of benignity, she very expressively said, "As I don't know your plan, or what you propose, I cannot tell what Would make you comfortable, but you know the size of my family." I comprehended her, and was immediately interrupting her with assurances of my freedom from all expectation or claim; but she stopped me, saying, "You know what you now have from me:--the half of that I mean to continue." Amazed and almost overpowered by a munificence I had so little expected or thought of, I poured forth the most earnest disclaimings of such a mark of her graciousness, declaring I knew too well her innumerable calls to be easy in receiving it and much more I uttered to this purpose, with the unaffected warmth that animated me at the moment. She heard me almost silently; but, in conclusion, Simply, yet strongly, said, "I shall certainly do that" with a stress on the that that seemed to kindly mean she would rather have done more. The conference was in this stage when the Princess Elizabeth came into the room. The queen then retired to the antechamber. My eyes being full, and my heart not very empty, I could not then forbear saying to her royal highness how much the goodness of the queen had penetrated me. The sweet princess spoke feelings I could not expect, by the immediate glistening of her soft eyes. She condescended to express her concern At my retiring; but most kindly added, "However, Page 405 Miss Burney, go when you will, that you have this to comfort you, your behaviour has been most perfectly honourable." LEAVE-TAKINGS. This, my last day at Windsor, was filled with nothing but packing, leave-taking, bills-paying, and lessoning to Mlle. Jacobi, who adhered to my side through everything, and always with an interest that made its own way for her. All the people I had to Settle With poured forth for my better health good wishes without end; but amongst the most unwilling for my retreat stood poor Mrs. Astley.(344) Indeed she quite saddened me by her sadness, and by the recollections of that sweet and angelic being her mistress, who had so solaced my early days at that place. Mr. Bryant, too, came this same morning; he had an audience of the queen: he knew nothing previously of my design. He seemed thunderstruck. "Bless me!" he cried, in his short and simple but expressive manner, "so I shall never see you again, never have the honour to dine in that apartment with you more!" etc. I would have kept him to dinner this last day, but he was not well, and would not be persuaded. He would not, however, bid me adieu, but promised to endeavour to see me some time at Chelsea. I had then a little note from Miss Gomme, desiring to see me in the garden. She had just gathered the news. I do not believe any one Was more disposed to be sorry, if the Sight and sense of my illness had not checked her concern. She highly approved the step I was taking, and was most cordial and kind. Miss Planta came to tell me she must decline dining with me, as she felt she should cry all dinner-time, in reflecting upon its being our last meal together at Windsor, and this might affront Mlle. Jacobi. The queen deigned to come once more to my apartment this afternoon. She brought me the debt. It was a most mixed feeling with which I now saw her. In the evening came Madame de la Fite, I need not tell you, I imagine, that her expressions were of "la plus vife douleur,"; yet she owned she could not wonder my father should try what another life would do for me. My dear Mrs. de Luc came next; She, alone, knew of this while impending. She rejoiced the time of deliverance was arrived, for she had Page 406 often feared I should outstay my strength, and sink while the matter was arranging. She rejoiced, however, with tears in her kind eyes; and, indeed, I took leave of her With true regret. It was nine o'clock before I could manage to go down the garden to the lower Lodge, to pay my duty to the younger princesses, whom I Could not else see at all, as they never go to town for the Court-days. I went first up-stairs to Gomme, and had the mortification to learn that the sweet Princess Amelia was already gone to bed. This extremely grieved me. When or how I may see her lovely little highness more, Heaven only knows! Miss Gomme kindly accompanied me to Miss Goldsworthy's apartment, and promised me a few more words before I set out the next morning. I found Mrs. Cheveley, at whose door, and at Miss Neven, her sister's, I had tapped and left my name, with Miss Goldsworthy and Dr. Fisher: that pleasing and worthy man has just taken a doctor's degree. I waited with Miss Goldsworthy till the princesses Mary and Sophia came from the upper Lodge, which is when the king and queen go to supper. Their royal highnesses, were gracious even to kindness; they shook my hand again and again, and wished me better health, and all happiness, with the sweetest earnestness. Princess Mary repeatedly desired to see me whenever I came to the Queen's house, and condescended to make me as repeatedly promise that I would not fail. I was deeply touched by their goodness, and by leaving them. Wednesday.-In the morning Mrs. Evans, the housekeeper, came to take leave of me; and the housemaid of my apartment, who, poor girl, cried bitterly that I was going to give place to a foreigner, for Mrs. Schwellenberg's severity with servants has made all Germans feared in the house. O, but let me first mention that, when I came from the lower Lodge, late as it was, I determined to see my old friends the equerries, and not quit the place without bidding them adieu. I had never seen them since I had dared mention my designed retreat. I told William, therefore, to watch their return from the castle, and to give my compliments to either Colonel Gwynn or Colonel Goldsworthy, and an invitation to my apartment. Colonel Goldsworthy came instantly. I told him I could not think of leaving Windsor without offering first my good Page 407 wishes to all the household. He said that, when my intended departure had been published, he and all the gentlemen then with him had declared it ought to have taken place six months ago. He was extremely courteous, and I begged him to bring to me, the rest of his companions that were known to me. He immediately fetched Colonel Gwynn, General Grenville, Colonel Ramsden, and Colonel Manners. This was the then party. I told him I sent to beg their blessing upon my departure. They were all much pleased, apparently, that I had not made my exit without seeing them: they all agreed on the Urgency of the measure, and we exchanged good wishes most cordially. My Wednesday morning's attendance upon the queen was a melancholy office. Miss Goldsworthy as well as Miss Gomme came early to take another farewell. I had not time to make any visits in the town, but left commissions with Mrs. de Luc and Madame de la Fite. Even Lady Charlotte Finch I could not Call upon, though she had made me many kind visits since my illness. I wrote to her, however, by Miss Gomme, to thank her, and bid her adieu. FAREWELL TO KEW. Thursday, July 7.-This, my last day of office, was big and busy,- -joyful, yet affecting to me in a high degree. In the morning, before I left Kew, I had my last interview with Mrs. Schwellenberg. She was very kind in it, desiring to see me whenever I could in town, during her residence at the Queen's house, and to hear from me by letter meanwhile. She then much Surprised me by an offer of succeeding to her own place,--when it was vacated either by her retiring or her death. This was, indeed, a mark of favour and confidence I had not expected. I declined, however, to enter upon the subject, as the manner in which she opened it made it very solemn, and, to her, very affecting. She would take no leave of me, but wished me better hastily, and saying we should soon meet, she hurried suddenly out of the room. Poor woman! If her temper were not so irascible, I really believe her heart would be by no means wanting in kindness. I then took leave of Mrs. Sandys, giving her a token of remembrance in return for her constant good behaviour, and Page 408 she showed marks of regard, and of even grief, I was sorry to receive, as I could so little return. But the tragedy of tragedies was parting with Goter;(345) that poor girl did nothing but cry incessantly from the time she knew of our separation. I was very sorry to have no place to recommend her to, though I believe she may rather benefit by a vacation that carries her to her excellent father and Mother, who teach her nothing but good. I did what I could to soften the blow, by every exertion in my power in all ways; for it was impossible to be unmoved at her violence of sorrow. I then took leave of Kew Palace--the same party again accompanying me, for the last time, in a royal vehicle going by the name of Miss Burney's coach. THE FINAL PARTING. I come now near the close of my Court career. At St. James's all was graciousness; and my royal mistress gave me to understand she would have me stay to assist at her toilet after the Drawing-room; and much delighted me by desiring my attendance on the Thursday fortnight, when she came again to town. This lightened the parting in the pleasantest manner possible. When the queen commanded me to follow her to her closet I was, indeed, in much emotion; but I told her that, as what had passed from Mrs. Schwellenberg in the morning had given me to understand her majesty was fixed in her munificent intention, notwithstanding- what I had most unaffectedly urged against it-- "Certainly," she interrupted, "I shall certainly do it." "Yet so little," I continued, "had I thought it right to dwell upon such an expectation, that, in the belief your majesty would yet take it into further consideration, I had not even written It to my father." "Your father," she again interrupted me, "has nothing to do with it; it is solely from me to you." "Let me then humbly entreat," I cried, "still in some measure to be considered as a servant of your majesty, either as reader, or to assist occasionally if Mlle. Jacobi should be ill." She looked most graciously pleased, and Immediately closed in with the proposal, saying, "When your health is restored,-- perhaps sometimes." Page 409 I then fervently poured forth my thanks for all her goodness, and my prayers for her felicity. She had her handkerchief in her hand or at her eyes the whole time. I was so much moved by her condescending kindness, that as soon as I got out of the closet I nearly sobbed. I went to help Mlle. Jacobi to put up the jewels, that my emotion might the less be observed. The king then came into the room. He immediately advanced to the window, where I stood, to speak to me. I was not then able to comport myself steadily. I was forced to turn my head away from him. He stood still and silent for some minutes, waiting to see if I should turn about; but I could not recover myself sufficiently to face him, strange as it was to do otherwise; and Perceiving me quite overcome he walked away, and I saw him no more. His kindness, his goodness, his benignity, never shall I forget--never think of but with fresh gratitude and reverential affection. They were now all going--I took, for the last time, the cloak of the queen, and, putting It over her shoulders, slightly ventured to press them, earnestly, though in a low voice, saying, "God Almighty bless your majesty!" She turned round, and, putting her hand upon my ungloved arm, pressed it with the greatest kindness, and said, "May you be happy!" She left me overwhelmed with tender gratitude. The three eldest princesses were in the next room: they ran in to me the moment the queen went onward. Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth each took a hand, and the princess royal put hers over them. I could speak to none of them; but they repeated, "I wish you happy!--I wish you health!" again and again, with the Sweetest eagerness. They then set off for Kew. Here, therefore, end my Court annals; after having lived in the service of her majesty five years within ten days--from July 17, 1786, to July 7, 1791. (333) By her "Visions" Fanny apparently means her desire of resigning her place at Court, and her hope of her father's concurrence.-ED. (334) i.e., Attempts to induce him to procure for sundry strangers some acquaintance with his daughter.-ED. (335) The Comtesse de Bouflers-Rouvrel and, probably, her daughter-in-law, the Comtesse Amélie de Bouflers. Madame de Bouflers-Rouvrel was distinguished in Parisian society as a bel-esbrit, and corresponded for many years with Rousseau. Left a widow in 1764, she became the mistress of the Prince de Conti. Her first visit to England was in 1763, when she was taken by Topham Beauclerk to see Dr. Johnson. She revisited this country at the time of the emigration, but returning to France, was imprisoned by the Revolutionists. The fall of Robespierre (July, 1794) restored her to liberty. Am6lie de Bouflers, less fortunate than her mother-in-law, perished by the guillotine, June 27, 1794.-ED. (336) But is it possible, sir, that your daughter has no holidays? (337) Burke's speech, delivered February 9, in a debate on the army estimates, in which he took occasion to denounce, with great vehemence, the principles and conduct of the French Revolution, which he contrasted, much to its disadvantage, with the English Revolution of 1688. "The French," he said, "had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto appeared in the world." The sentiments uttered by Burke on this occasion delighted the ministerialists and friends of the Court as much as they dismayed his own party. As the debate proceeded he found himself in the strange position of a chief of opposition enduring the compliments of the prime minister and the attacks of Fox and Sheridan, who took a broader and juster view of the great events in France, though condemning equally with Burke the Excesses of the Revolutionists. Fox declared His grief at hearing, "from the lips of a man whom he loved and revered," Sentiments "so hostile to the general principles of liberty." This speech of Burke's may be said to mark the commencement of that disagreement between himself and Fox, which culminated in the total breach of their friendship.-ED. (338) Dr. Burney was a member of this famous club, having been elected in 1784. Mr. Windham had been a member since 1778.-ED. (339) "Reflections on the Revolution in France," published November 1, 1790. it was received by the public with avidity, and went through eleven editions within a year-ED. (340) An allusion to the imperious interruption of the marriage of Cecilia, and young Delvile. See "Cecilia," book vii., ch. 7.-ED. (341) Some weeks later Fanny has the following allusion to the ball: "The Princess Mary chatted with me over her own adventures on the queen's birthday, when she first appeared at Court. The history of her dancing at the ball, and the situation of her partner and brother, the Duke of Clarence, she spoke of with a sweet ingenuousness and artless openness which makes her very amiable character. And not a little did I divert her when I related the duke's visit to our party! 'O,' cried she, 'he told me of it himself the next morning, and said, "You may think how far I was gone, for I kissed the Schwellenberg's hand!"'"-ED. (342) "On the evening of Saturday May 15 [1784), he [Dr. Johnson] was in fine spirits at our Essex Head Club. He told us, 'I dined yesterday at Patrick's with Mrs. Carter, Miss Hannah More, and Fanny Burney. Three such women are not to be found: I know not where I could find a fourth, except Mrs. Lennox, who is superior to them all.' " (Boswell.) This "occasional sally" cannot, of course, be taken as expressing Johnson's deliberate opinion of the relative merits of Fanny Burney and Mrs. Lenox. He was an old friend of Charlotte Lenox, and had written in 1752 the dedication for her "Female Quixote," a novel of singular charm and humour, though scarcely to be placed on a par with "Evelina" or "Cecilia."-ED. (343) Fanny's successor in office.-ED. 344) The old servant of Mrs. Delany.-ED. (345) Fanny's maid.-ED. Page 410 ' SECTION 18. (1791-2.) REGAINED LIBERTY. [Fanny's rambling journey to the west with Mrs. Ord was a pleasant restorative, to mind and body, and bore good fruit hereafter in the pages, of " The Wanderer." At Bath, in the course of this journey, she formed an acquaintance equally interesting and unlooked-for. It was certainly singular, to use her own words, "that the first visit I should make after leaving the queen should be to meet the head of the opposition public, the Duchess of Devonshire!" The famous Whig duchess was then in her thirty-fifth year. Fanny's description of her personal charms tallies exactly with the impression which we derive from her portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough: that their celebrity was due rather to expressiveness and animation than to a countenance regularly beautiful. But the charming duchess, like most other people, had a skeleton in her closet. Notwithstanding her high spirits, and "native. cheerfulness," "she appeared to me not happy," writes our penetrating Diarist. What was the skeleton? Not gambling debts, although the duchess followed the fashion of the day, and Sheridan declared that he had handed her into her carriage when she was literally sobbing at her losses. Fanny gives us a hint, slight but unmistakeable. At their first meeting the duchess was accompanied by another lady--a beautiful, alluring woman, with keen dark eyes, who smiled, some one said, "like Circe." Lady Spencer introduced her daughter to Miss Burney with warm pleasure, and then, "slightly and as if unavoidably," named the beautiful enchantress--Lady Elizabeth Foster. It is only necessary to add that in 1809, some three years after the death of his first wife, the Duchess Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire married again, and his second wife was Lady Elizabeth Foster.-ED.] Page 411 RELEASED FROM DUTY. Chelsea College, July.-My dear father was waiting for me in my apartment at St. James's when their majesties and their fair royal daughters were gone. He brought me home, and welcomed me most sweetly. My heart was a little sad, in spite of its contentment. My joy in quitting my place extended not to quitting the king and queen; and the final marks of their benign favour had deeply impressed me. My mother received me according to my wishes, and Sarah Most cordially. My dear James and Charles speedily came to see me; and one precious half-day I was indulged with my kind Mr. Locke and his Fredy. If i had been stouter and stronger in health, I should then have been almost flightily happy; but the Weakness of the frame still kept the rest in order. My ever-kind Miss Cambridge was also amongst the foremost to hasten with congratulations on my return to my old ways and to make me promise to visit Twickenham after my projected tour with Mrs. Ord. I could myself undertake no visiting at this time; rest and quiet being quite essential to my recovery. But my father did the honours for me amongst those who had been most interested in my resignation. He called instantly upon Sir Joshua Reynolds and Miss Palmer, and Mr. Burke; and he wrote to Mr. Walpole, Mr. Seward, Mrs. Crewe, Mr. Windham, and my Worcester uncle. Mr. Walpole wrote the most charming of answers, In the gallantry of the old Court, and with all its wit, concluding with a warm invitation to Strawberry Hill. Sir Joshua and Miss Palmer Sent me every species of kind exultation. Mr. Burke was not in town. Mr. Seward wrote very heartily and cordially, and came also when my Susanna was here. Mrs. Crewe immediately pressed me to come and recruit at Crewe Hall in Cheshire, where she promised me repose, and good air, and good society. A WESTERN JOURNEY: FARNHAM CASTLE. Sidmouth, Devonshire, Monday, Aug. 1.-I have now been a week out upon my travels, but have not had the means or the time, till this moment, to attempt their brief recital. Page 412 Mrs. Ord called for me about ten in the morning. I left my dearest father with the less regret, as his own journey to Mrs. crewe was very soon to take place. It was a terribly rainy morning, but I was eager not to postpone the excursion. As we travelled on towards Staines, I could scarcely divest myself of the idea that I was but making again my usual journey to Windsor; and I could with difficulty forbear calling Mrs. Ord Miss Planta during the whole of that well-known road. I did not, indeed, take her maid, who was our third in the coach, for Mr. de Luc, or Mr. Turbulent; but the place she occupied made me think much more of those I so long had had for my vis-`a-vis than of herself. We went on no farther than to Bagshot: thirty miles was the extremity of our powers; but I bore them very tolerably, though variably. We put up at the best inn, very early, and then inquired what we could see In the town and neighbourhood. "Nothing!" was the concise answer of a staring maid. We determined, therefore, to prowl to the churchyard, and read the tombstone inscriptions: but when we asked the way, the same woman, staring still more wonderingly, exclaimed, "Church! There's no church nigh here!--There's the Prince Of Wales'S, just past the turning. You may go and see that, if you will." So on we walked towards this hunting Villa: but after toiling up a long unweeded avenue, we had no sooner opened the gate to the parks than a few score of dogs, which were lying in ambush, Set Up so prodigious a variety of magnificent barkings, springing forward at the same time, that, content with having caught a brief view of the seat, we left them to lord it over the domain they regarded as their own, and, with all due Submission, pretty hastily shut the gate, without troubling them to give us another salute. We returned to the inn, and read B---'s "Lives of the Family of the Boyles." Aug. 2.-We proceeded to Farnham to breakfast, and thence walked to the castle. The Bishop of Winchester, Mrs. North. and the whole family are gone abroad. The castle is a good old building, with as much of modern elegance and fashion intermixed in its alterations and fitting up as Mrs. North could possibly contrive to weave into its ancient grandeur. . . . I wished I could have climbed to the top of an old tower, much out of repair, but so high, that I fancied I could thence have espied the hills of Norrbury. However, I was ready to fall already, from only ascending the slope to reach the castle. Page 413 A PARTY OF FRENCH FUGITIVES. We arrived early at Winchester; but the town was so full, as the judges were expected next morning, that we could only get one bed-chamber, in which Mrs. Ord, her maid, and myself reposed. just after we had been obliged to content ourselves with this scanty accommodation, we saw a very handsome coach and four horses, followed by a chaise and outriders, stop at the gate, and heard the mistress of the house declare she- could not receive the company; and the postilions, at the same time, protested the horses could go no farther. They inquired for fresh horses; there were none to be had in the whole city; and the party were all forced to remain in their carriages, without horses, at the inn-gate, for the chance of what might pass on the road. We asked who they were, and our pity was doubled in finding them foreigners. We strolled about the upper part of the city, leaving the cathedral for the next morning. We saw a large, uniform, handsome palace, which is called by the inhabitants "The king's house," and which was begun by Charles II. We did not, therefore, expect the elegant architecture of his father's days. One part, they particularly told us, was designed for Nell Gwynn. It was never finished, and neglect has taken place of time in rendering it a most ruined structure, though, as it bears no marks of antiquity, it has rather the appearance of owing its destruction to a fire than to the natural decay of age. It is so spacious, however, and stands so magnificently to overlook the city, that I wish it to be completed for an hospital or infirmary. I have written Mrs. Schwellenberg an account of its appearance and state, which I am sure will be read by her majesty. When we returned to the Inn, still the poor travellers were in the same situation: they looked so desolate, and could so indifferently make themselves understood, that Mrs. Ord good- naturedly invited them to drink tea with us. They most thankfully accepted the offer, and two ladies and two gentlemen ascended the stairs with us to our dining-room. The chaise had the female servants. The elder lady was so truly French--so vive and so triste in turn--that she seemed formed from the written character of a Frenchwoman, such, at least, as we English write them. She was very forlorn in her air, and very sorrowful in her counte- Page 414 nance; yet all action and gesture, and of an animation when speaking nearly fiery in its vivacity: neither pretty nor young, but neither ugly nor old; and her smile, which was rare, had a finesse very engaging; while her whole demeanour announced a person Of consequence, and all her discourse told that she was well-informed, well-educated, and well-bred. The other lady, whom they called mademoiselle, as the first madame, was young, dark but clear and bright in her eyes and complexion, though without good features, or a manner of equal interest with the lady she accompanied. She proved, however, sensible, and seemed happy in the general novelty around her. She spoke English pretty well, and was admired without mercy by the rest of the party, as a perfect mistress of the language. The madame spoke it very ill indeed, but pleasantly. Of the two gentlemen, one they called only monsieur, and the other the madame addressed as her brother. The monsieur was handsome, rather tonnish, and of the high haughty ton, and seemed the devoted attendant or protector of the madame, who sometimes spoke to him almost with asperity, from eagerness, and a tinge of wretchedness and impatience, which coloured all she said; and, at other times, softened off her vehemence with a smile the most expressive, and which made its way to the mind immediately, by coming with sense and meaning, and not merely from good humour and good spirits as the more frequent smiles of happier persons. The brother seemed lively and obliging, and entirely at the devotion of his sister, who gave him her commands with an authority that would not have brooked dispute. They told us they were just come from Southampton, which they had visited in their way from viewing the fleet at the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, and they meant to go on now to Bath. We soon found they were aristocrats, which did better for them with Mrs. Ord and me than it would have done with you republicans of Norbury and Mickleham; yet I wish you had all met the madame, and heard her Indignant unhappiness. They had been in England but two months. They all evidently belonged to madame, who appeared to me a fugitive just before the flight of the French king,(346) or in consequence of his having been taken. Page 415 She entered upon her wretched situation very soon, lamenting that he was, in fact, no king, and bewailing his want of courage for his trials. the queen she never mentioned. She spoke once or twice of son mari, but did not say who or what he was, nor where. "They say," she cried, "In France they have now liberty! Who has liberty, le peuple, or the mob? Not les honn`etes gens; for those whose principles are known to be aristocratic must fly, or endure every danger and indignity. Ah! est-ce l`a la libert`e?" The monsieur said he had always been the friend of liberty, such as it was in England; but in France it was general tyranny. "In England," he cried, "he was a true democrat, though bien aristocrate in France." "At least," said the poor madame, "formerly, in all the sorrows of life, we had nos terres to which we could retire, and there forget them, and dance, and sing, and laugh, and fling them all aside, till forced back to Paris. But now our villas are no protection: we may be safe, but the first offence conceived by le peuple is certain destruction; and, without a moment's warning, we may be forced to fly our own roofs, and see them and all we are worth burnt before our eyes in horrible triumph." This was all said in French. But the anguish of her Countenance filled me with compassion, though it was scarcely possible to restrain a smile when, the moment after, she" said she Might be very wrong, but she hoped I would forgive her if she owned she preferred Paris incomparably to London and pitied me very unreservedly for never having seen that first of cities. Her sole hope, she said, for the overthrow of that anarchy in which the Unguarded laxity of the king had plunged the first Country in the world,--vous me pardonnec, Mademoiselle,--was now from the German princes, who, she flattered herself, Would rise In their own defence. She told me, the next moment, of les spectacles I should find at Southampton, and asked me what she might expect at Bath of public amusement and buildings. I was travelling I said, for my health, and Should visit no theatres, ball-rooms, etc., and could recommend none. She did not seem to comprehend me; yet, in the midst of Page 416 naming these places, she sighed as deeply from the bottom of her heart as if she had been forswearing the world for ever in despair. But it was necessary, , she said, when unhappy, to go abroad the more, pour se distraire. In parting, they desired much to renew acquaintance with us when we returned to London. Mrs. Ord gave her direction to the monsieur, who in return, wrote theirs--"The French ladies, NO. 30, Gerrard-street, Soho." They stayed till our early hour Of retiring made Mrs. Ord suffer them to go. I was uneasy to know what would become of them. I inquired of a waiter: he unfeelingly laughed, and said, "O! they do well enough; they've got a room." I asked if he could yet let them have beds to stay, or horses to proceed? "No," answered he, sneeringly: "but it don't matter for, now they've got a room, they are as merry and capering as if they were going to dance." just after this, Mrs. Stephenson, Mrs. Ord's maid, came running in. "La! ma'am," she cried, "I've been so frightened, you can't think: the French folks sent for me on purpose, to ask t'other lady's name, they said, and they had asked William before, so they knew it; but they said I must write it down, and where she lived; so I was forced to write, 'Miss Burney, Chelsea,' and they fell a smiling so at one another." 'Twas impossible to help laughing; but we desired her, in return, to send for one of their maids and ask their names also. She came back, and said she could not understand the maids, and so they had called one of the gentlemen, and he had written down "Madame la Comtesse de Menage, et Mlle. de Beaufort." We found, afterwards, they had sat up till two in the morning, and then procured horses and journeyed towards Oxford. WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. Aug. 3.-We walked to the cathedral, and saw it completely. Part of it remains from the original Saxon building, though neglected, except by travellers, as the rest of the church is ample for all uses, and alone kept in repair. The bones of eleven Saxon kings are lodged in seven curious old chests, in which they were deposited after being dug up and disturbed in the civil wars and ensuing confusions. The small number of chests is owing to the small proportion remaining of some of the skeletons, which occasioned their being united with others. Page 417 The Saxon characters are in many inscriptions preserved, though in none entire. They were washing a plaster from the walls, to discern some curious old painting, very miserable, but very entertaining, of old legends, which some antiquaries are now endeavouring to discover. William of Wykham, by whom the cathedral was built in its present form, lies buried, with his effigy and whole monument in very fine alabaster, and probably very like, as it was done, they aver, before he died. Its companion, equally superb, is Cardinal Beaufort, uncle of Harry VI. William Rufus, slain in the neighbouring forest, is buried in the old choir: his monument is of plain stone, without any inscription or ornament, and only shaped like a coffin. Hardyknute had a much more splendid monument preserved for him; but Harry I. had other business to attend, I presume, than to decorate the tomb of one brother while despoiling of his kingdom another. An extremely curious old chapel and monument remain of Archbishop Langton, of valuable gothic workmanship. The altar, which is highly adorned with gold, was protected in Cromwell's time by the address and skill of the Winton inhabitants, who ran up a slight wall before it, and deceived the reformists, soi-disants. I could hardly quit this poor dear old building, so much I was interested with its Saxon chiefs, its little queer niches, quaint images, damp cells, mouldering walls, and mildewed pillars. One chest contains the bones entire of Egbert, our first king. Edred, also. I distinguished. The screen was given to this church by King Charles, and is the work of Inigo Jones. It is very simple in point of ornament, very complete in taste and elegance; nevertheless, a screen of Grecian architecture in a cathedral of gothic workmanship was ill, I think, imagined. STONEHENGE, WILTON, AND MILTON ABBEY. Aug. 5.-We went to Stonehenge. Here I was prodigiously disappointed, at first, by the huge masses of stone so unaccountably piled at the summit of Salisbury Plain. However, we alighted, and the longer I surveyed and considered them, the more augmented my wonder and diminished my disappointment. We then went on to Wilton, where I renewed my delight over the exquisite Vandykes, and with the statues, busts, and pictures, which again I sighingly quitted, with a longing wish Page 418 I might ever pass under that roof time enough to see them more deliberately. We stopped in the Hans Holbein Porch, and upon the Inigo Jones bridge, as long as we Could stand, after standing and staring and straining our eyes till our guide was quite fatigued. 'Tis a noble collection; and how might it be enjoyed if, as an arch rustic Old labouring man told u, fine folks lived as they ought to do! Sunday, Aug. 7.-After an early dinner we set off for Milton Abbey, the seat of Lord Milton, partly constructed from the old abbey and partly new. There is a magnificent gothic hall in excellent preservation, of evident Saxon workmanship, and extremely handsome, though not of the airy beauty of the chapel. The situation of this abbey is truly delicious: it is in a vale of extreme fertility and richness, surrounded by hills of the most exquisite form, and mostly covered with hanging woods, but so varied in their growth and groups, that the eye is perpetually fresh caught with objects of admiration. 'Tis truly a lovely place. LYME AND SIDMOUTH. Aug. 8.-We proceeded to Bridport, a remarkably clean town, with the air so clear and pure, it seemed a new climate. Hence we set out, after dinner, for Lyme, and the road through which we travelled is the most beautiful to which my wandering destinies have yet sent me. It is diversified with all that can compose luxuriant scenery, and with just as much of the approach to sublime as is in the province of unterrific beauty. The hills are the highest, I fancy, in the south of this county--the boldest and noblest; the vales of the finest verdure, wooded and watered as if only to give ideas of finished landscapes; while the whole, from time to time, rises into still superior grandeur, by openings between the heights that terminate the View With the Splendour of the British channel. There was no going on in the carriage through such enchanting scenes; we got out upon the hills, and walked till we could walk no longer. The descent down to Lyme is uncommonly steep; and indeed is very striking, from the magnificence of the ocean that washes its borders. Chidiock and Charmouth, two villages between Bridport and Lyme, are the very prettiest I have ever seen. During the whole of this post I was fairly taken away, not only from the world but from myself, and completely wrapped up and engrossed by the Page 419 pleasures, wonders, and charms of animated nature, thus seen in fair perfection. Lyme. however, brought me to myself; for the part by the sea, where we fixed our abode, was so dirty and fishy that I rejoiced when we left it. Aug. 9.- We travelled to Sidmouth. And here we have taken up our abode for a week. It was all devoted to rest and sea-air. Sidmouth is built in a vale by the sea-coast, and the terrace for company is nearer to the ocean than any I have elsewhere seen, and therefore both more pleasant and more commodious. The little bay is of a most peaceful kind, and the sea was as calm and gentle as the Thames. I longed to bathe, but I am in no state now to take liberties with myself, and, having no advice at hand, I ran no risk. SIDMOUTH LOYALTY. Nothing has given me so much pleasure since I came to this place as our landlady's account of her own and her town's loyalty. She is a baker, a poor widow woman, she told us, who lost her husband by his fright in thinking he saw a ghost, just after her mother was drowned. She carries on the business, with the help of her daughter, a girl about fifteen. I inquired of her if she had seen the royal family when they visited Devonshire? "Yes, sure, ma'am!" she cried; there was ne'er a soul left in all this place for going Out to See 'em. My daughter and I rode a double horse, and we went to Sir George Young's, and got into the park, for we knew the housekeeper, and she gave my daughter a bit to taste of the king's dinner when they had all done, and she said she might talk on it when she was a old woman." I asked another good woman, who came in for some flour, if she had been of the party? "No," she said, "she was ill, but she had had holiday enough upon the king's recovery, for there was such a holiday then as the like was not in all England." "Yes, sure, ma'am," cried the poor baker-woman, "we all did our best then for there was ne'er a town in all England like Sidmouth for rejoicing. Why, I baked a hundred and ten penny loaves for the poor, and so did every baker in town, and there's three, and the gentry subscribed for it. And the gentry roasted a bullock and cut it all up, and we all eat it, in the midst of the rejoicing. And then we had such a fine page 420 sermon, it made us all cry; there was a more tears shed than ever was known, all for over-joy. And they had the king drawed, and dressed up all in gold and laurels, and they put un in a coach and eight horses, and carried un about; and all the grand gentlemen in the town, and all abouts, come in their own carriages to join. And they had the finest band of music in all England singing 'God save the king,' and every Soul joined in the chorus, and all not so much because he was a king, but because they said a was such a worthy gentleman, and that the like of him was never known in this nation before: so we all subscribed for the illuminations for that reason, some a shilling, some a guinea, and some a penny,--for no one begrudged it, as a was such a worthy person." This good Mrs. Dare has purchased images of all the royal family, in her great zeal, and I had them in my apartment--King, Queen, Prince of Wales, Dukes of York, Clarence, Kent, Sussex, Cumberland, and Cambridge; Princess Royal, and Princesses Augusta, Eliza, Mary, Sophia, and Amelia, God bless them all! POWDERHAM CASTLE AND COLLUMPTON CHURCH. Aug. 16.-We quitted Sidmouth, and proceeded through the finest country possible to Exmouth, to see that celebrated spot of beauty. The next morning we crossed the Ex and visited Powderham Castle. Its appearance, noble and antique without, loses all that character from French finery and minute elegance and gay trappings within. The present owner, Lord Courtney, has fitted it up in the true Gallic taste, and every room has the air of being ornamented for a gala. The housekeeper did not let us see half the castle; she only took us to those rooms which the present lord has modernized and fitted up in the sumptuous French taste ; the old part of the castle she doubtless thought would disgrace him; forgetting or rather never knowing--that the old part alone was worth a traveller's curiosity, since the rest might be anticipated by a visit to any celebrated cabinet-maker. Thence we proceeded to Star Cross to dine; and saw on the opposite coast the house Of Sir Francis Drake, which was built by his famous ancestor. Here we saw a sight that reminded me of the drawings of Webber from the South Sea Isles; women scarce clothed at all, with feet and legs entirely naked, straw bonnets of uncouth Shapes tied on their heads, a Page 421 sort of man's jacket on their bodies, and their short coats pinned up in the form of concise trousers, very succinct! and a basket on each arm, strolling along with wide mannish strides to the borders of the river, gathering cockles. They looked, indeed, miserable and savage. Hence we went, through very beautiful roads, to Exeter. That great old city is too narrow, too populous, too dirty, and too ill-paved, to meet with my applause. Next morning we breakfasted at Collumpton, and visited its church. Here we saw the remains of a once extremely rich gothic structure, though never large. There is all the appearance of its having been the church of an abbey before the Reformation. It is situated in a deep but most fertile vale; its ornaments still retain so much of gilding, painting, and antique splendour, as could never have belonged to a mere country church. The wood carving, too, though in ruins, is most laboriously well done; the roof worked in blue and gold, lighter, but in the style of the royal chapel at St. James's.We were quite surprised to find such a structure in a town so little known or named. One aisle was added by a clothier of the town in the reign of Edward VI.; probably upon its first being used as a protestant and public place of worship. This is still perfect, but very clumsy and inelegant compared with the ancient part. The man, to show he gloried in the honest profession whence he derived wealth for this good purpose, has his arms at one corner, with his name, J. Lane, in gothic characters, and on the opposite corner his image, terribly worked in the wall, with a pair of shears in one hand, so large as to cut across the figure downwards almost obscuring all but his feet. Till the cicerone explained this, I took the idea for a design of Death, placed where most conspicuously he might show himself, ready to cut in two the poor objects that entered the church. GLASTONBURY ABBEY. Aug. 19.-To vary the scenery we breakfasted at Bridgewater, in as much dirt and noise, from the judges filling the town, as at Taunton we had enjoyed neatness and quiet. We walked beside the river, which is navigable from the Bristol channel ; and a stream more muddy, and a quay more dirty and tarry and pitchy, I would not covet to visit again. It is here called the Perrot. Thence, however, we proceeded to what made amends Page 422 all--the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. These are the most elegant remains of monkish grandeur I have ever chanced to see,--the forms, designs, ornaments,---all that is left is in the highest perfection of gothic beauty. Five hundred souls, the people told us, were supported in this abbey and its cloisters. A chapel of Joseph of Arimathea has the outworks nearly entire, and I was quite bewitched with their antique beauty. But the entrance into the main front of the abbey is stupendous; its height is such that the eye aches to look up at it, though it is now curtailed, by no part of its arch remaining except the first inclination towards that form, which shows it to have been the entrance. Not a bit of roof remains in any part. All the monuments that Were not utterly decayed or destroyed have been removed to Wells. Mere walls alone are left here, except the monks' kitchen. This is truly curious: it is a circular building, with a dome as high--higher I fancy--than the Pantheon's; four immense fireplaces divide it Into four parts at the bottom, and an oven still is visible. One statue is left in one niche, which the people about said was of the abbot's chief cook! If this monastery was built by the famous old cruel hypocrite abbot, Dunstan, I shall grieve so much taste was bestowed on such a wretch.(347) We had only labourers for our informants. But one boy was worth hearing: he told me there was a well of prodigious depth, which he showed me, and this well had long been dried up, and so covered over as to be forgotten, till his grandfather dreamed a dream that the water of this well would restore him from a bad state of health to good; so he dug, and the well was found, and he drank the water and was cured! And since then the poor came from all parts who were afflicted with diseases, and drank the water and were cured. One woman was now at Glastonbury to try it, and already almost well! What strange inventions and superstitions even the ruins of what had belonged to St. Dunstan can yet engender! The Glastonbury thorn we forgot to ask for. WELLS CATHEDRAL. Hence we proceeded to Wells. Here we waited, as usual, upon the cathedral, which received our compliments with but Page 423 small return of civility. There was little to be seen without, except old monuments of old abbots removed from Glastonbury, so inferior in workmanship and design to the abbey once containing them, that I was rather displeased than gratified by the sight. They have also a famous clock, brought from the abbey at Its general demolition. This exhibits a set of horses with riders, who curvet a dance round a bell by the pulling a string, with an agility comic enough, and fitted to serve for a puppet-show; which, in all probability, was its design, in order to recreate the poor monks at their hours of play. There is also a figure of St. Dunstan, who regularly strikes the quarters of every hour by clock-work, and who holds in his hand a pair of tongs--the same I suppose as those with which he was wont to pull the devil by the nose, in their nocturnal interviews. The old castle of Wells is now the palace for the bishop. It is moated still, and looks dreary, Secluded, and in the bad old style. At night, upon a deeply deliberate investigation in the medical way, it was suddenly resolved that we should proceed to Bath instead of Bristol, and that I should try there first the stream of King BladUd. So now, at this moment, here we are. BATH REVISITED. Queen Square, Bath, Aug. 20.--Bath is extremely altered since I last visited it. Its circumference is perhaps trebled but its buildings are so unfinished, so spread, so everywhere beginning and nowhere ending, that it looks rather like a space of ground lately fixed upon for erecting a town, than a town itself, of so many years' duration. It is beautiful and wonderful throughout. The hills are built up and down, and the vales so stocked with streets and houses, that, in some places, from the ground-floor on one side a street, you cross over to the attic of your opposite neighbour. The white stone, where clean, has a beautiful effect, and, even where worn, a grand one. But I must not write a literal Bath guide, and a figurative one Anstey (348) has all to himself. I will only tell you in brief, yet in truth, it looks a city of palaces, a town of hills, and a hill of towns. Page 424 O how have I thought, in patrolling it, Of my poor Mrs, Thrale! I went to look (and sigh at the sight) at the house on the North parade where we dwelt, and almost every Old place brings to my mind some scene in which we were engaged. Besides the constant sadness of all recollections that bring fresh to my thoughts a breach with a friend once so loved, how are most of the families altered and dispersed in these absent ten Years! From Mrs. Montagu's, Miss Gregory by a marriage disapproved, is removed for ever; from Mrs. Cholmley's, by the severer blow of death, Lady Mulgrave is separated; Mrs. Lambart, by the same blow, has lost the brother, Sir Philip Clerke, who brought us to her acquaintance; Mr. Bowdler and his excellent eldest daughter have yielded to the same stroke; Mrs. Byron has followed. Miss Leigh has been married and widowed; Lord Mulgrave has had the same hard lot; and, besides these, Mrs. Cotton, Mrs. Thrale's aunt, Lady Miller, and Mr. Thrale himself, are no more. A VISIT FROM LADY SPENCER. Aug. 31.-I found I had no acquaintance here, except Mr. Harrington, who is ill, Mrs. Hartley, who is too lame for visiting, and the Vanbrughs; and though Mrs. Ord, from her frequent residence here, knows many of the settled inhabitants, she has kindly complied with my request of being dispensed from making new visits. Soon after we came, while I was finishing some letters, and quite alone, Mrs. Ord's servant brought me word Lady Spencer would ask me how I did, if I was well enough to receive her. Of course I begged she might come up-stairs. I have met her two or three times at my dearest Mrs. Delany's, where I met, also, with marked civilities from her. I knew she was here, with her unhappy daughter,--Lady Duncannon,(349) whom she assiduously nurses, aided by her more celebrated other daughter, the Duchess of Devonshire. She made a very flattering apology for coming, and then began to converse upon my beloved Mrs. Delany, and thence to subjects more general. She is a sensible and sagacious character, intelligent, polite, and agreeable, and she spends her life in such exercises of active charity and zeal, that she Page 425 would be one of the most exemplary women of rank of the age, had she less of show in her exertions, and more of forbearance in publishing them. My dear oracle, however, once said, vainglory must not be despised or discouraged, when it operated but as a human engine for great or good deeds. She spoke of Lady Duncannon's situation with much sorrow, and expatiated upon her resignation to her fate, her prepared state for death, and the excellence of her principles, with an eagerness and feeling that quite overwhelmed me with surprise and embarrassment. Her other daughter she did not mention; but her grand-daughter, Lady Georgiana Cavendish, she spoke of with rapture. Miss Trimmer, also, the eldest daughter of the exceeding worthy Mrs. Trimmer, she named with a regard that seemed quite affectionate. She told me she had the care of the young Lady Cavendishes, but was in every respect treated as if one of themselves. BATH SUNDAY SCHOOLS. The name of Mrs. Trimmer led us to talk of the Sunday schools and Schools of Industry. They are both in a very flourishing state at Bath, and Lady Spencer has taken one school under her own immediate patronage. The next day, of course, I waited on her - she was out. But the following day, which was Sunday,, she sent me a message up-stairs to say she would take me to see the Sunday-school, if I felt well enough to desire it. She waited below for my answer, which, of course, I carried down in my proper person, ready hatted and cloaked. It was a most interesting sight. Such a number of poor innocent children, all put into a way of right, most taken immediately from every way of wrong, lifting Up their little hands, and joining in those prayers and supplications for mercy and grace, which, even if they understand not, must at least impress them with a general idea of religion, a dread of evil, and a love of good ; it was, indeed, a sight to expand the best hopes of the heart. I felt very much obliged to my noble conductress, with whom I had much talk upon the subject in our walk back. Her own little school, of course, engaged us the most. She told me that the next day six of her little girls were to be new clothed, by herself, in honour of the birthday of the Duke of Devonshire's second daughter, Lady Harriot Cavendish, who Page 426 was to come to her grandmamma's house to see the ceremony. To this sight she also Invited me, and I accepted her kindness with pleasure. The following day, therefore, Monday, I obeyed Lady Spencer's time, and at six o'clock was at her house in Gay-street. Lady Spencer had Mrs. Mary Pointz and Miss Trimmer with her; and the six children, just prepared for Lady Harriot, in their new gowns, were dismissed from their examination, upon my arrival, and sent down-stairs to Wait the coming of her little ladyship, who, having dined with her mamma, was later than her appointment. Lady Georgiana is just eight Years old. She has a fine, animated, sweet, and handsome countenance, and the form and figure of a girl of ten or twelve years of age. Lady Harriot, who this day was six Years old, is by no means so handsome, but has an open and pleasing countenance, and a look of the most happy disposition. Lady Spencer brought her to me immediately. I inquired after the young Marquis of Hartington. Lady Spencer told me they never trusted him from the Upper walks, near his house, in Marlborough-buildings. He has a house of his own near the duke's, and a carriage entirely to himself; but YOU will see the necessity of these appropriations, when I remind You he is now fourteen months old. Lady Spencer had now a lottery--without blanks, you Will suppose- -of playthings and toys for the children. She distributed the prizes, and Lady Duncannon held the tickets. During this entered Lord Spencer, the son of Lady Spencer, who was here only for three days, to see his sister Duncannon. They had all dined with the little Lady Harriot. The duke is now at Chatsworth, in Derbyshire. I thought of Lord Spencer's kindness to Charles, and I recollected he was a favourite of Mr. Windham. I saw him, therefore, with very different ideas to those raised by the sight of his poor sister Duncannon, to whom he made up with every mark of pitying affection; she, meanwhile, receiving him with the most expressive pleasure, though nearly silent. I could not help feeling touched, in defiance of all obstacles. Presently followed two ladies. Lady Spencer, with a look and manner warmly announcing pleasure in what she was doing, then introduced me to the first of them, saying, "Duchess of Devonshire, Miss Burney." She made me a very civil compliment upon hoping my Page 427- health was recovering, and Lady Spencer then, shortly, and as if unavoidably, said, "Lady Elizabeth Foster." I have neglected to mention, in its place, that the six poor little girls had a repast in the garden, and Lady Georgiana earnestly begged leave to go down and see and speak with them. She applied to Lady Spencer. "O grandmamma," she cried, "pray let me go! Mamma says it all depends upon you." The duchess expressed some fear lest there might be any illness or disorder among the poor things: Lady Spencer answered for them; and Lady Georgiana, with a sweet delight, flew down into the garden, all the rest accompanying, and Lady Spencer and the duchess soon following. It was a beautiful sight, taken in all its dependencies, from the windows. Lord Spencer presently joined them, GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE To return to the duchess. I did not find so much beauty in her as I expected, notwithstanding the variations of accounts; but I found far more of manner, politeness, and gentle quiet. She seems by nature to possess the highest animal spirits, but she appeared to me not happy. I thought she looked oppressed within, though there is a native cheerfulness about her which I fancy scarce ever deserts her. There is in her face, especially when she speaks, a sweetness of good-humour and obligingness, that seem to be the natural and instinctive qualities of her disposition; joined to an openness of countenance that announces her endowed, by nature, with a character intended wholly for honesty, fairness, and good purposes. She now conversed with me wholly, and in so soberly sensible and quiet a manner, as I had imagined incompatible with her powers. Too much and too little credit have variously been given her. About me and my health she was more civil than I can well tell you; not from prudery--I have none, in these records, methinks!- -but from its being mixed into all that passed. We talked over my late tour, Bath waters, and the king's illness. This, which was led to by accident, was here a tender Subject, considering her heading the Regency squadron; however, I have only one line to pursue, and from that I can never vary. I spoke of my own deep distress from his sufferings without reserve, and of the distress of the queen with the most avowed compassion and respect. She was extremely well-bred in all she said herself, and seemed willing Page 428 to keep up the subject. I fancy no one has just in the same way treated it with her grace before; however, she took all in good part, though to have found me retired in discontent had perhaps been more congenial to her. But I have been sedulous to make them all know the contrary. Nevertheless, as I am eager to be considered apart from all party, I was much pleased, after all this, to have her express herself very desirous to keep up Our acquaintance, ask many questions as to the chance of my remaining in Bath, most politely hope to profit from it, and, finally, inquire my direction. Lady Elizabeth (Foster] has the character of being so alluring that Mrs. Holroyd told me it was the opinion Of Mr. Gibbon no man could withstand her, and that, if she chose to beckon the lord chancellor from his woolsack, in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience!(350) BISHOP PERCY. Not long after our settling at Bath, I found, upon returning from the Pump-room, cards left for me of the Bishop of Dromore (Dr. Percy), Mrs. and the Miss Percys. I had met them formerly once at Miss Reynolds's, and once Visited them when Dr. Percy was Dean of Carlisle. The collector and editor of the beautiful reliques of ancient English poetry, I could not but be happy to again see. I returned the visit: they were out; but the bishop soon after came when I was at home. I had a pleasant little chat with him. The bishop is perfectly easy and unassuming, very communicative, and, though not very entertaining because too prolix, he is otherwise intelligent and of good commerce. Mrs. Percy is ill, and cannot make visits, though she sends her name and receives company at home. She is very uncultivated and ordinary in manners and conversation, but a good creature and much delighted to talk over the royal family, to one of whom she was formerly a nurse. THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE AGAIN. Three days before we left Bath, as I was coming with Mrs. Ord from the Pump-room, we encountered a chair from Page 429 which a lady repeatedly kissed her hand and bowed to me. I was too nearsighted to distinguish who she was, till, coming close, and a little stopped by more people, she put her face to the glass, and said "How d'ye do? How d'ye do?" and I recollected the Duchess of Devonshire. About an hour after I had again the honour of a visit from her, and with Lady dowager Spencer. I was luckily at home alone, Mrs Ord having dedicated the rest of the morning to her own visits. I received them, therefore, with great pleasure. I now saw the duchess far more easy and lively in her spirits, and, consequently, far more lovely in her person. Vivacity is so much her characteristic, that her style of beauty requires it indispensably; the beauty, indeed, dies away without it. I now saw how her fame for personal charms had been obtained; the expression of her smiles is so very sweet, and has an ingenuousness and openness so singular, that, taken in those moments, not the most rigid critic could deny the justice of her personal celebrity. She was quite gay, easy, and charming: indeed, that last epithet might have been coined for her. This has certainly been a singular acquaintance for me that the first visit I should make after leaving the queen should be to meet the head of the opposition public, the Duchess of Devonshire! DR. BURNEY'S CONVERSATION WITH MR. BURKE: REMARKS BY Miss BURNEY. "I [Dr. Burney] dined with Sir Joshua last week, and met Mr. Burke, his brother, Mr. Malone, the venerable Bishop of St. Pol de L`eonn, and a French abb`e or chevalier. I found Mr. Burke in the room on my arrival, and after the first very cordial civilities were over, he asked me, with great eagerness, whether I thought he might go in his present dress to pay his respects to Miss Burney, and was taking up his hat, till I told him you were out of town. He imagined, I Suppose, you were in St. Martin's-street, where he used to call upon you. In talking over your health, the recovery of your liberty and of society, he said, if Johnson had been alive, your history would Page 430 have furnished him with an additional and interesting article to his 'Vanity of Human Wishes.' He said he had never been more mistaken in his life. He thought the queen had never behaved more amiably, or shown more good sense, than in appropriating you to her service; but what a service had it turned out!--a confinement to such a companion as Mrs. Schwellenberg!--Here exclamations of severity and kindness in turn lasted a considerable time." If ever I see Mr. Burke where he speaks to me upon the subject, I will openly confide to him how impossible it was that the queen should conceive the subserviency expected, unjustly and unwarrantably, by Mrs. Schwellenberg: to whom I ought only to have belonged officially, and at official hours, unless the desire of further intercourse had been reciprocal. The queen had imagined that a younger and more lively colleague would have made her faithful old servant happier and that idea was merely amiable in her majesty, who could not Suspect the misery inflicted on that poor new colleague, LITERARY RECREATION. Chelsea College, October-.-I have never been so pleasantly situated at home since I lost the sister of my heart and my most affectionate Charlotte. My father is almost constantly Within. Indeed, I now live with him wholly ; he has himself appropriated me a place, a seat, a desk, a table, and every convenience and comfort, and he never seemed yet so earnest to keep me about him. We read together, write together,- chat, compare notes, communicate projects, and diversify each other's employments. He is all goodness, gaiety, and affection; and his society and kindness are more precious to Me than ever. Fortunately, in this season of leisure and comfort, the spirit of composition proves active. The day is never long enough, and I Could employ two pens almost incessantly, in my scribbling what will not be repressed. This is a delight to my dear father inexpressibly great and though I have gone no further than to let him know, from time to time, the species of matter that occupies me, he is perfectly contented, and patiently waits till something is quite finished, before he insists upon reading a word. This "suits my humour well," as my own industry is all gone when once its intent is produced. For the rest I have been going on with my third tragedy. Page 431 I have two written, but never yet have had opportunity to read them; which, of course, prevents their being corrected to the best of my power, and fitted for the perusal of less indulgent eyes; or rather of eyes less prejudiced. Believe me, my dear friends, in the present composed and happy state of my mind, I Could never have suggested these tales; but, having only to correct, combine, contract, and finish, I will not leave them undone. Not, however, to sadden myself to the same point in which I began them, I read more than I write, and call for happier themes from others, to enliven my mind from the dolorous sketches I now draw of my Own. The library or study, in which we constantly sit, supplies such delightful variety of food, that I have nothing to wish. Thus, my beloved sisters and friends, you see me, at length, enjoying all that peace, ease, and chosen recreation and employment, for which so long I sighed in vain, and which, till very lately, I had reason to believe, even since attained, had been allowed me too late. I am more and more thankful every night, every morning, for the change in my destiny, and present blessings of my lot ; and you, my beloved Susan and Fredy, for whose prayers I have so often applied in my sadness, suffering, and despondence, afford me now the same community of thanks and acknowledgments. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDs's BLINDNESS. November.-Another evening my father took me to Sir Joshua Reynolds. I had long languished to see that kindly zealous friend, but his ill health had intimidated me rom making the attempt; and now my dear father went up stairs alone, and inquired of Miss Palmer if her uncle was well enough to admit me. He returned for me immediately. I felt the utmost pleasure in again mounting his staircase. Miss Palmer hastened forward and embraced me most cordially. I then shook hands with Sir Joshua. He had a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green halfbonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. "I am very glad," he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, "to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now,--and hardly that." I was really quite touched. The expectation of total blind- Page 432 ness depresses him inexpressibly; not, however, inconceivably I hardly knew how to express either my concern for his altered situation since our meeting, or my joy in again being with him: but my difficulty was short; Miss Palmer eagerly drew me to herself, and recommended to Sir Joshua to go on with his cards. He had no spirit to oppose; probably, indeed, no inclination. One other time we called again, in a morning. Sir Joshua and his niece were alone, and that invaluable man was even more dejected than before. How grievous to me It is to see him thus changed!(352) AMONG OLD FRIENDS. December.-I most gladly accepted an invitation to my good Mrs. Ord, to meet a circle of old friends. The day proved extremely pleasant. We went to dinner, my father and I, and met Mrs. Montagu, in good spirits, and very unaffectedly agreeable. No one was there to awaken ostentation, no new acquaintance to require any surprise from her powers; she was therefore natural and easy, as well as informing and entertaining. Mrs. Garrick embraced me again and again, to express a satisfaction in meeting me once more in this social way, that she would have thought it indecorous to express by words. I thanked her exactly in the same language ; and, without a syllable being uttered, she said, "I rejoice you are no longer a courtier!" and I answered, "I love you dearly for preferring me in my old state!" In the evening we were joined by Lady Rothes,(353) with whom I had my peace to make for a long-neglected letter upon my Page 433 "restoration to society," as she termed it, and who was very lively and pleasant. . . . Mr. Pepys, who came just at that instant from Twickenham, which he advanced eagerly to tell me, talked of Mr. Cambridge, and his admirable wit and spirits, and Miss Cambridge, and her fervent friendship for me, and the charm and agreeability of the whole house, with an ardour so rapid, there scarce needed any reply. Mr. Batt gave me a most kindly congratulatory bow upon his entrance. I knew his opinion of my retreat, and understood it: but I was encircled till the concluding part of the evening by the Pepys and Lady Rothes, etc.; and then Mr. Batt seated himself by my elbow, and began. "How I rejoice," he cried, "to see you at length out of thraldom!" "Thraldom?" quoth I, "that's rather a strong word! I assure you 'tis the first time I have heard it pronounced full and plumply." "O, but," cried he, laughing, "I may be allowed to say so, because you know my principles. You know me to be loyal; you could not stand it from an opposition-man--but saints may do much!" He is a professed personal friend of Mr. Pitt. I then began some exculpation of my late fatigues, assuring him they were the effect of a situation not understood, and not of any hardness of heart. "Very probably," cried he; "but I am glad you have ended them: I applaud--I honour the step you have taken. Those who suffer, yet still continue in fetters, I never pity;--there is a want of integrity, as well as spirit, in such submission." "Those they serve," cried I, "are not the persons to blame; they are commonly uninformed there is anything to endure, and believe all is repaid by the smiles so universally solicited." "I know it," cried he; "and it is that general base subservience that makes me struck with your opposite conduct." "My conduct," quoth I, "was very simple; though I believe it did not the less surprise; but it all consisted in not pretending, when I found myself sinking, to be swimming." He said many other equally good-natured things, and finished them with "But what a pleasure it is to me to see you here in this manner, dressed no more than other people! I have not seen you these five years past but looking dressed out for the Drawing-room, or something as bad!" Page 434 A SUMMONS FROM THE QUEEN. January.-I had a very civil note from Mrs. Schwellenberg telling me that Miss Goldsworthy was ill, which made Miss Gomme necessary to the princesses, and therefore, as Mlle. Jacobi was still lame, her majesty wished for my attendance On Wednesday noon. I received this little summons with very sincere pleasure, and sent a warm acknowledgment for its honour. I was engaged for the evening to Mr. Walpole, now Lord Orford, by my father, who promised to call for me at the Queen's house. At noon I went thither, and saw, by the carriages, their majesties were just arrived from Windsor. In my way upstairs I encountered the Princess Sophia. I really felt a pleasure at her sight, so great that I believe I saluted her ; I hardly know ; but she came forward, with her hands held out, so good humoured and so sweetly, I was not much on my guard. How do I wish I had gone that moment to my royal mistress, while my mind was fully and honestly occupied with the most warm satisfaction in being called again into her presence! The Princess Sophia desired me to send her Miss Gomme, whom she said I should find in my own room. Thither I went, and we embraced very cordially; but she a little made me stare by saying, "Do you sleep in your old bed?" "No," I answered, "I go home after dinner," and she said no more, but told me she must have two hours conference alone with me, from the multiplicity of things she had to discuss with me. We parted then, and I proceeded to Mrs. Schwellenberg. There I was most courteously received, and told I was to go at night to the play. I replied I was extremely sorry, but I was engaged. She looked deeply displeased, and I was forced to offer to send an excuse. Nothing, however, was settled; she went to the queen, whither I was most eager to follow, but I depended upon her arrangement, and could not go uncalled. I returned to my own room, as they still call it, and Miss Gomme and Miss Planta both came to me. We had a long discourse upon matters and things. By and by Miss Gomme was called out to Princesses Mary and Amelia; she told them who was in the old apartment, and they instantly entered it. Princess Mary took my hand, and said repeatedly, "My dear Miss Burney, how glad I am to see you again!" and the lovely little Princess Amelia kissed me twice, with the sweetest air of Page 435 affection. This was a very charming meeting to me, and I expressed my real delight in being thus allowed to come amongst them again, in the strongest and truest terms. I had been but a short time alone, when Westerhaults came to ask me if I had ordered my father's carriage to bring me from the play. I told him I was engaged but would give up that engagement, and endeavour to secure being fetched home after the play. Mrs. Schwellenberg then desired to see me. "What you mean by going home?" cried she, somewhat deridingly: "know you not you might sleep here?" I was really thunderstruck; so weak still, and so unequal as I feel to undertake night and morning attendance, which I now saw expected. I was obliged, however, to comply; and I wrote a note to Sarah, and another note to be given to my father, when he called to take me to Lord Orford. But I desired we might go in chairs, and not trouble him for the carriage. This arrangement, and my dread of an old attendance I was so little fitted for renewing, had so much disturbed me before I was summoned to the queen, that I appeared before her without any of the glee and spirits with which I had originally obeyed her commands. I am still grieved at this circumstance, as it must have made me seem cold and insensible to herself, when I was merely chagrined at the peremptory mismanagement of her agent. Mr. de Luc was with her. She was gracious, but by no means lively or cordial. She was offended, probably,--and there was no reason to wonder, and yet no means to clear away the cause. This gave me much vexation, and the more I felt it the less I must have appeared to merit her condescension. Nevertheless, after she was dressed she honoured me with a summons to the White closet, where I presently felt as much at home as if I had never quitted the royal residence. She inquired into my proceedings, and I began a little history of my south-west tour,- which she listened to till word was brought the king was come from the levee: dinner was then ordered, and I was dismissed. At our dinner, the party, in the old style, was -Mr. de Luc, Miss Planta, Mrs. Stainforth, and Miss Gomme; Mrs. Schwellenberg was not well enough to leave her own apartment, except to attend the queen. We were gay enough, I own my spirits were not very low in finding myself a guest at that table, where Page 436 I was so totally unfit to be at home, and whence, nevertheless,; I should have been very much and deeply concerned to have found myself excluded, since the displeasure of the queen could alone have procured such a banishment. Besides, to visit, I like the whole establishment, however inadequate I found them for supplying the place of all I quitted to live among them. O, who could succeed there? During the dessert the Princess Elizabeth came into the T room. I was very glad, by this means, to see all this lovely female tribe. As soon as she was gone I made off to prepare for the play, with fan, cloak-, and gloves. At the door of my new old room who should I encounter but Mr. Stanhope? He was all rapture, in his old way, at the meeting, and concluded me, I believe, reinstated. I got off as fast as Possible, and had just shut myself in, and him out, when I heard the voice of the king, who passed my door to go to the dining-room. I was quite chagrined to have left it so unseasonably, as my whole heart yearned to see him. He stayed but a minute, and I heard him stop close to my door, and speak with Mr. de Luc. The loudness of his voice assuring me he was saying nothing he meant to be unheard, I could not resist softly opening my door. I fancy he expected this, for he came up to me immediately, and with a look of goodness almost amounting to pleasure--I believe I may say quite--he inquired after my health, and its restoration, and said he was very glad to see me again. Then turning gaily to Mr. de Luc, "And you, Mr. de Luc," he cried, "are not you, too, very glad to see Miss Beurni again?" I told him, very truly, the pleasure with which I had reentered his roof.--He made me stand near a lamp, to examine me, and pronounced upon my amended looks with great benevolence: and, when he was walking away, said aloud to Mr. de Luc, who attended him, "I dare say she was very willing to come!" Our party in the box for the queen's attendants consisted of Lady Catherine Stanhope, Miss Planta, Major Price, Greville Upton, and Mr. Frank Upton. The king and queen and six princesses sat opposite. It was to me a lovely and most charming sight. The Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York and his bride, with the Duke of Clarence, sat immediately under us. I saw the duchess now and then, and saw that she has a very sensible and marked countenance, but no beauty. Page 437 She was extremely well received by the people, and smiled at in the most pleasing manner by her opposite new relations. At night I once more attended the queen, and it seemed as strange to me as if I had never done it before. The next day, Thursday, the queen gave up the Drawing-room, on account of a hurt on her foot. I had the honour of another very long conference in the White closet, in which I finished the account of my late travels, and during which, though she was very gracious, she was far less communicative than heretofore, saying little herself, and making me talk almost all. When I attended the queen again to-night, the strangeness was so entirely worn away, that it seemed to me as if I had never left my office! And so again on Friday morning At noon the royal family set off for Windsor. The queen graciously sent for me before she went, to bid me good- bye, and condescended to thank me for my little services. I would have offered repetition with all my heart, but I felt my frame unequal to such business. Indeed I was half dead with only two days' and nights' exertion. 'Tis amazing how I ever went through all that is passed. MR. HASTINGS'S DEFENCE. Feb. 13.-I found a note from Mrs. Schwellenberg, with an offer of a ticket for Mr. Hastings's trial, the next day, if I wished to go to it. I did wish it exceedingly, no public subject having ever so deeply interested me; but I could not recollect any party I could join, and therefore I proposed to Captain Phillips to call on his Court friend, and lay before her my difficulty. He readily declared he would do more, for he would frankly ask her for a ticket for himself, and stay another day, merely to accompany me. You know well the kind pleasure and zeal with which he is always ready to discover and propose expedients in distress. His visit prospered, and we went to Westminster Hall together. All the managers attended at the opening, but the attendance of all others was cruelly slack. To hear the attack, the people came in crowds; to hear the defence, they scarcely came in t`ete- `a-t`etes! 'Tis barbarous there should be so much more pleasure given by the recital of guilt than by the vindication of innocence! Mr. Law(354) spoke the whole time; he made a general harangue Page 438 in answer to the opening general harangue of Mr. Burke, and he spoke many things that brought forward conviction in favour of Mr. Hastings; but he was terrified exceedingly, and this timidity Induced him to so frequently beg quarter from his antagonists, both for any blunders and any deficiencies, that I felt angry with even modest egotism, when I considered that it was rather his place to come forward with the shield and armour of truth, undaunted, and to have defied, rather than deprecated, the force of talents when without such support. None of the managers quitted their box, and I am uncertain whether or not any of them saw me. Mr. Windham, in particular, I feel satisfied either saw me not, or was so circumstanced, as manager, that he could not come to speak with me; for else, this my first appearance from the parental roof under which he has so largely contributed to replace me would have been the last time for his dropping my acquaintance. Mr. Sheridan I have no longer any ambition to be noticed by; and Mr. Burke, at this place, I am afraid I have already displeased, so unavoidably cold and frigid did I feel myself when he came here to me formerly. Anywhere else, I should bound forward to meet him, with respect, and affection, and gratitude. In the evening I went to the queen's house. I found Mrs, Schwellenberg, who instantly admitted me, at cards with Mr. de Luc. Her reception was perfectly kind; and when I would have given up the tickets, she told me they were the queen's, who desired, if I wished it, I would keep them for the season. This was a pleasant hearing upon every account, and I came away in high satisfaction. A few days after, I went again to the trial, and took another captain for my esquire--my good and ever-affectionate James. The Hall was still more empty, both of Lords and Commons, and of ladies too, than the first day of this session. I am quite shocked at the little desire there appears to hear Mr. Hastings's defence. DIVERSE VIEWS. When the managers entered, James presently said, "Here's Mr. Windham coming to speak to you." And he broke from the procession, as it was descending to its cell, to give me that pleasure. His inquiries about my health were not, as he said, merely common inquiries, but, without any other answer to them than a bow, I interrupted their course by quickly saying, "You Page 439 have been excursioning and travelling all the world o'er since I saw you last." He paid me in my own coin with only a bow, hastily going back to myself: "But your tour," he cried, "to the west, after all that-" I saw what was following, and, again abruptly stopping him, "But here you are returned," I cried, "to all your old labours and toils again." "No, no," cried he, half laughing, "not labours and toils always; they are growing into pleasures now." "That's being very good, very liberal, indeed," quoth I, supposing him to mean hearing the defence made the pleasure but he stared at me with so little concurrence, that, soon understanding he only meant bringing their charges home to the confusion of the culprit, I stared again a little while, and then said, "You sometimes accuse me of being ambiguous; I think you seem so yourself, now!" "To nobody but you," cried he, with a rather reproachful accent. "O, now," cried I, "you are not ambiguous, and I am all the less pleased." "People," cried James, bonnement, "don't like to be convinced." "Mr. Hastings," said Mr. Windham, "does not convince, he does not bring conviction home." "Not to you," quoth I, returning his accent pretty fully, "Why, true," answered he very candidly; "there may be something in that." "How is it all to be?" cried James. "Is the defence to go on long, and are they to have any evidence; or how?" "We don't know this part of the business," said Mr. Windham, smiling a little at such an upright downright question "it is Mr. Hastings's affair now to settle it: however, I understand he means to answer charge after charge as they were brought against him, first by speeches, then by evidence: however, this is all conjecture." MR. LAW'S SPEECH DISCUSSED. We then spoke of Mr. Law, Mr. Hastings's first counsel, and I expressed some dissatisfaction that such attackers should not have had abler and more equal opponents. Page 440 "But do you not think Mr. Law spoke well?" cried he, "clear, forcible? " "Not forcible," cried I. I would not say not clear. "He was frightened," said Mr. Windham, "he might not do himself justice. I have heard him elsewhere, and been very well satisfied with him; but he looked pale and alarmed, and his voice trembled." "I was very well content with his materials," quoth I, "which I thought much better than the use he made of them; and once or twice, he made an opening that, with a very little skill, might most adroitly and admirably have raised a laugh against you all." He looked a little askew, I must own, but he could not help smiling. . . I gave him an instance in point, which -was the reverse given by Mr. Law to the picture drawn by Mr. Burke of Tamerlane, in which he said those virtues and noble qualities bestowed upon him by the honourable manager were nowhere to be found but on the British stage. Now this, seriously, with a very little ingenuity, might have placed Mr. Burke at the head of a company of comedians. This last notion I did not speak, however; but enough was understood, and Mr. Windham looked straight away from me, without answering; nevertheless, his profile, which he left me, showed much more disposition to laugh than to be incensed. Therefore I proceeded ; pointing out another lost opportunity that, well saved, might have proved happily ridiculous against them; and this was Mr. Law's description of the real state of India, even from its first discovery by Alexander, opposed to Mr. Burke's flourishing representation, of its golden age, its lambs and tigers associating, etc. Still he looked askew ; but I believe he is truth itself, for he offered no defence, though, of course, he would not enter into the attack. And surely at this critical period I must not spare pointing out all he will submit to hear, on the side of a man of whose innocence I am so fully persuaded. "I must own, however," continued I, finding him still attentive, though silent, "Mr. Law provoked me in one point--his apologies for his own demerits. Why should he contribute his humble mite to your triumphs? and how little was it his place to extol your superior talents, as if you were not self-sufficient enough already, without his aid." 'Unless you had heard the speech of Mr. Law, you can hardly Page 441 imagine with what timid flattery he mixed every exertion he ventured to make in behalf of his client ; and I could not forbear this little observation, because I had taken notice with what haughty derision the managers had perceived the fears of their importance, which were felt even by the very counsel of their prisoner. Mr. Windham, too, who himself never looks either insolent or deriding, must be sure what I meant for his associates could not include himself. He did not, however, perfectly welcome the remark; he still only gave me his profile, and said not a word,-so I went on. Mr. Hastings little thinks what a pleader I am become in his cause, against one of his most powerful adversaries. "There was still another thing," quoth I, "in which I felt vexed with Mr. Law: how could he be so weak as to beg quarter from you, and to humbly hope that, if any mistake, any blunder, any improvident word escaped him, you would have the indulgence to spare your ridicule? O yes, to be sure! when I took notice at the moment of his supplication, and before any error committed, that every muscle of every face, amongst you was at work from the bare suggestion." He could not even pretend to look grave now, but, turning frankly towards me, said, "Why, Mr. Fox most justly observed upon that petition, that, if any man makes a blunder, a mistake, 'tis very well to apologize: but it was singular to hear a man gravely preparing for his blunders and mistakes, and wanting to make terms for them beforehand." "I like him for this," cried James again bonnement, "that he seems so much interested for his client." "Will you give me leave to inquire," quoth I, "one thing? You know my old knack of asking strange questions." He only bowed--archly enough, I assure you. " Did I fancy, or was it fact, that you were a flapper to Mr. Burke, when Mr. Law charged him with disingenuity, in not having recanted the accusation concerning Devy Sing? He appeared to me in much perturbation, and I thought by his see-saw he was going to interrupt the speech: did you prevent him?" "No, no," he answered, "I did not: I did not think him in any danger." He rubbed his cheek, though, as he spoke, as if he did not much like that circumstance. O that Mr. Burke--so great, so noble a creature--can in this point thus have been warped. Page 442 MR. WINDHAM ON THE FRENCH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. I ran off to another scene, and inquired how he had been amused abroad, and, in particular, at the National Assembly? "Indeed," he answered, "it was extremely curious for a short time; but there is little variety in it, and therefore it will not do long." I was in a humour to be just as sincere here, as about the trial; so you democrats must expect no better. "I understand," quoth I, "there is a great dearth of abilities in this new Assembly; how then should there be any variety?" "No, I cannot say that: they do not want abilities; but they have no opportunity to make their way." "O!" quoth I, shaking my wise head, "abilities, real abilities, make their own way." "Why, that's true; but, in that Assembly, the noise, the tumult-- " "Abilities," again quoth I, " "have power to quell noise and tumult." "Certainly, in general; but not in France. These new legislative members are so solicitous to speak, so anxious to be heard, that they prefer uttering any tautology to listening to others; and when once they have begun, they go on with what speed they may, and without selection, rather than stop. They see so many ready to seize their first pause, they know they have so little chance of a second hearing, that I never entered the Assembly without being reminded of the famous old story of the man who patiently bore hearing a tedious harangue, by saying the whole time to himself, 'Well, well, 'tis his turn now; but let him beware how he sneezes."' "A BARBAROUS BUSINESS!" James now again asked some question of their intentions with regard to the progress of the trial. He answered, "We have nothing to do with its present state. We leave Mr. Hastings now to himself, and his own set. Let him keep to his cause, and he may say what he will. We do not mean to interfere, nor avail ourselves of our privileges." Mr. Hastings was just entered; I looked down at him, and saw his half-motion to kneel; I could not bear it, and, turning suddenly to my neighbour, "O, Mr. Windham," I cried, "after Page 443 all, 'tis, indeed, a barbarous business!" This was rather further than I meant to go, for I said it with serious earnestness; but it was surprised from me by the emotion always excited at sight of that unmerited humiliation. He looked full at me upon this solemn attack, and with a look of chagrin amounting to displeasure, saying, "It is a barbarous business we have had to go through." I did not attempt to answer this, for, except through the medium of sport and raillery, I have certainly no claim upon his patience. But, in another moment, in a tone very flattering, he said, "I do not understand, nor can any way imagine, how you can have been thus perverted!" "No, no!" quoth I, "it is you who are perverted!" Here Mr. Law began his second oration, and Mr. Windham ran down to his cell. I fancy this was not exactly the conversation he expected upon my first enlargement. However, though it would very seriously grieve me to hurt or offend him, I cannot refuse my own veracity, nor Mr. Hastings's injuries, the utterance of what I think truth. Mr. Law was far more animated and less frightened, and acquitted himself so as to merit almost as much `eloge as, in my opinion, he had merited censure at the opening. It was all in answer to Mr. Burke's general exordium and attack. DEATH OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. Upon the day of Sir Joshua Reynolds's death(355) I was in my bed, with two blisters, and I did not hear of it till two days after. I shall enter nothing upon this Subject here; our current letters mentioned the particulars, and I am not desirous to retrace them. His loss is as universally felt as his merit is universally acknowledged, and, joined to all public motives, I had myself private ones of regret that cannot subside. He was always peculiarly kind to me, and he had worked at my deliverance from a life he conceived too laborious for me as if I had been his own daughter; yet, from the time of my coming forth, I only twice saw him. I had not recovered strength for visiting before he was past receiving me. I grieve inexpressibly never to have been able to make him the small tribute of thanks for his most kind exertions in my cause. I little thought the second time I saw him would be my last opportunity, and my intention was to wait some favourable opening. Page 444 Miss Palmer is left heiress,(356) and her unabating attendance upon her inestimable uncle in his sickroom makes everybody content with her great acquisition. I am sure she loved and admired him with all the warmth of her warm heart. I wrote her a few lines of condolence, and she has sent me a very kind answer. She went immediately to the Burkes, with whom she will chiefly, I fancy, associate. March.-Sad for the loss of Sir Joshua, and all of us ill ourselves, we began this month. Upon its 3rd day was his funeral.(357) My dear father could not attend; but Charles was invited and went. All the Royal Academy, professors and students, and all the Literary club, attended as family, mourners. Mr. Burke, Mr. Malone, and Mr. Metcalf, are executors. Miss Palmer has spared nothing, either in thought or expense, that could render the last honours splendid and grateful. It was a very melancholy day to us; though it had the alleviation and softening of a letter from our dear Charlotte, promising to arrive the next day. MR. WINDHAM TWITTED ON His LACK OF COMPASSION. April 23.--I thought myself equal to again going to the trial, which recommenced, after six or seven weeks' cessation, on account of the judges going the circuit. Sarah went with me: I am now so known in the chamberlain's box that the door-keepers and attendants make way for me without looking at my ticket. And to be sure, the managers on one side, and Mr. Hastings's friends and counsel on the other, must pretty well have my face by heart. I have the faces of all them, most certainly, in full mental possession; and the figures of many whose names I know not are so familiar to my eyes, that should I chance hereafter to meet them, I shall be apt to take them for old acquaintances. There was again a full appearance of managers to accompany Page 445 Mr. Burke in his entry; and again Mr. Windham quitted the procession, as it descended to the box, and filed off to speak with me. He made the most earnest inquiries after the health of my dearest father, as well as after my own. He has all the semblance of real regard and friendship for us, and I am given to believe he wears no semblance that has not a real and sympathetic substance couched beneath. His manner instantly revived in my mind my intent not to risk, with him, the loss of making those poor acknowledgments for his kindness, that I so much regret omitting to Sir Joshua Reynolds. In return to his inquiries about my renovating health, I answered that I had again been very ill since I saw him last, and added, "Indeed, I believe I did not come away too soon." " And now," cried I, "I cannot resist giving myself the pleasure of making my acknowledgments for what I owe to you upon this subject. I have been, indeed, very much obliged, by various things that have come round to me, both to you and Sir Joshua.--O what a loss is that!" "What a wretched loss!" cried he: and we then united our warmest suffrages in his favour, with our deepest regret for our deprivation. Here I observed poor Mr. Hastings was brought in. I saw he was fixing him. "And can you," I cried, fixing him, "can you have so much compassion for one captive, and still have none for another?" "Have you, then, still," cried he, "the same sentiments?" "Have you," cried I, "heard all thus far of the defence, and are you still unmoved?" "Unmoved?" cried he, emphatically; "shall I be moved by a lion? You see him there in a cage, and pity him; look back to when you might have seen him with a lamb in his claws!" I could only look dismayed for a moment. "But, at least," I said, "I hope what I hear is not true, though I now grow afraid to ask?" "If it is anything about me," he answered, "it is certainly not true." "I am extremely glad, indeed," cried I, "for it has been buzzed about in the world that you were to draw up the final charge. This I thought most cruel of all; You, who have held back all this time--" "Yes! pretty completely," interrupted he, laughing. Page 446 "No, not completely," I continued; "but Yet YOU have made no direct formal speech, nor have come forward in any positive and formidable manner; therefore, as we have now heard all the others, and--almost enough--" I was obliged to stop a moment, to see how this adventurous plainness was taken; and he really, though my manner showed me only rallying, looked I don't know how, at such unexampled disrespect towards his brother orators. But I soon went quietly on: "To come forth now, after all that has passed, with the eclat of novelty, and,-for the most cruel part of all,--that which cannot be answered." "You think," cried he, "'tis bringing a fresh courser into the field of battle, just as every other is completely jaded?" "I think," cried I, "that I am very generous to wish against what I should so much wish for, but for other considerations." "O, what a flattering way," cried he, "of stating it! however, I can bear to allow you a little waste of compliments, which you know so well how to make; but I cannot bear to have you waste your compassion." A POINT OF CEREMONIAL. May.-The 1st of this month I went again to Westminster Hall, with our cousin Elizabeth. Evidence was brought forward by the counsel for Mr. Hastings, and Lord Stormont was called upon as a witness. This produced some curious debating among the Lords, and with the chancellor. They spoke only for the ears of one another, as it was merely to settle some ceremonial, whether he was to be summoned to the common place where the witnesses stood, or had the claim of a peer to speak in his place, robed. This latter prevailed: and then we expected his speech; but no, a new debate ensued, which, as we gathered from the rumour about us, was that his lordship should have the prayer book, for his oath, belonging to the House of Peers. Here, also, his dignity was triumphant, though it cost the whole assembly a full quarter of an hour; while another prayer book was officially at hand, in the general post for plebeian witnesses. Well! aristocrat as I am, compared with you, I laughed heartily at all this mummery, and yet it was possibly wise, at this period of pulling down all law and order, all privilege and subordination, however frivolous was its appearance. Page 447 His testimony was highly favourable to Mr. Hastings, with regard to authenticating the intelligence he had received of an opening war with France, upon which hung much justification of the measures Mr. Hastings had pursued for raising supplies. MRS. SCHWELLENBERG AND MLLE. JACOBI. Thence I went to the Queen's house, where -I have a most cordial general invitation from Mrs. Schwellenberg to go by all opportunities; and there is none so good as after the trial, that late hour exactly according With her dinner-time. She is just as she Was with respect to health; but in all other respects, how amended! all civility, all obligingness, all courtesy! and so desirous to have me visit her, that she presses me to come incessantly. During coffee, the princess royal came into the room. She condescended to profess herself quite glad to see me; and she had not left the room five minutes before, again returning, she said, "Mrs. Schwellenberg, I am come to plague you, for I am come to take away Miss Burney." I give you leave to guess whether this plagued me. May 2.-The following week I again went to Westminster Hall. Mlle. Jacobi had made a point of accompanying me, that she might see the show, as James called it to General Burgoyne, and I had great pleasure in taking her, for she is a most ingenuous and good creature, though--alas!--by no means the same undaunted, gay, open character as she appeared at first. Sickness, confinement, absence from her friends, submission to her coadjutrix, and laborious watching have much altered her. The trial of this day was all written evidence in favour of Mr. Hastings, and violent quarrelling as to its admissibility on the part of Mr. Burke. Mr. Windham took his place, during some part of the controversy, and spoke ably and clearly as to the given point in dispute, but with the most palpable tremor and internal struggle. A LONG TALK WITH THE KING AND QUEEN. I attended Mlle. Jacobi to the Queen's house, where I dined ; and great indeed was my pleasure, during coffee, to see the Princess Elizabeth, who, In the most Pleasing manner Page 448 and the highest spirits, came to summon me to the queen. I found her majesty again with all her sweet daughters but the youngest. She was gracious and disposed to converse. We had a great deal of talk upon public concerns, and she told me a friend Of mine had spoken very well the day before, and so had Mr. Burke. She meant Mr. Windham. It was against the new associates, and in favour of the proclamation.(358) Mr. Burke, of course, would here come forth in defence of his own predictions and opinions; but Mr. Windham, who had rather abided hitherto with Charles Fox, in thinking Mr. Burke too extreme, well as he loves him personally, was a new convert highly acceptable. He does not, however, go all lengths with Mr. Burke; he is only averse to an unconstitutional mode of reform, and to sanctioning club powers, so as to enable them, as in France, to overawe the state and senate.(359) Soon after, to my infinite joy, the king entered. O, he spoke to me so kindly!--he congratulated me on the better looks which his own presence and goodness gave me, repeatedly declaring he had never seen me in such health. He asked me after my father, and listened with interest when I mentioned his depression, and told him that all he had done of late to soothe his retirement and pain had been making canons to solemn words, and with such difficulties of composition as, in better health and spirits, would have rather proved oppressive and perplexing than a relief to his feelings. "I, too," said the king, after a very serious pause, "have myself sometimes found, when ill or disturbed, that some grave and even difficult employment for my thoughts has tended more to compose me than any of the supposed usual relaxations." He also condescended to ask after little Norbury, taking off the eager little fellow while he spoke, and his earnest manner of delivery. He then Inquired about my friends Mr. and Mrs. Locke, and their expectations of the return of Page 449 William. He inquired how I live, whom I saw, what sort of neighbours I had in the college, and many other particulars, that seemed to desire to know how I went on, and whether I was comfortable. His looks, I am sure, said so, and most sweetly and kindly. They kept me till they went to the Japan room, where they meet the officers and ladies who attend them in public. They were going to the Ancient Music. This dear king, nobly unsuspicious where left to himself, and where he has met no doubleness, spoke also very freely of some political matters before me--of the new association in particular. It gratified me highly. MADAME DE GENLIS: A WOEFUL CHANGE. I got home to dinner to meet Mrs. and Miss Mary Young,(360) who are in town for a few weeks. Miss Mary is sensible, and quick, and agreeable. They give a very unpleasant account of Madame de Genlis, or de Sillery, or Brulard, as she is now called.(361) They say she has established herself at Bury, in their neighbourhood, with Mlle. la Princesse d'Orleans and Pamela, and a Circe, and another Page 450 young girl under her care. They have taken a house, the master of which always dines with them, though Mrs. Young says he is such a low man he should not dine with her daughter. They form twenty with themselves and household. They keep a botanist, a chemist, and a natural historian always with them. These are supposed to have been common servants of the Duke of Orleans in former days, as they always walk behind the ladies when abroad; but, to make amends in the new equalising style, they all dine together at home. They visit at no house but Sir Thomas Gage's, where they carry their harps, and frequently have music. They have been to Bury ball, and danced all night Mlle. d'Orl`eans with anybody, known or unknown to Madame Brulard. What a woeful change from that elegant, amiable, high-bred Madame de Genlis I knew six years ago! the apparent pattern of female perfection in manners, conversation, and delicacy. There are innumerable democrats assembled in Suffolk; among them the famous Tom Paine, who herds with all the farmers that will receive him, and there propagates his pernicious doctrines. THE WEEPING BEAUTY AGAIN. May 25.-This morning I went to a very fine public breakfast, given by Mrs. Montagu. . . . The crowd of company was such that we could only slowly make way, in any part. There could not be fewer than four or five hundred people. It was like a full Ranelagh by daylight. We now met Mrs. Porteus, and who should be with her but the poor pretty S.S., whom so long I had not seen, and who has now lately been finally given up by her long-sought and very injurious lover, Dr. Vyse? She is sadly faded, and looked disturbed and unhappy; but still beautiful, though no longer blooming; and still affectionate, though absent and evidently absorbed. We had a little chat together about the Thrales. In mentioning our former intimacy with them, "Ah, those," she cried, "were happy times!" and her eyes glistened. poor thing! hers has been a lamentable story!---Imprudence and vanity have rarely been mixed with so much sweetness, and good-humour, and candour, and followed with more reproach and ill success. We agreed to renew acquaintance next winter; at present she will be little more in town. Page 451 MADAME DE LA FITE AND MRS. HASTINGS. We went then round the rooms, which were well worth examination and admiration ; and we met friends and acquaintance every other step. . . . While we were examining the noble pillars in the new room, I heard an exclamation of "Est-ce possible? suis-je si heureuse?--Est-ce ma ch`ere Mlle. Beurni que je vois?"(362) Need I say this was Madame de la, Fite ? or Mrs. Fitt, as, since the French Revolution, of which she is a favourer, she is called by some of the household to which I belonged. I spoke so as to moderate this rapture into something less calling for attention, which her voice and manner were engaging, not unwillingly. I had not seen her since my retreat, and, if she had been less pompous, I should have been glad of the meeting. She kept my hand close grasped between both her own, (though her fan nipped one of my fingers till I was ready to make faces,) with a most resolute empressement, to the great inconvenience of those who wanted to pass, for we were at one of the entrances into the great new room; and how long she might have continued this fond detention I know not, if a lady, whose appearance vied for show and parade with Madame de la Fite's manner and words, had not called out aloud, "I am extremely happy indeed to see Miss Burney!" This was Mrs. Hastings; and to answer her I was let loose. I have always been very sorry that Mrs. Hastings, who is a pleasing, lively, and well-bred woman, with attractive manners and attentions to those she wishes to oblige, should have an indiscretion so peculiarly unsuited to her situation, as to aim always at being the most conspicuous figure wherever she appears. Her dress now was like that of an Indian princess, according to our ideas of such ladies, and so much the most splendid, from its ornaments, and style, and fashion, though chiefly of muslin, that everybody else looked under-dressed in her presence. It is for Mr. Hastings I am sorry when I see this inconsiderate vanity, in a woman who would so much better manifest her sensibility of his present hard disgrace, by a modest and quiet appearance and demeanour. Page 452 THE IMPETUOUS ORATOR. Wednesday, May 30.-To-day I went to Westminster Hall again, to hear the evidence of Mr. Markham, which is so pleasantly in favour of Mr. Hastings, that all the friends of that persecuted man are gratified by all he deposes. Miss Ord accompanied me. When the impetuous and ungovernable Mr. Burke was Interrupting the chancellor, in order to browbeat Mr. Hastings's evidence, Mr. Windham involuntarily exclaimed, "Hist!" just as if he had been at his elbow, and playing the kind part of a flapper. I could not help laughing, and half joining him: he echoed back my laugh, and with a good humour that took in all its meaning and acknowledged its sympathy with regard to Mr. Burke, nevertheless, he spoke not a word. Afterwards, however, he spoke when I had far rather he had been silent, for he went to the assistance of Mr. Burke. Michael Angelo Taylor spoke also; but I observed with pleasure a distinction the chancellor made to Mr. Windham; for, when he answered their arguments, he singled him out as the person who had said what alone he meant upon that question to notice, by saying, "The honourable manager who spoke second." But I am sure--I think so, at least--Mr. Windham as little approves the violence of Mr. Burke in this trial as I do myself. I see him evidently and frequently suffer great pain and mortification when he is so obstreperous. BOSWELL'S MIMICRY OF DR. JOHNSON. June 1.-This day had been long engaged for breakfasting with Mrs. Dickenson and dining with Mrs. Ord. The breakfast guests were Mr. Langton, Mr. Foote, Mr. Dickenson, jun., a cousin, and a very agreeable and pleasing man; Lady Herries, Miss Dickenson, another cousin, and Mr. Boswell. This last was the object of the morning. I felt a strong sensation of that displeasure which his loquacious communications of every weakness and infirmity of the first and greatest good man of these times has awakened in me, at his first sight; and, though his address to me was courteous in the extreme, and he made a point of sitting next me, I felt an indignant disposition to a nearly forbidding reserve and silence. How Page 453 many starts of passion and prejudice has he blackened into record, that else might have sunk, for ever forgotten, under the preponderance of weightier virtues and excellences! Angry, however, as I have long been with him, he soon insensibly conquered, though he did not soften me: there is so little of ill-design or ill-nature in him, he is so open and forgiving for all that is said in return, that he soon forced me to consider him in a less serious light, and change my resentment against his treachery into something like commiseration of his levity ; and before we parted we became good friends. There is no resisting great good humour, be what will in the opposite scale. He entertained us all as if hired for that purpose, telling stories of Dr. Johnson, and acting them with incessant buffoonery. I told him frankly that, if he turned him into ridicule by caricature, I should fly the premises: he assured me he would not, and indeed his imitations, though comic to excess, were so far from caricature that he omitted a thousand gesticulations which I distinctly remember. Mr. Langton told some stories himself in imitation of Dr. johnson; but they became him less than Mr. Boswell, and only reminded me of what Dr. Johnson himself once said to me--"Every man has, some time in his life, an ambition to be a wag." If Mr. Langton had repeated anything from his truly great friend quietly, it would far better have accorded with his own serious and respectable character. THE KING'S BIRTHDAY. June 4.-The birthday of our truly good king. As his majesty had himself given me, when I saw him after the queen's birthday, an implied reproach for not presenting myself at the palace that day, I determined not to incur a similar censure on this, especially as I hold my admission on such a national festival as a real happiness, as well as honour, when it is to see themselves. How different was my attire from every other such occasion the five preceding years! It was a mere simple dressed undress, without feathers, flowers, hoop, or furbelows. When I alighted at the porter's lodge I was stopped from crossing the court-yard by seeing the king with his three sons, the Prince of Wales, Duke of York, and Duke of Clarence, who were standing there after alighting from their horses, to Page 454 gratify the people who encircled the iron rails. It was a pleasant and goodly sight, and I rejoiced in such a detention. I had a terrible difficulty to find a friend who would make known to her majesty that I was come to pay my devoirs. At length, while watching in the passages to and fro, I heard a step upon the princesses' stairs, and, venturing forward, I encountered the Princess Elizabeth. I paid my respectful congratulations on the day, which she most pleasantly received, and I intimated my great desire to see her majesty. I am Sure the amiable princess communicated my petition, for Mr, de Luc came out in a few minutes and ushered me into the royal presence. The queen was in her state dressing-room, her head attired for the Drawing-room superbly; but her Court-dress, as usual, remaining to be put on at St. James's. She had already received all her early complimenters, and was prepared to go to St. James's: the princess royal was seated by her side, and all the other princesses, except the Princess Amelia, were in the room, with the Duchess of York. Mr. de Luc, Mrs. Schwellenberg, Madame de la Fite, and Miss Goldsworthy were in the background. The queen smiled upon me most graciously, and every princess came up separately to speak with me. I thanked her majesty warmly for admitting me upon such an occasion, "O!" cried she, "I resolved to see you the moment I knew you were here." She then inquired when I went into Norfolk, and conversed upon my summer plans, etc., with more of her original sweetness of manner than I have seen since my resignation. What pleasure this gave me ! and what pleasure did I feel in being kept by her till the further door opened, and the king entered, accompanied by the Dukes of York and Clarence. I motioned to retreat, but calling out, "What, Miss Burney," the king came up to me and inquired how I did,- and began talking to me so pleasantly, so gaily, so kindly even, that I had the satisfaction of remaining and of gathering courage to utter my good wishes and warm fervent prayers for this day. He deigned to hear me very benignly; or make believe he did, for I did not make my harangue very audibly; but he must be sure of its purport. He said I was grown "quite fat" since he had seen me, and appealed to the Duke of York: he protested my arm was half as big again as heretofore, and then he measured it with his Page 455 spread thumbs and forefingers; and the whole of his manner showed his perfect approbation of the step I had taken, of presenting myself in the royal presence on this auspicious day. The queen soon after walked up to me, and asked if I should like to see the ball at night. I certainly should much like to have seen them "in all their glory," after seeing them thus in all their kindness, as well as to have been present at the first public appearance at Court of the Princess Sophia : but I had no means to get from and to Chelsea so late at night, and was, therefore, forced to excuse myself, and decline her gracious proposition of giving me tickets. MR. HASTINGS'S SPEECH. Two days after, I went again to Westminster Hall with Miss Ord. Her good mother has a ticket for the Duke of Newcastle's box, in which she was seated. This -day's business consisted of examining witnesses: it was meant for the last meeting. during this session - but when it was over, Mr. Hastings arose and addressed the Lords in a most noble and pathetic speech, praying them to continue their attendance till his defence was heard throughout, or, at least, not to deny him the finishing his answer to the first charge. He spoke, I believe, to the hearts of everybody, except his prosecutors : the whole assembly seemed evidently affected by what he urged, upon the unexampled delay of justice In his trial: silence was never more profound than that which his voice instantly commanded. Poor unhappy, injured gentleman! How, how can such men practise cruelty so glaring as is manifested in the whole conduct of this trial! >From hence, as usual, I went to dine at the Queen's house. Mrs. Schwellenberg took me to the queen after coffee. She was writing to Lady Cremorne: she talked with me while she finished her letter, and then read it to me, exactly as in old times. She writes with admirable facility, and peculiar elegance of expression, as well as of handwriting. She asked me, somewhat curiously, if I had seen any of my old friends? I found she meant oppositionists. I told her only at the trial. She kept me in converse till the dear king came into the room: he had a grandson of Lord Howe's with him, a little boy in petticoats, with whom he was playing, and whom he thought remembered me, I had seen him frequently Page 456 at Weymouth, and the innocent little fellow insisted upon Making me his bows and reverences, when told to Make them to the queen. The king asked me what had been doing at Westminster Hall? I repeated poor Mr. Hastings's remonstrance, particularly a part of it in which he had mentioned that he had already "appealed to his majesty, whose justice he could not doubt." The king looked a little queer, but I was glad of the opportunity of putting in a word for poor Mr. Hastings. I went on regularly to the trial till it finished for this year. Mr. Dallas closed his answer to the first charge, with great spirit and effect, and seemed to make numerous Proselytes for Mr. Hastings. A WELL-PRESERVED BEAUTY. Thursday, June 18.-After many invitations and regulations, it was settled I was to accompany my father on a visit of three days to Mrs. Crewe at Hampstead. The villa at Hampstead is small, but commodious. We were received by Mrs. Crewe with much kindness. The room was rather dark, and she had a veil to her bonnet, half down, and with this aid she looked still in a full blaze of beauty. I was wholly astonished. Her bloom, perfectly natural, is as high as that of Augusta Locke when in her best looks, and the form of her face is so exquisitely perfect that my eye never Met it without fresh admiration. She is certainly, in my eyes, the most completely a beauty of any woman I ever saw. I know not, even now, any female in her first youth who could bear the comparison. She uglifies everything near her. Her son was with her. He is just of age, and looks like her elder brother! He is a heavy old-looking young Man. He is going to China with Lord Macartney.(363) THE BURKES. My former friend, young Burke, was also there. I was glad to renew acquaintance with him though I could see some little strangeness in him: this, however, completely wore off. Page 457 before the day was over. Soon after entered Mrs. Burke, Miss F.,(364) a niece, and Mr. Richard Burke, the comic, humorous, bold, queer brother of the Mr. Burke, who, they said, was soon coming, with Mr. Elliot. The Burke family were invited by Mrs. Crewe to meet us. Mrs. Burke was just what I have always seen her, soft, gentle, reasonable, and obliging; and we met, I think, upon as good terms as if so many years had not parted us. At length Mr. Burke appeared, accompanied by Mr. Elliot. He shook hands with my father as soon as he had paid his devoirs to Mrs. Crewe, but he returned my curtsey with so distant a bow, that I Concluded myself quite lost with him, from my evident solicitude in poor Mr. Hastings's cause. I could not wish that less obvious, thinking as I think of it; but I felt infinitely grieved to lose the favour of a man whom in all other articles, I so much venerate, and whom, Indeed, I esteem and admire as the very first man of true genius now living in this Country. Mrs. Crewe introduced me to Mr. Elliot: I am Sure we were already personally known to each other, for I have seen him perpetually in the managers' box, whence, as often, he must have seen me in the great chamberlain's. He is a tall, thin young man, plain in face, dress, and manner, but sensible, and possibly much besides; he was reserved, however, and little else appeared. The moment I was named, to my great joy I found Mr. Burke had not recollected me. He is more near-sighted, considerably,- than myself. "Miss Burney!" he now exclaimed, coming forward, and quite kindly taking my hand, "I did not see you;" and then he spoke very sweet words of the meeting, and of my looking far better than "while I was a courtier," and of how he rejoiced to see that I so little suited that station. "You look," cried he, "quite renewed, revived, disengaged; you seemed, when I conversed with you last, at the trial, quite altered; I never saw such a change for the better as quitting a Court has brought about!" Ah! thought I, this is simply a mistake, from reasoning according to your own feelings. I only seemed altered for the worse at the trial, because I there looked coldly and distantly, from distaste and disaffection to your proceedings; and I here Page 458 . look changed for the better, only because I here meet You without the chill of disapprobation, and with the glow of my first admiration of you and your talents! BURKE'S CONVERSATIONAL POWERS. Mrs. Crewe gave him her place, and he sat by me, and entered into a most animated conversation upon Lord Macartney and his Chinese expedition, and the two Chinese youths who were to accompany it. These last he described minutely and spoke of the extent of the undertaking in high, and perhaps fanciful, terms, but with allusions and anecdotes intermixed, so full of general information and brilliant ideas, that I soon felt the whole of my first enthusiasm return, and with it a sensation of pleasure that made the day delicious to me. After this my father joined us, and politics took- the lead. He spoke then with an eagerness and a vehemence that instantly banished the graces, though it redoubled the energies, of his discourse. "The French Revolution," he said, "which began by authorising and legalising Injustice, and which by rapid steps had proceeded to every species of despotism except owning a despot, was now menacing all the universe and all mankind with the most violent concussion of principle and order." My father heartily joined, and I tacitly assented to his doctrines, though I feared not with his fears. One Speech I Must repeat, for it is explanatory of his conduct, and nobly explanatory. When lie had expatiated upon the present dangers, even to English liberty and property, from the contagion of havoc and novelty, he earnestly exclaimed, "This it is that has made ME an abettor and supporter of kings! Kings are necessary, and if we would preserve peace and prosperity, we must preserve THEM we must all put our shoulders to the work! Ay, and stoutly, too!" This subject lasted till dinner. At dinner Mr. Burke sat next Mrs. Crewe, and I had the happiness to be seated next Mr. Burke, and my other neighbour was his amiable son. The dinner, and the dessert when the servants were removed, were delightful. How I wish my dear Susanna and Fredy could meet this wonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes! But politics, even on his own Page 459 side, must always be excluded; his irritability Is so terrible on that theme that it gives immediately to his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers. I can give you only a few little detached traits of what passed, as detail would be endless. Charles Fox being mentioned, Mrs. Crewe told us that he had lately said, upon being shown some passage in Mr. Burke's book which he had warmly opposed, but which had, in the event, made its own justification, very candidly, "Well! Burke is right--but Burke is often right, only he is right too soon." "Had Fox seen some things in that book," answered Mr. Burke, "as soon, he would at this moment, in all probability, be first minister of this country." "What!" cried Mrs. Crewe, "with Pitt?--No!--no!--Pitt won't go out, and Charles Fox will never make a coalition with Pitt." "And why not?" said Mr. Burke, dryly; "why not this coalition as well as other coalitions?" Nobody tried to answer this. "Charles Fox, however," said Mr. Burke afterwards, "can never internally like the French Revolution. He is entangled; but, in himself, if he should find no other objection to it, he has at least too much taste for such a revolution." Mr. Elliot related that he had lately been in a company of some of the first and most distinguished men of the French nation, now fugitives here, and had asked them some questions about the new French ministry; they had answered that they knew them not even by name till now! "Think," cried he, "what a ministry that must be! Suppose a new administration formed here of Englishmen of whom we had never before heard the names! what statesmen they must be! how prepared and fitted for government! To begin by being at the helm!" Mr. Richard Burke related, very comically, various censures cast upon his brother, accusing him of being the friend of despots, and the abettor of slavery, because he had been shocked at the imprisonment of the king of France, and was anxious to preserve our own limited monarchy in the same state in which it so long had flourished. Mr. Burke looked half alarmed at his brother's opening, but, Page 460 when he had finished, he very good-humouredly poured out a glass of wine, and, turning to me, said, "Come then--here's slavery for ever!" This was well understood, and echoed round the table with hearty laughter. "This would do for you completely, Mr. Burke," said Mrs. Crewe, "if it could get into a newspaper! Mr. Burke, they would say, has now spoken out; the truth has come to light unguardedly, and his real defection from the cause Of true liberty is acknowledged. I should like to draw up the paragraph!" "And add," said Mr. Burke, "the toast was addressed to Miss Burney, in order to pay court to the queen!" This sport went on till, upon Mr. Elliot's again mentioning France and the rising jacobins, Mr. Richard Burke loudly gave a new toast--"Come!" cried he, "here's confusion to Confusion!" Mr. Windham, who Was gone into Norfolk for the summer, was frequently mentioned, and always with praise. Mr. Burke, upon Mr. Elliot's saying something of his being very thin, warmly exclaimed, "He is just as he should be! If I were Windham this minute, I Should not wish to be thinner, nor fatter, nor taller, nor shorter, nor any way, nor in anything, altered." Some time after, speaking of former days, you may believe I was struck enough to hear Mr. Burke say to Mrs. Crewe, "I wish you had known Mrs. Delany! She was a pattern of a perfect fine lady, a real fine lady, of other days! Her manners were faultless; her deportment was all elegance, her speech was all sweetness, and her air and address all dignity. I always looked up to her as the model of an accomplished woman of former times." Do you think I heard such a testimony to my most revered and beloved departed friend unmoved? Afterwards, still to Mrs. Crewe, he proceeded to say, she had been married to Mr. Wycherley, the author.(365) There I ventured to interrupt him, and tell him I fancied that must he some Page 461 great mistake, as I had been well acquainted with her history from her own mouth. He seemed to have heard it from some good authority; but I could by no means accede my belief, as her real life and memoirs had been so long in my hands, written by herself to a certain period, and, for some way, continued by me. This, however, I did not mention. A WILD IRISH GIRL. When we left the dining-parlour to the gentlemen, Miss F- seized my arm, without the smallest previous speech, and, with a prodigious Irish brogue, said "Miss Burney, I am so glad you can't think to have this favourable opportunity of making an intimacy with you! I have longed to know you ever since I became rational!" I was glad, too, that nobody heard her! She made me walk off with her in the garden, whither we had adjourned for a stroll, at a full gallop, leaning upon my arm, and putting her face close to mine, and sputtering at every word from excessive eagerness. "I have the honour to know some of your relations in Ireland," she continued; "that is, if they an't yours, which they are very sorry for, they are your sister's, which is almost the same thing. Mr. Shirley first lent me 'Cecilia,' and he was so delighted to hear my remarks! Mrs. Shirley's a most beautiful creature; she's grown so large and so big! and all her daughters are beautiful; so is all the family. I never saw Captain Phillips, but I dare say he's beautiful." She is quite a wild Irish girl. Presently she talked of Miss Palmer. "O, she loves you!" she cried; "she says she saw you last Sunday, and she never was so happy in her life. She said you looked sadly." This Miss F- is a handsome girl, and seems very good humoured. I imagine her but just imported, and I doubt not but the soft-mannercd, and well-bred, and quiet Mrs. Burke will soon subdue this exuberance of loquacity. I gathered afterwards from Mrs. Crewe, that my curious new acquaintance made innumerable inquiries concerning my employment and office under the queen. I find many people much disturbed to know whether I had the place of the Duchess of Ancastor, on one side, or of a chamber-maid, on the other. Truth is apt to lie between conjectures. Page 462 ERSKINE's EGOTISM. The party returned with two very singular additions to its number--Lord Loughborough,(366) and Mr. and Mrs. Erskine.(367) They have villas at Hampstead, and were met in the walk; Mr. Erskine else would not, probably, have desired to meet Mr. Burke, who openly in the House of Commons asked him if he knew what friendship meant, when he pretended to call him, Mr. Burke, his friend? There was an evident disunion of the cordiality of the party from this time. My father, Mr. Richard Burke, his nephew, and Mr. Elliot entered into some general discourse; Mr. Page 463 Burke took up a volume Of Boileau, and read aloud, though to himself, and with a pleasure that soon made him seem to forget all intruders; Lord Loughborough joined Mrs. Burke and Mr. Erskine, seating himself next to Mrs. Crewe, engrossed her entirely, yet talked loud enough for all to hear who were not engaged themselves. For me, I sat next Mrs. Erskine, who seems much a woman of the world, for she spoke with me just as freely, and readily, and easily as if we had been old friends. Mr. Erskine enumerated all his avocations to Mrs. Crewe, and, amongst others, mentioned, very calmly, having to plead against Mr. Crewe upon a manor business in Cheshire. Mrs. Crewe hastily and alarmed interrupted him, to inquire what he meant, and what might ensue to Mr. Crewe? O, nothing but the loss of the lordship upon that spot," he coolly answered; "but I don't know that it will be given against him: I only know I shall have three hundred Pounds for it." Mrs. Crewe looked thoughtful; and Mr. Erskine then began to speak of the new Association for Reform, by the friends of the people, headed by Messrs. Grey and Sheridan, and sustained by Mr. Fox, and openly opposed by Mr. Windham, as well as Mr. Burke. He said much of the use they had made of his name, though he had never yet been to the society; and I began to understand that he meant to disavow it; but presently he added, "I don't know whether I shall ever attend--I have so much to do--so little time: however, the people must be supported."(368) "PRAY, will you tell me," said Mrs. Crewe, drily, "what you mean by the people? I never knew." He looked surprised, but evaded any answer and soon after took his leave, with his wife, who seems by no means to admire him as much as he admires himself, if I may judge by short odd speeches which dropped from her. The eminence of Mr. Erskine seems all for public life; in private, his excessive egotisms undo him. Lord Loughborough instantly took his seat next to Mrs. Crewe; and presently related a speech which Mr. Erskine has lately made at some public meeting, and which he opened to this effect:--"As to me, gentlemen, I have some title to give my opinions freely. Would you know what my title is derived from? I challenge any man to inquire! If he ask my Page 464 birth,--its genealogy may dispute with kings! If my wealth, it is all for which I have time to hold out my hand! If my talents,--No! of those, gentlemen, I leave you to judge for yourselves."(369) CAEN-WOOD. June 22.-Mrs. Crewe took my father and myself to see the Hampstead lions. We went to Caen-wood, to see the house and pictures. Poor Lord Mansfield(370) has not been downstairs, the housekeeper told us, for the last four years; yet she asserts he is by no means superannuated, and frequently sees his very intimate friends, and seldom refuses to be consulted by any lawyers. He was particularly connected with my revered Mrs. Delany, and I felt melancholy upon entering his house to recollect how often that beloved lady had planned carrying thither Miss Port and myself, and how often we had been invited by Miss Murrays, my lord's nieces. I asked after those ladies, and left them my respects. I heard they were up-stairs with Lord Mansfield, whom they never left. Many things in this house were interesting, because historical but I fancy the pictures, at least, not to have much other recommendation. A portrait Of Pope, by himself, I thought extremely curious. It is very much in the style of most of jervas's own paintings. They told us that, after the burning of Lord Mansfield's house in town, at the time of Lord G. Gordon's riots, thousands came to inquire, if this original portrait was preserved. Luckily it was at Caen-wood. We spent a good deal of time in the library,--and saw first editions of almost all Queen Anne's classics; and lists of subscribers to Pope's "Iliad," and many such matters, all enlivening to some corner or other of the memory. AN ADVENTURE WITH MRS. CREWE. We next proceeded to the Shakspeare gallery,(371) which I had Page 465 never seen. And here we met with an adventure that finished our morning's excursions. There was a lady in the first room, dressed rather singularly, quite alone, and extremely handsome, who was parading about with a nosegay in her hand, which she frequently held to her nose, in a manner that was evidently calculated to attract notice. We therefore passed on to the inner room, to avoid her. Here we had but just all taken our stand opposite different pictures, when she also entered, and, coming pretty close to my father, sniffed at her flowers with a sort of extatic eagerness, and then let them fall. My father picked them up, and gravely presented them to her. She curtsied to the ground in receiving them, and presently crossed over the room, and,, brushing past Mrs. Crewe, seated herself immediately by her elbow. Mrs. Crewe, not admiring this familiarity, moved away, giving her at the same time a look of dignified distance that was almost petrifying. It did not prove so to this lady, who presently followed her to the next picture, and, sitting as close as she could to where Mrs. Crewe stood, began singing various quick passages, without words or connexion. I saw Mrs. Crewe much alarmed, and advanced to stand by her, meaning to whisper her that we had better leave the room; and this idea was not checked by seeing that the flowers were artificial. By the looks we interchanged we soon mutually said, "This is a mad woman." We feared irritating her by a sudden flight, but gently retreated, and soon got quietly into the large room when she bounced up with a great noise, and, throwing the veil of her bonnet violently back, as if fighting it, she looked after us, pointing at Mrs. Crewe. Seriously frightened, Mrs. Crewe seized my father's arm, and hurried up two or three steps into a small apartment. Here Mrs. Crewe, addressing herself to an elderly gentleman, asked if he could inform the people below that a mad woman was terrifying the company ; and while he was receiving her commission with the most profound respect, and with an evident air of admiring astonishment at her beauty, we heard a rustling, and, looking round, saw the same figure hastily striding after us, and in an instant at our elbows. Mrs. Crewe turned quite pale ; it was palpable she was the object pursued, and she most civilly and meekly articulated, "I beg your pardon, ma'am," as she hastily passed her, and hurried down the steps. We were going to run for our lives, Page 466 when Miss Townshend whispered Mrs. Crewe it was Only Mrs. Wells the actress, and said she was certainly Only performing vagaries to try effect, which she was quite famous for doing. It would have been food for a painter to have seen Mrs. Crewe during this explanation. All her terror instantly gave way to indignation; and scarcely any pencil could equal the high vivid glow of her cheeks. To find herself made the object of game to the burlesque humour of a bold player, was an indignity she could not brook, and her mind was immediately at work how to assist herself against such unprovoked and unauthorized effrontery. The elderly gentleman who, with great eagerness, had followed Mrs. Crewe, accompanied by a young man who was of his party, requested more particularly her commands ; but before Mrs. Crewe's astonishment and resentment found words, Mrs. Wells, singing, and throwing herself into extravagant attitudes, again rushed down the steps, and fixed her eyes on Mrs. Crewe. This, however, no longer served her purpose. Mrs. Crewe fixed her in return, and with a firm, composed, commanding air and look that, though it did not make this strange creature retreat, somewhat disconcerted her for a few minutes. She then presently affected a violent coughing such a one as almost shook the room; though such a forced and unnatural noise as rather resembled howling than a cold. This over, and perceiving Mrs, Crewe still steadily keeping her ground, she had the courage to come up to us, and, with a flippant air, said to the elderly gentleman, "Pray, sir, will you tell me what it is o'clock?" He looked vexed to be called a moment from looking at Mrs. Crewe, and, with a forbidding gravity, answered her, "About two." "No offence, I hope, sir?" cried she, seeing him turn eagerly from her. He bowed without looking at her, and she strutted away, still, however, keeping in sight, and playing various tricks, her eyes perpetually turned towards Mrs. Crewe, who as regularly, met them, with an expression such as might have turned a softer culprit to stone. Our cabal was again renewed, and Mrs. Crewe again told this gentleman to make known to the proprietors of the gallery that this person was a nuisance to the company, when, suddenly re-approaching as, she called out, "Sir! sir!" to the younger of our new protectors. He coloured, and looked much alarmed, but only bowed. Page 467 "Pray, sir," cried she, "what's o'clock?" He looked at his watch, and answered. "You don't take it ill, I hope, sir?" she cried. He only bowed. "I do no harm, sir," said she; "I never bite." The poor young man looked aghast, and bowed lower; but Mrs. Crewe, addressing herself to the elder, said aloud, "I beg you, sir, to go to Mr. Boydell; you may name me to him--Mrs. Crewe." Mrs. Wells at this walked away, yet still in sight. "You may tell him what has happened, sir, in all our names. You may tell him Miss Burney--" "O no!" cried I, in a horrid fright, "I beseech I may not be named! And, indeed, ma'am, it may be better to let it all alone. It will do no good; and it may all get into the newspapers." "And if it does," cried Mrs. Crewe, "what is it to us? We have done nothing; we have given no offence, and made no disturbance. This person has frightened us all wilfully, and Utterly without provocation; and now she can frighten us no longer, she would brave us. Let her tell her own story, and how will it harm us?" "Still," cried I, "I must always fear being brought into any newspaper cabals. Let the fact be ever so much against her, she will think the circumstances all to her honour if a paragraph comes out beginning 'Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Wells.'" Mrs. Crewe liked this sound as little as I should have liked it in placing my own name where I put hers. She hesitated a little what to do, and we all walked down-stairs, where instantly this bold woman followed us, paraded Up and down the long shop with a dramatic air while our group was in conference, and then, sitting down at the clerk's desk, and calling in a footman, she desired him to wait while she wrote a note. She scribbled a few lines, and read aloud her direction, "To Mr. Topham;" and giving the note to the man, said, "Tell your master that is something to make him laugh. Bid him not send to the press till I see him." Now as Mr. Topham is the editor of "The World," and notoriously her protector, as her having his footman acknowledged, this looked rather serious, and Mrs. Crewe began to partake of my alarm. She therefore, to my infinite satisfaction, told her new friend that she desired he would name no names, but merely mention that some ladies had been frightened. . . . Page 468 We then got into Mrs. Crewe's carriage, and not till then would this facetious Mrs. Wells quit the shop. And she walked in sight, dodging us, and playing antics of a tragic sort of gesture, till we drove out of her power to keep up with us. What a strange creature! AN INVITATION FROM ARTHUR YOUNG. (Mr. Arthur Young to Fanny Burney.) Bradfield Farm, June 18, 1792. WHAT a plaguy business 'tis to take up one's pen to write to a person who is constantly moving in a vortex of pleasure, brilliancy, and wit,--whose movements and connections are, as it were, in another world! One knows not how to manage the matter with such folks, till you find by a little approximation and friction of tempers and things that they are mortal, and no more than good sort of people in the main, only garnished with something we do not possess ourselves. Now then, the consequence. Only three pages to write, and one lost in introduction! To the matter at last. It seemeth that you make a journey to Norfolk. Now do ye see, if you do not give a call on the farmer, and examine his ram (an old acquaintance), his bull, his lambs, calves, and crops, he will say but one thing of you--that you are fit for a court, but not for a farm; and there is more happiness to be found among my rooks than in the midst of all the princes and princesses of Golconda. I would give an hundred pound to see you married to a farmer that never saw London, with plenty of poultry ranging in a few green fields, and flowers and shrubs disposed where they should be, around a cottage, and not around a breakfast-room in Portman-square, fading in eyes that know not to admire them. In honest truth now, let me request your company here. It will give us all infinite pleasure. You are habituated to admiration, but you shall have here what is much better--the friendship of those who loved you long before the world admired you. Come, and make old friends happy! (346) The flight of the king and his family from Paris, on the night of June 20-21. They reached Varennes in safety the following night, but were there recognised and stopped, and the next day escorted back to Paris.-ED. (347) The reader will find in Green's "History of the English People," a widely different view of' the character of Dunstan. But Fanny knew only the old stories, and had, moreover, written a tragedy, "Edwy and Elgiva," in which Dunstan, in accordance with those old stories, appears as the villain.-ED. (348) Author of the "New Bath Guide."-ED. (349) Henrietta Frances, second daughter of John, first Earl Spencer, and younger sister of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, married Viscount Duncannon in 1780. She died in 1821.-ED. (350) Gibbon had good reason for his opinion of the power of Lady Elizabeth's charms. In 1787, he met her at Lausanne, a young widow of twenty-eight, and found her allurements so irresistible that he proposed marriage to her, and was rejected.-ED. (351) Mrs. Ord was a yet more violent Tory than Fanny herself, and would believe no good of the Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of the Whigs.-ED. (352) In the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," Fanny writes in more detail of this her last visit to Sir Joshua. "He was still more deeply depressed; though Miss Palmer good-humouredly drew a smile from him, by gaily exclaiming, 'Do, pray, now, uncle, ask Miss Burney to write another book directly! for we have almost finished Cecilia again--and this is our sixth reading of it!'" "The little occupation, Miss Palmer said, of which Sir joshua was then capable, was carefully dusting the paintings in his picture gallery, and placing them in different points of view. "This passed at the conclusion Of 1791; on the February of the following year, this friend, equally amiable and eminent, was no more! (Memoirs, vol. iii. P. 144).-ED. (353) The wife of Sir Lucas Pepys.-ED. (354) Afterwards Lord Ellenborough: the leading counsel for Hastings.-ED. (355) February 23, 1792.-ED. (356) The greater part of Sir joshua's large fortune was left to his unmarried niece, Mary Palmer. Considerable legacies were left to his niece, Mrs. Gwatkin (Offy Palmer), and to his friend Edmund Burke. In addition to these legacies, his will provided for a number of small bequests, including one of a thousand pounds to his old servant, Ralph Kirkley. In the following summer Mary Palmer married the Earl of Inchiquin, afterwards Marquis of Thomond. "He is sixty-nine," Fanny writes about that time of Lord Inchiquin; "but they say he is remarkably pleasing in his manners, and soft and amiable in his disposition."-ED. (357) He was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, near the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren.-ED. (358) The recent proclamation by the Government against the publication and sale of seditious writings. The "new associates" were members of the societies of sympathisers with the principles of the French Revolution, which, under such titles as "Friends of the People." "Corresponding Society," etc., were now spreading all over England.-ED. (359) The revolutionary clubs of Paris, the Jacobins' Club in particular, gradually acquired such power as enabled them to overawe the Legislative Assembly, and even, at a later date, the Convention itself. Their influence only ceased with the overthrow and death of their leader, Robespièrre, in 1794.-ED. (360) The wife and eldest daughter of Arthur Young, the well-known writer on agriculture. Mrs. Young was the sister of Dr. Burney's second Wife.-ED. (361) "Madame de Genlis's husband, the Count de Genlis, had become Marquis of Sillery by the death of his elder brother. He was a Revolutionist and member of the Girondin party: one of the twenty-two Girondins who perished by the guillotine, October 31, 1793. Madame de Genlis (or Brulard) had come to England in October, 1791, with her young pupil, Mlle. d'Orléans (Egalité), the daughter of Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans, whose physicians had ordered her to take the waters at Bath. They remained in England until November, 1792, when they were recalled to Paris by Egalité. Arriving there, they found themselves proscribed as emigrants, and obliged to quit Paris within eight-and-forty hours. They then took refuge in Flanders, and settled at Tournay where Pamela was married to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, subsequently one of the leaders in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. In Flanders Madame de Genlis enjoyed the protection of General Dumontiez, but when he became suspected, with too good reason, by the Convention, she was obliged again to take flight, and found safety at last with Mlle. d'Orléans, in Switzerland. Pamela was the adopted daughter of Madame de Genlis; some said her actual daughter by the Duke of Orleans; but this is at least doubtful. "Circe," or "Henrietta Circe," as Fanny afterwards calls her, was Madame de Genlis's niece, Henriette de Sercey (!), who subsequently married a rich merchant of Hamburg.-ED. VOL. 11. (362) "Is it possible? Am I so happy? Do I see my dear Miss Burney?" (363) Earl Macartney was sent as ambassador to China in 1793, for the purpose of concluding a commercial treaty with that power. He was unsuccessful, however, and, after spending some months in China, the embassy returned to England.-ED. (364) "Miss French, a lively niece of Mr. Burke's." (.Memoirs of Dr. Burney, vol. iii, p. 157.)-ED. (365) Burke was, of course, mistaken. When Wycherley died, at seventy-five (December, 1715), Mary Granville (afterwards Mrs. Delany) was in her sixteenth year. Wycherley, it is true, married a young wife on his deathbed, but it is certain that this was not Mary Granville; indeed, if Pope's account, given in Spence's "Anecdotes," may be trusted, it was a woman of very different character.-ED. (366) Alexander Wedderburn, afterwards Lord Loughborough, was born in or near Edinburgh in 1733. He attained distinction at the bar, and entered Parliament early in the reign of George III. As a politician he was equally notorious for his skill in debate and his want of public principle. Previously a member of the opposition, he ratted to the Government in 1771, and was rewarded by Lord North with the Solicitor-Generalship. He defended Lord Clive in 1773. When Thurlow became Lord Chancellor (in 1778), Wedderburn succeeded him in the office of Attorney-General. In 1786 he was made Chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and called to the House of Peers by the title of Baron Loughborough. After this we find him acting as a follower of Charles Fox, and leader of the Whig party in the House of Lords. He supported Fox's views on the Regency question in 1788-9, but when the split in the Whig party on the subject of the French Revolution took place, Loughborough, like Burke, gave his support to the government. In January, 1793, he obtained the long coveted post of Lord Chancellor. He died January 1, 1805. A story goes that when the news of Loughborough's death was brought to George III., "his majesty was graciously pleased to exclaim, 'Then he has not left a greater knave behind him in my dominions.'" (Campbell's "Lives of the Chancellors," vol. vi., p. 334.)-ED. (367) Thomas Erskine (born 1750, died 1823), "If less eminent in the law, was a far more respectable politician than Loughborough, although his parliamentary career was by no means so brilliant. He was a consistent Whig, with the courage of his convictions. He lost his post of Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales through his defence of Thomas Paine, author of the famous "Rights of Man," in December, 1792. Fired by the example of the French Revolutionists, the friends of liberty in England were, about this time, everywhere forming themselves into political associations, for the purpose of promoting Parliamentary reform, and generally "spreading the principles of freedom." By the government these societies were regarded as seditious. Erskine was a member of one or more of these associations, and one of his most brilliant triumphs at the bar was connected with the prosecution by government (October, 1794), of Hardy Thelwall and Horne Tooke for high treason, as members of one of these supposed seditious societies. The prisoners were defended by Erskine and acquitted. Erskine became Lord Chancellor in 1806 after the death of Pitt.-ED. (368) On his own admission Erskine was a member of the Society of Friends of the People about the end of 1792-ED. (369) With all his talents Erskine was always noted for his inordinate vanity.-ED. (370) The famous Lord Chief justice. He died in 1793, aged eighty-eight years.-ED. (371) Alderman Boydell's celebrated "Shakspeare Gallery" in Pall Mall, contained paintings illustrative of Shakspeare by Reynolds, Romney, Fuseli, and many others of the most distinguished painters of the day. The entire collection, comprising one hundred and seventy works, was sold by auction by Christie, in May, 1805.-ED. (372) For Arthur Young, see postea, vol. iii., p. 17. Bradfield Farm, his home was in Suffolk, in the neighbourhood of Bury St. Edmunds.-ED. 
43043	----	Transcriber's Note: This is Volume I of a three volume set: Volume I--Unknown Volume II--Famous Volume III--Sunset A combined index to the entire set is located at the end of Volume III. Narrative content written by J. Cross and material quoted from writers other than George Eliot are interspersed throughout the text. Their content is placed in block quotes. Remaining transcriber's notes are located at the end of the text. * * * * * GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE VOL. I.--UNKNOWN "OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY" [Illustration: Portrait of George Eliot. Etched by M. Rajon.] GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE _as related in her Letters and Journals_ ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND J. W. CROSS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME I NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS. _LIBRARY EDITION._ ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ESSAYS and LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50. ROMOLA. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. For other editions of George Eliot's works published by Harper & Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_. PREFACE. With the materials in my hands I have endeavored to form an _autobiography_ (if the term may be permitted) of George Eliot. The life has been allowed to write itself in extracts from her letters and journals. Free from the obtrusion of any mind but her own, this method serves, I think, better than any other open to me, to show the development of her intellect and character. In dealing with the correspondence I have been influenced by the desire to make known the woman, as well as the author, through the presentation of her daily life. On the intellectual side there remains little to be learned by those who already know George Eliot's books. In the twenty volumes which she wrote and published in her lifetime will be found her best and ripest thoughts. The letters now published throw light on another side of her nature--not less important, but hitherto unknown to the public--the side of the affections. The intimate life was the core of the root from which sprung the fairest flowers of her inspiration. Fame came to her late in life, and, when it presented itself, was so weighted with the sense of responsibility that it was in truth a rose with many thorns, for George Eliot had the temperament that shrinks from the position of a public character. The belief in the wide, and I may add in the beneficent, effect of her writing was no doubt the highest happiness, the reward of the artist which she greatly cherished: but the joys of the hearthside, the delight in the love of her friends, were the supreme pleasures in her life. By arranging all the letters and journals so as to form one connected whole, keeping the order of their dates, and with the least possible interruption of comment, I have endeavored to combine a narrative of day-to-day life, with the play of light and shade which only letters, written in various moods, can give, and without which no portrait can be a good likeness. I do not know that the particular method in which I have treated the letters has ever been adopted before. Each letter has been pruned of everything that seemed to me irrelevant to my purpose--of everything that I thought my wife would have wished to be omitted. Every sentence that remains adds, in my judgment, something (however small it may be) to the means of forming a conclusion about her character. I ought perhaps to say a word of apology for what may appear to be undue detail of travelling experiences; but I hope that to many readers these will be interesting, as reflected through George Eliot's mind. The remarks on works of art are only meant to be records of impressions. She would have deprecated for herself the attitude of an art critic. Excepting a slight introductory sketch of the girlhood, up to the time when letters became available, and a few words here and there to elucidate the correspondence, I have confined myself to the work of selection and arrangement. I have refrained almost entirely from quoting remembered sayings by George Eliot, because it is difficult to be certain of complete accuracy, and everything depends upon accuracy. Recollections of conversation are seldom to be implicitly trusted in the absence of notes made at the time. The value of spoken words depends, too, so much upon the _tone_, and on the circumstances which gave rise to their utterance, that they often mislead as much as they enlighten, when, in the process of repetition, they have taken color from another mind. "All interpretations depend upon the interpreter," and I have judged it best to let George Eliot be her own interpreter, as far as possible. I owe thanks to Mr. Isaac Evans, the brother of my wife, for much of the information in regard to her child-life; and the whole book is a long record of debts due to other friends for letters. It is not, therefore, necessary for me to recapitulate the list of names in this place. My thanks to all are heartfelt. But there is a very special acknowledgment due to Miss Sara Hennell, to Mrs. Bray, and to the late Mr. Charles Bray of Coventry, not only for the letters which they placed at my disposal, but also for much information given to me in the most friendly spirit. The very important part of the life from 1842 to 1854 could not possibly have been written without their contribution. To Mr. Charles Lewes, also, I am indebted for some valuable letters and extracts from the journals of his father, besides the letters addressed to himself. He also obtained for me an important letter written by George Eliot to Mr. R. H. Hutton; and throughout the preparation of the book I have had the advantage of his sympathetic interest, and his concurrence in the publication of all the materials. Special thanks are likewise due to Messrs. Wm. Blackwood & Sons for having placed at my disposal George Eliot's long correspondence with the firm. The letters (especially those addressed to her friend the late Mr. John Blackwood) throw a light, that could not otherwise have been obtained, on the most interesting part of her literary career. To the legal representatives of the late Charles Dickens, of the late Lord Lytton, and of Mrs. Carlyle; to Mr. J. A. Froude, and to Mr. Archer Gurney, I owe thanks for leave to print letters written by them. For all the defects that there may be in the plan of these volumes I alone am responsible. The lines were determined and the work was substantially put into shape before I submitted the manuscript to any one. While passing the winter in the south of France I had the good fortune at Cannes to find, in Lord Acton, not only an enthusiastic admirer of George Eliot, but also a friend always most kindly ready to assist me with valuable counsel and with cordial, generous sympathy. He was the first reader of the manuscript, and whatever accuracy may have been arrived at, particularly in the names of foreign books, foreign persons, and foreign places, is in great part due to his friendly, careful help. But of course he has no responsibility whatever for any of my sins of omission or commission. By the kind permission of Sir Frederic Burton, I have been enabled to reproduce as a frontispiece M. Rajon's etching of the beautiful drawing, executed in 1864, now in the National Portrait Gallery, South Kensington. The view of the old house at Rosehill is from a drawing by Mrs. Bray. It is connected with some of George Eliot's happiest experiences, and with the period of her most rapid intellectual development. For permission to use the sketch of the drawing-room at the Priory I am indebted to the Messrs. Harpers, of New York. In conclusion, it is in no conventional spirit, but from my heart, that I bespeak the indulgence of readers for my share of this work. Of its shortcomings no one can be so convinced as I am myself. J. W. C. CAMDEN HILL, _December, 1884_. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. Introductory Sketch of Childhood. Page 1 CHAPTER I. AUGUST, 1838, TO MARCH, 1841. Life at Griff 28 CHAPTER II. MARCH, 1841, TO APRIL, 1846. Coventry--Translation of Strauss 61 CHAPTER III. MAY, 1846, TO MAY, 1849. Life in Coventry till Mr. Evans's Death 106 CHAPTER IV. JUNE, 1849, TO MARCH, 1850. Geneva 150 CHAPTER V. MARCH, 1850, TO JULY, 1854. Work in London--Union with Mr. Lewes 181 CHAPTER VI. JULY, 1854, TO MARCH, 1855. Germany 239 CHAPTER VII. MARCH, 1855, TO DECEMBER, 1857. Richmond--"Scenes of Clerical Life" 273 APPENDIX 349 ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I. PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ELIOT. Etched by M. Rajon _Frontispiece._ GRIFF--FRONT VIEW _To face p_. 6 GRIFF--WITH THE FARM OFFICES " 12 HOUSE IN FOLESHILL ROAD, COVENTRY " 62 PORTRAIT OF MR. ROBERT EVANS " 148 ROSEHILL " 182 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE. _INTRODUCTORY SKETCH OF CHILDHOOD._ "_Nov. 22, 1819._--Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm,[1] at five o'clock this morning." This is an entry, in Mr. Robert Evans's handwriting, on the page of an old diary that now lies before me, and records, with characteristic precision, the birth of his youngest child, afterwards known to the world as George Eliot. Let us pause for a moment to pay its due homage to the precision, because it was in all probability to this most noteworthy quality of her father's nature that the future author was indebted for one of the principal elements of her own after-success--the enormous faculty for taking pains. The baby was born on St. Cecilia's day, and Mr. Evans, being a good churchman, takes her, on the 29th November, to be baptized in the church at Chilvers Coton--the parish in which Arbury Farm lies--a church destined to impress itself strongly on the child's imagination, and to be known by many people in many lands afterwards as Shepperton Church. The father was a remarkable man, and many of the leading traits in his character are to be found in Adam Bede and in Caleb Garth--although, of course, neither of these is a portrait. He was born in 1773, at Ellaston, in Staffordshire, son of a George Evans, who carried on the business of builder and carpenter there: the Evans family having come originally from Northop, in Flintshire. Robert was brought up to the business; but about 1799, or a little before, he held a farm of Mr. Francis Newdigate at Kirk Hallam, in Derbyshire, and became his agent. On Sir Roger Newdigate's death the Arbury estate came to Mr. Francis Newdigate for his life, and Mr. Evans accompanied him into Warwickshire, in 1806, in the capacity of agent. In 1801 he had married Harriott Poynton, by whom he had two children--Robert, born 1802, at Ellaston, and Frances Lucy, born 1805, at Kirk Hallam. His first wife died in 1809; and on 8th February, 1813, he married Christiana Pearson, by whom he had three children--Christiana, born 1814; Isaac, born 1816, and Mary Ann, born 1819. Shortly after the last child's birth, Robert, the son, became the agent, under his father, for the Kirk Hallam property, and lived there with his sister Frances, who afterwards married a Mr. Houghton. In March, 1820, when the baby girl was only four months old, the Evans family removed to Griff, a charming red-brick, ivy-covered house on the Arbury estate--"the warm little nest where her affections were fledged"--and there George Eliot spent the first twenty-one years of her life. Let us remember what the England was upon which this observant child opened her eyes. The date of her birth was removed from the beginning of the French Revolution by just the same period of time as separates a child, born this year, 1884, from the beginning of the Crimean War. To a man of forty-six to-day, the latter event seems but of yesterday. It took place at a very impressionable period of his life, and the remembrance of every detail is perfectly vivid. Mr. Evans was forty-six when his youngest child was born. He was a youth of sixteen when the Revolution began, and that mighty event, with all its consequences, had left an indelible impression on him, and the convictions and conclusions it had fostered in his mind permeated through to his children, and entered as an indestructible element into the susceptible soul of his youngest daughter. There are bits in the paper "Looking Backward," in "Theophrastus Such," which are true autobiography. "In my earliest remembrance of my father his hair was already gray, for I was his youngest child, and it seemed to me that advanced age was appropriate to a father, as, indeed, in all respects I considered him a parent so much to my honor that the mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger--his stories from his life including so many names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship.... Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of ill-founded self-confidence.... And I often smile at my consciousness that certain Conservative prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influences of our Midland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups and the little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my father's prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when the great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy regeneration of all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial initiative of France was turning into a Napoleonic empire.... To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the scoundrel; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong government which could maintain order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word 'government' in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my effective religion, in contrast with the word 'rebel,' which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed inquiry." This early association of ideas must always be borne in mind, as it is the key to a great deal in the mental attitude of the future thinker and writer. It is the foundation of the latent Conservative bias. The year 1819 is memorable as a culminating period of bad times and political discontent in England. The nation was suffering acutely from the reaction after the excitement of the last Napoleonic war. George IV. did not come to the throne till January, 1820, so that George Eliot was born in the reign of George III. The trial of Queen Caroline was the topic of absorbing public interest. Waterloo was not yet an affair of five years old. Byron had four years, and Goethe had thirteen years, still to live. The last of Miss Austen's novels had been published only eighteen months, and the first of the Waverley series only six years before. Thackeray and Dickens were boys at school, and George Sand, as a girl of fifteen, was leaving her loved freedom on the banks of the Indre for the Convent des Anglaises at Paris. That "Greater Britain" (Canada and Australia), which to-day forms so large a reading public, was then scarcely more than a geographical expression, with less than half a million of inhabitants, all told, where at present there are eight millions; and in the United States, where more copies of George Eliot's books are now sold than in any other quarter of the world, the population then numbered less than ten millions where to-day it is fifty-five millions. Including Great Britain, these English-speaking races have increased from thirty millions in 1820 to one hundred millions in 1884; and with the corresponding increase in education we can form some conception how a popular English writer's fame has widened its circle. There was a remoteness about a detached country-house, in the England of those days, difficult for us to conceive now, with our railways, penny-post, and telegraphs; nor is the Warwickshire country about Griff an exhilarating surrounding. There are neither hills nor vales, no rivers, lakes, or sea--nothing but a monotonous succession of green fields and hedgerows, with some fine trees. The only water to be seen is the "brown canal." The effect of such a landscape on an ordinary observer is not inspiring, but "effective magic is transcendent nature;" and with her transcendent nature George Eliot has transfigured these scenes, dear to Midland souls, into many an idyllic picture, known to those who know her books. In her childhood the great event of the day was the passing of the coach before the gate of Griff House, which lies at a bend of the high-road between Coventry and Nuneaton, and within a couple of miles of the mining village of Bedworth, "where the land began to be blackened with coal-pits, the rattle of hand-looms to be heard in hamlets and villages. Here were powerful men walking queerly, with knees bent outward from squatting in the mine, going home to throw themselves down in their blackened flannel and sleep through the daylight, then rise and spend much of their high wages at the alehouse with their fellows of the Benefit Club; here the pale, eager faces of hand-loom weavers, men and women, haggard from sitting up late at night to finish the week's work, hardly begun till the Wednesday. Everywhere the cottages and the small children were dirty, for the languid mothers gave their strength to the loom; pious Dissenting women, perhaps, who took life patiently, and thought that salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not at all on cleanliness. The gables of Dissenting chapels now made a visible sign of religion, and of a meeting-place to counterbalance the alehouse, even in the hamlets.... Here was a population not convinced that old England was as good as possible; here were multitudinous men and women aware that their religion was not exactly the religion of their rulers, who might therefore be better than they were, and who, if better, might alter many things which now made the world perhaps more painful than it need be, and certainly more sinful. Yet there were the gray steeples too, and the churchyards, with their grassy mounds and venerable headstones, sleeping in the sunlight; there were broad fields and homesteads, and fine old woods covering a rising ground, or stretching far by the roadside, allowing only peeps at the park and mansion which they shut in from the working-day world. In these midland districts the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another; after looking down on a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighborhood of the town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay, and where men with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say that 'they never meddled with politics themselves.'"[2] [Illustration: Griff House--Front view.] We can imagine the excitement of a little four-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother waiting, on bright frosty mornings, to hear the far-off ringing beat of the horses' feet upon the hard ground, and then to see the gallant appearance of the four grays, with coachman and guard in scarlet, outside passengers muffled up in furs, and baskets of game and other packages hanging behind the boot, as his majesty's mail swung cheerily round on its way from Birmingham to Stamford. Two coaches passed the door daily--one from Birmingham at 10 o'clock in the morning, the other from Stamford at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. These were the chief connecting links between the household at Griff and the outside world. Otherwise life went on with that monotonous regularity which distinguishes the country from the town. And it is to these circumstances of her early life that a great part of the quality of George Eliot's writing is due, and that she holds the place she has attained in English literature. Her roots were down in the pre-railroad, pre-telegraphic period--the days of fine old leisure--but the fruit was formed during an era of extraordinary activity in scientific and mechanical discovery. Her genius was the outcome of these conditions. It would not have existed in the same form deprived of either influence. Her father was busy both with his own farm-work and increasing agency business. He was already remarked in Warwickshire for his knowledge and judgment in all matters relating to land, and for his general trustworthiness and high character, so that he was constantly selected as arbitrator and valuer. He had a wonderful eye, especially for valuing woods, and could calculate with almost absolute precision the quantity of available timber in a standing tree. In addition to his merits as a man of business, he had the good fortune to possess the warm friendship and consistent support of Colonel Newdigate of Astley Castle, son of Mr. Francis Newdigate of Arbury, and it was mainly through the colonel's introduction and influence that Mr. Evans became agent also to Lord Aylesford, Lord Lifford, Mr. Bromley Davenport, and several others. His position cannot be better summed up than in the words of his daughter, writing to Mr. Bray on 30th September, 1859, in regard to some one who had written of her, after the appearance of "Adam Bede," as a "self-educated farmer's daughter." "My father did not raise himself from being an artisan to be a farmer; he raised himself from being an artisan to be a man whose extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services valued through several counties. He had large knowledge of building, of mines, of plantations, of various branches of valuation and measurement--of all that is essential to the management of large estates. He was held by those competent to judge as _unique_ among land-agents for his manifold knowledge and experience, which enabled him to save the special fees usually paid by landowners for special opinions on the different questions incident to the proprietorship of land. So far as I am personally concerned I should not write a stroke to prevent any one, in the zeal of antithetic eloquence, from calling me a tinker's daughter; but if my father is to be mentioned at all--if he is to be identified with an imaginary character--my piety towards his memory calls on me to point out to those who are supposed to speak with information what he really achieved in life." Mr. Evans was also, like Adam Bede, noteworthy for his extraordinary physical strength and determination of character. There is a story told of him, that one day when he was travelling on the top of a coach, down in Kent, a decent woman sitting next him complained that a great hulking sailor on her other side was making himself offensive. Mr. Evans changed places with the woman, and, taking the sailor by the collar, forced him down under the seat, and held him there with an iron hand for the remainder of the stage: and at Griff it is still remembered that the master, happening to pass one day while a couple of laborers were waiting for a third to help to move the high, heavy ladder used for thatching ricks, braced himself up to a great effort, and carried the ladder alone and unaided from one rick to the other, to the wide-eyed wonder and admiration of his men. With all this strength, however, both of body and of character, he seems to have combined a certain self-distrust, owing, perhaps, to his early imperfect education, which resulted in a general submissiveness in his domestic relations, more or less portrayed in the character of Mr. Garth. His second wife was a woman with an unusual amount of natural force; a shrewd, practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs. Poyser vein in her. Hers was an affectionate, warm-hearted nature, and her children, on whom she cast "the benediction of her gaze," were thoroughly attached to her. She came of a race of yeomen, and her social position was, therefore, rather better than her husband's at the time of their marriage. Her family are, no doubt, prototypes of the Dodsons in the "Mill on the Floss." There were three other sisters married, and all living in the neighborhood of Griff--Mrs. Everard, Mrs. Johnson, and Mrs. Garner--and probably Mr. Evans heard a good deal about "the traditions in the Pearson family." Mrs. Evans was a very active, hard-working woman, but shortly after her last child's birth she became ailing in health, and consequently her eldest girl, Christiana, was sent to school, at a very early age, to Miss Lathom's, at Attleboro, a village a mile or two from Griff, while the two younger children spent some part of their time every day at the cottage of a Mrs. Moore, who kept a dame's school close to Griff gates. The little girl very early became possessed with the idea that she was going to be a personage in the world; and Mr. Charles Lewes has told me an anecdote which George Eliot related of herself as characteristic of this period of her childhood. When she was only four years old she recollected playing on the piano, of which she did not know one note, in order to impress the servant with a proper notion of her acquirements and generally distinguished position. This was the time when the love for her brother grew into the child's affections. She used always to be at his heels, insisting on doing everything he did. She was not, in these baby-days, in the least precocious in learning. In fact, her half-sister, Mrs. Houghton, who was some fourteen years her senior, told me that the child learned to read with some difficulty; but Mr. Isaac Evans says that this was not from any slowness in apprehension, but because she liked playing so much better. Mere sharpness, however, was not a characteristic of her mind. Hers was a large, slow-growing nature; and I think it is, at any rate, certain that there was nothing of the infant phenomenon about her. In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life, namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all. Very jealous in her affections, and easily moved to smiles or tears, she was of a nature capable of the keenest enjoyment and the keenest suffering, knowing "all the wealth and all the woe" of a pre-eminently exclusive disposition. She was affectionate, proud, and sensitive in the highest degree. The sort of happiness that belongs to this budding-time of life, from the age of three to five, is apt to impress itself very strongly on the memory; and it is this period which is referred to in the Brother and Sister Sonnet, "But were another childhood's world my share, I would be born a little sister there." When her brother was eight years old he was sent to school at Coventry, and, her mother continuing in very delicate health, the little Mary Ann, now five years of age, went to join her sister at Miss Lathom's school, at Attleboro, where they continued as boarders for three or four years, coming, occasionally, home to Griff on Saturdays. During one of our walks at Witley, in 1880, my wife mentioned to me that what chiefly remained in her recollection about this very early school-life was the difficulty of getting near enough the fire in winter to become thoroughly warmed, owing to the circle of girls forming round too narrow a fireplace. This suffering from cold was the beginning of a low general state of health; also at this time she began to be subject to fears at night--"the susceptibility to terror"--which she has described as haunting Gwendolen Harleth in her childhood. The other girls in the school, who were all, naturally, very much older, made a great pet of the child, and used to call her "little mamma," and she was not unhappy except at nights; but she told me that this liability to have "all her soul become a quivering fear," which remained with her afterwards, had been one of the supremely important influences dominating at times her future life. Mr. Isaac Evans's chief recollection of this period is the delight of the little sister at his home-coming for holidays, and her anxiety to know all that he had been doing and learning. The eldest child, who went by the name of Chrissey, was the chief favorite of the aunts, as she was always neat and tidy, and used to spend a great deal of her time with them, while the other two were inseparable playfellows at home. The boy was his mother's pet and the girl her father's. They had everything to make children happy at Griff--a delightful old-fashioned garden, a pond and the canal to fish in, and the farm-offices close to the house, "the long cow-shed, where generations of the milky mothers have stood patiently, the broad-shouldered barns, where the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music," and where butter-making and cheese-making were carried on with great vigor by Mrs. Evans. [Illustration: Griff--with the Farm Offices.] Any one, about this time, who happened to look through the window on the left-hand side of the door of Griff House would have seen a pretty picture in the dining-room on Saturday evenings after tea. The powerful, middle-aged man with the strongly marked features sits in his deep, leather-covered arm-chair, at the right-hand corner of the ruddy fireplace, with the head of "the little wench" between his knees. The child turns over the book with pictures that she wishes her father to explain to her--or that perhaps she prefers explaining to him. Her rebellious hair is all over her eyes, much vexing the pale, energetic mother who sits on the opposite side of the fire, cumbered with much service, letting no instant of time escape the inevitable click of the knitting-needles, accompanied by epigrammatic speech. The elder girl, prim and tidy, with her work before her, is by her mother's side; and the brother, between the two groups, keeps assuring himself by perpetual search that none of his favorite means of amusement are escaping from his pockets. The father is already very proud of the astonishing and growing intelligence of his little girl. From a very early age he has been in the habit of taking her with him in his drives about the neighborhood, "standing between her father's knees as he drove leisurely," so that she has drunk in knowledge of the country and of country folk at all her pores. An old-fashioned child, already living in a world of her own imagination, impressible to her finger-tips, and willing to give her views on any subject. The first book that George Eliot read, so far as I have been able to ascertain, was a little volume published in 1822, entitled "The Linnet's Life," which she gave to me in the last year of her life, at Witley. It bears the following inscription, written some time before she gave it to me: "This little book is the first present I ever remember having received from my father. Let any one who thinks of me with some tenderness after I am dead take care of this book for my sake. It made me very happy when I held it in my little hands, and read it over and over again; and thought the pictures beautiful, especially the one where the linnet is feeding her young." It must, I think, have been very shortly after she received this present that an old friend of the family, who was in the habit of coming as a visitor to Griff from time to time, used occasionally to bring a book in his hand for the little girl. I very well remember her expressing to me deep gratitude for this early ministration to her childish delights; and Mr. Burne Jones has been kind enough to tell me of a conversation with George Eliot about children's books, when she also referred to this old gentleman's kindness. They were agreeing in disparagement of some of the books that the rising generation take their pleasure in, and she recalled the dearth of child-literature in her own home, and her passionate delight and total absorption in �sop's Fables (given to her by the aforesaid old gentleman), the possession of which had opened new worlds to her imagination. Mr. Burne Jones particularly remembers how she laughed till the tears ran down her face in recalling her infantine enjoyment of the humor in the fable of Mercury and the Statue-seller. Having so few books at this time, she read them again and again, until she knew them by heart. One of them was a Joe Miller jest-book, with the stories from which she used greatly to astonish the family circle. But the beginning of her serious reading-days did not come till later. Meantime her talent for observation gained a glorious new field for employment in her first journey from home, which took place in 1826. Her father and mother took her with them on a little trip into Derbyshire and Staffordshire, where she saw Mr. Evans's relations, and they came back through Lichfield, sleeping at the Swan.[3] They were away only a week, from the 18th to the 24th of May; but "what time is little" to an imaginative, observant child of seven on her first journey? About this time a deeply felt crisis occurred in her life, as her brother had a pony given to him, to which he became passionately attached. He developed an absorbing interest in riding, and cared less and less to play with his sister. The next important event happened in her eighth or ninth year, when she was sent to Miss Wallington's school at Nuneaton with her sister. This was a much larger school than Miss Lathom's, there being some thirty girls, boarders. The principal governess was Miss Lewis, who became then, and remained for many years after, Mary Ann Evans's most intimate friend and principal correspondent, and I am indebted to the letters addressed to her from 1836 to 1842 for most of the information concerning that period. Books now became a passion with the child; she read everything she could lay hands on, greatly troubling the soul of her mother by the consumption of candles as well as of eyesight in her bedroom. From a subsequent letter it will be seen that she was "early supplied with works of fiction by those who kindly sought to gratify her appetite for reading." It must have been about this time that the episode occurred in relation to "Waverley" which is mentioned by Miss Simcox in her article in the June, 1881, number of the _Nineteenth Century Review_. It was quite new to me, and, as it is very interesting, I give it in Miss Simcox's own words: "Somewhere about 1827 a friendly neighbor lent 'Waverley' to an elder sister of little Mary Ann Evans. It was returned before the child had read to the end, and, in her distress at the loss of the fascinating volume, she began to write out the story as far as she had read it for herself, beginning naturally where the story begins with Waverley's adventures at Tully Veolan, and continuing until the surprised elders were moved to get her the book again." Miss Simcox has pointed out the reference to this in the motto of the 57th chapter of "Middlemarch:" "They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain, lake, and scaur, And larger yet with wonder, love, belief Towards Walter Scott, who, living far away, Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but, day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran, They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan." Miss Simcox also mentions that "Elia divided her childish allegiance with Scott, and she remembered feasting with singular pleasure upon an extract in some stray almanac from the essay in commemoration of 'Captain Jackson and his slender ration of Single Gloucester.' This is an extreme example of the general rule that a wise child's taste in literature is sounder than adults generally venture to believe." We know, too, from the "Mill on the Floss" that the "History of the Devil," by Daniel Defoe, was a favorite. The book is still religiously preserved at Griff, with its pictures just as Maggie looked at them. "The Pilgrim's Progress," also, and "Rasselas" had a large share of her affections. At Miss Wallington's the growing girl soon distinguished herself by an easy mastery of the usual school-learning of her years, and there, too, the religious side of her nature was developed to a remarkable degree. Miss Lewis was an ardent Evangelical Churchwoman, and exerted a strong influence on her young pupil, whom she found very sympathetically inclined. But Mary Ann Evans did not associate freely with her schoolfellows, and her friendship with Miss Lewis was the only intimacy she indulged in. On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began, about this time, the habit of acting charades together before the Griff household and the aunts, who were greatly impressed with the cleverness of the performance; and the girl was now recognized in the family circle as no ordinary child. Another epoch presently succeeded, on her removal to Miss Franklin's school at Coventry, in her thirteenth year. She was probably then very much what she has described her own Maggie at the age of thirteen: "A creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it." In _Our Times_ of June, 1881, there is a paper by a lady whose mother was at school with Mary Ann Evans, which gives some interesting particulars of the Miss Franklins. "They were daughters of a Baptist minister who had preached for many years in Coventry, and who inhabited, during his pastorate, a house in the chapel-yard almost exactly resembling that of Rufus Lyon in 'Felix Holt.' For this venerable gentleman Miss Evans, as a schoolgirl, had a great admiration, and I, who can remember him well, can trace in Rufus Lyon himself many slight resemblances, such as the 'little legs,' and the habit of walking up and down when composing. Miss Rebecca Franklin was a lady of considerable intellectual power, and remarkable for her elegance in writing and conversation, as well as for her beautiful calligraphy. In her classes for English Composition Mary Ann Evans was, from her first entering the school, far in advance of the rest; and while the themes of the other children were read, criticised, and corrected in class, hers were reserved for the private perusal and enjoyment of the teacher, who rarely found anything to correct. Her enthusiasm for music was already very strongly marked, and her music-master, a much-tried man, suffering from the irritability incident to his profession, reckoned on his hour with her as a refreshment to his wearied nerves, and soon had to confess that he had no more to teach her. In connection with this proficiency in music, my mother recalls her sensitiveness at that time as being painfully extreme. When there were visitors, Miss Evans, as the best performer in the school, was sometimes summoned to the parlor to play for their amusement, and though suffering agonies from shyness and reluctance, she obeyed with all readiness, but, on being released, my mother has often known her to rush to her room and throw herself on the floor in an agony of tears. Her schoolfellows loved her as much as they could venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to themselves, and she had playful nicknames for most of them. My mother, who was delicate, and to whom she was very kind, was dubbed by her 'Miss Equanimity.' A source of great interest to the girls, and of envy to those who lived farther from home, was the weekly cart which brought Miss Evans new-laid eggs and other delightful produce of her father's farm." In talking about these early days, my wife impressed on my mind the debt she felt that she owed to the Miss Franklins for their excellent instruction, and she had also the very highest respect for their moral qualities. With her chameleon-like nature she soon adopted their religious views with intense eagerness and conviction, although she never formally joined the Baptists or any other communion than the Church of England. She at once, however, took a foremost place in the school, and became a leader of prayer-meetings among the girls. In addition to a sound English education the Miss Franklins managed to procure for their pupils excellent masters for French, German, and music; so that, looking to the lights of those times, the means of obtaining knowledge were very much above the average for girls. Her teachers, on their side, were very proud of their exceptionally gifted scholar; and years afterwards, when Miss Evans came with her father to live in Coventry, they introduced her to one of their friends, not only as a marvel of mental power, but also as a person "sure to get something up very soon in the way of clothing-club or other charitable undertaking." This year, 1832, was not only memorable for the change to a new and superior school, but it was also much more memorable to George Eliot for the riot which she saw at Nuneaton, on the occasion of the election for North Warwickshire, after the passing of the great Reform Bill, and which subsequently furnished her with the incidents for the riot in "Felix Holt." It was an event to lay hold on the imagination of an impressionable girl of thirteen, and it is thus described in the local newspaper of 29th December, 1832: "On Friday, the 21st December, at Nuneaton, from the commencement of the poll till nearly half-past two, the Hemingites[4] occupied the poll; the numerous plumpers for Sir Eardley Wilmot and the adherents of Mr. Dugdale being constantly interrupted in their endeavors to go to the hustings to give an honest and conscientious vote. The magistrates were consequently applied to, and from the representations they received from all parties, they were at length induced to call in aid a military force. A detachment of the Scots Greys accordingly arrived; but it appearing that that gallant body was not sufficiently strong to put down the turbulent spirit of the mob, a reinforcement was considered by the constituted authorities as absolutely necessary. The tumult increasing, as the detachment of the Scots Greys were called in, the Riot Act was read from the windows of the Newdigate Arms; and we regret to add that both W. P. Inge, Esq., and Colonel Newdigate, in the discharge of their magisterial duties, received personal injuries. "On Saturday the mob presented an appalling appearance, and but for the forbearance of the soldiery numerous lives would have fallen a sacrifice. Several of the officers of the Scots Greys were materially hurt in their attempt to quell the riotous proceedings of the mob. During the day the sub-sheriffs at the different booths received several letters from the friends of Mr. Dugdale, stating that they were outside of the town, and anxious to vote for that gentleman, but were deterred from entering it from fear of personal violence. Two or three unlucky individuals, drawn from the files of the military on their approach to the poll, were cruelly beaten, and stripped literally naked. We regret to add that one life has been sacrificed during the contest, and that several misguided individuals have been seriously injured." The term ending Christmas, 1835, was the last spent at Miss Franklin's. In the first letter of George Eliot's that I have been able to discover, dated 6th January, 1836, and addressed to Miss Lewis, who was at that time governess in the family of the Rev. L. Harper, Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, she speaks of her mother having suffered a great increase of pain, and adds-- "We dare not hope that there will be a permanent improvement. Our anxieties on my mother's account, though so great, have been since Thursday almost lost sight of in the more sudden, and consequently more severe, trial which we have been called on to endure in the alarming illness of my dear father. For four days we had no cessation of our anxiety; but I am thankful to say that he is now considered out of danger, though very much reduced by frequent bleeding and very powerful medicines." In the summer of this year--1836--the mother died, after a long, painful illness, in which she was nursed with great devotion by her daughters. It was their first acquaintance with death; and to a highly wrought, sensitive girl of sixteen such a loss seems an unendurable calamity. "To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair." Many references will be found in the subsequent correspondence to what she suffered at this time, all summed up in the old popular phrase, "We can have but one mother." In the following spring Christiana was married to Mr. Edward Clarke, a surgeon practising at Meriden, in Warwickshire. One of Mr. Isaac Evans's most vivid recollections is that on the day of the marriage, after the bride's departure, he and his younger sister had "a good cry" together over the break-up of the old home-life, which of course could never be the same with the mother and the elder sister wanting. Twenty-three years later we shall find George Eliot writing, on the death of this sister, that she "had a very special feeling for her--stronger than any third person would think likely." The relation between the sisters was somewhat like that described as existing between Dorothea and Celia in "Middlemarch"--no intellectual affinity, but a strong family affection. In fact, my wife told me, that although Celia was not in any sense a portrait of her sister, she "had Chrissey continually in mind" in delineating Celia's character. But we must be careful not to found too much on such _suggestions_ of character in George Eliot's books; and this must particularly be borne in mind in the "Mill on the Floss." No doubt the early part of Maggie's portraiture is the best autobiographical representation we can have of George Eliot's own feelings in her childhood, and many of the incidents in the book are based on real experiences of family life, but so mixed with fictitious elements and situations that it would be absolutely misleading to trust to it as a true history. For instance, all that happened in real life between the brother and sister was, I believe, that as they grew up their characters, pursuits, and tastes diverged more and more widely. He took to his father's business, at which he worked steadily, and which absorbed most of his time and attention. He was also devoted to hunting, liked the ordinary pleasures of a young man in his circumstances, and was quite satisfied with the circle of acquaintance in which he moved. After leaving school at Coventry he went to a private tutor's at Birmingham, where he imbibed strong High-Church views. His sister had come back from the Miss Franklins' with ultra-Evangelical tendencies, and their differences of opinion used to lead to a good deal of animated argument. Miss Evans, as she now was, could not rest satisfied with a mere profession of faith without trying to shape her own life--and, it may be added, the lives around her--in accordance with her convictions. The pursuit of pleasure was a snare; dress was vanity; society was a danger. "From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation: her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity. And so it came to pass that she often lost the spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act; she often strove after too high a flight, and came down with her poor little half-fledged wings dabbled in the mud.... That is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism--the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy honors to be gathered and worn."[5] After Christiana's marriage the entire charge of the Griff establishment devolved on Mary Ann, who became a most exemplary housewife, learned thoroughly everything that had to be done, and, with her innate desire for perfection, was never satisfied unless her department was administered in the very best manner that circumstances permitted. She spent a great deal of time in visiting the poor, organizing clothing-clubs, and other works of active charity. But over and above this, as will be seen from the following letters, she was always prosecuting an active intellectual life of her own. Mr. Brezzi, a well-known master of modern languages at Coventry, used to come over to Griff regularly to give her lessons in Italian and German. Mr. M'Ewen, also from Coventry, continued her lessons in music, and she got through a large amount of miscellaneous reading by herself. In the evening she was always in the habit of playing to her father, who was very fond of music. But it requires no great effort of imagination to conceive that this life, though full of interests of its own, and the source from whence the future novelist drew the most powerful and the most touching of her creations, was, as a matter of fact, very monotonous, very difficult, very discouraging. It could scarcely be otherwise to a young girl with a full, passionate nature and hungry intellect, shut up in a farmhouse in the remote country. For there was no sympathetic human soul near with whom to exchange ideas on the intellectual and spiritual problems that were beginning to agitate her mind. "You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl."[6] This is a point of view that must be distinctly recognized by any one attempting to follow the development of George Eliot's character, and it will always be corrected by the other point of view which she has made so prominent in all her own writing--the soothing, strengthening, sacred influences of the home life, the home loves, the home duties. Circumstances in later life separated her from her kindred, but among her last letters it will be seen that she wrote to her brother in May, 1880, that "our long silence has never broken the affection for you that began when we were little ones"[7]--and she expresses her satisfaction in the growing prosperity of himself and all his family. It was a real gratification to her to hear from some Coventry friends that her nephew, the Rev. Frederic Evans, the present rector of Bedworth, was well spoken of as a preacher in the old familiar places, and in our last summer at Witley we often spoke of a visit to Warwickshire, that she might renew the sweet memories of her child-days. No doubt, the very monotony of her life at Griff, and the narrow field it presented for observation of society, added immeasurably to the intensity of a naturally keen mental vision, concentrating into a focus what might perhaps have become dissipated in more liberal surroundings. And though the field of observation was narrow in one sense, it included very various grades of society. Such fine places as Arbury, and Packington, the seat of Lord Aylesford, where she was being constantly driven by her father, affected the imagination and accentuated the social differences--differences which had a profound significance for such a sensitive and such an intellectually commanding character, and which left their mark on it. "No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the signs and luxuries of ladyhood] and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious sense can preoccupy the imagination."[8] The tone of her mind will be seen from the letters written during the following years, and I remember once, after we were married, when I was urging her to write her autobiography, she said, half sighing, half smiling, "The only thing I should care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair I suffered from of ever being able to achieve anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge of this might be a help to some other struggler"--adding, with a smile, "but, on the other hand, it might only lead to an increase of bad writing." _SUMMARY._ NOVEMBER 22, 1819, TO END OF 1837. Birth at Arbury Farm--Baptism--Character of father--His first marriage and children--Second marriage and children--Removal to Griff--Events at time of birth--Character of country about Griff--Coach communication--Father's position--Anecdotes of father--Character of mother--Mother's family and delicacy--Dame's school--Companionship with brother--Miss Lathom's school at Attleboro--Suffers from fear--Father's pet--Drives with him--First books read--First journey to Staffordshire--Miss Wallington's school at Nuneaton--Miss Lewis, governess--Books read--Religious impressions--Charade acting--Miss Franklin's school at Coventry--Riot at Nuneaton--First letter to Miss Lewis--Mother's illness--Mother's death--Sister Christiana married to Mr. Clarke--Relations with brother--Housekeeper at Griff--Life and studies there. FOOTNOTES: [1] The farm is also known as the South Farm, Arbury. [2] "Felix Holt"--Introduction. [3] See vol. ii. p. 96. [4] A Mr. Heming was the Radical candidate. [5] "Mill on the Floss," chap. iii. book iv. [6] "Daniel Deronda." [7] See vol. iii. [8] "Felix Holt," chap. xxxviii. p. 399. CHAPTER I. In the foregoing introductory sketch I have endeavored to present the influences to which George Eliot was subjected in her youth, and the environment in which she grew up; I am now able to begin the fulfilment of the promise on the titlepage, that the life will be related in her own letters; or, rather, in extracts from her own letters, for no single letter is printed entire from the beginning to the end. I have not succeeded in obtaining any between 6th January, 1836, and 18th August, 1838; but from the latter date the correspondence becomes regular, and I have arranged it as a continuous narrative, with the names of the persons to whom the letters are addressed in the margin. The slight thread of narrative or explanation which I have written to elucidate the letters, where necessary, will hereafter occupy an inside margin, so that the reader will see at a glance what is narrative and what is correspondence, and will be troubled as little as possible with marks of quotation or changes of type. The following opening letter of the series to Miss Lewis describes a first visit to London with her brother: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 18th Aug. 1838.] Let me tell you, though, that I was not at all delighted with the stir of the great Babel, and the less so, probably, owing to the circumstances attending my visit thither. Isaac and I went alone (that seems rather Irish), and stayed only a week, every day of which we worked hard at seeing sights. I think Greenwich Hospital interested me more than anything else. Mr. Isaac Evans himself tells me that what he remembers chiefly impressed her was the first hearing the great bell of St. Paul's. It affected her deeply. At that time she was so much under the influence of religious and ascetic ideas that she would not go to any of the theatres with her brother, but spent all her evenings alone, reading. A characteristic reminiscence is that the chief thing she wanted to buy was Josephus's "History of the Jews;" and at the same bookshop her brother got her this he bought for himself a pair of hunting sketches. In the same letter, alluding to the marriage of one of her friends, she says: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 18th Aug. 1838.] For my part, when I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly being transacted, I can only sigh for those who are multiplying earthly ties which, though powerful enough to detach their hearts and thoughts from heaven, are so brittle as to be liable to be snapped asunder at every breeze. You will think that I need nothing but a tub for my habitation to make me a perfect female Diogenes; and I plead guilty to occasional misanthropical thoughts, but not to the indulgence of them. Still, I must believe that those are happiest who are not fermenting themselves by engaging in projects for earthly bliss, who are considering this life merely a pilgrimage, a scene calling for diligence and watchfulness, not for repose and amusement. I do not deny that there may be many who can partake with a high degree of zest of all the lawful enjoyments the world can offer, and yet live in near communion with their God--who can warmly love the creature, and yet be careful that the Creator maintains his supremacy in their hearts; but I confess that, in my short experience and narrow sphere of action, I have never been able to attain to this. I find, as Dr. Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier than moderation. I do not wonder you are pleased with Pascal;[9] his thoughts may be returned to the palate again and again with increasing rather than diminished relish. I have highly enjoyed Hannah More's letters; the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very salutary. "That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises," is a valuable admonition. I was once told that there was nothing out of myself to prevent my becoming as eminently holy as St. Paul; and though I think that is too sweeping an assertion, yet it is very certain we are generally too low in our aims, more anxious for safety than sanctity, for place than purity, forgetting that each involves the other, and that, as Doddridge tells us, to rest satisfied with any attainments in religion is a fearful proof that we are ignorant of the very first principles of it. O that we could live only for eternity! that we could realize its nearness! I know you do not love quotations, so I will not give you one; but if you do not distinctly remember it, do turn to the passage in Young's "Infidel Reclaimed," beginning, "O vain, vain, vain all else eternity," and do love the lines for my sake. I really feel for you, sacrificing, as you are, your own tastes and comforts for the pleasure of others, and that in a manner the most trying to rebellious flesh and blood; for I verily believe that in most cases it requires more of a martyr's spirit to endure, with patience and cheerfulness, daily crossings and interruptions of our petty desires and pursuits, and to rejoice in them if they can be made to conduce to God's glory and our own sanctification, than even to lay down our lives for the truth. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 6th Nov. 1838.] I can hardly repress a sort of indignation towards second causes. That your time and energies should be expended in ministering to the petty interests of those far beneath you in all that is really elevating is about as _bienséant_ as that I should set fire to a goodly volume to light a match by! I have had a very unsettled life lately--Michaelmas, with its onerous duties and anxieties, much company (for us) and little reading, so that I am ill prepared for corresponding with profit or pleasure. I am generally in the same predicament with books as a glutton with his feast, hurrying through one course that I may be in time for the next, and so not relishing or digesting either; not a very elegant illustration, but the best my organs of ideality and comparison will furnish just now. I have just begun the "Life of Wilberforce," and I am expecting a rich treat from it. There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations, or rather _besetments_, and my own, that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him! I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of the ground. May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments! May I seek to be sanctified wholly! My nineteenth birthday will soon be here (the 22d)--an awakening signal. My mind has been much clogged lately by languor of body, to which I am prone to give way, and for the removal of which I shall feel thankful. We have had an oratorio at Coventry lately, Braham, Phillips, Mrs. Knyvett, and Mrs. Shaw--the last, I think, I shall attend. I am not fitted to decide on the question of the propriety or lawfulness of such exhibitions of talent and so forth, because I have no soul for music. "Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth." I am a tasteless person, but it would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship, nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency. The above remarks on oratorio are the more surprising because, two years later, when Miss Evans went to the Birmingham festival, in September, 1840, previous to her brother's marriage, she was affected to an extraordinary degree, so much so that Mrs. Isaac Evans--then Miss Rawlins--told me that the attention of people sitting near was attracted by her hysterical sobbing. And in all her later life music was one of the chiefest delights to her, and especially oratorio. "Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that indicates a great specific talent; it was rather that her sensibility to the supreme excitement of music was only one form of that passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made her faults and virtues all merge in each other--made her affections sometimes an impatient demand, but also prevented her vanity from taking the form of mere feminine coquetry and device, and gave it the poetry of ambition."[10] The next two letters, dated from Griff--February 6th and March 5th, 1839--are addressed to Mrs. Samuel Evans, a Methodist preacher, the wife of a younger brother of Mr. Robert Evans. They are the more interesting from the fact, which will appear later, that an anecdote related by this aunt during her visit to Griff in 1839 was the germ of "Adam Bede." To what extent this Elizabeth Evans resembled the ideal character of Dinah Morris will also be seen in its place in the history of "Adam Bede." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Samuel Evans, 6th Feb. 1839.] I am so unwilling to believe that you can forget a promise, or to entertain fears respecting your health, that I persuade myself I must have mistaken the terms of the agreement between us, and that I ought to have sent you a letter before I considered myself entitled to one from Wirksworth. However this may be, I feel so anxious to hear of your well-being in every way, that I can no longer rest satisfied without using my only means of obtaining tidings of you. My dear father is not at home to-night, or I should probably have a message of remembrance to give you from him, in addition to the good news that he is as well as he has been for the last two years, and even, I think, better, except that he feels more fatigue after exertion of mind or body than formerly. If you are able to fill a sheet, I am sure both uncle and you would in doing so be complying with the precept, "Lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees." I need not tell you that this is a dry and thirsty land, and I shall be as grateful to you for a draught from your fresh spring as the traveller in the Eastern desert is to the unknown hand that digs a well for him. "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," seems to be my character, instead of that regular progress from strength to strength that marks, even in this world of mistakes, the people that shall, in the heavenly Zion, stand before God. I shall not only suffer, but be delighted to receive, the word of exhortation, and I beg you not to withhold it. If I did not know how little you need human help, I should regret that my ignorance and want of deep feeling in spiritual things prevent me from suggesting profitable or refreshing thoughts; but I dare say I took care to tell you that my desire for correspondence with you was quite one of self-interest. I am thankful to tell you that my dear friends here are all well. I have a faint hope that the pleasure and profit I have felt in your society may be repeated in the summer: there is no place I would rather visit than Wirksworth, or the inhabitants of which have a stronger hold on my affections. In the next letter the touch about Mrs. Fletcher's life is characteristic. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Samuel Evans, 5th Mch. 1839.] My dear father is just now so plunged in business, and that of a fatiguing kind, that I should put your confidence in my love and gratitude to an unreasonably severe trial if I waited until he had leisure to unite with me in filling a sheet. You were very kind to remember my wish to see "Mrs. Fletcher's Life:" I only desire such a spiritual digestion as has enabled _you_ to derive so much benefit from its perusal. I am truly glad to hear that you are less embarrassed with respect to your congregation, etc., than you were when we saw you. I must protest against your making apologies for speaking of yourself, for nothing that relates to you can be uninteresting to me. The unprofitableness you lament in yourself, during your visit to us, had its true cause, not in your lukewarmness, but in the little improvement I sought to derive from your society, and in my lack of humility and Christian simplicity, that makes me willing to obtain credit for greater knowledge and deeper feeling than I really possess. Instead of putting my light under a bushel, I am in danger of ostentatiously displaying a false one. You have much too high an opinion, my dear aunt, of my spiritual condition, and of my personal and circumstantial advantages. My soul seems for weeks together completely benumbed, and when I am aroused from this torpid state, the intervals of activity are comparatively short. I am ever finding excuses for this in the deprivation of outward excitement and the small scope I have for the application of my principles, instead of feeling self-abasement under the consciousness that I abuse precious hours of retirement, which would be eagerly employed in spiritual exercises by many a devoted servant of God who is struggling with worldly cares and occupations. I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all--ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed. But you will perhaps remember, my dear aunt, that I do not attach much value to a disclosure of religious feelings, owing probably to the dominant corruption I have just been speaking of, which "turns the milk of my good purpose all to curd." On 16th March, 1839, in a letter to Miss Lewis, there is a reference to good spirits, which is of the rarest occurrence all through the correspondence: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 16th Mch. 1839.] I am this morning hardly myself, owing to the insuppressible rising of my animal spirits on a deliverance from sick headache; and then the letter continues as to the expediency of reading works of fiction, in answer to a question Miss Lewis had asked: I put out of the question all persons of perceptions so quick, memories so eclectic and retentive, and minds so comprehensive that nothing less than omnivorous reading, as Southey calls it, can satisfy their intellectual man; for (if I may parody the words of Scripture without profaneness) they will gather to themselves all facts, and heap unto themselves all ideas. For such persons we cannot legislate. Again, I would put out of the question standard works, whose contents are matter of constant reference, and the names of whose heroes and heroines briefly, and therefore conveniently, describe characters and ideas--such are "Don Quixote," Butler's "Hudibras," "Robinson Crusoe," "Gil Blas," Byron's Poetical Romances, Southey's ditto, etc. Such, too, are Walter Scott's novels and poems. Such allusions as "He is a perfect Dominie Sampson," "He is as industrious in finding out antiquities, and about as successful, as Jonathan Oldbuck," are likely to become so common in books and conversation that, _always providing_ our leisure is not circumscribed by duty within narrow bounds, we should, I think, qualify ourselves to understand them. Shakespeare has a higher claim than this on our attention; but we have need of as nice a power of distillation as the bee, to suck nothing but honey from his pages. However, as in life we must be exposed to malign influences from intercourse with others, if we would reap the advantages designed for us by making us social beings, so in books. Having cleared our way of what would otherwise have encumbered us, I would ask why is one engaged in the instruction of youth to read, as a purely conscientious and self-denying performance of duty, works whose value to others is allowed to be doubtful? I can only imagine two shadows of reasons. Either that she may be able experimentally to decide on their desirableness for her pupils, or else that there is a certain power exerted by them on the mind that would render her a more efficient "tutress" by their perusal. I would not depreciate the disinterestedness of those who will make trial of the effect on themselves of a cup suspected poisonous, that they may deter another from risking life; but it appears to me a work of supererogation, since there are enough witnesses to its baneful effect on themselves already to put an end to all strife in the matter. The Scriptural declaration, "As face answereth to face in a glass, so the heart of man to man," will exonerate me from the charge of uncharitableness, or too high an estimation of myself, if I venture to believe that the same causes which exist in my own breast to render novels and romances pernicious have their counterpart in that of every fellow-creature. I am, I confess, not an impartial member of a jury in this case; for I owe the culprits a grudge for injuries inflicted on myself. When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with the things around me; I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions, that I might be left to my own musings, and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading, and of course I made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air. But it may be said--"No one ever dreamed of recommending children to read them: all this does not apply to persons come to years of discretion, whose judgments are in some degree matured." I answer that men and women are but children of a larger growth: they are still imitative beings. We cannot (at least those who ever read to any purpose at all)--we cannot, I say, help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds. We hardly wish to lay claim to such elasticity as retains no impress. We are active beings too. We are each one of the _dramatis personæ_ in some play on the stage of life; hence our actions have their share in the effects of our reading. As to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of fictions, I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by that of history. It is the merit of fictions to come within the orbit of probability: if unnatural they would no longer please. If it be said the mind must have relaxation, "Truth is strange--stranger than fiction." When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth there is no other resort than fiction: till then, I cannot imagine how the adventures of some phantom conjured up by fancy can be more entertaining than the transactions of real specimens of human nature, from which we may safely draw inferences. I dare say Mr. James's "Huguenot" would be recommended as giving an idea of the times of which he writes; but as well may one be recommended to look at landscapes for an idea of English scenery. The real secret of the relaxation talked of is one that would not generally be avowed; but an appetite that wants seasoning of a certain kind cannot be indicative of health. Religious novels are more hateful to me than merely worldly ones: they are a sort of centaur or mermaid, and, like other monsters that we do not know how to class, should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born. The weapons of the Christian warfare were never sharpened at the forge of romance. Domestic fictions, as they come more within the range of imitation, seem more dangerous. For my part, I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life. Have I, then, any time to spend on things that never existed? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 20th May, 1839.] You allude to the religious, or rather irreligious, contentions that form so prominent a feature in the aspect of public affairs--a subject, you will perhaps be surprised to hear me say, full of interest to me, and on which I am unable to shape an opinion for the satisfaction of my mind. I think no one feels more difficulty in coming to a decision on controverted matters than myself. I do not mean that I have not preferences; but, however congruous a theory may be with my notions, I cannot find that comfortable repose that others appear to possess after having made their election of a class of sentiments. The other day Montaigne's motto came to my mind (it is mentioned by Pascal) as an appropriate one for me--"Que sais-je?"--beneath a pair of balances, though, by-the-bye, it is an ambiguous one, and may be taken in a sense that I desire to reprobate, as well as in a Scriptural one, to which I do not refer. I use it in a limited sense as a representation of my oscillating judgment. On no subject do I veer to all points of the compass more frequently than on the nature of the visible Church. I am powerfully attracted in a certain direction, but, when I am about to settle there, counter-assertions shake me from my position. I cannot enter into details, but when we are together I will tell you all my difficulties--that is, if you will be kind enough to listen. I have been reading the new prize essay on "Schism," by Professor Hoppus, and Milner's "Church History," since I last wrote to you: the former ably expresses the tenets of those who deny that any form of Church government is so clearly dictated in Scripture as to possess a divine right, and, consequently, to be binding on Christians; the latter, you know, exhibits the views of a moderate Evangelical Episcopalian on the inferences to be drawn from ecclesiastical remains. He equally repudiates the loud assertion of a _jus divinum_, to the exclusion of all separatists from the visible Church, though he calmly maintains the superiority of the evidence in favor of Episcopacy, of a moderate kind both in power and extent of diocese, as well as the benefit of a national establishment. I have been skimming the "Portrait of an English Churchman," by the Rev. W. Gresley: this contains an outline of the system of those who exclaim of the Anglican Church as the Jews did of their sacred building (that they do it in as reprehensible a spirit I will not be the judge), "the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" is exclusively theirs; while the authors of the Oxford Tracts go a step further, and evince by their compliments to Rome, as a dear though erring sister, and their attempts to give a Romish color to our ordinance, with a very confused and unscriptural statement of the great doctrine of justification, a disposition rather to fraternize with the members of a Church carrying on her brow the prophetical epithets applied by St. John to the scarlet beast, the mystery of iniquity, than with pious Nonconformists. It is true they disclaim all this, and that their opinions are seconded by the extensive learning, the laborious zeal, and the deep devotion of those who propagate them; but a reference to facts will convince us that such has generally been the character of heretical teachers. Satan is too crafty to commit his cause into the hands of those who have nothing to recommend them to approbation. According to their dogmas, the Scotch Church and the foreign Protestant Churches, as well as the non-Episcopalians of our own land, are wanting in the essentials of existence as part of the Church. In the next letter there is the first allusion to authorship, but, from the wording of the sentence, the poem referred to has evidently not been a first attempt. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 17th July, 1839.] I send you some doggerel lines, the crude fruit of a lonely walk last evening when the words of one of our martyrs occurred to me. You must be acquainted with the idiosyncrasy of my authorship, which is, that my effusions, once committed to paper, are like the laws of the Medes and Persians, that alter not. "_Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle._" --2 PETER i. 14. "As o'er the fields by evening's light I stray I hear a still, small whisper--Come away; Thou must to this bright, lovely world soon say Farewell! "The mandate I'd obey, my lamp prepare, Gird up my garments, give my soul to pray'r, And say to earth, and all that breathe earth's air, Farewell! "Thou sun, to whose parental beam I owe All that has gladden'd me while here below, Moon, stars, and covenant-confirming bow, Farewell! "Ye verdant meads, fair blossoms, stately trees, Sweet song of birds and soothing hum of bees, Refreshing odors wafted on the breeze, Farewell! "Ye patient servants of creation's Lord, Whose mighty strength is govern'd by his word, Who raiment, food, and help in toil afford, Farewell! "Books that have been to me as chests of gold, Which, miserlike, I secretly have told, And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold, Farewell! "Blest volume! whose clear truth-writ page once known, Fades not before heaven's sunshine or hell's moan, To thee I say not, of earth's gifts alone, Farewell! "There shall my new-born senses find new joy, New sounds, new sights, my eyes and ears employ, Nor fear that word that here brings sad alloy, Farewell!" I had a dim recollection that my wife had told me that this poem had been printed somewhere. After a long search I found it in the _Christian Observer_ for January, 1840. The version there published has the two following additional verses, and is signed M. A. E.: "Ye feebler, freer tribes that people air, Ye gaudy insects, making buds your lair, Ye that in water shine and frolic there, Farewell! "Dear kindred, whom the Lord to me has given, Must the strong tie that binds us now be riven? No! say I--only till we meet in heaven, Farewell!" The editor of the _Christian Observer_ has added this note: "We do not often add a note to a poem: but if St. John found no temple in the New Jerusalem, neither will there be any need of a Bible; for we shall not then see through a glass darkly--through the veil of sacraments or the written Word--but face to face. The Bible is God's gift, but not for heaven's use. Still, on the very verge of heaven we may cling to it, after we have bid farewell to everything earthly: and this, perhaps, is what M. A. E. means." In the following letter we already see the tendency to draw illustrations from science: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 4th Sept. 1839.] I have lately led so unsettled a life, and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or, rather, it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments, that shows here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fern-like plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts incrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics--all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening every-day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations. How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as the forms and hues of the summer clouds! A single word is sometimes enough to give an entirely new mould to our thoughts--at least, I find myself so constituted; and therefore to me it is pre-eminently important to be anchored within the veil, so that outward things may be unable to send me adrift. Write to me as soon as you can. Remember Michaelmas is coming, and I shall be engaged in matters so nauseating to me that it will be a charity to console me; to reprove and advise me no less. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 22d Nov. 1839.] I have emerged from the slough of domestic troubles, or, rather, to speak quite clearly, "malheurs de cuisine," and am beginning to take a deep breath in my own element, though with a mortifying consciousness that my faculties have become superlatively obtuse during my banishment from it. I have been so self-indulgent as to possess myself of Wordsworth at full length, and I thoroughly like much of the contents of the first three volumes, which I fancy are only the low vestibule of the three remaining ones. I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I could like them. The distress of the lower classes in our neighborhood is daily increasing, from the scarcity of employment for weavers, and I seem sadly to have handcuffed myself by unnecessary expenditure. To-day is my 20th birthday. This allusion to Wordsworth is interesting, as it entirely expresses the feeling she had to him up to the day of her death. One of the very last books we read together at Cheyne Walk was Mr. Frederick Myers's "Wordsworth" in the "English Men of Letters," which she heartily enjoyed. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 23d Mch. 1840.] I have just received my second lesson in German. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 2d May, 1840, Friday evening.] I know you will be glad to think of me as thoroughly employed, as, indeed, I am to an extent that makes me fear I shall not be able to accomplish everything well. I have engaged, if possible, to complete the chart,[11] the plan of which I sketched out last year, by November next, and I am encouraged to believe that it will answer my purpose to print it. The profits arising from its sale, if any, will go partly to Attleboro Church, and partly to a favorite object of my own. Mrs. Newdigate is very anxious that I should do this, and she permits me to visit her library when I please, in search of any books that may assist me. Will you ask Mr. Craig what he considers the best authority for the date of the apostolical writings? I should like to carry the chart down to the Reformation, if my time and resources will enable me to do so. We are going to have a clothing-club, the arrangement and starting of which are left to me. I am ashamed to run the risk of troubling you, but I should be very grateful if you could send me an abstract of the rules by which yours is regulated. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 21st May, 1840.] Our house is now, and will be for the next two months, miserably noisy and disorderly with the musical operations of masons, carpenters, and painters. You know how abhorrent all this is to my tastes and feelings, taking all the spice out of my favorite little epithet, "this working-day world:" I can no longer use it figuratively. How impressive must the gradual rise of Solomon's Temple have been! each prepared mass of virgin marble laid in reverential silence. I fancy Heber has compared it to the growth of a palm. Your nice miniature chart, which I shall carefully treasure up, has quite satisfied me that Dr. Pearson, at least, has not realized my conceptions, though it has left me still dubious as to my own power of doing so. I will just (if you can bear to hear more of the matter) give you an idea of the plan, which may have partly faded from your memory. The series of perpendicular columns will successively contain the Roman emperors, with their dates, the political and religious state of the Jews, the bishops, remarkable men, and events in the several churches, a column being devoted to each of the chief ones, the aspect of heathenism and Judaism towards Christianity, the chronology of the apostolical and patristical writings, schisms, and heresies, General Councils, eras of corruption (under which head the remarks would be general), and I thought possibly an application of the apocalyptic prophecies, which would merely require a few figures and not take up room. I think there must be a break in the chart after the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire, and I have come to a determination not to carry it beyond the first acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Pope by Phocas, in 606, when Mohammedanism became a besom of destruction in the hand of the Lord, and completely altered the aspect of ecclesiastical history. So much for this, at present, airy project, about which I hope never to tease you more. Mr. Harper[12] lent me a little time ago a work by the Rev. W. Gresley, begging me to read it, as he thought it was calculated to make me a proselyte to the opinions it advocates. I had skimmed the book before ("Portrait of an English Churchman"), but I read it attentively a second time, and was pleased with the spirit of piety that breathes throughout. His last work is one in a similar style ("The English Citizen"), which I have cursorily read; and, as they are both likely to be seen by you, I want to know your opinion of them. Mine is this: that they are sure to have a powerful influence on the minds of small readers and shallow thinkers, as, from the simplicity and clearness with which the author, by his _beau-idéal_ characters, enunciates his sentiments, they furnish a magazine of easily wielded weapons for _morning-calling_ and _evening-party_ controversialists, as well as that really honest minds will be inclined to think they have found a resting-place amid the footballing of religious parties. But it appears to me that there is unfairness in arbitrarily selecting a train of circumstances and a set of characters as a development of a class of opinions. In this way we might make atheism appear wonderfully calculated to promote social happiness. I remember, as I dare say you do, a very amiable atheist depicted by Bulwer in "Devereux;" and for some time after the perusal of that book, which I read seven or eight years ago,[13] I was considerably shaken by the impression that religion was not a requisite to moral excellence. Have you not alternating seasons of mental stagnation and activity? just such as the political economists say there must be in a nation's pecuniary condition--all one's precious specie, Time, going out to procure a stock of commodities, while one's own manufactures are too paltry to be worth vending. I am just in that condition--partly, I think, owing to my not having met with any steel to sharpen my edge against for the last three weeks. I am going to read a volume of the Oxford Tracts and the "Lyra Apostolica;" the former I almost shrink from the labor of conning, but the other I confess I am attracted towards by some highly poetical extracts that I have picked up in various quarters. I have just bought Mr. Keble's "Christian Year," a volume of sweet poetry that perhaps you know. The fields of poesy look more lovely than ever, now I have hedged myself in the geometrical regions of fact, where I can do nothing but draw parallels and measure differences in a double sense. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 26th May, 1840.] [14]I will only hint that there seems a probability of my being an unoccupied damsel, of my being severed from all the ties that have hitherto given my existence the semblance of a usefulness beyond that of making up the requisite quantum of animal matter in the universe. A second important intimation respecting my worthy self is one that, I confess, I impart without one sigh, though perhaps you will think my callousness discreditable. It is that Seeley & Burnside have just published a Chart of Ecclesiastical History, doubtless giving to my airy vision a local habitation and a name. I console all my little regrets by thinking that what is thus evidenced to be a desideratum has been executed much better than if left to my slow fingers and slower head. I fear I am laboriously doing nothing, for I am beguiled by the fascination that the study of languages has for my capricious mind. I could e'en give myself up to making discoveries in the world of words. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, in London, Whit-Wednesday, June, 1840.] May I trouble you to procure for me an Italian book recommended by Mr. Brezzi--Silvio Pellico's "Le mie Prigioni;" if not, "Storia d'Italia"? If they are cheap, I should like both. I shall have, I hope, a little trip with my father next week into Derbyshire, and this "lark" will probably be beneficial to me; so do not imagine I am inviting you to come and hear moaning, when you need all attainable relaxation. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 23d June, 1840.] Your letter greeted me last night on my arrival from Staffordshire. The prospectus of Mr. Henslow's work is as marvellous to my ignorant conceptions as the prophecies of the wonders of the steam-engine would have been to some British worthy in the days of Caractacus. I can only gape as he would probably have done. I hope Mr. H. has not imitated certain show-keepers, who give so exaggerated a representation of their giantess, on the outside, that the spectators have disappointment for their cash within. If I do not see you, how shall I send your "Don Quixote," which I hope soon to finish? I have been sadly interrupted by other books that have taken its scanty allowance of time, or I should have made better haste with it. Will you try to get me Spenser's "Faery Queen"? the cheapest edition, with a glossary, which is quite indispensable, together with a clear and correct type. I have had some treats on my little excursion, not the least of which was the gazing on some--albeit the smallest--of the "everlasting hills," and on those noblest children of the earth, fine, healthy trees, as independent in their beauty as virtue; set them where you will, they adorn, and need not adornment. Father indulged me with a sight of Ashborne Church, the finest mere parish church in the kingdom--in the _interior_; of Alton Gardens, where I saw actually what I have often seen mentally--the bread-fruit tree, the fan-palm, and the papyrus; and last, of Lichfield Cathedral, where, besides the exquisite architectural beauties, both external and internal, I saw Chantrey's famous monument of the Sleeping Children. There is a tasteless monument to the learned and brilliant female pedant of Lichfield, Miss Seward, with a poor epitaph by Sir Walter Scott. In the town we saw a large monument erected to Johnson's memory, showing his Titanic body, in a sitting posture, on the summit of a pedestal which is ornamented with bas-reliefs of three passages in his life: his penance in Uttoxeter Market, his chairing on the shoulders of his schoolmates, and his listening to the preaching of Sacheverel. The statue is opposite to the house in which Johnson was born--altogether inferior to that in St. Paul's, which shook me almost as much as a real glance from the literary monarch. I am ashamed to send you so many ill-clothed nothings. My excuse shall be a state of head that calls for four leeches before I can attack Mrs. Somerville's "Connection of the Physical Sciences." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, July, Monday morning, 1840.] I write with a very tremulous hand, as you will perceive; both this, and many other defects in my letter, are attributable to a very mighty cause--no other than the boiling of currant jelly! I have had much of this kind of occupation lately, and I grieve to say I have not gone through it so cheerfully as the character of a Christian who professes to do _all_, even the most trifling, duty, as the Lord demands. My mind is consequently run all wild, and bears nothing but _dog-roses_. I am truly obliged to you for getting me Spenser. How shall I send to you "Don Quixote," which I have quite finished? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th July, 1840.] I believe it is decided that father and I should leave Griff and take up our residence somewhere in the neighborhood of Coventry, if we can obtain a suitable house, and this is at present a matter of anxiety. So you see I am likely still to have a home where I can independently welcome you. I am really so plunged in an abyss of books, preserves, and sundry _important trivialities_, that I must send you this bare proof that I have not cast the remembrance of you to a dusty corner of my heart. Ever believe that "my heart is as thy heart," that you may rely on me as a second self, and that I shall, with my usual selfishness, lose no opportunity of gratifying my duplicate. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 12th Aug. 1840.] The Epistle to the Colossians is pre-eminently rich in the coloring with which it portrays the divine fulness contained in the Saviour, contrasted with the beggarly elements that a spirit of self-righteousness would, in some way, mingle with the light of life, the filthy rags it would tack round the "fine raiment" of his righteousness. I have been reading it in connection with a train of thought suggested by the reading of "Ancient Christianity and the Oxford Tracts," by Isaac Taylor, one of the most eloquent, acute, and pious of writers. Five numbers only have yet appeared. Have you seen them? If not, I should like to send you an abstract of his argument. I have gulped it (pardon my coarseness) in a most reptile-like fashion. I must _chew_ it thoroughly to facilitate its assimilation with my mental frame. When your pupils can relish Church history, I venture to recommend the chart lately published by Seeley & Burnside--far superior in conception to mine--as being more compendious, yet answering the purpose of presenting epochs as nuclei round which less important events instinctively cluster. Mrs. John Cash of Coventry, who was then Miss Mary Sibree, daughter of a Nonconformist minister there, and whose acquaintance Miss Evans made a year or two later in Coventry, writes in regard to this book of Isaac Taylor's: "In her first conversations with my father and mother, they were much interested in learning in what high estimation she held the writings of Isaac Taylor. My father _thought_ she was a little disappointed on hearing that he was a Dissenter. She particularly enjoyed his 'Saturday Evening,' and spoke in years after to me of his 'Physical Theory of Another Life,' as exciting thought and leading speculation further than he would have desired. When his 'Ancient Christianity' was published in numbers, Miss Evans took it in, and kindly forwarded the numbers to us. From the impression made on my own mind by unfavorable facts about 'The Fathers,' and from her own subsequent references to this work, I am inclined to think it had its influence in unsettling her views of Christianity." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 17th Sept. 1840.] I have thought of you as _the_ one who has ever shown herself so capable of consideration for my weakness and sympathy in my warm and easily fastened affections. My imagination is an enemy that must be cast down ere I can enjoy peace or exhibit uniformity of character. I know not which of its caprices I have most to dread--that which incites it to spread sackcloth "above, below, around," or that which makes it "cheat my eye with blear illusion, and beget strange dreams" of excellence and beauty in beings and things of only working-day price. The beautiful heavens that we have lately enjoyed awaken in me an indescribable sensation of exultation in existence, and aspiration after all that is suited to engage an immaterial nature. I have not read very many of Mr. B.'s poems, nor any with much attention. I simply declare my determination not to feed on the broth of literature when I can get strong soup--such, for instance, as Shelley's "Cloud," the five or six stanzas of which contain more poetic metal than is beat out in all Mr. B.'s pages. You must know I have had bestowed on me the very pretty cognomen of Clematis, which, in the floral language, means "mental beauty." I cannot find in my heart to refuse it, though, like many other appellations, it has rather the appearance of a satire than a compliment. _Addio!_ I will send your floral name in my next, when I have received my dictionary. My hand and mind are wearied with writing four pages of German and a letter of business. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 1st Oct. 1840.] My dear Veronica--which, being interpreted, is "fidelity in friendship"--Last week I was absent from home from Wednesday to Saturday, in quest of the "coy maiden," Pleasure--at least, nominally so, the real motive being rather to gratify another's feeling.[15] I heard the "Messiah" on Thursday morning at Birmingham, and some beautiful selections from other oratories of Handel and Haydn on Friday. With a stupid, drowsy sensation, produced by standing sentinel over damson cheese and a warm stove, I cannot do better than ask you to read, if accessible, Wordsworth's short poem on the "Power of Sound," with which I have just been delighted. I have made an alteration in my plans with Mr. Brezzi, and shall henceforward take Italian and German alternately, so that I shall not be liable to the consciousness of having imperative employment for every interstice of time. There seems a greater affinity between German and my mind than Italian, though less new to me, possesses. I am reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and Tasso. I was pleased with a little poem I learned a week or two ago in German; and, as I want you to like it, I have just put the idea it contains into English doggerel, which quite fails to represent the beautiful simplicity and nature of the original, but yet, I hope, will give you sufficiently its sense to screen the odiousness of the translation. _Eccola_: QUESTION AND ANSWER. "'Where blooms, O my father, a thornless rose?' 'That can I not tell thee, my child; Not one on the bosom of earth e'er grows But wounds whom its charms have beguiled.' "'Would I'd a rose on my bosom to lie, But I shrink from the piercing thorn: I long, but I dare not its point defy; I long, and I gaze forlorn.' "'Not so, O my child--round the stem again Thy resolute fingers entwine; Forego not the joy for its sister, pain-- Let the rose, the sweet rose, be thine.'" Would not a parcel reach you by railway? This is the first allusion to the new means of locomotion, which would, no doubt, be attracting much interest in the Griff household, as valuation was a large part of Mr. Evans's business. Long years after, George Eliot wrote: "Our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labor, has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape.... There comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face, or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut through, or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level, and the white steam-pennon flies along it." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 27th Oct. 1840.] My only reason for writing is to obtain a timely promise that you will spend your holidays chiefly with me, that we may once more meet among scenes which, now I am called on to leave them, I find to have _grown in_ to my affections. Carlyle says that to the artisans of Glasgow the world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of copperas-fumes, low cellars, hard wages, "striking," and whiskey; and if the recollection of this picture did not remind me that gratitude should be my reservoir of feeling, that into which all that comes from above or around should be received as a source of fertilization for my soul, I should give a lachrymose parody of the said description, and tell you all-seriously what I now tell you playfully, that mine is too often a world such as Wilkie can so well paint, a walled-in world furnished with all the details which he remembers so accurately, and the least interesting part whereof is often what I suppose must be designated the intelligent; but I deny that it has even a comparative claim to the appellation, for give me a three-legged stool, and it will call up associations--moral, poetical, mathematical--if I do but ask it, while some human beings have the odious power of contaminating the very images that are enshrined as our soul's arcana. Their baleful touch has the same effect as would a uniformity in the rays of light--it turns all objects to pale lead-color. O how luxuriously joyous to have the wind of heaven blow on one after being _stived_ in a human atmosphere--to feel one's heart leap up after the pressure that Shakespeare so admirably describes: "When a man's wit is not seconded by the forward chick understanding, it strikes a man as dead as a large reckoning in a small room." But it is time I check this Byronic invective, and, in doing so, I am reminded of Corinne's, or rather Oswald's, reproof--"La vie est un _combat_ pas un _hymne_." We should aim to be like a plant in the chamber of sickness--dispensing purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure, and cramps its instinctive propensity to expand. Society is a wide nursery of plants, where the hundreds decompose to nourish the future ten, after giving collateral benefits to their contemporaries destined for a fairer garden. An awful thought! one so heavy that if our souls could once sustain its whole weight, or, rather, if its whole weight were once to drop on them, they would break and burst their tenements. How long will this continue? The cry of the martyrs heard by St. John finds an echo in every heart that, like Solomon's, groans under "the outrage and oppression with which earth is filled." Events are now so momentous, and the elements of society in so chemically critical a state, that a drop seems enough to change its whole form. I am reading Harris's "Great Teacher," and am _innig bewegt_, as a German would say, by its stirring eloquence, which leaves you no time or strength for a cold estimate of the writer's strict merits. I wish I could read some extracts to you. Isaac Taylor's work is not yet complete. When it is so, I hope to reperuse it. Since I wrote to you I have had Aimé Martin's work, "L'Education des Mères," lent to me, and I have found it to be the real Greece whence "Woman's Mission" has only imported to us a few marbles--but! Martin is a _soi-disant_ rational Christian, if I mistake him not. I send you an epitaph which he mentions on a tomb in Paris--that of a mother: "Dors en paix, O ma mère, ton fils t'obeira toujours." I am reading eclectically Mrs. Hemans's poems, and venture to recommend to your perusal, if unknown to you, one of the longest ones--"The Forest Sanctuary." I can give it my pet adjective--exquisite. I have adopted as my motto, "_Certum pete finem_"--seek a sure end.[16] [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 5th Dec. 1840.] Come when you would best like to do so: if my heart beat at all at the time, it will be with a more rapid motion than the general, from the joy of seeing you. I cannot promise you more than calmness when that flush is past, for I am aweary, aweary--longing for rest, which seems to fly from my very anticipations. But this wrought-up sensitiveness which makes me shrink from all contact is, I know, not for communication or sympathy, and is, from that very character, a kind of trial best suited for me. Whatever tends to render us ill-contented with ourselves, and more earnest aspirants after perfect truth and goodness, is gold, though it come to us all molten and burning, and we know not our treasure until we have had long smarting. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 21st Dec. 1840.] It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather. I understand the Icelanders have much national poetry, but I guess it was written in the neighborhood of the boiling springs. I will promise to be as cheerful and as Christmas-like as my rickety body and chameleon-like spirits will allow. I am about to commence the making of mince-pies, with all the interesting sensations characterizing young enterprise or effort. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 27th Jan. 1841.] Happily, the moody, melancholy temperament has some counterbalancing advantages to those of the sanguine: it _does_ sometimes meet with results more favorable than it expected, and by its knack of imagining the pessimus, cheats the world of its power to disappoint. The very worm-like originator of this coil of sentiment is the fact that you write more cheerfully of yourself than I had been thinking of you, and that, _ergo_, I am pleased. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 11th Feb. 1841.] On Monday and Tuesday my father and I were occupied with the sale of furniture at our new house: it is probable that we shall migrate thither in a month. I shall be incessantly hurried until after our departure, but at present I have to be grateful for a smooth passage through contemplated difficulties. Sewing is my staple article of commerce with the hard trader, Time. Now the wind has veered to the south I hope to do much more, and that with greater zest than I have done for many months--I mean, of all kinds. I have been reading the three volumes of the "Life and Times of Louis the Fourteenth," and am as eagerly waiting for the fourth and last as any voracious novel-reader for Bulwer's last. I am afraid I am getting quite martial in my spirit, and, in the warmth of my sympathy for Turenne and Condé, losing my hatred of war. Such a conflict between _individual_ and _moral_ influence is no novelty. But certainly war, though the heaviest scourge with which the divine wrath against sin is manifested in Time, has been a necessary vent for impurities and a channel for tempestuous passions that must have otherwise made the whole earth, like the land of the devoted Canaanites, to vomit forth the inhabitants thereof. Awful as such a sentiment appears, it seems to me that in the present condition of man (and I do not mean this in the sense that Cowper does), such a purgation of the body politic is probably essential to its health. A foreign war would soon put an end to our national humors, that are growing to so alarming a head. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th Mch. 1841.] What do you think of the progress of architecture as a subject for poetry? I am just about to set out on a purchasing expedition to Coventry: you may therefore conceive that I am full of little plans and anxieties, and will understand why I should be brief. I hope by the close of next week that we and our effects shall be deposited at Foleshill, and until then and afterwards I shall be fully occupied, so that I am sure you will not expect to hear from me for the next six weeks. One little bit of unreasonableness you must grant me--the request for a letter from yourself within that time. _SUMMARY._ AUGUST 18, 1838, TO MARCH 8, 1841. Letters to Miss Lewis--First visit to London--Religious asceticism--Pascal--Hannah More's letters--Young's "Infidel Reclaimed"--Michaelmas visitors--"Life of Wilberforce"--Nineteenth birthday--Oratorio at Coventry--Religious objections to music--Letters to Mrs. Samuel Evans--Religious reflections--Besetting sin ambition--Letters to Miss Lewis--Objections to fiction-reading--Religious contentions on the nature of the visible Church--First poem--Account of books read and studies pursued--Wordsworth--Twentieth birthday--German begun--Plan of Chart of Ecclesiastical History--Religious controversies--Oxford Tracts--"Lyra Apostolica"--"Christian Year"--Chart of Ecclesiastical History forestalled--Italian begun--Trip to Derbyshire and Staffordshire--"Don Quixote"--Spenser's "Faery Queen"--Mrs. Somerville's "Connection of the Physical Sciences"--Dislike of housekeeping work--Removal to Coventry decided--"Ancient Christianity and the Oxford Tracts," by Isaac Taylor, and Mrs. John Cash's impression of its effect--Determination not to feed on the broth of literature--Visit to Birmingham to hear the "Messiah"--Reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and Tasso--Translation of German poem--Depression of surroundings at Griff--Reading Harris's "Great Teacher," Aimé Martin's "L'Education des Mères," and Mrs. Hemans's Poems--Selling furniture at new house--Sewing--Reading "Life and Times of Louis XIV."--Removal to Foleshill road, Coventry. FOOTNOTES: [9] Given to her as a school prize when she was fourteen. [10] "Mill on the Floss," chap. v. book vi. [11] Of ecclesiastical history. [12] The Squire of Coton. [13] When she would be thirteen years old. [14] Written probably in view of her brother's marriage. [15] Visit to Miss Rawlins, her brother's _fiancée_. [16] By a curious coincidence, when she became Mrs. Cross, this actually was her motto. CHAPTER II. New circumstances now created a change almost amounting to a revolution in Miss Evans's life. Mr. Isaac Evans, who had been associated for some time with his father in the land-agency business, married, and it was arranged that he should take over the establishment at Griff. This led to the removal in March, 1841, of Mr. Robert Evans and his daughter to a house on the Foleshill road, in the immediate neighborhood of Coventry. The house is still standing, although considerably altered--a semi-detached house with a good bit of garden round it, and from its upper windows a wide view over the surrounding country, the immediate foreground being unfortunately, however, disfigured by the presence of mills and chimneys. It is town life now instead of country life, and we feel the effects at once in the tone of the subsequent letters. The friendships now formed with Mr. and Mrs. Bray and Miss Sara Hennell particularly, and the being brought within reach of a small circle of cultivated people generally, render this change of residence an exceedingly important factor in George Eliot's development. It chanced that the new house was next door to Mrs. Pears', a sister of Mr. Bray, and as there had been some acquaintance in days gone by between him and the family at Griff, this close neighborhood led to an exchange of visits. The following extracts from letters to Miss Lewis show how the acquaintance ripened, and will give some indications of the first impressions of Coventry life: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, Saturday evening, April, 1841.] Last evening I mentioned you to my neighbor (Mrs. Pears), who is growing into the more precious character of a friend. I have seriously to be thankful for far better health than I have possessed, I think, for years, and I am imperatively called on to trade diligently with this same talent. I am likely to be more and more busy, if I succeed in a project that is just now occupying my thoughts and feelings. I seem to be tried in a contrary mode to that in which most of my dearest friends are being tutored--tried in the most dangerous way--by prosperity. Solomon says, "In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider." It seems to me that a transposition, _vice versâ_, of the admonitions would be equally salutary and just. Truly, as the prophet of Selwyn has told us, "Heaven is formidable in its favors." Not that a wise and grateful reception of blessings obliges us to stretch our faces to the length of one of Cromwell's Barebones; nor to shun that joyous, bird-like enjoyment of things (which, though perishable as to their actual existence, will be embalmed to eternity in the precious spices of gratitude) that is distinct from levity and voluptuousness. I am really crowded with engagements just now, and I have added one to the number of my correspondents. [Illustration: House in Foleshill Road, Coventry.] [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, April, 1841] The whole of last week was devoted to a bride's-maid's[17] duties, and each day of this has been partially occupied in paying or receiving visits. I have a calm in sea and sky that I doubt not will ere long be interrupted. This is not our rest, if we are among those for whom there remaineth one, and to pass through life without tribulation (or, as Jeremy Taylor beautifully says, with only such a measure of it as may be compared to an artificial discord in music, which nurses the ear for the returning harmony) would leave us destitute of one of the marks that invariably accompany salvation, and of that fellowship in the sufferings of the Redeemer which can alone work in us a resemblance to one of the most prominent parts of his divinely perfect character, and enable us to obey the injunction, "In patience possess your souls." I have often observed how, in secular things, active occupation in procuring the necessaries of life renders the character indifferent to trials not affecting that one object. There is an analogous influence produced in the Christian by a vigorous pursuit of duty, a determination to work while it is day. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 28th April, 1841.] One of the penalties women must pay for modern deference to their intellect is, I suppose, that they must give reasons for their conduct, after the fashion of men. The days are past for pleading a woman's reason. The truth is, that the hinderances to my writing have been like the little waves of the brooks that look so lovely just now--they have arisen one after another close to my side, but when I have looked back I have found the ripples too insignificant to be marked in the distance. My father's longer _séjours_ at home than formerly, and multiplied acquaintances and engagements, are really valid excuses for me hitherto, but I do not intend to need them in future; I hope to be a "snapper-up of unconsidered" moments. I have just been interrupted by a visit from a lass of fourteen, who has despoiled me of half an hour, and I am going out to dinner, so that I cannot follow the famous advice, "Hasten slowly." I suppose that you framed your note on the principle that a sharp and sudden sound is the most rousing, but there are _addenda_ about yourself that I want to know, though I dare not ask for them. I do not feel settled enough to write more at present. How is it that Erasmus could write volumes on volumes and multifarious letters besides, while I, whose labors hold about the same relation to his as an ant-hill to a pyramid or a drop of dew to the ocean, seem too busy to write a few? A most posing query! [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, Thursday morning, June, 1841.] I have of late felt a depression that has disordered the vision of my mind's eye and made me _alive_ to what is certainly a fact (though my imagination when I am in health is an adept at concealing it), that I am _alone_ in the world. I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that I have not friends _most_ undeservedly kind and tender, and disposed to form a far too favorable estimate of me, but I mean that I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings, the same temptations, the same delights as myself. I merely mention this as the impression that obtrudes itself when my body tramples on its keeper--(a metaphor borrowed from a menagerie of wild beasts, if it should happen to puzzle you!)--mysterious "connection exquisite of distant worlds" that we present! A few drops of steel will perhaps make me laugh at the simple objects that, in gloom and mist, I conjure into stalking apparitions. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, at Margate, 31st July, 1841.] I am beginning to be interlaced with multiplying ties of duty and affection, that, while they render my new home happier, forbid me to leave it on a pleasure-seeking expedition. I think, indeed, that both my heart and limbs would leap to behold the great and wide sea--that old ocean on which man can leave no trace. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 3d Sept. 1841.] I have been revelling in Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System," and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to universe, trying to conceive myself in such a position and with such a visual faculty as would enable me to enjoy what Young enumerates among the novelties of the "Stranger" man when he bursts the shell to "Behold an infinite of floating worlds Divide the crystal waves of ether pure In endless voyage without port." "Hospitable infinity!" Nichol beautifully says. How should I love to have a thorough-going student with me, that we might read together! We might each alternately employ the voice and the fingers, and thus achieve just twice as much as a poor solitary. I am more impressed than ever with a truth beautifully expressed in "Woman's Mission"--"Learning is only so far valuable as it serves to enlarge and enlighten the bounds of conscience." This I believe it eminently does when pursued humbly and piously, and from a belief that it is a solemn duty to cultivate every faculty of our nature so far as primary obligations allow. There is an exhortation of St. Paul's that I should love to take as my motto: "Finally, my brethren, whatsoever things are honest" (you know the continuation)--"if there be _any_ virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." I have had to lament lately that mine is not a _hard-working_ mind--it requires frequent rest. I am violently in love with the Italian fashion of repeating an adjective or adverb, and even noun, to give force to expression: there is so much more fire in it than in our circumlocutory phrases, our dull "verys" and "exceedinglys" and "extremelys." I strongly recommend Hallam to you. I shall read it again if I live. When a sort of haziness comes over the mind, making one feel weary of articulated or written signs of ideas, does not the notion of a less laborious mode of communication, of a perception approaching more nearly to intuition, seem attractive? Nathless, I love words: they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind. Without them, in our present condition, our intellectual strength would have no implements. I have been rather humbled in thinking that if I were thrown on an uncivilized island, and had to form a literature for its inhabitants from my own mental stock, how very fragmentary would be the information with which I could furnish them! It would be a good mode of testing one's knowledge to set one's self the task of writing sketches of all subjects that have entered into one's studies entirely from the chronicles of memory. The prevalence of misery and want in this boasted nation of prosperity and glory is appalling, and really seems to call us away from mental luxury. O to be doing some little towards the regeneration of this groaning, travailing creation! I am supine and stupid--overfed with favors--while the haggard looks and piercing glance of want and conscious hopelessness are to be seen in the streets. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 1st Oct. 1841.] Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love--that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 2d Nov. 1841.] I am going, I hope, to-day to effect a breach in the thick wall of indifference behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to intrench themselves; but I fear I shall fail. This probably refers to the first visit paid by Miss Evans to Mr. and Mrs. Bray at their house. They had met in the previous May at Mrs. Pears'; but although they were at once mutually attracted, the acquaintance does not seem to have been immediately prosecuted further. Now, however, any time lost in the beginning was quickly made up, and it is astonishing how rapidly the most intimate relations were formed. Mr. Bray was a ribbon-manufacturer, well-to-do at that time, and had a charming house, Rosehill, with a beautiful lawn and garden, in the outskirts of Coventry. Only a part of his time was occupied with his business, and he had much leisure and opportunity, of which he availed himself, for liberal self-education and culture. His was a robust, self-reliant mind. Already, in 1839, he had published a work on the "Education of the Feelings," viewed from the phrenological standpoint; and in this year, 1841, appeared his most important book, "The Philosophy of Necessity." He always remained a sincere and complete believer in the science of phrenology. He had married Miss Caroline Hennell, sister of the Mr. Charles Hennell who published, in 1838, "An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity"--a remarkable book, which was translated into German, Strauss contributing a preface to the translation. It will be seen from subsequent letters how greatly Miss Evans was interested in this book--how much she admired it; and the reading of it, combined with the association with her new friends--with the philosophical speculations of Mr. Bray, and with Mrs. Bray's sympathy in her brother's critical and sceptical standpoint--no doubt hastened the change in her attitude towards the dogmas of the old religion. In the Analytical Catalogue of Mr. Chapman's publications, issued in 1852, there is an analysis of Hennell's "Inquiry," done by Miss Evans, which may be inserted here, as giving her idea of the book eleven years later. "The first edition of this work appeared in 1838, when the present strong current of public opinion in favor of free religious discussion had not yet set in; and it probably helped to generate the tone of thought exhibited in more recent works of the same class, to which circumstances have given a wider fame--works which, like the above, in considering questions of Biblical criticism and the philosophy of Christianity, combine high refinement, purity of aim, and candor, with the utmost freedom of investigation, and with a popularity of style which wins them the attention not only of the learned but of the practical. "The author opens his inquiry with an historical sketch, extending from the Babylonish Captivity to the end of the first century, the design of which is to show how, abstracting the idea of the miraculous, or any speciality of divine influence, the gradual development of certain elements in Jewish character, and the train of events in Jewish history, contributed to form a suitable _nidus_ for the production of a character and career like that of Jesus, and how the devoted enthusiasm generated by such a career in his immediate disciples, rendering it easier for them to modify their ideas of the Messiah than to renounce their belief in their Master's Messiahship--the accession of Gentile converts and the destruction of the last remnant of theocracy, necessitating a wider interpretation of Messianic hopes--the junction of Christian ideas with Alexandrian Platonism, and the decrepitude of polytheism, combined to associate the name of Jesus, his Messiahship, his death and his resurrection, with a great moral and religious revolution. This historical sketch, which is under the disadvantage of presenting, synthetically, ideas based on a subsequent analysis, is intended to meet the difficulty so often urged, and which might be held to nullify the value of a critical investigation, that Christianity is a fact for which, if the supposition of a miraculous origin be rejected, no adequate and probable causes can be assigned, and that thus, however defective may be the evidence of the New-Testament history, its acceptance is the least difficult alternative. "In the writer's view, the characteristics of the Essene sect, as traced by Josephus and Philo, justify the supposition that Jesus was educated in their school of philosophy; but with the elevated belief and purity of life which belonged to this sect he united the ardent patriotic ideas which had previously animated Judas of Galilee, who resisted the Roman authority on the ground that God was the only ruler and lord of the Jews. The profound consciousness of genius, a religious fervor which made the idea of the divine ever present to him, patriotic zeal, and a spirit of moral reform, together with a participation in the enthusiastic belief of his countrymen that the long-predicted exaltation of Israel was at hand, combined to produce in the mind of Jesus the gradual conviction that he was himself the Messiah, with whose reign that exaltation would commence. He began, as John the Baptist had already done, to announce 'the kingdom of heaven,' a phrase which, to the Jewish mind, represented the national glorification of Israel; and by his preaching, and the influence of his powerful personality, he won multitudes in Galilee to a participation in his belief that he was the expected Son of David. His public entrance into Jerusalem in the guise which tradition associated with the Messiah, when he sanctioned the homage of the multitude, was probably the climax of his confidence that a great demonstration of divine power, in concurrence with popular enthusiasm, would seat him triumphantly on the throne of David. No such result appearing, his views of the divine dispensation with respect to himself began to change, and he felt the presentiment that he must enter on his Messianic reign through the gates of suffering and death. Viewing Jesus as a pretender not only to spiritual but to political power, as one who really expected the subversion of the existing government to make way for his own kingship (though he probably relied on divine rather than on human means), he must necessarily have appeared in a dangerous light to those of his countrymen who were in authority, and who were anxious at any price to preserve public tranquillity in the presence of the Roman power, ready to visit with heavy vengeance any breach of order, and to deprive them of the last remnants of their independence; and hence the motives for his arrest and execution. To account for the belief of the disciples in the resurrection of their Master--a belief which appears to have been sincere--the author thinks it necessary to suppose a certain nucleus of fact, and this he finds in the disappearance of the body of Jesus, a point attested by all the four evangelists. The secret of this disappearance probably lay with Joseph of Arimathæa and Nicodemus, who were anxious to avoid implicating themselves with that fermentation of regretful enthusiasm to which a resort of the disciples to the grave might give rise. Animated by a belief in the resurrection, which, being more harmless in the eyes of the authorities than that in a living Messiah, they were permitted to preach with little molestation; the zeal of the disciples won many converts; a new impulse was given to their cause by the accession of Paul, who became the chief missionary of the new faith, as construed by himself, to the Gentiles; and the concurrence of the causes indicated above, modifying the early creed of the apostles, and blending it with trains of thought already prevalent, bore along Christianity in its conquest over the minds of men until it became the dominant religion of the Roman world. "Having sought to show, in this preliminary sketch, that a belief in miracles is not entailed on us by the fact of the early growth of Christianity, the author enters on the inquiry whether the claims of the evangelical writers on our credence are such as to sustain the miraculous part of their narratives. The answer is in the negative. He discusses, first, the date and credibility of each Gospel, and concludes that while Matthew has many marvellous stories, incongruous in themselves, and not only unsupported but contradicted by the other evangelists, he nevertheless presents the most comprehensible account of the career of Jesus; that in Mark, evidently more remote in time and circumstances, both from his events and from Jewish modes of thought, the idea conveyed of Jesus is much vaguer and less explicable; that in Luke there is a still further modification of his character, which has acquired a tinge of asceticism; while in John the style of his teaching is wholly changed, and instead of the graphic parable and the pithy apothegm, he utters long, mystical discourses in the style of the first epistle bearing the name of the same evangelist. Mr. Hennell, however, adheres to the conclusion that the substance of this Gospel came from the apostle John at an advanced age, when both the events of his early manhood and the scenes of his native land lay in the far distance. The writer then enters on a special examination of the Resurrection and Ascension, and the other miracles in the Gospels and the Acts, and inquires how far they are sustained by the apostolic Epistles. He examines the prophecies of the Old Testament supposed to have been fulfilled in Jesus, and also the predictions of Jesus himself concerning his death and resurrection; and, finally, he considers the character, views, and doctrine of Christ. According to him, an impartial study of the conduct and sayings of Jesus, as exhibited in the Gospels, produces the conviction that he was an enthusiast and a revolutionist, no less than a reformer and a moral and religious teacher. Passages are adduced from the Old Testament, and from the apocryphal and rabbinical writings, to show that there is scarcely anything absolutely original in the teaching of Jesus; but, in the opinion of the author, he manifests a freedom and individuality in the use of his materials, and a general superiority of tone and selection, which, united with the devotion of his life to what he held the highest purpose, mark him to be of an order of minds occurring but at rare intervals in the history of our race. "Shortly after the appearance of this work it was translated into German through the instrumentality of Dr. Strauss, who, in the preface he prefixed to it, says: 'Not sufficiently acquainted with German to read continuously a learned work in that language, the labors of our theologians were only accessible to him' (the author of the 'Inquiry') 'so far as they were written in Latin, or translated into English, or treated of in English writings or periodicals: especially he is unacquainted with what the Germans have effected in the criticism of the gospels since Schleiermacher's work on Luke, and even the earlier commentators he knows but imperfectly. Only so much the more remarkable is it, however, that both in the principles and in the main results of his investigation, he is on the very track which has been entered on among us in recent years.... That at certain periods, certain modes of thought lie as it were in the atmosphere, ... and come to light in the most remote places without perceptible media of communication, is shown, not only by the contents, but by the spirit, of Mr. Hennell's work. No further traces of the ridicule and scorn which characterize his countrymen of the deistical school; the subject is treated in the earnest and dignified tone of the truth-seeker, not with the rancor of a passionate polemic; we nowhere find him deriving religion from priestcraft, but from the tendencies and wants of human nature.... These elevated views, which the learned German of our day appropriates as the fruit of the religious and scientific advancement of his nation, this Englishman, to whom most of the means at our command were wanting, has been able to educe entirely from himself.... An Englishman, a merchant, a man of the world, he possesses, both by nature and by training, the practical insight, the sure tact, which lays hold on realities. The solution of problems over which the German flutters with many circuits of learned formulæ, our English author often succeeds in seizing at one spring.... To the learned he often presents things under a surprisingly new aspect; to the unlearned, invariably under that which is the most comprehensible and attractive.'" The reading of Mr. Hennell's book no doubt marks an epoch in George Eliot's development; but probably there had been a good deal of half-unconscious preparation beforehand (as indicated by Mrs. Cash's remarks on Isaac Taylor's work, in the last chapter), which was greatly stimulated now by the contact with new minds. The following extract from a letter to Miss Lewis, dated 13th November, 1841, accurately fixes the date of the first acknowledgment by herself that her opinions were undergoing so momentous a change. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 13th Nov. 1841.] My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may lead, I know not--possibly to one that will startle you; but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error. I venture to say our love will not decompose under the influence of separation, unless you excommunicate me for differing from you in opinion. Think--is there any _conceivable_ alteration in me that would prevent your coming to me at Christmas? I long to have a friend such as you are, I think I may say, alone to me, to unburden every thought and difficulty--for I am still a solitary, though near a city. But we have the universe to talk with, infinity in which to stretch the gaze of hope, and an all-bountiful, all-wise Creator in whom to confide--he who has given us the untold delights of which our reason, our emotion, our sensations, are the ever-springing sources. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th Dec. 1841.] What a pity that while mathematics are indubitable, immutable, and no one doubts the properties of a triangle or a circle, doctrines infinitely important to man are buried in a charnel-heap of bones over which nothing is heard but the barks and growls of contention! "Unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united." It was impossible for such a nature as Miss Evans's, in the enthusiasm of this first great change, to rest satisfied in compliance with the old forms, and she was so uneasy in an equivocal position that she determined to give up going to church. This was an unforgivable offence in the eyes of her father, who was a Churchman of the old school, and nearly led to a family rupture. He went so far as to put into an agent's hands the lease of the house in the Foleshill road, with the intention of going to live with his married daughter. Upon this, Miss Evans made up her mind to go into lodgings at Leamington, and to try to support herself by teaching. The first letter to Mrs. Bray refers to this incident: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Jan. 1842.] My guardian angel, Mrs. Pears, has just sent for me to hear your kind note, which has done my aching limbs a little good. I shall be most thankful for the opportunity of going to Leamington, and Mrs. Pears is willing to go too. There is but _one_ woe, that of leaving my dear father--all else, doleful lodgings, scanty meals, and _gazing-stockism_, are quite indifferent to me. Therefore do not fear for me when I am once settled in my home--wherever it may be--and freed from wretched suspense. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, Friday evening, Feb. 1842.] Far from being weary of your dear little Henry, his matin visits are as cheering to me as those of any little bird "that comes in spite of sorrow, And at my window bids good-morrow." We have not, perhaps, been so systematic as a regular tutor and pupil would have been, but we crave indulgence for some laxity. I was really touched that you should think of _me_ while among friends more closely linked with you in every way. I was beginning to get used to the conviction that, ivy-like as I am by nature, I must (as we see ivy do sometimes) shoot out into an isolated tree. Never again imagine that you need ask forgiveness for speaking or writing to me on subjects to me more interesting than aught else; on the contrary, believe that I really enjoy conversation of this nature: blank silence and cold reserve are the only bitters I care for in my intercourse with you. I can rejoice in all the joys of humanity; in all that serves to elevate and purify feeling and action; nor will I quarrel with the million who, I am persuaded, are with me in intention, though our dialects differ. Of course, I must desire the ultimate downfall of error, for no error is innocuous; but this assuredly will occur without my proselytizing aid, and the best proof of a real love of the truth--that freshest stamp of divinity--is a calm confidence in its intrinsic power to secure its own high destiny, that of universal empire. Do not fear that I will become a stagnant pool by a self-sufficient determination only to listen to my own echo; to read the yea, yea, on my own side, and be most comfortably deaf to the nay, nay. Would that all rejected _practically_ this maxim! To _fear_ the examination of any proposition appears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever. For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth's Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination. We shall then see her resurrection! Meanwhile, although I cannot rank among my principles of action a fear of vengeance eternal, gratitude for predestined salvation, or a revelation of future glories as a reward, I fully participate in the belief that the only heaven here, or hereafter, is to be found in conformity with the will of the Supreme; a continual aiming at the attainment of the perfect ideal, the true _logos_ that dwells in the bosom of the one Father. I hardly know whether I am ranting after the fashion of one of the Primitive Methodist prophetesses, with a cart for her rostrum, I am writing so fast. Good-bye, and blessings on you, as they will infallibly be on the children of peace and virtue. Again about the same date in 1842 she writes to Mrs. Bray: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Feb. 1842.] A heart full of love and gratitude to you for all your kindness in thought and act to me, undeserving. I dare say my manner belies my feelings: but friendship must live by faith and not by sight, and I shall be a great gainer by leaving you to interpret my mystic character without any other key than your own goodness. The last letter of the series to Miss Lewis also refers to the difficulties of the situation: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 19th Feb. 1842.] I dare say you have added, subtracted, and divided suppositions until you think you have a sure product--viz., a good quantum, or, rather, a bad one, of indifference and forgetfulness, as the representation of my conduct towards you. If so, revise your arithmetic, for be it known to you that, having had my propensities, sentiments, and intellect gauged a second time, I am pronounced to possess a large organ of "adhesiveness," a still larger one of "firmness," and as large of "conscientiousness"--hence, if I should turn out a very weathercock and a most pitiful truckler, you will have data for the exercise of faith maugre common-sense, common justice, and the testimony of your eyes and ears. How do you go on for society, for communion of spirit, the drop of nectar in the cup of mortals? But why do I say the drop? The mind that feels its value will get large draughts from some source, if denied it in the most commonly chosen way. "'Mid the rich store of nature's gifts to man Each has his loves, close wedded to his soul By fine association's golden links. As the Great Spirit bids creation teem With conscious being and intelligence, So man, his miniature resemblance, gives To matter's every form a speaking soul, An emanation from his spirit's fount, The impress true of its peculiar seal. Here finds he thy best image, sympathy." Beautiful egoism, to quote one's own. But where is not this same ego? The martyr at the stake seeks its gratification as much as the court sycophant, the difference lying in the comparative dignity and beauty of the two egos. People absurdly talk of self-denial. Why, there is none in virtue, to a being of moral excellence: the greatest torture to such a soul would be to run counter to the dictates of conscience; to wallow in the slough of meanness, deception, revenge, or sensuality. This was Paul's idea in the first chapter of 2d Epistle to Timothy (I think that is the passage). I have had a weary week. At the beginning more than the usual amount of _cooled_ glances, and exhortations to the suppression of self-conceit. The former are so many hailstones that make me wrap more closely around me the mantle of determinate purpose: the latter are needful, and have a tendency to exercise forbearance, that well repays the temporary smart. The heart knoweth its own, whether bitterness or joy: let us, dearest, beware how we, _even with good intentions_, press a finger's weight on the already bruised. And about the same date she writes to Mrs. Bray: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of Feb. 1842.] I must relieve my conscience before I go to bed by entering a protest against every word or accent of discontent that I uttered this morning. If I have ever complained of any person or circumstance, I do penance by eating my own words. When my real self has regained its place, I can shake off my troubles "like dewdrops from the lion's mane," and then I feel the baseness of imputing my sorrows to others rather than to my own pitiful weakness. But I do not write for your forgiveness; that I know I have. I only want to satisfy my indignation against myself. The conclusion of the matter was that Mr. Evans withdrew his house from the agent's hands, and his daughter went to stay at Griff, with Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Evans, whence she writes the following letter to Mrs. Pears: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, Thursday, Mch. 1842.] I have just been climbing up some favorite old hills, or rather hillocks, and if I could see you I should find myself in high preparation for one of my thorough chats. Oh, if I could transport myself to your dining-room, where I guess you and Mr. Pears are sitting in anticipation of tea--carrying on no "holy war," but at peace with the world and its opinions, or, if ever you do battle, in the happy ranks of the majority--I could kiss you into sublime liberality! How are you and your dear husband and children? It seems a week of years instead of days since you said to me your kind good-bye, and as I have tried your magnanimity quite long enough to be assured that you will not let me hear of you without a beseeching letter from me, I snatch half an hour from a too short day for the generous purpose of doubly qualifying myself, first, by pouring out the contents of my gossip-wallet, and then quietly awaiting the news I want to hear of you. I have here, in every way, abundant and unlooked-for blessings--delicacy and consideration from all whom I have seen; and I really begin to recant my old belief about the indifference of all the world towards me, for my acquaintances of this neighborhood seem to seek an opportunity of smiling on me in spite of my heresy. All these things, however, are but the fringe and ribbons of happiness. They are _ad_herent, not _in_herent; and, without any affectation, I feel myself to be acquiring what I must hold to be a precious possession, an independence of what is baptized by the world external good. There are externals (at least, they are such in common thought) that I could ill part with--the deep, blue, glorious heavens, bending as they do over all, presenting the same arch, emblem of a truer omnipresence, wherever we may be chased, and all the sweet, peace-breathing sights and sounds of this lovely earth. These, and the thoughts of the good and great, are an inexhaustible world of delight; and the felt desire to be one in will and design with the great mind that has laid open to us these treasures is the sun that warms and fructifies it. I am more and more impressed with the duty of _finding_ happiness. On a retrospection of the past month, I regret nothing so much as my own impetuosity both of feeling and judging. I am not inclined to be sanguine as to my dear father's future determination, and I sometimes have an intensely vivid consciousness, which I only allow to be a fleeting one, of all that is painful and that has been so. I can only learn that my father has commenced his alterations at Packington, but he only appears to be temporarily acquiescing in my brother's advice "not to be in a hurry." I do not intend to remain here longer than three weeks, or, at the very farthest, a month; and, if I am not then recalled, I shall write for definite directions. I must have a _home_, not a visiting-place. I wish you would learn something from my father, and send me word how he seems disposed. I hope you get long walks on these beautiful days. You would love to hear the choristers we have here; they are hymning away incessantly. Can you not drive over and see me? Do come by hook or by crook. Why, Mr. Pears could almost walk hither. I am becoming very hurried, for most welcome tea is in the vicinity, and I must be busy after I have imbibed its inspiration. You will write to me to-morrow, will you not? and pray insist on Mr. Pears writing an appendix. I had a note from Mrs. Bray this morning, and I liked it better than my breakfast. So do give me a little treat on Saturday. Blessings on you and yours, as all forlorn beggars have said from time immemorial to their benefactors; but real feeling, you know, will sometimes slip into a hackneyed guise. Miss Evans remained for about three weeks at Griff, at the end of which time, through the intervention of her brother, the Brays, and Miss Rebecca Franklin, the father was very glad to receive her again, and she resumed going to church as before. It will be seen from a subsequent noteworthy letter to Miss Sara Hennell, dated 19th October, 1843, that Miss Evans's views of the best course to be pursued under similar circumstances had already undergone considerable modifications, and in the last year of her life she told me that, although she did not think she had been to blame, few things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary collision with her father, which might, she thought, have been avoided with a little management. In July of this year (1842) Miss Sara Hennell--the gifted sister of Mrs. Bray--came to Rosehill, and completed the trio destined to exert the most important influence over the life of George Eliot. The individual characters of these three friends, and the relations each bore to their correspondent, will unfold themselves in the letters. It is only necessary here to say that the two ladies--Cara and Sara, as they are always addressed--now became like sisters to Miss Evans, and Mr. Bray her most intimate male friend, and the letters to them form an almost unbroken chain during all the remainder of George Eliot's life. To us Miss Sara Hennell is the most important correspondent, for it is to her that Miss Evans mainly turns now for intellectual sympathy; to Mrs. Bray when she is in pain or trouble, and wants affectionate companionship; with Mr. Bray she quarrels, and the humorous side of her nature is brought out. Every good story goes to him, with a certainty that it will be appreciated. With all three it is a beautiful and consistent friendship, running like a thread through the woof of the coming thirty-eight years. For the next twelve years, as will be seen, it is quite the most important thread; and although later it naturally became very much less important, it was never dropped except for a moment, in 1854, owing to a brief misunderstanding of letters, which will appear in its due place. The following letters to Miss Sara Hennell show what was passing from 30th August, 1842, to April, 1843: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th Aug. 1842.] How I have delighted in the thought that there are beings who are better than their promises, beyond the regions of waking and sleeping dreams. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, Sept. 1842.] I have not yet accounted for my tardiness in writing, which, I assure you, is no representation of my usual habit, and has been occasioned only by a week's indisposition, the foster-parent to the ill-favored offspring of my character and circumstances, gloom and stolidity, and I could not write to you with such companions to my thought. I am anxious that you should not imagine me unhappy even in my most melancholy moods, for I hold all indulgence of sadness that has the slightest tincture of discontent to be a grave delinquency. I think there can be few who more truly feel than I that this is a world of bliss and beauty--that is, that bliss and beauty are the end, the tendency of creation; and evils are the shadows that are the only conditions of light in the picture, and I live in much, much enjoyment. I am beginning to enjoy the "Eneid," though, I suppose, much in the same way as the uninitiated enjoy wine, compared with the connoisseurs. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Nov. 1842.] I have been in high displeasure with myself, have thought my soul only fit for limbo, to keep company with other abortions, and my life the shallowest, muddiest, most unblessing stream. Having got my head above this slough of despond, I feel quite inclined to tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me. You observe in your note that some persons say the unsatisfied longing we feel in ourselves for something better than the greatest perfection to be found on earth is a proof that the true object of our desires lies beyond it. Assuredly, this earth is not the home of the spirit--it will rest only in the bosom of the Infinite. But the non-satisfaction of the affections and intellect being inseparable from the unspeakable advantage of such a mind as that of man in connection with his corporal condition and _terrene_ destiny, forms not at present an argument with me for the realization of particular desires. The next letter refers to Miss Mary Hennell's[18] last illness: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Jan. 1843.] I cannot help wishing to tell you, now that you are in trouble and anxiety, how dear you are to me, and how the recollection of you is ever freshening in my mind. You have need of all your cheeriness and energy; and if they do not fail, I think it almost enviable, as far as one's self is concerned (not, of course, when the sufferer is remembered), to have the care of a sick-room, with its twilight and tiptoe stillness and helpful activity. I have always had a peculiarly peaceful feeling in such a scene. Again, after the death of Miss Mary Hennell, there is a letter to her sister Sara: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, April, 1843.] We always find that our stock of appreciated good can never be really diminished. When the chief desire of the eyes is taken, we can afford a gaze to hitherto unnoticed possessions; and even when the topmost boughs are lopped, a thousand shoots spring from below with the energy of new life. So it will be with you; but you cannot yet look beyond the present, nor is it desirable that you should. It would not be well for us to overleap one grade of joy or suffering: our life would lose its completeness and beauty. Rosehill not only afforded a pleasant variety in the Coventry life, as most visitors to the town, of any note, found their way there, but the Brays were also frequently in the habit of making little holiday excursions, in many of which Miss Evans now joined. Thus we find them in May, 1843, all going to Stratford and Malvern, together with Mr. Charles Hennell and Miss Sara Hennell, for a week; and again, in July of that year the same party, accompanied by Miss Brabant, daughter of Dr. Brabant of Devizes, went on a fortnight's tour, visiting Tenby, among other places. This trip is chiefly memorable from the fact that it was indirectly responsible for Miss Evans undertaking the translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu." For Miss Brabant (to whom the translation had been confided by Mr. Joseph Parkes of Birmingham and a group of friends) became engaged to be married to Mr. Charles Hennell; and shortly after her marriage she handed the work over to Miss Evans. In the next two letters to Miss Sara Hennell there are allusions to the approaching marriage, which took place in London on 1st November, 1843, the Brays and Miss Evans being present. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Sept. 1843.] Many thanks for procuring me the hymns and anthems. I was right glad to play "Ancient of Ages" again, and I shall like still better to sing it with you when we meet. That that is to be so soon, and under circumstances so joyful, are among the _mirabilia_ of this changing world. To see and re-see such a cluster of not indifferent persons as the programme for the wedding gives, will be almost too large a _bonne-bouche_. I saw Robert Owen yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Bray having kindly asked me to dine with him, and I think if his system prosper it will be in spite of its founder, and not because of his advocacy. The next letter to Mrs. Bray gives a pleasant glimpse of their studies together, and of the little musical society that was in the habit of meeting at Rosehill to play concerted pieces. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, no date, 1843.] I only wish you would change houses with the mayor, that I might get to you when I would. I send you the first part of "Wallenstein," with the proposition that we should study that in conjunction with the "Thirty Years' War," as I happen to have a loose copy. We had better omit the "Lager," and begin "Die Piccolomini." You shall have "Joan of Arc," my grand favorite, as a _bonne-bouche_ when you have got through "Wallenstein," which will amply repay you for any trouble in translating it, and is not more difficult than your reading ought to be now. I have skimmed Manzoni, who has suffered sadly in being poured out of silver into pewter. The chapter on Philosophy and Theology is worth reading. Miss Brabant sent me my "Hyperion" with a note, the other day. She had put no direction besides Coventry, and the parcel had consequently been sent to some other Miss Evans, and my choice little sentimental treasures, alas! exposed to vulgar gaze. Thank you for the manual, which I have had so long. I trust I did not bestow those scratches on the cover. I have been trying to find a French book that you were not likely to have read, but I do not think I have one, unless it be "Gil Blas," which you are perhaps too virtuous to have read, though how any one can opine it to have a vicious tendency I am at a loss to conjecture. They might as well say that to condemn a person to eat a whole plum-pudding would deprive him of all future relish for plain food. I have had a visitor ever since Saturday, and she will stay till Saturday again. I cannot desire that you should _un_ask Violin and Flute, unless a postponement would be in every way as agreeable to you and them. If you have them, you will give them much more pleasure as Piano than I, so do not think of me in the matter for a moment. Good-bye; and remember to treat your cold as if it were an orphan's cold, or a widow's cold, or any one's cold but your own. The following is the letter before referred to as containing an important and noteworthy declaration of opinion on the very interesting question of conformity: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Oct. 1843.] The first thing I have to say to you is to entreat that you and Mrs. Hennell will not perplex yourselves for a moment about my accommodation during the night. I am so well now that a hearthrug would be as luxurious a couch as I should need, and I defy anything short of a kettledrum or my conscience to keep me awake after a long day. The subject of your conversation with Miss D---- is a very important one, and worth an essay. I will not now inflict one of mine on you, but I will tell you, as briefly as possible, my present opinion, which you know is contrary to the one I held in the first instance. I am inclined to think that such a change of sentiment is likely to happen to most persons whose views on religious matters undergo a change early in life. The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope. We think we shall run well when we have the full use of our limbs and the bracing air of independence, and we believe that we shall soon obtain something positive, which will not only more than compensate us for what we have renounced, but will be so well worth offering to others that we may venture to proselytize as fast as our zeal for truth may prompt us. But a year or two of reflection, and the experience of our own miserable weakness, which will ill afford to part even with the crutch of superstition, must, I think, effect a change. Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds. Agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the _truth of feeling_ as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body, and that we cannot, in the majority of cases, wrench them away without destroying vitality. We begin to find that with individuals, as with nations, the only safe revolution is one arising out of the wants which their own progress has generated. It is the quackery of infidelity to suppose that it has a nostrum for all mankind, and to say to all and singular, "Swallow my opinions and you shall be whole." If, then, we are debarred by such considerations from trying to reorganize opinions, are we to remain aloof from our fellow-creatures on occasions when we may fully sympathize with the feelings exercised, although our own have been melted into another mould? Ought we not on every opportunity to seek to have our feelings in harmony, though not in union, with those who are often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, than ourselves? The results of nonconformity in a family are just an epitome of what happens on a larger scale in the world. An influential member chooses to omit an observance which, in the minds of all the rest, is associated with what is highest and most venerable. He cannot make his reasons intelligible, and so his conduct is regarded as a relaxation of the hold that moral ties had on him previously. The rest are infected with the disease they imagine in him. All the screws by which order was maintained are loosened, and in more than one case a person's happiness may be ruined by the confusion of ideas which took the form of principles. But, it may be said, how then are we to do anything towards the advancement of mankind? Are we to go on cherishing superstitions out of a fear that seems inconsistent with any faith in a Supreme Being? I think the best and the only way of fulfilling our mission is to sow good seed in good (_i.e._, prepared) ground, and not to root up tares where we must inevitably gather all the wheat with them. We cannot fight and struggle enough for freedom of inquiry, and we need not be idle in imparting all that is pure and lovely to children whose minds are unbespoken. Those who can write, let them do it as boldly as they like; and let no one hesitate at proper seasons to make a full _con_fession (far better than _pro_fession). St. Paul's reasoning about the conduct of the strong towards the weak, in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Romans, is just in point. But I have not said half what I meant to say. There are so many aspects in which the subject might be presented that it is useless to attempt to exhaust it. I fear I have written very unintelligibly, for it is rather late, and I am so cold that my thoughts are almost frozen. After Miss Brabant's marriage to Mr. Charles Hennell, Miss Evans went to stay for a week or two with Dr. Brabant at Devizes, and some time about the beginning of January, 1844, the proposition was made for the transfer of the translation of Strauss from Mrs. Charles Hennell. At the end of April, 1844, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Sara Hennell that Miss Evans is "working away at Strauss six pages a day," and the next letter from Miss Evans refers to the beginning of the undertaking. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday, May, 1844.] To begin with business, I send you on the other side the translations you wished (Strauss), but they are perhaps no improvements on what you had done. I shall be very glad to learn from you the particulars as to the mode of publication--who are the parties that will find the funds, and whether the manuscripts are to be put into the hands of any one when complete, or whether they are to go directly from me to the publishers? I was very foolish not to imagine about these things in the first instance, but ways and means are always afterthoughts with me. You will soon be settled and enjoying the blessed spring and summer time. I hope you are looking forward to it with as much delight as I. One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one! Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown. Witness colic and whooping-cough and dread of ghosts, to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake. Then the sorrows of older persons, which children see but cannot understand, are worse than all. All this to prove that we are happier than when we were seven years old, and that we shall be happier when we are forty than we are now, which I call a comfortable doctrine, and one worth trying to believe! I am sitting with father, who every now and then jerks off my attention to the history of Queen Elizabeth, which he is reading. On the 1st July, 1844, there was another little trip with the Brays to the Cumberland lakes, this time returning by Manchester and Liverpool; and on reaching home, about the beginning of August, there is the following letter: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, Aug. 1844.] Can I have the remaining volumes of Strauss, excepting any part that you may choose to keep for your own use? If you could also send me such parts of the introduction and first section as you wish me to look over, I should like to despatch that business at intervals, when I am not inspired for more thorough labor. Thank you for the encouragement you sent me. I only need it when my head is weak and I am unable to do much. Then I sicken at the idea of having Strauss in my head and on my hands for a lustrum, instead of saying good-bye to him in a year. When I can work fast I am never weary, nor do I regret either that the work has been begun or that I have undertaken it. I am only inclined to vow that I will never translate again, if I live to correct the sheets for Strauss. My first page is 257. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 31st Oct. 1844.] Pray tell Mrs. C. Hennell that no apology was needed for the very good translation she has sent me. I shall be glad to avail myself of it to the last word, for I am thoroughly tired of my own garb for Strauss's thoughts. I hope the introduction, etc., will be ready by the end of November, when I hope to have put the last words to the first volume. I am awfully afraid of my own translation, and I want you to come and comfort me. I am relapsing into heathen darkness about everything but Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. "Heaven has sent leanness into my soul"--for reviling them, I suppose. This lovely autumn! Have you enjoyed its long shadows and fresh breezes? [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of 1844.] I do not think it was kind to Strauss (I knew he was handsome) to tell him that a young lady was translating his book. I am sure he must have some twinges of alarm to think he was dependent on that most contemptible specimen of the human being for his English reputation. By the way, I never said that the Canons of the Council of Nice, or the Confession of Augsburg, or even the Thirty-nine Articles, are suggestive of poetry. I imagine no _dogmas_ can be. But surely Christianity, with its Hebrew retrospect and millennial hopes, the heroism and divine sorrow of its founder, and all its glorious army of martyrs, might supply, and has supplied, a strong impulse not only to poetry, but to all the Fine Arts. Mr. Pears is coming home from Malvern to-night, and the children are coming to tea with me, so that I have to make haste with my afternoon matters. Beautiful little Susan has been blowing bubbles, and looking like an angel at sport. I am quite happy, only sometimes feeling "the weight of all this unintelligible world." [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Sunday, beginning of 1845.] Your books are come for the school, and I have covered them--at least those that I think you will like for the children; two or three are quite for grown-up people. What an exquisite little thing that is of Harriet Martineau's--"The Crofton Boys"! I have had some delightful crying over it. There are two or three lines in it that would feed one's soul for a month. Hugh's mother says to him, speaking of people who have permanent sorrow, "They soon had a new and delicious pleasure, which none but the bitterly disappointed can feel--the pleasure of rousing their souls to bear pain, and of _agreeing with God silently_, when nobody knows what is in their hearts." I received "Sybil" yesterday quite safely. I am not utterly disgusted with D'Israeli. The man hath good veins, as Bacon would say, but there is not enough blood in them. The 17th April this year was an interesting day, as Miss Evans went with the Brays to Atherstone Hall, and met Harriet Martineau for the first time. It will be seen that in later years there was considerable intimacy between them. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th April, 1845.] If you think any of my future manuscript too untidy for the printer, only mark it to that effect, and I will rewrite it, for I do not mind that mechanical work; and my conscience is rather uneasy lest the illegibility of my hand should increase materially the expense of the publication. Do not be alarmed because I am not well just now: I shall be better very soon, and I am not really disgusted with Strauss. I only fancy so sometimes, as I do with all earthly things. In June Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans "looks all the better of her London trip. I never saw her so blooming and buoyant;" but the two next letters show a relapse. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of June, (?) 1845.] Glad am I that some one can enjoy Strauss! The million certainly will not, and I have ceased to sit down to him with any relish. I should work much better if I had some proof-sheets coming in to assure me that my soul-stupefying labor is not in vain. I am more grateful to you than I can tell you for taking the trouble you do. If it had not been for your interest and encouragement I should have been almost in despair by this time. And again, a little later: I begin utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published, unless I can imitate the Rev. Mr. Davis, and print it myself. At the very best, if we go on according to the rate of procedure hitherto, the book will not be published within the next two years. This seems dolorous enough to me, whose only real satisfaction just now is some hope that I am not sowing the wind. It is very laughable that I should be irritated about a thing in itself so trifling as a translation, but it is the very triviality of the thing that makes delays provoking. The difficulties that attend a really grand undertaking are to be borne, but things should run smoothly and fast when they are not important enough to demand the sacrifice of one's whole soul. The second volume is quite ready. The last few sections were written under anything but favorable circumstances. They are not Strauss's best thoughts, nor are they put into his translator's best language; but I have not courage to imitate Gibbon--put my work in the fire and begin again. In July, 1845, there seems to have arisen some difficulty in getting in the cash subscriptions for the publication. Mr. Charles Hennell and Mr. Joseph Parkes, however, exerted themselves in the matter, and £300 was collected, and the following letter shows the relief it was to Miss Evans: [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Hennell, Friday evening, July, 1845.] Thank you for sending me the good news so soon, and for sympathizing in my need of encouragement. I have all I want now, and shall go forward on buoyant wing. I am glad for the work's sake, glad for your sake, and glad for "the honorable gentleman's" sake, that matters have turned out so well. Pray think no more of my pens, ink, and paper. I would gladly give much more towards the work than these and my English, if I could do so consistently with duty. The book now got into the hands of the printers, as will be seen from the next letter: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Aug. 1845.] I have just been looking over some of the _revise_, and reading again your sweet letter to me from Hastings, and an impulse of gratitude and love will not let me rest without writing you a little note, though my hand has almost done its possible for the day under this intense heat. You do not guess how much pleasure it gives me to look over your pencillings, they prove so clearly that you have really entered into the meaning of every sentence, and it always gives one satisfaction to see the evidence of brain-work. I am quite indebted to you for your care, and I feel greatly the advantage of having a friend to undertake the office of critic. There is one word I must mention--Azazel is the word put in the original of the Old Testament for the scapegoat: now I imagine there is some dubiousness about the meaning, and that Strauss would not think it right to translate _scapegoat_, because, from the tenor of his sentence, he appears to include Azazel with the evil demons. I wonder if it be supposed by any one that Azazel is in any way a distinct being from the goat. I know no Hebrew scholar, and have access to no Hebrew lexicon. Have you asked Mr. Hennell about it? Your letter describes what I _have_ felt rather than what I feel. It seems as if my affections were quietly sinking down to temperate, and I every day seem more and more to value thought rather than feeling. I do not think this is man's best estate, but it is better than what I have sometimes known. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday evening, autumn of 1845.] I am not ashamed to confess that I should like to be idle with you for a little while, more than anything else I can think of just now. But, alas! leathery brain must work at leathery Strauss for a short time before my butterfly days come. O, how I shall spread my wings then! Anent the Greek, it would produce very dreadful cold perspirations indeed in me, if there were anything amounting to a serious error, but this, I trust, there will not be. You must really expect me, if not to sleep and snore _aliquando_, at least to nod in the course of some thousand pages. I should like you to be deliberate over the _Schluss Abhandlung_. It is the only part on which I have bestowed much pains, for the difficulty was _piquing_, not piquant. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, no date, 1845.] I am never pained when I think Strauss right; but in many cases I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory--not a perfect theory in itself. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Sept. 1845.] I am delighted with the proof. The type and everything else are just what I wished. To see the first sheet is the next best thing to seeing the last, which I hope we shall all have done this time next year. There is a very misty vision of a trip to the Highlands haunting us in this quarter. The vision would be much pleasanter if Sara were one of the images in it. You would surely go if we went, and then the thing would be perfect. I long to see you, for you are becoming a sort of transfigured existence, a mere ideal to me, and I have nothing to tell me of your real flesh-and-blood self but sundry very useful little pencil-marks, and a scrap of Mrs. Bray's notes now and then. So, if you would have me bear in my memory your own self, and not some aerial creation that I call by your name, you must make your appearance. In October "the misty vision" took palpable shape, and the Brays, Miss Hennell, and Miss Evans had a delightful fortnight in Scotland, visiting Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, The Trossachs, Stirling, Edinburgh, Melrose, and Abbotsford. They were away from the 14th to the 28th, and on returning to Coventry Strauss was taken up again. Miss Hennell was reading the translation, and aiding with suggestions and corrections. The next letter to her seems to be dated in November. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Nov. 1845.] Please to tell Mr. Hennell that "habits of thought" is not a translation of the word _particularismus_. This does not mean national idiosyncrasy, but is a word which characterizes that idiosyncrasy. If he decidedly objects to particularism, ask him to be so good as substitute _exclusiveness_, though there is a shade of meaning in _particularismus_ which even that does not express. It was because the word could only be translated by a circumlocution that I ventured to Anglicize it. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Tuesday morning, Dec. (?) 1845.] I have been idle, and have not done a stroke to the prefaces, but they shall be sent as soon as possible. Thanks for the copy of the Latin preface and letter. They are in preconceived harmony with my ideas of the appropriate. I will leave the titlepage to you and Mr. Hennell. Thanks for the news in your last _extra Blatt_. I am glad to find that the theological organs are beginning to deal with philosophy, but I can hardly imagine your writer to be a friend with a false cognizance on his shield. These dear orthodox people talk so simply sometimes that one cannot help fancying them satirists of their own doctrines and fears, though they mean manfully to fight against the enemy. I should like if possible to throw the emphasis on _critically_ in the titlepage. Strauss means it to be so: and yet I do not know how we can put anything better than what you say. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Dec. 1845.] I send you to-day the conclusion of the chapter you are reading, and, unless you find anything of importance to be rectified, you need not return this to me, but may forward the whole to the printer as soon as you have read it. I am not altogether satisfied with the use of the word sacrament as applied specifically to the _Abendmahl_. It seems like a vulgarism to say _the_ sacrament for one thing, and for another it does not seem _ab_original enough in the life of Jesus; but I know of no other word that can be substituted. I have altered passover to paschal meal, but [Greek: tho pascha] is used in the New Testament of the eating of the lamb _par excellence_. You remember, in the title of the first section in the _Schluss_--which I had been so careless as to omit--the expression is "Nothwendiger Uebergang der Kritik in das Dogma." Now, dogmatism will not do, as that would represent _Dogmatismus_. "Dogmatik" is the idea, I believe--_i.e._, positive theology. Is it allowable to say _dogmatics_, think you? I do not understand how the want of manuscript can be so pressing, as I have only had one proof for the last fortnight. It seems quite dispiriting to me now not to see the proofs regularly. I have had a miserable week of headache, but am better now, and ready for work, to which I must go. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Jan. 1846.] I do pity you, with the drunken Christmas workmen keeping you in this uncomfortable interregnum. But do not go distraught; the spring will really come and the birds--many having had to fly across the Atlantic, which is farther than you have to go to establish yourself. I could easily give the meaning of the Hebrew word in question, as I know where to borrow a lexicon. But observe, there are two Hebrew words untranslated in this proof. I do not think it will do to give the English in one place and not in another, where there is no reason for such a distinction, and there is not here, for the note in this proof sounds just as fee-fo-fum-ish as the other without any translation. I could not alter the "troublesome," because it is the nearest usable adjective for _schwierig_, which stands in the German. I am tired of inevitable _importants_, and cannot bear to put them when they do not represent the German. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Jan. 1846.] I have been sadly occupied for the last ten days. My father has been ill, and has required much attention, and my own head was very middling for some days, so that I send you but a poor cargo of new manuscript. Indeed, on looking through the last quire of paper this morning for the purpose of putting in the Greek, it seemed all very poor to me, but the subject is by no means inspiring, and no muse would condescend to visit such an uncertain votary as I have been for the last week or so. How is it that I have only had one proof this week? You know we are five hundred pages in advance of the printer, so you need not be dreadfully alarmed. I have been so pleased to hear some of your letters read to me, but, alas! I can reflect no pleasure at this moment, for I have a woful pain and am in a desperate hurry. On 14th February, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Sara Hennell that Miss Evans "says she is Strauss-sick--it makes her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the Crucifixion, and only the sight of the Christ-image[19] and picture make her endure it. Moreover, as her work advances nearer its public appearance, she grows dreadfully nervous. Poor thing, I do pity her sometimes, with her pale, sickly face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father. This illness of his has tried her so much, for all the time she had for rest and fresh air she had to read to him. Nevertheless, she looks very happy and satisfied sometimes in her work." And about the end of February there is the following letter from Miss Evans: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1846.] Health and greeting, my Achates, in this veritable spring month. I shall send you a parcel on Monday with sixty-four new pages of German for your intellectual man. The next parcel, which will be the LAST, I shall send on the Monday following, and when you have read to the end, you may, if you think it desirable, send the whole to me. Your dull ass does not mend his pace for beating; but he _does_ mend it when he finds out that he is near his journey's end, and makes you wonder how he could pretend to find all the previous drawing so hard for him. I plead guilty to having set off in a regular scamper: but be lenient and do not scold me if you find all sorts of carelessnesses in these last hundred pages. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1846.] I have been guilty of the most unpardonable piece of carelessness, for which I am stretched on a rack of anxiety and mortification. In the proof that came on Thursday I unwittingly drew out a quarter sheet with the blotting-paper, and did not discover the mistake until Saturday morning, when about to correct the last proof. Surely the printer would discover the absence of the four pages and wait for them--otherwise I would rather have lost one of my fingers, or all the hair from my head, than have committed such a _faux pas_. For there were three very awkward blunders to be corrected. All this vexation makes a cold and headache doubly intolerable, and I am in a most purgatorial state on this "good Sunday." I shall send the proofs, with the unfortunate quarter sheet and an explanation, to-night to Mr. Chapman, and prithee do thou inquire and see that the right thing is done. The tears are streaming from my smarting eyes--so farewell. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.] I wish we could get the book out in May--why not? I suppose the binding could not be all got through--the printing and writing I should think might be managed in time. Shouldn't I like to fleet the time away with thee as they did in the Golden Age--after all our toils to lie reclined on the hills (spiritually), like gods together, careless of mankind. Sooth to speak, idleness, and idleness with thee, is just the most tempting mirage you could raise before my mind's eye--I say mirage, because I am determined from henceforth to believe in no substantiality for future time, but to live in and love the present--of which I have done too little. Still, the thought of being with you in your own home will attract me to that future; for without all controversy I love thee and miss thee. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.] My soul kisses thee, dear Sara, in gratitude for those dewy thoughts of thine in this morning's note. My poor adust soul wants such refreshment. Continue to do me good--hoping for nothing again. I have had my sister with me all day--an interruption, alas! I cannot write more, but I should not be happy to let the day pass without saying one word to thee. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.] The last hundred pages have certainly been totally uninteresting to me, considered as matter for translation. Strauss has inevitably anticipated in the earlier part of his work all the principles and many of the details of his criticism, and he seems fagged himself. _Mais courage!_ the neck of the difficulty is broken, and there is really very little to be done now. If one's head would but keep in anything like thinking and writing order! Mine has robbed me of half the last fortnight; but I am a little better now, and am saying to myself _Frisch zu!_ The Crucifixion and the Resurrection are, at all events, better than the bursting asunder of Judas. I am afraid I have not made this dull part of Strauss even as tolerable as it might be, for both body and mind have recoiled from it. Thank you, dearest, for all your love and patience for me and with me. I have nothing on earth to complain of but subjective maladies. Father is pretty well, and I have not a single excuse for discontent through the livelong day. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Mch. 1846.] As I believe that even your kindness cannot overcome your sincerity, I will cast aside my fear that your wish to see me in your own home is rather a plan for my enjoyment than for yours. I believe it would be an unmixed pleasure to me to be your visitor, and one that I would choose among a whole bouquet of agreeable possibilities; so I will indulge myself, and accept the good that the heavens and you offer me. I am miserably in want of you to stir up my soul and make it shake its wings, and begin some kind of flight after something good and noble, for I am in a grovelling, slothful condition, and you are the _only_ friend I possess who has an animating influence over me. I have written to Mr. Hennell anent the titlepage, and have voted for _critically examined_, from an entire conviction of its preferableness. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, beginning of April, 1846.] See what it is to have a person _en rapport_ with you, that knows all your thoughts without the trouble of communication! I am especially grateful to you for restoring the "therefore" to its right place. I was about to write to you to get you to remonstrate about this and the "dispassionate calmness," which I did not at all like; but I thought you had corrected the prefaces, as the marks against the Latin looked like yours, so I determined to indulge my _laissez-faire_ inclinations, for I hate stickling and debating unless it be for something really important. I do really like reading our Strauss--he is so _klar und ideenvoll_; but I do not know _one_ person who is likely to read the book through--do you? Next week we will be merry and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked, together. On 19th April, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans is "as happy as you may imagine at her work being done. She means to come and read Shakespeare through to us as her first enjoyment." And again, on 27th April, that she "is delighted beyond measure with Strauss's elegant preface. It is just what she likes. And what a nice letter too! The Latin is quite beyond me, but the letter shows how neatly he can express himself." _SUMMARY._ MARCH, 1841, TO APRIL, 1846. Foleshill--New friends--Mrs. Pears--Coventry life and engagements--Letters to Miss Lewis--Brother's marriage--Mental depression--Reading Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System"--Makes acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Reads Charles Hennell's book, "An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity"--Effect of this book--Gives up going to church--Family difficulties--Letters to Mrs. Pears--Visit to Griff--Returns to Foleshill and resumes going to church--Acquaintance with Miss Sara Hennell, and development of friendship with her and Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell describing mental characteristics--Attitude towards immortality--Death of Miss Mary Hennell--Excursion with the Brays, Mr. Charles Hennell, and Miss Hennell to Stratford and Malvern, and to Tenby with same party and Miss Brabant--Meets Robert Owen--Studies German and music with Mrs. Bray--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, with important declaration of opinion in regard to conformity--Mr. Charles Hennell's marriage--Stay with Dr. Brabant at Devizes--Arrangement for translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu"--Excursion with Brays to the Cumberland lakes, returning by Manchester and Liverpool--Weary of Strauss--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Poetry of Christianity--Admiration of Harriet Martineau's "The Crofton Boys"--Trip to London--Despair about publication of Strauss--Subscription of £300 for the work--In better heart--Minutiæ of Strauss translation--Pains taken with the _Schluss Abhandlung_--Opinion of Strauss's work--The book in print--Trip to the Highlands--Strauss difficulties--Miss Hennell reads the translation and makes suggestions--Suffering from headaches and "Strauss-sick"--The last MS. of the translation sent to Miss Hennell--Joy at finishing--Delighted with Strauss's Preface. FOOTNOTES: [17] Brother's marriage. [18] Miss Mary Hennell was the author of "An Outline of the Various Social Systems founded on the Principle of Co-operation," published in 1841. [19] This was an ivory image she had of the Crucified Christ over the desk in her study at Foleshill, where she did all her work at that time--a little room on the first floor, with a charming view over the country. CHAPTER III. The completion of the translation of Strauss is another milestone passed in the life journey of George Eliot, and the comparatively buoyant tone of the letters immediately following makes us feel that the galled neck is out of the yoke for a time. In May, Mrs. Bray had gone away from home for a visit, and the next letter is addressed to her. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Sunday (probably about 6th May), 1846.] Do not stay any longer than is necessary to do you good, lest I should lose the pleasure of loving you, for my affections are always the warmest when my friends are within an attainable distance. I think I can manage to keep respectably warm towards you for three weeks without seeing you, but I cannot promise more. Tell Mr. Bray I am getting too amiable for this world, and Mr. Donovan's wizard hand would detect a slight corrugation of the skin on my organs 5 and 6;[20] they are so totally without exercise. I had a lecture from Mr. Pears on Friday, as well as a sermon this morning, so you need be in no alarm for my moral health. Do you never think of those Caribs who, by dint of flattening their foreheads, can manage to see perpendicularly above them without so much as lifting their heads? There are some good people who remind me of them. They see everything so clearly and with so little trouble, but at the price of sad self-mutilation. On the 26th May Miss Evans went to pay a visit to Mrs. and Miss Hennell at Hackney, and she writes from there to Mrs. Bray, who was expected to join them in London. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of May, 1846.] I cannot deny that I am very happy without you, but perhaps I shall be happier with you, so do not fail to try the experiment. We have been to town only once, and are saving all our strength to "rake" with you; but we are as ignorant as Primitive Methodists about any of the amusements that are going. Please to come in a very mischievous, unconscientious, theatre-loving humor. Everybody I see is very kind to me, and therefore I think them all very charming; and, having everything I want, I feel very humble and self-denying. It is only rather too great a bore to have to write to my friends when I am half asleep, and I have not yet reached that pitch of amiability that makes such magnanimity easy. Don't bring us any bad news or any pains, but only nods and becks and wreathèd smiles. They stayed in London till the 5th June, and on the 15th of that month the translation of Strauss was published. On the 2d July Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans "is going to Dover with her father, for a fortnight." In passing through Dover on our way to the Continent, in 1880, after our marriage, we visited the house they stayed at in 1846, and my wife then told me that she had suffered a great deal there, as her father's health began to show signs of breaking up. On returning to Coventry there is the following letter referring to Wicksteed's review of the translation of Strauss, which was advertised for the forthcoming number of the _Prospective Review_. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Thursday, Aug. (?) 1846.] Do you think it worth my while to buy the _Prospective_ for the sake of Wicksteed's review--is there anything new in it? Do you know if Mr. Chapman has any unusual facilities for obtaining cheap classics? Such things are to be got handsome and second-hand in London--if one knew but the way. I want to complete Xenophon's works. I have the "Anabasis," and I might, perhaps, get a nice edition of the "Memorabilia" and "Cyropædia" in a cheaper way than by ordering them directly from our own bookseller. I have been reading the "Fawn of Sertorius."[21] I think you would like it, though the many would not. It is pure, chaste, and classic, beyond any attempt at fiction I ever read. If it be Bulwer's, he has been undergoing a gradual transfiguration, and is now ready to be exalted into the assembly of the saints. The professor's (Strauss's) letter, transmitted through you, gave me infinite consolation, more especially the apt and pregnant quotation from Berosus. Precious those little hidden lakelets of knowledge in the high mountains, far removed from the vulgar eye, only visited by the soaring birds of love. On 25th September, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans "looks very brilliant just now. We fancy she must be writing her novel;" and then come the following letters, written in October and November: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Oct. 1846.] All the world is bathed in glory and beauty to me now, and thou sharest in the radiance. Tell me whether I live for you as you do for me, and tell me how gods and men are treating you. You must send me a scrap every month--only a scrap with a dozen words in it, just to prevent me from starving on faith alone--of which you know I have the minimum of endowment. I am sinning against my daddy by yielding to the strong impulse I felt to write to you, for he looks at me as if he wanted me to read to him. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Oct. 1846.] I do not know whether I can get up any steam again on the subject of Quinet; but I will try--when Cara comes back, however, for she has run away with "Christianity" into Devonshire, and I must have the book as a springing-board. When does the _Prospective_ come out? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Nov. 1846.] The review of Strauss contains some very just remarks, though, on the whole, I think it shallow, and in many cases unfair. The praise it gives to the translation is just what I should have wished; indeed, I cannot imagine anything more gratifying in the way of laudation. Is it not droll that Wicksteed should have chosen one of my interpolations, or rather paraphrases, to dilate on. The expression "granite," applied to the sayings of Jesus, is nowhere used by Strauss, but is an impudent addition of mine to eke out his metaphor. Did you notice the review of Foster's Life?[22] I am reading the Life, and thinking all the time how you would like it. It is deeply interesting to study the life of a genius under circumstances amid which genius is so seldom to be found. Some of the thoughts in his journal are perfect gems. The words of the reviewer of the Strauss translation in the _Prospective_ are worth preserving: "A faithful, elegant, and scholarlike translation. Whoever reads these volumes without any reference to the German must be pleased with the easy, perspicuous, idiomatic, and harmonious force of the English style. But he will be still more satisfied when, on turning to the original, he finds that the rendering is word for word, thought for thought, and sentence for sentence. In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which imparts to the volumes before us the air and spirit of an original. Though the translator never obtrudes himself upon the reader with any notes or comments of his own, yet he is evidently a man who has a familiar knowledge of the whole subject; and if the work be the joint production of several hands, moving in concert, the passages of a specially scholastic character, at least, have received their version from a discerning and well-informed theologian. Indeed, Strauss may well say, as he does in the notice which he writes for the English edition, that, as far as he has examined it, the translation is 'et accurata et perspicua.'" [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Nov. 1846.] Many things, both outward and inward, have concurred to make this November far happier than the last. One's thoughts "Are widened with the process of the suns;" and if one is rather doubtful whether one is really wiser or better, it is some comfort to know that the desire to be so is more pure and dominant. I have been thinking of that most beautiful passage in Luke's Gospel--the appearance of Jesus to the disciples at Emmaus. How universal in its significance! The soul that has hopelessly followed its Jesus--its impersonation of the highest and best--all in despondency; its thoughts all refuted, its dreams all dissipated. Then comes another Jesus--another, but the same--the same highest and best, only chastened--crucified instead of triumphant--and the soul learns that this is the true way to conquest and glory. And then there is the burning of the heart, which assures that "this was the Lord!"--that this is the inspiration from above, the true comforter that leads unto truth. But I am not become a Methodist, dear Sara; on the contrary, if I am pious one day, you may be sure I was very wicked the day before, and shall be so again the next. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Dec. 1846.] I have been at Griff for the last week, or I should have written before. I thank you most heartily for sending me "Heliados"--first, because I admire it greatly in itself; and, secondly, because it is a pretty proof that I am not dissociated from your most hallowed thoughts. As yet I have read it only once, but I promise myself to read it again and again. I shall not show it to any one, for I hate "friendly criticism," as much for you as for myself; but you have a better spirit than I, and when you come I will render "Heliados" up to you, that others may have the pleasure of reading it. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Feb. 1847.] Lying in bed this morning, grievously tormented, your "Heliados" visited me and revealed itself to me more completely than it had ever done before. How true that "it is only when all portions of an individual nature, or all members of society, move forward harmoniously together that religious progress is calm and beneficial!" I imagine the sorrowful amaze of a child who had been dwelling with delight on the idea that the stars were the pavement of heaven's court, and that there above them sat the kind but holy God, looking like a venerable Father who would smile on his good little ones--when it was cruelly told, before its mind had substance enough to bear such tension, that the sky was not real, that the stars were worlds, and that even the sun could not be God's dwelling, because there were many, many suns. These ideas would introduce atheism into the child's mind, instead of assisting it to form a nobler conception of God (of course I am supposing the bare information given, and left to the child to work upon); whereas the idea it previously had of God was perfectly adapted to its intellectual condition, and formed to the child as perfect an embodiment of the all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful as the most enlightened philosopher ever formed to himself. On 21st April Miss Evans went to London with the Brays, and, among other things, heard "Elijah" at Exeter Hall. On returning to Coventry she writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th April, 1847.] I did so long to see you after hearing "Elijah," just to exchange an exclamation of delight. Last night I had a perfect treat, too, in "I Puritani." Castellar was admirable as Elvira, and Gardoni as a seraph. N.B.--I liked the Babel less--another sign of age. Mention has already been made of Miss Mary Sibree (now Mrs. John Cash of Coventry), and as the following genial letter is addressed to her, it gives an opportunity for mentioning here that Miss Evans had a high regard for all the members of the Sibree family. At the end of this year (1847) and the beginning of 1848 there will be found an interesting correspondence with Miss Sibree's brother, Mr. John Sibree, who, in 1849, published a translation of Hegel's "Lectures on the Philosophy of History," and in 1880 a volume of poems entitled "Fancy, and other Rhymes." The subjoined extract from a communication from Mrs. Cash will show upon what terms Miss Evans was with the family: "It was in the early part of the year 1841 that Miss Franklin came to see my mother at our house on the Foleshill road--about a mile and a half from Coventry--to tell her, as a piece of most interesting news, that an old pupil, of whom she herself and her sister Rebecca had always been very proud, was coming at the Lady-Day quarter to live at a house on the same road--within five minutes' walk of ours. This was Miss Evans, then twenty-one years of age. Miss Franklin dwelt with much pride on Miss Evans's mental power, on her skill in music, etc.; but the great recommendation to my mother's interest was the zeal for others which had marked her earnest piety at school, where she had induced the girls to come together for prayer, and which had led her to visit the poor most diligently in the cottages round her own home. Many years after, an old nurse of mine told me that these poor people had said, after her removal, 'We shall never have another Mary Ann Evans.' "My mother was asked to second and help her in work of this kind. 'She will be sure to get something up very soon,' was the last remark I can recall; and on her first visit to us I well remember she told us of a club for clothing, set going by herself and her neighbor Mrs. Pears, in a district to which she said 'the euphonious name of the Pudding-Pits had been given.' It was not until the winter of 1841, or early in 1842, that my mother first received (not from Miss Evans's own lips, but through a mutual friend) the information that a total change had taken place in this gifted woman's mind with respect to the evangelical religion, which she had evidently believed in up to the time of her coming to Coventry, and for which, she once told me, she had at one time sacrificed the cultivation of her intellect, and a proper regard to personal appearance. 'I used,' she said, 'to go about like an owl, to the great disgust of my brother; and I would have denied him what I now see to have been quite lawful amusements.' My mother's grief, on hearing of this change in one whom she had begun to love, was very great; but she thought argument and expostulation might do much, and I well remember a long evening devoted to it, but no more of the subject-matter than her indignant refusal to blame the Jews for not seeing in a merely spiritual Deliverer a fulfilment of promises of a temporal one; and a still more emphatic protest against my father's assertion that we had no claim on God. To Miss Evans's affectionate and pathetic speech to my mother, 'Now, Mrs. Sibree, you won't care to have anything more to do with me,' my mother rejoined, 'On the contrary, I shall feel more interested in you than ever.' But it was very evident at this time that she stood in no _need_ of sympathizing friends; that the desire for congenial society, as well as for books and larger opportunities for culture, which had led her most eagerly to seek a removal from Griff to a home near Coventry, had been met beyond her highest expectations. In Mr. and Mrs. Bray, and in the Hennell family, she had found friends who called forth her interest and stimulated her powers in no common degree. This was traceable even in externals--in the changed tone of voice and manner--from formality to a geniality which opened my heart to her, and made the next five years the most important epoch in my life. She gave me (as yet in my teens) weekly lessons in German, speaking freely on all subjects, but with no attempt to directly unsettle my evangelical beliefs, confining herself in these matters to a steady protest against the claim of the Evangelicals to an exclusive possession of higher motives to morality--or even to religion. Speaking to my mother of her dearest friend, Mrs. Bray, she said, 'She is the most religious person I know.' Of Mr. Charles Hennell, in whose writings she had great interest, she said, 'He is a perfect model of manly excellence.' "On one occasion, at Mr. Bray's house at Rosehill, roused by a remark of his on the beneficial influence exercised by evangelical beliefs on the moral feelings, she said energetically, 'I say it now, and I say it once for all, that I am influenced in my own conduct at the present time by far higher considerations, and by a nobler idea of duty, than I ever was while I held the evangelical beliefs.' When, at length, after my brother's year's residence at the Hallé University (in 1842-43), my own mind having been much exercised in the matter of religion, I felt the moral difficulties press heavily on my conscience, and my whole heart was necessarily poured out to my 'guide, philosopher, and friend,' the steady turning of my attention from theoretical questions to a confession of my own want of thoroughness in arithmetic, which I pretended to teach; and the request that I would specially give attention to this study and get my conscience clear about it, and that I would not come to her again until my views of religion were also clear, is too characteristic of Miss Evans, as I knew her during those years, and too much in harmony with the moral teaching of George Eliot, to be omitted in reminiscences by one to whom that wholesome advice proved a turning-point in life. Two things more I cannot omit to mention: one, the heightened sense given to me by her of the duty of making conversation profitable, and, in general, of using time for serious purposes--of the positive immorality of frittering it away in ill-natured or in poor, profitless talk; another, the debt (so frequently acknowledged by Miss Evans to me) which she owed, during the years of her life with her father, to the intercourse she enjoyed with her friends at Rosehill. Mr. and Mrs. Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were _her_ world; and on my saying to her once, as we closed the garden-door together, that we seemed to be entering a paradise, she said, 'I do indeed feel that I shut the world out when I shut that door.' It is consoling to me now to feel that in her terrible suffering through her father's illness and death, which were most trying to witness, she had such alleviations." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Sibree, 10th May, 1847.] It is worth while to forget a friend for a week or ten days, just for the sake of the agreeable kind of startle it gives one to be reminded that one has such a treasure in reserve--the same sort of pleasure, I suppose, that a poor body feels who happens to lay his hand on an undreamed-of sixpence which had sunk to a corner of his pocket. When Mr. Sibree brought me your parcel, I had been to London for a week; and having been full of Mendelssohn oratorios and Italian operas, I had just this kind of delightful surprise when I saw your note and the beautiful purse. Not that I mean to compare you to a sixpence; you are a bright, golden sovereign to me, with edges all unrubbed, fit to remind a poor, tarnished, bruised piece, like me, that there are ever fresh and more perfect coinages of human nature forthcoming. I am very proud of my purse--first, because I have long had to be ashamed of drawing my old one out of my pocket; and, secondly, because it is a sort of symbol of your love for me--and who is not proud to be loved? For there is a beautiful kind of pride at which no one need frown--I may call it a sort of impersonal pride--a thrill of exultation at all that is good and lovely and joyous as a possession of our human nature. I am glad to think of all your pleasure among friends new and old. Mrs. D----'s mother is, I dare say, a valuable person; but do not, I beseech thee, go to old people as oracles on matters which date any later than their thirty-fifth year. Only trust them, if they are good, in those practical rules which are the common property of long experience. If they are governed by one special idea which circumstances or their own mental bias have caused them to grasp with peculiar firmness, and to work up into original forms, make yourself master of their thoughts and convictions, the residuum of all that long travail which poor mortals have to encounter in their threescore years and ten, but do not trust their application of their gathered wisdom; for however just old people may be their _principles_ of judgment, they are often wrong in their application of them, from an imperfect or unjust conception of the matter to be judged. Love and cherish and venerate the old; but never imagine that a worn-out, dried-up organization can be so rich in inspiration as one which is full fraught with life and energy. I am not talking like one who is superlatively jealous for the rights of the old; yet such I am, I assure thee. I heard Mendelssohn's new oratorio, "Elijah," when I was in London. It has been performed four times in Exeter Hall to as large an audience as the building would hold--Mendelssohn himself the conductor. It is a glorious production, and altogether I look upon it as a kind of sacramental purification of Exeter Hall, and a proclamation of indulgence for all that is to be perpetrated there during this month of May. This is a piece of impiety which you may expect from a lady who has been guanoing her mind with French novels. This is the impertinent expression of D'Israeli, who, writing himself much more detestable stuff than ever came from a French pen, can do nothing better to bamboozle the unfortunates who are seduced into reading his "Tancred" than speak superciliously of all other men and things--an expedient much more successful in some quarters than one would expect. But _au fond_, dear Mary, I have no impiety in my mind at this moment, and my soul heartily responds to your rejoicing that society is attaining a more perfect idea and exhibition of Paul's exhortation--"Let the same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." I believe the Amen to this will be uttered more and more fervently, "Among all posterities for evermore." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th June, 1847.] Ask me not why I have never written all this weary time. I can only answer, "All things are full of labor--man cannot utter it"--_et seq._ See the first chapter of Ecclesiastes for my experience. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Sept. 1847.] I have read the "Inquiry" again with more than interest--with delight and high admiration. My present impression from it far surpasses the one I had retained from my two readings about five years ago. With the exception of a few expressions which seem too little discriminating in the introductory sketch, there is nothing in its whole tone, from beginning to end, that jars on my moral sense; and apart from any opinion of the book as an explanation of the existence of Christianity and the Christian documents, I am sure that no one, fit to read it at all, could read it without being intellectually and morally stronger--the reasoning is so close, the induction so clever, the style so clear, vigorous, and pointed, and the animus so candid and even generous. Mr. Hennell ought to be one of the happiest of men that he has done such a life's work. I am sure if I had written such a book I should be invulnerable to all the arrows of all spiteful gods and goddesses. I should say, "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself," seeing that I have delivered such a message of God to men. The book is full of _wit_, to me. It gives me that exquisite kind of laughter which comes from the gratification of the reasoning faculties. For instance: "If some of those who were actually at the mountain doubted whether they saw Jesus or not, we may reasonably doubt whether he was to be seen at all there: especially as the words attributed to him do not seem at all likely to have been said, from the disciples paying no attention to them." "The disciples considered her (Mary Magdalene's) words idle tales, and believed them not." We have thus their example for considering her testimony alone as insufficient, and for seeking further evidence. To say "Jewish philosopher" seems almost like saying a round square; yet those two words appear to me the truest description of Jesus. I think the "Inquiry" furnishes the utmost that can be done towards obtaining a _real_ view of the life and character of Jesus, by rejecting as little as possible from the Gospels. I confess that I should call many things "shining ether," to which Mr. Hennell allows the solid angularity of facts; but I think he has thoroughly worked out the problem--subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly improbable, and what will be the remainder? At the end of September Miss Evans and her father went for a little trip to the Isle of Wight, and on their return there is the following letter: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Oct. 1847.] I heartily wish you had been with me to see all the beauties which have gladdened my soul and made me feel that this earth is as good a heaven as I ought to dream of. I have a much greater respect for the Isle of Wight, now I have seen it, than when I knew it only by report--a compliment which one can seldom very sincerely pay to things and people that one has heard puffed and bepraised. I do long for you to see Alum Bay. Fancy a very high precipice, the strata upheaved perpendicularly in rainbow-like streaks of the brightest maize, violet, pink, blue, red, brown, and brilliant white, worn by the weather into fantastic fretwork, the deep blue sky above, and the glorious sea below. It seems an enchanted land, where the earth is of more delicate, refined materials than this dingy planet of ours is wrought out of. You might fancy the strata formed of the compressed pollen of flowers, or powder from bright insects. You can think of nothing but Calypsos, or Prosperos and Ariels, and such-like beings. I find one very great spiritual good attendant on a quiet, meditative journey among fresh scenes. I seem to have removed to a distance from myself when I am away from the petty circumstances that make up my ordinary environment. I can take myself up by the ears and inspect myself, like any other queer monster on a small scale. I have had many thoughts, especially on a subject that I should like to work out--"The superiority of the consolations of philosophy to those of (so-called) religion." Do you stare? Thank you for putting me on reading Sir Charles Grandison. I have read five volumes, and am only vexed that I have not the two last on my table at this moment, that I might have them for my _convives_. I had no idea that Richardson was worth so much. I have had more pleasure from him than from all the Swedish novels together. The morality is perfect--there is nothing for the new lights to correct. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Nov. 1847.] How do you like "Lelia," of which you have never spoken one word? I am provoked with you for being in the least pleased with "Tancred;" but if you have found out any lofty meaning in it, or any true picturing of life, tell it me, and I will recant. I have found two new readers of Strauss. One, a lady at Leamington, who is also reading the "Inquiry," but likes Strauss better! The other is a gentleman here in Coventry; he says "it is most clever and ingenious, and that no one whose faith rests only on the _common_ foundation can withstand it." I think he may safely say that his faith rests on an _un_common foundation. The book will certainly give him a lift in the right direction, from its critical, logical character--just the opposite of his own. I was interested the other day in talking to a young lady who lives in a nest of clergymen, her brothers, but not of the evangelical school. She had been reading Blanco White's life, and seems to have had her spirit stirred within her, as every one's must be who reads the book with any power of appreciation. She is unable to account to herself for the results at which Blanco White arrived with his earnestness and love of truth; and she asked me if I had come to the same conclusions. I think "Live and teach" should be a proverb as well as "Live and learn." We must teach either for good or evil; and if we use our inward light as the Quaker tells us, always taking care to feed and trim it well, our teaching must, in the end, be for good. We are growing old together--are we not? I am growing happier too. I am amusing myself with thinking of the prophecy of Daniel as a sort of allegory. All those monstrous, "rombustical" beasts with their horns--the horn with eyes and a mouth speaking proud things, and the little horn that waxed rebellious and stamped on the stars, seem like my passions and vain fancies, which are to be knocked down one after the other, until all is subdued into a universal kingdom over which the Ancient of Days presides--the spirit of love--the Catholicism of the Universe--if you can attach any meaning to such a phrase. It _has_ a meaning for my sage noddle. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Jan. 1848.] I am reading George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur" with great delight, and hoping that they will some time do you as much good as they do me. In the meantime, I think the short letter about "Lelia" will interest you. It has a very deep meaning to my apprehension. You can send back the pages when you have duly digested them. I once said of you that yours was a sort of alkali nature which would detect the slightest acid of falsehood. You began to phiz-z-z directly it approached you. I want you as a test. I now begin to see the necessity of the arrangement (a bad word) that love should determine people's fate while they are young. It is so impossible to admire--"_s'enthousiasmer_" of--an _individual_ as one gets older. Here follows the interesting correspondence, referred to before, with Mr. John Sibree: [Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, beginning of 1848.] Begin your letter by abusing me, according to my example. There is nothing like a little gunpowder for a damp chimney; and an explosion of that sort will set the fire of your ideas burning to admiration. I hate bashfulness and modesties, as Sir Hugh Evans would say; and I warn you that I shall make no apologies, though, from my habit of writing only to people who, rather than have nothing from me, will tolerate nothings, I shall be very apt to forget that you are not one of those amiably silly individuals. I must write to you _more meo_, without taking pains or laboring to be _spirituelle_ when Heaven never meant me to be so; and it is your own fault if you bear with my letters a moment after they become an infliction. I am glad you detest Mrs. Hannah More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books, nor her character. She was that most disagreeable of all monsters, a blue-stocking--a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card-playing pigs. It is some time since I read "Tancred," so that I have no very vivid recollection of its details; but I thought it very "thin," and inferior in the working up to "Coningsby" and "Sybil." Young Englandism is almost as remote from my sympathies as Jacobitism, as far as its force is concerned, though I love and respect it as an effort on behalf of the people. D'Israeli is unquestionably an able man, and I always enjoy his tirades against liberal principles as opposed to popular principles--the name by which he distinguishes his own. As to his theory of races, it has not a leg to stand on, and can only be buoyed up by such windy eloquence as--You chubby-faced, squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion, to the Hebrews--nay, the Hebrews lead your armies: in proof of which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon's, was a Jew, whose real name was Manasseh. Extermination up to a certain point seems to be the law for the inferior races--for the rest fusion, both for physical and moral ends. It appears to me that the law by which privileged classes degenerate, from continual intermarriage, must act on a larger scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations have been always kept apart until they have sufficiently developed their idiosyncrasies, and then some great revolutionary force has been called into action, by which the genius of a particular nation becomes a portion of the common mind of humanity. Looking at the matter æsthetically, our idea of beauty is never formed on the characteristics of a single race. I confess the types of the pure races, however handsome, always impress me disagreeably; there is an undefined feeling that I am looking not at _man_, but at a specimen of an order under Cuvier's class Bimana. The negroes certainly puzzle me. All the other races seem plainly destined to extermination, not excepting even the Hebrew Caucasian. But the negroes are too important, physiologically and geographically, for one to think of their extermination; while the repulsion between them and the other races seems too strong for fusion to take place to any great extent. On one point I heartily agree with D'Israeli as to the superiority of the Oriental races--their clothes are beautiful and their manners are agreeable. Did you not think the picture of the Barroni family interesting? I should like to know who are the originals. The fellowship of race, to which D'Israeli so exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse, which must ultimately be superseded, that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire's vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology, and almost all their history, is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus; but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy, and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other Oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade. And do you really think that sculpture and painting are to die out of the world? If that be so, let another deluge come as quickly as possible, that a new race of Glums and Gowries may take possession of this melancholy earth. I agree with you as to the inherent superiority of music--as that questionable woman, the Countess Hahn-Hahn, says painting and sculpture are but an idealizing of our actual existence. Music arches over this existence with another and a diviner. Amen, too, to that _ideenvoll_ observation of Hegel's. "We hardly know what it is to feel for human misery until we have heard a shriek; and a more perfect hell might be made out of sound than out of any preparation of fire and brimstone." When the tones of our voice have betrayed peevishness or harshness, we seem to be doubly haunted by the ghost of our sin; we are doubly conscious that we have been untrue to our part in the great Handel chorus. But I cannot assent to the notion that music is to supersede the other arts, or that the highest minds must necessarily aspire to a sort of Milton blindness, in which the _tiefste der Sinne_ is to be a substitute for all the rest. I cannot recognize the truth of all that is said about the necessity of religious fervor to high art. I am sceptical as to the real existence of such fervor in any of the greatest artists. Artistic power seems to me to resemble dramatic power--to be an intimate perception of the varied states of which the human mind is susceptible, with ability to give them out anew in intensified expression. It is true that the older the world gets originality becomes less possible. Great subjects are used up, and civilization tends evermore to repress individual predominance, highly wrought agony, or ecstatic joy. But all the gentler emotions will be ever new, ever wrought up into more and more lovely combinations, and genius will probably take their direction. Have you ever seen a head of Christ taken from a statue, by Thorwaldsen, of Christ scourged? If not, I think it would almost satisfy you. There is another work of his, said to be very sublime, of the Archangel waiting for the command to sound the last trumpet. Yet Thorwaldsen came at the fag end of time. I am afraid you despise landscape painting; but to me even the works of our own Stanfield, and Roberts, and Creswick bring a whole world of thought and bliss--"a sense of something far more deeply interfused." The ocean and the sky and the everlasting hills are spirit to me, and they will never be robbed of their sublimity. [Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, beginning of 1848.] I have tired myself with trying to write cleverly, _invitâ Minervâ_, and having in vain endeavored to refresh myself by turning over Lavater's queer sketches of physiognomies, and still queerer judgments on them, it is a happy thought of mine that I have a virtuous reason for spending my _ennui_ on you. I send you a stanza I picked up the other day in George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," which is almost the ultimatum of human wisdom on the question of human sorrow. "Le bonheur et le malheur, Nous viennent du même auteur, Voilà la _ressemblance_. Le bonheur nous rend heureux, Et le malheur malheureux, Voilà la différence." Ah, here comes a cup of coffee to console me! When I have taken it I will tell you what George Sand says: "Sais tu bien que tout est dit devant Dieu et devant les hommes quand l'homme infortuné demande compte de ses maux et qu'il obtient cette réponse? Qu'y a-t-il de plus? Rien." But I am not a mocking pen, and if I were talking to you instead of writing, you would detect some falsity in the ring of my voice. Alas! the atrabiliar patient you describe is first cousin to me in my very worst moods, but I have a profound faith that the serpent's head will be bruised. This conscious kind of false life that is ever and anon endeavoring to form itself within us and eat away our true life, will be overcome by continued accession of vitality, by our perpetual increase in "quantity of existence," as Foster calls it. Creation is the superadded life of the intellect; sympathy, all-embracing love, the superadded moral life. These given more and more abundantly, I feel that all the demons, which are but my own egotism mopping and mowing and gibbering, would vanish away, and there would be no place for them, "For every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by hope's perpetual breath." Evils, even sorrows, are they not all negations? Thus matter is in a perpetual state of decomposition; superadd the principle of life, and the tendency to decomposition is overcome. Add to this consciousness, and there is a power of self-amelioration. The passions and senses decompose, so to speak. The intellect, by its analytic power, restrains the fury with which they rush to their own destruction; the moral nature purifies, beautifies, and at length transmutes them. But to whom am I talking? You know far more _sur ce chapitre_ than I. Every one talks of himself or herself to me, and I beg you will follow every one's example in this one thing only. Individuals are precious to me in proportion as they unfold to me their intimate selves. I have just had lent me the journal of a person who died some years ago. When I was less venerable I should have felt the reading of such a thing insupportable; now it interests me, though it is the simplest record of events and feelings. Mary says she has told you about Mr. Dawson and his lecture--miserably crude and mystifying in some parts, but with a few fine passages. He is a very delightful man, but not (at least so say my impressions) a great man. How difficult it is to be great in this world, where there is a tariff for spiritualities as well as for beeves and cheese and tallow. It is scarcely possible for a man simply to give out his true inspiration--the real, profound conviction which he has won by hard wrestling, or the few-and-far-between pearls of imagination; he must go on talking or writing by rote, or he must starve. Would it not be better to take to tent-making with Paul, or to spectacle-making with Spinoza? [Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, Feb. 1848.] Write and tell you that I join you in your happiness about the French Revolution? Very fine, my good friend. If I made you wait for a letter as long as you do me, our little _échantillon_ of a millennium would be over, Satan would be let loose again, and I should have to share your humiliation instead of your triumph. Nevertheless I absolve you, for the sole merit of thinking rightly (that is, of course, just as I do) about _la grande nation_ and its doings. You and Carlyle (have you seen his article in last week's _Examiner_?) are the only two people who feel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that you lacked revolutionary ardor. But no--you are just as _sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any great manifestation of the forces that underlie our every-day existence. I should have written a soprano to your jubilate the very next day, but that, lest I should be exalted above measure, a messenger of Satan was sent in the form of a headache, and directly on the back of that a face-ache, so that I have been a mere victim of sensations, memories, and visions for the last week. I am even now, as you may imagine, in a very shattered, limbo-like mental condition. I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really great movement; that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipped off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing to the image of Christ, "who first taught fraternity to men." One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his; it is worthy of an aureole. I am chiefly anxious about Albert, the operative, but his picture is not to be seen. I have little patience with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off; we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and have their dinner regularly, but, for Heaven's sake, preserve me from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think that the shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign much longer. I should have no hope of good from any imitative movement at home. Our working classes are eminently inferior to the mass of the French people. In France the _mind_ of the people is highly electrified; they are full of ideas on social subjects; they really desire social _reform_--not merely an acting out of Sancho Panza's favorite proverb, "Yesterday for you, to-day for me." The revolutionary animus extended over the whole nation, and embraced the rural population--not merely, as with us, the artisans of the towns. Here there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality (in the agricultural and mining districts especially) than of perception or desire of justice that a revolutionary movement would be simply destructive, not constructive. Besides, it would be put down. Our military have no notion of "fraternizing." They have the same sort of inveteracy as dogs have for the ill-dressed _canaille_. They are as mere a brute force as a battering-ram; and the aristocracy have got firm hold of them. And there is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of _political_ reform. This is all we are fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and out of it. But we English are slow crawlers. The sympathy in Ireland seems at present only of the water-toast kind. The Glasgow riots are more serious; but one cannot believe in a Scotch Reign of Terror in these days. I should not be sorry to hear that the Italians had risen _en masse_, and chased the odious Austrians out of beautiful Lombardy. But this they could hardly do without help, and that involves another European war. Concerning the "tent-making," there is much more to be said, but am I to adopt your rule and never speak of what I suppose we agree about? It is necessary to me, not simply to _be_ but to _utter_, and I require utterance of my friends. What is it to me that I think the same thoughts? I think them in a somewhat different fashion. No mind that has any _real_ life is a mere echo of another. If the perfect unison comes occasionally, as in music, it enhances the harmonies. It is like a diffusion or expansion of one's own life to be assured that its vibrations are repeated in another, and words are the media of those vibrations. Is not the universe itself a perpetual utterance of the one Being? So I say again, utter, utter, utter, and it will be a deed of mercy twice blessed, for I shall be a safety-valve for your communicativeness and prevent it from splitting honest people's brains who don't understand you; and, moreover, it will be fraught with ghostly comfort to me. [Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, Sunday evening, later in 1848.] I might make a very plausible excuse for not acknowledging your kind note earlier by telling you that I have been both a nurse and invalid; but, to be thoroughly ingenuous, I must confess that all this would not have been enough to prevent my writing but for my chronic disease of utter idleness. I have heard and thought of you with great interest, however. You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy; for, to speak in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck, I am _haud ignara mali_. I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours, though rather differing in species. I sincerely rejoice in the step you have taken; it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true development of your nature. It was impossible to think of your career with hope, while you tacitly subscribed to the miserable _etiquette_ (it deserves no better or more spiritual name) of sectarianism. Only persevere; be true, firm, and loving; not too anxious about immediate usefulness to others--that can only be a result of justice to yourself. Study mental hygiene. Take long doses of _dolce far niente_, and be in no great hurry about anything in this 'varsal world! Do we not commit ourselves to sleep, and so resign all care for ourselves every night; lay ourselves gently on the bosom of Nature or God? A beautiful reproach to the spirit of some religionists and ultra good people. I like the notion of your going to Germany, as good in every way, for yourself, body and mind, and for all others. Oh, the bliss of having a very high attic in a romantic Continental town, such as Geneva, far away from morning callers, dinners, and decencies, and then to pause for a year and think _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_, and then to return to life, and work for poor stricken humanity, and never think of self again![23] I am writing nearly in the dark, with the post-boy waiting. I fear I shall not be at home when you come home, but surely I shall see you before you leave England. However that may be, I shall utter a genuine _Lebewohl_. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Feb. 1848.] In my view there are but two kinds of _regular_ correspondence possible--one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after, and this we carry on through the medium of Cara; or one purely moral and intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification, in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects, in order to send a weekly or fortnightly packet, as so much duty and self-castigation. I have always been given to understand that such Lady-Jane-Grey-like works were your abhorrence. However, let me know what you _would_ like--what would make you continue to hold me in loving remembrance or convince you that you are a bright evergreen in my garden of pleasant plants. Behold me ready to tear off my right hand or pluck out my right eye (metaphorically, of course--I speak to an experienced exegetist, _comme dirait notre_ Strauss), or write reams of letters full of interesting falsehoods or very dull truths. We have always concluded that our correspondence should be of the _third_ possible kind--one of impulse, which is necessarily irregular as the Northern Lights. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th April, 1848.] I am a miserable wretch, with aching limbs and sinking spirits, but still alive enough to feel the kindness of your last note. I thoroughly enjoyed your delight in Emerson. I should have liked to see you sitting by him "with awful eye," for once in your life feeling all the bliss of veneration. I am quite uncertain about our movements. Dear father gets on very slowly, if at all. You will understand the impossibility of my forming any plans for my own pleasure. Rest is the only thing I can think of with pleasure now. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th April, 1848.] Dear father is so decidedly progressing towards recovery that I am full of quiet joy--a gentle dawning light after the moonlight of sorrow. I have found already some of the "sweet uses" that belong only to what is called trouble, which is, after all, only a deepened gaze into life, like the sight of the darker blue and the thickening host of stars when the hazy effect of twilight is gone--as our dear Blanco White said of death. I shall have less time than I have had at my own disposal, probably; but I feel prepared to accept life, nay, lovingly to embrace it, in any form in which it shall present itself. Some time in May Mr. Evans and his daughter went to St. Leonard's, and remained there till near the end of June. His mortal illness had now taken hold of him, and this was a depressing time, both for him and for her, as will be seen from the following letters: [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, May, 1848.] Your words of affection seem to make this earthly atmosphere sit less heavily on my shoulders, and in gratitude I must send you my thanks before I begin to read of Henry Gow and Fair Catharine for father's delectation. In truth, I have found it somewhat difficult to live for the last week--conscious all the time that the only additions to my lot worth having must be more strength to love in my own nature; but perhaps this very consciousness has an irritating rather than a soothing effect. I have a fit of sensitiveness upon me, which, after all, is but egotism and mental idleness. The enthusiasm without which one cannot even pour out breakfast well (at least _I_ cannot) has forsaken me. You may laugh, and wonder when my enthusiasm has displayed itself, but that will only prove that you are no seer. I can never live long without it in some form or other. I possess my soul in patience for a time, believing that this dark, damp vault in which I am groping will soon come to an end, and the fresh, green earth and the bright sky be all the more precious to me. But for the present my address is Grief Castle, on the River of Gloom, in the Valley of Dolor. I was amused to find that Castle Campbell in Scotland was called so. Truly for many seasons in my life I should have been an appropriate denizen of such a place; but I have faith that unless I am destined to insanity, I shall never again abide long in that same castle. I heartily say Amen to your dictum about the cheerfulness of "large moral regions." Where _thought_ and _love_ are active--thought the formative power, love the vitalizing--there can be no sadness. They are in themselves a more intense and extended participation of a divine existence. As they grow, the highest species of faith grows too, and all things are possible. I don't know why I should prose in this way to you. But I wanted to thank you for your note, and all this selfish grumbling was at my pen's end. And now I have no time to redeem myself. We shall not stay long away from home, I feel sure. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st May, 1848.] Father has done wonders in the way of walking and eating--for him--but he makes not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour. I have told you everything now, except that I look amiable in spite of a strong tendency to look black, and speak gently, though with a strong propensity to be snappish. Pity me, ye happier spirits that look amiable and speak gently because ye _are_ amiable and gentle. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th June, 1848.] Alas for the fate of poor mortals, which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone!--the hard, angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose! It is so in all the stages of life; the poetry of girlhood goes, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season, and we see ourselves, and all about us, as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms--poor tentative efforts of the _Natur Princip_ to mould a personality. This is the state of prostration, the self-abnegation, through which the soul must go, and to which perhaps it must again and again return, that its poetry or religion, which is the same thing, may be a real, ever-flowing river, fresh from the windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep--not an artificial basin, with grotto-work and gold-fish. I feel a sort of madness growing upon me, just the opposite of the delirium which makes people fancy that their bodies are filling the room. It seems to me as if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point. But I am wasting this "good Sunday morning" in grumblings. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 8th June, 1848.] Poor Louis Blanc! The newspapers make me melancholy; but shame upon me that I say "poor." The day will come when there will be a temple of white marble, where sweet incense and anthems shall rise to the memory of every man and woman who has had a deep _Ahnung_--a presentiment, a yearning, or a clear vision--of the time when this miserable reign of Mammon shall end; when men shall be no longer "like the fishes of the sea," society no more like a face one half of which--the side of profession, of lip-faith--is fair and God-like; the other half--the side of deeds and institutions--with a hard, old, wrinkled skin puckered into the sneer of a Mephistopheles. I worship the man who has written as the climax of his appeal against society, "L'inegalité des talents _doit aboutir_ non à l'inegalité des retributions mais à l'inegalité des devoirs." You will wonder what has wrought me up into this fury. It is the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d June, 1848.] All creatures about to moult, or to cast off an old skin, or enter on any new metamorphosis, have sickly feelings. It was so with me. But now I am set free from the irritating, worn-out integument. I am entering on a new period of my life, which makes me look back on the past as something incredibly poor and contemptible. I am enjoying repose, strength, and ardor in a greater degree than I have ever known, and yet I never felt my own insignificance and imperfection so completely. My heart bleeds for dear father's pains, but it is blessed to be at hand to give the soothing word and act needed. I should not have written this description of myself but that I felt your affectionate letter demanded some I-ism, which, after all, is often humility rather than pride. Paris, poor Paris--alas! alas! [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, June, 1848.] I have read "Jane Eyre," and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the book _is_ interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports. About the beginning of July Miss Evans and her father returned to Coventry; and the 13th July was a memorable day, as Emerson came to visit the Brays, and she went with them to Stratford. All she says herself about it is in this note. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, July, 1848.] I have seen Emerson--the first _man_ I have ever seen. But you have seen still more of him, so I need not tell you what he is. I shall leave Cara to tell how the day--the Emerson day--was spent, for I have a swimming head from hanging over the desk to write business letters for father. Have you seen the review of Strauss's pamphlet in the _Edinburgh_? The title is "Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren, oder Julian der Abtrünnige"--a sort of erudite satire on the King of Prussia; but the reviewer pronounces it to have a permanent value quite apart from this fugitive interest. The "Romantiker," or Romanticist, is one who, in literature, in the arts, in religion or politics, endeavors to revive the dead past. Julian was a romanticist in wishing to restore the Greek religion and its spirit, when mankind had entered on the new development. But you have very likely seen the review. I must copy one passage, translated from the conclusion of Strauss's pamphlet, lest you should not have met with it. "Christian writers have disfigured the death-scene of Julian. They have represented him as furious, blaspheming, despairing, and in his despair exclaiming, _Thou_ hast conquered, O Galilean!--'[Greek: nenikekas Galilaie].' This phrase, though false as history, has a truth in it. It contains a prophecy--to us a consoling prophecy--and it is this: Every Julian--_i.e._, every great and powerful man--who would attempt to resuscitate a state of society which has died, will infallibly be vanquished by the Galilean--for the Galilean is nothing less than the genius of the future!" [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Dec. 1848.] Father's tongue has just given utterance to a thought which has been very visibly radiating from his eager eyes for some minutes. "I thought you were going on with the book." I can only bless you for those two notes, which have emanated from you like so much ambrosial scent from roses and lavender. Not less am I grateful for the Carlyle eulogium.[24] I have shed some quite delicious tears over it. This is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love another. More anon--this from my doleful prison of stupidity and barrenness, with a yawning trapdoor ready to let me down into utter fatuity. But I can even yet feel the omnipotence of a glorious chord. Poor pebble as I am, left entangled among slimy weeds, I can yet hear from afar the rushing of the blessed torrent, and rejoice that it is there to bathe and brighten other pebbles less unworthy of the polishing. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of 1848.] Thank you for a sight of our blessed St. Francis's[25] letter. There is no imaginable moment in which the thought of such a being could be an intrusion. His soul is a blessed _yea_. There is a sort of blasphemy in that proverbial phrase, "Too good to be true." The highest inspiration of the purest, noblest human soul, is the nearest expression of the truth. Those extinct volcanoes of one's spiritual life--those eruptions of the intellect and the passions which have scattered the lava of doubt and negation over our early faith--are only a glorious Himalayan chain, beneath which new valleys of undreamed richness and beauty will spread themselves. Shall we poor earthworms have sublimer thoughts than the universe, of which we are poor chips--mere effluvia of mind--shall we have sublimer thoughts than that universe can furnish out into reality? I am living unspeakable moments, and can write no more. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Jan. 1849.] I think of you perpetually, but my thoughts are all aqueous; they will not crystallize--they are as fleeting as ripples on the sea. I am suffering perhaps as acutely as ever I did in my life. Breathe a wish that I may gather strength--the fragrance of your wish will reach me somehow. The next letter is to Mrs. Houghton, who, it will be remembered, was the only daughter by Mr. Evans's first marriage. Miss Evans had more intellectual sympathy with this half-sister Fanny than with any of the other members of her family, and it is a pity that more of the letters to her have not been preserved. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, Sunday evening, 1849.] I have been holding a court of conscience, and I cannot enjoy my Sunday's music without restoring harmony, without entering a protest against that superficial soul of mine which is perpetually contradicting and belying the true inner soul. I am in that mood which, in another age of the world, would have led me to put on sackcloth and pour ashes on my head, when I call to mind the sins of my tongue--my animadversions on the faults of others, as if I thought myself to be something when I am nothing. When shall I attain to the true spirit of love which Paul has taught for all the ages? I want no one to excuse me, dear Fanny; I only want to remove the shadow of my miserable words and deeds from before the divine image of truth and goodness, which I would have all beings worship. I need the Jesuits' discipline of silence, and though my "evil speaking" issues from the intellectual point of view rather than the moral--though there may be gall in the thought while there is honey in the feeling, yet the evil speaking is wrong. We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever. Poor hints and sketches of souls as we are--with some slight, transient vision of the perfect and the true--we had need help each other to gaze at the blessed heavens instead of peering into each other's eyes to find out the motes there. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday morning, 4th Feb. 1849.] I have not touched the piano for nearly two months until this morning, when, father being better, I was determined to play a mass before the piano is utterly out of tune again. _Write, asking for nothing again_, like a true disciple of Jesus. I am still feeling rather shattered in brain and limbs; but do not suppose that I lack inward peace and strength. My body is the defaulter--_consciously_ so. I triumph over all things in the spirit, but the flesh is weak, and disgraces itself by headaches and backaches. I am delighted to find that you mention Macaulay, because that is an indication that Mr. Hennell has been reading him. I thought of Mr. H. all through the book, as the only person I could be quite sure would enjoy it as much as I did myself. I did not know if it would interest you: tell me more explicitly that it does. Think of Babylon being unearthed in spite of the prophecies? Truly we are looking before and after, "au jour d'aujourd'hui," as Monsieur Bricolin says. Send me the criticism of Jacques the morn's morning--only beware there are not too many blasphemies against my divinity. Paint soap-bubbles--and never fear but I will find _a_ meaning, though very likely not your meaning. Paint the Crucifixion in a bubble--after Turner--and then the Resurrection: I see them now. There has been a vulgar man sitting by while I have been writing, and I have been saying parenthetical bits of civility to him to help out poor father in his conversation, so I have not been quite sure what I have been saying to you. I have woful aches which take up half my nervous strength. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Feb. 1849.] My life is a perpetual nightmare, and always haunted by something to be done, which I have never the time, or, rather, the energy, to do. Opportunity is kind, but only to the industrious, and I, alas! am not one of them. I have sat down in desperation this evening, though dear father is very uneasy, and his moans distract me, just to tell you that you have full absolution for your criticism, which I do not reckon of the impertinent order. I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me--who have rolled away the waters from their bed, raised new mountains and spread delicious valleys for me--are not in the least oracles to me. It is just possible that I may not embrace one of their opinions; that I may wish my life to be shaped quite differently from theirs. For instance, it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau's views of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous--that he was guilty of some of the worst _bassesses_ that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this: and it would be not the less true that Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions; which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me; and this not by teaching me any new belief. It is simply that the rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim _Ahnungen_ in my soul; the fire of his genius has so fused together old thoughts and prejudices that I have been ready to make new combinations. It is thus with George Sand. I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book. I don't care whether I agree with her about marriage or not--whether I think the design of her plot correct, or that she had no precise design at all, but began to write as the spirit moved her, and trusted to Providence for the catastrophe, which I think the more probable case. It is sufficient for me, as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that "great power of God manifested in her," that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results, and (I must say, in spite of your judgment) some of the moral instincts and their tendencies, with such truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such tragic power, and, withal, such loving, gentle humor, that one might live a century with nothing but one's own dull faculties, and not know so much as those six pages will suggest. The psychological anatomy of Jacques and Fernande in the early days of their marriage seems quite preternaturally true--I mean that her power of describing it is preternatural. Fernande and Jacques are merely the feminine and the masculine nature, and their early married life an every-day tragedy; but I will not dilate on the book or on your criticism, for I am so sleepy that I should write nothing but _bêtises_. I have at last the most delightful "De imitatione Christi," with quaint woodcuts. One breathes a cool air as of cloisters in the book--it makes one long to be a saint for a few months. Verily its piety has its foundations in the depth of the divine-human soul. In March Miss Evans wrote a short notice of the "Nemesis of Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_, in which she says: "We are sure that its author is a bright, particular star, though he sometimes leaves us in doubt whether he be not a fallen 'son of the morning.'" The paper was sent to Mr. Froude, and on 23d March Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell: "Last night at dusk M. A. came running in in high glee with a most charming note from Froude, naïvely and prettily requesting her to reveal herself. He says he recognized her hand in the review in the _Coventry Herald_, and if she thinks him a fallen star she might help him to rise, but he 'believes he has only been dipped in the Styx, and is not much the worse for the bath.' Poor girl, I am so pleased she should have this little episode in her dull life." The next letter again refers to Mr. Froude's books. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Wednesday, April, 1849.] Tell me not that I am a mere prater--that feeling never talks. I will talk, and caress, and look lovingly, until death makes me as stony as the Gorgon-like heads of all the judicious people I know. What is anything worth until it is uttered? Is not the universe one great utterance? Utterance there must be in word or deed to make life of any worth. Every true pentecost is a gift of utterance. Life is too short and opportunities too meagre for many deeds--besides, the best friendships are precisely those where there is no possibility of material helpfulness--and I would take no deeds as an adequate compensation for the frigid, glassy eye and hard, indifferent tones of one's very solid and sensible and conscientious friend. You will wonder of what this is _à propos_--only of a little bitterness in my own soul just at this moment, and not of anything between you and me. I have nothing to tell you, for all the "haps" of my life are so indifferent. I spin my existence so entirely out of myself that there is a sad want of proper names in my conversation, and I am becoming a greater bore than ever. It is a consciousness of this that has kept me from writing to you. My letters would be a sort of hermit's diary. I have so liked the thought of your enjoying the "Nemesis of Faith." I quote Keats's sonnet, _à propos_ of that book. It has made me feel-- "Like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez--when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien." You must read "The Shadows of the Clouds." It produces a sort of palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or delightful. I cannot take up the book again, though wanting very much to read it more closely. Poor and shallow as one's own soul is, it is blessed to think that a sort of transubstantiation is possible by which the greater ones can live in us. Egotism apart, another's greatness, beauty, or bliss is one's own. And let us sing a _Magnificat_ when we are conscious that this power of expansion and sympathy is growing, just in proportion as the individual satisfactions are lessening. Miserable dust of the earth we are, but it is worth while to be so, for the sake of the living soul--the breath of God within us. You see I can do nothing but scribble my own prosy stuff--such chopped straw as my soul is foddered on. I am translating the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" of Spinoza, and seem to want the only friend that knows how to praise or blame. How exquisite is the satisfaction of feeling that another mind than your own sees precisely where and what is the difficulty--and can exactly appreciate the success with which it is overcome. One knows--_sed longo intervallo_--the full meaning of the "fit audience though few." How an artist must hate the noodles that stare at his picture, with a vague notion that it _is_ a clever thing to be able to paint. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, 10th May, 1849.] I know it will gladden your heart to hear that father spoke of you the other day with affection and gratitude. He remembers you as one who helped to strengthen that beautiful spirit of resignation which has never left him through his long trial. His mind is as clear and rational as ever, notwithstanding his feebleness, and he gives me a thousand little proofs that he understands my affection and responds to it. These are very precious moments to me; my chair by father's bedside is a very blessed seat to me. My delight in the idea that you are being benefited after all, prevents me from regretting you, though you are just the friend that would complete my comfort. Every addition to your power of enjoying life is an expansion of mine. I partake of your ebb and flow. I am going to my post now. I have just snatched an interval to let you know that, though you have taken away a part of yourself from me, neither you nor any one else can take the whole. It will have been seen from these late letters, that the last few months of her father's illness had been a terrible strain on his daughter's health and spirits. She did all the nursing herself, and Mrs. Congreve (who was then Miss Bury, daughter of the doctor who was attending Mr. Evans--and who, it will be seen, subsequently became perhaps the most intimate and the closest of George Eliot's friends) tells me that her father told her at the time that he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for. The translating was a great relief when she could get to it. Under date of 19th April, 1849, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell, "M. A. is happy now with this Spinoza to do: she says it is such a rest for her mind." The next letter to Rosehill pathetically describes how the end came at last to Mr. Evans's sufferings: [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, half-past nine, Wednesday morning, 31st May, 1849.] Dear friends, Mr. Bury told us last night that he thought father would not last till morning. I sat by him with my hand in his till four o'clock, and he then became quieter and has had some comfortable sleep. He is obviously weaker this morning, and has been for the last two or three days so painfully reduced that I dread to think what his dear frame may become before life gives way. My brother slept here last night, and will be here again to-night. What shall I be without my father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I write when I can, but I do not know whether my letter will do to send this evening. _P.S._--Father is very, very much weaker this evening. Mr. Evans died during that night, 31st May, 1849. [Illustration: Portrait of Mr. Robert Evans.] _SUMMARY._ MAY, 1846, TO MAY, 1849. Visit to Mrs. Hennell at Hackney--Letters to Mrs. Bray--Strauss translation published--Visit to Dover with father--Classical books wanted--Pleasure in Strauss's letter--Brays suspect novel-writing--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell--Good spirits--Wicksteed's review of the Strauss translation--Reading Foster's life--Visit to Griff--Child's view of God (_à propos_ of Miss Hennell's "Heliados")--Visit to London--"Elijah"--Likes London less--The Sibree family and Mrs. John Cash's reminiscences--Letter to Miss Mary Sibree--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell--Mental depression--Opinion of Charles Hennell's "Inquiry"--Visit to the Isle of Wight with father--Admiration of Richardson--Blanco White--Delight in George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur"--Letters to Mr. John Sibree--Opinion of Mrs. Hannah More's letters--"Tancred," "Coningsby," and "Sybil"--D'Israeli's theory of races--Gentile nature kicks against superiority of Jews--Bows only to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry--Superiority of music among the arts--Relation of religion to art--Thorwaldsen's Christ--Admiration of Roberts and Creswick--The intellect and moral nature restrain the passions and senses--Mr. Dawson the lecturer--Satisfaction in French Revolution of '48--The men of the barricade bowing to the image of Christ--Difference between French and English working-classes--The need of utterance--Sympathy with Mr. Sibree in religious difficulties--Longing for a high attic in Geneva--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell--Views on correspondence--Mental depression--Father's illness--Father better--Goes with him to St. Leonard's--Letter to Charles Bray--Depression to be overcome by thought and love--Admiration of Louis Blanc--Recovery from depression--"Jane Eyre"--Return to Coventry--Meets Emerson--Strauss's pamphlet on Julian the Apostate--Carlyle's eulogium on Emerson--Francis Newman--Suffering from depression--Letter to Mrs. Houghton--Self-condemnation for evil speaking--Letters to Miss Hennell--Macaulay's History--On the influence of George Sand's and Rousseau's writing--Writes review of the "Nemesis of Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_--Opinion of the "Nemesis" and the "Shadows of the Clouds"--Translating Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"--Letter to Mrs. Pears--The consolations of nursing--Strain of father's illness--Father's death. FOOTNOTES: [20] Organs of Combativeness. [21] Afterwards acknowledged by the author, Robert Landor (brother of Walter Savage Landor), who also wrote the "Fountain of Arethusa," etc. [22] John Foster, Baptist minister, born 1770, died 1843. [23] An _Ahnung_--a presentiment--of her own future. [24] On Emerson. [25] Francis Newman. CHAPTER IV. It fortunately happened that the Brays had planned a trip to the Continent for this month of June, 1849, and Miss Evans, being left desolate by the death of her father, accepted their invitation to join them. On the 11th June they started, going by way of Paris, Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, Nice, Genoa, Milan, Como, Lago Maggiore, Martigny, and Chamounix, arriving at Geneva in the third week of July. Here Miss Evans determined to remain for some months, the Brays returning home. Before they went, however, they helped her to settle herself comfortably _en pension_, and, as will be seen from the following letters, the next eight months were quietly and peacefully happy. The _pension_ selected in the first instance was the Campagne Plongeon, which stands on a slight eminence a few hundred yards back from the road on the route d'Hermance, some ten minutes' walk from the Hôtel Métropole. From the Hôtel National on the Quai de Mont Blanc one catches a pleasant glimpse of it nestling among its trees. A good-sized, gleaming white house, with a centre, and gables at each side, a flight of steps leading from the middle window to the ground. A meadow in front, nicely planted, slopes charmingly down to the blue lake, and behind the house, on the left-hand side, there is an avenue of remarkably fine chestnut-trees, whence there is a magnificent view of the Jura mountains on the opposite side of the lake. The road to Geneva is very beautiful, by the lake-side, bordered with plane-trees. It was a delightful, soothing change after the long illness and the painful death of her father--after the monotonous dulness, too, of an English provincial town like Coventry, where there is little beauty of any sort to gladden the soul. In the first months following a great loss it is good to be alone for a time--alone, especially amidst beautiful scenes--and alone in the sense of being removed from habitual associations, but yet constantly in the society of new acquaintances, who are sufficiently interesting, but not too intimate. The Swiss correspondence which follows is chiefly addressed to the Brays collectively, and describes the life minutely. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 27th July, 1840.] About my comfort here, I find no disagreeables, and have every physical comfort that I care about. The family seems well-ordered and happy. I have made another friend, too--an elderly English lady, a Mrs. Locke, who used to live at Ryde--a pretty old lady with plenty of shrewdness and knowledge of the world. She began to say very kind things to me in rather a waspish tone yesterday morning at breakfast. I liked her better at dinner and tea, and to-day we are quite confidential. I only hope she will stay; she is just the sort of person I shall like to have to speak to--not at all "congenial," but with a character of her own. The going down to tea bores me, and I shall get out of it as soon as I can, unless I can manage to have the newspapers to read. The American lady embroiders slippers--the mamma looks on and does nothing. The marquis and his friends play at whist; the old ladies sew; and madame says things so true that they are insufferable. She is obliged to talk to all, and cap their _niaiseries_ with some suitable observation. She has been very kind and motherly to me. I like her better every time I see her. I have quiet and comfort--what more can I want to make me a healthy, reasonable being once more? I will never go near a friend again until I can bring joy and peace in my heart and in my face--but remember that friendship will be easy then. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 5th Aug. 1849.] I hope my imagination paints truly when it shows me all of you seated with beaming faces round the tea-table at Rosehill. I shall be yearning to know that things as well as people are smiling on you; but I am sure you will not let me wait for news of you longer than is necessary. My life here would be delightful if we could always keep the same set of people; but, alas! I fear one generation will go and another come so fast that I shall not care to become acquainted with any of them. My good Mrs. Locke is not going, that is one comfort. She is quite a mother to me--helps me to buy my candles and do all my shopping--takes care of me at dinner, and quite rejoices when she sees me enjoy conversation or anything else. The St. Germains are delightful people--the marquise really seems to me the most charming person I ever saw, with kindness enough to make the ultra-politeness of her manners quite genuine. She is very good to me, and says of me, "Je m'interesse vivement à mademoiselle." The marquis is the most well-bred, harmless of men. He talks very little--every sentence seems a terrible gestation, and comes forth _fortissimo_; but he generally bestows one on me, and seems especially to enjoy my poor tunes (mind you, all these trivialities are to satisfy your vanity, not mine--because you are beginning to be ashamed of having loved me). The gray-headed gentleman got quite fond of talking philosophy with me before he went; but, alas! he and a very agreeable young man who was with him are gone to Aix les Bains. The young German is the Baron de H----. I should think he is not more than two or three and twenty, very good-natured, but a most determined enemy to all gallantry. I fancy he is a Communist; but he seems to have been joked about his opinions by madame and the rest until he has determined to keep a proud silence on such matters. He has begun to talk to me, and I think we should become good friends; but he, too, is gone on an expedition to Monte Rosa. He is expecting his brother to join him here on his return, but I fear they will not stay long. The _gouvernante_ is a German, with a moral region that would rejoice Mr. Bray's eyes. Poor soul, she is in a land of strangers, and often seems to feel her loneliness. Her situation is a very difficult one; and "_die Angst_," she says, often brings on a pain at her heart. Madame is a woman of some reading and considerable talent--very fond of politics, a devourer of the journals, with an opinion ready for you on any subject whatever. It will be a serious loss to her to part with the St. Germain family. I fear that they will not stay longer than this month. I should be quite indifferent to the world that comes or goes if once I had my boxes with all my books. Last Sunday I went with madame to a small church near Plongeon, and I could easily have fancied myself in an Independent chapel at home. The spirit of the sermon was not a whit more elevated than that of our friend Dr. Harris; the text, "What shall I do to be saved?" the answer of Jesus being blinked as usual. To-day I have been to hear one of the most celebrated preachers, M. Meunier. His sermon was really eloquent--all written down, but delivered with so much energy and feeling that you never thought of the book. It is curious to notice how patriotism--_dévouement à la patrie_--is put in the sermons as the first of virtues, even before devotion to the Church. We never hear of it in England after we leave school. The good marquis goes with his family and servants, all nicely dressed, to the Catholic Church. They are a most orderly set of people: there is nothing but their language and their geniality and politeness to distinguish them from one of the best of our English aristocratic families. I am perfectly comfortable; every one is kind to me and seems to like me. Your kind hearts will rejoice at this, I know. Only remember that I am just as much interested in all that happens to you at Rosehill as you are in what happens to me at Plongeon. Pray that the motto of Geneva may become mine--"_Post tenebras lux_." [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th Aug. 1849.] I have no head for writing to-day, for I have been keeping my bed for the last three days; but I must remember that writing to you is like ringing a bell hung in the planet Jupiter--it is so weary a while before one's letters reach. I have been positively sickening for want of my boxes, and anxiety to hear of my relations. Your kind letter of this morning has quieted the latter a little; but my boxes, alas! have not appeared. Do not be alarmed about my health. I have only had a terrible headache--prolonged, in fact, by the assiduities of the good people here; for the first day I lay in my bed I had the whole female world of Plongeon in my bedroom, and talked so incessantly that I was unable to sleep after it; the consequence, as you may imagine, was that the next day I was very much worse; but I am getting better, and indeed it was worth while to be ill to have so many kind attentions. There is a fresh German family from Frankfurt here just now--Madame Cornelius and her children. She is the daughter of the richest banker in Frankfurt, and, what is better, full of heart and mind, with a face that tells you so before she opens her lips. She has more reading than the marquise, being German and Protestant; and it is a real refreshment to talk with her for half an hour. The dear marquise is a truly devout Catholic. It is beautiful to hear her speak of the comfort she has in the confessional--for our _têtes-à-tête_ have lately turned on religious matters. She says I am in a "mauvaise voie sous le rapport de la religion. Peut être vous vous marierez, et le mariage, chère amie, sans la foi religieuse!..." She says I have isolated myself by my studies--that I am too cold and have too little confidence in the feelings of others towards me--that I do not believe how deep an interest she has conceived in my lot. She says Signor Goldrini (the young Italian who was here for a week) told her, when he had been talking to me one evening, "Vous aimerez cette demoiselle, j'en suis sûr"--and she has found his prediction true. They are leaving for their own country on Wednesday. She hopes I shall go to Italy and see her; and when I tell her that I have no faith that she will remember me long enough for me to venture on paying her a visit if ever I should go to Italy again, she shakes her head at my incredulity. She was born at Genoa. Her father was three years Sardinian Minister at Constantinople before she was married, and she speaks with enthusiasm of her life there--"C'est là le pays de la vraie poésie ou l'on sent ce que c'est que de vivre par le coeur." M. de H---- is returned from Monte Rosa. He would be a nice person if he had another soul added to the one he has by nature--the soul that comes by sorrow and love. I stole his book while he was gone--the first volume of Louis Blanc's "History of Ten Years." It contains a very interesting account of the three days of July, 1830. His brother is coming to join him, so I hope he will not go at present. Tell Miss Sibree my address, and beg her to write to me all about herself, and to write on thin paper. I hardly know yet whether I shall like this place well enough to stay here through the winter. I have been under the disadvantage of wanting all on which I chiefly depend, my books, etc. When I have been here another month I shall be better able to judge. I hope you managed to get in the black velvet dress. The people dress, and think about dressing, here more even than in England. You would not know me if you saw me. The marquise took on her the office of _femme de chambre_ and dressed my hair one day. She has abolished all my curls, and made two things stick out on each side of my head like those on the head of the Sphinx. All the world says I look infinitely better; so I comply, though to myself I seem uglier than ever--if possible. I am fidgeted to death about my boxes, and that tiresome man not to acknowledge the receipt of them. I make no apology for writing all my peevishness and follies, because I want you to do the same--to let me know everything about you, to the aching of your fingers--and you tell me very little. My boxes, my boxes! I dream of them night and day. Dear Mr. Hennell! Give him my heartiest affectionate remembrances. Tell him I find no one here so spirited as he: there are no better jokes going than I can make myself. Mrs. Hennell and Mrs. C. Hennell, too, all are remembered--if even I have only seen them in England. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Aug. 1849.] Mme. de Ludwigsdorff, the wife of an Austrian baron, has been here for two days, and is coming again. She is handsome, spirited, and clever--pure English by birth, but quite foreign in manners and appearance. She, and all the world besides, are going to winter in Italy. Nothing annoys me now; I feel perfectly at home, and shall really be comfortable when I have all my little matters about me. This place looks more lovely to me every day--the lake, the town, the _campagnes_, with their stately trees and pretty houses, the glorious mountains in the distance; one can hardly believe one's self on earth; one might live here, and forget that there is such a thing as want or labor or sorrow. The perpetual presence of all this beauty has somewhat the effect of mesmerism or chloroform. I feel sometimes as if I were sinking into an agreeable state of numbness, on the verge of unconsciousness, and seem to want well pinching to rouse me. The other day (Sunday) there was a _fête_ held on the lake--the _fête_ of Navigation. I went out, with some other ladies, in M. de H----'s boat, at sunset, and had the richest draught of beauty. All the boats of Geneva turned out in their best attire. When the moon and stars came out there were beautiful fireworks sent up from the boats. The mingling of the silver and the golden rays on the rippled lake, the bright colors of the boats, the music, the splendid fireworks, and the pale moon looking at it all with a sort of grave surprise, made up a scene of perfect enchantment; and our dear old Mont Blanc was there, in his white ermine robe. I rowed all the time, and hence comes my palsy. I can perfectly fancy dear Mrs. Pears in her Leamington house. How beautiful all that Foleshill life looks now, like the distant Jura in the morning! She was such a sweet, dear, good friend to me. My walks with her, my little visits to them in the evening--all is remembered. I am glad you have seen Fanny again; any attention you show her is a real kindness to me, and I assure you she is worth it. You know, or, you do not know, that my nature is so chameleon-like I shall lose all my identity unless you keep nourishing the old self with letters; so, pray, write as much and as often as you can. It jumps admirably with my humor to live in two worlds at once in this way. I possess my dearest friends and my old environment in my thoughts, and another world of novelty and beauty in which I am actually moving, and my contrariety of disposition always makes the world that lives in my thoughts the dearer of the two, the one in which I more truly dwell. So, after all, I enjoy my friends most when I am away from them. I shall not say so, though, if I should live to rejoin you six or seven months hence. Keep me for seven[26] years longer, and you will find out the use of me, like all other pieces of trumpery. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 6th Sept. 1849.] Have I confided too much in your generosity in supposing that you would write to me first? or is there some other reason for your silence? I suffer greatly from it--not entirely from selfish reasons, but in great part because I am really anxious to know all about you, your state of health and spirits, the aspect of things within and without you. Did Mr. Bray convey to you my earnest request that you would write to me? You know of my whereabouts and circumstances from my good friends at Rosehill, so that I have little to tell you; at least, I have not spirit to write of myself until I have heard from you, and have an assurance from yourself that you yet care about me. Sara (Mrs. Isaac Evans) has sent me word of the sad, sad loss that has befallen poor Chrissey and Edward--a loss in which I feel that I have a share; for that angelic little being had great interest for me; she promised to pay so well for any care spent on her. I can imagine poor Edward's almost frantic grief, and I dread the effect on Chrissey's weak frame of her more silent suffering. Anything you can tell me about them will be read very eagerly. I begin to feel the full value of a letter; so much so that, if ever I am convinced that any one has the least anxiety to hear from me, I shall always reckon it among the first duties to sit down without delay, giving no ear to the suggestions of my idleness and aversion to letter-writing. Indeed, I am beginning to find it really pleasant to write to my friends, now that I am so far away from them; and I could soon fill a sheet to you, if your silence did not weigh too heavily on my heart. My health is by no means good yet; seldom good enough not to be a sort of drag on my mind; so you must make full allowance for too much egotism and susceptibility in me. It seems to be three years instead of three months since I was in England and amongst you, and I imagine that all sorts of revolutions must have taken place in the interim; whereas to you, I dare say, remaining in your old home and among your every-day duties, the time has slipped away so rapidly that you are unable to understand my anxiety to hear from you. I think the climate here is not particularly healthy; I suppose, from the vicinity of the lake, which, however, becomes so dear to me that one cannot bear to hear it accused. Good-bye, dear Fanny; a thousand blessings to you, whether you write to me or not, and much gratitude if you do. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 13th Sept. 1849.] My boxes arrived last Friday. The expense was fr. 150--perfectly horrible! Clearly, I must give myself for food to the fowls of the air or the fishes of the lake. It is a consolation to a mind imbued with a lofty philosophy that, when one can get nothing to eat, one can still be eaten--the evil is only apparent. It is quite settled that I cannot stay at Plongeon; I must move into town. But, alas! I must pay fr. 200 per month. If I were there I should see more conversable people than here. Do you think any one would buy my "Encyclopædia Britannica" at half-price, and my globes? If so, I should not be afraid of exceeding my means, and I should have a little money to pay for my piano, and for some lessons of different kinds that I want to take. The "Encyclopædia" is the last edition, and cost £42, and the globes £8 10_s._ I shall never have anywhere to put them, so it is folly to keep them, if any one will buy them. No one else has written to me, though I have written to almost all. I would rather have it so than feel that the debt was on my side. When will you come to me for help, that I may be able to hate you a little less? I shall leave here as soon as I am able to come to a decision, as I am anxious to feel settled, and the weather is becoming cold. This house is like a bird-cage set down in a garden. Do not count this among my letters. I am good for nothing to-day, and can write nothing well but bitterness, so that I will not trust myself to say another word. The Baronne de Ludwigsdorff seems to have begun to like me very much, and is really kind; so you see Heaven sends kind souls, though they are by no means kindred ones. Poor Mrs. Locke is to write to me--has given me a little ring; says, "Take care of yourself, my child--have some tea of your own--you'll be quite another person if you get some introductions to clever people; you'll get on well among a certain set--that's true;" it is her way to say "that's true" after all her affirmations. She says, "You won't find any kindred spirits at Plongeon, my dear." [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th Sept. 1849.] I am feeling particularly happy because I have had very kind letters from my brother and sisters. I am ashamed to fill sheets about myself, but I imagined that this was precisely what you wished. Pray correct my mistake, if it be one, and then I will look over the Calvin manuscripts, and give you some information of really general interest, suited to our mutual capacities. Mme. Ludwigsdorff is so good to me--a charming creature--so anxious to see me comfortably settled--petting me in all sorts of ways. She sends me tea when I wake in the morning--orange-flower water when I go to bed--grapes--and her maid to wait on me. She says if I like she will spend the winter after this at Paris with me, and introduce me to her friends there; but she does not mean to attach herself to me, because I shall never like her long. I shall be tired of her when I have sifted her, etc. She says I have more intellect than _morale_, and other things more true than agreeable; however, she is "greatly interested" in me; has told me her troubles and her feelings, she says, in spite of herself; for she has never been able before in her life to say so much even to her old friends. It is a mystery she cannot unravel. She is a person of high culture, according to the ordinary notions of what feminine culture should be. She speaks French and German perfectly, plays well, and has the most perfect polish of manner--the most thorough refinement, both socially and morally. She is tall and handsome, a striking-looking person, but with a sweet feminine expression when she is with those she likes; dresses exquisitely; in fine, is all that I am not. I shall tire you with all this, but I want you to know what good creatures there are here as elsewhere. Miss F. tells me that the first day she sat by my side at dinner she looked at me and thought to herself, "That is a grave lady; I do not think I shall like her much;" but as soon as I spoke to her, and she looked into my eyes, she felt she could love me. Then she lent me a book written by her cousin--a religious novel--in which there is a fearful infidel who will not believe, and hates all who do, etc. Then she invited me to walk with her, and came to talk in my room; then invited me to go to the Oratoire with them, till I began to be uncomfortable under the idea that they fancied I was evangelical, and that I was gaining their affection under false pretences; so I told Miss F. that I was going to sacrifice her good opinion, and confess my heresies. I quite expected, from their manner and character, that they would forsake me in horror--but they are as kind as ever. They never go into the _salon_ in the evening, and I have almost forsaken it, spending the evening frequently in Mme. de Ludwigsdorff's room, where we have some delightful tea. The tea of the house here is execrable; or, rather, as Mrs. A. says, "How glad we ought to be that it has no taste at all; it might have a very bad one!" I like the A.'s; they are very good-natured. Mrs. A., a very ugly but lady-like little woman, who is under an infatuation "as it regards" her caps--always wearing the brightest rose-color or intensest blue--with a complexion not unlike a dirty primrose glove. The rest of the people are nothing to me, except, indeed, dear old Mlle. de Phaisan, who comes into my room when I am ill, with "Qu'est ce que vous avez, ma bonne?" in the tone of the kindest old aunt, and thinks that I am the most amiable douce creature, which will give you a better opinion of her charity than her penetration. Dear creatures! no one is so good as you yet. I have not yet found any one who can bear comparison with you; not in kindness to me--_ça va sans dire_--but in solidity of mind and in expansion of feeling. This is a very coarse thing to say, but it came to the end of my pen, and _litera scripta manet_--at least, when it comes at the end of the second page. I shall certainly stay at Geneva this winter, and shall return to England as early as the spring weather will permit, always supposing that nothing occurs to alter my plans. I am still thin; so how much will be left of me next April I am afraid to imagine. I shall be length without breadth. Cara's assurance that you are well and comfortable is worth a luncheon to me, which is just the thing I am generally most in want of, for we dine at six now. I love to imagine you in your home; and everything seems easy to me when I am not disturbed about the health or well-being of my loved ones. It is really so; I do not say it out of any sort of affectation, benevolent or otherwise. I am without carefulness, alas! in more senses than one. Thank Sara very heartily for her letter. I do not write a special sheet for her to-day, because I have to write to two or three other people, but she must not the less believe how I valued a little private morsel from her; and also that I would always rather she wrote "from herself" than "to me"--that is my theory of letter-writing. Your letters are as welcome as Elijah's ravens--I thought of saying the dinner-bell, only that would be too gross! I get impatient at the end of the ten days which it takes for our letters to go to and fro; and I have not the least faith in the necessity for keeping the sheet three or four days before Mr. Bray can find time to write his meagre bit. If you see the Miss Franklins, give my love to them; my remembrances to Mr. and Mrs. Whittem; love to Miss Sibree always. Hearty love to Clapton[27] and Woodford;[28] and a very diffusive benevolence to the world in general, without any particular attachment to A or B. I am trying to please Mr. Bray. Good-bye, dear souls. _Dominus vobiscum._ [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Thursday, 4th Oct. 1849.] I am anxious for you to know my new address, as I shall leave here on Tuesday. I think I have at last found the very thing. I shall be the only lodger. The _appartement_ is _assez joli_, with an alcove, so that it looks like a sitting-room in the daytime--the people, an artist of great respectability, and his wife, a most kind-looking, lady-like person, with two boys, who have the air of being well educated. They seem very anxious to have me, and are ready to do anything to accommodate me. I shall live with them--that is, dine with them; breakfast in my own room. The terms are fr. 150 per month, light included. M. and Mme. d'Albert are middle-aged, musical, and, I am told, have _beaucoup d'esprit_. I hope this will not exceed my means for four or five months. There is a nice, large _salon_ and a good _salle à manger_. I am told that their society is very good. Mme. de Ludwigsdorff was about going there a year ago, and it was she who recommended it to me. I hope Sara's fears are supererogatory--a proof of a too nervous solicitude about me, for which I am grateful, though it does me no good to hear of it. I want encouraging rather than warning and checking. I believe I am so constituted that I shall never be cured of my faults except by God's discipline. If human beings would but believe it, they do me the most good by saying to me the kindest things truth will permit; and really I cannot hope those will be superlatively kind. The reason I wished to raise a little extra money is that I wanted to have some lessons and other means of culture--not for my daily bread, for which I hope I shall have enough; but, since you think my scheme impracticable, we will dismiss it. _Au reste_, be in no anxiety about me. Nothing is going wrong that I know of. I am not an absolute fool and weakling. When I am fairly settled in my new home I will write again. My address will be--M. d'Albert Durade, Rue des Chanoines, No. 107. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 4th Oct. 1849.] The blessed compensation there is in all things made your letter doubly precious for having been waited for, and it would have inspired me to write to you again much sooner, but that I have been in uncertainty about settling myself for the winter, and I wished to send you my future address. I am to move to my new home on Tuesday the 9th. I shall not at all regret leaving here; the season is beginning to be rather sombre, though the glorious chestnuts here are still worth looking at half the day. You have heard of some of the people whom I have described in my letters to Rosehill. The dear little old maid, Mlle. de Phaisan, is quite a good friend to me--extremely prosy, and full of tiny details; but really people of that calibre are a comfort to one occasionally, when one has not strength enough for more stimulating things. She is a sample of those happy souls who ask for nothing but the work of the hour, however trivial; who are contented to live without knowing whether they effect anything, but who do really effect much good, simply by their calm and even _maintien_. I laugh to hear her say in a tone of remonstrance--"Mme. de Ludwigsdorff dit qu'elle s'ennuie quand les soirées sont longues: moi, je ne conçois pas comment on peut s'ennuyer quand on a de l'ouvrage ou des jeux ou de la conversation." When people who are dressing elegantly and driving about to make calls every day of their life have been telling me of their troubles--their utter hopelessness of ever finding a vein worth working in their future life--my thoughts have turned towards many whose sufferings are of a more tangible character, and I have really felt all the old commonplaces about the equality of human destinies, always excepting those spiritual differences which are apart not only from poverty and riches, but from individual affections. Dear Chrissey has found time and strength to write to me, and very precious her letter was, though I wept over it. "Deep, abiding grief must be mine," she says, and I know well it must be. The mystery of trial! It falls with such avalanche weight on the head of the meek and patient. I wish I could do something of more avail for my friends than love them and long for their happiness. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 11th Oct. 1849.] M. and Mme. d'Albert are really clever people--people worth sitting up an hour longer to talk to. This does not hinder madame from being an excellent manager--dressing scrupulously, and keeping her servants in order. She has hung my room with pictures, one of which is the most beautiful group of flowers conceivable thrown on an open Bible, painted by herself. I have a piano which I hire. There is also one in the _salon_. M. d'Albert plays and sings, and in the winter he tells me they have parties to sing masses and do other delightful things. In fact, I think I am just in the right place. I breakfast in my own room at half-past eight, lunch at half-past twelve, and dine at four or a little after, and take tea at eight. From the tea-table I have gone into the _salon_ and chatted until bedtime. It would really have been a pity to have stayed at Plongeon, out of reach of everything, and with people so little worth talking to. I have not found out the _desagrémens_ here yet. It is raining horribly, but this just saves me from the regret I should have felt at having quitted the chestnuts of Plongeon. That _campagne_ looked splendid in its autumn dress. George Eliot retained so warm an admiration and love for M. d'Albert Durade to the end of her life that it seems fitting here to mention that he still lives, carrying well the weight of eighty winters. He is _conservateur_ of the Athénée--a permanent exhibition of works of art in Geneva; and he published only last year (1883) a French translation of the "Scenes of Clerical Life," having already previously published translations of "Adam Bede," "Felix Holt," "Silas Marner," and "Romola." The description of his personal appearance, in the following letter, still holds good, save that the gray hair has become quite white. He lost his wife in 1873; and it will be seen from subsequent letters that George Eliot kept up a faithful attachment to her to the end. They were both friends after her own heart. The old apartment is now No. 18, instead of No. 107, Rue des Chanoines, and is occupied as the printing-office of the _Journal de Genève_. But half of the rooms remain just as they were five-and-thirty years ago. The _salon_, wainscoted in imitation light-oak panels, with a white China stove, and her bedroom opening off it--as she had often described it to me; and M. d'Albert has still in his possession the painting of the bunch of beautiful flowers thrown on an open Bible mentioned in the last letter. He told me that when Miss Evans first came to look at the house she was so horrified with the forbidding aspect of the stairs that she declared she would not go up above the first floor; but when she got inside the door she was reconciled to her new quarters. Calvin's house is close to the Rue des Chanoines, and she was much interested in it. It will be seen that she did some work in physics under Professor de la Rive; but she principally rested and enjoyed herself during the stay at Geneva. It was exactly the kind of life she was in need of at the time, and the letters show how much she appreciated it. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 26th Oct. 1849.] I languished for your letter before it came, and read it three times running--judge whether I care less for you than of old. It is the best of blessings to know that you are well and cheerful; and when I think of all that might happen in a fortnight to make you otherwise, especially in these days of cholera and crises, I cannot help being anxious until I get a fresh assurance that at least five days ago all was well. Before I say anything about myself, I must contradict your suspicion that I paint things too agreeably for the sake of giving you pleasure. I assure you my letters are subjectively true; the falsehood, if there be any, is in my manner of seeing things. But I will give you some _vérités positives_, in which, alas! poor imagination has hitherto been able to do little for the world. Mme. d'Albert anticipates all my wants, and makes a spoiled child of me. I like these dear people better and better--everything is so in harmony with one's moral feeling that I really can almost say I never enjoyed a more complete _bien être_ in my life than during the last fortnight. For M. d'Albert, I love him already as if he were father and brother both. His face is rather haggard-looking, but all the lines and the wavy gray hair indicate the temperament of the artist. I have not heard a word or seen a gesture of his yet that was not perfectly in harmony with an exquisite moral refinement--indeed, one feels a better person always when he is present. He sings well, and plays on the piano a little. It is delightful to hear him talk of his friends--he admires them so genuinely--one sees so clearly that there is no reflex egotism. His conversation is charming. I learn something every dinner-time. Mme. d'Albert has less of genius and more of cleverness--a really lady-like person, who says everything well. She brings up her children admirably--two nice, intelligent boys;[29]--the youngest, particularly, has a sort of Lamartine expression, with a fine head. It is so delightful to get among people who exhibit no meannesses, no worldlinesses, that one may well be enthusiastic. To me it is so blessed to find any departure from the rule of giving as little as possible for as much as possible. Their whole behavior to me is as if I were a guest whom they delighted to honor. Last night we had a little knot of their most intimate musical friends, and M. and Mme. d'Albert introduced me to them as if they wished me to know them--as if they wished me to like their friends and their friends to like me. The people and the evening would have been just after your own hearts. In fact, I have not the slightest pretext for being discontented--not the shadow of a discomfort. Even the little housemaid Jeanne is charming; says to me every morning, in the prettiest voice: "Madame a-t-elle bien dormi cette nuit?"--puts fire in my _chauffe-pied_ without being told--cleans my rooms most conscientiously. There--I promise to weary you less for the future with my descriptions. I could not resist the temptation to speak gratefully of M. and Mme. d'Albert. Give my love to Mrs. Pears--my constant, ever-fresh remembrance. My love to Miss Rebecca Franklin--tell her I have only spun my web to Geneva; it will infallibly carry me back again across the gulf, were it twice as great. If Mr. Froude preach the new word at Manchester, I hope he will preach it so as to do without an after-explanation, and not bewilder his hearers in the manner of Mephistopheles when he dons the doctor's gown of Faust. I congratulate you on the new edition,[30] and promise to read it with a disposition to admire when I am at Rosehill once more. I am beginning to lose respect for the petty acumen that sees difficulties. I love the souls that rush along to their goal with a full stream of sentiment--that have too much of the positive to be harassed by the perpetual negatives--which, after all, are but the disease of the soul, to be expelled by fortifying the principle of vitality. Good-bye, dear loves; sha'n't I kiss you when I am in England again--in England! I already begin to think of the journey as an impossibility. Geneva is so beautiful now, the trees have their richest coloring. Coventry is a fool to it--but, then, you are at Coventry, and you are better than lake, trees, and mountains. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Oct. 1849.] We have had some delicious autumn days here. If the fine weather last, I am going up the Salève on Sunday with M. d'Albert. On one side I shall have a magnificent view of the lake, the town, and the Jura; on the other, the range of Mont Blanc. The walks about Geneva are perfectly enchanting. "Ah!" says poor Mlle. de Phaisan, "nous avons un beau pays si nous n'avions pas ces Radicaux!" The election of the Conseil d'�tat is to take place in November, and an _émeute_ is expected. The actual government is Radical, and thoroughly detested by all the "respectable" classes. The vice-president of the Conseil and the virtual head of the government is an unprincipled, clever fellow, horribly in debt himself, and on the way to reduce the government to the same position. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Oct. 1849.] I like my town life vastly. I shall like it still better in the winter. There is an indescribable charm to me in this form of human nest-making. You enter a by no means attractive-looking house, you climb up two or three flights of cold, dark-looking stone steps, you ring at a very modest door, and you enter a set of rooms, snug, or comfortable, or elegant. One is so out of reach of intruders, so undiverted from one's occupations by externals, so free from cold, rushing winds through hall doors--one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree. I have always had a hankering after this sort of life, and I find it was a true instinct of what would suit me. Just opposite my windows is the street in which the Sisters of Charity live, and, if I look out, I generally see either one of them or a sober-looking ecclesiastic. Then a walk of five minutes takes me out of all streets, within sight of beauties that I am sure you too would love, if you did not share my enthusiasm for the town. I have not another minute, having promised to go out before dinner--so, dearest, take my letter as a hasty kiss, just to let you know how constantly I love you--how, the longer I live and the more I have felt, the better I know how to value you. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 4th Dec. 1849.] I write at once to answer your questions about business. Spinoza and I have been divorced for several months. My want of health has obliged me to renounce all application. I take walks, play on the piano, read Voltaire, talk to my friends, and just take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft. If you are anxious to publish the translation in question I could, after a few months, finish the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" to keep it company; but I confess to you that I think you would do better to abstain from printing a translation. What is wanted in English is not a translation of Spinoza's works, but a true estimate of his life and system. After one has rendered his Latin faithfully into English, one feels that there is another yet more difficult process of translation for the reader to effect, and that the only mode of making Spinoza accessible to a larger number is to study his books, then shut them, and give an analysis. For those who read the very words Spinoza wrote there is the same sort of interest in his style as in the conversation of a person of great capacity who has led a solitary life, and who says from his own soul what all the world is saying by rote; but this interest hardly belongs to a translation. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Dec. 1849.] Your letter is very sweet to me, giving me a picture of your quiet life. How shall I enable you to imagine mine, since you know nothing of the localities? My good friends here only change for the better. Mme. d'Albert is all affection; M. d'Albert all delicacy and intelligence; the friends to whom they have introduced me very kind in their attentions. In fact, I want nothing but a little more money, to feel more at ease about my fires, etc. I am in an atmosphere of love and refinement; even the little servant Jeanne seems to love me, and does me good every time she comes into the room. I can say anything to M. and Mme. d'Albert. M. d'A. understands everything, and if madame does not understand, she believes--that is, she seems always sure that I mean something edifying. She kisses me like a mother, and I am baby enough to find that a great addition to my happiness. _Au reste_, I am careful for nothing; I am a sort of supernumerary spoon, and there will be no damage to the set if I am lost. My heart-ties are not loosened by distance--it is not in the nature of ties to be so; and when I think of my loved ones as those to whom I can be a comforter, a help, I long to be with them again. Otherwise, I can only think with a shudder of returning to England. It looks to me like a land of gloom, of _ennui_, of platitude; but in the midst of all this it is the land of duty and affection, and the only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given to me some woman's duty--some possibility of devoting myself where I may see a daily result of pure, calm blessedness in the life of another. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th Dec. 1849.] How do you look? I hope that _bandeau_ of silvery locks is not widening too fast on the head I love so well--that the eyes are as bright as ever. Your letter tells me they will beam as kindly as ever when I see them once more. Never make apologies about your letters, or your words, or anything else. It is your soul to which I am wedded; and do I not know too well how the soul is doubly belied--first, by the impossibility of being in word and act as great, as loving, as good as it wills to be; and again, by the miserable weaknesses of the friends who see the words and acts through all sorts of mists raised by their own passions and preoccupations? In all these matters I am the chief of sinners, and I am tempted to rejoice in the offences of my friends, because they make me feel less humiliation. I am quite satisfied to be at Geneva instead of Paris; in fact, I am becoming passionately attached to the mountains, the lake, the streets, my own room, and, above all, the dear people with whom I live. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 23d Dec. 1849.] A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you--good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can't be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate. Henceforth I tell you nothing whatever about myself; for if I speak of agreeables, and say I am contented, Mr. Bray writes me word that you are all trying to forget me. If I were to tell you of disagreeables and privations and sadness, Sara would write: "If you are unhappy now, you will be so _à fortiori_ ten years hence." Now, since I have a decided objection to doses sent by post which upset one's digestion for a fortnight, I am determined to give you no pretext for sending them. You shall not know whether I am well or ill, contented or discontented, warm or cold, fat or thin. But remember that I am so far from being of the same mind as Mr. Bray, that good news of you is necessary to my comfort. I walk more briskly, and jump out of bed more promptly, after a letter that tells me you are well and comfortable, that business is promising, that men begin to speak well of you, etc. "I am comforted in your comfort," as saith St. Paul to the troublesome Corinthians. When one is cabined, cribbed, confined in one's self, it is good to be enlarged in one's friends. Good Mr. Marshall! We wish to keep even unamiable people when death calls for them, much more good souls like him. I am glad he had had one more pleasant visit to Cara for her to think of. Dear Sara's letter is very charming--not at all physicky--rather an agreeable draught of _vin sucré_. Dear Mr. Hennell, we shall never look upon his like. I am attending a course of lectures on Experimental Physics by M. le Professeur de la Rive, the inventor, among other things, of electroplating. The lectures occur every Wednesday and Saturday. It is time for me to go. I am distressed to send you this shabby last fragment of paper, and to write in such a hurry, but the days are really only two hours long, and I have so many things to do that I go to bed every night miserable because I have left out something I meant to do. Good-bye, dear souls. Forget me if you like, you cannot oblige me to forget you; and the active is worth twice of the passive all the world over! The earth is covered with snow, and the government is levelling the fortifications. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Jan. 1850.] You leave me a long time without news of you, though I told you they were necessary as a counteractive to the horrors of this terrible winter. Are you really so occupied as to have absolutely no time to think of me? I console myself, at least to-day, now we have a blue sky once more after two months of mist, with thinking that I am excluded by pleasanter ideas--that at least you are well and comfortable, and I ought to content myself with that. The fact is, I am much of Touchstone's mind--in respect my life is at Geneva, I like it very well, but in respect it is not with you, it is a very vile life. I have no yearnings to exchange lake and mountains for Bishop Street and the Radford Fields, but I have a great yearning to kiss you all and talk to you for three days running. I do not think it will be possible for me to undertake the journey before the end of March. I look forward to it with great dread. I see myself looking utterly miserable, ready to leave all my luggage behind me at Paris for the sake of escaping the trouble of it. We have had Alboni here--a very fat siren. There has been some capital acting of comedies by friends of M. d'Albert--one of them is superior to any professional actor of comedy I have ever seen. He reads _vaudevilles_ so marvellously that one seems to have a whole troupe of actors before one in his single person. He is a handsome man of fifty, full of wit and talent, and he married about a year ago. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 9th Feb. 1850.] It is one of the provoking contrarieties of destiny that I should have written my croaking letter when your own kind, consolatory one was on its way to me. I have been happier ever since it came. After mourning two or three months over Chrissey's account of your troubles, I can only dwell on that part of your letter which tells that there is a little more blue in your sky--that you have faith in the coming spring. Shall you be as glad to see me as to hear the cuckoo? I mean to return to England as soon as the Jura is passable without sledges--probably the end of March or beginning of April. I have a little _Heimweh_ "as it regards" my friends. I yearn to see those I have loved the longest, but I shall feel real grief at parting from the excellent people with whom I am living. I feel they are my _friends_; without entering into or even knowing the greater part of my views, they understand my character and have a real interest in me. I have infinite tenderness from Mme. d'Albert. I call her always "maman;" and she is just the creature one loves to lean on and be petted by. In fact, I am too much indulged, and shall go back to England as undisciplined as ever. This terribly severe winter has been a drawback on my recovering my strength. I have lost whole weeks from headache, etc., but I am certainly better now than when I came to Mme. d'Albert. You tell me to give you these details, so I obey. Decidedly England is the most comfortable country to be in in winter--at least, for all except those who are rich enough to buy English comforts everywhere. I hate myself for caring about carpets, easy-chairs, and coal fires--one's soul is under a curse, and can preach no truth while one is in bondage to the flesh in this way; but, alas! habit is the purgatory in which we suffer for our past sins. I hear much music. We have a reunion of musical friends every Monday. For the rest, I have refused _soirées_, which are as stupid and unprofitable at Geneva as in England. I save all more interesting details, that I may have them to tell you when I am with you. I am going now to a _séance_ on Experimental Physics by the celebrated Professor de la Rive. This letter will at least convince you that I am not eaten up by wolves, as they have been fearing at Rosehill. The English papers tell of wolves descending from the Jura and devouring the inhabitants of the villages, but we have been in happy ignorance of these editors' horrors. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 15th Feb. 1850.] If you saw the Jura to-day! The snow reveals its forests, ravines, and precipices, and it stands in relief against a pure blue sky. The snow is on the mountains only, now, and one is tempted to walk all day, particularly when one lies in bed till ten, as your exemplary friend sometimes does. I have had no discipline, and shall return to you more of a spoiled child than ever. Indeed, I think I am destined to be so to the end--one of the odious swarm of voracious caterpillars soon to be swept away from the earth by a tempest. I am getting better bodily. I have much less headache, but the least excitement fatigues me. Certainly, if one cannot have a malady to carry one off rapidly, the only sensible thing is to get well and fat; and I believe I shall be driven to that alternative. You know that George Sand writes for the theatre? Her "François le Champi--une Comédie," is simplicity and purity itself. The seven devils are cast out. We are going to have more acting here on Wednesday. M. Chamel's talent makes maman's _soirées_ quite brilliant. You will be amused to hear that I am sitting for my portrait--at M. d'Albert's request, not mine. If it turns out well, I shall long to steal it to give to you; but M. d'Albert talks of painting a second, and in that case I shall certainly beg one. The idea of making a study of my visage is droll enough. I have the kindest possible letters from my brother and sisters, promising me the warmest welcome. This helps to give me courage for the journey; but the strongest magnet of all is a certain little group of three persons whom I hope to find together at Rosehill. Something has been said of M. d'Albert accompanying me to Paris. I am saddened when I think of all the horrible anxieties of trade. If I had children, I would make them carpenters and shoemakers; that is the way to make them Messiahs and Jacob Boehms. As for us, who are dependent on carpets and easy-chairs, we are reprobates, and shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven. I go to the Genevese churches every Sunday, and nourish my heterodoxy with orthodox sermons. However, there are some clever men here in the Church, and I am fortunate in being here at a time when the very cleverest is giving a series of conferences. I think I have never told you that we have a long German lad of seventeen in the house--the most taciturn and awkward of lads. He said very naïvely, when I reproached him for not talking to a German young lady at a _soirée_, when he was seated next her at table--"Je ne savais que faire de mes jambes." They had placed the poor _garçon_ against one of those card-tables--all legs, like himself. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 1st March, 1850.] The weather is so glorious that I think I may set out on my journey soon after the 15th. I am not quite certain yet that M. d'Albert will not be able to accompany me to Paris; in any case, a package of so little value will get along safely enough. I am so excited at the idea of the time being so near when I am to leave Geneva--a real grief--and see my friends in England--a perfectly overwhelming joy--that I can do nothing. I am frightened to think what an idle wretch I am become. And you all do not write me one word to tell me you long for me. I have a great mind to elope to Constantinople, and never see any one any more! It is with a feeling of regret that we take leave of the pleasant town of Geneva, its lake and mountains, and its agreeable little circle of acquaintance. It was a peacefully happy episode in George Eliot's life, and one she was always fond of recurring to, in our talk, up to the end of her life. _SUMMARY._ JUNE, 1849, TO MARCH, 1850. Goes abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Geneva--Life at Campagne Plongeon--Letters to Brays describing surroundings--Mrs. Locke--The St. Germain family--Anxiety about her boxes with books, etc.--Hears M. Meunier preach--Patriotism the first of virtues--Mme. Cornelius--Mme. de Ludwigsdorff--"_Fête_ of Navigation" on the lake--Demand for letters--Prophetic anticipation of position seven years later--Wishes to sell some of her books and globes to get music lessons--Letter to Mrs. Houghton--Loss of Mrs. Clarke's child--Love of Lake of Geneva--Letters to Brays--Mme. Ludwigsdorff wishes her to spend winter in Paris--Mlle. de Phaisan--Finds apartment in Geneva, No. 107 Rue des Chanoines, with M. and Mme. d'Albert--Enjoyment of their society--Remarks on translations of Spinoza--Hope of a woman's duty--Attachment to Geneva--Yearning for friends at home--Alboni--Private theatricals--Portrait by M. d'Albert--Remarks on education of children--Leaves Geneva by Jura. FOOTNOTES: [26] It may be noted as a curious verification of this presentiment that "Scenes of Clerical Life" were published in 1856--just seven years later. [27] Mrs. Hennell. [28] Mr. and Mrs. C. Hennell. [29] Mr. Charles Lewes tells me that when he went to stay with the d'Alberts at Geneva, many years afterwards, they mentioned how much they had been struck by her extraordinary discernment of the character of these two boys. [30] "Philosophy of Necessity," by Charles Bray. CHAPTER V. M. d'Albert and his charge left Geneva towards the end of March, and as the railway was not yet opened all the way to France, they had to cross the Jura in sledges, and suffered terribly from the cold. They joined the railway at Tonnerre, and came through Paris, arriving in England on the 23d of March. After a day in London, Miss Evans went straight to her friends at Rosehill, where she stayed for a few days before going on to Griff. It will have been seen that she had set her hopes high on the delights of home-coming, and with her too sensitive, impressionable nature, it is not difficult to understand, without attributing blame to any one, that she was pretty sure to be laying up disappointment for herself. All who have had the experience of returning from a bright, sunny climate to England in March will recognize in the next letters the actual presence of the east wind, the leaden sky, the gritty dust, and _le spleen_. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Mch. 1850, from Rosehill.] No; I am not in England--I am only nearer the beings I love best. I try to forget all geography, and that I have placed myself irretrievably out of reach of nature's brightest glories and beauties to shiver in a wintry flat. I am unspeakably grateful to find these dear creatures looking well and happy, in spite of worldly cares, but your clear face and voice are wanting to me. But I must wait with patience, and perhaps by the time I have finished my visits to my relations you will be ready to come to Rosehill again. I want you to scold me, and make me good. I am idle and naughty--_on ne peut plus_--sinking into heathenish ignorance and woman's frivolity. Remember, you are one of my guardian angels. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, beginning of April, 1850, from Griff.] Will you send the enclosed note to Mrs. C. Hennell? I am not quite sure about her direction, but I am anxious to thank her for her kindness in inviting me. Will you also send me an account of Mr. Chapman's prices for lodgers, and if you know anything of other boarding-houses, etc., in London? Will you tell me what you can? I am not asking you merely for the sake of giving you trouble. I am really anxious to know. Oh, the dismal weather and the dismal country and the dismal people. It was some envious demon that drove me across the Jura. However, I am determined to sell everything I possess, except a portmanteau and carpet-bag and the necessary contents, and be a stranger and a foreigner on the earth for evermore. But I must see you first; that is a yearning I still have in spite of disappointments. From Griff she went to stay with her sister, Mrs. Clarke, at Meriden, whence she writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 24th April, 1850.] Have you any engagement for the week after next? If not, may I join you on Saturday the 4th, and invite M. d'Albert to come down on the following Monday? It appears he cannot stay in England longer than until about the second week in May. I am uncomfortable at the idea of burdening even your friendship with the entertainment of a person purely for my sake. It is indeed the greatest of all the great kindnesses you have shown me. Write me two or three kind words, dear Cara. I have been so ill at ease ever since I have been in England that I am quite discouraged. Dear Chrissey is generous and sympathizing, and really cares for my happiness. [Illustration: Rosehill.] On the 4th of May Miss Evans went to Rosehill, and on the 7th M. d'Albert joined the party for a three days' visit. The strong affection existing between Mr. and Mrs. Bray and their guest, and the more congenial intellectual atmosphere surrounding them, led Miss Evans to make her home practically at Rosehill for the next sixteen months. She stayed there continuously till the 18th November, and, among other things, wrote a review of Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect." In October Mr. Mackay and Mr. Chapman, the editor of the _Westminster Review_, came to stay at Rosehill, and there was probably some talk then about her assisting in the editorial work of the _Review_, but it was not until the following spring that any definite understanding on this subject was arrived at. Meantime the article on Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" came out in the January, 1851, number of the _Westminster_. It contains the following remarkable passages: "Our civilization, and yet more, our religion, are an anomalous blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development. We are in bondage to terms and conceptions, which, having had their roots in conditions of thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us as spells which have lost their virtue. The endeavor to spread enlightened ideas is perpetually counteracted by these _idola theatri_, which have allied themselves, on the one hand, with men's better sentiments, and, on the other, with institutions in whose defence are arrayed the passions and the interests of dominant classes. Now, although the teaching of positive truth is the grand means of expelling error, the process will be very much quickened if the negative argument serve as its pioneer; if, by a survey of the past, it can be shown how each age and each race has had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development, and that for succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit, along with the forms, of the past, is as futile as the embalming of the dead body in the hope that it may one day be resumed by the living soul.... It is Mr. Mackay's faith that divine revelation is not contained exclusively or pre-eminently in the facts and inspirations of any one age or nation, but is coextensive with the history of human development, and is perpetually unfolding itself to our widened experience and investigation, as firmament upon firmament becomes visible to us in proportion to the power and range of our exploring-instruments. The master-key to this revelation is the recognition of the presence of undeviating law in the material and moral world--of that invariability of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics, and our religion. It is this invariability of sequence which can alone give value to experience, and render education, in the true sense, possible. The divine yea and nay, the seal of prohibition and of sanction, are effectually impressed on human deeds and aspirations, not by means of Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of consequences whose evidence is confirmed instead of weakened as the ages advance; and human duty is comprised in the earnest study of this law and patient obedience to its teaching. While this belief sheds a bright beam of promise on the future career of our race, it lights up what once seemed the dreariest region of history with new interest; every past phase of human development is part of that education of the race in which we are sharing; every mistake, every absurdity, into which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an experiment of which we may reap the benefit. A correct generalization gives significance to the smallest detail, just as the great inductions of geology demonstrate in every pebble the working of laws by which the earth has become adapted for the habitation of man. In this view religion and philosophy are not merely conciliated, they are identical; or, rather, religion is the crown and consummation of philosophy--the delicate corolla which can only spread out its petals in all their symmetry and brilliance to the sun when root and branch exhibit the conditions of a healthy and vigorous life." Miss Evans seems to have been in London from the beginning of January till the end of March, 1851; and Mr. Chapman made another fortnight's visit to Rosehill at the end of May and beginning of June. It was during this period that, with Miss Evans's assistance, the prospectus of the new series of the _Westminster Review_ was determined on and put in shape. At the end of July she went with Mrs. Bray to visit Mr. and Mrs. Robert Noel, at Bishop Steignton, in Devonshire. Mrs. Bray had some slight illness there, and Miss Evans writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Aug. 1851.] I am grieved indeed if anything might have been written, which has not been written, to allay your anxiety about Cara. Her letter yesterday explained what has been the matter. I knew her own handwriting would be pleasanter to you than any other. I have been talking to her this morning about the going to London or to Rosehill. She seems to prefer London. A glance or two at the Exposition, she thinks, would do her no harm. To-day we are all going to Teignmouth. She seems to like the idea of sitting by the waves. The sun is shining gloriously, and all things are tolerably promising. I am going to walk on before the rest and have a bath. They went to London on the 13th of August, saw the Crystal Palace, and returned to Rosehill on the 16th. At the end of that month, Mr. George Combe (the distinguished phrenologist) arrived on a visit, and he and Mrs. Combe became good friends to Miss Evans, as will be seen from the subsequent correspondence. They came on a second visit to Rosehill the following month--Mr. Chapman being also in the house at the same time--and at the end of September Miss Evans went to stay with the Chapmans at No. 142 Strand, as a boarder, and as assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_. A new period now opens in George Eliot's life, and emphatically the most important period, for now she is to be thrown in contact with Mr. Lewes, who is to exercise so paramount an influence on all her future, with Mr. Herbert Spencer, and with a number of writers then representing the most fearless and advanced thought of the day. Miss Frederica Bremer, the authoress, was also boarding with the Chapmans at this time, as will be seen from the following letters: [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, end of Sept. 1851.] Mr. Mackay has been very kind in coming and walking out with me, and that is the only variety I have had. Last night, however, we had an agreeable enough gathering. Foxton[31] came, who, you know, is trying, with Carlyle and others, to get a chapel for Wilson at the West End--in which he is to figure as a seceding clergyman. I enclose you two notes from Empson (he is the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_) as a guarantee that I have been trying to work. Again, I proposed to write a review of Greg for the _Westminster_, not for money, but for love of the subject as connected with the "Inquiry." Mr. Hickson referred the matter to Slack again, and he writes that he shall not have room for it, and that the subject will not suit on this occasion, so you see I am obliged to be idle, and I like it best. I hope Mr. Bray is coming soon to tell me everything about you. I think I shall cry for joy to see him. But do send me a little note on Monday morning. Mrs. Follen called the other day, in extreme horror at Miss Martineau's book. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, end of Sept. 1851.] Dr. Brabant returned to Bath yesterday. He very politely took me to the Crystal Palace, the theatre, and the Overland Route. On Friday we had Foxton, Wilson, and some other nice people, among others a Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has just brought out a large work on "Social Statics," which Lewes pronounces the best book he has seen on the subject. You must see the book, if possible. Mr. Chapman is going to send you Miss Martineau's work, or rather Mr. Atkinson's,[32] which you must review in the _Herald_. Whatever else one may think of the book, it is certainly the boldest I have seen in the English language. I get nothing done here, there are so many _distractions_--moreover, I have hardly been well a day since I came. I wish I were rich enough to go to the coast, and have some plunges in the sea to brace me. Nevertheless do not suppose that I don't enjoy being here. I like seeing the new people, etc., and I am afraid I shall think the country rather dull after it. I am in a hurry to-day. I must have two hours' work before dinner, so imagine everything I have not said, or, rather, reflect that this scrap is quite as much as you deserve after being so slow to write to me. The reference, in the above letter, to Mr. Lewes must not be taken as indicating personal acquaintance yet. It is only a quotation of some opinion heard or read. Mr. Lewes had already secured for himself a wide reputation in the literary world by his "Biographical History of Philosophy," his two novels, "Ranthorpe," and "Rose, Blanche, and Violet"--all of which had been published five or six years before--and his voluminous contributions to the periodical literature of the day. He was also, at this time, the literary editor of the _Leader_ newspaper, so that any criticism of his would carry weight, and be talked about. Much has already been written about his extraordinary versatility, the variety of his literary productions, his social charms, his talent as a _raconteur_, and his dramatic faculty; and it will now be interesting, for those who did not know him personally, to learn the deeper side of his character, which will be seen, in its development, in the following pages. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, end of Sept. 1851.] I don't know how long Miss Bremer will stay, but you need not wish to see her. She is to me equally unprepossessing to eye and ear. I never saw a person of her years who appealed less to my purely instinctive veneration. I have to reflect every time I look at her that she is really Frederica Bremer. Fox is to write the article on the Suffrage, and we are going to try Carlyle for the Peerage, Ward refusing, on the ground that he thinks the improvement of the physical condition of the people so all-important that he must give all his energies to that. He says, "Life is a bad business, but we must make the best of it;" to which philosophy I say Amen. Dr. Hodgson is gone, and all the fun with him. I was introduced to Lewes the other day in Jeff's shop--a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance.[33] [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Oct. (?) 1851.] Professor Forbes is to write us a capital scientific article, whereat I rejoice greatly. The Peerage apparently will not "get itself done," as Carlyle says. It is not an urgent question, nor does one see that, if the undue influence of the Peers on the elections for the Commons were done away with, there would be much mischief from the House of Lords remaining for some time longer _in statu quo_. I have been reading Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" with great pleasure--not for its presentation of Sterling, but of Carlyle. There are racy bits of description in his best manner, and exquisite touches of feeling. Little rapid characterizations of living men too--of Francis Newman, for example--"a man of fine university and other attainments, of the sharpest cutting and most restlessly advancing intellect, and of the mildest pious enthusiasm." There is an inimitable description of Coleridge and his eternal monologue--"To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in the end be exhilarating to no creature." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Oct. 1851.] All the world is doing its _devoir_ to the great little authoress (Miss Bremer). I went to the exhibition on Saturday to hear the final "God save the Queen" and the three times three--"C'êtait un beau moment." Mr. Greg thought the review "well done, and in a kindly spirit," but thought there was not much in it--dreadfully true, since there was only all his book. I think he did not like the apology for his want of theological learning, which, however, was just the thing most needed, for the _Eclectic_ trips him up on that score. Carlyle was very amusing the other morning to Mr. Chapman about the Exhibition. He has no patience with the prince and "that Cole" assembling Sawneys from all parts of the land, till you can't get along Piccadilly. He has been worn to death with bores all summer, who present themselves by twos and threes in his study, saying, "Here we are," etc., etc. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Oct. 1851.] I wish you could see Miss Bremer's albums, full of portraits, flowers, and landscapes, all done by herself. A portrait of Emerson, marvellously like; one of Jenny Lind, etc. Last night we had quite a charming _soirée_--Sir David Brewster and his daughter; Mackay, author of a work on popular education you may remember to have seen reviewed in the _Leader_; the Ellises, the Hodgsons, and half a dozen other nice people. Miss Bremer was more genial than I have seen her--played on the piano, and smiled benevolently. Altogether, I am beginning to repent of my repugnance. Mackay approves our prospectus _in toto_. He is a handsome, fine-headed man, and a "good opinion." We are getting out a circular to accompany the prospectus. I have been kept down-stairs by Mr. Mackay for the last two hours, and am hurried, but it was a necessity to write _ein paar Worte_ to you. Mr. Mackay has written an account of his book for the catalogue. I have been using my powers of eloquence and flattery this morning to make him begin an article on the "Development of Protestantism." Mr. Ellis was agreeable--really witty. He and Mrs. Ellis particularly cordial to me, inviting me to visit them without ceremony. I love you all better every day, and better the more I see of other people. I am going to one of the Birkbeck schools. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3rd Nov. 1851.] I must tell you a story Miss Bremer got from Emerson. Carlyle was very angry with him for not believing in a devil, and to convert him took him amongst all the horrors of London--the gin-shops, etc.--and finally to the House of Commons, plying him at every turn with the question, "Do you believe in a devil noo?" There is a severe attack on Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" in yesterday's _Times_--unfair as an account of the book, but with some truth in its general remarks about Carlyle. There is an article, evidently by James Martineau, in the _Prospective_, which you must read, "On the Unity of the Logical and Intuitive in the Ultimate Grounds of Religious Belief." I am reading with great amusement (!) J. H. Newman's "Lectures on the Position of Catholics." They are full of clever satire and description. My table is groaning with books, and I have done very little with them yet, but I trust in my star, which has hitherto helped me, to do all I have engaged to do. Pray remember to send the MS. translation of Schleiermacher's little book, and also the book itself. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 15th Nov. 1851.] When Mr. Noel had finished his farewell visit to-day, Mr. Flower was announced, so my morning has run away in chat. Time wears, and I don't get on so fast as I ought, but I must scribble a word or two, else you will make my silence an excuse for writing me no word of yourselves. I am afraid Mr. Noel and Mr. Bray have given you a poor report of me. The last two days I have been a little better, but I hardly think existing arrangements can last beyond this quarter. Mr. Noel says Miss L. is to visit you at Christmas. I hope that is a mistake, as it would deprive me of my hoped-for rest amongst you. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Monday, 23d Nov. 1851.] On Saturday afternoon came Mr. Spencer to ask Mr. Chapman and me to go to the theatre; so I ended the day in a godless manner, seeing the "Merry Wives of Windsor." You must read Carlyle's denunciation of the opera, published in the _Keepsake_! The _Examiner_ quotes it at length. I send you the enclosed from Harriet Martineau. Please to return it. The one from Carlyle you may keep till I come. He is a naughty fellow to write in the _Keepsake_, and not for us, after I wrote him the most insinuating letter, offering him three glorious subjects. Yesterday we went to Mr. Mackay's, Dr. Brabant being there. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 27th Nov. 1851.] Carlyle called the other day, strongly recommending Browning, the poet, as a writer for the _Review_, and saying, "We shall see," about himself. In other respects we have been stagnating since Monday, and now I must work, work, work, which I have scarcely done two days consecutively since I have been here. Lewes says his article on "Julia von Krüdener"[34] will be glorious. He sat in the same box with us at the "Merry Wives of Windsor," and helped to carry off the dolorousness of the play. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Tuesday, 22d Dec. 1851.] Alas! the work is so heavy just for the next three days, all the revises being yet to come in, and the proof of my own article;[35] and Mr. Chapman is so overwhelmed with matters of detail, that he has earnestly requested me to stay till Saturday, and I cannot refuse, but it is a deep disappointment to me. My heart will yearn after you all. It is the first Christmas Day I shall have passed without any Christmas feeling. On Saturday, if you will have me, nothing shall keep me here any longer. I am writing at a high table, on a low seat, in a great hurry. Don't you think my style is editorial? Accordingly, on Saturday, the 29th December, 1851, she did go down to Rosehill, and stayed there till 12th January, when she returned to London, and writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 12th Jan. 1852.] I had a comfortable journey all alone, except from Weedon to Blisworth. When I saw a coated animal getting into my carriage, I thought of all horrible stories of madmen in railways; but his white neckcloth and thin, mincing voice soon convinced me that he was one of those exceedingly tame animals, the clergy. A kind welcome and a good dinner--that is the whole of my history at present. I am in anything but company trim, or spirits. I can do nothing in return for all your kindness, dear Cara, but love you, as I do most heartily. You and all yours, for their own sake first, but if it were not so, for yours. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Jan. 1852.] Harriet Martineau called on Monday morning with Mr. Atkinson. Very kind and cordial. I honor her for her powers and industry, and should be glad to think highly of her. I have no doubt that she is fascinating when there is time for talk. We have had two agreeable _soirées_. Last Monday I was talking and listening for two hours to Pierre Leroux--a dreamy genius. He was expounding to me his ideas. He belongs neither to the school of Proudhon, which represents Liberty only--nor to that of Louis Blanc, which represents Equality only--nor to that of Cabet, which represents Fraternity. Pierre Leroux's system is the _synthèse_ which combines all three. He has found the true _pont_ which is to unite the love of self with love of one's neighbor. He is, you know, a very voluminous writer. George Sand has dedicated some of her books to him. He dilated on his views of the "Origin of Christianity." Strauss deficient, because he has not shown the _identity of the teaching of Jesus with that of the Essenes_. This is Leroux's favorite idea. I told him of your brother. He, moreover, traces Essenism back to Egypt, and thence to India--the cradle of all religions, etc., etc., with much more, which he uttered with an unction rather amusing in a _soirée tête-à-tête_. "Est ce que nous sommes faits pour chercher le bonheur? Est ce là votre idée--dites moi." "Mais non--nous sommes faits, je pense, pour nous développer le plus possible." "Ah! c'est ça." He is in utter poverty, going to lecture--_autrement il faut mourir_. Has a wife and children with him. He came to London in his early days, when he was twenty-five, to find work as a printer. All the world was in mourning for the Princess Charlotte. "Et moi, je me trouvais avoir _un habit vert-pomme_." So he got no work; went back to Paris; by hook or by crook founded the _Globe_ journal; knew St. Simon; disagrees with him entirely, as with all other theorists except Pierre Leroux. We are trying Mazzini to write on "Freedom _v._ Despotism," and have received an admirable article on "The New Puritanism,"[36] _i.e._, "Physical Puritanism," from Dr. Browne, the chemist of Edinburgh, which, I think, will go in the next number. I am in a miserable state of languor and low spirits, in which everything is a trouble to me. I must tell you a bit of Louis Blanc's English, which Mr. Spencer was reciting the other night. The _petit homme_ called on some one, and said, "I come to tell you how you are. I was at you the other day, but you were not." [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Feb. 1852.] We went to quite a gay party at Mrs. Mackay's on Saturday. Good Mr. Mackay has been taking trouble to get me to Hastings for my health--calling on Miss Fellowes, daughter of the "Religion of the Universe," and inducing her to write me a note of invitation. Sara will be heartily welcome. Unfortunately, I had an invitation to the Parkes's, to meet Cobden, on Saturday evening. I was sorry to miss that. Miss Parkes[37] is a dear, ardent, honest creature; and I hope we shall be good friends. I have nothing else to tell you. I am steeped in dulness within and without. Heaven send some lions to-night to meet Fox, who is coming. An advertisement we found in the _Times_ to-day--"To gentlemen. A _converted_ medical man, of gentlemanly habits and fond of Scriptural conversation, wishes to meet with a gentleman of Calvinistic views, thirsty after truth, in want of a daily companion. A little temporal aid will be expected in return. Address, Verax!" [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 8th Feb. 1852.] We are going to Mr. Ellis's, at Champion Hill, to-morrow evening. I am better now. Have rid myself of all distasteful work, and am trying to love the glorious destination of humanity, looking before and after. We shall be glad to have Sara. Miss Sara Hennell arrived on a visit to the Strand next day--the 9th February--and stayed till the 17th. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 16th Feb. 1852.] I have not merely had a headache--I have been really ill, and feel very much shattered. We (Miss Evans and Miss Sara Hennell) dined yesterday at Mrs. Peter Taylor's,[38] at Sydenham. I was not fit to go, especially to make my _début_ at a strange place; but the country air was a temptation. The thick of the work is just beginning, and I am bound in honor not to run away from it, as I have shirked all labor but what is strictly editorial this quarter. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 20th Feb. 1852.] We went to the meeting of the Association for the Abolition of the Taxes on Knowledge on Wednesday, that I might hear Cobden, in whom I was wofully disappointed. George Dawson's speech was admirable. I think it undesirable to fix on a London residence at present, as I want to go to Brighton for a month or two next quarter. I am seriously concerned at my languid body, and feel the necessity of taking some measures to get vigor. Lewes inquired for Sara last Monday, in a tone of interest. He was charmed with her, as who would not be that has any taste? Do write to me, dear Cara; I want comforting: this world looks ugly just now; all people rather worse than I have been used to think them. Put me in love with my kind again, by giving me a glimpse of your own inward self, since I cannot see the outer one. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th Mch. 1852.] I can sympathize with you in your troubles, having been a housekeeper myself, and known disappointment in trusted servants. Ah, well! we have a good share of the benefits of our civilization, it is but fair that we should feel some of the burden of its imperfections. Thank you a thousand times for wishing to see me again. I should really like to see you in your own nice, fresh, healthy-looking home again; but until the end of March I fear I shall be a prisoner, from the necessity for constant work. Still, it is possible that I may have a day, though I am quite unable to say when. You will be still more surprised at the notice of the _Westminster_ in _The People_, when you know that Maccoll himself wrote it. I have not seen it, but had been told of its ill-nature. However, he is too good a man to write otherwise than sincerely; and our opinion of a book often depends on the state of the liver! [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 25th Mch. 1852.] I had two offers last night--not of marriage, but of music--which I find it impossible to resist. Mr. Herbert Spencer proposed to take me on Thursday to hear "William Tell," and Miss Parkes asked me to go with her to hear the "Creation" on Friday. I have had so little music this quarter, and these two things are so exactly what I should like, that I have determined to put off, for the sake of them, my other pleasure of seeing you. So, pray, keep your precious welcome warm for me until Saturday, when I shall positively set off by the two o'clock train. Harriet Martineau has written me a most cordial invitation to go to see her before July, but that is impossible. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 27th Mch. 1852.] I am grieved to find that you have to pay for that fine temperament of yours in attacks of neuralgia. Your silence did not surprise me, after the account you had given me of your domestic circumstances, but I have wished for you on Monday evenings. Your cordial assurance that you shall be glad to see me sometimes is one of those pleasant things--those life-preservers--which relenting destiny sends me now and then to buoy me up. For you must know that I am not a little desponding now and then, and think that old friends will die off, while I shall be left without the power to make new ones. You know how sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one, and the last notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields and sky. I feel so about life sometimes. It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller's. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her journal--"I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?" I am thankful, as if for myself, that it was sweet at last. But I am running on about feelings when I ought to tell you facts. I am going on Wednesday to my friends in Warwickshire for about ten days or a fortnight. When I come back, I hope you will be quite strong and able to receive visitors without effort--Mr. Taylor too. I _did_ go to the _conversazione_; but you have less to regret than you think. Mazzini's speeches are better read than heard. Proofs are come, demanding my immediate attention, so I must end this hasty scribble. On the 3d April Miss Evans went to Rosehill, and stayed till the 14th. On her return she writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 17th April, 1852.] There was an article on the bookselling affair in the _Times_ of yesterday, which must be the knell of the Association. Dickens is to preside at a meeting in this house on the subject some day next week. The opinions on the various articles in the _Review_ are, as before, ridiculously various. The _Economist_ calls the article on Quakerism "admirably written." Greg says the article on India is "very masterly;" while he calls Mazzini's "sad stuff--mere verbiage." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st April, 1852.] If there is any change in my affection for you it is that I love you more than ever, not less. I have as perfect a friendship for you as my imperfect nature can feel--a friendship in which deep respect and admiration are sweetened by a sort of flesh-and-blood sisterly feeling and the happy consciousness that I have your affection, however undeservedly, in return. I have confidence that this friendship can never be shaken; that it must last while I last, and that the supposition of its ever being weakened by a momentary irritation is too contemptibly absurd for me to take the trouble to deny it. As to your whole conduct to me, from the first day I knew you, it has been so generous and sympathetic that, if I did not heartily love you, I should feel deep gratitude--but love excludes gratitude. It is impossible that I should ever love two women better than I love you and Cara. Indeed, it seems to me that I can never love any so well; and it is certain that I can never have any friend--not even a husband--who would supply the loss of those associations with the past which belong to you. Do believe in my love for you, and that it will remain as long as I have my senses, because it is interwoven with my best nature, and is dependent, not on any accidents of manner, but on long experience, which has confirmed the instinctive attraction of earlier days. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 22d April, 1852.] Our fortunes here are, as usual, checkered-- "Twist ye, twine ye, even so Mingle human weal and woe." Grote is very friendly, and has propitiated J. S. Mill, who will write for us when we want him. We had quite a brilliant _soirée_ yesterday evening. W. R. Greg, Forster (of Rawdon), Francis Newman, the Ellises, and Louis Blanc, were the stars of greatest magnitude. I had a pleasant talk with Greg and Forster. Greg was "much pleased to have made my acquaintance." Forster, on the whole, appeared to think that people should be glad to make _his_ acquaintance. Greg is a short man, but his brain is large, the anterior lobe very fine, and a moral region to correspond. Black, wiry, curly hair, and every indication of a first-rate temperament. We have some very nice Americans here--the Pughs--friends of the Parkes's, really refined, intellectual people. Miss Pugh, an elderly lady, is a great abolitionist, and was one of the Women's Convention that came to England in 1840, and was not allowed to join the Men's Convention. But I suppose we shall soon be able to say, _nous avons changé tout cela_. I went to the opera on Saturday--"I Martiri," at Covent Garden--with my "excellent friend, Herbert Spencer," as Lewes calls him. We have agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other's society as we like. He is a good, delightful creature, and I always feel better for being with him. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d May, 1852.] I like to remind you of me on Sunday morning, when you look at the flowers and listen to music; so I send a few lines, though I have not much time to spare to-day. After Tuesday I will write you a longer letter, and tell you all about everything. I am going to the opera to-night to hear the "Huguenots." See what a fine thing it is to pick up people who are short-sighted enough to like one. On the 4th of May a meeting, consisting chiefly of authors, was held at the house in the Strand, for the purpose of hastening the removal of the trade restrictions on the Commerce of Literature, and it is thus described in the following letter: [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 5th May, 1852.] The meeting last night went off triumphantly, and I saluted Mr. Chapman with "See the Conquering Hero Comes" on the piano at 12 o'clock; for not until then was the last magnate, except Herbert Spencer, out of the house. I sat at the door for a short time, but soon got a chair within it, and heard and saw everything. Dickens in the chair--a position he fills remarkably well, preserving a courteous neutrality of eyebrows, and speaking with clearness and decision. His appearance is certainly disappointing--no benevolence in the face, and, I think, little in the head; the anterior lobe not by any means remarkable. In fact, he is not distinguished-looking in any way--neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short. Babbage moved the first resolution--a bad speaker, but a great authority. Charles Knight is a beautiful, elderly man, with a modest but firm enunciation; and he made a wise and telling speech which silenced one or two vulgar, ignorant booksellers who had got into the meeting by mistake. One of these began by complimenting Dickens--"views held by such worthy and important gentlemen, _which is your worthy person in the chair_." Dickens looked respectfully neutral. The most telling speech of the evening was Prof. Tom Taylor's--as witty and brilliant as one of George Dawson's. Prof. Owen's, too, was remarkably good. He had a resolution to move as to the bad effect of the trade restrictions on scientific works, and gave his own experience in illustration. Speaking of the slow and small sale of scientific books of a high class, he said, in his silvery, bland way--alluding to the boast that the retail booksellers _recommended_ the works of less known authors--"for which limited sale we are doubtless indebted to the kind recommendation of our friends, the retail booksellers"--whereupon these worthies, taking it for a _bonâ fide_ compliment, cheered enthusiastically. Dr. Lankester, Prof. Newman, Robert Bell, and others, spoke well. Owen has a tremendous head, and looked, as he was, the greatest celebrity of the meeting. George Cruikshank, too, made a capital speech, in an admirable moral spirit. He is the most homely, genuine-looking man; not unlike the pictures of Captain Cuttle. I went to hear the "Huguenots" on Saturday evening. It was a rich treat. Mario and Grisi and Formes, and that finest of orchestras under Costa. I am going to a concert to-night. This is all very fine, but, in the meantime, I am getting as haggard as an old witch under London atmosphere and influences. I shall be glad to have sent me my Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, and Wordsworth, if you will be so good as to take the trouble of packing them. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday, 12th(?) May, 1852.] My days have slipped away in a most mysterious fashion lately--chiefly, I suppose, in long walks and long talks. Our Monday evenings are dying off--not universally regretted--but we are expecting one or two people to-night. I have nothing to tell except that I went to the opera on Thursday, and heard "La Juive," and, moreover, fell in love with Prince Albert, who was unusually animated and prominent. He has a noble, genial, intelligent expression, and is altogether a man to be proud of. I am going next Thursday to see Grisi in "Norma." She is quite beautiful this season, thinner than she was, and really younger looking. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th May, 1852.] My brightest spot, next to my love of _old_ friends, is the deliciously calm, _new_ friendship that Herbert Spencer gives me. We see each other every day, and have delightful _camaraderie_ in everything. But for him my life would be desolate enough. What a wretched lot of old, shrivelled creatures we shall be by and by. Never mind, the uglier we get in the eyes of others the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship, and now it is in a slight degree my experience. Mme. d'Albert has sent me the sweetest letter, just like herself; and I feel grateful to have such a heart remembering and loving me on the other side of the Jura. They are very well and flourishing. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Wednesday, 2d June, 1852.] I am bothered to death with article-reading and scrap-work of all sorts: it is clear my poor head will never produce anything under these circumstances; _but I am patient_. I am ashamed to tease you so, but I must beg of you to send me George Sand's works; and also I shall be grateful if you will lend me--what I think you have--an English edition of "Corinne," and Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." Harriet Martineau's article on "Niebuhr" will not go in the July number. I am sorry for it; it is admirable. After all, she is a _trump_--the only Englishwoman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing. On Thursday morning I went to St. Paul's to see the charity children assembled, and hear their singing. Berlioz says it is the finest thing he has heard in England; and this opinion of his induced me to go. I was not disappointed; it is worth doing once, especially as we got out before the sermon. I had a long call from George Combe yesterday. He says he thinks the _Westminster_, under _my_ management, the most important means of enlightenment of a literary nature in existence; the _Edinburgh_, under Jeffrey, nothing to it, etc.!!! I wish _I_ thought so too. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 21st June, 1852.] Your joint assurance of welcome strengthens the centripetal force that would carry me to you; but, on the other hand, sundry considerations are in favor of the centrifugal force, which, I suppose, will carry me to Broadstairs or Ramsgate. On the whole, I prefer to keep my visit to you as a _bonne-bouche_, when I am just in the best physical and mental state for enjoying it. I hope to get away on Saturday, or on Wednesday at the latest. I think the third number of the _Review_ will be capital; thoroughly readable, and yet not frothy. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 23d June, 1852.] I have assured Herbert Spencer that you will think it a sufficiently formal answer to the invitation you sent him through Mr. Lewes, if I tell you that he will prefer waiting for the pleasure of a visit to you until I am with you--if you will have him then. I spent the evening at Mr. Parkes's on Monday. Yesterday Herbert Spencer brought his father to see me--a large-brained, highly informed man, with a certain quaintness and simplicity, altogether very pleasing. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th June, (?) 1852.] After all, I begin to hope that our next number will be the best yet. Forbes is good; Froude ditto; and James Martineau, if I may judge from a glance at a few of his pages, admirable. Lewes has written us an agreeable article on "Lady Novelists." There is a mysterious contribution to the independent section. We are hoping that an article on "Edinburgh Literary Men," yet to come, will be very good. If not, we shall put in "Niebuhr;" it is capital. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, end of June, 1852.] The opera, Chiswick Flower Show, the French play, and the Lyceum, all in one week, brought their natural consequences of headache and hysterics--all yesterday. At five o'clock I felt quite sure that life was unendurable. This morning, however, the weather and I are both better, having cried ourselves out and used up all our clouds; and I can even contemplate living six months longer. Was there ever anything more dreary than this June? [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday morning, 2d July, 1852.] I am busy packing to-day, and am going to Mr. Parkes's to dinner. Miss Parkes has introduced me to Barbara Smith,[39] whose expression I like exceedingly, and hope to know more of her. I go to Broadstairs on Saturday. I am sadly in want of the change, and would much rather present myself to you all when I can do you more credit as a friend. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th July, 1852.] I warn you against Ramsgate, which is a strip of London come out for an airing. Broadstairs is perfect; and I have the snuggest little lodging conceivable, with a motherly good woman and a nice little damsel of fourteen to wait on me. There are only my two rooms in this cottage, but lodgings are plentiful in the place. I have a sitting-room about eight feet by nine, and a bedroom a little larger; yet in that small space there is almost every comfort. I pay a guinea a week for my rooms, so I shall not ruin myself by staying a month, unless I commit excesses in coffee and sugar. I am thinking whether it would not be wise to retire from the world and live here for the rest of my days. With some fresh paper on the walls, and an easy-chair, I think I could resign myself. Come and tell me your opinion. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th July, 1852.] I thought of you last night, when I was in a state of mingled rapture and torture--rapture at the sight of a glorious evening sky, torture at the sight and hearing of the belaboring given to the poor donkey which was drawing me from Ramsgate home. I had a note from Miss Florence Nightingale yesterday. I was much pleased with her. There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well expressed by her form and manner. Glad you are pleased with the _Westminster_. I do think it a rich number--matter for a fortnight's reading and thought. Lewes has not half done it justice in the _Leader_. To my mind the "Niebuhr" article is as good as any of them. If you could see me in my quiet nook! I am half ashamed of being in such clover, both spiritually and materially, while some of my friends are on the dusty highways, without a tuft of grass or a flower to cheer them. A letter from you will be delightful. We seem to have said very little to each other lately. But I always know--rejoice to know--that there is the same Sara for me as there is the same green earth and arched sky, when I am good and wise enough to like the best thing. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st July, 1852.] Do not be anxious about me--there is no cause. I am profiting, body and mind, from quiet walks and talks with nature, gathering "lady's bedstraw" and "rest-harrow," and other pretty things; picking up shells (not in the Newtonian sense, but literally); reading Aristotle, to find out what is the chief good; and eating mutton-chops, that I may have strength to pursue it. If you insist on my writing about "emotions," why, I must get some up expressly for the purpose. But I must own I would rather not, for it is the grand wish and object of my life to get rid of them as far as possible, seeing they have already had more than their share of my nervous energy. I shall not be in town on the 2d of August--at least, I pray Heaven to forbid it. Mrs. Bray paid a visit to Broadstairs from the 3d to the 12th August, and the next letter is addressed to her. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Thursday, 14th (?) Aug. 1852.] Are you really the better for having been here? Since you left I have been continually regretting that I could not make your visit pleasanter. I was irritable and out of sorts; but you have an apparatus for secreting happiness--that's it. Providence, seeing that I wanted weaning from this place, has sent a swarm of harvest-bugs and lady-birds. These, with the half-blank, half-dissipated feeling which comes on after having companions and losing them, make me think of returning to London on Saturday week with more resignation than I have felt before. I am very well and "plucky"--a word which I propose to substitute for happy, as more truthful. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Aug. 1852.] For the last two months I have been at this pretty, quiet place, which "David Copperfield" has made classic, far away from London noise and smoke. I am sorry now that I brought with me Fox's "Lectures," which I had not managed to read before I left town. But I shall return thither at the end of next week, and I will at once forward the volume to Gary Lane. One sees no novels less than a year old at the sea-side, so I am unacquainted with the "Blithedale Romance," except through the reviews, which have whetted my curiosity more than usual. Hawthorne is a grand favorite of mine, and I shall be sorry if he do not go on surpassing himself. It is sad to hear of your only going out to consult a physician. Illness seems to me the one woe for which there is no comfort--no compensation. But perhaps you find it otherwise, for you have a less rebellious spirit than I, and suffering seems to make you look all the more gentle. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 22d Aug. 1852.] Thinking of you this morning--as I often do, though you may not suppose so--it was "borne in on my mind" that I must write to you, and I obey the inspiration without waiting to consider whether there may be a corresponding desire on your part to hear from me. I live in a world of cares and joys so remote from the one in which we used to sympathize with each other that I find positive communication with you difficult. But I am not unfaithful to old loves--they were sincere, and they are lasting. I hope you will not think it too much trouble to write me a little news of yourself. I want very much to know if your health continues good, and if there has been any change in your circumstances, that I may have something like a true conception of you. All is well with me so far as my individuality is concerned, but I have plenty of friends' troubles to sorrow over. I hope you have none to add to the number. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Aug. 1852.] I celebrated my return to London by the usual observance--that is to say, a violent headache, which is not yet gone, and of course I am in the worst spirits, and my opinion of things is not worth a straw. I tell you this that you may know why I only send you this scrap instead of the long letter which I have _in petto_ for you, and which would otherwise have been written yesterday. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Sept. 1852.] Somehow my letters--except those which come under the inexorable imperative _must_ (the "ought" I manage well enough to shirk)--will not get written. The fact is, I am in a croaking mood, and I am waiting and waiting for it to pass by, so if my pen croaks in spite of my resolutions to the contrary, please to take no notice of it. Ever since I came back I have felt something like the madness which imagines that the four walls are contracting and going to crush one. Harriet Martineau (in a private letter shown to me), with incomprehensible ignorance, jeers at Lewes for introducing _psychology_ as a science in his Comte papers. Why, Comte himself holds psychology to be a necessary link in the chain of science. Lewes only suggests a change in its relations. There is a great, dreary article on the Colonies by my side, asking for reading and abridgment, so I cannot go on scribbling--indeed, my hands are so hot and tremulous this morning that it will be better for you if I leave off. Your little loving notes are very precious to me; but I say nothing about matters of feeling till my good genius has returned from his excursions; the evil one has possession just now. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 11th Sept. 1852.] The week has really yielded nothing worth telling you. I am a few degrees more wizened and muddle-headed; and the articles for the _Review_ are, on the whole, unsatisfactory. I fear a discerning public will think this number a sad falling-off. This is the greater pity, that said public is patronizing us well at present. Scarcely a day passes that some one does not write to order the _Review_, as a permanent subscriber. You may as well expect news from an old spider or bat as from me. I can only tell you what I think of the "Blithedale Romance," of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the American Fishery Dispute--all which, I am very sure, you don't want to know. Do have pity on me, and make a little variety in my life, by all sending me a scrap--never mind if it be only six lines apiece. Perhaps something will befall me one day or other. As it is, nothing happens to me but the ringing of the dinner-bell and the arrival of a proof. I have no courage to walk out. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 18th Sept. 1852.] Lewes called on me the other day and told me of a conversation with Professor Owen, in which the latter declared his conviction that the cerebrum was not the organ of the mind, but the cerebellum rather. He founds on the enormous comparative size of brain in the grampus! The professor has a huge anterior lobe of his own. What would George Combe say if I were to tell him? But every great man has his paradox, and that of the first anatomist in Europe ought to be a startling one. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Saturday, Sept. 1852.] We shall make a respectable figure after all--nine articles, and two or three of them good, the rest not bad. The _Review_ has been selling well lately, in spite of its being the end of the quarter. We have made splendid provision for January--Froude, Harriet Martineau, Theodore Parker, Samuel Brown, etc., etc. The autumnal freshness of the mornings makes me dream of mellowing woods and gossamer threads. I am really longing for my journey. Bessie Parkes spent last evening with me, chatting of experience. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Oct. 1852.] Pity me--I have had the headache for four days incessantly. But now I am well, and even the Strand seems an elysium by contrast. I set off on Tuesday for Edinburgh by express. This is awfully expensive, but it seems the only way of reaching there alive with my frail body. I have had the kindest notes from the Combes and from Harriet Martineau. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 7th Oct. 1852.] Here I am in this beautiful Auld Reekie once more--hardly recognizing myself for the same person as the _damozel_ who left it by the coach with a heavy heart some six years ago. The Combes are all kindness, and I am in clover--an elegant house, glorious fires, and a comfortable carriage--in short, just in the circumstances to nourish sleek optimism, convince one that this is _le meilleur des mondes possibles_, and make one shudder at the impiety of all who doubt it. Last evening Mr. Robert Cox came to tea, to be introduced to me as my _cicerone_ through the lions of Edinburgh. The talk last night was pleasant enough, though, of course, all the interlocutors besides Mr. Combe have little to do but shape elegant modes of negation and affirmation, like the people who are talked to by Socrates in Plato's dialogues--"Certainly," "that I firmly believe," etc. I have a beautiful view from my room window--masses of wood, distant hills, the Firth, and four splendid buildings, clotted far apart--not an ugly object to be seen. When I look out in the morning, it is as if I had waked up in Utopia or Icaria, or one of Owen's parallelograms. The weather is perfect--all the more delightful to me for its northern sharpness, which is just what I wanted to brace me. I have been out walking and driving all day, and have only time before dinner to send this _paar Worte_, but I may have still less time to-morrow. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 12th Oct. 1852.] Between the beauty of the weather and the scenery, and the kindness of good people, I am tipsy with pleasure. But I shall tell you nothing of what I see and do, because that would be taking off some of the edge from your pleasure in seeing me. One's dear friend who has nothing at all to tell one is a bore. Is it not so, honor bright? I enjoy talking to Mr. Combe; he can tell me many things, especially about men in America and elsewhere, which are valuable; and, besides, I sometimes manage to get in more than a negative or affirmative. He and Mrs. Combe are really affectionate to me, and the mild warmth of their regard, with the perfect order and elegance of everything about me, are just the soothing influence to do me good. They urge me to stay longer, but I shall adhere to my original determination of going to Miss Martineau's on the 20th, and I do not _mean_ to stay with her longer than the 25th. We are going to-day to Craigcrook (Jeffrey's place), a beautiful spot, which old October has mellowed into his richest tints. Such a view of Edinburgh from it! [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Oct. 1852.] Those who know the article on Whewell to be Mill's, generally think it good, but I confess to me it is unsatisfactory. The sun _does_ shine here, albeit this is the 12th October. I wish you could see the view from Salisbury Crag. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Oct. 1852.] Yes, he is an apostle. An apostle, it is true, with a back and front drawing-room, but still earnest, convinced, consistent, having fought a good fight, and now peacefully enjoying the retrospect of it. I shall leave these good friends with regret, almost with repentings, that I did not determine to pay them a longer visit. I have had a pleasant note from Miss Martineau this morning, with a vignette of her house--I suppose to make me like all the better the idea of going there. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Thursday night, 22d Oct. 1852.] The coach brought me to Miss Martineau's gate at half-past six yesterday evening, and she was there, with a beaming face, to welcome me. Mr. Atkinson joined us this morning, and is a very agreeable addition. There has been an intelligent gentleman visitor to-day, who is interested in Miss Martineau's building society; and we have been trudging about, looking at cottages and enjoying the sight of the mountains, spite of the rain and mist. The weather is not promising, that is the worst of it. Miss M. is charming in her own home--quite handsome from her animation and intelligence. She came behind me, put her hands round me, and kissed me in the prettiest way this evening, telling me she was so glad she had got me here. I send you her note that you may have an idea of "The Knoll." [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 24th Oct. 1852.] We had a fine day yesterday, and went to Borrowdale. I have not been well since I have been here. Still I manage to enjoy, certainly not myself, but my companions and the scenery. I shall set off from here on Tuesday morning, and shall be due at the Coventry station, I believe, at 5.50. After a pleasant ten days' visit to Rosehill, Miss Evans returned to London on the 3d November. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 6th Nov. 1852.] To get into a first-class carriage, fall asleep, and awake to find one's self where one would be, is almost as good as having Prince Hussein's carpet. This was my easy way of getting to London on Thursday. By 5 o'clock I had unpacked my boxes and made my room tidy, and then I began to feel some satisfaction in being settled down where I am of most use just now. After dinner came Herbert Spencer, and spent the evening. Yesterday morning Mr. Greg called on his way to Paris, to express his regret that he did not see me at Ambleside. He is very pleasing, but somehow or other he frightens me dreadfully. I am going to plunge into Thackeray's novel now ("Esmond"). [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Saturday, Nov. (?) 1852.] Oh, this hideous fog! Let me grumble, for I have had headache the last three days, and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney? "Esmond" is the most uncomfortable book you can imagine. You remember how you disliked "François le Champi." Well, the story of "Esmond" is just the same. The hero is in love with the daughter all through the book, and marries the mother at the end. You should read the debates on the opening of Parliament in the _Times_. Lord Brougham, the greatest of English orators, perpetrates the most delicious _non sequitur_ I have seen for a long time. "My Lords, I believe that any disturbance of the repose of the world is very remote, _because it is our undeniable right and an unquestionable duty_ to be prepared with the means of defence, should such an event occur." These be thy gods, O Israel! [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday, 20th Nov. 1852.] I perceive your reading of the golden rule is "Do as you are done by;" and I shall be wiser than to expect a letter from you another Monday morning, when I have not earned it by my Saturday's billet. The fact is, both callers and work thicken--the former sadly interfering with the latter. I will just tell you how it was last Saturday, and that will give you an idea of my days. My task was to read an article of Greg's in the _North British_ on "Taxation," a heap of newspaper articles, and all that J. S. Mill says on the same subject. When I had got some way into this _magnum mare_, in comes Mr. Chapman, with a thick German volume. "Will you read enough of this to give me your opinion of it?" Then of course I must have a walk after lunch, and when I had sat down again, thinking that I had two clear hours before dinner, rap at the door--Mr. Lewes, who, of course, sits talking till the second bell rings. After dinner another visitor, and so behold me, at 11 P.M., still very far at sea on the subject of Taxation, but too tired to keep my eyes open. We had Bryant the poet last evening--a pleasant, quiet, elderly man. Do you know of this second sample of plagiarism by D'Israeli, detected by the _Morning Chronicle_?[40] It is worth sending for its cool impudence. Write me some news about trade, at all events. I could tolerate even Louis Napoleon, if somehow or other he could have a favorable influence on the Coventry trade. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 4th Dec. 1852.] Another week almost "with the years beyond the flood." What has it brought you? To me it has brought articles to read--for the most part satisfactory--new callers, and letters to nibble at my time, and a meeting of the Association for the Abolition of Taxes on Knowledge. I am invited to go to the Leigh Smiths on Monday evening to meet Mr. Robert Noel. Herbert Spencer is invited, too, because Mr. Noel wants especially to see him. Barbara Smith speaks of Mr. R. Noel as their "dear German friend." So the Budget is come out, and I am to pay income-tax. All very right, of course. An enlightened personage like me has no "ignorant impatience of taxation." I am glad to hear of the Lectures to Young Men and the banquet of the Laborers' Friend Society. "Be not weary in well-doing." Thanks to Sara for her letter. She must not mind paying the income-tax; it is a right principle that Dizzy is going upon; and with her great conscientiousness she ought to enjoy being flayed on a right principle. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 10th Dec. 1852.] I am not well--all out of sorts--and what do you think I am minded to do? Take a return ticket, and set off by the train to-morrow 12 o'clock, have a talk with you and a blow over the hill, and come back relieved on Monday. I the rather indulge myself in this, because I think I shall not be able to be with you until some time after Christmas. Pray forgive me for not sending you word before. I have only just made up my mind. This visit to Rosehill lasted only from the 11th to 13th December, and the following short note is the next communication: [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 19th (?) Dec. 1852.] I am very wretched to-day on many accounts, and am only able to write you two or three lines. I have heard this morning that Mr. Clarke is dangerously ill. Poor Chrissey and her children. Thank you for your kind letter. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st Dec. 1852.] I dare say you will have heard, before you receive this, that Edward Clarke is dead. I am to go to the funeral, which will take place on Friday. I am debating with myself as to what I ought to do now for poor Chrissey, but I must wait until I have been on the spot and seen my brother. If you hear no more from me, I shall trust to your goodness to give me a bed on Thursday night. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Christmas Day, 25th Dec. 1852, from Meriden.] Your love and goodness are a comforting presence to me everywhere, whether I am ninety or only nine miles away from you. Chrissey bears her trouble much better than I expected. We hope that an advantageous arrangement may be made about the practice; and there is a considerable sum in debts to be collected. I shall return to town on Wednesday. It would have been a comfort to see you again before going back, but there are many reasons for not doing so. I am satisfied now that my duties do not lie _here_, though the dear creatures here will be a constant motive for work and economy. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 31st Dec. 1852.] I arrived here only yesterday. I had agreed with Chrissey that, all things considered, it was wiser for me to return to town; that I could do her no substantial good by staying another week, while I should be losing time as to other matters. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 7th Jan. 1853.] I am out of spirits about the _Review_. I should be glad to run away from it altogether. But one thing is clear, that it would be a great deal worse if I were not here. This is the only thought that consoles me. We are thinking of sending Chrissey's eldest boy to Australia. A patient of his father's has offered to place him under suitable protection at Adelaide, and I strongly recommend Chrissey to accept her offer--that is, if she will let it be available a year hence; so I have bought Sidney's book on Australia, and am going to send it to Chrissey, to enlighten her about matters there, and accustom her mind to the subject. You are "jolly," I dare say, as good people have a right to be. Tell me as much of your happiness as you can, that I may rejoice in your joy, having none of my own. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Jan. 1853.] I begin to feel for other people's wants and sorrows a little more than I used to do. Heaven help us! said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another. Tell Sara she is as good as a group of spice-islands to me; she wafts the pleasantest influences, even from a distance. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Jan. 1853.] Pray do not lay the sins of the article on the "Atomic Theory" to poor Lewes's charge. How you could take it for his I cannot conceive. It is as remote from his style, both of thinking and writing, as anything can be. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 18th Jan. 1853.] This week has yielded nothing to me but a crop of very large headaches. The pain has gone from my head at last, but I am feeling very much shattered, and find it easier to cry than to do anything else. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st Feb. 1853.] My complaint, of which I am now happily rid, was rheumatism in the right arm; a sufficient reason, you will see, for my employing a scribe to write that promise which I now fulfil. I am going into the country, perhaps for a fortnight, so that, if you are kind enough to come here on Wednesday evening, I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you. All the more reason for writing to you, in spite of cold feet and the vilest pens in the world. Francis Newman is likely to come once or twice in the season; not more. He has, of course, a multitude of engagements, and many more attractive ones than a _soirée_ in the Strand. Never mention me to him in the character of editress. I think--at least, I am told--that he has no high estimate of woman's powers and functions. But let that pass. He is a very pure, noble being, and it is good only to look at such. The article on "Slavery," in the last number of the _Westminster_--which I think the best article of them all--is by W. E. Forster, a Yorkshire manufacturer, who married Dr. Arnold's daughter. He is a very earnest, independent thinker, and worth a gross of literary hacks who have the "trick" of writing. I hope you are interested in the Slavery question, and in America generally--that cradle of the future. I used resolutely to turn away from American politics, and declare that the United States was the last region of the world I should care to visit. Even now I almost loathe the _common_ American type of character. But I am converted to a profound interest in the history, the laws, the social and religious phases of North America, and long for some knowledge of them. Is it not cheering to think of the youthfulness of this little planet, and the immensely greater youthfulness of our race upon it? to think that the higher moral tendencies of human nature are yet only in their germ? I feel this more thoroughly when I think of that great western continent, with its infant cities, its huge, uncleared forests, and its unamalgamated races. I dare say you have guessed that the article on "Ireland" is Harriet Martineau's. Herbert Spencer did _not_ contribute to the last number. _� propos_ of articles, do you see the _Prospective Review_? There is an admirable critique of Kingsley's "Phaethon" in it, by James Martineau. But perhaps you may not be as much in love with Kingsley's genius, and as much "riled" by his faults, as I am. Of course you have read "Ruth" by this time. Its style was a great refreshment to me, from its finish and fulness. How women have the courage to write, and publishers the spirit to buy, at a high price, the false and feeble representations of life and character that most feminine novels give, is a constant marvel to me. "Ruth," with all its merits, will not be an enduring or classical fiction--will it? Mrs. Gaskell seems to me to be constantly misled by a love of sharp contrasts--of "dramatic" effects. She is not contented with the subdued coloring, the half-tints, of real life. Hence she agitates one for the moment, but she does not secure one's lasting sympathy; her scenes and characters do not become typical. But how pretty and graphic are the touches of description! That little attic in the minister's house, for example, which, with its pure white dimity bed-curtains, its bright-green walls, and the rich brown of its stained floor, remind one of a snowdrop springing out of the soil. Then the rich humor of Sally, and the sly satire in the description of Mr. Bradshaw. Mrs. Gaskell has, certainly, a charming mind, and one cannot help loving her as one reads her books. A notable book just come out is Wharton's "Summary of the Laws relating to Women." "Enfranchisement of women" only makes creeping progress; and that is best, for woman does not yet deserve a much better lot than man gives her. I am writing to you the last thing, and am so tired that I am not quite sure whether I finish my sentences. But your divining power will supply their deficiencies. The first half of February was spent in visits to the Brays and to Mrs. Clarke, at Attleboro, and on returning to London Miss Evans writes: [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 15th Feb. 1853.] I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading "Villette," a still more wonderful book than "Jane Eyre." There is something almost preternatural in its power. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Feb. 1853.] Mrs. Follen showed me a delightful letter which she has had from Mrs. Stowe, telling all about herself. She begins by saying: "I am a little bit of a woman, rather more than forty, as withered and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very well worth looking at in my best days, and now a decidedly used-up article." The whole letter is most fascinating, and makes one love her. "Villette," "Villette"--have you read it? [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 25th Feb. 1853.] We had an agreeable evening on Wednesday--a Mr. Huxley being the centre of interest. Since then I have been headachy and in a perpetual rage over an article that gives me no end of trouble, and will not be satisfactory after all. I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting. For the rest, I am in excellent spirits, though not in the best health or temper. I am in for loads of work next quarter, but I shall not tell you what I am going to do. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Mch. 1853.] I have been ready to tear my hair with disappointment about the next number of the _Review_. In short, I am a miserable editor. I think I shall never have the energy to move--it seems to be of so little consequence where I am or what I do. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Mch. 1853.] On Saturday I was correcting proofs literally from morning till night; yesterday ditto. The _Review_ will be better than I once feared, but not so good as I once hoped. I suppose the weather has chilled your charity as well as mine. I am very hard and Mephistophelian just now, but I lay it all to this second winter. We had a pleasant evening last Wednesday. Lewes, as always, genial and amusing. He has quite won my liking, in spite of myself. Of course, Mr. Bray highly approves the recommendation of the Commissioners on _Divorce_. I have been to Blandford Square (Leigh Smith's) to an evening party this week. Dined at Mr. Parkes's on Sunday, and am invited to go there again to-night to meet the Smiths. Lewes was describing Currer Bell to me yesterday as a little, plain, provincial, sickly looking old maid. Yet what passion, what fire in her! Quite as much as in George Sand, only the clothing is less voluptuous. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th April, 1853.] What do you think of my going to Australia with Chrissey and all her family?--to settle them, and then come back. I am just going to write to her, and suggest the idea. One wants _something_ to keep up one's faith in happiness--a ray or two for one's friends, if not for one's self. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 16th April, 1853.] We had an agreeable _soirée_ last Wednesday. I fell in love with Helen Faucit. She is the most poetic woman I have seen for a long time; there is the ineffable charm of a fine character which makes itself felt in her face, voice, and manner. I am taking doses of agreeable follies, as you recommend. Last night I went to the French theatre, and to-night I am going to the opera to hear "William Tell." People are very good to me. Mr. Lewes, especially, is kind and attentive, and has quite won my regard, after having had a good deal of my vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems. A man of heart and conscience, wearing a mask of flippancy. When the warm days come, and the bearskin is under the acacia, you must have me again. 6th May.--Went to Rosehill and returned on 23d to Strand. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 17th June, 1853.] On Wednesday I dined at Sir James Clark's, where the Combes are staying, and had a very pleasant evening. The Combes have taken lodgings in Oxford Terrace, where I mean to go. It is better than the Strand--trees waving before the windows, and no noise of omnibuses. Last Saturday evening I had quite a new pleasure. We went to see Rachel again, and sat on the stage between the scenes. When the curtain fell we walked about and saw the green-room, and all the dingy, dusty paraphernalia that make up theatrical splendor. I have not yet seen the "Vashti" of Currer Bell in Rachel, though there was some approach to it in Adrienne Lecouvreur. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th June, 1853.] On Saturday we will go to Ockley, near Dorking, where are staying Miss Julia Smith, Barbara Smith, and Bessie Parkes. I shall write to the Ockley party to-day and tell them of the probability that they will see you. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1853, from St. Leonards.] I never felt the delight of the thorough change that the coast gives one so much as now, and I shall be longing to be off with you again in October. I am on a delightful hill looking over the heads of the houses, and having a vast expanse of sea and sky for my only view. The bright weather and genial air--so different from what I have had for a year before--make me feel as happy and stupid as a well-conditioned cow. I sit looking at the sea and the sleepy ships with a purely animal _bien être_. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 9th Aug. 1853.] It would have been a satisfaction to your benevolence to see me sitting on the beach laughing at the _Herald's_ many jokes, and sympathizing with your indignation against Judge Maule. It always helps me to be happy when I know that you are so; but I do not choose to vindicate myself against doubts of that, because it is unworthy of you to entertain them. I am going on as well as possible physically--really getting stout. I should like to have a good laugh with you immensely. How nice it would be to meet you and Cara on the beach this evening, and instead of sending you such a miserable interpreter of one's feelings as a letter, give you the look and the hand of warm affection! This British Channel really looks as blue as the Mediterranean to-day. What weather! [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Aug. 1853.] For the first time in my experience I am positively revelling in the _Prospective_. James Martineau transcends himself in beauty of imagery in the article on Sir William Hamilton, but I have not finished him yet. Yesterday it rained _sans_ intermission, and of course I said _cui bono?_ and found my troubles almost more than I could bear; but to-day the sun shines, and there is blue above and blue below, consequently I find life very glorious, and myself a particularly fortunate _diavolessa_. The landlord of my lodgings is a German, comes from Saxe-Weimar, knows well the Duchess of Orleans, and talked to me this morning of _Mr._ Schiller and _Mr._ Goethe. _� propos_ of Goethe, there is a most true, discriminating passage about him in the article on Shakespeare in the _Prospective_. _Mr._ Goethe is one of my companions here, and I had felt some days before reading the passage the truth which it expresses. Subjoined is the passage from the _Prospective Review_ of August, 1853: "Goethe's works are too much in the nature of literary studies; the mind is often deeply impressed by them, but one doubts if the author was. He saw them as he saw the houses of Weimar and the plants in the act of metamorphosis. He had a clear perception of their fixed condition and their successive transitions, but he did not really (at least so it seems to us) comprehend their motive power. In a word, he appreciated their life but not their liveliness.... And we trace this not to a defect in imaginative power--a defect which it would be a simple absurdity to impute to Goethe--but to the tone of his character and the habits of his mind. He moved hither and thither through life, but he was always a man apart. He mixed with unnumbered kinds of men, with courts and academies, students and women, camps and artists, but everywhere he was with them, yet not of them. In every scene he was there, and he made it clear that he was there with a reserve and as a stranger. He went there _to experience_. As a man of universal culture, and well skilled in the order and classification of human life, the fact of any one class or order being beyond his reach or comprehension seemed an absurdity; and it was an absurdity. He thought that he was equal to moving in any description of society, and he was equal to it; but then, on that account, he was absorbed in none." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Sept. 1853.] As for me, I am in the best health and spirits. I have had a letter from Mr. Combe to-day, urging me to go to Edinburgh, but I have made an engagement with Mr. Chapman to do work which will oblige me to remain in London. Mrs. P. is a very bonny, pleasant-looking woman, with a smart drawing-room and liberal opinions--in short, such a friend as self-interest, well understood, would induce one to cultivate. I find it difficult to meet with any lodgings at once tolerable and cheap. My theory is to _live_ entirely--that is, pay rent and find food--out of my positive income, and then work for as large a surplus as I can get. The next number of the _Review_ will be better than usual. Froude writes on the "Book of Job"! He at first talked of an article on the three great _subjective_ poems--Job, Faust, and Hamlet--an admirable subject--but it has shrunk to the Book of Job alone. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Oct. 1853.] I have been busied about my lodgings all afternoon. I am not going to Albion Street, but to 21 Cambridge Street, Hyde Park Square. I hope you will be pleased with our present number. If you don't think the "Universal Postulate" first-rate, I shall renounce you as a critic. Why don't you write grumbling letters to me when you are out of humor with life, instead of making me ashamed of myself for ever having grumbled to you? I have been a more good-for-nothing correspondent than usual lately; this affair of getting lodgings, added to my other matters, has taken up my time and thoughts. I have promised to do some work to-night and to-morrow for a person[41] who is rather more idle than myself, so I have not a moment to spare. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Oct. 1853.] I am reading "The Religion of the Heart" (Leigh Hunt's), and am far more pleased with it than I expected to be. I have just fallen on two passages with which you will agree. "Parker ... is full of the poetry of religion; Martineau equally so, with a closer style and incessant eloquence of expression, perhaps a perilous superabundance of it as regards the claims of matter over manner; and his assumptions of perfection in the character of Jesus are so reiterated and peremptory that in a man of less evident heart and goodness they might almost look like a very unction of insincerity or of policy, of doubt forcing itself to seem undoubting. Hennell's 'Christian Theism' is one long, beautiful discourse proclaiming the great Bible of Creation, and reconciling Pagan and Christian Philosophy." Good Sir James Clark stopped me in the Park yesterday, as I was sauntering along with eyes on the clouds, and made very fatherly inquiries about me, urging me to spend a quiet evening with him and Lady Clark next week--which I will certainly do; for they are two capital people, without any snobbery. I like my lodgings--the housekeeper cooks charming little dinners for me, and I have not one disagreeable to complain of at present, save such as are inseparable from a ground-floor. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 29th Oct. 1853.] Last night I saw the first fine specimen of a man in the shape of a clergyman that I ever met with--Dawes, the Dean of Hereford. He is the man who has been making the experiment of mingling the middle and lower classes in schools. He has a face so intelligent and benignant that children might grow good by looking at it. Harriet Martineau called yesterday. She is going to her brother's at Birmingham soon. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Nov. 1853.] Mr. Lewes was at Cambridge about a fortnight ago, and found that Herbert Spencer was a great deal talked of there for the article on the "Universal Postulate," as well as other things. Mr. Lewes himself has a knot of devotees there who make his "History of Philosophy" a private text-book. Miss Martineau's "Comte" is out now. Do you mean to _do_ it? or Mr. Lewes's? We can get no one to write an article on Comte for the next number of the _Westminster_--Bain, our last hope, refusing. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 5th Nov. 1853.] I think you would find some capital extracts for the _Herald_ (Coventry), in the article on "Church Parties" in the _Edinburgh_. The _Record_ is attempting a reply to it, in which it talks of the truculent infidelity of _Voltaire_ AND _Robespierre_! Has A. sent you his book on the Sabbath? If ever I write a book I will make a present of it to nobody; it is the surest way of taking off the edge of appetite for it, if no more. I am as well as possible; and certainly, when I put my head into the house in the Strand, I feel that I have gained, or, rather, escaped, a great deal physically by my change. Have you known the misery of writing with a _tired_ steel pen, which is reluctant to make a mark? If so, you will know why I leave off. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 7th Nov. 1853.] Chrissey has just sent me a letter, which tells that you have been suffering severely, and that you are yet very ill. I must satisfy my own feelings by telling you that I grieve at this, though it will do you little good to know it. Still, when _I_ am suffering, I do care for sympathy, and perhaps you are of the same mind. If so, think of me as your loving sister, who remembers all your kindness to her, all the pleasant hours she has had with you, and every little particular of her intercourse with you, however long and far she may have been removed from you. Dear Fanny, I can never be indifferent to your happiness or sorrow, and in this present sad affliction my thoughts and love are with you. I shall tease you with no words about myself _now_--perhaps by and by it will amuse you to have a longer letter. [Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 8th Nov. 1853.] Hitherto I have been spending £9 per month--at least after that rate--but I have had frequent guests. I am exceedingly comfortable, and feel quite at home now. Harriet Martineau has been very kind--called again on Tuesday, and yesterday sent to invite me to go to Lady Compton's, where she is staying, on Saturday evening. This, too, in spite of my having vexed her by introducing Mr. Lewes to her, which I did as a desirable bit of peacemaking. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1853 (thirty-fourth birthday).] I begin this year more happily than I have done most years of my life. "Notre vraie destinée," says Comte, "se compose de _resignation_ et _d'activité_"--and I seem more disposed to both than I have ever been before. Let us hope that we shall both get stronger by the year's activity--calmer by its resignation. I know it may be just the contrary--don't suspect me of being a canting optimist. We _may_ both find ourselves at the end of the year going faster to the hell of conscious moral and intellectual weakness. Still, there is a possibility--even a probability--the other way. I have not seen Harriet Martineau's "Comte" yet--she is going to give me a copy--but Mr. Lewes tells me it seems to him admirably well done. I told Mr. Chapman yesterday that I wished to give up my connection with the editorship of the _Westminster_. He wishes me to continue the present state of things until April. I shall be much more satisfied on many accounts to have done with that affair; but I shall find the question of supplies rather a difficult one this year, as I am not likely to get any money either for "Feuerbach" or for "The Idea of a Future Life,"[42] for which I am to have "half profits"=0/0! I hope you will appreciate this _bon-mot_ as I do--"C'est un homme admirable--il se tait en sept langues!"[43] [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 2d Dec. 1853.] I am going to detail all my troubles to you. In the first place, the door of my sitting-room doesn't quite fit, and a draught is the consequence. Secondly, there is a piano in the house which has decidedly entered on its second childhood, and this piano is occasionally played on by Miss P. with a really enviable _aplomb_. Thirdly, the knocks at the door startle me--an annoyance inseparable from a ground-floor room. Fourthly, Mrs. P. scolds the servants _stringendo e fortissimo_ while I am dressing in the morning. Fifthly--there is no fifthly. I really have not another discomfort when I am well, which, alas! I have not been for the last ten days; so, while I have been up to the chin in possibilities of enjoyment, I have been too sick and headachy to use them. One thing is needful--a good digestion. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 28th Dec. 1853.] Spent Christmas Day alone at Cambridge Street. How shall I thank you enough for sending me that splendid barrel of beet-root, so nicely packed? I shall certainly eat it and enjoy it, which, I fancy, is the end you sought, and not thanks. Don't suppose that I am looking miserable--_au contraire_. My only complaints just now are idleness and dislike-to-getting-up-in-the-morningness, whereby the day is made too short for what I want to do. I resolve every day to conquer the flesh the next, and, of course, am a little later in consequence. I dined with Arthur Helps yesterday at Sir James Clark's--very snug--only he and myself. He is a sleek man, with close-snipped hair; has a quiet, humorous way of talking, like his books. At the beginning of January, 1854, there was another visit to Mrs. Clarke, at Attleboro, for ten days. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 6th Feb. 1854.] In the last number of the _Scotsman_ which I sent you there was a report of a speech by Dr. Guthrie at the Education meeting, containing a passage which I meant to have copied. He is speaking of the impossibility of teaching morality with the "Bible shut," and says that in that case the teacher would be obliged to resort to "congruity and the fitness of things," about which the boy knows nothing more than that the apple is _fit_ for his mouth. What is wanted to convince the boy of his sin is, "Thou God seest me," and "Thou bleeding Lamb, the best morality is love of thee!" Mr. Lewes came a few minutes after you left, and desired me to tell you that he was sorry to miss you. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 6th April, 1854.] Thank you for your very kind letter, which I received this morning. It is pleasant to think of you as quite well, and enjoying your sea-breezes. But do you imagine me sitting with my hands crossed, ready to start for any quarter of the world at the shortest notice. It is not on those terms that people, not rich, live in London. I shall be deep in proof-sheets till the end of May, and shall only dismiss them to make material for new ones. I dare say you will pity me. But, as one of Balzac's characters says, after maturity, "La vie n'est que l'exercice d'une habitude dans un milieu préféré;" and I could no more live out of my _milieu_ than the haddocks I dare say you are often having for dinner. My health is better. I had got into a labyrinth of headaches and palpitations, but I think I am out of it now, and I hope to keep well. I am not the less obliged to you, dear Fanny, for wishing to have me with you. But to leave London now would not be agreeable to me, even if it were morally possible. To see you again would certainly be a pleasure, but I hope that will come to pass without my crossing the Irish Channel. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Saturday, 18th April, 1854.] I am rather overdone with the week's work, and the prospect of what is to come next. Poor Lewes is ill, and is ordered not to put pen to paper for a month; so I have something to do for him in addition to my own work, which is rather pressing. He is gone to Arthur Helps, in Hampshire, for ten days, and I really hope this total cessation from work, in obedience to a peremptory order, will end in making him better than he has been for the last year. No opera and no fun for me for the next month. Happily, I shall have no time to regret it. Plenty of bright sun on your anemone bed. How lovely your place must look, with its fresh leaves! [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 23d May, 1854.] It is quite possible that I may wish to go to the Continent, or twenty other things. Mr. Lewes is going on a walking excursion to Windsor to-day with his doctor, who pronounces him better, but not yet fit for work. However, he is obliged to do a little, and must content himself with an _approximation_ to his doctor's directions. In this world all things are approximations, and in the system of the Dog Star too, in spite of Dr. Whewell. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Friday, no date, 1854.] My troubles are purely psychical--self-dissatisfaction, and despair of achieving anything worth the doing. I can truly say they vanish into nothing before any fear for the happiness of those I love. Thank you for letting me know how things are, for indeed I could not bear to be shut out from your anxieties. When I spoke of myself as an island, I did not mean that I was so exceptionally. We are all islands-- "Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe, Our hermit spirits dwell and roam apart"-- and this seclusion is sometimes the most intensely felt at the very moment your friend is caressing you or consoling you. But this gradually becomes a source of satisfaction instead of repining. When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business--that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives, and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to our own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf, that at mid-day there will be no trace of. This is no high-flown sentimentality, but a simple reflection, which I find useful to me every day. I expect to see Mr. Lewes back again to-day. His poor head--his only fortune--is not well yet; and he has had the misery of being _ennuyé_ with idleness, without perceiving the compensating physical improvement. Still, I hope the good he has been getting has been greater than he has been conscious of. I expect "Feuerbach" will be all in print by the end of next week, and there are no skippings, except such as have been made on very urgent grounds. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Tuesday, 6th June, 1854.] Thanks for your assurance of welcome. I will trust to it when the gods send favorable circumstances. But I see no probability of my being able to be with you before your other midsummer visitors arrive. I delight to think that you are all a little more cheery. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Wednesday, 28th June, 1854.] I reached the Euston Station as dusty as an old ledger, but with no other "incommodity." I went to the Lyceum last night to see "Sunshine through the Clouds,"[44] a wonderfully original and beautiful piece by Mme. de Girardin, which makes one cry rather too much for pleasure. Vestris acts finely the bereaved mother, passing through all the gradations of doubt and hope to the actual recovery of her lost son. My idea of you is rather bright just now, and really helps to make me enjoy all that is enjoyable. That is part of the benefit I have had from my pleasant visit, which was made up of sunshine, green fields, pleasant looks, and good eatables--an excellent compound. Will you be so kind as to send my books by railway, _without_ the Shelley? [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Monday, 4th July, 1854.] Pray consider the Strauss MSS. waste paper. _I_ shall never want them again. I dined with your old acquaintance, Dr. Conolly, at Sir James Clark's, the other day. He took me down to dinner, and we talked of you. The translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthums" was published in July in "Chapman's Quarterly Series," with Miss Evans's name on the titlepage as the translator, the first and only time her real name appeared in print. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th July, 1854.] I am going to pack up the Hebrew Grammar, the Apocryphal Gospels, and your pretty Titian, to be sent to you. Shall I despatch them by rail or deposit them with Mr. Chapman, to be asked for by Mr. Bray when he comes to town? I shall soon send you a good-bye, for I am preparing to go abroad (?). Herbert Spencer's article on the "Genesis of Science" is a good one. He will stand in the Biographical Dictionaries of 1854 as "Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great work, ... which gave a new impulse to psychology, and has mainly contributed to the present advanced position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in the middle of the last century. The life of this philosopher, like that of the great Kant, offers little material for the narrator. Born in the year 1820," etc. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th July, 1854.] Dear friends--all three--I have only time to say good-bye, and God bless you. _Poste Restante_, Weimar, for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin. Ever your loving and grateful Marian. We have now been led up to the most important event in George Eliot's life--her union with Mr. George Henry Lewes. Here, as elsewhere, it seems to me to be of the first importance that she should speak for herself; and there is, fortunately, a letter to Mrs. Bray, dated in September, 1855--fourteen months after the event--which puts on record the point of view from which she regarded her own action. I give this letter here (out of its place as to date); and I may add, what, I think, has not been mentioned before, that not only was Mr. Lewes's previous family life irretrievably spoiled, but his home had been wholly broken up for nearly two years. In forming a judgment on so momentous a question, it is, above all things, necessary to understand what was actually undertaken, what was actually achieved; and, in my opinion, this can best be arrived at, not from any outside statement or arguments, but by consideration of the whole tenor of the life which follows, in the development of which Mr. Lewes's true character, as well as George Eliot's, will unfold itself. No words that any one else can write, no arguments any one else can use, will, I think, be so impressive as the life itself. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Sept. 1855.] If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mistake me in many ways, for not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes's real character and the course of his actions, but also it is several years now since you and I were much together, and it is possible that the modifications my mind has undergone may be quite in the opposite direction of what you imagine. No one can be better aware than yourself that it is possible for two people to hold different opinions on momentous subjects with equal sincerity, and an equally earnest conviction that their respective opinions are alone the truly moral ones. If we differ on the subject of the marriage laws, I at least can believe of you that you cleave to what you believe to be good; and I don't know of anything in the nature of your views that should prevent you from believing the same of me. _How far_ we differ I think we neither of us know, for I am ignorant of your precise views; and, apparently, you attribute to me both feelings and opinions which are not mine. We cannot set each other quite right in this matter in letters, but one thing I can tell you in few words. Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do _not_ act as I have done. That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only understand by remembering how subtile and complex are the influences that mould opinion. But I _do_ remember this: and I indulge in no arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From the majority of persons, of course, we never looked for anything but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except, indeed, that, being happy in each other, we find everything easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than we provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a sufficient basis for that. Pardon me if, in vindicating myself from some unjust conclusions, I seem too cold and self-asserting. I should not care to vindicate myself if I did not love you and desire to relieve you of the pain which you say these conclusions have given you. Whatever I may have misinterpreted before, I do not misinterpret your letter this morning, but read in it nothing else than love and kindness towards me, to which my heart fully answers yes. I should like never to write about myself again; it is not healthy to dwell on one's own feelings and conduct, but only to try and live more faithfully and lovingly every fresh day. I think not one of the endless words and deeds of kindness and forbearance you have ever shown me has vanished from my memory. I recall them often, and feel, as about everything else in the past, how deficient I have been in almost every relation of my life. But that deficiency is irrevocable, and I can find no strength or comfort except in "pressing forward towards the things that are before," and trying to make the present better than the past. But if we should never be very near each other again, dear Cara, do bear this faith in your mind, that I was not insensible or ungrateful to all your goodness, and that I am one among the many for whom you have not lived in vain. I am very busy just now, and have been obliged to write hastily. Bear this in mind, and believe that no meaning is mine which contradicts my assurance that I am your affectionate and earnest friend. _SUMMARY._ MARCH, 1850, TO JULY, 1854. Return to England with M. d'Albert--Depressing effect of change--Visit to Rosehill--Visit to brother and sister at Griff and Meriden--Deeper depression--To Rosehill again with M. d'Albert--Makes her home there for sixteen months--Reviews Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" in _Westminster_--Meets Mr. Chapman, the editor of the _Westminster_--Helps to settle Prospectus of new series of the _Review_--Visits Robert Noel at Bishop Steignton with Mrs. Bray--Visit to London--Crystal Palace--Returns to Rosehill, and meets Mr. and Mrs. George Combe--Goes to London as assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_--Letters to Brays--Review writing: Dr. Brabant, Foxton, Wilson--Meets Mr. Herbert Spencer--Miss Martineau--Distractions of London--Low health--Miss Bremer--Introduction to Mr. Lewes--Opinion of House of Lords--Carlyle's "Life of Sterling"--Carlyle anecdotes--Mackay--James Martineau--J. H. Newman's Lectures--Translation of Schleiermacher--Letter from Carlyle--Intimacy begins with Mr. Lewes--Reviews Carlyle's "Sterling" in _Westminster_--Visit to Rosehill--Returns to Strand--Harriet Martineau--Pierre Leroux--Louis Blanc--Miss Bessie Parkes--Mrs. Peter Taylor--"Margaret Fuller's Life"--Description of _Westminster_ reviewers--Growing intimacy with Mr. Herbert Spencer--Meeting of authors and booksellers at Mr. Chapman's--Admiration of Prince Albert--Grisi--Hack work of _Review_--Appreciation of Miss Martineau's writings--Singing of charity children at St. Paul's--George Combe's opinion of _Westminster_ editing--Barbara Leigh Smith--Visit to Broadstairs--Florence Nightingale--Return to Strand--Depression--Professor Owen on the Cerebellum--Visit to Combes at Edinburgh, and to Harriet Martineau at Ambleside--Return to London--Reading "Esmond"--Lord Brougham's speech--Work in Strand--Bryant--Visit to Rosehill--Death of Edward Clarke--Visit to widowed sister at Meriden--Return to Strand--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Views on America--"Ruth"--Visit to Rosehill, and to Mrs. Clarke at Attleboro--Return to Strand--Reading "Villette"--Letter from Mrs. Stowe to Mrs. Follen--Meets Huxley--Thinks of going to Australia to settle Mrs. Clarke--Admiration of Helen Faucit--Growing regard for Mr. Lewes--Kindness of Sir James Clark--Visit to Ockley--Change to St. Leonard's--Improvement in health--Return to Strand--Spencer's "Universal Postulate"--Removal to 21 Cambridge Street--Leigh Hunt's "Religion of the Heart"--Dawes, Dean of Hereford--Harriet Martineau--Comte--Contemplates publishing "The Idea of a Future Life"--Meets Arthur Helps--Intimate relations with Mr. Lewes--Translation of Feuerbach--Visit to Rosehill--Return to London--Feuerbach completed--Estimate of Herbert Spencer--Good-bye to Brays--Union with Mr. Lewes--Letter to Mrs. Bray thereon. FOOTNOTES: [31] Frederick Foxton, author of "Popular Christianity: its Transition State and Probable Development." [32] "Man's Nature and Development," by Martineau and Atkinson. [33] This was a merely formal and casual introduction. That George Eliot was ever brought into close relations with Mr. Lewes was due to Mr. Herbert Spencer having taken him to call on her in the Strand later in this year. [34] Appeared in January, 1852, number of the _Westminster Review_, No. 1 of the New Series. [35] Review of Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" in _Westminster_, Jan. 1852. [36] Published in the April, 1852, number of the _Westminster_. [37] Now Madame Belloc, who remained to the end one of George Eliot's closest friends. [38] Mrs. Peter Taylor remained a lifelong and a valued friend of George Eliot's, and many interesting letters in this volume are addressed to her. I am glad also to take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to her for procuring for me two other sets of correspondence--the letters addressed to Mrs. Beecher Stowe and to Mrs. William Smith. [39] Afterwards Madame Bodichon--one of the three or four most intimate friends of George Eliot, whose name will very often appear in subsequent pages. [40] Funeral oration on the Duke of Wellington. [41] Correcting _Leader_ proofs for Mr. Lewes. [42] Advertised in 1853-54 as to appear by "Marian Evans" in "Chapman's Quarterly Series," but never published. [43] Lord Acton tells me he first heard this _bon-mot_, in 1855, related of Immanuel Bekker, the philologist. [44] Translated and adapted from the French, "La joie fait peur," by Mr. Lewes, under the name of Slingsby Lawrence. CHAPTER VI. [Sidenote: Journal, 20th July, 1854.] I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street on 20th July, 1854, and found myself on board the _Ravensbourne_, bound for Antwerp. The day was glorious, and our passage perfect. The sunset was lovely, but still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the Scheldt between two and three in the morning. The crescent moon, the stars, the first faint blush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass of clouds on the horizon, which sent forth flashes of lightning, and the graceful forms of the boats and sailing-vessels, painted in jet-black on the reddish gold of the sky and water, made up an unforgettable picture. Then the sun rose and lighted up the sleepy shores of Belgium, with their fringe of long grass, their rows of poplars, their church spires and farm buildings. [Sidenote: 21st July.] The great treat at Antwerp was the sight of the Descent from the Cross, which, with its pendant, the Elevation of the Cross, has been undergoing restoration. In the latter the face of Jesus is sublime in its expression of agony and trust in the Divine. It is certainly the finest conception of the suffering Christ I have ever seen. The rest of the picture gave me no pleasure. But in the Descent from the Cross, color, form, and expression alike impressed me with the sense of grandeur and beauty. A little miserable copy of the picture placed near it served as an admirable foil. [Sidenote: 22d July.] We went to the museum and saw Rubens's Crucifixion, even more beautiful to me than the Descent from the Cross. These two pictures profoundly impressed me with the miserable lack of breadth and grandeur in the conceptions of our living artists. The reverence for the old masters is not all humbug and superstition. [Sidenote: 30th July.] We breakfasted in the public room at the hotel at Cologne, and were joined there by Dr. Brabant and Strauss. After a short interview with them we went on board the steamboat which was to take us to Coblentz. [Sidenote: Weimar, Description, Aug.-Oct. 1854.] It was very pretty to look out of the window, when dressing, on a garden that reminded one of an English village: the town is more like a huge village, or market-town, than the precincts of a court. G. called on Schöll, and in the afternoon he (Schöll) came and took us to the _Schloss_, where we saw the Dichter Zimmer--a suite of rooms dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. In each room there is the bust of the poet who is its presiding genius; and the walls of the Goethe and Schiller rooms are decorated with frescoes representing scenes from their works. The Wieland room is decorated with arabesques only. The idea of these rooms is a very pretty one, but the frescoes are badly executed. I am delighted with Schöll. He is a bright-looking, well-made man, with his head finely set on his shoulders, very little like a German. We discovered, after we had known him some time, that he is an Austrian, and so has more southern blood in his veins than the heavy Thuringians. His manners are hearty and cordial, and his conversation really instructive: his ideas are so thoroughly shaped and so admirably expressed. Sauppe is also a _Gelehrter_, director of the gymnasium, and editor of a series of classics which are being brought out; and he is evidently thought a great deal of in Weimar. We went with the Schölls and Sauppes to Tiefurt, and saw the queer little _Schloss_ which used to be Amalia's residence. Tiefurt was a favorite resort of ours, for the walk to it is a very pleasant one, and the Tiefurt park is a little paradise. The Ilm is seen here to the best advantage: it is clearer than at Weimar, and winds about gracefully among fine trees. One of the banks is a high, steep declivity, which shows the trees in all their perfection. In autumn, when the yellow and scarlet were at their brightest, these banks were fairy-like in their beauty. It was here that Goethe and his court friends got up the performance of "Die Fischerin" by torchlight. About ten days after our arrival at Weimar we made an excursion to Ettersburg, one of the duke's summer residences, interesting to us beforehand as the scene of private theatricals and _sprees_ in the Goethe days. We carried provisions with us, and Keats's poems. The morning was one of the brightest and hottest that August ever bestowed, and it required some resolution to trudge along the shadeless _chaussée_, which formed the first two or three miles of our way. One compensating pleasure was the sight of the beautiful mountain ashes in full berry, which, alternately with cherry-trees, border the road for a considerable distance. I felt a child's love for the bunches of coral standing out against the blue sky. The _Schloss_ is a house of very moderate size, and no pretension of any kind. Two flights of steps lead up to the door, and the balustrades are ornamented with beautiful creepers. A tiny sort of piazza under the steps is ornamented with creepers too, and has pretty earthenware vases filled with plants hanging from the ceiling. We felt how much beauty might be procured at small expense in looking at these things. A beautiful walk through a beech wood took us to the _Mooshütte_, before which stands the beech whereon Goethe and his friends cut their names, and from which Goethe denounced Waldemar. We could recognize some of the initials. With Ettersburg I shall always associate Arthur Helps, for he was with us on the second and last time we saw it. He came to Weimar quite unexpectedly on the 29th August, and the next evening we all three drove to Ettersburg. He said the country just round Weimar reminded him of Spain. This led him to talk of his Spanish travels, and he told us some delightful stories in a delightful way. At one inn he was considerably embarrassed in eating his dinner by the presence of a handsome woman, who sat directly opposite to him, resting on her elbows, and fixing her dark eyes on him with a fearful intensity of interest. This woman was the cook, anxious to know that her dishes were acceptable to the stranger. Under this terrible surveillance he did not dare to omit a single dish, though sorely longing to do so. Our greatest expedition from Weimar was to Ilmenau. We set out with a determination to find the Gabel-Bach and Kickel-hahn (Goethe's residence) without the encumbrance of a guide. We found the man who inhabits the simple wooden house which used to be Carl August's hunting-box. He sent a man on with us to show us the way to the Kickel-hahn, which we at last reached--I with weary legs. There is a magnificent view of hills from this spot; but Goethe's tiny wooden house is now closely shut in by fir-trees, and nothing can be seen from the windows. His room, which forms the upper floor of the house, is about ten or twelve feet square. It is now quite empty, but there is an interesting memorial of his presence in these wonderful lines, written by his own hand, near the window-frame: "Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch." We wrote our names near one of the windows. About the middle of September the theatre opened, and we went to hear "Ernani." Liszt looked splendid as he conducted the opera. The grand outline of his face and floating hair were seen to advantage as they were thrown into dark relief by the stage lamps. We were so fortunate as to have all three of Wagner's most celebrated operas while we were at Weimar. G., however, had not patience to sit out more than two acts of "Lohengrin;" and, indeed, I too was weary. The declamation appeared to me monotonous, and situations, in themselves trivial or disagreeable, were dwelt on fatiguingly. Without feeling competent to pass a judgment on this opera as music, one may venture to say that it fails in one grand requisite of art, based on an unchangeable element in human nature--the need for contrast. With the "Fliegender Holländer" I was delighted; the poem and the music were alike charming. The "Tannhäuser," too, created in me a great desire to hear it again. Many of the situations, and much of the music, struck me as remarkably fine. And I appreciated these operas all the better retrospectively when we saw "Der Freischütz," which I had never before heard and seen on the stage. The effect of the delicious music, with which one is so familiar, was completely spoiled by the absence of recitative, and the terrible _lapsus_ from melody to ordinary speech. The bacchanalian song seemed simply ridiculous, sung at a little pot-house table at a party of _two_, one of whom was sunk in melancholy; and the absurdity reached a _ne plus ultra_ when Caspar climbed the tree, apparently with the sole purpose of being shot. _� propos_ of the theatre, we were immensely amused to learn that a fair, small-featured man, who somehow always looked to me as if he had just come out of the shell, had come to Weimar to fit himself for a dramatic writer by going behind the scenes! He had as yet written nothing, but was going to work in what he considered a _gründlich_ way. When we passed along the Schiller Strasse, I used to be very much thrilled by the inscription, "Hier wohnte Schiller," over the door of his small house. Very interesting it is to see his study, which is happily left in its original state. In his bedroom we saw his skull for the first time, and were amazed at the smallness of the intellectual region. There is an intensely interesting sketch of Schiller lying dead, which I saw for the first time in the study; but all pleasure in thinking of Schiller's portraits and bust is now destroyed to me by the conviction of their untruthfulness. Rauch told us that he had a _miserabled Stirne_.[45] Waagen says that Tieck the sculptor told him there was something in Schiller's whole person which reminded him of a _camel_. Goethe's house is much more important-looking, but, to English eyes, far from being the palatial residence which some German writers think it. The entrance-hall is certainly rather imposing, with its statues in niches, and broad staircase. The latter was made after his own design, and was an "after-shine" of Italian tastes. The pictures are wretched, the casts not much better--indeed, I remember nothing which seemed intrinsically worth looking at. The MS. of his "Römische Elegien," written by himself in the Italian character, is to be seen here; and one likes to look at it better than at most of the other things. G. had obtained permission from Frau v. Goethe to see the studio and Schlafzimmer, which are not open to the public, and here our feelings were deeply moved. We entered first a small room containing drawers and shelves devoted to his mineralogical collections. From these we passed into the study. It is rather a dark room, for there are only two small windows--German windows. A plain deal table stands in the middle, and near the chair, against this table, is a high basket, where, I was afterwards told, Goethe used to put his pocket-handkerchief. A long sort of writing-table and bookcase united stands against one wall. Here hangs the pin-cushion, just as he left it, with visiting-cards suspended on threads, and other trifles which greatness and death have made sacred. Against the opposite wall, where you enter the bedroom, there is a high writing-desk, on which stands a little statue of Napoleon in creamy glass. The bedroom is very small. By the side of the bed stands a stuffed arm-chair, where he used to sit and read while he drank his coffee in the morning. It was not until very late in his life that he adopted the luxury of an arm-chair. From the other side of the study one enters the library, which is fitted up in a very makeshift fashion, with rough deal shelves, and bits of paper, with Philosophy, History, etc., written on them, to mark the classification of the books. Among such memorials one breathes deeply, and the tears rush to one's eyes. There is one likeness of Goethe that is really startling and thrilling from the idea it gives one of perfect resemblance. It is painted on a cup, and is a tiny miniature, but the execution is so perfect that, on applying a magnifying glass, every minute stroke has as natural an appearance as the texture of a flower or the parts of an insect under the microscope. Equally interesting is the _Gartenhaus_, which we used to see almost every day in our walks. Within, it is a not uncomfortable, homely sort of cottage; no furniture is left in it, and the family want to sell it. It stands on a pleasant slope fronting the west, and there is a charming bit of garden and orchard attached to it. Close to the garden hedge runs the road which leads to Ober Weimar, and on the other side of this road a meadow stretches to the trees which border the Ilm. A bridge nearly opposite the Gartenhaus takes one to the Borkenhaus, Carl August's little retreat, from which he used to telegraph to Goethe. The road to Ober Weimar was one of our favorite walks, especially towards the end of our stay at Weimar, when we were glad of all the sunshine we could get. Sometimes we used to turn out of it, up a grove of weeping birches, into the ploughed fields at the top of the slope on which the Gartenhaus and other little villas stand. Here we enjoyed many a lovely sunset; one, in particular, was marvellously splendid. The whole hemisphere was golden, towards the east tinted with rose-color. From this little height we looked on the plantations of the park, in their autumnal coloring, the town, with its steep-roofed church and its castle tower, colored a gay green, the line of chestnuts along the Belvedere Chaussée, and Belvedere itself peeping from its nest of trees. Another very favorite walk of mine was the _Webicht_, a beautiful wood through which ran excellent carriage-roads and grassy footpaths. How richly have I enjoyed skirting this wood and seeing, on the other side, the sky arching grandly down over the open fields, the evening red flushing the west over the town, and the bright stars come out as if to relieve the sun in his watch over mortals. And then the winding road through the Webicht on the side towards Tiefurt, with its tall, overarching trees now bending their mossy trunks forward, now standing with stately erectness like lofty pillars; and the charming grassy paths through the heart of the wood, among its silvery-barked birches! The Webicht lies towards Tiefurt, and one side of it is bordered by the road thither. I remember, as we were returning from Tiefurt one evening, a beautiful effect of the setting sunlight pouring itself under the trees, and making the road before us almost crimson. One of our pleasantest acquaintances at Weimar was the French ambassador, the Marquis de Ferrière, a very favorable specimen of a Frenchman, but intensely French. His genial soul and perfect good-humor gave one the same sort of _bien-être_ as a well-stuffed arm-chair and a warm hearthrug. In the course of conversation, speaking of Yvan's accounts of his travels (the marquis was first secretary to the Chinese embassy which Yvan accompanied), he said, "C'était faux d'un bout à l'autre; mais c'était spirituel, paradoxal, amusant--enfin _tout ce qu'il fallait pour un journal_." Another day he observed that the famous words of Napoleon to his Egyptian army, "Forty centuries look down on you from the summits of these pyramids," were characteristic of the French national feeling, as those of Nelson, "England expects the man to make his duty" were of the English. This is a fair specimen of the correctness with which one generally hears English quoted; and we often reminded ourselves that it was a mirror in which we might see our own German. Liszt's conversation is charming. I never met with a person whose manner of telling a story was so piquant. The last evening but one that he called on us, wishing to express his pleasure in G.'s article about him, he very ingeniously conveyed that expression in a story about Spontini and Berlioz. Spontini visited Paris while Liszt was living there, and haunted the opera--a stiff, self-important personage, with high shirt-collars, the least attractive individual imaginable; Liszt turned up his own collars, and swelled out his person, so as to give us a vivid idea of the man. Every one would have been glad to get out of Spontini's way--indeed, elsewhere "on feignait de le croire mort," but at Paris, as he was a member of the Institute, it was necessary to recognize his existence. Liszt met him at Erard's more than once. On one of these occasions Liszt observed to him that Berlioz was a great admirer of his (Spontini's), whereupon Spontini burst into a terrible invective against Berlioz as a man who, with the like of him, was ruining art, etc. Shortly after the "Vestale" was performed, and forthwith appeared an enthusiastic article by Berlioz on Spontini's music. The next time Liszt met him of the high collars he said, "You see I was not wrong in what I said about Berlioz's admiration of you." Spontini swelled in his collars, and replied, "Monsieur, Berlioz a du talent comme critique!" Liszt's replies were always felicitous and characteristic. Talking of Mme. d'Agoult, he told us that when her novel "Nelida" appeared, in which Liszt himself is pilloried as a delinquent, he asked her, "Mais pourquoi avez-vous tellement maltraité ce pauvre Lehmann?" The first time we were asked to breakfast at his house, the Altenburg, we were shown into the garden, where, in a saloon formed by overarching trees, the _déjeuner_ was set out. We found Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the lyric poet, Dr. Schade--a _Gelehrter_, and Cornelius. Presently came a Herr--or Doctor--Raff, a musician, who has recently published a volume called "Wagnerfrage." Soon after we were joined by Liszt and the Princess Marie, an elegant, gentle-looking girl of seventeen, and last by the Princess Wittgenstein, with her nephew, Prince Eugène, and a young French artist, a pupil of Scheffer. The princess was tastefully dressed in a morning-robe of some semi-transparent white material, lined with orange-color, which formed the bordering and ornamented the sleeves, a black lace jacket, and a piquant cap set on the summit of her comb, and trimmed with violet color. When the cigars came, Hoffman was requested to read some of his poetry, and he gave us a bacchanalian poem with great spirit. I sat next to Liszt, and my great delight was to watch him and observe the sweetness of his expression. Genius, benevolence, and tenderness beam from his whole countenance, and his manners are in perfect harmony with it. Then came the thing I had longed for--his playing. I sat near him, so that I could see both his hands and face. For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration--for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano. He played one of his own compositions--one of a series of religious fantasies. There was nothing strange or excessive about his manner. His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face was simply grand--the lips compressed, and the head thrown a little backward. When the music expressed quiet rapture or devotion a smile flitted over his features; when it was triumphant the nostrils dilated. There was nothing petty or egoistic to mar the picture. Why did not Scheffer paint him thus, instead of representing him as one of the three Magi? But it just occurs to me that Scheffer's idea was a sublime one. There are the two aged men who have spent their lives in trying to unravel the destinies of the world, and who are looking for the Deliverer--for the light from on high. Their young fellow-seeker, having the fresh inspiration of early life, is the first to discern the herald star, and his ecstasy reveals it to his companions. In this young Magus, Scheffer has given a portrait of Liszt; but even here, where he might be expected to idealize unrestrainedly, he falls short of the original. It is curious that Liszt's face is the type that one sees in all Scheffer's pictures; at least, in all I have seen. In a little room which terminates the suite at the Altenburg there is a portrait of Liszt, also by Scheffer--the same of which the engraving is familiar to every one. This little room is filled with memorials of Liszt's triumphs and the worship his divine talent has won. It was arranged for him by the princess, in conjunction with the Arnims, in honor of his birthday. There is a medallion of him by Schwanthaler, a bust by an Italian artist, also a medallion by Rietschl--very fine--and cabinets full of jewels and precious things--the Weimar gifts of the great. In the music _salon_ stand Beethoven's and Mozart's pianos. Beethoven's was a present from Broadwood, and has a Latin inscription intimating that it was presented as a tribute to his illustrious genius. One evening Liszt came to dine with us at the Erb Prinz, and introduced M. Rubinstein, a young Russian, who is about to have an opera of his performed in Weimar. Our expenses at Weimar, including wine and washing, were £2 6_s._ per week. Dear Weimar! We were sorry to say good-bye to it, with its pleasant group of friends. On the 4th of November, after a stay of just three months, we turned our backs on it "to seek fresh streets and faces new" at Berlin. [Sidenote: Berlin, Recollections, Nov. 1854 to Mch. 1855.] There are certain persons without any physiognomy, the catalogue of whose features, as, item, a Roman nose, item, a pair of black eyes, etc., gives you the entire contents of their faces. There is no difference of opinion about the looks of such people. All the world is agreed either that they are pretty or ugly. So it is with Berlin. Every one tells you it is an uninteresting modern city, with broad, monotonous streets; and when you see it, you cannot for the life of you get up an emotion of surprise, or make a remark about the place which you have not heard before. The day after our arrival was Sunday, 6th November; the sun shone brightly, and we went to walk in the Linden, elbowing our way among the _promeneurs endimanchés_, who looked remarkably smart and handsome after the Thuringians. We had not gone far when we met a nice-looking old gentleman, with an order round his neck, and a gold-headed cane in his hand, who exclaimed, on seeing G., "Ist's möglich?" and then bade him heartily welcome. I saw at once it was the Varnhagen of whom I had heard so often. His niece, arrayed in smiles and a pink bonnet, was with him. For the first six weeks, when the weather permitted, we took long walks in the Thiergarten, where the straight and uniform avenues of insignificant trees contrasted very disadvantageously with the charming variety of our beloved park at Weimar. Still, we now and then noticed a beautiful wintry effect, especially in the part most remote from the town, where the trees are finer and the arrangements more varied. One walk, which skirted the Thiergarten on the right-hand side coming from the town, we were particularly fond of, because it gave us on one side an open view, with water and a boat or two, which, touched by the magic of sunshine, was pleasant to see. At Berlin it was "a day of small things" with regard to the beautiful, and we made much of little. Our little circle of acquaintances was very agreeable and varied. Varnhagen was a real treasure to G., for his library supplied all the deficiencies of the public one, where to ask for books was generally like "sinking buckets into empty wells." He is a man of real culture, kindliness, and polish (Germanly speaking); and he has besides that thorough liberalism, social, religious, and political, which sets the mind at ease in conversation, and delivers it from the fear of running against some prejudice, or coming suddenly on the sunk fence of some miserable limitation. The first morning he called on us he talked of his terrible disappointment in Carlyle, a subject to which he often returned. He evidently felt an antipathy to the "Teufelsdröckh," which, indeed, it was not difficult to understand from the mere _manière d'étre_ of the two men. They had corresponded for years before they saw each other; and Varnhagen was, and is, a great admirer of Carlyle's best work, but he was thoroughly repelled by his rough, paradoxical talk, and, more justifiably, by the despotic doctrines which it has been his humor to teach of late. We were amused to hear that Carlyle said he should think no one could die at Berlin, "for in beds _without curtains_ what Christian could give up the ghost?" At Varnhagen's we met, for the first time, Professor Stahr, who was there with Fanny Lewald, Fräulein Solmar, Frau Muisch, Dr. Ring, Dr. Vehse, Gräfin von Kalkreuth, and Director Wilhelm Schadow, author of "Der Moderne Vasari." We talked of Goethe. Varnhagen brought out autographs and portraits, and read us an epigram of his own on the want of liberality which Goethe's family show about opening his house to the public. He showed us a portrait of Kleist, who shot himself, in company with Frau Vogel, near an inn on the way to Potsdam. There was no love-affair between them; they were both thoroughly unhappy--he poor and hopeless for the future; and she suffering from an incurable disease. In the evening they both wrote, on a single sheet of paper, letters to their friends, communicating their intention (this sheet Varnhagen possesses). Early in the morning they rose, took a cup of coffee, went to the brink of a piece of water in the neighborhood of the inn, and there shot themselves. Du Bois Reymond spoke very decidedly of the German civilization as inferior to the English. Varnhagen, when well, is a regular visitor at Fräulein Solmar's, who for many years has kept an open _salon_ for her friends every evening but one in the week. Here the three-cornered chair next the sofa was reserved for him, except when General Pfuhl was there. This General Pfuhl is a fine specimen of an old soldier, who is at the same time a man of instruction and of strong social sympathies. He has been in the service of Prussia, has been within a hair's-breadth of being frozen to death, "and so following." He spoke French admirably, and always had something interesting and characteristic to tell or say. His appreciatory groans, always in the right place, when G. was reading "Shylock" did us both good, under the chills of a German audience. Fräulein Solmar is a remarkably accomplished woman--probably between fifty and sixty, but of that agreeable _Wesen_ which is so free from anything startling in person or manner, and so at home in everything one can talk of, that you think of her simply as a delightful presence, and not as a woman of any particular age. She converses perfectly in French, well in English, and well also, as we were told, in Italian. There is not the slightest warmth of manner or expression in her, but always the same even cheerfulness and intelligence--in fact, she is the true type of the mistress of the _salon_. During the first half of our stay in Berlin we went about once a week to her house; but bad health and bad weather kept us away during the last six weeks, except for one or two evenings. Baron Sternberg, the novelist, used frequently to glide in when we were there, and cast strange, cold glances around, talking quietly to Fräulein Assing or some other lady who sat in a distant parallel of latitude. One evening a Frenchman there amused us by saying that he found in Meyerbeer's "Huguenots" the whole spirit of the epoch of Charles IX. "Lisez les Chroniques"--"de Froissart?" suggested Mlle. Solmar. "Oui, quelque chose comme ça; ou bien les Chroniques de Brantôme ou de _Mérimée_, et vous trouverez que Meyerbeer a parfaitement exprimé tout cela; du moins c'est ce que je trouve, moi." I said, "Mais peut-être, Monsieur, c'est votre génie à vous qui a fait entrer les idées dans la musique." He answered with complacent deprecation. G. looked immovably serious, but was inwardly tickled by the audacity of my compliment, and the evident acceptance of it. A still more interesting acquaintance was Professor Gruppe, who has written great books on the Greek drama and on Philosophy; has been a political writer; is a lyric and epic poet; has invented a beautiful kind of marbled paper for binding books; is an enthusiastic huntsman, and, withal, the most simple, kind-hearted creature in the world. His little wife, who is about twenty years younger than himself, seems to adore him, and it is charming to see the group they and their two little children make in their dwelling, up endless flights of stairs in the Leipziger Platz. Very pleasant evenings we had there, chatting or playing whist, or listening to readings of Gruppe's poems. We used to find him in a gray cloth _Schlafrock_, which I fancy was once a great-coat, and a brown velvet cap surmounting his thin gray hairs. I never saw a combination at all like that which makes up Gruppe's character. Talent, fertility, and versatility that seem to indicate a fervid temperament, and yet no scintillation of all this in his talk and manner; on the contrary, he seems slow at apprehending other people's ideas, and is of an almost childish _naiveté_ in the value he attaches to poor jokes, and other trivialities. _� propos_ of jokes, we noticed that during the whole seven months of our stay in Germany we never heard one witticism, or even one felicitous idea or expression, from a German! Gruppe has a delightful library, with rare books, and books too good to be rare; and we often applied to him for some of them. He lent me "Lessing," and that is an additional circumstance to remember with pleasure in connection with the Laocoon. He one evening gave us an interesting account of his work on the cosmic system of the Greeks, and read us a translation, by himself, of one of the Homeric hymns--Aphrodite--which is very beautiful, a sort of _Gegenstück_ to "Der Gott und die Bajadere:" and generally we were glad when he took up the book. He read us a specimen of his epic poem, "Firdusi," which pleased us. The fable on which this poem is founded is fine. The sultan had engaged Firdusi to write a great poem on his exploits, and had promised to pay for this one hundred thousand pieces (gold being understood). Firdusi had delighted in the thought of this sum, which he intended to devote to the benefit of his native city. When the poem was delivered, and the sack of money given to Firdusi, he found that the pieces were silver! He burst into a song of scorn against the sultan, and paid the miserable sum to his bath-man. Gruppe thinks Shakespeare more extensively sold in Germany than any other book, except the Bible and Schiller! One night we attempted "Brag" or "Pocher," but Gruppe presently became alarmed at G.'s play, and said "Das würde an zwölf Groschen reichen." He drew some Jews' faces with a pen admirably. We were invited to meet Waagen, whom we found a very intelligent and amusing man. He told us a story about Goethe, who said of some one, "I thank thee, Almighty God, that thou hast produced no second edition of this man!" and an amusing judgment passed on Goethe himself, that he was "Kein dummer Mann!" Also a story of a lady who went to see him, as an intellectual adorer, and began to spout to him, as his masterpiece, "Fest gemauert in der Erden,"[46] etc. Another pleasant friend was Edward Magnus, the portrait-painter, an acute, intelligent, kind-hearted man, with real talent in his art. He was the only German we met with who seemed conscious of his countrymen's deficiencies. He showed in every possible way a hearty desire to do us service--sent us books, came to chat with us, showed us his portraits, and, when we were going away, brought us lithographs of some paintings of his, that we might carry away a remembrance of him. He has travelled very extensively, and had much intercourse with distinguished people, and these means of culture have had some of their best effects on his fine temperament and direct, truthful mind. He told us a rich story about Carlyle. At a dinner-party, given by Magnus in his honor, Wiese and Cornelius were deploring Goethe's want of evangelical sentiment. Carlyle was visibly uneasy, fumbling with his dinner-napkin. At last he broke out thus: "Meine Herren kennen sie die Anekdote von dem Manne der die Sonne lästerte weil sie ihm sein Cigarre nicht anstecken liess?"[47] In the little room where we used to be ushered to wait for him there was a portrait of Thorwaldsen and one of Mendelssohn, both of whom he knew well. I was surprised to find in his _atelier_ the original of the portrait of Jenny Lind, with which I was so familiar. He was going to send it, together with Sontag's portrait, to the exhibition at Paris. His brother, the chemist, was also a bright, good-natured-looking man. We were invited to a large evening party at his house, and found very elegant rooms, with a remarkable assemblage of celebrated men--Johannes Müller, Du Bois Reymond, Rose, Ehrenberg, etc. Some of the women were very pretty and well dressed. The supper, brought round on trays, was well appointed; and altogether the party was well managed. We spent one evening with Professor Stahr and his wife--Fanny Lewald--after their marriage. Stahr has a copy of the charming miniature of Schiller, taken when he was about thirty--a miniature in the possession of a certain Madame von Kalb. There are the long _Gänsehals_,[48] the aquiline nose, the blue eyes and auburn hair. It is a most real and striking portrait. I saw also a portrait and bust of Madame d'Agoult here, both rather handsome. The first evening Stahr told us some of the grievances which the Prussians have to bear from their government, and among the rest the vexatious necessity for a "concession" or license, before any, the simplest vocation, can be entered on. He observed, with justice, that the English are apt to suppose the German Revolution of '48 was mere restlessness and aping of other nations, when in fact there were real oppressions which the Germans had to bear, and which they had borne with a patience that the English would not imitate for a month. By far the most distinguished-looking man we saw at Berlin, and, indeed, next to Liszt, in Germany, was Rauch the sculptor. Schöll had given G. a letter for him, and soon after it had been left at his house he called on us in the evening, and at once won our hearts by his beautiful person and the benignant and intelligent charm of his conversation. He is indeed the finest old man I ever saw--more than seventy-six, I believe, but perfectly upright, even stately, in his carriage. His features are harmonious, his complexion has a delicate freshness, his silky white hair waves gracefully round his high forehead, and his brown eyes beam with benevolence and intelligence. He is above the common height, and his stature and beauty together ennoble the gray working surtout and cap which he wears in his _atelier_ into a picturesque and distinguished costume. The evening he was with us he talked delightfully of Goethe, dwelling especially on his lovable nature. He described very graphically Goethe's way of introducing subjects, showing plates, etc., bringing in the cast of Schiller's skull, and talking of it and other little particulars of interest. We went one morning to his _atelier_, and found him superintending his pupil's work at a large group representing Moses with his hands held up by Aaron and Hur. It was extremely interesting to me to see Rauch's original little clay model of this group, for I had never seen statuary in that first stage before. The intense expression of entreaty in the face of the Moses was remarkable. But the spirit of this group is so alien to my sympathies that I could feel little pleasure in the idea of its production. On the other hand, my heart leaped at the sight of old Kant's quaint figure, of which Rauch is commissioned to produce a colossal statue for Königsberg. In another _atelier_, where the work is in a different stage, we saw a splendid marble monument, nearly completed, of the late king of Hanover. Pitiable that genius and spotless white marble should be thrown away on such human trash! Our second visit to Rauch's _atelier_ was paid shortly before we left Berlin. The group of Moses, Aaron, and Hur was clothed up, and the dark-eyed, olive-complexioned pupil was at work on a pretty little figure of Hope--a child stepping forward with upturned face, a bunch of flowers in her hand. In the other _atelier_ we saw a bust of Schleiermacher, which, with the equestrian statue of Fritz, and its pedestal, Rauch was going to send to the Paris Exhibition. Schleiermacher's face is very delicately cut, and indicates a highly susceptible temperament. The colossal head of Fritz, seen on a level with one's eye, was perfectly startling from its living expression. One can't help fancying that the head is thinking and that the eyes are seeing. Dessoir the actor was another pleasant variety in our circle of acquaintance. He created in us a real respect and regard for him, not only by his sincere devotion to his art, but by the superiority of feeling which shone through all the little details of his conduct and conversation. Of lowly birth, and entirely self-taught, he is by nature a gentleman. Without a single physical gift as an actor, he succeeds, by force of enthusiasm and conscientious study, in arriving at a representation which commands one's attention and feelings. I was very much pleased by the simplicity with which he one day said, "Shakespeare ist mein Gott; ich habe keinen anderen Gott:" and indeed one saw that his art was a religion to him. He said he found himself inevitably led into singsong declamation by Schiller, but with Shakespeare it was impossible to be declamatory. It was very agreeable to have him as a companion now and then in our walks, and to have him read or discuss Shakespeare for an hour or two in the evening. He told us an amusing story about his early days. When he was a youth of sixteen or seventeen, acting at Spandau, he walked to Berlin (about nine miles) and back in the evening, accompanied by a watchmaker named Naundorff, an enthusiast for the theatre. On their way Dessoir declaimed at the top of his voice, and was encouraged by the applause of his companion to more and more exertion of lungs and limbs, so that people stared at them, and followed them, as if they thought them two madmen. This watchmaker was Louis XVII.! Dessoir also imitated admirably Aldridge's mode of advancing to kill Duncan--like a wild Indian lurking for a not much wilder beast. He paid us the very pretty attention of getting up a dinner for us at Dietz's, and inviting Rötscher and Förster to meet us; and he supplied us with tickets for the theatre, which, however, was a pleasure we used sparingly. The first time we went was to see "Nathan der Weise"--a real enjoyment, for the elegant theatre was new to us, and the scenery was excellent; better than I saw there on any subsequent occasion. Döring performed Nathan, and we thus saw him for the first time to great advantage; for, though he drags down this part, as he does all others, the character of Nathan sets limits which he cannot overstep; and though we lose most of its elevation in Döring's acting, we get, _en revanche_, an admirable ease and naturalness. His fine, clear voice and perfect enunciation told excellently in the famous monologue, and in the whole scene with Saladin. Our hearts swelled and the tears came into our eyes as we listened to the noble words of dear Lessing, whose great spirit lives immortally in this crowning work of his. Our great anxiety was to see and hear Johanna Wagner, so we took tickets for the "Orpheus," which Mlle. Solmar told us she thought her best part. We were thoroughly delighted both with her and her music. The caricatures of the Furies, the ballet-girls, and the butcher-like Greek shades in Elysium, the ugly, screaming Eurydice, and the droll appearance of Timzek as Amor, in which she looked like a shop-girl who has donned a masquerade dress impromptu, without changing her headdress--all these absurdities were rather an amusement than a drawback to our pleasure; for the Orpheus was perfect in himself, and looked like a noble horse among mules and donkeys. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Jan. 1855.] Our days are so accurately parcelled out that my time for letter-writing is rather restricted, and for every letter I write I have to leave out something which we have learned to think necessary. We have been to hear "Fidelio" this evening--not well executed, except so far as the orchestra was concerned; but the divine music positively triumphs over the defects of execution. One is entirely wrapped in the _idea_ of the composer. Last week we had "Orpheus and Eurydice," and I heard, for the first time, at once an opera of Gluck's and Johanna Wagner. It is one of the glories of Berlin to give Gluck's operas, and it is also something of a glory to have "die Wagner." She is really a fine actress and a fine singer; her voice is not ravishing, but she is mistress of it. I thought of you that evening, and wished you could hear and see what I know would interest you greatly--I refer rather to Gluck's opera than to Johanna Wagner. The scene in which Orpheus (Johanna Wagner) enters Tartarus, is met by the awful Shades, and charms them into ecstatic admiration till they make way for him to pass on, is very fine. The voices--except in the choruses--are all women's voices; and there are only three characters--Orpheus, Amor, and Eurydice. One wonders that Pluto does not come as a basso; and one would prefer Mercury as a tenor to Amor in the shape of an ugly German soprano; but Gluck wished it otherwise, and the music is delightful. I am reading a charming book by Professor Stahr--who is one of our acquaintances here--"Torso: Kunst, Künstler, und Kunst Werke der Alten." It feeds the fresh interest I am now feeling in art. Professor Stahr is a very erudite man, and, what is very much rarer among Germans, a good writer, who knows how to select his materials, and has, above all, a charming talent for description. We saw at his house the other night the first portrait of Schiller which _convinces_ me of a likeness to him. It is the copy of a miniature which has never been engraved. The face is less beautiful than that of the ordinary busts and portraits, but is very remarkable--the eyes blue, the complexion very fair (the picture was taken in his youth), and the hair sunny. He has the long "goose-neck" which he describes as belonging to Carl Moor in the "Robbers," and the forehead is _fuyant_ in correspondence with the skull. The piteous contrast there is between the anxiety poor Schiller is constantly expressing about a livelihood--about the thalers he has to pay for this and the thalers he has to receive for that--and Goethe's perfect ease in that respect! For the "History of the Netherlands" he got little more than fifteen shillings per sheet. I am very much interested in Professor Gruppe as a type of the German _Gelehrter_. He has written books on everything--on the Greek drama, a great book on the cosmic system of the Greeks, an epic, numberless lyric poems, etc.; he has a philosophical work and a history of literature in the press; is professor of philosophy at the university; is enthusiastic about boar-hunting, and has written a volume of hunting poems--and _ich weiss nicht was_. Withal he is as simple as a child. When we go to see them in the evening we find him wrapped in a moth-eaten gray coat and a cap on his head. Then he reads us a translation of one of the Homeric hymns, and goes into the most naïve _impersonal_ ecstasy at the beauty of his own poetry (which is really good). The other night he read us part of an epic which is still in MS., and is to be read before the king--such is the fashion here. And his little wife, who is about twenty years younger than himself, listens with loving admiration. Altogether, they and their two little children are a charming picture. [Sidenote: Berlin, Recollections, 1854-55.] We went to only one concert, for which Vivier was kind enough to send us tickets. It was given by him and Roger, assisted by Arabella Goddard and Johanna Wagner. Roger's singing of the "Erl King" was a treat not to be forgotten. He gave the full effect to Schubert's beautiful and dramatic music; and his way of falling from melody into awe-struck speech in the final words "_War todt_" abides with one. I never felt so thoroughly the beauty of that divine ballad before. The king was present in all his toothlessness and blinkingness; and the new princess from Anhalt Dessau, young and delicate-looking, was there too. Arabella Goddard played the "Harmonious Blacksmith" charmingly, and then Wagner sang badly two ineffective German songs, and Halévy's duet from the "Reine de Chypre" with Roger. Vivier is amusing. He says Germans take off their hats on all possible pretexts--not for the sake of politeness, but _pour être embarrassants_. They have wide streets, simply to embarrass you, by making it impossible to descry a shop or a friend. A German always has _three_ gloves--"On ne sait pas pourquoi." There is a dog-tax in order to maintain a narrow _trottoir_ in Berlin, and every one who keeps a dog feels authorized to keep the _trottoir_ and move aside for no one. If he has two dogs he drives out of the _trottoir_ the man who has only one: the very dogs begin to be aware of it. If you kick one when he is off the _trottoir_ he will bear it patiently, but on the _trottoir_ he resents it vehemently. He gave us quite a bit of Molière in a description of a mystification at a restaurant. He says to the waiter--"Vous voyez ce monsieur là. C'est le pauvre M. Colignon." (Il faut qu'il soit quelq'un qui prend très peu--une tasse de café ou comme ça, et qui ne dépense pas trop.) "Je suis son ami. Il est fou. Je le garde. Combien doit-il payer?" "Un franc." "Voilà." Then Vivier goes out. Presently the so-called M. Colignon asks how much he has to pay, and is driven to exasperation by the reiterated assurance of the waiter--"C'est payé, M. Colignon." The first work of art really worth looking at that one sees at Berlin is the "Rosse-bändiger" in front of the palace. It is by a sculptor named Cotes, who made horses his especial study; and certainly, to us, they eclipsed the famous Colossi at Monte Cavallo, casts of which are in the new museum. The collection of pictures at the old museum has three gems, which remain in the imagination--Titian's Daughter, Correggio's Jupiter and Io, and his Head of Christ on the Handkerchief. I was pleased also to recognize among the pictures the one by Jan Steen, which Goethe describes in the "Wahlverwandschaften" as the model of a _tableau vivant_, presented by Luciane and her friends. It is the daughter being reproved by her father, while the mother is emptying her wine-glass. It is interesting to see the statue of Napoleon, the worker of so much humiliation to Prussia, placed opposite that of Julius Cæsar. They were very happy months we spent at Berlin, in spite of the bitter cold which came on in January and lasted almost till we left. How we used to rejoice in the idea of our warm room and coffee as we battled our way from dinner against the wind and snow! Then came the delightful long evening, in which we read Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, and Macaulay, with German _Pfefferkuchen_ and _Semmels_ at the end to complete the _noctes cenæque deûm_. We used often to turn out for a little walk in the evening, when it was not too cold, to refresh ourselves by a little pure air as a change from the stove-heated room. Our favorite walk was along the Linden, in the broad road between the trees. We used to pace to old Fritz's monument, which loomed up dark and mysterious against the sky. Once or twice we went along the gas-lighted walk towards Kroll's. One evening in our last week we went on to the bridge leading to the Wilhelm Stadt, and there by moon and gas light saw the only bit of picturesqueness Berlin afforded us. The outline of the Schloss towards the water is very varied, and a light in one of the windows near the top of a tower was a happy accident. The row of houses on the other side of the water was shrouded in indistinctness, and no ugly object marred the scene. The next day, under the light of the sun, it was perfectly prosaic. Our _table d'hôte_ at the Hotel de l'Europe was so slow in its progress from one course to another, and there was so little encouragement to talk to our neighbors, that we used to take our books by way of beguiling the time. Lessing's "Hamburgische Briefe," which I am not likely to take up again, will thus remain associated in my memory with my place at the _table d'hôte_. The company here, as almost everywhere else in Berlin, was sprinkled with officers. Indeed, the swords of officers threaten one's legs at every turn in the streets, and one sighs to think how these unproductive consumers of _Wurst_, with all their blue and scarlet broadcloth, are maintained out of the pockets of the community. Many of the officers and privates are startlingly tall; indeed, some of them would match, I should think, with the longest of Friedrich Wilhelm's _lange Kerle_. It was a bitterly cold, sleety morning--the 11th of March--when we set out from Berlin, leaving behind us, alas! G.'s rug, which should have kept his feet warm on the journey. Our travelling companions to Cologne were fat Madame Roger, her little daughter, and her dog, and a queen's messenger--a very agreeable man, who afterwards persuaded another of the same vocation to join us for the sake of warmth. This poor man's teeth were chattering with cold, though he was wrapped in fur; and we, all furless as we were, pitied him, and were thankful that at least we were not feverish and ill, as he evidently was. We saw the immortal old town of Wolfenbüttel at a distance, as we rolled along; beyond this there was nothing of interest in our first day's journey, and the only incident was the condemnation of poor Madame Roger's dog to the dog-box, apart from its mistress with her warm cloaks. She remonstrated in vain with a brutal German official, and it was amusing to hear him say to her in German, "Wenn sie Deutsch nicht verstehen können." "Eh bien--prenez la." "Ah! quel satan de pays!" was her final word, as she held out the shivering little beast. We stayed at Cologne, and next morning walked out to look at the cathedral again. Melancholy as ever in its impression upon me! From Cologne to Brussels we had some rather interesting companions, in two French artists who were on their way from Russia. Strange beings they looked to us at first, in their dirty linen, Russian caps, and other queer equipments; but in this, as in many other cases, I found that a first impression was an extremely mistaken one--for instead of being, as I imagined, common, uncultivated men, they were highly intelligent. At Brussels, as we took our supper, we had the pleasure of looking at Berlioz's fine head and face, he being employed in the same way on the other side of the table. The next morning to Calais. They were pleasant days those at Weimar and Berlin, and they were working days. Mr. Lewes was engaged in completing his "Life of Goethe," which had been begun some time before, but which was now for the most part rewritten. At Weimar, George Eliot wrote the article on Victor Cousin's "Madame de Sablé" for the _Westminster Review_. It was begun on 5th August, and sent off on 8th September. At Berlin she nearly finished the translation of Spinoza's "Ethics"--begun on 5th November--and wrote an article on Vehse's "Court of Austria," which was begun on 23d January, and finished 4th March, 1855. Besides this writing, I find the following among the books that were engaging their attention; and in collecting the names from George Eliot's Journal, I have transcribed any remarks she makes on them: Sainte-Beuve, Goethe's "Wahlverwandschaften," Rameau's "Neffe," "Egmont," "The Hoggarty Diamond," Moore's "Life of Sheridan"--a first-rate specimen of bad biographical writing; "Götz" and the "Bürger General," Uhland's poems, "Wilhelm Meister," Rosenkranz on the Faust Sage, Heine's poems, Shakespeare's plays ("Merchant of Venice," "Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Cæsar"--very much struck with the masculine style of this play, and its vigorous moderation, compared with "Romeo and Juliet"--"Antony and Cleopatra," "Henry IV.," "Othello," "As You Like It," "Lear"--sublimely powerful--"Taming of the Shrew," "Coriolanus," "Twelfth Night," "Measure for Measure," "Midsummer-Night's Dream," "Winter's Tale," "Richard III.," "Hamlet"); Lessing's "Laocoon"--the most un-German of all the German books that I have ever read. The style is strong, clear, and lively; the thoughts acute and pregnant. It is well adapted to rouse an interest both in the classics and in the study of art; "Emilia Galotti" seems to me a wretched mistake of Lessing's. The Roman myth of Virginius is grand, but the situation, transported to modern times and divested of its political bearing, is simply shocking. Read "Briefe über Spinoza" (Jacobi's), "Nathan der Weise," Fanny Lewald's "Wandlungen," "Minna von Barnhelm," "Italiänische Reise," the "Residence in Rome;" a beautiful description of Rome and the Coliseum by moonlight--a fire made in the Coliseum sending its smoke, silvered by the moonlight, through the arches of the mighty walls. Amusing story of Goethe's landlady's cat worshipping Jupiter by licking his beard--a miracle, in her esteem, explained by Goethe as a discovery the cat had made of the oil lodging in the undulations of the beard. "Residence in Naples"--pretty passage about a star seen through a chink in the ceiling as he lay in bed. It is remarkable that when Goethe gets to Sicily he is, for the first time in Italy, enthusiastic in his descriptions of natural beauty. Read Scherr's "Geschichte Deutscher Cultur und Sitte"--much interested in his sketch of German poetry in the Middle Ages; "Iphigenia." Looked into the "Xenien," and amused ourselves with their pointlessness. "Hermann and Dorothea," "Tasso," "Wanderjahre"--_à mourir d'ennui_; Heine's "Geständnisse"--immensely amused with the wit of it in the first fifty pages, but afterwards it burns low, and the want of principle and purpose make it wearisome. Lessing's "Hamburgische Briefe." Read Goethe's wonderful observations on Spinoza. Particularly struck with the beautiful modesty of the passage in which he says he cannot presume to say that he thoroughly understands Spinoza. Read "Dichtung und Wahrheit," Knight's "Studies of Shakespeare." Talked of the "Wahlverwandschaften" with Stahr--he finding fault with the _dénouement_, which I defended. Read Stahr's "Torso"--too long-winded a style for reading aloud. Knight's "History of Painting." Compared several scenes of "Hamlet" in Schlegel's translation with the original. It is generally very close, and often admirably well done; but Shakespeare's strong, concrete language is almost always weakened. For example, "Though this hand were _thicker than_ itself in brother's blood" is rendered, "Auch um und um in Bruder's Blut getauchet." The prose speeches of Hamlet lose all their felicity in the translation. Read Stahr on the Eginetan Sculptures, "Die Neue Melusine," "West-�stliche Divan," Gervinus on Shakespeare--found it unsatisfactory; Stahr's "Ein Jahr in Italien"--the description of Florence excellent. Read the wonderfully beautiful "Römische Elegien" again, and some of the Venetian epigrams, Vehse's "Court of Austria"--called on Miss Assing to try and borrow the book from Varnhagen. He does not possess it, so G. called on Vehse, and asked him to lend it to me. He was very much pleased to do so. Read the "Zueignung," the "Gedichte," and several of the ballads. Looked through Wraxall's "Memoirs." Read Macaulay's "History of England." Wrote article on Stahr. This writing and reading, combined with visiting, theatre-going, and opera-going, make a pretty full life for these eight months--a striking contrast to the coming months of complete social quietness in England. Both lives had their attractions, the superficial aspects of which may be summed up in a passage from the Journal, dated 13th March, 1855, on arrival at the Lord Warden Hotel, at Dover: English mutton and an English fire were likely to be appreciated by creatures who had had eight months of Germany, with its questionable meat and its stove-heated rooms. The taste and quietude of a first-rate English hotel were also in striking contrast with the heavy finery, the noise, and the indiscriminate smoking of German inns. But, after all, Germany is no bad place to live in; and the Germans, to counterbalance their want of taste and politeness, are at least free from the bigotry of exclusiveness of their more refined cousins. I even long to be among them again--to see Dresden and Munich and Nürnberg and the Rhine country. May the day soon come! _SUMMARY._ JULY, 1854, TO MARCH, 1855. Leaves London with Mr. Lewes for Antwerp--Rubens's pictures--Cologne--Dr. Brabant and Strauss--Weimar--Schöll--The Dichter Zimmer--Sauppe--Tiefurt--Ettersburg--Arthur Helps--Gabel-Bach and Kickel-hahn--Liszt--Wagner's operas--"Der Freischütz"--Schiller's house--Goethe's house--Gartenhaus--Ober Weimar--The Webicht--Marquis de Ferrière--Liszt anecdotes--Cornelius--Raff--Princess Wittgenstein--Liszt's playing--Scheffer's picture--Expenses at Weimar--Leave for Berlin--Meet Varnhagen--Thiergarten--Acquaintances in Berlin--Fräulein Solmar--Professor Gruppe--Epic of Firdusi--Waagen--Edward Magnus--Professor Stahr and Fanny Lewald--Rauch the sculptor--Kant's statue--Dessoir the actor--"Nathan der Weise"--Döring's acting--Johanna Wagner--Letter to Miss Hennell--"Fidelio"--Reading Stahr's "Torso"--Likeness of Schiller--Vivier--Roger and Arabella Goddard--The Rosse-bändiger--Pictures--Cold in Berlin--View of Schloss from bridge--Leave Berlin for England--Books read--Article written on "Madame de Sablé"--Translation of Spinoza's "Ethics"--Article on Vehse's "Court of Austria"--Article on Stahr. FOOTNOTES: [45] A wretched forehead. [46] First line of Schiller's "Song of the Bell." [47] "Gentlemen, do you know the story of the man who railed at the sun because it would not light his cigar?" [48] Goose-neck. CHAPTER VII. [Sidenote: Journal, Mch. 1855.] _March 14._--Took lodgings at 1 Sydney Place, Dover. _March 15._--A lovely day. As I walked up the Castle hill this afternoon the town, with its background of softly rounded hills shrouded in sleepy haze, its little lines of water looking golden in the sun, made a charming picture. I have written the preface to the Third Book of "Ethics," read Scherr, and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." _March 16._--I read Shakespeare's "Passionate Pilgrim" at breakfast, and found a sonnet in which he expresses admiration of Spenser (Sonnet viii.): "Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch Upon the lute doth ravish human sense; Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such As, passing all conceit, needs no defence."[49] I must send word of this to G., who has written in his "Goethe" that Shakespeare has left no line in praise of a contemporary. I could not resist the temptation of walking out before I sat down to work. Came in at half-past ten, and translated Spinoza till nearly one. Walked out again till two. After dinner read "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and some of the "Sonnets." That play disgusted me more than ever in the final scene, where Valentine, on Proteus's mere begging pardon, when he has no longer any hope of gaining his ends, says: "All that was mine in Sylvia, I give thee!" Silvia standing by. Walked up the Castle hill again, and came in at six. Read Scherr, and found an important hint that I have made a mistake in a sentence of my article on "Austria" about the death of Franz von Sickingen. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Mch. 1855.] I dare say you will be surprised to see that I write from Dover. We left Berlin on the 11th. I have taken lodgings here for a little while, until Mr. Lewes has concluded some arrangements in London; and, with the aid of lovely weather, am even enjoying my solitude, though I don't mind how soon it ends. News of you all at Rosehill--how health and business and all other things are faring--would be very welcome to me, if you can find time for a little note of homely details. I am well and calmly happy--feeling much stronger and clearer in mind for the last eight months of new experience. We were sorry to leave our quiet rooms and agreeable friends in Berlin, though the place itself is certainly ugly, and _am Ende_ must become terribly wearisome for those who have not a vocation there. We went again and again to the new museum to look at the casts of the Parthenon Sculptures, and registered a vow that we would go to feast on the sight of the originals the first day we could spare in London. I had never cast more than a fleeting look on them before, but now I can in some degree understand the effect they produced on their first discovery. [Sidenote: Journal, 1855.] _March 25._--A note from Mr. Chapman, in which he asks me to undertake part of the Contemporary Literature for the _Westminster Review_. _April 18._--Came to town, to lodgings in Bayswater. _April 23._--Fixed on lodgings at East Sheen. _April 25._--Went to the British Museum. _April 28._--Finished article on "Weimar," for _Fraser_. During this month George Eliot was finishing the translating and revising of Spinoza's "Ethics," and was still reading Scherr's book, Schrader's "German Mythology"--a poor book--"The Tempest," "Macbeth," "Niebelungenlied," "Romeo and Juliet," article on "Dryden" in the _Westminster_, "Reineke Fuchs," "Genesis of Science," Gibbon, "Henry V.," "Henry VIII.," first, second, and third parts of "Henry VI.," "Richard II." _May 2._--Came to East Sheen, and settled in our lodgings. _May 28._--Sent Belles-lettres section to _Westminster Review_. During May several articles were written for the _Leader_. _June 13._--Began Part IV. of Spinoza's "Ethics." Began also to read Cumming, for article in the _Westminster_. We are reading in the evenings now Sydney Smith's letters, Boswell, Whewell's "History of Inductive Sciences," "The Odyssey," and occasionally Heine's "Reisebilder." I began the second book of the "Iliad," in Greek, this morning. _June 21._--Finished article on Brougham's "Lives of Men of Letters." _June 23._--Read "Lucrezia Floriani." We are reading White's "History of Selborne" in the evening, with Boswell and the "Odyssey." [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d June, 1855.] I have good hope that you will be deeply interested in the "Life of Goethe." It is a book full of feeling, as well as of thought and information, and I even think will make you love Goethe as well as admire him. Eckermann's is a wonderful book, but only represents Goethe at eighty. We were fortunate enough to be in time to see poor Eckermann before his _total_ death. His mind was already half gone, but the fine brow and eyes harmonized entirely with the interest we had previously felt in him. We saw him in a small lodging, surrounded by singing birds, and tended by his son--an intelligent youth of sixteen, who showed some talent in drawing. I have written a castigation of Brougham for the _Leader_, and shall be glad if your sympathy goes along with it. Varnhagen has written "Denkwurdigkeiten," and all sorts of literature, and is, or, rather was, the husband of _Rahel_, the greatest of German women. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st July, 1855.] It was surely you who wrote the notice of the _Westminster_ in the _Herald_ (Coventry) which we received this morning. I am very much pleased with your appreciation of Mr. Lewes's article. You hardly do justice to Froude's article on "Spinoza." I don't at all agree with Froude's own views, but I think his account of Spinoza's doctrines admirable. Mr. Lewes is still sadly ailing--tormented with tooth and face ache. This is a terrible trial to us poor scribblers, to whom health is money, as well as all other things worth having. I have just been reading that Milton suffered from indigestion--quite an affecting fact to me. I send you a letter which I have had from Barbara Smith. I think you will like to see such a manifestation of her strong, noble nature. On 1st August, 1855, Mr. Lewes went down to Ramsgate for change, taking his three boys with him for a week's holiday. Meantime George Eliot was continuing her article-writing, and in this week wrote an article for the _Leader_, having written one for the same journal three weeks before. On 22d August she wrote another article for the _Leader_, and on the 24th she finished the one on Cumming for the _Westminster_. Mr. C. Lewes tells me that he remembers it was after reading this article that his father was prompted to say to George Eliot, while walking one day with her in Richmond Park, that it convinced him of the true genius in her writing. Mr. Lewes was not only an accomplished and practised literary critic, but he was also gifted with the inborn insight accompanying a fine artistic temperament, which gave unusual weight to his judgment. Up to this time he had not been quite sure of anything beyond great talent in her productions. The first three weeks in September were again busily occupied in article-writing. She contributed three papers to the _Leader_, as well as the Belles-lettres section for the October number of the _Westminster_. On the 19th September they left East Sheen, and after spending a couple of weeks at Worthing for a sea change, they took rooms at 8 Park Shot, Richmond, which remained their home for more than three years. Here some of George Eliot's most memorable literary work was accomplished. Both she and Mr. Lewes were now working very hard for what would bring immediate profit, as they had to support not only themselves but his children and their mother. They had only one sitting-room between them; and I remember, in a walk on St. George's Hill, near Weybridge, in 1871, she told me that the scratching of another pen used to affect her nerves to such an extent that it nearly drove her wild. On the 9th October she finished an article on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft, and on the 12th October one on Carlyle for the _Leader_, and began an article on Heine for the January number of the _Westminster_. In October there are the following letters to the Brays: [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, Monday, Oct. (?) 1855.] Since you have found out the "Cumming," I write by to-day's post just to say that it _is_ mine, but also to beg that you will not mention it as such to any one likely to transmit the information to London, as we are keeping the authorship a secret. The article appears to have produced a strong impression, and that impression would be a little counteracted if the author were known to be a _woman_. I have had a letter addressed "to the author of Article No. 4," begging me to print it separately "for the good of mankind in general!" It is so kind of you to rejoice in anything I do at all well. I am dreadfully busy again, for I am going to write an article for the _Westminster Review_ again, besides my other work. We enjoy our new lodgings very much--everything is the pink of order and cleanliness. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Oct. 1855.] Why you should object to Herbert Spencer speaking of Sir William Hamilton's contributions to a theory of perception as "valuable" I am unable to conceive. Sir William Hamilton has been of service to him as well as to others; and instead of repressing acknowledgments of merit in others, I should like them to be more freely given. I see no dignity, or anything else that is good, in ignoring one's fellow-beings. Herbert Spencer's views, like every other man's views, could not have existed without the substratum laid by his predecessors. But perhaps you mean something that I fail to perceive. Your bit of theology is very fine. Here is a delicious Hibernicism in return. In a treatise on consumption, sent yesterday, the writer says: "There is now hardly any _difference_ on this subject--at least _I_ feel none." Our life has no incidents except such as take place in our own brains, and the occasional arrival of a longer letter than usual. Yours are always read aloud and enjoyed. Nevertheless our life is intensely occupied, and the days are far too short. We are reading Gall's "Anatomie et Physiologie du Cerveau," and Carpenter's "Comparative Physiology," aloud in the evenings; and I am trying to fix some knowledge about plexuses and ganglia in my soft brain, which generally only serves me to remember that there is something I ought to remember, and to regret that I did not put the something down in my note-book. For "Live and learn," we should sometimes read "Live and grow stupid." [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st Nov. 1855.] You will receive by rail to-morrow a copy of the "Life and Works of Goethe" (published on 1st November), which I hope you will accept as a keepsake from me. I should have been glad to send it you earlier, but as Mr. Lewes has sold the copyright of the first edition, he has only a small number of copies at his disposal, and so I doubted whether I ought to ask for one. I think you will find much to interest you in the book. I can't tell you how I value it, as the best product of a mind which I have every day more reason to admire and love. We have had much gratification in the expression of individual opinion. The press is very favorable, but the notices are for the most part too idiotic to give us much pleasure, except in a pecuniary point of view. I am going out to-day, for the first time for nearly a fortnight. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Nov. 1855.] I have just finished a long article on Heine for the _Westminster Review_, which none of you will like. _En revanche_, Mr. Lewes has written one on "Lions and Lion Hunters," which you will find amusing. On the 12th December the Belles-lettres section for the January number of the _Westminster Review_ was finished and sent off, and the next entry in the Journal is dated: [Sidenote: Journal, 1855.] _Dec. 24, 1855._--For the last ten days I have done little, owing to headache and other ailments. Began the "Antigone," read Von Bohlen on "Genesis," and Swedenborg. Mr. Chapman wants me to write an article on "Missions and Missionaries," for the April number of the _Westminster_, but I think I shall not have it ready till the July number. In the afternoon I set out on my journey to see my sister, and arrived at her house about eight o'clock, finding her and her children well. _Dec. 29, 1855._--Returned to Richmond. G. away at Vernon Hill (Arthur Helps's), having gone thither on Wednesday. _Dec. 30, 1855._--Read the "Shaving of Shagpat" (George Meredith's). _Dec. 31, 1855._--Wrote a review of "Shagpat." [Sidenote: Journal, 1856.] _Jan. 1, 1856._--Read Kingsley's "Greek Heroes," and began a review of Von Bohlen. _Jan. 5, 1856._--G. came home. _Jan. 6, 1856._--Began to revise Book IV. of Spinoza's "Ethics," and continued this work through the week, being able to work but slowly. Finished Kahnis's "History of German Protestantism." _Jan. 16, 1856._--Received a charming letter from Barbara Smith, with a petition to Parliament that women may have a right to their earnings. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Jan. 1856.] I believe there have been at least a thousand copies of the "Goethe" sold, which is a wonderfully good sale in less than three months for a thirty-shilling book. We have a charming collection of letters, both from remarkable acquaintances and remarkable non-acquaintances, expressing enthusiastic delight in the book--letters all the more delightful because they are quite spontaneous, and spring from a generous wish to let the author know how highly the writers value his work. If you want some idle reading, get the "Shaving of Shagpat," which, I think, you will say deserves all the praise I gave it. [Sidenote: Journal, 1856.] _Feb. 19, 1856._--Since the 6th January I have been occupied with Spinoza; and, except a review of Griswold's "American Poets," have done nothing else but translate the Fifth Book of the "Ethics," and revise the whole of my translation from the beginning. This evening I have finished my revision. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Feb. 1856.] I was so glad to have a little news of you. I should like to hear much oftener, but our days are so accurately parcelled out among regular occupations that I rarely manage to do anything not included in the programme; and, without reading Mrs. Barbauld on the "Inconsistency of Human Expectations," I know that receiving letters is inconsistent with not writing any. Have you seen any numbers of the _Saturday Review_, a new journal, on which "all the talents" are engaged? It is not properly a newspaper, but--what its title expresses--a political and literary review. We are delighting ourselves with Ruskin's third volume, which contains some of the finest writing I have read for a long time (among recent books). I read it aloud for an hour or so after dinner; then we jump to the old dramatists, when Mr. Lewes reads to me as long as his voice will hold out, and after this we wind up the evening with Rymer Jones's "Animal Kingdom," by which I get a confused knowledge of branchiæ, and such things--perhaps, on the whole, a little preferable to total ignorance. These are our _noctes_--without _cenæ_ for the present--occasionally diversified by very dramatic singing of Figaro, etc., which, I think, must alarm "that good man, the clergyman," who sits below us. We have been half laughing, half indignant, over Alison's new volume of his "History of Europe," in which he undertakes to give an account of German literature. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Feb. 1856.] What you tell me of Harriet Martineau interests me very much. I feel for her terrible bodily suffering, and think of her with deep respect and admiration. Whatever may have been her mistakes and weaknesses, the great and good things she has done far outweigh them; and I should be grieved if anything in her memoir should cast a momentary shadow over the agreeable image of her that the world will ultimately keep in its memory. I wish less of our piety were spent on imaginary perfect goodness, and more given to real _im_perfect goodness. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1856.] I am very happy for you to keep the sheets, and to get signatures (for the Women's Petition that they should have legal right to their own earnings). Miss Barbara Smith writes that she must have them returned to her before the 1st of March. I am glad you have taken up the cause, for I do think that, with proper provisos and safeguards, the proposed law would help to raise the position and character of women. It is one round of a long ladder stretching far beyond our lives. During March, George Eliot wrote only the Belles-lettres section for the April number of the _Westminster_, having resigned the subject of "Missions" to Harriet Martineau. She also wrote two articles for the _Saturday Review_, and two for the _Leader_. And there are the following letters in March to the Brays, in which allusion is made to their leaving the old home at Rosehill, owing to the unsatisfactory state of the Coventry business. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 26th Mch. 1856.] We are flourishing in every way except in health. Mr. Lewes's head is still infirm, but he manages, nevertheless, to do twice as much work as other people. I am always a croaker, you know, but my ailments are of a small kind, their chief symptoms being a muddled brain; and, as my pen is not of the true literary order which will run along without the help of brains, I don't get through so much work as I should like. By the way, when the Spinoza comes out, be so good as not to mention my name in connection with it. I particularly wish not to be known as the translator of the "Ethics," for reasons which it would be "too tedious to mention." You don't know what a severely practical person I am become, and what a sharp eye I have to the main chance. I keep the purse, and dole out sovereigns with all the pangs of a miser. In fact, if you were to feel my bump of acquisitiveness, I dare say you would find it in a state of inflammation, like the "veneration" of that clergyman to whom Mr. Donovan said, "Sir, you have recently been engaged in prayer." I hope you recognized your own wit about the one-eyed dissenters, which was quoted in the _Leader_ some time ago. You always said no one did so much justice to your jokes as I did. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st Mch. 1856.] My mind is more rebellious than yours, and I can't help being saddened by the idea of you and Cara being in any other home than the dear old one. But I know that your cheerful courage is yet stronger in deed than in word. Will not business or pleasure bring you to London soon, and will you not come to see us? We can give you a bed--not a sumptuous one, but one which you will perhaps not find intolerable for a night. I know the trip up the Thames is charming, and we should like to do it with you, but I don't think we can manage it this summer. We are going to send or take the boys (Mr. Lewes's sons) to school in Germany at midsummer, and are at present uncertain about our arrangements. If we can _send_ them, we shall go to the coast as soon as the warm weather comes, and remain there for three months. But our plans are not yet crystallized. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 1st April, 1856.] After I wrote you yesterday morning we had a letter from Germany which has made Mr. Lewes incline to defer sending the boys thither till next year. But he is anxious to remove them from their present school: and, in the course of our consultations on the subject, we thought of Mr. John Sibree as a person in whom we should feel confidence as to the moral influence he would exercise as a tutor. The risk of placing children with entire strangers is terrible. So I tease you with another letter to ask you if Mr. J. Sibree continues in the same position as formerly, and if he is still anxious to obtain pupils. What a delicious day! We are going to have a holiday at the Zoological Gardens. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th April, 1856.] Thank you for taking the trouble to write me a full account of matters so interesting to me. I hope you will be able thoroughly to enjoy this last precious summer on the pretty lawn, where it is one of my pleasures on sunshiny days to think of you all strolling about or seated on the Bearskin. We are very thankful for the Hofwyl circular, and have almost decided to send the two eldest boys there. But it is necessary to weigh all things carefully before coming to a determination; as, not being either swindlers or philanthropists, we don't like to incur obligations which there is not a reasonable certainty of our being able to meet. I am much obliged to Mr. Bray, too, for sending Mr. John Sibree's letter. Mr. Lewes had already received an answer from him declining his proposition, but we were interested to read his very characteristic letter to his sister, which proved to Mr. Lewes that I had given him a correct description of the man. The next few weeks are, perhaps, the most signally important and interesting of all in George Eliot's development. There are unmistakable signs of the rising of the sap of creative production. In the middle of April Mr. Herbert Spencer, who had been abroad for some time, returned to England, and dined with them at Park Shot on the 15th, and on the 18th they went with him to Sydenham. On the 22d April George Eliot began her article on Young; and on the 29th she began to read Riehl's book,[50] on which she was to write another article for the _Westminster_. On the 8th of May they set off for Ilfracombe, and we have the following "recollections" of that place: [Sidenote: Ilfracombe, Recollections, 1856.] It was a cold, unfriendly day--the 8th of May--on which we set out for Ilfracombe with our hamper of glass jars, which we meant for our sea-side vivarium. We had to get down at Windsor, and were not sorry that the interval was long enough to let us walk round the castle, which I had never seen before except from a distance. The famous "slopes," the avenues in the park, and the distant landscape, looked very lovely in the fresh and delicate greens of spring; and the castle is surely the most delightful royal residence in the world. We took our places from Windsor all the way to Exeter; and at Bristol, where we had to wait three hours, the misery of my terrible headache was mitigated by the interest we felt in seeing the grand old Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, forever associated with the memory of Chatterton. "It stands, the maestrie of a human hand, The pride of Bristowe and the western land." It was cheering, the next morning after our arrival at Ilfracombe, to get up with a head rather less aching, and to walk up and down the little garden of Runnymede Villa in the bright sunshine. I had a great deal of work before me--the writing of an article on Riehl's book, which I had not half read, as well as the article on Belles-lettres; but my head was still dizzy, and it seemed impossible to sit down to writing at once in these new scenes, so we determined to spend the day in explorations. From our windows we had a view of the higher part of the town, and generally it looked uninteresting enough; but what is it that light cannot transfigure into beauty? One evening, after a shower, as the sun was setting over the sea behind us, some peculiar arrangement of clouds threw a delicious evening light on the irregular cluster of houses, and merged the ugliness of their forms in an exquisite flood of color--as a stupid person is made glorious by a noble deed. A perfect rainbow arched over the picture. From one end of the Capstone we have an admirable bit for a picture. In the background rises old Helesborough, jutting out far into the sea--rugged and rocky as it fronts the waves, green and accessible landward; in front of this stands Lantern Hill, a picturesque mass of green and gray, surmounted by an old bit of building that looks as if it were the habitation of some mollusk that had secreted its shell from the material of the rock; and quite in the foreground, contrasting finely in color with the rest, are some lower perpendicular rocks of dark-brown tints, patched here and there with vivid green. In hilly districts, where houses and clusters of houses look so tiny against the huge limbs of mother earth, one cannot help thinking of man as a parasitic animal--an epizoan making his abode in the skin of the planetary organism. In a flat country, a house or a town looks imposing; there is nothing to rival it in height, and we may imagine the earth a mere pedestal for us. But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and, still more, a number of houses, looking like a few barnacles, clustered on the side of a great rock, we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing, house-appropriating, and shell-secreting animals. The difference between a man with his house and a mollusk with its shell lies in the number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact of individual existence and the completion of the building. Whatever other advantages we may have over mollusks and insects in our habitations, it is clear that their architecture has the advantage of ours in beauty--at least, considered as the architecture of the species. Look at man in the light of a shell-fish, and it must be admitted that his shell is generally ugly; and it is only after a great many more "steps or phenomena" that he secretes here and there a wonderful shell in the shape of a temple or a palace. On our first zoophyte hunt it was characteristic of the wide difference there is between having eyes and _seeing_, that in this region of sea-anemones, where the Mesembryanthemum especially is as plenty as blackberries, we climbed about for two hours without seeing one anemone, and went in again with scarcely anything but a few stones and weeds to put into our jars. On our next hunt, however, after we had been out some time, G. exclaimed, "I see an anemone!" and we were immensely excited by the discovery of this little red Mesembryanthemum, which we afterwards disdained to gather, as much as if it had been a nettle. It was a _crescendo_ of delight when we found a "strawberry," and a _fortissimo_ when I, for the first time, saw the pale, fawn-colored tentacles of an _Anthea cereus_ viciously waving like little serpents in a low-tide pool. But not a polype for a long, long while could even G. detect, after all his reading; so necessary is it for the eye to be educated by objects as well as ideas. Every day I gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience, either through G.'s calling on me to look through the microscope, or from hunting on the rocks; and this in spite of my preoccupation with my article, which I worked at considerably _à contre-coeur_, despairing of it ever being worth anything. When at last, by the 17th of June, both my articles were despatched, I felt delightfully at liberty, and determined to pay some attention to seaweeds, which I had never seen in such beauty as at Ilfracombe. For hitherto I had been chiefly on chalky and sandy shores, where there were no rock-pools to show off the lovely colors and forms of the algæ. There are tide-pools to be seen almost at every other step on the shore at Ilfracombe; and I shall never forget their appearance when we first arrived there. The _Corallina officinalis_ was then in its greatest perfection, and with its purple-pink fronds threw into relief the dark olive fronds of the Laminariæ on one side, and the vivid green of the Ulva and Enteromorpha on the other. After we had been there a few weeks the Corallina was faded; and I noticed the _Mesagloia vermicularis_ and the _M. virescens_, which look very lovely in the water, from the white cilia, which make the most delicate fringe to their yellow-brown, whip-like fronds, and some of the common Polysiphoniæ. These tide-pools made me quite in love with seaweeds, so I took up Landsborough's book and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history. Our zoological expeditions alternated with delicious inland walks. I think the country looked its best when we arrived. It was just that moment in spring when the leaves are in full leaf, but still keep their delicate varieties of coloring, and that _transparency_ which belongs only to this season. And the furze was in all its golden glory! It was almost like the fading away of the evening red, when the furze blossoms died off from the hills, and the only contrast left was that of the marly soil with the green crops and woods. The primroses were the contemporaries of the furze, and sprinkled the sides of the hills with their pale stars almost as plentifully as daisies or buttercups elsewhere. But the great charm of all Devonshire lanes is the springs that you detect gurgling in shady recesses, covered with liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other broad-leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture. We seemed to make less of our evenings at Ilfracombe than we have ever done elsewhere. We used often to be tired with our hunting or walking; and we were reading books which did not make us take them up very eagerly--Gosse's "Rambles on the Devonshire Coast," for example; Trench's "Calderon," and other volumes, taken up in a desultory way. One bit of reading we had there, however, which interested me deeply. It was Masson's "Life of Chatterton," which happily linked itself with the impressions I had received from the sight of the old church at Bristol. Mr. Tugwell's (the curate) acquaintance was a real acquisition to us, not only because he was a companion and helper in zoological pursuits, but because to know him was to know of another sweet nature in the world. It is always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human being; it refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks. One Sunday evening we walked up to his pretty house to carry back some proofs of his, and he induced us to go in and have coffee with him. He played on his harmonium, and we chatted pleasantly. The last evening of our stay at Ilfracombe he came to see us in Mrs. Webster's drawing-room, and we had music till nearly eleven o'clock--a pleasant recollection! We only twice took the walk beyond Watermouth towards Berrynarbor. The road lies through what are called the "Meadows," which look like a magnificent park. A stream, fringed with wild-flowers and willows, runs along the valley, two or three yards from the side of the road. This stream is clear as crystal, and about every twenty yards it falls over a little artificial precipice of stones. The long grass was waving in all the glory of June, before the mower has come to make it suffer a "love change" from beauties into sweet odors; and the slopes on each side of us were crowned or clothed with fine trees. The last time we went through these meadows was on our last day at Ilfracombe. Such sunlight and such deep peace on the hills and by the stream! Coming back, we rested on a gate under the trees, and a blind man came up to rest also. He told us, in his slow way, what a fine, "healthy spot" this was--yes, a very healthy spot--a healthy spot. And then we went on our way, and saw his face no more. I have talked of the Ilfracombe lanes without describing them, for to describe them one ought to know the names of all the lovely wild-flowers that cluster on their banks. Almost every yard of these banks is a "Hunt" picture--a delicious crowding of mosses and delicate trefoil and wild strawberries and ferns great and small. But the crowning beauty of the lanes is the springs that gush out in little recesses by the side of the road--recesses glossy with liverwort and feathery with fern. Sometimes you have the spring when it has grown into a brook, either rushing down a miniature cataract by the lane-side, or flowing gently as a "braided streamlet" across your path. I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it. We have then a sign which at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others. We ascended the Tors only twice; for a tax of 3_d._ per head was demanded on this luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very frequently: yet the view is perhaps the very finest to be had at Ilfracombe. Bay behind bay, fringed with foam, and promontory behind promontory, each with its peculiar shades of purple light--the sweep of the Welsh coast faintly visible in the distance, and the endless expanse of sea, flecked with ships, stretching on our left. [Sidenote: Ilfracombe, Recollections, June, 1856.] One evening we went down to the shore through the "Tunnels" to see the sunset. Standing in the "Ladies' Cove," we had before us the sharp fragments of rock jutting out of the waves and standing black against the orange and crimson sky. How lovely to look into that brilliant distance and see the ship on the horizon seeming to sail away from the cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have always that sort of feeling when I look at sunset; it always seems to me that there in the West lies a land of light and warmth and love. On the 26th of June we said good-bye to Ilfracombe. The sight of the cockle-women at Swansea, where we had to wait, would make a fine subject for a painter. One of them was the grandest woman I ever saw--six feet high, carrying herself like a Greek warrior, and treading the earth with unconscious majesty. Her face was weather-beaten and wizened, but her eyes were bright and piercing, and the lines of her face, with its high cheek-bones, strong and characteristic. The guard at the railway station told us that one of the porters had been insolent the other day to a cockle-woman, and that she immediately pitched him off the platform into the road below! [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 6th June, 1856.] When we arrived here I had not even read a great book on which I had engaged to write a long article by the beginning of this month; so that between work and zoology and bodily ailments my time has been full to overflowing. We are enchanted with Ilfracombe. I really think it is the loveliest sea-place I ever saw, from the combination of fine rocky coast with exquisite inland scenery. But it would not do for any one who can't climb rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the peculiarity of this country is, that it is all hill and no valley. You have no sooner got to the foot of one hill than you begin to mount another. You would laugh to see our room decked with yellow pie-dishes, a _foot-pan_, glass jars and phials, all full of zoophytes, or mollusks, or anellides--and, still more, to see the eager interest with which we rush to our "preserves" in the morning to see if there has been any mortality among them in the night. We have made the acquaintance of a charming little zoological curate here, who is a delightful companion on expeditions, and is most good-natured in lending and giving apparatus and "critturs" of all sorts. Mr. Pigott[51] is coming here with his yacht at the end of June, and we hope then to go to Clovelly--Kingsley's Clovelly--and perhaps other places on the coast that we can't reach on foot. After this we mean to migrate to Tenby, for the sake of making acquaintance with its mollusks and medusæ. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 8th June, 1856.] I received your kind letter only yesterday, but I write a few words in answer at once, lest, as it so often happens, delay should beget delay. It is never too late to write generous words, and although circumstances are not likely to allow of our acquiring a more intimate knowledge of each other from personal intercourse, it will always be a pleasant thought to me that you have remembered me kindly, and interpreted me nobly. You are one of the minority who know how to "use their imagination in the service of charity." I have suffered so much from misunderstanding created by letters, even to old friends, that I never write on private personal matters, unless it be a rigorous duty or necessity to do so. Some little phrase or allusion is misinterpreted, and on this false basis a great fabric of misconception is reared, which even explanatory conversations will not remove. Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly on under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th June, 1856.] Yes, indeed, I do remember old Tenby days, and had set my heart on being in the very same house again; but, alas! it had just been let. It is immensely smartened up, like the place generally, since those old times, and is proportionately less desirable for quiet people who have no flounces and do not subscribe to new churches. Tenby looks insignificant in picturesqueness after Ilfracombe; but the two objects that drew us hither, zoology and health, will flourish none the worse for the absence of tall precipices and many-tinted rocks. The air is delicious--soft, but not sultry--and the sands and bathing such as are to be found nowhere else. St. Catherine's Rock, with its caverns, is our paradise. We go there with baskets, hammers and chisels, and jars and phials, and come home laden with spoils. Altogether, we are contented to have been driven away from Ilfracombe by the cold wind, since a new place is new experience, and Mr. Lewes has never been here before. To me there is the additional pleasure--half melancholy--of recalling all the old impressions and comparing them with the new. I understand your wish to have as much of Rosehill as possible this year, and I am so glad that you will associate a visit from Herbert Spencer with this last summer. I suppose he is with you now. If so, give him my very evil regards, and tell him that because he has not written to us we will diligently _not_ tell him a great many things he would have liked to know. We have a project of going into St. Catherine's caverns with lanterns, some night when the tide is low, about eleven, for the sake of seeing the zoophytes preparing for their midnight revels. The Actiniæ, like other belles, put on their best faces on such occasions. Two things we have lost by leaving Ilfracombe for which we have no compensation--the little zoological curate, Mr. Tugwell, who is really one of the best specimens of the clergyman species I have seen; and the pleasure of having Miss Barbara Smith there for a week, sketching the rocks, and putting our love of them into the tangible form of a picture. We are looking out now for Mr. Pigott in his yacht; and his amiable face will make an agreeable variety on the sands. I thought "Walden"[52] (you mean "Life in the Woods," don't you?) a charming book, from its freshness and sincerity as well as for its bits of description. It is pleasant to think that Harriet Martineau can make so much of her last days. Her energy and her habit of useful work are admirable. During the stay at Ilfracombe and Tenby not much literary work was done, except the articles on Young and on Riehl's book. There was a notice of Masson's Essays and the Belles-lettres section for the July number of the _Westminster_, and a review for the _Leader_. There is mention, too, of the reading of Beaumarchais' "Memoirs," Milne Edwards's "Zoology," Harvey's sea-side book, and "Coriolanus," and then comes this significant sentence in her Journal: [Sidenote: Journal, 1856.] _July 20, 1856._--The fortnight has slipped away without my being able to show much result for it. I have written a review of the "Lover's Seat," and jotted down some recollections of Ilfracombe; besides these trifles, and the introduction to an article already written, I have done no _visible_ work. But I have absorbed many ideas and much bodily strength; indeed, I do not remember ever feeling so strong in mind and body as I feel at this moment. On Saturday, the 12th, Barbara Smith arrived, and stayed here till Wednesday morning. We enjoyed her society very much, but were deeply touched to see that three years had made her so much older and sadder. Her activity for great objects is admirable; and contact with her is a fresh inspiration to work while it is day. We have now taken up Quatrefages again. The "Memoirs" of Beaumarchais yielded me little fruit. Mr. Chapman invites me to contribute to the _Westminster_ for this quarter. I am anxious to begin my fiction-writing, and so am not inclined to undertake an article that will give me much trouble, but, at all events, I will finish my article on Young. _July 21._--We had a delightful walk on the north sands, and hunted with success. A sunny, happy day. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th July, 1856.] Glad to hear at last some news of your Essay--hoping to hear more and better by and by. I didn't like to think that your labor would be thrown away, except so far as it must do good to yourself by clearing up your ideas. Not that your ideas were muddy, but the last degree of clearness can only come by writing. Mr. Pigott is with us just now, and we are meditating a nocturnal visit to St. Catherine's caves with him. Our visit to Tenby has been very useful zoologically, but we are not otherwise greatly in love with the place. It seems tame and vulgar after Ilfracombe. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 6th Aug. 1856.] Thank you for your kind note,[53] so like yourself. Such things encourage me, and help me to do better. I never think what I write is good for anything till other people tell me so, and even then it always seems to me as if I should never write anything _else_ worth reading. Ah, how much good we may do each other by a few friendly words, and the opportunities for them are so much more frequent than for friendly deeds! We want people to feel with us more than to act for us. Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards to you. He, too, was very pleased with your letter, for he cares more about getting approbation for me than for himself. _He_ can do very well without it. On the 8th August they left Tenby, and on 9th arrived at Richmond "with terrible headache, but enjoyed the sense of being 'at home' again." On the 18th, "walked in Kew Park, and talked with G. of my novel. Finished 'César Birotteau' aloud." On the 25th August Mr. Lewes set off for Hofwyl, near Berne, taking his two eldest boys, Charles and Thornton, to place them at school there. He returned on 4th September, and in his absence George Eliot had been busy with her article on "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." This was finished on the 12th September, and on the 19th she sent off the Belles-lettres section for the October number of the _Westminster_. We have now arrived at the period of the new birth, and, fortunately, in the following memorandum, we have George Eliot's own words as to how it came about: [Sidenote: How I came to write fiction.] September, 1856, made a new era in my life, for it was then I began to write fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel; and my shadowy conception of what the novel was to be, varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to another. But I never went further towards the actual writing of the novel than an introductory chapter describing a Staffordshire village and the life of the neighboring farm-houses; and as the years passed on I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life. I always thought I was deficient in dramatic power, both of construction and dialogue, but I felt I should be at my ease in the descriptive parts of a novel. My "introductory chapter" was pure description, though there were good materials in it for dramatic presentation. It happened to be among the papers I had with me in Germany, and one evening at Berlin something led me to read it to George. He was struck with it as a bit of concrete description, and it suggested to him the possibility of my being able to write a novel, though he distrusted--indeed, disbelieved in--my possession of any dramatic power. Still, he began to think that I might as well try some time what I could do in fiction, and by and by, when we came back to England, and I had greater success than he ever expected in other kinds of writing, his impression that it was worth while to see how far my mental power would go towards the production of a novel, was strengthened. He began to say very positively, "You must try and write a story," and when we were at Tenby he urged me to begin at once. I deferred it, however, after my usual fashion with work that does not present itself as an absolute duty. But one morning, as I was thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story, of which the title was "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton." I was soon wide awake again and told G. He said, "Oh, what a capital title!" and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story. George used to say, "It may be a failure--it may be that you are unable to write fiction. Or, perhaps, it may be just good enough to warrant your trying again." Again, "You may write a _chef-d'oeuvre_ at once--there's no telling." But his prevalent impression was, that though I could hardly write a _poor_ novel, my effort would want the highest quality of fiction--dramatic presentation. He used to say, "You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the production of a novel. It is worth while for you to try the experiment." We determined that if my story turned out good enough we would send it to Blackwood; but G. thought the more probable result was that I should have to lay it aside and try again. But when we returned to Richmond I had to write my article on "Silly Novels," and my review of Contemporary Literature for the _Westminster_, so that I did not begin my story till September 22. After I had begun it, as we were walking in the park, I mentioned to G. that I had thought of the plan of writing a series of stories, containing sketches drawn from my own observation of the clergy, and calling them "Scenes from Clerical Life," opening with "Amos Barton." He at once accepted the notion as a good one--fresh and striking; and about a week afterwards, when I read him the first part of "Amos," he had no longer any doubt about my ability to carry out the plan. The scene at Cross Farm, he said, satisfied him that I had the very element he had been doubtful about--it was clear I could write good dialogue. There still remained the question whether I could command any pathos; and that was to be decided by the mode in which I treated Milly's death. One night G. went to town on purpose to leave me a quiet evening for writing it. I wrote the chapter from the news brought by the shepherd to Mrs. Hackit, to the moment when Amos is dragged from the bedside, and I read it to G. when he came home. We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, "I think your pathos is better than your fun." The story of the "Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton" was begun on 22d September and finished on the 5th November, and I subjoin the opening correspondence between Mr. Lewes and Mr. John Blackwood, to exhibit the first effect it produced: [Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes, to John Blackwood, 6th Nov. 1856.] "I trouble you with a MS. of 'Sketches of Clerical Life' which was submitted to me by a friend who desired my good offices with you. It goes by this post. I confess that before reading the MS. I had considerable doubts of my friend's powers as a writer of fiction; but, after reading it, these doubts were changed into very high admiration. I don't know what you will think of the story, but, according to my judgment, such humor, pathos, vivid presentation, and nice observation have not been exhibited (in this style) since the 'Vicar of Wakefield;' and, in consequence of that opinion, I feel quite pleased in negotiating the matter with you. "This is what I am commissioned to say to you about the proposed series. It will consist of tales and sketches illustrative of the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago--but solely in its _human_, and not at all in its _theological_ aspects; the object being to do what has never yet been done in our literature, for we have had abundant religious stories, polemical and doctrinal, but since the 'Vicar' and Miss Austen, no stories representing the clergy like every other class, with the humors, sorrows, and troubles of other men. He begged me particularly to add, that--as the specimen sent will sufficiently prove--the tone throughout will be sympathetic, and not at all antagonistic. "Some of these, if not all, you may think suitable for 'Maga.' If any are sent of which you do not approve, or which you do not think sufficiently interesting, these he will reserve for the separate republication, and for this purpose he wishes to retain the copyright. Should you only print one or two, he will be well satisfied; and still better, if you should think well enough of the series to undertake the separate republication." [Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood, to G. H. Lewes, 12th Nov. 1856.] "I am happy to say that I think your friend's reminiscences of Clerical Life will do. If there is any more of the series written I should like to see it, as, until I saw more, I could not make any decided proposition for the publication of the tales, in whole or in part, in the Magazine. This first specimen, 'Amos Barton,' is unquestionably very pleasant reading. Perhaps the author falls into the error of trying too much to explain the characters of his actors by description instead of allowing them to evolve in the action of the story; but the descriptions are very humorous and good. The death of Milly is powerfully done, and affected me much. I am not sure whether he does not spoil it a little by specifying so minutely the different children and their names. The wind-up is perhaps the lamest part of the story; and there, too, I think the defect is caused by the specifications as to the fortunes of parties of whom the reader has no previous knowledge, and cannot, consequently, feel much interest. At first, I was afraid that in the amusing reminiscences of childhood in church there was a want of some softening touch, such as the remembrance of a father or mother lends, in after-years, to what was at the time considerable penance. "I hate anything of a sneer at real religious feeling as cordially as I despise anything like cant, and I should think this author is of the same way of thinking, although his clergymen, with one exception, are not very attractive specimens of the body. The revulsion of feeling towards poor Amos is capitally drawn, although the asinine stupidity of his conduct about the countess had disposed one to kick him. "I dare say I shall have a more decided opinion as to the merits of the story when I have looked at it again and thought over it; but in the meantime I am sure that there is a happy turn of expression throughout, also much humor and pathos. If the author is a new writer, I beg to congratulate him on being worthy of the honors of print and pay. I shall be very glad to hear from you or him soon." [Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes to John Blackwood, Saturday, Nov. 1856.] "I have communicated your letter to my clerical friend, who, though somewhat discouraged by it, has taken my advice, and will submit the second story to you when it is written. At present he has only written what he sent you. His avocations, he informs me, will prevent his setting to work for the next three weeks or so, but as soon as he is at liberty he will begin. "I rate the story much higher than you appear to do, from certain expressions in your note, though you too appreciate the humor and pathos and the happy turn of expression. It struck me as being fresher than any story I have read for a long while, and as exhibiting, in a high degree, that faculty which I find to be the rarest of all--viz., the dramatic ventriloquism. "At the same time I told him that I thoroughly understood your editorial caution in not accepting from an unknown hand a series on the strength of one specimen." [Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood to G. H. Lewes, 18th Nov. 1856.] "I was very far from intending that my letter should convey anything like disappointment to your friend. On the contrary, I thought the tale very good, and intended to convey as much. But I dare say I expressed myself coolly enough. Criticism would assume a much soberer tone were critics compelled _seriously to act_ whenever they expressed an opinion. Although not much given to hesitate about anything, I always think twice before I put the decisive mark 'In type for the Magazine' on any MS. from a stranger. Fancy the intense annoyance (to say nothing of more serious considerations) of publishing, month after month, a series about which the conviction gradually forces itself on you that you have made a total blunder. "I am sorry that the author has no more written, but if he cares much about a speedy appearance, I have so high an opinion of this first tale that I will waive my objections, and publish it without seeing more--not, of course, committing myself to go on with the other tales of the series unless I approved of them. I am very sanguine that I will approve, as, in addition to the other merits of 'Amos,' I agree with you that there is great freshness of style. If you think also that it would stimulate the author to go on with the other tales with more spirit, I will publish 'Amos' at once. He could divide into two parts. I am blocked up for December, but I could start him in January. "I am glad to hear that your friend is, as I supposed, a clergyman. Such a subject is best in clerical hands, and some of the pleasantest and least-prejudiced correspondents I have ever had are English clergymen. "I have not read 'Amos Barton' a second time, but the impression on my mind of the whole character, incidents, and feeling of the story is very distinct, which is an excellent sign." [Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes to John Blackwood, Saturday, Nov. 1856.] "Your letter has greatly restored the shaken confidence of my friend, who is unusually sensitive, and, unlike most writers, is more anxious about _excellence_ than about appearing in print--as his waiting so long before taking the venture proves. He is consequently afraid of failure, though not afraid of obscurity; and by failure he would understand that which I suspect most writers would be apt to consider as success--so high is his ambition. "I tell you this that you may understand the sort of shy, shrinking, ambitious nature you have to deal with. I tried to persuade him that you really _did_ appreciate his story, but were only hesitating about committing yourself to a series; and your last letter has proved me to have been right--although, as he never contemplated binding you to the publication of any portion of the series to which you might object, he could not at first see your position in its true light. "All is, however, clear now. He will be gratified if you publish 'Amos Barton' in January, as it will give him ample time to get the second story ready, so as to appear when 'Barton' is finished, should you wish it. He is anxious, however, that you should publish the general title of 'Scenes of Clerical Life;' and I think you may do this with perfect safety, since it is quite clear that the writer of 'Amos Barton' is capable of writing at least one more story suitable to 'Maga;' and two would suffice to justify the general title. "Let me not forget to add that when I referred to 'my clerical friend,' I meant to designate the writer of the clerical stories--not that he was a clericus. I am not at liberty to remove the veil of anonymity, even as regards social position. Be pleased, therefore, to keep the whole secret, and not even mention _my_ negotiation, or in any way lead guessers (should any one trouble himself with such a guess--_not_ very likely) to jump from me to my friend." On Christmas Day, 1856, "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" was begun, and during December and January the following are mentioned among the books read: The "Ajax" of Sophocles, Miss Martineau's "History of the Peace," Macaulay's "History" finished, Carlyle's "French Revolution," Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," and "Mansfield Park." [Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood, to the author of "Amos Barton," 29th Dec. 1856.] "Along with this I send a copy of the January number of the Magazine, in which you will find the first part of 'Amos Barton.' It gives me very great pleasure to begin the number with 'Amos,' and I put him in that position because his merits well entitle him to it, and also because it is a vital point to attract public attention to the _first_ part of a series, to which end being the first article of the first number of the year may contribute. "I have already expressed to our friend Mr. Lewes the very high opinion I entertain of 'Amos,' and the expectations I have formed of the series, should his successors prove equal to him, which I fully anticipate. "It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh, so humorous, and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so much in so few words. "Those who have seen the tale here are chiefly members of my own family, and they are all enthusiastic in praise. "You may recollect that I expressed a fear that in the affecting and highly wrought scene of poor Milly's death, the attempt to individualize the children by reiterating their names weakened the effect, as the reader had not been prepared to care for them individually, but simply as a group--the children of Milly and the sorrow-stricken curate. My brother says, 'No. Do not advise the author to touch anything so exquisite.' Of course you are the best judge. "I now send proof of the conclusion of 'Amos,' in acknowledgment of which, and of the first part, I have the pleasure of enclosing a check for £52 10_s._--fifty guineas. "If the series goes on as I anticipate, there is every prospect that a republication as a separate book, at some time or other, will be advisable. We would look upon such republication as a joint property, and would either give you a sum for your interest in it, or publish on the terms of one half of the clear profits, to be divided between author and publisher, as might be most agreeable to you. "I shall be very glad to hear from you, either direct or through Mr. Lewes; and any intelligence that the successors of 'Amos' are taking form and substance will be very acceptable. "I shall let you know what the other contributors and the public think of 'Amos' as far as I can gather a verdict, but in the meantime I may congratulate you on having achieved a preliminary success at all events." [Sidenote: Letter from the author of "Amos Barton" to John Blackwood, Jan. 1857.] Your letter has proved to me that the generous editor and publisher--generous both in word and in deed--who makes the author's path smooth and easy, is something more than a pleasant tradition. I am very sensitive to the merits of checks for fifty guineas, but I am still more sensitive to that cordial appreciation which is a guarantee to me that my work was worth doing for its own sake. If the "Scenes of Clerical Life" should be republished, I have no doubt we shall find it easy to arrange the terms. In the meantime, the most pressing business is to make them worth republishing. I think the particularization of the children in the deathbed scene has an important effect on the imagination. But I have removed all names from the "conclusion" except those of Patty and Dickey, in whom, I hope, the reader has a personal interest. I hope to send you the second story by the beginning of February. It will lie, for the most part, among quite different scenes and persons from the last--opening in Shepperton once more, but presently moving away to a distant spot and new people, whom, I hope, you will not like less than "Amos" and his friends. But if any one of the succeeding stories should seem to you unsuitable to the pages of "Maga," it can be reserved for publication in the future volume, without creating any difficulty. Thank you very warmly for the hearty acceptance you have given to my first story. [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] The first part of "Amos Barton" appeared in the January number of _Blackwood_. Before the appearance of the Magazine, on sending me the proof, Mr. John Blackwood already expressed himself with much greater warmth of admiration; and when the first part had appeared he sent me a charming letter, with a check for fifty guineas, and a proposal about republication of the series. When the story was concluded he wrote me word how Albert Smith had sent him a letter saying he had never read anything that affected him more than Milly's death, and, added Blackwood, "The men at the club seem to have mingled their tears and their tumblers together. It will be curious if you should be a member and be hearing your own praises." There was clearly no suspicion that I was a woman. It is interesting, as an indication of the value there is in such conjectural criticism generally, to remember that when G. read the first part of "Amos" to a party at Helps's, they were all sure I was a clergyman--a Cambridge man. Blackwood seemed curious about the author, and, when I signed my letter "George Eliot," hunted up some old letters from Eliot Warburton's brother to compare the handwritings, though, he said, "'Amos' seems to me not in the least like what that good artilleryman would write." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Feb. 1857.] Thank you for fulfilling your promise to let me know something of the criticisms passed on my story. I have a very moderate respect for "opinions of the press," but the private opinions of intelligent people may be valuable to me. In reference to artistic presentation much adverse opinion will, of course, arise from a dislike to the _order_ of art rather than from a critical estimate of the execution. Any one who detests the Dutch school in general will hardly appreciate fairly the merits of a particular Dutch painting. And against this sort of condemnation one must steel one's self as one best can. But objections which point out to me any vice of manner, or any failure in producing an intended effect, will be really profitable. For example, I suppose my scientific illustrations must be at fault, since they seem to have obtruded themselves disagreeably on one of my readers. But if it be a sin to be at once a man of science and a writer of fiction, I can declare my perfect innocence on that head, my scientific knowledge being as superficial as that of the most "practised writers." I hope to send you a second story in a few days, but I am rather behindhand this time, having been prevented from setting to work for some weeks by other business. Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my _incognito_, having observed that a _nom de plume_ secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be well to give you my prospective name, as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries; and accordingly I subscribe myself, best and most sympathizing of editors, yours very truly, GEORGE ELIOT. I may mention here that my wife told me the reason she fixed on this name was that George was Mr. Lewes's Christian name, and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Feb. 1857.] First let me thank you very heartily for your letter of the 10th. Except your own very cordial appreciation, which is so much beyond a mere official acceptance, that little fact about Albert Smith has gratified me more than anything else in connection with the effect of "Amos." If you should happen to hear an opinion from Thackeray, good or bad, I should like to know it. You will see that I have availed myself of your suggestions on points of language. I quite recognize the justice of your criticisms on the French phrases. They are not in keeping with my story. But I am unable to alter anything in relation to the delineation or development of character, as my stories always grow out of my psychological conception of the _dramatis personæ_. For example, the behavior of Caterina in the gallery is essential to my conception of her nature, and to the development of that nature in the plot. My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I cannot stir a step aside from what I _feel_ to be _true_ in character. If anything strikes you as untrue to human nature in my delineations, I shall be very glad if you will point it out to me, that I may reconsider the matter. But, alas! inconsistencies and weaknesses are not untrue. I hope that your doubts about the plot will be removed by the further development of the story. Meanwhile, warmest thanks for your encouraging letters. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th Feb. 1857.] I am the more inclined to think that I shall admire your book because you are suspected of having given undue preponderance to the Christian argument: for I have a growing conviction that we may measure true moral and intellectual culture by the comprehension and veneration given to all forms of thought and feeling which have influenced large masses of mankind--and of all intolerance the intolerance calling itself philosophical is the most odious to me. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Mch. 1857.] Thank you for the copy of "Maga" and for the accompanying check. One has not many correspondents whose handwriting has such agreeable associations as yours. I was particularly pleased with that extract you were so good as to send me from Mr. Swayne's letter. Dear old "Goldie" is one of my earliest and warmest admirations, and I don't desire a better fate than to lie side by side with him in people's memories. The Rev. Mr. Swayne had written to Blackwood saying that "Amos," in its charming tendencies, reminded him of the "Vicar of Wakefield." Blackwood had written, much delighted with the two first parts of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," which were sent to him together. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Mch. 1857.] I began, oddly enough you will perhaps think, by reading through the "Answers of Infidelity,"[54] those being the most interesting parts of the book to me. Some of your own passages I think very admirable--some of them made me cry, which is always a sign of the highest pleasure writing can give me. But in many of the extracts, I think, Infidelity cuts a very poor figure. Some are feeble, some _bad_, and terribly discrepant in the tone of their thought and feeling from the passages which come fresh from your own mind. The disadvantage arising from the perpetual shifting of the point of view is a disadvantage, I suppose, inseparable from the plan, which I cannot admire or feel to be effective, though I can imagine it may be a serviceable form of presentation to some inquirers. The _execution_ I do admire. I think it shows very high and rare qualities of mind--a self-discipline and largeness of thought which are the highest result of culture. The "Objections of Christianity," which I have also read, are excellently put, and have an immense advantage over the "Answers of Infidelity" in their greater homogeneity. The first part I have only begun and glanced through, and at present have no other observation to make than that I think you might have brought a little more artillery to bear on Christian morality. But nothing is easier than to find fault--nothing so difficult as to _do_ some real work. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Mch. 1857.] I think I wrote very brusquely and disagreeably to you the other day, but the impertinence was altogether in the form and not at all in the feeling. I always have uncomfortable sensations after writing objections and criticisms when they relate to things I substantially admire. It is inflicting a hurt on my own veneration. I showed the passage on the eye, p. 157, to Herbert Spencer, and he agrees with us that you have not stated your idea so as to render it a logical argument against design. You appear to imply that development and gradation in organs and functions are opposed to that conception, which they are not. I suppose you are aware that we all three hold the conception of creative design to be untenable. We only think you have not made out a good case against it. Thank you for sending me some news of Harriet Martineau. I have often said lately, "I wonder how she is." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1857.] I am glad you retain a doubt in favor of the _dagger_, and wish I could convert you to entire approval, for I am much more satisfied when your feeling is thoroughly with me. But it would be the death of my story to substitute a dream for the real scene. Dreams usually play an important part in fiction, but rarely, I think, in actual life. So many of us have reason to know that criminal impulses may be felt by a nature which is nevertheless guarded by its entire constitution from the commission of crime, that I can't help hoping that my Caterina will not forfeit the sympathy of all my readers. The answer you propose to give to curious inquirers is the best possible. For several reasons I am very anxious to retain my _incognito_ for some time to come, and, to an author not already famous, anonymity is the highest _prestige_. Besides, if George Eliot turns out a dull dog and an ineffective writer--a mere flash in the pan--I, for one, am determined to cut him on the first intimation of that disagreeable fact. The fates have willed that this shall be a very melancholy story, and I am longing to be a little merrier again. On the 16th March Mr. Lewes and George Eliot started for Plymouth, Penzance, and the Scilly Isles, and we have the following recollections of their stay there: [Sidenote: Recollections, Scilly Isles, March-May, 1857.] I had never before seen a granite coast, and on the southern side of the island of St. Mary's one sees such a coast in its most striking and characteristic forms. Rectangular crevices, the edges of which have been rounded by weather, give many of the granite masses a resemblance to bales of wool or cotton heaped on each other; another characteristic form is the mushroom-shaped mass, often lying poised on the summits of more cubical bowlders or fragments; another is the immense flat platform stretching out like a pier into the sea; another the oval basins formed by the action of the rain-water on the summits of the rocks and bowlders. The coloring of the rocks was very various and beautiful; sometimes a delicate grayish-green, from the shaggy byssus which clothes it, chiefly high up from the water; then a light, warm brown; then black; occasionally of a rich yellow; and here and there purplish. Below the rocks, on the coast, are almost everywhere heaps of white bowlders, sometimes remarkably perfect ovals, and looking like huge eggs of some monstrous bird. Hardly any weed was to be seen on the granite, except here and there in a rock-pool, green with young ulva; and no barnacles incrust the rock, no black mussels, scarcely any limpets. The waves that beat on this coast are clear as crystal, and we used to delight in watching them rear themselves like the horses of a mighty sea-god as they approached the rocks on which they were broken into eddies of milky foam. Along a great part of this southern coast there stretch heathy or furzy downs, over which I used to enjoy rambling immensely; there is a sense of freedom in those unenclosed grounds that one never has in a railed park, however extensive. Then, on the north side of the island, above Sandy Bar, what a view we used to get of the opposite islands and reefs, with their delicious violet and yellow tints--the tall ship or two anchored in the Sound, changing their aspect like living things, and when the wind was at all high the white foam prancing round the reefs and rising in fountain-like curves above the screen of rocks! Many a wet and dirty walk we had along the lanes, for the weather was often wet and almost always blustering. Now and then, however, we had a clear sky and a calm sea, and on such days it was delicious to look up after the larks that were soaring above us, or to look out on the island and reef studded sea. I never enjoyed the lark before as I enjoyed it at Scilly--never felt the full beauty of Shelley's poem on it before. A spot we became very fond of towards the close of our stay was Carne Lea, where, between two fine, jutting piles of granite, there was a soft down, gay with the pretty pink flowers of the thrift, which, in this island, carpets the ground like greensward. Here we used to sit and lie in the bright afternoons, watching the silver sunlight on the waves--bright silver, not golden--it is the morning and evening sunlight that is golden. A week or two after our arrival we made the acquaintance of Mr. Moyle, the surgeon, who became a delightful friend to us, always ready to help with the contents of his surgery or anything else at his command. We liked to have him come and smoke a cigar in the evening, and look in now and then for a little lesson in microscopy. The little indications of the social life at Scilly that we were able to pick up were very amusing. I was repeatedly told, in order to make me aware who Mr. Hall was, that he married a Miss Lemon. The people at St. Mary's imagine that the lawyers and doctors at Penzance are a sort of European characters that every one knows. We heard a great deal about Mr. Quill, an Irishman, the Controller of the Customs; and one day, when we were making a call on one of the residents, our host said two or three times, at intervals, "I wish you knew Quill!" At last, on our farewell call, we saw the distinguished Quill, with his hair plastered down, his charming smile, and his trousers with a broad stripe down each leg. Our host amused us by his contempt for curs: "Oh, I wouldn't have a cur--there's nothing to look at in a cur!"[55] [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th April, 1857.] The smallest details, written in the hastiest way, that will enable me to imagine you as you are, are just what I want; indeed, all I care about in correspondence. We are more and more in love with these little islands. There is not a tree to be seen, but there are grand granite hills on the coast, such as I never saw before, and furze-covered hills with larks soaring and singing above them, and zoological wonders on the shore to fill our bottles and our souls at once. For some time I have been unusually weak and knock-up-able. Our landlady is an excellent woman, but, like almost all peculiarly domestic women, has not more than rudimentary ideas of cooking; and in an island where you can get nothing but beef, except by sending to Penzance, that supreme science has its maximum value. She seems to think eating a purely arbitrary procedure--an abnormal function of mad people who come to Scilly; and if we ask her what the people live on here, is quite at a loss to tell us, apparently thinking the question relates to the abstruser portion of natural history. But I insist, and give her a culinary lecture every morning, and we do, in the end, get fed. Altogether our life here is so far better than the golden age that we work as well as play. That is the happy side of things. But there is a very sad one to me which I shall not dwell upon--only tell you of. More than a week ago I received the news that poor Chrissey had lost one of her pretty little girls of fever; that the other little one--they were the only two she had at home with her--was also dangerously ill, and Chrissey herself and her servant apparently attacked by typhus too. The thought of her in this state is a perpetual shadow to me in the sunshine. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th April, 1857.] I shudder at entering on such great subjects (as "Design") in letters; my idle brain wants lashing to work, like a negro, and will do nothing under a slighter stimulus. We are enjoying a retrogression to old-fashioned reading. I rush on the slightest pretext to Sophocles, and am as excited about blind old Oedipus as any young lady can be about the latest hero with magnificent eyes. But there is _one_ new book we have been enjoying, and so, I hope, have you--the "Life of Charlotte Brontë." Deeply affecting throughout; in the early part romantic, poetic, as one of her own novels; in the later years tragic, especially to those who know what sickness is. Mrs. Gaskell has done her work admirably, both in the industry and care with which she has gathered and selected her material, and in the feeling with which she has presented it. There is one exception, however, which I regret very much. She sets down Branwell's conduct entirely to remorse. Remorse may make sad work with a man, but it will not make such a life as Branwell's was in the last three or four years, unless the germs of vice had sprouted and shot up long before, as it seems clear they had in him. What a tragedy!--that picture of the old father and the three sisters trembling, day and night, in terror at the possible deeds of their drunken, brutal son and brother! That is the part of the life which affects me most. [Sidenote: Letter to Isaac P. Evans, 16th April, 1857.] I have been looking anxiously for some further tidings of Chrissey since your last letter, which told me that she and Kate were better, though not out of danger. I try to hope that no news is good news; but if you do not think it troublesome to write, I shall be thankful to have that hope changed into certainty. Meanwhile, to save multiplying letters--which I know you are not fond of--I mention now what will take no harm from being mentioned rather prematurely. I should like Chrissey to have £15 of my next half-year's income, due at the beginning of June, to spend in taking a change of air as soon as she is able to do so; and perhaps, if it were desirable for her to leave before the money has been paid in, you would be so kind as to advance it for a few weeks. I am writing, of course, in ignorance of her actual state; but I should think it must be good for her, as soon as she is able to move, to leave that fever-infected place for a time, and I know the money must have gone very fast in recent expenses. I only suggest the change of air as the thing that I should think best for Chrissey; but, in any case, I should like her to have the money, to do what she pleases with it. If she is well enough please to give her the enclosed note, in which I have suggested to her what I have just written to you. I am much obliged to you for your last letter, and shall be still more so if you will write me word of Chrissey's present condition. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st May, 1857.] Thank you for the pleasant notes of impressions concerning my story, sent to me through Lewes. I will pay attention to your caution about the danger of huddling up my stories. Conclusions are the weak point of most authors, but some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation. There must be something wrong in the winding-up of "Amos," for I have heard of two persons who are disappointed with the conclusion. But the story never presented itself to me as possible to be protracted after Milly's death. The drama ends there. I am thinking of writing a short epilogue to "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," and I will send it you with the proof from Jersey, where, on a strict promise that I am not to be dissected, I shall shortly join our friend Lewes. The third story will be very different from either of the preceding, which will perhaps be an advantage, as poor Tina's sad tale was necessarily rather monotonous in its effects. The epilogue to "Mr. Gilfil" was written sitting on the Fortification Hill, Scilly Isles, one sunshiny morning. [Sidenote: Jersey, Recollections, 1857.] It was a beautiful moment (12th May) when we came to our lodgings at Gorey. The orchards were all in blossom--and this is an island of orchards. They cover the slopes; they stretch before you in shady, grassy, indefinite extent through every other gateway by the roadside; they flourish in some spots almost close to the sea. What a contrast to the Scilly Isles! There you stand on the hills like a sparrow on the housetop; here you are like the same sparrow when he is hopping about on the branches with green above him, green below, and green all round. Gorey stands in Granville Bay, where the grand old castle of Mont Orgueil stands and keeps guard on a fine rocky promontory overlooking the little harbor dotted with fishing craft. There is a charming piece of common, or down, where you can have the quietest, easiest walking, with a carpet of minute wild-flowers that are not hindered from flourishing by the sandy rain of the coast. I delighted extremely in the brownish-green softness of this undulating common, here and there varied with a patch of bright green fern--all the prettier for two little homesteads set down upon it, with their garden-fence and sheltering trees. It was pretty in all lights, but especially the evening light, to look round at the castle and harbor, the village and the scattered dwellings peeping out from among trees on the hill. The castle is built of stone which has a beautiful pinkish-gray tint, and the bright green ivy hangs oblique curtains on its turreted walls, making it look like a natural continuation or outgrowth of the rocky and grassy height on which it stands. Then the eye wanders on to the right and takes in the church standing half-way down the hill, which is clothed with a plantation, and shelters the little village, with its cloud of blue smoke; still to the right, and the village breaks off, leaving nothing but meadows in front of the slope that shuts out the setting sun, and only lets you see a hint of the golden glory that is reflected in the pink, eastern clouds. The first lovely walk we found inland was the Queen's Fern Valley, where a broad strip of meadow and pasture lies between two high slopes covered with woods and ferny wilderness. When we first saw this valley it was in the loveliest spring-time; the woods were a delicious mixture of red and tender green and purple. We have watched it losing that spring beauty and passing into the green and flowery luxuriance of June, and now into the more monotonous summer tint of July. When the blossoms fell away from the orchards my next delight was to look at the grasses mingled with the red sorrel; then came the white umbelliferous plants, making a border or inner frame for them along the hedgerows and streams. Another pretty thing here is the luxuriance of the yellow iris, that covers large pieces of moist ground with its broad blades. Everywhere there are tethered cows, looking at you with meek faces--mild-eyed, sleek, fawn-colored creatures, with delicate, downy udders. Another favorite walk of ours was round by Mont Orgueil, along the coast. Here we had the green or rocky slope on one side of us, and on the other the calm sea stretching to the coast of France, visible on all but the murkiest days. But the murky days were not many during our stay, and our evening walks round the coast usually showed us a peaceful, scarcely rippled sea, plashing gently on the purple pebbles of the little scalloped bays. There were two such bays within the boundary of our sea-side walk in that direction, and one of them was a perpetual wonder to us, in the luxuriant verdure of meadows and orchards and forest-trees that sloped down to the very shore. No distressed look about the trees as if they were ever driven harshly back by the winter winds--it was like an inland slope suddenly carried to the coast. As for the inland walks, they are inexhaustible. The island is one labyrinth of delicious roads and lanes, leading you by the most charming nooks of houses with shady grounds and shrubberies, delightful farm homesteads, and trim villas. It was a sweet, peaceful life we led here. Good creatures, the Amys, our host and hostess, with their nice boy and girl, and the little white kid--the family pet. No disagreeable sounds to be heard in the house, no unpleasant qualities to hinder one from feeling perfect love to these simple people. We have had long rambles and long readings. But our choice of literature has been rather circumscribed in this out-of-the-way place. The "Life of George Stephenson" has been a real profit and pleasure. I have read Draper's "Physiology" aloud for grave evening hours, and such books as Currer Bell's "Professor," Mlle. d'Auny's "Mariage en Province," and Miss Ferrier's "Marriage," for lighter food. The last, however, we found ourselves unable to finish, notwithstanding Miss Ferrier's high reputation. I have been getting a smattering of botany from Miss Catlow and from Dr. Thomson's little book on wild-flowers, which have created at least a longing for something more complete on the subject. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d May, 1857.] Such hedgerows in this island! Such orchards, white against the green slopes, and shady walks by the woodside, with distracting wild-flowers. We enjoy the greenery and variety of this bushy island all the better for our stay on bare Scilly, which we had gone to and fro upon till we knew it by heart. Our little lodgings are very snug--only 13_s._ a week--a nice little sitting-room, with a workroom adjoining for Mr. Lewes, who is at this moment in all the bliss of having discovered a parasitic worm in a cuttlefish. We dine at five, and our afternoons are almost exhausted in rambling. I hope to get up my strength in this delicious quiet, and have fewer interruptions to work from headache than I have been having since Christmas. I wonder if I should have had the happiness of seeing Cara if I had been at Richmond now. I would rather see her than any one else in the world--except poor Chrissey. Tell me when you have read the life of Currer Bell. Some people think its revelations in bad taste--making money out of the dead, wounding the feelings of the living, etc. What book is there that some people or other will not find abominable? We thought it admirable, cried over it, and felt the better for it. We read Cromwell's letters again at Scilly with great delight. In May Mr. Lewes writes to Mr. John Blackwood: "We were both amused with the divination of the Manx seer and his friend Liggers." This is the first mention of the individual, whose real name was Liggins of Nuneaton, who afterwards became notorious for laying claim to the authorship of the "Scenes of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede." "Janet's Repentance" had been begun on the 18th April, and the first three parts were finished in Jersey. In reference to the "Scenes of Clerical Life" there are the following entries in the Journal: [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] _May 2._--Received letter from Blackwood expressing his approbation of Part IX. of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." He writes very pleasantly, says the series is attributed by many to Bulwer, and that Thackeray thinks highly of it. This was a pleasant fillip to me, who am just now ready to be dispirited on the slightest pretext. _May 21._--The other day we had a pleasant letter from Herbert Spencer, saying that he had heard "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" discussed by Baynes and Dallas, as well as previously by Pigott, all expressing warm approval, and curiosity as to the author. _May 26._--Received a pleasant letter from Blackwood, enclosing one from Archer Gurney to the author of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." I subjoin this letter, as it is the first she received in her character of a creative author, and it still bears a pencil memorandum in her writing: "This letter he brought up to me at Jersey after reading it, saying, with intense joy, 'Her fame is beginning.'" [Sidenote: Letter from Rev. Archer Gurney, to the author of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," 14th May, 1857.] "BUCKINGHAM (BUCKS), _Thursday, 14th May, 1857_. "Sir,--Will you consider it impertinent in a brother author and old reviewer to address a few lines of earnest sympathy and admiration to you, excited by the purity of your style, originality of your thoughts, and absence of all vulgar seeking for effect in those 'Scenes of Clerical Life' now appearing in _Blackwood_? If I mistake not much, your muse of invention is no hackneyed one, and your style is too peculiar to allow of your being confounded with any of the already well-known writers of the day. Your great and characteristic charm is, to my mind, Nature. You frequently, indeed, express what I may call brilliant ideas, but they always seem to come unsought for, never, as in Lytton, for instance, to be elaborated and placed in the most advantageous light. I allude to such brief aphoristic sayings as 'Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms'--'All with that brisk and cheerful air which a sermon is often observed to produce when it is quite finished.' By-the-bye. I am one of the cloth, and might take exception to certain hints, perhaps, but these are dubious. What I see plainly I admire honestly, and trust that more good remains behind. Will you always remain equally natural? That is the doubt. Will the fear of the critic, or the public, or the literary world, which spoils almost every one, never master you? Will you always write to please yourself, and preserve the true independence which seems to mark a real supremacy of intellect? But these questions are, I fear, impertinent. I will conclude. Pardon this word of greeting from one whom you may never see or know, and believe me your earnest admirer, ARCHER GURNEY. "The Author of 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story.'" [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] _June._--Blackwood writes from London that he hears nothing but approval of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." Lord Stanley, among other people, had spoken to him about the "Clerical Scenes," at Bulwer's, and was astonished to find Blackwood in the dark as to the author. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d June, 1857.] I send you by the same post with this the first part of my third story, which I hope will not disappoint you. The part is, I think, rather longer than my parts have usually been, but it would have been injurious to the effect of the story to pause earlier. Pleasant letters like yours are the best possible stimulus to an author's powers, and if I don't write better and better the fault will certainly not lie in my editor, who seems to have been created in pre-established harmony with the organization of a susceptible contributor. This island, too, with its grassy valleys and pretty, indented coast is not at all a bad haunt for the Muses, if, as one may suppose, they have dropped their too scanty classical attire, and appear in long dresses and brown hats, like decent Christian women likely to inspire "Clerical Scenes." Moreover, having myself a slight zoological weakness, I am less alarmed than most people at the society of a zoological maniac. So that, altogether, your contributor is in promising circumstances, and if he doesn't behave like an animal in good condition, is clearly unworthy of his keep. I am much gratified to have made the conquest of Professor Aytoun; but with a parent's love for the depreciated child, I can't help standing up for "Amos" as better than "Gilfil." Lewes seems to have higher expectations from the third story than from either of the preceding; but I can form no judgment myself until I have quite finished a thing, and see it aloof from my actual self. I can only go on writing what I feel, and waiting for the proof that I have been able to make others feel. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th June, 1857.] Richmond is _not_ fascinating in "the season" or through the summer. It is hot, noisy, and haunted with Cockneys; but at other times we love the Park with an increasing love, and we have such a kind, good landlady there, that it always seems like going home when we return to Park Shot. She writes to us: "I hope you will make your fortune--but you must always live with me," which, considering that she gets less out of us than other lodgers, is a proof of affection in a landlady. Yes! we like our wandering life at present, and it is fructifying, and brings us material in many ways; but we keep in perspective the idea of a cottage among green fields and cows, where we mean to settle down (after we have once been to Italy), and buy pots and kettles and keep a dog. Wherever we are we work hard--and at work which brings _present_ money; for we have too many depending on us to be _dilettanti_ or idlers. I wish it to be understood that I should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation. You wonder how my face has changed in the last three years. Doubtless it is older and uglier, but it ought not to have a bad expression, for I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or discontent, which you know were always ready enough to come on slight call, and I have everything to call out love and gratitude. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. John Cash (Miss Mary Sibree), 6th June, 1857.] Your letter was very sweet to me. The sense of my deficiencies in the past often presses on me with a discouraging weight, and to know that any one can remember me lovingly, helps me to believe that there has been some good to balance the evil. I like to think of you as a happy wife and mother; and since Rosehill must have new tenants, I like to think that you and yours are there rather than any one else, not only because of my own confidence in your nature, but because our dear friends love you so much as a neighbor. You know I can never feel otherwise than sorry that they should not have ended their days in that pretty home; but the inevitable regret is softened as much as possible by the fact that the home has become yours. It is very nice to hear that Mrs. Sibree can relish anything of my writing. She was always a favorite with me; and I remember very vividly many pleasant little conversations with her. Seventy-two! How happy you are to have a dear, aged mother, whose heart you can gladden. I was a good deal touched by the letter your brother wrote to you about accepting, or, rather, declining, more pupils. I feel sure that his sensitive nature has its peculiar trials and struggles in this strange life of ours, which some thick-skinned mortals take so easily. I am very happy--happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to healthful activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature, partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be rejoiced in with trembling. But even if that hope should be unfulfilled, I am contented to have lived and suffered for the sake of what has already been. You see your kind letter has made me inclined to talk about myself, but, as we do not often have any communication with each other, I know it will be a gratification to your sympathetic nature to have a few direct words from me that will assure you of my moral well-being. I hope your little ones are just like you--just as fair and sweet-tempered. [Sidenote: Journal, June, 1857.] I sent off the first part of "Janet's Repentance," but to my disappointment Blackwood did not like it so well--seemed to misunderstand the characters, and to be doubtful about the treatment of clerical matters. I wrote at once to beg him to give up printing the story if he felt uncomfortable about it, and he immediately sent a very anxious, cordial letter, saying the thought of putting a stop to the series "gave him quite a turn:" he "did not meet with George Eliots every day"--and so on. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th June, 1857.] I am not much surprised and not at all hurt by your letter received to-day with the proof. It is a great satisfaction--in fact, my only satisfaction--that you should give me your judgment with perfect frankness. I am able, I think, to enter into an editor's doubts and difficulties, and to see my stories in some degree from your point of view as well as my own. My answer is written after considering the question as far as possible on all sides, and as I feel that I shall not be able to make any other than _superficial_ alterations in the proof, I will, first of all, say what I can in explanation of the spirit and future course of the present story. The collision in the drama is not at all between "bigoted churchmanship" and evangelicalism, but between _ir_religion and religion. Religion in this case happens to be represented by evangelicalism; and the story, so far as regards the _persecution_, is a real bit in the religious history of England, that happened about eight-and-twenty years ago. I thought I had made it apparent in my sketch of Milby feelings, on the advent of Mr. Tryan, that the conflict lay between immorality and morality--irreligion and religion. Mr. Tryan will carry the reader's sympathy. It is through him that Janet is brought to repentance. Dempster's vices have their natural evolution in deeper and deeper moral deterioration (though not without softening touches), and death from intemperance. Everything is softened from the fact, so far as art is permitted to soften and yet to remain essentially true. My sketches, both of Churchmen and Dissenters, with whom I am almost equally acquainted, are drawn from close observation of them in real life, and not at all from hearsay or from the descriptions of novelists. If I were to undertake to alter language or character. I should be attempting to represent some vague conception of what may possibly exist in other people's minds, but has no existence in my own. Such of your marginal objections as relate to a mere detail I can meet without difficulty by alteration; but as an artist I should be utterly powerless if I departed from my own conceptions of life and character. There is nothing to be done with the story, but either to let Dempster and Janet and the rest be as I _see_ them, or to renounce it as too painful. I am keenly alive at once to the scruples and alarms an editor may feel, and to my own utter inability to write under cramping influence, and on this double ground I should like you to consider whether it will not be better to close the series for the Magazine _now_. I dare say you will feel no difficulty about publishing a volume containing the story of "Janet's Repentance," and I shall accept that plan with no other feeling than that you have been to me the most liberal and agreeable of editors, and are the man of all others I would choose for a publisher. My irony, so far as I understand myself, is not directed against opinions--against any class of religious views--but against the vices and weaknesses that belong to human nature in every sort of clothing. But it is possible that I may not affect other minds as I intend and wish to affect them, and you are a better judge than I can be of the degree in which I may occasionally be offensive. I should like _not_ to be offensive--I should like to touch every heart among my readers with nothing but loving humor, with tenderness, with belief in goodness. But I may have failed in this case of "Janet," at least so far as to have made you feel its publication in the Magazine a disagreeable risk. If so, there will be no harm done by closing the series with No. 2, as I have suggested. If, however, I take your objections to be deeper than they really are--if you prefer inserting the story in spite of your partial dissatisfaction, I shall, of course, be happy to appear under "Maga's" wing still. When I remember what have been the successes in fiction, even as republications from "Maga," I can hardly believe that the public will regard my pictures as exceptionally coarse. But in any case there are too many prolific writers who devote themselves to the production of pleasing pictures, to the exclusion of all disagreeable truths, for me to desire to add to their number. In this respect, at least, I may have some resemblance to Thackeray, though I am not conscious of being in any way a disciple of his, unless it constitute discipleship to think him, as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do, on the whole the most powerful of living novelists. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 8th June, 1857.] I feel every day a greater disinclination for theories and arguments about the origin of things in the presence of all this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness that floods one with conflicting emotions. We are reading "Aurora Leigh" for the third time, with more enjoyment than ever. I know no book that gives me a deeper sense of communion with a large as well as beautiful mind. It is in process of appearing in a third edition, and no wonder. If I live five years longer the positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others, and I can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past. Do not misunderstand me, and suppose that I think myself heroic or great in any way. Far enough from that! Faulty, miserably faulty I am--but least of all faulty where others most blame. On the 24th July the pleasant sojourn at Jersey came to an end. The travellers returned to 8 Park Shot, Richmond, where Miss Sara Hennell paid them a visit at the end of the month, and Dr. and Mrs. Bodichon (_née_ Miss Barbara L. Smith) came on the 4th of August. On the 12th August there is an entry in the Journal, "Finished the 'Electra' of Sophocles, and began �schylus's 'Agamemnon,'" and then come the following letters: [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, Tuesday, 17th Aug. 1857.] Lewes has just given me your letter of the 15th, with the accompanying one from the Rev. W. P. Jones. Mr. Tryan is not a portrait of any clergyman, living or dead. He is an ideal character, but I hope probable enough to resemble more than one evangelical clergyman of his day. If Mr. Jones's deceased brother was like Mr. Tryan so much the better, for in that case he was made of human nature's finer clay. I think you will agree with me that there are few clergymen who would be depreciated by an identification with Mr. Tryan. But I should rather suppose that the old gentleman, misled by some similarity in outward circumstances, is blind to the discrepancies which must exist where no portrait was intended. As to the rest of my story, so far as its elements were suggested by real persons, those persons have been, to use good Mr. Jones's phrase, "long in eternity." I think I told you that a persecution of the kind I have described did actually take place, and belongs as much to the common store of our religious history as the Gorham Controversy, or as Bishop Blomfield's decision about wax candles. But I only know the _outline_ of the real persecution. The details have been filled in from my imagination. I should consider it a fault which would cause me lasting regret if I had used reality in any other than the legitimate way common to all artists, who draw their materials from their observation and experience. It would be a melancholy result of my fictions if I gave _just_ cause of annoyance to any good and sensible person. But I suppose there is no perfect safeguard against erroneous impressions or a mistaken susceptibility. We are all apt to forget how little there is about us that is unique, and how very strongly we resemble many other insignificant people who have lived before us. I shouldn't wonder if several nieces of pedantic maiden ladies saw a portrait of their aunt in Miss Pratt, but I hope they will not think it necessary, on that ground, to increase the already troublesome number of your correspondents. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Aug. 1857.] We went to see Rosa Bonheur's picture the other day. What power! That is the way women should assert their rights. Writing is part of my religion, and I can write no word that is not prompted from within. At the same time I believe that almost all the best books in the world have been written with the hope of getting money for them. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Sept. 1857.] Unless there be any strong reason to the contrary, I should like to close the series with this story. According to my calculation, which, however, may be an erroneous one, the three stories will make two good volumes--_i.e._, good as to bulk. I have a subject in my mind which will not come under the limitations of the title "Clerical Life," and I am inclined to take a large canvas for it and write a novel. In case of my writing fiction for "Maga" again, I should like to be considerably beforehand with my work, so that you can read a thoroughly decisive portion before beginning to print. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Sept. 1857.] The days are very peaceful--peacefully busy. One always feels a deeper calm as autumn comes on. I should be satisfied to look forward to a heaven made up of long autumn afternoon walks, quite delivered from any necessity of giving a judgment on the woman question, or of reading newspapers about Indian mutinies. I am so glad there are thousands of good people in the world who have very decided opinions, and are fond of working hard to enforce them. I like to feel and think everything and do nothing, a pool of the "deep contemplative" kind. Some people _do_ prosper--that is a comfort. The rest of us must fall back on the beatitudes--"Blessed are the poor"--that is Luke's version, you know, and it is really, on the whole, more comforting than Matthew's. I'm afraid there are few of us who can appropriate the blessings of the "poor in spirit." We are reading one of the most wonderful books in French or any other literature--Monteil's "Histoire des Français des divers �tats"--a history written on an original plan. If you see any account of it, read that account. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, Saturday, 17th Oct. 1857.] I am very much gratified that my Janet has won your heart and kept up your interest in her to the end. My new story haunts me a good deal, and I shall set about it without delay. It will be a country story--full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay. But I shall not ask you to look at it till I have written a volume or more, and then you will be able to judge whether you will prefer printing it in the Magazine, or publishing it as a separate novel when it is completed. By the way, the sheets of the "Clerical Scenes" are not come, but I shall not want to make any other than verbal and literal corrections, so that it will hardly be necessary for me to go through the sheets _and_ the proofs, which I must, of course, see. I enclose a titlepage with a motto. But if you don't like the motto, I give it up. I've not set my heart on it. I leave the number of copies to be published, and the style of getting up, entirely to your discretion. As to the terms, I wish to retain the copyright, according to the stipulation made for me by Lewes when he sent "Amos Barton;" and whatever you can afford to give me for the first edition I shall prefer having as a definite payment rather than as half profits. You stated, in a letter about "Amos Barton," your willingness to accede to either plan, so I have no hesitation in expressing my wishes. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Oct. 1857.] "Open to conviction," indeed! I should think so. I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid. These are my only prejudices. I _was_ pleased with Mr. Call.[56] He is a man one really cares to talk to--has thoughts, says what he means, and listens to what others say. We should quite like to see him often. And I cannot tell you how much I have felt Mrs. Call's graceful as well as kind behavior to me. Some months ago, before the new edition of the "Biographical History of Philosophy" came out, Mr. Lewes had a letter from a working-man at Leicester, I think, who said that he and some fellow-students met together, on a Sunday, to read the book aloud and discuss it. He had marked some errors of the press and sent them to Mr. Lewes for his new edition. Wasn't that pretty? [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 30th Oct. 1857.] "Conscience goes to the hammering in of nails" is my gospel. There can be no harm in preaching _that_ to women at any rate. But I should be sorry to undertake any more specific enunciation of doctrine on a question so entangled as the "woman question." The part of the Epicurean gods is always an easy one; but because I prefer it so strongly myself, I the more highly venerate those who are struggling in the thick of the contest. "La carrière ouverte aux taléns," whether the talents be feminine or masculine, I am quite confident is a right maxim. Whether "La carrière ouverte à la Sottise" be equally just when made equally universal, it would be too much like "taking sides" for me to say. There are only three entries in the journal for October. [Sidenote: Journal, Oct. 1857.] _Oct. 9._--Finished "Janet's Repentance." I had meant to carry on the series, and especially I longed to tell the story of the "Clerical Tutor," but my annoyance at Blackwood's want of sympathy in the first part (although he came round to admiration at the third part) determined me to close the series and republish them in two volumes. _Oct. 22._--Began my new novel, "Adam Bede." _Oct. 29._--Received a letter from Blackwood offering me £120 for the first edition of "Scenes of Clerical Life." [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Oct. 1857.] I am quite contented with the sum (£120) you offer me for the edition, being thoroughly confident of your disposition to do the best you can for me. I perceive your hope of success for the "Scenes" is not strong, and you certainly have excellent means of knowing the probabilities in such a case. I am not aware that the motto has been used before, but if you suspect it, we had better leave it out altogether. A stale motto would hardly be an ornament to the titlepage. [Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 1st Nov. 1857.] How I wish I could get to you by some magic, and have one walk over the hill with you again. Letters are poor things compared with five minutes of looking and speaking, and one kiss. Nevertheless, I do like to have a little letter now and then, though I don't for a moment ask it if you have no spontaneous impulse to give it. I can't help losing belief that people love me--the unbelief is in my nature, and no sort of fork will drive it finally out. I can't help wondering that you can think of _me_ in the past with much pleasure. It all seems so painful to me--made up of blunders and selfishness--and it only comes back upon me as a thing to be forgiven. That is honest, painful truth, and not sentimentality. But I am thankful if others found more good than I am able to remember. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Nov. 1857.] It is pleasant to have the first sheet of one's proof--to see one's paragraphs released from the tight-lacing of double columns, and expanding themselves at their ease. I perceive clearly the desirableness of the short number--for my observation of literary affairs has gone far enough to convince me that neither critical judgment nor practical experience can guarantee any opinion as to rapidity of sale in the case of an unknown author; and I shudder at the prospect of encumbering my publisher's bookshelves. My new story is in progress--slow progress at present. A little sunshine of success would stimulate its growth, I dare say. Unhappily, I am as impressionable as I am obstinate, and as much in need of sympathy from my readers as I am incapable of bending myself to their tastes. But if I can only find a public as cordial and agreeable in its treatment of me as my editor, I shall have nothing to wish. Even my thin skin will be comfortable then. The page is not a shabby one, after all; but I fear the fact of two volumes instead of three is a fatal feature in my style in the eyes of librarians. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Nov. 1857.] One is glad to have one's book (_à propos_ of review of Lewes's "History of Philosophy") spoken well of by papers of good circulation, because it is possible, though not certain, that such praise may help the sale; but otherwise it is hardly worth while to trouble one's self about newspaper reviews, unless they point out some error, or present that very rare phenomenon, a true appreciation, which is the most delicious form in which sympathy can reach one. So much sectarian feeling usually arises in discussions on the subject of phrenology that I confess the associations of the word are not agreeable to me. The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant; and I am often in danger of secreting that sort of venom. [Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 15th Nov. 1857.] It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then, when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand. It is an old weakness of mine to have no faith in affection that does not express itself; and when friends take no notice of me for a long while I generally settle down into the belief that they have become indifferent or have begun to dislike me. That is not the best mental constitution; but it might be worse--for I don't feel obliged to dislike _them_ in consequence. I, for one, ought not to complain if people think worse of me than I deserve, for I have very often reason to be ashamed of my thoughts about others. They almost always turn out to be better than I expected--fuller of kindness towards me at least. In the fundamental doctrine of your book (the philosophy of necessity)--that mind presents itself under the same conditions of invariableness of antecedent and consequent as all other phenomena (the only difference being that the true antecedent and consequent are proportionately difficult to discover as the phenomena are more complex)--I think you know that I agree. And every one who knows what science means must also agree with you that there can be no social science without the admission of that doctrine. I dislike extremely a passage in which you appear to consider the disregard of individuals as a lofty condition of mind. My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy. The fact that in the scheme of things we see a constant and tremendous sacrifice of individuals, is, it seems to me, only one of the many proofs that urge upon us our total inability to find in our own natures a key to the Divine mystery. I could more readily turn Christian, and worship Jesus again, than embrace a Theism which professes to explain the proceedings of God. But I don't feel at all wise in these matters. I have a few strong impressions which serve me for my own support and guidance, but do not in the least qualify me to speak as a theorist. Mr. Lewes sends you his kind remembrances, and will not like you any the worse for cutting him up. He has had to perform that office for his own friends sometimes. I suppose phrenology is an open question, on which everybody has a right to speak his mind. Mr. Lewes, feeling the importance of the subject, desired to give it its due place in his "History of Philosophy," and, doing so, he must, of course, say what _he_ believes to be the truth, not what other people believe to be the truth. If you will show where he is mistaken, you will be doing him a service as well as phrenology. His arguments may be bad; but I will answer for him that he has not been guilty of any intentional unfairness. With regard to their system, phrenologists seem to me to be animated by the same sort of spirit as that of religious dogmatists, and especially in this--that in proportion as a man approximates to their opinions without identifying himself with them, they think him offensive and contemptible. It is amusing to read from the opposite side complaints against Mr. Lewes for giving too high a position to phrenology, and a confident opinion that "phrenologists, by their ridiculous pretensions, merit all the contempt that has been thrown on them." Thus doctors differ! But I am much less interested in crusades for or against phrenology than in your happiness at Ivy Cottage.[57] Happiness means all sorts of love and good feeling; and that is the best result that can ever come out of science. Do you know Buckle's "History of Civilization"? I think you would find it a suggestive book. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th Nov. 1857.] Anniversaries are sad things--to one who has lived long and done little. Herbert Spencer dined with us the other day--looks well, and is brimful of clever talk as usual. His volume of "Essays" is to come out soon. He is just now on a crusade against the notion of "species." We are reading Harriet Martineau's history with edification, and otherwise feeding our souls, which flourish very well, notwithstanding November weather. [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] _Nov. 28._--A glorious day, still autumnal and not wintry. We have had a delicious walk in the Park, and I think the coloring of the scenery is more beautiful than ever. Many of the oaks are still thickly covered with leaves of a rich yellow-brown; the elms, golden sometimes, still with lingering patches of green. On our way to the Park the view from Richmond hill had a delicate blue mist over it, that seemed to hang like a veil before the sober brownish-yellow of the distant elms. As we came home, the sun was setting on a fog-bank, and we saw him sink into that purple ocean--the orange and gold passing into green above the fog-bank, the gold and orange reflected in the river in more sombre tints. The other day, as we were coming home through the Park, after having walked under a sombre, heavily clouded sky, the western sun shone out from under the curtain, and lit up the trees and grass, thrown into relief on a background of dark purple cloud. Then, as we advanced towards the Richmond end of the Park, the level, reddening rays shone on the dry fern and the distant oaks, and threw a crimson light on them. I have especially enjoyed this autumn, the delicious greenness of the turf, in contrast with the red and yellow of the dying leaves. _Dec. 6_ (_Sunday_).--Finished the "Agamemnon" to-day. In the evenings of late we have been reading Harriet Martineau's "Sketch of the British Empire in India," and are now following it up with Macaulay's articles on Clive and Hastings. We have lately read Harriet Martineau's Introduction to the "History of the Peace." _Dec. 8._--I am reading "Die Familie," by Riehl, forming the third volume of the series, the two first of which, "Land und Volk" and "Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft," I reviewed for the _Westminster_. A letter from Blackwood to-day tells us that Major Blackwood, during his brother's absence in England, having some reasons, not specified, for being more hopeful about the "Clerical Scenes," resolved to publish 1000 instead of 750; and in consequence of this Blackwood promises to pay me an additional £60 when 750 shall have been sold off. He reports that an elderly clergyman has written to him to say that "Janet's Repentance" is exquisite--another vote to register along with that of Mrs. Nutt's rector, who "cried over the story like a child." _Dec. 10._--Major Blackwood called--an unaffected, agreeable man. It was evident to us, when he had only been in the room a few minutes, that he knew I was George Eliot. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th Dec. 1857.] Lewes has read to me your last kind letter, and I am not insensible to the "practical cheerer" it contains. But I rejoice with trembling at the additional 250, lest you should have to repent of them. I have certainly had a good deal of encouragement to believe that there are many minds, both of the more cultured sort and of the common novel-reading class, likely to be touched by my stories; but the word "many" is very elastic, and often shrinks frightfully when measured by a financial standard. When one remembers how long it was before Charles Lamb's Essays were known familiarly to any but the elect few, the very strongest assurance of merit or originality--supposing one so happy as to have that assurance--could hardly do more than give the hope of _ultimate_ recognition. [Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Dec. 1857.] Our affairs are very prosperous just now, making sunshine in a shady, or, rather, in a foggy place. It is a great happiness to me that Mr. Lewes gets more and more of the recognition he deserves; pleasant letters and speeches have been very numerous lately, especially about his "Sea-side Studies," which have appeared in _Blackwood_, and are soon to appear--very much improved and enlarged--in a separate volume. Dear Carlyle writes, _à propos_ of his "Friedrich:" "I have had such a fourteen months as was never appointed me before in this world--sorrow, darkness, and disgust my daily companions; and no outlook visible, except getting a detestable business turned off, or else being driven mad by it." That is his exaggerated way of speaking; and writing is always painful to him. Do you know he is sixty-two! I fear this will be his last book. Tell Mr. Bray I am reading a book of Riehl's, "The Family," forming the sequel to his other volumes. He will be pleased to hear that so good a writer agrees with him on several points about the occupations of women. The book is a good one; and if I were in the way of writing articles, I should write one on it. There is so much to read, and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger. Time is like the Sibylline leaves, getting more precious the less there remains of it. That, I believe, is the correct allusion for a fine writer to make on the occasion. [Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Dec. 1857.] I give up the motto, because it struck you as having been used before; and though I copied it into my note-book when I was re-reading "Amelia" a few months ago, it is one of those obvious quotations which never _appear_ fresh, though they may actually be made for the first time. I shall be curious to know the result of the subscription. There are a few persons to whom I should like a copy of the volume to be sent, and I enclose a list of them. [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] _Dec. 17._--Read my new story to G. this evening as far as the end of the third chapter. He praised it highly. I have finished "Die Familie," by Riehl--a delightful book. I am in the "Choephoræ" now. In the evenings we are reading "History of the Thirty Years' Peace" and Béranger. Thoroughly disappointed in Béranger. _Dec. 19_ (_Saturday_).--Alone this evening with very thankful, solemn thoughts--feeling the great and unhoped-for blessings that have been given me in life. This last year, especially, has been marked by inward progress and outward advantages. In the spring George's "History of Philosophy" appeared in the new edition; his "Sea-side Studies" have been written with much enjoyment, and met with much admiration, and now they are on the verge of being published with bright prospects. Blackwood has also accepted his "Physiology of Common Life;" the "Goethe" has passed into its third German edition; and, best of all, G.'s head is well. I have written the "Scenes of Clerical Life"--my first book; and though we are uncertain still whether it will be a success as a separate publication, I have had much sympathy from my readers in _Blackwood_, and feel a deep satisfaction in having done a bit of faithful work that will perhaps remain, like a primrose root in the hedgerow, and gladden and chasten human hearts in years to come. [Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 23d Dec. 1857.] Buckle's is a book full of suggestive material, though there are some strangely unphilosophic opinions mixed with its hardy philosophy. For example, he holds that there is no such thing as _race_ or _hereditary transmission_ of qualities! (I should tell you, at the same time, that he is a necessitarian and a physiological-psychologist.) It is only by such negations as these that he can find his way to the position which he maintains at great length--that the progress of mankind is dependent entirely on the progress of knowledge, and that there has been no intrinsically moral advance. However, he presents that side of the subject which has, perhaps, been least adequately dwelt on. [Sidenote: Journal, 1857.] _Dec. 25_ (_Christmas Day_).--George and I spent this lovely day together--lovely as a clear spring day. We could see Hampstead from the Park so distinctly that it seemed to have suddenly come nearer to us. We ate our turkey together in a happy _solitude à deux_. _Dec. 31_ (_the last night of 1857_).--The dear old year is gone with all its _Weben_ and _Streben_. Yet not gone either; for what I have suffered and enjoyed in it remains to me an everlasting possession while my soul's life remains. This time last year I was alone, as I am now, and dear George was at Vernon Hill. I was writing the introduction to "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." What a world of thoughts and feelings since then! My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year: I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. I have had some severe suffering this year from anxiety about my sister, and what will probably be a final separation from her--there has been no other real trouble. Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long, sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age. Our prospects are very bright too. I am writing my new novel. G. is full of his "Physiology of Common Life." He has just finished editing Johnston, for which he is to have 100 guineas, and we have both encouragement to think that our books just coming out, "Sea-side Studies" and "Scenes of Clerical Life," will be well received. So good-bye, dear 1857! May I be able to look back on 1858 with an equal consciousness of advancement in work and in heart. _SUMMARY._ MARCH, 1855, TO DECEMBER, 1857. Return to England--Dover--Bayswater--East Sheen--Books read--Articles written--Letters to Miss Hennell--"Life of Goethe"--Froude's article on Spinoza--Article-writing--"Cumming"--8 Park Shot, Richmond--Letter to Charles Bray--Effect of article on Cumming--Letter to Miss Hennell--Reading on Physiology--Article on Heine--Review for _Leader_, etc.--Books read--Visit to Mrs. Clarke at Attleboro--Sale of "Life of Goethe"--"Shaving of Shagpat"--Spinoza's "Ethics," translation finished--The _Saturday Review_--Ruskin--Alison--Harriet Martineau--Women's earnings--Articles and reviews--Wishes not to be known as translator of the "Ethics"--Article on Young begun--Visit to Ilfracombe--Description--Zoophyte hunting--Finished articles on Young and Riehl--Naturalistic experience--Delightful walks--Rev. Mr. Tugwell--Devonshire lanes and springs--Tendency to scientific accuracy--Sunsets--Cocklewomen at Swansea--Letters to Miss Hennell and Mrs. Peter Taylor--Tenby--Zoology--Thoreau's "Walden"--Feeling strong in mind and body--Barbara Leigh Smith comes to Tenby--George Eliot anxious to begin her fiction-writing--Mr. E. F. S. Pigott--Return to Richmond--Mr. Lewes takes his boys to Hofwyl--George Eliot writes article on "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"--"How I came to write fiction"--Correspondence between Mr. Lewes and Mr. John Blackwood about MS. of "Amos Barton"--"Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" begun--Books read--Letter from John Blackwood to the author of "Amos Barton," sending copy of the January, 1857, number of the Magazine and fifty guineas--Reply--Blackwood's admiration--Albert Smith's appreciation--Letters to Blackwood--Name of George Eliot assumed--Dutch school in art--Artistic bent--Letter to Miss Hennell--Intolerance--Letter to John Blackwood on Mr. Swayne comparing writing to Goldsmith's--Letter to Miss Hennell on essay "Christianity and Infidelity"--Letter to Blackwood--Caterina and the dagger scene--Trip to Penzance and the Scilly Isles--Description of St. Mary's--Mr. Moyle, the surgeon--Social Life--Letter to Mrs. Bray, anxiety about sister--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell--"Life of Charlotte Brontë"--Letter to Isaac P. Evans--Mrs. Clarke's illness--Letter to Blackwood--Conclusions of stories--Jersey--Description of Gorey--Delightful walks--Reading Draper's "Physiology"--Miss Catlow and Dr. Thomson on wild-flowers--"Life of George Stephenson"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Life in Jersey--Liggins appears on the scene--"Janet's Repentance"--Series attributed to Bulwer--Thackeray thinks highly of it--Letter from Herbert Spencer about "Mr. Gilfil"--Letter from Archer Gurney--Lord Stanley thinks highly of the "Scenes"--Letter to Blackwood, with First Part of "Janet's Repentance"--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Richmond--Expression of face--Letter to Mrs. John Cash--Happiness in her life and hope in her work--Chilled by Blackwood's want of enthusiasm about "Janet"--Letter to John Blackwood on "Janet"--Letter to Miss Sarah Hennell--"Aurora Leigh"--Return to Richmond--Letter to John Blackwood on "Janet"--Letters to Miss Hennell--Rosa Bonheur--Thought not action--Mr. and Mrs. Call--Letter to John Blackwood--Haunted by new story--Letter to Charles Bray--"The Woman Question"--Close of "Clerical Scenes" series--"Adam Bede" begun--Receives £120 for first edition of "Scenes of Clerical Life"--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Unbelief in people's love--Letter to John Blackwood--Sheets of "Clerical Scenes"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Newspaper criticism--Letter to Charles Bray--"The Philosophy of Necessity"--Sympathy with individuals--Objection to Theism--Phrenology--Happiness the best result that can ever come out of science--Letters to Miss Hennell--Reading Riehl's "The Family"--Hunger for Knowledge--Buckle's "History of Civilization"--Autumn days at Richmond--Reading the "Agamemnon"--Harriett Martineau's "Sketch of the British Empire in India"--Macaulay's essays on Clive and Hastings--Major Blackwood calls and suspects identity of George Eliot--Reading the "Choephoræ"--"History of the Thirty Years' Peace," and Béranger--Thankfulness in reviewing experience of 1857. FOOTNOTES: [49] G. writes that this sonnet is Barnwell's.--[Note written later.] [50] "Land und Volk." [51] Mr. Edward Smyth Pigott, who remained to the end of their lives a very close and much valued friend of Mr. Lewes and George Eliot. [52] By Thoreau. [53] About the article on Riehl's book, "The Natural History of German Life." [54] "Baillie Prize Essay on Christianity and Infidelity: an Exposition of the Arguments on both Sides." By Miss Sara Hennell. [55] "Mill on the Floss," chap. iii. book iv. Bob Jakin. [56] Mr. W. M. W. Call, author of "Reverberations and other Poems," who married Mr. Charles Hennell's widow--formerly Miss Brabant. As will be seen from the subsequent correspondence, Mr. and Mrs. Call remained among the Lewes's warm friends to the end, and Mr. Call is the author of an interesting paper on George Eliot in the _Westminster Review_ of July, 1881. [57] The Brays' new house at Coventry. APPENDIX. As this volume is going through the press, I have to thank Mrs. John Cash of Coventry for the following valuable additional information in regard to the important subject of Miss Evans's change of religious belief in 1841-42, and for her further general recollections of the Coventry period of George Eliot's life: I was sixteen years of age in 1841; and, as I have already stated, my first remembrance of Miss Evans is of her call on my father and mother, with their friend and neighbor Mrs. Pears, when in conversation she gave expression to her great appreciation of the writings of Isaac Taylor. The controversy raised by the "Tracts for the Times," which gave occasion for the publication of Mr. Taylor's "Ancient Christianity," being now remote, I give the following extract from a footnote in Trench's "Notes on the Parables," to show the influence such a work as Mr. Taylor's would be likely to exercise on the mind of one who esteemed its author; and also the feeling it excited against an eminently religious man, by revelations which he desired and believed would serve the cause of New Testament Christianity. The note is on the "Tares." The quotation, containing the reference, is from Menken: "Many so-called Church historians (_authors of 'Ancient Christianity' and the like_), ignorant of the purpose and of the hidden glory of the Church, have their pleasure in the Tares, and imagine themselves wonderfully wise and useful when out of Church history (which ought to be the history of the Light and the Truth) they have made a shameful history of error and wickedness." It was upon her first or second interview with my mother that Miss Evans told her how shocked she had been by the apparent union of religious feeling with a low sense of morality among the people in the district she visited, who were mostly Methodists. She gave as an instance the case of a woman who, when a falsehood was clearly brought home to her by her visitors, said, "She did not feel that she had grieved the Spirit much." Now those readers of the letters to Miss Lewis who are acquainted with modern Evangelicalism, even in its "after-glow," especially as it was presented to the world by Church of England teaching and practice, will recognize its characteristics in the moral scrupulousness, the sense of obligation on the part of Christians to avoid the very appearance of evil, the practical piety, which those letters reveal. Mrs. Evans (Miss Lewis tells me) was a very serious, earnest-minded woman, anxiously concerned for the moral and religious training of her children: glad to place them under the care of such persons as the Misses Franklin, to whose school a mother of a different order objected, on the ground that "it was where that saint Mary Ann Evans had been." It is natural then that, early awed by and attracted towards beliefs cherished by the best persons she had known, and advocated in the best books she had read, the mind of Miss Evans should have been stirred by exhibitions of a _theoretic_ severance of religion from morality, whether presented among the disciples of "Ancient Christianity" or by the subjects of its modern revivals: it is probable that she may thereby have been led, as others have been, to a reconsideration of the creeds of Christendom, and to further inquiry concerning their origin. On the same grounds it is likely that the presentation of social virtues, apart from evangelical motives, would impress her; and I have authority for stating that to the inquiry of a friend in after-years, as to what influence she attributed the first unsettlement of her orthodox views, she quickly made answer: "Oh, Walter Scott's." Now I well remember her speaking to me of Robert Hall's confession that he had been made unhappy for a week by the reading of Miss Edgeworth's Tales, in which useful, good, and pleasant lives are lived with no reference to religious hopes and fears; and her drawing my attention to the real greatness of mind and sincerity of faith which this candid confession betokened. Such remarks, I think, throw light upon the _way_ in which her own evangelical belief had been affected by works in which its dogmas are not enforced as necessary springs of virtuous action. I give these scattered reminiscences, in evidence of the half-unconscious preparation (of which Mr. Cross speaks) for a change which was, in my judgment, more gradual in its development, as well as deeper in its character, than might be inferred from the record of its abrupt following upon Miss Evans's introduction to Mr. Hennell's "Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity." The evening's discussion with my father, to which I have referred in my previous communication in the "Life," is now vividly present to my mind. There was not only on her part a vehemence of tone, startling in one so quiet, but a crudeness in her objections, an absence of proposed solution of difficulties, which partly distressed and partly pleased me (siding as I did mentally with my father), and which was in strange contrast to the satisfied calm which marked her subsequent treatment of religious differences. Upon my father's using an argument (common enough in those days) drawn from the present condition of the Jews as a fulfilment of prophecy, and saying, "If I were tempted to doubt the truth of the Bible, I should only have to look at a Jew to confirm my faith in it." "Don't talk to me of the Jews!" Miss Evans retorted, in an irritated tone; "to think that they were deluded into expectations of a temporal deliverer, and then punished because they couldn't understand that it was a spiritual deliverer that was intended!" To something that followed from her, intimating the claim of creatures upon their Creator, my father objected, "But we have no claim upon God." "No claim upon God!" she reiterated indignantly; "we have the strongest possible claim upon him." I regret that I can recall nothing more of a conversation carried on for more than two hours; but I vividly remember how deeply Miss Evans was moved, and how, as she stood against the mantelpiece during the last part of the time, her delicate fingers, in which she held a small piece of muslin on which she was at work, trembled with her agitation. The impression allowed to remain upon the minds of her friends, for some time after she had made declaration of her heresies, was of her being in a troubled, unsettled state. So great were her simplicity and candor in acknowledging this, and so apparent was her earnest desire for truth, that no hesitation was felt in asking her to receive visits from persons of different persuasions, who were judged competent to bring forward the best arguments in favor of orthodox doctrines. One of these was a Baptist minister, introduced to her by Miss Franklin; he was said to be well read in divinity, and I remember him as an original and interesting preacher. After an interview with Miss Evans, meeting my father, he said: "That young lady must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read." Mr. Watts, one of the professors at Spring Hill College (Independent), Birmingham, a colleague of Mr. Henry Rogers, author of the "Eclipse of Faith," and who had himself studied at the Hallé University, and enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Tholück, was requested (I think by my mother) to call on Miss Evans. His acquaintance with German Rationalism (rare in England in those days) qualified him to enter into, and it was hoped to meet, difficulties raised by a critical study of the New Testament. After his first or second interview, my brother remembers his observing with emphasis, "_She_ has gone into the question;" and I can recall a reference made by him at a later date in my hearing to Miss Evans's discontent with her own solutions--or rather with her own standpoint at that time. This discontent, he said, "was so far satisfactory." Doubtless it gave him hope of the reconversion of one who had, as he told my mother, awakened deep interest in his own mind, as much by the earnestness which characterized her inquiries as by her exceptional attainments. From letters that passed between my brother and myself during his residence in Germany, I give the following extracts referring to this period. The first is from one of mine, dated September 2, 1842: "In my father's absence we (my mother and I) called on Miss Evans. She now takes up a different position. Her views are not altogether altered, but she says it would be extreme arrogance in so young a person to suppose she had obtained _yet_ any just ideas of truth. She had been reading Dr. Tholück's reply to Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' but said Mr. Watts had advised her _not_ to read his 'Guido and Julius.'" In answer to this my brother says, in a letter dated Hallé, September 26, 1842, "You have given, doubtless, a very accurate account of Miss Evans's mode of stating her present sentiments. Mr. Watts's reason for advising that Dr. Tholück's 'Guido and Julius' be not read is, perhaps, that the reasoning is not satisfactory." In another letter, addressed to my brother at Hallé, and dated October 28, 1842, I tell him: "Last week mother and I spent an evening with Miss Evans. She seemed more settled in her views than ever, and rests her objections to Christianity on this ground, that Calvinism is Christianity, and, this granted, that it is a religion based on pure selfishness. She occupied, however, a great part of the time in pleading for works of imagination, maintaining that they perform an office for the mind which nothing else can. On the mention of Shakespeare, she praised him with her characteristic ardor, was shocked at the idea that mother should disapprove the perusal of his writings, and quite distressed lest, through her influence, I should be prevented from reading them. She could be content were she allowed no other book than Shakespeare; and in educating a child, this would be the first book she would place in its hands. "She seems to have read a great deal of Italian literature, and speaks with rapture of Metastasio's novels. She has lent me 'Le mie Prigioni' di Silvio Pellico, in his own tongue, as a book to begin with. She says there is a prevailing but very mistaken idea that Italian is an easy language, though she is exceedingly delighted with it. If at any time I wish to begin German, she would very much like to give me some instruction." In addition to the above relating to Shakespeare, I recall the protest that my mother's objection to his plays (my mother _had_ been an ardent lover of "the play"), on the ground that there were things in them that offended her, was as reasonable as the objection to walk in a beautiful garden, "because toads and weeds are to be found in it." In a letter dated March 6, 1843, I write to my brother: "Your request that you may be informed as to the precise nature of Miss Evans's philosophical views I shall find it very difficult to comply with, inasmuch as on our last interview she did not express herself so fully on this subject as formerly; indeed, I believe she is not now so desirous of controversy. She however appeared, to me at least, to have rather changed her ground on some points. For instance, she said she considered Jesus Christ as the embodiment of perfect love, and seemed to be leaning slightly to the doctrines of Carlyle and Emerson when she remarked that she considered the Bible a revelation in a certain sense, as she considered herself a revelation of the mind of Deity, etc. She was very anxious to know if you had heard Schelling." In a letter addressed to my brother at Spring Hill College, and dated October 28, 1844, I find this reference to Dr. Harris, who had been preaching a charity sermon in a chapel at Foleshill: "Miss Evans has just been reproaching me for not informing her of Dr. Harris's preaching, which she would have given anything to hear, as she says his 'Great Teacher' left more delightful impressions on her mind than anything she ever read, and is, she thinks, the best book that could be written by a man holding his principles." In the same letter I mention a second lesson in German given me by Miss Evans. In one written some time before, I tell my brother of her kind proposal, but add that my parents object "on account of her dangerous sentiments." She had, however, since called at our house one morning to renew it: and I well remember how eagerly I watched my mother, looking so affectionately at Miss Evans, and saying quietly, "You know, with your superior intellect, I cannot help fearing you might influence Mary, though you might not intend to do so. But," she went on to say, "her father does not agree with me: he does not see any danger, and thinks we ought not to refuse, as it is so very kind of you to be willing to take the trouble--and we know it would be a great advantage to her to learn German; for she will probably have to earn her living by teaching." Seeing at a glance how matters stood, Miss Evans turned round quickly to me, and said, "Come on Saturday at three o'clock, and bring what books you have." So I went, and began "Don Carlos," continuing to go, with some intervals occasioned by absence, pretty regularly on Saturday afternoons, for nearly two years; but it was not until the end of the second year, when I received Miss Evans's suggestion that the lessons were no longer necessary, and should be discontinued, that I fully realized what this companionship had been to me. The loss was like the loss of sunshine. No promise had been given that my religious belief should be undisturbed, nor was any needed. Interest was turned aside from Calvinism and Arminianism, which at an early age had engaged my attention, towards manifestations of nobility of character, and sympathy with human struggles and sufferings under varied conditions. The character of the "Marquis von Posa" (in "Don Carlos") roused an enthusiasm for heroism and virtue, which it was delightful to express to one who so fully shared it. Placing together one day the works of Schiller, which were in two or three volumes, Miss Evans said, "Oh, if _I_ had given these to the world, how happy I should be!" It must have been to confirm myself in my traditional faith by confession of it, that I once took upon myself to say to her how sure I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief. "Oh, it is so, is it?" she said, with the kindest smile, and nothing further passed. From time to time, however, her reverence and affection for the character of Christ and the Apostle Paul, and her sympathy with genuine religious feeling, were very clear to me. Expressing one day her horror of a crowd, she said, "I never would press through one, unless it were to see a second Jesus." The words startled me--the conception of Jesus Christ in my mind being so little associated with a human form; but they impressed me with a certain reality of feeling which I contrasted, as I did Miss Evans's abiding interest in great principles, with the somewhat factitious and occasional as well as fitful affection and concern manifest in many whom I looked up to as "converted" people. Once only do I remember such contrast being made by herself. She attended the service at the opening of a new church at Foleshill, with her father, and remarked to me the next day that, looking at the gayly dressed people, she could not help thinking how much easier life would be to her, and how much better she should stand in the estimation of her neighbors, if only she could take things as they did, be satisfied with outside pleasures, and conform to the popular beliefs without any reflection or examination. Once, too, after being in the company of educated persons "professing and calling themselves Christians," she commented to me on the _tone_ of conversation, often frivolous, sometimes ill-natured, that seemed yet to excite in no one any sense of impropriety. It must have been in those early days that she spoke to me of a visit from one of her uncles in Derbyshire, a Wesleyan, and how much she had enjoyed talking with him, finding she could enter into his feelings so much better than she had done in past times, when her views seemed more in accordance with his own, but were really less so. Among other books, I remember the "Life of Dr. Arnold" interested her deeply. Speaking of it to me one morning, she referred to a conversation she had had with a friend the evening before, and said they had agreed that it was a great good for such men to remain within the pale of orthodoxy, that so they might draw from the old doctrines the best that was to be got from them. Of criticisms on German books read with Miss Evans, I recall one or two. In the "Robbers," she criticised the attempt to enhance the horror of the situation of the abandoned father, by details of physical wretchedness, as a mistake in Art. "Wallenstein" she ranked higher from an intellectual point of view than any other work of Schiller's. The talk of the soldiers in the "Lager" she pointed out to me as "just what it would be." On my faint response, "I suppose it is!" she returned, "No, you do not _suppose_--we _know_ these things;" and then gave me a specimen of what might be a navvy's talk--"The sort of thing such people say, is, 'I'll break off your arm, and bloody your face with the stump.'" Mrs. Bray tells the following incident, as showing her quick perception of excellence from a new and unknown source. "We were sitting," Mrs. Bray says, "one summer afternoon on the lawn at Rosehill, July, 1850, when Marian came running to us from the house with the _Leader_ newspaper in her hand. 'Here is a new poet come into the world!' she exclaimed, and sitting down with us she read from the _Leader_ the poem called 'Hymn,' signed M., and ending with the fine stanza: "'When I have passed a nobler life in sorrow; Have seen rude masses grow to fulgent spheres; Seen how To-day is father of To-morrow, And how the Ages justify the Years, I praise Thee, God.' "The 'Hymn' is now reprinted in Mr. W. M. W. Call's volume of collected poems, called 'Golden Histories.'" Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy" was not so popular as his other works, but Miss Evans was deeply moved by it. Putting it into my hands one morning, she said, "There, read it--_you_ will care for it." The "Life of Jean Paul Richter," published in the Catholic Series (in which the head of Christ, by De la Roche, so dear to her, figures as a vignette), was read and talked of with great interest, as was his "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," translated by the late Mr. Edward Noel of Hampstead. Choice little bits of humor from the latter she greatly enjoyed. Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," I think Miss Evans gave to me. I know it interested her, as did Emerson's "Essays." On his visit to Coventry, we could not, unfortunately, accept Mr. Bray's kind invitation to meet him at Rosehill; but after he had left, Miss Evans soon came up kindly to give us her impressions of him while they were fresh in her memory. She told us he had asked her what had first awakened her to deep reflection, and when she answered, "Rousseau's Confessions," he remarked that this was very interesting, inasmuch as Carlyle had told him that very book had had the same effect upon his mind. As _I_ heard Emerson's remark after his interviews with Miss Evans, it was, "That young lady has a calm, clear spirit." Intercourse, it will be seen, was kept up with my family, otherwise than through the lessons, by calls, and in little gatherings of friends in evenings, when we were favored to hear Miss Evans sing. Her voice was not strong, and I think she preferred playing on the piano; but her low notes were effective, and there was always an elevation in the rendering. As I knew Miss Evans, no one escaped her notice. In her treatment of servants, for instance, she was most considerate. "They come to me," she used to say, "with all their troubles," as indeed did her friends generally--sometimes, she would confess, to an extent that quite oppressed her. When any object of charity came under her notice, and power to help was within her reach, she was very prompt in rendering it. Our servant's brother or sister, or both of them, died, leaving children dependent on friends themselves poor. Miss Evans at once offered to provide clothing and school-fees for one of these, a chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age. Unexpectedly, however, an aunt at a distance proposed to adopt the child. I recollect taking her to say good-bye to her would-be benefactress, and can see her now, standing still and subdued in her black frock and cape, with Miss Evans kneeling down by her, and saying, after giving her some money, "Then I suppose there is nothing else we can do for her." My husband's mother, who was a member of the Society of Friends, established, with the help of her daughters and a few others interested, an Industrial Home for girls about the age of fourteen. It was in the year 1843, and was, therefore, one of the first institutions of the kind in England. The model was taken from something of the same order attempted by a young girl in France. The girls were, as far as practicable, to maintain themselves, working under conditions of comfort and protection more attainable than in their own homes. The idea was new; the Home could not be started without funds, and my mother undertook to collect for it in her own neighborhood. In a letter to me, written at this time, she tells me she is "not doing much to help dear Mrs. Cash," there being "a prejudice against the scheme;" but adds, "This morning Miss Evans called, and brought me two guineas from her father." I tell of this as one among many indications of Miss Evans's ever-growing zeal to serve humanity in a broader way, motived, as _she_ felt, by a higher aim than what she termed "desire to save one's soul by making up coarse flannel for the poor." In these broad views--in this desire to bring her less advantaged neighbors nearer to her own level, to meet them on common ground, to raise them above the liability to eleemosynary charity--she had Mr. Bray's full sympathy. To me she dwelt frequently upon his genuine benevolence, upon his ways of advancing the interests of the working men, as being, in her judgment, wise and good. She visited periodically, in turn with Mrs. Bray, myself, and a few others, an infant school which Mr. Bray had helped to start; and although this sort of work was so little suited to her, yet so much did she feel the duty of living for others, especially the less privileged, that one morning she came to Mrs. Bray, expressing strongly her desire to help in _any_ work that could be given her. The only thing that could be thought of was the illustration of some lessons in Natural History, on sheets of cardboard, needed then, when prints of the kind were not to be procured for schools. The class of animals to be illustrated by Mrs. Bray on the sheet taken by Miss Evans was the "Rodentiæ," and at the top a squirrel was to figure, the which she undertook to draw. This I have seen, half-finished--a witness to the willing mind; proof that its proper work lay otherwhere. Lectures at the Mechanics' Institute were matters of great interest to Miss Evans; and I remember the pleasure given her by the performance of the music of "Comus," with lecture by Professor Taylor, at our old St. Mary's Hall. In that hall, too, we heard the first lecture on total abstinence that I remember to have heard in Coventry, though of "Temperance Societies" we knew something. The lecturer was the Rev. Mr. Spencer, a clergyman at Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath, and uncle of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Miss Evans was present at the lecture, with Mr. Bray, who told me afterwards he had some difficulty in restraining her from going up, as soon as the lecture was over, to take the pledge, he thought, without due consideration. "I felt," she said, speaking to me afterwards of the lecturer, "that he had got hold of a power for good that was of incalculable worth." I need scarcely say that I received, along with lessons in German, some "rules and lessons for life" from Miss Evans. One of the first was an injunction to be accurate, enforced with the warning that the tendency is to grow less and less so as we get older. The other was tolerance. How well I can remember the remonstrance, "My dear child, the great lesson of life is tolerance." In the proverb, "Live and let live," she saw a principle involved, harder to act upon, she would say, than the maxims of benevolence--I think, because bringing less credit with it. The reading of dramas and romances naturally gives rise to discussion of their main theme. In treating of love and marriage, Miss Evans's feeling was so fine as to satisfy a young girl in her teens, with her impossible ideals. The conception of the union of two persons by so close a tie as marriage, without a previous union of minds as well as hearts, was to her dreadful. "How terrible it must be," she once said to me, "to find one's self tied to a being whose limitations you could see, and must know were such as to prevent your ever being understood!" She thought that though in England marriages were not professedly "arrangés," they were so too often practically: young people being brought together, and receiving intimations that mutual interest was desired and expected, were apt to drift into connections on grounds not strong enough for the wear and tear of life; and this, too, among the middle as well as in the higher classes. After speaking of these and other facts, of how things were and would be, in spite of likelihood to the contrary, she would end by saying, playfully, "Now, remember I tell you this, and I am sixty!" She thought the stringency of laws rendering the marriage-tie (at that date) irrevocable, practically worked injuriously; the effect being "that many wives took far less pains to please their husbands in behavior and appearance, because they knew their own position to be invulnerable." And at a later time she spoke of marriages on the Continent, where separations did not necessarily involve discredit, as being very frequently far happier. One claim, as she regarded it, from equals to each other was this, the right to hear from the aggrieved, "You have ill-treated me; do you not see your conduct is not fair, looked at from my side?" Such frankness would, she said, bring about good understanding better than reticent endurance. Her own filial piety was sufficiently manifest; but of the converse obligation, that of the claim of child upon parent, she was wont to speak thus strongly. "There may be," she would say, "conduct on the part of a parent which should exonerate his child from further obligation to him; but there cannot be action conceivable which should absolve the parent from obligation to serve his child, seeing that for that child's existence he is himself responsible." I did not at the time see the connection between this view and the change of a fundamental nature marked by Miss Evans's earlier contention for our "claim on God." The bearing of the above on orthodox religion I did not see. Some time ago, however, I came across this reflection, made by a clergyman of the Broad Church school--that since the _claims_ of children had, in the plea for schools, been based on the responsibility of parents towards them, a higher principle had been maintained on the platform than was preached from the pulpit, as the basis of the popular theology. In my previous communication in the "Life" I have already made mention of Miss Evans's sympathy with me in my own religious difficulties; and my obligations to her were deepened by her seconding my resolve to acknowledge how much of the traditional belief had fallen away from me and left a simpler faith. In this I found her best help when, as time passed on, my brother saw he could not conscientiously continue in the calling he had chosen. As, however, his heresies were not considered fatal, and he was esteemed by the professors and students of his college, there was for some time hesitation. In this predicament I wrote to him, a little favoring compromise. My mother also wrote. I took the letters to Miss Evans before posting them. She read mine first, with no remark, and then began my mother's, reading until she came upon these words--"In the meantime, let me entreat you not to utter any sentiments, either in the pulpit or in conversation, that you do not believe to be strictly true;" on which she said, turning to me, "Look, this is the important point, what your mother says here," and I immediately put my own letter into the fire. "What are you doing?" she quickly said; and when I answered, "You are right--my mother's letter is to the point, and that only need go," she nodded assent, and, keeping it, sent it enclosed with a few lines from herself. I knew what I had done and so did she: the giving up of the ministry to a young man without other resources was no light matter; and as I rose to go she said, "These are the tragedies for which the world cares so little, but which are so much to me." More than twenty years elapsed before I had again the privilege of seeing George Eliot, and that on one occasion only, after her final settlement in London. It touched me deeply to find how much she had retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I remarked on this to Mr. Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter and myself at parting. "Wonderful sympathy," I said. "Is it not?" said he; and when I added, inquiringly, "The power lies there?" "Unquestionably it does," was his answer; "she forgets nothing that has ever come within the curl of her eyelash; above all, she forgets no one who has ever spoken to her one kind word." END OF VOL. I. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors were repaired. Duplicate sidenotes (repeated at the top of continuation pages) were deleted. Latin-1 file: _underscores_ enclose italicized content. P. 99 "[Greek: tho pascha]" and p. 139 "[Greek: nenikekas Galilaie]"--for the actual Greek script see the html version of this volume. 
6457	----	This eBook was produced by Marjorie Fulton. THE DIARY AND LETTERS OF MADAME D'ARBLAY (FRANCES BURNEY.) WITH NOTES BY W. C. WARD, AND PREFACED BY LORD MACAULAY'S ESSAY. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. (1792-1840.) WITH A PORTRAIT OF GENERAL D'ARBLAY. LONDON AND NEW YORK: FREDERICK WARNE AND CO. 1892. 19. (1792-3) THE FRENCH POLITICAL EMIGRANTS: MISS BURNEY MARRIES M. D'ARBLAY--11-70 Arrival of French Emigrants at juniper Hall--The Doctor's five Daughters--A Visit to Arthur Young--The Duke de Liancourt's abortive Efforts at Rouen--The Duke's Escape to England: "Pot Portere"--Madame de Genlis's hasty Retreat--A Nobleman of the Ancien Regime--Ducal Vivacity and Sadness--Graceful offers of Hospitality--The Emigrants at juniper Hall described--Monsieur d'Arblay--M. de Jaucourt: Madame de Stael--Severe Decrees against the Emigrants--Monsieur Girardin--The Phillipses at juniper Hall--Mystery attending M. de Narbonne's Birth--Revolutionary Societies in Norfolk: Death of Mr. Francis--Departure of Madame de la Chatre--Arrival of M. de la Chatre--English Feeling at the Revolutionary Excesses--Louis XVI's Execution--A Gloomy Club Meeting--Madame de Stael at juniper Hall--Miss Burney's Admiration of Madame de Stael--Failing Resources--The Beginning of the End--"This Enchanting Monsieur d'Arblay"--Talleyrand is found charming--A Proposed Visit to Madame de Stael disapproved of--M. de Lally Tolendal and his Tragedy--Contemplated Dispersion of the French Colony--Madame de Stael's Words of Farewell: M. d'Arblay--Regrets respecting Madame do Stael--M. d'Arblay's Visit to Chesington--The Matrimonial Project is Discussed--Dr. Burney's Objections to the Match--The Marriage takes place--Announcement of the Marriage to a Friend. 20. (1793-6) LOVE IN A COTTAGE: THE D'ARBLAYS VISIT WINDSOR-- 71-121 The French Clergy Fund: The Toulon Expedition--Madame d'Arblay on her Marriage--Mr. Canning--Talleyrand's Letters of Adieu--M. d'Arblay's Horticultural Pursuits--Mrs. Piozzi--M. d'Arblay as a Gardener--A Novel and a Tragedy-- page vi Hastings's Acquittal: Dr. Burney's Metastasio--Baby d'Arblay--The withdrawn Tragedy--"Camilla"--An Invitation to the Hermitage-- Presentation of "Camilla" at Windsor--A Conversation with the Queen--With the Princess Royal and Princess Augusta--A Present from the King and Queen--Curiosity regarding M. d'Arblay--The King approves the Dedication of "Camilla"--A delicious Chat with the Princesses--The King notices M. d'Arblay--The King and Queen on "Camilla"--Anecdote of the Duchess of York--A Visit to Mrs. Boscawen--The Relative Success of Madame d'Arblay's Novels--A Contemplated Cottage--The Princess Royal's first Interview with her Fianc`e--Opinions of the Reviews on "Camilla"--Death of Madame d'Arblay's Stepmother--The French Emigr`es at Norbury--Dr. Burney's depressed state--Covetous of Personal Distinction--Baby d'Arblay again and other Matters. 21. (1797-8) "CAMILLA" COTTAGE: SUNDRY VISITS TO THE ROYAL FAMILY--122-169 A Disagreeable journey Home--Burke's Funeral at Beaconsfield-- Death of M. d'Arblay's Brother--From Crewe Hall to Chelsea--At Dr. Herschel's--Hospitality under Difficulties--War Taxes: "Camilla" Cottage--Visitors arrive inopportunely-Another Visit to the Royal Family--Interview with the Queen--The King and his Infant Grand-daughter--Admiral Duncan's Victory--The Prince and Princess of Orange--Some Notable Actresses--The Duke of Clarence--Princess Sophia of Gloucester--Indignation against Talleyrand--The d'Arblay Maisonnette--Interview with the Queen and the Princesses--Royal Contributions towards the War-- Invitation to the Play--Mrs Schwellenberg's Successor--Madame d'Arblay's Little Boy at Court--His Presentation to the Queen-- Mlle. Bachmeister produces a Favourable Impression. 22. (1798-1802) VISITS TO OLD FRIENDS: WEST HANIBLE: DEATH OF MRS. PHILLIPS: SOJOURN IN FRANCE--170-247 A Visit to Mrs. Chapone--Mrs. Boscawen, Lady Strange, and Mr. Seward--A Mysterious Bank-Note--The new Brother-in-law: a Cordial Professor--Precocious Master Alex--The Page vii Barbaulds--Princess Amelia at juniper Hall--Death of Mr. Seward-- Dr. Burney again visits Dr. Herschel--Dr. Burney and the King-- Overwhelmed with the Royal Graciousness--War Rumours--Illness and Death of Mrs. Phillips--A Princess's Condescension--Horticultural Misfortunes--A Withdrawn Comedy--M. d'Arblay's French Property-- Home Matters--Contemplated journey to France--M. d'Arblay's Rough Sea Passage--Suggested Abandonment of Camilla Cottage--M. d'Arblay's Proposed Retirement from Military Service--M. d'Arblay's Disappointment--On the eve of Madame d'Arblay's journey to France--In France during the Peace and subsequently-- Arrival at Calais--"God save the King!" on French Soil--A Ramble through the Town--Sunday on the Road to Paris--Engagements, Occupations, and Fatigues--Aristocratic Visitors--Anxiety to see the first Consul--At the Opera-bouffe--Difficulties respecting Madame de Stael--Madame de Lafayette--Sight-seeing at the Tuileries--A Good Place is Secured--M. d'Arblay's Military Comrades--Arrival of the Troops--An Important New Acquaintance-- Madame c'est mon Mari--Advent of the first Consul--The Parade of Troops--A Scene--With M. d'Arblay's Relatives at joigny--Some joigny Acquaintances--The Influenza in Paris--Rumours of War-- "Our little Cell at Passy"--The Prince of Wales eulogized--Dr. Burney at Bath--Affectionate Greetings to Dr. Burney--Dr. Burney's Diploma. 23. (1812-14) MADAME D'ARBLAY AND HER SON IN ENGLAND--248-291 Narrative of Madame d'Arblay's journey to London--Anxiety to see Father and Friends--A Mild Minister of Police--Embarkation Interdicted--A Change of Plan--A New Passport obtained-- Commissions for London--Delay at Dunkirk--The MS. of "The Wanderer"--Spanish Prisoners at Dunkirk--Surprised by an Officer of Police--Interrogated at the Police Office--The "Mary Ann" captured off Deal--joy on arriving in England--Young d'Arblay secures a Scholarship--The Queen alarmed by a Mad Woman--Weather Complaints: Proposed Meeting with Lord Lansdowne--A Young Girl's entry to London Society: Madame de Sta`el--Rogers the Poet-- Interview with Mr. Wilberforce--Intended Publication of "The Wanderer"--General d'Arblay's wounded Comrades Page viii --Death of Dr. Burney--Favourable News of M. d'Arblay--"The Wanderer"--Madame d'Arblay's Presentation to Louis XVIII.--At Grillon's Hotel--Grattan the Orator--A Demonstrative Irish Lady- -Inquiries after the Duchess d'Angouleme--Preparations for the Presentations--Arrival of Louis XVIII.--The Presentations to the King--A Flattering Royal Reception--An important Letter Delayed-- M. d'Arblay arrives in England--A Brilliant Assemblage--M. d'Arblay enters Louis XVIII.'s Bodyguard. 24. (1815) MADAME D'ARBLAY AGAIN IN FRANCE: BONAPARTE'S ESCAPE FROM ELBA--292-333 An Interview with the Duchess of Angouleme--Arrival at the Tuileries--A Mis-apprehension--A Discovery and a Rectification-- Conversation on Madame d'Arblay's Escape and M. d'Arblay's Loyalty--The Prince Regent the Duchess's Favourite--Narrative of Madame d'Arblay's Flight from Paris to Brussels--Prevailing Inertia on Bonaparte's return from Elba--Bonaparte's Advance: Contemplated Migration from Paris--General d'Arblay's Military Preparations--Preparations for Flight: Leave-takings--Aristocratic Irritability--The Countess d'Auch's Composure--Rumours of Bonaparte's near approach--Departure from Paris at Night Time--A Halt at Le Bourget--The journey Resumed--A Supper at Amiens with the Prefect--Reception at the Prefecture at Arras--A Cheerful D6jeuner somewhat ruffled--A Loyal Prefect-- Emblems of Loyalty at Douay--State of Uncertainty at Orchies--A Mishap on the Road--A kindly offer of Shelter--Alarmed by Polish Lancers--Arrival at Tournay--Futile Efforts to Communicate with M. d'Arblay--Interviews with M. de Chateaubriand. 25. (1815) AT BRUSSELS: WATERLOO: REJOINS M. D'ARBLAY--334--383 Sojourn at Brussels--Letters from General d'Arblay--Arrival of General d'Arblay--A Mission entrusted to General d'Arblay--"Rule Britannia!" in the All`ee Verte--General d'Arblay leaves for Luxembourg--An Exchange of visits--The Fete Dieu--The Eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb--A Proposed Royal Corps--Painful Suspense-- Inquietude at Brussels--The Black Page ix Brunswickers--The Opening of the Campaign--News from the Field of Battle--Project for quitting Brussels--Calmly awaiting the Result--Flight to Antwerp determined on--A Check met with--A Captured French General--The Dearth of News--Rumours of the French coming--French Prisoners brought in--News of Waterloo--The Victory declared to be complete--The Wounded and the Prisoners-- Hostilities at an end: Te Deum for the Victory--Maternal Advice-- About the Great Battle--An Accident befalls General d'Arblay-- Madame d'Arblay's Difficulties in rejoining her Husband--A Friendly Reception at Cologne--From Cologne to Coblenz and Treves--Meeting with General d'Arblay--Waiting for Leave to return to France--Departure for Paris--A Chance View of the Emperor of Russia--English Troops in Occupation--Leavetaking: M. de Talleyrand. 26. (1815-8) AT BATH AND ILFRACOMBE: GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S ILLNESS AND DEATH--384--431 Arrival in England--Alexander d'Arblay: Some old Bath Friends-- French Affairs: General d'Arblay's Health--The Escape of Lavalette: The Streatham Portraits--Regarding Husband and Son-- Maternal Anxieties--Advantages of Bath: Young d'Arblay's Degree-- Playful Reproaches and Sober Counsel--Preparations for leaving Bath--Installed at Ilfracombe--A Captured Spanish Ship--The Spanish Captain's Cook--Ships in Distress--Young d'Arblay's Tutor--General d'Arblay's Ill-health--Particulars of Ilfracombe-- Young d'Arblay's Aversion to Study--A Visit from the first Chess Player in England--A Coast Ramble in search of Curiosities-- Caught, by the Rising Tide--Efforts to reach a place of safety--A Signal of Distress--Little Diane--Increasing Danger--The Last Wave of the Rising Tide--Arrival of Succour--Meeting between Mother and Son--General d'Arblay's return to England--The Princess Charlotte's Death--The Queen and Princesses at Bath-- News arrives of the Princess Charlotte's Death--An old Acquaintance: Serious Illness of General d'Arblay--The General's First Attack: Delusive Hopes--General d'Arblay presented to the Queen--Gloomy Forebodings--Presents from the Queen and Princess Elizabeth--The General receives the Visit of a Priest--The Last Sacrament Administered--Farewell Words of Counsel--The End Arrives. Page x 27. (1818-40) YEARS OF WIDOWHOOD: DEATH OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S SON: HER OWN DEATH--435--458 Mournful Reflections--Visits received and Letters penned--Removal from Bath to London--Death of the Queen: Sketch of her Character- -Madame d'Arblay's Son is Ordained--With some Royal Highnesses-- Queen Caroline--Gossip from an Old Friend, and the Reply--More Gossip--Ill-health of the Rev. A. d'Arblay: Dr. Burney's MSS.--A last Gossiping Letter--Death of Mrs. Piozzi--Mrs. Piozzi compared with Madame de Stael--Sister Hetty--Official Duties Temporarily Resumed--The Rev. A. d'Arblay named Lent Preacher--Madame d'Arblay's Health and Occupation--Destroyed Correspondence--The Princess and the Rev. A. d'Arblay--A Visit from Sir Walter Scott--Memoirs of Dr. Burney--Deaths of Hester Burney and Mrs. Locke--Death of the Rev. A. d'Arblay--Death of Madame d'Arblay's sister Charlotte--Illness and Death of Madame d'Arblay. INDEX--459-480Page 11 SECTION 19. (1792-3) THE FRENCH POLITICAL EMIGRANTS: MISS BURNEY MARRIES M. D'ARBLAY. [The following section must be pronounced, from the historical point of view, one of the most valuable in the " Diary." It gives us authentic glimpses of some of the actors in that great Revolution, "the Death-Birth of a new order," which was getting itself transacted, with such terrible accompaniments, across the channel. The refugees with whom Fanny grew acquainted, and who formed the little colony at juniper Hall, near Dorking, were not the men of the first emigration--princes and nobles who fled their country, like cowards, as soon as they found themselves in danger, and reentered it like traitors, in the van of a foreign invasion. Not such were the inmates of Juniper Hall. These were constitutional monarchists, men who had taken part with the people in the early stage of the Revolution, who had been instrumental in making the Constitution, and who had sought safety in flight only when the Constitution was crushed and the monarchy abolished by the triumph of the extreme party. To the grands seigneurs of the first emigration, these constitutional royalists, were scarcely less detestable than the jacobins themselves. A few leading facts and dates will perhaps assist the reader to a clearer understanding of the situation. September 1791, the French Assembly, having finished its work of Constitution-making, and the said [Constitution being accepted by the king, retires gracefully, and the new Assembly, constitutionally elected, meets, October 1. But the Constitution, ushered in with such rejoicings, proves a failure. The king has the right to veto the acts of the Assembly, and he exerts that right with a vengeance :--vetoes their most urgent decrees: decree against the emigrant noblesse, plotting, there at Coblenz, the downfall of their country; decree against nonjuring priests, intriguing endlessly against the Constitution. Patriot-Minister Roland remonstrates with his majesty, and the patriotic ministry is forthwith dismissed. Meanwhile distress and Page 12 disorder are everywhere, and emigration is on the increase Abroad, Austria and Prussia are threatening invasion, and the emigrants at Coblenz are clamorous for war. War with Austria is declared, April 20, 1792; war with Prussia follows three months later; England remaining still neutral. One of our friends of juniper Hall, Madame de Staél's friend, Count Louis de Narbonne, has been constitutional minister of war, but had to retire in March, when the popular ministry--Roland's--came into office. It is evident that the king and the Assembly cannot act together; nay, the king himself feels the impossibility of it, and is already setting his hopes on foreign interference, secretly corresponding with Austria and Prussia. The people of Paris, too, feel the impossibility, and are setting their hopes on something very different. The monarchy must go; jacobins' club(1) and men of the Gironde, afterwards at death- grapple with one another, are now united on this point; they, and not a constitutional government, are the true representatives of Paris and of France. A year ago, July 1791, the people of Paris, demanding the deposition of the king, were dispersed by General Lafayette with volleys of musketry. But Lafayette's popularity and power are now gone. "The hero of two worlds," as he was called, was little more than a boy when he fought under Washington, in the cause of American independence. Animated by the same love of liberty which had carried him to America, Lafayette took part in the early movements of the French Revolution. In 1789, after the fall of the Bastille, he was commander of the national guard, and one of the most popular men in France. A high-minded man, full of sincerity, of enthusiasm: "Cromwell Grandison," Mirabeau nicknamed him. Devoted to the Constitution, Lafayette was no friend to the extreme party, to the jacobins, with their Danton, their Robespierre. He had striven for liberty, but for liberty and monarchy combined; and the two things were fast becoming irreconcilable. And now, in July 1792, distrusted alike by the Court and the people, Lafayette sits sad at Sedan, in the midst of his army. War has already commenced, with a desultory and unsuccessful attack by the French upon the Austrian Netherlands. But the real struggle is now approaching. Heralded by an insolent proclamation, the Duke of Brunswick is marching from Coblenz with more than a hundred thousand Prussians, Austrians, and emigrants ; and General Lafayette, alas ! appears more bent upon denouncing jacobinism than upon defending the frontier. The country is indeed in danger. With open hostility advancing from without, doubt and suspicion fermenting within, Paris at last rises in good earnest, August 10, 1792. This is the answer to Brunswick's insolent proclamation. Paris attacks the Tuileries, King Louis and his family taking refuge in the Assembly; captures the Tuileries, not without terrible loss, the brave Swiss guard Page 13 standing steadfast to their posts, and getting, the greater part of them, massacred. Yielding to the demands of the people, the Assembly passes decrees suspending the king, dismissing the ministers, and convoking a National Convention. This was the work of the famous 10th of August, the birthday of the French Republic. on the 13th August the royal family is sent to the prison of the Temple from whence the king and the queen, unhappy Marie Antoinette, will come forth only to trial and execution. A new patriotic ministry is formed--Rolan again minister of the interior, Danton, the soul of the insurrection, minister of justice; a tribunal is appointed) and the prisons of Paris are filled with persons suspect. Executions follow; but the tribunal makes not quick enough work. Austrians and Prussians are advancing towards Paris; in Paris itself thousands of aristocrats, enemies to their country, are lying hid, ready to join the foreign foes. In these desperate straits, Paris, at least sansculotte Paris, frenzied and wild for vengeance, falls upon the mad expedient of massacring the prisoners: more than a thousand suspected royalists are slaughtered, after brief improvised Trial or pretence of trial; or even without trial at all. This butchery is known as the "September massacres" (Sept. 2-6, 1792), infamous in history, heartily approved by few, perhaps, even of the more violent Republicans; indignantly denounced by Rowland and the less violent, powerless, nevertheless, to interfere, Paris being "in death-panic, the enemy and gibbets at its door."(2) Sept. 22, the Legislative Assembly having Dissolved, the National Convention holds its first meeting and proclaims the Republic: royalty for ever abolished in France. Among the feelings, with which the news of these events are received in England, horror predominates. Still the Government takes no decisive step. The English ambassador in Paris, Lord Gower, is indeed recalled, in consequence of the events of August 10, but the French ambassador, Chauvelin, yet remains in London, although unrecognised in an official capacity after the deposition of Louis. War is in the wind, and, although Fox and many members of the opposition earnestly deprecate any hostile interference in the affairs of the Republic, a strong contingent of the Whig party, headed by Burke, is not less earnest in their efforts to make peace with France impossible. Pitt, indeed, is in favour of neutrality, but Pitt is forced to give way at last. Meanwhile, the popular feeling in favour of the royalists is being heightened and extended by the constant influx of French refugees. Thousands of the recalcitrant clergy, especially, with no king's veto now to protect them, are seeking safety, in England. Many adherents of the Constitution, too, ex-members of the Assembly and others, are fleeing hither from a country intolerant of monarchists, even constitutional; establishing themselves at juniper Hall and elsewhere. Among them we note the Duke de Liancourt, whose escape the reader will find related in the following pages; Count de Lally- Page 14 Tollendal and M. de jaucourt, saved, both, by - good fortune, from the September massacres ; Vicomte de Montmorency, or call him citoyen, who voted for the abolition of titles; ex-minister of war Narbonne, concealed after August 10 by Madame de Stael, and escaping disguised as a servant; and presently, too, Madame de Stael herself; and last, but not least interesting to readers of the Diary, General Alexandre dArblay, whom Fanny will before long fall in love with and marry. One person, too, there is, more noteworthy, or at least more prominent in history, than any of these, whom Fanny meets at Mickleham, whom she dislikes instinctively at first sight, but whose plausible speech and ingratiating manners soon make a convert of her. This is citizen Talleyrand--Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-P�rigord, Bishop of Autun. He, too, is now an emigrant, although he came to England in a far different character, as secret ambassador from the Constitutional Government of France ; citizen Chauvelin being the nominal ambassador. On the whole, Talleyrand's diplomacy has not been productive of much good, to himself or others. Back in Paris before the 10th of August, he returned to London in September with a passport from Danton. A questionable man; some think him a jacobin, others a royalist in disguise. And now, while he is in London, there is talk of him in the Convention : citizen Talleyrand, it seems, has professed himself " disposed to serve the king ;" whereupon (December 5, 1792) citizen Talleyrand is decreed accused, and his name is inscribed on the list of emigrants. We must turn once again to France. At Sedan, in a white heat of indignation on the news of that 10th of August, constitutional (sic) Lafayette emits a proclamation : the Constitution is destroyed, the king a prisoner: let us march for Paris and restore them! There is hope at first, that the army will follow Lafayette, but hope tells a flattering tale : the soldiers, it seems, care more for their country than for the Constitution. Lafayette sees that all is lost ; rides (August 18) for Holland with a few friends, of whom General d'Arblay is one; intends to take passage thence for America, but falls, instead, into the hands of the Austrians, and spends the next few years imprisoned in an Austrian fortress. General d'Arblay, after a few days, is allowed to proceed to England. Lafayette gone, the command of the army falls to General Dumouriez. Brunswick with his Prussians and emigrants, Clairfait with his Austrians, are now in France; advancing upon Paris. They take Longwy and Verdun; try to take Thonville and Lille, but cannot; and find Dumouriez and his sansculottes, there in the passes of Argonne, the "Thermopylae of France," an unexpectedly hard nut to crack. In fact, the nut is not to be cracked at all: Dumouriez, " more successful than Leonidas," flings back the invasion; compels the invaders to evacuate France; and in November, assuming the offensive, conquers the whole Austrian Netherlands. Meantime, in the south-east, the war in Page 15 which the Republic is engaged with the King of Sardinia progresses also favourably, and Savoy and Nice are added to the French territory. Europe may arm, but a people fighting for an ideal is not to be crushed. France has faith in her ideal of liberty and fraternity, questionable or worse though some of the methods are by which she endeavours to realise it. But Danton is right: "il nous faut de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace;" and with superb audacity the Republic defies the armed powers of Europe, decrees (November 19) assistance to every nation that will strike a blow for freedom, and cast off its tyrants. A yet more daring act of defiance follows--tragic to all men, unspeakably horrible to Fanny Burney and all friends of monarchy, constitutional or other. In December 1792, poor King Louis is tried before the National Convention, found guilty of "conspiring against liberty;" condemned to death by a majority of votes; in January, executed January 21. It is even as Danton said in one of his all-too gigantic figures 'the coalesced kings threaten us; we hurl at their feet, as gage of battle, the Head of a King."' (3) Louis's kinsman, profligate Philippe Egalit�, ci-devant Duc d'Orl�ans, votes for death; before another year has passed he himself will have perished by the guillotine. In England, war is resolved upon; even Pitt sees not how it can be avoided. January 24, ambassador Chauvelin is ordered to quit England within eight days; Talleyrand remaining yet another year. Spain, too, is arming, and Holland is England's ally. War being inevitable, the Republic determines to be first in the field; declares war on England and Holland, February 1, 1793, and on Spain, March 7.-ED.] ARRIVAL OF FRENCH EMIGRANTS AT JUNIPER HALL. August 1792. Our ambassador is recalled from France Russia has declared war against that wretched kingdom. But it may defy all outward enemies to prove in any degree destructive in comparison with its lawless and barbarous inmates. We shall soon have no authentic accounts from Paris, as no English are expected to remain after the ambassador, and no French will dare to write, in such times of pillage, what may carry them à la lanterne.(4) Page 16 (Mrs. Phillips to Fanny Burney.) Mickleham, September 1792. We shall shortly, I believe, have a little colony of unfortunate (or rather) fortunate, since here they are safe) French noblesse in our neighbourhood. Sunday evening Ravely informed Mr. Locke that two or three families had joined to take Jenkinson's house, juniper Hall, and that another family had taken a small house at Westhamble, which the people very reluctantly let, upon the Christian-like supposition that, being nothing but French papishes, they would never pay. Our dear Mr. Locke, while this was agitating, sent word to the landlord that he would be answerable for the rent ; however, before this message arrived, the family were admitted. The man said they had pleaded very hard indeed, and said, if he did but know the distress they had been in, he would not hesitate. This house is taken by Madame de Broglie, daughter of the mareschal, who is in the army with the French princes;(5) or, rather, wife to his son, Victor Broglie, till very lately general of one of the French armies, and at present disgraced, and fled nobody knows where. This poor lady came over in an open boat, with a son younger than my Norbury, and was fourteen hours at sea. She has other ladies with her, and gentlemen, and two little girls, who had been sent to England some weeks ago; they are all to lodge in a sort of cottage, containing only a kitchen and parlour on the ground floor. I long to offer them my house, 'and have been much gratified by finding Mr. Locke immediately determined to visit them; his taking this step will secure them the civilities, at least, of the other neighbours. At Jenkinson's are-la Marquise de la Ch�tre, whose husband is with the emigrants; her son; M. de Narbonne, lately ministre de la guerre;(6) M. de Montmorency; Charles or Theodore Lameth; Jaucourt; and one or two more, whose names I have forgotten, are either arrived to-day, or expected. I feel infinitely interested for all these persecuted persons. Pray tell me whatever you hear of M. de Liancourt, etc. Heaven bless you! Page 17 THE DOCTOR'S FIVE DAUGHTERS. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Halstead, October 2, '92. My dearest padre,-I have just got your direction, in a letter from my mother, and an account that you seem to be in health and spirits; so now I think it high time to let you know a little about some of your daughters, lest you should forget you have any such incumbrances. In the first place, two of them, Esther and F. B., had a safe and commodious journey hither, in the midst of pattering showers and cloudy skies, making up as well as they could for the deficiencies of the elements by the dulcet recreation of the concord of sweet sounds ; not from tabrets and harps, but from the harmony of hearts with tongues. In the second place, a third of them, Charlotte F., writes word her caro sposo has continued very tolerably well this last fortnight, and that she still desires to receive my visit according to the first appointment. In the third place, a fourth of them, Sarah, is living upon French politics and with French fugitives, at Bradfield,(7) where she seems perfectly satisfied with foreign forage. In the fourth place, Susanna, another of them, sends cheering histories of herself and her tribe, though she concludes them with a sighing ejaculation of "I wish I did not know there was such a country as France !" A VISIT To ARTHUR YOUNG.(8) Oct. 5.-I left Halstead, and set off, alone, for Bradfield Hall, which was but one stage of nineteen miles distant. Sarah,(9) who was staying with her aunt, Mrs. Young, expected Page 18 me, and came running out before the chaise stopped at the door, and Mr. Young following, with both hands full of French newspapers. He welcomed me with all his old spirit and impetuosity, exclaiming his house never had been so honoured since its foundation, nor ever could be again, unless I re-visited it in my way back, even though all England came in the meantime! Do you not know him well, my Susan, by this opening rodomontade? "But where," cried he, "is Hetty? O that Hetty! Why did you not bring her with you? That wonderful creature! I have half a mind to mount horse, and gallop to Halstead to claim her! What is there there to merit her? What kind of animals have you left her with? Anything capable of understanding her?" During this we mounted up-stairs, into the dining-room. Here all looked cold and comfortless, and no Mrs. Young appeared. I inquired for her, and heard that her youngest daughter, Miss Patty, had just had a fall from her horse, which had bruised her face, and occasioned much alarm. The rest of the day we spoke only of French politics. Mr. Young is a severe penitent of his democratic principles, and has lost even all pity for the constituants r�volutionnaires, who had "taken him in" by their doctrines, but cured him by their practice, and who "ought better to have known what they were about before they presumed to enter into action." Even the Duc de Liancourt,(11) who was then in a small house at Bury, merited, he said, all the personal misfortunes that had befallen him. "I have real obligations to him," he added, "and therefore I am anxious to show him respect, and do him any service, in his present reverse of fortune; but he has brought it all on himself, and, what is worse; on his country." He wrote him, however, a note to invite him to dinner the next day. The duke wrote an answer, that lamented excessively being engaged to meet Lord Euston, And dine with the Bury aldermen. Page 19 THE DUKE DE LIANCOURT'S ABORTIVE EFFORTS AT ROUEN. I must now tell you the history of this poor duke's arriving in England, for it involves a revival of loyalty-an effort to make some amends to his unhappy sovereign for the misery into which he had largely contributed to plunge him; which, with me, has made his peace for ever. But first I should tell, he was the man who almost compelled the every-way- deluded Louis to sanction the National Assembly by his presence when first it resisted his orders. The queen and all her party were strongly against the measure, and prophesied it would be the ruin of his authority; but the duke, highly ambitious of fame, as Mr. Young describes him, and willing to sacrifice everything to the new systems then pervading all France, suddenly rushed into his closet, upon the privilege of being one of the five or seven pairs de France(12) who have that licence, and, with a strong and forcible eloquence, declared nothing but his concession would save the nation from a civil war; while his entering, unarmed, into the National Assembly, would make him regarded for ever as the father and saviour of his people, and secure him the powerful sovereignty of the grateful hearts of all his subjects. He succeeded, and the rest is public. This incident has set all the Coblenz(13) party utterly and for ever against the duke. He had been some time in extreme anguish for the unhappy king, whose ill-treatment on the 20th of June 1792,(14) reached him while commandant at Rouen. He then first began to see, that the monarch or the jacobins must inevitably fall, and he could scarce support the prospect of ultimate danger threatening the former. When the news reached him of the bloody 10th of August, a plan which for some time he had been forming, of gaining over his regiment to the service of the king, was rendered abortive. Yet all his officers except One had promised to join in any enterprise for their insulted master. He had hoped to get the king to Page 20 Rouen under this protection, as I gather, though this matter has never wholly transpired, But the king could not be persuaded to trust any one. How should he?--especially a revolutionnaire? No time now was to be lost, and, in his first impetuosity of rage and despair, he instantly summoned his officers and his troops ; and, in the midst of them all, upon the parade or place of assembling, he took off his hat, and called out aloud, "Vive le roi!" His officers echoed the sound, all but one!--yet not a soldier joined. Again be waved his hat, and louder and louder called out, "Vive le roi!" And then every soldier repeated it after him. Enchanted with hope, he felt one exulting moment, when this single dissentient officer called out aloud, as soon as the loyal cry was over, "As an officer of the nation I forbid this!--Vive la nation!" The duke instantly had the man arrested, and retired to his apartment to compose his excess agitation, and consider how to turn this promise of loyalty to the service of his now imprisoned king; but, in a short time, an officer strongly attached to him entered the room hastily, and cried, "Sauvez vous, M. de Liancourt!(15)--be speedy! the jacobin party of Rouen have heard of your indiscretion and a price is this moment set upon your head!" The duke knew too well with whom he had to act for a moment's hesitation. To serve the king was now impossible, as he had but to appear in order to be massacred. He could only save his own life by flight. THE DUKE'S ESCAPE To ENGLAND: "POT PORTERE." In what manner he effected his escape out of Rouen he has never mentioned. I believe he was assisted by those who, remaining behind, could only be named to be torn in pieces for their humanity. M. Jamard, a French priest, tells me no human being knows when or how he got away, and none suspected him to be gone for two days. He went first to Abbeville there, for two days, he appeared everywhere, walking about in his regimentals, and assuming an air of having nothing to apprehend. This succeeded, as his indiscretion had not yet spread at Abbeville; but, meanwhile, a Page 21 youth whom he had brought up from a child, and on whose fond regard and respect he could rely, was employed in seeking him the means of passing over to England. This was infinitely difficult, as he was to leave France without any passport. How he quitted Abbeville I know not; but he was in another town, near the coast, three days, still waiting for a safe conveyance; and here, finding his danger increased greatly by delay, he went to some common house, without dress or equipage or servants that could betray him, and spent his whole time in bed, under pretence of indisposition, to avoid being seen. At length his faithful young groom succeeded; and he got, at midnight, into a small boat, with only two men. He had been taken for the King of France by one, who had refused to convey him ; and some friend, who assisted his escape, was forced to get him off, at last, by holding a pistol to the head of his conductor, and protesting he would shoot him through and through, if he made further demur, or spoke aloud. It was dark, and midnight. Both he and his groom planted themselves in the bottom of the boat, and were covered with fagots, lest any pursuit should ensue : and thus wretchedly they were suffocated till they thought themselves at a safe distance from France. The poor youth then, first looking up, exclaimed, "Ah! nous sommes perdus!(16) they are carrying us back to our own country!" The duke started up; he had the same opinion, but thought opposition vain; he charged him to keep silent and quiet; and after about another league, they found this, at least, a false alarm, owing merely to a thick fog or mist. At length they landed--at Hastings, I think. The boatman had his money, and they walked on to the nearest public-house. The duke, to seem English, called for "pot portere." It was brought him, and he drank it off in two draughts, his drought being extreme ; and he called for another instantly. That also, without any suspicion or recollection of consequences, was as hastily swallowed; and what ensued he knows not. He was intoxicated, and fell into a profound sleep. His groom helped the people of the house to carry him upstairs and put him to bed. How long he slept he knows not, but he woke in the middle of the night without the smallest consciousness of where he was, or what had happened. ' Page 22 France alone was in his head-France and its horrors, which nothing-not even English porter and intoxication and sleep - could drive away. He looked round the room with amaze at first, and soon after with consternation. It was so unfurnished, so miserable, so lighted with only one small bit of a candle, that it occurred to him he was in a maison de force(17) '- thither conveyed in his sleep. The stillness of everything confirmed this dreadful idea. He arose, slipped on his clothes, and listened at the door. He heard no sound. He was scarce, yet, I suppose, quite awake, for he took the candle, and determined to make an attempt to escape. Down-stairs he crept, neither hearing nor making any noise and he found himself in a kitchen ' he looked round, and the brightness of a shelf of pewter plates struck his eye under them were pots and kettles shining and polished. "Ah! "? cried he to himself, "je suis en Angleterre."(18) The recollection came all at once at sight of a cleanliness which, in these articles, he says, is never met with in France. He did not escape too soon, for his first cousin, the good Duc de la Rochefoucault, another of the first r�volutionnaires, was massacred the next month.(19) The character he has given of this murdered relation is the most affecting, in praise and virtues, that can possibly be heard. k Sarah has heard him till she could not keep the tears from her eyes. They had been �l�ves(20) together, and loved each other as the tenderest brothers. MADAME DE GENLIS'S HASTY RETREAT. You will all be as sorry as I was myself to hear that every ill story of la Comtesse de Genlis was confirmed by the duke. Page 23 She was resident at Bury, when he arrived, with Mlle. Egalit�, Pamela, Henrietta Circe, and several others, who appeared in various ways, as artists, gentlemen, domestics, and equals, on various occasions. The history of their way of life is extraordinary, and not very comprehensible, probably owing to the many necessary difficulties which the new 'system of equality produces.(21) A lady of Bury, a sister of Sir Thomas Gage, had been very much caught by Madame Brulard,(22) who had almost lived at the house of Sir Thomas. Upon the arrival of the duke he was invited to Sir Thomas Gage's immediately; and Miss G, calling upon Madame Brulard, mentioned him, and asked if she knew him?--No, she answered; but she had seen him. This was innocently repeated to the duke, who then, in a transport of rage, broke out with "Elle M'a vu!(23) and is that all?--Does she forget that she has spoke to me? that she has heard me too? " And then he related, that when all was wearing the menacing aspect of anarchy, before it broke out, and before he was ordered to his regiment at Rouen, he had desired an audience of Madame Brulard, for the first time, having been always a friend of Madame d'Orl�ans, and consequently her enemy. She was unwilling to see him, but he would not be refused. He then told her that France was upon the point of ruin, and that the Duc d'Orl�ans, who had been its destruction, and "the disgrace of the Revolution," could alone now prevent the impending havoc. He charged her therefore, forcibly and peremptorily, to take in charge a change of measures, and left her with an exhortation which he then flattered himself would have some chance of averting the coming dangers. But quickly -after she quitted France voluntarily, and settled in England. "And can she have forgot all this ?" cried he. I know not if this was repeated to Madame de Brulard but certain it is she quitted Bury with the utmost expedition, She did not even wait to pay her debts, and left the poor Henrietta Circe behind, as a sort of hostage, to prevent alarm. The creditors, however, finding her actually gone, entered the house, and poor Henrietta was terrified into hysterics. Probably she knew not but they were jacobins, or would act upon jacobin principles. Madame Brulard then Page 24 sent for her, and remitted money, and proclaimed her intention of returning to Suffolk no more. A NOBLEMAN OF THE ANCIEN R�GIEM. The duke accepted the invitation for to-day, and came early, on horseback. He had just been able to get over some two or three of his horses from France. He has since, I hear, been forced to sell them. Mrs. Young was not able to appear; Mr. Young came to my room door to beg I would waste no time; Sarah and I, therefore, proceeded to the drawing-room. The duke was playing with a favourite dog-the thing probably the most dear to him in England; for it was just brought him over by his faithful groom, whom he had sent back upon business to his son. He is very tall, and, were his figure less, would be too fat, but all is in proportion. His face, which is very handsome, though not critically so, has rather a haughty expression when left to itself, but becomes soft and spirited in turn, according to whom he speaks, and has great play and variety. His deportment is quite noble, and in a style to announce conscious rank even to the most sedulous equaliser. His carriage is peculiarly upright, and his person uncommonly well made. His manners are such as only admit of comparison with what We have read, not what we have seen; for he has all the air of a man who would wish to lord over men, but to cast himself at the feet of women. He was in mourning for his barbarously murdered cousin the Duc de la Rochefoucault. His first address was of the highest style. I shall not attempt to recollect his words, but they were most elegantly expressive of his satisfaction in a meeting he had long, he said, desired. With Sarah he then shook hands. She had been his interpretess here on his arrival, and he seems to have conceived a real kindness for her; an honour of which she is extremely sensible, and with reason. A little general talk ensued, and he made a point of curing Sarah of being afraid of his dog. He made no secret of thinking it affectation, and never rested till he had conquered it completely. I saw here, in the midst of all that at first so powerfully struck me of dignity, importance, and high-breeding, a true French Polisson; for he called the dog round her, made it jump on her shoulder, and amused himself as, Page 25 in England, only a schoolboy or a professed fox-hunter would have dreamt of doing. This, however, recovered me to a little ease, which his compliment had rather overset. Mr. Young hung back, nearly quite silent. Sarah was quiet when reconciled to the dog, or, rather, subdued by the duke; and then, when I thought it completely out of his head, he tranquilly drew a chair next mine, and began a sort of separate conversation, which he suffered nothing to interrupt till we were summoned to dinner. His subject was 'Cecilia;' and he seemed not to have the smallest idea I could object to discussing it, any more than if it had been the work of another person. I answered all his demands and interrogatories with a degree of openness I have never answered any other upon this topic; but the least hope of beguiling the misery of an �migr� tames me. Mr. Young listened with amaze, and all his ears, to the many particulars and elucidations which the duke drew from me; he repeatedly called out he had heard nothing of them before, and rejoiced he was at least present when they were communicated. This proved, at length, an explanation to the duke himself, that, the moment he understood, made him draw back, saying, "Peut-�tre que je suis indiscret?"(24) However, he soon returned to the charge - and when Mr. Young made any more exclamations, he heeded them not: he smiled, indeed, when Sarah also affirmed he had procured accounts she had never heard before; but he has all the air of a man not new to any mark of more than common favour. At length we were called to dinner, during which he spoke of general things. DUCAL VIVACITY AND SADNESS. The French of Mr. Young, at table, was very comic ; he never hesitates for a word, but puts English wherever he is at a loss, with a mock French pronunciation. "Monsieur Duc," as he calls him, laughed once or twice, but clapped him on the back, called him "un brave homme," and gave him instruction as well as encouragement in all his blunders. When the servants were gone, the duke asked me if anybody might write a letter to the king? I fancy he had some per- Page 26 sonal idea of this kind. I told him yes, but through the hands of a lord of the bedchamber, or some state officer, or a minister. He seemed pensive, but said no more. He inquired, however, if I had not read to the queen and seemed to wish to understand my office; but here he was far more circumspect than about 'Cecilia.' He has lived so much in a Court, that he knew exactly how far he might inquire with the most scrupulous punctilio. I found, however, he had imbibed the jacobin notion that our beloved king was still disordered; for, after some talk upon his illness, and very grave and proper expressions concerning the affliction and terror it produced in the kingdom, he looked at me very fixedly,, and, with an arching brow, said, "Mais, mademoiselle--apr�s tout--le roi--est il bien gu�ri?"(25) I gave him such assurances as he could not doubt, from their simplicity, which resulted from their truth. Mr. Young would hardly let Sarah and me retreat; however, we promised to meet soon to coffee. I went away full of concern for his injuries, and fuller of amazement at the vivacity with which he bore them. When at last we met in the drawing-room, I found the duc all altered. Mr. Young had been forced away by business, and was but just returned, and he had therefore been left a few minutes by himself; the effect was visible, and extremely touching. Recollections and sorrow had retaken possession of his mind; and his spirit, his vivacity, his power of rallying were all at an end. He was strolling about the room with an air the most gloomy, and a face that looked enveloped in clouds of sadness and moroseness. There was a fiert� almost even fierce in his air and look, as, wrapped in himself, he continued his walk. I felt now an increasing compassion:--what must he not suffer when he ceases to fight with his calamities! Not to disturb him we talked with one another; but he soon shook himself and joined us; though he could not bear to sit down, or stand a moment in a place. "CETTE COQUINE DE BRULARD." Sarah spoke of Madame Brulard, and, in a little malice, to draw him out, said her sister knew her very well. The duc " Page 27 with eyes of fire at the sound, came up to me: "Comment, mademoiselle! vous avez connu cette coquine de Brulard?"(26) And then he asked me what I had thought of her. I frankly answered that I had thought her charming; gay, intelligent, well-bred, well-informed, and amiable. He instantly drew back, as if sorry he had named her so roughly, and looked at Sally for thus surprising him; but I immediately continued that I could now no longer think the same of her, as I could no longer esteem her; but I confessed my surprise had been inexpressible at her duplicity. 'He allowed that, some years ago, she might have a better chance than now of captivation - for the deeper she had immersed in politics, the more she had forfeited of feminine attraction. "Ah!" he cried, " with her talents-her knowledge-her parts-had she been modest, reserved, gentle, what a blessing might she have proved to her country! but she is devoted to intrigue and cabal, and proves its curse." He then spoke with great asperity against all the femmes de lettres now known; he said they were commonly the most disgusting of their sex, in France, by their arrogance, boldness, and mauvais moeurs. GRACEFUL OFFERS OF HOSPITALITY. I inquired if Mr. Young had shown him a letter from the Duke of Grafton, which he had let me read in the morning. It was to desire Mr. Young would acquaint him if the Duc de Liancourt was still in Bury, and, if so, to wait upon him, in the Duke of Grafton's name, to solicit him to make Euston his abode while in England, and to tell him that he should have his apartments wholly unmolested, and his time wholly unbroken; that he was sensible, in such a situation of mind, he must covet much quiet and freedom from interruption and impertinence; and he therefore promised that, if he would honour his house with his residence, it should be upon the same terms as if he were in an hotel-that he would never know if he were at home or abroad, or even in town or in the country - and he hoped the Duc de Liancourt would make no more scruple of accepting such an asylum and retreat at his house than he would himself have done of accepting a similar Page 28 one from the duke in France, if the misfortunes of his own country had driven him to exile. I was quite in love with the Duke of Grafton for this kindness. The Duc de Liancourt bowed to my question, and seemed much gratified with the invitation; but I see he cannot brook obligation; he would rather live in a garret, and call it his own. He told me, however, with an air of some little pleasure, that he had received just such another letter from Lord Sheffield. I believe both these noblemen had been entertained at Liancourt some years ago. I inquired after Madame la duchesse, and I had the satisfaction to hear she was safe in Switzerland. The duke told me she had purchased an estate there. He inquired very particularly after your juniper colony, and M. de Narbonne, but said he most wished to meet with M. d'Arblay, who was a friend and favourite of his eldest son. THE EMIGRANTS AT JUNIPER HALL DESCRIBED. [It is hoped that some pages from Mrs. Phillips's journalizing letters to her sister, written at this period, may not be unacceptable , since they give particulars concerning several distinguished actors and sufferers in the French Revolution, and also contain the earliest description of M. d'Arblay.(27)) (Mrs. Philips to Fanny Burney.) Mickleham, November, 1792. It gratifies me very much that I have been able to interest you for our amiable and charming neighbours. Mrs. Locke had been so kind as to pave the way for my introduction to Madame de la Ch�tre, and carried me on Friday to juniper Hall, where we found M. de Montmorency, a ci-devant duc,(28) and one who gave some of the first great examples of sacrificing personal interest to what was then considered the public good. I know not whether you will like him the better when I tell you that from him proceeded the motion for the abolition of titles in France; but if you do Page 29 not, let me, in his excuse, tell you he was scarcely one-and- twenty when an enthusiastic spirit impelled him to this, I believe, ill-judged and mischievous act. My curiosity was greatest to see M. de Jaucourt, because I remembered many lively and spirited speeches made by him during the time of the Assembl�e L�gislalive, and that he was a warm defender of my favourite hero, M. Lafayette. Of M. de Narbonne's abilities we could have no doubt from his speeches and letters whilst ministre de la guerre, which post he did not quit till last May.(29) By his own desire, he then joined Lafayette's army, and acted under him; but on the 10th of August, he was involved, with perhaps nearly all the most honourable and worthy of the French nobility, accused as a traitor by the jacobins, and obliged to fly from his country M. d'Argenson was already returned to France, and Madame de Broglie had set out the same day, November 2nd, hoping to escape the decree against the emigrants.(30) Madame de la Ch�tre received us with great politeness. She is about thirty-three; an elegant figure, not pretty, but with an animated and expressive countenance; very well read, pleine d'esprit, and, I think, very lively and charming. A gentleman was with her whom Mrs. Locke had not yet seen, M. d'Arblay. She introduced him, and when he had quitted the room, told us he was adjutant-general to M. Lafayette, mar�chal de camp, and in short the first in military rank of those who had accompanied that general when he so unfortunately fell into the hands of the Prussians; but, not having been one of the Assembl�e Constituante, he was allowed, with four others, to proceed into Holland, and there M. de Narbonne wrote to him. "Et comme il l'aime infiniment," said Madame de la Chàtre, "il l'a pri� de venir vivre avec lui."(31 He had arrived only two days before. He is tall, and a good figure, with an open and manly countenance; about forty, I imagine. It was past twelve. However, Madame de la Chàtre owned Page 30 she had not breakfasted--ces messieurs were not yet ready. A little man, who looked very triste indeed, in an old- fashioned suit of clothes, with long flaps to a waistcoat embroidered in silks no longer very brilliant, sat in a corner of the room. I could not imagine who he was, but when he spoke was immediately convinced he was no Frenchman. I afterwards heard he had been engaged by M. de Narbonne for a year, to teach him and all the party English. He had had a place in some college in France at the beginning of the Revolution, but was now driven out and destitute. His name is Clarke. He speaks English with an accent tant soit Peu Scotch. Madame de la Chàtre, with great franchise entered into details of her situation and embarrassment, whether she might venture, like Madame de Broglie, to go over to France, in which case she was dans le cas oû elle pouvoit toucher sa fortune(32) immediately. She said she could then settle in England, and settle comfortably. M. de la Chàtre, it seems, previous to his joining the king's brothers, had settled upon her her whole fortune. She and all her family were great favourers of the original Revolution and even at this moment she declares herself unable to wish the restoration of the old r�gime, with its tyranny and corruptions--persecuted and ruined as she and thousands more have been by the unhappy consequences of the Revolution, M. de Narbonne now came in. He seems forty, rather fat, but would be handsome were it not for a slight cast of one eye. He was this morning in great spirits. Poor man! It was the only time I have ever seen him so. He came up very courteously to me, and begged leave de me faire Sa Cour(33) at Mickleham, to which I graciously assented. Then came M. de jaucourt, whom I instantly knew by Mr. Locke's description. He is far from handsome, but has a very intelligent countenance, fine teeth, and expressive eyes. I scarce heard a word from him, but liked his appearance exceedingly, and not the less for perceiving his respectful and affectionate manner of attending to Mr. Locke but when Mr. Locke reminded us that Madame de la Chàtre had not breakfasted, we took leave, after spending an hour in a manners so pleasant and so interesting that it scarcely appeared ten minutes. Page 31 MONSIEUR D'ARBLAY. NOV. 7.- --Phillips was at work in the parlour, and I had just stepped into the next room for some papers I wanted, when I heard a man's voice, and presently distinguished these words: "Je ne parle pas trop bien l'Anglois, monsieur."(34) I came forth immediately to relieve Phillips, and then found it was M. d'Arblay. I received him de bien bon coeur, as courteously as I could. The adjutant of M. Lafayette, and one of those who proved faithful to that excellent general, could not but be interesting to me. I was extremely pleased at ]its coming, and more and more pleased with himself every moment that passed. He seems to me a true militaire, franc et loyal--open as the day; warmly affectionate to his friends; intelligent, ready, and amusing in conversation, with a great share of gai�t� de coeur, and, at the same time, of na�vet� and bonne foi. He was no less flattering to little Fanny than M. de Narbonne had been. We went up into the drawing-room with him, and met Willy on the stairs, and Norbury capered before us. "Ah, madame," cried M. d'Arblay, "la jolie petite maison que vous avez, et les jolis petits hôtes!"(35) looking at the children, the drawings, etc. He took Norbury on his lap and played with -him. I asked him if he was not proud of being so kindly noticed by the adjutant-general of M. Lafayette? "Est-ce qu'il sait le nom de M. Lafayette?"(36) said he, smiling. I said he was our hero, and that I was thankful to see at least one of his faithful friends here. I asked if M. Lafayette was allowed to write and receive letters. He said yes, but they were always given to him open. - Norbury now (still seated on his lap) took courage to whisper him, "Were you, sir, put in prison with M. Lafayette?" "Oui, mon ami," "And--was it quite dark?" I was obliged, laughing, to translate this curious question. M. d'Arblay laughed too: "Non, mon ami," said he, "on nous amis abord dans une assez jolie chambre."(37) i lamented the hard fate of M. Lafayette, and the rapid and wonderful reverse he had met with, after having been, as he Page 32 well merited to be, the most popular man in France. This led M. d'Arblay to speak of M. de Narbonne, to whom I found him passionately attached. Upon my mentioning the sacrifices made by the French nobility, and by a great number of them voluntarily, he said no one had made more than M. de Narbonne; that, previous to the Revolution, he had more wealth and more power than almost any except the princes of the blood. For himself, he mentioned his fortune and his income from his appointments as something immense, but 1 never remember the number of hundred thousand livres, nor can tell what their amount is without some consideration. . . . The next day Madame de la Ch�tre was so kind as to send me the French papers, by her son, who made a silent visit of about five minutes. M. DE JAUCOURT. MADAME DE STAEL. Friday morning.-I sent Norbury with the French papers, desiring him to give them to M. d'Arblay. He stayed a prodigious while, and at last came back attended by M. de Narbonne, M. de Jaucourt, and M. d'Arblay. M. de Jaucourt is a delightful man--as comic, entertaining, unaffected, unpretending, and good-humoured as dear Mr Twining, only younger, and not quite so black. He is a man likewise of first-rate abilities--M. de Narbonne says, perhaps superior to Vaublanc(38) and of very uncommon firmness and integrity of character. The account Mr. Batt gave of the National Assembly last summer agrees perfectly with that of M. de Jaucourt, who had the misfortune to be one of the deputies, and who, upon some great occasion in support of the king and constitution, found only twenty-four members who had courage to support him, though a far more considerable number gave him secretly their good wishes and prayers. It was on this that he regarded all hope of justice and order as lost, and that he gave in sa d�mission(39) from the Assembly. In a few days he was seized, and sans forme de proces(40) having lost his inviolability as a Page 33 member, thrown into the prison of the Abbaye, where, had it not been for the very extraordinary and admirable exertions of Madame de Stael (M. Necker's daughter, and the Swedish ambassador's wife), he would infallibly have been massacred. I must here tell you that this lady, who was at that time seven months gone with child, was indefatigable in her efforts to save every one she knew from this dreadful massacre. She walked daily (for carriages were not allowed to pass in the streets) to the H6tel de Ville, and was frequently shut up for five hours together with the horrible wretches that composed the Comit� de Surveillance, by whom these murders were directed; and by her eloquence, and the consideration demanded by her rank and her talents, she obtained the deliverance of above twenty unfortunate prisoners, some of whom she knew but slightly. . . . Madame de la Ch�tre and M. de Jaucourt have since told me that M. de Narbonne and M. d'Arblay had been treated with singular ingratitude by the king, whom they nevertheless still loved as well as forgave. They likewise say he wished to get rid of M. de Narbonne from the ministry, because he could not trust him with his projects of contre revolution. M. d'Arblay was the officer on guard at the Tuileries the night on which the king, etc., escaped to Varennes,(41) and ran great risk of being denounced, and perhaps massacred, though he had been kept in the most perfect ignorance of the king's intention. SEVERE DECREES AGAINST THE EMIGRANTS. The next Sunday, November 18th, Augusta and Amelia came to me after church, very much grieved at the inhuman decrees just passed in the Convention, including as emigrants, with those who have taken arms against their country, all who have quitted it since last July; and adjudging their estates to confiscation, and their persons to death should they return to France. " Ma'am," said Mr. Clarke, " it reduces this family to nothing : all they can hope is, by the help of their parents and friends, to get together wherewithal to purchase a cottage in America, and live as they can." Page 34 I was more shocked and affected by this account than I could very easily tell you. To complete the tragedy, M. de Narbonne had determined to write an offer--a request rather--to be allowed to appear as a witness in behalf of the king, upon his trial ; and M. d'Arblay had declared he would do the same, and share the fate of his friend, whatever it might be. MONSIEUR GIRARDIN. On Tuesday, the 20th, I called to condole with our friends on these new misfortunes. Madame de la Ch�tre received me with politeness, and even cordiality: she told me she was a little recovered from the first shock--that she should hope to gather together a small d�bris of her fortune, but never enough to settle in England--that, in short, her parti �tait pris(42)--that she must go to America. It went to my heart to hear her say so. Presently came in M. Girardin. He is son to the Marquis de Girardin d'Ermenonville, the friend of Rousseau, whose last days were passed, and whose remains are deposited, in his domain. This M. Girardin was a pupil of Rousseau; he was a member of the Legislative Assembly, and an able opponent of the jacobins. It was to him that M. Merlin, apr�s bien de gestes mena�ans,(43) had held a pistol, in the midst of the Assembly. His father was a mad republican, and never satisfied with the rational spirit of patriotism that animated M. Girardin; who, witnessing the distress of all the friends he most esteemed and honoured, and being himself in personal danger from the enmity of the jacobins, had, as soon as the Assembl�e L�gislative broke up, quitted Paris, I believe, firmly determined never to re-enter it under the present r�gime. I was prepossessed very much in favour of this gentleman, from his conduct in the late Assembly and all we had heard of him. I confess I had not represented him to myself as a great, fat, heavy-looking man, with the manners of a somewhat hard and morose Englishman: he is between thirty and forty, I imagine; he had been riding as far as to the cottage Mr. Malthouse had mentioned to him--l'asile de jean Jacques(44)--and said it was very near this place (it is at the foot of Leith Hill, Mr. Locke has since told me). They then talked over the newspapers which were come Page 35 that morning. M. de St. just,(45) who made a most fierce speech for the trial and condemnation of the king, they said had before only been known by little madrigals, romances, and heures tendres, published in the 'Almanac des Muses.' "A cette heure," said M. de jaucourt, laughing, "c'est un fier republicain."(46) THE PHILLIPSES AT JUNIPER HALL. Nov. 27.-Phillips and I determined at about half-past one to walk to "junipre" together. M. d'Arblay received us at the door, and showed the most flattering degree of pleasure at our arrival. We found with Madame de la Ch�tre another French gentleman, M. Sicard, who was also an officer of M. de Lafayette's. M. de Narbonne said he hoped we would be sociable, and dine with them now and then. Madame de la Ch�tre made a speech to the same effect, "Et quel jour, par exemple," said M. de Narbonne, "feroit wieux qu'aujourd'hui?"(47) Madame de la Ch�tre took my hand instantly, to press in the most pleasing and gratifying manner imaginable this proposal; and before I had time to answer, M. d'Arblay, snatching up his hat, declared he would run and fetch the children. I was obliged to entreat Phillips to bring him back, and entreated him to entendre raison.(48) . . . I pleaded their late hour of dinner, our having no carriage, and my disuse to the night air at this time of the year; but M. de Narbonne said their cabriolet (they have no other carriage) should take us home, and that there was a top to it, and Madame de la Ch�tre declared she would cover me well with shawls, etc. . . . M. d'Arblay scampered off for the little ones, whom all insisted upon having, and Phillips accompanied him, as it wanted I believe almost four hours to their dinner time. . . . Page 36 Then my dress: Oh, it was parfaite, and would give them all the courage to remain as they were, sans toilette: in short, nothing was omitted to render us comfortable and at our ease, and I have seldom passed a more pleasant day--never, I may fairly say, with such new acquaintance. I was only sorry M. de jaucourt did not make one of the party. MYSTERY ATTENDING M. DE NARBONNE'S BIRTH. Whilst M. d'Arblay and Phillips were gone, Madame de la Ch�tre told me they had that morning received M. Necker's "D�fense du Roi," and if I liked it that M. de Narbonne would read it out to us.(49) You may conceive my answer. It is a most eloquent production, and was read by M. de Narbonne with beaucoup d'�me. Towards the end it is excessively touching, and his emotion was very evident, and would have struck and interested me had I felt no respect for his character before. I must now tell you the secret of his birth, which, however, is, I conceive, no great secret even in London, as Phillips heard it at Sir Joseph Banks's. Madame Victoire, daughter of Louis XV., was in her youth known to be attached to the Comte de Narbonne, father of our M. de Narbonne. The consequence of this attachment was such as to oblige her to a temporary retirement, under the pretence of indisposition during which time la Comtesse de Narbonne, who was one of her attendants, not only concealed her own chagrin, but was the means of preserving her husband from a dangerous situation, and the princess from disgrace. She declared herself with child, and, in short, arranged all so well as to seem the mother of her husband's son ; though the truth was immediately suspected, and rumoured about the Court, and Madame de la Ch�tre told me, was known and familiarly spoken of by all her friends, except in the presence of Page 37 Narbonne, to whom no one would certainly venture to hint it. His father is dead, but la Comtesse de Narbonne, his reputed mother, lives, and is still an attendant on Madame Victoire, at Rome. M. de Narbonne's wife is likewise with her, and he himself was the person fixed on by Mesdames to accompany them when they quitted France for Italy. An infant daughter was left by him at Paris, who is still there with some of his family, and whom he expressed an earnest wish to. bring over, though the late decree may perhaps render his doing so impossible. He has another daughter, of six years old, who is with her mother at Rome, and whom he told me the pope had condescended to embrace. He mentioned his mother once (meaning la Comtesse de Narbonne) with great respect and affection. REVOLUTIONARY SOCIETIES IN NORFOLK. DEATH OF MR. FRANCIS. (Fanny Burney to Mrs. Philips.) Aylsham, Norfolk, November 27, '92. My dearest Susanna's details of the French colony at juniper are truly interesting. I hope I may gather from them that M. de Narbonne, at least, has been able to realise some property here. I wish much to hear that poor Madame de Broglie has been permitted to join her husband. Who is this M. Malouet(50) who has the singular courage and feeling to offer to plead the cause of a fallen monarch in the midst of his ferocious accusers? And how ventures M. de Chauvelin to transmit such a proposal? I wish your French neighbours could give some account of this. I hear that the son for whom the Duc de Liancourt has been trembling, has been reduced to subscribe to all jacobin lengths, to save his life, and retain a little property. What seasons are these for dissolving all delicacy of internal honour! I am truly amazed, and half alarmed, to find this county with little revolution societies, which transmit their notions of Page 38 things to the larger committee at Norwich, which communicates the whole to the reformists of London. I am told there is scarce a village in Norfolk free from these meetings. . . . My good and brilliant champion in days of old, Mr. Windham, has never been in Norfolk since I have entered it. He had a call to Bulstrode, to the installation of the Duke of Portland, just as I arrived, and he has been engaged there and at Oxford ever since. I regret missing him at Holkham: I bad no chance of him anywhere else, as I have been so situated, from the melancholy circumstances of poor Mr. Francis's illness, that I have been unable to make acquaintance where he visits. (Miss Burney's second visit at Aylsham proved a very mournful one. Soon after her arrival, Mr. Francis, her brother-in-law, was seized with an apoplectic fit, which terminated in his death; and Miss Burney remained with her widowed sister, soothing and assisting her, till the close of the year, when she accompanied the bereaved family to London.] DEPARTURE OF MADAME DE LA CHATRE. (Mrs. Philips to Fanny Burney.) December 16, '92. . . .. Everything that is most shocking may, I fear, be expected for the unfortunate King of France, his queen, and perhaps all that belong to him. M. d'Arblay said it would indeed scarce have been possible to hope that M. de Narbonne could have escaped with life, had the sauf-conduit requested been granted him, for attending as a witness at the king's trial. . . . M. de Narbonne had heard nothing new from France, but mentioned, with great concern, the indiscretion of the king, in having kept all his letters since the Revolution; that the papers lately discovered in the Tuileries would bring ruin and death on hundreds of his friends ; and that almost every one in that number "s'y trouvoient compliqu�s"(51) some way or other. A decree of accusation had been lanc� against M. Talleyrand, not for anything found from himself, but because M. de Laporte, long since executed, and from whom, of course, no renseignemens or explanations of any kind could Page 39 be gained, had written to the king that l'Eveque d'Autun(52) was well disposed to serve him. Can there be injustice more flagrant? M. Talleyrand, it seems, had proposed returning, and hoped to settle his affairs in France in person, but now he must be content with life ; and as for his property (save what he may chance to have in other countries), he must certainly lose all. Monday, December 17, In the morning, Mr. and Mrs. Locke called, and with them came Madame de la Ch�tre, to take leave. She now told us, perfectly in confidence, that Madame de Broglie had found a friend in the Mayor of Boulogne, that she was lodged at his house, and that she could answer for her (Madame de la Ch�tre) being received by him as well as she could desire (all this must be secret, as this good mayor, if accused of harbouring or befriending des �migr�s, would no doubt pay for it with his life). Madame de la Ch�tre said, all her friends who had ventured upon writing to her entreated her not to lose the present moment to return, as, the three months allowed for the return of those excepted in the decree once past, all hope would be lost for ever. Madame de Broglie, who is her cousin, was most excessively urgent to her to lose not an instant in returning, and had declared there would be no danger. Madame de la Ch�tre was put in spirits by this account, and the hope of becoming not destitute of everything; and I tried to hope without fearing for her, and, indeed, most sincerely offer up my petitions for her safety. Heaven prosper her! Her courage and spirits are wonderful. M. de Narbonne seemed, however, full of apprehensions for her. M. de Jaucourt seemed to have better hopes ; he, even he, has now thoughts of returning, or rather his generosity compels him to think of it. His father has represented to him that his sister's fortune must suffer unless he appears in France again - and although he had resisted every other consideration, on this he has given way. ARRIVAL OF M. DE LA CHATRE. Friday, December 21st, we dined at Norbury Park, and met our French friends: M. d'Arblay came in to coffee before the other gentlemen. We had been talking of Madame de la Page 40 Chattre, and conjecturing conjectures about her sposo: we were all curious, and all inclined to imagine him old, ugly, proud, aristocratic, -a kind of ancient and formal courtier ; so we questioned M. d'Arblay, acknowledging our curiosity, and that we wished to know, enfin, if M. de la Ch�tre was "digne d'etre �poux d'une personne si aimable et si charmante que Madame de la Ch�tre."(53) He looked very drolly, scarce able to meet our eyes; but at last, as he is la franchise m�me, he answered, "M. de la Ch�tre est un bon homme--parfaitement bon homme: au reste, il est brusque comme un cheval de carrosse."(54) We were in the midst of our coffee when St. jean came forward to M. de Narbonne, and said somebody wanted to speak to him. He went out of the room; in two minutes he returned, followed by a gentleman in a great-coat, whom we had never seen, and whom he introduced immediately to Mrs. Locke by the name of M. de la Ch�tre. The appearance of M. de la Ch�tre was something like a coup de th�atre; for, despite our curiosity, I had no idea we should ever see him, thinking that nothing could detach him from the service of the French princes. His abord and behaviour answered extremely well the idea M. d'Arblay had given us of him, who in the word brusque rather meant unpolished in manners than harsh in character. He is quite old enough to be father to Madame de la Ch�tre, and, had he been presented to us as such, all our wonder would have been to see so little elegance in the parent of such a woman. After the first introduction was over, he turned his back to the fire, and began sans fa�on, a most confidential discourse with M. de Narbonne. They had not met since the beginning of the Revolution, and, having been of very different parties, it was curious and pleasant to see them now, in their mutual misfortunes, meet en bons amis. They rallied each other sur leurs disgraces very good-humouredly and comically; and though poor M. de la Ch�tre had missed his wife by only one day, and his son by a few hours, nothing seemed to give him de phumeur.(55) He gave the account of his disastrous journey since he had quitted. the princes, who are themselves reduced Page 41 to great distress, and were unable to pay him his arrears: he said he could not get a sou from France, nor had done for two years. All the money he had, with his papers and clothes, were contained in a little box, with which he had embarked in a small boat--I could not hear whence : but the weather was tempestuous, and he, with nearly all the passengers, landed, and walked to the nearest town, leaving his box and two faithful servants (who had never, he said, quitted him since he had left France) in the boat: he had scarce been an hour at the auberge (56) when news was brought that the boat had sunk, At this, M. de Narbonne threw himself back on his seat, exclaiming against the hard fate which pursued all ses malheureux amis!(57) "Mais attendez donc," cried the good humoured M. de la Ch�tre, "Je n'ai pas encore fini: on nous a assur� que personne n'a p�ri et que m�me tout ce qu'il y avait sur le b�teau a �t� sauv�!'(58) He said, however, that being now in danger of falling into the hands of the French, he dared not stop for his box or servants; but, leaving a note of directions behind him, he proceeded incognito, and at length got on board a packet-boat for England, in which though he found several of his countrymen and old acquaintance, he dared not discover himself till they were en pleine mer.(59) He went on gaily enough, laughing at ses amis les constitutionnaires,(60) and M. de Narbonne, with much more wit, and not less good humour, retorting back his raillery on the parti de Brunswick.. . . M. de la Ch�tre mentioned the quinzaine(61) in which the princes' army had been paid up, as the most wretched he had ever known. Of 22,000 men who formed the army of the emigrants, 16,000 were gentlemen,-men of family and fortune: all of whom were now, with their families, destitute. He mentioned two of these who had engaged themselves lately in some orchestra, where they played first and second flute. The princes, he said, had been twice arrested for debt in different places--that they were now so reduced that they dined, themselves, the Comte d'Artois, children, tutors, etc.--eight or nine persons in all--upon one single dish. Page 42 ENGLISH FEELING AT THE REVOLUTIONARY EXCESSES. (Fanny Burney to Mrs. Locke.) Chelsea, December 20, '92. ..... God keep us all safe and quiet! All now wears a fair aspect; but I am told Mr. Windham says we are not yet out of the wood though we see the path through it. There must be no relaxation. The Pretended friends of the people, pretended or misguided, wait but the stilling of the present ferment of loyalty to come forth. Mr. Grey has said so in the House. Mr. Fox attended the St. George's meeting, after keeping back to the last, and was nobody there! The accounts from France are thrilling. Poor M. d'Arblay's speech should be translated, and read to all English imitators of French reformers. What a picture of the now reformed! Mr. Burke's description of the martyred Duc de la Rochefoucault should be read also by all the few really pure promoters of new systems. New systems, I fear, in states, are always dangerous, if not wicked. Grievance by grievance, wrong by wrong, must only be assailed, and breathing time allowed to old prejudices, and old habits, between all that is done. . . . I had fancied the letters brought for the King of France's trial were forgeries. One of them, certainly, to M. Bouill�, had its answer dated before it was written. If any have been found, others will be added, to serve any evil purposes. Still, however, I hope the king and his family will be saved. I cannot but believe it, from all I can put together. If the worst of the jacobins hear that Fox has called him an "unfortunate monarch,"- -that Sheridan has said "his execution would be an act of injustice,"--and Grey, "that we ought to have spared that one blast to their glories by earlier negotiation and an ambassador,"--surely the worst of these wretches will not risk losing their only abettors and palliators in this kingdom? I mean publicly; they have privately and individually their abettors and palliators in abundance still, wonderful as that is. I am glad M. d'Arblay has joined the set at "Junipre." What miserable work is this duelling, which I hear of among the emigrants, after such hair-breadth 'scapes for life and existence!--to attack one another on the very spot they seek for refuge from attacks! It seems a sort of profanation of safety. Page 43 LOUIS XVI.'S EXECUTION. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Norbury Park, January 28, '93. My dearest padre,-I have been wholly without spirit for writing, reading, working, or even walking or conversing, ever since the first day of my arrival. The dreadful tragedy(62) acted in France has entirely absorbed me. Except the period of the illness of our own inestimable king, 1 have never been so overcome with grief and dismay, for any but personal and family calamities. O what a tragedy! how implacable its villainy, and how severe its sorrows! You know, my dearest father, how little I had believed such a catastrophe possible: with all the guilt and all the daring already shown, I had still thought this a height of enormity impracticable. And, indeed, without military law throughout the wretched city, it had still not been perpetrated. Good heaven!- -what must have been the sufferings of the few unhardened in crimes who inhabit that city of horrors!--if I, an English person, have been so deeply afflicted, that even this sweet house and society--even my Susan and her lovely children--have been incapable to give me any species of pleasure, or keep me from a desponding low-spiritedness, what must be the feelings of all but the culprits in France? M. de Narbonne and M. d'Arblay have been almost annihilated : they are for ever repining that they are French, and, though two of the most accomplished and elegant men I ever saw, they break our hearts with the humiliation they feel for their guiltless birth in that guilty country! We are all here expecting war every day. This dear family has deferred its town journey till next Wednesday. I have not been at all at Mickleham, nor yet settled whether to return to town with the Lockes, or to pay my promised visit there first, All has been so dismal, so wretched, that I have scarce ceased to regret our living at such times, and not either Sooner or later. These immediate French sufferers here interest us, and these alone have been able to interest me at all. We hear of a very bad tumult in Ireland, and near Captain Phillips's property: Mr. Brabazon writes word it is very serious. Page 44 Heaven guard us from insurrections! What must be the feelings at the queen's house? how acute, and how indignant! A GLOOMY CLUB MEETING. (-Dr. Burney to Fanny Burney and Mrs. Phillips.) Chelsea College, January 31, 1793. . . . At the Club,(63) on Tuesday, the fullest I ever knew, consisting of fifteen members, fourteen seemed all of one mind, and full of reflections on the late transaction in France ; but, when about half the company was assembled, who should come in but Charles Fox! There were already three or four bishops arrived, hardly one of whom could look at him, I believe, without horror, After the first bow and cold salutation, the conversation stood still for several minutes. During dinner Mr Windham, and Burke, jun., came in, who were obliged to sit at a side table. All were boutonn�s,(64) and not a word of the martyred king or politics of any kind was mentioned; and though the company was chiefly composed of the most eloquent and loquacious men in the kingdom, the conversation was the dullest and most uninteresting I ever remember at this or any such large meeting. Mr Windham and Fox, civil-young Burke and he never spoke. The Bishop of Peterborough as sulky as the d--l; the Bishop of Salisbury, more a man of the world, very cheerful; the Bishop of Dromore(65) frightened as much as a barn-door fowl at the sight of a fox; Bishop Marlow preserved his usual pleasant countenance. Steevens in the chair; the Duke of Leeds on his right, and Fox on his left, said not a word. Lords Ossory and Lucan, formerly much attached, seemed silent and sulky. MADAME DE STAEL AT JUNIPER HALL. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Norbury Park, Monday, February 4, '93. . . . Madame de Stael, daughter of M. Necker, is now at the head of the colony of French noblesse, established near Page 45 Mickleham. She is one of the first women I have ever met with for abilities and extraordinary intellect. She has just received, by a private letter, many particulars not yet made public, and which the Commune and Commissaries of the Temple had ordered should be suppressed. It has been exacted by those cautious men of blood that nothing should be printed that could attendrir le peuple.(66) Among other circumstances, this letter relates that the poor little dauphin supplicated the monsters who came with the decree of death to his unhappy father, that they would carry him to the Convention, and the forty-eight Sections of Paris, and suffer him to beg his father's life. This touching request was probably suggested to him by his miserable mother or aunt.... M. de Narbonne has been quite ill with the grief of this last enormity: and M. d'Arblay is now indisposed. This latter is one of the most delightful characters I have ever met, for openness, probity, intellectual knowledge, and unhackneyed manners. (Madame de Stael to Fanny BUrney.(67)) Written from juniper Hall, Dorking, Surrey, 1793. When I learned to read English I begun by milton, to know all or renounce at all in once. I follow the same system in writing my first English letter to Miss burney; after such an enterprize nothing can affright me. I feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my admiration, inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence, and impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown I could express sentiments so deeply felt. my servant will return for a french answer. I intreat miss burney to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card. best compliments to my dear protectress, Madame Phillipe. (Madame de Stael to Fanny Burney.) Your card in french, my dear, has already something of Your grace in writing English : it is cecilia translated. my !. ' Page 46 only correction is to fill the interruptions of some sentences, and I put in them kindnesses for me. I do not consult my master to write to you; a fault more or less is nothing in such an occasion. What may be the perfect grammar of Mr. Clarke, it cannot establish any sort of equality between you and I. then I will trust with my heart alone to supply the deficiency. let us speak upon a grave subject: do I see you that morning? What news from Captain phillip? when do you come spend a large week in that house? every question requires an exact answer; a good, also. my happiness depends on it, and I have for pledge your honour. good morrow and farewell. pray madame phillips, recollecting all her knowledge in french, to explain that card to you. (Madame de Stael to Fanny Burney.) January, 1793. tell me, my dear, if this day is a charming one, if it must be a sweet epoch in my life?--do you come to dine here with your lovely sister, and do you stay night and day till our sad separation? I rejoice me with that hope during this week do not deceive my heart. I hope that card very clear, mais, pour plus de certitude, je vous dis en françois que votre chambre, la maison, les habitants de juniper, tout est prêt á recevoir la première femme d'angleterre.(68) Janvier. MISS BURNEY'S ADMIRATION OF MADAME DE STAEL. (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Mickleham, February 29, 1793 Have you not begun, dearest sir, to give me up as a lost sheep? Susanna's temporary widowhood, however, has tempted me on, and spelled me with a spell I know not how to break. It is long, long since we have passed any time so completely together; her three lovely children only knit us the closer. The widowhood, however, we expect now quickly to expire, and I had projected my return to my dearest father Page 47 for Wednesday next, which would complete my fortnight here but some circumstances are intervening that incline me to postpone it another week. Madame de Stal, daughter of M. Necker, and wife of the Swedish ambassador to France, is now head of the little French colony in this neighbourhood. M. de Stael, her husband, is at present suspended in his embassy, but not recalled and it is yet uncertain whether the regent Duke of Sudermania will send him to Paris, during the present horrible Convention, or order him home. He is now in Holland, waiting for commands. Madame de Stal, however, was unsafe in Paris, though an ambassadress, from the resentment owed her by the commune, for having received and protected in her house various destined victims of the 10th August and of the 2nd September. She was even once stopped in her carriage, which they called aristocratic, because of its arms and ornaments, and threatened to be murdered, and only saved by one of the worst wretches of the Convention, Tallien, who feared provoking a war with Sweden, from such an offence to the wife of its ambassador. She was obliged to have this same Tallien to accompany her, to save her from massacre, for some miles from Paris, when compelled to quit it. She is a woman of the first abilities, I think, I have ever seen; she is more in the style of Mrs. Thrale than of any other celebrated character, but she has infinitely more depth, and seems an even profound politician and metaphysician. She has suffered us to hear some of her works in MS., which are truly wonderful, for powers both of thinking and expression. She adores her father, but is much alarmed at having had no news from him since he has heard of the massacre of the martyred Louis; and who can wonder it should have overpowered him? Ever since her arrival she has been pressing me to spend some time with her before I return to town. She wanted Susan and me to pass a month with her, but, finding that impossible, she bestowed all her entreaties upon me alone, and they are grown so urgent, upon my preparation for departing, and acquainting her my furlough of absence was over, that she not only insisted upon my writing to you, and telling why I deferred my return, but declares she will also write herself, to ask your permission for the visit. She exactly resembles Mrs. Thrale in the ardour and warmth of her temper and partialities. I find her impossible to resist, and therefore, if your answer to Page 48 her is such as I conclude it must be, I shall wait upon her for a week. She is only a short walk from hence, at juniper Hall. FAILING RESOURCES. There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating, than this colony ; between their sufferings and their argr�mens they occupy us almost wholly. M. de Narbonne, alas, has no thousand pounds a year! he got over only four thousand pounds at the beginning, from a most splendid fortune; and, little foreseeing how all has turned out, he has lived, we fear, upon the principal ; for he says, if all remittance is withdrawn, on account of the war, he shall soon be as ruined as those companions of his misfortunes with whom as yet he has shared his little all. He bears the highest character for goodness, parts, sweetness of manners, and ready wit. You could not keep your heart from him if you saw him only for . half an hour. He has not yet recovered from the black blow of the king's death, but he is better, and less jaundiced ; and he has had a letter which, I hear, has comforted him, though at first it was almost heart-breaking, informing him of the unabated regard for him of the truly saint-like Louis. This is communicated in a letter from M. de Malesherbes.(69) THE BEGINNING OF THE END. M. d'Arblay is one of the most singularly interesting characters that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature, that I had been unjust enough to think could not belong to a Frenchman. With all this, which is his military portion, he is passionately fond of literature, a most delicate critic in his own language, welt versed in both Italian and German, and a very elegant Page 49 poet. He has just undertaken to become my French master for pronunciation, and he gives me long daily lessons in reading. Pray expect wonderful improvements! In return, I hear him in English; and for his theme, this evening he has been writing an English address " Mr. Burney," (ie. M. le Docteur), joining in Madame de Stael's request. I hope your last club was more congenial? M. de Talleyrand insists on conveying this letter for you. He has been on a visit here, and returns again on Wednesday. He is a man of admirable conversation, quick, terse, fin, and yet deep, to the extreme of those four words. They are a marvellous set for excess of agreeability. "THIS ENCHANTING MONSIEUR D'ARBLAY." (Fanny Burney to Mrs. Locke.) Mickleham. Your kind letter, my beloved Fredy, was most thankfully received, and we rejoice the house and situation promise so much local comfort; but I quite fear with you that even the bas bleu will not recompense the loss of the "Junipre" society. It is, indeed, of incontestable superiority. But you must burn this confession, or my poor effigy will blaze for it. I must tell you a little of our proceedings, as they all relate to these people of a thousand. M. d'Arblay came from the melancholy sight of departing Norbury to Mickleham, and with an air the most triste, and a sound of voice quite dejected, as I learn from Susanna for I was in my heroics, and could not appear till the last half hour. A headache prevented my waiting upon Madame de Stal that day, and obliged me to retreat soon after nine o'clock in the evening, and my douce compagne would not let me retreat alone. We had only robed ourselves in looser drapery, when a violent ringing at the door startled us; we listened, and heard the voice of M. d'Arblay, and Jerry answering, "They're gone to bed." "Comment? What?" cried he: "C'est impossible! what you say?" Jerry then, to show his new education in this new colony, said "All�e couch�e!" It rained furiously, and we were quite grieved, but there was no help. He left a book for "Mlle. Burnet," and word that Madame de Stael could not come on account of the bad weather. M. Ferdinand was with him and has bewailed the disaster Page 50 and M. Sicard says he accompanied them till he was quite wet through his redingote; but this enchanting M. d'Arblay will murmur at nothing. The next day they all came, just as we had dined, for a morning visit,--Madame de Stael, M. Talleyrand, M. Sicard, and M. d'Arblay; the latter then made "insistance" upon commencing my "master of the language," and I think he will be almost as good a one as the little don.(70) M. de Talleyrand opened, at last, with infinite wit and capacity. Madame de Stael whispered me, "How do you like him?" "Not very much," I answered, "but I do not know him." "Oh, I assure you," cried she, "he is the best of the men." I was happy not to agree ; but I have no time for such minute detail till we meet. She read the noble tragedy of "Tancr�de,"(71) till she blinded us all round. She is the most charming person, to use her own phrase, "that never I saw." . . We called yesterday upon Madame de Stael, and sat with her until three o'clock, only the little don being present. She was delightful; yet I see much uneasiness hanging over the whole party, from the terror that the war may stop all remittances. Heaven forbid! TALLEYRAND IS FOUND CHARMING. (Fanny Burney to Mrs locke.) Thursday, Mickleham. I have no heart not to write, and no time to write. I have been scholaring all day, and mastering too : for our lessons are mutual, and more entertaining than can easily be conceived. My master of the language says he dreams of how much more solemnly he shall write to charming Mrs. Locke after a little more practice. Madame de Stael has written me two English notes, quite beautiful in ideas, and not very reprehensible in idiom. But English has nothing to do with elegance such as theirs--at least, little and rarely. I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull, when this c�terie come in competition; It is inconceivable what a convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the first members, and one of the most charming, of this exquisite set: Susanna is as completely a proselyte, Page 51 His powers of entertainment are astonishing, both in information and in raillery. We know nothing of how the rest of the world goes on. They are all coming to-night. I have yet avoided, but with extreme difficulty, the change of abode. Madame de Stael, however, will not easily be parried, and how I may finally arrange I know not. Certainly I will not offend or hurt her, but otherwise I had rather be a visitor than a guest Pray tell Mr. Locke that " the best of the men " grows upon us at every meeting. We dined and stayed till midnight at "junipre" on Tuesday, and I would I could recollect but the twentieth part of the excellent things that were said. Madame de Stael read us the opening of her work "Sur le Bonheur:" it seems to me admirable. M. de Talleyrand avowed he had met with nothing better thought or more ably expressed; it contains the most touching allusions to their country's calamities. A PROPOSED VISIT TO MADAME DE STAEL DISAPPROVED OF. (Doctor Burney to Fanny Burney.) Chelsea College, February 19, 1793. Why, Fanny, what are you about, and where are you? I shall write at you, not knowing how to write to you, as Swift did to the flying and romantic Lord Peterborough. I had written the above, after a yesterday's glimmering and a feverish night as usual, when behold! a letter of requisition for a further furlough! I had long histories ready for narration de vive voix, but my time is too short and my eyes and head too -weak for much writing this morning. I am not at all surprised at your account of the captivating powers of Madame de Stael. It corresponds with all I had heard about her, and with the opinion I formed of her intellectual and literary powers, in reading her charming little "Apologie de Rousseau." But as nothing human is allowed to be perfect, she has not escaped censure. Her house was the centre of revolutionists Previous to the 10th of August, after her father's departure, and she has been accused of partiality to M. de N.(72) But Perhaps all may be jacobinical malignity. However, unfavourable stories of her have been brought hither, and the Page 52 Burkes and Mrs. Ord have repeated them to me. But you know that M. Necker's administration, and the conduct of the nobles who first joined in the violent measures that subverted the ancient establishments by the abolition of nobility and the ruin of the church, during the first National Assembly, are held in greater horror by aristocrats than even the members of the present Convention. I know this will make you feel uncomfortable, but it seemed to me right to hint it to You. If you are not absolutely in the house of Madame do Stael when this arrives, it would perhaps be possible for you to waive the visit to her, by a compromise, of having something to do for Susy, and so make the addendum to your stay under her roof. . . (Fanny Burney to Dr. Burney.) Mickleham, February 22, '03, What a kind letter is my dearest father's, and how kindly speedy ! yet it is too true it has given me very uncomfortable feelings. I am both hurt and astonished at the acrimony of malice; indeed, I believe all this Party to merit nothing but honour, compassion, and praise. Madame de Stael, the daughter of M. Necker--the idolising daughter--of course, and even from the best principles, those of filial reverence, entered into the opening of the Revolution just as her father entered into it; but as to her house having become the centre of revolutionists before the 10th of August, it was so only for the constitutionalists, who, at that period, were not only members of the then established government, but the decided friends of the king. The aristocrats were then already banished, or wanderers from fear, or concealed and silent from cowardice; and the jacobins --I need not, after what I have already related, mention how utterly abhorrent to her must be that fiend-like set. The aristocrats, however, as you well observe, and as she has herself told me, hold the constitutionalists in greater horror than the Convention itself. This, however, is a violence against justice which cannot, I hope, be lasting ; and the malignant assertions which persecute her, all of which she has lamented to us, she imputes equally to the bad and virulent of both these parties. The intimation concerning M. de N. was, however, wholly Page 53 new to us, and I do firmly believe it a gross calumny. M. de N. was of her society, which contained ten or twelve of the first people in Paris, and, occasionally, almost all Paris ! she loves him even tenderly, but so openly, so simply, so unaffectedly, and with such utter freedom from all coquetry, that, if they were two men, or two women, the affection could not, I think, be more obviously undesi,gning. She is very plain, he is very handsome ; her intellectual endowments must be with him her sole attraction. M. de Talleyrand was another of her society, and she seems equally attached to him. M. le Viscomte de Montmorenci she loves, she says, as her brother: he is another of this bright constellation, and esteemed of excellent capacity. She says, if she continues in England he will certainly come, for he loves her too well to stay away. In short, her whole coterie live together as brethren. Madame la Marquise de la Ch�tre, who has lately returned to France, to endeavour to obtain de quoi vivre en Angleterre,(73) and who had been of this colony for two or three months since the 10th of August, Is a bosom friend of Madame de Stael and of all this circle : she is reckoned a very estimable as well as fashionable woman ; and a daughter of the unhappy Montmorin, who was killed on the 1st of September(74) is another of this set. Indeed, I think you could not spend a day with them and not see that their commerce is that of pure, but exalted and most elegant, friendship. I would, nevertheless, give the world to avoid being a guest under their roof, now I have heard even the shadow of such a rumour; and I will, if it be possible without hurting or of-fending them. I have waived and waived acceptance almost from the moment of Madame de Stael's arrival. I prevailed with her to let my letter go alone to you, and I have told her, with regard to your answer, that you were sensible of the honour her kindness did me, and could not refuse to her request the week's furlough ; and then followed reasons for the Compromise you pointed out, too diffuse for writing. As Yet they have succeeded, though she is surprised and disappointed. She wants us to study French and English together, and nothing could to me be more desirable, but for this invidious report. M. d'Arblay as well as M. de Narbonne, sent over a declaration in favour of the poor king. M. d'A. had been the Page 54 commandant at Longwy, and had been named to that post by the king himself In the accusation of the infernals, as Mr. Young justly calls them, the king is accused of leaving Longwy undefended, and a prey to the Prussians. M. d'Arblay, who before that period had been promoted into the regiment of M. de Narbonne, and thence summoned to be adjutant-general of Lafayette, wrote therefore, on this charge, to M. de Malesherbes, and told him that the charge was utterly false . that the king had taken every precaution for the proper preservation of Longwy, and that M. d'Arblay, the king's commandant, had himself received a letter of thanks and approbation from Duniouriez, who said, nothing would have been lost had every commandant taken equal pains, and exerted equal bravery. This original letter M. d'Arblay sent to M. Malesherbes, not as a vindication of himself, for he had been summoned from Longwy before the Prussians assailed it, but as a vindication of the officer appointed by the king, while he had yet the command. M. de Malesherbes wrote an answer of thanks, and said he should certainly make use of this information in the defence, However, the fear of Dumouriez, I suppose, prevented his being named. M. d'Arblay, in quitting France with Lafayette, upon the deposition of the king, had only a little ready money in his pocket, and he has been d�cr�(75) I since, and all he was worth in the world is sold and seized by the Convention. M. de Narbonne loves him as the tenderest of brothers, and, while one has a guinea in the world, the other will have half. "Ah!" cried M. d'Arblay, upon the murder of the king, which almost annihilated him, "I know not how those can exist who have any feelings of remorse, when I scarce can endure my life, from the simple feeling of regret that ever I pronounced the word liberty in France!" M. DE LALLY TOLENDAL AND HIS TRAGEDY. (Mrs. Phillips to Mrs. Locke.) Mickleham, April 2, 1793. ....I must, however, say something of juniper, whence I had an irresistible invitation to dine, etc., yesterday, and Page 55 M. de Lally Tolendal(76) read his "Mort de Strafford," which he had already recited once, and which Madame do Stael requested him to repeat for my sake. I had a great curiosity to see M. de Lally. I cannot say that feeling was gratified by the sight of him, though it was satisfied, insomuch that it has left me without any great anxiety to see him again. He is the very reverse of all that my imagination had led me to expect in him: large, fat, with a great head, small nose, immense cheeks, nothing distingu� in his manner and en fait d'esprit, and of talents in conversation, so far, so very far, distant from our juniperians, and from M. de Talleyrand, who was there, as I could not have conceived, his abilities as a writer and his general reputation considered. He seems un bon gar�on, un tr�s honn�te gar�on, as M. Talleyrand says of him, et non de plus.(77) He is extremely absorbed by his tragedy, which he recites by heart, acting as well as declaiming with great energy, though seated, as Le Texier is. He seemed, previous to the performance, occupied completely by It, except while the dinner lasted, which he did not neglect; but he was continually reciting to himself till we sat down to table, and afterwards between the courses. M. Talleyrand seemed much struck with his piece, which appears to me to have very fine lines and passages in it, but which, altogether, interested me but little. I confess, indeed, the violence of ses gestes, and the alternate howling and thundering of his voice in declaiming, fatigued me excessively. If our Fanny had been present, I am afraid I should many times have been affected as one does not expect to be at a tragedy. We sat down at seven to dinner, and had half finished before M. d'Arblay appeared, though repeatedly sent for; he was profoundly grave and silent, and disappeared after the dinner, which was very gay. He was sent for, after coffee and Norbury were gone, several times, that the tragedy might be begun; and . at last Madame de S. impatiently proposed beginning without him. "Mais cela lui fera de la peine,"(78) said M. d'Autun (Talleyrand), good-naturedly; and, as she Page 56 persisted, he rose up and limped out of the room to fetch him he succeeded in bringing him. M Malouet has left them. La Princesse d'Henin is a very pleasing, well-bred woman: she left juniper the next morning with M. de Lally. CONTEMPLATED DisPERSION OF THE FRENCH COLONY. (Mrs. Phillips to Fanny Burney) Mickleham, April 3. After I had sent off my letter to you on Monday I walked on to juniper, and entered at the same moment with Mr. jenkinson(79) and his attorney--a man whose figure strongly resembles some of Hogarth's most ill-looking, personages, and who appeared to me to be brought as a kind of spy, or witness of all that was passing. I would have retreated, fearing to interrupt business, but I was surrounded, and pressed to stay, by Madame de Stael with great empressement, and with much kindness by M. d'Arblay and all the rest. Mr. Clarke was the spokesman, and acquitted himself with great dignity and moderation; Madame de S. now and then came forth with a little coquetterie pour adoucir ce sauvage jenkinson.(80) "What will you, Mr. jenkinson? tell to me, what will you?" M. de Narbonne, somewhat indign� de la mauvaise foi, and exc�d� des longueurs de son adversaire, (81) was not quite so gentle with him, and I was glad to perceive that he meant to resist, in some degree at least, the exorbitant demands of his landlord. Madame de Stael was very gay, and M. de Talleyrand very comique, this evening ; he criticised, amongst other things, her reading of prose, with great sang froid. . . . They talked over a number of their friends and acquaintances with the utmost unreserve, and sometimes with the most comic humour imaginable,--M. de Lally, M. de Lafayette, la Princesse d'Henin, la Princesse de Poix, a M. Guibert, an author. and one who was, Madame de Stael told me, passionately in love with her before she married; and innumerable others. M. d'Arblay had been employed almost night and day since Page 57 he came from London in Writing a m�moire, which Mr Villiers had wished to have, upon the 'Artillerie Cheval,' and he had not concluded it till this morning. (Mrs. Philips to Fanny Burney.) Tuesday, May 14. Trusting to the kindness of chance, I begin in at the top of my paper. Our Juniperians went to see Paine's hill yesterday, and had the good-nature to take my little happy Norbury. In the evening came Miss F- to show me a circular letter, sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury to all the parishes in England, authorising the ministers of those parishes to raise a subscription for the unfortunate French clergy. She talked of our neighbours, and very shortly and abruptly said, "So, Mrs. Phillips, we hear you are to have Mr. Norbone and the other French company to live with you--Pray is it so?" I was, I confess, a little startled at this plain inquiry, but answered as composedly as I could, setting out with informing this b�te personnage that Madame de Stael was going to Switzerland to join her husband and family in a few days, and that of all the French company none would remain but M. de Narbonne and M. d'Arblay, for whom the captain and myself entertained a real friendship and esteem, and whom he had begged to make our house their own for a short time, as the impositions they had had to support from their servants, etc., and the failure of their remittances from abroad, had obliged them to resolve on breaking up housekeeping. I had scarcely said thus much when our party arrived from Paine's hill; the young lady, though she had drunk tea, was so obliging as to give us her company for near two hours, and made a curious attack on M. de N., upon the first pause, in wretched French, though we had before, all of us, talked no other language than English:--"Je vous prie, M. Gnawbone, comment se porte la reine?"(82) Her pronunciation was such that I thought his understanding her miraculous : however, he did guess her meaning, and answered, with all his accustomed douceur and politeness, that he hoped well, but had no means but general ones of information. "I believe," said she afterwards, "nobody was so hurt at Page 58 the king's death as my papa! he couldn't ride on horseback next day!" She then told M. de Narbonne some anecdotes (very new to him, no doubt), which she had read in the newspapers, of the Convention; and then spoke of M. Egalit�. "I hope," said she, flinging her arms out with great violence, "he'll come to be gullytined. He showed the king how he liked to be gullytined, so now I hope he'll be gullytined himself!--So shocking! to give his vote against his own nephew!" If the subject of her vehemence and blunders had been less just or less melancholy, I know not how I should have kept my face in order. Our evening was very pleasant when she was gone, Madame de Stael is, with all her wildness and blemishes, a delightful companion, and M. de N. rises upon me in esteem and affection every time I see him: their minds in some points ought to be exchanged, for he is as delicate as a really feminine woman, and evidently suffers when he sees her setting les biens�ances(83) aside, as it often enough befalls her to do. Poor Madame de Stael has been greatly disappointed and hurt by the failure of the friendship and intercourse she had wished to maintain with you,--of that I am sure; I fear, too, she is on the point of being offended. I am not likely to be her confidant if she is so, and only judge from the nature of things, and from her character, and a kind of d�pit(84) in her manner once or twice in speaking of you. She asked me If you would accompany Mrs. Locke back into the country? I answered that my father would not wish to lose you for so long a time at once, as you had been absent from him as a nurse so many days. After a little pause, "Mais est-ce qu'une femme est en tutelle pour la vie dans ce pays?" she said. "Il me paroit que votre soeur est comme une demoiselle de quatorze ans."(85) I did not oppose this idea, but enlarged rather on the constraints laid upon females, some very unnecessarily, in England,--hoping to lessen her d�pit; it continued, however, visible in her countenance, though she did not express it in words. Page 59 [The frequency and intimacy with which Miss Burney and M. d'Arblay now met, ripened into attachment the high esteem which each felt for the other; and, after many struggles and scruples, occasioned by his reduced circumstances and clouded prospects, M. d'Arblay wrote her an offer of his hand ; candidly acknowledging, however, the slight hope he entertained of ever recovering the fortune he had lost by the Revolution. At this time Miss Burney went to Chesington for a short period; probably hoping that the extreme quiet of that place would assist her deliberations, and tranquillise her mind during her present perplexities.] MADAME DE STAEL'S WORDS OF FAREWELL. M. D'ARBLAY. (Mrs. Philips to Fanny Burney at Chesington.) Sunday, after church, I walked up to Norbury; there unexpectedly I met all our juniperians, and listened to one of the best conversations I ever heard : it was on literary topics, and the chief speakers Madame de Stael, M. de Talleyrand, Mr. Locke, and M. Dumont, a gentleman on a visit of two days at juniper, a Genevois, homme d'esprit et de lettres. I had not a word beyond the first " how d'yes " with any one, being obliged to run home to my abominable dinner in the midst of the discourse. On Monday I went, by invitation, to juniper to dine, and before I came away at night a letter arrived express to Madame de Stael. On reading it, the change in her countenance made me guess the contents, It was from the Swedish gentleman who had been appointed by her husband to meet her at Ostend; he wrote from that place that he was awaiting her arrival. She had designed walking home with us by moonlight, but her spirits were too much oppressed to enable her to keep this intention. M. d'Arblay walked home with Phillips and me. Every moment of his time has been given of late to transcribing a MS. work of Madame de Stael, on 'L'Influence des Passions.' It is a work of considerable length, and written in a hand the most difficult possible to decipher. On Tuesday we all met again at Norbury, where we spent the day. Madame de Stael could not rally her spirits at all, Page 60 and seemed like one torn from all that was dear to her. I was truly concerned. After giving me a variety of charges, or rather entreaties, to watch and attend to the health, spirits, and affairs of the friends she was leaving, she said to me, "Et d�tes Mlle. Burney que je ne lui en veux pas du tout--que je quitte le pays l'aimant bien sinc�rement et sans rancune."(86) I assured her earnestly, and with more words than I have room to insert, not only of your admiration, but affection, and sensibility of her worth and chagrin at seeing no more of her. I hope I exceeded not your wishes; mais il n'y avoit pas moyen de resister.(87) She seemed pleased, and said, "Vous �tes bien bonne de me dire cela,"(88) but in a low and faint voice, and dropped the subject. Before we took leave, M. d'Arblay was already gone, meaning to finish transcribing her MS. I came home with Madame de Stael and M. de Narbonne. The former actually sobbed in saying farewell to Mrs. Locke, and half way down the hill; her parting from me was likewise very tender and flattering. I determined, however, to see her again, and met her near the school, on Wednesday morning with a short note and a little offering which I was irresistibly tempted to make her. She could not speak to me, but kissed her hand with a very speaking and touching expression of countenance. it was this morning, and just as I was setting out to meet her, that Skilton arrived from Chesington. I wrote a little, walked out, and returned to finish as I could. At dinner came our Tio--(89) very bad indeed. After it we walked together with the children to Norbury; but little Fanny was so well pleased with his society that it was impossible to get a word on any particular subject. I, however, upon his venturing to question me whereabouts was the Page 61 campagne o� se trouvoit Mlle. Burney,(90) ventured de mon c�t�(91) to speak the name of Chesington, and give a little account of its inhabitants, the early love we had for the spot, our excellent Mr. Crisp, and your good and kind hostesses. He listened with much interest and pleasure, and said, "Mais, ne pourroit-on pas faire ce petit voyage-l ?"(92) I ventured to say nothing encouraging, at least, decisively, in a great measure upon the children's account, lest they should repeat; and, moreover, your little namesake seemed to me surprisingly attentive and �veill�e, as if elle se doutoit de quelque chose.(93) When we came home I gave our Tio so paper to write to you; it was not possible for me to add more than the address, much as I wished it. REGRETS RESPECTING MADAME DE STAEL. (Fanny Burney to Mrs. -Locke.) Chesington, 1793. I have been quite enchanted to-day by my dear Susan's intelligence that my three convalescents walked to the wood. Would I had been there to meet and receive them. I have regretted excessively the finishing so miserably an acquaintance begun with so much spirit and pleasure, and the d�pit I fear Madame de Stael must have experienced. I wish the world would take more care of itself, and less of its neighbours. I should have heen very safe, I trust, without such flights, and distances, and breaches. But there seemed an absolute resolution formed to crush this acquaintance, and compel me to appear its wilful renouncer. All I did also to clear the matter, and soften to Madame de Stael any pique or displeasure, unfortunately served only to increase them. Had I understood her disposition better, I should certainly have attempted no palliation, for I rather offended her pride than mollified her wrath. Yet I followed the golden rule, for how much should I prefer any acknowledgment of regret at such an apparent change, from any one I esteemed, to a seeming Page 62 unconscious complacency in an unexplained caprice! I am vexed, however, very much vexed, at the whole business. I hope she left Norbury Park with full satisfaction in its steady and more comfortable connection. I fear mine will pass for only a fashionable one. Miss Kitty Cooke still amuses me very much by her incomparable dialect; and by her kindness and friendliness. I am taken the best care of imaginable. My poor brother, who will carry this to Mickleham, is grievously altered by the loss of his little girl. It has affected his spirits and his health, and he is grown so thin and meagre, that he looks ten years older than when I saw him last. I hope he will now revive, since the blow is over; but it has been a very, very hard one, after such earnest pains to escape it. .. Did the wood look very beautiful? I have figured it to myself with the three dear convalescents wandering in its winding paths, and inhaling its freshness and salubrity, ever since I heard of this walk. I wanted prodigiously to have issued forth from some little green recess, to have hailed your return. I hope Mr. Locke had the pleasure of this sight. Is jenny capable of such a mounting journey? Do you know anything of a certain young lady, who eludes all my inquiries, famous for having eight sisters, all of uncommon talents? I had formerly some intercourse with her, and she used to promise she would renew it whenever I pleased but whether she is offended that I have slighted her offers so long, or whether she is fickle, or only whimsical, I know not all that is quite undoubted is that she has concealed herself so effectually from my researches, that I might as well look for justice and clemency in the French Convention, as for this former friend in the plains and lanes of Chesington where, erst, she met me whether I would or no. M. D'ARBLAY'S VISIT TO CHESINGTON. (Fanny Burney to Mrs. Locke.) Chesington, 1793. How sweet to me was my dearest Fredy's assurance that my gratification and prudence went at last hand in hand! I had longed for the sight of her writing, and not dared wish it. Page 63 I shall now long Impatiently till I can have the pleasure of saying "Ma'am, I desire no more of your letters." I have heard to-day all I can most covet of all my dear late malades. I take it for granted this little visit was made known to my dearest sister confidant. I had prepared for it from the time of my own expectation, and I have had much amusement in what the preparation produced. Mrs Hamilton ordered half a ham to be boiled ready; and Miss Kitty trimmed up her best cap, and tried it on, on Saturday, to get it in shape to her face. She made chocolate also, which we drank up on Monday and Tuesday, because it was spoiling. "I have never seen none of the French quality," she says, "and I have a purdigious curosity; though as to dukes and dukes' sons, and these high top captains, I know they'll think me a mere country bumpkin. Howsever, they can't call me worse than 'Fat Kit Square,' and that's the worst name I ever got from any of our English petite bears, which I suppose these petite French quality never heard the like of." Unfortunately, however, when all was prepared above, the French top captain entered while poor Miss Kitty was in dishabill, and Mrs. Hamilton finishing washing up her china from breakfast. A maid who was out at the pump, and first saw the arrival, ran in to give Miss Kitty time to escape, for she was in her round dress night-cap, and without her roll and curls. However, he followed too quick, and Mrs. Hamilton was seen in her linen gown and mob, though she had put on a silk one in expectation for every noon these four or five days past; and Miss Kitty was in such confusion, she hurried out of the room. She soon, however, returned with the roll and curls, and the forehead and throat fashionably lost, in a silk gown. And though she had not intended to speak a word, the gentle quietness of her guest so surprised and pleased her, that she never quitted his side while he stayed, and has sung his praises ever since. Mrs. Hamilton, good soul ! in talking and inquiring since of his history and conduct, shed tears at the recital. She says now she, has really seen one of the French gentry that has been drove out of their country by the villains she has heard Of, she shall begin to believe there really has been a Revolution! and Miss Kitty says, "I purtest I did not know before but it was all a sham." Page 64 THE MATRIMONIAL PROJECT IS DISCUSSED. (Fanny Burney to Mrs. Phillips.) Friday, May 31, Chesington. My heart so smites me this morning with making no answer to all I have been requested to weigh and decide, that I feel I cannot with any ease return to town without at least complying with one demand, which first, at parting yesterday, brought me to write fully to you, my Susan, if I could not elsewhere to my satisfaction. in the course of last night and this morning Much indeed has occurred to me, that now renders my longer silence as to prospects and proceedings unjustifiable to myself. I will therefore now address myself to both my beloved confidants, and open to them all my thoughts, and entreat their own with equal plainness in return. M. d'Arblay's last three letters convince me he is desperately dejected when alone, and when perfectly natural. It is not that he wants patience, but he wants rational expectation of better times, expectation founded on something more than mere aerial hope, that builds one day upon what the next blasts; and then has to build again, and again to be blasted. What affects me the most in this situation is, that his time may as completely be lost as another's peace, by waiting for the effects of distant events, vague, bewildering, and remote, and quite as likely to lead to ill as to good. The very waiting, indeed, with the mind in such a state, is in itself an evil scarce to be recompensed. . . . My dearest Fredy, in the beginning of her knowledge of this transaction, told me that Mr. Locke was of opinion that one hundred pounds per annum(94) might do, as it does for many a curate. M. d'A. also most solemnly and affectingly declares that le simple n�cessaire is all he requires and here, In your vicinity, would unhesitatingly be preferred by him to the most brilliant fortune in another s�jour. If he can say that, what must I be not to echo it? I, who in the bosom of my own most chosen, most darling friends--- I need not enter more upon this; you all must know to me a crust of bread, with a little roof for shelter, and a fire Page 65 for warmth, near you, would bring me to peace, to happiness, to all that My heart holds dear, or even in any situation could prize. I cannot picture such a fate with dry eyes ; all else but kindness and society has to me so always been nothing. With regard to my dear father, he has always left me to myself; I will not therefore speak to him while thus uncertain what to decide. it is certain, however, that, with peace of mind and retirement, I have resources that I could bring forward to amend the little situation ; as well as that, once thus undoubtedly established and naturalised, M. d'A. would have claims for employment. These reflections, with a mutual freedom from ambition might lead to a quiet road, unbroken by the tortures of applications, expectations, attendance, disappointment, and time-wasting hopes and fears; if there were not apprehensions the one hundred pounds might be withdrawn. I do not think it likely, but it is a risk too serious in its consequences to be run. M. d'A. protests he could not answer to himself the hazard. How to ascertain this, to clear the doubt, or to know the fatal certainty before it should be too late, exceeds my powers of suggestion. His own idea, to write to the queen, much as it has startled me, and wild as it seemed to me, is certainly less wild than to take the chance of such a blow in the dark. Yet such a letter could not even reach her. His very name is probably only known to her through myself. In short, my dearest friends, you will think for me, and let me know what occurs to you, and I will defer any answer till I hear your opinions. Heaven ever bless you! And pray for me at this moment. DR. BURNEY'S OBJECTIONS TO THE MATCH. (Dr. Burney to Fanny Burney.) May, 1793, Dear Fanny,-I have for some time seen very plainly that you are �prise, and have been extremely uneasy at the discovery. YOU must have observed my silent gravity, surpassing that of mere illness and its consequent low spirits. I had some thoughts of writing to Susan about it, and intended begging her to do what I must now do for myself--that is, beg and admonish you not to entangle yourself in a wild and Page 66 romantic attachment, which offers nothing in prospect but poverty and distress, with future inconvenience and unhappiness. M. d'Arblay is certainly a very amiable and accomplished man, and of great military abilities I take for granted ; but what employment has he for them of which the success is not extremely hazardous? His property, whatever it was, has been confiscated--d�cr�--by the Convention - and if a counter-revolution takes place, unless it be exactly such a one as suits the particular political sect in which he enlisted, it does not seem likely to secure to him an establishment in France. And as to an establishment in England, I know the difficulty which very deserving natives find in procuring one, with every appearance of interest, friends, and probability; and, to a foreigner, I fear the difficulty will be more than doubled. As M. d'Arblay is at present circumstanced, an alliance with anything but a fortune sufficient for the support of himself and partner would be very imprudent. He is a mere soldier of fortune, under great disadvantages. Your income, if it was as certain as a freehold estate, is insufficient for the purpose ; and if the queen should be displeased and withdraw her allowance, what could you do? I own that, if M. d'Arblay had an establishment in France sufficient for him to marry a wife with little or no fortune, much as I am inclined to honour and esteem him, I should wish to prevent you from fixing your residence there; not merely from selfishness, but for your own sake, I know your love for your family, and know that it is reciprocal; I therefore cannot help thinking that you would mutually be lost to each other. The friends, too, which you have here, are of the highest and most desirable class. To quit them, in order to make new friendships in a strange land, in which the generality of its inhabitants at present seem incapable of such virtues as friendship is built upon, seems wild and visionary. If M. d'Arblay had a sufficient establishment here for the purposes of credit and comfort, and determined to settle here for life, I should certainly think ourselves honoured by his alliance ; but his situation is at present so very remote from all that can satisfy prudence, or reconcile to an affectionate father the idea of a serious attachment, that I tremble for your heart and future happiness. M. d'Arblay must have lived too long in the great world to accommodate himself Page 67 contentedly to the little. his fate seems so intimately connected with that of his miserable country, and that country seems at a greater distance from peace, order, and tranquillity now than it has done at any time since the Revolution. These considerations, and the uncertainty Of what party will finally prevail, make me tremble for you both. You see, by what I have said, that my objections are not personal, but wholly prudential. For heaven's sake, my dear Fanny, do not part with your heart too rapidly, or involve yourself in deep engagements which it will be difficult to dissolve; and to the last degree imprudent, as things are at present circumstanced, to fulfil. As far as character, merit, and misfortune demand esteem and regard, you may be sure that M. d'Arblay will be always received by me with the utmost attention and respect - but, in the present situation of things, I can by no means think I ought to encourage (blind and ignorant as I am of all but his misfortunes) a serious and solemn union with one whose unhappiness would be a reproach to the facility and inconsiderateness of a most affectionate father. THE MARRIAGE TAKES PLACE. Memorandum, this 7th May, 1825. In answer to these apparently most just, and, undoubtedly, most parental and tender apprehensions, Susanna, the darling child of Dr. Burney, as well as first chosen friend of M, d'Arblay, wrote a statement of the plans, and means, and purposes of M. d'A. and F. B.--so clearly demonstrating their power of happiness, with willing economy, congenial tastes, and mutual love of the country, that Dr. B. gave way, and sent, though reluctantly, a consent - by which the union took place the 31st Of July, 1793, in Mickleham church, In presence of Mr. and Mrs. Locke, Captain and Mrs. Phillips, M. de Narbonne, and Captain Burney, who was father to his sister, as Mr. Locke was to M. d'A. ; and on the 1st of August the ceremony was re-performed in the Sardinian chapel, according to the rites of the Romish Church; and never, never was union more blessed and felicitous; though after the first eight years of unmingled happiness, it was assailed by many calamities, chiefly of separation or illness, yet still mentally unbroken. F. D'ARBLAY. Page 68 ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE MARRIAGE TO A FRIEND. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs.----.) August 2, 1793. How in the world shall I begin this letter to my dearest M--! how save her from a surprise almost too strong for her weak nerves and tender heart! After such an opening, perhaps any communication may be a relief but it is surprise only I would guard against; my present communication has nothing else to fear; it has nothing in it sad, melancholy, unhappy, but it has everything that is marvellous and unexpected. Do you recollect at all, when you were last in town, my warm interest for the loyal part of the French exiles?-=do you remember my �loge of a French officer, in particular, a certain M. d'Arblay? Ah, my dear M--, you are quick as lightning; your sensitive apprehension will tell my tale for me now, without more aid than some details of circumstance. The �loge I then made, was with design to prepare you for an event I had reason to expect: such, however, was the uncertainty of my situation, from prudential obstacles, that I dared venture at no confidence, though my heart prompted it strongly, to a friend so sweetly sympathising in all my feelings and all my affairs--so constantly affectionate- so tenderly alive to all that interests and concerns me. My dearest M-, you will give me, I am sure, your heart-felt wishes--your most fervent prayers. The choice I have made appears to me all you could yourself wish to fall to my lot--all you could yourself have formed to have accorded best with your kind partiality. I had some hope you would have seen him that evening when we went together from Mrs. M. Montagu to Mrs. Locke's, for he was then a guest in Portland Place; but some miserable circumstances, of which I knew nothing till after had just fallen out, and he had shut himself up in his room. He did not know we were there. Many, indeed, have been the miserable circumstances that have, from time to time, alarmed and afflicted in turn, and seemed to render a renunciation indispensable. The difficulties, however, have been conquered; and last Sunday Page 69 Mr. and Mrs. Locke, my sister and Captain Phillips, and my brother Captain Burney, accompanied us to the altar, in Mickleham church ; since which the ceremony has been repeated in the chapel of the Sardinian ambassador, that if, by a counter-revolution in France, M. d'Arblay recovers any f his rights, his wife may not be excluded from their participation. You may be amazed not to see the name of my dear father upon this solemn occasion - but his apprehensions from the smallness of our income have made him cold and averse and though he granted his consent, I could not even solicit his presence. I feel satisfied, however, that time will convince him I have not been so imprudent as he now thinks me. Happiness is the great end of all our worldly views and proceedings, and no one can judge for another in what will produce it, To me, wealth and ambition would always be unavailing ; I have lived in their most centrical possessions, and I have always seen that the happiness of the richest and the greatest has been the moment of retiring from riches and from power. Domestic comfort and social affection have invariably been the sole as well as ultimate objects of my choice, and I have always been a stranger to any other species of felicity. M. d'Arblay has a taste for literature, and a passion for reading and writing, as marked as my own ; this is a sympathy to rob retirement of all superfluous leisure, and insure to us both occupation constantly edifying or entertaining. He has seen so much of life, and has suffered so severely from its disappointments, that retreat, with a chosen companion, is become his final desire. Mr. Locke has given M. d'Arblay a piece of ground in his beautiful park-, upon which we shall build a little neat and plain habitation. We shall continue, meanwhile, in his neighbourhood, to superintend the little edifice, and enjoy the Society of his exquisite house, and that of my beloved sister Phillips. We are now within two miles of both, at a farm-house, where we have what apartments we require, and no more, in a most beautiful and healthy situation, a mile and a half from any town. The nearest is Bookham; but I beg that MY letters may be directed to me at Captain Phillips's, Mickleham, as the post does not come this way, and I may else miss them for a week. AS I do not correspond with Mrs Montagu, and it would Page 70 be awkward to begin upon such a theme, I beg that when you write you will say something for me. One of my first pleasures, in our little intended home, will be, finding a place of honour for the legacy of Mrs. Delany. Whatever may be the general wonder, and perhaps blame, of general people, at this connexion, equally indiscreet in pecuniary points for us both, I feel sure that the truly liberal and truly intellectual judgment of that most venerated character would have accorded its sanction, when acquainted with the worthiness of the object who would wish it. Adieu, my sweet friend. Give my best compliments to Mr. ---, and give me your kind wishes, your kind prayers, my ever dear M--. (1) So called from the convent where their meetings were held. (2) Carlyle. (3) Carlyle. (4 "To the lamp;" the street lamp-irons being found, by the - French sansculottes, a handy substitute for the gallows.-ED. (5) The old Marshal Duke de Broglie was one of the early emigrants. He quitted France in July 1789, after the fall of the Bastille.-ED. (6) "Minister of War." (7) Bradfield Hall, near Bury St. Edmund's, Suffolk, the house of Arthur Young, See infra.-ED. (8) " Arthur Young, the well-known writer of works on agriculture, still in high repute. He was a very old friend of the Burneys ; connected with them also, by marriage, Mrs. Young being a sister of Dr. Burney's second wife. His " Travels in France " (from 1769 to 1790), published in 1794, gives a most valuable and interesting account of the state of that country just before the Revolution. Arthur Young was appointed Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, established by Act of Parliament in 1793. He died in 1820, in his seventy-ninth year, having been blind for some years previous to his death.-ED. (9) Fanny's half-sister, Sarah Harriet Burney, -ED. (10) " Minister of war." (11) One memorable saying is recorded of the Duke de Liancourt. He brought the news to the king of the capture of the Bastille by the people of Paris, July 14, 1789. "Late at night, the Duke de Liancourt, having official right of entrance, gains access to the royal apartments unfolds, with earnest clearness, in his constitutional way, the Job's- news. 'Mais,' said poor Louis, 'c'est une r�volte, Why, that is a revolt!'�'Sire,' answered Liancourt, 'it is not a revolt,--it is a revolution.'"-(Carlyle.)-ED. (12) "Peers of France." (13) Coblenz was the rallying-place of the emigrant noblesse.-ED. (14) On the 20th of June 1792, sansculotte Paris, assembling in its thousands, broke into the Tuileries, and called upon the king to remove his veto upon the decree against the priests, and to recall the ministry--Roland's--which he had just dismissed. For three hours the king stood face to face with the angry crowd, refusing to comply. In the evening, the Mayor of Paris, P�tion, arrived, with other popular leaders from the Assembly, and persuaded the people to disperse.-ED. (15) "Save Yourself, M. de Liancourt!" (16) "Ah! we are lost!" (17) "prison." (18) " I am in England. (19) The Duke de la Rochefoucault, "journeying, by quick stages, with his mother and wife, towards the Waters of Forges, or some quieter country, was arrested at Gisors; conducted along the streets, amid effervescing multitudes, and killed dead ' by the stroke of a paving-stone hurled through the coach-window.' Killed as a once Liberal, now Aristocrat; Protector of Priests, Suspender of virtuous P�tions, and most unfortunate Hot-grown-cold, detestable to Patriotism. He dies lamented of Europe; his blood spattering the cheeks of his old mother, ninety-three years old." -(Carlyle, Erench Aevolulion, Part III., Book I., ch. vi.)- ED. (20) School-boys. (21) See note 361 ante, vol. ii. p. 449.-ED. (22) The name under which Madame de Genlis was now passing. (23) " She has seen me!" (24) "Perhaps I am indiscreet?" (25) "But, mademoiselle--after all--the king--is he quite cured? " (26) "What, mademoiselle! you knew that infamous woman?" (27) These "journalizing letters " of Mrs. Phillips continue without interruption from the present page to page 37.-ED. (28) Not yet duke, but viscount. He was created duke by Louis XVIII., in 1822.-ED. (29) It should be March. "The portfolio of war was withdrawn from him, by a very laconic letter from the king, March 10, 1792; he had held it three months and three days." (Nouvelle Biographie G�n�rale: art. Narbonne.)-ED. (30) Severe decrees against the emigrants were passed in the Convention shortly afterwards. See infra, P. 33.-ED. (31) "And as he is extremely attached to him, he has begged him to come and live with him." (32) In a position to realise her fortune." (33) "To pay his respects to me." (34) "I do not speak English very well." (35) "*What a pretty little house you have, and what pretty little hosts. " (36) "Does he know the name of M. Lafayette ?" (37) "They put us at first into a pretty enough room." (38) A constitutionalist and member of the Legislative Assembly, who narrowly escaped with his life on the 10th of August. He lived thenceforward in retirement until after the fall of Robespierre and the jacobins, and came again to the fore under Napoleon.-ED. (39) "His resignation." (40) "Without form of law." (41) The night of June 20-21, 1791, King Louis fled disguised from Paris, with his family; got safely as far as Varennes, but was there discovered, and obliged to return.-ED. (42) "Resolution was taken." (43) "After many threatening gestures." (44) The asylum of Jean jacques (Rousseau). (45) St. just was one of the most notable members of the National Convention. "Young Saint-just is coming, deputed by Aisne in the North; more like a Student than a Senator; not four-and-twenty yet (Sept. 1792); who has written Books; a youth of slight stature, with mild mellow voice, enthusiast olive-complexion and long black hair." (Carlyle.) He held with Robespierre, and was guillotined with him, July 28, 1794.-ED. (46) ' "And now he is a proud republican." (47) "What day better than the present?" (48) "Listen to reason." (49) M. de Necker was father of Madame de Stael, and at one time the most popular minister of France. Controller-general of finances from 1776 to 1781, and again in 1788. In July 1789, he was dismissed, to the anger of indignant Paris; had to he recalled before many days, and returned in triumph, to be, it was hoped, "Saviour of France." But his popularity gradually declined, and at last "'Adored Minister' Necker sees good on the 3rd of September, 1790, to withdraw softly, almost privily--with an eye to the 'recovery of his health.' Home to native Switzerland; not as he last came; lucky to reach it alive!" (Carlyle)-ED. (50) Malouet was a member of the Assembly, and one of the constitutional royalists who took refuge in England in September, 1792. Hearing of the intended trial of the king, 'Malouet wrote to the Convention, requesting a passport, that he might go to Paris to defend him. He got no passport, however ; only his name put on the list of emigrants for an answer. ED. (51) "Were mixed up in it." (52) The Bishop of Autun:--Talleyrand.-ED. (53) "Worthy to be the husband of so amiable and charming a person as Madame de la Ch�tre." (54) "M. de la Ch�tre is a capital fellow; but as rough as a cart-horse." (55) The spleen. (56) Inn. (57) "His unfortunate friends." (58) "But wait a bit ; I have not yet finished : we were assured that no one was lost, and even that everything on the vessel was saved." (59) "Out at sea." (60) "His friends the constitutionalists." (61) Fortnight. (62) The execution of Louis XVI. (63) The Literary Club. (64) Guarded: circumspect. (65) Dr. Percy, editor of the "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry."-ED. (66) "Move the people to compassion." (67) As literary curiosities, the subjoined notes from Madame de Stael , have been printed verbatim et literatim: they are probably her earliest attempts at English writing. (68) "But, to make more sure, I tell you in French that your room, the house, the inmates of Juniper, everything is ready to receive the first woman in England." (69) Malesherbes was one of the counsel who defended Louis at his trial. The Convention, after debate, has granted him Legal Counsel, of his own choosing. Advocate Target feels himself 'too old,' being turned of fifty-four - and declines. . . . Advocate Tronchet, some ten years older, does not decline. Nay behold, good old Malesherbes steps forward voluntarily; to the last of his fields , the good old hero! He is gray with seventy years; he says, 'I was twice called to the Council of him who was my Master, When all the world coveted that honour; and I owe him the same service now, when it has become one which many reckon dangerous!"--(Carlyle). Malesherbes was guillotined in 1794, during "the Reign of Terror."-ED. (70) Mr. Clarke. (71) Voltaire's.--ED. (72) Narbonne.-ED. (73) "Something to live on in England." (74) September 2, it should be.-ED. (75) i.e., D�cr�t� d'accusation, accused.-ED. (76) Lally Tolendal was the son of the brave Lally, Governor of Pondicherry, whose great services in India were rewarded by the French government with four years' imprisonment, repeated torture, and finally ignominious death, in 1760. The infliction of torture on criminals was not put a stop to in France until the Revolution.-ED. (77) "A very good fellow, and nothing more." (78) "But he will be hurt at that." (79) The owner of Juniper Hall.-ED. (80) "Coquetry to soften that barbarous jenkinson." (81) "Indignant at the bad faith, and tired with the tediousness of his opponent." (82) "Pray, Mr. Gnawbone, how is the queen?" (83) Punctiliousness: propriety. (84) Pet: Vexation. (85) "Is a woman in leading strings all her life in this country? It seems to me that your sister is like a child of fourteen." (86) "And tell Miss Burney that I don't desire it of her-that I leave the Country loving her sincerely, and bearing her no grudge." (87) "There was no way out of it." (88) "You are very good to say SO." (89) M. d'Arblay. "When Lieutenant [James] Burney accompanied captain Cook to otaheite, each of the English sailors was adopted as a brother by some one of the natives. The ceremony consisted in rubbing noses together, and exchanging the appellation Tyo or Toio, which signified 'chosen friend.' This title was sometimes playfully given to Miss Burney by Mrs. Thrale." note to the original edition of the "Diary", vol. ii. page 38.-ED. (90) "Country place where Miss Burney was." (91) "On my part." (92) "Could not one make that little journey?" (93) "Wide awake, as if she suspected something." (94) The amount of Fanny's pension from the queen.-ED. SECTION 20. (1793-6) LOVE IN A COTTAGE: THE D'ARBLAYS VISIT WINDSOR. [Never, probably, did Fanny enjoy greater happiness than during the first few years of her married life, "Love in a cottage" on an income Of One hundred pounds a year, was exactly suited to her retiring and affectionate nature. The cottage, too, was within easy walking distance of Mickleham, where resided her favourite sister, Susanna, and of Norbury Park, the home of her dearest friends, the Lockes. Here, then, in this beautiful part of Surrey, with a devoted husband by her side, and, in due time, a little son (her only child) to share with him her tenderness and care ' did Fanny lead, for some.time, a tranquil and, in the main, a happy life. Her chief excursions were occasional visits to the queen and princesses-delightful visits now that she was out of harness. Towards the end, however, of the period of which the following 'Section contains the history, two melancholy events, happening in quick succession, brought sorrow to the little household at Book'ham. The departure for Ireland of Susan Phillips left a grievous gap in the circle of Fanny's best-loved friends. We gather from the "Diary" that Captain (now Major) Phillips had gone to Ireland, with his little son, Norbury, to superintend the management of his estate at Belcotton, some months before his wife left Mickleham. In the autumn of 1796 he returned to fetch his wife and the rest of his family. An absence of three years was intended, The parting was rendered doubly distressing by the evidently declining state of Susan's health. Shortly afterwards, in October 1796, died Fanny's step-mother, who had been, for many years, more Or less an invalid. Fanny hastened to Chelsea on receiving the news, and spent some time there with her father and his Youngest daughter. The following extract from a memorandum of Dr. Burney's will be read, we think, not without Interest. "On the 26th of October, she [his second wife) was interred in the burying-ground of Chelsea College. On the 27th, I returned to my melancholy home, disconsolate and stupified, Though long Page 72 expected, this calamity was very severely felt; I missed her counsel, converse, and family regulations; and a companion of thirty years, whose mind was cultivated, whose intellects were above the general level of her sex, and whose curiosity after knowledge was insatiable to the last. These were losses that caused a vacuum in my habitation and in my mind, that has never been filled up. "My four eldest daughters, all dutiful, intelligent, and affectionate, were married, and had families of their own to superintend, or they might have administered comfort. My youngest daughter ' Sarah Harriet, by my second marriage, had quick intellects, and distinguished talents ; but she had no experience in household affairs. However, though she had native spirits of the highest gaiety, she became a steady and prudent character, and a kind and good girl. There is, I think, considerable merit in her novel, 'Geraldine,' particularly in the conversations; and I think the scene at the emigrant cottage really touching. At least it drew tears from me, when I was not so prone to shed them as I am at present."(95) During these years Fanny did not suffer her pen to lie idle. Her tragedy, "Edwy and Elgiva," was produced, though without success, at Drury Lane. On the other hand, the success of her third novel, "Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, " published by subscription in 1796, was, at least from a financial point of view, conspicuous and immediate. Out of an edition of four thousand, three thousand five hundred copies were sold within three months. Were we to attempt to rank Madame d'Arblay's novels in order of merit, we should perhaps feel compelled to place "Camilla" at the bottom of the list, yet without intending to imply any considerable inferiority. But it is full of charm and animation the characters--the female characters especially-are drawn with a sure hand, the humour is as diverting, the satire as spirited as ever. Fanny"s fops and men of the ton are always excellent in their kind, and "Camilla" contains, perhaps, her greatest triumph in this direction, in the character of Sir Sedley Clarendal. Lovel. in "Evelina," and Meadows, in "Cecilia," are mere blockheads, whose distinction is wholly due to the ludicrousness of their affectations; but in Sir Sedley she has attempted, and succeeded in the much more difficult task of portraying a man of naturally good parts and feelings, who, through idleness and vanity, has allowed himself to sink into the position of a mere leader of the ton, whose better nature rises at times, in spite of himself, above the flood of affectation and folly beneath which he endeavours to drown it. Camilla herself, the light-hearted, unsuspicious Camilla, however she may differ, in some points of character, from Fanny's other heroines, possesses one quality which is common to them all, the power of fascinating the reader. Perhaps the least satisfactory character in the book is that of the hero, Edgar Mandlebert, whose extreme caution in the choice of a wife betrays him into ungenerous suspicions, as irritating to the impatient reader as they are dis- Page 73 tressing to pool- Camilla. In fine, whatever faults, as occasionally of style, the book may have the interest never for One moment flags from the first page to the last of the entire five volumes. The subscriPtion-price of " Camilla " was fixed at one guinea. Fanny's friends, Mrs. Crewe, Mrs. Boscawen, and Mrs. Locke, exerted themselves with the utmost zeal and success in procuring subscribers, and the printed lists prefixed to the first volume contains nearly eleven hundred names. Among wthem we notice the name of Edmund Burke, whose great career was closing in a cloud of domestic trouble'. Early in 1794 he lost his brother, Richard, and in August of the same year a far heavier blow fell upon him in the death, at the age of thirty-six, of his only and promising son, "the pride and ornament of my existence," as he called him in a touching letter to Mrs. Crewe. The desolate father, already worn with the thankless toils of statesmanship, in which his very errors had been the outcome of a noble and enthusiastic temperament, never recovered from this blow. But when Mrs. Crewe sent him, in 1795, the proposals for publishing "Camilla," Burke roused himself to do a new kindness to an old friend. He forwarded to Mrs. Crewe a note for twenty pounds, desiring in return one copy of the book, and justified his generous donation in a letter of the most delicate Courtesy. "As to Miss Burney," he wrote, "the subscription ought to be, for certain persons, five guineas; and to take but a single copy each. The rest as it is. I am sure that it is a disgrace to the age and nation, if this be not a great thing for her. if every person in England who has received pleasure'and instruction from 'Cecilia,' were to rate its value at the hundredth part of their satisfaction, Madame d'Arblay would be one of the richest women in the kingdom. "Her scheme was known before she lost two of her most respectful admirers from this house; and this, with Mrs. BUrke's' subscription and mine, make the paper I send you. One book is as good as a thousand: one of hers is certainly as good as a thousand others." The book, on its Publication 'was sent to Bath, where Burke was lying ill-too ill to read it. To Mrs. Crewe, who visited him at the time, he said : "How ill I am you will easily believe, when a new work of Madame d'Arblay's lies on my table, unread!"(96) Meanwhile the retirement of the "hermits" at Bookham was now and again disturbed by echoes of the tumult without. The war was progressing, and the Republic was holding its own against the combined powers of Europe. Dr. Burney refers to the "sad news" from Dunkirk. In August, 1793, an English army, commanded by the Duke of York, had invested that important stronghold: on the night of September 8, thanks to the exertions of the garrison and the advance of General Houchard to its relief, the siege was urriedly abandoned and his royal highness had to beat a retreat, leaving behind him' his siege-artillery and a large quantity of aggage and ammunition. Another siege--that of Page 74 Toulon-seemed likely to prove a matter of nearer concern to Fanny. The inhabitants of Toulon, having royalist, or at least anti-jacobin, sympathies, and stirred by the fate of Marseilles, had determined, in an unhappy hour, to defy the Convention and to proclaim the dauphin by the title of Louis XVII. They invoked the protection of the English fleet under Admiral Hood, who accordingly took possession of the harbour and of the French ships of war stationed therein, while a force of English and Spanish soldiers was sent on shore to garrison the forts. In the course of these proceedings the admiral issued to the townspeople two proclamations, by the second of which, dated August 28, 1793, after noticing the declaration of the inhabitants in favour of monarchy, and Their desire to re-establish the constitution as it was accepted by the late king, he explicitly declared that he took possession of Toulon and should keep it solely as a deposit for Louis XXIII., and that only until the restoration of peace. This hopeful intelligence did not escape General d'Arblay, busied among his cabbages at Bookham. A blow to be struck for Louis XVII. and the constitution! The general straightway flung aside the "Gardener's Dictionary," and wrote an offer to Mr. Pitt of his services as volunteer at Toulon, in the sacred cause of the Bourbons. Happily for Fanny, his offer was not accepted, for some reason unexplained.(97) In the meantime, General Dugommier and the republicans, a young artillery-officer named Napoleon Buonaparte among them, were using their best endeavours to reduce Toulon, with what result we shall presently see.-ED.] THE FRENCH CLERGY FUND. THE TOULON ExPEDITION. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) September 12, 1793. Dear Fanny--In this season of leisure I am as fully occupied as ever your friend Mr. DelVile(98) was. So many people to attend, so many complaints to hear, and so many grievances to redress, that it has been impossible for me to write to you sooner. I have been out of town but one Single day, I believe, since you were here: that was spent at Richmond with my sisters. But every day Page 75 produces business for other people, which occupies me as much as ever I found myself in days of hurry about my own affairs. I have had a negotiation and correspondence to carry on for and with Charlotte Smith,(99) of which I believe I told you the beginning, and I do not see the end myself. Her second son had his foot shot off before Dunkirk, and has undergone a very dangerous amputation, which, it is much feared, will be fatal. Mrs. Crewe, having seen at Eastbourne a great number of venerable and amiable French clergy suffering all the evils of banishment and beggary with silent resignation, has for some time had in meditation a plan for procuring some addition to the small allowance the committee at Freemasons' hall is able to allow, from the residue of the subscriptions and briefs in their favour. Susan will show you the plan. . . . You say that M. d'Arblay is not only his own architect, but intends being his own gardener. I suppose the ground allotted to the garden of your maisonnette is marked out, and probably will be enclosed and broken up before the foundation of your mansion is laid ; therefore, to encourage M. d'Arblay in the study of horticulture, I have the honour to send him Miller's 'Gardeners' Dictionary,'--an excellent book, at least for the rudiments of the art. I send you, my dear Fanny, an edition of Milton, which I can well spare, and which you ought not to live without ; and I send you both our dear friend Dr. Johnson's 'Rasselas.' This is sad news from Dunkirk, at which our own jacobins will insolently triumph. Everything in France seems to move in a regular progression from bad to worse. After near five years' struggle and anarchy, no man alive, with a grain of modesty, would venture to predict how or when the evils of that country will be terminated. In the meantime the peace and comfort of every civilised part of the globe is threatened with similar calamities. (Madame dArblay to Dr. Burney) Bookham, September 29, 1793. When I received the last letter of my dearest father, and for some hours after, I was the happiest of all human beings. I make no exception, for I think none possible : not a wish remained to me; not a thought of forming one. Page 76 This was just the period--is it not always so?--for a blow of sorrow to reverse the whole scene : accordingly, that evening M. d'Arblay communicated to me his desire of going to Toulon. He had intended retiring from public life; his services and his sufferings in his severe and long career, repaid by exile and confiscation, and for ever embittered to his memory by the murder of his sovereign, had justly satisfied the claims of his conscience and honour; and led him, without a single self-reproach, to seek a quiet retreat in domestic society : but the second declaration of Lord Hood no sooner reached this little obscure dwelling,-no sooner had he read the words Louis XVII. and the constitution to which he had sworn united, than his military ardour rekindled, his loyalty was all up in arms, and every sense of duty carried him back to wars and dangers. I dare not speak of myself, except to say that I have forborne to oppose him with a single solicitation; all the felicity of this our chosen and loved retirement would effectually be annulled by the smallest suspicion that it was enjoyed at the expense of any duty - and therefore, since he is persuaded it is right to go, I acquiesce. He is now writing an offer of his services, which I am to convey to Windsor, and which he means to convey himself to Mr. Pitt. As I am sure it will interest my dear father, I will copy it for him. . . . My dearest father, before this tremendous project broke into our domestic economy, M, d'Arblay had been employed in a little composition, which, being all in his power, he destined to lay at your feet, as a mark of his pleasure in your attention to his horticultural pursuit. He has just finished copying it for you, and to-morrow it goes by the stage. Your hint of a book from time to time enchanted him: it seems to me the only present he accepts entirely without pain. He has just requested me to return to Mrs. Locke herself a cadeau she had brought us. If it had been an old Courtcalendar, or an almanac, or anything in the shape of a brochure, he would have received it with his best bow and smile. This Toulon business finally determines our deferring the maisonnette till the spring. Heaven grant it may be deferred no longer!(100) Mr Locke says it will be nearly as soon ready as if begun in the autumn, for it will be better to have it Page 77 aired and inhabited before the winter seizes it, If the memoire which M. d'Arblay is now writing is finished in time, it shall accompany the little packet; if not, we will send it by the first opportunity. Meanwhile, M. d'Arblay makes a point of our indulging ourselves with the gratification of subscribing one guinea to your fund,(101) and Mrs. Locke begs you will trust her and insert her subscription in your list, and Miss Locke and Miss Amelia Locke. Mr. Locke is charmed with your plan. M. d'Arblay means to obtain you Lady Burrel and Mrs. Berm. If you think I can write to any purpose, tell me a little hint how and of what, dearest sir; for I am in the dark as to what may remain yet unsaid. Otherwise, heavy as is my heart just now, I could work for them and Your plan.(102) (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) October 4, 1793. Dear Fanny,--This is a terrible coup, so soon after your union; but I honour M, d'Arblay for offering his service on so great an occasion, and you for giving way to what seems an indispensable duty. Common-place reflections on the vicissitudes of human affairs would afford you little consolation. The stroke is new to your situation, and so will be the fortitude necessary on the occasion. However, to military men, who, like M. d'Arblay, have been but just united to the object of their choice, and begun to domesticate, it is no uncommon tbing for their tranquillity to be disturbed by " the trumpet's loud clangor." Whether the offer is accepted or not, the having made it will endear him to those embarked in the same cause among his countrymen, and elevate him in the general opinion of the English public. This consideration I am sure will afford you a satisfaction the most likely to enable you to support the anxiety and pain of absence. I have no doubt of the offer being taken well at Windsor, and of its conciliating effects. If his majesty and the ministry Page 78 have any settled plan for accepting or rejecting similar offers I know not; but it seems very likely that Toulon will be regarded as the rallying point for French royalists of all sects and denominations. . . . I shall be very anxious to know how the proposition of M. d'Arblay has been received; and, if accepted, on what conditions, and when and how the voyage is to be performed , I should hope in a stout man of war ; and that M. de Narbonne will be of the party, being so united in friendship and political principles. Has M. d'Arblay ever been at Toulon ? It is supposed to be so well fortified, both by art and nature, on the land side, that; if not impregnable, the taking it by the regicides will require so much time that it is hoped an army of counterrevolutionists will be assembled from the side of Savoy, sufficient to raise the siege, if unity of measures and action prevail between the Toulonnais and their external friends. But even if the assailants should make such approaches as to render it necessary to retreat, with such a powerful fleet as that of England and Spain united, it will not only be easy to carry off the garrison and inhabitants in time, but to destroy such ships as cannot be brought away, and ruin the harbour and arsenal for many years to come.' I have written to Mrs. Crewe all you have said on the subject of writing something to stimulate benevolence and commiseration in favour of the poor French ecclesiastics, amounting to six thousand now in England, besides four hundred laity here and eight hundred at Jersey, in utter want. The fund for the laity was totally exhausted the 27th of last month, and the beginning of the next that raised by former subscriptions and briefs will be wholly expended! The expense, in only allowing the clergy 8 shillings a-week, amounts Page 79 to about 7500 pounds a-month, which cannot be supported long by private subscriptions, and must at last be taken up by Parliament; but to save the national disgrace of suffering these excellent people to die of hunger, before the Parliament meets and agrees to do something for them, the ladies must work hard. You and M. d'Arblay are very good in wishing to contribute your mite ; but I did not intend leading you into this scrape. If you subscribe your pen, and he his sword, it will best answer Mr. Burke's idea, who says, "There are two ways by which people may be charitable-the one by their money, the other by their exertions." (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Sunday noon, October 21, 1793. My dearest father will think I have been very long in doing the little I have done; but my mind is so anxiously discom-fited by the continued suspense with regard to M. d'Arblay's proposition and wish, that it has not been easy to me to weigh completely all I could say, and the fear of repeating what had already been offered upon the subject has much restrained me, for I have seen none of the tracts that may have appeared. However, it is a matter truly near my heart ; and though I have not done it rapidly, I have done it with my whole mind, and, to own the truth, with a species of emotion that has greatly affected me, for I could not deeply consider the situation of these venerable men without feeling for them to the quick. If what I have written should have power to procure them one more guinea, I shall be paid. If you think what I have drawn up worth printing, I should suppose it might make a little sixpenny paper, and be sold for the same purpose it is written. Or will it only do to be printed at the expense of the acting ladies, and given gratis? You must judge of this. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, October 27, 1793. My most dear father,--The terrible confirmation of this last act of savage hardness of heart(104) has wholly overset us again. M. d'Arblay had entirely discredited its probability, Page 80 and, to the last moment, disbelieved the report not from milder thoughts of the barbarous rulers of his unhappy country, but from seeing that the death of the queen could answer no purpose, helpless as she was to injure them, while her life might answer some as a hostage with the emperor. Cruelty, however, such as theirs, seems to require no incitement whatever; its own horrible exercise appears sufficient both to prompt and to repay it. Good heaven! that that wretched princess should so finish sufferings so unexampled! With difficulties almost incredible, Madame de Stael has contrived, a second time, to save the lives of M. de Jaucourt and M, de Montmorenci, who are just arrived in Switzerland. We know as yet none of the particulars; simply that they are saved is all: but they write in a style the most melancholy to M. de Narbonne, of the dreadful fanaticism of licence, which they dare call liberty, that still reigns unsubdued in France, And they have preserved nothing but their persons ! of their vast properties they could secure no more than pocket-money, for travelling in the most penurious manner. They are therefore in a state the most deplorable. Switzerland is filled with gentlemen and ladies of the very first families and rank, who are all starving, but those who have had the good fortune to procure, by disguising their quality, some menial office! No answer comes from Mr. Pitt ; and we now expect none till Sir Gilbert Elliot makes his report of the state of Toulon and of the Toulonnese till which, probably, no decision will be formed whether the constitutionals in England will be employed or not. [M. d'Arblay's offer of serving in the expedition to Toulon was not accepted, and the reasons for which it was declined do not appear.] MADAME D'ARBLAY ON HER MARRIAGE. (Madame d'Arblay to mrs.----.) The account of your surprise, my sweet friend, was the last thing to create mine: I was well aware of the general astonishment, and of yours in particular. My own, however, at my very extraordinary fate, is singly greater than that of all my friends united. I had never made any vow against marriage, but I had long, long been firmly persuaded it was for me a state of too much hazard and too little promise to draw me from my Page 81 individual plans and purposes. I remember, in playing -at questions and commands, when I was thirteen, being asked when I intended to marry? and surprising my playmates by solemnly replying) "When I think I shall be happier than I am in being single." It is true, I imagined that time would never arrive - and I have pertinaciously adhered to trying no experiment upon any other hope - for, many and mixed as are the ingredients which form what is generally considered as happiness, I was always fully convinced [hat social sympathy of character and taste could alone have any chance with me; all else I always thought, and now know, to be immaterial. I have only this peculiar,--that what many contentedly assert or adopt in theory, I have had the courage to be guided by in practice. We are now removed to a very small house in the suburbs of a very small village called Bookham. We found it rather inconvenient to reside in another person's dwelling, though our own apartments were to ourselves. Our views are not so beautiful as from Phenice farm, but our situation is totally free from neighbours and intrusion. We are about a mile and a half from Norbury Park, and two miles from Mickleham. I am become already so stout a walker, by use, and with the help of a very able supporter, that I go to those places and return home on foot without fatigue, when the weather is kind. At other times I condescend to accept a carriage from Mr. Locke ; but it is always reluctantly, I so much prefer walking where, as here, the country and prospects are inviting. I thank you for your caution about building: we shall certainly undertake nothing but by contract - however, it would be truly mortifying to give up a house in Norbury Park we defer the structure till the spring, as it is to be so very slight, that Mr. Locke says it will be best to have it hardened in its first stage by the summer's sun. It will be very small, merely an habitation for three people, but in a situation truly beautiful, and within five minutes of either Mr. Locke or my sister Phillips: it is to be placed just between those two loved houses. My dearest father, whose fears and drawbacks have been my Sole subject of regret, begins now to see I have not judged rashly, or with romance, in seeing my own road to my own felicity. And his restored cheerful concurrence in my constant principles, though new station, leaves me, for myself, Page 82 without a wish. L'ennui, which could alone infest our retreat, I have ever been a stranger to, except in tiresome company, and my companion has every possible resource against either feeling or inspiring it. As my partner is a Frenchman, I conclude the wonder raised by the connexion may spread beyond my own private circle; but no wonder upon earth can ever arrive near my own in having found such a character from that nation. This is a prejudice certainly, impertinent and very John Bullish, and very arrogant but I only share it with all my countrymen, and therefore must needs forgive both them and myself. I am convinced, however, from your tender solicitude for me in all ways, that you will be glad to hear that the queen and all the royal family have deigned to send me wishes for my happiness through Mrs. Schwellenberg, who has written me what you call a very kind congratulation. [In the year 1794, the happiness of the "Hermitage" was increased by the birth of a son,(105) who was christened Alexander Charles Louis Piochard d'Arblay; receiving the names of his father, with those of his two godfathers, the Comte de Narbonne and Dr. Charles Burney.] MR. CANNING. (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney) Bookham, February 8, 1794. The times are indeed, as my dearest father says, tremendous, and reconcile this retirement daily more and more to my chevalier- -chevalier every way, by birth, by his order, and by his character; for to-day he has been making his first use of a restoration to his garden in gathering snowdrops for his fair Dulcinea--you know I must say fair to finish the phrase with any effect. I am very sorry for the sorrow I am sure Mr. Burke will feel for the loss of his brother, announced in Mr. Coolie's paper yesterday. Besides, he was a comic, good-humoured, entertaining man, though not bashful.(106) Page 83 What an excellent opening Mr. Canning has made at last! Entre nous soit dit, I remember, when at Windsor, that I Was told Mr. Fox came to Eton purposely to engage to himself that young man, from the already great promise of his rising abilities - and he made dinners for him and his nephew, Lord Holland, to teach them political lessons. It must have had an odd effect upon him, I think, to hear such a speech from his disciple.(107) Mr. Locke now sends us the papers for the debates every two or three days ; he cannot quicker, as his own household readers are so numerous. I see almost nothing of Mr. Windham in them ; which vexes me: but I see Mr. Windham in Mr. Canning. TALLEYRAND's LETTERS OF ADIEU.(108) (M. de Talleyrand to Mrs. Philips.) Londres, 1794. Madame,--Il faut qu'il y ait eu de l'impossibilit� pour que ce matin je n'aie pas eu l'honneur de vous voir; mais l'im- Page 84 possibilit� la plus forte m'a priv� du dernier plaisir que je pouvois avoir en Europe. Permettez moi, madame, de vous remercier encore une fois do toutes vos bont�s, de vous demander un peu de part dans votre souvenir, et laissez moi vous dire que mes voeux se porteront dans tous les terns de ma vie vers vous, vers le capitaine, vers vos enfans. Vous allez avoir en Am�rique un serviteur bien z�l�; je ne reviendrai pas en Europe sans arriver dans le Surrey: tout ce qui, pour mon esprit et pour mon coeur, a quelque valeur, est l . Voulez-vous bien pr�senter tous mes complimens au capitaine?(109) (M. de Talleyrand to M. and Madame d'Arblay.) Londres, 2 Mars, 1794. Adieu, mon cher D'Arblay: je quitte votre pays jusqu'au moment o� il n'appartiendra plus aux petites passions des hommes. Alors j'y reviendrai; non, en v�rit�, pour m'occuper d'affaires, car il y a long tems que je les ai abandonn�es pour jamais; mais pour voir les excellens habitans du Surrey, J'esp�re savoir assez d'Anglais pour entendre Madame d'Arblay; d'ici quatre mois je ne vais faire autre chose que l'�tudier: et pour apprendre le beau et bon langage, c'est "Evelina" et "Cecilia" qui sont mes livres d'�tude et de plaisir. Je vous souhaite, mon cher ami, toute esp�ce de bonheur, et vous �tes on position de remplir tous mes souhaits. je ne sais combien de tems je resterai en Am�rique: s'il se r�f�roit quelque chose de raisonnable et de stable pour notre malheureux pays, je reviendrois; si l'Europe s'ab�me dans la campagne prochaine, je pr�parerai en Am�rique des asyles tous nos amis. Page 85 Adieu: mes hommages Madame d'Arblay et Madame phillips, je vous en prie: je vous demande et vous promets amiti� pour la vie.(110) M. D'ARBLAY's HORTICULTURAL PURSUITS. (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney.) Bookham, March 22, 1794. My dear father.--I am this Moment returned from reading your most welcome and kind letter at our Susanna's. The account of your better health gives me a pleasure beyond all words; and it is the more essential to my perfect contentment on account of your opinion of our retreat. I doubt not, my dearest father, but you judge completely right, and I may nearly say we are both equally disposed to pay the most implicit respect to your counsel. We give up, therefore, all thoughts of our London excursion for the present, and I shall write to that effect to our good intended hostess very speedily. I can easily conceive far more than you enlarge upon in this counsel: and, indeed, I have not myself been wholly free from apprehension of possible embarras, should we, at this period, visit London; for though M. d'Arblay not only could stand, but would court, all personal scrutiny, whether retrospective or actual, I see daily the extreme susceptibility which attends his very nice notions of honour, and how quickly and deeply his spirit is wounded by whatever he regards as injustice. Incapable, too, of the least trimming or Page 86 disguise, he could not, at a time such as this, be in London without suffering or risking perhaps hourly, something unpleasant. Here we are tranquil, undisturbed and undisturbing. Can life, he often says, he more innocent than ours, or happiness more inoffensive? He works in his garden, or studies English and mathematics, while I write. When I work at my needle, he reads to me; and we enjoy the beautiful country around us in long and romantic strolls, during which he carries under his arm a portable garden chair, lent us by Mrs. Locke, that I may rest as I proceed. He is extremely fond, too, of writing, and makes, from time to time, memorandums of such memoirs, poems, and anecdotes as he recollects, and I wish to have preserved. These resources for sedentary life are certainly the first blessings that can be given to man, for they enable him to be happy in the extremest obscurity, even after tasting the dangerous draughts of glory and ambition. The business of M. de Lafayette(111) has been indeed extremely bitter to him. It required the utmost force he could put upon himself not to take some public part in it. He drew up a short but most energetic defence of that unfortunate general, in a letter, which he meant to print and send to the editors of a newspaper which had traduced him, with his name at full length. But after two nights' sleepless deliberation, the hopelessness of serving his friend, with a horror and disdain of being mistaken as one who would lend any arms to weaken government at this crisis, made him consent to repress it. I was dreadfully uneasy during the conflict, knowing, far better than I can make him conceive, the mischiefs that might follow any interference at this moment, in matters brought before the nation, from a foreigner. But, conscious of his own integrity, I plainly see he must either wholly retire, or come forward to encounter whatever he thinks wrong. Ah--better let him accept your motto, and cultiver son jardin! He is now in it, notwithstanding our long walk to Mickleham, and working hard and fast to finish some selfset task that to-morrow, Sunday, must else impede. page 87 M. d'Arblay, to my infinite satisfaction, gives up all thoughts of building, in the present awful state of public affairs. To show you, however, how much he is " of your advice " as to son jardin, he has been drawing a plan for it, which I intend to beg, borrow, or steal (all one), to give you some idea how seriously he studies to make his manual labours of some real utility. This sort of work, however, is so totally new to him, that he receives every now and then some of poor Merlin's "disagreeable compliments;" for, when Mr. Locke's or the captain's gardeners favour our grounds with a visit, they commonly make known that all has been done wrong. Seeds are sowing in some parts when plants ought to be reaping, and plants are running to seed while they are thought not yet at maturity. Our garden, therefore, is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the world; but M. d'A. assures me it is to be the staff of our table and existence. A little, too, he has been unfortunate ; for, after immense toil in planting and transplanting strawberries round our hedge, here at Bookham, he has just been informed they will bear no fruit the first year, and the second we may be "over the hills and far away!" Another time, too, with great labour, he cleared a considerable compartment of weeds, and, when it looked clean and well, and he showed his work to the gardener, the man said he had demolished an asparagus-bed! M. d'A. protested, however, nothing could look more like des mauvaises herbes. His greatest passion is for transplanting. Everything we possess he moves from one end of the garden to another, to produce better effects. Roses take place of jessamines, jessamines of honeysuckles, and honeysuckles of lilacs, till they have all danced round as far as the space allows; but whether the effect may not be a general mortality, summer only can determine. Such is our horticultural history. But I must not omit that we have had for one week cabbages from our own cultivation every day! O, you have no idea how sweet they tasted! We agreed they had a freshness and a go�t we had never met with before. We had them for too short a time to grow tired of them, because, as I have already hinted, they were beginning to run to seed before we knew they were eatable. . . April. Think of our horticultural shock last week, when Mrs. Bailey, our landlady, "entreated M. d'Arblay not to Spoil Page 88 her fruit-trees!"--trees he had been pruning with his utmost skill and strength. However, he has consulted your "Millar" thereupon, and finds out she is very ignorant, which he has gently intimated to her. MRS. PIOZZI. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, April, 1794. What a charming letter was your last, my dearest father How full of interesting anecdote and enlivening detail! The meeting with Mrs. Thrale, so surrounded by her family, made me breathless; and while you were conversing with the Signor, and left me in doubt whether you advanced to her or not, I almost gasped with impatience and revived old feelings, which, presently, you reanimated to almost all their original energy How like my dearest father to find all his kindness rekindled when her ready hand once more invited it! I heard her voice in, "Why here's Dr. Burney, as young as ever!" and my dear father in his parrying answers.(112) No scene could have been related to me more interesting or more welcome. My heart and hand, I am sure, would have met her in the same manner. The friendship was too pleasant in its first stage, and too strong in its texture, to be ever obliterated, though it has been tarnished and clouded. I wish few things more earnestly than again to meet her. M. D'ARDLAY AS A GARDENER. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.)(113) Bookham, August, '94. It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind I ever, I think, experienced :---so kind a thought, so Page 89 sweet a surprise as was my dearest father's visit! How softly and soothingly it has rested upon my mind ever since! "Abdolomine"(114) has no regret but that his garden was not in better order; he was a little piqu�, he confesses, that you said it was not very neat--and, to be shor!-0-but his passion is to do great works: he undertakes with pleasure, pursues with energy, and finishes with spirit; but, then, all is over! He thinks the business once done always done; and to repair, and amend, and weed, and cleanse--O, these are drudgeries insupportable to him! However, you should have seen the place before he began his operations, to do him justice ; there was then nothing else but mauvaises herbes; now, you must at least allow there is a mixture of flowers and grain! I wish you had seen him yesterday, mowing down our hedge--with his sabre, and with an air and attitudes so military, that, if he had been hewing down other legions than those he encountered--ie., of spiders--he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous, or have demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows, I am "the most contente personne in the world" to see his sabre so employed! A NOVEL AND A TRAGEDY. You spirited me on in all ways; for this week past I have taken tightly to the grand ouvrage.(115) If I go on so a little longer, I doubt not but M. d'Arblay will begin settling where to have a new shelf for arranging it! which is already in his rumination for Metastasio;(116) I imagine you now .,Seriously resuming that work; I hope to see further sample ere long. We think with very great pleasure of accepting my mother's and your kind invitation for a few days. I hope and mean, if possible, to bring with me also a little sample of something less in the dolorous style than what always causes your poor shoulders a little Shrug.(117) . . . How truly grieved was I to hear from Mr. Locke of the death of young Mr. Burke!(118) What a dreadful blow upon his Page 90 father and mother ! to come at the instant of the son's highest and most honourable advancement, and of the father's retreat to the bosom of his family from public life ! His brother, too, gone so lately! I am most sincerely sorry, indeed, and quite shocked, as there seemed so little suspicion of such an event's approach, by your account of the joy caused by Lord Fitzwilliam's kindness. Pray tell me if you hear how poor Mr. Burke and his most amiable wife endure this calamity, and how they are. . . . (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs.----.) Bookham, April 15, 1795. So dry a reproof from so dear a friend! And do you, then, measure my regard of heart by my remissness of hand? Let me give you the short history of my tragedy,(119) fairly and frankly. I wrote it not, as your acquaintance imagined, for the stage, nor yet for the press. I began it at Kew palace, and, at odd moments, I finished it at Windsor; without the least idea of any species of publication. Since I left the royal household, I ventured to let it be read by my father, Mr. and Mrs. Locke, my sister Phillips, and, of course, M. d'Arblay, and not another human being. Their opinions led to what followed, and my brother, Dr. Charles, showed it to Mr. Kemble while I was on my visit to my father last October. He instantly and warmly pronounced for its acceptance, but I knew not when Mr. Sheridan would see it, and had not the smallest expectation of its appearing this year. However, just three days before my beloved little infant came into the world, an express arrived from my brother, that Mr. Kemble wanted the tragedy immediately, in order to show it to Mr. Sheridan, who had just heard of it, and had spoken in the most flattering terms of his good will for its reception. Still, however, I was in doubt of its actual acceptance till three weeks after my confinement, when I had a visit from my brother, who told me he was, the next morning, to read the piece in the green-room. This was a precipitance for which I was every way unprepared, as I had never made but one copy of the play, and had intended divers corrections and alterations. Absorbed, however, by my new charge and then Page 91 growing ill, I had a sort of indifference about the matter, which, in fact, has lasted ever since. The moment I was then able to hold a pen I wrote two short letters, to acknowledge the state of the affair to my sisters - and to one of these epistles I had an immediate laughing answer, informing me my confidence was somewhat of the latest, as the subject of it was already in all the newspapers! I was extremely chagrined at this intelligence; but, from that time, thought it all too late to be the herald of my own designs. And this, added to my natural and incurable dislike to enter upon these egotistical details unasked, has caused my silence to my dear M- -, and to every friend I possess. Indeed, speedily after, I had an illness so severe and so dangerous, that for full seven weeks the tragedy was neither named nor thought of by M. d'Arblay or myself. The piece was represented to the utmost disadvantage, save only Mrs. Siddons and Mr. Kemble - for it was not written with any idea of the stage, and my illness and weakness, and constant absorbment, at the time of its preparation, occasioned it to appear with so many undramatic effects, from my inexperience of theatrical requisites and demands, that, when I saw it, I myself perceived a thousand things I wished to change. The performers, too, were cruelly imperfect, and made blunders I blush to have pass for mine,-added to what belong to me. The most important character after the hero and heroine had but two lines of his part by heart ! He made all the rest at random, and such nonsense as put all the other actors out as much as himself; so that a more wretched Performance, except Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kemble, and Mr. Bensley, could not be exhibited in a barn. All this concurred to make it very desirable to withdraw the piece for alterations, which I have done. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) May 7, 1795. One of my dinners, since my going out, was at Charlotte's, with the good Hooles. After dinner Mr. Cumberland came in, and was extremely courteous, and seemingly friendly, about you and your piece. He took me aside from Mrs. Paradise, who had fastened on me and held me tight by an account of her own and Mr. paradise's complaints, so Page 92 circumstantially narrated, that not a stop so short as a comma occurred in more than an hour, while I was civilly waiting for a full period. Mr. Cumberland expressed his sorrow at what had happened at Drury-lane, and said that, if he had had the honour of knowing you sufficiently, he would have told you d'avance what would happen, by what he had heard behind the scenes. The players seem to have given the play an ill name. But, he says, if you would go to work again, by reforming this, or work with your best powers at a new plan, and would submit it to his inspection, he would, from the experience he has had, risk his life on its success. This conversation I thought too curious not to be mentioned. . . . HASTINGs' ACQUITTAL. DR. BURNEY'S METASTASIO. Well, but how does your Petit and pretty monsieur do? 'Tis pity you and M. d'Arblay don't like him, poor thing! And how does horticulture thrive ? This is a delightful time of the year for your Floras and your Linnaei: I envy the life of a gardener in spring, particularly in fine weather. And so dear Mr. Hastings is honourably acquitted!(120) and I visited him the next morning, and we cordially shook hands. I had luckily left my name at his door as soon as I was able to go out, and before it was generally expected that he would be acquitted. . . . The young Lady Spencer and I are become very thick , I have dined with her at Lady Lucan's, and met her at the blue parties there. She has invited me to her box at the opera, to her house in St James's Place, and at the Admiralty, whither the family removed last Saturday, and she says I must come to her the 15th, 22nd, and 29th of this month, when I shall see a huge assembly. Mrs. Crewe says all London will be there. She is a pleasant, lively, and comical creature, with more talents and discernment than are expected from a character si fol�tre. My lord is not only the handsomest and the best intentioned man in the kingdom, but at present the most useful and truly patriotic. And then, he has written to Vienna for Metastasio's three inedited volumes, which I so much want ere I advance too far in the press for them to be of any use. I am halooed on prodigiously in my Metastasio mania. All the critics--Warton, Twining, Nares, and Dr. Charles--say that his "Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d'Aristotile," which I am Page 93 now translating, is the best piece of dramatic criticism that has ever been written. "Bless my heart!" says Warton, "I, that have been all my life defending the three unities, am overset." "Ay," quoth I, "has not he made you all ashamed of 'em? You learned folks are only theorists in theatrical matters, but Metastasio had sixty years' successful practice. There!--Go to." My dear Fanny, before you write another play, you must read Aristotle and Horace, as expounded by my dear Metastasio. But, basta. You know when I take up a favourite author, as a Johnson, a Haydn, or a Metastasio, I do not soon lay him down or let him be run down. . . . Here it strikes three o'clock: the post knell, not bell, tolls here, and I must send off my scrib: but I will tell you, though I need not, that, now I have taken up Metastasio again, I work at him in every uninterrupted moment. I have this morning attempted his charming pastoral, in "il Re Pastore." I'll give you the translation, because the last stanza is a portrait:-- To meadows, woods, and fountains Our tender flocks I'll lead; In meads beneath the mountains My love shall see them feed. Our simple narrow mansion Will suit our station well; There's room for heart expansion And peace and joy to dwell. BABY D'ARBLAY. THE WITHDRAWN TRAGEDY. (From Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney) Hermitage, Bookham, May 13, 1795. As you say, 'tis pity M. d'A. and his rib should have conceived such an antipathy to the petit monsieur! O if you could see him now! My mother would be satisfied, for his little cheeks are beginning to favour of the trumpeter's, and Esther would be satisfied, for he eats like an embryo alderman. He enters into all we think, say, mean, and wish ! His eyes are sure to sympathise in all our affairs and all our feelings. We find some kind reason for every smile he bestows upon us, and some generous and disinterested Motive for every grave look. Page 94 If he wants to be danced, we see he has discovered that his gaiety is exhilarating to us ; if he refuses to be moved, we take notice that he fears to fatigue us. If he will not be quieted without singing, we delight in his early go�t for les beaux arts. If he is immovable to all we can devise to divert him, we are edified by the grand sirieux of his dignity and philosophy: if he makes the house ring with loud acclaim because his food, at first call, does not come ready warm into his mouth, we hold up our hands with admiration at his vivacity. Your conversation with Mr. Cumberland astonished me. I certainly think his experience of stage effect, and his interest with players, so important, as almost instantly to wish putting his sincerity to the proof. How has he got these two characters- -one, of Sir Fretful Plagiary, detesting all works but those he owns, and all authors but himself--the other, of a man too perfect even to know or conceive the vices of the world, such as he is painted by Goldsmith in "Retaliation?" And which of these characters is true?(121) I am not at all without thoughts of a future revise of "Edwy and Elgiva," for which I formed a plan on the first night, from what occurred by the representation. And let me own to you, when you commend my "bearing so well a theatrical drubbing," I am by no means enabled to boast I bear it with conviction of my utter failure. The piece was certainly not Page 95 heard, and therefore not really judged. The audience finished with an unmixed applause on hearing it was withdrawn for alterations, and I have considered myself in the publicly accepted situation of having at my own option to let the piece die, or attempt its resuscitation,-its reform, as Mr. Cumberland calls it. However, I have not given one moment to the matter since my return to the Hermitage. F. D'A. PS-I should he very glad to hear good news of the revival of Mr. Burke. Have you ever seen him since this fatality in his family? I am glad, nevertheless with all my heart, of Mr. Hastings's honourable acquittal. "CAMILLA." (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs.--.) Bookham, June 15, '95, Let me hasten to tell you something of myself that I shall be very sorry you should hear from any other, as your too susceptible mind would be hurt again, and that would grieve me quite to the heart. I have a long work, which a long time has been in hand, that I mean to publish soon--in about a year. Should it succeed, like 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia,' it may be a little portion to our Bambino. We wish, therefore, to print it for ourselves in this hope; but the expenses of the press are so enormous, so raised by these late Acts, that it is out of all question for us to afford it. We have, therefore, been led by degrees to listen to counsel of some friends, and to print it by subscription. This is in many--many ways unpleasant and unpalatable to us both; but the real chance of real use and benefit to Our little darling overcomes all scruples, and therefore, to work we go! You will feel, I dare believe, all I could write on this Subject; I once rejected such a plan, formed for me by Mr. Burke, where books were to be kept by ladies, not booksellers,--the Duchess of Devonshire, Mrs. Boscawen, and Mrs. Crewe; but I was an individual then, and had no cares of times to come: now, thank heaven! this is not the case;--and when I look at my little boy's dear, innocent, yet intelligent face, I defy any pursuit to be painful that may lead to his good. Page 96 (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, June 18, '95. All our deliberations made, even after your discouraging calculations, we still mean to hazard the publishing by subscription. And, indeed, I had previously determined, when I. changed my state, to set aside all my innate and original abhorrences, and to regard and use as resources, myself, what had always been considered as such by others. Without this idea, and this resolution, our hermitage must have been madness. . . . I like well the idea of giving no name at all,-why should not I have my mystery as well as "Udolpho?"(122)--but, " now, don't fly, Dr. Burney! I own I do not like calling it a novel; it gives so simply the notion of a mere love-story, that I recoil a little from it. I mean this work to be sketches of characters and morals put in action,-not a romance. I remember the word " novel " was long in the way of 'Cecilia,' as I was told at the queen's house; and it was not permitted to be read by the princesses till sanctioned by a bishop's recommendation,--the late Dr. Ross of Exeter. Will you then suffer mon amour Propre to be saved by the proposals running thus?--Proposals for printing by subscription, in six volumes duodecimo, a new work by the author of "Evelina" and "Cecilia." How grieved I am you do not like my heroine's name!(123) the prettiest in nature! I remember how many people did not like that of "Evelina," and called it "affected" and "missish," till they read the book, and then they got accustomed in a few pages, and afterwards it was much approved. I must leave this for the present untouched ; for the force of the name attached by the idea of the character, in the author's mind, is such, that I should not know how to sustain it by any other for a long while. In "Cecilia" and "Evelina" 'twas the same: the names of all the personages annexed, with me, all the ideas I put in motion with them. The work is so far advanced, that the personages are all, to me, as so many actual acquaintances, whose memoirs and Page 97 opinions I am committing to paper. I will make it the best I can, my dearest father. I will neither be indolent, nor negligent, nor avaricious. I can never half answer the expectations that seem excited. I must try to forget them, or I shall be in a continual quivering. Mrs. Cooke, my excellent neighbour, came in Just now to read me a paragraph of a letter from Mrs. Leigh, of Oxfordshire, her sister. . . . After much of civility about the new work and its author, it finishes thus:--"Mr. Hastings I saw just now: I told him what was going forward; he gave a great jump, and exclaimed, 'Well, then, now I can serve her, thank Heaven, and I will! I will write to Anderson to engage Scotland, and I will attack the East Indies myself!'" F. D'A. P.S.-The Bambino is half a year old this day. N.B.-I have not heard the Park or Tower guns. I imagine the wind did not set right. AN INVITATION TO THE HERMITAGE. (Madame d"Arblay to the Comte de Narbonne.(124)] Bookham, 26th December, 1795. What a letter, to terminate so long and painful a silence! It has penetrated us with sorrowing and indignant feelings. Unknown to M. d'Arblay whose grief and horror are upon point of making him quite ill, I venture this address to his most beloved friend; and before I seal it I will give him the option to burn or underwrite it. I shall be brief in what I have to propose: sincerity need not be loquacious, and M. de Narbonne is too kind to demand phrases for ceremony. Should your present laudable but melancholy plan fail, and should nothing better offer, or till something can be arranged, will you dear Sir, condescend to share the poverty of our hermitage? Will you take a little cell under our rustic roof, and fare as we fare? What to us two hermits is cheerful and happy, will to you, indeed, be miserable but it will be some solace to the goodness of your heart to witness our contentment;--to dig with M. d'A. in the garden will be of service to Page 98 your health; to muse sometimes with me in the parlour will be a relaxation to your mind. You will not blush to own your little godson. Come, then, and give him your blessing; relieve the wounded feelings of his father--oblige his mother--and turn hermit at Bookham, till brighter suns invite you elsewhere. F. D'ARPLAY. You will have terrible dinners, alas !--but your godson comes in for the dessert.(125) PRESENTATION OF "CAMILLA" AT WINDSOR. [During the years 1794 and 1795, Madame d'Arblay finished and prepared for the press her third novel, "Camilla," which was published partly by subscription in 1796 the dowager Duchess of Leinster, the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Crewe, and Mrs. Locke, kindly keeping lists, and receiving the names of subscribers. This work having been dedicated by permission to the queen, the authoress was desirous of presenting the first copy to her majesty, and made a journey to Windsor for that honour.) (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, July 10, 1796. If I had as much of time as of matter, my dear father, what an immense letter should I write you ! But I have still so many book oddments of accounts, examinations, directions, and little household affairs to arrange, that, with baby-kissing, included, I expect I can give you to-day only part the first of an excursion which I mean to comprise in four parts: so here begins. The books were ready at eleven or twelve, but not so the tailor! The three Miss Thrales came to a short but cordial hand-shaking at the last minute, by appointment; and at about half-past three we set forward. I had written the day before to my worthy old friend Mrs. Agnew, the housekeeper, erst, of my revered Mrs. Delany, to secure us rooms for one page 99, day and night, and to Miss Planta to make known I could not set out till late. When we came into Windsor at seven o'clock, the way to Mrs. Agnew's was so intricate that we could not find it, till one of the king's footmen recollecting me, I imagined, came forward, a volunteer, and walked by the side of the chaise to show the postilion the house.--N.B. No bad omen to worldly augurers. Arrived, Mrs. Agnew came forth with faithful attachment, to conduct us to our destined lodgings. I wrote hastily to Miss Planta, to announce to the queen that I was waiting the honour of her majesty's commands ; and then began preparing for my appearance the next morning, when I expected a summons - but Miss Planta came instantly herself from the queen, with orders of immediate attendance, as her majesty would see me directly! The king was just gone upon the Terrace, but her majesty did not walk that evening. Mrs. Agnew was my maid, Miss Planta my arranger; my landlord, who was a hairdresser, came to my head, and M. d'Arblay was general superintendent. The haste and the joy went hand in hand, and I was soon equipped, though shocked at my own precipitance in sending before I was already visible. Who, however, could have expected such prompt admission? and in an evening? M. d'Arblay helped to carry the books as far as to the gates. My lodgings were as near to them as possible. At our first entry towards the Queen's lodge we encountered Dr. Fisher and his lady: the sight of me there, in a dress announcing indisputably whither I was hieing, was such an Astonishment, that they looked at me rather as a recollected spectre than a renewed acquaintance. When we came to the iron rails poor Miss Planta, in much fidget, begged to take the books from M. d'Arblay, terrified, I imagine, lest French feet should contaminate the gravel within!--while he, innocent of her fears, was insisting upon carrying them as far as to the house, till he saw I took part with Miss Planta, and he was then compelled to let us lug in ten volumes as we could. The king was already returned from the Terrace, the page told us." O, then," said Miss Planta, "you are too late!" However, I went into my old dining-parlour; while she said she would see if any one could obtain the queen's commands for another time. I did not stay five minutes Page 100 ruminating upon the dinners, "gone where the chickens," etc., when Miss Planta return and told me the queen would see me instantly. The queen was In her dressing-room, and with only the Princess Elizabeth. Her reception was the Most gracious. yet, when she saw my emotion in thus meeting her again; she herself was by no means quite unmoved. I presented my little--yet not small-- offering, upon one knee placing them, as she directed, upon a table by her side, and expressing, as well as I could, my devoted gratitude for her invariable goodness to me. She then began a conversation, in her old style, upon various things and people, with all her former graciousness of manner, which soon, as she perceived my strong sense of her indulgence, grew into even all its former kindness. Particulars I have now no room for ; but when in about half an hour, she said, "How long do you intend to stay here, Madame d'Arblay?" and I answered, "We have no intentions, ma'am," she repeated, laughing, "You have no intentions!--Well, then, if you can come again to-morrow Morning, you shall see the princesses." She then said she would not detain me at present; encouraged by all that had passed, I asked if I might presume to put at the door of the king's apartment a copy of MY little work. She hesitated, but with smiles the most propitious;. then told me to fetch the books - and whispered something to the Princess Elizabeth, who left the room by another door at the same moment that I retired for the other set. Almost immediately upon my return to the queen and the Princess Elizabeth, the king entered the apartment, and entered it to receive himself my little offering. "Madame d'Arblay," said her majesty, "tells me that Mrs. Boscawen is to have the third set; but the first--Your majesty will excuse me--is mine." This was not, you will believe, thrown away upon me. The king, smiling, said, "Mrs Boscawen, I hear, has been very zealous." I confirmed this. and the Princess Elizabeth eagerly called out, "Yes, sir! and while Mrs. Boscawen kept a copy for Madame d'Arblay, the Duchess of Beaufort kept one for Mrs. Boscawen." This led to a little discourse upon the business, in which the king's countenance seemed to speak a benign interest; and the queen then said, Page 101 "This book was begun here, sir." Which already I had mentioned. "And what did you write Of it here?" cried he. "How far did You go?--Did You finish any part? or only form the skeleton?" "Just that, sir," I answered; "the skeleton was formed here, but nothing was completed. I worked it up in my little cottage." "And about what time did You give to it?" "All my time, sir; from the Period I planned publishing it, I devoted myself to it wholly. I had no episode but a little baby. My subject grew Upon me, and increased my materials to a bulk that I am afraid will be more laborious to wade through for the reader than for the writer." "Are you much frightened cried he, smiling, "as much frightened as you were before?" "I have hardly had time to know yet, sir. I received the fair sheets Of the last volume only last night. I have, therefore, had no leisure for fear. And sure I am, happen what May to the book from the critics, it can never cause me pain in any proportion with the pleasure and happiness I owe to it." I /am sure I spoke most sincerely and he looked kindly to believe me. He asked if Mr. Locke had seen it; and when I said no, he seemed comically pleased, as if desirous to have it in its first state. He asked next if Dr. Burney had overlooked it; and, upon the same answer, looked with the same satisfaction. He did not imagine how it would have passed Current with my dearest father: he appeared Only to be glad it would be a genuine work: but, laughingly, said, "So you kept it quite snug?" "Not intentionally, sir, but from my situation and my haste; I should else have been very happy to have consulted my father and Mr. Locke; but I had so much, to the last moment, to write, that I literally had not a moment to hear what could be said. The work is longer by the whole fifth Volume than I had first planned; and I am almost ashamed to look at its size, and afraid my readers would have been more obliged to me if I had left so much out than for putting So much in." He laughed and inquired who corrected my proofs? 'Only myself," I answered. "Why, some authors have told me," cried he, "that they Page 102 are the last to do that work for themselves. They know so well by heart what ought to be, that they run on without seeing what is. They have told me, besides, that a mere plodding head is best and surest for that work ; and that the livelier the imagination, the less it should be trusted to." I must not go on thus minutely, or my four parts will be forty. But a full half-hour of graciousness, I could almost call kindness, was accorded me, though the king came from the concert to grant it ; and it broke up by the queen saying, "I have told Madame d'Arblay that, if she can come again to-morrow, she shall see the princesses." The king bowed gently to my grateful obeisance for this offer, and told me I should not know the Princess Amelia, she was so much grown, adding, "She is taller than you!" I expressed warmly my delight in the permission of Seeing their royal highnesses, and their majesties returned to the concert-room. The Princess Elizabeth stayed, -and flew up to me, crying, "How glad I am to see you here again, my dear Miss Burney!--I beg your pardon,--Madame d'Arblay I mean -but I always call all my friends by their maiden names when I first see them after they are married." I warmly now opened upon my happiness in this return to all their sights, and the condescension and sweetness with which it was granted me - and confessed I could hardly behave prettily and properly at my first entrance after so long an absence. "O, I assure you I felt for you!" cried she; "I thought you must be agitated ; it was so natural to you to come here-to mamma!" You will believe, my dearest father, how light-hearted and full of glee I went back to my expecting companion: Miss Planta accompanied me, and stayed the greatest part of the little remaining evening, promising to let me know at what hour I should wait upon their royal highnesses. A CONVERSATION WITH THE QUEEN. The next morning, at eight or nine o'clock, my old footman, Moss, came with Mlle, Jacobi's compliments to M. and Madame d'Arblay, and an invitation to dine at the Queen's lodge. Miss Planta arrived at ten, with her majesty's commands that I should be at the Queen's lodge at twelve. I stayed meanwhile, with good Mrs. Agnew, and M. d'Arblay made Page 103 acquaintance with her worthy husband, who is a skilful and famous botanist, and lately made gardener to the queen for Frogmore - so M. d'Arblay consulted him about our cabbages! and so, if they have not now a high flavour, we are hopeless. At eleven M. d'Arblay again ventured to esquire me to the rails round the lodge, whence I showed him my ci-devant apartment, which he languished to view nearer. I made a visit to Mlle. Jacobi, who is a very good creature, and with whom I remained very comfortably till her majesty and the princesses returned from Frogmore, where they had passed two or three hours. Almost immediately I was summoned to the queen by one of the pages. She was just seated to her hair-dresser. She conversed upon various public and general topics till the friseur was dismissed, and then I was honoured with an audience, quite alone, for a full hour and a half. During this, nothing could be more gracious than her whole manner, and The particulars, as there was no pause, would fill a duodecimo volume at least. Among them was Mr. Windham, whom she named with great favour; and gave me the opportunity of expressing my delight upon his belonging to the government. We had so often conversed about him during the accounts I had related of Mr. Hastings's trial, that there was much to say upon the acquisition to the administration, and my former round assertions of his goodness of heart and honour. She inquired how you did, my dearest father, with an air of great kindness and, when I said well, looked pleased, as she answered, "I was afraid he was ill, for I saw him but twice last year at our music." She then gave me an account of the removal of the concert to the Haymarket since the time I was admitted to it. She then talked of some books and authors, but found me wholly in the Clouds as to all that is new. She then said, "What a very pretty book Dr. Burney has brought out upon Metastasio! I am very much pleased with it. Pray (smiling) what will he bring out next?" "As yet, madam, I don't know of any new plan." "But he will bring out something else?" "Most probably, but he will rest a little first, I fancy." "Has he nothing in hand?" "Not that I now know of, madam." "O but he soon will!" cried she, again smiling. Page 104 "He has so active a mind, ma'am, that I believe it quite impossible to him to be utterly idle , but, indeed, I know of no present design being positively formed." We had then some discourse upon the new connexion at Norbury park--the Fitzgeralds, etc.; and from this she led to various topics of our former conferences, both in persons and things, and gave me a full description of her new house at Frogmore, its fitting up, and the share of each princess in its decoration. She spoke with delight of its quiet and ease, and her enjoyment of its complete retirement. "I spend," she cried, "there almost constantly all my mornings. I rarely come home but just before dinner, merely to dress, but to-day I came sooner." This was said in a manner so flattering, I could scarce forbear the air of thanking her , however, I checked the expression, though I could not the inference which urged it. WITH THE PRINCESs ROYAL AND PRINCESS AUGUSTA. At two o'clock the Princess Elizabeth appeared. "Is the princess royal ready?" said the queen. She answered, "Yes:" and her majesty then told me I might go to her, adding, "You know the way, Madame d'Arblay." And, thus licensed, I went to the apartment of her royal highness up stairs. She was just quitting it, She received me most graciously, and told me she was going to sit for her picture, if I would come and stay with her while she sat. Miss Bab Planta was in attendance, to read during this period. The princess royal ordered me a chair facing her; and another for Miss Bab and her book, which, however, was never opened. The painter was Mr. Dupont.(1266) She was very gay and very charming, full of lively discourse and amiable condescension. In about an hour the Princess Augusta came in : she addressed me with her usual sweetness, and, when she had looked at her sister's portrait, said, "Madame d'Arblay, when the princess royal can spare you, I hope you will come to me," as she left the room. I did not flout her; and when I had been an hour with the princess royal, she told me she would Page 105 keep me no longer from Augusta, and Miss Planta came to conduct me to the latter. This lovely princess received me quite alone ; Miss Planta only shut me in - and she then made me sit by her, and kept me in most bewitching discourse more than an hour. She has a gaiety, a charm about her, that is quite resistless: and much of true, genuine, and very original humour. She related to me the history of all the feats, and exploits, and dangers, and escapes of her brothers during last year; rejoicing in their safety, yet softly adding, "Though these trials and difficulties did them a great deal of good." We talked a little of France, and she inquired of me what I knew of the late unhappy queen, through M. d'Arblay ; and spoke of her with the most virtuous discrimination between her foibles and her really great qualities, with her most barbarous end. .She then dwelt upon Madame Royale, saying, in her unaffected manner, " It's very odd one never hears what sort of girl she is." I told her all I had gathered from M. d'Arblay. She next spoke of my Bambino, indulging me in recounting his faits et gestes; and never moved till the princess royal came to summon her. They were all to return to Frogmore to dinner. "We have detained Madame d'Arblay between us the whole morning," said the princess royal, with a gracious smile. "Yes," cried Princess Augusta, "and I am afraid I have bored her to death; but when once I begin upon my poor brothers, I can never stop without telling all my little bits of glory." She then outstayed the princess royal to tell me that, when she was at Plymouth, at church, she saw so many officers' wives, and sisters, and mothers, helping their maimed husbands, or brothers, or sons, that she could not forbear whispering to the queen, "Mamma, how lucky it is Ernest is just come so seasonably with that wound in his face! I should have been quite shocked, else, not to have had one little bit of glory among ourselves!" When forced away from this sweet creature, I went to Mlle. Jacobi, who said, "But where is M. d'Arblay?" Finding it too late for me to go to my lodging to dress before dinner I wrote him a word, which immediately brought him to the Queen's lodge : and there I shall leave my dear father the pleasure of seeing us, mentally, at dinner, at my ancient table,-both invited by the queen's commands. Miss Gomme was asked to meet me, and the repast was extremely pleasant. page 106 A PRESENT FROM THE KING AND QUEEN. just before we assembled to dinner Mlle. Jacobi desired to speak with me alone, and, taking me to another room, presented me with a folded little packet, saying, "The queen ordered me to put this into your hands, and said, 'Tell Madame d'Arblay it is from us both."' It was a hundred guineas. I was confounded, and nearly sorry, so little was such a mark of their goodness in my thoughts. She added that the king, as soon as he came from the chapel in the morning, went to the queen's dressing-room just before he set out for the levee, and put into her hands fifty guineas, saying, "This is for my set!" The queen answered, "I shall do exactly the same for mine," and made up the packet herself. "'Tis only,' she said, 'for the paper, tell Madame d'Arblay, nothing for the trouble!'" meaning she accepted that. The manner of this was so more than gracious, so kind, in the words us both, that indeed the money at the time was quite nothing in the scale of my gratification ; it was even less, for it almost pained me. However, a delightful thought that in a few minutes occurred made all light and blithesome. "We will come, then," I cried, "once a year to Windsor, to walk the Terrace, and see the king, queen, and sweet princesses. This will enable us, and I shall never again look forward to so long a deprivation of their sight." This, with my gratitude for their great goodness, was what I could not refrain commissioning her to report. CURIOSITY REGARDING M. D'ARBLAY. Our dinner was extremely cheerful; all my old friends were highly curious to see M. d'Arblay, who was in spirits, and, as he could address them in French, and at his ease, did not seem much disapproved of by them. I went to my lodging afterwards to dress, where I told my monsieur this last and unexpected stroke, which gave him exactly my sensations, and we returned to tea. We had hopes of the Terrace, as my monsieur was quite eager to see all this beloved royal House. The weather, however, was very unpromising. The king came from the lodge during our absence; but soon after we were in the levee three royal coaches arrived from Frogmore: in the first was the queen, the Princesses Royal and Augusta, and some lady in waiting. M. d'Arblay stood beside me Page 107 at a window to see them; her majesty looked up and bowed to me, and, upon her alighting, she looked up again. This, I am sure, was to see M. d'Arblay, who could not be doubted, as he wore his croix the whole time he was at Windsor. The princesses bowed also, and the four younger, who followed, all severally kissed their hands to me, and fixed their eyes on my companion with an equal expression of kindness and curiosity ; he therefore saw them perfectly. THE KING APPROVES THE DEDICATION OF "CAMILLA." In a few minutes a page came to say, "The princesses desire to see Madame d'Arblay," and he conducted me to the apartment of the Princess Elizabeth, which is the most elegantly and fancifully ornamented of any in the lodge, as she has most delight and most taste in producing good effects. Here the fair owner of the chamber received me, encircled with the Princesses Mary and Amelia, and no attendant. They were exactly as I had left them--kind, condescending, open, and delightful; and the goodness of the queen, in sparing them all to me thus, without any allay of ceremony, or g�ne of listening Mutes, I felt most deeply. They were all very gay, and I not very sad, so we enjoyed A perfectly easy and even merry half-hour in divers discourses, in which they recounted to me who had been most anxious about "the book," and doubted not its great success, as everybody was so eager about it. "And I must tell you one thing," Cried the Princess Elizabeth; "the king is very much pleased with the dedication." This was, you will be sure, a very touching hearing to me; And Princess Mary exclaimed, "And he is very difficult!" "O, yes, he's hardly ever pleased with a dedication," cried one of the princesses. "He almost always thinks them so fulsome." "I was resolved I would tell it you," cried Princess Elizabeth. Can you imagine anything more amiable than this pleasure in giving pleasure? A DELICIOUS CHAT WITH THE PRINCESSES. Soon after the Princess Augusta came in, smiling and lovely. Princess royal next appeared Princess Augusta sat down, and charged me to take a chair next her. Princess Page 108 royal did not stay long, and soon returned to summon her sister Augusta downstairs, as the concert was begun : but she replied she could not come yet : and the princess royal went alone. We had really a most delicious chat then. They made a thousand inquiries about my book, and when and where it was written, etc., and how I stood as to fright and fidget. I answered all with openness, and frankly related my motives for the publication. Everything of housekeeping, I told them, was nearly doubled in price at the end of the first year and half of our marriage, and we found it impossible to continue so near our friends and the capital with our limited income, though M. d'A. had accommodated himself completely, and even happily, to every species of economy, and though my dearest father had capitally assisted us ; I then, therefore, determined upon adopting a plan I had formerly rejected, of publishing by subscription. I told them the former history of that plan, as Mr. Burke's, and many particulars that seemed extremely to interest them. My garden, our way of life, our house, our Bambino,-all were inquired after and related. I repeatedly told them the strong desire M. d'Arblay had to be regaled with a sight of all their House -a House to which I stood so every way indebted,-,and they looked kindly concerned that the weather admitted no prospect of the Terrace. I mentioned to the Princess Augusta my recent new obligation to their majesties, and my amaze and even shame at their goodness. "O, I am sure," cried she, "they were very happy to have it in their power." "Yes, and we were so glad!" "So glad!" echoed each of the others. "How enchanted should I have been," cried I, "to have presented my little book to each of your royal highnesses if I had dared! or if, after her majesty has looked it over, I might hope for such a permission, how proud and how happy it would make me!" "O, I daresay you may," cried the Princess Augusta, eagerly. I then intimated how deeply I should feel such an honour, if it might be asked, after her majesty had read it - and the Princess Elizabeth gracefully undertook the office. She related to me, in a most pleasant manner, the whole of her own recent transaction, its rise and cause and progress, in "The Page 109 Birth of Love:"(127) but I must here abridge, or never have done. I told them all my scheme for coming again next July, which they sweetly seconded. Princess Amelia assured me she had not forgotten me ; and when another summons came for the concert, Princess Augusta, comically sitting still and holding me by her side, called out, "Do you little ones go!" But they loitered also, and we went on, on, on, with our chat,- -they as unwilling as myself to break it up,-till staying longer was impossible ; and then, in parting, they all expressed the kindest pleasure in our newly-adopted plan of a yearly visit. "And pray," cried Princess Elizabeth, "write again immediately!" "O, no," cried Princess Augusta, "wait half a year--to rest; and then--increase your family--all ways!" "The queen," said Princess Elizabeth, "consulted me which way she should read 'Camilla-' whether quick, at once, or comfortably at Weymouth: so I answered, 'Why, mamma, I think, as you will be so much interested in the book, Madame d'Arblay would be most pleased you should read it now at once, quick, that nobody may be mentioning the events before You come to them - and then again at Weymouth, slow and comfortably.'" In going, the sweet Princess Augusta loitered last but her youngest sister, Amelia, who came to take my hand when the rest were departed, and assure me she should never forget Me. We spent the remnant of Wednesday evening with my old friends, determining to quit Windsor the next day, if the weather did not promise a view of the royal family upon the Terrace for M. d'Arblay. THE KING NOTICES M. D'ARBLAY. Thursday morning was lowering, and we determined upon departing, after only visiting some of my former acquaintances. 'We met Miss Planta in our way to the lodge, and took leave; but when we arrived at Mlle. Jacobi's we found that the queen expected we should stay for the chance of the Terrace, and had told Mlle. Jacobi to again invite us to dinner. . . . We left the friendly Miss Goldsworthy for other visits;--first to good old Mrs. Planta; next to the very respectable Page 110 Dr. Fisher and his wife. The former insisted upon doing the honours himself of St. George's cathedral to M. d'Arblay which occasioned his seeing that beautiful antique building to the utmost advantage. Dr. Fisher then accompanied us to a spot to show M. d'Arblay Eton in the best view. Dinner passed as before, but the evening lowered, and hopes of the Terrace were weak, when the Duke and Duchess of York arrived. This seemed to determine against us, as they told us the duchess never went upon the Terrace but in the finest weather, and the royal family did not choose to leave her. We were hesitating therefore whether to set off for Rose Dale, when Mlle. Jacobi gave an intimation to me that the king, herself, and the Princess Amelia, would walk on the Terrace. Thither instantly we hastened, and were joined by Dr. and Mrs. Fisher. The evening was so raw and cold that there was very little company, and scarce any expectation of the royal family - and when we had been there about half an hour the musicians retreated, and everybody was preparing to follow, when a messenger suddenly came forward, helter skelter, running after the horns and clarionets, and hallooing to them to return. This brought back the straggling parties, and the king, Duke of York, and six princesses soon appeared. I have never yet seen M. d'Arblay agitated as at this moment ; he could scarce keep his steadiness, or even his ground. The recollections, he has since told me, that rushed upon his mind of his own king and royal House were so violent and so painful as almost to disorder him. His majesty was accompanied by the duke, and Lord Beaulieu, Lord Walsingham, and General Manners; the princesses were attended by Lady Charlotte Bruce, some other lady, and Miss Goldsworthy: The king stopped to speak to the Bishop of Norwich and some others at the entrance, and then walked on towards us, who were at the further end. As he approached, the princess royal said, loud enough to be heard by Mrs. Fisher, "Madame d'Arblay, sir;" and instantly he came on a step, and then stopped and addressed me, and, after a word or two of the weather, he said, "Is that M. d'Arblay?" and most graciously bowed to him and entered into a little conversation; demanding how long he had been in England, how long in the country, etc., and with a sweetness, an air of wishing us well, that will never, never be erased from our hearts. Page 111 M. d'Arblay recovered himself immediately Upon this address, and answered with as much firmness as respect. Upon the king's bowing and leaving US, the commander-in- chief(128) most courteously bowed also to M. d'Arblay, and the princesses all came up to speak to me, and to curtsy to him ; and the Princess Elizabeth cried, "I've got leave! and mamma says she won't wait to read it first!" After this the king and duke never passed without taking off their hats, and the princesses gave me a smile and a curtsy at every turn: Lord Walsingbam came to speak to me, and Mr. Fairly, and General Manners, who regretted that more of our old tea-party were not there to meet me once more. THE KING AND QUEEN ON "CAMILLA." As soon as they all re-entered the lodge we followed to take leave of Mlle. Jacobi; but, Upon moving towards the passage, the princess royal appeared, saying, "Madame d'Arblay, I come to waylay you!" and made me follow her to the dressing-room, whence the voice of the queen, as the door opened, called out, in mild accents, "Come in, Madame d'Arblay!" Her majesty was seated at the upper end of the room, with the Duchess of York (129) on her right, and the Princesses Sophia and Amelia on her left. She made me advance, and said, "I have just been telling the Duchess of York that I find her royal highness's name the first Upon this list,"--producing "Camilla." "Indeed," said the duchess, bowing to me, "I was so very impatient to read it, I could not but try to get it as early as possible. I am very eager for it, indeed!" "I have read," said the queen, "but fifty pages yet; but I am in great uneasiness for that Poor little girl that I am afraid will get the small-pox! and I am sadly afraid that sweet little other girl will not keep her fortune! but I won't Peep! I read quite fair. But I must tell Madame d'Arblay I know a country gentleman, in Mecklenburg, exactly the very character of that good old man the Uncle!" She seemed to speak as if delighted to meet him upon paper. The king now came in, and I could not forbear making up Page 112 to him, to pour forth some part of my full heart for his goodness! He tried to turn away, but it was smilingly; and I had courage to pursue him, for I could not help it. He then slightly bowed it off, and asked the queen to repeat what she had said upon the book. "O, your majesty," she cried, "I must not anticipate!" yet told him of her pleasure in finding an old acquaintance. "Well!" cried the king archly, " and what other characters have you seized?" "None," I protested, "from life." "O!" cried he, shaking his head, "you must have some!" "Indeed your majesty will find none!" I cried. "But they may be a little better, or a little worse," he answered, "but still, if they are not like somebody, how can they play their parts?" "O, yes, sir," I cried, "as far as general nature goes, or as characters belong to classes, I have certainly tried to take them. But no individuals!" My account must be endless if I do not now curtail. The Duke of York, the other princesses, General Manners, and all the rest of the group, made way to the room soon after, upon hearing the cheerfulness of the voice of the king, whose .graciousness raised me into spirits that set me quite at my ease. He talked much upon the book, and then of Mrs. Delany, and then of various others that my sight brought to his recollection, and all with a freedom and goodness that enabled me to answer without difficulty or embarrassment, and that produced two or three hearty laughs from the Duke of York. ANECDOTE OF THE DUCHESS OF YORK. After various other topics, the queen said, "Duchess, Madame d'Arblay is aunt of the pretty little boy (130) you were so good to." The duchess understood her so immediately that I fancy this was not new to her. She bowed to me again, very smilingly, upon the acknowledgments this encouraged me to offer; and the king asked an explanation. "Sir," said the duchess, "I was upon the road near Dorking, and I saw a little gig overturned, and a little boy was taken out, and sat down upon the road. I told them to Page 113 stop and ask if the little boy was hurt, and they said yes .- and I asked where he was to go, and they said to a village just a few miles off; so I took him into my coach, Sir, and carried him home." "And the benedictions, madam," cried I, "of all his family have followed you ever since!" "And he said your royal highness called him a very pretty boy," cried the queen, laughing, to whom I had related it. "Indeed, what he said is very true," answered she, nodding. "Yes; he said," quoth I, again to the queen, "that he saw the duchess liked him." This again the queen repeated and the duchess again nodded, and pointedly repeated, "It is very true." "He was a very fine boy-a very fine boy indeed!" cried the king; "what is become of him?" I was a little distressed in answering, "He is in Ireland, sir." "In Ireland ! What does he do in Ireland? what does he go there for?" "His father took him, Sir," I was forced to answer. "And what does his father take him to Ireland for?" "Because-he is an Irishman, Sir!" I answered, half laughing. When at length, every one deigning me a bow of leavetaking, their majesties, and sons and daughters, retired to the adjoining room, the Princess Amelia loitered to shake hands, and the Princess Augusta returned for the same condescension, reminding me of my purpose for next year. While this was passing, the princess royal had repaired to the apartment of Mlle. Jacobi, where she had held a little Conversation with M. d'Arblay. A VISIT TO MRS. BOSCAWEN. We finished the evening very cheerfully with Mlle. Jacobi and Mlle. Montmoulin, whom she invited to meet us, and the next morning left Windsor and visited Rose Dale.(131) Mrs. Boscawen received us very sweetly, and the little offering as if not at all her due, Mrs. Levison Gower was with her, and showed us Thomson's temple. Mrs. Boscawen spoke of my Page 114 dearest father with her Usual true sense Of how to Speak of him. She invited us to dinner, but we were anxious to return to our Bambino, and M. d'Arblay had, all this time, only fought off being ill with his remnant of cold. Nevertheless, when we came to Twickenham, my good old friend Mr. Cambridge was so cordial and so earnest that we could not resist him, and were pressed in to staying dinner. . . . At a little before eleven we arrived at our dear cottage, and to our sleeping Bambino. THE RELATIVE SUCCESS OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S NOVELS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, Friday, October, 1796. I meant to have begun with our thanks for my dear kind father's indulgence of our extreme curiosity and interest in the sight of the reviews. I am quite happy in what I have escaped of greater severity, though my mate cannot bear that the palm should be contested by "Evelina" and "Cecilia;" his partiality rates the last as so much the highest; so does the newspaper I have mentioned, of which I long to send you a copy. But those immense men, whose single praise was fame and security--who established, by a word, the two elder sisters-are now silent, Johnson and Sir Joshua are no more, and Mr. Burke is ill, or otherwise engrossed; yet, even without their powerful influence, to which I owe such unspeakable obligation, the essential success of "Camilla" exceeds that of the elders. The sale is truly astonishing. Charles has just sent to me that five hundred only remain of four thousand, and it has appeared scarcely three months. The first edition of "Evelina" was of eight hundred, the second of five hundred, and the third of a thousand. What the following have been I have never heard, The sale from that period became more flourishing than the publisher cared to announce. Of "Cecilia" the first edition was reckoned enormous at two thousand and as a part of payment Was reserved for it, I remember our dear Daddy Crisp thought it very unfair. It was printed, like this, in July, and sold in October, to every one's wonder. Here, however, the sale's increased in rapidity more than a third. Charles says,-- "Now heed no more what critics thought 'em, Since this you know, all people bought 'em." Page 115 A CONTEMPLATED COTTAGE. We have resumed our original plan, and are going immediately to build a little cottage for ourselves. We shall make it as small and as cheap as will accord with its being warm and comfortable. We have relinquished, however, the very kind offer of Mr. Locke, which he has renewed, for his park. We mean to make this a property saleable or letable for our Alex, and in Mr. Locke's park we could not encroach any tenant, if the Youth's circumstances, profession, or inclination .should make him not choose the spot for his own residence. M. dArblay, therefore, has fixed upon a field of Mr. Locke's, which he will rent, and of which Mr. Locke will grant him a lease of ninety years. By this means, we shall leave the little Alex a little property, besides what will be in the funds, and a property likely to rise in value, as the situation of the field is remarkably beautiful. It is in the valley, between Mr. Locke's park and Dorking, and where land is so scarce, that there is not another possessor within many miles who would part, upon any terms, with half-an-acre. My kindest father will come and give it, I trust, his benediction. I am now almost jealous of Bookham for having received it. Imagine but the ecstasy of M. d'Arblay in training, all his own way, an entire new garden. He dreams now of cabbage-walks, potato-beds, bean-perfumes, and peas-blossoms. My mother should send him a little sketch to help his flower-garden, which will be his second favourite object. THE PRINCESS ROYAL'S FIRST INTERVIEW WITH HER FIANCE. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) 1796. A private letter from Windsor tells me the Prince of Wurtemberg has much pleased in the royal House, by his manner and address upon his interview, but that the poor Princess royal was almost dead with terror, and agitation, and affright, at the first meeting.(132) She could not utter a word, The queen was obliged to speak her answers. The prince said he hoped this first would be the last disturbance his page 116 presence would ever occasion her. She then tried to recover, and so far conquered her tumult as to attempt joining In a general discourse from time to time. He paid his court successfully, I am told, to the sisters, who all determine to like him; and the princess royal is quite revived in her spirits again, now this tremendous opening sight is over. You will be pleased, and my dearest Mr. Locke, at the style of my summons: 'tis so openly from the queen herself, Indeed, she has behaved like an angel to me, from the trying time to her of my marriage with a Frenchman. "So odd, you know," as Lady Inchiquin said. OPINIONS OF THE REVIEWS ON "CAMILLA." (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) November, 1796. . . .The "Monthly Review" has come in to-day, and it does not satisfy me, or raise my spirits, or anything but my indignation. James has read the remarks in it on "Camilla," and we are all dissatisfied. Perhaps a few of the verbal criticisms may be worth your attention in the second edition; but these have been picked out and displayed with no friendly view, and without necessity, in a work of such length and intrinsic sterling worth. J'enrage! Morbleu! (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, November, 1796. I had intended writing to my dearest father by a return of goods, but I find it impossible to defer the overflowings of my heart at his most kind and generous indignation with the reviewer. What censure can ever so much hurt as such compensation can heal? And, in fact, the praise is so strong that, were it neatly put together, the writer might challenge my best enthusiasts to find it insufficient. The truth, however, is, that the criticisms come forward, and the panegyric is entangled, and so blended with blame as to lose almost all effect, The reviews, however, as they have not made, will not, I trust, mar me. "Evelina" made its way all by itself; it was well spoken of, indeed, in all the reviews, compared with general novels, but it was undistinguished by any quotation, and only put in the Monthly Catalogue, and only allowed Page 117 short single paragraph. It was circulated only by the general public till it reached, through that unbiassed medium, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Burke, and thence it wanted no patron. Nov. 14.-Upon a second reading of the Monthly Review upon "Camilla," I am in far better humour with it, and willing to confess to the criticisms, if I may claim by that concession any right to the eulogies. They are stronger and more important, upon re-perusal, than I had imagined, in the panic of a first survey and an unprepared-for disappointment in anything like severity from so friendly an editor. The recommendation, at the conclusion, of the book as a warning guide to youth, would recompense me, upon the least reflection, for whatever strictures Might precede it. I hope my kind father has not suffered his generous--and to me most cordial--indignation against the reviewer to interfere with his intended answer to the affectionate letter of Dr. Griffiths.(133 DEATH OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S STEPMOTHER. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Bookham, November 7, 1796. Yes, -my beloved Susan safe landed at Dublin was indeed all-sufficient for some time; nor, indeed, could I even read any more for many minutes. That, and the single sentence at the end, "My Norbury is with me"--completely overset ne, though only with joy. After your actual safety, nothing could so much touch me as the picture I Instantly viewed of Norbury in Your arms. Yet I shall hope for more detail hereafter. The last letter I had from you addressed to myself shows me your own sentiment of the fatal event(134) which so speedily followed your departure, and which my dear father has himself announced to you, though probably the newspapers will anticipate his letter. I am very sorry, now, I did not write sooner; but while you were still in England, and travelling so slowly, I had always lurking ideas that disqualified me from writing to Ireland. The minute I received, from Sally, by our dearest father's desire the last tidings I set out for Chelsea. I was much Shocked by the news, long as it has been but natural to look Page 118 forward to it. My better part spoke even before myself upon the propriety of my instant journey, and promised me a faithful nursing attendance during my absence. I went in a chaise, to lose no time - but the uncertainty how I might find my poor father made me arrive with a nervous seizure upon my voice that rendered it as husky as Mr. Rishton's. While I settled with the postilion, Sally, James, Charlotte, and Marianne, came to me. Esther and Charles had been there the preceding day ; they were sent to as soon as the event had happened. My dearest father received me with extreme kindness, but though far, far more calm and quiet than I could expect, he was much shaken, and often very faint. However, in the course of the evening, he suffered me to read to him various passages from various books, such as conversation introduced; and as his nature is as pure from affectation as from falsehood, encouraged in himself, as well as permitted in us, whatever could lead to cheerfulness. Let me not forget to record one thing that was truly generous in my poor mother's last voluntary exertions. She charged Sally and her maid both not to call my father when she appeared to be dying; and not disturb him if her death should happen in the night, nor to let him hear it till he arose at his usual time. I feel sensibly the kindness of this sparing consideration. Yet not so would I be used! O never should I forgive the misjudged prudence that should rob me of one little instant of remaining life in one who was truly dear to me'; Nevertheless, I shall not be surprised to have his first shock succeeded by a sorrow it did not excite, and I fear he will require much watching and vigilance to be kept as well as I have quitted him. THE FRENCH EMIGRES AT NORBURY. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Bookham, December 25, 1796. You will have heard that the Princesse d'Henin and M. de Lally have spent a few days at Norbury Park. We went every evening regularly to meet them, and they yet contrive to grow higher and higher in our best opinions and affections; they force that last word; none other is adequate to such regard as they excite. Page 119 M. de Lally read us a pleading for �migr�s of all descriptions, to the people and government of France, for their re-instalment in their native land, that exceeds in eloquence, argument, taste, feeling, and every power of oratory and truth united, anything I ever remember to have read. It is so affecting in many places, that I was almost ill from restraining My nearly convulsive emotions. My dear and honoured partner gives me, perhaps, an interest in such a subject beyond what is mere natural due and effect, therefore I cannot be sure such will be its universal success; yet I shall be nothing less than Surprised to live to see his statue erected in his own country, at the expense of his own restored exiles. 'Tis, indeed, a wonderful performance. And he was so easy, So gay, so unassuming, yet free from condescension, that I almost worshipped him. M. d'Arblay cut me off a bit of the coat in which he read his pleading, and I shall preserve it, labelled! The princess was all that was amiable and attractive, and she loves my Susanna so tenderly, that her voice was always caressing when she named her. She would go to Ireland, she repeatedly said, on purpose to see you, were her fortune less miserably cramped. The journey, voyage, time, difficulties, and ,sea-sickness, would be nothing for obstacles. You have made, there, that rare and exquisite acquisition-an ardent friend for life. DR. BURNEY'S DEPRESSED STATE. I have not heard very lately of my dearest father; all accounts speak of his being very much lower in spirits than When I left him. I sometimes am ready to return to him, for my whole heart yearns to devote itself to him - but the babe, and the babe's father--and there is no going en famille uninvited--and my dear father does not feel equal to making the invitation. One of the Tichfield dear girls seems to be constantly with Sally, to aid the passing hours, but Our poor father wants something more than cheerfulness and affection, though nothing without them could do; he wants some one to find out pursuits--to entice him into reading, by bringing books, or starting subjects; some one to lead him to talk of what he thinks, or to forget what he thinks of, by adroitly talking of what may catch other attention. Even where deep sorrow is impossible, a gloomy void must rest in the total breaking up such a long and such a fast connexion. Page 120 I must always grieve at your absence at such a period. our Esther has SO much to do in her own family, and fears so much the cold of Chelsea, that she can be only of day and occasional use, and it is nights and mornings that call for the confidential companion that might best revive him, He is more amiable, more himself, if possible, than ever. God long preserve him to bless us all! COVETOUS OF PERSONAL DISTINCTION. Your old acquaintance, Miss --, has been passing ten days in this neighbourhood. She is become very pleasingly formed in manners, wherever she wishes to oblige, and all her roughnesses and ruggednesses are worn off. I believe the mischief done by her education, and its wants, not cured, if curable au fond; but much amended to all, and apparently done away completely to many. What really rests is a habit of exclusively consulting just what she likes best, not what would be or prove best for others. She thinks, indeed, but little of anything except with reference to herself, and what gives her an air, and will give her a character, for inconstancy, that is in fact the mere result of seeking her own gratification alike in meeting or avoiding her connexions. If she saw this, she has understanding sufficient to work it out of her; but she weighs nothing sufficiently to dive into her own self. She knows she is a very clever girl, and she is neither well contented with others, nor happy in herself, but where this is evidently acknowledged. We spent an evening together at Norbury Park ; she was shown all Mr. William's pictures and drawings. I knew her expectations of an attention she had no chance of exciting and therefore devoted myself to looking them over with her yet, though Mr. Locke himself led the way to see them, and explained several, and though Amelia addressed her with the utmost sweetness, and Mrs. Locke with perfect good breeding, I could not draw from her one word relative to the evening, or the family, except that she did not think she had heard Mr. William's voice once. A person so young, and with such good parts, that can take no pleasure but in personal distinction, which is all her visit can have wanted, will soon cut all real improvement short, by confining herself to such society alone as elevates herself. There she will always make a capital figure, for her conversation is sprightly and enter- Page 121 taining, and her heart and principles are both good : she has many excellent qualities, and various resources in herself; but she is good enough to make me lament that she is not modest enough to be yet better. BABY D'ARBLAY AGAIN ; AND OTHER MATTERS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, NOV. 29, 1796. My little man waits for your lessons to get on in elocution: he has made no further advance but that of calling out, as he saw our two watches hung on two opposite hooks over the chamber chimney-piece, "Watch, papa,--watch, mamma;" so, though his first speech is English, the idiom is French. We agree this is to avoid any heartburning in his parents. He is at this moment so exquisitely enchanted with a little penny trumpet, and finding he can produce such harmony his own self, that he is blowing and laughing till he can hardly stand. If you could see his little swelling cheeks you would not accuse yourself of a misnomer in calling him cherub. I try to impress him with an idea of pleasure in going to see grandpapa, but the short visit to Bookham is forgotten, and the permanent engraving remains, and all his concurrence consists in pointing up to the print over the chimney-piece, and giving it one of his concise little bows. Are not people a little revived in the political world by this unexampled honour paid to Mr. Pitt?(135) Mr. Locke has subscribed 3000 pounds. How you rejoiced me by what you say of poor Mr. Burke for I had seen the paragraph of his death with most exceeding great concern. The Irish reports, are, I trust, exaggerated; few things come quite plainly from Hibernia: yet what a time, in all respects, to transport thither, as you too well term it, our beloved Susan! She writes serenely, and Norbury seems to Page 122 repay a world of sufferings : it is delightful to see her SO satisfied there, at least; but they have all, she says, got the brogue. Our building is to be resumed the 1st of March; it will then soon be done, as it is only of lath and plaster, and the roof and wood-work are already prepared.' My indefatigable superintendent goes every morning for two, three, or four hours to his field, to work at a sunk fence that 'IS to protect his garden from our cow. I have sent Mrs. Boscawen, through Miss Cambridge, a history of our plan. The dwelling is destined by M. d'Arblay to be called the Camilla cottage. (95) "Memoires of Dr. Burney," vol. iii. pp. 224-5. (96) "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," vol. iii., pp. 210-11. (97) In the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney" Madame d'Arblay writes that "Before the answer of Mr. Pitt to the memorial could be returned, the attempt upon Toulon proved abortive." Mr, Pitt must certainly have been in no hurry to reply; for the memorial was sent to him about the commencement of October, and Toulon was not evacuated by the English until the 18th of December.-ED. (98) A character in "Cecilia."-ED. (99) The well-known novelist.-ED. (100) The cottage which Fanny and her husband contemplated building, was not actually commenced until after the publication of "Camilla," in 1796.-ED. (101) The fund which Mrs. Crewe was exerting herself to raise for the benefit of the French emigrant clergy.-ED. (102) Mrs. Crewe had been urging Dr. Burney to engage his daughter to contribute, by her pen, to the relief of the emigrant clergy. Fanny accordingly wrote an "Address to the Ladies of Great Britain," in the form of a short pamphlet, which was published by Cadell, and which appears to have had the desired effect.-ED. (103) Alas for Dr. Burney's hopes! Toulon was successfully defended until the middle of December, when the vigorous measures of the besiegers, inspired by the genius Of Young Buonaparte, resulted in the complete triumph of the Republicans. On the 17th of December they carried by storm Fort Eguillette and the heights of Faron. From these positions their artillery commanded the harbour, and, further defence of the town being thereby rendered impracticable, its instant evacuation was resolved upon by the allies. An attempt to burn the French war-ships in the harbour, before abandoning the place, was only partially successful. On the 18th and 19th the troops embarked. Vast numbers of fugitives were taken on board the retreating fleet, but a large proportion of the unfortunate Toulonnais remained, to experience the cruel vengeance of the Republicans-ED. (104) The execution of Marie Antoinette, October 16, 1793.-ED. (105) He was born on the 18th of December 1794.-ED. (106) Goldsmith has drawn the character of Richard Burke in "Retaliation," as follows:-- "Here lies honest Richard, whose fate I must Sigh at; Alaq, that such frolic should now be so quiet! What spirits were his! what wit and what whim! Now breaking a jest, and now breaking a limb; Now wrangling and grumbling to keep up the ball; Now teasing and vexing, yet laughing at all. In short, so provoking a devil was Dick, That we wish'd him full ten times a day at old Nick, But, missing his mirth and agreeable vein, As often we wish'd to have Dick back again."-ED. (107) George Canning, who was not yet twenty-four years of age, had just entered Parliament as member for Newport. He had formerly been a Whig and an associate of Fox and Sheridan, but the excesses of the French ,Revolution appear to have driven him, as they had driven Burke and Windham, over to the opposite camp. He took his seat as a Tory and a supporter of Mr. Pitt, and a Tory he remained to the end of his days. Canning's maiden speech, to which Fanny refers, was delivered January 31, in a debate on the treaty between Great Britain and the King of Sardinia. By this treaty, which was signed April 25, 1793, it was agreed that the two contracting parties should make common cause in the war against the French Republic; that England should pay to the King of Sardinia an annual subsidy of 200,000 pounds, to enable him to maintain the war; and that England should not conclude peace without providing for the restoration to Sardinia of the territories which had been torn from it by the Republic. In the debate of January 31, 1794, Fox vigorously attacked the treaty, while Canning, who spoke later, defended it in an able and well-received maiden speech.-ED. (108) Talleyrand's intrigues had made him an object of suspicion to both parties. He was detested by the royalists of the first emigration, had been d�cr�t� d'accusation by the Convention, and was regarded by the English government as a dangerous person. In January 1794, he received an order from the government to quit England within five days, and he embarked in consequence, for the United States, February 3.-ED. (109) "London, 1794.-Madame,--Had it been possible I would have had the honour of seeing you this morning , but the utter impossibility of doing so has deprived me of the last pleasure that I might have had in Europe. Permit me, madame, to thank you again for all your kindness, and to ask a little place in your memory, and let me tell you, I shall never cease, while I live, to offer my vows for your welfare, and for that of the captain and your children. You will have a very zealous servant in America; I shall not return to Europe without coming to Surrey: everything of value to my intellect or my heart is there. "Kindly present my compliments to the captain." (110) "London, March 2, 1794. Farewell, my dear d'Arblay: I leave your country till the time when it will no longer be governed by the petty passions of men. Then I will return; not, indeed, to busy myself with public affairs, for I have long since abandoned them for ever; but to see the excellent inhabitants of Surrey. I hope to know enough English to understand Madame d'Arblay; for the next four months, I shall do nothing but study it: and, to acquaint myself with the beauties of the language, I take 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia,' both for study and pleasure. I wish You, my dear friend, all kinds of happiness, and you are in the way to fulfil all my wishes. "I do not know how long I shall remain in America. If there were a prospect of the re-establishment of reason and stability in our unhappy country, I should return; if Europe goes to pieces in the coming campaign, I will prepare a refuge in America for all our friends. "Farewell. My respects to Madame d'Arblay and Mrs. Phillips. I ask of you and I promise you a lifelong friendship." (The date at the head Of this letter Is evidently incorrect-- probably a slip of the writer's. Talleyrand embarked February 3.-ED. (111) Lafayette's brilliant services in the cause of liberty had not secured him from the usual fate of moderate revolutionists at this period. In the early days of the Revolution, he was the hero of the French people; in 1792, denounced by Robespi�rre and the jacobins, he was compelled to seek safety in flying from France. He escaped the guillotine, indeed, but fell into the hands of the Austrians, was cast into prison, and did not gain his liberty till September, 1797.-ED. (112) This was Dr. Burney's first meeting with Mrs. Piozzi since her marriage. It occurred at one of Salomon's celebrated concerts, where the doctor, with surprise, perceived Piozzi among the audience, not knowing that he had returned from Italy. He entered into a cordial conversation with the Signor, and inquired after his wife. "Piozzi, turning round, pointed to a sofa, on which, to his infinite joy, Dr. Burney beheld Mrs. Thrale Piozzi, seated in the midst of her daughters, the four Miss Thrales," those young ladies (at least, the three elder, for Cecilia had been abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi) having made up their minds by this time to accept the inevitable, and to be reconciled to their mother." See "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," vol. iii. p. 198.-ED. (113) Written after the Doctor's first visit to Bookham. (114) Name of a gardener in a drama of Fontenelle's. (115) The novel of "Camilla," then lately begun. (116) "Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Metastasio," a work which Dr. Burney was then engaged upon, and which was published in three Volumes, 8vo in 1796.-ED. (117) "Edwy and Elgiva," a tragedy by Madame d'Arblay. (118) Edmund Burke's only son, Richard, died August 2, 1794.-ED (119) "Edwy and Elgiva," produced by Sheridan at Drury-lane, March 21, 1795; it was acted but once, and never printed.-ED. (120) Warren Hastings was acquitted of all the charges, April 23, 1795. (121) Both characters, to some extent, were true. Goldsmith's portrait of Cumberland, though flattering, is not, we fancy, without a slight undercurrent of irony. Here are the lines from "Retaliation." "Here Cumberland lies, having acted his parts, The Terence of England, the mender of hearts; A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are. His gallants are all faultless, his women divine, And Comedy wonders at being so fine: Like a tragedy-queen he has dizen'd her out, Or rather like Tragedy giving a rout. His fools have their follies so lost in a crowd Of virtues and feelings, that Folly grows proud And coxcombs, alike in their failings atone: Adopting his portraits, are pleas'd with their own, Say, where has our poet this malady caught? Or wherefore his characters thus without fault? Say, was it that, mainly directing his view To find out men's virtues, and finding them few, Quite sick of pursuing each troublesome elf, He grew lazy at last, and drew from himself?"-ED. (122) The novels of Mrs. Radcliffe were now at the height of their popularity. "The Mysteries of Udolpho," perhaps the most powerful of her works, had recently been published, to the intense delight of all lovers of the thrilling and romantic.-ED. (123) The name was then "Ariella," changed afterwards to "Camilla." (124) Written during his embarrassments from the French Revolution, and answer to a letter expressing bitter disappointment from repeated losses. (125) M. de Narbonne, in reply, expressed, in lively terms, his gratitude for Madame d'Arblay's invitation, and his pleasure in receiving it. But he declined the proposal. He was not, he said, wholly without resources, or without hopes for the future, and circumstances made it desirable that he should reside at present near the French frontier.-ED. (126) Gainsborough Dupont, a nephew of the great Gainsborough. He was a portrait-painter of some merit, and an excellent mezzo- tint engraver. some of his best plates were engraved after paintings by Gainsborough. Mr Dupont died in 1797.-ED. (127) " The Birth of Love;" a poem: with engravings, from designs by her royal highness the Princess Elizabeth. (128) i.e., the Duke of York, second son of the king. He had been appointed field-marshal and commander-in-chief early in 1795.-ED. (129) The Duchess of York was daughter to the King of Prussia.- ED. (130) Susan's little son, Norbury Phillips.-ED. (131) Rose Dale, Richmond, Surrey. This place was formerly the residence of the poet Thomson, and afterwards became the property of the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen. (132) The princess royal was married, May 18, 1797, to Frederick William, hereditary prince of Wurtemberg.-ED. (133) Editor and proprietor of the "Monthly Review." (134) The death of Dr. Burney's second wife. (135) Fanny alludes to the so-called "loyalty loan," proposed and carried by Mr Pitt, to meet the expenses of the war. "Pitt evinced his own Public spirit, when he relied on and appealed to the public spirit of the People. He announced a loan of 18,000,000 pounds, at five per cent., to be taken at 112 pounds , 10 shillings, for every 100 pounds stock, and with an option to the proprietors to he paid off at par within two years after a treaty of peace."-(Stanhope's "Life of Pitt," vol. ii., P. 389.) The loan was taken up by the Public with extraordinary eagerness, 5,000,000 pounds being subscribed on the first day of issue (December 1, 1796).-ED. .' (136) They had commenced building the cottage in October. Fanny writes, November 29: "Our cottage building stops now, from the shortness of the days, till the beginning of March. The foundation is laid, and it will then be run up with great speed. The well, at length, is finished, and it is a hundred and odd feet deep. The water is said to be excellent, but M. d'Arblay has had it now stopped to prevent accidents from hazardous boys, who, when the field is empty of owners, will be amusing themselves there. He has just completed his grand plantations; part of which are in evergreens, part in firewood for future time, and part in an orchard."-ED. Page 123 SECTION 21. (1797-8) "CAMILLA" COTTAGE. SUNDRY VISITS TO THE ROYAL FAMILY. [Fanny's pen portraits of the princesses are as fascinating as Gainsborough's paintings of them. Their truly amiable characters and sweet dispositions are nowhere more pleasantly illustrated than in the following section of the "Diary." A list of their names, with the dates of their births and deaths, may be useful to the reader. 1. Charlotte, princess royal. born 1767: Queen of Wirtemburg: died 1828. 2. Augusta, Fanny's favourite, as she well deserved to be. Born 1768 : never married : died 1840. 3. Elizabeth, the artist of the family. Born 1770 : married the hereditary prince (afterwards, in 1820, Landgrave) of Hesse- Homburg in 18 18, and settled in Germany: died 1840. 4. Mary. Born 1776 : married her cousin, William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester, in 1816: died 1857. 5. Sophia, born 1777: died 1848. 6. Amelia, born 1783. Her health first gave way in 1798 (see p. 180): she died, unmarried, at Windsor, in 1810. A few days before her death she gave her poor blind, old father, a ring containing a scrap of her hair ; saying only, as she pressed it into his hand, "Remember me!" The poor king's anguish brought on a fresh attack of insanity, from which he never recovered.-ED.] A DISAGREEABLE JOURNEY HoME. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, January 3, '97. WAS extremely vexed at missing our uncertain post yesterday, and losing, unavoidably, another to-day, before I return my dearest father our united thanks for the kind and sweet fortnight passed under his roof. Our adventures in coming back were better adapted to our departure than our Page 124 arrival, for they were rather rueful. One of the horses did not like his business, and wanted to be off, and we were stopped by his gambols continually , and, if I had not been a soldier's wife, I should have been terribly alarmed; but my soldier does not like to see himself disgraced in his other half, and so I was fain to keep up my courage, till, at length, after we had passed Fetcham, the frisky animal plunged till he fastened the shaft against a hedge, and then, little Betty beginning to scream, I inquired of the postilion if we had not better alight. If it were not, he said, for the dirt, yes. The dirt then was defied, and I prevailed, though with difficulty, upon my chieftain to consent to a general dismounting. And he then found it was not too soon, for the horse became inexorable to all menace, caress, chastisement, or harangue, and was obliged to be loosened. Meanwhile, Betty, Bab, and I trudged on, vainly looking back for our vehicle, till we reached our little home--a mile and a half. Here we found good fires, though not a morsel of food; this however, was soon procured, and our walking apparel changed for drier raiment; and I sent forth our nearest cottager, and a young butcher, and a boy, towards Fetcham, to aid the vehicle, or its contents, for my chevalier had stayed on account of our chattels: and about two hours after the chaise arrived, with one horse, and pushed by its hirer, while it was half dragged by its driver. But all came safe; and we drank a dish of tea, and ate a mutton chop, and kissed our little darling, and forgot all else of our journey hut the pleasure we had had at Chelsea with my dearest father and dear Sally. And just now I received a letter from our Susanna, which tells me the invasion(137) has been made in a part of Ireland Page 125 . where all is so loyal there can be no apprehension from any such attempt ; but she adds, that if it had happened in the north everything might have been feared. Heaven send the invaders far from all the points of the Irish compass! and that's an Irish wish for expression, though not for meaning. All the intelligence she gathers is encouraging, with regard to the spirit and loyalty of all that surround her. But Mr. Brabazon is in much uneasiness for his wife, whose situation is critical, and he hesitates whether or not to convey her to Dublin, as a place of more security than her own habitation. What a period this for the usual journey of our invaluable Susan! BURKE's FUNERAL AT BEACONSFIELD. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) Saturday Night, July 22, 1797. I was invited to poor Mr. Burke's funeral,(138) by Mrs. Crewe and two notes from Beaconsfield. Malone and I went to Bulstrode together in my car, this day sevennight, with two horses added to mine. Mrs. Crewe had invited me thither when she went down first. We found the Duke of Portland there; and the Duke of Devonshire and Windham came to dinner. The chancellor and speaker of the House of Commons could not leave London till four o'clock, but arrived a little after seven. We all set off together for Beaconsfield, where we found the rest of the pall-bearers--Lord Fitzwilliam, Lord Inchiquin, and Sir Gilbert Eliot, with Drs. King and Lawrence, Lord North, Dudley North, and many of the deceased's private friends, though by his repeated injunction the funeral was to be very private. We had all hatbands, scarfs, and gloves; and he left a list to whom rings of remembrance are to be sent, among whom my name occurred, and a jeweller has been here for my measure. I went back to Bulstrode, by invitation, with the two dukes, the chancellor, and speaker, Windham, Malone, and Secretary King. I ,stayed there till Sunday evening, and got home just before the dreadful storm. The duke was extremely civil and hospitable,-- Page 126 pressed me much to stay longer and go with them, the chancellor, speaker, Windham, and Mrs. Crewe, to Pinn, to see the school, founded by Mr. Burke, for the male children of French emigrant nobles; but I could not with prudence stay, having a couple of ladies waiting for me in London, and two extra horses with me. So much for poor Mr. Burke, certainly one of the greatest men of the present century; and I think I might say the best orator and statesman of modern times. He had his passions and prejudices to which I did not subscribe - but I always admired his great abilities, friendship, and urbanity - and it would be ungrateful in you and me, to whom he was certainly partial, not to feel and lament his loss. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, July 27, '97. I was surprised, and almost frightened, though at the same time gratified, to find you assisted in paying the last honours to Mr. Burke. How sincerely I sympathise in all you say of that truly great man! That his enemies say he was not perfect is nothing compared with his immense superiority over almost all those who are merely exempted from his peculiar defects. That he was upright in heart, even where he acted wrong, I do truly believe; and that he asserted nothing he had not persuaded himself to be true, from Mr. Hastings's being the most rapacious of villains, to the king's being incurably insane. He was as generous as kind, and as liberal in his sentiments as he was luminous in intellect and extraordinary in abilities and eloquence. Though free from all little vanity, high above envy, and glowing with zeal to exalt talents and merit in others, he had, I believe a consciousness of his own greatness, that shut out those occasional and useful self-doubts which keep our judgment in order, by calling our motives and our passions to account. DEATH OF M. D'ARBLAY'S BROTHER. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Bookham, August 10, '97. You know, I believe, with what cruel impatience and uncertainty my dear companion has waited for some news Of his family ; no tidings, however, could be procure, nor has Page 127 ever heard from any part of it till last Saturday morning, when two letters arrived by the same post, with information of the death of his only brother. impossible as it has long been to look back to France without fears amounting even to expectation of horrors, he had never ceased cherishing hopes some favourable turn would, in the end, unite him with this last branch of his house; the shock, therefore, has been terribly severe, and has cast a gloom upon his mind and spirits which nothing but his kind anxiety to avoid involving mine can at present suppress. He is now the last of a family of seventeen, and not one relation of his own name now remains but his own little English son. His father was the only son of an only son, which drives all affinity on the paternal side into fourth and fifth kinsmen. On the maternal side, however, he has the happiness to hear that an uncle, who is inexpressibly dear to him, who was his guardian and best friend through life, still lives, and has been permitted to remain unmolested in his own house, at Joigny, where he is now in perfect health, save from rheumatic .attacks, which though painful are not dangerous. A son, too, of this gentleman, who was placed as a commissaire-de-guerre by M. d'Arblay during the period of his belonging to the war committee, still holds the same situation, which is very lucrative, and which M. d'A. had concluded would have been withdrawn as soon as his own flight from France was known. The little property of which the late Chevalier d'Arblay died possessed, this same letter says, has been "vendu pour la nation,"(139) because his next heir was an �migr�; though there is a little niece, Mlle. Girardin, daughter of an only sister, who is in France, and upon whom the succession was settled, if her uncles died without immediate heirs. Some little matter, however, what we know not, has been reserved by being bought in by this respectable uncle, who sends M. d'Arblay word he has saved him what he may yet live upon, if he can find means to return without personal risk, and who solicits to again see him with urgent fondness, in which he is joined by his aunt with as much warmth as if she, also, was his relation by blood, not alliance. The late chevalier, my M. d'A. says, was a man of the softest manners and most exalted honour ; and he was so tall and so thin, he was often nicknamed Don Quixote, but he was so completely aristocratic with regard to the Revolution, Page 128 at its very commencement, that M. d'A. has heard nothing yet with such unspeakable astonishment as the news that he died, near Spain, of his wounds from a battle in which he had fought for the Republic. "How strange," says M. d'A., "is our destiny! that that Republic which I quitted, determined to be rather an hewer of wood and drawer of water all my life than serve, he should die for." The secret history of this may some day come out, but it is now inexplicable, for the mere fact, without the smallest comment, is all that has reached us, In the period, indeed, in which M. d'A. left France, there were but three steps possible for those who had been bred to arms-flight, the guillotine, or fighting for the Republic, "The former this brother," M. d'A. says, "had not energy of character to undertake in the desperate manner in which he risked it himself, friendless and fortuneless, to live in exile as he could. The guillotine no one could elect; and the continuing in the service, though in a cause he detested, was, probably, his hard compulsion." . . . Our new habitation will very considerably indeed exceed our first intentions and expectations. I suppose it has ever been so, and so ever must be ; for we sought as well as determined to keep within bounds, and M. d'A. still thinks he has done it - however, I am more aware of our tricks upon travellers than to enter into the same delusion. The pleasure, however, he has taken in this edifice is my first joy, for it has constantly shown me his heart has invariably held to those first feelings which, before our union, determined him upon settling in England. O! if you knew how he has been assailed, by temptations of every sort that either ambition, or interest, or friendship could dictate, to change his plan,-and how his heart sometimes yearns towards those he yet can love in his native soil, while his firmness still remains unshaken,-- you would not wonder I make light of even extravagance in a point that shows him thus fixed to make this object a part of the whole system of his future life. FROM CREWE HALL TO CHELSEA. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) Friday Night, September 13, 1797. My dear Fanny,-Where did I leave off?--hang me if I know!--I believe I told you, or all when with YOU, Of the Chester and Liverpool journey and voyage. On Saturday Page 129 26th August, the day month from leaving London, M. le pr�sident de Frondeville and I left Crewe Hall on our way back. The dear Mrs. Crewe kindly set us in our way as far as Etruria. We visited Trentham Hall, in Staffordshire, the famous seat of the Marquis of Stafford,--a very fine place--fine piece of water--fine hanging woods,--the valley of Tempe--and the river Trent running through the garden. Mrs C. introduced us to the marchioness, who did us the honour of showing us the house herself; it has lately been improved and enlarged by Wyatt:--fine pictures, library, etc. After a luncheon here, we went to Etruria, which I had never seen. Old Mr. Wedgwood is dead, and his son and successor not at home ; but we went to the pottery manufacture, and saw the whole process of forming the beautiful things which are dispersed all over the universe from this place. Mrs. C. offered to send you a little hand churn for your breakfast butter ; but I should have broke it to pieces, and durst not accept of it. But if it would be of any use, when you have a cow, I will get you one at the Wedgwood ware-house in London. Here we parted. The president and I got to Lichfield by about ten o'clock that night. In the morning, before my companion was up, I strolled about the city with one of the waiters, in search of Frank Barber,' who I had been told lived there; but on ,inquiry I was told his residence was in a village three or four miles off. I however soon found the house where dear Dr. Johnson was born, and his father's shop. The house is stuccoed, has five sash-windows in front, and pillars before it. It is the best house thereabouts, near St. Mary's Church, in a broad street, and is now a grocer's shop. I went next to the Garrick house, which has been lately repaired, stuccoed, enlarged, and sashed. Peter Garrick, David's eldest brother, died about two years ago, leaving all his Possessions to the apothecary that had attended him. But the will was disputed and set aside not long since, it having appeared at a trial that the testator was insane at the time the will was made; so that Mrs. Doxie, Garrick's sister, a widow with a numerous family, recovered the house and -_30,000, She now lives in it with her family, and has been able to set up a carriage. The inhabitants of Lichfield were so pleased Page 130 with the decision of the court on the trial, that they illuminated the streets, and had public rejoicings on the occasion. After examining this house well, I tried to find the residence of Dr. James, inventor of the admirable fever powders, which have so often saved the life of our dear Susey, and others without number. But the ungrateful inhabitants knew nothing about him. . . . The cathedral, which has been lately thoroughly repaired internally, is the most complete and beautiful Gothic building I ever saw. The outside was tr�s mal trait� by the fanatics of the last century; but there are three beautiful spires still standing, and more than fifty whole-length figures of saints in their original niches. The choir is exquisitely beautiful. A fine new organ is erected, and was well played, and I never heard the cathedral service so well performed to that instrument only before. The services and anthems were middle-aged music, neither too old and dry, nor too modern and light ; the voices subdued, and exquisitely softened and sweetened by the building, While the lessons were reading, which I could not hear, I looked for monuments, and found a beautiful one to Garrick, and another just by it to Johnson; the former erected by Mrs. Garrick, who has been daily abused for not erecting one to her husband in Westminster Abbey ; but sure that was a debt due to him from the public, and that due from his widow best paid here.(141) Johnson's has been erected by his friends:--both are beautiful, and alike in every particular. There is a monument here to Johnson's first patron, Mr. Walmsley, whose amplitude of learning and copiousness of communication were such, that our revered friend said, "it might be doubted whether a day passed in which he had not some advantage from his friendship." There is a monument likewise to Lady M. W. Montagu, and to the father of Mr. Addison, etc. We left Lichfield about two o'clock, and reached Daventry that night, stopping a little at Coventry to look at the great church and Peeping Tom. Next day got to St. Albans time enough to look 'It the church and neighbouring ruins. Next morning breakfasted at Barnet, where my car met me, and got to Chelsea by three o'clock, leaving my agreeable compagnon de voyage, M. le pr�sident, at his apartments in town. . . . Page 131 AT DR. HERSCHEL'S. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) Chelsea College, Thursday, September 28. My dear Fanny,--I read your letter pen in hand, and shall try to answer it by to-day's post. But first let me tell you that it was very unlikely to find me at home, for on Tuesday I went to Lord Chesterfield's at Bailie's, and arrived there in very good time for a four o'clock dinner - when, behold ! I was informed by the porter that " both my lord and lady were in town, and did not return till Saturday ! " Lord Chesterfield had unexpectedly been obliged to go to town by indisposition. Though I was asked to alight and take refreshment, I departed immediately, intending to dine and lie at Windsor, to be near Dr. Herschel, with whom a visit had been arranged by letter. But as I was now at liberty to make that visit at any time of the day I pleased, I drove through Slough in my way to Windsor, in order to ask at Dr. Herschel's door when my visit would be least inconvenient to him--that night or next morning. The good soul was at dinner, but came to the door himself, to press me to alight immediately and partake of his family repast - and this he did so heartily that I could not resist. I was introduced to the family at table, four ladies, and a little boy about the age and size of Martin.(142) I was quite shocked at seeing so many females: I expected (not knowing Herschel was married) only to have found Miss Herschel. . . . I expressed my concern and shame at disturbing them at this time of the day ; told my story, at which they were so cruel as to rejoice, and went so far as to say they rejoiced at the accident which had brought me there, and hoped I would send my carriage away, and take a bed with them. They were sorry they had no stables for my horses. I thought it necessary, You may, be sure, to faire la petite bouche, ,but in spite of my blushes I was obliged to submit to my trunk being taken in and the car sent to the inn just by. . . . Your health was drunk after dinner (put that int.) your pocket); and after much social conversation and a few hearty laughs, the ladies proposed to take a walk, in order, I believe, to leave Herschel and me together. We walked and talked Page 132 round his great telescopes till it grew damp and dusk, then retreated into his study to philosophise. I had a string of questions ready to ask, and astronomical difficulties to solve, which, with looking at curious books and instruments, filled up the time charmingly till tea, which being drank with the ladies, we two retired again to the starry. Now having paved the way, we began to talk of my poetical plan, and he pressed me to read what I had done.(143) Heaven help his head! my eight books, of from four hundred to eight hundred and twenty lines, would require two or three days to read. He made me unpack my trunk for my MS., from which I read him the titles of the chapters, and begged he would choose any book or character of a great astronomer he pleased. "Oh, let us have the beginning." I read him the first eighteen or twenty lines of the exordium, and then said I rather wished to come to modern times - I was more certain of my ground in high antiquity than after the time of Copernicus, and began my eighth chapter, entirely on Newton and his system. He gave me the greatest encouragement said repeatedly that I perfectly understood what I was writing' about - and only stopped me at two places: one was at a word too strong for what I had to describe, and the other at one too weak. The doctrine he allowed to be quite orthodox, concerning gravitation, refraction, reflection, optics, comets, magnitudes, distances, revolutions, etc., but made a discovery to me which, had I known sooner, would have overset me, and prevented my reading any part of my work: he said he had almost always had an aversion to poetry, which he regarded as the arrangement of fine words, without any useful meaning or adherence to truth; but that, when truth and science were united to these fine words, he liked poetry very well; and next morning, after breakfast, he made me read as much of another chapter on Descartes, etc., as the time would allow, as I had ordered my carriage at twelve. I read, talked, asked questions, and looked at books and instruments, till near one, when I set off for Chelsea. Page 133 HOSPITALITY UNDER DIFFICULTIES. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Francis.) Westhamble, November 16, 1797. Your letter was most welcome to me, my dearest Charlotte, and I am delighted Mr. Broome(144) and my dear father will so speedily meet. If they steer clear of politics, there can be no doubt of their immediate exchange of regard and esteem. At all events, I depend upon Mr. B.'s forbearance of such subjects, if their opinions clash. Pray let me hear how the interview went off. I need not say how I shall rejoice to see you again, nor how charmed we shall both be to make a nearer acquaintance with Mr. Broome; but, for heaven's sake, my dear girl, how are we to give him a dinner?--unless he will bring with him his poultry, for ours are not yet arrived from Bookham; and his fish, for ours are still at the bottom of some pond we know not where, and his spit, for our jack is yet without clue; and his kitchen grate, for ours waits for Count Rumford's(145) next pamphlet;--not to mention his table-linen;--and not to speak Page 134 of his knives and forks, some ten of our poor original twelve having been massacred in M. d'Arblay's first essays in the art of carpentering ;-and to say nothing of his large spoons, the silver of our plated ones having feloniously made off under cover of the whitening-brush--and not to talk of his cook, ours being not yet hired ;-and not to start the subject of wine, ours, by some odd accident, still remaining at the wine-merchant's! With all these impediments, however, to convivial hilarity, if he will eat a quarter of a joint of meat (his share, I mean), tied up by a packthread, and roasted by a log of wood on the bricks,--and declare no potatoes so good as those dug by M. d'Arblay out of our garden,--and protest our small beer gives the spirits of champagne,--and make no inquiries where we have deposited the hops he will conclude we have emptied out of our table-cloth,-- and pronounce that bare walls are superior to tapestry,--and promise us the first sight of his epistle upon visiting a new-built cottage,--we shall be sincerely happy to receive him in our hermitage; where I hope to learn, for my dearest Charlotte's sake, to love him as much as, for his own I have very long admired him. WAR TAXES. "CAMILLA" COTTAGE. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Westhamble, December, '97. The new threefold assessment of taxes has terrified us rather seriously ; though the necessity, and therefore justice, of them, we mutually feel. My father thinks his own share will amount to eighty pounds a year ! We have, this very morning, decided upon parting with four of our new windows, --a great abatement of agr�mens to ourselves, and of ornament to our appearance; and a still greater sacrifice to the amour Propre of my architect, who, indeed,--his fondness for his edifice considered,--does not ill deserve praise that the scheme had not his mere consent, but his own free proposition. . . . We quitted Bookham with one single regret--that of leaving our excellent neighbours the Cookes. . . . we languished for the moment of removal with almost infantine fretfulness at every delay that distanced it; and when at last the grand day came, our final packings, with all their toil Page 135 and difficulties and labour and expense, were mere acts of pleasantry; so bewitched were we with the impending change, that, though from six o'clock to three we were hard at work, without a kettle to boil the breakfast, or a knife to cut bread for a luncheon, we missed nothing, wanted nothing, and were as insensible to fatigue as to hunger. M. d'Arblay set out on foot, loaded with remaining relics of things, to us precious, and Betty afterwards with a remnant of glass or two; the other maid had been sent two days before. I was forced to have a chaise for my Alex and me, and a few looking-glasses, a few folios, and not a few other oddments and then, with dearest Mr. Locke, our founder's portrait, and my little boy, off I set, and I would my dearest Susan could relate to me as delicious a journey. My mate, striding over hedge and ditch, arrived first, though he set out after' to welcome me to our new dwelling; and we entered our new best room, in which I found a glorious fire of wood, and a little bench, borrowed of one of the departing carpenters : nothing else. We contrived to make room for each other, and Alex disdained all rest. His spirits were so high upon finding two or three rooms totally free for his horse (alias any stick he can pick up) and himself, unencumbered by chairs and tables and such-like lumber, that he was as merry as a little Andrew and as wild as twenty colts. Here we unpacked a small basket containing three or four loaves, and, with a garden-knife, fell to work; some eggs had been procured from a neighbouring farm, and one saucepan had been brought. We dined, therefore, exquisitely, and drank to our new possession from a glass of clear water out of our new well. At about eight o'clock our goods arrived. We had our bed put up in the middle of our room, to avoid risk of damp walls, and our Alex had his dear Willy's crib at our feet. We none of us caught cold. We had fire night and day in the maids' room, as well as Our own -or rather in my Susan's room; for we lent them that, their own having a little inconvenience against a fire, because it is built without a chimney. We Continued making fires all around us the first fortnight, and then found wood would be as bad as an apothecary's bill, so desisted; but we did not stop short so soon as to want the latter to succeed the former, or put our calculation to the proof. Our first week was devoted to unpacking, and exulting in Our completed plan. To have no one thing at hand, nothing Page 136 to eat, nowhere to sit--all were trifles, rather, I think, amusing than incommodious. The house looked so clean, the distribution of the rooms and closets is so convenient, the prospect everywhere around is so gay and so lovely, and the park of dear Norbury is so close at hand, that we hardly knew how to require anything else for existence than the enjoyment of our own situation. At this period I received my summons. I believe I have already explained that I had applied to Miss Planta for advice whether my best chance of admission would be at Windsor, Kew, or London. I had a most kind letter of answer, importing my letter had been seen, and that her majesty would herself fix the time when she could admit me. This was a great happiness to me, and the fixture was for the Queen's house in town. VISITORS ARRIVE INOPPORTUNELY. The only drawback to the extreme satisfaction of such graciousness as allowing an appointment to secure me from a fruitless journey, as well as from impropriety and all fear of intrusion, was, that exactly at this period the Princess d'Henin and M. de Lally were expected at Norbury. I hardly could have regretted anything else, I was so delighted by my summons; but this I indeed lamented. They arrived to dinner on Thursday: I was involved in preparations, and unable to meet them, and my mate would not be persuaded to relinquish aiding me. The next morning, through mud, through mire, they came to our cottage. The poor princess was forced to change shoes and stockings. M. de Lally is more accustomed to such expeditions. Nothing could be more sweet than they both were, nor indeed, more grateful than I felt for my share in their kind exertion. The house was re-viewed all over, even the little pot au feu was opened by the princess, excessively curious to see our manner of living in its minute detail. I have not heard if your letter has been received by M. de Lally; but I knew not then you had written, and therefore did not inquire. The princess talked of nothing so much as you, and with a softness of regard that quite melted me. I always tell her warmly how you feel about her. M. de Lally was most melancholy about France; the last new and most alas! barbarous revolution(146) has disheartened all his hopes--alas! Page 137 whose can withstand it? They made a long and kind visit, and in the afternoon we went to Norbury Park, where we remained till near eleven o'clock, and thought the time very short. Madame d'Henin related some of her adventures in this second flight from her terrible country, and told them with a spirit and a power of observation that would have made them interesting if a tale of old times ; but now, all that gives account of those events awakens the whole mind to attention. M. de Lally after tea read us a beginning of a new tragedy, composed upon an Irish story, but bearing allusion so palpable to the virtues and misfortunes of Louis XVI. that it had almost as strong an effect upon our passions and faculties as if it had borne the name of that good and unhappy prince. It is written with great pathos, noble sentiment, and most eloquent language. I parted from them with extreme reluctance-nay, vexation. ANOTHER VISIT TO THE ROYAL FAMILY. I set off for town early the next day, Saturday. My time was not yet fixed for my royal interview, but I had various preparations impossible to make in this dear, quiet, obscure cottage. Mon ami could not accompany me, as we had still two men constantly at work, the house without being quite unfinished but I could not bear to leave his little representative, who, with Betty, was my companion to Chelsea. There I was expected, and Our dearest father came forth with open arms to welcome us. He was in delightful spirits, the sweetest humour, and perfectly good looks and good health. My little rogue soon engaged him in a romp, which conquered his rustic shyness, and they became the best friends in the world. Thursday morning I had a letter from Miss Planta, written with extreme warmth of kindness, and fixing the next day at eleven o'clock for my royal admission. Page 138 I went up-stairs to Miss Planta's room, where, while I waited for her to be called, the charming Princess Mary passed by, attended by Mrs. Cheveley. She recollected me and turned back, and came up to me with a fair hand graciously held out to me. "How do you do, Madame d'Arblay?" she cried: "I am vastly glad to see you again and how does your little boy do?" I gave her a little account of the rogue, and she proceeded to inquire about my new cottage, and its actual state. I entered into a long detail of its bare walls, and unfurnished sides, and the gambols of the little man unencumbered by cares of fractures from useless ornaments, that amused her good-humoured interest in my affairs very much , and she did not leave me till Miss Planta came to usher me to Princess Augusta. That kind princess received me with a smile so gay, and a look so pleased at my pleasure in again seeing her, that I quite regretted the etiquette which prevented a chaste embrace. She was sitting at her toilette having her hair dressed. The royal family were all going at night to the play. She turned instantly from the glass to face me, and insisted upon my being seated immediately. She then wholly forgot her attire and ornaments and appearance, and consigned herself wholly to conversation, with that intelligent animation which marks her character. She inquired immediately how my little boy did, and then with great sweetness after his father, and after my father. My first subject was the princess royal, and I accounted for not having left my hermitage in the hope of once more seeing her royal highness before her departure. It would have been, I told her, so melancholy a pleasure to have come merely for a last view, that I could not bear to take my annual indulgence at a period which would make it leave a mournful impression upon my mind for a twelvemonth to come. The princess said she could enter into that, but said it as if she had been surprised I had not appeared. She then gave ne some account of the ceremony ;(147) and when I told her I had heard that her royal highness the bride had never looked so lovely, she confirmed the praise warmly, but laughingly added, "'Twas the queen dressed her! You know what a figure she used to make of herself, with her odd manner Of Page 139 dressing herself; but mamma said, 'Now really, princess royal, this one time is the last, and I cannot suffer you to make such a quiz of yourself; so I will really have you dressed such a quiz of yourself, properly.' And indeed the queen was quite in the right, for everybody said she had never looked so well in her life." The word "quiz," you may depend, was never the queen's. I had great comfort, however, in gathering, from all that passed on that subject, that the royal family is persuaded this estimable princess is happy. From what I know of her disposition I am led to believe the situation may make her so. She is born to preside, and that with equal softness and dignity; but she was here in utter subjection, for which she had neither spirits nor inclination. She adored the king, honoured the queen, and loved her sisters, and had much kindness for her brothers ; but her style of life was not adapted to the royalty of her nature, any more than of her birth; and though she only wished for power to do good and to confer favours, she thought herself out of her place in not possessing it. I was particularly happy to learn from the Princess Augusta that she has already a favourite friend in her new Court, in one of the princesses of Wurtemberg, wife of a younger brother of the hereditary prince, and who is almost as a widow, from the prince, her husband, being constantly with the army. This is a delightful circumstance, as her turn of mind, and taste, and ,employments, accord singularly with those of our princess. I have no recollection of the order of our conversation, but will give you what morsels occur to me as they arise in my memory. The terrible mutiny occupied us some time.(148) She told me Page 140 many anecdotes that she had learnt in favour Of various sailors, declaring, with great animation, her security In their good hearts, however drawn aside by harder and more cunning heads, The sweetness with which she delights to get out of all that is forbidding in her rank is truly adorable. In speaking of a sailor on board the St. Fiorenzo, when the royal family made their excursion by sea from Weymouth, she said, "You must know this man was a great favourite of mine, for he had the most honest countenance you can conceive, and I have often talked with him, every time we have been at Weymouth, so that we were good friends; but I wanted now in particular to ask him concerning the mutiny, but I knew I should not get him to speak out while the king and queen and my sisters were by ; so I told Lady Charlotte Bellasyse to watch an opportunity when he was upon deck, and the rest were in the cabin, and then we went up to him and questioned him; and he quite answered my expectations, for, instead of taking any merit to himself from belonging to the St. Fiorenso, which was never in the mutiny, the good creature said he was sure there was not a sailor in the navy that was not sorry to have belonged to it, and would not have got out of it as readily as himself, if he had known but how." The Princess Elizabeth now entered, but she did not stay. She came to ask something of her sister relative to a little f�te she was preparing, by way of a collation, in honour of the Princess Sophia, who was twenty this day. She made kind inquiries after my health, etc., and, being mistress of the birthday f�te, hurried off, and I had not the pleasure to see her any more. I must be less minute, or I shall never have done. My charming Princess Augusta renewed the conversation. Admiral Duncan's noble victory(149) became the theme, but it was interrupted by the appearance of the lovely Princess Amelia, now become a model of grace, beauty and sweetness, Page 141 in their bud. She gave me her hand with the softest expression of kindness, and almost immediately began questioning me concerning my little boy and with an air of interest the most captivating. But again Princess Augusta declined any interruptors: "You shall have Madame d'Arblay all to yourself, my dear, soon," she cried, laughingly; and, with a smile a little serious, the sweet Princess Amelia retreated. It would have been truly edifying to young ladies living in the great and public world to have assisted in my place at the toilette of this exquisite Princess Augusta. Her ease, amounting even to indifference, as to her ornaments and decoration, showed a mind so disengaged from vanity, so superior to personal appearance, that I could with difficulty forbear manifesting my admiration. She let the hair-dresser proceed upon her head without comment and without examination, just as if it was solely his affair ; and when the man, Robinson, humbly begged to know what ornaments he was to prepare the hair for, she said, "O, there are my feathers, and my gown is blue, so take what you think right." And when he begged she would say whether she would have any ribbons or other things mixed with the feathers and jewels, she said, "You understand all that best, Mr. Robinson, I'm sure; there are the things, so take just what you please." And after this she left him wholly to himself, never a moment interrupting her discourse or her attention with a single direction. INTERVIEW WITH THE QUEEN. Princess Augusta had just begun a very interesting account of an officer that had conducted himself singularly well in the mutiny, when Miss Planta came to summon me to the queen. I begged permission to return afterwards for my unfinished narrative, and then proceeded to the white closet. The queen was alone, seated at a table, and working. Miss Planta opened the door and retired without entering. I felt a good deal affected by the sight of her Majesty again, so graciously accorded to my request ; but my first and instinctive feeling was nothing to what I experienced when, after my profoundly respectful reverence, I raised my eyes, and saw in hers a look of sensibility so expressive of regard, and so examining, so penetrating into mine, as to seem to convey, involuntarily, a regret I had quitted her. This, at least, was the idea that struck me, from the species of look which met Page 142 me; and it touched me to the heart, and brought instantly, in defiance of all struggle, a flood of tears into my eyes. I was some minutes recovering; and when I then entreated her forgiveness, and cleared up, the voice with which she Spoke, in hoping I was well, told me she had caught a little of my sensation, for it was by no means steady. Indeed, at that moment, I longed to kneel and beseech her pardon for the displeasure I had felt in her long resistance of my resignation, for I think, now, it was from a real and truly honourable wish to attach me to her for ever. But I then suffered too much from a situation so ill adapted to my choice and disposition, to do justice to her opposition, or to enjoy its honour to myself. Now that I am so singularly, alas! nearly singularly happy, though wholly from my perseverance in that resignation, I feel all I owe her, and I feel more and more grateful for every mark of her condescension, either recollected or renewed. She looked ill, pale, and harassed. The king was but just returned from his abortive visit to the Nore, and the inquietude she had sustained during that short separation, circumstanced many ways alarmingly, had evidently shaken her: I saw with much, with deep concern, her sunk eyes and spirits. I believe the sight of me raised not the latter. Mrs. Schwellenberg had not long been dead, and I have some reason to think she would not have been sorry to have had me supply the vacancy; for I had immediate notice sent me of her death by Miss Planta, so written as to persuade me it was a letter by command. But not all my duty, all my gratitude, could urge me, even one short fleeting moment, to weigh any interest against the soothing serenity, the unfading felicity, of a hermitage such as mine. We spoke of poor Mrs. Schwelly,--and of her successor, Mlle. Backmeister,--and of mine, Mrs. Bremyere; and I could not but express my concern that her majesty had again been so unfortunate, for Mlle. Jacobi had just retired to Germany, ill and dissatisfied with everything in England. The Princess Augusta had recounted to me the whole narrative of her retirement, and its circumstances. The queen told me that the king had very handsomely taken care of her. But such frequent retirements are heavy weights upon the royal bounty. I felt almost guilty when the subject was started; but not from any reproach, any allusion,-not a word was dropped that had not kindness and goodness for its basis and its superstructure at once. Page 143 "How is your little boy?" was one of the earliest questions. "is he here?" she added. "O yes," I answered, misunderstanding her, "he is my shadow; I go nowhere without him." "But here, I mean?" "O no! ma'am, I did not dare presume--" I stopped, for her look said it would be no presumption. And Miss Planta had already desired me to bring him to her next time; which I suspect was by higher order than her own suggestion. She then inquired after my dear father, and so graciously, that I told her not only of his good health, but his occupations, his new work, a "Poetical History of Astronomy," and his consultations with Herschel. She permitted me to speak a good deal of the Princess of Wurtemberg, whom they still all call princess royal. She told me she had worked her wedding garment, and entirely, and the real labour it had proved, from her steadiness to have no help, well knowing that three stitches done by any other would make it immediately said it was none of it by herself. "As the bride of a widower," she continued, "I know she ought to be in white and gold ; but as the king's eldest daughter she had a right to white and silver, which she preferred." A little then we talked of the late great naval victory, and she said it was singularly encouraging to us that the three great victories at sea had been "against our three great enemies, successively : Lord Howe against the French, Lord St. Vincent against the Spaniards, and Lord Duncan against the Dutch."(150) She spoke very feelingly of the difficult situation of the Orange family, now in England, upon this battle; and she repeated me the contents of' a letter from the Princess of Orange, whose character she much extolled, upon the occasion, page 144 to the Princess Elizabeth, saying she could not bear to be the only person in England to withhold her congratulations to the king upon such an occasion, when no one owed him such obligations; but all she had to regret was that the Dutch had not fought with, not against, the English, and that the defeat had not fallen upon those who ought to be their joint enemies. She admired and pitied, inexpressibly, this poor fugitive princess. I told her of a note my father had received from Lady Mary Duncan, in answer to his wishing her joy of her relation's prowess and success, in which he says, "Lady Mary has been, for some days past, like the rest of the nation drunk for joy." This led to more talk of this singular lady: and reciprocal stories of her oddities. She then deigned to inquire very particularly about our new cottage,-its size, its number of rooms, and its grounds. I told her, honestly, it was excessively comfortable, though unfinished and unfitted up, for that it had innumerable little contrivances and conveniences, just adapted to our particular use and taste, as M. d'Arblay had been its sole architect and surveyor. "Then I dare say," she answered, "it is very commodious, for there are no people understand enjoyable accommodations more than French gentleman, when they have the arranging them themselves." This was very kind, and encouraged me to talk a good deal of my partner, in his various works and employments ; and her manner of attention was even touchingly condescending, all circumstances considered. And she then related to me the works of two French priests, to whom she has herself been so good as to commit the fitting up of one of her apartments at Frogmore. And afterwards she gave me a description of what another French gentleman-- elegantly and feelingly avoiding to say emigrant--had done in a room belonging to Mrs. Harcourt, at Sophia farm, where he had the sole superintendence of it, and has made it beautiful. When she asked about our field, I told her we hoped in time to buy it, as Mr. Locke had the extreme kindness to consent to part with it to us, when it should suit our convenience to purchase instead of renting it. I thought I saw a look of peculiar satisfaction at this, that seemed to convey pleasure in the implication thence to be drawn, that England was our decided, not forced or eventual residence. And she led me on to many minute particulars of our situation and way of living, with a sweetness of interest I can never forget. Page 145 Nor even here stopped the sensations of gratitude and pleasure she thus awoke. She spoke then of my beloved Susan ; asked if she were still in Ireland, and how the " pretty Norbury " did. She then a little embarrassed me by an inquiry "why Major Phillips went to Ireland?" for my answer, that he was persuaded he should improve his estate by superintending the agriculture of it himself, seemed dissatisfactory; however, she pressed it no further. But I cannot judge by what passed whether she concludes he is employed in a military way there, or whether she has heard that he has retired. She seemed kindly pleased at all I had to relate of my dear Norbury, and I delighted to call him back to her remembrance. She talked a good deal of the Duchess of York, who continues the first favourite of the whole royal family. She told me of her beautiful works, lamented her indifferent health, and expatiated upon her admirable distribution of her time and plan of life, and charming qualities and character. But what chiefly dwells upon me with pleasure is, that she spoke to me upon some subjects and persons that I know she would not for the world should be repeated, with just the same confidence, the same reliance upon my grateful discretion for her openness, that she honoured me with while she thought me established in her service for life. I need not tell my Susan how this binds me more than ever to her. Very short to me seemed the time, though the whole conversation was serious, and her air thoughtful almost to sadness, when a page touched the door, and said something in German. The queen, who was then standing by the window, turned round to answer him, and then, with a sort of Congratulatory smile to me, said, "Now you will see what you don't expect--the king!" I could indeed not expect it, for he was at Blackheath at a review, and he was returned only to dress for the levee. . . THE KING AND HIS INFANT GRAND-DAUGHTER. The king related very pleasantly- a little anecdote of Lady --. "She brought the little Princess Charlotte,"(151) he said "to me just before the review. 'She hoped,' she said, 'I should not take it ill, for, having mentioned it to the child, Page 146 she built so upon it that she had thought of nothing else.' Now this," cried he, laughing heartily, "was pretty strong! How can she know what a child is thinking of before it can speak?" I was very happy at the fondness they both expressed for the little princess, "A sweet little creature," the king called her; "A most lovely child," the queen turned to me to add and the king said he had taken her upon his horse, and given her a little ride, before the regiment rode up to him. "'TIS very odd," he added, "but she always knows me on horseback, and never else." "Yes," said the queen, "when his majesty comes to her on horseback, she claps her little bands, and endeavours to say 'Gampa!' immediately." I was much pleased that she is brought up to such simple and affectionate acknowledgment of relationship. The king then inquired about my father, and with a look of interest and kindness that regularly accompanies his mention of that most dear person. He asked after his health, his spirits, and his occupations, waiting for long answers to each inquiry, The queen anticipated my relation of his astronomic work, and he seemed much pleased with the design, as well as at hearing that his prot�g� Dr. Herschel, had been consulted. I was then a little surprised by finding he had heard of "Clarentine."(152) He asked me, smilingly, some questions about it, and if it were true, what he suspected, that my young sister had a mind to do as I had done, and bring out a work in secret? I was very much pleased then when the queen said, "I have seen it, sir, and it is very pretty." . . . ADMIRAL DUNCAN'S VICTORY. THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF ORANGE. I then, by her majesty's kind appointment, returned to my lovely and loved Princess Augusta. Her hairdresser was just gone, and she was proceeding in equipping herself "If you can bear to see all this work," cried she, "pray come and sit with me, my dear Madame d'Arblay." Nothing could be more expeditious than her attiring herself, nothing more careless than her examination how it succeeded. But judge my confusion and embarrassment, when, upon my saying I came to petition for the rest of the Story, Page 147 she had just begun, and her answering by inquiring what it was about, I could not tell! It had entirely escaped my memory; and though I sought every way I could suggest to recall it, I so entirely failed, that after her repeated demands, I was compelled honestly to own that the commotion I had been put in by my interview with their majesties had really driven it from my mind. She bore this with the true good humour of good sense but I was most excessively ashamed. She then resumed the reigning subject of the day, Admiral Duncan's victory and this led to speak again of the Orange family; but she checked what seemed occurring to her about them, till her wardrobe-woman had done and was -dismissed ; then, hurrying her away, while she sat down by me, putting on her long and superb diamond earrings herself, and without even turning towards a glass, she said, "I don't like much to talk of that family before the servants, for I am told they already think the king too good to them." The Princess of Orange is, I find, a great favourite with them all ; the Prince Frederick also, I believe, they like very much; but the prince himself, she said, " has never, in fact, had his education finished. He was married quite a ',-,'boy - but, being married, concluded himself a man, and not only turned off all his instructors, but thought it unnecessary to ask, or hear, counsel or advice of any one. He is like a fallow field,-that is, not of a soil that can't be improved ;:but one that has been left quite to itself, and therefore has no materials put in it for improvement." She then told me that she had hindered him, with great faculty, from going to a great dinner, given at the Mansion House. upon the victory of Admiral Duncan. It was not, she said, that he did not feel for his country in that defeat, but that he never weighed the impropriety of his public appearance upon an occasion of rejoicing at it, nor the Ill effect the history of his so doing would produce in Holland. She had the kindness of heart to take upon herself preventing him "for no one," says she, "that is about him dares ever speak to him, to give him any hint of advice; which is a great "Misfortune: to him, poor man, for it makes him never know what is said or thought of him." She related with a great deal of humour her arguments to dissuade him, and his na�ve manner of combating them. But though she conquered at last, she did not convince, Page 148 The Princess of Orange, she told me, had a most superior understanding and might guide him sensibly and honourably, but he was so jealous of being thought led by her counsel' that he never listened to it at all. She gave me to understand that this unhappy princess had had a life of uninterrupted indulgence and prosperity till the late revolution - and that the suddenness of such adversity had rather soured her mind, which, had it met sorrow and evil by any gradations, would have been equal to bearing them even nobly - but so quick a transition from affluence, and power, and wealth, and grandeur, to a fugitive and dependent state, had almost overpowered her. A door was now opened from an inner apartment, where, I believe, was the grand collation for the Princess Sophia's birthday, and a tall thin young man appeared at it, peeping and staring, but not entering. "O! How do you do, Ernest?" cried the princess; "I hope you are well; only pray do shut the door." He did not obey, nor move, either forwards or backwards, but kept peering and peeping. She called to him again, beseeching him to shut the door- but he was determined to first gratify his curiosity, and, when he had looked as long as he thought pleasant, he entered the apartment; but Princess Augusta, instead of receiving and welcoming him, only said, "Good-bye, my dear Ernest; I shall see you again at the play." He then marched on, finding himself so little desired, and only saying, "No, you won't; I hate the play." I had risen when I found it one of the princes, and with a motion of readiness to depart - but my dear princess would not let me. When we were alone again, "Ernest," she said, "has a very good heart; only he speaks without taking time to think." She then gave me an instance. The Orange family by some chance were all assembled with our royal family when the news of the great victory at sea arrived; or at least upon the same day. "We were all," said she, " distressed for them upon SO trying an occasion and at supper we talked, of' course, Of every other subject; but Ernest, quite uneasy at the forbearance, said to me, 'You don't think I won't drink Duncan's health to-night?' 'Hush!' cried I. 'That's very hard indeed!' said he, quite loud. I saw the princess of Page 149 orange looking at him, and was sure she had heard him; I trod upon his foot, and made him turn to her. She looked so disturbed, that he saw she had understood him, and he coloured very high. The Princess of Orange then said, 'I hope my being here will be no restraint upon anybody: I know what must be the subject of everybody's thoughts, and I beg I may not prevent its being so of their discourse.' Poor Ernest now was so sorry, he was ready to die, and the tears started into his eyes; and he would not have given his toast after this for all the world." SOME NOTABLE ACTRESSES. The play they were going to was "The Merchant of Venice," to see a new actress, just now much talked of--Miss Betterton; and the king, hearing she was extremely frightened at the thoughts of appearing before him, desired she might choose her own part for the first exhibition in his presence. She fixed upon Portia. In speaking of Miss Farren's marriage with the Earl of Derby, she displayed that sweet mind which her state and station has so wholly escaped sullying; for, far from expressing either horror, or resentment, or derision at an actress being elevated to the rank of second countess of England, she told me, with an air of satisfaction, that she was informed she had behaved extremely well since her marriage, and done many generous and charitable actions. She spoke with pleasure, too, of the high marriage made by another actress, Miss Wallis, who has preserved a spotless character, and is now the wife of a man of fortune and family Mr Campbell. In mentioning Mrs. Siddons, and her great and affecting powers, she much surprised me by intelligence that she had bought the proprietorship of Sadler's-wells. I could not hear it without some amusement it seemed, I said, so extraordinary a combination--so degrading a one, indeed,-that of the first tragic actress, the living Melpomene, and something so burlesque as Sadler's-wells. She laughed, and said it offered her a very ludicrous image, for Mrs. Siddons and Sadler's-wells," said she, " seems to me as ill-fitted as the dish they call a toad in a hole which I never saw, but always think of with anger, - -putting a noble sirloin of beef into .1 ,'poor, Paltry batter-pudding! Page 150 THE DUKE OF CLARENCE. The door now again opened, and another royal personage put in his head - and upon the princess saying, "How d'ye do, William?" I recollected the Duke of Clarence. I rose, of course, and he made a civil bow to my curtsey The princess asked him about the House of Lords the preceding evening, where I found he had spoken very handsomely and generously in eulogium of Admiral Duncan. Finding he was inclined to stay, the princess said to me, "Madame d'Arblay, I beg you will sit down." "Pray, madam," said the duke, with a formal motion of his hand, "let me beg you to be seated." "You know--you recollect Madame d'Arblay, don't you, William ?" said the princess. He bowed civilly an affirmative, and then began talking to me of Chesington. How I grieved poor dear Kitty was gone! How great would have been her gratification to have heard that he mentioned her, and with an air of kindness, as if he had really entered into the solid goodness of her character. I was much Surprised and much pleased, yet not without some perplexity and some embarrassment, as his knowledge of the excellent Kitty was from her being the dupe of the mistress of his aide-de-camp. The princess, however, saved me any confusion beyond apprehension, for she asked not one question. He moved on towards the next apartment, and we were again alone. She then talked to me a great deal of him, and gave me, admirably, his character. She is very partial to him, but by no means blindly. He had very good parts, she said, but seldom did them justice. "If he has something of high importance to do," she continued, "he will exert himself to the utmost, and do it really well; but otherwise, he is so fond of his ease, he lets everything take its course. He can just do a great deal or nothing. However, I really think, if he takes pains, he may make something of a speaker by and by in the House." She related a visit he had made at Lady Mary Duncan's, at Hampton Court, upon hearing Admiral Duncan was there and told me the whole and most minute particulars of the battle, as they were repeated by his royal highness from the admiral's own account. But You will dispense with the martial detail from me. "Lady Mary," cried she, "is much Page 151 enchanted with her gallant nephew. 'I used to look,' says she, 'for honour and glory from my other side, the T--s ; but I receive it only from the Duncans ! As to the T-s, what good do they do their country?--why, they play all day at tennis, and learn with vast skill to notch and scotch and go one! And that's what their country gets from them!"' I thought now I should certainly be dismissed, for a page came to the door to announce that the Duke of York was arrived : but she only said, "Very well; pray shut the door," which seemed her gentle manner of having it understood she would not be disturbed, as she used the same words when messages were brought her from the Princesses Elizabeth and Mary. She spoke again of the Duchess of York with the same fondness as at Windsor. "I told you before," she said, "I loved her like one of my own sisters, and I can tell you no more: and she knows it; for one day she was taken ill, and fainted, and we put her upon one of our beds, and got her everything we could think of ourselves, and let nobody else wait upon her ; and when she revived she said to my brother, 'These are my sisters--I am sure they are! they must be my own!" PRINCESS SOPHIA OF GLOUCESTER. Our next and last interruption, I think, was from a very gentle tap at the door, and a "May I come in?" from a soft voice, while the lock was turned, and a youthful and very lovely female put in her head. The princess immediately rose, and said, " "O yes," and held out her two hands to her; turning at the same time to me, and saying, "Princess Sophia." I found it was the Duke of Gloucester's(154) daughter. She is very fat, with very fine eyes, a bright, even dazzling bloom, fine teeth, a beautiful skin, and a look of extreme modesty and sweetness. She curtseyed to me so distinguishingly, that I was almost confused by her condescension, fearing she 'Might imagine, from finding me seated with the Princess 'Augusta, and in such close conference, I was somebody. "You look so fine and so grand," cried she, examining the princess's attire, which was very superb in silver and diamonds, "that I am almost afraid to come near you!" Her own dress was perfectly simple, though remarkably elegant. Page 152 O!--I hate myself when so fine cried Princess Augusta; "I cannot bear it but there is no help--the people at the play always expect it." They then conversed a little while, both standing ; and then Princess Augusta said, "Give my love to the duke (meaning of Gloucester), "and I hope I shall see him bye and bye; and to William."(155) (meaning the duke's son). And this, which was not a positive request that she would prolong her visit, was understood; and the lovely cousin made her curtsey and retired. To me, again, she made another, so gravely low and civil, that I really blushed to receive it, from added fear of being mistaken. I accompanied her to the door, and shut it for her; and the moment she was out of the room, and out of sight of the Princess Augusta, she turned round to me, and with a smile of extreme Civility, and a voice very soft, said, "I am so happy to see you!--I have longed for it a great, great while--for I have read you with such delight and instruction, so often." I was very much surprised indeed; I expressed my sense of her goodness as well as I could; and she curtseyed again, and glided away. "How infinitely gracious is all your royal highness's House to me!" cried I, as I returned to my charming princess; who again made me take my seat next her own, and again renewed her discourse. I stayed on with this delightful princess till near four o'clock, when she descended to dinner. I then accompanied her to the head of the stairs, saying, "I feel quite low that this is over! How I wish it might be repeated in half a year instead of a year!" "I'm sure, and so do I!" were the last kind words she condescendingly uttered. I then made a little visit to Miss Planta, who was extremely friendly, and asked me why I should wait another year before I came. I told her I had leave for an annual visit, and could not presume to encroach beyond such a permission. However, as she proposed my calling upon her when I happened to be in town, I begged her to take some opportunity to hint my wish of admission, if possible, more frequently. Very soon afterwards I had a letter from Miss Planta, saying she had mentioned to her majesty my regret of the Page 153 long intervals of annual admissions; and that her majesty had most graciously answered, "She should be very glad to see me whenever I came to town." DIARY RESUMED: (Addressed to Mrs. Phillips.) INDIGNATION AGAINST TALLEYRAND. Westhamble, Jan. 18, 1798-I am very impatient to know if the invasion threat affects your part of Ireland. Our 'Oracle' is of opinion the French soldiers will not go to Ireland, though there flattered with much help, because they can expect but little advantage, after all the accounts spread by the Opposition of its starving condition ; but that they will come to England, though sure of contest, at least, because there they expect the very road to be paved with gold. Nevertheless, how I wish my heart's beloved here! to share with us at least the same fears, instead of the division of apprehension we must now mutually be tormented with. I own I am sometimes affrighted enough. These sanguine and sanguinary wretches will risk all for the smallest hope of plunder ; and Barras assures them they have only to enter England to be lords of wealth unbounded. But Talleyrand!--how like myself must you have felt at his conduct! indignant--amazed--ashamed! Our first prepossession against him was instinct--he conquered it by pains indefatigable to win us, and he succeeded astonishingly, for we became partial to him almost to fondness. The part he now acts against England may be justified, perhaps, by the spirit of revenge ; but the part he submits to perform of coadjutor with the worst of villains--with Barras--Rewbel--Merlin--marks some internal atrocity of character that disgusts as much as disappoints me. And now, a last stroke, which appears in yesterday's paper, gives the finishing hand to his portrait in my eyes. He has sent (and written) the letter which exhorts the King of Prussia to order the Duke of Brunswick to banish and drive from his dominions all the emigrants there in asylum --and among these are the Archbishop of Rennes (his uncle) and--his own mother! Poor M. de Narbonne! how will he be shocked and let down! where he now is we cannot conjecture: all emigrants are exiled from the Canton of Berne, where he resided; I feel extremely disturbed about him. If that wretch Talleyrand has Page 154 not given him some private Intimation to escape, and where to be safe, he must be a monster. THE D'ARBLAY MAISONNETTE. This very day, I thank God ! we paid the last of our work men. Our house now is our own fairly --that it is our own madly too you will all think, when I tell you the small remnant of our income that has outlived this payment. However, if the Carmagnols do not seize our walls, we despair not of enjoying, in defiance of all straitness and strictness, our dear dwelling to our hearts' content. But we are reducing our expenses and way of life, in order to go on, in a manner you would laugh to see, though almost cry to hear. But I never forget Dr. Johnson's words. When somebody said that a certain person "had no turn for economy," he answered, "Sir, you might as well say that he has no turn for honesty." We know nothing yet of our taxes-nothing- of our assessments; but we are of good courage, and so pleased with our maisonnette, we think nothing too dear for it, provided we can but exist in it. I should like much to know how you stand affected about the assessment, and about the invasion. O that all these public troubles would accelerate Your return! private blessings they would then, at least, prove. Ah, my Susan, how do I yearn for some little ray upon this subject! Charles and his family are at Bath, and Charlotte is gone to them for a fortnight. All accounts that reach me of all the house and race are well. Mr. Locke gives us very-frequent peeps indeed, and looks with such benevolent pleasure at our dear cottage and its environs! and seems to say, "I brought all this to bear," and to feel happy in the noble trust he placed in our self-belief that he might venture to show that kind courage without which we could never have been united. All this retrospection is expressed by his penetrating eyes it every visit. He rarely alights ; but I frequently enter the phaeton, and take a conversation in an airing. And when he comes without his precious Amelia, he indulges my Alex in being our third. INTERVIEW WITH THE QUEEN AND THE PRINCESSES. And now I have to prepare another Court relation for MY dearest Susanna. I received on Wednesday morn a letter from our dearest Page 155 father, telling me he feared he should be forced to quit his Chelsea apartments, from a new arrangement among the officers, and wishing me to represent his difficulties, his books, health, time of life, and other circumstances, through Miss Planta, to the queen. M. d'Arblay and I both thought that, if I had any chance of being of the smallest use, it would be by endeavouring to obtain an audience-not by letter; and as the most remote hope of success was sufficient to urge -every exertion, we settled that I should set out instantly for Chelsea ; and a chaise, therefore, we sent for from Dorking, and I set off at noon. M. d'A. would not go, as we knew not what accommodation I might find ; and I could not, uninvited and unexpected, take my little darling boy; so I went not merrily, though never more willingly. My dear father was at home, and, I could see, by no means surprised by my appearance, though he had not hinted at desiring it. Of course he was not very angry nor sorry, and we communed together upon his apprehensions, and settled our plan. I was to endeavour to represent his case to the queen, in hopes it might reach his majesty, and procure some order in his favour. I wrote to Miss Planta, merely to say I was come to pass three days at Chelsea, and, presuming upon the gracious permission of her majesty, I ventured to make known my arrival, ,in the hope it might possibly procure me the honour of admittance. The next morning, Thursday, I had a note from Miss Planta, to say that she had the pleasure to acquaint ',.",me her majesty desired I would be at the Queen's house next day at ten o'clock. Miss Planta conducted me immediately, by order, to the Princess Elizabeth, who received me alone, and kept me t�te- -t�te till I was summoned to the queen, which was near ,.an hour. She was all condescension and openness, and inquired into my way of life and plans, with a sort of kindness that I am sure belonged to a real wish to find them happy and prosperous. When I mentioned how much of our time was mutually given to books and writing, M. d'Arblay being as great a scribbler as myself, she good-naturedly exclaimed, "How fortunate he should have so much the same taste!" "It was that, in fact," I answered, "which united us for our acquaintance began, in intimacy, by reading French together, and writing themes, both French and English, for each other's correction." Page 156 "Pray," cried she, " if it is not impertinent, may I ask to what religion you shall bring up your son?" "The Protestant," I replied; telling her it was M. d'Arblay's own wish, since he was an Englishman born, he should be an Englishman bred,--with much more upon the subject that my Susan knows untold. She then inquired why M. d'Arblay was not naturalised. This was truly kind, for it looked like wishing our permanently fixing in this his adopted country. I answered that he found he could not be naturalised as a catholic, which had made him relinquish the plan; for though he was firmly persuaded the real difference between the two religions was trifling, and such as even appeared to him, in the little he had had opportunity to examine, to be in favour of Protestantism, he could not bring himself to study the matter with a view of changing that seemed actuated by interest ; nor could I wish it, earnest as I was for his naturalisation. But he hoped, ere long, to be able to be naturalised as an Irishman, that clause of religion not being there insisted upon , or else to become a denizen, which was next best, and which did not meddle with religion at all. She made me talk to her a great deal of my little boy, and my father, and M. d'Arblay; and when Miss Planta came to fetch me to her majesty, she desired to see me again before my departure. The queen was in her White closet, working at a round table, with the four remaining princesses, Augusta, Mary, Sophia, and Amelia. She received me most sweetly, and with a look of far better spirits than upon my last admission. She permitted me, in the most gracious manner, to inquire about the princess royal, now Duchess of WUrtemberg, and gave me an account of her that I hope is not flattered ; for it seemed happy, and such as reconciled them all to the separation. When she deigned to inquire,- herself, after my dear father, you may be sure of the eagerness With which I seized the moment for relating his embarrassment and difficulties. She heard me with a benevolence that assured me, though she made no speech, my history would not be forgotten, nor remembered vainly. I was highly satisfied with her look and manner. The Princesses Mary and Amelia had a little opening between them , and when the queen was conversing with some lady who was teaching the Princess Sophia some work, they began a whispering conversation with me about my little Page 157 boy. How tall is he?--how old is he?--Is he fat or thin?--is he like you or M. d'Arblay? etc.--with sweet vivacity of interest,- -the lovely Princess Amelia finishing her listening to my every answer with a "dear little thing!" that made me long to embrace her as I have done in her childhood. She is now full as tall as princess royal, and as much formed ; she looks seventeen, though only fourteen, but has an innocence, an Hebe blush, an air of modest candour, and a gentleness so caressingly inviting, of voice and eye, that I have seldom seen a more captivating young creature. Then they talked of my new house, and inquired about every room it contained; and then of our grounds, and they were mightily diverted with the mixtures of roses and cabbages, sweet briars, and potatoes, etc. The queen, catching the domestic theme, presently made inquiries herself, both as to the building and the child, asking, with respect to the latter, "Is he here?" as if she meant in the palace. I told her I had come so unexpectedly myself upon my father's difficulties, that I had not this time brought my little shadow. I believed, however, I should fetch him, as, if I lengthened my stay, M. d'Arblay would come also. "To be sure!" she said, as if feeling the trio's full objections to separating. She asked if I had seen a play just come out, called "He's much to Blame;" and, on my negative, began to relate to me its plot and characters, and the representation and its effect ; and, warming herself by her own account and my attention, she presently entered into a very minute history of each act, and a criticism upon some incidents, with a spirit and judiciousness that were charming. She is delightful in discourse when animated by her subject, and speaking to auditors with whom, neither from circumstance nor suspicion, she has restraint. But when, as occasionally she deigned to ask my opinion of the several actors she brought in review, I answered I had never seen them,--neither Mrs. Pope, Miss Betterton, Mr. Murray, etc.,--she really looked almost concerned. She knows my fondness for the theatre, and I did not fear to say my inability to indulge it was almost my only regret in my hermit life. "I, too," she graciously said, "prefer plays to all other amusements." By degrees all the princesses retired, except the Princess Augusta. She then spoke more openly upon less public matters,-in particular upon the affair, then just recent, of the Page 158 Duke of Norfolk, who, you may have heard, had drunk, at the Whig Club, "To the majesty of the people," in consequence of which the king had erased his name from the privy council. His grace had been caricatured drinking from a silver tankard with the burnt bread still in flames touching his mouth, and exclaiming, "Pshaw! my toast has burnt my mouth." This led me to speak of his great brick house, which is our immediate vis- -vis. And much then ensued upon Lady ---- concerning whom she opened to me very completely, allowing all I said of her uncommon excellence as a mother, but adding, "Though she is certainly very clever, she thinks herself so a little too much, and instructs others at every word. I was so tired with her beginning everything with 'I think,' that, at last, just as she said so, I stopped her, and cried., 'O, I know what you think, Lady ----!' Really, one is obliged to be quite sharp with her to keep her In her place." . . . Lady C--, she had been informed, had a considerable sum in the French funds, which she endeavoured from time to time to recover, but upon her last effort, she had the following query put to her agent by order of the Directory: how much she would have deducted from the principal, as a contribution towards the loan raising for the army of England? If Lady C-- were not mother-in-law to a minister who sees the king almost daily, I should think this a made story. When, after about an hour and a half's audience, *she dismissed me, she most graciously asked my stay at Chelsea, and desired I would inform Miss Planta before I returned home. This gave me the most gratifying feeling, and much hope for my dearest father. ROYAL CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS THE WAR. Returning then, according to my permission, to Princess Elizabeth, she again took up her netting, and made me sit by her. We talked a good deal of the new-married daughter of Lady Templetown, and she was happy, she said, to hear from me that the ceremony was performed by her own favourite Bishop of Durham, for she was sure a blessing would attend his joining their hands. She asked me much of my little man, and told me several things of the Princess Charlotte, her niece, and our future queen; she seems very fond of her, and says 'tis a lovely child, and extremely like the Prince Of Page 159 Wales. "She is just two years old," said she, "and speaks very prettily, though not plainly. I flatter myself Aunt Liby, as she calls me, is a great favourite with her." My dearest Princess Augusta soon after came in, and, after staying a few minutes, and giving some message to her sister, said, "And when you leave Elizabeth, my dear Madame d'Arblay, I hope you'll come to me." This happened almost immediately, and I found her hurrying over the duty of her toilette, which she presently despatched, though she was going to a public concert of Ancient Music, and without scarcely once looking in the glass, from haste to have done, and from a freedom from vanity I never saw quite equalled in any young woman of any class. She then dismissed her hairdresser and wardrobe-woman, and made me sit by her. Almost immediately we began upon the voluntary contributions to the support of the war; and when I mentioned the queen's munificent donation of five thousand pounds a-year for its support, and my admiration of it, from my peculiar knowledge, through my long residence under the royal roof, of the many claims which her majesty's benevolence, as well as state, had raised upon her powers, she seemed much gratified by the justice I did her royal mother, and exclaimed eagerly "I do assure you, my dear Madame d'Arblay, people ought to know more how good the queen is, for they don't know it half." And then she told me that she only by accident had learnt almost all that she knew of the queen's bounties. "And the most I gathered," she continued, laughing, "was, to tell you the real truth, by my own impertinence - for when we were at Cheltenham, Lady Courtown (the queen's lady-in-waiting for the country) put her pocket-book down on the table, when I was alone with her, by some chance open at a page where mamma's name was written : so, not guessing at any secret commission, I took it up, and read-Given by her majesty's commands--so much, and so much, and so much. And I was quite surprised. However, Lady Courtown made me promise never to mention it to the queen ; so I never have. But I long it should be known, for all that; though I would not take such a liberty as to spread it of my own judgment." I then mentioned my own difficulties formerly, when her Majesty, upon my ill state of health's urging my resigning the honour of belonging to the royal household, so graciously Page 160 settled upon me a pension, that I had been forbidden to name it. I had been quite distressed in not avowing what I so gratefully felt, and hearing questions and surmises and remarks I had no power to answer. She seemed instantly to comprehend that my silence might do wrong, on such an occasion, to the queen, for she smiled, and with great quickness cried, "O, I dare say you felt quite guilty in holding your tongue." And she was quite pleased with the permission afterwards granted me to be explicit. When I spoke of her own and her royal sisters' contributions, one hundred pounds per annum, she blushed, bat seemed ready to enter upon the subject, even confidentially, and related its whole history. No one ever advised or named it to them, as they have none of them any separate establishment, but all hang upon the queen, from whose pin-money they are provided for till they marry, or have an household of their own granted by Parliament. "Yet we all longed to subscribe," cried she, "and thought it quite right, if other young ladies did, not to be left out. But the difficulty was, how to do what would not be improper for us, and yet not to be generous at mamma's expense, for that would only have been unjust. So we consulted some of our friends, and then fixed upon one hundred pounds a-piece; and when we asked the queen's leave, she was so good as to approve it. So then we spoke to the king, and he said it was but little, but he wished particularly nobody should subscribe what would really distress them ; and that, if that was all we could conveniently do, and regularly continue, he approved it more than to have us make a greater exertion, and either bring ourselves into difficulties or not go on. But he was not at all angry." She then gave me the history of the contribution of her brothers. The Prince of Wales could not give in his name without the leave of his creditors. "But Ernest," cried she, "gives three hundred pounds a-year, and that's a tenth of his income, for the king allows him three thousand pounds." All this leading to discourse upon loyalty, and then its contrast, democracy, she narrated to me at full length a lecture of Therwall's, which had been repeated to her by M. de Guiffardi�re. It was very curious from her mouth. But she is candour in its whitest purity, wherever it is possible to display it, in discriminating between good and bad, and abstracting rays of light even from the darkest shades. So she did even from Therwall. Page 161 She made me, as usual, talk of my little boy, and was much amused by hearing that, imitating what he heard from me, he called his father "mon ami," and tutoyed him, drinking his health at dinner, as his father does to me--"� la sant�." When at length the Princess Augusta gave me the bow of cong� she spoke of seeing me again soon: I said I should therefore lengthen my stay in town, and induce M. d'Arblay to come and bring my boy. "We shall see you then certainly," said she, smiling, "and do pray, my dear Madame d'Arblay, bring your little boy with you. And don't say anything to him," cried she, as I was departing; "let us see him quite natural." I understood her gracious, and let me say rational, desire, that the child should not be impressed with any awe of the royal presence. I assured her I must obey, for he was so young, so wild, and so unused to present himself, except as a plaything, that it would not be even in my power to make him orderly. . . . My dear father was extremely pleased with what I had to tell him, and hurried me back to Westhamble, to provide myself with baggage for sojourning with him. My two Alexanders, you will believe, were now warmly invited to Chelsea, and we all returned thither together, accompanied by Betty Nurse. INVITATION TO THE PLAY. MRS SCHWELLENBERG'S SUCCESSOR. I shall Complete my next Court visit before I enter upon aught else. I received, very soon, a note from Madame Bremyere, who is my successor. [I have told you poor Mlle. Jacobi is returned to Germany, I think; and that her niece, La Bettina, is to marry a rich English merchant and settle in London.] This note says Mrs Bremyere has received the queen's commands to invite Madame d'Arblay to the play tomorrow night "-with her own desire I would drink coffee in her apartment before we went to the theatre. Could anything More sweetly mark the real kindness of the queen than this remembrance of my fondness for plays ? My dear father lent me his carriage, and I was now introduced to the successor of Mrs. Schwellenberg, Mlle. Bachmeister, a German, brought over by M. de Luc, who travelled to Germany to accompany her hither. I found she was the lady I had seen with the queen and princesses, Page 162 ing some work. Not having been to the so-long-known apartments since the death of Mrs. Schwellenberg, I knew not how they were arranged, and had concluded Madame Bremyere possessed those of Mrs. Schwellenberg. Thither, therefore, I went, and was received, to my great surprise, by this lady, who was equally surprised by my entrance, though without any doubt who I might be, from having seen me with the queen, and from knowing I was to join the play-party to my ci-devant box. I inquired if I had made any mistake, but though she could not say no, she would not suffer Me to rectify it, but sent to ask Madame Bremyere to meet me in her room. Mlle. Bachmeister is extremely genteel in her figure, though extremely plain in her face; her voice is gentle and penetrating; her manners are soft, yet dignified, and she appears to be both a feeling and a cultivated character. I could not but lament such had not been the former possessor of an apartment I had so often entered with the most cruel antipathy. I liked her exceedingly; she is a marked gentlewoman in her whole deportment, though whether so from birth, education, or only mind, I am ignorant. Since she gave me so pleasant a prejudice in her favour, you will be sure our acquaintance began with some spirit. We talked much of the situation she filled; and I thought it my duty to cast the whole of my resignation of one so similar upon ill health. Mrs. Bremyere soon joined us, and we took up Miss Barbara Planta in our way to the theatre. When the king entered, followed by the queen and his lovely daughters, and the orchestra struck up " God save the king," and the people all called for the singers, who filled the stage to sing it, the emotion I was suddenly filled with so powerfully possessed me, that I wished I could, for a minute or two, have flown from the box, to have sobbed; I was so gratefully delighted at the sight before me, and so enraptured at the continued enthusiasm of the no longer volatile people for their worthy, revered sovereign, that I really suffered from the restraint I felt of being forced to behave decorously. The play was the "Heir at Law," by Colman the younger. I liked it extremely. It has a good deal of character, a happy plot, much interest in the under parts, and is combined, I think, by real genius, though open to innumerable partial criticisms. I heard a gentleman's voice from the next box call softly to Miss Barbara Planta, "Who is that lady?" and Page 163 heard her answer my name, and him rejoin, "I thought so." I found it was Lord Aylesbury, who also has resigned, and was at the play only for the pleasure of sitting opposite his late royal mistress. . . . MADAME D'ARBLAY's LITTLE BOY AT COURT. About a week after this theatrical regale, I went to the Queen's house, to make known I had only a few more days to remain at Chelsea. I arrived just as the royal family had set out for Windsor; but Miss Bacbmeister, fortunately, had only ascended her coach to follow. I alighted, and went to tell my errand. Mrs. Bremyere, Mrs. Cheveley, and Miss Planta were her party. The latter promised to speak for me to the queen; but, gathering I had my little boy, in my father's carriage, she made me send for him. They took him in, and loaded him with bonbons and admiration, and would have loaded him with caresses to boot, but the little wretch resisted that part of the entertainment. Upon their return from Windsor, you will not suppose me made very unhappy to receive the following billet:-- March 8th, 1798. My dear friend,-The queen has commanded me to acquaint you that she desires you will be at the Queen's house on Thursday morning at ten o'clock, with your lovely boy. You are desired to come upstairs in Princess Elizabeth's apartments, and her majesty will send for you as soon as she can see you. Adieu! Yours most affectionately, M. Planta. A little before ten, you will easily believe, we were at the ,Queen's house, and were immediately ushered into the apartment of the Princess Elizabeth, who, to show she expected my little man, had some playthings upon one of her many tables; for her royal highness has at least twenty in her principal room. The child, in a new muslin frock, sash, etc.' did not look to much disadvantage, and she examined him with the most good-humoured pleasure, and, finding him too shy to be seized, had the graciousness, as well as sense, to play round and court him by sportive wiles, instead of being offended at his insensibility to her royal notice. She ran about the room, peeped at him through chairs, clapped her hands, half caught without touching him, and showed a skill Page 164 and a sweetness that made one almost sigh she should have no call for her maternal propensities. There came in presently Miss D-, a young lady about thirteen, who seems in some measure under the protection of her royal highness, who had rescued her poor injured and amiable mother, Lady D-, from extreme distress, into which she had been involved by her unworthy husband's connexion with the infamous Lady W-, who, more hardhearted than even bailiffs, had forced certain of those gentry, in an execution she had ordered in Sir H. D-'s house, to seize even all the children's playthings ! as well as their clothes, and that when Lady D-- had but just lain in, and was nearly dying! This charming princess, who had been particularly acquainted with Lady D- during her own illness at Kew Palace, where the queen permitted the intercourse, came forward upon this distress, and gave her a small independent house in the neighbourhood of Kew, with every advantage she could annex to it. But she is now lately no more, and, by the sort of reception given to her daughter, I fancy the princess transfers to her that kind benevolence the mother no longer wants. just then, Miss Planta came to summon us to the Princess Augusta. She received me with her customary sweetness, and called the little boy to her. He went fearfully and cautiously, yet with a look of curiosity at the state of her head, and the operations of her friseur, that seemed to draw him on more powerfully than her commands. He would not, however, be touched, always flying to my side at the least attempt to take his hand. This would much have vexed me, if I had not seen the ready allowance she made for his retired life, and total want of use to the sight of anybody out of our family, except the Lockes, amongst whom I told her his peculiar preference for Amelia. "Come then," cried she, "come hither, my dear, and tell me all about her,--is she very good to you?--do you like her very much?" He was now examining her fine carpet, and no answer was to be procured. I would have apologised, but she would not let me. "'Tis so natural," she cried, '"that he should be more amused with those shapes and colours than with my stupid questions." Princess Mary now came in, and, earnestly looking at him, exclaimed, "He's beautiful!--what eyes!--do look at his eyes!" Page 165 "Come hither, my dear," again cried Princess Augusta, "come hither;" and, catching him to her for a Moment, and, holding up his hair. to lift up his face and made him look at her, she smiled very archly, and cried, "O ! horrid eyes! shocking eyes!--take them away!" Princess Elizabeth then entered, attended by a page, who was loaded With playthings which she had been sending for. You may suppose him caught now! He seized upon dogs, horses, chaise, a cobbler, a watchman, and all he could grasp but would not give his little person or cheeks, to my great confusion, for any of them. I was fain to call him a little savage, a wild deer, a creature just caught from the woods, and whatever could indicate his rustic life, and apprehension of new faces,--to prevent their being hurt ; and their excessive good nature helped all my excuses, nay, made them needless, except to myself. . Princess Elizabeth now began playing upon an organ she had brought him, which he flew to seize. "Ay, do! that's right, my dear," cried Princess Augusta, stopping her ears at some discordant sounds; "take it to mon ami, to frighten the cats out of his garden." And now, last of all, came in Princess Amelia, and, strange to relate ! the child was instantly delighted with her! She came first up to me, and, to my inexpressible surprise and enchantment, she gave me her sweet beautiful face to kiss!--an honour I had thought now for ever over, though she had so frequently gratified me with it formerly. Still more touched, however, than astonished, I would have kissed her hand, but, withdrawing it, saying, "No, no,--you know I hate that!" she again presented me her ruby lips, and with an expression of -such ingenuous sweetness and innocence as was truly captivating. She is and will be another Princess Augusta. She then turned to the child, and his eyes met hers with a look of the same pleasure that they were sought. She stooped down to take his unresisting hands, and, exclaiming "Dear little thing!" took him in her arms, to his own as obvious content as hers. "He likes her!" cried Princess Augusta, "a little rogue! see how he likes her!" "Dear little thing!" with double the emphasis, repeated the young princess, now sitting down and taking him upon her knee; "and how does M. d'Arblay do?" The child now left all his new playthings, his admired Page 166 carpet, and his privilege of jumping from room to room, for the gentle pleasure of sitting in her lap and receiving her caresses. I could not be very angry, you will believe, yet I would have given the world I could have made him equally grateful to the Princess Augusta. This last charming personage, I now found, was going to Sit for her picture--I fancy to send to the Duchess of Wurtemberg. She gave me leave to attend her with my bantling. The other princesses retired to dress for Court. It was with great difficulty I could part my little love from his grand collection of new playthings, all of which he had dragged into the painting-room, and wanted now to pull them down-stairs to the queen's apartment. I persuaded him, however, to relinquish the design without a quarrel, by promising we would return for them. HIS PRESENTATION TO THE QUEEN. I was not a little anxious, you will believe, in this presentation of my unconsciously honoured rogue, who entered the White closet totally unimpressed with any awe, and only with a sensation of disappointment in not meeting again the gay young party, and variety of playthings, he had left above. The queen, nevertheless, was all condescending indulgence, and had a Noah's ark ready displayed upon the table for him. But her look was serious and full of care, and, though perfectly gracious, none of her winning smiles brightened her countenance, and her voice was never cheerful. I have since known that the Irish conspiracy with France was just then discovered, and O'Connor that very morning taken.(156) No wonder she should have felt a shock that pervaded her whole mind and manners! If we all are struck with horror at such developments of treason, danger, and guilt, what must they prove to the royal family, at whom they are Page 167 regularly aimed ? How my heart has ached for them in that horrible business! "And how does your papa do?" said the queen. "He's at Telsea," answered the child. "And how does grandDapa do?" "He's in the toach," he replied. "And what a pretty frock you've got on! who made it you, mamma, or little aunty?" The little boy now grew restless, and pulled me about, with a desire to change his situation. I was a good deal embarrassed, as I saw the queen meant to enter into conversation as usual; which I knew to be impossible, unless he had some entertainment to occupy him. She perceived this soon, and had the goodness immediately to open Noah's ark herself, which she had meant he should take away with him to examine and possess at once. But he was now soon in raptures : and, as the various animals were produced, looked with a delight that danced in all his features; and when any appeared of which he knew the name, he capered with joy; such as, "O! a tow [cow]!" But at the dog, he clapped his little hands, and running close to her Majesty; leant upon her lap, exclaiming, "O, it's bow wow!" "And do you know this, little man?" said the queen, showing him a cat. "Yes," cried he, again jumping as he leant upon her, "its name is talled pussey!" And at the appearance of Noah, in a green mantle, and leaning on a stick, he said, "At's (that's] the shepherd's boy!" The queen now inquired about my dear father, and heard all I had to say relative to his apartments, with an air of interest, yet not as if it was new to her. I have great reason to believe the accommodation then arranging, and since settled, as to his continuance in the College, has been deeply influenced by some royal hint. . . . I imagined she had just heard of the marriage of Charlotte, for she inquired after my sister Frances, whom she never had mentioned before since I quitted my post. I was obliged briefly to relate the transaction, seeking to adorn it by stating Mr. Broome's being the author of "Simkin's Letters." She agreed in their uncommon wit and humour. My little rebel, meanwhile, finding his animals were not given into his own hands, but removed from their mischief, was struggling all this time to get at the Tunbridge-ware of Page 168 the queen's work-box, and, in defiance of all my efforts to prevent him, he seized one piece, which he called a hammer, and began violently knocking the table with it. I would fain have taken it away silently - but he resisted such grave authority, and so continually took it back, that the queen, to my great confusion, now gave it him. Soon, however, tired also of this, he ran away from me into the next room, which was their majesties' bedroom, and in which were all the jewels ready to take to St. James's, for the Court attire. I was excessively ashamed, and obliged to fetch him back in my arms, and there to keep him. " "Get down, little man," said the queen; "you are too heavy for your mamma." He took not the smallest notice of this admonition. The queen, accustomed to more implicit obedience, repeated it but he only nestled his little head in my neck, and worked' about his whole person, so that I with difficulty held him. The queen now imagined he did not know whom she meant, and said, " What does he call you? Has he any particular name for you?" He now lifted up his head, and, before I could answer, called out, in a fondling manner, "Mamma, mamma!" "O!" said she, smiling, "he knows who I mean!" His restlessness still interrupting all attention, in defiance of my earnest whispers for quietness, she now said, "Perhaps he is hungry?" and rang her bell, and ordered a page to bring some cakes. He took one with great pleasure, and was content to stand down to eat it. I asked him if he had nothing to say for it; he nodded his little head, and composedly answered, "Sanky, queen!" This could not help amusing her, nor me, neither, for I had no expectation of quite so succinct an answer. The carriages were now come for St. James's, and the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth came into the apartment. The little monkey, in a fit of renewed lassitude after his cake, had flung himself on the floor, to repose at his ease. He rose, however, upon their appearance, and the sweet Princess Augusta said to the queen, "He has been so good, up-stairs, mamma, that nothing could be better behaved." I could have kissed her for this instinctive kindness, excited by a momentary view of my embarrassment at his little airs and liberties. The queen heard her with an air of approving, as well as understanding, her motive, and spoke to me with the utmost Page 169 condescension of him, though I cannot recollect how, for I was a good deal fidgeted lest he should come to some disgrace, by any actual mischief or positive rebellion. I escaped pretty well, however, and they all left us with smiles and graciousness. . . . You will not be much surprised to hear that papa came to help us out of the coach, at* our return to Chelsea, eager to know how our little rebel had conducted himself, and how he had been received. The sight of his playthings, you will believe, was not very disagreeable. The ark, watchman, and cobbler, I shall keep for him till he may himself judge their worth beyond their price. MLLE. BACHMEISTER PRODUCES A FAVOURABLE IMPRESSION. I returned to the Queen's house in the afternoon to drink coffee with Mlle. Bachmeister, whom I found alone, and spent a half-hour with very pleasantly, though very seriously, for her character is grave and feeling, and I fear she is not happy. Afterwards we were joined by Madame Bremyere, who is far more cheerful. The play was called "Secrets Worth Knowing;" a new piece. In the next box to ours sat Mrs. Ariana Egerton, the bed-chamber-woman to her majesty, who used so frequently to visit me at Windsor. She soon recollected me, though she protested I looked so considerably in better health, she took me for my own Younger sister - and we had a great deal of chat together, very amicable and cordial. I so much respect her warm exertions for the emigrant ladies, that I addressed her with real pleasure, in pouring forth my praises for her kindness and benevolence. When we returned to the Queen's house my father's carriage was not arrived, and I was obliged to detain Mlle. Bachmeister in conversation for full half an hour, while I waited ; but it served to increase my good disposition to her. She is really an interesting woman. Had she been in that place while I belonged to the queen, heaven knows if I had so struggled for deliverance , for poor Mrs. Schwellenberg so wore, wasted, and tortured all my little leisure, that my time for repose was, in fact, my time of greatest labour. So all is for the best! I have escaped offending lastingly the royal mistress I love and honour, and-I live at Westhamble with my two precious Alexanders. (137) The most interesting account of the unfortunate expedition to Bantry Bay is to be found in Wolfe Tone's " Memoirs." Wolfe Tone, one of the leading members of the Irish Revolutionary party, had been for some time resident in Paris, engaged in negotiations with the Directory, with the view of obtaining French support for the Irish in their intended attempt to throw off the yoke of England. About the middle of December, 1796, a large French fleet, under the Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, sailed from Brest, having on board an army of f twenty-five thousand men, commanded by General Hoche, one of the ablest officers of the Republic. Wolfe Tone accompanied the troops in the capacity of adjutant to the general, But the fleet was dispersed by storms. The vessel which had General Hoche on board was obliged to put into the harbour of Rochelle, and comparatively few of the ships, with about six thousand troops on board, actually cast anchor in Bantry Bay. Even there, the wind was so 'Violent as to render landing impossible, and after a few days' delay the expedition returned to France.-ED. (138) Edmund Burke died, at his house at Beaconsfield, half an hour after midnight on the morning Of Sunday, July 9, 1797. He was buried, July 15, in the parish church of Beaconsfield.-ED. (139) Sold for the benefit of the nation. (140) Dr. Johnson's negro servant. Johnson left him a comfortable annuity, on which he retired to Lichfield. He died in the infirmary at Stafford, February 13, 1801.-ED. (141) The Garrick family resided in Lichfield. David Garrick was born in Hereford, but educated at Lichfield.-ED. (142) Dr. Burney's little grandson, and the son of Captain James BAR Burney. after years, as readers of "Elia" will remember, Martin Burney was the friend of Charles Lamb.-ED. (143) Since the death of his second wife, Dr. Burney had been engaged upon a "historical and didactic poem on astronomy." He had been urged to the undertaking by Fanny, who hoped that the interest of this new occupation might prove a relief to his sorrow. Astronomy Was a favourite subject with Dr. Burney, and he made great progress with the poem, which was for years his favourite recreation. At a later period, however, for some reason which his daughter never discovered, he relinquished the task and destroyed the manuscript.-ED. (144) Ralph Broome, who married Charlotte Francis in 1798, wasthe author of "The Letters of Simpkin the Second, poetic recorder of all the proceedings upon the trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., in Westminster Hall," published by Stockdale, 1789. These letters, which had already appeared separately in "The World," form, as the title implies, a burlesque report of the trial, in rhymed verse. The author is very severe upon the managers, and proportionately favourable to Mr. Hastings. The letters are amusing and not without Wit, although in these respects "Simpkin the Second" falls decidedly short of "Simpkin the First," who is, of course, the Simple Simkin of Anstey's "New Bath Guide." upon which clever satire Broome had modelled his performance.-ED. (145) Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was a very singular character--- a compound of experimental philosopher, practical philanthropist, soldier and statesman. He was born at Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753. A Tory during the struggle for American independence, he embarked for England before the close of the war. There he was well received by the government, but shortly afterwards he went to Bavaria, where he entered into the service of the Elector. He soon attained a high reputation by the reforms which he introduced in various departments, and was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, by the title of Count Rumford. Among his principal achievements in Bavaria were the reforms which he brought about in the army, and the measures which he instituted for the relief of the poor and the suppression of beggary. To Fanny, at present, Count Rumford was more interesting as the inventor of an improved Cooking range, by which the consumption of fuel was greatly reduced. See his "Life" by James Renwick, in Sparks'.s "Library of American Biography," Boston, 1845.-ED. (146) The insurrection of the 18th of Fructidor (September 4, 1797). In 1795, on the dissolution of the Convention, the government of France was entrusted to a Directory of five persons, assisted by two councils--the Council of Ancients, and the Council of Five hundred. In course of time, the reactionary, or anti-revolutionary, party obtained a large majority in the councils, which were thus involved in continual disputes with the Directory. The army supported the Directory, and on the 4th Of September a large body of troops surrounded the Tuileries, and arrested a number of the most obnoxious members of the councils; many of these Were afterwards--not guillotined, but transported to South America.-ED. (147) The marriage of the princess royal and the hereditary prince of Wurtemberg, May 18, 1797.-ED. (148) In April, 797, a serious mutiny broke out in the fleet at Spithead. The sailors demanded increased pay and better food. Their demands were finally conceded, and they returned to their duty, May 14. A few days later, a still more alarming mutiny broke out in the fleet at the Nore. The mutineers hoisted the red flag, May 23, and, being joined by vessels from other squadrons, found themselves presently masters of eleven ships of the line, and thirteen frigates. With this powerful fleet they blocked the Thames, and put a stop to the river trade of London. Their demands were more extensive than those of the Spithead Mutineers, but government firmly refused further concessions, and in June the want of union and resolution among the men brought about the collapse of the mutiny. Ship after ship deserted the red flag, until the last vessel was steered into Sheerness harbour, and given up to the authorities. Several of the leaders were tried by court-martial and hanged ; the rest of the mutineers were pardoned.-ED. (149) The decisive victory gained by Admiral Duncan over the Dutch fleet, off Camperdown, October 11, 1797. in January, 1795, the French army under General Pichegru had conquered Holland with little difficulty, meeting, indeed, with much sympathy from the inhabitants. The Prince of Orange and his family were forced to take refuge in England and the representatives of the Dutch people immediately assembling, proclaimed Holland a republic, under the protection of France. From that time Holland had been in alliance with France, and at war with England. Duncan was rewarded for his victory with a pension and a peerage--Viscount Duncan of Camperdown henceforward.-ED. (150) Duncan's victory we have already noted. Lord Howe's was the great victory of June 1, 1794, over the French fleet commanded by Admiral Villaret-joyeuse. It was in this battle that the Vengeur went down, out Of which incident Barrere manufactured, for the benefit of the French people, that rousing story of the disabled ship refusing to strike its colours, and sinking while every man of the crew, With his last breath, shouted "Vive la Republique!" Magnificent, had it not been pure fiction! Lord St. Vincent (then Admiral Jervis) gained a complete victory over the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, February 14, 1797. Spain, as well as Holland, was now in alliance with France: had made peace with France in 1795, and declared war against England in the following year. ,K Admiral Jervis received the title of Earl St. Vincent and a pension in consequence of his victory.-ED. (151) Only child of the Prince and Princess of Wales, born January 7, 1796.-ED. (152) A novel by Sarah Harriet Burney.-ED. (153) The Duke of Cumberland, afterward, King of Hanover; fifth son of George III.; born 1771, died 1851.-ED. (154) William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and brother of George III.-ED. (155) William Frederick, afterwards Duke of Gloucester, and husband of the Princess Mary. He was born in 1776, and died in 1836.-ED. (156) Arthur O'Connor, nephew and heir of Lord Longueville, was one of the Irish leaders, who took part in the negotiations between the Revolutionary party in Ireland and the French Directory. He and two or three of his associates were arrested at Margate (February 28, 1798), where they were attempting to hire a boat to take them to France. They were tried at Maidstone (May 21), and one of the party, on whom were found some compromising papers, including an address to the Directory, was convicted and hanged. O'Connor was acquitted, but immediately rearrested and detained in custody during the rising in Ireland.- ED. Page 170 SECTION 22. (1798-1802.) VISITS TO OLD FRIENDS: WESTHAMBLE: DEATH OF MRS. PHILLIPS: SOJOURN IN FRANCE. [From the " Memoirs of Dr. Burney " we extract the following details respecting the death of Fanny's favourite sister, Susan Phillips. "Winter now was nearly at hand, and travelling seemed deeply dangerous, in her sickly state, for the enfeebled Susanna. Yet she herself, panting to receive again the blessing of her beloved father, concentrated every idea of recovery in her return. She declined, therefore, though with exquisite sensibility, the supplicating desire of this Editor [Madame d'Arblay] to join and to nurse her at Belcotton, her own cottage ; and persevered through every impediment in her efforts to reach the parental home. . . . Every obstacle, at length, being finally vanquished, the journey was resolved upon, and its preparations were made;-- when a fearful new illness suddenly confined the helpless invalid to her bed. There she remained some weeks - after which, with the utmost difficulty, and by two long days' travelling, though for a distance of only twenty-six miles, she reached Dublin where, exhausted, emaciated, she was again forced to her bed ; there again to remain for nearly as long a new delay! " Every hour of separation became now to the Doctor Dr. Burney] an hour of grief, from the certainty that, the expedition once begun, it could be caused only by suffering malady, or expiring strength. "It was not till the very close of the year 1799, amidst deep snow, fierce frost, blighting winds, and darksome days, that, scarcely alive, his sinking Susanna was landed at Park Gate. There she was joined by her affectionate brother, Dr. Charles, who hastened to hail her arrival, that he might convey her in his own warm carriage to her heart-yearning father, her fondly impatient brethren, and the tenderest of friends. But he found her in no state to travel: further feeble, Page 171 drooping, wasted away, scarcely to be known, shrunk, nearly withered!--yet still with her fair mind in full possession of its clearest powers; still with all the native sweetness of her looks, manners, voice, and smiles; still with all her desire to please; her affecting patience of endurance; her touching sensibility for every species of attention; and all her unalterable loveliness of disposition, that sought to console for her own afflictions, to give comfort for her own sufferings! "During the space of a doubtful week, her kind brother Dr. Charles, awaited the happy moment when she might be able to move on. But on--save as a corpse,---she moved no more! * Gentle was her end! gentle as the whole tenor of her life but as sudden in its conclusion as it had been lingering in its approach." * She died at Park Gate, January 6, 1800, and was buried in Neston Churchyard, near Park Gate.-ED. The latter portion of the following section introduces the reader to new scenes and new acquaintances. During the summer of 1801 negotiations for peace between France and England were carried on in London, between lord Hawkesbury, on the part of the English government, and M. Otto, the French plenipotentiary. The preliminary treaty was signed in London, October 1, 1801, and ratified a few days later on the part of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, and de facto ruler of France, by a special envoy from Paris--General Lauriston. The definitive treaty, by which the details of mutual concessions, etc., were finally arranged, was signed at Amiens, March 25, 1802. In England the peace was received with rapture: General Lauriston was drawn in triumph in his carriage through the streets of London by the people. The "mutual concessions," however, showed a large balance in favour of France. As Sheridan observed, it was a peace of which every one was glad, but no one proud. The establishment of peace determined M. d'Arblay to revisit France, and to endeavour to obtain from the First Consul the half-pay pension to which his former services in the army had entitled him. In this project he was warmly encouraged by his old friend and comrade, General Lauriston, whom he had called upon in London, and who had received him with open arms. The result of his journey may be read in the following pages. His wife and son joined him in France, in April, 1802, with the intention of returning to England after a year's absence. But their return was prevented by the renewal of the war between the two countries in the following year, and ten years elapsed before Fanny saw again her father and her native country. Her first impressions of France are recorded in the " Diary" with very pleasant minuteness, but of her life during the greater part of these years of exile a few letters, Written at long intervals, give us all the information which we possess. -ED.) Page 172 A VISIT TO MRS. CHAFONE. March 1798.I have not told you of my renewed intercourse with Mrs. Chapone, who had repeatedly sent me kind wishes and messages, of her desire to see me again. She was unfortunately ill, and I was sent from her door without being named; but she sent me a kind note to Chelsea, which gave me very great pleasure. Indeed, she had always behaved towards me with affection as well as kindness, and I owe to her the blessing of my first acquaintance with my dear Mrs., Delany. It was Mrs. Chapone who took me to her first, whose kind account had made her desire to know me, and who always expressed the most generous pleasure in the intimacy she had brought about, though it soon took place of all that had preceded it with herself. I wrote a very long answer, with a little history of our way of life, and traits of-M. d'Arblay, by which her quick discernment might judge both of that and my state of mind. When we came again to Chelsea at this period, our Esther desired, or was desired by Mrs. Chapone, to arrange a meeting. I was really sorry I could not call upon her with my urchin; but I could only get conveyed to her one evening, when I went with our Esther, but was disappointed of M. d'Arblay, who had been obliged to go to Westhamble. This really mortified me, and vexed Mrs. Chapone. We found her alone, and she received me with the most open affection. Mrs. Chapone knew the day I could be with her too late to make any party, and would have been profuse in apologies if I had not truly declared I rejoiced in seeing her alone, Indeed, it would have been better If we had been so completely, for our dearest Esther knew but few of the old connexions concerning whom I wished to inquire and to talk, and she knew too much of all about myself and my situation of which Mrs. Chapone wished to ask and to hear. I fear, therefore, she was tired, though she would not: say so, and though she looked and conducted herself with great sweetness.. Mrs. Chapone spoke warmly of "Camilla," especially of Sir Hugh, but told me she had detected me in some Gallicisms, Page 173 and pointed some out. She pressed me in a very flattering manner to write again ; and dear Hetty, forgetting our relationship's decency, seconded her so heartily you must have laughed to hear her hoping we could never furnish our house till I went again to the press. When Mrs. Chapone heard of my father's difficulties about Chelsea, and fears of removal, on account of his twenty thousand volumes,--"Twenty thousand volumes!" she repeated; "bless me! why, how can he so encumber himself? Why does he not burn half? for how much must be to spare that never can be worth his looking at from such a store! And can he want to keep them all? I should not have suspected Dr. Burney, of all men, of being such a Dr. Orkborne!"(157)...... MRS. BOSCAWEN, LADY STRANGE, AND MR. SEWARD. The few other visits which opportunity and inclination united for my making during our short and full fortnight were-- To Mrs. Boscawen, whither we went all three, for I knew she wished to see our little one, whom I had in the coach with Betty, ready for a summons. Mrs. Boscawen was all herself,---that is, all elegance and good-breeding. Do you remember the verses on the blues which we attributed to Mr. Pepys?-- Each art of conversation knowing, High-bred, elegant boscawen. To Miss Thrale's, where I also carried my little Alex. To Lady Strange(158) whom I had not seen for more years than I know how to count. She was at home, and alone, except for her young grandchild, another Bell Strange, daughter of James, who is lately returned from India, with a large fortune, is become member of Parliament, and has married, for his second wife, a niece of Secretary Dundas's. Lady Strange received me with great kindness, and, to my great surprise, knew me instantly. I found her more serious and grave than formerly; I had not seen her since Sir Page 174 Robert's death, and many events of no enlivening nature; but I found, with great pleasure, that all her native fire and wit and intelligence were still within, though less voluntary and quick in flashing out, for every instant I stayed she grew brighter and nearer her true self. Her little grandchild is a delightful little creature, the very reverse of the other Bell(159) in appearance and disposition, for she is handsome and open and gay; but I hope, at the same time, her resemblance in character, as Bell is strictly principled and upright. Lady Strange inquired if I had any family, and, when she gathered I had a little one down-stairs in the carriage, desired to see it, for little Bell was wild in the request. "But have nae mair!" cried she; "the times are bad and hard;--ha' nae mair! if you take my advice, you'll ha' nae mair! you've been vary discreet, and, faith, I commend you!" Little Bell had run down-stairs to hasten Betty and the child, and now, having seized him in her arms, she sprang into the room with him. His surprise, her courage, her fondling, her little form, and her prettiness, had astonished him into consenting to her seizure ; but he sprang from her to me the moment they entered the drawing-room. I begged Lady Strange to give him her blessing. She looked at him with a strong and earnest expression of examining interest and pleasure, and then, with an arch smile, turning suddenly about to me, exclaimed, "Ah! faith and troth, you mun ha' some mair! if you can make 'em so pratty as this, you mun ha' some mair! sweet bairn! I gi' you my benediction! be a comfort to your papa and mamma! Ah, madam!" (with one of her deep sighs) "I must gi' my consent to your having some mair ! if you can make 'em so pratty as this, faith and troth, I mun let you have a girl!" I write all this without scruple to my dearest Susan, for prattiness like this little urchin's is not likely to spoil either him or ourselves by lasting. 'Tis a juvenile flower, yet one my Susan will again, I hope, view while still in its first bloom. . . . I was extremely pleased in having an interview again with my old, and I believe very faithful, friend Mr. Seward, whom I had not seen since my marriage, but Whom I had heard, through the Lockes, was indefatigable in inquiries and Page 175 expressions of good-will upon every occasion. He had sent me his compilation of anecdotes of distinguished characters, and two little letters have passed between us upon them. I was unluckily engaged the morning he was at Chelsea, and obliged to quit him before we had quite overcome a little awkwardness which our long absence and my changed name had involuntarily produced at our first meeting; and I was really sorry, as I have always retained a true esteem for him, though his singularities and affectation of affectation always struck me. But both those and his spirit of satire are mere quizziness 3 his mind is all solid benevolence and worth. A MYSTERIOUS BANK-NOTE. And now I must finish this Chelsea narrative, with its most singular, though brief, adventure. One morning at breakfast, my father received a letter, which he opened, and found to be only a blank cover with a letter enclosed, directed "A Madame, Madame d'Arblay." This, upon opening, produced a little bank-note of five pounds, and these words:-- "Madame d'Arblay need not have any scruple in accepting the enclosed trifle, as it is considered only as a small tribute of gratitude and kindness, so small, indeed, that every precaution has been taken to prevent the least chance of discovery ; and the person who sends it even will never know whether it was received or not. Dr. Burney is quite ignorant of it." This is written evidently in a feigned hand, and I have not the most remote idea whence it can come. But for the word gratitude I might have suggested many ; but, upon the whole, I am utterly unable to suggest any one creature upon earth likely to do such a thing. I might have thought of my adorable princess, but that it is so little a sum. Be it as it may, it is certainly done in great kindness, by some one who knows five pounds is not so small a matter to us as to most others ; and after vainly striving to find out or conjecture whence it came, we determined to devote it to our country. There's patriotism! we gave it in voluntary subscription for the war and it was very seasonable to us for this purpose. This magnificent patriotic donation was presented to the Bank of England by Mr. Angerstein, through Mr. Locke, and we have had thanks from the committee which made us blush. Many reasons have prevented my naming this anecdote, the principal of which were fears that, if it should Page 176 be known such a thing was made use of, and, as it chanced when we should otherwise have really been distressed how to come forward or hold back, any other friend might adopt the same method, which, gratefully as I feel the kindness that alone could have instigated it, has yet a depressing effect, and I would not have it become current. Could I, or should I ever trace it, I must, in some mode or other, attempt retaliation. THE NEW BROTHER-IN-LAW: A CORDIAL PROFESSOR. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) After sundry abortive proposals of our new brother-in-law, Mr. Broome, for our meeting, he and Charlotte finally came, with little Charlotte, to breakfast and spend a day with us. He has by no means the wit and humour and hilarity his "Simkin's Letters" prepare for; but the pen and the tongue are often unequally gifted. He is said to be very learned, deeply skilled in languages, and general erudition and he is full of information upon most subjects that can be mentioned. We talked of India, and he permitted me to ask what questions I pleased upon points and things of which I was glad to gather accounts from so able a traveller. Another family visit which took place this Summer gave us pleasure of a far more easy nature, because unmixed with watchful anxiety; this was from Charles and his son, who, by an appointment for which he begged our consent, brought with him also Mr. Professor Young, of Glasgow, a man whose learning sits upon him far lighter than Mr. Broome's ! Mr. Young has the bonhonlie of M. de Lally, with as much native humour as he has acquired erudition: he has a face that looks all honesty and kindness, and manners gentle and humble ; an enthusiasm for whatever he thinks excellent, whether in talents or character, in art or in nature; and is altogether a man it seems impossible to know, even for a day, and not to love and wish well. This latter is probably the effect of his own cordial disposition to amity. He took to us, all three, so evidently and so warmly, and was so smitten with our little dwelling, its situation and simplicity, and so much struck with what he learned and saw of M. d'Arblay's cultivating literally his own grounds, and literally being his own gardener, after finding by conversation, what a use he had made of his earlier days In literary Page 177 attainments, that he seemed as if he thought himself brought to a vision of the golden age,---such was the appearance of his own sincere and upright mind in rejoicing to see happiness where there was palpably no luxury, no wealth. It was a most agreeable surprise to me to find such a man in Mr. Professor Young, as I had expected a sharp though amusing satirist, from his very comic but sarcastic imitation of Dr. Johnson's "Lives," in a criticism upon Gray's "Elegy." Charles was all kind affection, and delighted at our approbation of his friend, for the professor has been such many years, and very essentially formerly,-a circumstance Charles is now gratefully and warmly returning. It is an excellent part of Charles's character that he never forgets any kind office he has received. I learned from them that Mr. Rogers, author of the "Pleasures of Memory," that most sweet poem, had ridden round the lanes about our domain to view it, and stood--or made his horse stand,--at our gate a considerable time, to examine our Camilla cottage,--a name I am sorry to find Charles, or some one, had spread to him; and he honoured all with his good word. I should like to meet with him. PRECOCIOUS MASTER ALEX. Lady Rothes(160) constant in every manifestation of regard, came hither the first week of our establishment, and came three times to denials, when my gratitude forced open my doors. Her daughter, Lady Harriet, was with her: she is a pretty and pleasing young woman. Sir Lucas came another morning, bringing my old friend Mr. Pepys. Alex was in high spirits and amused them singularly. He had just taken to spelling; and every word he heard, of which he either knew or could guess the orthography, he instantly, in a little concise and steady manner, pronounced all the letters of, with a look of great but very grave satisfaction at his own performances, and a familiar nod at every word so conquered, as thus :-- Mr. Pepys. You are a fine boy, indeed! Alex. B, o, y; boy. (Every letter articulated with strong, almost heroic emphasis.) Mr. P. And do you run about here in this pleasant place all day long? Page 178 Alex. D, a, y; day. Mr. P. And can you read your book, You Sweet little fellow? Alex. R, e, a, d; read. Etc. He was in such good looks that all this nonsense won nothing but admiration, and Mr. Pepys could attend to nothing else, but only charged me to let him alone. "For mercy's sake, don't make him study," cried Sir Lucas also; "he is so well disposed that you must rather repress than advance him, or his health may pay the forfeit of his application." "O, leave him alone! cried Mr. Pepys: "take care only of his health and strength; never fear such a boy as that wanting learning." THE BARBAULDS. I was extremely surprised to be told by the maid a gentleman and lady had called at the door, who sent in a card and begged to know if I could admit them; and to see the names on the card were Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld.(161) I had never seen them more than twice; the first time, by their own desire, Mrs. Chapone carried me to meet them at Mr. Burrows's: the other time, I think, was at Mrs. Chapone's. You must be sure I could not hesitate to receive, and receive with thankfulness, this civility from the authoress of the most useful books, next to Mrs. Trimmer's, that have been yet written for dear little children; though this with the world is probably her very secondary merit, her many pretty Poems, and particularly songs, being generally esteemed. But many more have written those as well, and not a few better; for children's books she began the new walk, which has since been so well cultivated, to the great information as well as utility of parents. Mr. Barbauld is a dissenting minister--an author also, but I am unacquainted with his works. They were in our little dining-parlour-the only one that has any chairs in it--and began apologies for their visit; but I interrupted and finished them with my thanks. She is much altered, but not for the worse to me, though she is for herself, since the flight of her youth, which is evident, has taken also with it a great portion of an almost set smile, which had an air of determined complacence and prepared acquiescence that seemed to result Page 179 from a sweetness which never risked being off guard. I remember Mrs. Chapone's saying to me, after our interview, "She is a very good young woman, as well as replete with talents; but why must one always smile so? It makes my poor jaws ache to look at her." We talked, of course, of that excellent lady ; and you will believe I did not quote her notions of smiling. The Burrows family, she told me,. was quite broken up; old Mrs. Amy alone remaining alive. Her brother, Dr. Aiken,(162) with his family, were passing the summer at Dorking, on account of his ill-health, the air of that town having been recommended for his complaints. The Barbaulds were come to spend some time with him, and would not be so near without renewing their acquaintance. They had been walking in Norbury Park, which they admired very much; and Mrs. Barbauld very elegantly said, "If there was such a public officer as a legislator of taste, Mr. Locke ought to be chosen for it." They inquired much about M. d'Arblay, who was working in his garden, and would not be at the trouble of dressing to appear. They desired to see Alex, and I produced him ; and his orthographical feats were very well-timed here, for as soon as Mrs. Barbauld said, "What is your name, you pretty creature?" he sturdily answered "B, o, y; boy." Almost all our discourse was upon the Irish rebellion. Mr. Barbauld is a very little, diminutive figure, but well-bred and sensible. I borrowed her poems, afterwards, of Mr. Daniel, who chanced to have them, and have read them with much esteem of the piety and worth they exhibit, and real admiration of the last amongst them, which is an epistle to Mr. Wilberforce in favour of the demolition of the slave-trade, 1 'n which her energy seems to spring from the real spirit of virtue, suffering at the luxurious depravity which can tolerate, in a free land, so unjust, cruel, and abominable a traffic. We returned their visit together in a few days, at Dr. Aiken's lodgings, at Dorking, where, as she permitted M. d'Arblay to speak French, they had a very animated discourse upon buildings, French and English, each supporting those of their own country with great spirit, but my monsieur, Page 180 to own the truth, having greatly the advantage both in manner and argument. He was in spirits, and came forth with his best exertions. Dr. Aiken looks very sickly, but is said to be better: he has a good countenance. PRINCESS AMELIA AT JUNIPER HALL. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Westhamble, 1798. And now, my beloved Susan, I will sketch my last Court history of this year. The Princess Amelia, who had been extremely ill since My last royal admittance, of some complaint in her knee which caused spasms the most dreadfully painful, was now returning from her sea-bathing at Worthing, and I heard from all around the neighbourhood that her royal highness was to rest and stop one night at juniper Hall, whither she was to be attended by Mr. Keate the surgeon, and by Sir Lucas Pepys, who was her physician at Worthing. I could not hear of her approaching so near our habitation, and sleeping within sight of us, and be contented without an effort to see her; yet I would not distress Lady Rothes by an application she would not know how either to refuse or grant, from the established etiquette of bringing no one into the presence of their royal highnesses but by the queen's permission. So infinitely sweet, however, that young love of a princess always is to me, that I gathered courage to address a petition to her majesty herself, through the medium of Miss Planta, for leave to pay my homage.-I will copy my answer, sent by return of post. .. "My dear friend,-I have infinite pleasure in acquainting you that the queen has ordered me to say that you have her leave to see dear Princess Amelia, provided Sir Lucas Pepys and Dr. Keate permit it, etc." With so complete and honourable a credential, I now scrupled not to address a few lines to Lady Rothes, telling her My authority, to prevent any embarrassment, for entreating her leave to pay my devoirs to the young princess on Saturday morning,--the Friday I imagined she would arrive too fatigued to be seen. I intimated also my wish to bring my boy, not to be presented unless demanded, but to be Put into some closet where he might be at hand in case of that Page 181 honour. The sweet princess's excessive graciousness to him gave me courage for this request. Lady Rothes sent me a kind note which made me perfectly comfortable. It was the 1st of December, but a beautifully clear and fine day. I borrowed Mr. Locke's carriage. Sir Lucas came to us immediately, and ushered us to the breakfast-parlour, giving me the most cheering accounts of the recovery of the princess. Here I was received by Lady Rothes, who presented me to Lady Albinia Cumberland, widow of Cumberland the author's only son, and one of the ladies of the princesses. I found her a peculiarly pleasing woman, in voice, manner, look, and behaviour. This introduction over, I had the pleasure to shake hands with Miss Goldsworthy, whom I was very glad to see, and who was very cordial and kind; but who is become, alas! so dreadfully deaf, there is no conversing with her, but by talking for a whole house to hear every word ! With this infirmity, however, she is still in her first youth and brightness, compared with her brother, who, though I knew him of the party, is so dreadfully altered, that I with difficulty could venture to speak to him by the name of General Goldsworthy. He has had three or four more strokes of apoplexy since I saw him. I fancy he had a strong consciousness of his alteration, for he seemed embarrassed and shy, and only bowed to me, at first, without speaking. but I wore that off afterwards, by chatting over old stories with him. The princess breakfasted alone, attended by Mrs. Cheveley. When this general breakfast was over, Lady Albinia retired. But in a very few minutes she returned, and said, "Her royal highness desires to see Madame d'Arblay and her little boy." The princess was seated on a sofa, in a French gray riding-dress, with pink lapels, her beautiful and richly flowing and shining fair locks unornamented. Her breakfast was still before her, and Mrs. Cheveley in waiting. Lady Albinia announced me, and she received me with the brightest smile, calling me up to her, and stopping my profound reverence, by pouting out her sweet ruby lips for me to kiss. She desired me to come and sit by her; but, ashamed of so much indulgence, I seemed not to hear her, and drew a chair at a little distance. "No, no," she cried, nodding, "come here; come and sit by me here, my dear Madame d'Arblay." I had then only to say 'twas my duty to obey her, and I seated myself on her sofa. Lady Albinia, whom she motioned Page 182 to sit, took an opposite chair, and Mrs. Cheveley, after we had spoken a few words together, retired. Her attention now was bestowed upon my Alex, who required not quite so much solicitation to take his part of the sofa. He came jumping and skipping up to her royal highness, with such gay and merry antics, that it was impossible not to be diverted with so sudden a change from his composed and quiet behaviour in the other room. He seemed enchanted to see her again, and I was only alarmed lest he should skip upon her poor knee in his caressing agility. I bid him, in vain, however, repeat Ariel's "Come unto these yellow sands," which he can say very prettily; he began, and the princess, who knew it, prompted him to go on --but a fit of shame came suddenly across him-or of capriciousness-and he would not continue. Lady Albinia soon after left the room - and the princess, then, turning hastily and eagerly to me, said, "Now we are alone, do let me ask you one question, Madame d'Arblay. Are you--are you--[looking with strong expression to discover her answer] writing anything?" I could not help laughing, but replied in the negative. "Upon your honour?" she cried earnestly, and looking disappointed. This was too hard an interrogatory for evasion; and I was forced to say--the truth--that I was about nothing I had yet fixed if or not I should ever finish, but that I was rarely without some project. This seemed to satisfy and please her. I told her of my having seen the Duke of Clarence at Leatherhead fair. "What, William?" she cried, surprised. This unaffected, natural way of naming her brothers and sisters is infinitely pleasing. She took a miniature from her pocket, and said, "I must show you Meney's picture," meaning Princess Mary, whom she still calls Meney, because it was the name she gave her when unable to pronounce Mary--a time she knew I well remembered. It was a very sweet miniature, and extremely like. "Ah! what happiness," I cried, "your royal highness will feel, and give, upon returning to their majesties and their royal highnesses, after such an absence, and such sufferings!" "O! yes!--I shall be SO glad!" she cried, and then Lady Albinia came in and whispered her it was time to admit Lady Rothes, who then entered with Lady Harriet and the Miss Leslies. When she was removing, painfully lifted from her seat Page 183 between Sir Lucas and Mr. Keate, she stopped to pay her compliments and thanks to Lady Rothes with a dignity and self- command extremely striking. . DEATH OF MR. SEWARD. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) Westhamble, May 2, 1799. Poor Mr. Seward! I am indeed exceedingly concerned--nay, grieved--for his loss to us: to us I trust I may say; for I believe he was so substantially good a creature, that he has left no fear or regret merely for himself. He fully expected his end was quickly approaching. I saw him at my father's at Chelsea, and he spent almost a whole morning with me in chatting of other times, as he called it ; for we travelled back to Streatham, Dr. Johnson, and the Thrales. But he told me he knew his disease incurable. Indeed he had passed a quarter of an hour in recovering breath, in a room with the servants, before he let me know he had mounted the college stairs. My father was not at home. He had thought himself immediately dying, he said, four days before, by certain sensations that he believed to be fatal, but he mentioned it with cheerfulness ; and though active in trying all means to lengthen life, declared himself perfectly calm in suspecting they would fail. TO give me a proof, he said he had been anxious to serve Mr. Wesley, the methodist musician, and he had recommended him to the patronage of the Hammersleys, and begged my father to meet him there to dinner; but as this was arranged, he was seized himself with a dangerous attack, which he believed to be mortal. And during this belief, "willing to have the business go on," said he, laughing, "and not miss me, I wrote a letter to a young lady, to tell her all I wished to be done upon the occasion, to serve Wesley, and to show him to advantage. I gave every direction I should have given in person, in a complete persuasion at the moment I should never hold a pen in my hand again." This letter, I found, was to Miss Hammersley. I had afterwards the pleasure of introducing M. d'Arblay to him, and it seemed a gratification to him to make the acquaintance. I knew he had been curious to see him, and he wrote my father word afterwards he had been much pleased. My father says he sat with him an hour the Saturday before he died - and though he thought him very ill, he was so little Page 184 aware his end was so rapidly approaching, that, like my dearest friend, he laments his loss as if by sudden death. I was sorry, too, to see in the newspapers, the expulsion of Mr. Barry from the Royal Academy. I suppose it is from some furious harangue.(163) His passions have no restraint though I think extremely well of his heart, as well as of his understanding. DR. BURNEY AGAIN VISITS DR. HERSCHEL. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) Slough, Monday morning, July 22, 1799, in bed at Dr. Herschel's, half-past five, where I can neither sleep nor lie idle. My dear Fanny,-I believe I told you on Friday that I was going to finish the perusal of my astronomical verses to the great astronomer on Saturday. Here I arrived at three o'clock,- -neither Dr. nor Mrs. H. at home. This was rather discouraging, but all was set to rights by the appearance of Miss Baldwin, a sweet, timid, amiable girl, Mrs. Herschel's niece. ....When we had conversed about ten minutes, in came two other sweet girls, the daughters of Dr. Parry of Bath, on a visit here. More natural, obliging, charming girls I have seldom seen; and, moreover, very pretty. We soon got acquainted. I found they were musical, and in other respects very well educated. It being a quarter past four, and the lord and lady of the mansion not returned, Miss Baldwin would have dinner served, according to order, and an excellent dinner it was, and our chattation no disagreeable sauce. After an admirable dessert, I made the Misses Parry sing and play, and sang and played with them so delightfully, "you can't think!" Mr. and Mrs. H. did not return till between seven and eight ; but when they came, apologies for being out on pressing business, cordiality and kindness, could not be more liberally bestowed. After tea Dr. H. proposed that we two should retire into a quiet room, in order to resume the perusal of my work, in Page 185 which no progress had been made since last December. The evening was finished very cheerfully; and we went to our bowers not much out of humour with each other, or with the world. DR. BURNEY AND THE KING. We had settled a plan to go to the chapel at Windsor in' the morning, the king and royal family being there, and the town very full. Dr. H. and Mrs. H. stayed at home, and I was accompanied by the three Graces. Dr. Goodenough, the successor of Dr. Shepherd, as canon, preached. I had dined with him at Dr. Duval's. He is a very agreeable man, and passionately fond of music, with whom, as a professor, a critic, and an historian of the art; I seem to stand very high; but I could not hear a single sentence of his sermon, on account of the distance. After the service I got a glimpse of the good king, in his light-grey farmer-like morning Windsor uniform, in a great crowd, but could not even obtain that glance of the queen and princesses. The day was charming. The chapel is admirably repaired, beautified, and a new west window painted on glass. All was cheerfulness, gaiety, and good humour, such as the subjects of no other monarch, I believe, i on earth enjoy at present; and except return of creepings now and then, and a cough, I was as happy as the best. At dinner we all agreed to go to the Terrace,--Mr., Mrs., and Miss H., with their nice little boy, and the three young ladies. This plan we put in execution, and arrived on the Terrace a little after seven. I never saw it more crowded or gay. The park was almost full of happy people--farmers, servants, and tradespeople,--alt In Elysium. Deer in the distance, and dears unnumbered near. Here I met with everybody I wished and expected to see previous to the king's arrival in the part of the Terrace where I and my party were planted. ..... Chelsea, Tuesday, three o'clock. Not a moment could I get to write till now; and I am afraid of forgetting some part of my history, but I ought not, for the events of this visit are very memorable. When the king and queen, arm in arm, were approaching the place where the Herschel family and I had planted ourselves, one of the Misses Parry heard the queen say to his majesty, "There's Dr. Burney," when they instantly came to me, so smiling and gracious that I longed to throw myself at Page 186 their feet. "How do you, Dr. Burney?" said the king, "Why, you are grown fat and young." "Yes, indeed," said the queen; "I was very glad to hear from Madame d'Arblay how well you looked." "Why, you used to be as thin as Dr. Lind," says the king. Lind was then in sight--a mere lath; but these few words were accompanied with such Very gracious smiles, and seemingly affectionate good-humour--the whole royal family, except the Prince of Wales, standing by in the midst of a crowd of the first people in the kingdom for rank and office--that I was afterwards looked at as a sight. After this the king and queen hardly ever passed by me without a smile and a nod. The weather was charming; the park as full as the Terrace, the king having given permission to the farmers, tradesmen, and even livery servants, to be there during the time of his walking. Now I must tell you that Herschel proposed to me to go with him to the king's concert at night, he having permission to go when he chooses, his five nephews (Griesbachs) making a principal part of the band. "And," says he, "I know you will be welcome." But I should not have presumed to believe this if his majesty had not formerly taken me into his concert-room himself from your apartments. This circumstance, and the gracious notice with which I had been just honoured, emboldened me. A fine music-room in the Castle, next the Terrace, is now fitted up for his majesty's evening concerts, and an organ erected. Part of the first act had been performed previous to our arrival. There were none but the performers in the room, except the Duchesses of Kent and cumberland, with two or three general officers backwards. The king seldom goes into the music-room after the first act; and the second and part of the third were over before we saw anything of him, though we heard his majesty, the queen, and princesses talking in the next room. At length he came directly up to me and Herschel, and the first question his majesty asked me was,--"How does Astronomy go on?" I, pretending to suppose he knew nothing of my poem, said, "Dr. Herschel will better inform your majesty than I can." "Ay, ay," says the king, "but you are going to tell us something with your pen;" and moved his hand in a writing manner. "What--what--progress have you made?" "Sir, it is all finished, and all but the last of twelve books have been read to my friend Dr. Herschel." The king, then, looking at Herschel, as who would say, "How is it?" "It Page 187 is a very capital work, sir," says H. "I wonder how you find time?" said the king. "I make time, Sir." "How, how?" "I take it out of my sleep, sir." When the considerate good king, "But you'll hurt your health. How long," he adds, "have you been at it?" "Two or three years, at odd and stolen moments, Sir." "Well," said the king (as he had said to you before), "whatever you write, I am sure will be entertaining." I bowed most humbly, as ashamed of not deserving so flattering a speech. "I don't say it to flatter you," says the king; "if I did not think it, I would not say it." OVERWHELMED WITH THE ROYAL GRACIOUSNESS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) "Fore George, a more excellent song than t'other!" Westhamble, July 25, '99. Why, my dearest padre, your subjects rise and rise,-till subjects, in fact, are no longer in question. I do not wonder you felt melted by the king's goodness. I am sure I did in its perusal. And the queen!-her naming me so immediately went to my heart. Her speeches about me to Mrs. Locke in the drawing-room, her interest in my welfare, her deigning to say she had "never been amongst those who had blamed my marriage," though she lost by it my occasional attendances, and her remarking "I looked the picture of happiness," had warmed me to the most fervent gratitude, and the more because her saying she had never been amongst those who had blamed me shows there were people who had not failed to do me ill offices in her hearing; though probably, and I firmly believe, without any personal enmity, as I am unconscious of my having any owed me; but merely from a cruel malice with which many seize every opportunity, almost involuntarily, to do mischief and most especially to undermine at Court any one presumed to be in any favour. And, still further, I thought her words conveyed a confirmation of what her conduct towards me in my new capacity always led me to conjecture, namely, that my guardian star had ordained it so that the real character and principles of my honoured and honourable mate had, by some happy chance, reached the royal ear "before the news of our union. The dear king's graciousness :to M. d'Arblay upon the Terrace, when the commander-in-chief, just then returned from the Continent, was by his side, made it impossible not to suggest this : and now, the queen's Page 188 again naming me so in, public puts it, in my conception, beyond doubt. My kindest father will be glad, I am sure, to have added to the great delight of his recital a strength to a notion I so much love to cherish. WAR RUMOURS. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Aug. 14, '99. People here are very sanguine that Ireland is quiet, and will remain so; and that the combined fleets can never reach it. How are your own politics upon that point? Mine will take their colour, be it what it may. Our dear father is Visiting about, from Mr. Cox's to Mrs. Crewe, with whom be is now at Dover, where Mr. Crewe has some command. We are all in extreme disturbance here about the secret expedition. Nothing authentic is arrived from the first armament; and the second is all prepared for sailing. . . . Both officers and men are gathered from all quarters. - Heaven grant them speedy safety, and ultimate peace ! God bless my own dearest Susan, and strengthen and restore her. Amen! Amen. ILLNESS AND DEATH OF MRS. PHILLIPS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Westhamble, October 1, '99. Whether gaily or sadly to usher what I have to say I know not, but your sensations, like mine, will I am sure be mixed. The major has now written to Mrs. Locke that he is anxious to have Susan return to England. She is "in an ill state of health," he says, and he wishes her to try her native air; but the revival of coming to you and among us all, and the tender care that will be taken of her, is likely to do much for her; therefore, if we get her but to this side the channel, the blessing is comparatively so great, that I shall feel truly thankful to heaven. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Phillips.) Westhamble, December 10, '99. O my Susan, my heart's dear sister! with what bitter sorrow have I read this last account! With us, with yourself, your children,-all,-you have trifled in respect to health, though in all things else you are honour and veracity personified; Page 189 but nothing had prepared me to think you in such a grave state as I now find you. Would to God I could get to you! If Mr. Keirnan thinks you had best pass the winter in Dublin, stay, and let me come to you. Venture nothing against his opinion, for mercy's sake! Fears for your health take place of all impatience to expedite your return; only go not back to Belcotton, where you cannot be under his direction, and are away from the physician he thinks of so highly. I shall write immediately to Charles about the carriage. I am sure of his answer beforehand,--so must you be. Act, therefore, with regard to the carriage, as if already it were arranged. But I am well aware it must not set out till you Are well enough to nearly fix your day of sailing. I say nearly, for we must always allow for accidents. I shall write to our dear father, and Etty, and James, and send to Norbury Park - but I shall wait till to-morrow, not to infect them with what I am infected.. . . O my Susan! that I could come to you! But all must depend on Mr. Keirnan's decision. If you can come to us with perfect safety, however slowly, I shall not dare add to your embarrassment of persons and package. Else Charles's carriage--O, what a temptation to air it for you all the way! Take no more large paper, that you may write with less fatigue, and, if possible, oftener;--to any one will suffice for all. (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney.) 9th January, 1800. My most dear padre,-My mate will say all,-so I can only offer up my earnest prayers I may soon be allowed the blessing--the only one I sigh for--of embracing my dearest Susan in your arms and under your roof. Amen. F. D'A. These were the last written lines of the last period--unsuspected as such--of my perfect happiness on earth; for they were stopped on the road by news that my heart's beloved sister, Susanna Elizabeth Phillips, had ceased to breathe. The tenderest of husbands--the most feeling of human beings--had only reached Norbury Park, on his way to a believed meeting with that angel, when the fatal blow was struck; and he came back to West Hamble-- to the dreadful task of revealing the irreparable loss which his own goodness, sweetness, patience, and sympathy could alone have made supported. Page 190 (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) 9th January, 1800. "As a guardian angel!"--Yes, my dearest Fredy, as such in every interval of despondence I have looked up to the sky to see her, but my eyes cannot pierce through the thick atmosphere, and I can only represent her to me seated on a chair of sickness, her soft hand held partly out to me as I approach her; her softer eyes so greeting me as never welcome was expressed before; and a smile of heavenly expression speaking the tender gladness of her grateful soul that God at length should grant our re-union. From our earliest moments, my Fredy, when no misfortune happened to our dear family, we wanted nothing but each other. Joyfully as others were received by us--loved by us--all that was necessary to our happiness was fulfilled by our simple junction. This I remember with my first remembrance; nor do I recollect a single instance of being affected beyond a minute by any outward disappointment, if its result was leaving us together. She was the soul of my soul !-and 'tis wonderful to me, my dearest Fredy, that the first shock did not join them immediately by the flight of mine-but that over-that dreadful, harrowing, never-to be-forgotten moment of horror that made me wish to be mad--the ties that after that first endearing period have shared with her my heart, come to my aid. Yet I was long incredulous; and still sometimes I think it is not--and that she will come-- and I paint her by my side--by my father's--in every room of these apartments, destined to have chequered the woes of her life with rays of comfort, joy, and affection. O, my Fredy ! not selfish is the affliction that repines her earthly course of sorrow was allowed no shade!--that at the instant soft peace and consolation awaited her she should breathe her last! You would understand all the hardship of resignation for me were you to read the joyful opening of her letter, on her landing, to my poor father, and her prayer at the end to be restored to him. O, my Fredy! could you indeed think of me--be alarmed for me on that dreadful day?---I can hardly make that enter my comprehension; but I thank you from my soul; for that is beyond any love I had thought possible, even from Your tender heart. Tell me you all keep well, and forgive me my distraction. I write so fast I fear you can hardly read; but you will See Page 191 I am conversing with you, and that will show you how I turn to you for the comfort of your tenderness. Yes, you have all a loss, indeed! A PRINCESS'S CONDESCENSION. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke). Greenwich, Friday, February, 1800. Here we are, my beloved friend. We came yesterday. All places to me are now less awful than my own so dear habitation. My royal interview took place on Wednesday. I was five hours with the royal family, three of them alone with the queen, whose graciousness and kind goodness I cannot express. And each of the princesses saw me with a sort of concern and interest I can never forget. I did tolerably well, though not quite as steadily as I expected but with my own Princess Augusta I lost all command. She is still wrapt up, and just recovering from a fever herself- and she spoke to me in a tone--a voice so commiserating--I could not stand it--I was forced to stop short in my approach, and hide my face with my muff. She came up to me immediately, put her arm upon my shoulder, and kissed me--I shall never forget it.--How much more than thousands of words did a condescension so tender tell me her kind feelings!--She is one of the few beings in this world that can be, in the words of M. de Narbonne, "all that is douce and all that is sbirituelle,"--his words upon my lost darling! It is impossible more of comfort or gratification could be given than I received from them all. HORTICULTURAL MISFORTUNES. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney). Westhamble, March 22, 1800. Day after day I have meant to write to my dearest father 'but I have been unwell ever since our return, and that has not added to my being sprightly. I have not once crossed 'the threshold since I re-entered the house till to-day, when Mr. and Mrs. Locke almost insisted upon taking me an airing. I am glad of it, for it has done me good, and broken a kind of spell that made me unwilling to stir. Page 192 M. d'Arblay has worked most laboriously in his garden but his misfortunes there, during our absence, might melt a heart of stone. The horses of our next neighbouring farmer broke through our hedges, and have made a kind of bog of our mead ow, by scampering in it during the wet; the sheep followed, who have eaten up all our greens, every sprout and cabbage and lettuce, destined for the winter ; while the horses dug up our turnips and carrots; and the swine, pursuing such examples, have trod down all the young plants besides devouring whatever the others left of vegetables. Our potatoes, left, from our abrupt departure, in the ground, are all rotten or frostbitten, and utterly spoilt; and not a single thing has our whole ground produced us since we came home. A few dried carrots, which remain from the in-doors collection, are all we have to temper our viands.. What think you of this for people who make it a rule to owe a third of their sustenance to the garden? Poor M, d'A.'s renewal of toil, to supply future times, is exemplary to behold, after such discouragement. But he works as if nothing had failed; such is his patience as well as industry. My Alex, I am sure you will be kindly glad to hear, is entirely well; and looks so blooming--no rose can be fresher. I am encouraging back his spouting propensity, to fit him for his royal interview with the sweet and gay young princess who has demanded him, who will, I know, be diverted with his speeches and gestures. We must present ourselves before Easter, as the Court then adjourns to Windsor for ten days. My gardener will not again leave his grounds to the fourfooted marauders; and our stay, therefore, will be the very shortest we can possibly make it ; for though we love retirement, we do not like solitude. I long for some further account of you, dearest: sir, and how you bear the mixture of business and company, of "fag and frolic," as Charlotte used to phrase it. Westhamble, April 27, 1800. My Alex improves in all that I can teach, and my gardener is laboriously recovering from his winter misfortunes. He is now raising a hillock by the gate, for a view of NorbUry Park from our grounds, and he has planted potatoes upon almost every spot where they can grow. The dreadful price of provisions makes this our first attention. The poor people about us complain they are nearly starved, and the children of the Page 193 journeymen of the tradesmen at Dorking come to our door to beg halfpence for a little bread. What the occasion of such universal dearth can be we can form no notion, and have no information. The price of bread we can conceive from the bad harvest; but meat, butter, and shoes!---nay, all sorts of nourriture or clothing seem to rise in the same proportion, and without any adequate cause. The imputed one of the war does not appear to me sufficient, though the drawback from all by the income-tax is severely an underminer of comfort. What is become of the campaign? are both parties incapacitated from beginning? or is each waiting a happy moment to strike some definitive stroke? We are strangely in the dark about all that is going on, and unless you will have the compassion to write us some news, we may be kept so till Mr. Locke returns. A WITHDRAWN COMEDY. [Towards the close of the preceding year Dr. Charles Burney had placed in the hands of Mr. Harris, the manager of Covent Garden-theatre, a comedy by Madame d'Arblay, called "Love and Fashion." Mr. Harris highly approved the piece, and early in the spring put it into rehearsal ; but Dr. Burney was seized with a panic concerning its success, and, to oblige him, his daughter and her husband withdrew it. The following letter announced their generous compliance with his wishes.] (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney.) Monday. I hasten to tell you, dearest sir, Mr. H. has at length listened to our petitions, and has returned me my poor ill-fated ---, wholly relinquishing all claim to it for this season. He has promised also to do his utmost, as far as his influence extends, to keep the newspapers totally silent in future. We demand, therefore, no contradictory paragraph, as the report must needs die when the reality no more exists. Nobody has believed it from the beginning, on account of the premature moment when it was advertised. This release gives me present repose, which, indeed, I much wanted; for to combat your, to me, unaccountable but most afflicting displeasure, in the midst of my own panics and disturbance, would have been ample punishment to me had I been guilty of a crime, in doing what I have all my life been Page 194 urged to, and all my life intended, --writing a comedy. Your goodness, your kindness, your regard for my fame, I know have caused both your trepidation, which doomed me to certain failure, and your displeasure that I ran, what you thought, a wanton risk. But it is not wanton, my dearest father. My imagination is not at my own control, or I would always have continued in the walk YOU approved. The combinations for another long work did not occur to me; incidents and effects for a drama did. I 'thought the field more than open--inviting to me. The chance held out golden dreams.--The risk could be only our own; for, permit me to say, appear when it will, you will find nothing in the principles, the moral, or the language that will make you blush for me. A failure upon those points only, can bring disgrace; Upon mere cabal or want of dramatic powers, it can only cause disappointment. I hope, therefore, my dearest father, in thinking this over you will cease to nourish such terrors and disgust at an essay so natural, and rather say to yourself, with an internal smile, "After all, 'tis but like father like child; for to what walk do I confine myself? She took my example in writing--she takes it in ranging. Why then, after all, should I lock her up in one paddock, well as she has fed there, if she says she finds nothing more to nibble; while I find all the earth unequal to my ambition, and mount the skies to content it? Come on, then, poor Fan! the world has acknowledged you my offspring, and I will disencourage you no more. Leap the pales of your paddock--let us pursue our career; and, while you frisk from novel to comedy, I, quitting music and prose, will try a race with poetry and the stars." I am sure my dear father will not infer, from this appeal, I mean to parallel our works. No one more truly measures her own inferiority, which, with respect to yours, has always been my pride. I only mean to show, that if my muse loves a little variety, she has an hereditary claim to try it. M. D'ARBLAY's FRENCH PROPERTY. (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney.) Westhamble, November 7, 1800. I think it very long not to hear at least of YOU, my dearest padre. My tranquil and happy security, alas! has been Page 195 broken in upon by severe conflicts since I wrote to My dearest father last, which I would not communicate while yet pending, but must now briefly narrate. My partner, the truest of partners, has been erased from the list of emigrants nearly a year; and in that period has been much pressed and much blamed by his remaining friends in France, by every opportunity through which they could send to him, for not immediately returning, and seeing if anything could be yet saved from the wreck of his own and family's fortune ; but he held steady to his original purpose never to revisit his own country till it was at peace with this ; till a letter came from his beloved uncle himself, conveyed to him through Hambro', which shook all the firmness of his resolution, and has kept him, since its receipt, in a state of fermentation, from doubts and difficulties, and crossing wishes and interests, that has much affected his health as well as tranquillity. All, however, now, is at least decided; for a few days since he received a letter from M. Lajard, who is returned to Paris, with information from his uncle's eldest son, that some of his small property is yet unsold, to about the amount of 1000 pounds, and can still be saved from sequestration if he will immediately go over and claim it; or, if that is impossible, if he will send his procuration to his uncle, from some country not at war with France. This ended all his internal contest; and he is gone this very morning to town to procure a passport and a passage in some vessel bound to Holland. So unused are we to part, never yet for a week having been separated during the eight years of our union, that our first idea was going together, and taking our Alex; and certain I am nothing would do me such material and mental good as so complete a change of scene; but the great expense of the voyage and journey, and the inclement season for our little boy, at length finally settled us to pray only for a speedy meeting. But I did not give it up till late last night, and am far from quite reconciled to relinquishing it even now. He has no intention to go to France, or he would make an effort to pass by Calais, which would delightfully shorten the passage; but he merely means to remain at the Hague while he sends over his procuration, and learns how soon he may hope to reap its fruits. page 196 Westhamble, 16th December, 1800. He is returned, my dearest father, already! MY joy and surprise are so great I seem in a dream. I have just this moment a letter from him, written at Gravesend. What he has been able to arrange as to his affairs, I know not ; and just now cannot care, so great is my thankfulness for his safety and return. He waits in the river for his passport, and will, when he obtains it, hasten, I need not say, to Westhamble. HOME MATTERS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Westhamble, September i, 1801. A carpet we have-though not yet spread, as the chimney is unfinished, and room incomplete. Charles brought us the tapis-so that, in fact, we have yet bought nothing for our best room--and meant,--for our own share--to buy a table . . . and if my dearest father will be so good--and so naughty at once, as to crown our salle d'audience with a gift we shall prize beyond all others, we can think only of a table. Not a dining one, but a sort of table for a little work and a few books,--en ala--without which, a room looks always forlorn. I need not say how we shall love it ; and I must not say how we shall blush at it; and I cannot say how we feel obliged at it--for the room will then be complete in love-offerings. Mr. Locke finished glazing or polishing his impression border for the chimney on Saturday. It will be, I fear, his last work of that sort, his eyes, which are very longsighted, now beginning to fail and weaken at near objects. My Alex intends very soon, he says, to marry-and, not long since, with the gravest simplicity, he went up to Mr William Locke, who was here with his fair bride, and said, "How did you get that wife, William? because I want to get such a one--and I don't know which is the way." And he is now actually employed in fixing sticks and stones at convenient distances, upon a spot very near our own, where he means to raise a suitable structure for his residence, after his nuptials. You will not think he has suffered much time to be wasted before he has begun deliberating upon his conjugal establishment. We spent the greatest part of last week in visits at Norbury Park, to meet M. de Lally, whom I am very sorry you missed. Page 197 He is delightful in the country full of resources, of gaiety, of intelligence, of good humour and mingling powers of instruction. with entertainment. He has read us several fragments of works of his own, admirable in eloquence, sense, and feeling - chiefly parts of tragedies, and all referring to subjects next his heart, and clearest in his head ; namely, the French Revolution and its calamities, and filial reverence and enthusiasm for injured parents. CONTEMPLATED JOURNEY To FRANCE. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Westhamble, October 3, 1801. God avert mischief from this peace, my dearest father! For in our hermitage you may imagine, more readily than I can express, the hopes and happiness it excites. M. d'Arblay now feels paid for his long forbearance, his kind patience, and compliance with my earnest wishes not to revisit his native land while we were at war with it. He can now go with honour as well as propriety - for every body, even the highest personages, will rather expect he should make the journey as a thing of course, than hear of it as a proposition for deliberation. He will now have his heart's desire granted, in again seeing his loved and respectable uncle,-and many relations, and more friends, and his own native town, as well as soil ; and he will have the delight of presenting to that uncle, and those friends, his little pet Alex. With all this gratification to one whose endurance of such a length of suspense, and repetition of disappointment, I have observed with gratitude, and felt with sympathy-must not I, too, find pleasure ? Though, on my side, many are the drawbacks - but I ought not, and must not, listen to them. We shall arrange our affairs with all the speed in our power, after the ratification is arrived, for saving the cold and windy weather; but the approach of winter is unlucky, as it will lengthen our stay, to avoid travelling and voyaging during its severity - unless, indeed, any internal movement, or the menace of any, should make frost and snow secondary fears, and induce us to scamper off. But the present is a season less liable in all appearance to storms, than the seasons that may follow. Fates, joy, and pleasure, will probably for some months occupy the public in France - and it will not be till Page 198 those rejoicings are past, that they will set about weighing causes of new commotion, the rights of their governors, or the means, or desirability of changing them. I would far rather go immediately, than six months hence. [The projected journey of Madame d'Arblay with her husband did not take place this year; the season being already advanced, and their little boy not strong enough to bear the fatigue of such an expedition. Monsieur d'Arblay went alone to France.] M. D'ARBLAY's ROUGH SEA PASSAGE. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Westhamble, November 11, 1801. I did not purpose writing to my dearest father till my suspense and inquietude were happily removed by a letter from France; but as I find he is already anxious himself, I will now relate all I yet know of my dearest traveller's history. On Wednesday the 28th of October, he set off for Gravesend. A vessel, he was told, was ready for sailing,- and would set off the following day. He secured his passage, and took up his abode at an inn, whence he wrote me a very long letter, in full hope his next would be from his own country. But Thursday came, and no sailing--though the wind was fair, and the weather then calm: he amused his disappointment as well as he could by visiting divers gardeners, and taking sundry lessons for rearing and managing asparagus. Friday, also, came-and still no sailing ! He was more and more vexed ; but had recourse then to a chemist, with whom he revised much of his early knowledge. Saturday followed--no sailing! and he found the people waited on and on, in hopes of more passengers, though never avowing their purpose, His patience was now nearly exhausted, and he went and made such vifs remonstrances that he almost startled the managers. They pretended the ballast was all they stayed for : he offered to aid that himself; and actually went to work, and never rested till the vessel was absolutely ready: orders, enfin, were given for sailing next morning, though he fears, with all his skill, and all his eloquence, and all his aiding, they were more owing to the arrival of four passengers than to his exertions. That night, October the 31st, he went on board; and November the 1st he set sail at five o'clock in the morning. Page 199 You know how high a wind arose on Sunday the 1st, and how dreadful a storm succeeded, lasting all night, all Monday, and all night again. How thankful, how grateful am I to have heard of his safety since so terrifying a period. They got on, with infinite difficulty and danger, as far as Margate; they there took anchor, and my kind voyager got a letter for me sent on shore, "moyennant un schelling ."(164) To tell you my gratitude in knowing him safe after that tempest--no I cannot! Your warm affections, my dearest father, will easily paint to you my thankfulness. Next, they got on to Deal, and here anchored again, for the winds, though they abated on shore, kept violent and dangerous near the coast. Some of the passengers went on shore, and put two letters for me in the post, assuring me all was safe. These two passengers, who merely meant to dine on shore, and see the town, were left behind. The sea rose so high, no boat could put off to bring them back; and, though the captain hoisted a flag to announce he was sailing, there was no redress. They had not proceeded a league before the sea grew yet more rough and perilous, and the captain was forced to hoist a flag of distress. Everything in the vessel was overset; my poor M. d'Arblay's provision-basket flung down, and its contents demolished; his bottle of wine broken by another toss, and violent fall, and he was nearly famished. The water now began to get into the ship, all hands were at work that could work, and he, my poor voyager, gave his whole noble strength to the pump, till he was so exhausted, so fatigued, so weakened, that with difficulty he could hold a pen to repeat that still--I might be tranquille, for all danger was again over. A pilot came out to them from Dover, for seven guineas, which the higher of the passengers subscribed for (and here poor M. d'A. was reckoned of that class], and the vessel was got into the port at Dover, and the pilot, moyennant un autre schelling, put me again a letter, with all these particulars, into the post. This was Thursday the 5th. The sea still so boisterous, the vessel was unable to cross the water. The magistrates at Dover permitted the poor passengers all to land ; and M. d'Arblay wrote to me again, from the inn, after being regaled with an excellent dinner, of which he had been much in want. Here they met again the two passengers lost at Deal, who, in hopes of this circumstance, had travelled post Page 200 from thence to Dover. Here, too, M. d'A. met the Duke de Duras, an hereditary officer of the crown, but who told him, since peace was made, and all hope seemed chased of a proper return to his country, he was going, incognito, to visit a beloved old mother, whom he had not seen for eleven years. "I have no passport," he said, "for France , but I mean to avow myself to the commissary at Calais, and tell him I know I am not erased, nor do I demand to be so. I only solicit an interview with a venerable parent. Send to Paris, to beg leave for it. You may put me in Prison till the answer arrives; but, for mercy, for humanity's sake, suffer me to wait in France till then! guarded as you please!" This is his Purposed address--which my M. d'A. says he heard, avec les larmes aux yeux.(165) I shall long to hear the event. On Friday, November 6th, M. d'A. wrote me two lines:"Nov. 6, 1801.--,Je pars! the wind is excellent--au revoir." This is dated ten o'clock in the morning. I have not had a word since. [in the original edition here follow three letters, in French, from M. d'Arblay to his wife. From these letters we translate the following extracts.-ED. "Paris. "I do not yet know positively when it will be possible for me to go to see my uncle. The settlement of my claim of half-pay is anything but advanced. . . . To-morrow morning I have an appointment with Du Taillis, aide-de-camp to Berthler (the French minister of war). When I leave him, I hope to see Talleyrand; but what I most particularly desire is, not to depart without having at least a glimpse of the first Consul (Napoleon), that man so justly celebrated. . . . In reference to the obligation which we, formerly on the list of emigrants, have to him, Narbonne said to me to-day, 'He has set all our heads on our shoulders.' I like this expression." " Paris, November 16, 1801. "La Tour Maubourg, one of the companions of General Lafayette, wished to marry his daughter to an emigrant whose name was not yet struck off the list. He obtained an interview with the first Consul, at which he entered into details on the matter, without attempting to conceal the objections which might be taken to the requested erasement of the young man's Page 201 name from the list of emigrants. Bonaparte interrupted him and said, 'Is the young man agreeable to your daughter?' 'Yes, General.'-' 'Is he agreeable to you, M. de Maubourg?' 'Very much so, General.'--'Well then, the man whom you judge worthy to enter into such a family as yours, is surely worthy also to be a French citizen.'" "15th Frimaire (December 6), 1801. "According to all appearance, my dearest, I shall not obtain the settlement I ask for. Everybody says that nothing could be more just than my demand, but so many persons who have served all through the war are at present on half-pay, that I am desperately afraid it will be the same with my past services as with my property, and for the same reason-the impossibility of satisfying all demands, however well founded. Meanwhile, my dearest, it is impossible to conceal from ourselves that we have been living, for some years, with all our economy, on resources which are now either exhausted, or very nearly so. The greater part of our income [Fanny's pension] is anything but certain, yet what should we do if that were to fail us ? The moral of this discourse is, that while I am fit for something, it is my duty, as a husband and a father, to try what can be done to secure for us, if possible, an old age of absolute independence ; and for our little one a position which may prevent his being a burden to us. . . . ". . . The consuls in England have not yet been nominated. The consulship in London will be well worth having, and perhaps, although there will be plenty of candidates, it might not be impossible for me to obtain it. It is at least probable that I could get appointed to one of the sea-ports. . . . ". . . Answer me at once, I beg of you. Think if this plan is opposed to any of your tastes; for you know there is only one possible happiness for me. Need I say more?") SUGGESTED ABANDONMENT' OF CAMILLA COTTAGE. (Madame d'Arblay to M. d'Arblay.) Westhamble, December 15, 1801. The relief, the consolation of your frequent letters I can never express, nor my grateful sense of your finding time for them, situated as you now are-, and yet that I have this moment read, of the 15 Frimaire, has made my heart ache Page 202 heavily. Our hermitage is so dear to me-our book-room, 'so precious, and in its retirement, its beauty of prospect, form, convenience, and comforts, so impossible to replace, that I sigh, and deeply, in thinking of relinquishing it. Your happiness, however, is now all mine ; if deliberately therefore, you wish to try a new system, I will surely try it, with you, be it what it may. I will try any thing but what I try now--absence ! Think, however, well, mon tr s cher ami, before you decide upon any occupation that robs you of being master of your own time, leisure, hours, gardening, scribbling, and reading. In the happiness you are now enjoying, while it Is SO new to you, you are perhaps unable to appreciate your own value of those six articles, which, except in moments of your bitter regret at the privation of your first friends and beloved country, have made your life so desirable. Weigh, weigh it well in the detail. I cannot write. Should you find the sum total preponderate in favour of your new scheme, I will say no more. All schemes will to me be preferable to seeing you again here, without the same fondness for the place, and way of life, that has made it to me what it has been. With regard to the necessity or urgency of the measure, I could say much that I cannot write. You know now I can live with you, and you know I am not without views, as well as hopes, of ameliorating our condition. I will fully discuss the subject with our oracle.(166) His kindness, his affection for you! Yesterday, when I produced your letter, and the extracts from M. Necker, and was going to read some, he said, in that voice that is so penetratingly sweet, when he speaks from his heart--"I had rather hear one line of d'Arblay's than a volume of M. Necker's,"--yet at the same time begging to peruse the MS. when I could spare it. I wish you could have heard the tone in which he pronounced those words: it vibrated on my ears all day. I have spent near two hours upon this theme with our dearest oracle and his other half He is much affected by the idea of any change that may remove us from his daily sight; but, with his unvarying disinterestedness, says he thinks such a place would be fully acquitted by you. If it is of consul here, in London, he is sure you would fill up all its functions even Page 203 admirably. I put the whole consideration into your own hands , what, upon mature deliberation, you judge to be best, I will abide by. Heaven guide and speed your determination! M. D'ARBLAY'S PROPOSED RETIREMENT FROM MILITARY SERVICE. 1802. [The beginning of this year was attended with much anxiety to Madame d'Arblay. Her husband, disappointed in the hopes suggested by his friends, of his receiving employment as French commercial consul in London, directed his efforts to obtaining his half-pay on the retired list of French officers. This was promised, on condition that he should previously serve at St. Domingo, where General Leclerc was then endeavouring to put down Toussaint's insurrection. He accepted the appointment conditionally on his being allowed to retire as soon as that expedition should be ended. This, he was told, was impossible, and he therefore hastened back to his family towards the end of January. In February, a despatch followed him from General Berthier, then minister at war, announcing that his appointment was made out, and on his own terms. 'To this M. d'Arblay wrote his acceptance, but repeated a stipulation he had before made, that while he was ready to fight against the enemies of the Republic, yet, should future events disturb the peace lately established between France and England, it was his unalterable determination never to take up arms against the British government. As this determination had already been signified by M. d'Arblay, he waited not to hear the result of its repetition, but set off again for Paris to receive orders, and proceed thence to St. Domingo. After a short time he was informed that his stipulation of never taking up arms against England could not be accepted, and that his military appointment was in consequence annulled. Having been required at the Alien office, on quitting England, to engage that he would not return for the space of one year, he now proposed that Madame d'Arblay, with her little boy, should join him in France:-and among the following letters will be found several in which she describes her first impressions on reaching that country, and the society to which she was introduced.] Page 204 (Madame d'Arblay to Miss Planta.) Camilla Cottage, Westhamble, February 11, 1802. A most unexpected, and, to me, severe event, draws from me now an account I had hoped to have reserved for a far happier communication, but which I must beg you to endeavour to seek some leisure moment for making known, with the utmost humility, to my royal mistress. . . . Upon the total failure of every effort M. d'Arblay could make to recover any part of his natural inheritance, he was advised by his friends to apply to the French government for half pay, upon the claims of his former military services. He drew up a memoir, openly stating his attachment and loyalty to his late king, and appealing for this justice after undeserved proscription. His right was admitted, but he was informed it could only be made good by his re-entering the army; and a proposal to that effect was sent him by Berthier, the minister of war. The disturbance of his mind at an offer which so many existing circumstances forbade his foreseeing, was indescribable. He had purposed faithfully retiring to his hermitage, with his fellow-hermit, for the remainder of his life: and nothing upon earth could ever induce him to bear arms against the country which had given him asylum, as well as birth to his wife and child;--and yet a military spirit of honour, born and bred in him, made it repugnant to all his feelings to demand even retribution from the government of his own country, yet refuse to serve it. Finally, therefore, he resolved to accept the offer conditionally--to accompany the expedition to St. Domingo, for the restoration of order in the French colonies, and then, restored thus to his rank in the army, to claim his retraite. This he declared to the minister of war, annexing a further clause of receiving his instructions immediately from the government. The minister's answer to this was, that these conditions were impossible. Relieved rather than resigned-though dejected to find himself thus thrown out of every promise of prosperity, M. d'Arblay hastened back to his cottage, to the inexpressible satisfaction of the- recluse he had left there. short, however, has been its duration ! A packet has just followed him, containing a letter from Berthier, to tell him that his appointment was made out according to his own demands ! and Page 205 enclosing another letter to the commander-in-chief, Leclerc, with the orders of government for employing him, delivered in terms, the most distinguished, of his professional character. All hesitation, therefore, now necessarily ends, and nothing remains for M. d'Arblay but acquiescence and despatch,-- while his best consolation is in the assurance he has universally received, that this expedition has the good wishes and sanction of England. And, to avert any misconception or misrepresentation, he has this day delivered to M. Otto(167) a letter, addressed immediately to the first Consul, acknowledging the flattering manner in which he has been called forth, but decidedly and clearly repeating what he had already declared to the war minister, that though he would faithfully fulfil the engagement into which he was entering, it was his unalterable resolution never to take up arms against the British government. I presume to hope this little detail may, at some convenient moment, meet her majesty's eyes-with every expression of my profoundest devotion. M. D'ARBLAY's DISAPPOINTMENT. (Madame d'Arblay to M. d'Arblay.) Westhamble, March 14, 1802. O my dearest friend,- Can the intelligence I have most desired come to me in a form that forbids my joy at it? What tumultuous sensations your letter of the 8th has raised!(168) Alas! that to relinquish this purpose should to you be as great unhappiness as to me was its suggestion! I know not how to enter upon the subject--how to express a single feeling. I fear to seem ungrateful to providence, or to you ungenerous. I will only, therefore, say, that as all your motives have been the most strictly honourable, it is not possible they should not, ultimately, have justice done them by all. That I feel for your disappointment I need not tell you, when you find it has power to shake to its foundation what would else be the purest satisfaction of my soul. Let us--let us hope fairer days will ensue and do not let the courage Page 206 which was so prompt to support you to St. Domingo fail you in remaining at Paris. What you say of the year's probation I knew not before. Would you have me make any inquiry if it be irreversible?' I should think not ; and am most ready and eager to try by every means in my power, if you will authorize me. If not, to follow you, whithersoever you will, is much less my duty than my delight ! You have only to dictate whither, and how, and every doubt, every fear, every difficulty, will give way to my eager desire to bring your little boy to you. Would I not have left even Kin to have followed you and your fate even to St. Domingo? 'Tis well, however, you did not listen to me, for that poor little susceptible soul could not, as yet lose us both at once, and be preserved himself He has lived' so singularly alone with us, and for us, that he does not dream of any possible existence in which we should be both separated from him. But of him--our retreat--our books--our scribbling--our garden--our unique mode of life--I must not talk to you now, now that your mind, thoughts, views, and wishes are all distorted from themes of peace, domestic life, and literary pursuits; yet time, I hope, reflection, your natural philosophy of accommodating yourself to your fate, and your kindness for those who are wholly devoted to you, will bring you back to the love of those scenes, modes, and sentiments, which for upwards of eight years have sufficed for our mutual happiness. I had been negotiating for apartments at Twickenham, opposite Richmond, ever since you went, and on Friday I wrote to close with the engagement. This very morning I have two letters, full of delight at our approaching neighbourhood. Miss C.(169) herself writes in tears, she says, of joy, that I should be so near her, and that you should have wished it, and blesses you for your confidence in her warm friendship. It is quite impossible to read of such affection and zeal and goodness with dry eyes. I am confounded how to disenchant her--- yet so generous and disinterested she is, that, however disappointed, she will be sure to rejoice for me in our re-union; for you, my dearest friend! ah! who can rejoice? Your mind was all made up to the return of its professional pursuits, and I am frightened out of all my own satisfaction by MY dread of the weight of this chagrin upon your spirits. What Page 207 you can do to avert depression,, that cruel underminer of every faculty that makes life worth sustaining, I beseech you to call forth. Think how I have worked for fortitude since Feb. 11th. Alas! vainly I have tried what most I wished--my poor pen!--but now "occupe-toi pour r�aliser l'esp�rance." Those words will operate like magic, I trust; and I will not close my eyes this night till I have committed to paper some opening to a new essay. Be good, then, and don't let me be as unhappy this way as I have been the other. Direct always to me, Norbury Park, Dorking. Heaven bless--bless you [Here follows, in the original edition, another letter in French, from M. d'Arblay to his wife. We translate the following passage.-ED. "At Ventose, year 10, (March 12, 1802). "You have doubtless communicated to our friends at Norbury Park, the letters which I have sent you. Did I tell you that I sent a copy of those letters to M. de Lafayette?(170) M. de Lafayette came at once to Paris, and requested an interview with Bonaparte, who granted it immediately. Addressing him, M. de Lafayette said, ' I have come to speak to you of one of my friends and companions--d'Arblay.' 'I know that business,' said the first Consul, in a tone which expressed more good-will than I ventured to hope for, at least, more than I had been given reason to expect. 'I assure you,' said M. de Lafayette to me, the next day, 'you have some good friends with the first Consul, who had already spoken to him on your business. He seemed to me, from the first instant, rather disposed in your favour than angry with you. . . . When I told him of your fear lest this business should have excited his displeasure, he replied positively, that it should do you no injury whatever, and that he would regard, in the step you had taken, only the husband of Cecilia.' "I hope you will not be very displeased at the way this business, which has caused me much vexation, has terminated. I think I may even add, in confidence, that I am, perhaps, not without a near prospect of getting my retiring pension. Come to me, then, my dearest. Page 208 ON THE EVE OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S JOURNEY To FRANCE. (Madame d'Arblay to Doctor Burney.) March 30, 1802. Now, indeed, my dearest father, I am in an excess of hurry not to be exceeded by even any of yours. I have a letter from M. d'Arblay, to tell me he has already taken us an apartment, and he dates from the 5th of April, in Paris, where he has reasons for remaining some time, before we go to his good uncle, at Joigny. I am to take the little sweet child with me you saw here one day, Mlle. de Chavagnac, whose father, le Comte de Chavagnac, has desired her restoration. My kind Mrs: Locke is almost in affliction at parting with her though glad of an opportunity of sending her with friends the poor thing knows and loves. I fear, I have so very much to do here, that I shall have a very, very short enjoyment of my beloved father at Chelsea but I shall get there as soon as possible, and stay there to my last moment. I have a thousand things, and very curious ones, to tell you; but I must defer them for vive voix. I am really bewildered and almost trembling with hurry, and with what I am going to undertake! Yet through all, i bless God every moment of my life that M. d'Arblay went not to that pestilential climate I do all-- all I can to keep up my courage--or rather to make up; and when I feel faltering, I think of St Domingo! Every body that knows St Domingo now owns that he had hardly a chance for safety, independent of tempests in the voyage, and massacres in the mountains. May I but be able to console him for all he has sacrificed to my peace and happiness ! and no privation will be severe, so that at our stated period, Michaelmas twelvemonth, we return to my country, and to my dearest father, whom heaven bless and preserve, prays his dutiful, affectionate and grateful, and devoted daughter, F. d'A. DIARY: (Addressed to Dr. Burney). IN FRANCE DURING THE PEACE AND SUBSEQUENTLY. April, 1802-I seize, at length, upon the largest paper I can procure, to begin to my beloved father some account of our journey, and if I am able, I mean to keep him a brief Page 209 journal of my proceedings during this destined year or eighteen months' separation,-secure of his kindest interest in all that I may have to relate, and certain he will be anxious to know how I go on in a strange land : 'tis my only way now of communicating with him, and I must draw from it one of my dearest worldly comforts, the hopes of seeing his loved hand with some return. April 15.-William and John conducted my little boy and me in excellent time to the inn in Piccadilly, where we met my kind Mrs. Locke and dear little Adrienne de Chavagnac. The parting there was brief and hurried; and I set off on my grand expedition, with my two dear young charges, exactly at five o'clock. . . . Paris, April 15, 1802.-The book-keeper came to me eagerly, crying "vite, vite, madame, prenez votre place dans la diligence, car voici un Monsieur Anglais, qui surement va prendre la meileure!" En effet, ce Monsieur Anglais did not disappoint his expectations, or much raise mine - for he not only took the best place, but contrived to ameliorate it by the little scruple with which he made every other worse, from the unbridled expansion in which he indulged his dear person, by putting out his elbows against his next, and his knees and feet against his opposite neighbour. He seemed prepared to look upon all around-him with a sort of sulky haughtiness, pompously announcing himself as a commander of distinction who had long served at Gibraltar and various places, who had travelled thence through France, and from France to Italy, who was a native of Scotland, and -of proud, though unnamed genealogy '; and was now going to Paris purposely to behold the first Consul, to whom he meant to claim an introduction through Mr. Jackson. His burnt complexion, Scotch accent, large bony face and figure, and high and distant demeanour, made me easily conceive and believe him a highland chief. I never heard his name, but I think him a gentleman born, though not gently bred. Page 210 The next to mention is a Madame Raymond or Grammont, for I heard not distinctly which, who seemed very much a gentlewoman, and who was returning to France, too uncertain of the state of her affairs to know whether she might rest there or not. She had only one defect to prevent my taking much interest in her ; this was, not merely an avoidance, but a horror of being touched by either of my children ; who, poor little souls, restless and fatigued by the confinement they endured, both tried to fling themselves upon every passenger in turn ; and though by every one they were sent back to their sole prop, they were by no one repulsed with such hasty displeasure as by this old lady, who seemed as fearful of having the petticoat of her gown, which was stiff, round, and bulging, as if lined with parchment, deranged, as if she had been attired in a hoop for Court. The third person was a Madame Blaizeau, who seemed an exceeding good sort of a woman, gay, voluble, good humoured, and merry. All we had of amusement sprung from her sallies, which were uttered less from a desire of pleasing others, her very natural character having none of the high polish bestowed by the Graces, than from a jovial spirit of enjoyment which made them produce pleasure to herself. She soon and frankly acquainted us she had left France to be a governess to some young ladies before the Revolution, and under the patronage, as I think, of the Duke of Dorset - she had been courted, she told us, by an English gentleman farmer, but he would not change his religion for her, nor she for him, and so, when every thing was bought for her wedding, they broke off the connexion ; and she afterwards married a Frenchman. She had seen a portrait, set richly in diamonds, of the king, prepared for a present to the first Consul ; and described its superb ornaments and magnificence, in a way to leave no doubt of the fact. She meant to stop at St. Denis, to inquire if her mother yet lived, having received no intelligence from or of her, these last ten eventful years ! At Canterbury, while the horses were changed, my little ones and I went to the cathedral; but dared merely seize sufficient time to view the outside and enter the principal aisle. I was glad even of that much, as its antique grandeur gave me a pleasure which I always love to cherish in the view of fine old cathedrals, those most permanent monuments Of what our ancestors thought reverence to God, as manifested in munificence to the place dedicated to his worship. Page 211 At Dover we had a kind of dinner-supper in one, and my little boy and girl and I retired immediately after it, took some tea in our chamber, and went to rest. April 16.-As we were not to sail till twelve, I had hoped to have seen the castle and Shakspeare's cliff, but most unfortunately it rained all the morning, and we were confined to the inn, except for the interlude of the custom-house, where, however, the examination was so slight, and made with such civility, that we had no other trouble with it than a wet walk and a few shillings. Our passports were examined; and we then ' went to the port, and, the sea being perfectly smooth, were lifted from the quay to the deck of our vessel with as little difficulty as we could have descended from a common chair to the ground. ARRIVAL AT CALAIS. The calm which caused our slow passage and our sickness, was now favourable, for it took us into the port of Calais so close and even with the quay, that we scarcely accepted even a hand to aid us from the vessel to the shore. The quay was lined with crowds of people, men, women, and children, and certain amphibious females, who might have passed for either sex, or anything else in the world, except what they really were, European women! Their men's hats, men's jackets, and men's shoes - their burnt skins, and most savage-looking petticoats, hardly reaching, nay, not reaching their knees, would have made me instantly believe any account I could have heard of their being just imported from the wilds of America. The vessel was presently filled with men, who, though dirty and mean, were so civil and gentle, that they could not displease, and who entered it so softly and quietly, that, neither hearing nor seeing their approach, it seemed as if they had availed themselves of some secret trap-doors through which they had mounted to fill the ship, without sound or bustle, in a single moment. When we were quitting it, however, this tranquillity as abruptly finished, for in an instant a part of them rushed round me, one demanding to carry Alex, another Adrienne, another seizing my �critoire, another my arm, and some one, I fear, my parasol, as I have never been able to find it since. We were informed we must not leave the ship till Monsieur Page 212 le commissaire arrived to carry us, I think, to the Municipality of Calais to show our passports. Monsieur le commisSaire in white with some red trappings, soon arrived, civilly hastening himself quite out of breath to save us from waiting' We then mounted the quay, and I followed the rest of the passengers, who all followed the commissary, accompanied by two men carrying the two children, and two more carrying one my �critoire, and the other insisting on conducting its owner. The quantity of people that surrounded and walked with us, surprised me ; and their decency, their silence their quietness astonished me. To fear them was impossible: even in entering France with all the formed fears hanging upon its recent though past horrors. But on coming to the municipality, I was, I own, extremely ill at ease, when upon our gouvernante's desiring me to give the commissary my passport, as the rest of the passengers had done, and my answering it was in my �critoire, she exclaimed, "Vite! Vite! cherchez-le, ou vous serez arr�t�e!"(172) You may be sure I was quick enough, or at least tried to be so, for my fingers presently trembled, and I could hardly put in the key. In the hall to which we now repaired, our passports were taken and deposited, and we had new ones drawn up and given us in their stead. On quitting this place we were accosted by a new crowd, all however as gentle, though not as silent, as our first friends, who recommended various hotels to us, one begging we would go to Grandsire, another to Duroc, another to Meurice--and this last prevailed with the gouvernante, whom I regularly followed, not from preference, but from the singular horror my otherwise worthy and wellbred old lady manifested, when, by being approached by the children, her full round coats risked the danger of being modernised into the flimsy, falling drapery of the present day. At Meurice's our goods were entered, and we heard that they would be examined at the custom-house in the afternoon. We breakfasted, and the crowd of fees which were claimed by the captain, steward, sailors, carriers, and heaven knows who, besides, are inconceivable. I gave whatever they asked, from ignorance of what was due, and from fear of offending those of whose extent, still less of whose use, of power I could form no judgment. I was the only one in this predicament; the rest refusing or disputing every demand. They all, but us Page 213 Went out to walk - but I stayed to write to my dearest father, to Mrs. Locke, and my expecting mate. "GOD SAVE THE KING!" ON FRENCH SOIL. We were all three too much awake by the new scene to try for any repose, and the hotel windows sufficed for our amusement till dinner; and imagine, my dearest sir, how my repast was seasoned, when I tell you that, as soon as it began, a band "of music came to the window and struck up "God save the king." I can never tell you what a pleased emotion was excited in my breast by this sound on a shore so lately hostile, and on which I have so many, so heartfelt motives for wishing peace and amity perpetual! A RAMBLE THROUGH THE TOWN. This over, we ventured out of the hotel to look at the street. The day was fine, the street was clean, two or three people who passed us, made way for the children as they skipped out of' my hands, and I saw such an unexpected appearance of quiet, order and civility, that, almost without knowing it, we strolled from the gate, and presently found ourselves in the market-place, which was completely full of sellers, and buyers, ,and booths, looking like a large English fair. The queer, gaudy jackets, always of a different colour from the petticoats of the women, and their immense wing-caps, which seemed made to double over their noses, but which all flew back so as to discover their ears, in which 1 regularly saw -large and generally drop gold ear-rings, were quite as diverting ...to myself as to Alex and Adrienne. Many of them, also, had gold necklaces chains, and crosses; but ear-rings all: even maids who were scrubbing or sweeping, ragged wretches bearing burdens on their heads or shoulders, old women selling fruit or other eatables, gipsy-looking creatures with children tied to their backs--all wore these long, broad, large, shining ear-rings. Beggars we saw not--no, not one, all the time we stayed or sauntered; and for civility and gentleness, the poorest and most ordinary persons we met or passed might be compared with the best dressed and best looking walkers in the streets of our metropolis, and still to the disadvantage of the latter. I cannot say how much this surprised me, as I had conceived a horrific idea of the populace of this country, imagining em all transformed into bloody monsters. Page 214 Another astonishment I experienced equally pleasing, though not equally important to my ease; I saw innumerable pretty women and lovely children, almost all of them extremely fair. I had been taught to expect nothing but mahogany complexions and hideous features instantly on crossing the strait of Dover. When this, however, was mentioned in our party afterwards, the Highlander exclaimed, "But Calais was in the hands of the English so many years, that the English -race there is not yet extinct." The perfect security in which I now saw we might wander about, induced us to walk over the whole town, and even extend our excursions to the ramparts surrounding it. It is now a very clean and pretty town, and so orderly that there was no more tumult or even noise in the market-place, where the people were so close together as to form a continual crowd, than in the by-streets leading to the country, where scarcely a passenger was to be seen. This is certainly a remark which, I believe, could never be made in England. When we returned to the hotel, I found all my fellow travellers had been to the custom house! I had quite forgotten, or rather neglected to inquire the hour for this formality, and was beginning to alarm myself lest I was out of rule, when a young man, a commissary, I heard, of the hotel, came to me and asked if I had anything contraband to the laws of the Republic. I answered as I had done before, and he readily undertook to go through the ceremony for me without my appearing. I was so much frightened, and so happy not to be called upon personally, that I thought myself very cheaply off in his after-demand of a guinea and a half. I had two and a half to pay afterwards for additional luggage.. We found reigning through Calais a general joy and satisfaction at the restoration of Dimanche and abolition of d�cade.(173) I had a good deal of conversation with the maid of the inn, a tall, fair, extremely pretty woman, and she talked much upon this subject, and the delight it occasioned, and the obligation all France was under to the premier Consul for restoring religion and worship. Page 215 SUNDAY ON THE ROAD TO PARIS. Sunday, April 18. --We set off for Paris at five o'clock in the morning. The country broad, flat, or' barrenly steep --Without trees, without buildings, and scarcely inhabited-- exhibited a change from the fertile fields, and beautiful woods ,band gardens, and civilisation of Kent, so sudden and unpleasant that I only lamented the fatigue of my position, which regularly impeded my making use of this chasm of 'pleasure and observation for repose. This part of France must certainly be the least frequented, for we rarely met a single carriage, and the villages, few and distant, seemed to have no intercourse with each other. Dimanche, indeed, might occasion this stiffness, for we saw, at almost all the villages, neat and clean peasants going to or coming from mass, and seeming indescribably elated and happy by the public permission of divine worship on its originally appointed day. I was struck with the change in Madame Raymond, who joined us in the morning from another hotel. Her hoop was no more visible; her petticoats were as lank, or more so, than her neighbours'; and her distancing the children was not only at an end, but she prevented me from renewing any of my cautions to them, of not incommoding her - and when we were together a few moments, before we were joined by the rest, she told me, with a significant smile, not to tutor the children about her any more, as she only avoided them from having something of consequence to take care of, which was removed. I then saw she meant some English lace or muslin, which she had carried in a petticoat, and, since the customhouse examination was over, had now packed in her trunk. Poor lady! I fear this little merchandise was all her hope of succour on her arrival! She is amongst the emigrants who have twice or thrice returned, but not yet been able to rest in their own country. What most in the course of this journey struck me, was the satisfaction of all the country people, with whom I could converse at the restoration of the Dimanche; and the boasts they now ventured to make of having never kept the d�cade, except during the dreadful reign of Robespierre, when not to oppose any of his severest decrees was insufficient for safety, ,"it was essential even to existence to observe them with every parade of the warmest approval. Page 216 The horrible stories from every one of that period of wanton as well as political cruelty, I must have judged exaggerated, either through the mist of fear or the heats of resentment but that, though the details had innumerable modifications' there was but one voice for the excess of barbarity. At a little hamlet near Clermont, where we rested some time, two good old women told us that this was the happiest day (twas Sunday) of their lives; that they had lost le bon Dieu for these last ten years, but that Bonaparte had now found him! In another cottage we were told the villagers had kept their own cur� all this time concealed, and though privately and with fright, they had thereby saved their souls through the whole of the bad times! And in another, some poor creatures said they were now content with their destiny, be it what it might, since they should be happy, at least, in the world to come - but that while denied going to mass, they had all their sufferings aggravated by knowing that they must lose their souls hereafter, besides all that they had to endure here! O my dearest father! that there can have existed wretches of such diabolical wickedness as to have snatched, torn, from the toiling indigent every ray even of future hope! Various of these little conversations extremely touched me nor was I unmoved, though not with such painful emotion, on the sight of the Sunday night dance, in a little village through which we passed, where there seemed two or three hundred peasants engaged in that pastime all clean and very gaily dressed, yet all so decent and well behaved, that, but for the poor old fiddlers, we might have driven on, and not have perceived the rustic ball. Here ends the account of my journey, and if it has amused my dearest father, it will be a true delight to me to have scribbled it. My next letter brings me to the capital, and to the only person who can console me for my always lamented absence from himself. ENGAGEMENTS, OCCUPATIONS, AND FATIGUE (Madame d'Arblay to Miss Planta.) Paris, April 27, 1802. A week have I been here, my dear Miss Planta, so astonishingly engaged, so indispensably occupied, or so suffering from fatigue, that I have not been able till now to take up Page 217 pen, except to satisfy my dear father of our safe arrival. To give you some idea of these engagements, occupations, and fatigues, I must begin with the last. We were a whole long, languid day, a whole restless, painful night, upon the sea; my little Alex sick as death, suffering if possible yet more than myself, though I had not a moment of ease and comfort. My little Adrienne de Chavagnac was perfectly well all the time, singing and skipping about the cabin, and amusing every one by her innocent enjoyment of the novelty of the scene. . . . As to my occupations;-my little apartment to arrange, my trunks and baggage to unpack and place, my poor Adrienne to consign to her friends, my Alex to nurse from a threatening malady; letters to deliver, necessaries to buy; a femme de chambre to engage; and, most important of all! my own sumptuous wardrobe to refit, and my own poor exterior to reorganise! I see you smile, methinks, at this hint; but what smiles would brighten the countenance of a certain young lady called Miss Rose, who amused herself by anticipation, when I had last the honour of seeing her, with the changes I might have to undergo, could she have heard the exclamations which followed the examination of my attire: "This won't do! That YOU can never wear! This you can never be seen in! That would make you stared at as a curiosity!-- Three petticoats! no one wears more than one!-- Stays? everybody has left off even corsets!--Shift sleeves? not a soul now wears even a chemise!" etc. In short, I found all I possessed seemed so hideously old fashioned, or so comically rustic, that as soon as it was decreed I must make appearance in the grand monde, hopeless of success in exhibiting myself in the' costume Fran�ais, I gave over the attempt, and ventured to come forth as a gothic Anglaise, who never heard of, or never heeded the reigning metamorphosis. As to my engagements;--when should I finish, should I tell all that have been made or proposed, even in the short space of a single week? The civilities I have met with, contrary to all my expectations, have not more amazed me for myself, than gratified me for M. d'Arblay, who is keenly alive to the kind, I might say distinguished, reception I have been favoured with by those to whom my arrival is known. Your favourite hero is excessively popular at this moment from three successive grand events, all occurring within the Page 218 short time of my arrival,--the ratification of the treaty of peace--the restoration of Sunday, and Catholic worship--and the amnesty of the emigrants. At the Opera buffa, the loge in which I sat was exactly opposite to that of the first Consul but he and his family are all at Malmaison. DIARY RESUMED: (Addressed to Dr. Burney.) ARISTOCRATIC VISITORS. Paris, April 1, 1802.(174)-Almost immediately after my arrival in Paris, I was much surprised by a visit from the ci-devant Prince de Beauvau, madame his wife, and Mademoiselle de Mortemar her sister, all brought by Madame d'Henin. if gratified in the first instance by a politeness of attention so little my due and so completely beyond my expectations, how was my pleasure enhanced when I found they all three spoke English with the utmost ease and fluency, and how pleased also at the pleasure I was able to give them in reward of their civility, by a letter I had brought from Mrs. Harcourt, which was received with the warmest delight by Mademoiselle de Mortemar and a message from a young lady named Elizabeth, with the profoundest gratitude. April 24-This morning Madame d'Henin was so kind as to accompany us, in making our visit to Madame de Beauvau her niece, and Mademoiselle de Mortemar. We found them at home with M. de Beauvau, and they indulged me with the sight of their children, who are the most flourishing and healthy possible, and dressed and brought up with English plainness and simplicity. The visit was very pleasant, and Madame d'Henin made a party for us all to meet again the next day, and go to the Opera buffa. ANXIETY TO SEE THE FIRST CONSUL. I have heard much of the visit of Mrs. Damer and the Miss Berrys to Paris, and their difficulty to get introduced to the first Consul.(175) A lady here told us she had been called upon Page 219 by Miss Berry, who had complained with much energy upon this subject, saying, "We have been everywhere--seen everything--heard every body--beheld such sights! listened to such discourse! joined such society! and all to obtain his notice! Don't you think it very extraordinary that he should not himself desire to see Mrs. Damer? "Madame," replied the lady, "perhaps if you had done but half this, the first Consul might have desired to see you both." "But you don't imagine," answered she, laughing, "we came over from England to see you ci-devants ? We can see such as you at home!" She was gone before our arrival ; and, as I understand, succeeded at last in obtaining an introduction. They were both, Mrs. Damer and Miss Berry, as I am told, very gay and agreeable, as well as enterprising, and extremely well r�pandues. AT THE OPERA-BOUFFE. April 25.-I was not much better in the evening, but the party for the Opera buffa being formed by Madame d'Henin on my account, my going was indispensable. She had borrowed the loge of M. de Choiseul, which, being entailed upon the family perp�tuit�, has in a most extraordinary manner continued unalienated through the whole course of massacres and proscriptions to the present day, when the right owner possesses it. It is the largest and best box, except that which is opposite to it, in the theatre. . . . The opera was "Le Nozze di Dorina," by Sarti, and extremely pretty; though I wished it had been as new to M. C-- de P-- as to myself, for then he would not have divided my attention by obligingly singing every note with every performer. In truth, I was still so far from recovered from the fatigue of my journey, that I was lulled to a drowsiness the most distressing before the end of the second act, ' page 220 which being but too obvious, Madame d'Henin and M. d'Arblay took me away before I risked a downright nap by waiting for the third. DIFFICULTIES RESPECTING MADAME DE STAEL. April 26-The assembly at Madame d'Henin's was one of the most select and agreeable at which I was ever present. Assembly, however, I ought not to call a meeting within the number of twenty. But I was uneasy for my poor Alex, and therefore stole away as soon as possible; not, however, till Madame de Tess� made a party for us for the following Thursday at her house, nor till I had held a private discourse with Mademoiselle de -- upon my embarrassment as to Madame de Stael, from the character she held in England; which embarrassment was not much lightened by her telling me it was not held more fair in France ! Yet, that everywhere the real evil is highly exaggerated by report, envy, and party-spirit, all allow. She gives, however, great assemblies at which all Paris assist, and though not solicited or esteemed by her early friends and acquaintance, she is admired, and pitied, and received by them. I would she were gone to Copet!(176) What most perplexed me at this period was the following note from Madame de Stael. "je voudrois vous t�moigner mon empressement, madame, et je crains d'�tre indiscrette. j'esp�re que vous aurez la bont� de me faire dire quand vous serez assez remise des fatigues de votre voyage pour que je puisse avoir l'honneur de vous voir sans vous importuner. "Ce 4 florial. (177) "Necker Stael de H."(178) How is it possible, when even the common civility of a card for her card is yet unreturned, that she can have brought herself thus to descend from her proud heights to solicit the Page 221 renewal of an acquaintance broken so abruptly in England, and so palpably shunned in France ? Is it that the regard she appeared to conceive for me in England was not only sincere but constant? If so, I must very much indeed regret a waste of kindness her character and conduct make it impossible for me to repay, even though, on this spot, I am assured all her misfortunes are aggravated, nay caricatured, by report, and that she exerts her utmost influence, and calls forth her best talents, upon every occasion which presents itself for serving those who have been her friends ; and that, notwithstanding circumstances and disunion, either in politics or morals, may have made them become her enemies. Her generosity is cited as truly singular upon this head, and I have heard histories of her returning, personally, good for evil that would do honour to any character living. After much deliberation and discussion, my French master composed the following answer:-- \"Madame d'Arblay ne peut qu'�tre infiniment flatt�e de l'extr�me bont� de Madame la Comtesse de Stael. Elle aura tr�s certainement l'honneur de se pr�senter chez Madame de Stael aussit�t que possible."(179) Cooler than this it was not easy to write, and the ne peut qu'�tre is a tournure that is far enough from flattering. I hope, however, it will prepare her for the frozen kind of intercourse which alone can have place between us. MADAME DE LAFAYETTE. As I wished much to see the parade, or review, which was to take place on the 5th, and is only once a month, we were forced to devote the preceding day to visits, as it was decreed in our council of etiquette that I could not appear in a place where I might be seen by those who had shown me the civility of beginning an acquaintance, till I had acknowledged my debt to them. . . . I was so thoroughly tired when I returned from all these visits, that I was forced to rest upon a bed for the remainder of the day, to my no small discomposure before the evening was closed; for, in a close cap, my feet in their native, undraperied state, hidden by a large, long, wrapping morning Page 222 gown, your daughter, my dearest sir, lay reclined on a bed when, rather late in the evening, I was told Madame d'Henin was in the salon. I was going to send in my excuses, while I rose to get ready for waiting upon her - but Alex flung open the door, and seeing where I was, and how fatigued, she insisted on my keeping still, and came to my bedside, and sat in friendly converse, listening to the history of my morning excursion, till a ring at the bell of our ante-room made me desire to have nobody admitted. Alex again, however, frisking about, prevented Pauline, my little femme de chambre, from hearing me, and she announced Madame de Lafayette! You may easily believe this name, and my present situation, put me into no small commotion. I was beseeching Madame d'Henin to go to the saloon with my apologies, when Alex, whose illness, though it has diminished his strength and his flesh, has left his spirits as wild as ever, called out to proclaim where I was, and while Madame Lafayette was gently moving on, flung the bedroom door wide open, saying, "Mamma is here! " Madame Lafayette, concluding, I suppose, that I received du monde in the French manner, immediately presented herself at the door, where I had no resource but to entreat Madame d'Henin, who is her intimate friend, to receive her, for I was wholly powerless, with my unsandaled feet, from rising. Madame d'Henin now brought her to my bedside, where nothing could have been more awkward than my situation : but that the real reverence I had conceived for her character and her virtues made the sight of so singular a person, her condescension in the visit, and her goodness, though lame, in mounting three pair of stairs, give me a sensation of pleasure, that by animating my spirits, endowed me with a courage that overcame all difficulties both of language and position, and enabled me to express my gratitude for her kindness and my respect for her person, with something far nearer to fluency and clearness than anything in speech I have yet attempted. My mind instantly presented her to me, torn from her beloved family, and thrown into the death-impending prison of Robespierre ; and then saved by his timely destruction from the scaffold, and then using her hardly-recovered liberty only by voluntarily sacrificing it to be immured with her husband in the dungeon of Olm�tz.(180) Various as may be the opinions of Page 223 the politics of M. de Lafayette, all Europe, I believe,'concur in admiration of the character and conduct of his virtuous and heroic wife. Indeed, nothing since my arrival has so sensibly gratified me, from without, as this visit. Madame Lafayette is the daughter of the ci-devant Duc d'Ayen, and consequently niece of Madame de Tess�, the duke's sister. She was married to M. de Lafayette when she was only seventeen years of age. By some cold or mismanagement, and total want of exercise in the prison of Olm�tz, some humour has fallen into one of her ankles, that, though it does not make her absolutely lame, causes walking to be so painful and difficult to her that she moves as little as possible, and is always obliged to have a stool for her foot. She now resides with M. de Lafayette and their three children entirely in the country, at a chateau which has descended to her since the revolutionary horrors and therefore has not been confiscated, called "La Grange." They never come to Paris but upon business of positive necessity. She had arrived only this morning on a visit to her aunt, Madame de Tess�, to make some preparations for the approaching marriage of her only son. Her youngest daughter, Mademoiselle de Lafayette, accompanied her. She is a blooming young creature of English fairness-as we English choose to say-with a bright native colour, and beautiful light hair ; otherwise with but indifferent features, and not handsome : yet her air, though modest even to the extreme that borders upon bashfulness, is distinguished, and speaks her to be both sensible and well brought up. Madame de Lafayette, also, is by no means handsome; but has eyes so expressive, so large, and so speaking, that it is not easy to criticise her other features, for it is almost impossible to look at them. Her manner is calm and mild, yet noble. She is respected even by surrounding infidels for her genuine piety, which, in the true character of true religion, is severe only for herself, lenient and cheerful for all others. I do not say this from what I could see in the hour she was so good as to pass with me, but from all I have heard. She warmly invited me to La Grange, and requested me to name an early day for passing some time there. I proposed Page 224 that it might be after the marriage had taken place,"as till then all foreign people or subjects might be obtrusive. She paused a moment, and then said, "Apr�s?--c'est vrai we could then more completely enjoy Madame d'Arblay' society; for we must now have continual interruptions, surrounded as we are by workmen, goods, chattels, and preparations; so that there would be a nail to hammer between almost every word; and yet, as we are going to Auvergne, after the ceremony, it will be so long before a meeting may be arranged, that I believe the less time lost the better." I know M. d'Arblay desired this acquaintance for me too earnestly to offer any opposition; and I was too much charmed with its opening to make any myself: it was therefore determined we should go the following week to La Grange. SIGHT-SEEING AT THE TuILERIES. May 5-Again a full day. M. d'Arblay had procured us three tickets for entering the apartments at the Tuileries to see the parade of General Hulin, now high in actual rank and service, but who had been a sous-officier under M. d'Arblay's command; our third ticket was for Madame d'Henin, who had never been to this sight-- nor, indeed, more than twice to any spectacle since her return to France--till my arrival; but she is so obliging and good as to accept, nay to seek, every thing that can amuse, of which I can profit. We breakfasted with her early, and were appointed to join the party of M. le Prince de Beauvau, who had a general in his carriage, through whose aid and instructions we hoped to escape all difficulties. Accordingly the coach in which they went was desired to stop at Madame d'Henin's door, so as to let us get into our fiacre, and follow it straight. This was done, and our precursor stopped at the gate leading to the garden of the Tuileries. The De Beauvaus, Mademoiselle de Mortemar, and their attending general, alighted, and we followed their example and joined them, which was no sooner done than their general, at the sight of M. d'Arblay, suddenly drew back from conducting Madame de Beauvau, and flew up to him. They had been ancient camarades, but had not met since M. d'A.'s emigration. The crowd was great, but civil and well -dressed ; and we met with no impediment till we came to the great entrance. Alas, I had sad recollections of sad readings in mounting the Page 225 steps! We had great difficulty, notwithstanding our tickets, in making our way--I mean Madame d'Henin and ourselves, for Madame de Beauvau and Mademoiselle de Mortemar having an officer in the existing military to aid them, were admitted and helped by all the attendants; and so forwarded that we wholly lost sight of them, till we arrived, long after, in the apartment destined for the exhibition. This, however, was so crowded that every place at the windows for seeing the parade was taken, and the row formed opposite to see the first Consul as he passes through the room to take horse, was so thick and threefold filled, that not a possibility existed of even a passing peep. Madame d'Henin would have retired, but as the whole scene was new and curious to me, I prevailed with her to stay, that I might view a little of the costume of the company; though I was sorry I detained her, when I saw her perturbed spirits from the recollections which, I am sure, pressed upon her on re-entering this palace : and that her sorrows were only subdued by her personal indignation, which was unconscious, but yet very prominent, to find herself included in the mass of the crowd in being refused all place and distinction, where, heretofore, she was amongst the first for every sort of courtesy. Nothing of this, however, was said and you may believe my pity for her was equally unuttered. We seated ourselves now, hopeless of any other amusement than seeing the uniforms of the passing officers, and the light drapery of the stationary ladies, which, by the way, is not by any means so notorious nor so common as has been represented ; on the contrary, there are far more who are decent enough to attract no attention, than who are fashionable enough to call for it. During this interval M. d'Arblay found means, by a ticket lent him by M. de Narbonne, to enter the next apartment, and there to state our distress, not in vain, to General Hulin; and presently he returned, accompanied by this officer, who is, I fancy, at least seven feet high, and was dressed in one of the most showy uniforms I ever saw. M. d'Arblay introduced me to him. He expressed his pleasure in seeing the wife of his old comrade, and taking my hand, caused all the crowd to make way, and conducted me into the apartment adjoining to that where the first Consul receives the ambassadors, with a flourish of manners so fully displaying power as well as courtesy, that I felt as if in the hands of one of the seven champions who meant to mow down all before him, should Page 226 any impious elf dare dispute his right to give me liberty, or to show me honour. A GOOD PLACE IS SECURED, He put me into the first place in the apartment which was sacred to general officers, and as many ladies as could be accommodated in two rows only at the windows. M. d'Arblay, under the sanction of his big friend, followed with Madame d'Henin , and we had the pleasure of rejoining Madame de Beauvau and Mademoiselle de Mortemar, who were at the same windows, through the exertions of General Songis. The scene now, with regard to all that was present, was splendidly gay and highly animating. The room was full, but not crowded, with officers of rank in sumptuous rather than rich uniforms, and exhibiting a martial air that became their attire, which, however, generally speaking, was too gorgeous to be noble. Our window was that next to the consular apartment, in which Bonaparte was holding a levee, and it was close to the steps ascending to it; by which means we saw all the forms of the various exits and entrances, and had opportunity to examine every dress and every countenance that passed and repassed. This was highly amusing, I might say historic, where the past history and the present office were known. Sundry footmen of the first Consul, in very fine liveries, were attending to bring or arrange chairs for whoever required them ; various peace-officers, superbly begilt, paraded occasionally up and down the chamber, to keep the ladies to their windows and the gentlemen to their ranks, so as to preserve the passage or lane through which the first Consul was to walk upon his entrance, clear and open; and several gentlemanlike looking persons, whom in former times I should have supposed pages of the back stairs, dressed in black, with gold chains hanging round their necks, and medallions pending from them, seemed to have the charge of the door itself, leading immediately to the audience chamber of the first Consul. M. D'ARPLAY'S MILITARY COMRADES. But what was most prominent in commanding notice, was the array of the aides-de-camp of Bonaparte, which was so Page 227 almost furiously striking, that all other vestments, even the most gaudy, appeared suddenly under a gloomy cloud when contrasted with its brightness. We were long viewing them before we could discover what they were to represent, my three lady companions being as new to this scene as myself; but afterwards M. d'Arblay starting forward to speak to one of them, brought him across the lane to me, and said "General Lauriston," His kind and faithful friendship to M. d'Arblay, so amiably manifested upon his late splendid embassy to England, made me see him with great pleasure. It was of course but for a moment, as he was amongst those who had most business upon their hands. General d'Hennezel also came to me for a few minutes, and three or four others, whom M. d'Arblay named, but whom I have forgotten. Indeed, I was amazed at the number of old friends by whom he was recognised, and touched far more than I can express, to see him in his old coat and complete undress, accosted by his fine (former) brethren, in all their new and beautiful costume, with an eagerness of regard that, resulting from first impulse, proved their judgment, or rather knowledge of his merits, more forcibly than any professions, however warm, could have done. He was indeed, after the aides-de-camp, the most striking figure in the apartment, from contrasting as much with the general herd by being the plainest and worst dressed, as they did by being the gayest and most showy. General Lauriston is a very handsome man, and of a very pleasing and amiable countenance; and his manly air carried off the frippery of his trappings, so as to make them appear almost to advantage. ARRIVAL OF THE TROOPS. While this variety of attire, of carriage, and of physiognomy amused us in facing the passage prepared for the first Consul, we were occupied, whenever we turned round, by seeing from the window the garden of the Tuileries filling 'with troops. In the first row of females at the window where we stood, were three ladies who, by my speaking English with Mademoiselle de Mortemar and Madame de Beauvau, discovered .my country, and, as I have since heard, gathered my name; and here I blush to own how unlike was the result to what "One of this nation might have experienced from a similar Page 228 discovery in England; for the moment it was buzzed "C'est Une �trang�re, c'est une Anglaise," (181) every one tried to Place, to oblige, and to assist me, and yet no one looked curious, or stared at me. Ah, my dear padre, do you not a little fear, in a contrasted situation, no one would have tried to place oblige, or assist, yet every one would have looked curious, and stared? Well, there are virtues as well as defects of all classes, and John Bull can fight so good a battle for his share of the former, that he need not be utterly cast down in acknowledging now and then a few of the latter. AN IMPORTANT NEW ACQUAINTANCE. The best view from the window to see the marching forwards of the troops was now bestowed upon me, and I vainly offered it to the ladies of my own party, to whom the whole of the sight was as new as to myself. The three unknown ladies began conversing with me, and, after a little general-talk, one of them with sudden importance of manner, in a tone slow but energetic, said, "Avez-vous vu, madame, le premier Consul?" "Pas encore, madame." "C'est sans doute ce que vous souhaitez le plus, madame?" "Oui, madame." "Voulez-vous le voir parfaitement bien, et tout fait votre aise?" "je le d�sire beaucoup, madame."(182) She then told me to keep my eyes constantly upon her, and not an instant lose sight of her movements; and to suffer no head, in the press that would ensue when the first Consul appeared, to intervene between us. "Faites comme cela, madame," continued she; "et vous le verrez bien, bien; car," added she, solemnly, and putting her hand on her breast,--"moi--je vais lui parler!"(183) I thanked her very much, but it was difficult to express as Page 229 much satisfaction as she displayed herself. You may suppose, however, how curious I felt for such a conversation, and how scrupulously I followed her injunctions of watching her motions. A little squat good-humoured lady, with yellow flowers over a mob cap upon her hair - who had little sunken eyes, concise nose, and a mouth so extended by perpetual smiling, that, hardly leaving an inch for the cheek, it ran nearly into the ear, on my other side now demanded my attention also, and told me she came regularly every month to the great review, that she might always bring some friend who wanted to see it. I found by this she was a person of some power, some influence, at least, and not entirely averse to having it known. She was extremely civil to me - but as my other friend had promised me so singular a regale, I had not much voluntary time to spare for her , this, however, appeared to be no impediment to that she was so obliging as to determine to bestow upon me, and she talked satisfied with my acquiescence to her civility, till a sort of bustle just before us making me look a little sharp, she cried-- "Vous le voyez, madame!" "Qui?" exclaimed I, "le premier Consul?" "Mais non!--pas encore--mais--ce--ce monsieur l !"(184) MADAME, C'EST MON MArI. I looked at her to see whom I was to remark, and her eyes led me to a tall, large figure, with a broad gold-laced hat, who was clearing the lane which some of the company had infringed, with a stentorian voice, and an air and manner of such authority as a chief constable might exert in an English riot. "Oui, madame," I answered, not conceiving why I was to look at him; "je le vois, ce monsieur; il est bien grand."(185) "Oui, madame," replied she, with a yet widened smile, and a look of lively satisfaction; "il est bien grand! Vous le voyez bien?" "O, fort bien!" cried I, quite at a loss what she meant me to understand, till at last, fixing first him, and then me, she expressively said-- page 230 "Madame, c'est mon mari!"(186) The grin now was distended to the very utmost limits of the stretched lips, and the complacency of her countenance forcibly said,. "What do you think of me now?" My countenance, however, was far more clever than my head, if it made her any answer. But, in the plenitude of her own admiration of a gentleman who seemed privileged to speak roughly, and push violently whoever, by a single inch, passed a given barrier, she imagined, I believe, that to belong to him entitled her to be considered as sharing his prowess ; she seemed even to be participating in the merits of his height and breadth, though be could easily have put her into his pocket. Not perceiving, as I imagine, all the delight of felicitation in my countenance that she had expected, her own fell, in a disappointed pause, into as much of length as its circular form would admit of; it recovered, however, in another minute its full merry rotundity, by conjecturing, as I have reason to think, that the niggardliness of my admiration was occasioned by my doubt of her assertions; for, looking at me with an expression that demanded my attention, she poked her head under the arm of a tall grenadier, stationed to guard our window, and trying to catch the eye of the object of her devotion, called out in an accent of tenderness, "M'ami! M'ami!" The surprise she required was now gratified in full, though what she concluded to be excited by her happiness, was simply the effect of so caressing a public address from so diminutive a little creature to so gigantic a big one. Three or four times the soft sound was repeated ere it reached the destined ear, through the hubbub created by his own loud and rough manner of calling to order; but, when at last he caught the gentle appellation, and looked down upon her, it was with an eyebrow so scowling, a mouth so pouting, and an air that so rudely said, "What the d-- do you want?" that I was almost afraid he would have taken her between his thumb and finger, and given her a shake. However, be only grumbled out, "Qu'est-ce que c'est, donc?"(187) A little at a loss what to say, she gently stammered, "M'ami,--le--le premier Consul, ne vient-il pas?"(188) "Oui! oui!" was blustered in reply, with a look that completed the phrase by "you fool you!" though the voice left it unfinished. Page 231 Not disconcerted even yet, though rather abashed,, she turned to me with a pleased grin that showed her proud of his noble ferociousness, and said, "C'est mon mari, madame!" as if still fearful I was not fully convinced of the grandeur of her connexion. "M'ami" having now cleared the passage by ranging all the company in two direct lines, the officers of highest rank were assembled, and went in a sort of procession into the inner apartment to the audience of the first Consul. During the time this lasted, some relaxation of discipline ensued, and the gentlemen from the opposite row ventured to approach and peep at the windows with the ladies; but as soon as the generals descended from the steps they had mounted, their short conference being over, "M'ami" again appeared,. to the inexpressible gratification of his loving little mate, again furiously hustled every one to his post; and the flags, next, as I think, were carried in procession to the inner apartment, but soon after brought back. ADVENT OF THE FIRST CONSUL. The Prince of Orange then passed us to enter the audience chamber, with a look so serious, an air so depressed, that I have not been at all surprised to hear he was that very night taken very ill. The last object for whom the way was cleared was the second Consul, Cambac�r�s, who advanced with a stately and solemn pace, slow, regular, and consequential; dressed richly in scarlet and gold, and never looking to the right or left, but wearing a mien of fixed gravity and importance. He had several persons in his suite, who, I think, but am not sure, were ministers of state. At length the two human hedges were finally formed, the door of the audience chamber was thrown wide open with a commanding crash, and a vivacious officer-sentinel-or I know not what, nimbly descended the three steps into our apartment, and placing himself at the side of the door, with one hand spread as high as possible above his head, and the other extended horizontally, called out in a loud and authoritative voice, "Le premier Consul!" You will easily believe nothing more was necessary to obtain attention; not a soul either spoke or stirred as he and his suite passed along, which was so quickly that, had I not been placed so near the door, and had not all about Page 232 me facilitated my standing foremost, and being least crowd obstructed, I could hardly have seen him. As it was, I had a view so near, though so brief, of his face, as to be very much struck by it. It is of a deeply impressive cast, pale even to sallowness, while not only in the eye but in every feature--care, thought, melancholy, and meditation are strongly marked, with so much of character, nay, genius, and so penetrating a seriousness, or rather sadness, as powerfully to sink into an observer's mind. Yet, though the busts and medallions I have seen are, in general, such good resemblances that I think I should have known him untold, he has by no means the look to be expected from Bonaparte, but rather that of a profoundly studious and contemplative man, who "o'er books consumes" not only the "midnight oil" but his own daily strength, "and wastes the puny body to decay" by abstruse speculation and theoretic plans or rather visions, ingenious but not practicable. But the look of the commander who heads his own army, who fights his own battles, who conquers every difficulty by personal exertion, who executes all he plans, who performs even all he suggests; whose ambition is of the most enterprising, and whose bravery is of the most daring cast:--this, which is the look to be expected from his situation, and the exploits which have led to it, the spectator watches for in vain. The plainness, also, of his dress, so conspicuously contrasted by the finery of all around him, conspires forcibly with his countenance, so "sicklied o'er with the pale hue of thought," to give him far more the air of a student than a warrior. The intense attention with which I fixed him in this short but complete view made me entirely forget the lady who had promised me to hold him in conference. When he had passed, however, she told me it was upon his return she should address him, as he was too much hurried to be talked with at the moment of going to the parade. I was glad to find my chance not over, and infinitely curious to know what was to follow. THE PARADE OF TROOPS. The review I shall attempt no description of. I have no knowledge of the subject, and no fondness for its object. It was far more superb than anything I had ever beheld: but while all the pomp and circumstance of war animated others, Page 233 it only saddened me ; and all of past reflection, all of future dread, made the whole grandeur of the martial scene, and all the delusive seduction of martial music, fill my eyes frequently with tears, but not regale my poor muscles with one single smile. Bonaparte, mounting a beautiful and spirited white horse, closely encircled by his glittering aides-de-camp, and accompanied by his generals, rode round the ranks, holding his bridle indifferently in- either hand, and seeming utterly careless of the prancing, rearing, or other freaks of his horse, insomuch as to strike some who were near me with a notion of his being a bad horseman. I am the last to be a judge upon this subject, but as a remarker, he only appeared to me a man who knew so well he could manage the animal when he pleased, that he did not deem it worth his while to keep constantly in order what he knew, if urged or provoked, he could subdue in a moment. Precisely opposite to the window at which I was placed, the chief Consul stationed himself after making his round and thence he presented some swords of honour, spreading out one arm with an air and mien which changed his look from that of scholastic severity to one that was highly military and commanding. . . . A SCENE. The review over, the chief Consul returned to the palace. The lines were again formed, and he re-entered our apartment with his suite. As soon as he approached our window, I observed my first acquaintance start a little forward. I was now all attention to her performance of her promise; and just as he reached us she stretched out her hand to present him a petition! The enigma of the conference was now solved, and I laughed at my own wasted expectation. Lui parler, however, the lady certainly did; so far she kept her word; for when he had taken the scroll, and was passing on, she rushed out of the line, and planting herself immediately before him so as to prevent his walking on, screamed, rather than spoke, for her voice was shrill with impetuosity to be heard and terror of failure, "C'est pour mon fils! vous me l'avez promis!"(189) The first Consul stopped and spoke; but not loud enough for me to hear his voice: while his aides-de-camp and the attending generals surrounding him more closely, all in a Page 234 breath rapidly said to the lady, "Votre nom, madame, votre nom!"(190) trying to disengage the Consul from her importunity, in which they succeeded, but not with much ease, as she seemed purposing to cling to him till she got his personal answer. He faintly smiled as he passed on, but looked harassed and worn; while she, turning to me, with an exulting face and voice, exclaimed, "Je l'aurai! je l'aurai!" meaning what she had petitioned for--"car . . . tous ces g�n�raux m'ont demand�s mon nom!" (191) Could any inference be clearer? The moment the chief Consul had ascended the steps leading to the inner apartment, the gentlemen in black with ,gold chains gave a general hint that all the company must depart, as the ambassadors and the ministers were now summoned to their monthly public audience with the chief Consul. The crowd, however, was so great, and Madame d'Henin was so much incommoded, and half ill, I fear, by internal suffering, that M. d'Arblay procured a pass for us by a private door down to a terrace leading to a quiet exit from the palace into the Tuileries garden. WITH M. D'ARBLAY'S RELATIVES AT JOIGNY. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.)(192) Paris, 1802. .....With the nearest relatives now existing of M. d'Arblay I am myself more pleased than I can tell you. We have spent a fortnight at joigny,(193) and found them all awaiting us with the most enthusiastic determination to receive with open arms and open heart the choice and the offspring of their returned exile. Their kindness has truly penetrated me; and the heads of the family, the uncle and the aunt, are so charming as well as so worthy, that I could have remained with them for months had not the way of life which their residence in a country town has forced them to adopt, been utterly at war with all that, to me, makes peace, and happiness, and cheerfulness, namely, the real domestic life of living with my own small but all-sufficient family. I have never loved a dissipated Page 235 life, which it is no virtue in me, therefore, to relinquish; but I now far less than ever can relish it, and know not how to enjoy anything away from home, except by distant intervals; and then with that real moderation, I am so far from being a misanthrope or sick of the world, that I have real pleasure in mixed society. It is difficult, however, in the extreme, to be able to keep to such terms. M. d'Arblay has so many friends, and an acquaintance so extensive, that the mere common decencies of established etiquettes demand, as yet, nearly all my time; and this has been a true fatigue both to my body and my spirits. M. d'Arblay is related, though very distantly, to a quarter of the town, and the other three-quarters are his friends or acquaintance; and all of them came, first, to see me; next, to know how I did after the journey; next, were all to be waited upon in return ; next, came to thank me for my visit; next, to know how the air of Joigny agreed with me - next, to make a little further acquaintance ; and, finally, to make a visit of cong�. And yet all were so civil, so pleasant, and so pleased with my monsieur's return, that could I have lived three lives, so as to have had some respite, I could not have found fault for it was scarcely ever with the individual intruder, but with the continuance or repetition of interruption. SOME JOIGNY ACQUAINTANCES. (Madame d'Arblay to Miss Planta, for the queen and princesses.) Passy, December 19, 1802. .....Rarely, indeed, my dear Miss Planta, I have received more pleasure than from your last most truly welcome letter, with assurances so unspeakably seasonable. I had it here at Passy the 5th day after its date. I thank you again and again, but oh! how I thank God! Permit me now to go back to Joigny, for the purpose of giving some account of two very interesting acquaintances we made there. The first was Colonel Louis Bonaparte,(194) youngest brother but one, (Jerome) of the first Consul. His Page 236 regiment was quartered at joigny, where he happened to be upon our last arrival at that town, and where the first visit he made was to M. MBazille, the worthy maternal uncle of M. d'Arblay. He is a young man of the most serious demeanour, a grave yet pleasing countenance, and the most reserved yet gentlest manners. His conduct in the small town (for France) of joigny was not merely respectable, but exemplary; he would accept no distinction in consequence of his powerful connexions, but presented himself everywhere with the unassuming modesty of a young man who had no claims beyond what he might make by his own efforts and merits. He discouraged all gaming, to which the inhabitants are extremely prone, by always playing low himself; and he discountenanced parade, by never suffering his own servant to wait behind his chair where he dined. He broke up early both from table and from play - was rigid in his attentions to his military duties, strict in the discipline of is officers as well as men, -and the first to lead the way in every decency and regularity. When to this I add that his conversation is sensible, and well bred, yet uncommonly diffident, and that but twenty-three summers have yet rolled over his head, so much good sense, forbearance, and propriety, in a situation so open to flattery, ambition, or vanity, obtained, as they merited, high consideration and perfect good will. I had a good deal of conversation with him, for he came to sit by me both before and after his card-party wherever I had the pleasure to meet him ; and his quiet and amiable manners, and rational style of discourse, made him a great loss to our society, when he was summoned to Paris, upon the near approach of the event which gave him a son and heir. He was very kind to my little Alex, whom he never saw without embracing, and he treated M. d'Arblay with a marked distinction extremely gratifying to me. The second acquaintance to which I have alluded is a lady, Madame de Souza.(195) She soon found the road to my good will and regard, for she told me that she, with another lady, had been fixed upon by M. del Campo, my old sea-visitor, for the high honour of aiding him in his reception of the first lady of our land and her lovely daughters, upon the grand f�te which he gave upon the dearest and most memorable of occasions(196) and she spoke with such pleasure and gratitude of Page 237 the sweet condescension she then experienced, that she charmed and delighted me, and we struck up an intimacy without further delay. Our theme was always ready, and I only regretted that I could see her but seldom, as she lived two or three miles out of Joigny, at Cesy, in the small ch�teau of la ci-devant Princesse de Beaufremont, a lady with whom I had had the honour of making acquaintance in Paris, and who is one of those who suffered most during the horrors of the Revolution. At the dreadful period when all the rage was to burn the property and title-deeds of the rich and high-born, her noble ch�teau, one of the most considerable in France, was. utterly consumed, and all her papers; that no record of her genealogy might remain, were committed, with barbarous triumph, to the flames : yet was this, such is her unhappy fate, the least of her misfortunes ; her eldest daughter, a beautiful young creature, upon whom she doted, was in the ch�teau at this horrible period, and forced to make her escape with such alarm and precipitance, that she never recovered from the excess of her terror, which robbed her of her life before she was quite seventeen years of age ! Around the small and modest ch�teau de Cesy, in which Madame de Beaufremont and her youngest and now only daughter, Madame de Listenois, at present reside, the grounds have been cultivated in the English style; and the walks, now shady, now open, now rising, now descending, with water, bridges, cascades, and groves, and occasional fine picturesque views from the banks of the Yonne, are all laid out with taste and pretty effects. We strolled over them with a large party, till we came to a little recess. Madame de Beaufremont then took me by the arm, and we separated from the company to enter it together, and she showed me an urn surrounded with cypress trees and weeping willows, watered by a clear, small, running rivulet, and dedicated to the memory of her first-born and early-lost lamented daughter. Poor lady! she seems entirely resigned to all the rest of her deprivations, but here the wound is incurable ! yet, this subject apart, she is cheerful, loves society, or rather social discourse, with a chosen few, and not only accepts with Pleasure whatever may enliven her, but exerts herself to contribute all that is in her power to the entertainment of others. She has still preserved enough from the wreck of her Possessions to live elegantly, though not splendidly; and her table is remarkably well served. She has a son-in-law, M. Page 238 de Listenois, whom I did not see; but her remaining daughter Madame de Listenois, is a very fine young woman. Madame de Souza has spent the whole summer with these ladies. She told me she liked England so very much, and was so happy during the six weeks she passed there, that she wept bitterly on quitting it. She was received, she says, at Court in the most bewitching manner, and she delights in retracing her honours, and her sense of them. She is still so very handsome, though sickly and suffering, that I imagine she must then have been exquisitely beautiful. I am told, by a French officer who has served in Spain, M. de Meulan, that when she left that country she was reckoned the most celebrated beauty of Madrid. I had another new acquaintance at Joigny, also, in a lady who came from Auxerre, as she was pleased to say, to see me, Madame La Villheurnois, widow of M. La Villheurnois, who was amongst the unhappy objects d�port�s, by the order of the Directory, la Guiane.(197) As soon as the first civilities were over, she said, "Permettez, madame! connaisseZ-vous Sidney?"(198) I could not doubt who she meant, though there is no avoiding a smile at this drolly concise way of naming a man by his nom de bapt�me.(199) She was extremely surprised when I answered no; telling me she had concluded "que tout le monde en Angleterre"(200) must know Sidney! Yes, I said, by character certainly ; but personally I had never the gratification of meeting with him. She told me she was intimately acquainted with him herself, from seeing him continually when he was confined in the Temple, as she attended there her "malheureux �poux,"(201) and she saw also, she said, "son valet et son jockey,"(202) whom she never suspected to be disguised emigrants, watching to aid his escape. "Surtout," she added, "comme le jockey avait des trous aux bas terribles,")203) which Page 239 induced her daughter to buy him a new pair of stockings for charity. A gentleman who accompanied her to Joigny, her secretary, told me he had played at ball with Sidney every day for six months, while he also attended upon poor M. La Vilheurnois...... THE INFLUENZA IN PARIS. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Passy, March 23, 1803. I have been anxious to write since I received your last kind inquiries, my dearest padre; but so tedious has been my seizure, that I have not yet got from its wraps or confinements. I feel, however, as if this were their last day, and that to-morrow would have the honour to see me abroad. I have had no fever, and no physician, and no important malady; but cold has fastened upon cold, so as utterly to imprison me. La gripe,(204) however, I escaped, so has Alex, and our maid and helpers--and M. d'Arblay, who caught it latterly in his excursions to Paris, had it so slightly that but for the fright attached to the seizure (which I thought would almost have demolished me at first, from the terror hanging on its very name at that fatal period) I should have deemed it a mere common cold. It is now universally over, but the mischief it has done is grievously irreparable. . . . It was a disastrous and frightful time. The streets of Paris were said to be as full of funerals as of cabriolets. For my own part, I have not once been able to enter that capital since I left it at the end of October. But I cannot help attributing much of the mortality which prevailed in consequence of this slight disease, to the unwholesome air occasioned by the dreadful want of cleanliness in that city, which, but for the healthiness of the beautiful and delicious walks around it, i.e., the Boulevards, must surely have proved pestilential. The air of our house at Passy is perfectly pure and sweet. M. d'Arblay is now making a last effort with respect to his retraite,(205) which has languished in adjournment above a year. He has put it into the hands of a faithful and most amiable friend, now in high esteem with the premier Consul, General Lauriston, who so kindly renewed an ancient friendship with his former camarade when he was on his splendid short embassy in England. If through him it should fail, I shall never think of it more. Page 240 RUMOURS OF WAR. (Madame dArblay to Mrs. Locke) NO- 54, Rue Basse, Passy, near Paris, April 30, 1803. How to write I know not, at a period so tremendous-nor yet how to be silent. My dearest, dearest friends ! if the war indeed prove inevitable, what a heart-breaking position is ours!-to explain it fully would demand folios, and yet be never so well done as you, with a little consideration, can do it for us. Who better than Mr. Locke and his Fredy-who so well can comprehend, that, where one must be sacrificed, the other will be yet more to be pitied ?-I will not go on-I will talk only of you, till our fate must be determined. And M. d'Arblay, who only in the wide world loves his paternal uncle as well (we always except ourselves at Westminster! how tenderly does he join in my every feeling! and how faithfully keep unimpaired all our best and happiest sympathies! May 2.--Better appearances in the political horizon now somewhat recruit my spirits, which have been quite indescribably tortured, rather than sunk, by the impossibility of any private arrangement for our mutual happiness in the dread event of war. God Almighty yet avert it! And should it fall to the lot of Lauriston to confirm the peace, what a guardian angel upon earth I shall deem him! How I wish he could meet with you! he is so elegant in his manners he would immediately give you pleasure; and his countenance is so true in announcing him amiable, that you might look at him with trust as well as satisfaction. . . . May 13--Ah, my dearest friends--what a melancholy end to my hopes and my letter. I have just heard that Lord Whitworth(206) set off for Chantilly last night; war therefore seems inevitable; and my grief, I, who feel myself now of two countries, is far greater than I can wish to express. While posts are yet open, write to me, my beloved friend, and by Hamburg. I trust we may still and regularly correspond, long as the letters may be in travelling. As our letters never Page 241 treat but of our private concerns, health and welfare neither country can object to our intercourse. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney). Passy, May 6, 1803. if my dearest father has the smallest idea of the suspense and terror in which I have spent this last fortnight, from the daily menace of war, he will be glad, I am sure, of the respite allowed me-if no more--from a visit I have just received from Mrs. Huber, who assures me the Ambassador has postponed his setting off, and consented to send another courier.(207) To say how I pray for his success would indeed be needless. I have hardly closed my eyes many nights past. My dearest father will easily conceive the varying conflicts of our minds, and how mutual are our sufferings. . . . We were buoyed up here for some days with the hope that General Lauriston was gone to England as plenipo, to end the dread contest without new effusion of blood: but Paris, like London, teems with hourly false reports, and this intelligence, unhappily, was of the number. The continued kindness and friendship of that gentleman for M. d'Arblay make me take a warm interest in whatever belongs to him. About ten days ago, when M. d'Arblay called upon him, relative to the affair so long impending of his retraite, he took his hand, and said "Fais-moi ton compliment!"(208) You are sure how heartily M. d'Arblay would be ready to comply-"but "what," he demanded, "can be new to you of honours?" "I have succeeded," he answered, "for you!--the first Consul has signed your m�moire." When such delicacy is joined to warm attachment, my dearest father will not wonder I should be touched by it. . . . M. d'Arblay has now something in his native country, where all other claims are vain, and all other expectations completely destroyed. He had been flattered with recovering some portion, at least, of his landed property near Joigny; but those who have purchased it during his exile add such enormous and unaccountable charges to what they paid for it at that period, that it is become, to us, wholly unattainable. Page 242 " OUR LITTLE CELL AT PASSY." (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Passy, April 11, 1804. We live in the most quiet, and, I think, enviable retired merit. Our house is larger than we require, but not a quarter furnished. Our view is extremely pretty from it, and always cheerful; we rarely go out, yet always are pleased to return. We have our books, our prate, and our boy--how, with all this, can we, or ought we to suffer ourselves to complain of our narrowed and narrowing income? If we are still able to continue at Passy, endeared to me now beyond any other residence away from you all, by a friendship I have formed here with one of the sweetest women I have ever known, Madame de Maisonneuve, and to M. d'Arblay by similar sentiments for all her family, our philosophy will not be put to severer trials than it can sustain. And this engages us to bear a thousand small privations which we might, perhaps, escape, by shutting ourselves up in some spot more remote from the capital. But as my deprivation of the society of my friends is what I most lament, so something that approaches nearest to what I have lost affords me the best reparation. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Passy, May 29, 1808. Before I expected it, my promised opportunity for again writing to my most dear father is arrived. I entirely forget whether, before the breaking out of the war stopt our correspondence, M. d'Arblay had already obtained his retraite: and, consequently, whether that is an event I have mentioned or not. Be that as it may, he now has it--it is 1500 livres, or 62 pounds, 10 shillings. per annum. But all our resources from England ceasing with the peace, we had so little left from what we had brought over, and M. d'Arblay has found so nearly nothing remaining of his natural and hereditary claims in his own province, that he determined upon applying for some employment that might enable him to live with independence, how ever parsimoniously. This he has, with infinite difficulty, etc., at length obtained, and he is now a r�dacteur in the civil department of les B�timens, etc.(209) This is no sinecure. He Page 243 attends at his bureau from half-past nine to half-past four o'clock every day; and as we live so far off as Passy he is obliged to set off for his office between eight and nine, and does not return to his hermitage till past five. However, what necessity has urged us to desire, and made him solicit, we must not, now acquired, name or think of with murmuring or regret. He has the happiness to be placed amongst extremely worthy people; and those who are his chefs in office treat him with every possible mark of consideration and feeling. We continue steady to our little cell at Passy, which is retired, quiet, and quite to ourselves, with a magnificent view of Paris from one side, and a beautiful one of the country on the other. It is unfurnished-indeed, unpapered, and every way unfinished; for our workmen, in the indispensable repairs which preceded our entering it, ran us up bills that compelled us to turn them adrift, and leave every thing at a stand, when three rooms only were made just habitable. THE PRINCE OF WALES EULOGIZED. (Dr. Burney to Madame d'Arblay.) July 12, 1805. . . . Your brother, Dr. Charles, and I have had the honour last Tuesday of dining with the Prince of Wales at Lord Melbourne's at the particular desire of H.R.H. He is so good-humoured and gracious to those against whom he has no party prejudice, that it is impossible not to be flattered by this politeness and condescension. I was astonished to find him, amidst such constant dissipation, possessed of so much learning, wit, knowledge of books in general, discrimination of Character, as well as original humour. He quoted Homer to my son as readily as if the beauties of Dryden or Pope were under consideration. And as to music, he is an excellent critic; has an enlarged taste-- admiring whatever is excellent in its kind, of whatever age or country the composers or performers may be; without, however, being insensible to the superior genius and learning necessary to some kinds of music more than others. The conversation was general and lively, in which several of the company, consisting of eighteen or twenty, took a share, till towards the heel of the evening, or rather the toe of the morning; for we did not rise from table till one Page 244 o'clock, when Lady Melbourne being returned from the opera with her daughters, coffee was ordered; during which H.R.H. took me outside and talked exclusively about music near half an hour, and as long with your brother concerning Greek literature. He is a most excellent mimic of well-known characters: had we been in the dark any one would have sworn that Dr. Parr and Kemble were in the room. Besides being possessed of a great fund of original humour, and good humour, he may with truth be said to have as much wit as Charles II., with much more learning--for his merry majesty could spell no better than the bourgeois gentilhomme. DR. BURNEY AT BATH. (Dr. Burney to Madame dArblay.) June 12, 1808. . . . Last autumn I had an alarming seizure In my left hand and, mine being pronounced a Bath case, on Christmas Eve I set out for that city, extremely weak and dispirited-put myself under the care of Dr. Parry, and after remaining there three months, I found my hand much more alive, and my general health considerably amended. During my invalidity at Bath I had an unexpected visit from your Streatham friend,(210) of whom I had lost sight for more than ten years. I saw very few people, but none of an evening nor of a morning, on the days my hand was pumped on. When her name was sent in I was much surprised, but desired she might be admitted; and I received her as an old friend with whom I had spent much time very happily, and never wished to quarrel. She still looks well, but is grave, and candour itself; though still she says good things, and writes admirable notes and letters, I am told, to my granddaughters C. and M., of whom she is very fond. We shook hands very cordially, and avoided any allusion to our long separation and its cause; the Caro Sposo still lives, but is such an object from the gout that the account of his sufferings made me pity him sincerely; he wished, she told me, "to see his old and worthy friend," and, un beau matin, I could not refuse compliance with his wish. She nurses him with great affection and tenderness, never goes out or has company when he is in pain. Page 245 AFFECTIONATE GREETINGS To DR. BURNEY. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) September, 1808. After being so long robbed of all means of writing to my beloved father, I seize, with nearly as much surprise as gratitude, a second opportunity of addressing him almost before the first can have brought my hand to his sight. When will some occasion offer to bring me back-not my revenge, but my first and most coveted satisfaction ? With how much more spirit, also, should I write, if I knew what were received of what already I have scrawled ! Volumes, however, must have been told you, of what in other times I should have written, by Maria. For myself, when once a reunion takes place, I can scarcely conceive which will be hardest worked, my talking faculties or my listening ones. O what millions of things I want to inquire and to know! The rising generation, me thinks, at least, might keep me some letters and packets ready for occasional conveyances. I should be grateful beyond measure. M. d'Arblay writes--"how desired is, how happy shall be, the day, in which we shall receive your dearest blessing and embrace! Pray be so kind not to forget the mate always remembering your kindness for him and his. A thousand thousand loves to all." (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) No. 13, Rue d'Anjou, Paris, May 2, 1810. A happy May-day to my dearest father! Sweet-scented be the cowslips which approach his nostrils! lovely and rosy the milkmaids that greet his eyes, and animating as they are noisy the marrow-bones and cleavers that salute his ears! Dear, and even touching, are these anniversary recollections where distance and absence give them existence only in the memory! and, at this moment, to hear and see them I Would exchange all the Raphaels in our Museum, and the new and beautiful composition of Paesiello in the chapel. Could you but send me a little food for the hope now in private circulation that the new alliance of the Emperor(211) may perhaps extend to a general alliance of all Europe, Oh, Page 246 heaven! how would that brighten my faculties of enjoyment! I should run about to see all I have hitherto omitted to seek, with the ardent curiosity of a traveller newly arrived ; and I should hasten to review and consider all I have already beheld, with an alertness of vivacity that would draw information from every object I have as yet looked at with undiscerning tameness. Oh, such a gleam of light would new-model or re-model me, and I should make you present to all my sights, and partake of all the wonders that surround me ! Were not this cruel obscurity so darkening to my views, and so depressing to my spirits, I could tell my dearest father many things that might amuse him, and detail to him, in particular, my great and rare happiness in a point the most essential, after domestic comforts, to peace of mind and cheerfulness, namely, my good fortune in my adopted friends in this my adopted country. The society in which I mix, when I can prevail with myself to quit my yet dearer fireside, is all that can be wished, whether for wit, wisdom, intelligence, gaiety, or politeness. The individuals with whom I chiefly mix, from being admired at first for their talents or amiability, are now sincerely loved for their kindness and goodness. Could I write more frequently, or with more security that I write not to the winds and the waves, I would characterize the whole set to you, and try to make us yet shake hands in the same Party. . . . (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) No. 13, Rue d'Anjou, Paris, ce 16 Sept. 1810. Can I tell you, my dearest father!-oh, no! I can never tell you-the pleasure, the rapture with which I received your letter by Madame Solvyns. It had been so cruelly long since I had heard from you, so anxious and suffering a space since I had seen your handwriting, that, when at last it came, I might have seemed, to one who did not know me, rather penetrated by sudden affliction than by joy. But how different was all within to what appeared without! My partner-in-all received it at his bureau, and felt an impatience so unconquerable to communicate so extreme a pleasure that he quitted everything to hasten home; for he was incapable of going on with his business. How satisfactory, also, is all the intelligence ! how gaily, with what spirit written ! . . . I do nothing of late but dream of seeing you, my most dear Page 247 father. I think I dream it wide awake, too; the desire is so strong that it pursues me night and day, and almost persuades me it has something in it of reality : and I do not choose to discourage even ideal happiness. DR. BURNEY's DIPLOMA. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) No. 13, Rue d'Anjou, 14th April, 1811. .....Have you received the letter in which I related that your diploma has been brought to me by the perpetual secretary of the class of the Fine Arts of the Institute of France?(212) I shall not have it conveyed but by some very certain hand, and that, now, is most difficult to find. M. Le Breton has given me, also, a book of the list of your camarades, in which he has written your name. He says it will be printed in next year's register. He has delivered to me, moreover, a medal, which is a mark of distinction reserved for peculiar honour to peculiar select personages. Do you suppose I do not often--often--often think who would like, and be fittest to be the bearer to you of these honours? . . . How kind was the collection of letters you made more precious by endorsing! I beseech you to thank all my dear correspondents, and to bespeak their patience for answers, which shall arrive by every wind that I can make blow their way; but yet more, beseech their generous attention to my impatience for more, should the wind blow fair for me before it will let me hail them in return. Difficultly can they figure to themselves my joy--my emotion at receiving letters from such dates as they can give me! [During this year Madame d'Arblay's correspondence with her English connexions was interrupted not only by the difficulty of conveying letters, but also by a dangerous illness and the menace of a cancer, from which she could only be relieved by submitting to a painful and hazardous operation. The fortitude with which she bore this suffering, and her generous solicitude for Monsieur d'Arblay and those around her, excited the warmest sympathy in all who heard of her trial, and her French friends universally gave her the name of l'ange,(213) so touched were they by her tenderness and Magnanimity.] (157) " Dr. Orkborne" is the name of one of the characters in "Camilla," a pedantic scholar, who lives only in his books.-ED. (158) Widow of Sir Robert Strange, the celebrated engraver, and a very old friend of the Burney family. She was a Scotchwoman (her maiden name, Isabel Lumisden), and in her younger days an enthusiastic Jacobite. She obliged her lover, Strange, to join the young Pretender in 1745, and afterwards married him against her father's wish.-ED. (159) "The other Bell" was the daughter of Sir Robert and Lady Strange.-ED. (160) Wife of Sir Lucas Pepys, the physician.-ED. (161) Anna Letitia Barbauld, the well-known author, and editor of Richardson's Correspondence, etc.-ED. (162) John Aiken, M.D., brother to Mrs. Barbauld, and, like his sister, an author and editor. His "Evenings at Home" is still a well-known book: many of our readers will probably have pleasant reminiscences of it, connected with their childhood.-ED. (163) Barry had published a furious attack upon his fellow-Academicians in a "Letter to the Dilettanti Society." He was already, owing chiefly to his own violent temper, on ill terms with nearly all of them, and the "Letter" prove(I to be the last straw. Various charges were drawn up against the Professor of Painting, and he was expelled forthwith from the Academy, without being permitted to speak in his own defence. (164) "By the help of a shilling." (165) "With tears in his eyes." (166) i.e., Mr. Locke.-ED. (167) The French minister in England.-ED. (168) A letter in which M. d'Arblay had acquainted his wife with the withdrawal of his commission in the French army, in consequence of his refusal, under any circumstances, to bear arms against England.-ED. (169) Miss Cambridge.-ED. (170) Lafayette was then living in retirement, with his wife and family, at is chateau of La Grange. -ED. (171) "Quick, quick, madam, take your seat in the diligence, for here is an English gentleman who is sure to take the best place!"--There is evidently some mistake here, in making the book-keeper in Piccadilly speak French and talk about the diligence. That the paragraph relates to Fanny's departure from London is evident from several passages in the text: the mention, later, of changing horses at Canterbury, the references to her fellow-travellers at Calais. The date to the above paragraph is also clearly wrong, as it will be seen that on the 18th of April they were still on the road to Paris.-ED. (172) "Quick! quick! look for it, or you will be arrested!" (173) in the new calendar adopted by the Republic in 1793, a division of the month into decades, or periods of ten days, was substituted for the old division into weeks. Every tenth day (d�cadi) was a day of rest, instead of every seventh day, (Sunday, Dimanche). The months were of thirty days each, with five odd festival days (Sansculottades) in the year, and a sixth (Festival of the Revolution) in Leap Year. Napoleon restored the Sunday in place of d�cadi. The new calendar was discontinued altogether, January 1, 1806.-ED. (174) The date is again wrong--probably a misprint for April 21.-ED. (175) Mrs. Damer, the sculptor, as an ardent Whig and supporter of Charles Fox, professed herself at this time an enthusiastic admirer of the first Consul. She had known jos�phine de Beauharnais before her marriage with Napoleon, and, after the peace of Amiens, visited Paris on Jos�phine's invitation. She was there introduced to Napoleon, to whom she afterwards presented a bust of Charles Fox, executed by herself. Mrs. Damer's companions on this excursion were Mary Berry, the author (born 1763-died 1852), and her younger sister, Agnes Berry. These two ladies were prodigious favourites with Horace Walpole, who called them his "twin wives," and was, it is said, even desirous, in his old age, Of marrying the elder Miss Berry. One of his valued possessions was a marble bust of Mary Berry, the work of his kinswoman, Mrs. Damer. At his death in 1797 he bequeathed to the Miss Berrys a house for their joint lives, besides a legacy Of 4000 pounds to each sister. Mary Berry published an edition of her old admirer's works the year after his death.-ED. (176) The Swiss home of her father, 'M. Necker, on the shore of the lake, and some ten miles north of the town of Geneva. Necker retired thither after his fall in 1790, and spent there, in retirement, the remaining years of his life. He died at Geneva, in April, 1804.-ED. (177) Madame de Stael's orthography is here preserved. " I should like to prove to you my zeal, madam, and I am afraid of being indiscreet. I hope you will have the goodness to let me know when you are sufficiently recovered from the fatigue of your journey, that I might have the honour of seeing you without being tiresome to you." (178) The 4th Floria (April 23). (179) "Madame d'Arblay can only be infinitely flattered by the extreme goodness of Madame the Countess de Stael. She will very certainly have the honour of calling upon Madame de Stael as soon as possible." (180) Madame de Lafayette was thrown into prison after the flight of her husband; released in February, 1795, more than six months after the death of Robespierre. She then journeyed to Austria, and obtained leave to share, with her two daughters, her husband's captivity at Olm�tz. Lafayette was released in September, 1797; returned to France in 1800, Napoleon not forbidding, though not quite approving. Madame de Lafayette's constitution was permanently impaired by the confinement which she suffered at Olm�tz. She died December 24, 1807.-ED. (181) "It's a foreigner, it's an Englishwoman." (182) "Have you seen the first Consul, madam?" "Not yet, madam." "It is doubtless what you most wish for, madam?" "Yes, madam." "Do you wish to have an excellent view of him, and to see him quite at your ease?" "I am particularly desirous of it, madam." (183) "Do thus, madam, and you will see him well, well; for I-am going to speak to him ! " (184) "You see him, madam!" "Whom?" exclaimed I, "the first Consul?" "Oh no!--not yet;--but--that--that gentleman!" (185) "yes, madam, I see that gentleman; he is very tall!" (186) "Madam, it is my husband!" (187) "What is the matter?" (188) "M'ami, the--the first Consul, is he not coming?" (189) "'Tis for my son ! you promised it me!" (190) "Your name, madam, your name!" (191) "I shall have it! I shall have it! for all those generals asked my name!" (192) Fanny's eldest sister, Esther, who married (1770) her cousin, Charles Rousseau Burney.-ED. (193) joigny was the birth-place of M. d'Arblay.-ED. (194) Louis Bonaparte was born in 1778, and, young as he was, had already served with distinction in the campaign in Italy. He was subsequently king of Holland from 1806 to 1810, when that country was annexed by Napoleon to the French Empire. He married Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter, by her first marriage, of Napoleon's wife, Josephine, and was the father of the Emperor Napoleon III.-ED. (195) Authoress of "Ad�le de Senange," etc. (196) On the king's recovery, in the spring of 1789.-ED. (197) Many of the leading members of the Councils of "Ancients" and of "Five Hundred " had been transported to Guiana after the coup d'�tat of September 4, 1797. See note (146) ante, p. 136.-ED. (198) "Excuse me, madam ! do you know Sidney? Sidney " is Sir Sidney Smith, whose gallant and successful defence of Acre against the French,, in the spring of 1799, obliged Napoleon to relinquish the invasion of Syria.-ED. (199) Christian name. (200) "Every one in England." (201) "Unfortunate husband." (202) "His valet and his jockey, (groom)." (203) "Especially as the jockey had terrible holes in his stockings." (204) The influenza. (205) Retiring pension. (206) The English ambassador in Paris. All hopes of a satisfactory termination to the dispute between the English and French governments being now at an end, Lord Whitworth was ordered to return to England, and left Paris May 12, 1803. His return was followed by the recall of the French minister in London, and the declaration of war between the two countries.-ED. (207) The reader will have noticed that the date of this letter is earlier than that of the paragraph in the preceding letter, in which Fanny alludes to the departure of the Ambassador from Paris.-ED. (208) "Make me your compliments." (209) "Or, as we might say, a clerk in the department of works."- ED. (210) Mrs. Piozzi.-ED. (211) Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French, November 19, 1804. His "new alliance" was his marriage, in the spring Of 1810, with the archduchess Maria Louisa, daughter of the Emperor of Austria. With this alliance in view he had been divorced from Jos�phine at the close of the preceding year.-ED (212) Dr. Burney had been elected a corresponding member of this section of the Institute.-ED. (213) The angel. Page 248 SECTION 23. (1812-14.) MADAME D'ARBLAY AND HER SON IN ENGLAND, [At the commencement of the year 1814 was published "The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties," the fourth and last novel by the author of "Evelina," "Cecilia," and "Camilla." The five volumes were sold for two guineas-double the price of "Camilla,"--and we gather from Madame d'Arblay's own statement that she received at least fifteen hundred pounds for the work. She informs us also that three thousand six hundred copies were sold during the first six months. This pecuniary profit, however, was the only advantage which she derived from the book. It was severely treated by the critics ; its popularity,-- if it ever had any, for its large sale was probably due to the author's high reputation,--speedily declined; and the almost total oblivion into which it passed has remained unbroken to the present day. Yet "The Wanderer" was deserving of a better fate. In many respects it is not inferior to any of Madame d'Arblay's earlier works. Its principal defect is one of literary style, and its style, though faulty and unequal, is by no means devoid of charm and impressiveness. The artless simplicity and freshness of "Evelina" render that work, her first novel, the most successful of all in point of style. In "Cecilia" the style shows more of conscious art, and is more laboured. In "Camilla" and "The Wanderer" it is at once more careless and more affected than in the earlier novels ; her English is at times slipshod, at times disfigured by attempts at fine writing. But, admitting all this, we must admit also that Fanny, even in "The Wanderer," proves herself mistress of what we may surely regard as the most essential part of style-its power of affecting the reader agreeably with the intentions of the author. She plays upon her reader's emotions with a sure touch; she excites or soothes him at her will; she arouses by turns his compassion, his mirth, his resentment, according as she strikes the keys of pathos, of humour, or of irony. A style which is capable of producing such effects is not rashly to be condemned on the score of occasional affectations and irregularities. Page 249 The question of style apart, we do not feel that "The Wanderer" shows the slightest decline in its author's powers. The plot is as ingeniously complicated as ever, the suspense as skilfully maintained; the characters seem to us as real as those in "Evelina," or "Cecilia," or in the "Diary" itself; the alternate pathos and satire of the book keep our attention ever on the alert. That it failed to win the suffrages of the public was certainly due to no demerit in the work. Many causes may have conspired against it. The public taste had long been debauched by novels of that nightmare school in which Mrs Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis were the leaders. Moreover, in the very year in which "The Wanderer" was published, appeared the first of a series of works of fiction which, by their power and novelty, were to monopolise, for a time, the public attention and applause, and which were thereafter to secure for their author a high rank among the immortals of English literature. At the end of the fifth volume of "The Wanderer" were inserted a few leaves, containing a list of books recently published or "in the press;" and last on the list of the latter stands "Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years since." Like " Evelina," "The Wanderer" is inscribed in a touching dedication (this time, however, in prose, and with his name prefixed) to Fanny's beloved father. The dedication is dated March 14, 1814 : on the 12th of the following month Dr. Burney died at Chelsea College, in his eighty-seventh year.-ED.] NARRATIVE OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S JOURNEY TO LONDON. ANXIETY TO SEE FATHER AND FRIENDS. Dunkirk, 1812. There are few events of my life that I more regret not having committed to paper while they were fresher in my memory, than my police adventure at Dunkirk, the most fearful that I have ever experienced, though not, alas, the most afflicting, for terror, and even horror, are short of deep affliction; while they last they are, nevertheless, absorbers; but once past, whether ill or well, they are over, and from them, as from bodily pain, the animal spirits can rise uninjured: not so from that grief which has its source in irreInediable calamity; from that there is no rising, no relief, save in hopes of eternity: for here on earth all buoyancy of mind that Might produce the return of peace, is sunk for ever. I will Page 250 now, however, put down all that recurs to me of my first return home. In the year 1810, when I had been separated from my dear father, and country, and native friends, for eight years, my desire to again see them became so anxiously impatient that my tender companion proposed my passing over to England alone, to spend a month or two at Chelsea. Many females at that period, and amongst them the young Duchesse de Duras, had contrived to procure passports for a short similar excursion ; though no male was permitted, under any pretence, to quit France, save with the army. Reluctantly--with all my wishes in favour of the scheme,--yet most reluctantly, I accepted the generous offer; for never did I know happiness away from that companion, no, not even out of his sight! but still, I was consuming with solicitude to see my revered father--to be again in his kind arms, and receive his kind benediction. A MILD MINISTER OF POLICE. For this all was settled, and I had obtained my passport, which was brought to me without my even going to the police office, by the especial favour of M. Le Breton, the Secretaire Perp�tuel l'Institut. The ever active services of M. de Narbonne aided this peculiar grant ; though, had not Bonaparte been abroad with his army at the time, neither the one nor the other would have ventured at so hardy a measure of assistance. But whenever Bonaparte left Paris, there was always an immediate abatement of severity in the police; and Fouch�, though he had borne a character dreadful beyond description in the earlier and most horrible times of the Revolution, was,'at this period, when minister of police, a man of the mildest manners, the most conciliatory conduct, and of the easiest access in Paris. He had least the glare of the new imperial court of any one of its administration; he affected, indeed, all the simplicity of a plain Republican. I have often seen him strolling in the most shady and unfrequented parts of the "Elysian Fields," muffled up in a plain brown rocolo, and giving le bras to his wife, without suite or servant, merely taking the air, with the evident design of enjoying also an unmolested t�te- -t�te. On these occasions, though he was universally known, nobody approached him; and he seemed, himself, not to observe that any other person Page 251 was in the walks. He was said to be remarkably agreeable in conversation, and his person was the best fashioned and most gentlemanly of any man I have happened to see, belonging to the government. Yet, such was the impression made upon me by the dreadful reports that were spread of his cruelty and ferocity at Lyons,(214) that I never saw him but I thrilled with horror. How great, therefore, was my obligation to M. de Narbonne and to M. Le Breton, for procuring me a passport, without my personal application to a man from whom I shrunk as from a monster. EMBARKATION INTERDICTED. I forget now for what spot the passport was nominated, perhaps for Canada, but certainly not for England and M. Le Breton, who brought it to me himself, assured me that no difficulty would be made for me either to go or to return, as I was known to have lived a life the most inoffensive to government, and perfectly free from all species of political intrigue, and as I should leave behind me such sacred hostages as my husband and my son. Thus armed, and thus authorized, I prepared, quietly and secretly, for my expedition, while my generous mate employed all his little leisure in discovering where and how I might embark - when, one morning, when I was bending over my trunk to press in its contents, I was abruptly broken in upon by M. de Boinville, who was in my secret, and who called upon me to stop! He had received certain, he said, though as yet unpublished information, that a universal embargo was laid upon every vessel, and that not a fishing-boat was permitted to quit the coast. Confounded, affrighted, disappointed, and yet relieved, I submitted to the blow, and obeyed the injunction. M. de Boinville then revealed to me the new political changes that occasioned this measure, which he had learned from some confiding friends in office; but which I do not touch upon, as they are now in every history of those times. Page 252 I pass on to my second attempt, in the year 1812. Disastrous was that interval ! All correspondence with England was prohibited under pain of death ! One letter only reached me, most unhappily, written with unreflecting abruptness, announcing, without preface, the death of the Princess Amelia, the new and total derangement of the king, and the death of Mr. Locke. Three such calamities overwhelmed me, overwhelmed us both, for Mr. Locke, my revered Mr. Locke, was as dear to my beloved partner as to myself. Poor Mrs. C concluded these tidings must have already arrived, but her fatal letter gave the first intelligence, and no other letter, at that period, found its way to me. She sent hers, I think, by some trusty returned prisoner. She little knew my then terrible situation ; hovering over my head was the stiletto of a surgeon for a menace of cancer yet, till that moment, hope of escape had always been held out to me by the Baron de Larrey-- hope which, from the reading of that fatal letter, became extinct. A CHANGE OF PLAN. When I was sufficiently recovered for travelling, after a dreadful operation, my plan was resumed, but with an alteration which added infinitely to its interest, as well as to its importance. Bonaparte was now engaging in a new war, of which the aim and intention was no less than-the conquest of the world. This menaced a severity of conscription to which Alexander, who had now spent ten years in France, and was seventeen years of age, would soon become liable. His noble father had relinquished all his own hopes and emoluments in the military career, from the epoch that his king was separated from his country; though that career had been his peculiar choice, and was suited peculiarly to the energy of his character, the vigour of his constitution, his activity, his address, his bravery, his spirit of resource, never overset by difficulty nor wearied by fatigue---all which combination of military requisites-- "The eye could in a moment reach, And read depicted in his martial air," But his high honour, superior to his interest, superior to his inclination, and ruling his whole conduct with unremitting, unalienable constancy, impelled him to prefer the hard labour and obscure drudgery of working at a bureau of the minister Page 253 of the interior, to any and every advantage or promotion that could be offered him in his own immediate and favourite line of life, when no longer compatible with his allegiance and loyalty. To see, therefore, his son bear arms in the very cause that had been his ruin--bear arms against the country which had given himself as well as his mother, birth, would indeed have been heart-breaking. We agreed, therefore, that Alexander should accompany me to England, where, I flattered myself, I might safely deposit him, while I returned to await, by the side of my husband, the issue of the war, in the fervent hope that it would prove our restoration to liberty and reunion. A NEW PASSPORT OBTAINED. My second passport was procured with much less facility than the first. Fouch� was no longer minister of police, and, strange to tell, Fouch�, who, till he became that minister, had been held in horror by all France-all Europe, conducted himself with such conciliatory mildness to all ranks of people .while in that office, evinced such an appearance of humanity, and exhibited such an undaunted spirit of justice in its execution, that at his dismission all Paris was in affliction and dismay ! Was this from the real merit he had shown in his police capacity? Or was it from a yet greater fear of malignant cruelty awakened by the very name of his successor, Savary, Duke of Rovigo?(215) Now, as before, the critical moment was seized by my friends to act for me when Bonaparte had left Paris to proceed towards the scene of his next destined enterprise;(216) and he was, I believe, already at Dresden when my application was ,made. My kind friend Madame de T-- here took the agency which M. de Narbonne could no longer sustain, as he was now attending the emperor, to whom he had been made aide-de-camp, and through her means, after many difficulties and delays, I obtained a licence of departure for myself and Page 254 for Alexander. For what place, nominally, my passport was assigned, I do not recollect; I think, for Newfoundland, but certainly for some part of the coast of America. Yet everybody at the police office saw and knew that England was my object. They connived, nevertheless, at the accomplishment of my wishes, with significant though taciturn consciousness. COMMISSIONS FOR LONDON. >From all the friends whom I dared trust with my secret expedition, I had commissions for London; though merely verbal, as I was cautioned to take no letters. No one at that time could send any to England by the post. I was charged by sundry persons to write for them, and in their names, upon my arrival. Madame de Tracy begged me to discover the address of her sister-in-law, Madame de Civrac, who had emigrated into the wilds of Scotland, and of whom she anxiously wished for some intelligence. This occasioned my having a little correspondence with her, which I now remark because she is named as one of the principal dames de la soci�t� by Madame de Genlis. Madame d'Astorre desired me to find out her father, M. le Comte de Cely, and to give him news of her and her children. This I did, and received from the old gentleman some visits, and many letters. Madame la Princesse de Chimay entrusted me with a petition--a verbal one, to the Prince of Wales, in favour of the Duc de Fitzjames, who, in losing his wife, had lost an English pension. This I was to transmit to his royal highness by means of the Duchess dowager of Buccleugh - who was also entreated to make known the duke's situation to M. d'Escars, who was in the immediate service of Louis XVIII.; for M. d'Escars I had a sort of cipher from Madame de Chimay, to authenticate my account. DELAY AT DUNKIRK. Our journey--Alexander's and mine--from Paris to Dunkirk was sad, from the cruel separation which it exacted, and the fearful uncertainty of impending events ; though I was animated at times into the liveliest sensations, in the prospect of again beholding my father, my friends, and my country. General d'Arblay, through his assiduous researches, aided by those of M. de Boinville and some others, found that a vessel was preparing to sail from Dunkirk to Dover, under Page 255 American colours, and with American passports and licence and, after privately landing such of its passengers as meant but to cross the channel, to proceed to the western continents. M. d'Arblay found, at the same time, six or seven persons of his acquaintance who were to embark in this vessel. We all met, and severally visited at Dunkirk, where I was compelled, through the mismanagement and misconduct of the captain of the vessel, to spend the most painfully wearisome six weeks of my life, for they kept me alike from all that was dearest to me, either in France or in England, save my Alexander. I was twenty times on the point of returning to Paris; but whenever I made known that design, the captain promised to sail the next morning. The truth is, he postponed the voyage from day to day and from week to week, in the hope of obtaining more passengers ; and, as the clandestine visit he meant to make. to Dover, in his way to America, was whispered about, reinforcements very frequently encouraged his cupidity. The ennui of having no positive occupation was now, for the first time, known to me; for though the first object of my active cares was with me, it was not as if that object had been a daughter, and always at my side ; it was a youth of seventeen, who, with my free consent, sought whatever entertainment the place could afford, to while away fatigue. He ran, therefore, wildly about at his pleasure, to the quay, the dockyard, the sea, the suburbs, the surrounding country - but chiefly, his time was spent in skipping to the " Mary Ann," our destined vessel, and seeing its preparations for departure. To stroll about the town, to call upon my fellow-sufferers, to visit the principal shops, and to talk with the good Dutch people while I made slight purchases, was all I could devise to do that required action. THE MS. OF "THE WANDERER." When I found our stay indefinitely protracted, it occurred to me that if I had the papers of a work which I had then in hand, they might afford me an occupation to while away my truly vapid and uninteresting leisure. I wrote this idea to my partner in all-- as M. de Talleyrand had called M. d'Arblay; and, with a spirit that was always in its first youth where any service was to be performed, he waited on M. de Saulnier at the police office, and made a request that my manuscripts Page 256 might be sent after me, with a permission that I might also be allowed to carry them with me on board the ship. He durst not say to England, whither no vessel was supposed to sail; but he would not, to M. de Saulnier, who palpably connived at my plan and purpose, say America. M. de Saulnier made many inquiries relative to these papers; but on being assured, upon honour, that the work had nothing in it political, nor even national, nor possibly offensive to the government, he took the single word of M. d'Arblay, whose noble countenance and dauntless openness of manner were guarantees of sincerity that wanted neither seals nor bonds, and invested him with the power to send me what papers be pleased, without demanding to examine, or even to see them -a trust so confiding and so generous, that I have regretted a thousand times the want of means to acknowledge it according to its merit. This work was "The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties," of which nearly three volumes were finished. They arrived, nevertheless, vainly for any purpose at Dunkirk; the disturbance of my suspensive -state incapacitating me for any composition, save of letters to my best friend, to whom I wrote, or dictated by Alexander, every day; and every day was only supported by the same kind diurnal return. But when, at length, we were summoned to the vessel, and our goods and chattels were conveyed to the custom-house, and when the little portmanteau was produced, and found to be filled with manuscripts, the police officer who opened it began a rant of indignation and amazement at a sight so unexpected and prohibited, that made him incapable to inquire or to hear the meaning of such a freight. He sputtered at the mouth, and stamped with his feet, so forcibly and vociferously, that no endeavours of mine could induce him to stop his accusations of traitorous designs, till, tired of the attempt, I ceased both explanation and entreaty, and stood before him with calm taciturnity. Wanting, then, the fresh fuel of interruption or opposition, his fire and fury evaporated into curiosity to know what I could offer. Yet even then, though my account staggered his violence into some degree of civility, he evidently deemed it, from its very nature, incredible ; and this fourth child of my brain had undoubtedly been destroyed ere it was born, had I not had recourse to an English merchant, Mr. Gregory, long settled at Dunkirk, to whom, Page 257 happily, I had been recommended, as to a person capable, in any emergence, to afford me assistance; he undertook the responsibility ; and the letter of M. d'Arblay, containing the licence of M. de Saulnier, was then all-sufficient for my manuscripts and their embarkation. SPANISH PRISONERS AT DUNKIRK. The second event I have to relate I never even yet recollect without an inward shuddering. In our walks out of the town, on the borders of the ocean, after passing beyond the dockyard or wharf, we frequently met a large party of Spanish prisoners, well escorted by gendarmes, and either going to their hard destined labour, or returning from it for repast or repose. I felt deeply interested by them, knowing they were men with and for whom our own English and the immortal Wellington were then fighting : and this interest induced me to walk on the bank by which they were paraded to and fro, as often as I could engage Alexander, from his other pursuits, to accompany me. Their appearance was highly in their favour, as well as their situation ; they had a look calmly intrepid, of concentrated resentment, yet unalterable patience, They were mostly strong-built and vigorous; of solemn, almost stately deportment, and with fine dark eyes, full of meaning, rolling around them as if in watchful expectation of insult; and in a short time they certainly caught from my countenance an air of sympathy, for they gave me, in return, as we passed one another, a glance that spoke grateful consciousness. I followed them to the place of their labour ; though my short-sightedness would not let me distinguish what they were about, whether mending fortifications, dykes, banks, parapets, or what not: and I durst not use my glass, lest I should be suspected as a spy. We only strolled about in their vicinity, as if merely visiting and viewing the sea. The weather -it was now August-was so intensely hot, the place was so completely without shade, and their work was so violent, that they changed hands every two hours, and those who were sent off to recruit were allowed to cast themselves upon the burnt and straw-like grass, to await their alternate summons. This they did in small groups, but without venturing to solace their rest by any species of social intercourse. They were as taciturn with one another as with their keepers and taskmasters. Page 258 One among them there was who wore an air of superiority, ,grave and composed, yet decided, to which they all appeared to bow down with willing subserviency, though the distinction was only demonstrated by an air of profound respect whenever they approached or passed him, for discourse held they none. One morning, when I observed him seated at a greater distance than usual from his overseers, during his hour of release, I turned suddenly from my walk as if with a view to bend my way homewards, but contrived, while talking with Alexander and looking another way, to slant my steps close to where he sat surrounded by his mute adherents, and to drop a handful of small coin nearly under the elbow upon which, wearily, lie was reclining. We proceeded with alertness, and talking together aloud; but Alexander perceived this apparent chief evidently moved by what I had done, though forbearing to touch the little offering, which, however, his companions immediately secured. After this I never met him that he did not make me a slight but expressive bow. This encouraged me to repeat the poor little tribute of compassion, which I soon found he distributed, as far as it would go, to the whole set, by the kindly looks with which every one thenceforward greeted me upon every meeting. Yet he whom we supposed to be some chief, and who palpably discovered it was himself I meant to distinguish, never touched the money, nor examined what was taken up by the others, who, on their part, nevertheless seemed but to take charge of it in trust. We were now such good friends, that this became more than ever my favourite walk and these poor unhappy captives never saw me without brightening up into a vivacity of pleasure that was to me a real exhilaration. We had been at Dunkirk above five weeks, when one evening, having a letter of consequence to send to Paris, I begged Alexander to carry it to the post himself, and to deposit me upon the quay, and there to join me. As the weather was very fine I stood near the sea, wistfully regarding the element on which depended all my present hopes and views. But presently my meditations were interrupted, and my thoughts diverted from mere self by the sudden entrance, in a large body, of my friends the Spanish prisoners, who all bore down to the very place where I was stationed, evidently recognising me, and eagerly showing that it was not without extreme satisfaction. I saw their approach, in return, with lively Page 259 pleasure, for, the quay being, I suppose, a place of certain security, they were unencumbered by their usual turnkeys, the gendarmes, and this freedom, joined to their surprise at my sight, put them also off their guard, and they flocked round though not near me, and hailed me with smiles, bows, and hands put upon their breasts. I now took courage to speak to them, partly in French, partly in English, for I found they understood a little of both those languages. I inquired whence they came, and whether they knew General Wellington. They smiled and nodded at his name, and expressed infinite delight in finding I was English ; but though they all, by their head movements, entered into discourse, my friend the chief was the only one who attempted to answer me. When I first went to France, being continually embarrassed for terms, I used constantly to apply to M. d'Arblay for aid, till Madame de Tess� charged him to be quiet, saying that my looks filled up what my words left short, "de sorte que," she added, "nous la devinons;"(217) this was the case between my Spaniards and myself, and we -devin-d one another so much to our mutual satisfaction, that while this was the converse the most to my taste of any I had had at Dunkirk, it was also, probably, most to theirs of any that had fallen to their lot since they had been torn from their native country. SURPRISED BY AN OFFICER OF POLICE. While this was going on I was privately drawing from my purse all that it contained of small money to distribute to my new friends - but at this same moment a sudden change in the countenance of the chief from looks of grateful feeling, to an expression of austerity, checked my purpose, and, sorry and alarmed lest he had taken offence, I hastily drew my empty hand from my reticule. I then saw that the change of expression was not simply to austerity from pleasure, but to consternation from serenity - and I perceived that it was not to me the altered visage was directed; the eye pointed beyond me, and over my head startled, I turned round, and what, then, was my own consternation when I beheld an officer of the police, in full gold trappings, furiously darting forward from a small house at the entrance upon the quay, which I afterwards learnt was his official dwelling. When he came within two yards of us he stood still, mute and erect ; but with an air of menace, his eyes scowling first upon the chief, Page 260 then upon me, then upon the whole group, and then upon me again, with looks that seemed diving into some conspiracy. My alarm was extreme - my imprudence in conversing with these unhappy captives struck me at once with foreboding terror of ill consequences. I had, however, sufficient presence of mind to meet the eyes of my antagonist with a look that showed surprise, rather than apprehension at his wrath. This was not without some effect. Accustomed, probably, to scrutinize and to penetrate into secret plots, he might be an adept in distinguishing the fear of ill-treatment from the fear of detection. The latter I could certainly not manifest, as my compassion had shown no outward mark beyond a little charity - but the former I tried, vainly, perhaps, to subdue : for I well knew that pity towards a Spaniard would be deemed suspicious, at least, if not culpable. We were all silent, and all motionless ; but when the man, having fixed upon me his eyes with intention to petrify me, saw that I fixed him in return with an open though probably not very composed face, he-spoke, and with a voice of thunder, vociferating reproach, accusation, and condemnation all in one. His words I could not distinguish; they were so confused and rapid from rage. This violence, though it secretly affrighted me, I tried to meet with simple astonishment, making no sort of answer or interruption to his invectives. When he observed my steadiness, and that he excited none of the humiliation of discovered guilt, he stopped short and, after a pause, gruffly said,-- "Qui �tes-vous?" "Je me nomme d'Arblay." "Etes-vous mari�e?" "Oui." "O� est votre mari?" "A Paris." "Qui est-il?" "Il travaille aux Bureaux de l'Int�rieur." "Pourquoi le quittez-vous?"(218) Page 261 I was here sensibly embarrassed. I durst not avow I was going to England ; I could not assert I was really going to America. I hesitated, and the sight of his eyes brightening up with the hope of mischief, abated my firmness ; and, while he seemed to be staring me through, I gave an account, very imperfect, indeed, and far from clear, though true, that I came to Dunkirk to embark on board the "Mary Ann" vessel. "Ah ha!" exclaimed he, "vous �tes Anglaise?"(219) Then, tossing back his head with an air of triumphant victory, "suivez-moi!"(220) he added, and walked away, fast and fierce, but looking back every minute to see that I followed. INTERROGATED AT THE POLICE OFFICE. Never can I forget the terror with which I was seized at this command; it could only be equalled by the evident consternation and sorrow that struck me, as I turned my head around to see where I was, in my poor chief and his group. Follow I did, though not less per force than if I had been dragged by chains. When I saw him arrive at the gate of the little dwelling I have mentioned, which I now perceived to belong to him officially, I impulsively, involuntarily stopped. To enter a police office, to be probably charged with planning some conspiracy with the enemies of the state, my poor Alexander away, and not knowing what must have become of me; my breath was gone; my power of movement ceased; my head, or understanding, seemed a chaos, bereft of every distinct or discriminating idea; and my feet, as if those of a statue, felt riveted to the ground, from a vague but overwhelming belief I was destined to incarceration in some dungeon, where I might sink ere I could make known my situation to my friends, while Alex, thus unaccountably abandoned, might be driven to despair, or become the prey to nameless mischiefs. Again the tiger vociferated a "suivez-moi!" but finding it no longer obeyed, he turned full round as he stood upon ]its threshold, and perceiving my motionless and speechless dismay, looked at me for two or three seconds in scornful, but investigating taciturnity. Then, putting his arms a-kimbo, he said, in lower, but more, taunting accents, "Vous ne le jugez donc pas propos de me suivre?" (221) Page 262 This was followed by a sneering, sardonic grin that seemed anticipating the enjoyment of using compulsion. On, therefore, I again forced myself, and with tolerable composure I said, "Je n'ai rien, monsieur, je crois, faire ici?"(222) "Nous verrons!"(223) he answered, bluffly, and led the way into a small hovel rather than parlour - and then haughtily seated himself at a table, on which were pen, ink, and paper, and, while I stood before him, began an interrogation, with the decided asperity of examining a detected criminal, of whom he was to draw up the proces verbal. When I perceived this, my every fear, feeling, nay, thought, concentrated in Alexander, to whom I had determined not to allude, while I had any hope of self-escape, to avoid for us both the greatest of all perils, that of an accusation of intending to evade the ensuing conscription, for which, though Alex was yet too young, he was fast advancing to be amenable. But now that I was enclosed from his sight, and there was danger every moment of his suddenly missing me, I felt that our only chance of safety must lie in my naming him before he should return. With all the composure, therefore, that I could assume, I said that I was come to Dunkirk with my son to embark in the "Mary Ann," an American vessel, with a passport from M. de Saulnier, secretary to the Duke de Rovigo, minister of police. And what had I done with this son? I had sent him to the post-office with a letter for his father. At that instant I perceived Alexander wildly running past the window. This moment was critical. I instantly cried, "Sir, there is my son!" The man rose, and went to the door, calling Out, "Jeune homme!"(224) Alex approached, and was questioned, and though much amazed, gave answers perfectly agreeing with mine. I now recovered my poor affrighted faculties, and calmly said that if he had any doubt of our veracity, I begged he would send for Mr. Gregory, who knew us well. This, a second time, was a most happy reference. Mr. Gregory was of the highest respectability, and he was near at hand. There could be no doubt of the authenticity f such an appeal. Page 263 The brow of my ferocious assailant was presently unbent. I seized the favourable omen to assure him, with apparent indifference, that I had no objection to being accompanied or preceded to the Hotel Sauvage, where I resided, nor to giving him the key of my portmanteau and portfolio, if it were possible I had excited any suspicion by merely speaking, from curiosity, to the Spanish prisoners. No, he answered, he would not disturb me; and then, having entered the name of Alexander by the side of mine, he let us depart. Speechless was my joy, and speechless was the surprise of Alexander, and we walked home in utter silence. Happily, this incident occurred but just before we set sail, for with it terminated my greatest solace at Dunkirk, the seeing and consoling those unhappy prisoners, and the regale of wandering by the sea-coast. THE "MARY ANN" CAPTURED OFF DEAL. Six weeks completely we consumed in wasteful weariness at Dunkirk; and our passage, when at last we set sail, was equally, in its proportion, toilsome and tedious. Involved in a sickening calm, we could make no way, but lingered two days and two nights in this long-short passage. The second night, indeed, might have been spared me, as it was spared to all my fellow voyagers. But when we cast anchor, I was so exhausted by the unremitting sufferings I had endured, that I was literally unable to rise from my hammock. Yet was there a circumstance capable to have aroused me from any torpidity, save the demolishing ravage of sea-sickness for scarcely were we at anchor, when Alex, capering up to the deck, descended with yet more velocity than he had mounted to exclaim, "Oh, maman! there are two British officers now upon deck." But, finding that even this could not make me recover speech or motion, he ran back again to this new and delighting sight, and again returning 'cried out in a tone of rapture, "Maman, we are taken by the British! We are all captured by British officers!" Even in my immovable, and nearly insensible state, this juvenile ardour, excited by so new and strange an adventure, afforded me some amusement. It did not, however, afford me strength, for I could not rise, though I heard that every other passenger was removed. With difficulty, even next morning, I crawled upon the deck, and there I had been but a short time, Page 264 when Lieutenant Harford came on board to take possession of the vessel, not as French, but American booty, war having been declared against America the preceding week. Mr. Harford, hearing my name, most courteously addressed me, with congratulations upon my safe arrival in England. These were words to rewaken all the happiest purposes of my expedition, and they recovered me from the nerveless, sinking state into which my exhaustion had cast me, as if by a miracle. My father, my brothers, my sisters, and all my heart-dear friends, seemed rising to my view and springing to my embraces, with all the joy of renovating reunion. I thankfully accepted his obliging offer to carry me on shore in his own boat; but when I turned round, and called upon Alexander to follow us, Mr. Harford, assuming a commanding air, said, "No, madam, I cannot take that young man. No French person can come into my boat without a passport and permission from government." My air now a little corresponded with his own, as I answered, "He was born, Sir, in England!" "Oh!" cried he, " "that's quite another matter; come along, Sir! we'll all go together." I now found we were rowing to Deal, not Dover, to which town we had been destined by our engagement: but we had been captured, it seems, chemin fuisant, though so gently, and with such utter helplessness of opposition, that I had become a prisoner without any suspicion of my captivity. JOY ON ARRIVING IN ENGLAND. We had anchored about half a mile, I imagine, from the shore ; which I no sooner touched than, drawing away my arm from Mr. Harford, I took up on one knee, with irrepressible transport, the nearest bright pebble, to press to my lips in grateful joy at touching again the land of my nativity, after an absence, nearly hopeless, of more than twelve years. Of the happiness that ensued--my being again in the arms of my dearly loved father-in those of my dear surviving sisters--my brothers--my friends, some faint details yet remain in a few letters to my heart's confidant that he preserved: but they are truly faint, for my satisfaction was always damped in recording it to him who SO fondly wished to partake of it, and whose absence from that participation always rendered it incomplete. And, on one great source of renovated felicity, I did not Page 265 dare touch even by inference, even by allusion--that of finding my gracious royal mistress and her august daughters as cordial in their welcome, as trustingly confidential, and as amiably condescending, I had almost said affectionate, as if I had never departed from the royal roof under which, for five years, I had enjoyed their favour. To have spoken of the royal family in letters sent to France under the reign of Bonaparte, might have brought destruction on him for whom I would a thousand times sooner have suffered it myself. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Broome.)(225) Aug. 15, 1812. In a flutter of joy such as my tender Charlotte will feel in reading this, I write to her from England! I can hardly believe it; I look around me in constant inquiry and doubt I speak French to every soul, and I whisper still if I utter a word that breathes private opinion. . . . We set off for Canterbury, where we slept, and on the 20th(226) proceeded towards Chelsea. While, upon some common, we stopped to water the horses, a gentleman on horseback passed us twice, and then, looking in, pronounced my name - and I saw it was Charles, dear Charles! who had been watching for us several hours and three nights following, through a mistake. Thence we proceeded to Chelsea, where we arrived at nine o'clock at night. I was in a state almost breathless. I could only demand to see my dear father alone: fortunately, he had had the same feeling, and had charged all the family to stay away, and all the world to be denied. I found him, therefore, in his library, by himself-but oh! my dearest, very much altered indeed--weak, weak and changed- -his head almost always hanging down, and his hearing most cruelly impaired. I was terribly affected, but most grateful to God for my arrival. Our meeting, you may be sure, was very tender, though I roused myself as quickly as possible to be gay and cheering. He was extremely kind to Alex, and said, in a tone the most impressive, "I should have been very glad to have seen M. d'Arblay!" In discourse, however, he reanimated, and was, at times, all himself. But he now admits scarcely a creature but of his family, and will only see for a short time even his children. He likes quietly reading, and lies Page 266 almost constantly upon the sofa, and will never eat but alone. What a change! YOUNG D'ARBLAY SECURES A SCHOLARSHIP. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) March 16, 1813. How will my kindest father rejoice for me! for my dear partner-- for my boy! The election is gained, and Alexander has obtained the Tancred scholarship. He had all the votes: the opponent retired. Sir D-- behaved handsomely, came forward, and speechified for us. Sir Francis Milman, who was chairman, led the way in the harangue. Dr. Davy, our supporter, leader, inspirer, director, heart and head, patron and guide, spoke also. Mr H-- spoke, too; but nothing, they tell me, to our purpose, nor yet against it. He gave a very long and elaborate history of a cause which he is to plead in the House of Lords, and which has not the smallest reference whatsoever to the case in point. Dr. Davy told me, in recounting it, that he is convinced the good and wary lawyer thought this an opportunity not to be lost for rehearsing his cause, which would prevent loss of time to himself, or hindrance of business, except to his hearers : however, he gave us his vote. 'Tis a most glorious affair. THE QUEEN ALARMED BY A MAD WOMAN. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) May 11, 1813. My own inclination and intention kept in mind your charge, , my dearest sir, that as soon as I was able I would wait upon Lady Crewe;(227) fortunately, I found her at home, and in her best style, cordial as well as good-humoured, and abounding in acute and odd remarks. I had also the good fortune to see my lord, who seems always pleasing, unaffected, and sensible, and to possess a share of innate modesty that no intercourse with the world, nor addition of years, can rob him of. I was much satisfied with my visit - but what I shall do for time, now once I have been launched from my couch, or sick chamber, I wot not. Page 267 What a terrible alarm is this which the poor tormented queen has again received!(228) I wrote my concern as soon as I heard of it, though I have not yet seen the printed account, my packet of papers reaching only to the very day before that event. My answer has been a most gracious summons to the Queen's house for to-morrow. Her majesty and two of the princesses come to town for four days. This robs me of my Chelsea visit for this week, as I keep always within call during the town residences, when I have royal notice of them, and, indeed, there is nothing I desire more than to see her majesty at this moment, and to be allowed to express what I have felt for her. My letter from Madame Beckersdorff says that such an alarm would have been frightful for anybody, but how much more peculiarly so for the queen, who has experienced such poignant horror from the effects of disordered intellects! who is always suffering from them, and so nearly a victim to the unremitting exercise of her duties upon that subject and these calls. I have had a visit this morning from Mrs. Piozzi, who is in town only for a few days upon business. She came while I was out - but I must undoubtedly make a second tour, after my royal four days are passed, in order to wait upon and thank her. I have been received more graciously than ever, if that be possible, by my dear and honoured queen and sweet Princesses Eliza and Mary. The queen has borne this alarm astonishingly, considering how great was the shock at the moment; but she has so high a character, that she will not suffer anything personal to sink her spirits, which she saves wholly for the calls upon them of others, and great and terrible have been those calls. The beloved king is in the best state possible for his present melancholy situation; that is, wholly free from real bodily suffering, or imaginary mental misery, for he is persuaded that he is always conversing with angels. WEATHER COMPLAINTS. PROPOSED MEETING WITH LORD LANSDOWNE. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Chenies-street, Alfred-place, May 23, 1813. Oh, how teased I am, my dearest padre, by this eternal unwalkable weather! Every morning rises so fairly, that at every noon I am preparing to quit my conjuring, and repair, Page 268 by your kind invitation, to prelude my promised chat by a repast with Sarah - when mizzling falls the rain, or hard raps the hail, and the day, for me, is involved in damps and dangers that fix me again to my dry, but solitary conjurations. I am so tired now of disappointments, that I must talk a little with my padre in their defiance, and in a manner now, thank God! out of their reach. Ah, how long will letters be any safer than meetings! The little world I see all give me hope and comfort from the posture of affairs but I am too deeply interested to dare be sanguine while in such suspense. Lady Crewe invited me to her party that she calls Noah's ark; but I cannot yet risk an evening, and a dressed one too. She then said she would make me a small party with the Miss Berrys, and for a morning; and now she has written to Charles to make interest with me to admit Lord Lansdowne, at his own earnest request! I am quite non compos to know how I shall make my way through these honours, to my strength and re-establishment, for they clash with my private plan and adopted system of quiet. However, she says the meeting shall be in the country, at Brompton, and without fuss or ceremony. Her kindness is inexpressible, therefore I have not courage to refuse her. She has offered me her little residence at Brompton for my dwelling for a week or so, to restore me from all my influenzas : she may truly be called a faithful family friend. I hope dear Sarah and Fanny Raper will be of the party. If they are, charge them, dear sir, to let me hear their voices, for I shall never find out their faces. What weather! what weather! when shall I get to Chelsea, and embrace again my beloved father? This free-born weather of our sea-girt isle of liberty is very incommodious to those who have neither carriages for wet feet, nor health for damp shoulders. If the farmers, however, are contented, I must be patient. We may quarrel with all our wishes better than with our corn. Adieu, my most dear father, till the sun shines drier. A YOUNG GIRL'S ENTRY TO LONDON SOCIETY. MADAME DE STAEL. (Madame d'Arblay to a friend.) London, August 20, 1813- . . .Your charming girl, by what I can gather, has seen, upon the whole, a great deal of this vast town and its Page 269 splendours,--a little more might, perhaps, have been better, in making her, with a mind such as hers, regret it a little less. Merit of her sort can here be known with difficulty. Dissipation is so hurried, so always in a bustle, that even amusement must be prominent, to be enjoyed. There is no time for development; nothing, therefore, is seen but what is conspicuous; and not much is heard but what is obstreperous. They who, in a short time, can make themselves known and admired now in London, must have their cupids, in Earl Dorset's phrase-- Like blackguard boys, Who thrust their links full in your face. I had very much matter that I meant and wished to say to you upon this subject; but in brief--I do not myself think it a misfortune that your dear girl cannot move in a London round, away from your own wing: you have brought her up so well, and she seems so good, gentle, and contented, as well as accomplished, that I cannot wish her drawn into a vortex where she may be imbued with other ideas, views, and wishes than those that now constitute her happiness--and happiness! what ought to be held more sacred where it is innocent--what ought so little to risk any unnecessary or premature concussion? With all the deficiencies and imperfections of her present situation, which you bewail but which she does not find out, it is, alas! a million to one whether, even in attaining the advantages and society you wish for her, she will ever again, after any change, be as happy as she is at this moment. A mother whom she looks up to and doats upon--a sister whom she so fondly loves--how shall they be replaced? The chances are all against her (though the world has, I know, such replacers), from their rarity. I am truly glad you had a gratification you so earnestly coveted, that of seeing Madame de Stael: your account of her was extremely interesting to me. As to myself, I have not seen her at all. Various causes have kept me in utter retirement; and, in truth, with respect to Madame de Stael, my situation is really embarrassing. It is too long and difficult to write upon, nor do I recollect whether I ever communicated to you our original acquaintance, which, at first, was intimate. I shall always, internally, be grateful for the partiality with which she sought me out upon her arrival in this country before my- marriage: and still, and far more, if she can forgive my dropping her, which I could not help Page 270 for none of my friends, at that time, would suffer me to keep up the intercourse! I had messages, remonstrances, entreaties, representations, letters, and conferences, till I could resist no longer; though I had found her so charming, that I fought the hardest battle I dared fight against almost all my best connections. She is now received by all mankind;--but that, indeed, she always was--all womankind, I should say--with distinction and pleasure. I wish much to see her "Essay on Suicide;" but it has not yet fallen in my way. When will the work come out for which she was, she says, chass�e de la France?(229) Where did --- hear her a whole evening? She is, indeed, most uncommonly entertaining, and animating as well as animated, almost beyond anybody, "Les M�moires de Madame de Stael" I have read long ago, and with singular interest and eagerness. They are so attaching, so evidently original and natural, that they stand very high, indeed, in reading that has given me most pleasure. My boy has just left me for Greenwich.(230) He goes in October to Cambridge; I wish to install him there myself. My last letter from Paris gives me to the end of October to stay in England. ROGERS THE POET. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) August 24, 1813. .....I was delighted by meeting Lady Wellington, not long since, at Lady Templetown's. Her very name electrified me with emotion. I dined at Mr. Rogers's, at his beautiful mansion in the Green Park, to meet Lady Crewe; and Mrs. Barbauld was also there, whom I had not seen many, many years, and alas, should not have known! Mr. Rogers was so considerate to my sauvagerie as to have no party, though Mr. Sheridan, he said, had expressed his great desire to meet again his old friend Madame d'Arblay! Lady Crewe told me she certainly would not leave town without seeking Page 271 another chattery with her old friend, Dr. Burney, whom she always saw with fresh pleasure. INTERVIEW WITH MR. WILBERFORCE. (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Sandgate, Sept., 1813. Let me steal a moment to relate a singular gratification, and, in truth, a real and great honour I have had to rejoice in. You know, my padre, probably, that Marianne Francis was commissioned by Mr. Wilberforce(231) to bring about an acquaintance with your F. d'A., and that, though highly susceptible to such a desire, my usual shyness, or rather consciousness of inability to meet the expectations that must have made him seek me, induced my declining an interview. Eh bien--at church at Sandgate, the day after my arrival, I saw this justly celebrated man, and was introduced to him in the churchyard, after the service, by Charles. The ramparts and martellos around us became naturally our theme, and Mr. Wilberforce proposed showing them to me. I readily accepted the offer, and Charles and Sarah, and Mrs. Wilberforce and Mrs. Barrett, went away in their several carriages, while Mr. Barrett alone remained, and Mr. Wilberforce gave me his arm, and, in short, we walked the round from one to five o'clock! Four hours' of the best conversation I have, nearly, ever enjoyed. He was anxious for a full and true account of Paris, and particularly of religion and infidelity, and of Bonaparte and the wars, and of all and everything that had occurred during my ten years' seclusion in France; and I had so much to communicate, and his drawing out and comments and episodes were all so judicious, so spirited, so full of information yet so unassuming, that my shyness all flew away and I felt to be his confidential friend, opening to him upon every occurrence and every sentiment, with the frankness that is usually won by years of intercourse. I was really and truly delighted and enlightened by him; I desire nothing more Page 272 than to renew the acquaintance, and cultivate it to intimacy. But, alas! he was going away next morning. INTENDED PUBLICATION OF "THE WANDERER." (Madame d'Arblay to Dr. Burney.) Richmond Hill, Oct. 12, 1813. My most dear padre will, I am sure, congratulate me that I have just had the heartfelt delight of a few lines from M. d'Arblay, dated September 5th. I had not had any news since the 17th of August, and I had the melancholy apprehension upon my spirits that no more letters would be allowed to pass till the campaign was over. It has been therefore one of the most welcome surprises I ever experienced. He tells me, also, that he is perfectly well, and quite acabl� with business. This, for the instant, gives me nothing but joy; for, were he not essentially necessary in some department of civil labour and use, he would surely be included in some lev�e en masse. Every way, therefore, this letter gives me relief and pleasure. I have had, also, this morning, the great comfort to hear that my Alexander is " stout and well at Cambridge, where his kind uncle Charles still remains. I am indescribably occupied, and have been so ever since my return from Ramsgate, in giving more and more last touches to my work, about which I begin to grow very, anxious. I am to receive merely 500 pounds upon delivery of the MS. the two following 500 by instalments from nine months to nine months, that is, in a year and a half from the day of publication. If all goes well, the whole will be 3000, but only at the end of the sale of eight thousand copies. Oh, my padre, if you approve the work, I shall have good hope. GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S WOUNDED COMRADES. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) Dec. 16, 1813. Ah, my dearest friend, how is my poor cottage-how are my proofs-- how is everything forced from my mind, except what necessity drives there, by this cruel stroke to my suffering partner! The world had power only in two instances to have given him quite so deadly a blow, dear to his heart of love as Page 273 are some, nay, many others; but here--for M. de Narbonne, it was a passion of admiration, joined to a fondness of friendship, that were a part of himself.(232) How he will bear it, and in our absence, perpetually occupies my thoughts. And I have no means to hear from, or to write to him!--none, absolutely none! just before this wound was inflicted, I was already overwhelmed with grief for my poor Madame de Maisonneuve, A for M. d'Arblay himself, and for my own personal loss, in the death--premature and dreadful, nay, inhuman--of the noble, perfect brother of that Madame de Maisonneuve; General Latour Maubourg, a man who, like my own best friend was--is signalized among his comrades by the term of a vrai Chevalier Fran�ais. He was without a blot; and his life has been thrown away merely to prevent his being made a prisoner! He had received a horrible wound on the first of the tremendous battles of Leipzic, and on the second he suffered amputation; and immediately after was carried away to follow the retreating army! In such a condition, who can wonder to hear that, a very few miles from Leipzic, he expired?(233) DEATH OF DR. BURNEY. [In the beginning of the year 1814, Madame d'Arblay published her fourth work, "The Wanderer," and nearly at the same time peace was declared between France and England. Her satisfaction at an event so long wished for, was deeply saddened by the death of her father, Dr. Burney; whom she nursed and attended to the last moment with dutiful tenderness. Soon after the Restoration of the French royal family, Monsieur d'Arblay was placed by the Duke de Luxembourg in the French " gardes du corps." He obtained leave of absence towards the close of the year, and came to England Page 274 for a few weeks ; after which Madame d'Arblay returned with him to Paris, leaving their son to pursue his studies at Cambridge.] (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. ----) March(234) 19, 1814. Be not uneasy for me, nay tender friend: my affliction is heavy, but not acute - my beloved father had been spared to us something beyond the verge of the prayer for his preservation, which you must have read, for already his sufferings had far surpassed his enjoyments. I could not have wished him so to linger, though I indulged almost to the last hour a hope he might yet recover, and be restored to comfort. I last of all gave him up, but never wished his duration such as I saw him on the last few days. Dear blessed parent! how blest am I that I came over to him while he was yet susceptible of pleasure--of happiness! My best comfort in my grief, in his loss, is that I watched by his side the last night, and hovered over him two hours after he breathed no more; for though much suffering had preceded the last hours, they were so quiet, and the final exit was so soft, that I had not perceived it though I was sitting by his bedside, and would not believe when all around announced it. I forced them to let me stay by him, and his revered form became stiff before I could persuade myself that he was gone hence for ever. Yet neither then nor now has there been any violence, anything to fear from my grief; his loss was too indubitably to be expected, he had been granted too long to our indulgence to allow any species of repining to mingle with my sorrow; and it is repining that makes sorrow too hard to bear with resignation. Oh, I have known it! FAVOURABLE NEWS OF M. D'ARBLAY. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) April 3, 1814. I hasten to impart to my kind and sympathising friend that I received-last night good tidings of my best friend of friends; they have been communicated to me, oddly enough, through the Alien office! Mr. Reeves wrote them to my Page 275 reverend brother,(235) by the desire of an English lady now resident in Paris-Madame Solvyns (wife of a Frenchman), at the request of M. d'Arblay; they assure me of his perfect health... Nothing could be so well timed as this intelligence, for my inquietude was beginning to be doubly restless from the accession of time that has fallen to me by having got rid of all my proofs, etc. it is only real and indispensable business that can force away attention from suspensive uneasiness. Another comfort of the very first magnitude, my sweet friend will truly, I know, participate in--my Alexander begins to listen to reason. He assures me he is now going on with very tolerable regularity; and I have given him, for this term, to soberize and methodize him a little, a private tutor ; and this tutor has won his heart by indulging him in his problem passion. They work together, he says, with a rapidity and eagerness that makes the hour of his lesson by far the most delightful portion of his day. And this tutor, he tells me, most generously gives him problems to work at in his absence: a favour for which every pupil, perchance, would not be equally grateful, but which Alexander, who loves problems algebraic as another boy loves a play or an opera, regards as the height of indulgence. "THE WANDERER." [Soon after the publication of " The Wanderer," Madame d'Arblay wrote as follows to a friend:--] I beseech you not to let your too ardent friendship disturb you about the reviews and critiques, and I quite supplicate you to leave their authors to their own severities or indulgence. I have ever steadily refused all interference with public opinion or private criticism. I am told I have been very harshly treated ; but I attribute it not to what alone would affect me, but which I trust I have not excited, personal enmity. I attribute it to the false expectation, universally spread, that the book would be a picture of France, as well as to the astonishing �clat of a work in five volumes being all bespoken before it was published. The booksellers, erroneously and injudiciously concluding the sale would so go on, fixed the rapacious price of two guineas, which again damped the sale. But why say damped, when it is only their unreasonable expectations that are disappointed ? for they acknowledge that 3600 copies are positively sold and paid for in the first half year. What must I be, if not far more than Page 276 contented? I have not read or heard one of the criticisms; my mind has been wholly occupied by grief for the loss of my dearest father, or the inspection of his MSS., and my harassing situation relative to my own proceedings. Why, then, make myself black bile to disturb me further? No; I will not look at a word till my spirits and time are calmed and quiet, and I can set about preparing a corrected edition. I will then carefully read all - and then, the blow to immediate feelings being over, I can examine as well as read, impartially and with profit, both to my future surveyors and myself. MADAME D'ARBLAY'S PRESENTATION TO LOUIS XVIII AT GRILLON's HOTEL. 1814.-While I was still under the almost first impression of grief for the loss of my dear and honoured father I received a letter from Windsor Castle, written by Madame Beckersdorff, at the command of her majesty, to desire I would take the necessary measures for being presented to son altesse royale Madame Duchesse d'Angoul�me,l who was to have a Drawing-room in London, both for French and English, on the day preceding her departure for France. The letter added, that I must waive all objections relative to my recent loss, as it would be improper, in the present state of things, that the wife of a general officer should not be presented; and, moreover, that I should be personally expected and well received, as I had been named to son altesse royale by the queen herself. In conclusion, I was charged not to mention this circumstance, from the applications or jealousies it might excite. To hesitate was out of the question - and to do honour to my noble absent partner, and in his name to receive honour, were precisely the two distinctions my kind father would most have enjoyed for me. Page 277 I had but two or three days for preparation. Lady Crewe most amiably came to me herself, and missing me in person, wrote me word she would lend me her carriage, to convey me from Chelsea to her house in Lower Grosvenor-street, and thence accompany me herself to the audience. When the morning arrived I set off with tolerable courage. Arrived, however, at Lady Crewe's, when I entered the room in which this dear and attached friend of my father received me, the heaviness of his loss proved quite overpowering to my spirits ; and in meeting the two hands of my hostess, I burst into tears and could not, for some time, listen to the remonstrances against unavailing grief with which she rather chid than soothed me. But I could not contest the justice of what she uttered, though my grief was too fresh for its observance. Sorrow, as my dearest father was wont to say, requires time, as well as wisdom and religion, to digest itself , and till that time is both accorded and well employed, the sense of its uselessness serves but to augment, not mitigate, its severity. Lady Crewe purposed taking this opportunity of paying her own respects, with her congratulations, to Madame la Duchesse d'Angoul�me. She had sent me a note from Madame de Gouvello, relative to the time, for presentation, which was to take place it Grillon's hotel in Albemarle-street. We went very early, to avoid a crowd. But Albemarle-street was already quite full, though quiet. We entered the hotel without difficulty, Lady Crewe having previously demanded a private room of Grillon, who had once been cook to her lord. This private room was at the back of the house, with a mere yard or common garden for its prospect. , Lady Crewe declared this was quite too stupid, and rang the bell for waiter after waiter, till she made M. Grillon come himself. She then, in her singularly open and easy manner, told him to be so good as to order us a front room, where we might watch for the arrival of the royals, and be amused ourselves at the same time by seeing the entrances of the mayor, aldermen, and common councilmen, and other odd characters, who would be coming to pay their court to these French princes and princesses. M. Grillon gave a nod of acquiescence, and we were instantly shown to a front apartment just over the street door, which was fortunately supplied with a balcony. I should have been much entertained by all this, and Page 278 particularly with the originality, good humour, and intrepid yet intelligent odd fearlessness of all remark, or even consequence, which led Lady Crewe to both say and do exactly what she pleased, had my heart been lighter - but it was too heavy for pleasure; and the depth of my mourning, and the little, but sad time that was yet passed since it had become my gloomy garb, made me hold it a matter even of decency, as well as of feeling, to keep out of sight. I left Lady Crewe, therefore, to the full enjoyment of her odd figures, while I seated myself, solitarily, at the further end of the room. GRATTAN THE ORATOR. In an instant, however, she saw from the window some acquaintance, and beckoned them up. A gentleman, middle-aged, of a most pleasing appearance and address, immediately obeyed her summons, accompanied by a young man with a sensible look; and a young lady, pretty, gentle, and engaging, with languishing, soft eyes; though with a smile and an expression of countenance that showed an innate disposition to archness and sport. This uncommon trio I soon found to consist of the celebrated Irish orator, Mr. Grattan,(237) and his son and daughter. Lady Crewe welcomed them with all the alertness belonging to her thirst for amusement, and her delight in sharing it with those she thought capable of its participation. This she had sought, but wholly missed in me; and could neither be angry nor disappointed, though she was a little vexed. She suffered me not, however, to remain long in my seclusion, but called me to the balcony, to witness the jolting out of their carriages of the aldermen and common councilmen, exhibiting, as she said, "Their fair round bodies with fat capon lined;" and wearing an air of proudly hospitable satisfaction, in visiting a king of France who had found an asylum in a street of the city of Westminster. The crowd, however, for they deserve a better name than Page 279 mob, interested my observation still more. John Bull has seldom appeared to me to greater advantage. I never saw him en masse behave with such impulsive propriety. Enchanted to behold a king of France in his capital; conscious that le grand monarque was fully in his power; yet honestly enraptured to see that "The king would enjoy his own again," and enjoy it through the generous efforts of his rival, brave, noble old England; he yet seemed aware that it was fitting to subdue all exuberance of pleasure, which, else, might annoy, if not alarm, his regal guest. He took care, therefore, that his delight should not amount to exultation; it was quiet and placid, though pleased and curious : I had almost said it was gentlemanlike. And nearly of the same colour, though from so inferior an incitement, were the looks and attention of the Grattans, particularly of the father, to the black mourner whom Lady Crewe called amongst them. My garb, or the newspapers, or both, explained the dejection I attempted not to repress, though I carefully forbade it any vent - and the finely speaking face of Mr. Grattan seemed investigating the physiognomy, while it commiserated the situation of the person brought thus before him. His air had something foreign in it, from the vivacity that accompanied his politeness ; I should have taken him for a well-bred man of fashion of France. Good breeding, in England, amongst the men, is ordinarily stiff, reserved, or cold. Among the exceptions to this stricture, how high stood Mr. Windham! and how high in gaiety with vivacity stood my own honoured father! Mr. Locke, who was elegance personified in his manners, was lively only in his own domestic or chosen circle. A DEMONSTRATIVE IRISH LADY, A new scene now both astonished and discomposed me. A lady, accompanied humbly by a gentleman, burst into the room with a noise, a self-sufficiency, and an assuming confidence of superiority, that would have proved highly offensive, had it not been egregiously ridiculous. Her attire was as flaunting as her air and her manner; she was rouged and beribboned. But English she was not - she was Irish, in its most flaunting and untamed nature, and possessed of so boisterous a spirit, that she appeared to be just caught from the woods---the bogs, I might rather say. Page 280 When she had poured forth a volley of words, with a fluency and loudness that stunned me, Lady Crewe, with a. smile that seemed to denote she intended to give her pleasure, presented me by name to Madame la Baronne de M-- She made me a very haughty curtsey, and then, turning rudely away, looked reproachfully at Lady Crewe, and screamed out, " Oh, fie! fie, fie, fie!" Lady Crewe, astonished and shocked, seemed struck speechless, and I stood still with my eyes wide open, and my mouth probably so also, from a sort of stupor, for I could annex no meaning nor even any idea to such behaviour. She made not, however, any scruple to develop her motives, for she vehemently inveighed against being introduced to such an acquaintance, squalling out, "She has writ against the �migr�s!- -she has writ against the Great Cause! O fie! fie! fie!" When she had made these exclamations, and uttered these accusations, till the indulged vent to her rage began to cool it, she stopped of her own accord, and, finding no one spoke, looked as if she felt rather silly; while M. le Baron de M--, her very humble sposo, shrugged his shoulders. The pause was succeeded by an opening harangue from Lady Crewe, begun in a low and gentle voice, that seemed desirous to spare me what might appear an undue condescension, in taking any pains to clear me from so gross an attack. She gave, therefore, nearly in a whisper, a short character of me and of my conduct, of which I heard just enough to know that such was her theme; and then, more audibly, she proceeded to state, that far from writing against the emigrants, I had addressed an exhortation to all the ladies of Great Britain in their favour. "Oh, then," cried Madame de M--, "it was somebody else--it was somebody else!" And then she screamed out delightedly, "I'm so glad I spoke out, because of this explanation!--I'm so glad! never was so glad!" She now jumped about the room, quite crazily, protesting she never rejoiced so much at anything she had ever done in her life. But when she found her joy, like her assault, was all her own, she stopped short, astonished, I suppose, at my insensibility; and said to me, "How lucky I spoke out! the luckiest thing in the world! I'm so glad! A'n't you? Because of this �claircissement." "If I had required any �claircissement," I drily began. "O, if it was not you, then," cried she, "'twas Charlotte Smith." Page 281 Lady Crewe seemed quite ashamed that such a scene should pass where she presided, and Mr. Grattan quietly stole away. Not quietly, nor yet by stealth, but with evident disappointment that her energies were not more admired, Madame la Baronne now called upon her attendant sposo, and strode off herself. I found she was a great heiress of Irish extraction and education, and that she had bestowed all her wealth upon this emigrant baron, who might easily merit it, when, besides his title, he gave her his patience and obsequiousness. INQUIRIES AFTER THE DUCHESS D'ANGOULEME. Some other friends of Lady Crewe now found her out, and she made eager inquiries amongst them relative to Madame la Duchesse d'Angoul�me, but could gather no tidings. She heard, however, that there were great expectations of some arrivals down stairs, where two or three rooms were filled with company. She desired Mr. Grattan, junior, to descend into this crowd, and to find out where the duchess was to be seen, and when, and how. He obeyed. But, when he returned, what was the provocation of Lady Crewe, what my own disappointment, to hear that the duchess was not arrived, and was not expected ! She was at the house of Monsieur le Comte d'Artois, her father-in-law. "Then what are we come hither for?" exclaimed her ladyship: "expressly to be tired to death for no purpose! Do pray, at least, Mr. Grattan, be so good as to see for my carriage, that we may go to the right house." Mr. Grattan was all compliance, and with a readiness so obliging and so well bred that I am sure he is his father's true son in manners, though there was no opportunity to discover whether the resemblance extended also to genius. He was not, however, cheered when he brought word that neither carriage nor footman were to be found. Lady Crewe then said he must positively go down, and make the Duc de Duras tell us what to do. In a few minutes he was with us again, shrugging his shoulders at his ill success. The king, Louis XVIII.,(238) he said, Page 282 was expected, and M. le Duc was preparing to receive him, and not able to speak or listen to any one. Lady Crewe declared herself delighted by this information, because there would be an opportunity for having me presented to his majesty. "Go to M. de Duras," she cried, "and tell him Madame d'Arblay wishes it." "For heaven's sake!" exclaimed I, "do no such thing! I have not the most distant thought of the kind! It is Madame la Duchesse d'Angoul�me alone that I--" "O, pho, pho!--it is still more essential to be done to the king--it is really important: so go, and tell the duke, Mr. Grattan, that Madame d'Arblay is here, and desires to be presented. Tell him 'tis a thing quite indispensable." I stopped him again, and quite entreated that no such step might be taken, as I had no authority for presentation but to the duchess. However, Lady Crewe was only provoked at my backwardness, and charged Mr. Grattan not to heed me. "Tell the duke," she cried, "that Madame d'Arblay is our Madame de Stael! tell him we are as proud of our Madame d'Arblay as he can be of his Madame de Stael." Off she sent him, and off I flew again to follow him and whether he was most amused or most teased by our opposing petitions, I know not - but he took the discreet side of not venturing again to return among us. PREPARATIONS FOR THE PRESENTATIONS. Poor Lady Crewe seemed to think I lost a place at Court, or perhaps a peerage, by my untamable shyness, and was quite vexed. Others came to her now, who said several rooms below were filled with expectant courtiers. Miss Grattan then earnestly requested me to descend with her, as a chaperon, that she might see something of what was going forwards. I could not refuse so natural a request, and down we went, seeking one of the common] crowded rooms, that we might not intrude where there was preparation or expectation relative to the king. And here, sauntering or grouping, meditating in silence or congratulating each other in coteries, or waiting with curiosity, or self-preparing for presentation with timidity, we found a multitude of folks in an almost unfurnished and quite unadorned apartment. The personages seemed fairly divided between the nation at home and the nation from abroad ; Page 283 the English and the French; each equally, though variously, occupied in expecting the extraordinary sight of a monarch thus wonderfully restored to his rank and his throne, after misfortunes that had seemed irremediable, and an exile that had appeared hopeless. Miss Grattan was saluted, en passant, by several acquaintances, and amongst them by the son-in-law of her dear country's viceroy Lord Whitworth, the young Duke of Dorset; and Lady Crewe herself, too tired to abide any longer in her appropriated apartment, now descended. We patrolled about, zig-zag, as we could; the crowd, though of very good company, having no chief or regulator, and therefore making no sort of avenue or arrangement for avoiding inconvenience. There was neither going up nor coming down; we were all hustled together, without direction and without object, for nothing whatsoever was present to look at or to create any interest, and our expectations were merely kept awake by a belief that we should know in time when and where something or somebody was to be seen. For myself, however, I was much tormented during this interval from being named incessantly by Lady Crewe. My deep mourning, my recent heavy loss, and the absence and distance of my dear husband made me peculiarly wish to be unobserved. Peculiarly, I say; for never yet had the moment arrived in which to be marked had not been embarrassing and disconcerting to me, even when most flattering. A little hubbub soon after announced something new, and presently a whisper was buzzed around the room of the "Prince de Cond�." His serene highness looked very much pleased--as no wonder--at the arrival of such a day; but he was so surrounded by all his countrymen who were of rank to claim his attention, that I could merely see that he was little and old, but very unassuming and polite. Amongst his courtiers were sundry of the French noblesse that were known to Lady Crewe and I heard her uniformly say to them, one after another, Here is Madame d'Arblay, who must be presented to the king. Quite frightened by an assertion so wide from my intentions, so unauthorised by any preparatory ceremonies, unknown to my husband, and not, like a presentation to the Duchesse d'Angoul�me, encouraged by my queen, I felt as if guilty of taking liberty the most presumptuous, and with a forwardness and assurance the most foreign to my character. Yet to Page 284 control the zeal of Lady Crewe was painful from her earnestness, and appeared to be ungrateful to her kindness ; I therefore shrunk back, and presently suffered the crowd to press between us so as to find myself wholly separated from my party. This would have been ridiculous had I been more happy - but in my then state of affliction, it was necessary to my peace. ARRIVAL OF Louis XVIII. Quite to myself, how I smiled inwardly at my adroit cowardice, and was contemplating the surrounding masses of people, when a new and more mighty hubbub startled me, and presently I heard a buzzing whisper spread throughout the apartment of "The king!--le roi!" Alarmed at my strange situation, I now sought to decamp, meaning to wait for Lady Crewe up stairs : but to even approach the door was impossible. I turned back, therefore, to take a place by the window, that I might see his majesty alight from his carriage, but how great was my surprise when, just as I reached the top of the room, the king himself entered it at the bottom! I had not the smallest idea that this was the chamber of audience ; it was so utterly unornamented. But I now saw that a large fauteuil was being conveyed to the upper part, exactly where I stood, ready for his reception and repose. Placed thus singularly, by mere accident, and freed from my fears of being brought forward by Lady Crewe, I felt rejoiced in so fair an opportunity of beholding the king of my honoured husband, and planted myself immediately behind, though not near to his prepared seat ; and, as I was utterly unknown and must be utterly unsuspected, I indulged myself with a full examination. An avenue had instantly been cleared from the door to the chair, and the king moved along It slowly, slowly, slowly, rather dragging his large and weak limbs than walking; but his face was truly engaging; benignity was in every feature, and a smile beamed over them that showed thankfulness to providence in the happiness to which he was so suddenly arrived; with a courtesy, at the same time, to the spectators, who came to see and congratulate it, the most pleasing and cheering. The scene was replete with motives to grand reflections and to me, the devoted subject of another monarch, whose melancholy alienation of mind was a constant source to me of Page 285 sorrow, it was a scene for conflicting feelings and profound meditation. THE PRESENTATIONS TO THE KING. His majesty took his seat, with an air of mingled sweetness and dignity. I then, being immediately behind him, lost sight of his countenance, but saw that of every individual who approached to be presented. The Duc de Duras stood at his left hand, and was le grand maitre des c�r�monies; Madame de Gouvello stood at his right side; though whether in any capacity, or simply as a French lady known to him, I cannot tell. In a whisper, from that lady, I learned more fully the mistake of the hotel, the Duchesse d'Angoul�me never having meant to quit that of her beaup�re, Monsieur le Comte d'Artois, in South Audley-street. The presentations were short, and without much mark or likelihood. The men bowed low, and passed on; the ladies curtsied, and did the same. Those who were not known gave a card, I think, to the Duc de Duras, who named them; those of former acquaintance with his majesty simply made their obeisance. M. de Duras, who knew how much fatigue the king had to go through, hurried every one on, not only with speed but almost with ill-breeding, to my extreme astonishment. Yet the English, by express command of his majesty, had always the preference and always took place of the French ; which was an attention of the king in return for the asylum he had here found, that he seemed delighted to display, Early in this ceremony came forward Lady Crewe, who being known to the king from sundry previous meetings, was not named ; and only, after curtseying, reciprocated smiles with his majesty, and passed on. But instead of then moving off, though the duke, who did not know her, waved his hand to hasten her away, she whispered, but loud enough for me to hear, "Voici Madame d'Arblay; il faut qu'elle soit pr�sent�e."(239) She then went gaily off, without heeding me. The duke only bowed, but by a quick glance recognised me, and by another showed a pleased acquiescence in the demand. Retreat' now, was out of the question; but I so feared my position was wrong, that I was terribly disturbed, and felt hot and cold, and cold and hot, alternately, with excess of Page 286 embarrassment. I was roused, however, after hearing for so long a time nothing but French, by the sudden sound of English. An address, in that language, was read to his majesty, which was presented by the noblemen and gentlemen of the county of Buckingham, congratulatory upon his happy restoration, and filled with cordial thanks for the graciousness of his manners, and the benignity of his conduct, during his long residence amongst them; warmly proclaiming their participation in his joy, and their admiration of his virtues. The reader was colonel Nugent, a near relation of the present Duke of Buckingham. But, if the unexpected sound of these felicitations delivered in English, roused and struck me, how much greater arose my astonishment and delight when the French monarch, in an accent of the most condescending familiarity and pleasure, uttered his acknowledgments in English also-expressing his gratitude for all their attentions, his sense of their kind interest in his favour, and his eternal remembrance of the obligations he owed to the whole county of Buckinghamshire, for the asylum and consolations he had found in it during his trials and calamities! I wonder not that Colonel Nugent was so touched by this reply, as to be led to bend the knee, as to his own sovereign, when the king held out his hand - for I myself, though a mere outside auditress, was so moved, and so transported with surprise by the dear English language from his mouth, that I forgot at once all my fears, and dubitations, and, indeed, all myself, my poor little self, in my pride and exultation at such a moment for my noble country.(240) A FLATTERING ROYAL RECEPTION. Fortunately for me, the Duc de Duras made this the moment for my presentation, and, seizing my hand and drawing me suddenly from behind the chair to the royal presence, he said, " Sire, Madame d'Arblay." How singular a change, that what, but the instant before, would have overwhelmed me with diffidence and embarrassment, Page 287 now found me all courage and animation ! and when his majesty took my hand--or, rather, took hold of my fist--and said, in very pretty English, "I am very happy to see you," I felt such a glow of satisfaction, that involuntarily, I burst forth with its expression, incoherently, but delightedly and irresistibly, though I cannot remember how. He certainly was not displeased, for his smile was brightened and his manner was most flattering, as he repeated that he was very glad to see me, and added that he had known me, "though without sight, very long: for I have read you--and been charmed with your books--charmed and entertained. I have read them often, I know them very well indeed; and I have long wanted to know you!" I was extremely surprised,-and not only at these unexpected compliments, but equally that my presentation, far from seeming, as I had apprehended, strange, was met by a reception of the utmost encouragement. When he stopped, and let go my hand, I curtsied respectfully, and was moving on ; but he again caught my fist, and, fixing me, with looks of strong though smiling investigation, he appeared archly desirous to read the lines of my face, as if to deduce from them the qualities of my mind. His manner, however, was so polite and so gentle that he did not at all discountenance me : and though he resumed the praise of my little works, he uttered the panegyric with a benignity so gay as well as flattering, that I felt enlivened, nay, elevated, with a joy that overcame mauvaise honte. The Duc de Duras, who had hurried on all others, seeing he had no chance to dismiss me with the same sans c�r�monie speed, now joined his voice to exalt my satisfaction, by saying, at the next pause, "et M. d'Arblay, sire, bon et brave, est un des plus devou�s et fid�les serviteurs de votre majest�."(241) The king with a gracious little motion of his head, and with eyes of the most pleased benevolence, expressively said, "Je le Crois."(242) And a third time he stopped my retiring curtsey, to take my hand. This last stroke gave me such delight, for my absent best ami, that I could not again attempt to speak. The king pressed my hand--wrist I should say, for it was that he grasped, and then saying, "Bon jour, madame la comtesse," let me go. Page 288 My eyes were suffused with tears, from mingled emotions I glided nimbly through the crowd to a corner at the other end of the room, where Lady Crewe joined me almost instantly, and with felicitations the most amiably cordial and lively. We then repaired to a side-board on which we contrived to seat ourselves, and Lady Crewe named to me the numerous personages of rank who passed on before us for presentation. But every time any one espied her and approached,, she named me also; an honour to which I was very averse. This I intimated, but to no purpose; she went on her own way. The curious stares this produced, in my embarrassed state of spirits, from recent grief, were really painful to sustain ; but when the seriousness of my representation forced her to see that I was truly in earnest in my desire to remain unnoticed, she was so much vexed, and even provoked, that she very gravely begged that, if such were the case, I would move a little farther from her; saying, "If one must be so ill-natured to people as not to name you, I had rather not seem to know who you are myself." AN IMPORTANT LETTER DELAYED. When, at length, her ladyship's chariot was announced, we drove to Great Cumberland-place, Lady Crewe being so kind as to convey me to Mrs. Angerstein. As Lady Crewe was too much in haste to alight, the sweet Amelia Angerstein came to the carriage to speak to her, and to make known that a letter had arrived from M. de la Ch�tre relative to my presentation, which, by a mistake of address, had not come in time for my reception.(244) This note dispelled all of astonishment that had enveloped with something like incredulity my own feelings and perceptions in my unexpected presentation and reception. The king himself had personally desired to bestow upon me this mark of royal favour. What difficulty, what embarrassment, what confusion should I have escaped, had not that provoking mistake which kept back my letter occurred Page 289 M. D'ARBLAY ARRIVES IN ENGLAND. Madame d"Arblay to Mrs. locke.) April 30, 1814. My own dearest friend must be the first, as she will be among the warmest, to participate in my happiness--M. d'Arblay is arrived. He came yesterday, quite unexpectedly as to the day, but not very much quicker than my secret hopes. He is extremely fatigued with all that has passed, yet well ; and all himself, i.e., all that is calculated to fill my heart with gratitude for my lot in life. How would my beloved father have rejoiced in his sight, and in these glorious new events!(245) A BRILLIANT ASSEMBLAGE. (Madame d'Arblay to M. d'Arblay) June 18, 1814. Ah, mon ami! you are really, then, well?--really in Paris?-- really without hurt or injury? What I have suffered from a suspense that has no name from its misery shall now be buried in restored peace, and hope, and happiness. With the most fervent thanks to providence that my terrors are removed, and that I have been tortured by only false apprehensions, I will try to banish from my mind all but the joy, and gratitude to heaven, that your safety and health inspire. Yet still, it is difficult to me to feel assured that all is well ! I have so long been the victim to fear and anguish, that my spirits cannot at once get back their equilibrium. . . . Hier j'ai quitt� ma retraite, tr�s volontiers, pour(246) indulge myself with the sight of the Emperor of Russia. How was I charmed with his pleasing, gentle, and so perfectly unassuming air, manner, and demeanour! I was extremely gratified, also, by seeing the King of Prussia, who interests us all here, by a look that still indicates his tender regret for the partner of his hopes, toils, and sufferings, but not of his victories and enjoyments. It was at the queen's palace I saw them by especial and most gracious permission. The Prussian princes, six in number, and the young prince of Mecklenburg, and the Duchess of Oldenbourg, were of the party. All our royal Page 290 dukes assisted, and the Princesses Augusta and Mary. The Princess Charlotte looked quite beautiful. She is wonderfully improved. It was impossible not to be struck with her personal attractions, her youth, and splendour. The Duchess of York looked amongst the happiest; the King of Prussia is her brother. M. D'ARBLAY ENTERS Louis XVIII.'S BODY-GUARD. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. locke.) London, July, 1814. After a most painful suspense I have been at length relieved by a letter from Paris. It is dated the 18th of June, and has been a fortnight on the road. It is, he says, his fourth letter, and he had not then received one of the uneasy tribe of my own. The consul-generalship is, alas, entirely relinquished, and that by M. d'Arblay himself, who has been invited into the garde du corps by the Duc de Luxembourg, for his own company an invitation he deemed it wrong to resist at such a moment ; and he has since been named one of the officers of the garde du corps by the king, Louis XVIII., to whom he had taken the customary oath that very day--the 18th. The season, however, of danger over, and the throne and order steadily re-established, he will still, I trust and believe, retire to civil domestic life. May it be speedily! After twenty years' lying by, I cannot wish to see him re-enter a military career at sixty years of age, though still young in all his faculties and feelings, and in his capacity of being as useful to others as to himself. There is a time, however, when the poor machine, though still perfect in a calm, is unequal to a storm. Private life, then, should be sought while it yet may be enjoyed; and M. d'Arblay has resources for retirement the most delightful, both for himself and his friends. He is dreadfully worn and fatigued by the last year; and he began his active services at thirteen years of age. He is now past sixty. Every propriety, therefore, will abet my wishes, when the king no longer requires around him his tried and faithful adherents. And, indeed, I am by no means myself insensible to what is so highly gratifying to his feelings as this mark of distinction bien plus honorable, cependant,(247) as he adds, than lucrative. . . . . . Page 291 (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) August 9, 1814. The friends of M. d'A. in Paris are now preparing to claim for him his rank in the army, as he held it under Louis XVI., of mar�chal de Camp; and as the Duc de Luxembourg will present, in person, the demand au roi, there is much reason to expect it will be granted. M. de Thuisy, who brought your letter from Adrienne, has given a flourishing account of M. d'A. in his new uniform, though the uniform itself, he says, is very ugly. But so sought is the company of the garde du corps du roi that the very privates, M. de T. says, are gentlemen. M. d'A. himself has only the place of sous-lieutenant; but it is of consequence sufficient, in that company, to be signed by the king, who had rejected two officers that had been named to him just before he gave his signature for M. d'A. August 24, 1814. M. d'Arblay has obtained his rank, and the kind king has dated it from the aera when the original brevet was signed by poor Louis XVI. in 1792. [Here follows, in the original edition, a long letter in French from M. d'Arblay to his wife, dated " Paris, August 3 0, 1814. " He records the enthusiasm manifested by the people of Paris on the arrival of the king and the Duchess of Angoul�me, and the flattering reception given by the king to the Duke of Wellington. "After having testified his satisfaction at the sentiments which the duke had just expressed to him on the part of the prince regent, and told him that he infinitely desired to see the peace which had been so happily concluded, established on solid foundations, his majesty added, 'For that I shall have need of the powerful co-operation of his royal highness. The choice which he has made of you, sir, gives me hope of it. He honours me. . . . I am proud to see that the first ambassador sent to me by England is the justly celebrated Duke of Wellington."' M. d'Arblay counts with certainty upon his wife's joining him in November, and ventures upon the unlucky assertion that " the least doubt of the stability of the paternal government, which has been so miraculously restored to us, is no longer admissible."-ED.] (214) Lyons rebelled against the Republic in the summer of 1793: against Jacobinism, in the first instance, and guillotined its jacobin leader, Chalier; later it declared for the king. After a long siege and a heroic defence, Lyons surrendered to the Republicans, October 9, 1793, and Fouch� was one of the commissioners sent down by the Convention to execute vengeance on the unfortunate town. A terrible vengeance was taken. "The Republic must march to liberty over corpses," said Fouch�; and thousands of the inhabitants were shot or guillotined. -ED. (215) The reputed assassin of the Duc d'Enghien. ["Assassin" is surely an unnecessarily strong term. The seizure of the Duke d'Enghien on neutral soil was illegal and indefensible: but he was certainly guilty of conspiring against the government of his country. He was arrested, by Napoleon's orders, in the electorate of Baden, in March, 1804; carried across the frontier, conveyed to Vincennes, tried by court-martial, condemned, and shot forthwith.-ED.] (216) The disastrous campaign in Russia. Napoleon left Paris on the 9th Of May, 1812.-ED. (217) "So that we divine her meaning." (218) "Who are you? "My name is d'Arblay." "Are you married?" "Yes." "Where is your husband?" "At Paris." "Who is he?" "He works in the Home Office." "Why are you leaving him?" (219) "You are English?" (220) "Follow me!" (221) "You do not think proper to follow me, then?" (222) "I have nothing to do here, sir, I believe." (223) "We shall see!" " (224) "Young Man!" (225) Her sister Charlotte, formerly Mrs. Francis.-ED. (226) The 20th of August.-ED. (227) Mrs Crewe's husband, John Crewe of Crewe Hall, cheshire, had been created a peer by the title of Baron Crewe of Crewe, in 1806.-ED. (228) An attempt to enter her apartment by a crazy woman. (229) " Hunted out of France." The work in question was Madame de Stael's book on Germany (De l'Allemagne), which had been printed at Paris, and of which the entire edition had been seized by the police before its publication, on the plea that it contained passages offensive to the government. The authoress, moreover, was ordered to quit France, and joined her father at Coppet in Switzerland-ED. (230) No doubt, for his uncle's school. Dr Charles Burney had left Hammersmith and established his school at Greenwich in 1793.-ED. (231) William Wilberforce, the celebrated philanthropist, was born at Htill in 1759. He devoted his life to the cause of the negro slaves; and to his exertions in Parliament were chiefly due the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the total abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1833. He died in the latter year, thanking God that he "had seen the day in which England was willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery."-ED. (232) Narbonne was appointed by Napoleon, during the campaign of 1813, governor of the fortress of Torgau, on the Elbe. He defended the place with great resolution, even after the emperor had been obliged to retreat beyond the Rhine, but unhappily took the fever, and died there, November 17, 1813.-ED. (233) This proved to be a false report. General Victor de Latour Maubourg suffered the amputation of a leg at Leipzic, where he fought bravely in the service of the Emperor Napoleon. But he did not die of his wound, and we find him, in 1815, engaged in raising volunteers for the service of Louis XVIII.-ED. (234) Here is evidently a mistake as to the month: the date, no doubt, should be April 19. Dr. Burney died on the 12th of April, 1814.-ED. (235) Dr. Charles Burney.-ED. (236) Marie Th�r�se Charlotte, Duchess of Angoul�me, was the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She was born in 1778, and, after the execution of her father and mother she was detained in captivity in Paris until December, 1795, when she was delivered up to the Austrians in exchange for certain French prisoners of war. in 1799 she married her cousin, the Duke of Angoul�me, son of Louis XVI's brother, the Count d'Artois, (afterwards Charles X. of France). On the return of Napoleon from Elba, the Duchess of Angoul�me so distinguished herself by her exertions and the spirit which she displayed in the king's cause, that Napoleon said of her " she was the only man in her family."-ED. (237) Henry Grattan, the Irish statesman, orator, and patriot. Already one of the most distinguished members of the Irish Parliament, he vigorously opposed the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. He sat in the Imperial Parliament as member for Dublin from 1806 until his death in 1820, in his seventy-fourth year. As an orator, Mr. Lecky writes of him, "He was almost unrivalled in crushing invective, in delineations of character, and in brief, keen arguments; carrying on a train of sustained reason he was not so happy."-ED. (238) Louis XVIII., formerly known as the Count of Provence, was the brother of the unfortunate Louis XVI. "Louis XVII" was the title given by the royalists to the young son of Louis XVI., who died, a prisoner, in June, 1795, some two years after the execution of his father.-ED. (239) "There is Madame d'Arblay; she must be presented." (240) What a moment for her noble country, and what a subject for pride and exultation! Were we not very sure of Fanny's sincerity, it were scarcely possible to read with patience such passages as this and others similarly extravagant. Her common sense seems to take flight in the presence of royalty.-ED. (242) "And M. d'Arblay, Sire, good and brave, is one of your majesty's most devoted and faithful servants." (243) "I believe it." (244) This letter, addressed to Mrs. Angerstein, was to the effect that the Duchess of Angoul�me would be very pleased to receive Madame d'Arblay, at 72 South Audley-street, between three and half-past three ; and that the king (Louis XVIII.) also desired to see her, and would receive between four and five.-ED. (245) M. d'Arblay returned to France in the following June. -ED. (246) Yesterday I left my retreat, very willingly, to-" (247) "Far more honorable, nevertheless---" Page 292 SECTION 24. (1815) MADAME D'ARBLAY AGAIN IN FRANCE: BONAPARTE'S ESCAPE FROM ELBA. (The two following sections contain Fanny's account of her adventures during the " Hundred Days " which elapsed between the return of Napoleon from Elba and his final downfall and abdication. This narrative may be recommended to the reader as an interesting supplement to the history of that period. The great events of the time, the triumphal progress of the emperor, the battles which decided his destiny and the fate of Europe, we hear of only at a distance, by rumour or chance intelligence ; but our author brings vividly before us, and with the authenticity of personal observation, the disturbed state of the country, the suspense, the alarms, the distress occasioned by the war. To refresh our readers' memories, we give an epitome, as brief as possible, of the events to which Madame d'Arblay's narrative forms, as it were, a background. When Napoleon abdicated the imperial throne, in April, 1814, the allied powers consented by treaty to confer upon him the sovereignty of the island of Elba, with a revenue of two million francs. To Elba he was accordingly banished, but the revenue was never paid. This disgraceful infringement of the treaty of Fontainebleau, joined to the accounts which he received of the state of public feeling in France, determined him to make the attempt to regain his lost empire. March 1, 1815, he landed at Cannes, with a few hundred men. He was everywhere received with the utmost enthusiasm. The troops sent to oppose him joined his standard with shouts of "Vive l'empereur!" March 20, he entered Paris in triumph, Louis XVIII having taken his departure the preceding evening, "amidst the tears and lamentations of several courtiers."(248) The congress of the allied powers at Vienna proclaimed the emperor an outlaw, not choosing to remember that the treaty which they accused him of breaking, had been first violated by themselves. To his offers of negotiation they replied not. The Page 293 English army under the Duke of Wellington, the Prussian under Prince Bl�cher occupied Belgium; the Austrians and Russians were advancing in immense force towards the Rhine. Anxious to strike a blow before the arrival of the latter Napoleon left Paris for Belgium, June 12. His army amounted to about one hundred and twenty thousand men. On the 15th the fighting commenced, h and the advanced guard of the Prussians was driven back. On the 16th, Bl�cher was attacked at Ligny, and defeated with terrible loss; but Marshal Ney was unsuccessful in an attack upon the combined English and Belgian army at Quatre Bras. Sunday, June 18, was the day of the decisive battle of Waterloo. After the destruction of his army, Napoleon hastened to Paris, but all hope was at an end. He abdicated the throne for the second time, proceeded to Rochefort, and voluntarily surrendered himself to Captain Maitland, of the English seventy-four, Bellerophon. He was conveyed to England, but was not permitted to land, and passed the few remaining years of his life a prisoner in the island of St. Helena.-ED.] AN INTERVIEW WITH THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULEME. I come now to my audience with Madame, Duchesse d'Angoul�me.(249) As I had missed, through a vexatious mistake, the honour she had herself intended me, of presentation in England, my own condescending royal mistress, Queen Charlotte, recommended my claiming its performance on my return to Paris. M. d'Arblay then consulted with the Vicomte d'Agoult, his intimate early friend, how to repair in France my English deprivation. M. d'Agoult was �cuyer to her royal highness, and high in her confidence and favour. He advised me simply to faire ma cour as the wife of a superior officer in the garde du corps du roi, at a public drawing-room; but the great exertion and publicity, joined to the expense Of such a presentation, made me averse, in all ways, to this proposal; and when M. d'Arblay protested I had not anything in view but to pay my respectful devoirs to her royal highness, M. d'Agoult undertook to make known my wish. It soon proved that this alone was necessary for its success, for madame la duchesse Page 294 instantly recollected what had passed in England, and said she would name, with pleasure, the first moment in her power - expressing an impatience on her own part that an interview should not be delayed which had been desired by her majesty Queen Charlotte of England. . . . I have omitted to mention that on the Sunday preceding, the Duchess d'Angoul�me, at Court, had deigned to tell my best friend that she was reading, and with great pleasure, Madame d'Arblay's last work. He expressed his gratification, and added that he hoped it was in English, as her altesse royale so well knew that language. No, she answered, it was the translation she read; the original she had not been able to procure. On this M. d'Arblay advised me to send a copy. I had none bound, but the set which had come back to me from my dear father. This, however, M. d'A. carried to the Vicomte d'Agoult, with a note from me in which, through the medium of M. d'Agoult, I supplicated leave from her royal highness to lay at her feet this only English set I possessed. In the most gracious manner possible, as the Vicomte told M. d'Arblay, her royal highness accepted the work, and deigned also to keep the billet. She had already, unfortunately, finished the translation, but she declared her intention to read the original. Previously to my presentation, M. d'Arblay took me to the salon of the exhibition of pictures, to view a portrait of Madame d'Angoul�me, that I might make some acquaintance with her face before the audience. This portrait was deeply interesting, but deeply melancholy. ARRIVAL AT THE TUILERIES. All these precautions taken, I went, at the appointed hour and morning, about the end of February, 1815, to the palace of the Tuileries, escorted by the most indulgent of husbands we repaired instantly to the apartment of the Duchesse de Serrent, who received us with the utmost politeness; she gave us our lesson how to proceed, and then delivered us over to some page of her royal highness. We were next shown into a very large apartment. I communicated to the page a request that he would endeavour to make known to M. de Montmorency that I was arrived, and how much I wished to see him. In a minute or two came forth a tall, sturdy dame, who Page 295 immediately addressed me by my name, and spoke with an air, that demanded my returning her compliment. I could not, however, recollect her till she said she had formerly met me at the Princess d'Henin's. I then recognised the dowager Duchesse de Duras, whom, in fact, I had seen last at the Princesse de Chimay's, in the year 1812, just before my first return to England; and had received from her a commission to acquaint the royal family of France that her son, the duke, had kept aloof from all service under Bonaparte, though he had been named in the gazettes as having accepted the place of chamberlain to the then emperor. Yet such was the subjection, at that time, of all the old nobility to the despotic power of that mighty ruler, that M. de Duras had not dared to contradict the paragraph. She then said that her altesse royale was expecting me; and made a motion that I should pursue my way into the next room, M. d'Arblay no longer accompanying me. But before I disappeared she assured me that I should meet with a most gracious reception, for her altesse royale had declared she would see me with marked favour, if she saw no other English whatsoever; because Madame d'Arblay, she said, was the only English person who had been peculiarly recommended to her notice by the Queen of England. In the next, which was another very large apartment, I was received by a lady much younger and more agreeable than Madame de Duras, gaily and becomingly dressed, and wearing a smiling air with a sensible face. I afterwards heard it was Madame de Choisy, who, a few years later, married the Vicomte d'Agoult. Madame de Choisy instantly began some compliments, but finding she only disconcerted me, she soon said she must not keep me back, and curtsied me on to another room, into which she shut me. A MISAPPREHENSION. I here imagined I was to find M. de Montmorency, but I saw only a lady, who stood at the upper end of the apartment, and slightly curtsied, but without moving or speaking. Concluding this to be another dame de la cour, from my internal persuasion that ultimately I was to be presented by M. de Montmorency, I approached her composedly, with a mere common inclination of the head, and looked wistfully forward to the further door. She inquired politely after my Page 296 health, expressing good-natured concern to hear it had been deranged, and adding that she was bien aise de me voir.](250) I thanked her, with some expression of obligation to her civility, but almost without looking at her, from perturbation lest some mistake had intervened to prevent my introduction, as I still saw nothing of M. de Montmorency. She then asked me if I would not sit down, taking a seat at the same time herself. I readily complied; but was too much occupied with the ceremony I was awaiting to discourse, though she immediately began what was meant for a conversation. I hardly heard, or answered, so exclusively was my attention engaged in watching the door through which I was expecting a summons; till, at length, the following words rather surprised me (I must write them in English, for my greater ease, though they were spoken in French)--"I am quite sorry to have read your last charming work in French." My eyes now changed their direction from the door to her face, to which I hastily turned my head, as she added,--"Puis-je le garder le livre que vous m'avez envoy�?"(251) A DISCOVERY AND A RECTIFICATION. Startled, as if awakened from a dream, I fixed her and perceived the same figure that I had seen at the salon. I now felt sure I was already in the royal presence of the Duchesse d'Angoul�me, with whom I had seated myself almost cheek by jowl, without the smallest suspicion of my situation. I really seemed thunderstruck. I had approached her with so little formality, I had received all her graciousness with so little apparent sense of her condescension, I had taken my seat, nearly unasked, so completely at my ease, and I had pronounced so unceremoniously the plain "vous," without softening it off with one single "altesse royale," that I had given her reason to think me either the most forward person in my nature, or the worst bred ]In my education, existing. I was in a consternation and a confusion that robbed me of breath; and my first impulse was to abruptly arise, confess my error, and offer every respectful apology I could devise; but as my silence and strangeness produced silence, a pause ensued that gave me a moment for reflection, which represented Page 297 to me that son altesse royale might be seriously hurt, that nothing in her demeanour had announced her, rank; and such a discovery might lead to increased distance and reserve in her future conduct upon other extra audiences, that could not but be prejudicial to her popularity, which already was injured by an opinion extremely unjust, but very generally spread, of her haughtiness. It was better, therefore, to be quiet, and to let her suppose that embarrassment, and English awkwardness and mauvaise honte, had occasioned my unaccountable manners. I preserved, therefore, my taciturnity, till, tired of her own, she gently repeated, "Puis-je le garder, cette copie que vous m'avez envoy�?" civilly adding that she should be happy to read it again when she had a little forgotten it, and had a little more time. I seized this fortunate moment to express my grateful acknowledgments for her goodness, with the most unaffected sincerity, yet scrupulously accompanied with all the due forms of profound respect. What she thought of so sudden a change of dialect I have no means of knowing ; hut I could not, for a long time afterwards, think of it myself with a grave countenance. From that time, however, I failed not to address her with appropriate reverence, though, as it was too late now to assume the distant homage pertaining, of course, to her very high rank, I insensibly suffered one irregularity to lead to, nay to excuse another; for I passed over all the etiquette d'usage, of never speaking but en r�ponse; and animated myself to attempt to catch her attention, by conversing with fullness and spirit upon every subject she began, or led to ; and even by starting subjects myself, when she was silent. This gave me an opportunity of mentioning many things that had happened in Paris during my long ten years' uninterrupted residence, which were evidently very interesting to her. Had she become grave, or inattentive, I should have drawn back _; but, on the contrary, she grew more and more �veill�e, and her countenance was lighted up with the most encouraging approval. CONVERSATION ON MADAME D'ARBLAY's ESCAPE AND M. D'ARBLAY'S LOYALTY. She was curious, she said, to know how I got over to England in the year 1812, having been told that I had effected my escape by an extraordinary disguise. I assured her that Page 298 I had not escaped at all; as so to have done must have endangered the generous husband and father, who permitted mine and his son's departure. I had procured a passport for us both, which was registered in the ordinary manner, chez le ministre de police for foreign affairs; ches- one, I added, whose name I could not pronounce in her royal highness's hearing; but to whom I had not myself applied. She well knew I meant Savary, Duc de Rovigo, whose history with respect to the murdered Due d'Enghien has, since that period, been so variously related. I was then embarrassed, for I had owed my passport to the request of Madame d'A., who was distantly connected with Savary, and who had obtained it to oblige a mutual friend ; I found, however, to my great relief, that the duchess possessed the same noble delicacy that renders all private intercourse with my own exemplary princesses as safe for others as it is honourable to myself; for she suffered me to pass by the names of my assistants, when I said they were friends who exerted themselves for me in consideration of my heavy grief, in an absence of ten years from a father whom I had left at the advanced age of seventy-five; joined to my terror lest my son should remain till he attained the period of the conscription, and be necessarily drawn into the military service of Bonaparte. And, indeed, these two points could alone, with all my eagerness to revisit my native land, have induced me to make the journey by a separation from my best friend. This led me to assume courage to recount some of the prominent parts of the conduct of M. d'Arblay during our ten years' confinement, rather than residence, in France ; I thought this necessary, lest our sojourn during the usurpation should be misunderstood. I told her, in particular, of three high military appointments which he had declined. The first was to be head of l'�tat major of a regiment under a general whose name I cannot spell--in the army of Poland, a post of which the offer was procured for him by M. de Narbonne, then aide-de-camp to Bonaparte. The second was an offer, through General Gassendi, of being Commander of Palma Nuova, whither M. d'A. might carry his wife and son, as he was to have the castle for his residence, and there was no war with Italy at that time. The third offer was a very high one: it was no less than the command of Cherbourg, as successor to M. le Comte de la Tour Maubourg, who was sent elsewhere, by still higher promotion. Steady, however, Page 299 invariably steady was M. d'Arblay never to serve against his liege sovereign, General Gassendi, one of the most zealous of his friends, contrived to cover up this dangerous rejection and M. d'Arblay continued In his humbler but far more' meritorious Office Of sous Chef to one of the bureaux de l,int�rieur. I had now the pleasure to hear the princess say, "Il a aqi bien noblement."(252) "For though he would take no part," I added, la guerre, nor yet in the diplomatie, he could have no objection to making plans, arrangements, buildings, and so forth, of monuments, hospitals, and palaces; for at that period, palaces, like princes, were �lev�s tous les jours."(253) She could not forbear smiling; and her smile, which is rare, is so peculiarly becoming, that it brightens her countenance into a look of youth and beauty. "But why," I cried, recollecting myself, "should I speak French, when your royal highness knows English so well?" "O, no!" cried she, shaking her head, "very bad!" >From that time, however, I spoke in my own tongue, and saw myself perfectly understood, though those two little words were the only English ones she uttered herself, replying always in French. "Le roi," she said, "se rapelle tr s bien de vous avoir vu Londres."(254) "O, je n'en doute nullement,"(255) I replied, rather na�vely, "for there passed a scene that cannot be forgotten, and that surprised me into courage to come forward, after I had spent the whole morning in endeavouring to shrink backward. And I could not be sorry--for I felt that his majesty could not he offended at a vivacity which his own courtesy to England excited." The princess smiled, with a graciousness that assured me I had not mistaken the king's benevolence, of which she evidently partook. THE PRINCE REGENT THE DUCHEss's FAVOURITE. The conversation then turned upon the royal family of England, and it was inexpressibly gratifying to me to hear her just appreciation of the virtues, the intellectual endowments, the ' Page 300 sweetness of manner, and the striking grace of every one, according to their different character, that was mentioned. The prince regent, however, was evidently her favourite. The noble style in which he had treated her and all her family at his Carlton House f�te, in the midst of their misfortunes, and while so much doubt hung against every chance of those misfortunes being ever reversed, did so much honour to his heart and proved so solacing to their woes and humiliation, that she could never revert to that public testimony of his esteem and goodwill without the most glowing gratitude. "O!" she cried, "il a �t� parfait!"(256) The Princesse Elise,(257) with whom she was in correspondence, seemed to stand next. "C'est elle," she said, "qui fait les honneurs de la famille royale,(258) and with a charm the most enlivening and delightful." The conference was only broken up by a summons to the king's dinner. My audience, however, instead of a few minutes, for which the Duchesse de Duras had prepared me, was extended to three-quarters of an hour, by the watch of my kind husband, who waited, with some of his old friends whom he had joined in the palace, to take me home. The princess, as she left me to go down a long corridor to the dining apartment, took leave of me in a manner the most gracious, honouring me with a message to her majesty the queen of England, of her most respectful homage, and with her kind and affectionate remembrance to all the princesses, with warm assurances of her eternal attachment. She then moved on, but again stopped when going, to utter some sentences most grateful to my ears, of her high devotion to the queen and deep sense of all her virtues. I little thought that this, my first, would prove also my last, meeting with this exemplary princess, whose worth, courage, fortitude, and piety are universally acknowledged, but whose powers of pleasing seem little known. After an opening such as this, how little could I foresee that this interview was to be a final one! . . . Alas! in a day or two after it had taken place, son altesse royale set out for Bordeaux. . . . And then followed the return of Bonaparte from Elba, and then the Hundred Days. Page 301 NARRATIVE OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S FLIGHT FROM PARIS TO BRUSSELS [The following Narrative was written some time after the events described took place. It is judged better to print it in a connected form : a few of the letters written on the spot being subsequently given.] PREVAILING INERTIA ON BONAPARTE'S RETURN FROM ELBA. I have no remembrance how I first heard of the return of Bonaparte from Elba. Wonder at his temerity was the impression made by the news, but wonder unmixed with apprehension. This inactivity of foresight was universal. A torpor indescribable, a species of stupor utterly indefinable, seemed to have enveloped the capital with a mist that was impervious. Everybody went about their affairs, made or received visits, met, and parted, without speaking, or, I suppose , thinking of this event as of a matter of any importance. My own participation in this improvident blindness is to myself incomprehensible. Ten years I had lived under the dominion of Bonaparte; I had been in habits of intimacy with many friends of those who most closely surrounded him; I was generously trusted, as one with whom information, while interesting and precious, would be inviolably safe-as one, in fact, whose honour was the honour of her spotless husband, and therefore invulnerable : well, therefore, by narrations the most authentic, and by documents the most indisputable, I knew the character of Bonaparte ; and marvellous beyond the reach of my comprehension is my participation in this inertia. . . . Thus familiar to his practices, thus initiated in his resources, thus aware of his gigantic ideas of his own destiny, how could I for a moment suppose he would re-visit France without a consciousness of success, founded upon some secret conviction that it was infallible, through measures previously arranged ? I can only conclude that my understanding, such as it is, was utterly tired out by a long harass of perpetual alarm and sleepless apprehension. Unmoved, therefore, I remained in the general apparent repose which, if it were as real in those with whom I mixed as in myself, I now deem a species of infatuation. Whether or not M. d'Arblay was involved in the general failure of foresight I have mentioned, I never now can ascertain. To spare me any evil tidings, and save me from Page 302 even the shadow of any unnecessary alarm, was the first and constant solicitude of his indulgent goodness. At this period he returned to Paris to settle various matters for our Senlis residence. We both now knew the event that so soon was to monopolize all thought and all interest throughout Europe: but we knew it without any change in our way of life; on the contrary, we even resumed our delightful airings in the Bois de Boulogne, whither the general drove me every morning in a light cal�che, of which he had possessed himself upon his entrance into the king's body-guard the preceding year. Brief, however, was this illusion, and fearful was the light by which its darkness was dispersed. In a few days we hear that Bonaparte, whom we had concluded to be, of course, either stopped at landing and taken prisoner, or forced to save himself by flight, was, on the contrary, pursuing unimpeded his route to Lyons. >From this moment disguise, if any there had been, was over with the most open and frank of human beings, who never even transitorily practised it but to keep off evil, or its apprehension, from others. He communicated to me now his strong view of danger ; not alone that measures might be taken to secure my safety, but to spare me any sudden agitation. Alas! none was spared to himself! More clearly than any one he anticipated the impending tempest, and foreboded its devastating effects. He spoke aloud and strenuously, with prophetic energy, to all with whom he was then officially associated but the greater part either despaired of resisting the torrent, or disbelieved its approach. What deeply interesting scenes crowd upon my remembrance, of his noble, his daring, but successless exertions! The king's body-guard immediately de service,(259) at that time, was the compagnie of the Prince de Poix, a man of the most heartfelt loyalty, but who had never served, and who was incapable of so great a command at so critical a juncture, from utter inexperience. BONAPARTE'S ADVANCE: CONTEMPLATED MIGRATION FROM PARIS. At this opening of the famous Hundred Days it seemed to occur to no one that Bonaparte would make any attempt upon Paris. It was calmly taken for granted he would Page 303 speedily escape back to Elba, or remain in the south a prisoner - and it was only amongst deep or restless politicians that any inquietude was manifested with respect to either of these results. Madame la Princesse d'Henin, indeed, whom I was in the habit of frequently meeting, had an air and Manner that announced perturbation ; but her impetuous spirit in politics kept her mind always in a state of energy upon public affairs. But when Bonaparte actually arrived at Lyons the face of affairs changed. Expectation was then awakened--consternation began to spread; and report went rapidly to her usual work, of now exciting nameless terror, and now allaying even reasonable apprehension. To me, every moment became more anxious. I saw General d'Arblay imposing upon himself a severity of service for which he had no longer health or strength, and imposing it only the more rigidly from the fear that his then beginning weakness and infirmities should seem to plead for indulgence. it was thus that he insisted upon going through the double duty of artillery officer at the barracks, and of officier sup�rieur in the king's body-guards at the Tuileries, The smallest representation to M. le Duc de Luxembourg, who had a true value for him, would have procured a substitute: but he would not hear me upon such a proposition; he would sooner, far, have died at his post, He now almost lived either at the Tuileries or at the barracks. I only saw him when business or military arrangements brought him home; but he kindly sent me billets to appease my suspense every two or three hours. The project upon Paris became at length obvious, yet its success was little feared, though the horrors of a civil war seemed inevitable. M. d'Arblay began to wish me away; he made various propositions for ensuring my safety; he even pressed me to depart for England to rejoin Alexander and my family: but I knew them to be in security, whilst my first earthly tie was exposed to every species of danger, and I besought him not to force me away. He was greatly distressed, but could not oppose my urgency. He procured me, however, a passport from M. le Comte de Jaucourt, his long attached friend, who was minister aux affaires �trang�res(260) ad interim, while Talleyrand Perigord was with the Congress at Vienna. Page 304 I received it most unwillingly: I could not endure to absent myself from the seat of government,-for I little divined how soon that government was to change its master. Nevertheless, the prudence of this preparatory measure soon became conspicuous, for the very following day I heard of nothing but purposed emigrations from Paris-retirement, concealment, embarrassments, and difficulties. My sole personal joy was that my younger Alexander was far away, and safely lodged in the only country of safety. But, on the 17th, hope again revived. I received these words from my best friend, written on a scrap of paper torn from a parcel, and brought to me by his groom from the palace of the Tuileries, where their writer had passed the night mounting guard:-- "Nous avons de meilleures nouvelles. Je ne puis entrer dans aucun d�tail; mais sois tranquille, et aime bien qui t'aime uniquement.(261) God bless you." This news hung upon the departure of Marshal Ney to meet Bonaparte and stop his progress, with the memorable words uttered publicly to the king, that he would bring him to Paris in an iron cage. The king at this time positively announced and protested that he would never abandon his throne nor quit his capital, Paris. Various of my friends called upon me this day, all believing the storm was blowing over. Madame Chastel and her two daughters were calm, but, nevertheless, resolved to visit a small terre(262) which they possessed, till the metropolis was free from all contradictory rumours. Madame de Cadignan preserved her imperturbable gaiety and carelessness, and said she should stay, happen what might ; for what mischief could befall a poor widow ? Her sportive smiles and laughing eyes displayed her security in the power of her charms. Madame de Maisonneuve was filled with apprehensions for her brothers, who were all in highly responsible situations, and determined to remain in Paris to be in the midst of them. The Princesse d'Henin came to me daily to communicate all the intelligence she gathered from the numerous friends and connections through whom she was furnished with supplies. Her own plans were incessantly changing, but her friendship knew no Page 305 alteration; and in every various modification of her intentions she always offered to include me in their execution, should my affairs reduce me, finally, to flight. Flight, however, was intolerable to my thoughts. I weighed it not as saving me from Bonaparte - I could consider it only as separating me from all to which my heart most dearly clung. Madame d'Henin was undecided whether to go to the north or to the south-to Bordeaux or to Brussels ; I could not, therefore, even give a direction to M. d'Arblay where I could receive any intelligence, and the body-guard of the king was held in utter suspense as to its destination. This, also, was unavoidable, since the king himself could only be guided by events. The next day, the 18th of March, all hope disappeared. From north, from south, from east, from west, alarm took the field, danger flashed its lightnings, and contention growled its thunders: yet in Paris there was no rising, no disturbance, no confusion--all was taciturn suspense, dark dismay, or sullen passiveness. The dread necessity which had reduced the king, Louis XVIII., to be placed on his throne by foreigners, would have annihilated all enthusiasm of loyalty, if any had been left by the long underminings of revolutionary principles. What a day was *this of gloomy solitude! Not a soul approached me, save, for a few moments, my active Madame d'Henin, who came to tell me she was preparing to depart, unless a successful battle should secure the capital from the conqueror. I now promised that if I should ultimately be compelled to fly my home, I would thankfully be of her party; and she grasped at this engagement with an eagerness that gave proof of her sincere and animated friendship. This intimation was balm to the heart of my dearest partner, and he wished the measure to be executed and expedited; but I besought him, as he valued my existence, not to force me away till every other resource was hopeless. GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S MILITARY PREPARATIONS. He passed the day almost wholly at the barracks. When he entered his dwelling, in the Rue de Miromenil, it was only upon military business, and from that he could spare me scarcely a second. He was shut up in his library with continual comers and goers; and though I durst not follow Page 306 him, I could not avoid gathering, from various circumstances, that he was now preparing to take the field, in full expectation of being sent out with his comrades of the guard, to check the rapid progress of the invader. I knew this to be his earnest wish, as the only chance of saving the king and the throne; but he well knew it was my greatest dread, though I was always silent upon the subject, well aware that while his honour was dearer to him than his life, my own sense of duty was dearer to me also than mine. While he sought, therefore, to spare me the view of his arms and warlike equipage and habiliments, I felt his wisdom as well as his kindness, and tried to appear as if I had no suspicion of his proceedings, remaining almost wholly in my own room, to avoid any accidental surprise, and to avoid paining him with the sight of my anguish. I masked it as well as I could for the little instant he had from time to time to spare me; but before dinner he left me entirely, having to pass the night cheval at the barracks, as he had done the preceding night at the Tuileries. The length of this afternoon, evening, and night was scarcely supportable : his broken health, his altered looks, his frequent sufferings, and diminished strength, all haunted me with terror, in the now advancing prospect of his taking the field. And where? And how? No one knew! Yet he was uncertain whether he could even see me once more the next day! . . . I come now to the detail of one of the most dreadful days of my existence, the 19th of March, 1815, the last which preceded the triumphant return of Bonaparte to the capital of France. Little, on its opening, did I imagine that return so near, or believe it would be brought about without even any attempted resistance. General d'Arblay, more in the way of immediate intelligence, and more able to judge of its result, was deeply affected by the most gloomy prognostics. He came home at about six in the morning, harassed, worn, almost wasted with fatigue, and yet more with a baleful view of all around him, and with a sense of wounded military honour in the inertia which seemed to paralyze all effort to save the king and his cause. He had spent two nights following armed on guard, one at the Tuileries, in his duty of garde du corps to the king; the other on duty as artillery captain at the barracks. He went to bed for a few hours ; and then, after a wretched breakfast in which he Page 307 briefly narrated the state of things he had witnessed and his apprehensions, be conjured me, in the most solemn and earnest manner, to yield to the necessity of the times, and consent to quit Paris with Madame d'Henin, should she ultimately decide to depart. I could not, when I saw his sufferings, endure to augment them by any further opposition; but never was acquiescence so painful! To lose even the knowledge whither he went, or the means of acquainting him whither I might go myself--to be deprived of the power to join him, should he be made prisoner--or to attend him, should he be wounded. . . . I could not pronounce my consent; but he accepted it so decidedly in my silence, that he treated it as arranged, and hastened its confirmation by assuring me I had relieved his mind from a weight of care and distress nearly intolerable. As the wife of an officer in the king's body-guard, in actual service, I might be seized, he thought, as a kind of hostage, and might probably fare all the worse for being also an Englishwoman. He then wrote a most touching note to the Princesse d'Henin, supplicating her generous friendship to take the charge not only of my safety, but of supporting and consoling me. After this, he hurried back to the Tuileries for orders, apparently more composed; and that alone enabled me to sustain my so nearly compulsory and so repugnant agreement. His return was speedy: he came, as he had departed, tolerably composed, for he had secured me a refuge, and he had received orders to prepare to march--to Melun, he concluded, to encounter Bonaparte, and to battle; for certain news had arrived of the invader's rapid approach. . . . at half-past two; at noon it was expected that the body-guard would be put in motion. Having told me this history, he could not spare me another moment till that which preceded his leaving home to join the Due de Luxembourg's company. He then came to me, with an air of assumed serenity, and again, in the most kindly, soothing terms, called upon me to give him an example of courage. I obeyed his injunction with my best ability-yet how dreadful was our parting! We knelt together in short but fervent prayer to heaven for each other's preservation, and then separated. At the door he turned back, and with a smile which, though forced, had inexpressible sweetness, he half gaily exclaimed, "Vive le roi!" I instantly caught his wise Page 308 wish that we should part with apparent cheerfulness, and reechoed his words-and then he darted from my sight. This had passed in an ante-room ; but I then retired to my bedchamber, where, all effort over, I remained for some minutes abandoned to an affliction nearly allied to despair, though rescued from it by fervent devotion. But an idea then started into my mind that yet again I might behold him. I ran to a window which looked upon the inward court-yard. There, indeed, behold him I did, but oh, with what anguish ! just mounting his war-horse, a noble animal, of which he was singularly fond, but which at this moment I viewed with acutest terror, for it seemed loaded with pistols, and equipped completely for immediate service on the field of battle; while Deprez, the groom, prepared to mount another, and our cabriolet was filled with baggage and implements of war. I could not be surprised, since I knew the destination of the general ; but so carefully had he spared me the progress of his preparations, which he thought would be killing me by inches, that I had not the most distant idea he was thus armed and encircled with instruments of death-bayonets, lances, pistols, guns, sabres, daggers !-what horror assailed me at the sight! I had only so much sense and self-control left as to crawl softly and silently away, that I might not inflict upon him the suffering of beholding my distress - but when he had passed the windows, I opened them to look after him. The street was empty - the gay constant gala of a Parisian Sunday was changed into fearful solitude : no sound was heard, but that of here and there some hurried footstep, on one hand hastening for a passport to secure safety by flight ; on the other, rushing abruptly from or to some concealment, to devise means of accelerating and hailing the entrance of the conqueror. Well in tune with this air of an impending crisis, was my miserable mind, which from grief little short of torture sunk, at its view, into a state of morbid quiet, that seemed the produce of feelings totally exhausted. PREPARATIONS FOR FLIGHT: LEAVE-TAKINGS. Thus I continued, inert, helpless, motionless, till the Princesse d'Henin came into my apartment. Her first news was, that Bonaparte had already reached Compi�gne, and that to-morrow, the 20th of March, he might arrive in Paris, if the Page 309 army of the king stopped not his progress. It was now necessary to make a prompt decision; my word was given, and I agreed to accompany her whithersoever she fixed to go. She was STILL hesitating; but it was settled I should join her in the evening, bag and baggage, and partake of her destination. . . . I was now sufficiently roused for action, and my first return to conscious understanding was a desire to call in and pay every bill that might be owing, as well as the rent of our apartments up to the present moment, that no pretence might be assumed from our absence for disposing of our goods, books, or property of any description. As we never had any avoidable debts, this was soon settled ; but the proprietor of the house was thunderstruck by the measure, saying, the king had reiterated his proclamation that he would not desert his capital. I could only reply that the general was at his majesty's orders, and that my absence Would be short. I then began collecting our small portion of plate, etc.; but while thus occupied, I received a message from Madame d'Henin, to tell me I must bring nothing but a small change of linen, and one band-box, as by the news she had just heard, she was convinced we should be back again in two or three days, and she charged me to be with her in an hour from that time. I did what she directed, and put what I most valued, that was not too large, into a hand-basket, made by some French prisoners in England, that had been given me by my beloved friend Mrs. Locke. I then swallowed, standing, my neglected dinner, and, with Madame Deprez, and my small allowance of baggage, I got into a fiacre, and drove to General Victor de la Tour Maubourg, to bid adieu to my dearest Madame de Maisonneuve, and her family. It was about nine o'clock at night, and very dark. I sent on Madame Deprez to the princess, and charged her not to return to summon me till the last moment. The distance was small. I found the -house of the Marquis Victor de la Tour Maubourg in a state of the most gloomy dismay. No portier was in the way, but the door of the porte CocH�re was ajar, and I entered on foot, no fiacre being ever admitted into les cours des h�Tels. Officers and strangers were passing to and fro, some to receive, others to resign commissions, but all with quick steps, though in dead silence. Not a servant was in the way, and hardly any light; all seemed in disorder. Page 310 groped along till I came to the drawing-room, in which were several people, waiting for orders, or for an audience ; but in no communication with each other, for here, also, a dismal taciturnity prevailed, From my own disturbance, joined to my short-sightedness, I was some time ere I distinguished Madame Victor de la Tour Maubourg, and when at last I saw her, I ventured not to address or to approach her. She was at a table, endeavouring to make some arrangement, or package, or examination, with papers and boxes before her, but deluged in tears, which flowed so fast that she appeared to have relinquished all effort to restrain them, And this was the more affecting to witness, as she is eminently equal and cheerful in her disposition. I kept aloof, and am not certain that she even perceived me. The general was in his own apartment, transacting military business of moment. But no sooner was I espied by my dearest Madame de Maisonneuve, than I was in her kind arms. She took me apart to reveal to me that the advance of the late emperor was still more rapid than its report. All were quitting Paris, or resigning themselves to passive submission. For herself, she meant to abide by whatever should be the destination of her darling brother Victor, who was now finishing a commission that no longer could be continued, of raising volunteers-for there was no longer any royal army for them to join ! Whether the king would make a stand at the Tuileries, as he had unhappily promised, or whether he would fly, was yet unknown ; but General Victor de Maubourg was now going to equip himself in full uniform, that he might wait upon his majesty in person, decidedly fixed to take his orders, be they what they might. With danger thus before him, in his mutilated state, having undergone an amputation of the leg and thigh on the field of battle, who can wonder at the desolation of Madame Victor when he resolved to sustain the risk of such an offer? Presently, what was my emotion at the sudden and abrupt entrance into the room of an officer of the king's garde du corps! in the self-same uniform as that from which I had parted with such anguish in the morning! A transitory hope glanced like lightning upon my brain, with an idea that the body-guard was all at hand; but as evanescent as bright was the flash! The concentrated and mournful look of the officer assured me nothing genial was awaiting me - and when the next minute we recognized each other, I saw it was the Count Charles de la Tour Maubourg, the youngest brother of Madame de Page 311 Maisonneuve; and he then told me he had a note for me from M. d'Arblay. Did I breathe then? i think not! I grasped the paper in my hand, but a mist was before my eyes, and I could not read a word. Madame de Maisonneuve held a hurried conference with her brother, and then informed me that the body-guard was all. called out) the whole four companies, with their servants, equipage, arms and horses, to accompany and protect the king in his flight from Paris! But whither he would go, or with what intent, whether of battle or of escape, had not been announced. The Count Charles had obtained leave of absence for one hour to see his wife (Mademoiselle de Lafayette) and his children; but M. d'Arblay, who belonged to the artillery company, could not be spared even a moment. He had therefore seized a cover of a letter of M. de Bethizy, the commandant, to write me a few words. I now read them, and found-- "Ma ch�re amie--Tout est perdu! je ne puis entrer dans aucun d�tail--de gr�ce, partez! le plut�t sera le mieux. A la vie et la mort, A. D'A."(263) Scarcely had I read these lines, when I was told that Madame d'Henin had sent me a summons. I now could but embrace my Madame de Maisonneuve in silence, and depart. . . . ARISTOCRATIC IRRITABILITY. Arrived at Madame la Princesse d'Henin's, all was in a perturbation yet greater than what I had left, though not equally afflicting. Madame d'Henin was so little herself, that every moment presented a new view of things, and urged her impatiently, nay imperiously, to differ from whatever was offered. Now she saw instantly impending danger, and was for precipitate flight; now she saw fearless security, and determined not to move a step ; the next moment all was alarm again, and she wanted wings for speed - and the next, the smallest apprehension awakened derision and contempt. I, who had never yet seen her but all that was elegant, rational, and kind, was thunderstruck by this effect of threatening Page 312 evil upon her high and susceptible spirit. From manners of dignified serenity, she so lost all self-possession as to answer nearly with fury whatever was not acquiescent concurrence in her opinion: from sentiments of the most elevated nobleness she was urged, by every report that opposed her expectations, to the utterance of wishes and of assertions that owed their impulse to passion, and their foundation to prejudice ; and from having sought, with the most flattering partiality, to attach me to her party, she gave me the severe shock of intimating that my joining her confused all er measures. To change my plan now was impossible ; my husband and my best friends knew me to be with her, and could seek me, or bestow information upon me, in no other direction; I had given up my own home, and to return thither, or to stay any where in Paris, was to constitute myself a prisoner: nevertheless, it was equally a sorrow and a violence to my feelings to remain with her another moment after so astonishing a reproach. Displeasure at it, however, subsided, when I found that it proceeded neither from weakened regard, nor a wanton abuse of power, but from a mind absolutely disorganized. M. le Comte de Lally Tolendal, the Cicero of France, and most eloquent man of his day, and one of the most honourable, as well as most highly gifted, was, I now found, to be of our fugitive party. He was her admiring and truly devoted friend, and by many believed to be privately married to her. I am myself of that opinion, and that the union, on account of prior and unhappy circumstances, was forborne to be avowed. Certainly their mutual conduct warranted this conclusion. Nevertheless, his whole demeanour towards her announced the most profound respect as well as attachment ; and hers to him the deepest consideration, with a delight in his talents amounting to an adoration that met his for her noble mind and winning qualities. She wanted, however, despotically to sway him ; and little as he might like the submission she required, he commonly yielded, to avoid, as I conceive, the dangerous conjectures to which dissension might make them liable. But at this moment, revolutionary terrors and conflicting sensations robbed each of them of that self-command which till now had regulated their public intercourse. She, off all guard, let loose alike the anxious sensibility and the arbitrary impetuosity of her nature: he, occupied with too mighty a trouble to have time or care for his wonted watchful Page 313 attentions, heard alike her admonitions or lamentations with an air of angry, but silent displeasure ; or, when urged too pointedly for maintaining his taciturnity, retorted her reproaches or remarks with a vehemence that seemed the echo of her own. Yet in the midst of this unguarded contention, which had its secret incitement, I doubt not, from some cruelly opposing difference of feelings--of ideas upon the present momentous crisis, nothing could be more clear than that their attachment to each other, though it could not subdue their violent tempers, was, nevertheless, the predominant passion of their souls. THE COUNTESS D'AUCH'S COMPOSURE. The turbulence of these two animated characters upon this trying occasion was strongly contrasted by the placid suffering and feminine endurance of Madame la Comtesse d'Auch, the daughter and sole heiress and descendant of M. de Lally. Her husband, like mine, was in the body-guard of Louis XVIII., and going, or gone, no one knew whither, nor with what intent; her estate and property were all near Bordeaux, and her little children were with her at Paris. The difficult task, in the great uncertainty of events, was now hers to decide, whether to seek the same refuge that her father and Madame Henin should resolve upon seeking, or whether to run every personal risk in trying to save her lands and fortune from confiscation, by traversing, with only her babies and servants, two or three hundred miles, to reach her chateau at Auch ere it might be seized by the conquering party. Quietly, and in total silence, she communed with herself, not mixing in the discourse, nor seeming to heed the disturbance around her; but, when at length applied to, her resolution, from her Own concentrated meditations, was fixedly taken, to preserve, if possible, by her exertions and courage, the property of her absent and beloved husband, for his hoped return and for her children. This steadiness and composure called not forth any imitation. M. de Lally breathed hard with absolute agony of internal debate; and Madame d'Henin now declared she was sure all would blow over in a false alarm, and that she would not hesitate any longer between Brussels and Bordeaux, but remain quietly in Paris, and merely sit up all night to be on the watch. Page 314 RUMOURS OF BONAPARTE'S NEAR APPROACH. M. de Lally determined to go now in person to the Tuileries, to procure such information as might decide his shattered and irresolute friend. When he was gone, a total silence ensued. Madame d'Auch was absorbed in her fearful enterprise, and Madame d'Henin, finding no one opposed her (for my thoughts were with no one present), walked up and down the room, with hasty movement, as if performing some task. Various persons came and went, messengers, friends, or people upon business. She seized upon them all, impatiently demanding their news, and their opinions, but so volubly, at the same time, uttering her own, as to give them no time to reply, though as they left her, too much hurried themselves to wait her leisure for listening, she indignantly exclaimed against their stupidity and insensibility. But what a new and terrible commotion was raised in her mind, in that of Madame d'Auch, and in mine, upon receiving a pencil billet from M. de Lally, brought by a confidential servant, to announce that Bonaparte was within a few hours' march of Paris! He begged her to hasten off, and said he would follow in his cabriolet when he had made certain arrangements, and could gain some information as to the motions of the king. She now instantly ordered horses to her berlin,(264) which had long been loaded, and calling up all her people and dependants, was giving her orders with the utmost vivacity, when intelligence was brought her that no horses could now be had, the government having put them all in requisition. I was struck with horror. To be detained in Paris, the seat of impending conquest, and the destined capital of the conqueror--detained a helpless prisoner, where all would be darkly unknown to me, where Truth could find no entrance, Falsehood no detection--where no news could reach me, except news that was fatal--oh! what dire feelings were mine at this period! Madame d'Auch, who had taken her precautions, instantly though sadly, went away, to secure her own carriage, and preserve her little babies. DEPARTURE FROM PARIS AT NIGHT TIME. Madame d'Henin was now almost distracted, but this dreadful prospect of indefinite detention, with all the horrors Page 315 of captivity, lasted not long: Le Roy, her faithful domestic from his childhood, prevailed upon some stable friend to grant the use of his horses for one stage from Paris, and the berlin and four was at the porte coch�re in another moment, The servants and dependants of Madame d'Henin accompanied her to the carriage in tears ; and all her fine qualities were now unmixed, as she took an affectionate leave of them, with a sweetness the most engaging, suffering the women to kiss her cheek, and smiling kindly on the men, who kissed her robe. Vivacity like hers creates alarm, but, in France, breeds no resentment ; and where, like hers, the character is eminently noble and generous, it is but considered as a mark of conscious rank, and augments rather than diminishes personal devotion. We now rushed into the carriage, averse, yet eager, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, 19th March, 1815. As Madame d'Henin had a passport for herself, et sa famille, we resolved to keep mine in reserve, in case of accidents or separation, and only to produce hers, while I should be included in its privileges. The decision for our route was for Brussels ; the femme de chambre of Madame d'Henin-within, and the valet, Le Roy, outside the carriage, alone accompanied us, with two postilions for the four horses. Madame d'Henin, greatly agitated, spoke from time to time, though rather in ejaculations upon our flight, its uncertainties and alarms, than with any view to conversation; but if she had any answer, it was of simple acquiescence from her good and gentle femme de chambre; as to me . . . I could not utter a word--my husband on his war-horse--his shattered state of health--his long disuse to military service, yet high-wrought sense of military honour--all these were before me. I saw, heard, and was conscious of nothing else, till we arrived at Le Bourget,(265) a long, straggling, small town. And here, Madame d'Henin meant to stop, or at least change horses. A HALT AT LE BOURGET. But all was still, and dark, and shut up. It was the dead of night, and no sort of alarm seemed to disturb the inhabitants Page 316 of the place. We knocked at the first inn: but after waiting a quarter of an hour, some stable-man came Out to say there was not a room vacant. The same reply was with the same delay given us at two other inns; but, finally, we were more successful, though even then we could obtain only a single apartment, with three beds. These we appropriated for Madame d'Henin, myself, and her maid; and the men-servants were obliged to content themselves with mattresses in the kitchen. The town, probably, was filled with fugitives from Paris. A supper was directly provided, but Madame d'Henin, who now again repented having hurried off, resolved upon sending her faithful Le Roy back to the metropolis, to discover whether it were positively true that the king had quitted it, He hired a horse, and we then endeavoured to repose . . . but oh, how far from me was all possibility of obtaining it! About three in the morning M. de Lally overtook us. His information was immediately conveyed to the Princesse d'Henin. It was gloomily affrighting. The approach of Bonaparte was wholly unresisted; all bowed before, that did not spring forward to meet him. Le Roy returned about six in the morning. The king, and his guards, and his family, had all suddenly left Paris, but whither had not transpired. He was preceded, encircled, and followed by his four companies of body-guards. Horror and distress at such a flight and such uncertainty were not mine only, though circumstances rendered mine the most poignant; but M. de Lally had a thousand fears for the excellent and loved husband of his daughter, M. le Comte d'Auch; and Madame d'Henin trembled, for herself and all her family, at the danger of the young Hombert La Tour du Pin. THE JOURNEY RESUMED. No longer easy to be so near Paris, we hastily prepared to get on for Brussels, our destined harbour. M. de Lally now accompanied us, followed by his valet in a cabriolet. Our journey commenced in almost total silence on all parts: the greatness of the change of government thus marvellously effecting, the impenetrable uncertainty of coming events, and our dreadful ignorance of the fate of those most precious to us, who were involved in the deeds and the consequences Page 317 of immediate action, filled every mind too awfully for speech and our sole apparent attention was to the passengers we overtook, or by whom we were overtaken. These were so few, that I think we could not count half a dozen on our way to Senlis, and those seemed absorbed in deadly thought and silence, neither looking at us, nor caring to encounter our looks. The road, the fields, the hamlets, all appeared deserted. Desolate and lone was the universal air. I have since concluded that the people of these parts had separated into two divisions; one of which had hastily escaped, to save their lives and loyalty, while the other had hurried to the capital to greet the conqueror - for this was Sunday,(266) the 20th of March. Oh, what were my sensations on passing through Senlis Senlis, so lately fixed for my three months' abode with my general, during his being de service. When we stopped at a nearly empty inn, during the change of horses, I inquired after Madame Le Quint, and some other ladies who had been prepared to kindly receive me--but they were all gone! hastily they had quitted the town, which, like its environs, had an air of being generally abandoned. The desire of obtaining intelligence made Madame d'Henin most unwilling to continue a straightforward journey, that must separate her more and more from the scene of action. M. de Lally wished to see his friend the young Duc d'Orl�ans,(267) who was at Peronne, with his sister and part of his family; and he was preparing to gratify this desire, when a discussion relative to the danger of some political misconstruction, the duke being at that time upon ill terms with Monsieur, Comte d'Artois,(268) made him relinquish his purpose. We wandered about, however, I hardly know where, save that we stopped from time to time at small hovels in which resided tenants of the Prince or of the Princess de Poix, who received Madame d'Henin with as much devotion of attachment as they could have done in the fullest splendour of her power to reward their kindness ; though with an entire familiarity of discourse that, had I been new to French Customs, would have seemed to me marks of total loss of respect. But after a ten years' unbroken residence in France, Page 318 I was too well initiated in the ways of the dependants Upon the great belonging to their own tenantry, to make a mistake so unjust to their characters. We touched, as I think, at Noailles, at St. just, at Mouchy, and at Poix--but I am only sure we finished the day by arriving at Roy, where still the news of that day was unknown. What made it travel so slowly I cannot tell; but from utter dearth of all the intelligence by which we meant to be guided, we remained, languidly and helplessly, at Roy till the middle of the following Monday,(269) the 21st March. About that time some military entered the town and our inn. We durst not ask a single question, in our uncertainty to which side they belonged ; but the four horses were hastily ordered, since to decamp seemed what was most necessary. But Brussels was no longer the indisputable spot, as the servants Overheard some words that implied a belief that Louis XVIII. was quitting France to return to his old asylum, England. It was determined, therefore, though not till after a tumultuous debate between the princess and M. de Lally, to go straight to Amiens, where the prefect, M. Lameth, was a former friend, if not connection, of the princess. We had now to travel by a cross-road, and a very bad one, and it was not till night that we arrived at the suburbs. It was here first we met with those difficulties that announced, by vigilance with disturbance, a kind of suspended government; for the officers of the police who demanded our passports were evidently at a loss whether to regard them as valid or not. Their interrogatories, meanwhile, were endless; and, finally, they desired us, as it was so late and dark, to find ourselves a lodging in the suburbs, and not enter the city of Amiens till the next morning. Clouded as were alike our perceptions and our information, we could not but be aware of the danger of to-morrow, when our entrance might be of a sort to make our exit prohibited. Again followed a tumultuous debate, which ended in the hazardous resolve of appealing to the prefect and casting ourselves upon his protection. This appeal ended all inquisition : we were treated with deference, and accommodated in a decent room, while the passports of Madame d'Henin and of M. de Lally were forwarded to the prefecture. We remained here some time in the utmost stillness, no one pronouncing a word. We knew not who might listen, nor Page 319 with what ears ! But far from still was all within, because far from confident how the prefect might judge necessary to arrest, or to suffer our proceeding further. The answer was, at length, an order to the police officers to let us enter the city and be conducted to an hotel named by M. Lameth. A SUPPER AT AmIENS WITH THE PREFECT. We had an immensely long drive through the city of Amiens ere we came to the indicated hotel. But here Madame d'Henin found a note that was delivered to her by the secretary of the prefecture, announcing the intention of the prefect to have the honour of waiting upon her; and when M. Lameth was announced, M. de Lally and I retired to our several chambers. Her t�te- -t�te with him was very long, and ended in a summons to M. de Lally to make it a trio. This interview was longer still, and my anxiety for the news with which it might terminate relative to the king, the body-guard, and our detention or progression, was acute. At length I also was summoned. Madame d'Henin came out to me upon the landing-place, hastily and confusedly, to say that the prefect did not judge proper to receive her at the prefecture, but that he would stay and sup with her, and that I was to pass for her premi�re femme de chambre, as it would not be prudent to give in my name, though it had been made known to M. Lameth; but the wife of an officer so immediately in the service of the king must not be specified as the host of a prefect, if that prefect meant , to yield to the tide of a new government. Tide? Nay, torrent it was at this moment ; and any resistance that had not been previously organized, and with military force, must have been vain. I made, however, no inquiry. I was simply acquiescent; and, distantly following Madame d'Henin, remained at the end of the room while the servants and the waiters adjusted matters for supper. In a situation of such embarrassment I never before was placed. I knew not which way to look, nor what to do. Discovery at such a crisis might have been fatal, as far as might hang upon detention; and detention, which would rob me of all means of hearing of M. d'Arblay, should I gather what was his route, and be able to write to him, was death to my peace. I regretted I had not demanded to stay in Page 320 another room; but, in such heart-piercing moments, to be in the way of intelligence is the involuntary first movement. When all was arranged, and Madame d'Henin was seated M. de Lally set a chair for me, slightly bowing to me to take it. I complied, and supper began. I was helped, of course the last, and not once spoken to by any body. The repast' was not very gay, yet by no means dejected. The conversation was upon general topics, and M. de Lameth was entirely master of himself, seeming wholly without emotion. I was afterwards informed that news had just reached him, but not officially, that Bonaparte had returned to Paris. Having heard, therefore, nothing from the new government he was able to act as if there were none such, and he kindly obliged Madame d'Henin by giving her new passports, which should the conquest be confirmed, would be safer than passports from the ministers of Louis XVIII. at Paris. . . . M. Lameth could not, however, answer for retaining his powers, nor for what might be their modification even from hour to hour: he advised us, therefore, by no means to risk his being either replaced or restrained, but to get on as fast as possible with his passports while certain they were efficient. He thought it safer, also, to make a circuit than to go back again to the high-road we had quitted. Our design of following the king, whom we imagined gaining the sea-coast to embark for England, was rendered abortive from the number of contradictory accounts which had reached M. Lameth as to the route he had taken. Brussels, therefore, became again our point of desire; but M. Lameth counselled us to proceed for the moment to Arras, where M. --- (I forget his name) would aid us either to proceed, or to change, according to circumstances, our destination. Not an instant, however, was to be lost, lest M. Lameth should be forced himself to detain us. Horses, therefore, he ordered for us, and a guide across the country for Arras. I learnt nothing of this till we re-entered our carriage. The servants and waiters never quitted the room, and the prefect had as much his own safety to guard from ill construction or report as ours. Madame d'Henin, though rouged the whole time with confusion, never ventured to address a word to me. It was, indeed, more easy to be silent than to speak to me either with a tone of condescension or of command, and any other must have been suspicious. M. de Page 321 Lally was equally dumb, but active in holding out every plat to me, though always looking another way. M. Lameth eyed me with curiosity, but had no resource against surmise save that adopted by Madame d'Henin. However, he had the skill and the politeness to name, in the course of the repast, M. d'Arblay, as if accidentally, yet with an expression of respect and distinction, carefully, as he spoke, turning his eyes from mine, though it was the only time that, voluntarily, he would have met them. The horses being ready, M. Lameth took leave. RECEPTION AT THE PREFECTURE AT ARRAS. It was now about eleven at night. The road was of the roughest sort, and we were jerked up and down the ruts so as with difficulty to keep our seats : it was also very dark, and the drivers could not help frequently going out of their way, though the guide, groping on upon such occasions on foot, soon set them right. It was every way a frightful night. Misery, both public and private, oppressed us all, and the fear of pursuit and captivity had the gloomy effect of causing general taciturnity ; so that no kind voice, nor social suggestion, diverted the sense of danger, or excited one of hope. At what hour we arrived at Arras on Wednesday, the 22nd March, I cannot tell; but we drove straight to the prefecture, a very considerable mansion, surrounded with spacious grounds and gardens, which to me, nevertheless, had a bleak, flat, and desolate air, though the sun was brightly shining. We stopped at the furthest of many gates on the high road, while madame sent in to M. -- (I forget his name) the note with which we had been favoured by M. Lameth. The answer was a most courteous invitation of entrance, and the moment the carriage stopped at the great door of the portico, the prefect, M. -, hastened out to give Madame d'Henin le bras. He was an old soldier and in full uniform, and he came to us from a battalion drawn out in array on one side the park. Tall, and with still a goodly port, though with a face worn and weather-beaten, he had the air of a gentleman as well as of a general officer - and the open and hospitable smile with which he received the princess, while bareheaded and baldheaded he led her into his palace, diffused a welcome around that gave an involuntary cheeriness even to poor dejected me. How indescribably gifted is the human face Y Page 322 divine," in those who are invested with power, to transmit Or to blight comfort even by a glance! As Madame d'Henin demanded a private audience, I know not what passed; but I have reason to believe we were the first who brought news to Arras that approached to the truth of the actual position of Paris. M. Lameth, for Political reasons, had as studiously avoided naming M. de Lally as myself in his note .- but M. de Lally was treated by the mistress of the house with the distinction due to a gentleman travelling with the princess ; and as to me, some of the younger branches of the family took me under their protection, and very kind they were, showing me the garden, library, and views of the surrounding country. A CHEERFUL DEJEUNER SOMEWHAT RUFFLED. Meanwhile, an elegant breakfast was prepared for a large company, a review having been ordered for that morning, and several general officers being invited by the prefect. This repast had a cheerfulness that to me, an Englishwoman, was unaccountable and is indefinable. The king had been compelled to fly his capital , no one knew where he was seeking shelter; no one knew whether he meant to resign his crown in hopeless inaction, or whether to contest it in sanguinary civil war. Every family, therefore, with its every connection in the whole empire of the French, was involved in scenes upon which hung prosperity or adversity, reputation or disgrace, honour or captivity ; yet at such a crisis the large assembled family met with cheerfulness, the many guests were attended to with politeness, and the goodly fare of that medley of refreshments called a d�jeuner in France was met with appetites as goodly as its incitements. This could not be from insensibility; the French are anything rather than insensible : it could not be from attachment to Bonaparte, the prefect loudly declaring his devotion to Louis XVIII. I can only, therefore, attribute it to the long revolutionary state of the French mind, as well as nation, which had made it so familiar to insurrection, change, and incertitude, that they met it as a man meets some unpleasant business which he must unavoidably transact, and which, since he has no choice to get rid of, he resolves to get through to the best of his ability. We were still, however, smelling sweet flowers and regaled Page 323 with fine fruits, when this serenity was somewhat ruffled by the arrival of the commander of the forces which had been reviewed, or destined for review, I know not which. He took the prefect aside, and they were some time together. He then, only bowing to the ladies of the house, hastened off. The prefect told us the news that imperfectly arrived was very bad, but he hoped a stand would be made against any obstinate revolt ; and he resolved to assemble every officer and soldier belonging to his government, and to call upon each separately to take again, and solemnly, his oath of allegiance. . While preparing for this ceremony the commander again returned, and told him he had positive information that the. defection was spreading, and that whole troops and' companies were either sturdily waiting in inaction, or boldly marching on to meet the conqueror. A LOYAL PREFECT. Our table was now broken up, and we were wishing to depart ere official intimation from the capital might arrest our further progress - but our horses were still too tired, and no others were to be procured. We became again very uneasy, and uneasiness began to steal upon all around us. The prefect was engaged in perpetual little groups of consultation, chiefly with general officers, who came and went with incessant bustle, and occasionally and anxiously were joined by persons of consequence of the vicinity. The greater the danger appeared, the more intrepidly the brave old prefect declared his loyalty ; yet he was advised by all parties to give up his scheme till he knew whether the king himself 'made a stand in his own cause. $ He yielded reluctantly; and when Madame d'Henin found his steady adhesion to his king, she came up to him and said, that, finding the firmness of his devotion to Louis XVIII., she was sure it would give him pleasure to know he had at that moment under his roof the wife of a general officer in the actual escort of his majesty. He instantly came to me with a benevolent smile, and we had a conversation of deep Interest upon the present state of things. I had the heartfelt satisfaction to find that my honoured husband was known to him, not alone by reputation, but personally; and to find that, and to hear his praise, has always been one and the same thing. Alas! those sounds on these sad ears vibrate no Page 324 more!.....At length, however, about noon, we set off, accompanied by the prefect and all his family to our carriage. EMBLEMS OF LOYALTY AT DOUAY. At Douay, we had the satisfaction to see still stronger outward marks of attachment to the king and his cause, for in every street through which we passed, the windows were decked with emblems of faithfulness to the Bourbon dynasty, white flags, or ribands, or, handkerchiefs. All, however, without commotion, all was a simple manifestation of respect, No insurrection was checked, for none had been excited - no mob was dispersed, for scarcely any one seemed to venture from his house. Our intention was to quit the French territory that night, and sleep in more security at Tournay ; but the roads became so bad, and our horses grew so tired, that it was already dark before we reached Orchies. M. de Lally went on from Douay in his cabriolet, to lighten our weight, as Madame d'Henin had a good deal of baggage. We were less at our ease, while thus perforce travelling slower, to find the roads, as we proceeded from Douay, become more peopled. Hitherto they had seemed nearly a blank. We now began, also, to be met, or to be overtaken, by small parties of troops. We naturally looked out with earnestness on each side, to discover to whom or to what they belonged : but the compliment of a similar curiosity on their part was all we gained. Sometimes they called out a "Vive--" but without finishing their wish; and we repeated--that is, we bowed to--the same hailing exclamation, without knowing or daring to inquire its purport. STATE OF UNCERTAINTY AT ORCHIES. At Orchies, where we arrived rather late in the evening, we first found decided marks of a revolutionary state of things. No orders were sent by either party. The king and his government were too imminently in personal danger to assert their rights, or retain their authority for directing the provinces; Bonaparte and his followers and supporters were too much engrossed by taking possession of the capital, and too uncertain of their success, to try a power which had as yet no basis, or risk a disobedience which they had no means to resent. The people, as far as we could see or learn Page 325 seemed passively waiting the event ; and the constituted authorities appeared to be self-suspended from their functions till the droit des plus fort(270) should ascertain who were their masters. Nevertheless, while we waited at Orchies for horses, news arrived by straggling parties which, though only whispered, created evidently some disturbance - a sort of wondering expectation soon stared from face to face, asking by the eye what no one durst pronounce by the voice; what does all this portend? and for what ought we to prepare? A MISHAP ON THE ROAD. it was past eleven o'clock, and the night was dark and damp, ere we could get again into our carriages - but the increasing bustle warned us off, and a nocturnal journey had nothing to appal us equally with the danger of remaining. We eagerly, therefore, set off, but we were still in the suburbs of Orchies, when a call for help struck our ears, and the berlin stopped. It was so dark, we could not at first discern what was the matter, but we soon found that the carriage of M. de Lally had broken down. Madame d'Henin darted out of the berlin with the activity of fifteen. Her maid accompanied her, and I eagerly followed. Neither M. de Lally nor his man had received any injury, but the cabriolet could no longer proceed without being repaired. The groom was sent to discover the nearest blacksmith, who came soon to examine the mischief, and declared that it could not be remedied before daylight. We were forced to submit the vehicle to his decree - but our distress what to do with ourselves was now very serious. We knew there was no accommodation for us at the inn we had 'just quitted, but that of passing the night by the kitchen fire, exposed to all the hazards of suspicious observation upon our evident flight. To remain upon the high road stationary in our berlin might, at such a period, encompass us with dangers yet more serious. A KINDLY OFFER OF SHELTER. We were yet unresolved, when a light from the windows of a small house attracted our attention, and a door was opened, at which a gentlewoman somewhat more than elderly stood, with a candle in her hand, that lighted up a face full of Page 326 benevolence, in which was painted strong compassion on the view of our palpable distress. Her countenance encouraged us to approach her, and the smile with which she saw us come forward soon accelerated our advance; and when We reached her threshold, she waited neither for solicitation nor representation, but let us into her small dwelling without a single question, silently, as if fearful herself we might be observed, shutting the street door before she spoke. She then lamented, as we must needs, she said, be cold and comfortless, that she had no fire, but added that she and her little maid were in bed and asleep, when the disturbance on the road had awakened her, and made her hasten up, to inquire if any one were hurt. We told as much of our Story as belonged to our immediate situation, and she then instantly, assured us we should be welcome to stay in her house till the cabriolet was repaired. Without waiting for our thanks, she then gave to each a chair, and fetched great plenty of fuel, with which she made an ample and most reviving fire, in a large stove that was placed in the middle of the room. She had bedding, she said, for two, and begged that, when we were warmed and comforted, we would decide which of us most wanted rest. We durst not, however, risk, at such a moment, either being separated or surprised; we entreated her, therefore, to let us remain together, and to retire herself to the repose her humanity had thus broken. But she would not leave us. She brought forth bread, butter, and cheese, with wine and some other beverage, and then made us each a large bowl of tea. And when we could no longer partake of her hospitable fare, she fetched us each a pillow, and a double chair, to rest our heads and our feet. ALARMED BY POLISH LANCERS. Thus cheered and refreshed, we blessed our kind hostess, and fell into something like a slumber, when we were suddenly roused by the sound of trumpets, and warlike instruments, and the trampling of many horses, coming from afar, but approaching with rapidity. We all started up alarmed, and presently the group, perceiving, I imagine, through the ill-closed shutters, some light, stopped before the house, and battered the door and the window, demanding admission. We hesitated whether to remain or endeavour to conceal ourselves Page 327 but our admirable hostess bid us be still, while, calm herself, she opened the street door, where she parleyed with the party, cheerfully and without any appearance of fear, and told them she had no room for their accommodation, because she had given up even her own bed to some relations who were travelling, she gained from them an applauding huzza and their departure. She then informed us they were Polish lancers, and that she believed they were advancing to scour the country in favour of Bonaparte. She expressed herself an open 'and ardent loyalist for the Bourbons, but said she had no safety except in submitting, like all around her, to the stronger powers. Again, by her persuasion, we sought to compose ourselves; but a second party soon startled us from our purpose, and from that time we made no similar attempt. I felt horrified at every blast of the trumpet, and the fear of being made prisoner, or pillaged, assailed me unremittingly. At about five o'clock in the morning our carriages were at the door. We blessed our benevolent hostess, took her name and address, that we might seek some means of manifesting our gratitude, and then quitted Orchies. For the rest of our journey till we reached the frontiers, we were annoyed with incessant small military groups or horsemen; but though suspiciously regarded, we were not stopped. The fact is, the new government was not yet, in those parts, sufficiently organised to have been able to keep if they had been strong enough to detain us. But we had much difficulty to have our passports honoured for passing the frontiers ; and if they had not been so recently renewed at Amiens, I think it most probable our progress would have been impeded till new orders and officers were entitled to make us halt. ARRIVAL AT TOURNAY. Great, therefore, was our satisfaction when, through all these difficulties, we entered Tournay-where, being no longer in the lately restored kingdom of France, we considered ourselves to be escaped from the dominion of Bonaparte, and where we determined therefore to remain till we could guide our further proceedings by tidings of the plan and the position of Louis XVIII. We went to the most considerable inn, and all retired to rest which, after so much fatigue, mental and bodily, we required, and happily obtained. Page 328 The next day we had the melancholy satisfaction of hearing that Louis XVIII. also had safely passed the frontiers of his lost kingdom. As we were less fearful, now, of making inquiries, M. de Lally soon learnt that his majesty had halted at Lille, where he was then waiting permission and directions for a place of retreat from the King of Holland, or the Netherlands. But no intelligence whatsoever could we gain relative to the body-guards, and my disturbance increased, every moment. There was far more commotion at Tournay than at any other town through which we passed; for as the people here were not under the French government, either old or new, they were not awed into waiting to know to which they should belong, in fearful passiveness : yet they had all the perplexity upon their minds of disquieting ignorance whether they were to be treated as friends or foes, since if Bonaparte prevailed they could not but expect to be joined again to his dominions. All the commotion, therefore, of divided interests and jarring opinions was awake, and in full operation upon the faculties and feelings of every Belgian at this critical moment. FUTILE EFFORTS TO COMMUNICATE WITH M. D'ARBLAY. The horror of my suspense relative to the safety and the fate of Monsieur d'Arblay reduced my mind to a sort of chaos, that makes it impossible to recollect what was our abode at Tournay. I can but relate my distress and my researches. My first thought was to send a letter to my general at Lille, which if he was there would inform him of my vicinity, and if not, might perhaps find its way to his destination. At all events, I resolved only to write what would be harmless should it fall even into the hands of the enemy. I directed those few lines to M. le Chevalier d'Arblay, officier sup�rieur du garde du corps de sa majest� Louis XVIII. But when I would have sent them to the post, I was informed there was no post then to Lille. I then sought for a messenger, but was told that Lille was inaccessible. The few letters that were permitted to enter it were placed in a basket, the handle of which was tied to a long cord, that was hooked up to the top of the walls, and thence descended to appointed magistrates. Vainly I made every effort in my power to avail myself Of this method, no one of my party, nor at the inn,,knew or Page 329 could indicate any means that promised success, or even a trial. Worn at length by an anxiety I found insupportable, I took a resolution to go forth myself, stranger as I was to the place, and try to get my letter conveyed to the basket, however difficult or costly might be its carriage. Quite alone, therefore, I sallied forth, purposing to find, if possible, some sturdy boy who would be glad of such remuneration as I could offer, to pass over to Lille. Again, however, vain was every attempt. I entered all decent poor houses; sauntered to the suburbs, and entered sundry cottages; but no inquiry could procure either a man or a boy that would execute my commission. French was so generally known that I commonly made myself understood, though I only received a shake of the head, or a silent walking off, in return to my propositions. But in the end, a lad told me he thought he had heard that Madame la Duchesse de St. Agnes had had some intercourse with Lille. Delighted, I desired him to show me the house she inhabited. We walked to it together, and I then said I would saunter near the spot while he entered, with my earnest petition to know whether madame could give me any tidings of the king's body-guard. He returned with an answer that madame would reply to a written note, but to nothing verbal. I bid the boy hie with me to the inn; but as I had no writing tackle, I sent him forward to procure me proper implements at the stationer's. How it happened I know not, but I missed the boy, whom I could never regain and I soon after lost my way myself. In much perplexity I was seeking information which way to steer, when a distant sound of a party of horse caught my attention. I stopped. The sound approached nearer; the boys and idle people in the street ran forward to meet it, and presently were joined or followed by the more decent inhabitants. I had not the temerity to make one among them, yet my anxiety for news of any sort was too acute to permit me to retire. I stood therefore still, waiting for what might arrive, till I perceived some outriders galloping forward in the royal livery of France. Immediately after, a chariot and four with the arms of France followed, encircled by horsemen, and nearly enveloped by a continually increasing crowd, whence, from time to time, issued a feeble cry of "Vive le roi!" while two or three other carriages brought up the rear. With difficulty now could I forbear plunging into the midst of them, for my big expectations painted to me Louis XVIII. arrived Page 330 at Tournay, and my bigger hopes pictured with him his loyal guard. They had soon however passed by, but their straggling followers showed me their route, which I pursued till I lost both sight and sound belonging to them. I then loitered for my errand boy, till I found myself, by some indications that helped my remembrance, near the spot whence I had started. . Glad, for safety's sake, to be so near my then home, though mourning my fruitless wandering, I hastened my footsteps; but what was my emotion on arriving within a few yards of the inn, to observe the royal carriage which had galloped past me, the horsemen, the royal livery and all the appearance that had awakened my dearest hopes' The crowd was dispersed, but the porter's lodge, or perhaps bookkeeper's, was filled with gentlemen, or officers in full uniform. I hurried on, and hastily inquired who it was that had just arrived. My answer was, the Prince de Cond�. A thousand projects now occurred to me for gaining intelligence from such high authority, but in the large courtyard I espied Madame d'Henin sauntering up and down, while holding by the arm of a gentleman I had never before seen. Anxious to avoid delay, and almost equally desirous to escape remonstrances on my enterprise, since I could listen only to my restless anxiety, I would have glided by unnoticed; but she called after me aloud, and I was compelled to approach her. She was all astonishment at my courage in thus issuing forth alone, I knew not where nor whither, and declared that I was m�connoissable; but I only answered by entreating her to inquire the names of some of the gentlemen just arrived, that I might judge whether any among them could give me the information for which I sighed. No sooner did I hear that M. le Comte de Viomenil was of the number, than, recollecting his recent appointment at Paris, in conjunction with Victor de Maubourg, to raise volunteers for the king, I decided upon seeking him. Madame d'Henin would have given me some counsel, but I could not hear her; as I hurried off, however, the gentleman whose arm she held offered me his assistance in a tone and with a look of so much benevolence, that I frankly accepted it, and we sallied in search of a person known to me only by name. My stranger friend now saved me every exertion, by making every inquiry and led me from corridor to corridor, above, below, and to almost every apartment, asking incessantly if M. le Comte de Viomenil was not in the inn. Page 331 At length we learned that M. de Viomenil was dining quite alone in an upper chamber. My kind-hearted conductor led me to the door of the room assigned, and then tapped at it; and on an answer of "entrez!" he let go my arm, and with a bow silently left me. I found M. de Viomenil at table : he said he could give no possible account of his majesty, save that he was at Gand, but that of the body-guard he knew positively nothing. INTERVIEWS WITH M. DE CHATEAUBRIAND. I afterwards learnt that my benevolent strange chevalier was no other than the celebrated M. de Ch�teaubriand.(271) I saw nothing more of him, save for a moment, when, in passing by a small staircase that led to my chamber, a door was suddenly opened, whence Madame d'Henin put out her head to invite me to enter, when she presented me to him and to Madame de Ch�teaubriand, a very elegant woman, but of a cold, reserved demeanour. I expressed eagerly the pleasure I had experienced in seeing the author of " The Itinerary to Jerusalem," a work I had read in Paris with extraordinary interest and satisfaction ; but I believe the "G�nie du Christianisme," and perhaps the "Atala," were works so much more prized by that author as to make my compliment misplaced. However, I so much more enjoy the natural, pleasing, instructive, and simple, though ingenious style and matter of the " Itinerary " than I do the overpowering sort of heroic eloquence of those more popular performances, that the zest of dear hallowed truth would have been wanting had I not expressed my choice. The "Itinerary" is, indeed, one of the most agreeable books I know. M. de Ch�teaubriand hung back, whether pleased or not, Page 332 with an air of gentlemanly serenity. I had opportunity for further effort : we left Tournay to proceed to Brussels, and heavy was my heart and my will to quit, thus in ignorance, the vicinity of Lille. At the town at which we stopped to dine which, I think, was Atot, we again met M. et Madame de Ch�teaubriand. This was a mutual satisfaction, and we agreed to have our meal in common. I now had more leisure, not of time alone, but of faculty, for doing justice to M. de Chateaubriand, whom I found amiable, unassuming, and, though somewhat spoilt by the egregious flattery to which he had been accustomed, wholly free from airs or impertinent selfconceit. Excessive praise seemed only to cause him excessive pleasure in himself, without leading to contempt or scorn of others. He is by no means tall, and is rather thickset - but his features are good, his countenance is very fine, and his eyes are beautiful, alike from colour, shape, and expression ; while there is a striking benevolence in his look, tone of voice, and manner. Madame de Ch�teaubriand also gained ground by farther acquaintance. She was faded, but not pass�e, and was still handsome, and of a most graceful carriage, though distant and uninviting. Her loftiness had in it something so pensive mixed with its haughtiness, that though it could not inspire confidence, it did not create displeasure. She possessed also a claim to sympathy and respect in being the niece of M. de Malesherbes, that wise, tender, generous, noble defender of Louis XVI. The conversation during and after dinner was highly interesting. M. de Ch�teaubriand opened upon his situation with a trusting unreserve that impressed me with an opinion of the nobleness of his mind. Bonaparte had conceived against him, he said, a peculiar antipathy, for which various motives might be assigned: he enumerated them not, however, probably from the presence of his wife ; as his marriage with a niece of that martyr to the service of the murdered king, Louis XVI., I conclude to be at their head. The astonishing and almost boundless success of his works, since he was dissatisfied with his principles, and more than suspicious of his disaffection to the imperial government, must have augmented aversion by mixing with it some species of apprehension. I know not what were the first publications of M. de Ch�teaubriand, but they were in such high estimation Page 333 when first I heard him mentioned, that no author was more celebrated in France; when his "Martyres" came out, no other book was mentioned; and the famous critic Geoffroyq who guided the taste of Paris, kept it alive by criticisms of alternate praise and censure without end. "Atala," the pastoral heroic romance, bewitched all the reading ladies into a sort of idolatry of its writer, and scarcely a page of it remained unadorned by some representation in painting. The enthusiasm, indeed, of the draughtsmen and of the fair sex seemed equally emulous to place the author and the work at the head of celebrity and the fashion. Of all this, of course, he spoke not - but he related the story of his persecution by Napoleon concerning his being elected a member of the French Institute. I was in too much disturbance to be able to clearly listen to the narrative, but I perfectly recollect that the censor, to soften Napoleon, had sent back the manuscript to M. de Ch�teaubriand, with an intimation that no public discourse could be delivered that did not contain an �loge of the Emperor. M. de Ch�teaubriand complied with the ordinance; but whether the forced praise was too feeble, or whether the aversion was too insuperable, I know not : all that is certain is, that Napoleon, after repeated efforts from the Institute of reelection, positively refused to ratify that of M. de Ch�teaubriand.(272) Another time a cousin of this gentleman was reputed to be engaged In a conspiracy against the emperor. M. de Ch�teaubriand solemnly declared he disbelieved the charge; and, as his weight in public opinion was so great, he ventured to address a supplique to Napoleon in favour of his kinsman; but the answer which reached him the following day was an account of his execution ! (248) Horne's"History of Napoleon." (249) This portion of the Diary is not dated, but the meeting with the Duchess of Angoul�me must have taken place in January or February, 1815. Madame d'Arblay had joined her husband in France, her son remaining at Cambridge.-ED. (250) "Very glad to see me." (251) "May I keep the book you sent me?" (252) "He has acted very nobly." (253) Raised every day." (254) "The king recollects very well having seen you in London." (255) "O, I don't doubt it at all." (256) "He was perfect!" (257) Princess Elizabeth. (258) "'Tis she who does the honours of the royal family." (259) On duty. (260) Minister for foreign affairs. (261) "We have better news. I can enter into no detail; but be calm, and love him who loves you alone. (262) Country estate. (263) "My dearest--All is lost! I cannot enter into details--pray, set out the sooner the better. Yours in life and death, A. d'A." (264) A large travelling-coach.-ED. (265) Le Bourget was the scene of some desperate fighting during the siege of Paris in 1870. It was surprised and captured from the Prussians before daybreak of October 28, by a French force commanded by General de Bellemare, but, after a gallant defence of two days, it was retaken by the Prussians. December 21, an attempt was made by the French to recapture Le Bourget, but without success.-ED. (266) Monday, the 20th, it should be-ED. (267) The son of Philippe Egalit�, afterwards King Louis Philippe.-ED. (268) Brother of Louis XVIII., whom he succeeded under the title of Charles X.-ED. (269) Should be Tuesday-ED. (270) "Right of the strongest." (271) Fran�ois Ren� de Ch�teaubriand was born at Saint Malo in 1768 He visited the United States in 1789, and found, in the pathless forests of the new world, the scenery which he describes, with poetic fervour, in the pages of "Atala." The news of the king's flight to Varennes brought him back to Europe. He married (1792) 'Mlle. de la Vigne-Buisson, joined the emigrant army which marched with Brunswick to conquer France, got wounded at Thionville, and retired to England. After the appointment of Bonaparte to the office of first Consul, Ch�teaubriand returned to France, and published his heroic- sentimental romance of "Atala." Its success with the public was great, and it was followed by "The Genius of Christianity," and other works. Under the restored Bourbons, Ch�teaubriand filled high diplomatic posts. This most sentimental of men of genius died in July, 1848.-ED. (272) This occurred in the year 1811.-ED. Page 334 SECTION 25 (1815) AT BRUSSELS: WATERLOO: REJOINS M. D'ARBLAY. SOJOURN AT BRUSSELS. Arrived at Brussels, we drove immediately to the house in which dwelt Madame la Comtesse de Maurville. That excellent person had lived many years in England an emigrant, and there earned a scanty maintenance by keeping a French school. She had now retired upon a very moderate pension, but was surrounded by intimate friends, who only suffered her to lodge at her own home. She received us in great dismay, fearing to lose her little all by these changes of government. I was quite ill on my arrival: excessive fatigue, affright, and watchfulness overwhelmed me. At Brussels all was quiet and tame. The Belgians had lost their original antipathy to Bonaparte, without having yet had time to acquire any warmth of interest for the Bourbons. Natively phlegmatic, they demand great causes or strong incitement to rouse them from that sort of passiveness that is the offspring of philosophy and timidity- philosophy, that teaches them to prize 'the blessings of safety ; and timidity, that points out the dangers of enterprise. In all I had to do with them I found them universally worthy, rational, and kind-hearted ; but Slow, sleepy, and uninteresting, in the sickroom to which I was immediately consigned, I met with every sort of kindness from Madame de Maurville, whom I had known intimately at Paris, and who had known and Page 335 appreciated my beloved, exemplary sister Phillips in London. Madame de Maurville was a woman that the Scotch would call long-headed; she was sagacious, penetrating, and gifted with strong humour. She saw readily the vices and follies of mankind, and laughed at them heartily, without troubling herself to grieve at them. She was good herself, alike in heart and in conduct, and zealous to serve and oblige ; but with a turn to satire that made the defects of her neighbours rather afford her amusement than concern. ' I was visited here by the highly accomplished Madame de la: Tour du Pin, wife to the favourite nephew of Madame d'Henin; a woman of as much courage as elegance, and who had met danger, toil, and difficulty in the Revolution with as much spirit, and nearly as much grace, as she had displayed in meeting universal admiration and homage at the court of Marie-Antoinette, of which she was one of the most brilliant latter ornaments. Her husband was at this time one of the French ministers at the Congress at Vienna; whence, as she learned a few days after my arrival at Brussels, he had been sent on an embassy of the deepest importance and risk, to La Vend�e or Bordeaux. She bore the term of that suspense with an heroism that I greatly admired, for I well knew she adored her husband. M. la Tour du Pin had been a prefect of Brussels under Bonaparte, though never in favour, his internal loyalty to the Bourbons being well known. But Bonaparte loved to attach great names and great characters to his government, conscious of their weight both at home and abroad, and he trusted in the address of that mental diving-machine, his secret police, for warding off any hazard he might run, from employing the adherents of his enemies. His greatly capacious, yet only half-formed mind, could have parried, as well as braved, every danger and all opposition, had not his inordinate ambition held him as arbitrarily under control as he himself held under control every other passion. Madame de Maurville soon found us a house, of which we took all but the ground floor: the entresol was mine, the first floor was Madame d'Henin's, and that above it was for M. de Lally. It was near the cathedral, and still in a prolongation of Madame de Maurville's street, la Rue de la Montagne. Nothing was known at Brussels, nothing at all, of the fate Of the body-guard, or of the final destination of Louis XVIII. How circumstances of such moment, nay, notoriety, could be kept from public knowledge, I can form no idea; but neither Page 336 in the private houses of persons of the first rank, in which, through Madame d'Henin, I visited, nor in any of the shops nor by any other sort of intercourse, either usual or accidental, could I gather any intelligence. Madame la Duchesse de Duras, ci-devant Mademoiselle Kersaint, who had visited me in Paris, and who was now in hasty emigration at Brussels, with her youngest daughter, Mademoiselle Clara de Duras, seemed sincerely moved by my distress, and wrote to various of her friends, who were emigrating within her reach, to make inquiry for me. I visited her in a shabby hotel, where I found her without suite or equipage, but in perfect tranquillity at their loss, and not alone unmurmuring, but nearly indifferent to her privations; while Mademoiselle Clara ran up and down stairs on her mother's messages, and even brought in wood for the stove, with an alacrity and cheerfulness that seemed almost to enjoy the change to hardships from grandeur. Indeed, to very young people, such reverses, for a certain time, appear as a frolic. Novelty, mere novelty, during the first youth, can scarcely be bought too dear. >From M. de la Feronaye, Madame de Duras procured me intelligence that the body-guard had been dispersed and disbanded by the Duc de Berry, on the frontiers of La Belgique they were left at liberty to remain in France, or to seek other asylums, as his majesty Louis XVIII. could not enter the kingdom of Holland with a military guard of his own. This news left me utterly in the dark which way to look for hope or information. Madame de Duras, however, said she expected soon to see the Duc de Richelieu, whose tidings might be more precise. LETTERS FROM GENERAL D'ARBLAY. Ten wretched days passed on in this ignorance, from the 19th to the 29th of March, 1815, when Madame de Maurville flew into my apartment, with all the celerity of fifteen, and all the ardour of twenty years of age, to put into my hands a letter from General d'Arblay, addressed to herself, to inquire whether she had any tidings to give him of my existence, and whether I had been heard of at Brussels, or was known to have travelled to Bordeaux, as Madame d'Henin, cousin to Madame de Maurville, had been uncertain, when M. d'Arblay left me in Paris, to which of those cities she should go. Page 337 The joy of that moment, Oh! the joy of that Moment that showed me again the handwriting that demonstrated the life and safety of all to which my earthly happiness clung, can never be expressed, and only by our meeting, when at last it took place, could be equalled. It was dated "Ypres, 27 Mars." I wrote directly thither, proposing to join him, if ", there were any impediment to his coming on to Brussels. I had already written, at hazard, to almost every town in the Netherlands. The very next day, another letter from the same kind hand arrived to Madame la Duchesse d'Hurste. This was succeeded by news that the king, Louis XVIII., had been followed to Gand by his body-guard. Thither, also, I expedited a letter, under cover to the Duc de Luxembourg, capitaine of the company to which M. d'Arblay belonged. I lived now in a hurry of delight that scarcely allowed me breathing-time, a delight that made me forget all my losses, my misfortunes-my papers, keepsakes, valuables of various sorts, with our goods, clothes, money-bonds, and endless et ceteras, left, as I had reason to fear, to seizure and confiscation upon the entry of the emperor into Paris-all, all was light, was nothing in the scale ; and I wrote to my Alexander, and my dearest friends, to rejoice in my joy, and that they had escaped my alarm. Next day, and again the next, came a letter from M. d'Arblay himself. The first was from Ypres, the second was from Bruges, and brought by the post, as my beloved correspondent had been assured of my arrival at Brussels by the Duc de Luxembourg, at Ghistelle, near Ostend, which M. d'Arblay was slowly approaching on horseback, when he met the carriage of Louis XVIII., as it stopped for a relay of horses, and the duke, espying him, descended from the second carriage of the king's suite, to fly to and embrace him, with that lively friendship he has ever manifested towards him. Thence they agreed that the plan of embarkation should be renounced, and, instead of Ostend M. d'Arblay turned his horse's head towards Gand, where he had a rendezvous with the duke. There he remained, to renew the offer of his services to his king, and there he was most peculiarly distinguished by M. le Duc de Feltre (General Clarke), who was still occupying the Post assigned him on the restoration of Louis XVIII. of ministre de la guerre.(273) Page 338 Relieved now--or rather blest--I was no longer deaf to the kindness of those who sought to enliven my exile ; I not only visited Madame la Duchesse de Duras, but also cultivated an intercourse with the charming Madame de la Tour du Pin whom I was the more glad to find delightful from her being of English origin; a Mademoiselle Dillon, Whose family was transplanted into France under James II., and who was descended from a nobleman whose eminent accomplishments she inherited with his blood; the famous Lord Falkland, on whose tomb in Westminster Abbey is carved "Here lies the friend of Sir Philip Sidney." Her sister, Miss Fanny Dillon, had been married by Bonaparte to General Bertrand; and thus, while one of them' was an emigrant following the fortunes of the Bourbons, the other was soon after destined to accompany Bonaparte himself into exile. Le Colonel de Beaufort, also, a warm, early friend of General d'Arblay, belonging to the garrison of Metz or of Toul, I forget which, had married a lady of great wealth in La Belgique; a woman rather unhappy in her person, but possessed of a generous and feeling heart : and this she instantly demonstrated by seeking and cultivating an acquaintance with the wandering wife of her husband's early camarade. I found her so amiable, and so soothing in her commiseration during my distress, that I warmly returned the partiality she showed me. ARRIVAL OF GENERAL D'ARBLAY. Four days passed thus serenely, when, on that which completed a fortnight's absence from my best friend, the Duc de Duras came to convoy his wife to Gand, where he was himself in waiting upon Louis XVIII., and shortly afterwards M. de Ch�teaubriand was made a privy counsellor and settled there also. And within a day or two after this my door was opened by General d'Arblay! Oh, how sweet was this meeting ! this blessed reunion!-- how perfect, how exquisite! Here I must be silent. General d'Arblay was only with me by the permission of the Duc de Luxembourg, and liable to receive orders daily to return to Gand ; for I found to my speechless dismay, yet resistless approbation, that General d'Arblay had made a Page 339 decision as noble as it was dangerous, to refuse no call, to abstain from no effort, that might bring into movement his loyalty to his king and his cause, at this moment of calamity to both. Yet such was the harassed, or rather broken state of his health, that his mental strength and unconquerable courage alone preserved the poor shattered frame from sinking into languor and inertion. About this time I saw the entry of the new king, William Frederick, of the new kingdom of the Netherlands.(274) Tapestry, or branches of trees, were hung out at all the windows, or, in their failure, dirty carpets, old coats and cloaks, and even mats-a motley display of proud parade or vulgar poverty, that always, to me, made processions on the continent appear burlesque. A MISSION ENTRUSTED To GENERAL D'ARBLAY. On the 22nd of April opened a new source, though not an unexpected one, of inquietude, that preyed the more deeply upon my spirits from the necessity of concealing its torments. . . . The military call for M. d'Arblay arrived from Gand. The summons was from M. le Comte de Roch. The immediate hope in which we indulged at this call was, that the mission to which it alluded need not necessarily separate us, but that I might accompany my honoured husband and remain at his quarters. But, alas! he set out instantly for Gand . . . . . April 23rd brought me a letter: the mission was to Luxembourg. His adjoint was the Colonel Comte de Mazancourt, his aide-de-camp M. de Premorel, and also that gentleman's son. The plan was to collect and examine all the soldiers who were willing to return from the army of Bonaparte to that of Louis XVIII. Eleven other general officers were named to similar posts, all on frontier towns, for the better convenience of receiving the volunteers. On the 24th April M. d'Arblay again joined me revived by his natively martial spirit, and pleased to be employed! April 26, we left the Rue de La Montague, after, on my part, exactly a month's residence. Our new apartments in Page 340 the March� aux Bois were au premier,(275) and commodious and pleasant. One drawing-room was appropriated solely by M. d'Arblay for his military friends or military business ; the other was mine. Here we spent together seventeen days; and not to harass my recollections, I will simply copy what I find in MY old memorandum-book, as it was written soon after those days were no more:--"Seventeen days I have passed with my best friend; and, alas ! passed them chiefly in suspense and gnawing inquietude, covered over with assumed composure . but they have terminated, Heaven be praised! with better views, with softer calm, and fairer hopes. Heaven realize them! I am much pleased with his companions. M. le Comte de Mazancourt, his adjoint, is a gay, spirited and spirituel young man, remarkably well bred, and gallantly fond of his profession. M. de Premorel, the aide-de-camp, is a man of solid worth and of delicate honour, and he is a descendant of Godefroy de Bouillon. To this must be added, that he is as poor as he is noble, and bears his penury with the gentlemanly sentiment of feeling it distinct from disgrace. He is married, and has ten or eleven children: he resides with a most deserving wife, a woman also of family, on a small farm, which he works at himself, and which repays him by its produce. For many days in the year, potatoes, he told me, were the only food they could afford for themselves or their offspring! But they eat them with the proud pleasure of independence and of honour and loyalty, such as befits their high origins, always to serve, or be served, in the line of their legal princes. As soon as Louis XVIII. was established on his throne, M. de Premorel made himself known to the Duc de Luxembourg, who placed him in his own company in the garde du corps, and put his son upon the supernumerary list. . . .." This young man is really charming. He has a native noblesse of air and manner, with a suavity as well as steadiness of serene politeness, that announce the Godefroy blood flowing With conscious dignity and inborn courage through his youthful veins. He is very young, but tall and handsome, and speaks of all his brothers and sisters as if already he were chef de famille, and bound to sustain and protect them.. I delighted to lead him to talk of them, and the conversation on that subject always brightened him into joy and loquacity. He named every one of them to me in particular repeatedly, Page 341 with a desire I should know them individually, and a warm hope I might one day verify his representations. This youth, Alphonse, and his father dined with us daily at this period. All the mornings were devoted to preparations for the ensuing expected campaign. When, however, all was prepared, and the word of command alone was waited for from the Mar�chal Duc de Feltre, my dearest friend indulged in one morning's recreation, which proved as 'agreeable as anything at such a period could be to a mind oppressed like mine. He determined that we should visit the Palais de Lachen, which had been the dwelling assigned as the palace for the Empress Josephine by Bonaparte at the time of his divorce. My dearest husband drove me in his cabriolet, and the three gentlemen whom he invited to be of the party accompanied us on horseback. The drive, the day, the road, the views, our new horses-all were delightful, and procured me a short relaxation from the foresight of evil. The Palace of Lachen was at this moment wholly uninhabited, and shown to us by some common servant. It is situated in a delicious park d'Anglaise, and with a taste, a polish, and an elegance that clears it from the charge of frippery or gaudiness, though its ornaments and embellishments are all of the liveliest gaiety. There is in some of the apartments some Gobelin tapestry, of which there are here and there parts and details so exquisitely worked that I could have " hung over them enamoured." "RULE BRITANNIA!" IN THE ALLEE VERTE. Previously to this reviving excursion my dearest friend had driven me occasionally in the famous All�e Verte, which the inhabitants of Brussels consider as the first promenade in the world; but it by no means answered to such praise in my eyes: it is certainly very pretty, but too regular, too monotonous, and too flat to be eminently beautiful, though from some parts the most distant from the city there are views of cottages and hamlets that afford great pleasure. Our last entertainment here was a concert in the public and fine room appropriated for music or dancing. The celebrated Madame Catalani had a benefit, at which the Queen of the Netherlands was present, not, however, in state, though not incognita; and the king of warriors, Marshal Lord Wellington, surrounded by his staff and all the officers Page 342 and first persons here, whether Belgians, Prussians, Hanoverians, or English. I looked at Lord Wellington watchfully, and was charmed with every turn of his countenance, with his noble and singular physiognomy and his eagle eye. He was gay even to sportiveness all the evening, conversing with the officers around him. He never was seated, not even a moment, though I saw seats vacated to offer to him frequently. He seemed enthusiastically charmed with Catalani, ardently applauding whatsoever she sung, except the "Rule Britannia;: and there, with sagacious reserve, he listened in utter Silence. Who ordered it I know not, but he felt it was injudicious in every country but -our own to give out a chorus of "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!" And when an encore began to be vociferated from his officers, he instantly crushed it by a commanding air of disapprobation, and thus offered me an opportunity of seeing how magnificently he could quit his convivial familiarity for imperious' dominion when occasion might call for the transformation. GENERAL D'ARBLAY LEAVES FOR LUXEMBOURG. When the full order arrived from Gand, establishing the mission of M. d'Arblay at Luxembourg, he decided upon demanding an audience of the Duke of Wellington, with whom he thought it necessary to concert his measures. The duke received him without difficulty, and they had a conference of some length, the result of which was that his grace promised to prepare Blucher, the great Prussian general, then actually at Luxembourg, for aiding the scheme. M. d'Arblay himself also wrote to Bl�cher; but before any answer could be returned, a new ordonnance from the Duc de Feltre directed M. d'Arblay to hasten to his post without delay. May 13, 1815.-My best friend left me to begin his campaign; left me, by melancholy chance, upon his birthday. I could not that day see a human being - I could but consecrate it to thoughts of him who had just quitted me yet who from me never was, never can be, mentally absent , and to our poor Alexander, thus inevitably, yet severely cast upon himself. AN EXCHANGE OF VISITS. The next day the gentle and feeling Madame de Beaufort spent the morning with me, using the most engaging efforts to Page 343 prevail with me to dine constantly at her table, and to accompany her in a short time to her villa. Without any charms, personal or even intellectual, to catch or fascinate, she seemed to have so much goodness of character, that I could not but try to attach myself to her, and accept her kindness as the "cordial drop" to make the cup of woe of my sad solitude go down; for Madame d'Henin, who, to equal sensibility, joined the finest understanding, was now so absorbed in politics that she had no time for any expansion of sympathy. She came, nevertheless, to see me in the evening, and to endeavour to draw me again into human life ! And her kind effort so far conquered me, that I called upon her the next day, and met Madame de Vaudreuil, for whom I had a still unexecuted commission from the Duchess dowager of Buccleuch, upon whom I had waited at the request of the princesse de Chimay, to entreat the interest of her grace with the prince regent, that the English pension accorded to the Duchess of Fitzjames might be continued to the duke, her husband, who remained a ruined widower with several children. I failed in my attempt, the natural answer being, that there was no possibility of granting a pension to a foreigner who resided in his own country while that country was at open war with the land whence he aspired at its obtention, a word I make for my passing convenience. I exchanged visits also with Madame de la Tour du Pin, the truly elegant, accomplished, and high-bred niece, by marriage, of Madame la Princesse d'Henin. Her husband, M. de la Tour du Pin, was at that time at Vienna, forming a part of the renowned Congress, by which he was sent to La Vend�e; to announce there the resolution of the assembled sovereigns to declare Bonaparte an outlaw, in consequence of his having broken the conditions of his accepted abdication, And I was discovered and visited by M. le Comte de Boursac, one of the first officers of the establishment of the Prince de Cond�, with whom he was then at Brussels; a man of worth and cultivation. At Paris he visited us so often, that he took up the name at the door of "Le Voisin," thinking it more safe to be so designated than to pronounce too frequently the name of a known adherent to the Bourbons. The good Madame de Maurville I saw often, and the family of the Boyds, with which my general had engaged me to quit Brussels, should Brussels become the seat of War, Page 344 THE FETE DIEU. Brussels in general was then inhabited by catholics, and catholic ceremonies were not unfrequent. In particular, la F�te Dieu was kept with much pomp, and a procession of priests paraded the streets, accompanied by images, pictures paintings, tapestry, and other insignia of outward and visible worship; and the windows were hung with carpets, and rugs, and mats, and almost with rags, to prove good will, at least, to what they deem a pious show. Ludicrous circumstances without end interrupted, or marred the procession, from frequent hard showers, during which the priests, decorated with splendid robes and petticoats, and ornaments the most gaudy, took sudden refuge at the doors of the houses by which they were passing, and great cloths, towels, or coarse canvas, were flung over the consecrated finery, and the relics were swaddled up in flannels, while dirt, splashes, running, scampering, and ludicrous wrappings up, broke at once and disfigured the procession. THE ECCENTRIC LADY CAROLINE LAMB. At Madame de la Tour du Pin's I kept the f�te of Madame de Maurville, with a large and pleasant party; and I just missed meeting the famous Lady Caroline Lamb,(276) who had been there at dinner, and whom I saw, however, crossing the Place Royale, from Madame de la Tour du Pin's to the Grand Hotel ; dressed, Or rather not dressed, so as to excite universal attention, and authorise every boldness of staring, from the general to the lowest soldier, among the military groups then constantly parading the Place,-for she had one shoulder, half her back, and all her throat and neck, displayed as if at the call of some statuary for modelling a heathen goddess. A slight scarf hung over the other shoulder, and the rest Of the attire was of accordant lightness. As her ladyship had Page 345 not then written, and was not, therefore, considered as one apart, from being known as an eccentric authoress, this conduct and demeanour excited something beyond surprise, and in an English lady provoked censure, if not derision, upon the whole English nation. A PROPOSED ROYAL CORPS. Monsieur le Duc de Luxembourg came to inform me that he was on the point of negotiating with the Duke of Wellington and Prince Bl�cher, upon raising a royal corps to accompany their army into France, should the expected battle lead to that result ; and he desired me to prepare M. d'Arblay, should such be the case, for a recall from Tr�ves, that he might resume his post in the body-guards belonging to the Compagnie de Luxembourg. He spoke of my beloved in terms of such high consideration, and with expressions so amiable of regard and esteem, that he won my heart. He could by no means, he said, be again under active military orders, and consent to lose so distinguished an officer from his corps. I had formerly met the duke in Paris, at Madame de Laval's - and he bad honoured me with a visit chez moi immediately after my return from England: and in consequence of those meetings, and of his real friendship for M. d'Arblay, he now spoke to me with the unreserved trust due to a tried confidant in case of peril and urgency. He stayed with me nearly two hours-for when once the heart ventured to open itself upon the circumstances, expectations, or apprehensions of. that eventful period, subjects, opinions, and feelings pressed forward with such eagerness for discussion, that those who upon such conditions met, found nothing so difficult as to separate. I wrote instantly to M. d'Arblay ; but the duke's plan proved abortive, as the Duke of Wellington and Prince Bl�cher refused all sanction to the junction of a French army With that of the allies. The thought, -perhaps-and perhaps Justly, that by entering France with natives against natives, they might excite a civil war, more difficult to conduct than that of only foreigners against foreigners. PAINFUL SUSPENSE. Suspense, during all this period, was frightfully mistress of '-,,the mind; nothing was known, everything was imagined. Page 346 The two great interests that were at war, the Bourbonists and Bonapartists, were divided and sub-divided into factions, or rather fractions, without end, and all that was kept invariably and on both sides alive was expectation. Wanderers, deserters or captives from France, arrived daily at Brussels, all with varying news of the state of that empire, and of the designs of Bonaparte amongst them. The Chevalier d'Argy made me a visit, to deliver me a letter from M. de Premorel, for M. d'Arblay. This gentleman was just escaped from Sedan in the disguise of a paysan, and assisted by a paysanne, belonging to his family. She conducted him through by-paths and thick forests, that she knew to be least frequented by the troops, police, or custom-house officers of *Bonaparte. He was going to offer his services to the king, Louis XVIII. I had much interesting public news from M. d'Argy : but I pass by all now except personal detail, as I write but for my nearest friends; and all that was then known of public occurrence has long been stale. . . . During this melancholy period when leisure, till now a delight, became a burthen to me, I could not call my faculties into any species of intellectual service; all was sunk, was annihilated in the overpowering predominance of anxiety for the coming event. I endured my suspense only by writing to or hearing from him who was its object. All my next dear connections were well. I heard from them satisfactorily, and I was also engaged in frequent correspondence with the Princess Elizabeth, whose letters are charming, not only from their vivacity, their frankness, and condescension, but from a peculiarity of manner, the result of having mixed little with the world, that, joined to great fertility of fancy, gives a something so singular and so genuine to her style of writing, as to render her letters desirable and interesting, independent of the sincere and most merited attachment which their gracious kindness inspires. INQUIETUDE AT BRUSSELS. I come now to busier scenes, and to my sojourn at Brussels during the opening of one of the most famous campaigns upon record ; and the battle of Waterloo, upon which, in great measure, hung the fate of Europe. Yet upon reflection, I will write no account of these great events, which have been detailed so many hundred times, and Page 347 so many hundred ways, as I have nothing new to offer upon them ; I will simply write the narrative of my own history at that awful period. I was awakened in the middle of the night by confused noises in the house, and running up and down stairs. I listened attentively, but heard no sound of voices, and soon all was quiet. I then concluded the persons who resided in the apartments on the second floor, over my head, had returned home later and I tried to fall asleep again. I succeeded; but I was again awakened at about five o'clock in the morning Friday, 16th June, by the sound of a bugle in the March� aux Bois: I started up and opened the window. But I only perceived some straggling soldiers, hurrying in different directions, and saw lights gleaming from some of the chambers in the neighbourhood : all again was soon still, and my own dwelling in profound silence, and therefore I concluded there had been some disturbance in exchanging sentinels at the various posts, which was already appeased: and I retired once more to my pillow, and remained till my usual hour. I was finishing, however, a letter for my best friend, when my breakfast was brought in, at my then customary time of eight o'clock; and, as mistakes and delays and miscarriages of letters had caused me much unnecessary misery, I determined to put what I was then writing in the post myself, and set off with it the moment it was sealed. THE BLACK BRUNSWICKERS. In my way back from the post-office, my ears were alarmed by the sound of military music, and my eyes equally struck with the sight of a body of troops marching to its measured time. But I soon found that what I had supposed to be an occasionally passing troop, was a complete corps; infantry, cavalry artillery, bag and baggage, with all its officers in full uniform, and that uniform was black. This gloomy hue gave an air so mournful to the procession, that, knowing its destination for battle, I contemplated with an aching heart. On inquiry, I learned it was the army of Brunswick. How much deeper yet had been my heartache had I foreknown that nearly all those brave men, thus marching on in gallant though dark array, with their valiant royal chief(277) at their head, Page 348 the nephew of my own king, George III., were amongst the first destined victims to this dreadful contest, and that neither the chief, nor the greater part of his warlike associates, would within a few short hours, breathe again the vital air ! My interrogations were answered with brevity, yet curiosity was all awake and all abroad; for the procession lasted some hours. Not a door but was open; not a threshold but was crowded, and not a window of the many-windowed gothic modern, frightful, handsome, quaint, disfigured, fantastic, or lofty mansions that diversify the large' market-place of Brussels, but was occupied by lookers on. Placidly, indeed, they saw the warriors pass : no kind greeting welcomed their arrival; no warm wishes followed them to combat. Neither, on the other hand, was there the slightest symptom of dissatisfaction ; yet even while standing thus in the midst of them, an unheeded, yet observant stranger, it was not possible for me to discern, with any solidity of conviction, whether the Belgians were, at heart, Bourbonists or Bonapartists. The Bonapartists, however, were in general the most open, for the opinion on both sides, alike with good will and with ill, was nearly universal that Bonaparte was invincible. THE OPENING OF THE CAMPAIGN. Still, I knew not, dreamt not, that the campaign was already opened - that Bonaparte had broken into La Belgique on the 15th, and had taken Charleroi; though it was news undoubtedly spread all over Brussels except to my lonely self. My own disposition, at this period, to silence and retirement, was too congenial with the taciturn habits of my hosts to be by them counteracted, and they suffered me, therefore, to return to my home as I had quitted it, with a mere usual and civil salutation ; while themselves and their house were evidently continuing their common avocations with their common composure. Surely our colloquial use of the word phlegm must be derived from the character of the Flemings. The important tidings now, however, burst upon me in sundry directions. The Princesse d'Henin, Colonel de Beaufort, Madame de Maurville, the Boyd family, all, with intelligence of the event, joined offers of service, and invitations to reside with them during this momentous contest, should I prefer such protection to remaining alone at such a crisis. Page 349 What a day of confusion and alarm did we all spend on the 17th! In my heart the whole time was Tr�ves! Tr�ves! Tr�ves! That day, and June 18th, I passed in hearing the cannon! Good heaven! what indescribable horror to be so near the field of slaughter! such I call it, for the preparation to the ear by the tremendous sound was soon followed by its fullest effect, in the view of the wounded, the bleeding martyrs to the formidable contention that was soon to terminate the history of the war. And hardly more afflicting was this disabled return from the battle, than the sight of the continually pouring forth ready-armed and vigorous victims that marched past my windows to meet similar destruction. NEWS FROM THE FIELD OF BATTLE. Accounts from the field of battle arrived hourly; sometimes directly from the Duke of Wellington to Lady Charlotte Greville, and to some other ladies who had near relations in the combat, and which, by their means, were circulated in Brussels ; and at other times from such as conveyed those amongst the wounded Belgians, whose misfortunes were -inflicted near enough to the skirts of the spots of action, to allow of their being dragged away by their hovering countrymen to the city : the spots, I say, of action, for the far-famed battle of Waterloo was preceded by three days of partial engagements. During this period, I spent my whole time in seeking and passing from house to house of the associates of my distress, or receiving them in mine. Ten times, at least, I crossed over to Madame d'Henin, discussing plans and probabilities, and interchanging hopes and fears. I spent a considerable part of the morning with Madame de la Tour -du Pin, who was now returned from Gand, where Louis XVIII. supported his suspense and his danger with a coolness and equanimity which, when the �clat surrounding the glory of his daring and great opponent shall no longer by its overpowering resplendence keep all around it in the shade, will carry him down to posterity as the monarch precisely formed, by the patient good sense, the enlightened liberality, and the Immovable composure of his character, to meet the perilous perplexities of his situation, and, if he could not combat them with the vigour and genius of a hero, to sustain them at least with the dignity of a prince. Page 350 PROJECTS FOR QUITTING BRUSSELS, Madame d'Henin and Madame de la Tour du Pin projected retreating to Gand, should the approach of the enemy be unchecked ; to avail themselves of such protection as might be obtained from seeking it under the wing of Louis XVIII. M. de la Tour du Pin had, I believe, remained there with his majesty. M. de Lally and the Boyds inclined to Antwerp, where they might safely await the fate of Brussels, near enough for returning, should it weather the storm, yet within reach of vessels to waft them to the British shores should it be lost. Should this last be the fatal termination, I, Of course, had agreed to join the party of the voyage, and resolved to secure my passport, that, while I waited to the last moment, I might yet be prepared for a hasty retreat. I applied for a passport to Colonel Jones, to whom the Duke of Wellington had deputed the military command of Brussels in his absence but he was unwilling to sanction an evacuation of Brussels, which he deemed premature. It was not, he said, for us, the English, to spread alarm, or prepare for an overthrow: he had not sent away his own wife or children, and he had no doubt but victory would repay his confidence. I was silenced, but not convinced ; the event was yet uncertain, and my stake was, with respect to earthly happiness, my existence. A compromise occurred to me, which suggested my dispensing with a new passport, and contenting myself with obtaining his signature to my old one, accorded by M. le Chevalier de Jaucourt. He could not refuse to sign it; and we then separated. I promised him, nevertheless, that I would remain to the last extremity; and I meant no other. I was now better satisfied, though by no means at ease. Yet the motive of Colonel Jones was, that all should yield to the glory of the British arms and the Duke of Wellington. And I had the less right to be surprised, from the dreadful soldier's speech I had heard him utter when I first saw him, to the Princesse d'Henin: complaining of the length of time that was wasted in inaction, and of the inactivity and tameness of the Bourbons, he exclaimed, "We want blood, madam! what we want is blood!" CALMLY AWAITING THE RESULT, I found upon again going my rounds for information, that 'though news was arriving incessantly from the scene of action, Page 351 and with details always varying,, Bonaparte was always advancing. All the people of Brussels lived in the streets. Doors seemed of no use, for they were never shut. The individuals, when they re-entered their houses, only resided at the windows : so that the whole population of the city seemed constantly in public view. Not only business as well as society was annihilated, but even every species of occupation. All of which we seemed capable was, to inquire or to relate, to speak or to hear. Yet no clamour, no wrangling, nor even debate was intermixed with either question or answer ; curiosity, though incessant, was serene ; the faces were all monotony, though the tidings were all variety. I could attribute this only to the length of time during which the inhabitants had been habituated to change both of masters and measures, and to their finding that, upon an average, they neither lost nor gained by such successive revolutions. And to this must be joined their necessity of submitting, be it what it might, to the result. This mental consciousness probably kept their passions in order, and crushed all the impulses by which hope or fear is excited. No love of liberty buoyed up resistance; no views of independence brightened their imagination; and they bore even suspense with the calm of apparent philosophy, and an exterior of placid indifference. The first intelligence Madame d'Henin now gave me was, that the Austrian minister extraordinary, M. le Comte de Vincent, had been wounded close by the side of the Duke of Wellington ; and that he was just brought back in a litter to her hotel. As she was much acquainted with him, she desired me to accompany her in making her personal inquiries. No one now sent servants, cards, or messages, where there was any serious interest in a research. There was too much eagerness to bear delay, and ceremony and etiquette always fly from distress and from business. Le Comte de Vincent, we had the pleasure to hear, had been hurt only in the hand ; but this wound afterwards proved more serious than at first was apprehended, threatening for ,many weeks either gangrene or amputation. News, however, far more fatal struck our ears soon after : the gallant Duke of Brunswick was killed! and by a shot close also to the Duke of Wellington! The report now throughout Brussels was that the two Mighty chiefs, Bonaparte and Wellington, were almost constantly in view of each other. Page 352 FLIGHT To ANTWERP DETERMINED ON. But what a day was the next--June 18th--the greatest, perhaps, in its result, in the annals of Great Britain! My slumbers having been tranquillized by the close Of the 17th, I was calmly reposing, when I was awakened by the sound of feet abruptly entering my drawing-room. I started, and had but just time to see by my watch that it was only six o'clock, when a rapping at my bedroom door so quick as to announce as much trepidation as it excited, made me slip on a long kind of domino always, in those times, at hand, to keep me ready for encountering surprise, and demanded what was the matter? "Open your door! there is not a moment to lose! " was the answer, in the voice of Miss Ann Boyd. I obeyed, in great alarm, and saw that pretty and pleasing young woman, with her mother, Mrs. Boyd, who remembered having known and played with me when we were both children, and whom I had met with at Passy, after a lapse of more than forty years. They both eagerly told me that all their new hopes had been overthrown by better authenticated news, and that I must be with them by eight o'clock, to proceed to the wharf, and set sail for Antwerp, whence we sail on for England, should the taking of Brussels by Bonaparte endanger Antwerp also. To send off a few lines to the post, with my direction at Antwerp, to pack and to pay, was all that I could attempt, or even desire ; for I had not less time than appetite for thinking of breakfast. My host and my maid carried my small package, and I arrived before eight in the Rue d'Assault. We set off for the wharf on foot, not a fiacre or chaise being procurable. Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, five or six of their family, a governess, and I believe some servants, with bearers of our baggage, made our party. Though the distance was short, the walk was long, because rugged, dirty, and melancholy. Now and then we heard a growling noise, like distant thunder, but far more dreadful. When we had got about a third part of the way, a heavy rumbling sound made us stop to listen. It was approaching nearer and nearer, and we soon found that we were followed by innumerable carriages, and a multitude of persons. All was evidently military, but of so gloomy, taciturn, and forbidding a description, that when we were overtaken we had not courage to offer a question to any passer by. Had Page 353 we been as certain that they belonged to the enemy as we felt convinced that, thus circumstanced, they must belong to our own interests, we could not have been awed more effectually into silent passiveness, so decisively repelling to inquiry was every aspect, In truth, at that period, when every other hour changed the current of expectation, no one could be inquisitive without the risk of passing for a spy, nor communicative without the hazard of being suspected as a traitor. Arrived at the wharf, Mr. Boyd pointed out to us our barge, which seemed fully ready for departure ; but the crowd already come and still coming so incommoded us, that Mr. Boyd desired we would enter a large inn, and wait till he could speak with the master, and arrange our luggage and places, We went, therefore, into a spacious room and ordered breakfast, when the room was entered by a body of military men of all sorts ; but we were suffered to keep our ground till Mr, Boyd came to inform us that we must all decamp! A CHECK MET WITH. Confounded, but without any interrogatory, we vacated the apartment, and Mr. Boyd conducted us not to the barge, not to the wharf, but to the road back to Brussels ; telling us, in an accent of depression, that he feared all was lost-that Bonaparte was advancing-that his point was decidedly Brussels-and that the Duke of Wellington had sent orders that all the magazines, the artillery, and the warlike stores of every description, and all the wounded, the maimed, and the sick, should be immediately removed to Antwerp. For this purpose he had issued directions that every barge, every boat should be seized for the use of the army, and that everything of value should be conveyed away, the hospitals emptied, and Brussels evacuated. If this intelligence filled us with the most fearful alarm, how much more affrighting still was the sound of cannon which next assailed our ears ! The dread reverberation became louder and louder as we proceeded. Every shot tolled to our imaginations the death of myriads; and the conviction that the destruction and devastation were so near us, with the probability that if all attempt at escape should prove abortive, we might be personally involved in the carnage, gave us sensations too awful for verbal expression; we could only gaze and tremble, listen and shudder. Page 354 Yet, strange to relate! on re-entering the city, all seemed quiet and tranquil as usual! and though it was in this imminent and immediate danger of being invested, and perhaps pillaged, I saw no outward mark of distress or disturbance, or even of hurry or curiosity. Having re-lodged us in the Rue d'Assault, Mr. Boyd tried to find some land carriage for our removal. But not only every chaise had been taken, and every diligence secured, the cabriolets, the cal�ches, nay, the waggons and the carts; and every species of caravan, had been seized for Military service. And, after the utmost efforts he could make, in every kind of way, he told us we must wait the chances of the day, for that there was no possibility of escape from Brussels either by land or water. Remedy there was none; nor had we any other resource; we were fain, therefore, quietly to submit. Mr. Boyd, however, assured me that, though no land carriage was likely to find horses during this furious contest, he had been promised the return of a barge for the next morning, if he and his party would be at the wharf by six o'clock. We all therefore agreed that, if we were spared any previous calamity, we would set out for the wharf at five o'clock, and I accepted their invitation to be with them in the evening, and spend the night at their house. We then separated; I was anxious to get home, to watch the post, and to write to Tr�ves. A CAPTURED FRENCH GENERAL. My reappearance produced no effect upon my hosts : they saw my return with the same placid civility that they had seen my departure. But even apathy, or equanimity,--which shall I call it?--like theirs was now to be broken; I was seated at my bureau and writing, when a loud "hurrah!" reached my ears from some distance, while the daughter of my host, a girl of about eighteen, gently opening my door, said the fortune of the day had suddenly turned, and that Bonaparte was taken prisoner. At the same time the "hurrah!" came nearer. I flew to the window; my host and hostess came also, crying, "Bonaparte est pris! le voil ! le Voil !"(278) I then saw, on a noble war-horse in full equipinent, a general in the splendid uniform of France but visibly disarmed, and, Page 355 to all appearance, tied to his horse, or, at least, held on, so as to disable him from making any effort to gallop it off, and surrounded, preceded, and followed by a. crew of roaring wretches, who seemed eager for the moment when he should be lodged where they had orders to conduct him, that they might unhorse, strip, pillage him, and divide the spoil. His high, feathered, glittering helmet he had pressed down as low as he could on his forehead, and I could not discern his face ; but I was instantly certain he was not Bonaparte, on finding the whole commotion produced by the rifling crew above mentioned, which, though it might be guided, probably, by some subaltern officer, who might have the captive in charge, had left the field of battle at a moment when none other could be spared, as all the attendant throng were evidently amongst the refuse of the army followers. I was afterwards informed that this unfortunate general was the Count Lobau. He met with singular consideration during his captivity in the Low Countries, having thence taken to himself a wife. That wife I had met when last in Paris, at a ball given by Madame la Princesse de Beauvau. She was quite young and extremely pretty, and the gayest of the gay, laughing, chatting the whole evening, chiefly with the fat and merry, good-humoured Duchesse de Feltre (Madame la Mar�chale Clarke) - and her husband, high in office, in fame, and in favour, was then absent on some official duty. THE DEARTH OF NEWS. The dearth of any positive news from the field of battle, even in the heart of Brussels, at this crisis, when everything that was dear and valuable to either party was at stake, was at one instant nearly distracting in its torturing suspense to the wrung nerves, and at another insensibly blunted them into a kind of amalgamation with the Belgic philosophy. At certain houses, as well as at public offices, news, I doubt not, arrived; but no means were taken to - promulgate it - no gazettes, as in London, no bulletins, as in Paris, were cried about the streets ; we were all left at once to our conjectures and our destinies. The delusion of victory vanished into a merely passing advantage, as I gathered from the earnest researches into which it led me; and evil only met all ensuing investigation; retreat and defeat were the words in every mouth around me! Page 356 The Prussians, it was asserted, were completely vanquished on the 15th, and the English on the 16th, while on the day just passed, the 17th, a day of continual fighting and bloodshed, drawn battles on both sides left each party Proclaiming what neither party could prove--success. It was Sunday ; but church service was out of the question though never were prayers more frequent, more fervent, Form, indeed, they could not have, nor union, while constantly expecting the enemy with fire and sword at the gates, Who could enter a place of worship, at the risk of making it a scene of slaughter? But who, also, in circumstances so awful, could require the exhortation of a priest or the example of a congregation, to stimulate devotion? No! in those fearful exigencies, where, in the full vigour of health, strength, and life's freshest resources, we seem destined to abruptly quit this mortal coil, we need no spur--all is spontaneous; and the soul is unshackled. RUMOURS OF THE FRENCH COMING. Not above a quarter of an hour had I been restored to my sole occupation of solace, before I was again interrupted and startled ; but not as on the preceding occasion by riotous shouts ; the sound was a howl, violent, loud, affrighting, and issuing from many voices. I ran to the window, and saw the March� aux Bois suddenly filling with a populace, pouring in from all its avenues, and hurrying on rapidly, and yet as if unconscious in what direction; while women with children in their arms, or clinging to their clothes, ran screaming out of doors - and cries, though not a word was ejaculated, filled the air, and from every house, I saw windows closing, and shutters fastening ; all this, though long in writing, was presented to my eyes in a single moment, and was followed in another by a burst into my apartment, to announce that the French were come! I know not even who made this declaration; my head was out of the window, and the person who made it scarcely entered the room and was gone. How terrific was this moment ! My perilous situation urged me to instant flight; and, without waiting to speak to the people of the house, I crammed my papers and money into a basket, and throwing on a shawl and bonnet, I flew down stairs and out of doors. My intention was to go to the Boyds, to partake, as I had engaged, their fate , but the crowd were all issuing from the Page 357 way I must have turned to have gained the Rue d'Assault, and I thought, therefore, I might be safer with Madame de Maurville, who, also, not being English, might be less obnoxious to the Bonapartists. To the Rue de la Montagne I hurried, in consequence, my steps crossing and crossed by an affrighted multitude ; but I reached it in safety, and she received me with an hospitable welcome. I found her calm, and her good humour undisturbed. Inured to revolutions, under which she had smarted so as she could smart no more, from the loss of all those who had been the first objects of her solicitude, a husband and three sons! she was now hardened in her feelings upon public events, though her excellent heart was still affectionate and zealous for the private misfortunes of the individuals whom she loved. What a dreadful day did I pass! dreadful in the midst of its glory! for it was not during those operations that sent details partially to our ears that we could judge of the positive state of affairs, or build upon any permanency of success. Yet here I soon recovered from all alarm for personal safety, and lost the horrible apprehension of being in the midst of a city that was taken, sword in hand, by an enemy-an apprehension that, while it lasted, robbed me of breath, chilled my blood, and gave me a shuddering ague that even now in fancy returns as I seek to commit it to paper. FRENCH PRISONERS BROUGHT IN. The alerte(279) which had produced this effect, I afterwards learnt, though not till the next day, was utterly false ; but whether it had been produced by mistake or by deceit I never knew. The French, indeed, were coming; but not triumphantly ., they were prisoners, surprised and taken suddenly, ,and brought in, being disarmed, by an escort ; and, as they were numerous, and their French uniform was discernible from afar, the almost universal belief at Brussels that Bonaparte was invincible, might perhaps, without any intended deception, have raised the report that they were advancing as conquerors. NEWS OF WATERLOO. I attempt no description of this day, the grandeur of which was unknown, or unbelieved, in Brussels till it had taken its Page 358 flight, and could only be named as time past. The Duke of Wellington and Prince Bl�cher were too mightily engaged in meriting fame to spare an instant for either claiming or proclaiming it. I was fain, therefore, to content myself with the intelligence that reached Madame de Maurville fortuitously. The crowds in the streets, the turbulence, the inquietude, the bustle the noise, the cries, the almost yells, kept up a perpetual expectation of annoyance. The door was never opened, but I felt myself pale and chill with fear of some sanguinary attack or military surprise. It is true that as Brussels was not fortified and could, in itself, offer no resistance, it could neither b' besieged nor taken by storm ; but I felt certain that the Duke of Wellington would combat for it inch by inch, and that in a conflict between life and death, every means would be resorted to that could be suggested by desperation. Madame de Maurville now told me that an English commissary was just arrived from the army, who had assured her that the tide of success was completely turned to the side of the Allies. She offered to conduct me to his apartment, which was in the same hotel as her own, and in which he was writing and transacting business gravely assuring me, and I really believe, herself, that he could not but be rejoiced to give me, in person, every particular I could wish to hear. I deemed it, however, but prudent not to put his politeness to a test so severe. Urgent, nevertheless, to give me pleasure, and not easily set aside from following her own conceptions, she declared she would go down stairs, and inform Mr. Saumarez that she had a countrywoman of his in her room, whom he would be charmed to oblige. I tried vainly to stop her; good humour, vivacity, curiosity, and zeal were all against my efforts; she went, and to my great surprise returned escorted by Mr. Saumarez himself. His narration was all triumphant and his account of the Duke of Wellington might almost have seemed an exaggerated panegyric if it had painted some warrior in a chivalresque romance. . . . I could not but be proud of this account: independent from its glory; my revived imagination hung the blessed laurels of peace. But though Hope was all alive, Ease and Serenity were not her companions: Mr. Saumarez could not disguise that there was still much to do, and consequently to apprehend; and he had never, he said, amongst the many he had viewed, seen a field Page 359 of battle in such excessive disorder. Military carriages of all sorts, and' multitudes of groups unemployed, occupied spaces that ought to have been left for manoeuvring or observation. I attribute this to the various nations who bore arms on that great day in their own manner; though the towering generalissimo of all cleared the ground, and dispersed what was unnecessary at every moment that was not absorbed by the fight. When the night of this memorable day arrived, I took leave of Madame de Maurville to join the Boyds, according to my engagement: for though all accounts confirmed the victory of the Duke of Wellington, we had so little idea of its result, that we still imagined the four days already spent in the work of carnage must be followed by as many more, before the dreadful conflict could terminate. Madame de Maurville lent me her servant, with whom I now made my way tolerably well, for though the crowd remained, it was no longer turbulent. A general knowledge of general success to the Allies was everywhere spread ; curiosity therefore began to be satisfied, and inquietude to be removed. The concourse were composedly--for no composure is like that of the Flemings- -listening to details of the day in tranquil groups, and I had no interruption to my walk but from my own anxiety to catch, as I could, some part of the relations. As all these have since been published, I omit them, though the interest with which I heard them was, at the moment, intense. Three or four shocking sights intervened during my passage, of officers of high rank, either English or Belge, and either dying or dead, extended upon biers, carried by soldiers. The view of their gay and costly attire, with the conviction of their suffering, or fatal state, joined to the profound silence of their bearers and attendants, was truly saddening ; and if my reflections were morally dejecting, what, oh what were my personal feelings and fears, in the utter uncertainty whether this victory were more than a passing triumph! In one place we were entirely stopped by a group that had gathered round a horse, of which a British soldier was examining one of the knees. The animal was a tall war-horse, and one of the noblest of his species. The soldier was enumerating to his hearers its high qualities, and exultingly acquainting them it was his own property, as he had taken it, if I understood right, from the fields He produced also a very fine ring, which was all he had taken Page 360 of spoil, Yet this man gravely added that pillage had been forbidden by the commander-in-chief! I found the Boyds still firm for departure. The news of the victory of the day, gained by the Duke of Wellington and Prince Bl�cher, had raised the highest delight; but further intelligence had just reached them that the enemy, since the great battle, was working to turn the right wing of the Duke of Wellington, who was in the most imminent danger; and that the capture of Brussels was expected to take place the next morning, as everything indicated that Brussels was the point at which Bonaparte aimed, to retrieve his recent defeat. Mr. Boyd used every possible exertion to procure chaises or diligence, or any sort of land conveyance, for Antwerp, but every horse was under military requisition - even the horses of the farmers, of the nobility and gentry, and of travellers, The hope of water-carriage was all that remained. We were to set off so early, that we agreed not to retire to rest. THE VICTORY DECLARED TO BE COMPLETE. A gentleman, however, of their acquaintance, presently burst into the room with assurances that the enemy was flying in all directions, his better news reanimated my courage for Brussels and my trust in the Duke of Wellington; and when the Boyd family summoned me the next morning at four or five o'clock to set off with them for Antwerp, I permitted my repugnance to quitting the only spot where I could receive letters from Tr�ves to conquer every obstacle, and begged them to excuse my changed purpose. They wondered at my temerity, and probably blamed it ; but there was no time for discussion, and we separated. It was not till Tuesday, the 20th, I had certain and satisfactory assurances how complete was the victory. At the house of Madame de Maurville I heard confirmed and detailed the matchless triumph of the matchless Wellington, interspersed with descriptions of scenes of slaughter on the field of battle to freeze the blood, and tales of woe amongst mourning survivors in Brussels to rend the heart. While listening with speechless avidity to these relations, we were joined by M. de la Tour du Pin, who is a cousin of Madame de Maurville, and who said the Duke of Wellington had galloped to Brussels from Wavre to see the Prince of Orange and inquire in person after his wounds. Prince Page 361 Bl�cher was in close pursuit of Bonaparte, who was totally defeated, his baggage all taken, even his private equipage and personals, and who was a fugitive himself, and in disguise! The duke considered the battle to be so decisive, that while prince Bl�cher was posting after the remnant of the Bonapartian army, he determined to follow himself as convoy to Louis XVIII.; and he told M. de la Tour du Pin and the Duke de Fitzjames, whom he met at the palace of the King of Holland, to acquaint their king with this his proposal, and to beg his majesty to set forward without delay to join him for its execution. The Duke de Fitzjames was gone already to Gand with his commission. How daring a plan was this, while the internal state of France was so little known, while les places fortes(280) were all occupied, and while the corps of Grouchy was still intact, and the hidden and possible resources of Bonaparte were unfathomed! The event, however, demonstrated that the Duke of Wellington had judged with as much quickness of perception as intrepidity of valour. 'Twas to Tournay he had desired that the King of France would repair. THE WOUNDED AND THE PRISONERS. The duke now ordered that the hospitals, invalids, magazines, etc., should all be stationed at Brussels, which he regarded as saved from invasion and completely secure. It is not near the scene of battle that war, even with victory, wears an aspect of felicity-no, not even in the midst of its highest resplendence of glory. A more terrific or afflicting sojourn than that of Brussels at this period can hardly be imagined. The universal voice declared that so sanguinary a battle as that which was fought almost in its neighbourhood, and quite within its hearing, never yet had spread the plains with slaughter; and though exultation cannot ever have been prouder, nor satisfaction more complete, in the brilliancy of success, all my senses were shocked in viewing the effects of its attainment. For more than a week from this time I never approached my window but to witness sights of wretchedness. Maimed, wounded, bleeding, mutilated, tortured victims of this exterminating contest passed by every minute: the fainting, the sick, the dying and the dead, on brancards,(281) In carts, in waggons, succeeded one another without intermission. There Page 362 seemed to be a whole and a large army of disabled or lifeless soldiers! All that was intermingled with them bore an aspect of still more poignant horror ; for the Bonapartian Prisoners who were now poured into the city by hundreds, had a mien of such ferocious desperation, where they were marched on, uninjured, from having been taken by surprise or overpowered by numbers - or faces of such anguish, where they were drawn on in open vehicles, the helpless victims of gushing wounds or horrible dislocations, that to see them without commiseration for their sufferings, or admiration for the heroic, however misled enthusiasm, to which they Were martyrs, must have demanded an apathy dead to all feeling but what is personal, or a rancour too ungenerous to yield even to the view of defeat. Both the one set and the other of these unhappy warriors endured their calamities with haughty forbearance of complaint, The maimed and lacerated, while their ghastly visages spoke torture and death, bit their own clothes, perhaps their flesh ! to save the loud utterance of their groans; while those of their comrades who had escaped these corporeal inflictions seemed to be smitten with something between remorse and madness that they had not forced themselves on to destruction ere thus they were exhibited in dreadful parade through the streets of that city they had been sent forth to conquer. Others of these wretched prisoners had, to me, as I first saw them, the air of the lowest and most disgusting of jacobins, in dirty tattered vestments of all sorts and colours, or soiled carters' frocks; but disgust was soon turned to pity, when I afterwards learnt that these shabby accoutrements had been cast over them by their conquerors after despoiling them of their own. Everybody was wandering from home; all Brussels seemed living in the streets. The danger to the city, which had imprisoned all its inhabitants except the rabble or the military, once completely passed, the pride of feeling and showing their freedom seemed to stimulate their curiosity in seeking details on what had passed and was passing. But neither the pride nor the joy of victory was anywhere of an exulting nature. London and Paris render all other places that I, at least, have dwelt in, tame and insipid. Bulletins in a few shop-windows alone announced to the general public that the Allies had vanquished and that Bonaparte was a fugitive. I met at the embassy an old English officer who gave me Page 363 most interesting and curious information, assuring me that in the carriage of Bonaparte, which had been seized, there were proclamations ready printed, and even dated from the palace of Lachen, announcing the downfall of the Allies and the triumph of Bonaparte ! But no satisfaction could make me hear without deadly dismay and shuddering his description of the field of battle. Piles of dead!--Heaps, masses, hills of dead bestrewed the plains! I met also Colonel Jones; so exulting in success! so eager to remind me of his assurances that all was safe! And I was much interested in a narration made to me by a wounded soldier, who was seated in the courtyard of the embassy. He had been taken prisoner after he was severely wounded, on the morning of the 18th, and forced into a wood with many others, where he had been very roughly used, and stripped of his coat, waistcoat, and even his shoes ; but as the fortune of the day began to turn, there was no one left to watch him, and he crawled on all-fours till he got out of the wood, and was found by some of his roving comrades. Thousands, I believe I may say without exaggeration, were employed voluntarily at this time in Brussels in dressing wounds and attending the sick beds of the wounded. Humanity could be carried no further ; for not alone the Belgians and English were thus nursed and assisted, nor yet the Allies, but the prisoners also ; and this, notwithstanding the greatest apprehensions being prevalent that the sufferers, from their multitude, would bring pestilence into the heart of the city. The immense quantity of English, Belgians, and Allies, who were first, of course, conveyed to the hospitals and prepared houses of Brussels, required so much time for carriage and placing, that although the carts, waggons, and every attainable or seizable vehicle were unremittingly in motion-now coming, now returning to the field of battle for more,- it was nearly a week, or at least five or six days, ere the unhappy wounded prisoners, who were necessarily last served, could be accommodated. And though I was assured that medical and surgical aid was administered to them wherever it was possible, the blood that dried upon their skins and their garments, joined to the dreadful sores occasioned by this neglect, produced an effect so pestiferous, that, at every new entry, eau de Cologne, or vinegar, was resorted to by every inhabitant, even amongst the shopkeepers, even amongst the commonest persons, for averting the menaced contagion. Page 364 Even the churches were turned into hospitals, and every house in Brussels was ordered to receive or find an asylum for some of the sick. The Boyds were eminently good in nursing, dressing wounds, making slops, and administering comfort amongst the maimed, whether friend or foe. Madame d'Henin sent her servants, and money, and cordials to all the French that came within her reach ; Madame de la Tour du Pin was munificent in the same attentions; and Madame de Maurville never passed by an opportunity of doing good. M. de Beaufort, being far the richest of my friends at this place, was not spared; he had officers and others quartered upon him without mercy. We were all at work more or less in making lint. For me, I was about amongst the wounded half the day, the British, s'entend! The rising in France for the honour of the nation now, and for its safety in independence hereafter, was brilliant and delightful, spreading in some directions from La Manche to La M�diterran�e: the focus of loyalty was Bordeaux. The king left Gand the 22nd. All Alost, etc., surrounded followed, or preceded him. The noble Bl�cher entered France at Mortes le Ch�teau. HOSTILITIES AT AN END: TE DEUM FOR THE VICTORY, It was not till June 26th that the blessed news reached me of the cessation of hostilities. Colonel Beaufort was the first who brought me this intelligence, smiling kindly himself at the smiles he excited. Next came la Princesse d'Henin, escorted by my and her highly valued M, de Lally Tolendal. With open arms that dear princess reciprocated congratulations. Madame de Maurville next followed, always cordial where she could either give or behold happiness. The Boyds hurried to me in a body to wish and be wished joy. And last, but only in time, not in kindness, came Madame la Vicomtesse de Laval, mother to the justly honoured philanthropist, or, as others--but not I--call him, bigot, M. Mathieu de Montmorency, who, at this moment, is M. le Duc de Montmorency. Brussels now, which had seemed for so many days, from the unremitting passage of maimed, dying, or dead, a mere out-door hospital, revived, or, rather, was invigorated to something above its native state ; for from uninteresting tameness it became elevated to spirit, consequence, and vivacity. Page 365 On the following Sunday I had the gratification of hearing, at the Protestant chapel, the Te Deum for the grand victory, in presence of the King and Queen of the Low Countries--or Holland, and of the Dowager Princess of Orange, and the young warrior her grandson. This prince looked so ill, so meagre, so weak, from his half-cured wounds, that to appear on this occasion seemed another, and perhaps not less dangerous effort of heroism, added to those which had so recently distinguished him in the field. What enthusiasm would such an exertion, with his pallid appearance, have excited in London or Paris ! even here, a little gentle huzza greeted him from his carriage to the chapel - and for the same short passage, back again. After which, he drove off as tranquilly as any common gentleman might have driven away, to return to his home and his family dinner. About the middle of July-but I am not clear of the date -the news was assured and confirmed of the brilliant reenthronement of Louis XVIII., and that Bonaparte had ,surrendered to the English. Brussels now became an assemblage of all nations, from the rapturous enthusiasm that pervaded all to view the field of battle, the famous Waterloo, and gather upon the spot ,,details of the immortal victory of Wellington. MATERNAL ADVICE. (Madame d'Arblay to her son.) April 26, 1815. At length, my long expecting eyes meet again your hand-writing, after a breach of correspondence that I can never 'recollect without pain. Revive it not in my mind by any repetition, and I will dismiss it from all future power of tormenting me, by considering it only as a dream of other times. Cry "Done!" my Alex, and I will skip over the subject, not perhaps as lightly, but as swiftly as you skip over the hills of Norbury Park. I delight to think of the good and pleasure that sojourn may do you; though easily, too easily, I conceive the melancholy reflections that were awakened by the sight of our dear, dear cottage; yet your expressions upon its view lose much of their effect by being Overstrained, recherch�s, and designing to be pathetic. We never touch others, my dear Alex, where we study to show we -,are touched ourselves. I beg you, when you write to me, Page 366 to let your pen paint your thoughts as they rise, not as you seek or labour to embellish them. I remember you once wrote me a letter so very fine from Cambridge, that, if it had not made me laugh, it would certainly have made me sick. Be natural, my dear boy, and you will be sure to please Your mother without wasting your time. Let us know what you have received, what you have spent, what you may have still unpaid, and what you yet want. But for this last article, we both desire you will not wait our permission to draw upon your aunt, whom we shall empower to draw upon Mr. Hoare in our names. We know you to have no wanton extravagances, and no idle vanity, we give you, therefore, dear Alex, carte blanche to apply to your aunt, only consulting with her, and begging her kind, maternal advice to help your inexperience in regulating your expenses. She knows the difference that must be made between our fortune and that of Clement - but she knows our affection for our boy, and our confidence in his honour and probity, and will treat him with as much kindness, though not with equal luxury. Your father charges you never to be without your purse, and never to let it be empty. Your aunt will counsel you about your clothes. About your books we trust to yourself. And pray don't forget, when you make sleeping visits, to recompense the trouble you must unavoidably give to servants. And if you join any party to any public place, make a point to pay for yourself. It will be far better to go seldom, and with that gentlemanly spirit, than often, with the air of a hanger-on. How infinitely hospitable has been your uncle James! But hospitality is his characteristic. We had only insisted upon your regularity at chapel and at lectures, and we hear of your attention to them comparatively, and we are fixed to be contented en attendant. Don't lose courage, dear, dear Alex , the second place is the nearest to the first. I love you with all my heart and soul! . . . ABOUT THE GREAT BATTLE. (Madame d'Arblay to General d'Arblay.) Monday, June 19, 1815- The sitting up all night, however little merrily, made me, I know not how, seem to have lived a day longer than real time, for I thought to-day the 20th when I finished my letter of this morning. I have now, therefore, to rectify that Mistake, Page 367 and tell you that there is, therefore, no chasm in the known history of the Duke of Wellington. But, to my infinite regret, with all the great, nay marvellous feats he has performed, he is less, not more, in public favour, from not being approved, or rather, I think, comprehended, in the opening of this tremendous business. As I am sure the subject must be of deeper interest to you than any other, at such an instant, I will tell you all I know-all I have heard and gathered, for I know nothing, and add my own consequent conjectures, as soon as I have first acquainted you that I separated from the Boyds at about half past seven in the morning, too much satisfied with the news of Lord Wellington's victory to endure to distance myself still further from all I love most upon earth. They, therefore, still alarmed, went to Antwerp, and I am again at the little bureau, upon which my dearest ami has sometimes written in the March� aux Bois. The first news the Duke of Wellington was known to receive of the invasion of les Pays Bas was at a ball at the Duchess of Richmond's. He would not break up the party, more than half of which was formed of his officers, nor suffer any interruption. Some time after, however, he went out, and when he returned distributed cards of orders to the several commanding officers. But he stayed to supper - after which fifty red-coats retired abruptly. Not so the duke--and he is now much-- Ah, mon ami, two letters arrive at the same instant, that curtail all subjects but what belong to themselves. Nous allons commencer!--Heaven preserve and prosper the beloved partner of my soul. I dare enter upon nothing; I can only say the first of the two letters, written before the order of commencer was issued, is one of the fullest and dearest I have in my possession; and I shall read and re-read its interesting contents with heart-felt pleasure. Tell, tell me, my beloved ami, where, when you would have me remove? I will not ask how--I will find that out. To be nearer to you--to hear more frequently--oh, what a solace! The maimed, wounded, bleeding, fainting, arrive still every minute. There seems a whole, and a large army of mutilated Soldiers. Jerome is said to be killed, and Vandamme to have lost both legs.(282) Our loss is yet incalculable. Page 368 Every creature that was movable is gone to Antwerp, or England, but myself - but my intense desire not to lose ground or time in my letters made me linger to the last, and now, thank heaven, all danger here is at an end, and all fugitives are returning. The imperial guard is almost annihilated. They fought like demons. Napoleon cried out continually to them, the prisoners say, "A Bruxelles, mes enfans! Bruxelles! Bruxelles!" They were reported one day to be actually arrived here. I never saw, never, indeed, felt such consternation. Not only money, jewels, and valuables of pecuniary sorts were shut up, but babies from the arms of their terrified mothers and nurses. I flew out myself, to take refuge in the apartments of Madame de Maurville, and I never witnessed such horror and desolation. I have left this for a word at the last minute, This is Wednesday, June 21st.... Mr Kirkpatrick tells me Murat is dead of his wounds;(283) Vandamme lost his two thighs, and is dead also; Jerome died of a cannon-ball at once. Poor M, de Vincent, the Austrian, has a ball still in his arm, which they cannot extract, Lord Fitzroy Somerset has an arm shot off; Lord Uxbridge a leg. Col. Hamilton is killed. Lobau is here a prisoner. I shall continue to write all the Page 369 particulars I can gather. It has been the most bloody battle that ever was fought, and the victory the most entire. AN ACCIDENT BEFALLS GENERAL D'ARBLAY. on the 19th of July, 1815, during the ever memorable Hundred Days, I was writing to my best friend, when I received a visit from la Princesse d'Henin and Colonel de Beaufort, who entered the room with a sort of precipitancy and confusion that immediately struck me as the effect of evil tidings which they came to communicate. My ideas instantly flew to the expectation of new public disaster, when Madame d'Henin faintly pronounced the name of M. d'Arblay. Alarmed, I turned from one to the other in speechless trepidation, dreading to ask, while dying to know what awaited me. Madame d'Henin then said, that M. de Beaufort had received a letter from M. d'Arblay: and I listened with subdued, yet increasing terror, while they acquainted me that M. d'Arblay had received on the calf of his leg a furious kick from a wild horse, which had occasioned so bad a wound as to confine him to his bed - and that he wished M. de Beaufort to procure me some travelling guide, that I might join 'him as soon as it would be possible with safety and convenience. But what was my agony when I saw that the letter was not in his own band! I conjured them to leave me, and let me read it alone. They offered, the one to find me a clever femme de chambre, the other to inquire for a guide to aid me to set out, if able, the next day; but I rather know this from recollection than from having understood them at the time: I only entreated their absence; and having consented to their return in a few hours, I forced them away. No sooner were they gone, than, calming my spirits by earnest and devout prayer, which alone supports my mind, and even preserves my senses, in deep calamity, I ran over the letter, which was dated the fourth day after the wound, and acknowledged that three incisions had been made in the leg unnecessarily by an ignorant surgeon, which had so aggravated the danger, as well as the suffering, that he was now in bed, not only from the pain of the lacerated limb, but also from a nervous fever! and that no hope was held Out to him of quitting it in less than a fortnight or three weeks. Page 370 MADAME D'ARBLAY'S DIFFICULTIES IN REJOINING HER HUSBAND. I determined not to wait, though the poor sufferer himself had charged that I should, either for the femme de chambe of Madame d'Henin or the guide of M. de Beaufort, which they could not quite promise even for the next day; and to me the next hour seemed the delay of an age. I went, therefore to order a chaise at six on the road to Luxembourg. The' answer was, that no horses were to be had! Almost distracted, I flew myself to the inn; but the answer was repeated! The route to Luxembourg, they told me, was infested with straggling parties, first, from the wandering army of Grouchy, now rendered pillagers from want of food ; and next, from the pursuing army of the Prussians, who made themselves pillagers also through the rights of conquest. To travel in a chaise would be impracticable, they assured me, without a guard. I now resolved upon travelling in the diligence, and desired to secure a place in that for Tr�ves. There was none to that city ! "And what is the nearest town to Tr�ves, whence I might go on in a chaise?" "Luxembourg." I bespoke a place, but was told that the diligence had set off the very day before, and that none other would go for six days, as it only quitted Brussels once a week. My friend the Baroness de Spagen next told me that, if travel I would, I had but to go by Li�ge, which, though not a direct, was the only safe road; that then she would put me under the protection of her brother-in-law, the Comte de Spagen, who was himself proceeding to that city by the ensuing night- coach. I accepted this kindness with rapture. I flew myself to the book-keeper I had so abruptly quitted, and instantly secured a place in the Li�ge diligence for night; and I was taking leave of my hosts, a Brussels fiacre being at the door, laden with my little luggage, when I was told that Le Roi, the confidential servant of Madame d'Henin, besought to speak a word to me from his mistress. He told me that the Princesse 'was quite miserable at my hazardous plan, which she had gathered from Madame de la Tour du Pin, and that she Page 371 supplicated me to postpone my purpose only till the next day, when I should have some one of trust to accompany me. I assured him that nothing now could make me risk procrastination, but begged him to still the fears of the excellent Princesse by acquainting her I should be under the protection of the Comte de Spagen. arrived at the inn after this last unprepared-for impediment, three or four minutes too late ! What was the fermentation of my mind at this news! A whole week I must wait for the next diligence, and even then lose the aid and countenance of le Comte de Spagen. Le Roi, who, through some short cut of footpaths and alleys, had got to the inn before me, earnestly pressed me, in the style of the confidential old servants of the French nobility, to go and compose myself chez la princesse. Even my host and hostess had pursued to wish me again good-bye, and now expressed their warm hopes I should return to them. But the book-keeper alone spoke a language to snatch me from despair, by saying my fiacre might perhaps catch the diligence two miles off, in the All�e Verte, where it commonly stopped for fresh passengers or parcels. Eagerly I promised the coachman a reward if he could succeed, and off he drove. The diligence was at the appointed place, and that instant ready to proceed ! I rushed into it with trepidation of hurry, and when more composed, I was eager to find out which of my fellow- travellers might be the Comte de Spagen; but I dared risk no question. I sat wholly silent. We arrived at Li�ge about nine in the morning I now advanced to the book-keeper, and made inquiries about the Comte de Spagen. He had arrived in the earlier coach, and was gone on in some other to his estates. As calmly as was in my power, I then declared my purpose to go to Tr�ves, and begged to be put on my way. I was come wrong, the book-keeper answered; the road was by Luxembourg. And how was I to get thither? By Brussels, he said, and a week hence, the diligence having set off the day before. Alas, I well knew that! and entreated some other means to forward me to Tr�ves, Page 372 He replied that he knew of none from Li ge; but that if I would go to Aix, I might there, perhaps, though it was out of the road, hear of some conveyance; but he asserted it was utterly impossible I could leave Li ge without a passport from the Prussian police-office, where I should only and surely be detained if I had not one to show from whence I came. This happily, reminded me of the one I had from M. de jaucourt' in Paris, and which was fortunately, though accidentally, in my hand-basket. Arrived at Aix, I earnestly inquired for a conveyance to Tr�ves; none existed! nor could I hear of any at all, save a diligence to juliers, which was to set out at four o'clock the next morning. To lose thus a whole day, and even then to go only more north instead of south, almost cast me into despair. But redress there was none, and I was forced to secure myself a place to juliers, whence, I was told, I might get on. At any more tranquil period I should have seized this interval for visiting the famous old cathedral and the tomb of Charlemagne; but now I thought not of them; I did not even recollect that Aix-la-Chapelle had been the capital of that emperor. I merely saw the town through a misty, mizzling rain, and that the road all around it was sandy and heavy, or that all was discoloured by my own disturbed view. I laid down, in a scarcely furnished apartment, without undressing. I suffered no shutter or curtain to be closed, lest i should lose my vehicle ; and such was my anxiety, that at three o'clock, by my own watch, I descended to inquire if we were not to set off. I wandered about by the twilight of a season that is never quite dark, but met no one. I returned to my chamber, but, always in terror of being forgotten, descended again in a quarter of an hour, though still without success. An hour, says Dr. Johnson, may be tedious, but it cannot be long : four o'clock at last struck, and I ran into a vehicle then ready in the courtyard of the auberge.(284) I found myself alone, which, at first, was a great relief to my mind, that was overburthened with care and apprehension, and glad of utter silence. Ere long, however, I found it fed my melancholy, which it was my business rather to combat and I was not, therefore, sorry when a poor woman with a child was admitted from the outside through the charity of the coachman, as the rain grew heavier. Page 373 At juliers we stopped at a rather large inn, at the head of an immensely long market-place. It was nearly empty, except where occupied by straggling soldiers, poor, lame, or infirm labourers, women, and children. The universal war of the Continent left scarcely a man unmaimed to be seen in civil life. The women who met my eyes were all fat, with very round and very brown faces. Most of them were barefooted, nay, barelegged, and had on odd small caps, very close round their visages. The better sort, I fancy, at that critical time, had hidden themselves or fled the town. We entered Cologne through an avenue, said to be seven miles in length, of lime-trees. It was evening, but very light, and Cologne had a striking appearance, from its magnitude and from its profusion of steeples. The better sort of houses were white and looked neat, though in an old-fashioned style, and elaborately ornamented. But, between the ravages of time and of war, the greater part of them seemed crumbling away, if not tumbling down. A FRIENDLY RECEPTION AT COLOGNE. But while I expected to be driven on to some auberge, a police officer, in a Prussian uniform, came to the coach-door, and demanded our passports. My companion made herself known as a native, and was let out directly. The officer, having cast his eye over my passport, put his head through the window of the carriage, and, in a low whisper, asked me whether I were French? French by marriage, though English by birth, I hardly knew which to call myself; I said, however, "Oui." He then, in a voice yet more subdued, gave me to understand that he could serve me. I caught at his offer, and told him I earnestly desired to go straight to Tr�ves, to a wounded friend. He would do for me what he could, he answered, for he was French himself, though employed by the Prussians. He would carry my passport for me to the magistrate of the place and get it signed without my having any further trouble though only, he feared, to Bonn, or, at farthest, to Coblenz, whence I might probably proceed unmolested. He knew also, and could recommend me to a most respectable lady and gentleman, both French, and under the Prussian hard gripe, where I might spend the evening en famille, and be spared entering any auberge. Page 374 He conducted me, in silence, passing through the cloisters to a house not far distant, and very retired in its appearance'. Arrived at a door at which he knocked or rang, he still spoke not a word, but when an old man came to open it, in a shabby dress, but with a good and lively face, be gave him some directions in German and in a whisper, and then entrusted with my passport, he bowed to me and hurried away. The old man led me to a very large room, scarcely at all furnished. He pulled out of a niche a sort of ebony armchair, very tottering and worn, and said he would call madame, for whom he also placed a fauteuil, at the head of an immense and clumsy table. I was then joined by an elderly gentlewoman, who was led in ceremoniously by a gentleman still more elderly. The latter made me three profound obeisances, which I returned with due imitation, while the lady approached me with good breeding, and begged me to take my seat. The old man then, who I found was their domestic, served the tea. I know not whether this was their general custom, or a compliment to a stranger. But when we had all taken some, they opened into a little conversation. It was I, indeed, who began by apologising for my intrusion, and expressing at the same time my great relief in being spared going to an auberge, alone as I was; but I assured them that the gentleman who had brought me to their dwelling had acted entirely by his own uninfluenced authority. They smiled or rather tried to smile, for melancholy was seated on their countenances in its most fixed colours and they told me that person was their best friend, and lost no opportunity to offer them succour or comfort. He had let them know my situation, and had desired they would welcome and cheer me. Welcome me, the lady added in French, they did gladly, since I was in distress; but they had little power to cheer me, involved as they were themselves in the depths of sorrow. Sympathy of compassion soon led to sympathy of confidence; and when they heard to whom I belonged, and the nature of my terrible haste, they related their own sad history. Death, misfortune, and oppression had all laid on them their iron hands ; they had lost their sons while forcibly fighting for a usurpation which they abhorred; they had lost their property by emigration; and they had been treated with Page 375 equal harshness by the revolutionists because they were suspected of loyalty, and by the royalists because their children had served in the armies of the revolutionists. They were now living nearly in penury, and owed their safety and peace solely to the protection of the officer who had brought me to them. With communications such as these, time passed so little heavily, however sadly, that we were ill-disposed to separate; and eleven o'clock struck, as we sat over their economical but well served and well cooked little supper, ere the idea of retiring was mentioned. They then begged me to go to rest, as I must be at the diligence for Coblenz by four o'clock the next morning. To another large room, nearly empty except the old, high, and narrow bed, the domestic now conducted me, promising to call me at half-past three o'clock in the morning, and to attend me to the diligence. I did not dare undress; I tied my watch, which was a small repeater, round my wrist, and laid down in my clothes-but to strike my watch, and to pray for my beloved invalid, and my safe restoration to him, filled up, without, I believe, three minutes of repose, the interval to my conductor's return. At half-past three we set out, after I had safely deposited all I durst spare, where my disinterested, but most poor host would inevitably find my little offering, which, if presented to him, he would probably have refused. I never heard his name, which he seemed studious to hold back; but I have reason to think he was of the ancient provincial noblesse. His manners, and those of his wife, had an antique etiquette in them that can only accord with that idea. The walk was immensely long; it was through the scraggy and hilly streets I have mentioned, and I really thought it endless. The good domestic carried my luggage. The height of the houses made the light merely not darkness ; we met not a creature; and the painful pavement and barred windows, and fear of being too late, made the walk still more dreary. I was but just in time; the diligence was already drawn out of the inn-yard, and some friends of the passengers were taking leave. I eagerly secured my place - and never so much regretted the paucity of my purse as in my inability to recompense as I wished the excellent domestic whom I now quitted. Page 376 FROM COLOGNE TO COBLENZ AND TREVES. I found myself now in much better society than I had yet been, consisting of two gentlemen, evidently of good education, and a lady. They were all, German, and spoke only that language one to another, though they addressed me in French as often as my absorption in my own ruminations gave any opening for their civility. And this was soon the case, by my hearing them speak of the Rhine ; my thoughts were so little geographical that it had not occurred to me that Cologne was upon that river - I had not, therefore, looked for or perceived it the preceding evening: but upon my now starting at the sound of its name and expressing my Strong -curiosity to behold it, they all began to watch for the first point upon which it became clearly visible, and all five with one voice called out presently after, "Ah, le voil !"(285) But imagination had raised expectations that the Rhine, at this part of its stream, would by no means answer. It seemed neither so wide, so deep, so rapid, nor so grand as my mind had depicted it nor yet were its waters so white or bright as to suit my ideas of its fame. At last my heart became better tuned. I was now on my right road; no longer travelling zig-zag, and as I could procure any means to get on, but in the straight road, by Coblenz, to the city which contained the object of all my solicitude. And then it was that my eyes opened to the beauties of nature; then it was that the far-famed Rhine found justice in those poor little eyes, which hitherto, from mental preoccupation, or from expectations too high raised, had refused a cordial tribute to its eminent beauty, unless indeed its banks, till after Bonn, are of inferior loveliness. Certain it is, that from this time till my arrival at Coblenz, I thought myself in regions of enchantment. >From Coblenz to Tr�ves I was two days travelling, though it might with ease have been accomplished in less than half that time. We no longer journeyed in any diligence that may be compared with one of France or of England, but in a queer German carriage, resembling something mixed of a coach, a chaise, and a cart. Page 377 MEETING WITH GENERAL D'ARBLAY. At Tr�ves, at length, on Monday evening, the 24th of July, 1815, I arrived in a tremor of joy and terror indescribable. But my first care was to avoid hazarding any mischief from surprise; and my first measure was to obtain some intelligence previously to risking an interview. It was now six days since any tidings had reached me. My own last act in leaving Brussels had been to write a few lines to M. de Premorel, my General's aide-de-camp, to announce my journey, and prepare him for my arrival. I now wrote a few lines to the valet of Monsieur d'Arblay, and desired he would come instantly to the inn for the baggage of Madame d'Arblay, who was then on the road. Hardly five minutes elapsed ere Fran�ois, running like a race-horse, though in himself a staid and composed German, appeared before me. How I shook at his sight with terrific suspense ! The good-natured creature relieved me instantly though with a relief that struck at my heart with a pang of agony--for he said that the danger was over, and that both the surgeons said so. He was safe, I thanked God ! but danger, positive danger had existed! Faint I felt, though in a tumult of grateful sensations: I took his arm, for my tottering feet would hardly support me; and M. de Premorel, hastening to meet me at the street-door, told me that the general was certain I was already at Tr�ves; I therefore permitted myself to enter his apartment at once. Dreadfully suffering, but still mentally occupied by the duties of his profession, I found him. Three wounds had been inflicted on his leg by the kick of a wild horse, which he had bought at Tr�ves, with intent to train to military service. He was felled by them to the ground. Yet, had he been skilfully attended, he might have been completely cured! But all the best surgeons, throughout every district, had been seized upon for the armies : and the ignorant hands into which he fell aggravated the evil, by incisions hazardous, unnecessary, and torturing. WAITING FOR LEAVE TO RETURN To FRANCE. The adjoint of M. d'Arblay, M. le Comte de Mazancourt, had been sent to Paris by M. d'Arblay, to demand leave and Page 378 passports for returning to France, the battle and peace of Waterloo having ended the purpose for which he had been appointed by Louis XVIII., through the orders of the Mar�chal Duc de Feltre, minister at war, to raise recruits from the faithful who wished to quit the usurper. My poor sufferer had been quartered upon M. Nell, a gentleman of Tr�ves; but there was no room for me at M. Nell's, and I was obliged-most reluctantly-to be conducted to an hotel at some distance. But the next day M. d'Arblay entered into an agreement with Madame de la Grange, a lady of condition who resided at Tr�ves, to admit me to eat and lodge at her house, upon the picnic plan, of paying the overplus of that expense I should cause her, with a proper consideration, not mentioned, but added by my dear general, for my apartment and incidental matters. This sort of plan, since their ruin by the Revolution, had become so common as to be called fashionable amongst the aristocratic noblesse, who were too much impoverished to receive their friends under their roofs but by community of fortune during their junction. Every morning after breakfast one of the family conducted me back to M. Nell's, where I remained till the hour of dinner, when M. Godefroy de Premorel commonly gave me le bras for returning, and Fran�ois watched for me at the end of the repast. This was to me a cruel arrangement, forcing my so frequent absences; but I had no choice. It was not till after reiterated applications by letter, and by MM. de Mazancourt and Premorel in person, that my poor general could obtain his letters of recall; though the re-establishment of Louis XVIII. on his throne made the mission on the frontiers null, and though the hapless and helpless state of health of M. d'Arblay would have rendered him incapable of continuing to fulfil its duties if any yet were left to perform. The mighty change of affairs so completely occupied men's minds, as well as their hands, that they could work only for themselves and the present : the absent were utterly forgotten. The Duc de Luxembourg, however, at length interfered, and procured passports, with the ceremonies of recall. DEPARTURE FOR PARIS. On the morning of our departure from Tr�ves, all the families of Nell and La Grange filled the courtyard, and surrounded the little carriage in which we set out, with others, Page 379 unknown to me, but acquainted with the general, and lamenting to lose sight of him-as who that ever knew him failed doing? M. de Mazancourt and the De Premorels had preceded us. The difficulty of placing the poor wounded leg was great and grievous, and our journey was anything but gay; the cure, alas, was so much worse than incomplete! The spirits of the poor worn invalid were sunk, and, like his bodily strength, exhausted; it was so new to him to be helpless, and so melancholy ! After being always the most active, the most enterprising, the most ingenious in difficulty and mischance, and the most vivacious in conquering evils, and combating accidents;-to find himself thus suddenly bereft not only of his powers to serve and oblige all around him, but even of all means of aiding and sufficing to himself, was profoundly dejecting ; nor, to his patriot-heart, was this all: far otherwise. We re-entered France by the permission of foreigners, and could only re-enter at all by passports of all the Allies! It seemed as if all Europe had freer egress to that country than its natives! Yet no one more rejoiced in the victory of Waterloo--no one was more elated by the prospect of its glorious results: for the restoration of the monarchy he was most willing to shed the last drop of his blood. But not such was the manner in which he had hoped to see it take place ; he had hoped it would have been more spontaneous, and the work of the French themselves to overthrow the usurpation. He felt, therefore, severely shocked, when, at the gates of Thionville, upon demanding admittance by giving his name, his military rank, and his personal passport, he was disregarded and unheard by a Prussian sub-officer--a Prussian to repulse a French general, in the immediate service of his king, from entering France! His choler rose, in defiance of sickness and infirmity; but neither indignation nor representation were of any avail, till he condescended to search his portefeuille for a passport of All the Allies, which the Duc de Luxembourg had wisely forwarded to Tr�ves, joined to that of the minister at war. Yet the Prussian was not to blame,. save for his uncourteous manners : the King of France was only such, at that moment, through Bl�cher and Wellington. Three or four days, I think, we passed at Metz, where the general put himself Into the hands of a surgeon of eminence, who did what was now to be done to rectify the gross mismanagement at Tr�ves. In this time I saw all that was most Page 380 worth remark in the old and famous city of Metz. But it looked drear and abandoned- as everywhere during my journey. Nothing was yet restored, for confidence was wanting in the state of things. Wellington and Bl�cher, the lords of the ascendant, seemed alone gifted with the Power of foreseeing, as they had been instrumentally of regulating, events. A CHANCE VIEW OF THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA. Not long after, I forget exactly where, we came under new yet still foreign masters--the Russians ; who kept Posts, like sentinels, along the high road, at stated distances. They were gentle and well-behaved, in a manner and to a degree that was really almost edifying. On the plains of Chalons there was a grand Russian encampment. We stopped half a day for rest at some small place in its neighbourhood and I walked about, guarded by the good Fran�ois, to view it. But, on surveying a large old house, which attracted my notice by a group of Russian officers that I observed near its entrance, how was I struck on being told by Fran�ois, that the Emperor of all the Russias was at that moment its inhabitant! At the entrance of the little gate that opened the palisade stood a lady with two or three gentlemen. There was no crowd, and no party of guards, nor any sign of caution or parade of grandeur, around this royally honoured dwelling. And, in a few minutes, the door was quietly opened and the emperor came out, in an undress uniform, wearing no stars nor orders, and with an air of gay good humour, and unassuming ease. There was something in his whole appearance of hilarity, freedom, youthfulness, and total absence of all thought of state and power, that would have led me much sooner to suppose him a jocund young Lubin, or country esquire, than an emperor, warrior, or a statesman. The lady curtsied low, and her gentlemen bowed profoundly as he reached the group. He instantly recognised them, and seemed enchanted at their sight. A sprightly conversation ensued, in which he addressed himself chiefly to the lady, who seemed accustomed to his notice, yet to receive it with a species of rapture. The gentlemen also had the easy address of conscious welcome to inspirit them, and I never followed up a conversation I could not hear, with more certainty of its being agreeable to all parties. They all spoke French, and I was restrained only by my own sense of propriety from advancing Page 381 within hearing 'of every word; for no sentinel, nor guard of any kind, interfered to keep the few lookers on at a distance; This discourse over, be gallantly touched his bat and leaped into his open carriage, attended by a Russian officer, and was out of sight in a moment. How far more happy, disengaged, and to his advantage, was this view of his imperial majesty, than that which I had had the year before in England, where the crowds that surrounded, and the pressure of unrestrained curiosity and forwardness, certainly embarrassed, if they did not actually displease him! ENGLISH TROOPS IN OCCUPATION. At Meaux I left again my captive companion for a quarter of an hour to visit the cathedral of the sublimely eloquent Bossuet. In happier moments I should not have rested Without discovering and tracing the house, the chamber, the library, the study, the garden which had been as it were sanctified by his virtues, his piety, his learning, and his genius and oh, how eagerly, if not a captive, would my noble-minded companion have been my conductor! A new change again of military control soon followed, at which I grieved for my beloved companion. I almost felt ashamed to look at him, though my heart involuntarily, irresistibly palpitated with emotions which had little, indeed, in unison with either grief or shame; for the sentinels, the guards, the camps, became English. All converse between us now stopped involuntarily, and as if by tacit agreement. M. d'Arblay was too sincere a loyalist to be sorry, yet too high-spirited a freeman to be satisfied. I could devise nothing; to say that might not cause some painful discussion or afflicting retrospection, and we travelled many miles in pensive silence-each nevertheless intensely observant of the astonishing new scene presented to our view, on re-entering the capital of France, to see the vision of Henry V. revived, and Paris in the hands of the English! I must not omit to mention that notwithstanding this complete victory over Bonaparte, the whole of the peasantry and common people, converse with them when or where or how I might during our route, with one accord avowed themselves utterly incredulous of his defeat. They all believed he Page 382 had only given way in order that he might come forward with new forces to extirpate all opposers, and exalt himself on their ashes to permanent dominion. LEAVETAKING: M. DE TALLEYRAND. On the eve of setting out for England, I went round to all I could reach of my intimate acquaintance, to make--as it has proved--a last farewell! M. de Talleyrand came in to Madame de Laval's drawing-room during my visit of leavetaking. He was named upon entering; but there is no chance he could recollect me, as I had not seen him since the first month or two after my marriage, when he accompanied M. de Narbonne and M. de Beaumetz to our cottage at Bookham. I could not forbear whispering to Madame de Laval, how many souvenirs his sight awakened! M. de Narbonne was gone, who made so much of our social felicity during the period of our former acquaintance; and Mr. Locke was gone, who made its highest intellectual delight; and Madame de Stael,(286) who gave it a zest of wit, deep thinking, and light speaking, of almost unexampled entertainment; and my beloved sister Phillips, whose sweetness, intelligence, grace, and sensibility won every heart: these were gone, who all, during the sprightly period in which I was known to M. Talleyrand, had almost always made our society. Ah! what parties were those! how select, how refined though sportive, how investigatingly sagacious though invariably well-bred! Madame de Laval sighed deeply, without answering me, but I left M. de Talleyrand to Madame la Duchesse de Luynes, and a sister of A le Duc de Luxembourg, and another lady or two, while I engaged my truly amiable hostess, till I rose to depart: and then, in passing the chair of M. de Talleyrand, who gravely and silently, but politely, rose and bowed, I said, "M. de Talleyrand m'a oubli: mais on n'oublie pas M. de Talleyrand."(287) I left the room with quickness, but saw a movement of surprise by no means unpleasant break over the habitual placidity, the nearly imperturbable composure of his made-up countenance. Page 383 our journey was eventless, yet sad; sad, not solely, though chiefly, from the continued sufferings of my wounded companion, but sad also, that I quitted so many dear friends, who had wrought themselves, by innumerable kindnesses, into my affections, and who knew not, for we could not bring ourselves to utter words that must have reciprocated so much pain, that our intended future residence was England. The most tender and generous of fathers had taken this difficult resolution for the sake of his son, whose earnest wish had been repeatedly expressed for permission to establish himself in the land of his birth. That my wishes led to the same point, there could be no doubt, and powerfully did they weigh with the most disinterested and most indulgent of husbands. All that could be suggested to compromise what was jarring in our feelings, so as to save all parties from murmuring or regret, was the plan of a yearly journey to France. (273) Minister of war. (274) About the close of the year 1813, when Napoleon's star was setting, and his enemies were pressing hard upon him, the Dutch threw off the yoke of France, recalled the Prince of Orange, and proclaimed him at Amsterdam King of the United Netherlands, by the title of William I.-ED. (275) On the first floor. (276) Lady Caroline Lamb (born in 1785) was the wife of the Hon. William Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne and prime minister of England. A year or two before Fanny saw her, she was violently in love with Lord Byron: "absolutely besieged him," Rogers said. Byron was not unwilling to be besieged, though he presently grew tired of the lady, and broke off their correspondence, to her great distress, with an insulting and rather heartless letter. But it was more than a mere flirtation on Lady Caroline's part. She fainted away on meeting Byron's funeral (1824); "her mind became more affected; she was separated from her husband and died 26 January, 1828, generously cared for by him to the last."(Dict. of National Biography.) She was the author of two or three novel.-ED. (277) Son of the Duke of Brunswick who invaded France in 1792, and who died in 1806 of the wounds which he received in the battle of Jena. His son was killed at Quatre Bras, June 16, 1815.-ED. (278) "Bonaparte is taken! there he is!" (279) Alarm. (280) Fortresses. (281) Litters. (282) Both reports were false. Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon's youngest brother, formerly King of Westphalia, was wounded in the groin at Quatre Bras, two days before the battle of Waterloo. His wound, however, was not so severe as to prevent him from serving at Waterloo, and, after the flight of the Emperor to Paris, Jerome remained to conduct the retreat and rally the fugitives. General Vandamme was not at Waterloo at all, nor was he wounded. He was attached to the army commanded by Marshal Grouchy, and was engaged in a useless conflict with the Prussian rear-guard at Wavres on the day of the decisive battle.-ED. (283) Another false rumour. Murat was in France during the whole of the Waterloo campaign. This distinguished soldier had married Caroline Bonaparte, the youngest sister of Napoleon, by whom he was made King of Naples. In December, 1813, Murat was ungrateful enough to join the allied powers against the Emperor, but, after Napoleon's return from Elba, he threw himself into the war with characteristic precipitation. Marching from Naples with an army of 50,000 men, he occupied Rome and Florence, but was soon after totally defeated by the Austrians, and escaped with difficulty to France. The Emperor refused to see him. After the final abdication of Napoleon, Murat made a desperate attempt, with a handful of men, to regain his kingdom of Naples. He was taken prisoner, tried by a military commission, condemned to death, and immediately shot. At St. Helena Napoleon said of him, "It was his fate to ruin us every way; once by declaring against us, and again by unadvisedly taking our part."-ED. (284) Inn. (285) "Ah! there it is!" (286) This was a misapprehension. Madame de Stael died at Paris, July 14, 1817. The above narrative was written at a period some years later than that of the events to which it relates, and hence, in all probability, the mistake arose.-ED. (287) "M. de Talleyrand has forgotten me; but one does not forget M. de Talleyrand." Page 384 SECTION 26. (1815-8) AT BATH AND ILFRACOMBE: GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S ILLNESS AND DEATH. ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke and Mrs. Angerstein.) Dover, Oct. 18, 1815. Last night, my ever dear friends, we arrived once more in old England. I write this to send the moment I land in London. I cannot boast of our health, our looks, our strength, but I hope we may recover a part of all when our direful fatigues, mental and corporeal, cease to utterly weigh upon and wear us. We shall winter in Bath. The waters of Plombi�res have been recommended to my poor boiteux,(288) but he has obtained a cong� that allows this change. Besides his present utter incapacity for military service, he is now unavoidably on the retraite(289 list, and the King of France permits his coming over, not alone without difficulty, but with wishing him a good journey, through the Duc de Luxembourg, his captain in the gardes du corps. Adieu, dearest both--Almost I embrace you in dating from Dover. Had you my letter from Tr�ves? I suspect not, for my melancholy new history would have brought your kind condolence: or, otherwise, that missed me. Our letters were almost all intercepted by the Prussians while we were Page 385 there. Not one answer arrived to us from Paris, save by private hands. . . . December 24, 1815. My heart has been almost torn asunder, of late, by the dreadful losses which the newspapers have communicated to me, of the two dearest friends(290) of my absent partner ; both sacrificed in the late sanguinary conflicts. It has been with difficulty I have forborne attempting to return to him ; but a winter voyage might risk giving him another loss. The death of one of these so untimely departed favourites, how will Madame de Stael support? Pray tell me if you hear any thing of her, and what. . . . [With the year 1816 a new section of Madame d'Arblay's correspondence may be said to commence in her letters to her son, the late Rev. A. d'Arblay, who was then pursuing his studies at Caius college, Cambridge. It has been thought advisable to be more sparing in publication from this, than from the earlier portions of Madame d'Arblay's correspondence. Without, however, a few of these letters to her son, "the child of many hopes," this picture of her mind, with all its tenderness, playfulness, and sound sense, would scarcely be complete.] ALEXANDER D'ARBLAY: SOME OLD BATH FRIENDS. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke) Bath, February 15, 1816. Incredible is the time I have lost without giving in that claim which has never been given in vain for news of my own ,dear friend - but I have been-though not ill, so continually unwell, and though not, as so recently, in disordered and disorganizing difficulties, yet so incessantly occupied with small, but indispensable occupations, that the post hour has always gone by to-day to be waited for to-morrow. Yet my heart has never been satisfied-I don't mean with itself, for with that it can never quarrel on this subject,-but with my pen-my slack, worn, irregular, fugitive, fatigued, yet ever faithful, though never punctual pen. My dearest friend forgives, I know, even that; but her known and unvarying lenity is the very cause I cannot forgive it myself. We have had our Alexander for six weeks; he left us three \ Page 386 days ago, and I won't tell my dear friend whether or not we miss him. He is precisely such as he was--as inartificial in his character, as irregular in his studies. He cannot bring himself to conquer his disgust of the routine of labour at Cambridge; and while he energetically argues upon the innocence of a preference to his own early practice,(291) which he vindicates, I believe unanswerably, with regard to its real superiority, he is insensible, at least forgetful, of all that can be urged of the mischiefs to his prospects in life that must result from his not conquering his inclinations,"- I have nearly lost all hope of his taking the high degree A judged to him by general expectation at the University, from the promise of his opening. Of old friends here, I have found stationary, Mrs. Holroyd, and Mrs. Frances. and Harriet Bowdler. Mrs. Holroyd still gives parties, and tempted me to hear a little medley music, as she called it. Mrs. F. Bowdler lives on Lansdowne-crescent, and scarcely ever comes down the hill. Mrs. Harriet I have missed, though we have repeatedly sought a meeting on both sides ; but she left Bath for some excursion soon after my arrival. Another new resident here will excite, I am sure, a more animated interest ' Mrs. Piozzi. The Bishop of Salisbury, my old friend, found me out, and came to make me a long and most amiable visit, which was preceded by Mrs. I-, and we all spent an evening with them very sociably and pleasantly. FRENCH AFFAIRS. GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S HEALTH. (Madame d'Arblay to her Son.) Bath, Friday, April 2, 1816. ......The Oppositionists, and all their friends, have now a dread of France, and bend their way to Italy. But the example now given at Paris, in the affair of Messrs. Wilson and Co.(292) that Englishmen are as amenable to the laws and customs of the countries which they inhabit, as foreigners while in England are to ours, will make them more careful, both in spirit and conduct, than heretofore they have deemed it necessary to be, all over the globe. It is a general opinion Page 387 that there will be a great emigration this summer, because John Bull longs to see something beyond the limited circumference of his birthright - but that foreign nations will be now so watchful of his proceedings, so jealous of his correspondence, and so easily offended by his declamation or epigrams, that he will be glad to return here, where liberty, when not abused, allows a real and free exercise of true independence of mind, speech, and conduct, such as no other part of the world affords. I am truly happy not to be at Paris at such a juncture ; for opinions must be cruelly divided, and society almost out of the question. Our letters all confess that scarcely one family is d'acord even with itself. The overstraining royalists make moderate men appear jacobins. The good king must be torn to pieces between his own disposition to clemency, and the vehemence of his partisans against risking any more a general amnesty. All that consoles me for the length of time required for the cure of your padre's leg is the consequence, in its keeping off his purposed visit. A cold has forced him to relinquish the pump till to-day, when he is gone to make another essay. He is so popular in Bath, that he is visited here by everybody that can make any pretext for calling. I have this moment been interrupted by a letter to invite me with my " bewitching husband " to a villa near Prior Park. He is not insensible to the kindness he meets with - au contraire, it adds greatly to his contentment in the steadiness of a certain young sprig that is inducing him here to plant his final choux; and the more, as we find that, as far as that sprig has been seen here, he, also, has left so favourable an impression, that we are continually desired to introduce him, on his next arrival, wherever we go. Your kind father, upon your last opening of "All here is well," instantly ran down stairs, with a hop, skip, and a jump, and agreed to secure our pretty lodgings for a year. THE ESCAPE OF LAVALETTE. THE STREATHAM PORTRAITS. (Madame d'Arblay to her Son.) Bath, April 30, 1816. The three chevaliers have all been condemned as culpable of aiding a state-criminal to escape, but not accused of any conspiracy against the French government. They Page 388 are therefore, sentenced merely to three months' imprisonment.(293) Certainly, if their logic were irrefutable, and if the treaty of Paris included the royal pardon with the amnesty accorded by the allied generals, then, to save those who ought not to have been tried would have been meritorious rather than illegal; but the king had no share in that treaty, which could only hold good in a military sense, of security from military prosecution or punishment from the Allies. These Allies, however, did not call themselves conquerors, nor take Paris, nor judge the Parisians ; but so far as belonged to a capitulation, meant, on both sides, to save the capital and its inhabitants from pillage and the sword. Once restored to its rightful monarch, all foreign interference was at an end. Having been seated on the throne by the nation, and having never abdicated, though he had been chased by rebellion from his kingdom, he had never forfeited his privilege to judge which of his subjects were still included in his original amnesty, and which had incurred the penalty or chances of being tried by the laws of the land - and by them, not by royal decree, condemned or acquitted. A false idea seems encouraged by all the king's enemies, that his amnesty ought to have secured pardon to the condemned: the amnesty could only act up to the period when it was granted and accepted; it could have nothing to do with after-offences. I am grieved to lose my respect and esteem for a character I had considered so heroical as that of Sir R. Wilson: but to find, through his intercepted correspondence, that the persecution Page 389 of the Protestants was to be asserted, true or false, to blacken the reigning dynasty. . . to find this truly diabolic idea presented to him by a brother of whom he speaks as the partner of all his thoughts, etc., has consumed every spark of favour in which he was held throughout the whole nation, except, perhaps, in those whom party will make deaf and blind for ever to what opposes their own views and schemes. I do not envy Lord Grey for being a third in such an intercourse, an intercourse teeming with inventive plots and wishes for new revolutions ! Your uncle has bought the picture of my dearest father at Streatham.(294) I am truly rejoiced it will come into our family, since the collection for which it was painted is broken up. Your uncle has also bought the Garrick, which was one of the most agreeable and delightful of the set. To what recollections, at once painful and pleasing, does this sale give birth! In the library, in which those pictures were hung, we always breakfasted; and there I have had as many precious conversations with the great and good Dr. Johnson as there are days in the year. Dr. Johnson sold the highest of all! 'tis an honour to our age, that!--360 pounds! My dear father would have been mounted higher, but that his son Charles was there to bid for himself, and, everybody must have seen, was resolved to have it. There was besides, I doubt not, a feeling for his lineal claim and pious desire. REGARDING HUSBAND AND SON. (Madame d'Arblay to a Friend.) Bath, August 17, 1816. I have been in a state of much uncertainty and disturbance since I wrote last with respect to one of the dearest possible interests of life, the maternal: the uncertainty, however, for this epoch is over, and I will hasten to communicate to you its result, that I may demand further and frequent accounts of your own plans, and of their execution or change, success Page 390 or failure. All that concerns you, must to me always be near and dear. General d'Arblay is gone to France, and here at Bath rest sa femme et son fils.(295) There was no adjusting the excursion but by separation. Alexander would have been wilder than ever for his French mathematics in re-visiting Paris ; and, till his degree is taken, we must not contribute to lowering it by feasting his opposing pursuits with fresh nourishment, M. d'Arblay nevertheless could by no means forego his intention which a thousand circumstances led him to consider as right' He could not, indeed, feel himself perfectly sa place without paying his devoirs to his king, notwithstanding he has been put by his majesty himself, not by his own desire, en retraite. The exigencies of the treasury demand this, for all who are not young enough for vigorous active service; but his wounded leg prevented his returning thanks sooner for the promotion with which the king finished and recompensed his services;(296) and therefore he deems it indispensable to present himself at the foot of the throne for that purpose now that he is able to "bear his body more seemly" (like Audrey) in the royal presence. He hopes also to arrange for receiving here his half-pay, when sickness or affairs or accident may prevent his crossing the Channel. Choice and happiness will, to his last breath, carry him annually to France ; for, not to separate us from his son, or in the bud of life, to force that son's inclination in fixing his place or mode of residence, alone decides his not fixing there his own last staff. But Alexander, young as he left that country, has seen enough of it to be aware that no line is open there to ambition or importance, but the military, most especially for the son of an officer so known and marked for his military character: and I need not tell you that, with my feelings and sentiments, to see him wield a sword that could only lead him to renown by being drawn against the country of his birth and of mine, would demolish my heart, and probably my head; and, to believe in any war in which England and France will not be rivals, is to entertain Arcadian hopes, fit only for shepherds and shepherdesses of the drama. Page 391 MATERNAL ANXIETIES. (Madame d'Arblay to General d'Arblay.) Bath, October 28th, 1816. Certainement, et tr�s certainement, mon bien cher ami, your beautiful strictures upon la connoissance et l'usage du monde would have given "un autre cours mes id�es"(297) were the object of our joint solicitude less singular; but our Alexander, mon ami, dear as he is to us, and big as are my hopes pour l'avenir,(298) our Alexander is far different from what you were at his age. More innocent, I grant, and therefore highly estimable, and worthy of our utmost care, and worthy of the whole heart of her to whom he shall permanently attach himself. But O, how far less aimable! He even piques himself upon the difference, as if that difference were to his advantage. He is a medley of good qualities and of faults the most extraordinary and the most indescribable. Enfin, except in years, in poetry, and in mathematics, il n'est encore qu'un enfant.(299) Were he so only as to la connoissance, et m�me l'usage du monde, I should immediately subscribe to the whole of your really admirable dissertation upon the subject in the letter now before me, for I should then sympathise in your idea that a lovely young companion might mould him to her own excellence, and polish him to our wishes; but O, nous n'en sommes pas l !(300) When he is wholly at his ease, as he is at present, with his mother, and as he would soon inevitably be with his wife, he is so uncouth, so negligent, and absent, that his frightened partner would either leave him in despair to himself, or, by reiterated attempts to reason with him, lose her bridal power, and raise the most dangerous dissensions. He exults rather than blushes in considering himself ignorant of all that belongs to common life, and of everything that is deemed useful. Even in mathematics he disdains whatever is not abstract and simply theoretical. "Trouble I hate" he calls his motto. You will easily conceive that there are moments, nay, days, in which he is more reasonable; I should else be Page 392 hopeless : nor will he ever dare hold such language to you. but it is not less the expression of his general mind. Sometimes, too, he wishes for wealth, but it is only that he might be supine. Poor youth ! he little sees 'how soon he would then become poor ! Yet, while thus open to every dupery and professedly without any sense of order, he is so fearful of ridicule, that a smile from his wife at any absurdity would fill him with the most gloomy indignation. It does so now from his mother. A wife, I foresee you will reply, young and beautiful, sera bien autre chose; mais je crois que vous Vous trompez:(301) a mistress, a bride,--oui! a mistress and a bride would see him her devoted slave ; but in the year following year, when ardent novelty is passed away, a mother loved as I am may form much judgment what will be the lot of the wife, always allowing for the attractions of reconciliation which belong exclusively to the marriage state, where it is happy. Nevertheless, I am completely of your opinion, that a good and lovely wife will ultimately soften his asperity, and give him a new taste for existence, by opening to him new sources of felicity, and exciting, as you justly suggest, new emulation to improvement, when he is wise enough to know how to appreciate, to treat, and to preserve such a treasure. But will four months fit him for beginning such a trial? Think of her, mon ami, as well as of him. The "responsibility" in this case would be yours for both, and exquisite would be your agony should either of them be unhappy. A darling daughter-an only child, nursed in the lap of soft prosperity, sole object of tenderness and of happiness to both her parents. rich, well-born, stranger to all care, and unused to any control; beautiful as a little angel, and (be very sure) not unconscious she is born to be adored ; endowed with talents to create admiration, independently of the �clat of her personal charms, and indulged from her cradle in every wish, every fantaisie.--Will such a young creature as this be happy with our Alexander after her bridal supremacy, when the ecstasy of his first transports are on the wane? That a beauty such as you describe might bring him, even from a first interview, to her feet, notwithstanding all his present prejudices against a French wife, I think probable enough, though he now thinks his taste in beauty different from yours; for he has never, he says, been struck but by a commanding air. All beauty, "Page 393 however, soon finds its own way to the heart. But could any permanent amendment ensue, from working upon his errors only through his passions? Is it not to be feared that as they, the passions, subside, the errors would all peep up again ? And she, who so prudently has already rejected a nearly accepted pr�tendant for his want of order!!!(302) (poor Alexander!) how will she be content to be a monitress, where she will find everything in useful life to teach, and nothing in return to learn? And even if he endure the perpetual tutoring, will not she sicken of her victories ere he wearies of his defeats? And will Alexander be fit or willing to live under the eye, which he will regard as living under the subjection, of his wife's relations? In this country there is no notion of that mode of married life -, and our proud Alexander, the more he may want counsel and guidance, will the more haughtily, from fearing to pass for a baby, resent them. Let me add, that nothing can be less surprising than that he should have fixed his own expectation of welfare in England. Recollect, mon ami, it is now nearly three years ago since you gave him, in a solemn and beautiful letter, his choice between Cambridge and la compagnie de -Luxembourg, into which you had entered him saying that your position exacted that you should take your son back to serve, or not at all. You have certainly kept his definite answer, from which he has never wavered. And again, only at your last departure, this August, you told us positively that you could not take your son to France at twenty-one years of age with any honour or propriety but to enter him in the army. I would else, you know, have shut myself up with him in some cottage au lys, merely for the great pleasure of accompanying you. Alexander, therefore, now annexes an idea of degradation to a residence non-military in France. He would deem himself humbled by the civil place at which you hint, even if you could bring him, which I doubt above all, to submit to its duties. He regards himself, from peculiar circumstances, as an established Englishman (though born of a French father), with your own full consent, nay, by your own conditions. I by no means believe he will ever settle out of England, though he delights to think of travelling. And such, mon ami, appeared to be your own sentiments Page 394 when we parted, though they are changed now, or overpowered by the new view that is presented to you of domestic felicity, for Alexander. I have written thus fully, and after the best meditation in my power, according to your desire ; an(] every reflection and observation upon the subject, and upon Alexander, unites in making me wish, with the whole Of my judgment and feeling at once, to keep back, not to forward, any matrimonial connection, for years, not months, unless month,,; first produce the change to his advantage that I dare only expect from years. ADVANTAGES OF BATH: YOUNG D'ARBLAY's DECREE. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) Bath, November 10, 1816. I wish to live at Bath, wish it devoutly ; for at Bath we shall live, or no longer in England. London will only do for those who have two houses, and of the real country I may say the same; for a cottage, now Monsieur d'Arblay cannot, as heretofore, brave all the seasons, to work, and embellish his wintry hours, by embellishing anticipatingly his garden, would be too lonely, in so small a family, for the long evenings of cold and severe weather; and would lose us Alexander half the year, as we could neither expect nor wish to see him begin life as a recluse from the world. Bath, therefore, as it eminently agrees with us all, is, in England, the only place for us, since here, all the year round, there is always town at command, and always the country for prospect, exercise, and delight. Therefore, my dear friend, not a word but in favour of Bath, if you love me. Our own finishing finale will soon take root here, or yonder; for Alex will take his degree in January, and then, his mind at liberty, and his faculties in their full capacity for meditating upon his lot in life, he will come to a decision what mountain he shall climb, upon which to fix his staff; for all that relates to worldly prosperity will to him be up-hill toil, and labour. Never did I see in youth a mind so quiet, so philosophic, in mundane matters, with a temper so eager, so impetuous, so burningly alive to subjects of science and literature. The Tancred scholarship is still in suspense. The vice-chancellor is our earnest friend, as well as our faithful Dr. Davy, but the trustees have come to no determination - and Alex is my companion-or rather, I am Alex's Page 395 flapper-till the learned doctors can agree. At all events, he will not come out in Physic; we shall rather enter him at another college, with all the concomitant expenses, than let him, from any economy, begin his public career under false colours. When he entered this institution, I had not any notion of this difficulty; I was ignorant there would be any objection against his turning which way he pleased when the time for taking the degree should arrive. I am now in almost daily hope of the return of my voyager. His last letter tells me to direct no more to Paris. [After this time General d'Arblay made frequent journeys to Paris.] PLAYFUL REPROACHES AND SOBER COUNSEL. (Madame d'Arblay to her Son.) Bath, Friday, April 25, 1817. Why, what a rogue you are! four days in town! As there can be no scholarship--h�las! it matters not; but who knew that circumstance when they played truant? Can you tell me that, hey! Mr Cantab? Why, you dish me as if I were no more worth than Paley or Newton, or such like worthies! Your dear padre is very considerably better, surtout in looks, but by no means re-established ; for cold air--too much exertion- -too little--and all sorts of nourishment or beverage that are not precisely adapted to the present state of the poor shattered frame, produce instant pain, uneasiness, restlessness, and suffering. Such, however, is the common condition of convalescence, and therefore I observe it with much more concern than surprise - and Mr. Hay assures me all is as well as can possibly be expected after so long and irksome an illness. "The scholarship is at an end-- So much for that!" pretty cool, my friend! Will it make you double your diligence for what is not at an end? hey, mon petit monsieur? But I am sorry for your disappointment in the affair you mention, my dear Alex : though your affections were not so far engaged, methinks, but that your amour propre(303) is still more bless�(304) than your heart! hey? However, 'tis a real loss, Page 396 though little more than of an ideal friend, at present. But no idea is so flattering and so sweet, as that which opens to expectation a treasure of such a sort. I am really, therefore, sorry for you, my dear Alex. Your determination to give way to no sudden impulse in future is quite right. Nothing is so pleasant as giving way to impulse; nothing so hazardous. But this history must double your value for Messrs. Jones Musgrave, Jacobs, Ebden, Theobald, and Whewell. "Cling to those who cling to you!" said the immortal Johnson to your mother, when she uttered something that seemed fastidious relative to a person whose partiality she did not prize. Your padre was prevailed upon to go to the play. We were both very well pleased with H. Payne in certain parts; in some instances I even thought him excellent, especially in the natural, gentlemanly, and pensive tones in which he went through the gravedigger's and other scenes of the last act. But, for the soliloquies, and the grand conference with the mother! oh, there, Garrick rose up to my remembrance with an �clat of perfection that mocks all approach of approbation for a successor. But you, M. Keanite, permit a little hint against those looks that convey your resentment. They may lead to results that may be unpleasant. It is best to avoid displaying a susceptibility that shows the regret all on your own side ! Let the matter die away as though it had never been. Assume your cool air; your "so much for that!" but do not mark a d�pit that will rather flatter than vex. At first, it was well ; you gave way to Nature and to truth, and made apparent you had been sincere : but there, for your dignity's sake, let all drop ; and be civil as well as cool, if you would keep the upper hand. PREPARATIONS FOR LEAVING BATH. (Madame d'Arblay to General d'Arblay.) 1817. .....June 18.-I made a morning visit to Mrs. Piozzi, whom I found with +Dr. Minchin, an informed, sensible physician. She was strange, as usual, at first; but animated, as usual, afterwards. The sisters, Mrs. Frances and Mrs Harriet Bowdler, called upon me, and were admitted, for I heard their names in time; and we had much good old talk), Page 397 that is, Frances and I; for Harriet is ever prim and demure and nearly mute before her elder sister. June 25.-Fixing the last day of the month for my journey, I set seriously to work to hasten my preparations. What a business it was! You have no conception how difficult, nor how laborious, it is to place so many books, such a quantity of linen, such a wardrobe, and such a mass of curiosities, in so small a compass. How fagged and fatigued I retired to rest every night, you may imagine. Alex vigorously carried heavy loads at a time from the study to the garret, but only where he might combine and arrange and order all for himself. However, he was tolerably useful for great luggages. June 26.-We spent the afternoon at Larkhall place, to meet there Maria and Sophy. My dear sister(305) was all spirit and vivacity. Mr. Burney, all tranquil enjoyment--peace, rest, leisure, books, music, drawing, and walking fill up his serene days, and repay the long toils of his meritorious life. And my sister, who happily foresees neither sickness nor ennui, is the spirit and spring of the party. June 28.-I devoted all day to leave-taking visits, for so many houses were opened, and claimed long confabulations, from their rarity, that I had not finished my little round till past ten o'clock at night. Yet of these hosts, Mrs. Frances Bowdler, Mrs. Piozzi, Mrs. Morgan, and Mrs. Andr� were out. Two of the three latter ladies are now in France, and they have written word, that the distress in their province exceeds all they have left in this country! Madame do Sourches has written a similar melancholy account; and Mrs. Holroyd, who received my longest call this morning, read me a letter from Lady B. with words yet stronger of the sufferings in the Low Countries! O baleful effects of "Bella, horrida bella!" I sat an hour also with Mrs. Harriet Bowdler, in sober chat and old histories. She has not--il s'en faut--the exhilaration and entertainment of her clever sister; but there is all the soft repose of good sense, good humour, urbanity, and kindness. One cannot do better than to cultivate with both; for if, after the spirited Frances, the gentle Harriet seems dull, one may at least say that after the kind Harriet, the satirical Frances seems alarming. But my longest visit was to the excellent Mrs. Ogle, who is the oldest acquaintance with whom I have any present connection in the world. It was at her house I first saw Mrs, Page 398 Chapone, who was her relation; I visited her, with my dear father, my mother-in-law, and my sisters ; though from circumstances we lost sight of each other, and met no more till I had that happy encounter with her at Cheltenham, when I brought her to the good and dear king. My respect for her age, her virtues, and this old connection, induced me to stay with her till it was too late to present myself elsewhere. I merely therefore called at the door of Madame de Sommery to inquire whether they Could receive me sans c�remonie for half an hour in the evening. This was agreed to , and Alex accompanied or rather preceded me to Madame de Sommery, who had her two jolies daughters, Stephanie and Pulch�rie, at work by her side, the tea-table spread l'Anglaise, and four of your th��tre(306)I upon the table, with Alex just beginning "Lido" as I entered. I was never so pleased with them before, though they have always charmed me; but in this private, comfortable style they were all ten times more easy, engaging, and lively than I had ever yet seen them. INSTALLED AT ILFRACOMBE. (Madame d'Arblay to General d'Arblay.) Ilfracombe, Devonshire, June 31,(sic) 1817. . . .This very day of our arrival, before Alex had had time to search out Mr. Jacob, somebody called out to him in the street, "Ah, d'Arblay!" who proved to be his man. They strolled about the town, and then Jacob desired to be brought to me. Unluckily, I was unpacking, and denied. He has appointed Alex for a lesson to-morrow. May he put him a little en train! July 5.--I must now give you some account of this place. We are lodged on the harbour. The mistress of our apartments is widow to some master of a vessel that traded at Ilfracombe, with Ireland chiefly. She has three or four children: the eldest, but twelve years old, is the servant of the lodgers, and as adroit as if she were thirty. Our situation is a very amusing one; for the quay is narrow, and there are vessels just on its level, so close that even children walk into them all day long. When the sea is up, the scene is gay, busy, and interesting; but on its ebb the sands here are not Page 399 clean and inviting, but dark and muddy, and the contrary of odoriferous. But the entrance and departure of vessels, the lading, unlading, and the management of ships and boats, offer constantly something new to an eye accustomed only to land views and occupations. A CAPTURED SPANISH SHIP. But chiefly I wish for you for the amusement you would find from a Spanish vessel, which is close to the quay, immediately opposite to our apartments, and on a level with the parlour of the house. It has been brought in under suspicion of piracy, or smuggling, or aiding the slave trade. What the circumstances of the accusation are I know not - but the captain is to be tried at Exeter on the ensuing western circuit. Meantime, his goods are all sequestered, and he has himself dismissed all his sailors and crew to rejoin him when the trial is over. He is upon his parole, and has liberty to go whithersoever he will; but he makes no use of the permission, as he chooses not to leave his cargo solely under the inspection of the excisemen and custom officers here, who have everything under lock and key and seal. He is a good-looking man, and, while not condemned, all are willing to take his word for his innocence. Should that be proved, what compensation will be sufficient for repairing his confinement? He has retained with him only his physician, his own servant his cook, and a boy, with another lad, who is an American. I see him all day long, walking his quarter-deck, and ruminating upon his situation, with an air of philosophy that shows strong character. His physician, who is called here the " doctor," and is very popular, is his interpreter; he speaks English and French, has a spirited, handsome face, and manners the most courteous, though with a look darkly shrewd and Spanish. THE SPANISH CAPTAIN'S COOK. But the person who would most entertain you is the cook, who appears the man of most weight in the little coterie ; for he lets no one interfere with his manoeuvres. All is performed for the table in full sight, a pa�le(307) being lighted with a burning fierce fire upon the deck, where he officiates. He wears a complete white dress, and has a pail of water by his side, in Page 400 which he washes everything he dresses, and his Own hand, to boot, with great attention. He begins his pot au feu soon after seven every morning, and I watch the operation from my window; it is entirely French, except that he puts in more meat, and has it cut, apparently, into pounds; for I see it all carved into square morsels, seemingly of that weight, which he inserts bit by bit, with whole bowls, delicately cleaned, washed and prepared, of cabbages, chicory, turnips, carrots celery, and small herbs. Then some thick slices of ship ham and another bowl of onions and garlic; salt by a handful, and pepper by a wooden spoon full. This is left for many hours; and in the interval he prepares a porridge of potatoes well mashed, and barley well boiled, with some other ingredient that, when it is poured into a pan, bubbles up like a syllabub. But before he begins, he employs the two lads to wash all the ship. To see all this is the poor captain's only diversion ; but the cook never heeds him while at his professional operations; he even motions to him to get out of the way if he approaches too near, and is so intent upon his grand business that he shakes his head without answering, when the captain speaks to him, with an air that says, "Are you crazy to try to take off my attention?" And when the doctor, who often advances to make some observation, and to look on, tries to be heard, he waves his hand in disdain, to silence him. Yet, when all is done, and he has taken off his white dress, he becomes all obsequiousness, respectfully standing out of the way, or diligently flying forward to execute any command. SHIPS IN DISTRESS. July 6.-Alex and I went to church this morning, and heard a tolerable sermon. In the evening there was a storm, that towards night grew tremendous. The woman of the house called us to see two ships in distress. We went to the top of the house for a view of the sea, which was indeed frightful. One ship was endeavouring to gain the harbour; the other, to steer further into the main ocean ; but both appeared to be nearly swamped by the violence of the winds and waves. People mounted to the lighthouse with lights ; for at this season the lantern is not illuminated ; and a boat was sent out to endeavour to assist, and take any spare hands or passengers, if such there were, from the vessel ; but the sea was so boisterous Page 401 that they could not reach the ship, and were nearly lost in the attempt. Alex ran up to the lighthouse, to see what was doing ; but was glad to return, as he could with difficulty keep his feet, and was on the point of being lifted off them down the precipice into the sea. I never was so horrified as when, from the top of the house, I perceived his danger. Thank God, he felt it in time, and came back in safety. It requires use to sustain the feet in such a hurricane, upon a rock perpendicularly standing in the ocean. YOUNG D'ARBLAY's TUTOR. July 7.-We have heard that one of the vessels got off; but no tidings whatsoever have been received of the other. It is suspected to be a passage vessel from Bristol to Ireland. I have had Mr. Jacob to tea; I could not yet arrange a dinner, and he was impatient for an introduction. I like him extremely: he has everything in his favour that can be imagined ; sound judgment without positiveness, brilliant talents without conceit, authority with gentleness, and consummate knowledge of science with modesty. What a blessing that such a character should preside over these inexperienced youths ! Mr. Jacob has aided us to remove. Time is a plaything to the diligent and obliging, though a thief to the idle and capricious ; the first find it, in the midst of every obstacle, for what they wish, while the latter lose it, though surrounded by every resource, for all that they want. I had such success that I now write from my new dwelling, which I will describe to-morrow. July 9.-Quelle joie! this morning I receive a welcome to my new habitation, to make it cheer me from the beginning. 'Tis begun June 28th, and finished July 2nd. How propos is what I had just written of time in the hands of the diligent and obliging! yet how it is you can bestow so much upon me is my admiration. I have not mentioned a letter I have received from Mrs. Frances Bowdler. She tells me of the marriage of Miss---- to a Prussian gentleman, and expresses some vexation at it, but adds, "Perhaps I ought not to say this to you," meaning on account of the objection to a foreigner; and then elegantly adds, "but one person's having gained the great prize in the lottery does not warrant another to throw his whole wealth into the wheel." Not very bad English that? Page 402 GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S ILL-HEALTH. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Broome.) Ilfracombe, Post Office, July 23, 1817. .....I have letters very frequently from Paris, all assuring me M. d'A. is re-establishing upon the whole; yet all letting me see, by collateral accounts, anecdotes, or expressions, that he is constantly in the hands of his physician, and that a difficulty of breathing attacks him from time to time, as it did before his journey: with a lassitude, a weakness, and a restlessness which make him there, as here they made him since his illness, unfit for company, and incapable, but by starts and for moments to have any enjoyment of mixed society! I do not therefore, feel comfortable about him, though, thank heaven, not alarmed. And at all events I am glad he tries the change of air. Change of scene also was advised for him by all * but he is too kind to find that beneficial when we are separated; and he writes me frequent avowals of seizures of dejection and sadness that reduce him to a state of great suffering. The parting, while he was in a situation so discouraging, was very cruel but Alexander had, and has, no chance of taking a tolerable degree without a friend constantly at hand to remind him of the passage of time. He never thinks of it: every day seems a day by itself, which he may fill up at pleasure, but which opens to him no prospect of the day that will succeed! So little reflection on the future, with so good capacity for judging the present, were never before united. PARTICULARS OF ILFRACOMBE. We are very well lodged for pleasantness, and for excellent people. We have a constant view of the sea from our drawing room, which is large and handsome - our bedrooms also are good; but our minor accommodations, our attendance, dinner equipage, cooking, etc., would very ill have contented my general had he been here. The best men, the most moderate and temperate, are difficult, nay, dainty, compared with women. When he comes, if I am so happy as to see him return while we are here, I must endeavour to ameliorate these matters. Ilfracombe is a long, narrow town, consisting of only one regular street, though here and there small groups of houses hang upon its skirts, and it is not destitute of lanes and alleys. Page 403 The town part or side Is ugly, ill paved and ill looking: but the backs of the habitations offer, on one side the street, prospects of fine hills, and on the other, noble openings to the sea. The town is built upon a declivity, of which the church is at the summit, and the harbour makes the termination. It was in the harbour, that is upon the quay, that we were at first lodged ; and our apartments were by no means without interest or amusement; but just as we were comfortably settled in them, we were told the ebbs and flows, etc., of the tides left occasionally, or brought, odours not the most salubrious. To this representation I thought it right to yield so implicitly, that I sought a new abode, and changed my quarters instantly. YOUNG D'ARBLAY's AVERSION TO STUDY. (Madame d'Arblay to General d'Arblay.) Friday, September 12, 1817. I have so much to say to my dearest friend, that I open my new sheet at the moment of finishing the old one, though I shall not send it for a week - and let me begin by quieting your poor nerves relative to La Chapelle, in assuring you I neglect no possible means to follow, substantially and effectually, your injunctions, though I dare not tell him that you would never pardon the smallest infraction of our new treaty. He is not capable, mon ami, of an exactitude of that undeviating character. To force further solemn promises from so forgetful, so unreflecting, yet so undesigning and well-meaning a young creature, is to plunge him and ourselves into the culpability of which we accuse him. To attempt in that manner to couper court,(308) etc., instead of frightening him into right, would harden him into desperation. His disgust to his forced study is still so vehement, that it requires all I can devise of exhortation, persuasion, menace, and soothing, tour tour, to deter him from relinquishing all effort! The times, mon ami, are "out of joint:" we must not by exigeance precipitate him to his ruin, but try patiently and prudently, every possible means, to rescue him from the effects of his own wilful blindness and unthinking, idle eccentricity. If we succeed, how will he bless us when his maturer judgment opens his eyes to the evils he will have escaped! but if we fail why should we lie down and die because he Page 404 might have obtained fame and riches, yet obstinately preferred obscurity with a mere competence? Put not Your recovery and your happiness upon such a cast! My own struggles to support the disappointment for which I am forced to prepare myself, in the midst of all my persevering, unremitting efforts to avert it, are sufficiently severe ; but the manner in which I see your agitation threaten your health, makes his failure but secondary to my apprehensions! Oh, mon ami, ought we not rather to unite in comforting each other by sustaining ourselves? Should we not have done so mutually, if the contagious fever at Cambridge had carried him off? And what is the mortification of a bad degree and a lessened ambition, with all the mundane humiliation belonging to it, compared with the total earthly loss of so dear an object, who may be good and happy in a small circle, if he misses, by his own fault, mounting into a larger? Take courage, my dearest ami, and relieve me from the double crush that else may wholly destroy mine. Let us both, while we yet venture to hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Nothing on my part shall be wanting to save this blow; but should his perversity make it inevitable, we must unite our utmost strength, not alone to console each other, but to snatch from that "sombre d�couragement"(309) you so well foresee, the wilful, but ever fondly-loved dupe of his own insouciance. . . .(310) A VISIT FROM THE FIRST CHESS PLAYER IN ENGLAND. And now to lighter matters. I hope I have gained a smile from you by my disclosure that I lost my journal time for my usual post-day by successive dissipation ? What will you have conjectured ? That I have consented at last to listen to Mr. Jacob's recommendation for going to the Ilfracombe ball, and danced a fandango with him! or waltzed, au moins! or that I have complied with his desire of going to the cricket-ground, just arranged by the Cantabs and some officers who are here, in subscribing three guineas for the use of a field? Vous n'�tes pas;(311) for though I should like, in itself, to see a cricket-match, in a field which Mr. Jacob says is beautifully situated, and where the Bishop of Ossory and his lady, Mrs. Fowler, go frequently, as two of their sons are amongst the Page 405 players; yet, as Jacob evidently thinks our poor Alexander ought not to spare time for being of the party, I cannot bear to quit my watchful place by his side, and go thither without him. Mais--Vous vous rendez, n'est-ce-pas?(312) Eh bien--to go back to Sept. 2nd. Alexander and I were nearly finishing our evening, tea being over, and nine o'clock having struck, while he was reading the "Spiritual Quixote"(313) for a little relaxation; when Miss Elizabeth Ramsay came to tell me that a gentleman was just arrived at Ilfracombe who begged leave to wait upon me, if I would admit him; and she gave me a card with the name of Mr. Bowdler. Of course I complied, and Alexander was wild with joy at the thought of such an interview, as Mr. Bowdler is acknowledged the first chess-player in England, and was the only man, when Philidor was here, who had the honour of a drawn battle with him: a thing that Philidor has recorded by printing the whole of the game in his treatise on chess. I was not glad to bring back his ideas to that fascination, yet could not be sorry he should have so great a pleasure. Mr. Bowdler presented himself very quickly, though not till he had made a toilette of great dress, such as would have suited the finest evening assembly at Bath. He was always a man of much cultivation, and a searcher of the bas bleus(314) all his life. He is brother to our two Mrs. Bowdlers, and was now come to escort Mrs. Frances from his house in Wales, where she has spent the summer, to Ilfracombe. I had formerly met this gentleman very often, at bleu parties, and once at a breakfast at his own house, given in honour of Mrs. Frances, where I met Sophy Streatfield, then a great beauty and a famous Greek scholar, of whom the " Literary Herald says:-- "Lovely Streatfield's ivory neck, Nose and notions la Grecque." He was extremely civil to Alex, whom he had longed, he said, to see, and Alex listened to every word that dropped from him, as if it would teach some high move at chess. We had much talk of old times. We had not met since we parted in St. James's-place, in the last illness of my dear Mrs. Page 406 Delany, whom he then attended as a physician. He stayed till past ten, having left his sister at the hotel, too tired with a sea passage to come out, or to receive chez elle. But he entreated me to dine with them next day, the only day he should spend at Ilfracombe, with such excess of earnestness and Alex seconded the request with so many "Oh, mamma's!" that he overpowered all refusal, assuring me it could not interfere with my Bath measures, as it was a dinner, pour ainsi dire,(315) on the road, for he and his sister were forced to dine at the hotel. He also declared, in a melancholy tone that he might probably never see me more, unless I made a tour of Wales, as -he began to feel himself too old for the exertion of a sea voyage. The next morning, immediately after breakfast, I waited upon my old friend and namesake, Fanny Bowdler, and sat with her two hours t�te- -t�te, for her brother was unwell, and she is admirable in close dialogue. I had hardly got home ere she followed me, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner; when again we met, and only parted for our downy pillows. Her strong sense, keen observation, and travelled intelligence and anecdotes, made the day, thus devoted to her, from ten in the morning to ten at night, pass off with great spirit and liveliness: but Alex, oh! he was in Elysium. Mr. Bowdler took a great fancy to him, and indulged his ardent wish of a chess talk to the full; satisfying him in many difficult points, and going over with him his own famous game with Philidore - and, in short, delivering himself over to that favourite subject with him entirely. It will not, however, be mischievous, for Mr. Bowdler's own enthusiasm is over, and he has now left the game quite off, not having played it once these seven years. THE DIARY CONTINUED. A COAST RAMBLE IN SEARCH OF CURIOSITIES. The term for Alexander's studies with Mr. Jacob was just finishing, and a few days only remained ere the party was. to be dispersed, when I determined upon devoting a morning to the search of such curiosities as the coast produced. . I marched forth, attended only by M. d'Arblay's favourite little dog, Diane, with a large silk bag to see what I could Page 407 find that I might deem indigenous, as a local offering to the collection of my general, who was daily increasing his mineralogical stores, under the skilful direction of his friend, -the celebrated naturalist, M. de Bournon. I began my perambulation by visiting the promontory called "the Capstan"--or rather attempting that visit; for after mounting to nearly its height, by a circuitous path from the town, by which alone the ascent is possible, the side of the promontory being a mere precipice overlooking the ocean, a sudden gust of wind dashed so violently against us, that in the danger of being blown into the sea, I dropped on the turf at full length, and saw Diane do the same, with her four paws spread as widely as possible, to flatten her body more completely to the ground. This opening to my expedition thus briefly set aside, I repaired to the coast, where there are pebbles, at least, in great beauty as well as abundance. The coast of Ilfracombe is broken by rocks, which bear evident marks of being fragments of some one immense rock, which, undermined by the billows in successive storms, has been cast in all directions in its fall. We went down to the edge of the sea, which was clear, smooth, and immovable as a lake, the wind having subsided into a calm so quiet, that I could not tell whether the tide were in or out. Not a creature was in sight; but presently a lady descended, with a book in her hand, and passed on before us to the right, evidently to read alone. Satisfied by this circumstance that the tide was going out, and all was safe, I began my search, and soon accumulated a collection of beautiful pebbles, each of which seemed to merit being set in a ring. The pleasure they afforded me insensibly drew me on to the entrance of the Wildersmouth, which is the name given to a series of recesses formed by the rocks, and semicircular, open at the bottom to the sea, and only to be entered from the sands at low tide. I coasted two or three of them, augmenting my spoil as I proceeded; and perceiving the lady I have- already mentioned composedly engaged with her book, I hurried past to visit the last recess, whither I had never yet ventured. I found it a sort of chamber, though with no roof but a clear blue sky. The top was a portly mountain, rough, steep and barren - the left side was equally mountainous, but consisting of layers of a sort of slate, intermixed with moss ; the right side was the elevated Capstan, Page 408 which here was perpendicular; and at the bottom were ,the sands, by which I entered it, terminated by the ocean. The whole was altogether strikingly picturesque, wild and original. There was not one trace of art, or even of any previous entrance into it of man. I could almost imagine myself its first human inmate. My eye was presently caught by the appearance, near the top, of a cavern, at the foot of which I perceived something of so brilliant a whiteness that, in hopes of a treasure for my bag, I hastened to the spot. What had attracted me proved to be the jawbone and teeth of some animal. Various rudely curious things at the mouth of the cavern invited investigation; Diane, however, brushed forward, and was soon out of sight, but while I was busily culling, hoarding, or rejecting whatever struck my fancy, she returned with an air so piteous, and a whine so unusual, that, concluding she pined to return to a little puppy of a week old that she was then rearing, I determined to hasten; but still went on with my search, till the excess of her distress leading her to pull me by the gown, moved me to take her home; but when I descended, for this recess was on a slant, how was I confounded to find the sands at the bottom, opening to the recess, whence I had entered this marine chamber, were covered by the waves; though so gentle had been their motion, and so calm was the sea, that their approach had not caught my ear. I hastily remounted, hoping to find some outlet at the top by which I might escape, but there was none. This was not pleasant but still I was not frightened, not conceiving or believing that I could be completely enclosed: the less, as I recollected, in my passage to the cavern, having had a glimpse of the lady who was reading in the neighbouring recess. I hastily scrambled to the spot to look for her, and entreat her assistance ; but how was I then startled to find that she was gone, and that her recess, which was on less elevated ground than mine, was fast filling with water! CAUGHT BY THE RISING TIDE. I now rushed down to the sea, determined to risk a wet jerkin, by wading through a wave or two, to secure myself from being shut up in this unfrequented place : but the time was past! The weather suddenly changed, the lake was gone, and billows mounted one after the other, as if with enraged Page 409 pursuit of what they could seize and swallow. I eagerly ran up and down, from side to side, and examined every nook and corner, every projection and hollow, to find any sort of opening through which I could pass-but there was none. Diane looked scared; she whined, she prowled about - her dismay was evident, and filled me with compassion-but I could not interrupt my affrighted search to console her. Soon after, however, she discovered a hole in the rock at the upper part, which seemed to lead to the higher sands. She got through it, and then turned round to bark, as triumphing in her success, and calling upon me to share its fruits. But in vain !-the hollow was too small for my passage save of my head, and I could only have remained in it as if standing in the pillory. I still, therefore, continued my own perambulation, but I made a motion to my poor Diane to go, deeming it cruel to detain her from her little one. Yet I heard her howl as if reduced to despair, that I would not join her. Anon, however, she was silent--I looked after her, but she had disappeared. This was an alarming moment. Alone, without the smallest aid, or any knowledge how high the sea might mount, or what was the extent of my danger, I looked up wistfully at Capstan, and perceived the iron salmon; but this angle of that promontory was so steep as to be utterly impracticable for climbing by human feet; and its height was such as nearly to make me giddy in considering it from so close a point of view. I went from it, therefore, to the much less elevated and less perpendicular rock opposite; but there all that was not slate, which crumbled in my hands, was moss, from which they glided. There was no hold whatsoever for the feet. "I ran therefore to the top, where a large rock, by reaching from the upper part of this slated one to Capstan, formed the chamber in which I was thus unexpectedly immured. But this was so rough, pointed, sharp, and steep that I could scarcely touch it. The hole through which Diane had crept was at an accidentally thin part, and too small to afford a passage to anything bigger than her little self. The rising storm, however, brought forward the billows with augmented noise and violence; and my wild asylum lessened every moment. Now, indeed, I comprehended the fulness of my danger. If a wave once reached my feet, while coming upon me with the tumultuous vehemence of this storm, I had Page 410 nothing I could hold by to sustain me from becoming its prey and must inevitably be carried away into the ocean. EFFORTS TO REACH A PLACE OF SAFETY. I darted about in search of some place of safety, rapidly, and all eye; till at length I espied a small tuft of grass on the pinnacle of the highest of the small rocks that were scattered about my prison; for such now appeared my fearful dwelling-place. This happily pointed out to me a spot that the waves had never yet attained; for all around bore marks of the visits. To reach that tuft would be safety, and I made the attempt with eagerness ; but the obstacles I encountered were terrible. The roughness of the rock tore my clothes - its sharp points cut, now my feet, and now my fingers - and the distances from each other of the holes by which I could gain any footing for my ascent, increased the difficulty. I gained, however, nearly a quarter of the height, but I could climb no further and then found myself on a ledge where it was possible to sit down - and I have rarely found a little repose more seasonable. But it was not more sweet than short : for in a few minutes a sudden gust of wind raised the waves to a frightful height, whence their foam reached the base of my place of refuge, and threatened to attain soon the spot to which I had ascended. I now saw a positive necessity to mount yet higher, co�te qui co�te, and, little as I had thought it possible, the pressing danger gave me both means and fortitude to accomplish it: but with so much hardship that I have ever since marvelled at my success. My hands were wounded, my knees were bruised, and my feet were cut for I could only scramble up by clinging to the rock on all fours. When I had reached to about two-thirds of the height of my rock, I could climb no further. All above was so sharp and so perpendicular that neither hand nor foot could touch it without being wounded. My head, however, was nearly on a level with the tuft of grass, and my elevation from the sands was very considerable. I hoped, therefore, I was safe from being washed away by the waves; but I could only hope; I had no means to ascertain my situation; and hope as I might, it was as painful as it was hazardous. The tuft to which I had aimed to rise, and which, had I succeeded, would have been security, was a mere point, as unattainable as it was unique, Page 411 not another blade of grass being anywhere discernible. I was rejoiced, however, to have reached a spot where there was sufficient breadth to place one foot at least without cutting it, though the other was poised on such unfriendly ground that it could bear no part in sustaining me. Before me was an immense slab, chiefly of slate, but it was too slanting to serve for a seat-and seat I had none. My only prop, therefore, was holding by the slab, where it was of a convenient height for my hands. This support, besides affording me a little rest, saved me from becoming giddy, and enabled me from time to time to alternate the toil of my feet. A SIGNAL OF DISTRESS. Glad was I, at least, that my perilous clambering had finished by bringing me to a place where I might remain still ; for with affright, fatigue, and exertion I was almost exhausted. The wind was now abated, and the sea so calm, that I could not be sure whether the tide was still coming in. To ascertain this was deeply necessary for my tranquillity, that I might form some idea what would be the length of my torment. I fixed my eyes, therefore, upon two rocks that stood near the sea entrance into my recess, almost close to the promontory, from which they had probably been severed by successive storms. As they were always in the sea I could easily make my calculation by observing whether they seemed to lengthen or shorten. With my near-sighted glass I watched them ; and great was my consternation when, little by little, I lost sight of them. I now looked wistfully onward to the main ocean, in the hope of espying some vessel, or fishing-boat, with intention of spreading and waving my parasol, in signal of distress, should any one come in sight. But nothing appeared. All was vacant and vast ! I was wholly alone-wholly isolated. I feared to turn my head lest I should become giddy, and lose my balance. LITTLE DIANE. In this terrible state, painful, dangerous, and, more than all, solitary, who could paint my joy, when suddenly, reentering by the aperture in the rock through which she had quitted me, I perceived my dear little Diane ! For the instant I felt as if restored to safety-I no longer seemed Page 412 abandoned. She soon leaped across the flat stones and the sands which separated us, but how great was the difficulty to make her climb as I had climbed! Twenty times she advanced only to retreat from the sharp points of the rock, till ultimately she picked herself out a passage by help of the slate, and got upon the enormous table, of which the upper part was my support ; but the slant was such, that as fast as she ascended she slipped down, and we were both, I believe almost hopeless of the desired junction, when, catching at a favourable moment that had advanced her paws within my reach, I contrived to hook her collar by the curved end of my parasol and help her forward. This I did with one hand, and as quick as lightning, dragging her over the slab and dropping her at my feet, whence she soon nestled herself in a sort of niche of slate, in a situation much softer than mine, but in a hollow that for me was impracticable. I hastily recovered my hold, which I marvel now that I had the temerity to let go; but to have at my side my dear little faithful Diane was a comfort which no one not planted, and for a term that seemed indefinite, in so unknown-a solitude, can conceive. What cries of joy the poor little thing uttered when thus safely lodged! and with what tenderness I sought to make her sensible of my gratitude for her return ! I was now, compared with all that had preceded, in Paradise : so enchanted did I -feel at no longer considering myself as if alone in the world. O, well I can conceive the interest excited in the French prisoner by a spider, even a spider! Total absence of all. of animation in a place of confinement, of which the term is unknown, where volition is set aside, and where captivity is the work of the elements, casts the fancy into a state of solemn awe, of fearful expectation, which I have not words to describe; while the higher mind, mastering at times that fancy, seeks resignation from the very sublimity of that terrific vacuity whence all seems exiled, but self: seeks, and finds it in the almost Visible security of the omnipresence of God. To see after my kind little companion was an occupation that for awhile kept me from seeing after myself, but when I had done what I could towards giving her comfort and assistance, I again looked before me, and saw the waters at the base of my rock of refuge, still gradually rising on, while both my rocks of mark were completely swallowed up! Page 413 the INCREASING DANGER, My next alarm was one that explained that of Diane when she came back so scared from the cavern ; for the waves, probably from some subterraneous passage, now forced their way through that cavern, threatening inundation to even the highest part of my chamber. This was horrific. I could no longer even speak to Diane; my eyes were riveted upon this unexpected gulf, and in a few moments an immense breaker attacked my rock, and, impeded by its height from going straight forward, was dashed in two directions, and foamed onward against each side. I did not breathe--I felt faint--I felt even sea-sick. On, then, with added violence came two wide-spreading waves, and, being parted by my rock, completely encompassed it, meeting each other on the further and upper ground. I now gave up my whole soul to prayer for myself and for my Alexander, and that I might mercifully be spared this watery grave, or be endowed with courage and faith for meeting it with firmness. The next waves reached to the uppermost end of my chamber, which was now all sea, save the small rock upon which I was mounted! How I might have been subdued by a situation so awful at once, and so helpless, if left to unmixed contemplation, I know not -- had I not been still called into active service in sustaining my poor Diane. No sooner were we thus encompassed than she was seized with a dismay that filled me with pity. She trembled violently, and rising and looking down at the dreadful sight of sea, sea, sea all around, and sea still to the utmost extent of the view beyond, she turned up her face to me, as if appealing for protection and when I spoke to her with kindness, she crept forward to my feet, and was instantly taken with a shivering fit. I could neither sit nor kneel to offer her any comfort, but I dropped down as children do when they play at hunt the slipper, for so only could I loose my hold of the slab without falling, and I then stroked and caressed her in as fondling a way as if she had been a child; and I recovered her from her ague-fit by rubbing her head and back with my shawl. She then looked up at me somewhat composed, though still piteous and forlorn, and licked my hands with gratitude. Page 414 THE LAST WAVE OF THE RISING TIDE. While this passed the sea had gained considerably in height, and, a few minutes afterwards all the horrors of a tempest seemed impending. The wind roared around me, pushing on the waves with a frothy velocity that, to a bystander, not to an inmate amidst them, would have been beautiful. It whistled with shrill and varying tones from the numberless crevices in the three immense rocky mountains by whose semicircular adhesion I was thus immured - and it burst forth at times in squalls, reverberating from height to height or chasm to chasm, as if "the big-mouthed thunder" "Were bellowing through the vast and boundless deep." A wave, at length, more stupendous than any which had preceded it, dashed against my rock as if enraged at an interception of its progress, and rushed on to the extremity of this savage chamber, with foaming impetuosity. This moment I believed to be my last of mortality ! but a moment only it was ; for scarcely had I time, with all the rapidity of concentrated thought, to recommend myself, my husband, and my poor Alexander, humbly but fervently to the mercy of the Almighty, when the celestial joy broke in upon me of perceiving that this wave, which had bounded forward with such fury, was the last of the rising tide ! In its rebound, it forced back with it, for an instant, the whole body of water that was lodged nearest to the upper extremity of my recess, and the transporting sight was granted me of an opening to the sands but they were covered again the next instant, and as no other breaker made a similar opening, I was still, for a considerable length of time, in the same situation: but I lost hope no more. The tide was turned: it could rise therefore no higher; the danger was over of so unheard-of an end; of vanishing no one knew how or where--of leaving to my kind, deploring friends an unremitting uncertainty of my fate--of my re-appearance or dissolution. I now wanted nothing but time, and caution, to effect my deliverance. The threat of the tempest, also, was over ; the air grew as serene as my mind, the sea far more calm, the sun beautifully tinged the west, and its setting upon the ocean was resplendent. By remembrance, however, alone, I speak of its glory, not from any pleasure I then experienced in its sight: it told Page 415 me of the waning day; and the anxiety I had now dismissed for myself redoubled for my poor Alexander. . . . With my bag of curiosities I made a cushion for Diane, which, however little luxurious, was softness itself compared with her then resting-place. She, also, could take no repose, but from this period I made her tolerably happy, by caresses and continual attentions. But no sooner had the beams of the sun vanished from the broad horizon, than a small, gentle rain began to fall, and the light as well as brightness of the day became obscured by darkling clouds. This greatly alarmed me, in defiance of my joy and my philosophy; for I dreaded being surprised by the night in this isolated situation. I was supported, however, by perceiving that the sea was clearly retrograding, and beholding, little by little, the dry ground across the higher extremity of my apartment. How did I bless the sight ! the sands and clods of sea-mire were more beautiful to my eyes than the rarest mosaic pavement of antiquity. Nevertheless, the return was so gradual, that I foresaw I had still many hours to remain a prisoner. ARRIVAL OF SUCCOUR. The night came on--there was no moon - but the sea, by its extreme whiteness, afforded some degree of pale light, when suddenly I thought I perceived something in the air. Affrighted, I looked around me but nothing was visible; yet in another moment something like a shadow flitted before my eyes. I tried to fix it, but could not develop any form : something black was all I could make out; it seemed in quick motion, for I caught and lost it alternately, as if it was a shadow reflected by the waters. I looked up at Capstan: nothing was there, but the now hardly discernible Iron salmon. I then looked at the opposite side. . . . ah, gracious heaven, what were my sensations to perceive two human figures! Small they looked, as in a picture, from their distance, the height of the rock, and the obscurity of the night; but not less certainly from their outline, human figures. I trembled--I could not breathe--in another minute I was espied, for a voice loud, but unknown to my ears, called out "Holloa!" I unhesitatingly answered, "I am safe!" "Thank God!" was the eager reply, in a voice hardly Page 416 articulate, "Oh, thank God!" but not in a Voice unknown though convulsed with agitation--it was the voice of my dear son! Oh what a quick transition from every direful apprehension to' joy and delight! yet knowing his precipitancy, and fearing a rash descent to join me, in ignorance of the steepness and dangers of the precipice which parted us, I called out with all the energy in my power to conjure him to await patiently, as I would myself, the entire going down of the tide. He readily gave me this promise, though still in sounds almost inarticulate. I was then indeed in heaven while upon earth. Another form then appeared, while Alex and the first companion retired. This form, from a gleam of light on her dress, I soon saw to be female. She called out to me that Mr. Alexander and his friend were gone to call for a boat to come round for me by sea. The very thought made me shudder, acquainted as I now was with the nature of my recess, where, though the remaining sea looked as smooth as the waters of a lake, I well knew it was but a surface covering pointed fragments of rock, against which a boat must have been overset or stranded. Loudly, therefore, as I could raise my voice, I called upon my informant to fly after them, and say I was decided to wait till the tide was down. She replied that she would not leave me alone for the world. The youths, however, soon returned to the top of the mountain, accompanied by a mariner, who had dissuaded them from their dangerous enterprise. I cheerfully repeated that I was safe, and begged reciprocated patience. They now wandered about on the heights, one of them always keeping in view. Meanwhile, I had now the pleasure to descend to the sort of halfway-house which I had first hoped would serve for my refuge. The difficulty was by no means so arduous to come down as to mount, especially as, the waters being no longer so high as my rock, there was no apprehension of destruction should my footing fail me. Some time after I descried a fourth figure on the summit, bearing a lantern. This greatly rejoiced me, for the twilight now was grown so obscure that I had felt much troubled how I might at last grope my way in the dark out of this terrible Wildersmouth. Page 417 They all now, from the distance and the dimness, looked like spectres : we spoke no more, the effort being extremely fatiguing. I observed, however, with great satisfaction, an increase of figures, so that the border of the precipice seemed covered with people. This assurance that if any accident happened, there would be succour at hand, relieved many a fresh starting anxiety. Not long after, the sea wholly disappeared, and the man with the lantern, who was an old sailor, descended the precipice on the further part, by a way known to him ; and placing the lantern where it might give him light, yet allow him the help of both his hands, he was coming to me almost on all fours - when Diane leaped to the bottom of the rock, and began a barking so loud and violent that the seaman stopped short, and I had the utmost difficulty to appease my little dog, and prevail with her, between threats and cajolements, to suffer his approach. . . . MEETING BETWEEN MOTHER AND SON. My son no sooner perceived that the seaman had found footing, though all was still too watery and unstable for me to quit my rock, than he darted forward by the way thus pointed out, and clambering, or rather leaping up to me, he was presently in my arms. Neither of us could think or care about the surrounding spectators-we seemed restored to each other, almost miraculously, from destruction and death. Neither of us could utter a word, but both, I doubt not, were equally occupied in returning the most ardent thanks to heaven. Alexander had run wildly about in every direction; visited hill, dale, cliff, by-paths, and public roads, to make and instigate inquiry-but of the Wildersmouth he thought not, and never, I believe, had heard; and as it was then a mere part of the sea, from the height of the tide, the notion or remembrance of it occurred to no one. Mr. Jacob, his coolheaded and excellent hearted friend, was most unfortunately at Barnstaple, but he at length thought of Mr. John Le Fevre, a young man who was eminently at the head of the Ilfracombe students, and had resisted going to the ball at Barnstaple, not to lose an hour of his time. Recollecting this, Alex went to his dwelling, and bursting into his apartment, called out, "My mother is missing!" Page 418 The generous youth, seeing the tumult of soul in which he was addressed, shut up his bureau without a word, and hurried off with his distressed comrade, giving up for that benevolent purpose the precious time he had refused himself to spare for a moment's recreation. Fortunately, providentially, Mr. Le Fevre recollected Wildersmouth, and that one of his friends had narrowly escaped destruction by a surprise there of the sea. He no sooner named this than he and Alexander contrived to climb up the rock opposite to Capstan, whence they looked down upon my recess. At first they could discern nothing, save one small rock uncovered by the sea : but at length, as my head moved, Le Fevre saw something like a shadow--he then called out, "Holloa!" etc. To Mr. Le Fevre, therefore, I probably owe my life. Two days after, I visited the spot of my captivity, but it had entirely changed its appearance. A storm of equinoctial violence had broken off its pyramidal height, and the drift of sand and gravel, and fragments of rocks, had given a new face to the whole recess. I sent for the seaman to ascertain the very spot: this he did; but told me that a similar change took place commonly twice a year - and added, very calmly, that two days later I could not have been saved from the waves. GENERAL D'ARBLAY'S RETURN TO ENGLAND. (Madame d'Arblay to a Friend.) Bath, November 9, 1817. Can I still hope, my dear friend, for that patient partiality which will await my tardy answer ere it judges my irksome silence? Your letter Of Sept. 27th I found upon my table when I returned, the 5th of October, from Ilfracombe. I returned, with Alexander, to meet General d'A. from Paris. You will be sorry, I am very sure, and probably greatly surprised, to hear that he came in a state to occupy every faculty of my mind and thoughts-- altered--thin--weak--depressed--full of pain--and disappointed in every expectation of every sort that had urged his excursion! I thank God the fever that confined him to his bed for three days is over, and he yesterday went down stairs and his repose now is the most serene and reviving. The fever, Mr. Hay assured me, was merely symptomatic ; not of inflammation Page 419 or any species of danger, but the effect of his sufferings. Alas! that is heavy and severe enough, but still, where fever comes, 'tis of the sort the least cruel, because no ways alarming. Nov. 15-I never go out, nor admit any one within - nor shall I, till a more favourable turn will let me listen to his earnest exhortations that I should do both. Mr. Hay gives me strong hopes that that will soon arrive, and then I shall not vex him by persevering in this seclusion: you know and can judge how little this part of my course costs me, for to quit the side of those we prize when they are in pain, would be a thousand times greater sacrifice than any other privation. THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE'S DEATH. You are very right as to Lady Murray, not only, of course, I am honoured by her desire of intercourse, but it can never be as a new acquaintance I can see the daughter of Lord and Lady Mulgrave. I have been frequently in the company of the former, who was a man of the gayest wit in society I almost ever knew. He spread mirth around him by his sprightly ideas and sallies, and his own laugh was as hearty and frank as that he excited in others ; and his accomplished and attaching wife was one of the sweetest creatures in the world. Alas ! how often this late tragedy in the unfortunate royal family has called her to my remembrance!(316) She, however, left the living consolation of a lovely babe to her disconsolate survivor ;-the poor Prince Leopold loses in one blow mother and child. The royal visit here has been a scene of emotion:--first of joy and pleasure, next of grief and disappointment. The queen I thought looked well till this sudden and unexpected blow; after which, for the mournful day she remained, she admitted no one to her presence, but most graciously sent me a message to console me. She wrote instantly, with her own hand, to Prince Leopold-that prince who must seem to have had a vision of celestial happiness, so perfect it was, so exalted, and so transitory. The poor Princess Charlotte's passion for him had absorbed her, yet was so well placed as only to form her to excellence, and it had so completely won his return, that like herself he coveted Page 420 her alone...... Princess Elizabeth is much altered personally, to my great concern; but her manners, and amiability, and talents, I think more pleasing and more attaching than ever, How delighted I was at their arrival ! THE QUEEN AND PRINCESSES AT BATH. (Madame d'Arblay to her Son.) Bath, November 9, 1817. We have here spent nearly a week in a manner the most extraordinary, beginning with hope and pleasure, proceeding to fear and pain, and ending in disappointment and grief. The joy exhibited on Monday, when her majesty and her royal highness arrived, was really ecstatic ; the illumination was universal. The public offices were splendid; so were the tradespeople's who had promises or hopes of employment; the nobles and gentles were modestly gay, and the poor eagerly put forth their mite. But all was flattering, because voluntary. Nothing was induced by power, or forced by mobs. All was left to individual choice. Your padre and I patrolled the principal streets, and were quite touched by the universality of the homage paid to the virtues and merit of our venerable queen, upon this her first progress through any part of her domains by herself. Hitherto she has only accompanied the poor king, as at Weymouth and Cheltenham, Worcester and Exeter, Plymouth and Portsmouth, etc. ; or the prince regent, as at Brighthelmstone. But here, called by her health, she came as principal, and in her own character of rank and consequence. And, as Mr. Hay told me, the inhabitants of Bath were all even vehement to let her see the light in which they held her individual self, after so many years witnessing her exemplary conduct and distinguished merit. ::She was very sensible to this tribute; but much affected, nay, dejected, in receiving it, at the beginning; from coming without the king where the poor king had always meant himself to bring her - but just as he had arranged for the excursion, and even had three houses taken for him in the Royal-crescent, he was afflicted by blindness. He would not then come; for what, he said, was a beautiful city to him who could not look at it? This was continually in the remembrance of the queen during the honours of her reception ; but she had recovered from the melancholy recollection, and was Page 421 cheering herself by the cheers of all the inhabitants, when the first news arrived of the illness of the Princess Charlotte. At that moment she was having her diamonds placed on her head for the reception of the mayor and corporation of Bath, with an address upon the honour done to their city, and upon their hopes from the salutary spring she came to quaff. Her first thought was to issue orders for deferring this ceremony but when she considered that all the members of the municipality must be assembled, and that the great dinner they had prepared to give to the Duke of Clarence could only be postponed at an enormous and useless expense, she composed her spirits, finished her regal decorations, and admitted the citizens of Bath, who were highly gratified by her condescension, and struck by her splendour, which was the same as she appeared in on the greatest occasions in the capital. The Princess Elizabeth was also a blaze of jewels. And our good little Mayor (not four feet high) and aldermen and common councilmen were all transported. NEWS ARRIVES OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE'S DEATH. The Duke of Clarence accepted their invitation, and was joined by the Marquis of Bath and all the queen's suite. But the dinner was broken up. The duke received an express with the terrible tidings: he rose from table, and struck his forehead as he read them, and then hurried out of the assembly with inexpressible trepidation and dismay. The queen also was at table when the same express arrived, though only with the princess and her own party: all were dispersed in a moment, and she shut herself up, admitting no one but her royal highness. She would have left Bath the next morning; but her physician, Sir Henry Halford, said it would be extremely dangerous that she should travel so far, in her state of health, just in the first perturbation of affliction. She would see no one but her suite all day, and set out the next for Windsor Castle, to spend the time previous to the last melancholy rites, in the bosom of her family. All Bath wore a face of mourning. The transition from gaiety and exultation was really awful. What an extinction of youth and happiness ! The poor Princess Charlotte had never known a moment's suffering since her marriage. Her lot seemed perfect. Prince Leopold is, indeed, to be pitied. Page 422 (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Broome.) Bath, November 25, 1817. .....We are all here impressed with the misfortunes of the royal house, and chiefly with the deadly blow inflicted on the perfect conjugal happiness of the first young couple in the kingdom. The first couple not young bad already received a blow yet, perhaps, more frightful : for to have, yet lose-to keep, yet never to enjoy the being we most prize, is surely yet more torturing than to yield at once to the stroke which we know awaits us, and by which, at last, we must necessarily and indispensably fall. The queen supports herself with the calm and serenity belonging to one inured to misfortune, and submissive to Providence. The Princess Elizabeth has native spirits that resist all woe after the first shock, though she is full of kindness, goodness, and zeal for right action. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE. SERIOUS ILLNESS OF GENERAL D'ARBLAY. (Mrs. Piozzi to Madame d'Arblay.) Bath, Thursday, February 26, 1818. I had company in the room when Lady K-'s note arrived, desiring I would send you some papers of hers by the person who should bring it. I had offered a conveyance to London by some friends of my own, but she preferred their passing through your hands. Accept my truest wishes for the restoration of complete peace to a mind which has been SO long and so justly admired, loved, and praised by, Dear madam,--Your ever faithful, H. L. P. Who attends the general? and why do you think him SO very bad? (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Piozzi.) Bath, February 26, 1818. There is no situation in which a kind remembrance from you, my dear madam, would not awaken me to some pleasure; but my poor sufferer was so very ill when your note came, that it was not possible for me to answer it. That I think him so very bad, is that I see him perpetually in pain Page 423 nearly insupportable ; yet I am assured it is local and unattended with danger while followed up with constant care and caution. This supports my spirits, which bear me and enable me to help him through a malady of anguish and difficulty. It is a year this very month since he has been in the hands of Mr. Hay as a regular patient. Mr. Hay was recommended to us by Mrs. Locke and Mrs. Angerstein, whom he attends as physician, from their high opinion of his skill and discernment. But, alas ! all has failed here ; and we have called in Mr. Tudor, as the case terminates in being one that demands a surgeon. Mr. Tudor gives me every comfort in prospect, but prepares me for long suffering, and slow, slow recovery. Shall I apologise for this wordy explanation? No - you will see by it with what readiness I am happy, to believe that our interest in each other must ever be reciprocal. Lady K- by no means intended to give me the charge of the papers; she only thought they might procure some passing amusement to my invalid. I must, on the contrary, hope you will permit me to return them you, in a few days, for such conveyance as you may deem safe; I am now out of the way of seeking any. I hope you were a little glad that my son has been among the high Wranglers. NARRATIVE OF THE ILLNESS AND DEATH OF GENERAL D'ARBLAY. THE GENERAL'S FIRST ATTACK: DELUSIVE HOPES. Bolton Street, Berkeley Square. It is now the 17th of November, 1819. A year and a half have passed since I was blessed with the sight of my beloved husband. I can devise no means to soothe my lonely woe, so likely of success as devoting my evening solitude to recollections of his excellences, and of every occurrence of his latter days, till I bring myself up to the radiant serenity of their end. I think it will be like passing with him, with him himself, a few poor fleeting but dearly-cherished moments. I will call back the history of my beloved husband's last illness. Ever present as it is to me, it will be a relief to set it down. In Paris, in the autumn Of 1817, he was first attacked with Page 424 the deadly evil by which he was finally consumed. I suspected not his danger. He had left me in June, in the happy but most delusive persuasion that the journey and his native air would complete his recovery from the jaundice, which had attacked him in February, 1817. Far from ameliorating, his health went on daily declining. His letters, which at first were the delight and support of my existence, became disappointing, dejecting, afflicting. I sighed for his return ! I believed. he was trying experiments that hindered his recovery; and, indeed, I am persuaded he precipitated the evil by continual changes of system. At length his letters became so comfortless, that I almost expired with desire to join him - but he positively forbade my quitting our Alexander, who was preparing for his grand examination at Cambridge. On the opening of October, 1817, Alex and I returned from Ilfracombe to Bath to meet our best friend. He arrived soon after, attended by his favourite medical man, Mr. Hay, whom he had met in Paris. We found him extremely altered-not in mind, temper, faculties--oh, no!--but in looks and strength: thin and weakened so as to be fatigued by the smallest exertion. He tried, however, to revive; we sought to renew our walks, but his strength was insufficient. He purchased a garden in the Crescent fields, and worked in it, but came home always the worse for the effort. His spirits were no longer in their state of native genial cheerfulness : he could still be awakened to gaiety, but gaiety was no longer innate, instinctive with him. GENERAL D'ARBLAY PRESENTED TO THE QUEEN. In this month, October, 1817, I had a letter from the Princess Elizabeth, to inform me that her majesty and herself were coming to pass four weeks in Bath. The queen's stay was short, abruptly and sadly broken up by the death of the Princess Charlotte. In twenty-four hours after the evil tidings, they hastened to Windsor to meet the prince regent and almost immediately after the funeral, the queen and princess returned, accompanied by the Duke of Clarence. I saw them continually, and never passed a day without calling at the royal abode by the queen's express permission ; and during the whole period of their stay, my invalid appeared to be stationary in his health. I never quitted him save for this royal visit, and that only of a morning. Page 425 He had always purposed being presented to her majesty in the pump-room, and the queen herself deigned to say "she should be very glad to see the general." Ill he was! suffering, emaciated, enfeebled! But he had always spirit awake to every call; and just before Christmas, 1817, we went together, between seven and eight o'clock in the morning, in chairs, to the pump-room. I thought I had never seen him look to such advantage. His fine brow so open, his noble countenance so expressive, his features so formed for a painter's pencil! This, too, was the last time he ever wore his military honours--his three orders of "St. Louis," "the Legion of Honour," and "Du Lys," or "De la Fid�lit�;" decorations which singularly became him, from his strikingly martial port and character. The queen was brought to the circle in her sedan-chair, and led to the seat prepared for her by her vice-chamberlain, making a gracious general bow to the assembly as she passed. Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Tudor waited upon her with the Bath water, and she conversed with them, and the mayor and aldermen, and her own people, for some time. After this she rose to make her round with a grace indescribable, and, to those who never witnessed it, inconceivable ; for it was such as to carry off age, infirmity, sickness, diminutive stature and to give her, in defiance of such disadvantages, a power of charming that rarely has been equalled. Her face had a variety of expression that made her features soon seem agreeable; the intonations of her voice so accorded with her words, her language was so impressive, and her manner so engaging and encouraging, that it was not possible to be the object of her attention without being both struck with her uncommon abilities and fascinated by their exertion. Such was the effect which she produced upon General d'Arblay, to whom she soon turned. Highly sensible to the honour of her distinction, he forgot his pains in his desire to manifest his gratitude;--and his own smiles--how winning they became! Her majesty spoke of Bath, of Windsor, of the Continent; and while addressing him, her eyes turned to meet mine with a look that said, "Now I know I am making you happy!" She asked me, archly, whether I was not fatigued by coming to the pump-room so early? and said, "Madame d'Arblay thinks I have never seen you before ! but she is mistaken, for I peeped at you through the window as you passed to the Terrace at Windsor." Alas! the queen no Page 426 sooner ceased to address him than the pains he had suppressed became intolerable, and he retreated from the circle and sank upon a bench near the wall - he could stand no longer, and we returned home to spend the rest of the day in bodily misery. GLOOMY FOREBODINGS. Very soon after the opening of this fatal year 1818, expressions dropped from my beloved of his belief of his approaching end : they would have broken my heart, had not an incredulity --now my eternal wonder,--kept me in a constant persuasion that he was hypochondriac, and tormented with false apprehensions. Fortunate, merciful as wonderful, was that incredulity, which, blinding me to my coming woe, enabled me to support my courage by my hopes, and helped me to sustain his own. In his occasional mournful prophecies, which I always rallied off and refused to listen to, he uttered frequently the kind words, "Et jamais je n'ai tant aim� la vie! Jamais, jamais, la vie ne m'a �t� plus ch�re!"(317) How sweet to me were those words, which I thought- -alas, how delusively--would soothe and invigorate recovery! The vivacity with which I exerted all the means in my power to fly from every evil prognostic, he was often struck with, and never angrily; on the contrary, he would exclaim, "Comme j'admire ton courage!"(318) while his own, on the observation, always revived. "My courage?" I always answered, "What courage? Am I not doing what I most desire upon earth--remaining by your side? When you are not well, the whole universe is to me, there!" Soon after, nevertheless, recurring to the mournful idea ever uppermost, he said, with a serenity the most beautiful, "Je voudrois que nous causassions sur tout cela avec calme,---doucement,--cheerfully m�me(319) as of a future voyage-- as of a subject of discussion--simply to exchange our ideas and talk them over." Alas, alas ! how do I now regret that I seconded not this project, so fitted for all pious Christian minds, whether their pilgrimage be of shorter or longer duration. But I saw him Page 427 I, oh, how ill! I felt myself well ; it was, therefore, apparent who must be the survivor in case of sunderment; and, therefore, all power of generalizing the subject was over. And much and ardently as I should have rejoiced in treating such a theme when he was well, or on his recovery, I had no power to sustain it thus situated. I could only attend his sick couch; I could only 'live by fostering hopes of his revival, and seeking to make them reciprocal. During this interval a letter from my affectionate sister Charlotte suggested our taking further advice to aid Mr. Hay, since the malady was so unyielding. /On January the 24th Mr. Tudor came, but after an interview and examination, his looks were even forbidding. Mr. Hay had lost his air of satisfaction and complacency, Mr. Tudor merely inquired whether he should come again? "Oh, yes, yes, yes!" I cried, and they retired together. And rapidly I flew, not alone from hearing, but from forming any opinion, and took refuge by the side of my beloved, whom I sought to console and revive. And this very day, as I have since found, he began his Diary for the year. It contains these words:-- "Jamais je n'ai tant aim� la vie que je suis en si grand danger de perdre; malgr� que je n'aye point de fi�vre, ni le moindre mal la t�te; et que j'aye non seulement l'esprit libre, mais le coeur d'un contentement Parfait. La volont� de Dieu soit faite! J'attends pour ce soir ou demain le resultat d'une consultation."(320) PRESENTS FROM THE QUEEN AND PRINCEss ELIZABETH. On this same day Madame de Soyres brought me a packet from her majesty, and another from the Princess Elizabeth. The kind and gracious princess sent me a pair of silver camp candlesticks, with peculiar contrivances which she wrote me word might amuse the general as a military man, while they might be employed by myself to light my evening researches among the MSS. of my dear father, which she wished me to collect and to preface by a memoir. Her mother's offering was in the same spirit of benevolence - it was a collection of all the volumes of "L'Hermite de Page 428 la Chauss�e d'Antin," with Chalmers's Astronomical Sermons, and Drake's two quartos on Shakespeare; joined to a small work of deeper personal interest to me than them all, which was a book of prayers suited to various circumstances, and printed at her majesty's own press at Frogmore. In this she had condescended to write my name, accompanied by words of peculiar kindness. My poor ami looked over every title-page with delight, feeling as I did myself that the gift was still more meant for him than for me--or rather, doubly, trebly for me in being calculated to be pleasing to him!--he was to me the soul of all pleasure on earth. What words of kindness do I find, and now for the first time read, in his Diary dated 2nd February! After speaking--h�las, h�las!--"de ses douleurs inouies," (321) he adds, "Quelle �trange maladie! et quelle position que la mienne! il en est une, peut�tre plus ficheuse encore, c'est celle de ma malheureuse compagne; avec quelle tendresse elle me soigne! et avec quel courage elle supporte ce qu'elle a souffrir! Je ne puis que r�p�ter, La volont� de Dieu soit faite!"(322) Alas! the last words he wrote in February were most melancholy:-- "20 F�vrier, Je sens que je m'afaiblis horriblement--je ne crois pas que ceci puisse �tre encore bien long.(323) Ch�re Fanny, cher Alex! God bless you! and unite us for ever, Amen!" Oh my beloved! Delight, pride, and happiness of my heart! May heaven in its mercy hear this prayer! . . . THE GENERAL RECEIVES THE VISIT OF A PRIEST. In March he revived a little, and Mr. Tudor no longer denied me hope; on the 18th Alex came to our arms and gratulations on his fellowship; which gave to his dearest father a delight the most touching. I have no Diary in his honoured hand to guide my narrative in April; a few words only he ever wrote more, and these, after speaking of his sufferings, end with "Pazienza! " Page 429 Pazienza!"--such was his last written expression! 'Tis on the 5th of April. . . . On the 3rd of May he reaped, I humbly trust, the fair fruit of that faith and patience he so pathetically implored and so beautifully practised. At this critical period in April I was called down one day to Madame la Marquise de S-, who urged me to summon a priest of the Roman catholic persuasion to my precious sufferer. I was greatly disturbed every way; I felt in shuddering the danger she apprehended, and resisted its belief; yet I trembled lest I should be doing wrong. I was a protestant, and had no faith in confession to man. I had long had reason to believe that my beloved partner was a protestant, also, in his heart ; but he had a horror of apostasy, and therefore, as he told me, would not investigate the differences of the two religions; he had besides a tie which to his honour and character was potent and persuasive; he had taken an oath to keep the catholic faith when he received his Croix de St. Louis, which was at a period when the preference of the simplicity of protestantism was not apparent to him. All this made me personally easy for him, yet, as this was not known, and as nothing definite had ever passed between us upon this delicate subject, I felt that he apparently belonged still to the Roman catholic church; and after many painful struggles I thought it my absolute duty to let him judge for himself, even at the risk of inspiring the alarm I so much sought to save him! . . . I compelled myself therefore to tell him the wish of Madame de S-, that he should see a priest. "Eh bien," he cried, gently yet readily, "je ne m'y oppose pas. Qu'en penses tu?" I begged to leave such a decision wholly to himself. Never shall I forget the heavenly composure with which my beloved partner heard me announce that the priest, Dr. Elloi, was come. Cheerfully as I urged myself to name him, still he could but regard the visit as an invitation to make his last preparations for quitting mortal life. With a calm the most gentle and genuine, he said he had better be left alone with him, and they remained together, I believe, three hours. I was deeply disturbed that my poor patient should be so long without sustenance or medicine - but I durst not intrude, though anxiously I kept at hand in case of any sudden summons. When, at length, the priest re-appeared, I found Page 430 my dearest invalid as placid as before this ceremony, though fully convinced it was meant as the annunciation of his expected and approaching departure. THE LAST SACRAMENT ADMINISTERED. Dr. Elloi now came not only every day, but almost every hour of the day, to obtain another interview; but my beloved, though pleased that the meeting had taken place, expressed no desire for its repetition. I was cruelly distressed ; the fear of doing wrong has been always the leading principle of my internal guidance, and here I felt incompetent to judge what was right. Overpowered, therefore, by my own inability to settle that point, and my terror lest I should mistake it, I ceased to resist ; and Dr. Elloi, while my patient was sleeping from opium, glided into his chamber, and knelt down by the bedside with his prayer book in his hand. Two hours this lasted; but when the doctor informed me he had obtained the general's promise that he should administer to him the last sacrament, the preparations were made accordingly, and I only entreated leave to be present. This solemn communion, at which I have never in our own church attended with unmoistened eyes, was administered the same evening. The dear invalid was in bed: his head raised with difficulty, he went through this ceremony with spirits calm, and a countenance and voice of holy composure. FAREWELL WORDS OF COUNSEL. Thenceforth he talked openly, and almost solely, of his approaching dissolution, and prepared for it by much silent mental prayer. He also poured forth his soul in counsel for Alexander and myself. I now dared no longer oppose to him my hopes of his recovery - the season was too awful. I heard him only with deluges of long-restrained tears, and his generous spirit seemed better satisfied in thinking me now --awakened to a sense of his danger, as preparatory for supporting its consequence. "Parle de moi." He said, afterwards, "Parle--et souvent. Surtout Ò Alexandre; qu'il ne m'oublie pas!"(325) "Je ne parlerai pas d'autre chose!"(326) I answered . . . and Page 431 I felt his tender purpose. He knew how I forbore ever to speak of my lost darling sister, and he thought the constraint injurious both to my health and spirits : he wished to change my mode with regard to himself by an injunction of his own. "Nous ne parlerons pas d'autre chose!" I added, "mon ami!--mon ami!--je ne survivrai que pour cela!"(327) He looked pleased, and with a calm that taught me to repress my too great emotion. He then asked for Alexander, embraced him warmly, and half raising himself with a strength that had seemed extinct but the day before, he took a hand of Alexander and one of mine, and putting them together between both his own, he tenderly pressed them, exclaiming, "How happy I am! I fear I am too happy!" Kindest of human hearts! His happiness was in seeing us together ere he left us his fear was lest he should too keenly regret the quitting us! At this time he saw for a few minutes my dear sister Esther and her Maria, who had always been a great favourite with him. When they retired, he called upon me to bow my knees as he dropped upon his own, that he might receive, he said, my benediction, and that we might fervently and solemnly join in prayer to Almighty God for each other. He then consigned himself to uninterrupted meditation : he told me not to utter one word to him, even of reply, beyond the most laconic necessity. He desired that when I brought him his medicine or nutriment, I would give it without speech and instantly retire; and take care that no human being addressed or approached him. This awful command lasted unbroken during the rest of the evening, the whole of the night, and nearly the following day. So concentrated in himself he desired to be!--yet always as free from irritation as from despondence-- always gentle and kind even when taciturn, and even when in torture. When the term of his meditative seclusion seemed to be over, I found him speaking with Alexander, and pouring into the bosom of his weeping son the balm of parental counsel and comfort. I received at this time a letter from my affectionate sister Charlotte, pressing for leave to come and aid me to nurse my dearest invalid. He took the letter and pressed it to his lips, saying, "Je l'aime bien; dis le lui. Et Page 432 elle M'aime."(328) But I felt that she could do me no good. We had a nurse whose skill made her services a real blessing ; and for myself, woe, such as he believed approaching, surpassed all aid but from prayer and from heaven--lonely meditation. When the morning dawned, he ordered Payne to open the shutters and to undraw the curtains. The prospect from the windows facing his bed was picturesque, lively, lovely: he looked at it with a bright smile of admiration, and cast his arm over his noble brow, as if hailing one more return of day' and light, and life with those he loved. But when, in the course of the day, something broke from me of my reverence at his heavenly resignation, "R�sign�?" he repeated, with a melancholy half smile; "mais comme �ah!" and then in a voice of tenderness the most touching, he added, "Te quitter!" I dare not, even yet, hang upon my emotion at those words! That night passed in tolerable tranquillity, and without alarm, his pulse still always equal and good, though smaller. On Sunday, the fatal 3rd of May, my patient was still cheerful, and slept often, but not long. This circumstance was delightful to my observation, and kept off the least suspicion that my misery could be so near. THE END ARRIVES. My pen lingers now!-reluctant to finish the little that remains. About noon, gently awaking from a slumber, he called to me for some beverage, but was weaker than usual, and could not hold the cup. I moistened his lips with a spoon several times. He looked at me with sweetness inexpressible, and pathetically said, "Qui?" He stopped, but I saw he meant "Who shall return this for you?" I instantly answered to his obvious and most touching meaning, by a cheerful exclamation of "You! my dearest ami! You yourself! You shall recover, and take your revenge." He smiled, but shut his eyes in silence. After this, he bent forward, as he was supported nearly upright by pillows in his bed, and taking my hand, and holding it between both his own, he impressively said, "Je ne sais si Page 433 ce sera le dernier mot--mais ce sera la derni�re pens�e--notre r�union!"(329) Oh, words the most precious that ever the tenderest of husbands left for balm to the lacerated heart of a surviving wife! I fastened my lips on his loved hands, but spoke not. It was not then that those words were my blessing! They awed--they thrilled--more than they solaced me. How little knew I then that he should speak to me no more ! Towards evening I sat watching in my arm-chair, and Alex remained constantly with me. His sleep was so calm, that an hour passed in which I indulged the hope that a favourable crisis was arriving; that a turn would take place by which his vital powers would be restored; but when the hour was succeeded by another hour, when I saw a universal stillness in the whole frame, such as seemed to stagnate all around, I began to be strangely moved. "Alex!" I whispered, "this sleep is critical! a crisis arrives! Pray God-- Almighty God!--that it be fav--." I could not proceed. Alex looked aghast, but firm. I sent him to call Payne. I intimated to her my opinion that this sleep was important, but kept a composure astonishing, for when no one would give me encouragement, I compelled myself to appear not to want it, to deter them from giving me despair. Another hour passed of concentrated feelings, of breathless dread. His face had still its unruffled serenity, but methought the hands were turning cold; I covered them - -I watched over the head of my beloved; I took new flannel to roll over his feet; the stillness grew more awful; the skin became colder. Alex, my dear Alex, proposed calling in Mr. Tudor, and ran off for him. I leant over him now with sal volatile to his temple, his forehead, the palms of his hands, but I had no courage to feel his pulse, to touch his lips. Mr. Tudor came - he put his hand upon the heart, the noblest of hearts, and pronounced that all was over! How I bore this is still marvellous to me! I had always believed such a sentence would at once have killed me. But his sight--the sight of his stillness, kept me from distraction! Sacred he appeared, and his stillness I thought should be mine, and be inviolable. I suffered certainly a partial derangement, for I cannot to this moment recollect anything that now succeeded, with truth Page 434 or consistency; my memory paints things that were necessarily real, joined to others that could not possibly have happened, yet so amalgamates the whole together as to render it impossible for me to separate truth from indefinable, unaccountable fiction. Even to this instant I always see the room itself charged with a medley of silent and strange figures grouped against the wall just opposite to me, Mr. Tudor, methought, was come to drag me by force away; and in this persuasion, which was false, I remember supplicating him to grant me but one hour, telling him I had solemnly engaged myself to pass it in watching. . . . But why go back to my grief? Even yet, at times, it seems as fresh as ever, and at all times weighs on me with a feeling that seems stagnating the springs of life. But for Alexander ,our Alexander!--I think I could hardly have survived. His tender sympathy, with his claims to my love, and the solemn injunctions given me to preserve for him, and devote to him, my remnant of life--these, through the Divine mercy, sustained me. May that mercy, with its best blessings, daily increase his resemblance to his noble father. March 20, 1820. (288) M. d'Arblay, who was, it appears, still lame (boiteux) from the kick which he had received from a horse.-ED, (289) Half-pay. (290) The Comte de Narbonne and Comte F. de la Tour Maubourg. (291) He had studied mathematics in Paris according to the analytical method, instead of the geometrical, which was at that time exclusively taught at Cambridge. (292) See infra, p. 387-8.-ED. (293) It is not without pain that we find Fanny, in this letter defending the harsh treatment accorded by the Bourbon king to Lavalette and others of the partisans of the emperor. Lavalette had served Napoleon both as soldier and diplomatist. At the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 he retired from public life, but on the return of Napoleon he again entered the service of his old master. He was arrested after the downfall of the emperor, tried for treason, and condemned to death. His wife implored the king's mercy in vain, Lavalette was confined in the Conciergerie, and December 21, 1815, was the day fixed for his execution. The evening before that day his wife visited him in the prison. He exchanged clothes with her, and thus disguised, succeeded in making his escape. His safety was secured by three English gentlemen, one of whom, Sir Robert Wilson, conveyed Lavalette, in the disguise of an English officer, across the Belgian frontier. For this generous act the three Englishmen were tried in Paris, and sentenced, each, to three months' imprisonment.-ED. (294) At the sale of the collection, formed by Mr. Thrale, of portraits of his distinguished friends, painted by one of the most distinguished of them-Sir Joshua Reynolds. The collection comprised portraits of Johnson, Burke, Dr. Burney, Reynolds, etc. Reynolds painted two portraits of Johnson for Mr. Thrale. That referred to by Fanny is probably the magnificent portrait painted about 1773, and now in the National Gallery, for which Thrale paid thirty-five guineas.-ED. (295) "His wife and son." (296) M. d'Arblay had been promoted by Louis XVIII. to the rank of Lieutenant-General.-ED. (297) "Certainly, and very certainly, my dearest, your beautiful strictures upon the knowledge and the customs of the world would have given another current to my ideas." (298) "For the future." (299) "He is still but a child." (300) "That is not our case." (301) "Will be quite another thing; but I think you are mistaken." (302) This paragon of perfection, then, was an actual person, whom General d'Arblay was thinking of as a wife for his son!-ED. (303) Self-love. (304) Wounded. (305) Esther Burney.-ED. (306) Volumes of plays.-ED. (307) Stove. (308) "Make short work." (309) "Gloomy discouragement." (310) "Apathy." (311) "You are quite mistaken." (312) "You give it up, don't you?" (313) An interesting and humorous novel by the Rev. Richard Graves, the friend of Shenstone.-ED. (314) Blue stockings. (315) "So to speak." (316) The Princess Charlotte, only child of the prince and princess of Wales, was married at the age of twenty (May 2, 1816) to Prince Leopold of SaxeCoburg. On the 5th of November, 1817, she was delivered of a still-born child, and died a few hours later.-ED. (317) "I have never loved life so much! Never, never has life been dearer to me!" (318) "How I admire your courage!" (319) "I should like us to talk of all that with calmness,-- mildly,--even cheerfully." (320) "Never have I so much loved life as now that I am in so great danger of losing it ; notwithstanding that I have no fever, nor is my head in the least affected ; and not only is my mine] clear, but my heart perfectly at ease. God's will be done! I await the result of a consultation this evening or to-morrow." (321) "Of his unheard-of sufferings." (322) "What a strange malady! and what a position is mine! there is one perhaps more grievous yet, that of my unhappy companion-- with what tenderness she cares for me! and with what courage she bears what she has to suffer! I can only repeat, God's will be done!" (323) "February 20. I feel that I am getting horribly weak--I do not think this can last much longer." (324) "Well, I have no objection. What do you think of it?" (325) "Speak of me! Speak--and often. Especially to Alexander; that he may not forget me!" (326) "I shall speak of nothing else!" (327) "We shall speak of nothing else! my dear!--my dear!--I shall survive only for that!" (328) "I love her well; tell her so. And she loves me." (329) "I do not know if this will be my last word--but it will be my last thought--our reunion." Page 435 SECTION 27. (1818-40) YEARS OF WIDOWHOOD. DEATH OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S SON. HER OWN DEATH. (Extracts from Pocket-book Diary.) MOURNFUL REFLECTIONS. May 17, 1818. This melancholy second Sunday since My irreparable loss I ventured to church. I hoped it might calm my mind and subject it to its new state--its lost--lost happiness. But I suffered inexpressibly; I sunk on my knees, and could scarcely contain my sorrows--scarcely rise any more! but I prayed--fervently--and I am glad I made the trial, however severe. Oh mon ami! mon tendre ami! if you looked down! if that be permitted, how benignly will you wish my participation in your blessed relief! Sunday, May 31.-This was the fourth Sunday passed since I have seen and heard and been blessed with the presence of my angel husband. Oh loved and honoured daily more and more! Yet how can that be? No! even now, in this cruel hour of regret and mourning it cannot be! for love and honour could rise no higher than mine have risen long, long since, in my happiest days. June 3.-This day, this 3rd of June, completes a calendar month since I lost the beloved object of all my tenderest affections, and all my views and hopes and even ideas of happiness on earth. . . . June 7.-The fifth sad Sunday this of earthly separation! oh heavy, heavy parting! I went again to church. I think Page 436 it right, and I find it rather consolatory-rather only, for the effort against sudden risings of violent grief at peculiar passages almost destroys me; and no prayers do me the service I receive from those I continually offer up in our apartment by the side of the bed on which he breathed forth his last blessing. Oh words for ever dear! for ever balsamic! "Je ne sais si ce sera le dernier mot--mais ce sera bien la derni�re pens�e--notre r�union." VISITS RECEIVED AND LETTERS PENNED. June 18.-My oldest friend to my knowledge living, Mrs. Frances Bowdler, made a point of admission this morning, and stayed with me two hours. She was friendly and good, and is ever sensible and deeply clever. Could I enjoy any society, she would enliven and enlighten it, but I now can only enjoy sympathy!--sympathy and pity! Alex and I had both letters from M. de Lafayette. June 23.-To-day I have written my first letter since my annihilated happiness-to my tenderly sympathising Charlotte. I covet a junction with that dear and partial sister for ending together our latter days. I hope we shall bring it to bear. With Alex read part of St. Luke. June 29.-To-day I sent a letter, long in writing and painfully finished, to my own dear Madame de Maisonneuve. She will be glad to see my hand, grieved as she will be at what it has written. With Alex read part of St. Luke. June 30-I wrote--with many sad struggles--to Madame Beckersdorff, my respectful devoirs to her majesty, with the melancholy apology for my silence during the royal nuptials of the Dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge; and upon the departure of dear Princess Eliza,' and upon her majesty's so frequent and alarming attacks of ill health. With Alex read the Acts of the Apostles. . . . July 8.-I have given to Alex the decision of where we shall dwell. Unhappy myself everywhere, why not leave unshackled his dawning life? To quit Bath--unhappy Bath!--he had long desired: and, finally, he has fixed his choice in the very capital itself. I cannot hesitate to oblige him. August 28.-My admirable old friend, Mrs. Frances Page 437 Bowdler, spent the afternoon with me. Probably we shall meet no more but judiciously, as suits her enlightened understanding, and kindly, as accords with her long partiality,- she forbore any hint on that point. Yet her eyes swam in tears, not ordinary to her, when she bade me adieu. August 30.-The seventeenth week's sun rises on my deplorable change! A very kind, cordial, brotherly letter arrives from my dear James. An idea of comfort begins to steal its way to my mind, in renewing my intercourse with this worthy brother, who feels for me, I see, with sincerity and affection. Sept. 5.-A letter from dowager Lady Harcourt, on the visibly approaching dissolution of my dear honoured royal mistress ! written by desire of my beloved Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, to save me the shock of surprise, added to that of grief. Sunday, Sept. 6.-A fresh renewal to me of woe is every returning week ! The eighteenth this of the dread solitude of my heart ; and miserably, has it passed, augmenting sorrow weighing it in the approaching loss of my dear queen! Again I took the Sacrament at the Octagon, probably for the last time. Oh, how earnest were my prayers for re-union in a purer world! Prayers were offered for a person lying dangerously ill. I thought of the queen, and prayed for her fervently. Sunday, Sept. 27-This day, the twenty-first Sunday of my bereavement, Alexander, I trust, is ordained a deacon of the Church of England. Heaven propitiate his entrance! I wrote to the good Bishop of Salisbury to beseech his pious wishes on this opening of clerical life. REMOVAL FROM BATH TO LONDON. Sept. 28.-Still my preparations to depart from Bath take up all of time that grief does not seize irresistibly; for, oh! what anguish overwhelms my soul in quitting the place where last he saw and blessed me!--the room, the spot on which so softly, so holily, yet so tenderly, he embraced me and breathed his last! Sept. 30.-This morning I left Bath with feelings of profound affliction - yet, reflecting that hope was ever open-- that future union may repay this laceration--oh, that my torn soul could more look forward with sacred aspiration! Then better would it support its weight of woe. Page 438 My dear James received me with tender pity; so did his good wife, son, and daughter. Oct. 6.-My dear Alexander left me this morning for Cambridge. How shall I do, thus parted from both! My kind brother, and his worthy house, have softened off the day much; yet I sigh for seclusion--my mind labours under the weight of assumed sociability. Oct. 8. I came this evening to my new and probably last dwelling, No. 11, Bolton-street, Piccadilly. My kind James conducted me. Oh, how heavy is my forlorn heart ! I have made myself very busy all day ; so only could I have supported this first opening to my baleful desolation ! No adored husband! No beloved son ! But the latter is only at Cambridge. Ah! let me struggle to think more of the other, the first, the chief, as also only removed from my sight by a transitory journey! Oct. 14.-Wrote to my--erst--dearest friend, Mrs. Piozzi. I can never forget my long love for her, and many obligations to her friendship, strangely as she had been estranged since her marriage. Oct. 30.-A letter from my loved Madame de Maisonneuve, full of feeling, sense, sweetness, information to beguile me back to life, and of sympathy to open my sad heart to friendship. Nov. 7.-A visit from the excellent Harriet Bowdler, who gave me an hour of precious society, mingling her commiserating sympathy with hints sage and right of the duty of revival from every stroke of heaven. Oh, my God, Saviour! To thee may I turn more and more. DEATH OF THE QUEEN: SKETCH OF HER CHARACTER.(331) Nov. 17-This day, at one o'clock, breathed her last the inestimable Queen of England.(332) Heaven rest and bless her soul! Her understanding was of the best sort ; for while it endued her with powers to form a judgment of all around her, it pointed out to her the fallibility of appearances, and thence kept her always open to conviction where she had been led by circumstances into mistake. >From the time of my first entrance into her household her manner to me was most kind and encouraging, for she had Page 439 formed her previous opinion from the partial accounts of my beloved Mrs. Delany. She saw that, impressed with real respect for her character, and never-failing remembrance of her rank, she might honour me with confidence without an apprehension of imprudence, invite openness without incurring freedom, and manifest kindness without danger of encroachment. . . . When I was alone with her she discarded all royal constraint, all stiffness, all formality, all pedantry of grandeur, to lead me to speak to her with openness and ease; but any inquiries which she made in our t�te- -t�tes never awakened an idea of prying into affairs, diving into secrets, discovering views, intentions, or latent wishes, or amuses. No,. she was above all such minor resources for attaining intelligence; what she desired to know she asked openly, though cautiously if of grave matters, and playfully if of mere news or chit-chat, but always beginning with, "If there is any reason I should not be told, or any that you should not tell, don't answer me." Nor were these words of course, they were spoken with such visible sincerity, that I have availed myself of them fearlessly, though never without regret, as it was a delight to me to be explicit and confidential in return for her condescension. But whenever she saw a question painful, or that it occasioned even hesitation, she promptly and generously started some other subject. Dec. 2.-The queen, the excellent exemplary queen, was this day interred in the vault of her royal husband's ancestors,(133) to moulder like his subjects, bodily into dust; but mentally, not so! She will live in the memory of those who knew her best, and be set up as an example even by those who only after her death know, or at least acknowledge her virtues. I heard an admirable sermon on her departure and her character from Mr. Repton in St. James's church. I wept the whole time, as much from gratitude and tenderness to hear her thus appreciated as from grief at her loss--to me a most heavy one! for she was faithfully, truly, and solidly attached to me, as I to her. Dec. 12.-A letter from the Duchess of Gloucester,(134) to My equal gratification and surprise. She has deigned to answer my poor condolence the very moment, as she says, that she Page 440 received it. Touched to the heart, but no longer with pleasure in any emotion, I wept abundantly. MADAME D'ARBLAY'S SON IS ORDAINED. Sunday, April 11, 1818.-This morning my dearest Alexander was ordained a priest by the Bishop of Chester in St. James's church. I went thither with my good Eliz. Ramsay, and from the gallery witnessed the ceremony. Fifty-two were ordained at the same time. I fervently pray to God that my son may meet this his decided calling with a disposition and conduct to sanction its choice ! and with virtues to merit his noble father's name and exemplary character! Amen Amen! WITH some ROYAL HIGHNESSES. July 15-A message from H. R. H. Princess Augusta, with whom I passed a morning as nearly delightful as any, now, can be! She played and sang to me airs of her own composing-unconscious, medley reminiscences, but very pretty, and prettily executed. I met the Duke of York, who greeted me most graciously- saying, as if with regret, how long it was since he had seen me. In coming away, I met, in the corridor, my sweet Duchess of Gloucester, who engaged me for next Sunday to herself. July 26.-Her royal highness presented me to the duke, whom I found well-bred, Polite, easy, unassuming, and amiable; kind, not condescending. QUEEN CAROLINE. (Madame d"Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) Wednesday, June 7, 1820. . . . All London now is wild about the newly arrived royal traveller.(135) As she is in this neighbourhood, our part of the Page 441 town is surprised and startled every other hour by the arrival of some new group of the curious rushing on to see her and her 'squire the alderman, at their balcony. Her 'squire, also, now never comes forth unattended by a vociferous shouting multitude. I suppose Augusta, who resides still nearer to the dame and the 'squire of dames, is recreated in this lively way yet more forcibly. The 15th of this month is to be kept as king's birthday at Court. Orders have been issued to the princesses to that effect, and to tell them they must appear entirely out of mourning. They had already made up dresses for half mourning, of white and black. I should not marvel if the royal traveller should choose to enter the apartments, and offer her congratulations upon the festival. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Locke.) Elliot Vale, London, August 15, 1820. How long it seems--"Seems, madam! nay, it is! since I have heard from my most loved friend!--I have had, Page 442 however, I thank heaven, news of her, and cheering news, though I have lost sight of both her dear daughters. . . . We are all, and of all classes, all opinions, all ages, and all parties, absolutely absorbed by the expectation of Thursday. The queen has passed the bottom of our street twice this afternoon in an open carriage, with Lady Ann(336) and Alderman Wood!-How very inconceivable that among so many adherents, she can find that only esquire!-And why she should have any, in her own carriage and in London, it is not easy to say. There is a universal alarm for Thursday.(337) the letter to the king breathes battle direct to both Houses of Parliament as much as to his majesty. Mr. Wilberforce is called upon, and looked up to, as the only man in the dominions to whom an arbitration should belong. Lord John Russell positively asserts that it is not with Lord Castlereagh and the ministers that conciliation or non-conciliation hangs, but with Mr. Wilberforce and his circle. If I dared hope such was the case, how much less should I be troubled by the expectance awakened for to-morrow--it is now Wednesday that I finish my poor shabby billet. Tremendous is the general alarm at this moment for the accused turns accuser, public and avowed, of King, Lords, and Commons, declaring she will submit to no award of any of them. What would she say should evidence be imperfect or wanting, and they should acquit her? It is, however, open war, and very dreadful, She really invokes a revolution in every paragraph of her letter to her sovereign and lord and husband. I know not what sort of conjugal rule will be looked for by the hitherto lords and masters of the world, if this conduct is abetted by them. . . . The heroine passed by the bottom of our street yesterday, in full pomp and surrounded with shouters and vociferous admirers. She now dresses superbly every day, and has always six horses and an open carriage. She seems to think now she has no chance but from insurrection, and therefore all her harangues invite it. Oh Dr. Parr!--how my poor brother would have blushed for him! he makes those orations Page 443 with the aid of Cobbett!--and the council, I suppose. Of course, like Croaker in "The Good-natured Man" I must finish with "I wish we may all be well this day three months!" GOSSIP FROM AN OLD FRIEND, AND THE REPLY. (From Mrs. Piozzi to Madame d'Arblay.) Bath, October 20. It was very gratifying, dear madam, to find myself so kindly remembered, and with all my heart I thank you for your letter. My family are gone to Sandgate for the purpose of bathing in the sea, this wonderfully beautiful October ; and were you not detained in London by such a son as I hear you are happy in, I should wish you there too, Apropos to October, I have not your father's admirable verses upon that month ; those upon June, I saw when last in Wales could you get me the others ? it would be such a favour and you used to like them best. How changed is the taste of verse, prose, and painting since le bon vieux temps, dear madam! Nothing attracts us but what terrifies, and is within--if within--a hair's breadth of positive disgust. The picture of Death on his Pale Horse, however, is very grand certainly-and some of the strange things they write remind me of Squoire Richard's visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says "Odd, they are pure grim devils,"--particularly a wild and hideous tale called Frankenstein. Do you ever see any of the friends we used to live among? Mrs. Lambert is yet alive, and in prosperous circumstances ; and Fell, the bookseller in Bond-street, told me a fortnight or three weeks ago, that Miss Streatfield lives where she did in his neighbourhood,-- Clifford-street, S. S. still. Old Jacob and his red night-cap are the only live creatures, as an Irishman would say, that come about me of those you remember, and death alone will part us,-he and I both lived longer with Mr. Piozzi than we had done with Mr. Thrale. Archdeacon Thomas is, I think, the only friend you and I have now quite in common : he gets well ; and if there was hope of his getting clear from entanglement, he would be young again,-he is a valuable mortal. Adieu! Leisure for men of business, you know, and business for men of leisure, would cure many complaints. Page 444 Once more, farewell ! and accept my thanks for your good-natured recollection of poor H. L. P. (Madame d'Arblay. to Mrs. Piozzi-) Bolton-street, December 15, 1820. Now at last, dear madam, with a real pen I venture to answer your kind acceptance of my Bath leave-taking address, of a date I would wish you to forget-but the letter is before me, and has no other word I should like to relinquish. But more of grief at the consequence of my silence, namely your own, hangs upon the circumstance than shame, for i have been so every way unwell,-unhinged, shattered, and unfitted for any correspondence that could have a chance of reciprocating pleasure, that perhaps I ought rather to demand your thanks than your pardon for this delay. I will demand, however, which you please, so you will but tell me which you will grant, for then I shall hear from you again. I must, nevertheless, mention, that my first intention, upon reading the letter with which you favoured me, was to forward to you the verses on October, of my dear father, which you honoured with so much approbation .- but I have never been able to find them, unless you mean the ode, written in that month, on the anniversary of his marriage with my mother-in-law, beginning:-- Hail, eldest offspring of the circling year, October! bountiful, benign, and clear, Whose gentle reign, from all excesses free, Gave birth to Stella--happiness to me." If it be this, I will copy it out with the greatest alacrity, for the first opportunity of conveyance. So here, again, like the dun of a dinner card, I entitle myself to subjoin "An answer is required." . . . You inquire if I ever see any of the friends we used to live amongst :-almost none; but I may resume some of those old ties this winter, from the ardent desire of my son. I have, till very lately, been so utterly incapable to enjoy society, that I have held it as much kindness to others as to myself, to keep wholly out of its way. I am now, in. health, much better, and consequently more able to control the murmuring propensities that were alienating me from the purposes of life while yet living,-this letter, indeed, will show that I am Page 445 * restored to the wish, at least, of solace, and that the native cheerfulness of my temperament is opening from the weight of sadness by which I had long believed it utterly demolished. But Time, " uncalled, unheeded, unawares, "-works as secretly upon our spirits as upon our years, and gives us as little foresight into what we can endure, as into how long we shall exist. . . . MORE Gossip. (From Mrs. Piozzi to Madame d'Arblay.) Penzance, Thursday, January 18, 1821. Dear Madame d'Arblay was very considerate in giving me something to answer, for something original to say would be difficult to find at Penzance; but your letter has no date, and I am not sure that Bolton-street is sufficient. Poor Mrs. Byron, who used to inhabit it, would have enjoyed her grandson's(338) reputation, would not she? had it pleased God to lengthen her life like that of Mrs. Lambart, who died only last week, but a few days short of her expected centenary-as did Fontenelle. You are truly fortunate, dear madam, so was your father, in leaving those behind who knew and could appreciate your merits--every scrap will properly be valued--but those verses belong not to the October I meant. . . . Mrs. Bourdois and her sisters--all true Burneys--will be angry I don't live wholly at Bath, and their society would prove a strong temptation; but Bath is too much for me, who am now unwilling to encounter either crowds or solitude: I feared neither for three-score years of my life, and earnestly now join my too disinterested solicitations to those of your son, that you will no longer bury your charming talents in seclusion. Sorrow, as Dr. Johnson said, is the mere rust of the soul. Activity will cleanse and brighten it. You recollect the --'s; Fanny married Sir Something --, and is a widowed mother. The young man, of whom high expectations were formed, took to the gaming table, forged for 5000 pounds, and was saved out of prison by the dexterity of his servant:--a complete coup de th��tre. That I call sorrow scarce possible to be borne. You saw the story in the newspapers, but possibly were not aware who was the sufferer. Will it amuse you to hear that "fine Mr. Daniel," as you Page 446 used to call my showy butler, died an object of disgust and horror, whilst old Jacob, with whose red nightcap you comically threatened the gay dandy--lived till the other day, and dying, left 800 pounds behind him! Such stuff is this world made of! The literary world is to me terra incognita, far more deserving of the name (now Parry and Ross are returned) than any part of the polar region; but the first voyage amused me most and when I had seen red snow, and heard of men who wanted our sailors to fly, because they perceived they could swim, I really thought it time to lie down and die; but one cannot die when one will, so I have hung half on, half off, society this last half year; and begin 1821 by thanking dear Madame d'Arblay for her good-natured recollection of poor H. L. Piozzi. ILL-HEALTH OF THE REV. A. D'ARBLAY. DR. BURNEY'S MSS. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Piozzi.) Bolton-street, Berkeley-square, Feb. 6, 1821. You would be repaid, dear madam, if I still, as I believe, know you, for the great kindness of your prompt answer, had you witnessed the satisfaction with which it was received ; even at a time of new and dreadful solicitude; for my son returned from Cambridge unwell, and in a few days after his arrival at home was seized with a feverish cold which threatened to fasten upon the whole system of his existence, not with immediate danger, but with a perspective to leave but small openings to any future view of health, strength, or longevity. I will not dwell upon this period, but briefly say, it seems passed over. He is now, I thank heaven, daily reviving, and from looking like-not a walking, but a creeping spectre, he is gaining force, spirit, and flesh visibly, and almost hour by hour; still, however, he requires the utmost attention, and the more from the extreme insouciance, from being always absorbed in some mental combinations, with which he utterly neglects himself. I am therefore wholly devoted to watching him. I am quite vexed not to find the right October. However, I do not yet despair, for in the multitude of MSS. that have fallen to my mournfully surviving lot to select, or destroy, etc., chaos seems come again; and though I have worked at them during the last year so as to obtain a little light, it is scarcely Page 447 more than darkness visible. To all the vast mass left to my direction by my dear father, who burnt nothing, not even an invitation to dinner, are added not merely those that devolved to me by fatal necessity in 1818, but also all the papers possessed from her childhood to her decease of that sister you so well, dear madam, know to have been my heart's earliest darling. When on this pile are heaped the countless hoards which my own now long life has gathered together, of my personal property, such as it is, and the correspondence of my family and my friends, and innumerable incidental windfalls, the whole forms a body that might make a bonfire to illuminate me nearly from hence to Penzance. And such a bonfire might perhaps be not only the shortest, but the wisest way to dispose of such materials. This enormous accumulation has been chiefly owing to a long unsettled home, joined to a mind too deeply occupied by immediate affairs and feelings to have the intellect at liberty for retrospective investigations. . . . A LAST GOSSIPING LETTER. (From Mrs. Piozzi to Madame d'Arblay.) Sion Row, Clifton, near Bristol, March 15, 1821. I feel quite happy in being able to reply to dear Madame d'Arblay's good-natured inquiries, from this, the living world. Such we cannot term Penzance--not with propriety--much like Omai, who said to you, "No mutton there, missee, no fine coach, no clock upon the stairs," etc.; but en revanche here is no Land's End, no submarine mine of Botallock! What a wonderful thing is that extensive cavern ! stretching out half a mile forward under the roaring ocean, from whence 'tis protected only by a slight covering, a crust of rock, which, if by any accident exploded, "Would let in light on Pluto's dire abodes, Abhorr'd by men, and dreadful ev'n to Gods." Plutus, however, not Pluto, is professed proprietor - 'tis an immense vacuity filled with the vapours of tin and copper, belonging to Lord Falmouth and a company of miners, where sixty human beings work night and day, and hear the waves over their heads , sometimes regularly beating the Cornish cliffs, sometimes tossing the terrified mariner upon the inhospitable shore; where shipwreck is, even in these civilized days, considered as a Godsend. Page 448 I am glad I saw it, and that I shall see it no more. You would not know poor Streatham Park. I have been forced to dismantle and forsake it; the expenses of the present time treble those of the moments you remember; and since giving up my Welsh estate, my income is greatly diminished. I fancy this will be my last residence in this world, meaning Clifton, not Sion Row, where I only live till my house in the Crescent is ready for me. A high situation is become necessary to my breath, and this air will agree with me better than Bath did. You ask how the Pitches family went on. Jane married a rough man, quarter-master to a marching regiment, and brought him three sons: the first a prodigy of science, wit, and manners; he died early: the second I know nothing of: the third, a model of grace and beauty, married the Duke of Marlborough's sister. Peggy is Countess Coventry, you know, and has a numerous progeny. Emily is wife to Mr. Jolliffe, M.P. for some place, I forget what. Penelope married Sir John Sheffield, but died before he came to the title. I dined with them all last time I was in London, at Coventry House. Poor old Davies's departure grieved me, so did that of good Mr. Embry; au reste, the village of Streatham is full of rich inhabitants, the common much the worse for being so spotted about with houses, and the possibility of avoiding constant intercourse with their inhabitants (as in Mr. Thrale's time) wholly lost!..... DEATH OF MRS. PIOZZI. May, 1821.--I have lost now, just lost, my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi,(339) who preserved her fine faculties, her imagination, her intelligence, her powers of allusion and citation, her extraordinary memory, and her almost unexampled vivacity, to the last of her existence. She was in her eighty-second year, and yet owed not her death to age nor to natural decay, but to the effects of a fall in a journey from Penzance to Clifton. On her eightieth birthday she gave a great ball, concert, and supper, in the public rooms at Bath, to upwards of two hundred persons, and the ball she opened herself. She was, in truth, a most wonderful character for talents and eccentricity, for wit, genius, generosity, spirit, and powers of entertainment. Page 449 MRS. PIOZZI COMPARED WITH MADAME DE STAEL. She had a great deal both of good and not good, in common with Madame de Stael Holstein. They had the same sort of highly superior intellect, the same depth of learning, the same general acquaintance with science, the same ardent love of literature, the same thirst for universal knowledge, and the same buoyant animal spirits, such as neither sickness, sorrow, nor even terror, could subdue. Their conversation was equally luminous, from the sources of their own fertile minds, and from their splendid acquisitions from the works and acquirements of others. Both were zealous to serve, liberal to bestow, and graceful to oblige; and both were truly highminded in prizing and praising whatever was admirable that came in their way. Neither of them was delicate nor polished, though each was flattering and caressing; but both had a fund inexhaustible of good humour, and of sportive gaiety, that made their intercourse with those they wished to please attractive, instructive, and delightful and though not either of them had the smallest real malevolence in their compositions, neither of them could ever withstand the pleasure of uttering a repartee, let it wound whom it might, even though each would serve the very person they goaded with all the means in their power. Both were kind, charitable, and munificent, and therefore beloved; both were sarcastic, careless, and daring, and therefore feared. The morality of Madame de Stael was by far the most faulty, but so was the society to which she belonged so were the general manners of those by whom she was encircled. SISTER HETTY. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) October 21, 1821. "Your mind," my dearest Esther, was always equal to literary pursuits, though your time seems only now to let you enjoy them. I have often thought that had our excellent and extraordinary own mother been allowed longer life, she would have contrived to make you sensible of this sooner. I do not mean in a common way, for that has never failed, but in one striking and distinguished ; for she very early indeed began to form your taste for reading, and delighted Page 450 to find time, amidst all her cares, to guide you to the best authors, and to read them with you, commenting and pointing out passages worthy to be learned by heart. I perfectly recollect, child as I was, and never of the party, this part of your education. At that very juvenile period, the difference even of months makes a marked distinction in bestowing and receiving instruction. I, also, was so peculiarly backward, that even our Susan stood before me; she could read when I knew not my letters. But though so sluggish to learn, I was always observant: do you remember Mr. Seaton's denominating me, at fifteen, "the silent, observant Miss Fanny"? Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope's works and Pitt's "AEneid." I recollect, also, your spouting passages from Pope, that I learned from hearing you recite them before--many years before I read them myself. But after you lost, so young, that incomparable guide, you had none left. Our dear -father was always abroad, usefully or ornamentally; and, after giving you a year in Paris with the best masters that could be procured, you came home at fifteen or sixteen to be exclusively occupied by musical studies, save for the interludes that were "Sacred to dress and beauty's pleasing cares:" for so well you played, and so lovely you looked, that admiration followed alike your fingers and your smiles : and the pianoforte and the world divided your first youth, which, had that exemplary guide been spared us, I am fully persuaded would have left some further testimony of its passage than barely my old journals, written to myself, which celebrate your wit and talents as highly as your beauty. And I judge I was not mistaken, by all in which you have had opportunity to show your mental faculties, i.e. your letters, which have always been strikingly good and agreeable, and evidently unstudied. When Alex comes home I will try to get "Crabbe," and try to hear it with pleasure. The two lines you have quoted are very touching. Thus much, my dear Etty, i wrote on the day I received your last; but . . . . November.-I write now from Eliot Vale, under the kind and elegant roof of sweet Mrs. Locke, who charges me with her most affectionate remembrances. Perhaps I may meet here with your favourite Crabbe: as I subscribe to no library, I know not how else I shall get at him. I thank you a Page 451 thousand times for the good bulletin of your health, my dearest Esther; and I know how kindly you will reciprocate my satisfaction when I tell you mine is inconceivably ameliorated, moyennant great and watchful care: and Alex keeps me to that with the high hand of peremptory insistence, according to the taste of the times for the "rising generation" expects just as much obedience to orders as they withhold. If you were to hear the young gentleman delivering to me his lectures on health, and dilating upon air, exercise, social intercourse, and gay spirits, you would be forced to seek a magnifying glass to believe that your eyes did not deceive you, but that it was really your nephew haranguing his mother. However, we must pass by the exhorting impetuosity, in favour of the zealous anxiety that fires it up in his animated breast. OFFICIAL DUTIES TEMPORARILY RESUMED. I was kept in town by a particular circumstance--I might say, like the play-bills, by particular desire; for it was a fair royal personage who condescended to ask me to remit my visit to Eliot Vale, that I might attend her sittings for her picture, her two ladies being at that time absent on cong�. You may believe how much I was gratified, because you know my sincere and truly warm attachment for all those gracious personages; but you may be surprised Your poor sister could now be pitched upon, where so much choice must always be at hand, for whiling away the tediousness of what she, the princess, calls the odious occupation of sitting still for this exhibition - but the fact is, I was able to fulfil her views better than most people could, in defiance of my altered spirits and depressed faculties, by having recourse simply to my memory in relating things I saw, or heard, or did, during the long ten years, and the eventful--added one year more, that I spent abroad. Only to name Bonaparte in any positive trait that I had witnessed or known, was sufficient to make her open her fine eyes in a manner extremely advantageous to the painter. THE Rev. A. D'ARBLAY NAMED LENT PREACHER. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) February 29, 1823. .....Thanks for that kind jump of joy for the success of Alex at Lee, and for my hopes from St. Paul's. You ask who Page 452 named him preacher for the 5th Sunday in Lent: How could I omit telling you 'twas the Bishop of London himself? -This has been brought about by a detail too long for paper, but it is chiefly to my faithful old friends Bishop Fisher of Salisbury and the Archdeacon of Middlesex that we owe this mark of attention; for Alex has never been presented to the Bishop of London. MADAME D'ARBLAY'S HEALTH AND OCCUPATION. You still ask about my health, etc. I thought the good result would have sufficed ; but thus stands the detail : I was packing up a board of papers to carry with me to Richmond, many months now ago, and employed above an hour, bending my head over the trunk, and on my knees -when, upon meaning to rise, I was seized with a giddiness, a glare of sparks before my eyes, and a torturing pain on one side of my head, that nearly disabled me from quitting my posture, and that was followed, when at last I rose, by an inability to stand or walk. My second threat of seizure was at Eliot Vale, while Alex was at Tunbridge. I have been suddenly taken a third time, in the middle of the night, with a seizure as if a hundred windmills were turning round in my head: in short,-I had now recourse to serious medical help, and, to come to the sum total, I am now so much better that I believe myself to be merely in the common road of such gentle, gradual decay as, I humbly trust, I have been prepared to meet with highest hope, though with deepest awe--for now many years back. The chief changes, or reforms, from which I reap benefit are, 1st. Totally renouncing for the evenings all revision or indulgence in poring over those letters and papers whose contents come nearest to my heart, and work upon its bleeding regrets. Next, transferring-to the evening, as far as is in my power, all of sociality, with Alex, or my few remaining friends, or the few he will present to me of new ones. 3rd. Constantly going out every day-either in brisk walks in the morning, or in brisk jumbles in the carriage of one of my three friends who send for me, to a t�te- -t�te tea converse. 4th. Strict attention to diet. . . . I ought to have told you the medical sentence upon which I act. These were the words--"You have a head over-worked, and a heart over-loaded." This produces a disposition to Page 453 fulness in both that causes stagnation, etc., with a consequent want of circulation at the extremities, that keeps them cold and aching. Knowing this, I now act upon it as warily as I am able. The worst of all is, that I have lost, totally lost, my pleasure in reading! except when Alex is my lecturer, for whose sake my faculties are still alive to what--erst! gave them their greatest delight. But alone; I have no longer that resource; I have scarcely looked over a single sentence, but some word of it brings to my mind some mournful recollection, or acute regret, and takes from one all attention--my eyes thence glance vainly over pages that awaken no ideas.--This is melancholy in the extreme; yet I have tried every species of writing and writer-- but all pass by me mechanically, instead Of instructing or entertaining me intellectually. But for this sad deprivation of my original taste, my evenings might always be pleasing and reviving--but alas! DESTROYED CORRESPONDENCE. (Madame d'Arblay to Mrs. Burney.) August, 1823. What an interesting letter is this last, my truly dear Hetty 'tis a real sister's letter, and such a one as I am at this time frequently looking over of old times! For the rest of my life I shall take charge' and save my own executor the discretionary labours that with myself are almost endless ; for I now regularly destroy all letters that either may eventually do mischief, however clever, or that contain nothing of instruction or entertainment, however innocent. This, which I announce to all my correspondents who write confidentially, occasions my receiving letters that are real conversations. Were I younger I should consent to this condition with great reluctance-or perhaps resist it : but such innumerable papers, letters, documents, and memorandums have now passed through my hands, and, for reasons prudent, or kind, or conscientious, have been committed to the flames, that I should hold it wrong to make over to any other judgment than My Own, the danger or the innoxiousness of any and every manuscript that has been cast into my power. To you, therefore, I may now safely copy a charge delivered to me by UP our dear vehement Mr. Crisp, at the opening of my juvenile Page 454 correspondence with him,--"Harkee, you little monkey!--dash away whatever comes uppermost; if you stop to consider either what you say, or what may be said of you, I would not ,give one fig for your letters."--How little, in those days, did either he or I fear, or even dream of the press! What became of letters, jadis, I know not; but they were certainly both written and received with as little fear as wit. Now every body seems -obliged to take as much care of their writing desks as of their trinkets or purses,-for thieves be abroad of more descriptions than belong to the penniless pilferers. THE PRINCESS AND THE REV. A. D'ARBLAY. (Madame dArblay to Mrs. locke.) 11 Bolton-street, Nov. 1824. Now then for a more cheerful winding-up. I came from Camden Town very unwillingly,--but Alex was called to Cambridge to an audit, and so I took that opportunity to make a break-up. But the day before I quitted it I received the highest resident honour that can be bestowed upon me--namely, a visit from one of my dear and condescending princesses. She came by appointment,-yet her entrance was so quick that Alex had not time to save himself.-However, she took the incident not only without displeasure but with apparent satisfaction, saying she was very glad to renew her acquaintance with him. She had not seen him since the time of his spouting, "The spacious firmament on high"--"Ye shepherds so cheerful and gay," etc.,--all of which she remembers hearing. Ah--I have never recollected till this instant that I ought to have gone to her the next day !-how shocking!--and now that I have the consciousness, I can do nothing, for I am lame from a little accident.--Well!--she is all goodness-and far more prone to forgive than I, I trust, am to offend. A VISIT FROM SIR WALTER SCOTT. Although Madame d'Arblay's intercourse with society was now usually confined to that of her relations and of old and established friends, she yet greeted with admiration and pleasure Sir Walter Scott, who was brought to her by Mr. Rogers. Sir Walter, in his Diary for Nov. 18th, 1826, thus Page 455 describes the visit:--"I have been introduced to Madame d'Arblay, the celebrated authoress of 'Evelina' and 'Cecilia,' an elderly lady with no remains of personal beauty, but with a simple and gentle manner, and pleasing expression of countenance, and apparently quick feelings. She told me she had wished to see two persons-myself, of course, being one, the other, George Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with--a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed Phillis of a dairy-maid, instead of the grease fit only for cartwheels which one is dosed with by the pound. "I trust I shall see this lady again." MEMOIRS OF DR. BURNEY. >From the year 1828 to 1832 Madame d'Arblay was chiefly occupied in preparing for the press the Memoirs of her father; and on their publication, she had the pleasure to receive letters from Dr. Jebb, Bishop of Limerick, and from Mr. Southey, the poet. Among the less favourable criticisms of her work, the Only one which gave Madame d'Arblay serious pain was an attack (in a periodical publication) upon her veracity--a quality which, in her, Dr. Johnson repeatedly said "he had never found failing," and for which she had been through life trusted, honoured, and emulated. DEATHS OF HESTER BURNEY AND MRS. LOCKE. (1835 to 1838.) Madame d'Arblay's letters were now very few. - A complaint in one of her eyes, which was expected to terminate in a cataract, made both reading and writing difficult to her. The number of her correspondents had also been painfully lessened by the death of her eldest sister, Mrs. Burney, and that of her beloved friend, Mrs. Locke ; and she had sympathised with other branches of her family in many similar afflictions, for she retained in a peculiar degree not only her intellectual powers, but the warn) and generous affections of her youth. "Though now her eightieth year was past," she took her wonted and vivid interest in the concerns, the joys, and sorrows of those she loved. Page 456 DEATH OF THE REV. A. D'ARBLAY. At this time her son formed an attachment which promised to secure his happiness, and to gild his mother's remaining days with affection and peace : and at the close of the year 1836 he was nominated minister of Ely chapel, which afforded her considerable satisfaction. But her joy was mournfully short-lived. That building, having been shut for some years, was damp and ill-aired. The Rev. Mr. d'Arblay began officiating there in winter, and during the first days of his ministry he caught the influenza, which became so serious an illness as to require the attendance of two physicians. Dr. Holland and Dr. Kingston exerted their united skill with the kindest interest; but their patient, never robust, was unable to cope with the malady, and on the 19th of January, 1837, in three weeks from his first seizure, the death of this beloved son threw Madame d'Arblay again into the depths of affliction. Yet she bore this desolating stroke with religious submission, receiving kindly every effort made to console her, and confining chiefly to her own private memoranda the most poignant expressions of her anguish and regret, as also of the deeply religious trust by which she was supported. The following paragraph is taken from her private notebook:-- "1837.-On the opening of this most mournful--most earthly hopeless, of any and of all the years yet commenced of my long career! Yet, humbly I bless my God and Saviour, not hopeless; but full of gently-beaming hopes, countless and fraught with aspirations of the time that may succeed to the dread infliction of this last irreparable privation, and bereavement of my darling loved, and most touchingly loving, dear, soul--dear Alex." DEATH OF MADAME D'ARBLAY'S SISTER CHARLOTTE. Much as Madame d'Arblay had been tried by the severest penalty of lengthened days, the loss of those who were dearest to her, *one more such sorrow remained in her cup of life. Her gentle and tender sister Charlotte, many years younger than herself, was to precede her in that eternal world for which they were both preparing; and in the autumn of the year 1838, a short illness terminated in the removal of that beloved sister. Page 457 ILLNESS AND DEATH OF MADAME D'ARBLAY. (1839-40.) Madame d'Arblay's long and exemplary life was now drawing to a close; her debility increased, her sight and hearing nearly failed her; but in these afflictions she was enabled to look upwards with increasing faith and resignation. In a letter on the 5th of March, 1839, she wrote the following paragraph,(340) which was perhaps the last ever traced by her pen :-- "March 5, 1839. "Ah, my dearest! how changed, changed I am, since the irreparable loss of your beloved mother! that last original tie to native original affections! . . . "Wednesday.-I broke off, and an incapable unwillingness seized my pen; but I hear you are not well, and I hasten--if that be a word I can ever use again--to make personal Inquiry how you are. "I have been very ill, very little apparently, but with nights of consuming restlessness and tears. I have now called in Dr. Holland, who understands me marvellously, and I am now much as usual; no, not that--still tormented by nights without repose-- but better. "My spirits have been dreadfully saddened of late by whole days- -nay weeks--of helplessness for any employment. They have but just revived. How merciful a reprieve! How merciful IS ALL we know! The ways of Heaven are not dark and intricate, but unknown and unimagined till the great teacher, Death, develops them." In November, 1839, Madame d'Arblay was attacked by an illness which showed itself at first in sleepless nights and nervous imaginations. Spectral illusions, such as Dr. Abercrombie has described, formed part of her disorder; and though after a time Dr. Holland's skill removed these nervous impressions, yet her debility and cough increased, accompanied by constant fever. For several weeks hopes of her recovery were entertained; her patience assisted the remedies of her kind physician , and the amiable young friend, " who was to her as a daughter," watched over her with unremitting care and attention but she became more and more feeble, Page 458 and her mind wandered ; though at times every day she was composed and collected, and then given up to silent prayer, with her hands clasped and eyes uplifted. During the earlier part of her illness she had listened with comfort to some portions of St. John's Gospel, but she now said to her niece, "I would ask you to read to me, but I could not understand one word--not a syllable! but I thank God my mind has not waited till this time." At another moment she charged the same person with affectionate farewells and blessings to several friends, and with thanks for all their kindness to her. Soon after she said, "I have had some sleep." "That is well," was the reply; "you wanted rest." "I shall have it soon, my dear," she answered emphatically: and thus, aware that death was approaching, in peace with all the world, and in holy trust and reliance on her Redeemer, she breathed her last on the 6th of January, 1840 ; the anniversary of that day she had long consecrated to prayer, and to the memory of her beloved sister Susanna. (330) Her departure for Germany with her husband, the Prince of Hesse-Homburg, to whom she had been recently married.-ED. ' (331) From a Memorandum book of Madame d'Arblays. (332) Queen Charlotte died at the palace at Kew, in the seventy-fifth year of her age, after an illness of six months.-ED. (133) At Windsor.-ED. (134) The Princess Mary, who had married her cousin, the Duke of Gloucester.-ED. (135) Queen Caroline. George IV. was now king, George III. having died January 29, 1820. A brief account of the life of Queen Caroline may be of assistance to the reader. Her father was the Duke of Brunswick: her mother a sister of George II. She was born in 1768, and married her cousin, the Prince of Wales, in April, 1795, A speedy estrangement followed, brought about by the prince's intrigues, especially with Lady Jersey; and, after the birth of their daughter, the Princess Charlotte, a total separation took place. In 1806 a charge of adultery was brought against the Princess of Wales. The charge was declared disproved, but colour had been given to it by the undoubted levity and imprudence of her conduct. In 1813 she went abroad, and spent several years in travelling on the continent. Her behaviour during this period gave rise to fresh charges, from which she has never been entirely cleared. She returned to England, June 6, 1820, came to London, and took up her residence in South Audley-street, at the house of her friend, Alderman Wood, one of the members of Parliament for the city of London. Shortly before her return, the king's ministers had proposed to settle upon her an annuity of -/'50,000 for life, subject to the conditions of her continuing to reside abroad, and refraining from assuming the title of queen. This proposal she instantly rejected. She was received in England by the people with unbounded enthusiasm, to which the general discontent then prevailing questionless contributed. A secret committee of the House of Lords, appointed to examine the charges against the queen, having made their report, the government brought in a bill to deprive her of the title of queen, and to dissolve the marriage. She was defended by counsel before the House of Lords, her leading advocate being Mr. (afterwards Lord) Brougham, The Motion for the third reading of the bill passed (November 10) by a small majority, but the bill was immediately afterwards abandoned by the government. This proceeding was generally considered as tantamount to an acquittal, and was celebrated by illuminations and the voting of congratulatory addresses in all parts of the country. Queen Caroline did not long enjoy her triumph. She presented herself at Westminster Abbey on the occasion of the king's coronation, July 19, 1821, but was refused admission. Less than three weeks later she was dead.-ED. (336) Lady Ann Hamilton, who had formerly belonged to Queen Caroline's household, and had joined her in France, shortly before her return to England.-ED. (337) Thursday, August 17, was the day on which the queen's trial commenced before the House of Lords.-ED. (338) Lord Byron, the poet.-ED. (339) Mrs. Piozzi died at Clifton, May 2, 1821, having survived her second husband about twelve years.-ED. (340) To her niece Mrs. Barrett. INDEX Addington, Dr., attends the king, ii. 262. Agujari, Lucrezia, vocalist, i. 162. Aiken, John, M.D., iii. 179. Akenside, his "Pleasures of Imagination" discussed, ii. 193. Alexander I. of Russia, iii. 289, 380. Allen, Mrs. S., marries Dr. Burney, i, xviii. Althorpe, Lord, i. 176, Amelia, Princess, her childish ways and sports, 1. 349, 420, 437; her birthday, 364; 439, 442; ii. 34, 72, 75, 303, 309, 4o6; her AFFECtion for Fanny, 434; iii. 108, 138, 140, 156, 165; at Juniper Hall, 180. Amiens, Fanny's supper at, iii. 319. Ancaster, Duchess of, i. 350 355, 361, 365, 379, 385, 387, 391, 393-4, 396; ii. 10, 39, 85. Andrews, Miles, ii. 32. Angouleme, Duchess d', in London, iii. 276, 281, 291-3; conversation with Fanny, 295. Anstey, Christopher, "Evelina" attributed to, i. xxv, 63. Anstruther, Mr. M.P., ii. 97, 145, 345, 352. Antwerp, projected flight to, iii. 352. Arblay, general Alex. d', acount of, i. xliv; at Juniper Hall, iii. 14, 28-9, 31, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43, 45; he and Fanny in love, 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 62; named to Fanny, 67; 68, 74; his pursuits, 75, 85; at Windsor, 99, 102, 105-6; noticed by George III., 109; plans Camilla Cottage, 115, 122-3, 154; his brother's death, 126; 135, 155-6, 171, 192; his French property, 194; goes to France, 198; his military appointment, 203-7; in Paris, 224-5; his old comrades, 227; his relatives, 234; his pension and property, 241-2; 255, 272, 287; returns to France, 289; enters Louis XVIII's bodyguard, 290; reinstated as maréchal de Camp, 291; his loyalty, 298; on the eve of the Hundred Days, 304-8, 311; reaches Belgium, 337; his mission to Luxemburg, 339, 342; his audience with Wellington, 342; his accident, 369; joined by Fanny at Treves, 370-7; returns to England, 383-5; his affairs and plans, 390; his failing health, 07, 400, 418, 422-3; presented to the queen, 424-6; gradually sinking, 426, 428-32; his death, 433. Arblay, Rev. Alexander d', iii. 82, 97, 121, 138, 143, 156-7; at Court, 163; presented to the queen, 167; his precocity, 177, 182, 192, 196; goes to France, 209; at Dunkirk, 252; returns to England, 263; secures a scholarship, 266, 270; at Cambridge, 272, 275, 293; maternal advice to, 365; his waywardness and prospects, 386, 390-6; his tutor, 401; his aversion to study, 403; his alarm for his mother, 415-8; at his father's death-bed, 430-3; at Cambridge, 436; ordained, 437, 440; in ill-health, 446; named Lent preacher, 451; with one Of the princesses, 454; his death, 456. Arblay, Madame d' (Frances Burney), announces her marriage, iii. 67-70; loses her stepmother, 71; her tragedy, "Edwy and Elgiva," 72, 90-4; her novel, "Camilla," 72, 89, 95-6, 98-112; birth of her son, 85; meets Mrs. Piozzi, 88; presents "Camilla" to royalty, 99-112; relative success of her novels, 114; her Camilla Cottage, 115, 122-3; her opinion of Burke, 126; visits the queen, 141; chats with the princesses, 138-40, 140, 153-4; indignant with Talleyrand, 153; her little boy at Court, 163; visits old friends, 172; with Princess Amelia, 180-3; her withdrawn comedy, "Love and Fashion," 193; her anxiety for her husband, 205-7; goes to France, 208; to Paris, 215; her life there, 216; snubs Mdme. deStael, 220; at the Tuileries, 224; sees Napoleon, 232; at Joigny, 234; at Passy and Paris, 240-7; her dangerous illness, 247, 252; her adventure at Dunkirk, 249; her return to England, 263; regrets Mdme. de Stael, 269; meets S. Rogers, 270; Wilberforce, 271; publishes "The Wanderer," 272-3-5; loses her father, 273-4; is presented to Louis XVIII., 276; joined by her husband, 289; returns to France, 292; meets Duchess d'Angouleme, 293; her flight from Paris, 301, 308-27; her efforts to communicate with her husband, 328; converses with Chateaubriand, 330-3; arrives at Brussels, 334; receives news of d'Arblay, 336-7, 338; her projected flight to Antwerp, 352; joins her husband at Treves, 370-7; returns to France, 378; her bon mot to Talleyrand, 382; return to England, 383; at Bath, 385; Ilfracombe, 398, 402; is caught by the rising tide, 4o6-18; at Bath, 418, 422-37; her husband's illness, 423; his death, 432; her years of widowhood, 434; her son ordained, 440; her correspondence with Madame PiOzzi, 443-8; her health and occupations, 452; is visited by Sir Walter Scott, 454; issues the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," 455; her son's death, 456; her illness and death, 458. Argand, Aimé, i. 405. Argy, Chevalier d', iii. 346. Arras, Fanny at, iii. 321. Arundel, Lord, i. 198. Auch, Countess d', iii. 313. Augusta, Princess, i. 339, 342, 360, 362; her birthday, 365, 375, 385, 387, 409, 439-40; ii. 9, 10; teased by Turbulent, 26; 32, 34-5, 50, 75, 155, 164, 2o6, 242, 270, 310, 347, 490; iii. 104, 107-8, 138, 146, 156-9, 164, 440. Aylesbury, Lord, ii. 332, 400; iii. 163. Aylsham, Fanny at, iii. 37. Bachmeister, Mlle., successor to Mrs. Schwellenberg, iii. 142, 162, 163. Baker, Sir George, M.D., attends the king, ii. 222-3, 231-2, 234-5, 250, 263. Banks, Sir Joseph, ii. 140-1. Bantry Bay Expedition, iii. 124. Barbauld, Mr. and Mrs. (the authoress), iii. 178. Barber, Frank, Johnson's negro, i. 287; iii. 129. Barclay & Perkins, origin of, i. 203. Baretti, Joseph, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvi; admires "Evelina," xxvii, 83; teases Charlotte Burney, 302; his wager, 302, 305; attacks Mrs. Piozzi, ii. 167, 176; tried for murder, 176. Barrett, Mrs., i. xi; iii. 457. Barrington, Lord, at Dr. Burney's, i. Xvii. Barry, Mr., R. A., at Dr. Burney's, i. xvi; expelled the Academy, iii. 184. Bate, Henry, Rev., of the Morning Post and Herald, i. 164. Bath, Fanny at, i. 165-197 423-9; iii. 385-98, 418, 422-37 Queen Charlotte at, iii. 420. Bath, Marquis an(l Marchioness of, ii. 330 ; their family, 331. Bath Easton, i. 174, 189. Batt, Mr., ii. 83, 433. Battiscombe (royal apothecary), i. 293, 446 ; ii. 231, 233. Beauclerk, Topham and Lady Di., i. 154, 231-2. Beauffiremont, Princess de, iii. 237. Beaufort, Duke of, ii. 291. Beauvau, Prince and Princess de, iii. 218, 224-5. Berry, Agnes and Mary, iii. 219. Bertie, Lady Charlotte, lady of the bedchamber, i. 365, 385, 390-3; ii. 39. Betterton, Miss, actress, iii. 149, 157. Bewley, Mr., and Johnson's hearthbroom, i. xvi. Birch, Selina, a prodigy, i. 150-3. Black Brunswickers, the, iii. 347. Blakeney, General, his disposition and conversation, i. 158-164. Blandford, Marquis of, i. 387. Blenheim, royal visit to, i. 397. Bligh, Captain (afterwards Admiral), ii, 350, 358. Blucher, Marshal, iii. 342, 345, 358, 364. Bolt Court, Johnson's home at, i. 95-7, 258, 283-8. Bonaparte, Jerome, iii. 367. Bonaparte, Louis, iii. 235. Bonaparte, Napoleon, and M. d'Arblay, i., x1v; bon mot of, iii. 200; and d'Arblay, 207; at the Tuileries, 231; returns from Elba, 301, 314; persecutes Chateaubriand, 333; his last campaign, 293, 351, 353, 363, 365. Bookham, Fanny at, iii, 75, et seq. Boscawen, Hon. Mrs., ii. 83, 291 iii. 98, 100, 133, 173. Boswell, James, i. 234-5, 319; his "Life of Dr. Johnson," ii. 377, 400-2; his mimicry of Johnson, 432. Bouchier, Captain, i. 179-80, 185-9. Bouffiers-Rouvrel, Countess de, ii. 368. Bourget, Le, Fanny's halt at, iii. 315. Bowdler, Harriet, i. 190-1; iii. 386. Bowdlers, the, i. 194; ii. 424; iii. 386, 396, 401; the first chess-player in England, 405, 406. Boyd, Mr. and Mrs., at Brussels, iii. 343, 352-3, 360. Boydell, Alderman, ii. 464. Bremyere, Mrs., iii. 142, 161. Brighthelmstone (Brighton), Fanny at, i. 112, 133-7, 153-64, 197, 236-9-48. Brisvane, Captain, i. 185-8. Broglie, Marshal de, iii. 16; Madame de, iii. 16, 29, 39. Broome, Ralph, author of "Simkins' Letters," iii. 133, 167, 176. Broome, Mrs., see Burney, Charlotte. Brown, Fanny, an untidy flirt, i. 85-6, 138-9. Bruce, James, the traveller, i. xvii; ii. 330. Brudenell, Miss, ii. 126. Brunswick, army of, iii. 347; Duke of, his death, 347, 351. Brussels, Fanny at, iii. 334; "Rule Britannia" at, 341-2; Fete-Dieu at, 344; the inquietude at, 346; plans for quitting, 350; aspect of, before and after Waterloo, 351-65. Bryant, Jacob, i. 402; his eccentric talk, ii. 22-3, 31, 72, 349, 405. Budé, General, i. 353, 355, 358, 365-6, 416-7, 421, 427, 440-1, 444; ii. 36, 47, 51, 213, 218, 224, 226, 228-9, 245, 341. Bulkley, Lord, ii. 347. Buller, Dean, ii. 321. Bunbury, Henry W., ii. 51, 59, 140, 190-1, 195; Mrs. (Goldsmith's "Little Comedy"), i. 111. Burgoyne, General, ii. 120. Burke, Edmund, praises "Evelina", i. xxvi, 94; slighted by Fanny, xxxvii; introduced to Fanny, 230; on "Cecilia," 232, 252-4; on Fanny's Court appointment, 290; / at the Hastings trial, ii. 92-3, 110, 112, 117; his speech against Hastings, 121, 128, 134; at the trial, 125-7, 129-30, 138, 145, 147, 345, 352, 355, 359-61, 363-4, 392, 438, 440, 445, 452; on the Regency Bill, 351; on the French Revolution, 371, 377; on Fanny's treatment at Court, 429; Reynolds's legacy to, 444; at Mrs. Crewe's with Fanny, 457-63; on Fox, 459; on Windham, 460; subscribes for "Camilla," iii. 73; his death and funeral, 125. Burke, Mrs. Edmund, i. 252, ii. 457, 461. Burke, Richard, son of Edmund, i. 254, 259; ii. 101, 121, 456; iii. 44, 89. Burke, Richard, brother of Edmund, i. 229; ii. 101, 121, 457; iii. 82. Burke, William, i. 115-9. Burney, Charles, Mus. Doc., his early life, marriage, position, and friends, i. xiii-xvii; his second marriage, xviii; authorises the publication of "Evelina," xxiv; peruses it, xxv, 65-8; appointed organist at Chelsea, xxxvii; takes Fanny to Streatham, 75; visits Reynolds, 115; meets Murpby, 129; visits Mrs. Paradise, 224; dines with Reynolds, 228; Visits Chesington, 233; chides Mrs. Thrale, 237; distressed at Crisp's death, 271; at Johnson's deathbed and funeral, 285-8; is commended by the queen, 295; misses a Court appointment, 323-6; is delighted at Fanny's appointment, xxxiii, 329; takes her to Windsor, 333; alluded to, 370, 415; his verses on the queen's birthday, ii. 9; is incensed at Fanny's condition, 65; is lampooned in the Probationary Odes, 145; George III's opinion of him, 291-2; mentioned, 356; his views respecting Fanny's resignation, 366, 368-70, 374, 376-7, 380, 386-7 [See also i. xli-ii]; takes her home, 411; chats with Burke, 429; with Fanny, 430-32; meets the Burkes at Mrs. Crewe's, 456-62; Fox at the Literary Club, iii, 44; objects to Mdme. de Stael, 51; to Fanny's marriage, 65; loses his second wife, 71, 117-9; meets the Piozzis, 88; his "Life of Metastasio," 89, 92, 103; attends Burke's funeral, 125; visits Etruria and Lichfield, 128; visits Herschel, 131, 184; his poetical history of astronomy, 143; his Chelsea apartments, 155, 165; his books, 173; converses with George III, 185, 193; dines with the Prince of Wales, 243; visits Bath, 244; elected a member of the French Institute, 247; is greatly aged, 265; his death, 249, 273; his portrait by Reynolds, 389; his papers, 447; his memoirs, 455. Burney, Mrs., née Allen, wife of above, I. 60; visits Lowndes with Fanny, 79; dresses badly, 86; visits Reynolds, 113; her death, iii. 71, 117. Burney, Rev. Charles, D.D., his birth and library, i. 60; attends Johnson's funeral, 288; at the Hastings trial, ii. 95, 100, 103, 391; mentioned, 375, 411; ii. 171; dines with the Prince of Wales, 243; meets Fanny on her return from France, 265; his school, 270, 272; buys his father's portrait, 389. Burney, Charles Rousseau ("Mr. Burney"), his parentage and mariiage, i. 59; toasts the author of "Evelina," 72; referred to, iii. 397. Burney, Charlotte Anne (Mrs. Francis, afterwards Broome), account of, i. 60; describes her father's perusal of "Evelina," 65-7, 198, 224; fragments of her journal, 254; teased by Baretti, 302; 415; ii. 102, 108, 145; at the Hastings trial, 345, 375; iii. 17; marries Ralph Broome, 133, 167; her death, 456. Burney, Edward, Fanny's cousin, artist, i. 60, 61, 233. Burney, Esther ("Hetty"), birth and marriage, i. 59; and "Evelina," 64; ii. 350, 356; iii. 17, 397, 449, 455. Burney, Frances (Madame d'Arblay), Macaulay's acount of:-- her birth and education, i. xiv-v; surroundings, xvii; appearance and opportunities, xviii; her Writings, first attempts, xviii; her Diary and Letters, xix, xxiii; "Evelina," xxiii-vii; "The Witlings," xxviii; "Cecilia," xxix; "Camilla," "Edwy and Elgiva," x1v; "The Wanderers," and the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," xlvi; qualities and blemishes of her writings, xlvii-lvii; her detractors and admirers, xxvi-vii; her presentation to George III. and Queen Charlotte, xxx; her appointment and life at Court, xxxi-v; her account of the royal visit to Oxford, xxxv; of the trial of Warren Hastings, xxxvi; of George III's illness, xxxviii; her last years at Court, illness and resignation, xxxix; her trip through the south-west of England, visit to juniper Hall, and marriage with General d'Ar.blay, xliv; her departure for France, x1v; return to England and death, xlvi. Diary and Letters:-- Her account of "Evelina," i. 61-74; visits the Thrales and meets Dr. Johnson and Seward, 75-8; interviews Lowndes, 79; is confused by the praise of Johnson and others, 83-91; meets Sir Joshua Reynolds, 92-5; Mrs. Montagu, 100; husbands suggested for her, 106; is kissed by Johnson, 109; visited by Dr. Francklin, 112; visits Reynolds, 113; meets R. B. Sheridan and his Wife, 123; meets Arthur Murphy, 129; purposes writing a play ("The Witlings"), 129, 133; at Brighton, 133; at Streatham, 137; sends "The Witlings" to Crisp, 145; her views of its fate, 146; visits Tunbridge Wells, 149; Brighton, 153, 236, 239, 248; is badly treated by the Cumberlands, 155; visits Bath, 165; her letters on the Gordon riots, 193; leaves Bath, 197; at Streatham, 203; attends Mrs. Paradise's rout, 224; meets Edmund Burke and Gibbon, 228; sits for her portrait, 233 her account of General Paoli, 234-5; of Miss Monckton's assembly, 248; at Mrs. Walsingham's, 256; meets Mrs. Siddons, 257; visits Johnson, 258; is Praised by Soames Jenyns, 261-2; loses her friend Crisp, 270-1; visits the Cambridges, 273-5; her friendship for Mrs. Locke, 277; her views on Mrs. Thrale's second marriage, 278-9; at Norbury with the Lockes, 280; her stormy interview with Lady F., 282; her last chat with Johnson, 283; her account of his death, 285; her visits to Mrs. Delany, 265-70, 292; hides from the queen, 297; her first interview with the king and queen, 298; discusses literary matters with the king and queen, 316-21; is presented at Court, 322; is appointed a keeper of the robes, 327-32; her arrival and reception at Windsor, 333-8; looks on at the queen's toilet, 339; is visited by Court officials, 340; her daily routine, 345; prepares the queen's snuff, 348, 361; accompanies the Court to Kew, 349; is visited by Mrs. Warren Hastings, 352; on familiar terms with the princesses, 353; her account of an attempt against the king, 355; her bitter experience of Mrs. Schwellenberg begins, 359; is kissed by Princess Amelia, 365; is promised a gown from the queen, 368; defends Mrs. Hastings, 371; visits Nuneham and Oxford with the Court, 373; worries and difficulties of the excursion, 374, 382, 390, 393-4; her duties at Windsor and Kew, 399; reads to the queen, 403; repines at her Position, 403; discusses Mdme. de Genlis, 4o5; meets W. Herschel, 408, 444; cannot ask: a guest to dinner, 413; invites a wrong guest, 417 receives a lilac tabby from the queen, 421; is entrusted with the queen's jewels, 422; her tea-table worries, 425; obtains a holiday, 433 ; her verses on "The Greatcoat," 424, 434; romps with Princess Amelia, 437; is too late to attend on the queen, 438; her present to Princess Augusta, 440; is taken ill, 445; in a predicament at St. James's, ii. 10-15; is worried by Turbulent, 16, 24-31, 47, 54, 57, 82, 214-5; is complimented in an epilogue, 32; is disappointed With Mrs. Siddons, 52; her resignation rumoured, 62; is persecuted by Mrs. Schwellenberg, 65; receives a gift from the queen, 72; discusses Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, 74; among her old friends, 82, 85; attends the Warren Hastings trial, 95-136, 143-9, 345-6, 352-5, 357-65, 370-3, 389-95, 437-47, 452, 455; at Egham races, 151; at Cheltenham with the Court, 154-9; her flirtation with Fairly, 159-61, 165, 168-9, 174, 177-87, 193-5, 197-9, 200-3, 204-6; meets Seward, 167, 170; meets Robert Raikes at Gloucester, 171; visits Tewkesbury, 191; is visited by Richard Burney, 192; is attacked with influenza, 195; visits Worcester, 199; is at Windsor again, 207; is twitted about Canon Shepherd, 209, 217; her introduction to Lalande, 210; is eyed curiously by the Prince of Wales, 211; is plagued by Mrs. Schwellenberg, 215-8; begins to write "Edwy and Elgiva," 222; converses with George III. at the outset of his illness, 225-6; her anxiety for him and the queen, 230-2; attends the public prayers for his recovery, 250; is comforted by Pepys's prognostics, 251; leaves for Kew, 265-6; reports to the queen on the king's health, 270; is chased by the king in Kew Gardens; is kissed by him, 289; his strange talk to her, 290-2; her meetings with Fairly during the king's illness, 237, 239, 242, 244, 246, 248, 251, 253-64, 271, 275, 277, 279, 281, 297-8; Fairly's visits remarked on by the queen, 280, 282; Mrs. Schwellenberg's treatment of her during the king's illness, 246, 272-5, 295; sees the king recovered, 298-9, 300; her verses on his recovery, 303; her parting from Fairly, 303-4; meets Miss Fuzilier, 304; at Lyndhurst, 310; Southampton, 312; Weymouth, 313; Exeter and Saltram, 321; Plymouth, 323; Mount Edgecumbe, 327; meets Fairly again, 329; at Longleat, 330; Tottenham Court, 332; Windsor, 333; hears rumours of Fairly's marriage, 334, 340; in the crush at Covent Garden, 335; visited by Mrs. Fairly, 344, 373; reads Colman's plays to the queen, 347, 350; meets Madame PiOzzi, 355; her servant Columb, 367; meets James Boswell, 377; is mentioned in his "Johnson," 401; helps the queen to write verses, 388; her desire to resign, 366, 368-70, 374-6, 379, 389; close of her Court duties, 401; her successor and pension, 403; her leave-takings, 4o5-8; travels through the south-west of England, 410; meets Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 426-9; and Bishop Percy, 428; her literary recreation, 430; on Reynolds's blindness, 431; attends the queen, 434-7; chats with her and the king, 448; compliments the king on his birthday, 453; with the Burkes at Mrs. Crewe's, 456; visits Caen Wood, 464; her adventure at the Shakespeare gallery, 465; is invited to Arthur Young's, 468; stays there, iii. 17; at Aylsham, 37; Norbury Park, 43; meets Madame de Stael and other émigrés of juniper Hall, 44-61; falls in love with d'Arblay, 48, 59, 64; marries him, 67 (see Arblay, Madame d'). Burney, James (afterwards Admiral), his birth, voyages, marriage, and death, i. 59, 168, 173, 200; at Chesington, 436; at the Hastings trial, ii. 120, 122, 125, 129-39, 357-8, 438; his interview with the Earl of Chatham, 370; wants a ship, 356; mentioned, 350, 411; iii. 60. Burney, Mrs. James, i. 436. Burney, Richard, Fanny's uncle, i. 60. Burney, Richard, Fanny's cousin, i. 60; "Evelina" read to, 62; visits Fanny at Cheltenham, ii. 192. Burney, Richard Thomas, i. 60. Burney, Sarah Harriet ("Sally"), i. 60, 65, 333; ii. 357, 391, 411; iii. 17, 24, 72, 146. Burney, Susanna Elizabeth (Mrs. Phillips), her birth, marriage, and death, i. 60; 62-6, 65, 224, 270, 278, 280, 344, 403, 411, 415; her acquaintance with the emigres of juniper Hall, iii. 17, 28-38, 54, 56-61, 64; leaves for Ireland, 71, 121, 124; her death, 170, 188-91. Bute, Lady, ii. 69-70. Byron, Augusta, i. 169, 179, 181, 185-8; Captain George, 169, 173; Mrs., i. 169; ii. 424; iii. 445. Caen-Wood, ii. 464-' Cagliostro, Count, i. 411. Calais, description of, iii. 211. Calvert, Dr., i. 92-3. Cambaceres, iii. 231. Cambridge, Rev. George Owen, i. 258-9, 261-4, 273, 275. Cambridge, Miss, i. 327-30, 347; ii. 223, 271, 304, 344, 375, 411. Cambridge, Richard Owen, i. 258-9, 261-2, 273-5, 326; ii. 16, 83. "Camilla," Madame d'Arblay's novel, i. x1v; Macaulay on, li-lv; iii. 72, 89, 95-6, 98-102, 107-12, 114; reviewed, 116. Camilla Cottage, iii. 115, 122-3, 135, 154, 157. Campbell, Lady Augusta, ii. 85. Camperdown, Duncan's victory off, iii. 140-3, 147-50. Campo, Signor del, ii. 36, 47. Canning, George, iii. 82-3. Carmichael, Miss, Johnson's Poll, i. 96-7. Caroline of Brunswick (Queen), iii. 440-3; Carter, Elizabeth, ii. 83, 279. Cator, Mr., i. 210-13, 221. Cavendish, Ladies Georgiana and Harriet, ii. 425-6. "Cecilia," Fanny's novel; price paid for, i. Xxiv, 254; its production, xxviii-ix, 202, 228; Macaulay's estimate of, xxxii, l-lv; praised by Burke, 232-3; extolled by the "old wits," 251-4; eulogised by Soames jenyns, 261-3; discussed at Mrs. Delany's, 268-76; ii. 32, 176; iii. 114. Chamier, Anthony, M.P., i. 148 Chapman, Dr., Vice- Chancellor at Oxford, ii. 386-7. Chapone, Mrs. (Hester Mulso), account Of, i. 265-70, 288; ii. 83, 321; iii. 172, 398. Charlotte, Princess, anecdotes of, iii. 145, 159, 290; her death, 419, 421. Charlotte, Queen, Macaulay's account of, i. xxx-xxxii; in favour of Warren Hastings, xxxviii; her treatment of Fanny, xl, xli, xliii; generosity to Mrs. Delany, 291; inquisitive about Fanny, 294-5; meets her, 304-13; her disposition and manners, 314; chats about Mdme. de Genlis, Goethe, Klopstock, Milton, Wickliffe, and Roman Catholic superstitions, 319-21; on the Terrace at Windsor, 325; aPpoints Fanny a keeper of her robes, 327-32; receives her at Windsor, 335; ceremonial in her dressing-room, 339; Fanny's routine with, 345-8; er snuff, 348-9, 361; at a Drawing-room, 350, 369; at Kew, 351; her pet dog, 353; distressed by the attempt against the king, 355, 357-61, 367; promises Fanny a gown, 368; visits Nuneham, 374; Oxford, 385-95; Blenheim, 397; Fanny as her reader, 403; advises her concerning Mdme. de Genlis, 407; 416, 419, 420, 422; praised by Fanny, 424; cautions Fanny, 432; tired of her gewgaws, grants Fanny a holiday, 433; receives some verses from her, 424, 434; rebukes her, 439; 440, 442, 446 Dr. Burney's verses for, ii. 10; 22; at the play, 31; on the king's birthday, 33; with the Polignacs, 39; with the Duke of York, 49; 52, 85; with the Prince of Wales, 61, 63; her New Year gift to Fanny, 72; remarks on Dr. Johnson, 77-8; interested in the Hastings trial, 95, 119, 345, 361, 390-1, 395, 448; chats about Lady Hawke's novel, 150; visits Cheltenham, 155-7; her rooms there, 163; her selfishness, 181; remarks on Fairly, 185-7; visits Worcester, 199; on Fairly, 200, 205-6; returns to Windsor, 206; her Wit, 216; during the king's illness, 224-31, 234-6, 238-40, 242, 244, 246, 248-50, 252, 257-8, 262-3; at Kew with the king, 265, 269, 272, 276; remarks on Fairly's visits to Fanny, 280, 282, 285; her birthday, 281, 361; 292, 295 walks out with the king, 297-8; 300, 302; orders illuminations for the king's recovery, 303; holds a Drawing-room, 304; her poultry, 305; visits Lyndhurst, 310; Weymouth, 313, 315, 320-1, 323; Longleat, 330-3; on Fairly, 335; at the play, 335, 342; employs Fanny as reader, 347, 350; her treatment of Fanny, 366, 379- 89, 390, 401-2; her gift to Lord Harcourt, 388; grants Fanny a pension, 403-4, 405; takes leave of her, 408-9; attended by Fanny, 434-7; chats with Fanny, 447, 454-5; Fanny presents "Camilla: to, iii. 99, 103; gives Fanny fifty guineas, 106; has interviews with her, 141, 154; her bounties, 159; alarmed by a mad woman, 266, 278; visits Bath, 420; receives General d'Arblay, 425; her presents to Fanny, 427; her approaching dissolution, 437; her death, 438-9. Chateaubriand, F. R. de, iii. 330-3, 338; his wife, 331-2. Chatham, Pitt, Earl of, i. xx; ii. 321; receives James Burney, 370. Chatre, Marchioness de la, iii. 10, 28, 35, 39, 53; Marquis de la, iii. 39. Chavagnac, Adrienne de, iii. 208. Cheltenham, royal visit to, ii. 154; the wells at, 164; the walks at, 173. Chesington, residence of S. Crisp, i. xxii, 60; Fanny at, 64-75, 200, 233, 266, 270-1, 433 ; iii. 61-5. Chester, Porteus, Bishop of, his sermons, i. 313; his preferment, ii. 82. Chesterfield, Earl of, ii. 317, 346. Cheveley, Mrs., i. 416, 439; ii. 36, 72. Chimay, Princess de, iii. 254. Cholmondeley, Mrs., admires "Evelina," i. xxvii, 68, 94; meets Fanny, 114-20; her entertainment, 120-6; Cholmondeley, Mr., i. 114; Fanny, i. 114- Claremont, Lady, ii. 97. Clarence, Duke of, see William, Prince. Clarges, Sir Thomas, i. 344. Clayton, Lady Louisa, i. 325, 342. Clerk, Mr., apothecary, ii. 195. Clerke, Sir Philip Jennings, i. 127-8, 137-9, 194, 204-5; ii. 312. Clive, Kitty, i- 317. Collumpton Church, ii. 421. Colman, George, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvi; his comedies, ii. 347-50. Cologne, iii. 373. Columb, Jacob, ii. 367. Condé, prince de, iii. 283, 329-30. Conway, General, ii. 23. Cooke, Kitty, i. 60, 108, 200, 233, 435; iii. 63. Cork, Lord, i. 228-9. Cotton, Captain, i. 173. Court (the), life of an attendant at, i. xxxi, xxxiv; monotony of, Xxxv; Fanny's treatment at, xl-xliii ; 289-90; presentations at, 322-3; at Windsor, 333-49, 352-66, 400-47; at Kew, 349, 366, 422 at St. james's, 308, 350, 360. royal birthdays at, 364 visits Nuneham, 374-85, 396; Oxford, 385-95; Blenheim, 397; equerries at, 429; routine at, 443; at St james's, ii. 9-15, 33-5, 62, 65, 85; at Windsor, 16-31, 35-53, 55-61, 72-81 ; at Kew, 50; at the play, 32; New Year's day at, 72; visits Cheltenham, 155; Worcester, 199; during the king's illness, at Windsor, 222-264; at Kew, 265-303; at Windsor, 303; in the New Forest, 311; at Weymouth, 313-21, 329; at Exeter and Saltram, 322-3; Longleat, 330; Tottenham Court, 332; Windsor, 333, 340, 373, 401; Kew, 407; St. james's, 304, 335, 345-73, 382, 396, 408. at Windsor, iii. 99-112, 185-7. Courtenay, Lord, ii, 420. Courtown, Lord, i. 366 ; ii. 155, 159, 162, 164, 165, 191, 199, 314, 323, 399; Lady, ii. 191, 263, 265, 274, 322; iii. 159, Coussmaker, Miss, i. 67. Coventry, Lady, and Crisp's "Virginia," i. xx-i. Crawford, Mr., ii. 51. Crewe, John, first Lord, iii. 266; Mrs., later Lady, i. 121; ii. 129-30, 138-9, 411, 456-68; iii. 73, 75, 77, 125-6, 129, 266-8, 277-88. Crisp, Anne, i. 26. Crisp, Samuel, his appearance and acquirements, i. xix; his "Virginia," xx, xxi; his misanthropy, xxii; his regard for Fanny; he condemns "The Witlings," xxviii, 145-7; "Evelina" read to him, 64; he guesses the author, 70-1; learns the truth, 74-5; alluded to, 200, 233; his death, xxix, 238, 270-1; his remarks on letter writing, iii. 452. Critics, Macaulay on the, i. xix. Croker, J. W., twits Fanny, i. xxvi. Crutchley, Mr., M.P., chats with Fanny, 1. 106-8, 201-23; at the Hastings trial, ii. 101-2, 114, 122; at Egham races, 151. Cumberland, Richard, i. xxvi, 121, 156-8, 315-6; iii. 91-4; Mrs., i. 154-6; Richard, the younger, i. 155-7. Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of, ii. 98; iii. 160. Cumberland, Lady Albinia, iii. 181. Cure, Mr., i. 154-5. Damer, Hon. Mrs., ii. 328; iii. 218. D'Arblay, see Arblay. Davenant, Mr. and Mrs., i. 208-9. Delany, Dr., i. xxx, 264. Delany, Mrs., account of, i. xxx, 64; reads "Cecilia," 252-3; Fanny's first Visit to, 265-70; royal generosity to, 290; visited by George III. and Queen Charlotte, 293; her intercourse with Fanny and the royal family, 324, 329-30, 334-44, 351-2, 355, 358-9, 363-6, 374, 401, 4o6, 416, 420, 422, 426-7, 439, 441-2; ii. 21, 32, 53, 61, 69, 72, 94; her death, 141-3; her marriage at Longleat, 330; judged by Burke, 460. Delap, Rev. John, D.D., i. 139, 141, 150, 157, 160-1. Delawarr, Earl, ii. 321. Desmoulins, Mrs., Johnson's "De Mullin," i. 95-6, 258. Devonshire, Duke of, i. 248; ii. 410, 426-8; iii. 125; Georgiana, Duchess of, i. 2 15 ; ii. 410, 426-8. Dewes, Bernard, i. 295, 298-9, 440. "Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay," original edition, i. xi, xii, Xlv; origin of the, xiv, xxxiv. Dickens, Mrs., i. 154. Digby, Colonel, Hon. Stephen, see Fairly. Dillon, Mdlle. iii. 338. Dobson, Mrs., authoress, i. 170. Dorset, Duke of, i. 121, 309. Douai, royalists at, iii. 324. Douglas, Archibald, ii. 222-3. Douglas, Captain, R.N., ii. 316, 337. Douglas, Dr., i. 445. Douglas, Lady Frances, ii, 222. D'Oyley, Sir John and Lady, ii. 169, 173-4. Drake, Sir Francis (royal steward), i. 363; ii. 420. Dudley, Sir H. Bate, see Bate. Dumouriez, General, iii. 54. Duncan, Admiral, his victory off Camperdown, iii. 140-3, 147-50. Duncannon, Lady, ii. 424. Dundas, Mr. (Sir David), ii. 375. Dunkirk, Fanny's adventure at, iii, 249; Spanish prisoners at, 257. Duras, Dowager Duchess de, iii. 295. Duras, Duchess de, iii- 336; Duke de, iii. 281-7, "Early Diary of Frances Burney," i. xv. "Edwy and Elgiva," Fanny's tragedy, i. xiv; ii, 222, 349; iii. 72, 90. Effingham, Lady, lady of the bed-chamber, i. 343, 351-2, 361, 439; ii. 8, 222, 225, 227. Egerton, Mrs Ariana, iii. 69. Egham races, Fanny at, ii. 151. Elizabeth, Princess ; her illness, i. 296-315; her intercourse with Fanny, 339, 355, 362, 365 374, 377-8, 385, 387, 423; ii. 10, 34-5, 39, 155, 164, 201, 205, 211, 296, 347, 404, 409, 436, 447, 454; iii. 100, 108; her marriage, 122 ; 140, 155, 158, 165, 266, 300, 346, 420-2, 427, 436. Ellenborough, Lord (Mr. Law), at the Hastings trial, ii. 437, 439-41, 443- Elliot, Sir Gilbert, ii. 97, 100, 118; iii. 80, 125. Embry, Mr., i. 109-10. Emigrés, French, at juniper Hall, i. xliv; iii. 11, 13, 15, 28-61. Erskine, Hon. Thomas, and Mrs. Siddons, i. 257; his egotism, his wife, ii. 462-4. "Evelina," Fanny's novel ; its publication, i. xxiv, 59, 61-2; its success, xxv, 115; its admirers, Nxvi; its style, liii, liv; Macaulay's estimate of, lvi; attributed to Anstey, 63; read to Crisp, 64-5; by Dr. Burney, 66-7; by Reynolds, 78; by Burke, 101; praised by Dr. Burney, Mrs. Cholmondeley, and Mrs. Thrale, 68-72; by Dr. Johnson, 71, 73, 76, 103; by Crisp, 74-5; by Seward, 77; by Sheridan, 124; Fanny's copy of, 69; price paid for the NIS., 69; Reynolds sits up reading, 78; praised to Dr. Lort, 90-1; curiosity respecting its author, 92-5, 224-8; Cumberland's jealousy of, 158; quoted, 165; a child's enquiries about, 191-2; Paoli's View Of, 234; Windham's remarks on, ii. 144; Baretti on, 176; its sale, iii. 114. Exeter, royal visit to, ii. 321. Fairly, Colonel (Hon. Stephen Digby), i. xxxix; ii. attacks Mrs. Warren Hastings, 371; at Nuneham, with Fanny, 380, 383; at Oxford, 385, 390, 395-7; embroiled with Mrs. Schwellenberg, 400; looks melancholy, 445; loses his first wife, ii. 53; at Windsor, 75; his conversation, 78; likely to marry Miss Fuzilier, 126, 153, 177; 139; with Fanny, 154; at Cheltenham, 155, 158-9; his téte-a-téte with Fanny, 159-61 ; 162 ; talks, reads, and flirts with her, 165-8, 170, 174, 177-87, 193, 197, 199; ill with the gout, 171, 173; criticises the princes, 189; takes leave of Fanny, 200-3; his note to her, 204; discussed by his brother equerries, 213; with the Gunnings, 224; at Windsor during George III.'s illness, 228, 233, 236-7, 239-40; soothes the king, 241; on familiar terms with Fanny, 242-4-6-8; his remarks on the prayers for the king, 249; is anxious about the queen, 251; his intercourse with Fanny, 253-62, 264; arrives at Kew, 267; is concerned for the princesses, 271-2; disliked by Mrs. Schwellenberg, 275-7; with Fanny, 277, 279, 281; the queen remarks on his visits, 280-2; search for him, 285; 293-4; meets Windham, 297-8; takes leave of Fanny, 303-4 at Weymouth, 329; his marriage is rumoured, 334, 340; his strange wedding to Miss Fuzilier, 342-4; meets Fanny again, iii. 111. Fairly, Mrs., ii. 344, 373; see also Fuzilier. Farnham, ii. 411. Farren, Miss, actresw, ii. 32; iii. 149. Fauconberg Hall, ii. 155, 157; Lord, ii. 155. "Female Quixote, The," by Charlotte Lenox, i. lvi. Ferrars, Lady De, i. 243-4; Lord De, i. 243. Ferry, Mr., i. 178-9. Fielding, Henry, Dr. Johnson on, i. 91. Fielding, Sir John, i. 192-3. Fielding, Mrs. (woman of the bedchamber), i. 341-2, 351, 366; ii. 10, 304. Finch, Lady Charlotte (governess to the princesses), i. 341-2, 355-6; ii. 184, 252, 259, 265, 270, 274, 286. Finch, Miss, i- 06. Fisher, Canon, i. 338, 366, 427, 436-7; ii. 72, 75-6, 212-3, 342, 406; iii. 99, 120. Fisher, Kitty, and Dr. Johnson, i. 89. Fisher, Mrs., ii. 72, 75; iii. 110. Fite, Madame de la, at Norbury Park, i. 280-1, 311-2; her intercourse with Fanny at Windsor, 337, 342, 355, 405-6, 409-16, 440 ; ii. 35, 405, 451. Fitzherbert, Mrs., ii. 320. Flint, Bet, and Johnson, i. 87,8. Foster, Lady Elizabeth, ii- 410, 427-8. Fouche, iii. 250. Fox, Charles James, at the Hastings trial, ii. 92, 93, 97, 125, 127-8, 134-5, 361, 392, 441; and the regency bill, 221; Burke on, 459, 463; and the execution of Louis xvi, iii. 44. France, revolution in, iii. 11, 42-4; Fanny goes to, 203; leaves, 263; returns to, 292-327, 378,83; foreign occupation Of, 379-81. Francis, Clement, marries Charlotte Burney, i. 332 ; ii. 109, 123, 145, 345, 375, 380-1; iii. 38. Francis, Mrs., see Burney, Charlotte. Francis, Mr. (Sir Philip), ii. 89, 109, 346. Francklin, Rev. Th., D. D., admires "Evelina," i. xxvii; interviews Fanny, 112. French Clergy Fund, the, iii. 77, 78. French, Miss, Burke's niece, ii. 457, 461; Fuller, Captain, and his soldiers, i. 135, 136, 137. Fuller, Mr. Rose, at Streatham, i. 92, 109, 139; his conversation, 148, 153. Fuzilier, Miss (Charlotte Gunning), ii. 126, 153, 177, 224, 255, 304, 340, 342-4, see Fairly, Mrs. Gabrielli, Signora, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvii. Gage, Sir Thomas, ii. 450; iii. 23. Galway, Dowager Lady, i. 248, 254. Gaud (Ghent), Louis xviii. at, iii. 337, 349. Garrick, David, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvi; his connection with Crisp's "Virginia," xx, xxi; his love of flattery, 122; 317; reads "Lethe" to a royal audience, 349; his relatives, his monument at Lichfield, iii. 129. Garrick, Mrs., ii. 82, 432. Garth, Major, ii- 374. Gast, Mrs. Sophia, Crisp's sister, i. 60, 71, 169, 233, 266; ii. 207. Genlis, Madame de, Fanny's acquaintance with, i. 316; her strictures on the English stage, 318 ; Queen Charlotte on her writings, 319; her position discussed, 405-8; in England as Mdme. Brulard, 449; iii. 22-4, 26-7. George III, his generosity to Mrs. Delany, i. 265, 291 ; visits her incog, 293; is inquisitive about Fanny, 294; his first interview with her, XXX, 298; his health, constitution, and diet, 299 ; questions Fanny about her writings, 301-4; is anxious she should continue writing, 310; his views on sermons, 313; his demeanour and character, 314, 318-9; takes tea at Mrs. Delany's, etiquette, 314-5; his opinions of Lord George Sackville, Voltaire, and Rousseau, 316; of plays and players, 317; on the Terrace at Windsor, 325-6; in the queen's dressing-room, 339; at Kew, 349-51; an attempt on his life, 355-61; is cheered at Little Kew, 367; visits Nuneham, Oxford, and Blenheim, 373-98; protects Herschel, 408, 420; his equerries and his barley-water, 431 ; with his favourite daughter, Amelia, 437; visits Fanny during her illness, 446; converses with jacob Bryant, ii. 23; at the play, 31; his birthday, 33; plays backgammon, 37; with the Polignacs, 39; is joyful at the Duke of York's return, 49; criticises Goldsworthy's collar, 84; is amused by a caricature, 140; goes to Cheltenham, 155; his rooms there, 163; visits Cirencester, 171; Tewkesbury, 174; is solicitous about Fairly, 181-2, 186, 187-8; lodges the Duke of York in a portable wooden house, 190; has Fanny prescribed for, 196; visits Worcester, 199; returns to Windsor, 206; his illness, 220; is in an uncertain state, 222-4; his want of sleep, 294-6; progress of his illness, 226-8; first outburst of delirium, 228; delirious, 232; refuses to see Dr. Warren, 234; his night watchers, 238; is soothed by Mr. Fairly, 240; public prayers for, 248; is much worse, 250; certainty of his recovery, 251; his charter, 254, 256; reports upon his Condition, 257; requires stricter management, 259; is removed to Kew, 261, 265-6; state of his health, 268, 272, 273; takes his first walk, 274; his varying condition, 276-7; is treated by Dr. Willis, 274, 278; on the queen's birthday, 281; chases Fanny in Kew Gardens, 287-92; his gradual amendment, 294-8; is completely restored, 299; inquires after Fanny, 300; illuminations on his recovery, 303; his reception in the New Forest, 310; at LyDdhurst, 311; at Salisbury, Dorchester, Weymouth, 313; his sea baths, 314-6; his amusements at and excursions from Weymouth, 316-21; at Exeter and Saltram, 322-3; again at Weymouth, 329; at Longleat, 330; at Tottenham Court, 332; returns to Windsor, 333; at Covent Garden Theatre, 335-40; is interested in the Hastings trial, 395. 456 ; his birthday, 395, 399; reads Boswell's "Johnson," 401-2; takes leave of Fanny, 409; meets her again; 436; chats with her, 448-9, 453-6; "Camilla" presented to him, iii. 100, 106-7; notices M. d'Arblay, 110; remarks on "Camilla," 111; chats with Fanny, 145; with Dr. Burney, 185-7; is again mad; 252, 267; his death, 440. Ghent, see Gand. Gibbon eulogises Fanny, i. xxvi; meets her, 228-32; reads "Cecilia," 254; falls into the Thames, 275; admires Lady Elizabeth Foster, ii. 428. Girardin, Alexandre de, iii. 34. Glastonbury Abbey, ii. 421. Gloucester, Fanny at, ii. 171. Gloucester, Dr. Halifax, bishop of, ii. 173. Gloucester, Princess Sophia of, iii. 151. Gloucester, William Frederick, Duke of, iii. 151. Gloucester, William Henry, Duke of, ii. 98, 311 ; iii. 151. Goethe, his "Sorrows of Werther," i. xxxi, 320. Goldsmith, Dr., his "Good-Natured man" and "The Rambler," i. 83-4; his love for Mary Horneck, 111; his blundering ways, 232. Goldsworthy, Colonel (equerry), his character and humour, i. 421; is offended with Fanny, 427; his duties and discomforts, 429-31; 440; his remarks on the Court concerts, 444; ii- 17; character and humour, 36-7; derides Col. Manners, 40-2; his huge coat collar, 84; at Worcester, 199 213 his breach of etiquette, 216, 218; during George III.s illness, 228-9, 231, 233, 235, 239, 261, 268; at Weymouth, 320, 323, 407. Goldsworthy, Miss (governess to the princesses), i. 2o2, 342, 365, 421; ii. 32, 231-5, 238-9, 240, 246, 252, 266; 270, 396, 406-7, 434. Gomme, Miss, Court attendant, ii. 34, 95, too, 270, 283, 295, 342, 405, 434 ; iii. 105. Gordon, Lord George, i. 192-5-7, 411; riots, i. 165, 192-9. Grafton, Duke of, iii. 27. Grattan, Henry, iii. 278, 281. Gregory, Miss, i. 100-3; ii. 424. Grenville, General, ii. 50, 218, 407. Greville, Colonel, equerry, see Wellbred. Greville, Fulk, patron ofDr. Burney, i. xiii. Grey, Mr., afterwards Earl, at the Hastings trial, ii. 93, 97; and Reform, 463; alluded to, iii. 389. Grub Street, Fanny's proposed visit to, i. 199. Guibert, M., iii. 56. Guiche, Countess de, ii. 39. Guiffardiere, Rev. C. de, see "Turbulent." Gunning, Charlotte, see Fuzilier. Gunning, Sir Robt., ii. 126, 224, 342. Gwatkin, Mr., i. 92, 119; ii. 444. Gwynn, Colonel (king's equerry), ii- 45, 47, 51, 155, 158-9, 162, 165, 173, 191, 247, 317, 407 ; Mrs., see Horneck, Mary. Haggerdorn, Mrs., keeper of the queen's robes, succeeded by Fanny, i. 329-31; ii. 24, 153. Hagget, Rev. Mr., i. 379, 383, 385, 390, 396-8. Hales, Lady, on "Evelina," i. 67. Halifax, Dr., ii. 173. Hamilton , "Single speech," i. 164. Hamilton, Sir William, ii. 38. Hamilton, Lady Ann, iii. 442. Hamilton, Mrs., of Chesington, i. 60, 200, 233 ; iii. 63. Hampden, Mrs., i. 250. Harcourt, Earl of, i. 122-3, 373-4, 379, 385, 387-8, 390, 400; ii. 185, 191, 388, 399; Countess of, i. 373, 377, 382, 385, 390, 393-4 ii. 185, 191. Harcourt, General, i. 380, 383, 385, 390; ii. 39, 244, 268; Mrs., i. 396; ii. 39, 281. Harrington, Dr., i. 171-8, 195. Harrington, Rev. Henry, i. 171-2, 177. Harris, James, i. 198; ii. 355-8. Hartington, Marquis of, ii. 426. Hastings, Warren, Fanny's opinions of, i. xxxvii; Queen Charlotte and, xxxviii; meets Fanny, 326; his marriage, 327; the storm gathering round, ii. 44; résumé of his career, impeachment, trial, 86-94; Fanny's account of his trial, 95-139, 143-9, 345-6, 352-5, 357-65, 370-3, 389-95, 437-47, 452,455-6; meets Windham, 373; is acquitted, iii. 92. Hastings, Mrs. Warren, account of, i. 327; visits Fanny, 352; is defended by her, 371, 372; mischief making about, 400; her money, ii. 92; her eccentricities, 451. Hawke, Lady, i. 225-8; ii. 150. Hawkesworth, i. xvi. Hawkins, Mr., surgeon of the royal household, ii. 235, 252, 260, 276. Hawkins the, ii. 200. Hayes, Mrs., i. 443. Heberden, Dr., king's physician, ii. 38, 226, 232, 234, 250; Mrs. and Miss, i. 360; ii. 39. Henderson, John, actor, i. 317. Henin, Princess d', iii, 56, 119, 136, 218-9, 222, 304-5, 307; her flight from Paris with Fanny, 311, 313-25, 330; at Brussels, 335, 343, 349, 304, 369, 370. Herschel, Miss, her comet, i. 409; ii. 58; iii. 131. Herschel, Dr. (afterwards Sir W.), his telescope, i. 408-9, 445; discussed, ii. 37, 38, 40, 58; visited by Dr. Burney, iii. 131, 184-7. Hoole, John, i. 259, 285. Horneck, Catherine (Mrs Bunbury), "Little Comedy," i. 111; ii. 51. Horneck, Mary (Mrs. Gwynn), the Jessamy Bride, i. 111, 114; ii. 45, 140, 317, 319; Mrs., i. 111, 114. Howard, Lady Frances, i- 343-4, 352, 439 ; ii. 222. Howard, Sir George, i. 344, 352 ii. 222. Howe, Lord, and the I"Vengeur," iii. 143. Huddisford, Mr., his libel on Fanny, i. 113, 119. Hulin, General, iii. 224-5. Humphries, Miss, i. 62-3. Hundred Days, the, iii. 292-3. Huntingdon, i. 176, 180. Hurd, Bishop of Worcester, ii. 143, 199. Ilfracombe, Fanny at, iii. 398; her adventure at, 405-18. Illness of George III., ii. 221-99. Imhoff, Madame, marries Warren Hastings, i. 327. Impey, Sir Elijah, ii. 89, 118. Inchiquin, Lord, iii. 125. Jacobi, Mdlle., Fanny's successor, ii. 403-9, 434, 447; iii. 102, 106, 109, 142. jaucourt, M. de, iii. 14, 29-32, 80. jenyns, Soame, praises "Cecilia," i. 261-3. jerningham, his verses, i. xxvii. Jervis, Admiral, iii. 143. Johnson, Commodore, i. 168. Johnson, Samuel, LL. D., his friend- ship for Dr. Burney, i. xvi; his opinion of "Evelina," xxvi; his last message to Fanny, xxix; assists her with "Cecilia," lii-lv; "Evelina" read to him, 71, 73; meets Fanny, 77; tails at Langton, 81; praises "Evelina," 83, 90, 103; abuses the Scotch, 84-5; criticises Mrs. Burney's dress, 86; his stories of Bet Flint and Mrs. Pinkethman, 87-8; his household, 95; his opinion of Mrs. Montagu, 97-9; his compliments and bitter sayings, 104-6; kisses Fanny, 109; disputes with Sir P. J. Clerke, 128-9; advises Fanny respecting her play, 130-2; his account of the Gordon riots, 192; offers to take Fanny to Grub Street, 199; is appointed Thrale's executor, 202; intercedes for Mauritius Lowe, 209; his "Life of Lord Lyttelton," 211-3; his sportive moods, 215; at Brighton, 238; on Gray and Pope, 240-1; his bluster at Lord de Ferrars, 243; is held in general dread, 247 attends Miss Monckton's assembly, 250-5; his inmates at Bolt Court, 258; is attacked by paralysis, 272; his failing health, 283; his death, 285-8; his letters to Mrs. Thrale, ii. 74; his intercourse with Windham, 103, 136-8; his life by Boswell, 377, 400; his monument at Lichfield, iii. 129; his portrait by Reynolds, 389; his view of sorrow, 445. Joigny, Fanny at, iii. 234. Jones, Colonel, commander at Brussels, iii. 350, 363. Jordan, Mrs., ii. 79; in "The Country Girl," 185, 190. juniper Hall, French émigré's at, i. xliv; iii. 11, 13, 15, 28, 61. Kaye, Captain, a beau, i. 245-6. Kenyon, Lord, ii. 393. Kew Palace, the Court at, i. 349-51, 367, 422; ii. 50-4; during the king's illness, 265-303; gardens of, Fanny chased by George III., 287; Fanny's farewell to, 407. Klopstock, his "Messiah," i. x1xi, 320. L'AEKEN, palace of, iii. 341. Ladd, Sir John, i. 107; Lady, i. 92, 109. Lafayette. Marquis de, iii, 12, 14, 29, 31, 86, 207, 426; Marchioness de, iii. 221; Mdlle. de, iii. 223. Lalande, J. J. de, ii. 208-11. Lally-Tolendol, Count de, iii. 13; his tragedy, 54; at Norbury, 118, 136; his qualities, 196-7; his flight from France, 312-4, 316-25, 328, 364, 369. Lamb, Lady Caroline, iii, 344. Lamballe, Princess de, ii. 50. Lameth, iii. 16, 319-20. Langton, Bennet, admires "Evelina," i. xxvii; his children and affairs, 81-2; at Johnson's deathbed, 286-8; his wife, ii. 83; mimics Johnson, 453. Lansdowne, Lord, his connection with Waller and Pope, i. xxx; iii. 260. Latour-Maubourg, Victor de, iii. 273, 309. Lauriston, General, iii. 171, 227, 241. Lavalette, Marquis de, his escape, iii. 386-8. Law, Mr., ii. 437, 439-41, 443. Lawrence, Sir Thomas, his precocity, i. 167. Lenox, Charlotte, her novel, "The Female Quixote," i. lvi; Johnson on, ii. 401. Lever, Sir Ashton, ii. 319. Levett, Robert, at Dr. johnson's, i. 96. Liancourt, Duke de, iii. 13, 18-22, 24-8, 37. Lindsay, Lady Anne, i. 144. Linley, Eliza Anne, married to Sheridan, i. 111-12, 344 [see Sheridan, Mrs.]. Linley, Miss, sister to Mrs. Sheridan, i. 121. Literary Club, The, meeting at, iii. 44. Lobau, Count, iii- 355. Locke, Mr. and Mrs., of Norbury Park, i. 277, 280-2, 312, 344, 411; ii. 299, 305; iii. 16, 39, 59, 76, 81, 115, 120, 144, 154, 202, 252, 279, 384-5, 394, 441, 450, 455; William, son of, his artistic talent, i. 312-3 ; ii. 60, 141. London, Porteus, Bishop of, ii. 82. Long, Dudley, ii. 97. Longleat, the Court at, ii. 330; paintings at, 331. Lort, Michael, D.D., and "Evelina," i. 89, 90. Loughborough, Lord, ii. 462. Louis xvi, his trial and execution, iii. 42-4, 48, 53-4. Louis xviii., his levee at Grillon's, 276; Fanny presented to, 284-8; his reception in Paris, 291, 310, 318; reaches Ghent, 337, 349; leaves for France, 364-5. "Love and Fashion," Fanny's comedy, iii. 193. Lowe, Mauritius, painter, i. 209. Lowndes, J., publishes "Evelina," i. xxiv, xxv, 59, 61, 69, 75; is interviewed by Fanny, 79. Luc, M. de, i. 443; ii. 9, 40, 48, 65-8, 70, 243-4, 262, 320, 391, 393, 396, 403, 435-6; Mrs de, i- 353, 363 ; ii. 405. Lucan, Lady, and Mrs. Siddons, i. 257-8. Lulworth Castle, The Court at, ii. 318; Fanny at, 320. Luxembourg, Duke de, iii. 345. Luxemburg, M. d'Arblay's mission to, iii. 339. Lyndhurst, the king at, ii. 311. Lyme, Fanny at, ii. 418. MacBean, Johnson's amanuensis, i. 96. Macartney, Earl, ii. 456. Macburneys, The, i., xiii. Malesherbes, M. de, iii. 48, 54, Malouet, iii. 37. Manners, colonel, afterwards General (equerry), his eccentric sayings, ii. 36-8; his singing, 40-2; plagues Mrs. Schwellenberg, 42; his election beating, 213; alluded to, 152, 257; mystifies Mrs. Scbwellenberg, 305; as an M.P., 351; mentioned, 393, 407; iii. 110-2. Mansfield, Lord, i. 192-3; ii. 464. Markham, Archbishop, ii. 105. Marlborough, Duke of, is colour-blind, i. 307; at Oxford, 386-7-9; Duchess of, 386-9. Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, anecdote of, i. 169. Mary, Princess, i. 353-4, 365; ii. 34, 39, 296, 396, 4o6, 434; iii. 138, 164, 266, 437-9, 440. Maurville, Mdme. de, iii. 334, 338, 348, 358, 364. Mazancourt, Count de, iii. 339-40, 377. Melbourne, Lord, iii. 243, 344. Menage, Countess de, ii. 413. "Memoirs of Dr. Burney,"'i. xxiii, lv, 234; iii. 455. "Metastasio, Life of," Dr. Burney's, iii. 89, 92, 103. Metcalf, Philip, M.P., i. 244-5, 250. Mhaughendorf, Miss, i- 375-7, 381. Mickleham, Fanny at, iii. 46, 49, 50, 52; her marriage at, 67, 71. Miller, Sir John, i. 174, 180, 190, 221. Miller, Lady, "The Lady of the Vase," i. xxvii, 74-5, 180, 189, 221; ii. 424. Milton Abbey, ii. 417. Mithoff, Rev. Mr., i. 418-20. Molloy, Capt., R.N., ii. 324-7. Molyneux, Sir F., ii. 98. Monckton, Hon. Miss (afterwards Countess of Cork), meets Fanny, i. 248; her assembly, 249-56, 257; ii. 102-3. Monmoulin, Mdlle., i. 365; ii. 34, 270, 282, 295-6, 342. Montagu, Duke of, i. 365, 440. Montagu, Elizabeth, née Robinson, her writings, conversation, and disposition, i. 97-8; Johnson's opinion of, 99; meets Fanny, 100-3; her opinion of Johnson's "Life of Lord Lyttelton," 210; praises "Cecilia," 251-2; Frances Reynolds's letter to, 260; mentioned, ii. 82, 424, 432, 450. Montagu, Frederick, M.P., ii. 97, 291. Montmorency, Viscount de, iii. 14, 28, 39, 53, 80. Mordaunt, Lord, i. 134. More, Hannah, her flattery, i. 122, 185. Mornington, Lady, ii. 338. Mortemart, Mdlle. de, iii. 218, 224. Mount Edgecumbe, Lordand Lady, i. xvii ; ii. 323, 327. Mount Edgecumbe, Fanny at, ii. 327. Mountmorres, Lord, ii. 336-9. Mulgrave, Lord, i. xvii, 168, 172-4-6; ii. 83, 150; Lady, ii. 83, 150. Mulso, Hester, see Chapone. Murat, iii. 368. Murphy, Arthur, offers to assist Fanny Burney in writing a play, i. xxviii, 130-1, 133, 134. Murray, Lady, iii. 419. Musgrave, Mr., i. 221. Musters, Mrs., a beauty, i. 154. Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Narbonne, Count de, in England, i. xliv; iii. 29-30, 35-7, 40, 43, 45, 52, 54, 57, 82, 97; in France, 253; his death, 273. Necker, M., iii. 36, 47, 52, 220, Netherlands, King and Queen of the, iii. 339, 365. Newcastle, Duke of, ii. 96. New Forest, the king's reception in the, ii. 310. Ney, Marshal, and his iron cage for Napoleon, iii. 304. Nicholson, Margaret, her attempt against the king, i. 355-61, 367. Nore, the, mutiny at, iii. 139. Norfolk, Duke of, iii. 158. North, Colonel, ii. 97. North, Lord, ii, 392. Nugent, Colonel, reads an address to Louis XVIII., iii. 286. Nuneham, royal visits to, i. 374-85, 396 ; ii- 156. O'Connor, Arthur, iii. 166. Ogle, Mrs., ii. 187-8; iii. 397. Omai, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvii. Orange, Prince (William 1. of Holland) and Princess of, iii. 147, 231, 339, 365. Orange, Prince of (William II. of Holland), iii, 365. Ord, Mrs., a "blue stocking," i. 259, 261-3, 333-4; ii. 82, 150, 370, 378, 410-29. Orford, Lord, ii. 434-5. "Original Love Letters," ii. 170, 182. O'Riley, Miss, a flirt, i. 205. Orleans, Mdlle d', ii. 449-50; iii. 23. Orloff, Count, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvii. Otaheite, rubbing noses at, iii. 60. Owen, Miss, i. 13-5. Oxford, royal visits to, i. xxxv-vi, 385-95; ii. 156. Pacchierotti, Gasparo, vocalist, i. XVii, 121, 224, 263-4; ii. 356. Paine, Thomas, in Suffolk, ii. 450. Palmer, Miss, and "Evelina," i. 92-5; at Reynolds's, 113-20, 228-9, 256; at Cheltenham, ii. 169, 173-4, 411, 431; inherits from Reynolds, marries Lord Inchiquin, 444. Palmerston, Lord, i. 115-20. Pamela, Mdme. de Genlis's, ii. 449; iii. 23. Paoli, General Pasquale, pays homage to Fanny, i. xxvii; her account OF, 23-5. Paradise, Mr. and Mrs., i. 224-8. Paris, Fanny in, iii. 215; a parade in presence of the first Consul, 224 ; the influenza in, 239; on Napoleon's return from Elba, 305; Fanny's flight from, 308 et seq.; her return to, 378. Paston Letters," the, ii. 21-2, 150. Payne and Cadell, publish "Cecilia," i. 254. Pembroke, Elizabeth, Countess of, i- 135-6, 178. Pepys, Lucas, Dr., afterwards Sir, i. 239; ii. 83, 126; attends the king, 250-3, 262-4, 276, 284, 287; 432 ; iii. 177, 180. Pepys, W. W., afterwards Sir, i. 148, 210-3, 239-41 ii. 82; iii. 177. Percy, Bishop, ii. 428; iii. 44. Perkins, Mr., i. 197. Philidor, iii. 405. Phillips, Captain Molesworth, i. 60, 224, 231 ; ii. 357, 437; iii. 31, 35, 59, 71, 113; Mrs., see Burney, Susanna. Pinkethman, Mrs. and Dr. Johnson, i. 88. Piozzi, Signor, marries Mrs. Thrale, i. 236-8, 278-9 ; iii. 88. Piozzi, Mrs. (Thrale), leaves England, i. 237; is gay and happy, 288 ; publishes her correspondence with Johnson, ii. 74-8, 101; is attacked by Baretti, ii. 167, 176; meets Fanny, 355; Dr. Burney, iii. 88; at Bath, 386, 396-7, 422; letters from, 443-5-7; her death, 448; compared with Mdme. de Stael, 449. Pitt, William, and the Regency bill, i, XXXi., ii. 220-1; and the Hastings trial, ii. 93, 108, 135; at Windsor, 263; D'Arblay's application to, iii. 74; his "loyalty loan," 121. Planta, Miss, English teacher and attendant to the princesses; her intercourse with Fanny, i. 291, 349-51, 361, 365, 374-87, 390-8, 415, 437, 443, 446 ; ii. 18, 30-3, 46, 65-9, 85, 139, 155-9, 161-8, 170, 180-5, 189-94, 200-1, 218, 224, 228, 242, 246, 262, 266-9, 283, 312-4-6, 322-3, 327-9, 335-8, 405, 434; iii. 99, 142, 155, 163. Plymouth dockyard, ii. 323. Polier, Colonel, a gourmand, i. 336, 340, 345. Polignac, Duke and Duchess de, at Windsor, ii. 39; the duchess and the Diamond Necklace scandal, ibid. Port, Miss, account of, i. 293; at Mrs. Delany'S, 293, 298, 300; serves tea to George III., 315, 318; her intercourse with Fanny, 337-8, 342, 401, 418, 427, 440; ii. 36, 39, 40, 46, 49, 141-2, 150, 184-6, 192. Porteus, Dr., Bishop of Chester, i. 313 ; ii. 82. Portland, Duchess of, née Harley, inquires after "Cecilia," i. 251, 253; meets Fanny, 267-70; her death, 290; Duke of, iii. 125. Powderham Castle, ii. 420. Prémorel, M. de, iii. 340, 346, 377-8. Price, Major, equerry to George III, i. 338, 344, 352, 355, 358, 363-6, 371, 380, 383-7, 390, 396-7, 400, 416, 421; ii, 17, 45, 176, 203, 206, 341, 346, 436. Princes, the, see Cumberland, Gloucester, Dukes of, Wales, Prince of, William, Prince (Duke of Clarence), and York, Duke of. Princess Royal, Charlotte (Queen of Wiirtemburg), i. 339, 348, 354, 358, 365, 375, 377-8, 385, 387, 416, 420, 422-3; ii. 10, 35, 199, 216, 266, 340, 347, 409, 447; iii. 104, 107; is presented to her fiancé, 115; 122; her marriage, 138-9. Princesses, the, i- 353, 357, 365, 377, 389, 394; ii. 33, 224, 236, 265, 269-70, 271-2, 409, 455; their births, marriages, deaths, iii. 123; 451, 454; see also Amelia; Augusta, Elizabeth, Mary, Princess Royal, and Sophia. "Probationary Odes," the, ii. 145. Prussia, King of, iii. 289. Quatre Bras, battle of, iii. 347, 351. Queen, the, see Charlotte, Queen. Raikes, Robert, founder of Sunday schools, ii. 171-3. Ramsden, Colonel, equerry, ii. 36-7, 407. Regency bill, the, i. xxxix; ii. 220-1, 271, 276, 296-9. Regent, Prince, see Wales. Revolution, the French, résumé of the principal events of, from September 1791 to March 1793, iii. 11-5; the capture of the Bastille, 18; the invasion of the Tuileries, 19; the Duke de Liancourt's efforts at Rouen, 19-22; decrees against the emigres, 33; trial and execution of Louis XVI., 42-4, 48; sieges of Dunk-irk and Toulon, 73-4, 78; the insurrection of the 18th Fructidor, 136; the "Vengeur" legend, 143; the peace of Amiens, 171; the revolutionary calendar, 214. Reynolds, Mrs. Frances, i. 78, 199, 260. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, at Dr. Burney's, i. xvi; reads "Evelina," 78; his meeting and intercourse with Fanny, 92-5, 106, 113, 123, 125-6; is derided by Blakeney, 160; his opinion of Lawrence, 167; his picture of Beattie, 184; introduces Fanny to Burke and Gibbon, 228-32; with Fanny at Miss Monckton's, 29-6, 259-60, 272; ii. 82; at the Hastings trial, 100; his failing eyesight, 333, 377, 411, 431-2; his death, his disposition of his fortune, 444 ; his paintings at Streatham, iii. 389. Rhamus, Mr., ii. 11, 13. Rhine, scenery of the, iii, 377. Richmond, Reynolds's dinner party at, i. 228. Richmond, Duke of, ii. 321; Duchess of, her ball at Brussels, iii. 367. Riggs, Mrs., i. 174, 189. Roberts, Dr., provost of Eton, i. 401, 440. Roche, Mdme. de la, authoress, i. 409-16. Rochefoucault, Duke de la, iii. 22. Rogers, Samuel, iii. 177, 270, 454. Rothes, Lady, ii. 432; iii. 177, 180. Rousseau, J. J., George III. on, i. xxx, 316. Rovigo, Duke de, iii. 253. Royal, Princess, see Princess. Rumford, Count, iii. 133. Russia, Alexander 1. of, iii. 289. Rutland, Mary Isabella, Duchess of, i. 215. Sackville, Lord George, R. Cumberland and George III. on, i. 315-6. St. Asaph's, Bishop of, 1, 229. St. James's Palace, Court drawingrooms at, i. 308, 350, 369 ; ii. 9-15, 33-5, 65-6, 85, 304, 335; the Court at, 345-73, 382, 396, 408 ; attempt against George III. outside, i. 356. St. just, de, iii. 35. St. Vincent, Lord, iii. 143. Salisbury, i. 197; Bishop of, i. 338; iii. 386, 437; Marquis of, ii. 292, 399. Saltram, the Court at, ii. 323. Sandwich, Earl of, i. xvii. Savile, Sir George, i. 193. Saxe-Gotha, Duke of, i. 344. Saye and Sele, Lady, i. 225-8; ii. 151; Lord, i. 227-8. Schwellenberg, -,Mrs., keeper of the queen's robes, Fanny's life with, i. xxxiv, X1, x1ii, 290; knows Mrs. Hastings, 327-8; Fanny is introduced to her, 331-2, 335-40, 344-53, 355, 358; Fanny's bitter experience of her begins, 359 ; 360; invites herself to supper, 363 falls ill, 366; offers Fanny a gown from the queen, 367; in a Pet, 371; 373-4; makes mischief about Mrs. Hastings, 400; her tyranny, 404; 4113-5, 418-20 again ill, 421-2, 425; ii. 35; teased by the equerries, 42-6; suspicious of Turbulent, 46, 52, 56; her tyrannical ways, 62, 65-8; her capriciousness, 68-71 72; does Fanny a favour, 74-7; extremely ill, 84, 139; returns to Windsor, 152; Fanny's nickname for, 157; twits Fanny about marriage, 209, 217; rails at her, 215-6; angry with Goldsworthy, 217; again ill, 218; during the king's illness, 246-7, 253, 269, 271; her cruelty to Fanny, 272-4; her aversion for Fairly' 275; 282-3; George III. on her conduct, 290; accuses Fanny of visiting gentlemen, 295; in a temper, 301-2; is mystified, 304; rails at Fairly, 341; with Fanny, 347, 378-9, 381, 384-7; at Prince William's drinking bout, 396-8; is kissed by him, 400; her severity, 4o6; takes leave of Fanny, 407; with her again, 434-7; is all civility, 447; her death, iii. 142. Scott, Major, ii. 92, 105, 108. Scott, Sir Walter, iii- 454-5. "Seduction," a play, ii. 32. Selwyn, Mr., banker, i. 161-7. Sercey, Henriette de, ii. 449-50; iii. 23. Seward, William, i. xxvii; his meetings with Fanny, 77-8, 89, 90, 109-10; and Sophy Streatfield, 132, 137, 142, 144-5; his ennui and suggested play, 142-4, 212-5, 218-22, 272; meets Fanny at Cheltenham, ii. 167, 170, 173; 411 ; iii. 174; his death, 183. Shakespeare, George III.'s opinions of, i. xxx, 318; gallery, the, ii. 464. Shelley, Lady, i. 242. Shenstone, William, i. 212. Shepherd, Dr. A., ii. 55, 208-11, 217. Sherborne Castle, ii. 319, 330. Sheridan, R. B., eulogises Fanny, i. xxvi; marries Miss Linley, 111-2, 344; meets Fanny, 123, 145; Mrs. Thrale's bon mot on, 223; at the Hastings trial, ii. 93, 139, 438. Sheridan, Mrs., née Linley, her beauty, talents, marriage, i. 111-2; meets Fanny, 121, 344. Shipley, Georgiana, i. 229. Siddons, Mrs., meets Fanny, i. 257 ; praised by George III., 321; disappointing on near acquaintance, ii. 52; 317-9; buys Sadler-,' Wells, iii. 149. Sidmouth, ii. 419. Sleepe, Esther, mother of Fanny Burney, her marriage and death, i. xiv; Mr., i. 199. Smelt, Mr., Court official, i. 166, 324, 327-31, 437-9, 443-5; ii. 9, 15, 19, 20-2, 50, 83, 241, 243-4, 273, 276-7, 293, 297, 300, 303; Mrs., i. 437-8, 440; ii. 241. Smith, Mr. Thrale's Cousin, i. 106-7. Smith, Charlotte, iii. 75. Sophia, Princess, and Mr. Webb's nose, 1. 311; 353, 365; ii. 34, 211, 309, 406, 434, 455; iii. 140, 156. Sophia of Gloucester, Princess, see Gloucester. Southwell, Lord, i. 209. Souza, Mdme. de, iii. 236-8. Spanish prisoners at Dunkirk, iii. 259; ship captured, 399. Spencer, Countess, i. 359; ii. 424-9; iii. 92; Earl, 424-7; the Ladies, i. 386-7-9; ii. 23. Stael, Madame de, in England, i. xliv, iii. 14, 32; her first letters in English, 45; Fanny's admiration for, 46-8, 50; Dr. Burney's disapproval of, 51; defended by Fanny, 52, 55-61 80; snubbed by Fanny, 220; regretted by her, 269, 382; compared with Mrs. Thrale, 449; M. de, iii. 47. Stainsforth, Mrs., ii. 399. Stanhope, Mr., ii. 396. Stonehenge, ii. 417. Stormont, Lord, ii. 446. Strange, Sir Robert and Lady, iii. 173; Mary Bruce, i. 288. Streatfield, Mrs., i. 149-50; Sophia, the weeping beauty, i. 132-3, 137-42, 144-5, 149-53, 219-21, 283; ii. 450; Iii. 405. Streatham, the Thrales' residence at, i. xxvi; Fanny at, 75-8, 80, 110, 127-33, 137-49, 203-23; the paintings at, iii. 389; dismantled and forsaken, 448. Stuart, Lady, Louisa, ii. 69-70. Sunday schools established, ii. 171. Sydney, Lady, ii. 317. Talleyrand-PérigGord, Charles Maurice de, at juniper Hall, i. xliv; iii. 14, 39; is found charming, 50; 53, 55; his letters of adieu, 83; Fanny indignant with, 153; her bon mot to, 382. Tallien, iii. 47. Taylor, Michael Angelo, ii. 97, 145, 452. Templetown, Lord and Lady, ii. 151. Tewkesbury, Fanny at, ii. 191. Thackeray, Mrs., ii. 69. Thielky, Mrs., i. 340, 345-6, 353, 374, 381-2. Thrale, Mr., "Evelina" read to, i. 71; his character and acquirements, 75; 82, 86, 89, 90, 92, 96, 127-8, 132-4, 149, 153, 166, 168, 194-7; his death, 200-3. Thrale, Mrs., hears about "Evelina," i. xxv, her character and disposition, xxvi; her second marriage, xxix admires "Evelina," 68, 71-2; advises Fanny to write for the stage, 74, 129-31; her kindness to Fanny, 76, 80; praises "Evelina" to Dr. Lort, 90-1; to Mrs. Montagu, 102-5; makes sport with Reynolds, 92-5; converses with Johnson, 95-7; her opinions of him, 104-6; suggests some husbands for Fanny, 106-8; mentioned, 109-10; at Brighton with Fanny, 133, 136, 149, 339-48; with Sophy Streatfield, 132, 137-42; meets the Cumberlands, 156-8; converses with Blakeney, 159-63; at Bath with Fanny, 165-97; loses her husband, 200-3; banters Crutchley, 216-9; her opinion of Mrs. Siddons, 257; alluded to, 258, 262, 265; her fascination and Wit, 277; marries PiOzzi, 236-8. See Piozzi, Mrs. Thrale, Hester[" Queenie "], i. 75, 76, 92, 93, 101, 102, 133, 149, 157, 203, 206-8, 224, 240, 243, 284; Susan, i. 133, 240. Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, ii. 99, 104, 263. Tottenham Court, royal visit to, ii. 332; paintings at, 332-3. Toulon, siege of, iii. 73-4, 76, 78, 90. Tour du Pin, M. and Mdme. de la, iii. 335, 343, 349-50, 364. Tournai, Fanny arrives at, iii. 327. Travell, Beau, i. 76. Treves, Fanny's journey to, iii. 370-8. Tryon, Miss, ii. 304. Tucker, Dean, ii. 173. Tuileries, the, invaded, iii. 19; Bonaparte at, 224; Duchess d'Angouleme at, 294. Tunbridge, Fanny at, i. 112, 149. Turbulent, Mr. (Rev. C. de Guiffardi6re), account Of, i. 436; on Court routine, 443-4; introduces Wellbred to Fanny, ii. 16-21, 22; Worries Fanny, 24; teases Princess Augusta, 26-8; meets with a rebuff, 28-31; with the queen, 35; Mrs, Schwellenberg suspicious of, 46; annoys Fanny, 47-8; troublesome again, 54, 56-8; condemns himself, 80, 140-1; his troublesome pleasantries, 151-2, 208; rails at Fanny, 214-5; greatly altered, 222; during the king's illness, 244, 341, 400, 403. Turner, Sir G. P., i. 227. Twining, Rev. T., i. xvi. Valletort, Lord, ii. 327-9. Vandamme, General, iii. 368. "Vengeur," legend of the, iii. 143, Vernon, the Misses, i. 379, 383-7, 393, 396-8. Vesey, Mrs., a bluestocking, i. 98, 122, 277. 373 ; ii. 97. Victoire, Madame, daughter of Louis XV., iii. 36-7. Villiers, Hon. George, ii. 305, 307, 321. Vincent, Count de, iii. 351. Voltaire, George III. on, i. xxx, 316. Waldegrave, Lady Caroline, i. 340; ii, 238, 322; Lady Elizabeth, i. 340, 365; ii. 39, 230-1, 233, 235, 238, 240, 246, 252, 259, 265-6, 275, 322. Wales, Prince of (George IV.), i. 360; his good heart but suspicious conduct, 373; his mother's anxiety regarding him, 432; on bad terms with the king, ii. 10; with the Polignacs, 39; reconciled with his father, 40; With the Duke of York at Windsor, 49-51; with the queen, 61, 64; at the Hastings trial, 98; his animal spirits, 189; eyes Fanny curiously, 211; and the Regency bill, 221; at Windsor during the king's illness, 228, 235, 237, 239-41, 242-5, 263-4; goes to Kew, 266; at the play, 436; iii. 160; eulogised by Dr. Burney, 243; by the Duchess d'Angouleme, 299; his matrimonial troubles, 440-1. Wallace, Mr., attorney-general, i. 205. Waller, Edmund, ii. 204. Wallis, Miss, iii. i49. Walpole, Horace, "Evelina" attributed to, i. 79; chats with Fanny, ii. 85, 411; iii. 219. See Orford. Walsingham, Mrs., entertains Fanny, i. 256-7, 307; Lord, ii. 126. "Wanderer, The," Mme. d'Arblay's novel, i. Xlvi, lv; iii. 248-9, 255, 272-3-5. Warren, Dr., ii. 224-5, 245, 280; Lady, her tale of a dowry hunter, i. 242. Warton, Dr. Joseph, i. 123, 401-2, 422 ; ii. 32 1. Waterloo, battle of, iii, 357-68. Webb, Mr., his huge nose, i. 311. Wedderburn, Alex., see Loughborough. Wellbred (Greville), Colonel, king's equerry, introduced to Fanny, ii. 16-21; disposition, 36-8; derides Manners, 40-2, 43-4; Fanny's opinion of, 78-9; his powers of sight, 84, 139, 151-2; accompanies George III. to Kew, 268, 285, 291. Wellesley, Lady Anne, ii. 338. Wellington, Duke of, iii. 291; at Brussels, 341-2, 345, 355 at Waterloo, 360-7. Wells Cathedral, ii. 422. Wells, Mrs., actress, ii. 318, 464-8. West, Benjamin, R.A., ii. 35. Wesley, Charles, i. 344; iii. 183. Weston, Miss, i. 179-80. Weymouth, the Court at, ii. 313 Lady, i. 291 ; ii- 39, 155, 157, 162, 164, 185. See Bath, Marchioness of. Whalley, Mr. and Mrs., i. 171-5, 180. Whitworth, Lord, iii. 240. Wieland, i. 409-10, 412. Wilberforce, W., iii. 271, 442. Wilkes, John, ii. 339. William, Prince, Duke of Clarence, ii. 98, 189, 308; his partiality for champagne, 395-400; 436, 454; iii- 150, 421, 436. Williams, Anna, and " Evelina," i. 75; Johnson's account of, 95; befriended by Mrs. Montagu, 98, 258. Willis, Dr., senior, attends the king, ii. 274, 276-9, 290-1, 293, 296, 298; Dr. John, ii. 274, 278-9, 287, 291; Rev. Thos., ii. 277, 278-9, 335, 346. Wilton, ii. 417; Lord Grey de, ii. 291.'' Winchester, ii. 413-7. Windham, William, M.P., eulogises Fanny xxvi ; at the Hastings trial, ii. 102-119, 120-1, 123, 130-8, 144-9, 352-5, 357-65, 370-3, 390, 393, 438-43, 444-6, 447, 452; portrayed by Fairly, 297-8; urges that Fanny should resign, 376; judged by Burke, 460; 463; iii. 38; at the Literary Club, 44; at Burke's funeral, 125; his good breeding, 279. Windsor, Fanny at, i. )2-326, 331, 333; the Court at, 19-49, 352-66, 400-447; ii. 16-31, 35-53, 55-61, 72-81, 139, 207; ' during the king's illness, 222-64; 333, 340, 347, 373, 401; iii. 99-112, 185-7. "Witlings, The," Fanny's comedy, Macaulay's account of, xviii; praised by Arthur Murphy, 133; its fate, 145-9. Worcester, royal Visit to, ii. 109. Wurtembvirg, Prince of, iii. 115, 156. Wycherley, W, ii. 460. Wynn, Sir Watkin, ii. 291. W---, Miss, a young infidel, i. 180-4, 190-1; ii. 191. York, Archbishop Markham of, ii. 105. York, Duchess of, ii. 436, 454; Iii. 111-2, 145. York, Frederick, Duke of, mentioned, i. 401, 417; returns to England, 49-51, 59, 63; with the queen, 85; at the Hastings trial, 98; his animal spirits, 189; at Cheltenham, 190; at Windsor during the king's illness, 226, 237; his father's favourite, 241, 242, 246, 251; his wife, 436; at the siege of Dunkirk, iii. 73; commander-in-chief, 11-2. Young, Arthur, ii. 449; invites Fanny to Bradfield, 468; with the Duke de Liancourt, iii. 17-28; Mrs., ii, 449; Mary, ii. 449. Young, Profesor , iii. 176. TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH, 
25851	----	Transcriber's Note: For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by ~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the text. THE LIFE OF [Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens] [Illustration] THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER. THREE VOLUMES IN TWO. VOL. I. * * * * * BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY, (LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.) 1875. THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER. VOL. I. 1812-1842. TO THE DAUGHTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS, MY GOD-DAUGHTER MARY AND HER SISTER KATE, =This Book is Dedicated= BY THEIR FRIEND, AND THEIR FATHER'S FRIEND AND EXECUTOR, JOHN FORSTER NOTE TO THE PRESENT EDITION. SUCH has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of adding that the mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the well-known "Penny" and "Saturday" Magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years' earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and instructive character. "I used," he says, "when I was at school, to take in the _Terrific Register_, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap." An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: "Will you permit me to say that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury Street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment." PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON, _23d December, 1871_. TABLE OF CONTENTS. * * * * * CHAPTER I. 1812-1822. Pages 21-46. CHILDHOOD. ÆT. 1-10. PAGE Birth at Landport in Portsea 21 Family of John Dickens 22 Powers of observation in children 23 Two years old 23 In London, æt. 2-3 23 In Chatham, æt. 4-9 23 Vision of boyhood 24 The queer small child 25 Mother's teaching 26 Day-school in Rome Lane 27 Retrospects of childhood 27 David Copperfield and Charles Dickens 28 Access to small but good library 29 Tragedy-writing 30 Comic-song singing 31 Cousin James Lamert 31 First taken to theatre 32 At Mr. Giles's school 32 Encored in the recitations 33 Boyish recollections 33 Birthplace of his fancy 35 Last night in Chatham 35 In London 36 First impressions 36 Bayham Street, Camden-town 36 Faculty of early observation 37 His description of his father 38 Small theatre made for him 38 Sister Fanny at Royal Academy of Music 39 Walks about London 39 Biography and autobiography 40 At his godfather's and his uncle's 41 First efforts at description 42 "Res Angusta Domi" 42 Mother exerting herself 43 Father in the Marshalsea 43 Visit to the prison 44 Captain Porter 44 Old friends disposed of 45 At the pawnbroker's 46 CHAPTER II. 1822-1824. Pages 47-70. HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD. ÆT. 10-12. Mr. Dilke's half-crown 48 Story of boyhood told 48 D. C. and C. D. 48 Enterprise of the cousins Lamert 49 First employment in life 51 Blacking-warehouse 51 A poor little drudge 52 Bob Fagin and Poll Green 52 "Facilis Descensus" 52 Crushed hopes 53 The home in Gower Street 53 Regaling alamode 54 Home broken up 54 At Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town 55 Sundays in prison 55 Pudding-shops and coffee-shops 56 What was and might have been 57 Thomas and Harry 58 A lodging in Lant Street 59 Meals in the Marshalsea 59 C. D. and the Marchioness 60 Originals of Garland family 60 Adventure with Bob Fagin 61 Saturday-night shows 61 Appraised officially 62 Publican and wife at Cannon Row 63 Marshalsea incident in _Copperfield_ 64 Incident as it occurred 65 Materials for _Pickwick_ 66 Sister Fanny's musical prize 66 From Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street 67 Father's quarrel with James Lamert 68 Quits the warehouse 68 Bitter associations of servitude 69 What became of the blacking business 70 CHAPTER III. 1824-1830. Pages 71-95. SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE. ÆT. 12-18. Outcome of boyish trials 71 Disadvantage in later years 72 Advantages 73 Next move in life 74 Wellington House Academy 74 Revisited and described 75 Letter from a schoolfellow 76 C. D.'s recollections of school 77 Schoolfellow's recollections of C. D. 77 Fac-simile of schoolboy letter 79 Daniel Tobin 81 Another schoolfellow's recollections 82 Writing tales and getting up plays 83 Master Beverley scene-painter 84 Street-acting 84 The schoolfellows after forty years 85 Smallness of the world 86 In attorneys' offices 87 At minor theatres 88 The father on the son's education 89 Studying short-hand 90 In British Museum reading-room 90 Preparing for the gallery 91 D. C. for C. D. 91 A real Dora in 1829 92 The same Dora in 1855 93 Dora changed into Flora 94 Ashes of youth and hope 95 CHAPTER IV. 1831-1835. Pages 96-106. REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE. ÆT. 19-23. Reporting for _True Sun_ 96 First seen by me 97 Reporting for _Mirror_ and _Chronicle_ 97 First published piece 97 Discipline and experiences of reporting 98 Life as a reporter 99 John Black 100 Mr. Thomas Beard 101 A letter to his editor 102 Incident of reporting days 102 The same more correctly told 103 Origin of "Boz" 104 Captain Holland 104 Mr. George Hogarth 105 Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_ 105 C. D.'s first hearty appreciator 106 CHAPTER V. 1836. Pages 107-115. FIRST BOOK, AND ORIGIN OF PICKWICK. ÆT. 24. _Sketches by Boz_ 107 Fancy-piece by N. P. Willis: a poor English author 107 Start of _Pickwick_ 108 Marriage to Miss Hogarth 108 First connection with Chapman & Hall 109 Mr. Seymour's part in _Pickwick_ 109 Letters relating thereto 110 C. D.'s own account 110 False claims refuted 111 Pickwick's original, his figure and his name 112 First sprightly runnings of genius 113 The _Sketches_ characterized 114 Mr. Seymour's death 115 New illustrator chosen 115 Mr. Hablot K. Browne 115 C. D. leaves the gallery 116 _Strange Gentleman_ and _Village Coquettes_ 116 CHAPTER VI. 1837. Pages 117-140. WRITING THE PICKWICK PAPERS. ÆT. 25. First letter from him 117 As he was thirty-five years ago 118 Mrs. Carlyle and Leigh Hunt 119 Birth of eldest son 119 From Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street 119 A long-remembered sorrow 120 I visit him 120 Hasty compacts with publishers 121 Self-sold into quasi-bondage 121 Agreements for editorship and writing 121 Mr. Macrone's scheme to reissue _Sketches_ 122 Attempts to prevent it 123 Exorbitant demand 123 Impatience of suspense 123 Purchase advised 124 _Oliver Twist_ 125 Characters real to himself 125 Sense of responsibility for his writings 126 Criticism that satisfied him 126 Help given with his proofs 126 Writing _Pickwick_, Nos. 14 and 15 127 Scenes in a debtors' prison 128 A recollection of Smollett 128 Reception of _Pickwick_ 129 A popular rage 129 Mr. Carlyle's "dreadful" story 130 Secrets of success 130 _Pickwick_ inferior to later books 131 Exception for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick 131 Personal habits of C. D. 132 Reliefs after writing 133 Natural discontents 134 The early agreements 134 Tale to follow _Oliver Twist_ 135 Compromise with Mr. Bentley 135 Trip to Flanders 135 First visit to Broadstairs 136 Piracies of _Pickwick_ 137 A sufferer from agreements 138 First visit to Brighton 138 What he is doing with _Oliver Twist_ 139 Reading De Foe 139 "No Thoroughfare" 139 Proposed help to Macready 140 CHAPTER VII. 1837-1838. Pages 141-151. BETWEEN PICKWICK AND NICKLEBY. ÆT. 25-26. Edits _Life of Grimaldi_ 141 His own opinion of it 142 An objection answered 142 His recollections of 1823 142 Completion of _Pickwick_ 143 A purpose long entertained 144 Relations with Chapman & Hall 144 Payments made for _Pickwick_ 145 Agreement for _Nicholas Nickleby_ 145 _Oliver Twist_ characterized 146 Reasons for acceptance with every class 146 Nightmare of an agreement 147 Letter to Mr. Bentley 147 Proposal as to _Barnaby Rudge_ 148 Result of it 148 Birth of eldest daughter 149 _Young Gentlemen_ and _Young Couples_ 149 First number of _Nicholas Nickleby_ 150 2d of April, 1838 150 CHAPTER VIII. 1838. Pages 152-164. OLIVER TWIST. ÆT. 26. Interest in characters at close of _Oliver_ 152 Writing of the last chapter 153 Cruikshank illustrations 154 Etchings for last volume 154 How executed 154 Slander respecting them exposed 155 Falsehood ascribed to the artist 155 Reputation of the new tale 156 Its workmanship 157 Social evils passed away 157 Living only in what destroyed them 157 Chief design of the story 158 Its principal figures 158 Comedy and tragedy of crime 159 Reply to attacks 160 Le Sage, Gay, and Fielding 160 Likeness to them 161 Again the shadow of _Barnaby_ 161 Appeal to Mr. Bentley for delay 161 A very old story 162 "Sic vos non vobis" 162 _Barnaby_ given up by Mr. Bentley 163 Resignation of _Miscellany_ 163 Parent parting from child 164 CHAPTER IX. 1838-1839. Pages 165-179. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. ÆT. 26-27. Doubts of success dispelled 165 Realities of English life 166 Characters self-revealed 167 Miss Bates and Mrs. Nickleby 167 Smike and Dotheboys 167 A favorite type of humanity 168 Sydney Smith and Newman Noggs 168 Kindliness and breadth of humor 169 Goldsmith and Smollett 169 Early and later books 170 Biographical not critical 171 Characteristics 171 Materials for the book 171 Birthday letter 172 A difficulty at starting 172 Never in advance with _Nickleby_ 173 Always with later books 173 Enjoying a play 174 At the Adelphi 174 Writing Mrs. Nickleby's love-scene 175 Sydney Smith vanquished 175 Winding up the story 176 Parting from creatures of his fancy 177 The Nickleby dinner 178 Persons present 178 The Maclise portrait 178 CHAPTER X. 1838-1839. Pages 180-190. DURING AND AFTER NICKLEBY. ÆT. 26-27. The Cottage at Twickenham 180 Daniel Maclise 180 Ainsworth and other friends 181 Mr. Stanley of Alderley 182 Petersham cottage 182 Childish enjoyments 182 Writes a farce for Covent Garden 183 Entered at the Middle Temple 183 We see Wainewright in Newgate 184 _Oliver Twist_ and the _Quarterly_ 184 Hood's _Up the Rhine_ 185 Shakspeare Society 185 Birth of second daughter 186 House-hunting 186 _Barnaby_ at his tenth page 186 Letter from Exeter 187 A landlady and her friends 187 A home for his father and mother 188 Autobiographical 189 Visit to an upholsterer 189 Visit from the same 190 CHAPTER XI. 1839. Pages 191-199. NEW LITERARY PROJECT. ÆT. 27-28. Thoughts for the future 191 Doubts of old serial form 192 Suggestion for his publishers 192 My mediation with them 193 Proposed weekly publication 193 Design of it 193 Old favorites to be revived 194 Subjects to be dealt with 194 Chapters on Chambers 194 Gog and Magog Relaxations 194 Savage Chronicles 195 Others as well as himself to write 195 Travels to Ireland and America in view 195 Stipulation as to property and payments 196 Great hopes of success 197 Assent of his publishers 197 No planned story 197 Terms of agreement 197 Notion for his hero 198 A name hit upon 199 Sanguine of the issue 199 CHAPTER XII. 1840-1841. Pages 200-216. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. ÆT. 28-29. Visit to Walter Landor 200 First thought of Little Nell 200 Hopeful of Master Humphrey 201 A title for the child-story 202 First sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ 202 Its original plan abandoned 203 Reasons for this 203 To be limited to one story 203 Disadvantages of weekly publication 204 A favorite description 204 In Bevis Marks for Sampson Brass 205 At Lawn House, Broadstairs 205 Dedication of his first volume to Rogers 205 Chapters 43-45 206 Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness 207 Masterpiece of kindly fun 207 Closing of the tale 208 Effect upon the writer 208 Making-believe very much 209 The end approaching 209 The realities of fiction 209 Death of Little Nell 210 My share in the close 211 A suggestion adopted by him 211 Success of the story 211 Useful lessons 212 Its mode of construction 213 Character and characteristics 213 The art of it 213 A recent tribute 214 Harte's "Dickens in Camp" 215 CHAPTER XIII. 1840. Pages 217-231. DEVONSHIRE TERRACE AND BROADSTAIRS. ÆT. 28. A good saying 217 Landor mystified 218 The mirthful side of Dickens 218 Extravagant flights 218 Humorous despair 219 Riding exercise 220 First of the ravens 220 The groom Topping 220 The smoky chimneys 221 Juryman at an inquest 222 Practical humanity 222 Publication of _Clock's_ first number 222 Transfer of _Barnaby_ settled 223 A true prediction 224 Revisiting old scenes 224 C. D. to Chapman & Hall 224 Terms of sale of _Barnaby_ 225 A gift to a friend 226 Final escape from bondage 226 Published libels about him 227 Said to be demented 227 To be insane and turned Catholic 228 Begging letter-writers 228 A donkey asked for 228 Mr. Kindheart 229 Friendly meetings 229 Social talk 229 Reconciling friends 230 Hint for judging men 230 CHAPTER XIV. 1841. Pages 232-248. BARNABY RUDGE. ÆT. 29. Advantage in beginning _Barnaby_ 232 Birth of fourth child and second son 233 The Raven 233 A loss in the family 234 Grip's death 235 C. D. describes his illness 235 Family mourners 236 Apotheosis by Maclise 237 Grip the second 239 The inn at Chigwell 239 A _Clock_ Dinner 240 Lord Jeffrey in London 240 The _Lamplighter_ 240 The _Pic Nic Papers_ 241 Character of Lord George Gordon 241 A doubtful fancy 242 Interest in new labor 243 Constraints of weekly publication 243 The prison-riots 244 A serious illness 244 Close of _Barnaby_ 244 Character of the tale 245 Defects in the plot 245 The No-Popery riots 245 Descriptive power displayed 246 Leading persons in story 247 Mr. Dennis the hangman 248 CHAPTER XV. 1841. Pages 249-262. PUBLIC DINNER IN EDINBURGH. ÆT. 29. His son Walter Landor 249 Dies in Calcutta (1863) 250 C. D. and the new poor-law 250 Moore and Rogers 251 Jeffrey's praise of Little Nell 251 Resolve to visit Scotland 251 Edinburgh dinner proposed 252 Sir David Wilkie's death 252 Peter Robertson 253 Professor Wilson 253 A fancy of Scott 254 Lionization made tolerable 254 Thoughts of home 255 The dinner and speeches 255 His reception 256 Wilson's eulogy 256 Home yearnings 257 Freedom of city voted to him 257 Speakers at the dinner 257 Politics and party influences 258 Whig jealousies 259 At the theatre 260 Hospitalities 260 Moral of it all 260 Proposed visit to the Highlands 261 Maclise and Macready 261 Guide to the Highlands 262 Mr. Angus Fletcher (Kindheart) 262 CHAPTER XVI. 1841. Pages 263-276. ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS. ÆT. 29. A fright 264 Fletcher's eccentricities 264 The Trossachs 264 The traveler's guide 265 A comical picture 265 Highland accommodation 265 Grand scenery 266 Changes in route 267 A waterfall 267 Entrance to Glencoe 267 The pass of Glencoe 268 Loch Leven 269 A July evening 269 Postal service at Loch Earn Head 269 The maid of the inn 270 Impressions of Glencoe 270 An adventure 271 Torrents swollen with rain 271 Dangerous traveling 272 Incidents and accidents 272 Broken-down bridge 273 A fortunate resolve 273 Post-boy in danger 274 The rescue 274 Narrow escape 274 A Highland inn and inmates 275 English comfort at Dalmally 275 Dinner at Glasgow proposed 276 Eagerness for home 276 CHAPTER XVII. 1841. Pages 277-283. AGAIN AT BROADSTAIRS. ÆT. 29. Peel and his party 277 Getting very radical 278 Thoughts of colonizing 278 Political squib by C. D. 278 Fine old English Tory times 279 Mesmerism 280 Metropolitan prisons 280 Book by a workman 280 An August day by the sea 281 Another story in prospect 281 _Clock_ discontents 281 New adventure 282 Agreement for it signed 282 The book that proved to be _Chuzzlewit_ 283 Peel and Lord Ashley 283 Visions of America 283 CHAPTER XVIII. 1841. Pages 284-291. EVE OF THE VISIT TO AMERICA. ÆT. 29. Greetings from America 284 Reply to Washington Irving 284 Difficulties in the way 285 Resolve to go 286 Wish to revisit scenes of boyhood 286 Proposed book of travel 286 Arrangements for the journey 287 Impatience of suspense 287 Resolve to leave the children 288 Mrs. Dickens reconciled 288 A grave illness 288 Domestic griefs 289 The old sorrow 289 At Windsor 290 Son Walter's christening 290 At Liverpool with the travelers 291 CHAPTER XIX. 1842. Pages 292-309. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. ÆT. 30. Rough passage 293 A steamer in a storm 293 Resigned to the worst 293 Of himself and fellow-travelers 294 The Atlantic from deck 294 The ladies' cabin 294 Its occupants 295 Card-playing on the Atlantic 295 Ship-news 296 A wager 297 Halifax harbor 297 Ship aground 297 Captain Hewitt 298 Speaker of House of Assembly 299 Ovation to C. D. 299 Arrival at Boston 300 Incursion of editors 300 At Tremont House 300 The welcome 301 Deputations 301 Dr. Channing to C. D. 302 Public appearances 302 A secretary engaged 303 Bostonians 303 General characteristics 304 Personal notices 304 Perils of steamers 305 A home-thought 305 American institutions 306 How first impressed 306 Reasons for the greeting 306 What was welcomed in C. D. 307 Old World and New World 308 Daniel Webster as to C. D. 308 Channing as to C. D. 308 Subsequent disappointments 309 New York invitation to dinner} Fac-similes of signatures } Additional fac-similes } Facing page 309. New York invitation to ball } Fac-similes of signatures } Additional fac-similes } CHAPTER XX. 1842. Pages 310-334. SECOND IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. ÆT. 30. Second letter 310 International copyright 311 Third letter 311 The dinner at Boston 312 Worcester, Springfield, and Hartford 313 Queer traveling 313 Levees at Hartford and New Haven 313 At Wallingford 314 Serenades 314 Cornelius C. Felton 315 Payment of personal expenses declined 315 At New York 315 Irving and Colden 315 Description of the ball 316 Newspaper accounts 317 A phase of character 317 Opinion in America 318 International copyright 318 American authors in regard to it 319 Outcry against the nation's guest 319 Declines to be silent on copyright 319 Speech at dinner 320 Irving in the chair 320 Chairman's break-down 321 An incident afterwards in London 321 Results of copyright speeches 322 A bookseller's demand for help 322 Suggestion for copyright memorial 323 Henry Clay's opinion 323 Life in New York 324 Distresses of popularity 324 Intentions for future 325 Refusal of invitations 325 Going south and west 325 As to return 326 Dangers incident to steamers 326 Slavery 327 Ladies of America 327 Party conflicts 328 Non-arrival of Cunard steamer 328 Copyright petition for Congress 328 No hope of the Caledonia 329 A substitute for her 330 Anxiety as to letters 330 Of distinguished Americans 330 Hotel bills 331 Thoughts of the children 331 Acadia takes Caledonia's place 332 Letter to C. D. from Carlyle 332 Carlyle on copyright 332 Argument against stealing 333 Rob Roy's plan worth bettering 334 C. D. as to Carlyle 334 CHAPTER XXI. 1842. Pages 335-357. PHILADELPHIA, WASHINGTON, AND THE SOUTH. ÆT. 30. At Philadelphia 335 Rule in printing letters 335 Promise as to railroads 336 Experience of them 337 Railway-cars 337 Charcoal stoves 337 Ladies' cars 338 Spittoons 338 Massachusetts and New York 339 Police-cells and prisons 339 House of detention and inmates 340 Women and boy prisoners 341 Capital punishment 342 A house of correction 342 Four hundred single cells 343 Comparison with English prisons 344 Inns and landlords 344 At Washington 344 Hotel extortion 345 Philadelphia penitentiary 345 The solitary system 345 Solitary prisoners 346 Talk with inspectors 346 Bookseller Carey 347 Changes of temperature 347 Henry Clay 348 Proposed journeyings 348 Letters from England 349 Congress and Senate 349 Leading American statesmen 349 The people of America 350 Englishmen "located" there 350 "Surgit amari aliquid" 351 The copyright petition 351 At Richmond 351 Irving appointed to Spain 352 Experience of a slave city 353 Incidents of slave-life 353 Discussion with a slaveholder 353 Feeling of South to England 354 Levees at Richmond 354 One more banquet accepted 355 My gift of _Shakspeare_ 355 Home letters and fancies 356 Self-reproach of a noble nature 356 Washington Irving's leave-taking 357 CHAPTER XXII. 1842. Pages 358-380. CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST. ÆT. 30. Character in the letters 358 The _Notes_ less satisfactory 359 Personal narrative in letters 359 The copyright differences 360 Social dissatisfactions 360 A fact to be remembered 361 Literary merits of the letters 361 Personal character portrayed 362 On board for Pittsburgh 362 Choicest passages of _Notes_ 362 Queer stage-coach 363 Something revealed on the top 364 At Harrisburg 364 Treaties with Indians 365 Local legislatures 365 A levee 365 Morning and night in canal-boat 366 At and after breakfast 366 Making the best of it 367 Hardy habits 368 By rail across mountain 368 Mountain scenery 369 New settlements 369 Original of Eden in _Chuzzlewit_ 369 A useful word 370 Party in America 371 Home news 371 Meets an early acquaintance 372 "Smallness of the world" 372 Queer customers at levees 372 Our anniversary 373 The Cincinnati steamer 374 Frugality in water and linen 374 Magnetic experiments 375 Life-preservers 376 Bores 376 Habits of neatness 377 Wearying for home 377 Another solitary prison 378 New terror to loneliness 378 Arrival at Cincinnati 378 Two judges in attendance 379 The city described 379 On the pavement 380 CHAPTER XXIII. 1842. Pages 381-406. THE FAR WEST: TO NIAGARA FALLS. ÆT. 30. Descriptions in letters and in _Notes_ 381 Outline of westward travel 382 An Arabian-Night city 383 A temperance festival 383 A party at Judge Walker's 383 The party from another view 384 Young lady's description of C. D. 384 Mournful results of boredom 385 Down the Mississippi 386 Listening and watching 386 A levee at St. Louis 386 Compliments 387 Lord Ashburton's arrival 387 Talk with a judge on slavery 388 A negro burnt alive 388 Feeling of slaves themselves 389 American testimony 389 Pretty little scene 390 A mother and her husband 390 The baby 391 St. Louis in sight 392 Meeting of wife and husband 392 Trip to a prairie 393 On the prairie at sunset 393 General character of scenery 394 The prairie described 394 Disappointment and enjoyment 394 Soirée at Planter's House Inn 395 Good fare 395 No gray heads in St. Louis 396 Dueling 396 Mrs. Dickens as a traveler 397 From Cincinnati to Columbus 397 What a levee is like 398 From Columbus to Sandusky 398 The travelers alone 399 A log house inn 400 Making tidy 400 A monetary crisis 400 Americans not a humorous people 401 The only recreations 401 From Sandusky to Buffalo 402 On Lake Erie 402 Reception and consolation of a mayor 403 From Buffalo to Niagara 403 Nearing the Falls 404 The Horse-shoe 404 Effect upon him of Niagara 405 The old recollection 405 Looking forward 406 CHAPTER XXIV. 1842. Pages 407-418. NIAGARA AND MONTREAL. ÆT. 30. Last two letters 407 Dickens vanquished 407 Obstacles to copyright 408 Two described 408 Value of literary popularity 409 Substitute for literature 410 The secretary described 410 His paintings 411 The lion and ---- 411 Toryism of Toronto 412 Canadian attentions 412 Proposed theatricals 413 Last letter 413 The private play 414 Stage manager's report 414 Bill of the performance 415 The lady performers 417 A touch of Crummles 417 HOME 418 PAGE Autograph of C. D. (1837) _Fly-leaf_ C. D. æt. 27. From Maclise's Painting, by Graves, A.R.A. _Title-page_ Fac-simile of Letter written in Boyhood 79 Outline of the Maclise Painting of 1839. Engraved by Jeens 178 Apotheosis of Grip the Raven, by Maclise, R.A. 237 Fac-simile of C. D.'s autograph signature Boz (1841) 276 Fac-simile of Invitation to the Public Dinner in New York, with the signatures 309 Fac-simile of Invitation to the Public Ball in New York, with the signatures 309 Fac-simile of the Bill of the Private Play in Canada 415 THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD 1812-1822. Birth at Landport in Portsea--Family of John Dickens--Powers of Observation in Children--Two Years Old--In London, æt. 2-3--In Chatham, æt. 4-9--Vision of Boyhood--The Queer Small Child--Mother's Teaching--Day-School in Rome Lane--Retrospects of Childhood--David Copperfield and Charles Dickens--Access to Small but Good Library--Tragedy-Writing--Comic-Song Singing--Cousin James Lamert--First taken to Theatre--At Mr. Giles's School--Encored in the Recitations--Boyish Recollections--Birthplace of his Fancy--Last Night in Chatham--In London--First Impressions--Bayham Street, Camden-town--Faculty of Early Observation--His Description of his Father--Small Theatre made for him--Sister Fanny at Royal Academy of Music--Walks about London--Biography and Autobiography--At his Godfather's and his Uncle's--First Efforts at Description--"Res Angusta Domi"--Mother exerting Herself--Father in the Marshalsea--Visit to the Prison--Captain Porter--Old Friends disposed of--At the Pawnbroker's. CHARLES DICKENS, the most popular novelist of the century, and one of the greatest humorists that England has produced, was born at Landport in Portsea on Friday, the 7th of February, 1812. His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy-pay office, was at this time stationed in the Portsmouth dockyard. He had made acquaintance with the lady, Elizabeth Barrow, who became afterwards his wife, through her elder brother, Thomas Barrow, also engaged on the establishment at Somerset House; and she bore him in all a family of eight children, of whom two died in infancy. The eldest, Fanny (born 1810), was followed by Charles (entered in the baptismal register of Portsea as Charles John Huffham, though on the very rare occasions when he subscribed that name he wrote Huffam); by another son, named Alfred, who died in childhood; by Letitia (born 1816); by another daughter, Harriet, who died also in childhood; by Frederick (born 1820); by Alfred Lamert (born 1822); and by Augustus (born 1827); of all of whom only the second daughter now survives. Walter Scott tells us, in his fragment of autobiography, speaking of the strange remedies applied to his lameness, that he remembered lying on the floor in the parlor of his grandfather's farm-house, swathed up in a sheepskin warm from the body of the sheep, being then not three years old. David Copperfield's memory goes beyond this. He represents himself seeing so far back into the blank of his infancy as to discern therein his mother and her servant, dwarfed to his sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and himself going unsteadily from the one to the other. He admits this may be fancy, though he believes the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy, and thinks that the recollection of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose. But what he adds is certainly not fancy. "If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics." Applicable as it might be to David Copperfield, this was simply and unaffectedly true of Charles Dickens. He has often told me that he remembered the small front garden to the house at Portsea, from which he was taken away when he was two years old, and where, watched by a nurse through a low kitchen-window almost level with the gravel walk, he trotted about with something to eat, and his little elder sister with him. He was carried from the garden one day to see the soldiers exercise; and I perfectly recollect that, on our being at Portsmouth together while he was writing _Nickleby_, he recognized the exact shape of the military parade seen by him as a very infant, on the same spot, a quarter of a century before. When his father was again brought up by his duties to London from Portsmouth, they went into lodgings in Norfolk Street, Middlesex Hospital; and it lived also in the child's memory that they had come away from Portsea in the snow. Their home, shortly after, was again changed, on the elder Dickens being placed upon duty in Chatham dockyard; and the house where he lived in Chatham, which had a plain-looking whitewashed plaster front and a small garden before and behind, was in St. Mary's Place, otherwise called the Brook, and next door to a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel, of which a Mr. Giles, to be presently mentioned, was minister. Charles at this time was between four and five years old;[1] and here he stayed till he was nine. Here the most durable of his early impressions were received; and the associations that were around him when he died were those which at the outset of his life had affected him most strongly. The house called Gadshill Place stands on the strip of highest ground in the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. Often had we traveled past it together, years and years before it became his home, and never without some allusion to what he told me when first I saw it in his company, that amid the recollections connected with his childhood it held always a prominent place, for, upon first seeing it as he came from Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with much admiration, he had been promised that he might himself live in it, or in some such house, when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough. Which for a long time was his ambition. The story is a pleasant one, and receives authentic confirmation at the opening of one of his essays on traveling abroad, when as he passes along the road to Canterbury there crosses it a vision of his former self: "So smooth was the old high-road, and so fresh were the horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy. "'Holloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?' "'At Chatham,' says he. "'What do you do there?' says I. "'I go to school,' says he. "I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went out to rob those travelers, and ran away.' "'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I. "'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But _do_ let us stop at the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!' "'You admire that house?' said I. "'Bless you, sir,' said the very queer small boy, 'when I was not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be brought to look at it. And now I am nine, I come by myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, _If you were to be very persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it_. Though that's impossible!' said the very queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window with all his might. "I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy; for that house happens to be _my_ house, and I have reason to believe that what he said was true." The queer small boy was indeed his very self. He was a very little and a very sickly boy. He was subject to attacks of violent spasm which disabled him for any active exertion. He was never a good little cricket-player. He was never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoner's base. But he had great pleasure in watching the other boys, officers' sons for the most part, at these games, reading while they played; and he had always the belief that this early sickness had brought to himself one inestimable advantage, in the circumstance of his weak health having strongly inclined him to reading. It will not appear, as my narrative moves on, that he owed much to his parents, or was other than in his first letter to Washington Irving he described himself to have been, a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy;" but he has frequently been heard to say that his first desire for knowledge, and his earliest passion for reading, were awakened by his mother, who taught him the first rudiments not only of English, but also, a little later, of Latin. She taught him regularly every day for a long time, and taught him, he was convinced, thoroughly well. I once put to him a question in connection with this to which he replied in almost exactly the words he placed five years later in the mouth of David Copperfield: "I faintly remember her teaching me the alphabet; and when I look upon the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their shapes, and the easy good nature of O and S, always seem to present themselves before me as they used to do." Then followed the preparatory day-school, a school for girls and boys to which he went with his sister Fanny, and which was in a place called Rome (pronounced Room) Lane. Revisiting Chatham in his manhood, and looking for the place, he found it had been pulled down to make a new street, "ages" before; but out of the distance of the ages arose nevertheless a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer's shop; that he went up steps to it; that he had frequently grazed his knees in doing so; and that in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.[2] Other similar memories of childhood have dropped from him occasionally in his lesser writings; whose readers may remember how vividly portions of his boyhood are reproduced in his fancy of the Christmas-tree, and will hardly have forgotten what he says, in his thoughtful little paper on Nurses' stories, of the doubtful places and people to which children may be introduced before they are six years old, and forced, night after night, to go back to against their wills, by servants to whom they are intrusted. That childhood exaggerates what it sees, too, has he not tenderly told? How he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least as wide as Regent Street, which he afterwards discovered to be little better than a lane; how the public clock in it, supposed to be the finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw; and how in its town-hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet not so painfully, either, when second thoughts wisely came. "Ah! who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the worse!" And here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted, that even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain Booth and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books nothing more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dickens in more especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made since his death, connecting David's autobiography with his own; accounting, by means of such actual experiences, for the so frequent recurrence in his writings of the prison-life, its humor and pathos, described in them with such wonderful reality; and discovering in what David tells Steerforth at school of the stories he had read in his childhood, what it was that had given the bent to his own genius. There is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be seen that the identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered experiences not less startling in the reality than they appear to be in the fiction. Of the "readings" and "imaginations" which he describes as brought away from Chatham, this authority can tell us. It is one of the many passages in _Copperfield_ which are literally true, and its proper place is here. "My father had left a small collection of books in a little room up-stairs to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, the _Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, and _Robinson Crusoe_ came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,--they, and the _Arabian Nights_ and the _Tales of the Genii_,--and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; _I_ knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favorite characters in them. . . . I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of voyages and travels--I forget what, now--that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees: the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. . . . When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighborhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I _know_ that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlor of our little village ale-house." Every word of this personal recollection had been written down as fact, some years before it found its way into _David Copperfield_; the only change in the fiction being his omission of the name of a cheap series of novelists then in course of publication, by which his father had become happily the owner of so large a lump of literary treasure in his small collection of books. The usual result followed. The child took to writing, himself, and became famous in his childish circle for having written a tragedy called _Misnar_, the Sultan of India, founded (and very literally founded, no doubt) on one of the _Tales of the Genii_. Nor was this his only distinction. He told a story offhand so well, and sang small comic songs so especially well, that he used to be elevated on chairs and tables, both at home and abroad, for more effective display of these talents; and when he first told me of this, at one of the Twelfth-night parties on his eldest son's birthday, he said he never recalled it that his own shrill little voice of childhood did not again tingle in his ears, and he blushed to think what a horrible little nuisance he must have been to many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him. His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a youth of some ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert, stepson to his mother's sister, and therefore a sort of cousin, who was his great patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for her first husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death by drowning at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay clerk's wife, at Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her second husband Dr. Lamert, an army-surgeon, whose son James, even after he had been sent to Sandhurst for his education, continued still to visit Chatham from time to time. He had a turn for private theatricals; and as his father's quarters were in the ordnance hospital there, a great rambling place otherwise at that time almost uninhabited, he had plenty of room in which to get up his entertainments. The staff-doctor himself played his part, and his portrait will be found in _Pickwick_. By Lamert, I have often heard him say, he was first taken to the theatre at the very tenderest age. He could hardly, however, have been younger than Charles Lamb, whose first experience was of having seen _Artaxerxes_ when six years old; and certainly not younger than Walter Scott, who was only four when he saw _As You Like It_ on the Bath stage, and remembered having screamed out, _Ain't they brothers?_ when scandalized by Orlando and Oliver beginning to fight.[3] But he was at any rate old enough to recollect how his young heart leaped with terror as the wicked king Richard, struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond, backed up and bumped against the box in which he was; and subsequent visits to the same sanctuary, as he tells us, revealed to him many wondrous secrets, "of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in _Macbeth_ bore an awful resemblance to the thanes and other proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good king Duncan couldn't rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself somebody else." During the last two years of Charles's residence at Chatham, he was sent to a school kept in Clover Lane by the young Baptist minister already named, Mr. William Giles. I have the picture of him here, very strongly in my mind, as a sensitive, thoughtful, feeble-bodied little boy, with an unusual sort of knowledge and fancy for such a child, and with a dangerous kind of wandering intelligence that a teacher might turn to good or evil, happiness or misery, as he directed it. Nor does the influence of Mr. Giles, such as it was, seem to have been other than favorable. Charles had himself a not ungrateful sense in after-years that this first of his masters, in his little-cared-for childhood, had pronounced him to be a boy of capacity; and when, about half-way through the publication of _Pickwick_, his old teacher sent a silver snuff-box with admiring inscription to the "inimitable Boz," it reminded him of praise far more precious obtained by him at his first year's examination in the Clover Lane academy, when his recitation of a piece out of the _Humorist's Miscellany_ about Doctor Bolus had received, unless his youthful vanity bewildered him, a double encore. A habit, the only bad one taught him by Mr. Giles, of taking for a time, in very moderate quantities, the snuff called Irish blackguard, was the result of this gift from his old master; but he abandoned it after some few years, and it was never resumed. It was in the boys' playing-ground near Clover Lane in which the school stood, that, according to one of his youthful memories, he had been, in the hay-making time, delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an immense pile "(of haycock)," by his countrymen the victorious British "(boy next door and his two cousins)," and had been recognized with ecstasy by his affianced one "(Miss Green)," who had come all the way from England "(second house in the terrace)" to ransom and marry him. It was in this playing-field, too, as he has himself recorded, he first heard in confidence from one whose father was greatly connected, "being under government," of the existence of a terrible banditti called _the radicals_, whose principles were that the prince-regent wore stays, that nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy ought to be put down; horrors at which he trembled in his bed, after supplicating that the radicals might be speedily taken and hanged. Nor was it the least of the disappointments of his visit in after-life to the scenes of his boyhood that he found this play-field had been swallowed up by a railway station. It was gone, with its two beautiful trees of hawthorn; and where the hedge, the turf, and all the buttercups and daisies had been, there was nothing but the stoniest of jolting roads. He was not much over nine years old when his father was recalled from Chatham to Somerset House, and he had to leave this good master, and the old place endeared to him by recollections that clung to him afterwards all his life long. It was here he had made the acquaintance not only of the famous books that David Copperfield specially names, of _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, the _Vicar of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Arabian Nights_, and the _Tales of the Genii_, but also of the _Spectator_, the _Tatler_, the _Idler_, the _Citizen of the World_, and Mrs. Inchbald's _Collection of Farces_. These latter had been, as well, in the little library to which access was open to him; and of all of them his earliest remembrance was the having read them over and over at Chatham, not for the first, the second, or the third time. They were a host of friends when he had no single friend; and in leaving the place, I have often heard him say, he seemed to be leaving them too, and everything that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or sunshine. It was the birthplace of his fancy; and he hardly knew what store he had set by its busy varieties of change and scene, until he saw the falling cloud that was to hide its pictures from him forever. The gay bright regiments always going and coming, the continual paradings and firings, the successions of sham sieges and sham defenses, the plays got up by his cousin in the hospital, the navy-pay yacht in which he had sailed to Sheerness with his father, and the ships floating out in the Medway with their far visions of sea,--he was to lose them all. He was never to watch the boys at their games any more, or see them sham over again the sham sieges and sham defenses. He was to be taken to London inside the stage-coach Commodore; and Kentish woods and fields, Cobham park and hall, Rochester cathedral and castle, and all the wonderful romance together, including the red-cheeked baby he had been wildly in love with, were to vanish like a dream. "On the night before we came away," he told me, "my good master came flitting in among the packing-cases to give me Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake. Which I kept for his sake, and its own, a long time afterwards." A longer time afterwards he recollected the stage-coach journey, and said in one of his published papers that never had he forgotten, through all the intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. "There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it." The earliest impressions received and retained by him in London were of his father's money involvements; and now first he heard mentioned "the deed," representing that crisis of his father's affairs in fact which is ascribed in fiction to Mr. Micawber's. He knew it in later days to have been a composition with creditors; though at this earlier date he was conscious of having confounded it with parchments of a much more demoniacal description. One result from the awful document soon showed itself in enforced retrenchment. The family had to take up its abode in a house in Bayham Street, Camden-town. Bayham Street was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived over the way. Many, many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other boys of his own age, and to sink into a neglected state at home which had been always quite unaccountable to him. "As I thought," he said on one occasion very bitterly, "in the little back-garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!" He was at another school already, not knowing it. The self-education forced upon him was teaching him, all unconsciously as yet, what, for the future that awaited him, it most behooved him to know. That he took, from the very beginning of this Bayham-Street life, his first impression of that struggling poverty which is nowhere more vividly shown than in the commoner streets of the ordinary London suburb, and which enriched his earliest writings with a freshness of original humor and quite unstudied pathos that gave them much of their sudden popularity, there cannot be a doubt. "I certainly understood it," he has often said to me, "quite as well then as I do now." But he was not conscious yet that he did so understand it, or of the influence it was exerting on his life even then. It seems almost too much to assert of a child, say at nine or ten years old, that his observation of everything was as close and good, or that he had as much intuitive understanding of the character and weaknesses of the grown-up people around him, as when the same keen and wonderful faculty had made him famous among men. But my experience of him led me to put implicit faith in the assertion he unvaryingly himself made, that he had never seen any cause to correct or change what in his boyhood was his own secret impression of anybody whom he had had, as a grown man, the opportunity of testing in later years. How it came that, being what he was, he should now have fallen into the misery and neglect of the time about to be described, was a subject on which thoughts were frequently interchanged between us; and on one occasion he gave me a sketch of the character of his father, which, as I can here repeat it in the exact words employed by him, will be the best preface I can make to what I feel that I have no alternative but to tell. "I know my father to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Everything that I can remember of his conduct to his wife, or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day, unweariedly and patiently, many nights and days. He never undertook any business, charge, or trust, that he did not zealously, conscientiously, punctually, honorably discharge. His industry has always been untiring. He was proud of me, in his way, and had a great admiration of the comic singing. But, in the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living." The cousin by marriage of whom I have spoken, James Lamert, who had lately completed his education at Sandhurst and was waiting in hopes of a commission, lived now with the family in Bayham Street, and had not lost his taste for the stage, or his ingenuities in connection with it. Taking pity on the solitary lad, he made and painted a little theatre for him. It was the only fanciful reality of his present life; but it could not supply what he missed most sorely, the companionship of boys of his own age, with whom he might share in the advantages of school and contend for its prizes. His sister Fanny was at about this time elected as a pupil to the Royal Academy of Music; and he has told me what a stab to his heart it was, thinking of his own disregarded condition, to see her go away to begin her education, amid the tearful good wishes of everybody in the house. Nevertheless, as time went on, his own education still unconsciously went on as well, under the sternest and most potent of teachers; and, neglected and miserable as he was, he managed gradually to transfer to London all the dreaminess and all the romance with which he had invested Chatham. There were then at the top of Bayham Street some almshouses, and were still when he revisited it with me nearly twenty-seven years ago; and to go to this spot, he told me, and look from it over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields (no longer there when we saw it together) at the cupola of St. Paul's looming through the smoke, was a treat that served him for hours of vague reflection afterwards. To be taken out for a walk into the real town, especially if it were anywhere about Covent Garden or the Strand, perfectly entranced him with pleasure. But most of all he had a profound attraction of repulsion to St. Giles's. If he could only induce whomsoever took him out to take him through Seven-Dials, he was supremely happy. "Good Heaven!" he would exclaim, "what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary arose in my mind out of that place!" He was all this time, the reader will remember, still subject to continual attacks of illness, and, by reason of them, a very small boy even for his age. That part of his boyhood is now very near of which, when the days of fame and prosperity came to him, he felt the weight upon his memory as a painful burden until he could lighten it by sharing it with a friend; and an accident I will presently mention led him first to reveal it. There is, however, an interval of some months still to be described, of which, from conversations or letters that passed between us, after or because of this confidence, and that already have yielded fruit to these pages, I can supply some vague and desultory notices. The use thus made of them, it is due to myself to remark, was contemplated then; for though, long before his death, I had ceased to believe it likely that I should survive to write about him, he had never withdrawn the wish at this early time strongly expressed, or the confidences, not only then but to the very eve of his death reposed in me, that were to enable me to fulfill it.[4] The fulfillment indeed he had himself rendered more easy by partially uplifting the veil in _David Copperfield_. The visits made from Bayham Street were chiefly to two connections of the family, his mother's elder brother and his godfather. The latter, who was a rigger, and mast-, oar-, and block-maker, lived at Limehouse in a substantial handsome sort of way, and was kind to his godchild. It was always a great treat to him to go to Mr. Huffham's; and the London night-sights as he returned were a perpetual joy and marvel. Here, too, the comic-singing accomplishment was brought into play so greatly to the admiration of one of the godfather's guests, an honest boat-builder, that he pronounced the little lad to be a "progidy." The visits to the uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk with his father, in Somerset House, were nearer home. Mr. Thomas Barrow, the eldest of his mother's family, had broken his leg in a fall; and, while laid up with this illness, his lodging was in Gerrard Street, Soho, in the upper part of the house of a worthy gentleman then recently deceased, a bookseller named Manson, father to the partner in the celebrated firm of Christie & Manson, whose widow at this time carried on the business. Attracted by the look of the lad as he went up-stairs, these good people lent him books to amuse him; among them Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_, Holbein's _Dance of Death_, and George Colman's _Broad Grins_. The latter seized his fancy very much; and he was so impressed by its description of Covent Garden, in the piece called "The Elder Brother," that he stole down to the market by himself to compare it with the book. He remembered, as he said in telling me this, snuffing up the flavor of the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction. Nor was he far wrong, as comic fiction then and for some time after was. It was reserved for himself to give sweeter and fresher breath to it. Many years were to pass first, but he was beginning already to make the trial. His uncle was shaved by a very odd old barber out of Dean Street, Soho, who was never tired of reviewing the events of the last war, and especially of detecting Napoleon's mistakes, and rearranging his whole life for him on a plan of his own. The boy wrote a description of this old barber, but never had courage to show it. At about the same time, taking for his model the description of the canon's housekeeper in _Gil Blas_, he sketched a deaf old woman who waited on them in Bayham Street, and who made delicate hashes with walnut-ketchup. As little did he dare to show this, either; though he thought it, himself, extremely clever. In Bayham Street, meanwhile, affairs were going on badly; the poor boy's visits to his uncle, while the latter was still kept a prisoner by his accident, were interrupted by another attack of fever; and on his recovery the mysterious "deed" had again come uppermost. His father's resources were so low, and all his expedients so thoroughly exhausted, that trial was to be made whether his mother might not come to the rescue. The time was arrived for her to exert herself, she said; and she "must do something." The godfather down at Limehouse was reported to have an Indian connection. People in the East Indies always sent their children home to be educated. She would set up a school. They would all grow rich by it. And then, thought the sick boy, "perhaps even I might go to school myself." A house was soon found at number four, Gower Street north; a large brass plate on the door announced MRS. DICKENS'S ESTABLISHMENT; and the result I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised so high: "I left, at a great many other doors, a great many circulars calling attention to the merits of the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at last my father was arrested." The interval between the sponging-house and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running errands and carrying messages for the prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and through shining tears; and the last words said to him by his father before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea were to the effect that the sun was set upon him forever. "I really believed at the time," said Dickens to me, "that they had broken my heart." He took afterwards ample revenge for this false alarm by making all the world laugh at them in _David Copperfield_. The readers of Mr. Micawber's history who remember David's first visit to the Marshalsea prison, and how upon seeing the turnkey he recalled the turnkey in the blanket in _Roderick Random_, will read with curious interest what follows, written as a personal experience of fact two or three years before the fiction had even entered into his thoughts: "My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room (on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now; with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him, who came in by-and-by; and, as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I was sent up to 'Captain Porter' in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens's compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a knife and fork? "Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return. There was a very dirty lady in his little room; and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had, on a shelf; and I knew (God knows how) that the two girls with the shock heads were Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare say; but I came down again to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the knife and fork were in my hand." How there was something agreeable and gipsy-like in the dinner after all, and how he took back the captain's knife and fork early in the afternoon, and how he went home to comfort his mother with an account of his visit, David Copperfield has also accurately told. Then, at home, came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an immense time, yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by degrees was sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in those sorrowful transactions. Such of the books as had been brought from Chatham--_Peregrine Pickle_, _Roderick Random_, _Tom Jones_, _Humphrey Clinker_, and all the rest--went first. They were carried off from the little chiffonier, which his father called the library, to a bookseller in the Hampstead Road, the same that David Copperfield describes as in the City Road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for word in his imaginary narrative: "The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye bearing witness to his excesses overnight (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink); and he, with a shaking hand, endeavoring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call again; but his wife had always got some (had taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk), and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went down together." The same pawnbroker's shop, too, which was so well known to David, became not less familiar to Charles; and a good deal of notice was here taken of him by the pawnbroker, or by his principal clerk who officiated behind the counter, and who, while making out the duplicate, liked of all things to hear the lad conjugate a Latin verb and translate or decline his _musa_ and _dominus_. Everything to this accompaniment went gradually; until, at last, even of the furniture of Gower Street number four there was nothing left except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds. Then they encamped, as it were, in the two parlors of the emptied house, and lived there night and day. All which is but the prelude to what remains to be described. FOOTNOTES: [1] "I shall cut this letter short, for they are playing Masaniello in the drawing-room, and I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child a few miles off, and Somebody (who, I wonder, and which way did _She_ go, when she died) hummed the evening hymn to me, and I cried on the pillow,--either with the remorseful consciousness of having kicked Somebody else, or because still Somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day." From Gadshill, 24 Sept. 1857. "Being here again, or as much here as anywhere in particular." [2] "The mistress of the establishment holds no place in our memory; but, rampant on one eternal door-mat, in an eternal entry long and narrow, is a puffy pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who triumphs over Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating way he had of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of his moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we conclude that he was of French extraction, and his name _Fidèle_. He belonged to some female, chiefly inhabiting a back parlor, whose life appears to us to have been consumed in sniffing, and in wearing a brown beaver bonnet."--_Reprinted Pieces_, 287. (In such quotations as are made from his writings, the _Charles Dickens Edition_ will be used.) [3] "A few weeks' residence at home convinced me, who had till then been an only child in the house of my grandfather, that a quarrel between brothers was a very natural event."--Lockhart's _Life_, i. 30. [4] The reader will forgive my quoting from a letter of the date of the 22d April, 1848. "I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." "You know me better," he wrote, resuming the same subject on the 6th of July, 1862, "than any other man does, or ever will." In an entry of my diary during the interval between these years, I find a few words that not only mark the time when I first saw in its connected shape the autobiographical fragment which will form the substance of the second chapter of this biography, but also express his own feeling respecting it when written: "20 January, 1849. The description may make none of the impression on others that the reality made on him. . . . Highly probable that it may never see the light. No wish. Left to J. F. or others." The first number of _David Copperfield_ appeared five months after this date; but though I knew, even before he adapted his fragment of autobiography to the eleventh number, that he had now abandoned the notion of completing it under his own name, the "_no wish_," or the discretion left me, was never in any way subsequently modified. What follows, from the same entry, refers to the manuscript of the fragment: "No blotting, as when writing fiction; but straight on, as when writing ordinary letter." CHAPTER II. HARD EXPERIENCES IN BOYHOOD. 1822-1824. Mr. Dilke's Half-crown--Story of Boyhood told--D. C. and C. D.--Enterprise of the Cousins Lamert--First Employment in Life--Blacking-Warehouse--A Poor Little Drudge--Bob Fagin and Poll Green--"Facilis Descensus"--Crushed Hopes--The Home in Gower Street--Regaling Alamode--Home broken up--At Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town--Sundays in Prison--Pudding-Shops and Coffee-Shops--What was and might have been--Thomas and Harry--A Lodging in Lant Street--Meals in the Marshalsea--C. D. and the Marchioness--Originals of Garland Family--Adventure with Bob Fagin--Saturday-Night Shows--Appraised officially--Publican and Wife at Cannon Row--Marshalsea Incident in _Copperfield_--Incident as it occurred--Materials for _Pickwick_--Sister Fanny's Musical Prize--From Hungerford Stairs to Chandos Street--Father's Quarrel with James Lamert--Quits the Warehouse--Bitter Associations of Servitude--What became of the Blacking-Business. THE incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me, or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April of 1847. I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr. Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke I never spoke of the subject again. It was not, however, then, but some weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance while he remembered anything, and the recollection of which, at intervals, haunted him and made him miserable, even to that hour. Very shortly afterwards I learnt in all their detail the incidents that had been so painful to him, and what then was said to me or written respecting them revealed the story of his boyhood. The idea of _David Copperfield_, which was to take all the world into his confidence, had not at this time occurred to him; but what it had so startled me to know, his readers were afterwards told with only such change or addition as for the time might sufficiently disguise himself under cover of his hero. For the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a "laboring hind" in the service of "Murdstone and Grinby," and conscious already of what made it seem very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at such an age, was indeed himself. His was the secret agony of soul at finding himself "companion to Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes," and his the tears that mingled with the water in which he and they rinsed and washed out bottles. It had all been written, as fact, before he thought of any other use for it; and it was not until several months later, when the fancy of _David Copperfield_, itself suggested by what he had so written of his early troubles, began to take shape in his mind, that he abandoned his first intention of writing his own life. Those warehouse experiences fell then so aptly into the subject he had chosen, that he could not resist the temptation of immediately using them; and the manuscript recording them, which was but the first portion of what he had designed to write, was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and earlier chapters of his novel. What already had been sent to me, however, and proof-sheets of the novel interlined at the time, enable me now to separate the fact from the fiction, and to supply to the story of the author's childhood those passages, omitted from the book, which, apart from their illustration of the growth of his character, present to us a picture of tragical suffering, and of tender as well as humorous fancy, unsurpassed in even the wonders of his published writings. The person indirectly responsible for the scenes to be described was the young relative James Lamert, the cousin by his aunt's marriage of whom I have made frequent mention, who got up the plays at Chatham, and after passing at Sandhurst had been living with the family in Bayham Street in the hope of obtaining a commission in the army. This did not come until long afterwards, when, in consideration of his father's services, he received it, and relinquished it then in favor of a younger brother; but he had meanwhile, before the family removed from Camden-town, ceased to live with them. The husband of a sister of his (of the same name as himself, being indeed his cousin, George Lamert), a man of some property, had recently embarked in an odd sort of commercial speculation, and had taken him into his office and his house, to assist in it. I give now the fragment of the autobiography of Dickens: "This speculation was a rivalry of 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand,'--at that time very famous. One Jonathan Warren (the famous one was Robert), living at 30, Hungerford Stairs, or Market, Strand (for I forget which it was called then), claimed to have been the original inventor or proprietor of the blacking-recipe, and to have been deposed and ill used by his renowned relation. At last he put himself in the way of selling his recipe, and his name, and his 30, Hungerford Stairs, Strand (30, Strand, very large, and the intermediate direction very small), for an annuity; and he set forth by his agents that a little capital would make a great business of it. The man of some property was found in George Lamert, the cousin and brother-in-law of James. He bought this right and title, and went into the blacking-business and the blacking-premises. "--In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought. Its chief manager, James Lamert, the relative who had lived with us in Bayham Street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the blacking-warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first, and seven afterwards. At any rate, the offer was accepted very willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking-warehouse to begin my business life. "It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge. "The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in _Oliver Twist_. "Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour; from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of his or mine; and, for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots, down-stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards again, to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_), worked generally, side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane theatre; where another relation of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes. "No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. "My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from Chatham workhouse, in the two parlors in the emptied house in Gower Street north. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour, and usually I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at some neighboring shop. In the latter case, it was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook's shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson's alamode beef-house in Clare Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don't know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn't taken it." I lose here for a little while the fragment of direct narrative, but I perfectly recollect that he used to describe Saturday night as his great treat. It was a grand thing to walk home with six shillings in his pocket, and to look in at the shop-windows and think what it would buy. Hunt's roasted corn, as a British and patriotic substitute for coffee, was in great vogue just then; and the little fellow used to buy it, and roast it on the Sunday. There was a cheap periodical of selected pieces called the _Portfolio_, which he had also a great fancy for taking home with him. The new proposed "deed," meanwhile, had failed to propitiate his father's creditors; all hope of arrangement passed away; and the end was that his mother and her encampment in Gower Street north broke up and went to live in the Marshalsea. I am able at this point to resume his own account: "The key of the house was sent back to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and I (small Cain that I was, except that I had never done harm to any one) was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in Little College Street, Camden-town, who took children in to board, and had once done so at Brighton; and who, with a few alterations and embellishments, unconsciously began to sit for Mrs. Pipchin in _Dombey_ when she took in me. "She had a little brother and sister under her care then; somebody's natural children, who were very irregularly paid for; and a widow's little son. The two boys and I slept in the same room. My own exclusive breakfast, of a penny cottage loaf and a penny-worth of milk, I provided for myself. I kept another small loaf, and a quarter of a pound of cheese, on a particular shelf of a particular cupboard; to make my supper on when I came back at night. They made a hole in the six or seven shillings, I know well; and I was out at the blacking-warehouse all day, and had to support myself upon that money all the week. I suppose my lodging was paid for, by my father. I certainly did not pay it myself; and I certainly had no other assistance whatever (the making of my clothes, I think, excepted), from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from any one that I can call to mind, so help me God. "Sundays, Fanny and I passed in the prison. I was at the academy in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, at nine o'clock in the morning, to fetch her; and we walked back there together, at night. "I was so young and childish, and so little qualified--how could I be otherwise?--to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that, in going to Hungerford Stairs of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put out at half-price on trays at the confectioners' doors in Tottenham Court Road; and I often spent in that the money I should have kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner, or bought a roll, or a slice of pudding. There were two pudding-shops between which I was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St. Martin's Church (at the back of the church) which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day; and many and many a day did I dine off it. "We had half an hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee, and a slice of bread-and-butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden market, and stared at the pineapples. The coffee-shops to which I most resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now) close to Hungerford market; and one in St. Martin's Lane, of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood. "I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the week through; by putting it away in a drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount and labeled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond. "But I held some station at the blacking-warehouse too. Besides that my relative at the counting-house did what a man so occupied, and dealing with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a different footing from the rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to tell. No man's imagination can overstep the reality. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work. I knew from the first that, if I could not do my work as well as any of the rest, I could not hold myself above slight and contempt. I soon became at least as expeditious and as skillful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as 'the young gentleman.' A certain man (a soldier once) named Thomas, who was the foreman, and another named Harry, who was the carman and wore a red jacket, used to call me 'Charles' sometimes, in speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain them over our work with the results of some of the old readings, which were fast perishing out of my mind. Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the 'young gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily. "My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite hopeless, and abandoned as such, altogether; though I am solemnly convinced that I never, for one hour, was reconciled to it, or was otherwise than miserably unhappy. I felt keenly, however, the being so cut off from my parents, my brothers and sisters, and, when my day's work was done, going home to such a miserable blank; and _that_, I thought, might be corrected. One Sunday night I remonstrated with my father on this head, so pathetically, and with so many tears, that his kind nature gave way. He began to think that it was not quite right. I do believe he had never thought so before, or thought about it. It was the first remonstrance I had ever made about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a little more than I intended. A back-attic was found for me at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough, where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were sent over for me, and made up on the floor. The little window had a pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new abode I thought it was a Paradise." There is here another blank, which it is, however, not difficult to supply from letters and recollections of my own. What was to him of course the great pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bringing him again, though after a fashion sorry enough, within the circle of home. From this time he used to breakfast "at home,"--in other words, in the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates were open, and for the most part much earlier. They had no want of bodily comforts there. His father's income, still going on, was amply sufficient for that; and in every respect indeed but elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out of it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham Street, the orphan girl of the Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the Marchioness in the _Old Curiosity Shop_. She also had a lodging in the neighborhood, that she might be early on the scene of her duties; and when Charles met her, as he would do occasionally, in his lounging-place by London Bridge, he would occupy the time before the gates opened by telling her quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the tower. "But I hope I believed them myself," he would say. Besides breakfast, he had supper also in the prison, and got to his lodging generally at nine o'clock. The gates closed always at ten. I must not omit what he told me of the landlord of this little lodging. He was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was lame, and had a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame too. They were all very kind to the boy. He was taken with one of his old attacks of spasm one night, and the whole three of them were about his bed until morning. They were all dead when he told me this; but in another form they still live very pleasantly as the Garland family in the _Old Curiosity Shop_. He had a similar illness one day in the warehouse, which I can describe in his own words: "Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that time, that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side, half the day. I got better, and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison, and, after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house." The Saturday nights continued, as before, to be precious to him. "My usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and down that turning in the Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop-door on the other. There are a good many little low-browed old shops in that street, of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few weeks ago, where I used to buy boot-laces on Saturday nights, and saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-indian, and the Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered anywhere or under any circumstances, will instantly recall that time, is the smell of hat-making." His father's attempts to avoid going through the court having failed, all needful ceremonies had to be undertaken to obtain the benefit of the insolvent debtors' act; and in one of these little Charles had his part to play. One condition of the statute was that the wearing-apparel and personal matters retained were not to exceed twenty pounds sterling in value. "It was necessary, as a matter of form, that the clothes I wore should be seen by the official appraiser. I had a half-holiday to enable me to call upon him, at his own time, at a house somewhere beyond the Obelisk. I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or corduroy trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which had been given me by my grandmother before the blacking-days, and I had entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable possession might not bring me over the twenty pounds. So I was greatly relieved, and made him a bow of acknowledgment as I went out." Still, the want felt most by him was the companionship of boys of his own age. He had no such acquaintance. Sometimes he remembered to have played on the coal-barges at dinner-time, with Poll Green and Bob Fagin; but those were rare occasions. He generally strolled alone, about the back streets of the Adelphi, or explored the Adelphi arches. One of his favorite localities was a little public-house by the water-side, called the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we once missed in looking for it together; and he had a vision which he has mentioned in _Copperfield_ of sitting eating something on a bench outside, one fine evening, and looking at some coal-heavers dancing before the house. "I wonder what they thought of me," says David. He had himself already said the same in his fragment of autobiography. Another characteristic little incident he made afterwards one of David's experiences, but I am able to give it here without the disguises that adapt it to the fiction: "I was such a little fellow, with my poor white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers, that frequently, when I went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter to wash down the saveloy and the loaf I had eaten in the street, they didn't like to give it me. I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere for my father, and was going back to the borough over Westminster Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street,--which is still there, though altered,--at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, 'What is your very best--the VERY _best_--ale, a glass?' For the occasion was a festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my birthday, or somebody else's. 'Two-pence,' says he. 'Then,' says I, 'just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.' The landlord looked at me, in return, over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face, and, instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, etc. etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord's wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave me a kiss that was half admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure." A later, and not less characteristic, incident of the true story of this time found also a place, three or four years after it was written, in his now famous fiction. It preceded but by a short time the discharge, from the Marshalsea, of the elder Dickens; to whom a rather considerable legacy from a relative had accrued not long before ("some hundreds," I understood), and had been paid into court during his imprisonment. The scene to be described arose on the occasion of a petition drawn up by him before he left, praying, not for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, as David Copperfield relates, but for the less dignified but more accessible boon of a bounty to the prisoners to drink his majesty's health on his majesty's forthcoming birthday. "I mention the circumstance because it illustrates, to me, my early interest in observing people. When I went to the Marshalsea of a night, I was always delighted to hear from my mother what she knew about the histories of the different debtors in the prison; and when I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them all come in, one after another (though I knew the greater part of them already, to speak to, and they me), that I got leave of absence on purpose, and established myself in a corner, near the petition. It was stretched out, I recollect, on a great ironing-board, under the window, which in another part of the room made a bedstead at night. The internal regulations of the place, for cleanliness and order, and for the government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot water and some means of cooking, and a good fire, were provided for all who paid a very small subscription, were excellently administered by a governing committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the time being. As many of the principal officers of this body as could be got into the small room without filling it up, supported him, in front of the petition; and my old friend Captain Porter (who had washed himself, to do honor to so solemn an occasion) stationed himself close to it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was then thrown open, and they began to come in, in a long file; several waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his signature, and went out. To everybody in succession, Captain Porter said, 'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such words as 'Majesty--gracious Majesty--your gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects--your Majesty's well-known munificence,'--as if the words were something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; my poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity, and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely believe I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated or not, quite as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my own little character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper. I might be able to do that now, more truly: not more earnestly, or with a closer interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, of gait, of manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would rather have seen it than the best play ever played; and I thought about it afterwards, over the pots of paste-blacking, often and often. When I looked, with my mind's eye, into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's incarceration, I wonder whether half a dozen men were wanting from the Marshalsea crowd that came filing in again, to the sound of Captain Porter's voice!" When the family left the Marshalsea they all went to lodge with the lady in Little College Street, a Mrs. Roylance, who has obtained unexpected immortality as Mrs. Pipchin; and they afterwards occupied a small house in Somers-town. But, before this time, Charles was present with some of them in Tenterden Street to see his sister. Fanny received one of the prizes given to the pupils of the Royal Academy of Music. "I could not bear to think of myself--beyond the reach of all such honorable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before. There was no envy in this." There was little need that he should say so. Extreme enjoyment in witnessing the exercise of her talents, the utmost pride in every success obtained by them, he manifested always to a degree otherwise quite unusual with him; and on the day of her funeral, which we passed together, I had most affecting proof of his tender and grateful memory of her in these childish days. A few more sentences, certainly not less touching than any that have gone before, will bring the story of them to its close. They stand here exactly as written by him: "I am not sure that it was before this time, or after it, that the blacking-warehouse was removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden. It is no matter. Next to the shop at the corner of Bedford Street in Chandos Street are two rather old-fashioned houses and shops adjoining one another. They were one then, or thrown into one, for the blacking-business; and had been a butter-shop. Opposite to them was, and is, a public-house, where I got my ale, under these new circumstances. The stones in the street may be smoothed by my small feet going across to it at dinner-time, and back again. The establishment was larger now, and we had one or two new boys. Bob Fagin and I had attained to great dexterity in tying up the pots. I forget how many we could do in five minutes. We worked, for the light's sake, near the second window as you come from Bedford Street; and we were so brisk at it that the people used to stop and look in. Sometimes there would be quite a little crowd there. I saw my father coming in at the door one day when we were very busy, and I wondered how he could bear it. "Now, I generally had my dinner in the warehouse. Sometimes I brought it from home, so I was better off. I see myself coming across Russell Square from Somers-town, one morning, with some cold hotch-potch in a small basin tied up in a handkerchief. I had the same wanderings about the streets as I used to have, and was just as solitary and self-dependent as before; but I had not the same difficulty in merely living. I never, however, heard a word of being taken away, or of being otherwise than quite provided for. "At last, one day, my father, and the relative so often mentioned, quarreled; quarreled by letter, for I took the letter from my father to him which caused the explosion, but quarreled very fiercely. It was about me. It may have had some backward reference, in part, for anything I know, to my employment at the window. All I am certain of is, that, soon after I had given him the letter, my cousin (he was a sort of cousin, by marriage) told me he was very much insulted about me, and that it was impossible to keep me after that. I cried very much, partly because it was so sudden, and partly because in his anger he was violent about my father, though gentle to me. Thomas, the old soldier, comforted me, and said he was sure it was for the best. With a relief so strange that it was like oppression, I went home. "My mother set herself to accommodate the quarrel, and did so next day. She brought home a request for me to return next morning, and a high character of me, which I am very sure I deserved. My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily; for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back. "From that hour until this at which I write, no word of that part of my childhood which I have now gladly brought to a close has passed my lips to any human being. I have no idea how long it lasted; whether for a year, or much more, or less. From that hour until this my father and my mother have been stricken dumb upon it. I have never heard the least allusion to it, however far off and remote, from either of them. I have never, until I now impart it to this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God. "Until old Hungerford market was pulled down, until old Hungerford Stairs were destroyed, and the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not endure to go near it. For many years, when I came near to Robert Warren's in the Strand, I crossed over to the opposite side of the way, to avoid a certain smell of the cement they put upon the blacking-corks, which reminded me of what I was once. It was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way home by the borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak. "In my walks at night I have walked there often, since then, and by degrees I have come to write this. It does not seem a tithe of what I might have written, or of what I meant to write." The substance of some after-talk explanatory of points in the narrative, of which a note was made at the time, may be briefly added. He could hardly have been more than twelve years old when he left the place, and was still unusually small for his age; much smaller, though two years older, than his own eldest son was at the time of these confidences. His mother had been in the blacking-warehouse many times; his father not more than once or twice. The rivalry of Robert Warren by Jonathan's representatives, the cousins George and James, was carried to wonderful extremes in the way of advertisement; and they were all very proud, he told me, of the cat scratching the boot, which was _their_ house's device. The poets in the house's regular employ he remembered, too, and made his first study from one of them for the poet of Mrs. Jarley's wax-work. The whole enterprise, however, had the usual end of such things. The younger cousin tired of the concern; and a Mr. Wood, the proprietor who took James's share and became George's partner, sold it ultimately to Robert Warren. It continued to be his at the time Dickens and myself last spoke of it together, and he had made an excellent bargain of it. CHAPTER III. SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE. 1824-1830. Outcome of Boyish Trials--Disadvantage in Later Years--Advantages--Next Move in Life--Wellington House Academy--Revisited and Described--Letter from a Schoolfellow--C. D.'s Recollections of School--Schoolfellow's Recollections of C. D.--Fac-simile of Schoolboy Letter--Daniel Tobin--Another Schoolfellow's Recollections--Writing Tales and getting up Plays--Master Beverley Scene-Painter--Street-acting--The Schoolfellows after Forty Years--Smallness of the World--In Attorneys' Offices--At Minor Theatres--The Father on the Son's Education--Studying Short-hand--In British Museum Reading Room--Preparing for the Gallery--D. C. for C. D.--A Real Dora in 1829--The same Dora in 1855--Dora changed into Flora--Ashes of Youth and Hope. IN what way these strange experiences of his boyhood affected him afterwards, this narrative of his life must show; but there were influences that made themselves felt even on his way to manhood. What at once he brought out of the humiliation that had impressed him so deeply, though scarcely as yet quite consciously, was a natural dread of the hardships that might still be in store for him, sharpened by what he had gone through; and this, though in its effect for the present imperfectly understood, became by degrees a passionate resolve, even while he was yielding to circumstances, _not to be_ what circumstances were conspiring to make him. All that was involved in what he had suffered and sunk into, could not have been known to him at the time; but it was plain enough later, as we see; and in conversation with me after the revelation was made, he used to find, at extreme points in his life, the explanation of himself in those early trials. He had derived great good from them, but not without alloy. The fixed and eager determination, the restless and resistless energy, which opened to him opportunities of escape from many mean environments, not by turning off from any path of duty, but by resolutely rising to such excellence or distinction as might be attainable in it, brought with it some disadvantage among many noble advantages. Of this he was himself aware, but not to the full extent. What it was that in society made him often uneasy, shrinking, and over-sensitive, he knew; but all the danger he ran in bearing down and overmastering the feeling, he did not know. A too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone of fierceness; something in his nature that made his resolves insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed. So rare were these manifestations, however, and so little did they prejudice a character as entirely open and generous as it was at all times ardent and impetuous, that only very infrequently, towards the close of the middle term of a friendship which lasted without the interruption of a day for more than three-and-thirty years, were they ever unfavorably presented to me. But there they were; and when I have seen strangely present, at such chance intervals, a stern and even cold isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost feminine and the most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as though his habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk, for the time, under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had dealt to him in those early years. On more than one occasion, indeed, I had confirmation of this. "I must entreat you," he wrote to me in June, 1862, "to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time." One good there was, however, altogether without drawback, and which claims simply to be mentioned before my narrative is resumed. The story of his childish misery has itself sufficiently shown that he never throughout it lost his precious gift of animal spirits, or his native capacity for humorous enjoyment; and there were positive gains to him from what he underwent, which were also rich and lasting. To what in the outset of his difficulties and trials gave the decisive bent to his genius, I have already made special reference; and we are to observe, of what followed, that with the very poor and unprosperous, out of whose sufferings and strugglings, and the virtues as well as vices born of them, his not least splendid successes were wrought, his childish experiences had made him actually one. They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humor, and on whose side he got the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self. Nor was it a small part of this manifest advantage that he should have obtained his experience as a child and not as a man; that only the good part, the flower and fruit of it, was plucked by him; and that nothing of the evil part, none of the earth in which the seed was planted, remained to soil him. His next move in life can also be given in his own language: "There was a school in the Hampstead Road kept by Mr. Jones, a Welshman, to which my father dispatched me to ask for a card of terms. The boys were at dinner, and Mr. Jones was carving for them with a pair of holland sleeves on, when I acquitted myself of this commission. He came out, and gave me what I wanted; and hoped I should become a pupil. I did. At seven o'clock one morning, very soon afterwards, I went as day-scholar to Mr. Jones's establishment, which was in Mornington Place, and had its school-room sliced away by the Birmingham Railway, when that change came about. The school-room, however, was not threatened by directors or civil engineers then, and there was a board over the door, graced with the words WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY." At Wellington House Academy he remained nearly two years, being a little over fourteen years of age when he quitted it. In his minor writings as well as in _Copperfield_ will be found general allusions to it, and there is a paper among his pieces reprinted from _Household Words_ which purports specifically to describe it. To the account therein given of himself when he went to the school, as advanced enough, so safely had his memory retained its poor fragments of early schooling, to be put into _Virgil_, as getting sundry prizes, and as attaining to the eminent position of its first boy, one of his two schoolfellows with whom I have had communication makes objection; but both admit that the general features of the place are reproduced with wonderful accuracy, and more especially in those points for which the school appears to have been much more notable than for anything connected with the scholarship of its pupils. In the reprinted piece Dickens describes it as remarkable for white mice. He says that red-polls, linnets, and even canaries were kept by the boys in desks, drawers, hat-boxes, and other strange refuges for birds; but that white mice were the favorite stock, and that the boys trained the mice much better than the master trained the boys. He recalled in particular one white mouse who lived in the cover of a Latin dictionary, ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets, turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance on the stage as the dog of Montàrgis, who might have achieved greater things but for having had the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep inkstand and was dyed black and drowned. Nevertheless he mentions the school as one also of some celebrity in its neighborhood, though nobody could have said why; and adds that among the boys the master was supposed to know nothing, and one of the ushers was supposed to know everything. "We are still inclined to think the first-named supposition perfectly correct. We went to look at the place only this last midsummer, and found that the railway had cut it up, root and branch. A great trunk line had swallowed the playground, sliced away the school-room, and pared off the corner of the house. Which, thus curtailed of its proportions, presented itself in a green stage of stucco, profile-wise towards the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without a handle, standing on end." One who knew him in those early days, Mr. Owen P. Thomas, thus writes to me (February, 1871): "I had the honor of being Mr. Dickens's schoolfellow for about two years (1824-1826), both being day-scholars, at Mr. Jones's 'Classical and Commercial Academy,' as then inscribed in front of the house, and which was situated at the corner of Granby Street and the Hampstead Road. The house stands now in its original state, but the school and large playground behind disappeared on the formation of the London and Northwestern Railway, which at this point runs in a slanting direction from Euston Square underneath the Hampstead Road. We were all companions and playmates when out of school, as well as fellow-students therein." (Mr. Thomas includes in this remark the names of Henry Danson, now a physician in practice in London; of Daniel Tobin, whom I remember to have been frequently assisted by his old schoolfellow in later years; and of Richard Bray.) "You will find a graphic sketch of the school by Mr. Dickens himself in _Household Words_ of 11th October, 1851. The article is entitled Our School. The names of course are feigned; but, allowing for slight coloring, the persons and incidents described are all true to life, and easily recognizable by any one who attended the school at the time. The Latin master was Mr. Manville, or Mandeville, who for many years was well known at the library of the British Museum. The academy, after the railroad overthrew it, was removed to another house in the neighborhood, but Mr. Jones and two at least of his assistant masters have long ago departed this life." One of the latter was the usher believed to know everything, who was writing-master, mathematical master, English master, divided the little boys with the Latin master, made out the bills, mended the pens, and always called at parents' houses to inquire after sick boys, because he had gentlemanly manners. This picture my correspondent recognized; as well as those of the fat little dancing-master who taught them hornpipes, of the Latin master who stuffed his ears with onions for his deafness, of the gruff serving-man who nursed the boys in scarlet fever, and of the principal himself, who was always ruling ciphering-books with a bloated mahogany ruler, smiting the palms of offenders with the same diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other. "My recollection of Dickens whilst at school," Mr. Thomas continues, "is that of a healthy-looking boy, small but well built, with a more than usual flow of spirits, inducing to harmless fun, seldom or never I think to mischief, to which so many lads at that age are prone. I cannot recall anything that then indicated he would hereafter become a literary celebrity; but perhaps he was too young then. He usually held his head more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general smartness about him. His weekday dress of jacket and trowsers, I can clearly remember, was what is called pepper-and-salt; and, instead of the frill that most boys of his age wore then, he had a turn-down collar, so that he looked less youthful in consequence. He invented what we termed a 'lingo,' produced by the addition of a few letters of the same sound to every word; and it was our ambition, walking and talking thus along the street, to be considered foreigners. As an alternate amusement the present writer well remembers extemporizing tales of some sort, and reciting them offhand, with Dickens and Danson or Tobin walking on either side of him. I inclose you a copy of a note I received from him when he was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, perhaps one of the earliest productions of his pen. The Leg referred to was the Legend of something, a pamphlet romance I had lent him; the Clavis was of course the Latin school-book so named." There is some underlying whim or fun in the "Leg" allusions which Mr. Thomas appears to have overlooked, and certainly fails to explain; but the note, which is here given in fac-simile, may be left to speak for itself; and in the signature the reader will be amused to see the first faint beginning of a flourish afterwards famous. "After a lapse of years," Mr. Thomas continues, "I recognized the celebrated writer as the individual I had known so well as a boy, from having preserved this note; and upon Mr. Dickens visiting Reading in December, 1854, to give one of his earliest readings for the benefit of the literary institute, of which he had become president on Mr. Justice Talfourd's death, I took the opportunity of showing it to him, when he was much diverted therewith. On the same occasion we conversed about mutual schoolfellows, and among others Daniel Tobin was referred to, whom I remembered to have been Dickens's _most_ intimate companion in the school-days (1824 to 1826). His reply was that Tobin either was then, or had previously been, assisting him in the capacity of amanuensis; but there is a subsequent mystery about Tobin, in connection with his friend and patron, which I have never been able to comprehend; for I understood shortly afterwards that there was entire separation between them, and it must have been an offense of some gravity to have sundered an acquaintance formed in early youth, and which had endured, greatly to Tobin's advantage, so long. He resided in our school-days in one of the now old and grimy-looking stone-fronted houses in George Street, Euston Road, a few doors from the Orange-tree tavern. It is the opinion of the other schoolfellow with whom we were intimate, Doctor Danson, that upon leaving school Mr. Dickens and Tobin entered the same solicitor's office, and this he thinks was either in or near Lincoln's Inn Fields." [Illustration: Handwritten note: Punctuation and capitalization, retained: Tim/ I am quite ashamed I have not returned your Leg but you shall have it by Harry to-morrow If you would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have it at a very ~reduced price~ Cheaper in comparison than a Leg. Yours &c ~C Dickens.~ PS. I suppose all this time you have had ~a wooden~ leg. I have weighed yours every saturday Night (No date, but was written in latter part of 1825.)] The offense of Tobin went no deeper than the having at last worn out even Dickens's patience and kindness. His applications for relief were so incessantly repeated, that to cut him and them adrift altogether was the only way of escape from what had become an intolerable nuisance. To Mr. Thomas's letter the reader will thank me for adding one not less interesting with which Dr. Henry Danson has favored me. We have here, with the same fun and animal spirits, a little of the proneness to mischief which his other schoolfellow says he was free from; but the mischief is all of the harmless kind, and might perhaps have been better described as but part of an irrepressible vivacity: "My impression is that I was a schoolfellow of Dickens for nearly two years: he left before me, I think at about fifteen years of age. Mr. Jones's school, called the Wellington Academy, was in the Hampstead Road, at the northeast corner of Granby Street. The school-house was afterwards removed for the London and Northwestern Railway. It was considered at the time a very superior sort of school,--one of the best, indeed, in that part of London; but it was most shamefully mismanaged, and the boys made but very little progress. The proprietor, Mr. Jones, was a Welshman; a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant; whose chief employment was to scourge the boys. Dickens has given a very lively account of this place in his paper entitled Our School, but it is very mythical in many respects, and more especially in the compliment he pays in it to himself. I do not remember that Dickens distinguished himself in any way, or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not learn Greek or Latin there; and you will remember there is no allusion to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed lad, full of animation and animal spirits, and probably was connected with every mischievous prank in the school. I do not think he came in for any of Mr. Jones's scourging propensity: in fact, together with myself, he was only a day-pupil, and with these there was a wholesome fear of tales being carried home to the parents. His personal appearance at that time is vividly brought home to me in the portrait of him taken a few years later by Mr. Lawrence. He resided with his friends in a very small house in a street leading out of Seymour Street, north of Mr. Judkin's chapel. "Depend on it, he was quite a self-made man, and his wonderful knowledge and command of the English language must have been acquired by long and patient study after leaving his last school. "I have no recollection of the boy you name. His chief associates were, I think, Tobin, Mr. Thomas, Bray, and myself. The first-named was his chief ally, and his acquaintance with him appears to have continued many years afterwards. At about that time Penny and Saturday Magazines were published weekly, and were greedily read by us. We kept bees, white mice, and other living things clandestinely in our desks; and the mechanical arts were a good deal cultivated, in the shape of coach-building, and making pumps and boats, the motive power of which was the white mice. "I think at that time Dickens took to writing small tales, and we had a sort of club for lending and circulating them. Dickens was also very strong in using a sort of lingo, which made us quite unintelligible to bystanders. We were very strong, too, in theatricals. We mounted small theatres, and got up very gorgeous scenery to illustrate the _Miller and his Men_ and _Cherry and Fair Star_. I remember the present Mr. Beverley, the scene-painter, assisted us in this. Dickens was always a leader at these plays, which were occasionally presented with much solemnity before an audience of boys and in the presence of the ushers. My brother, assisted by Dickens, got up the _Miller and his Men_, in a very gorgeous form. Master Beverley constructed the mill for us in such a way that it could tumble to pieces with the assistance of crackers. At one representation the fireworks in the last scene, ending with the destruction of the mill, were so very real that the police interfered and knocked violently at the doors. Dickens's after-taste for theatricals might have had its origin in these small affairs. "I quite remember Dickens on one occasion heading us in Drummond Street in pretending to be poor boys, and asking the passers-by for charity,--especially old ladies, one of whom told us she 'had no money for beggar-boys.' On these adventures, when the old ladies were quite staggered by the impudence of the demand, Dickens would explode with laughter and take to his heels. "I met him one Sunday morning shortly after he left the school, and we very piously attended the morning service at Seymour Street Chapel. I am sorry to say Master Dickens did not attend in the slightest degree to the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was ready and the potatoes would be spoiled, and in fact behaved in such a manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel. "I heard of him some time after from Tobin, whom I met carrying a foaming pot of London particular in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I then understood that Dickens was in the same or some neighboring office. "Many years elapsed after this before I became aware, from accidentally reading Our School, that the brilliant and now famous Dickens was my old schoolfellow. I didn't like to intrude myself upon him; and it was not until three or four years ago, when he presided at the University College dinner at Willis's rooms, and made a most brilliant and effective speech, that I sent him a congratulatory note reminding him of our former fellowship. To this he sent me a kind note in reply, and which I value very much. I send you copies of these."[5] From Dickens himself I never heard much allusion to the school thus described; but I knew that, besides being the subject dealt with in _Household Words_, it had supplied some of the lighter traits of Salem House for _Copperfield_; and that to the fact of one of its tutors being afterwards engaged to teach a boy of Macready's, our common friend, Dickens used to point for one of the illustrations of his favorite theory as to the smallness of the world, and how things and persons apparently the most unlikely to meet were continually knocking up against each other. The employment as his amanuensis of his schoolfellow Tobin dates as early as his Doctors'-Commons days, but both my correspondents are mistaken in the impression they appear to have received that Tobin had been previously his fellow-clerk in the same attorney's office. I had thought him more likely to have been accompanied there by another of his boyish acquaintances who became afterwards a solicitor, Mr. Mitton, not recollected by either of my correspondents in connection with the school, but whom I frequently met with him in later years, and for whom he had the regard arising out of such early associations. In this, however, I have since discovered my own mistake: the truth being that it was this gentleman's connection, not with the Wellington Academy, but with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, where the brothers of Dickens were subsequently placed, which led to their early knowledge of each other. I fancy that they were together also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy's in New Square, Lincoln's Inn; but, whether or not this was so, Dickens certainly had not quitted school many months before his father had made sufficient interest with an attorney of Gray's Inn, Mr. Edward Blackmore, to obtain him regular employment in his office. In this capacity of clerk, our only trustworthy glimpse of him we owe to the last-named gentleman, who has described briefly, and I do not doubt authentically, the services so rendered by him to the law. It cannot be said that they were noteworthy, though it might be difficult to find a more distinguished person who has borne the title, unless we make exception for the very father of literature himself, whom Chaucer, with amusing illustration of the way in which words change their meanings, calls "that conceited clerke Homère." "I was well acquainted," writes Mr. Edward Blackmore of Alresford, "with his parents, and, being then in practice in Gray's Inn, they asked me if I could find employment for him. He was a bright, clever-looking youth, and I took him as a clerk. He came to me in May, 1827, and left in November, 1828; and I have now an account-book which he used to keep of petty disbursements in the office, in which he charged himself with the modest salary first of thirteen shillings and sixpence, and afterwards of fifteen shillings, a week. Several incidents took place in the office of which he must have been a keen observer, as I recognized some of them in his _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_; and I am much mistaken if some of his characters had not their originals in persons I well remember. His taste for theatricals was much promoted by a fellow-clerk named Potter, since dead, with whom he chiefly associated. They took every opportunity, then unknown to me, of going together to a minor theatre, where (I afterwards heard) they not unfrequently engaged in parts. After he left me I saw him at times in the lord chancellor's court, taking notes of cases as a reporter. I then lost sight of him until his _Pickwick_ made its appearance." This letter indicates the position he held at Mr. Blackmore's; and we have but to turn to the passage in _Pickwick_ which describes the several grades of attorney's clerk, to understand it more clearly. He was very far below the articled clerk, who has paid a premium and is attorney in perspective. He was not so high as the salaried clerk, with nearly the whole of his weekly thirty shillings spent on his personal pleasures. He was not even on the level with his middle-aged copying-clerk, always needy and uniformly shabby. He was simply among, however his own nature may have lifted him above, the "office-lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night for saveloys and porter, and think there's nothing like life." Thus far, not more or less, had he now reached. He was one of the office-lads, and probably in his first surtout. But, even thus, the process of education went on, defying what seemed to interrupt it; and in the amount of his present equipment for his needs of life, what he brought from the Wellington House Academy can have borne but the smallest proportion to his acquirement at Mr. Blackmore's. Yet to seek to identify, without help from himself, any passages in his books with those boyish law-experiences, would be idle and hopeless enough. In the earliest of his writings, and down to the very latest, he worked exhaustively the field which is opened by an attorney's office to a student of life and manners; but we have not now to deal with his numerous varieties of the _genus_ clerk drawn thus for the amusement of others, but with the acquisitions which at present he was storing up for himself from the opportunities such offices opened to him. Nor would it be possible to have better illustrative comment on all these years than is furnished by his father's reply to a friend it was now hoped to interest on his behalf, which more than once I have heard him whimsically, but good-humoredly, imitate. "Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was your son educated?" "Why, indeed, sir--ha! ha!--he may be said to have educated himself!" Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that all men who rise above the common level receive,--the first, that of his teachers, and the second, more personal and more important, _his own_,--he had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed for him. Very nearly another eighteen months were now to be spent mainly in practical preparation for what he was, at this time, led finally to choose as an employment from which a fair income was certain with such talents as he possessed; his father already having taken to it, in these latter years, in aid of the family resources. In his father's house, which was at Hampstead through the first portion of the Mornington Street school time, then in the house out of Seymour Street mentioned by Dr. Danson, and afterwards, upon the elder Dickens going into the gallery, in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, Charles had continued to live; and, influenced doubtless by the example before him, he took sudden determination to qualify himself thoroughly for what his father was lately become, a newspaper parliamentary reporter. He set resolutely, therefore, to the study of short-hand; and, for the additional help of such general information about books as a fairly-educated youth might be expected to have, as well as to satisfy some higher personal cravings, he became an assiduous attendant in the British Museum reading-room. He would frequently refer to these days as decidedly the usefulest to himself he had ever passed; and, judging from the results, they must have been so. No man who knew him in later years, and talked to him familiarly of books and things, would have suspected his education in boyhood, almost entirely self-acquired as it was, to have been so rambling or hap-hazard as I have here described it. The secret consisted in this, that, whatever for the time he had to do, he lifted himself, there and then, to the level of, and at no time disregarded the rules that guided the hero of his novel. "Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well. What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely. Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self, and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now to have been my golden rules." Of the difficulties that beset his short-hand studies, as well as of what first turned his mind to them, he has told also something in _Copperfield_. He had heard that many men distinguished in various pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in parliament, and he was not deterred by a friend's warning that the mere mechanical accomplishment for excellence in it might take a few years to master thoroughly; "a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand writing and reading being about equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages." Undaunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this as in graver things, and, having bought Mr. Gurney's half-guinea book, worked steadily his way through its distractions. "The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was almost heart-breaking." What it was that made it not quite heart-breaking to the hero of the fiction, its readers know; and something of the same kind was now to enter into the actual experience of its writer. First let me say, however, that after subduing to his wants in marvelously quick time this unruly and unaccommodating servant of stenography, what he most desired was still not open to him. "There never _was_ such a short-hand writer," has been often said to me by Mr. Beard, the friend he first made in that line when he entered the gallery, and with whom to the close of his life he maintained the friendliest intercourse. But there was no opening for him in the gallery yet. He had to pass nearly two years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, practicing in this and the other law courts, before he became a sharer in parliamentary toils and triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had no belief in any but the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden reappearance of the real one in his life, nearly six years after _Copperfield_ was written, convinced me there had been a more actual foundation for those chapters of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still, I would hardly admit it, and, that the matter could possibly affect him then, persisted in a stout refusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little light on this juvenile part of his career, and I therefore venture to preserve it: "I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling, and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and that this began when I was Charley's age; that it excluded every other idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are equal to four times four; and that I went at it with a determination to overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads; then you are wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since!--And so I suffered, and so worked, and so beat and hammered away at the maddest romances that ever got into any boy's head and stayed there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now, loosens my hold upon myself. Without for a moment sincerely believing that it would have been better if we had never got separated, I cannot see the occasion of so much emotion as I should see any one else. No one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection gave me in _Copperfield_. And, just as I can never open that book as I open any other book, I cannot see the face (even at four-and-forty), or hear the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes of all that youth and hope in the wildest manner." More and more plainly seen, however, in the light of four-and-forty, the romance glided visibly away, its work being fairly done; and at the close of the month following that in which this letter was written, during which he had very quietly made a formal call with his wife at his youthful Dora's house, and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the hall, her stuffed favorite Jip, he began the fiction in which there was a Flora to set against its predecessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. The fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was conscious of anything. FOOTNOTES: [5] The reader will probably think them worth subjoining. Dr. Danson wrote: "_April, 1864._ DEAR SIR, On the recent occasion of the U. C. H. dinner, you would probably have been amused and somewhat surprised to learn that one of those whom you addressed had often accompanied you over that 'field of forty footsteps' to which you so aptly and amusingly alluded. It is now some years since I was accidentally reading a paper written by yourself in the _Household Words_, when I was first impressed with the idea that the writer described scenes and persons with which I was once familiar, and that he must necessarily be the veritable Charles Dickens of 'our school,'--the school of Jones! I did not then, however, like to intrude myself upon you, for I could hardly hope that you would retain any recollection of myself; indeed, it was only barely possible you should do so, however vividly _I_ might recall you in many scenes of fun and frolic of my school-days. I happened to be present at the dinner of Tuesday last (being interested as an old student in the school of the hospital), and was seated very near you; I was tempted during the evening to introduce myself to you, but feared lest an explanation such as this in a public room might attract attention and be disagreeable to yourself. A man who has attained a position and celebrity such as yours will probably have many early associates and acquaintances claiming his notice. I beg of you to believe that such is not my object, but that having so recently met you I feel myself unable to repress the desire to assure you that no one in the room could appreciate the fame and rank you have so fairly won, or could wish you more sincerely long life and happiness to enjoy them, than, Dear Sir, your old schoolfellow, HENRY DANSON." To this Dickens replied: "GADSHILL PLACE, _Thursday, 5th May, 1864_. DEAR SIR, I should have assured you before now that the receipt of your letter gave me great pleasure, had I not been too much occupied to have leisure for correspondence. I perfectly recollect your name as that of an old schoolfellow, and distinctly remember your appearance and dress as a boy, and believe you had a brother who was unfortunately drowned in the Serpentine. If you had made yourself personally known to me at the dinner, I should have been well pleased; though in that case I should have lost your modest and manly letter. Faithfully yours, CHARLES DICKENS." [6] I take other fanciful allusions to the lady from two of his occasional writings. The first from his visit to the city churches (written during the Dombey time, when he had to select a church for the marriage of Florence): "Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old women asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window, and the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a city church on account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it was in Huggin Lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this!' and when my Angelica consented that it should occur at no other--which it certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere. And O, Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning when I can't attend to the sermon? and, more difficult question than that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side?" The second, from his pleasant paper on birthdays: "I gave a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never had the remotest intention of sending any of those letters; but to write them, and after a few days tear them up, had been a sublime occupation." CHAPTER IV. REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE. 1831-1835. Reporting for _True Sun_--First seen by me--Reporting for _Mirror_ and _Chronicle_--First Published Piece--Discipline and Experiences of Reporting--Life as a Reporter--John Black--Mr. Thomas Beard--A Letter to his Editor--Incident of Reporting Days--The same more correctly told--Origin of "Boz"--Captain Holland--Mr. George Hogarth--Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_--C. D.'s First Hearty Appreciator. DICKENS was nineteen years old when at last he entered the gallery. His father, with whom he still lived in Bentinck Street, had already, as we have seen, joined the gallery as a reporter for one of the morning papers, and was now in the more comfortable circumstances derived from the addition to his official pension which this praiseworthy labor insured; but his own engagement on the _Chronicle_ dates somewhat later. His first parliamentary service was given to the _True Sun_, a journal which had then on its editorial staff some dear friends of mine, through whom I became myself a contributor to it, and afterwards, in common with all concerned, whether in its writing, reporting, printing, or publishing, a sharer in its difficulties. The most formidable of these arrived one day in a general strike of the reporters; and I well remember noticing at this dread time, on the staircase of the magnificent mansion we were lodged in, a young man of my own age, whose keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose name, upon inquiry, I then for the first time heard. It was coupled with the fact, which gave it interest even then, that "young Dickens" had been spokesman for the recalcitrant reporters, and conducted their case triumphantly. He was afterwards during two sessions engaged for the _Mirror of Parliament_, which one of his uncles by the mother's side originated and conducted; and finally, in his twenty-third year, he became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. A step far more momentous to him (though then he did not know it) he had taken shortly before. In the December number for 1833 of what then was called the _Old Monthly Magazine_, his first published piece of writing had seen the light. He has described himself dropping this paper (Mr. Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk) stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation when it appeared in all the glory of print: "On which occasion I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there." He had purchased the magazine at a shop in the Strand; and exactly two years afterwards, in the younger member of a publishing firm who had called, at the chambers in Furnival's Inn to which he had moved soon after entering the gallery, with the proposal that originated _Pickwick_, he recognized the person he had bought that magazine from, and whom before or since he had never seen. This interval of two years more than comprised what remained of his career in the gallery and the engagements connected with it; but that this occupation was of the utmost importance in its influence on his life, in the discipline of his powers as well as of his character, there can be no doubt whatever. "To the wholesome training of severe newspaper work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first successes," he said to the New York editors when he last took leave of them. It opened to him a wide and varied range of experience, which his wonderful observation, exact as it was humorous, made entirely his own. He saw the last of the old coaching-days, and of the old inns that were a part of them; but it will be long before the readers of his living page see the last of the life of either. "There never was," he once wrote to me (in 1845), "anybody connected with newspapers who, in the same space of time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I. And what gentlemen they were to serve, in such things, at the old _Morning Chronicle_! Great or small it did not matter. I have had to charge for half a dozen break-downs in half a dozen times as many miles. I have had to charge for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swift-flying carriage-and-pair. I have had to charge for all sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question, such being the ordinary results of the pace which we went at. I have charged for broken hats, broken luggage, broken chaises, broken harness--everything but a broken head, which is the only thing they would have grumbled to pay for." Something to the same effect he said publicly twenty years later, on the occasion of his presiding, in May, 1865, at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, when he condensed within the compass of his speech a summary of the whole of his reporting life. "I am not here," he said, "advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable truth--nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer, from my short-hand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark-lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle-yard there, to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once 'took,' as we used to call it, an election-speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep,--kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew. These trivial things I mention as an assurance to you that I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech (the phenomenon does occur), I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the table-cloth, taking an imaginary note of it all." The latter I have known him do frequently. It was indeed a quite ordinary habit with him. Mr. James Grant, a writer who was himself in the gallery with Dickens, and who states that among its eighty or ninety reporters he occupied the very highest rank, not merely for accuracy in reporting but for marvelous quickness in transcribing, has lately also told us that while there he was exceedingly reserved in his manners, and that, though showing the usual courtesies to all he was concerned with in his duties, the only personal intimacy he formed was with Mr. Thomas Beard, then too reporting for the _Morning Chronicle_. I have already mentioned the friendly and familiar relations maintained with this gentleman to the close of his life; and in confirmation of Mr. Grant's statement I can further say that the only other associate of these early reporting days to whom I ever heard him refer with special regard was the late Mr. Vincent Dowling, many years editor of _Bell's Life_, with whom he did not continue much personal intercourse, but of whose character as well as talents he had formed a very high opinion. Nor is there anything to add to the notice of these days which the reader's fancy may not easily supply. A letter has been kept as written by him while engaged on one of his "expresses;" but it is less for its saying anything new, than for its confirming with a pleasant vividness what has been said already, that its contents will justify mention here. He writes, on a "Tuesday morning" in May, 1835, from the Bush Inn, Bristol; the occasion that has taken him to the west, connected with a reporting party, being Lord John Russell's Devonshire contest above named, and his associate-chief being Mr. Beard, intrusted with command for the _Chronicle_ in this particular express. He expects to forward "the conclusion of Russell's dinner" by Cooper's company's coach leaving the Bush at half-past six next morning; and by the first Ball's coach on Thursday morning he will forward the report of the Bath dinner, indorsing the parcel for immediate delivery, with extra rewards for the porter. Beard is to go over to Bath next morning. He is himself to come back by the mail from Marlborough; he has no doubt, if Lord John makes a speech of any ordinary dimensions, it can be done by the time Marlborough is reached; "and taking into consideration the immense importance of having the addition of saddle-horses from thence, it is, beyond all doubt, worth an effort. . . . I need not say," he continues, "that it will be sharp work and will require two of us; for we shall both be up the whole of the previous night, and shall have to sit up all night again to get it off in time." He adds that as soon as they have had a little sleep they will return to town as quickly as they can; but they have, if the express succeeds, to stop at sundry places along the road to pay money and notify satisfaction. And so, for himself and Beard, he is his editor's very sincerely. Another anecdote of these reporting days, with its sequel, may be added from his own alleged relation, in which, however, mistakes occur that it seems strange he should have made. The story, as told, is that the late Lord Derby, when Mr. Stanley, had on some important occasion made a speech which all the reporters found it necessary greatly to abridge; that its essential points had nevertheless been so well given in the _Chronicle_ that Mr. Stanley, having need of it for himself in greater detail, had sent a request to the reporter to meet him in Carlton House Terrace and take down the entire speech; that Dickens attended and did the work accordingly, much to Mr. Stanley's satisfaction; and that, on his dining with Mr. Gladstone in recent years, and finding the aspect of the dining-room strangely familiar, he discovered afterwards on inquiry that it was there he had taken the speech. The story, as it actually occurred, is connected with the brief life of the _Mirror of Parliament_. It was not at any special desire of Mr. Stanley's, but for that new record of the debates, which had been started by one of the uncles of Dickens and professed to excel _Hansard_ in giving verbatim reports, that the famous speech against O'Connell was taken as described. The young reporter went to the room in Carlton Terrace because the work of his uncle Barrow's publication required to be done there; and if, in later years, the great author was in the same room as the guest of the prime minister, it must have been but a month or two before he died, when for the first time he visited and breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone. The mention of his career in the gallery may close with the incident. I will only add that his observation while there had not led him to form any high opinion of the House of Commons or its heroes, and that of the Pickwickian sense which so often takes the place of common sense in our legislature he omitted no opportunity of declaring his contempt at every part of his life. The other occupation had meanwhile not been lost sight of, and for this we are to go back a little. Since the first sketch appeared in the _Monthly Magazine_, nine others have enlivened the pages of later numbers of the same magazine, the last in February, 1835, and that which appeared in the preceding August having first had the signature of Boz. This was the nickname of a pet child, his youngest brother Augustus, whom in honor of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ he had dubbed Moses, which being facetiously pronounced through the nose became Boses, and being shortened became Boz. "Boz was a very familiar household word to me, long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it." Thus had he fully invented his Sketches by Boz before they were even so called, or any one was ready to give much attention to them; and the next invention needful to himself was some kind of payment in return for them. The magazine was owned as well as conducted at this time by a Mr. Holland, who had come back from Bolivar's South American campaigns with the rank of captain, and had hoped to make it a popular mouthpiece for his ardent liberalism. But this hope, as well as his own health, quite failed; and he had sorrowfully to decline receiving any more of the sketches when they had to cease as voluntary offerings. I do not think that either he or the magazine lived many weeks after an evening I passed with him in Doughty Street in 1837, when he spoke in a very touching way of the failure of this and other enterprises of his life, and of the help that Dickens had been to him. Nothing thus being forthcoming from the _Monthly_, it was of course but natural the sketches too should cease to be forthcoming; and, even before the above-named February number appeared, a new opening had been found for them. An evening offshoot to the _Morning Chronicle_ had been lately in hand; and to a countryman of Black's engaged in the preparations for it, Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens was communicating from his rooms in Furnival's Inn, on the evening of Tuesday, the 20th of January, 1835, certain hopes and fancies he had formed. This was the beginning of his knowledge of an accomplished and kindly man, with whose family his relations were soon to become so intimate as to have an influence on all his future career. Mr. Hogarth had asked him, as a favor to himself, to write an original sketch for the first number of the enterprise, and in writing back to say with what readiness he should comply, and how anxiously he should desire to do his best for the person who had made the request, he mentioned what had arisen in his mind. It had occurred to him that he might not be unreasonably or improperly trespassing farther on Mr. Hogarth if, trusting to his kindness to refer the application to the proper quarter, he begged to ask whether it was probable, if he commenced a regular series of articles under some attractive title for the _Evening Chronicle_, its conductors would think he had any claim to _some_ additional remuneration (of course, of no great amount) for doing so. In short, he wished to put it to the proprietors--first, whether a continuation of some chapters of light papers in the style of his street-sketches would be considered of use to the new journal; and secondly, if so, whether they would not think it fair and reasonable that, taking his share of the ordinary reporting business of the _Chronicle_ besides, he should receive something for the papers beyond his ordinary salary as a reporter. The request was thought fair, he began the sketches, and his salary was raised from five to seven guineas a week. They went on, with undiminished spirit and freshness, throughout the year; and, much as they were talked of outside as well as in the world of newspapers, nothing in connection with them delighted the writer half so much as the hearty praise of his own editor. Mr. Black is one of the men who has passed without recognition out of a world his labors largely benefited, but with those who knew him no man was so popular, as well for his broad kindly humor as for his honest great-hearted enjoyment of whatever was excellent in others. Dickens to the last remembered that it was most of all the cordial help of this good old mirth-loving man which had started him joyfully on his career of letters. "It was John Black that flung the slipper after me," he would often say. "Dear old Black! my first hearty out-and-out appreciator," is an expression in one of his letters written to me in the year he died. CHAPTER V. FIRST BOOK, AND ORIGIN OF PICKWICK. 1836. _Sketches by Boz_--Fancy-piece by N. P. Willis: a Poor English Author--Start of _Pickwick_--Marriage to Miss Hogarth--First Connection with Chapman & Hall--Mr. Seymour's Part in _Pickwick_--Letters relating thereto--C. D.'s own Account--False Claims refuted--Pickwick's Original, his Figure and his Name--First Sprightly Runnings of Genius--The _Sketches_ characterized--Mr. Seymour's Death--New Illustrator chosen--Mr. Hablot K. Browne--C. D. leaves the Gallery--_Strange Gentleman_ and _Village Coquettes_. THE opening of 1836 found him collecting into two volumes the first series of _Sketches by Boz_, of which he had sold the copyright for a conditional payment of (I think) a hundred and fifty pounds to a young publisher named Macrone, whose acquaintance he had made through Mr. Ainsworth a few weeks before.[7] At this time also, we are told in a letter before quoted, the editorship of the _Monthly Magazine_ having come into Mr. James Grant's hands, this gentleman, applying to him through its previous editor to know if he would again contribute to it, learned two things: the first, that he was going to be married; and the second, that, having entered into an arrangement to write a monthly serial, his duties in future would leave him small spare time. Both pieces of news were soon confirmed. The _Times_ of the 26th of March, 1836, gave notice that on the 31st would be published the first shilling number of the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, edited by Boz_; and the same journal of a few days later announced that on the 2d of April Mr. Charles Dickens had married Catherine, the eldest daughter of Mr. George Hogarth, whom already we have met as his fellow-worker on the _Chronicle_. The honeymoon was passed in the neighborhood to which at all times of interest in his life he turned with a strange recurring fondness; and while the young couple are at the quiet little village of Chalk, on the road between Gravesend and Rochester, I will relate exactly the origin of the ever-memorable Mr. Pickwick. A young publishing-house had started recently, among other enterprises ingenious rather than important, a Library of Fiction; among the authors they wished to enlist in it was the writer of the sketches in the _Monthly_; and, to the extent of one paper during the past year, they had effected this through their editor, Mr. Charles Whitehead, a very ingenious and very unfortunate man. "I was not aware," wrote the elder member of the firm to Dickens, thirteen years later, in a letter to which reference was made[8] in the preface to _Pickwick_ in one of his later editions, "that you were writing in the _Chronicle_, or what your name was; but Whitehead, who was an old _Monthly_ man, recollected it, and got you to write The Tuggs's at Ramsgate." And now comes another person on the scene. "In November, 1835," continues Mr. Chapman, "we published a little book called the _Squib Annual_, with plates by Seymour; and it was during my visit to him to see after them that he said he should like to do a series of cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already published. I said I thought they might do, if accompanied by letter-press and published in monthly parts; and, this being agreed to, we wrote to the author of _Three Courses and a Dessert_, and proposed it; but, receiving no answer, the scheme dropped for some months, till Seymour said he wished us to decide, as another job had offered which would fully occupy his time; and it was on this we decided to ask you to do it. Having opened already a connection with you for our Library of Fiction, we naturally applied to you to do the _Pickwick_; but I do not think we even mentioned our intention to Mr. Seymour, and I am quite sure that from the beginning to the end nobody but yourself had anything whatever to do with it. Our prospectus was out at the end of February, and it had all been arranged before that date." The member of the firm who carried the application to him in Furnival's Inn was not the writer of this letter, but Mr. Hall, who had sold him two years before, not knowing that he was the purchaser, the magazine in which his first effusion was printed; and he has himself described what passed at the interview: "The idea propounded to me was that the monthly something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour; and there was a notion, either on the part of that admirable humorous artist, or of my visitor, that a NIMROD CLUB, the members of which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity, would be the best means of introducing these. I objected, on consideration that, although born and partly bred in the country, I was no great sportsman, except in regard to all kinds of locomotion; that the idea was not novel, and had already been much used; that it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I would like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever course I might prescribe to myself at starting. My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number; from the proof-sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his drawing of the club and his happy portrait of its founder. I connected Mr. Pickwick with a club, because of the original suggestion; and I put in Mr. Winkle expressly for the use of Mr. Seymour." Mr. Hall was dead when this statement was first made, in the preface to the cheap edition in 1847; but Mr. Chapman clearly recollected his partner's account of the interview, and confirmed every part of it, in his letter of 1849,[9] with one exception. In giving Mr. Seymour credit for the figure by which all the habitable globe knows Mr. Pickwick, and which certainly at the outset helped to make him a reality, it had given the artist too much. The reader will hardly be so startled as I was on coming to the closing line of Mr. Chapman's confirmatory letter: "As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour's first sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of mine at Richmond, a fat old beau, who would wear, in spite of the ladies' protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John Foster." On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. Here were the only two leading incidents of his own life before I knew him, his marriage and the first appearance of his Pickwick; and it turned out after all that I had some shadowy association with both. He was married on the anniversary of my birthday, and the original of the figure of Mr. Pickwick bore my name.[10] The first number had not yet appeared when his _Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People_, came forth in two duodecimos with some capital cuts by Cruikshank, and with a preface in which he spoke of the nervousness he should have had in venturing alone before the public, and of his delight in getting the help of Cruikshank, who had frequently contributed to the success, though his well-earned reputation rendered it impossible for him ever to have shared the hazard, of similar undertakings. It very soon became apparent that there was no hazard here. The _Sketches_ were much more talked about than the first two or three numbers of _Pickwick_, and I remember still with what hearty praise the book was first named to me by my dear friend Albany Fonblanque, as keen and clear a judge as ever lived either of books or men. Richly did it merit all the praise it had, and more, I will add, than he was ever disposed to give to it himself. He decidedly underrated it. He gave, in subsequent writings, so much more perfect form and fullness to everything it contained, that he did not care to credit himself with the marvel of having yet so early anticipated so much. But the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here. Mr. Bumble is in the parish sketches, and Mr. Dawkins the dodger in the Old Bailey scenes. There is laughter and fun to excess, never misapplied; there are the minute points and shades of character, with all the discrimination and nicety of detail, afterwards so famous; there is everywhere the most perfect ease and skill of handling. The observation shown throughout is nothing short of wonderful. Things are painted literally as they are, and, whatever the picture, whether of every-day vulgar, shabby-genteel, or downright low, with neither the condescending air which is affectation, nor the too familiar one which is slang. The book altogether is a perfectly unaffected, unpretentious, honest performance. Under its manly, sensible, straightforward vein of talk there is running at the same time a natural flow of sentiment never sentimental, of humor always easy and unforced, and of pathos for the most part dramatic or picturesque, under which lay the germ of what his mature genius took afterwards most delight in. Of course there are inequalities in it, and some things that would have been better away; but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in its descriptions of the old city with which its writer was so familiar. It was a picture of every-day London at its best and worst, in its humors and enjoyments as well as its sufferings and sins, pervaded everywhere not only with the absolute reality of the things depicted, but also with that subtle sense and mastery of feeling which gives to the reader's sympathies invariably right direction, and awakens consideration, tenderness, and kindness precisely for those who most need such help. Between the first and the second numbers of _Pickwick_, the artist, Mr. Seymour, died by his own hand; and the number came out with three instead of four illustrations. Dickens had seen the unhappy man only once, forty-eight hours before his death; when he went to Furnival's Inn with an etching for the "stroller's tale" in that number, which, altered at Dickens's suggestion, he brought away again for the few further touches that occupied him to a late hour of the night before he destroyed himself. A notice attached to the number informed the public of this latter fact. There was at first a little difficulty in replacing him, and for a single number Mr. Buss was interposed. But before the fourth number a choice had been made, which as time went on was so thoroughly justified, that through the greater part of the wonderful career which was then beginning the connection was kept up, and Mr. Hablot Browne's name is not unworthily associated with the masterpieces of Dickens's genius. An incident which I heard related by Mr. Thackeray at one of the Royal Academy dinners belongs to this time: "I can remember when Mr. Dickens was a very young man, and had commenced delighting the world with some charming humorous works in covers which were colored light green and came out once a month, that this young man wanted an artist to illustrate his writings; and I recollect walking up to his chambers in Furnival's Inn, with two or three drawings in my hand, which, strange to say, he did not find suitable." Dickens has himself described another change now made in the publication: "We started with a number of twenty-four pages and four illustrations. Mr. Seymour's sudden and lamented death before the second number was published, brought about a quick decision upon a point already in agitation: the number became one of thirty-two pages with only two illustrations, and remained so to the end." The Session of 1836 terminated his connection with the gallery, and some fruits of his increased leisure showed themselves before the close of the year. His eldest sister's musical attainments and connections had introduced him to many cultivators and professors of that art; he was led to take much interest in Mr. Braham's enterprise at the St. James's theatre; and in aid of it he wrote a farce for Mr. Harley, founded upon one of his sketches, and the story and songs for an opera composed by his friend Mr. Hullah. Both the _Strange Gentleman_, acted in September, and the _Village Coquettes_, produced in December, 1836, had a good success; and the last is memorable to me for having brought me first into personal communication with Dickens. FOOTNOTES: [7] To this date belongs a visit paid him at Furnival's Inn in Mr. Macrone's company by the notorious Mr. N. P. Willis, who calls him "a young paragraphist for the _Morning Chronicle_," and thus sketches his residence and himself: "In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the Bull-and-Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers), the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair, 'My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a publisher.' Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller, _minus_ the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and buttoned up, the very personification, I thought, of a close sailer to the wind." I remember, while my friend lived, our laughing heartily at this description, hardly a word of which is true; and I give it now as no unfair specimen of the kind of garbage that since his death also has been served up only too plentifully by some of his own as well as by others of Mr. Willis's countrymen. [8] Not quoted in detail, on that or any other occasion; though referred to. It was, however, placed in my hands, for use if occasion should arise, when Dickens went to America in 1867. The letter bears date the 7th July, 1849, and was Mr. Chapman's answer to the question Dickens had asked him, whether the account of the origin of _Pickwick_ which he had given in the preface to the cheap edition in 1847 was not strictly correct. "It is so correctly described," was Mr. Chapman's opening remark, "that I can throw but little additional light on it." The name of his hero, I may add, Dickens took from that of a celebrated coach-proprietor of Bath. [9] The appeal was then made to him because of recent foolish statements by members of Mr. Seymour's family, which Dickens thus contradicted: "It is with great unwillingness that I notice some intangible and incoherent assertions which have been made, professedly on behalf of Mr. Seymour, to the effect that he had some share in the invention of this book, or of anything in it, not faithfully described in the foregoing paragraph. With the moderation that is due equally to my respect for the memory of a brother-artist, and to my self-respect, I confine myself to placing on record here the facts--That Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in this book. That Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written. That I believe I never saw Mr. Seymour's handwriting in my life. That I never saw Mr. Seymour but once in my life, and that was on the night but one before his death, when he certainly offered no suggestion whatsoever. That I saw him then in the presence of two persons, both living, perfectly acquainted with all these facts, and whose written testimony to them I possess. Lastly, that Mr. Edward Chapman (the survivor of the original firm of Chapman & Hall) has set down in writing, for similar preservation, his personal knowledge of the origin and progress of this book, of the monstrosity of the baseless assertions in question, and (tested by details) even of the self-evident impossibility of there being any truth in them." The "written testimony" alluded to is also in my possession, having been inclosed to me by Dickens, in 1867, with Mr. Chapman's letter here referred to. [10] Whether Mr. Chapman spelt the name correctly, or has unconsciously deprived his fat beau of the letter "r," I cannot say; but experience tells me that the latter is probable. I have been trying all my life to get my own name spelt correctly, and have only very imperfectly succeeded. CHAPTER VI. WRITING THE PICKWICK PAPERS. 1837. First Letter from him--As he was Thirty-five Years ago--Mrs. Carlyle and Leigh Hunt--Birth of Eldest Son--From Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street--A Long-Remembered Sorrow--I visit him--Hasty Compacts with Publishers--Self-sold into Quasi-Bondage--Agreements for Editorship and Writing--Mr. Macrone's Scheme to reissue _Sketches_--Attempts to prevent it--Exorbitant Demand--Impatience of Suspense--Purchase advised--_Oliver Twist_--Characters real to himself--Sense of Responsibility for his Writings--Criticism that satisfied him--Help given with his Proofs--Writing _Pickwick_, Nos. 14 and 15--Scenes in a Debtors' Prison--A Recollection of Smollett--Reception of _Pickwick_--A Popular Rage--Mr. Carlyle's "Dreadful" Story--Secrets of Success--_Pickwick_ inferior to Later Books--Exception for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick--Personal Habits of C. D.--Reliefs after Writing--Natural Discontents--The Early Agreements--Tale to follow _Oliver Twist_--Compromise with Mr. Bentley--Trip to Flanders--First Visit to Broadstairs--Piracies of _Pickwick_--A Sufferer from Agreements--First Visit to Brighton--What he is doing with _Oliver Twist_--Reading De Foe--"No Thoroughfare"--Proposed Help to Macready. THE first letter I had from him was at the close of 1836, from Furnival's Inn, when he sent me the book of his opera of the _Village Coquettes_, which had been published by Mr. Bentley; and this was followed, two months later, by his collected _Sketches_, both first and second series; which he desired me to receive "as a very small testimony of the donor's regard and obligations, as well as of his desire to cultivate and avail himself of a friendship which has been so pleasantly thrown in his way. . . . In short, if you will receive them for my sake and not for their own, you will very greatly oblige me." I had met him in the interval at the house of our common friend Mr. Ainsworth, and I remember vividly the impression then made upon me. Very different was his face in those days from that which photography has made familiar to the present generation. A look of youthfulness first attracted you, and then a candor and openness of expression which made you sure of the qualities within. The features were very good. He had a capital forehead, a firm nose with full wide nostril, eyes wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humor and cheerfulness, and a rather prominent mouth strongly marked with sensibility. The head was altogether well formed and symmetrical, and the air and carriage of it were extremely spirited. The hair so scant and grizzled in later days was then of a rich brown and most luxuriant abundance, and the bearded face of his last two decades had hardly a vestige of hair or whisker; but there was that in the face as I first recollect it which no time could change, and which remained implanted on it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books, and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it. _It was as if made of steel_, was said of it, four or five years after the time to which I am referring, by a most original and delicate observer, the late Mrs. Carlyle. "What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room!" wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the morning after I made them known to each other. "It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings." In such sayings are expressed not alone the restless and resistless vivacity and force of which I have spoken, but that also which lay beneath them of steadiness and hard endurance. Several unsuccessful efforts were made by each to get the other to his house before the door of either was opened at last. A son had been born to him on Twelfth-day (the 6th January, 1837), and before the close of the following month he and his wife were in the lodgings at Chalk they had occupied after their marriage. Early in March there is a letter from him accounting for the failure of a promise to call on me because of "a crew of house-agents and attorneys" through whom he had nearly missed his conveyance to Chalk, and been made "more than half wild besides." This was his last letter from Furnival's Inn. In that same month he went to 48, Doughty Street; and in his first letter to me from that address, dated at the close of the month, there is this passage: "We only called upon you a second time in the hope of getting you to dine with us, and were much disappointed not to find you. I have delayed writing a reply to your note, meaning to call upon you. I have been so much engaged, however, in the pleasant occupation of 'moving' that I have not had time; and I am obliged at last to write and say that I have been long engaged to the _Pickwick_ publishers to a dinner in honor of that hero which comes off to-morrow. I am consequently unable to accept your kind invite, which I frankly own I should have liked much better." That Saturday's celebration of his twelfth number, the anniversary of the birth of _Pickwick_, preceded by but a few weeks a personal sorrow which profoundly moved him. His wife's next younger sister, Mary, who lived with them, and by sweetness of nature even more than by graces of person had made herself the ideal of his life, died with a terrible suddenness that for the time completely bore him down.[11] His grief and suffering were intense, and affected him, as will be seen, through many after-years. The publication of _Pickwick_ was interrupted for two months, the effort of writing it not being possible to him. He moved for change of scene to Hampstead, and here, at the close of May, I visited him, and became first his guest. More than ordinarily susceptible at the moment to all kindliest impressions, his heart opened itself to mine. I left him as much his friend, and as entirely in his confidence, as if I had known him for years. Nor had many weeks passed before he addressed to me from Doughty Street words which it is my sorrowful pride to remember have had literal fulfillment: "I look back with unmingled pleasure to every link which each ensuing week has added to the chain of our attachment. It shall go hard, I hope, ere anything but Death impairs the toughness of a bond now so firmly riveted." It remained unweakened till death came. There were circumstances that drew us at once into frequent and close communication. What the sudden popularity of his writings implied, was known to others some time before it was known to himself; and he was only now becoming gradually conscious of all the disadvantage this had placed him at. He would have laughed if, at this outset of his wonderful fortune in literature, his genius acknowledged by all without misgiving, young, popular, and prosperous, any one had compared him to the luckless men of letters of former days, whose common fate was to be sold into a slavery which their later lives were passed in vain endeavors to escape from. Not so was his fate to be, yet something of it he was doomed to experience. He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable suffering. It was not until the fourth or fifth number of _Pickwick_ (in the latter Sam Weller made his first appearance) that its importance began to be understood by "the trade," and on the eve of the issue of its sixth number, the 22d August, 1836, he had signed an agreement with Mr. Bentley to undertake the editorship of a monthly magazine to be started the following January, to which he was to supply a serial story; and soon afterwards he had agreed with the same publisher to write two other tales, the first at a specified early date; the expressed remuneration in each case being certainly quite inadequate to the claims of a writer of any marked popularity. Under these Bentley agreements he was now writing, month by month, the first half of _Oliver Twist_, and, under his Chapman & Hall agreement, the last half of _Pickwick_, not even by a week in advance of the printer with either; when a circumstance became known to him of which he thus wrote to me: "I heard half an hour ago, on authority which leaves me in no doubt about the matter (from the binder of _Pickwick_, in fact), that Macrone intends publishing a new issue of my _Sketches_ in monthly parts of nearly the same size and in just the same form as the _Pickwick Papers_. I need not tell you that this is calculated to injure me most seriously, or that I have a very natural and most decided objection to being supposed to presume upon the success of the _Pickwick_, and thus foist this old work upon the public in its new dress for the mere purpose of putting money in my own pocket. Neither need I say that the fact of my name being before the town, attached to three publications at the same time, must prove seriously prejudicial to my reputation. As you are acquainted with the circumstances under which these copyrights were disposed of, and as I know I may rely on your kind help, may I beg you to see Macrone, and to state in the strongest and most emphatic manner my feeling on this point? I wish him to be reminded of the sums he paid for those books; of the sale he has had for them; of the extent to which he has already pushed them; and of the very great profits he must necessarily have acquired from them. I wish him also to be reminded that no intention of publishing them in this form was in the remotest manner hinted to me, by him or on his behalf, when he obtained possession of the copyright. I then wish you to put it to his feelings of common honesty and fair dealing whether after this communication he will persevere in his intention." What else the letter contained need not be quoted, but it strongly moved me to do my best. I found Mr. Macrone inaccessible to all arguments of persuasion, however. That he had bought the book for a small sum at a time when the smallest was not unimportant to the writer, shortly before his marriage, and that he had since made very considerable profits by it, in no way disturbed his position that he had a right to make as much as he could of what was his, without regard to how it had become so. There was nothing for it but to change front, and, admitting it might be a less evil to the unlucky author to repurchase than to let the monthly issue proceed, to ask what further gain was looked for; but so wide a mouth was opened at this that I would have no part in the costly process of filling it. I told Dickens so, and strongly counseled him to keep quiet for a time. But the worry and vexation were too great with all the work he had in hand, and I was hardly surprised next day to receive the letter sent me; which yet should be prefaced with the remark that suspense of any kind was at all times intolerable to the writer. The interval between the accomplishment of anything, and "its first motion," Dickens never could endure, and he was too ready to make any sacrifice to abridge or end it. This did not belong to the strong side of his character, and advantage was frequently taken of the fact. "I sent down just now to know whether you were at home (two o'clock), as Chapman & Hall were with me, and, the case being urgent, I wished to have the further benefit of your kind advice and assistance. Macrone and H---- (arcades ambo) waited on them this morning, and after a long discussion peremptorily refused to take one farthing less than the two thousand pounds. H---- repeated the statement of figures which he made to you yesterday, and put it to Hall whether he could say from his knowledge of such matters that the estimate of probable profit was exorbitant. Hall, whose judgment may be relied on in such matters, could not dispute the justice of the calculation. And so the matter stood. In this dilemma it occurred to them (my _Pickwick_ men), whether, if the _Sketches_ _must_ appear in monthly numbers, it would not be better for them to appear for their benefit and mine conjointly than for Macrone's sole use and behoof; whether they, having all the _Pickwick_ machinery in full operation, could not obtain for them a much larger sale than Macrone could ever get; and whether, even at this large price of two thousand pounds, we might not, besides retaining the copyright, reasonably hope for a good profit on the outlay. These suggestions having presented themselves, they came straight to me (having obtained a few hours' respite) and proposed that we should purchase the copyrights between us for the two thousand pounds, and publish them in monthly parts. I need not say that no other form of publication would repay the expenditure; and they wish me to explain by an address that _they_, who may be fairly put forward as the parties, have been driven into that mode of publication, or the copyrights would have been lost. I considered the matter in every possible way. I sent for you, but you were out. I thought of"--what need not be repeated, now that all is past and gone--"and consented. Was I right? I think you will say yes." I could not say no, though I was glad to have been no party to a price so exorbitant; which yet profited extremely little the person who received it. He died in hardly more than two years; and if Dickens had enjoyed the most liberal treatment at his hands, he could not have exerted himself more generously for the widow and children. His new story was now beginning largely to share attention with his _Pickwick Papers_, and it was delightful to see how real all its people became to him. What I had most, indeed, to notice in him, at the very outset of his career, was his indifference to any praise of his performances on the merely literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose on their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities rather than creatures of fancy. The exception that might be drawn from _Pickwick_ is rather in seeming than substance. A first book has its immunities, and the distinction of this from the rest of the writings appears in what has been said of its origin. The plan of it was simply to amuse. It was to string together whimsical sketches of the pencil by entertaining sketches of the pen; and, at its beginning, where or how it was to end was as little known to himself as to any of its readers. But genius is a master as well as a servant, and when the laughter and fun were at their highest something graver made its appearance. He had to defend himself for this; and he said that, though the mere oddity of a new acquaintance was apt to impress one at first, the more serious qualities were discovered when we became friends with the man. In other words he might have said that the change was become necessary for his own satisfaction. The book itself, in teaching him what his power was, had made him more conscious of what would be expected from its use; and this never afterwards quitted him. In what he was to do hereafter, as in all he was doing now, with _Pickwick_ still to finish and _Oliver_ only beginning, it constantly attended him. Nor could it well be otherwise, with all those fanciful creations so real, to a nature in itself so practical and earnest; and in this spirit I had well understood the letter accompanying what had been published of _Oliver_ since its commencement the preceding February, which reached me the day after I visited him. Something to the effect of what has just been said, I had remarked publicly of the portion of the story sent to me; and his instant warm-hearted acknowledgment, of which I permit myself to quote a line or two, showed me in what perfect agreement we were: "How can I thank you? Can I do better than by saying that the sense of poor Oliver's reality, which I know you have had from the first, has been the highest of all praise to me? None that has been lavished upon me have I felt half so much as that appreciation of my intent and meaning. You know I have ever done so, for it was your feeling for me and mine for you that first brought us together, and I hope will keep us so till death do us part. Your notices make me grateful, but very proud: so have a care of them." There was nothing written by him after this date which I did not see before the world did, either in manuscript or proofs; and in connection with the latter I shortly began to give him the help which he publicly mentioned twenty years later in dedicating his collected writings to me. One of his letters reminds me when these corrections began, and they were continued very nearly to the last. They lightened for him a labor of which he had more than enough imposed upon him at this time by others, and they were never anything but an enjoyment to me. "I have," he wrote, "so many sheets of the _Miscellany_ to correct before I can begin _Oliver_, that I fear I shall not be able to leave home this morning. I therefore send your revise of the _Pickwick_ by Fred, who is on his way with it to the printers. You will see that my alterations are very slight, but I think for the better." This was the fourteenth number of the _Pickwick Papers_. Fred was his next younger brother, who lived with him at the time. The number following this was the famous one in which the hero finds himself in the Fleet; and another of his letters will show what enjoyment the writing of it had given to himself. I had sent to ask him where we were to meet for a proposed ride that day. "HERE," was his reply. "I am slippered and jacketed, and, like that same starling who is so very seldom quoted, can't get out. I am getting on, thank Heaven, like 'a house o' fire,' and think the next _Pickwick_ will bang all the others. I shall expect you at one, and we will walk to the stable together. If you know anybody at Saint Paul's, I wish you'd send round and ask them not to ring the bell so. I can hardly hear my own ideas as they come into my head, and say what they mean." The exulting tone of confidence in what he had thus been writing was indeed well justified. He had as yet done nothing so remarkable, in blending humor with tragedy, as his picture of what the poor side of a debtors' prison was in the days of which we have seen that he had himself had bitter experience; and we have but to recall, as it rises sharply to the memory, what is contained in this portion of a work that was not only among his earliest but his least considered as to plan, to understand what it was that not alone had given him his fame so early, but that in itself held the germ of the future that awaited him. Every point was a telling one, and the truthfulness of the whole unerring. The dreadful restlessness of the place, undefined yet unceasing, unsatisfying and terrible, was pictured throughout with De Foe's minute reality; while points of character were handled in that greater style which connects with the richest oddities of humor an insight into principles of character universal as nature itself. When he resolved that Sam Weller should be occupant of the prison with Mr. Pickwick, he was perhaps thinking of his favorite Smollett, and how, when Peregrine Pickle was inmate of the Fleet, Hatchway and Pipes refused to leave him; but Fielding himself might have envied his way of setting about it. Nor is any portion of his picture less admirable than this. The comedy gradually deepening into tragedy; the shabby vagabonds who are the growth of debtors' prisons, contrasting with the poor simple creatures who are their sacrifices and victims; Mr. Mivins and Mr. Smangle side by side with the cobbler ruined by his legacy, who sleeps under the table to remind himself of his old four-poster; Mr. Pickwick's first night in the marshal's room, Sam Weller entertaining Stiggins in the snuggery, Jingle in decline, and the chancery prisoner dying; in all these scenes there was writing of the first order, a deep feeling of character, that delicate form of humor which has a quaintly pathetic turn in it as well, comedy of the richest and broadest kind, and the easy handling throughout of a master in his art. We place the picture by the side of those of the great writers of this style, of fiction in our language, and it does not fall by the comparison. Of what the reception of the book had been up to this time, and of the popularity Dickens had won as its author, this also will be the proper place to speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of everything unreal or factitious in the causes that contributed to it, it is unexampled in literature. Here was a series of sketches, without the pretense to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth in a form apparently ephemeral as its purpose; having none that seemed higher than to exhibit some studies of cockney manners with help from a comic artist; and after four or five parts had appeared, without newspaper notice or puffing, and itself not subserving in the public anything false or unworthy, it sprang into a popularity that each part carried higher and higher, until people at this time talked of nothing else, tradesmen recommended their goods by using its name, and its sale, outstripping at a bound that of all the most famous books of the century, had reached to an almost fabulous number. Of part one, the binder prepared four hundred; and of part fifteen, his order was for more than forty thousand. Every class, the high equally with the low, was attracted to it. The charm of its gayety and good humor, its inexhaustible fun, its riotous overflow of animal spirits, its brightness and keenness of observation, and, above all, the incomparable ease of its many varieties of enjoyment, fascinated everybody. Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found it to be irresistible. "An archdeacon," wrote Mr. Carlyle afterwards to me, "with his own venerable lips, repeated to me, the other night, a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days any way!'--This is dreadful." Let me add that there was something more in it all than the gratification of mere fun and laughter, more even than the rarer pleasure that underlies the outbreak of all forms of genuine humor. Another chord had been struck. Over and above the lively painting of manners which at first had been so attractive, there was something that left deeper mark. Genial and irrepressible enjoyment, affectionate heartiness of tone, unrestrained exuberance of mirth, these are not more delightful than they are fleeting and perishable qualities; but the attention eagerly excited by the charm of them in _Pickwick_ found itself retained by something more permanent. We had all become suddenly conscious, in the very thick of the extravaganza of adventure and fun set before us, that here were real people. It was not somebody talking humorously about them, but they were there themselves. That a number of persons belonging to the middle and lower ranks of life (Wardles, Winkles, Wellers, Tupmans, Bardells, Snubbinses, Perkers, Bob Sawyers, Dodsons, and Foggs) had been somehow added to his intimate and familiar acquaintance, the ordinary reader knew before half a dozen numbers were out; and it took not many more to make clear to the intelligent reader that a new and original genius in the walk of Smollett and Fielding had arisen in England. I do not, for reasons to be hereafter stated, think the _Pickwick Papers_ comparable to the later books; but, apart from the new vein of humor it opened, its wonderful freshness and its unflagging animal spirits, it has two characters that will probably continue to attract to it an unfading popularity. Its pre-eminent achievement is of course Sam Weller,--one of those people that take their place among the supreme successes of fiction, as one that nobody ever saw but everybody recognizes, at once perfectly natural and intensely original. Who is there that has ever thought him tedious? Who is so familiar with him as not still to be finding something new in him? Who is so amazed by his inexhaustible resources, or so amused by his inextinguishable laughter, as to doubt of his being as ordinary and perfect a reality, nevertheless, as anything in the London streets? When indeed the relish has been dulled that makes such humor natural and appreciable, and not his native fun only, his ready and rich illustration, his imperturbable self-possession, but his devotion to his master, his chivalry and his gallantry, are no longer discovered, or believed no longer to exist, in the ranks of life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical misjudgment. But of this there is small fear. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick are the Sancho and the Quixote of Londoners, and as little likely to pass away as the old city itself. Dickens was very fond of riding in these early years, and there was no recreation he so much indulged, or with such profit to himself, in the intervals of his hardest work. I was his companion oftener than I could well afford the time for, the distances being great and nothing else to be done for the day; but when a note would unexpectedly arrive while I knew him to be hunted hard by one of his printers, telling me he had been sticking to work so closely that he must have rest, and, by way of getting it, proposing we should start together that morning at eleven o'clock for "a fifteen-mile ride out, ditto in, and a lunch on the road" with a wind-up of six o'clock dinner in Doughty Street, I could not resist the good fellowship. His notion of finding rest from mental exertion in as much bodily exertion of equal severity, continued with him to the last; taking in the later years what I always thought the too great strain of as many miles in walking as he now took in the saddle, and too often indulging it at night; for, though he was always passionately fond of walking, he observed as yet a moderation in it, even accepting as sufficient my seven or eight miles' companionship. "What a brilliant morning for a country walk!" he would write, with not another word in his dispatch. Or, "Is it possible that you can't, oughtn't, shouldn't, mustn't, _won't_ be tempted, this gorgeous day?" Or, "I start precisely--precisely, mind--at half-past one. Come, come, _come_, and walk in the green lanes. You will work the better for it all the week. Come! I shall expect you." Or, "You don't feel disposed, do you, to muffle yourself up and start off with me for a good brisk walk over Hampstead Heath? I knows a good 'ous there where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner, and a glass of good wine:" which led to our first experience of Jack Straw's Castle, memorable for many happy meetings in coming years. But the rides were most popular and frequent. "I think," he would write, "Richmond and Twickenham, thro' the park, out at Knightsbridge, and over Barnes Common, would make a beautiful ride." Or, "Do you know, I shouldn't object to an early chop at some village inn?" Or, "Not knowing whether my head was off or on, it became so addled with work, I have gone riding the old road, and should be truly delighted to meet or be overtaken by you." Or, "Where shall it be--_oh, where_--Hampstead, Greenwich, Windsor? WHERE?????? while the day is bright, not when it has dwindled away to nothing! For who can be of any use whatsomdever such a day as this, excepting out of doors?" Or it might be interrogatory summons to "A hard trot of three hours?" or intimation as laconic "To be heard of at Eel-pie House, Twickenham!" When first I knew him, I may add, his carriage for his wife's use was a small chaise with a smaller pair of ponies, which, having a habit of making sudden rushes up by-streets in the day and peremptory standstills in ditches by night, were changed in the following year for a more suitable equipage. To this mention of his habits while at work when our friendship began, I have to add what will complete the relation already given, in connection with his _Sketches_, of the uneasy sense accompanying his labor that it was yielding insufficient for himself while it enriched others, which is a needful part of his story at this time. At midsummer, 1837, replying to some inquiries, and sending his agreement with Mr. Bentley for the _Miscellany_ under which he was writing _Oliver_, he went on: "It is a very extraordinary fact (I forgot it on Sunday) that I have NEVER HAD from him a copy of the agreement respecting the novel, which I never saw before or since I signed it at his house one morning long ago. Shall I ask him for a copy or no? I have looked at some memoranda I made at the time, and I _fear_ he has my second novel on the same terms, under the same agreement. This is a bad lookout, but we must try and mend it. You will tell me you are very much surprised at my doing business in this way. So am I, for in most matters of labor and application I am punctuality itself. The truth is (though you do not need I should explain the matter to you, my dear fellow), that if I had allowed myself to be worried by these things, I could never have done as much as I have. But I much fear, in my desire to avoid present vexations, I have laid up a bitter store for the future." The second novel, which he had promised in a complete form for a very early date, and had already selected subject and title for, was published four years later as _Barnaby Rudge_; but of the third he at present knew nothing but that he was expected to begin it, if not in the magazine, somewhere or other independently within a specified time. The first appeal made, in taking action upon his letter, had reference to the immediate pressure of the _Barnaby_ novel; but it also opened up the question of the great change of circumstances since these various agreements had been precipitately signed by him, the very different situation brought about by the extraordinary increase in the popularity of his writings, and the advantage it would be to both Mr. Bentley and himself to make more equitable adjustment of their relations. Some misunderstandings followed, but were closed by a compromise in September, 1837; by which the third novel was abandoned[12] on certain conditions, and _Barnaby_ was undertaken to be finished by November, 1838. This involved a completion of the new story during the progress of _Oliver_, whatever might be required to follow on the close of _Pickwick_; and I doubted its wisdom. But it was accepted for the time. He had meanwhile taken his wife abroad for a ten days' summer holiday, accompanied by the shrewd observant young artist, Mr. Hablot Browne, whose admirable illustrations to _Pickwick_ had more than supplied Mr. Seymour's loss; and I had a letter from him on their landing at Calais on the 2d of July: "We have arranged for a post-coach to take us to Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, and a hundred other places, that I cannot recollect now and couldn't spell if I did. We went this afternoon in a barouche to some gardens where the people dance, and where they were footing it most heartily,--especially the women, who in their short petticoats and light caps look uncommonly agreeable. A gentleman in a blue surtout and silken berlins accompanied us from the hotel, and acted as curator. He even waltzed with a very smart lady (just to show us, condescendingly, how it ought to be done), and waltzed elegantly, too. We rang for slippers after we came back, and it turned out that this gentleman was the Boots." His later sea-side holiday was passed at Broadstairs, as were those of many subsequent years, and the little watering-place has been made memorable by his pleasant sketch of it. From his letters to myself a few lines may be given of his first doings and impressions there. Writing on the 3d of September, he reports himself just risen from an attack of illness. "I am much better, and hope to begin _Pickwick No. 18_ to-morrow. You will imagine how queer I must have been when I tell you that I have been compelled for four-and-twenty mortal hours to abstain from porter or other malt liquor!!! I have done it though--really. . . . I have discovered that the landlord of the Albion has delicious hollands (but what is that to _you_? for you cannot sympathize with my feelings), and that a cobbler who lives opposite to my bedroom window is a Roman Catholic, and gives an hour and a half to his devotions every morning behind his counter. I have walked upon the sands at low-water from this place to Ramsgate, and sat upon the same at high-ditto till I have been flayed with the cold. I have seen ladies and gentlemen walking upon the earth in slippers of buff, and pickling themselves in the sea in complete suits of the same. I have seen stout gentlemen looking at nothing through powerful telescopes for hours, and, when at last they saw a cloud of smoke, fancying a steamer behind it, and going home comfortable and happy. I have found out that our next neighbor has a wife and something else under the same roof with the rest of his furniture,--the wife deaf and blind, and the something else given to drinking. And if you ever get to the end of this letter _you_ will find out that I subscribe myself on paper, as on everything else (some atonement perhaps for its length and absurdity)," etc. etc. In his next letter (from 12, High Street, Broadstairs, on the 7th) there is allusion to one of the many piracies of _Pickwick_, which had distinguished itself beyond the rest by a preface abusive of the writer plundered: "I recollect this 'member of the Dramatic Authors' Society' bringing an action once against Chapman who rented the City theatre, in which it was proved that he had undertaken to write under special agreement seven melodramas for five pounds, to enable him to do which a room had been hired in a gin-shop close by. The defendant's plea was that the plaintiff was always drunk, and had not fulfilled his contract. Well, if the _Pickwick_ has been the means of putting a few shillings in the vermin-eaten pockets of so miserable a creature, and has saved him from a workhouse or a jail, let him empty out his little pot of filth and welcome. I am quite content to have been the means of relieving him. Besides, he seems to have suffered by agreements!" His own troubles in that way were compromised for the time, as already hinted, at the close of this September month; and at the end of the month following, after finishing _Pickwick_ and resuming _Oliver_, the latter having been suspended by him during the recent disputes, he made his first visit to Brighton. The opening of his letter of Friday the 3d of November is full of regrets that I had been unable to join them there: "It is a beautiful day, and we have been taking advantage of it, but the wind until to-day has been so high and the weather so stormy that Kate has been scarcely able to peep out of doors. On Wednesday it blew a perfect hurricane, breaking windows, knocking down shutters, carrying people off their legs, blowing the fires out, and causing universal consternation. The air was for some hours darkened with a shower of black hats (second-hand), which are supposed to have been blown off the heads of unwary passengers in remote parts of the town, and have been industriously picked up by the fishermen. Charles Kean was advertised for _Othello_ 'for the benefit of Mrs. Sefton, having most kindly postponed for this one day his departure for London.' I have not heard whether he got to the theatre, but I am sure nobody else did. They do _The Honeymoon_ to-night, on which occasion I mean to patronize the drayma. We have a beautiful bay-windowed sitting-room here, fronting the sea, but I have seen nothing of B.'s brother who was to have shown me the lions, and my notions of the place are consequently somewhat confined: being limited to the pavilion, the chain-pier, and the sea. The last is quite enough for me, and, unless I am joined by some male companion (_do you think I shall be?_), is most probably all I shall make acquaintance with. I am glad you like _Oliver_ this month: especially glad that you particularize the first chapter. I hope to do great things with Nancy. If I can only work out the idea I have formed of her, and of the female who is to contrast with her, I think I may defy Mr. ---- and all his works.[13] I have had great difficulty in keeping my hands off Fagin and the rest of them in the evenings; but, as I came down for rest, I have resisted the temptation, and steadily applied myself to the labor of being idle. Did you ever read (of course you have, though) De Foe's _History of the Devil_? What a capital thing it is! I bought it for a couple of shillings yesterday morning, and have been quite absorbed in it ever since. We must have been jolter-headed geniuses not to have anticipated M.'s reply. My best remembrances to him. I see H. at this moment. I must be present at a rehearsal of that opera. It will be better than any comedy that was ever played. Talking of comedies, I still see NO THOROUGHFARE staring me in the face, every time I look down that road. I have taken places for Tuesday next. We shall be at home at six o'clock, and I shall hope at least to see you that evening. I am afraid you will find this letter extremely dear at eightpence, but if the warmest assurances of friendship and attachment, and anxious lookings-forward to the pleasure of your society, be worth anything, throw them into the balance, together with a hundred good wishes and one hearty assurance that I am," etc. etc. "CHARLES DICKENS. No room for the flourish--I'll finish it the next time I write to you." The flourish that accompanied his signature is familiar to every one. The allusion to the comedy expresses a fancy he at this time had of being able to contribute some such achievement in aid of Macready's gallant efforts at Covent Garden to bring back to the stage its higher associations of good literature and intellectual enjoyment. It connects curiously now that unrealized hope with the exact title of the only story he ever helped himself to dramatize, and which Mr. Fechter played at the Adelphi three years before his death. FOOTNOTES: [11] Her epitaph, written by him, remains upon a gravestone in the cemetery at Kensal Green: "Young, beautiful, and good, God numbered her among his angels at the early age of seventeen." [12] I have a memorandum in Dickens's writing that five hundred pounds was to have been given for it, and an additional two hundred and fifty pounds on its sale reaching three thousand copies; but I feel certain it was surrendered on more favorable terms. [13] The allusion was to the supposed author of a paper in the _Quarterly Review_ (Oct. 1837), in the course of which there was much high praise, but where the writer said at the close, "Indications are not wanting that the particular vein of humor which has hitherto yielded so much attractive metal is worked out. . . . The fact is, Mr. Dickens writes too often and too fast. . . . If he persists much longer in this course, it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate:--he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick." CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN PICKWICK AND NICKLEBY. 1837-1838. Edits _Life of Grimaldi_--His Own Opinion of it--An Objection answered--His Recollections of 1823--Completion of _Pickwick_--A Purpose long entertained--Relations with Chapman & Hall--Payments made for _Pickwick_--Agreement for _Nicholas Nickleby_--_Oliver Twist_ characterized--Reasons for Acceptance with every Class--Nightmare of an Agreement--Letter to Mr. Bentley--Proposal as to _Barnaby Rudge_--Result of it--Birth of Eldest Daughter--_Young Gentlemen and Young Couples_--First Number of _Nicholas Nickleby_--2d of April, 1838. NOT remotely bearing on the stage, nevertheless, was the employment on which I found him busy at his return from Brighton; one result of his more satisfactory relations with Mr. Bentley having led to a promise to edit for him a life of the celebrated clown Grimaldi. The manuscript had been prepared from autobiographical notes by a Mr. Egerton Wilks, and contained one or two stories told so badly, and so well worth better telling, that the hope of enlivening their dullness at the cost of very little labor constituted a sort of attraction for him. Except the preface, he did not write a line of this biography, such modifications or additions as he made having been dictated by him to his father; whom I found often in the supreme enjoyment of the office of amanuensis. He had also a most indifferent opinion of the mass of material which in general composed it, describing it to me as "twaddle," and his own modest estimate of the book, on its completion, may be guessed from the number of notes of admiration (no less than thirty) which accompanied his written mention to me of the sale with which it started in the first week of its publication: "Seventeen hundred _Grimaldis_ have been already sold, and the demand increases daily!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" It was not to have all its own way, however. A great many critical faults were found; and one point in particular was urged against his handling such a subject, that he could never himself even have seen Grimaldi. To this last objection he was moved to reply, and had prepared a letter for the _Miscellany_, "from editor to sub-editor," which it was thought best to suppress, but of which the opening remark may now be not unamusing: "I understand that a gentleman unknown is going about this town privately informing all ladies and gentlemen of discontented natures, that, on a comparison of dates and putting together of many little circumstances which occur to his great sagacity, he has made the profound discovery that I can never have seen Grimaldi whose life I have edited, and that the book must therefore of necessity be bad. Now, sir, although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendor of Christmas pantomimes and the humor of Joe, in whose honor I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823, yet as I had not then aspired to the dignity of a tail-coat, though forced by a relentless parent into my first pair of boots, I am willing, with the view of saving this honest gentleman further time and trouble, to concede that I had not arrived at man's estate when Grimaldi left the stage, and that my recollections of his acting are, to my loss, but shadowy and imperfect. Which confession I now make publickly, and without mental qualification or reserve, to all whom it may concern. But the deduction of this pleasant gentleman that therefore the Grimaldi book must be bad, I must take leave to doubt. I don't think that to edit a man's biography from his own notes it is essential you should have known him, and I don't believe that Lord Braybrooke had more than the very slightest acquaintance with Mr. Pepys, whose memoirs he edited two centuries after he died." Enormous meanwhile, and without objection audible on any side, had been the success of the completed _Pickwick_, which we celebrated by a dinner, with himself in the chair and Talfourd in the vice-chair, everybody in hearty good humor with every other body; and a copy of which I received from him on the 11th of December in the most luxurious of Hayday's bindings, with a note worth preserving for its closing allusion. The passage referred to in it was a comment, in delicately chosen words, that Leigh Hunt had made on the inscription at the grave in Kensal Green:[14] "Chapman & Hall have just sent me, with a copy of our deed, three 'extra-super' bound copies of _Pickwick_, as per specimen inclosed. The first I forward to you, the second I have presented to our good friend Ainsworth, and the third Kate has retained for herself. Accept your copy with one sincere and most comprehensive expression of my warmest friendship and esteem; and a hearty renewal, if there need be any renewal when there has been no interruption, of all those assurances of affectionate regard which our close friendship and communion for a long time back has every day implied. . . . That beautiful passage you were so kind and considerate as to send me, has given me the only feeling akin to pleasure (sorrowful pleasure it is) that I have yet had, connected with the loss of my dear young friend and companion; for whom my love and attachment will never diminish, and by whose side, if it please God to leave me in possession of sense to signify my wishes, my bones, whenever or wherever I die, will one day be laid. Tell Leigh Hunt when you have an opportunity how much he has affected me, and how deeply I thank him for what he has done. You cannot say it too strongly." The "deed" mentioned was one executed in the previous month to restore to him a third ownership in the book which had thus far enriched all concerned but himself. The original understanding respecting it Mr. Edward Chapman thus describes for me: "There was no agreement about _Pickwick_ except a verbal one. Each number was to consist of a sheet and a half, for which we were to pay fifteen guineas; and we paid him for the first two numbers at once, as he required the money to go and get married with. We were also to pay more according to the sale, and I think _Pickwick_ altogether cost us three thousand pounds." Adjustment to the sale would have cost four times as much, and of the actual payments I have myself no note; but, as far as my memory serves, they are overstated by Mr. Chapman. My impression is that, above and beyond the first sum due for each of the twenty numbers (making no allowance for their extension after the first to thirty-two pages), successive checks were given, as the work went steadily on to the enormous sale it reached, which brought up the entire sum received to two thousand five hundred pounds. I had, however, always pressed so strongly the importance to him of some share in the copyright, that this at last was conceded in the deed above mentioned, though five years were to elapse before the right should accrue; and it was only yielded as part consideration for a further agreement entered into at the same date (the 19th of November, 1837), whereby Dickens engaged to "write a new work, the title whereof shall be determined by him, of a similar character and of the same extent as the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_," the first number of which was to be delivered on the 15th of the following March, and each of the numbers on the same day of each of the successive nineteen months; which was also to be the date of the payment to him, by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, of twenty several sums of one hundred and fifty pounds each for five years' use of the copyright, the entire ownership in which was then to revert to Dickens. The name of this new book, as all the world knows, was _The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby_; and between April, 1838, and October, 1839, it was begun and finished accordingly. All through the interval of these arrangements _Oliver Twist_ had been steadily continued. Month by month, for many months, it had run its opening course with the close of _Pickwick_, as we shall see it close with the opening of _Nickleby_; and the expectations of those who had built most confidently on the young novelist were more than confirmed. Here was the interest of a story simply but well constructed; and characters with the same impress of reality upon them, but more carefully and skillfully drawn. Nothing could be meaner than the subject, the progress of a parish or workhouse boy, nothing less so than its treatment. As each number appeared, his readers generally became more and more conscious of what already, as we have seen, had revealed itself amid even the riotous fun of _Pickwick_, that the purpose was not solely to amuse; and, far more decisively than its predecessor, the new story further showed what were the not least potent elements in the still increasing popularity that was gathering around the writer. His qualities could be appreciated as well as felt in an almost equal degree by all classes of his various readers. Thousands were attracted to him because he placed them in the midst of scenes and characters with which they were already themselves acquainted; and thousands were reading him with no less avidity because he introduced them to passages of nature and life of which they before knew nothing, but of the truth of which their own habits and senses sufficed to assure them. Only to genius are so revealed the affinities and sympathies of high and low, in regard to the customs and usages of life; and only a writer of the first rank can bear the application of such a test. For it is by the alliance of common habits, quite as much as by the bonds of a common humanity, that we are all of us linked together; and the result of being above the necessity of depending on other people's opinions, and that of being below it, are pretty much the same. It would equally startle both high and low to be conscious of the whole that is implied in this close approximation; but for the common enjoyment of which I speak such consciousness is not required; and for the present Fagin may be left undisturbed in his school of practical ethics with only the Dodger, Charley Bates, and his other promising scholars. With such work as this in hand, it will hardly seem surprising that as the time for beginning _Nickleby_ came on, and as he thought of his promise for November, he should have the sense of "something hanging over him like a hideous nightmare." He felt that he could not complete the _Barnaby Rudge_ novel by the November of that year, as promised, and that the engagement he would have to break was unfitting him for engagements he might otherwise fulfill. He had undertaken what, in truth, was impossible. The labor of at once editing the _Miscellany_ and supplying it with monthly portions of _Oliver_ more than occupied all the time left him by other labors absolutely necessary. "I no sooner get myself up," he wrote, "high and dry, to attack _Oliver_ manfully, than up come the waves of each month's work, and drive me back again into a sea of manuscript." There was nothing for it but that he should make further appeal to Mr. Bentley. "I have recently," he wrote to him on the 11th of February, 1838, "been thinking a great deal about _Barnaby Rudge_. _Grimaldi_ has occupied so much of the short interval I had between the completion of the _Pickwick_ and the commencement of the new work, that I see it will be wholly impossible for me to produce it by the time I had hoped, with justice to myself or profit to you. What I wish you to consider is this: would it not be far more to your interest, as well as within the scope of my ability, if _Barnaby Rudge_ began in the _Miscellany_ immediately on the conclusion of _Oliver Twist_, and were continued there for the same time, and then published in three volumes? Take these simple facts into consideration. If the _Miscellany_ is to keep its ground, it _must_ have some continuous tale from me when _Oliver_ stops. If I sat down to _Barnaby Rudge_, writing a little of it when I could (and with all my other engagements it would necessarily be a very long time before I could hope to finish it that way), it would be clearly impossible for me to begin a new series of papers in the _Miscellany_. The conduct of three different stories at the same time, and the production of a large portion of each, every month, would have been beyond Scott himself. Whereas, having _Barnaby_ for the _Miscellany_, we could at once supply the gap which the cessation of _Oliver_ must create, and you would have all the advantage of that prestige in favor of the work which is certain to enhance the value of _Oliver Twist_ considerably. Just think of this at your leisure. I am really anxious to do the best I can for you as well as for myself, and in this case the pecuniary advantage must be all on your side." This letter nevertheless, which had also requested an overdue account of the sales of the _Miscellany_, led to differences which were only adjusted after six months' wrangling; and I was party to the understanding then arrived at, by which, among other things, _Barnaby_ was placed upon the footing desired, and was to begin when _Oliver_ closed. Of the progress of his _Oliver_, and his habits of writing at the time, it may perhaps be worth giving some additional glimpses from his letters of 1838. "I was thinking about _Oliver_ till dinner-time yesterday," he wrote on the 9th of March,[15] "and, just as I had fallen upon him tooth and nail, was called away to sit with Kate. I did eight slips, however, and hope to make them fifteen this morning." Three days before, a little daughter had been born to him, who became a little god-daughter to me; on which occasion (having closed his announcement with a postscript of "I can do nothing this morning. What time will you ride? The sooner the better, for a good long spell"), we rode out fifteen miles on the great north road, and, after dining at the Red Lion in Barnet on our way home, distinguished the already memorable day by bringing in both hacks dead lame. On that day week, Monday, the 13th, after describing himself "sitting patiently at home waiting for _Oliver Twist_ who has not yet arrived," which was his pleasant form of saying that his fancy had fallen into sluggishness that morning, he made addition not less pleasant as to some piece of painful news I had sent him, now forgotten: "I have not yet seen the paper, and you throw me into a fever. The comfort is, that all the strange and terrible things come uppermost, and that the good and pleasant things are mixed up with every moment of our existence so plentifully that we scarcely heed them." At the close of the month Mrs. Dickens was well enough to accompany him to Richmond, for now the time was come to start _Nickleby_; and, having been away from town when _Pickwick's_ first number came out, he made it a superstition to be absent at all future similar times. The magazine-day of that April month, I remember, fell upon a Saturday, and the previous evening had brought me a peremptory summons: "Meet me at the Shakspeare on Saturday night at eight; order your horse at midnight, and ride back with me." Which was done accordingly. The smallest hour was sounding from St. Paul's into the night before we started, and the night was none of the pleasantest; but we carried news that lightened every part of the road, for the sale of _Nickleby_ had reached that day the astonishing number of nearly fifty thousand! I left him working with unusual cheerfulness at _Oliver Twist_ when I left the Star and Garter on the next day but one, after celebrating with both friends on the previous evening an anniversary[16] which concerned us all (their second and my twenty-sixth), and which we kept always in future at the same place, except when they were living out of England, for twenty successive years. It was a part of his love of regularity and order, as well as of his kindliness of nature, to place such friendly meetings as these under rules of habit and continuance. FOOTNOTES: [14] See _ante_, p. 120. [15] There is an earlier allusion I may quote, from a letter in January, for its mention of a small piece written by him at this time, but not included in his acknowledged writings: "I am as badly off as you. I have not done the _Young Gentlemen_, nor written the preface to _Grimaldi_, nor thought of _Oliver Twist_, or even supplied a subject for the plate." The _Young Gentlemen_ was a small book of sketches which he wrote anonymously as the companion to a similar half-crown volume of _Young Ladies_ (not written by him), for Messrs. Chapman & Hall. He added subsequently a like volume of _Young Couples_, also without his name. [16] See _ante_, p. 113. CHAPTER VIII. OLIVER TWIST. 1838. Interest in Characters at Close of _Oliver_--Writing of the Last Chapter--Cruikshank Illustrations--Etchings for Last Volume--How executed--Slander respecting them exposed--Falsehood ascribed to the Artist--Reputation of the New Tale--Its Workmanship--Social Evils passed away--Living only in what destroyed them--Chief Design of the Story--Its Principal Figures--Comedy and Tragedy of Crime--Reply to Attacks--Le Sage, Gay, and Fielding--Likeness to them--Again the Shadow of _Barnaby_--Appeal to Mr. Bentley for Delay--A Very Old Story--"Sic Vos non Vobis"--_Barnaby_ given up by Mr. Bentley--Resignation of _Miscellany_--Parent parting from Child. THE whole of his time not occupied by _Nickleby_ was now given to _Oliver_, and as the story shaped itself to its close it took extraordinary hold of him. I never knew him work so frequently after dinner, or to such late hours (a practice he afterwards abhorred), as during the final months of this task; which it was now his hope to complete before October, though its close in the magazine would not be due until the following March. "I worked pretty well last night," he writes, referring to it in May, "very well indeed; but, although I did eleven close slips before half-past twelve, I have four to write to complete the chapter; and, as I foolishly left them till this morning, have the steam to get up afresh." A month later he writes, "I got to the sixteenth slip last night, and shall try hard to get to the thirtieth before I go to bed."[17] Then, on a "Tuesday night," at the opening of August, he wrote, "Hard at work still. Nancy is no more. I showed what I have done to Kate last night, who was in an unspeakable '_state_:' from which and my own impression I augur well. When I have sent Sikes to the devil, I must have yours." "No, no," he wrote, in the following month: "don't, don't let us ride till to-morrow, not having yet disposed of the Jew, who is such an out-and-outer that I don't know what to make of him." No small difficulty to an inventor, where the creatures of his invention are found to be as real as himself; but this also was mastered; and then there remained but the closing quiet chapter to tell the fortunes of those who had figured in the tale. To this he summoned me in the first week of September, replying to a request of mine that he'd give me a call that day: "Come and give _me_ a call, and let us have 'a bit o' talk' before we have a bit o' som'at else. My missis is going out to dinner, and I ought to go, but I have got a bad cold. So do you come, and sit here, and read, or work, or do something, while I write the LAST chapter of _Oliver_, which will be arter a lamb chop." How well I remember that evening! and our talk of what should be the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as indeed for the Dodger too) Talfourd had pleaded as earnestly in mitigation of judgment as ever at the bar for any client he had most respected. The publication had been announced for October, but the third-volume illustrations intercepted it a little. This part of the story, as we have seen, had been written in anticipation of the magazine, and the designs for it, having to be executed "in a lump," were necessarily done somewhat hastily. The matter supplied in advance of the monthly portions in the magazine formed the bulk of the last volume as published in the book; and for this the plates had to be prepared by Cruikshank also in advance of the magazine, to furnish them in time for the separate publication: Sikes and his dog, Fagin in the cell, and Rose Maylie and Oliver, being the three last. None of these Dickens had seen until he saw them in the book on the eve of its publication; when he so strongly objected to one of them that it had to be canceled. "I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon," he wrote to the artist at the end of October, "to look at the latter pages of _Oliver Twist_ before it was delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last one,--Rose Maylie and Oliver,--without entering into the question of great haste, or any other cause, which may have led to its being what it is, I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us with respect to the result. May I ask you whether you will object to designing this plate afresh, and doing so _at once_, in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel confident you know me too well to feel hurt by this inquiry, and with equal confidence in you I have lost no time in preferring it." This letter, printed from a copy in Dickens's handwriting fortunately committed to my keeping, entirely disposes of a wonderful story[18] originally promulgated in America with a minute particularity of detail that might have raised the reputation of Sir Benjamin Backbite himself. Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels, however, should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens's letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of its author's genius had been merely an illustration of etchings by Mr. Cruikshank! The completed _Oliver Twist_ found a circle of admirers, not so wide in its range as those of others of his books, but of a character and mark that made their honest liking for it, and steady advocacy of it, important to his fame; and the book has held its ground in the first class of his writings. It deserves that place. The admitted exaggerations in _Pickwick_ are incident to its club's extravaganza of adventure, of which they are part, and are easily separable from the reality of its wit and humor, and its incomparable freshness; but no such allowances were needed here. Make what deduction the too scrupulous reader of _Oliver_ might please for "lowness" in the subject, the precision and the unexaggerated force of the delineation were not to be disputed. The art of copying from nature as it really exists in the common walks had not been carried by any one to greater perfection, or to better results in the way of combination. Such was his handling of the piece of solid, existing, every-day life, which he made here the groundwork of his wit and tenderness, that the book which did much to help out of the world the social evils it portrayed will probably preserve longest the picture of them as they then were. Thus far, indeed, he had written nothing to which in a greater or less degree this felicity did not belong. At the time of which I am speaking, the debtors' prisons described in _Pickwick_, the parochial management denounced in _Oliver_, and the Yorkshire schools exposed in _Nickleby_, were all actual existences,--which now have no vivider existence than in the forms he thus gave to them. With wiser purposes, he superseded the old petrifying process of the magician in the Arabian tale, and struck the prisons and parish abuses of his country, and its schools of neglect and crime, into palpable life forever. A portion of the truth of the past, of the character and very history of the moral abuses of his time, will thus remain always in his writings; and it will be remembered that with only the light arms of humor and laughter, and the gentle ones of pathos and sadness, he carried cleansing and reform into those Augean stables. Not that such intentions are in any degree ever intruded by this least didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. _Oliver Twist_ is the history of a child born in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of pictures from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly natural agencies, from the dying mother and the starved wretches of the first volume, through the scenes and gradations of crime, careless or deliberate, which have a frightful consummation in the last volume, but are never without the reliefs and self-assertions of humanity even in scenes and among characters so debased. It is indeed the primary purpose of the tale to show its little hero, jostled as he is in the miserable crowd, preserved everywhere from the vice of its pollution by an exquisite delicacy of natural sentiment which clings to him under every disadvantage. There is not a more masterly touch in fiction, and it is by such that this delightful fancy is consistently worked out to the last, than Oliver's agony of childish grief on being brought away from the branch-workhouse, the wretched home associated only with suffering and starvation, and with no kind word or look, but containing still his little companions in misery. Of the figures the book has made familiar to every one it is not my purpose to speak. To name one or two will be enough. Bumble and his wife; Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger; the cowardly charity-boy, Noah Claypole, whose _Such agony, please, sir_, puts the whole of a school-life into one phrase; the so-called merry old Jew, supple and black-hearted Fagin; and Bill Sikes, the bolder-faced bulky-legged ruffian, with his white hat and white shaggy dog,--who does not know them all, even to the least points of dress, look, and walk, and all the small peculiarities that express great points of character? I have omitted poor wretched Nancy; yet it is to be said of her, with such honest truthfulness her strength and weakness are shown, in the virtue that lies neighbored in her nature so closely by vice, that the people meant to be entirely virtuous show poorly beside her. But, though Rose and her lover are trivial enough beside Bill and his mistress, being indeed the weak part of the story, it is the book's pre-eminent merit that vice is nowhere made attractive in it. Crime is not more intensely odious, all through, than it is also most wretched and most unhappy. Not merely when its exposure comes, when the latent recesses of guilt are laid bare, and all the agonies of remorse are witnessed; not in the great scenes only, but in those lighter passages where no such aim might seem to have guided the apparently careless hand, this is emphatically so. Whether it be the comedy or the tragedy of crime, terror and retribution dog closely at its heels. They are as plainly visible when Fagin is first shown in his den, boiling the coffee in the saucepan and stopping every now and then to listen when there is the least noise below,--the villainous confidence of habit never extinguishing in him the anxious watchings and listenings of crime,--as when we see him at the last in the condemned cell, like a poisoned human rat in a hole. A word may be added upon the attacks directed against the subject of the book, to which Dickens made reply in one of his later editions, declaring his belief that he had tried to do a service to society, and had certainly done no disservice, in depicting a knot of such associates in crime in all their deformity and squalid wretchedness, skulking uneasily through a miserable life to a painful and shameful death. It is, indeed, never the subject that can be objectionable, if the treatment is not so, as we may see by much popular writing since, where subjects unimpeachably high are brought low by degrading sensualism. When the object of a writer is to exhibit the vulgarity of vice, and not its pretensions to heroism or cravings for sympathy, he may measure his subject with the highest. We meet with a succession of swindlers and thieves in _Gil Blas_; we shake hands with highwaymen and housebreakers all round in the _Beggars' Opera_; we pack cards with La Ruse or pick pockets with Jonathan in Fielding's _Mr. Wild the Great_; we follow cruelty and vice from its least beginning to its grossest ends in the prints of Hogarth; but our morals stand none the looser for any of them. As the spirit of the Frenchman was pure enjoyment, the strength of the Englishmen lay in wisdom and satire. The low was set forth to pull down the false pretensions of the high. And though for the most part they differ in manner and design from Dickens in this tale, desiring less to discover the soul of goodness in things evil than to brand the stamp of evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and results are substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and vulgarity of the materials employed we measure the gentlemanliness and beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of its treatment of imposture, but for the rest of the world it will still teach the invaluable lesson of what men ought to be from what they are. We cannot learn it more than enough. We cannot too often be told that as the pride and grandeur of mere external circumstance is the falsest of earthly things, so the truth of virtue in the heart is the most lovely and lasting; and from the pages of _Oliver Twist_ this teaching is once again to be taken by all who will look for it there. And now, while _Oliver_ was running a great career of popularity and success, the shadow of the tale of _Barnaby Rudge_, which he was to write on similar terms, and to begin in the _Miscellany_ when the other should have ended, began to darken everything around him. We had much discussion respecting it, and I had no small difficulty in restraining him from throwing up the agreement altogether; but the real hardship of his position, and the considerate construction to be placed on every effort made by him to escape from obligations incurred in ignorance of the sacrifices implied by them, will be best understood from his own frank and honest statement. On the 21st of January, 1839, inclosing me the copy of a letter which he proposed to send to Mr. Bentley the following morning, he thus wrote: "From what I have already said to you, you will have been led to expect that I entertained some such intention. I know you will not endeavor to dissuade me from sending it. Go it MUST. It is no fiction to say that at present I _cannot_ write this tale. The immense profits which _Oliver_ has realized to its publisher and is still realizing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work on the same journeyman-terms; the consciousness that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who are nearest and dearest to me I can realize little more than a genteel subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits. And I cannot--cannot and will not--under such circumstances that keep me down with an iron hand, distress myself by beginning this tale until I have had time to breathe, and until the intervention of the summer, and some cheerful days in the country, shall have restored me to a more genial and composed state of feeling. There--for six months _Barnaby Rudge_ stands over. And but for you, it should stand over altogether. For I do most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done so much for those who drove them. This net that has been wound about me so chafes me, so exasperates and irritates my mind, that to break it at whatever cost--_that_ I should care nothing for--is my constant impulse. But I have not yielded to it. I merely declare that I must have a postponement very common in all literary agreements; and for the time I have mentioned--six months from the conclusion of _Oliver_ in the _Miscellany_--I wash my hands of any fresh accumulation of labor, and resolve to proceed as cheerfully as I can with that which already presses upon me."[20] To describe what followed upon this is not necessary. It will suffice to state the results. Upon the appearance in the _Miscellany_, in the early months of 1839, of the last portion of _Oliver Twist_, its author, having been relieved altogether from his engagement to the magazine, handed over, in a familiar epistle from a parent to his child, the editorship to Mr. Ainsworth; and the still subsisting agreement to write _Barnaby Rudge_ was, upon the overture of Mr. Bentley himself in June of the following year, 1840, also put an end to, on payment by Dickens, for the copyright of _Oliver Twist_ and such printed stock as remained of the edition then on hand, of two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds. What was further incident to this transaction will be told hereafter; and a few words may meanwhile be taken, not without significance in regard to it, from the parent's familiar epistle. It describes the child as aged two years and two months (so long had he watched over it); gives sundry pieces of advice concerning its circulation, and the importance thereto of light and pleasant articles of food; and concludes, after some general moralizing on the shiftings and changes of this world having taken so wonderful a turn that mail-coach guards were become no longer judges of horse-flesh, "I reap no gain or profit by parting from you, nor will any conveyance of your property be required, for in this respect you have always been literally Bentley's Miscellany and never mine." FOOTNOTES: [17] Here is another of the same month: "All day I have been at work on _Oliver_, and hope to finish the chapter by bedtime. I wish you'd let me know what Sir Francis Burdett has been saying about him at some Birmingham meeting. B. has just sent me the _Courier_ containing some reference to his speech; but the speech I haven't seen." [18] Reproduced as below, in large type, and without a word of contradiction or even doubt, in a biography of Mr. Dickens put forth by Mr. Hotten: "Dr. Shelton McKenzie, in the American _Round Table_, relates this anecdote of _Oliver Twist_: In London I was intimate with the brothers Cruikshank, Robert and George, but more particularly with the latter. Having called upon him one day at his house (it was then in Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville), I had to wait while he was finishing an etching, for which a printer's boy was waiting. To while away the time, I gladly complied with his suggestion that I should look over a portfolio crowded with etchings, proofs, and drawings, which lay upon the sofa. Among these, carelessly tied together in a wrap of brown paper, was a series of some twenty-five or thirty drawings, very carefully finished, through most of which were carried the well-known portraits of Fagin, Bill Sikes and his dog, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and Master Charles Bates--all well known to the readers of _Oliver Twist_. There was no mistake about it; and when Cruikshank turned round, his work finished, I said as much. He told me that it had long been in his mind to show the life of a London thief by a series of drawings engraved by himself, in which, without a single line of letter-press, the story would be strikingly and clearly told. 'Dickens,' he continued, 'dropped in here one day, just as you have done, and, while waiting until I could speak with him, took up that identical portfolio, and ferreted out that bundle of drawings. When he came to that one which represents Fagin in the condemned cell, he studied it for half an hour, and told me that he was tempted to change the whole plot of his story; not to carry Oliver Twist through adventures in the country, but to take him up into the thieves' den in London, show what their life was, and bring Oliver through it without sin or shame. I consented to let him write up to as many of the designs as he thought would suit his purpose; and that was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created. My drawings suggested them, rather than his strong individuality suggested my drawings.'" [19] This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr. Cruikshank's announcement in the _Times_, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had "confused some circumstances with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over some drawings and sketches," the substance of his information as to who it was that originated _Oliver Twist_, and all its characters, had been derived from Mr. Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing fable, therefore, has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr. Cruikshank is to be congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence respecting it as long as Mr. Dickens lived. [20] Upon receiving this letter I gently reminded him that I had made objection at the time to the arrangement on the failure of which he empowered me to bring about the settlement it was now proposed to supersede. I cannot give his reply, as it would be unbecoming to repeat the warmth of its expression to myself, but I preserve its first few lines to guard against any possible future misstatement: "If you suppose that anything in my letter could by the utmost latitude of construction imply the smallest dissatisfaction on my part, for God's sake dismiss such a thought from your mind. I have never had a momentary approach to doubt or discontent where you have been mediating for me. . . . I could say more, but you would think me foolish and rhapsodical; and such feeling as I have for you is better kept within one's own breast than vented in imperfect and inexpressive words." CHAPTER IX. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 1838-1839. Doubts of Success dispelled--Realities of English Life--Characters self-revealed--Miss Bates and Mrs. Nickleby--Smike and Dotheboys--A Favorite Type of Humanity--Sydney Smith and Newman Noggs--Kindliness and Breadth of Humor--Goldsmith and Smollett--Early and Later Books--Biographical not critical--Characteristics--Materials for the Book--Birthday Letter--A Difficulty at Starting--Never in Advance with _Nickleby_--Always with Later Books--Enjoying a Play--At the Adelphi--Writing Mrs. Nickleby's Love-scene--Sydney Smith vanquished--Winding up the Story--Parting from Creatures of his Fancy--The Nickleby Dinner--Persons present--The Maclise Portrait. I WELL recollect the doubt there was, mixed with the eager expectation which the announcement of his second serial story had awakened, whether the event would justify all that interest, and if indeed it were possible that the young writer could continue to walk steadily under the burden of the popularity laid upon him. The first number dispersed this cloud of a question in a burst of sunshine; and as much of the gayety of nations as had been eclipsed by old Mr. Pickwick's voluntary exile to Dulwich was restored by the cheerful confidence with which young Mr. Nicholas Nickleby stepped into his shoes. Everything that had given charm to the first book was here, with more attention to the important requisite of a story, and more wealth as well as truth of character. How this was poured forth in each successive number, it hardly needs that I should tell. To recall it now, is to talk of what since has so interwoven itself with common speech and thought as to have become almost part of the daily life of us all. It was well said of him, soon after his death, in mentioning how largely his compositions had furnished one of the chief sources of intellectual enjoyment to this generation, that his language had become part of the language of every class and rank of his countrymen, and his characters were a portion of our contemporaries. "It seems scarcely possible," continued this otherwise not too indulgent commentator, "to believe that there never were any such persons as Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Gamp. They are to us not only types of English life, but types actually existing. They at once revealed the existence of such people, and made them thoroughly comprehensible. They were not studies of persons, but persons. And yet they were idealized in the sense that the reader did not think that they were drawn from the life. They were alive; they were themselves." The writer might have added that this is proper to all true masters of fiction who work in the higher regions of their calling. Nothing certainly could express better what the new book was at this time making manifest to its thousands of readers; not simply an astonishing variety in the creations of character, but what it was that made these creations so real; not merely the writer's wealth of genius, but the secret and form of his art. There never was any one who had less need to talk about his characters, because never were characters so surely revealed by themselves; and it was thus their reality made itself felt at once. They talked so well that everybody took to repeating what they said, as the writer just quoted has pointed out; and the sayings being the constituent elements of the characters, these also of themselves became part of the public. This, which must always be a novelist's highest achievement, was the art carried to exquisite perfection on a more limited stage by Miss Austen; and, under widely different conditions both of art and work, it was pre-eminently that of Dickens. I told him, on reading the first dialogue of Mrs. Nickleby and Miss Knag, that he had been lately reading Miss Bates in _Emma_, but I found that he had not at this time made the acquaintance of that fine writer. Who that recollects the numbers of _Nickleby_ as they appeared can have forgotten how each number added to the general enjoyment? All that had given _Pickwick_ its vast popularity, the overflowing mirth, hearty exuberance of humor, and genial kindliness of satire, had here the advantage of a better-laid design, more connected incidents, and greater precision of character. Everybody seemed immediately to know the Nickleby family as well as his own. Dotheboys, with all that rendered it, like a piece by Hogarth, both ludicrous and terrible, became a household word. Successive groups of Mantalinis, Kenwigses, Crummleses, introduced each its little world of reality, lighted up everywhere with truth and life, with capital observation, the quaintest drollery, and quite boundless mirth and fun. The brothers Cheeryble brought with them all the charities. With Smike came the first of those pathetic pictures that filled the world with pity for what cruelty, ignorance, or neglect may inflict upon the young. And Newman Noggs ushered in that class of the creatures of his fancy in which he took himself perhaps the most delight, and which the oftener he dealt with the more he seemed to know how to vary and render attractive: gentlemen by nature, however shocking bad their hats or ungenteel their dialects; philosophers of modest endurance, and needy but most respectable coats; a sort of humble angels of sympathy and self-denial, though without a particle of splendor or even good looks about them, except what an eye as fine as their own feelings might discern. "My friends," wrote Sydney Smith, describing to Dickens the anxiety of some ladies of his acquaintance to meet him at dinner, "have not the smallest objection to be put into a number, but on the contrary would be proud of the distinction; and Lady Charlotte, in particular, you may marry to Newman Noggs." Lady Charlotte was not a more real person to Sydney than Newman Noggs; and all the world that Dickens attracted to his books could draw from them the same advantage as the man of wit and genius. It has been lately objected that humanity is not seen in them in its highest or noblest types, and the assertion may hereafter be worth considering; but what is very certain is, that they have inculcated humanity in familiar and engaging forms to thousands and tens of thousands of their readers, who can hardly have failed each to make his little world around him somewhat the better for their teaching. From first to last they were never for a moment alien to either the sympathies or the understandings of any class; and there were crowds of people at this time that could not have told you what imagination meant, who were adding month by month to their limited stores the boundless gains of imagination. One other kindliest product of humor in _Nickleby_, not to be passed over in even thus briefly recalling a few first impressions of it, was the good little miniature-painter Miss La Creevy, living by herself, overflowing with affections she has nobody to bestow on, but always cheerful by dint of industry and good-heartedness. When she is disappointed in the character of a woman she has been to see, she eases her mind by saying a very cutting thing at her expense _in a soliloquy_: and thereby illustrates one of the advantages of having lived alone so long, that she made always a confidante of herself; was as sarcastic as she could be, by herself, on people who offended her; pleased herself, and did no harm. Here was one of those touches, made afterwards familiar to the readers of Dickens by innumerable similar fancies, which added affection to their admiration for the writer, and enabled them to anticipate the feeling with which posterity would regard him as indeed the worthy companion of the Goldsmiths and Fieldings. There was a piece of writing, too, within not many pages of it, of which Leigh Hunt exclaimed on reading it that it surpassed the best things of the kind in Smollett that he was able to call to mind. This was the letter of Miss Squeers to Ralph Nickleby, giving him her version of the chastisement inflicted by Nicholas on the schoolmaster: "My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen. We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. . . . Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes". . . . Thus rapidly may be indicated some elements that contributed to the sudden and astonishingly wide popularity of these books. I purposely reserve from my present notices of them, which are biographical rather than critical, any statement of the reasons for which I think them inferior in imagination and fancy to some of the later works; but there was continued and steady growth in them on the side of humor, observation, and character, while freshness and raciness of style continued to be an important help. There are faults of occasional exaggeration in the writing, but none that do not spring from animal spirits and good humor, or a pardonable excess, here and there, on the side of earnestness; and it has the rare virtue, whether gay or grave, of being always thoroughly intelligible and for the most part thoroughly natural, of suiting itself without effort to every change of mood, as quick, warm, and comprehensive as the sympathies it is taxed to express. The tone also is excellent. We are never repelled by egotism or conceit, and misplaced ridicule never disgusts us. When good is going on, we are sure to see all the beauty of it; and when there is evil, we are in no danger of mistaking it for good. No one can paint more picturesquely by an apposite epithet, or illustrate more happily by a choice allusion. Whatever he knows or feels, too, is always at his fingers' ends, and is present through whatever he is doing. What Rebecca says to Ivanhoe of the black knight's mode of fighting would not be wholly inapplicable to Dickens's manner of writing: "There is more than mere strength, there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow he deals." This, when a man deals his blows with a pen, is the sort of handling that freshens with new life the oldest facts, and breathes into thoughts the most familiar an emotion not felt before. There seemed to be not much to add to our knowledge of London until his books came upon us, but each in this respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In _Nickleby_ the old city reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing over what is good and cheerful in it, or the veil is uplifted from its darker scenes, it is at all times our privilege to see and feel it as it absolutely is. Its interior hidden life becomes familiar as its commonest outward forms, and we discover that we hardly knew anything of the places we supposed that we knew the best. Of such notices as his letters give of his progress with _Nickleby_, which occupied him from February, 1838, to October, 1839, something may now be said. Soon after the agreement for it was signed, before the Christmas of 1837 was over, he went down into Yorkshire with Mr. Hablot Browne to look up the Cheap Schools in that county to which public attention had been painfully drawn by a law-case in the previous year; which had before been notorious for cruelties committed in them, whereof he had heard as early as in his childish days;[21] and which he was bent upon destroying if he could. I soon heard the result of his journey; and the substance of that letter, returned to him for the purpose, is in his preface to the story written for the collected edition. He came back confirmed in his design, and in February set to work upon his first chapter. On his birthday he wrote to me, "I _have_ begun! I wrote four slips last night, so you see the beginning is made. And what is more, I can go on: so I hope the book is in training at last." "The first chapter of _Nicholas_ is done," he wrote two days later. "It took time, but I think answers the purpose as well as it could." Then, after a dozen days more, "I wrote twenty slips of _Nicholas_ yesterday, left only four to do this morning (up at 8 o'clock too!), and have ordered my horse at one." I joined him as he expected, and we read together at dinner that day the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_. In the following number there was a difficulty which it was marvelous should not oftener have occurred to him in this form of publication. "I could not write a line till three o'clock," he says, describing the close of that number, "and have yet five slips to finish, and don't know what to put in them, for I have reached the point I meant to leave off with." He found easy remedy for such a miscalculation at his outset, and it was nearly his last as well as first misadventure of the kind: his difficulty in _Pickwick_, as he once told me, having always been, not the running short, but the running over: not the whip, but the drag, that was wanted. Sufflaminandus erat, as Ben Jonson said of Shakspeare. And in future works, with such marvelous nicety could he do always what he had planned, strictly within the space available, that only another similar instance is remembered by me. The third number introduced the school; and "I remain dissatisfied until you have seen and read number three," was his way of announcing to me his own satisfaction with that first handling of Dotheboys Hall. Nor had it the least part in my admiration of his powers at this time that he never wrote without the printer at his heels; that, always in his later works two or three numbers in advance, he was never a single number in advance with this story; that the more urgent the call upon him the more readily he rose to it; and that his astonishing animal spirits never failed him. As late in the November month of 1838 as the 20th, he thus wrote to me: "I have just begun my second chapter; cannot go out to-night; must get on; think there _will_ be a _Nickleby_ at the end of this month now (I doubted it before); and want to make a start towards it if I possibly can." That was on Tuesday; and on Friday morning in the same week, explaining to me the failure of something that had been promised the previous day, he tells me, "I was writing incessantly until it was time to dress; and have not yet got the subject of my last chapter, which _must be_ finished to-night." But this was not all. Between that Tuesday and Friday an indecent assault had been committed on his book by a theatrical adapter named Stirling, who seized upon it without leave while yet only a third of it was written; hacked, cut, and garbled its dialogue to the shape of one or two farcical actors; invented for it a plot and an ending of his own, and produced it at the Adelphi; where the outraged author, hard pressed as he was with an unfinished number, had seen it in the interval between the two letters I have quoted. He would not have run such a risk in later years, but he threw off lightly at present even such offenses to his art; and though I was with him at a representation of his _Oliver Twist_ the following month at the Surrey theatre, when in the middle of the first scene he laid himself down upon the floor in a corner of the box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell, he had been able to sit through _Nickleby_ and to see a kind of merit in some of the actors. Mr. Yates had a sufficiently humorous meaning in his wildest extravagance, and Mr. O. Smith could put into his queer angular oddities enough of a hard dry pathos, to conjure up shadows at least of Mantalini and Newman Noggs; of Ralph Nickleby there was indeed nothing visible save a wig, a spencer, and a pair of boots; but there was a quaint actor named Wilkinson who proved equal to the drollery though not to the fierce brutality of Squeers; and even Dickens, in the letter that amazed me by telling me of his visit to the theatre, was able to praise "the skillful management and dressing of the boys, the capital manner and speech of Fanny Squeers, the dramatic representation of her card-party in Squeers's parlor, the careful making-up of all the people, and the exceedingly good tableaux formed from Browne's sketches. . . . Mrs. Keeley's first appearance beside the fire (see wollum), and all the rest of Smike, was excellent; bating sundry choice sentiments and rubbish regarding the little robins in the fields which have been put in the boy's mouth by Mr. Stirling the adapter." His toleration could hardly be extended to the robins, and their author he very properly punished by introducing and denouncing him at Mr. Crummles's farewell supper. The story was well in hand at the next letter to be quoted, for I limit myself to those only with allusions that are characteristic or illustrative. "I must be alone in my glory to-day," he wrote, "and see what I can do. I perpetrated a great amount of work yesterday, and have every day indeed since Monday, but I must buckle-to again and endeavor to get the steam up. If this were to go on long, I should 'bust' the boiler. I think Mrs. Nickleby's love-scene will come out rather unique." The steam doubtless rose dangerously high when such happy inspiration came. It was but a few numbers earlier than this, while that eccentric lady was imparting her confidences to Miss Knag, that Sydney Smith confessed himself vanquished by a humor against which his own had long striven to hold out. "_Nickleby_ is _very good_," he wrote to Sir George Phillips after the sixth number. "I stood out against Mr. Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me."[22] The close of the story was written at Broadstairs, from which (he had taken a house "two doors from the Albion Hotel, where we had that merry night two years ago") he wrote to me on the 9th September, 1839, "I am hard at it, but these windings-up wind slowly, and I shall think I have done great things if I have entirely finished by the 20th. Chapman & Hall came down yesterday with Browne's sketches, and dined here. They imparted their intentions as to a Nicklebeian fête which will make you laugh heartily--so I reserve them till you come. It has been blowing great guns for the last three days, and last night (I wish you could have seen it!) there was such a sea! I staggered down to the pier, and, creeping under the lee of a large boat which was high and dry, watched it breaking for nearly an hour. Of course I came back wet through." On the afternoon of Wednesday, the 18th, he wrote again: "I shall not finish entirely before Friday, sending Hicks the last twenty pages of manuscript by the night-coach. I have had pretty stiff work, as you may suppose, and I have taken great pains. The discovery is made, Ralph is dead, the loves have come all right, Tim Linkinwater has proposed, and I have now only to break up Dotheboys and the book together. I am very anxious that you should see this conclusion before it leaves my hands, and I plainly see therefore that I must come to town myself on Saturday if I would not endanger the appearance of the number. So I have written to Hicks to send proofs to your chambers as soon as he can that evening; and, if you don't object, I will dine with you any time after five, and we will devote the night to a careful reading. I have not written to Macready, for they have not yet sent me the title-page of dedication, which is merely 'To W. C. Macready, Esq., the following pages are inscribed, as a slight token of admiration and regard, by his friend the Author.' Meanwhile will you let him know that I have fixed the Nickleby dinner for Saturday, the 5th of October? Place, the Albion in Aldersgate Street. Time, six for half-past exactly. . . . I shall be more glad than I can tell you to see you again, and I look forward to Saturday, and the evenings that are to follow it, with most joyful anticipation. I have had a good notion for _Barnaby_, of which more anon." The shadow from the old quarter, we see, the unwritten _Barnaby_ tale, intrudes itself still; though hardly, as of old, making other pleasanter anticipations less joyful. Such, indeed, at this time was his buoyancy of spirit that it cost him little, compared with the suffering it gave him at all subsequent similar times, to separate from the people who for twenty months had been a part of himself. The increased success they had achieved left no present room but for gladness and well-won pride; and so, to welcome them into the immortal family of the English novel, and open cheerily to their author "fresh woods and pastures new," we had the dinner celebration. But there is small need now to speak of what has left, to one of the few survivors, only the sadness of remembering that all who made the happiness of it are passed away. There was Talfourd, facile and fluent of kindliest speech, with whom we were in constant and cordial intercourse, and to whom, grateful for his copyright exertions in the House of Commons, he had dedicated _Pickwick_; there was Maclise, dear and familiar friend to us both, whose lately-painted portrait of Dickens hung in the room;[23] and there was the painter of the Rent-day, who made a speech as good as his pictures, rich in color and quaint with homely allusion, all about the reality of Dickens's genius, and how there had been nothing like him issuing his novels part by part since Richardson issued his novels volume by volume, and how in both cases people talked about the characters as if they were next-door neighbors or friends; and as many letters were written to the author of _Nickleby_ to implore him not to kill poor Smike, as had been sent by young ladies to the author of _Clarissa_ to "save Lovelace's soul alive." These and others are gone. Of those who survive, only three arise to my memory,--Macready, who spoke his sense of the honor done him by the dedication in English as good as his delivery of it, Mr. Edward Chapman, and Mr. Thomas Beard. FOOTNOTES: [21] "I cannot call to mind now how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in by-places near Rochester castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked up at that time." [22] Moore, in his _Diary_ (April, 1837), describes Sydney crying down Dickens at a dinner in the Row, "and evidently without having given him a fair trial." [23] This portrait was given to Dickens by his publishers, for whom it was painted with a view to an engraving for _Nickleby_, which, however, was poorly executed, and of a size too small to do the original any kind of justice. To the courtesy of its present possessor, the Rev. Sir Edward Repps Joddrell, and to the careful art of Mr. Robert Graves, A.R.A., I owe the illustration at the opening of this volume, in which the head is for the first time worthily expressed. In some sort to help also the reader's fancy to a complete impression, Maclise having caught as happily the figure as the face, a skillful outline of the painting has been executed for the present page by Mr. Jeens. "As a likeness," said Mr. Thackeray of the work, and no higher praise could be given to it, "it is perfectly amazing. A looking-glass could not render a better fac-simile. We have here the real identical man Dickens, the inward as well as the outward of him." CHAPTER X. DURING AND AFTER NICKLEBY. 1838-1839. The Cottage at Twickenham--Daniel Maclise--Ainsworth and other Friends--Mr. Stanley of Alderley--Petersham Cottage--Childish Enjoyments--Writes a Farce for Covent Garden--Entered at the Middle Temple--We see Wainewright in Newgate--_Oliver Twist_ and the _Quarterly_--Hood's _Up the Rhine_--Shakspeare Society--Birth of Second Daughter--House-Hunting--_Barnaby_ at his Tenth Page--Letter from Exeter--A Landlady and her Friends--A Home for his Father and Mother--Autobiographical--Visit to an Upholsterer--Visit from the Same. THE name of his old gallery-companion may carry me back from the days to which the close of _Nickleby_ had led me to those when it was only beginning. "This snow will take away the cold weather," he had written, in that birthday letter of 1838 already quoted, "and then for Twickenham." Here a cottage was taken, nearly all the summer was passed, and a familiar face there was Mr. Beard's. There, with Talfourd and with Thackeray and Jerrold, we had many friendly days, too; and the social charm of Maclise was seldom wanting. Nor was there anything that exercised a greater fascination over Dickens than the grand enjoyment of idleness, the ready self-abandonment to the luxury of laziness, which we both so laughed at in Maclise, under whose easy swing of indifference, always the most amusing at the most aggravating events and times, we knew that there was artist-work as eager, energy as unwearying, and observation almost as penetrating as Dickens's own. A greater enjoyment than the fellowship of Maclise at this period it would indeed be difficult to imagine. Dickens hardly saw more than he did, while yet he seemed to be seeing nothing; and the small esteem in which this rare faculty was held by himself, a quaint oddity that gave to shrewdness itself in him an air of Irish simplicity, his unquestionable turn for literature, and a varied knowledge of it not always connected with such intense love and such unwearied practice of one special and absorbing art, combined to render him attractive far beyond the common. His fine genius and his handsome person, of neither of which at any time he seemed himself to be in the slightest degree conscious, completed the charm. Edwin Landseer, all the world's favorite, and the excellent Stanfield, came a few months later, in the Devonshire-Terrace days; but another painter-friend was George Cattermole, who had then enough and to spare of fun as well as fancy to supply ordinary artists and humorists by the dozen, and wanted only a little more ballast and steadiness to have had all that could give attraction to good-fellowship. A friend now especially welcome, too, was the novelist Mr. Ainsworth, who shared with us incessantly for the three following years in the companionship which began at his house; with whom we visited, during two of those years, friends of art and letters in his native Manchester, from among whom Dickens brought away his Brothers Cheeryble, and to whose sympathy in tastes and pursuits, accomplishments in literature, open-hearted generous ways, and cordial hospitality, many of the pleasures of later years were due. Frederick Dickens, to whom soon after this a treasury clerkship was handsomely given, on Dickens's application, by Mr. Stanley of Alderley, known in and before those Manchester days, was for the present again living with his father, but passed much time in his brother's home; and another familiar face was that of Mr. Thomas Mitton, who had known him when himself a law-clerk in Lincoln's Inn, through whom there was introduction of the relatives of a friend and partner, Mr. Smithson, the gentleman connected with Yorkshire mentioned in his preface to _Nickleby_, who became very intimate in his house. These, his father and mother and their two younger sons, with members of his wife's family, and his married sisters and their husbands, Mr. and Mrs. Burnett and Mr. and Mrs. Austin, are figures that all associate themselves prominently with the days of Doughty Street and the cottages of Twickenham and Petersham as remembered by me in the summers of 1838 and 1839. In the former of these years the sports were necessarily quieter[24] than at Petersham, where extensive garden-grounds admitted of much athletic competition, from the more difficult forms of which I in general modestly retired, but where Dickens for the most part held his own against even such accomplished athletes as Maclise and Mr. Beard. Bar-leaping, bowling, and quoits were among the games carried on with the greatest ardor; and in sustained energy, what is called keeping it up, Dickens certainly distanced every competitor. Even the lighter recreations of battledoor and bagatelle were pursued with relentless activity; and at such amusements as the Petersham races, in those days rather celebrated, and which he visited daily while they lasted, he worked much harder himself than the running horses did. What else his letters of these years enable me to recall, that could possess any interest now, may be told in a dozen sentences. He wrote a farce by way of helping the Covent Garden manager which the actors could not agree about, and which he turned afterwards into a story called _The Lamplighter_. He entered his name among the students at the inn of the Middle Temple, though he did not eat dinners there until many years later. We made together a circuit of nearly all the London prisons, and, in coming to the prisoners under remand while going over Newgate, accompanied by Macready and Mr. Hablot Browne,[25] were startled by a sudden tragic cry of "My God! there's Wainewright!" In the shabby-genteel creature, with sandy disordered hair and dirty moustache, who had turned quickly round with a defiant stare at our entrance, looking at once mean and fierce, and quite capable of the cowardly murders he had committed, Macready had been horrified to recognize a man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he had dined. Between the completion of _Oliver_ and its publication, Dickens went to see something of North Wales; and, joining him at Liverpool, I returned with him.[26] Soon after his arrival he had pleasant communication with Lockhart, dining with him at Cruikshank's a little later; and this was the prelude to a _Quarterly_ notice of _Oliver_ by Mr. Ford, written at the instance of Lockhart, but without the raciness he would have put into it, in which amende was made for previous less favorable remarks in that review. Dickens had not, however, waited for this to express publicly his hearty sympathy with Lockhart's handling of some passages in his admirable _Life of Scott_ that had drawn down upon him the wrath of the Ballantynes. This he did in the _Examiner_; where also I find him noticing a book by Thomas Hood: "rather poor, but I have not said so, because Hood is too, and ill besides." In the course of the year he was taken into Devonshire to select a home for his father, on the removal of the latter (who had long given up his reporting duties) from his London residence; and this he found in a cottage at Alphington, near Exeter, where he placed the elder Dickens with his wife and their youngest son. The same year closed Macready's Covent Garden management, and at the dinner to the retiring manager, when the Duke of Cambridge took the chair, Dickens spoke with that wonderful instinct of knowing what to abstain from saying, as well as what to say, which made his after-dinner speeches quite unique. Nor should mention be omitted of the Shakspeare Society, now diligently attended, of which Procter, Talfourd, Macready, Thackeray, Henry Davison, Blanchard, Charles Knight, John Bell, Douglas Jerrold, Maclise, Stanfield, George Cattermole, the good Tom Landseer, Frank Stone, and other old friends were members, and where, out of much enjoyment and many disputings,[27] there arose, from Dickens and all of us, plenty of after-dinner oratory. The closing months of this year of 1839 had special interest for him. At the end of October another daughter was born to him, who bears the name of that dear friend of his and mine, Macready, whom he asked to be her godfather; and before the close of the year he had moved out of Doughty Street into Devonshire Terrace, a handsome house with a garden of considerable size, shut out from the New Road by a high brick wall facing the York Gate into Regent's Park. These various matters, and his attempts at the _Barnaby_ novel on the conclusion of _Nickleby_, are the subject of his letters between October and December. "Thank God, all goes famously. I have worked at _Barnaby_ all day, and moreover seen a beautiful (and reasonable) house in Kent Terrace, where Macready once lived, but larger than his." Again (this having gone off): "_Barnaby_ has suffered so much from the house-hunting, that I mustn't chop to-day." Then (for the matter of the Middle Temple), "I return the form. It's the right temple, I take for granted. _Barnaby_ moves, not at race-horse speed, but yet as fast (I think) as under these unsettled circumstances could possibly be expected." Or again: "All well. _Barnaby_ has reached his tenth page. I have just turned lazy, and have passed into _Christabel_, and thence to _Wallenstein_." At last the choice was made. "A house of great promise (and great premium), 'undeniable' situation, and excessive splendor, is in view. Mitton is in treaty, and I am in ecstatic restlessness. Kate wants to know whether you have any books to send her, so please to shoot here any literary rubbish on hand." To these I will only add a couple of extracts from his letters while in Exeter arranging his father's and mother's new home. They are very humorous; and the vividness with which everything, once seen, was photographed in his mind and memory, is pleasantly shown in them. "I took a little house for them this morning" (5th March, 1839: from the New London Inn), "and if they are not pleased with it I shall be grievously disappointed. Exactly a mile beyond the city on the Plymouth road there are two white cottages: one is theirs and the other belongs to their landlady. I almost forget the number of rooms, but there is an excellent parlor with two other rooms on the ground floor, there is really a beautiful little room over the parlor which I am furnishing as a drawing-room, and there is a splendid garden. The paint and paper throughout is new and fresh and cheerful-looking, the place is clean beyond all description, and the neighborhood I suppose the most beautiful in this most beautiful of English counties. Of the landlady, a Devonshire widow with whom I had the honor of taking lunch to-day, I must make most especial mention. She is a fat, infirm, splendidly-fresh-faced country dame, rising sixty and recovering from an attack 'on the nerves'--I thought they never went off the stones, but I find they try country air with the best of us. In the event of my mother's being ill at any time, I really think the vicinity of this good dame, the very picture of respectability and good humor, will be the greatest possible comfort. _Her_ furniture and domestic arrangements are a capital picture, but that I reserve till I see you, when I anticipate a hearty laugh. She bears the highest character with the bankers and the clergyman (who formerly lived in _my_ cottage himself), and is a kind-hearted worthy capital specimen of the sort of life, or I have no eye for the real and no idea of finding it out. "This good lady's brother and his wife live in the next nearest cottage, and the brother transacts the good lady's business, the nerves not admitting of her transacting it herself, although they leave her in her debilitated state something sharper than the finest lancet. Now, the brother having coughed all night till he coughed himself into such a perspiration that you might have 'wringed his hair,' according to the asseveration of eye-witnesses, his wife was sent for to negotiate with me; and if you could have seen me sitting in the kitchen with the two old women, endeavoring to make them comprehend that I had no evil intentions or covert designs, and that I had come down all that way to take some cottage and had _happened_ to walk down that road and see that particular one, you would never have forgotten it. Then, to see the servant-girl run backwards and forwards to the sick man, and when the sick man had signed one agreement which I drew up and the old woman instantly put away in a disused tea-caddy, to see the trouble and the number of messages it took before the sick man could be brought to sign another (a duplicate) that we might have one apiece, was one of the richest scraps of genuine drollery I ever saw in all my days. How, when the business was over, we became conversational; how I was facetious, and at the same time virtuous and domestic; how I drank toasts in the beer, and stated on interrogatory that I was a married man and the father of two blessed infants; how the ladies marveled thereat; how one of the ladies, having been in London, inquired where I lived, and, being told, remembered that Doughty Street and the Foundling Hospital were in the Old Kent Road, which I didn't contradict,--all this and a great deal more must make us laugh when I return, as it makes me laugh now to think of. Of my subsequent visit to the upholsterer recommended by the landlady; of the absence of the upholsterer's wife, and the timidity of the upholsterer fearful of acting in her absence; of my sitting behind a high desk in a little dark shop, calling over the articles in requisition and checking off the prices as the upholsterer exhibited the goods and called them out; of my coming over the upholsterer's daughter with many virtuous endearments, to propitiate the establishment and reduce the bill; of these matters I say nothing, either, for the same reason as that just mentioned. The discovery of the cottage I seriously regard as a blessing (not to speak it profanely) upon our efforts in this cause. I had heard nothing from the bank, and walked straight there, by some strange impulse, directly after breakfast. I am sure they may be happy there; for if I were older, and my course of activity were run, I am sure _I_ could, with God's blessing, for many and many a year.". . . "The theatre is open here, and Charles Kean is to-night playing for his last night. If it had been the 'rig'lar' drama I should have gone, but I was afraid Sir Giles Overreach might upset me, so I stayed away. My quarters are excellent, and the head-waiter is _such_ a waiter! Knowles (not Sheridan Knowles, but Knowles of the Cheetham Hill Road[28]) is an ass to him. This sounds bold, but truth is stranger than fiction. By-the-by, not the least comical thing that has occurred was the visit of the upholsterer (with some further calculations) since I began this letter. I think they took me here at the New London for the Wonderful Being I am; they were amazingly sedulous; and no doubt they looked for my being visited by the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood. My first and only visitor came to-night: a ruddy-faced man in faded black, with extracts from a feather-bed all over him; an extraordinary and quite miraculously dirty face; a thick stick; and the personal appearance altogether of an amiable bailiff in a green old age. I have not seen the proper waiter since, and more than suspect I shall not recover this blow. He was announced (by _the_ waiter) as 'a person.' I expect my bill every minute. . . . "The waiter is laughing outside the door with another waiter--this is the latest intelligence of my condition." FOOTNOTES: [24] We had at Twickenham a balloon club for the children, of which I appear to have been elected the president on condition of supplying all the balloons, a condition which I seem so insufficiently to have complied with as to bring down upon myself the subjoined resolution. The Snodgering Blee and Popem Jee were the little brother and sister, for whom, as for their successors, he was always inventing these surprising descriptive epithets. "Gammon Lodge, Saturday evening, June 23d, 1838. Sir, I am requested to inform you that at a numerous meeting of the Gammon Aeronautical Association for the Encouragement of Science and the Consumption of Spirits (of Wine)--Thomas Beard Esquire, Mrs. Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens, Esquire, the Snodgering Blee, Popem Jee, and other distinguished characters being present and assenting, the vote of censure of which I inclose a copy was unanimously passed upon you for gross negligence in the discharge of your duty, and most unjustifiable disregard of the best interests of the Society. I am, Sir, your most obedient servant, Charles Dickens, Honorary Secretary. To John Forster, Esquire." [25] Not Mr. Procter, as, by an oversight of his own, Dickens caused to be said in an interesting paper on Wainewright which appeared in his weekly periodical. [26] I quote from a letter dated Llangollen, Friday morning, 3d Nov. 1838: "I wrote to you last night, but by mistake the letter has gone on Heaven knows where in my portmanteau. I have only time to say, go straight to Liverpool by the first Birmingham train on Monday morning, and at the Adelphi Hotel in that town you will find me. I trust to you to see my dear Kate and bring the latest intelligence of her and the darlings. My best love to them." [27] One of these disputes is referred to by Charles Knight in his Autobiography; and I see in Dickens's letters the mention of another in which I seem to have been turned by his kindly counsel from some folly I was going to commit: "I need not, I am sure, impress upon you the sincerity with which I make this representation. Our close and hearty friendship happily spares me the necessity. But I will add this--that feeling for you an attachment which no ties of blood or other relationship could ever awaken, and hoping to be to the end of my life your affectionate and chosen friend, I am convinced that I counsel you now as you would counsel me if I were in the like case; and I hope and trust that you will be led by an opinion which I am sure cannot be wrong when it is influenced by such feelings as I bear towards you, and so many warm and grateful considerations." [28] This was the butler of Mr. Gilbert Winter, one of the kind Manchester friends whose hospitality we had enjoyed with Mr. Ainsworth, and whose shrewd, quaint, old-world ways come delightfully back to me as I write his once well-known and widely-honored name. CHAPTER XI. NEW LITERARY PROJECT. 1839. Thoughts for the Future--Doubts of old Serial Form--Suggestion for his Publishers--My Mediation with them--Proposed Weekly Publication--Design of it--Old Favorites to be revived--Subjects to be dealt with--Chapters on Chambers--Gog and Magog Relaxations--Savage Chronicles--Others as well as himself to write--Travels to Ireland and America in View--Stipulation as to Property and Payments--Great Hopes of Success--Assent of his Publishers--No Planned Story--Terms of Agreement--Notion for his Hero--A Name hit upon--Sanguine of the Issue. THE time was now come for him seriously to busy himself with a successor to _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, which he had not, however, waited thus long before turning over thoroughly in his mind. _Nickleby's_ success had so far outgone even the expectation raised by _Pickwick's_, that, without some handsome practical admission of this fact at the close, its publishers could hardly hope to retain him. This had been frequently discussed by us, and was well understood. But, apart from the question of his resuming with them at all, he had persuaded himself it might be unsafe to resume in the old way, believing the public likely to tire of the same twenty numbers over again. There was also another and more sufficient reason for change which naturally had great weight with him, and this was the hope that, by invention of a new mode as well as kind of serial publication, he might be able for a time to discontinue the writing of a long story with all its strain on his fancy, in any case to shorten and vary the length of the stories written by himself, and perhaps ultimately to retain all the profits of a continuous publication without necessarily himself contributing every line that was to be written for it. These considerations had been discussed still more anxiously; and for several months some such project had been taking form in his thoughts. While he was at Petersham (July, 1839) he thus wrote to me: "I have been thinking that subject over. Indeed, I have been doing so to the great stoppage of _Nickleby_ and the great worrying and fidgeting of myself. I have been thinking that if Chapman & Hall were to admit you into their confidence with respect to what they mean to do at the conclusion of _Nickleby_, without admitting me, it would help us very much. You know that I am well disposed towards them, and that if they do something handsome, even handsomer perhaps than they dreamt of doing, they will find it their interest, and will find me tractable. You know also that I have had straightforward offers from responsible men to publish anything for me at a percentage on the profits and take all the risk; but that I am unwilling to leave them, and have declared to you that if they behave with liberality to me I will not on any consideration, although to a certain extent I certainly and surely must gain by it. Knowing all this, I feel sure that if you were to put before them the glories of our new project, and, reminding them that when _Barnaby_ is published I am clear of all engagements, were to tell them that if they wish to secure me and perpetuate our connection now is the time for them to step gallantly forward and make such proposals as will produce that result,--I feel quite sure that if this should be done by you, as you only can do it, the result will be of the most vital importance to me and mine, and that a very great deal may be effected, thus, to recompense your friend for very small profits and very large work as yet. I shall see you, please God, on Tuesday night; and if they wait upon you on Wednesday, I shall remain in town until that evening." They came; and the tenor of the interview was so favorable that I wished him to put in writing what from time to time had been discussed in connection with the new project. This led to the very interesting letter I shall now quote, written also in the same month from Petersham. I did not remember, until I lately read it, that the notion of a possible visit to America had been in his thoughts so early. "I should be willing to commence on the thirty-first of March, 1840, a new publication, consisting entirely of original matter, of which one number, price threepence, should be published every week, and of which a certain amount of numbers should form a volume, to be published at regular intervals. The best general idea of the plan of the work might be given, perhaps, by reference to the _Spectator_, the _Tatler_, and Goldsmith's _Bee_; but it would be far more popular both in the subjects of which it treats and its mode of treating them. "I should propose to start, as the _Spectator_ does, with some pleasant fiction relative to the origin of the publication; to introduce a little club or knot of characters and to carry their personal histories and proceedings through the work; to introduce fresh characters constantly; to reintroduce Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, the latter of whom might furnish an occasional communication with great effect; to write amusing essays on the various foibles of the day as they arise; to take advantage of all passing events; and to vary the form of the papers by throwing them into sketches, essays, tales, adventures, letters from imaginary correspondents, and so forth, so as to diversify the contents as much as possible. "In addition to this general description of the contents, I may add that under particular heads I should strive to establish certain features in the work, which should be so many veins of interest and amusement running through the whole. Thus the Chapters on Chambers, which I have long thought and spoken of, might be very well incorporated with it; and a series of papers has occurred to me containing stories and descriptions of London as it was many years ago, as it is now, and as it will be many years hence, to which I would give some such title as The Relaxations of Gog and Magog, dividing them into portions like the _Arabian Nights_, and supposing Gog and Magog to entertain each other with such narrations in Guildhall all night long, and to break off every morning at daylight. An almost inexhaustible field of fun, raillery, and interest would be laid open by pursuing this idea. "I would also commence, and continue from time to time, a series of satirical papers purporting to be translated from some Savage Chronicles, and to describe the administration of justice in some country that never existed, and record the proceedings of its wise men. The object of this series (which if I can compare it with anything would be something between _Gulliver's Travels_ and the _Citizen of the World_) would be to keep a special lookout upon the magistrates in town and country, and never to leave those worthies alone. "The quantity of each number that should be written by myself would be a matter for discussion and arrangement. Of course I should pledge and bind myself upon that head. Nobody but myself would ever pursue _these ideas_, but I must have assistance of course, and there must be some contents of a different kind. Their general nature might be agreed upon beforehand, but I should stipulate that this assistance is chosen solely by myself, and that the contents of every number are as much under my own control, and subject to as little interference, as those of a number of _Pickwick_ or _Nickleby_. "In order to give fresh novelty and interest to this undertaking, I should be ready to contract to go at any specified time (say in the midsummer or autumn of the year, when a sufficient quantity of matter in advance should have been prepared, or earlier if it were thought fit) either to Ireland or to America, and to write from thence a series of papers descriptive of the places and people I see, introducing local tales, traditions, and legends, something after the plan of Washington Irving's _Alhambra_. I should wish the republication of these papers in a separate form, with others to render the subject complete (if we should deem it advisable), to form part of the arrangement for the work; and I should wish the same provision to be made for the republication of the Gog and Magog series, or indeed any that I undertook. "This is a very rough and slight outline of the project I have in view. I am ready to talk the matter over, to give any further explanations, to consider any suggestions, or to go into the details of the subject immediately. I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication nowadays, or its chances of success. Of course I think them very great, very great indeed,--almost beyond calculation,--or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. "The heads of the terms upon which I should be prepared to go into this undertaking would be--That I be made a proprietor in the work and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am insured, _for_ that writing in every number, a certain sum of money. That those who assist me, and contribute the remainder of every number, shall be paid by the publishers immediately after its appearance, according to a scale to be calculated and agreed upon, on presenting my order for the amount to which they may be respectively entitled. Or, if the publishers prefer it, that they agree to pay me a certain sum for the _whole_ of every number, and leave me to make such arrangements for that part which I may not write, as I think best. Of course I should require that for these payments, or any other outlay connected with the work, I am not held accountable in any way; and that no portion of them is to be considered as received by me on account of the profits. I need not add that some arrangement would have to be made, if I undertake my Travels, relative to the expenses of traveling. "Now, I want our publishing friends to take these things into consideration, and to give me the views and proposals they would be disposed to entertain when they have maturely considered the matter." The result of their consideration was, on the whole, satisfactory. An additional fifteen hundred pounds was to be paid at the close of _Nickleby_, the new adventure was to be undertaken, and Cattermole was to be joined with Browne as its illustrator. Nor was its plan much modified before starting, though it was felt by us all that, for the opening numbers at least, Dickens would have to be sole contributor, and that, whatever otherwise might be its attraction, or the success of the detached papers proposed by him, some reinforcement of them from time to time, by means of a story with his name continued at reasonable if not regular intervals, would be found absolutely necessary. Without any such planned story, however, the work did actually begin, its course afterwards being determined by circumstances stronger than any project he had formed. The agreement, drawn up in contemplation of a mere miscellany of detached papers or essays, and in which no mention of any story appeared, was signed at the end of March; and its terms were such as to place him in his only proper and legitimate position in regard to all such contracts, of being necessarily a gainer in any case, and, in the event of success, the greatest gainer of all concerned in the undertaking. All the risk of every kind was to be undergone by the publishers; and, as part of the expenses to be defrayed by them of each weekly number, he was to receive fifty pounds. Whatever the success or failure, this was always to be paid. The numbers were then to be accounted for separately, and half the realized profits paid to him, the other half going to the publishers; each number being held strictly responsible for itself, and the loss upon it, supposing any, not carried to the general account. The work was to be continued for twelve months certain, with leave to the publishers then to close it; but if they elected to go on, he was himself bound to the enterprise for five years, and the ultimate copyright as well as profit was to be equally divided. Six weeks before signature of this agreement, while a title was still undetermined, I had this letter from him: "I will dine with you. I intended to spend the evening in strict meditation (as I did last night); but perhaps I had better go out, lest all work and no play should make me a dull boy. _I_ have a list of titles too, but the final title I have determined on--or something very near it. I have a notion of this old file in the queer house, opening the book by an account of himself, and, among other peculiarities, of his affection for an old quaint queer-cased clock; showing how that when they have sat alone together in the long evenings, he has got accustomed to its voice, and come to consider it as the voice of a friend; how its striking, in the night, has seemed like an assurance to him that it was still, a cheerful watcher at his chamber-door; and now its very face has seemed to have something of welcome in its dusty features, and to relax from its grimness when he has looked at it from his chimney-corner. Then I mean to tell how that he has kept odd manuscripts in the old, deep, dark, silent closet where the weights are; and taken them from thence to read (mixing up his enjoyments with some notion of his clock); and how, when the club came to be formed, they, by reason of their punctuality and his regard for this dumb servant, took their name from it. And thus I shall call the book either _Old Humphrey's Clock_, or _Master Humphrey's Clock_; beginning with a woodcut of old Humphrey and his clock, and explaining the why and wherefore. All Humphrey's own papers will be dated then From my clock-side, and I have divers thoughts about the best means of introducing the others. I thought about this all day yesterday and all last night till I went to bed. I am sure I can make a good thing of this opening, which I have thoroughly warmed up to in consequence." A few days later: "I incline rather more to _Master Humphrey's Clock_ than _Old Humphrey's_--if so be that there is no danger of the pensive confounding master with a boy." After two days more: "I was thinking all yesterday, and have begun at _Master Humphrey_ to-day." Then, a week later: "I have finished the first number, but have not been able to do more in the space than lead up to the Giants, who are just on the scene." CHAPTER XII. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. 1840-1841. Visit to Walter Landor--First Thought of Little Nell--Hopeful of Master Humphrey--A Title for the Child-Story--First Sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_--Its Original Plan abandoned--Reasons for this--To be limited to One Story--Disadvantages of Weekly Publication--A Favorite Description--In Bevis Marks for Sampson Brass--At Lawn House, Broadstairs--Dedication of his First Volume to Rogers--Chapters 43-45--Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness--Masterpiece of Kindly Fun--Closing of the Tale--Effect upon the Writer--Making-believe very much--The End approaching--The Realities of Fiction--Death of Little Nell--My Share in the Close--A Suggestion adopted by him--Success of the Story--Useful Lessons--Its Mode of Construction--Character and Characteristics--The Art of it--A Recent Tribute--Harte's "Dickens in Camp." A DAY or two after the date of the last letter quoted, Dickens and his wife, with Maclise and myself, visited Landor in Bath, and it was during three happy days we passed together there that the fancy which was shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its author,[29]--but as yet with the intention only of making out of it a tale of a few chapters. On the 1st of March we returned from Bath; and on the 4th I had this letter: "If you can manage to give me a call in the course of the day or evening, I wish you would. I am laboriously turning over in my mind how I can best effect the improvement we spoke of last night, which I will certainly make by hook or by crook, and which I would like you to see _before_ it goes finally to the printer's. I have determined not to put that witch-story into number 3, for I am by no means satisfied of the effect of its contrast with Humphrey. I think of lengthening Humphrey, finishing the description of the society, and closing with the little child-story, which is SURE to be effective, especially after the old man's quiet way." Then there came hard upon this: "What do you think of the following double title for the beginning of that little tale? 'PERSONAL ADVENTURES OF MASTER HUMPHREY: _The Old Curiosity Shop_.' I have thought of _Master Humphrey's Tale_, _Master Humphrey's Narrative_, _A Passage in Master Humphrey's Life_--but I don't think any does as well as this. I have also thought of _The Old Curiosity Dealer and the Child_ instead of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. Perpend. Topping waits."----And thus was taking gradual form, with less direct consciousness of design on his own part than I can remember in any other instance of all his career, a story which was to add largely to his popularity, more than any other of his works to make the bond between himself and his readers one of personal attachment, and very widely to increase the sense entertained of his powers as a pathetic as well as humorous writer. He had not written more than two or three chapters, when the capability of the subject for more extended treatment than he had at first proposed to give to it pressed itself upon him, and he resolved to throw everything else aside, devoting himself to the one story only. There were other strong reasons for this. Of the first number of the _Clock_ nearly seventy thousand were sold; but with the discovery that there was no continuous tale the orders at once diminished, and a change must have been made even if the material and means for it had not been ready. There had been an interval of three numbers between the first and second chapters, which the society of Mr. Pickwick and the two Wellers made pleasant enough; but after the introduction of Dick Swiveller there were three consecutive chapters; and in the continued progress of the tale to its close there were only two more breaks, one between the fourth and fifth chapters and one between the eighth and ninth, pardonable and enjoyable now for the sake of Sam and his father. The reintroduction of these old favorites, it will have been seen, formed part of his original plan; of his abandonment of which his own description may be added, from his preface to the collected edition: "The first chapter of this tale appeared in the fourth number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, when I had already been made uneasy by the desultory character of that work, and when, I believe, my readers had thoroughly participated in the feeling. The commencement of a story was a great satisfaction to me, and I had reason to believe that my readers participated in this feeling too. Hence, being pledged to some interruptions and some pursuit of the original design, I set cheerfully about disentangling myself from those impediments as fast as I could; and, this done, from that time until its completion _The Old Curiosity Shop_ was written and published from week to week, in weekly parts." He had very early himself become greatly taken with it. "I am very glad indeed," he wrote to me after the first half-dozen chapters, "that you think so well of the _Curiosity Shop_, and especially that what may be got out of Dick strikes you. I _mean_ to make much of him. I feel the story extremely myself, which I take to be a good sign; and am already warmly interested in it. I shall run it on now for four whole numbers together, to give it a fair chance." Every step lightened the road as it became more and more real with each character that appeared in it, and I still recall the glee with which he told me what he intended to do not only with Dick Swiveller, but with Septimus Brass, changed afterwards to Sampson. Undoubtedly, however, Dick was his favorite. "Dick's behavior in the matter of Miss Wackles will, I hope, give you satisfaction," is the remark of another of his letters. "I cannot yet discover that his aunt has any belief in him, or is in the least degree likely to send him a remittance, so that he will probably continue to be the sport of destiny." His difficulties were the quickly recurring times of publication, the confined space in each number that yet had to contribute its individual effect, and (from the suddenness with which he had begun) the impossibility of getting in advance. "I was obliged to cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter. I hadn't room to turn:" to this or a similar effect his complaints are frequent, and of the vexations named it was by far the worst. But he steadily bore up against all, and made a triumph of the little story. To help his work he went twice to Broadstairs, in June and in September. From this he wrote to me (17th June), "It's now four o'clock, and I have been at work since half-past eight. I have really dried myself up into a condition which would almost justify me in pitching off the cliff, head first--but I must get richer before I indulge in a crowning luxury. Number 15, which I began to-day, I anticipate great things from. There is a description of getting gradually out of town, and passing through neighborhoods of distinct and various characters, with which, if I had read it as anybody else's writing, I think I should have been very much struck. The child and the old man are on their journey of course, and the subject is a very pretty one." Between these two Broadstairs visits he wrote to me, "I intended calling on you this morning on my way back from Bevis Marks, whither I went to look at a house for Sampson Brass. But I got mingled up in a kind of social paste with the Jews of Houndsditch, and roamed about among them till I came out in Moorfields, quite unexpectedly. So I got into a cab, and came home again, very tired, by way of the City Road." At the opening of September he was again at Broadstairs. The residence he most desired there, Fort House, stood prominently at the top of a breezy hill on the road to Kingsgate, with a corn-field between it and the sea, and this in many subsequent years he always occupied; but he was fain to be content, as yet, with Lawn House, a smaller villa between the hill and the corn-field, from which he now wrote of his attentions to Mr. Sampson Brass's sister: "I have been at work of course" (2d September), "and have just finished a number. I have effected a reform by virtue of which we breakfast at a quarter-before eight, so that I get to work at half-past, and am commonly free by one o'clock or so, which is a great happiness. Dick is now Sampson's clerk, and I have touched Miss Brass in Number 25, lightly, but effectively I hope." At this point it became necessary to close the first volume of the _Clock_, which was issued accordingly with a dedication to Rogers, and a preface to which allusion will be made hereafter. "I have opened the second volume," he wrote to me on the 9th of September, "with Kit; and I saw this morning looking out at the sea, as if a veil had been lifted up, an affecting thing that I can do with him by-and-by. Nous verrons." "I am glad you like that Kit number," he wrote twelve days later; "I thought you would. I have altered that about the opera-going. Of course I had no intention to delude the many-headed into a false belief concerning opera-nights, but merely to specify a class of senators. I needn't have done it, however, for God knows they're pretty well all alike." This referred to an objection made by me to something he had written of "opera-going senators on Wednesday nights;" and, of another change made in compliance with some other objection of mine, he wrote on the 4th of October, "You will receive the proof herewith. I have altered it. You must let it stand now. I really think the dead mankind a million fathoms deep, the best thing in the sentence. I have a notion of the dreadful silence down there, and of the stars shining down upon their drowned eyes,--the fruit, let me tell you, of a solitary walk by starlight on the cliffs. As to the child-image, I have made a note of it for alteration. In number thirty there will be some cutting needed, I think. I have, however, something in my eye near the beginning which I can easily take out. You will recognize a description of the road we traveled between Birmingham and Wolverhampton; but I had conceived it so well in my mind that the execution doesn't please me quite as well as I expected. I shall be curious to know whether you think there's anything in the notion of the man and his furnace-fire. It would have been a good thing to have opened a new story with, I have been thinking since." In the middle of October he returned to town, and by the end of the month he had so far advanced that the close of the story began to be not far distant. "Tell me what you think," he had written just before his return, "of 36 and 37? The way is clear for Kit now, and for a great effect at the last with the Marchioness." The last allusion I could not in the least understand, until I found, in the numbers just sent me, those exquisite chapters of the tale, the 57th and 58th, in which Dick Swiveller realizes his threat to Miss Wackles, discovers the small creature that his destiny is expressly saving up for him, dubs her Marchioness, and teaches her the delights of hot purl and cribbage. This is comedy of the purest kind; its great charm being the good-hearted fellow's kindness to the poor desolate child hiding itself under cover of what seems only mirth and fun. Altogether, and because of rather than in spite of his weakness, Dick is a captivating person. His gayety and good humor survive such accumulations of "staggerers," he makes such discoveries of the "rosy" in the very smallest of drinks, and becomes himself by his solacements of verse such a "perpetual grand Apollo," that his failings are all forgiven, and hearts resolutely shut against victims of destiny in general open themselves freely to Dick Swiveller. At the opening of November, there seems to have been a wish on Maclise's part to try his hand at an illustration for the story; but I do not remember that it bore other fruit than a very pleasant day at Jack Straw's Castle, where Dickens read one of the later numbers to us. "Maclise and myself (alone in the carriage)," he wrote, "will be with you at two exactly. We propose driving out to Hampstead and walking there, if it don't rain in buckets'-full. I sha'n't send Bradburys' the MS. of next number till to-morrow, for it contains the shadow of the number after that, and I want to read it to Mac, as, if he likes the subject, it will furnish him with one, I think. You can't imagine (gravely I write and speak) how exhausted I am to-day with yesterday's labors. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don't know what to do with myself. . . . I think the close of the story will be great." Connected with the same design on Maclise's part there was another reading, this time at my house, and of the number shadowed forth by what had been read at Hampstead. "I will bring the MS.," he writes on the 12th of November, "and, for Mac's information if needful, the number before it. I have only this moment put the finishing touch to it. The difficulty has been tremendous--the anguish unspeakable. I didn't say six. Therefore dine at half-past five like a Christian. I shall bring Mac at that hour." He had sent me, shortly before, the chapters in which the Marchioness nurses Dick in his fever, and puts his favorite philosophy to the hard test of asking him whether he has ever put pieces of orange-peel into cold water and made believe it was wine. "If you make believe very much, it's quite nice; but if you don't, you know, it hasn't much flavor:" so it stood originally, and to the latter word in the little creature's mouth I seem to have objected. Replying (on the 16th of December) he writes, "'If you make believe very much, it's quite nice; but if you don't, you know, it seems as if it would bear a little more seasoning, certainly.' I think that's better. Flavor is a common word in cookery, and among cooks, and so I used it. The part you cut out in the other number, which was sent me this morning, I had put in with a view to Quilp's last appearance on any stage, which is casting its shadow upon my mind; but it will come well enough without such a preparation, so I made no change. I mean to shirk Sir Robert Inglis, and work to-night. I have been solemnly revolving the general story all this morning. The forty-fifth number will certainly close. Perhaps this forty-first, which I am now at work on, had better contain the announcement of _Barnaby_? I am glad you like Dick and the Marchioness in that sixty-fourth chapter. I thought you would." Fast shortening as the life of little Nell was now, the dying year might have seen it pass away; but I never knew him wind up any tale with such a sorrowful reluctance as this. He caught at any excuse to hold his hand from it, and stretched to the utmost limit the time left to complete it in. Christmas interposed its delays too, so that Twelfth-night had come and gone when I wrote to him in the belief that he was nearly done. "Done!" he wrote back to me on Friday, the 7th; "Done!!! Why, bless you, I shall not be done till Wednesday night. I only began yesterday, and this part of the story is not to be galloped over, I can tell you. I think it will come famously--but I am the wretchedest of the wretched. It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more than the Single Gentleman. I sha'n't recover it for a long time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed afresh when I only think of the way of doing it: what the actual doing it will be, God knows. I can't preach to myself the schoolmaster's consolation, though I try. Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story. I don't know what to say about dining to-morrow--perhaps you'll send up to-morrow morning for news? That'll be the best way. I have refused several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere till I had done. I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying to get into, and having to fetch it all back again." He had finished, all but the last chapter, on the Wednesday named; that was the 12th of January; and on the following night he read to me the two chapters of Nell's death, the seventy-first and seventy-second, with the result described in a letter to me of the following Monday, the 17th January, 1841: "I can't help letting you know how much your yesterday's letter pleased me. I felt sure you liked the chapters when we read them on Thursday night, but it was a great delight to have my impression so strongly and heartily confirmed. You know how little value I should set on what I had done, if all the world cried out that it was good, and those whose good opinion and approbation I value most were silent. The assurance that this little closing of the scene touches and is felt by you so strongly, is better to me than a thousand most sweet voices out of doors. When I first began, _on your valued suggestion_, to keep my thoughts upon this ending of the tale, I resolved to try and do something which might be read by people about whom Death had been, with a softened feeling, and with consolation. . . . After you left last night, I took my desk up-stairs, and, writing until four o'clock this morning, finished the old story. It makes me very melancholy to think that all these people are lost to me forever, and I feel as if I never could become attached to any new set of characters." The words printed in italics, as underlined by himself, give me my share in the story which had gone so closely to his heart. I was responsible for its tragic ending. He had not thought of killing her, when, about half-way through, I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings so that the gentle pure little figure and form should never change to the fancy. All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again. The published book was an extraordinary success, and, in America more especially, very greatly increased the writer's fame. The pathetic vein it had opened was perhaps mainly the cause of this, but opinion at home continued still to turn on the old characteristics,--the freshness of humor of which the pathos was but another form and product, the grasp of reality with which character had again been seized, the discernment of good under its least attractive forms and of evil in its most captivating disguises, the cordial wisdom and sound heart, the enjoyment and fun, luxuriant yet under proper control. No falling-off was found in these; and I doubt if any of his people have been more widely liked than Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. The characters generally, indeed, work out their share in the purpose of the tale; the extravagances of some of them help to intensify its meaning; and the sayings and doings of the worst and the best alike have their point and applicability. Many an oversuspicious person will find advantage in remembering what a too liberal application of Foxey's principle of suspecting everybody brought Mr. Sampson Brass to; and many an overhasty judgment of poor human nature will unconsciously be checked, when it is remembered that Mr. Christopher Nubbles _did_ come back to work out that shilling. But the main idea and chief figure of the piece constitute its interest for most people, and give it rank upon the whole with the most attractive productions of English fiction. I am not acquainted with any story in the language more adapted to strengthen in the heart what most needs help and encouragement, to sustain kindly and innocent impulses, and to awaken everywhere the sleeping germs of good. It includes necessarily much pain, much uninterrupted sadness; and yet the brightness and sunshine quite overtop the gloom. The humor is so benevolent; the view of errors that have no depravity of heart in them is so indulgent; the quiet courage under calamity, the purity that nothing impure can soil, are so full of tender teaching. Its effect as a mere piece of art, too, considering the circumstances in which I have shown it to be written, I think very noteworthy. It began with a plan for but a short half-dozen chapters; it grew into a full-proportioned story under the warmth of the feeling it had inspired its writer with; its very incidents created a necessity at first not seen; and it was carried to a close only contemplated after a full half of it had been written. Yet, from the opening of the tale to that undesigned ending,--from the image of little Nell asleep amid the quaint grotesque figures of the old curiosity warehouse to that other final sleep she takes among the grim forms and carvings of the old church aisle,--the main purpose seems to be always present. The characters and incidents that at first appear most foreign to it are found to have had with it a close relation. The hideous lumber and rottenness that surround the child in her grandfather's home take shape again in Quilp and his filthy gang. In the first still picture of Nell's innocence in the midst of strange and alien forms, we have the forecast of her after-wanderings, her patient miseries, her sad maturity of experience before its time. Without the show-people and their blended fictions and realities, their wax-works, dwarfs, giants, and performing dogs, the picture would have wanted some part of its significance. Nor could the genius of Hogarth himself have given it higher expression than in the scenes by the cottage door, the furnace-fire, and the burial-place of the old church, over whose tombs and gravestones hang the puppets of Mr. Punch's show while the exhibitors are mending and repairing them. And when, at last, Nell sits within the quiet old church where all her wanderings end, and gazes on those silent monumental groups of warriors,--helmets, swords, and gauntlets wasting away around them,--the associations among which her life had opened seem to have come crowding on the scene again, to be present at its close,--but stripped of their strangeness; deepened into solemn shapes by the suffering she has undergone; gently fusing every feeling of a life past into hopeful and familiar anticipation of a life to come; and already imperceptibly lifting her, without grief or pain, from the earth she loves, yet whose grosser paths her light steps only touched to show the track through them to heaven. This is genuine art, and such as all cannot fail to recognize who read the book in a right sympathy with the conception that pervades it. Nor, great as the discomfort was of reading it in brief weekly snatches, can I be wholly certain that the discomfort of so writing it involved nothing but disadvantage. With so much in every portion to do, and so little space to do it in, the opportunities to a writer for mere self-indulgence were necessarily rare. Of the innumerable tributes the story has received, and to none other by Dickens have more or more various been paid, there is one, the very last, which has much affected me. Not many months before my friend's death, he had sent me two _Overland Monthlies_ containing two sketches by a young American writer far away in California, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in which he had found such subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in late years discovered; the manner resembling himself, but the matter fresh to a degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly, and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality. I have rarely known him more honestly moved. A few months passed; telegraph-wires flashed over the world that he had passed away on the 9th of June; and the young writer of whom he had then written to me, all unconscious of that praise, put his tribute of gratefulness and sorrow into the form of a poem called _Dickens in Camp_.[30] It embodies the same kind of incident which had so affected the master himself, in the papers to which I have referred; it shows the gentler influences which, in even those Californian wilds, can restore outlawed "roaring camps" to silence and humanity; and there is hardly any form of posthumous tribute which I can imagine likely to have better satisfied his desire of fame than one which should thus connect, with the special favorite among all his heroines, the restraints and authority exerted by his genius over the rudest and least civilized of competitors in that far fierce race for wealth. "Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, The river sang below; The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting Their minarets of snow: "The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted The ruddy tints of health On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted In the fierce race for wealth; "Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure A hoarded volume drew, And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure To hear the tale anew; "And then, while round them shadows gathered faster, And as the fire-light fell, He read aloud the book wherein the Master Had writ of 'Little Nell:' "Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy,--for the reader Was youngest of them all,-- But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar A silence seemed to fall; "The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows, Listened in every spray, While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows Wandered and lost their way. "And so in mountain solitudes--o'ertaken As by some spell divine-- Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken From out the gusty pine. "Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire; And he who wrought that spell?-- Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire, Ye have one tale to tell! "Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story Blend with the breath that thrills With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory That fills the Kentish hills. "And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,-- This spray of Western pine! "July, 1870." FOOTNOTES: [29] I have mentioned the fact in my _Life of Landor_; and to the passage I here add the comment made by Dickens when he read it: "It was at a celebration of his birthday in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35, St. James's Square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator. No character in prose fiction was a greater favorite with Landor. He thought that, upon her, Juliet might for a moment have turned her eyes from Romeo, and that Desdemona might have taken her hair-breadth escapes to heart, so interesting and pathetic did she seem to him; and when, some years later, the circumstance I have named was recalled to him, he broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed the fact, and added that he had never in his life regretted anything so much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35, St. James's Square, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become conscious of our sense of his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter." Dickens had himself proposed to tell this story as a contribution to my biography of our common friend, but his departure for America prevented him. "I see," he wrote to me, as soon as the published book reached him, "you have told, with what our friend would have called _won_-derful accuracy, the little St. James's Square story, which a certain faithless wretch was to have related." [30] _Poems._ By Bret Harte (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1871), pp. 32-35. CHAPTER XIII. DEVONSHIRE TERRACE AND BROADSTAIRS. 1840. A Good Saying--Landor mystified--The Mirthful Side of Dickens--Extravagant Flights--Humorous Despair--Riding Exercise--First of the Ravens--The Groom Topping--The Smoky Chimneys--Juryman at an Inquest--Practical Humanity--Publication of _Clock's_ First Number--Transfer of _Barnaby_ settled--A True Prediction--Revisiting Old Scenes--C. D. to Chapman & Hall--Terms of Sale of _Barnaby_--A Gift to a Friend--Final Escape from Bondage--Published Libels about him--Said to be demented--To be insane and turned Catholic--Begging Letter-Writers--A Donkey asked for--Mr. Kindheart--Friendly Meetings--Social Talk--Reconciling Friends--Hint for judging Men. IT was an excellent saying of the first Lord Shaftesbury, that, seeing every man of any capacity holds within himself two men, the wise and the foolish, each of them ought freely to be allowed his turn; and it was one of the secrets of Dickens's social charm that he could, in strict accordance with this saying, allow each part of him its turn; could afford thoroughly to give rest and relief to what was serious in him, and, when the time came to play his gambols, could surrender himself wholly to the enjoyment of the time, and become the very genius and embodiment of one of his own most whimsical fancies. Turning back from the narrative of his last piece of writing to recall a few occurrences of the year during which it had occupied him, I find him at its opening in one of these humorous moods, and another friend, with myself, enslaved by its influence. "What on earth does it all mean?" wrote poor puzzled Mr. Landor to me, inclosing a letter from him of the date of the 11th of February, the day after the royal nuptials of that year. In this he had related to our old friend a wonderful hallucination arising out of that event, which had then taken entire possession of him. "Society is unhinged here," thus ran the letter, "by her majesty's marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen hopelessly in love with the Queen, and wander up and down with vague and dismal thoughts of running away to some uninhabited island with a maid of honor, to be entrapped by conspiracy for that purpose. Can you suggest any particular young person, serving in such a capacity, who would suit me? It is too much perhaps to ask you to join the band of noble youths (Forster is in it, and Maclise) who are to assist me in this great enterprise, but a man of your energy would be invaluable. I have my eye upon Lady . . . , principally because she is very beautiful and has no strong brothers. Upon this, and other points of the scheme, however, we will confer more at large when we meet; and meanwhile burn this document, that no suspicion may arise or rumor get abroad." The maid of honor and the uninhabited island were flights of fancy, but the other daring delusion was for a time encouraged to such whimsical lengths, not alone by him, but (under his influence) by the two friends named, that it took the wildest forms of humorous extravagance; and of the private confidences much interchanged, as well as of the style of open speech in which our joke of despairing unfitness for any further use or enjoyment of life was unflaggingly kept up, to the amazement of bystanders knowing nothing of what it meant, and believing we had half lost our senses, I permit myself to give from his letters one further illustration. "I am utterly lost in misery," he writes to me on the 12th of February, "and can do nothing. I have been reading _Oliver_, _Pickwick_, and _Nickleby_ to get my thoughts together for the new effort, but all in vain: "My heart is at Windsor, My heart isn't here; My heart is at Windsor. A following my dear. I saw the Responsibilities this morning, and burst into tears. The presence of my wife aggravates me. I loathe my parents. I detest my house. I begin to have thoughts of the Serpentine, of the Regent's Canal, of the razors up-stairs, of the chemist's down the street, of poisoning myself at Mrs. ----'s table, of hanging myself upon the pear-tree in the garden, of abstaining from food and starving myself to death, of being bled for my cold and tearing off the bandage, of falling under the feet of cab-horses in the New Road, of murdering Chapman & Hall and becoming great in story (SHE must hear something of me then--perhaps sign the warrant: or is that a fable?), of turning Chartist, of heading some bloody assault upon the palace and saving Her by my single hand--of being anything but what I have been, and doing anything but what I have done. Your distracted friend, C. D." The wild derangement of asterisks in every shape and form, with which this incoherence closed, cannot here be given. Some ailments which dated from an earlier period in his life made themselves felt in the spring of the year, as I remember, and increased horse-exercise was strongly recommended to him. "I find it will be positively necessary to go, for five days in the week, at least," he wrote to me in March, "on a perfect regimen of diet and exercise, and am anxious therefore not to delay treating for a horse." We were now in consequence, when he was not at the sea-side, much on horseback in suburban lanes and roads; and the spacious garden of his new house was also turned to healthful use at even his busiest times of work. I mark this, too, as the time when the first of his ravens took up residence there; and as the beginning of disputes with two of his neighbors about the smoking of the stable-chimney, which his groom Topping, a highly absurd little man with flaming red hair, so complicated by secret devices of his own, meant to conciliate each complainant alternately and having the effect of aggravating both, that law-proceedings were only barely avoided. "I shall give you," he writes, "my latest report of the chimney in the form of an address from Topping, made to me on our way from little Hall's at Norwood the other night, where he and Chapman and I had been walking all day, while Topping drove Kate, Mrs. Hall, and her sisters, to Dulwich. Topping had been regaled upon the premises, and was just drunk enough to be confidential. 'Beggin' your pardon, sir, but the genelman next door sir, seems to be gettin' quite comfortable and pleasant about the chimley.'--'I don't think he is, Topping.'--'Yes he is sir I think. He comes out in the yard this morning and says, _Coachman_ he says' (observe the vision of a great large fat man called up by the word) _is that your raven_ he says, _Coachman? or is it Mr. Dickens's raven?_ he says. My master's sir, I says. Well, he says, It's a fine bird. _I think the chimley 'ill do now Coachman,--now the jint's taken off the pipe_ he says. I hope it will sir, I says; my master's a genelman as wouldn't annoy no genelman if he could help it, I'm sure; and my missis is so afraid of havin' a bit o' fire that o' Sundays our little bit o' weal or wot not, goes to the baker's a purpose.--_Damn the chimley, Coachman_, he says, _it's a smokin' now_.--It ain't a smokin' your way sir, I says; Well he says _no more it is, Coachman, and as long as it smokes anybody else's way, it's all right and I'm agreeable_.' Of course I shall now have the man from the other side upon me, and very likely with an action of nuisance for smoking into his conservatory." A graver incident, which occurred to him also among his earliest experiences as tenant of Devonshire Terrace, illustrates too well the always practical turn of his kindness and humanity not to deserve relation here. He has himself described it in one of his minor writings, in setting down what he remembered as the only good that ever came of a beadle. Of that great parish functionary, he says, "having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished metropolitan parish, a house which then appeared to me to be a frightfully first-class family mansion involving awful responsibilities, I became the prey." In other words, he was summoned, and obliged to sit, as juryman at an inquest on the body of a little child alleged to have been murdered by its mother; of which the result was, that, by his persevering exertion, seconded by the humane help of the coroner, Mr. Wakley, the verdict of himself and his fellow-jurymen charged her only with concealment of the birth. "The poor desolate creature dropped upon her knees before us with protestations that we were right (protestations among the most affecting that I have ever heard in my life), and was carried away insensible. I caused some extra care to be taken of her in the prison, and counsel to be retained for her defense when she was tried at the Old Bailey; and her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it was right." How much he felt the little incident, at the actual time of its occurrence, may be judged from the few lines written to me next morning: "Whether it was the poor baby, or its poor mother, or the coffin, or my fellow-jurymen, or what not, I can't say, but last night I had a most violent attack of sickness and indigestion, which not only prevented me from sleeping, but even from lying down. Accordingly Kate and I sat up through the dreary watches." The day of the first publication of _Master Humphrey_ (Saturday, 4th April) had by this time come, and, according to the rule observed in his two other great ventures, he left town with Mrs. Dickens on Friday, the 3d. With Maclise we had been together at Richmond the previous night; and I joined him at Birmingham the day following with news of the sale of the whole sixty thousand copies to which the first working had been limited, and of orders already in hand for ten thousand more! The excitement of the success somewhat lengthened our holiday; and, after visiting Shakspeare's house at Stratford and Johnson's at Lichfield, we found our resources so straitened in returning, that, employing as our messenger of need his younger brother Alfred, who had joined us from Tamworth, where he was a student-engineer, we had to pawn our gold watches at Birmingham. At the end of the following month he went to Broadstairs, and not many days before (on the 20th of May) a note from Mr. Jordan on behalf of Mr. Bentley opened the negotiations formerly referred to,[31] which transferred to Messrs. Chapman & Hall the agreement for _Barnaby Rudge_. I was myself absent when he left, and in a letter announcing his departure he had written, "I don't know of a word of news in all London, but there will be plenty next week, for I am going away, and I hope you'll send me an account of it. I am doubtful whether it will be a murder, a fire, a vast robbery, or the escape of Gould, but it will be something remarkable no doubt. I almost blame myself for the death of that poor girl who leaped off the monument upon my leaving town last year. She would not have done it if I had remained, neither would the two men have found the skeleton in the sewers." His prediction was quite accurate, for I had to tell him, after not many days, of the potboy who shot at the queen. "It's a great pity," he replied, very sensibly, "they couldn't suffocate that boy, Master Oxford, and say no more about it. To have put him quietly between two feather beds would have stopped his heroic speeches, and dulled the sound of his glory very much. As it is, she will have to run the gauntlet of many a fool and madman, some of whom may perchance be better shots and use other than Brummagem firearms." How much of this actually came to pass, the reader knows. From the letters of his present Broadstairs visit, there is little further to add to their account of his progress with his story; but a couple more lines may be given for their characteristic expression of his invariable habit upon entering any new abode, whether to stay in it for days or for years. On a Monday night he arrived, and on the Tuesday (2d of June) wrote to me, "_Before_ I tasted bit or drop yesterday, I set out my writing-table with extreme taste and neatness, and improved the disposition of the furniture generally." He stayed till the end of June; when Maclise and myself joined him for the pleasure of posting back home with him and Mrs. Dickens, by way of his favorite Chatham and Rochester and Cobham, where we passed two agreeable days in revisiting well-remembered scenes. I had meanwhile brought to a close the treaty for repurchase of _Oliver_ and surrender of _Barnaby_, upon terms which are succinctly stated in a letter written by him to Messrs. Chapman & Hall on the 2d of July, the day after our return: "The terms upon which you advance the money to-day for the purchase of the copyright and stock[32] of _Oliver_ on my behalf are understood between us to be these. That this 2250_l._ is to be deducted from the purchase-money of a work by me entitled _Barnaby Rudge_, of which two chapters are now in your hands, and of which the whole is to be written within some convenient time to be agreed upon between us. But if it should not be written (which God forbid!) within five years, you are to have a lien to this amount on the property belonging to me that is now in your hands, namely, my shares in the stock and copyright of _Sketches by Boz_, _The Pickwick Papers_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Oliver Twist_, and _Master Humphrey's Clock_; in which we do not include any share of the current profits of the last-named work, which I shall remain at liberty to draw at the times stated in our agreement. Your purchase of _Barnaby Rudge_ is made upon the following terms. It is to consist of matter sufficient for ten monthly numbers of the size of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, which you are, however, at liberty to divide and publish in fifteen smaller numbers if you think fit. The terms for the purchase of this edition in numbers, and for the copyright of the whole book for six months after the publication of the last number, are 3000_l._ At the expiration of the six months the whole copyright reverts to me." The sequel was, as all the world knows, that Barnaby became successor to Little Nell, the money being repaid by the profits of the _Clock_; but I ought to mention also the more generous sequel that my own small service had, on my receiving from him, after not many days, an antique silver-mounted jug of great beauty of form and workmanship, but with a wealth far beyond jeweler's chasing or artist's design in the written words that accompanied it.[33] I accepted them to commemorate, not the help they would have far overpaid, but the gladness of his own escape from the last of the agreements that had hampered the opening of his career, and the better future that was now before him. At the opening of August he was with Mrs. Dickens for some days in Devonshire, on a visit to his father, but he had to take his work with him; and, as he wrote to me, they had only one real holiday, when Dawlish, Teignmouth, Babbicombe, and Torquay were explored, returning to Exeter at night. In the beginning of September he was again at Broadstairs. "I was just going to work," he wrote on the 9th, "when I got this letter, and the story of the man who went to Chapman & Hall's knocked me down flat. I wrote until now (a quarter to one) against the grain, and have at last given it up for one day. Upon my word it is intolerable. I have been grinding my teeth all the morning. I think I could say in two lines something about the general report with propriety. I'll add them to the proof" (the preface to the first volume of the _Clock_ was at this time in preparation), "giving you full power to cut them out if you should think differently from me, and from C. and H., who in such a matter must be admitted judges." He refers here to a report, rather extensively circulated at the time, and which through various channels had reached his publishers, that he was suffering from loss of reason and was under treatment in an asylum.[34] I would have withheld from him the mention of it, as an absurdity that must quickly pass away, but against my wish it had been communicated to him, and I had difficulty in keeping within judicious bounds his extreme and very natural wrath. A few days later (the 15th) he wrote, "I have been rather surprised of late to have applications from Roman Catholic clergymen, demanding (rather pastorally, and with a kind of grave authority) assistance, literary employment, and so forth. At length it struck me that, through some channel or other, I must have been represented as belonging to that religion. Would you believe that in a letter from Lamert, at Cork, to my mother, which I saw last night, he says, 'What do the papers mean by saying that Charles is demented, and, further, _that he has turned Roman Catholic_?'--!" Of the begging-letter-writers, hinted at here, I ought earlier to have said something. In one of his detached essays he has described, without a particle of exaggeration, the extent to which he was made a victim by this class of swindler, and the extravagance of the devices practiced on him; but he has not confessed, as he might, that for much of what he suffered he was himself responsible, by giving so largely, as at first he did, to almost every one who applied to him. What at last brought him to his senses in this respect, I think, was the request made by the adventurer who had exhausted every other expedient, and who desired finally, after describing himself reduced to the condition of a traveling Cheap Jack in the smallest way of crockery, that a donkey might be left out for him next day, which he would duly call for. This I perfectly remember, and I much fear that the applicant was the Daniel Tobin before mentioned.[35] Many and delightful were other letters written from Broadstairs at this date, filled with whimsical talk and humorous description relating chiefly to an eccentric friend who stayed with him most of the time, and is sketched in one of his published papers as Mr. Kindheart; but all too private for reproduction now. He returned in the middle of October, when we resumed our almost daily ridings, foregatherings with Maclise at Hampstead and elsewhere, and social entertainments with Macready, Talfourd, Procter, Stanfield, Fonblanque, Elliotson, Tennent, D'Orsay, Quin, Harness, Wilkie, Edwin Landseer, Rogers, Sydney Smith, and Bulwer. Of the genius of the author of _Pelham_ and _Eugene Aram_ he had, early and late, the highest admiration, and he took occasion to express it during the present year in a new preface which he published to _Oliver Twist_. Other friends became familiar in later years; but, disinclined as he was to the dinner-invitations that reached him from every quarter, all such meetings with those whom I have named, and in an especial manner the marked attentions shown him by Miss Coutts which began with the very beginning of his career, were invariably welcome. To speak here of the pleasure his society afforded, would anticipate the fitter mention to be made hereafter. But what in this respect distinguishes nearly all original men, he possessed eminently. His place was not to be filled up by any other. To the most trivial talk he gave the attraction of his own character. It might be a small matter,--something he had read or observed during the day, some quaint odd fancy from a book, a vivid little out-door picture, the laughing exposure of some imposture, or a burst of sheer mirthful enjoyment,--but of its kind it would be something unique, because genuinely part of himself. This, and his unwearying animal spirits, made him the most delightful of companions; no claim on good-fellowship ever found him wanting; and no one so constantly recalled to his friends the description Johnson gave of Garrick, as the cheerfulest man of his age. Of what occupied him in the way of literary labor in the autumn and winter months of the year, some description has been given; and, apart from what has already thus been said of his work at the closing chapters of _The Old Curiosity Shop_, nothing now calls for more special allusion, except that in his town-walks in November, impelled thereto by specimens recently discovered in his country-walks between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven-Dials, and took to singing himself, with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood, not a few of these wonderful productions. His last successful labor of the year was the reconciliation of two friends; and his motive, as well as the principle that guided him, as they are described by himself, I think worth preserving. For the first: "In the midst of this child's death, I, over whom something of the bitterness of death has passed, not lightly perhaps, was reminded of many old kindnesses, and was sorry in my heart that men who really liked each other should waste life at arm's length." For the last: "I have laid it down as a rule in my judgment of men, to observe narrowly whether some (of whom one is disposed to think badly) don't carry all their faults upon the surface, and others (of whom one is disposed to think well) don't carry many more beneath it. I have long ago made sure that our friend is in the first class; and when I know all the foibles a man has, with little trouble in the discovery, I begin to think he is worth liking." His latest letter of the year, dated the day following, closed with the hope that we might, he and I, enjoy together "fifty more Christmases, at least, in this world, and eternal summers in another." Alas! FOOTNOTES: [31] See _ante_, p. 163. [32] By way of a novelty to help off the stock, he had suggested (17th June), "Would it not be best to print new title-pages to the copies sheets and publish them as a new edition, with an interesting Preface? I am talking about all this as though the treaty were concluded, but I hope and trust that in effect it is, for negotiation and delay are worse to me than drawn daggers." See my remark _ante_, p. 123. [33] "Accept from me" (July 8, 1840), "as a slight memorial of your attached companion, the poor keepsake which accompanies this. My heart is not an eloquent one on matters which touch it most, but suppose this claret-jug the urn in which it lies, and believe that its warmest and truest blood is yours. This was the object of my fruitless search, and your curiosity, on Friday. At first I scarcely knew what trifle (you will deem it valuable, I know, for the giver's sake) to send you; but I thought it would be pleasant to connect it with our jovial moments, and to let it add, to the wine we shall drink from it together, a flavor which the choicest vintage could never impart. Take it from my hand,--filled to the brim and running over with truth and earnestness. I have just taken one parting look at it, and it seems the most elegant thing in the world to me, for I lose sight of the vase in the crowd of welcome associations that are clustering and wreathing themselves about it." [34] Already he had been the subject of similar reports on the occasion of the family sorrow which compelled him to suspend the publication of _Pickwick_ for two months (_ante_, p. 120), when, upon issuing a brief address in resuming his work (30th June, 1837), he said, "By one set of intimate acquaintances, especially well informed, he has been killed outright; by another, driven mad; by a third, imprisoned for debt; by a fourth, sent per steamer to the United States; by a fifth, rendered incapable of mental exertion for evermore; by all, in short, represented as doing anything but seeking in a few weeks' retirement the restoration of that cheerfulness and peace of which a sad bereavement had temporarily deprived him." [35] See _ante_, p. 81. CHAPTER XIV. BARNABY RUDGE. 1841. Advantage in beginning _Barnaby_--Birth of Fourth Child and Second Son--The Raven--A Loss in the Family--Grip's Death--C. D. describes his Illness--Family Mourners--Apotheosis by Maclise--Grip the Second--The Inn at Chigwell--A _Clock_ Dinner--Lord Jeffrey in London--The _Lamplighter_--The _Pic Nic Papers_--Character of Lord George Gordon--A Doubtful Fancy--Interest in New Labor--Constraints of Weekly Publication--The Prison-Riots--A Serious Illness--Close of _Barnaby_--Character of the Tale--Defects in the Plot--The No-Popery Riots--Descriptive Power displayed--Leading Persons in Story--Mr. Dennis the Hangman. THE letters of 1841 yield similar fruit as to his doings and sayings, and may in like manner first be consulted for the literary work he had in hand. He had the advantage of beginning _Barnaby Rudge_ with a fair amount of story in advance, which he had only to make suitable, by occasional readjustment of chapters, to publication in weekly portions; and on this he was engaged before the end of January. "I am at present" (22d January, 1841) "in what Leigh Hunt would call a kind of impossible state,--thinking what on earth Master Humphrey can think of through four mortal pages. I added, here and there, to the last chapter of the _Curiosity Shop_ yesterday, and it leaves me only four pages to write." (They were filled by a paper from Humphrey introductory of the new tale, in which will be found a striking picture of London from midnight to the break of day.) "I also made up, and wrote the needful insertions for, the second number of _Barnaby_,--so that I came back to the mill a little." Hardly yet; for after four days he writes, having meanwhile done nothing, "I have been looking (three o'clock) with an appearance of extraordinary interest and study at _one leaf_ of the _Curiosities of Literature_ ever since half-past ten this morning--I haven't the heart to turn over." Then on Friday the 29th better news came. "I didn't stir out yesterday, but sat and _thought_ all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of _Barnaby_ by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope, and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable. . . . By-the-by, don't engage yourself otherwise than to me for Sunday week, because it's my birthday. I have no doubt we shall have got over our troubles here by that time, and I purpose having a snug dinner in the study." We had the dinner, though the troubles were not over; but the next day another son was born to him. "Thank God," he wrote on the 9th, "quite well. I am thinking hard, and have just written to Browne inquiring when he will come and confer about the raven." He had by this time resolved to make that bird, whose accomplishments had been daily ripening and enlarging for the last twelve months to the increasing mirth and delight of all of us, a prominent figure in _Barnaby_; and the invitation to the artist was for a conference how best to introduce him graphically. The next letter mentioning _Barnaby_ was from Brighton (25th February), whither he had flown for a week's quiet labor: "I have (it's four o'clock) done a very fair morning's work, at which I have sat very close, and been blessed besides with a clear view of the end of the volume. As the contents of one number usually require a day's thought at the very least, and often more, this puts me in great spirits. I think--that is, I hope--the story takes a great stride at this point, and takes it WELL. Nous verrons. Grip will be strong, and I build greatly on the Varden household." Upon his return he had to lament a domestic calamity, which, for its connection with that famous personage in _Barnaby_, must be mentioned here. The raven had for some days been ailing, and Topping had reported of him, as Shakspeare of Hamlet, that he had lost his mirth and foregone all customary exercises; but Dickens paid no great heed, remembering his recovery from an illness of the previous summer when he swallowed some white paint; so that the graver report which led him to send for the doctor came upon him unexpectedly, and nothing but his own language can worthily describe the result. Unable from the state of his feelings to write two letters, he sent the narrative to Maclise, under an enormous black seal, for transmission to me; and thus it befell that this fortunate bird receives a double passport to fame, so great a humorist having celebrated his farewell to the present world, and so great a painter his welcome to another. "You will be greatly shocked" (the letter is dated Friday evening, March 12, 1841) "and grieved to hear that the Raven is no more. He expired to-day at a few minutes after twelve o'clock at noon. He had been ailing for a few days, but we anticipated no serious result, conjecturing that a portion of the white paint he swallowed last summer might be lingering about his vitals without having any serious effect upon his constitution. Yesterday afternoon he was taken so much worse that I sent an express for the medical gentleman (Mr. Herring), who promptly attended, and administered a powerful dose of castor oil. Under the influence of this medicine, he recovered so far as to be able at eight o'clock P.M. to bite Topping. His night was peaceful. This morning at daybreak he appeared better; received (agreeably to the doctor's directions) another dose of castor oil; and partook plentifully of some warm gruel, the flavor of which he appeared to relish. Towards eleven o'clock he was so much worse that it was found necessary to muffle the stable-knocker. At half-past, or thereabouts, he was heard talking to himself about the horse and Topping's family, and to add some incoherent expressions which are supposed to have been either a foreboding of his approaching dissolution, or some wishes relative to the disposal of his little property: consisting chiefly of half-pence which he had buried in different parts of the garden. On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed _Halloa old girl!_ (his favorite expression), and died. "He behaved throughout with a decent fortitude, equanimity, and self-possession, which cannot be too much admired. I deeply regret that being in ignorance of his danger I did not attend to receive his last instructions. Something remarkable about his eyes occasioned Topping to run for the doctor at twelve. When they returned together our friend was gone. It was the medical gentleman who informed me of his decease. He did it with great caution and delicacy, preparing me by the remark that 'a jolly queer start had taken place;' but the shock was very great notwithstanding. I am not wholly free from suspicions of poison. A malicious butcher has been heard to say that he would 'do' for him: his plea was that he would not be molested in taking orders down the mews, by any bird that wore a tail. Other persons have also been heard to threaten: among others, Charles Knight, who has just started a weekly publication price fourpence: _Barnaby_ being, as you know, threepence. I have directed a post-mortem examination, and the body has been removed to Mr. Herring's school of anatomy for that purpose. "I could wish, if you can take the trouble, that you could inclose this to Forster immediately after you have read it. I cannot discharge the painful task of communication more than once. Were they ravens who took manna to somebody in the wilderness? At times I hope they were, and at others I fear they were not, or they would certainly have stolen it by the way. In profound sorrow, I am ever your bereaved friend C. D. Kate is as well as can be expected, but terribly low, as you may suppose. The children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles. But that was play." [Illustration: [Sideways text: apotheosis] My dear Forster Dickens desires me transmit to you the enclosed announcement of the Raven's decease - which took place in Devonshire Terrace March 1841 HIC DM] Maclise's covering letter was an apotheosis, to be rendered only in fac-simile. In what way the loss was replaced, so that _Barnaby_ should have the fruit of continued study of the habits of the family of birds which Grip had so nobly represented, Dickens has told in the preface to the story; and another, older, and larger Grip, obtained through Mr. Smithson, was installed in the stable, almost before the stuffed remains of his honored predecessor had been sent home in a glass case, by way of ornament to his master's study. I resume our correspondence on what he was writing: "I see there is yet room for a few lines" (25th March), "and you are quite right in wishing what I cut out to be restored. I did not want Joe to be so short about Dolly, and really wrote his references to that young lady carefully,--as natural things with a meaning in them. Chigwell, my dear fellow, is the greatest place in the world. Name your day for going. Such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,--such a lovely ride,--such beautiful forest scenery,--such an out-of-the-way, rural place,--such a sexton! I say again, name your day." The day was named at once; and the whitest of stones marks it, in now sorrowful memory. His promise was exceeded by our enjoyment; and his delight in the double recognition, of himself and of _Barnaby_, by the landlord of the nice old inn, far exceeded any pride he would have taken in what the world thinks the highest sort of honor. "I have shut myself up" (26th March) "by myself to-day, and mean to try and 'go it' at the _Clock_; Kate being out, and the house peacefully dismal. I don't remember altering the exact part you object to, but if there be anything here you object to, knock it out ruthlessly." "Don't fail" (April the 5th) "to erase anything that seems to you too strong. It is difficult for me to judge what tells too much, and what does not. I am trying a very quiet number to set against this necessary one. I hope it will be good, but I am in very sad condition for work. Glad you think this powerful. What I have put in is more relief, from the raven." Two days later: "I have done that number, and am now going to work on another. I am bent (please Heaven) on finishing the first chapter by Friday night. I hope to look in upon you to-night, when we'll dispose of the toasts for Saturday. Still bilious--but a good number, I hope, notwithstanding. Jeffrey has come to town, and was here yesterday." The toasts to be disposed of were those to be given at the dinner on the 10th to celebrate the second volume of _Master Humphrey_: when Talfourd presided, when there was much jollity, and, according to the memorandum drawn up that Saturday night now lying before me, we all in the greatest good humor glorified each other: Talfourd proposing the _Clock_, Macready Mrs. Dickens, Dickens the publishers, and myself the artists; Macready giving Talfourd, Talfourd Macready, Dickens myself, and myself the comedian Mr. Harley, whose humorous songs had been the not least considerable element in the mirth of the evening. Five days later he writes, "I finished the number yesterday, and, although I dined with Jeffrey, and was obliged to go to Lord Denman's afterwards (which made me late), have done eight slips of the _Lamplighter_ for Mrs. Macrone, this morning. When I have got that off my mind, I shall try to go on steadily, fetching up the _Clock_ lee-way." The _Lamplighter_ was his old farce,[36] which he now turned into a comic tale; and this, with other contributions given him by friends and edited by him as _Pic Nic Papers_, enabled him to help the widow of his old publisher in her straitened means by a gift of £300. He had finished his work of charity before he next wrote of _Barnaby Rudge_, but he was fetching up his lee-way lazily. "I am getting on" (29th of April) "very slowly. I want to stick to the story; and the fear of committing myself, because of the impossibility of trying back or altering a syllable, makes it much harder than it looks. It was too bad of me to give you the trouble of cutting the number, but I knew so well you would do it in the right places. For what Harley would call the 'onward work' I really think I have some famous thoughts." There is an interval of a month before the next allusion: "Solomon's expression" (3d of June) "I meant to be one of those strong ones to which strong circumstances give birth in the commonest minds. Deal with it as you like. . . . Say what you please of Gordon" (I had objected to some points in his view of this madman, stated much too favorably as I thought), "he must have been at heart a kind man, and a lover of the despised and rejected, after his own fashion. He lived upon a small income, and always within it; was known to relieve the necessities of many people; exposed in his place the corrupt attempt of a minister to buy him out of Parliament; and did great charities in Newgate. He always spoke on the people's side, and tried against his muddled brains to expose the profligacy of both parties. He never got anything by his madness, and never sought it. The wildest and most raging attacks of the time allow him these merits: and not to let him have 'em in their full extent, remembering in what a (politically) wicked time he lived, would lie upon my conscience heavily. The libel he was imprisoned for when he died, was on the Queen of France; and the French government interested themselves warmly to procure his release,--which I think they might have done, but for Lord Grenville." I was more successful in the counsel I gave against a fancy he had at this part of the story, that he would introduce as actors in the Gordon riots three splendid fellows who should order, lead, control, and be obeyed as natural guides of the crowd in that delirious time, and who should turn out, when all was over, to have broken out from Bedlam; but, though he saw the unsoundness of this, he could not so readily see, in Gordon's case, the danger of taxing ingenuity to ascribe a reasonable motive to acts of sheer insanity. The feeblest parts of the book are those in which Lord George and his secretary appear. He left for Scotland after the middle of June, but he took work with him. "You may suppose," he wrote from Edinburgh on the 30th, "I have not done much work; but by Friday night's post from here I hope to send the first long chapter of a number and both the illustrations; from Loch Earn on Tuesday night, the closing chapter of that number; from the same place on Thursday night, the first long chapter of another, with both the illustrations; and, from some place which no man ever spelt but which sounds like Ballyhoolish, on Saturday, the closing chapter of that number, which will leave us all safe till I return to town." Nine days later he wrote from "Ballechelish," "I have done all I can or need do in the way of _Barnaby_ until I come home, and the story is progressing (I hope you will think) to good strong interest. I have left it, I think, at an exciting point, with a good dawning of the riots. In the first of the two numbers I have written since I have been away, I forget whether the blind man, in speaking to Barnaby about riches, tells him they are to be found in _crowds_. If I have not actually used that word, will you introduce it? A perusal of the proof of the following number (70) will show you how, and why." "Have you," he wrote shortly after his return (29th July), "seen No. 71? I thought there was a good glimpse of a crowd, from a window--eh?" He had now taken thoroughly to the interest of his closing chapters, and felt more than ever the constraints of his form of publication. "I am warming up very much" (on the 5th August from Broadstairs) "about _Barnaby_. Oh! if I only had him, from this time to the end, in monthly numbers. _N'importe!_ I hope the interest will be pretty strong,--and, in every number, stronger." Six days later, from the same place: "I was always sure I could make a good thing of _Barnaby_, and I think you'll find that it comes out strong to the last word. I have another number ready, all but two slips. Don't fear for young Chester. The time hasn't come----there we go again, you see, with the weekly delays. I am in great heart and spirits with the story, and with the prospect of having time to think before I go on again." A month's interval followed, and what occupied it will be described shortly. On the 11th September he wrote, "I have just burnt into Newgate, and am going in the next number to tear the prisoners out by the hair of their heads. The number which gets into the jail you'll have in proof by Tuesday." This was followed up a week later: "I have let all the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfield's, and played the very devil. Another number will finish the fires, and help us on towards the end. I feel quite smoky when I am at work. I want elbow-room terribly." To this trouble, graver supervened at his return, a serious personal sickness not the least; but he bore up gallantly, and I had never better occasion than now to observe his quiet endurance of pain, how little he thought of himself where the sense of self is commonly supreme, and the manful duty with which everything was done that, ailing as he was, he felt it necessary to do. He was still in his sick-room (22d October) when he wrote, "I hope I sha'n't leave off any more, now, until I have finished _Barnaby_." Three days after that, he was busying himself eagerly for others; and on the 2d of November the printers received the close of _Barnaby Rudge_. This tale was Dickens's first attempt out of the sphere of the life of the day and its actual manners. Begun during the progress of _Oliver Twist_, it had been for some time laid aside; the form it ultimately took had been comprised only partially within its first design; and the story in its finished shape presented strongly a special purpose, the characteristic of all but his very earliest writings. Its scene is laid at the time when the incessant execution of men and women, comparatively innocent, disgraced every part of the country; demoralizing thousands, whom it also prepared for the scaffold. In those days the theft of a few rags from a bleaching-ground, or the abstraction of a roll of ribbons from a counter, was visited with the penalty of blood; and such laws brutalized both their ministers and victims. It was the time, too, when a false religious outcry brought with it appalling guilt and misery. These are vices that leave more behind them than the first forms assumed, and they involve a lesson sufficiently required to justify a writer in dealing with them. There were also others grafted on them. In Barnaby himself it was desired to show what sources of comfort there might be, for the patient and cheerful heart, in even the worst of all human afflictions; and in the hunted life of his outcast father, whose crime had entailed not that affliction only but other more fearful wretchedness, we have as powerful a picture as any in his writings of the inevitable and unfathomable consequences of sin. But, as the story went on, it was incident to these designs that what had been accomplished in its predecessor could hardly be attained here, in singleness of purpose, unity of idea, or harmony of treatment; and other defects supervened in the management of the plot. The interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close; and what has chiefly taken the reader's fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later chapters, the great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable. There are few things more masterly in any of his books. From the first low mutterings of the storm to its last terrible explosion, this frantic outbreak of popular ignorance and rage is depicted with unabated power. The aimlessness of idle mischief by which the ranks of the rioters are swelled at the beginning; the recklessness induced by the monstrous impunity allowed to the early excesses; the sudden spread of this drunken guilt into every haunt of poverty, ignorance, or mischief in the wicked old city, where the rich materials of crime lie festering; the wild action of its poison on all, without scheme or plan of any kind, who come within its reach; the horrors that are more bewildering for this complete absence of purpose in them; and, when all is done, the misery found to have been self-inflicted in every cranny and corner of London, as if a plague had swept over the streets: these are features in the picture of an actual occurrence, to which the manner of the treatment gives extraordinary force and meaning. Nor, in the sequel, is there anything displayed with more profitable vividness than the law's indiscriminate cruelty at last, in contrast with its cowardly indifference at first; while, among the casual touches lighting up the scene with flashes of reality that illumine every part of it, may be instanced the discovery, in the quarter from which screams for succor are loudest when Newgate is supposed to be accidentally on fire, of four men who were certain in any case to have perished on the drop next day. The story, which has unusually careful writing in it, and much manly upright thinking, has not so many people eagerly adopted as of kin by everybody, as its predecessors are famous for; but it has yet a fair proportion of such as take solid form within the mind and keep hold of the memory. To these belong in an especial degree Gabriel Varden and his household, on whom are lavished all the writer's fondness and not a little of his keenest humor. The honest locksmith with his jovial jug, and the tink-tink-tink of his pleasant nature making cheerful music out of steel and iron; the buxom wife, with her plaguy tongue that makes every one wretched whom her kindly disposition would desire to make happy; the good-hearted plump little Dolly, coquettish minx of a daughter, with all she suffers and inflicts by her fickle winning ways and her small self-admiring vanities; and Miggs the vicious and slippery, acid, amatory, and of uncomfortable figure, sower of family discontents and discords, who swears all the while she wouldn't make or meddle with 'em "not for a annual gold-mine and found in tea and sugar:" there is not much social painting anywhere with a better domestic moral than in all these; and a nice propriety of feeling and thought regulates the use of such satire throughout. No one knows more exactly how far to go with that formidable weapon, or understands better that what satirizes everything, in effect satirizes nothing. Another excellent group is that which the story opens with, in the quaint old kitchen of the Maypole; John Willett and his friends, genuinely comic creations all of them. Then we have Barnaby and his raven: the light-hearted idiot, as unconscious of guilt as of suffering, and happy with no sense but of the influences of nature; and the grave sly bird, with sufficient sense to make himself as unhappy as rascally habits will make the human animal. There is poor brutish Hugh, too, loitering lazily outside the Maypole door, with a storm of passions in him raging to be let loose; already the scaffold's withered fruit, as he is doomed to be its ripe offering; and though with all the worst instincts of the savage, yet not without also some of the best. Still farther out of kindly nature's pitying reach lurks the worst villain of the scene: with this sole claim to consideration, that it was by constant contact with the filthiest instrument of law and state he had become the mass of moral filth he is. Mr. Dennis the hangman is a portrait that Hogarth would have painted with the same wholesome severity of satire which is employed upon it in _Barnaby Rudge_. FOOTNOTES: [36] See _ante_, pp. 125 and 183. CHAPTER XV. PUBLIC DINNER IN EDINBURGH. 1841. His Son Walter Landor--Dies in Calcutta (1863)--C. D. and the New Poor-Law--Moore and Rogers--Jeffrey's Praise of Little Nell--Resolve to visit Scotland--Edinburgh Dinner proposed--Sir David Wilkie's Death--Peter Robertson--Professor Wilson--A Fancy of Scott--Lionization made tolerable--Thoughts of Home--The Dinner and Speeches--His Reception--Wilson's Eulogy--Home Yearnings--Freedom of City voted to him--Speakers at the Dinner--Politics and Party Influences--Whig Jealousies--At the Theatre--Hospitalities--Moral of it all--Proposed Visit to the Highlands--Maclise and Macready--Guide to the Highlands--Mr. Angus Fletcher (Kindheart). AMONG the occurrences of the year, apart from the tale he was writing, the birth of his fourth child and second son has been briefly mentioned. "I mean to call the boy Edgar," he wrote, the day after he was born (9th February), "a good honest Saxon name, I think." He changed his mind in a few days, however, on resolving to ask Landor to be godfather. This intention, as soon as formed, he announced to our excellent old friend, telling him it would give the child something to boast of, to be called Walter Landor, and that to call him so would do his own heart good. For, as to himself, whatever realities had gone out of the ceremony of christening, the meaning still remained in it of enabling him to form a relationship with friends he most loved; and as to the boy, he held that to give him a name to be proud of was to give him also another reason for doing nothing unworthy or untrue when he came to be a man. Walter, alas! only lived to manhood. He obtained a military cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, and died at Calcutta on the last day of 1863, in his twenty-third year. The interest taken by this distinguished lady in him and in his had begun, as I have said, at an earlier date than even this; and I remember, while _Oliver Twist_ was going on, his pleasure because of her father's mention of him in a speech at Birmingham, for his advocacy of the cause of the poor. Whether to the new poor-law Sir Francis Burdett objected as strongly as we have seen that Dickens did, as well as many other excellent men, who forgot the atrocities of the system it displaced in their indignation at the needless and cruel harshness with which it was worked at the outset, I have not at hand the means of knowing. But certainly this continued to be strongly the feeling of Dickens, who exulted in nothing so much as at any misadventure to the Whigs in connection with it. "How often used Black and I," he wrote to me in April, "to quarrel about the effect of the poor-law bill! Walter comes in upon the cry. See whether the Whigs go out upon it." It was the strong desire he had to make himself heard upon it, even in Parliament, that led him not immediately to turn aside from a proposal, now privately made by some of the magnates of Reading, to bring him in for that borough; but the notion was soon dismissed, as, on its revival more than once in later times, it continued very wisely to be. His opinions otherwise were extremely radical at present, as will be apparent shortly; and he did not at all relish Peel's majority of one when it came soon after, and unseated the Whigs. It was just now, I may add, he greatly enjoyed a quiet setting-down of Moore by Rogers at Sir Francis Burdett's table, for talking exaggerated toryism. So debased was the House of Commons by reform, said Moore, that a Burke, if you could find him, would not be listened to. "No such thing, Tommy," said Rogers; "_find yourself_, and they'd listen even to you." This was not many days before he hinted to me an intention soon to be carried out in a rather memorable manner: "I have done nothing to-day" (18th March: we had bought books together, the day before, at Tom Hill's sale) "but cut the _Swift_, looking into it with a delicious laziness in all manner of delightful places, and put poor Tom's books away. I had a letter from Edinburgh this morning, announcing that Jeffrey's visit to London will be the week after next; telling me that he drives about Edinburgh declaring there has been 'nothing so good as Nell since Cordelia,' which he writes also to all manner of people; and informing me of a desire in that romantic town to give me greeting and welcome. For this and other reasons I am disposed to make Scotland my destination in June rather than Ireland. Think, _do_ think, meantime (here are ten good weeks), whether you couldn't, by some effort worthy of the owner of the gigantic helmet, go with us. Think of such a fortnight,--York, Carlisle, Berwick, your own Borders, Edinburgh, Rob Roy's country, railroads, cathedrals, country inns, Arthur's Seat, lochs, glens, and home by sea. DO think of this, seriously, at leisure." It was very tempting, but not to be. Early in April Jeffrey came, many feasts and entertainments welcoming him, of which he very sparingly partook; and before he left, the visit to Scotland in June was all duly arranged, to be initiated by the splendid welcome of a public dinner in Edinburgh, with Lord Jeffrey himself in the chair. Allan the painter had come up meanwhile, with increasing note of preparation; and it was while we were all regretting Wilkie's absence abroad, and Dickens with warrantable pride was saying how surely the great painter would have gone to this dinner, that the shock of his sudden death[37] came, and there was left but the sorrowful satisfaction of honoring his memory. There was one other change before the day. "I heard from Edinburgh this morning," he wrote on the 15th of June. "Jeffrey is not well enough to take the chair, so Wilson does. I think under all circumstances of politics, acquaintance, and _Edinburgh Review_, that it's much better as it is--Don't you?" His first letter from Edinburgh, where he and Mrs. Dickens had taken up quarters at the Royal Hotel on their arrival the previous night, is dated the 23d of June: "I have been this morning to the Parliament House, and am now introduced (I hope) to everybody in Edinburgh. The hotel is perfectly besieged, and I have been forced to take refuge in a sequestered apartment at the end of a long passage, wherein I write this letter. They talk of 300 at the dinner. We are very well off in point of rooms, having a handsome sitting-room, another next to it for _Clock_ purposes, a spacious bedroom, and large dressing-room adjoining. The castle is in front of the windows, and the view noble. There was a supper ready last night which would have been a dinner anywhere." This was his first practical experience of the honors his fame had won for him, and it found him as eager to receive as all were eager to give. Very interesting still, too, are those who took leading part in the celebration; and in his pleasant sketches of them there are some once famous and familiar figures not so well known to the present generation. Here, among the first, are Wilson and Robertson. "The renowned Peter Robertson is a large, portly, full-faced man, with a merry eye, and a queer way of looking under his spectacles which is characteristic and pleasant. He seems a very warm-hearted earnest man too, and I felt quite at home with him forthwith. Walking up and down the hall of the courts of law (which was full of advocates, writers to the signet, clerks, and idlers) was a tall, burly, handsome man of eight-and-fifty, with a gait like O'Connell's, the bluest eye you can imagine, and long hair--longer than mine--falling down in a wild way under the broad brim of his hat. He had on a surtout coat, a blue checked shirt; the collar standing up, and kept in its place with a wisp of black neckerchief; no waistcoat; and a large pocket-handkerchief thrust into his breast, which was all broad and open. At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his eyes as wide open as he could get them. I guessed it was Wilson, and it was. A bright, clear-complexioned, mountain-looking fellow, he looks as though he had just come down from the Highlands, and had never in his life taken pen in hand. But he has had an attack of paralysis in his right arm, within this month. He winced when I shook hands with him; and once or twice, when we were walking up and down, slipped as if he had stumbled on a piece of orange-peel. He is a great fellow to look at, and to talk to; and, if you could divest your mind of the actual Scott, is just the figure you would put in his place." Nor have the most ordinary incidents of the visit any lack of interest for us now, in so far as they help to complete the picture of himself: "Allan has been squiring me about, all the morning. He and Fletcher have gone to a meeting of the dinner-stewards, and I take the opportunity of writing to you. They dine with us to-day, and we are going to-night to the theatre. M'Ian is playing there. I mean to leave a card for him before evening. We are engaged for every day of our stay, already; but the people I have seen are so very hearty and warm in their manner that much of the horrors of lionization gives way before it. I am glad to find that they propose giving me for a toast on Friday the Memory of Wilkie. I should have liked it better than anything, if I could have made my choice. Communicate all particulars to Mac. I would to God you were both here. Do dine together at the Gray's Inn on Friday, and think of me. If I don't drink my first glass of wine to you, may my pistols miss fire, and my mare slip her shoulder. All sorts of regard from Kate. She has gone with Miss Allan to see the house she was born in, etc. Write me soon, and long, etc." His next letter was written the morning after the dinner, on Saturday, the 26th June: "The great event is over; and, being gone, I am a man again. It was the most brilliant affair you can conceive; the completest success possible, from first to last. The room was crammed, and more than seventy applicants for tickets were of necessity refused yesterday. Wilson was ill, but plucked up like a lion, and spoke famously.[38] I send you a paper herewith, but the report is dismal in the extreme. They say there will be a better one--I don't know where or when. Should there be, I will send it to you. I _think_ (ahem!) that I spoke rather well. It was an excellent room, and both the subjects (Wilson and Scottish Literature, and the Memory of Wilkie) were good to go upon. There were nearly two hundred ladies present. The place is so contrived that the cross table is raised enormously: much above the heads of people sitting below: and the effect on first coming in (on me, I mean) was rather tremendous. I was quite self-possessed, however, and, notwithstanding the enthoosemoosy, which was very startling, as cool as a cucumber. I wish to God you had been there, as it is impossible for the 'distinguished guest' to describe the scene. It beat all natur.". . . Here was the close of his letter: "I have been expecting every day to hear from you, and not hearing mean to make this the briefest epistle possible. We start next Sunday (that's to-morrow week). We are going out to Jeffrey's to-day (he is very unwell), and return here to-morrow evening. If I don't find a letter from you when I come back, expect no Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life from your indignant correspondent. Murray the manager made very excellent, tasteful, and gentlemanly mention of Macready, about whom Wilson had been asking me divers questions during dinner." "A hundred thanks for your letter," he writes four days later. "I read it this morning with the greatest pleasure and delight, and answer it with ditto, ditto. Where shall I begin--about my darlings? I am delighted with Charley's precocity. He takes arter his father, he does. God bless them, you can't imagine (_you!_ how can you?) how much I long to see them. It makes me quite sorrowful to think of them. . . . Yesterday, sir, the lord provost, council, and magistrates voted me by acclamation the freedom of the city, in testimony (I quote the letter just received from 'James Forrest, lord provost') 'of the sense entertained by them of your distinguished abilities as an author.' I acknowledged this morning in appropriate terms the honor they had done me, and through me the pursuit to which I was devoted. It _is_ handsome, is it not?" The parchment scroll of the city-freedom, recording the grounds on which it was voted, hung framed in his study to the last, and was one of his valued possessions. Answering some question of mine, he told me further as to the speakers, and gave some amusing glimpses of the party-spirit which still at that time ran high in the capital of the north. "The men who spoke at the dinner were all the most rising men here, and chiefly at the Bar. They were all, alternately, Whigs and Tories; with some few Radicals, such as Gordon, who gave the memory of Burns. He is Wilson's son-in-law and the lord-advocate's nephew--a very masterly speaker indeed, who ought to become a distinguished man. Neaves, who gave the other poets, a _little_ too lawyer-like for my taste, is a great gun in the courts. Mr. Primrose is Lord Rosebery's son. Adam Black, the publisher as you know. Dr. Alison, a very popular friend of the poor. Robertson you know. Allan you know. Colquhoun is an advocate. All these men were selected for the toasts as being crack speakers, known men, and opposed to each other very strongly in politics. For this reason, the professors and so forth who sat upon the platform about me made no speeches and had none assigned them. I felt it was very remarkable to see such a number of gray-headed men gathered about my brown flowing locks; and it struck most of those who were present very forcibly. The judges, solicitor-general, lord-advocate, and so forth, were all here to call, the day after our arrival. The judges never go to public dinners in Scotland. Lord Meadowbank alone broke through the custom, and none of his successors have imitated him. It will give you a good notion of _party_ to hear that the solicitor-general and lord-advocate refused to go, though they had previously engaged, _unless_ the croupier or the chairman were a Whig. Both (Wilson and Robertson) were Tories, simply because, Jeffrey excepted, no Whig could be found who was adapted to the office. The solicitor laid strict injunctions on Napier not to go if a Whig were not in office. No Whig was, and he stayed away. I think this is good?--bearing in mind that all the old Whigs of Edinburgh were cracking their throats in the room. They gave out that they were ill, and the lord-advocate did actually lie in bed all the afternoon; but this is the real truth, and one of the judges told it me with great glee. It seems they couldn't quite trust Wilson or Robertson, as they thought; and feared some Tory demonstration. Nothing of the kind took place; and ever since, these men have been the loudest in their praises of the whole affair." The close of his letter tells us all his engagements, and completes his graceful picture of the hearty Scottish welcome given him. It has also some personal touches that may be thought worth preserving. "A threat reached me last night (they have been hammering at it in their papers, it seems, for some time) of a dinner at Glasgow. But I hope, having circulated false rumors of my movements, to get away before they send to me; and only to stop there on my way home, to change horses and send to the post-office. . . . You will like to know how we have been living. Here's a list of engagements, past and present. Wednesday, we dined at home, and went incog. to the theatre at night, to Murray's box; the pieces admirably done, and M'Ian in the _Two Drovers_ quite wonderful and most affecting. Thursday, to Lord Murray's; dinner and evening party. Friday, _the_ dinner. Saturday, to Jeffrey's, a beautiful place about three miles off" (Craigcrook, which at Lord Jeffrey's invitation I afterwards visited with him), "stop there all night, dine on Sunday, and home at eleven. Monday, dine at Dr. Alison's, four miles off. Tuesday, dinner and evening party at Allan's. Wednesday, breakfast with Napier, dine with Blackwood's seven miles off, evening party at the treasurer's of the town-council, supper with all the artists (!!). Thursday, lunch at the solicitor-general's, dine at Lord Gillies's, evening party at Joseph Gordon's, one of Brougham's earliest supporters. Friday, dinner and evening party at Robertson's. Saturday, dine again at Jeffrey's; back to the theatre, at half-past nine to the moment, for public appearance;[39] places all let, etc. etc. etc. Sunday, off at seven o'clock in the morning to Stirling, and then to Callender, a stage further. Next day, to Loch Earn, and pull up there for three days, to rest and work. The moral of all this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most heartily for having given me a quiet spirit, and a heart that won't hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for battledoor and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac; and I feel Topping's merits more acutely than I have ever done in my life. On Sunday evening, the 17th of July, I shall revisit my household gods, please Heaven. I wish the day were here. For God's sake be in waiting. I wish you and Mac would dine in Devonshire Terrace that day with Fred. He has the key of the cellar. _Do._ We shall be at Inverary in the Highlands on Tuesday week, getting to it through the Pass of Glencoe, of which you may have heard! On Thursday following we shall be at Glasgow, where I shall hope to receive your last letter before we meet. At Inverary, too, I shall make sure of finding at least one, at the post-office. . . . Little Allan is trying hard for the post of queen's limner for Scotland, vacant by poor Wilkie's death. Every one is in his favor but ----, who is jobbing for some one else. Appoint him, will you, and I'll give up the premiership.--How I breakfasted to-day in the house where Scott lived seven-and-twenty years; how I have made solemn pledges to write about missing children in the _Edinburgh Review_, and will do my best to keep them; how I have declined to be brought in, free gratis for nothing and qualified to boot, for a Scotch county that's going a-begging, lest I should be thought to have dined on Friday under false pretenses; these, with other marvels, shall be yours anon. . . . I must leave off sharp, to get dressed and off upon the seven miles' dinner-trip. Kate's affectionate regards. My hearty loves to Mac and Grim." Grim was another great artist having the same beginning to his name, whose tragic studies had suggested an epithet quite inapplicable to any of his personal qualities. The narrative of the trip to the Highlands must have a chapter to itself and its incidents of adventure and comedy. The latter chiefly were due to the guide who accompanied him, a quasi-Highlander himself, named a few pages back as Mr. Kindheart, whose real name was Mr. Angus Fletcher, and to whom it hardly needs that I should give other mention than will be supplied by such future notices of him as my friend's letters may contain. He had a wayward kind of talent, which he could never concentrate on a settled pursuit; and though at the time we knew him first he had taken up the profession of a sculptor, he abandoned it soon afterwards. His mother, a woman distinguished by many remarkable qualities, lived now in the English lake-country; and it was no fault of hers that this home was no longer her son's. But what mainly had closed it to him was undoubtedly not less the secret of such liking for him as Dickens had. Fletcher's eccentricities and absurdities, often divided by the thinnest partition from the most foolish extravagance, but occasionally clever, and always the genuine though whimsical outgrowth of the life he led, had a curious sort of charm for Dickens. He enjoyed the oddity and humor; tolerated all the rest; and to none more freely than to Kindheart during the next few years, both in Italy and in England, opened his house and hospitality. The close of the poor fellow's life, alas! was in only too sad agreement with all the previous course of it; but this will have mention hereafter. He is waiting now to introduce Dickens to the Highlands. FOOTNOTES: [37] Dickens refused to believe it at first. "My heart assures me Wilkie liveth," he wrote. "He is the sort of man who will be VERY old when he dies"--and certainly one would have said so. [38] The speeches generally were good, but the descriptions in the text by himself will here be thought sufficient. One or two sentences ought, however, to be given to show the tone of Wilson's praise, and I will only preface them by the remark that Dickens's acknowledgments, as well as his tribute to Wilkie, were expressed with great felicity, and that Peter Robertson seems to have thrown the company into convulsions of laughter by his imitation of Dominie Sampson's PRO-DI-GI-OUS, in a supposed interview between that worthy schoolmaster and Mr. Squeers of Dotheboys. I now quote from Professor Wilson's speech: "Our friend has mingled in the common walks of life; he has made himself familiar with the lower orders of society. He has not been deterred by the aspect of vice and wickedness, and misery and guilt, from seeking a spirit of good in things evil, but has endeavored by the might of genius to transmute what was base into what is precious as the beaten gold. . . . But I shall be betrayed, if I go on much longer,--which it would be improper for me to do,--into something like a critical delineation of the genius of our illustrious guest. I shall not attempt that; but I cannot but express, in a few ineffectual words, the delight which every human bosom feels in the benign spirit which pervades all his creations. How kind and good a man he is, I need not say; nor what strength of genius he has acquired by that profound sympathy with his fellow-creatures, whether in prosperity and happiness, or overwhelmed with unfortunate circumstances, but who yet do not sink under their miseries, but trust to their own strength of endurance, to that principle of truth and honor and integrity which is no stranger to the uncultivated bosom, and which is found in the lowest abodes in as great strength as in the halls of nobles and the palaces of kings. Mr. Dickens is also a satirist. He satirizes human life, but he does not satirize it to degrade it. He does not wish to pull down what is high into the neighborhood of what is low. He does not seek to represent all virtue as a hollow thing, in which no confidence can be placed. He satirizes only the selfish, and the hard-hearted, and the cruel. Our distinguished guest may not have given us, as yet, a full and complete delineation of the female character. But this he has done: he has not endeavored to represent women as charming merely by the aid of accomplishments, however elegant and graceful. He has not depicted those accomplishments as their essentials, but has spoken of them rather as always inspired by a love of domesticity, by fidelity, by purity, by innocence, by charity, and by hope, which makes them discharge, under the most difficult circumstances, their duties, and which brings over their path in this world some glimpses of the light of heaven. Mr. Dickens may be assured that there is felt for him all over Scotland a sentiment of kindness, affection, admiration, and love; and I know for certain that the knowledge of these sentiments must make him happy." [39] On this occasion, as he told me afterwards, the orchestra did a double stroke of business, much to the amazement of himself and his friends, by improvising at his entrance _Charley is my Darling_, amid tumultuous shouts of delight. CHAPTER XVI. ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS. 1841. A Fright--Fletcher's Eccentricities--The Trossachs--The Travelers' Guide--A Comical Picture--Highland Accommodation--Grand Scenery--Changes in Route--A Waterfall--Entrance to Glencoe--The Pass of Glencoe--Loch Leven--A July Evening--Postal Service at Loch Earn Head--The Maid of the Inn--Impressions of Glencoe--An Adventure--Torrents swollen with Rain--Dangerous Traveling--Incidents and Accidents--Broken-down Bridge--A Fortunate Resolve--Post-boy in Danger--The Rescue--Narrow Escape--A Highland Inn and Inmates--English Comfort at Dalmally--Dinner at Glasgow proposed--Eagerness for Home. FROM Loch Earn Head Dickens wrote on Monday, the 5th of July, having reached it, "wet through," at four that afternoon: "Having had a great deal to do in a crowded house on Saturday night at the theatre, we left Edinburgh yesterday morning at half-past seven, and traveled, with Fletcher for our guide, to a place called Stewart's Hotel, nine miles further than Callender. We had neglected to order rooms, and were obliged to make a sitting-room of our own bed-chamber; in which my genius for stowing furniture away was of the very greatest service. Fletcher slept in a kennel with three panes of glass in it, which formed part and parcel of a window; the other three panes whereof belonged to a man who slept on the other side of the partition. He told me this morning that he had had a nightmare all night, and had screamed horribly, he knew. The stranger, as you may suppose, hired a gig and went off at full gallop with the first glimpse of daylight.[40] Being very tired (for we had not had more than three hours' sleep on the previous night) we lay till ten this morning, and at half-past eleven went through the Trossachs to Loch Katrine, where I walked from the hotel after tea last night. It is impossible to say what a glorious scene it was. It rained as it never does rain anywhere but here. We conveyed Kate up a rocky pass to go and see the island of the Lady of the Lake, but she gave in after the first five minutes, and we left her, very picturesque and uncomfortable, with Tom" (the servant they had brought with them from Devonshire Terrace) "holding an umbrella over her head, while we climbed on. When we came back, she had gone into the carriage. We were wet through to the skin, and came on in that state four-and-twenty miles. Fletcher is very good-natured, and of extraordinary use in these outlandish parts. His habit of going into kitchens and bars, disconcerting at Broadstairs, is here of great service. Not expecting us till six, they hadn't lighted our fires when we arrived here; and if you had seen him (with whom the responsibility of the omission rested) running in and out of the sitting-room and the two bedrooms with a great pair of bellows, with which he distractedly blew each of the fires out in turn, you would have died of laughing. He had on his head a great Highland cap, on his back a white coat, and cut such a figure as even the inimitable can't depicter. . . . "The inns, inside and out, are the queerest places imaginable. From the road, this one," at Loch Earn Head, "looks like a white wall, with windows in it by mistake. We have a good sitting-room, though, on the first floor: as large (but not as lofty) as my study. The bedrooms are of that size which renders it impossible for you to move, after you have taken your boots off, without chipping pieces out of your legs. There isn't a basin in the Highlands which will hold my face; not a drawer which will open, after you have put your clothes in it; not a water-bottle capacious enough to wet your toothbrush. The huts are wretched and miserable beyond all description. The food (for those who can pay for it) 'not bad,' as M. would say: oat-cake, mutton, hotch-potch, trout from the loch, small beer bottled, marmalade, and whiskey. Of the last-named article I have taken about a pint to-day. The weather is what they call 'soft'--which means that the sky is a vast water-spout that never leaves off emptying itself; and the liquor has no more effect than water. . . . I am going to work to-morrow, and hope before leaving here to write you again. The elections have been sad work indeed. That they should return Sibthorp and reject Bulwer, is, by Heaven, a national disgrace. . . . I don't wonder the devil flew over Lincoln. The people were far too addle-headed, even for him. . . . I don't bore you with accounts of Ben this and that, and Lochs of all sorts of names, but this is a wonderful region. The way the mists were stalking about to-day, and the clouds lying down upon the hills; the deep glens, the high rocks, the rushing waterfalls, and the roaring rivers down in deep gulfs below; were all stupendous. This house is wedged round by great heights that are lost in the clouds; and the loch, twelve miles long, stretches out its dreary length before the windows. In my next I shall soar to the sublime, perhaps; in this here present writing I confine myself to the ridiculous. But I am always," etc. etc. His next letter bore the date of "Ballechelish, Friday evening, ninth July, 1841, half-past nine, P.M.," and described what we had often longed to see together, the Pass of Glencoe. . . . "I can't go to bed without writing to you from here, though the post will not leave this place until we have left it and arrived at another. On looking over the route which Lord Murray made out for me, I found he had put down Thursday next for Abbotsford and Dryburgh Abbey, and a journey of seventy miles besides! Therefore, and as I was happily able to steal a march upon myself at Loch Earn Head, and to finish in two days what I thought would take me three, we shall leave here to-morrow morning; and, by being a day earlier than we intended at all the places between this and Melrose (which we propose to reach by Wednesday night), we shall have a whole day for Scott's house and tomb, and still be at York on Saturday evening, and home, God willing, on Sunday. . . . We left Loch Earn Head last night, and went to a place called Killin, eight miles from it, where we slept. I walked some six miles with Fletcher after we got there, to see a waterfall; and truly it was a magnificent sight, foaming and crashing down three great steeps of riven rock; leaping over the first as far off as you could carry your eye, and rumbling and foaming down into a dizzy pool below you, with a deafening roar. To-day we have had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, through the bleakest and most desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes, and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices. The cold all day has been _intense_, and the rain sometimes most violent. It has been impossible to keep warm, by any means; even whiskey failed; the wind was too piercing even for that. One stage of ten miles, over a place called the Black Mount, took us two hours and a half to do; and when we came to a lone public called the King's House, at the entrance to Glencoe,--this was about three o'clock,--we were wellnigh frozen. We got a fire directly, and in twenty minutes they served us up some famous kippered salmon, broiled; a broiled fowl; hot mutton ham and poached eggs; pancakes; oat-cake; wheaten bread; butter; bottled porter; hot water, lump sugar, and whiskey; of which we made a very hearty meal. All the way, the road had been among moors and mountains, with huge masses of rock, which fell down God knows where, sprinkling the ground in every direction, and giving it the aspect of the burial-place of a race of giants. Now and then we passed a hut or two, with neither window nor chimney, and the smoke of the peat fire rolling out at the door. But there were not six of these dwellings in a dozen miles; and anything so bleak and wild, and mighty in its loneliness, as the whole country, it is impossible to conceive. Glencoe itself is perfectly _terrible_. The pass is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In amongst these rocks on one side of the pass (the left as we came) there are scores of glens, high up, which form such haunts as you might imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a fever. They will live in my dreams for years--I was going to say as long as I live, and I seriously think so. The very recollection of them makes me shudder. . . . Well, I will not bore you with my impressions of these tremendous wilds, but they really are fearful in their grandeur and amazing solitude. Wales is a mere toy compared with them." The further mention of his guide's whimsical ways may stand, for it cannot now be the possible occasion of pain or annoyance, or of anything but very innocent laughter: "We are now in a bare white house on the banks of Loch Leven, but in a comfortably-furnished room on the top of the house,--that is, on the first floor,--with the rain pattering against the window as though it were December, the wind howling dismally, a cold damp mist on everything without, a blazing fire within half way up the chimney, and a most infernal Piper practicing under the window for a competition of pipers which is to come off shortly. . . . The store of anecdotes of Fletcher with which we shall return will last a long time. It seems that the F.'s are an extensive clan, and that his father was a Highlander. Accordingly, wherever he goes, he finds out some cotter or small farmer who is his cousin. I wish you could see him walking into his cousins' curds and cream, and into their dairies generally! Yesterday morning, between eight and nine, I was sitting writing at the open window, when the postman came to the inn (which at Loch Earn Head is the post-office) for the letters. He is going away, when Fletcher, who has been writing somewhere below-stairs, rushes out, and cries, 'Halloa there! Is that the Post?' 'Yes!' somebody answers. 'Call him back!' says Fletcher: 'Just sit down till I've done, _and don't go away till I tell you_.'--Fancy! The General Post, with the letters of forty villages in a leathern bag! . . . To-morrow at Oban. Sunday at Inverary. Monday at Tarbet. Tuesday at Glasgow (and that night at Hamilton). Wednesday at Melrose. Thursday at ditto. Friday I don't know where. Saturday at York. Sunday--how glad I shall be to shake hands with you! My love to Mac. I thought he'd have written once. Ditto to Macready. I had a very nice and welcome letter from him, and a most hearty one from Elliotson. . . . P.S. Half asleep. So excuse drowsiness of matter and composition. I shall be full of joy to meet another letter from you! . . . P.P.S. They speak Gaelic here, of course, and many of the common people understand very little English. Since I wrote this letter, I rang the girl up-stairs, and gave elaborate directions (you know my way) for a pint of sherry to be made into boiling negus; mentioning all the ingredients one by one, and particularly nutmeg. When I had quite finished, seeing her obviously bewildered, I said, with great gravity, 'Now you know what you're going to order?' 'Oh, yes. Sure.' 'What?'--a pause--'Just'--another pause--'Just plenty of _nutbergs_!'" The impression made upon him by the Pass of Glencoe was not overstated in this letter. It continued with him as he there expressed it; and as we shall see hereafter, even where he expected to find Nature in her most desolate grandeur on the dreary waste of an American prairie, his imagination went back with a higher satisfaction to Glencoe. But his experience of it is not yet completely told. The sequel was in a letter of two days' later date, from "Dalmally, Sunday, July the eleventh, 1841:" "As there was no place of this name in our route, you will be surprised to see it at the head of this present writing. But our being here is a part of such moving accidents by flood and field as will astonish you. If you should happen to have your hat on, take it off, that your hair may stand on end without any interruption. To get from Ballyhoolish (as I am obliged to spell it when Fletcher is not in the way; and he is out at this moment) to Oban, it is necessary to cross two ferries, one of which is an arm of the sea, eight or ten miles broad. Into this ferry-boat, passengers, carriages, horses, and all, get bodily, and are got across by hook or by crook if the weather be reasonably fine. Yesterday morning, however, it blew such a strong gale that the landlord of the inn, where we had paid for horses all the way to Oban (thirty miles), honestly came up-stairs just as we were starting, with the money in his hand, and told us it would be impossible to cross. There was nothing to be done but to come back five-and-thirty miles, through Glencoe and Inverouran, to a place called Tyndrum, whence a road twelve miles long crosses to Dalmally, which is sixteen miles from Inverary. Accordingly we turned back, and in a great storm of wind and rain began to retrace the dreary road we had come the day before. . . . I was not at all ill pleased to have to come again through that awful Glencoe. If it had been tremendous on the previous day, yesterday it was perfectly horrific. It had rained all night, and was raining then, as it only does in these parts. Through the whole glen, which is ten miles long, torrents were boiling and foaming, and sending up in every direction spray like the smoke of great fires. They were rushing down every hill and mountain side, and tearing like devils across the path, and down into the depths of the rocks. Some of the hills looked as if they were full of silver, and had cracked in a hundred places. Others as if they were frightened, and had broken out into a deadly sweat. In others there was no compromise or division of streams, but one great torrent came roaring down with a deafening noise, and a rushing of water that was quite appalling. Such a _spaet_, in short (that's the country word), has not been known for many years, and the sights and sounds were beyond description. The post-boy was not at all at his ease, and the horses were very much frightened (as well they might be) by the perpetual raging and roaring; one of them started as we came down a steep place, and we were within that much (----) of tumbling over a precipice; just then, too, the drag broke, and we were obliged to go on as we best could, without it: getting out every now and then, and hanging on at the back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast, and going Heaven knows where. Well, in this pleasant state of things we came to King's House again, having been four hours doing the sixteen miles. The rumble where Tom sat was by this time so full of water that he was obliged to borrow a gimlet and bore holes in the bottom to let it run out. The horses that were to take us on were out upon the hills, somewhere within ten miles round; and three or four bare-legged fellows went out to look for 'em, while we sat by the fire and tried to dry ourselves. At last we got off again (without the drag and with a broken spring, no smith living within ten miles), and went limping on to Inverouran. In the first three miles we were in a ditch and out again, and lost a horse's shoe. All this time it never once left off raining; and was very windy, very cold, very misty, and most intensely dismal. So we crossed the Black Mount, and came to a place we had passed the day before, where a rapid river runs over a bed of broken rock. Now, this river, sir, had a bridge last winter, but the bridge broke down when the thaw came, and has never since been mended; so travelers cross upon a little platform, made of rough deal planks stretching from rock to rock; and carriages and horses ford the water, at a certain point. As the platform is the reverse of steady (we had proved this the day before), is very slippery, and affords anything but a pleasant footing, having only a trembling little rail on one side, and on the other nothing between it and the foaming stream, Kate decided to remain in the carriage, and trust herself to the wheels rather than to her feet. Fletcher and I had got out, and it was going away, when I advised her, as I had done several times before, to come with us; for I saw that the water was very high, the current being greatly swollen by the rain, and that the post-boy had been eyeing it in a very disconcerted manner for the last half-hour. This decided her to come out; and Fletcher, she, Tom, and I, began to cross, while the carriage went about a quarter of a mile down the bank, in search of a shallow place. The platform shook so much that we could only come across two at a time, and then it felt as if it were hung on springs. As to the wind and rain! . . . well, put into one gust all the wind and rain you ever saw and heard, and you'll have some faint notion of it! When we got safely to the opposite bank, there came riding up a wild Highlander, in a great plaid, whom we recognized as the landlord of the inn, and who, without taking the least notice of us, went dashing on,--with the plaid he was wrapped in, streaming in the wind,--screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, and making the most frantic gestures you ever saw, in which he was joined by some other wild man on foot, who had come across by a short cut, knee-deep in mire and water. As we began to see what this meant, we (that is, Fletcher and I) scrambled on after them, while the boy, horses, and carriage were plunging in the water, which left only the horses' heads and the boy's body visible. By the time we got up to them, the man on horseback and the men on foot were perfectly mad with pantomime; for as to any of their shouts being heard by the boy, the water made such a great noise that they might as well have been dumb. It made me quite sick to think how I should have felt if Kate had been inside. The carriage went round and round like a great stone, the boy was as pale as death, the horses were struggling and plashing and snorting like sea-animals, and we were all roaring to the driver to throw himself off and let them and the coach go to the devil, when suddenly it came all right (having got into shallow water), and, all tumbling and dripping and jogging from side to side, climbed up to the dry land. I assure you we looked rather queer, as we wiped our faces and stared at each other in a little cluster round about it. It seemed that the man on horseback had been looking at us through a telescope as we came to the track, and knowing that the place was very dangerous, and seeing that we meant to bring the carriage, had come on at a great gallop to show the driver the only place where he could cross. By the time he came up, the man had taken the water at a wrong place, and in a word was as nearly drowned (with carriage, horses, luggage, and all) as ever man was. Was _this_ a good adventure? "We all went on to the inn,--the wild man galloping on first, to get a fire lighted,--and there we dined on eggs and bacon, oat-cake, and whiskey; and changed and dried ourselves. The place was a mere knot of little outhouses, and in one of these there were fifty Highlanders _all drunk_. . . . Some were drovers, some pipers, and some workmen engaged to build a hunting-lodge for Lord Breadalbane hard by, who had been driven in by stress of weather. One was a paper-hanger. He had come out three days before to paper the inn's best room, a chamber almost large enough to keep a Newfoundland dog in, and, from the first half-hour after his arrival to that moment, had been hopelessly and irreclaimably drunk. They were lying about in all directions: on forms, on the ground, about a loft overhead, round the turf-fire wrapped in plaids, on the tables, and under them. We paid our bill, thanked our host very heartily, gave some money to his children, and after an hour's rest came on again. At ten o'clock at night we reached this place, and were overjoyed to find quite an English inn, with good beds (those we have slept on, yet, have always been of straw), and every possible comfort. We breakfasted this morning at half-past ten, and at three go on to Inverary to dinner. I believe the very rough part of the journey is over, and I am really glad of it. Kate sends all kind of regards. I shall hope to find a letter from you at Inverary when the post reaches there, to-morrow. I wrote to Oban yesterday, desiring the post-office keeper to send any he might have for us, over to that place. Love to Mac." One more letter, brief, but overflowing at every word with his generous nature, must close the delightful series written from Scotland. It was dated from Inverary the day following his exciting adventure; promised me another from Melrose (which has unfortunately not been kept with the rest); and inclosed the invitation to a public dinner at Glasgow. "I have returned for answer that I am on my way home, on pressing business connected with my weekly publication, and can't stop. But I have offered to come down any day in September or October, and accept the honor then. Now, I shall come and return per mail; and, if this suits them, enter into a solemn league and covenant to come with me. _Do._ You must. I am sure you will. . . . Till my next, and always afterwards, God bless you. I got your welcome letter this morning, and have read it a hundred times. What a pleasure it is! Kate's best regards. I am dying for Sunday, and wouldn't stop now for twenty dinners of twenty thousand each. [Illustration: 'Always your affectionate friend 'Doz.] "Will Lord John meet the Parliament, or resign first?" I agreed to accompany him to Glasgow; but illness intercepted that celebration. FOOTNOTES: [40] Poor good Mr. Fletcher had, among his other peculiarities, a habit of venting any particular emotion in a wildness of cry that went beyond even the descriptive power of his friend, who referred to it frequently in his Broadstairs letters. Here is an instance (20th Sept, 1840): "Mrs. M. being in the next machine the other day heard him howl like a wolf (as he does) when he first touched the cold water. I am glad to have my former story in that respect confirmed. There is no sound on earth like it. In the infernal regions there may be, but elsewhere there is no compound addition of wild beasts that could produce its like for their total. The description of the wolves in _Robinson Crusoe_ is the nearest thing; but it's feeble--very feeble--in comparison." Of the generally amiable side to all his eccentricities I am tempted to give an illustration from the same letter: "An alarming report being brought to me the other day that he was preaching, I betook myself to the spot, and found he was reading Wordsworth to a family on the terrace, outside the house, in the open air and public way. The whole town were out. When he had given them a taste of Wordsworth, he sent home for Mrs. Norton's book, and entertained them with selections from that. He concluded with an imitation of Mrs. Hemans reading her own poetry, which he performed with a pocket-handkerchief over his head to imitate her veil--all this in public, before everybody." CHAPTER XVII. AGAIN AT BROADSTAIRS. 1841. Peel and his Party--Getting very Radical--Thoughts of colonizing--Political Squib by C. D.--Fine Old English Tory Times--Mesmerism--Metropolitan Prisons--Book by a Workman--An August Day by the Sea--Another Story in Prospect--_Clock_ Discontents--New Adventure--Agreement for it signed--The Book that proved to be _Chuzzlewit_--Peel and Lord Ashley--Visions of America. SOON after his return, at the opening of August, he went to Broadstairs; and the direction in which that last question shows his thoughts to have been busy was that to which he turned his first holiday leisure. He sent me some rhymed squibs as his anonymous contribution to the fight the Liberals were then making against what was believed to be intended by the return to office of the Tories; ignorant as we were how much wiser than his party the statesman then at the head of it was, or how greatly what we all most desired would be advanced by the very success that had been most disheartening. There will be no harm now in giving one of these pieces, which will sufficiently show the tone of all of them, and with what a hearty relish they were written. I doubt indeed if he ever enjoyed anything more than the power of thus taking part occasionally, unknown to outsiders, in the sharp conflict the press was waging at the time. "By Jove, how radical I am getting!" he wrote to me (13th August). "I wax stronger and stronger in the true principles every day. I don't know whether it's the sea, or no, but so it is." He would at times even talk, in moments of sudden indignation at the political outlook, of carrying off himself and his household gods, like Coriolanus, to a world elsewhere! "Thank God there is a Van Diemen's Land. That's my comfort. Now, I wonder if I should make a good settler! I wonder, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs, and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! What do you think? Upon my word, I believe I should." His political squibs during the Tory interregnum comprised some capital subjects for pictures after the manner of Peter Pindar; but that which I select has no touch of personal satire in it, and he would himself, for that reason, have least objected to its revival. Thus ran his new version of "The Fine Old English Gentleman, to be said or sung at all conservative dinners:" I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate; When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate. In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains, With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains, With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins; For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies, To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies, Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers' creed, The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed. . . . Oh, the fine old English Tory times; When will they come again? In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark; Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark; And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. Oh, the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! . . . But tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in the main; That night must come on these fine days, in course of time was plain; The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain; A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain, With the fine old English Tory days, All of the olden time. The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be--dear bread! in Ireland--sword and brand! And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time! Of matters in which he had been specially interested before he quitted London, one or two may properly be named. He had always sympathized, almost as strongly as Archbishop Whately did, with Dr. Elliotson's mesmeric investigations; and, reinforced as these were in the present year by the displays of a Belgian youth whom another friend, Mr. Chauncy Hare Townshend, brought over to England, the subject, which to the last had an attraction for him, was for the time rather ardently followed up. The improvement during the last few years in the London prisons was another matter of eager and pleased inquiry with him; and he took frequent means of stating what in this respect had been done, since even the date when his _Sketches_ were written, by two most efficient public officers at Clerkenwell and Tothill Fields, Mr. Chesterton and Lieutenant Tracey, whom the course of these inquiries turned into private friends. His last letter to me before he quitted town sufficiently explains itself. "Slow rises worth by poverty deprest" was the thought in his mind at every part of his career, and he never for a moment was unmindful of the duty it imposed upon him: "I subscribed for a couple of copies" (31st July) "of this little book. I knew nothing of the man, but he wrote me a very modest letter of two lines, some weeks ago. I have been much affected by the little biography at the beginning, and I thought you would like to share the emotion it had raised in me. I wish we were all in Eden again--for the sake of these toiling creatures." In the middle of August (Monday, 16th) I had announcement that he was coming up for special purposes: "I sit down to write to you without an atom of news to communicate. Yes, I have,--something that will surprise you, who are pent up in dark and dismal Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and the fishing-boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red flags at the mast-heads for flowers, and panting with delight accordingly. [Here the Inimitable, unable to resist the brilliancy out of doors, breaketh off, rusheth to the machines, and plungeth into the sea. Returning, he proceedeth:] Jeffrey is just as he was when he wrote the letter I sent you. No better, and no worse. I had a letter from Napier on Saturday, urging the children's-labor subject upon me. But, as I hear from Southwood Smith that the report cannot be printed until the new Parliament has sat at the least six weeks, it will be impossible to produce it before the January number. I shall be in town on Saturday morning and go straight to you. A letter has come from little Hall begging that when I _do_ come to town I will dine there, as they wish to talk about the new story. I have written to say that I will do so on Saturday, and we will go together; but I shall be by no means good company. . . . I have more than half a mind to start a bookseller of my own. I could; with good capital too, as you know; and ready to spend it. _G. Varden beware!_" Small causes of displeasure had been growing out of the _Clock_, and were almost unavoidably incident to the position in which he found himself respecting it. Its discontinuance had become necessary, the strain upon himself being too great without the help from others which experience had shown to be impracticable; but I thought he had not met the difficulty wisely by undertaking, which already he had done, to begin a new story so early as the following March. On his arrival, therefore, we decided on another plan, with which we went armed that Saturday afternoon to his publishers, and of which the result will be best told by himself. He had returned to Broadstairs the following morning, and next day (Monday, the 23d of August) he wrote to me in very enthusiastic terms of the share I had taken in what he calls "the development on Saturday afternoon; when I thought Chapman very manly and sensible, Hall morally and physically feeble though perfectly well intentioned, and both the statement and reception of the project quite triumphant. Didn't you think so too?" A fortnight later, Tuesday, the 7th of September, the agreement was signed in my chambers, and its terms were to the effect following. The _Clock_ was to cease with the close of _Barnaby Rudge_, the respective ownerships continuing as provided; and the new work in twenty numbers, similar to those of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, was not to begin until after an interval of twelve months, in November, 1842. During its publication he was to receive two hundred pounds monthly, to be accounted as part of the expenses; for all which, and all risks incident, the publishers made themselves responsible, under conditions the same as in the _Clock_ agreement; except that out of the profits of each number they were to have only a fourth, three-fourths going to him, and this arrangement was to hold good until the termination of six months from the completed book, when, upon payment to him of a fourth of the value of all existing stock, they were to have half the future interest. During the twelve months' interval before the book began, he was to be paid one hundred and fifty pounds each month; but this was to be drawn from his three-fourths of the profits, and in no way to interfere with the monthly payments of two hundred pounds while the publication was going on.[41] Such was the "project," excepting only a provision to be mentioned hereafter against the improbable event of the profits being inadequate to the repayment; and my only drawback from the satisfaction of my own share in it arose from my fear of the use he was likely to make of the leisure it afforded him. That this fear was not ill founded appeared at the close of the next note I had from him: "There's no news" (13th September) "since my last. We are going to dine with Rogers to-day, and with Lady Essex, who is also here. Rogers is much pleased with Lord Ashley, who was offered by Peel a post in the government, but resolutely refused to take office unless Peel pledged himself to factory-improvement. Peel 'hadn't made up his mind,' and Lord Ashley was deaf to all other inducements, though they must have been very tempting. Much do I honor him for it. I am in an exquisitely lazy state, bathing, walking, reading, lying in the sun, doing everything but working. This frame of mind is superinduced by the prospect of rest, and the promising arrangements which I owe to you. I am still haunted by visions of America night and day. To miss this opportunity would be a sad thing. Kate cries dismally if I mention the subject. But, God willing, I think it _must_ be managed somehow!" FOOTNOTES: [41] "M. was quite aghast last night (9th of September) at the brilliancy of the C. & H. arrangement: which is worth noting perhaps." CHAPTER XVIII. EVE OF THE VISIT TO AMERICA. 1841. Greetings from America--Reply to Washington Irving--Difficulties in the Way--Resolve to go--Wish to revisit Scenes of Boyhood--Proposed Book of Travel--Arrangements for the Journey--Impatience of Suspense--Resolve to leave the Children--Mrs. Dickens reconciled--A Grave Illness--Domestic Griefs--The Old Sorrow--At Windsor--Son Walter's Christening--At Liverpool with the Travelers. THE notion of America was in his mind, as we have seen, when he first projected the _Clock_; and a very hearty letter from Washington Irving about Little Nell and the _Curiosity Shop_, expressing the delight with his writings and the yearnings to himself which had indeed been pouring in upon him for some time from every part of the States, had very strongly revived it. He answered Irving with more than his own warmth: unable to thank him enough for his cordial and generous praise, or to tell him what lasting gratification it had given. "I wish I could find in your welcome letter," he added, "some hint of an intention to visit England. I should love to go with you, as I have gone, God knows how often, into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbor Court, and Westminster Abbey. . . . It would gladden my heart to compare notes with you about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in the daytime, when a very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy." After interchange of these letters the subject was frequently revived; upon his return from Scotland it began to take shape as a thing that somehow or other, at no very distant date, _must be_; and at last, near the end of a letter filled with many unimportant things, the announcement, doubly underlined, came to me. The decision once taken, he was in his usual fever until its difficulties were disposed of. The objections to separation from the children led at first to the notion of taking them, but this was as quickly abandoned; and what remained to be overcome yielded readily to the kind offices of Macready, the offer of whose home to the little ones during the time of absence, though not accepted to the full extent, gave yet the assurance needed to quiet natural apprehensions. All this, including an arrangement for publication of such notes as might occur to him on the journey, took but a few days; and I was reading in my chambers a letter he had written the previous day from Broadstairs, when a note from him reached me, written that morning in London, to tell me he was on his way to take share of my breakfast. He had come overland by Canterbury after posting his first letter, had seen Macready the previous night, and had completed some part of the arrangements. This mode of rapid procedure was characteristic of him at all similar times, and will appear in the few following extracts from his letters: "Now" (19th September) "to astonish you. After balancing, considering, and weighing the matter in every point of view, I HAVE MADE UP MY MIND (WITH GOD'S LEAVE) TO GO TO AMERICA--AND TO START AS SOON AFTER CHRISTMAS AS IT WILL BE SAFE TO GO." Further information was promised immediately; and a request followed, characteristic as any he could have added to his design of traveling so far away, that we should visit once more together the scenes of his boyhood. "On the ninth of October we leave here. It's a Saturday. If it should be fine dry weather, or anything like it, will you meet us at Rochester, and stop there two or three days to see all the lions in the surrounding country? Think of this. . . . If you'll arrange to come, I'll have the carriage down, and Topping; and, supposing news from Glasgow don't interfere with us, which I fervently hope it will not, I will insure that we have much enjoyment." Three days later than that which announced his resolve, the subject was resumed: "I wrote to Chapman & Hall asking them what they thought of it, and saying I meant to keep a note-book, and publish it for half a guinea or thereabouts, on my return. They instantly sent the warmest possible reply, and said they had taken it for granted I would go, and had been speaking of it only the day before. I have begged them to make every inquiry about the fares, cabins, berths, and times of sailing; and I shall make a great effort to take Kate _and_ the children. In that case I shall try to let the house furnished, for six months (for I shall remain that time in America); and if I succeed, the rent will nearly pay the expenses out, and home. I have heard of family cabins at £100; and I think one of these is large enough to hold us all. A single fare, I think, is forty guineas. I fear I could not be happy if we had the Atlantic between us; but leaving them in New York while I ran off a thousand miles or so, would be quite another thing. If I can arrange all my plans before publishing the _Clock_ address, I shall state therein that I am going: which will be no unimportant consideration, as affording the best possible reason for a long delay. How I am to get on without you for seven or eight months, I cannot, upon my soul, conceive. I dread to think of breaking up all our old happy habits for so long a time. The advantages of going, however, appear by steady looking-at so great, that I have come to persuade myself it is a matter of imperative necessity. Kate weeps whenever it is spoken of. Washington Irving has got a nasty low fever. I heard from him a day or two ago." His next letter was the unexpected arrival which came by hand from Devonshire Terrace, when I thought him still by the sea: "This is to give you notice that I am coming to breakfast with you this morning on my way to Broadstairs. I repeat it, sir,--on my way _to_ Broadstairs. For, directly I got Macready's note yesterday I went to Canterbury, and came on by day-coach for the express purpose of talking with him; which I did between 11 and 12 last night in Clarence Terrace. The American preliminaries are necessarily startling, and, to a gentleman of my temperament, destroy rest, sleep, appetite, and work, unless definitely arranged.[42] Macready has quite decided me in respect of time and so forth. The instant I have wrung a reluctant consent from Kate, I shall take our joint passage in the mail-packet for next January. I never loved my friends so well as now." We had all discountenanced his first thought of taking the children; and, upon this and other points, the experience of our friend who had himself traveled over the States was very valuable. His next letter, two days later from Broadstairs, informed me of the result of the Macready conference: "Only a word. Kate is quite reconciled. 'Anne' (her maid) goes, and is amazingly cheerful and light of heart upon it. And I think, at present, that it's a greater trial to me than anybody. The 4th of January is the day. Macready's note to Kate was received and acted upon with a perfect response. She talks about it quite gayly, and is satisfied to have nobody in the house but Fred, of whom, as you know, they are all fond. He has got his promotion, and they give him the increased salary from the day on which the minute was made by Baring, I feel so amiable, so meek, so fond of people, so full of gratitudes and reliances, that I am like a sick man. And I am already counting the days between this and coming home again." He was soon, alas! to be what he compared himself to. I met him at Rochester at the end of September, as arranged; we passed a day and night there; a day and night in Cobham and its neighborhood, sleeping at the Leather Bottle; and a day and night at Gravesend. But we were hardly returned when some slight symptoms of bodily trouble took suddenly graver form, and an illness followed involving the necessity of surgical attendance. This, which with mention of the helpful courage displayed by him has before been alluded to,[43] put off necessarily the Glasgow dinner; and he had scarcely left his bedroom when a trouble arose near home which touched him to the depths of the greatest sorrow of his life, and, in the need of exerting himself for others, what remained of his own illness seemed to pass away. His wife's younger brother had died with the same unexpected suddenness that attended her younger sister's death; and the event had followed close upon the decease of Mrs. Hogarth's mother while on a visit to her daughter and Mr. Hogarth. "As no steps had been taken towards the funeral," he wrote (25th October) in reply to my offer of such service as I could render, "I thought it best at once to bestir myself; and not even you could have saved my going to the cemetery. It is a great trial to me to give up Mary's grave; greater than I can possibly express. I thought of moving her to the catacombs and saying nothing about it; but then I remembered that the poor old lady is buried next her at her own desire, and could not find it in my heart, directly she is laid in the earth, to take her grandchild away. The desire to be buried next her is as strong upon me now as it was five years ago; and I _know_ (for I don't think there ever was love like that I bear her) that it will never diminish. I fear I can do nothing. Do you think I can? They would move her on Wednesday, if I resolved to have it done. I cannot bear the thought of being excluded from her dust; and yet I feel that her brothers and sisters, and her mother, have a better right than I to be placed beside her. It is but an idea. I neither think nor hope (God forbid) that our spirits would ever mingle _there_. I ought to get the better of it, but it is very hard. I never contemplated this--and coming so suddenly, and after being ill, it disturbs me more than it ought. It seems like losing her a second time. . . ." "No," he wrote the morning after, "I tried that. No, there is no ground on either side to be had. I must give it up. I shall drive over there, please God, on Thursday morning, before they get there; and look at her coffin." He suffered more than he let any one perceive, and was obliged again to keep his room for some days. On the 2d of November he reported himself as progressing and ordered to Richmond, which, after a week or so, he changed to the White Hart at Windsor, where I passed some days with him, Mrs. Dickens, and her younger sister Georgina; but it was not till near the close of that month he could describe himself as thoroughly on his legs again, in the ordinary state on which he was wont to pride himself, bolt upright, staunch at the knees, a deep sleeper, a hearty eater, a good laugher, and nowhere a bit the worse, "bating a little weakness now and then, and a slight nervousness at times." We had some days of much enjoyment at the end of the year, when Landor came up from Bath for the christening of his godson; and the "Britannia," which was to take the travelers from us in January, brought over to them in December all sorts of cordialities, anticipations, and stretchings-forth of palms, in token of the welcome awaiting them. On New Year's Eve they dined with me, and I with them on New Year's Day; when (his house having been taken for the period of his absence by General Sir John Wilson) we sealed up his wine-cellar, after opening therein some sparkling Moselle in honor of the ceremony, and drinking it then and there to his happy return. Next morning (it was a Sunday) I accompanied them to Liverpool, Maclise having been suddenly stayed by his mother's death; the intervening day and its occupations have been humorously sketched in his American book; and on the 4th they sailed. I never saw the Britannia after I stepped from her deck back to the small steamer that had taken us to her. "How little I thought" (were the last lines of his first American letter), "the first time you mounted the shapeless coat, that I should have such a sad association with its back as when I saw it by the paddle-box of that small steamer!" FOOTNOTES: [42] See _ante_, p. 123. [43] See _ante_, p. 244. CHAPTER XIX. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. 1842. Rough Passage--A Steamer in a Storm--Resigned to the Worst--Of Himself and Fellow-travelers--The Atlantic from Deck--The Ladies' Cabin--Its Occupants--Card-playing on the Atlantic--Ship-news--A Wager--Halifax Harbor--Ship aground--Captain Hewitt--Speaker of House of Assembly--Ovation to C. D.--Arrival at Boston--Incursion of Editors--At Tremont House--The Welcome--Deputations--Dr. Channing to C. D.--Public Appearances--A Secretary engaged--Bostonians--General Characteristics--Personal Notices--Perils of Steamers--A Home-thought--American Institutions--How first impressed--Reasons for the Greeting--What was welcomed in C. D.--Old World and New World--Daniel Webster as to C. D.--Channing as to C. D.--Subsequent Disappointments--New York Invitation to Dinner--Fac-similes of Signatures--Additional Fac-similes--New York Invitation to Ball--Fac-similes of Signatures--Additional Fac-similes. THE first lines of that letter were written as soon as he got sight of earth again, from the banks of Newfoundland, on Monday, the 17th of January, the fourteenth day from their departure: even then so far from Halifax that they could not expect to make it before Wednesday night, or to reach Boston until Saturday or Sunday. They had not been fortunate in the passage. During the whole voyage the weather had been unprecedentedly bad, the wind for the most part dead against them, the wet intolerable, the sea horribly disturbed, the days dark, and the nights fearful. On the previous Monday night it had blown a hurricane, beginning at five in the afternoon and raging all night. His description of the storm is published, and the peculiarities of a steamer's behavior in such circumstances are hit off as if he had been all his life a sailor. Any but so extraordinary an observer would have described a steamer in a storm as he would have described a sailing-ship in a storm. But any description of the latter would be as inapplicable to my friend's account of the other as the ways of a jackass to those of a mad bull. In the letter from which it was taken, however, there were some things addressed to myself alone: "For two or three hours we gave it up as a lost thing; and with many thoughts of you, and the children, and those others who are dearest to us, waited quietly for the worst. I never expected to see the day again, and resigned myself to God as well as I could. It was a great comfort to think of the earnest and devoted friends we had left behind, and to know that the darlings would not want." This was not the exaggerated apprehension of a landsman merely. The head engineer, who had been in one or other of the Cunard vessels since they began running, had never seen such stress of weather; and I heard Captain Hewitt himself say afterwards that nothing but a steamer, and one of that strength, could have kept her course and stood it out. A sailing-vessel must have beaten off and driven where she could; while through all the fury of that gale they actually made fifty-four miles headlong through the tempest, straight on end, not varying their track in the least. He stood out against sickness only for the day following that on which they sailed. For the three following days he kept his bed, miserable enough, and had not, until the eighth day of the voyage, six days before the date of his letter, been able to get to work at the dinner-table. What he then observed of his fellow-travelers, and had to tell of their life on board, has been set forth in his _Notes_ with delightful humor; but in its first freshness I received it in this letter, and some whimsical passages, then suppressed, there will be no harm in printing now: "We have 86 passengers; and such a strange collection of beasts never was got together upon the sea, since the days of the Ark. I have never been in the saloon since the first day; the noise, the smell, and the closeness being quite intolerable. I have only been on deck _once_!--and then I was surprised and disappointed at the smallness of the panorama. The sea, running as it does and has done, is very stupendous, and viewed from the air or some great height would be grand no doubt. But seen from the wet and rolling decks, in this weather and these circumstances, it only impresses one giddily and painfully. I was very glad to turn away, and come below again. "I have established myself, from the first, in the ladies' cabin--you remember it? I'll describe its other occupants, and our way of passing the time, to you. "First, for the occupants. Kate and I, and Anne--when she is out of bed, which is not often. A queer little Scotch body, a Mrs. P--,[44] whose husband is a silversmith in New York. He married her at Glasgow three years ago, and bolted the day after the wedding; being (which he had not told her) heavily in debt. Since then she has been living with her mother; and she is now going out under the protection of a male cousin, to give him a year's trial. If she is not comfortable at the expiration of that time, she means to go back to Scotland again. A Mrs. B--, about 20 years old, whose husband is on board with her. He is a young Englishman domiciled in New York, and by trade (as well as I can make out) a woolen-draper. They have been married a fortnight. A Mr. and Mrs. C--, marvelously fond of each other, complete the catalogue. Mrs. C--, I have settled, is a publican's daughter, and Mr. C-- is running away with her, the till, the time-piece off the bar mantel-shelf, the mother's gold watch from the pocket at the head of the bed; and other miscellaneous property. The women are all pretty; unusually pretty. I never saw such good faces together, anywhere." Their "way of passing the time" will be found in the _Notes_ much as it was written to me; except that there was one point connected with the card-playing which he feared might overtax the credulity of his readers, but which he protested had occurred more than once: "Apropos of rolling, I have forgotten to mention that in playing whist we are obliged to put the tricks in our pockets, to keep them from disappearing altogether; and that five or six times in the course of every rubber we are all flung from our seats, roll out at different doors, and keep on rolling until we are picked up by stewards. This has become such a matter of course, that we go through it with perfect gravity, and, when we are bolstered up on our sofas again, resume our conversation or our game at the point where it was interrupted." The news that excited them from day to day, too, of which little more than a hint appears in the _Notes_, is worth giving as originally written: "As for news, we have more of that than you would think for. One man lost fourteen pounds at vingt-un in the saloon yesterday, or another got drunk before dinner was over, or another was blinded with lobster-sauce spilt over him by the steward, or another had a fall on deck and fainted. The ship's cook was drunk yesterday morning (having got at some salt-water-damaged whiskey), and the captain ordered the boatswain to play upon him with the hose of the fire-engine until he roared for mercy--which he didn't get: for he was sentenced to look out, for four hours at a stretch for four nights running, without a great-coat, and to have his grog stopped. Four dozen plates were broken at dinner. One steward fell down the cabin stairs with a round of beef, and injured his foot severely. Another steward fell down after him and cut his eye open. The baker's taken ill; so is the pastry-cook. A new man, sick to death, has been required to fill the place of the latter officer, and has been dragged out of bed and propped up in a little house upon deck, between two casks, and ordered (the captain standing over him) to make and roll out pie-crust; which he protests, with tears in his eyes, it is death to him in his bilious state to look at. Twelve dozen of bottled porter has got loose upon deck, and the bottles are rolling about distractedly, overhead. Lord Mulgrave (a handsome fellow, by-the-by, to look at, and nothing but a good 'un to go) laid a wager with twenty-five other men last night, whose berths, like his, are in the fore-cabin, which can only be got at by crossing the deck, that he would reach his cabin first. Watches were set by the captain's, and they sallied forth, wrapped up in coats and storm caps. The sea broke over the ship so violently, that they were _five-and-twenty minutes_ holding on by the handrail at the starboard paddle-box, drenched to the skin by every wave, and not daring to go on or come back, lest they should be washed overboard. News! A dozen murders in town wouldn't interest us half as much." Nevertheless their excitements were not over. At the very end of the voyage came an incident very lightly touched in the _Notes_, but more freely told to me under date of the 21st January: "We were running into Halifax harbor on Wednesday night, with little wind and a bright moon; had made the light at its outer entrance, and given the ship in charge to the pilot; were playing our rubber, all in good spirits (for it had been comparatively smooth for some days, with tolerably dry decks and other unusual comforts), when suddenly the ship STRUCK! A rush upon deck followed, of course. The men (I mean the crew! think of this) were kicking off their shoes and throwing off their jackets preparatory to swimming ashore; the pilot was beside himself; the passengers dismayed; and everything in the most intolerable confusion and hurry. Breakers were roaring ahead; the land within a couple of hundred yards; and the vessel driving upon the surf, although her paddles were worked backwards, and everything done to stay her course. It is not the custom of steamers, it seems, to have an anchor ready. An accident occurred in getting ours over the side; and for half an hour we were throwing up rockets, burning blue-lights, and firing signals of distress, all of which remained unanswered, though we were so close to the shore that we could see the waving branches of the trees. All this time, as we veered about, a man was heaving the lead every two minutes; the depths of water constantly decreasing; and nobody self-possessed but Hewitt. They let go the anchor at last, got out a boat, and sent her ashore with the fourth officer, the pilot, and four men aboard, to try and find out where we were. The pilot had no idea; but Hewitt put his little finger upon a certain part of the chart, and was as confident of the exact spot (though he had never been there in his life) as if he had lived there from infancy. The boat's return about an hour afterwards proved him to be quite right. We had got into a place called the Eastern Passage, in a sudden fog and through the pilot's folly. We had struck upon a mud-bank, and driven into a perfect little pond, surrounded by banks and rocks and shoals of all kinds: the only safe speck in the place. Eased by this report, and the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three o'clock in the morning, to lie there all night." The next day's landing at Halifax, and delivery of the mails, are sketched in the _Notes_; but not his personal part in what followed: "Then, sir, comes a breathless man who has been already into the ship and out again, shouting my name as he tears along. I stop, arm in arm with the little doctor whom I have taken ashore for oysters. The breathless man introduces himself as The Speaker of the House of Assembly; _will_ drag me away to his house; and _will_ have a carriage and his wife sent down for Kate, who is laid up with a hideously swoln face. Then he drags me up to the Governor's house (Lord Falkland is the governor), and then Heaven knows where; concluding with both houses of parliament, which happen to meet for the session that very day, and are opened by a mock speech from the throne delivered by the governor, with one of Lord Grey's sons for his aide-de-camp, and a great host of officers about him. I wish you could have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable[45] in the streets. I wish you could have seen judges, law-officers, bishops, and law-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could have seen the inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the Speaker's throne, and sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, the observed of all observers, listening with exemplary gravity to the queerest speaking possible, and breaking in spite of himself into a smile as he thought of this commencement to the Thousand and One stories in reserve for home and Lincoln's Inn Fields and Jack Straw's Castle.--Ah, Forster! when I _do_ come back again!----" He resumed his letter at Tremont House on Saturday, the 28th of January, having reached Boston that day week at five in the afternoon; and, as his first American experience is very lightly glanced at in the _Notes_, a fuller picture will perhaps be welcome. "As the Cunard boats have a wharf of their own at the custom-house, and that a narrow one, we were a long time (an hour at least) working in. I was standing in full fig on the paddle-box beside the captain, staring about me, when suddenly, long before we were moored to the wharf, a dozen men came leaping on board at the peril of their lives, with great bundles of newspapers under their arms; worsted comforters (very much the worse for wear) round their necks; and so forth. 'Aha!' says I, 'this is like our London Bridge;' believing of course that these visitors were news-boys. But what do you think of their being EDITORS? And what do you think of their tearing violently up to me and beginning to shake hands like madmen? Oh! if you could have seen how I wrung their wrists! And if you could but know how I hated one man in very dirty gaiters, and with very protruding upper teeth, who said to all comers after him, 'So you've been introduced to our friend Dickens--eh?' There was one among them, though, who really was of use; a Doctor S., editor of the ----. He ran off here (two miles at least), and ordered rooms and dinner. And in course of time Kate, and I, and Lord Mulgrave (who was going back to his regiment at Montreal on Monday, and had agreed to live with us in the mean while) sat down in a spacious and handsome room to a very handsome dinner, bating peculiarities of putting on table, and had forgotten the ship entirely. A Mr. Alexander, to whom I had written from England promising to sit for a portrait, was on board directly we touched the land, and brought us here in his carriage. Then, after sending a present of most beautiful flowers, he left us to ourselves, and we thanked him for it." What further he had to say of that week's experience finds its first public utterance here. "How can I tell you," he continues, "what has happened since that first day? How can I give you the faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end? There is to be a public dinner to me here in Boston, next Tuesday, and great dissatisfaction has been given to the many by the high price (three pounds sterling each) of the tickets. There is to be a ball next Monday week at New York, and 150 names appear on the list of the committee. There is to be a dinner in the same place, in the same week, to which I have had an invitation with every known name in America appended to it. But what can I tell you about any of these things which will give you the slightest notion of the enthusiastic greeting they give me, or the cry that runs through the whole country? I have had deputations from the Far West, who have come from more than two thousand miles' distance: from the lakes, the rivers, the back-woods, the log houses, the cities, factories, villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the States have written to me. I have heard from the universities, Congress, Senate, and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind. 'It is no-nonsense, and no common feeling,' wrote Dr. Channing to me yesterday. 'It is all heart. There never was, and never will be, such a triumph.' And it is a good thing, is it not, . . . to find those fancies it has given me and you the greatest satisfaction to think of, at the core of it all? It makes my heart quieter, and me a more retiring, sober, tranquil man, to watch the effect of those thoughts in all this noise and hurry, even than if I sat, pen in hand, to put them down for the first time. I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upwards with unchanging finger for more than four years past. And if I know my heart, not twenty times this praise would move me to an act of folly.". . . There were but two days more before the post left for England, and the close of this part of his letter sketched the engagements that awaited him on leaving Boston: "We leave here next Saturday. We go to a place called Worcester, about 75 miles off, to the house of the governor of this place; and stay with him all Sunday. On Monday we go on by railroad about 50 miles further to a town called Springfield, where I am met by a 'reception committee' from Hartford 20 miles further, and carried on by the multitude: I am sure I don't know how, but I shouldn't wonder if they appear with a triumphal car. On Wednesday I have a public dinner there. On Friday I shall be obliged to present myself in public again, at a place called New Haven, about 30 miles further. On Saturday evening I hope to be at New York; and there I shall stay ten days or a fortnight. You will suppose that I have enough to do. I am sitting for a portrait and for a bust. I have the correspondence of a secretary of state, and the engagements of a fashionable physician. I have a secretary whom I take on with me. He is a young man of the name of Q.; was strongly recommended to me; is most modest, obliging, silent, and willing; and does his work _well_. He boards and lodges at my expense when we travel; and his salary is ten dollars per month--about two pounds five of our English money. There will be dinners and balls at Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and I believe everywhere. In Canada, I have promised to _play_ at the theatre with the officers, for the benefit of a charity. We are already weary, at times, past all expression; and I finish this by means of a pious fraud. We were engaged to a party, and have written to say we are both desperately ill. . . . 'Well,' I can fancy you saying, 'but about his impressions of Boston and the Americans?'--Of the latter, I will not say a word until I have seen more of them, and have gone into the interior. I will only say, now, that we have never yet been required to dine at a table-d'hôte; that, thus far, our rooms are as much our own here as they would be at the Clarendon; that but for an odd phrase now and then--such as _Snap of cold weather_; a _tongue-y man_ for a talkative fellow; _Possible?_ as a solitary interrogation; and _Yes?_ for indeed--I should have marked, so far, no difference whatever between the parties here and those I have left behind. The women are very beautiful, but they soon fade; the general breeding is neither stiff nor forward; the good nature, universal. If you ask the way to a place--of some common water-side man, who don't know you from Adam--he turns and goes with you. Universal deference is paid to ladies; and they walk about at all seasons, wholly unprotected. . . . This hotel is a trifle smaller than Finsbury Square; and is made so infernally hot (I use the expression advisedly) by means of a furnace with pipes running through the passages, that we can hardly bear it. There are no curtains to the beds, or to the bedroom windows. I am told there never are, hardly, all through America. The bedrooms are indeed very bare of furniture. Ours is nearly as large as your great room, and has a wardrobe in it of painted wood not larger (I appeal to K.) than an English watch-box. I slept in this room for two nights, quite satisfied with the belief that it was a shower-bath." The last addition made to this letter, from which many vividest pages of the _Notes_ (among them the bright quaint picture of Boston streets) were taken with small alteration, bore date the 29th of January: "I hardly know what to add to all this long and unconnected history. Dana, the author of that _Two Years before the Mast_" (a book which I had praised much to him, thinking it like De Foe), "is a very nice fellow indeed; and in appearance not at all the man you would expect. He is short, mild-looking, and has a care-worn face. His father is exactly like George Cruikshank after a night's jollity--only shorter. The professors at the Cambridge university, Longfellow, Felton, Jared Sparks, are noble fellows. So is Kenyon's friend, Ticknor. Bancroft is a famous man; a straightforward, manly, earnest heart; and talks much of you, which is a great comfort. Doctor Channing I will tell you more of, after I have breakfasted alone with him next Wednesday. . . . Sumner is of great service to me. . . . The president of the Senate here presides at my dinner on Tuesday. Lord Mulgrave lingered with us till last Tuesday (we had our little captain to dinner on the Monday), and then went on to Canada. Kate is quite well, and so is Anne, whose smartness surpasses belief. They yearn for home, and so do I. "Of course you will not see in the papers any true account of our voyage, for they keep the dangers of the passage, when there are any, very quiet. I observed so many perils peculiar to steamers that I am still undecided whether we shall not return by one of the New York liners. On the night of the storm, I was wondering within myself where we should be, if the chimney were blown overboard; in which case, it needs no great observation to discover that the vessel must be instantly on fire from stem to stern. When I went on deck next day, I saw that it was held up by a perfect forest of chains and ropes, which had been rigged in the night. Hewitt told me (when we were on shore, not before) that they had men lashed, hoisted up, and swinging there, all through the gale, getting these stays about it. This is not agreeable--is it? "I wonder whether you will remember that next Tuesday is my birthday! This letter will leave here that morning. "On looking back through these sheets, I am astonished to find how little I have told you, and how much I have, even now, in store which shall be yours by word of mouth. The American poor, the American factories, the institutions of all kinds--I have a book, already. There is no man in this town, or in this State of New England, who has not a blazing fire and a meat dinner every day of his life. A flaming sword in the air would not attract so much attention as a beggar in the streets. There are no charity uniforms, no wearisome repetition of the same dull ugly dress, in that blind school.[46] All are attired after their own tastes, and every boy and girl has his or her individuality as distinct and unimpaired as you would find it in their own homes. At the theatres, all the ladies sit in the fronts of the boxes. The gallery are as quiet as the dress circle at dear Drury Lane. A man with seven heads would be no sight at all, compared with one who couldn't read and write. "I won't speak (I say 'speak'! I wish I could) about the dear precious children, because I know how much we shall hear about them when we receive those letters from home for which we long so ardently." * * * * * Unmistakably to be seen, in this earliest of his letters, is the quite fresh and unalloyed impression first received by him at this memorable visit; and it is due, as well to himself as to the great country which welcomed him, that this should be considered independently of any modification it afterwards underwent. Of the fervency and universality of the welcome there could indeed be no doubt, and as little that it sprang from feelings honorable both to giver and receiver. The sources of Dickens's popularity in England were in truth multiplied many-fold in America. The hearty, cordial, and humane side of his genius had fascinated them quite as much; but there was also something beyond this. The cheerful temper that had given new beauty to the commonest forms of life, the abounding humor which had added largely to all innocent enjoyment, the honorable and in those days rare distinction of America which left no home in the Union inaccessible to such advantages, had made Dickens the object everywhere of grateful admiration, for the most part of personal affection. But even this was not all. I do not say it either to lessen or to increase the value of the tribute, but to express simply what it was; and there cannot be a question that the young English author, whom by his language they claimed equally for their own, was almost universally regarded by the Americans as a kind of embodied protest against what they believed to be worst in the institutions of England, depressing and overshadowing in a social sense, and adverse to purely intellectual influences. In all the papers of every grade in the Union, of which many were sent to me at the time, the feeling of triumph over the mother-country in this particular is everywhere predominant. You worship titles, they said, and military heroes, and millionaires, and we of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we think in these parts worthier of honor, than birth, or wealth, a title, or a sword. Well, there was something in this too, apart from a mere crowing over the mother-country. The Americans had honestly more than a common share in the triumphs of a genius which in more than one sense had made the deserts and wildernesses of life to blossom like the rose. They were entitled to select for a welcome, as emphatic as they might please to render it, the writer who pre-eminently in his generation had busied himself to "detect and save," in human creatures, such sparks of virtue as misery or vice had not availed to extinguish; to discover what is beautiful and comely under what commonly passes for the ungainly and the deformed; to draw happiness and hopefulness from despair itself; and, above all, so to have made known to his own countrymen the wants and sufferings of the poor, the ignorant, and the neglected, that they could be left in absolute neglect no more. "A triumph has been prepared for him," wrote Mr. Ticknor to our dear friend Kenyon, "in which the whole country will join. He will have a progress through the States unequaled since Lafayette's." Daniel Webster told the Americans that Dickens had done more already to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament. His sympathies are such, exclaimed Dr. Channing, as to recommend him in an especial manner to us. He seeks out that class, in order to benefit them, with whom American institutions and laws sympathize most strongly; and it is in the passions, sufferings, and virtues of the mass that he has found his subjects of most thrilling interest. "He shows that life in its rudest form may wear a tragic grandeur; that amidst follies and excesses, provoking laughter or scorn, the moral feelings do not wholly die; and that the haunts of the blackest crime are sometimes lighted up by the presence and influence of the noblest souls. His pictures have a tendency to awaken sympathy with our race, and to change the unfeeling indifference which has prevailed towards the depressed multitude, into a sorrowful and indignant sensibility to their wrongs and woes." Whatever may be the turn which we are to see the welcome take, by dissatisfaction that arose on both sides, it is well that we should thus understand what in its first manifestations was honorable to both. Dickens had his disappointments, and the Americans had theirs; but what was really genuine in the first enthusiasm remained without grave alloy from either; and the letters, as I proceed to give them, will so naturally explain and illustrate the misunderstanding as to require little further comment. I am happy to be able here to place on record fac-similes of the invitations to the public entertainments in New York which reached him before he quitted Boston. The mere signatures suffice to show how universal the welcome was from that great city of the Union. FOOTNOTES: [44] The initials used here are in no case those of the real names, being employed in every case for the express purpose of disguising the names. Generally the remark is applicable to all initials used in the letters printed in the course of this work. [45] This word, applied to him by his old master; Mr. Giles (_ante_, p. 33), was for a long time the epithet we called him by. [46] His descriptions of this school, and of the case of Laura Bridgeman, will be found in the _Notes_, and have therefore been, of course, omitted here. CHAPTER XX. SECOND IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. 1842. Second Letter--International Copyright--Third Letter--The Dinner at Boston--Worcester, Springfield, and Hartford--Queer Traveling--Levees at Hartford and New Haven--At Wallingford--Serenades--Cornelius C. Felton--Payment of Personal Expenses declined--At New York--Irving and Colden--Description of the Ball--Newspaper Accounts--A Phase of Character--Opinion in America--International Copyright--American Authors in regard to it--Outcry against the Nation's Guest--Declines to be silent on Copyright--Speech at Dinner--Irving in the Chair--Chairman's Breakdown--An Incident afterwards in London--Results of Copyright Speeches--A Bookseller's Demand for Help--Suggestion for Copyright Memorial--Henry Clay's Opinion--Life in New York--Distresses of Popularity--Intentions for Future--Refusal of Invitations--Going South and West--As to Return--Dangers incident to Steamers--Slavery--Ladies of America--Party Conflicts--Non-arrival of Cunard Steamer--Copyright Petition for Congress--No Hope of the Caledonia--Substitute for her--Anxiety as to Letters--Of Distinguished Americans--Hotel Bills--Thoughts of the Children--Acadia takes Caledonia's Place--Letter to C. D. from Carlyle--Carlyle on Copyright--Argument against Stealing--Rob Roy's Plan worth bettering--C. D. as to Carlyle. HIS second letter, radiant with the same kindly warmth that gave always pre-eminent charm to his genius, was dated from the Carlton Hotel, New York, on the 14th February, but its only allusion of any public interest was to the beginning of his agitation of the question of international copyright. He went to America with no express intention of starting this question in any way, and certainly with no belief that such remark upon it as a person in his position could alone be expected to make would be resented strongly by any sections of the American people. But he was not long left in doubt on this head. He had spoken upon it twice publicly, "to the great indignation of some of the editors here, who are attacking me for so doing, right and left." On the other hand, all the best men had assured him that, if only at once followed up in England, the blow struck might bring about a change in the law; and, yielding to the pleasant hope that the best men could be a match for the worst, he urged me to enlist on his side what force I could, and in particular, as he had made Scott's claim his war-cry, to bring Lockhart into the field. I could not do much, but I did what I could. Three days later he began another letter; and, as this will be entirely new to the reader, I shall print it as it reached me, with only such omission of matter concerning myself as I think it my duty, however reluctantly, to make throughout these extracts. There was nothing in its personal details, or in those relating to international copyright, available for his _Notes_; from which they were excluded by the two rules he observed in that book,--the first to be altogether silent as to the copyright discussion, and the second to abstain from all mention of individuals. But there can be no harm here in violating either rule, for, as Sydney Smith said with his humorous sadness, "We are all dead now." "Carlton House, New York: Thursday, February Seventeenth, 1842. . . . As there is a sailing-packet from here to England to-morrow which is warranted (by the owners) to be a marvelous fast sailer, and as it appears most probable that she will reach home (I write the word with a pang) before the Cunard steamer of next month, I indite this letter. And lest this letter should reach you before another letter which I dispatched from here last Monday, let me say in the first place that I _did_ dispatch a brief epistle to you on that day, together with a newspaper, and a pamphlet touching the Boz ball; and that I put in the post-office at Boston another newspaper for you containing an account of the dinner, which was just about to come off, you remember, when I wrote to you from that city. "It was a most superb affair; and the speaking _admirable_. Indeed, the general talent for public speaking here is one of the most striking of the things that force themselves upon an Englishman's notice. As every man looks on to being a member of Congress, every man prepares himself for it; and the result is quite surprising. You will observe one odd custom,--the drinking of sentiments. It is quite extinct with us, but here everybody is expected to be prepared with an epigram as a matter of course. "We left Boston on the fifth, and went away with the governor of the city to stay till Monday at his house at Worcester. He married a sister of Bancroft's, and another sister of Bancroft's went down with us. The village of Worcester is one of the prettiest in New England. . . . On Monday morning at nine o'clock we started again by railroad and went on to Springfield, where a deputation of two were waiting, and everything was in readiness that the utmost attention could suggest. Owing to the mildness of the weather, the Connecticut river was 'open,' videlicet not frozen, and they had a steamboat ready to carry us on to Hartford; thus saving a land-journey of only twenty-five miles, but on such roads at this time of year that it takes nearly twelve hours to accomplish! The boat was very small, the river full of floating blocks of ice, and the depth where we went (to avoid the ice and the current) not more than a few inches. After two hours and a half of this queer traveling, we got to Hartford. There, there was quite an English inn; except in respect of the bedrooms, which are always uncomfortable; and the best committee of management that has yet presented itself. They kept us more quiet, and were more considerate and thoughtful, even to their own exclusion, than any I have yet had to deal with. Kate's face being horribly bad, I determined to give her a rest here; and accordingly wrote to get rid of my engagement at New Haven, on that plea. We remained in this town until the eleventh: holding a formal levee every day for two hours, and receiving on each from two hundred to three hundred people. At five o'clock on the afternoon of the eleventh, we set off (still by railroad) for New Haven, which we reached about eight o'clock. The moment we had had tea, we were forced to open another levee for the students and professors of the college (the largest in the States), and the townspeople. I suppose we shook hands, before going to bed, with considerably more than five hundred people; and I stood, as a matter of course, the whole time. . . . "Now, the deputation of two had come on with us from Hartford; and at New Haven there was another committee; and the immense fatigue and worry of all this, no words can exaggerate. We had been in the morning over jails and deaf and dumb asylums; had stopped on the journey at a place called Wallingford, where a whole town had turned out to see me, and to gratify whose curiosity the train stopped expressly; had had a day of great excitement and exertion on the Thursday (this being Friday); and were inexpressibly worn out. And when at last we got to bed and were 'going' to fall asleep, the choristers of the college turned out in a body, under the window, and serenaded us! We had had, by-the-by, another serenade at Hartford, from a Mr. Adams (a nephew of John Quincy Adams) and a German friend. _They_ were most beautiful singers: and when they began, in the dead of the night, in a long, musical, echoing passage outside our chamber door; singing, in low voices to guitars, about home and absent friends and other topics that they knew would interest us; we were more moved than I can tell you. In the midst of my sentimentality, though, a thought occurred to me which made me laugh so immoderately that I was obliged to cover my face with the bedclothes. 'Good Heavens!' I said to Kate, 'what a monstrously ridiculous and commonplace appearance my boots must have, outside the door!' I never _was_ so impressed with a sense of the absurdity of boots, in all my life. "The New Haven serenade was not so good; though there were a great many voices, and a 'reg'lar' band. It hadn't the heart of the other. Before it was six hours old, we were dressing with might and main, and making ready for our departure; it being a drive of twenty minutes to the steamboat, and the hour of sailing nine o'clock. After a hasty breakfast we started off; and after another levee on the deck (actually on the deck), and 'three times three for Dickens,' moved towards New York. "I was delighted to find on board a Mr. Felton whom I had known at Boston. He is the Greek professor at Cambridge, and was going on to the ball and dinner. Like most men of his class whom I have seen, he is a most delightful fellow,--unaffected, hearty, genial, jolly; quite an Englishman of the best sort. We drank all the porter on board, ate all the cold pork and cheese, and were very merry indeed. I should have told you, in its proper place, that both at Hartford and New Haven a regular bank was subscribed, by these committees, for _all_ my expenses. No bill was to be got at the bar, and everything was paid for. But as I would on no account suffer this to be done, I stoutly and positively refused to budge an inch until Mr. Q. should have received the bills from the landlord's own hands, and paid them to the last farthing. Finding it impossible to move me, they suffered me, most unwillingly, to carry the point. "About half-past 2 we arrived here. In half an hour more, we reached this hotel, where a very splendid suite of rooms was prepared for us; and where everything is very comfortable, and no doubt (as at Boston) _enormously_ dear. Just as we sat down to dinner, David Colden made his appearance; and when he had gone, and we were taking our wine, Washington Irving came in alone, with open arms. And here he stopped, until ten o'clock at night." (Through Lord Jeffrey, with whom he was connected by marriage, and Macready, of whom he was the cordial friend, we already knew Mr. Colden; and his subsequent visits to Europe led to many years' intimate intercourse, greatly enjoyed by us both.) "Having got so far, I shall divide my discourse into four points. First, the ball. Secondly, some slight specimens of a certain phase of character in the Americans. Thirdly, international copyright. Fourthly, my life here, and projects to be carried out while I remain. "Firstly, the ball. It came off last Monday (vide pamphlet.) 'At a quarter-past 9, exactly' (I quote the printed order of proceeding), we were waited upon by 'David Colden, Esquire, and General George Morris;' habited, the former in full ball costume, the latter in the full dress uniform of Heaven knows what regiment of militia. The general took Kate, Colden gave his arm to me, and we proceeded downstairs to a carriage at the door, which took us to the stage-door of the theatre, greatly to the disappointment of an enormous crowd who were besetting the main door and making a most tremendous hullaballoo. The scene on our entrance was very striking. There were three thousand people present in full dress; from the roof to the floor, the theatre was decorated magnificently; and the light, glitter, glare, show, noise, and cheering, baffle my descriptive powers. We were walked in through the centre of the centre dress-box, the front whereof was taken out for the occasion; so to the back of the stage, where the mayor and other dignitaries received us; and we were then paraded all round the enormous ball-room, twice, for the gratification of the many-headed. That done, we began to dance--Heaven knows how we did it, for there was no room. And we continued dancing until, being no longer able even to stand, we slipped away quietly, and came back to the hotel. All the documents connected with this extraordinary festival (quite unparalleled here) we have preserved; so you may suppose that on this head alone we shall have enough to show you when we come home. The bill of fare for supper is, in its amount and extent, quite a curiosity. "Now, the phase of character in the Americans which amuses me most was put before me in its most amusing shape by the circumstances attending this affair. I had noticed it before, and have since; but I cannot better illustrate it than by reference to this theme. Of course I can do nothing but in some shape or other it gets into the newspapers. All manner of lies get there, and occasionally a truth so twisted and distorted that it has as much resemblance to the real fact as Quilp's leg to Taglioni's. But with this ball to come off, the newspapers were if possible unusually loquacious; and in their accounts of me, and my seeings, sayings, and doings on the Saturday night and Sunday before, they describe my manner, mode of speaking, dressing, and so forth. In doing this, they report that I am a very charming fellow (of course), and have a very free and easy way with me; 'which,' say they, 'at first amused a few fashionables;' but soon pleased them exceedingly. Another paper, coming after the ball, dwells upon its splendor and brilliancy; hugs itself and its readers upon all that Dickens saw, and winds up by gravely expressing its conviction that Dickens was never in such society in England as he has seen in New York, and that its high and striking tone cannot fail to make an indelible impression on his mind! For the same reason I am always represented, whenever I appear in public, as being 'very pale;' 'apparently thunderstruck;' and utterly confounded by all I see. . . . You recognize the queer vanity which is at the root of all this? I have plenty of stories in connection with it to amuse you with when I return." "_Twenty-fourth February._ "It is unnecessary to say . . . that this letter _didn't_ come by the sailing packet, and _will_ come by the Cunard boat. After the ball I was laid up with a very bad sore throat, which confined me to the house four whole days; and as I was unable to write, or indeed to do anything but doze and drink lemonade, I missed the ship. . . . I have still a horrible cold, and so has Kate, but in other respects we are all right. I proceed to my third head: the international copyright question. "I believe there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in this.--There!--I write the words with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the bottom of my soul. I spoke, as you know, of international copyright, at Boston; and I spoke of it again at Hartford. My friends were paralyzed with wonder at such audacious daring. The notion that I, a man alone by himself, in America, should venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually struck the boldest dumb! Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston--every man who writes in this country is devoted to the question, and not one of them _dares_ to raise his voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. It is nothing that of all men living I am the greatest loser by it. It is nothing that I have a claim to speak and be heard. The wonder is that a breathing man can be found with temerity enough to suggest to the Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could have seen the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats. "I had no sooner made that second speech than such an outcry began (for the purpose of deterring me from doing the like in this city) as an Englishman can form no notion of. Anonymous letters, verbal dissuasions; newspaper attacks making Colt (a murderer who is attracting great attention here) an angel by comparison with me; assertions that I was no gentleman, but a mere mercenary scoundrel; coupled with the most monstrous misrepresentations relative to my design and purpose in visiting the United States; came pouring in upon me every day. The dinner committee here (composed of the first gentlemen in America, remember that) were so dismayed, that they besought me not to pursue the subject, _although they every one agreed with me_. I answered that I would. That nothing should deter me. . . . That the shame was theirs, not mine; and that as I would not spare them when I got home, I would not be silenced here. Accordingly, when the night came, I asserted my right, with all the means I could command to give it dignity, in face, manner, or words; and I believe that if you could have seen and heard me, you would have loved me better for it than ever you did in your life. "The _New York Herald_, which you will receive with this, is the _Satirist_ of America; but having a great circulation (on account of its commercial intelligence and early news) it can afford to secure the best reporters. . . . My speech is done, upon the whole, with remarkable accuracy. There are a great many typographical errors in it; and by the omission of one or two words, or the substitution of one word for another, it is often materially weakened. Thus, I did not say that I 'claimed' my right, but that I 'asserted' it; and I did not say that I had 'some claim,' but that I had 'a most righteous claim,' to speak. But altogether it is very correct." * * * * * Washington Irving was chairman of this dinner, and, having from the first a dread that he should break down in his speech, the catastrophe came accordingly. Near him sat the Cambridge professor who had come with Dickens by boat from New Haven, with whom already a warm friendship had been formed that lasted for life, and who has pleasantly sketched what happened. Mr. Felton saw Irving constantly in the interval of preparation, and could not but despond at his daily iterated foreboding of _I shall certainly break down_; though besides the real dread there was a sly humor which heightened its whimsical horror with an irresistible drollery. But the professor plucked up hope a little when the night came and he saw that Irving had laid under his plate the manuscript of his speech. During dinner, nevertheless, his old foreboding cry was still heard, and "at last the moment arrived; Mr. Irving rose; and the deafening and long-continued applause by no means lessened his apprehension. He began in his pleasant voice; got through two or three sentences pretty easily, but in the next hesitated; and, after one or two attempts to go on, gave it up, with a graceful allusion to the tournament and the troop of knights all armed and eager for the fray; and ended with the toast CHARLES DICKENS, THE GUEST OF THE NATION. _There!_ said he, as he resumed his seat amid applause as great as had greeted his rising, _There! I told you I should break down, and I've done it!_" He was in London a few months later, on his way to Spain; and I heard Thomas Moore describe[47] at Rogers's table the difficulty there had been to overcome his reluctance, because of this break-down, to go to the dinner of the Literary Fund on the occasion of Prince Albert's presiding. "However," said Moore, "I told him only to attempt a few words, and I suggested what they should be, and he said he'd never thought of anything so easy, and he went, and did famously." I knew very well, as I listened, that this had _not_ been the result; but as the distinguished American had found himself, on this second occasion, not among orators as in New York, but among men as unable as himself to speak in public, and equally able to do better things,[48] he was doubtless more reconciled to his own failure. I have been led to this digression by Dickens's silence on his friend's break-down. He had so great a love for Irving that it was painful to speak of him as at any disadvantage, and of the New York dinner he wrote only in its connection with his own copyright speeches. * * * * * "The effect of all this copyright agitation at least has been to awaken a great sensation on both sides of the subject; the respectable newspapers and reviews taking up the cudgels as strongly in my favor, as the others have done against me. Some of the vagabonds take great credit to themselves (grant us patience!) for having made me popular by publishing my books in newspapers: as if there were no England, no Scotland, no Germany, no place but America in the whole world. A splendid satire upon this kind of trash has just occurred. A man came here yesterday, and demanded, not besought but demanded, pecuniary assistance; and fairly bullied Mr. Q. for money. When I came home, I dictated a letter to this effect,--that such applications reached me in vast numbers every day; that if I were a man of fortune, I could not render assistance to all who sought it; and that, depending on my own exertion for all the help I could give, I regretted to say I could afford him none. Upon this, my gentleman sits down and writes me that he is an itinerant bookseller; that he is the first man who sold my books in New York; that he is distressed in the city where I am reveling in luxury; that he thinks it rather strange that the man who wrote _Nickleby_ should be utterly destitute of feeling; and that he would have me 'take care I don't repent it.' What do you think of _that_?--as Mac would say. I thought it such a good commentary, that I dispatched the letter to the editor of the only English newspaper here, and told him he might print it if he liked. "I will tell you what _I_ should like, my dear friend, always supposing that your judgment concurs with mine, and that you would take the trouble to get such a document. I should like to have a short letter addressed to me by the principal English authors who signed the international copyright petition, expressive of their sense that I have done my duty to the cause. I am sure I deserve it, but I don't wish it on that ground. It is because its publication in the best journals here would unquestionably do great good. As the gauntlet is down, let us go on. Clay has already sent a gentleman to me express from Washington (where I shall be on the 6th or 7th of next month) to declare his strong interest in the matter, his cordial approval of the 'manly' course I have held in reference to it, and his desire to stir in it if possible. I have lighted up such a blaze that a meeting of the foremost people on the other side (very respectfully and properly conducted in reference to me, personally, I am bound to say) was held in this town t'other night. And it would be a thousand pities if we did not strike as hard as we can, now that the iron is so hot. "I have come at last, and it is time I did, to my life here, and intentions for the future. I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair. If I visit a public institution, with only one friend, the directors come down incontinently, waylay me in the yard, and address me in a long speech. I go to a party in the evening, and am so inclosed and hemmed about by people, stand where I will, that I am exhausted for want of air. I dine out, and have to talk about everything, to everybody. I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the pew I sit in, and the clergyman preaches _at_ me. I take my seat in a railroad-car, and the very conductor won't leave me alone. I get out at a station, and can't drink a glass of water, without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters arrive, all about nothing, and all demanding an immediate answer. This man is offended because I won't live in his house; and that man is thoroughly disgusted because I won't go out more than four times in one evening. I have no rest or peace, and am in a perpetual worry. "Under these febrile circumstances, which this climate especially favors, I have come to the resolution that I will not (so far as my will has anything to do with the matter) accept any more public entertainments or public recognitions of any kind, during my stay in the United States; and in pursuance of this determination I have refused invitations from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Virginia, Albany, and Providence. Heaven knows whether this will be effectual, but I shall soon see, for on Monday morning, the 28th, we leave for Philadelphia. There I shall only stay three days. Thence we go to Baltimore, and _there_ I shall only stay three days. Thence to Washington, where we may stay perhaps ten days; perhaps not so long. Thence to Virginia, where we may halt for one day; and thence to Charleston, where we may pass a week perhaps, and where we shall very likely remain until your March letters reach us, through David Colden. I had a design of going from Charleston to Columbia in South Carolina, and there engaging a carriage, a baggage-tender and negro boy to guard the same, and a saddle-horse for myself,--with which caravan I intended going 'right away,' as they say here, into the West, through the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, across the Alleghany Mountains, and so on until we should strike the lakes and could get to Canada. But it has been represented to me that this is a track only known to traveling merchants; that the roads are bad, the country a tremendous waste, the inns log houses, and the journey one that would play the very devil with Kate. I am staggered, but not deterred. If I find it possible to be done in the time, I mean to do it; being quite satisfied that without some such dash I can never be a free agent, or see anything worth the telling. "We mean to return home in a packet-ship,--not a steamer. Her name is the George Washington, and she will sail from here, for Liverpool, on the seventh of June. At that season of the year they are seldom more than three weeks making the voyage; and I never will trust myself upon the wide ocean, if it please Heaven, in a steamer again. When I tell you all that I observed on board that Britannia, I shall astonish you. Meanwhile, consider two of their dangers. First, that if the funnel were blown overboard the vessel must instantly be on fire, from stem to stern; to comprehend which consequence, you have only to understand that the funnel is more than 40 feet high, and that at night you see the solid fire two or three feet above its top. Imagine this swept down by a strong wind, and picture to yourself the amount of flame on deck; and that a strong wind is likely to sweep it down you soon learn, from the precautions taken to keep it up in a storm, when it is the first thing thought of. Secondly, each of these boats consumes between London and Halifax 700 tons of coals; and it is pretty clear, from this enormous difference of weight in a ship of only 1200 tons burden in all, that she must either be too heavy when she comes out of port, or too light when she goes in. The daily difference in her rolling, as she burns the coals out, is something absolutely fearful. Add to all this, that by day and night she is full of fire and people, that she has no boats, and that the struggling of that enormous machinery in a heavy sea seems as though it would rend her into fragments--and you may have a pretty con-sid-erable damned good sort of a feeble notion that it don't fit nohow; and that it a'n't calculated to make you smart, overmuch; and that you don't feel 'special bright; and by no means first-rate; and not at all tonguey (or disposed for conversation); and that however rowdy you may be by natur', it does use you up com-plete, and that's a fact; and makes you quake considerable, and disposed toe damn the [)e]ngin[)e]!--All of which phrases, I beg to add, are pure Americanisms of the first water. "When we reach Baltimore, we are in the regions of slavery. It exists there, in its least shocking and most mitigated form; but there it is. They whisper, here (they dare only whisper, you know, and that below their breaths), that on that place, and all through the South, there is a dull gloomy cloud on which the very word seems written. I shall be able to say, one of these days, that I accepted no public mark of respect in any place where slavery was;--and that's something. "The ladies of America are decidedly and unquestionably beautiful. Their complexions are not so good as those of Englishwomen; their beauty does not last so long; and their figures are very inferior. But they are most beautiful. I still reserve my opinion of the national character,--just whispering that I tremble for a radical coming here, unless he is a radical on principle, by reason and reflection, and from the sense of right. I fear that if he were anything else, he would return home a Tory. . . . I say no more on that head for two months from this time, save that I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in the failure of its example to the earth. The scenes that are passing in Congress now, all tending to the separation of the States, fill one with such a deep disgust that I dislike the very name of Washington (meaning the place, not the man), and am repelled by the mere thought of approaching it." "_Twenty-seventh February. Sunday._ "There begins to be great consternation here, in reference to the Cunard packet which (we suppose) left Liverpool on the fourth. She has not yet arrived. We scarcely know what to do with ourselves in our extreme anxiety to get letters from home. I have really had serious thoughts of going back to Boston, alone, to be nearer news. We have determined to remain here until Tuesday afternoon, if she should not arrive before, and to send Mr. Q. and the luggage on to Philadelphia to-morrow morning. God grant she may not have gone down! but every ship that comes in brings intelligence of a terrible gale (which indeed was felt ashore here) on the night of the fourteenth; and the sea-captains swear (not without some prejudice, of course) that no steamer could have lived through it, supposing her to have been in its full fury. As there is no steam-packet to go to England, supposing the Caledonia not to arrive, we are obliged to send our letters by the Garrick ship, which sails early to-morrow morning. Consequently I must huddle this up, and dispatch it to the post-office with all speed. I have so much to say that I could fill quires of paper, which renders this sudden pull-up the more provoking. "I have in my portmanteau a petition for an international copyright law, signed by all the best American writers, with Washington Irving at their head. They have requested me to hand it to Clay for presentation, and to back it with any remarks I may think proper to offer. So 'Hoo-roar for the principle, as the money-lender said ven he vouldn't renoo the bill.' "God bless you. . . . You know what I would say about home and the darlings. A hundred times God bless you. . . . Fears are entertained for Lord Ashburton also. Nothing has been heard of him." A brief letter, sent me next day by the minister's bag, was in effect a postscript to the foregoing, and expressed still more strongly the doubts and apprehensions his voyage out had impressed him with, and which, though he afterwards saw reason greatly to modify his misgivings, were not so strange at that time as they appear to us now: "Carlton House, New York, February twenty-eighth, 1842. . . . The Caledonia, I grieve and regret to say, has not arrived. If she left England to her time, she has been four-and-twenty days at sea. There is no news of her; and on the nights of the fourteenth and eighteenth it blew a terrible gale, which almost justifies the worst suspicions. For myself, I have hardly any hope of her; having seen enough, in our passage out, to convince me that steaming across the ocean in heavy weather is as yet an experiment of the utmost hazard. "As it was supposed that there would be no steamer whatever for England this month (since in ordinary course the Caledonia would have returned with the mails on the 2d of March), I hastily got the letters ready yesterday and sent them by the Garrick; which may perhaps be three weeks out, but is not very likely to be longer. But belonging to the Cunard company is a boat called the Unicorn, which in the summertime plies up the St. Lawrence, and brings passengers from Canada to join the British and North American steamers at Halifax. In the winter she lies at the last-mentioned place; from which news has come this morning that they have sent her on to Boston for the mails, and, rather than interrupt the communication, mean to dispatch her to England in lieu of the poor Caledonia. This in itself, by the way, is a daring deed; for she was originally built to run between Liverpool and Glasgow, and is no more designed for the Atlantic than a Calais packet-boat; though she once crossed it, in the summer season. "You may judge, therefore, what the owners think of the probability of the Caledonia's arrival. How slight an alteration in our plans would have made us passengers on board of her! "It would be difficult to tell you, my dear fellow, what an impression this has made upon our minds, or with what intense anxiety and suspense we have been waiting for your letters from home. We were to have gone South to-day, but linger here until to-morrow afternoon (having sent the secretary and luggage forward) for one more chance of news. Love to dear Macready, and to dear Mac, and every one we care for. It's useless to speak of the dear children. It seems now as though we should never hear of them. . . . "P.S. Washington Irving is a _great_ fellow. We have laughed most heartily together. He is just the man he ought to be. So is Doctor Channing, with whom I have had an interesting correspondence since I saw him last at Boston. Halleck is a merry little man. Bryant a sad one, and very reserved. Washington Allston the painter (who wrote _Monaldi_) is a fine specimen of a glorious old genius. Longfellow, whose volume of poems I have got for you, is a frank accomplished man as well as a fine writer, and will be in town 'next fall.' Tell Macready that I suspect prices here must have rather altered since his time. I paid our fortnight's bill here, last night. We have dined out every day (except when I was laid up with a sore throat), and only had in all four bottles of wine. The bill was 70_l._ English!!! "You will see, by my other letter, how we have been fêted and feasted; and how there is war to the knife about the international copyright; and how I _will_ speak about it, and decline to be put down. . . . "Oh for news from home! I think of your letters so full of heart and friendship, with perhaps a little scrawl of Charley's or Mamey's, lying at the bottom of the deep sea; and am as full of sorrow as if they had once been living creatures.--Well! they _may_ come, yet." * * * * * They did reach him, but not by the Caledonia. His fears as to that vessel were but too well founded. On the very day when she was due in Boston (the 18th of February) it was learned in London that she had undergone misadventure; that, her decks having been swept and her rudder torn away, though happily no lives were lost, she had returned disabled to Cork; and that the Acadia, having received her passengers and mails, was to sail with them from Liverpool next day. Of the main subject of that letter written on the day preceding,--of the quite unpremeditated impulse, out of which sprang his advocacy of claims which he felt to be represented in his person,--of the injustice done by his entertainers to their guest in ascribing such advocacy to selfishness,--and of the graver wrong done by them to their own highest interests, nay, even to their commonest and most vulgar interests, in continuing to reject those claims, I will add nothing now to what all those years ago I labored very hard to lay before many readers. It will be enough if I here print, from the authors' letters I sent out to him by the next following mail, in compliance with his wish, this which follows from a very dear friend of his and mine. I fortunately had it transcribed before I posted it to him; Mr. Carlyle having in some haste written from "Templand, 26 March, 1842," and taken no copy. "We learn by the newspapers that you everywhere in America stir up the question of international copyright, and thereby awaken huge dissonance where all else were triumphant unison for you. I am asked my opinion of the matter, and requested to write it down in words. "Several years ago, if memory err not, I was one of many English writers who, under the auspices of Miss Martineau, did already sign a petition to congress praying for an international copyright between the two Nations,--which properly are not two Nations, but one; _indivisible_ by parliament, congress, or any kind of human law or diplomacy, being already _united_ by Heaven's Act of Parliament, and the everlasting law of Nature and Fact. To that opinion I still adhere, and am like to continue adhering. "In discussion of the matter before any congress or parliament, manifold considerations and argumentations will necessarily arise; which to me are not interesting, nor essential for helping me to a decision. They respect the time and manner in which the thing should be; not at all whether the thing should be or not. In an ancient book, reverenced I should hope on both sides of the Ocean, it was thousands of years ago written down in the most decisive and explicit manner, 'Thou _shalt not_ steal.' That thou belongest to a different 'Nation,' and canst steal without being certainly hanged for it, gives thee no permission to steal! Thou shalt _not_ in anywise steal at all! So it is written down, for Nations and for Men, in the Law-Book of the Maker of this Universe. Nay, poor Jeremy Bentham and others step in here, and will demonstrate that it is actually our true convenience and expediency not to steal; which I for my share, on the great scale and on the small, and in all conceivable scales and shapes, do also firmly believe it to be. For example, if Nations abstained from stealing, what need were there of fighting,--with its butcherings and burnings, decidedly the most expensive thing in this world? How much more two Nations, which, as I said, are but one Nation; knit in a thousand ways by Nature and Practical Intercourse; indivisible brother elements of the same great SAXONDOM, to which in all honorable ways be long life! "When Mr. Robert Roy M'Gregor lived in the district of Menteith on the Highland border two centuries ago, he for his part found it more convenient to supply himself with beef by stealing it alive from the adjacent glens, than by buying it killed in the Stirling butchers' market. It was Mr. Roy's plan of supplying himself with beef in those days, this of stealing it. In many a little 'Congress' in the district of Menteith, there was debating, doubt it not, and much specious argumentation this way and that, before they could ascertain that, really and truly, buying was the best way to get your beef; which, however, in the long run they did with one assent find it indisputably to be: and accordingly they hold by it to this day." This brave letter was an important service rendered at a critical time, and Dickens was very grateful for it. But, as time went on, he had other and higher causes for gratitude to its writer. Admiration of Carlyle increased in him with his years; and there was no one whom in later life he honored so much, or had a more profound regard for. FOOTNOTES: [47] On the 22d of May, 1842. [48] The dinner was on the 10th of May, and early the following morning I had a letter about it from Mr. Blanchard, containing these words: "Washington Irving couldn't utter a word for trembling, and Moore was as little as usual. But, poor Tom Campbell--great Heavens! what a spectacle! Amid roars of laughter he began a sentence three times about something that Dugald Stewart or Lord Bacon had said, and never could get beyond those words. The Prince was capital, though deucedly frightened. He seems unaffected and amiable, as well as very clever." CHAPTER XXI. PHILADELPHIA, WASHINGTON, AND THE SOUTH. 1842. At Philadelphia--Rule in Printing Letters--Promise as to Railroads--Experience of them--Railway-cars--Charcoal Stoves--Ladies' Cars--Spittoons--Massachusetts and New York--Police-cells and Prisons--House of Detention and Inmates--Women and Boy Prisoners--Capital Punishment--A House of Correction--Four Hundred Single Cells--Comparison with English Prisons--Inns and Landlords--At Washington--Hotel Extortion--Philadelphia Penitentiary--The Solitary System--Solitary Prisoners--Talk with Inspectors--Bookseller Carey--Changes of Temperature--Henry Clay--Proposed Journeyings--Letters from England--Congress and Senate--Leading American Statesmen--The People of America--Englishmen "located" there--"Surgit amari aliquid"--The Copyright Petition--At Richmond--Irving appointed to Spain--Experience of a Slave City--Incidents of Slave Life--Discussion with a Slaveholder--Feeling of South to England--Levees at Richmond--One more Banquet accepted--My Gift of _Shakspeare_--Home Letters and Fancies--Self-reproach of a Noble Nature--Washington Irving's Leave-taking. DICKENS'S next letter was begun in the "United States Hotel, Philadelphia," and bore date "Sunday, sixth March, 1842." It treated of much dealt with afterwards at greater length in the _Notes_, but the freshness and vivacity of the first impressions in it have surprised me. I do not, however, print any passage here which has not its own interest independently of anything contained in that book. The rule will be continued, as in the portions of letters already given, of not transcribing anything before printed, or anything having even but a near resemblance to descriptions that appear in the _Notes_. ". . . . . . As this is likely to be the only quiet day I shall have for a long time, I devote it to writing to you. We have heard nothing from you[49] yet, and only have for our consolation the reflection that the Columbia[50] is now on her way out. No news had been heard of the Caledonia yesterday afternoon, when we left New York. We _were_ to have quitted that place last Tuesday, but have been detained there all the week by Kate having so bad a sore throat that she was obliged to keep her bed. We left yesterday afternoon at five o'clock, and arrived here at eleven last night. Let me say, by the way, that this is a very trying climate. "I have often asked Americans in London which were the better railroads,--ours or theirs? They have taken time for reflection, and generally replied on mature consideration that they rather thought we excelled; in respect of the punctuality with which we arrived at our stations, and the smoothness of our traveling. I wish you could see what an American railroad is, in some parts where I now have seen them. I won't say I wish you could feel what it is, because that would be an unchristian and savage aspiration. It is never inclosed, or warded off. You walk down the main street of a large town; and, slap-dash, headlong, pell-mell, down the middle of the street, with pigs burrowing, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, close to the very rails, there comes tearing along a mad locomotive with its train of cars, scattering a red-hot shower of sparks (from its _wood_ fire) in all directions; screeching, hissing, yelling, and panting; and nobody one atom more concerned than if it were a hundred miles away. You cross a turnpike-road; and there is no gate, no policeman, no signal--nothing to keep the wayfarer or quiet traveler out of the way, but a wooden arch on which is written, in great letters, 'Look out for the locomotive.' And if any man, woman, or child don't look out, why, it's his or her fault, and there's an end of it. "The cars are like very shabby omnibuses,--only larger; holding sixty or seventy people. The seats, instead of being placed long ways, are put cross-wise, back to front. Each holds two. There is a long row of these on each side of the caravan, and a narrow passage up the centre. The windows are usually all closed, and there is very often, in addition, a hot, close, most intolerable charcoal stove in a red-hot glow. The heat and closeness are quite insupportable. But this is the characteristic of all American houses, of all the public institutions, chapels, theatres, and prisons. From the constant use of the hard anthracite coal in these beastly furnaces, a perfectly new class of diseases is springing up in the country. Their effect upon an Englishman is briefly told. He is always very sick and very faint; and has an intolerable headache, morning, noon, and night. "In the ladies' car, there is no smoking of tobacco allowed. All gentlemen who have ladies with them sit in this car; and it is usually very full. Before it, is the gentlemen's car; which is something narrower. As I had a window close to me yesterday which commanded this gentlemen's car, I looked at it pretty often, perforce. The flashes of saliva flew so perpetually and incessantly out of the windows all the way, that it looked as though they were ripping open feather-beds inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers.[51] But this spitting is universal. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon on the bench, the counsel have theirs, the witness has his, the prisoner his, and the crier his. The jury are accommodated at the rate of three men to a spittoon (or spit-box as they call it here); and the spectators in the gallery are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature expectorate without cessation. There are spit-boxes in every steamboat, bar-room, public dining-room, house of office, and place of general resort, no matter what it be. In the hospitals, the students are requested, by placard, to use the boxes provided for them, and not to spit upon the stairs. I have twice seen gentlemen, at evening parties in New York, turn aside when they were not engaged in conversation, and spit upon the drawing-room carpet. And in every bar-room and hotel passage the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open oysters--from the quantity of this kind of deposit which tessellates it all over. . . . "The institutions at Boston, and at Hartford, are most admirable. It would be very difficult indeed to improve upon them. But this is not so at New York; where there is an ill-managed lunatic asylum, a bad jail, a dismal workhouse, and a perfectly intolerable place of police-imprisonment. A man is found drunk in the streets, and is thrown into a cell below the surface of the earth; profoundly dark; so full of noisome vapors that when you enter it with a candle you see a ring about the light, like that which surrounds the moon in wet and cloudy weather; and so offensive and disgusting in its filthy odors that you _cannot bear_ its stench. He is shut up within an iron door, in a series of vaulted passages where no one stays; has no drop of water, or ray of light, or visitor, or help of any kind; and there he remains until the magistrate's arrival. If he die (as one man did not long ago), he is half eaten by the rats in an hour's time (as this man was). I expressed, on seeing these places the other night, the disgust I felt, and which it would be impossible to repress. 'Well, I don't know,' said the night constable--that's a national answer, by-the-by,--'well, I don't know. I've had six-and-twenty young women locked up here together, and beautiful ones too, and that's a fact.' The cell was certainly no larger than the wine-cellar in Devonshire Terrace; at least three feet lower; and stunk like a common sewer. There was one woman in it then. The magistrate begins his examinations at five o'clock in the morning; the watch is set at seven at night; if the prisoners have been given in charge by an officer, they are not taken out before nine or ten; and in the interval they remain in these places, where they could no more be heard to cry for help, in case of a fit or swoon among them, than a man's voice could be heard after he was coffined up in his grave. "There is a prison in this same city, and indeed in the same building, where prisoners for grave offenses await their trial, and to which they are sent back when under remand. It sometimes happens that a man or woman will remain here for twelve months, waiting the result of motions for new trial, and in arrest of judgment, and what not. I went into it the other day: without any notice or preparation, otherwise I find it difficult to catch them in their work-a-day aspect. I stood in a long, high, narrow building, consisting of four galleries one above the other, with a bridge across each, on which sat a turnkey, sleeping or reading as the case might be. From the roof, a couple of wind-sails dangled and drooped, limp and useless; the sky-light being fast closed, and they only designed for summer use. In the centre of the building was the eternal stove; and along both sides of every gallery was a long row of iron doors--looking like furnace-doors, being very small, but black and cold as if the fires within had gone out. "A man with keys appears, to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and, in his way, civil and obliging." (I omit a dialogue of which the substance has been printed,[52] and give only that which appears for the first time here.) "'Suppose a man's here for twelve months. Do you mean to say he never comes out at that little iron door?' "'He _may_ walk some, perhaps--not much.' "'Will you show me a few of them?' "'Ah! All, if you like.' "He threw open a door, and I looked in. An old man was sitting on his bed, reading. The light came in through a small chink, very high up in the wall. Across the room ran a thick iron pipe to carry off filth; this was bored for the reception of something like a big funnel in shape; and over the funnel was a watercock. This was his washing apparatus and water-closet. It was not savory, but not very offensive. He looked up at me; gave himself an odd, dogged kind of shake; and fixed his eyes on his book again. I came out, and the door was shut and locked. He had been there a month, and would have to wait another month for his trial. 'Has he ever walked out now, for instance?' 'No.'. . . "'In England, if a man is under sentence of death even, he has a yard to walk in at certain times.' "'Possible?' ". . . Making me this answer with a coolness which is perfectly untranslatable and inexpressible, and which is quite peculiar to the soil, he took me to the women's side, telling me, upon the way, all about this man, who, it seems, murdered his wife, and will certainly be hanged. The women's doors have a small square aperture in them; I looked through one, and saw a pretty boy about ten or twelve years old, who seemed lonely and miserable enough--as well he might. 'What's _he_ been doing?' says I. 'Nothing,' says my friend. 'Nothing!' says I. 'No,' says he. 'He's here for safe keeping. He saw his father kill his mother, and is detained to give evidence against him--that was his father you saw just now.' 'But that's rather hard treatment for a witness, isn't it?' 'Well, I don't know. It a'n't a very rowdy life, and _that's_ a fact.' So my friend, who was an excellent fellow in his way, and very obliging, and a handsome young man to boot, took me off to show me some more curiosities; and I was very much obliged to him, for the place was so hot, and I so giddy, that I could scarcely stand. . . . "When a man is hanged in New York, he is walked out of one of these cells, without any condemned sermon or other religious formalities, straight into the narrow jail-yard, which may be about the width of Cranbourn Alley. There, a gibbet is erected, which is of curious construction; for the culprit stands on the earth with the rope about his neck, which passes through a pulley in the top of the 'Tree' (see _Newgate Calendar_ passim), and is attached to a weight something heavier than the man. This weight, being suddenly let go, drags the rope down with it, and sends the criminal flying up fourteen feet into the air; while the judge, and jury, and five-and-twenty citizens (whose presence is required by the law), stand by, that they may afterwards certify to the fact. This yard is a very dismal place; and when I looked at it, I thought the practice infinitely superior to ours: much more solemn, and far less degrading and indecent. [Illustration] "There is another prison near New York which is a house of correction. The convicts labor in stone-quarries near at hand, but the jail has no covered yards or shops, so that when the weather is wet (as it was when I was there) each man is shut up in his own little cell, all the live-long day. These cells, in all the correction-houses I have seen, are on one uniform plan,--thus: A, B, C, and D, are the walls of the building with windows in them, high up in the wall. The shaded place in the centre represents four tiers of cells, one above the other, with doors of grated iron, and a light grated gallery to each tier. Four tiers front to B, and four to D, so that by this means you may be said, in walking round, to see eight tiers in all. The intermediate blank space you walk in, looking up at these galleries; so that, coming in at the door E, and going either to the right or left till you come back to the door again, you see all the cells under one roof and in one high room. Imagine them in number 400, and in every one a man locked up; this one with his hands through the bars of his grate, this one in bed (in the middle of the day, remember), and this one flung down in a heap upon the ground with his head against the bars like a wild beast. Make the rain pour down in torrents outside. Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch's cauldron. Add a smell like that of a thousand old mildewed umbrellas wet through, and a thousand dirty-clothes-bags musty, moist, and fusty, and you will have some idea--a very feeble one, my dear friend, on my word--of this place yesterday week. You know of course that we adopted our improvements in prison-discipline from the American pattern; but I am confident that the writers who have the most lustily lauded the American prisons have never seen Chesterton's domain or Tracey's.[53] There is no more comparison between these two prisons of ours, and any I have seen here YET, than there is between the keepers here, and those two gentlemen. Putting out of sight the difficulty we have in England of finding _useful_ labor for the prisoners (which of course arises from our being an older country and having vast numbers of artisans unemployed), our system is more complete, more impressive, and more satisfactory in every respect. It is very possible that I have not come to the best, not having yet seen Mount Auburn. I will tell you when I have. And also when I have come to those inns, mentioned--vaguely rather--by Miss Martineau, where they undercharge literary people for the love the landlords bear them. My experience, so far, has been of establishments where (perhaps for the same reason) they very monstrously and violently overcharge a man whose position forbids remonstrance. "WASHINGTON, Sunday, March the Thirteenth, 1842. "In allusion to the last sentence, my dear friend, I must tell you a slight experience I had in Philadelphia. My rooms had been ordered for a week, but, in consequence of Kate's illness, only Mr. Q. and the luggage had gone on. Mr. Q. always lives at the table-d'hôte, so that while we were in New York our rooms were empty. The landlord not only charged me half the full rent for the time during which the rooms were reserved for us (which was quite right), but charged me also _for board for myself and Kate and Anne, at the rate of nine dollars per day_ for the same period, when we were actually living, at the same expense, in New York!!! I _did_ remonstrate upon this head, but was coolly told it was the custom (which I have since been assured is a lie), and had nothing for it but to pay the amount. What else could I do? I was going away by the steamboat at five o'clock in the morning; and the landlord knew perfectly well that my disputing an item of his bill would draw down upon me the sacred wrath of the newspapers, which would one and all demand in capitals if THIS was the gratitude of the man whom America had received as she had never received any other man but La Fayette? "I went last Tuesday to the Eastern Penitentiary near Philadelphia, which is the only prison in the States, or I believe in the world, on the principle of hopeless, strict, and unrelaxed solitary confinement, during the whole term of the sentence. It is wonderfully kept, but a most dreadful, fearful place. The inspectors, immediately on my arrival in Philadelphia, invited me to pass the day in the jail, and to dine with them when I had finished my inspection, that they might hear my opinion of the system. Accordingly I passed the whole day in going from cell to cell, and conversing with the prisoners. Every facility was given me, and no constraint whatever imposed upon any man's free speech. If I were to write you a letter of twenty sheets, I could not tell you this one day's work; so I will reserve it until that happy time when we shall sit round the table a Jack Straw's--you, and I, and Mac--and go over my diary. I never shall be able to dismiss from my mind the impressions of that day. Making notes of them, as I have done, is an absurdity, for they are written, beyond all power of erasure, in my brain. I saw men who had been there, five years, six years, eleven years, two years, two months, two days; some whose term was nearly over, and some whose term had only just begun. Women too, under the same variety of circumstances. Every prisoner who comes into the jail comes at night; is put into a bath, and dressed in the prison-garb; and then a black hood is drawn over his face and head, and he is led to the cell from which he never stirs again until his whole period of confinement has expired. I looked at some of them with the same awe as I should have looked at men who had been buried alive and dug up again. "We dined in the jail: and I told them after dinner how much the sight had affected me, and what an awful punishment it was. I dwelt upon this; for, although the inspectors are extremely kind and benevolent men, I question whether they are sufficiently acquainted with the human mind to know what it is they are doing. Indeed, I am sure they do not know. I bore testimony, as every one who sees it must, to the admirable government of the institution (Stanfield is the keeper: grown a little younger, that's all); but added that nothing could justify such a punishment but its working a reformation in the prisoners. That for short terms--say two years for the maximum--I conceived, especially after what they had told me of its good effects in certain cases, it might perhaps be highly beneficial; but that, carried to so great an extent, I thought it cruel and unjustifiable; and, further, that their sentences for small offenses were very rigorous, not to say savage. All this they took like men who were really anxious to have one's free opinion and to do right. And we were very much pleased with each other, and parted in the friendliest way. "They sent me back to Philadelphia in a carriage they had sent for me in the morning; and then I had to dress in a hurry, and follow Kate to Carey's the bookseller's, where there was a party. He married a sister of Leslie's. There are three Miss Leslies here, very accomplished; and one of them has copied all her brother's principal pictures. These copies hang about the room. We got away from this as soon as we could; and next morning had to turn out at five. In the morning I had received and shaken hands with five hundred people, so you may suppose that I was pretty well tired. Indeed, I am obliged to be very careful of myself; to avoid smoking and drinking; to get to bed soon; and to be particular in respect of what I eat. . . . You cannot think how bilious and trying the climate is. One day it is hot summer, without a breath of air; the next, twenty degrees below freezing, with a wind blowing that cuts your skin like steel. These changes have occurred here several times since last Wednesday night. "I have altered my route, and don't mean to go to Charleston. The country, all the way from here, is nothing but a dismal swamp; there is a bad night of sea-coasting in the journey; the equinoctial gales are blowing hard; and Clay (a most _charming_ fellow, by-the-by), whom I have consulted, strongly dissuades me. The weather is intensely hot there; the spring fever is coming on; and there is very little to see, after all. We therefore go next Wednesday night to Richmond, which we shall reach on Thursday. There we shall stop three days; my object being to see some tobacco-plantations. Then we shall go by James River back to Baltimore, which we have already passed through, and where we shall stay two days. Then we shall go West at once, straight through the most gigantic part of this continent: across the Alleghany Mountains, and over a prairie. "STILL AT WASHINGTON, Fifteenth March, 1842. . . . It is impossible, my dear friend, to tell you what we felt when Mr. Q. (who is a fearfully sentimental genius, but heartily interested in all that concerns us) came to where we were dining last Sunday, and sent in a note to the effect that the Caledonia[54] had arrived! Being really assured of her safety, we felt as if the distance between us and home were diminished by at least one-half. There was great joy everywhere here, for she had been quite despaired of, but our joy was beyond all telling. This news came on by express. Last night your letters reached us. I was dining with a club (for I can't avoid a dinner of that sort, now and then), and Kate sent me a note about nine o'clock to say they were here. But she didn't open them--which I consider heroic--until I came home. That was about half-past ten; and we read them until nearly two in the morning. "I won't say a word about your letters; except that Kate and I have come to a conclusion which makes me tremble in my shoes, for we decide that humorous narrative is your forte, and not statesmen of the commonwealth. I won't say a word about your news; for how could I in that case, while you want to hear what we are doing, resist the temptation of expending pages on those darling children? . . . "I have the privilege of appearing on the floor of both Houses here, and go to them every day. They are very handsome and commodious. There is a great deal of bad speaking, but there are a great many very remarkable men, in the legislature: such as John Quincy Adams, Clay, Preston, Calhoun, and others: with whom I need scarcely add I have been placed in the friendliest relations. Adams is a fine old fellow--seventy-six years old, but with most surprising vigor, memory, readiness, and pluck. Clay is perfectly enchanting; an irresistible man. There are some very notable specimens, too, out of the West. Splendid men to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in varied accomplishments, Indians in quickness of eye and gesture, Americans in affectionate and generous impulse. It would be difficult to exaggerate the nobility of some of these glorious fellows. "When Clay retires, as he does this month, Preston will become the leader of the Whig party. He so solemnly assures me that the international copyright shall and will be passed, that I almost begin to hope; and I shall be entitled to say, if it be, that I have brought it about. You have no idea how universal the discussion of its merits and demerits has become, or how eager for the change I have made a portion of the people. "You remember what ---- was, in England. If you _could_ but see him here! If you could only have seen him when he called on us the other day,--feigning abstraction in the dreadful pressure of affairs of state; rubbing his forehead as one who was aweary of the world; and exhibiting a sublime caricature of Lord Burleigh. He is the only thoroughly unreal man I have seen on this side the ocean. Heaven help the President! All parties are against him, and he appears truly wretched. We go to a levee at his house to-night. He has invited me to dinner on Friday, but I am obliged to decline; for we leave, per steamboat, to-morrow night. "I said I wouldn't write anything more concerning the American people, for two months. Second thoughts are best. I shall not change, and may as well speak out--to _you_. They are friendly, earnest, hospitable, kind, frank, very often accomplished, far less prejudiced than you would suppose, warm-hearted, fervent, and enthusiastic. They are chivalrous in their universal politeness to women, courteous, obliging, disinterested; and, when they conceive a perfect affection for a man (as I may venture to say of myself), entirely devoted to him. I have received thousands of people of all ranks and grades, and have never once been asked an offensive or unpolite question,--except by Englishmen, who, when they have been 'located' here for some years, are worse than the devil in his blackest painting. The State is a parent to its people; has a parental care and watch over all poor children, women laboring of child, sick persons, and captives. The common men render you assistance in the streets, and would revolt from the offer of a piece of money. The desire to oblige is universal; and I have never once traveled in a public conveyance without making some generous acquaintance whom I have been sorry to part from, and who has in many cases come on miles, to see us again. But I don't like the country. I would not live here, on any consideration. It goes against the grain with me. It would with you. I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here and be happy. I have a confidence that I must be right, because I have everything, God knows, to lead me to the opposite conclusion; and yet I cannot resist coming to this one. As to the causes, they are too many to enter upon here. . . . "One of two petitions for an international copyright which I brought here from American authors, with Irving at their head, has been presented to the House of Representatives. Clay retains the other for presentation to the Senate after I have left Washington. The presented one has been referred to a committee; the Speaker has nominated as its chairman Mr. Kennedy, member for Baltimore, who is himself an author and notoriously favorable to such a law; and I am going to assist him in his report. "RICHMOND, IN VIRGINIA. Thursday Night, March 17. "Irving was with me at Washington yesterday, and _wept heartily_ at parting. He is a fine fellow, when you know him well; and you would relish him, my dear friend, of all things. We have laughed together at some absurdities we have encountered in company, quite in my vociferous Devonshire-Terrace style. The 'Merrikin' government has treated him, he says, most liberally and handsomely in every respect. He thinks of sailing for Liverpool on the 7th of April, passing a short time in London, and then going to Paris. Perhaps you may meet him. If you do, he will know that you are my dearest friend, and will open his whole heart to you at once. His secretary of legation, Mr. Coggleswell, is a man of very remarkable information, a great traveler, a good talker, and a scholar. "I am going to sketch you our trip here from Washington, as it involves nine miles of a 'Virginny Road.' That done, I must be brief, good brother.". . . The reader of the _American Notes_ will remember the admirable and most humorous description of the night steamer on the Potomac, and of the black driver over the Virginia road. Both were in this letter; which, after three days, he resumed "At Washington again, Monday, March the twenty-first: "We had intended to go to Baltimore from Richmond, by a place called Norfolk; but, one of the boats being under repair, I found we should probably be detained at this Norfolk two days. Therefore we came back here yesterday, by the road we had traveled before; lay here last night; and go on to Baltimore this afternoon, at four o'clock. It is a journey of only two hours and a half. Richmond is a prettily situated town, but, like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit), has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is _most_ distressing. In the black car (for they don't let them sit with the whites), on the railroad as we went there, were a mother and family, whom the steamer was conveying away, to sell; retaining the man (the husband and father, I mean) on his plantation. The children cried the whole way. Yesterday, on board the boat, a slave-owner and two constables were our fellow-passengers. They were coming here in search of two negroes who had run away on the previous day. On the bridge at Richmond there is a notice against fast driving over it, as it is rotten and crazy: penalty--for whites, five dollars; for slaves, fifteen stripes. My heart is lightened as if a great load had been taken from it, when I think that we are turning our backs on this accursed and detested system. I really don't think I could have borne it any longer. It is all very well to say 'be silent on the subject.' They won't let you be silent. They _will_ ask you what you think of it; and _will_ expatiate on slavery as if it were one of the greatest blessings of mankind. 'It's not,' said a hard, bad-looking fellow to me the other day, 'it's not the interest of a man to use his slaves ill. It's damned nonsense that you hear in England.'--I told him quietly that it was not a man's interest to get drunk, or to steal, or to game, or to indulge in any other vice, but he _did_ indulge in it for all that; that cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power, were two of the bad passions of human nature, with the gratification of which, considerations of interest or of ruin, had nothing whatever to do; and that, while every candid man must admit that even a slave might be happy enough with a good master, all human beings knew that bad masters, cruel masters, and masters who disgraced the form they bore, were matters of experience and history, whose existence was as undisputed as that of slaves themselves. He was a little taken aback by this, and asked me if I believed in the Bible. Yes, I said, but if any man could prove to me that it sanctioned slavery, I would place no further credence in it. 'Well then,' he said, 'by God, sir, the niggers must be kept down, and the whites have put down the colored people wherever they have found them.' 'That's the whole question,' said I. 'Yes, and by God,' says he, 'the British had better not stand out on that point when Lord Ashburton comes over, for I never felt so warlike as I do now,--and that's a fact.' I was obliged to accept a public supper in this Richmond, and I saw plainly enough there that the hatred which these Southern States bear to us as a nation has been fanned up and revived again by this Creole business, and can scarcely be exaggerated. . . . . "We were desperately tired at Richmond, as we went to a great many places and received a very great number of visitors. We appoint usually two hours in every day for this latter purpose, and have our room so full at that period that it is difficult to move or breathe. Before we left Richmond, a gentleman told me, when I really was so exhausted that I could hardly stand, that 'three people of great fashion' were much offended by having been told, when they called last evening, that I was tired and not visible, then, but would be 'at home' from twelve to two next day! Another gentleman (no doubt of great fashion also) sent a letter to me two hours after I had gone to bed, preparatory to rising at four next morning, with instructions to the slave who brought it to knock me up and wait for an answer! "I am going to break my resolution of accepting no more public entertainments, in favor of the originators of the printed document overleaf. They live upon the confines of the Indian territory, some two thousand miles or more west of New York! Think of my dining there! And yet, please God, the festival will come off--I should say about the 12th or 15th of next month.". . . The printed document was a series of resolutions, moved at a public meeting attended by all the principal citizens, judges, professors, and doctors of St. Louis, urgently inviting to that city of the Far West the distinguished writer then the guest of America, eulogizing his genius, and tendering to him their warmest hospitalities. He was at Baltimore when he closed his letter. "BALTIMORE, _Tuesday, March 22d._ "I have a great diffidence in running counter to any impression formed by a man of Maclise's genius, on a subject he has fully considered." (Referring, apparently, to some remark by myself on the picture of the Play-scene in _Hamlet_, exhibited this year.) "But I quite agree with you about the King in _Hamlet_. Talking of Hamlet, I constantly carry in my great-coat pocket the _Shakspeare_ you bought for me in Liverpool. What an unspeakable source of delight that book is to me! "Your Ontario letter I found here to-night: sent on by the vigilant and faithful Colden, who makes every thing having reference to us or our affairs a labor of the heartiest love. We devoured its contents, greedily. Good Heaven, my dear fellow, how I miss you! and how I count the time 'twixt this and coming home again! Shall I ever forget the day of our parting at Liverpool! when even ---- became jolly and radiant in his sympathy with our separation! Never, never shall I forget that time. Ah! how seriously I thought then, and how seriously I have thought many, many times since, of the terrible folly of ever quarreling with a true friend, on good-for-nothing trifles! Every little hasty word that has ever passed between us rose up before me like a reproachful ghost. At this great distance, I seem to look back upon any miserable small interruption of our affectionate intercourse, though only for the instant it has never outlived, with a sort of pity for myself as if I were another creature. "I have bought another accordion. The steward lent me one, on the passage out, and I regaled the ladies' cabin with my performances. You can't think with what feeling I play _Home Sweet Home_ every night, or how pleasantly sad it makes us. . . . And so God bless you. . . . I leave space for a short postscript before sealing this, but it will probably contain nothing. The dear, dear children! what a happiness it is to know that they are in such hands! * * * * * "P.S. Twenty-third March, 1842. Nothing new. And all well. I have not heard that the Columbia is in, but she is hourly expected. Washington Irving has come on for another leave-taking,[55] and dines with me to-day. We start for the West, at half-after eight to-morrow morning. I send you a newspaper, the most respectable in the States, with a very just copyright article." FOOTNOTES: [49] At the top of the sheet, above the address and date, are the words "Read on. We _have_ your precious letters, but you'll think at first we have not. C. D." [50] The ship next in rotation to the Caledonia from Liverpool. [51] This comparison is employed in another descriptive passage to be found in the _Notes_ (p. 57). [52] _Notes_, p. 49. [53] See _ante_, p. 280. [54] This was the Acadia with the Caledonia mails. [55] At his second visit to America, when in Washington in February, 1868, Dickens, replying to a letter in which Irving was named, thus describes the last meeting and leave-taking to which he alludes above: "Your reference to my dear friend Washington Irving renews the vivid impressions reawakened in my mind at Baltimore but the other day. I saw his fine face for the last time in that city. He came there from New York to pass a day or two with me before I went westward; and they were made among the most memorable of my life by his delightful fancy and genial humor. Some unknown admirer of his books and mine sent to the hotel a most enormous mint-julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, one on either side of it, with great solemnity (it filled a respectably-sized round table), but the solemnity was of very short duration. It was quite an enchanted julep, and carried us among innumerable people and places that we both knew. The julep held out far into the night, and my memory never saw him afterwards otherwise than as bending over it, with his straw, with an attempted air of gravity (after some anecdote involving some wonderfully droll and delicate observation of character), and then, as his eye caught mine, melting into that captivating laugh of his, which was the brightest and best I have ever heard." CHAPTER XXII. CANAL-BOAT JOURNEYS: BOUND FAR WEST. 1842. Character in the Letters--The _Notes_ less satisfactory--Personal Narrative in Letters--The Copyright Differences--Social Dissatisfactions--A Fact to be remembered--Literary Merits of the Letters--Personal Character portrayed--On Board for Pittsburgh--Choicest Passages of _Notes_--Queer Stage-coach--Something revealed on the Top--At Harrisburg--Treaties with Indians--Local Legislatures--A Levee--Morning and Night in Canal-boat--At and after Breakfast--Making the best of it--Hardy Habits--By Rail across Mountain--Mountain Scenery--New Settlements--Original of Eden in _Chuzzlewit_--A Useful Word--Party in America--Home News--Meets an Early Acquaintance--"Smallness of the World"--Queer Customers at Levees--Our Anniversary--The Cincinnati Steamer--Frugality in Water and Linen--Magnetic Experiments--Life-preservers--Bores--Habits of Neatness--Wearying for Home--Another Solitary Prison--New Terror to Loneliness--Arrival at Cincinnati--Two Judges in Attendance--The City described--On the Pavement. It would not be possible that a more vivid or exact impression than that which is derivable from these letters could be given of either the genius or the character of the writer. The whole man is here in the supreme hour of his life, and in all the enjoyment of its highest sensations. Inexpressibly sad to me has been the task of going over them, but the surprise has equaled the sadness. I had forgotten what was in them. That they contained, in their first vividness, all the most prominent descriptions of his published book, I knew. But the reproduction of any part of these was not permissible here; and, believing that the substance of them had been thus almost wholly embodied in the _American Notes_, when they were lent to assist in its composition, I turned to them with very small expectation of finding anything available for present use. Yet the difficulty has been, not to find, but to reject; and the rejection when most unavoidable has not been most easy. Even where the subjects recur that are in the printed volume, there is a freshness of first impressions in the letters that renders it no small trial to act strictly on the rule adhered to in these extracts from them. In the _Notes_ there is of course very much, masterly in observation and description, of which there is elsewhere no trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from it. It will always, of course, have value as a deliberate expression of the results gathered from the American experiences, but the _personal narrative_ of this famous visit to America is in the letters alone. In what way his experiences arose, the desire at the outset to see nothing that was not favorable, the slowness with which adverse impressions were formed, and the eager recognition of every truthful and noble quality that arose and remained above the fault-finding, are discoverable only in the letters. Already it is manifest from them that the before-mentioned disappointments, as well of the guest in his entertainers as of the entertainers in their guest, had their beginning in the copyright differences; but it is not less plain that the social dissatisfactions on his side were of even earlier date, and with the country itself had certainly nothing to do. It was objected to him, I well remember, that in making such unfavorable remarks as his published book did on many points, he was assailing the democratic institutions that had formed the character of the nation; but the answer is obvious, that, democratic institutions being universal in America, they were as fairly entitled to share in the good as in the bad; and in what he praised, of which there is here abundant testimony, he must be held to have exalted those institutions as much, as in what he blamed he could be held to depreciate them. He never sets himself up in judgment on the entire people. As we see, from the way the letters show us that the opinions he afterwards published were formed, he does not draw conclusions while his observation is only half concluded; and he refrains throughout from the example too strongly set him, even in the very terms of his welcome by the writers of America,[56] of flinging one nation in the other's face. He leaves each upon its own ground. His great business in his publication, as in the first impressions recorded here, is to exhibit social influences at work as he saw them himself; and it would surely have been of all bad compliments the worst, when resolving, in the tone and with the purpose of a friend, to make public what he had observed in America, if he had supposed that such a country would take truth amiss. There is, however, one thing to be especially remembered, as well in reading the letters as in judging of the book which was founded on them. It is a point to which I believe Mr. Emerson directed the attention of his countrymen. Everything of an objectionable kind, whether the author would have it so or not, stands out more prominently and distinctly than matter of the opposite description. The social sin is a more tangible thing than the social virtue. Pertinaciously to insist upon the charities and graces of life, is to outrage their quiet and unobtrusive character; but we incur the danger of extending the vulgarities and indecencies if we seem to countenance by omitting to expose them. And if this is only kept in view in reading what is here given, the proportion of censure will be found not to overbalance the just admiration and unexaggerated praise. Apart from such considerations, it is to be also said, the letters, from which I am now printing exactly as they were written, have claims, as mere literature, of an unusual kind. Unrivaled quickness of observation, the rare faculty of seizing out of a multitude of things the thing only that is essential, the irresistible play of humor, such pathos as only humorists of this high order possess, and the unwearied unforced vivacity of ever fresh, buoyant, bounding animal spirits, never found more natural, variously easy, or picturesque expression. Written amid such distraction, fatigue, and weariness as they describe, amid the jarring noises of hotels and streets, aboard steamers, on canal-boats, and in log huts, there is not an erasure in them. Not external objects only, but feelings, reflections, and thoughts, are photographed into visible forms with the same unexampled ease. They borrow no help from the matters of which they treat. They would have given, to the subjects described, old acquaintance and engrossing interest if they had been about a people in the moon. Of the personal character at the same time self-portrayed, others, whose emotions it less vividly awakens, will judge more calmly and clearly than myself. Yet to myself only can it be known how small were the services of friendship that sufficed to rouse all the sensibilities of this beautiful and noble nature. Throughout our life-long intercourse it was the same. His keenness of discrimination failed him never excepting here, when it was lost in the limitless extent of his appreciation of all kindly things; and never did he receive what was meant for a benefit that he was not eager to return it a hundredfold. No man more truly generous ever lived. His next letter was begun from "on board the canal-boat. Going to Pittsburgh. Monday, March twenty-eighth, 1842;" and the difficulties of rejection, to which reference has just been made, have been nowhere felt by me so much. Several of the descriptive masterpieces of the book are in it, with such touches of original freshness as might fairly have justified a reproduction of them in their first form. Among these are the Harrisburg coach on its way through the Susquehanna valley; the railroad across the mountain; the brown-forester of the Mississippi, the interrogative man in pepper-and-salt, and the affecting scene of the emigrants put ashore as the steamer passes up the Ohio. But all that I may here give, bearing any resemblance to what is given in the _Notes_, are the opening sketch of the small creature on the top of the queer stage-coach, to which the printed version fails to do adequate justice, and an experience to which the interest belongs of having suggested the settlement of Eden in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. . . . "We left Baltimore last Thursday, the twenty-fourth, at half-past eight in the morning, by railroad; and got to a place called York, about twelve. There we dined, and took a stage-coach for Harrisburg; twenty-five miles further. This stage-coach was like nothing so much as the body of one of the swings you see at a fair set upon four wheels and roofed and covered at the sides with painted canvas. There were twelve _inside_! I, thank my stars, was on the box. The luggage was on the roof; among it, a good-sized dining-table, and a big rocking-chair. We also took up an intoxicated gentleman, who sat for ten miles between me and the coachman; and another intoxicated gentleman who got up behind, but in the course of a mile or two fell off without hurting himself, and was seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had found him. There were four horses to this land-ark, of course; but we did not perform the journey until after half-past six o'clock that night. . . . The first half of the journey was tame enough, but the second lay through the valley of the Susquehanah (I think I spell it right, but I haven't that American Geography at hand), which is very beautiful. . . . "I think I formerly made a casual remark to you touching the precocity of the youth of this country. When we changed horses on this journey I got down to stretch my legs, refresh myself with a glass of whiskey-and-water, and shake the wet off my great-coat,--for it was raining very heavily, and continued to do so, all night. Mounting to my seat again, I observed something lying on the roof of the coach, which I took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of ten miles or so, however, I discovered that it had a pair of dirty shoes at one end, and a glazed cap at the other; and further observation demonstrated it to be a small boy, in a snuff-colored coat, with his arms quite pinioned to his sides by deep forcing into his pockets. He was, I presume, a relative or friend of the coachman's, as he lay atop of the luggage, with his face towards the rain; and, except when a change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared to be asleep. Sir, when we stopped to water the horses, about two miles from Harrisburg, this thing slowly upreared itself to the height of three foot eight, and, fixing its eyes on me with a mingled expression of complacency, patronage, national independence, and sympathy for all outer barbarians and foreigners, said, in shrill piping accents, 'Well now, stranger, I guess you find this a'most like an English a'ternoon,--hey?' It is unnecessary to add that I thirsted for his blood. . . . "We had all next morning in Harrisburg, as the canal-boat was not to start until three o'clock in the afternoon. The officials called upon me before I had finished breakfast; and, as the town is the seat of the Pennsylvanian legislature, I went up to the Capitol. I was very much interested in looking over a number of treaties made with the poor Indians, their signatures being rough drawings of the creatures or weapons they are called after; and the extraordinary drawing of these emblems, showing the queer, unused, shaky manner in which each man has held the pen, struck me very much. "You know my small respect for our House of Commons. These local legislatures are too insufferably apish of mighty legislation, to be seen without bile; for which reason, and because a great crowd of senators and ladies had assembled in both houses to behold the inimitable, and had already begun to pour in upon him even in the secretary's private room, I went back to the hotel, with all speed. The members of both branches of the legislature followed me there, however, so we had to hold the usual levee before our half-past one o'clock dinner. We received a great number of them. Pretty nearly every man spat upon the carpet, as usual; and one blew his nose with his fingers,--also on the carpet, which was a very neat one, the room given up to us being the private parlor of the landlord's wife. This has become so common since, however, that it scarcely seems worth mentioning. Please to observe that the gentleman in question was a member of the senate, which answers (as they very often tell me) to our House of Lords. "The innkeeper was the most attentive, civil, and obliging person I ever saw in my life. On being asked for his bill, he said there was no bill: the honor and pleasure, etc. being more than sufficient.[57] I did not permit this, of course, and begged Mr. Q. to explain to him that, traveling four strong, I could not hear of it on any account. "And now I come to the Canal-Boat. Bless your heart and soul, my dear fellow,--if you could only see us on board the canal-boat! Let me think, for a moment, at what time of the day or night I should best like you to see us. In the morning? Between five and six in the morning, shall I say? Well! you _would_ like to see me, standing on the deck, fishing the dirty water out of the canal with a tin ladle chained to the boat by a long chain; pouring the same into a tin basin (also chained up in like manner); and scrubbing my face with the jack towel. At night, shall I say? I don't know that you _would_ like to look into the cabin at night, only to see me lying on a temporary shelf exactly the width of this sheet of paper when it's open (_I measured it this morning_),[58] with one man above me, and another below; and, in all, eight-and-twenty in a low cabin, which you can't stand upright in with your hat on. I don't think you would like to look in at breakfast-time either, for then these shelves have only just been taken down and put away, and the atmosphere of the place is, as you may suppose, by no means fresh; though there _are_ upon the table tea and coffee, and bread and butter, and salmon, and shad, and liver, and steak, and potatoes, and pickles, and ham, and pudding, and sausages; and three-and-thirty people sitting round it, eating and drinking; and savory bottles of gin, and whiskey, and brandy, and rum, in the bar hard by; and seven-and-twenty out of the eight-and-twenty men, in foul linen, with yellow streams from half-chewed tobacco trickling down their chins. Perhaps the best time for you to take a peep would be the present: eleven o'clock in the forenoon: when the barber is at his shaving, and the gentlemen are lounging about the stove waiting for their turns, and not more than seventeen are spitting in concert, and two or three are walking overhead (lying down on the luggage every time the man at the helm calls 'Bridge!'), and I am writing this in the ladies' cabin, which is a part of the gentlemen's, and only screened off by a red curtain. Indeed, it exactly resembles the dwarf's private apartment in a caravan at a fair; and the gentlemen, generally, represent the spectators at a penny a head. The place is just as clean and just as large as that caravan you and I were in at Greenwich Fair last past. Outside, it is exactly like any canal-boat you have seen near the Regent's Park, or elsewhere. "You never can conceive what the hawking and spitting is, the whole night through. Last night was the worst. _Upon my honor and word_ I was obliged, this morning, to lay my fur coat on the deck, and wipe the half-dried flakes of spittle from it with my handkerchief; and the only surprise seemed to be that I should consider it necessary to do so. When I turned in last night, I put it on a stool beside me, and there it lay, under a cross-fire from five men,--three opposite, one above, and one below. I make no complaints, and show no disgust. I am looked upon as highly facetious at night, for I crack jokes with everybody near me until we fall asleep. I am considered very hardy in the morning, for I run up, bare-necked, and plunge my head into the half-frozen water, by half-past five o'clock. I am respected for my activity, inasmuch as I jump from the boat to the towing-path, and walk five or six miles before breakfast; keeping up with the horses all the time. In a word, they are quite astonished to find a sedentary Englishman roughing it so well, and taking so much exercise; and question me very much on that head. The greater part of the men will sit and shiver round the stove all day, rather than put one foot before the other. As to having a window open, that's not to be thought of. "We expect to reach Pittsburgh to-night, between eight and nine o'clock; and there we ardently hope to find your March letters awaiting us. We have had, with the exception of Friday afternoon, exquisite weather, but cold. Clear starlight and moonlight nights. The canal has run, for the most part, by the side of the Susquehanah and Iwanata rivers; and has been carried through tremendous obstacles. Yesterday we crossed the mountain. This is done _by railroad_. . . . You dine at an inn upon the mountain; and, including the half-hour allowed for the meal, are rather more than five hours performing this strange part of the journey. The people north and 'down east' have terrible legends of its danger; but they appear to be exceedingly careful, and don't go to work at all wildly. There are some queer precipices close to the rails, certainly; but every precaution is taken, I am inclined to think, that such difficulties, and such a vast work, will admit of. "The scenery, before you reach the mountains, and when you are on them, and after you have left them, is very grand and fine; and the canal winds its way through some deep, sullen gorges, which, seen by moonlight, are very impressive: though immeasurably inferior to Glencoe, to whose terrors I have not seen the smallest _approach_. We have passed, both in the mountains and elsewhere, a great number of new settlements and detached log houses. Their utterly forlorn and miserable appearance baffles all description. I have not seen six cabins out of six hundred, where the windows have been whole. Old hats, old clothes, old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat; and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its unwholesome water; where the frogs so croak at night that after dark there is an incessant sound as if millions of phantom teams, with bells, were traveling through the upper air, at an enormous distance off. It is quite an oppressive circumstance, too, to _come_ upon great tracks, where settlers have been burning down the trees; and where their wounded bodies lie about, like those of murdered creatures; while here and there some charred and blackened giant rears two bare arms aloft, and seems to curse his enemies. The prettiest sight I have seen was yesterday, when we--on the heights of the mountain, and in a keen wind--looked down into a valley full of light and softness; catching glimpses of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark; pigs scampering home, like so many prodigal sons; families sitting out in their gardens; cows gazing upward, with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves, looking on at their unfinished houses, and planning work for to-morrow;--and the train riding on, high above them, like a storm. But I know this is beautiful--very--very beautiful! "I wonder whether you and Mac mean to go to Greenwich Fair! Perhaps you dine at the Crown and Sceptre to-day, for it's Easter-Monday--who knows! I wish you drank punch, dear Forster. It's a shabby thing, not to be able to picture you with that cool green glass. . . . "I told you of the many uses of the word 'fix.' I ask Mr. Q. on board a steamboat if breakfast be nearly ready, and he tells me yes he should think so, for when he was last below the steward was 'fixing the tables'--in other words, laying the cloth. When we have been writing, and I beg him (do you remember anything of my love of order, at this distance of time?) to collect our papers, he answers that he'll 'fix 'em presently.' So when a man's dressing he's 'fixing' himself, and when you put yourself under a doctor he 'fixes' you in no time. T'other night, before we came on board here, when I had ordered a bottle of mulled claret and waited some time for it, it was put on table with an apology from the landlord (a lieutenant-colonel) that 'he feared it wasn't fixed properly.' And here, on Saturday morning, a Western man, handing the potatoes to Mr. Q. at breakfast, inquired if he wouldn't take some of 'these fixings' with his meat. I remained as grave as a judge. I catch them looking at me sometimes, and feel that they think I don't take any notice. Politics are very high here; dreadfully strong; handbills, denunciations, invectives, threats, and quarrels. The question is, who shall be the next President. The election comes off in _three years and a half_ from this time." He resumed his letter, "on board the steamboat from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, April the 1st, 1842. A very tremulous steamboat, which makes my hand shake. This morning, my dear friend, this very morning, which, passing by without bringing news from England, would have seen us on our way to St. Louis (viâ Cincinnati and Louisville) with sad hearts and dejected countenances, and the prospect of remaining for at least three weeks longer without any intelligence of those so inexpressibly dear to us--this very morning, bright and lucky morning that it was, a great packet was brought to our bedroom door, from HOME. How I have read and re-read your affectionate, hearty, interesting, funny, serious, delightful, and thoroughly Forsterian Columbia letter, I will not attempt to tell you; or how glad I am that you liked my first; or how afraid I am that my second was not written in such good spirits as it should have been; or how glad I am again to think that my third _was_; or how I hope you will find some amusement from my fourth: this present missive. All this, and more affectionate and earnest words than the post-office would convey at any price, though they have no sharp edges to hurt the stamping-clerk--you will understand, I know, without expression, or attempt at expression. So, having got over the first agitation of so much pleasure; and having walked the deck; and being now in the cabin, where one party are playing at chess, and another party are asleep, and another are talking round the stove, and all are spitting; and a persevering bore of a horrible New Englander with a droning voice like a gigantic bee _will_ sit down beside me, though I am writing, and talk incessantly, in my very ear, to Kate; here goes again. "Let me see. I should tell you, first, that we got to Pittsburgh between eight and nine o'clock of the evening of the day on which I left off at the top of this sheet; and were there received by a little man (a very little man) whom I knew years ago in London. He rejoiceth in the name of D. G.; and, when I knew him, was in partnership with his father on the Stock-Exchange, and lived handsomely at Dalston. They failed in business soon afterwards, and then this little man began to turn to account what had previously been his amusement and accomplishment, by painting little subjects for the fancy shops. So I lost sight of him, nearly ten years ago; and here he turned up t'other day, as a portrait-painter in Pittsburgh! He had previously written me a letter which moved me a good deal, by a kind of quiet independence and contentment it breathed, and still a painful sense of being alone, so very far from home. I received it in Philadelphia, and answered it. He dined with us every day of our stay in Pittsburgh (they were only three), and was truly gratified and delighted to find me unchanged,--more so than I can tell you. I am very glad to-night to think how much happiness we have fortunately been able to give him. "Pittsburgh is like Birmingham--at least its townsfolks say so; and I didn't contradict them. It is, in one respect. There is a great deal of smoke in it. I quite offended a man at our yesterday's levee, who supposed I was 'now quite at home,' by telling him that the notion of London being so dark a place was a popular mistake. We had very queer customers at our receptions, I do assure you. Not least among them, a gentleman with his inexpressibles imperfectly buttoned and his waistband resting on his thighs, who stood behind the half-opened door, and could by no temptation or inducement be prevailed upon to come out. There was also another gentleman, with one eye and one fixed gooseberry, who stood in a corner, motionless like an eight-day clock, and glared upon me, as I courteously received the Pittsburgians. There were also two red-headed brothers--boys--young dragons rather--who hovered about Kate, and wouldn't go. A great crowd they were, for three days; and a very queer one." "STILL IN THE SAME BOAT. _April the Second, 1842._ "Many, many happy returns of the day. It's only eight o'clock in the morning now, but we mean to drink your health after dinner, in a bumper; and scores of Richmond dinners to us! We have some wine (a present sent on board by our Pittsburgh landlord) in our own cabin; and we shall tap it to good purpose, I assure you; wishing you all manner and kinds of happiness, and a long life to ourselves that we may be partakers of it. We have wondered a hundred times already, whether you and Mac will dine anywhere together, in honor of the day. I say yes, but Kate says no. She predicts that you'll ask Mac, and he won't go. I have not yet heard from him. "We have a better cabin here than we had on board the Britannia; the berths being much wider, and the den having two doors: one opening on the ladies' cabin, and one upon a little gallery in the stern of the boat. We expect to be at Cincinnati some time on Monday morning, and we carry about fifty passengers. The cabin for meals goes right through the boat, from the prow to the stern, and is very long; only a small portion of it being divided off, by a partition of wood and ground glass, for the ladies. We breakfast at half-after seven, dine at one, and sup at six. Nobody will sit down to any one of these meals, though the dishes are smoking on the board, until the ladies have appeared and taken their chairs. It was the same in the canal-boat. "The washing department is a little more civilized than it was on the canal, but bad is the best. Indeed, the Americans when they are traveling, as Miss Martineau seems disposed to admit, are exceedingly negligent; not to say dirty. To the best of my making out, the ladies, under most circumstances, are content with smearing their hands and faces in a very small quantity of water. So are the men; who superadd to that mode of ablution a hasty use of the common brush and comb. It is quite a practice, too, to wear but one cotton shirt a week, and three or four fine linen _fronts_. Anne reports that this is Mr. Q.'s course of proceeding; and my portrait-painting friend told me that it was the case with pretty nearly all his sitters; so that when he bought a piece of cloth not long ago, and instructed the sempstress to make it _all_ into shirts, not fronts, she thought him deranged. "My friend the New Englander, of whom I wrote last night, is perhaps the most intolerable bore on this vast continent. He drones, and snuffles, and writes poems, and talks small philosophy and metaphysics, and never _will_ be quiet, under any circumstances. He is going to a great temperance convention at Cincinnati; along with a doctor of whom I saw something at Pittsburgh. The doctor, in addition to being everything that the New Englander is, is a phrenologist besides. I dodge them about the boat. Whenever I appear on deck, I see them bearing down upon me--and fly. The New Englander was very anxious last night that he and I should 'form a magnetic chain,' and magnetize the doctor, for the benefit of all incredulous passengers; but I declined on the plea of tremendous occupation in the way of letter-writing. "And, speaking of magnetism, let me tell you that the other night at Pittsburgh, there being present only Mr. Q. and the portrait-painter, Kate sat down, laughing, for me to try my hand upon her. I had been holding forth upon the subject rather luminously, and asserting that I thought I could exercise the influence, but had never tried. In six minutes, I magnetized her into hysterics, and then into the magnetic sleep. I tried again next night, and she fell into the slumber in little more than two minutes. . . . I can wake her with perfect ease; but I confess (not being prepared for anything so sudden and complete) I was on the first occasion rather alarmed. . . . The Western parts being sometimes hazardous, I have fitted out the whole of my little company with LIFE-PRESERVERS, which I inflate with great solemnity when we get aboard any boat, and keep, as Mrs. Cluppins did her umbrella in the court of common pleas, ready for use upon a moment's notice.". . . He resumed his letter, on "Sunday, April the third," with allusion to a general who had called upon him in Washington with two literary ladies, and had written to him next day for an immediate interview, as "the two LL's" were ambitious of the honor of a personal introduction. "Besides the doctor and the dread New Englander, we have on board that valiant general who wrote to me about the 'two LL's.' He is an old, old man with a weazen face, and the remains of a pigeon-breast in his military surtout. He is acutely gentlemanly and officer-like. The breast has so subsided, and the face has become so strongly marked, that he seems, like a pigeon-pie, to show only the feet of the bird outside, and to keep the rest to himself. He is perhaps _the_ most horrible bore in this country. And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here. There are no particular characters on board, with these three exceptions. Indeed, I seldom see the passengers but at meal-times, as I read and write in our own little state-room. . . . I have smuggled two chairs into our crib, and write this on a book upon my knee. Everything is in the neatest order, of course; and my shaving-tackle, dressing-case, brushes, books, and papers, are arranged with as much precision as if we were going to remain here a month. Thank God we are not. "The average width of the river rather exceeds that of the Thames at Greenwich. In parts it is much broader; and then there is usually a green island, covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally we stop for a few minutes at a small town, or village (I ought to say city, everything is a city here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitudes, overgrown with trees, which, in these western latitudes, are already in leaf, and very green. . . . "All this I see, as I write, from the little door into the stern-gallery which I mentioned just now. It don't happen six times in a day that any other passenger comes near it; and, as the weather is amply warm enough to admit of our sitting with it open, here we remain from morning until night: reading, writing, talking. What our theme of conversation is, I need not tell you. No beauty or variety makes us weary less for home. We count the days, and say, 'When May comes, and we can say--_next month_--the time will seem almost gone.' We are never tired of imagining what you are all about. I allow of no calculation for the difference of clocks, but insist on a corresponding minute in London. It is much the shortest way, and best. . . . Yesterday, we drank your health and many happy returns--in wine, after dinner; in a small milk-pot jug of gin-punch, at night. And when I made a temporary table, to hold the little candlestick, of one of my dressing-case trays; cunningly inserted under the mattress of my berth with a weight atop of it to keep it in its place, so that it made a perfectly exquisite bracket; we agreed, that, please God, this should be a joke at the Star and Garter on the second of April eighteen hundred and forty-three. If your blank _can_ be surpassed, . . . believe me ours transcends it. My heart gets, sometimes, SORE for home. "At Pittsburgh I saw another solitary confinement prison: Pittsburgh being also in Pennsylvania. A horrible thought occurred to me when I was recalling all I had seen, that night. _What if ghosts be one of the terrors of these jails?_ I have pondered on it often, since then. The utter solitude by day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence of death; the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can be said to stand, that never walks as men do) in the same corner of his cell. The more I think of it, the more certain I feel that not a few of these men (during a portion of their imprisonment at least) are nightly visited by spectres. I did ask one man in this last jail, if he dreamed much. He gave me a most extraordinary look, and said--under his breath--in a whisper, 'No.'" "CINCINNATI. _Fourth April, 1842._ "We arrived here this morning: about three o'clock, I believe, but I was fast asleep in my berth. I turned out soon after six, dressed, and breakfasted on board. About half-after eight, we came ashore and drove to the hotel, to which we had written on from Pittsburgh ordering rooms; and which is within a stone's throw of the boat-wharf. Before I had issued an official notification that we were 'not at home,' two Judges called, on the part of the inhabitants, to know when we would receive the townspeople. We appointed to-morrow morning, from half-past eleven to one; arranged to go out, with these two gentlemen, to see the town, _at_ one; and were fixed for an evening party to-morrow night at the house of one of them. On Wednesday morning we go on by the mail-boat to Louisville, a trip of fourteen hours; and from that place proceed in the next good boat to St. Louis, which is a voyage of four days. Finding from my judicial friends (well-informed and most agreeable gentlemen) this morning that the prairie travel to Chicago is a very fatiguing one, and that the lakes are stormy, sea-sicky, and not over safe at this season, I wrote by our captain to St. Louis (for the boat that brought us here goes on there) to the effect, that I should not take the lake route, but should come back here; and should visit the prairies, which are within thirty miles of St. Louis, immediately on my arrival there. . . . "I have walked to the window, since I turned this page, to see what aspect the town wears. We are in a wide street: paved in the carriage-way with small white stones, and in the footway with small red tiles. The houses are for the most part one story high; some are of wood; others of a clean white brick. Nearly all have green blinds outside every window. The principal shops over the way are, according to the inscriptions over them, a Large Bread Bakery; a Book Bindery; a Dry Goods Store; and a Carriage Repository; the last-named establishment looking very like an exceedingly small retail coal-shed. On the pavement under our window, a black man is chopping wood; and another black man is talking (confidentially) to a pig. The public table, at this hotel and at the hotel opposite, has just now finished dinner. The diners are collected on the pavement, on both sides of the way, picking their teeth, and talking. The day being warm, some of them have brought chairs into the street. Some are on three chairs; some on two; and some, in defiance of all known laws of gravity, are sitting quite comfortably on one: with three of the chair's legs, and their own two, high up in the air. The loungers, underneath our window, are talking of a great Temperance convention which comes off here to-morrow. Others, about me. Others, about England. Sir Robert Peel is popular here, with everybody. . . ." FOOTNOTES: [56] See _ante_, pp. 307, 308. [57] Miss Martineau was perhaps partly right, then? _Ante_, p. 344. [58] Sixteen inches exactly. CHAPTER XXIII. THE FAR WEST: TO NIAGARA FALLS. 1842. Descriptions in Letters and in _Notes_--Outline of Westward Travel--An Arabian Night City--A Temperance Festival--A Party at Judge Walker's--The Party from another View--Mournful Results of Boredom--Young Lady's Description of C. D.--Down the Mississippi--Listening and Watching--A Levee at St. Louis--Compliments--Lord Ashburton's Arrival--Talk with a Judge on Slavery--A Negro burnt alive--Feeling of Slaves themselves--American Testimony--Pretty Little Scene--A Mother and her Husband--The Baby--St. Louis in Sight--Meeting of Wife and Husband--Trip to a Prairie--On the Prairie at Sunset--General Character of Scenery--The Prairie described--Disappointment and Enjoyment--Soirée at Planter's House Inn--Good Fare--No Gray Heads in St. Louis--Dueling--Mrs. Dickens as a Traveler--From Cincinnati to Columbus--What a Levee is like--From Columbus to Sandusky--The Travelers alone--A Log House Inn--Making tidy--A Momentary Crisis--Americans not a Humorous People--The Only Recreations--From Sandusky to Buffalo--On Lake Erie--Reception and Consolation of a Mayor--From Buffalo to Niagara--Nearing the Falls--The Horse-shoe--Effect upon him of Niagara--The Old Recollection--Looking forward. THE next letter described his experiences in the Far West, his stay in St. Louis, his visit to a prairie, the return to Cincinnati, and, after a stage-coach ride from that city to Columbus, the travel thence to Sandusky, and so, by Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara. All these subjects appear in the _Notes_, but nothing printed there is repeated in the extracts now to be given. Of the closing passages of his journey, when he turned from Columbus in the direction of home, the story, here for the first time told, is in his most characteristic vein; the account that will be found of the prairie will probably be preferred to what is given in the _Notes_; the Cincinnati sketches are very pleasant; and even such a description as that of the Niagara Falls, of which so much is made in the book, has here an independent novelty and freshness. The first vividness is in his letter. The naturalness of associating no image or sense but of repose, with a grandeur so mighty and resistless, is best presented suddenly; and, in a few words, we have the material as well as moral beauty of a scene unrivaled in its kind upon the earth. The instant impression we find to be worth more than the eloquent recollection. The captain of the boat that had dropped them at Cincinnati and gone to St. Louis had stayed in the latter place until they were able to join and return with him; this letter bears date accordingly, "On board the Messenger again. Going from St. Louis back to Cincinnati. Friday, fifteenth April, 1842;" and its first paragraph is an outline of the movements which it afterwards describes in detail. "We remained in Cincinnati one whole day after the date of my last, and left on Wednesday morning, the 6th. We reached Louisville soon after midnight on the same night; and slept there. Next day at one o'clock we put ourselves on board another steamer, and traveled on until Sunday evening, the tenth; when we reached St. Louis at about nine o'clock. The next day we devoted to seeing the city. Next day, Tuesday, the twelfth, I started off with a party of men (we were fourteen in all) to see a prairie; returned to St. Louis about noon on the thirteenth; attended a soirée and ball--not a dinner--given in my honor that night; and yesterday afternoon at four o'clock we turned our faces homewards. Thank Heaven! "Cincinnati is only fifty years old, but is a very beautiful city; I think the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston. It has risen out of the forest like an Arabian-Night city; is well laid out; ornamented in the suburbs with pretty villas; and above all, for this is a very rare feature in America, has smooth turf-plots and well-kept gardens. There happened to be a great temperance festival; and the procession mustered under, and passed, our windows early in the morning. I suppose they were twenty thousand strong, at least. Some of the banners were quaint and odd enough. The ship-carpenters, for instance, displayed on one side of their flag the good Ship Temperance in full sail; on the other, the Steamer Alcohol blowing up sky-high. The Irishmen had a portrait of Father Mathew, you may be sure. And Washington's broad lower jaw (by-the-by, Washington had not a pleasant face) figured in all parts of the ranks. In a kind of square at one outskirt of the city they divided into bodies, and were addressed by different speakers. Drier speaking I never heard. I own that I felt quite uncomfortable to think they could take the taste of it out of their mouths with nothing better than water. "In the evening we went to a party at Judge Walker's, and were introduced to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly. I was required to sit down by the greater part of them, and talk![59] In the night we were serenaded (as we usually are in every place we come to), and very well serenaded, I assure you. But we were very much knocked up. I really think my face has acquired a fixed expression of sadness from the constant and unmitigated boring I endure. The LL's have carried away all my cheerfulness. There is a line in my chin (on the right side of the under lip), indelibly fixed there by the New Englander I told you of in my last. I have the print of a crow's foot on the outside of my left eye, which I attribute to the literary characters of small towns. A dimple has vanished from my cheek, which I felt myself robbed of at the time by a wise legislator. But on the other hand I am really indebted for a good broad grin to P. . E. . , literary critic of Philadelphia, and sole proprietor of the English language in its grammatical and idiomatical purity; to P. . E. . , with the shiny straight hair and turned-down shirt-collar, who taketh all of us English men of letters to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly, but told me, at the same time, that I had 'awakened a new era' in his mind. . . . "The last 200 miles of the voyage from Cincinnati to St. Louis are upon the Mississippi, for you come down the Ohio to its mouth. It is well for society that this Mississippi, the renowned father of waters, had no children who take after him. It is the beastliest river in the world.". . . (His description is in the _Notes_.) "Conceive the pleasure of rushing down this stream by night (as we did last night) at the rate of fifteen miles an hour; striking against floating blocks of timber every instant; and dreading some infernal blow at every bump. The helmsman in these boats is in a little glass house upon the roof. In the Mississippi, another man stands in the very head of the vessel, listening and watching intently; listening, because they can tell in dark nights by the noise when any great obstruction is at hand. This man holds the rope of a large bell which hangs close to the wheel-house, and whenever he pulls it the engine is to stop directly, and not to stir until he rings again. Last night, this bell rang at least once in every five minutes; and at each alarm there was a concussion which nearly flung one out of bed. . . . While I have been writing this account, we have shot out of that hideous river, thanks be to God; never to see it again, I hope, but in a nightmare. We are now on the smooth Ohio, and the change is like the transition from pain to perfect ease. "We had a very crowded levee in St. Louis. Of course the paper had an account of it. If I were to drop a letter in the street, it would be in the newspaper next day, and nobody would think its publication an outrage. The editor objected to my hair, as not curling sufficiently. He admitted an eye; but objected again to dress, as being somewhat foppish, 'and indeed perhaps rather flash.' 'But such,' he benevolently adds, 'are the differences between American and English taste--rendered more apparent, perhaps, by all the other gentlemen present being dressed in black.' Oh that you could have seen the other gentlemen! . . . "A St. Louis lady complimented Kate upon her voice and manner of speaking, assuring her that she should never have suspected her of being Scotch, or even English. She was so obliging as to add that she would have taken her for an American, anywhere: which she (Kate) was no doubt aware was a very great compliment, as the Americans were admitted on all hands to have greatly refined upon the English language! I need not tell you that out of Boston and New York a nasal drawl is universal, but I may as well hint that the prevailing grammar is also more than doubtful; that the oddest vulgarisms are received idioms; that all the women who have been bred in slave-States speak more or less like negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses; and that the most fashionable and aristocratic (these are two words in great use), instead of asking you in what place you were born, inquire where you 'hail from.' ! ! "Lord Ashburton arrived at Annapolis t'other day, after a voyage of forty odd days in heavy weather. Straightway the newspapers state, on the authority of a correspondent who 'rowed round the ship' (I leave you to fancy her condition), that America need fear no superiority from England, in respect of her wooden walls. The same correspondent is 'quite pleased' with the frank manner of the English officers; and patronizes them as being, for John Bulls, quite refined. My face, like Haji Baba's, turns upside down, and my liver is changed to water, when I come upon such things, and think who writes and who read them. . . . "They won't let me alone about slavery. A certain judge in St. Louis went so far yesterday that I fell upon him (to the indescribable horror of the man who brought him) and told him a piece of my mind. I said that I was very averse to speaking on the subject here, and always forbore, if possible; but when he pitied our national ignorance of the truths of slavery, I must remind him that we went upon indisputable records, obtained after many years of careful investigation, and at all sorts of self-sacrifice, and that I believed we were much more competent to judge of its atrocity and horror than he who had been brought up in the midst of it. I told him that I could sympathize with men who admitted it to be a dreadful evil, but frankly confessed their inability to devise a means of getting rid of it; but that men who spoke of it as a blessing, as a matter of course, as a state of things to be desired, were out of the pale of reason; and that for them to speak of ignorance or prejudice was an absurdity too ridiculous to be combated. . . . "It is not six years ago, since a slave in this very same St. Louis, being arrested (I forget for what), and knowing he had no chance of a fair trial, be his offense what it might, drew his bowie-knife and ripped the constable across the body. A scuffle ensuing, the desperate negro stabbed two others with the same weapon. The mob who gathered round (among whom were men of mark, wealth, and influence in the place) overpowered him by numbers; carried him away to a piece of open ground beyond the city; _and burned him alive_. This, I say, was done within six years, in broad day; in a city with its courts, lawyers, tipstaffs, judges, jails, and hangman; and not a hair on the head of one of those men has been hurt to this day. And it is, believe me, it is the miserable, wretched independence in small things, the paltry republicanism which recoils from honest service to an honest man, but does not shrink from every trick, artifice, and knavery in business, that makes these slaves necessary, and will render them so, until the indignation of other countries sets them free. "They say the slaves are fond of their masters. Look at this pretty vignette[60] (part of the stock in trade of a newspaper), and judge how you would feel, when men, looking in your face, told you such tales with the newspaper lying on the table. In all the slave-districts, advertisements for runaways are as much matters of course as the announcement of the play for the evening with us. The poor creatures themselves fairly worship English people: they would do anything for them. They are perfectly acquainted with all that takes place in reference to emancipation; and _of course_ their attachment to us grows out of their deep devotion to their owners. I cut this illustration out of a newspaper which had a leader in reference to _the abominable and hellish doctrine of Abolition--repugnant alike to every law of God and Nature_. 'I know something,' said a Dr. Bartlett (a very accomplished man), late a fellow-passenger of ours,--'I know something of their fondness for their masters. I live in Kentucky; and I can assert upon my honor that, in my neighborhood, it is as common for a runaway slave, retaken, to draw his bowie-knife and rip his owner's bowels open, as it is for you to see a drunken fight in London.' "SAME BOAT, _Saturday, Sixteenth April, 1842._ "Let me tell you, my dear Forster, before I forget it, a pretty little scene we had on board the boat between Louisville and St. Louis, as we were going to the latter place. It is not much to tell, but it was very pleasant and interesting to witness." What follows has been printed in the _Notes_, and ought not, by the rule I have laid down, to be given here. But, beautiful as the printed description is, it has not profited by the alteration of some touches and the omission of others in the first fresh version of it, which, for that reason, I here preserve,--one of the most charming soul-felt pictures of character and emotion that ever warmed the heart in fact or fiction. It was, I think, Jeffrey's favorite passage in all the writings of Dickens; and certainly, if any one would learn the secret of their popularity, it is to be read in the observation and description of this little incident. "There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with a sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby had been born in her mother's house, and she had not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning) for twelve months: having left him a month or two after their marriage. Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was: and there she was, all the livelong day, wondering whether 'he' would be at the wharf; and whether 'he' had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the baby on shore by somebody else, _'he' would know it, meeting it in the street_: which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this matter, clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she: and the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I promise you: inquiring, every time we met at table, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and supposing she wouldn't want to go ashore the night we reached it, and cutting many other dry jokes which convulsed all his hearers, but especially the ladies. There was one little, weazen, dried-apple old woman among them, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands under such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lap-dog), old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby now and then, or laughing with the rest when the little woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him, in the joy of her heart. It was something of a blow to the little woman that when we were within twenty miles of our destination it became clearly necessary to put the baby to bed; but she got over that with the same good humor, tied a little handkerchief over her little head, and came out into the gallery with the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with! At last, there were the lights of St. Louis--and here was the wharf--and those were the steps--and the little woman, covering her face with her hands, and laughing, or seeming to laugh, more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up tight. I have no doubt that, in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears lest she should hear 'him' asking for her; but I didn't see her do it. Then a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, and was staggering about among the other boats to find a landing-place; and everybody looked for the husband, and nobody saw him; when all of a sudden, right in the midst of them,--God knows how she ever got there,--there was the little woman hugging with both arms round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy fellow! And in a moment afterwards, there she was again, dragging him through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as he lay asleep!--What a good thing it is to know that so many of us would have been quite down-hearted and sorry if that husband had failed to come!" He then resumes; but in what follows nothing is repeated that will be found in his printed description of the jaunt to the looking-glass prairie: "But about the prairie--it is not, I must confess, so good in its way as this; but I'll tell you all about that too, and leave you to judge for yourself. Tuesday the 12th was the day fixed; and we were to start at five in the morning--sharp. I turned out at four; shaved and dressed; got some bread and milk; and, throwing up the window, looked down into the street. Deuce a coach was there, nor did anybody seem to be stirring in the house. I waited until half-past five; but no preparations being visible even then, I left Mr. Q. to look out, and lay down upon the bed again. There I slept until nearly seven, when I was called. . . . Exclusive of Mr. Q. and myself, there were twelve of my committee in the party: all lawyers except one. He was an intelligent, mild, well-informed gentleman of my own age,--the Unitarian minister of the place. With him, and two other companions, I got into the first coach. . . . "We halted at so good an inn at Lebanon that we resolved to return there at night, if possible. One would scarcely find a better village alehouse of a homely kind in England. During our halt I walked into the village, and met a _dwelling-house_ coming down-hill at a good round trot, drawn by some twenty oxen! We resumed our journey as soon as possible, and got upon the looking-glass prairie at sunset. We halted near a solitary log house for the sake of its water; unpacked the baskets; formed an encampment with the carriages; and dined. "Now, a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing--but more, that one may say one has seen it, than for any sublimity it possesses in itself. Like most things, great or small, in this country, you hear of it with considerable exaggerations. Basil Hall was really quite right in depreciating the general character of the scenery. The widely-famed Far West is not to be compared with even the tamest portions of Scotland or Wales. You stand upon the prairie, and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic. I retired from the rest of the party, to understand my own feelings the better; and looked all round, again and again. It was fine. It was worth the ride. The sun was going down, very red and bright; and the prospect looked like that ruddy sketch of Catlin's, which attracted our attention (you remember?); except that there was not so much ground as he represents, between the spectator and the horizon. But to say (as the fashion is here) that the sight is a landmark in one's existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is sheer gammon. I would say to every man who can't see a prairie--go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive, and Salisbury Plain is _decidedly_ more so. "We had brought roast fowls, buffalo's tongue, ham, bread, cheese, butter, biscuits, sherry, champagne, lemons and sugar for punch, and abundance of ice. It was a delicious meal; and, as they were most anxious that I should be pleased, I warmed myself into a state of surpassing jollity; proposed toasts from the coach-box (which was the chair); ate and drank with the best; and made, I believe, an excellent companion to a very friendly companionable party. In an hour or so we packed up, and drove back to the inn at Lebanon. While supper was preparing, I took a pleasant walk with my Unitarian friend; and when it was over (we drank nothing with it but tea and coffee) we went to bed. The clergyman and I had an exquisitely clean little chamber of our own; and the rest of the party were quartered overhead. . . . "We got back to St. Louis soon after twelve at noon; and I rested during the remainder of the day. The soirée came off at night, in a very good ball-room at our inn,--the Planter's House. The whole of the guests were introduced to us, singly. We were glad enough, you may believe, to come away at midnight; and were very tired. Yesterday, I wore a blouse. To-day, a fur coat. Trying changes! "IN THE SAME BOAT, "_Sunday, Sixteenth April, 1842._ "The inns in these outlandish corners of the world would astonish you by their goodness. The Planter's House is as large as the Middlesex Hospital, and built very much on our hospital plan, with long wards abundantly ventilated, and plain whitewashed walls. They had a famous notion of sending up at breakfast-time large glasses of new milk with blocks of ice in them as clear as crystal. Our table was abundantly supplied indeed at every meal. One day when Kate and I were dining alone together, in our own room, we counted sixteen dishes on the table at the same time. "The society is pretty rough, and intolerably conceited. All the inhabitants are young. _I didn't see one gray head in St. Louis._ There is an island close by, called Bloody Island. It is the dueling-ground of St. Louis; and is so called from the last fatal duel which was fought there. It was a pistol duel, breast to breast, and both parties fell dead at the same time. One of our prairie party (a young man) had acted as second there, in several encounters. The last occasion was a duel with rifles, at forty paces; and coming home he told us how he had bought his man a coat of green linen to fight in, woolen being usually fatal to rifle-wounds. Prairie is variously called (on the refinement principle, I suppose) Para_a_rer; par_e_arer; and paro_a_rer. I am afraid, my dear fellow, you will have had great difficulty in reading all the foregoing text. I have written it, very laboriously, on my knee; and the engine throbs and starts as if the boat were possessed with a devil. "SANDUSKY, "_Sunday, Twenty-fourth April, 1842._ "We went ashore at Louisville this night week, where I left off, two lines above; and slept at the hotel, in which we had put up before. The Messenger being abominably slow, we got our luggage out next morning, and started on again at eleven o'clock in the Benjamin Franklin mail-boat: a splendid vessel, with a cabin more than two hundred feet long, and little state-rooms affording proportionate conveniences. She got in at Cincinnati by one o'clock next morning, when we landed in the dark and went back to our old hotel. As we made our way on foot over the broken pavement, Anne measured her length upon the ground, but didn't hurt herself. I say nothing of Kate's troubles--but you recollect her propensity? She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter; scrapes the skin off her legs; brings great sores and swellings on her feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself blue with bruises. She really has, however, since we got over the first trial of being among circumstances so new and so fatiguing, made a _most admirable_ traveler in every respect. She has never screamed or expressed alarm under circumstances that would have fully justified her in doing so, even in my eyes; has never given way to despondency or fatigue, though we have now been traveling incessantly, through a very rough country, for more than a month, and have been at times, as you may readily suppose, most thoroughly tired; has always accommodated herself, well and cheerfully, to everything; and has pleased me very much, and proved herself perfectly game. "We remained at Cincinnati all Tuesday the nineteenth, and all that night. At eight o'clock on Wednesday morning the twentieth, we left in the mail-stage for Columbus: Anne, Kate, and Mr. Q. inside; I on the box. The distance is a hundred and twenty miles; the road macadamized; and, for an American road, very good. We were three-and-twenty hours performing the journey. We traveled all night; reached Columbus at seven in the morning; breakfasted; and went to bed until dinner-time. At night we held a levee for half an hour, and the people poured in as they always do: each gentleman with a lady on each arm, exactly like the Chorus to God Save the Queen. I wish you could see them, that you might know what a splendid comparison this is. They wear their clothes precisely as the chorus people do; and stand--supposing Kate and me to be in the centre of the stage, with our backs to the footlights--just as the company would, on the first night of the season. They shake hands exactly after the manner of the guests at a ball at the Adelphi or the Haymarket; receive any facetiousness on my part as if there were a stage direction 'all laugh;' and have rather more difficulty in 'getting off' than the last gentlemen, in white pantaloons, polished boots, and berlins, usually display, under the most trying circumstances. "Next morning, that is to say, on Friday, the 22d, at seven o'clock exactly, we resumed our journey. The stage from Columbus to this place only running thrice a week, and not on that day, I bargained for an 'exclusive extra' with four horses; for which I paid forty dollars, or eight pounds English: the horses changing, as they would if it were the regular stage. To insure our getting on properly, the proprietors sent an agent on the box; and, with no other company but him and a hamper full of eatables and drinkables, we went upon our way. It is impossible to convey an adequate idea to you of the kind of road over which we traveled. I can only say that it was, at the best, but a track through the wild forest, and among the swamps, bogs, and morasses of the withered bush. A great portion of it was what is called a 'corduroy road:' which is made by throwing round logs or whole trees into a swamp, and leaving them to settle there. Good Heaven! if you only felt one of the least of the jolts with which the coach falls from log to log! It is like nothing but going up a steep flight of stairs in an omnibus. Now the coach flung us in a heap on its floor, and now crushed our heads against its roof. Now one side of it was deep in the mire, and we were holding on to the other. Now it was lying on the horses' tails, and now again upon its back. But it never, never was in any position, attitude, or kind of motion, to which we are accustomed in coaches; or made the smallest approach to our experience of the proceedings of any sort of vehicle that goes on wheels. Still, the day was beautiful, the air delicious, and we were _alone_; with no tobacco-spittle, or eternal prosy conversation about dollars and politics (the only two subjects they ever converse about, or can converse upon), to bore us. We really enjoyed it; made a joke of the being knocked about; and were quite merry. At two o'clock we stopped in the wood to open our hamper and dine; and we drank to our darlings and all friends at home. Then we started again and went on until ten o'clock at night: when we reached a place called Lower Sandusky, sixty-two miles from our starting-point. The last three hours of the journey were not very pleasant; for it lightened--awfully: every flash very vivid, very blue, and very long; and, the wood being so dense that the branches on _either_ side of the track rattled and broke _against_ the coach, it was rather a dangerous neighborhood for a thunder-storm. "The inn at which we halted was a rough log house. The people were all abed, and we had to knock them up. We had the queerest sleeping-room, with two doors, one opposite the other; both opening directly on the wild black country, and neither having any lock or bolt. The effect of these opposite doors was, that one was always blowing the other open: an ingenuity in the art of building, which I don't remember to have met with before. You should have seen me, in my shirt, blockading them with portmanteaus, and desperately endeavoring to make the room tidy! But the blockading was really needful, for in my dressing-case I have about 250_l._ in gold; and for the amount of the middle figure in that scarce metal there are not a few men in the West who would murder their fathers. Apropos of this golden store, consider at your leisure the strange state of things in this country. It has _no money_; really no money. The bank-paper won't pass; the newspapers are full of advertisements from tradesmen who sell by barter; and American gold is not to be had, or purchased. I bought sovereigns, English sovereigns, at first; but as I could get none of them at Cincinnati, to this day, I have had to purchase French gold; 20-franc pieces; with which I am traveling as if I were in Paris! "But let's go back to Lower Sandusky. Mr. Q. went to bed up in the roof of the log house somewhere, but was so beset by bugs that he got up after an hour and _lay in the coach_, . . . where he was obliged to wait till breakfast-time. We breakfasted, driver and all, in the one common room. It was papered with newspapers, and was as rough a place as need be. At half-past seven we started again, and we reached Sandusky at six o'clock yesterday afternoon. It is on Lake Erie, twenty-four hours' journey by steamboat from Buffalo. We found no boat here, nor has there been one, since. We are waiting, with every thing packed up, ready to start on the shortest notice; and are anxiously looking out for smoke in the distance. "There was an old gentleman in the log inn at Lower Sandusky who treats with the Indians on the part of the American government, and has just concluded a treaty with the Wyandot Indians at that place to remove next year to some land provided for them west of the Mississippi, a little way beyond St. Louis. He described his negotiation to me, and their reluctance to go, exceedingly well. They are a fine people, but degraded and broken down. If you could see any of their men and women on a race-course in England, you would not know them from gipsies. "We are in a small house here, but a very comfortable one, and the people are exceedingly obliging. Their demeanor in these country parts is invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity of enjoyment. It is most remarkable. I am quite serious when I say that I have not heard a hearty laugh these six weeks, except my own; nor have I seen a merry face on any shoulders but a black man's. Lounging listlessly about; idling in bar-rooms; smoking; spitting; and lolling on the pavement in rocking-chairs, outside the shop-doors; are the only recreations. I don't think the national shrewdness extends beyond the Yankees; that is, the Eastern men. The rest are heavy, dull, and ignorant. Our landlord here is from the East. He is a handsome, obliging, civil fellow. He comes into the room with his hat on; spits in the fireplace as he talks; sits down on the sofa with his hat on; pulls out his newspaper, and reads; but to all this I am accustomed. He is anxious to please--and that is enough. "We are wishing very much for a boat; for we hope to find our letters at Buffalo. It is half-past one; and, as there is no boat in sight, we are fain (sorely against our wills) to order an early dinner. "_Tuesday, April Twenty-sixth, 1842._ "NIAGARA FALLS!!! (UPON THE ENGLISH[61] SIDE.) "I don't know at what length I might have written you from Sandusky, my beloved friend, if a steamer had not come in sight just as I finished the last unintelligible sheet! (oh! the ink in these parts!): whereupon I was obliged to pack up bag and baggage, to swallow a hasty apology for a dinner, and to hurry my train on board with all the speed I might. She was a fine steamship, four hundred tons burden, name the Constitution, had very few passengers on board, and had bountiful and handsome accommodation. It's all very fine talking about Lake Erie, but it won't do for persons who are liable to sea-sickness. We were all sick. It's almost as bad in that respect as the Atlantic. The waves are very short, and horribly constant. We reached Buffalo at six this morning; went ashore to breakfast; sent to the post-office forthwith; and received--oh! who or what can say with how much pleasure and what unspeakable delight!--our English letters! "We lay all Sunday night at a town (and a beautiful town too) called Cleveland; on Lake Erie. The people poured on board, in crowds, by six on Monday morning, to see me; and a party of 'gentlemen' actually planted themselves before our little cabin, and stared in at the door and windows _while I was washing, and Kate lay in bed_. I was so incensed at this, and at a certain newspaper published in that town which I had accidentally seen in Sandusky (advocating war with England to the death, saying that Britain must be 'whipped again,' and promising all true Americans that within two years they should sing Yankee Doodle in Hyde Park and Hail Columbia in the courts of Westminster), that when the mayor came on board to present himself to me, according to custom, I refused to see him, and bade Mr. Q. tell him why and wherefore. His honor took it very coolly, and retired to the top of the wharf, with a big stick and a whittling knife, with which he worked so lustily (staring at the closed door of our cabin all the time) that long before the boat left, the big stick was no bigger than a cribbage-peg! "I never in my life was in such a state of excitement as coming from Buffalo here, this morning. You come by railroad, and are nigh two hours upon the way. I looked out for the spray, and listened for the roar, as far beyond the bounds of possibility as though, landing in Liverpool, I were to listen for the music of your pleasant voice in Lincoln's Inn Fields. At last, when the train stopped, I saw two great white clouds rising up from the depths of the earth,--nothing more. They rose up slowly, gently, majestically, into the air. I dragged Kate down a deep and slippery path leading to the ferry-boat; bullied Anne for not coming fast enough; perspired at every pore; and felt, it is impossible to say how, as the sound grew louder and louder in my ears, and yet nothing could be seen for the mist. "There were two English officers with us (ah! what _gentlemen_, what noblemen of nature they seemed), and they hurried off with me; leaving Kate and Anne on a crag of ice; and clambered after me over the rocks at the foot of the small Fall, while the ferryman was getting the boat ready. I was not disappointed--but I could make out nothing. In an instant I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin. I saw the water tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity. But when we were seated in the boat, and crossing at the very foot of the cataract--then I began to feel what it was. Directly I had changed my clothes at the inn I went out again, taking Kate with me, and hurried to the Horse-shoe Fall. I went down alone, into the very basin. It would be hard for a man to stand nearer God than he does there. There was a bright rainbow at my feet; and from that I looked up to--great Heaven! to _what_ a fall of bright green water! The broad, deep, mighty stream seems to die in the act of falling; and from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with the same dread solemnity--perhaps from the creation of the world. "We purpose remaining here a week. In my next I will try to give you some idea of my impressions, and to tell you how they change with every day. At present it is impossible. I can only say that the first effect of this tremendous spectacle on me was peace of mind--tranquillity--great thoughts of eternal rest and happiness--nothing of terror. I can shudder at the recollection of Glencoe (dear friend, with Heaven's leave we must see Glencoe together), but whenever I think of Niagara I shall think of its beauty. "If you could hear the roar that is in my ears as I write this. Both Falls are under our windows. From our sitting-room and bedroom we look down straight upon them. There is not a soul in the house but ourselves. What would I give if you and Mac were here to share the sensations of this time! I was going to add, what would I give if the dear girl whose ashes lie in Kensal Green had lived to come so far along with us--but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight. * * * * * "One word on the precious letters before I close. You are right, my dear fellow, about the papers; and you are right (I grieve to say) about the people. _Am I right?_ quoth the conjurer. _Yes!_ from gallery, pit, and boxes. I _did_ let out those things, at first, against my will, but when I come to tell you all--well; only wait--only wait--till the end of July. I say no more. "I do perceive a perplexingly divided and subdivided duty, in the matter of the book of travels. Oh! the sublimated essence of comicality that I _could_ distil, from the materials I have! . . . You are a part, and an essential part, of our home, dear friend, and I exhaust my imagination in picturing the circumstances under which I shall surprise you by walking into 58, Lincoln's Inn Fields. We are truly grateful to God for the health and happiness of our inexpressibly dear children and all our friends. But one letter more--only one. . . . I don't seem to have been half affectionate enough, but there _are_ thoughts, you know, that lie too deep for words." FOOTNOTES: [59] A young lady's account of this party, written next morning, and quoted in one of the American memoirs of Dickens, enables us to contemplate his suffering from the point of view of those who inflicted it: "I went last evening to a party at Judge Walker's, given to the hero of the day. . . . When we reached the house, Mr. Dickens had left the crowded rooms, and was in the hall with his wife, about taking his departure when we entered the door. We were introduced to him in our wrapping; and in the flurry and embarrassment of the meeting, one of the party dropped a parcel, containing shoes, gloves, etc. Mr. Dickens, stooping, gathered them up and restored them with a laughing remark, and we bounded up-stairs to get our things off. Hastening down again, we found him with Mrs. Dickens seated upon a sofa, surrounded by a group of ladies; Judge Walker having requested him to delay his departure for a few moments, for the gratification of some tardy friends who had just arrived, ourselves among the number. Declining to re-enter the rooms where he had already taken leave of the guests, he had seated himself in the hall. He is young and handsome, has a mellow, beautiful eye, fine brow, and abundant hair. His mouth is large, and his smile so bright it seemed to shed light and happiness all about him. His manner is easy, negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish; in fact, he was overdressed, yet his garments were worn so easily they appeared to be a necessary part of him. (!) He had a dark coat, with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat, embroidered with colored flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front, was a black neckcloth, also embroidered in colors, in which were placed two large diamond pins connected by a chain. A gold watch-chain, and a large red rose in his button-hole, completed his toilet. He appeared a little weary, but answered the remarks made to him--for he originated none--in an agreeable manner. Mr. Beard's portrait of Fagin was so placed in the room that we could see it from where we stood surrounding him. One of the ladies asked him if it was his idea of the Jew. He replied, 'Very nearly.' Another, laughingly, requested that he would give her the rose he wore, as a memento. He shook his head and said, 'That will not do; he could not give it to one; the others would be jealous.' A half-dozen then insisted on having it, whereupon he proposed to divide the leaves among them. In taking the rose from his coat, either by design or accident, the leaves loosened and fell upon the floor, and amid considerable laughter the ladies stooped and gathered them. He remained some twenty minutes, perhaps, in the hall, and then took his leave. I must confess to considerable disappointment in the personal of my idol. I felt that his throne was shaken, although it never could be destroyed." This appalling picture supplements and very sufficiently explains the mournful passage in the text. [60] "RUNAWAY NEGRO IN JAIL" was the heading of the advertisement inclosed, which had a woodcut of master and slave in its corner, and announced that Wilford Garner, sheriff and jailer of Chicot County, Arkansas, requested owner to come and prove property--or---- [61] Ten dashes underneath the word. CHAPTER XXIV. NIAGARA AND MONTREAL. 1842. Last Two Letters--Dickens vanquished--Obstacles to Copyright--Two described--Value of Literary Popularity--Substitute for Literature--The Secretary described--His Paintings--The Lion and ---- --Toryism of Toronto--Canadian Attentions--Proposed Theatricals--Last Letter--The Private Play--Stage Manager's Report--The Lady Performers--Bill of the Performance--A Touch of Crummles--HOME. MY friend was better than his word, and two more letters reached me before his return. The opening of the first was written from Niagara on the 3d, and its close from Montreal on the 12th, of May; from which latter city also, on the 26th of that month, the last of all was written. Much of the first of these letters had reference to the international copyright agitation, and gave strong expression to the indignation awakened in him (nor less in some of the best men of America) by the adoption, at a public meeting in Boston itself, of a memorial against any change of the law, in the course of which it was stated that, if English authors were invested with any control over the republication of their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors to alter and adapt them to the American taste. This deliberate declaration, however, unsparing as Dickens's anger at it was, in effect vanquished him. He saw the hopelessness of pursuing further any present effort to bring about the change desired; and he took the determination not only to drop any allusion to it in his proposed book, but to try what effect might be produced, when he should again be in England, by a league of English authors to suspend further intercourse with American publishers while the law should remain as it is. On his return he made accordingly a public appeal to this effect, stating his own intention for the future to forego all profit derivable from the authorized transmission of early proofs across the Atlantic; but his hopes in this particular also were doomed to disappointment. I now leave the subject, quoting only from his present letter the general remarks with which it is dismissed by himself. "NIAGARA FALLS, "_Tuesday, Third May, 1842._ "I'll tell you what the two obstacles to the passing of an international copyright law with England are: firstly, the national love of 'doing' a man in any bargain or matter of business; secondly, the national vanity. Both these characteristics prevail to an extent which no stranger can possibly estimate. "With regard to the first, I seriously believe that it is an essential part of the pleasure derived from the perusal of a popular English book, that the author gets nothing for it. It is so dar-nation 'cute--so knowing in Jonathan to get his reading on those terms. He has the Englishman so regularly on the hip that his eye twinkles with slyness, cunning, and delight; and he chuckles over the humor of the page with an appreciation of it quite inconsistent with, and apart from, its honest purchase. The raven hasn't more joy in eating a stolen piece of meat, than the American has in reading the English book which he gets for nothing. "With regard to the second, it reconciles that better and more elevated class who are above this sort of satisfaction, with surprising ease. The man's read in America! The Americans like him! They are glad to see him when he comes here! They flock about him, and tell him that they are grateful to him for spirits in sickness; for many hours of delight in health; for a hundred fanciful associations which are constantly interchanged between themselves and their wives and children at home! It is nothing that all this takes place in countries where he is _paid_; it is nothing that he has won fame for himself elsewhere, and profit too. The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more _would_ he have? Here's reward enough for any man. The national vanity swallows up all other countries on the face of the earth, and leaves but this above the ocean. Now, mark what the real value of this American reading is. Find me in the whole range of literature one single solitary English book which becomes popular with them before, by going through the ordeal at home and becoming popular there, it has forced itself on their attention--and I am content that the law should remain as it is, forever and a day. I must make one exception. There _are_ some mawkish tales of fashionable life before which crowds fall down as they were gilded calves, which have been snugly enshrined in circulating libraries at home, from the date of their publication. "As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing? Our people don't think of poetry, sir. Dollars, banks, and cotton are _our_ books, sir.' And they certainly are in one sense; for a lower average of general information than exists in this country on all other topics, it would be very hard to find. So much, at present, for international copyright." The same letter kept the promise made in its predecessor that one or two more sketches of character should be sent: "One of the most amusing phrases in use all through the country, for its constant repetition, and adaptation to every emergency, is 'Yes, Sir.' Let me give you a specimen." (The specimen was the dialogue, in the _Notes_, of straw-hat and brown-hat, during the stage-coach ride to Sandusky.) "I am not joking, upon my word. This is exactly the dialogue. Nothing else occurring to me at this moment, let me give you the secretary's portrait. Shall I? "He is of a sentimental turn--strongly sentimental; and tells Anne as June approaches that he hopes 'we shall sometimes think of him' in our own country. He wears a cloak, like Hamlet; and a very tall, big, limp, dusty black hat, which he exchanges on long journeys for a cap like Harlequin's. . . . He sings; and in some of our quarters, when his bedroom has been near ours, we have heard him grunting bass notes through the keyhole of his door, to attract our attention. His desire that I should formally ask him to sing, and his devices to make me do so, are irresistibly absurd. There was a piano in our room at Hartford (you recollect our being there, early in February?)--and he asked me one night, when we were alone, if 'Mrs. D.' played. 'Yes, Mr. Q.' 'Oh, indeed, Sir! _I_ sing: so whenever you want _a little soothing_--' You may imagine how hastily I left the room, on some false pretense, without hearing more. "He paints. . . . An enormous box of oil-colors is the main part of his luggage: and with these he blazes away, in his own room, for hours together. Anne got hold of some big-headed, pot-bellied sketches he made of the passengers on board the canal-boat (including me in my fur coat), the recollection of which brings the tears into my eyes at this minute. He painted the Falls, at Niagara, superbly; and is supposed now to be engaged on a full-length representation of me: waiters having reported that chamber-maids have said that there is a picture in his room which has a great deal of hair. One girl opined that it was 'the beginning of the King's Arms;' but I am pretty sure that the Lion is myself. . . . "Sometimes, but not often, he commences a conversation. That usually occurs when we are walking the deck after dark; or when we are alone together in a coach. It is his practice at such times to relate the most notorious and patriarchal Joe Miller, as something that occurred in his own family. When traveling by coach, he is particularly fond of imitating cows and pigs; and nearly challenged a fellow-passenger the other day, who had been moved by the display of this accomplishment into telling him that he was 'a Perfect Calf.' He thinks it an indispensable act of politeness and attention to inquire constantly whether we're not sleepy, or, to use his own words, whether we don't 'suffer for sleep.' If we have taken a long nap of fourteen hours or so, after a long journey, he is sure to meet me at the bedroom door when I turn out in the morning, with this inquiry. But, apart from the amusement he gives us, I could not by possibility have lighted on any one who would have suited my purpose so well. I have raised his ten dollars per month to twenty; and mean to make it up for six months." The conclusion of this letter was dated from "Montreal, Thursday, twelfth May," and was little more than an eager yearning for home: "This will be a very short and stupid letter, my dear friend; for the post leaves here much earlier than I expected, and all my grand designs for being unusually brilliant fall to the ground. I will write you _one line_ by the next Cunard boat,--reserving all else until our happy and long long looked-for meeting. "We have been to Toronto and Kingston; experiencing attentions at each which I should have difficulty in describing. The wild and rabid toryism of Toronto is, I speak seriously, _appalling_. English kindness is very different from American. People send their horses and carriages for your use, but they don't exact as payment the right of being always under your nose. We had no less than _five_ carriages at Kingston waiting our pleasure at one time; not to mention the commodore's barge and crew, and a beautiful government steamer. We dined with Sir Charles Bagot last Sunday. Lord Mulgrave was to have met us yesterday at Lachine; but, as he was wind-bound in his yacht and couldn't get in, Sir Richard Jackson sent his drag four-in-hand, with two other young fellows who are also his aides, and in we came in grand style. "The Theatricals (I think I told you[62] I had been invited to play with the officers of the Coldstream Guards here) are _A Roland for an Oliver_; _Two o'Clock in the Morning_; and either the _Young Widow_, or _Deaf as a Post_. Ladies (unprofessional) are going to play, for the first time. I wrote to Mitchell at New York for a wig for Mr. Snobbington, which has arrived, and is brilliant. If they had done _Love, Law, and Physick_, as at first proposed, I was already 'up' in Flexible, having played it of old, before my authorship days; but if it should be Splash in the _Young Widow_, you will have to do me the favor to imagine me in a smart livery-coat, shiny black hat and cockade, white knee-cords, white top-boots, blue stock, small whip, red cheeks, and dark eyebrows. Conceive Topping's state of mind if I bring this dress home and put it on unexpectedly! . . . God bless you, dear friend. I can say nothing about the seventh, the day on which we sail. It is impossible. Words cannot express what we feel, now that the time is so near. . . ." His last letter, dated from "Peasco's Hotel, Montreal, Canada, twenty-sixth of May," described the private theatricals, and inclosed me a bill of the play. "This, like my last, will be a stupid letter, because both Kate and I are thrown into such a state of excitement by the near approach of the seventh of June that we can do nothing, and think of nothing. "The play came off last night. The audience, between five and six hundred strong, were invited as to a party; a regular table with refreshments being spread in the lobby and saloon. We had the band of the twenty-third (one of the finest in the service) in the orchestra, the theatre was lighted with gas, the scenery was excellent, and the properties were all brought from private houses. Sir Charles Bagot, Sir Richard Jackson, and their staffs were present; and as the military portion of the audience were all in full uniform, it was really a splendid scene. "We 'went' also splendidly; though with nothing very remarkable in the acting way. We had for Sir Mark Chase a genuine odd fish, with plenty of humor; but our Tristram Sappy was not up to the marvelous reputation he has somehow or other acquired here. I am not however, let me tell you, placarded as stage-manager for nothing. Everybody was told they would have to submit to the most iron despotism; and didn't I come Macready over them? Oh, no. By no means. Certainly not. The pains I have taken with them, and the perspiration I have expended, during the last ten days, exceed in amount anything you can imagine. I had regular plots of the scenery made out, and lists of the properties wanted; and had them nailed up by the prompter's chair. Every letter that was to be delivered, was written; every piece of money that had to be given, provided; and not a single thing lost sight of. I prompted, myself, when I was not on; when I was, I made the regular prompter of the theatre my deputy; and I never saw anything so perfectly touch and go, as the first two pieces. The bedroom scene in the interlude was as well furnished as Vestris had it; with a 'practicable' fireplace blazing away like mad, and everything in a concatenation accordingly. I really do believe that I was very funny: at least I know that I laughed heartily at myself, and made the part a character, such as you and I know very well: a mixture of T----, Harley, Yates, Keeley, and Jerry Sneak. It went with a roar, all through; and, as I am closing this, they have told me I was so well made up that Sir Charles Bagot, who sat in the stage-box, had no idea who played Mr. Snobbington, until the piece was over. [Illustration: Private Theatricals.] * * * * * =COMMITTEE.= * * * * * Mrs. TORRENS. W. C. ERMATINGER, Esq. Mrs. PERRY. Captain TORRENS. THE EARL OF MULGRAVE. * * * * * STAGE MANAGER--MR. CHARLES DICKENS. * * * * * QUEEN'S THEATRE, MONTREAL * * * * * ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, MAY 25TH, 1842, WILL BE PERFORMED, =ROLAND FOR AN OLIVER.= * * * * * MRS. SELBORNE. [Handwritten: Mrs. Torrens] MARIA DARLINGTON. [Handwritten: Miss Griffin] MRS. FIXTURE. [Handwritten: Miss Ermatinger.] MR. SELBORNE. [Handwritten: Lord Mulgrave.] ALFRED HIGHFLYER. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens] SIR MARK CHASE. [Handwritten: Honourable Mr. Methuen] FIXTURE. [Handwritten: Captain Willoughby.] GAMEKEEPER. [Handwritten: Captain Granville] * * * * * AFTER WHICH, AN INTERLUDE IN ONE SCENE, (FROM THE FRENCH,) CALLED =Past Two o'Clock in the Morning.= * * * * * THE STRANGER. [Handwritten: Captain Granville] MR. SNOBBINGTON. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens] * * * * * TO CONCLUDE WITH THE FARCE, IN ONE ACT, ENTITLED =DEAF AS A POST.= * * * * * MRS. PLUMPLEY. [Handwritten: Mrs. Torrens] AMY TEMPLETON. [Handwritten: Mrs. Charles Dickens!!!!!!!!] SOPHY WALTON. [Handwritten: Mrs. Perry.] SALLY MAGGS. [Handwritten: Miss Griffin] CAPTAIN TEMPLETON. [Handwritten: Captain Torrens] MR. WALTON. [Handwritten: Captain Willoughby.] TRISTRAM SAPPY. [Handwritten: Doctor Griffin] CRUPPER. [Handwritten: Lord Mulgrave] GALLOP. [Handwritten: Mr. Charles Dickens.] MONTREAL, May 24, 1842. GAZETTE OFFICE. "But only think of Kate playing! and playing devilish well, I assure you! All the ladies were capital, and we had no wait or hitch for an instant. You may suppose this, when I tell you that we began at eight, and had the curtain down at eleven. It is their custom here, to prevent heart-burnings in a very heart-burning town, whenever they have played in private, to repeat the performances in public. So, on Saturday (substituting, of course, real actresses for the ladies), we repeat the two first pieces to a paying audience, for the manager's benefit. . . . "I send you a bill, to which I have appended a key. "I have not told you half enough. But I promise you I shall make you shake your sides about this play. Wasn't it worthy of Crummles that when Lord Mulgrave and I went out to the door to receive the Governor-general, the regular prompter followed us in agony with four tall candlesticks with wax candles in them, and besought us with a bleeding heart to carry two apiece, in accordance with all the precedents? . . . * * * * * "I have hardly spoken of our letters, which reached us yesterday, shortly before the play began. A hundred thousand thanks for your delightful mainsail of that gallant little packet. I read it again and again; and had it all over again at breakfast-time this morning. I heard also, by the same ship, from Talfourd, Miss Coutts, Brougham, Rogers, and others. A delicious letter from Mac too, as good as his painting, I swear. Give my hearty love to him. . . . God bless you, my dear friend. As the time draws nearer, we get FEVERED with anxiety for home. . . . Kiss our darlings for us. We shall soon meet, please God, and be happier and merrier than ever we were, in all our lives. . . . Oh, home--home--home--home--home--home--HOME!!!!!!!!!!!" =END OF VOL. I.= FOOTNOTES: [62] See _ante_, p. 303. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page viii, "recoltions" changed to "recollections" (Another schoolfellow's recollections) Page ix, extraneous page number removed Original text read: Writing _Pickwick_, Nos. 14 127 and 15 127 Page 59, "t" changed to "it" (it as early as) Page 117, "reisssue" changed to "reissue" (Scheme to reissue) Page 224, "s" changed to "is" (there is little further) Page 224, "hab" changed to "habit" (his invariable habit) Page 242, "axing" changed to "taxing" (taxing ingenuity to) Page 242, "f" chagned to "of" (of sheer insanity) Page 286, word "I" inserted into text. (I have heard of) To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations, capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained. For example: Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained. ***** Transcriber's Note: For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by ~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the text. THE LIFE OF [Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens] [Illustration] THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER. VOL. II. 1842-1852. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. * * * * * A NOTICE written under date of the 23rd December, 1871, appeared with the Tenth Edition. "Such has been the rapidity of the demand for successive impressions of this book, that I have found it impossible, until now, to correct at pages 31, 87, and 97 three errors of statement made in the former editions; and some few other mistakes, not in themselves important, at pages 96, 101, and 102. I take the opportunity of adding, that the mention at p. 83 is not an allusion to the well-known 'Penny' and 'Saturday' magazines, but to weekly periodicals of some years' earlier date resembling them in form. One of them, I have since found from a later mention by Dickens himself, was presumably of a less wholesome and instructive character. 'I used,' he says, 'when I was at school, to take in the _Terrific Register_, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap.' An obliging correspondent writes to me upon my reference to the Fox-under-the-hill, at p. 62: 'Will you permit me to say, that the house, shut up and almost ruinous, is still to be found at the bottom of a curious and most precipitous court, the entrance of which is just past Salisbury-street. . . . It was once, I think, the approach to the halfpenny boats. The house is now shut out from the water-side by the Embankment.'" I proceed to state in detail what the changes thus referred to were. The passage about James Lamert, beginning at the thirteenth line of p. 31, now stands: "His chief ally and encourager in these displays was a youth of some ability, much older than himself, named James Lamert, stepson to his mother's sister and therefore a sort of cousin, who was his great patron and friend in his childish days. Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles Barrow, himself a lieutenant in the navy, had for her first husband a commander in the navy called Allen; on whose death by drowning at Rio Janeiro she had joined her sister, the navy-pay clerk's wife, at Chatham; in which place she subsequently took for her second husband Doctor Lamert, an army surgeon, whose son James, even after he had been sent to Sandhurst for his education, continued still to visit Chatham from time to time. He had a turn for private theatricals; and as his father's quarters were in the ordnance-hospital there, a great rambling place otherwise at that time almost uninhabited, he had plenty of room in which to get up his entertainments." Two other corrections were consequent on this change. At the 21st line of page 38, for "the elder cousin" read "the cousin by marriage;" and at the 31st line of p. 49, "cousin by his mother's side" should be "cousin by his aunt's marriage." At the 15th line of the 41st page, "his bachelor-uncle, fellow-clerk," &c. should be "the uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk," &c. At the 11th line of page 54, "Charles-court" should be "Clare-court." The allusion to one of his favourite localities at the 23d line of page 62 should stand thus: "a little public-house by the water-side called the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we once missed in looking for it together." The passage at p. 87, having reference to an early friend who had been with him, as I supposed, at his first school, should run thus: "In this however I have since discovered my own mistake: the truth being that it was this gentleman's connection, not with the Wellington-academy, but with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in Hunter-street, Brunswick-square, where the brothers of Dickens were subsequently placed, which led to their early knowledge of each other. I fancy that they were together also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy's in New-square, Lincoln's-inn; but, whether or not this was so, Dickens certainly had not quitted school many months before his father had made sufficient interest with an attorney of Gray's-inn, Mr. Edward Blackmore, to obtain him regular employment in his office." There is subsequent allusion to the same gentleman (at p. 182) as his "school-companion at Mr. Dawson's in Henrietta-street," which ought to stand as "having known him when himself a law-clerk in Lincoln's-inn." At p. 96 I had stated that Mr. John Dickens reported for the _Morning Chronicle_; and at p. 101 that Mr. Thomas Beard reported for the _Morning Herald_; whereas Mr. Dickens, though in the gallery for other papers, did not report for the _Chronicle_, and Mr. Beard did report for that journal; and where (at p. 102) Dickens was spoken of as associated with Mr. Beard in a reporting party which represented respectively the _Chronicle_ and _Herald_, the passage ought simply to have described him as "connected with a reporting party, being Lord John Russell's Devonshire contest above-named, and his associate chief being Mr. Beard, entrusted with command for the _Chronicle_ in this particular express." At p. 97 I had made a mistake about his "first published piece of writing," in too hastily assuming that he had himself forgotten what the particular piece was. It struck an intelligent and kind correspondent as very unlikely that Dickens should have fallen into error on such a point; and, making personal search for himself (as I ought to have done), discovered that what I supposed to be another piece was merely the same under another title. The description of his first printed sketch should therefore be "(Mr. Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk)." There is another mistake at p. 159, of "bandy-legged" instead of "bulky-legged" and, at p. 177, of "fresh fields" for "fresh woods." Those several corrections were made in the Tenth Edition. To the Eleventh these words were prefixed (under date of the 23rd of January, 1872): "Since the above mentioned edition went to press, a published letter has rendered necessary a brief additional note to the remarks made at pp. 155-6." The remark occurs in my notice of the silly story of Mr. Cruikshank having originated _Oliver Twist_, and, with the note referred to, now stands in the form subjoined. "Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels however should fall to the person by whom the tale is told,* or whether any part belongs to the authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its slander. Dickens's letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of its author's genius had been merely an illustration of etchings by Mr. Cruikshank!" Note to the words "person by whom the tale is told:" "*This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr. Cruikshank's announcement in the _Times_, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had 'confused some circumstances with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over some drawings and sketches,' the substance of his information as to who it was that originated _Oliver Twist_, and all its characters, had been derived from Mr. Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing fable, therefore, has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr. Cruikshank is to be congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence respecting it as long as Mr. Dickens lived." In the Twelfth Edition I mentioned, in the note at p. 149, a little work of which all notice had been previously omitted; and the close of that note now runs: "He had before written for them, without his name, _Sunday under Three Heads_; and he added subsequently a volume of _Young Couples_." At p. 157, "parish abuses" is corrected in the same edition to "parish practices;" and at p. 173, "in his later works" to "in his latest works." I have received letters from several obliging correspondents, among them three or four who were scholars at the Wellington-house Academy before or after Dickens's time, and one who attended the school with him; but such remark as they suggest will more properly accompany my third and closing volume. PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON, _29th of October, 1872._ ILLUSTRATIONS. * * * * * PAGE Autograph of Charles Dickens _Fly leaf_ Charles Dickens, æt. 47. From the portrait painted for the author in 1859 by W. P. Frith, R.A. Engraved by Robert Graves, A.R.A. _Frontispiece_ Charles Dickens, his Wife, and her Sister. Drawn by Daniel Maclise R.A. in 1842. Engraved by C. H. Jeens 48 Sketch of the Villa Bagnerello (Albaro), by Angus Fletcher 121 Drawing of the Palazzo Peschiere (Genoa), by Mr. Batson 141 At 58, Lincoln's-inn-fields, Monday the 2nd of December, 1844. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. Engraved by C. H. Jeens 174 Rosemont, Lausanne. From a drawing by the Hon. Mrs. Watson 229 M. Barthelémy's card 325 Seventeen "fancies" for Mr. Dombey. Designed by H. K. Browne 345 Twelve more similar fancies. From the design of the same artist 346 Charles Dickens to George Cruikshank. Facsimile of a letter written in 1838, concerning the later illustrations to _Oliver Twist_ 349-50 TABLE OF CONTENTS. * * * * * CHAPTER I. 1842. Pages 21-39. AMERICAN NOTES. ÆT. 30. PAGE Return from America 21 Longfellow in England 22 At Broadstairs 23 Preparing _Notes_ 23 Fancy for opening of _Chuzzlewit_ 24 Attractions at Margate 25 Being, not always Believing 26 Burlesque of classic tragedy 26 A smart man and forged letter 26 A proposed dedication 27 Authorship and sea bathing 28 Easy-living rich and patient poor 28 Coming to the end 29 Rejected motto for _Notes_ 30 Home of the _Every Day Book_ 31 Scene at a funeral 32 An introductory chapter suppressed 33 Chapter first printed 33-37 Jeffrey's opinion of the _Notes_ 38 Later page anticipated 38 Experience of America in 1868 38 CHAPTER II. 1843. Pages 40-62. FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. ÆT. 31. A sunset at Land's-end 40 A holiday described by C. D. 41 The same described by Maclise 42 A landscape and a portrait 43 Names first given to _Chuzzlewit_ 44 Origin of the novel 45 Prologue to a play 45 On a tragedy by Browning 46 George Eliot's first book 47 Accompaniments of work 47 Miss Georgina Hogarth 48 Three portraits 49 A public benefactor 50 Controversy on _Notes_ 50 Original of Mrs. Gamp 51 What he will do with her 51 John Black 53 Macready and America 53 Apprehended disservice 54 Exertions for Elton family 55 Seaside life in ordinary 55 Public speeches 56 Ragged schools and results 57 Unitarianism 59 Return to Church of England 59 Language of his Will 59 _Christmas Carol_ 60 Birth of third son 61 Amusing letter 61 CHAPTER III. 1843-1844. Pages 63-92. CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL. ÆT. 31-32. Falling-off in _Chuzzlewit_ sale 63 Publishers and authors 64 Premature fears 65 Resolve to change his publishers 66 Proposal to his printers 66 Desire to travel again 67 Ways and means 68 Objections to the scheme 69 Confidence in himself 70 Want of confidence in others 70 Bent on his plan 71 Turning point of his career 72 Grounds for course taken 73 On _Martin Chuzzlewit_ 74 American portions 75 The book's special superiority 76 News from America 76 American consolations 77 Why no Pecksniffs in France 78 Why Tartuffes in England 78 A favourite scene of Thackeray's 79 Process of creation in a novel 80 Intended motto for story 81 Leading characters 82 A superb masterpiece 83 Triumph of humorous art 84 Publication of _Christmas Carol_ 84 Unrealized hopes 85 Results of _Carol_ sale 86 Renewed negotiations with printers 87 Agreement with Bradbury and Evans 88 Letters about the _Carol_ 89 Spirit of the book 90 Something better than literature 91 CHAPTER IV. 1844. Pages 93-110. YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY. ÆT. 32. Gore-house friends 93 Sensitive for his calling 94 A troublesome cheque 95 Education speeches 95 Sufferings from stage-adaptations 96 Wrongs from piracy 96 Proceedings in Chancery 97 A pirate's plea 97 Result of Chancery experience 99 Piracy preferred 99 Reliefs to work 100 The tempted and tempter 101 Favourite bit of humour 102 Criticized without humour 102 Taine on Dickens 102 Macready in New Orleans 103 Society in England 104 Writing in the _Chronicle_ 104 Conference with its new editor 104 Preparations for departure 105 In temporary quarters 106 Begging-letter case 106 The farewell dinner-party 107 "Evenings of a Working-man" 108 Greenwich dinner 109 J. M. W. Turner and Carlyle 110 CHAPTER V. 1844. Pages 111-138. IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO. ÆT. 32. The travel to Italy 111 A bit of character 112 French thrown away 112 The Albaro villa 113 First experiences 114 Cloudy weather 115 Sunsets and scenery 116 Address to Maclise 116 The Mediterranean 117 Colours of sky and sea 117 Warning to Maclise 118 Perishing frescoes 118 French Consul at Genoa 119 Rooms in villa described 120 Surrounding scenery 121 Church-ruin on the rocks 121 Angus Fletcher's sketch 121 Work in abeyance 122 Learning Italian 122 Domestic news 123 His English servants 123 English residents 124 Genoa the superb 125 Church splendours and tinsel 126 Theatres 126 Italian plays 127 Dumas' _Kean_ 127 Religious houses 128 Sunday promenade 128 Winter residence chosen 129 A lucky arrival 129 Dinner at French Consul's 130 Verses in C. D.'s honour 130 Others in Prince Joinville's 131 Rumours of war with England 131 A Marquis's reception 132 Flight and tumble 133 Quiet enjoyments 134 English visitors and news 135 Talk with Lord Robertson 135 A suggestion for Jerrold 136 Visit of Frederick Dickens 136 An inn on the Alps 136 Dangers of sea-bathing 137 A change beginning 138 CHAPTER VI. 1844. Pages 139-162. WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE. ÆT. 32. Palace of the Fish-ponds 139 Rooms and frescoes 140 View over the city 141 Dancing and praying 142 Peschiere garden 142 Trying to write 143 A difficulty settled 143 Craving for streets 144 Design for his book 144 Governor's levee 144 Absence of the poet 145 Subject he is working at 145 C. D.'s politics 146 Choice of a hero 147 Master-passion 147 Religious sentiment 147 A dream 148 Dialogue in a vision 149 "What is the True religion?" 149 Fragments of reality in a vision 149 Trying regions of thought 150 Reverence for Doctor Arnold 150 First part of book finished 151 Anticipation of its close 151 Differences from published tale 152 First outline of the _Chimes_ 152-156 Liking for the subject 156 What the writing cost him 156 Realities of fictitious sorrow 157 Wild mountain weather 157 Banquet at the Whistle 158 Startling news 158 Coming to London 159 Secret of the visit 160 Eager to try effect of story 160 Plans a reading at my rooms 160 The tale finished 161 Proposed travel 161 Party for the Reading 162 CHAPTER VII. 1844. Pages 163-178. ITALIAN TRAVEL. ÆT. 32. Cities and people 163 Venice 164 Rapture of enjoyment 165 Aboard the city 165 What he saw and felt 165 Solitary thoughts 166 At Lodi 166 About paintings and engravings 167 Titian and Tintoretto 168 Conventionalities 169 Monks and painters 169 The inns 170 Compensation for discomfort 170 Brave C of his _Pictures_ 171 Louis Roche of Avignon 171 Dinner at the Peschiere 172 Custom-house officers 173 At Milan and Strasburg 173 Passing the Simplon 174 In London 174 A Reading in Lincoln's-inn-fields 174 Persons present 175 Success of the visit 175 In Paris with Macready 176 Origin of our private play 176 A recognition at Marseilles 177 Friendly Americans 177 On board for Genoa 177 Information for travellers 178 CHAPTER VIII. 1845. Pages 179-200. LAST MONTHS IN ITALY. ÆT. 33. Birthday gift for eldest son 179 Suspicious "Characters" 180 Jesuit interferences 180 Birth of 1845 180 Travel southward 181 Carrara and Pisa 181 A wild journey 182 Birds of prey 183 A beggar and his staff 183 "My lord" loses temper 184 And has the worst of it 184 At Rome 184 The Campagna 185 Bay of Naples 185 Filth of Naples and Fondi 186 The Lazzaroni 186 False picturesque 187 Sad English news 187 True friends in calamity 188 At Florence 188 Wayside memorials and Landor's villa 189 Death of Bobus Smith 190 At Lord Holland's 190 Lord Palmerston's brother 190 Again at the Peschiere 190 To publish or not? 191 Thoughts of home 192 American friends 192 Deaths among English residents 193 Scarlet breeches out of place 193 Angus Fletcher 193 Complaint of a meek footman 194 Recalling Lady Holland 194 A touch of Portsmouth 195 Plans for meeting 196 Last letter from Genoa 196 Closing excitements and troubles 196 Italians hard at work 197 Returning by Switzerland 197 Passage of the St. Gothard 198 Splendours of Swiss scenery 198 Dangers of it 199 What is left behind the Alps 199 A week in Flanders 200 CHAPTER IX. 1845-1846. Pages 201-221. AGAIN IN ENGLAND. ÆT. 33-34. Old hopes revived 201 Notions for a periodical 201 Proposed prospectus 202 Chances for and against it 203 Swept away by larger venture 203 Christmas book of 1845 204 D'Orsay and the courier 204 Another passage of Autobiography 204 More of the story of early years 205 Wish to try the stage 205 Applies to manager of Covent Garden 205 Sister Fanny in the secret 206 Stage studies and rehearsings 206 Strange news for Macready 207 Requisites of author and actor 208 Play chosen for private performance 209 Fanny Kelly and her theatre 209 Every Man in his Humour 209 The company of actors 210 Enjoying a character 210 Troubles of management 210 First and second performances 211 Of the acting 211 C. D. as performer 212 C. D. as manager 212 Two human mysteries 213 The mysteries explained 213 Training for the stage 213 At Broadstairs 214 Ramsgate entertainments 214 Birth of fourth son 215 Second raven's death 215 Intended daily paper 215 Disturbing engagements 216 Old ways interrupted 216 My appeal against the enterprise 217 Reply and issue 217 Interruption and renewal 218 The beginning and the end 218 Forming new resolve 219 Back to old scenes 219 Editorship ceased 219 Going to Switzerland 220 A happy saying 221 Leaves England 221 CHAPTER X. 1846. Pages 222-243. A HOME IN SWITZERLAND. ÆT. 34. On the Rhine 222 German readers of Dickens 223 Travelling Englishmen 223 A hoaxing-match 224 House-hunting 224 Tempted by a mansion 225 Chooses a cottage 225 Earliest impressions 226 Lausanne described 227 Views from his farm 228 Under his windows 228 A sketch of Rosemont 229 Design as to work 230 The English colony 231 Unaccommodating carriage 232 A death in the lake 232 Boatman's narrative 233 The Theatre 233 The Prison 234 The Blind Institution 235 Interesting cases 235-240 Beginning work 240 First slip of New Novel 241 Sortes Shandyanæ 242 The Christmas tale 242 CHAPTER XI. 1846. Pages 244-260. SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY. ÆT. 34. The mountains and lake 244 The people and their manners 245 A country fête 246 Family sketch 246 Rifle-shooting 247 A marriage on the farm 248 Gunpowder festivities 248 Bride and mother 248 First number of _Dombey_ 249 Christmas book 249 General idea for new story 250 Hints for illustration of it 250 Haldimands and Cerjats 251 Visit of Henry Hallam 251 Local news 252 Sight-seers from England 252 Trip to Chamounix 253 Mule-travelling 253 Mont Blanc range 254 Mer de Glace 255 Tête Noire pass 255 Help in an accident 256 English, French, and Prussian 256 Second number of _Dombey_ 257 Castle of Chillon described 257 Honour to New Constitution 258 Political celebration 258 Malcontents 259 Good conduct of the people 259 Protestant and Catholic cantons 260 A timely word on Ireland 260 CHAPTER XII. 1846. Pages 261-276. SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL. ÆT. 34. Home politics 261 The Whigs and Peel 261 Belief in emigration schemes 262 Mark Lemon 263 An incident of character 263 Hood's _Tylney Hall_ 264 Trait of the Duke of Wellington 264 Mr. Watson of Rockingham 264 A recollection of reporting days 265 Returns to _Dombey_ 265 Two English travellers 266 Party among the hills 267 A Smollett and Fielding hero 268 Milksop youths 268 Ogre and Lambs 268 Sir Joseph and his family 269 Lord Vernon 270 Passion for rifle-shooting 270 A wonderful carriage 270 The Ladies Taylor 271 Proposed Reading of first _Dombey_ 272 A sketch from life 272 Two sisters and their books 272 Trip to Great St. Bernard 273 Ascent of the mountain 274 The Convent 274 Scene at the mountain top 274 Bodies found in the snow 275 The holy fathers 275 A tavern all but sign 276 The monk and _Pickwick_ 276 CHAPTER XIII. 1846. Pages 277-294. LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE. ÆT. 34. A picture completed 277 Great present want 277 Daily life 278 Imaginative needs 278 Self-judgments 279 The Now and the Hereafter 279 Fancies for Christmas books 280 Second number of _Dombey_ 280 A personal revelation 281 Craving for streets 281 Food for fancy 282 Second _Dombey_ done 282 Curious wants of the mind 283 Success of the Reading 283 First thought of Public Readings 284 Two stories in hand 285 Unexpected difficulties 286 Work under sensitive conditions 286 Alarm for _Dombey_ 287 Doubts and misgivings 287 Change of scene to be tried 287 At Genoa 288 Disquietudes of authorship 288 Wanting counsel 289 At the worst 289 Report of Genoa 290 A new social experience 290 Feminine eccentricities 291 A ladies' dinner 291 Elephant-quellers 292 "Like a Manchester cotton mill" 292 Again at Rosemont 293 Visit of the Talfourds 293 Lodging his friends 294 Intentions and hope 294 CHAPTER XIV. 1846. Pages 295-315. REVOLUTION AT GENEVA. CHRISTMAS BOOK AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND. ÆT. 34. An arrival of manuscript 295 A title 295 Large sale of _Dombey_ 296 Again at Geneva 296 Rising against the Jesuits 297 Back to Lausanne 297 The fight in Geneva 298 Rifle against cannon 299 True objection to Roman-Catholicism 299 Genevese "aristocracy" 299 A lesson 300 Traces left by revolution 300 Abettors of revolution 301 Where the shoe pinches 301 _Daily News'_ changes 302 My surrender of editorship 302 Thoughts for the future 303 Letters about _Battle of Life_ 303 Jeffrey's opinion 303 Sketch of story 304 A difficulty in plot 305 Old characteristics 305 His own comments 306 Reply to criticism 307 Stanfield illustrations 307 Doubts of third part 308 Strengthening the close 308 Objections invited 309 Tendency to blank verse 309 Grave mistake by Leech 310 How dealt with by C. D. 310 First impulse 311 Kindly afterthought 311 Lord Gobden and free trade 312 Needs while at work 312 Pleasures of autumn 313 Striking tents 314 Sadness of leave-taking 314 Travelling to Paris 314 At Paris 315 CHAPTER XV. 1846-1847. Pages 316-333. THREE MONTHS IN PARIS. ÆT. 34-35. A greeting from Lord Brougham 316 French Sunday 317 A house taken 317 Absurdity of the abode 318 Its former tenant 319 Sister Fanny's illness 319 Opinion of Elliotson 320 The king of the barricades 320 Unhealthy symptoms 321 Incident in the streets 321 The Parisian population 322 Americans and French 322 Unsettlement of plans 323 Eldest son's education 323 A true friend 323 Christmas tale on the stage 323 An alarming neighbour 325 Startling blue-devils 326 Approach to cannibalism 326 In London 326 Cheap edition of works 326 Suppressed dedication 326 Return to Paris 326 Begging-letter writers 327 Friendly services 327 Imaginary dialogue 328 A Boulogne reception 328 Cautions to a traveller 329 Citizen Dickens 330 Sight-seeing 330 At theatres 330 Visits to famous Frenchmen 331 Evening with Victor Hugo 331 Adventure with a coachman 332 Bibliothèque Royale 333 Premonitory symptoms 333 In London 334 A party at Gore-house 334 Illness of eldest son 335 Snuff-shop readings 336 Old charwoman's compliment 336 CHAPTER XVI. 1846-1848. Pages 337-367. DOMBEY AND SON. ÆT. 34-36. Drift of the tale 337 Why undervalued 338 Mistakes of critics 338 Adherence to first design 338 Plan for Paul and his sister 339 For Dombey and his daughter 339 Proposed course of the story 340 "The stock of the soup" 340 Walter Gay and his fate 341 Decided favourably 341 Six pages too much 342 Omissions objected to 342 New chapter written 343 Portions sacrificed 343 Anxiety for the face of his hero 344 A suggested type of city-gentleman 344 Artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey 345-6 Dickens and his illustrators 347 A silly story repeated 347 Why noticed again 348 Facsimile of letter to Cruikshank 349-50 Dickens's words at the time 349 Cruikshank's thirty-four years after 350 A masterpiece of Dickens's writing 351 Picture of him at work 352 An experience of Ben Jonson's 352 How objections are taken 352 Shall Paul's life be prolonged? 353 A Reading of the second number 353 A number to be added to Paul's life 354 Failure of an illustration 354 What it should have been 355 The Mrs. Pipchin of his childhood 355 First thought of his Autobiography 356 Opening his fourth number 356 At Doctor Blimber's 357 Paul's school life 357 Paul and Florence 357 Jeffrey's forecast of the tale 358 Beginning his fifth number 359 What he will do with it 359 A damper to the spirits 359 Close of Paul's life 360 Jeffrey on Paul's death 361 Thoughts for Edith 362 Florence and Little Nell 362 Judgments and comparisons 363 Edith's first destiny 363 Doubts suggested 364 An important change 364 Diogenes remembered 365 Other characters 365 Blimber establishment 366 Supposed originals 366 Surmises entirely wrong 367 CHAPTER XVII. 1847-1852. Pages 368-402. SPLENDID STROLLING. ÆT. 35-40. Birth of fifth son 368 Death of Lieut. Sydney Dickens 368 Proposed benefit for Leigh Hunt 369 The plays and actors 370 The manager 370 Troubles at rehearsals 371 Pains rewarded 371 Leigh Hunt's account 372 Receipts and expenses 373 Lord Lytton's prologue 373 Appearance of Mrs. Gamp 374 Fancy for a jeu d'esprit 374 Mrs. Gamp at the play 375 Failure of artists 375 An unfinished fancy 375 Mrs. Gamp with the strollers 376 Alarm of Mrs. Harris 376 Leigh Hunt and Poole 377 Ticklish society 378 Mrs. Gamp's cabman 378 George Cruikshank 379 Mr. Wilson the barber 379 Wig experiences 380 Fatigues of a powder ball 380 Manager's moustache and whiskers 381 Leech, Lemon, and Jerrold 381-2 Mrs. Gamp's dislike of "Dougladge" 382 Costello, Stone, and Egg 383 "Only the engine" 384 Cruikshank's _Bottle_ 384 Profits of _Dombey_ 385 Time come for savings 385 Proposed edition of old novels 385 Another dropped design 386 The Praslin tragedy 386 Penalty for seeing before others 387 Street-music 387 Margate theatre and manager 387 As to Christmas book 388 Delay found necessary 389 A literary Kitely 389 Meetings at Leeds and Glasgow 390 Book-friends 391 Sheriff Alison 391 Hospitable welcome 391 Scott-monument 392 Purchase of Shakespeare's house 392 Scheme to benefit Knowles 393 Plays rehearsed 394 _Merry Wives_ chosen 394 Performances and result 394 At Knebworth-park 395 Guild of Literature and Art 396 Unfortunate omission 396 The farce that was to be written 396 The farce that was substituted 397 _Not so Bad as we Seem_ 397 Travelling theatre and scenes 398 Success of the comedy 398 An incident at Sunderland 399 Troubles of a manager 399 Acting under difficulties 400 Scenery overturned 401 Effects of fright 401 Mr. Wilkie Collins 402 CHAPTER XVIII. 1848-1851. Pages 403-441. SEASIDE HOLIDAYS. ÆT. 36-39. Louis Philippe dethroned 403 French missive from C. D. 404 Aspirations of Citizen Dickens 404 At Broadstairs 405 By rail to China 405 The Junk 406 Mariners on deck and in cabin 406 Perplexing questions 406 A toy-shop on the seas 407 Type of finality 407 A contrast 408 Home questions 408 Temperance agitations 409 The temptations to gin-shop 409 Necessity of dealing with _them_ 409 Stages anterior to drunkenness 410 Cruikshank's satire 410 Realities of his pencil 411 Its one-sidedness 411 Dickens on Hogarth 412 Cause as well as effect 412 Exit of Gin-lane 412 Wisdom of the great painter 413 Late, but never too late 413 Dickens on designs by Leech 414 Originality of Leech 414 Superiority of his method 415 The requisites for it 415 Excuses for the rising generation 416 Intellectual juvenility 416 A dangerous youth 417 What Leech will be remembered for 417 Odd adventures 418 Pony-chaise accident 418 Parallel to Squeers 419 Strenuous idleness 419 French philosophy 420 Hint for Mr. Taine 420 The better for idleness 421 A favourite spot 421 At Brighton 421 With mad folks and doctors 422 A name for his new book 422 At Broadstairs 422 Troubles in his writing 423 A letter in character 423 At Bonchurch 425 The Rev. James White 425 Mirth and melancholy 425 Mrs. James White 426 First impressions of Undercliff 426 Talfourd made a judge 427 Dickens's affection for him 427 Church-school examination 428 Dinners and pic-nics 428 The comedian Regnier 429 When acting is genuine 429 Doubts as to health 429 Arrivals and departures 430 A startling revelation 431 Effects of Bonchurch climate 431 Utter prostration 431 Difficulties of existing there 432 Distrust of doctors 433 Other side of picture 433 What I observed at the time 434 From the _Copperfield_ MS. 434 Mr. Browne's sketch of Micawber 435 Accident to John Leech 435 Its consequences 435 Depressing influences 436 At Broadstairs 436 Railway travellers 437 The exhibition year 438 A _Copperfield_ banquet 438 C. D. on money values 439 His leisure reading 439 A correction for Carlyle 440 Good criticism 441 Thoughts of a new book 441 The old restlessness 441 Beginning on a Friday 441 CHAPTER XIX. 1848-1850. Pages 442-456. HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS. ÆT. 36-40. Maturing book for Christmas 442 Friendly plea for Mr. Macrone 442 Completion of Christmas story 443 Dropped motto 443 The "ghost" and the "bargain" 444 The Tetterby family 445 Teachings of the little tale 445 His own statement of its intention 446 Forgive that you may forget 446 _Copperfield_ sales 447 A letter from Russia 448 Translation into Russian 448 Sympathy of Siberia 448 The Periodical taking form 449 A design for it described 449 Original and selected matter 449 A Shadow for everywhere 450 Hopes of success 450 Doubts respecting it 451 Incompatibility of design 451 New design chosen 452 Assistant editor appointed 453 Titles proposed 453 Appearance of first number 454 Earliest contributors 454 Opinion of Mr. Sala 454 Child's dream of a star 455 A fancy derived from childhood 456 CHAPTER XX. 1848-1851. Pages 457-494. LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE. ÆT. 36-39. Sentiment about places 457 Confidences 458 Personal revelations 458 Early memories 459 At his sister's sick-bed 459 Last thoughts 460 Sister's death 460 Book to be written in first person 461 Riding over Salisbury Plain 461 Visiting scene of a tragedy 462 First sees Yarmouth 462 Birth of sixth son 462 Notion for a character 463 Choosing a title 463 "Mag's Diversions" 464 "Copperfield" chosen 464 Varieties of it proposed 465 Title finally determined 466 Difficulties of opening 466 Rogers and Benedict 466 Wit of Fonblanque 467 Procter and Macready 467 The Sheridans 468 Lord Byron's Ada 469 Dinner to Halévy and Scribe 469 Brougham and "the _Punch_ people" 469 The Duke at Vauxhall 470 Carlyle and Thackeray 470 Judicious change of a "tag" 471 A fact for a biographer 471 Marryat's delight with children 472 Bulwer Lytton and Monckton Milnes 472 Lords Nugent and Dudley Stuart 472-3 Kemble, Harness, and Dyce 473 Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble 473 Comparison and good distinction 474 Mazzini and Edinburgh friends 474 Artist-acquaintance 475 Visitors at his house 475 Friends from America 476 M. Van de Weyer 476 Ambition to see into heaven 477 Literature and art in the city 477 Doubtful compliment 478 A hint for London citizens 478 Letter against public executions 479 American observer in England 479 Marvels of English manners 480 A letter from Rockingham 481 Private theatricals 481 Major Bentley and General Boxall 481-2 A family scene 482 Doing too much 483 Death of Francis Jeffrey 483 Progress of work 484 The child-wife 484 A run to Paris 484 Banker or proctor 485 Doubts as to Dora settled 486 Of Rogers and Landor 486 A third daughter born 487 At Great Malvern 487 Macready's farewell 488 Experience of a brother author 488 The Home at Shepherd's-bush 488 Father's illness 489 Death of John Dickens 489 Tribute by his son 490 Theatrical-fund dinner 490 Plea for small actors 491 Remembering the forgotten 491 Death of his little daughter 492 Difficult tasks in life 492 Dora's grave 493 Advocating sanitary reform 493 Lord Shaftesbury 494 Realities of his books to Dickens 494 THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER I. AMERICAN NOTES. 1842. Return from America--Longfellow in England--Thirty Years Ago--At Broadstairs--Preparing _Notes_--Fancy for the Opening of _Chuzzlewit_--Reading Tennyson--Theatricals at Margate--A New Protégé--Proposed Dedication--Sea-bathing and Authorship--Emigrants in Canada--Coming to the End--Rejected Motto for _Notes_--Return to London--Cheerless Visit--The Mingled Yarn--Scene at a Funeral--The Suppressed Introductory Chapter to the _Notes_, now first printed--Jeffrey's Opinion of the _Notes_--Dickens's Experience of America in 1868. THE reality did not fall short of the anticipation of home. His return was the occasion of unbounded enjoyment; and what he had planned before sailing as the way we should meet, received literal fulfilment. By the sound of his cheery voice I first knew that he was come; and from my house we went together to Maclise, also "without a moment's warning." A Greenwich dinner in which several friends (Talfourd, Milnes, Procter, Maclise, Stanfield, Marryat, Barham, Hood, and Cruikshank among them) took part, and other immediate greetings, followed; but the most special celebration was reserved for autumn, when, by way of challenge to what he had seen while abroad, a home-journey was arranged with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself for his companions, into such of the most striking scenes of a picturesque English county as the majority of us might not before have visited: Cornwall being ultimately chosen. Before our departure he was occupied by his preparation of the _American Notes_; and to the same interval belongs the arrival in London of Mr. Longfellow, who became his guest, and (for both of us I am privileged to add) our attached friend. Longfellow's name was not then the pleasant and familiar word it has since been in England; but he had already written several of his most felicitous pieces, and he possessed all the qualities of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial American. He reminded me, when lately again in England, of two experiences out of many we had enjoyed together this quarter of a century before. One of them was a day at Rochester, when, met by one of those prohibitions which are the wonder of visitors and the shame of Englishmen, we overleapt gates and barriers, and, setting at defiance repeated threats of all the terrors of law coarsely expressed to us by the custodian of the place, explored minutely the castle ruins. The other was a night among those portions of the population which outrage law and defy its terrors all the days of their lives, the tramps and thieves of London; when, under guidance and protection of the most trusted officers of the two great metropolitan prisons afforded to us by Mr. Chesterton and Lieut. Tracey, we went over the worst haunts of the most dangerous classes. Nor will it be unworthy of remark, in proof that attention is not drawn vainly to such scenes, that, upon Dickens going over them a dozen years later when he wrote a paper about them for his _Household Words_, he found important changes effected whereby these human dens, if not less dangerous, were become certainly more decent. On the night of our earlier visit, Maclise, who accompanied us, was struck with such sickness on entering the first of the Mint lodging-houses in the borough, that he had to remain, for the time we were in them, under guardianship of the police outside. Longfellow returned home by the Great Western from Bristol on the 21st of October, enjoying as he passed through Bath the hospitality of Landor; and at the end of the following week we started on our Cornish travel. But what before this had occupied Dickens in the writing way must now be told. Not long after his reappearance amongst us, his house being still in the occupation of Sir John Wilson, he went to Broadstairs, taking with him the letters from which I have quoted so largely to help him in preparing his _American Notes_; and one of his first announcements to me (18th of July) shows not only this labour in progress, but the story he was under engagement to begin in November working in his mind. "The subjects at the beginning of the book are of that kind that I can't _dash_ at them, and now and then they fret me in consequence. When I come to Washington, I am all right. The solitary prison at Philadelphia is a good subject, though; I forgot that for the moment. Have you seen the Boston chapter yet? . . . I have never been in Cornwall either. A mine certainly; and a letter for that purpose shall be got from Southwood Smith. I have some notion of opening the new book in the lantern of a lighthouse!" A letter a couple of months later (16th of Sept.) recurs to that proposed opening of his story which after all he laid aside; and shows how rapidly he was getting his _American Notes_ into shape. "At the Isle of Thanet races yesterday I saw--oh! who shall say what an immense amount of character in the way of inconceivable villainy and blackguardism! I even got some new wrinkles in the way of showmen, conjurors, pea-and-thimblers, and trampers generally. I think of opening my new book on the coast of Cornwall, in some terribly dreary iron-bound spot. I hope to have finished the American book before the end of next month; and we will then together fly down into that desolate region." Our friends having Academy engagements to detain them, we had to delay a little; and I meanwhile turn back to his letters to observe his progress with his _Notes_, and other employments or enjoyments of the interval. They require no illustration that they will not themselves supply: but I may remark that the then collected _Poems_ of Tennyson had become very favourite reading with him; and that while in America Mr. Mitchell the comedian had given him a small white shaggy terrier, who bore at first the imposing name of Timber Doodle, and became a great domestic pet and companion. "I have been reading" (7th of August) "Tennyson all this morning on the seashore. Among other trifling effects, the waters have dried up as they did of old, and shown me all the mermen and mermaids, at the bottom of the ocean; together with millions of queer creatures, half-fish and half-fungus, looking down into all manner of coral caves and seaweed conservatories; and staring in with their great dull eyes at every open nook and loop-hole. Who else, too, could conjure up such a close to the extraordinary and as Landor would say 'most wonderful' series of pictures in the 'dream of fair women,' as-- "'Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates, Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes, Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates, And hushed seraglios!' "I am getting on pretty well, but it was so glittering and sunshiny yesterday that I was forced to make holiday." Four days later: "I have not written a word this blessed day. I got to New York yesterday, and think it goes as it should . . . Little doggy improves rapidly, and now jumps over my stick at the word of command. I have changed his name to Snittle Timbery, as more sonorous and expressive. He unites with the rest of the family in cordial regards and loves. _Nota Bene_. The Margate theatre is open every evening, and the Four Patagonians (see Goldsmith's _Essays_) are performing thrice a week at Ranelagh . . ." A visit from me was at this time due, to which these were held out as inducements; and there followed what it was supposed I could not resist, a transformation into the broadest farce of a deep tragedy by a dear friend of ours. "Now you really must come. Seeing only is believing, very often isn't that, and even Being the thing falls a long way short of believing it. Mrs. Nickleby herself once asked me, as you know, if I really believed there ever was such a woman; but there'll be no more belief, either in me or my descriptions, after what I have to tell of our excellent friend's tragedy, if you don't come and have it played again for yourself 'by particular desire.' We saw it last night, and oh! if you had but been with us! Young Betty, doing what the mind of man without my help never _can_ conceive, with his legs like padded boot-trees wrapped up in faded yellow drawers, was the hero. The comic man of the company enveloped in a white sheet, with his head tied with red tape like a brief and greeted with yells of laughter whenever he appeared, was the venerable priest. A poor toothless old idiot at whom the very gallery roared with contempt when he was called a tyrant, was the remorseless and aged Creon. And Ismene being arrayed in spangled muslin trowsers very loose in the legs and very tight in the ankles, such as Fatima would wear in _Blue Beard_, was at her appearance immediately called upon for a song. After this, can you longer. . . ?" With the opening of September I had renewed report of his book, and of other matters. "The Philadelphia chapter I think very good, but I am sorry to say it has not made as much in print as I hoped . . . In America they have forged a letter with my signature, which they coolly declare appeared in the _Chronicle_ with the copyright circular; and in which I express myself in such terms as you may imagine, in reference to the dinners and so forth. It has been widely distributed all over the States; and the felon who invented it is a 'smart man' of course. You are to understand that it is not done as a joke, and is scurrilously reviewed. Mr. Park Benjamin begins a lucubration upon it with these capitals, DICKENS IS A FOOL, AND A LIAR. . . . I have a new protégé, in the person of a wretched deaf and dumb boy whom I found upon the sands the other day, half dead, and have got (for the present) into the union infirmary at Minster. A most deplorable case." On the 14th he told me: "I have pleased myself very much to-day in the matter of Niagara. I have made the description very brief (as it should be), but I fancy it is good. I am beginning to think over the introductory chapter, and it has meanwhile occurred to me that I should like, at the beginning of the volumes, to put what follows on a blank page. _I dedicate this Book to those friends of mine in America, who, loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is written good humouredly and in a kind spirit._ What do you think? Do you see any objection?" My reply is to be inferred from what he sent back on the 20th. "I don't quite see my way towards an expression in the dedication of any feeling in reference to the American reception. Of course I have always intended to glance at it, gratefully, in the end of the book; and it will have its place in the introductory chapter, if we decide for that. Would it do to put in, after 'friends in America,' _who giving me a welcome I must ever gratefully and proudly remember, left my judgment free, and_ who, loving, &c. If so, so be it." Before the end of the month he wrote: "For the last two or three days I have been rather slack in point of work; not being in the vein. To-day I had not written twenty lines before I rushed out (the weather being gorgeous) to bathe. And when I have done that, it is all up with me in the way of authorship until to-morrow. The little dog is in the highest spirits; and jumps, as Mr. Kenwigs would say, perpetivally. I have had letters by the Britannia from Felton, Prescott, Mr. Q, and others, all very earnest and kind. I think you will like what I have written on the poor emigrants and their ways as I literally and truly saw them on the boat from Quebec to Montreal." This was a passage, which, besides being in itself as attractive as any in his writings, gives such perfect expression to a feeling that underlies them all, that I subjoin it in a note.[63] On board this Canadian steamboat he encountered crowds of poor emigrants and their children; and such was their patient kindness and cheerful endurance, in circumstances where the easy-living rich could hardly fail to be monsters of impatience and selfishness, that it suggested to him a reflection than which it was not possible to have written anything more worthy of observation, or more absolutely true. Jeremy Taylor has the same philosophy in his lesson on opportunities, but here it was beautified by the example with all its fine touches. It made us read Rich and Poor by new translation. The printers were now hard at work, and in the last week of September he wrote: "I send you proofs as far as Niagara . . . I am rather holiday-making this week . . . taking principal part in a regatta here yesterday, very pretty and gay indeed. We think of coming up in time for Macready's opening, when perhaps you will give us a chop; and of course you and Mac will dine with _us_ the next day? I shall leave nothing of the book to do after coming home, please God, but the two chapters on slavery and the people which I could manage easily in a week, if need were . . . The policeman who supposed the Duke of Brunswick to be one of the swell mob, ought instantly to be made an inspector. The suspicion reflects the highest credit (I seriously think) on his penetration and judgment." Three days later: "For the last two days we have had gales blowing from the north-east, and seas rolling on us that drown the pier. To-day it is tremendous. Such a sea was never known here at this season, and it is running in at this moment in waves of twelve feet high. You would hardly know the place. But we shall be punctual to your dinner hour on Saturday. If the wind should hold in the same quarter, we may be obliged to come up by land; and in that case I should start the caravan at six in the morning. . . . What do you think of this for my title--_American Notes for General Circulation_; and of this motto? "In reply to a question from the Bench, the Solicitor for the Bank observed, that this kind of notes circulated the most extensively, in those parts of the world where they were stolen and forged. _Old Bailey Report._" The motto was omitted, objection being made to it; and on the last day of the month I had the last of his letters during this Broadstairs visit. "Strange as it may appear to you" (25th of September), "the sea is running so high that we have no choice but to return by land. No steamer can come out of Ramsgate, and the Margate boat lay out all night on Wednesday with all her passengers on board. You may be sure of us therefore on Saturday at 5, for I have determined to leave here to-morrow, as we could not otherwise manage it in time; and have engaged an omnibus to bring the whole caravan by the overland route. . . . We cannot open a window, or a door; legs are of no use on the terrace; and the Margate boats can only take people aboard at Herne Bay!" He brought with him all that remained to be done of his second volume except the last two chapters, including that to which he has referred as "introductory;" and on the following Wednesday (5th of October) he told me that the first of these was done. "I want you very much to come and dine to-day that we may repair to Drury-lane together; and let us say half-past four, or there is no time to be comfortable. I am going out to Tottenham this morning, on a cheerless mission I would willingly have avoided. Hone, of the _Every Day Book_, is dying; and sent Cruikshank yesterday to beg me to go and see him, as, having read no books but mine of late, he wanted to see and shake hands with me before (as George said) 'he went.' There is no help for it, of course; so to Tottenham I repair, this morning. I worked all day, and till midnight; and finished the slavery chapter yesterday." The cheerless visit had its mournful sequel before the next month closed, when he went with the same companion to poor Hone's funeral; and one of his letters written at the time to Mr. Felton has so vividly recalled to me the tragi-comedy of an incident of that day, as for long after he used to describe it, and as I have heard the other principal actor in it good-naturedly admit to be perfectly true, that two or three sentences may be given here. The wonderful neighbourhood in this life of ours, of serious and humorous things, constitutes in itself very much of the genius of Dickens's writing; the laughter close to the pathos, but never touching it with ridicule; and this small occurrence may be taken in farther evidence of its reality. "We went into a little parlour where the funeral party was, and God knows it was miserable enough, for the widow and children were crying bitterly in one corner, and the other mourners (mere people of ceremony, who cared no more for the dead man than the hearse did) were talking quite coolly and carelessly together in another; and the contrast was as painful and distressing as anything I ever saw. There was an independent clergyman present, with his bands on and a bible under his arm, who, as soon as we were seated, addressed C thus, in a loud emphatic voice. 'Mr. C, have you seen a paragraph respecting our departed friend, which has gone the round of the morning papers?' 'Yes, sir,' says C, 'I have:' looking very hard at me the while, for he had told me with some pride coming down that it was his composition. 'Oh!' said the clergyman. 'Then you will agree with me, Mr. C, that it is not only an insult to me, who am the servant of the Almighty, but an insult to the Almighty, whose servant I am.' 'How is that, sir?' says C. 'It is stated, Mr. C, in that paragraph,' says the minister, 'that when Mr. Hone failed in business as a bookseller, he was persuaded by _me_ to try the pulpit; which is false, incorrect, unchristian, in a manner blasphemous, and in all respects contemptible. Let us pray.' With which, and in the same breath, I give you my word, he knelt down, as we all did, and began a very miserable jumble of an extemporary prayer. I was really penetrated with sorrow for the family" (he exerted himself zealously for them afterwards, as the kind-hearted C also did), "but when C, upon his knees and sobbing for the loss of an old friend, whispered me 'that if that wasn't a clergyman, and it wasn't a funeral, he'd have punched his head,' I felt as if nothing but convulsions could possibly relieve me." On the 10th of October I heard from him that the chapter intended to be introductory to the _Notes_ was written, and waiting our conference whether or not it should be printed. We decided against it; on his part so reluctantly, that I had to undertake for its publication when a more fitting time should come. This in my judgment has arrived, and the chapter first sees the light on this page. There is no danger at present, as there would have been when it was written, that its proper self-assertion should be mistaken for an apprehension of hostile judgments which he was anxious to deprecate or avoid. He is out of reach of all that now; and reveals to us here, as one whom fear or censure can touch no more, his honest purpose in the use of satire even where his humorous temptations were strongest. What he says will on other grounds also be read with unusual interest, for it will be found to connect itself impressively not with his first experiences only, but with his second visit to America at the close of his life. He held always the same high opinion of what was best in that country, and always the same contempt for what was worst in it. "INTRODUCTORY. AND NECESSARY TO BE READ. "I have placed the foregoing title at the head of this page, because I challenge and deny the right of any person to pass judgment on this book, or to arrive at any reasonable conclusion in reference to it, without first being at the trouble of becoming acquainted with its design and purpose. "It is not statistical. Figures of arithmetic have already been heaped upon America's devoted head, almost as lavishly as figures of speech have been piled above Shakespeare's grave. "It comprehends no small talk concerning individuals, and no violation of the social confidences of private life. The very prevalent practice of kidnapping live ladies and gentlemen, forcing them into cabinets, and labelling and ticketing them whether they will or no, for the gratification of the idle and the curious, is not to my taste. Therefore I have avoided it. "It has not a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composition. "Neither does it contain, nor have I intended that it should contain, any lengthened and minute account of my personal reception in the United States: not because I am, or ever was, insensible to that spontaneous effusion of affection and generosity of heart, in a most affectionate and generous-hearted people; but because I conceive that it would ill become me to flourish matter necessarily involving so much of my own praises, in the eyes of my unhappy readers. "This book is simply what it claims to be--a record of the impressions I received from day to day, during my hasty travels in America, and sometimes (but not always) of the conclusions to which they, and after-reflection on them, have led me; a description of the country I passed through; of the institutions I visited; of the kind of people among whom I journeyed; and of the manners and customs that came within my observation. Very many works having just the same scope and range, have been already published, but I think that these two volumes stand in need of no apology on that account. The interest of such productions, if they have any, lies in the varying impressions made by the same novel things on different minds; and not in new discoveries or extraordinary adventures. "I can scarcely be supposed to be ignorant of the hazard I run in writing of America at all. I know perfectly well that there is, in that country, a numerous class of well-intentioned persons prone to be dissatisfied with all accounts of the Republic whose citizens they are, which are not couched in terms of exalted and extravagant praise. I know perfectly well that there is in America, as in most other places laid down in maps of the great world, a numerous class of persons so tenderly and delicately constituted, that they cannot bear the truth in any form. And I do not need the gift of prophecy to discern afar off, that they who will be aptest to detect malice, ill will, and all uncharitableness in these pages, and to show, beyond any doubt, that they are perfectly inconsistent with that grateful and enduring recollection which I profess to entertain of the welcome I found awaiting me beyond the Atlantic--will be certain native journalists, veracious and gentlemanly, who were at great pains to prove to me, on all occasions during my stay there, that the aforesaid welcome was utterly worthless. "But, venturing to dissent even from these high authorities, I formed my own opinion of its value in the outset, and retain it to this hour; and in asserting (as I invariably did on all public occasions) my liberty and freedom of speech while I was among the Americans, and in maintaining it at home, I believe that I best show my sense of the high worth of that welcome, and of the honourable singleness of purpose with which it was extended to me. From first to last I saw, in the friends who crowded round me in America, old readers, over-grateful and over-partial perhaps, to whom I had happily been the means of furnishing pleasure and entertainment; not a vulgar herd who would flatter and cajole a stranger into turning with closed eyes from all the blemishes of the nation, and into chaunting its praises with the discrimination of a street ballad-singer. From first to last I saw, in those hospitable hands, a home-made wreath of laurel; and not an iron muzzle disguised beneath a flower or two. "Therefore I take--and hold myself not only justified in taking, but bound to take--the plain course of saying what I think, and noting what I saw; and as it is not my custom to exalt what in my judgment are foibles and abuses at home, so I have no intention of softening down, or glozing over, those that I have observed abroad. "If this book should fall into the hands of any sensitive American who cannot bear to be told that the working of the institutions of his country is far from perfect; that in spite of the advantage she has over all other nations in the elastic freshness and vigour of her youth, she is far from being a model for the earth to copy; and that even in those pictures of the national manners with which he quarrels most, there is still (after the lapse of several years, each of which may be fairly supposed to have had its stride in improvement) much that is just and true at this hour; let him lay it down, now, for I shall not please him. Of the intelligent, reflecting, and educated among his countrymen, I have no fear; for I have ample reason to believe, after many delightful conversations not easily to be forgotten, that there are very few topics (if any) on which their sentiments differ materially from mine. "I may be asked--'If you have been in any respect disappointed in America, and are assured beforehand that the expression of your disappointment will give offence to any class, why do you write at all?' My answer is, that I went there expecting greater things than I found, and resolved as far as in me lay to do justice to the country, at the expense of any (in my view) mistaken or prejudiced statements that might have been made to its disparagement. Coming home with a corrected and sobered judgment, I consider myself no less bound to do justice to what, according to my best means of judgment, I found to be the truth." Of the book for whose opening page this matter introductory was written, it will be enough merely to add that it appeared on the 18th of October; that before the close of the year four large editions had been sold; and that in my opinion it thoroughly deserved the estimate formed of it by one connected with America by the strongest social affections, and otherwise in all respects an honourable, high-minded, upright judge. "You have been very tender," wrote Lord Jeffrey, "to our sensitive friends beyond sea, and my whole heart goes along with every word you have written. I think that you have perfectly accomplished all that you profess or undertake to do, and that the world has never yet seen a more faithful, graphic, amusing, kind-hearted narrative." * * * * * I permit myself so far to anticipate a later page as to print here a brief extract from one of the letters of the last American visit. Without impairing the interest with which the narrative of that time will be read in its proper place, I shall thus indicate the extent to which present impressions were modified by the experience of twenty-six years later. He is writing from Philadelphia on the fourteenth of January, 1868. "I see _great changes_ for the better, socially. Politically, no. England governed by the Marylebone vestry and the penny papers, and England as she would be after years of such governing; is what I make of _that_. Socially, the change in manners is remarkable. There is much greater politeness and forbearance in all ways. . . . On the other hand there are still provincial oddities wonderfully quizzical; and the newspapers are constantly expressing the popular amazement at 'Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure.' They seem to take it ill that I don't stagger on to the platform overpowered by the spectacle before me, and the national greatness. They are all so accustomed to do public things with a flourish of trumpets, that the notion of my coming in to read without somebody first flying up and delivering an 'Oration' about me, and flying down again and leading me in, is so very unaccountable to them, that sometimes they have no idea until I open my lips that it can possibly be Charles Dickens." FOOTNOTES: [63] "Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the rich; and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it. In many a noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of fathers, whose private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to the skies. But bring him here, upon this crowded deck. Strip from his fair young wife her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided hair, stamp early wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation, array her faded form in coarsely patched attire, let there be nothing but his love to set her forth or deck her out, and you shall put it to the proof indeed. So change his station in the world that he shall see, in those young things who climb about his knee, not records of his wealth and name, but little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so many poachers on his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum of comfort, and farther to reduce its small amount. In lieu of the endearments of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its pains and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and querulous endurance: let its prattle be, not of engaging infant fancies, but of cold, and thirst, and hunger: and if his fatherly affection outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; careful of his children's lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then send him back to parliament, and pulpit, and to quarter sessions, and when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and tell those holders-forth that they, by parallel with such a class, should be high angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble siege to heaven at last. . . . Which of us shall say what he would be, if such realities, with small relief or change all through his days, were his! Looking round upon these people: far from home, houseless, indigent, wandering, weary with travel and hard living: and seeing how patiently they nursed and tended their young children: how they consulted ever their wants first, then half supplied their own; what gentle ministers of hope and faith the women were; how the men profited by their example; and how very, very seldom even a moment's petulance or harsh complaint broke out among them: I felt a stronger love and honour of my kind come glowing on my heart, and wished to God there had been many atheists in the better part of human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the book of life." CHAPTER II. FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 1843. A Sunset at Land's-end--Description of the Cornish Tour--Letter from Maclise--Maclise to J. F.--Names first given to _Chuzzlewit_--First Number of _Chuzzlewit_--Prologue to a Play--A Tragedy by Browning--Accompaniments of Work--Miss Georgina Hogarth--American Controversy--Cottage at Finchley--Origin of Mrs. Gamp--Change of Editorship at _Chronicle_--Macready bound for America--Works of Charity and Mercy--Visit to Broadstairs--Sea-side Life in Ordinary--Speech at Opening of the Manchester Athenæum--Dickens's Interest in Ragged Schools--His Sympathy with the Church of England--Origin of his _Christmas Carol_--Third Son born. THE Cornish trip had come off, meanwhile, with such unexpected and continued attraction for us that we were well into the third week of absence before we turned our faces homeward. Railways helped us then not much; but where the roads were inaccessible to post-horses, we walked. Tintagel was visited, and no part of mountain or sea consecrated by the legends of Arthur was left unexplored. We ascended to the cradle of the highest tower of Mount St. Michael, and descended into several mines. Land and sea yielded each its marvels to us; but of all the impressions brought away, of which some afterwards took forms as lasting as they could receive from the most delightful art, I doubt if any were the source of such deep emotion to us all as a sunset we saw at Land's-end. Stanfield knew the wonders of the Continent, the glories of Ireland were native to Maclise, I was familiar from boyhood with border and Scottish scenery, and Dickens was fresh from Niagara; but there was something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no parallel in memory. But with the varied and overflowing gladness of those three memorable weeks it would be unworthy now to associate only the saddened recollection of the sole survivor. "Blessed star of morning!" wrote Dickens to Felton while yet the glow of its enjoyment was upon him. "Such a trip as we had into Cornwall just after Longfellow went away! . . . Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. . . . Heavens! If you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense varieties of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights where the unspeakable green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had come and gone. . . . I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun."[64] The Logan Stone, by Stanfield, was one of them; and it laughingly sketched both the charm of what was seen and the mirth of what was done, for it perched me on the top of the stone. It is historical, however, the ascent having been made; and of this and other examples of steadiness at heights which deterred the rest, as well as of a subject suggested for a painting of which Dickens became the unknown purchaser, Maclise reminded me in some pleasant allusions many years later, which, notwithstanding their tribute to my athletic achievements, the good-natured reader must forgive my printing. They complete the little picture of our trip. Something I had written to him of recent travel among the mountain scenery of the wilder coasts of Donegal had touched the chord of these old remembrances. "As to your clambering," he replied, "don't I know what happened of old? Don't I still see the Logan Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below! Should I ever have blundered on the waterfall of St. Wighton, if you had not piloted the way? And when we got to Land's-end, with the green sea far under us lapping into solitary rocky nooks where the mermaids live, who but you only had the courage to stretch over, to see those diamond jets of brightness that I swore then, and believe still, were the flappings of their tails! And don't I recall you again, sitting on the tip-top stone of the cradle-turret over the highest battlement of the castle of St. Michael's Mount, with not a ledge or coigne of vantage 'twixt you and the fathomless ocean under you, distant three thousand feet? Last, do I forget you clambering up the goat-path to King Arthur's castle of Tintagel, when, in my vain wish to follow, I grovelled and clung to the soil like a Caliban, and you, in the manner of a tricksy spirit and stout Ariel, actually danced up and down before me!" The waterfall I led him to was among the records of the famous holiday, celebrated also by Thackeray in one of his pen-and-ink pleasantries, which were sent by both painters to the next year's Academy; and so eager was Dickens to possess this landscape by Maclise which included the likeness of a member of his family, yet so anxious that our friend should be spared the sacrifice which he knew would follow an avowal of his wish, that he bought it under a feigned name before the Academy opened, and steadily refused to take back the money which on discovery of the artifice Maclise pressed upon him.[65] Our friend, who already had munificently given him a charming drawing of his four eldest children to accompany him and his wife to America, had his generous way nevertheless; and as a voluntary offering four years later, painted Mrs. Dickens on a canvas of the same size as the picture of her husband in 1839. "Behold finally the title of the new book," was the first note I had from Dickens (12th of November) after our return; "don't lose it, for I have no copy." Title and even story had been undetermined while we travelled, from the lingering wish he still had to begin it among those Cornish scenes; but this intention had now been finally abandoned, and the reader lost nothing by his substitution for the lighthouse or mine in Cornwall, of the Wiltshire-village forge on the windy autumn evening which opens the tale of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Into that name he finally settled, but only after much deliberation, as a mention of his changes will show. Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback, and Sweezlewag, to those of Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig; nor was Chuzzlewit chosen at last until after more hesitation and discussion. What he had sent me in his letter as finally adopted, ran thus: "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewig, his family, friends, and enemies. Comprising all his wills and his ways. With an historical record of what he did and what he didn't. The whole forming a complete key to the house of Chuzzlewig." All which latter portion of the title was of course dropped as the work became modified, in its progress, by changes at first not contemplated; but as early as the third number he sent me the plan of "old Martin's plot to degrade and punish Pecksniff," and the difficulties he encountered in departing from other portions of his scheme were such as to render him, in his subsequent stories, more bent upon constructive care at the outset, and adherence as far as might be to any design he had formed. The first number, which appeared in January 1843, had not been quite finished when he wrote to me on the 8th of December: "The Chuzzlewit copy makes so much more than I supposed, that the number is nearly done. Thank God!" Beginning so hurriedly as at last he did, altering his course at the opening and seeing little as yet of the main track of his design, perhaps no story was ever begun by him with stronger heart or confidence. Illness kept me to my rooms for some days, and he was so eager to try the effect of Pecksniff and Pinch that he came down with the ink hardly dry on the last slip to read the manuscript to me. Well did Sydney Smith, in writing to say how very much the number had pleased him, foresee the promise there was in those characters. "Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable--quite first-rate painting, such as no one but yourself can execute!" And let me here at once remark that the notion of taking Pecksniff for a type of character was really the origin of the book; the design being to show, more or less by every person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have their root in selfishness. Another piece of his writing that claims mention at the close of 1842 was a prologue contributed to the _Patrician's Daughter_, Mr. Westland Marston's first dramatic effort, which had attracted him by the beauty of its composition less than by the courage with which its subject had been chosen from the actual life of the time. "Not light its import, and not poor its mien; Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene." This was the date, too, of Mr. Browning's tragedy of the _Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, which I took upon myself, after reading it in the manuscript, privately to impart to Dickens; and I was not mistaken in the belief that it would profoundly touch him. "Browning's play," he wrote (25th of November), "has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had no mother.' I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant _begin his tale upon the scene_; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.--Macready likes the altered prologue very much.". . . There will come a more convenient time to speak of his general literary likings, or special regard for contemporary books; but I will say now that nothing interested him more than successes won honestly in his own field, and that in his large and open nature there was no hiding-place for little jealousies. An instance occurs to me which may be named at once, when, many years after the present date, he called my attention very earnestly to two tales then in course of publication in _Blackwood's Magazine_, and afterwards collected under the title of _Scenes of Clerical Life_. "Do read them," he wrote. "They are the best things I have seen since I began my course." Eighteen hundred and forty-three[66] opened with the most vigorous prosecution of his _Chuzzlewit_ labour. "I hope the number will be very good," he wrote to me of number two (8th of January). "I have been hammering away, and at home all day. Ditto yesterday; except for two hours in the afternoon, when I ploughed through snow half a foot deep, round about the wilds of Willesden." For the present, however, I shall glance only briefly from time to time at his progress with the earlier portions of the story on which he was thus engaged until the midsummer of 1844. Disappointments arose in connection with it, unexpected and strange, which had important influence upon him: but, I reserve the mention of these for awhile, that I may speak of the leading incidents of 1843. "I am in a difficulty," he wrote (12th of February), "and am coming down to you some time to-day or to-night. I couldn't write a line yesterday; not a word, though I really tried hard. In a kind of despair I started off at half-past two with my pair of petticoats to Richmond; and dined there!! Oh what a lovely day it was in those parts." His pair of petticoats were Mrs. Dickens and her sister Georgina: the latter, since his return from America, having become part of his household, of which she remained a member until his death; and he had just reason to be proud of the steadiness, depth, and devotion of her friendship. In a note-book begun by him in January 1855, where, for the first time in his life, he jotted down hints and fancies proposed to be made available in future writings, I find a character sketched of which, if the whole was not suggested by his sister-in-law, the most part was applicable to her. "She--sacrificed to children, and sufficiently rewarded. From a child herself, always 'the children' (of somebody else) to engross her. And so it comes to pass that she is never married; never herself has a child; is always devoted 'to the children' (of somebody else); and they love her; and she has always youth dependent on her till her death--and dies quite happily." Not many days after that holiday at Richmond, a slight unstudied outline in pencil was made by Maclise of the three who formed the party there, as we all sat together; and never did a touch so light carry with it more truth of observation. The likenesses of all are excellent; and I here preserve the drawing because nothing ever done of Dickens himself has conveyed more vividly his look and bearing at this yet youthful time. He is in his most pleasing aspect; flattered, if you will; but nothing that is known to me gives a general impression so life-like and true of the then frank, eager, handsome face. It was a year of much illness with me, which had ever-helpful and active sympathy from him. "Send me word how you are," he wrote, two days later. "But not so much for that I now write, as to tell you, peremptorily, that I insist on your wrapping yourself up and coming here in a hackney-coach, with a big portmanteau, to-morrow. It surely is better to be unwell with a Quick and Cheerful (and Co) in the neighbourhood, than in the dreary vastness of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Here is the snuggest tent-bedstead in the world, and there you are with the drawing-room for your workshop, the Q and C for your pal, and 'every-think in a concatenation accordingly.' I begin to have hopes of the regeneration of mankind after the reception of Gregory last night, though I have none of the _Chronicle_ for not denouncing the villain. Have you seen the note touching my _Notes_ in the blue and yellow?" The first of these closing allusions was to the editor of the infamous _Satirist_ having been hissed from the Drury-lane stage, on which he had presented himself in the character of Hamlet; and I remember with what infinite pleasure I afterwards heard Chief Justice Tindal in court, charging the jury in an action brought by this malefactor against a publican of St. Giles's for having paid men to take part in the hissing of him, avow the pride he felt in "living in the same parish with a man of that humble station of life of the defendant's," who was capable of paying money out of his own pocket to punish what he believed to be an outrage to decency. The second allusion was to a statement of the reviewer of the _American Notes_ in the _Edinburgh_ to the effect, that, if he had been rightly informed, Dickens had gone to America as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt contradiction had been given in the _Times_. "I deny it," wrote Dickens, "wholly. He is wrongly informed; and reports, without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only characterize by using one of the shortest and strongest words in the language." The disputes that had arisen out of the American book, I may add, stretched over great part of the year. It will quite suffice, however, to say here that the ground taken by him in his letters written on the spot, and printed in my former volume, which in all the more material statements his book invited public judgment upon and which he was moved to reopen in _Chuzzlewit_, was so kept by him against all comers, that none of the counter-statements or arguments dislodged him from a square inch of it. But the controversy is dead now; and he took occasion, on his later visit to America, to write its epitaph. Though I did not, to revert to his February letter, obey its cordial bidding by immediately taking up quarters with him, I soon after joined him at a cottage he rented in Finchley; and here, walking and talking in the green lanes as the midsummer months were coming on, his introduction of Mrs. Gamp, and the uses to which he should apply that remarkable personage, first occurred to him. In his preface to the book he speaks of her as a fair representation, at the time it was published, of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness: but he might have added that the rich were no better off, for Mrs. Gamp's original was in reality a person hired by a most distinguished friend of his own, a lady, to take charge of an invalid very dear to her; and the common habit of this nurse in the sick room, among other Gampish peculiarities, was to rub her nose along the top of the tall fender. Whether or not, on that first mention of her, I had any doubts whether such a character could be made a central figure in his story, I do not now remember; but if there were any at the time, they did not outlive the contents of the packet which introduced her to me in the flesh a few weeks after our return. "Tell me," he wrote from Yorkshire, where he had been meanwhile passing pleasant holiday with a friend, "what you think of Mrs. Gamp? You'll not find it easy to get through the hundreds of misprints in her conversation, but I want your opinion at once. I think you know already something of mine. I mean to make a mark with her." The same letter enclosed me a clever and pointed little parable in verse which he had written for an annual edited by Lady Blessington.[67] Another allusion in the February letter reminds me of the interest which his old work for the _Chronicle_ gave him in everything affecting its credit, and that this was the year when Mr. John Black ceased to be its editor, in circumstances reviving strongly all Dickens's sympathies. "I am deeply grieved" (3rd of May, 1843) "about Black. Sorry from my heart's core. If I could find him out, I would go and comfort him this moment." He did find him out; and he and a certain number of us did also comfort this excellent man after a fashion extremely English, by giving him a Greenwich dinner on the 20th of May; when Dickens had arranged and ordered all to perfection, and the dinner succeeded in its purpose, as in other ways, quite wonderfully. Among the entertainers were Sheil and Thackeray, Fonblanque and Charles Buller, Southwood Smith and William Johnson Fox, Macready and Maclise, as well as myself and Dickens. There followed another similar celebration, in which one of these entertainers was the guest and which owed hardly less to Dickens's exertions, when, at the Star-and-garter at Richmond in the autumn, we wished Macready good-speed on his way to America. Dickens took the chair at that dinner; and with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself, was in the following week to have accompanied the great actor to Liverpool to say good-bye to him on board the Cunard ship, and bring his wife back to London after their leave-taking; when a word from our excellent friend Captain Marryat, startling to all of us except Dickens himself, struck him out of our party. Marryat thought that Macready might suffer in the States by any public mention of his having been attended on his way by the author of the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, and our friend at once agreed with him. "Your main and foremost reason," he wrote to me, "for doubting Marryat's judgment, I can at once destroy. It has occurred to me many times; I have mentioned the thing to Kate more than once; and I had intended _not_ to go on board, charging Radley to let nothing be said of my being in his house. I have been prevented from giving any expression to my fears by a misgiving that I should seem to attach, if I did so, too much importance to my own doings. But now that I have Marryat at my back, I have not the least hesitation in saying that I am certain he is right. I have very great apprehensions that the _Nickleby_ dedication will damage Macready. Marryat is wrong in supposing it is not printed in the American editions, for I have myself seen it in the shop windows of several cities. If I were to go on board with him, I have not the least doubt that the fact would be placarded all over New York, before he had shaved himself in Boston. And that there are thousands of men in America who would pick a quarrel with him on the mere statement of his being my friend, I have no more doubt than I have of my existence. You have only doubted Marryat because it is impossible for _any man_ to know what they are in their own country, who has not seen them there." This letter was written from Broadstairs, whither he had gone in August, after such help as he only could give, and never took such delight as in giving, to a work of practical humanity. Earlier in the year he had presided at a dinner for the Printers' Pension-fund, which Thomas Hood, Douglas Jerrold, and myself attended with him; and upon the terrible summer-evening accident at sea by which Mr. Elton the actor lost his life, it was mainly by Dickens's unremitting exertions, seconded admirably by Mr. Serle and warmly taken up by Mr. Elton's own profession (the most generous in the world), that ample provision was made for the many children. At the close of August I had news of him from his favourite watering-place, too characteristic to be omitted. The day before had been a day of "terrific heat," yet this had not deterred him from doing what he was too often suddenly prone to do in the midst of his hardest work. "I performed an insane match against time of eighteen miles by the milestones in four hours and a half, under a burning sun the whole way. I could get" (he is writing next morning) "no sleep at night, and really began to be afraid I was going to have a fever. You may judge in what kind of authorship-training I am to-day. I could as soon eat the cliff as write about anything." A few days later, however, all was well again; and another sketch from himself, to his American friend, will show his sea-side life in ordinary. "In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another bay-window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they _do_ say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles or so away), and then I'm told there is a sound in Lincoln's-inn-fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses."[68] He returned to town "for good" on Monday the 2nd of October, and from the Wednesday to the Friday of that week was at Manchester, presiding at the opening of its great Athenæum, when Mr. Cobden and Mr. Disraeli also "assisted." Here he spoke mainly on a matter always nearest his heart, the education of the very poor. He protested against the danger of calling a little learning dangerous; declared his preference for the very least of the little over none at all; proposed to substitute for the old a new doggerel, Though house and lands be never got, Learning can give what they can _not_; told his listeners of the real and paramount danger we had lately taken Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, "thousands of immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance;" and contrasted this with the unspeakable consolation and blessings that a little knowledge had shed on men of the lowest estate and most hopeless means, "watching the stars with Ferguson the shepherd's boy, walking the streets with Crabbe, a poor barber here in Lancashire with Arkwright, a tallow-chandler's son with Franklin, shoemaking with Bloomfield in his garret, following the plough with Burns, and, high above the noise of loom and hammer, whispering courage in the ears of workers I could this day name in Sheffield and in Manchester." The same spirit impelled him to give eager welcome to the remarkable institution of Ragged schools, which, begun by a shoemaker of Southampton and a chimney-sweep of Windsor and carried on by a peer of the realm, has had results of incalculable importance to society. The year of which I am writing was its first, as this in which I write is its last; and in the interval, out of three hundred thousand children to whom it has given some sort of education, it is computed also to have given to a third of that number the means of honest employment.[69] "I sent Miss Coutts," he had written (24th of September), "a sledge hammer account of the Ragged schools; and as I saw her name for two hundred pounds in the clergy education subscription-list, took pains to show her that religious mysteries and difficult creeds wouldn't do for such pupils. I told her, too, that it was of immense importance they should be _washed_. She writes back to know what the rent of some large airy premises would be, and what the expense of erecting a regular bathing or purifying place; touching which points I am in correspondence with the authorities. I have no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the matter. She is a most excellent creature, I protest to God, and I have a most perfect affection and respect for her." One of the last things he did at the close of the year, in the like spirit, was to offer to describe the Ragged schools for the _Edinburgh Review_. "I have told Napier," he wrote to me, "I will give a description of them in a paper on education, if the _Review_ is not afraid to take ground against the church catechism and other mere formularies and subtleties, in reference to the education of the young and ignorant. I fear it is extremely improbable it will consent to commit itself so far." His fears were well-founded; but the statements then made by him give me opportunity to add that it was his impatience of differences on this point with clergymen of the Established Church that had led him, for the past year or two, to take sittings in the Little Portland-street Unitarian chapel; for whose officiating minister, Mr. Edward Tagart, he had a friendly regard which continued long after he had ceased to be a member of his congregation. That he did so quit it, after two or three years, I can distinctly state; and of the frequent agitation of his mind and thoughts in connection with this all-important theme, there will be other occasions to speak. But upon essential points he had never any sympathy so strong as with the leading doctrine and discipline of the Church of England; to these, as time went on, he found himself able to accommodate all minor differences; and the unswerving faith in Christianity itself, apart from sects and schisms, which had never failed him at any period of his life, found expression at its close in the language of his will. Twelve months before his death, these words were written. "I direct that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb . . . I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there." Active as he had been in the now ending year, and great as were its varieties of employment; his genius in its highest mood, his energy unwearied in good work, and his capacity for enjoyment without limit; he was able to signalize its closing months by an achievement supremely fortunate, which but for disappointments the year had also brought might never have been thought of. He had not begun until a week after his return from Manchester, where the fancy first occurred to him, and before the end of November he had finished, his memorable _Christmas Carol_. It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him out of the time taken up by two numbers of his _Chuzzlewit_; and though begun with but the special design of adding something to the _Chuzzlewit_ balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own account of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let himself loose like a madman. "Forster is out again," he added, by way of illustrating our practical comments on his celebration of the jovial old season, "and if he don't go in again after the manner in which we have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's-buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before." Yet had it been to him, this closing year, a time also of much anxiety and strange disappointments of which I am now to speak; and before, with that view, we go back for a while to its earlier months, one step into the new year may be taken for what marked it with interest and importance to him. Eighteen hundred and forty-four was but fifteen days old when a third son (his fifth child, which received the name of its godfather Francis Jeffrey) was born; and here is an answer sent by him, two days later, to an invitation from Maclise, Stanfield, and myself to dine with us at Richmond. "DEVONSHIRE LODGE, _Seventeenth of January_, 1844. FELLOW COUNTRYMEN! The appeal with which you have honoured me, awakens within my breast emotions that are more easily to be imagined than described. Heaven bless you. I shall indeed be proud, my friends, to respond to such a requisition. I had withdrawn from Public Life--I fondly thought forever--to pass the evening of my days in hydropathical pursuits, and the contemplation of virtue. For which latter purpose, I had bought a looking-glass.--But, my friends, private feeling must ever yield to a stern sense of public duty. The Man is lost in the Invited Guest, and I comply. Nurses, wet and dry; apothecaries; mothers-in-law; babbies; with all the sweet (and chaste) delights of private life; these, my countrymen, are hard to leave. But you have called me forth, and I will come. Fellow countrymen, your friend and faithful servant, CHARLES DICKENS." FOOTNOTES: [64] Printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ shortly after his death, and since collected, by Mr. James T. Fields of Boston, with several of later date addressed to himself, and much correspondence having reference to other writers, into a pleasing volume entitled _Yesterdays with Authors_. [65] This is mentioned in Mr. O. Driscoll's agreeable little Memoir, but supposed to refer to Maclise's portrait of Dickens. [66] In one of the letters to his American friend Mr. Felton there is a glimpse of Christmas sports which had escaped my memory, and for which a corner may be found here, inasmuch as these gambols were characteristic of him at the pleasant old season, and were frequently renewed in future years. "The best of it is" (31 Dec. 1842) "that Forster and I have purchased between us the entire stock-in-trade of a conjuror, the practice and display whereof is entrusted to me. . . . In those tricks which require a confederate I am assisted (by reason of his imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders. We come out on a small scale to-night, at Forster's, where we see the old year out and the new one in." _Atlantic Monthly_, July 1871. [67] "I have heard, as you have, from Lady Blessington, for whose behoof I have this morning penned the lines I send you herewith. But I have only done so to excuse myself, for I have not the least idea of their suiting her; and I hope she will send them back to you for the _Ex._" C. D. to J. F. July 1843. The lines are quite worth preserving. A WORD IN SEASON. They have a superstition in the East, That Allah, written on a piece of paper, Is better unction than can come of priest, Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper: Holding, that any scrap which bears that name In any characters its front impress'd on, Shall help the finder thro' the purging flame, And give his toasted feet a place to rest on. Accordingly, they make a mighty fuss With every wretched tract and fierce oration, And hoard the leaves--for they are not, like us A highly civilized and thinking nation: And, always stooping in the miry ways To look for matter of this earthly leaven, They seldom, in their dust-exploring days, Have any leisure to look up to Heaven. So have I known a country on the earth Where darkness sat upon the living waters, And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters: And yet, where they who should have oped the door Of charity and light, for all men's finding Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor, And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding. The gentlest man among those pious Turks God's living image ruthlessly defaces; Their best High-Churchman, with no faith in works, Bowstrings the Virtues in the market-places. The Christian Pariah, whom both sects curse (They curse all other men, and curse each other), Walks thro' the world, not very much the worse, Does all the good he can, and loves his brother. [68] C. D. to Professor Felton (1st Sept. 1843), in _Atlantic Monthly_ for July 1871. [69] "After a period of 27 years, from a single school of five small infants, the work has grown into a cluster of some 300 schools, an aggregate of nearly 30,000 children, and a body of 3000 voluntary teachers, most of them the sons and daughters of toil. . . . Of more than 300,000 children which, on the most moderate calculation, we have a right to conclude have passed through these schools since their commencement, I venture to affirm that more than 100,000 of both sexes have been placed out in various ways, in emigration, in the marine, in trades, and in domestic service. For many consecutive years I have contributed prizes to thousands of the scholars; and let no one omit to call to mind what these children were, whence they came, and whither they were going without this merciful intervention. They would have been added to the perilous swarm of the wild, the lawless, the wretched, and the ignorant, instead of being, as by God's blessing they are, decent and comfortable, earning an honest livelihood, and adorning the community to which they belong." _Letter of Lord Shaftesbury in the Times of the 13th of November, 1871._ CHAPTER III. CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL. 1843-1844. Sale of _Chuzzlewit_--Publishers and Authors--Unlucky Clause in _Chuzzlewit_ Agreement--Resolve to have other Publishers--A Plan for seeing Foreign Cities--Confidence in Himself--Preparation of _Carol_--Turning-point of his Career--Work and its Interruptions--Superiority of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ to former Books--News from America--A Favourite Scene of Thackeray's--Grand Purpose of the Satire of _Chuzzlewit_--Publication of _Christmas Carol_--Unrealized Hopes--Agreement with Bradbury and Evans. CHUZZLEWIT had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its predecessors. The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two stories; for into everything in this world mere habit enters more largely than we are apt to suppose. Nor had the temporary withdrawal to America been favourable to an immediate resumption by his readers of their old and intimate relations. This also is to be added, that the excitement by which a popular reputation is kept up to the highest selling mark, will always be subject to lulls too capricious for explanation. But whatever the causes, here was the undeniable fact of a grave depreciation of sale in his writings, unaccompanied by any falling off either in themselves or in the writer's reputation. It was very temporary; but it was present, and to be dealt with accordingly. The forty and fifty thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprize in which the _Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared, had fallen to little over twenty thousand. They rose somewhat on Martin's ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he'd _go to America_; but though it was believed that this resolve, which Dickens adopted as suddenly as his hero, might increase the number of his readers, that reason influenced him less than the challenge to make good his _Notes_ which every mail had been bringing him from unsparing assailants beyond the Atlantic. The substantial effect of the American episode upon the sale was yet by no means great. A couple of thousand additional purchasers were added, but the highest number at any time reached before the story closed was twenty-three thousand. Its sale, since, has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_. We were now, however, to have a truth brought home to us which few that have had real or varied experience in such matters can have failed to be impressed by--that publishers are bitter bad judges of an author, and are seldom safe persons to consult in regard to the fate or fortunes that may probably await him. Describing the agreement for this book in September 1841, I spoke of a provision against the improbable event of its profits proving inadequate to certain necessary repayments. In this unlikely case, which was to be ascertained by the proceeds of the first five numbers, the publishers were to have power to appropriate fifty pounds a month out of the two hundred pounds payable for authorship in the expenses of each number; but though this had been introduced with my knowledge, I knew also too much of the antecedent relations of the parties to regard it as other than a mere form to satisfy the attorneys in the case. The fifth number, which landed Martin and Mark in America, and the sixth, which described their first experiences, were published; and on the eve of the seventh, in which Mrs. Gamp was to make her first appearance, I heard with infinite pain that from Mr. Hall, the younger partner of the firm which had enriched itself by _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, and a very kind well-disposed man, there had dropped an inconsiderate hint to the writer of those books that it might be desirable to put the clause in force. It had escaped him without his thinking of all that it involved; certainly the senior partner, whatever amount of as thoughtless sanction he had at the moment given to it, always much regretted it, and made endeavours to exhibit his regret; but the mischief was done, and for the time was irreparable. "I am so irritated," Dickens wrote to me on the 28th of June, "so rubbed in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt, by what I told you yesterday, that a wrong kind of fire is burning in my head, and I don't think I _can_ write. Nevertheless, I am trying. In case I should succeed, and should not come down to you this morning, shall you be at the club or elsewhere after dinner? I am bent on paying the money. And before going into the matter with anybody I should like you to propound from me the one preliminary question to Bradbury and Evans. It is more than a year and a half since Clowes wrote to urge me to give him a hearing, in case I should ever think of altering my plans. A printer is better than a bookseller, and it is quite as much the interest of one (if not more) to join me. But whoever it is, or whatever, I am bent upon paying Chapman and Hall _down_. And when I have done that, Mr. Hall shall have a piece of my mind." What he meant by the proposed repayment will be understood by what formerly was said of his arrangements with these gentlemen on the repurchase of his early copyrights. Feeling no surprise at this announcement, I yet prevailed with him to suspend proceedings until his return from Broadstairs in October; and what then I had to say led to memorable resolves. The communication he had desired me to make to his printers had taken them too much by surprise to enable them to form a clear judgment respecting it; and they replied by suggestions which were in effect a confession of that want of confidence in themselves. They enlarged upon the great results that would follow a reissue of his writings in a cheap form; they strongly urged such an undertaking; and they offered to invest to any desired amount in the establishment of a magazine or other periodical to be edited by him. The possible dangers, in short, incident to their assuming the position of publishers as well as printers of new works from his pen, seemed at first to be so much greater than on closer examination they were found to be, that at the outset they shrank from encountering them. And hence the remarkable letter I shall now quote (1st of November, 1843). "Don't be startled by the novelty and extent of my project. Both startled _me_ at first; but I am well assured of its wisdom and necessity. I am afraid of a magazine--just now. I don't think the time a good one, or the chances favourable. I am afraid of putting myself before the town as writing tooth and nail for bread, headlong, after the close of a book taking so much out of one as _Chuzzlewit_. I am afraid I could not do it, with justice to myself. I know that whatever we may say at first, a new magazine, or a new anything, would require so much propping, that I should be _forced_ (as in the _Clock_) to put myself into it, in my old shape. I am afraid of Bradbury and Evans's desire to force on the cheap issue of my books, or any of them, prematurely. I am sure if it took place yet awhile, it would damage me and damage the property, _enormously_. It is very natural in them to want it; but, since they do want it, I have no faith in their regarding me in any other respect than they would regard any other man in a speculation. I see that this is really your opinion as well; and I don't see what I gain, in such a case, by leaving Chapman and Hall. If I had made money, I should unquestionably fade away from the public eye for a year, and enlarge my stock of description and observation by seeing countries new to me; which it is most necessary to me that I should see, and which with an increasing family I can scarcely hope to see at all, unless I see them now. Already for some time I have had this hope and intention before me; and though not having made money yet, I find or fancy that I can put myself in the position to accomplish it. And this is the course I have before me. At the close of _Chuzzlewit_ (by which time the debt will have been materially reduced) I purpose drawing from Chapman and Hall my share of the subscription--bills, or money, will do equally well. I design to tell them that it is not likely I shall do anything for a year; that, in the meantime, I make no arrangement whatever with any one; and our business matters rest _in statu quo_. The same to Bradbury and Evans. I shall let the house if I can; if not, leave it to be let. I shall take all the family, and two servants--three at most--to some place which I know beforehand to be CHEAP and in a delightful climate, in Normandy or Brittany, to which I shall go over, first, and where I shall rent some house for six or eight months. During that time, I shall walk through Switzerland, cross the Alps, travel through France and Italy; take Kate perhaps to Rome and Venice, but not elsewhere; and in short see everything that is to be seen. I shall write my descriptions to you from time to time, exactly as I did in America; and you will be able to judge whether or not a new and attractive book may not be made on such ground. At the same time I shall be able to turn over the story I have in my mind, and which I have a strong notion might be published with great advantage, _first in Paris_--but that's another matter to be talked over. And of course I have not yet settled, either, whether any book about the travel, or this, should be the first. 'All very well,' you say, 'if you had money enough.' Well, but if I can see my way to what would be necessary without binding myself in any form to anything; without paying interest, or giving any security but one of my Eagle five thousand pounds; you would give up that objection. And I stand committed to no bookseller, printer, money-lender, banker, or patron whatever; and decidedly strengthen my position with my readers, instead of weakening it, drop by drop, as I otherwise must. Is it not so? and is not the way before me, plainly this? I infer that in reality you do yourself think, that what I first thought of is _not_ the way? I have told you my scheme very badly, as I said I would. I see its great points, against many prepossessions the other way--as, leaving England, home, friends, everything I am fond of--but it seems to me, at a critical time, _the_ step to set me right. A blessing on Mr. Mariotti my Italian master, and his pupil!--If you have any breath left, tell Topping how you are." I had certainly not much after reading this letter, written amid all the distractions of his work, with both the _Carol_ and _Chuzzlewit_ in hand; but such insufficient breath as was left to me I spent against the project, and in favour of far more consideration than he had given to it, before anything should be settled. "I expected you," he wrote next day (the 2nd of November), "to be startled. If I was startled myself, when I first got this project of foreign travel into my head, MONTHS AGO, how much more must you be, on whom it comes fresh: numbering only hours! Still, I am very resolute upon it--very. I am convinced that my expenses abroad would not be more than half of my expenses here; the influence of change and nature upon me, enormous. You know, as well as I, that I think _Chuzzlewit_ in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I _know_, if I have health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up to-morrow. But how many readers do _not_ think! How many take it upon trust from knaves and idiots, that one writes too fast, or runs a thing to death! How coldly did this very book go on for months, until it forced itself up in people's opinion, without forcing itself up in sale! If I wrote for forty thousand Forsters, or for forty thousand people who know I write because I can't help it, I should have no need to leave the scene. But this very book warns me that if I _can_ leave it for a time, I had better do so, and must do so. Apart from that again, I feel that longer rest after this story would do me good. You say two or three months, because you have been used to see me for eight years never leaving off. But it is not rest enough. It is impossible to go on working the brain to that extent for ever. The very spirit of the thing, in doing it, leaves a horrible despondency behind, when it is done; which must be prejudicial to the mind, so soon renewed, and so seldom let alone. What would poor Scott have given to have gone abroad, of his own free will, a young man, instead of creeping there, a driveller, in his miserable decay! I said myself in my note to you--anticipating what you put to me--that it was a question _what_ I should come out with, first. The travel-book, if to be done at all, would cost me very little trouble; and surely would go very far to pay charges, whenever published. We have spoken of the baby, and of leaving it here with Catherine's mother. Moving the children into France could not, in any ordinary course of things, do them anything but good. And the question is, what it would do to that by which they live: not what it would do to them.--I had forgotten that point in the B. and E. negociation; but they certainly suggested instant publication of the reprints, or at all events of some of them; by which of course I know, and as you point out, I could provide of myself what is wanted. I take that as putting the thing distinctly as a matter of trade, and feeling it so. And, as a matter of trade with them or anybody else, as a matter of trade between me and the public, should I not be better off a year hence, with the reputation of having seen so much in the meantime? The reason which induces you to look upon this scheme with dislike--separation for so long a time--surely has equal weight with me. I see very little pleasure in it, beyond the natural desire to have been in those great scenes; I anticipate no enjoyment at the time. I have come to look upon it as a matter of policy and duty. I have a thousand other reasons, but shall very soon myself be with you." There were difficulties, still to be strongly urged, against taking any present step to a final resolve; and he gave way a little. But the pressure was soon renewed. "I have been," he wrote (10th of November), "all day in _Chuzzlewit_ agonies--conceiving only. I hope to bring forth to-morrow. Will you come here at six? I want to say a word or two about the cover of the _Carol_ and the advertising, and to consult you on a nice point in the tale. It will come wonderfully I think. Mac will call here soon after, and we can then all three go to Bulwer's together. And do, my dear fellow, do for God's sake turn over about Chapman and Hall, and look upon my project as a _settled thing_. If you object to see them, I must write to them." My reluctance as to the question affecting his old publishers was connected with the little story, which, amid all his perturbations and troubles and "_Chuzzlewit_ agonies," he was steadily carrying to its close; and which remains a splendid proof of how thoroughly he was borne out in the assertion just before made, of the sense of his power felt by him, and his confidence that it had never been greater than when his readers were thus falling off from him. He had entrusted the _Carol_ for publication on his own account, under the usual terms of commission, to the firm he had been so long associated with; and at such a moment to tell them, short of absolute necessity, his intention to quit them altogether, I thought a needless putting in peril of the little book's chances. He yielded to this argument; but the issue, as will be found, was less fortunate than I hoped. Let disappointments or annoyances, however, beset him as they might, once heartily in his work and all was forgotten. His temperament of course coloured everything, cheerful or sad, and his present outlook was disturbed by imaginary fears; but it was very certain that his labours and successes thus far had enriched others more than himself, and while he knew that his mode of living had been scrupulously governed by what he believed to be his means, the first suspicion that these might be inadequate made a change necessary to so upright a nature. It was the turning-point of his career; and the issue, though not immediately, ultimately justified him. Much of his present restlessness I was too ready myself to ascribe to that love of change in him which was always arising from his passionate desire to vary and extend his observation; but even as to this the result showed him right in believing that he should obtain decided intellectual advantage from the mere effects of such farther travel. Here indeed he spoke from experience, for already he had returned from America with wider views than when he started, and with a larger maturity of mind. The money difficulties on which he dwelt were also, it is now to be admitted, unquestionable. Beyond his own domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many, never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust; and it was after describing to me one such with great bitterness, a few days following the letter last quoted, that he thus replied on the following day (19th of November) to the comment I had made upon it. "I was most horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it, and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9 last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote eight printed pages of _Chuzzlewit_ yesterday. The consequence is that I _could_ finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh very much." The very next day, unhappily, there came to himself a repetition of precisely similar trouble in exaggerated form, and to me a fresh reminder of what was gradually settling into a fixed resolve. "I am quite serious and sober when I say, that I have very grave thoughts of keeping my whole menagerie in Italy, three years." * * * * * Of the book which awoke such varied feelings and was the occasion of such vicissitudes of fortune, some notice is now due; and this, following still as yet my former rule, will be not so much critical as biographical. He had left for Italy before the completed tale was published, and its reception for a time was exactly what his just-quoted letter prefigures. It had forced itself up in public opinion without forcing itself up in sale. It was felt generally to be an advance upon his previous stories, and his own opinion is not to be questioned that it was in a hundred points immeasurably the best of them thus far; less upon the surface, and going deeper into springs of character. Nor would it be difficult to say, in a single word, where the excellence lay that gave it this superiority. It had brought his highest faculty into play: over and above other qualities it had given scope to his imagination; and it first expressed the distinction in this respect between his earlier and his later books. Apart wholly from this, too, his letters will have confirmed a remark already made upon the degree to which his mental power had been altogether deepened and enlarged by the effect of his visit to America. In construction and conduct of story _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is defective, character and description constituting the chief part of its strength. But what it lost as a story by the American episode it gained in the other direction; young Martin, by happy use of a bitter experience, casting off his slough of selfishness in the poisonous swamp of Eden. Dickens often confessed, however, the difficulty it had been to him to have to deal with this gap in the main course of his narrative; and I will give an instance from a letter he wrote to me when engaged upon the number in which Jonas brings his wife to her miserable home. "I write in haste" (28th of July 1843), "for I have been at work all day; and, it being against the grain with me to go back to America when my interest is strong in the other parts of the tale, have got on but slowly. I have a great notion to work out with Sydney's favourite,[70] and long to be at him again." But obstructions of this kind with Dickens measured only and always the degree of readiness and resource with which he rose to meet them, and never had his handling of character been so masterly as in _Chuzzlewit_. The persons delineated in former books had been more agreeable, but never so interpenetrated with meanings brought out with a grasp so large, easy, and firm. As well in this as in the passionate vividness of its descriptions, the imaginative power makes itself felt. The windy autumn night, with the mad desperation of the hunted leaves and the roaring mirth of the blazing village forge; the market-day at Salisbury; the winter walk, and the coach journey to London by night; the ship voyage over the Atlantic; the stormy midnight travel before the murder, the stealthy enterprise and cowardly return of the murderer; these are all instances of first-rate description, original in the design, imaginative in all the detail, and very complete in the execution. But the higher power to which I direct attention is even better discerned in the persons and dialogue. With nothing absent or abated in its sharp impressions of reality, there are more of the subtle requisites which satisfy reflection and thought. We have in this book for the most part, not only observation but the outcome of it, the knowledge as well as the fact. While we witness as vividly the life immediately passing, we are more conscious of the permanent life above and beyond it. Nothing nearly so effective therefore had yet been achieved by him. He had scrutinised as truly and satirised as keenly; but had never shown the imaginative insight with which he now sent his humour and his art into the core of the vices of the time. Sending me the second chapter of his eighth number on the 15th of August, he gave me the latest tidings from America. "I gather from a letter I have had this morning that Martin has made them all stark staring raving mad across the water. I wish you would consider this. Don't you think the time has come when I ought to state that such public entertainments as I received in the States were either accepted before I went out, or in the first week after my arrival there; and that as soon as I began to have any acquaintance with the country, I set my face against any public recognition whatever but that which was forced upon me to the destruction of my peace and comfort--and made no secret of my real sentiments." We did not agree as to this, and the notion was abandoned; though his correspondent had not overstated the violence of the outbreak in the States when those chapters exploded upon them. But though an angry they are a good humoured and a very placable people; and, as time moved on a little, the laughter on that side of the Atlantic became quite as great as our amusement on this side, at the astonishing fun and comicality of these scenes. With a little reflection the Americans had doubtless begun to find out that the advantage was not all with us, nor the laughter wholly against them. They had no Pecksniff at any rate. Bred in a more poisonous swamp than their Eden, of greatly older standing and much harder to be drained, Pecksniff was all our own. The confession is not encouraging to national pride, but this character is so far English, that though our countrymen as a rule are by no means Pecksniffs, the ruling weakness is to countenance and encourage the race. When people call the character exaggerated, and protest that the lines are too broad to deceive any one, they only refuse, naturally enough, to sanction in a book what half their lives is passed in tolerating if not in worshipping. Dickens, illustrating his never-failing experience of being obliged to subdue in his books what he knew to be real for fear it should be deemed impossible, had already made the remark in his preface to _Nickleby_, that the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary. They agree to be deceived in a reality, and reward themselves by refusing to be deceived in a fiction. That a great many people who might have sat for Pecksniff, should condemn him for a grotesque impossibility, as Dickens averred to be the case, was no more than might be expected. A greater danger he has exposed more usefully in showing the greater numbers, who, desiring secretly to be thought better than they are, support eagerly pretensions that keep their own in countenance, and, without being Pecksniffs, render Pecksniffs possible. All impostures would have something too suspicious or forbidding in their look if we were not prepared to meet them half way. There is one thing favourable to us however, even in this view, which a French critic has lately suggested. Informing us that there are no Pecksniffs to be found in France, Mr. Taine explains this by the fact that his countrymen have ceased to affect virtue, and pretend only to vice; that a charlatan setting up morality would have no sort of following; that religion and the domestic virtues have gone so utterly to rags as not to be worth putting on for a deceitful garment; and that, no principles being left to parade, the only chance for the French modern Tartuffe is to confess and exaggerate weaknesses. We seem to have something of an advantage here. We require at least that the respectable homage of vice to virtue should not be omitted. "Charity, my dear," says our English Tartuffe, upon being bluntly called what he really is, "when I take my chamber-candlestick to-night, remind me to be more than usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done me an injustice." No amount of self-indulgence weakens or lowers his pious and reflective tone. "Those are her daughters," he remarks, making maudlin overtures to Mrs. Todgers in memory of his deceased wife. "Mercy and Charity, Charity and Mercy, not unholy names I hope. She was beautiful. She had a small property." When his condition has fallen into something so much worse than maudlin that his friends have to put him to bed, they have not had time to descend the staircase when he is seen to be "fluttering" on the top landing, desiring to collect their sentiments on the nature of human life. "Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence." He turns his old pupil out of doors in the attitude of blessing him, and when he has discharged that social duty retires to shed his personal tribute of a few tears in the back garden. No conceivable position, action, or utterance finds him without the vice in which his being is entirely steeped and saturated. Of such consummate consistency is its practice with him, that in his own house with his daughters he continues it to keep his hand in; and from the mere habit of keeping up appearances, even to himself, falls into the trap of Jonas. Thackeray used to say that there was nothing finer in rascaldom than this ruin of Pecksniff by his son-in-law at the very moment when the oily hypocrite believes himself to be achieving his masterpiece of dissembling over the more vulgar avowed ruffian. "'Jonas!' cried Mr. Pecksniff much affected, 'I am not a diplomatical character; my heart is in my hand. By far the greater part of the inconsiderable savings I have accumulated in the course of--I hope--a not dishonourable or useless career, is already given, devised, or bequeathed (correct me, my dear Jonas, if I am technically wrong), with expressions of confidence which I will not repeat; and in securities which it is unnecessary to mention; to a person whom I cannot, whom I will not, whom I need not, name.' Here he gave the hand of his son-in-law a fervent squeeze, as if he would have added, 'God bless you: be very careful of it when you get it!'" Certainly Dickens thus far had done nothing of which, as in this novel, the details were filled in with such minute and incomparable skill; where the wealth of comic circumstance was lavished in such overflowing abundance on single types of character; or where generally, as throughout the story, the intensity of his observation of individual humours and vices had taken so many varieties of imaginative form. Everything in _Chuzzlewit_ indeed had grown under treatment, as will be commonly the case in the handling of a man of genius, who never knows where any given conception may lead him, out of the wealth of resource in development and incident which it has itself created. "As to the way," he wrote to me of its two most prominent figures, as soon as all their capabilities were revealed to him, "As to the way in which these characters have opened out, that is, to me, one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows, what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation--if such a thing be possible, more so." The remark displays exactly what in all his important characters was the very process of creation with him. Nor was it in the treatment only of his present fiction, but also in its subject or design, that he had gone higher than in preceding efforts. Broadly what he aimed at, he would have expressed on the title-page if I had not dissuaded him, by printing there as its motto a verse altered from that prologue of his own composition to which I have formerly referred: "Your homes the scene. Yourselves, the actors, here!" Debtors' prisons, parish Bumbledoms, Yorkshire schools, were vile enough, but something much more pestiferous was now the aim of his satire; and he had not before so decisively shown vigour, daring, or discernment of what lay within reach of his art, as in taking such a person as Pecksniff for the central figure in a tale of existing life. Setting him up as the glass through which to view the groups around him, we are not the less moved to a hearty detestation of the social vices they exhibit, and pre-eminently of selfishness in all its forms, because we see more plainly than ever that there is but one vice which is quite irremediable. The elder Chuzzlewits are bad enough, but they bring their self-inflicted punishments; the Jonases and Tigg Montagues are execrable, but the law has its halter and its penal servitude; the Moulds and Gamps have plague-bearing breaths, from which sanitary wisdom may clear us; but from the sleek, smiling, crawling abomination of a Pecksniff, there is no help but self-help. Every man's hand should be against him, for his is against every man; and, as Mr. Taine very wisely warns us, the virtues have most need to be careful that they do not make themselves panders to his vice. It is an amiable weakness to put the best face on the worst things, but there is none more dangerous. There is nothing so common as the mistake of Tom Pinch, and nothing so rare as his excuses. The art with which that delightful character is placed at Mr. Pecksniff's elbow at the beginning of the story, and the help he gives to set fairly afloat the falsehood he innocently believes, contribute to an excellent management of this part of the design; and the same prodigal wealth of invention and circumstance which gives its higher imaginative stamp to the book, appears as vividly in its lesser as in its leading figures. There are wonderful touches of this suggestive kind in the household of Mould the undertaker; and in the vivid picture presented to us by one of Mrs. Gamp's recollections, we are transported to the youthful games of his children. "The sweet creeturs! playing at berryins down in the shop, and follerin' the order-book to its long home in the iron safe!" The American scenes themselves are not more full of life and fun and freshness, and do not contribute more to the general hilarity, than the cockney group at Todgers's; which is itself a little world of the qualities and humours that make up the interest of human life, whether it be high or low, vulgar or fine, filled in with a master's hand. Here, in a mere byestroke as it were, are the very finest things of the earlier books superadded to the new and higher achievement that distinguished the later productions. No part indeed of the execution of this remarkable novel is inferior. Young Bailey and Sweedlepipes are in the front rank of his humorous creations; and poor Mrs. Todgers, worn but not depraved by the cares of gravy and solicitudes of her establishment, with calculation shining out of one eye but affection and goodheartedness still beaming in the other, is in her way quite as perfect a picture as even the portentous Mrs. Gamp with her grim grotesqueness, her filthy habits and foul enjoyments, her thick and damp but most amazing utterances, her moist clammy functions, her pattens, her bonnet, her bundle, and her umbrella. But such prodigious claims must have a special mention. This world-famous personage has passed into and become one with the language, which her own parts of speech have certainly not exalted or refined. To none even of Dickens's characters has there been such a run of popularity; and she will remain among the everlasting triumphs of fiction, a superb masterpiece of English humour. What Mr. Mould says of her in his enthusiasm, that she's the sort of woman one would bury for nothing, and do it neatly too, every one feels to be an appropriate tribute; and this, by a most happy inspiration, is exactly what the genius to whom she owes her existence did, when he called her into life, to the foul original she was taken from. That which enduringly stamped upon his page its most mirth-moving figure, had stamped out of English life for ever one of its disgraces. The mortal Mrs. Gamp was handsomely put into her grave, and only the immortal Mrs. Gamp survived. Age will not wither this one, nor custom stale her variety. In the latter point she has an advantage over even Mr. Pecksniff. She has a friend, an alter ego, whose kind of service to her is expressed by her first utterance in the story; and with this, which introduces her, we may leave her most fitly. "'Mrs. Harris,' I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in, which it was but a young person, 'Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'leave the bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, but let me put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.' 'Mrs. Gamp,' she says in answer, 'if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks--night watching,' said Mrs. Gamp with emphasis, 'being a extra charge--you are that inwallable person.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.'" To this there is nothing to be added, except that in the person of that astonishing friend every phase of fun and comedy in the character is repeated, under fresh conditions of increased appreciation and enjoyment. By the exuberance of comic invention which gives his distinction to Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp profits quite as much; the same wealth of laughable incident which surrounds that worthy man is upon her heaped to overflowing; but over and above this, by the additional invention of Mrs. Harris, it is all reproduced, acted over with renewed spirit, and doubled and quadrupled in her favour. This on the whole is the happiest stroke of humorous art in all the writings of Dickens. * * * * * But this is a chapter of disappointments, and I have now to state, that as _Martin Chuzzlewit's_ success was to seem to him at first only distant and problematical, so even the prodigious immediate success of the _Christmas Carol_ itself was not to be an unmitigated pleasure. Never had a little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise. Published but a few days before Christmas, it was hailed on every side with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was sold the first day, and on the third of January 1844 he wrote to me that "two thousand of the three printed for second and third editions are already taken by the trade." But a very few weeks were to pass before the darker side of the picture came. "Such a night as I have passed!" he wrote to me on Saturday morning the 10th of February. "I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever. I found the _Carol_ accounts awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of £230! And the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment! My year's bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do. Good Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago! Do come soon, as I am very anxious to talk with you. We can send round to Mac after you arrive, and tell him to join us at Hampstead or elsewhere. I was so utterly knocked down last night, that I came up to the contemplation of all these things quite bold this morning. If I can let the house for this season, I will be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant offers. I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption." The ultimate result was that his publishers were changed, and the immediate result that his departure for Italy became a settled thing; but a word may be said on these Carol accounts before mention is made of his new publishing arrangements.[71] Want of judgment had been shown in not adjusting the expenses of production with a more equable regard to the selling price, but even as it was, before the close of the year, he had received £726 from a sale of fifteen thousand copies; and the difference between this and the amount realised by the same proportion of the sale of the successor to the _Carol_, undoubtedly justified him in the discontent now expressed. Of that second tale, as well as of the third and fourth, more than double the numbers of the _Carol_ were at once sold, and of course there was no complaint of any want of success: but the truth really was, as to all the Christmas stories issued in this form, that the price charged, while too large for the public addressed by them, was too little to remunerate their outlay; and when in later years he put forth similar fancies for Christmas, charging for them fewer pence than the shillings required for these, he counted his purchasers, with fairly corresponding gains to himself, not by tens but by hundreds of thousands.[72] It was necessary now that negotiations should be resumed with his printers, but before any step was taken Messrs. Chapman and Hall were informed of his intention not to open fresh publishing relations with them after _Chuzzlewit_ should have closed. Then followed deliberations and discussions, many and grave, which settled themselves at last into the form of an agreement with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans executed on the first of June 1844; by which, upon advance made to him of £2800, he assigned to them a fourth share in whatever he might write during the next ensuing eight years, to which the agreement was to be strictly limited. There were the usual protecting clauses, but no interest was to be paid, and no obligations were imposed as to what works should be written, if any, or the form of them; the only farther stipulation having reference to the event of a periodical being undertaken whereof Dickens might be only partially editor or author, in which case his proprietorship of copyright and profits was to be two thirds instead of three fourths. There was an understanding, at the time this agreement was signed, that a successor to the _Carol_ would be ready for the Christmas of 1844; but no other promise was asked or made in regard to any other book, nor had he himself decided what form to give to his experiences of Italy, if he should even finally determine to publish them at all. Between this agreement and his journey six weeks elapsed, and there were one or two characteristic incidents before his departure: but mention must first be interposed of the success quite without alloy that also attended the little book, and carried off in excitement and delight every trace of doubt or misgiving. "Blessings on your kind heart!" wrote Jeffrey to the author of the _Carol_. "You should be happy yourself, for you may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas 1842." "Who can listen," exclaimed Thackeray, "to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." Such praise expressed what men of genius felt and said; but the small volume had other tributes, less usual and not less genuine. There poured upon its author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general burden was to tell him, amid many confidences about their homes, how the _Carol_ had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a little shelf by itself, and was to do them all no end of good. Anything more to be said of it will not add much to this. There was indeed nobody that had not some interest in the message of the _Christmas Carol_. It told the selfish man to rid himself of selfishness; the just man to make himself generous; and the good-natured man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature. Its cheery voice of faith and hope, ringing from one end of the island to the other, carried pleasant warning alike to all, that if the duties of Christmas were wanting no good could come of its outward observances; that it must shine upon the cold hearth and warm it, and into the sorrowful heart and comfort it; that it must be kindness, benevolence, charity, mercy, and forbearance, or its plum pudding would turn to bile, and its roast beef be indigestible.[73] Nor could any man have said it with the same appropriateness as Dickens. What was marked in him to the last was manifest now. He had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life and spirits, its humour in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him. Its imaginations as well as kindly thoughts were his; and its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places, he had made his own. Christmas Day was not more social or welcome: New Year's Day not more new: Twelfth Night not more full of characters. The duty of diffusing enjoyment had never been taught by a more abundant, mirthful, thoughtful, ever-seasonable writer. Something also is to be said of the spirit of the book, and of the others that followed it, which will not anticipate special allusions to be made hereafter. No one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old nursery tales, and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here only giving them a higher form. The social and manly virtues he desired to teach, were to him not less the charm of the ghost, the goblin, and the fairy fancies of his childhood; however rudely set forth in those earlier days. What now were to be conquered were the more formidable dragons and giants which had their places at our own hearths, and the weapons to be used were of a finer than the "ice-brook's temper." With brave and strong restraints, what is evil in ourselves was to be subdued; with warm and gentle sympathies, what is bad or unreclaimed in others was to be redeemed; the Beauty was to embrace the Beast, as in the divinest of all those fables; the star was to rise out of the ashes, as in our much-loved Cinderella; and we were to play the Valentine with our wilder brothers, and bring them back with brotherly care to civilization and happiness. Nor is it to be doubted, I think, that, in that largest sense of benefit, great public and private service was done; positive, earnest, practical good; by the extraordinary popularity, and nearly universal acceptance, which attended these little holiday volumes. They carried to countless firesides, with new enjoyment of the season, better apprehension of its claims and obligations; they mingled grave with glad thoughts, much to the advantage of both; what seemed almost too remote to meddle with they brought within reach of the charities, and what was near they touched with a dearer tenderness; they comforted the generous, rebuked the sordid, cured folly by kindly ridicule and comic humour, and, saying to their readers _Thus you have done, but it were better Thus_, may for some have realised the philosopher's famous experience, and by a single fortunate thought revised the whole manner of a life. Criticism here is a second-rate thing, and the reader may be spared such discoveries as it might have made in regard to the _Christmas Carol_. FOOTNOTES: [70] Chuffey. Sydney Smith had written to Dickens on the appearance of his fourth number (early in April): "Chuffey is admirable. . . . I never read a finer piece of writing: it is deeply pathetic and affecting." [71] It may interest the reader, and be something of a curiosity of literature, if I give the expenses of the first edition of 6000, and of the 7000 more which constituted the five following editions, with the profit of the remaining 2000 which completed the sale of fifteen thousand: CHRISTMAS CAROL. 1st Edition, 6000 No. 1843. £ _s._ _d._ Dec. Printing 74 2 9 Paper 89 2 0 Drawings and Engravings 49 18 0 Two Steel Plates 1 4 0 Printing Plates 15 17 6 Paper for do 7 12 0 Colouring Plates 120 0 0 Binding 180 0 0 Incidents and Advertising 168 7 8 Commission 99 4 6 -------------- £805 8 5 ============== * * * * * 2nd to the 7th Edition, making 7000 Copies. 1844. £ _s._ _d._ Jan. Printing 58 18 0 Paper 103 19 0 Printing Plates 17 10 0 Paper 8 17 4 Colouring Plates 140 0 0 Binding 199 18 2 Incidents and Advertising 83 5 8 Commission 107 18 10 ------------- £720 7 0 ============= * * * * * Two thousand more, represented by the last item in the subjoined balance, were sold before the close of the year, leaving a remainder of 70 copies. 1843. £ _s._ _d._ Dec. Balance of a/c to Mr. Dickens's credit 186 16 7 1844. Jan. to April. Do. Do. 349 12 0 May to Dec. Do. Do. 189 11 5 ------------- Amount of Profit on the Work £726 0 0 ============= [72] In November 1865 he wrote to me that the sale of his Christmas fancy for that year (_Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions_) had gone up, in the first week, to 250,000. [73] A characteristic letter of this date, which will explain itself, has been kindly sent to me by the gentleman it was written to, Mr. James Verry Staples, of Bristol:--"Third of April, 1844. I have been very much gratified by the receipt of your interesting letter, and I assure you that it would have given me heartfelt satisfaction to have been in your place when you read my little _Carol_ to the Poor in your neighbourhood. I have great faith in the poor; to the best of my ability I always endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit of their becoming. I mention this to assure you of two things. Firstly, that I try to deserve their attention; and secondly, that any such marks of their approval and confidence as you relate to me are most acceptable to my feelings, and go at once to my heart." CHAPTER IV. YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY. 1844. Gore-house--Liverpool and Birmingham Institutes--A Troublesome Cheque--Wrongs from Piracy--Proceedings in Chancery--Result of Chancery Experience--Reliefs to Work--M. Henri Taine on Dickens--Writing in the _Chronicle_--Preparations for Departure--In Temporary Quarters--The Farewell Dinner-party--"The Evenings of a Working-man"--Greenwich Dinner. AND now, before accompanying Dickens on his Italian travel, one or two parting incidents will receive illustration from his letters. A thoughtful little poem written during the past summer for Lady Blessington has been quoted on a previous page: and it may remind me to say here what warmth of regard he had for her, and for all the inmates of Gore-house; how uninterruptedly joyous and pleasurable were his associations with them; and what valued help they now gave in his preparations for Italy. The poem, as we have seen, was written during a visit made in Yorkshire to the house of Mr. Smithson, already named as the partner of his early companion, Mr. Mitton; and this visit he repeated in sadder circumstances during the present year, when (April 1844) he attended Mr. Smithson's funeral. With members or connections of the family of this friend, his intercourse long continued. In the previous February, on the 26th and 28th respectively, he had taken the chair at two great meetings, in Liverpool of the Mechanics' Institution, and in Birmingham of the Polytechnic Institution, to which reference is made by him in a letter of the 21st. I quote the allusion because it shows thus early the sensitive regard to his position as a man of letters, and his scrupulous consideration for the feelings as well as interest of the class, which he manifested in many various and often greatly self-sacrificing ways all through his life. "Advise me on the following point. And as I must write to-night, having already lost a post, advise me by bearer. This Liverpool Institution, which is wealthy and has a high grammar-school the masters of which receive in salaries upwards of £2000 a year (indeed its extent horrifies me; I am struggling through its papers this morning), writes me yesterday by its secretary a business letter about the order of the proceedings on Monday; and it begins thus. 'I beg to send you prefixed, with the best respects of our committee, a bank order for twenty pounds in payment of the expenses contingent on your visit to Liverpool.'--And there, sure enough, it is. Now my impulse was, _and is_, decidedly to return it. Twenty pounds is not of moment to me; and any sacrifice of independence is worth it twenty times' twenty times told. But haggling in my mind is a doubt whether that would be proper, and not boastful (in an inexplicable way); and whether as an author, I have a right to put myself on a basis which the professors of literature in other forms _connected with the Institution_ cannot afford to occupy. Don't you see? But of course you do. The case stands thus. The Manchester Institution, being in debt, appeals to me as it were _in formâ pauperis_, and makes no such provision as I have named. The Birmingham Institution, just struggling into life with great difficulty, applies to me on the same grounds. But the Leeds people (thriving) write to me, making the expenses a distinct matter of business; and the Liverpool, as a point of delicacy, say nothing about it to the last minute, and then send the money. Now, what in the name of goodness ought I to do?--I am as much puzzled with the cheque as Colonel Jack was with his gold. If it would have settled the matter to put it in the fire yesterday, I should certainly have done it. Your opinion is requested. I think I shall have grounds for a very good speech at Brummagem; but I am not sure about Liverpool: having misgivings of over-gentility." My opinion was clearly for sending the money back, which accordingly was done. Both speeches, duly delivered to enthusiastic listeners at the places named, were good, and both, with suitable variations, had the same theme: telling his popular audience in Birmingham that the principle of their institute, education comprehensive and unsectarian, was the only safe one, for that without danger no society could go on punishing men for preferring vice to virtue without giving them the means of knowing what virtue was; and reminding his genteeler audience in Liverpool, that if happily they had been themselves well taught, so much the more should they seek to extend the benefit to all, since, whatever the precedence due to rank, wealth, or intellect, there was yet a nobility beyond them, expressed unaffectedly by the poet's verse and in the power of education to confer. Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good: True hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. He underwent some suffering, which he might have spared himself, at his return. "I saw the _Carol_ last night," he wrote to me of a dramatic performance of the little story at the Adelphi. "Better than usual, and Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but _heart-breaking_ to me. Oh Heaven! if any forecast of _this_ was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind of meat under done; and his face is quite perfect." Of what he suffered from these adaptations of his books, multiplied remorselessly at every theatre, I have forborne to speak, but it was the subject of complaint with him incessantly; and more or less satisfied as he was with individual performances, such as Mr. Yates's Quilp or Mantalini and Mrs. Keeley's Smike or Dot, there was only one, that of Barnaby Rudge by the Miss Fortescue who became afterwards Lady Gardner, on which I ever heard him dwell with a thorough liking. It is true that to the dramatizations of his next and other following Christmas stories he gave help himself; but, even then, all such efforts to assist special representations were mere attempts to render more tolerable what he had no power to prevent, and, with a few rare exceptions, they were never very successful. Another and graver wrong was the piracy of his writings, every one of which had been reproduced with merely such colourable changes of title, incidents, and names of characters, as were believed to be sufficient to evade the law and adapt them to "penny" purchasers. So shamelessly had this been going on ever since the days of _Pickwick_, in so many outrageous ways[74] and with all but impunity, that a course repeatedly urged by Talfourd and myself was at last taken in the present year with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Chuzzlewit_ pirates. Upon a case of such peculiar flagrancy, however, that the vice-chancellor would not even hear Dickens's counsel; and what it cost our dear friend Talfourd to suppress his speech exceeded by very much the labour and pains with which he had prepared it. "The pirates," wrote Dickens to me, after leaving the court on the 18th of January, "are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone. Knight Bruce would not hear Talfourd, but instantly gave judgment. He had interrupted Anderdon constantly by asking him to produce a passage which was not an expanded or contracted idea from my book. And at every successive passage he cried out, 'That is Mr. Dickens's case. Find another!' He said that there was not a shadow of doubt upon the matter. That there was no authority which would bear a construction in their favour; the piracy going beyond all previous instances. They might mention it again in a week, he said, if they liked, and might have an issue if they pleased; but they would probably consider it unnecessary after that strong expression of his opinion. Of course I will stand by what we have agreed as to the only terms of compromise with the printers. I am determined that I will have an apology for their affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I will stick to my friend the author." Two days later he wrote: "The farther affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals _are_ rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men must be who hold on by the heels of literature. Oh! the agony of Talfourd at Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had sat up till three in the morning, he says, preparing his speech; and would have done all kinds of things with the affidavits. It certainly was a splendid subject. We have heard nothing from the vagabonds yet. I once thought of printing the affidavits without a word of comment, and sewing them up with _Chuzzlewit_. Talfourd is strongly disinclined to compromise with the printers on any terms. In which case it would be referred to the master to ascertain what profits had been made by the piracy, and to order the same to be paid to me. But wear and tear of law is my consideration." The undertaking to which he had at last to submit was, that upon ample public apology, and payment of all costs, the offenders should be let go; but the real result was that, after infinite vexation and trouble, he had himself to pay all the costs incurred on his own behalf; and, a couple of years later, upon repetition of the wrong he had suffered in so gross a form that proceedings were again advised by Talfourd and others, he wrote to me from Switzerland the condition of mind to which his experience had brought him. "My feeling about the ---- is the feeling common, I suppose, to three fourths of the reflecting part of the community in our happiest of all possible countries; and that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the _Carol_ case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. Upon the whole, I certainly would much rather NOT proceed. What do you think of sending in a grave protest against what has been done in this case, on account of the immense amount of piracy to which I am daily exposed, and because I have been already met in the court of chancery with the legal doctrine that silence under such wrongs barred my remedy: to which Talfourd's written opinion might be appended as proof that we stopped under no discouragement. It is useless to affect that I don't know I have a morbid susceptibility of exasperation, to which the meanness and badness of the law in such a matter would be stinging in the last degree. And I know of nothing that _could_ come, even of a successful action, which would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost."[75] A few notes of besetting temptations during his busiest days at _Chuzzlewit_, one taken from each of the first four months of the year when he was working at its masterly closing scenes, will amusingly exhibit, side by side, his powers of resistance and capacities of enjoyment. "I had written you a line" (16th of January), "pleading Jonas and Mrs. Gamp, but this frosty day tempts me sorely. I am distractingly late; but I look at the sky, think of Hampstead, and feel hideously tempted. Don't come with Mae, and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you did." In the next (18th of February), he is not the tempted, but the tempter. "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead to dinner. I leave Betsey Prig as you know, so don't you make a scruple about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up, to give you time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw's at four. . . . In the very improbable (surely impossible?) case of your not coming, we will call on you at a quarter before eight, to go to the ragged school." The next (5th of March) shows him in yielding mood, and pitying himself for his infirmity of compliance. "Sir, I will--he--he--he--he--he--he--I will NOT eat with you, either at your own house or the club. But the morning looks bright, and a walk to Hampstead would suit me marvellously. If you should present yourself at my gate (bringing the R. A.'s along with you) I shall not be sapparized. So no more at this writing from Poor MR. DICKENS." But again the tables are turned, and he is tempter in the last; written on that Shakespeare day (23rd of April) which we kept always as a festival, and signed in character expressive of his then present unfitness for any of the practical affairs of life, including the very pressing business which at the moment ought to have occupied him, namely, attention to the long deferred nuptials of Miss Charity Pecksniff. "November blasts! Why it's the warmest, most genial, most intensely bland, delicious, growing, springy, songster-of-the-grovy, bursting-forth-of-the-buddy, day as ever was. At half-past four I shall expect you. Ever, MODDLE." Moddle, the sentimental noodle hooked by Miss Pecksniff who flies on his proposed wedding-day from the frightful prospect before him, the reader of course knows; and has perhaps admired for his last supreme outbreak of common sense. It was a rather favourite bit of humour with Dickens; and I find it pleasant to think that he never saw the description given of it by a trained and skilful French critic, who has been able to pass under his review the whole of English literature without any apparent sense or understanding of one of its most important as well as richest elements. A man without the perception of humour taking English prose literature in hand, can of course set about it only in one way. Accordingly, in Mr. Taine's decisive judgments of our last great humourist, which proceed upon a principle of psychological analysis which it is only fair to say he applies impartially to everybody, _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ are not in any manner even named or alluded to; Mrs. Gamp is only once mentioned as always talking of Mrs. Harris; and Mr. Micawber also only once as using always the same emphatic phrases; the largest extracts are taken from the two books in all the Dickens series that are weakest on the humorous side, _Hard Times_ and the _Chimes_; _Nickleby_, with its many laughter-moving figures, is dismissed in a line and a half; Mr. Toots, Captain Cuttle, Susan Nipper, Toodles, and the rest have no place in what is said of _Dombey_; and, to close with what has caused and must excuse my digression, Mr. Augustus Moddle is introduced as a gloomy maniac who makes us laugh and makes us shudder, and as drawn so truly for a madman that though at first sight agreeable, he is in reality horrible![76] A month before the letter subscribed by Dickens in the character, so happily unknown to himself, of this gloomy maniac, he had written to me from amidst his famous chapter in which the tables are turned on Pecksniff; but here I quote the letter chiefly for noticeable words at its close. "I heard from Macready by the Hibernia. I have been slaving away regularly, but the weather is against rapid progress. I altered the verbal error, and substituted for the action you didn't like some words expressive of the hurry of the scene. Macready sums up slavery in New Orleans in the way of a gentle doubting on the subject, by a 'but' and a dash. I believe it is in New Orleans that the man is lying under sentence of death, who, not having the fear of God before his eyes, did not deliver up a captive slave to the torture? The largest gun in that country has not burst yet--_but it will_. Heaven help us, too, from explosions nearer home! I declare I never go into what is called 'society' that I am not aweary of it, despise it, hate it, and reject it. The more I see of its extraordinary conceit, and its stupendous ignorance of what is passing out of doors, the more certain I am that it is approaching the period when, being incapable of reforming itself, it will have to submit to be reformed by others off the face of the earth." Thus we see that the old radical leanings were again rather strong in him at present, and I may add that he had found occasional recent vent for them by writing in the _Morning Chronicle_. Some articles thus contributed by him having set people talking, the proprietors of the paper rather eagerly mooted the question what payment he would ask for contributing regularly; and ten guineas an article was named. Very sensibly, however, the editor who had succeeded his old friend Black pointed out to him, that though even that sum would not be refused in the heat of the successful articles just contributed, yet (I quote his own account in a letter of the 7th of March 1844) so much would hardly be paid continuously; and thereupon an understanding, was come to, that he would write as a volunteer and leave his payment to be adjusted to the results. "Then said the editor--and this I particularly want you to turn over in your mind, at leisure--supposing me to go abroad, could I contemplate such a thing as the writing of a letter a week under any signature I chose, with such scraps of descriptions and impressions as suggested themselves to my mind? If so, would I do it for the _Chronicle_? And if so again, what would I do it for? He thought for such contributions Easthope would pay anything. I told him that the idea had never occurred to me; but that I was afraid he did not know what the value of such contributions would be. He repeated what he had said before; and I promised to consider whether I could reconcile it to myself to write such letters at all. The pros and cons need to be very carefully weighed. I will not tell you to which side I incline, but if we should disagree, or waver on the same points, we will call Bradbury and Evans to the council. I think it more than probable that we shall be of exactly the same mind, but I want you to be in possession of the facts and therefore send you this rigmarole." The rigmarole is not unimportant; because, though we did not differ on the wisdom of saying No to the _Chronicle_, the "council" spoken of was nevertheless held, and in it lay the germ of another newspaper enterprise he permitted himself to engage in twelve months later, to which he would have done more wisely to have also answered No. The preparation for departure was now actively going forward, and especially his enquiries for two important adjuncts thereto, a courier and a carriage. As to the latter it occurred to him that he might perhaps get for little money "some good old shabby devil of a coach--one of those vast phantoms that hide themselves in a corner of the Pantechnicon;" and exactly such a one he found there; sitting himself inside it, a perfect Sentimental Traveller, while the managing man told him its history. "As for comfort--let me see--it is about the size of your library; with night-lamps and day-lamps and pockets and imperials and leathern cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances. Joking apart, it is a wonderful machine. And when you see it (if you _do_ see it) you will roar at it first, and will then proclaim it to be 'perfectly brilliant, my dear fellow.'" It was marked sixty pounds; he got it for five-and-forty; and my own emotions respecting it he had described by anticipation quite correctly. In finding a courier he was even more fortunate; and these successes were followed by a third apparently very promising, but in the result less satisfactory. His house was let to not very careful people. The tenant having offered herself for Devonshire-terrace unexpectedly, during the last week or two of his stay in England he went into temporary quarters in Osnaburgh-terrace; and here a domestic difficulty befell of which the mention may be amusing, when I have disposed of an incident that preceded it too characteristic for omission. The Mendicity Society's officers had caught a notorious begging-letter writer, had identified him as an old offender against Dickens of which proofs were found on his person, and had put matters in train for his proper punishment; when the wretched creature's wife made such appeal before the case was heard at the police-court, that Dickens broke down in his character of prosecutor, and at the last moment, finding what was said of the man's distress at the time to be true, relented. "When the Mendicity officers themselves told me the man was in distress, I desired them to suppress what they knew about him, and slipped out of the bundle (in the police office) his first letter, which was the greatest lie of all. For he looked wretched, and his wife had been waiting about the street to see me, all the morning. It was an exceedingly bad case however, and the imposition, all through, very great indeed. Insomuch that I could not _say_ anything in his favour, even when I saw him. Yet I was not sorry that the creature found the loophole for escape. The officers had taken him illegally without any warrant; and really they messed it all through, quite facetiously." He will himself also best relate the small domestic difficulty into which he fell in his temporary dwelling, upon his unexpectedly discovering it to be unequal to the strain of a dinner party for which invitations had gone out just before the sudden "let" of Devonshire-terrace. The letter is characteristic in other ways, or I should hardly have gone so far into domesticities here; and it enables me to add that with the last on its list of guests, Mr. Chapman the chairman of Lloyd's, he held much friendly intercourse, and that few things more absurd or unfounded have been invented, even of Dickens, than that he found any part of the original of Mr. Dombey in the nature, the appearance, or the manners of this estimable gentleman. "Advise, advise," he wrote (9 Osnaburgh-terrace, 28th of May 1844), "advise with a distracted man. Investigation below stairs renders it, as my father would say, 'manifest to any person of ordinary intelligence, if the term may be considered allowable,' that the Saturday's dinner cannot come off here with safety. It would be a toss-up, and might come down heads, but it would put us into an agony with that kind of people. . . . Now, I feel a difficulty in dropping it altogether, and really fear that this might have an indefinably suspicious and odd appearance. Then said I at breakfast this morning, I'll send down to the Clarendon. Then says Kate, have it at Richmond. Then I say, that might be inconvenient to the people. Then she says, how could it be if we dine late enough? Then I am very much offended without exactly knowing why; and come up here, in a state of hopeless mystification. . . . What do you think? Ellis would be quite as dear as anybody else; and unless the weather changes, the place is objectionable. I must make up my mind to do one thing or other, for we shall meet Lord Denman at dinner to-day. Could it be dropped decently? That, I think very doubtful. Could it be done for a couple of guineas apiece at the Clarendon? . . . In a matter of more importance I could make up my mind. But in a matter of this kind I bother and bewilder myself, and come to no conclusion whatever. Advise! Advise! . . . List of the Invited. There's Lord Normanby. And there's Lord Denman. There's Easthope, wife, and sister. There's Sydney Smith. There's you and Mac. There's Babbage. There's a Lady Osborne and her daughter. There's Southwood Smith. And there's Quin. And there are Thomas Chapman and his wife. So many of these people have never dined with us, that the fix is particularly tight. Advise! Advise!" My advice was for throwing over the party altogether, but additional help was obtained and the dinner went off very pleasantly. It was the last time we saw Sydney Smith. Of one other characteristic occurrence he wrote before he left; and the very legible epigraph round the seal of his letter, "It is particularly requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not trouble himself to seal it again," expresses both its date and its writer's opinion of a notorious transaction of the time. "I wish" (28th of June) "you would read this, and give it me again when we meet at Stanfield's to-day. Newby has written to me to say that he hopes to be able to give Overs more money than was agreed on." The enclosure was the proof-sheet of a preface written by him to a small collection of stories by a poor carpenter dying of consumption, who hoped by their publication, under protection of such a name, to leave behind him some small provision for his ailing wife and little children.[77] The book was dedicated to the kind physician, Doctor Elliotson, whose name was for nearly thirty years a synonym with us all for unwearied, self-sacrificing, beneficent service to every one in need. The last incident before Dickens's departure was a farewell dinner to him at Greenwich, which took also the form of a celebration for the completion of _Chuzzlewit_, or, as the Ballantynes used to call it in Scott's case, a christening dinner; when Lord Normanby took the chair, and I remember sitting next the great painter Turner, who had come with Stanfield, and had enveloped his throat, that sultry summer day, in a huge red belcher-handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove. He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the changing lights on the river. Carlyle did not come; telling me in his reply to the invitation that he truly loved Dickens, having discerned in the inner man of him a real music of the genuine kind, but that he'd rather testify to this in some other form than that of dining out in the dogdays. FOOTNOTES: [74] In a letter on the subject of copyright published by Thomas Hood after Dickens's return from America, he described what had passed between himself and one of these pirates who had issued a Master Humphrey's Clock edited by Bos. "Sir," said the man to Hood, "if you had observed the name, it was _Bos_, not _Boz_; s, sir, not z; and, besides, it would have been no piracy, sir, even with the z, because _Master Humphrey's Clock_, you see, sir, was not published as by Boz, but by Charles Dickens!" [75] The reader may be amused if I add in a note what he said of the pirates in those earlier days when grave matters touched him less gravely. On the eve of the first number of _Nickleby_ he had issued a proclamation. "Whereas we are the only true and lawful Boz. And whereas it hath been reported to us, who are commencing a new work, that some dishonest dullards resident in the by-streets and cellars of this town impose upon the unwary and credulous, by producing cheap and wretched imitations of our delectable works. And whereas we derive but small comfort under this injury from the knowledge that the dishonest dullards aforesaid cannot, by reason of their mental smallness, follow near our heels, but are constrained to creep along by dirty and little-frequented ways, at a most respectful and humble distance behind. And whereas, in like manner, as some other vermin are not worth the killing for the sake of their carcases, so these kennel pirates are not worth the powder and shot of the law, inasmuch as whatever damages they may commit they are in no condition to pay any. This is to give notice, that we have at length devised a mode of execution for them, so summary and terrible, that if any gang or gangs thereof presume to hoist but one shred of the colours of the good ship _Nickleby_, we will hang them on gibbets so lofty and enduring that their remains shall be a monument of our just vengeance to all succeeding ages; and it shall not lie in the power of any lord high admiral, on earth, to cause them to be taken down again." The last paragraph of the proclamation informed the potentates of Paternoster-row, that from the then ensuing day of the thirtieth of March, until farther notice, "we shall hold our Levees, as heretofore, on the last evening but one of every month, between the hours of seven and nine, at our Board of Trade, number one hundred and eighty-six in the Strand, London; where we again request the attendance (in vast crowds) of their accredited agents and ambassadors. Gentlemen to wear knots upon their shoulders; and patent cabs to draw up with their doors towards the grand entrance, for the convenience of loading." [76] This might seem not very credible if I did not give the passage literally, and I therefore quote it from the careful translation of _Taine's History of English Literature_ by Mr. Van Laun, one of the masters of the Edinburgh Academy, where I will venture to hope that other authorities on English Literature are at the same time admitted. "Jonas" (also in _Chuzzlewit_) "is on the verge of madness. There are other characters quite mad. Dickens has drawn three or four portraits of madmen, very agreeable at first sight, but so true that they are in reality horrible. It needed an imagination like his, irregular, excessive, capable of fixed ideas, to exhibit the derangements of reason. Two especially there are, which make us laugh, and which make us shudder. Augustus, the gloomy maniac, who is on the point of marrying Miss Pecksniff; and poor Mr. Dick, half an idiot, half a monomaniac, who lives with Miss Trotwood. . . . The play of these shattered reasons is like the creaking of a dislocated door; it makes one sick to hear it." (Vol. ii. p. 346.) The original was published before Dickens's death, but he certainly never saw it. [77] He wrote from Marseilles (17th Dec. 1844). "When poor Overs was dying he suddenly asked for a pen and ink and some paper, and made up a little parcel for me which it was his last conscious act to direct. She (his wife) told me this and gave it me. I opened it last night. It was a copy of his little book in which he had written my name, 'With his devotion.' I thought it simple and affecting of the poor fellow." From a later letter a few lines may be added. "Mrs. Overs tells me" (Monte Vacchi, 30th March, 1845) "that Miss Coutts has sent her, at different times, sixteen pounds, has sent a doctor to her children, and has got one of the girls into the Orphan School. When I wrote her a word in the poor woman's behalf, she wrote me back to the effect that it was a kindness to herself to have done so, 'for what is the use of my means but to try and do some good with them?'" CHAPTER V. IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO. 1844. Arrival at Marseilles--A Character--Villa at Genoa--Sirocco--Sunsets and Scenery--Address to Maclise--French and Italian Skies--The Mediterranean--The Cicala--French Consul of Genoa--Learning Italian--Trades-people--Genoa the Superb--Theatres--Italian Plays--Religious Houses--Sunday Promenade--Winter Residence chosen--Dinner at French Consul's--Reception at M. di Negri's--A Tumble--English Visitors and News--Visit of his Brother--Sea-bathing. THE travelling party arrived at Marseilles on the evening of Sunday the 14th of July. Not being able to get vetturino horses in Paris, they had come on, post; paying for nine horses but bringing only four, and thereby saving a shilling a mile out of what the four would have cost in England. So great thus far, however, had been the cost of travel, that "what with distance, caravan, sight-seeing, and everything," two hundred pounds would be nearly swallowed up before they were at their destination. The success otherwise had been complete. The children had not cried in their worst troubles, the carriage had gone lightly over abominable roads, and the courier had proved himself a perfect gem. "Surrounded by strange and perfectly novel circumstances," Dickens wrote to me from Marseilles, "I feel as if I had a new head on side by side with my old one." To what shrewd and kindly observation the old one had helped him at every stage of his journey, his published book of travel tells, and of all that there will be nothing here; but a couple of experiences at his outset, of which he told me afterwards, have enough character in them to be worth mention. Shortly before there had been some public interest about the captain of a Boulogne steamer apprehended on a suspicion of having stolen specie, but reinstated by his owners after a public apology to him on their behalf; and Dickens had hardly set foot on the boat that was to carry them across, when he was attracted by the look of its captain, and discovered him after a few minutes' talk to be that very man. "Such an honest, simple, good fellow, I never saw," said Dickens, as he imitated for me the homely speech in which his confidences were related. The Boulogne people, he said, had given him a piece of plate, "but Lord bless us! it took a deal more than that to get him round again in his own mind; and for weeks and weeks he was uncommon low to be sure. Newgate, you see! What a place for a sea-faring man as had held up his head afore the best on 'em, and had more friends, I mean to say, and I do tell you the daylight truth, than any man on this station--ah! or any other, I don't care where!" His first experience in a foreign tongue he made immediately on landing, when he had gone to the bank for money, and after delivering with most laborious distinctness a rather long address in French to the clerk behind the counter, was disconcerted by that functionary's cool enquiry in the native-born Lombard-street manner, "How would you like to take it, sir?" He took it, as everybody must, in five-franc pieces, and a most inconvenient coinage he found it; for he required so much that he had to carry it in a couple of small sacks, and was always "turning hot about suddenly" taking it into his head that he had lost them. The evening of Tuesday the 16th of July saw him in a villa at Albaro, the suburb of Genoa in which, upon the advice of our Gore-house friends, he had resolved to pass the summer months before taking up his quarters in the city. His wish was to have had Lord Byron's house there, but it had fallen into neglect and become the refuge of a third-rate wine-shop. The matter had then been left to Angus Fletcher who just now lived near Genoa, and he had taken at a rent absurdly above its value[78] an unpicturesque and uninteresting dwelling, which at once impressed its new tenant with its likeness to a pink jail. "It is," he said to me, "the most perfectly lonely, rusty, stagnant old staggerer of a domain that you can possibly imagine. What would I give if you could only look round the courtyard! _I_ look down into it, whenever I am near that side of the house, for the stable is so full of 'vermin and swarmers' (pardon the quotation from my inimitable friend) that I always expect to see the carriage going out bodily, with legions of industrious fleas harnessed to and drawing it off, on their own account. We have a couple of Italian work-people in our establishment; and to hear one or other of them talking away to our servants with the utmost violence and volubility in Genoese, and our servants answering with great fluency in English (very loud: as if the others were only deaf, not Italian), is one of the most ridiculous things possible. The effect is greatly enhanced by the Genoese manner, which is exceedingly animated and pantomimic; so that two friends of the lower class conversing pleasantly in the street, always seem on the eve of stabbing each other forthwith. And a stranger is immensely astonished at their not doing it." The heat tried him less than he expected, excepting always the sirocco, which, near the sea as they were, and right in the course of the wind as it blew against the house, made everything hotter than if there had been no wind. "One feels it most, on first getting up. Then, it is really so oppressive that a strong determination is necessary to enable one to go on dressing; one's tendency being to tumble down anywhere and lie there." It seemed to hit him, he said, behind the knee, and made his legs so shake that he could not walk or stand. He had unfortunately a whole week of this without intermission, soon after his arrival; but then came a storm, with wind from the mountains; and he could bear the ordinary heat very well. What at first had been a home-discomfort, the bare walls, lofty ceilings, icy floors, and lattice blinds, soon became agreeable; there were regular afternoon breezes from the sea; in his courtyard was a well of very pure and very cold water; there were new milk and eggs by the bucketful, and, to protect from the summer insects these and other dainties, there were fresh vine-leaves by the thousand; and he satisfied himself, by the experience of a day or two in the city, that he had done well to come first to its suburb by the sea. What startled and disappointed him most were the frequent cloudy days.[79] He opened his third letter (3rd of August) by telling me there was a thick November fog, that rain was pouring incessantly, and that he did not remember to have seen in his life, at that time of year, such cloudy weather as he had seen beneath Italian skies. "The story goes that it is in autumn and winter, when other countries are dark and foggy, that the beauty and clearness of this are most observable. I hope it may prove so; for I have postponed going round the hills which encircle the city, or seeing any of the sights, until the weather is more favourable.[80] I have never yet seen it so clear, for any longer time of the day together, as on a bright, lark-singing, coast-of-France-discerning day at Broadstairs; nor have I ever seen so fine a sunset, _throughout_, as is very common there. But the scenery is exquisite, and at certain periods of the evening and the morning the blue of the Mediterranean surpasses all conception or description. It is the most intense and wonderful colour, I do believe, in all nature." In his second letter from Albaro there was more of this subject; and an outbreak of whimsical enthusiasm in it, meant especially for Maclise, is followed by some capital description. "I address you, my friend," he wrote, "with something of the lofty spirit of an exile, a banished commoner, a sort of Anglo-Pole. I don't exactly know what I have done for my country in coming away from it, but I feel it is something; something great; something virtuous and heroic. Lofty emotions rise within me, when I see the sun set on the blue Mediterranean. I am the limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner, and my boots are green. . . . Apropos of blue. In a certain picture called the Serenade for which Browning wrote that verse[81] in Lincoln's-inn-fields, you, O Mac, painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the south of France, at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles, I saw deep blue skies; and also in America. But the sky above me is familiar to my sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin brother shining through the window of Jack Straw's--that down in Devonshire-terrace I have seen a better sky? I dare say it is; but like a great many other heresies, it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in the vineyard down below the windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing, silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it, only so much as you could scoop up on the beach in the hollow of your hand, would wash out everything else, and make a great blue blank of your intellect. . . . When the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic. From any one of eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may behold the broad sea, villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose leaves. Strewn with them? Steeped in them! Dyed, through and through and through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce (like everything else in these parts), and goes down headlong. Run to fetch your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night--and it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here that chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very loud: something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born to chirp; to progress in chirping; to chirp louder, louder, louder; till it gives one tremendous chirp and bursts itself. That is its life and death. Everything is 'in a concatenation accordingly.' The day gets brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter, hotter, hotter, till it explodes. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper, till it tumbles down and rots. . . . Ask me a question or two about fresco: will you be so good? All the houses are painted in fresco, hereabout (the outside walls I mean, the fronts, backs, and sides), and all the colour has run into damp and green seediness; and the very design has straggled away into the component atoms of the plaster. Beware of fresco! Sometimes (but not often) I can make out a Virgin with a mildewed glory round her head, holding nothing in an undiscernible lap with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arm of a cherub. But it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old fresco-painted vases outside my own gate, one on either hand, which are so faint that I never saw them till last night; and only then, because I was looking over the wall after a lizard who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar above, and crawled over one of these embellishments in his retreat. . . ." That letter sketched for me the story of his travel through France, and I may at once say that I thus received, from week to week, the "first sprightly runnings" of every description in his _Pictures from Italy_. But my rule as to the American letters must be here observed yet more strictly; and nothing resembling his printed book, however distantly, can be admitted into these pages. Even so my difficulty of rejection will not be less; for as he had not actually decided, until the very last, to publish his present experiences at all, a larger number of the letters were left unrifled by him. He had no settled plan from the first, as in the other case. [Illustration] His most valued acquaintance at Albaro was the French consul-general, a student of our literature who had written on his books in one of the French reviews, and who with his English wife lived in the very next villa, though so oddly shut away by its vineyard that to get from the one adjoining house to the other was a mile's journey.[82] Describing, in that August letter, his first call from this new friend thus pleasantly self-recommended, he makes the visit his excuse for breaking off from a facetious description of French inns to introduce to me a sketch, from a pencil outline by Fletcher, of what bore the imposing name of the Villa di Bella vista, but which he called by the homelier one of its proprietor, Bagnerello. "This, my friend, is quite accurate. Allow me to explain it. You are standing, sir, in our vineyard, among the grapes and figs. The Mediterranean is at your back as you look at the house: of which two sides, out of four, are here depicted. The lower story (nearly concealed by the vines) consists of the hall, a wine-cellar, and some store-rooms. The three windows on the left of the first floor belong to the sala, lofty and whitewashed, which has two more windows round the corner. The fourth window _did_ belong to the dining-room, but I have changed one of the nurseries for better air; and it now appertains to that branch of the establishment. The fifth and sixth, or two right-hand windows, sir, admit the light to the inimitable's (and uxor's) chamber; to which the first window round the right-hand corner, which you perceive in shadow, also belongs. The next window in shadow, young sir, is the bower of Miss H. The next, a nursery window; the same having two more round the corner again. The bowery-looking place stretching out upon the left of the house is the terrace, which opens out from a French window in the drawing-room on the same floor, of which you see nothing: and forms one side of the court-yard. The upper windows belong to some of those uncounted chambers upstairs; the fourth one, longer than the rest, being in F.'s bedroom. There is a kitchen or two up there besides, and my dressing-room; which you can't see from this point of view. The kitchens and other offices in use are down below, under that part of the house where the roof is longest. On your left, beyond the bay of Genoa, about two miles off, the Alps stretch off into the far horizon; on your right, at three or four miles distance, are mountains crowned with forts. The intervening space on both sides is dotted with villas, some green, some red, some yellow, some blue, some (and ours among the number) pink. At your back, as I have said, sir, is the ocean; with the slim Italian tower of the ruined church of St. John the Baptist rising up before it, on the top of a pile of savage rocks. You go through the court-yard, and out at the gate, and down a narrow lane to the sea. Note. The sala goes sheer up to the top of the house; the ceiling being conical, and the little bedrooms built round the spring of its arch. You will observe that we make no pretension to architectural magnificence, but that we have abundance of room. And here I am, beholding only vines and the sea for days together. . . . Good Heavens! How I wish you'd come for a week or two, and taste the white wine at a penny farthing the pint. It is excellent.". . . Then, after seven days: "I have got my paper and inkstand and figures now (the box from Osnaburgh-terrace only came last Thursday), and can think--I have begun to do so every morning--with a business-like air, of the Christmas book. My paper is arranged, and my pens are spread out in the usual form. I think you know the form--Don't you? My books have not passed the custom-house yet, and I tremble for some volumes of Voltaire. . . . I write in the best bedroom. The sun is off the corner window at the side of the house by a very little after twelve; and I can then throw the blinds open, and look up from my paper, at the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, at the blistering white hot fort with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no broader than his own musket, and at the sky, as often as I like. It is a very peaceful view, and yet a very cheerful one. Quiet as quiet can be." Not yet however had the time for writing come. A sharp attack of illness befell his youngest little daughter, Kate, and troubled him much. Then, after beginning the Italian grammar himself, he had to call in the help of a master; and this learning of the language took up time. But he had an aptitude for it, and after a month's application told me (24th of August) that he could ask in Italian for whatever he wanted in any shop or coffee-house, and could read it pretty well. "I wish you could see me" (16th of September), "without my knowing it, walking about alone here. I am now as bold as a lion in the streets. The audacity with which one begins to speak when there is no help for it, is quite astonishing." The blank impossibility at the outset, however, of getting native meanings conveyed to his English servants, he very humorously described to me; and said the spell was first broken by the cook, "being really a clever woman, and not entrenching herself in that astonishing pride of ignorance which induces the rest to oppose themselves to the receipt of any information through any channel, and which made A. careless of looking out of window, in America, even to see the Falls of Niagara." So that he soon had to report the gain, to all of them, from the fact of this enterprising woman having so primed herself with "the names of all sorts of vegetables, meats, soups, fruits, and kitchen necessaries," that she was able to order whatever was needful of the peasantry that were trotting in and out all day, basketed and barefooted. Her example became at once contagious;[83] and before the end of the second week of September news reached me that "the servants are beginning to pick up scraps of Italian; some of them go to a weekly conversazione of servants at the Governor's every Sunday night, having got over their consternation at the frequent introduction of quadrilles on these occasions; and I think they begin to like their foreigneering life." In the tradespeople they dealt with at Albaro he found amusing points of character. Sharp as they were after money, their idleness quenched even that propensity. Order for immediate delivery two or three pounds of tea, and the tea-dealer would be wretched. "Won't it do to-morrow?" "I want it now," you would reply; and he would say, "No, no, there can be no hurry!" He remonstrated against the cruelty. But everywhere there was deference, courtesy, more than civility. "In a café a little tumbler of ice costs something less than threepence, and if you give the waiter in addition what you would not offer to an English beggar, say, the third of a halfpenny, he is profoundly grateful." The attentions received from English residents were unremitting.[84] In moments of need at the outset, they bestirred themselves ("large merchants and grave men") as if they were the family's salaried purveyors; and there was in especial one gentleman named Curry whose untiring kindness was long remembered. The light, eager, active figure soon made itself familiar in the streets of Genoa, and he never went into them without bringing some oddity away. I soon heard of the strada Nuova and strada Balbi; of the broadest of the two as narrower than Albany-street, and of the other as less wide than Drury-lane or Wych-street; but both filled with palaces of noble architecture and of such vast dimensions that as many windows as there are days in the year might be counted in one of them, and this not covering by any means the largest plot of ground. I heard too of the other streets, none with footways, and all varying in degrees of narrowness, but for the most part like Field-lane in Holborn, with little breathing-places like St. Martin's-court; and the widest only in parts wide enough to enable a carriage and pair to turn. "Imagine yourself looking down a street of Reform Clubs cramped after this odd fashion, the lofty roofs almost seeming to meet in the perspective." In the churches nothing struck him so much as the profusion of trash and tinsel in them that contrasted with their real splendours of embellishment. One only, that of the Cappucini friars, blazed every inch of it with gold, precious stones, and paintings of priceless art; the principal contrast to its radiance being the dirt of its masters, whose bare legs, corded waists, and coarse brown serge never changed by night or day, proclaimed amid their corporate wealth their personal vows of poverty. He found them less pleasant to meet and look at than the country people of their suburb on festa-days, with the Indulgences that gave them the right to make merry stuck in their hats like turnpike-tickets. He did not think the peasant girls in general good-looking, though they carried themselves daintily and walked remarkably well: but the ugliness of the old women, begotten of hard work and a burning sun, with porters' knots of coarse grey hair grubbed up over wrinkled and cadaverous faces, he thought quite stupendous. He was never in a street a hundred yards long without getting up perfectly the witch part of _Macbeth_. With the theatres of course he soon became acquainted, and of that of the puppets he wrote to me again and again with humorous rapture. "There are other things," he added, after giving me the account which is published in his book, "too solemnly surprising to dwell upon. They must be seen. They must be seen. The enchanter carrying off the bride is not greater than his men brandishing fiery torches and dropping their lighted spirits of wine at every shake. Also the enchanter himself, when, hunted down and overcome, he leaps into the rolling sea, and finds a watery grave. Also the second comic man, aged about 55 and like George the Third in the face, when he gives out the play for the next night. They must all be seen. They can't be told about. Quite impossible." The living performers he did not think so good, a disbelief in Italian actors having been always a heresy with him, and the deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's _Père Goriot_. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful--perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of _Kean_, in which most of the representatives of English actors wore red hats with steeple crowns, and very loose blouses with broad belts and buckles round their waists. "There was a mysterious person called the Prince of Var-lees" (Wales), "the youngest and slimmest man in the company, whose badinage in Kean's dressing-room was irresistible; and the dresser wore top-boots, a Greek skull-cap, a black velvet jacket, and leather breeches. One or two of the actors looked very hard at me to see how I was touched by these English peculiarities--especially when Kean kissed his male friends on both cheeks." The arrangements of the house, which he described as larger than Drury-lane, he thought excellent. Instead of a ticket for the private box he had taken on the first tier, he received the usual key for admission which let him in as if he lived there; and for the whole set-out, "quite as comfortable and private as a box at our opera," paid only eight and fourpence English. The opera itself had not its regular performers until after Christmas, but in the summer there was a good comic company, and he saw the _Scaramuccia_ and the _Barber of Seville_ brightly and pleasantly done. There was also a day theatre, beginning at half past four in the afternoon; but beyond the novelty of looking on at the covered stage as he sat in the fresh pleasant air, he did not find much amusement in the Goldoni comedy put before him. There came later a Russian circus, which the unusual rains of that summer prematurely extinguished. The Religious Houses he made early and many enquiries about, and there was one that had stirred and baffled his curiosity much before he discovered what it really was. All that was visible from the street was a great high wall, apparently quite alone, no thicker than a party wall, with grated windows, to which iron screens gave farther protection. At first he supposed there had been a fire; but by degrees came to know that on the other side were galleries, one above another, one above another, and nuns always pacing them to and fro. Like the wall of a racket-ground outside, it was inside a very large nunnery; and let the poor sisters walk never so much, neither they nor the passers-by could see anything of each other. It was close upon the Acqua Sola, too; a little park with still young but very pretty trees, and fresh and cheerful fountains, which the Genoese made their Sunday promenade; and underneath which was an archway with great public tanks, where, at all ordinary times, washerwomen were washing away, thirty or forty together. At Albaro they were worse off in this matter: the clothes there being washed in a pond, beaten with gourds, and whitened with a preparation of lime: "so that," he wrote to me (24th of August), "what between the beating and the burning they fall into holes unexpectedly, and my white trowsers, after six weeks' washing, would make very good fishing-nets. It is such a serious damage that when we get into the Peschiere we mean to wash at home." Exactly a fortnight before this date, he had hired rooms in the Peschiere from the first of the following October; and so ended the house-hunting for his winter residence, that had taken him so often to the city. The Peschiere was the largest palace in Genoa let on hire, and had the advantage of standing on a height aloof from the town, surrounded by its own gardens. The rooms taken had been occupied by an English colonel, the remainder of whose term was let to Dickens for 500 francs a month (£20); and a few days after (20th of August) he described to me a fellow tenant: "A Spanish duke has taken the room under me in the Peschiere. The duchess was his mistress many years, and bore him (I think) six daughters. He always promised her that if she gave birth to a son, he would marry her; and when at last the boy arrived, he went into her bedroom, saying--'Duchess, I am charmed to "salute you!"' And he married her in good earnest, and legitimatized (as by the Spanish law he could) all the other children." The beauty of the new abode will justify a little description when he takes up his quarters there. One or two incidents may be related, meanwhile, of the closing weeks of his residence at Albaro. In the middle of August he dined with the French consul-general, and there will now be no impropriety in printing his agreeable sketch of the dinner. "There was present, among other Genoese, the Marquis di Negri: a very fat and much older Jerdan, with the same thickness of speech and size of tongue. He was Byron's friend, keeps open house here, writes poetry, improvises, and is a very good old Blunderbore; just the sort of instrument to make an artesian well with, anywhere. Well, sir, after dinner, the consul proposed my health, with a little French conceit to the effect that I had come to Italy to have personal experience of its lovely climate, and that there was this similarity between the Italian sun and its visitor, that the sun shone into the darkest places and made them bright and happy with its benignant influence, and that my books had done the like with the breasts of men, and so forth. Upon which Blunderbore gives his bright-buttoned blue coat a great rap on the breast, turns up his fishy eye, stretches out his arm like the living statue defying the lightning at Astley's, and delivers four impromptu verses in my honour, at which everybody is enchanted, and I more than anybody--perhaps with the best reason, for I didn't understand a word of them. The consul then takes from his breast a roll of paper, and says, 'I shall read them!' Blunderbore then says, 'Don't!' But the consul does, and Blunderbore beats time to the music of the verse with his knuckles on the table; and perpetually ducks forward to look round the cap of a lady sitting between himself and me, to see what I think of them. I exhibit lively emotion. The verses are in French--short line--on the taking of Tangiers by the Prince de Joinville; and are received with great applause; especially by a nobleman present who is reported to be unable to read and write. They end in my mind (rapidly translating them into prose) thus,-- 'The cannon of France Rendering thanks Shake the foundation To Heaven. Of the wondering sea, The King The artillery on the shore And all the Royal Family Is put to silence. Are bathed Honour to Joinville In tears. And the Brave! They call upon the name The Great Intelligence Of Joinville! Is borne France also Upon the wings of Fame Weeps, and echoes it. To Paris. Joinville is crowned Her national citizens With Immortality; Exchange caresses And Peace and Joinville, In the streets! And the Glory of France, The temples are crowded Diffuse themselves With religious patriots Conjointly.' If you can figure to yourself the choice absurdity of receiving anything into one's mind in this way, you can imagine the labour I underwent in my attempts to keep the lower part of my face square, and to lift up one eye gently, as with admiring attention. But I am bound to add that this is really pretty literal; for I read them afterwards." This, too, was the year of other uncomfortable glories of France in the last three years of her Orleans dynasty; among them the Tahiti business, as politicians may remember; and so hot became rumours of war with England at the opening of September that Dickens had serious thoughts of at once striking his tent. One of his letters was filled with the conflicting doubts in which they lived for nigh a fortnight, every day's arrival contradicting the arrival of the day before: so that, as he told me, you met a man in the street to-day, who told you there would certainly be war in a week; and you met the same man in the street to-morrow, and he swore he always knew there would be nothing but peace; and you met him again the day after, and he said it all depended _now_ on something perfectly new and unheard of before, which somebody else said had just come to the knowledge of some consul in some dispatch which said something about some telegraph which had been at work somewhere, signalizing some prodigious intelligence. However, it all passed harmlessly away, leaving him undisturbed opportunity to avail himself of a pleasure that arose out of the consul-general's dinner party, and to be present at a great reception given shortly after by the good "old Blunderbore" just mentioned, on the occasion of his daughter's birthday. The Marquis had a splendid house, but Dickens found the grounds so carved into grottoes and fanciful walks as to remind him of nothing so much as our old White-conduit-house, except that he would have been well pleased, on the present occasion, to have discovered a waiter crying, "Give your orders, gents!" it being not easy to him at any time to keep up, the whole night through, on ices and variegated lamps merely. But the scene for awhile was amusing enough, and not rendered less so by the delight of the Marquis himself, "who was constantly diving out into dark corners and then among the lattice-work and flower pots, rubbing his hands and going round and round with explosive chuckles in his huge satisfaction with the entertainment." With horror it occurred to Dickens, however, that four more hours of this kind of entertainment would be too much; that the Genoa gates closed at twelve; and that as the carriage had not been ordered till the dancing was expected to be over and the gates to reopen, he must make a sudden bolt if he would himself get back to Albaro. "I had barely time," he told me, "to reach the gate before midnight; and was running as hard as I could go, down-hill, over uneven ground, along a new street called the strada Sevra, when I came to a pole fastened straight across the street, nearly breast high, without any light or watchman--quite in the Italian style. I went over it, headlong, with such force that I rolled myself completely white in the dust; but although I tore my clothes to shreds, I hardly scratched myself except in one place on the knee. I had no time to think of it then, for I was up directly and off again to save the gate: but when I got outside the wall, and saw the state I was in, I wondered I had not broken my neck. I 'took it easy' after this, and walked home, by lonely ways enough, without meeting a single soul. But there is nothing to be feared, I believe, from midnight walks in this part of Italy. In other places you incur the danger of being stabbed by mistake; whereas the people here are quiet and good tempered, and very rarely commit any outrage." Such adventures, nevertheless, are seldom without consequences, and there followed in this case a short but sharp attack of illness. It came on with the old "unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side," for which Bob Fagin had prepared and applied the hot bottles in the old warehouse time; and it yielded quickly to powerful remedies. But for a few days he had to content himself with the minor sights of Albaro. He sat daily in the shade of the ruined chapel on the seashore. He looked in at the festa in the small country church, consisting mainly of a tenor singer, a seraphine, and four priests sitting gaping in a row on one side of the altar "in flowered satin dresses and little cloth caps, looking exactly like the band at a wild-beast-caravan." He was interested in the wine-making, and in seeing the country tenants preparing their annual presents for their landlords, of baskets of grapes and other fruit prettily dressed with flowers. The season of the grapes, too, brought out after dusk strong parties of rats to eat them as they ripened, and so many shooting parties of peasants to get rid of these despoilers, that as he first listened to the uproar of the firing and the echoes he half fancied it a siege of Albaro. The flies mustered strong, too, and the mosquitos;[85] so that at night he had to lie covered up with gauze, like cold meat in a safe. Of course all news from England, and especially visits paid him by English friends who might be travelling in Italy, were a great delight. This was the year when O'Connell was released from prison by the judgment of the Lords on appeal. "I have no faith in O'Connell taking the great position he might upon this: being beleaguered by vanity always. Denman delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it _is_ a mistake; and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing: fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble letter of Carlyle's" (in which a timely testimony had been borne to the truthfulness and honour of Mazzini), "which I think above all praise. My love to him." Among his English visitors were Mr. Tagart's family, on their way from a scientific congress at Milan; and Peter (now become Lord) Robertson from Rome, of whose talk he wrote very pleasantly. The sons of Burns had been entertained during the summer in Edinburgh at what was called a Burns Festival, of which, through Jerrold who was present, I had sent him no very favourable account; and this was now confirmed by Robertson, whose letters had given him an "awful" narrative of Wilson's speech, and of the whole business. "There was one man who spoke a quarter of an hour or so, to the toast of the navy; and could say nothing more than 'the--British--navy--always appreciates--' which remarkable sentiment he repeated over and over again for that space of time; and then sat down. Robertson told me also that Wilson's allusion to, or I should rather say expatiation upon, the 'vices' of Burns, excited but one sentiment of indignation and disgust: and added, very sensibly, 'By God!--I want to know _what Burns did_! I never heard of his doing anything that need be strange or unaccountable to the Professor's mind. I think he must have mistaken the name, and fancied it a dinner to the sons of _Burke_'--meaning of course the murderer. In short he fully confirmed Jerrold in all respects." The same letter told me, too, something of his reading. Jerrold's _Story of a Feather_ he had derived much enjoyment from. "Gauntwolf's sickness and the career of that snuffbox, masterly.[86] I have been deep in Voyages and Travels, and in De Foe. Tennyson I have also been reading, again and again. What a great creature he is! . . . What about the _Goldsmith_? Apropos, I am all eagerness to write a story about the length of that most delightful of all stories, the _Vicar of Wakefield_." In the second week of September he went to meet his brother Frederick at Marseilles, and bring him back over the Cornice road to pass a fortnight's holiday at Genoa; and his description of the first inn upon the Alps they slept in is too good to be lost. "We lay last night," he wrote (9th of September) "at the first halting-place on this journey, in an inn which is not entitled, as it ought to be, The house of call for fleas and vermin in general, but is entitled the grand hotel of the Post! I hardly know what to compare it to. It seemed something like a house in Somers-town originally built for a wine-vaults and never finished, but grown very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!--But let me here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms hardly human." In four days they were at Albaro, and the morning after their arrival Dickens underwent the terrible shock of seeing his brother very nearly drowned in the bay. He swam out into too strong a current,[87] and was only narrowly saved by the accident of a fishing-boat preparing to leave the harbour at the time. "It was a world of horror and anguish," Dickens wrote to me, "crowded into four or five minutes of dreadful agitation; and, to complete the terror of it, Georgy, Charlotte" (the nurse), "and the children were on a rock in full view of it all, crying, as you may suppose, like mad creatures." His own bathing was from the rock, and, as he had already told me, of the most primitive kind. He went in whenever he pleased, broke his head against sharp stones if he went in with that end foremost, floundered about till he was all over bruises, and then climbed and staggered out again. "Everybody wears a dress. Mine extremely theatrical: Masaniello to the life: shall be preserved for your inspection in Devonshire-terrace." I will add another personal touch, also Masaniello-like, which marks the beginning of a change which, though confined for the present to his foreign residence and removed when he came to England, was resumed somewhat later, and in a few more years wholly altered the aspect of his face. "The moustaches are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a little at the ends to improve the shape. They are charming, charming. Without them, life would be a blank." FOOTNOTES: [78] He regretted one chance missed by his eccentric friend, which he described to me just before he left Italy. "I saw last night an old palazzo of the Doria, six miles from here, upon the sea, which De la Rue urged Fletcher to take for us, when he was bent on that detestable villa Bagnerello; which villa the Genoese have hired, time out of mind, for one-fourth of what I paid, as they told him again and again before he made the agreement. This is one of the strangest old palaces in Italy, surrounded by beautiful _woods_ of great trees (an immense rarity here) some miles in extent: and has upon the terrace a high tower, formerly a prison for offenders against the family, and a defence against the pirates. The present Doria lets it as it stands for £40 English--for the year. . . . And the grounds are no expense; being proudly maintained by the Doria, who spends this rent, when he gets it, in repairing the roof and windows. It is a wonderful house; full of the most unaccountable pictures and most incredible furniture: every room in it like the most quaint and fanciful of Cattermole's pictures; and how many rooms I am afraid to say." 2nd of June, 1845. [79] "We have had a London sky until to-day," he wrote on the 20th of July, "gray and cloudy as you please: but I am most disappointed, I think, in the evenings, which are as commonplace as need be; for there is no twilight, and as to the stars giving more light here than elsewhere, that is humbug." The summer of 1844 seems to have been, however, an unusually stormy and wet season. He wrote to me on the 21st of October that they had had, so far, only four really clear days since they came to Italy. [80] "My faith on that-point is decidedly shaken, which reminds me to ask you whether you ever read Simond's Tour in Italy. It is a most charming book, and eminently remarkable for its excellent sense, and determination not to give in to conventional lies." In a later letter he says: "None of the books are unaffected and true but Simond's, which charms me more and more by its boldness, and its frank exhibition of that rare and admirable quality which enables a man to form opinions for himself without a miserable and slavish reference to the pretended opinions of other people. His notices of the leading pictures enchant me. They are so perfectly just and faithful, and so whimsically shrewd." Rome, 9th of March, 1845. [81] I send my heart up to thee, all my heart In this my singing! For the stars help me, and the sea bears part; The very night is clinging Closer to Venice' streets to leave one space Above me, whence thy face May light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place. Written to express Maclise's subject in the Academy catalogue. [82] "Their house is next to ours on the right, with vineyard between; but the place is so oddly contrived that one has to go a full mile round to get to their door." [83] Not however, happily for them, in another important particular, for on the eve of their return to England she declared her intention of staying behind and marrying an Italian. "She will have to go to Florence, I find" (12th of May 1845), "to be married in Lord Holland's house: and even then is only married according to the English law: having no legal rights from such a marriage, either in France or Italy. The man hasn't a penny. If there were an opening for a nice clean restaurant in Genoa--which I don't believe there is, for the Genoese have a natural enjoyment of dirt, garlic, and oil--it would still be a very hazardous venture; as the priests will certainly damage the man, if they can, for marrying a Protestant woman. However, the utmost I can do is to take care, if such a crisis should arrive, that she shall not want the means of getting home to England. As my father would observe, she has sown and must reap." [84] He had carried with him, I may here mention, letters of introduction to residents in all parts of Italy, of which I believe he delivered hardly one. Writing to me a couple of months before he left the country he congratulated himself on this fact. "We are living very quietly; and I am now more than ever glad that I have kept myself aloof from the 'receiving' natives always, and delivered scarcely any of my letters of introduction. If I had, I should have seen nothing and known less. I have observed that the English women who have married foreigners are invariably the most audacious in the license they assume. Think of one lady married to a royal chamberlain (not here) who said at dinner to the master of the house at a place where I was dining--that she had brought back his _Satirist_, but didn't think there was quite so much 'fun' in it as there used to be. I looked at the paper afterwards, and found it crammed with such vile obscenity as positively made one's hair stand on end." [85] What his poor little dog suffered should not be omitted from the troubles of the master who was so fond of him. "Timber has had every hair upon his body cut off because of the fleas, and he looks like the ghost of a drowned dog come out of a pond after a week or so. It is very awful to see him slide into a room. He knows the change upon him, and is always turning round and round to look for himself. I think he'll die of grief." Three weeks later: "Timber's hair is growing again, so that you can dimly perceive him to be a dog. The fleas only keep three of his legs off the ground now, and he sometimes moves of his own accord towards some place where they don't want to go." His improvement was slow, but after this continuous. [86] A characteristic message for Jerrold came in a later letter (12th of May, 1845): "I wish you would suggest to Jerrold for me as a Caudle subject (if he pursue that idea). 'Mr. Caudle has incidentally remarked that the house-maid is good-looking.'" [87] Of the dangers of the bay he had before written to me (10th of August). "A monk was drowned here on Saturday evening. He was bathing with two other monks, who bolted when he cried out that he was sinking--in consequence, I suppose, of his certainty of going to Heaven." CHAPTER VI. WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE. 1844. Palace of the Fish-ponds--Mural Paintings--Peschiere Garden--A Peal of Chimes--Governor's Levee--_Chimes_ a Plea for the Poor--Dickens's Choice of a Hero--Religious Sentiment--Dialogue in a Vision--Hard at Work--First Outline of the _Chimes_--What the Writing of it cost Him--Wild Weather--Coming to London--Secret of the Visit--The Tale finished--Proposed Travel. IN the last week of September they moved from Albaro into Genoa, amid a violent storm of wind and wet, "great guns blowing," the lightning incessant, and the rain driving down in a dense thick cloud. But the worst of the storm was over when they reached the Peschiere. As they passed into it along the stately old terraces, flanked on either side with antique sculptured figures, all the seven fountains were playing in its gardens, and the sun was shining brightly on its groves of camellias and orange-trees. It was a wonderful place, and I soon became familiar with the several rooms that were to form their home for the rest of their stay in Italy. In the centre was the grand sala, fifty feet high, of an area larger than "the dining-room of the Academy," and painted, walls and ceiling, with frescoes three hundred years old, "as fresh as if the colours had been laid on yesterday." On the same floor as this great hall were a drawing-room, and a dining-room,[88] both covered also with frescoes still bright enough to make them thoroughly cheerful, and both so nicely proportioned as to give to their bigness all the effect of snugness.[89] Out of these opened three other chambers that were turned into sleeping-rooms and nurseries. Adjoining the sala, right and left, were the two best bedrooms; "in size and shape like those at Windsor-castle but greatly higher;" both having altars, a range of three windows with stone balconies, floors tesselated in patterns of black and white stone, and walls painted every inch: on the left, nymphs pursued by satyrs "as large as life and as wicked;" on the right, "Phaeton larger than life, with horses bigger than Meux and Co.'s, tumbling headlong down into the best bed." The right-hand one he occupied with his wife, and of the left took possession as a study; writing behind a big screen he had lugged into it, and placed by one of the windows, from which he could see over the city, as he wrote, as far as the lighthouse in its harbour. Distant little over a mile as the crow flew, flashing five times in four minutes, and on dark nights, as if by magic, illuminating brightly the whole palace-front every time it shone, this lighthouse was one of the wonders of Genoa. [Illustration] When it had all become more familiar to him, he was fond of dilating on its beauties; and even the dreary sound of the chaunting from neighbouring mass-performances, as it floated in at all the open windows, which at first was a sad trouble, came to have its charm for him. I remember a vivid account he gave me of a great festa on the hill behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright with red and gold and blue and silver; so many minutes of dancing, and of praying, in regular turns of each. But the view over into Genoa, on clear bright days, was a never failing enjoyment. The whole city then, without an atom of smoke, and with every possible variety of tower and steeple pointing up into the sky, lay stretched out below his windows. To the right and left were lofty hills, with every indentation in their rugged sides sharply discernible; and on one side of the harbour stretched away into the dim bright distance the whole of the Cornice, its first highest range of mountains hoary with snow. Sitting down one Spring day to write to me, he thus spoke of the sea and of the garden. "Beyond the town is the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, as blue, at this moment, as the most pure and vivid prussian blue on Mac's palette when it is newly set; and on the horizon there is a red flush, seen nowhere as it is here. Immediately below the windows are the gardens of the house, with gold fish swimming and diving in the fountains; and below them, at the foot of a steep slope, the public garden and drive, where the walks are marked out by hedges of pink roses, which blush and shine through the green trees and vines, close up to the balconies of these windows. No custom can impair, and no description enhance, the beauty of the scene." All these and other glories and beauties, however, did not come to him at once. They counted for little indeed when he first set himself seriously to write. "Never did I stagger so upon a threshold before. I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left Devonshire-terrace; and could take root no more until I return to it. . . . Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West Middlesex water-works at Devonshire-terrace." The subject for his new Christmas story he had chosen, but he had not found a title for it, or the machinery to work it with; when, at the moment of what seemed to be his greatest trouble, both reliefs came. Sitting down one morning resolute for work, though against the grain, his hand being out and everything inviting to idleness, such a peal of chimes arose from the city as he found to be "maddening." All Genoa lay beneath him, and up from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead." He had never before so suffered, nor did he again; but this was his description to me next day, and his excuse for having failed in a promise to send me his title. Only two days later, however, came a letter in which not a syllable was written but "We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight, Master Shallow!" and I knew he had discovered what he wanted. Other difficulties were still to be got over. He craved for the London streets. He so missed his long night-walks before beginning anything that he seemed, as he said, dumbfounded without them. "I can't help thinking of the boy in the school-class whose button was cut off by Walter Scott and his friends. Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight o'clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on. I am sadly strange as it is, and can't settle. You will have lots of hasty notes from me while I am at work; but you know your man; and whatever strikes me, I shall let off upon you as if I were in Devonshire-terrace. It's a great thing to have my title, and see my way how to work the bells. Let them clash upon me now from all the churches and convents in Genoa, I see nothing but the old London belfry I have set them in. In my mind's eye, Horatio. I like more and more my notion of making, in this little book, a great blow for the poor. Something powerful, I think I can do, but I want to be tender too, and cheerful; as like the _Carol_ in that respect as may be, and as unlike it as such a thing can be. The duration of the action will resemble it a little, but I trust to the novelty of the machinery to carry that off; and if my design be anything at all, it has a grip upon the very throat of the time." (8th of October.) Thus bent upon his work, for which he never had been in more earnest mood, he was disturbed by hearing that he must attend the levee of the Governor who had unexpectedly arrived in the city, and who would take it as an affront, his eccentric friend Fletcher told him, if that courtesy were not immediately paid. "It was the morning on which I was going to begin, so I wrote round to our consul,"--praying, of course, that excuse should be made for him. Don't bother yourself, replied that sensible functionary, for all the consuls and governors alive; but shut yourself up by all means. "So," continues Dickens, telling me the tale, "he went next morning in great state and full costume, to present two English gentlemen. 'Where's the great poet?' said the Governor. 'I want to see the great poet.' 'The great poet, your excellency,' said the consul, 'is at work, writing a book, and begged me to make his excuses.' 'Excuses!' said the Governor, 'I wouldn't interfere with such an occupation for all the world. Pray tell him that my house is open to the honour of his presence when it is perfectly convenient for him; but not otherwise. And let no gentleman,' said the Governor, a surweyin' of his suite with a majestic eye, 'call upon Signor Dickens till he is understood to be disengaged.' And he sent somebody with his own cards next day. Now I _do_ seriously call this, real politeness and pleasant consideration--not positively American, but still gentlemanly and polished. The same spirit pervades the inferior departments; and I have not been required to observe the usual police regulations, or to put myself to the slightest trouble about anything." (18th of October.) The picture I am now to give of him at work should be prefaced by a word or two that may throw light on the design he was working at. It was a large theme for so small an instrument; and the disproportion was not more characteristic of the man, than the throes of suffering and passion to be presently undergone by him for results that many men would smile at. He was bent, as he says, on striking a blow for the poor. They had always been his clients, they had never been forgotten in any of his books, but here nothing else was to be remembered. He had become, in short, terribly earnest in the matter. Several months before he left England, I had noticed in him the habit of more gravely regarding many things before passed lightly enough; the hopelessness of any true solution of either political or social problems by the ordinary Downing-street methods had been startlingly impressed on him in Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil, as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came therefore to think of his new story for Christmas time, he resolved to make it a plea for the poor. He did not want it to resemble his _Carol_, but the same kind of moral was in his mind. He was to try and convert Society, as he had converted Scrooge, by showing that its happiness rested on the same foundations as those of the individual, which are mercy and charity not less than justice. Whether right or wrong in these assumptions, need not be questioned here, where facts are merely stated to render intelligible what will follow; he had not made politics at any time a study, and they were always an instinct with him rather than a science; but the instinct was wholesome and sound, and to set class against class never ceased to be as odious to him as he thought it righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the other. And so, here in Italy, amid the grand surroundings of this Palazzo Peschiere, the hero of his imagination was to be a sorry old drudge of a London ticket-porter, who in his anxiety not to distrust or think hardly of the rich, has fallen into the opposite extreme of distrusting the poor. From such distrust it is the object of the story to reclaim him; and, to the writer of it, the tale became itself of less moment than what he thus intended it to enforce. Far beyond mere vanity in authorship went the passionate zeal with which he began, and the exultation with which he finished, this task. When we met at its close, he was fresh from Venice, which had impressed him as "the wonder" and "the new sensation" of the world: but well do I remember how high above it all arose the hope that filled his mind. "Ah!" he said to me, "when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's staircase that Sampson couldn't overthrow!" In varying forms this ambition was in all his life. Another incident of these days will exhibit aspirations of a more solemn import that were not less part of his nature. It was depth of sentiment rather than clearness of faith which kept safe the belief on which they rested against all doubt or question of its sacredness, but every year seemed to strengthen it in him. This was told me in his second letter after reaching the Peschiere; the first having sent me some such commissions in regard to his wife's family as his kindly care for all connected with him frequently led to. "Let me tell you," he wrote (30th of September), "of a curious dream I had, last Monday night; and of the fragments of reality I can collect; which helped to make it up. I have had a return of rheumatism in my back, and knotted round my waist like a girdle of pain; and had laid awake nearly all that night under the infliction, when I fell asleep and dreamed this dream. Observe that throughout I was as real, animated, and full of passion as Macready (God bless him!) in the last scene of _Macbeth_. In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I recognized the voice. Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it 'Dear.' At this, I thought it recoiled; and I felt immediately, that not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have addressed it so familiarly. 'Forgive me!' I said. 'We poor living creatures are only able to express ourselves by looks and words. I have used the word most natural to _our_ affections; and you know my heart.' It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me--which I knew spiritually, for, as I have said, I didn't perceive its emotions by its face--that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, 'Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!' 'Form a wish,' it said. I thought, reasoning with myself: 'If I form a selfish wish, it will vanish.' So I hastily discarded such hopes and anxieties of my own as came into my mind, and said, 'Mrs. Hogarth is surrounded with great distresses'--observe, I never thought of saying 'your mother' as to a mortal creature--'will you extricate her?' 'Yes.' 'And her extrication is to be a certainty to me, that this has really happened?' 'Yes.' 'But answer me one other question!' I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave me. 'What is the True religion?' As it paused a moment without replying, I said--Good God in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away!--'You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? or,' I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, 'perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?' 'For _you_,' said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; 'for _you_, it is the best!' Then I awoke, with the tears running down my face, and myself in exactly the condition of the dream. It was just dawn. I called up Kate, and repeated it three or four times over, that I might not unconsciously make it plainer or stronger afterwards. It was exactly this. Free from all hurry, nonsense, or confusion, whatever. Now, the strings I can gather up, leading to this, were three. The first you know, from the main subject of my last letter. The second was, that there is a great altar in our bed-room, at which some family who once inhabited this palace had mass performed in old time: and I had observed within myself, before going to bed, that there was a mark in the wall, above the sanctuary, where a religious picture used to be; and I had wondered within myself what the subject might have been, _and what the face was like_. Thirdly, I had been listening to the convent bells (which ring at intervals in the night), and so had thought, no doubt, of Roman Catholic services. And yet, for all this, put the case of that wish being fulfilled by any agency in which I had no hand; and I wonder whether I should regard it as a dream, or an actual Vision!" It was perhaps natural that he should omit, from his own considerations awakened by the dream, the very first that would have risen in any mind to which his was intimately known--that it strengthens other evidences, of which there are many in his life, of his not having escaped those trying regions of reflection which most men of thought and all men of genius have at some time to pass through. In such disturbing fancies during the next year or two, I may add that the book which helped him most was the _Life of Arnold_. "I respect and reverence his memory," he wrote to me in the middle of October, in reply to my mention of what had most attracted myself in it, "beyond all expression. I must have that book. Every sentence that you quote from it is the text-book of my faith." He kept his promise that I should hear from him while writing, and I had frequent letters when he was fairly in his work. "With my steam very much up, I find it a great trial to be so far off from you, and consequently to have no one (always excepting Kate and Georgy) to whom to expatiate on my day's work. And I want a crowded street to plunge into at night. And I want to be 'on the spot' as it were. But apart from such things, the life I lead is favourable to work." In his next letter: "I am in regular, ferocious excitement with the _Chimes_; get up at seven; have a cold bath before breakfast; and blaze away, wrathful and red-hot, until three o'clock or so; when I usually knock off (unless it rains) for the day . . . I am fierce to finish in a spirit bearing some affinity to those of truth and mercy, and to shame the cruel and the canting. I have not forgotten my catechism. 'Yes verily, and with God's help, so I will!'" Within a week he had completed his first part, or quarter. "I send you to-day" (18th of October), "by mail, the first and longest of the four divisions. This is great for the first week, which is usually up-hill. I have kept a copy in shorthand in case of accidents. I hope to send you a parcel every Monday until the whole is done. I do not wish to influence you, but it has a great hold upon me, and has affected me, in the doing, in divers strong ways, deeply, forcibly. To give you better means of judgment I will sketch for you the general idea, but pray don't read it until you have read this first part of the MS." I print it here. It is a good illustration of his method in all his writing. His idea is in it so thoroughly, that, by comparison with the tale as printed, we see the strength of its mastery over his first design. Thus always, whether his tale was to be written in one or in twenty numbers, his fancies controlled him. He never, in any of his books, accomplished what he had wholly preconceived, often as he attempted it. Few men of genius ever did. Once at the sacred heat that opens regions beyond ordinary vision, imagination has its own laws; and where characters are so real as to be treated as existences, their creator himself cannot help them having their own wills and ways. Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie) who is to give to the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic fancy at the close of my sketch which the published story fell short of. Altogether the comparison is worth observing. "The general notion is this. That what happens to poor Trotty in the first part, and what will happen to him in the second (when he takes the letter to a punctual and a great man of business, who is balancing his books and making up his accounts, and complacently expatiating on the necessity of clearing off every liability and obligation, and turning over a new leaf and starting fresh with the new year), so dispirits him, who can't do this, that he comes to the conclusion that his class and order have no business with a new year, and really are 'intruding.' And though he will pluck up for an hour or so, at the christening (I think) of a neighbour's child, that evening: still, when he goes home, Mr. Filer's precepts will come into his mind, and he will say to himself, 'we are a long way past the proper average of children, and it has no business to be born:' and will be wretched again. And going home, and sitting there alone, he will take that newspaper out of his pocket, and reading of the crimes and offences of the poor, especially of those whom Alderman Cute is going to put down, will be quite confirmed in his misgiving that they are bad; irredeemably bad. In this state of mind, he will fancy that the Chimes are calling, to him; and saying to himself 'God help me. Let me go up to 'em. I feel as if I were going to die in despair--of a broken heart; let me die among the bells that have been a comfort to me!'--will grope his way up into the tower; and fall down in a kind of swoon among them. Then the third quarter, or in other words the beginning of the second half of the book, will open with the Goblin part of the thing: the bells ringing, and innumerable spirits (the sound or vibration of them) flitting and tearing in and out of the church-steeple, and bearing all sorts of missions and commissions and reminders and reproaches, and comfortable recollections and what not, to all sorts of people and places. Some bearing scourges; and others flowers, and birds, and music; and others pleasant faces in mirrors, and others ugly ones: the bells haunting people in the night (especially the last of the old year) according to their deeds. And the bells themselves, who have a goblin likeness to humanity in the midst of their proper shapes, and who shine in a light of their own, will say (the Great Bell being the chief spokesman) Who is he that being of the poor doubts the right of poor men to the inheritance which Time reserves for them, and echoes an unmeaning cry against his fellows? Toby, all aghast, will tell him it is he, and why it is. Then the spirits of the bells will bear him through the air to various scenes, charged with this trust: That they show him how the poor and wretched, at the worst--yes, even in the crimes that aldermen put down, and he has thought so horrible--have some deformed and hunchbacked goodness clinging to them; and how they have their right and share in Time. Following out the history of Meg the Bells will show her, that marriage broken off and all friends dead, with an infant child; reduced so low, and made so miserable, as to be brought at last to wander out at night. And in Toby's sight, her father's, she will resolve to drown herself and the child together. But before she goes down to the water, Toby will see how she covers it with a part of her own wretched dress, and adjusts its rags so as to make it pretty in its sleep, and hangs over it, and smooths its little limbs, and loves it with the dearest love that God ever gave to mortal creatures; and when she runs down to the water, Toby will cry 'Oh spare her! Chimes, have mercy on her! Stop her!'--and the bells will say, 'Why stop her? She is bad at heart--let the bad die.' And Toby on his knees will beg and pray for mercy: and in the end the bells will stop her, by their voices, just in time. Toby will see, too, what great things the punctual man has left undone on the close of the old year, and what accounts he has left unsettled: punctual as he is. And he will see a great many things about Richard, once so near being his son-in-law, and about a great many people. And the moral of it all will be, that he has his portion in the new year no less than any other man, and that the poor require a deal of beating out of shape before their human shape is gone; that even in their frantic wickedness there may be good in their hearts triumphantly asserting itself, though all the aldermen alive say 'No,' as he has learnt from the agony of his own child; and that the truth is Trustfulness in them, not doubt, nor putting down, nor filing them away. And when at last a great sea rises, and this sea of Time comes sweeping down, bearing the alderman and such mudworms of the earth away to nothing, dashing them to fragments in its fury--Toby will climb a rock and hear the bells (now faded from his sight) pealing out upon the waters. And as he hears them, and looks round for help, he will wake up and find himself with the newspaper lying at his foot; and Meg sitting opposite to him at the table, making up the ribbons for her wedding to-morrow; and the window open, that the sound of the bells ringing the old year out and the new year in may enter. They will just have broken out, joyfully; and Richard will dash in to kiss Meg before Toby, and have the first kiss of the new year (he'll get it too); and the neighbours will crowd round with good wishes; and a band will strike up gaily (Toby knows a Drum in private); and the altered circumstances, and the ringing of the bells, and the jolly musick, will so transport the old fellow that he will lead off a country dance forthwith in an entirely new step, consisting of his old familiar trot. Then quoth the inimitable--Was it a dream of Toby's after all? Or is Toby but a dream? and Meg a dream? and all a dream! In reference to which, and the realities of which dreams are born, the inimitable will be wiser than he can be now, writing for dear life, with the post just going, and the brave C booted. . . . Ah how I hate myself, my dear fellow, for this lame and halting outline of the Vision I have in my mind. But it must go to you. . . . You will say what is best for the frontispiece". . . . With the second part or quarter, after a week's interval, came announcement of the enlargement of his plan, by which he hoped better to carry out the scheme of the story, and to get, for its following part, an effect for his heroine that would increase the tragic interest. "I am still in stout heart with the tale. I think it well-timed and a good thought; and as you know I wouldn't say so to anybody else, I don't mind saying freely thus much. It has great possession of me every moment in the day; and drags me where it will. . . . If you only could have read it all at once!--But you never would have done that, anyway, for I never should have been able to keep it to myself; so that's nonsense. I hope you'll like it. I would give a hundred pounds (and think it cheap) to see you read it. . . . Never mind." That was the first hint of an intention of which I was soon to hear more; but meanwhile, after eight more days, the third part came, with the scene from which he expected so much, and with a mention of what the writing of it had cost him. "This book (whether in the Hajji Baba sense or not I can't say, but certainly in the literal one) has made my face white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn't write it twice, for something. . . . You will see that I have substituted the name of Lilian for Jessie. It is prettier in sound, and suits my music better. I mention this, lest you should wonder who and what I mean by that name. To-morrow I shall begin afresh (starting the next part with a broad grin, and ending it with the very soul of jollity and happiness); and I hope to finish by next Monday at latest. Perhaps on Saturday. I hope you will like the little book. Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely ridiculous.". . . His letter ended abruptly. "I am going for a long walk, to clear my head. I feel that I am very shakey from work, and throw down my pen for the day. There! (That's where it fell.)" A huge blot represented it, and, as Hamlet says, the rest was silence. Two days later, answering a letter from me that had reached in the interval, he gave sprightlier account of himself, and described a happy change in the weather. Up to this time, he protested, they had not had more than four or five clear days. All the time he had been writing they had been wild and stormy. "Wind, hail, rain, thunder and lightning. To-day," just before he sent me his last manuscript, "has been November slack-baked, the sirocco having come back; and to-night it blows great guns with a raging storm." "Weather worse," he wrote after three Mondays, "than any November English weather I have ever beheld, or any weather I have had experience of anywhere. So horrible to-day that all power has been rained and gloomed out of me. Yesterday, in pure determination to get the better of it, I walked twelve miles in mountain rain. You never saw it rain. Scotland and America are nothing to it." But now all this was over. "The weather changed on Saturday night, and has been glorious ever since. I am afraid to say more in its favour, lest it should change again." It did not. I think there were no more complainings. I heard now of autumn days with the mountain wind lovely, enjoyable, exquisite past expression. I heard of mountain walks behind the Peschiere, most beautiful and fresh, among which, and along the beds of dry rivers and torrents, he could "pelt away," in any dress, without encountering a soul but the contadini. I heard of his starting off one day after finishing work, "fifteen miles to dinner--oh my stars! at such an inn!!!" On another day, of a party to dinner at their pleasant little banker's at Quinto six miles off, to which, while the ladies drove, he was able "to walk in the sun of the middle of the day and to walk home again at night." On another, of an expedition up the mountain on mules. And on another of a memorable tavern-dinner with their merchant friend Mr. Curry, in which there were such successions of surprising dishes of genuine native cookery that they took two hours in the serving, but of the component parts of not one of which was he able to form the remotest conception: the site of the tavern being on the city wall, its name in Italian sounding very romantic and meaning "the Whistle," and its bill of fare kept for an experiment to which, before another month should be over, he dared and challenged my cookery in Lincoln's-inn. A visit from him to London was to be expected almost immediately! That all remonstrance would be idle, under the restless excitement his work had awakened, I well knew. It was not merely the wish he had, natural enough, to see the last proofs and the woodcuts before the day of publication, which he could not otherwise do; but it was the stronger and more eager wish, before that final launch, to have a vivider sense than letters could give him of the effect of what he had been doing. "If I come, I shall put up at Cuttris's" (then the Piazza-hotel in Covent-garden) "that I may be close to you. Don't say to anybody, except our immediate friends, that I am coming. Then I shall not be bothered. If I should preserve my present fierce writing humour, in any pass I may run to Venice, Bologna, and Florence, before I turn my face towards Lincoln's-inn-fields; and come to England by Milan and Turin. But this of course depends in a great measure on your reply." My reply, dwelling on the fatigue and cost, had the reception I foresaw. "Notwithstanding what you say, I am still in the same mind about coming to London. Not because the proofs concern me at all (I should be an ass as well as a thankless vagabond if they did), but because of that unspeakable restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to remain here and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full balloon, left to itself, not to go up. I do not intend coming from _here_, but by way of Milan and Turin (previously going to Venice), and so, across the wildest pass of the Alps that may be open, to Strasburg. . . . As you dislike the Young England gentleman I shall knock him out, and replace him by a man (I can dash him in at your rooms in an hour) who recognizes no virtue in anything but the good old times, and talks of them, parrot-like, whatever the matter is. A real good old city tory, in a blue coat and bright buttons and a white cravat, and with a tendency of blood to the head. File away at Filer, as you please; but bear in mind that the _Westminster Review_ considered Scrooge's presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with political economy. I don't care at all for the skittle-playing." These were among things I had objected to. But the close of his letter revealed more than its opening of the reason, not at once so frankly confessed, for the long winter-journey he was about to make; and if it be thought that, in printing the passage, I take a liberty with my friend, it will be found that equal liberty is taken with myself, whom it goodnaturedly caricatures; so that the reader can enjoy his laugh at either or both. "Shall I confess to you, I particularly want Carlyle above all to see it before the rest of the world, when it is done; and I should like to inflict the little story on him and on dear old gallant Macready with my own lips, and to have Stanny and the other Mac sitting by. Now, if you was a real gent, you'd get up a little circle for me, one wet evening, when I come to town: and would say, 'My boy (SIR, will you have the goodness to leave those books alone and to go downstairs--WHAT the Devil are you doing! And mind, sir, I can see nobody--do you hear? Nobody. I am particularly engaged with a gentleman from Asia)--My boy, would you give us that little Christmas book (a little Christmas book of Dickens's, Macready, which I'm anxious you should hear); and don't slur it, now, or be too fast, Dickens, please!'--I say, if you was a real gent, something to this effect might happen. I shall be under sailing orders the moment I have finished. And I shall produce myself (please God) in London on the very day you name. For one week: to the hour." The wish was complied with, of course; and that night in Lincoln's-inn-fields led to rather memorable issues. His next letter told me the little tale was done. "Third of November, 1844. Half-past two, afternoon. Thank God! I have finished the _Chimes_. This moment. I take up my pen again to-day; to say only that much; and to add that I have had what women call 'a real good cry!'" Very genuine all this, it is hardly necessary to say. The little book thus completed was not one of his greater successes, and it raised him up some objectors; but there was that in it which more than repaid the suffering its writing cost him, and the enmity its opinions provoked; and in his own heart it had a cherished corner to the last. The intensity of it seemed always best to represent to himself what he hoped to be longest remembered for; and exactly what he felt as to this, his friend Jeffrey warmly expressed. "All the tribe of selfishness, and cowardice and cant, will hate you in their hearts, and cavil when they can; will accuse you of wicked exaggeration, and excitement to discontent, and what they pleasantly call disaffection! But never mind. The good and the brave are with you, and the truth also." He resumed his letter on the fourth of November. "Here is the brave courier measuring bits of maps with a carving-fork, and going up mountains on a teaspoon. He and I start on Wednesday for Parma, Modena, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Brescia, and Milan. Milan being within a reasonable journey from here, Kate and Georgy will come to meet me when I arrive there on my way towards England; and will bring me all letters from you. I shall be there on the 18th. . . . Now, you know my punctiwality. Frost, ice, flooded rivers, steamers, horses, passports, and custom-houses may damage it. But my design is, to walk into Cuttris's coffee-room on Sunday the 1st of December, in good time for dinner. I shall look for you at the farther table by the fire--where we generally go. . . . But the party for the night following? I know you have consented to the party. Let me see. Don't have any one, this particular night, to dinner, but let it be a summons for the special purpose at half-past 6. Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all things: _her_ judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish; Edwin Landseer; Blanchard; perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and Fox? I leave it to you. You know the effect I want to try . . . Think the _Chimes_ a letter, my dear fellow, and forgive this. I will not fail to write to you on my travels. Most probably from Venice. And when I meet you (in sound health I hope) oh Heaven! what a week we will have." FOOTNOTES: [88] "Into which we might put your large room--I wish we could!--away in one corner, and dine without knowing it." [89] "Very vast you will say, and very dreary; but it is not so really. The paintings are so fresh, and the proportions so agreeable to the eye, that the effect is not only cheerful but snug. . . . We are a little incommoded by applications from strangers to go over the interior. The paintings were designed by Michael Angelo, and have a great reputation. . . . Certain of these frescoes were reported officially to the Fine Art Commissioners by Wilson as the best in Italy . . . I allowed a party of priests to be shown the great hall yesterday . . . It is in perfect repair, and the doors almost shut--which is quite a miraculous circumstance. I wish you could see it, my dear F. Gracious Heavens! if you could only _come back_ with me, wouldn't I soon flash on your astonished sight." (6th of October.) CHAPTER VII. ITALIAN TRAVEL. 1844. Cities and People--Venice--Proposed Travel--At Lodi--Paintings--The Inns--Dinner at the Peschiere--Custom-house Officers--At Milan--At Strasburg--Return to London--A Macready Rehearsal--Friendly Americans. SO it all fell out accordingly. He parted from his disconsolate wife, as he told me in his first letter from Ferrara, on Wednesday the 6th of November: left her shut up in her palace like a baron's lady in the time of the crusades; and had his first real experience of the wonders of Italy. He saw Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, and Mantua. As to all which the impressions conveyed to me in his letters have been more or less given in his published _Pictures_. They are charmingly expressed. There is a sketch of a cicerone at Bologna which will remain in his books among their many delightful examples of his unerring and loving perception for every gentle, heavenly, and tender soul, under whatever conventional disguise it wanders here on earth, whether as poorhouse orphan or lawyer's clerk, architect's pupil at Salisbury or cheerful little guide to graves at Bologna; and there is another memorable description in his Rembrandt sketch, in form of a dream, of the silent, unearthly, watery wonders of Venice. This last, though not written until after his London visit, had been prefigured so vividly in what he wrote at once from the spot, that those passages from his letter[90] may be read still with a quite undiminished interest. "I must not," he said, "anticipate myself. But, my dear fellow, nothing in the world that ever you have heard of Venice, is equal to the magnificent and stupendous reality. The wildest visions of the Arabian Nights are nothing to the piazza of Saint Mark, and the first impression of the inside of the church. The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn't build such a place, and enchantment couldn't shadow it forth in a vision. All that I have heard of it, read of it in truth or fiction, fancied of it, is left thousands of miles behind. You know that I am liable to disappointment in such things from over-expectation, but Venice is above, beyond, out of all reach of coming near, the imagination of a man. It has never been rated high enough. It is a thing you would shed tears to see. When I came _on board_ here last night (after a five miles' row in a gondola; which somehow or other, I wasn't at all prepared for); when, from seeing the city lying, one light, upon the distant water, like a ship, I came plashing through the silent and deserted streets; I felt as if the houses were reality--the water, fever-madness. But when, in the bright, cold, bracing day, I stood upon the piazza, this morning, by Heaven the glory of the place was insupportable! And diving down from that into its wickedness and gloom--its awful prisons, deep below the water; its judgment chambers, secret doors, deadly nooks, where the torches you carry with you blink as if they couldn't bear the air in which the frightful scenes were acted; and coming out again into the radiant, unsubstantial Magic of the town; and diving in again, into vast churches, and old tombs--a new sensation, a new memory, a new mind came upon me. Venice is a bit of my brain from this time. My dear Forster, if you could share my transports (as you would if you were here) what would I not give! I feel cruel not to have brought Kate and Georgy; positively cruel and base. Canaletti and Stanny, miraculous in their truth. Turner, very noble. But the reality itself, beyond all pen or pencil. I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel to be an impossibility. And here I sit alone, writing it: with nothing to urge me on, or goad me to that estimate, which, speaking of it to anyone I loved, and being spoken to in return, would lead me to form. In the sober solitude of a famous inn; with the great bell of Saint Mark ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two stories high) looking down upon the grand canal and away, beyond, to where the sun went down to-night in a blaze; and thinking over again those silent speaking faces of Titian and Tintoretto; I swear (uncooled by any humbug I have seen) that Venice is _the_ wonder and the new sensation of the world! If you could be set down in it, never having heard of it, it would still be so. With your foot upon its stones, its pictures before you, and its history in your mind, it is something past all writing of or speaking of--almost past all thinking of. You couldn't talk to me in this room, nor I to you, without shaking hands and saying 'Good God my dear fellow, have we lived to see this!'" Five days later, Sunday the 17th, he was at Lodi, from which he wrote to me that he had been, like Leigh Hunt's pig, up "all manner of streets" since he left his palazzo; that with one exception he had not on any night given up more than five hours to rest; that all the days except two had been bad ("the last two foggy as Blackfriars-bridge on Lord Mayor's day"); and that the cold had been dismal. But what cheerful, keen, observant eyes he carried everywhere; and, in the midst of new and unaccustomed scenes, and of objects and remains of art for which no previous study had prepared him, with what a delicate play of imagination and fancy the minuteness and accuracy of his ordinary vision was exalted and refined; I think strikingly shown by the few unstudied passages I am preserving from these friendly letters. He saw everything for himself; and from mistakes in judging for himself which not all the learning and study in the world will save ordinary men, the intuition of genius almost always saved him. Hence there is hardly anything uttered by him, of this much-trodden and wearisomely-visited, but eternally beautiful and interesting country, that will not be found worth listening to. "I am already brim-full of cant about pictures, and shall be happy to enlighten you on the subject of the different schools, at any length you please. It seems to me that the preposterous exaggeration in which our countrymen delight in reference to this Italy, hardly extends to the really good things.[91] Perhaps it is in its nature, that there it should fall short. I have never seen any praise of Titian's great picture of the Transfiguration of the Virgin at Venice, which soared half as high as the beautiful and amazing reality. It is perfection. Tintoretto's picture too, of the Assembly of the Blest, at Venice also, with all the lines in it (it is of immense size and the figures are countless) tending majestically and dutifully to Almighty God in the centre, is grand and noble in the extreme. There are some wonderful portraits there, besides; and some confused, and hurried, and slaughterous battle pieces, in which the surprising art that presents the generals to your eye, so that it is almost impossible you can miss them in a crowd though they are in the thick of it, is very pleasant to dwell upon. I have seen some delightful pictures; and some (at Verona and Mantua) really too absurd and ridiculous even to laugh at. Hampton-court is a fool to 'em--and oh there are some rum 'uns there, my friend. Some werry rum 'uns. . . . Two things are clear to me already. One is, that the rules of art are much too slavishly followed; making it a pain to you, when you go into galleries day after day, to be so very precisely sure where this figure will be turning round, and that figure will be lying down, and that other will have a great lot of drapery twined about him, and so forth. This becomes a perfect nightmare. The second is, that these great men, who were of necessity very much in the hands of the monks and priests, painted monks and priests a vast deal too often. I constantly see, in pictures of tremendous power, heads quite below the story and the painter; and I invariably observe that those heads are of the convent stamp, and have their counterparts, exactly, in the convent inmates of this hour. I see the portraits of monks I know at Genoa, in all the lame parts of strong paintings: so I have settled with myself that in such cases the lameness was not with the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance of his employers, who _would_ be apostles on canvas at all events."[92] In the same letter he described the Inns. "It is a great thing--quite a matter of course--with English travellers, to decry the Italian inns. Of course you have no comforts that you are used to in England; and travelling alone, you dine in your bedroom always. Which is opposed to our habits. But they are immeasurably better than you would suppose. The attendants are very quick; very punctual; and so obliging, if you speak to them politely, that you would be a beast not to look cheerful, and take everything pleasantly. I am writing this in a room like a room on the two-pair front of an unfinished house in Eaton-square: the very walls make me feel as if I were a bricklayer distinguished by Mr. Cubitt with the favour of having it to take care of. The windows won't open, and the doors won't shut; and these latter (a cat could get in, between them and the floor) have a windy command of a colonnade which is open to the night, so that my slippers positively blow off my feet, and make little circuits in the room--like leaves. There is a very ashy wood-fire, burning on an immense hearth which has no fender (there is no such thing in Italy); and it only knows two extremes--an agony of heat when wood is put on, and an agony of cold when it has been on two minutes. There is also an uncomfortable stain in the wall, where the fifth door (not being strictly indispensable) was walled up a year or two ago, and never painted over. But the bed is clean; and I have had an excellent dinner; and without being obsequious or servile, which is not at all the characteristic of the people in the North of Italy, the waiters are so amiably disposed to invent little attentions which they suppose to be English, and are so lighthearted and goodnatured, that it is a pleasure to have to do with them. But so it is with all the people. Vetturino-travelling involves a stoppage of two hours in the middle of the day, to bait the horses. At that time I always walk on. If there are many turns in the road, I necessarily have to ask my way, very often: and the men are such gentlemen, and the women such ladies, that it is quite an interchange of courtesies." Of the help his courier continued to be to him I had whimsical instances in almost every letter, but he appears too often in the published book to require such celebration here. He is however an essential figure to two little scenes sketched for me at Lodi, and I may preface them by saying that Louis Roche, a native of Avignon, justified to the close his master's high opinion. He was again engaged for nearly a year in Switzerland, and soon after, poor fellow, though with a jovial robustness of look and breadth of chest that promised unusual length of days, was killed by heart-disease. "The brave C continues to be a prodigy. He puts out my clothes at every inn as if I were going to stay there twelve months; calls me to the instant every morning; lights the fire before I get up; gets hold of roast fowls and produces them in coaches at a distance from all other help, in hungry moments; and is invaluable to me. He is such a good fellow, too, that little rewards don't spoil him. I always give him, after I have dined, a tumbler of Sauterne or Hermitage or whatever I may have; sometimes (as yesterday) when we have come to a public-house at about eleven o'clock, very cold, having started before day-break and had nothing, I make him take his breakfast with me; and this renders him only more anxious than ever, by redoubling attentions, to show me that he thinks he has got a good master . . . I didn't tell you that the day before I left Genoa, we had a dinner-party--our English consul and his wife; the banker; Sir George Crawford and his wife; the De la Rues; Mr. Curry; and some others, fourteen in all. At about nine in the morning, two men in immense paper caps enquired at the door for the brave C, who presently introduced them in triumph as the Governor's cooks, his private friends, who had come to dress the dinner! Jane wouldn't stand this, however; so we were obliged to decline. Then there came, at half-hourly intervals, six gentlemen having the appearance of English clergymen; other private friends who had come to wait. . . . We accepted _their_ services; and you never saw anything so nicely and quietly done. He had asked, as a special distinction, to be allowed the supreme control of the dessert; and he had ices made like fruit, had pieces of crockery turned upside down so as to look like other pieces of crockery non-existent in this part of Europe, and carried a case of tooth-picks in his pocket. Then his delight was, to get behind Kate at one end of the table, to look at me at the other, and to say to Georgy in a low voice whenever he handed her anything, 'What does master think of datter 'rangement? Is he content?'. . . If you could see what these fellows of couriers are when their families are not upon the move, you would feel what a prize he is. I can't make out whether he was ever a smuggler, but nothing will induce him to give the custom-house-officers anything: in consequence of which that portmanteau of mine has been unnecessarily opened twenty times. Two of them will come to the coach-door, at the gate of a town. 'Is there anything contraband in this carriage, signore?'--'No, no. There's nothing here. I am an Englishman, and this is my servant.' 'A buono mano signore?' 'Roche,'(in English) 'give him something, and get rid of him.' He sits unmoved. 'A buono mano signore?' 'Go along with you!' says the brave C. 'Signore, I am a custom-house-officer!' 'Well, then, more shame for you!'--he always makes the same answer. And then he turns to me and says in English: while the custom-house-officer's face is a portrait of anguish framed in the coach-window, from his intense desire to know what is being told to his disparagement: 'Datter chip,' shaking his fist at him, 'is greatest tief--and you know it you rascal--as never did en-razh me so, that I cannot bear myself!' I suppose chip to mean chap, but it may include the custom-house-officer's father and have some reference to the old block, for anything I distinctly know." He closed his Lodi letter next day at Milan, whither his wife and her sister had made an eighty miles journey from Genoa, to pass a couple of days with him in Prospero's old Dukedom before he left for London. "We shall go our several ways on Thursday morning, and I am still bent on appearing at Cuttris's on Sunday the first, as if I had walked thither from Devonshire-terrace. In the meantime I shall not write to you again . . . to enhance the pleasure (if anything _can_ enhance the pleasure) of our meeting . . . I am opening my arms so wide!" One more letter I had nevertheless; written at Strasburg on Monday night the 25th; to tell me I might look for him one day earlier, so rapid had been his progress. He had been in bed only once, at Friburg for two or three hours, since he left Milan; and he had sledged through the snow on the top of the Simplon in the midst of prodigious cold. "I am sitting here _in_ a wood-fire, and drinking brandy and water scalding hot, with a faint idea of coming warm in time. My face is at present tingling with the frost and wind, as I suppose the cymbals may, when that turbaned turk attached to the life guards' band has been newly clashing at them in St. James's-park. I am in hopes it may be the preliminary agony of returning animation." [Illustration: AT 58 LINCOLN'S-INN-FIELDS, MONDAY THE 2^{ND} OF DECEMBER 1844.] There was certainly no want of animation when we met. I have but to write the words to bring back the eager face and figure, as they flashed upon me so suddenly this wintry Saturday night that almost before I could be conscious of his presence I felt the grasp of his hand. It is almost all I find it possible to remember of the brief, bright, meeting. Hardly did he seem to have come when he was gone. But all that the visit proposed he accomplished. He saw his little book in its final form for publication; and, to a select few brought together on Monday the 2nd of December at my house, had the opportunity of reading it aloud. An occasion rather memorable, in which was the germ of those readings to larger audiences by which, as much as by his books, the world knew him in his later life; but of which no detail beyond the fact remains in my memory, and all are now dead who were present at it excepting only Mr. Carlyle and myself. Among those however who have thus passed away was one, our excellent Maclise, who, anticipating the advice of Captain Cuttle, had "made a note of" it in pencil, which I am able here to reproduce. It will tell the reader all he can wish to know. He will see of whom the party consisted; and may be assured (with allowance for a touch of caricature to which I may claim to be considered myself as the chief victim), that in the grave attention of Carlyle, the eager interest of Stanfield and Maclise, the keen look of poor Laman Blanchard, Fox's rapt solemnity, Jerrold's skyward gaze, and the tears of Harness and Dyce, the characteristic points of the scene are sufficiently rendered. All other recollection of it is passed and gone; but that at least its principal actor was made glad and grateful, sufficient farther testimony survives. Such was the report made of it, that once more, on the pressing intercession of our friend Thomas Ingoldsby (Mr. Barham), there was a second reading to which the presence and enjoyment of Fonblanque gave new zest;[93] and when I expressed to Dickens, after he left us, my grief that he had had so tempestuous a journey for such brief enjoyment, he replied that the visit had been one happiness and delight to him. "I would not recall an inch of the way to or from you, if it had been twenty times as long and twenty thousand times as wintry. It was worth any travel--anything! With the soil of the road in the very grain of my cheeks, I swear I wouldn't have missed that week, that first night of our meeting, that one evening of the reading at your rooms, aye, and the second reading too, for any easily stated or conceived consideration." He wrote from Paris, at which he had stopped on his way back to see Macready, whom an engagement to act there with Mr. Mitchell's English company had prevented from joining us in Lincoln's-inn-fields. There had been no such frost and snow since 1829, and he gave dismal report of the city. With Macready he had gone two nights before to the Odéon to see Alexandre Dumas' _Christine_ played by Madame St. George, "once Napoleon's mistress; now of an immense size, from dropsy I suppose; and with little weak legs which she can't stand upon. Her age, withal, somewhere about 80 or 90. I never in my life beheld such a sight. Every stage-conventionality she ever picked up (and she has them all) has got the dropsy too, and is swollen and bloated hideously. The other actors never looked at one another, but delivered all their dialogues to the pit, in a manner so egregiously unnatural and preposterous that I couldn't make up my mind whether to take it as a joke or an outrage." And then came allusion to a project we had started on the night of the reading, that a private play should be got up by us on his return from Italy. "You and I, sir, will reform this altogether." He had but to wait another night, however, when he saw it all reformed at the Italian opera where Grisi was singing in _Il Pirato_, and "the passion and fire of a scene between her, Mario, and Fornasari, was as good and great as it is possible for anything operatic to be. They drew on one another, the two men--not like stage-players, but like Macready himself: and she, rushing in between them; now clinging to this one, now to that, now making a sheath for their naked swords with her arms, now tearing her hair in distraction as they broke away from her and plunged again at each other; was prodigious." This was the theatre at which Macready was immediately to act, and where Dickens saw him next day rehearse the scene before the doge and council in _Othello_, "not as usual facing the float but arranged on one side," with an effect that seemed to him to heighten the reality of the scene. He left Paris on the night of the 13th with the malle poste, which did not reach Marseilles till fifteen hours behind its time, after three days and three nights travelling over horrible roads. Then, in a confusion between the two rival packets for Genoa, he unwillingly detained one of them more than an hour from sailing; and only managed at last to get to her just as she was moving out of harbour. As he went up the side, he saw a strange sensation among the angry travellers whom he had detained so long; heard a voice exclaim "I am blarmed if it ain't DICKENS!" and stood in the centre of a group of _Five Americans_! But the pleasantest part of the story is that they were, one and all, glad to see him; that their chief man, or leader, who had met him in New York, at once introduced them all round with the remark, "Personally our countrymen, and you, can fix it friendly sir, I do expectuate;" and that, through the stormy passage to Genoa which followed, they were excellent friends. For the greater part of the time, it is true, Dickens had to keep to his cabin; but he contrived to get enjoyment out of them nevertheless. The member of the party who had the travelling dictionary wouldn't part with it, though he was dead sick in the cabin next to my friend's; and every now and then Dickens was conscious of his fellow-travellers coming down to him, crying out in varied tones of anxious bewilderment, "I say, what's French for a pillow?" "Is there any Italian phrase for a lump of sugar? Just look, will you?" "What the devil does echo mean? The garsong says echo to everything!" They were excessively curious to know, too, the population of every little town on the Cornice, and all its statistics; "perhaps the very last subjects within the capacity of the human intellect," remarks Dickens, "that would ever present themselves to an Italian steward's mind. He was a very willing fellow, our steward; and, having some vague idea that they would like a large number, said at hazard fifty thousand, ninety thousand, four hundred thousand, when they asked about the population of a place not larger than Lincoln's-inn-fields. And when they said _Non Possible!_ (which was the leader's invariable reply), he doubled or trebled the amount; to meet what he supposed to be their views, and make it quite satisfactory." FOOTNOTES: [90] "I began this letter, my dear friend" (he wrote it from Venice on Tuesday night the 12th of November), "with the intention of describing my travels as I went on. But I have seen so much, and travelled so hard (seldom dining, and being almost always up by candle light), that I must reserve my crayons for the greater leisure of the Peschiere after we have met, and I have again returned to it. As soon as I have fixed a place in my mind, I bolt--at such strange seasons and at such unexpected angles, that the brave C stares again. But in this way, and by insisting on having everything shewn to me whether or no, and against all precedents and orders of proceeding, I get on wonderfully." Two days before he had written to me from Ferrara, after the very pretty description of the vineyards between Piacenza and Parma which will be found in the _Pictures from Italy_ (pp. 203-4): "If you want an antidote to this, I may observe that I got up, this moment, to fasten the window; and the street looked as like some byeway in Whitechapel--or--I look again--like Wych Street, down by the little barber's shop on the same side of the way as Holywell Street--or--I look again--as like Holywell Street itself--as ever street was like to street, or ever will be, in this world." [91] Four months later, after he had seen the galleries at Rome and the other great cities, he sent me a remark which has since had eloquent reinforcement from critics of undeniable authority. "The most famous of the oil paintings in the Vatican you know through the medium of the finest line-engravings in the world; and as to some of them I much doubt, if you had seen them with me, whether you might not think you had lost little in having only known them hitherto in that translation. Where the drawing is poor and meagre, or alloyed by time,--it is so, and it must be, often; though no doubt it is a heresy to hint at such a thing--the engraving presents the forms and the idea to you, in a simple majesty which such defects impair. Where this is not the case, and all is stately and harmonious, still it is somehow in the very grain and nature of a delicate engraving to suggest to you (I think) the utmost delicacy, finish, and refinement, as belonging to the original. Therefore, though the Picture in this latter case will greatly charm and interest you, it does not take you by surprise. You are quite prepared beforehand for the fullest excellence of which it is capable." In the same letter he wrote of what remained always a delight in his memory, the charm of the more private collections. He found magnificent portraits and paintings in the private palaces, where he thought them seen to greater advantage than in galleries; because in numbers not so large as to distract attention or confuse the eye. "There are portraits innumerable by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vandyke; heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; subjects by Raphael, and Correggio, and Murillo, and Paul Veronese, and Salvator; which it would be difficult indeed to praise too highly, or to praise enough. It is a happiness to me to think that they cannot be felt, as they should be felt, by the profound connoisseurs who fall into fits upon the longest notice and the most unreasonable terms. Such tenderness and grace, such noble elevation, purity, and beauty, so shine upon me from some well-remembered spots in the walls of these galleries, as to relieve my tortured memory from legions of whining friars and waxy holy families. I forgive, from the bottom of my soul, whole orchestras of earthy angels, and whole groves of St. Sebastians stuck as full of arrows according to pattern as a lying-in pincushion is stuck with pins. And I am in no humour to quarrel even with that priestly infatuation, or priestly doggedness of purpose, which persists in reducing every mystery of our religion to some literal development in paint and canvas, equally repugnant to the reason and the sentiment of any thinking man." [92] The last two lines he has printed in the _Pictures_, p. 249, "certain of" being inserted before "his employers." [93] I find the evening mentioned in the diary which Mr. Barham's son quotes in his Memoir. "December 5, 1844. Dined at Forster's with Charles Dickens, Stanfield, Maclise, and Albany Fonblanque. Dickens read with remarkable effect his Christmas story, the _Chimes_, from the proofs. . . ." (ii. 191.) CHAPTER VIII. LAST MONTHS IN ITALY. 1845. Jesuit Interferences--Travel Southward--Carrara and Pisa--A Wild Journey--At Radicofani--A Beggar and his Staff--At Rome--Terracina--Bay of Naples--Lazzaroni--Sad English News--At Florence--Visit to Landor's Villa--At Lord Holland's--Return to Genoa--Italy's Best Season--A Funeral--Nautical Incident--Fireflies at Night--Returning by Switzerland--At Lucerne--Passage of the St. Gothard--Splendour of Swiss Scenery--Swiss Villages. ON the 22nd of December he had resumed his ordinary Genoa life; and of a letter from Jeffrey, to whom he had dedicated his little book, he wrote as "most energetic and enthusiastic. Filer sticks in his throat rather, but all the rest is quivering in his heart. He is very much struck by the management of Lilian's story, and cannot help speaking of that; writing of it all indeed with the freshness and ardour of youth, and not like a man whose blue and yellow has turned grey." Some of its words have been already given. "Miss Coutts has sent Charley, with the best of letters to me, a Twelfth Cake weighing ninety pounds, magnificently decorated; and only think of the characters, Fairburn's Twelfth Night characters, being detained at the custom-house for Jesuitical surveillance! But these fellows are---- Well! never mind. Perhaps you have seen the history of the Dutch minister at Turin, and of the spiriting away of his daughter by the Jesuits? It is all true; though, like the history of our friend's servant,[94] almost incredible. But their devilry is such that I am assured by our consul that if, while we are in the south, we were to let our children go out with servants on whom we could not implicitly rely, these holy men would trot even their small feet into churches with a view to their ultimate conversion! It is tremendous even to see them in the streets, or slinking about this garden." Of his purpose to start for the south of Italy in the middle of January, taking his wife with him, his letter the following week told me; dwelling on all he had missed, in that first Italian Christmas, of our old enjoyments of the season in England; and closing its pleasant talk with a postscript at midnight. "First of January, 1845. Many many many happy returns of the day! A life of happy years! The Baby is dressed in thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. His birth is most portentous here." It was of ill-omen to me, one of its earliest incidents being my only brother's death; but Dickens had a friend's true helpfulness in sorrow, and a portion of what he then wrote to me I permit myself to preserve in a note[95] for what it relates of his own sad experiences and solemn beliefs and hopes. The journey southward began on the 20th January, and five days later I had a letter written from La Scala, at a little inn, "supported on low brick arches like a British haystack," the bed in their room "like a mangle," the ceiling without lath or plaster, nothing to speak of available for comfort or decency, and nothing particular to eat or drink. "But for all this I have become attached to the country and I don't care who knows it." They had left Pisa that morning and Carrara the day before: at the latter place an ovation awaiting him, the result of the zeal of our eccentric friend Fletcher, who happened to be staying there with an English marble-merchant.[96] "There is a beautiful little theatre there, built of marble; and they had it illuminated that night, in my honour. There was really a very fair opera: but it is curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of labourers in the quarries, who don't know a note of music, and sing entirely by ear. It was crammed to excess, and I had a great reception; a deputation waiting upon us in the box, and the orchestra turning out in a body afterwards and serenading us at Mr. Walton's." Between this and Rome they had a somewhat wild journey;[97] and before Radicofani was reached, there were disturbing rumours of bandits and even uncomfortable whispers as to their night's lodging-place. "I really began to think we might have an adventure; and as I had brought (like an ass) a bag of Napoleons with me from Genoa, I called up all the theatrical ways of letting off pistols that I could call to mind, and was the more disposed to fire them from not having any." It ended in no worse adventure, however, than a somewhat exciting dialogue with an old professional beggar at Radicofani itself, in which he was obliged to confess that he came off second-best. It transpired at a little town hanging on a hill side, of which the inhabitants, being all of them beggars, had the habit of swooping down, like so many birds of prey, upon any carriage that approached it. "Can you imagine" (he named a first-rate bore, for whose name I shall substitute) "M. F. G. in a very frowsy brown cloak concealing his whole figure, and with very white hair and a very white beard, darting out of this place with a long staff in his hand, and begging? There he was, whether you can or not; out of breath with the rapidity of his dive, and staying with his staff all the Radicofani boys, that he might fight it out with me alone. It was very wet, and so was I: for I had kept, according to custom, my box-seat. It was blowing so hard that I could scarcely stand; and there was a custom-house on the spot, besides. Over and above all this, I had no small money; and the brave C never has, when I want it for a beggar. When I had excused myself several times, he suddenly drew himself up and said, with a wizard look (fancy the aggravation of M. F. G. as a wizard!) 'Do you know what you are doing, my lord? Do you mean to go on, to-day?' 'Yes,' I said, 'I do.' 'My lord,' he said, 'do you know that your vetturino is unacquainted with this part of the country; that there is a wind raging on the mountain, which will sweep you away; that the courier, the coach, and all the passengers, were blown from the road last year; and that the danger is great and almost certain?' 'No,' I said, 'I don't.' 'My lord, you don't understand me, I think?' 'Yes I do, d---- you!' nettled by this (you feel it? I confess it). 'Speak to my servant. It's his business. Not mine'--for he really was too like M. F. G. to be borne. If you could have seen him!--'Santa Maria, these English lords! It's not their business, if they're killed! They leave it to their servants!' He drew off the boys; whispered them to keep away from the heretic; and ran up the hill again, almost as fast as he had come down. He stopped at a little distance as we moved on; and pointing to Roche with his long staff cried loudly after me, 'It's _his_ business if you're killed, is it, my lord? Ha! ha! ha! whose business is it, when the English lords are born! Ha! ha! ha!' The boys taking it up in a shrill yell, I left the joke and them at this point. But I must confess that I thought he had the best of it. And he had so far reason for what he urged, that when we got on the mountain pass the wind became terrific, so that we were obliged to take Kate out of the carriage lest she should be blown over, carriage and all, and had ourselves to hang on to it, on the windy side, to prevent its going Heaven knows where!" The first impression of Rome was disappointing. It was the evening of the 30th of January, and the cloudy sky, dull cold rain, and muddy footways, he was prepared for; but he was not prepared for the long streets of commonplace shops and houses like Paris or any other capital, the busy people, the equipages, the ordinary walkers up and down. "It was no more my Rome, degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins, than Lincoln's-inn-fields is. So I really went to bed in a very indifferent humour." That all this yielded to later and worthier impressions I need hardly say; and he had never in his life, he told me afterwards, been so moved or overcome by any sight as by that of the Coliseum, "except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of Niagara." He went to Naples for the interval before the holy week; and his first letter from it was to say that he had found the wonderful aspects of Rome before he left, and that for loneliness and grandeur of ruin nothing could transcend the southern side of the Campagna. But farther and farther south the weather had become worse; and for a week before his letter (the 11th of February), the only bright sky he had seen was just as the sun was coming up across the sea at Terracina. "Of which place, a beautiful one, you can get a very good idea by imagining something as totally unlike the scenery in _Fra Diavolo_ as possible." He thought the bay less striking at Naples than at Genoa, the shape of the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know what to liken the streets to where the mass of the lazzaroni live. You recollect that favourite pigstye of mine near Broadstairs? They are more like streets of such apartments heaped up story on story, and tumbled house on house, than anything else I can think of, at this moment." In a later letter he was even less tolerant. "What would I give that you should see the lazzaroni as they really are--mere squalid, abject, miserable animals for vermin to batten on; slouching, slinking, ugly, shabby, scavenging scarecrows! And oh the raffish counts and more than doubtful countesses, the noodles and the blacklegs, the good society! And oh the miles of miserable streets and wretched occupants,[99] to which Saffron-hill or the Borough-mint is a kind of small gentility, which are found to be so picturesque by English lords and ladies; to whom the wretchedness left behind at home is lowest of the low, and vilest of the vile, and commonest of all common things. Well! well! I have often thought that one of the best chances of immortality for a writer is in the Death of his language, when he immediately becomes good company; and I often think here,--What _would_ you say to these people, milady and milord, if they spoke out of the homely dictionary of your own 'lower orders.'" He was again at Rome on Sunday the second of March. Sad news from me as to a common and very dear friend awaited him there; but it is a subject on which I may not dwell farther than to say that there arose from it much to redeem even such a sorrow, and that this I could not indicate better than by these wise and tender words from Dickens. "No philosophy will bear these dreadful things, or make a moment's head against them, but the practical one of doing all the good we can, in thought and deed. While we can, God help us! ourselves stray from ourselves so easily; and there are all around us such frightful calamities besetting the world in which we live; nothing else will carry us through it. . . . What a comfort to reflect on what you tell me. Bulwer Lytton's conduct is that of a generous and noble-minded man, as I have ever thought him. Our dear good Procter too! And Thackeray--how earnest they have all been! I am very glad to find you making special mention of Charles Lever. I am glad over every name you write. It says something for our pursuit, in the midst of all its miserable disputes and jealousies, that the common impulse of its followers, in such an instance as this, is surely and certainly of the noblest." After the ceremonies of the holy week, of which the descriptions sent to me were reproduced in his book, he went to Florence,[100] which lived always afterwards in his memory with Venice, and with Genoa. He thought these the three great Italian cities. "There are some places here,[101]--oh Heaven how fine! I wish you could see the tower of the palazzo Vecchio as it lies before me at this moment, on the opposite bank of the Arno! But I will tell you more about it, and about all Florence, from my shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges. I shall not be sorry to sit down in it again. . . . Poor Hood, poor Hood! I still look for his death, and he still lingers on. And Sydney Smith's brother gone after poor dear Sydney himself! Maltby will wither when he reads it; and poor old Rogers will contradict some young man at dinner, every day for three weeks." Before he left Florence (on the 4th of April) I heard of a "very pleasant and very merry day" at Lord Holland's; and I ought to have mentioned how much he was gratified, at Naples, by the attentions of the English Minister there, Mr. Temple, Lord Palmerston's brother, whom he described as a man supremely agreeable, with everything about him in perfect taste, and with that truest gentleman-manner which has its root in kindness and generosity of nature. He was back at home in the Peschiere on Wednesday the ninth of April. Here he continued to write to me every week, for as long as he remained, of whatever he had seen: with no definite purpose as yet, but the pleasure of interchanging with myself the impressions and emotions undergone by him. "Seriously," he wrote to me on the 13th of April, "it is a great pleasure to me to find that you are really pleased with these shadows in the water, and think them worth the looking at. Writing at such odd places, and in such odd seasons, I have been half savage with myself, very often, for not doing better. But d'Orsay, from whom I had a charming letter three days since, seems to think as you do of what he has read in those shown to him, and says they remind him vividly of the real aspect of these scenes. . . . Well, if we should determine, after we have sat in council, that the experiences they relate are to be used, we will call B. and E. to their share and voice in the matter." Shortly before he left, the subject was again referred to (7th of June). "I am in as great doubt as you about the letters I have written you with these Italian experiences. I cannot for the life of me devise any plan of using them to my own satisfaction, and yet think entirely with you that in some form I ought to use them." Circumstances not in his contemplation at this time settled the form they ultimately took. Two more months were to finish his Italian holiday, and I do not think he enjoyed any part of it so much as its close. He had formed a real friendship for Genoa, was greatly attached to the social circle he had drawn round him there, and liked rest after his travel all the more for the little excitement of living its activities over again, week by week, in these letters to me. And so, from his "shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges," I had at regular intervals what he called his rambling talk; went over with him again all the roads he had taken; and of the more important scenes and cities, such as Venice, Rome, and Naples, received such rich filling-in to the first outlines sent, as fairly justified the title of _Pictures_ finally chosen for them. The weather all the time too had been without a flaw. "Since our return," he wrote on the 27th April, "we have had charming spring days. The garden is one grove of roses; we have left off fires; and we breakfast and dine again in the great hall, with the windows open. To-day we have rain, but rain was rather wanted I believe, so it gives offence to nobody. As far as I have had an opportunity of judging yet, the spring is the most delightful time in this country. But for all that I am looking with eagerness to the tenth of June, impatient to renew our happy old walks and old talks in dear old home." Of incidents during these remaining weeks there were few, but such as he mentioned had in them points of humour or character still worth remembering.[102] Two men were hanged in the city; and two ladies of quality, he told me, agreed to keep up for a time a prayer for the souls of these two miserable creatures so incessant that Heaven should never for a moment be left alone; to which end "they relieved each other" after such wise, that, for the whole of the stated time, one of them was always on her knees in the cathedral church of San Lorenzo. From which he inferred that "a morbid sympathy for criminals is not wholly peculiar to England, though it affects more people in that country perhaps than in any other." Of Italian usages to the dead some notices from his letters have been given, and he had an example before he left of the way in which they affected English residents. A gentleman of his friend Fletcher's acquaintance living four miles from Genoa had the misfortune to lose his wife; and no attendance on the dead beyond the city gate, nor even any decent conveyance, being practicable, the mourner, to whom Fletcher had promised nevertheless the sad satisfaction of an English funeral, which he had meanwhile taken enormous secret pains to arrange with a small Genoese upholsterer, was waited upon, on the appointed morning, by a very bright yellow hackney-coach-and-pair driven by a coachman in yet brighter scarlet knee-breeches and waistcoat, who wanted to put the husband and the body inside together. "They were obliged to leave one of the coach-doors open for the accommodation even of the coffin; the widower walked beside the carriage to the Protestant cemetery; and Fletcher followed on a big grey horse."[103] Scarlet breeches reappear, not less characteristically, in what his next letter told of a couple of English travellers who took possession at this time (24th of May) of a portion of the ground floor of the Peschiere. They had with them a meek English footman who immediately confided to Dickens's servants, among other personal grievances, the fact that he was made to do everything, even cooking, in crimson breeches; which in a hot climate, he protested, was "a grinding of him down." "He is a poor soft country fellow; and his master locks him up at night, in a basement room with iron bars to the window. Between which our servants poke wine in, at midnight. His master and mistress buy old boxes at the curiosity shops, and pass their lives in lining 'em with bits of parti-coloured velvet. A droll existence, is it not? We are lucky to have had the palace to ourselves until now, but it is so large that we never see or hear these people; and I should not have known even, if they had not called upon us, that another portion of the ground floor had been taken by some friends of old Lady Holland--whom I seem to see again, crying about dear Sydney Smith, behind that green screen as we last saw her together."[104] Then came a little incident also characteristic. An English ship of war, the Phantom, appeared in the harbour; and from her commander, Sir Henry Nicholson, Dickens received, among attentions very pleasant to him, an invitation to lunch on board and bring his wife, for whom, at a time appointed, a boat was to be sent to the Ponte Reale (the royal bridge). But no boat being there at the time, Dickens sent off his servant in another boat to the ship to say he feared some mistake. "While we were walking up and down a neighbouring piazza in his absence, a brilliant fellow in a dark blue shirt with a white hem to it all round the collar, regular corkscrew curls, and a face as brown as a berry, comes up to me and says 'Beg your pardon sir--Mr. Dickens?' 'Yes.' 'Beg your pardon sir, but I'm one of the ship's company of the Phantom sir, cox'en of the cap'en's gig sir, she's a lying off the pint sir--been there half an hour.' 'Well but my good fellow,' I said, 'you're at the wrong place!' 'Beg your pardon sir, I was afeerd it was the wrong place sir, but I've asked them Genoese here sir, twenty times, if it was Port Real; and they knows no more than a dead jackass!'--Isn't it a good thing to have made a regular Portsmouth name of it?" That was in his letter of the 1st June, which began by telling me it had been twice begun and twice flung into the basket, so great was his indisposition to write as the time for departure came; and which ended thus. "The fire-flies at night now, are miraculously splendid; making another firmament among the rocks on the seashore, and the vines inland. They get into the bedrooms, and fly about, all night, like beautiful little lamps.[105]. . . I have surrendered much I had fixed my heart upon, as you know, admitting you have had reason for not coming to us here: but I stand by the hope that you and Mac will come and meet us at Brussels; it being so very easy. A day or two there, and at Antwerp, would be very happy for us; and we could still dine in Lincoln's-inn-fields on the day of arrival." I had been unable to join him in Genoa, urgently as he had wished it: but what is said here was done, and Jerrold was added to the party. His last letter from Genoa was written on the 7th of June, not from the Peschiere, but from a neighbouring palace, "Brignole Rosso," into which he had fled from the miseries of moving. "They are all at sixes and sevens up at the Peschiere, as you may suppose; and Roche is in a condition of tremendous excitement, engaged in settling the inventory with the house-agent, who has just told me he is the devil himself. I had been appealed to, and had contented myself with this expression of opinion. 'Signor Noli, you are an old impostor!' 'Illustrissimo,' said Signor Noli in reply, 'your servant is the devil himself: sent on earth to torture me.' I look occasionally towards the Peschiere (it is visible from this room), expecting to see one of them flying out of a window. Another great cause of commotion is, that they have been paving the lane by which the house is approached, ever since we returned from Rome. We have not been able to get the carriage up since that time, in consequence; and unless they finish to-night, it can't be packed in the garden, but the things will have to be brought down in baskets, piecemeal, and packed in the street. To avoid this inconvenient necessity, the Brave made proposals of bribery to the paviours last night, and induced them to pledge themselves that the carriage should come up at seven this evening. The manner of doing that sort of paving work here, is to take a pick or two with an axe, and then lie down to sleep for an hour. When I came out, the Brave had issued forth to examine the ground; and was standing alone in the sun among a heap of prostrate figures: with a Great Despair depicted in his face, which it would be hard to surpass. It was like a picture--'After the Battle'--Napoleon by the Brave: Bodies by the Paviours." He came home by the Great St. Gothard, and was quite carried away by what he saw of Switzerland. The country was so divine that he should have wondered indeed if its sons and daughters had ever been other than a patriotic people. Yet, infinitely above the country he had left as he ranked it in its natural splendours, there was something more enchanting than these that he lost in leaving Italy; and he expressed this delightfully in the letter from Lucerne (14th of June) which closes the narrative of his Italian life. "We came over the St. Gothard, which has been open only eight days. The road is cut through the snow, and the carriage winds along a narrow path between two massive snow walls, twenty feet high or more. Vast plains of snow range up the mountain-sides above the road, itself seven thousand feet above the sea; and tremendous waterfalls, hewing out arches for themselves in the vast drifts, go thundering down from precipices into deep chasms, here and there and everywhere: the blue water tearing through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime. The pass itself, the mere pass over the top, is not so fine, I think, as the Simplon; and there is no plain upon the summit, for the moment it is reached the descent begins. So that the loneliness and wildness of the Simplon are not equalled _there_. But being much higher, the ascent and the descent range over a much greater space of country; and on both sides there are places of terrible grandeur, unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world. The Devil's Bridge, terrific! The whole descent between Andermatt (where we slept on Friday night) and Altdorf, William Tell's town, which we passed through yesterday afternoon, is the highest sublimation of all you can imagine in the way of Swiss scenery. Oh God! what a beautiful country it is! How poor and shrunken, beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect! "I look upon the coming down from the Great St. Gothard with a carriage and four horses and only one postilion, as the most dangerous thing that a carriage and horses can do. We had two great wooden logs for drags, and snapped them both like matches. The road is like a geometrical staircase, with horrible depths beneath it; and at every turn it is a toss-up, or seems to be, whether the leaders shall go round or over. The lives of the whole party may depend upon a strap in the harness; and if we broke our rotten harness once yesterday, we broke it at least a dozen times. The difficulty of keeping the horses together in the continual and steep circle, is immense. They slip and slide, and get their legs over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses, harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair hanging down her back very nearly to her heels, is looking on--apparently dressed for a melodrama, but in reality a waitress at this establishment. "If the Swiss villages look beautiful to me in winter, their summer aspect is most charming: most fascinating: most delicious. Shut in by high mountains capped with perpetual snow; and dotting a rich carpet of the softest turf, overshadowed by great trees; they seem so many little havens of refuge from the troubles and miseries of great towns. The cleanliness of the little baby-houses of inns is wonderful to those who come from Italy. But the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language, the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word; the captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything; are left behind the Alps. Remembering them, I sigh for the dirt again: the brick floors, bare walls, unplaistered ceilings, and broken windows." We met at Brussels; Maclise, Jerrold, myself, and the travellers; passed a delightful week in Flanders together; and were in England at the close of June. FOOTNOTES: [94] In a previous letter he had told me that history. "Apropos of servants, I must tell you of a child-bearing handmaiden of some friends of ours, a thorough out and outer, who, by way of expiating her sins, caused herself, the other day, to be received into the bosom of the infallible church. She had two marchionesses for her sponsors; and she is heralded in the Genoa newspapers as Miss B--, an English lady, who has repented of her errors and saved her soul alive." [95] "I feel the distance between us now, indeed. I would to Heaven, my dearest friend, that I could remind you in a manner more lively and affectionate than this dull sheet of paper can put on, that you have a Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as ever Nature forged. By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way--but to be knotted tighter up, if that be possible, until the same end comes to them as has come to these. That end but the bright beginning of a happier union, I believe; and have never more strongly and religiously believed (and oh! Forster, with what a sore heart I have thanked God for it) than when that shadow has fallen on my own hearth, and made it cold and dark as suddenly as in the home of that poor girl you tell me of. . . . When you write to me again, the pain of this will have passed. No consolation can be so certain and so lasting to you as that softened and manly sorrow which springs up from the memory of the Dead. I read your heart as easily as if I held it in my hand, this moment. And I know--I _know_, my dear friend--that before the ground is green above him, you will be content that what was capable of death in him, should lie there. . . . I am glad to think it was so easy, and full of peace. What can we hope for more, when our own time comes!--The day when he visited us in our old house is as fresh to me as if it had been yesterday. I remember him as well as I remember you. . . . I have many things to say, but cannot say them now. Your attached and loving friend for life, and far, I hope, beyond it. C. D." (8th of January, 1845.) [96] "A Yorkshireman, who talks Yorkshire Italian with the drollest and pleasantest effect; a jolly, hospitable excellent fellow; as odd yet kindly a mixture of shrewdness and simplicity as I have ever seen. He is the only Englishman in these parts who has been able to erect an English household out of Italian servants, but he has done it to admiration. It would be a capital country-house at home; and for staying in 'first-rate.' (I find myself inadvertently quoting _Tom Thumb_.) Mr. Walton is a man of an extraordinarily kind heart, and has a compassionate regard for Fletcher to whom his house is open as a home, which is half affecting and half ludicrous. He paid the other day a hundred pounds for him, which he knows he will never see a penny of again." C. D. to J. F. (25th of January, 1845.) [97] "Do you think," he wrote from Ronciglione on the 29th January, "in your state room, when the fog makes your white blinds yellow, and the wind howls in the brick and mortar gulf behind that square perspective, with a middle distance of two ladder-tops and a background of Drury-lane sky--when the wind howls, I say, as if its eldest brother, born in Lincoln's-inn-fields, had gone to sea and was making a fortune on the Atlantic--at such times do you ever think of houseless Dick?" [98] He makes no mention in his book of the pauper burial-place at Naples, to which the reference made in his letters is striking enough for preservation. "In Naples, the burying place of the poor people is a great paved yard with three hundred and sixty-five pits in it: every one covered by a square stone which is fastened down. One of these pits is opened every night in the year; the bodies of the pauper dead are collected in the city; brought out in a cart (like that I told you of at Rome); and flung in, uncoffined. Some lime is then cast down into the pit; and it is sealed up until a year is past, and its turn again comes round. Every night there is a pit opened; and every night that same pit is sealed up again, for a twelvemonth. The cart has a red lamp attached, and at about ten o'clock at night you see it glaring through the streets of Naples: stopping at the doors of hospitals and prisons, and such places, to increase its freight: and then rattling off again. Attached to the new cemetery (a very pretty one, and well kept: immeasurably better in all respects than Père-la-Chaise) there is another similar yard, but not so large.". . . In connection with the same subject he adds: "About Naples, the dead are borne along the street, uncovered, on an open bier; which is sometimes hoisted on a sort of palanquin, covered with a cloth of scarlet and gold. This exposure of the deceased is not peculiar to that part of Italy; for about midway between Rome and Genoa we encountered a funeral procession attendant on the body of a woman, which was presented in its usual dress, to my eyes (looking from my elevated seat on the box of a travelling carriage) as if she were alive, and resting on her bed. An attendant priest was chanting lustily--and as badly as the priests invariably do. Their noise is horrible. . . ." [99] "Thackeray praises the people of Italy for being kind to brutes. There is probably no country in the world where they are treated with such frightful cruelty. It is universal." (Naples, 2nd. Feb. 1845.) Emphatic confirmation of this remark has been lately given by the Naples correspondent of the _Times_, writing under date of February 1872. [100] The reader will perhaps think with me that what he noticed, on the roads in Tuscany more than in any others, of wayside crosses and religious memorials, may be worth preserving. . . . "You know that in the streets and corners of roads, there are all sorts of crosses and similar memorials to be seen in Italy. The most curious are, I think, in Tuscany. There is very seldom a figure on the cross, though there is sometimes a face; but they are remarkable for being garnished with little models in wood of every possible object that can be connected with the Saviour's death. The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his master thrice, is generally perched on the tip-top; and an ornithological phenomenon he always is. Under him is the inscription. Then, hung on to the cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the sponge of vinegar and water at the end, the coat without seam for which the soldiers cast lots, the dice-box with which they threw for it, the hammer that drove in the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the ladder which was set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the instrument of flagellation, the lantern with which Mary went to the tomb--I suppose; I can think of no other--and the sword with which Peter smote the high priest's servant. A perfect toyshop of little objects; repeated at every four or five miles all along the highway." [101] Of his visit to Fiesole I have spoken in my LIFE OF LANDOR. "Ten years after Landor had lost this home, an Englishman travelling in Italy, his friend and mine, visited the neighbourhood for his sake, drove out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked his coachman which was the villa in which the Landor family lived. 'He was a dull dog, and pointed to Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him. He was so deuced ready that I knew he lied. I went up to the convent, which is on a height, and was leaning over a dwarf wall basking in the noble view over a vast range of hill and valley, when a little peasant girl came up and began to point out the localities. _Ecco la villa Landora!_ was one of the first half-dozen sentences she spoke. My heart swelled as Landor's would have done when I looked down upon it, nestling among its olive-trees and vines, and with its upper windows (there are five above the door) open to the setting sun. Over the centre of these there is another story, set upon the housetop like a tower; and all Italy, except its sea, is melted down into the glowing landscape it commands. I plucked a leaf of ivy from the convent-garden as I looked; and here it is. 'For Landor. With my love.' So wrote Mr. Dickens to me from Florence on the and of April 1845; and when I turned over Landor's papers in the same month after an interval of exactly twenty years, the ivy-leaf was found carefully enclosed, with the letter in which I had sent it." Dickens had asked him before leaving what he would most wish to have in remembrance of Italy. "An ivy-leaf from Fiesole," said Landor. [102] One message sent me, though all to whom it refers have now passed away, I please myself by thinking may still, where he might most have desired it, be the occasion of pleasure. ". . . Give my love to Colden, and tell him if he leaves London before I return I will ever more address him and speak of him as _Colonel_ Colden. Kate sends _her_ love to him also, and we both entreat him to say all the affectionate things he can spare for third parties--using so many himself--when he writes to Mrs. Colden: whom you ought to know, for she, as I have often told you, is BRILLIANT. I would go five hundred miles to see her for five minutes. I am deeply grieved by poor Felton's loss. His letter is manly, and of a most rare kind in the dignified composure and silence of his sorrow." (See Vol. I. p. 315). [103] "It matters little now," says Dickens, after describing this incident in one of his minor writings, "for coaches of all colours are alike to poor Kindheart, and he rests far north of the little cemetery with the cypress trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so beautiful." What was said on a former page (_ante_, 182) may here be completed by a couple of stories told to Dickens by Mr. Walton, suggestive strongly of the comment that it required indeed a kind heart and many attractive qualities (which undoubtedly Fletcher possessed) to render tolerable such eccentricities. Dickens made one of these stories wonderfully amusing. It related the introduction by Fletcher of an unknown Englishman to the marble-merchant's house; the stay there of the Englishman, unasked, for ten days; and finally the walking off of the Englishman in a shirt, pair of stockings, neckcloth, pocket-handkerchief, and other etceteras belonging to Mr. Walton, which never reappeared after that hour. On another occasion, Fletcher confessed to Mr. Walton his having given a bill to a man in Carrara for £30; and the marble-merchant having asked, "And pray, Fletcher, have you arranged to meet it when it falls due?" Fletcher at once replied, "Yes," and to the marble-merchant's farther enquiry "how?" added, in his politest manner, "I have arranged to blow my brains out the day before!" The poor fellow did afterwards almost as much self-violence without intending it, dying of fever caught in night-wanderings through Liverpool half-clothed amid storms of rain. [104] Sydney died on the 22nd of February ('45), in his 77th year. [105] A remark on this, made in my reply, elicited what follows in a letter during his travel home: "Odd enough that remark of yours. I had been wondering at Rome that Juvenal (which I have been always lugging out of a bag, on all occasions) never used the fire-flies for an illustration. But even now, they are only partially seen; and no where I believe in such enormous numbers as on the Mediterranean coast-road, between Genoa and Spezzia. I will ascertain for curiosity's sake, whether there are any at this time in Rome, or between it and the country-house of Mæcenas--on the ground of Horace's journey. I know there is a place on the French side of Genoa, where they begin at a particular boundary-line, and are never seen beyond it. . . . All wild to see you at Brussels! What a meeting we will have, please God!" CHAPTER IX. AGAIN IN ENGLAND. 1845-1846. Proposed Weekly Paper--Christmas Book of 1845--Stage Studies--Private Theatricals--Dickens as Performer and as Manager--Second Raven's Death--Busy with the _Cricket_--Disturbing Engagements--Prospectus written by him--New Book to be written in Switzerland--Leaves England. HIS first letter after again taking possession of Devonshire-terrace revived a subject on which opinions had been from time to time interchanged during his absence, and to which there was allusion in the agreement executed before his departure. The desire was still as strong with him as when he started _Master Humphrey's Clock_ to establish a periodical, that, while relieving his own pen by enabling him to receive frequent help from other writers, might yet retain always the popularity of his name. "I really think I have an idea, and not a bad one, for the periodical. I have turned it over, the last two days, very much in my mind: and think it positively good. I incline still to weekly; price three halfpence, if possible; partly original, partly select; notices of books, notices of theatres, notices of all good things, notices of all bad ones; _Carol_ philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, jolly good temper; papers always in season, pat to the time of year; and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and Fireside. And I would call it, sir,-- -------------------------------------------------------- | | | THE CRICKET. | | | | A cheerful creature that chirrups on the Hearth. | | | | _Natural History._ | | | -------------------------------------------------------- "Now, don't decide hastily till you've heard what I would do. I would come out, sir, with a prospectus on the subject of the Cricket that should put everybody in a good temper, and make such a dash at people's fenders and arm-chairs as hasn't been made for many a long day. I could approach them in a different mode under this name, and in a more winning and immediate way, than under any other. I would at once sit down upon their very hobs; and take a personal and confidential position with them which should separate me, instantly, from all other periodicals periodically published, and supply a distinct and sufficient reason for my coming into existence. And I would chirp, chirp, chirp away in every number until I chirped it up to----well, you shall say how many hundred thousand! . . . Seriously, I feel a capacity in this name and notion which appears to give us a tangible starting-point, and a real, defined, strong, genial drift and purpose. I seem to feel that it is an aim and name which people would readily and pleasantly connect with _me_; and that, for a good course and a clear one, instead of making circles pigeon-like at starting, here we should be safe. I think the general recognition would be likely to leap at it; and of the helpful associations that could be clustered round the idea at starting, and the pleasant tone of which the working of it is susceptible, I have not the smallest doubt. . . . But you shall determine. What do you think? And what do you say? The chances are, that it will either strike you instantly, or not strike you at all. Which is it, my dear fellow? You know I am not bigoted to the first suggestions of my own fancy; but you know also exactly how I should use such a lever, and how much power I should find in it. Which is it? What do you say?--I have not myself said half enough. Indeed I have said next to nothing; but like the parrot in the negro-story, I 'think a dam deal.'" My objection, incident more or less to every such scheme, was the risk of losing its general advantage by making it too specially dependent on individual characteristics; but there was much in favour of the present notion, and its plan had been modified so far, in the discussions that followed, as to involve less absolute personal identification with Dickens,--when discussion, project, everything was swept away by a larger scheme, in its extent and its danger more suitable to the wild and hazardous enterprises of that prodigious year (1845) of excitement and disaster. In this more tremendous adventure, already hinted at on a previous page, we all became involved; and the chirp of the Cricket, delayed in consequence until Christmas, was heard then in circumstances quite other than those that were first intended. The change he thus announced to me about half way through the summer, in the same letter which told me the success of d'Orsay's kind exertion to procure a fresh engagement for his courier Roche.[106] "What do you think of a notion that has occurred to me in connection with our abandoned little weekly? It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making the Cricket a little household god--silent in the wrong and sorrow of the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy." The reader will not need to be told that thus originated the story of the _Cricket on the Hearth_, a Fairy Tale of Home, which had a great popularity in the Christmas days of 1845. Its sale at the outset doubled that of both its predecessors. But as yet the larger adventure has not made itself known, and the interval was occupied with the private play of which the notion had been started between us at his visit in December, and which cannot now be better introduced than by a passage of autobiography. This belongs to his early life, but I overlooked it when engaged on that portion of the memoir; and the accident gives it now a more appropriate place. For, though the facts related belong to the interval described in the chapter on his school-days and start in life, when he had to pass nearly two years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, the influences and character it illustrates had their strongest expression at this later time. I had asked him, after his return to Genoa, whether he continued to think that we should have the play; and this was his reply. It will startle and interest the reader, and I must confess that it took myself by surprise; for I did not thus early know the story of his boyish years, and I thought it strange that he could have concealed from me so much. "ARE we to have that play??? Have I spoken of it, ever since I came home from London, as a settled thing! I do not know if I have ever told you seriously, but I have often thought, that I should certainly have been as successful on the boards as I have been between them. I assure you, when I was on the stage at Montreal (not having played for years) I was as much astonished at the reality and ease, to myself, of what I did as if I had been another man. See how oddly things come about! When I was about twenty, and knew three or four successive years of Mathews's At Homes from sitting in the pit to hear them, I wrote to Bartley who was stage manager at Covent-garden, and told him how young I was, and exactly what I thought I could do; and that I believed I had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others. There must have been something in the letter that struck the authorities, for Bartley wrote to me, almost immediately, to say that they were busy getting up the _Hunchback_ (so they were!) but that they would communicate with me again, in a fortnight. Punctual to the time, another letter came: with an appointment to do anything of Mathews's I pleased, before him and Charles Kemble, on a certain day at the theatre. My sister Fanny was in the secret, and was to go with me to play the songs. I was laid up, when the day came, with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face; the beginning, by the bye, of that annoyance in one ear to which I am subject at this day. I wrote to say so, and added that I would resume my application next season. I made a great splash in the gallery soon afterwards; the _Chronicle_ opened to me; I had a distinction in the little world of the newspaper, which made me like it; began to write; didn't want money; had never thought of the stage, but as a means of getting it; gradually left off turning my thoughts that way; and never resumed the idea. I never told you this, did I? See how near I may have been, to another sort of life. "This was at the time when I was at Doctors' Commons as a shorthand writer for the proctors. And I recollect I wrote the letter from a little office I had there, where the answer came also. It wasn't a very good living (though not a _very_ bad one), and was wearily uncertain; which made me think of the Theatre in quite a business-like way. I went to some theatre every night, with a very few exceptions, for at least three years: really studying the bills first, and going to where there was the best acting: and always to see Mathews whenever he played. I practised immensely (even such things as walking in and out, and sitting down in a chair): often four, five, six hours a day: shut up in my own room, or walking about in the fields. I prescribed to myself, too, a sort of Hamiltonian system for learning parts; and learnt a great number. I haven't even lost the habit now, for I knew my Canadian parts immediately, though they were new to me. I must have done a good deal: for, just as Macready found me out, they used to challenge me at Braham's: and Yates, who was knowing enough in those things, wasn't to be parried at all. It was just the same, that day at Keeley's, when they were getting up the _Chuzzlewit_ last June. "If you think Macready would be interested in this Strange news from the South, tell it him. Fancy Bartley or Charles Kemble _now_! And how little they suspect me!" In the later letter from Lucerne written as he was travelling home, he adds: "_Did_ I ever tell you the details of my theatrical idea, before? Strange, that I should have quite forgotten it. I had an odd fancy, when I was reading the unfortunate little farce at Covent-garden, that Bartley looked as if some struggling recollection and connection were stirring up within him--but it may only have been his doubts of that humorous composition." The last allusion is to the farce of the _Lamplighter_ which he read in the Covent-garden green-room, and to which former allusion was made in speaking of his wish to give help to Macready's managerial enterprise. _What Might have Been_ is a history of too little profit to be worth anybody's writing, and here there is no call even to regret how great an actor was in Dickens lost. He took to a higher calling, but it included the lower. There was no character created by him into which life and reality were not thrown with such vividness, that the thing written did not seem to his readers the thing actually done, whether the form of disguise put on by the enchanter was Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mr. Squeers, or Fagin the Jew. He had the power of projecting himself into shapes and suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of creative imagination, and what he desired to express he became. The assumptions of the theatre have the same method at a lower pitch, depending greatly on personal accident; but the accident as much as the genius favoured Dickens, and another man's conception underwent in his acting the process which in writing he applied to his own. Into both he flung himself with the passionate fullness of his nature; and though the theatre had limits for him that may be named hereafter, and he was always greater in quickness of assumption than in steadiness of delineation, there was no limit to his delight and enjoyment in the adventures of our theatrical holiday. In less than three weeks after his return we had selected our play, cast our parts, and all but engaged our theatre; as I find by a note from my friend of the 22nd of July, in which the good natured laugh can give now no offence, since all who might have objected to it have long gone from us. Fanny Kelly, the friend of Charles Lamb, and a genuine successor to the old school of actresses in which the Mrs. Orgers and Miss Popes were bred, was not more delightful on the stage than impracticable when off, and the little theatre in Dean-street which the Duke of Devonshire's munificence had enabled her to build, and which with any ordinary good sense might handsomely have realized both its uses, as a private school for young actresses and a place of public amusement, was made useless for both by her mere whims and fancies. "Heavens! Such a scene as I have had with Miss Kelly here, this morning! She wanted us put off until the theatre should be cleaned and brushed up a bit, and she would and she would not, for she is eager to have us and alarmed when she thinks of us. By the foot of Pharaoh, it was a great scene! Especially when she choked, and had the glass of water brought. She exaggerates the importance of our occupation, dreads the least prejudice against the establishment in the minds of any of our company, says the place already has quite ruined her, and with tears in her eyes protests that any jokes at her additional expense in print would drive her mad. By the body of Cæsar, the scene was incredible! It's like a preposterous dream." Something of our play is disclosed by the oaths à la Bobadil, and of our actors by "the jokes" poor Miss Kelly was afraid of. We had chosen EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR, with special regard to the singleness and individuality of the "humours" portrayed in it; and our company included the leaders of a journal then in its earliest years, but already not more renowned as the most successful joker of jokes yet known in England, than famous for that exclusive use of its laughter and satire for objects the highest or most harmless which makes it still so enjoyable a companion to mirth-loving right-minded men. Maclise took earnest part with us, and was to have acted, but fell away on the eve of the rehearsals; and Stanfield, who went so far as to rehearse Downright twice, then took fright and also ran away:[107] but Jerrold, who played Master Stephen, brought with him Lemon, who took Brainworm; Leech, to whom Master Matthew was given; A'Beckett, who had condescended to the small part of William; and Mr. Leigh, who had Oliver Cob. I played Kitely, and Bobadil fell to Dickens, who took upon him the redoubtable Captain long before he stood in his dress at the footlights; humouring the completeness of his assumption by talking and writing Bobadil, till the dullest of our party were touched and stirred to something of his own heartiness of enjoyment. One or two hints of these have been given, and I will only add to them his refusal of my wish that he should go and see some special performance of the Gamester. "Man of the House. _Gamester!_ By the foot of Pharaoh, I will _not_ see the _Gamester_. Man shall not force, nor horses drag, this poor gentleman-like carcass into the presence of the _Gamester_. I have said it. . . . The player Mac hath bidden me to eat and likewise drink with him, thyself, and short-necked Fox to-night--An' I go not, I am a hog, and not a soldier. But an' thou goest not--Beware citizen! Look to it. . . . Thine as thou meritest. BOBADIL (Captain). Unto Master Kitely. These." The play was played on the 21st of September with a success that out-ran the wildest expectation; and turned our little enterprise into one of the small sensations of the day. The applause of the theatre found so loud an echo in the press, that for the time nothing else was talked about in private circles; and after a week or two we had to yield (we did not find it difficult) to a pressure of demand for more public performance in a larger theatre, by which a useful charity received important help, and its committee showed their gratitude by an entertainment to us at the Clarendon, a month or two later, when Lord Lansdowne took the chair. There was also another performance by us at the same theatre, before the close of the year, of a play by Beaumont and Fletcher. I may not farther indicate the enjoyments that attended the success, and gave always to the first of our series of performances a pre-eminently pleasant place in memory. Of the thing itself, however, it is necessary to be said that a modicum of merit goes a long way in all such matters, and it would not be safe now to assume that ours was much above the average of amateur attempts in general. Lemon certainly had most of the stuff, conventional as well as otherwise, of a regular actor in him, but this was not of a high kind; and though Dickens had the title to be called a born comedian, the turn for it being in his very nature, his strength was rather in the vividness and variety of his assumptions, than in the completeness, finish, or ideality he could give to any part of them. It is expressed exactly by what he says of his youthful preference for the representations of the elder Mathews. At the same time this was in itself so thoroughly genuine and enjoyable, and had in it such quickness and keenness of insight, that of its kind it was unrivalled; and it enabled him to present in Bobadil, after a richly coloured picture of bombastical extravagance and comic exaltation in the earlier scenes, a contrast in the later of tragical humility and abasement, that had a wonderful effect. But greatly as his acting contributed to the success of the night, this was nothing to the service he had rendered as manager. It would be difficult to describe it. He was the life and soul of the entire affair. I never seemed till then to have known his business capabilities. He took everything on himself, and did the whole of it without an effort. He was stage-director, very often stage-carpenter, scene-arranger, property-man, prompter, and band-master. Without offending any one he kept every one in order. For all he had useful suggestions, and the dullest of clays under his potter's hand were transformed into little bits of porcelain. He adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced as well as exhibited in his proper person everything of which he urged the necessity on others. Such a chaos of dirt, confusion, and noise, as the little theatre was the day we entered it, and such a cosmos as he made it of cleanliness, order, and silence, before the rehearsals were over! There were only two things left as we found them, bits of humanity both, understood from the first as among the fixtures of the place: a Man in a Straw Hat, tall, and very fitful in his exits and entrances, of whom we never could pierce the mystery, whether he was on guard or in possession, or what he was; and a solitary little girl, who flitted about so silently among our actors and actresses that she might have been deaf and dumb but for sudden small shrieks and starts elicited by the wonders going on, which obtained for her the name of Fireworks. There is such humorous allusion to both in a letter of Dickens's of a year's later date, on the occasion of the straw-hatted mystery revealing itself as a gentleman in training for the tragic stage, that it may pleasantly close for the present our private theatricals. "OUR STRAW-HATTED FRIEND from Miss Kelly's! Oh my stars! To think of him, all that time--Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that small theatre in Dean-street! FIREWORKS will come out shortly, depend upon it, in the dumb line; and will relate her history in profoundly unintelligible motions that will be translated into long and complicated descriptions by a grey-headed father, and a red-wigged countryman, his son. You remember the dumb dodge of relating an escape from captivity? Clasping the left wrist with the right hand, and the right wrist with the left hand--alternately (to express chains)--and then going round and round the stage very fast, and coming hand over hand down an imaginary cord; at the end of which there is one stroke on the drum, and a kneeling to the chandelier? If Fireworks can't do that--and won't somewhere--I'm a Dutchman." Graver things now claim a notice which need not be proportioned to their gravity, because, though they had an immediate effect on Dickens's fortunes, they do not otherwise form part of his story. But first let me say, he was at Broadstairs for three weeks in the autumn;[108] we had the private play on his return; and a month later, on the 28th of October, a sixth child and fourth son, named Alfred Tennyson after his godfathers d'Orsay and Tennyson, was born in Devonshire-terrace. A death in the family followed, the older and more gifted of his ravens having indulged the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal to his predecessor. Voracity killed him, as it killed Scott's. He died unexpectedly before the kitchen-fire. "He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of _Cuckoo_!" The letter which told me this (31st of October) announced to me also that he was at a dead lock in his Christmas story: "Sick, bothered and depressed. Visions of Brighton come upon me; and I have a great mind to go there to finish my second part, or to Hampstead. I have a desperate thought of Jack Straw's. I never was in such bad writing cue as I am this week, in all my life." The reason was not far to seek. In the preparation for the proposed new Daily Paper to which reference has been made, he was now actively assisting, and had all but consented to the publication of his name. I entertained at this time, for more than one powerful reason, the greatest misgiving of his intended share in the adventure. It was not fully revealed until later on what difficult terms, physical as well as mental, Dickens held the tenure of his imaginative life; but already I knew enough to doubt the wisdom of what he was at present undertaking. In all intellectual labour, his will prevailed so strongly when he fixed it on any object of desire, that what else its attainment might exact was never duly measured; and this led to frequent strain and unconscious waste of what no man could less afford to spare. To the world gladdened by his work, its production might always have seemed quite as easy as its enjoyment; but it may be doubted if ever any man's mental effort cost him more. His habits were robust, but not his health; that secret had been disclosed to me before he went to America; and to the last he refused steadily to admit the enormous price he had paid for his triumphs and successes. The morning after his last note I heard again. "I have been so very unwell this morning, with giddiness, and headache, and botheration of one sort or other, that I didn't get up till noon: and, shunning Fleet-street" (the office of the proposed new paper), "am now going for a country walk, in the course of which you will find me, if you feel disposed to come away in the carriage that goes to you with this. It is to call for a pull of the first part of the _Cricket_, and will bring you, if you like, by way of Hampstead to me, and subsequently to dinner. There is much I should like to discuss, if you can manage it. It's the loss of my walks, I suppose; but I am as giddy as if I were drunk, and can hardly see." I gave far from sufficient importance at the time to the frequency of complaints of this kind, or to the recurrence, at almost regular periods after the year following the present, of those spasms in the side of which he has recorded an instance in the recollections of his childhood, and of which he had an attack in Genoa; but though not conscious of it to its full extent, this consideration was among those that influenced me in a determination to endeavour to turn him from what could not but be regarded as full of peril. His health, however, had no real prominence in my letter; and it is strange now to observe that it appears as an argument in his reply. I had simply put before him, in the strongest form, all the considerations drawn from his genius and fame that should deter him from the labour and responsibility of a daily paper, not less than from the party and political involvements incident to it; and here was the material part of the answer made. "Many thanks for your affectionate letter, which is full of generous truth. These considerations weigh with me, _heavily_: but I think I descry in these times, greater stimulants to such an effort; greater chance of some fair recognition of it; greater means of persevering in it, or retiring from it unscratched by any weapon one should care for; than at any other period. And most of all I have, sometimes, that possibility of failing health or fading popularity before me, which beckons me to such a venture when it comes within my reach. At the worst, I have written to little purpose, if I cannot _write myself right_ in people's minds, in such a case as this." And so it went on: but it does not fall within my plan to describe more than the issue, which was to be accounted so far at least fortunate that it established a journal which has advocated steadily improvements in the condition of all classes, rich as well as poor, and has been able, during late momentous occurrences, to give wider scope to its influence by its enterprise and liberality. To that result, the great writer whose name gave its earliest attraction to the _Daily News_ was not enabled to contribute much; but from him it certainly received the first impress of the opinions it has since consistently maintained. Its prospectus is before me in his handwriting, but it bears upon itself sufficiently the character of his hand and mind. The paper would be kept free, it said, from personal influence or party bias; and would be devoted to the advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong might be redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of society promoted. The day for the appearance of its first number was that which was to follow Peel's speech for the repeal of the corn laws; but, brief as my allusions to the subject are, the remark should be made that even before this day came there were interruptions to the work of preparation, at one time very grave, which threw such "changes of vexation" on Dickens's personal relations to the venture as went far to destroy both his faith and his pleasure in it. No opinion need be offered as to where most of the blame lay, and it would be useless now to apportion the share that might possibly have belonged to himself; but, owing to this cause, his editorial work began with such diminished ardour that its brief continuance could not but be looked for. A little note written "before going home" at six o'clock in the morning of Wednesday the 21st of January 1846, to tell me they had "been at press three quarters of an hour, and were out before the _Times_," marks the beginning; and a note written in the night of Monday the 9th of February, "tired to death and quite worn out," to say that he had just resigned his editorial functions, describes the end. I had not been unprepared. A week before (Friday 30th of January) he had written: "I want a long talk with you. I was obliged to come down here in a hurry to give out a travelling letter I meant to have given out last night, and could not call upon you. Will you dine with us to-morrow at six sharp? I have been revolving plans in my mind this morning for quitting the paper and going abroad again to write a new book in shilling numbers. Shall we go to Rochester to-morrow week (my birthday) if the weather be, as it surely must be, better?" To Rochester accordingly we had gone, he and Mrs. Dickens and her sister, with Maclise and Jerrold and myself; going over the old Castle, Watts's Charity, and Chatham fortifications on the Saturday, passing Sunday in Cobham church and Cobham park; having our quarters both days at the Bull inn made famous in _Pickwick_; and thus, by indulgence of the desire which was always strangely urgent in him, associating his new resolve in life with those earliest scenes of his youthful time. On one point our feeling had been in thorough agreement. If long continuance with the paper was not likely, the earliest possible departure from it was desirable. But as the letters descriptive of his Italian travel (turned afterwards into _Pictures from Italy_) had begun with its first number, his name could not at once be withdrawn; and for the time during which they were still to appear, he consented to contribute other occasional letters on important social questions. Public executions and Ragged schools were among the subjects chosen by him, and all were handled with conspicuous ability. But the interval they covered was a short one. To the supreme control which he had quitted, I succeeded, retaining it very reluctantly for the greater part of that weary, anxious, laborious year; but in little more than four months from the day the paper started, the whole of Dickens's connection with the _Daily News_, even that of contributing letters with his signature, had ceased. As he said in the preface to the republished _Pictures_, it was a mistake to have disturbed the old relations between himself and his readers, in so departing from his old pursuits. It had however been "a brief mistake;" the departure had been only "for a moment;" and now those pursuits were "joyfully" to be resumed in Switzerland. Upon the latter point we had much discussion; but he was bent on again removing himself from London, and his glimpse of the Swiss mountains on his coming from Italy had given him a passion to visit them again. "I don't think," he wrote to me, "I _could_ shut out the paper sufficiently, here, to write well. No . . . I will write my book in Lausanne and in Genoa, and forget everything else if I can; and by living in Switzerland for the summer, and in Italy or France for the winter, I shall be saving money while I write." So therefore it was finally determined. There is not much that calls for mention before he left. The first conceiving of a new book was always a restless time, and other subjects beside the characters that were growing in his mind would persistently intrude themselves into his night-wanderings. With some surprise I heard from him afterwards, for example, of a communication opened with a leading member of the Government to ascertain what chances there might be for his appointment, upon due qualification, to the paid magistracy of London: the reply not giving him encouragement to entertain the notion farther. It was of course but an outbreak of momentary discontent; and if the answer had been as hopeful as for others' sake rather than his own one could have wished it to be, the result would have been the same. Just upon the eve of his departure, I may add, he took much interest in the establishment of the General Theatrical Fund, of which he remained a trustee until his death. It had originated in the fact that the Funds of the two large theatres, themselves then disused for theatrical performances, were no longer available for the ordinary members of the profession; and on the occasion of his presiding at its first dinner in April he said, very happily, that now the statue of Shakespeare outside the door of Drury-lane, as emphatically as his bust inside the church of Stratford-on-Avon, _pointed out his grave_. I am tempted also to mention as felicitous a word which I heard fall from him at one of the many private dinners that were got up in those days of parting to give him friendliest farewell. "Nothing is ever so good as it is thought," said Lord Melbourne. "And nothing so bad," interposed Dickens. The last incidents were that he again obtained Roche for his travelling servant, and that he let his Devonshire-terrace house to Sir James Duke for twelve months, the entire proposed term of his absence. On the 30th of May they all dined with me, and on the following day left England. FOOTNOTES: [106] Count d'Orsay's note about Roche, replying to Dickens's recommendation of him at his return, has touches of the pleasantry, wit, and kindliness that gave such a wonderful fascination to its writer. "Gore House, 6 July, 1845. MON CHER DICKENS, Nous sommes enchantés de votre retour. Voici, thank God, Devonshire Place ressuscité. Venez luncheoner demain à 1 heure, et amenez notre brave ami Forster. J'attends la perle fine des couriers. Vous l'immortalisez par ce certificat--la difficulté sera de trouver un maître digne de lui. J'essayerai de tout mon coeur. La Reine devroit le prendre pour aller en Saxe Gotha, car je suis convaincu qu'il est assez intelligent pour pouvoir découvrir ce Royaume. Gore House vous envoye un cargo d'amitiés des plus sincères. Donnez de ma part 100,000 kind regards à Madame Dickens. Toujours votre affectionné, Ce D'ORSAY. J'ai vu le courier, c'est le tableau de l'honnêteté, et de la bonne humeur. Don't forget to be here at one to-morrow, with Forster." [107] "Look here! Enclosed are two packets--a large one and a small one. The small one, read first. It contains Stanny's renunciation as an actor!!! After receiving it, at dinner time to-day" (22nd of August), "I gave my brains a shake, and thought of George Cruikshank. After much shaking, I made up the big packet, wherein I have put the case in the artfullest manner. R-r-r-r-ead it! as a certain Captain whom you know observes." The great artist was not for that time procurable, having engagements away from London, and Mr. Dudley Costello was substituted; Stanfield taking off the edge of his desertion as an actor by doing valuable work in management and scenery. [108] Characteristic glimpse of this Broadstairs holiday is afforded by a letter of the 19th of August 1845. "Perhaps it is a fair specimen of the odd adventures which befall the inimitable, that the cab in which the children and the luggage were (I and my womankind being in the other) got its shafts broken in the city, last Friday morning, through the horse stumbling on the greasy pavement; _and was drawn to the wharf (about a mile) by a stout man_, amid such frightful howlings and derisive yellings on the part of an infuriated populace, as I never heard before. Conceive the man in the broken shafts with his back towards the cab; all the children looking out of the windows; and the muddy portmanteaus and so forth (which were all tumbled down when the horse fell) tottering and nodding on the box! The best of it was, that _our_ cabman, being an intimate friend of the damaged cabman, insisted on keeping him company; and proceeded at a solemn walk, in front of the procession; thereby securing to me a liberal share of the popular curiosity and congratulation. . . . Everything here at Broadstairs is the same as of old. I have walked 20 miles a day since I came down, and I went to a circus at Ramsgate on Saturday night, where _Mazeppa_ was played in three long acts without an H in it: as if for a wager. Evven, and edds, and errors, and ands, were as plentiful as blackberries; but the letter H was neither whispered in Evven, nor muttered in Ell, nor permitted to dwell in any form on the confines of the sawdust." With this I will couple another theatrical experience of this holiday, when he saw a Giant played by a village comedian with a quite Gargantuesque felicity, and singled out for my admiration his fine manner of sitting down to a hot supper (of children), with the self-lauding exalting remark, by way of grace, "How pleasant is a quiet conscience and an approving mind!" CHAPTER X. A HOME IN SWITZERLAND. 1846. On the Rhine--Travelling Englishmen--At Lausanne--House-hunting--A Cottage chosen--First Impressions of Switzerland--Lausanne described--His Villa described--Design as to Work--English Neighbours--Swiss Prison System--Blind Institution--Interesting Case--Idiot Girl--Habits in Idiot Life and Savage--Begins Dombey--The Christmas Tale. HALTING only at Ostend, Verviers, Coblentz, and Mannheim, they reached Strasburg on the seventh of June: the beauty of the weather[109] showing them the Rhine at its best. At Mayence there had come aboard their boat a German, who soon after accosted Mrs. Dickens on deck in excellent English: "Your countryman Mr. Dickens is travelling this way just now, our papers say. Do you know him, or have you passed him anywhere?" Explanations ensuing, it turned out, by one of the odd chances my friend thought himself always singled out for, that he had with him a letter of introduction to the brother of this gentleman; who then spoke to him of the popularity of his books in Germany, and of the many persons he had seen reading them in the steamboats as he came along. Dickens remarking at this how great his own vexation was not to be able himself to speak a word of German, "Oh dear! that needn't trouble you," rejoined the other; "for even in so small a town as ours, where we are mostly primitive people and have few travellers, I could make a party of at least forty people who understand and speak English as well as I do, and of at least as many more who could manage to read you in the original." His town was Worms, which Dickens afterwards saw, ". . . a fine old place, though greatly shrunken and decayed in respect of its population; with a picturesque old cathedral standing on the brink of the Rhine, and some brave old churches shut up, and so hemmed in and overgrown with vineyards that they look as if they were turning into leaves and grapes." He had no other adventure on the Rhine. But, on the same steamer, a not unfamiliar bit of character greeted him in the well-known lineaments, moral and physical, of two travelling Englishmen who had got an immense barouche on board with them, and had no plan whatever of going anywhere in it. One of them wanted to have this barouche wheeled ashore at every little town and village they came to. The other was bent upon "seeing it out," as he said--meaning, Dickens supposed, the river; though neither of them seemed to have the slightest interest in it. "The locomotive one would have gone ashore without the carriage, and would have been delighted to get rid of it; but they had a joint courier, and neither of them would part with _him_ for a moment; so they went growling and grumbling on together, and seemed to have no satisfaction but in asking for impossible viands on board the boat, and having a grim delight in the steward's excuses." From Strasburg they went by rail on the 8th to Bâle, from which they started for Lausanne next day, in three coaches, two horses to each, taking three days for the journey: its only enlivening incident being an uproar between the landlord of an inn on the road, and one of the voituriers who had libelled Boniface's establishment by complaining of the food. "After various defiances on both sides, the landlord said 'Scélérat! Mécréant! Je vous boaxerai!' to which the voiturier replied, 'Aha! Comment dites-vous? Voulez-vous boaxer? Eh? Voulez-vous? Ah! Boaxez-moi donc! Boaxez-moi!'--at the same time accompanying these retorts with gestures of violent significance, which explained that this new verb-active was founded on the well-known English verb to boax, or box. If they used it once, they used it at least a hundred times, and goaded each other to madness with it always." The travellers reached the hotel Gibbon at Lausanne on the evening of Thursday the 11th of June; having been tempted as they came along to rest somewhat short of it, by a delightful glimpse of Neuchâtel. "On consideration however I thought it best to come on here, in case I should find, when I begin to write, that I want streets sometimes. In which case, Geneva (which I hope would answer the purpose) is only four and twenty miles away." He at once began house-hunting, and had two days' hard work of it. He found the greater part of those let to the English like small villas in the Regent's-park, with verandahs, glass-doors opening on lawns, and alcoves overlooking the lake and mountains. One he was tempted by, higher up the hill, "poised above the town like a ship on a high wave;" but the possible fury of its winter winds deterred him. Greater still was the temptation to him of "L'Elysée," more a mansion than a villa; with splendid grounds overlooking the lake, and in its corridors and staircases as well as furniture like an old fashioned country house in England; which he could have got for twelve months for £160. "But when I came to consider its vastness, I was rather dismayed at the prospect of windy nights in the autumn, with nobody staying in the house to make it gay." And so he again fell back upon the very first place he had seen, Rosemont, quite a doll's house; with two pretty little salons, a dining-room, hall, and kitchen, on the ground floor; and with just enough bedrooms upstairs to leave the family one to spare. "It is beautifully situated on the hill that rises from the lake, within ten minutes' walk of this hotel, and furnished, though scantily as all here are, better than others except Elysée, on account of its having being built and fitted up (the little salons in the Parisian way) by the landlady and her husband for themselves. They lived now in a smaller house like a porter's lodge, just within the gate. A portion of the grounds is farmed by a farmer, and _he_ lives close by; so that, while it is secluded, it is not at all lonely." The rent was to be ten pounds a month for half a year, with reduction to eight for the second half, if he should stay so long; and the rooms and furniture were to be described to me, so that according to custom I should be quite at home there, as soon as, also according to a custom well-known, his own ingenious re-arrangements and improvements in the chairs and tables should be completed. "I shall merely observe at present therefore, that my little study is upstairs, and looks out, from two French windows opening into a balcony, on the lake and mountains; and that there are roses enough to smother the whole establishment of the _Daily News_ in. Likewise, there is a pavilion in the garden, which has but two rooms in it; in one of which, I think you shall do your work when you come. As to bowers for reading and smoking, there are as many scattered about the grounds, as there are in Chalk-farm tea-gardens. But the Rosemont bowers are really beautiful. Will you come to the bowers. . . ?" Very pleasant were the earliest impressions of Switzerland with which this first letter closed. "The country is delightful in the extreme--as leafy, green, and shady, as England; full of deep glens, and branchy places (rather a Leigh Huntish expression), and bright with all sorts of flowers in profusion.[110] It abounds in singing birds besides--very pleasant after Italy; and the moonlight on the lake is noble. Prodigious mountains rise up from its opposite shore (it is eight or nine miles across, at this point), and the Simplon, the St. Gothard, Mont Blanc, and all the Alpine wonders are piled there, in tremendous grandeur. The cultivation is uncommonly rich and profuse. There are all manner of walks, vineyards, green lanes, cornfields, and pastures full of hay. The general neatness is as remarkable as in England. There are no priests or monks in the streets, and the people appear to be industrious and thriving. French (and very intelligible and pleasant French) seems to be the universal language. I never saw so many booksellers' shops crammed within the same space, as in the steep up-and-down streets of Lausanne." Of the little town he spoke in his next letter as having its natural dulness increased by that fact of its streets going up and down hill abruptly and steeply, like the streets in a dream; and the consequent difficulty of getting about it. "There are some suppressed churches in it, now used as packers' warehouses: with cranes and pulleys growing out of steeple-towers; little doors for lowering goods through, fitted into blocked-up oriel windows; and cart-horses stabled in crypts. These also help to give it a deserted and disused appearance. On the other hand, as it is a perfectly free place subject to no prohibitions or restrictions of any kind, there are all sorts of new French books and publications in it, and all sorts of fresh intelligence from the world beyond the Jura mountains. It contains only one Roman Catholic church, which is mainly for the use of the Savoyards and Piedmontese who come trading over the Alps. As for the country, it cannot be praised too highly, or reported too beautiful. There are no great waterfalls, or walks through mountain-gorges, _close_ at hand, as in some other parts of Switzerland; but there is a charming variety of enchanting scenery. There is the shore of the lake, where you may dip your feet, as you walk, in the deep blue water, if you choose. There are the hills to climb up, leading to the great heights above the town; or to stagger down, leading to the lake. There is every possible variety of deep green lanes, vineyard, cornfield, pasture-land, and wood. There are excellent country roads that might be in Kent or Devonshire: and, closing up every view and vista, is an eternally changing range of prodigious mountains--sometimes red, sometimes grey, sometimes purple, sometimes black; sometimes white with snow; sometimes close at hand; and sometimes very ghosts in the clouds and mist." In the heart of these things he was now to live and work for at least six months; and, as the love of nature was as much a passion with him in his intervals of leisure, as the craving for crowds and streets when he was busy with the creatures of his fancy, no man was better qualified to enjoy what was thus open to him from his little farm. The view from each side of it was different in character, and from one there was visible the liveliest aspect of Lausanne itself, close at hand, and seeming, as he said, to be always coming down the hill with its steeples and towers, not able to stop itself. "From a fine long broad balcony on which the windows of my little study on the first floor (where I am now writing) open, the lake is seen to wonderful advantage,--losing itself by degrees in the solemn gorge of mountains leading to the Simplon pass. Under the balcony is a stone colonnade, on which the six French windows of the drawing-room open; and quantities of plants are clustered about the pillars and seats, very prettily. One of these drawing-rooms is furnished (like a French hotel) with red velvet, and the other with green; in both, plenty of mirrors and nice white muslin curtains; and for the larger one in cold weather there is a carpet, the floors being bare now, but inlaid in squares with different-coloured woods." His description did not close until, in every nook and corner inhabited by the several members of the family, I was made to feel myself at home; but only the final sentence need be added. "Walking out into the balcony as I write, I am suddenly reminded, by the sight of the Castle of Chillon glittering in the sunlight on the lake, that I omitted to mention that object in my catalogue of the Rosemont beauties. Please to put it in, like George Robins, in a line by itself." [Illustration] Regular evening walks of nine or ten miles were named in the same letter (22nd of June) as having been begun;[111] and thoughts of his books were already stirring in him. "An odd shadowy undefined idea is at work within me, that I could connect a great battle-field somehow with my little Christmas story. Shapeless visions of the repose and peace pervading it in after-time; with the corn and grass growing over the slain, and people singing at the plough; are so perpetually floating before me, that I cannot but think there may turn out to be something good in them when I see them more plainly. . . . I want to get Four Numbers of the monthly book done here, and the Christmas book. If all goes well, and nothing changes, and I can accomplish this by the end of November, I shall run over to you in England for a few days with a light heart, and leave Roche to move the caravan to Paris in the meanwhile. It will be just the very point in the story when the life and crowd of that extraordinary place will come vividly to my assistance in writing." Such was his design; and, though difficulties not now seen started up which he had a hard fight to get through, he managed to accomplish it. His letter ended with a promise to tell me, when next he wrote, of the small colony of English who seemed ready to give him even more than the usual welcome. Two visits had thus early been paid him by Mr. Haldimand, formerly a member of the English parliament, an accomplished man, who, with his sister Mrs. Marcet (the well-known authoress), had long made Lausanne his home. He had a very fine seat just below Rosemont, and his character and station had made him quite the little sovereign of the place. "He has founded and endowed all sorts of hospitals and institutions here, and he gives a dinner to-morrow to introduce our neighbours, whoever they are." He found them to be happily the kind of people who rendered entirely pleasant those frank and cordial hospitalities which the charm of his personal intercourse made every one so eager to offer him. The dinner at Mr. Haldimand's was followed by dinners from the guests he met there; from an English lady[112] married to a Swiss, Mr. and Mrs. Cerjat, clever and agreeable both, far beyond the common; from her sister wedded to an Englishman, Mr. and Mrs. Goff; and from Mr. and Mrs. Watson of Rockingham-castle in Northamptonshire, who had taken the Elysée on Dickens giving it up, and with whom, as with Mr. Haldimand, his relations continued to be very intimate long after he left Lausanne. In his drive to Mr. Cerjat's dinner a whimsical difficulty presented itself. He had set up, for use of his wife and children, an odd little one-horse-carriage; made to hold three persons sideways, so that they should avoid the wind always blowing up or down the valley; and he found it attended with one of the drollest consequences conceivable. "It can't be easily turned; and as you face to the side, all sorts of evolutions are necessary to bring you 'broad-side to' before the door of the house where you are going. The country houses here are very like those upon the Thames between Richmond and Kingston (this, particularly), with grounds all round. At Mr. Cerjat's we were obliged to be carried, like the child's riddle, round the house and round the house, without touching the house; and we were presented in the most alarming manner, three of a row, first to all the people in the kitchen, then to the governess who was dressing in her bedroom, then to the drawing-room where the company were waiting for us, then to the dining-room where they were spreading the table, and finally to the hall where we were got out--scraping the windows of each apartment as we glared slowly into it." A dinner party of his own followed of course; and a sad occurrence, of which he and his guests were unconscious, signalised the evening (15th of July). "While we were sitting at dinner, one of the prettiest girls in Lausanne was drowned in the lake--in the most peaceful water, reflecting the steep mountains, and crimson with the setting sun. She was bathing in one of the nooks set apart for women, and seems somehow to have entangled her feet in the skirts of her dress. She was an accomplished swimmer, as many of the girls are here, and drifted, suddenly, out of only five feet water. Three or four friends who were with her, _ran away_, screaming. Our children's governess was on the lake in a boat with M. Verdeil (my prison-doctor) and his family. They ran inshore immediately; the body was quickly got out; and M. Verdeil, with three or four other doctors, laboured for some hours to restore animation; but she only sighed once. After all that time, she was obliged to be borne, stiff and stark, to her father's house. She was his only child, and but 17 years old. He has been nearly dead since, and all Lausanne has been full of the story. I was down by the lake, near the place, last night; and a boatman _acted_ to me the whole scene: depositing himself finally on a heap of stones, to represent the body." With M. Verdeil, physician to the prison and vice-president of the council of health, introduced by Mr. Haldimand, there had already been much communication; and I could give nothing more characteristic of Dickens than his reference to this, and other similar matters in which his interest was strongly moved during his first weeks at Lausanne.[113] "Some years ago, when they set about reforming the prison at Lausanne, they turned their attention, in a correspondence of republican feeling, to America; and taking the Philadelphian system for granted, adopted it. Terrible fits, new phases of mental affection, and horrible madness, among the prisoners, were very soon the result; and attained to such an alarming height, that M. Verdeil, in his public capacity, began to report against the system, and went on reporting and working against it until he formed a party who were determined not to have it, and caused it to be abolished--except in cases where the imprisonment does not exceed ten months in the whole. It is remarkable that in his notes of the different cases, there is _every effect_ I mentioned as having observed myself at Philadelphia; even down to those contained in the description of the man who had been there thirteen years, and who _picked his hands_ so much as he talked. He has only recently, he says, read the _American Notes_; but he is so much struck by the perfect coincidence that he intends to republish some extracts from his own notes, side by side with these passages of mine translated into French. I went with him over the prison the other day. It is wonderfully well arranged for a continental jail, and in perfect order. The sentences however, or some of them, are very terrible. I saw one man sent there for murder under circumstances of mitigation--for 30 years. Upon the silent social system all the time! They weave, and plait straw, and make shoes, small articles of turnery and carpentry, and little common wooden clocks. But the sentences are too long for that monotonous and hopeless life; and, though they are well-fed and cared for, they generally break down utterly after two or three years. One delusion seems to become common to three-fourths of them after a certain time of imprisonment. Under the impression that there is something destructive put into their food 'pour les guérir de crime' (says M. Verdeil), they refuse to eat!" It was at the Blind Institution, however, of which Mr. Haldimand was the president and great benefactor, that Dickens's attention was most deeply arrested; and there were two cases in especial of which the detail may be read with as much interest now as when my friend's letters were written, and as to which his own suggestions open up still rather startling trains of thought. The first, which in its attraction for him he found equal even to Laura Bridgman's, was that of a young man of 18: "born deaf and dumb, and stricken blind by an accident when he was about five years old. The Director of the institution is a young German, of great ability, and most uncommonly prepossessing appearance. He propounded to the scientific bodies of Geneva, a year ago (when this young man was under education in the asylum), the possibility of teaching him to speak--in other words, to play with his tongue upon his teeth and palate as if on an instrument, and connect particular performances with particular words conveyed to him in the finger-language. They unanimously agreed that it was quite impossible. The German set to work, and the young man now speaks very plainly and distinctly: without the least modulation, of course, but with comparatively little hesitation; expressing the words aloud as they are struck, so to speak, upon his hands; and showing the most intense and wonderful delight in doing it. This is commonly acquired, as you know, by the deaf and dumb who learn by sight; but it has never before been achieved in the case of a deaf, dumb, and blind subject. He is an extremely lively, intelligent, good-humoured fellow; an excellent carpenter; a first-rate turner; and runs about the building with a certainty and confidence which none of the merely blind pupils acquire. He has a great many ideas, and an instinctive dread of death. He knows of God, as of Thought enthroned somewhere; and once told, on nature's prompting (the devil's of course), a lie. He was sitting at dinner, and the Director asked him whether he had had anything to drink; to which he instantly replied 'No,' in order that he might get some more, though he had been served in his turn. It was explained to him that this was a wrong thing, and wouldn't do, and that he was to be locked up in a room for it: which was done. Soon after this, he had a dream of being bitten in the shoulder by some strange animal. As it left a great impression on his mind, he told M. the Director that he had told another lie in the night. In proof of it he related his dream, and added, 'It must be a lie you know, because there is no strange animal here, and I never was bitten.' Being informed that this sort of lie was a harmless one, and was called a dream, he asked whether dead people ever dreamed[114] while they were lying in the ground. He is one of the most curious and interesting studies possible." The second case had come in on the very day that Dickens visited the place. "When I was there" (8th of July) "there had come in, that morning, a girl of ten years old, born deaf and dumb and blind, and so perfectly untaught that she has not learnt to have the least control even over the performance of the common natural functions. . . . And yet she _laughs sometimes_ (good God! conceive what at!)--and is dreadfully sensitive from head to foot, and very much alarmed, for some hours before the coming on of a thunder storm. Mr. Haldimand has been long trying to induce her parents to send her to the asylum. At last they have consented; and when I saw her, some of the little blind girls were trying to make friends with her, and to lead her gently about. She was dressed in just a loose robe from the necessity of changing her frequently, but had been in a bath, and had had her nails cut (which were previously very long and dirty), and was not at all ill-looking--quite the reverse; with a remarkably good and pretty little mouth, but a low and undeveloped head of course. It was pointed out to me, as very singular, that the moment she is left alone, or freed from anybody's touch (which is the same thing to her), she instantly crouches down with her hands up to her ears, in exactly the position of a child before its birth; and so remains. I thought this such a strange coincidence with the utter want of advancement in her moral being, that it made a great impression on me; and conning it over and over, I began to think that this is surely the invariable action of savages too, and that I have seen it over and over again described in books of voyages and travels. Not having any of these with me, I turned to _Robinson Crusoe_; and I find De Foe says, describing the savages who came on the island after Will Atkins began to change for the better and commanded under the grave Spaniard for the common defence, 'their posture was generally sitting upon the ground, with their knees up towards their mouth, and the head put between the two hands, leaning down upon the knees'--exactly the same attitude!" In his next week's letter he reported further: "I have not been to the Blind asylum again yet, but they tell me that the deaf and dumb and blind child's _face_ is improving obviously, and that she takes great delight in the first effort made by the Director to connect himself with an occupation of her time. He gives her, every day, two smooth round pebbles to roll over and over between her two hands. She appears to have an idea that it is to lead to something; distinctly recognizes the hand that gives them to her, as a friendly and protecting one; and sits for hours quite busy." To one part of his very thoughtful suggestion I objected, and would have attributed to a mere desire for warmth, in her as in the savage, what he supposed to be part of an undeveloped or embryo state explaining also the absence of sentient and moral being. To this he replied (25th of July): "I do not think that there is reason for supposing that the savage attitude originates in the desire of warmth, because all naked savages inhabit hot climates; and their instinctive attitude, if it had reference to heat or cold, would probably be the coolest possible; like their delight in water, and swimming. I do not think there is any race of savage men, however low in grade, inhabiting cold climates, who do not kill beasts and wear their skins. The girl decidedly improves in face, and, if one can yet use the word as applied to her, in manner too. No communication by the speech of touch has yet been established with her, but the time has not been long enough." In a later letter he tells me (24th of August): "The deaf, dumb, and blind girl is decidedly improved, and very much improved, in this short time. No communication is yet established with her, but that is not to be expected. They have got her out of that strange, crouching position; dressed her neatly; and accustomed her to have a pleasure in society. She laughs frequently, and also claps her hands and jumps; having, God knows how, some inward satisfaction. I never saw a more tremendous thing in its way, in my life, than when they stood her, t'other day, in the centre of a group of blind children who sang a chorus to the piano; and brought her hand, and kept it, in contact with the instrument. A shudder pervaded her whole being, her breath quickened, her colour deepened,--and I can compare it to nothing but returning animation in a person nearly dead. It was really awful to see how the sensation of the music fluttered and stirred the locked-up soul within her." The same letter spoke again of the youth: "The male subject is well and jolly as possible. He is very fond of smoking. I have arranged to supply him with cigars during our stay here; so he and I are in amazing sympathy. I don't know whether he thinks I grow them, or make them, or produce them by winking, or what. But it gives him a notion that the world in general belongs to me.". . . Before his kind friend left Lausanne the poor fellow had been taught to say, "Monsieur Dickens m'a donné les cigares," and at their leave-taking his gratitude was expressed by incessant repetition of these words for a full half-hour. Certainly by no man was gratitude more persistently earned, than by Dickens, from all to whom nature or the world had been churlish or unfair. Not to those only made desolate by poverty or the temptations incident to it, but to those whom natural defects or infirmities had placed at a disadvantage with their kind, he gave his first consideration; helping them personally where he could, sympathising and sorrowing with them always, but above all applying himself to the investigation of such alleviation or cure as philosophy or science might be able to apply to their condition. This was a desire so eager as properly to be called one of the passions of his life, visible in him to the last hour of it. Only a couple of weeks, themselves not idle ones, had passed over him at Rosemont when he made a dash at the beginning of his real work; from which indeed he had only been detained so long by the non-arrival of a box dispatched from London before his own departure, containing not his proper writing materials only, but certain quaint little bronze figures that thus early stood upon his desk, and were as much needed for the easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens. "I have not been idle" (28th of June) "since I have been here, though at first I was 'kept out' of the big box as you know. I had a good deal to write for Lord John about the Ragged schools. I set to work and did that. A good deal for Miss Coutts, in reference to her charitable projects. I set to work and did _that_. Half of the children's New Testament[115] to write, or pretty nearly. I set to work and did _that_. Next I cleared off the greater part of such correspondence as I had rashly pledged myself to; and then. . . . BEGAN DOMBEY! I performed this feat yesterday--only wrote the first slip--but there it is, and it is a plunge straight over head and ears into the story. . . . Besides all this, I have really gone with great vigour at the French, where I find myself greatly assisted by the Italian; and am subject to two descriptions of mental fits in reference to the Christmas book: one, of the suddenest and wildest enthusiasm; one, of solitary and anxious consideration. . . . By the way, as I was unpacking the big box I took hold of a book, and said to 'Them,'--'Now, whatever passage my thumb rests on, I shall take as having reference to my work.' It was TRISTRAM SHANDY, and opened at these words, 'What a work it is likely to turn out! Let us begin it!'" The same letter told me that he still inclined strongly to "the field of battle notion" for his Christmas volume, but was not as yet advanced in it; being curious first to see whether its capacity seemed to strike me at all. My only objection was to his adventure of opening two stories at once, of which he did not yet see the full danger; but for the moment the Christmas fancy was laid aside, and not resumed, except in passing allusions, until after the close of August, when the first two numbers of _Dombey_ were done. The interval supplied fresh illustration of his life in his new home, not without much interest; and as I have shown what a pleasant social circle, "wonderfully friendly and hospitable"[116] to the last, already had grouped itself round him in Lausanne, and how full of "matter to be heard and learn'd" he found such institutions as its prison and blind school, the picture will receive attractive touches if I borrow from his letters written during this outset of _Dombey_, some farther notices as well of the general progress of his work, as of what was specially interesting or amusing to him at the time, and of how the country and the people impressed him. In all of these his character will be found strongly marked. FOOTNOTES: [109] "We have hardly seen a cloud in the sky since you and I parted at Ramsgate, and the heat has been extraordinary." [110] "The green woods and green shades about here," he says in another letter, "are more like Cobham in Kent, than anything we dream of at the foot of the Alpine passes." [111] To these the heat interposed occasional difficulties. "Setting off last night" (5th of July) "at six o'clock, in accordance with my usual custom, for a long walk, I was really quite floored when I got to the top of a long steep hill leading out of the town--the same by which we entered it. I believe the great heats, however, seldom last more than a week at a time; there are always very long twilights, and very delicious evenings; and now that there is moonlight, the nights are wonderful. The peacefulness and grandeur of the Mountains and the Lake are indescribable. There comes a rush of sweet smells with the morning air too, which is quite peculiar to the country." [112] "One of her brothers by the bye, now dead, had large property in Ireland--all Nenagh, and the country about; and Cerjat told me, as we were talking about one thing and another, that when he went over there for some months to arrange the widow's affairs, he procured a copy of the curse which had been read at the altar by the parish priest of Nenagh, against any of the flock who didn't subscribe to the O'Connell tribute." [113] In a note may be preserved another passage from the same letter. "I have been queer and had trembling legs for the last week. But it has been almost impossible to sleep at night. There is a breeze to-day (25th of July) and I hope another storm is coming up. . . . There is a theatre here; and whenever a troop of players pass through the town, they halt for a night and act. On the day of our tremendous dinner party of eight, there was an infant phenomenon; whom I should otherwise have seen. Last night there was a Vaudeville company; and Charley, Roche, and Anne went. The Brave reports the performances to have resembled Greenwich Fair. . . . There are some Promenade Concerts in the open air in progress now: but as they are just above one part of our garden we don't go: merely sitting outside the door instead, and hearing it all where we are. . . . Mont Blanc has been very plain lately. One heap of snow. A Frenchman got to the top, the other day." [114] ". . . Ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . . ." [115] This was an abstract, in plain language for the use of his children, of the narrative in the Four Gospels. Allusion was made, shortly after his death, to the existence of such a manuscript, with expression of a wish that it might be published; but nothing would have shocked himself so much as any suggestion of that kind. The little piece was of a peculiarly private character, written for his children, and exclusively and strictly for their use only. [116] So he described it. "I do not think," he adds, "we could have fallen on better society. It is a small circle certainly, but quite large enough. The Watsons improve very much on acquaintance. Everybody is very well informed; and we are all as social and friendly as people can be, and very merry. We play whist with great dignity and gravity sometimes, interrupted only by the occasional facetiousness of the inimitable." CHAPTER XI. SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY. 1846. The Mountains and Lake--Manners of the People--A Country Fête--Rifle-shooting--A Marriage--Gunpowder Festivities--Progress in Work--Hints to Artist for Illustrating Dombey--Henry Hallam--Sight-seers from England--Trip to Chamounix--Mule Travelling--Mer de Glace--Tête Noire Pass--An Accident--Castle of Chillon described--Political Celebration--Good Conduct of the People--Protestant and Catholic Cantons. WHAT at once had struck him as the wonderful feature in the mountain scenery was its everchanging and yet unchanging aspect. It was never twice like the same thing to him. Shifting and altering, advancing and retreating, fifty times a day, it was unalterable only in its grandeur. The lake itself too had every kind of varying beauty for him. By moonlight it was indescribably solemn; and before the coming on of a storm had a strange property in it of being disturbed, while yet the sky remained clear and the evening bright, which he found to be mysterious and impressive in an especial degree. Such a storm had come among his earliest and most grateful experiences; a degree of heat worse even than in Italy[117] having disabled him at the outset for all exertion until the lightning, thunder, and rain arrived. The letter telling me this (5th July) described the fruit as so abundant in the little farm, that the trees of the orchard in front of his house were bending beneath it; spoke of a field of wheat sloping down to the side window of his dining-room as already cut and carried; and said that the roses, which the hurricane of rain had swept away, were come back lovelier and in greater numbers than ever. Of the ordinary Swiss people he formed from the first a high opinion which everything during his stay among them confirmed. He thought it the greatest injustice to call them "the Americans of the Continent." In his first letters he said of the peasantry all about Lausanne that they were as pleasant a people as need be. He never passed, on any of the roads, man, woman, or child, without a salutation; and anything churlish or disagreeable he never noticed in them. "They have not," he continued, "the sweetness and grace of the Italians, or the agreeable manners of the better specimens of French peasantry, but they are admirably educated (the schools of this canton are extraordinarily good, in every little village), and always prepared to give a civil and pleasant answer. There is no greater mistake. I was talking to my landlord[118] about it the other day, and he said he could not conceive how it had ever arisen, but that when he returned from his eighteen years' service in the English navy he shunned the people, and had no interest in them until they gradually forced their real character upon his observation. We have a cook and a coachman here, taken at hazard from the people of the town; and I never saw more obliging servants, or people who did their work so truly _with a will_. And in point of cleanliness, order, and punctuality to the moment, they are unrivalled. . . ." The first great gathering of the Swiss peasantry which he saw was in the third week after his arrival, when a country fête was held at a place called The Signal; a deep green wood, on the sides and summit of a very high hill overlooking the town and all the country round; and he gave me very pleasant account of it. "There were various booths for eating and drinking, and the selling of trinkets and sweetmeats; and in one place there was a great circle cleared, in which the common people waltzed and polka'd, without cessation, to the music of a band. There was a great roundabout for children (oh my stars what a family were proprietors of it! A sunburnt father and mother, a humpbacked boy, a great poodle-dog possessed of all sorts of accomplishments, and a young murderer of seventeen who turned the machinery); and there were some games of chance and skill established under trees. It was very pretty. In some of the drinking booths there were parties of German peasants, twenty together perhaps, singing national drinking-songs, and making a most exhilarating and musical chorus by rattling their cups and glasses on the table and drinking them against each other, to a regular tune. You know it as a stage dodge, but the real thing is splendid. Farther down the hill, other peasants were rifle-shooting for prizes, at targets set on the other side of a deep ravine, from two to three hundred yards off. It was quite fearful to see the astonishing accuracy of their aim, and how, every time a rifle awakened the ten thousand echoes of the green glen, some men crouching behind a little wall immediately in front of the targets, sprung up with large numbers in their hands denoting where the ball had struck the bull's eye--and then in a moment disappeared again. Standing in a ring near these shooters was another party of Germans singing hunting-songs, in parts, most melodiously. And down in the distance was Lausanne, with all sorts of haunted-looking old towers rising up before the smooth water of the lake, and an evening sky all red, and gold, and bright green. When it closed in quite dark, all the booths were lighted up; and the twinkling of the lamps among the forest of trees was beautiful. . . ." To this pretty picture, a letter of a little later date, describing a marriage on the farm, added farther comical illustration of the rifle-firing propensities of the Swiss, and had otherwise also whimsical touches of character. "One of the farmer's people--a sister, I think--was married from here the other day. It is wonderful to see how naturally the smallest girls are interested in marriages. Katey and Mamey were as excited as if they were eighteen. The fondness of the Swiss for gunpowder on interesting occasions, is one of the drollest things. For three days before, the farmer himself, in the midst of his various agricultural duties, plunged out of a little door near my windows, about once in every hour, and fired off a rifle. I thought he was shooting rats who were spoiling the vines; but he was merely relieving his mind, it seemed, on the subject of the approaching nuptials. All night afterwards, he and a small circle of friends kept perpetually letting off guns under the casement of the bridal chamber. A Bride is always drest here, in black silk; but this bride wore merino of that colour, observing to her mother when she bought it (the old lady is 82, and works on the farm), 'You know, mother, I am sure to want mourning for you, soon; and the same gown will do.'"[119] Meanwhile, day by day, he was steadily moving on with his first number; feeling sometimes the want of streets in an "extraordinary nervousness it would be hardly possible to describe," that would come upon him after he had been writing all day; but at all other times finding the repose of the place very favourable to industry. "I am writing slowly at first, of course" (5th of July), "but I hope I shall have finished the first number in the course of a fortnight at farthest. I have done the first chapter, and begun another. I say nothing of the merits thus far, or of the idea beyond what is known to you; because I prefer that you should come as fresh as may be upon them. I shall certainly have a great surprise for people at the end of the fourth number;[120] and I think there is a new and peculiar sort of interest, involving the necessity of a little bit of delicate treatment whereof I will expound my idea to you by and by. When I have done this number, I may take a run to Chamounix perhaps. . . . My thoughts have necessarily been called away from the Christmas book. The first _Dombey_ done, I think I should fly off to that, whenever the idea presented itself vividly before me. I still cherish the Battle fancy, though it is nothing but a fancy as yet." A week later he told me that he hoped to finish the first number by that day week or thereabouts, when he should then run and look for his Christmas book in the glaciers at Chamounix. His progress to this point had been pleasing him. "I think _Dombey_ very strong--with great capacity in its leading idea; plenty of character that is likely to tell; and some rollicking facetiousness, to say nothing of pathos. I hope you will soon judge of it for yourself, however; and I know you will say what you think. I have been very constantly at work." Six days later I heard that he had still eight slips to write, and for a week had put off Chamounix. But though the fourth chapter yet was incomplete, he could repress no longer the desire to write to me of what he was doing (18th of July). "I think the general idea of _Dombey_ is interesting and new, and has great material in it. But I don't like to discuss it with you till you have read number one, for fear I should spoil its effect. When done--about Wednesday or Thursday, please God--I will send it in two days' posts, seven letters each day. If you have it set at once (I am afraid you couldn't read it, otherwise than in print) I know you will impress on B. & E. the necessity of the closest secrecy. The very name getting out, would be ruinous. The points for illustration, and the enormous care required, make me excessively anxious. The man for Dombey, if Browne could see him, the class man to a T, is Sir A---- E----, of D----'s. Great pains will be necessary with Miss Tox. The Toodle family should not be too much caricatured, because of Polly. I should like Browne to think of Susan Nipper, who will not be wanted in the first number. After the second number, they will all be nine or ten years older, but this will not involve much change in the characters, except in the children and Miss Nipper. What a brilliant thing to be telling you all these names so familiarly, when you know nothing about 'em! I quite enjoy it. By the bye, I hope you may like the introduction of Solomon Gills.[121] I think he lives in a good sort of house. . . . One word more. What do you think, as a name for the Christmas book, of THE BATTLE OF LIFE? It is not a name I have conned at all, but has just occurred to me in connection with that foggy idea. If I can see my way, I think I will take it next, and clear it off. If you knew how it hangs about me, I am sure you would say so too. It would be an immense relief to have it done, and nothing standing in the way of _Dombey_." Within the time left for it the opening number was done, but two little incidents preceded still the trip to Chamounix. The first was a visit from Hallam to Mr. Haldimand. "Heavens! how Hallam did talk yesterday! I don't think I ever saw him so tremendous. Very good-natured and pleasant, in his way, but Good Heavens! how he did talk. That famous day you and I remember was nothing to it. His son was with him, and his daughter (who has an impediment in her speech, as if nature were determined to balance that faculty in the family), and his niece, a pretty woman, the wife of a clergyman and a friend of Thackeray's. It strikes me that she must be 'the little woman' he proposed to take us to drink tea with, once, in Golden-square. Don't you remember? His great favourite? She is quite a charming person anyhow." I hope to be pardoned for preserving an opinion which more familiar later acquaintance confirmed, and which can hardly now give anything but pleasure to the lady of whom it is expressed. To the second incident he alludes more briefly. "As Haldimand and Mrs. Marcet and the Cerjats had devised a small mountain expedition for us for to-morrow, I didn't like to allow Chamounix to stand in the way. So we go with them first, and start on our own account on Tuesday. We are extremely pleasant with these people." The close of the same letter (25th of July), mentioning two pieces of local news, gives intimation of the dangers incident to all Swiss travelling, and of such special precautions as were necessary for the holiday among the mountains he was now about to take. "My first news is that a crocodile is said to have escaped from the Zoological gardens at Geneva, and to be now 'zigzag-zigging' about the lake. But I can't make out whether this is a great fact, or whether it is a pious fraud to prevent too much bathing and liability to accidents. The other piece of news is more serious. An English family whose name I don't know, consisting of a father, mother, and daughter, arrived at the hotel Gibbon here last Monday, and started off on some mountain expedition in one of the carriages of the country. It was a mere track, the road, and ought to have been travelled only by mules, but the Englishman persisted (as Englishmen do) in going on in the carriage; and in answer to all the representations of the driver that no carriage had ever gone up there, said he needn't be afraid he wasn't going to be paid for it, and so forth. Accordingly, the coachman got down and walked by the horses' heads. It was fiery hot; and, after much tugging and rearing, the horses began to back, and went down bodily, carriage and all, into a deep ravine. The mother was killed on the spot; and the father and daughter are lying at some house hard by, not expected to recover." His next letter (written on the second of August) described his own first real experience of mountain-travel. "I begin my letter to-night, but only begin, for we returned from Chamounix in time for dinner just now, and are pretty considerably done up. We went by a mountain pass not often crossed by ladies, called the Col de Balme, where your imagination may picture Kate and Georgy on mules _for ten hours at a stretch_, riding up and down the most frightful precipices. We returned by the pass of the Tête Noire, which Talfourd knows, and which is of a different character, but astonishingly fine too. Mont Blanc, and the Valley of Chamounix, and the Mer de Glace, and all the wonders of that most wonderful place, are above and beyond one's wildest expectations. I cannot imagine anything in nature more stupendous or sublime. If I were to write about it now, I should quite rave--such prodigious impressions are rampant within me. . . . You may suppose that the mule-travelling is pretty primitive. Each person takes a carpet-bag strapped on the mule behind himself or herself: and that is all the baggage that can be carried. A guide, a thorough-bred mountaineer, walks all the way, leading the lady's mule; I say the lady's par excellence, in compliment to Kate; and all the rest struggle on as they please. The cavalcade stops at a lone hut for an hour and a half in the middle of the day, and lunches brilliantly on whatever it can get. Going by that Col de Balme pass, you climb up and up and up for five hours and more, and look--from a mere unguarded ledge of path on the side of the precipice--into such awful valleys, that at last you are firm in the belief that you have got above everything in the world, and that there can be nothing earthly overhead. Just as you arrive at this conclusion, a different (and oh Heaven! what a free and wonderful) air comes blowing on your face; you cross a ridge of snow; and lying before you (wholly unseen till then), towering up into the distant sky, is the vast range of Mont Blanc, with attendant mountains diminished by its majestic side into mere dwarfs tapering up into innumerable rude Gothic pinnacles; deserts of ice and snow; forests of firs on mountain sides, of no account at all in the enormous scene; villages down in the hollow, that you can shut out with a finger; waterfalls, avalanches, pyramids and towers of ice, torrents, bridges; mountain upon mountain until the very sky is blocked away, and you must look up, overhead, to see it. Good God, what a country Switzerland is, and what a concentration of it is to be beheld from that one spot! And (think of this in Whitefriars and in Lincoln's-inn!) at noon on the second day from here, the first day being but half a one by the bye and full of uncommon beauty, you lie down on that ridge and see it all! . . . I think I must go back again (whether you come or not!) and see it again before the bad weather arrives. We have had sunlight, moonlight, a perfectly transparent atmosphere with not a cloud, and the grand plateau on the very summit of Mont Blanc so clear by day and night that it was difficult to believe in intervening chasms and precipices, and almost impossible to resist the idea that one might sally forth and climb up easily. I went into all sorts of places; armed with a great pole with a spike at the end of it, like a leaping-pole, and with pointed irons buckled on to my shoes; and am all but knocked up. I was very anxious to make the expedition to what is called 'The Garden:' a green spot covered with wild flowers, lying across the Mer de Glace, and among the most awful mountains: but I could find no Englishman at the hotels who was similarly disposed, and the Brave _wouldn't go_. No sir! He gave in point blank (having been horribly blown in a climbing excursion the day before), and couldn't stand it. He is too heavy for such work, unquestionably.[122] In all other respects, I think he has exceeded himself on this journey; and if you could have seen him riding a very small mule, up a road exactly like the broken stairs of Rochester-castle; with a brandy bottle slung over his shoulder, a small pie in his hat, a roast fowl looking out of his pocket, and a mountain staff of six feet long carried cross-wise on the saddle before him; you'd have said so. He was (next to me) the admiration of Chamounix, but he utterly quenched me on the road." On the road as they returned there had been a small adventure, the day before this letter was written. Dickens was jingling slowly up the Tête Noire pass (his mule having thirty-seven bells on its head), riding at the moment quite alone, when--"an Englishman came bolting out of a little châlet in a most inaccessible and extraordinary place, and said with great glee 'There has been an accident here sir!' I had been thinking of anything else you please; and, having no reason to suppose him an Englishman except his language, which went for nothing in the confusion, stammered out a reply in French and stared at him, in a very damp shirt and trowsers, as he stared at me in a similar costume. On his repeating the announcement, I began to have a glimmering of common sense; and so arrived at a knowledge of the fact that a German lady had been thrown from her mule and had broken her leg, at a short distance off, and had found her way in great pain to that cottage, where the Englishman, a Prussian, and a Frenchman, had presently come up; and the Frenchman, by extraordinary good fortune, was a surgeon! They were all from Chamounix, and the three latter were walking in company. It was quite charming to see how attentive they were. The lady was from Lausanne; where she had come from Frankfort to make excursions with her two boys, who are at the college here, during the vacation. She had no other attendants, and the boys were crying and very frightened. The Englishman was in the full glee of having just cut up one white dress, two chemises, and three pocket handkerchiefs, for bandages; the Frenchman had set the leg skilfully; the Prussian had scoured a neighboring wood for some men to carry her forward; and they were all at it, behind the hut, making a sort of handbarrow on which to bear her. When it was constructed, she was strapped upon it; had her poor head covered over with a handkerchief, and was carried away; and we all went on in company: Kate and Georgy consoling and tending the sufferer, who was very cheerful, but had lost her husband only a year." With the same delightful observation, and missing no touch of kindly character that might give each actor his place in the little scene, the sequel is described; but it does not need to add more. It was hoped that by means of relays of men at Martigny the poor lady might have been carried on some twenty miles, in the cooler evening, to the head of the lake, and so have been got into the steamer; but she was too exhausted to be borne beyond the inn, and there she had to remain until joined by relatives from Frankfort. A few days' rest after his return were interposed, before he began his second number; and until the latter has been completed, and the Christmas story taken in hand, I do not admit the reader to his full confidences about his writing. But there were other subjects that amused and engaged him up to that date, as well when he was idle as when again he was at work, to which expression so full of character is given in his letters that they properly find mention here. Between the second and the ninth of August he went down one evening to the lake, five minutes after sunset, when the sky was covered with sullen black clouds reflected in the deep water, and saw the Castle of Chillon. He thought it the best deserving and least exaggerated in repute, of all the places he had seen. "The insupportable solitude and dreariness of the white walls and towers, the sluggish moat and drawbridge, and the lonely ramparts, I never saw the like of. But there is a court-yard inside; surrounded by prisons, oubliettes, and old chambers of torture; so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more sorrowful. And oh! a wicked old Grand Duke's bedchamber upstairs in the tower, with a secret staircase down into the chapel, where the bats were wheeling about; and Bonnivard's dungeon; and a horrible trap whence prisoners were cast out into the lake; and a stake all burnt and crackled up, that still stands in the torture-ante-chamber to the saloon of justice (!)--what tremendous places! Good God, the greatest mystery in all the earth, to me, is how or why the world was tolerated by its Creator through the good old times, and wasn't dashed to fragments." On the ninth of August he wrote to me that there was to be a prodigious fête that day in Lausanne, in honour of the first anniversary of the proclamation of the New Constitution:[123] "beginning at sunrise with the firing of great guns, and twice two thousand rounds of rifles by two thousand men; proceeding at eleven o'clock with a great service, and some speechifying, in the church; and ending to-night with a great ball in the public promenade, and a general illumination of the town." The authorities had invited him to a place of honour in the ceremony; and though he did not go ("having been up till three o'clock in the morning, and being fast asleep at the appointed time"), the reply that sent his thanks expressed also his sympathy. He was the readier with this from having discovered, in the "old" or "gentlemanly" party of the place ("including of course the sprinkling of English who are always tory, hang 'em!"), so wonderfully sore a feeling about the revolution thus celebrated, that to avoid its fête the majority had gone off by steamer the day before, and those who remained were prophesying assaults on the unilluminated houses, and other excesses. Dickens had no faith in such predictions. "The people are as perfectly good tempered and quiet always, as people can be. I don't know what the last Government may have been, but they seem to me to do very well with this, and to be rationally and cheaply provided for. If you believed what the discontented assert, you wouldn't believe in one solitary man or woman with a grain of goodness or civility. I find nothing _but_ civility; and I walk about in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, where they live rough lives enough, in solitary cottages." The issue was told in two postscripts to his letter, and showed him to be so far right. "P.S. 6 o'clock afternoon. The fête going on, in great force. Not one of 'the old party' to be seen. I went down with one to the ground before dinner, and nothing would induce him to go within the barrier with me. Yet what they call a revolution was nothing but a change of government. Thirty-six thousand people, in this small canton, petitioned against the Jesuits--God knows with good reason. The Government chose to call them 'a mob.' So, to prove that they were not, they turned the Government out. I honour them for it. They are a genuine people, these Swiss. There is better metal in them than in all the stars and stripes of all the fustian banners of the so-called, and falsely called, U-nited States. They are a thorn in the sides of European despots, and a good wholesome people to live near Jesuit-ridden Kings on the brighter side of the mountains." "P.P.S. August 10th. . . . The fête went off as quietly as I supposed it would; and they danced all night." These views had forcible illustration in a subsequent letter, where he describes a similar revolution that occurred at Geneva before he left the country; and nothing could better show his practical good sense in a matter of this kind. The description will be given shortly; and meanwhile I subjoin a comment made by him, not less worthy of attention, upon my reply to his account of the anti-Jesuit celebration at Lausanne. "I don't know whether I have mentioned before, that in the valley of the Simplon hard by here, where (at the bridge of St. Maurice, over the Rhone) this Protestant canton ends and a Catholic canton begins, you might separate two perfectly distinct and different conditions of humanity by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the root of all its sorrows, even as English misgovernment and Tory villainy." Almost the counterpart of this remark is to be found in one of the later writings of Macaulay. FOOTNOTES: [117] "When it is very hot, it is hotter than in Italy. The over-hanging roofs of the houses, and the quantity of wood employed in their construction (where they use tile and brick in Italy), render them perfect forcing-houses. The walls and floors, hot to the hand all the night through, interfere with sleep; and thunder is almost always booming and rumbling among the mountains." Besides this, though there were no mosquitoes as in Genoa, there was at first a plague of flies, more distressing even than at Albaro. "They cover everything eatable, fall into everything drinkable, stagger into the wet ink of newly-written words and make tracks on the writing paper, clog their legs in the lather on your chin while you are shaving in the morning, and drive you frantic at any time when there is daylight if you fall asleep." [118] His preceding letter had sketched his landlord for me. . . . "There was an annual child's fête at the Signal the other night: given by the town. It was beautiful to see perhaps a hundred couple of children dancing in an immense ring in a green wood. Our three eldest were among them, presided over by my landlord, who was 18 years in the English navy, and is the Sous Prefet of the town--a very good fellow indeed; quite an Englishman. Our landlady, nearly twice his age, used to keep the Inn (a famous one) at Zurich: and having made £50,000 bestowed it on a young husband. She might have done worse." [119] The close of this letter sent family remembrances in characteristic form. "Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley, Chickenstalker, and Sampson Brass, commend themselves unto your Honour's loving remembrance." The last but one, who continued long to bear the name, was Frank; the last, who very soon will be found to have another, was Alfred. [120] The life of Paul was nevertheless prolonged to the fifth number. [121] The mathematical-instrument-maker, who Mr. Taine describes as a marine store dealer. [122] Poor fellow! he had latent disease of the heart, which developed itself rapidly on Dickens's return to England. [123] Out of the excitements consequent on the public festivities arose some domestic inconveniences. I will give one of them. "Fanchette the cook, distracted by the forthcoming fête, madly refused to buy a duck yesterday as ordered by the Brave, and a battle of life ensued between those two powers. The Brave is of opinion that 'datter woman have went mad.' But she seems calm to-day; and I suppose won't poison the family. . . ." CHAPTER XII. SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL. 1846. Home Politics--Malthus Philosophy--Mark Lemon--An Incident of Character--Hood's _Tylney Hall_--Duke of Wellington--Lord Grey--A Recollection of his Reporting Days--Returns to _Dombey_--Two English Travellers--Party among the Hills--Lord Vernon--A Wonderful Carriage--Reading of First _Dombey_--A Sketch from Life--Trip to Great St. Bernard--Ascent of the Mountain--The Convent--Scene at the Mountain Top--Bodies found in the Snow--The Holy Fathers--A Holy Brother and _Pickwick_. SOME sketches from the life in his pleasantest vein now claim to be taken from the same series of letters; and I will prefix one or two less important notices, for the most part personal also, that have characteristic mention of his opinions in them. Home-politics he criticized in what he wrote on the 24th of August, much in the spirit of his last excellent remark on the Protestant and Catholic cantons; having no sympathy with the course taken by the whigs in regard to Ireland after they had defeated Peel on his coercion bill, and resumed the government. "I am perfectly appalled by the hesitation and cowardice of the whigs. To bring in that arms bill, bear the brunt of the attack upon it, take out the obnoxious clauses, still retain the bill, and finally withdraw it, seems to me the meanest and most halting way of going to work that ever was taken. I cannot believe in them. Lord John must be helpless among them. They seem somehow or other never to know what cards they hold in their hands, and to play them out blindfold. The contrast with Peel (as he was last) is, I agree with you, certainly not favourable. I don't believe now they ever would have carried the repeal of the corn law, if they could." Referring in the same letter[124] to the reluctance of public men of all parties to give the needful help to schemes of emigration, he ascribed it to a secret belief "in the gentle politico-economical principle that a surplus population must and ought to starve;" in which for himself he never could see anything but disaster for all who trusted to it. "I am convinced that its philosophers would sink any government, any cause, any doctrine, even the most righteous. There is a sense and humanity in the mass, in the long run, that will not bear them; and they will wreck their friends always, as they wrecked them in the working of the Poor-law-bill. Not all the figures that Babbage's calculating machine could turn up in twenty generations, would stand in the long run against the general heart." Of other topics in his letters, one or two have the additional attractiveness derivable from touches of personal interest when these may with propriety be printed. Hardly within the class might have fallen a mention of Mark Lemon, of whom our recent play, and his dramatic adaptation of the _Chimes_, had given him pleasant experiences, if I felt less strongly not only that its publication would have been gladly sanctioned by the subject of it, but that it will not now displease another to whom also it refers, herself the member of a family in various ways distinguished on the stage, and to whom, since her husband's death, well-merited sympathy and respect have been paid. "After turning Mrs. Lemon's portrait over, in my mind, I am convinced that there is not a grain of bad taste in the matter, and that there is a manly composure and courage in the proceeding deserving of the utmost respect. If Lemon were one of your braggart honest men, he would set a taint of bad taste upon that action as upon everything else he might say or do; but being what he is, I admire him for it greatly, and hold it to be a proof of an exalted nature and a true heart. Your idea of him, is mine. I am sure he is an excellent fellow. We talk about not liking such and such a man because he doesn't look one in the face,--but how much we should esteem a man who looks the world in the face, composedly, and neither shirks it nor bullies it. Between ourselves, I say with shame and self-reproach that I am quite sure if Kate had been a Columbine her portrait would not be hanging, 'in character,' in Devonshire-terrace." He speaks thus of a novel by Hood. "I have been reading poor Hood's _Tylney Hall_; the most extraordinary jumble of impossible extravagance, and especial cleverness, I ever saw. The man drawn to the life from the pirate-bookseller, is wonderfully good; and his recommendation to a reduced gentleman from the university, to rise from nothing as he, the pirate, did, and go round to the churches and see whether there's an opening, and begin by being a beadle, is one of the finest things I ever read, in its way." The same letter has a gentle little trait of the great duke, touching in its simplicity, and worth preserving. "I had a letter from Tagart the day before yesterday, with a curious little anecdote of the Duke of Wellington in it. They have had a small cottage at Walmer; and one day--the other day only--the old man met their little daughter Lucy, a child about Mamey's age, near the garden; and having kissed her, and asked her what was her name, and who and what her parents were, tied a small silver medal round her neck with a bit of pink ribbon, and asked the child to keep it in remembrance of him. There is something good, and aged, and odd in it. Is there not?" Another of his personal references was to Lord Grey, to whose style of speaking and general character of mind he had always a strongly-expressed dislike, drawn not impartially or quite justly from the days of reaction that followed the reform debates, when the whig leader's least attractive traits were presented to the young reporter. "He is a very intelligent agreeable fellow, the said Watson by the bye" (he is speaking of the member of the Lausanne circle with whom he established friendliest after-intercourse); "he sat for Northamptonshire in the reform bill time, and is high sheriff of his county and all the rest of it; but has not the least nonsense about him, and is a thorough good liberal. He has a charming wife, who draws well, and is making a sketch of Rosemont for us that shall be yours in Paris." (It is already, by permission of its present possessor, the reader's, and all the world's who may take interest in the little doll's house of Lausanne which lodged so illustrious a tenant.) "He was giving me some good recollections of Lord Grey the other evening when we were playing at battledore (old Lord Grey I mean), and of the constitutional impossibility he and Lord Lansdowne and the rest laboured under, of ever personally attaching a single young man, in all the excitement of that exciting time, to the leaders of the party. It was quite a delight to me, as I listened, to recall my own dislike of his style of speaking, his fishy coldness, his uncongenial and unsympathetic politeness, and his insufferable though most gentlemanly artificiality. The shape of his head (I see it now) was misery to me, and weighed down my youth. . . ." It was now the opening of the second week in August; and before he finally addressed himself to the second number of _Dombey_, he had again turned a lingering look in the direction of his Christmas book. "It would be such a great relief to me to get that small story out of the way." Wisely, however, again he refrained, and went on with _Dombey_; at which he had been working for a little time when he described to me (24th of August) a visit from two English travellers, of one of whom with the slightest possible touch he gives a speaking likeness.[125] "Not having your letter as usual, I sat down to write to you on speculation yesterday, but lapsed in my uncertainty into _Dombey_, and worked at it all day. It was, as it has been since last Tuesday morning, incessantly raining regular mountain rain. After dinner, at a little after seven o'clock, I was walking up and down under the little colonnade in the garden, racking my brain about _Dombeys_ and _Battles of Lives_, when two travel-stained-looking men approached, of whom one, in a very limp and melancholy straw hat, ducked, perpetually to me as he came up the walk. I couldn't make them out at all; and it wasn't till I got close up to them that I recognised A. and (in the straw hat) N. They had come from Geneva by the steamer, and taken a scrambling dinner on board. I gave them some fine Rhine wine, and cigars innumerable. A. enjoyed himself and was quite at home. N. (an odd companion for a man of genius) was snobbish, but pleased and good-natured. A. had a five pound note in his pocket which he had worn down, by careless carrying about, to some two-thirds of its original size, and which was so ragged in its remains that when he took it out bits of it flew about the table. 'Oh Lor you know--now really--like Goldsmith you know--or any of those great men!' said N. with the very 'snatches in his voice and burst of speaking' that reminded Leigh Hunt of Cloten. . . . The clouds were lying, as they do in such weather here, on the earth, and our friends saw no more of Lake Leman than of Battersea. Nor had they, it might appear, seen more of the Mer de Glace, on their way here; their talk about it bearing much resemblance to that of the man who had been to Niagara and said it was nothing but water." His next letter described a day's party of the Cerjats, Watsons, and Haldimands, among the neighbouring hills, which, contrary to his custom while at work, he had been unable to resist the temptation of joining. They went to a mountain-lake twelve miles off, had dinner at the public-house on the lake, and returned home by Vevay at which they rested for tea; and where pleasant talk with Mr. Cerjat led to anecdotes of an excellent friend of ours, formerly resident at Lausanne, with which the letter closed. Our friend was a distinguished writer, and a man of many sterling fine qualities, but with a habit of occasional free indulgence in coarseness of speech, which, though his earlier life had made it as easy to acquire as difficult to drop, did always less than justice to a very manly, honest, and really gentle nature. He had as much genuinely admirable stuff in him as any favourite hero of Smollett or Fielding, and I never knew anyone who reminded me of those characters so much. "It would seem, Mr. Cerjat tells me, that he was, when here, infinitely worse in his general style of conversation, than now--sermuchser, as Toodles says, that Cerjat describes himself as having always been in unspeakable agony when he was at his table, lest he should forget himself (or remember himself, as I suggested) and break out before the ladies. There happened to be living here at that time a stately English baronet and his wife, who had two milksop sons, concerning whom they cherished the idea of accomplishing their education into manhood coexistently with such perfect purity and innocence, that they were hardly to know their own sex. Accordingly, they were sent to no school or college, but had masters of all sorts at home, and thus reached eighteen years or so, in what Falstaff calls a kind of male green-sickness. At this crisis of their innocent existence, our ogre friend encountered these lambs at dinner, with their father, at Cerjat's house; and, as if possessed by a devil, launched out into such frightful and appalling impropriety--ranging over every kind of forbidden topic and every species of forbidden word and every sort of scandalous anecdote--that years of education in Newgate would have been as nothing compared with their experience of that one afternoon. After turning paler and paler, and more and more stoney, the baronet, with a half-suppressed cry, rose and fled. But the sons--intent on the ogre--remained behind instead of following him; and are supposed to have been ruined from that hour. Isn't that a good story? I can SEE our friend and his pupils now. . . . Poor fellow! He seems to have a hard time of it with his wife. She had no interest whatever in her children; and was such a fury, that, being dressed to go out to dinner, she would sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of its place or some such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn't stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried to bed. He suffered martyrdom with her; and seems to have been himself, in all good-natured easy-going ways, just what we know him now." There were at this time some fresh arrivals of travelling English at Lausanne, outside their own little circle, and among them another baronet and his family made amusing appearance. "We have another English family here, one Sir Joseph and his lady, and ten children. Sir Joseph, a large baronet something in the Graham style, with a little, loquacious, flat-faced, damaged-featured, _old young_ wife. They are fond of society, and couldn't well have less. They delight in a view, and live in a close street at Ouchy, down among the drunken boatmen and the drays and omnibuses, where nothing whatever is to be seen but the locked wheels of carts scraping down the uneven, steep, stone pavement. The baronet plays double-dummy all day long, with an unhappy Swiss whom he has entrapped for that purpose; the baronet's lady pays visits; and the baronet's daughters play a Lausanne piano, which must be heard to be appreciated. . . ." Another sketch in the same letter touches little more than the eccentricities (but all in good taste and good humour) of the subject of it, who is still gratefully remembered by English residents in Italy for his scholarly munificence, and for very valuable service conferred by it on Italian literature. "Another curious man is backwards and forwards here--a Lord Vernon,[126] who is well-informed, a great Italian scholar deep in Dante, and a very good-humoured gentleman, but who has fallen into the strange infatuation of attending every rifle-match that takes place in Switzerland, accompanied by two men who load rifles for him, one after another, which he has been frequently known to fire off, two a minute, for fourteen hours at a stretch, without once changing his position or leaving the ground. He wins all kinds of prizes; gold watches, flags, teaspoons, tea-boards, and so forth; and is constantly travelling about with them, from place to place, in an extraordinary carriage, where you touch a spring and a chair flies out, touch another spring and a bed appears, touch another spring and a closet of pickles opens, touch another spring and disclose a pantry. While Lady Vernon (said to be handsome and accomplished) is continually cutting across this or that Alpine pass in the night, to meet him on the road, for a minute or two, on one of his excursions; these being the only times at which she can catch him. The last time he saw her, was five or six months ago, when they met and supped together on the St. Gothard! It is a monomania with him, of course. He is a man of some note; seconded one of Lord Melbourne's addresses; and had forty thousand a year, now reduced to ten, but nursing and improving every day. He was with us last Monday, and comes back from some out-of-the-way place to join another small picnic next Friday. As I have said, he is the very soul of good nature and cheerfulness, but one can't help being melancholy to see a man wasting his life in such a singular delusion. Isn't it odd? He knows my books very well, and seems interested in everything concerning them; being indeed accomplished in books generally, and attached to many elegant tastes." But the most agreeable addition to their own special circle was referred to in his first September letter, just when he was coming to the close of his second number of _Dombey_. "There are two nice girls here, the Ladies Taylor, daughters of Lord Headfort. Their mother was daughter (I think) of Sir John Stevenson, and Moore dedicated one part of the Irish Melodies to her. They inherit the musical taste, and sing very well. A proposal is on foot for our all bundling off on Tuesday (16 strong) to the top of the Great St. Bernard. But the weather seems to have broken, and the autumn rains to have set in; which I devoutly hope will break up the party. It would be a most serious hindrance to me, just now; but I have rashly promised. Do you know young Romilly? He is coming over from Geneva when 'the reading' comes off, and is a fine fellow I am told. There is not a bad little theatre here; and by way of an artificial crowd, I should certainly have got it open with an amateur company, if we were not so few that the only thing we want is the audience.". . . The "reading" named by him was that of his first number, which was to "come off" as soon as I could get the proofs out to him; but which the changes needful to be made, and to be mentioned hereafter, still delayed. The St. Bernard holiday, which within sight of his Christmas-book labour he would fain have thrown over, came off as proposed very fortunately for the reader, who might otherwise have lost one of his pleasantest descriptions. But before giving it, one more little sketch of character may be interposed as delicately done as anything in his writings. Steele's observation is in the outline, and Charles Lamb's humour in its touch of colouring. ". . . There are two old ladies (English) living here who may serve me for a few lines of gossip--as I have intended they should, over and over again, but I have always forgotten it. There were originally four old ladies, sisters, but two of them have faded away in the course of eighteen years, and withered by the side of John Kemble in the cemetery. They are very little, and very skinny; and each of them wears a row of false curls, like little rolling-pins, so low upon her brow, that there is no forehead; nothing above the eyebrows but a deep horizontal wrinkle, and then the curls. They live upon some small annuity. For thirteen years they have wanted very much to move to Italy, as the eldest old lady says the climate of this part of Switzerland doesn't agree with her, and preys upon her spirits; but they have never been able to go, because of the difficulty of moving 'the books.' This tremendous library belonged once upon a time to the father of these old ladies, and comprises about fifty volumes. I have never been able to see what they are, because one of the old ladies always sits before them; but they look, outside, like very old backgammon-boards. The two deceased sisters died in the firm persuasion that this precious property could never be got over the Simplon without some gigantic effort to which the united family was unequal. The two remaining sisters live, and will die also, in the same belief. I met the eldest (evidently drooping) yesterday, and recommended her to try Genoa. She looked shrewdly at the snow that closes up the mountain prospect just now, and said that when the spring was quite set in, and the avalanches were down, and the passes well open, she would certainly try that place, if they could devise any plan, in the course of the winter, for moving 'the books.' The whole library will be sold by auction here, when they are both dead, for about a napoleon; and some young woman will carry it home in two journeys with a basket." The last letter sent me before he fell upon his self-appointed task for Christmas, contained a delightful account of the trip to the Great St. Bernard. It was dated on the sixth of September. "The weather obstinately clearing, we started off last Tuesday for the Great St. Bernard, returning here on Friday afternoon. The party consisted of eleven people and two servants--Haldimand, Mr. and Mrs. Cerjat and one daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Watson, two Ladies Taylor, Kate, Georgy, and I. We were wonderfully unanimous and cheerful; went away from here by the steamer; found at its destination a whole omnibus provided by the Brave (who went on in advance everywhere); rode therein to Bex; found two large carriages ready to take us to Martigny; slept there; and proceeded up the mountain on mules next day. Although the St. Bernard convent is, as I dare say you know, the highest inhabited spot but one in the world, the ascent is extremely gradual and uncommonly easy: really presenting no difficulties at all, until within the last league, when the ascent, lying through a place called the valley of desolation, is very awful and tremendous, and the road is rendered toilsome by scattered rocks and melting snow. The convent is a most extraordinary place, full of great vaulted passages, divided from each other with iron gratings; and presenting a series of the most astonishing little dormitories, where the windows are so small (on account of the cold and snow), that it is as much as one can do to get one's head out of them. Here we slept: supping, thirty strong, in a rambling room with a great wood-fire in it set apart for that purpose; with a grim monk, in a high black sugar-loaf hat with a great knob at the top of it, carving the dishes. At five o'clock in the morning the chapel bell rang in the dismallest way for matins: and I, lying in bed close to the chapel, and being awakened by the solemn organ and the chaunting, thought for a moment I had died in the night and passed into the unknown world. "I wish to God you could see that place. A great hollow on the top of a range of dreadful mountains, fenced in by riven rocks of every shape and colour: and in the midst, a black lake, with phantom clouds perpetually stalking over it. Peaks, and points, and plains of eternal ice and snow, bounding the view, and shutting out the world on every side: the lake reflecting nothing: and no human figure in the scene. The air so fine, that it is difficult to breathe without feeling out of breath; and the cold so exquisitely thin and sharp that it is not to be described. Nothing of life or living interest in the picture, but the grey dull walls of the convent. No vegetation of any sort or kind. Nothing growing, nothing stirring. Everything iron-bound, and frozen up. Beside the convent, in a little outhouse with a grated iron door which you may unbolt for yourself, are the bodies of people found in the snow who have never been claimed and are withering away--not laid down, or stretched out, but standing up, in corners and against walls; some erect and horribly human, with distinct expressions on the faces; some sunk down on their knees; some dropping over on one side; some tumbled down altogether, and presenting a heap of skulls and fibrous dust. There is no other decay in that atmosphere; and there they remain during the short days and the long nights, the only human company out of doors, withering away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain where they died. "It is the most distinct and individual place I have seen, even in this transcendent country. But, for the Saint Bernard holy fathers and convent in themselves, I am sorry to say that they are a piece of as sheer humbug as we ever learnt to believe in, in our young days. Trashy French sentiment and the dogs (of which, by the bye, there are only three remaining) have done it all. They are a lazy set of fellows; not over fond of going out themselves; employing servants to clear the road (which has not been important or much used as a pass these hundred years); rich; and driving a good trade in Innkeeping: the convent being a common tavern in everything but the sign. No charge is made for their hospitality, to be sure; but you are shown to a box in the chapel, where everybody puts in more than could, with any show of face, be charged for the entertainment; and from this the establishment derives a right good income. As to the self-sacrifice of living up there, they are obliged to go there young, it is true, to be inured to the climate: but it is an infinitely more exciting and various life than any other convent can offer; with constant change and company through the whole summer; with a hospital for invalids down in the valley, which affords another change; and with an annual begging-journey to Geneva and this place and all the places round for one brother or other, which affords farther change. The brother who carved at our supper could speak some English, and had just had _Pickwick_ given him!--what a humbug he will think me when he tries to understand it! If I had had any other book of mine with me, I would have given it him, that I might have had some chance of being intelligible. . . ." FOOTNOTES: [124] Where he makes remark also on a class of offences which are still most inadequately punished: "I hope you will follow up your idea about the defective state of the law in reference to women, by some remarks on the inadequate punishment of that ruffian flippantly called by the liners the Wholesale Matrimonial Speculator. My opinion is, that in any well-ordered state of society, and advanced spirit of social jurisprudence, he would have been flogged more than once (privately), and certainly sentenced to transportation for no less a term than the rest of his life. Surely the man who threw the woman out of window was no worse, if so bad." [125] Ten days before there had been a visit from Mr. Ainsworth and his daughters on their way to Geneva. "I breakfasted with him at the hotel Gibbon next morning and they dined here afterwards, and we walked about all day, talking of our old days at Kensal-lodge." The same letter told me: "We had a regatta at Ouchy the other day, mainly supported by the contributions of the English handfull. It concluded with a rowing-match by women, which was very funny. I wish you could have seen Roche appear on the Lake, rowing, in an immense boat, Cook, Anne, two nurses, Katey, Mamey, Walley, Chickenstalker, and Baby; no boatmen or other degrading assistance; and all sorts of Swiss tubs splashing about them . . . Senior is coming here to-morrow, I believe, with his wife; and they talk of Brunel and his wife as on their way. We dine at Haldimand's to meet Senior--which solitary and most interesting piece of intelligence is all the news I know of . . . Take care you don't back out of your Paris engagement; but that we really do have (please God) some happy hours there. Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley, Chickenstalker, and Baby, send loves. . . . I am all anxiety and fever to know what we start _Dombey_ with!" [126] This was the fourth Baron Vernon, who succeeded to the title in 1829, and died seven years after the date of Dickens's description, in his 74th year. CHAPTER XIII. LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE. 1846. A Picture completed--Self-judgments--Christmas Fancies--Second Number of _Dombey_--A Personal Revelation--First Thought of Public Readings--Two Tales in Hand--Christmas Book given up--Goes to Geneva--Disquietudes of Authorship--Shadows from _Dombey_--A New Social Experience--Eccentricities--Feminine Smoking Party--Visit of the Talfourds--Christmas Book resumed--Lodging his Friends. SOMETHING of the other side of the medal has now to be presented. His letters enable us to see him amid his troubles and difficulties of writing, as faithfully as in his leisure and enjoyments; and when, to the picture thus given of Dickens's home life in Switzerland, some account has been added of the vicissitudes of literary labour undergone in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer and humourist; interested in everything that commended itself to a thoroughly earnest and eagerly enquiring nature; popular beyond measure with all having intercourse with him; the centre, and very soul, of social enjoyment; letting nothing escape a vision that was not more keen than kindly; and even when apparently most idle, never idle in the sense of his art, but adding day by day to experiences that widened its range, and gave freer and healthier play to an imagination always busily at work, alert and active in a singular degree, and that seemed to be quite untiring. At his heart there was a genuine love of nature at all times; and strange as it may seem to connect this with such forms of humorous delineation as are most identified with his genius, it is yet the literal truth that the impressions of this noble Swiss scenery were with him during the work of many subsequent years: a present and actual, though it might be seldom a directly conscious, influence. When he said afterwards, that, while writing the book on which he is now engaged, he had not seen less clearly each step of the wooden midshipman's staircase, each pew of the church in which Florence was married, or each bed in the dormitory of Doctor Blimber's establishment, because he was himself at the time by the lake of Geneva, he might as truly have said that he saw them all the more clearly even because of that circumstance. He worked his humour to its greatest results by the freedom and force of his imagination; and while the smallest or commonest objects around him were food for the one, the other might have pined or perished without additional higher aliment. Dickens had little love for Wordsworth, but he was himself an example of the truth the great poet never tired of enforcing, that Nature has subtle helps for all who are admitted to become free of her wonders and mysteries. Another noticeable thing in him is impressed upon these letters, as upon many also heretofore quoted, for indeed all of them are marvellously exact in the reproduction of his nature. He did not think lightly of his work; and the work that occupied him at the time was for the time paramount with him. But the sense he entertained, whether right or wrong, of the importance of what he had to do, of the degree to which it concerned others that the power he held should be exercised successfully, and of the estimate he was justified in forming as the fair measure of its worth or greatness, does not carry with it of necessity presumption or self-conceit. Few men have had less of either. It was part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much, to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving to accomplish; he could not otherwise have mastered one half the work he designed; and we are able to form an opinion, more just now for ourselves than it might have seemed to us then from others, of the weight and truth of such self-judgment. The fussy pretension of small men in great places, and the resolute self-assertion of great men in small places, are things essentially different. _Respice finem_. The exact relative importance of all our pursuits is to be arrived at by nicer adjustments of the Now and the Hereafter than are possible to contemporary judgments; and there have been some indications since his death confirmatory of the belief, that the estimate which he thought himself entitled to form of the labours to which his life was devoted, will be strengthened, not lessened, by time. Dickens proposed to himself, it will be remembered, to write at Lausanne not only the first four numbers of his larger book, but the Christmas book suggested to him by his fancy of a battle field; and reserving what is to be said of _Dombey_ to a later chapter, this and its successor will deal only with what he finished as well as began in Switzerland, and will show at what cost even so much was achieved amid his other and larger engagements. He had restless fancies and misgivings before he settled to his first notion. "I have been thinking this last day or two," he wrote on the 25th of July, "that good Christmas characters might be grown out of the idea of a man imprisoned for ten or fifteen years; his imprisonment being the gap between the people and circumstances of the first part and the altered people and circumstances of the second, and his own changed mind. Though I shall probably proceed with the Battle idea, I should like to know what you think of this one?" It was afterwards used in a modified shape for the _Tale of Two Cities_. "I shall begin the little story straightway," he wrote a few weeks later; "but I have been dimly conceiving a very ghostly and wild idea, which I suppose I must now reserve for the _next_ Christmas book. _Nous verrons._ It will mature in the streets of Paris by night, as well as in London." This took ultimately the form of the _Haunted Man_, which was not written until the winter of 1848. At last I knew that his first slip was done, and that even his eager busy fancy would not turn him back again. But other unsatisfied wants and cravings had meanwhile broken out in him, of which I heard near the close of the second number of _Dombey_. The first he had finished at the end of July; and the second, which he began on the 8th of August, he was still at work upon in the first week of September, when this remarkable announcement came to me. It was his first detailed confession of what he felt so continuously, and if that were possible even more strongly, as the years went on, that there is no single passage in any of his letters which throws such a flood of illuminative light into the portions of his life which always awaken the greatest interest. Very much that is to follow must be read by it. "You can hardly imagine," he wrote on the 30th of August, "what infinite pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on FAST. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this long rest" (it was now over two years since the close of _Chuzzlewit_), "as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! I don't say this at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. _My_ figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only the _Chimes_), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there--but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to, every night." At the close of the letter he told me that he had pretty well matured the general idea of the Christmas book, and was burning to get to work on it. He thought it would be all the better, for a change, to have no fairies or spirits in it, but to make it a simple domestic tale.[127] In less than a week from this date his second number was finished, his first slip of the little book done, and his confidence greater. They had had wonderful weather,[128] so clear that he could see from the Neuchâtel road the whole of Mont Blanc, six miles distant, as plainly as if he were standing close under it in the courtyard of the little inn at Chamounix; and, though again it was raining when he wrote, his "nailed shoes" were by him and his "great waterproof cloak" in preparation for a "fourteen-mile walk" before dinner. Then, after three days more, came something of a sequel to the confession before made, which will be read with equal interest. "The absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me, now that I have so much to do, in a most singular manner. It is quite a little mental phenomenon. I should not walk in them in the day time, if they were here, I dare say: but at night I want them beyond description. I don't seem able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. However, as you say, there are streets in Paris, and good suggestive streets too: and trips to London will be nothing then. WHEN I have finished the Christmas book, I shall fly to Geneva for a day or two, before taking up with _Dombey_ again. I like this place better and better; and never saw, I think, more agreeable people than our little circle is made up of. It is so little, that one is not 'bothered' in the least; and their interest in the inimitable seems to strengthen daily. I read them the first number last night 'was a' week, with unrelateable success; and old Mrs. Marcet, who is devilish 'cute, guessed directly (but I didn't tell her she was right) that little Paul would die. They were all so apprehensive that it was a great pleasure to read it; and I shall leave here, if all goes well, in a brilliant shower of sparks struck out of them by the promised reading of the Christmas book." Little did either of us then imagine to what these readings were to lead, but even thus early they were taking in his mind the shape of a sort of jest that the smallest opportunity of favour might have turned into earnest. In his very next letter he wrote to me: "I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infra dig) by one's having Readings of one's own books. It would be an _odd_ thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say? Will you step to Dean-street, and see how Miss Kelly's engagement-book (it must be an immense volume!) stands? Or shall I take the St. James's?" My answer is to be inferred from his rejoinder: but even at this time, while heightening and carrying forward his jest, I suspected him of graver desires than he cared to avow; and the time was to come, after a dozen years, when with earnestness equal to his own I continued to oppose, for reasons to be stated in their place, that which he had set his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and which I still can only wish he had preferred to surrender with all that seemed to be its enormous gains! "I don't think you have exercised your usual judgment in taking Covent-garden for me. I doubt it is too large for my purpose. However, I shall stand by whatever you propose to the proprietors." Soon came the changes of trouble and vexation I had too surely seen. "You remember," he wrote, "your objection about the two stories. I made over light of it. I ought to have considered that I have never before really tried the opening of two together--having always had one pretty far ahead when I have been driving a pair of them. I know it all now. The apparent impossibility of getting each into its place, coupled with that craving for streets, so thoroughly put me off the track, that, up to Wednesday or Thursday last, I really contemplated, at times, the total abandonment of the Christmas book this year, and the limitation of my labours to _Dombey and Son_! I cancelled the beginning of a first scene--which I have never done before--and, with a notion in my head, ran wildly about and about it, and could not get the idea into any natural socket. At length, thank Heaven, I nailed it all at once; and after going on comfortably up to yesterday, and working yesterday from half-past nine to six, I was last night in such a state of enthusiasm about it that I think I was an inch or two taller. I am a little cooler to-day, with a headache to boot; but I really begin to hope you will think it a pretty story, with some delicate notions in it agreeably presented, and with a good human Christmas groundwork. I fancy I see a great domestic effect in the last part." That was written on the 20th of September; but six days later changed the picture and surprised me not a little. I might grudge the space thus given to one of the least important of his books but that the illustration goes farther than the little tale it refers to, and is a picture of him in his moods of writing, with their weakness as well as strength upon him, of a perfect truth and applicability to every period of his life. Movement and change while he was working were not mere restlessness, as we have seen; it was no impatience of labour, or desire of pleasure, that led at such times to his eager craving for the fresh crowds and faces in which he might lose or find the creatures of his fancy; and recollecting this, much hereafter will be understood that might else be very far from clear, in regard to the sensitive conditions under which otherwise he carried on these exertions of his brain. "I am going to write you" (26th of September) "a most startling piece of intelligence. I fear there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of starting for London to-night. I have written nearly a third of it. It promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or with any shorter limit than a _Vicar of Wakefield_, I find to be a difficulty so perplexing--the past _Dombey_ work taken into account--that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on, and not being able to come back to the greater undertaking with the necessary freshness and spirit. If I had nothing but the Christmas book to do, I WOULD do it; but I get horrified and distressed beyond conception at the prospect of being jaded when I come back to the other, and making it a mere race against time. I have written the first part; I know the end and upshot of the second; and the whole of the third (there are only three in all). I know the purport of each character, and the plain idea that each is to work out; and I have the principal effects sketched on paper. It cannot end _quite_ happily, but will end cheerfully and pleasantly. But my soul sinks before the commencement of the second part--the longest--and the introduction of the under-idea. (The main one already developed, with interest.) I don't know how it is. I suppose it is the having been almost constantly at work in this quiet place; and the dread for the _Dombey_; and the not being able to get rid of it, in noise and bustle. The beginning two books together is also, no doubt, a fruitful source of the difficulty; for I am now sure I could not have invented the _Carol_ at the commencement of the _Chuzzlewit_, or gone to a new book from the _Chimes_. But this is certain. I am sick, giddy, and capriciously despondent. I have bad nights; am full of disquietude and anxiety; and am constantly haunted by the idea that I am wasting the marrow of the larger book, and ought to be at rest. One letter that I wrote you before this, I have torn up. In that the Christmas book was wholly given up for this year: but I now resolve to make one effort more. I will go to Geneva to-morrow, and try on Monday and Tuesday whether I can get on at all bravely, in the changed scene. If I cannot, I am convinced that I had best hold my hand at once; and not fritter my spirits and hope away, with that long book before me. You may suppose that the matter is very grave when I can so nearly abandon anything in which I am deeply interested, and fourteen or fifteen close MS. pages of which, that have made me laugh and cry, are lying in my desk. Writing this letter at all, I have a great misgiving that the letter I shall write you on Tuesday night will not make it better. Take it, for Heaven's sake, as an extremely serious thing, and not a fancy of the moment. Last Saturday after a very long day's work, and last Wednesday after finishing the first part, I was full of eagerness and pleasure. At all other times since I began, I have been brooding and brooding over the idea that it was a wild thing to dream of, ever: and that I ought to be at rest for the _Dombey_." The letter came, written on Wednesday not Tuesday night, and it left the question still unsettled. "When I came here" (Geneva, 30th of September) "I had a bloodshot eye; and my head was so bad, with a pain across the brow, that I thought I must have got cupped. I have become a great deal better, however, and feel quite myself again to-day. . . . I still have not made up my mind as to what I CAN do with the Christmas book. I would give any money that it were possible to consult with you. I have begun the second part this morning, and have done a very fair morning's work at it, but I do not feel it _in hand_ within the necessary space and divisions: and I have a great uneasiness in the prospect of falling behind hand with the other labour, which is so transcendantly important. I feel quite sure that unless I (being in reasonably good state and spirits) like the Christmas book myself, I had better not go on with it; but had best keep my strength for _Dombey_, and keep my number in advance. On the other hand I am dreadfully averse to abandoning it, and am so torn between the two things that I know not what to do. It is impossible to express the wish I have that I could take counsel with you. Having begun the second part I will go on here, to-morrow and Friday (Saturday, the Talfourds come to us at Lausanne, leaving on Monday morning), unless I see new reason to give it up in the meanwhile. Let it stand thus--that my next Monday's letter shall finally decide the question. But if you have not already told Bradbury and Evans of my last letter I think it will now be best to do so. . . . This non-publication of a Christmas book, if it must be, I try to think light of with the greater story just begun, and with this _Battle of Life_ story (of which I really think the leading idea is very pretty) lying by me, for future use. But I would like you to consider, in the event of my not going on, how best, by timely announcement, in November's or December's _Dombey_, I may seem to hold the ground prospectively. . . . Heaven send me a good deliverance! If I don't do it, it will be the first time I ever abandoned anything I had once taken in hand; and I shall not have abandoned it until after a most desperate fight. I could do it, but for the _Dombey_, as easily as I did last year or the year before. But I cannot help falling back on that continually: and this, combined with the peculiar difficulties of the story for a Christmas book, and my being out of sorts, discourages me sadly. . . . Kate is here, and sends her love.". . . A postscript was added on the following day. "Georgy has come over from Lausanne, and joins with Kate, &c. &c. My head remains greatly better. My eye is recovering its old hue of beautiful white, tinged with celestial blue. If I hadn't come here, I think I should have had some bad low fever. The sight of the rushing Rhone seemed to stir my blood again. I don't think I shall want to be cupped, this bout; but it looked, at one time, worse than I have confessed to you. If I have any return, I will have it done immediately." He stayed two days longer at Geneva, which he found to be a very good place; pleasantly reporting himself as quite dismayed at first by the sight of gas in it, and as trembling at the noise in its streets, which he pronounced to be fully equal to the uproar of Richmond in Surrey; but deriving from it some sort of benefit both in health and in writing. So far his trip had been successful, though he had to leave the place hurriedly to welcome his English visitors to Rosemont. One social and very novel experience he had in his hotel, however, the night before he left, which may be told before he hastens back to Lausanne; for it could hardly now offend any one even if the names were given. "And now sir I will describe, modestly, tamely, literally, the visit to the small select circle which I promised should make your hair stand on end. In our hotel were Lady A, and Lady B, mother and daughter, who came to the Peschiere shortly before we left it, and who have a deep admiration for your humble servant the inimitable B. They are both very clever. Lady B, extremely well-informed in languages, living and dead; books, and gossip; very pretty; with two little children, and not yet five and twenty. Lady A, plump, fresh, and rosy; matronly, but full of spirits and good looks. Nothing would serve them but we _must_ dine with them; and accordingly, on Friday at six, we went down to their room. I knew them to be rather odd. For instance, I have known Lady A, _full dressed_, walk alone through the streets of Genoa, the squalid Italian bye streets, to the Governor's soirée; and announce herself at the palace of state, by knocking at the door. I have also met Lady B, full dressed, without any cap or bonnet, walking a mile to the opera, with all sorts of jingling jewels about her, beside a sedan chair in which sat enthroned her mama. Consequently, I was not surprised at such little sparkles in the conversation (from the young lady) as 'Oh God what a sermon we had here, last Sunday!' 'And did you ever read such infernal trash as Mrs. Gore's?'--and the like. Still, but for Kate and Georgy (who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards), I should have thought it all very funny; and, as it was, I threw the ball back again, was mighty free and easy, made some rather broad jokes, and was highly applauded. 'You smoke, don't you?' said the young lady, in a pause of this kind of conversation. 'Yes,' I said, 'I generally take a cigar after dinner when I am alone.' 'I'll give you a good 'un,' said she, 'when we go up-stairs.' Well sir, in due course we went up stairs, and there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel, who looked like what we call in old England 'a reg'lar Bunter'--fluffy face (rouged); considerable development of figure; one groggy eye; blue satin dress made low with short sleeves, and shoes of the same. Also a daughter; face likewise fluffy; figure likewise developed; dress likewise low, with short sleeves, and shoes of the same; and one eye not yet actually groggy, but going to be. American lady married at sixteen; daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for sisters, &c. &c. &c. When that was over, Lady B brought out a cigar box, and gave me a cigar, made of negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs. The box was full of cigarettes--good large ones, made of pretty strong tobacco; I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa, and I knew them well. When I lighted my cigar, Lady B lighted hers, at mine; leaned against the mantelpiece, in conversation with me; put out her stomach, folded her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up sideways and her cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill, laughed, and talked, and smoked, in the most gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Lady A immediately lighted her cigar; American lady immediately lighted hers; and in five minutes the room was a cloud of smoke, with us four in the centre pulling away bravely, while American lady related stories of her 'Hookah' up stairs, and described different kinds of pipes. But even this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen came in, with whom, and the American lady, Lady B sat down to whist. The Frenchmen smoked of course (they were really modest gentlemen, and seemed dismayed), and Lady B played for the next hour or two with a cigar continually in her mouth--never out of it. She certainly smoked six or eight. Lady A gave in soon--I think she only did it out of vanity. American lady had been smoking all the morning. I took no more; and Lady B and the Frenchmen had it all to themselves. "Conceive this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants, but half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of surprise; but I never _was_ so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback, in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and another, I never saw a woman--not a basket woman or a gypsy--smoke, before!" He lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described. But now Saturday is come; he has hurried back for the friends who are on their way to his cottage; and on his arrival, even before they have appeared, he writes to tell me his better news of himself and his work. "In the breathless interval" (Rosemont: 3rd of October) "between our return from Geneva and the arrival of the Talfourds (expected in an hour or two), I cannot do better than write to you. For I think you will be well pleased if I anticipate my promise, and Monday, at the same time. I have been greatly better at Geneva, though I still am made uneasy by occasional giddiness and headache: attributable, I have not the least doubt, to the absence of streets. There is an idea here, too, that people are occasionally made despondent and sluggish in their spirits by this great mass of still water, lake Leman. At any rate I have been very uncomfortable: at any rate I am, I hope, greatly better: and (lastly) at any rate I hope and trust, _now_, the Christmas book will come in due course!! I have had three very good days' work at Geneva, and trust I may finish the second part (the third is the shortest) by this day week. Whenever I finish it, I will send you the first two together. I do not think they can begin to illustrate it, until the third arrives; for it is a single minded story, as it were, and an artist should know the end: which I don't think very likely, unless he reads it." Then, after relating a superhuman effort he was making to lodge his visitors in his doll's house ("I didn't like the idea of turning them out at night. It is so dark in these lanes, and groves, when the moon's not bright"), he sketched for me what he possibly might, and really did, accomplish. He would by great effort finish the small book on the 20th; would fly to Geneva for a week to work a little at _Dombey_, if he felt "pretty sound;" in any case would finish his number three by the 10th of November; and on that day would start for Paris: "so that, instead of resting unprofitably here, I shall be using my interval of idleness to make the journey and get into a new house, and shall hope so to put a pinch of salt on the tail of the sliding number in advance. . . . I am horrified at the idea of getting the blues (and bloodshots) again." Though I did not then know how gravely ill he had been, I was fain to remind him that it was bad economy to make business out of rest itself; but I received prompt confirmation that all was falling out as he wished. The Talfourds stayed two days: "and I think they were very happy. He was in his best aspect; the manner so well known to us, not the less loveable for being laughable; and if you could have seen him going round and round the coach that brought them, as a preliminary to paying the voiturier to whom he couldn't speak, in a currency he didn't understand, you never would have forgotten it." His friends left Lausanne on the 5th; and five days later he sent me two-thirds of the manuscript of his Christmas book. FOOTNOTES: [127] Writing on Sunday he had said: "I hope to finish the second number to-morrow, and to send it off bodily by Tuesday's post. On Wednesday I purpose, please God, beginning the _Battle of Life_. I shall peg away at that, without turning aside to _Dombey_ again; and _if_ I can only do it within the month!" I had to warn him, on receiving these intimations, that he was trying too much. [128] The storm of rain formerly mentioned by him had not been repeated, but the weather had become unsettled, and he thus referred to the rainfall which made that summer so disastrous in England. "What a storm that must have been in London! I wish we could get something like it, here. . . . It is thundering while I write, but I fear it don't look black enough for a clearance. The echoes in the mountains are of such a stupendous sort, that a peal of thunder five or ten minutes long, is here the commonest of circumstances. . . ." That was early in August, and at the close of the month he wrote: "I forgot to tell you that yesterday week, at half-past 7 in the morning, we had a smart shock of an earthquake, lasting, perhaps, a quarter of a minute. It awoke me in bed. The sensation was so curious and unlike any other, that I called out at the top of my voice I was sure it was an earthquake." CHAPTER XIV. REVOLUTION AT GENEVA, CHRISTMAS BOOK, AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND. 1846. At Lausanne--Large Sale of _Dombey_--Christmas Book done--At Geneva--Back to _Dombey_--Rising against the Jesuits--The Fight in Geneva--Rifle against Cannon--Genevese "Aristocracy"--Swiss "Rabble"--Traces left by the Revolution--Smaller Revolution in Whitefriars--_Daily News_ changes--Letters about his _Battle of Life_--Sketch of Story--Difficulty in Plot--His own Comments--Date of Story--Reply to Criticism--Stanfield's Offer of Illustrations--Doubts of Third Part--Tendency to Blank Verse--Stanfield's Designs--Grave Mistake by Leech--Last Days in Switzerland--Mountain Winds--A Ravine in the Hills--Sadness of Leave-taking--Travelling to Paris. "I SEND you in twelve letters, counting this as one, the first two parts (thirty-five slips) of the Christmas book. I have two present anxieties respecting it. One to know that you have received it safely; and the second to know how it strikes you. Be sure you read the first and second parts together. . . . There seems to me to be interest in it, and a pretty idea; and it is unlike the others. . . . There will be some minor points for consideration: as, the necessity for some slight alterations in one or two of the Doctor's speeches in the first part; and whether it should be called 'The Battle of Life. A Love Story'--to express both a love story in the common acceptation of the phrase, and also a story of love; with one or two other things of that sort. We can moot these by and by. I made a tremendous day's work of it yesterday and was horribly excited--so I am going to rush out, as fast as I can: being a little used up, and sick. . . . But never say die! I have been to the glass to look at my eye. Pretty bright!" I made it brighter next day by telling him that the first number of _Dombey_ had outstripped in sale the first of _Chuzzlewit_ by more than twelve thousand copies; and his next letter, sending the close of his little tale, showed his need of the comfort my pleasant news had given him. "I really do not know what this story is worth. I am so floored: wanting sleep, and never having had my head free from it for this month past. I think there are some places in this last part which I may bring better together in the proof, and where a touch or two may be of service; particularly in the scene between Craggs and Michael Warden, where, as it stands, the interest seems anticipated. But I shall have the benefit of your suggestions, and my own then cooler head, I hope; and I will be very careful with the proofs, and keep them by me as long as I can. . . . Mr. Britain must have another Christian name, then? 'Aunt Martha' is the Sally of whom the Doctor speaks in the first part. Martha is a better name. What do you think of the concluding paragraph? Would you leave it for happiness' sake? It is merely experimental. . . . I am flying to Geneva to-morrow morning." (That was on the 18th of October; and on the 20th he wrote from Geneva.) "We came here yesterday, and we shall probably remain until Katey's birthday, which is next Thursday week. I shall fall to work on number three of _Dombey_ as soon as I can. At present I am the worse for wear, but nothing like as much so as I expected to be on Sunday last. I had not been able to sleep for some time, and had been hammering away, morning, noon, and night. A bottle of hock on Monday, when Elliotson dined with us (he went away homeward yesterday morning), did me a world of good; the change comes in the very nick of time; and I feel in Dombeian spirits already. . . . But I have still rather a damaged head, aching a good deal occasionally, as it is doing now, though I have not been cupped--yet. . . . I dreamed all last week that the _Battle of Life_ was a series of chambers impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavouring to dove-tail the revolution here into the plot. The mental distress, quite horrible." Of the "revolution" he had written to me a week before, from Lausanne; where the news had just reached them, that, upon the Federal Diet decreeing the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic cantons had risen against the decree, the result being that the Protestants had deposed the grand council and established a provisional government, dissolving the Catholic league. His interest in this, and prompt seizure of what really was brought into issue by the conflict, is every way characteristic of Dickens. "You will know," he wrote from Lausanne on the 11th of October, "long before you get this, all about the revolution at Geneva. There were stories of plots against the Government when I was there, but I didn't believe them; for all sorts of lies are always afloat against the radicals, and wherever there is a consul from a Catholic Power the most monstrous fictions are in perpetual circulation against them: as in this very place, where the Sardinian consul was gravely whispering the other day that a society called the Homicides had been formed, whereof the president of the council of state, the O'Connell of Switzerland and a clever fellow, was a member; who were sworn on skulls and cross-bones to exterminate men of property, and so forth. There was a great stir here, on the day of the fight in Geneva. We heard the guns (they shook this house) all day; and seven hundred men marched out of this town of Lausanne to go and help the radical party--arriving at Geneva just after it was all over. There is no doubt they had received secret help from here; for a powder barrel, found by some of the Genevese populace with 'Canton de Vaud' painted on it, was carried on a pole about the streets as a standard, to show that they were sympathized with by friends outside. It was a poor mean fight enough, I am told by Lord Vernon, who was present and who was with us last night. The Government was afraid; having no confidence whatever, I dare say, in its own soldiers; and the cannon were fired everywhere except at the opposite party, who (I mean the revolutionists) had barricaded a bridge with an omnibus only, and certainly in the beginning might have been turned with ease. The precision of the common men with the rifle was especially shown by a small party of _five_, who waited on the ramparts near one of the gates of the town, to turn a body of soldiery who were coming in to the Government assistance. They picked out every officer and struck him down instantly, the moment the party appeared; there were three or four of them; upon which the soldiers gravely turned round and walked off. I dare say there are not fifty men in this place who wouldn't click your card off a target a hundred and fifty yards away, at least. I have seen them, time after time, fire across a great ravine as wide as the ornamental ground in St. James's-park, and never miss the bull's-eye. "It is a horribly ungentlemanly thing to say here, though I _do_ say it without the least reserve--but my sympathy is all with the radicals. I don't know any subject on which this indomitable people have so good a right to a strong feeling as Catholicity--if not as a religion, clearly as a means of social degradation. They know what it is. They live close to it. They have Italy beyond their mountains. They can compare the effect of the two systems at any time in their own valleys; and their dread of it, and their horror of the introduction of Catholic priests and emissaries into their towns, seems to me the most rational feeling in the world. Apart from this, you have no conception of the preposterous, insolent little aristocracy of Geneva: the most ridiculous caricature the fancy can suggest of what we know in England. I was talking to two famous gentlemen (very intelligent men) of that place, not long ago, who came over to invite me to a sort of reception there--which I declined. Really their talk about 'the people' and 'the masses,' and the necessity they would shortly be under of shooting a few of them as an example for the rest, was a kind of monstrosity one might have heard at Genoa. The audacious insolence and contempt of the people by their newspapers, too, is quite absurd. It is difficult to believe that men of sense can be such donkeys politically. It was precisely such a state of things that brought about the change here. There was a most respectful petition presented on the Jesuit question, signed by its tens of thousands of small farmers; the regular peasants of the canton, all splendidly taught in public schools, and intellectually as well as physically a most remarkable body of labouring men. This document is treated by the gentlemanly party with the most sublime contempt, and the signatures are said to be the signatures of 'the rabble.' Upon which, each man of the rabble shoulders his rifle, and walks in upon a given day agreed upon among them to Lausanne; and the gentlemanly party walk out without striking a blow." Such traces of the "revolution" as he found upon his present visit to Geneva he described in writing to me from the hotel de l'Ecu on the 20th of October. "You never would suppose from the look of this town that there had been anything revolutionary going on. Over the window of my old bedroom there is a great hole made by a cannon-ball in the house-front; and two of the bridges are under repair. But these are small tokens which anything else might have brought about as well. The people are all at work. The little streets are rife with every sight and sound of industry; the place is as quiet by ten o'clock as Lincoln's-inn-fields; and the only outward and visible sign of public interest in political events is a little group at every street corner, reading a public announcement from the new Government of the forthcoming election of state-officers, in which the people are reminded of their importance as a republican institution, and desired to bear in mind their dignity in all their proceedings. Nothing very violent or bad could go on with a community so well educated as this. It is the best antidote to American experiences, conceivable. As to the nonsense 'the gentlemanly interest' talk about, their opposition to property and so forth, there never was such mortal absurdity. One of the principal leaders in the late movement has a stock of watches and jewellery here of immense value--and had, during the disturbance--perfectly unprotected. James Fahzey has a rich house and a valuable collection of pictures; and, I will be bound to say, twice as much to lose as half the conservative declaimers put together. This house, the liberal one, is one of the most richly furnished and luxurious hotels on the continent. And if I were a Swiss with a hundred thousand pounds, I would be as steady against the Catholic cantons and the propagation of Jesuitism as any radical among 'em: believing the dissemination of Catholicity to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world. Which these people, thoroughly well educated, know perfectly. . . . The boys of Geneva were very useful in bringing materials for the construction of the barricades on the bridges; and the enclosed song may amuse you. They sing it to a tune that dates from the great French Revolution--a very good one." But revolutions may be small as well as their heroes, and while he thus was sending me his Gamin de Genève I was sending him news of a sudden change in Whitefriars which had quite as vivid interest for him. Not much could be told him at first, but his curiosity instantly arose to fever pitch. "In reference to that _Daily News_ revolution," he wrote from Geneva on the 26th, "I have been walking and wondering all day through a perfect Miss Burney's Vauxhall of conjectural dark walks. Heaven send you enlighten me fully on Wednesday, or number three will suffer!" Two days later he resumed, as he was beginning his journey back to Lausanne. "I am in a great state of excitement on account of your intelligence, and desperately anxious to know all about it. I shall be put out to an unspeakable extent if I don't find your letter awaiting me. God knows there has been small comfort for either of us in the _D. N._'s nine months." There was not much to tell then, and there is less now; but at last the discomfort was over for us both, as I had been unable to reconcile myself to a longer continuance of the service I had given in Whitefriars since he quitted it. The subject may be left with the remark made upon it in his first letter after returning to Rosemont. "I certainly am very glad of the result of the _Daily News_ business, though my gladness is dashed with melancholy to think that you should have toiled there so long, to so little purpose. I escaped more easily. However, it is all past now. . . . As to the undoubted necessity of the course you took, I have not a grain of question in my mind. That, being what you are, you had only one course to take and have taken it, I no more doubt than that the Old Bailey is not Westminster Abbey. In the utmost sum at which you value yourself, you were bound to leave; and now you _have_ left, you will come to Paris, and there, and at home again, we'll have, please God, the old kind of evenings and the old life again, as it used to be before those daily nooses caught us by the legs and sometimes tripped us up. Make a vow (as I have done) never to go down that court with the little news-shop at the corner, any more, and let us swear by Jack Straw as in the ancient times. . . . I am beginning to get over my sorrow for your nights up aloft in Whitefriars, and to feel nothing but happiness in the contemplation of your enfranchisement. God bless you!" The time was now shortening for him at Lausanne; but before my sketches of his pleasant days there close, the little story of his Christmas book may be made complete by a few extracts from the letters that followed immediately upon the departure of the Talfourds. Without comment they will explain its closing touches, his own consciousness of the difficulties in working out the tale within limits too confined not to render its proper development imperfect, and his ready tact in dealing with objection and suggestion from without. His condition while writing it did not warrant me in pressing what I might otherwise have thought necessary; but as the little story finally left his hands, it had points not unworthy of him; and a sketch of its design will render the fragments from his letters more intelligible. I read it lately with a sense that its general tone of quiet beauty deserved well the praise which Jeffrey in those days had given it. "I like and admire the _Battle_ extremely," he said in a letter on its publication, sent me by Dickens and not included in Lord Cockburn's Memoir. "It is better than any other man alive could have written, and has passages as fine as anything that ever came from the man himself. The dance of the sisters in that autumn orchard is of itself worth a dozen inferior tales, and their reunion at the close, and indeed all the serious parts, are beautiful, some traits of Clemency charming." Yet it was probably here the fact, as with the _Chimes_, that the serious parts were too much interwoven with the tale to render the subject altogether suitable to the old mirth-bringing season; but this had also some advantages. The story is all about two sisters, the younger of whom, Marion, sacrifices her own affection to give happiness to the elder, Grace. But Grace had already made the same sacrifice for this younger sister; life's first and hardest battle had been won by her before the incidents begin; and when she is first seen, she is busying herself to bring about her sister's marriage with Alfred Heathfield, whom she has herself loved, and whom she has kept wholly unconscious, by a quiet change in her bearing to him, of what his own still disengaged heart would certainly not have rejected. Marion, however, had earlier discovered this, though it is not until her victory over herself that Alfred knows it; and meanwhile he is become her betrothed. The sisters thus shown at the opening, one believing her love undiscovered and the other bent for the sake of that love on surrendering her own, each practising concealment and both unselfishly true, form a pretty and tender picture. The second part is intended to give to Marion's flight the character of an elopement; and so to manage this as to show her all the time unchanged to the man she is pledged to, yet flying from, was the author's difficulty. One Michael Warden is the _deus ex machinâ_ by whom it is solved, hardly with the usual skill; but there is much art in rendering his pretensions to the hand of Marion, whose husband he becomes after an interval of years, the means of closing against him all hope of success, in the very hour when her own act might seem to be opening it to him. During the same interval Grace, believing Marion to be gone with Warden, becomes Alfred's wife; and not until reunion after six years' absence is the truth entirely known to her. The struggle, to all of them, has been filled and chastened with sorrow; but joy revisits them at its close. Hearts are not broken by the duties laid upon them; nor is life shown to be such a perishable holiday, that amidst noble sorrow and generous self-denial it must lose its capacity for happiness. The tale thus justifies its place in the Christmas series. What Jeffrey says of Clemency, too, may suggest another word. The story would not be Dickens's if we could not discover in it the power peculiar to him of presenting the commonest objects with freshness and beauty, of detecting in the homeliest forms of life much of its rarest loveliness, and of springing easily upward from everyday realities into regions of imaginative thought. To this happiest direction of his art, Clemency and her husband render new tribute; and in her more especially, once again, we recognize one of those true souls who fill so large a space in his writings, for whom the lowest seats at life's feasts are commonly kept, but whom he moves and welcomes to a more fitting place among the prized and honoured at the upper tables. "I wonder whether you foresaw the end of the Christmas book! There are two or three places in which I can make it prettier, I think, by slight alterations. . . . I trust to Heaven you may like it. What an affecting story I could have made of it in one octavo volume. Oh to think of the printers transforming my kindly cynical old father into Doctor Taddler!" (28th of October.) * * * * * "Do you think it worth while, in the illustrations, to throw the period back at all for the sake of anything good in the costume? The story may have happened at any time within a hundred years. Is it worth having coats and gowns of dear old Goldsmith's day? or thereabouts? I really don't know what to say. The probability is, if it has not occurred to you or to the artists, that it is hardly worth considering; but I ease myself of it by throwing it out to you. It may be already too late, or you may see reason to think it best to 'stick to the _last_' (I feel it necessary to italicize the joke), and abide by the ladies' and gentlemen's spring and winter fashions of this time. Whatever you think best, in this as in all other things, is best, I am sure. . . . I would go, in the illustrations, for 'beauty' as much as possible; and I should like each part to have a general illustration to it at the beginning, shadowing out its drift and bearing: much as Browne goes at that kind of thing on _Dombey_ covers. I don't think I should fetter your discretion in the matter farther. The better it is illustrated, the better I shall be pleased of course." (29th of October.) ". . . I only write to say that it is of no use my writing at length, until I have heard from you; and that I will wait until I shall have read your promised communication (as my father would call it) to-morrow. I have glanced over the proofs of the last part and really don't wonder, some of the most extravagant mistakes occurring in Clemency's account to Warden, that the marriage of Grace and Alfred should seem rather unsatisfactory to you. Whatever is done about that must be done with the lightest hand, for the reader MUST take something for granted; but I think it next to impossible, without dreadful injury to the effect, to introduce a scene between Marion and Michael. The introduction must be in the scene between the sisters, and must be put, mainly, into the mouth of Grace. Rely upon it there is no other way, in keeping with the spirit of the tale. With this amendment, and a touch here and there in the last part (I know exactly where they will come best), I think it may be pretty and affecting, and comfortable too. . . ." (31st of October.) * * * * * ". . . I shall hope to touch upon the Christmas book as soon as I get your opinion. I wouldn't do it without. I am delighted to hear of noble old Stanny. Give my love to him, and tell him I think of turning Catholic. It strikes me (it may have struck you perhaps) that another good place for introducing a few lines of dialogue, is at the beginning of the scene between Grace and her husband, where he speaks about the messenger at the gate." (4th of November.) "Before I reply to your questions I wish to remark generally of the third part that all the passion that can be got into it, through my interpretation at all events, is there. I know that, by what it cost me; and I take it to be, as a question of art and interest, in the very nature of the story that it _should_ move at a swift pace after the sisters are in each other's arms again. Anything after that would drag like lead, and must. . . . Now for your questions. I don't think any little scene with Marion and anybody can prepare the way for the last paragraph of the tale: I don't think anything but a printer's line _can_ go between it and Warden's speech. A less period than ten years? Yes. I see no objection to six. I have no doubt you are right. Any word from Alfred in his misery? Impossible: you might as well try to speak to somebody in an express train. The preparation for his change is in the first part, and he kneels down beside her in that return scene. He is left alone with her, as it were, in the world. I am quite confident it is wholly impossible for me to alter that. . . . BUT (keep your eye on me) when Marion went away, she left a letter for Grace in which she charged her to encourage the love that Alfred would conceive for her, and FOREWARNED her that years would pass before they met again, &c. &c. This coming out in the scene between the sisters, and something like it being expressed in the opening of the little scene between Grace and her husband before the messenger at the gate, will make (I hope) a prodigious difference; and I will try to put in something with Aunt Martha and the Doctor which shall carry the tale back more distinctly and unmistakeably to the battle-ground. I hope to make these alterations next week, and to send the third part back to you before I leave here. If you think it can still be improved after that, say so to me in Paris and I will go at it again. I wouldn't have it limp, if it can fly. I say nothing to you of a great deal of this being already expressed in the sentiment of the beginning, because your delicate perception knows all that already. Observe for the artists. Grace will now only have _one child_--little Marion.". . . (At night, on same day.). . . "You recollect that I asked you to read it all together, for I knew that I was working for that? But I have no doubt of _your_ doubts, and will do what I have said. . . . I had thought of marking the time in the little story, and will do so. . . . Think, once more, of the period between the second and third parts. I will do the same." (7th of November.) * * * * * "I hope you will think the third part (when you read it in type with these amendments) very much improved. I think it so. If there should still be anything wanting, in your opinion, pray suggest it to me in Paris. I am bent on having it right, if I can. . . . If in going over the proofs you find the tendency to blank verse (I _cannot_ help it, when I am very much in earnest) too strong, knock out a word's brains here and there." (13th of November. Sending the proofs back.) * * * * * ". . . Your Christmas book illustration-news makes me jump for joy. I will write you at length to-morrow. I should like this dedication: This Christmas Book is cordially inscribed To my English Friends in Switzerland. Just those two lines, and nothing more. When I get the proofs again I think I may manage another word or two about the battle-field, with advantage. I am glad you like the alterations. I feel that they make it complete, and that it would have been incomplete without your suggestions." (21st of November. From Paris.) I had managed, as a glad surprise for him, to enlist both Stanfield and Maclise in the illustration of the story, in addition to the distinguished artists whom the publishers had engaged for it, Leech and Richard Doyle; and among the subjects contributed by Stanfield are three morsels of English landscape which had a singular charm for Dickens at the time, and seem to me still of their kind quite faultless. I may add a curious fact, never mentioned until now. In the illustration which closes the second part of the story, where the festivities to welcome the bridegroom at the top of the page contrast with the flight of the bride represented below, Leech made the mistake of supposing that Michael Warden had taken part in the elopement, and has introduced his figure with that of Marion. We did not discover this until too late for remedy, the publication having then been delayed, for these drawings, to the utmost limit; and it is highly characteristic of Dickens, and of the true regard he had for this fine artist, that, knowing the pain he must give in such circumstances by objection or complaint, he preferred to pass it silently. Nobody made remark upon it, and there the illustration still stands; but any one who reads the tale carefully will at once perceive what havoc it makes of one of the most delicate turns in it. "When I first saw it, it was with a horror and agony not to be expressed. Of course I need not tell _you_, my dear fellow, Warden has no business in the elopement scene. _He_ was never there! In the first hot sweat of this surprise and novelty, I was going to implore the printing of that sheet to be stopped, and the figure taken out of the block. But when I thought of the pain this might give to our kind-hearted Leech; and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I became more composed: though the fact is wonderful to me. No doubt a great number of copies will be printed by the time this reaches you, and therefore I shall take it for granted that it stands as it is. Leech otherwise is very good, and the illustrations altogether are by far the best that have been done for any of the Christmas books. You know how I build up temples in my mind that are not made with hands (or expressed with pen and ink, I am afraid), and how liable I am to be disappointed in these things. But I really am _not_ disappointed in this case. Quietness and beauty are preserved throughout. Say everything to Mac and Stanny, more than everything! It is a delight to look at these little landscapes of the dear old boy. How gentle and elegant, and yet how manly and vigorous, they are! I have a perfect joy in them." Of the few days that remained of his Lausanne life, before he journeyed to Paris, there is not much requiring to be said. His work had continued during the whole of the month before departure to occupy him so entirely as to leave room for little else, and even occasional letters to very dear friends at home were intermitted. Here is one example of many. "I will write to Landor as soon as I can possibly make time, but I really am so much at my desk perforce, and so full of work, whether I am there or elsewhere, between the Christmas book and _Dombey_, that it is the most difficult thing in the world for me to make up my mind to write a letter to any one but you. I ought to have written to Macready. I wish you would tell him, with my love, how I am situated in respect of pen, ink, and paper. One of the Lausanne papers, treating of free trade, has been very copious lately in its mention of LORD GOBDEN. Fact; and I think it a good name." Then, as the inevitable time approached, he cast about him for such comfort as the coming change might bring, to set against the sorrow of it; and began to think of Paris, "'in a less romantic and more homely contemplation of the picture,' as not wholly undesirable. I have no doubt that constant change, too, is indispensable to me when I am at work: and at times something more than a doubt will force itself upon me whether there is not something in a Swiss valley that disagrees with me. Certainly, whenever I live in Switzerland again, it shall be on the hill-top. Something of the _goître_ and _cretin_ influence seems to settle on my spirits sometimes, on the lower ground.[129] How sorry, ah yes! how sorry I shall be to leave the little society nevertheless. We have been thoroughly good-humoured and agreeable together, and I'll always give a hurrah for the Swiss and Switzerland." One or two English travelling by Lausanne had meanwhile greeted him as they were passing home, and a few days given him by Elliotson had been an enjoyment without a drawback. It was now the later autumn, very high winds were coursing through the valley, and his last letter but one described the change which these approaches of winter were making in the scene. "We have had some tremendous hurricanes at Lausanne. It is an extraordinary place now for wind, being peculiarly situated among mountains--between the Jura, and the Simplon, St. Gothard, St. Bernard, and Mont Blanc ranges; and at night you would swear (lying in bed) you were at sea. You cannot imagine wind blowing so, over earth. It is very fine to hear. The weather generally, however, has been excellent. There is snow on the tops of nearly all the hills, but none has fallen in the valley. On a bright day, it is quite hot between eleven and half past two. The nights and mornings are cold. For the last two or three days, it has been thick weather; and I can see no more of Mont Blanc from where I am writing now than if I were in Devonshire terrace, though last week it bounded all the Lausanne walks. I would give a great deal that you could take a walk with me about Lausanne on a clear cold day. It is impossible to imagine anything more noble and beautiful than the scene; and the autumn colours in the foliage are more brilliant and vivid now than any description could convey to you. I took Elliotson, when he was with us, up to a ravine I had found out in the hills eight hundred or a thousand feet deep! Its steep sides dyed bright yellow, and deep red, by the changing leaves; a sounding torrent rolling down below; the lake of Geneva lying at its foot; one enormous mass and chaos of trees at its upper end; and mountain piled on mountain in the distance, up into the sky! He really was struck silent by its majesty and splendour." He had begun his third number of _Dombey_ on the 26th of October, on the 4th of the following month he was half through it, on the 7th he was in the "agonies" of its last chapter, and on the 9th, one day before that proposed for its completion, all was done. This was marvellously rapid work, after what else he had undergone; but within a week, Monday the 16th being the day for departure, they were to strike their tents, and troubled and sad were the few days thus left him for preparation and farewell. He included in his leave-taking his deaf, dumb, and blind friends; and, to use his own homely phrase, was yet more terribly "down in the mouth" at taking leave of his hearing, speaking, and seeing friends. "I shall see you soon, please God, and that sets all to rights. But I don't believe there are many dots on the map of the world where we shall have left such affectionate remembrances behind us, as in Lausanne. It was quite miserable this last night, when we left them at Haldimand's." He shall himself describe how they travelled post to Paris, occupying five days. "We got through the journey charmingly, though not quite so quickly as we hoped. The children as good as usual, and even Skittles jolly to the last. (That name has long superseded Sampson Brass, by the bye. I call him so, from something skittle-playing and public-housey in his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels (hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold indeed crossing the Jura--nothing but fog and frost; but when we were out of Switzerland and across the French frontier, it became warmer, and continued so. We stopped at between six and seven each evening; had two rather queer inns, wild French country inns; but the rest good. They were three hours and a half examining the luggage at the frontier custom-house--atop of a mountain, in a hard and biting frost; where Anne and Roche had sharp work I assure you, and the latter insisted on volunteering the most astonishing and unnecessary lies about my books, for the mere pleasure of deceiving the officials. When we were out of the mountain country, we came at a good pace, but were a day late in getting to our hotel here." They were in Paris when that was written; at the hotel Brighton; which they had reached in the evening of Friday the 20th of November. FOOTNOTES: [129] "I may tell you," he wrote to me from Paris at the end of November, "now it is all over. I don't know whether it was the hot summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N. remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger. Yet I had little pain in my side; excepting that time at Genoa I have hardly had any since poor Mary died, when it came on so badly; and I walked my fifteen miles a day constantly, at a great pace." CHAPTER XV. THREE MONTHS IN PARIS. 1846-1847. Lord Brougham--French Sunday--A House taken--His French Abode--A Former Tenant--Sister Fanny's Illness--The King of the Barricades--The Morgue--Parisian Population--Americans and French--Unsettlement of Plans--A True Friend--Hard Frost--Alarming Neighbour--A Fellow-littérateur--London Visit--Return to Paris--Begging-letter-writers--A Boulogne Reception--French-English--Citizen Dickens--Sight-seeing--Evening with Victor Hugo--At the Bibliothèque Royale--Adventure with a Coachman--Illness of Eldest Son--Visit of his Father--The "Man that put together Dombey." NO man enjoyed brief residence in a hotel more than Dickens, but "several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of children" are not desirable accompaniments to this kind of life; and his first day in Paris did not close before he had offered for an "eligible mansion." That same Saturday night he took a "colossal" walk about the city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him; and among other things that attracted his notice was "rather a good book announced in a bookseller's window as _Les Mystères de Londres par Sir Trollopp_. Do you know him?" A countryman better known had given him earlier greeting. "The first man who took hold of me in the street, immediately outside this door, was Bruffum in his check trousers, and without the proper number of buttons on his shirt, who was going away this morning, he told me, but coming back in two months, when we would go and dine--at some place known to him and fame." Next day he took another long walk about the streets, and lost himself fifty times. This was Sunday, and he hardly knew what to say of it, as he saw it there and then. The bitter observance of that day he always sharply resisted, believing a little rational enjoyment to be not opposed to either rest or religion; but here was another matter. "The dirty churches, and the clattering carts and waggons, and the open shops (I don't think I passed fifty shut up, in all my strollings in and out), and the work-a-day dresses and drudgeries, are not comfortable. Open theatres and so forth I am well used to, of course, by this time; but so much toil and sweat on what one would like to see, apart from religious observances, a sensible holiday, is painful." The date of his letter was the 22nd of November, and it had three postscripts.[130] The first, "Monday afternoon," told me a house was taken; that, unless the agreement should break off on any unforeseen fight between Roche and the agent ("a French Mrs. Gamp"), I was to address him at No. 48, Rue de Courcelles, Faubourg St. Honoré; and that he would merely then advert to the premises as in his belief the "most ridiculous, extraordinary, unparalleled, and preposterous" in the whole world; being something between a baby-house, a "shades," a haunted castle, and a mad kind of clock. "They belong to a Marquis Castellan, and you will be ready to die of laughing when you go over them." The second P.S. declared that his lips should be sealed till I beheld for myself. "By Heaven it is not to be imagined by the mind of man!" The third P.S. closed the letter. "One room is a tent. Another room is a grove. Another room is a scene at the Victoria. The upstairs rooms are like fanlights over street-doors. The nurseries--but no, no, no, no more! . . ." His following letter nevertheless sent more, even in the form of an additional protestation that never till I saw it should the place be described. "I will merely observe that it is fifty yards long, and eighteen feet high, and that the bedrooms are exactly like opera-boxes. It has its little courtyard and garden, and porter's house, and cordon to open the door, and so forth; and is a Paris mansion in little. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. Being a gentleman's house, and not one furnished to let, it has some very curious things in it; some of the oddest things you ever beheld in your life; and an infinity of easy chairs and sofas. . . . Bad weather. It is snowing hard. There is not a door or window here--but that's nothing! there's not a door or window in all Paris--that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of chinks in the city that can he stopped to keep the wind out. And the cold!--but you shall judge for yourself; and also of this preposterous dining-room. The invention, sir, of Henry Bulwer, who when he had executed it (he used to live here), got frightened at what he had done, as well he might, and went away. . . . The Brave called me aside on Saturday night, and showed me an improvement he had effected in the decorative way. 'Which,' he said, 'will very much s'prize Mis'r Fors'er when he come.' You are to be deluded into the belief that there is a perspective of chambers twenty miles in length, opening from the drawing-room. . . ." My visit was not yet due, however, and what occupied or interested him in the interval may first be told. He had not been two days in Paris when a letter from his father made him very anxious for the health of his eldest sister. "I was going to the play (a melodrama in eight acts, five hours long), but hadn't the heart to leave home after my father's letter," he is writing on the 30th of November, "and sent Georgy and Kate by themselves. There seems to be no doubt whatever that Fanny is in a consumption." She had broken down in an attempt to sing at a party in Manchester; and subsequent examination by Sir Charles Bell's son, who was present and took much interest in her, too sadly revealed the cause. "He advised that neither she nor Burnett should be told the truth, and my father has not disclosed it. In worldly circumstances they are very comfortable, and they are very much respected. They seem to be happy together, and Burnett has a great deal of teaching. You remember my fears about her when she was in London the time of Alfred's marriage, and that I said she looked to me as if she were in a decline? Kate took her to Elliotson, who said that her lungs were certainly not affected then. And she cried for joy. Don't you think it would be better for her to be brought up, if possible, to see Elliotson again? I am deeply, deeply grieved about it." This course was taken, and for a time there seemed room for hope; but the result will be seen. In the same letter I heard of poor Charles Sheridan, well known to us both, dying of the same terrible disease; and his chief, Lord Normanby, whose many acts of sympathy and kindness had inspired strong regard in Dickens, he had already found "as informal and good-natured as ever, but not so gay as usual, and having an anxious, haggard way with him, as if his responsibilities were more than he had bargained for." Nor, to account for this, had Dickens far to seek, when a little leisure enabled him to see something of what was passing in Paris in that last year of Louis Philippe's reign. What first impressed him most unfavourably was a glimpse in the Champs Elysées, of the King himself coming in from the country. "There were two carriages. His was surrounded by horseguards. It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefet of Police riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance of the cortége, turning his head incessantly from side to side, like a figure in a Dutch clock, and scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all the twigs in all the trees in the long avenue." But these and other political indications were only, as they generally prove to be, the outward signs of maladies more deeply-seated. He saw almost everywhere signs of canker eating into the heart of the people themselves. "It is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive; and there can be no better summary of it, after all, than Hogarth's unmentionable phrase." He sent me no letter that did not contribute something of observation or character. He went at first rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive that he had not courage for a long time to go back; and on that same occasion he had noticed the keeper smoking a short pipe at his little window, "and giving a bit of fresh turf to a linnet in a cage." Of the condition generally of the streets he reported badly; the quays on the other side of the Seine were not safe after dark; and here was his own night experience of one of the best quarters of the city. "I took Georgy out, the night before last, to show her the Palais Royal lighted up; and on the Boulevard, a street as bright as the brightest part of the Strand or Regent-street, we saw a man fall upon another, close before us, and try to tear the cloak off his back. It was in a little dark corner near the Porte St. Denis, which stands out in the middle of the street. After a short struggle, the thief fled (there were thousands of people walking about), and was captured just on the other side of the road." An incident of that kind might mean little or much: but what he proceeded to remark of the ordinary Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers, had a more grave complexion; and may be thought perhaps still to yield some illustration, not without value, to the story of the quarter of a century that has passed since, and even to some of the appalling events of its latest year or two. "It is extraordinary what nonsense English people talk, write, and believe, about foreign countries. The Swiss (so much decried) will do anything for you, if you are frank and civil; they are attentive and punctual in all their dealings; and may be relied upon as steadily as the English. The Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers are more like (and unlike) Americans than I could have supposed possible. To the American indifference and carelessness, they add a procrastination and want of the least heed about keeping a promise or being exact, which is certainly not surpassed in Naples. They have the American semi-sentimental independence too, and none of the American vigour or purpose. If they ever get free trade in France (as I suppose they will, one day), these parts of the population must, for years and years, be ruined. They couldn't get the means of existence, in competition with the English workmen. Their inferior manual dexterity, their lazy habits, perfect unreliability, and habitual insubordination, would ruin them in any such contest, instantly. They are fit for nothing but soldiering--and so far, I believe, the successors in the policy of your friend Napoleon have reason on their side. Eh bien, mon ami, quand vous venez à Paris, nous nous mettrons à quatre épingles, et nous verrons toutes les merveilles de la cité, et vous en jugerez. God bless me, I beg your pardon! It comes so natural." On the 30th he wrote to me that he had got his papers into order and hoped to begin that day. But the same letter told me of the unsettlement thus early of his half-formed Paris plans. Three months sooner than he designed he should be due in London for family reasons; should have to keep within the limit of four months abroad; and as his own house would not be free till July, would have to hire one from the end of March. "In these circumstances I think I shall send Charley to King's-college after Christmas. I am sorry he should lose so much French, but don't you think to break another half-year's schooling would be a pity? Of my own will I would not send him to King's-college at all, but to Bruce-castle instead. I suppose, however, Miss Coutts is best. We will talk over all this when I come to London." The offer to take charge of his eldest son's education had been pressed upon Dickens by this true friend, to whose delicate and noble consideration for him it would hardly become me to make other allusion here. Munificent as the kindness was, however, it was yet only the smallest part of the obligation which Dickens felt that he owed this lady; to whose generous schemes for the neglected and uncared-for classes of the population, in all which he deeply sympathised, he did the very utmost to render, through many years, unstinted service of his time and his labour, with sacrifice unselfish as her own. His proposed early visit to London, named in this letter, was to see the rehearsal of his Christmas story, dramatised by Mr. Albert Smith for Mr. and Mrs. Keeley at the Lyceum; and my own proposed visit to Paris was to be in the middle of January. "It will then be the height of the season, and a good time for testing the unaccountable French vanity which really does suppose there are no fogs here, but that they are all in London."[131] The opening of his next letter, which bore date the 6th of December, and its amusing sequel, will sufficiently speak for themselves. "Cold intense. The water in the bedroom-jugs freezes into solid masses from top to bottom, bursts the jugs with reports like small cannon, and rolls out on the tables and wash-stands, hard as granite. I stick to the shower-bath, but have been most hopelessly out of sorts--writing sorts; that's all. Couldn't begin, in the strange place; took a violent dislike to my study, and came down into the drawing-room; couldn't find a corner that would answer my purpose; fell into a black contemplation of the waning month; sat six hours at a stretch, and wrote as many lines, &c. &c. &c. . . . Then, you know what arrangements are necessary with the chairs and tables; and then what correspondence had to be cleared off; and then how I tried to settle to my desk, and went about and about it, and dodged at it, like a bird at a lump of sugar. In short I have just begun; five printed pages finished, I should say; and hope I shall be blessed with a better condition this next week, or I shall be behind-hand. I shall try to go at it--hard. I can't do more. . . . There is rather a good man lives in this street, and I have had a correspondence with him which is preserved for your inspection. His name is Barthélemy. He wears a prodigious Spanish cloak, a slouched hat, an immense beard, and long black hair. He called the other day and left his card. Allow me to enclose his card, which has originality and merit. [Illustration: =Rue de Courcelles= _Barthélemy_ =49.=] Roche said I wasn't at home. Yesterday, he wrote me to say that he too was a 'Littérateur'--that he had called, in compliment to my distinguished reputation--'qu'il n'avait pas été reçu--qu'il n'était pas habitué à cette sorte de procédé--et qu'il pria Monsieur Dickens d'oublier son nom, sa mémoire, sa carte, et sa visite, et de considérer qu'elle n'avait pas été rendu!' Of course I wrote him a very polite reply immediately, telling him good-humouredly that he was quite mistaken, and that there were always two weeks in the beginning of every month when M. Dickens ne pouvait rendre visite à personne. He wrote back to say that he was more than satisfied; that it was his case too, at the end of every month; and that when busy himself, he not only can't receive or pay visits, but--'tombe, généralement, aussi, dans des humeurs noires qui approchent de l'anthropophagie!!!' I think that's pretty well." He was in London eight days, from the 15th to the 23rd of December;[132] and among the occupations of his visit, besides launching his little story on the stage, was the settlement of form for a cheap edition of his writings, which began in the following year. It was to be printed in double-columns, and issued weekly in three-halfpenny numbers; there were to be new prefaces, but no illustrations; and for each book something less than a fourth of the original price was to be charged. Its success was very good, but did not come even near to the mark of the later issues of his writings. His own feeling as to this, however, though any failure at the moment affected him on other grounds, was always that of a quiet confidence; and he had expressed this in a proposed dedication of this very edition, which for other reasons was ultimately laid aside. It will be worth preserving here. "This cheap edition of my books is dedicated to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die." Upon his return to Paris I had frequent report of his progress with his famous fifth number, on the completion of which I was to join him. The day at one time seemed doubtful. "It would be miserable to have to work while you were here. Still, I make such sudden starts, and am so possessed of what I am going to do, that the fear may prove to be quite groundless, and if any alteration would trouble you, let the 13th stand at all hazards." The cold he described as so intense, and the price of fuel so enormous, that though the house was not half warmed ("as you'll say, when you feel it") it cost him very near a pound a day. Begging-letter writers had found out "Monsieur Dickens, le romancier célèbre," and waylaid him at the door and in the street as numerously as in London: their distinguishing peculiarity being that they were nearly all of them "Chevaliers de la Garde Impériale de sa Majesté Napoléon le Grand," and that their letters bore immense seals with coats of arms as large as five-shilling pieces. His friends the Watsons passed new year's day with him on their way to Rockingham from Lausanne, leaving that country covered with snow and the Bise blowing cruelly over it, but describing it as nothing to the cold of Paris. On the day that closed the old year he had gone into the Morgue and seen an old man with grey head lying there. "It seemed the strangest thing in the world that it should have been necessary to take any trouble to stop such a feeble, spent, exhausted morsel of life. It was just dusk when I went in; the place was empty; and he lay there, all alone, like an impersonation of the wintry eighteen hundred and forty-six. . . . I find I am getting inimitable, so I'll stop." The time for my visit having come, I had grateful proof of the minute and thoughtful provision characteristic of him in everything. My dinner had been ordered to the second at Boulogne, my place in the malle-poste taken, and these and other services announced in a letter, which, by way of doing its part also in the kindly work of preparation, broke out into French. He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease and fluency. "I have written to the Hôtel des Bains at Boulogne to send on to Calais and take your place in the malle-poste. . . . Of course you know that you'll be assailed with frightful shouts all along the two lines of ropes from all the touters in Boulogne, and of course you'll pass on like the princess who went up the mountain after the talking bird; but don't forget quietly to single out the Hôtel des Bains commissionnaire. The following circumstances will then occur. My experience is more recent than yours, and I will throw them into a dramatic form. . . . You are filtered into the little office, where there are some soldiers; and a gentleman with a black beard and a pen and ink sitting behind a counter. _Barbe Noire_ (to the lord of L. I. F.). Monsieur, votre passeport. _Monsieur._ Monsieur, le voici! _Barbe Noire._ Où allez-vous, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur, je vais à Paris. _Barbe Noire._ Quand allez-vous partir, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur, je vais partir aujourd'hui. Avec la malle-poste. _Barbe Noire._ C'est bien. (To Gendarme.) Laissez sortir monsieur! _Gendarme._ Par ici, monsieur, s'il vous plait. Le gendarme ouvert une très petite porte. Monsieur se trouve subitement entouré de tous les gamins, agents, commissionnaires, porteurs, et polissons, en général, de Boulogne, qui s'élancent sur lui, en poussant des cris épouvantables. Monsieur est, pour le moment, tout-à-fait effrayé et bouleversé. Mais monsieur reprend ses forces et dit, de haute voix: 'Le Commissionnaire de l'Hôtel des Bains!' _Un petit homme_ (s'avançant rapidement, et en souriant doucement). Me voici, monsieur. Monsieur Fors Tair, n'est-ce pas? . . . Alors. . . . Alors monsieur se promène _à_ l'Hôtel des Bains, où monsieur trouvera qu'un petit salon particulier, en haut, est déjà préparé pour sa réception, et que son dîner est déjà commandé, aux soins du brave Courier, _à midi et demi_. . . . Monsieur mangera son dîner près du feu, avec beaucoup de plaisir, et il boirera de vin rouge à la santé de Monsieur de Boze, et sa famille intéressante et aimable. La malle-poste arrivera au bureau de la poste aux lettres à deux heures ou peut-être un peu plus tard. Mais monsieur chargera le commissionnaire d'y l'accompagner de bonne heure, car c'est beaucoup mieux de l'attendre que de la perdre. La malle-poste arrivé, monsieur s'assiéra, aussi confortablement qu'il le peut, et il y restera jusqu'à son arrivé au bureau de la poste aux lettres à Paris. Parceque, le convoi (_train_) n'est pas l'affaire de monsieur, qui continuera s'asseoir dans la malle-poste, sur le chemin de fer, et après le chemin de fer, jusqu'il se trouve à la basse-cour du bureau de la poste aux lettres à Paris, où il trouvera une voiture qui a été dépêché de la Rue de Courcelles, quarante-huit. Mais monsieur aura la bonté d'observer--Si le convoi arriverait à Amiens après le départ du convoi à minuit, il faudra y rester jusqu'à l'arrivé d'un autre convoi à trois heures moins un quart. En attendant, monsieur peut rester au buffet (_refreshment room_), où l'on peut toujours trouver un bon feu, et du café chaud, et des très bonnes choses à boire et à manger, pendant toute la nuit.--Est-ce que monsieur comprend parfaitement toutes ces règles pour sa guidance?--Vive le Roi des Français! Roi de la nation la plus grande, et la plus noble, et la plus extraordinairement merveilleuse, du monde! A bas des Anglais! "CHARLES DICKENS, "Français naturalisé, et Citoyen de Paris." We passed a fortnight together, and crowded into it more than might seem possible to such a narrow space. With a dreadful insatiability we passed through every variety of sight-seeing, prisons, palaces, theatres, hospitals, the Morgue and the Lazare, as well as the Louvre, Versailles, St. Cloud, and all the spots made memorable by the first revolution. The excellent comedian Regnier, known to us through Macready and endeared by many kindnesses, incomparable for his knowledge of the city and unwearying in friendly service, made us free of the green-room of the Français, where, on the birthday of Molière, we saw his "Don Juan" revived. At the Conservatoire we witnessed the masterly teaching of Samson; at the Odéon saw a new play by Ponsard, done but indifferently; at the Variétés "Gentil-Bernard," with four grisettes as if stepped out of a picture by Watteau; at the Gymnase "Clarisse Harlowe," with a death-scene of Rose Cheri which comes back to me, through the distance of time, as the prettiest piece of pure and gentle stage-pathos in my memory; at the Porte St. Martin "Lucretia Borgia" by Hugo; at the Cirque, scenes of the great revolution, and all the battles of Napoleon; at the Comic Opera, "Gibby"; and at the Palais Royal the usual new-year's piece, in which Alexandre Dumas was shown in his study beside a pile of quarto volumes five feet high, which proved to be the first tableau of the first act of the first piece to be played on the first night of his new theatre. That new theatre, the Historique, we also saw verging to a very short-lived completeness; and we supped with Dumas himself, and Eugène Sue, and met Théophile Gautier and Alphonse Karr. We saw Lamartine also, and had much friendly intercourse with Scribe, and with the kind good-natured Amedée Pichot. One day we visited in the Rue du Bac the sick and ailing Chateaubriand, whom we thought like Basil Montagu; found ourselves at the other extreme of opinion in the sculpture-room of David d'Angers; and closed that day at the house of Victor Hugo, by whom Dickens was received with infinite courtesy and grace. The great writer then occupied a floor in a noble corner-house in the Place Royale, the old quarter of Ninon l'Enclos and the people of the Regency, of whom the gorgeous tapestries, the painted ceilings, the wonderful carvings and old golden furniture, including a canopy of state out of some palace of the middle age, quaintly and grandly reminded us. He was himself, however, the best thing we saw; and I find it difficult to associate the attitudes and aspect in which the world has lately wondered at him, with the sober grace and self-possessed quiet gravity of that night of twenty-five years ago. Just then Louis Philippe had ennobled him, but the man's nature was written noble. Rather under the middle size, of compact close-buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair falling loosely over his close-shaven face, I never saw upon any features so keenly intellectual such a soft and sweet gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque distinctness given to it by Victor Hugo. He talked of his childhood in Spain, and of his father having been Governor of the Tagus in Napoleon's wars; spoke warmly of the English people and their literature; declared his preference for melody and simplicity over the music then fashionable at the Conservatoire; referred kindly to Ponsard, laughed at the actors who had murdered his tragedy at the Odéon, and sympathized with the dramatic venture of Dumas. To Dickens he addressed very charming flattery, in the best taste; and my friend long remembered the enjoyment of that evening. There is little to add of our Paris holiday, if indeed too much has not been said already. We had an adventure with a drunken coachman, of which the sequel showed at least the vigour and decisiveness of the police in regard to hired vehicles[133] in those last days of the Orleans monarchy. At the Bibliothèque Royale we were much interested by seeing, among many other priceless treasures, Gutenberg's types, Racine's notes in his copy of Sophocles, Rousseau's music, and Voltaire's note upon Frederick of Prussia's letter. Nor should I omit that in what Dickens then told me, of even his small experience of the social aspects of Paris, there seemed but the same disease which raged afterwards through the second Empire. Not many days after I left, all Paris was crowding to the sale of a lady of the demi-monde, Marie du Plessis, who had led the most brilliant and abandoned of lives, and left behind her the most exquisite furniture and the most voluptuous and sumptuous bijouterie. Dickens wished at one time to have pointed the moral of this life and death of which there was great talk in Paris while we were together. The disease of satiety, which only less often than hunger passes for a broken heart, had killed her. "What do you want?" asked the most famous of the Paris physicians, at a loss for her exact complaint. At last she answered: "To see my mother." She was sent for; and there came a simple Breton peasant-woman clad in the quaint garb of her province, who prayed by her bed until she died. Wonderful was the admiration and sympathy; and it culminated when Eugène Sue bought her prayer-book at the sale. Our last talk before I quitted Paris, after dinner at the Embassy, was of the danger underlying all this, and of the signs also visible everywhere of the Napoleon-worship which the Orleanists themselves had most favoured. Accident brought Dickens to England a fortnight later, when again we met together, at Gore-house, the self-contained reticent man whose doubtful inheritance was thus rapidly preparing to fall to him.[134] The accident was the having underwritten his number of _Dombey_ by two pages, which there was not time to supply otherwise than by coming to London to write them.[135] This was done accordingly; but another greater trouble followed. He had hardly returned to Paris when his eldest son, whom I had brought to England with me and placed in the house of Doctor Major, then head-master of King's-college-school, was attacked by scarlet fever; and this closed prematurely Dickens's residence in Paris. But though he and his wife at once came over, and were followed after some days by the children and their aunt, the isolation of the little invalid could not so soon be broken through. His father at last saw him, nearly a month before the rest, in a lodging in Albany-street, where his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, had devoted herself to the charge of him; and an incident of the visit, which amused us all very much, will not unfitly introduce the subject that waits me in my next chapter. An elderly charwoman employed about the place had shown so much sympathy in the family trouble, that Mrs. Hogarth specially told her of the approaching visit, and who it was that was coming to the sick-room. "Lawk ma'am!" she said. "Is the young gentleman upstairs the son of the man that put together _Dombey_?" Reassured upon this point, she explained her question by declaring that she never thought there was a man that _could_ have put together _Dombey_. Being pressed farther as to what her notion was of this mystery of a _Dombey_ (for it was known she could not read), it turned out that she lodged at a snuff-shop kept by a person named Douglas, where there were several other lodgers; and that on the first Monday of every month there was a Tea, and the landlord read the month's number of _Dombey_, those only of the lodgers who subscribed to the tea partaking of that luxury, but all having the benefit of the reading; and the impression produced on the old charwoman revealed itself in the remark with which she closed her account of it. "Lawk ma'am! I thought that three or four men must have put together _Dombey_!" Dickens thought there was something of a compliment in this, and was not ungrateful. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [130] It had also the mention of another floating fancy for the weekly periodical which was still and always present to his mind, and which settled down at last, as the reader knows, into _Household Words_. "As to the Review, I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of _Spectator_ (Addison's)--very cheap, and pretty frequent. We must have it thoroughly discussed. It would be a great thing to found something. If the mark between a sort of _Spectator_, and a different sort of _Athenæum_, could be well hit, my belief is that a deal might be done. But it should be something with a marked and distinctive and obvious difference, in its design, from any other existing periodical." [131] Some smaller items of family news were in the same letter. "Mamey and Katey have come out in Parisian dresses, and look very fine. They are not proud, and send their loves. Skittles is cutting teeth, and gets cross towards evening. Frankey is smaller than ever, and Walter very large. Charley in statu quo. Everything is enormously dear. Fuel, stupendously so. In airing the house, we burnt five pounds' worth of firewood in one week!! We mix it with coal now, as we used to do in Italy, and find the fires much warmer. To warm the house thoroughly, this singular habitation requires fires on the ground floor. We burn three. . . ." [132] "I shall bring the Brave, though I have no use for him. He'd die if I didn't." [133] Dickens's first letter after my return described it to me. "Do you remember my writing a letter to the prefet of police about that coachman? I heard no more about it until this very day" (12th of February), "when, at the moment of your letter arriving, Roche put his head in at the door (I was busy writing in the Baronial drawing-room) and said, 'Here is datter cocher!'--Sir, he had been in prison ever since! and being released this morning, was sent by the police to pay back the franc and a half, and to beg pardon, and to get a certificate that he had done so, or he could not go on the stand again! Isn't this admirable? But the culminating point of the story (it could happen with nobody but me) is that he WAS DRUNK WHEN HE CAME!! Not very, but his eye was fixed, and he swayed in his sabots, and smelt of wine, and told Roche incoherently that he wouldn't have done it (committed the offence, that is) if the people hadn't made him. He seemed to be troubled with a phantasmagorial belief that all Paris had gathered round us that night in the Rue St. Honoré, and urged him on with frantic shouts. . . . Snow, frost, and cold. . . . The Duke of Bordeaux is very well, and dines at the Tuileries to-morrow. . . . _When_ I have done, I will write you a brilliant letter. . . . Loves from all. . . . Your blue and golden bed looks desolate." The allusion to the Duc de Bordeaux was to remind me pleasantly of a slip of his own during our talk with Chateaubriand, when, at a loss to say something interesting to the old royalist, he bethought him to enquire with sympathy when he had last seen the representative of the elder branch of Bourbons, as if he were resident in the city then and there! [134] This was on Sunday, the 21st of February, when a party were assembled of whom I think the French Emperor, his cousin the Prince Napoleon, Doctor Quin, Dickens's eldest son, and myself, are now the only survivors. Lady Blessington had received the day before from her brother Major Power, who held a military appointment in Hobart Town, a small oil-painting of a girl's face by the murderer Wainewright (mentioned on a former page as having been seen by us together in Newgate), who was among the convicts there under sentence of transportation, and who had contrived somehow to put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice kind-hearted girl. Major Power knew nothing of the man's previous history at this time, and had employed him on the painting out of a sort of charity. As soon as the truth went back, Wainewright was excluded from houses before open to him, and shortly after died very miserably. What Reynolds said of portrait painting, to explain its frequent want of refinement, that a man could only put into a face what he had in himself, was forcibly shown in this incident. The villain's story altogether moved Dickens to the same interest as it had excited in another profound student of humanity (Sir Edward Lytton), and, as will be seen, he also introduced him into one of his later writings. [135] ". . . I am horrified to find that the first chapter makes _at least_ two pages less than I had supposed, and I have a terrible apprehension that there will not be copy enough for the number! As it could not possibly come out short, and as there would be no greater possibility of sending to me, in this short month, to supply what may be wanted, I decide--after the first burst of nervousness is gone--_to follow this letter by Diligence to-morrow morning_. The malle poste is full for days and days. I shall hope to be with you some time on Friday." C. D. to J. F. Paris: Wednesday, 17th February, 1847. THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER. THREE VOLUMES IN TWO. VOL. II. BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY, (LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.) 1875. CHAPTER XVI. DOMBEY AND SON. 1846-1848. Drift of the Tale--Why undervalued--Mistakes of Critics--Adherence to First Design--Design as to Paul and Sister--As to Dombey and Daughter--Real Character of Hero--Walter Gay--Omissions proposed--Anxiety as to Face of his Hero--Passage of Original MS. omitted--Artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey--Dickens and his Illustrators--Hints for Artist--Letter to Cruikshank--An Experience of Ben Jonson's--Sale of the First Number--A Reading of the Second Number--Scene at Mrs. Pipchin's--The Mrs. Pipchin of his Childhood--First Thought of his Autobiography--Paul's School-life--Jeffrey's Forecast of the Tale--A Damper to the Spirit--A Fancy for New Zealand--Close of Paul's Life--Jeffrey on Paul's Death--Florence and Little Nell--Jeffrey on the Edith Scenes--Edith's First Destiny--Jack Bunsby--Dombey Household--Blimber Establishment--Supposed Originals. THOUGH his proposed new "book in shilling numbers" had been mentioned to me three months before he quitted England, he knew little himself at that time or when he left excepting the fact, then also named, that it was to do with Pride what its predecessor had done with Selfishness. But this limit he soon overpassed; and the succession of independent groups of character, surprising for the variety of their forms and handling, with which he enlarged and enriched his plan, went far beyond the range of the passion of Mr. Dombey and Mr. Dombey's second wife. Obvious causes have led to grave under-estimates of this novel. Its first five numbers forced up interest and expectation so high that the rest of necessity fell short; but it is not therefore true of the general conception that thus the wine of it had been drawn, and only the lees left. In the treatment of acknowledged masterpieces in literature it not seldom occurs that the genius and the art of the master have not pulled together to the close; but if a work of imagination is to forfeit its higher meed of praise because its pace at starting has not been uniformly kept, hard measure would have to be dealt to books of undeniable greatness. Among other critical severities it was said here, that Paul died at the beginning not for any need of the story, but only to interest its readers somewhat more; and that Mr. Dombey relented at the end for just the same reason. What is now to be told will show how little ground existed for either imputation. The so-called "violent change" in the hero has more lately been revived in the notices of Mr. Taine, who says of it that "_it spoils a fine novel_;" but it will be seen that in the apparent change no unnaturalness of change was involved, and certainly the adoption of it was not a sacrifice to "public morality." While every other portion of the tale had to submit to such varieties in development as the characters themselves entailed, the design affecting Paul and his father had been planned from the opening, and was carried without alteration to the close. And of the perfect honesty with which Dickens himself repelled such charges as those to which I have adverted, when he wrote the preface to his collected edition, remarkable proof appears in the letter to myself which accompanied the manuscript of his proposed first number. No other line of the tale had at this time been placed on paper. When the first chapter only was done, and again when all was finished but eight slips, he had sent me letters formerly quoted. What follows came with the manuscript of the first four chapters on the 25th of July. "I will now go on to give you an outline of my immediate intentions in reference to _Dombey_. I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and bloating his pride to a prodigious extent. As the boy begins to grow up, I shall show him quite impatient for his getting on, and urging his masters to set him great tasks, and the like. But the natural affection of the boy will turn towards the despised sister; and I purpose showing her learning all sorts of things, of her own application and determination, to assist him in his lessons; and helping him always. When the boy is about ten years old (in the fourth number), he will be taken ill, and will die; and when he is ill, and when he is dying, I mean to make him turn always for refuge to the sister still, and keep the stern affection of the father at a distance. So Mr. Dombey--for all his greatness, and for all his devotion to the child--will find himself at arms' length from him even then; and will see that his love and confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr. Dombey has used--and so has the boy himself too, for that matter--as a mere convenience and handle to him. The death of the boy is a death-blow, of course, to all the father's schemes and cherished hopes; and 'Dombey and Son,' as Miss Tox will say at the end of the number, 'is a Daughter after all.'. . . From that time, I purpose changing his feeling of indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred. For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her hand, and never thought of him. . . . At the same time I shall change _her_ feeling towards _him_ for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be loved by him; engendered in her compassion for his loss, and her love for the dead boy whom, in his way, he loved so well too. So I mean to carry the story on, through all the branches and offshoots and meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last, and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself which goes on in all such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly unjust. . . . I rely very much on Susan Nipper grown up, and acting partly as Florence's maid, and partly as a kind of companion to her, for a strong character throughout the book. I also rely on the Toodles, and on Polly, who, like everybody else, will be found by Mr. Dombey to have gone over to his daughter and become attached to her. This is what cooks call 'the stock of the soup.' All kinds of things will be added to it, of course." Admirable is the illustration thus afforded of his way of working, and very interesting the evidence it gives of the genuine feeling for his art with which this book was begun. The close of the letter put an important question affecting gravely a leading person in the tale. . . . "About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first number, I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty, and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every-day, miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life; to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into bad, by degrees. If I kept some little notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you think it may be done, without making people angry? I could bring out Solomon Gills and Captain Cuttle well, through such a history; and I descry, anyway, an opportunity for good scenes between Captain Cuttle and Miss Tox. This question of the boy is very important. . . . Let me hear all you think about it. Hear! I wish I could.". . . For reasons that need not be dwelt upon here, but in which Dickens ultimately acquiesced, Walter was reserved for a happier future; and the idea thrown out took subsequent shape, amid circumstances better suited to its excellent capabilities, in the striking character of Richard Carstone in the tale of _Bleak House_. But another point had risen meanwhile for settlement not admitting of delay. In the first enjoyment of writing after his long rest, to which a former letter has referred, he had over-written his number by nearly a fifth; and upon his proposal to transfer the fourth chapter to his second number, replacing it by another of fewer pages, I had to object that this might damage his interest at starting. Thus he wrote on the 7th of August: ". . . I have received your letter to-day with the greatest delight, and am overjoyed to find that you think so well of the number. I thought well of it myself, and that it was a great plunge into a story; but I did not know how far I might be stimulated by my paternal affection. . . . What should you say, for a notion of the illustrations, to 'Miss Tox introduces the Party?' and 'Mr. Dombey and family?' meaning Polly Toodle, the baby, Mr. Dombey, and little Florence: whom I think it would be well to have. Walter, his uncle, and Captain Cuttle, might stand over. It is a great question with me, now, whether I had not better take this last chapter bodily out, and make it the last chapter of the second number; writing some other new one to close the first number. I think it would be impossible to take out six pages without great pangs. Do you think such a proceeding as I suggest would weaken number one very much? I wish you would tell me, as soon as you can after receiving this, what your opinion is on the point. If you thought it would weaken the first number, beyond the counterbalancing advantage of strengthening the second, I would cut down somehow or other, and let it go. I shall be anxious to hear your opinion. In the meanwhile I will go on with the second, which I have just begun. I have not been quite myself since we returned from Chamounix, owing to the great heat." Two days later: "I have begun a little chapter to end the first number, and certainly think it will be well to keep the ten pages of Wally and Co. entire for number two. But this is still subject to your opinion, which I am very anxious to know. I have not been in writing cue all the week; but really the weather has rendered it next to impossible to work." Four days later: "I shall send you with this (on the chance of your being favourable to that view of the subject) a small chapter to close the first number, in lieu of the Solomon Gills one. I have been hideously idle all the week, and have done nothing but this trifling interloper: but hope to begin again on Monday--ding dong. . . . The inkstand is to be cleaned out to-night, and refilled, preparatory to execution. I trust I may shed a good deal of ink in the next fortnight." Then, the day following, on arrival of my letter, he submitted to a hard necessity. "I received yours to-day. A decided facer to me! I had been counting, alas! with a miser's greed, upon the gained ten pages. . . . No matter. I have no doubt you are right, and strength is everything. The addition of two lines to each page, or something less,--coupled with the enclosed cuts, will bring it all to bear smoothly. In case more cutting is wanted, I must ask you to try your hand. I shall agree to whatever you propose." These cuttings, absolutely necessary as they were, were not without much disadvantage; and in the course of them he had to sacrifice a passage foreshadowing his final intention as to Dombey. It would have shown, thus early, something of the struggle with itself that such pride must always go through; and I think it worth preserving in a note.[136] [Illustration] [Illustration] Several letters now expressed his anxiety and care about the illustrations. A nervous dread of caricature in the face of his merchant-hero, had led him to indicate by a living person the type of city-gentleman he would have had the artist select; and this is all he meant by his reiterated urgent request, "I do wish he could get a glimpse of A, for he is the very Dombey." But as the glimpse of A was not to be had, it was resolved to send for selection by himself glimpses of other letters of the alphabet, actual heads as well as fanciful ones; and the sheetful I sent out, which he returned when the choice was made, I here reproduce in fac-simile. In itself amusing, it has now the important use of showing, once for all, in regard to Dickens's intercourse with his artists, that they certainly had not an easy time with him; that, even beyond what is ordinary between author and illustrator, his requirements were exacting; that he was apt, as he has said himself, to build up temples in his mind not always makeable with hands; that in the results he had rarely anything but disappointment; and that of all notions to connect with him the most preposterous would be that which directly reversed these relations, and depicted him as receiving from any artist the inspiration he was always vainly striving to give. An assertion of this kind was contradicted in my first volume; but it has since been repeated so explicitly, that to prevent any possible misconstruction from a silence I would fain have persisted in, the distasteful subject is again reluctantly introduced. It originated with a literary friend of the excellent artist by whom _Oliver Twist_ was illustrated from month to month, during the earlier part of its monthly issue. This gentleman stated, in a paper written and published in America, that Mr. Cruikshank, by executing the plates before opportunity was afforded him of seeing the letter press, had suggested to the writer the finest effects in his story; and to this, opposing my clear recollection of all the time the tale was in progress, it became my duty to say that within my own personal knowledge the alleged fact was not true. "Dickens," the artist is reported an saying to his admirer, "ferreted out that bundle of drawings, and when he came to the one which represents Fagin in the cell, he silently studied it for half an hour, and told me he was tempted to change the whole plot of his story. . . . I consented to let him write up to my designs; and that was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created." Happily I was able to add the complete refutation of this folly by producing a letter of Dickens written at the time, which proved incontestably that the closing illustrations, including the two specially named in support of the preposterous charge, Sikes and his Dog, and Fagin in his Cell, had not even been seen by Dickens until his finished book was on the eve of appearance. As however the distinguished artist, notwithstanding the refreshment of his memory by this letter, has permitted himself again to endorse the statement of his friend, I can only again print, on the same page which contains the strange language used by him, the words with which Dickens himself repels its imputation on his memory. To some it may be more satisfactory if I print the latter in fac-simile; and so leave for ever a charge in itself so incredible that nothing would have justified farther allusion to it but the knowledge of my friend's old and true regard for Mr. Cruikshank, of which evidence will shortly appear, and my own respect for an original genius well able to subsist of itself without taking what belongs to others. [Illustration: My dear Cruikshank, I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon to look at the latter ["last" crossed out] pages of Oliver Twist before it was delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last one, Rose Maylie and Oliver. Without entering into the question of great haste or [word crossed out] any other cause which may have led to its being what it is. I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us with [word crossed out] respect to the result--may] [Illustration: I ask you whether you will object to designing [word crossed out] this plate afresh and doing so ~at once~ in order that as few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel confident [words crossed out] you know me too well to feel hurt by this enquiry, and with that confidence in you I have lost no time in preparing it.][137] Resuming the _Dombey_ letters I find him on the 30th of August in better heart about his illustrator. "I shall gladly acquiesce in whatever more changes or omissions you propose. Browne seems to be getting on well. . . . He will have a good subject in Paul's christening. Mr. Chick is like D, if you'll mention that when you think of it. The little chapter of Miss Tox and the Major, which you alas! (but quite wisely) rejected from the first number, I have altered for the last of the second. I have not quite finished the middle chapter yet--having, I should say, three good days' work to do at it; but I hope it will be all a worthy successor to number one. I will send it as soon as finished." Then, a little later: "Browne is certainly interesting himself, and taking pains. I think the cover very good: perhaps with a little too much in it, but that is an ungrateful objection." The second week of September brought me the finished MS. of number two; and his letter of the 3rd of October, noticing objections taken to it, gives additional touches to this picture of him while at work. The matter that engages him is one of his masterpieces. There is nothing in all his writings more perfect, for what it shows of his best qualities, than the life and death of Paul Dombey. The comedy is admirable; nothing strained, everything hearty and wholesome in the laughter and fun; all who contribute to the mirth, Doctor Blimber and his pupils, Mr. Toots, the Chicks and the Toodles, Miss Tox and the Major, Paul and Mrs. Pipchin, up to his highest mark; and the serious scenes never falling short of it, from the death of Paul's mother in the first number, to that of Paul himself in the fifth, which, as a writer of genius with hardly exaggeration said, threw a whole nation into mourning. But see how eagerly this fine writer takes every suggestion, how little of self-esteem and self-sufficiency there is, with what a consciousness of the tendency of his humour to exuberance he surrenders what is needful to restrain it, and of what small account to him is any special piece of work in his care and his considerateness for the general design. I think of Ben Jonson's experience of the greatest of all writers. "He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." Who it was that stopped _him_, and the ease of doing it, no one will doubt. Whether he, as well as the writer of later time, might not with more advantage have been left alone, will be the only question. Thus ran the letter of the 3rd of October: "Miss Tox's colony I will smash. Walter's allusion to Carker (would you take it _all_ out?) shall be dele'd. Of course, you understand the man! I turned that speech over in my mind; but I thought it natural that a boy should run on, with such a subject, under the circumstances: having the matter so presented to him. . . . I thought of the possibility of malice on christening points of faith, and put the drag on as I wrote. Where would you make the insertion, and to what effect? _That_ shall be done too. I want you to think the number sufficiently good stoutly to back up the first. It occurs to me--might not your doubt about the christening be a reason for not making the ceremony the subject of an illustration? Just turn this over. Again: if I could do it (I shall have leisure to consider the possibility before I begin), do you think it would be advisable to make number three a kind of half-way house between Paul's infancy, and his being eight or nine years old?--In that case I should probably not kill him until the fifth number. Do you think the people so likely to be pleased with Florence, and Walter, as to relish another number of them at their present age? Otherwise, Walter will be two or three and twenty, straightway. I wish you would think of this. . . . I am sure you are right about the christening. It shall be artfully and easily amended. . . . Eh?" Meanwhile, two days before this letter, his first number had been launched with a sale that transcended his hopes and brought back _Nickleby_ days. The _Dombey_ success "is BRILLIANT!" he wrote to me on the 11th. "I had put before me thirty thousand as the limit of the most extreme success, saying that if we should reach that, I should be more than satisfied and more than happy; you will judge how happy I am! I read the second number here last night to the most prodigious and uproarious delight of the circle. I never saw or heard people laugh so. You will allow me to observe that my reading of the Major has merit." What a valley of the shadow he had just been passing, in his journey through his Christmas book, has before been told; but always, and with only too much eagerness, he sprang up under pressure. "A week of perfect idleness," he wrote to me on the 26th, "has brought me round again--idleness so rusting and devouring, so complete and unbroken, that I am quite glad to write the heading of the first chapter of number three to-day. I shall be slow at first, I fear, in consequence of that change of the plan. But I allow myself nearly three weeks for the number; designing, at present, to start for Paris on the 16th of November. Full particulars in future bills. Just going to bed. I think I can make a good effect, on the after story, of the feeling created by the additional number before Paul's death." . . . Five more days confirmed him in this hope. "I am at work at _Dombey_ with good speed, thank God. All well here. Country stupendously beautiful. Mountains covered with snow. Rich, crisp weather." There was one drawback. The second number had gone out to him, and the illustrations he found to be so "dreadfully bad" that they made him "curl his legs up." They made him also more than usually anxious in regard to a special illustration on which he set much store, for the part he had in hand. The first chapter of it was sent me only four days later (nearly half the entire part, so freely his fancy was now flowing and overflowing), with intimation for the artist: "The best subject for Browne will be at Mrs. Pipchin's; and if he liked to do a quiet odd thing, Paul, Mrs. Pipchin, and the Cat, by the fire, would be very good for the story. I earnestly hope he will think it worth a little extra care. The second subject, in case he shouldn't take a second from that same chapter, I will shortly describe as soon as I have it clearly (to-morrow or next day), and send it to _you_ by post." The result was not satisfactory; but as the artist more than redeemed it in the later course of the tale, and the present disappointment was mainly the incentive to that better success, the mention of the failure here will be excused for what it illustrates of Dickens himself. "I am really _distressed_ by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good Heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong. She is described as an old lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in the corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say what pain and vexation it is to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book. He never could have got that idea of Mrs. Pipchin if he had attended to the text. Indeed I think he does better without the text; for then the notion is made easy to him in short description, and he can't help taking it in." He felt the disappointment more keenly, because the conception of the grim old boarding-house keeper had taken back his thoughts to the miseries of his own child-life, and made her, as her prototype in verity was, a part of the terrible reality.[138] I had forgotten, until I again read this letter of the 4th of November 1846, that he thus early proposed to tell me that story of his boyish sufferings which a question from myself, of some months later date, so fully elicited. He was now hastening on with the close of his third number, to be ready for departure to Paris. ". . . I hope to finish the number by next Tuesday or Wednesday. It is hard writing under these bird-of-passage circumstances, but I have no reason to complain, God knows, having come to no knot yet. . . . I hope you will like Mrs. Pipchin's establishment. It is from the life, and I was there--I don't suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in my small life, at Geneva. _Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die? There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft's._" On the Monday week after that was written he left Lausanne for Paris, and my first letter to him there was to say that he had overwritten his number by three pages. "I have taken out about two pages and a half," he wrote by return from the hotel Brighton, "and the rest I must ask you to take out with the assurance that you will satisfy me in whatever you do. The sale, prodigious indeed! I am very thankful." Next day he wrote as to Walter. "I see it will be best as you advise, to give that idea up; and indeed I don't feel it would be reasonable to carry it out now. I am far from sure it could be wholesomely done, after the interest he has acquired. But when I have disposed of Paul (poor boy!) I will consider the subject farther." The subject was never resumed. He was at the opening of his admirable fourth part, when, on the 6th of December, he wrote from the Rue de Courcelles: "Here am I, writing letters, and delivering opinions, politico-economical and otherwise, as if there were no undone number, and no undone Dick! Well. Cosi va il mondo (God bless me! Italian! I beg your pardon)--and one must keep one's spirits up, if possible, even under _Dombey_ pressure. Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five. His school ought to be pretty good, but I haven't been able to dash at it freely, yet. However, I have avoided unnecessary dialogue so far, to avoid overwriting; and all I _have_ written is point." And so, in "point," it went to the close; the rich humour of its picture of Doctor Blimber and his pupils alternating with the quaint pathos of its picture of little Paul; the first a good-natured exposure of the forcing-system and its fruits, as useful as the sterner revelation in _Nickleby_ of the atrocities of Mr. Squeers, and the last even less attractive for the sweetness and sadness of its foreshadowing of a child's death, than for those strange images of a vague, deep thoughtfulness, of a shrewd unconscious intellect, of mysterious small philosophies and questionings, by which the young old-fashioned little creature has a glamour thrown over him as he is passing away. It was wonderfully original, this treatment of the part that thus preceded the close of Paul's little life; and of which the first conception, as I have shown, was an afterthought. It quite took the death itself out of the region of pathetic commonplaces, and gave to it the proper relation to the sorrow of the little sister that survives it. It is a fairy vision to a piece of actual suffering; a sorrow with heaven's hues upon it, to a sorrow with all the bitterness of earth. The number had been finished, he had made his visit to London, and was again in the Rue de Courcelles, when on Christmas day he sent me its hearty old wishes, and a letter of Jeffrey's on his new story of which the first and second part had reached him. "Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and Heaven at last! . . . Is it not a strange example of the hazard of writing in parts, that a man like Jeffrey should form his notion of Dombey and Miss Tox on three months' knowledge? I have asked him the same question, and advised him to keep his eye on both of them as time rolls on.[139] I do not at heart, however, lay much real stress on his opinion, though one is naturally proud of awakening such sincere interest in the breast of an old man who has so long worn the blue and yellow. . . . He certainly did some service in his old criticisms, especially to Crabbe. And though I don't think so highly of Crabbe as I once did (feeling a dreary want of fancy in his poems), I think he deserved the pains-taking and conscientious tracking with which Jeffrey followed him". . . . Six days later he described himself sitting down to the performance of one of his greatest achievements, his number five, "most abominably dull and stupid. I have only written a slip, but I hope to get to work in strong earnest to-morrow. It occurred to me on special reflection, that the first chapter should be with Paul and Florence, and that it should leave a pleasant impression of the little fellow being happy, before the reader is called upon to see him die. I mean to have a genteel breaking-up at Doctor Blimber's therefore, for the Midsummer vacation; and to show him in a little quiet light (now dawning through the chinks of my mind), which I hope will create an agreeable impression." Then, two days later: ". . . I am working very slowly. You will see in the first two or three lines of the enclosed first subject, with what idea I am ploughing along. It is difficult; but a new way of doing it, it strikes me, and likely to be pretty." And then, after three days more, came something of a damper to his spirits, as he thus toiled along. He saw public allusion made to a review that had appeared in the _Times_ of his Christmas book, and it momentarily touched what he too truly called his morbid susceptibility to exasperation. "I see that the 'good old Times' are again at issue with the inimitable B. Another touch of a blunt razor on B.'s nervous system.--Friday morning. Inimitable very mouldy and dull. Hardly able to work. Dreamed of _Timeses_ all night. Disposed to go to New Zealand and start a magazine." But soon he sprang up, as usual, more erect for the moment's pressure; and after not many days I heard that the number was as good as done. His letter was very brief, and told me that he had worked so hard the day before (Tuesday, the 12th of January), and so incessantly, night as well as morning, that he had breakfasted and lain in bed till midday. "I hope I have been very successful." There was but one small chapter more to write, in which he and his little friend were to part company for ever; and the greater part of the night of the day on which it was written, Thursday the 14th, he was wandering desolate and sad about the streets of Paris. I arrived there the following morning on my visit; and as I alighted from the malle-poste, a little before eight o'clock, found him waiting for me at the gate of the post-office bureau. I left him on the 2nd of February with his writing-table in readiness for number six; but on the 4th, enclosing me subjects for illustration, he told me he was "not under weigh yet. Can't begin." Then, on the 7th, his birthday, he wrote to warn me he should be late. "Could not begin before Thursday last, and find it very difficult indeed to fall into the new vein of the story. I see no hope of finishing before the 16th at the earliest, in which case the steam will have to be put on for this short month. But it can't be helped. Perhaps I shall get a rush of inspiration. . . . I will send the chapters as I write them, and you must not wait, of course, for me to read the end in type. To transfer to Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at. For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number. . . . We are going to dine again at the Embassy to-day--with a very ill will on my part. All well. I hope when I write next I shall report myself in better cue. . . . I have had a tremendous outpouring from Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past, present, or to come."[140] Three more days and I had the MS. of the completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place). "I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty, immediately after Paul's death, being very great. May you like it! My head aches over it now (I write at one o'clock in the morning), and I am strange to it. . . . I think I shall manage Dombey's second wife (introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his present state of mind, very naturally and well. . . . Paul's death has amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. . . . When I have done, I'll write you _such_ a letter! Don't cut me short in your letters just now, because I'm working hard. . . . _I_'ll make up. . . . Snow--snow--snow--a foot thick." The day after this, came the brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th, which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me; but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was written in England. I shall not farther dwell upon it in any detail. It extended over the whole of the year; and the interest and passion of it, when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the _Old Curiosity Shop_. Jeffrey compared Florence to little Nell, but the differences from the outset are very marked, and it is rather in what disunites or separates them that we seem to find the purpose aimed at. If the one, amid much strange and grotesque violence surrounding her, expresses the innocent, unconsciousness of childhood to such rough ways of the world, passing unscathed as Una to her home beyond it, the other is this character in action and resistance, a brave young resolute heart that will _not_ be crushed, and neither sinks nor yields, but from earth's roughest trials works out her own redemption even here. Of Edith from the first Jeffrey judged more rightly; and, when the story was nearly half done, expressed his opinion about her, and about the book itself, in language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of tragedy, and bringing before us the appalling struggles of a proud, scornful, and repentant spirit." Not that she was exactly this. Edith's worst qualities are but the perversion of what should have been her best. A false education in her, and a tyrant passion in her husband, make them other than Nature meant; and both show how life may run its evil course against the higher dispensations. As the catastrophe came in view, a nice point in the management of her character and destiny arose. I quote from a letter of the 19th of November, when he was busy with his fourteenth part. "Of course she hates Carker in the most deadly degree. I have not elaborated that, now, because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day) I have relied on it very much for the effect of her death. But I have no question that what you suggest will be an improvement. The strongest place to put it in, would be the close of the chapter immediately before this last one. I want to make the two first chapters as light as I can, but I will try to do it, solemnly, in that place." Then came the effect of this fourteenth number on Jeffrey; raising the question of whether the end might not come by other means than her death, and bringing with it a more bitter humiliation for her destroyer. While engaged on the fifteenth (21st December) Dickens thus wrote to me: "I am thoroughly delighted that you like what I sent. I enclose designs. Shadow-plate, poor. But I think Mr. Dombey admirable. One of the prettiest things in the book ought to be at the end of the chapter I am writing now. But in Florence's marriage, and in her subsequent return to her father, I see a brilliant opportunity. . . . Note from Jeffrey this morning, who won't believe (positively refuses) that Edith is Carker's mistress. What do you think of a kind of inverted Maid's Tragedy, and a tremendous scene of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never meant that?" So it was done; and when he sent me the chapter in which Edith says adieu to Florence, I had nothing but praise and pleasure to express. "I need not say," he wrote in reply, "I can't, how delighted and overjoyed I am by what you say and feel of it. I propose to show Dombey _twice_ more; and in the end, leave him exactly as you describe." The end came; and, at the last moment when correction was possible, this note arrived. "I suddenly remember that I have forgotten Diogenes. Will you put him in the last little chapter? After the word 'favourite' in reference to Miss Tox, you can add, 'except with Diogenes, who is growing old and wilful.' Or, on the last page of all, after 'and with them two children: boy and girl' (I quote from memory), you might say 'and an old dog is generally in their company,' or to that effect. Just what you think best." That was on Saturday the 25th of March, 1848, and may be my last reference to _Dombey_ until the book, in its place with the rest, finds critical allusion when I close. But as the confidences revealed in this chapter have dealt wholly with the leading currents of interest, there is yet room for a word on incidental persons in the story, of whom I have seen other so-called confidences alleged which it will be only right to state have really no authority. And first let me say what unquestionable evidence these characters give of the unimpaired freshness, richness, variety, and fitness of Dickens's invention at this time. Glorious Captain Cuttle, laying his head to the wind and fighting through everything; his friend Jack Bunsby,[141] with a head too ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger; good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the starched Dombey household so nicely appointed as to seem born for only that; simple thoughtful old Gills and his hearty young lad of a nephew; Mr. Toodle and his children, with the charitable grinder's decline and fall; Miss Tox, obsequious flatterer from nothing but good-nature; spectacled and analytic, but not unkind Miss Blimber; and the good droning dull benevolent Doctor himself, withering even the fruits of his well-spread dinner-table with his _It is remarkable, Mr. Feeder, that the Romans_--"at the mention of which terrible people, their implacable enemies, every young gentleman fastened his gaze upon the Doctor, with an assumption of the deepest interest." So vivid and life-like were all these people, to the very youngest of the young gentlemen, that it became natural eagerly to seek out for them actual prototypes; but I think I can say with some confidence of them all, that, whatever single traits may have been taken from persons known to him (a practice with all writers, and very specially with Dickens), only two had living originals. His own experience of Mrs. Pipchin has been related; I had myself some knowledge of Miss Blimber; and the Little Wooden Midshipman did actually (perhaps does still) occupy his post of observation in Leadenhall-street. The names that have been connected, I doubt not in perfect good faith, with Sol Gills, Perch the messenger, and Captain Cuttle, have certainly not more foundation than the fancy a courteous correspondent favours me with, that the redoubtable Captain must have sat for his portrait to Charles Lamb's blustering, loud-talking, hook-handed Mr. Mingay. As to the amiable and excellent city-merchant whose name has been given to Mr. Dombey, he might with the same amount of justice or probability be supposed to have originated _Coriolanus_ or _Timon of Athens_. FOOTNOTES: [136] "He had already laid his hand upon the bell-rope to convey his usual summons to Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk, belonging to his deceased wife, which had been taken, among other things, from a cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that his eye had lighted on it. He carried the key in his pocket; and he brought it to his table and opened it now--having previously locked the room door--with a well accustomed hand. "From beneath a heap of torn and cancelled scraps of paper, he took one letter that remained entire. Involuntarily holding his breath as he opened this document, and 'bating in the stealthy action something of his arrogant demeanour, he sat down, resting his head upon one hand, and read it through. "He read it slowly and attentively, and with a nice particularity to every syllable. Otherwise than as his great deliberation seemed unnatural, and perhaps the result of an effort equally great, he allowed no sign of emotion to escape him. When he had read it through, he folded and refolded it slowly several times, and tore it carefully into fragments. Checking his hand in the act of throwing these away, he put them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the chances of being reunited and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as usual, for little Paul, he sat solitary all the evening in his cheerless room." From the original MS. of _Dombey and Son_. [137] "I will now explain that 'Oliver Twist,' the ----, the ----, etc." (naming books by another writer), "were produced in an entirely different manner from what would be considered as the usual course; _for I, the Artist, suggested to the Authors of those works the original idea, or subject_, for them to write out--furnishing, at the same time, the principal characters and the scenes. And then, as the tale had to be produced in monthly parts, the _Writer_, or _Author_, and the Artist, had every month to arrange and settle what scenes, or subjects, and characters were to be introduced, and the Author had to _weave_ in such scenes as I wished to represent."--_The Artist and the Author_, by George Cruikshank, p. 15. (Bell & Daldy: 1872.) The italics are Mr. Cruikshank's own. [138] I take, from his paper of notes for the number, the various names, beginning with that of her real prototype, out of which the name selected came to him at last. "Mrs. Roylance . . . House at the seaside. Mrs. Wrychin. Mrs. Tipchin. Mrs. Alchin. Mrs. Somching. Mrs. Pipchin." See Vol. I. p. 55. [139] Some passages may be subjoined from the letter, as it does not appear among those printed by Lord Cockburn. "EDINBURGH, _14th December_, '46. My dear, dear Dickens!--and dearer every day, as you every day give me more pleasure and do me more good! You do not wonder at this style? for you know that I have been _in love with you_, ever since Nelly! and I do not care now who knows it. . . . The Dombeys, my dear D! how can I thank you enough for them! The truth, and the delicacy, and the softness and depth of the pathos in that opening death-scene, could only come from one hand; and the exquisite taste which spares all details, and breaks off just when the effect is at its height, is wholly yours. But it is Florence on whom my hopes chiefly repose; and in her I see the promise of another Nelly! though reserved, I hope, for a happier fate, and destined to let us see what a _grown-up_ female angel is like. I expect great things, too, from Walter, who begins charmingly, and will be still better I fancy than young Nickleby, to whom as yet he bears most resemblance. I have good hopes too of Susan Nipper, who I think has great capabilities, and whom I trust you do not mean to drop. Dombey is rather too hateful, and strikes me as a mitigated Jonas, without his brutal coarseness and ruffian ferocity. I am quite in the dark as to what you mean to make of Paul, but shall watch his development with interest. About Miss Tox, and her Major, and the Chicks, perhaps I do not care enough. But you know I always grudge the exquisite painting you waste on such portraits. I love the Captain, tho', and his hook, as much as you can wish; and look forward to the future appearances of Carker Junior, with expectations which I know will not be disappointed. . . ." [140] "EDINBURGH, _31st January_, 1847. Oh, my dear, dear Dickens! what a No. 5 you have now given us! I have so cried and sobbed over it last night, and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them; and I never can bless and love you enough. Since the divine Nelly was found dead on her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul, in the summer sunshine of that lofty room. And the long vista that leads us so gently and sadly, and yet so gracefully and winningly, to the plain consummation! Every trait so true, and so touching--and yet lightened by the fearless innocence which goes _playfully_ to the brink of the grave, and that pure affection which bears the unstained spirit, on its soft and lambent flash, at once to its source in eternity.". . . In the same letter he told him of his having been reading the _Battle of Life_ again, charmed with its sweet writing and generous sentiments. [141] "_Isn't Bunsby good_?" I heard Lord Denman call out, with unmistakable glee and enjoyment, over Talfourd's table--I think to Sir Edward Ryan; one of the few survivors of that pleasant dinner party of May 1847. CHAPTER XVII. SPLENDID STROLLING. 1847-1852. Birth of Fifth Son--Theatrical Benefit for Leigh Hunt--Troubles at Rehearsals--Leigh Hunt's Account--Receipts and Expenses--Anecdote of Macready--At Broadstairs--Appearance of Mrs. Gamp--Fancy for a Jeu-d'esprit--Mrs. Gamp at the Play--Mrs. Gamp with the Strollers--Confidences with Mrs. Harris--Leigh Hunt and Poole--Ticklish Society--Mrs. Gamp's Cabman--George Cruikshank--Mr. Wilson the Hair-dresser--In the Sweedlepipes Line--Fatigues of a Powder Ball--C. D.'s Moustache and Whiskers--John Leech--Mark Lemon--Douglas Jerrold--Dudley Costello--Frank Stone--Augustus Egg--J. F.--Cruikshank's _Bottle_--Profits of _Dombey_--Design for Edition of Old Novelists--Street-music at Broadstairs--Margate Theatre--Public Meetings--Book Friends--Friendly Reception in Glasgow--Scott-monument--Purchase of Shakespeare's House--Amateur Theatricals--Origin of Guild of Literature and Art--Travelling Theatre and Scenes--Success of Comedy and Farce--Troubles of a Manager--Acting under Difficulties--Scenery overturned--Dinner at Manchester. DEVONSHIRE TERRACE remaining still in possession of Sir James Duke, a house was taken in Chester-place, Regent's-park, where, on the 18th of April, his fifth son, to whom he gave the name of Sydney Smith Haldimand, was born.[142] Exactly a month before, we had attended together the funeral, at Highgate, of his publisher Mr. William Hall, his old regard for whom had survived the recent temporary cloud, and with whom he had the association as well of his first success, as of much kindly intercourse not forgotten at this sad time. Of the summer months that followed, the greater part was passed by him at Brighton or Broadstairs; and the chief employment of his leisure, in the intervals of _Dombey_, was the management of an enterprise originating in the success of our private play, of which the design was to benefit a great man of letters. The purpose and the name had hardly been announced, when, with the statesmanlike attention to literature and its followers for which Lord John Russell has been eccentric among English politicians, a civil-list pension of two hundred a year was granted to Leigh Hunt; but though this modified our plan so far as to strike out of it performances meant to be given in London, so much was still thought necessary as might clear off past liabilities, and enable one of the most genuine of writers better to enjoy the easier future that had at last been opened to him. Reserving therefore anything realized beyond a certain sum for a dramatic author of merit, Mr. John Poole, to whom help had become also important, it was proposed to give, on Leigh Hunt's behalf, two representations of Ben Jonson's comedy, one at Manchester and the other at Liverpool, to be varied by different farces in each place; and with a prologue of Talfourd's which Dickens was to deliver in Manchester, while a similar address by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was to be spoken by me in Liverpool. Among the artists and writers associated in the scheme were Mr. Frank Stone, Mr. Augustus Egg, Mr. John Leech, and Mr. George Cruikshank; Mr. Douglas Jerrold, Mr. Mark Lemon, Mr. Dudley Costello, and Mr. George Henry Lewes; the general management and supreme control being given to Dickens. Leading men in both cities contributed largely to the design, and my friend Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester has lately sent me some letters not more characteristic of the energy of Dickens in regard to it than of the eagerness of every one addressed to give what help they could. Making personal mention of his fellow-sharers in the enterprise he describes the troop, in one of those letters, as "the most easily governable company of actors on earth;" and to this he had doubtless brought them, but not very easily. One or two of his managerial troubles at rehearsals remain on record in letters to myself, and may give amusement still. Comedy and farces are referred to indiscriminately, but the farces were the most recurring plague. "Good Heaven! I find that A. hasn't twelve words, and I am in hourly expectation of rebellion!"--"You were right about the green baize, that it would certainly muffle the voices; and some of our actors, by Jove, haven't too much of that commodity at the best."--"B. shocked me so much the other night by a restless, stupid movement of his hands in his first scene with you, that I took a turn of an hour with him yesterday morning, and I hope quieted his nerves a little."--"I made a desperate effort to get C. to give up his part. Yet in spite of all the trouble he gives me I am sorry for him, he is so evidently hurt by his own sense of not doing well. He clutched the part, however, tenaciously; and three weary times we dragged through it last night."--"That infernal E. forgets everything."--"I plainly see that F. when nervous, which he is sure to be, loses his memory. Moreover his asides are inaudible, even at Miss Kelly's; and as regularly as I stop him to say them again, he exclaims (with a face of agony) that 'he'll speak loud on the night,' as if anybody ever did without doing it always!"--"G. not born for it at all, and too innately conceited, I much fear, to do anything well. I thought him better last night, but I would as soon laugh at a kitchen poker."--"Fancy H. ten days after the casting of that farce, wanting F.'s part therein! Having himself an excellent old man in it already, and a quite admirable part in the other farce." From which it will appear that my friend's office was not a sinecure, and that he was not, as few amateur-managers have ever been, without the experiences of Peter Quince. Fewer still, I suspect, have fought through them with such perfect success, for the company turned out at last would have done credit to any enterprise. They deserved the term applied to them by Maclise, who had invented it first for Macready, on his being driven to "star" in the provinces when his managements in London closed. They were "splendid strollers."[143] On Monday the 26th July we played at Manchester, and on Wednesday the 28th at Liverpool; the comedy being followed on the first night by _A Good Night's Rest_ and _Turning the Tables_, and on the second by _Comfortable Lodgings, or Paris in 1750_; and the receipts being, on the first night £440 12_s._, and on the second, £463 8_s._ 6_d._ But though the married members of the company who took their wives defrayed that part of the cost, and every one who acted paid three pounds ten to the benefit-fund for his hotel charges, the expenses were necessarily so great that the profit was reduced to four hundred guineas, and, handsomely as this realised the design, expectations had been raised to five hundred. There was just that shade of disappointment, therefore, when, shortly after we came back and Dickens had returned to Broadstairs, I was startled by a letter from him. On the 3rd of August he had written: "All well. Children" (who had been going through whooping cough) "immensely improved. Business arising out of the late blaze of triumph, worse than ever." Then came what startled me, the very next day. As if his business were not enough, it had occurred to him that he might add the much longed-for hundred pounds to the benefit-fund by a little jeu d'esprit in form of a history of the trip, to be published with illustrations from the artists; and his notion was to write it in the character of Mrs. Gamp. It was to be, in the phraseology of that notorious woman, a new "Piljians Projiss;" and was to bear upon the title page its description as an Account of a late Expedition into the North, for an Amateur Theatrical Benefit, written by Mrs. Gamp (who was an eye-witness), Inscribed to Mrs. Harris, Edited by Charles Dickens, and published, with illustrations on wood by so and so, in aid of the Benefit-fund. "What do you think of this idea for it? The argument would be, that Mrs. Gamp, being on the eve of an excursion to Margate as a relief from her professional fatigues, comes to the knowledge of the intended excursion of our party; hears that several of the ladies concerned are in an interesting situation; and decides to accompany the party unbeknown, in a second-class carriage--'in case.' There, she finds a gentleman from the Strand in a checked suit, who is going down with the wigs"--the theatrical hair-dresser employed on these occasions, Mr. Wilson, had eccentric points of character that were a fund of infinite mirth to Dickens--"and to his politeness Mrs. Gamp is indebted for much support and countenance during the excursion. She will describe the whole thing in her own manner: sitting, in each place of performance, in the orchestra, next the gentleman who plays the kettle-drums. She gives her critical opinion of Ben Jonson as a literary character, and refers to the different members of the party, in the course of her description of the trip: having always an invincible animosity towards Jerrold, for Caudle reasons. She addresses herself, generally, to Mrs. Harris, to whom the book is dedicated,--but is discursive. Amount of matter, half a sheet of _Dombey_: may be a page or so more, but not less." Alas! it never arrived at even that small size, but perished prematurely, as I feared it would, from failure of the artists to furnish needful nourishment. Of course it could not live alone. Without suitable illustration it must have lost its point and pleasantry. "Mac will make a little garland of the ladies for the title-page. Egg and Stone will themselves originate something fanciful, and I will settle with Cruikshank and Leech. I have no doubt the little thing will be droll and attractive." So it certainly would have been, if the Thanes of art had not fallen from him; but on their desertion it had to be abandoned after the first few pages were written. They were placed at my disposal then; and, though the little jest has lost much of its flavour now, I cannot find it in my heart to omit them here. There are so many friends of Mrs. Gamp who will rejoice at this unexpected visit from her! "I. MRS. GAMP'S ACCOUNT OF HER CONNEXION WITH THIS AFFAIR. "Which Mrs. Harris's own words to me, was these: 'Sairey Gamp,' she says, 'why not go to Margate? Srimps,' says that dear creetur, 'is to your liking, Sairey; why not go to Margate for a week, bring your constitootion up with srimps, and come back to them loving arts as knows and wallies of you, blooming? Sairey,' Mrs. Harris says, 'you are but poorly. Don't denige it, Mrs. Gamp, for books is in your looks. You must have rest. Your mind,' she says, 'is too strong for you; it gets you down and treads upon you, Sairey. It is useless to disguige the fact--the blade is a wearing out the sheets.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'I could not undertake to say, and I will not deceive you ma'am, that I am the woman I could wish to be. The time of worrit as I had with Mrs. Colliber, the baker's lady, which was so bad in her mind with her first, that she would not so much as look at bottled stout, and kept to gruel through the month, has agued me, Mrs. Harris. But ma'am,' I says to her, 'talk not of Margate, for if I do go anywheres, it is elsewheres and not there.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, solemn, 'whence this mystery? If I have ever deceived the hardest-working, soberest, and best of women, which her name is well beknown is S. Gamp Midwife Kingsgate Street High Holborn, mention it. If not,' says Mrs. Harris, with the tears a standing in her eyes, 'reweal your intentions.' 'Yes, Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'I will. Well I knows you Mrs. Harris; well you knows me; well we both knows wot the characters of one another is. Mrs. Harris then,' I says, 'I _have_ heerd as there _is_ a expedition going down to Manjestir and Liverspool, a play-acting. If I goes anywheres for change, it is along with that.' Mrs. Harris clasps her hands, and drops into a chair, as if her time was come--which I know'd it couldn't be, by rights, for six weeks odd. 'And have I lived to hear,' she says, 'of Sairey Gamp, as always kept hersef respectable, in company with play-actors!' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'be not alarmed--not reg'lar play-actors--hammertoors.' 'Thank Evans!' says Mrs. Harris, and bustiges into a flood of tears. "When the sweet creetur had compoged hersef (which a sip of brandy and water warm, and sugared pleasant, with a little nutmeg did it), I proceeds in these words. 'Mrs. Harris, I am told as these hammertoors are litter'ry and artistickle.' 'Sairey,' says that best of wimmin, with a shiver and a slight relasp, 'go on, it might be worse.' 'I likewise hears,' I says to her, 'that they're agoin play-acting, for the benefit of two litter'ry men; one as has had his wrongs a long time ago, and has got his rights at last, and one as has made a many people merry in his time, but is very dull and sick and lonely his own sef, indeed.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, 'you're an Inglish woman, and that's no business of you'rn.' "'No, Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'that's very true; I hope I knows my dooty and my country. But,' I says, 'I am informed as there is Ladies in this party, and that half a dozen of 'em, if not more, is in various stages of a interesting state. Mrs. Harris, you and me well knows what Ingeins often does. If I accompanies this expedition, unbeknown and second cladge, may I not combine my calling with change of air, and prove a service to my feller creeturs?' 'Sairey,' was Mrs. Harris's reply, 'you was born to be a blessing to your sex, and bring 'em through it. Good go with you! But keep your distance till called in, Lord bless you Mrs. Gamp; for people is known by the company they keeps, and litterary and artistickle society might be the ruin of you before you was aware, with your best customers, both sick and monthly, if they took a pride in themselves.' "II. MRS. GAMP IS DESCRIPTIVE. "The number of the cab had a seven in it I think, and a ought I know--and if this should meet his eye (which it was a black 'un, new done, that he saw with; the other was tied up), I give him warning that he'd better take that umbereller and patten to the Hackney-coach Office before he repents it. He was a young man in a weskit with sleeves to it and strings behind, and needn't flatter himsef with a suppogition of escape, as I gave this description of him to the Police the moment I found he had drove off with my property; and if he thinks there an't laws enough he's much mistook--I tell him that: "I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that morning with my bundle on my arm and one patten in my hand, you might have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a large shirt-collar and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr. Sweedlepipes's hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn't have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing, 'Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are _you_ up to!' I didn't know him from a man (except by his clothes); but I says faintly, 'If you're a Christian man, show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me put in a carriage, or I shall drop!' Which he kindly did, in a cheerful kind of a way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see, making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent, that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along with a individgle--the politest as ever I see--in a shepherd's plaid suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a trembling through nervousness worse than a aspian leaf. "'I'm wery appy, ma'am,' he says--the politest vice as ever I heerd!--'to go down with a lady belonging to our party.' "'Our party, sir!' I says. "'Yes, m'am,' he says, 'I'm Mr. Wilson. I'm going down with the wigs.' "Mrs. Harris, wen he said he was agoing down with the wigs, such was my state of confugion and worrit that I thought he must be connected with the Government in some ways or another, but directly moment he explains himsef, for he says: "'There's not a theatre in London worth mentioning that I don't attend punctually. There's five-and-twenty wigs in these boxes, ma'am,' he says, a pinting towards a heap of luggage, 'as was worn at the Queen's Fancy Ball. There's a black wig, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Garrick; there's a red one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kean; there's a brown one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kemble; there's a yellow one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was made for Cooke; there's a grey one, ma'am,' he says, 'as I measured Mr. Young for, mysef; and there's a white one, ma'am, that Mr. Macready went mad in. There's a flaxen one as was got up express for Jenny Lind the night she came out at the Italian Opera. It was very much applauded was that wig, ma'am, through the evening. It had a great reception. The audience broke out, the moment they see it.' "'Are you in Mr. Sweedlepipes's line, sir?' I says. "'Which is that, ma'am?' he says--the softest and genteelest vice I ever heerd, I do declare, Mrs. Harris! "'Hair-dressing,' I says. "'Yes, ma'am,' he replies, 'I have that honour. Do you see this, ma'am?' he says, holding up his right hand. "'I never see such a trembling,' I says to him. And I never did! "'All along of Her Majesty's Costume Ball, ma'am,' he says. 'The excitement did it. Two hundred and fifty-seven ladies of the first rank and fashion had their heads got up on that occasion by this hand, and my t'other one. I was at it eight-and-forty hours on my feet, ma'am, without rest. It was a Powder ball, ma'am. We have a Powder piece at Liverpool. Have I not the pleasure,' he says, looking at me curious, 'of addressing Mrs. Gamp?' "'Gamp I am, sir,' I replies. 'Both by name and natur.' "'Would you like to see your beeograffer's moustache and wiskers, ma'am?' he says. 'I've got 'em in this box.' "'Drat my beeograffer, sir,' I says, 'he has given me no region to wish to know anythink about him.' "'Oh, Missus Gamp, I ask your parden'--I never see such a polite man, Mrs. Harris! 'P'raps,' he says, 'if you're not of the party, you don't know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!' "'No, Sir,' I says, 'I don't, indeed.' "'Why, ma'am,' he says, a wisperin', 'that was George, ma'am.' "'What George, sir? I don't know no George,' says I. "'The great George, ma'am,' says he. 'The Crookshanks.' "If you'll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turns my head, and see the wery man a making picturs of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! while another of 'em--a tall, slim, melancolly gent, with dark hair and a bage vice--looks over his shoulder, with his head o' one side as if he understood the subject, and cooly says, '_I_'ve draw'd her several times--in Punch,' he says too! The owdacious wretch! "'Which I never touches, Mr. Wilson,' I remarks out loud--I couldn't have helped it, Mrs. Harris, if you had took my life for it!--'which I never touches, Mr. Wilson, on account of the lemon!' "'Hush!' says Mr. Wilson. 'There he is!' "I only see a fat gentleman with curly black hair and a merry face, a standing on the platform rubbing his two hands over one another, as if he was washing of 'em, and shaking his head and shoulders wery much; and I was a wondering wot Mr. Wilson meant, wen he says, 'There's Dougladge, Mrs. Gamp!' he says. 'There's him as wrote the life of Mrs. Caudle!' "Mrs. Harris, wen I see that little willain bodily before me, it give me such a turn that I was all in a tremble. If I hadn't lost my umbereller in the cab, I must have done him a injury with it! Oh the bragian little traitor! right among the ladies, Mrs. Harris; looking his wickedest and deceitfullest of eyes while he was a talking to 'em; laughing at his own jokes as loud as you please; holding his hat in one hand to cool his-sef, and tossing back his iron-grey mop of a head of hair with the other, as if it was so much shavings--there, Mrs. Harris, I see him, getting encouragement from the pretty delooded creeturs, which never know'd that sweet saint, Mrs. C, as I did, and being treated with as much confidence as if he'd never wiolated none of the domestic ties, and never showed up nothing! Oh the aggrawation of that Dougladge! Mrs. Harris, if I hadn't apologiged to Mr. Wilson, and put a little bottle to my lips which was in my pocket for the journey, and which it is very rare indeed I have about me, I could not have abared the sight of him--there, Mrs. Harris! I could not!--I must have tore him, or have give way and fainted. "While the bell was a ringing, and the luggage of the hammertoors in great confugion--all a litter'ry indeed--was handled up, Mr. Wilson demeens his-sef politer than ever. 'That,' he says, 'Mrs. Gamp,' a pinting to a officer-looking gentleman, that a lady with a little basket was a taking care on, 'is another of our party. He's a author too--continivally going up the walley of the Muses, Mrs. Gamp. There,' he says, alluding to a fine looking, portly gentleman, with a face like a amiable full moon, and a short mild gent, with a pleasant smile, 'is two more of our artists, Mrs G, well beknowed at the Royal Academy, as sure as stones is stones, and eggs is eggs. This resolute gent,' he says, 'a coming along here as is aperrently going to take the railways by storm--him with the tight legs, and his weskit very much buttoned, and his mouth very much shut, and his coat a flying open, and his heels a giving it to the platform, is a cricket and beeograffer, and our principal tragegian.' 'But who,' says I, when the bell had left off, and the train had begun to move, 'who, Mr. Wilson, is the wild gent in the prespiration, that's been a tearing up and down all this time with a great box of papers under his arm, a talking to everybody wery indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful?' 'Why?' says Mr. Wilson, with a smile. 'Because, sir,' I says, 'he's being left behind.' 'Good God!' cries Mr. Wilson, turning pale and putting out his head, 'it's _your_ beeograffer--the Manager--and he has got the money, Mrs. Gamp!' Hous'ever, some one chucked him into the train and we went off. At the first shreek of the whistle, Mrs. Harris, I turned white, for I had took notice of some of them dear creeturs as was the cause of my being in company, and I know'd the danger that--but Mr. Wilson, which is a married man, puts his hand on mine, and says, 'Mrs. Gamp, calm yourself; it's only the Ingein.'" Of those of the party with whom these humorous liberties were taken there are only two now living to complain of their friendly caricaturist, and Mr. Cruikshank will perhaps join me in a frank forgiveness not the less heartily for the kind words about himself that reached me from Broadstairs not many days after Mrs. Gamp. "At Canterbury yesterday" (2nd of September) "I bought George Cruikshank's _Bottle_. I think it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most admirable, except that the boy and girl in the very last are too young, and the girl more like a circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she is intended to represent. I question, however, whether anybody else living could have done it so well. There is a woman in the last plate but one, garrulous about the murder, with a child in her arms, that is as good as Hogarth. Also, the man who is stooping down, looking at the body. The philosophy of the thing, as a great lesson, I think all wrong; because to be striking, and original too, the drinking should have begun in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance--the three things in which, in its awful aspect, it _does_ begin. The design would then have been a double-handed sword--but too 'radical' for good old George, I suppose." The same letter made mention of other matters of interest. His accounts for the first half-year of _Dombey_ were so much in excess of what had been expected from the new publishing arrangements, that from this date all embarrassments connected with money were brought to a close. His future profits varied of course with his varying sales, but there was always enough, and savings were now to begin. "The profits of the half-year are brilliant. Deducting the hundred pounds a month paid six times, I have still to receive two thousand two hundred and twenty pounds, which I think is tidy. Don't you? . . . Stone is still here, and I lamed his foot by walking him seventeen miles the day before yesterday; but otherwise he flourisheth. . . . Why don't you bring down a carpet-bag-full of books, and take possession of the drawing-room all the morning? My opinion is that Goldsmith would die more easy by the seaside. Charley and Walley have been taken to school this morning in high spirits, and at London Bridge will be folded in the arms of Blimber. The Government is about to issue a Sanitary commission, and Lord John, I am right well pleased to say, has appointed Henry Austin secretary." Mr. Austin, who afterwards held the same office under the Sanitary act, had married his youngest sister Letitia; and of his two youngest brothers I may add that Alfred, also a civil-engineer, became one of the sanitary inspectors, and that Augustus was now placed in a city employment by Mr. Thomas Chapman, which after a little time he surrendered, and then found his way to America. The next Broadstairs letter (5th of September) resumed the subject of Goldsmith, whose life I was then bringing nearly to completion. "Supposing your _Goldsmith_ made a general sensation, what should you think of doing a cheap edition of his works? I have an idea that we might do some things of that sort with considerable effect. There is really no edition of the great British novelists in a handy nice form, and would it not be a likely move to do it with some attractive feature that could not be given to it by the Teggs and such people? Supposing one wrote an essay on Fielding for instance, and another on Smollett, and another on Sterne, recalling how one read them as a child (no one read them younger than I, I think;) and how one gradually grew up into a different knowledge of them, and so forth--would it not be interesting to many people? I should like to know if you descry anything in this. It is one of the dim notions fluctuating within me.[144]. . . The profits, brave indeed, are four hundred pounds more than the utmost I expected. . . . The same yearnings have been mine, in reference to the Praslin business. It is pretty clear to me, for one thing, that the Duchess was one of the most uncomfortable women in the world, and that it would have been hard work for anybody to have got on with her. It is strange to see a bloody reflection of our friends Eugène Sue and Dumas in the whole melodrama. Don't you think so . . . remembering what we often said of the canker at the root of all that Paris life? I dreamed of you, in a wild manner, all last night. . . . A sea fog here, which prevents one's seeing the low-water mark. A circus on the cliff to the right, and of course I have a box to-night! Deep slowness in the inimitable's brain. A shipwreck on the Goodwin sands last Sunday, which WALLY, with a hawk's eye, SAW GO DOWN: for which assertion, subsequently confirmed and proved, he was horribly maltreated at the time." Devonshire-terrace meanwhile had been left by his tenant; and coming up joyfully himself to take possession, he brought for completion in his old home an important chapter of _Dombey_. On the way he lost his portmanteau, but "Thank God! the MS. of the chapter wasn't in it. Whenever I travel, and have anything of that valuable article, I always carry it in my pocket."[145] He had begun at this time to find difficulties in writing at Broadstairs, of which he told me on his return. "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half-an-hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the window now (time, ten in the morning) and an Italian box of music on the steps--both in full blast." He closed with a mention of improvements in the Margate theatre since his memorable last visit. In the past two years it had been managed by a son of the great comedian, Dowton, with whose name it is pleasant to connect this note. "We went to the manager's benefit on Wednesday" (10th of September): "_As You Like It_ really very well done, and a most excellent house. Mr. Dowton delivered a sensible and modest kind of speech on the occasion, setting forth his conviction that a means of instruction and entertainment possessing such a literature as the stage in England, could not pass away; and, that what inspired great minds, and delighted great men, two thousand years ago, and did the same in Shakespeare's day, must have within itself a principle of life superior to the whim and fashion of the hour. And with that, and with cheers, he retired. He really seems a most respectable man, and he has cleared out this dust-hole of a theatre into something like decency." He was to be in London at the end of the month: but I had from him meanwhile his preface[146] for his first completed book in the popular edition (_Pickwick_ being now issued in that form, with an illustration by Leslie); and sending me shortly after (12th of Sept.) the first few slips of the story of the _Haunted Man_ proposed for his next Christmas book, he told me he must finish it in less than a month if it was to be done at all, _Dombey_ having now become very importunate. This prepared me for his letter of a week's later date. "Have been at work all day, and am seedy in consequence. _Dombey_ takes so much time, and requires to be so carefully done, that I really begin to have serious doubts whether it is wise to go on with the Christmas book. Your kind help is invoked. What do you think? Would there be any distinctly bad effect in holding this idea over for another twelvemonth? saying nothing whatever till November; and then announcing in the _Dombey_ that its occupation of my entire time prevents the continuance of the Christmas series until next year, when it is proposed to be renewed. There might not be anything in that but a possibility of an extra lift for the little book when it did come--eh? On the other hand, I am very loath to lose the money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I ought to fill. In short I am (forgive the expression) BLOWED if I know what to do. I am a literary Kitely--and you ought to sympathize and help. If I had no _Dombey_, I could write and finish the story with the bloom on--but there's the rub. . . . Which unfamiliar quotation reminds me of a Shakspearian (put an e before the s; I like it much better) speculation of mine. What do you say to 'take arms against a sea of troubles' having been originally written 'make arms,' which is the action of swimming. It would get rid of a horrible grievance in the figure, and make it plain and apt. I think of setting up a claim to live in The House at Stratford, rent-free, on the strength of this suggestion. You are not to suppose that I am anything but disconcerted to-day, in the agitation of my soul concerning Christmas; but I have been brooding, like Dombey himself, over _Dombey_ these two days, until I really can't afford to be depressed." To his Shakespearian suggestion I replied that it would hardly give him the claim he thought of setting up, for that swimming through your troubles would not be "opposing" them. And upon the other point I had no doubt of the wisdom of delay. The result was that the Christmas story was laid aside until the following year. The year's closing incidents were his chairmanship at a meeting of the Leeds Mechanics' Society on the 1st of December, and his opening of the Glasgow Athenæum on the 28th; where, to immense assemblages in both,[147] he contrasted the obstinacy and cruelty of the Power of ignorance with the docility and gentleness of the Power of knowledge; pointed the use of popular institutes in supplementing what is learnt first in life, by the later education for its employments and equipment for its domesticities and virtues, which the grown person needs from day to day as much as the child its reading and writing; and he closed at Glasgow with allusion to a bazaar set on foot by the ladies of the city, under patronage of the Queen, for adding books to its Athenæum library. "We never tire of the friendships we form with books," he said, "and here they will possess the added charm of association with their donors. Some neighbouring Glasgow widow will be mistaken for that remoter one whom Sir Roger de Coverley could not forget; Sophia's muff will be seen and loved, by another than Tom Jones, going down the High-street some winter day; and the grateful students of a library thus filled will be apt, as to the fair ones who have helped to people it, to couple them in their thoughts with Principles of the Population and Additions to the History of Europe, by an author of older date than Sheriff Alison." At which no one laughed so loudly as the Sheriff himself, who had cordially received Dickens as his guest, and stood with him on the platform. On the last day but one of the old year he wrote to me from Edinburgh. "We came over this afternoon, leaving Glasgow at one o'clock. Alison lives in style in a handsome country house out of Glasgow, and is a capital fellow, with an agreeable wife, nice little daughter, cheerful niece, all things pleasant in his household. I went over the prison and lunatic asylum with him yesterday;[148] at the Lord Provost's had gorgeous state-lunch with the Town Council; and was entertained at a great dinner-party at night. Unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy the order of the day, and I have never been more heartily received anywhere, or enjoyed myself more completely. The great chemist, Gregory, who spoke at the meeting, returned with us to Edinburgh to-day, and gave me many new lights on the road regarding the extraordinary pains Macaulay seems for years to have taken to make himself disagreeable and disliked here. No one else, on that side, would have had the remotest chance of being unseated at the last election; and, though Gregory voted for him, I thought he seemed quite as well pleased as anybody else that he didn't come in. . . . I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground." On the first day of 1848, still in Edinburgh, he wrote again: "Jeffrey, who is obliged to hold a kind of morning court in his own study during the holidays, came up yesterday in great consternation, to tell me that a person had just been to make and sign a declaration of bankruptcy; and that on looking at the signature he saw it was James Sheridan Knowles. He immediately sent after, and spoke with him; and of what passed I am eager to talk with you." The talk will bring back the main subject of this chapter, from which another kind of strolling has led me away; for its results were other amateur performances, of which the object was to benefit Knowles. This was the year when a committee had been formed for the purchase and preservation of Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and the performances in question took the form of contributions to the endowment of a curatorship to be held by the author of _Virginius_ and the _Hunchback_. The endowment was abandoned upon the town and council of Stratford finally (and very properly) taking charge of the house; but the sum realised was not withdrawn from the object really desired, and one of the finest of dramatists profited yet more largely by it than Leigh Hunt did by the former enterprise. It may be proper to remark also, that, like Leigh Hunt, Knowles received soon after, through Lord John Russell, the same liberal pension; and that smaller claims to which attention had been similarly drawn were not forgotten, Mr. Poole, after much kind help from the Bounty Fund, being in 1850 placed on the Civil List for half the amount by the same minister and friend of letters. Dickens threw himself into the new scheme with all his old energy;[149] and prefatory mention may be made of our difficulty in selection of a suitable play to alternate with our old Ben Jonson. The _Alchemist_ had been such a favourite with some of us, that, before finally laying it aside, we went through two or three rehearsals, in which I recollect thinking Dickens's Sir Epicure Mammon as good as anything he had done; and now the same trouble, with the same result, arising from a vain desire to please everybody, was taken successively with Beaumont and Fletcher's _Beggar's Bush_, and Goldsmith's _Good Natured Man_, with Jerrold's characteristic drama of the _Rent Day_, and Bulwer's masterly comedy of _Money_. Choice was at last made of Shakespeare's _Merry Wives_, in which Lemon played Falstaff, I took again the jealous husband as in Jonson's play, and Dickens was Justice Shallow; to which was added a farce, _Love, Law, and Physick_, in which Dickens took the part he had acted long ago, before his days of authorship; and, besides the professional actresses engaged, we had for our Dame Quickly the lady to whom the world owes incomparably the best _Concordance_ to Shakespeare that has ever been published, Mrs. Cowden Clarke. The success was undoubtedly very great. At Manchester, Liverpool, and Edinburgh there were single representations; but Birmingham and Glasgow had each two nights, and two were given at the Haymarket, on one of which the Queen and Prince were present. The gross receipts from the nine performances, before the necessary large deductions for London and local charges, were two thousand five hundred and fifty-one pounds and eightpence.[150] The first representation was in London on the 15th of April, the last in Glasgow on the 20th of July, and everywhere Dickens was the leading figure. In the enjoyment as in the labour he was first. His animal spirits, unresting and supreme, were the attraction of rehearsal at morning, and of the stage at night. At the quiet early dinner, and the more jovial unrestrained supper, where all engaged were assembled daily, his was the brightest face, the lightest step, the pleasantest word. There seemed to be no rest needed for that wonderful vitality. My allusion to the last of these splendid strollings in aid of what we believed to be the interests of men of letters, shall be as brief as I can make it. Two winters after the present, at the close of November 1850, in the great hall of Lord Lytton's old family mansion in Knebworth-park, there were three private performances by the original actors in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_. All the circumstances and surroundings were very brilliant; some of the gentlemen of the county played both in the comedy and farces; our generous host was profuse of all noble encouragement; and amid the general pleasure and excitement hopes rose high. Recent experience had shown what the public interest in this kind of amusement might place within reach of its providers; and there came to be discussed the possibility of making permanent such help as had been afforded to fellow writers, by means of an endowment that should not be mere charity, but should combine indeed something of both pension-list and college-lectureship, without the drawbacks of either. It was not enough considered that schemes for self-help, to be successful, require from those they are meant to benefit, not only a general assent to their desirability, but zealous and active co-operation. Without discussing now, however, what will have to be stated hereafter, it suffices to say that the enterprise was set on foot, and the "Guild of Literature and Art" originated at Knebworth. A five-act comedy was to be written by Sir Edward Lytton, and, when a certain sum of money had been obtained by public representations of it, the details of the scheme were to be drawn up, and appeal made to those whom it addressed more especially. In a very few months everything was ready, except a farce which Dickens was to have written to follow the comedy, and which unexpected cares of management and preparation were held to absolve him from. There were other reasons. "I have written the first scene," he told me (23rd March, 1851), "and it has droll points in it, more farcical points than you commonly find in farces,[151] really better. Yet I am constantly striving, for my reputation's sake, to get into it a meaning that is impossible in a farce; constantly thinking of it, therefore, against the grain; and constantly impressed with a conviction that I could never act in it myself with that wild abandonment which can alone carry a farce off. Wherefore I have confessed to Bulwer Lytton and asked for absolution." There was substituted a new farce of Lemon's, to which, however, Dickens soon contributed so many jokes and so much Gampish and other fun of his own, that it came to be in effect a joint piece of authorship; and Gabblewig, which the manager took to himself, was one of those personation parts requiring five or six changes of face, voice, and gait in the course of it, from which, as we have seen, he derived all the early theatrical ambition that the elder Mathews had awakened in him. "You have no idea," he continued, "of the immensity of the work as the time advances, for the Duke even throws the whole of the audience on us, or he would get (he says) into all manner of scrapes." The Duke of Devonshire had offered his house in Piccadilly for the first representations, and in his princely way discharged all the expenses attending them. A moveable theatre was built and set up in the great drawing-room, and the library was turned into a green-room. _Not so Bad as We Seem_ was played for the first time at Devonshire-house on the 27th of May, 1851, before the Queen and Prince and as large an audience as places could be found for; _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_ being the name given to the farce. The success abundantly realised the expectations formed; and, after many representations at the Hanover-square Rooms in London, strolling began in the country, and was continued at intervals for considerable portions of this and the following year. From much of it, illness and occupation disabled me, and substitutes had to be found; but to this I owe the opportunity now of closing with a characteristic picture of the course of the play, and of Dickens amid the incidents and accidents to which his theatrical career exposed him. The company carried with them, it should be said, the theatre constructed for Devonshire-house, as well as the admirable scenes which Stanfield, David Roberts, Thomas Grieve, Telbin, Absolon, and Louis Haghe had painted as their generous free-offerings to the comedy; of which the representations were thus rendered irrespective of theatres or their managers, and took place in the large halls or concert-rooms of the various towns and cities. "The enclosure forgotten in my last" (Dickens writes from Sunderland on the 29th of August 1852), "was a little printed announcement which I have had distributed at the doors wherever we go, knocking _Two o' Clock in the Morning_ bang out of the bills. Funny as it used to be, it is become impossible to get anything out of it after the scream of _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_. The comedy is so far improved by the reductions which your absence and other causes have imposed on us, that it acts now only two hours and twenty-five minutes, all waits included, and goes 'like wildfire,' as Mr. Tonson[152] says. We have had prodigious houses, though smaller rooms (as to their actual size) than I had hoped for. The Duke was at Derby, and no end of minor radiances. Into the room at Newcastle (where Lord Carlisle was by the bye) they squeezed six hundred people, at twelve and sixpence, into a space reasonably capable of holding three hundred. Last night, in a hall built like a theatre, with pit, boxes, and gallery, we had about twelve hundred--I dare say more. They began with a round of applause when Coote's white waistcoat appeared in the orchestra, and wound up the farce with three deafening cheers. I never saw such good fellows. Stanny is their fellow-townsman; was born here; and they applauded his scene as if it were himself. But what I suffered from a dreadful anxiety that hung over me all the time, I can never describe. When we got here at noon, it appeared that the hall was a perfectly new one, and had only had the slates put upon the roof by torchlight over night. Farther, that the proprietors of some opposition rooms had declared the building to be unsafe, and that there was a panic in the town about it; people having had their money back, and being undecided whether to come or not, and all kinds of such horrors. I didn't know what to do. The horrible responsibility of risking an accident of that awful nature seemed to rest wholly upon me; for I had only to say we wouldn't act, and there would be no chance of danger. I was afraid to take Sloman into council lest the panic should infect our men. I asked W. what he thought, and he consolingly observed that his digestion was so bad that death had no terrors for him! I went and looked at the place; at the rafters, walls, pillars, and so forth; and fretted myself into a belief that they really were slight! To crown all, there was an arched iron roof without any brackets or pillars, on a new principle! The only comfort I had was in stumbling at length on the builder, and finding him a plain practical north-countryman with a foot rule in his pocket. I took him aside, and asked him should we, or could we, prop up any weak part of the place: especially the dressing-rooms, which were under our stage, the weight of which must be heavy on a new floor, and dripping wet walls. He told me there wasn't a stronger building in the world; and that, to allay the apprehension, they had opened it, on Thursday night, to thousands of the working people, and induced them to sing, and beat with their feet, and make every possible trial of the vibration. Accordingly there was nothing for it but to go on. I was in such dread, however, lest a false alarm should spring up among the audience and occasion a rush, that I kept Catherine and Georgina out of the front. When the curtain went up and I saw the great sea of faces rolling up to the roof, I looked here and looked there, and thought I saw the gallery out of the perpendicular, and fancied the lights in the ceiling were not straight. Rounds of applause were perfect agony to me, I was so afraid of their effect upon the building. I was ready all night to rush on in case of an alarm--a false alarm was my main dread--and implore the people for God's sake to sit still. I had our great farce-bell rung to startle Sir Geoffrey instead of throwing down a piece of wood, which might have raised a sudden-apprehension. I had a palpitation of the heart, if any of our people stumbled up or down a stair. I am sure I never acted better, but the anxiety of my mind was so intense, and the relief at last so great, that I am half-dead to-day, and have not yet been able to eat or drink anything or to stir out of my room. I shall never forget it. As to the short time we had for getting the theatre up; as to the upsetting, by a runaway pair of horses, of one of the vans at the Newcastle railway station, _with all the scenery in it, every atom of which was turned over_; as to the fatigue of our carpenters, who have now been up four nights, and who were lying dead asleep in the entrances last night; I say nothing, after the other gigantic nightmare, except that Sloman's splendid knowledge of his business, and the good temper and cheerfulness of all the workmen, are capital. I mean to give them a supper at Liverpool, and address them in a neat and appropriate speech. We dine at two to-day (it is now one) and go to Sheffield at four, arriving there at about ten. I had been as fresh as a daisy; walked from Nottingham to Derby, and from Newcastle here; but seem to have had my nerves crumpled up last night, and have an excruciating headache. That's all at present. I shall never be able to bear the smell of new deal and fresh mortar again as long as I live." Manchester and Liverpool closed the trip with enormous success at both places; and Sir Edward Lytton was present at a public dinner which was given in the former city, Dickens's brief word about it being written as he was setting foot in the train that was to bring him to London. "Bulwer spoke brilliantly at the Manchester dinner, and his earnestness and determination about the Guild was most impressive. It carried everything before it. They are now getting up annual subscriptions, and will give us a revenue to begin with. I swear I believe that people to be the greatest in the world. At Liverpool I had a Round Robin on the stage after the play was over, a place being left for your signature, and as I am going to have it framed, I'll tell Green to send it to Lincoln's-inn-fields. You have no idea how good Tenniel, Topham, and Collins have been in what they had to do." These names, distinguished in art and letters, represent additions to the company who had joined the enterprise; and the last of them, Mr. Wilkie Collins, became, for all the rest of the life of Dickens, one of his dearest and most valued friends. FOOTNOTES: [142] He entered the Royal Navy, and survived his father only a year and eleven months. He was a Lieutenant, at the time of his death from a sharp attack of bronchitis; being then on board the P. and O. steamer "Malta," invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty little picture of him." It was a strange chance that led his father to invent this playful name for one whom the ocean did indeed take to itself at last. [143] I think it right to place on record here Leigh Hunt's own allusion to the incident (_Autobiography_, p. 432), though it will be thought to have too favourable a tone, and I could have wished that other names had also found mention in it. But I have already (p. 211) stated quite unaffectedly my own opinion of the very modest pretensions of the whole affair, and these kind words of Hunt may stand _valeant quantum_. "Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension was one on the part of my admirable friend Dickens and other distinguished men, Forsters and Jerrolds, who, combining kindly purpose with an amateur inclination for the stage, had condescended to show to the public what excellent actors they could have been, had they so pleased,--what excellent actors, indeed, some of them were. . . . They proposed . . . a benefit for myself, . . . and the piece performed on the occasion was Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_. . . . If anything had been needed to show how men of letters include actors, on the common principle of the greater including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. Mr. Dickens's Bobadil had a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has shown . . . and Mr. Forster delivered the verses of Ben Jonson with a musical flow and a sense of their grace and beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at present. At least I have never heard anything like it since Edmund Kean's.". . . To this may be added some lines from Lord Lytton's prologue spoken at Liverpool, of which I have not been able to find a copy, if indeed it was printed at the time; but the verses come so suddenly and completely back to me, as I am writing after twenty-five years, that in a small way they recall a more interesting effort of memory told me once by Macready. On a Christmas night at Drury Lane there came a necessity to put up the _Gamester_, which he had not played since he was a youth in his father's theatre thirty years before. He went to rehearsal shrinking from the long and heavy study he should have to undergo, when, with the utterance of the opening sentence, the entire words of the part came back, including even a letter which Beverly has to read, and which it is the property-man's business to supply. My lines come back as unexpectedly; but with pleasanter music than any in Mr. Moore's dreary tragedy, as a few will show. "Mild amid foes, within a prison free, He comes . . . our grey-hair'd bard of Rimini! Comes with the pomp of memories in his train, Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain! Comes with familiar smile and cordial tone, Our hearths' wise cheerer!--Let us cheer his own! Song links her children with a golden thread, To aid the living bard strides forth the dead. Hark the frank music of the elder age-- Ben Jonson's giant tread sounds ringing up the stage! Hail! the large shapes our fathers loved! again Wellbred's light ease, and Kitely's jealous pain. Cob shall have sense, and Stephen be polite, Brainworm shall preach, and Bobadil shall fight-- Each, here, a merit not his own shall find, And _Every Man_ the _Humour_ to be kind." [144] Another, which for many reasons we may regret went also into the limbo of unrealized designs, is sketched in the subjoined (7th of January, 1848). "Mac and I think of going to Ireland for six weeks in the spring, and seeing whether anything is to be done there, in the way of a book? I fancy it might turn out well." The Mac of course is Maclise. [145] "Here we are" (23rd of August) "in the noble old premises; and very nice they look, all things considered. . . . Trifles happen to me which occur to nobody else. My portmanteau 'fell off' a cab last night somewhere between London-bridge and here. It contained on a moderate calculation £70 worth of clothes. I have no shirt to put on, and am obliged to send out to a barber to come and shave me." [146] "Do you see anything to object to in it? I have never had so much difficulty, I think, in setting about any slight thing; for I really didn't know that I had a word to say, and nothing seems to live 'twixt what I _have_ said and silence. The advantage of it is, that the latter part opens an idea for future prefaces all through the series, and may serve perhaps to make a feature of them." (7th of September, 1847.) [147] From his notes on these matters I may quote. "The Leeds appears to be a very important institution, and I am glad to see that George Stephenson will be there, besides the local lights, inclusive of all the Baineses. They talk at Glasgow of 6,000 people." (26th of November.) "You have got Southey's _Holly Tree_. I have not. Put it in your pocket to-day. It occurs to me (up to the eyes in a mass of Glasgow Athenæum papers) that I could quote it with good effect in the North." (24th of December.) "A most brilliant demonstration last night, and I think I never did better. Newspaper reports bad." (29th of December.) [148] "Tremendous distress at Glasgow, and a truly damnable jail, exhibiting the separate system in a most absurd and hideous form. Governor practical and intelligent; very anxious for the associated silent system; and much comforted by my fault-finding." (30th of December.) [149] It would amuse the reader, but occupy too much space, to add to my former illustrations of his managerial troubles; but from an elaborate paper of rules for rehearsals, which I have found in his handwriting, I quote the opening and the close. "Remembering the very imperfect condition of all our plays at present, the general expectation in reference to them, the kind of audience before which they will be presented, and the near approach of the nights of performance, I hope everybody concerned will abide by the following regulations, and will aid in strictly carrying them out." Elaborate are the regulations set forth, but I take only the three last. "Silence, on the stage and in the theatre, to be faithfully observed; the lobbies &c. being always available for conversation. No book to be referred to on the stage; but those who are imperfect to take their words from the prompter. Everyone to act, as nearly as possible, as on the night of performance; everyone to speak out, so as to be audible through the house. And every mistake of exit, entrance, or situation, to be corrected _three times_ successively." He closes thus. "All who were concerned in the first getting up of _Every Man in his Humour_, and remember how carefully the stage was always kept then, and who have been engaged in the late rehearsals of the _Merry Wives_, and have experienced the difficulty of getting on, or off: of being heard, or of hearing anybody else: will, I am sure, acknowledge the indispensable necessity of these regulations." [150] I give the sums taken at the several theatres. Haymarket, £319 14_s._; Manchester, £266 12_s._ 6_d._; Liverpool, £467 6_s._ 6_d._; Birmingham, £327 10_s._, and £262 18_s._ 6_d._; Edinburgh, £325 1_s._ 6_d._; Glasgow, £471 7_s._ 8_d._, and (at half the prices of the first night) £210 10_s._ [151] "Those Rabbits have more nature in them than you commonly find in Rabbits"--the self-commendatory remark of an aspiring animal-painter showing his piece to the most distinguished master in that line--was here in my friend's mind. [152] Mr. Tonson was a small part in the comedy entrusted with much appropriateness to Mr. Charles Knight, whose _Autobiography_ has this allusion to the first performance, which, as Mr. Pepys says, is "pretty to observe." "The actors and the audience were so close together that as Mr. Jacob Tonson sat in Wills's Coffee-house he could have touched with his clouded cane the Duke of Wellington." (iii. 116.) CHAPTER XVIII. SEASIDE HOLIDAYS. 1848-1851. Louis Philippe dethroned--French Missive from C. D.--At Broadstairs--A Chinese Junk--What it was like--Perplexing Questions--A Type of Finality--A Contrast--Dickens's View of Temperance Agitation--Cruikshank's _Bottle_: and _Drunkard's Children_--Realities of Cruikshank's Pencil--Dickens on Hogarth--Exit of Gin-lane--Wisdom of the Great Painter--Originality of Leech--Superiority of his Method--Excuses for the Rising Generation--What Leech will be remembered for--Pony-chaise Accident--Fortunate Escape--Strenuous Idleness--Hint for Mr. Taine--At Brighton--A Name for his New Book--At Broadstairs--Summoned as Special Juror--A Male Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris--At Bonchurch--Rev. James White--First Impressions of the Undercliff--Talfourd made a Judge--Touching Letter from Jeffrey--The Comedian Regnier--Progress in Writing--A Startling Revelation--Effects of Bonchurch Climate--Mr. Browne's Sketch for Micawber--Accident to Leech--Its Consequences--At Broadstairs--A _Copperfield_ Banquet--Thoughts of a New Book. THE portion of Dickens's life over which his adventures of strolling extended was in other respects not without interest; and this chapter will deal with some of his seaside holidays before I pass to the publication in 1848 of the story of _The Haunted Man_, and to the establishment in 1850 of the Periodical which had been in his thoughts for half a dozen years before, and has had foreshadowings nearly as frequent in my pages. Among the incidents of 1848 before the holiday season came, were the dethronement of Louis Philippe, and birth of the second French republic: on which I ventured to predict that a Gore-house friend of ours, and _his_ friend, would in three days be on the scene of action. The three days passed, and I had this letter. "Mardi, Février 29, 1848. MON CHER. Vous êtes homme de la plus grande pénétration! Ah, mon Dieu, que vous êtes absolument magnifique! Vous prévoyez presque toutes les choses qui vont arriver; et aux choses qui viennent d'arriver vous êtes merveilleusement au-fait. Ah, cher enfant, quelle idée sublime vous vous aviez à la tête quand vous prévîtes si clairement que M. le Comte Alfred d'Orsay se rendrait au pays de sa naissance! Quel magicien! Mais--c'est tout égal, mais--il n'est pas parti. Il reste à Gore-house, où, avant-hier, il y avait un grand dîner à tout le monde. Mais quel homme, quel ange, néanmoins! MON AMI, je trouve que j'aime tant la République, qu'il me faut renoncer ma langue et écrire seulement le langage de la République de France--langage des Dieux et des Anges--langage, en un mot, des Français! Hier au soir je rencontrai à l'Athenæum Monsieur Mack Leese, qui me dit que MM. les Commissionnaires des Beaux Arts lui avaient écrit, par leur secrétaire, un billet de remerciements à propos de son tableau dans la Chambre des Députés, et qu'ils lui avaient prié de faire l'autre tableau en fresque, dont on y a besoin. Ce qu'il a promis. Voici des nouvelles pour les champs de Lincoln's Inn! Vive la gloire de France! Vive la République! Vive le Peuple! Plus de Royauté! Plus des Bourbons! Plus de Guizot! Mort aux traîtres! Faisons couler le sang pour la liberté, la justice, la cause populaire! Jusqu'à cinq heures et demie, adieu, mon brave! Recevez l'assurance de ma considération distinguée, et croyez-moi, CONCITOYEN! votre tout dévoué, CITOYEN CHARLES DICKENS." I proved to be not quite so wrong, nevertheless, as my friend supposed. Somewhat earlier than usual this summer, on the close of the Shakespeare-house performances, he tried Broadstairs once more, having no important writing in hand: but in the brief interval before leaving he saw a thing of celebrity in those days, the Chinese Junk; and I had all the details in so good a description that I could not resist the temptation of using some parts of it at the time. "Drive down to the Blackwall railway," he wrote to me, "and for a matter of eighteen-pence you are at the Chinese Empire in no time. In half a score of minutes, the tiles and chimney-pots, backs of squalid houses, frowsy pieces of waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, ditches, masts of ships, gardens of dockweed, and unwholesome little bowers of scarlet beans, whirl away in a flying dream, and nothing is left but China. How the flowery region ever came into this latitude and longitude is the first thing one asks; and it is not certainly the least of the marvel. As Aladdin's palace was transported hither and thither by the rubbing of a lamp, so the crew of Chinamen aboard the Keying devoutly believed that their good ship would turn up, quite safe, at the desired port, if they only tied red rags enough upon the mast, rudder, and cable. Somehow they did not succeed. Perhaps they ran short of rag; at any rate they hadn't enough on board to keep them above water; and to the bottom they would undoubtedly have gone but for the skill and coolness of a dozen English sailors, who brought them over the ocean in safety. Well, if there be any one thing in the world that this extraordinary craft is not at all like, that thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long, so grotesque; so low in the middle, so high at each end, like a China pen-tray; with no rigging, with nowhere to go to aloft; with mats for sails, great warped cigars for masts, gaudy dragons and sea-monsters disporting themselves from stem to stern, and _on_ the stern a gigantic cock of impossible aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce his equal,--it would look more at home at the top of a public building, or at the top of a mountain, or in an avenue of trees, or down in a mine, than afloat on the water. As for the Chinese lounging on the deck, the most extravagant imagination would never dare to suppose them to be mariners. Imagine a ship's crew, without a profile among them, in gauze pinafores and plaited hair; wearing stiff clogs a quarter of a foot thick in the sole; and lying at night in little scented boxes, like backgammon men or chess-pieces, or mother-of-pearl counters! But by Jove! even this is nothing to your surprise when you go down into the cabin. There you get into a torture of perplexity. As, what became of all those lanterns hanging to the roof when the Junk was out at sea? Whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other, like so many jesters' baubles? Whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch's Show, in the place of honour, ever tumbled out in heavy weather? Whether the incense and the joss-stick still burnt before her, with a faint perfume and a little thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were roaring all around? Whether that preposterous tissue-paper umbrella in the corner was always spread, as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks with in a storm? Whether all the cool and shiny little chairs and tables were continually sliding about and bruising each other, and if not why not? Whether anybody on the voyage ever read those two books printed in characters like bird-cages and fly-traps? Whether the Mandarin passenger, He Sing, who had never been ten miles from home in his life before, lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private china closet of his own (where he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the Goddess of the Sea, whose counterfeit presentment, like a flowery monthly nurse, occupies the sailors' joss-house in the second gallery? Whether it is possible that the said Mandarin, or the artist of the ship, Sam Sing, Esquire, R.A. of Canton, _can_ ever go ashore without a walking-staff of cinnamon, agreeably to the usage of their likenesses in British tea-shops? Above all, whether the hoarse old ocean could ever have been seriously in earnest with this floating toy-shop; or had merely played with it in lightness of spirit--roughly, but meaning no harm--as the bull did with another kind of china-shop on St. Patrick's day in the morning." The reply made on this brought back comment and sequel not less amusing. "Yes, there can be no question that this is Finality in perfection; and it is a great advantage to have the doctrine so beautifully worked out, and shut up in a corner of a dock near a fashionable white-bait house for the edification of man. Thousands of years have passed away since the first junk was built on this model, and the last junk ever launched was no better for that waste and desert of time. The mimic eye painted on their prows to assist them in finding their way, has opened as wide and seen as far as any actual organ of sight in all the interval through the whole immense extent of that strange country. It has been set in the flowery head to as little purpose for thousands of years. With all their patient and ingenious but never advancing art, and with all their rich and diligent agricultural cultivation, not a new twist or curve has been given to a ball of ivory, and not a blade of experience has been grown. There is a genuine finality in that; and when one comes from behind the wooden screen that encloses the curious sight, to look again upon the river and the mighty signs on its banks of life, enterprise, and progress, the question that comes nearest is beyond doubt a home one. Whether _we_ ever by any chance, in storms, trust to red flags; or burn joss-sticks before idols; or grope our way by the help of conventional eyes that have no sight in them; or sacrifice substantial facts for absurd forms? The ignorant crew of the Keying refused to enter on the ships' books, until 'a considerable amount of silvered-paper, tin-foil, and joss-stick' had been laid in by the owners for the purposes of their worship. And I wonder whether _our_ seamen, let alone our bishops and deacons, ever stand out upon points of silvered-paper and tin-foil and joss-sticks. To be sure Christianity is not Chin-Teeism, and that I suppose is why we never lose sight of the end in contemptible and insignificant quarrels about the means. There is enough matter for reflection aboard the Keying at any rate to last one's voyage home to England again." Other letters of the summer from Broadstairs will complete what he wrote from the same place last year on Mr. Cruikshank's efforts in the cause of temperance, and will enable me to say, what I know he wished to be remembered in his story, that there was no subject on which through his whole life he felt more strongly than this. No man advocated temperance, even as far as possible its legislative enforcement, with greater earnestness; but he made important reservations. Not thinking drunkenness to be a vice inborn, or incident to the poor more than to other people, he never would agree that the existence of a gin-shop was the alpha and omega of it. Believing it to be, _the_ "national horror," he also believed that many operative causes had to do with having made it so; and his objection to the temperance agitation was that these were left out of account altogether. He thought the gin-shop not fairly to be rendered the exclusive object of attack, until, in connection with the classes who mostly made it their resort, the temptations that led to it, physical and moral, should have been more bravely dealt with. Among the former he counted foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and workshop-customs, scarcity of light, air, and water, in short the absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter, the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome relaxation, the craving for _some_ stimulus and excitement, not less needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training, generally applied. This was consistently Dickens's "platform" throughout the years he was known to me; and holding it to be within the reach as well as the scope of legislation, which even our political magnates have been discovering lately, he thought intemperance to be but the one result that, out of all those arising from the absence of legislation, was the most wretched. For him, drunkenness had a teeming and reproachful history anterior to the drunken stage; and he thought it the first duty of the moralist bent upon annihilating the gin-shop, to "strike deep and spare not" at those previous remediable evils. Certainly this was not the way of Mr. Cruikshank, any more than it is that of the many excellent people who take part in temperance agitations. His former tale of the _Bottle_, as told by his admirable pencil, was that of a decent working man, father of a boy and a girl, living in comfort and good esteem until near the middle age, when, happening unluckily to have a goose for dinner one day in the bosom of his thriving family, he jocularly sends out for a bottle of gin, persuades his wife, until then a picture of neatness and good housewifery, to take a little drop after the stuffing, and the whole family from that moment drink themselves to destruction. The sequel, of which Dickens now wrote to me, traced the lives of the boy and girl after the wretched deaths of their drunken parents, through gin-shop, beer-shop, and dancing-rooms, up to their trial for robbery, when the boy is convicted, dying aboard the hulks; and the girl, desolate and mad after her acquittal, flings herself from London-bridge into the night-darkened river. "I think," said Dickens, "the power of that closing scene quite extraordinary. It haunts the remembrance like an awful reality. It is full of passion and terror, and I doubt very much whether any hand but his could so have rendered it. There are other fine things too. The death-bed scene on board the hulks; the convict who is composing the face, and the other who is drawing the screen round the bed's head; seem to me masterpieces worthy of the greatest painter. The reality of the place, and the fidelity with which every minute object illustrative of it is presented, are surprising. I think myself no bad judge of this feature, and it is remarkable throughout. In the trial scene at the Old Bailey, the eye may wander round the Court, and observe everything that is a part of the place. The very light and atmosphere are faithfully reproduced. So, in the gin-shop and the beer-shop. An inferior hand would indicate a fragment of the fact, and slur it over; but here every shred is honestly made out. The man behind the bar in the gin-shop, is as real as the convicts at the hulks, or the barristers round the table in the Old Bailey. I found it quite curious, as I closed the book, to recall the number of faces I had seen of individual identity, and to think what a chance they have of living, as the Spanish friar said to Wilkie, when the living have passed away. But it only makes more exasperating to me the obstinate one-sidedness of the thing. When a man shows so forcibly the side of the medal on which the people in their faults and crimes are stamped, he is the more bound to help us to a glance at that other side on which the faults and vices of the governments placed over the people are not less gravely impressed." This led to some remark on Hogarth's method in such matters, and I am glad to be able to preserve this fine criticism of that great Englishman, by a writer who closely resembled him in genius; as another generation will be probably more apt than our own to discover. "Hogarth avoided the Drunkard's Progress, I conceive, precisely because the causes of drunkenness among the poor were so numerous and widely spread, and lurked so sorrowfully deep and far down in all human misery, neglect, and despair, that even _his_ pencil could not bring them fairly and justly into the light. It was never his plan to be content with only showing the effect. In the death of the miser-father, his shoe new-soled with the binding of his bible, before the young Rake begins his career; in the worldly father, listless daughter, impoverished young lord, and crafty lawyer, of the first plate of Marriage-à-la mode; in the detestable advances through the stages of Cruelty; and in the progress downward of Thomas Idle; you see the effects indeed, but also the causes. He was never disposed to spare the kind of drunkenness that was of more 'respectable' engenderment, as one sees in his midnight modern conversation, the election plates, and crowds of stupid aldermen and other guzzlers. But after one immortal journey down Gin-lane, he turned away in pity and sorrow--perhaps in hope of better things, one day, from better laws and schools and poor men's homes--and went back no more. The scene of Gin-lane, you know, is that just cleared away for the extension of Oxford-street, which we were looking at the other day; and I think it a remarkable trait of Hogarth's picture, that while it exhibits drunkenness in the most appalling forms, it also forces on attention a most neglected wretched neighbourhood, and an unwholesome, indecent, abject condition of life that might be put as frontispiece to our sanitary report of a hundred years later date. I have always myself thought the purpose of this fine piece to be not adequately stated even by CHARLES LAMB. 'The very houses seem absolutely reeling' it is true; but beside that wonderful picture of what follows intoxication, we have indication quite as powerful of what leads to it among the neglected classes. There is no evidence that any of the actors in the dreary scene have ever been much better than we see them there. The best are pawning the commonest necessaries, and tools of their trades; and the worst are homeless vagrants who give us no clue to their having been otherwise in bygone days. All are living and dying miserably. Nobody is interfering for prevention or for cure, in the generation going out before us, or the generation coming in. The beadle is the only sober man in the composition except the pawnbroker, and he is mightily indifferent to the orphan-child crying beside its parent's coffin. The little charity-girls are not so well taught or looked after, but that they can take to dram-drinking already. The church indeed is very prominent and handsome; but as, quite passive in the picture, it coldly surveys these things in progress under shadow of its tower, I cannot but bethink me that it was not until this year of grace 1848 that a Bishop of London first came out respecting something wrong in poor men's social accommodations, and I am confirmed in my suspicion that Hogarth had many meanings which have not grown obsolete in a century." Another art-criticism by Dickens should be added. Upon a separate publication by Leech of some drawings on stone called the Rising Generation, from designs done for Mr. Punch's gallery, he wrote at my request a little essay of which a few sentences will find appropriate place with his letter on the other great caricaturist of his time. I use that word, as he did, only for want of a better. Dickens was of opinion that, in this particular line of illustration, while he conceded all his fame to the elder and stronger contemporary, Mr. Leech was the very first Englishman who had made Beauty a part of his art; and he held, that, by striking out this course, and setting the successful example of introducing always into his most whimsical pieces some beautiful faces or agreeable forms, he had done more than any other man of his generation to refine a branch of art to which the facilities of steam-printing and wood-engraving were giving almost unrivalled diffusion and popularity. His opinion of Leech in a word was that he turned caricature into character; and would leave behind him not a little of the history of his time and its follies, sketched with inimitable grace. "If we turn back to a collection of the works of Rowlandson or Gilray, we shall find, in spite of the great humour displayed in many of them, that they are rendered wearisome and unpleasant by a vast amount of personal ugliness. Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent what is satirized as being necessarily ugly, which is but the resource of an angry child or a jealous woman, it serves no purpose but to produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason why the farmer's daughter in the old caricature who is squalling at the harpsichord (to the intense delight, by the bye, of her worthy father, whom it is her duty to please) should be squab and hideous. The satire on the manner of her education, if there be any in the thing at all, would be just as good, if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would have made her so. The average of farmers' daughters in England are not impossible lumps of fat. One is quite as likely to find a pretty girl in a farm-house, as to find an ugly one; and we think, with Mr. Leech, that the business of this Style of art is with the pretty one. She is not only a pleasanter object, but we have more interest in her. We care more about what does become her, and does not become her. Mr. Leech represented the other day certain delicate creatures with bewitching countenances encased in several varieties of that amazing garment, the ladies' paletot. Formerly those fair creatures would have been made as ugly and ungainly as possible, and then the point would have been lost. The spectator, with a laugh at the absurdity of the whole group, would not have cared how such uncouth creatures disguised themselves, or how ridiculous they became. . . . But to represent female beauty as Mr. Leech represents it, an artist must have, a most delicate perception of it; and the gift of being able to realise it to us with two or three slight, sure touches of his pencil. This power Mr. Leech possesses, in an extraordinary degree. . . . For this reason, we enter our protest against those of the Rising Generation who are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in the right than the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock of hair from his pretty cousin, to take back to school. Madness is in her apron, and Virgil dog's-eared and defaced is in her ringlets. Doubts may suggest themselves of the perfect disinterestedness of the other young gentleman contemplating the fair girl at the piano--doubts engendered by his worldly allusion to 'tin'; though even that may have arisen in his modest consciousness of his own inability to support an establishment--but that he should be 'deucedly inclined to go and cut that fellow out,' appears to us one of the most natural emotions of the human breast. The young gentleman with the dishevelled hair and clasped hands who loves the transcendant beauty with the bouquet, and can't be happy without her, is to us a withering and desolate spectacle. Who _could_ be happy without her? . . . The growing youths are not less happily observed and agreeably depicted than the grown women. The languid little creature who 'hasn't danced since he was quite a boy,' is perfect; and the eagerness of the small dancer whom he declines to receive for a partner at the hands of the glorious old lady of the house (the little feet quite ready for the first position, the whole heart projected into the quadrille, and the glance peeping timidly at the desired one out of a flutter of hope and doubt) is quite delightful to look at. The intellectual juvenile who awakens the tremendous wrath of a Norma of private life by considering woman an inferior animal, is lecturing at the present moment, we understand, on the Concrete in connexion with the Will. The legs of the young philosopher who considers Shakespeare an over-rated man, were seen by us dangling over the side of an omnibus last Tuesday. We have no acquaintance with the scowling young gentleman who is clear that 'if his Governor don't like the way he goes on in, why he must have chambers and so much a week;' but if he is not by this time in Van Diemen's land, he will certainly go to it through Newgate. We should exceedingly dislike to have personal property in a strong box, to live in the suburb of Camberwell, and to be in the relation of bachelor-uncle to that youth. . . . In all his designs, whatever Mr. Leech desires to do, he does. His drawing seems to us charming; and the expression indicated, though by the simplest means, is exactly the natural expression, and is recognised as such immediately. Some forms of our existing life will never have a better chronicler. His wit is good-natured, and always the wit of a gentleman. He has a becoming sense of responsibility and self-restraint; he delights in agreeable things; he imparts some pleasant air of his own to things not pleasant in themselves; he is suggestive and full of matter; and he is always improving. Into the tone as well as into the execution of what he does, he has brought a certain elegance which is altogether new, without involving any compromise of what is true. Popular art in England has not had so rich an acquisition." Dickens's closing allusion was to a remark made by Mr. Ford in a review of _Oliver Twist_ formerly referred to. "It is eight or ten years since a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, making mention of MR. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, commented on the absurdity of excluding such a man from the Royal Academy, because his works were not produced in certain materials, and did not occupy a certain space in its annual shows. Will no Associates be found upon its books one of these days, the labours of whose oil and brushes will have sunk into the profoundest obscurity, when many pencil-marks of MR. CRUIKSHANK and of MR. LEECH will be still fresh in half the houses in the land?" Of what otherwise occupied him at Broadstairs in 1848 there is not much to mention until the close of his holiday. He used to say that he never went for more than a couple of days from his own home without something befalling him that never happened to anyone else, and his Broadstairs adventure of the present summer verged closer on tragedy than comedy. Returning there one day in August after bringing up his boys to school, it had been arranged that his wife should meet him at Margate; but he had walked impatiently far beyond the place for meeting when at last he caught sight of her, not in the small chaise but in a large carriage and pair followed by an excited crowd, and with the youth that should have been driving the little pony bruised and bandaged on the box behind the two prancing horses. "You may faintly imagine my amazement at encountering this carriage, and the strange people, and Kate, and the crowd, and the bandaged one, and all the rest of it." And then in a line or two I had the story. "At the top of a steep hill on the road, with a ditch on each side, the pony bolted, upon which what does John do but jump out! He says he was thrown out, but it cannot be. The reins immediately became entangled in the wheels, and away went the pony down the hill madly, with Kate inside rending the Isle of Thanet with her screams. The accident might have been a fearful one, if the pony had not, thank Heaven, on getting to the bottom, pitched over the side; breaking the shaft and cutting her hind legs, but in the most extraordinary manner smashing her own way apart. She tumbled down, a bundle of legs with her head tucked underneath, and left the chaise standing on the bank! A Captain Devaynes and his wife were passing in their carriage at the moment, saw the accident with no power of preventing it, got Kate out, laid her on the grass, and behaved with infinite kindness. All's well that ends well, and I think she's really none the worse for the fright. John is in bed a good deal bruised, but without any broken bone, and likely soon to come right; though for the present plastered all over, and, like Squeers, a brown-paper parcel chock-full of nothing but groans. The women generally have no sympathy for him whatever; and the nurse says, with indignation, how could he go and leave an unprotected female in the shay!" Holiday incidents there were many, but none that need detain us. This was really a summer idleness: for it was the interval between two of his important undertakings, there was no periodical yet to make demands on him, and only the task of finishing his _Haunted Man_ for Christmas lay ahead. But he did even his nothings in a strenuous way, and on occasion could make gallant fight against the elements themselves. He reported himself, to my horror, thrice wet through on a single day, "dressed four times," and finding all sorts of great things, brought out by the rains, among the rocks on the sea-beach. He also sketched now and then morsels of character for me, of which I will preserve one. "F is philosophical, from sunrise to bedtime: chiefly in the French line, about French women going mad, and in that state coming to their husbands, and saying, 'Mon ami, je vous ai trompé. Voici les lettres de mon amant!' Whereupon the husbands take the letters and think them waste paper, and become extra-philosophical at finding that they really _were_ the lover's effusions: though what there is of philosophy in it all, or anything but unwholesomeness, it is not easy to see." (A remark that it might not be out of place to offer to Mr. Taine's notice.) "Likewise about dark shades coming over our wedded Emmeline's face at parties; and about F handing her to her carriage, and saying, 'May I come in, for a lift homeward?' and she bending over him out of window, and saying in a low voice, I DARE NOT! And then of the carriage driving away like lightning, leaving F more philosophical than ever on the pavement." Not till the close of September I heard of work intruding itself, in a letter twitting me for a broken promise in not joining him: "We are reasonably jolly, but rurally so; going to bed o' nights at ten, and bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him, Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and pensiveness are coming. I have NOT '--seen Fancy write With a pencil of light On the blotter so solid, commanding the sea!' but I shouldn't wonder if she were to do it, one of these days. Dim visions of divers things are floating around me; and I must go to work, head foremost, when I get home. I am glad, after all, that I have not been at it here; for I am all the better for my idleness, no doubt. . . . Roche was very ill last night, and looks like one with his face turned to the other world, this morning. When _are_ you coming? Oh what days and nights there have been here, this week past!" My consent to a suggestion in his next letter, that I should meet him on his way back, and join him in a walking-excursion home, got me full absolution for broken promises; and the way we took will remind friends of his later life, when he was lord of Gadshill, of an object of interest which he delighted in taking them to see. "You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from Maidstone to Rochester, and the visit to the Druidical altar on the wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday; and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by Cobham on Thursday. . . ." His first seaside holiday in 1849 was at Brighton, where he passed some weeks in February; and not, I am bound to add, without the usual _un_usual adventure to signalize his visit. He had not been a week in his lodgings, where Leech and his wife joined him, when both his landlord and the daughter of his landlord went raving mad, and the lodgers were driven away to the Bedford hotel. "If you could have heard the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor's rescue; could have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with fear; could have seen three other M.D.'s come to his aid; with an atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and servants, surrounding the whole; you would have said it was quite worthy of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings." The letter ended with a word on what then his thoughts were full of, but for which no name had yet been found. "A sea-fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly delicious. My mind running, like a high sea, on names--not satisfied yet, though." When he next wrote from the seaside, in the beginning of July, he had found the name; had started his book; and was "rushing to Broadstairs" to write the fourth number of _David Copperfield_. In this came the childish experiences which had left so deep an impression upon him, and over which he had some difficulty in throwing the needful disguises. "Fourteen miles to-day in the country," he had written to me on the 21st of June, "revolving number four!" Still he did not quite see his way. Three days later he wrote: "On leaving you last night, I found myself summoned on a special jury in the Queen's Bench to-day. I have taken no notice of the document,[153] and hourly expect to be dragged forth to a dungeon for contempt of court. I think I should rather like it. It might help me with a new notion or two in my difficulties. Meanwhile I shall take a stroll to-night in the green fields from 7 to 10, if you feel inclined to join." His troubles ended when he got to Broadstairs, from which he wrote on the tenth of July to tell me that agreeably to the plan we had discussed he had introduced a great part of his MS. into the number. "I really think I have done it ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction. Vous verrez. I am getting on like a house afire in point of health, and ditto ditto in point of number." In the middle of July the number was nearly done, and he was still doubtful where to pass his longer summer holiday. Leech wished to join him in it, and both desired a change from Broadstairs. At first he thought of Folkestone,[154] but disappointment there led to a sudden change. "I propose" (15th of July) "returning to town to-morrow by the boat from Ramsgate, and going off to Weymouth or the Isle of Wight, or both, early the next morning." A few days after, his choice was made. He had taken a house at Bonchurch, attracted there by the friend who had made it a place of interest for him during the last few years, the Reverend James White, with whose name and its associations my mind connects inseparably many of Dickens's happiest hours. To pay him fitting tribute would not be easy, if here it were called for. In the kindly shrewd Scotch face, a keen sensitiveness to pleasure and pain was the first thing that struck any common observer. Cheerfulness and gloom coursed over it so rapidly that no one could question the tale they told. But the relish of his life had outlived its more than usual share of sorrows; and quaint sly humour, love of jest and merriment, capital knowledge of books, and sagacious quips at men, made his companionship delightful. Like his life, his genius was made up of alternations of mirth and melancholy. He would be immersed, at one time, in those darkest Scottish annals from which he drew his tragedies; and overflowing, at another, into Sir Frizzle Pumpkin's exuberant farce. The tragic histories may probably perish with the actor's perishable art; but three little abstracts of history written at a later time in prose, with a sunny clearness of narration and a glow of picturesque interest to my knowledge unequalled in books of such small pretension, will find, I hope, a lasting place in literature. They are filled with felicities of phrase, with breadth of understanding and judgment, with manful honesty, quiet sagacity, and a constant cheerful piety, valuable for all and priceless for the young. Another word I permit myself to add. With Dickens, White was popular supremely for his eager good fellowship; and few men brought him more of what he always liked to receive. But he brought nothing so good as his wife. "He is excellent, but she is better," is the pithy remark of his first Bonchurch letter; and the true affection and respect that followed is happily still borne her by his daughters. Of course there is something strange to be recorded of the Bonchurch holiday, but it does not come till nearer the ending; and, with more attention to Mrs. Malaprop's advice to begin with a little aversion, might probably not have come at all. He began with an excess of liking. Of the Undercliff he was full of admiration. "From the top of the highest downs," he wrote in his second letter (28th of July) "there are views which are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the Mediterranean; the variety of walks is extraordinary; things are cheap, and everybody is civil. The waterfall acts wonderfully, and the sea bathing is delicious. Best of all, the place is certainly cold rather than hot, in the summer time. The evenings have been even chilly. White very jovial, and emulous of the inimitable in respect of gin-punch. He had made some for our arrival. Ha! ha! not bad for a beginner. . . . I have been, and am, trying to work this morning; but I can't make anything of it, and am going out to think. I am invited by a distinguished friend to dine with you on the first of August, but I have pleaded distance and the being resident in a cave on the sea shore; my food, beans; my drink, the water from the rock. . . . I must pluck up heart of grace to write to Jeffrey, of whom I had but poor accounts from Gordon just before leaving. Talfourd delightful, and amuses me mightily. I am really quite enraptured at his success, and think of his happiness with uncommon pleasure." Our friend was now on the bench; which he adorned with qualities that are justly the pride of that profession, and with accomplishments that have become more rare in its highest places than they were in former times. His elevation only made those virtues better known. Talfourd assumed nothing with the ermine but the privilege of more frequent intercourse with the tastes and friends he loved, and he continued to be the most joyous and least affected of companions. Such small oddities or foibles as he had made him secretly only dearer to Dickens, who had no friend he was more attached to; and the many happy nights made happier by the voice so affluent in generous words, and the face so bright with ardent sensibility, come back to me sorrowfully now. "Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue." The poet's line has a double application and sadness. He wrote again on the first of August. "I have just begun to get into work. We are expecting the Queen to come by very soon, in grand array, and are going to let off ever so many guns. I had a letter from Jeffrey yesterday morning, just as I was going to write to him. He has evidently been very ill, and I begin to have fears for his recovery. It is a very pathetic letter, as to his state of mind; but only in a tranquil contemplation of death, which I think very noble." His next letter, four days later, described himself as continuing still at work; but also taking part in dinners at Blackgang, and picnics of "tremendous success" on Shanklin Down. "Two charity sermons for the school are preached to-day, and I go to the afternoon one. The examination of said school t'other day was very funny. All the boys made Buckstone's bow in the _Rough Diamond_, and some in a very wonderful manner recited pieces of poetry, about a clock, and may we be like the clock, which is always a going and a doing of its duty, and always tells the truth (supposing it to be a slap-up chronometer I presume, for the American clock in the school was lying frightfully at that moment); and after being bothered to death by the multiplication table, they were refreshed with a public tea in Lady Jane Swinburne's garden." (There was a reference in one of his letters, but I have lost it, to a golden-haired lad of the Swinburnes whom his own boys used to play with, since become more widely known.) "The rain came in with the first tea-pot, and has been active ever since. On Friday we had a grand, and what is better, a very good dinner at 'parson' Fielden's, with some choice port. On Tuesday we are going on another picnic; with the materials for a fire, at my express stipulation; and a great iron pot to boil potatoes in. These things, and the eatables, go to the ground in a cart. Last night we had some very good merriment at White's, where pleasant Julian Young and his wife (who are staying about five miles off) showed some droll new games"--and roused the ambition in my friend to give a "mighty conjuring performance for all the children in Bonchurch," for which I sent him the materials and which went off in a tumult of wild delight. To the familiar names in this letter I will add one more, grieving freshly even now to connect it with suffering. "A letter from Poole has reached me since I began this letter, with tidings in it that you will be very sorry to hear. Poor Regnier has lost his only child; the pretty daughter who dined with us that nice day at your house, when we all pleased the poor mother by admiring her so much. She died of a sudden attack of malignant typhus. Poole was at the funeral, and writes that he never saw, or could have imagined, such intensity of grief as Regnier's at the grave. How one loves him for it. But is it not always true, in comedy and in tragedy, that the more real the man the more genuine the actor?" After a few more days I heard of progress with his writing in spite of all festivities. "I have made it a rule that the inimitable is invisible, until two every day. I shall have half the number done, please God, to-morrow. I have not worked quickly here yet, but I don't know what I _may_ do. Divers cogitations have occupied my mind at intervals, respecting the dim design." The design was the weekly periodical so often in his thoughts, of which more will appear in my next chapter. His letter closed with intimations of discomfort in his health; of an obstinate cough; and of a determination he had formed to mount daily to the top of the downs. "It makes a great difference in the climate to get a blow there and come down again." Then I heard of the doctor "stethoscoping" him, of his hope that all was right in that quarter, and of rubbings "à la St. John Long" being ordered for his chest. But the mirth still went on. "There has been a Doctor Lankester at Sandown, a very good merry fellow, who has made one at the picnics, and whom I went over and dined with, along with Danby (I remember your liking for Danby, and don't wonder at it), Leech, and White." A letter towards the close of August resumed yet more of his ordinary tone. "We had games and forfeits last night at White's. Davy Roberts's pretty little daughter is there for a week, with her husband, Bicknell's son. There was a dinner first to say good-bye to Danby, who goes to other clergyman's-duty, and we were very merry. Mrs. White unchanging; White comically various in his moods. Talfourd comes down next Tuesday, and we think of going over to Ryde on Monday, visiting the play, sleeping there (I don't mean at the play), and bringing the Judge back. Browne is coming down when he has done his month's work. Should you like to go to Alum Bay while you are here? It would involve a night out, but I think would be very pleasant; and if you think so too, I will arrange it sub rosâ, so that we may not be, like Bobadil, 'oppressed by numbers.' I mean to take a fly over from Shanklin to meet you at Ryde; so that we can walk back from Shanklin over the landslip, where the scenery is wonderfully beautiful. Stone and Egg are coming next month, and we hope to see Jerrold before we go." Such notices from his letters may be thought hardly worth preserving; but a wonderful vitality in every circumstance, as long as life under any conditions remained to the writer, is the picture they contribute to; nor would it be complete without the addition, that fond as he was, in the intervals of his work, of this abundance and variety of enjoyments, to no man were so essential also those quieter hours of thought, and talk, not obtainable when "oppressed by numbers." My visit was due at the opening of September, but a few days earlier came the full revelation of which only a passing shadow had reached in two or three previous letters. "Before I think of beginning my next number, I perhaps cannot do better than give you an imperfect description of the results of the climate of Bonchurch after a few weeks' residence. The first salubrious effect of which the Patient becomes conscious is an almost continual feeling of sickness, accompanied with great prostration of strength, so that his legs tremble under him, and his arms quiver when he wants to take hold of any object. An extraordinary disposition to sleep (except at night, when his rest, in the event of his having any, is broken by incessant dreams) is always present at the same time; and, if he have anything to do requiring thought and attention, this overpowers him to such a degree that he can only do it in snatches: lying down on beds in the fitful intervals. Extreme depression of mind, and a disposition to shed tears from morning to night, developes itself at the same period. If the Patient happen to have been a good walker, he finds ten miles an insupportable distance; in the achievement of which his legs are so unsteady, that he goes from side to side of the road, like a drunken man. If he happen to have ever possessed any energy of any kind, he finds it quenched in a dull, stupid languor. He has no purpose, power, or object in existence whatever. When he brushes his hair in the morning, he is so weak that he is obliged to sit upon a chair to do it. He is incapable of reading, at all times. And his bilious system is so utterly overthrown, that a ball of boiling fat appears to be always behind the top of the bridge of his nose, simmering between his haggard eyes. If he should have caught a cold, he will find it impossible to get rid of it, as his system is wholly incapable of making any effort. His cough will be deep, monotonous, and constant. 'The faithful watch-dog's honest bark' will be nothing to it. He will abandon all present idea of overcoming it, and will content himself with keeping an eye upon his blood-vessels to preserve them whole and sound. _Patient's name, Inimitable B._ . . . It's a mortal mistake!--That's the plain fact. Of all the places I ever have been in, I have never been in one so difficult to exist in, pleasantly. Naples is hot and dirty, New York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy--but Bonchurch, smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here, in a year. It's not hot, it's not close, I don't know what it is, but the prostration of it is _awful_. Nobody here has the least idea what I think of it; but I find, from all sorts of hints from Kate, Georgina, and the Leeches, that they are all affected more or less in the same way, and find it very difficult to make head against. I make no sign, and pretend not to know what is going on. But they are right. I believe the Leeches will go soon, and small blame to 'em!--For me, when I leave here at the end of this September, I must go down to some cold place; as Ramsgate for example, for a week or two; or I seriously believe I shall feel the effects of it for a long time. . . . What do you think of _that_? . . . The longer I live, the more I doubt the doctors. I am perfectly convinced, that, for people suffering under a wasting disease, this Undercliff is madness altogether. The doctors, with the old miserable folly of looking at one bit of a subject, take the patient's lungs and the Undercliff's air, and settle solemnly that they are fit for each other. But the whole influence of the place, never taken into consideration, is to reduce and overpower vitality. I am quite confident that I should go down under it, as if it were so much lead, slowly crushing me. An American resident in Paris many years, who brought me a letter from Olliffe, said, the day before yesterday, that he had always had a passion for the sea never to be gratified enough, but that after living here a month, he could not bear to look at it; he couldn't endure the sound of it; he didn't know how it was, but it seemed associated with the decay of his whole powers." These were grave imputations against one of the prettiest places in England; but of the generally depressing influence of that Undercliff on particular temperaments, I had already enough experience to abate something of the surprise with which I read the letter. What it too bluntly puts aside are the sufferings other than his own, projected and sheltered by what only aggravated his; but my visit gave me proof that he had really very little overstated the effect upon himself. Making allowance, which sometimes he failed to do, for special peculiarities, and for the excitability never absent when he had in hand an undertaking such as _Copperfield_, I observed a nervous tendency to misgivings and apprehensions to the last degree unusual with him, which seemed to make the commonest things difficult; and though he stayed out his time, and brought away nothing that his happier associations with the place and its residents did not long survive, he never returned to Bonchurch. In the month that remained he completed his fifth number, and with the proof there came the reply to some questions of which I hardly remember more than that they referred to doubts of mine; one being as to the propriety of the kind of delusion he had first given to poor Mr. Dick,[155] which I thought a little too farcical for that really touching delineation of character. "Your suggestion is perfectly wise and sound," he wrote back (22nd of August). "I have acted on it. I have also, instead of the bull and china-shop delusion, given Dick the idea, that, when the head of king Charles the First was cut off, some of the trouble was taken out of it, and put into his (Dick's)". When he next wrote, there was news very welcome to me for the pleasure to himself it involved. "Browne has sketched an uncommonly characteristic and capital Mr. Micawber for the next number. I hope the present number is a good one. I hear nothing but pleasant accounts of the general satisfaction." The same letter told me of an intention to go to Broadstairs, put aside by doubtful reports of its sanitary condition; but it will be seen presently that there was another graver interruption. With his work well off his hands, however, he had been getting on better where he was; and they had all been very merry. "Yes," he said, writing after a couple of days (23rd of September), "we have been sufficiently rollicking since I finished the number; and have had great games at rounders every afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on; but I begin to long for a little peace and solitude. And now for my less pleasing piece of news. The sea has been running very high, and Leech, while bathing, was knocked over by a bad blow from a great wave on the forehead. He is in bed, and had twenty of his namesakes on his temples this morning. When I heard of him just now, he was asleep--which he had not been all night." He closed his letter hopefully, but next day (24th September) I had less favourable report. "Leech has been very ill with congestion of the brain ever since I wrote, and being still in excessive pain has had ice to his head continuously, and been bled in the arm besides. Beard and I sat up there, all night." On the 26th he wrote, "My plans are all unsettled by Leech's illness; as of course I do not like to leave this place while I can be of any service to him and his good little wife. But all visitors are gone to-day, and Winterbourne once more left to the engaging family of the inimitable B. Ever since I wrote to you Leech has been seriously worse, and again very heavily bled. The night before last he was in such an alarming state of restlessness, which nothing could relieve, that I proposed to Mrs. Leech to try magnetism. Accordingly, in the middle of the night I fell to; and after a very fatiguing bout of it, put him to sleep for an hour and thirty-five minutes. A change came on in the sleep, and he is decidedly better. I talked to the astounded little Mrs. Leech across him, when he was asleep, as if he had been a truss of hay. . . . What do you think of my setting up in the magnetic line with a large brass plate? 'Terms, twenty-five guineas per nap.'" When he wrote again on the 30th, he had completed his sixth number; and his friend was so clearly on the way to recovery that he was next day to leave for Broadstairs with his wife, her sister, and the two little girls. "I will merely add that I entreat to be kindly remembered to Thackeray" (who had a dangerous illness at this time); "that I think I have, without a doubt, _got_ the Periodical notion; and that I am writing under the depressing and discomforting influence of paying off the tribe of bills that pour in upon an unfortunate family-young-man on the eve of a residence like this. So no more at present from the disgusted, though still inimitable, and always affectionate B." He stayed at Broadstairs till he had finished his number seven, and what else chiefly occupied him were thoughts about the Periodical of which account will presently be given. "Such a night and day of rain," ran his first letter, "I should think the oldest inhabitant never saw! and yet, in the ould formiliar Broadstairs, I somehow or other don't mind it much. The change has done Mamey a world of good, and I have begun to sleep again. As for news, you might as well ask me for dolphins. Nobody in Broadstairs--to speak of. Certainly nobody in Ballard's. We are in the part, which is the house next door to the hotel itself, that we once had for three years running, and just as quiet and snug now as it was then. I don't think I shall return before the 20th or so, when the number is done; but I _may_, in some inconstant freak, run up to you before. Preliminary despatches and advices shall be forwarded in any case to the fragrant neighbourhood of Clare-market and the Portugal-street burying-ground." Such was his polite designation of my whereabouts: for which nevertheless he had secret likings. "On the Portsmouth railway, coming here, encountered Kenyon. On the ditto ditto at Reigate, encountered young Dilke, and took him in tow to Canterbury. On the ditto ditto at ditto (meaning Reigate), encountered Fox, M. P. for Oldham, and his daughter. All within an hour. Young Dilke great about the proposed Exposition under the direction of H. R. H. Prince Albert, and evincing, very pleasantly to me, unbounded faith in our old friend his father." There was one more letter, taking a rather gloomy view of public affairs in connection with an inflated pastoral from Doctor Wiseman "given out of the Flaminian Gate," and speaking dolefully of some family matters; which was subscribed, each word forming a separate line, "Yours Despondently, And Disgustedly, Wilkins Micawber." His visit to the little watering-place in the following year was signalised by his completion of the most famous of his novels, and his letters otherwise were occupied by elaborate managerial preparation for the private performances at Knebworth. But again the plague of itinerant music flung him into such fevers of irritation, that he finally resolved against any renewed attempt to carry on important work here; and the summer of 1851, when he was only busy with miscellaneous writing, was the last of his regular residences in the place. He then let his London house for the brief remainder of its term; ran away at the end of May, when some grave family sorrows had befallen him, from the crowds and excitements of the Great Exhibition; and with intervals of absence, chiefly at the Guild representations, stayed in his favourite Fort-house by the sea until October, when he took possession of Tavistock-house. From his letters may be added a few notices of this last holiday at Broadstairs, which he had always afterwards a kindly word for; and to which he said pleasant adieu in the sketch of "Our Watering-place," written shortly before he left. "It is more delightful here" (1st of June) "than I can express. Corn growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea--O it is wonderful! Why can't you come down next Saturday (bringing work) and go back with me on Wednesday for the _Copperfield_ banquet? Concerning which, of course, I say yes to Talfourd's kind proposal. Lemon by all means. And--don't you think? Browne? Whosoever, besides, pleases Talfourd will please me." Great was the success of that banquet. The scene was the Star-and-Garter at Richmond; Thackeray and Alfred Tennyson joined in the celebration; and the generous giver was in his best vein. I have rarely seen Dickens happier than he was amid the sunshine of that day. Jerrold and Thackeray returned to town with us; and a little argument between them about money and its uses, led to an avowal of Dickens about himself to which I may add the confirmation of all our years of intercourse. "No man," he said, "attaches less importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want of it, than I do." Vague mention of a "next book" escaped in a letter at the end of July, on which I counselled longer abstinence. "Good advice," he replied, "but difficult: I wish you'd come to us and preach another kind of abstinence. Fancy the Preventive men finding a lot of brandy in barrels on the rocks here, the day before yesterday! Nobody knows anything about the barrels, of course. They were intended to have been landed with the next tide, and to have been just covered at low water. But the water being unusually low, the tops of the barrels became revealed to Preventive telescopes, and descent was made upon the brandy. They are always at it, hereabouts, I have no doubt. And of course B would not have had any of it. O dear no! certainly not." His reading was considerable and very various at these intervals of labour, and in this particular summer took in all the minor tales as well as the plays of Voltaire, several of the novels (old favourites with him) of Paul de Kock, Ruskin's _Lamps of Architecture_, and a surprising number of books of African and other travel for which he had insatiable relish: but the notices of all this in his letters were few. "By the bye, I observe, reading that wonderful book the _French Revolution_ again, for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows everything, don't know what Mumbo Jumbo is. It is not an Idol. It is a secret preserved among the men of certain African tribes, and never revealed by any of them, for the punishment of their women. Mumbo Jumbo comes in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret _among the men_."--"I finished the _Scarlet Letter_ yesterday. It falls off sadly after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of the story is very much over-done, and not truly done I think. Their suddenness of meeting and agreeing to go away together, after all those years, is very poor. Mr. Chillingworth ditto. The child out of nature altogether. And Mr. Dimmisdale certainly never could have begotten her." In Mr. Hawthorne's earlier books he had taken especial pleasure; his _Mosses from an Old Manse_ having been the first book he placed in my hands on his return from America, with reiterated injunctions to read it. I will add a word or two of what he wrote of the clever story of another popular writer, because it hits well the sort of ability that has become so common, which escapes the highest point of cleverness, but stops short only at the very verge of it. "The story extremely good indeed; but all the strongest things of which it is capable, missed. It shows just how far that kind of power can go. It is more like a note of the idea than anything else. It seems to me as if it were written by somebody who lived next door to the people, rather than inside of 'em." I joined him for the August regatta and stayed a pleasant fortnight. His paper on "Our Watering-place" appeared while I was there, and great was the local excitement. His own restlessness with fancies for a new book had now risen beyond bounds, and for the time he was eager to open it in that prettiest quaintest bit of English landscape, Strood valley, which reminded him always of a Swiss scene. I had not left him many days when these lines followed me. "I very nearly packed up a portmanteau and went away, the day before yesterday, into the mountains of Switzerland, alone! Still the victim of an intolerable restlessness, I shouldn't be at all surprised if I wrote to you one of these mornings from under Mont Blanc. I sit down between whiles to think of a new story, and, as it begins to grow, such a torment of a desire to be anywhere but where I am; and to be going I don't know where, I don't know why; takes hold of me, that it is like being _driven away_. If I had had a passport, I sincerely believe I should have gone to Switzerland the night before last. I should have remembered our engagement--say, at Paris, and have come back for it; but should probably have left by the next express train." At the end of November, when he had settled himself in his new London abode, the book was begun; and as generally happened with the more important incidents of his life, but always accidentally, begun on a Friday. FOOTNOTES: [153] My friend Mr. Shirley Brooks sends me a "characteristic" cutting from an autograph catalogue in which these few lines are given from an early letter in the Doughty-street days. "I always pay my taxes when they won't call any longer, in order to get a bad name in the parish and so escape all honours." It is a touch of character, certainly; but though his motive in later life was the same, his method was not. He attended to the tax-collector, but of any other parochial or political application took no notice whatever. [154] Even in the modest retirement of a note I fear that I shall offend the dignity of history, and of biography, by printing the lines in which this intention was announced to me. They were written "in character;" and the character was that of the "waterman" at the Charing-cross cabstand, first discovered by George Cattermole, whose imitations of him were a delight to Dickens at this time, and adapted themselves in the exuberance of his admiration to every conceivable variety of subject. The painter of the Derby Day will have a fullness of satisfaction in remembering this. "Sloppy" the hero in question, had a friend "Jack" in whom he was supposed to typify his own early and hard experiences before he became a convert to temperance; and Dickens used to point to "Jack" as the justification of himself and Mrs. Gamp for their portentous invention of Mrs. Harris. It is amazing nonsense to repeat; but to hear Cattermole, in the gruff hoarse accents of what seemed to be the remains of a deep bass voice wrapped up in wet straw, repeat the wild proceedings of Jack, was not to be forgotten. "Yes sir, Jack went mad sir, just afore he 'stablished hisself by Sir Robert Peel's-s-s, sir. He was allis a callin' for a pint o' beer sir, and they brings him water sir. Yes sir. And so sir, I sees him dodgin' about one day sir, yes sir, and at last he gits a hopportunity sir and claps a pitch-plaster on the mouth o' th' pump sir, and says he's done for his wust henemy sir. Yes sir. And then they finds him a-sittin' on the top o' the corn-chest sir, yes sir, a crammin' a old pistol with wisps o' hay and horse-beans sir, and swearin' he's a goin' to blow hisself to hattoms, yes sir, but he doesn't, no sir. For I sees him arterwards a lyin' on the straw a manifacktrin' Bengal cheroots out o' corn-chaff sir and swearin' he'd make 'em smoke sir, but they hulloxed him off round by the corner of Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s sir, just afore I come here sir, yes sir. And so you never see'd us together sir, no sir." This was the remarkable dialect in which Dickens wrote from Broadstairs on the 13th of July. "About Saturday sir?--Why sir, I'm a-going to _Folkestone_ a Saturday sir!--not on accounts of the manifacktring of Bengal cheroots as there is there but for the survayin' o' the coast sir. 'Cos you see sir, bein' here sir, and not a finishin' my work sir till to-morrow sir, I couldn't go afore! And if I wos to come home, and not go, and come back agin sir, wy it would be nat'rally a hulloxing of myself sir. Yes sir. Wy sir, I b'lieve that the gent as is a goin' to 'stablish hisself sir, in the autumn, along with me round the corner sir (by Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s bank) is a comin' down to Folkestone Saturday arternoon--Leech by name sir--yes sir--another Jack sir--and if you wos to come down along with him sir by the train as gits to Folkestone twenty minutes arter five, you'd find me a smoking a Bengal cheroot (made of clover-chaff and horse-beans sir) on the platform. You couldn't spend your arternoon better sir. Dover, Sandgate, Herne Bay--they're all to be wisited sir, most probable, till such times as a 'ouse is found sir. Yes sir. Then decide to come sir, and say you will, and do it. I shall be here till arter post time Saturday mornin' sir. Come on then! "SLOPPY "His x mark." [155] It stood originally thus: "'Do you recollect the date,' said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, 'when that bull got into the china warehouse and did so much mischief?' I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but remembering a song about such an occurrence that was once popular at Salem House, and thinking he might want to quote it, replied that I believed it was on St. Patrick's Day. 'Yes, I know,' said Mr. Dick--'in the morning; but what year?' I could give no information on this point." Original MS. of _Copperfield_. CHAPTER XIX. HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS. 1848-1850. Friendly Plea for Mr. Macrone--Completion of Christmas Tale--The "Ghost" Story and the "Bargain"--The Tetterby Family--Moral of the Story--_Copperfield_ Sales--Letter from Russia--The Periodical taking Form--Hopes of Success--Doubts respecting it--New Design chosen--Names proposed--Appearance of First Number--Earliest Contributors--His Opinion of Mr. Sala--Child's Dream of a Star--A Fancy derived from his Childhood. IT has been seen that his fancy for his Christmas book of 1848 first arose to him at Lausanne in the summer of 1846, and that, after writing its opening pages in the autumn of the following year, he laid it aside under the pressure of his _Dombey_. These lines were in the letter that closed his 1848 Broadstairs holiday. "At last I am a mentally matooring of the Christmas book--or, as poor Macrone[156] used to write, 'booke,' 'boke,' 'buke,' &c." It was the first labour to which he applied himself at his return. In London it soon came to maturity; was published duly as _The Haunted Man, or the Ghost's Bargain_; sold largely, beginning with a subscription of twenty thousand; and had a great success on the Adelphi stage, to which it was rather cleverly adapted by Lemon. He had placed on its title page originally four lines from Tennyson's "Departure," "And o'er the hills, and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, across the day, Thro' all the world IT follow'd him;" but they were less applicable to the close than to the opening of the tale, and were dropped before publication. The hero is a great chemist, a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of studious philosophic habits, haunted with recollections of the past "o'er which his melancholy sits on brood," thinking his knowledge of the present a worthier substitute, and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can safely cast away. The recollections are of a great wrong done him in early life, and of all the sorrow consequent upon it; and the ghost he holds nightly conference with, is the darker presentiment of himself embodied in those bitter recollections. This part is finely managed. Out of heaped-up images of gloomy and wintry fancies, the supernatural takes a shape which is not forced or violent; and the dialogue which is no dialogue, but a kind of dreary dreamy echo, is a piece of ghostly imagination better than Mrs. Radcliffe. The boon desired is granted and the bargain struck. He is not only to lose his own recollection of grief and wrong, but to destroy the like memory in all whom he approaches. By this means the effect is shown in humble as well as higher minds, in the worst poverty as in competence or ease, always with the same result. The over-thinking sage loses his own affections and sympathy, sees them crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom he cannot change or influence, an outcast of the streets, a boy whom the mere animal appetites have turned into a small fiend. Never having had his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good; avarice, irreverence, and vindictiveness, are his nature; sorrow has no place in his memory; and from his brutish propensities the philosopher can take nothing away. The juxtaposition of two people whom such opposite means have put in the same moral position is a stroke of excellent art. There are plenty of incredibilities and inconsistencies, just as in the pleasant _Cricket on the Hearth_, which one does not care about, but enjoy rather than otherwise; and, as in that charming little book, there were minor characters as delightful as anything in Dickens. The Tetterby group, in whose humble, homely, kindly, ungainly figures there is everything that could suggest itself to a clear eye, a piercing wit, and a loving heart, became enormous favourites. Tilly Slowboy and her little dot of a baby, charging folks with it as if it were an offensive instrument, or handing it about as if it were something to drink, were not more popular than poor Johnny Tetterby staggering under his Moloch of an infant, the Juggernaut that crushes all his enjoyments. The story itself consists of nothing more than the effects of the Ghost's gift upon the various groups of people introduced, and the way the end is arrived at is very specially in Dickens's manner. What the highest exercise of the intellect had missed is found in the simplest form of the affections. The wife of the custodian of the college where the chemist is professor, in whom are all the unselfish virtues that can beautify and endear the humblest condition, is the instrument of the change. Such sorrow as she had suffered had made her only zealous to relieve others' sufferings: and the discontented wise man learns from her example that the world is, after all, a much happier compromise than it seems to be, and life easier than wisdom is apt to think it; that grief gives joy its relish, purifying what it touches truly; and that "sweet are the uses of adversity" when its clouds are not the shadow of dishonour. All this can be shown but lightly within such space, it is true; and in the machinery a good deal has to be taken for granted. But Dickens was quite justified in turning aside from objections of that kind. "You must suppose," he wrote to me (21st of November), "that the Ghost's saving clause gives him those glimpses without which it would be impossible to carry out the idea. Of course my point is that bad and good are inextricably linked in remembrance, and that you could not choose the enjoyment of recollecting only the good. To have all the best of it you must remember the worst also. My intention in the other point you mention is, that he should not know himself how he communicates the gift, whether by look or touch; and that it should diffuse itself in its own way in each case. I can make this clearer by a very few lines in the second part. It is not only necessary to be so, for the variety of the story, but I think it makes the thing wilder and stranger." Critical niceties are indeed out of place, where wildness and strangeness in the means matter less than that there should be clearness in the drift and intention. Dickens leaves no doubt as to this. He thoroughly makes out his fancy, that no man should so far question the mysterious dispensations of evil in this world as to desire to lose the recollection of such injustice or misery as he may suppose it to have done to himself. There may have been sorrow, but there was the kindness that assuaged it; there may have been wrong, but there was the charity that forgave it; and with both are connected inseparably so many thoughts that soften and exalt whatever else is in the sense of memory, that what is good and pleasurable in life would cease to continue so if these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that you may forgive, but to forgive that you may forget. It is forgiveness of wrong, for forgetfulness of the evil that was in it; such as poor old Lear begged of Cordelia. The design for his much-thought-of new Periodical was still "dim," as we have seen, when the first cogitation of it at Bonchurch occupied him; but the expediency of making it clearer came soon after with a visit from Mr. Evans, who brought his half-year's accounts of sales, and some small disappointment for him in those of _Copperfield_. "The accounts are rather shy, after _Dombey_, and what you said comes true after all. I am not sorry I cannot bring myself to care much for what opinions people may form; and I have a strong belief, that, if any of my books are read years hence, _Dombey_ will be remembered as among the best of them: but passing influences are important for the time, and as _Chuzzlewit_ with its small sale sent me up, _Dombey's_ large sale has tumbled me down. Not very much, however, in real truth. These accounts only include the first three numbers, have of course been burdened with all the heavy expenses of number one, and ought not in reason to be complained of. But it is clear to me that the Periodical must be set agoing in the spring; and I have already been busy, at odd half-hours, in shadowing forth a name and an idea. Evans says they have but one opinion repeated to them of _Copperfield_, and they feel very confident about it. A steady twenty-five thousand, which it is now on the verge of, will do very well. The back numbers are always going off. Read the enclosed." It was a letter from a Russian man of letters, dated from St. Petersburg and signed "Trinarch Ivansvitch Wredenskii," sending him a translation of _Dombey_ into Russian; and informing him that his works, which before had only been translated in the journals, and with certain omissions, had now been translated in their entire form by his correspondent, though even he had found an omission to be necessary in his version of _Pickwick_. He adds, with an exquisite courtesy to our national tongue which is yet not forgetful of the claims of his own nationality, that his difficulties (in the Sam Weller direction and others) had arisen from the "impossibility of portraying faithfully the beauties of the original in the Russian language, which, though the richest in Europe in its expressiveness, is far from being elaborate enough for literature like other civilized languages." He had however, he assured Dickens, been unremitting in his efforts to live with his thoughts; and the exalted opinion he had formed of them was attended by only one wish, that such a writer "could but have expanded under a Russian sky!" Still, his fate was an enviable one. "For the last eleven years your name has enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia, and from the banks of the Neva to the remotest parts of Siberia you are read with avidity. Your _Dombey_ continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia." Much did we delight in the good Wredenskii; and for a long time, on anything going "contrairy" in the public or private direction with him, he would tell me he had ordered his portmanteau to be packed for the more sympathizing and congenial climate of "the remotest parts of Siberia." The week before he left Bonchurch I again had news of the old and often recurring fancy. "The old notion of the Periodical, which has been agitating itself in my mind for so long, I really think is at last gradually growing into form." That was on the 24th of September; and on the 7th of October, from Broadstairs, I had something of the form it had been taking. "I do great injustice to my floating ideas (pretty speedily and comfortably settling down into orderly arrangement) by saying anything about the Periodical now: but my notion is a weekly journal, price either three-halfpence or two-pence, matter in part original and in part selected, and always having, if possible, a little good poetry. . . . Upon the selected matter, I have particular notions. One is, that it should always be _a subject_. For example, a history of Piracy; in connexion with which there is a vast deal of extraordinary, romantic, and almost unknown matter. A history of Knight-errantry, and the wild old notion of the Sangreal. A history of Savages, showing the singular respects in which all savages are like each other; and those in which civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest become like savages. A history of remarkable characters, good and bad, _in_ history; to assist the reader's judgment in his observation of men, and in his estimates of the truth of many characters in fiction. All these things, and fifty others that I have already thought of, would be compilations; through the whole of which the general intellect and purpose of the paper should run, and in which there would be scarcely less interest than in the original matter. The original matter to be essays, reviews, letters, theatrical criticisms, &c, &c, as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the spirit of the people and the time. . . . Now to bind all this together, and to get a character established as it were which any of the writers may maintain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain SHADOW, which may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty. Which may be in the Theatre, the Palace, the House of Commons, the Prisons, the Unions, the Churches, on the Railroad, on the Sea, abroad and at home: a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature. I don't think it would do to call the paper THE SHADOW: but I want something tacked to that title, to express the notion of its being a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow. I want to open the first number with this Shadow's account of himself and his family. I want to have all the correspondence addressed to him. I want him to issue his warnings from time to time, that he is going to fall on such and such a subject; or to expose such and such a piece of humbug; or that he may be expected shortly in such and such a place. I want the compiled part of the paper to express the idea of this Shadow's having been in libraries, and among the books referred to. I want him to loom as a fanciful thing all over London; and to get up a general notion of 'What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder? What will the Shadow say about that? Is the Shadow here?' and so forth. Do you understand? . . . I have an enormous difficulty in expressing what I mean, in this stage of the business; but I think the importance of the idea is, that once stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common-sense and humanity. I want to express in the title, and in the grasp of the idea to express also, that it is the Thing at everybody's elbow, and in everybody's footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in the street, in the house, from infancy to old age, everyone's inseparable companion. . . . Now do you make anything out of this? which I let off as if I were a bladder full of it, and you had punctured me. I have not breathed the idea to any one; but I have a lively hope that it _is_ an idea, and that out of it the whole scheme may be hammered." Excellent the idea doubtless, and so described in his letter that hardly anything more characteristic survives him. But I could not make anything out of it that had a quite feasible look. The ordinary ground of miscellaneous reading, selection, and compilation out of which it was to spring, seemed to me no proper soil for the imaginative produce it was meant to bear. As his fancies grew and gathered round it, they had given it too much of the range and scope of his own exhaustless land of invention and marvel; and the very means proposed for letting in the help of others would only more heavily have weighted himself. Not to trouble the reader now with objections given him in detail, my judgment was clear against his plan; less for any doubt of the effect if its parts could be brought to combine, than for my belief that it was not in that view practicable; and though he did not immediately accept my reasons, he acquiesced in them ultimately. "I do not lay much stress on your grave doubts about Periodical, but more anon." The more anon resolved itself into conversations out of which the shape given to the project was that which it finally took. It was to be a weekly miscellany of general literature; and its stated objects were to be, to contribute to the entertainment and instruction of all classes of readers, and to help in the discussion of the more important social questions of the time. It was to comprise short stories by others as well as himself; matters of passing interest in the liveliest form that could be given to them; subjects suggested by books that might most be attracting attention; and poetry in every number if possible, but in any case something of romantic fancy. This was to be a cardinal point. There was to be no mere utilitarian spirit; with all familiar things, but especially those repellent on the surface, something was to be connected that should be fanciful or kindly; and the hardest workers were to be taught that their lot is not necessarily excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination. This was all finally settled by the close of 1849, when a general announcement of the intended adventure was made. There remained only a title and an assistant editor; and I am happy now to remember that for the latter important duty Mr. Wills was chosen at my suggestion. He discharged his duties with admirable patience and ability for twenty years, and Dickens's later life had no more intimate friend. The title took some time and occupied many letters. One of the first thought-of has now the curious interest of having foreshadowed, by the motto proposed to accompany it, the title of the series of _All the Year Round_ which he was led to substitute for the older series in 1859. "THE ROBIN. With this motto from Goldsmith. '_The redbreast, celebrated for its affection to mankind, continues with us, the year round._'" That however was rejected. Then came: "MANKIND. This I think very good." It followed the other nevertheless. After it came: "And here a strange idea, but with decided advantages. 'CHARLES DICKENS. A weekly journal designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of readers. CONDUCTED BY HIMSELF.'" Still, there was something wanting in that also. Next day arrived: "I really think if there _be_ anything wanting in the other name, that this is very pretty, and just supplies it. THE HOUSEHOLD VOICE. I have thought of many others, as--THE HOUSEHOLD GUEST. THE HOUSEHOLD FACE. THE COMRADE. THE MICROSCOPE. THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE. THE LEVER. THE ROLLING YEARS. THE HOLLY TREE (with two lines from Southey for a motto). EVERYTHING, But I rather think the VOICE is it." It was near indeed; but the following day came, "HOUSEHOLD WORDS. This is a very pretty name:" and the choice was made. The first number appeared on Saturday the 30th of March 1850, and contained among other things the beginning of a story by a very original writer, Mrs. Gaskell, for whose powers he had a high admiration, and with whom he had friendly intercourse during many years. Other opportunities will arise for mention of those with whom this new labour brought him into personal communication, but I may at once say that of all the writers, before unknown, whom his journal helped to make familiar to a wide world of readers, he had the strongest personal interest in Mr. Sala, and placed at once in the highest rank his capabilities of help in such an enterprise.[157] An illustrative trait of what I have named as its cardinal point to him will fitly close my account of its establishment. Its first number, still unpublished, had not seemed to him quite to fulfil his promise, "tenderly to cherish the light of fancy inherent in all breasts;" and, as soon as he received the proof of the second, I heard from him. "Looking over the suggested contents of number two at breakfast this morning" (Brighton: 14th of March 1850) "I felt an uneasy sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to some universal household knowledge. Coming down in the railroad the other night (always a wonderfully suggestive place to me when I am alone) I was looking at the stars, and revolving a little idea about them. Putting now these two things together, I wrote the enclosed little paper, straightway; and should like you to read it before you send it to the printers (it will not take you five minutes), and let me have a proof by return." This was the child's "dream of a star," which opened his second number; and, not appearing among his reprinted pieces, may justify a word or two of description. It is of a brother and sister, constant child-companions, who used to make friends of a star, watching it together until they knew when and where it would rise, and always bidding it good-night; so that when the sister dies the lonely brother still connects her with the star, which he then sees opening as a world of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from earth to heaven; and he also sees angels waiting to receive travellers up that sparkling road, his little sister among them; and he thinks ever after that he belongs less to the earth than to the star where his sister is; and he grows up to youth and through manhood and old age, consoled still under the successive domestic bereavements that fall to his earthly lot by renewal of that vision of his childhood; until at last, lying on his own bed of death, he feels that he is moving as a child to his child-sister, and he thanks his heavenly father that the star had so often opened before to receive the dear ones who awaited him. His sister Fanny and himself, he told me long before this paper was written, used to wander at night about a churchyard near their house, looking up at the stars; and her early death, of which I am now to speak, had vividly reawakened all the childish associations which made her memory dear to him. FOOTNOTES: [156] The mention of this name may remind me to state that I have received, in reference to the account in my first volume of Dickens's repurchase of his _Sketches_ from Mr. Macrone, a letter from the solicitor and friend of that gentleman so expressed that I could have greatly wished to revise my narrative into nearer agreement with its writer's wish. But farther enquiry, and an examination of the books of Messrs. Chapman and Hall, have confirmed the statement given. Mr. Hansard is in error in supposing that "unsold impressions" of the books were included in the transaction (the necessary requirement being simply that the small remainders on hand should be transferred with a view to being "wasted"): I know myself that it could not have included any supposed right of Mr. Macrone to have a novel written for him, because upon that whole matter, and his continued unauthorised advertisements of the tale, I decided myself the reference against him: and Mr. Hansard may be assured that the £2000 was paid for the copyright alone. For the same copyright, a year before, Dickens had received £250, both the first and second series being included in the payment; and he had already had about the same sum as his half share of the profits of sales. I quote the close of Mr. Hansard's letter. "Macrone no doubt was an adventurer, but he was sanguine to the highest degree. He was a dreamer of dreams, putting no restraint on his exultant hopes by the reflection that he was not dealing justly towards others. But reproach has fallen upon him from wrong quarters. He died in poverty, and his creditors received nothing from his estate. But that was because he had paid away all he had, and all he had derived from trust and credit, _to authors_." This may have been so, but Dickens was not among the authors so benefited. The _Sketches_ repurchased for the high price I have named never afterwards really justified such an outlay. [157] Mr. Sala's first paper appeared in September 1851, and in the same month of the following year I had an allusion in a letter from Dickens which I shall hope to have Mr. Sala's forgiveness for printing. "That was very good indeed of Sala's" (some essay he had written). "He was twenty guineas in advance, by the bye, and I told Wills delicately to make him a present of it. I find him a very conscientious fellow. When he gets money ahead, he is not like the imbecile youth who so often do the like in Wellington-street" (the office of _Household Words_) "and walk off, but only works more industriously. I think he improves with everything he does. He looks sharply at the alterations in his articles, I observe; and takes the hint next time." CHAPTER XX. LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE. 1848-1851. Sentiment about Places--Personal Revelations--At his Sister's Sick-bed--Sister's Death--Book to be written in First Person--Visiting the Scene of a Tragedy--First sees Yarmouth--Birth of Sixth Son--Title of _Copperfield_ chosen--Difficulties of Opening--Memorable Dinner--Rogers and Benedict--Wit of Fonblanque--Procter and Macready--The Sheridans--Dinner to Halévy and Scribe--Expedition with Lord Mulgrave--The Duke at Vauxhall--Carlyle and Thackeray--Marryat's Delight with Children--Monckton Milnes and Lord Lytton--Lords Dudley, Stuart, and Nugent--Kemble, Harness, and Dyce--Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble--Mazzini and Edinburgh Friends--Artist Acquaintance--Friends from America--M. Van de Weyer--Doubtful Compliment--A Hint for London Citizens--Letter against Public Executions--An American Observer in England--Marvels of English Manners--Letter from Rockingham--Private Theatricals--A Family Scene--Death of Francis Jeffrey--Progress of _Copperfield_--A Run to Paris--Third Daughter born--At Great Malvern--Macready's Farewell--The Home at Shepherd's-bush--Death of John Dickens--Tribute by his Son--Theatrical-fund Dinner--Plea for Small Actors--Death of his Little Daughter--Advocating Sanitary Reform--Lord Shaftesbury--Realities of his Books to Dickens. EXCEPTING always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens had no particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for houses he had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him. But he cared most for Devonshire-terrace, perhaps for the bit of ground attached to it; and it was with regret he suddenly discovered, at the close of 1847, that he should have to resign it "next lady-day three years. I had thought the lease two years more." To that brief remaining time belong some incidents of which I have still to give account; and I connect them with the house in which he lived during the progress of what is generally thought his greatest book, and of what I think were his happiest years. We had never had such intimate confidences as in the interval since his return from Paris; but these have been used in my narrative of the childhood and boyish experiences, and what remain are incidental only. Of the fragment of autobiography there also given, the origin has been told; but the intention of leaving such a record had been in his mind, we now see, at an earlier date; and it was the very depth of our interest in the opening of his fragment that led to the larger design in which it became absorbed. "I hardly know why I write this," was his own comment on one of his personal revelations, "but the more than friendship which has grown between us seems to force it on me in my present mood. We shall speak of it all, you and I, Heaven grant, wisely and wonderingly many and many a time in after years. In the meanwhile I am more at rest for having opened all my heart and mind to you. . . . This day eleven years, poor dear Mary died."[158] That was written on the seventh of May 1848, but another sadness impending at the time was taking his thoughts still farther back; to when he trotted about with his little elder sister in the small garden to the house at Portsea. The faint hope for her which Elliotson had given him in Paris had since completely broken down; and I was to hear, in less than two months after the letter just quoted, how nearly the end was come. "A change took place in poor Fanny," he wrote on the 5th of July, "about the middle of the day yesterday, which took me out there last night. Her cough suddenly ceased almost, and, strange to say, she immediately became aware of her hopeless state; to which she resigned herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with extraordinary sweetness and constancy. The irritability passed, and all hope faded away; though only two nights before, she had been planning for 'after Christmas.' She is greatly changed. I had a long interview with her to-day, alone; and when she had expressed some wishes about the funeral, and her being buried in unconsecrated ground" (Mr. Burnett's family were dissenters), "I asked her whether she had any care or anxiety in the world. She said No, none. It was hard to die at such a time of life, but she had no alarm whatever in the prospect of the change; felt sure we should meet again in a better world; and although they had said she might rally for a time, did not really wish it. She said she was quite calm and happy, relied upon the mediation of Christ, and had no terror at all. She had worked very hard, even when ill; but believed that was in her nature, and neither regretted nor complained of it. Burnett had been always very good to her; they had never quarrelled; she was sorry to think of his going back to such a lonely home; and was distressed about her children, but not painfully so. She showed me how thin and worn she was; spoke about an invention she had heard of that she would like to have tried, for the deformed child's back; called to my remembrance all our sister Letitia's patience and steadiness; and, though she shed tears sometimes, clearly impressed upon me that her mind was made up, and at rest. I asked her very often, if she could ever recall anything that she could leave to my doing, to put it down, or mention it to somebody if I was not there; and she said she would, but she firmly believed that there was nothing--nothing. Her husband being young, she said, and her children infants, she could not help thinking sometimes, that it would be very long in the course of nature before they were reunited; but she knew that was a mere human fancy, and could have no reality after she was dead. Such an affecting exhibition of strength and tenderness, in all that early decay, is quite indescribable. I need not tell you how it moved me. I cannot look round upon the dear children here, without some misgiving that this sad disease will not perish out of our blood with her; but I am sure I have no selfishness in the thought, and God knows how small the world looks to one who comes out of such a sick-room on a bright summer day. I don't know why I write this before going to bed. I only know that in the very pity and grief of my heart, I feel as if it were doing something." After not many weeks she died, and the little child who was her last anxiety did not long survive her. In all the latter part of the year Dickens's thoughts were turning much to the form his next book should assume. A suggestion that he should write it in the first person, by way of change, had been thrown out by me, which he took at once very gravely; and this, with other things, though as yet not dreaming of any public use of his own personal and private recollections, conspired to bring about that resolve. The determination once taken, with what a singular truthfulness he contrived to blend the fact with the fiction may be shown by a small occurrence of this time. It has been inferred, from the vividness of the boy-impressions of Yarmouth in David's earliest experiences, that the place must have been familiar to his own boyhood: but the truth was that at the close of 1848 he first saw that celebrated sea-port. One of its earlier months had been signalised by an adventure in which Leech, Lemon, and myself took part with him, when, obtaining horses from Salisbury, we passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "hut" at Winterslow, birthplace of some of his finest essays; altogether with so brilliant a success that now (13th of November) he proposed to "repeat the Salisbury Plain idea in a new direction in mid-winter, to wit, Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight, with dark winter cliffs and roaring oceans." But mid-winter brought with it too much dreariness of its own, to render these stormy accompaniments to it very palatable; and on the last day of the year he bethought him "it would be better to make an outburst to some old cathedral city we don't know, and what do you say to Norwich and Stanfield-hall?" Thither accordingly the three friends went, illness at the last disabling me; and of the result I heard (12th of January, 1849) that Stanfield-hall, the scene of a recent frightful tragedy, had nothing attractive unless the term might be applied to "a murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime. We arrived," continued Dickens, "between the Hall and Potass farm, as the search was going on for the pistol in a manner so consummately stupid, that there was nothing on earth to prevent any of Rush's labourers from accepting five pounds from Rush junior to find the weapon and give it to him. Norwich, a disappointment" (one pleasant face "transformeth a city," but he was unable yet to connect it with our delightful friend Elwin); "all save its place of execution, which we found fit for a gigantic scoundrel's exit. But the success of the trip, for me, was to come. Yarmouth, sir, where we went afterwards, is the strangest place in the wide world: one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh between it and London. More when we meet. I shall certainly try my hand at it." He made it the home of his "little Em'ly." Everything now was taking that direction with him; and soon, to give his own account of it, his mind was upon names "running like a high sea." Four days after the date of the last-quoted letter ("all over happily, thank God, by four o'clock this morning") there came the birth of his eighth child and sixth son; whom at first he meant to call by Oliver Goldsmith's name, but settled afterwards into that of Henry Fielding; and to whom that early friend Ainsworth who had first made us known to each other, welcome and pleasant companion always, was asked to be godfather. Telling me of the change in the name of the little fellow, which he had made in a kind of homage to the style of work he was now so bent on beginning, he added, "What should you think of this for a notion of a character? 'Yes, that is very true: but now, _What's his motive?_' I fancy I could make something like it into a kind of amusing and more innocent Pecksniff. 'Well now, yes--no doubt that was a fine thing to do! But now, stop a moment, let us see--_What's his motive?_'" Here again was but one of the many outward signs of fancy and fertility that accompanied the outset of all his more important books; though, as in their cases also, other moods of the mind incident to such beginnings were less favourable. "Deepest despondency, as usual, in commencing, besets me;" is the opening of the letter in which he speaks of what of course was always one of his first anxieties, the selection of a name. In this particular instance he had been undergoing doubts and misgivings to more than the usual degree. It was not until the 23rd of February he got to anything like the shape of a feasible title. "I should like to know how the enclosed (one of those I have been thinking of) strikes you, on a first acquaintance with it. It is odd, I think, and new; but it may have A's difficulty of being 'too comic, my boy.' I suppose I should have to add, though, by way of motto, 'And in short it led to the very Mag's Diversions. _Old Saying._' Or would it be better, there being equal authority for either, 'And in short they all played Mag's Diversions. _Old Saying?_' _Mag's Diversions._ Being the personal history of MR. THOMAS MAG THE YOUNGER, Of Blunderstone House." This was hardly satisfactory, I thought; and it soon became apparent that he thought so too, although within the next three days I had it in three other forms. "_Mag's Diversions_, being the Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of Mr. David Mag the Younger, of Blunderstone House." The second omitted Adventures, and called his hero Mr. David Mag the Younger, of Copperfield House. The third made nearer approach to what the destinies were leading him to, and transformed Mr. David Mag into Mr. David Copperfield the Younger and his great-aunt Margaret; retaining still as his leading title, _Mag's Diversions_. It is singular that it should never have occurred to him, while the name was thus strangely as by accident bringing itself together, that the initials were but his own reversed; but he was much startled when I pointed this out, and protested it was just in keeping with the fates and chances which were always befalling him. "Why else," he said, "should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?" It was quite true that he did so, as I had curious proof following close upon the heels of that third proposal. "I wish," he wrote on the 26th of February, "you would look over carefully the titles now enclosed, and tell me to which you most incline. You will see that they give up _Mag_ altogether, and refer exclusively to one name--that which I last sent you. I doubt whether I could, on the whole, get a better name. "1. _The Copperfield Disclosures._ Being the personal history, experience, and observation, of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone House. "2. _The Copperfield Records._ Being the personal history, experience, and observation, of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of Copperfield Cottage. "3. _The Last Living Speech and Confession of David Copperfield Junior_, of Blunderstone Lodge, who was never executed at the Old Bailey. Being his personal history found among his papers. "4. _The Copperfield Survey of the World as it Rolled._ Being the personal history, experience, and observation, of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery. "5. _The Last Will and Testament of Mr. David Copperfield._ Being his personal history left as a legacy. "6. _Copperfield, Complete._ Being the whole personal history and experience of Mr. David Copperfield of Blunderstone House, which he never meant to be published on any account. Or, the opening words of No. 6 might be _Copperfield's Entire_; and _The Copperfield Confessions_ might open Nos. 1 and 2. Now, WHAT SAY YOU?" What I said is to be inferred from what he wrote back on the 28th. "The _Survey_ has been my favourite from the first. Kate picked it out from the rest, without my saying anything about it. Georgy too. You hit upon it, on the first glance. Therefore I have no doubt that it is indisputably the best title; and I will stick to it." There was a change nevertheless. His completion of the second chapter defined to himself, more clearly than before, the character of the book; and the propriety of rejecting everything not strictly personal from the name given to it. The words proposed, therefore, became ultimately these only: "The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant to be published on any account." And the letter which told me that with this name it was finally to be launched on the first of May, told me also (19th April) the difficulties that still beset him at the opening. "My hand is out in the matter of _Copperfield_. To-day and yesterday I have done nothing. Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering on like a stage-waggon. I can't even dine at the Temple to-day, I feel it so important to stick at it this evening, and make some head. I am quite aground; quite a literary Benedict, as he appeared when his heels wouldn't stay upon the carpet; and the long Copperfieldian perspective looks snowy and thick, this fine morning."[159] The allusion was to a dinner at his house the night before; when not only Rogers had to be borne out, having fallen sick at the table, but, as we rose soon after to quit the dining-room, Mr. Jules Benedict had quite suddenly followed the poet's lead, and fallen prostrate on the carpet in the midst of us. Amid the general consternation there seemed a want of proper attendance on the sick: the distinguished musician faring in this respect hardly so well as the famous bard, by whose protracted sufferings in the library, whither he had been removed, the sanitary help available on the establishment was still absorbed; and as Dickens had been eloquent during dinner on the atrocities of a pauper-farming case at Tooting which was then exciting a fury of indignation, Fonblanque now declared him to be no better himself than a second Drouet, reducing his guests to a lamentable state by the food he had given them, and aggravating their sad condition by absence of all proper nursing. The joke was well kept up by Quin and Edwin Landseer, Lord Strangford joining in with a tragic sympathy for his friend the poet; and the banquet so dolefully interrupted ended in uproarious mirth. For nothing really serious had happened. Benedict went laughing away with his wife, and I helped Rogers on with his overshoes for his usual night-walk home. "Do you know how many waistcoats I wear?" asked the poet of me, as I was doing him this service. I professed my inability to guess. "Five!" he said: "and here they are!" Upon which he opened them, in the manner of the gravedigger in _Hamlet_, and showed me every one. That dinner was in the April of 1849, and among others present were Mrs. Procter and Mrs. Macready, dear and familiar names always in his house. No swifter or surer perception than Dickens's for what was solid and beautiful in character; he rated it higher than intellectual effort; and the same lofty place, first in his affection and respect, would have been Macready's and Procter's, if the one had not been the greatest of actors, and the other a poet as genuine as old Fletcher or Beaumont. There were present at this dinner also the American minister and Mrs. Bancroft (it was the year of that visit of Macready to America, which ended in the disastrous Forrest riots); and it had among its guests Lady Graham, the wife of Sir James Graham, than whom not even the wit and beauty of her nieces, Mrs. Norton and Lady Dufferin, better represented the brilliant family of the Sheridans; so many of whose members, and these three above all, Dickens prized among his friends. The table that day will be "full" if I add the celebrated singer Miss Catherine Hayes, and her homely good-natured Irish mother, who startled us all very much by complimenting Mrs. Dickens on her having had for her father so clever a painter as Mr. Hogarth. Others familiar to Devonshire-terrace in these years will be indicated if I name an earlier dinner (3rd of January), for the "christening" of the _Haunted Man_, when, besides Lemons, Evanses, Leeches, Bradburys, and Stanfields, there were present Tenniel, Topham, Stone, Robert Bell, and Thomas Beard. Next month (24th of March) I met at his table, Lord and Lady Lovelace; Milner Gibson, Mowbray Morris, Horace Twiss, and their wives; Lady Molesworth and her daughter (Mrs. Ford); John Hardwick, Charles Babbage, and Dr. Locock. That distinguished physician had attended the poor girl, Miss Abercrombie, whose death by strychnine led to the exposure of Wainewright's murders; and the opinion he had formed of her chances of recovery, the external indications of that poison being then but imperfectly known, was first shaken, he told me, by the gloomy and despairing cries of the old family nurse, that her mother and her uncle had died exactly so! These, it was afterwards proved, had been among the murderer's former victims. The Lovelaces were frequent guests after the return from Italy, Sir George Crawford, so friendly in Genoa, having married Lord Lovelace's sister; and few had a greater warmth of admiration for Dickens than Lord Byron's "Ada," on whom Paul Dombey's death laid a strange fascination. They were again at a dinner got up in the following year for Scribe and the composer Halévy, who had come over to bring out the _Tempest_ at Her Majesty's-theatre, then managed by Mr. Lumley, who with M. Van de Weyer, Mrs. Gore and her daughter, the Hogarths, and I think the fine French comedian, Samson, were also among those present. Earlier that year there were gathered at his dinner-table the John Delanes, Isambard Brunels, Thomas Longmans (friends since the earliest Broadstairs days, and special favourites always), Lord Mulgrave, and Lord Carlisle, with all of whom his intercourse was intimate and frequent, and became especially so with Delane in later years. Lord Carlisle amused us that night, I remember, by repeating what the good old Brougham had said to him of "those _Punch_ people," expressing what was really his fixed belief. "They never get my face, and are obliged" (which, like Pope, he always pronounced obleeged), "to put up with my plaid trousers!" Of Lord Mulgrave, pleasantly associated with the first American experiences, let me add that he now went with us to several outlying places of amusement of which he wished to acquire some knowledge, and which Dickens knew better than any man; small theatres, saloons, and gardens in city or borough, to which the Eagle and Britannia were as palaces; and I think he was of the party one famous night in the summer of 1849 (29th of June), when with Talfourd, Edwin Landseer, and Stanfield, we went to the _Battle of Waterloo_ at Vauxhall, and were astounded to see pass in immediately before us, in a bright white overcoat, the great Duke himself, Lady Douro on his arm, the little Ladies Ramsay by his side, and everybody cheering and clearing the way before him. That the old hero enjoyed it all, there could be no doubt, and he made no secret of his delight in "Young Hernandez;" but the "Battle" was undeniably tedious, and it was impossible not to sympathize with the repeatedly and very audibly expressed wish of Talfourd, that "the Prussians would come up!" The preceding month was that of the start of _David Copperfield_, and to one more dinner (on the 12th) I may especially refer for those who were present at it. Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle came, Thackeray and Rogers, Mrs. Gaskell and Kenyon, Jerrold and Hablot Browne, with Mr. and Mrs. Tagart; and it was a delight to see the enjoyment of Dickens at Carlyle's laughing reply to questions about his health, that he was, in the language of Mr. Peggotty's housekeeper, a lorn lone creature and everything went contrairy with him. Things were not likely to go better, I thought, as I saw the great writer,--kindest as well as wisest of men, but not very patient under sentimental philosophies,--seated next the good Mr. Tagart, who soon was heard launching at him various metaphysical questions in regard to heaven and such like; and the relief was great when Thackeray introduced, with quaint whimsicality, a story which he and I had heard Macready relate in talking to us about his boyish days, of a country actor who had supported himself for six months on his judicious treatment of the "tag" to the _Castle Spectre_. In the original it stands that you are to do away with suspicion, banish vile mistrust, and, almost in the words we had just heard from the minister to the philosopher, "Believe there is a Heaven nor Doubt that Heaven is just!" in place of which Macready's friend, observing that the drop fell for the most part quite coldly, substituted one night the more telling appeal, "And give us your Applause, for _that_ is ALWAYS JUST!" which brought down the house with rapture. This chapter would far outrun its limits if I spoke of other as pleasant gatherings under Dickens's roof during the years which I am now more particularly describing; when, besides the dinners, the musical enjoyments and dancings, as his children became able to take part in them, were incessant. "Remember that for my Biography!" he said to me gravely on twelfth-day in 1849, after telling me what he had done the night before; and as gravely I now redeem my laughing promise that I would. Little Mary and her sister Kate had taken much pains to teach their father the polka, that he might dance it with them at their brother's birthday festivity (held this year on the 7th, as the 6th was a Sunday); and in the middle of the previous night as he lay in bed, the fear had fallen on him suddenly that the step was forgotten, and then and there, in that wintry dark cold night, he got out of bed to practise it. Anything _more_ characteristic could certainly not be told; unless I could have shown him dancing it afterwards, and far excelling the youngest performer in untiring vigour and vivacity. There was no one who approached him on these occasions excepting only our attached friend Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in Dickens's liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed away. Other names however still reproach me for omission as my memory goes back. With Marryat's on the earliest page of this volume stands that of Monckton Milnes, familiar with Dickens over all the time it covers, and still more prominent in Tavistock-house days when with Lady Houghton he brought fresh claims to my friend's admiration and regard. Of Bulwer Lytton's frequent presence in all his houses, and of Dickens's admiration for him as one of the supreme masters in his art, so unswerving and so often publicly declared, it would be needless again to speak. Nor shall I dwell upon his interchange of hospitalities with distinguished men in the two great professions so closely allied to literature and its followers; Denmans, Pollocks, Campbells, and Chittys; Watsons, Southwood Smiths, Lococks, and Elliotsons. To Alfred Tennyson, through all the friendly and familiar days I am describing, he gave full allegiance and honoured welcome. Tom Taylor was often with him; and there was a charm for him I should find it difficult to exaggerate in Lord Dudley Stuart's gentle yet noble character, his refined intelligence and generous public life, expressed so perfectly in his chivalrous face. Incomplete indeed would be the list if I did not add to it the frank and hearty Lord Nugent, who had so much of his grandfather, Goldsmith's friend, in his lettered tastes and jovial enjoyments. Nor should I forget occasional days with dear old Charles Kemble and one or other of his daughters; with Alexander Dyce; and with Harness and his sister, or his niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Archdale; made especially pleasant by talk about great days of the stage. It was something to hear Kemble on his sister's Mrs. Beverley; or to see Harness and Dyce exultant in recollecting her Volumnia. The enchantment of the Mrs. Beverley, her brother would delightfully illustrate by imitation of her manner of restraining Beverley's intemperance to their only friend, "You are too busy, sir!" when she quietly came down the stage from a table at which she had seemed to be occupying herself, laid her hand softly on her husband's arm, and in a gentle half-whisper "No, not too busy; mistaken perhaps; but----" not only stayed his temper but reminded him of obligations forgotten in the heat of it. Up to where the tragic terror began, our friend told us, there was nothing but this composed domestic sweetness, expressed even in the simplicity and neat arrangement of her dress, her cap with the strait band, and her hair gathered up underneath; but all changing when the passion _did_ begin; one single disordered lock escaping at the first outbreak, and, in the final madness, all of it streaming dishevelled down her beautiful face. Kemble made no secret of his belief that his sister had the higher genius of the two; but he spoke with rapture of "John's" Macbeth and parts of his Othello; comparing his "Farewell the tranquil mind" to the running down of a clock, an image which he did not know that Hazlitt had applied to the delivery of "To-morrow and to-morrow," in the other tragedy. In all this Harness seemed to agree; and I thought a distinction was not ill put by him, on the night of which I speak, in his remark that the nature in Kemble's acting only supplemented his magnificent art, whereas, though the artist was not less supreme in his sister, it was on nature she most relied, bringing up the other power only to the aid of it. "It was in another sense like your writing," said Harness to Dickens, "the commonest natural feelings made great, even when not rendered more refined, by art." Her Constance would have been fishwify, he declared, if its wonderful truth had not overborne every other feeling; and her Volumnia escaped being vulgar only by being so excessively grand. But it was just what was so called "vulgarity" that made its passionate appeal to the vulgar in a better meaning of the word. When she first entered, Harness said, swaying and surging from side to side with every movement of the Roman crowd itself, as it went out and returned in confusion, she so absorbed her son into herself as she looked at him, so swelled and amplified in her pride and glory for him, that "the people in the pit blubbered all round," and he could no more help it than the rest. There are yet some other names that should have place in these rambling recollections, though I by no means affect to remember all. One Sunday evening Mazzini made memorable by taking us to see the school he had established in Clerkenwell for the Italian organ-boys. This was after dining with Dickens, who had been brought into personal intercourse with the great Italian by having given money to a begging impostor who made unauthorized use of his name. Edinburgh friends made him regular visits in the spring time: not Jeffrey and his family alone, but sheriff Gordon and his, with whom he was not less intimate, Lord Murray and his wife, Sir William Allan and his niece, Lord Robertson with his wonderful Scotch mimicries, and Peter Fraser with his enchanting Scotch songs; our excellent friend Liston the surgeon, until his fatal illness came in December 1848, being seldom absent from those assembled to bid such visitors welcome. Allan's name may remind me of other artists often at his house, Eastlakes, Leslies, Friths, and Wards, besides those who have had frequent mention, and among whom I should have included Charles as well as Edwin Landseer, and William Boxall. Nor should I drop from this section of his friends, than whom none were more attractive to him, such celebrated names in the sister arts as those of Miss Helen Faucit, an actress worthily associated with the brightest days of our friend Macready's managements, Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. John Parry, Mr. Phelps, Mr. Webster, Mr. Harley, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, Mr. Whitworth, and Miss Dolby. Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby, and many-sided true-hearted Charles Knight; Mr. R. H. Horne and his wife were frequent visitors both in London and at seaside holidays; and I have met at his table Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall. There were the Duff Gordons too, the Lyells, and, very old friends of us both, the Emerson Tennents; there was the good George Raymond, Mr. Frank Beard and his wife; the Porter Smiths, valued for Macready's sake as well as their own; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Black, near connections by marriage of George Cattermole, with whom there was intimate intercourse both before and during the residence in Italy; Mr. Thompson, brother of Mrs. Smithson formerly named, and his wife, whose sister Frederick Dickens married; Mr. Mitton, his own early companion; and Mrs. Torrens, who had played with the amateurs in Canada. These are all in my memory so connected with Devonshire-terrace, as friends or familiar acquaintance, that they claim this word before leaving it; and visitors from America, I may remark, had always a grateful reception. Of the Bancrofts mention has been made, and with them should be coupled the Abbot Lawrences, Prescott, Hillard, George Curtis, and Felton's brother. Felton himself did not visit England until the Tavistock-house time. In 1847 there was a delightful day with the Coldens and the Wilkses, relatives by marriage of Jeffrey; in the following year, I think at my rooms because of some accident that closed Devonshire-terrace that day (25th of April), Dickens, Carlyle, and myself foregathered with the admirable Emerson; and M. Van de Weyer will probably remember a dinner where he took joyous part with Dickens in running down a phrase which the learned in books, Mr. Cogswell, on a mission here for the Astor library, had startled us by denouncing as an uncouth Scotch barbarism--_open up_. You found it constantly in Hume, he said, but hardly anywhere else; and he defied us to find it more than once through the whole of the volumes of Gibbon. Upon this, after brief wonder and doubt, we all thought it best to take part in a general assault upon _open up_, by invention of phrases on the same plan that should show it in exaggerated burlesque, and support Mr. Cogswell's indictment. Then came a struggle who should carry the absurdity farthest; and the victory remained with M. Van de Weyer until Dickens surpassed even him, and "opened up" depths of almost frenzied absurdity that would have delighted the heart of Leigh Hunt. It will introduce the last and not least honoured name into my list of his acquaintance and friends, if I mention his amusing little interruption one day to Professor Owen's description of a telescope of huge dimensions built by an enterprising clergyman who had taken to the study of the stars; and who was eager, said Owen, to see farther into heaven--he was going to say, than Lord Rosse; if Dickens had not drily interposed, "than his professional studies had enabled him to penetrate." Some incidents that belong specially to the three years that closed his residence in the home thus associated with not the least interesting part of his career, will farther show what now were his occupations and ways of life. In the summer of 1849 he came up from Broadstairs to attend a Mansion-house dinner, which the lord mayor of that day had been moved by a laudable ambition to give to "literature and art," which he supposed would be adequately represented by the Royal Academy, the contributors to _Punch_, Dickens, and one or two newspaper men. On the whole the result was not cheering; the worthy chief magistrate, no doubt quite undesignedly, expressing too much surprise at the unaccustomed faces around him to be altogether complimentary. In general (this was the tone) we are in the habit of having princes, dukes, ministers, and what not for our guests, but what a delight, all the greater for being unusual, to see gentlemen like you! In other words, what could possibly be pleasanter than for people satiated with greatness to get for a while by way of change into the butler's pantry? This in substance was Dickens's account to me next day, and his reason for having been very careful in his acknowledgment of the toast of "the Novelists." He was nettled not a little therefore by a jesting allusion to himself in the _Daily News_ in connection with the proceedings, and asked me to forward a remonstrance. Having a strong dislike to all such displays of sensitiveness, I suppressed the letter; but it is perhaps worth printing now. Its date is Broadstairs, Wednesday 11th of July 1849. "I have no other interest in, or concern with, a most facetious article on last Saturday's dinner at the Mansion-house, which appeared in your paper of yesterday, and found its way here to-day, than that it misrepresents me in what I said on the occasion. If you should not think it at all damaging to the wit of that satire to state what I did say, I shall be much obliged to you. It was this. . . . That I considered the compliment of a recognition of Literature by the citizens of London the more acceptable to us because it was unusual in that hall, and likely to be an advantage and benefit to them in proportion as it became in future less unusual. That, on behalf of the novelists, I accepted the tribute as an appropriate one; inasmuch as we had sometimes reason to hope that our imaginary worlds afforded an occasional refuge to men busily engaged in the toils of life, from which they came forth none the worse to a renewal of its strivings; and certainly that the chief magistrate of the greatest city in the world might be fitly regarded as the representative of that class of our readers." Of an incident towards the close of the year, though it had important practical results, brief mention will here suffice. We saw the Mannings executed on the walls of Horsemonger-lane gaol; and with the letter which Dickens wrote next day to the _Times_ descriptive of what we had witnessed on that memorable morning, there began an active agitation against public executions which never ceased until the salutary change was effected which has worked so well. Shortly after this he visited Rockingham-castle, the seat of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, his Lausanne friends; and I must preface by a word or two the amusing letter in which he told me of this visit. It was written in character, and the character was that of an American visitor to England. "I knew him, Horatio;" and a very kindly honest man he was, who had come to England authorised to make enquiry into our general agricultural condition, and who discharged his mission by publishing some reports extremely creditable to his good sense and ability, expressed in a plain nervous English that reminded one of the rural writings of Cobbett. But in an evil hour he published also a series of private letters to friends written from the various residences his introductions had opened to him; and these were filled with revelations as to the internal economy of English noblemen's country houses, of a highly startling description. As for example, how, on arrival at a house your "name is announced, and your portmanteau immediately taken into your chamber, which the servant shows you, with every convenience." How "you are asked by the servant at breakfast what you will have, or you get up and help yourself." How at dinner you don't dash at the dishes, or contend for the "fixings," but wait till "his portion is handed by servants to every one." How all the wines, fruit, glasses, candlesticks, lamps, and plate are "taken care of" by butlers, who have under-butlers for their "adjuncts;" how ladies never wear "white satin shoes or white gloves more than once;" how dinner napkins are "never left upon the table, but either thrown into your chair or on the floor under the table;" how no end of pains are taken to "empty slops;" and above all what a national propensity there is to brush a man's clothes and polish his boots, whensoever and wheresoever the clothes and boots can be seized without the man.[160] This was what Dickens good-humouredly laughs at. "Rockingham Castle: Friday, thirtieth of November, 1849. Picture to yourself, my dear F, a large old castle, approached by an ancient keep, portcullis, &c, &c, filled with company, waited on by six-and-twenty servants; the slops (and wine-glasses) continually being emptied; and my clothes (with myself in them) always being carried off to all sorts of places; and you will have a faint idea of the mansion in which I am at present staying. I should have written to you yesterday, but for having had a very busy day. Among the guests is a Miss B, sister of the Honourable Miss B (of Salem, Mass.), whom we once met at the house of our distinguished literary countryman Colonel Landor. This lady is renowned as an amateur actress, so last night we got up in the great hall some scenes from the _School for Scandal_; the scene with the lunatic on the wall, from the _Nicholas Nickleby_ of Major-General the Hon. C. Dickens (Richmond, Va.); some conjuring; and then finished off with country-dances; of which we had two admirably good ones, quite new to me, though really old. Getting the words, and making the preparations, occupied (as you may believe) the whole day; and it was three o'clock before I got to bed. It was an excellent entertainment, and we were all uncommonly merry. . . . I had a very polite letter from our enterprising countryman Major Bentley[161] (of Lexington, Ky.), which I shall show you when I come home. We leave here this afternoon, and I shall expect you according to appointment, at a quarter past ten A.M. to-morrow. Of all the country-houses and estates I have yet seen in England, I think this is by far the best. Everything undertaken eventuates in a most magnificent hospitality; and you will be pleased to hear that our celebrated fellow citizen General Boxall (Pittsburg, Penn.) is engaged in handing down to posterity the face of the owner of the mansion and of his youthful son and daughter. At a future time it will be my duty to report on the turnips, mangel-wurzel, ploughs, and live stock; and for the present I will only say that I regard it as a fortunate circumstance for the neighbouring community that this patrimony should have fallen to my spirited and enlightened host. Every one has profited by it, and the labouring people in especial are thoroughly well cared-for and looked after. To see all the household, headed by an enormously fat housekeeper, occupying the back benches last night, laughing and applauding without any restraint; and to see a blushing sleek-headed footman produce, for the watch-trick, a silver watch of the most portentous dimensions, amidst the rapturous delight of his brethren and sisterhood; was a very pleasant spectacle, even to a conscientious republican like yourself or me, who cannot but contemplate the parent country with feelings of pride in our own land, which (as was well observed by the Honorable Elias Deeze, of Hertford, Conn.) is truly the land of the free. Best remembrances from Columbia's daughters. Ever thine, my dear F,--C.H." Dickens, during the too brief time this excellent friend was spared to him, often repeated his visits to Rockingham, always a surpassing enjoyment; and in the winter of 1851 he accomplished there, with help of the country carpenter, "a very elegant little theatre," of which he constituted himself manager, and had among his actors a brother of the lady referred to in his letter, "a very good comic actor, but loose in words;" poor Augustus Stafford "more than passable;" and "a son of Vernon Smith's, really a capital low comedian." It will be one more added to the many examples I have given of his untiring energy both in work and play, if I mention the fact that this theatre was opened at Rockingham for their first representation on Wednesday the 15th of January; that after the performance there was a country dance which lasted far into the morning; and that on the next evening, after a railway journey of more than 120 miles, he dined in London with the prime minister, Lord John Russell. A little earlier in that winter we had together taken his eldest son to Eton, and a little later he had a great sorrow. "Poor dear Jeffrey!" he wrote to me on the 29th January, 1850. "I bought a _Times_ at the station yesterday morning, and was so stunned by the announcement, that I felt it in that wounded part of me, almost directly; and the bad symptoms (modified) returned within a few hours. I had a letter from him in extraordinary good spirits within this week or two--he was better, he said, than he had been for a long time--and I sent him proof-sheets of the number only last Wednesday. I say nothing of his wonderful abilities and great career, but he was a most affectionate and devoted friend to me; and though no man could wish to live and die more happily, so old in years and yet so young in faculties and sympathies, I am very very deeply grieved for his loss." He was justly entitled to feel pride in being able so to word his tribute of sorrowing affection. Jeffrey had completed with consummate success, if ever man did, the work appointed him in this world; and few, after a life of such activities, have left a memory so unstained and pure. But other and sharper sorrows awaited Dickens. The chief occupation of the past and present year, _David Copperfield_, will have a chapter to itself, and in this may be touched but lightly. Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along; certainly with less trouble to himself in the composition, beyond that ardent sympathy with the creatures of the fancy which always made so absolutely real to him their sufferings or sorrows; and he was probably never less harassed by interruptions or breaks in his invention. His principal hesitation occurred in connection with the child-wife Dora, who had become a great favourite as he went on; and it was shortly after her fate had been decided, in the early autumn of 1850,[162] but before she breathed her last, that a third daughter was born to him, to whom he gave his dying little heroine's name. On these and other points, without forestalling what waits to be said of the composition of this fine story, a few illustrative words from his letters will properly find a place here. "_Copperfield_ half done," he wrote of the second number on the 6th of June. "I feel, thank God, quite confident in the story. I have a move in it ready for this month; another for next; and another for the next." "I think it is necessary" (15th of November) "to decide against the special pleader. Your reasons quite suffice. I am not sure but that the banking house might do. I will consider it in a walk." "Banking business impracticable" (17th of November) "on account of the confinement: which would stop the story, I foresee. I have taken, for the present at all events, the proctor. I am wonderfully in harness, and nothing galls or frets." "_Copperfield_ done" (20th of November) "after two days' very hard work indeed; and I think a smashing number. His first dissipation I hope will be found worthy of attention, as a piece of grotesque truth." "I feel a great hope" (23rd of January, 1850) "that I shall be remembered by little Em'ly, a good many years to come." "I begin to have my doubts of being able to join you" (20th of February), "for _Copperfield_ runs high, and must be done to-morrow. But I'll do it if possible, and strain every nerve. Some beautiful comic love, I hope, in the number." "Still undecided about Dora" (7th of May), "but MUST decide to-day."[163] "I have been" (Tuesday, 20th of August) "very hard at work these three days, and have still Dora to kill. But with good luck, I may do it to-morrow. Obliged to go to Shepherd's-bush to-day, and can consequently do little this morning. Am eschewing all sorts of things that present themselves to my fancy--coming in such crowds!" "Work in a very decent state of advancement" (13th of August) "domesticity notwithstanding. I hope I shall have a splendid number. I feel the story to its minutest point." "Mrs. Micawber is still" (15th of August), "I regret to say, in statu quo. Ever yours, WILKINS MICAWBER." The little girl was born the next day, the 16th, and received the name of Dora Annie. The most part of what remained of the year was passed away from home. The year following did not open with favourable omen, both the child and its mother having severe illness. The former rallied however, and "little Dora is getting on bravely, thank God!" was his bulletin of the early part of February. Soon after, it was resolved to make trial of Great Malvern for Mrs. Dickens; and lodgings were taken there in March, Dickens and her sister accompanying her, and the children being left in London. "It is a most beautiful place," he wrote to me (15th of March). "O Heaven, to meet the Cold Waterers (as I did this morning when I went out for a shower-bath) dashing down the hills, with severe expressions on their countenances, like men doing matches and not exactly winning! Then, a young lady in a grey polka going _up_ the hills, regardless of legs; and meeting a young gentleman (a bad case, I should say) with a light black silk cap on under his hat, and the pimples of I don't know how many douches under that. Likewise an old man who ran over a milk-child, rather than stop!--with no neckcloth, on principle; and with his mouth wide open, to catch the morning air." This was the month, as we have seen, when the performances for the Guild were in active preparation, and it was also the date of the farewell dinner to our friend Macready on his quitting the stage. Dickens and myself came up for it from Malvern, to which he returned the next day; and from the spirited speech in which he gave the health of the chairman at the dinner, I will add a few words for the sake of the truth expressed in them. "There is a popular prejudice, a kind of superstition, that authors are not a particularly united body, and I am afraid that this may contain half a grain or so of the veracious. But of our chairman I have never in my life made public mention without adding what I can never repress, that in the path we both tread I have uniformly found him to be, from the first, the most generous of men; quick to encourage, slow to disparage, and ever anxious to assert the order of which he is so great an ornament. That we men of letters are, or have been, invariably or inseparably attached to each other, it may not be possible to say, formerly or now; but there cannot now be, and there cannot ever have been, among the followers of literature, a man so entirely without the grudging little jealousies that too often disparage its brightness, as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton." That was as richly merited as it is happily said. Dickens had to return to London after the middle of March for business connected with a charitable Home established at Shepherd's-bush by Miss Coutts, in the benevolent hope of rescuing fallen women by testing their fitness for emigration, of which future mention will be made, and which largely and regularly occupied his time for several years. On this occasion his stay was prolonged by the illness of his father. His health had been failing latterly, and graver symptoms were now spoken of. "I saw my poor father twice yesterday," he wrote to me on the 27th, "the second time between ten and eleven at night. In the morning I thought him not so well. At night, as well as any one in such a situation could be." Next day he was so much better that his son went back to Malvern, and even gave us grounds for hope that we might yet have his presence in Hertfordshire to advise on some questions connected with the comedy which Sir Edward Lytton had written for the Guild. But the end came suddenly. I returned from Knebworth to London, supposing that some accident had detained him at Malvern; and at my house this letter waited me. "Devonshire-terrace, Monday, thirty-first of March 1851. . . . My poor father died this morning at five and twenty minutes to six. They had sent for me to Malvern, but I passed John on the railway; for I came up with the intention of hurrying down to Bulwer Lytton's to-day before you should have left. I arrived at eleven last night, and was in Keppel-street at a quarter past eleven. But he did not know me, nor any one. He began to sink at about noon yesterday, and never rallied afterwards. I remained there until he died--O so quietly. . . . I hardly know what to do. I am going up to Highgate to get the ground. Perhaps you may like to go, and I should like it if you do. I will not leave here before two o'clock. I think I must go down to Malvern again, at night, to know what is to be done about the children's mourning; and as you are returning to Bulwer's I should like to have gone that way, if _Bradshaw_ gave me any hope of doing it. I wish most particularly to see you, I needn't say. I must not let myself be distracted by anything--and God knows I have left a sad sight!--from the scheme on which so much depends. Most part of the alterations proposed I think good." Mr. John Dickens was laid in Highgate Cemetery on the 5th of April; and the stone placed over him by the son who has made his name a famous one in England, bore tribute to his "zealous, useful, cheerful spirit." What more is to be said of him will be most becomingly said in speaking of _David Copperfield_. While the book was in course of being written, all that had been best in him came more and more vividly back to its author's memory; as time wore on, nothing else was remembered; and five years before his own death, after using in one of his letters to me a phrase rather out of the common with him, this was added: "I find this looks like my poor father, whom I regard as a better man the longer I live." He was at this time under promise to take the chair at the General Theatrical Fund on the 14th of April. Great efforts were made to relieve him from the promise; but such special importance was attached to his being present, and the Fund so sorely then required help, that, no change of day being found possible for the actors who desired to attend, he yielded to the pressure put upon him; of which the result was to throw upon me a sad responsibility. The reader will understand why, even at this distance of time; my allusion to it is brief. The train from Malvern brought him up only five minutes short of the hour appointed for the dinner, and we first met that day at the London Tavern. I never heard him to greater advantage than in the speech that followed. His liking for this Fund was the fact of its not confining its benefits to any special or exclusive body of actors, but opening them generously to all; and he gave a description of the kind of actor, going down to the infinitesimally small, not omitted from such kind help, which had a half-pathetic humour in it that makes it charming still. "In our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing, and to shake hands with everybody between all the verses. Or he may be the baron who gives the fête, and who sits uneasily on the sofa under a canopy with the baroness while the fête is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fête who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit to a bower or a palace. Or again, if an actor, he may be the armed head of the witch's cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom I have observed in country places, that he is much less like the notion formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or Donalbain of the previous scenes. This society, in short, says, 'Be you what you may, be you actor or actress, be your path in your profession never so high or never so low, never so haughty or never so humble, we offer you the means of doing good to yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.'" Half an hour before he rose to speak I had been called out of the room. It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him. But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. "Yet how often is it with all of us," he proceeded to say, and I remember to this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: "how often is it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities." In the disclosure that followed when he left the chair, Mr. Lemon, who was present, assisted me; and I left this good friend with him next day, when I went myself to Malvern and brought back Mrs. Dickens and her sister. The little child lies in a grave at Highgate near that of Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens; and on the stone which covers her is now written also her father's name, and those of two of her brothers. One more public discussion he took part in, before quitting London for the rest of the summer; and what he said (it was a meeting, with Lord Carlisle in the chair, in aid of Sanitary reform) very pregnantly illustrates what was remarked by me on a former page. He declared his belief that neither education nor religion could do anything really useful in social improvement until the way had been paved for their ministrations by cleanliness and decency. He spoke warmly of the services of Lord Ashley in connection with ragged schools, but he put the case of a miserable child tempted into one of those schools out of the noisome places in which his life was passed, and he asked what a few hours' teaching could effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole existence. "But give him, and his, a glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag, and which makes them the callous things they are; take the body of the dead relative from the room where the living live with it, and where such loathsome familiarity deprives death itself of awe; and then, but not before, they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the wretched, and who had compassion for all human sorrow." He closed by proposing Lord Ashley's health as having preferred the higher ambition of labouring for the poor to that of pursuing the career open to him in the service of the State; and as having also had "the courage on all occasions to face the cant which is the worst and commonest of all, the cant about the cant of philanthropy." Lord Shaftesbury first dined with him in the following year at Tavistock-house. Shortly after the Sanitary meeting came the first Guild performances; and then Dickens left Devonshire-terrace, never to return to it. What occupied him in the interval before he took possession of his new abode, has before been told; but two letters were overlooked in describing his progress in the labour of the previous year, and brief extracts from them will naturally lead me to the subject of my next chapter. "I have been" (15th of September) "tremendously at work these two days; eight hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half to-day, with the Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me over--utterly defeated me!" "I am" (21st of October) "within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what _Copperfield_ makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World." =END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.= FOOTNOTES: [158] I take the opportunity of saying that there was an omission of three words in the epitaph quoted on a former page (vol. i. p. 120). The headstone at the grave in Kensal-green bears this inscription: "Young, beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at the early age of seventeen." [159] From letters of nearly the same date here is another characteristic word: "Pen and ink before me! Am I not at work on _Copperfield_! Nothing else would have kept me here until half-past two on such a day. . . . Indian news bad indeed. Sad things come of bloody war. If it were not for Elihu, I should be a peace and arbitration man." [160] Here is really an only average specimen of the letters as published: "I forgot to say, if you leave your chamber twenty times a day, after using your basin, you would find it clean, and the pitcher replenished on your return, and that you cannot take your clothes off, but they are taken away, brushed, folded, pressed, and placed in the bureau; and at the dressing-hour, before dinner, you find your candles lighted, your clothes laid out, your shoes cleaned, and everything arranged for use; . . . the dress-clothes brushed and folded in the nicest manner, and cold water, and hot water, and clean napkins in the greatest abundance. . . . Imagine an elegant chamber, fresh water in basins, in goblets, in tubs, and sheets of the finest linen!" [161] From this time to his death there was always friendly intercourse with his old publisher Mr. Bentley. [162] It may be proper to record the fact that he had made a short run to Paris, with Maclise, at the end of June, of which sufficient farther note will have been taken if I print the subjoined passages from a letter to me dated 24th June, 1850, Hôtel Windsor, Rue de Rivoli. "There being no room in the Hôtel Brighton, we are lodged (in a very good apartment) here. The heat is absolutely frightful. I never felt anything like it in Italy. Sleep is next to impossible, except in the day, when the room is dark, and the patient exhausted. We purpose leaving here on Saturday morning and going to Rouen, whence we shall proceed either to Havre or Dieppe, and so arrange our proceedings as to be home, please God, on Tuesday evening. We are going to some of the little theatres to-night, and on Wednesday to the Français, for Rachel's last performance before she goes to London. There does not seem to be anything remarkable in progress, in the theatrical way. Nor do I observe that out of doors the place is much changed, except in respect of the carriages which are certainly less numerous. I also think the Sunday is even much more a day of business than it used to be. As we are going into the country with Regnier to-morrow, I write this after letter-time and before going out to dine at the Trois Frères, that it may come to you by to-morrow's post. The twelve hours' journey here is astounding--marvellously done, except in respect of the means of refreshment, which are absolutely none. Mac is very well (extremely loose as to his waistcoat, and otherwise careless in regard of buttons) and sends his love. De Fresne proposes a dinner with all the notabilities of Paris present, but I WON'T stand it! I really have undergone so much fatigue from work, that I am resolved not even to see him, but to please myself. I find, my child (as Horace Walpole would say), that I have written you nothing here, but you will take the will for the deed." [163] The rest of the letter may be allowed to fill the corner of a note. The allusions to Rogers and Landor are by way of reply to an invitation I had sent him. "I am extremely sorry to hear about Fox. Shall call to enquire, as I come by to the Temple. And will call on you (taking the chance of finding you) on my way to that Seat of Boredom. I wrote my paper for _H. W._ yesterday, and have begun _Copperfield_ this morning. Still undecided about Dora, but MUST decide to-day. La difficulté d'écrire l'Anglais m'est extrêmement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu! si l'on pourrait toujours écrire cette belle langue de France! Monsieur Rogere! Ah! qu'il est homme d'esprit, homme de génie, homme des lettres! Monsieur Landore! Ah qu'il parle Français--pas parfaitement comme un ange--un peu (peut-être) comme un diable! Mais il est bon garçon--sérieusement, il est un de la vraie noblesse de la nature. Votre tout dévoué, CHARLES. À Monsieur Monsieur Fos-tere." * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Pages 47-48, word split over two pages was mistyped. Word "yester- terday" changed to "yesterday" (Ditto yesterday; except) Footnote 116, "inim table" changed to "inimitable" (facetiousness of the inimitable) Page 310, "Nove ber" changed to "November" (21st of November) Page 311, "hem" changed to "them" (perfect joy in them) Footnote 139, "Edi burgh" changed to "Edinburgh" (Lord Cockburn. "EDINBURGH) Footnote 143, "l ght" changed to "light" (Wellbred's light ease) To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations, capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained. For example: Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained. ***** Transcriber's Note: For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by ~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the text. THE LIFE OF [Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens] THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS BY JOHN FORSTER. VOL. III. 1852-1870. ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Autograph of Charles Dickens _Fly-leaf_ Charles Dickens, æt. 56. From the last photograph taken in America, in 1868. Engraved by J. C. Armytage _Frontispiece_ Devonshire Terrace. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. 41 Tavistock House 53 Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _David Copperfield_ 157 Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _Little Dorrit_ 158 The Porch at Gadshill 204 The Châlet 213 House and conservatory, from the meadow 216 The study at Gadshill 222 Facsimile from the last page of _Edwin Drood_, written on the 8th of June, 1870 468 Facsimile of a page of _Oliver Twist_, written in 1837 469 The Grave. From an original water-colour drawing, executed for this Work, by S. L. Fildes. Engraved by J. Saddler _to face_ p. 544 TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. 1850-1853. Pages 21-50. DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE. ÆT. 38-41. PAGE Interest of _Copperfield_ 21 Real people in novels 22 Scott, Smollett, and Fielding 22 Complaint and atonement 23 Earlier and later methods 24 Boythorn and Skimpole 26 Yielding to temptation 27 Changes made in Skimpole 28 Relatives put into books 29 Scott and his father 29 Dickens and his father 30 No harm done 32 Micawber and Skimpole 32 Dickens and David 33 Dangers of autobiography 34 Design of David's character 35 Why books continue 36 The storm and shipwreck 37 Goethe on the insane 38 The two heroines 39 Risks not worth running 40 Devonshire Terrace 41 _Bleak House_ 43 Defects of the novel 44 Set-offs and successes 45 Value of critical judgments 46 The contact of extremes 47 Dean Ramsay on Jo 48 Town graves 49 One last friend 49 Truth of Gridley's case 50 CHAPTER II. 1853-1855. Pages 51-75. HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES. ÆT. 41-43. Titles proposed for _Bleak House_ 52 Restlessness 52 Tavistock House 53 Last child born 54 A young stage aspirant 54 Deaths of friends 55 At Boulogne 55 Publishing agreements 56 At Birmingham 56 Self-changes 57 Employments in Boulogne 59 First reading in public 60 Argument against paid readings 61 Children's theatricals 62 Mr. H. in _Tom Thumb_ 62 Dickens in Fortunio 63 Titles for a new story 65 Difficulties of weekly parts 66 Mr. Ruskin on _Hard Times_ 67 Truths enforced 68 Early experiences 69 Strike at Preston 69 Speaking at Drury Lane 70 Stanfield scenes 71 Tavistock House theatricals 71 Peter Cunningham 73 Incident of a November night 74 Degrees in misery 75 CHAPTER III. 1853. Pages 76-95. SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED. ÆT. 41. Swiss people 76 Narrow escape 77 Lausanne and Genoa 78 The Peschiere and its owner 79 On the way to Naples 80 A night on board ship 81 A Greek potentate 82 Going out to dinner 83 The old idle Frenchman 84 Changes and old friends 85 A "scattering" party 86 The puppets at Rome 87 Malaria and desolation 88 Plague-smitten places 89 Again in Venice 90 A painter among paintings 91 Liking for the Sardinians 92 Neapolitans in exile 93 Travelling police arrangements 94 Dickens and the Austrian 95 CHAPTER IV. 1853, 1854, and 1856. Pages 96-120. THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE. ÆT. 41, 42, 44. Visits to France 96 First summer residence (1853) 97 Villa des Moulineaux 98 Doll's house and offices 99 Bon garçon of a landlord 100 Making the most of it 101 Among Putney market-gardeners 102 Shakespearian performance 103 Pictures at the pig-market 104 English friends 105 Change of villa (1854) 105 The Northern Camp 106 Visit of Prince Albert 107 Emperor, Prince, and Dickens 108 "Like boxing" 109 The Empress at a review 110 A French conjuror 110 Conjuring by Dickens 111 Making demons of cards 112 Conjuror's compliment and vision 114 Old residence resumed (1856) 115 Last of the Camp 116 A household war 117 State of siege 118 Death of Gilbert A'Becket 119 Leaving for England 119 CHAPTER V. 1855, 1856. Pages 121-153. RESIDENCE IN PARIS. ÆT. 43-44. Actors and dramas 122 Frédéric Lemaitre 122 Last scene in _Gambler's Life_ 123 Apartment in Champs Elysées 124 French Translation of Dickens 125 Ary Scheffer and Daniel Manin 126 English friends 126 Acting at the Français 127 Dumas' _Orestes_ 129 _Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu 130 Profane nonsense 131 French _As You Like It_ 132 Story of a French drama 133 A delightful "Tag" 134 Auber and Queen Victoria 134 Scribe and his wife 136 At Regnier's 137 Viardot in _Orphée_ 138 Meets Georges Sand 138 Banquet at Girardin's 139 Second banquet 141 Bourse and its victims 142 Entry of troops from Crimea 143 Zouaves and their dog 144 Streets on New Year's Day 145 English and French art 146 Emperor and Edwin Landseer 147 Sitting to Ary Scheffer 148 Scheffer as to the likeness 149 A duchess murdered 150 Truth is stranger than fiction 151 Singular scenes described 152 What became of the actors 153 CHAPTER VI. 1855-1857. Pages 154-176. LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR. ÆT. 43-45. Watts's Rochester charity 155 Tablet to Dickens in Cathedral 155 _Nobody's Fault_ 155 How the _Dorrit_ story grew 156 Number-Plan of _Copperfield_ 157 Number-Plan of _Dorrit_ 158 Circumlocution Office 159 Flora and Mr. F---- 160 Weak and strong points 161 A scene of boy-trials 162 Reception of the novel 163 Christmas theatricals 164 Theatre-making 165 Rush for places 166 Douglas Jerrold's death 168 Exertions and result 168 Seeing the serpents fed 169 Lazy Tour projected 170 Up Carrick Fell 170 Accident to Mr. Wilkie Collins 171 At Wigton and Allonby 172 The Yorkshire landlady 173 Doncaster in race week 174 A performance of _Money_ 175 CHAPTER VII. 1857-1858. Pages 177-201. WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME. ÆT. 45-46. Disappointments and distastes 177 What we seem and are 178 Compensations of Art 179 Misgivings 180 A defect and a merit 181 Reply to a remonstrance 182 Dangerous comfort 183 One happiness missed 184 Homily on life 185 Confidences 186 Rejoinder to a reply 187 What the world cannot give 189 An old project revived 189 Shakespeare on acting 191 Hospital for sick children 192 Charities of the very poor 192 Unsolved mysteries 194 Appeal for sick children 195 Reading for Child's Hospital 195 Proposal for Paid readings 196 Question of the Plunge 198 Mr. Arthur Smith 199 Separation from Mrs. Dickens 200 What alone concerned the public 201 CHAPTER VIII. 1856-1870. Pages 202-222. GADSHILL PLACE. ÆT. 44-58. First description of it 202 The porch 204 Negotiations for purchase 204 Becomes his home 205 Gadshill a century ago 206 Past owners and tenants 207 Sinking a well 209 Gradual additions 210 Gift from Mr. Fechter 211 Dickens's writing-table 211 The châlet 213 Much coveted acquisition 214 Last improvement 215 Visits of friends 216 Dickens's Dogs 218 A Fenian mastiff 218 Linda and Mrs. Bouncer 219 Favourite walks 220 The study and chair 222 CHAPTER IX. 1858-1859. Pages 223-238. FIRST PAID READINGS. ÆT. 46-47. Various managements 223 One day's work 224 Impressions of Dublin 225 Irish audiences 226 Young Ireland and Old England 227 Railway ride to Belfast 229 Brought near his Fame 229 A knowing audience 231 Greeting in Manchester 231 Joined by his daughters 232 Strange life 233 Scotch audiences 234 When most successful in reading 235 At public meetings 236 Miss Marie Wilton as _Pippo_ 237 Ed. Landseer on Frith's portrait 238 CHAPTER X. 1859-1861. Pages 239-254. ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. ÆT. 47-49. _Household Words_ discontinued 240 Earliest and latest publishers 240 Dickens and Mr. Bentley 241 In search of a title 242 A title found 243 Success of new periodical 244 Difference from the old 245 At Knebworth 246 Commercial Travellers' Schools 247 A Traveller for human interests 248 Personal references in writing 249 Birds and low company 250 Bethnal-green fowls 251 An incident of Doughty Street 252 Offers from America 253 CHAPTER XI. 1861-1863. Pages 255-274. SECOND SERIES OF READINGS. ÆT. 49-51. Daughter Kate's marriage 255 Charles Alston Collins 257 Sale of Tavistock House 257 Brother Alfred's death 258 Metropolitan readings 258 Provincial circuit 259 New subjects for readings 260 Death of Mr. Arthur Smith 261 Death of Mr. Henry Austin 262 Readings at Brighton 263 At Canterbury and Dover 264 Alarming scene 265 Impromptu reading-hall 266 Scenes in Scotland 267 At Torquay 268 Death of C. C. Felton 269 Offers for Australia 270 Writing or Reading? 271 Home arguments 272 Religious Richardson's Show 273 Exiled ex-potentate 274 CHAPTER XII. 1855-1865. Pages 275-297. HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN. ÆT. 43-53. Book of MS. memoranda 275 Originals of characters 277 Fancies put into books 277 Notions for _Little Dorrit_ 278 Suggestions for other books 279 Hints for last completed book 280 Fancies never used 281 Ideas not worked out 282 A touching fancy 284 Domestic subjects 284 Characters of women 285 Other female groups 286 Uncle Sam 288 Sketches of selfishness 288 Striking thoughts 290 Subjects not accomplished 290 Characters laid aside 291 Available names 293 Titles for books 293 Names for girls and boys 295 An undistinguished crowd 296 Mr. Brobity's snuff-box 297 CHAPTER XIII. 1864-1867. Pages 298-324. THIRD SERIES OF READINGS. ÆT. 52-55. Death of Thackeray 298 Mother's death 300 Death of second son 300 Interest in Mr. Fechter 301 Notes on theatres 302 Sorrowful new year 303 C. W. Dilke's death 303 Staplehurst accident 305 Illness and suffering 305 Enters on new readings 306 Last meeting with Mrs. Carlyle 308 Mrs. Carlyle's death 309 Offer for more readings 309 Grave warnings 311 In Scotland 312 Exertion and its result 313 Self-deception 314 An old malady 314 Scene at Tynemouth 316 In Dublin with the Fenians 317 Yielding to temptation 318 Pressure from America 319 At bay at last 320 Warning unheeded 321 Discussion useless 322 The case in a nutshell 323 Decision to go 324 CHAPTER XIV. 1836-1870. Pages 325-386. DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. ÆT. 24-58. See before you oversee 326 M. Taine's criticism 326 What is overlooked in it 327 A popularity explained 328 National excuses for Dickens 330 Comparison with Balzac 330 Anticipatory reply to M. Taine 332 A critic in the _Fortnightly Review_ 333 Blame and praise to be reconciled 333 A plea for objectors 334 "Hallucinative" imagination 335 Vain critical warnings 336 The critic and the criticised 336 An opinion on the Micawbers 338 Hallucinative phenomena 338 Scott writing _Bride of Lammermoor_ 339 Claim to be fairly judged 340 Dickens's leading quality 341 Dangers of Humour 342 His earlier books 343 Mastery of dialogue 344 Character-drawing 345 Realities of fiction 346 Fielding and Dickens 347 Touching of extremes 347 Why the creations of fiction live 349 Enjoyment of his own humour 350 Unpublished note of Lord Lytton 350 Exaggerations of humour 351 Temptations of all great humourists 352 A word for fanciful descriptions 353 _Tale of Two Cities_ 355 Difficulties and success 355 Specialty of treatment 356 Reply to objections 357 Care with which Dickens worked 358 An American critic 359 _Great Expectations_ 360 Pip and Magwitch 361 Another boy-child for hero 362 Unlikeness in likeness 363 Vivid descriptive writing 364 Masterly drawing of character 365 A day on the Thames 366 Homely and shrewd satire 367 Incident changed for Lytton 368 As originally written 369 Christmas Sketches 370 _Our Mutual Friend_ 370 Writing numbers in advance 373 Working slowly 374 Death of John Leech 375 A fatal anniversary 376 Effects on himself and his novel 376 A tale by Edmond About 378 First and Last 378 _Doctor Marigold_ 379 Minor stories 380 "Something from Above" 381 Purity of Dickens's writings 382 Substitute for an alleged deficiency 382 True province of humour 383 Horace Greeley and Longfellow 384 Letters from an American 385 Companions for solitude 386 CHAPTER XV. 1867. Pages 387-406. AMERICA REVISITED. NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1867. ÆT. 55. Warmth of the greeting 388 Same cause as in 1842 388 Old and new friends 389 Changes since 1842 390 First Boston reading 391 Scene at New York sales 393 First New York reading 393 An action against Dickens 394 A fire at his hotel 395 Local and general politics 397 Railway arrangements 398 Police of New York 398 Mistletoe from England 399 As to newspapers 400 Nothing lasts long 401 Cities chosen for readings 401 Scene of a murder visited 402 A dinner at the murderer's 403 Illness and abstinence 404 Miseries of American travel 405 Startling prospect 406 CHAPTER XVI. 1868. Pages 407-443. AMERICA REVISITED. JANUARY TO APRIL, 1868. ÆT. 56. Speculators and public 408 An Englishman's disadvantage 408 "Freedom and independence" 408 Mountain-sneezers and eye-openers 409 The work and the gain 410 A scene at Brooklyn 411 At Philadelphia 412 "Looking up the judge" 413 Improved social ways 414 Result of thirty-four readings 415 Shadow to the sunshine 416 Readings in a church 417 Change of plan 417 Baltimore women 418 Success in Philadelphia 419 Objections to coloured people 420 With Sumner at Washington 421 President Lincoln's dream 423 Interview with President Johnson 423 Washington audiences 424 A comical dog 425 Incident before a reading 426 The child and the doll 427 North-west tour 428 Political excitement 429 Struggle for tickets 430 American female beauty 432 Sherry to "slop round" with 432 Final impression of Niagara 433 Letter to Mr. Ouvry 434 "Getting along" through water 435 Again attacked by lameness 437 Illness and exertion 437 Seeing prevents believing 439 All but used up 439 Last Boston readings 440 New York farewells 441 The receipts throughout 441 Promise at public dinner 442 The Adieu 443 CHAPTER XVII. 1868-1870. Pages 444-460. LAST READINGS. ÆT. 56-58. Health improved 444 What the readings did and undid 445 Expenses and gains in America 446 Noticeable changes in him 447 _Oliver Twist_ reading proposed 448 Objections to it 449 Death of Frederick Dickens 450 Macready at _Oliver Twist_ reading 451 Another attack of illness 452 A doctors' difference 454 At Emerson Tennent's funeral 454 The illness at Preston 455 Brought to London 456 Sir Thomas Watson consulted 456 His note of the case 457 Guarded sanction to other readings 458 Close of career as public reader 460 CHAPTER XVIII. 1869-1870. Pages 461-477. LAST BOOK. ÆT. 57-58. The agreement for _Edwin Drood_ 461 First fancy for it 462 Story as planned in his mind 463 What to be its course and end 463 Merits of the fragment 464 Comparison of early and late MSS 466 Discovery of an unpublished scene 467 Last page of _Drood_ in fac-simile 468 Page of _Oliver Twist_ in fac-simile 469 Delightful specimen of Dickens 470 Unpublished scene for _Drood_ 470-476 CHAPTER XIX. 1836-1870. Pages 478-526. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. ÆT. 24-58. Dickens not a bookish man 479 Books and their critics 479 Design of present book stated 480 Dickens made to tell his own story 480 Charge of personal obtrusiveness 481 Lord Russell on Dickens's letters 481 Shallower judgments 481 Absence of self-conceit in Dickens 482 Letter to youngest son 483 As to religion and prayer 485 Letter to a clergyman in 1856 485 Letter to a layman in 1870 486 Objection to posthumous honours 487 As to patronage of literature 488 Vanity of human wishes 488 As to writers and publishers 489 Editorship of his weekly serials 490 Work for his contributors 491 Editorial troubles and pleasures 493 Letter to an author 493 Help to younger novelists 495 Adelaide Procter's poetry 495 Effect of periodical writing 496 Proposed satirical papers 497 Political opinions 498 Not the man for Finsbury 499 The Liverpool dinner in 1869 500 Reply to Lord Houghton 501 Tribute to Lord Russell 501 People governing and governed 502 Alleged offers from her Majesty 503 Silly Rigmarole 504 The Queen sees him act (1857) 505 Desires to hear him read (1858) 506 Interview at the Palace (1870) 507 What passed at the interview 507 Dickens's grateful impression 508 A hope at the close of life 509 Games in Gadshill meadow 510 Home enjoyments 512 Habits of life everywhere 513 Family dependence on him 514 Carlyle's opinion of Dickens 514 Street walks and London haunts 515 Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 517 The first attack of lameness 518 Effect upon his dogs 518 Why right things to be done 519 Silent heroisms 519 At social meetings 520 Delight in "assumption" 520 Humouring a joke 522 Unlucky hits 522 Ghost stories 524 Predominant feeling of his life 525 Sermon of the Master of Balliol 525 CHAPTER XX. 1869-1870. Pages 527-545. THE END. ÆT. 57-58. Last summer and autumn 527 Showing London to a visitor 528 His son Henry's scholarship 529 Twelve more readings 530 Medical attendance at them 531 Excitement incident to them 532 The Farewell 533 Last public appearances 535 At Royal Academy dinner 535 Eulogy of Daniel Maclise 536 Return of illness 537 Our last meeting 538 A noteworthy incident 538 Last letter received from him 539 Final days at Gadshill 539 Wednesday the 8th of June 540 Last piece of writing 540 The 8th and 9th of June 541 The general grief 542 The burial 544 Unbidden mourners 544 The grave 544 * * * * * APPENDIX. I. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS 547 II. THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS 561 III. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE SECOND VOLUME OF THIS WORK 566 INDEX 571 THE LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS. CHAPTER I. DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE. 1850-1853. Interest of _Copperfield_--Scott, Smollett, and Fielding--Too close to the Real--Earlier and Later Methods--Dickens at Hatton-garden (1837)--Originals of Boythorn and Skimpole--Last Glimpse of Leigh Hunt (1859)--Changes made in Skimpole--Self-defence--Scott and his Father--Dickens and his Father--Sayings of John Dickens--Skimpole and Micawber--Dickens and David--Self-portraiture not attempted--The Autobiographic Form--Consistent Drawing--Design of David's Character--Tone of the Novel--The Peggottys--Miss Dartle--Mrs. Steerforth--Betsey Trotwood--A Country Undertaker--The Two Heroines--Contrast of Esther and David--Plot of the Story--Incidents and Persons interwoven--Defects of _Bleak House_--Success in Character--Value of Critical Judgments--Pathetic Touches--Dean Ramsay on _Bleak House_ and Jo--Originals of Chancery Abuses. DICKENS never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of _Copperfield_. The popularity it obtained at the outset increased to a degree not approached by any previous book excepting _Pickwick_. "You gratify me more than I can tell you," he wrote to Bulwer Lytton (July 1850), "by what you say about _Copperfield_, because I hope myself that some heretofore deficient qualities are there." If the power was not greater than in _Chuzzlewit_, the subject had more attractiveness; there was more variety of incident, with a freer play of character; and there was withal a suspicion, which though general and vague had sharpened interest not a little, that underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life. How much, was not known by the world until he had passed away. To be acquainted with English literature is to know, that, into its most famous prose fiction, autobiography has entered largely in disguise, and that the characters most familiar to us in the English novel had originals in actual life. Smollett never wrote a story that was not in some degree a recollection of his own adventures; and Fielding, who put something of his wife into all his heroines, had been as fortunate in finding, not Trulliber only, but Parson Adams himself, among his living experiences. To come later down, there was hardly any one ever known to Scott of whom his memory had not treasured up something to give minuter reality to the people of his fancy; and we know exactly whom to look for in Dandie Dinmont and Jonathan Oldbuck, in the office of Alan Fairford and the sick room of Crystal Croftangry. We are to observe also that it is never anything complete that is thus taken from life by a genuine writer, but only leading traits, or such as may give greater finish; that the fine artist will embody in his portraiture of one person his experiences of fifty; and that this would have been Fielding's answer to Trulliber if he had objected to the pigstye, and to Adams if he had sought to make a case of scandal out of the affair in Mrs. Slipslop's bedroom. Such questioning befell Dickens repeatedly in the course of his writings, where he freely followed, as we have seen, the method thus common to the masters in his art; but there was an instance of alleged wrong in the course of _Copperfield_ where he felt his vindication to be hardly complete, and what he did thereupon was characteristic. "I have had the queerest adventure this morning," he wrote (28th of December 1849) on the eve of his tenth number, "the receipt of the enclosed from Miss Moucher! It is serio-comic, but there is no doubt one is wrong in being tempted to such a use of power." Thinking a grotesque little oddity among his acquaintance to be safe from recognition, he had done what Smollett did sometimes, but never Fielding, and given way, in the first outburst of fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of figure and face amounting in effect to deformity. He was shocked at discovering the pain he had given, and a copy is before me of the assurances by way of reply which he at once sent to the complainant. That he was grieved and surprised beyond measure. That he had not intended her altogether. That all his characters, being made up out of many people, were composite, and never individual. That the chair (for table) and other matters were undoubtedly from her, but that other traits were not hers at all; and that in Miss Moucher's "Ain't I volatile" his friends had quite correctly recognized the favourite utterance of a different person. That he felt nevertheless he had done wrong, and would now do anything to repair it. That he had intended to employ the character in an unpleasant way, but he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, change it all, so that nothing but an agreeable impression should be left. The reader will remember how this was managed, and that the thirty-second chapter went far to undo what the twenty-second had done. A much earlier instance is the only one known to me where a character in one of his books intended to be odious was copied wholly from a living original. The use of such material, never without danger, might have been justifiable here if anywhere, and he had himself a satisfaction in always admitting the identity of Mr. Fang in _Oliver Twist_ with Mr. Laing of Hatton-garden. But the avowal of his purpose in that case, and his mode of setting about it, mark strongly a difference of procedure from that which, following great examples, he adopted in his later books. An allusion to a common friend in one of his letters of the present date--"A dreadful thought occurs to me! how brilliant in a book!"--expresses both the continued strength of his temptations and the dread he had brought himself to feel of immediately yielding to them; but he had no such misgivings in the days of _Oliver Twist_. Wanting an insolent and harsh police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original ready to his hand in one of the London offices; and instead of pursuing his later method of giving a personal appearance that should in some sort render difficult the identification of mental peculiarities, he was only eager to get in the whole man complete upon his page, figure and face as well as manners and mind. He wrote accordingly (from Doughty-street on the 3rd of June 1837) to Mr. Haines,[164] a gentleman who then had general supervision over the police reports for the daily papers. "In my next number of _Oliver Twist_ I must have a magistrate; and, casting about for a magistrate whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be _shown up_, I have as a necessary consequence stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton-garden celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly well; but as it would be necessary to describe his personal appearance also, I ought to have seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be) I have never done. In this dilemma it occurred to me that perhaps I might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-garden office for a few moments some morning. If you can further my object I shall be really very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity was found; the magistrate was brought up before the novelist; and shortly after, on some fresh outbreak of intolerable temper, the home-secretary found it an easy and popular step to remove Mr. Laing from the bench. This was a comfort to everybody, saving only the principal person; but the instance was highly exceptional, and it rarely indeed happens that to the individual objection natural in every such case some consideration should not be paid. In the book that followed _Copperfield_, two characters appeared having resemblances in manner and speech to two distinguished writers too vivid to be mistaken by their personal friends. To Lawrence Boythorn, under whom Landor figured, no objection was made; but Harold Skimpole, recognizable for Leigh Hunt, led to much remark; the difference being, that ludicrous traits were employed in the first to enrich without impairing an attractive person in the tale, whereas to the last was assigned a part in the plot which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Though a want of consideration was thus shown to the friend whom the character would be likely to recall to many readers, it is nevertheless very certain that the intention of Dickens was not at first, or at any time, an unkind one. He erred from thoughtlessness only. What led him to the subject at all, he has himself stated. Hunt's philosophy of moneyed obligations, always, though loudly, half jocosely proclaimed, and his ostentatious wilfulness in the humouring of that or any other theme on which he cared for the time to expatiate,[165] had so often seemed to Dickens to be whimsical and attractive that, wanting an "airy quality" for the man he invented, this of Hunt occurred to him; and "partly for that reason, and partly, he has since often grieved to think, for the pleasure it afforded to find a delightful manner reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend." This apology was made[166] after Hunt's death, and mentioned a revision of the first sketch, so as to render it less like, at the suggestion of two other friends of Hunt. The friends were Procter (Barry Cornwall) and myself; the feeling having been mine from the first that the likeness was too like. Procter did not immediately think so, but a little reflection brought him to that opinion. "You will see from the enclosed," Dickens wrote (17th of March 1852), "that Procter is much of my mind. I will nevertheless go through the character again in the course of the afternoon, and soften down words here and there." But before the day closed Procter had again written to him, and next morning this was the result. "I have again gone over every part of it very carefully, and I think I have made it much less like. I have also changed Leonard to Harold. I have no right to give Hunt pain, and I am so bent upon not doing it that I wish you would look at all the proof once more, and indicate any particular place in which you feel it particularly like. Whereupon I will alter that place." Upon the whole the alterations were considerable, but the radical wrong remained. The pleasant sparkling airy talk, which could not be mistaken, identified with odious qualities a friend only known to the writer by attractive ones; and for this there was no excuse. Perhaps the only person acquainted with the original who failed to recognize the copy, was the original himself (a common case); but good-natured friends in time told Hunt everything, and painful explanations followed, where nothing was possible to Dickens but what amounted to a friendly evasion of the points really at issue. The time for redress had gone. I yet well remember with what eager earnestness, on one of these occasions, he strove to set Hunt up again in his own esteem. "Separate in your own mind," he said to him, "what you see of yourself from what other people tell you that they see. As it has given you so much pain, I take it at its worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel I did wrong in doing it. I should otherwise have taken it at its best, and ridden off upon what I strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing in it that _should_ have given you pain. Every one in writing must speak from points of his experience, and so I of mine with you: but when I have felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and the most blotted parts of my MS. are those in which I have been striving hard to make the impression I was writing from, _un_like you. The diary-writing I took from Haydon, not from you. I now first learn from yourself that you ever set anything to music, and I could not have copied _that_ from you. The character is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty thousand people besides, and I did not fancy you would ever recognize it. Under similar disguises my own father and mother are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber." The distinction is that the foibles of Mr. Micawber and of Mrs. Nickleby, however laughable, make neither of them in speech or character less loveable; and that this is not to be said of Skimpole's. The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where near relatives are concerned. For what formerly was said of the Micawber resemblances, Dickens has been sharply criticized; and in like manner it was thought objectionable in Scott that for the closing scenes of Crystal Croftangry he should have found the original of his fretful patient at the death-bed of his own father. Lockhart, who tells us this, adds with a sad significance that he himself lived to see the curtain fall at Abbotsford upon even such another scene. But to no purpose will such objections still be made. All great novelists will continue to use their experiences of nature and fact, whencesoever derivable; and a remark made to Lockhart by Scott himself suggests their vindication. "If a man will paint from nature, he will be most likely to interest and amuse those who are daily looking at it." The Micawber offence otherwise was not grave. We have seen in what way Dickens was moved or inspired by the rough lessons of his boyhood, and the groundwork of the character was then undoubtedly laid; but the rhetorical exuberance impressed itself upon him later, and from this, as it expanded and developed in a thousand amusing ways, the full-length figure took its great charm. Better illustration of it could not perhaps be given than by passages from letters of Dickens, written long before Micawber was thought of, in which this peculiarity of his father found frequent and always agreeable expression. Several such have been given in this work from time to time, and one or two more may here be added. It is proper to preface them by saying that no one could know the elder Dickens without secretly liking him the better for these flourishes of speech, which adapted themselves so readily to his gloom as well as to his cheerfulness, that it was difficult not to fancy they had helped him considerably in both, and had rendered more tolerable to him, if also more possible, the shade and sunshine of his chequered life. "If you should have an opportunity _pendente lite_, as my father would observe--indeed did on some memorable ancient occasions when he informed me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at bay"--Dickens wrote in December 1847. "I have a letter from my father" (May 1841) "lamenting the fine weather, invoking congenial tempests, and informing me that it will not be possible for him to stay more than another year in Devonshire, as he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate Augustus's French." "There has arrived," he writes from the Peschiere in September 1844, "a characteristic letter for Kate from my father. He dates it Manchester, and says he has reason to believe that he will be in town with the pheasants, on or about the first of October. He has been with Fanny in the Isle of Man for nearly two months: finding there, as he goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every description of continental luxury at a cheap rate." Describing in the same year the departure from Genoa of an English physician and acquaintance, he adds: "We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice--or, as my father would say, to be deprived, to a certain extent, of the concomitant advantages, whatever they may be, resulting from his medical skill, such as it is, and his professional attendance, in so far as it may be so considered." Thus also it delighted Dickens to remember that it was of one of his connections his father wrote a celebrated sentence; "And I must express my tendency to believe that his longevity is (to say the least of it) extremely problematical:" and that it was to another, who had been insisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and nonconformist superiorities, he addressed words which deserve to be no less celebrated; "The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations." There was a laugh in the enjoyment of all this, no doubt, but with it much personal fondness; and the feeling of the creator of Micawber as he thus humoured and remembered the foibles of his original, found its counterpart in that of his readers for the creation itself, as its part was played out in the story. Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities. "The longer I live, the better man I think him," he exclaimed afterwards. The fact and the fancy had united whatever was most grateful to him in both. It is a tribute to the generally healthful and manly tone of the story of _Copperfield_ that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of Micawber over Skimpole is one of many indications of the inferiority of _Bleak House_ to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is genuine humour against personal satire. Between the worldly circumstances of the two, there is nothing to choose; but as to everything else it is the difference between shabbiness and greatness. Skimpole's sunny talk might be expected to please as much as Micawber's gorgeous speech, the design of both being to take the edge off poverty. But in the one we have no relief from attendant meanness or distress, and we drop down from the airiest fancies into sordidness and pain; whereas in the other nothing pitiful or merely selfish ever touches us. At its lowest depth of what is worst, we never doubt that something better must turn up; and of a man who sells his bedstead that he may entertain his friend, we altogether refuse to think nothing but badly. This is throughout the free and cheery style of _Copperfield_. The masterpieces of Dickens's humour are not in it; but he has nowhere given such variety of play to his invention, and the book is unapproached among his writings for its completeness of effect and uniform pleasantness of tone. What has to be said hereafter of those writings generally, will properly restrict what is said here, as in previous instances, mainly to personal illustration. The _Copperfield_ disclosures formerly made will for ever connect the book with the author's individual story; but too much has been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to warn the reader as to this. He can judge for himself how far the childish experiences are likely to have given the turn to Dickens's genius; whether their bitterness had so burnt into his nature, as, in the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war with injustice under every form displayed in his earliest books, to have reproduced itself only; and to what extent mere compassion for his own childhood may account for the strange fascination always exerted over him by child-suffering and sorrow. But, many as are the resemblances in Copperfield's adventures to portions of those of Dickens, and often as reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life, came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did. The language of the fiction reflects only faintly the narrative of the actual fact; and the man whose character it helped to form was expressed not less faintly in the impulsive impressionable youth, incapable of resisting the leading of others, and only disciplined into self-control by the later griefs of his entrance into manhood. Here was but another proof how thoroughly Dickens understood his calling, and that to weave fact with fiction unskilfully would be only to make truth less true. The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness to Dickens, even where intentional resemblance might seem to be prominent. Take autobiography as a design to show that any man's life may be as a mirror of existence to all men, and the individual career becomes altogether secondary to the variety of experiences received and rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood, and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him are more within control. Consider Copperfield thus in his proper place in the story, and sequence as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother, and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood; the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy's nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has had room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but David includes far less than this, and infinitely more. That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of Dickens's novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishable people, and a prodigal wealth of detail; but unity of drift or purpose is apparent always, and the tone is uniformly right. By the course of the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable; and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. It is easy thus to account for the supreme popularity of _Copperfield_, without the addition that it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself. Childhood and youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences. Mr. Micawber's presence must not prevent my saying that it does not take the lead of the other novels in humorous creation; but in the use of humour to bring out prominently the ludicrous in any object or incident without excluding or weakening its most enchanting sentiment, it stands decidedly first. It is the perfection of English mirth. We are apt to resent the exhibition of too much goodness, but it is here so qualified by oddity as to become not merely palatable but attractive; and even pathos is heightened by what in other hands would only make it comical. That there are also faults in the book is certain, but none that are incompatible with the most masterly qualities; and a book becomes everlasting by the fact, not that faults are not in it, but that genius nevertheless is there. Of its method, and its author's generally, in the delineation of character, something will have to be said on a later page. The author's own favourite people in it, I think, were the Peggotty group; and perhaps he was not far wrong. It has been their fate, as with all the leading figures of his invention, to pass their names into the language, and become types; and he has nowhere given happier embodiment to that purity of homely goodness, which, by the kindly and all-reconciling influences of humour, may exalt into comeliness and even grandeur the clumsiest forms of humanity. What has been indicated in the style of the book as its greatest charm is here felt most strongly. The ludicrous so helps the pathos, and the humour so uplifts and refines the sentiment, that mere rude affection and simple manliness in these Yarmouth boatmen, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and heroic endurance, take forms half-chivalrous half-sublime. It is one of the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at the close of _Copperfield_, when the body of the seducer is flung dead upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious of what he had failed to reach as the other of what he has perished to save, is a description that may compare with the most impressive in the language. There are other people drawn into this catastrophe who are among the failures of natural delineation in the book. But though Miss Dartle is curiously unpleasant, there are some natural traits in her (which Dickens's least life-like people are never without); and it was from one of his lady friends, very familiar to him indeed, he copied her peculiarity of never saying anything outright, but hinting it merely, and making more of it that way. Of Mrs. Steerforth it may also be worth remembering that Thackeray had something of a fondness for her. "I knew how it would be when I began," says a pleasant letter all about himself written immediately after she appeared in the story. "My letters to my mother are like this, but then she likes 'em--like Mrs. Steerforth: don't you like Mrs. Steerforth?" Turning to another group there is another elderly lady to be liked without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect womanhood. Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and truth all round, than Betsey Trotwood. It is one of her oddities to have a fool for a companion; but this is one of them that has also most pertinence and wisdom. By a line thrown out in _Wilhelm Meister_, that the true way of treating the insane was, in all respects possible, to act to them as if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs. Trotwood does for Mr. Dick goes a step farther, by showing how often asylums might be dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient intellects manageable with patience in their own homes. Characters hardly less distinguishable for truth as well as oddity are the kind old nurse and her husband the carrier, whose vicissitudes alike of love and of mortality are condensed into the three words since become part of universal speech, _Barkis is willin'_. There is wholesome satire of much utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the vampire propensity of the town undertaker in _Chuzzlewit_, that he dares not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters that are unlike than in distinguishing those that are like; and to many examples of the art in Dickens, such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr. Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs, Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr. Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and, amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the coffin is heard. Of the heroines who divide so equally between them the impulsive, easily swayed, not disloyal but sorely distracted affections of the hero, the spoilt foolishness and tenderness of the loving little child-wife, Dora, is more attractive than the too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing goodness of the angel-wife, Agnes. The scenes of the courtship and housekeeping are matchless; and the glimpses of Doctors' Commons, opening those views, by Mr. Spenlow, of man's vanity of expectation and inconsistency of conduct in neglecting the sacred duty of making a will, on which he largely moralizes the day before he dies intestate, form a background highly appropriate to David's domesticities. This was among the reproductions of personal experience in the book; but it was a sadder knowledge that came with the conviction some years later, that David's contrasts in his earliest married life between his happiness enjoyed and his happiness once anticipated, the "vague unhappy loss or want of something" of which he so frequently complains, reflected also a personal experience which had not been supplied in fact so successfully as in fiction. (A closing word may perhaps be allowed, to connect with Devonshire-terrace the last book written there. On the page opposite is engraved a drawing by Maclise of the house where so many of Dickens's masterpieces were composed, done on the first anniversary of the day when his daughter Kate was born.) _Bleak House_ followed _Copperfield_, which in some respects it copied in the autobiographical form by means of extracts from the personal relation of its heroine. But the distinction between the narrative of David and the diary of Esther, like that between Micawber and Skimpole, marks the superiority of the first to its successor. To represent a storyteller as giving the most surprising vividness to manners, motives, and characters of which we are to believe her, all the time, as artlessly unconscious, as she is also entirely ignorant of the good qualities in herself she is naïvely revealing in the story, was a difficult enterprise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success, and certainly not successful. Ingenuity is more apparent than freshness, the invention is neither easy nor unstrained, and though the old marvellous power over the real is again abundantly manifest, there is some alloy of the artificial. Nor can this be said of Esther's relation without some general application to the book of which it forms so large a part. The novel is nevertheless, in the very important particular of construction, perhaps the best thing done by Dickens. [Illustration: DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.] In his later writings he had been assiduously cultivating this essential of his art, and here he brought it very nearly to perfection. Of the tendency of composing a story piecemeal to induce greater concern for the part than for the whole, he had been always conscious; but I remember a remark also made by him to the effect that to read a story in parts had no less a tendency to prevent the reader's noticing how thoroughly a work so presented might be calculated for perusal as a whole. Look back from the last to the first page of the present novel, and not even in the highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will it be found, that event leads more closely to event, or that the separate incidents have been planned with a more studied consideration of the bearing they are severally to have on the general result. Nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn. The heart of the story is a Chancery suit. On this the plot hinges, and on incidents connected with it, trivial or important, the passion and suffering turn exclusively. Chance words, or the deeds of chance people, to appearance irrelevant, are found everywhere influencing the course taken by a train of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery, to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little law-stationer's servant help directly in the chain of small things that lead indirectly to Lady Dedlock's death. One strong chain of interest holds together Chesney Wold and its inmates, Bleak House and the Jarndyce group, Chancery with its sorry and sordid neighbourhood. The characters multiply as the tale advances, but in each the drift is the same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." _Edax rerum_ the motto of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story are sensibly affected, and to which Chancery itself might have succumbed if its devouring capacities had been less complete. But by the time there is found among the lumber the will which puts all to rights in the Jarndyce suit, it is found to be too late to put anything to rights. The costs have swallowed up the estate, and there is an end of the matter. What in one sense is a merit however may in others be a defect, and this book has suffered by the very completeness with which its Chancery moral is worked out. The didactic in Dickens's earlier novels derived its strength from being merely incidental to interest of a higher and more permanent kind, and not in a small degree from the playful sportiveness and fancy that lighted up its graver illustrations. Here it is of sterner stuff, too little relieved, and all-pervading. The fog so marvellously painted in the opening chapter has hardly cleared away when there arises, in _Jarndyce_ v. _Jarndyce_, as bad an atmosphere to breathe in; and thenceforward to the end, clinging round the people of the story as they come or go, in dreary mist or in heavy cloud, it is rarely absent. Dickens has himself described his purpose to have been to dwell on the romantic side of familiar things. But it is the romance of discontent and misery, with a very restless dissatisfied moral, and is too much brought about by agencies disagreeable and sordid. The Guppys, Weevles, Snagsbys, Chadbands, Krooks, and Smallweeds, even the Kenges, Vholeses, and Tulkinghorns, are much too real to be pleasant; and the necessity becomes urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced tender-souled Chancery victim, Gridley; the poor good-hearted youth Richard, broken up in life and character by the suspense of the Chancery suit on whose success he is to "begin the world," believing himself to be saving money when he is stopped from squandering it, and thinking that having saved it he is entitled to fling it away; trooper George, with the Bagnets and their household, where the most ludicrous points are more forcible for the pathetic touches underlying them; the Jellyby interior, and its philanthropic strong-minded mistress, placid and smiling amid a household muddle outmuddling Chancery itself; the model of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and especially the last, have been added by this book to the list of people more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual familiar acquaintance whom we see around us living and dying. But how do we know them? There are plenty to tell us that it is by vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of character, by manifestation outwardly rather than by what lies behind. Another opportunity will present itself for some remark on this kind of criticism, which has always had a special pride in the subtlety of its differences from what the world may have shown itself prone to admire. "In my father's library," wrote Landor to Southey's daughter Edith, "was the _Critical Review_ from its commencement; and it would have taught me, if I could not even at a very early age teach myself better, that Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith were really worth nothing." It is a style that will never be without cultivators, and its frequent application to Dickens will be shown hereafter. But in speaking of a book in which some want of all the freshness of his genius first became apparent, it would be wrong to omit to add that his method of handling a character is as strongly impressed on the better portions of it as on the best of his writings. It is difficult to say when a peculiarity becomes too grotesque, or an extravagance too farcical, to be within the limits of art, for it is the truth of these as of graver things that they exist in the world in just the proportions and degree in which genius can discover them. But no man had ever so surprising a faculty as Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing; and of entering into mental phases and processes so absolutely, in conditions of life the most varied, as to reproduce them completely in dialogue without need of an explanatory word. (He only departed from this method once, with a result which will then be pointed out.) In speaking on a former page of the impression of reality thus to a singular degree conveyed by him, it was remarked that where characters so revealed themselves the author's part in them was done; and in the book under notice there is none, not excepting those least attractive which apparently present only prominent or salient qualities, in which it will not be found that the characteristic feature embodied, or the main idea personified, contains as certainly also some human truth universally applicable. To expound or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and other tissues, was not at all Dickens's way. His genius was his fellow feeling with his race; his mere personality was never the bound or limit to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might colour them; he never stopped to dissect or anatomize his own work; but no man could better adjust the outward and visible oddities in a delineation to its inner and unchangeable veracities. The rough estimates we form of character, if we have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct: but men touch and interfere with one another by the contact of their extremes, and it may very often become necessarily the main business of a novelist to display the salient points, the sharp angles, or the prominences merely. The pathetic parts of _Bleak House_ do not live largely in remembrance, but the deaths of Richard and of Gridley, the wandering fancies of Miss Flite, and the extremely touching way in which the gentleman-nature of the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example, taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been reading _Bleak House_ aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is _there_ indeed; the intimations of true heart-feeling, the glimmerings of higher feeling, all are there; but everything still consistent and in harmony. Wonderful is the genius that can show all this, yet keep it only and really part of the character itself, low or common as it may be, and use no morbid or fictitious colouring. To my mind, nothing in the field of fiction is to be found in English literature surpassing the death of Jo!" What occurs at and after the inquest is as worth remembering. Jo's evidence is rejected because he cannot exactly say what will be done to him after he is dead if he should tell a lie;[167] but he manages to say afterwards very exactly what the deceased while he lived did to him. That one cold winter night, when he was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, a man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having questioned him and found he had not a friend in the world, said, "Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since, and asked him if he slept of a night, and how he bore cold and hunger, or if he ever wished to die; and would say in passing "I am as poor as you to-day, Jo" when he had no money, but when he had any would always give some. "He wos wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos werry good to me, he wos!" The inquest over, the body is flung into a pestiferous churchyard in the next street, houses overlooking it on every side, and a reeking little tunnel of a court giving access to its iron gate. "With the night, comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court, to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands, and looks in within the bars; stands looking in, for a little while. It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step, and makes the archway clean. It does so, very busily, and trimly; looks in again, a little while; and so departs." These are among the things in Dickens that cannot be forgotten; and if _Bleak House_ had many more faults than have been found in it, such salt and savour as this might freshen it for some generations. The first intention was to have made Jo more prominent in the story, and its earliest title was taken from the tumbling tenements in Chancery, "Tom-all-Alone's," where he finds his wretched habitation; but this was abandoned. On the other hand, Dickens was encouraged and strengthened in his design of assailing Chancery abuses and delays by receiving, a few days after the appearance of his first number, a striking pamphlet on the subject containing details so apposite that he took from them, without change in any material point, the memorable case related in his fifteenth chapter. Any one who examines the tract[168] will see how exactly true is the reference to it made by Dickens in his preface. "The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end." The suit, of which all particulars are given, affected a single farm, in value not more than £1200, but all that its owner possessed in the world, against which a bill had been filed for a £300 legacy left in the will bequeathing the farm. In reality there was only one defendant, but in the bill, by the rule of the Court, there were seventeen; and, after two years had been occupied over the seventeen answers, everything had to begin over again because an eighteenth had been accidentally omitted. "What a mockery of justice this is," says Mr. Challinor, "the facts speak for themselves, and I can personally vouch for their accuracy. The costs already incurred in reference to this £300 legacy are not less than from £800 to £900, and the parties are no forwarder. Already near five years have passed by, and the plaintiff would be glad to give up his chance of the legacy if he could escape from his liability to costs, while the defendants who own the little farm left by the testator, have scarce any other prospect before them than ruin." FOOTNOTES: [164] This letter is now in the possession of S. R. Goodman Esq. of Brighton. [165] Here are two passages taken from Hunt's writing in the _Tatler_ (a charming little paper which it was one of the first ventures of the young firm of Chapman and Hall to attempt to establish for Hunt in 1830), to which accident had unluckily attracted Dickens's notice:--"Supposing us to be in want of patronage, and in possession of talent enough to make it an honour to notice us, we would much rather have some great and comparatively private friend, rich enough to assist us, and amiable enough to render obligation delightful, than become the public property of any man, or of any government. . . . If a divinity had given us our choice we should have said--make us La Fontaine, who goes and lives twenty years with some rich friend, as innocent of any harm in it as a child, and who writes what he thinks charming verses, sitting all day under a tree." Such sayings will not bear to be deliberately read and thought over, but any kind of extravagance or oddity came from Hunt's lips with a curious fascination. There was surely never a man of so sunny a nature, who could draw so much pleasure from common things, or to whom books were a world so real, so exhaustless, so delightful. I was only seventeen when I derived from him the tastes which have been the solace of all subsequent years, and I well remember the last time I saw him at Hammersmith, not long before his death in 1859, when, with his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbé. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged sensuous and voluptuous qualities. [166] In a paper in _All the Year Round_. [167] "O! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy!--But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for _him. He_ don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. _He_ can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentleman here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the truth. 'This won't do, gentlemen,' says the coroner, with a melancholy shake of the head. . . . '_Can't exactly say_ won't do, you know. . . . It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.' Boy put aside; to the great edification of the audience;--especially of Little Swills, the Comic Vocalist." [168] By W. Challinor Esq. of Leek in Staffordshire, by whom it has been obligingly sent to me, with a copy of Dickens's letter acknowledging the receipt of it from the author on the 11th of March 1852. On the first of that month the first number of _Bleak House_ had appeared, but two numbers of it were then already written. CHAPTER II. HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES. 1853-1854-1855. _Bleak House_ Sale--Proposed Titles--Restless--Tavistock House--Last Child born--Death of Friends--Liking for Boulogne--Banquet at Birmingham--Self-changes--Overdoing it--Projected Trip to Italy--First Public Readings--Argument against Paid Readings--Children's Theatricals--Small Actors--Henry Fielding Dickens--Dickens and the Czar--Titles for a New Story--"Hard Times" chosen--Difficulties of Weekly Publication--Mr. Ruskin on _Hard Times_--Exaggerated Rebuke of Exaggeration--Manufacturing Town on Strike--Dinner to Thackeray--Peter Cunningham--Incident of a November Night. _DAVID COPPERFIELD_ had been written, in Devonshire-terrace for the most part, between the opening of 1849 and October 1850, its publication covering that time; and its sale, which has since taken the lead of all his books but _Pickwick_, never then exceeding twenty-five thousand. But though it remained thus steady for the time, the popularity of the book added largely to the sale of its successor. _Bleak House_ was begun in his new abode of Tavistock House at the end of November 1851; was carried on, amid the excitements of the Guild performances, through the following year; was finished at Boulogne in the August of 1853; and was dedicated to "his friends and companions in the Guild of Literature and Art." [Illustration: TAVISTOCK HOUSE.] In March 1852 the first number appeared,[169] and its sale was mentioned in the same letter from Tavistock House (7th of March) which told of his troubles in the story at its outset, and of other anxieties incident to the common lot and inseparable equally from its joys and sorrows, through which his life was passing at the time. "My Highgate journey yesterday was a sad one. Sad to think how all journeys tend that way. I went up to the cemetery to look for a piece of ground. In no hope of a Government bill,[170] and in a foolish dislike to leaving the little child shut up in a vault there, I think of pitching a tent under the sky. . . . Nothing has taken place here: but I believe, every hour, that it must next hour. Wild ideas are upon me of going to Paris--Rouen--Switzerland--somewhere--and writing the remaining two-thirds of the next No. aloft in some queer inn room. I have been hanging over it, and have got restless. Want a change I think. Stupid. We were at 30,000 when I last heard. . . . I am sorry to say that after all kinds of evasions, I am obliged to dine at Lansdowne House to-morrow. But maybe the affair will come off to-night and give me an excuse! I enclose proofs of No. 2. Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him singularly unlike the great original. Look it over, and say what occurs to you. . . . Don't you think Mrs. Gaskell charming? With one ill-considered thing that looks like a want of natural perception, I think it masterly." His last allusion is to the story by a delightful writer then appearing in _Household Words_; and of the others it only needs to say that the family affair which might have excused his absence at the Lansdowne dinner did not come off until four days later. On the 13th of March his last child was born; and the boy, his seventh son, bears his godfather's distinguished name, Edward Bulwer Lytton. The inability to "grind sparks out of his dull blade," as he characterized his present labour at _Bleak House_, still fretting him, he struck out a scheme for Paris. "I could not get to Switzerland very well at this time of year. The Jura would be covered with snow. And if I went to Geneva I don't know where I might _not_ go to." It ended at last in a flight to Dover; but he found time before he left, amid many occupations and some anxieties, for a good-natured journey to Walworth to see a youth rehearse who was supposed to have talents for the stage, and he was able to gladden Mr. Toole's friends by thinking favourably of his chances of success. "I remember what I once myself wanted in that way," he said, "and I should like to serve him." At one of the last dinners in Tavistock House before his departure, Mr. Watson of Rockingham was present; and he was hardly settled in Camden-crescent, Dover, when he had news of the death of that excellent friend. "Poor dear Watson! It was this day two weeks when you rode with us and he dined with us. We all remarked after he had gone how happy he seemed to have got over his election troubles, and how cheerful he was. He was full of Christmas plans for Rockingham, and was very anxious that we should get up a little French piece I had been telling him the plot of. He went abroad next day to join Mrs. Watson and the children at Homburg, and then go to Lausanne, where they had taken a house for a month. He was seized at Homburg with violent internal inflammation, and died--without much pain--in four days. . . . I was so fond of him that I am sorry you didn't know him better. I believe he was as thoroughly good and true a man as ever lived; and I am sure I can have felt no greater affection for him than he felt for me. When I think of that bright house, and his fine simple honest heart, both so open to me, the blank and loss are like a dream." Other deaths followed. "Poor d'Orsay!" he wrote after only seven days (8th of August). "It is a tremendous consideration that friends should fall around us in such awful numbers as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has ripened. But _this_ is all a Dream, may be, and death will wake us." Able at last to settle to his work, he stayed in Dover three months; and early in October, sending home his family caravan, crossed to Boulogne to try it as a resort for seaside holiday. "I never saw a better instance of our countrymen than this place. Because it is accessible it is genteel to say it is of no character, quite English, nothing continental about it, and so forth. It is as quaint, picturesque, good a place as I know; the boatmen and fishing-people quite a race apart, and some of their villages as good as the fishing-villages on the Mediterranean. The Haute Ville, with a walk all round it on the ramparts, charming. The country walks, delightful. It is the best mixture of town and country (with sea air into the bargain) I ever saw; everything cheap, everything good; and please God I shall be writing on those said ramparts next July!" Before the year closed, the time to which his publishing arrangements with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans were limited had expired, but at his suggestion the fourth share in such books as he might write, which they had now received for eight years, was continued to them on the understanding that the publishers' percentage should no longer be charged in the partnership accounts, and with a power reserved to himself to withdraw when he pleased. In the new year his first adventure was an ovation in Birmingham, where a silver-gilt salver and a diamond ring were presented to him, as well for eloquent service specially rendered to the Institution, as in general testimony of "varied literary acquirements, genial philosophy, and high moral teaching." A great banquet followed on Twelfth Night, made memorable by an offer[171] to give a couple of readings from his books at the following Christmas, in aid of the new Midland Institute. It might seem to have been drawn from him as a grateful return for the enthusiastic greeting of his entertainers, but it was in his mind before he left London. It was his first formal undertaking to read in public. His eldest son had now left Eton, and, the boy's wishes pointing at the time to a mercantile career, he was sent to Leipzig for completion of his education.[172] At this date it seemed to me that the overstrain of attempting too much, brought upon him by the necessities of his weekly periodical, became first apparent in Dickens. Not unfrequently a complaint strange upon his lips fell from him. "Hypochondriacal whisperings tell me that I am rather overworked. The spring does not seem to fly back again directly, as it always did when I put my own work aside, and had nothing else to do. Yet I have everything to keep me going with a brave heart, Heaven knows!" Courage and hopefulness he might well derive from the increasing sale of _Bleak House_, which had risen to nearly forty thousand; but he could no longer bear easily what he carried so lightly of old, and enjoyments with work were too much for him. "What with _Bleak House_, and _Household Words_, and _Child's History_" (he dictated from week to week the papers which formed that little book, and cannot be said to have quite hit the mark with it), "and Miss Coutts's Home, and the invitations to feasts and festivals, I really feel as if my head would split like a fired shell if I remained here." He tried Brighton first, but did not find it answer, and returned.[173] A few days of unalloyed enjoyment were afterwards given to the visit of his excellent American friend Felton; and on the 13th of June he was again in Boulogne, thanking heaven for escape from a breakdown. "If I had substituted anybody's knowledge of myself for my own, and lingered in London, I never could have got through." What befell him in Boulogne will be given, with the incidents of his second and third summer visits to the place, on a later page. He completed, by the third week of August, his novel of _Bleak House_; and it was resolved to celebrate the event by a two months' trip to Italy, in company with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg. The start was to be made from Boulogne in the middle of October, when he would send his family home; and he described the intervening weeks as a fearful "reaction and prostration of laziness" only broken by the _Child's History_. At the end of September he wrote: "I finished the little _History_ yesterday, and am trying to think of something for the Christmas number. After which I shall knock off; having had quite enough to do, small as it would have seemed to me at any other time, since I finished _Bleak House_." He added, a week before his departure: "I get letters from Genoa and Lausanne as if I were going to stay in each place at least a month. If I were to measure my deserts by people's remembrance of me, I should be a prodigy of intolerability. Have recovered my Italian, which I had all but forgotten, and am one entire and perfect chrysolite of idleness." From this trip, of which the incidents have an interest independent of my ordinary narrative, Dickens was home again in the middle of December 1853, and kept his promise to his Birmingham friends by reading in their Town Hall his _Christmas Carol_ on the 27th,[174] and his _Cricket on the Hearth_ on the 29th. The enthusiasm was great, and he consented to read his _Carol_ a second time, on Friday the 30th, if seats were reserved for working men at prices within their means. The result was an addition of between four and five hundred pounds to the funds for establishment of the new Institute; and a prettily worked flower-basket in silver, presented to Mrs. Dickens, commemorated these first public readings "to nearly six thousand people," and the design they had generously helped. Other applications then followed to such extent that limits to compliance had to be put; and a letter of the 16th of May 1854 is one of many that express both the difficulty in which he found himself, and his much desired expedient for solving it. "The objection you suggest to paid public lecturing does not strike me at all. It is worth consideration, but I do not think there is anything in it. On the contrary, if the lecturing would have any motive power at all (like my poor father this, in the sound!) I believe it would tend the other way. In the Colchester matter I had already received a letter from a Colchester magnate; to whom I had honestly replied that I stood pledged to Christmas readings at Bradford[175] and at Reading, and could in no kind of reason do more in the public way." The promise to the people of Reading was for Talfourd's sake; the other was given after the Birmingham nights, when an institute in Bradford asked similar help, and offered a fee of fifty pounds. At first this was entertained; but was abandoned, with some reluctance, upon the argument that to become publicly a reader must alter without improving his position publicly as a writer, and that it was a change to be justified only when the higher calling should have failed of the old success. Thus yielding for the time, he nevertheless soon found the question rising again with the same importunity; his own position to it being always that of a man assenting against his will that it should rest in abeyance. But nothing farther was resolved on yet. The readings mentioned came off as promised, in aid of public objects;[176] and besides others two years later for the family of a friend, he had given the like liberal help to institutes in Folkestone, Chatham, and again in Birmingham, Peterborough, Sheffield, Coventry, and Edinburgh, before the question settled itself finally in the announcement for paid public readings issued by him in 1858. Carrying memory back to his home in the first half of 1854, there are few things that rise more pleasantly in connection with it than the children's theatricals. These began with the first Twelfth Night at Tavistock House, and were renewed until the principal actors ceased to be children. The best of the performances were _Tom Thumb_ and _Fortunio_, in '54 and '55; Dickens now joining first in the revel, and Mr. Mark Lemon bringing into it his own clever children and a very mountain of child-pleasing fun in himself. Dickens had become very intimate with him, and his merry genial ways had given him unbounded popularity with the "young 'uns," who had no such favourite as "Uncle Mark." In Fielding's burlesque he was the giantess Glumdalca, and Dickens was the ghost of Gaffer Thumb; the names by which they respectively appeared being the Infant Phenomenon and the Modern Garrick. But the younger actors carried off the palm. There was a Lord Grizzle, at whose ballad of Miss Villikins, introduced by desire, Thackeray rolled off his seat in a burst of laughter that became absurdly contagious. Yet even this, with hardly less fun from the Noodles, Doodles, and King Arthurs, was not so good as the pretty, fantastic, comic grace of Dollalolla, Huncamunca, and Tom. The girls wore steadily the grave airs irresistible when put on by little children; and an actor not out of his fourth year, who went through the comic songs and the tragic exploits without a wrong note or a victim unslain, represented the small helmeted hero. He was in the bills as Mr. H----, but bore in fact the name of the illustrious author whose conception he embodied; and who certainly would have hugged him for Tom's opening song, delivered in the arms of Huncamunca, if he could have forgiven the later master in his own craft for having composed it afresh to the air of a ditty then wildly popular at the "Coal Hole."[177] The encores were frequent, and for the most part the little fellow responded to them; but the misplaced enthusiasm that took similar form at the heroic intensity with which he stabbed Dollalolla, he rebuked by going gravely on to the close. His Fortunio, the next Twelfth Night, was not so great; yet when, as a prelude to getting the better of the Dragon, he adulterated his drink (Mr. Lemon played the Dragon) with sherry, the sly relish with which he watched the demoralization, by this means, of his formidable adversary into a helpless imbecility, was perfect. Here Dickens played the testy old Baron, and took advantage of the excitement against the Czar raging in 1855 to denounce him (in a song) as no other than own cousin to the very Bear that Fortunio had gone forth to subdue. He depicted him, in his desolation of autocracy, as the Robinson Crusoe of absolute state, who had at his court many a show-day and many a high-day, but hadn't in all his dominions a Friday.[178] The bill, which attributed these interpolations to "the Dramatic Poet of the Establishment," deserves also mention for the fun of the six large-lettered announcements which stood at the head of it, and could not have been bettered by Mr. Crummles himself. "Re-engagement of that irresistible comedian" (the performer of Lord Grizzle) "Mr. Ainger!" "Reappearance of Mr. H. who created so powerful an impression last year!" "Return of Mr. Charles Dickens Junior from his German engagements!" "Engagement of Miss Kate, who declined the munificent offers of the Management last season!" "Mr. Passé, Mr. Mudperiod, Mr. Measly Servile, and Mr. Wilkini Collini!" "First appearance on any stage of Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter (who has been kept out of bed at a vast expense)." The last performer mentioned[179] was yet at some distance from the third year of his age. Dickens was Mr. Passé. Gravities were mixed with these gaieties. "I wish you would look" (20th of January 1854) "at the enclosed titles for the _H. W._ story, between this and two o'clock or so, when I will call. It is my usual day, you observe, on which I have jotted them down--Friday! It seems to me that there are three very good ones among them. I should like to know whether you hit upon the same." On the paper enclosed was written: 1. According to Cocker. 2. Prove it. 3. Stubborn Things. 4. Mr. Gradgrind's Facts. 5. The Grindstone. 6. Hard Times. 7. Two and Two are Four. 8. Something Tangible. 9. Our Hard-headed Friend. 10. Rust and Dust. 11. Simple Arithmetic. 12. A Matter of Calculation. 13. A Mere Question of Figures. 14. The Gradgrind Philosophy.[180] The three selected by me were 2, 6, and 11; the three that were his own favourites were 6, 13, and 14; and as 6 had been chosen by both, that title was taken. It was the first story written by him for _Household Words_; and in the course of it the old troubles of the _Clock_ came back, with the difference that the greater brevity of the weekly portions made it easier to write them up to time, but much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each. "The difficulty of the space," he wrote after a few weeks' trial, "is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room always, and open places in perspective. In this form, with any kind of regard to the current number, there is absolutely no such thing." He went on, however; and, of the two designs he started with, accomplished one very perfectly and the other at least partially. He more than doubled the circulation of his journal; and he wrote a story which, though not among his best, contains things as characteristic as any he has written. I may not go as far as Mr. Ruskin in giving it a high place; but to anything falling from that writer, however one may differ from it, great respect is due, and every word here said of Dickens's intention is in the most strict sense just.[181] "The essential value and truth of Dickens's writings," he says, "have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because Dickens's caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in _Hard Times_, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest he has written) is with many persons seriously diminished, because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens's wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially _Hard Times_, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told."[182] The best points in it, out of the circle of stage fire (an expression of wider application to this part of Dickens's life than its inventor supposed it to be), were the sketches of the riding-circus people and the Bounderby household; but it is a wise hint of Mr. Ruskin's that there may be, in the drift of a story, truths of sufficient importance to set against defects of workmanship; and here they challenged wide attention. You cannot train any one properly, unless you cultivate the fancy, and allow fair scope to the affections. You cannot govern men on a principle of averages; and to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market is not the _summum bonum_ of life. You cannot treat the working man fairly unless, in dealing with his wrongs and his delusions, you take equally into account the simplicity and tenacity of his nature, arising partly from limited knowledge, but more from honesty and singleness of intention. Fiction cannot prove a case, but it can express forcibly a righteous sentiment; and this is here done unsparingly upon matters of universal concern. The book was finished at Boulogne in the middle of July,[183] and is inscribed to Carlyle. An American admirer accounted for the vivacity of the circus-scenes by declaring that Dickens had "arranged with the master of Astley's Circus to spend many hours behind the scenes with the riders and among the horses;" a thing just as likely as that he went into training as a stroller to qualify for Mr. Crummles in _Nickleby_. Such successes belonged to the experiences of his youth; he had nothing to add to what his marvellous observation had made familiar from almost childish days; and the glimpses we get of them in the _Sketches by Boz_ are in these points as perfect as anything his later experience could supply. There was one thing nevertheless which the choice of his subject made him anxious to verify while _Hard Times_ was in hand; and this was a strike in a manufacturing town. He went to Preston to see one at the end of January, and was somewhat disappointed. "I am afraid I shall not be able to get much here. Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the placards pro and con; and the cold absence of smoke from the mill-chimneys; there is very little in the streets to make the town remarkable. I am told that the people 'sit at home and mope.' The delegates with the money from the neighbouring places come in to-day to report the amounts they bring; and to-morrow the people are paid. When I have seen both these ceremonies, I shall return. It is a nasty place (I thought it was a model town); and I am in the Bull Hotel, before which some time ago the people assembled supposing the masters to be here, and on demanding to have them out were remonstrated with by the landlady in person. I saw the account in an Italian paper, in which it was stated that 'the populace then environed the Palazzo Bull, until the padrona of the Palazzo heroically appeared at one of the upper windows and addressed them!' One can hardly conceive anything less likely to be represented to an Italian mind by this description, than the old, grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red brick house with a narrow gateway and a dingy yard, to which it applies. At the theatre last night I saw _Hamlet_, and should have done better to 'sit at home and mope' like the idle workmen. In the last scene, Laertes on being asked how it was with him replied (verbatim) 'Why, like a woodcock--on account of my treachery.'" (29th Jan.) The home incidents of the summer and autumn of 1855 may be mentioned briefly. It was a year of much unsettled discontent with him, and upon return from a short trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins, he flung himself rather hotly into agitation with the administrative reformers,[184] and spoke at one of the great meetings in Drury-lane Theatre. In the following month (April) he took occasion, even from the chair of the General Theatrical Fund, to give renewed expression to political dissatisfactions.[185] In the summer he threw open to many friends his Tavistock House Theatre, having secured for its "lessee and manager Mr. Crummles;" for its poet Mr. Wilkie Collins, in an "entirely new and original domestic melodrama;" and for its scene-painter "Mr. Stanfield, R.A."[186] _The Lighthouse_, by Mr. Wilkie Collins, was then produced, its actors being Mr. Crummles the manager (Dickens in other words), the Author of the play, Mr. Lemon and Mr. Egg, and the manager's sister-in-law and eldest daughter. It was followed by the Guild farce of _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_, in which besides the performers named, and Dickens in his old personation part, the manager's youngest daughter and Mr. Frank Stone assisted. The success was wonderful; and in the three delighted audiences who crowded to what the bills described as "the smallest theatre in the world," were not a few of the notabilities of London. Mr. Carlyle compared Dickens's wild picturesqueness in the old lighthouse keeper to the famous figure in Nicholas Poussin's bacchanalian dance in the National Gallery; and at one of the joyous suppers that followed on each night of the play, Lord Campbell told the company that he had much rather have written _Pickwick_ than be Chief Justice of England and a peer of parliament.[187] Then came the beginning of _Nobody's Fault_, as _Little Dorrit_ continued to be called by him up to the eve of its publication; a flight to Folkestone to help his sluggish fancy; and his return to London in October to preside at a dinner to Thackeray on his going to lecture in America. It was a muster of more than sixty admiring entertainers, and Dickens's speech gave happy expression to the spirit that animated all, telling Thackeray not alone how much his friendship was prized by those present, and how proud they were of his genius, but offering him in the name of the tens of thousands absent who had never touched his hand or seen his face, life-long thanks for the treasures of mirth, wit, and wisdom within the yellow-covered numbers of _Pendennis_ and _Vanity Fair_. Peter Cunningham, one of the sons of Allan, was secretary to the banquet; and for many pleasures given to the subject of this memoir, who had a hearty regard for him, should have a few words to his memory. His presence was always welcome to Dickens, and indeed to all who knew him, for his relish of social life was great, and something of his keen enjoyment could not but be shared by his company. His geniality would have carried with it a pleasurable glow even if it had stood alone, and it was invigorated by very considerable acquirements. He had some knowledge of the works of eminent authors and artists; and he had an eager interest in their lives and haunts, which he had made the subject of minute and novel enquiry. This store of knowledge gave substance to his talk, yet never interrupted his buoyancy and pleasantry, because only introduced when called for, and not made matter of parade or display. But the happy combination of qualities that rendered him a favourite companion, and won him many friends, proved in the end injurious to himself. He had done much while young in certain lines of investigation which he had made almost his own, and there was every promise that, in the department of biographical and literary research, he would have produced much weightier works with advancing years. This however was not to be. The fascinations of good fellowship encroached more and more upon literary pursuits, until he nearly abandoned his former favourite studies, and sacrificed all the deeper purposes of his life to the present temptation of a festive hour. Then his health gave way, and he became lost to friends as well as to literature. But the impression of the bright and amiable intercourse of his better time survived, and his old associates never ceased to think of Peter Cunningham with regret and kindness. Dickens went to Paris early in October, and at its close was brought again to London by the sudden death of a friend, much deplored by himself, and still more so by a distinguished lady who had his loyal service at all times. An incident before his return to France is worth brief relation. He had sallied out for one of his night walks, full of thoughts of his story, one wintery rainy evening (the 8th of November), and "pulled himself up," outside the door of Whitechapel Workhouse, at a strange sight which arrested him there. Against the dreary enclosure of the house were leaning, in the midst of the downpouring rain and storm, what seemed to be seven heaps of rags: "dumb, wet, silent horrors" he described them, "sphinxes set up against that dead wall, and no one likely to be at the pains of solving them until the General Overthrow." He sent in his card to the Master. Against him there was no ground of complaint; he gave prompt personal attention; but the casual ward was full, and there was no help. The rag-heaps were all girls, and Dickens gave each a shilling. One girl, "twenty or so," had been without food a day and night. "Look at me," she said, as she clutched the shilling, and without thanks shuffled off. So with the rest. There was not a single "thank you." A crowd meanwhile, only less poor than these objects of misery, had gathered round the scene; but though they saw the seven shillings given away they asked for no relief to themselves, they recognized in their sad wild way the other greater wretchedness, and made room in silence for Dickens to walk on. Not more tolerant of the way in which laws meant to be most humane are too often administered in England, he left in a day or two to resume his _Little Dorrit_ in Paris. But before his life there is described, some sketches from his holiday trip to Italy with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg, and from his three summer visits to Boulogne, claim to themselves two intervening chapters. FOOTNOTES: [169] I subjoin the dozen titles successively proposed for _Bleak House_. 1. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House;" 2. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House that was always shut up;" 3. "Bleak House Academy;" 4. "The East Wind;" 5. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined [House, Building, Factory, Mill] that got into Chancery and never got out;" 6. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the Grass grew;" 7. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House that was always shut up and never Lighted;" 8. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined Mill, that got into Chancery and never got out;" 9. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the Wind howled;" 10. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House that got into Chancery and never got out;" 11. "Bleak House and the East Wind. How they both got into Chancery and never got out;" 12. "Bleak House." [170] He was greatly interested in the movement for closing town and city graves (see the close of the 11th chapter of _Bleak House_), and providing places of burial under State supervision. [171] The promise was formally conveyed next morning in a letter to one who took the lead then and since in all good work for Birmingham, Mr. Arthur Ryland. The reading would, he said in this letter (7th of Jan. 1853), "take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half way through. There would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers." [172] Baron Tauchnitz, describing to me his long and uninterrupted friendly intercourse with Dickens, has this remark: "I give also a passage from one of his letters written at the time when he sent his son Charles, through my mediation, to Leipzig. He says in it what he desires for his son. 'I want him to have all interest in, and to acquire a knowledge of, the life around him, and to be treated like a gentleman though pampered in nothing. By punctuality in all things, great or small, I set great store.'" [173] From one of his letters while there I take a passage of observation full of character. "Great excitement here about a wretched woman who has murdered her child. Apropos of which I observed a curious thing last night. The newspaper offices (local journals) had placards like this outside: CHILD MURDER IN BRIGHTON. INQUEST. COMMITTAL OF THE MURDERESS. I saw so many common people stand profoundly staring at these lines for half-an-hour together--and even go back to stare again--that I feel quite certain they had not the power of thinking about the thing at all connectedly or continuously, without having something about it before their sense of sight. Having got that, they were considering the case, wondering how the devil they had come into that power. I saw one man in a smock frock lose the said power the moment he turned away, and bring his hob-nails back again." [174] The reading occupied nearly three hours: double the time devoted to it in the later years. [175] "After correspondence with all parts of England, and every kind of refusal and evasion on my part, I am now obliged to decide this question--whether I shall read two nights at Bradford for a hundred pounds. If I do, I may take as many hundred pounds as I choose." 27th of Jan. 1854. [176] On the 28th of Dec. 1854 he wrote from Bradford: "The hall is enormous, and they expect to seat 3700 people to-night! Notwithstanding which, it seems to me a tolerably easy place--except that the width of the platform is so very great to the eye at first." From Folkestone, on his way to Paris, he wrote in the autumn of 1855: "16th of Sept. I am going to read for them here, on the 5th of next month, and have answered in the last fortnight thirty applications to do the like all over England, Ireland, and Scotland. Fancy my having to come from Paris in December, to do this, at Peterborough, Birmingham, and Sheffield--old promises." Again: 23rd of Sept. "I am going to read here, next Friday week. There are (as there are everywhere) a Literary Institution and a Working Men's Institution, which have not the slightest sympathy or connexion. The stalls are five shillings, but I have made them fix the working men's admission at threepence, and I hope it may bring them together. The event comes off in a carpenter's shop, as the biggest place that can be got." In 1857, at Paxton's request, he read his _Carol_ at Coventry for the Institute. [177] My name it is Tom Thumb, Small my size, Small my size, My name it is Tom Thumb, Small my size. Yet though I am so small, I have killed the giants tall; And now I'm paid for all, Small my size, Small my size, And now I'm paid for all, Small my size. [178] This finds mention, I observe, in a pleasant description of "Mr. Dickens's Amateur Theatricals," which appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ two years ago, by one who had been a member of the Juvenile Company. I quote a passage, recommending the whole paper as very agreeably written, with some shrewd criticism. "Mr. Planché had in one portion of the extravaganza put into the mouth of one of the characters for the moment a few lines of burlesque upon Macbeth, and we remember Mr. Dickens's unsuccessful attempts to teach the performer how to imitate Macready, whom he (the performer) had never seen! And after the performance, when we were restored to our evening-party costumes, and the school-room was cleared for dancing, still a stray 'property' or two had escaped the vigilant eye of the property-man, for Douglas Jerrold had picked up the horse's head (Fortunio's faithful steed _Comrade_), and was holding it up before the greatest living animal painter, who had been one of the audience, with 'Looks as if it knew _you_, Edwin!'" [179] He went with the rest to Boulogne in the summer, and an anecdote transmitted in one of his father's letters will show that he maintained the reputation as a comedian which his early debut had awakened. "ORIGINAL ANECDOTE OF THE PLORNISHGHENTER. This distinguished wit, being at Boulogne with his family, made a close acquaintance with his landlord, whose name was M. Beaucourt--the only French word with which he was at that time acquainted. It happened that one day he was left unusually long in a bathing-machine when the tide was making, accompanied by his two young brothers and little English nurse, without being drawn to land. The little nurse, being frightened, cried 'M'soo! M'soo!' The two young brothers being frightened, cried 'Ici! Ici!'. Our wit, at once perceiving that his English was of no use to him under the foreign circumstances, immediately fell to bawling 'Beau-court!' which he continued to shout at the utmost pitch of his voice and with great gravity, until rescued.--_New Boulogne Jest Book_, page 578." [180] To show the pains he took in such matters I will give other titles also thought of for this tale. 1. Fact; 2. Hard-headed Gradgrind; 3. Hard Heads and Soft Hearts; 4. Heads and Tales; 5. Black and White. [181] It is well to remember, too, what he wrote about the story to Charles Knight. It had no design, he said, to damage the really useful truths of Political Economy, but was wholly directed against "those who see figures and averages, and nothing else; who would take the average of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a soldier in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur; and who would comfort the labourer in travelling twelve miles a day to and from his work, by telling him that the average distance of one inhabited place from another, on the whole area of England, is not more than four miles." [182] It is curious that with as strong a view in the opposite direction, and with an equally mistaken exaltation, above the writer's ordinary level, of a book which on the whole was undoubtedly below it, Mr. Taine speaks of _Hard Times_ as that one of Dickens's romances which is a summary of all the rest: exalting instinct above reason, and the intuitions of the heart above practical knowledge; attacking all education based on statistic figures and facts; heaping sorrow and ridicule on the practical mercantile people; fighting against the pride, hardness, and selfishness of the merchant and noble; cursing the manufacturing towns for imprisoning bodies in smoke and mud, and souls in falsehood and factitiousness;--while it contrasts, with that satire of social oppression, lofty eulogy of the oppressed; and searches out poor workmen, jugglers, foundlings, and circus people, for types of good sense, sweetness of disposition, generosity, delicacy, and courage, to perpetual confusion of the pretended knowledge, pretended happiness, pretended virtue, of the rich and powerful who trample upon them! This is a fair specimen of the exaggerations with which exaggeration is rebuked, in Mr. Taine's and much similar criticism. [183] Here is a note at the close. "Tavistock House. Look at that! Boulogne, of course. Friday, 14th of July, 1854. I am three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at _Hard Times_. I have done what I hope is a good thing with Stephen, taking his story as a whole; and hope to be over in town with the end of the book on Wednesday night. . . . I have been looking forward through so many weeks and sides of paper to this Stephen business, that now--as usual--it being over, I feel as if nothing in the world, in the way of intense and violent rushing hither and thither, could quite restore my balance." [184] "I have hope of Mr. Morley--whom one cannot see without knowing to be a straightforward, earnest man. Travers, too, I think a man of the Anti-corn-law-league order. I also think Higgins will materially help them. Generally I quite agree with you that they hardly know what to be at; but it is an immensely difficult subject to start, and they must have every allowance. At any rate, it is not by leaving them alone and giving them no help, that they can be urged on to success." 29th of March 1855. [185] "The Government hit took immensely, but I'm afraid to look at the report, these things are so ill done. It came into my head as I was walking about at Hampstead yesterday. . . . On coming away I told B. we must have a toastmaster in future less given to constant drinking while the speeches are going on. B. replied 'Yes sir, you are quite right sir, he has no head whatever sir, look at him now sir'--Toastmaster was weakly contemplating the coats and hats--'do you not find it difficult to keep your hands off him sir, he ought to have his head knocked against the wall sir,--and he should sir, I assure you sir, if he was not in too debased a condition to be aware of it sir.'" April 3rd 1855. [186] For the scene of the Eddystone Lighthouse at this little play, afterwards placed in a frame in the hall at Gadshill, a thousand guineas was given at the Dickens sale. It occupied the great painter only one or two mornings, and Dickens will tell how it originated. Walking on Hampstead Heath to think over his Theatrical Fund speech, he met Mr. Lemon, and they went together to Stanfield. "He has been very ill, and he told us that large pictures are too much for him, and he must confine himself to small ones. But I would not have this, I declared he must paint bigger ones than ever, and what would he think of beginning upon an act-drop for a proposed vast theatre at Tavistock House? He laughed and caught at this, we cheered him up very much, and he said he was quite a man again." April 1855. [187] Sitting at Nisi Prius not long before, the Chief Justice, with the same eccentric liking for literature, had committed what was called at the time a breach of judicial decorum. (Such indecorums were less uncommon in the great days of the Bench.) "The name," he said, "of the illustrious Charles Dickens has been called on the jury, but he has not answered. If his great Chancery suit had been still going on, I certainly would have excused him, but, as that is over, he might have done us the honour of attending here, that he might have seen how we went on at common law." CHAPTER III. SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED. 1853. Swiss People--Narrow Escape--Berne--Lausanne--An Old Friend--Genoa--Peschiere revisited--On the Way to Naples--Scene on Board Steamship--A Jaunt to Pisa--A Greek War-ship--At Naples--At Rome--Time's Changes--At the Opera--A "Scattering" Party--Performance of Puppets--Malaria--Desolation--At Bolsena--At Venice--Habits of Gondoliers--Uses of Travel--Tintoretto--At Turin--Liking for the Sardinians--Austrian Police--Police Arrangements--Dickens and the Austrian--An Old Dislike. THE first news of the three travellers was from Chamounix, on the 20th of October; and in it there was little made of the fatigue, and much of the enjoyment, of their Swiss travel. Great attention and cleanliness at the inns, very small windows and very bleak passages, doors opening to wintery blasts, overhanging eaves and external galleries, plenty of milk, honey, cows, and goats, much singing towards sunset on mountain sides, mountains almost too solemn to look at--that was the picture of it, with the country everywhere in one of its finest aspects, as winter began to close in. They had started from Geneva the previous morning at four, and in their day's travel Dickens had again noticed what he spoke of formerly, the ill-favoured look of the people in the valleys owing to their hard and stern climate. "All the women were like used-up men, and all the men like a sort of fagged dogs. But the good, genuine, grateful Swiss recognition of the commonest kind word--not too often thrown to them by our countrymen--made them quite radiant. I walked the greater part of the way, which was like going up the Monument." On the day the letter was written they had been up to the Mer de Glace, finding it not so beautiful in colour as in summer, but grander in its desolation; the green ice, like the greater part of the ascent, being covered with snow. "We were alarmingly near to a very dismal accident. We were a train of four mules and two guides, going along an immense height like a chimney-piece, with sheer precipice below, when there came rolling from above, with fearful velocity, a block of stone about the size of one of the fountains in Trafalgar-square, which Egg, the last of the party, had preceded by not a yard, when it swept over the ledge, breaking away a tree, and rolled and tumbled down into the valley. It had been loosened by the heavy rains, or by some wood-cutters afterwards reported to be above." The only place new to Dickens was Berne: "a surprisingly picturesque old Swiss town, with a view of the Alps from the outside of it singularly beautiful in the morning light." Everything else was familiar to him: though at that winter season, when the inns were shutting up, and all who could afford it were off to Geneva, most things in the valley struck him with a new aspect. From such of his old friends as he found at Lausanne, where a day or two's rest was taken, he had the gladdest of greetings; "and the wonderful manner in which they turned out in the wettest morning ever beheld for a Godspeed down the Lake was really quite pathetic." He had found time to see again the deaf, dumb, and blind youth at Mr. Haldimand's Institution who had aroused so deep an interest in him seven years before, but, in his brief present visit, the old associations would not reawaken. "Tremendous efforts were made by Hertzel to impress him with an idea of me, and the associations belonging to me; but it seemed in my eyes quite a failure, and I much doubt if he had the least perception of his old acquaintance. According to his custom, he went on muttering strange eager sounds like Town and Down and Mown, but nothing more. I left ten francs to be spent in cigars for my old friend. If I had taken one with me, I think I could, more successfully than his master, have established my identity." The child similarly afflicted, the little girl whom he saw at the same old time, had been after some trial discharged as an idiot. Before October closed, the travellers had reached Genoa, having been thirty-one consecutive hours on the road from Milan. They arrived in somewhat damaged condition, and took up their lodging in the top rooms of the Croce di Malta, "overlooking the port and sea pleasantly and airily enough, but it was no joke to get so high, and the apartment is rather vast and faded." The warmth of personal greeting that here awaited Dickens was given no less to the friends who accompanied him, and though the reader may not share in such private confidences as would show the sensation created by his reappearance, and the jovial hours that were passed among old associates, he will perhaps be interested to know how far the intervening years had changed the aspect of things and places made pleasantly familiar to us in his former letters. He wrote to his sister-in-law that the old walks were pretty much the same as ever except that there had been building behind the Peschiere up the San Bartolomeo hill, and the whole town towards San Pietro d'Arena had been quite changed. The Bisagno looked just the same, stony just then, having very little water in it; the vicoli were fragrant with the same old flavour of "very rotten cheese kept in very hot blankets;" and everywhere he saw the mezzaro as of yore. The Jesuits' College in the Strada Nuova was become, under the changed government, the Hôtel de Ville, and a splendid caffè with a terrace-garden had arisen between it and Palaviccini's old palace. "Pal himself has gone to the dogs." Another new and handsome caffè had been built in the Piazza Carlo Felice, between the old one of the Bei Arti and the Strada Carlo Felice; and the Teatro Diurno had now stone galleries and seats, like an ancient amphitheatre. "The beastly gate and guardhouse in the Albaro road are still in their dear old beastly state; and the whole of that road is just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but the beggars in general are all cleared off, and our old one-arm'd Belisario made a sudden evaporation a year or two ago. I am going to the Peschiere to-day." To myself he described his former favourite abode as converted into a girls' college; all the paintings of gods and goddesses canvassed over, and the gardens gone to ruin; "but O! what a wonderful place!" He observed an extraordinary increase everywhere else, since he was last in the splendid city, of "life, growth, and enterprise;" and he declared his old conviction to be confirmed that for picturesque beauty and character there was nothing in Italy, Venice excepted, "near brilliant old Genoa." The voyage thence to Naples, written from the latter place, is too capital a description to be lost. The steamer in which they embarked was "the new express English ship," but they found her to be already more than full of passengers from Marseilles (among them an old friend, Sir Emerson Tennent, with his family), and everything in confusion. There were no places at the captain's table, dinner had to be taken on deck, no berth or sleeping accommodation was available, and heavy first-class fares had to be paid. Thus they made their way to Leghorn, where worse awaited them. The authorities proved to be not favourable to the "crack" English-officered vessel (she had just been started for the India mail); and her papers not being examined in time, it was too late to steam away again that day, and she had to lie all night long off the lighthouse. "The scene on board beggars description. Ladies on the tables; gentlemen under the tables; bed-room appliances not usually beheld in public airing themselves in positions where soup-tureens had been lately developing themselves; and ladies and gentlemen lying indiscriminately on the open deck, arranged like spoons on a sideboard. No mattresses, no blankets, nothing. Towards midnight attempts were made, by means of awning and flags, to make this latter scene remotely approach an Australian encampment; and we three (Collins, Egg, and self) lay together on the bare planks covered with our coats. We were all gradually dozing off, when a perfectly tropical rain fell, and in a moment drowned the whole ship. The rest of the night we passed upon the stairs, with an immense jumble of men and women. When anybody came up for any purpose we all fell down, and when anybody came down we all fell up again. Still, the good-humour in the English part of the passengers was quite extraordinary. . . . There were excellent officers aboard, and, in the morning, the first mate lent me his cabin to wash in--which I afterwards lent to Egg and Collins. Then we, the Emerson Tennents, the captain, the doctor, and the second officer, went off on a jaunt together to Pisa, as the ship was to lie all day at Leghorn. The captain was a capital fellow, but I led him, facetiously, such a life the whole day, that I got most things altered at night. Emerson Tennent's son, with the greatest amiability, insisted on turning out of his state-room for me, and I got a good bed there. The store-room down by the hold was opened for Collins and Egg; and they slept with the moist sugar, the cheese in cut, the spices, the cruets, the apples and pears, in a perfect chandler's shop--in company with what a friend of ours would call a hold gent, who had been so horribly wet through over night that his condition frightened the authorities; a cat; and the steward, who dozed in an arm-chair, and all-night-long fell head foremost, once every five minutes, on Egg, who slept on the counter or dresser. Last night, I had the steward's own cabin, opening on deck, all to myself. It had been previously occupied by some desolate lady who went ashore at Civita Vecchia. There was little or no sea, thank Heaven, all the trip; but the rain was heavier than any I have ever seen, and the lightning very constant and vivid. We were, with the crew, some 200 people--provided with boats, at the utmost stretch, for one hundred perhaps. I could not help thinking what would happen if we met with any accident: the crew being chiefly Maltese, and evidently fellows who would cut off alone in the largest boat, on the least alarm; the speed very high; and the running, thro' all the narrow rocky channels. Thank God, however, here we are." A whimsical postscript closed the amusing narrative. "We towed from Civita Vecchia the entire Greek navy, I believe; consisting of a little brig of war with no guns, fitted as a steamer, but disabled by having burnt the bottoms of her boilers out, in her first run. She was just big enough to carry the captain and a crew of six or so: but the captain was so covered with buttons and gold that there never would have been room for him on board to put those valuables away, if he hadn't worn them--which he consequently did, all night. Whenever anything was wanted to be done, as slackening the tow-rope or anything of that sort, our officers roared at this miserable potentate, in violent English, through a speaking trumpet; of which he couldn't have understood a word in the most favourable circumstances. So he did all the wrong things first, and the right thing always last. The absence of any knowledge of anything but English on the part of the officers and stewards was most ridiculous. I met an Italian gentleman on the cabin steps yesterday morning, vainly endeavouring to explain that he wanted a cup of tea for his sick wife. And when we were coming out of the harbour at Genoa, and it was necessary to order away that boat of music you remember, the chief officer (called 'aft' for the purpose, as 'knowing something of Italian') delivered himself in this explicit and clear Italian to the principal performer--'Now Signora, if you don't sheer off you'll be run down, so you had better trice up that guitar of yours and put about.'" At Naples some days were passed very merrily; going up Vesuvius and into the buried cities, with Layard who had joined them, and with the Tennents. Here a small adventure befell Dickens specially, in itself extremely unimportant; but told by him with delightful humour in a letter to his sister-in-law. The old idle Frenchman, to whom all things are possible, with his snuff-box and dusty umbrella, and all the delicate and kindly observation, would have enchanted Leigh Hunt, and made his way to the heart of Charles Lamb. After mentioning Mr. Lowther, then English chargé d'affaires in Naples, as a very agreeable fellow who had been at the Rockingham play, he alludes to a meeting at his house. "We had an exceedingly pleasant dinner of eight, preparatory to which I was near having the ridiculous adventure of not being able to find the house and coming back dinnerless. I went in an open carriage from the hotel in all state, and the coachman to my surprise pulled up at the end of the Chiaja. 'Behold the house,' says he, 'of Il Signor Larthoor!'--at the same time pointing with his whip into the seventh heaven where the early stars were shining. 'But the Signor Larthorr,' says I, 'lives at Pausilippo.' 'It is true,' says the coachman (still pointing to the evening star), 'but he lives high up the Salita Sant' Antonio where no carriage ever yet ascended, and that is the house' (evening star as aforesaid), 'and one must go on foot. Behold the Salita Sant' Antonio!' I went up it, a mile and a half I should think, I got into the strangest places among the wildest Neapolitans; kitchens, washing-places, archways, stables, vineyards; was baited by dogs, and answered, in profoundly unintelligible language, from behind lonely locked doors in cracked female voices, quaking with fear; but could hear of no such Englishman, nor any Englishman. Bye and bye, I came upon a polenta-shop in the clouds, where an old Frenchman with an umbrella like a faded tropical leaf (it had not rained in Naples for six weeks) was staring at nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand. To him I appealed, concerning the Signor Larthoor. 'Sir,' said he, with the sweetest politeness, 'can you speak French?' 'Sir,' said I, 'a little.' 'Sir,' said he, 'I presume the Signer Loothere'--you will observe that he changed the name according to the custom of his country--'is an Englishman?' I admitted that he was the victim of circumstances and had that misfortune. 'Sir,' said he, 'one word more. _Has_ he a servant with a wooden leg?' 'Great heaven, sir,' said I, 'how do I know? I should think not, but it is possible.' 'It is always,' said the Frenchman, 'possible. Almost all the things of the world are always possible.' 'Sir,' said I--you may imagine my condition and dismal sense of my own absurdity, by this time--'that is true.' He then took an immense pinch of snuff wiped the dust off his umbrella, led me to an arch commanding a wonderful view of the Bay of Naples, and pointed deep into the earth from which I had mounted. 'Below there, near the lamp, one finds an Englishman with a servant with a wooden leg. It is always possible that he is the Signor Loothore.' I had been asked at six o'clock, and it was now getting on for seven. I went back in a state of perspiration and misery not to be described, and without the faintest hope of finding the spot. But as I was going farther down to the lamp, I saw the strangest staircase up a dark corner, with a man in a white waistcoat (evidently hired) standing on the top of it fuming. I dashed in at a venture, found it was the house, made the most of the whole story, and achieved much popularity. The best of it was that as nobody ever did find the place, Lowther had put a servant at the bottom of the Salita to wait 'for an English gentleman;' but the servant (as he presently pleaded), deceived by the moustache, had allowed the English gentleman to pass unchallenged." From Naples they went to Rome, where they found Lockhart, "fearfully weak and broken, yet hopeful of himself too" (he died the following year); smoked and drank punch with David Roberts, then painting everyday with Louis Haghe in St. Peter's; and took the old walks. The Coliseum, Appian Way, and Streets of Tombs, seemed desolate and grand as ever; but generally, Dickens adds, "I discovered the Roman antiquities to be _smaller_ than my imagination in nine years had made them. The Electric Telegraph now goes like a sunbeam through the cruel old heart of the Coliseum--a suggestive thing to think about, I fancied. The Pantheon I thought even nobler than of yore." The amusements were of course an attraction; and nothing at the Opera amused the party of three English more, than another party of four Americans who sat behind them in the pit. "All the seats are numbered arm-chairs, and you buy your number at the pay-place, and go to it with the easiest direction on the ticket itself. We were early, and the four places of the Americans were on the next row behind us--all together. After looking about them for some time, and seeing the greater part of the seats empty (because the audience generally wait in a caffè which is part of the theatre), one of them said 'Waal I dunno--I expect we aint no call to set so nigh to one another neither--will you scatter Kernel, will you scatter sir?--' Upon this the Kernel 'scattered' some twenty benches off; and they distributed themselves (for no earthly reason apparently but to get rid of one another) all over the pit. As soon as the overture began, in came the audience in a mass. Then the people who had got the numbers into which they had 'scattered,' had to get them out; and as they understood nothing that was said to them, and could make no reply but 'A-mericani,' you may imagine the number of cocked hats it took to dislodge them. At last they were all got back into their right places, except one. About an hour afterwards when Moses (_Moses in Egypt_ was the opera) was invoking the darkness, and there was a dead silence all over the house, unwonted sounds of disturbance broke out from a distant corner of the pit, and here and there a beard got up to look. 'What is it neow sir?' said one of the Americans to another;--'some person seems to be getting along, again streeem.' 'Waal sir' he replied 'I dunno. But I xpect 'tis the Kernel sir, a holdin on.' So it was. The Kernel was ignominiously escorted back to his right place, not in the least disconcerted, and in perfectly good spirits and temper." The opera was excellently done, and the price of the stalls one and threepence English. At Milan, on the other hand, the Scala was fallen from its old estate, dirty, gloomy, dull, and the performance execrable. Another theatre of the smallest pretension Dickens sought out with avidity in Rome, and eagerly enjoyed. He had heard it said in his old time in Genoa that the finest Marionetti were here; and now, after great difficulty, he discovered the company in a sort of stable attached to a decayed palace. "It was a wet night, and there was no audience but a party of French officers and ourselves. We all sat together. I never saw anything more amazing than the performance--altogether only an hour long, but managed by as many as ten people, for we saw them all go behind, at the ringing of a bell. The saving of a young lady by a good fairy from the machinations of an enchanter, coupled with the comic business of her servant Pulcinella (the Roman Punch) formed the plot of the first piece. A scolding old peasant woman, who always leaned forward to scold and put her hands in the pockets of her apron, was incredibly natural. Pulcinella, so airy, so merry, so life-like, so graceful, he was irresistible. To see him carrying an umbrella over his mistress's head in a storm, talking to a prodigious giant whom he met in the forest, and going to bed with a pony, were things never to be forgotten. And so delicate are the hands of the people who move them, that every puppet was an Italian, and did exactly what an Italian does. If he pointed at any object, if he saluted anybody, if he laughed, if he cried, he did it as never Englishman did it since Britain first at Heaven's command arose--arose--arose, &c. There was a ballet afterwards, on the same scale, and we really came away quite enchanted with the delicate drollery of the thing. French officers more than ditto." Of the great enemy to the health of the now capital of the kingdom of Italy, Dickens remarked in the same letter. "I have been led into some curious speculations by the existence and progress of the Malaria about Rome. Isn't it very extraordinary to think of its encroaching and encroaching on the Eternal City as if it were commissioned to swallow it up. This year it has been extremely bad, and has long outstayed its usual time. Rome has been very unhealthy, and is not free now. Few people care to be out at the bad times of sunset and sunrise, and the streets are like a desert at night. There is a church, a very little way outside the walls, destroyed by fire some 16 or 18 years ago, and now restored and re-created at an enormous expense. It stands in a wilderness. For any human creature who goes near it, or can sleep near it, after nightfall, it might as well be at the bottom of the uppermost cataract of the Nile. Along the whole extent of the Pontine Marshes (which we came across the other day), no creature in Adam's likeness lives, except the sallow people at the lonely posting-stations. I walk out from the Coliseum through the Street of Tombs to the ruins of the old Appian Way--pass no human being, and see no human habitation but ruined houses from which the people have fled, and where it is Death to sleep: these houses being three miles outside a gate of Rome at its farthest extent. Leaving Rome by the opposite side, we travel for many many hours over the dreary Campagna, shunned and avoided by all but the wretched shepherds. Thirteen hours' good posting brings us to Bolsena (I slept there once before), on the margin of a stagnant lake whence the workpeople fly as the sun goes down--where it is a risk to go; where from a distance we saw a mist hang on the place; where, in the inconceivably wretched inn, no window can be opened; where our dinner was a pale ghost of a fish with an oily omelette, and we slept in great mouldering rooms tainted with ruined arches and heaps of dung--and coming from which we saw no colour in the cheek of man, woman, or child for another twenty miles. Imagine this phantom knocking at the gates of Rome; passing them; creeping along the streets; haunting the aisles and pillars of the churches; year by year more encroaching, and more impossible of avoidance." From Rome they posted to Florence, reaching it in three days and a half, on the morning of the 20th of November; having then been out six weeks, with only three days' rain; and in another week they were at Venice. "The fine weather has accompanied us here," Dickens wrote on the 28th of November, "the place of all others where it is necessary, and the city has been a blaze of sunlight and blue sky (with an extremely clear cold air) ever since we have been in it. If you could see it at this moment you would never forget it. We live in the same house that I lived in nine years ago, and have the same sitting-room--close to the Bridge of Sighs and the Palace of the Doges. The room is at the corner of the house, and there is a narrow street of water running round the side: so that we have the Grand Canal before the two front windows, and this wild little street at the corner window: into which, too, our three bedrooms look. We established a gondola as soon as we arrived, and we slide out of the hall on to the water twenty times a day. The gondoliers have queer old customs that belong to their class, and some are sufficiently disconcerting. . . . It is a point of honour with them, while they are engaged, to be always at your disposal. Hence it is no use telling them they may go home for an hour or two--for they won't go. They roll themselves in shaggy capuccins, great coats with hoods, and lie down on the stone or marble pavement until they are wanted again. So that when I come in or go out, on foot--which can be done from this house for some miles, over little bridges and by narrow ways--I usually walk over the principal of my vassals, whose custom it is to snore immediately across the doorway. Conceive the oddity of the most familiar things in this place, from one instance: Last night we go downstairs at half-past eight, step into the gondola, slide away on the black water, ripple and plash swiftly along for a mile or two, land at a broad flight of steps, and instantly walk into the most brilliant and beautiful theatre conceivable--all silver and blue, and precious little fringes made of glittering prisms of glass. There we sit until half-past eleven, come out again (gondolier asleep outside the box-door), and in a moment are on the black silent water, floating away as if there were no dry building in the world. It stops, and in a moment we are out again, upon the broad solid Piazza of St. Mark, brilliantly lighted with gas, very like the Palais Royal at Paris, only far more handsome, and shining with no end of caffès. The two old pillars and the enormous bell-tower are as gruff and solid against the exquisite starlight as if they were a thousand miles from the sea or any undermining water: and the front of the cathedral, overlaid with golden mosaics and beautiful colours, is like a thousand rainbows even in the night." His formerly expressed notions as to art and pictures in Italy received confirmation at this visit. "I am more than ever confirmed in my conviction that one of the great uses of travelling is to encourage a man to think for himself, to be bold enough always to declare without offence that he _does_ think for himself, and to overcome the villainous meanness of professing what other people have professed when he knows (if he has capacity to originate an opinion) that his profession is untrue. The intolerable nonsense against which genteel taste and subserviency are afraid to rise, in connection with art, is astounding. Egg's honest amazement and consternation when he saw some of the most trumpeted things was what the Americans call 'a caution.' In the very same hour and minute there were scores of people falling into conventional raptures with that very poor Apollo, and passing over the most beautiful little figures and heads in the whole Vatican because they were not expressly set up to be worshipped. So in this place. There are pictures by Tintoretto in Venice, more delightful and masterly than it is possible sufficiently to express. His Assembly of the Blest I do believe to be, take it all in all, the most wonderful and charming picture ever painted. Your guide-book writer, representing the general swarming of humbugs, rather patronizes Tintoretto as a man of some sort of merit; and (bound to follow Eustace, Forsyth, and all the rest of them) directs you, on pain of being broke for want of gentility in appreciation, to go into ecstacies with things that have neither imagination, nature, proportion, possibility, nor anything else in them. You immediately obey, and tell your son to obey. He tells his son, and he tells his, and so the world gets at three-fourths of its frauds and miseries." The last place visited was Turin, where the travellers arrived on the 5th of December, finding it, with a brightly shining sun, intensely cold and freezing hard. "There are double windows to all the rooms, but the Alpine air comes down and numbs my feet as I write (in a cap and shawl) within six feet of the fire." There was yet something better than this to report of that bracing Alpine air. To Dickens's remarks on the Sardinian race, and to what he says of the exile of the noblest Italians, the momentous events of the few following years gave striking comment; nor could better proof be afforded of the judgment he brought to the observation of what passed before him. The letter had in all respects much interest and attractiveness. "This is a remarkably agreeable place. A beautiful town, prosperous, thriving, growing prodigiously, as Genoa is; crowded with busy inhabitants; full of noble streets and squares. The Alps, now covered deep with snow, are close upon it, and here and there seem almost ready to tumble into the houses. The contrast this part of Italy presents to the rest, is amazing. Beautifully made railroads, admirably managed; cheerful, active people; spirit, energy, life, progress. In Milan, in every street, the noble palace of some exile is a barrack, and dirty soldiers are lolling out of the magnificent windows--it seems as if the whole place were being gradually absorbed into soldiers. In Naples, something like a hundred thousand troops. 'I knew,' I said to a certain Neapolitan Marchese there whom I had known before, and who came to see me the night after I arrived, 'I knew a very remarkable gentleman when I was last here; who had never been out of his own country, but was perfectly acquainted with English literature, and had taught himself to speak English in that wonderful manner that no one could have known him for a foreigner; I am very anxious to see him again, but I forget his name.'--He named him, and his face fell directly. 'Dead?' said I.--'In exile.'--'O dear me!' said I, 'I had looked forward to seeing him again, more than any one I was acquainted with in the country!'--'What would you have!' says the Marchese in a low-voice. 'He was a remarkable man--full of knowledge, full of spirit, full of generosity. Where should he be but in exile! Where could he be!' We said not another word about it, but I shall always remember the short dialogue." On the other hand there were incidents of the Austrian occupation as to which Dickens thought the ordinary style of comment unfair; and his closing remark on their police is well worth preserving. "I am strongly inclined to think that our countrymen are to blame in the matter of the Austrian vexations to travellers that have been complained of. Their manner is so very bad, they are so extraordinarily suspicious, so determined to be done by everybody, and give so much offence. Now, the Austrian police are very strict, but they really know how to do business, and they do it. And if you treat them like gentlemen, they will always respond. When we first crossed the Austrian frontier, and were ushered into the police office, I took off my hat. The officer immediately took off his, and was as polite--still doing his duty, without any compromise--as it was possible to be. When we came to Venice, the arrangements were very strict, but were so business-like that the smallest possible amount of inconvenience consistent with strictness ensued. Here is the scene. A soldier has come into the railway carriage (a saloon on the American plan) some miles off, has touched his hat, and asked for my passport. I have given it. Soldier has touched his hat again, and retired as from the presence of superior officer. Alighted from carriage, we pass into a place like a banking-house, lighted up with gas. Nobody bullies us or drives us there, but we must go, because the road ends there. Several soldierly clerks. One very sharp chief. My passport is brought out of an inner room, certified to be en règle. Very sharp chief takes it, looks at it (it is rather longer, now, than _Hamlet_), calls out--'Signor Carlo Dickens!' 'Here I am sir.' 'Do you intend remaining long in Venice sir?' 'Probably four days sir!' 'Italian is known to you sir. You have been in Venice before?' 'Once before sir.' 'Perhaps you remained longer then sir?' 'No indeed; I merely came to see, and went as I came.' 'Truly sir? Do I infer that you are going by Trieste?' 'No. I am going to Parma, and Turin, and by Paris home.' 'A cold journey sir, I hope it may be a pleasant one.' 'Thank you.'--He gives me one very sharp look all over, and wishes me a very happy night. I wish _him_ a very happy night and it's done. The thing being done at all, could not be better done, or more politely--though I dare say if I had been sucking a gentish cane all the time, or talking in English to my compatriots, it might not unnaturally have been different. At Turin and at Genoa there are no such stoppages at all; but in any other part of Italy, give me an Austrian in preference to a native functionary. At Naples it is done in a beggarly, shambling, bungling, tardy, vulgar way; but I am strengthened in my old impression that Naples is one of the most odious places on the face of the earth. The general degradation oppresses me like foul air." CHAPTER IV. THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE. 1853, 1854, and 1856. Boulogne--Visits to France--His First Residence--Fishermen's Quarter--Villa des Moulineaux--M. Beaucourt--Tenant and Landlord--French Prices--Beaucourt's Visit to England--Preparations for the Fair--English Friends--Northern Camp--Visit of Prince Albert--Grand Review--Beaucourt's Excitement--Emperor, Prince, and Dickens--Jack-Tars--Legerdemain in Perfection--Conjuring by Dickens--Making Demons of Cards--Old Residence resumed--Last of the Camp--A Household War--Feline Foes--State of Siege--Preparing for Christmas--Gilbert A'Becket. DICKENS was in Boulogne, in 1853, from the middle of June to the end of September, and for the next three months, as we have seen, was in Switzerland and Italy. In the following year he went again to Boulogne in June, and stayed, after finishing _Hard Times_, until far into October. In February of 1855 he was for a fortnight in Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins; not taking up his more prolonged residence there until the winter. From November 1855 to the end of April 1856 he made the French capital his home, working at _Little Dorrit_ during all those months. Then, after a month's interval in Dover and London, he took up his third summer residence in Boulogne, whither his younger children had gone direct from Paris; and stayed until September, finishing _Little Dorrit_ in London in the spring of 1857. Of the first of these visits, a few lively notes of humour and character out of his letters will tell the story sufficiently. The second and third had points of more attractiveness. Those were the years of the French-English alliance, of the great exposition of English paintings, of the return of the troops from the Crimea, and of the visit of the Prince Consort to the Emperor; such interest as Dickens took in these several matters appearing in his letters with the usual vividness, and the story of his continental life coming out with amusing distinctness in the successive pictures they paint with so much warmth and colour. Another chapter will be given to Paris. This deals only with Boulogne. For his first summer residence, in June 1853, he had taken a house on the high ground near the Calais road; an odd French place with the strangest little rooms and halls, but standing in the midst of a large garden, with wood and waterfall, a conservatory opening on a great bank of roses, and paths and gates on one side to the ramparts, on the other to the sea. Above all there was a capital proprietor and landlord, by whom the cost of keeping up gardens and wood (which he called a forest) was defrayed, while he gave his tenant the whole range of both and all the flowers for nothing, sold him the garden produce as it was wanted, and kept a cow on the estate to supply the family milk. "If this were but 300 miles farther off," wrote Dickens, "how the English would rave about it! I do assure you that there are picturesque people, and town, and country, about this place, that quite fill up the eye and fancy. As to the fishing people (whose dress can have changed neither in colour nor in form for many many years), and their quarter of the town cobweb-hung with great brown nets across the narrow up-hill streets, they are as good as Naples, every bit." His description both of house and landlord, of which I tested the exactness when I visited him, was in the old pleasant vein; requiring no connection with himself to give it interest, but, by the charm and ease with which everything picturesque or characteristic was disclosed, placed in the domain of art. "O the rain here yesterday!" (26th of June.) "A great sea-fog rolling in, a strong wind blowing, and the rain coming down in torrents all day long. . . . This house is on a great hill-side, backed up by woods of young trees. It faces the Haute Ville with the ramparts and the unfinished cathedral--which capital object is exactly opposite the windows. On the slope in front, going steep down to the right, all Boulogne is piled and jumbled about in a very picturesque manner. The view is charming--closed in at last by the tops of swelling hills; and the door is within ten minutes of the post-office, and within quarter of an hour of the sea. The garden is made in terraces up the hill-side, like an Italian garden; the top walks being in the before-mentioned woods. The best part of it begins at the level of the house, and goes up at the back, a couple of hundred feet perhaps. There are at present thousands of roses all about the house, and no end of other flowers. There are five great summer-houses, and (I think) fifteen fountains--not one of which (according to the invariable French custom) ever plays. The house is a doll's house of many rooms. It is one story high, with eight and thirty steps up and down--tribune wise--to the front door: the noblest French demonstration I have ever seen I think. It is a double house; and as there are only four windows and a pigeon-hole to be beheld in front, you would suppose it to contain about four rooms. Being built on the hill-side, the top story of the house at the back--there are two stories there--opens on the level of another garden. On the ground floor there is a very pretty hall, almost all glass; a little dining-room opening on a beautiful conservatory, which is also looked into through a great transparent glass in a mirror-frame over the chimney-piece, just as in Paxton's room at Chatsworth; a spare bed-room, two little drawing-rooms opening into one another, the family bed-rooms, a bath-room, a glass corridor, an open yard, and a kind of kitchen with a machinery of stoves and boilers. Above, there are eight tiny bed-rooms all opening on one great room in the roof, originally intended for a billiard-room. In the basement there is an admirable kitchen with every conceivable requisite in it, a noble cellar, first-rate man's room and pantry; coach-house, stable, coal-store and wood-store; and in the garden is a pavilion, containing an excellent spare bed-room on the ground floor. The getting-up of these places, the looking-glasses, clocks, little stoves, all manner of fittings, must be seen to be appreciated. The conservatory is full of choice flowers and perfectly beautiful." Then came the charm of the letter, his description of his landlord, lightly sketched by him in print as M. Loyal-Devasseur, but here filled in with the most attractive touches his loving hand could give. "But the landlord--M. Beaucourt--is wonderful. Everybody here has two surnames (I cannot conceive why), and M. Beaucourt, as he is always called, is by rights M. Beaucourt-Mutuel. He is a portly jolly fellow with a fine open face; lives on the hill behind, just outside the top of the garden; and was a linen draper in the town, where he still has a shop, but is supposed to have mortgaged his business and to be in difficulties--all along of this place, which he has planted with his own hands; which he cultivates all day; and which he never on any consideration speaks of but as 'the Property.' He is extraordinarily popular in Boulogne (the people in the shops invariably brightening up at the mention of his name, and congratulating us on being his tenants), and really seems to deserve it. He is such a liberal fellow that I can't bear to ask him for anything, since he instantly supplies it whatever it is. The things he has done in respect of unreasonable bedsteads and washing-stands, I blush to think of. I observed the other day in one of the side gardens--there are gardens at each side of the house too--a place where I thought the Comic Countryman" (a name he was giving just then to his youngest boy) "must infallibly trip over, and make a little descent of a dozen feet. So I said, 'M. Beaucourt'--who instantly pulled off his cap and stood bareheaded--'there are some spare pieces of wood lying by the cow-house, if you would have the kindness to have one laid across here I think it would be safer.' 'Ah, mon dieu sir,' said M. Beaucourt, 'it must be iron. This is not a portion of the property where you would like to see wood.' 'But iron is so expensive,' said I, 'and it really is not worth while----' 'Sir, pardon me a thousand times,' said M. Beaucourt, 'it shall be iron. Assuredly and perfectly it shall be iron.' 'Then M. Beaucourt,' said I, 'I shall be glad to pay a moiety of the cost.' 'Sir,' said M. Beaucourt, 'Never!' Then to change the subject, he slided from his firmness and gravity into a graceful conversational tone, and said, 'In the moonlight last night, the flowers on the property appeared, O Heaven, to be _bathing themselves in the sky_. You like the property?' 'M. Beaucourt,' said I, 'I am enchanted with it; I am more than satisfied with everything.' 'And I sir,' said M. Beaucourt, laying his cap upon his breast, and kissing his hand--'I equally!' Yesterday two blacksmiths came for a day's work, and put up a good solid handsome bit of iron-railing, morticed into the stone parapet. . . . If the extraordinary things in the house defy description, the amazing phenomena in the gardens never could have been dreamed of by anybody but a Frenchman bent upon one idea. Besides a portrait of the house in the dining-room, there is a plan of the property in the hall. It looks about the size of Ireland; and to every one of the extraordinary objects, there is a reference with some portentous name. There are fifty-one such references, including the Cottage of Tom Thumb, the Bridge of Austerlitz, the Bridge of Jena, the Hermitage, the Bower of the Old Guard, the Labyrinth (I have no idea which is which); and there is guidance to every room in the house, as if it were a place on that stupendous scale that without such a clue you must infallibly lose your way, and perhaps perish of starvation between bedroom and bedroom."[188] On the 3rd of July there came a fresh trait of the good fellow of a landlord. "Fancy what Beaucourt told me last night. When he 'conceived the inspiration' of planting the property ten years ago, he went over to England to buy the trees, took a small cottage in the market-gardens at Putney, lived there three months, held a symposium every night attended by the principal gardeners of Fulham, Putney, Kew, and Hammersmith (which he calls Hamsterdam), and wound up with a supper at which the market-gardeners rose, clinked their glasses, and exclaimed with one accord (I quote him exactly) VIVE BEAUCOURT! He was a captain in the National Guard, and Cavaignac his general. Brave Capitaine Beaucourt! said Cavaignac, you must receive a decoration. My General, said Beaucourt, No! It is enough for me that I have done my duty. I go to lay the first stone of a house upon a Property I have--that house shall be my decoration. (Regard that house!)" Addition to the picture came in a letter of the 24th of July: with a droll glimpse of Shakespeare at the theatre, and of the Saturday's pig-market. "I may mention that the great Beaucourt daily changes the orthography of this place. He has now fixed it, by having painted up outside the garden gate, 'Entrée particulière de la Villa des Moulineaux.' On another gate a little higher up, he has had painted 'Entrée des Ecuries de la Villa des Moulineaux.' On another gate a little lower down (applicable to one of the innumerable buildings in the garden), 'Entrée du Tom Pouce.' On the highest gate of the lot, leading to his own house, 'Entrée du Château Napoléonienne.' All of which inscriptions you will behold in black and white when you come. I see little of him now, as, all things being 'bien arrangées,' he is delicate of appearing. His wife has been making a trip in the country during the last three weeks, but (as he mentioned to me with his hat in his hand) it was necessary that he should remain here, to be continually at the disposition of the tenant of the Property. (The better to do this, he has had roaring dinner parties of fifteen daily; and the old woman who milks the cows has been fainting up the hill under vast burdens of champagne.) "We went to the theatre last night, to see the _Midsummer Night's Dream_--of the Opera Comique. It is a beautiful little theatre now, with a very good company; and the nonsense of the piece was done with a sense quite confounding in that connexion. Willy Am Shay Kes Peer; Sirzhon Foll Stayffe; Lor Lattimeer; and that celebrated Maid of Honour to Queen Elizabeth, Meees Oleeveeir--were the principal characters. "Outside the old town, an army of workmen are (and have been for a week or so, already) employed upon an immense building which I supposed might be a Fort, or a Monastery, or a Barrack, or other something designed to last for ages. I find it is for the annual fair, which begins on the fifth of August and lasts a fortnight. Almost every Sunday we have a fête, where there is dancing in the open air, and where immense men with prodigious beards revolve on little wooden horses like Italian irons, in what we islanders call a roundabout, by the hour together. But really the good humour and cheerfulness are very delightful. Among the other sights of the place, there is a pig-market every Saturday, perfectly insupportable in its absurdity. An excited French peasant, male or female, with a determined young pig, is the most amazing spectacle. I saw a little Drama enacted yesterday week, the drollery of which was perfect. _Dram. Pers._ 1. A pretty young woman with short petticoats and trim blue stockings, riding a donkey with two baskets and a pig in each. 2. An ancient farmer in a blouse, driving four pigs, his four in hand, with an enormous whip--and being drawn against walls and into smoking shops by any one of the four. 3. A cart, with an old pig (manacled) looking out of it, and terrifying six hundred and fifty young pigs in the market by his terrific grunts. 4. Collector of Octroi in an immense cocked hat, with a stream of young pigs running, night and day, between his military boots and rendering accounts impossible. 5. Inimitable, confronted by a radiation of elderly pigs, fastened each by one leg to a bunch of stakes in the ground. 6. John Edmund Reade, poet, expressing eternal devotion to and admiration of Landor, unconscious of approaching pig recently escaped from barrow. 7. Priests, peasants, soldiers, &c. &c." He had meanwhile gathered friendly faces round him. Frank Stone went over with his family to a house taken for him on the St. Omer road by Dickens, who was joined in the chateau by Mr. and Mrs. Leech and Mr. Wilkie Collins. "Leech says that when he stepped from the boat after their stormy passage, he was received by the congregated spectators with a distinct round of applause as by far the most intensely and unutterably miserable looking object that had yet appeared. The laughter was tumultuous, and he wishes his friends to know that altogether he made an immense hit." So passed the summer months: excursions with these friends to Amiens and Beauvais relieving the work upon his novel, and the trip to Italy, already described, following on its completion. In June, 1854, M. Beaucourt had again received his famous tenant, but in another cottage or chateau (to him convertible terms) on the much cherished property, placed on the very summit of the hill with a private road leading out to the Column, a really pretty place, rooms larger than in the other house, a noble sea view, everywhere nice prospects, good garden, and plenty of sloping turf.[189] It was called the Villa du Camp de Droite, and here Dickens stayed, as I have intimated, until the eve of his winter residence in Paris. The formation of the Northern Camp at Boulogne began the week after he had finished _Hard Times_, and he watched its progress, as it increased and extended itself along the cliffs towards Calais, with the liveliest amusement. At first he was startled by the suddenness with which soldiers overran the roads, became billeted in every house, made the bridges red with their trowsers, and "sprang upon the pier like fantastic mustard and cress when boats were expected, many of them never having seen the sea before." But the good behaviour of the men had a reconciling effect, and their ingenuity delighted him. The quickness with which they raised whole streets of mud-huts, less picturesque than the tents,[190] but (like most unpicturesque things) more comfortable, was like an Arabian Nights' tale. "Each little street holds 144 men, and every corner-door has the number of the street upon it as soon as it is put up; and the postmen can fall to work as easily as in the Rue de Rivoli at Paris." His patience was again a little tried when he found baggage-wagons ploughing up his favourite walks, and trumpeters in twos and threes teaching newly-recruited trumpeters in all the sylvan places, and making the echoes hideous. But this had its amusement too. "I met to-day a weazen sun-burnt youth from the south with such an immense regimental shako on, that he looked like a sort of lucifer match-box, evidently blowing his life rapidly out, under the auspices of two magnificent creatures all hair and lungs, of such breadth across the shoulders that I couldn't see their breast-buttons when I stood in front of them." The interest culminated as the visit of the Prince Consort approached with its attendant glories of illuminations and reviews. Beaucourt's excitement became intense. The Villa du Camp de Droite was to be a blaze of triumph on the night of the arrival; Dickens, who had carried over with him the meteor flag of England and set it streaming over a haystack in his field,[191] now hoisted the French colours over the British Jack in honour of the national alliance; the Emperor was to subside to the station of a general officer, so that all the rejoicings should be in honour of the Prince; and there was to be a review in the open country near Wimereux, when "at one stage of the maneuvres (I am too excited to spell the word but you know what I mean)" the whole hundred thousand men in the camp of the North were to be placed before the Prince's eyes, to show him what a division of the French army might be. "I believe everything I hear," said Dickens. It was the state of mind of Hood's country gentleman after the fire at the Houses of Parliament. "Beaucourt, as one of the town council, receives summonses to turn out and debate about something, or receive somebody, every five minutes. Whenever I look out of window, or go to the door, I see an immense black object at Beaucourt's porch like a boat set up on end in the air with a pair of white trowsers below it. This is the cocked hat of an official Huissier, newly arrived with a summons, whose head is thrown back as he is in the act of drinking Beaucourt's wine." The day came at last, and all Boulogne turned out for its holiday; "but I" Dickens wrote, "had by this cooled down a little, and, reserving myself for the illuminations, I abandoned the great men and set off upon my usual country walk. See my reward. Coming home by the Calais road, covered with dust, I suddenly find myself face to face with Albert and Napoleon, jogging along in the pleasantest way, a little in front, talking extremely loud about the view, and attended by a brilliant staff of some sixty or seventy horsemen, with a couple of our royal grooms with their red coats riding oddly enough in the midst of the magnates. I took off my wide-awake without stopping to stare, whereupon the Emperor pulled off his cocked hat; and Albert (seeing, I suppose, that it was an Englishman) pulled off his. Then we went our several ways. The Emperor is broader across the chest than in the old times when we used to see him so often at Gore-house, and stoops more in the shoulders. Indeed his carriage thereabouts is like Fonblanque's."[192] The town he described as "one great flag" for the rest of the visit; and to the success of the illuminations he contributed largely himself by leading off splendidly with a hundred and twenty wax candles blazing in his seventeen front windows, and visible from that great height over all the place. "On the first eruption Beaucourt _danced and screamed_ on the grass before the door; and when he was more composed, set off with Madame Beaucourt to look at the house from every possible quarter, and, he said, collect the suffrages of his compatriots." Their suffrages seem to have gone, however, mainly in another direction. "It was wonderful," Dickens wrote, "to behold about the streets the small French soldiers of the line seizing our Guards by the hand and embracing them. It was wonderful, too, to behold the English sailors in the town, shaking hands with everybody and generally patronizing everything. When the people could not get hold of either a soldier or a sailor, they rejoiced in the royal grooms, and embraced _them_. I don't think the Boulogne people were surprised by anything so much, as by the three cheers the crew of the yacht gave when the Emperor went aboard to lunch. The prodigious volume of them, and the precision, and the circumstance that no man was left straggling on his own account either before or afterwards, seemed to strike the general mind with amazement. Beaucourt said it was _like boxing_." That was written on the 10th of September; but in a very few days Dickens was unwillingly convinced that whatever the friendly disposition to England might be, the war with Russia was decidedly unpopular. He was present when the false report of the taking of Sebastopol reached the Emperor and Empress. "I was at the Review" (8th of October) "yesterday week, very near the Emperor and Empress, when the taking of Sebastopol was announced. It was a magnificent show on a magnificent day; and if any circumstance could make it special, the arrival of the telegraphic despatch would be the culminating point one might suppose. It quite disturbed and mortified me to find how faintly, feebly, miserably, the men responded to the call of the officers to cheer, as each regiment passed by. Fifty excited Englishmen would make a greater sign and sound than a thousand of these men do. . . . The Empress was very pretty, and her slight figure sat capitally on her grey horse. When the Emperor gave her the despatch to read, she flushed and fired up in a very pleasant way, and kissed it with as natural an impulse as one could desire to see." On the night of that day Dickens went up to see a play acted at a café at the camp, and found himself one of an audience composed wholly of officers and men, with only four ladies among them, officers' wives. The steady, working, sensible faces all about him told their own story; "and as to kindness and consideration towards the poor actors, it was real benevolence." Another attraction at the camp was a conjuror, who had been called to exhibit twice before the imperial party, and whom Dickens always afterwards referred to as the most consummate master of legerdemain he had seen. Nor was he a mean authority as to this, being himself, with his tools at hand, a capital conjuror;[193] but the Frenchman scorned help, stood among the company without any sort of apparatus, and, by the mere force of sleight of hand and an astonishing memory, performed feats having no likeness to anything Dickens had ever seen done, and totally inexplicable to his most vigilant reflection. "So far as I know, a perfectly original genius, and that puts any sort of knowledge of legerdemain, such as I supposed that I possessed, at utter defiance." The account he gave dealt with two exploits only, the easiest to describe, and, not being with cards, not the most remarkable; for he would also say of this Frenchman that he transformed cards into very demons. He never saw a human hand touch them in the same way, fling them about so amazingly, or change them in his, one's own, or another's hand, with a skill so impossible to follow. "You are to observe that he was _with the company_, not in the least removed from them; and that we occupied the front row. He brought in some writing paper with him when he entered, and a black-lead pencil; and he wrote some words on half-sheets of paper. One of these half-sheets he folded into two, and gave to Catherine to hold. Madame, he says aloud, will you think of any class of objects? I have done so.--Of what class, Madame? Animals.--Will you think of a particular animal, Madame? I have done so.--Of what animal? The Lion.--Will you think of another class of objects, Madame? I have done so.--Of what class? Flowers.--The particular flower? The Rose.--Will you open the paper you hold in your hand? She opened it, and there was neatly and plainly written in pencil--_The Lion._ _The Rose._ Nothing whatever had led up to these words, and they were the most distant conceivable from Catherine's thoughts when she entered the room. He had several common school-slates about a foot square. He took one of these to a field-officer from the camp, decoré and what not, who sat about six from us, with a grave saturnine friend next him. My General, says he, will you write a name on this slate, after your friend has done so? Don't show it to me. The friend wrote a name, and the General wrote a name. The conjuror took the slate rapidly from the officer, threw it violently down on the ground with its written side to the floor, and asked the officer to put his foot upon it and keep it there: which he did. The conjuror considered for about a minute, looking devilish hard at the General.--My General, says he, your friend wrote Dagobert, upon the slate under your foot. The friend admits it.--And you, my General, wrote Nicholas. General admits it, and everybody laughs and applauds.--My General, will you excuse me, if I change that name into a name expressive of the power of a great nation, which, in happy alliance with the gallantry and spirit of France will shake that name to its centre? Certainly I will excuse it.--My General, take up the slate and read. General reads: DAGOBERT, VICTORIA. The first in his friend's writing; the second in a new hand. I never saw anything in the least like this; or at all approaching to the absolute certainty, the familiarity, quickness, absence of all machinery, and actual face-to-face, hand-to-hand fairness between the conjuror and the audience, with which it was done. I have not the slightest idea of the secret.--One more. He was blinded with several table napkins, and then a great cloth was bodily thrown over them and his head too, so that his voice sounded as if he were under a bed. Perhaps half a dozen dates were written on a slate. He takes the slate in his hand, and throws it violently down on the floor as before, remains silent a minute, seems to become agitated, and bursts out thus: 'What is this I see? A great city, but of narrow streets and old-fashioned houses, many of which are of wood, resolving itself into ruins! How is it falling into ruins? Hark! I hear the crackling of a great conflagration, and, looking up, I behold a vast cloud of flame and smoke. The ground is covered with hot cinders too, and people are flying into the fields and endeavouring to save their goods. This great fire, this great wind, this roaring noise! This is the great fire of London, and the first date upon the slate must be one, six, six, six--the year in which it happened!' And so on with all the other dates. There! Now, if you will take a cab and impart these mysteries to Rogers, I shall be very glad to have his opinion of them." Rogers had taxed our credulity with some wonderful clairvoyant experiences of his own in Paris to which here was a parallel at last! When leaving Paris for his third visit to Boulogne, at the beginning of June 1856, he had not written a word of the ninth number of his new book, and did not expect for another month to "see land from the running sea of _Little Dorrit_." He had resumed the house he first occupied, the cottage or villa "des Moulineaux," and after dawdling about his garden for a few days with surprising industry in a French farmer garb of blue blouse, leathern belt, and military cap, which he had mounted as "the only one for complete comfort," he wrote to me that he was getting "Now to work again--to work! The story lies before me, I hope, strong and clear. Not to be easily told; but nothing of that sort IS to be easily done that _I_ know of." At work it became his habit to sit late, and then, putting off his usual walk until night, to lie down among the roses reading until after tea ("middle-aged Love in a blouse and belt"), when he went down to the pier. "The said pier at evening is a phase of the place we never see, and which I hardly knew. But I never did behold such specimens of the youth of my country, male and female, as pervade that place. They are really, in their vulgarity and insolence, quite disheartening. One is so fearfully ashamed of them, and they contrast so very unfavourably with the natives." Mr. Wilkie Collins was again his companion in the summer weeks, and the presence of Jerrold for the greater part of the time added much to his enjoyment. The last of the camp was now at hand. It had only a battalion of men in it, and a few days would see them out. At first there was horrible weather, "storms of wind, rushes of rain, heavy squalls, cold airs, sea fogs, banging shutters, flapping doors, and beaten down rose-trees by the hundred; but then came a delightful week among the corn fields and bean fields, and afterwards the end. It looks very singular and very miserable. The soil being sand, and the grass having been trodden away these two years, the wind from the sea carries the sand into the chinks and ledges of all the doors and windows, and chokes them;--just as if they belonged to Arab huts in the desert. A number of the non-commissioned officers made turf-couches outside their huts, and there were turf orchestras for the bands to play in; all of which are fast getting sanded over in a most Egyptian manner. The Fair is on, under the walls of the haute ville over the way. At one popular show, the Malakhoff is taken every half-hour between 4 and 11. Bouncing explosions announce every triumph of the French arms (the English have nothing to do with it); and in the intervals a man outside blows a railway whistle--straight into the dining-room. Do you know that the French soldiers call the English medal 'The Salvage Medal'--meaning that they got it for saving the English army? I don't suppose there are a thousand people in all France who believe that we did anything but get rescued by the French. And I am confident that the no-result of our precious Chelsea enquiry has wonderfully strengthened this conviction. Nobody at home has yet any adequate idea, I am deplorably sure, of what the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office have done for us. But whenever we get into war again, the people will begin to find out." His own household had got into a small war already, of which the commander-in-chief was his man-servant "French," the bulk of the forces engaged being his children, and the invaders two cats. Business brought him to London on the hostilities breaking out, and on his return after a few days the story of the war was told. "Dick," it should be said, was a canary very dear both to Dickens and his eldest daughter, who had so tamed to her loving hand its wild little heart that it was become the most docile of companions.[194] "The only thing new in this garden is that war is raging against two particularly tigerish and fearful cats (from the mill, I suppose), which are always glaring in dark corners, after our wonderful little Dick. Keeping the house open at all points, it is impossible to shut them out, and they hide themselves in the most terrific manner: hanging themselves up behind draperies, like bats, and tumbling out in the dead of night with frightful caterwaulings. Hereupon, French borrows Beaucourt's gun, loads the same to the muzzle, discharges it twice in vain and throws himself over with the recoil, exactly like a clown. But at last (while I was in town) he aims at the more amiable cat of the two, and shoots that animal dead. Insufferably elated by this victory, he is now engaged from morning to night in hiding behind bushes to get aim at the other. He does nothing else whatever. All the boys encourage him and watch for the enemy--on whose appearance they give an alarm which immediately serves as a warning to the creature, who runs away. They are at this moment (ready dressed for church) all lying on their stomachs in various parts of the garden. Horrible whistles give notice to the gun what point it is to approach. I am afraid to go out, lest I should be shot. Mr. Plornish says his prayers at night in a whisper, lest the cat should overhear him and take offence. The tradesmen cry out as they come up the avenue, 'Me voici! C'est moi--boulanger--ne tirez pas, Monsieur Franche!' It is like living in a state of siege; and the wonderful manner in which the cat preserves the character of being the only person not much put out by the intensity of this monomania, is most ridiculous." (6th of July.) . . . "About four pounds of powder and half a ton of shot have been (13th of July) fired off at the cat (and the public in general) during the week. The finest thing is that immediately after I have heard the noble sportsman blazing away at her in the garden in front, I look out of my room door into the drawing-room, and am pretty sure to see her coming in after the birds, in the calmest manner, by the back window. Intelligence has been brought to me from a source on which I can rely, that French has newly conceived the atrocious project of tempting her into the coach-house by meat and kindness, and there, from an elevated portmanteau, blowing her head off. This I mean sternly to interdict, and to do so to-day as a work of piety." Besides the graver work which Mr. Wilkie Collins and himself were busy with, in these months, and by which _Household Words_ mainly was to profit, some lighter matters occupied the leisure of both. There were to be, at Christmas, theatricals again at Tavistock House; in which the children, with the help of their father and other friends, were to follow up the success of the _Lighthouse_ by again acquitting themselves as grown-up actors; and Mr. Collins was busy preparing for them a new drama to be called _The Frozen Deep_, while Dickens was sketching a farce for Mr. Lemon to fill in. But this pleasant employment had sudden and sad interruption. An epidemic broke out in the town, affecting the children of several families known to Dickens, among them that of his friend Mr. Gilbert A'Becket; who, upon arriving from Paris, and finding a favourite little son stricken dangerously, sank himself under an illness from which he had been suffering, and died two days after the boy. "He had for three days shown symptoms of rallying, and we had some hope of his recovery; but he sank and died, and never even knew that the child had gone before him. A sad, sad story." Dickens meanwhile had sent his own children home with his wife, and the rest soon followed. Poor M. Beaucourt was inconsolable. "The desolation of the place is wretched. When Mamey and Katey went, Beaucourt came in and wept. He really is almost broken-hearted about it. He had planted all manner of flowers for next month, and has thrown down the spade and left off weeding the garden, so that it looks something like a dreary bird-cage with all manner of grasses and chickweeds sticking through the bars and lying in the sand. 'Such a loss too,' he says, 'for Monsieur Dickens!' Then he looks in at the kitchen window (which seems to be his only relief), and sighs himself up the hill home."[195] The interval of residence in Paris between these two last visits to Boulogne is now to be described. FOOTNOTES: [188] Prices are reported in one of the letters; and, considering what they have been since, the touch of disappointment hinted at may raise a smile. "Provisions are scarcely as cheap as I expected, though very different from London: besides which, a pound weight here, is a pound and a quarter English. So that meat at 7_d._ a pound, is actually a fourth less. A capital dish of asparagus costs us about fivepence; a fowl, one and threepence; a duck, a few halfpence more; a dish of fish, about a shilling. The very best wine at tenpence that I ever drank--I used to get it very good for the same money in Genoa, but not so good. The common people very engaging and obliging." [189] Besides the old friends before named, Thackeray and his family were here in the early weeks, living "in a melancholy but very good chateau on the Paris road, where their landlord (a Baron) has supplied them, T. tells me, with one milk-jug as the entire crockery of the establishment." Our friend soon tired of this, going off to Spa, and on his return, after ascending the hill to smoke a farewell cigar with Dickens, left for London and Scotland in October. [190] Another of his letters questioned even the picturesqueness a little, for he discovered that on a sunny day the white tents, seen from a distance, looked exactly like an immense washing establishment with all the linen put out to dry. [191] "Whence it can be seen for miles and miles, to the glory of England and the joy of Beaucourt." [192] The picture had changed drearily in less than a year and a half, when (17th of Feb. 1856) Dickens thus wrote from Paris. "I suppose mortal man out of bed never looked so ill and worn as the Emperor does just now. He passed close by me on horseback, as I was coming in at the door on Friday, and I never saw so haggard a face. Some English saluted him, and he lifted his hand to his hat as slowly, painfully, and laboriously, as if his arm were made of lead. I think he _must_ be in pain." [193] I permit myself to quote from the bill of one of his entertainments in the old merry days at Bonchurch (ii. 425-434), of course drawn up by himself, whom it describes as "The Unparalleled Necromancer RHIA RHAMA RHOOS, educated cabalistically in the Orange Groves of Salamanca and the Ocean Caves of Alum Bay," some of whose proposed wonders it thus prefigures: THE LEAPING CARD WONDER. Two Cards being drawn from the Pack by two of the company, and placed, with the Pack, in the Necromancer's box, will leap forth at the command of any lady of not less than eight, or more than eighty, years of age. *** _This wonder is the result of nine years' seclusion in the mines of Russia._ THE PYRAMID WONDER. A shilling being lent to the Necromancer by any gentleman of not less than twelve months, or more than one hundred years, of age, and carefully marked by the said gentleman, will disappear from within a brazen box at the word of command, and pass through the hearts of an infinity of boxes, which will afterwards build themselves into pyramids and sink into a small mahogany box, at the Necromancer's bidding. *** _Five thousand guineas were paid for the acquisition of this wonder, to a Chinese Mandarin, who died of grief immediately after parting with the secret._ THE CONFLAGRATION WONDER. A Card being drawn from the Pack by any lady, not under a direct and positive promise of marriage, will be immediately named by the Necromancer, destroyed by fire, and reproduced from its own ashes. *** _An annuity of one thousand pounds has been offered to the Necromancer by the Directors of the Sun Fire Office for the secret of this wonder--and refused!!!_ THE LOAF OF BREAD WONDER. The watch of any truly prepossessing lady, of any age, single or married, being locked by the Necromancer in a strong box, will fly at the word of command from within that box into the heart of an ordinary half-quartern loaf, whence it shall be cut out in the presence of the whole company, whose cries of astonishment will be audible at a distance of some miles. *** _Ten years in the Plains of Tartary were devoted to the study of this wonder._ THE TRAVELLING DOLL WONDER. The travelling doll is composed of solid wood throughout, but, by putting on a travelling dress of the simplest construction, becomes invisible, performs enormous journeys in half a minute, and passes from visibility to invisibility with an expedition so astonishing that no eye can follow its transformations. *** _The Necromancer's attendant usually faints on beholding this wonder, and is only to be revived by the administration of brandy and water._ THE PUDDING WONDER. The company having agreed among themselves to offer to the Necromancer, by way of loan, the hat of any gentleman whose head has arrived at maturity of size, the Necromancer, without removing that hat for an instant from before the eyes of the delighted company, will light a fire in it, make a plum pudding in his magic saucepan, boil it over the said fire, produce it in two minutes, thoroughly done, cut it, and dispense it in portions to the whole company, for their consumption then and there; returning the hat at last, wholly uninjured by fire, to its lawful owner. *** _The extreme liberality of this wonder awakening the jealousy of the beneficent Austrian Government, when exhibited in Milan, the Necromancer had the honour to be seized, and confined for five years in the fortress of that city._ [194] Dick died at Gadshill in 1866, in the sixteenth year of his age, and was honoured with a small tomb and epitaph. [195] I cannot take leave of M. Beaucourt without saying that I am necessarily silent as to the most touching traits recorded of him by Dickens, because they refer to the generosity shown by him to an English family in occupation of another of his houses, in connection with whom his losses must have been considerable, but for whom he had nothing but help and sympathy. Replying to some questions about them, put by Dickens one day, he had only enlarged on their sacrifices and self-denials. "Ah that family, unfortunate! 'And you, Monsieur Beaucourt,' I said to him, 'you are unfortunate too, God knows!' Upon which he said in the pleasantest way in the world, Ah, Monsieur Dickens, thank you, don't speak of it!--And backed himself down the avenue with his cap in his hand, as if he were going to back himself straight into the evening star, without the ceremony of dying first. I never did see such a gentle, kind heart." CHAPTER V. RESIDENCE IN PARIS. 1855-1856. Actors and Dramas--Criticism of Frédéric Lemaitre--Increase of Celebrity--French Translation of Dickens--Conventionalities of the Théâtre Français--_Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu--Profane Nonsense--French _As You Like It_--Story of a French Drama--Auber and Queen Victoria--Robinson Crusoe--A Compliment and its Result--Madame Scribe--Ristori--Viardot in Orphée--Madame Dudevant at the Viardots--Banquet at Girardin's--National and Personal Compliment--Second Banquet--The Bourse and its Victims--Entry of Troops from Crimea--Paris illuminated--Streets on New Year's Day--Results of Imperial Improvement--English and French Art--French and English Nature--Sitting to Ary Scheffer--A Reading in Scheffer's Studio--Scheffer's Opinion of the Likeness--A Duchess murdered--A Chance Encounter, and what came of it. IN Paris Dickens's life was passed among artists, and in the exercise of his own art. His associates were writers, painters, actors, or musicians, and when he wanted relief from any strain of work he found it at the theatre. The years since his last residence in the great city had made him better known, and the increased attentions pleased him. He had to help in preparing for a translation of his books into French; and this, with continued labour at the story he had in hand, occupied him as long as he remained. It will be all best told by extracts from his letters; in which the people he met, the theatres he visited, and the incidents, public or private, that seemed to him worthy of mention, reappear with the old force and liveliness. Nor is anything better worth preserving from them than choice bits of description of an actor or a drama, for this perishable enjoyment has only so much as may survive out of such recollections to witness for itself to another generation; and an unusually high place may be challenged for the subtlety and delicacy of what is said in these letters of things theatrical, when the writer was especially attracted by a performer or a play. Frédéric Lemaitre has never had a higher tribute than Dickens paid to him during his few days' earlier stay at Paris in the spring. "Incomparably the finest acting I ever saw, I saw last night at the Ambigu. They have revived that old piece, once immensely popular in London under the name of _Thirty Years of a Gambler's Life_. Old Lemaitre plays his famous character,[196] and never did I see anything, in art, so exaltedly horrible and awful. In the earlier acts he was so well made up, and so light and active, that he really looked sufficiently young. But in the last two, when he had grown old and miserable, he did the finest things, I really believe, that are within the power of acting. Two or three times, a great cry of horror went all round the house. When he met, in the inn yard, the traveller whom he murders, and first saw his money, the manner in which the crime came into his head--and eyes--was as truthful as it was terrific. This traveller, being a good fellow, gives him wine. You should see the dim remembrance of his better days that comes over him as he takes the glass, and in a strange dazed way makes as if he were going to touch the other man's, or do some airy thing with it; and then stops and flings the contents down his hot throat, as if he were pouring it into a lime-kiln. But this was nothing to what follows after he has done the murder, and comes home, with a basket of provisions, a ragged pocket full of money, and a badly-washed bloody right hand--which his little girl finds out. After the child asked him if he had hurt his hand, his going aside, turning himself round, and looking over all his clothes for spots, was so inexpressibly dreadful that it really scared one. He called for wine, and the sickness that came upon him when he saw the colour, was one of the things that brought out the curious cry I have spoken of, from the audience. Then he fell into a sort of bloody mist, and went on to the end groping about, with no mind for anything, except making his fortune by staking this money, and a faint dull kind of love for the child. It is quite impossible to satisfy one's-self by saying enough of such a magnificent performance. I have never seen him come near its finest points, in anything else. He said two things in a way that alone would put him far apart from all other actors. One to his wife, when he has exultingly shewn her the money and she has asked him how he got it--'I found it'--and the other to his old companion and tempter, when he charged him with having killed that traveller, and he suddenly went headlong mad and took him by the throat and howled out, 'It wasn't I who murdered him--it was Misery!' And such a dress; such a face; and, above all, such an extraordinary guilty wicked thing as he made of a knotted branch of a tree which was his walking-stick, from the moment when the idea of the murder came into his head! I could write pages about him. It is an impression quite ineffaceable. He got half-boastful of that walking-staff to himself, and half-afraid of it; and didn't know whether to be grimly pleased that it had the jagged end, or to hate it and be horrified at it. He sat at a little table in the inn-yard, drinking with the traveller; and this horrible stick got between them like the Devil, while he counted on his fingers the uses he could put the money to." That was at the close of February. In October, Dickens's longer residence began. He betook himself with his family, after two unsuccessful attempts in the new region of the Rue Balzac and Rue Lord Byron, to an apartment in the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Over him was an English bachelor with an establishment consisting of an English groom and five English horses. "The concierge and his wife told us that his name was _Six_, which drove me nearly mad until we discovered it to be _Sykes_." The situation was a good one, very cheerful for himself and with amusement for his children. It was a quarter of a mile above Franconi's on the other side of the way, and within a door or two of the Jardin d'Hiver. The Exposition was just below; the Barrière de l'Etoile from a quarter to half a mile below; and all Paris, including Emperor and Empress coming from and returning to St. Cloud, thronged past the windows in open carriages or on horseback, all day long. Now it was he found himself more of a celebrity than when he had wintered in the city nine years before;[197] the feuilleton of the _Moniteur_ was filled daily with a translation of _Chuzzlewit_; and he had soon to consider the proposal I have named, to publish in French his collected novels and tales.[198] Before he had been a week in his new abode, Ary Scheffer, "a frank and noble fellow," had made his acquaintance; introduced him to several distinguished Frenchmen; and expressed the wish to paint him. To Scheffer was also due an advantage obtained for my friend's two little daughters of which they may always keep the memory with pride. "Mamey and Katey are learning Italian, and their master is Manin of Venetian fame, the best and the noblest of those unhappy gentlemen. He came here with a wife and a beloved daughter, and they are both dead. Scheffer made him known to me, and has been, I understand, wonderfully generous and good to him." Nor may I omit to state the enjoyment afforded him, not only by the presence in Paris during the winter of Mr. Wilkie Collins and of Mr. and Mrs. White of Bonchurch, but by the many friends from England whom the Art Exposition brought over. Sir Alexander Cockburn was one of these; Edwin Landseer, Charles Robert Leslie, and William Boxall, were others. Macready left his retreat at Sherborne to make him a visit of several days. Thackeray went to and fro all the time between London and his mother's house, also in the Champs Elysées, where his daughters were. And Paris for the time was the home of Robert Lytton, who belonged to the Embassy, of the Sartorises, of the Brownings, and of others whom Dickens liked and cared for. At the first play he went to, the performance was stopped while the news of the last Crimean engagement, just issued in a supplement to the _Moniteur_, was read from the stage. "It made not the faintest effect upon the audience; and even the hired claqueurs, who had been absurdly loud during the piece, seemed to consider the war not at all within their contract, and were as stagnant as ditch-water. The theatre was full. It is quite impossible to see such apathy, and suppose the war to be popular, whatever may be asserted to the contrary." The day before, he had met the Emperor and the King of Sardinia in the streets, "and, as usual, no man touching his hat, and very very few so much as looking round." The success of a most agreeable little piece by our old friend Regnier took him next to the Français, where Plessy's acting enchanted him. "Of course the interest of it turns upon a flawed piece of living china (_that_ seems to be positively essential), but, as in most of these cases, if you will accept the position in which you find the people, you have nothing more to bother your morality about." The theatre in the Rue Richelieu, however, was not generally his favourite resort. He used to talk of it whimsically as a kind of tomb, where you went, as the Eastern people did in the stories, to think of your unsuccessful loves and dead relations. "There is a dreary classicality at that establishment calculated to freeze the marrow. Between ourselves, even one's best friends there are at times very aggravating. One tires of seeing a man, through any number of acts, remembering everything by patting his forehead with the flat of his hand, jerking out sentences by shaking himself, and piling them up in pyramids over his head with his right forefinger. And they have a generic small comedy-piece, where you see two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat on, to talk to another man--and in respect of which you know exactly when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat off one table to put it upon the other--which strikes one quite as ludicrously as a good farce.[199]. . . There seems to be a good piece at the Vaudeville, on the idea of the _Town and Country Mouse_. It is too respectable and inoffensive for me to-night, but I hope to see it before I leave . . . I have a horrible idea of making friends with Franconi, and sauntering when I am at work into their sawdust green-room." At a theatre of a yet heavier school than the Français he had a drearier experience. "On Wednesday we went to the Odéon to see a new piece, in four acts and in verse, called _Michel Cervantes_. I suppose such an infernal dose of ditch water never was concocted. But there were certain passages, describing the suppression of public opinion in Madrid, which were received with a shout of savage application to France that made one stare again! And once more, here again, at every pause, steady, compact, regular as military drums, the Ça Ira!" On another night, even at the Porte St. Martin, drawn there doubtless by the attraction of repulsion, he supped full with the horrors of classicality at a performance of _Orestes_ versified by Alexandre Dumas. "Nothing have I ever seen so weighty and so ridiculous. If I had not already learnt to tremble at the sight of classic drapery on the human form, I should have plumbed the utmost depths of terrified boredom in this achievement. The chorus is not preserved otherwise than that bits of it are taken out for characters to speak. It is really so bad as to be almost good. Some of the Frenchified classical anguish struck me as so unspeakably ridiculous that it puts me on the broad grin as I write." At the same theatre, in the early spring, he had a somewhat livelier entertainment. "I was at the Porte St. Martin last night, where there is a rather good melodrama called _Sang Melé_, in which one of the characters is an English Lord--Lord William Falkland--who is called throughout the piece Milor Williams Fack Lorn, and is a hundred times described by others and described by himself as Williams. He is admirably played; but two English travelling ladies are beyond expression ridiculous, and there is something positively vicious in their utter want of truth. One 'set,' where the action of a whole act is supposed to take place in the great wooden verandah of a Swiss hotel overhanging a mountain ravine, is the best piece of stage carpentering I have seen in France. Next week we are to have at the Ambigu _Paradise Lost_, with the murder of Abel, and the Deluge. The wildest rumours are afloat as to the un-dressing of our first parents." Anticipation far outdoes a reality of this kind; and at the fever-pitch to which rumours raised it here, Dickens might vainly have attempted to get admission on the first night, if Mr. Webster, the English manager and comedian, had not obtained a ticket for him. He went with Mr. Wilkie Collins. "We were rung in (out of the café below the Ambigu) at 8, and the play was over at half-past 1; the waits between the acts being very much longer than the acts themselves. The house was crammed to excess in every part, and the galleries awful with Blouses, who again, during the whole of the waits, beat with the regularity of military drums the revolutionary tune of famous memory--Ça Ira! The play is a compound of _Paradise Lost_ and Byron's _Cain_; and some of the controversies between the archangel and the devil, when the celestial power argues with the infernal in conversational French, as 'Eh bien! Satan, crois-tu donc que notre Seigneur t'aurait exposé aux tourments que t'endures à présent, sans avoir prévu,' &c. &c. are very ridiculous. All the supernatural personages are alarmingly natural (as theatre nature goes), and walk about in the stupidest way. Which has occasioned Collins and myself to institute a perquisition whether the French ever have shown any kind of idea of the supernatural; and to decide this rather in the negative. The people are very well dressed, and Eve very modestly. All Paris and the provinces had been ransacked for a woman who had brown hair that would fall to the calves of her legs--and she was found at last at the Odéon. There was nothing attractive until the 4th act, when there was a pretty good scene of the children of Cain dancing in, and desecrating, a temple, while Abel and his family were hammering hard at the Ark, outside; in all the pauses of the revel. The Deluge in the fifth act was up to about the mark of a drowning scene at the Adelphi; but it had one new feature. When the rain ceased, and the ark drove in on the great expanse of water, then lying waveless as the mists cleared and the sun broke out, numbers of bodies drifted up and down. These were all real men and boys, each separate, on a new kind of horizontal sloat. They looked horrible and real. Altogether, a merely dull business; but I dare say it will go for a long while." A piece of honest farce is a relief from these profane absurdities. "An uncommonly droll piece with an original comic idea in it has been in course of representation here. It is called _Les Cheveux de ma Femme_. A man who is dotingly fond of his wife, and who wishes to know whether she loved anybody else before they were married, cuts off a lock of her hair by stealth, and takes it to a great mesmeriser, who submits it to a clairvoyante who never was wrong. It is discovered that the owner of this hair has been up to the most frightful dissipations, insomuch that the clairvoyante can't mention half of them. The distracted husband goes home to reproach his wife, and she then reveals that she wears a wig, and takes it off." The last piece he went to see before leaving Paris was a French version of _As You Like It_; but he found two acts of it to be more than enough. "In _Comme il vous Plaira_ nobody had anything to do but to sit down as often as possible on as many stones and trunks of trees as possible. When I had seen Jacques seat himself on 17 roots of trees, and 25 grey stones, which was at the end of the second act, I came away." Only one more sketch taken in a theatre, and perhaps the best, I will give from these letters. It simply tells us what is necessary to understand a particular "tag" to a play, but it is related so prettily that the thing it celebrates could not have a nicer effect than is produced by this account of it. The play in question, _Mémoires du Diable_, and another piece of enchanting interest, the _Médecin des Enfants_,[200] were his favourites among all he saw at this time. "As I have no news, I may as well tell you about the tag that I thought so pretty to the _Mémoires du Diable_; in which piece by the way, there is a most admirable part, most admirably played, in which a man says merely 'Yes' or 'No' all through the piece, until the last scene. A certain M. Robin has got hold of the papers of a deceased lawyer, concerning a certain estate which has been swindled away from its rightful owner, a Baron's widow, into other hands. They disclose so much roguery that he binds them up into a volume lettered 'Mémoires du Diable.' The knowledge he derives from these papers not only enables him to unmask the hypocrites all through the piece (in an excellent manner), but induces him to propose to the Baroness that if he restores to her her estate and good name--for even her marriage to the deceased Baron is denied--she shall give him her daughter in marriage. The daughter herself, on hearing the offer, accepts it; and a part of the plot is, her going to a masked ball, to which he goes as the Devil, to see how she likes him (when she finds, of course, that she likes him very much). The country people about the Château in dispute, suppose him to be really the Devil, because of his strange knowledge, and his strange comings and goings; and he, being with this girl in one of its old rooms, in the beginning of the 3rd act, shews her a little coffer on the table with a bell in it. 'They suppose,' he tells her, 'that whenever this bell is rung, I appear and obey the summons. Very ignorant, isn't it? But, if you ever want me particularly--very particularly--ring the little bell and try.' The plot proceeds to its development. The wrong-doers are exposed; the missing document, proving the marriage, is found; everything is finished; they are all on the stage; and M. Robin hands the paper to the Baroness. 'You are reinstated in your rights, Madame; you are happy; I will not hold you to a compact made when you didn't know me; I release you and your fair daughter; the pleasure of doing what I have done, is my sufficient reward; I kiss your hand and take my leave. Farewell!' He backs himself courteously out; the piece seems concluded, everybody wonders, the girl (little Mdlle. Luther) stands amazed; when she suddenly remembers the little bell. In the prettiest way possible, she runs to the coffer on the table, takes out the little bell, rings it, and he comes rushing back and folds her to his heart. I never saw a prettier thing in my life. It made me laugh in that most delightful of ways, with the tears in my eyes; so that I can never forget it, and must go and see it again." But great as was the pleasure thus derived from the theatre, he was, in the matter of social intercourse, even more indebted to distinguished men connected with it by authorship or acting. At Scribe's he was entertained frequently; and "very handsome and pleasant" was his account of the dinners, as of all the belongings, of the prolific dramatist--a charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage, handsome pair of horses, "all made, as he says, by his pen." One of the guests the first evening was Auber, "a stolid little elderly man, rather petulant in manner," who told Dickens he had once lived "at Stock Noonton" (Stoke Newington) to study English, but had forgotten it all. "Louis Philippe had invited him to meet the Queen of England, and when L. P. presented him, the Queen said, 'We are such old acquaintances through M. Auber's works, that an introduction is quite unnecessary.'" They met again a few nights later, with the author of the _History of the Girondins_, at the hospitable table of M. Pichot, to whom Lamartine had expressed a strong desire again to meet Dickens as "un des grands amis de son imagination." "He continues to be precisely as we formerly knew him, both in appearance and manner; highly prepossessing, and with a sort of calm passion about him, very taking indeed. We talked of De Foe[201] and Richardson, and of that wonderful genius for the minutest details in a narrative, which has given them so much fame in France. I found him frank and unaffected, and full of curious knowledge of the French common people. He informed the company at dinner that he had rarely met a foreigner who spoke French so easily as your inimitable correspondent, whereat your correspondent blushed modestly, and almost immediately afterwards so nearly choked himself with the bone of a fowl (which is still in his throat), that he sat in torture for ten minutes with a strong apprehension that he was going to make the good Pichot famous by dying like the little Hunchback at his table. Scribe and his wife were of the party, but had to go away at the ice-time because it was the first representation at the Opéra Comique of a new opera by Auber and himself, of which very great expectations have been formed. It was very curious to see him--the author of 400 pieces--getting nervous as the time approached, and pulling out his watch every minute. At last he dashed out as if he were going into what a friend of mine calls a plunge-bath. Whereat she rose and followed. She is the most extraordinary woman I ever beheld; for her eldest son must be thirty, and she has the figure of five-and-twenty, and is strikingly handsome. So graceful too, that her manner of rising, curtseying, laughing, and going out after him, was pleasanter than the pleasantest thing I have ever seen done on the stage." The opera Dickens himself saw a week later, and wrote of it as "most charming. Delightful music, an excellent story, immense stage tact, capital scenic arrangements, and the most delightful little prima donna ever seen or heard, in the person of Marie Cabel. It is called _Manon Lescaut_--from the old romance--and is charming throughout. She sings a laughing song in it which is received with madness, and which is the only real laughing song that ever was written. Auber told me that when it was first rehearsed, it made a great effect upon the orchestra; and that he could not have had a better compliment upon its freshness than the musical director paid him, in coming and clapping him on the shoulder with 'Bravo, jeune homme! Cela promet bien!'" At dinner at Regnier's he met M. Legouvet, in whose tragedy Rachel, after its acceptance, had refused to act Medea; a caprice which had led not only to her condemnation in costs of so much a night until she did act it, but to a quasi rivalry against her by Ristori, who was now on her way to Paris to play it in Italian. To this performance Dickens and Macready subsequently went together, and pronounced it to be hopelessly bad. "In the day entertainments, and little melodrama theatres, of Italy, I have seen the same thing fifty times, only not at once so conventional and so exaggerated. The papers have all been in fits respecting the sublimity of the performance, and the genuineness of the applause--particularly of the bouquets; which were thrown on at the most preposterous times in the midst of agonizing scenes, so that the characters had to pick their way among them, and a certain stout gentleman who played King Creon was obliged to keep a wary eye, all night, on the proscenium boxes, and dodge them as they came down. Now Scribe, who dined here next day (and who follows on the Ristori side, being offended, as everybody has been, by the insolence of Rachel), could not resist the temptation of telling us, that, going round at the end of the first act to offer his congratulations, he met all the bouquets coming back in men's arms to be thrown on again in the second act. . . . By the bye, I see a fine actor lost in Scribe. In all his pieces he has everything done in his own way; and on that same night he was showing what Rachel did not do, and wouldn't do, in the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, with extraordinary force and intensity." At the house of another great artist, Madame Viardot,[202] the sister of Malibran, Dickens dined to meet Georges Sands, that lady having appointed the day and hour for the interesting festival, which came off duly on the 10th of January. "I suppose it to be impossible to imagine anybody more unlike my preconceptions than the illustrious Sand. Just the kind of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the Queen's monthly nurse. Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed. Nothing of the blue-stocking about her, except a little final way of settling all your opinions with hers, which I take to have been acquired in the country where she lives, and in the domination of a small circle. A singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner. The dinner was very good and remarkably unpretending. Ourselves, Madame and her son, the Scheffers, the Sartorises, and some Lady somebody (from the Crimea last) who wore a species of paletot, and smoked. The Viardots have a house away in the new part of Paris, which looks exactly as if they had moved into it last week and were going away next. Notwithstanding which, they have lived in it eight years. The opera the very last thing on earth you would associate with the family. Piano not even opened. Her husband is an extremely good fellow, and she is as natural as it is possible to be." Dickens was hardly the man to take fair measure of Madame Dudevant in meeting her thus. He was not familiar with her writings, and had no very special liking for such of them as he knew. But no disappointment, nothing but amazement, awaited him at a dinner that followed soon after. Emile de Girardin gave a banquet in his honour. His description of it, which he declares to be strictly prosaic, sounds a little Oriental, but not inappropriately so. "No man unacquainted with my determination never to embellish or fancify such accounts, could believe in the description I shall let off when we meet of dining at Emile Girardin's--of the three gorgeous drawing rooms with ten thousand wax candles in golden sconces, terminating in a dining-room of unprecedented magnificence with two enormous transparent plate-glass doors in it, looking (across an ante-chamber full of clean plates) straight into the kitchen, with the cooks in their white paper caps dishing the dinner. From his seat in the midst of the table, the host (like a Giant in a Fairy story) beholds the kitchen, and the snow-white tables, and the profound order and silence there prevailing. Forth from the plate-glass doors issues the Banquet--the most wonderful feast ever tasted by mortal: at the present price of Truffles, that article alone costing (for eight people) at least five pounds. On the table are ground glass jugs of peculiar construction, laden with the finest growth of Champagne and the coolest ice. With the third course is issued Port Wine (previously unheard of in a good state on this continent), which would fetch two guineas a bottle at any sale. The dinner done, Oriental flowers in vases of golden cobweb are placed upon the board. With the ice is issued Brandy, buried for 100 years. To that succeeds Coffee, brought by the brother of one of the convives from the remotest East, in exchange for an equal quantity of California gold dust. The company being returned to the drawing-room--tables roll in by unseen agency, laden with Cigarettes from the Hareem of the Sultan, and with cool drinks in which the flavour of the Lemon arrived yesterday from Algeria, struggles voluptuously with the delicate Orange arrived this morning from Lisbon. That period past, and the guests reposing on Divans worked with many-coloured blossoms, big table rolls in, heavy with massive furniture of silver, and breathing incense in the form of a little present of Tea direct from China--table and all, I believe; but cannot swear to it, and am resolved to be prosaic. All this time the host perpetually repeats 'Ce petit dîner-ci n'est que pour faire la connaissance de Monsieur Dickens; il ne compte pas; ce n'est rien.' And even now I have forgotten to set down half of it--in particular the item of a far larger plum pudding than ever was seen in England at Christmas time, served with a celestial sauce in colour like the orange blossom, and in substance like the blossom powdered and bathed in dew, and called in the carte (carte in a gold frame like a little fish-slice to be handed about) 'Hommage à l'illustre écrivain d'Angleterre.' That illustrious man staggered out at the last drawing-room door, speechless with wonder, finally; and even at that moment his host, holding to his lips a chalice set with precious stones and containing nectar distilled from the air that blew over the fields of beans in bloom for fifteen summers, remarked 'Le dîner que nous avons eu, mon cher, n'est rien--il ne compte pas--il a été tout-à-fait en famille--il faut dîner (en vérité, dîner) bientôt. Au plaisir! Au revoir! Au dîner!'" The second dinner came, wonderful as the first; among the company were Regnier, Jules Sandeau, and the new Director of the Français; and his host again played Lucullus in the same style, with success even more consummate. The only absolutely new incident however was that "After dinner he asked me if I would come into another room and smoke a cigar? and on my saying Yes, coolly opened a drawer, containing about 5000 inestimable cigars in prodigious bundles--just as the Captain of the Robbers in _Ali Baba_ might have gone to a corner of the cave for bales of brocade. A little man dined who was blacking shoes 8 years ago, and is now enormously rich--the richest man in Paris--having ascended with rapidity up the usual ladder of the Bourse. By merely observing that perhaps he might come down again, I clouded so many faces as to render it very clear to me that _everybody present_ was at the same game for some stake or other!" He returned to that subject in a letter a few days later. "If you were to see the steps of the Bourse at about 4 in the afternoon, and the crowd of blouses and patches among the speculators there assembled, all howling and haggard with speculation, you would stand aghast at the consideration of what must be going on. Concierges and people like that perpetually blow their brains out, or fly into the Seine, 'à cause des pertes sur la Bourse.' I hardly ever take up a French paper without lighting on such a paragraph. On the other hand, thoroughbred horses without end, and red velvet carriages with white kid harness on jet black horses, go by here all day long; and the pedestrians who turn to look at them, laugh, and say 'C'est la Bourse!' Such crashes must be staved off every week as have not been seen since Law's time." Another picture connects itself with this, and throws light on the speculation thus raging. The French loans connected with the war, so much puffed and praised in England at the time for the supposed spirit in which they were taken up, had in fact only ministered to the commonest and lowest gambling; and the war had never in the least been popular. "Emile Girardin," wrote Dickens on the 23rd of March, "was here yesterday, and he says that Peace is to be formally announced at Paris to-morrow amid general apathy." But the French are never wholly apathetic to their own exploits; and a display with a touch of excitement in it had been witnessed a couple of months before on the entry of the troops from the Crimea,[203] when the Zouaves, as they marched past, pleased Dickens most. "A remarkable body of men," he wrote, "wild, dangerous, and picturesque. Close-cropped head, red skull cap, Greek jacket, full red petticoat trowsers trimmed with yellow, and high white gaiters--the most sensible things for the purpose I know, and coming into use in the line. A man with such things on his legs is always free there, and ready for a muddy march; and might flounder through roads two feet deep in mud, and, simply by changing his gaiters (he has another pair in his haversack), be clean and comfortable and wholesome again, directly. Plenty of beard and moustache, and the musket carried reverse-wise with the stock over the shoulder, make up the sunburnt Zouave. He strides like Bobadil, smoking as he goes; and when he laughs (they were under my window for half-an-hour or so), plunges backward in the wildest way, as if he were going to throw a sommersault. They have a black dog belonging to the regiment, and, when they now marched along with their medals, this dog marched after the one non-commissioned officer he invariably follows with a profound conviction that he was decorated. I couldn't see whether he had a medal, his hair being long; but he was perfectly up to what had befallen his regiment; and I never saw anything so capital as his way of regarding the public. Whatever the regiment does, he is always in his place; and it was impossible to mistake the air of modest triumph which was now upon him. A small dog corporeally, but of a great mind."[204] On that night there was an illumination in honour of the army, when the "whole of Paris, bye streets and lanes and all sorts of out of the way places, was most brilliantly illuminated. It looked in the dark like Venice and Genoa rolled into one, and split up through the middle by the Corso at Rome in the carnival time. The French people certainly do know how to honour their own countrymen, in a most marvellous way." It was the festival time of the New Year, and Dickens was fairly lost in a mystery of amazement at where the money could come from that everybody was spending on the étrennes they were giving to everybody else. All the famous shops on the Boulevards had been blockaded for more than a week. "There is now a line of wooden stalls, three miles long, on each side of that immense thoroughfare; and wherever a retiring house or two admits of a double line, there it is. All sorts of objects from shoes and sabots, through porcelain and crystal, up to live fowls and rabbits which are played for at a sort of dwarf skittles (to their immense disturbance, as the ball rolls under them and shakes them off their shelves and perches whenever it is delivered by a vigorous hand), are on sale in this great Fair. And what you may get in the way of ornament for two-pence, is astounding." Unhappily there came dark and rainy weather, and one of the improvements of the Empire ended, as so many others did, in slush and misery.[205] Some sketches connected with the Art Exposition in the winter of 1855, and with the fulfilment of Ary Scheffer's design to paint the portrait of Dickens, may close these Paris pictures. He did not think that English art showed to advantage beside the French. It seemed to him small, shrunken, insignificant, "niggling." He thought the general absence of ideas horribly apparent; "and even when one comes to Mulready, and sees two old men talking over a much-too-prominent table-cloth, and reads the French explanation of their proceedings, 'La discussion sur les principes de Docteur Whiston,' one is dissatisfied. Somehow or other they don't tell. Even Leslie's Sancho wants go, and Stanny is too much like a set-scene. It is of no use disguising the fact that what we know to be wanting in the men is wanting in their works--character, fire, purpose, and the power of using the vehicle and the model as mere means to an end. There is a horrible respectability about most of the best of them--a little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive to me of the state of England itself. As a mere fact, Frith, Ward, and Egg, come out the best in such pictures as are here, and attract to the greatest extent. The first, in the picture from the Good-natured Man; the second, in the Royal Family in the Temple; the third, in the Peter the Great first seeing Catherine--which I always thought a good picture, and in which foreigners evidently descry a sudden dramatic touch that pleases them. There are no end of bad pictures among the French, but, Lord! the goodness also!--the fearlessness of them; the bold drawing; the dashing conception; the passion and action in them![206] The Belgian department is full of merit. It has the best landscape in it, the best portrait, and the best scene of homely life, to be found in the building. Don't think it a part of my despondency about public affairs, and my fear that our national glory is on the decline, when I say that mere form and conventionalities usurp, in English art, as in English government and social relations, the place of living force and truth. I tried to resist the impression yesterday, and went to the English gallery first, and praised and admired with great diligence; but it was of no use. I could not make anything better of it than what I tell you. Of course this is between ourselves. Friendship is better than criticism, and I shall steadily hold my tongue. Discussion is worse than useless when you cannot agree about what you are going to discuss." French nature is all wrong, said the English artists whom Dickens talked to; but surely not because it is French, was his reply. The English point of view is not the only one to take men and women from. The French pictures are "theatrical," was the rejoinder. But the French themselves are a demonstrative and gesticulating people, was Dickens's retort; and what thus is rendered by their artists is the truth through an immense part of the world. "I never saw anything so strange. They seem to me to have got a fixed idea that there is no natural manner but the English manner (in itself so exceptional that it is a thing apart, in all countries); and that unless a Frenchman--represented as going to the guillotine for example--is as calm as Clapham, or as respectable as Richmond-hill, he cannot be right." To the sittings at Ary Scheffer's some troubles as well as many pleasures were incident, and both had mention in his letters. "You may faintly imagine what I have suffered from sitting to Scheffer every day since I came back. He is a most noble fellow, and I have the greatest pleasure in his society, and have made all sorts of acquaintances at his house; but I can scarcely express how uneasy and unsettled it makes me to have to sit, sit, sit, with _Little Dorrit_ on my mind, and the Christmas business too--though that is now happily dismissed. On Monday afternoon, _and all day on Wednesday_, I am going to sit again. And the crowning feature is, that I do not discern the slightest resemblance, either in his portrait or his brother's! They both peg away at me at the same time." The sittings were varied by a special entertainment, when Scheffer received some sixty people in his "long atelier"--"including a lot of French who _say_ (but I don't believe it) that they know English"--to whom Dickens, by special entreaty, read his _Cricket on the Hearth_. That was at the close of November. January came, and the end of the sittings was supposed to be at hand. "The nightmare portrait is nearly done; and Scheffer promises that an interminable sitting next Saturday, beginning at 10 o'clock in the morning, shall finish it. It is a fine spirited head, painted at his very best, and with a very easy and natural appearance in it. But it does not look to me at all like, nor does it strike me that if I saw it in a gallery I should suppose myself to be the original. It is always possible that I don't know my own face. It is going to be engraved here, in two sizes and ways--the mere head and the whole thing." A fortnight later, the interminable sitting came. "Imagine me if you please with No. 5 on my head and hands, sitting to Scheffer yesterday four hours! At this stage of a story, no one can conceive how it distresses me." Still this was not the last. March had come before the portrait was done. "Scheffer finished yesterday; and Collins, who has a good eye for pictures, says that there is no man living who could do the painting about the eyes. As a work of art I see in it spirit combined with perfect ease, and yet I don't see myself. So I come to the conclusion that I never _do_ see myself. I shall be very curious to know the effect of it upon you." March had then begun; and at its close Dickens, who had meanwhile been in England, thus wrote: "I have not seen Scheffer since I came back, but he told Catherine a few days ago that he was not satisfied with the likeness after all, and thought he must do more to it. My own impression of it, you remember?" In these few words he anticipated the impression made upon myself. I was not satisfied with it. The picture had much merit, but not as a portrait. From its very resemblance in the eyes and mouth one derived the sense of a general unlikeness. But the work of the artist's brother, Henri Scheffer, painted from the same sittings, was in all ways greatly inferior. Before Dickens left Paris in May he had sent over two descriptions that the reader most anxious to follow him to a new scene would perhaps be sorry to lose. A Duchess was murdered in the Champs Elysées. "The murder over the way (the third or fourth event of that nature in the Champs Elysées since we have been here) seems to disclose the strangest state of things. The Duchess who is murdered lived alone in a great house which was always shut up, and passed her time entirely in the dark. In a little lodge outside lived a coachman (the murderer), and there had been a long succession of coachmen who had been unable to stay there, and upon whom, whenever they asked for their wages, she plunged out with an immense knife, by way of an immediate settlement. The coachman never had anything to do, for the coach hadn't been driven out for years; neither would she ever allow the horses to be taken out for exercise. Between the lodge and the house, is a miserable bit of garden, all overgrown with long rank grass, weeds, and nettles; and in this, the horses used to be taken out to swim--in a dead green vegetable sea, up to their haunches. On the day of the murder, there was a great crowd, of course; and in the midst of it up comes the Duke her husband (from whom she was separated), and rings at the gate. The police open the grate. 'C'est vrai donc,' says the Duke, 'que Madame la Duchesse n'est plus?'--'C'est trop vrai, Monseigneur.'--'Tant mieux,' says the Duke, and walks off deliberately, to the great satisfaction of the assemblage." The second description relates an occurrence in England of only three years previous date, belonging to that wildly improbable class of realities which Dickens always held, with Fielding, to be (properly) closed to fiction. Only, he would add, critics should not be so eager to assume that what had never happened to themselves could not, by any human possibility, ever be supposed to have happened to anybody else. "B. was with me the other day, and, among other things that he told me, described an extraordinary adventure in his life, at a place not a thousand miles from my 'property' at Gadshill, three years ago. He lived at the tavern and was sketching one day when an open carriage came by with a gentleman and lady in it. He was sitting in the same place working at the same sketch, next day, when it came by again. So, another day, when the gentleman got out and introduced himself. Fond of art; lived at the great house yonder, which perhaps he knew; was an Oxford man and a Devonshire squire, but not resident on his estate, for domestic reasons; would be glad to see him to dinner to-morrow. He went, and found among other things a very fine library. 'At your disposition,' said the Squire, to whom he had now described himself and his pursuits. 'Use it for your writing and drawing. Nobody else uses it.' He stayed in the house _six months_. The lady was a mistress, aged five-and-twenty, and very beautiful, drinking her life away. The Squire was drunken, and utterly depraved and wicked; but an excellent scholar, an admirable linguist, and a great theologian. Two other mad visitors stayed the six months. One, a man well known in Paris here, who goes about the world with a crimson silk stocking in his breast pocket, containing a tooth-brush and an immense quantity of ready money. The other, a college chum of the Squire's, now ruined; with an insatiate thirst for drink; who constantly got up in the middle of the night, crept down to the dining-room, and emptied all the decanters. . . . B. stayed on in the place, under a sort of devilish fascination to discover what might come of it. . . . Tea or coffee never seen in the house, and very seldom water. Beer, champagne, and brandy, were the three drinkables. Breakfast: leg of mutton, champagne, beer, and brandy. Lunch: shoulder of mutton, champagne, beer, and brandy. Dinner: every conceivable dish (Squire's income, £7,000 a-year), champagne, beer, and brandy. The Squire had married a woman of the town from whom he was now separated, but by whom he had a daughter. The mother, to spite the father, had bred the daughter in every conceivable vice. Daughter, then 13, came from school once a month. Intensely coarse in talk, and always drunk. As they drove about the country in two open carriages, the drunken mistress would be perpetually tumbling out of one, and the drunken daughter perpetually tumbling out of the other. At last the drunken mistress drank her stomach away, and began to die on the sofa. Got worse and worse, and was always raving about Somebody's where she had once been a lodger, and perpetually shrieking that she would cut somebody else's heart out. At last she died on the sofa, and, after the funeral, the party broke up. A few months ago, B. met the man with the crimson silk stocking at Brighton, who told him that the Squire was dead 'of a broken heart'; that the chum was dead of delirium tremens; and that the daughter was heiress to the fortune. He told me all this, which I fully believe to be true, without any embellishment--just in the off-hand way in which I have told it to you." Dickens left Paris at the end of April, and, after the summer in Boulogne which has been described, passed the winter in London, giving to his theatrical enterprise nearly all the time that _Little Dorrit_ did not claim from him. His book was finished in the following spring; was inscribed to Clarkson Stanfield; and now claims to have something said about it. FOOTNOTES: [196] Twenty-one years before this date, in this same part, Lemaitre had made a deep impression in London; and now, eighteen years later, he is appearing in one of the revivals of Victor Hugo in Paris (1873.) [197] "It is surprising what a change nine years have made in my notoriety here. So many of the rising French generation now read English (and _Chuzzlewit_ is now being translated daily in the _Moniteur_), that I can't go into a shop and give my card without being acknowledged in the pleasantest way possible. A curiosity-dealer brought home some little knick-knacks I had bought, the other night, and knew all about my books from beginning to end of 'em. There is much of the personal friendliness in my readers, here, that is so delightful at home; and I have been greatly surprised and pleased by the unexpected discovery." To this I may add a line from one of his letters six years later. "I see my books in French at every railway station great and small."--13th of Oct. 1862. [198] "I forget whether" (6th of Jan. 1856) "I have already told you that I have received a proposal from a responsible bookselling house here, for a complete edition, authorized by myself, of a French translation of all my books. The terms involve questions of space and amount of matter; but I should say, at a rough calculation, that I shall get about £300 by it--perhaps £50 more." "I have arranged" (30th of Jan.) "with the French bookselling house to receive, by monthly payments of £40, the sum of £440 for the right to translate all my books: that is, what they call my Romances, and what I call my Stories. This does not include the Christmas Books, _American Notes_, _Pictures from Italy_, or the _Sketches_; but they are to have the right to translate them for extra payments if they choose. In consideration of this venture as to the unprotected property, I cede them the right of translating all future Romances at a thousand francs (£40) each. Considering that I get so much for what is otherwise worth nothing, and get my books before so clever and important a people, I think this is not a bad move?" The first friend with whom he advised about it, I should mention, was the famous Leipzig publisher, M. Tauchnitz, in whose judgment, as well as in his honour and good faith, he had implicit reliance, and who thought the offer fair. On the 17th of April he wrote: "On Monday I am going to dine with all my translators at Hachette's, the bookseller who has made the bargain for the complete edition, and who began this week to pay his monthly £40 for a year. I don't mean to go out any more. Please to imagine me in the midst of my French dressers." He wrote an address for the Edition in which he praised the liberality of his publishers and expressed his pride in being so presented to the French people whom he sincerely loved and honoured. Another word may be added. "It is rather appropriate that the French translation edition will pay my rent for the whole year, and travelling charges to boot."--24th of Feb. 1856. [199] He wrote a short and very comical account of one of these stock performances at the Français in which he brought out into strong relief all their conventionalities and formal habits, their regular surprises surprising nobody, and their mysterious disclosures of immense secrets known to everybody beforehand, which he meant for _Household Words_; but it occurred to him that it might give pain to Regnier, and he destroyed it. [200] Before he saw this he wrote: "That piece you spoke of (the _Médecin des Enfants_) is one of the very best melodramas I have ever read. Situations, admirable. I will send it to you by Landseer. I am very curious indeed to go and see it; and it is an instance to me of the powerful emotions from which art is shut out in England by the conventionalities." After seeing it he writes: "The low cry of excitement and expectation that goes round the house when any one of the great situations is felt to be coming is very remarkable indeed. I suppose there has not been so great a success of the genuine and worthy kind (for the authors have really taken the French dramatic bull by the horns, and put the adulterous wife in the right position), for many years. When you come over and see it, you will say you never saw anything so admirably done. There is one actor, Bignon (M. Delormel), who has a good deal of Macready in him; sometimes looks very like him; and who seems to me the perfection of manly good sense." 17th of April 1856. [201] I subjoin from another of these French letters of later date a remark on _Robinson Crusoe_. "You remember my saying to you some time ago how curious I thought it that _Robinson Crusoe_ should be the only instance of an universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry. I have been reading it again just now, in the course of my numerous refreshings at those English wells, and I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of an utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of Friday. It is as heartless as _Gil Blas_, in a very different and far more serious way. But the second part altogether will not bear enquiry. In the second part of _Don Quixote_ are some of the finest things. But the second part of _Robinson Crusoe_ is perfectly contemptible, in the glaring defect that it exhibits the man who was 30 years on that desert island with no visible effect made on his character by that experience. De Foe's women too--Robinson Crusoe's wife for instance--are terrible dull commonplace fellows without breeches; and I have no doubt he was a precious dry and disagreeable article himself--I mean De Foe: not Robinson. Poor dear Goldsmith (I remember as I write) derived the same impression." [202] When in Paris six years later Dickens saw this fine singer in an opera by Gluck, and the reader will not be sorry to have his description of it. "Last night I saw Madame Viardot do Gluck's Orphée. It is a most extraordinary performance--pathetic in the highest degree, and full of quite sublime acting. Though it is unapproachably fine from first to last, the beginning of it, at the tomb of Eurydice, is a thing that I cannot remember at this moment of writing, without emotion. It is the finest presentation of grief that I can imagine. And when she has received hope from the Gods, and encouragement to go into the other world and seek Eurydice, Viardot's manner of taking the relinquished lyre from the tomb and becoming radiant again, is most noble. Also she recognizes Eurydice's touch, when at length the hand is put in hers from behind, like a most transcendant genius. And when, yielding to Eurydice's entreaties she has turned round and slain her with a look, her despair over the body is grand in the extreme. It is worth a journey to Paris to see, for there is no such Art to be otherwise looked upon. Her husband stumbled over me by mere chance, and took me to her dressing-room. Nothing could have happened better as a genuine homage to the performance, for I was disfigured with crying."--30th of November 1862. [203] Here is another picture of Regiments in the Streets of which the date is the 30th of January. "It was cold this afternoon, as bright as Italy, and these Elysian Fields crowded with carriages, riders, and foot passengers. All the fountains were playing, all the Heavens shining. Just as I went out at 4 o'clock, several regiments that had passed out at the Barrière in the morning to exercise in the country, came marching back, in the straggling French manner, which is far more picturesque and real than anything you can imagine in that way. Alternately great storms of drums played, and then the most delicious and skilful bands, 'Trovatore' music, 'Barber of Seville' music, all sorts of music with well-marked melody and time. All bloused Paris (led by the Inimitable, and a poor cripple who works himself up and down all day in a big wheeled car) went at quick march down the avenue, in a sort of hilarious dance. If the colours with the golden eagle on the top had only been unfurled, we should have followed them anywhere, in any cause--much as the children follow Punches in the better cause of Comedy. Napoleon on the top of the Column seemed up to the whole thing, I thought." [204] Apropos of this, I may mention that the little shaggy white terrier who came with him from America, so long a favourite in his household, had died of old age a few weeks before (5th of Oct. 1855) in Boulogne. [205] "We have wet weather here--and dark too for these latitudes--and oceans of mud. Although numbers of men are perpetually scooping and sweeping it away in this thoroughfare, it accumulates under the windows so fast, and in such sludgy masses, that to get across the road is to get half over one's shoes in the first outset of a walk." . . . "It is difficult," he added (20th of Jan.) "to picture the change made in this place by the removal of the paving stones (too ready for barricades), and macadamization. It suits neither the climate nor the soil. We are again in a sea of mud. One cannot cross the road of the Champs Elysées here, without being half over one's boots." A few more days brought a welcome change. "Three days ago the weather changed here in an hour, and we have had bright weather and hard frost ever since. All the mud disappeared with marvellous rapidity, and the sky became Italian. Taking advantage of such a happy change, I started off yesterday morning (for exercise and meditation) on a scheme I have taken into my head, to walk round the walls of Paris. It is a very odd walk, and will make a good description. Yesterday I turned to the right when I got outside the Barrière de l'Etoile, walked round the wall till I came to the river, and then entered Paris beyond the site of the Bastille. To-day I mean to turn to the left when I get outside the Barrière, and see what comes of that." [206] This was much the tone of Edwin Landseer also, whose praise of Horace Vernet was nothing short of rapture; and how well I remember the humour of his description of the Emperor on the day when the prizes were given, and, as his old friend the great painter came up, the comical expression in his face that said plainly "What a devilish odd thing this is altogether, isn't it?" composing itself to gravity as he took Edwin by the hand, and said in cordial English "I am very glad to see you." He stood, Landseer told us, in a recess so arranged as to produce a clear echo of every word he said, and this had a startling effect. In the evening of that day Dickens, Landseer, Boxall, Leslie "and three others" dined together in the Palais Royal. CHAPTER VI. LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR. 1855-1857. Little Dorrit--A Proposed Opening--How the Story grew--Sale of the Book--Circumlocution Office--Flora and her Surroundings--Weak Points in the Book--Remains of Marshalsea visited--Reception of the Novel--Christmas Theatricals--Theatre-making--At Gadshill--Last Meeting of Jerrold and Dickens--Proposed Memorial Tribute--At the Zoological Gardens--Lazy Tour projected--Visit to Cumberland--Accident to Wilkie Collins--At Allonby--At Doncaster--Racing Prophecy--A Performance of _Money_. BETWEEN _Hard Times_ and _Little Dorrit_, Dickens's principal literary work had been the contribution to _Household Words_ of two tales for Christmas (1854 and 1855) which his readings afterwards made widely popular, the Story of Richard Doubledick,[207] and Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn. In the latter was related, with a charming naturalness and spirit, the elopement, to get married at Gretna Green, of two little children of the mature respective ages of eight and seven. At Christmas 1855 came out the first number of _Little Dorrit_, and in April 1857 the last. The book took its origin from the notion he had of a leading man for a story who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, "Well it's a mercy, however, nobody was to blame you know!" The title first chosen, out of many suggested, was _Nobody's Fault_; and four numbers had been written, of which the first was on the eve of appearance, before this was changed. When about to fall to work he excused himself from an engagement he should have kept because "the story is breaking out all round me, and I am going off down the railroad to humour it." The humouring was a little difficult, however; and such indications of a droop in his invention as presented themselves in portions of _Bleak House_, were noticeable again. "As to the story I am in the second number, and last night and this morning had half a mind to begin again, and work in what I have done, afterwards." It had occurred to him, that, by making the fellow-travellers at once known to each other, as the opening of the story stands, he had missed an effect. "It struck me that it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way, as fellow-travellers, and being in the same place, ignorant of one another, as happens in life; and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection a part of the interest." The change was not made; but the mention of it was one of several intimations to me of the altered conditions under which he was writing, and that the old, unstinted, irrepressible flow of fancy had received temporary check. In this view I have found it very interesting to compare the original notes, which as usual he prepared for each number of the tale, and which with the rest are in my possession, with those of _Chuzzlewit_ or _Copperfield_; observing in the former the labour and pains, and in the latter the lightness and confidence of handling.[208] "I am just now getting to work on number three: sometimes enthusiastic, more often dull enough. There is an enormous outlay in the Father of the Marshalsea chapter, in the way of getting a great lot of matter into a small space. I am not quite resolved, but I have a great idea of overwhelming that family with wealth. Their condition would be very curious. I can make Dorrit very strong in the story, I hope." The Marshalsea part of the tale undoubtedly was excellent, and there was masterly treatment of character in the contrasts of the brothers Dorrit; but of the family generally it may be said that its least important members had most of his genius in them. The younger of the brothers, the scapegrace son, and "Fanny dear," are perfectly real people in what makes them unattractive; but what is meant for attractiveness in the heroine becomes often tiresome by want of reality. [Illustration] [Illustration] The first number appeared in December 1855, and on the 2nd there was an exultant note. "_Little Dorrit_ has beaten even _Bleak House_ out of the field. It is a most tremendous start, and I am overjoyed at it;" to which he added, writing from Paris on the 6th of the month following, "You know that they had sold 35,000 of number two on new year's day." He was still in Paris on the day of the appearance of that portion of the tale by which it will always be most vividly remembered, and thus wrote on the 30th of January 1856: "I have a grim pleasure upon me to-night in thinking that the Circumlocution Office sees the light, and in wondering what effect it will make. But my head really stings with the visions of the book, and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by plunging out into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in these latitudes." The Circumlocution heroes led to the Society scenes, the Hampton-court dowager-sketches, and Mr. Gowan; all parts of one satire levelled against prevailing political and social vices. Aim had been taken, in the course of it, at some living originals, disguised sufficiently from recognition to enable him to make his thrust more sure; but there was one exception self-revealed. "I had the general idea," he wrote while engaged on the sixth number, "of the Society business before the Sadleir affair, but I shaped Mr. Merdle himself out of that precious rascality. Society, the Circumlocution Office, and Mr. Gowan, are of course three parts of one idea and design. Mr. Merdle's complaint, which you will find in the end to be fraud and forgery, came into my mind as the last drop in the silver cream-jug on Hampstead-heath. I shall beg, when you have read the present number, to enquire whether you consider 'Bar' an instance, in reference to K F, of a suggested likeness in not many touches!" The likeness no one could mistake; and, though that particular Bar has since been moved into a higher and happier sphere, Westminster-hall is in no danger of losing "the insinuating Jury-droop, and persuasive double-eyeglass," by which this keen observer could express a type of character in half a dozen words. Of the other portions of the book that had a strong personal interest for him I have spoken on a former page, and I will now only add an allusion of his own. "There are some things in Flora in number seven that seem to me to be extraordinarily droll, with something serious at the bottom of them after all. Ah, well! was there _not_ something very serious in it once? I am glad to think of being in the country with the long summer mornings as I approach number ten, where I have finally resolved to make Dorrit rich. It should be a very fine point in the story. . . . Nothing in Flora made me laugh so much as the confusion of ideas between gout flying upwards, and its soaring with Mr. F---- to another sphere." He had himself no inconsiderable enjoyment also of Mr. F.'s aunt; and in the old rascal of a patriarch, the smooth-surfaced Casby, and other surroundings of poor Flora, there was fun enough to float an argosy of second-rates, assuming such to have formed the staple of the tale. It would be far from fair to say they did. The defect in the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it. The agencies that bring about its catastrophe, too, are less agreeable even than in _Bleak House_; and, most unlike that well-constructed story, some of the most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there is under it a rare force of likeness in the unlikeness between the two which has much subtlety of intention; and they must both have had, as well as Mr. Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or development. The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care and study, as well of his own design as of models by masters in his art. A happier hint of apology, for example, could hardly be given for Fielding's introduction of such an episode as the Man of the Hill between the youth and manhood of Blifil and Tom Jones, than is suggested by what Dickens wrote of the least interesting part of _Little Dorrit_. In the mere form, Fielding of course was only following the lead of Cervantes and Le Sage; but Dickens rightly judged his purpose also to have been, to supply a kind of connection between the episode and the story. "I don't see the practicability of making the History of a Self-Tormentor, with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But I do see the possibility" (he saw the other practicability before the number was published) "of making it a chapter by itself, which might enable me to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you think that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of Fielding's reason for the introduced story, and Smollett's also, was, that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the idea it contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to present), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In Miss Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded in this." Shortly after the date of his letter he was in London on business connected with the purchase of Gadshill Place, and he went over to the Borough to see what traces were left of the prison of which his first impression was taken in his boyhood, which had played so important a part in this latest novel, and every brick and stone of which he had been able to rebuild in his book by the mere vividness of his marvellous memory. "Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill, to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part of the original building--now 'Marshalsea Place.' Found the rooms that have been in my mind's eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big boy, a very small boy, who, seeing me standing on the Marshalsea pavement, looking about, told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was right enough. . . . There is a room there--still standing, to my amazement--that I think of taking! It is the room through which the ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter's petition filed off in my boyhood. The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden; and I said to the boy 'Who lives there?' and he said, 'Jack Pithick.' 'Who is Jack Pithick?' I asked him. And he said, 'Joe Pithick's uncle.'" Mention was made of this visit in the preface that appeared with the last number; and all it is necessary to add of the completed book will be, that, though in the humour and satire of its finer parts not unworthy of him, and though it had the clear design, worthy of him in an especial degree, of contrasting, both in private and in public life, and in poverty equally as in wealth, duty done and duty not done, it made no material addition to his reputation. His public, however, showed no falling-off in its enormous numbers; and what is said in one of his letters, noticeable for this touch of character, illustrates his anxiety to avoid any set-off from the disquiet that critical discourtesies might give. "I was ludicrously foiled here the other night in a resolution I have kept for twenty years not to know of any attack upon myself, by stumbling, before I could pick myself up, on a short extract in the _Globe_ from _Blackwood's Magazine_, informing me that _Little Dorrit_ is 'Twaddle.' I was sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself for being such a fool, and then pleased with myself for having so long been constant to a good resolution." There was a scene that made itself part of history not four months after his death, which, if he could have lived to hear of it, might have more than consoled him. It was the meeting of Bismarck and Jules Favre under the walls of Paris. The Prussian was waiting to open fire on the city; the Frenchman was engaged in the arduous task of showing the wisdom of not doing it; and "we learn," say the papers of the day, "that while the two eminent statesmen were trying to find a basis of negotiation, Von Moltke was seated in a corner reading _Little Dorrit_." Who will doubt that the chapter on HOW NOT TO DO IT was then absorbing the old soldier's attention? * * * * * Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to Christmas, and, in turning the school-room into a theatre, sawing and hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. The priceless help of Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by Dickens, with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery planned out with walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this kind was to know how to take advice; and no suggestion came to him that he was not ready to act upon, if it presented the remotest likelihood. In one of his great difficulties of obtaining more space, for audience as well as actors, he was told that Mr. Cooke of Astley's was a man of much resource in that way; and to Mr. Cooke he applied, with the following result. "One of the finest things" (18th of October 1856) "I have ever seen in my life of that kind was the arrival of my friend Mr. Cooke one morning this week, in an open phaeton drawn by two white ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled), who came in at the gate with a little jolt and a rattle, exactly as they come into the Ring when they draw anything, and went round and round the centre bed of the front court, apparently looking for the clown. A multitude of boys who felt them to be no common ponies rushed up in a breathless state--twined themselves like ivy about the railings--and were only deterred from storming the enclosure by the glare of the Inimitable's eye. Some of these boys had evidently followed from Astley's. I grieve to add that my friend, being taken to the point of difficulty, had no sort of suggestion in him; no gleam of an idea; and might just as well have been the popular minister from the Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road. All he could say was--answering me, posed in the garden, precisely as if I were the clown asking him a riddle at night--that two of their stable tents would be home in November, and that they were '20 foot square,' and I was heartily welcome to 'em. Also, he said, 'You might have half a dozen of my trapezes, or my middle-distance-tables, but they're all 6 foot and all too low sir.' Since then, I have arranged to do it in my own way, and with my own carpenter. You will be surprised by the look of the place. It is no more like the school-room than it is like the sign of the Salutation Inn at Ambleside in Westmoreland. The sounds in the house remind me, as to the present time, of Chatham Dockyard--as to a remote epoch, of the building of Noah's ark. Joiners are never out of the house, and the carpenter appears to be unsettled (or settled) for life." Of course time did not mend matters, and as Christmas approached the house was in a state of siege. "All day long, a labourer heats size over the fire in a great crucible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell it. Seventy paint-pots (which came in a van) adorn the stage; and thereon may be beheld, Stanny, and three Dansons (from the Surrey Zoological Gardens), all painting at once!! Meanwhile, Telbin, in a secluded bower in Brewer-street, Golden-square, plies _his_ part of the little undertaking." How worthily it turned out in the end, the excellence of the performances and the delight of the audiences, became known to all London; and the pressure for admittance at last took the form of a tragi-comedy, composed of ludicrous makeshifts and gloomy disappointments, with which even Dickens's resources could not deal. "My audience is now 93," he wrote one day in despair, "and at least 10 will neither hear nor see." There was nothing for it but to increase the number of nights; and it was not until the 20th of January he described "the workmen smashing the last atoms of the theatre." His book was finished soon after at Gadshill Place, to be presently described, which he had purchased the previous year, and taken possession of in February; subscribing himself, in the letter announcing the fact, as "the Kentish Freeholder on his native heath, his name Protection."[209] The new abode occupied him in various ways in the early part of the summer; and Hans Andersen the Dane had just arrived upon a visit to him there, when Douglas Jerrold's unexpected death befell. It was a shock to every one, and an especial grief to Dickens. Jerrold's wit, and the bright shrewd intellect that had so many triumphs, need no celebration from me; but the keenest of satirists was one of the kindliest of men, and Dickens had a fondness for Jerrold as genuine as his admiration for him. "I chance to know a good deal about the poor fellow's illness, for I was with him on the last day he was out. It was ten days ago, when we dined at a dinner given by Russell at Greenwich. He was complaining much when we met, said he had been sick three days, and attributed it to the inhaling of white paint from his study window. I did not think much of it at the moment, as we were very social; but while we walked through Leicester-square he suddenly fell into a white, hot, sick perspiration, and had to lean against the railings. Then, at my urgent request, he was to let me put him in a cab and send him home; but he rallied a little after that, and, on our meeting Russell, determined to come with us. We three went down by steamboat that we might see the great ship, and then got an open fly and rode about Blackheath: poor Jerrold mightily enjoying the air, and constantly saying that it set him up. He was rather quiet at dinner--sat next Delane--but was very humorous and good, and in spirits, though he took hardly anything. We parted with references to coming down here" (Gadshill) "and I never saw him again. Next morning he was taken very ill when he tried to get up. On the Wednesday and Thursday he was very bad, but rallied on the Friday, and was quite confident of getting well. On the Sunday he was very ill again, and on the Monday forenoon died; 'at peace with all the world' he said, and asking to be remembered to friends. He had become indistinct and insensible, until for but a few minutes at the end. I knew nothing about it, except that he had been ill and was better, until, going up by railway yesterday morning, I heard a man in the carriage, unfolding his newspaper, say to another 'Douglas Jerrold is dead.' I immediately went up there, and then to Whitefriars . . . I propose that there shall be a night at a theatre when the actors (with old Cooke) shall play the _Rent Day_ and _Black-ey'd Susan_; another night elsewhere, with a lecture from Thackeray; a day reading by me; a night reading by me; a lecture by Russell; and a subscription performance of the _Frozen Deep_, as at Tavistock House. I don't mean to do it beggingly; but merely to announce the whole series, the day after the funeral, 'In memory of the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold,' or some such phrase. I have got hold of Arthur Smith as the best man of business I know, and go to work with him to-morrow morning--inquiries being made in the meantime as to the likeliest places to be had for these various purposes. My confident hope is that we shall get close upon two thousand pounds." The friendly enterprise was carried to the close with a vigour, promptitude, and success, that well corresponded with this opening. In addition to the performances named, there were others in the country also organized by Dickens, in which he took active personal part; and the result did not fall short of his expectations. The sum was invested ultimately for our friend's unmarried daughter, who still receives the income from myself, the last surviving trustee. So passed the greater part of the summer,[210] and when the country performances were over at the end of August I had this intimation. "I have arranged with Collins that he and I will start next Monday on a ten or twelve days' expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast-corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads. I must get a good name for it, and I propose it in five articles, one for the beginning of every number in the October part." Next day: "Our decision is for a foray upon the fells of Cumberland; I having discovered in the books some promising moors and bleak places thereabout." Into the lake-country they went accordingly; and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, contributed to _Household Words_, was a narrative of the trip. But his letters had descriptive touches, and some whimsical personal experiences, not in the published account. Looking over the _Beauties of England and Wales_ before he left London, his ambition was fired by mention of Carrick Fell, "a gloomy old mountain 1500 feet high," which he secretly resolved to go up. "We came straight to it yesterday" (9th of September). "Nobody goes up. Guides have forgotten it. Master of a little inn, excellent north-countryman, volunteered. Went up, in a tremendous rain. C. D. beat Mr. Porter (name of landlord) in half a mile. Mr. P. done up in no time. Three nevertheless went on. Mr. P. again leading; C. D. and C." (Mr. Wilkie Collins) "following. Rain terrific, black mists, darkness of night. Mr. P. agitated. C. D. confident. C. (a long way down in perspective) submissive. All wet through. No poles. Not so much as a walking-stick in the party. Reach the summit, at about one in the day. Dead darkness as of night. Mr. P. (excellent fellow to the last) uneasy. C. D. produces compass from pocket. Mr. P. reassured. Farm-house where dog-cart was left, N.N.W. Mr. P. complimentary. Descent commenced. C. D. with compass triumphant, until compass, with the heat and wet of C. D.'s pocket, breaks. Mr. P. (who never had a compass), inconsolable, confesses he has not been on Carrick Fell for twenty years, and he don't know the way down. Darker and darker. Nobody discernible, two yards off, by the other two. Mr. P. makes suggestions, but no way. It becomes clear to C. D. and to C. that Mr. P. is going round and round the mountain, and never coming down. Mr. P. sits on angular granite, and says he is 'just fairly doon.' C. D. revives Mr. P. with laughter, the only restorative in the company. Mr. P. again complimentary. Descent tried once more. Mr. P. worse and worse. Council of war. Proposals from C. D. to go 'slap down.' Seconded by C. Mr. P. objects, on account of precipice called The Black Arches, and terror of the country-side. More wandering. Mr. P. terror-stricken, but game. Watercourse, thundering and roaring, reached. C. D. suggests that it must run to the river, and had best be followed, subject to all gymnastic hazards. Mr. P. opposes, but gives in. Watercourse followed accordingly. Leaps, splashes, and tumbles, for two hours. C. lost. C. D. whoops. Cries for assistance from behind. C. D. returns. C. with horribly sprained ankle, lying in rivulet!" All the danger was over when Dickens sent his description; but great had been the trouble in binding up the sufferer's ankle and getting him painfully on, shoving, shouldering, carrying alternately, till terra firma was reached. "We got down at last in the wildest place, preposterously out of the course; and, propping up C. against stones, sent Mr. P. to the other side of Cumberland for dog-cart, so got back to his inn, and changed. Shoe or stocking on the bad foot, out of the question. Foot tumbled up in a flannel waistcoat. C. D. carrying C. melo-dramatically (Wardour to the life!)[211] everywhere; into and out of carriages; up and down stairs; to bed; every step. And so to Wigton, got doctor, and here we are!! A pretty business, we flatter ourselves!" Wigton, Dickens described as a place of little houses all in half-mourning, yellow stone or white stone and black, with the wonderful peculiarity that though it had no population, no business, and no streets to speak of, it had five linendrapers within range of their single window, one linendraper's next door, and five more linendrapers round the corner. "I ordered a night light in my bed-room. A queer little old woman brought me one of the common Child's night lights, and, seeming to think that I looked at it with interest, said, 'It's joost a vara keeyourious thing, sir, and joost new coom oop. It'll burn awt hoors a' end, and no gootther, nor no waste, nor ony sike a thing, if you can creedit what I say, seein' the airticle.'" In these primitive quarters there befell a difficulty about letters, which Dickens solved in a fashion especially his own. "The day after Carrick there was a mess about our letters, through our not going to a place called Mayport. So, while the landlord was planning how to get them (they were only twelve miles off), I walked off, to his great astonishment, and brought them over." The night after leaving Wigton they were at the Ship-hotel in Allonby. Allonby his letters presented as a small untidy outlandish place; rough stone houses in half mourning, a few coarse yellow-stone lodging houses with black roofs (bills in all the windows), five bathing-machines, five girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats (wishing they had not come); very much what Broadstairs would have been if it had been born Irish, and had not inherited a cliff. "But this is a capital little homely inn, looking out upon the sea; with the coast of Scotland, mountainous and romantic, over against the windows; and though I can just stand upright in my bedroom, we are really well lodged. It is a clean nice place in a rough wild country, and we have a very obliging and comfortable landlady." He had found indeed, in the latter, an acquaintance of old date. "The landlady at the little inn at Allonby, lived at Greta-Bridge in Yorkshire when I went down there before _Nickleby_; and was smuggled into the room to see me, after I was secretly found out. She is an immensely fat woman now. 'But I could tuck my arm round her waist then, Mr. Dickens,' the landlord said when she told me the story as I was going to bed the night before last. 'And can't you do it now?' I said. 'You insensible dog! Look at me! Here's a picture!' Accordingly I got round as much of her as I could; and this gallant action was the most successful I have ever performed, on the whole." On their way home the friends were at Doncaster, and this was Dickens's first experience of the St. Leger and its saturnalia. His companion had by this time so far recovered as to be able, doubled-up, to walk with a thick stick; in which condition, "being exactly like the gouty admiral in a comedy I have given him that name." The impressions received from the race-week were not favourable. It was noise and turmoil all day long, and a gathering of vagabonds from all parts of the racing earth. Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from an innocent horse had its representative in the streets; and as Dickens, like Gulliver looking down upon his fellow-men after coming from the horse-country, looked down into Doncaster High-street from his inn-window, he seemed to see everywhere a then notorious personage who had just poisoned his betting-companion. "Everywhere I see the late Mr. Palmer with his betting-book in his hand. Mr. Palmer sits next me at the theatre; Mr. Palmer goes before me down the street; Mr. Palmer follows me into the chemist's shop where I go to buy rose water after breakfast, and says to the chemist 'Give us soom sal volatile or soom damned thing o' that soort, in wather--my head's bad!' And I look at the back of his bad head repeated in long, long lines on the race course, and in the betting stand and outside the betting rooms in the town, and I vow to God that I can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation, insensibility, and low wickedness." Even a half-appalling kind of luck was not absent from my friend's experiences at the race course, when, what he called a "wonderful, paralysing, coincidence" befell him. He bought the card; facetiously wrote down three names for the winners of the three chief races (never in his life having heard or thought of any of the horses, except that the winner of the Derby, who proved to be nowhere, had been mentioned to him); "and, if you can believe it without your hair standing on end, those three races were won, one after another, by those three horses!!!" That was the St. Leger-day, of which he also thought it noticeable, that, though the losses were enormous, nobody had won, for there was nothing but grinding of teeth and blaspheming of ill-luck. Nor had matters mended on the Cup-day, after which celebration "a groaning phantom" lay in the doorway of his bed-room and howled all night. The landlord came up in the morning to apologise, "and said it was a gentleman who had lost £1500 or £2000; and he had drunk a deal afterwards; and then they put him to bed, and then he--took the 'orrors, and got up, and yelled till morning."[212] Dickens might well believe, as he declared at the end of his letter, that if a boy with any good in him, but with a dawning propensity to sporting and betting, were but brought to the Doncaster races soon enough, it would cure him. FOOTNOTES: [207] The framework for this sketch was a graphic description, also done by Dickens, of the celebrated Charity at Rochester founded in the sixteenth century by Richard Watts, "for six poor travellers, who, not being Rogues or Proctors, may receive gratis for one night, lodging, entertainment, and fourpence each." A quaint monument to Watts is the most prominent object on the wall of the south-west transept of the cathedral, and underneath it is now placed a brass thus inscribed: "CHARLES DICKENS. Born at Portsmouth, seventh of February 1812. Died at Gadshill Place by Rochester, ninth of June 1870. Buried in Westminster Abbey. To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life, this Tablet, with the sanction of the Dean and Chapter, is placed by his Executors." [208] So curious a contrast, taking _Copperfield_ for the purpose, I have thought worth giving in fac-simile; and can assure the reader that the examples taken express very fairly the general character of the Notes to the two books respectively. [209] In the same letter was an illustration of the ruling passion in death, which, even in so undignified a subject, might have interested Pope. "You remember little Wieland who did grotesque demons so well. Did you ever hear how he died? He lay very still in bed with the life fading out of him--suddenly sprung out of it, threw what is professionally called a flip-flap, and fell dead on the floor." [210] One of its incidents made such an impression on him that it will be worth while to preserve his description of it. "I have been (by mere accident) seeing the serpents fed to-day, with the live birds, rabbits, and guinea pigs--a sight so very horrible that I cannot get rid of the impression, and am, at this present, imagining serpents coming up the legs of the table, with their infernal flat heads, and their tongues like the Devil's tail (evidently taken from that model, in the magic lanterns and other such popular representations), elongated for dinner. I saw one small serpent, whose father was asleep, go up to a guinea pig (white and yellow, and with a gentle eye--every hair upon him erect with horror); corkscrew himself on the tip of his tail; open a mouth which couldn't have swallowed the guinea pig's nose; dilate a throat which wouldn't have made him a stocking; and show him what his father meant to do with him when he came out of that ill-looking Hookah into which he had resolved himself. The guinea pig backed against the side of the cage--said 'I know it, I know it!'--and his eye glared and his coat turned wiry, as he made the remark. Five small sparrows crouching together in a little trench at the back of the cage, peeped over the brim of it, all the time; and when they saw the guinea pig give it up, and the young serpent go away looking at him over about two yards and a quarter of shoulder, struggled which should get into the innermost angle and be seized last. Everyone of them then hid his eyes in another's breast, and then they all shook together like dry leaves--as I daresay they may be doing now, for old Hookah was as dull as laudanum. . . . Please to imagine two small serpents, one beginning on the tail of a white mouse, and one on the head, and each pulling his own way, and the mouse very much alive all the time, with the middle of him madly writhing." [211] There was a situation in the _Frozen Deep_ where Richard Wardour, played by Dickens, had thus to carry about Frank Aldersley in the person of Wilkie Collins. [212] The mention of a performance of Lord Lytton's _Money_ at the theatre will supply the farce to this tragedy. "I have rarely seen anything finer than Lord Glossmore, a chorus-singer in bluchers, drab trowsers, and a brown sack; and Dudley Smooth, in somebody else's wig, hindside before. Stout also, in anything he could lay hold of. The waiter at the club had an immense moustache, white trowsers, and a striped jacket; and he brought everybody who came in, a vinegar-cruet. The man who read the will began thus: 'I so-and-so, being of unsound mind but firm in body . . . ' In spite of all this, however, the real character, humour, wit, and good writing of the comedy, made themselves apparent; and the applause was loud and repeated, and really seemed genuine. Its capital things were not lost altogether. It was succeeded by a Jockey Dance by five ladies, who put their whips in their mouths and worked imaginary winners up to the float--an immense success." CHAPTER VII. WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME. 1857-1858. Disappointments and Distastes--Compensations of Art--Misgivings--Restlessness and Impatience--Reply to a Remonstrance--Visions of Places to write Books in--Fruitless Aspirations--What lay behind--Sorrowful Convictions--No Desire for Immunity from Blame--Counteracting Influences weakened--Old Project revived--Disadvantages of Public Reading--Speech for Children's Hospital--Unsolved Mysteries--Hospital described--Appeal for Sick Children--Reasons for and against Paid Readings--A Proposal from Mr. Beale--Question of the Plunge--Mr. Arthur Smith--Change in Home--Unwise Printed Statement--A "Violated Letter." AN unsettled feeling greatly in excess of what was usual with Dickens, more or less observable since his first residence at Boulogne, became at this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did not suit him, and he set no store by it. No man was better fitted to adorn any circle he entered, but beyond that of friends and equals he rarely passed. He would take as much pains to keep out of the houses of the great as others take to get into them. Not always wisely, it may be admitted. Mere contempt for toadyism and flunkeyism was not at all times the prevailing motive with him which he supposed it to be. Beneath his horror of those vices of Englishmen in his own rank of life, there was a still stronger resentment at the social inequalities that engender them, of which he was not so conscious and to which he owned less freely. Not the less it served secretly to justify what he might otherwise have had no mind to. To say he was not a gentleman would be as true as to say he was not a writer; but if any one should assert his occasional preference for what was even beneath his level over that which was above it, this would be difficult of disproof. It was among those defects of temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a point of pride to assume indifference to; the inequalities of rank which he secretly resented took more galling as well as glaring prominence from the contrast of the necessities he had gone through with the fame that had come to him; and when the forces he most affected to despise assumed the form of barriers he could not easily overleap, he was led to appear frequently intolerant (for he very seldom was really so) in opinions and language. His early sufferings brought with them the healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties; but the habit, in small as in great things, of renunciation and self-sacrifice, they did not teach; and, by his sudden leap into a world-wide popularity and influence, he became master of everything that might seem to be attainable in life, before he had mastered what a man must undergo to be equal to its hardest trials. Nothing of all this has yet presented itself to notice, except in occasional forms of restlessness and desire of change of place, which were themselves, when his books were in progress, so incident as well to the active requirements of his fancy as to call, thus far, for no other explanation. Up to the date of the completion of _Copperfield_ he had felt himself to be in possession of an all-sufficient resource. Against whatever might befall he had a set-off in his imaginative creations, a compensation derived from his art that never failed him, because there he was supreme. It was the world he could bend to his will, and make subserve to all his desires. He had otherwise, underneath his exterior of a singular precision, method, and strictly orderly arrangement in all things, and notwithstanding a temperament to which home and home interests were really a necessity, something in common with those eager, impetuous, somewhat overbearing natures, that rush at existence without heeding the cost of it, and are not more ready to accept and make the most of its enjoyments than to be easily and quickly overthrown by its burdens.[213] But the world he had called into being had thus far borne him safely through these perils. He had his own creations always by his side. They were living, speaking companions. With them only he was everywhere thoroughly identified. He laughed and wept with them; was as much elated by their fun as cast down by their grief; and brought to the consideration of them a belief in their reality as well as in the influences they were meant to exercise, which in every circumstance sustained him. It was during the composition of _Little Dorrit_ that I think he first felt a certain strain upon his invention which brought with it other misgivings. In a modified form this was present during the latter portions of _Bleak House_, of which not a few of the defects might be traced to the acting excitements amid which it was written; but the succeeding book made it plainer to him; and it is remarkable that in the interval between them he resorted for the first and only time in his life to a practice, which he abandoned at the close of his next and last story published in the twenty-number form, of putting down written "Memoranda" of suggestions for characters or incidents by way of resource to him in his writing. Never before had his teeming fancy seemed to want such help; the need being less to contribute to its fullness than to check its overflowing; but it is another proof that he had been secretly bringing before himself, at least, the possibility that what had ever been his great support might some day desert him. It was strange that he should have had such doubt, and he would hardly have confessed it openly; but apart from that wonderful world of his books, the range of his thoughts was not always proportioned to the width and largeness of his nature. His ordinary circle of activity, whether in likings or thinkings, was full of such surprising animation, that one was apt to believe it more comprehensive than it really was; and again and again, when a wide horizon might seem to be ahead of him, he would pull up suddenly and stop short, as though nothing lay beyond. For the time, though each had its term and change, he was very much a man of one idea, each having its turn of absolute predominance; and this was one of the secrets of the thoroughness with which everything he took in hand was done. As to the matter of his writings, the actual truth was that his creative genius never really failed him. Not a few of his inventions of character and humour, up to the very close of his life, his Marigolds, Lirripers, Gargerys, Pips, Sapseas and many others, were as fresh and fine as in his greatest day. He had however lost the free and fertile method of the earlier time. He could no longer fill a wide-spread canvas with the same facility and certainty as of old; and he had frequently a quite unfounded apprehension of some possible break-down, of which the end might be at any moment beginning. There came accordingly, from time to time, intervals of unusual impatience and restlessness, strange to me in connection with his home; his old pursuits were too often laid aside for other excitements and occupations; he joined a public political agitation, set on foot by administrative reformers; he got up various quasi-public private theatricals, in which he took the leading place; and though it was but part of his always generous devotion in any friendly duty to organize the series of performances on his friend Jerrold's death, yet the eagerness with which he flung himself into them, so arranging them as to assume an amount of labour in acting and travelling that might have appalled an experienced comedian, and carrying them on week after week unceasingly in London and the provinces, expressed but the craving which still had possession of him to get by some means at some change that should make existence easier. What was highest in his nature had ceased for the time to be highest in his life, and he had put himself at the mercy of lower accidents and conditions. The mere effect of the strolling wandering ways into which this acting led him could not be other than unfavourable. But remonstrance as yet was unavailing. To one very earnestly made in the early autumn of 1857, in which opportunity was taken to compare his recent rush up Carrick Fell to his rush into other difficulties, here was the reply. "Too late to say, put the curb on, and don't rush at hills--the wrong man to say it to. I have now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed. I must accept the drawback--since it is one--with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure prescribed to me." Something of the same sad feeling, it is right to say, had been expressed from time to time, in connection also with home dissatisfactions and misgivings, through the three years preceding; but I attributed it to other causes, and gave little attention to it. During his absences abroad for the greater part of 1854, '55, and '56, while the elder of his children were growing out of childhood, and his books were less easy to him than in his earlier manhood, evidences presented themselves in his letters of the old "unhappy loss or want of something" to which he had given a pervading prominence in _Copperfield_. In the first of those years he made express allusion to the kind of experience which had been one of his descriptions in that favourite book, and, mentioning the drawbacks of his present life, had first identified it with his own: "the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which seeks its realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual escape from the disappointment of heart around it." Later in the same year he thus wrote from Boulogne: "I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have managed it, I think possibly I might have gone to the Pyreennees (you know what I mean that word for, so I won't re-write it) for six months! I have put the idea into the perspective of six months, but have not abandoned it. I have visions of living for half a year or so, in all sorts of inaccessible places, and opening a new book therein. A floating idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland, and living in some astonishing convent, hovers about me. If _Household Words_ could be got into a good train, in short, I don't know in what strange place, or at what remote elevation above the level of the sea, I might fall to work next. _Restlessness_, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year--though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish." Again, four months later he wrote: "You will hear of me in Paris, probably next Sunday, and I _may_ go on to Bordeaux. Have general ideas of emigrating in the summer to the mountain-ground between France and Spain. Am altogether in a dishevelled state of mind--motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth threatening to close upon me. Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made?" Early in 1856 (20th of January) the notion revisited him of writing a book in solitude. "Again I am beset by my former notions of a book whereof the whole story shall be on the top of the Great St. Bernard. As I accept and reject ideas for _Little Dorrit_, it perpetually comes back to me. Two or three years hence, perhaps you'll find me living with the Monks and the Dogs a whole winter--among the blinding snows that fall about that monastery. I have a serious idea that I shall do it, if I live." He was at this date in Paris; and during the visit to him of Macready in the following April, the self-revelations were resumed. The great actor was then living in retirement at Sherborne, to which he had gone on quitting the stage; and Dickens gave favourable report of his enjoyment of the change to his little holiday at Paris. Then, after recurring to his own old notion of having some slight idea of going to settle in Australia, only he could not do it until he should have finished _Little Dorrit_, he went on to say that perhaps Macready, if he could get into harness again, would not be the worse for some such troubles as were worrying himself. "It fills me with pity to think of him away in that lonely Sherborne place. I have always felt of myself that I must, please God, die in harness, but I have never felt it more strongly than in looking at, and thinking of, him. However strange it is to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to repose--for some men there's no such thing in this life. The foregoing has the appearance of a small sermon; but it is so often in my head in these days that it cannot help coming out. The old days--the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it perhaps--but never quite as it used to be. I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one." It would be unjust and uncandid not to admit that these and other similar passages in the letters that extended over the years while he lived abroad, had served in some degree as a preparation for what came after his return to England in the following year. It came with a great shock nevertheless; because it told plainly what before had never been avowed, but only hinted at more or less obscurely. The opening reference is to the reply which had been made to a previous expression of his wish for some confidences as in the old time. I give only what is strictly necessary to account for what followed, and even this with deep reluctance. "Your letter of yesterday was so kind and hearty, and sounded so gently the many chords we have touched together, that I cannot leave it unanswered, though I have not much (to any purpose) to say. My reference to 'confidences' was merely to the relief of saying a word of what has long been pent up in my mind. Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too--and much more so. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise, the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me. Why I have even written I hardly know; but it is a miserable sort of comfort that you should be clearly aware how matters stand. The mere mention of the fact, without any complaint or blame of any sort, is a relief to my present state of spirits--and I can get this only from you, because I can speak of it to no one else." In the same tone was his rejoinder to my reply. "To the most part of what you say--Amen! You are not so tolerant as perhaps you might be of the wayward and unsettled feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life, and which I have, as you ought to know well, often only kept down by riding over it like a dragoon--but let that go by. I make no maudlin complaint. I agree with you as to the very possible incidents, even not less bearable than mine, that might and must often occur to the married condition when it is entered into very young. I am always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its highest sensations, and have said to myself for years, and have honestly and truly felt, This is the drawback to such a career, and is not to be complained of. I say it and feel it now as strongly as ever I did; and, as I told you in my last, I do not with that view put all this forward. But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that something might be done. I know too well it is impossible. There is the fact, and that is all one can say. Nor are you to suppose that I disguise from myself what might be urged on the other side. I claim no immunity from blame. There is plenty of fault on my side, I dare say, in the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices, and difficulties of disposition; but only one thing will alter all that, and that is, the end which alters everything." It will not seem to most people that there was anything here which in happier circumstances might not have been susceptible of considerate adjustment; but all the circumstances were unfavourable, and the moderate middle course which the admissions in that letter might wisely have prompted and wholly justified, was unfortunately not taken. Compare what before was said of his temperament, with what is there said by himself of its defects, and the explanation will not be difficult. Every counteracting influence against the one idea which now predominated over him had been so weakened as to be almost powerless. His elder children were no longer children; his books had lost for the time the importance they formerly had over every other consideration in his life; and he had not in himself the resource that such a man, judging him from the surface, might be expected to have had. Not his genius only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against failure in the realities around him. There was for him no "city of the mind" against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and satisfactions of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many a stout heart. At the close of that last letter from Gadshill (5th of September) was this question--"What do you think of my paying for this place, by reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very strongly tempted. Think of it." The reasons against it had great force, and took, in my judgment, greater from the time at which it was again proposed. The old ground of opposition remained. It was a substitution of lower for higher aims; a change to commonplace from more elevated pursuits; and it had so much of the character of a public exhibition for money as to raise, in the question of respect for his calling as a writer, a question also of respect for himself as a gentleman. This opinion, now strongly reiterated, was referred ultimately to two distinguished ladies of his acquaintance, who decided against it.[214] Yet not without such momentary misgiving in the direction of "the stage," as pointed strongly to the danger, which, by those who took the opposite view, was most of all thought incident to the particular time of the proposal. It might be a wild exaggeration to fear that he was in danger of being led to adopt the stage as a calling, but he was certainly about to place himself within reach of not a few of its drawbacks and disadvantages. To the full extent he perhaps did not himself know, how much his eager present wish to become a public reader was but the outcome of the restless domestic discontents of the last four years; and that to indulge it, and the unsettled habits inseparable from it, was to abandon every hope of resettling his disordered home. There is nothing, in its application to so divine a genius as Shakespeare, more affecting than his expressed dislike to a profession, which, in the jealous self-watchfulness of his noble nature, he feared might hurt his mind.[215] The long subsequent line of actors admirable in private as in public life, and all the gentle and generous associations of the histrionic art, have not weakened the testimony of its greatest name against its less favourable influences; against the laxity of habits it may encourage; and its public manners, bred of public means, not always compatible with home felicities and duties. But, freely open as Dickens was to counsel in regard of his books, he was, for reasons formerly stated,[216] less accessible to it on points of personal conduct; and when he had neither self-distrust nor self-denial to hold him back, he would push persistently forward to whatever object he had in view. An occurrence of the time hastened the decision in this case. An enterprise had been set on foot for establishment of a hospital for sick children;[217] a large old-fashioned mansion in Great Ormond-street, with spacious garden, had been fitted up with more than thirty beds; during the four or five years of its existence, outdoor and indoor relief had been afforded by it to nearly fifty thousand children, of whom thirty thousand were under five years of age; but, want of funds having threatened to arrest the merciful work, it was resolved to try a public dinner by way of charitable appeal, and for president the happy choice was made of one who had enchanted everybody with the joys and sorrows of little children. Dickens threw himself into the service heart and soul. There was a simple pathos in his address from the chair quite startling in its effect at such a meeting; and he probably never moved any audience so much as by the strong personal feeling with which he referred to the sacrifices made for the Hospital by the very poor themselves: from whom a subscription of fifty pounds, contributed in single pennies, had come to the treasurer during almost every year it had been open. The whole speech, indeed, is the best of the kind spoken by him; and two little pictures from it, one of the misery he had witnessed, the other of the remedy he had found, should not be absent from the picture of his own life. "Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane members of the most humane of professions, on a morning tour among some of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the closes and wynds of that picturesque place (I am sorry to remind you what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are), we saw more poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in, in a life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings, reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky and from the air, mere pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, a ragged woman and some ragged children crouching on the bare ground near it,--and, I remember as I speak, where the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained wall outside, came in trembling, as if the fever which had shaken everything else had shaken even it,--there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother had begged from a shop, a little, feeble, wan, sick child. With his little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in his small frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the small body from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he seldom complained; 'he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a' aboot.' God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his reasons for wondering. . . . Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have seen since that time in London; many have I also seen most affectionately tended, in unwholesome houses and hard circumstances where recovery was impossible: but at all such times I have seen my little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his dumb wonder to me what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God, such things should be! . . . But, ladies and gentlemen," Dickens added, "such things need NOT be, and will not be, if this company, which is a drop of the life-blood of the great compassionate public heart, will only accept the means of rescue and prevention which it is mine to offer. Within a quarter of a mile of this place where I speak, stands a once courtly old house, where blooming children were born, and grew up to be men and women, and married, and brought their own blooming children back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the other day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces. In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family bedchambers of that house are now converted, are lodged such small patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses, and the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre. Grouped about the little low tables in the centre of the rooms, are such tiny convalescents that they seem to be playing at having been ill. On the doll's beds are such diminutive creatures that each poor sufferer is supplied with its tray of toys: and, looking round, you may see how the little tired flushed cheek has toppled over half the brute creation on its way into the ark; or how one little dimpled arm has mowed down (as I saw myself) the whole tin soldiery of Europe. On the walls of these rooms are graceful, pleasant, bright, childish pictures. At the beds' heads, hang representations of the figure which is the universal embodiment of all mercy and compassion, the figure of Him who was once a child Himself, and a poor one. But alas! reckoning up the number of beds that are there, the visitor to this Child's Hospital will find himself perforce obliged to stop at very little over thirty; and will learn, with sorrow and surprise, that even that small number, so forlornly, so miserably diminutive compared with this vast London, cannot possibly be maintained unless the Hospital be made better known. I limit myself to saying better known, because I will not believe that in a Christian community of fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, it can fail, being better known, to be well and richly-endowed." It was a brave and true prediction. The Child's Hospital has never since known want. That night alone added greatly more than three thousand pounds to its funds, and Dickens put the crown to his good work by reading on its behalf, shortly afterwards, his _Christmas Carol_; when the sum realized, and the urgent demand that followed for a repetition of the pleasure given by the reading, bore down farther opposition to the project of his engaging publicly in such readings for himself. The Child's Hospital night was the 9th of February, its Reading was appointed for the 15th of April, and, nearly a month before, renewed efforts at remonstrance had been made. "Your view of the reading matter," Dickens replied, "I still think is unconsciously taken from your own particular point. You don't seem to me to get out of yourself in considering it. A word more upon it. You are not to think I have made up my mind. If I had, why should I not say so? I find very great difficulty in doing so because of what you urge, because I know the question to be a balance of doubts, and because I most honestly feel in my innermost heart, in this matter (as in all others for years and years), the honour of the calling by which I have always stood most conscientiously. But do you quite consider that the public exhibition of oneself takes place equally, whosoever may get the money? And have you any idea that at this moment--this very time--half the public at least supposes me to be paid? My dear F, out of the twenty or five-and-twenty letters a week that I get about Readings, twenty will ask at what price, or on what terms, it can be done. The only exceptions, in truth, are when the correspondent is a clergyman, or a banker, or the member for the place in question. Why, at this very time half Scotland believes that I am paid for going to Edinburgh!--Here is Greenock writes to me, and asks could it be done for a hundred pounds? There is Aberdeen writes, and states the capacity of its hall, and says, though far less profitable than the very large hall in Edinburgh, is it not enough to come on for? W. answers such letters continually. (--At this place, enter Beale. He called here yesterday morning, and then wrote to ask if I would see him to-day. I replied 'Yes,' so here he came in. With long preface called to know whether it was possible to arrange anything in the way of Readings for this autumn--say, six months. Large capital at command. Could produce partners, in such an enterprise, also with large capital. Represented such. Returns would be enormous. Would I name a sum? a minimum sum that I required to have, in any case? Would I look at it as a Fortune, and in no other point of view? I shook my head, and said, my tongue was tied on the subject for the present; I might be more communicative at another time. Exit Beale in confusion and disappointment.)--You will be happy to hear that at one on Friday, the Lord Provost, Dean of Guild, Magistrates, and Council of the ancient city of Edinburgh will wait (in procession) on their brother freeman, at the Music Hall, to give him hospitable welcome. Their brother freeman has been cursing their stars and his own, ever since the receipt of solemn notification to this effect." But very grateful, when it came, was the enthusiasm of the greeting, and welcome the gift of the silver wassail-bowl which followed the reading of the _Carol_. "I had no opportunity of asking any one's advice in Edinburgh," he wrote on his return. "The crowd was too enormous, and the excitement in it much too great. But my determination is all but taken. I must do _something_, or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state." What is pointed at in those last words had been taken as a ground of objection, and thus he turned it into an argument the other way. During all these months many sorrowful misunderstandings had continued in his home, and the relief sought from the misery had but the effect of making desperate any hope of a better understanding. "It becomes necessary," he wrote at the end of March, "with a view to the arrangements that would have to be begun next month if I decided on the Readings, to consider and settle the question of the Plunge. Quite dismiss from your mind any reference whatever to present circumstances at home. Nothing can put _them_ right, until we are all dead and buried and risen. It is not, with me, a matter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour, or making the best of it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is all despairingly over. Have no lingering hope of, or for, me in this association. A dismal failure has to be borne, and there an end. Will you then try to think of this reading project (as I do) apart from all personal likings and dislikings, and solely with a view to its effect on that peculiar relation (personally affectionate, and like no other man's) which subsists between me and the public? I want your most careful consideration. If you would like, when you have gone over it in your mind, to discuss the matter with me and Arthur Smith (who would manage the whole of the business, which I should never touch); we will make an appointment. But I ought to add that Arthur Smith plainly says, 'Of the immense return in money, I have no doubt. Of the Dash into the new position, however, I am not so good a judge.' I enclose you a rough note[218] of my project, as it stands in my mind." Mr. Arthur Smith, a man possessed of many qualities that justified the confidence Dickens placed in him, might not have been a good judge of the "Dash" into the new position, but no man knew better every disadvantage incident to it, or was less likely to be disconcerted by any. His exact fitness to manage the scheme successfully, made him an unsafe counsellor respecting it. Within a week from this time the reading for the Charity was to be given. "They have let," Dickens wrote on the 9th of April, "five hundred stalls for the Hospital night; and as people come every day for more, and it is out of the question to make more, they cannot be restrained at St. Martin's Hall from taking down names for other readings." This closed the attempt at further objection. Exactly a fortnight after the reading for the children's hospital, on Thursday the 29th April, came the first public reading for his own benefit; and before the next month was over, this launch into a new life had been followed by a change in his old home. Thenceforward he and his wife lived apart. The eldest son went with his mother, Dickens at once giving effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other children remained with himself, their intercourse with Mrs. Dickens being left entirely to themselves. It was thus far an arrangement of a strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for regarding it in any other light, if public attention had not been unexpectedly invited to it by a printed statement in _Household Words_. Dickens was stung into this by some miserable gossip at which in ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent; but he had now publicly to show himself, at stated times, as a public entertainer, and this, with his name even so aspersed, he found to be impossible. All he would concede to my strenuous resistance against such a publication, was an offer to suppress it, if, upon reference to the opinion of a certain distinguished man (still living), that opinion should prove to be in agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in with his own, and the publication went on. It was followed by another statement, a letter subscribed with his name, which got into print without his sanction; nothing publicly being known of it (I was not among those who had read it privately) until it appeared in the _New York Tribune_. It had been addressed and given to Mr. Arthur Smith as an authority for correction of false rumours and scandals, and Mr. Smith had given a copy of it, with like intention, to the _Tribune_ correspondent in London. Its writer referred to it always afterwards as his "violated letter." The course taken by the author of this book at the time of these occurrences, will not be departed from here. Such illustration of grave defects in Dickens's character as the passage in his life affords, I have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to it as he had unquestionable right to claim should be put forward also. How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and especially from the altered career on which at the same time he entered, will thus be sufficiently explained; and with anything else the public have nothing to do. FOOTNOTES: [213] Anything more completely opposed to the Micawber type could hardly be conceived, and yet there were moments (really and truly only moments) when the fancy would arise that if the conditions of his life had been reversed, something of a vagabond existence (using the word in Goldsmith's meaning) might have supervened. It would have been an unspeakable misery to him, but it might have come nevertheless. The question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him, and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father's weaknesses without the possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote on one occasion: "It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of our own failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently derived from his father cannot in his case be derived from association and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality as a living creature." [214] "You may as well know" (20th of March 1858) "that I went on" (I designate the ladies by A and B respectively) "and propounded the matter to A, without any preparation. Result.--'I am surprised, and I should have been surprised if I had seen it in the newspaper without previous confidence from you. But nothing more. N--no. Certainly not. Nothing more. I don't see that there is anything derogatory in it, even now when you ask me that question. I think upon the whole that most people would be glad you should have the money, rather than other people. It might be misunderstood here and there, at first; but I think the thing would very soon express itself, and that your own power of making it express itself would be very great.' As she wished me to ask B, who was in another room, I did so. She was for a moment tremendously disconcerted, '_under the impression that it was to lead to the stage_' (!!). Then, without knowing anything of A's opinion, closely followed it. That absurd association had never entered my head or yours; but it might enter some other heads for all that. Take these two opinions for whatever they are worth. A (being very much interested and very anxious to help to a right conclusion) proposed to ask a few people of various degrees who know what the Readings are, what _they_ think--not compromising me, but suggesting the project afar-off, as an idea in somebody else's mind. I thanked her, and said 'Yes,' of course." [215 Oh! for my sake do you with Fortune chide The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. . . Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd. . . Sonnet cxi. And in the preceding Sonnet cx. Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. . . [216] Vol. I. pp. 72-3. I repeat from that passage one or two sentences, though it is hardly fair to give them without the modifications that accompany them. "A too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone of fierceness; something in his nature that made his resolves insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed." [217] The Board of Health returns, showing that out of every annual thousand of deaths in London, the immense proportion of four hundred were those of children under four years old, had established the necessity for such a scheme. Of course the stress of this mortality fell on the children of the poor, "dragged up rather than brought up," as Charles Lamb expressed it, and perishing unhelped by the way. [218] Here is the rough note: in which the reader will be interested to observe the limits originally placed to the proposal. The first Readings were to comprise only the _Carol_, and for others a new story was to be written. He had not yet the full confidence in his power or versatility as an actor which subsequent experience gave him. "I propose to announce in a short and plain advertisement (what is quite true) that I cannot so much as answer the numerous applications that are made to me to read, and that compliance with ever so few of them is, in any reason, impossible. That I have therefore resolved upon a course of readings of the _Christmas Carol_ both in town and country, and that those in London will take place at St. Martin's Hall on certain evenings. Those evenings will be either four or six Thursdays, in May and the beginning of June. . . . I propose an Autumn Tour, for the country, extending through August, September, and October. It would comprise the Eastern Counties, the West, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. I should read from 35 to 40 times in this tour, at the least. At each place where there was a great success, I would myself announce that I should come back, on the turn of Christmas, to read a new Christmas story written for that purpose. This story I should first read a certain number of times in London. I have the strongest belief that by April in next year, a very large sum of money indeed would be gained by these means. Ireland would be still untouched, and I conceive America alone (if I could resolve to go there) to be worth Ten Thousand Pounds. In all these proceedings, the Business would be wholly detached from me, and I should never appear in it. I would have an office, belonging to the Readings and to nothing else, opened in London; I would have the advertisements emanating from it, and also signed by some one belonging to it; and they should always mention me as a third person--just as the Child's Hospital, for instance, in addressing the public, mentions me." CHAPTER VIII. GADSHILL PLACE. 1856-1870. First Description of Gadshill Place--Negociations for Purchase--Becomes his Home in 1859--Gadshill a Century Ago--Antecedents of Dickens's House--Exterior and Porch--Gradual Additions--Later Changes--Swiss Châlet presented by Mr. Fechter--Dickens's Writing-table--Making Gadshill his Home--Planting Trees--New Conservatory--Course of Daily Life--Dickens's Dogs--A Dog with a Taste--Favourite Walks--Cooling Churchyard. "I WAS better pleased with Gadshill Place last Saturday," he wrote to me from Paris on the 13th of February 1856, "on going down there, even than I had prepared myself to be. The country, against every disadvantage of season, is beautiful; and the house is so old fashioned, cheerful, and comfortable, that it is really pleasant to look at. The good old Rector now there, has lived in it six and twenty years, so I have not the heart to turn him out. He is to remain till Lady-Day next year, when I shall go in, please God; make my alterations; furnish the house; and keep it for myself that summer." Returning to England through the Kentish country with Mr. Wilkie Collins in July, other advantages occurred to him. "A railroad opened from Rochester to Maidstone, which connects Gadshill at once with the whole sea coast, is certainly an addition to the place, and an enhancement of its value. Bye and bye we shall have the London, Chatham and Dover, too; and that will bring it within an hour of Canterbury and an hour and a half of Dover. I am glad to hear of your having been in the neighbourhood. There is no healthier (marshes avoided), and none in my eyes more beautiful. One of these days I shall show you some places up the Medway with which you will be charmed." [Illustration: THE PORCH AT GADSHILL.] The association with his youthful fancy that first made the place attractive to him has been told; and it was with wonder he had heard one day, from his friend and fellow worker at _Household Words_, Mr. W. H. Wills, that not only was the house for sale to which he had so often looked wistfully, but that the lady chiefly interested as its owner had been long known and much esteemed by himself. Such curious chances led Dickens to his saying about the smallness of the world; but the close relation often found thus existing between things and persons far apart, suggests not so much the smallness of the world as the possible importance of the least things done in it, and is better explained by the grander teaching of Carlyle, that causes and effects, connecting every man and thing with every other, extend through all space and time. It was at the close of 1855 the negociation for its purchase began. "They wouldn't," he wrote (25th of November), "take £1700 for the Gadshill property, but 'finally' wanted £1800. I have finally offered £1750. It will require an expenditure of about £300 more before yielding £100 a year." The usual discovery of course awaited him that this first estimate would have to be increased threefold. "The changes absolutely necessary" (9th of February 1856) "will take a thousand pounds; which sum I am always resolving to squeeze out of this, grind out of that, and wring out of the other; this, that, and the other generally all three declining to come up to the scratch for the purpose." "This day,"[219] he wrote on the 14th of March, "I have paid the purchase money for Gadshill Place. After drawing the cheque (£1790) I turned round to give it to Wills, and said, 'Now isn't it an extraordinary thing--look at the Day--Friday! I have been nearly drawing it half a dozen times when the lawyers have not been ready, and here it comes round upon a Friday as a matter of course.'" He had no thought at this time of reserving the place wholly for himself, or of making it his own residence except at intervals of summer. He looked upon it as an investment only. "You will hardly know Gadshill again," he wrote in January 1858, "I am improving it so much--yet I have no interest in the place." But continued ownership brought increased liking; he took more and more interest in his own improvements, which were just the kind of occasional occupation and resource his life most wanted in its next seven or eight years; and any farther idea of letting it he soon abandoned altogether. It only once passed out of his possession thus, for four months in 1859; in the following year, on the sale of Tavistock House, he transferred to it his books and pictures and choicer furniture; and thenceforward, varied only by houses taken from time to time for the London season, he made it his permanent family abode. Now and then, even during those years, he would talk of selling it; and on his last return from America, when he had sent the last of his sons out into the world, he really might have sold it if he could then have found a house in London suitable to him, and such as he could purchase. But in this he failed; secretly to his own satisfaction, as I believe; and thereupon, in that last autumn of his life, he projected and carried out his most costly addition to Gadshill. Already of course more money had been spent upon it than his first intention in buying it would have justified. He had so enlarged the accommodation, improved the grounds and offices, and added to the land, that, taking also into account this final outlay, the reserved price placed upon the whole after his death more than quadrupled what he had given in 1856 for the house, shrubbery, and twenty years' lease of a meadow field. It was then purchased, and is now inhabited, by his eldest son. Its position has been described, and one of the last-century-histories of Rochester quaintly mentions the principal interest of the locality. "Near the twenty-seventh stone from London is Gadshill, supposed to have been the scene of the robbery mentioned by Shakespeare in his play of Henry IV; there being reason to think also that it was Sir John Falstaff, of truly comic memory, who under the name of Oldcastle inhabited Cooling Castle of which the ruins are in the neighbourhood. A small distance to the left appears on an eminence the Hermitage the seat of the late Sir Francis Head, Bart;[220] and close to the road, on a small ascent, is a neat building lately erected by Mr. Day. In descending Strood-hill is a fine prospect of Strood, Rochester, and Chatham, which three towns form a continued street extending above two miles in length." It had been supposed[221] that "the neat building lately erected by Mr. Day" was that which the great novelist made famous; but Gadshill Place had no existence until eight years after the date of the history. The good rector who so long lived in it told me, in 1859, that it had been built eighty years before by a then well-known character in those parts, one Stevens, father-in-law of Henslow the Cambridge professor of botany. Stevens, who could only with much difficulty manage to write his name, had begun life as ostler at an inn; had become husband to the landlord's widow; then a brewer; and finally, as he subscribed himself on one occasion, "mare" of Rochester. Afterwards the house was inhabited by Mr. Lynn (from some of the members of whose family Dickens made his purchase); and, before the Rev. Mr. Hindle became its tenant, it was inhabited by a Macaroni parson named Townshend, whose horses the Prince Regent bought, throwing into the bargain a box of much desired cigars. Altogether the place had notable associations even apart from those which have connected it with the masterpieces of English humour. "THIS HOUSE, GADSHILL PLACE, stands on the summit of Shakespeare's Gadshill, ever memorable for its association with Sir John Falstaff in his noble fancy. _But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses: I have vizards for you all; you have horses for yourselves._" Illuminated by Mr. Owen Jones, and placed in a frame on the first-floor landing, these words were the greeting of the new tenant to his visitors. It was his first act of ownership. All his improvements, it should perhaps be remarked, were not exclusively matters of choice; and to illustrate by his letters what befell at the beginning of his changes, will show what attended them to the close. His earliest difficulty was very grave. There was only one spring of water for gentlefolk and villagers, and from some of the houses or cottages it was two miles away. "We are still" (6th of July) "boring for water here, at the rate of two pounds per day for wages. The men seem to like it very much, and to be perfectly comfortable." Another of his earliest experiences (5th of September) was thus expressed: "Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year, by the number of miserable lean wretches, hardly able to crawl, who go hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for consumption. So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and sleep under wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally." Towards the close of the same month (24th of September) he wrote: "Here are six men perpetually going up and down the well (I know that somebody will be killed), in the course of fitting a pump; which is quite a railway terminus--it is so iron, and so big. The process is much more like putting Oxford-street endwise, and laying gas along it, than anything else. By the time it is finished, the cost of this water will be something absolutely frightful. But of course it proportionately increases the value of the property, and that's my only comfort. . . . The horse has gone lame from a sprain, the big dog has run a tenpenny nail into one of his hind feet, the bolts have all flown out of the basket-carriage, and the gardener says all the fruit trees want replacing with new ones." Another note came in three days. "I have discovered that the seven miles between Maidstone and Rochester is one of the most beautiful walks in England. Five men have been looking attentively at the pump for a week, and (I should hope) may begin to fit it in the course of October." . . . With even such varying fortune he effected other changes.[222] The exterior remained to the last much as it was when he used as a boy to see it first; a plain, old-fashioned, two-story, brick-built country house, with a bell-turret on the roof, and over the front door a quaint neat wooden porch with pillars and seats. But, among his additions and alterations, was a new drawing-room built out from the smaller existing one, both being thrown together ultimately; two good bedrooms built on a third floor at the back; and such rearrangement of the ground floor as, besides its handsome drawing-room, and its dining-room which he hung with pictures, transformed its bedroom into a study which he lined with books and sometimes wrote in, and changed its breakfast-parlour into a retreat fitted up for smokers into which he put a small billiard-table. These several rooms opened from a hall having in it a series of Hogarth prints, until, after the artist's death, Stanfield's noble scenes were placed there, when the Hogarths were moved to his bedroom; and in this hall, during his last absence in America, a parquet floor was laid down. Nor did he omit such changes as might increase the comfort of his servants. He built entirely new offices and stables, and replaced a very old coach-house by a capital servants' hall, transforming the loft above into a commodious school-room or study for his boys. He made at the same time an excellent croquet-ground out of a waste piece of orchard. Belonging to the house, but unfortunately placed on the other side of the high road, was a shrubbery, well wooded though in desolate condition, in which stood two magnificent cedars; and having obtained, in 1859, the consent of the local authorities for the necessary underground work, Dickens constructed a passage beneath the road[223] from his front lawn; and in the shrubbery thus rendered accessible, and which he then laid out very prettily, he placed afterwards a Swiss châlet[224] presented to him by Mr. Fechter, which arrived from Paris in ninety-four pieces fitting like the joints of a puzzle, but which proved to be somewhat costly in setting on its legs by means of a foundation of brickwork. Once up, however, it was a great resource in the summer months, and much of Dickens's work was done there. "I have put five mirrors in the châlet where I write,"[225] he told an American friend, "and they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious." He used to make great boast, too, not only of his crowds of singing birds all day, but of his nightingales at night. [Illustration: THE CHÂLET.] One or two more extracts from letters having reference to these changes may show something of the interest to him with which Gadshill thus grew under his hands. A sun-dial on his back-lawn had a bit of historic interest about it. "One of the balustrades of the destroyed old Rochester Bridge," he wrote to his daughter in June 1859, "has been (very nicely) presented to me by the contractors for the works, and has been duly stone-masoned and set up on the lawn behind the house. I have ordered a sun-dial for the top of it, and it will be a very good object indeed." "When you come down here next month," he wrote to me, "we have an idea that we shall show you rather a neat house. What terrific adventures have been in action; how many overladen vans were knocked up at Gravesend, and had to be dragged out of Chalk-turnpike in the dead of the night by the whole equine power of this establishment; shall be revealed at another time." That was in the autumn of 1860, when, on the sale of his London house, its contents were transferred to his country home. "I shall have an alteration or two to show you at Gadshill that greatly improve the little property; and when I get the workmen out this time, I think I'll leave off." October 1861 had now come, when the new bedrooms were built; but in the same month of 1863 he announced his transformation of the old coach-house. "I shall have a small new improvement to show you at Gads, which I think you will accept as the crowning ingenuity of the inimitable." But of course it was not over yet. "My small work and planting," he wrote in the spring of 1866, "really, truly, and positively the last, are nearly at an end in these regions, and the result will await summer inspection." No, nor even yet. He afterwards obtained, by exchange of some land with the trustees of Watts's Charity, the much coveted meadow at the back of the house of which heretofore he had the lease only; and he was then able to plant a number of young limes and chestnuts and other quick-growing trees. He had already planted a row of limes in front. He had no idea, he would say, of planting only for the benefit of posterity, but would put into the ground what he might himself enjoy the sight and shade of. He put them in two or three clumps in the meadow, and in a belt all round. Still there were "more last words," for the limit was only to be set by his last year of life. On abandoning his notion, after the American Readings, of exchanging Gadshill for London, a new staircase was put up from the hall; a parquet floor laid on the first landing; and a conservatory built, opening into both drawing-room and dining-room, "glass and iron," as he described it, "brilliant but expensive, with foundations as of an ancient Roman work of horrible solidity." This last addition had long been an object of desire with him; though he would hardly even now have given himself the indulgence but for the golden shower from America. He saw it first in a completed state on the Sunday before his death, when his younger daughter was on a visit to him. "Well, Katey," he said to her, "now you see POSITIVELY the last improvement at Gadshill;" and every one laughed at the joke against himself. The success of the new conservatory was unquestionable. It was the remark of all around him that he was certainly, from this last of his improvements, drawing more enjoyment than from any of its predecessors, when the scene for ever closed. [Illustration: HOUSE AND CONSERVATORY: FROM THE MEADOW.] Of the course of his daily life in the country there is not much to be said. Perhaps there was never a man who changed places so much and habits so little. He was always methodical and regular; and passed his life from day to day, divided for the most part between working and walking, the same wherever he was. The only exception was when special or infrequent visitors were with him. When such friends as Longfellow and his daughters, or Charles Eliot Norton and his wife, came, or when Mr. Fields brought his wife and Professor Lowell's daughter, or when he received other Americans to whom he owed special courtesy, he would compress into infinitely few days an enormous amount of sight seeing and country enjoyment, castles, cathedrals, and fortified lines, lunches and picnics among cherry orchards and hop-gardens, excursions to Canterbury or Maidstone and their beautiful neighbourhoods, Druid-stone and Blue Bell Hill. "All the neighbouring country that could be shown in so short a time," he wrote of the Longfellow visit, "they saw. I turned out a couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover road for our ride, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago." For Lord Lytton he did the same, for the Emerson Tennents, for Mr. Layard and Mr. Helps, for Lady Molesworth and the Higginses (Jacob Omnium), and such other less frequent visitors. Excepting on such particular occasions however, and not always even then, his mornings were reserved wholly to himself; and he would generally preface his morning work (such was his love of order in everything around him) by seeing that all was in its place in the several rooms, visiting also the dogs, stables, and kitchen garden, and closing, unless the weather was very bad indeed, with a turn or two round the meadow before settling to his desk. His dogs were a great enjoyment to him;[226] and, with his high road traversed as frequently as any in England by tramps and wayfarers of a singularly undesirable description, they were also a necessity. There were always two, of the mastiff kind, but latterly the number increased. His own favourite was Turk, a noble animal, full of affection and intelligence, whose death by a railway-accident, shortly after the Staplehurst catastrophe, caused him great grief. Turk's sole companion up to that date was Linda, puppy of a great St. Bernard brought over by Mr. Albert Smith, and grown into a superbly beautiful creature. After Turk there was an interval of an Irish dog, Sultan, given by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald; a cross between a St. Bernard and a bloodhound, built and coloured like a lioness and of splendid proportions, but of such indomitably aggressive propensities, that, after breaking his kennel-chain and nearly devouring a luckless little sister of one of the servants, he had to be killed. Dickens always protested that Sultan was a Fenian, for that no dog, not a secretly sworn member of that body, would ever have made such a point, muzzled as he was, of rushing at and bearing down with fury anything in scarlet with the remotest resemblance to a British uniform. Sultan's successor was Don, presented by Mr. Frederic Lehmann, a grand Newfoundland brought over very young, who with Linda became parent to a couple of Newfoundlands, that were still gambolling about their master, huge, though hardly out of puppydom, when they lost him. He had given to one of them the name of Bumble, from having observed, as he described it, "a peculiarly pompous and overbearing manner he had of appearing to mount guard over the yard when he was an absolute infant." Bumble was often in scrapes. Describing to Mr. Fields a drought in the summer of 1868, when their poor supply of ponds and surface wells had become waterless, he wrote: "I do not let the great dogs swim in the canal, because the people have to drink of it. But when they get into the Medway, it is hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble (the son, Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among some floating timber, and became frightened. Don (the father) was standing by me, shaking off the wet and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden he perceived something amiss, and went in with a bound and brought Bumble out by the ear. The scientific way in which he towed him along was charming." The description of his own reception, on his reappearance after America, by Bumble and his brother, by the big and beautiful Linda, and by his daughter Mary's handsome little Pomeranian, may be added from his letters to the same correspondent. "The two Newfoundland dogs coming to meet me, with the usual carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me coming in my usual dress out at the usual door, it struck me that their recollection of my having been absent for any unusual time was at once cancelled. They behaved (they are both young dogs) exactly in their usual manner; coming behind the basket phaeton as we trotted along, and lifting their heads to have their ears pulled, a special attention which they receive from no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard, Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with her great fore-paws. Mary's little dog too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the greatest agitation on being called down and asked by Mary, 'Who is this?' and tore round and round me like the dog in the Faust outlines." The father and mother and their two sons, four formidable-looking companions, were with him generally in his later walks. Round Cobham, skirting the park and village and passing the Leather Bottle famous in the page of _Pickwick_, was a favourite walk with Dickens. By Rochester and the Medway, to the Chatham Lines, was another. He would turn out of Rochester High-street through The Vines (where some old buildings, from one of which called Restoration-house he took Satis-house for _Great Expectations_, had a curious attraction for him), would pass round by Fort Pitt, and coming back by Frindsbury would bring himself by some cross fields again into the high road. Or, taking the other side, he would walk through the marshes to Gravesend, return by Chalk church, and stop always to have greeting with a comical old monk who for some incomprehensible reason sits carved in stone, cross-legged with a jovial pot, over the porch of that sacred edifice. To another drearier churchyard, itself forming part of the marshes beyond the Medway, he often took friends to show them the dozen small tombstones of various sizes adapted to the respective ages of a dozen small children of one family which he made part of his story of _Great Expectations_, though, with the reserves always necessary in copying nature not to overstep her modesty by copying too closely, he makes the number that appalled little Pip not more than half the reality. About the whole of this Cooling churchyard, indeed, and the neighbouring castle ruins, there was a weird strangeness that made it one of his attractive walks in the late year or winter, when from Higham he could get to it across country over the stubble fields; and, for a shorter summer walk, he was not less fond of going round the village of Shorne, and sitting on a hot afternoon in its pretty shaded churchyard. But on the whole, though Maidstone had also much that attracted him to its neighbourhood, the Cobham neighbourhood was certainly that which he had greatest pleasure in; and he would have taken oftener than he did the walk through Cobham park and woods, which was the last he enjoyed before life suddenly closed upon him, but that here he did not like his dogs to follow. [Illustration: THE STUDY AT GADSHILL.] Don now has his home there with Lord Darnley, and Linda lies under one of the cedars at Gadshill. FOOTNOTES: [219] On New Year's Day he had written from Paris. "When in London Coutts's advised me not to sell out the money for Gadshill Place (the title of my estate sir, my place down in Kent) until the conveyance was settled and ready." [220] Two houses now stand on what was Sir Francis Head's estate, the Great and Little Hermitage, occupied respectively by Mr. Malleson and Mr. Hulkes, who became intimate with Dickens. Perry of the _Morning Chronicle_, whose town house was in that court out of Tavistock-square of which Tavistock House formed part, had occupied the Great Hermitage previously. [221] By the obliging correspondent who sent me this _History of Rochester_, 8vo. (Rochester, 1772), p. 302. [222] "As to the carpenters," he wrote to his daughter in September 1860, "they are absolutely maddening. They are always at work yet never seem to do anything, L. was down on Friday, and said (with his eye fixed on Maidstone and rubbing his hands to conciliate his moody employer) that 'he didn't think there would be very much left to do after Saturday the 29th.' I didn't throw him out of window." [223] A passage in his paper on Tramps embodies very amusingly experience recorded in his letters of this brick-work tunnel and the sinking of the well; but I can only borrow one sentence. "The current of my uncommercial pursuits caused me only last summer to want a little body of workmen for a certain spell of work in a pleasant part of the country; and I was at one time honoured with the attendance of as many as seven-and-twenty, who were looking at six." Bits of wonderful observation are in that paper. [224] This was at the beginning of 1865. "The châlet," he wrote to me on the 7th of January, "is going on excellently, though the ornamental part is more slowly put together than the substantial. It will really be a very pretty thing; and in the summer (supposing it not to be blown away in the spring), the upper room will make a charming study. It is much higher than we supposed." [225] As surely, however, as he did any work there, so surely his indispensable little accompaniments of work (ii. 226) were carried along with him; and of these I will quote what was written shortly after his death by his son-in-law, Mr. Charles Collins, to illustrate a very touching sketch by Mr. Fildes of his writing-desk and vacant chair. "Ranged in front of, and round about him, were always a variety of objects for his eye to rest on in the intervals of actual writing, and any one of which he would have instantly missed had it been removed. There was a French bronze group representing a duel with swords, fought by a couple of very fat toads, one of them (characterised by that particular buoyancy which belongs to corpulence) in the act of making a prodigious lunge forward, which the other receives in the very middle of his digestive apparatus, and under the influence of which it seems likely that he will satisfy the wounded honour of his opponent by promptly expiring. There was another bronze figure which always stood near the toads, also of French manufacture, and also full of comic suggestion. It was a statuette of a dog-fancier, such a one as you used to see on the bridges or quays of Paris, with a profusion of little dogs stuck under his arms and into his pockets, and everywhere where little dogs could possibly be insinuated, all for sale, and all, as even a casual glance at the vendor's exterior would convince the most unsuspicious person, with some screw loose in their physical constitutions or moral natures, to be discovered immediately after purchase. There was the long gilt leaf with the rabbit sitting erect upon its haunches, the huge paper-knife often held in his hand during his public readings, and the little fresh green cup ornamented with the leaves and blossoms of the cowslip, in which a few fresh flowers were always placed every morning--for Dickens invariably worked with flowers on his writing-table. There was also the register of the day of the week and of the month, which stood always before him; and when the room in the châlet in which he wrote his last paragraph was opened, some time after his death, the first thing to be noticed by those who entered was this register, set at 'Wednesday, June 8'--the day of his seizure." It remains to this day as it was found. [226] Dickens's interest in dogs (as in the habits and ways of all animals) was inexhaustible, and he welcomed with delight any new trait. The subjoined, told him by a lady friend, was a great acquisition. "I must close" (14th of May 1867) "with an odd story of a Newfoundland dog. An immense black good-humoured Newfoundland dog. He came from Oxford and had lived all his life at a brewery. Instructions were given with him that if he were let out every morning alone, he would immediately find out the river; regularly take a swim; and gravely come home again. This he did with the greatest punctuality, but after a little while was observed to smell of beer. She was so sure that he smelt of beer that she resolved to watch him. Accordingly, he was seen to come back from his swim, round the usual corner, and to go up a flight of steps into a beer-shop. Being instantly followed, the beer-shop-keeper is seen to take down a pot (pewter pot), and is heard to say: 'Well, old chap! Come for your beer as usual, have you?' Upon which he draws a pint and puts it down, and the dog drinks it. Being required to explain how this comes to pass, the man says, 'Yes ma'am. I know he's your dog ma'am, but I didn't when he first come. He looked in ma'am--as a Brickmaker might--and then he come in--as a Brickmaker might--and he wagged his tail at the pots, and he giv' a sniff round, and conveyed to me as he was used to beer. So I draw'd him a drop, and he drunk it up. Next morning he come agen by the clock and I drawed him a pint, and ever since he has took his pint reglar.'" CHAPTER IX. FIRST PAID READINGS. 1858-1859. First Series--Exeter Audience--Impressions of Dublin--Irish Car-driver--Young Ireland and Old England--Reception in Belfast--At Harrogate--At York--At Manchester--Continued Successes--Scene at Edinburgh--At Dundee--At Aberdeen and Perth--At Glasgow--Glasgow Audience--Subjects of First Readings--First Library Edition of his Books--At Coventry--Frith's Portrait of Dickens. DICKENS gave his paid public Readings successively, with not long intervals, at four several dates; in 1858-9, in 1861-63, in 1866-67, and in 1868-70; the first series under Mr. Arthur Smith's management, the second under Mr. Headland's, and the third and fourth, in America as well as before and after it, under that of Mr. George Dolby, who, excepting in America, acted for the Messrs. Chappell. The references in the present chapter are to the first series only. It began with sixteen nights at St. Martin's Hall, the first on the 29th of April, the last on the 22nd of July, 1858; and there was afterwards a provincial tour of 87 readings, beginning at Clifton on the 2nd of August, ending at Brighton on the 13th of November, and taking in Ireland and Scotland as well as the principal English cities: to which were added, in London, three Christmas readings, three in January, with two in the following month; and, in the provinces in the month of October, fourteen, beginning at Ipswich and Norwich, taking in Cambridge and Oxford, and closing with Birmingham and Cheltenham. The series had comprised altogether 125 Readings when it ended on the 27th of October, 1859; and without the touches of character and interest afforded by his letters written while thus employed, the picture of the man would not be complete. Here was one day's work at the opening which will show something of the fatigue they involved even at their outset. "On Friday we came from Shrewsbury to Chester; saw all right for the evening; and then went to Liverpool. Came back from Liverpool and read at Chester. Left Chester at 11 at night, after the reading, and went to London. Got to Tavistock House at 5 A.M. on Saturday, left it at a quarter past 10 that morning, and came down here" (Gadshill: 15th of August 1858). The "greatest personal affection and respect" had greeted him everywhere. Nothing could have been "more strongly marked or warmly expressed;" and the readings had "gone" quite wonderfully. What in this respect had most impressed him, at the outset of his adventures, was Exeter. "I think they were the finest audience I ever read to; I don't think I ever read in some respects so well; and I never beheld anything like the personal affection which they poured out upon me at the end. I shall always look back upon it with pleasure." He often lost his voice in these early days, having still to acquire the art of husbanding it; and in the trial to recover it would again waste its power. "I think I sang half the Irish melodies to myself as I walked about, to test it." An audience of two thousand three hundred people (the largest he had had) greeted him at Liverpool on his way to Dublin, and, besides the tickets sold, more than two hundred pounds in money was taken at the doors. This taxed his business staff a little. "They turned away hundreds, sold all the books, rolled on the ground of my room knee-deep in checks, and made a perfect pantomime of the whole thing." (20th of August.) He had to repeat the reading thrice.[227] It was the first time he had seen Ireland, and Dublin greatly surprised him by appearing to be so much larger and more populous than he had supposed. He found it to have altogether an unexpectedly thriving look, being pretty nigh as big, he first thought, as Paris; of which some places in it, such as the quays on the river, reminded him. Half the first day he was there, he took to explore it; walking till tired, and then taking a car. "Power, dressed for the character of Teddy the Tiler, drove me: in a suit of patches, and with his hat unbrushed for twenty years. Wonderfully pleasant, light, intelligent, and careless."[228] The number of common people he saw in his drive, "also riding about in cars as hard as they could split," brought to his recollection a more distant scene, and but for the dresses he could have thought himself on the Toledo at Naples. In respect of the number of his audience, and their reception of him, Dublin was one of his marked successes. He came to have some doubt of their capacity of receiving the pathetic, but of their quickness as to the humorous there could be no question, any more than of their heartiness. He got on wonderfully well with the Dublin people.[229] The Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of view. "He was waiting for me at the hotel door last night. 'Whaat sart of a hoose sur?' he asked me. 'Capital.' 'The Lard be praised fur the 'onor 'o Dooblin!'" Within the hotel, on getting up next morning, he had a dialogue with a smaller resident, landlord's son he supposed, a little boy of the ripe age of six, which he presented, in his letter to his sister-in-law, as a colloquy between Old England and Young Ireland inadequately reported for want of the "imitation" it required for its full effect. "I am sitting on the sofa, writing, and find him sitting beside me. "_Old England._ Halloa old chap. "_Young Ireland._ Hal--loo! "_Old England_ (in his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys. "_Young Ireland._ Air yes? Ye'r right. "_Old England._ What do you learn, old fellow? "_Young Ireland_ (very intent on Old England, and always childish except in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils--and wureds of two sillibils--and wureds of one sillibil. "_Old England_ (cheerfully). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words of one syllable. "_Young Ireland_ (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly wureds of one sillibil. "_Old England._ Can you write? "_Young Ireland,_ Not yet. Things comes by deegrays. "_Old England._ Can you cipher? "_Young Ireland_ (very quickly). Whaat's that? "_Old England._ Can you make figures? "_Young Ireland._ I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond. "_Old England._ I say, old boy! Wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in the Hall, in a soldier's cap? You know!--In a soldier's cap? "_Young Ireland_ (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap? "_Old England._ Yes. "_Young Ireland._ Did it fit ankommon? "_Old England._ Yes. "_Young Ireland._ Dat was me!" The last night in Dublin was an extraordinary scene. "You can hardly imagine it. All the way from the hotel to the Rotunda (a mile), I had to contend against the stream of people who were turned away. When I got there, they had broken the glass in the pay-boxes, and were offering £5 freely for a stall. Half of my platform had to be taken down, and people heaped in among the ruins. You never saw such a scene."[230] But he would not return after his other Irish engagements. "I have positively said No. The work is too hard. It is not like doing it in one easy room, and always the same room. With a different place every night, and a different audience with its own peculiarity every night, it is a tremendous strain. . . . I seem to be always either in a railway carriage or reading, or going to bed; and I get so knocked up whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course." Belfast he liked quite as much as Dublin in another way. "A fine place with a rough people; everything looking prosperous; the railway ride from Dublin quite amazing in the order, neatness, and cleanness of all you see; every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright flowers." The success, too, was quite as great. "Enormous audiences. We turn away half the town.[231] I think them a better audience on the whole than Dublin; and the personal affection is something overwhelming. I wish you and the dear girls" (he is writing to his sister-in-law) "could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night, to 'do me the honor to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light you've been in mee house sir (and God love your face!) this many a year!'"[232] He had never seen men "go in to cry so undisguisedly," as they did at the Belfast _Dombey_ reading; and as to the _Boots_ and _Mrs. Gamp_ "it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me laugh so, that sometimes I _could not_ compose my face to go on." His greatest trial in this way however was a little later at Harrogate--"the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading, and tables d'hôte"--where he noticed, at the same reading, embodiments respectively of the tears and laughter to which he has moved his fellow creatures so largely. "There was one gentleman at the _Little Dombey_ yesterday morning" (he is still writing to his sister-in-law) "who exhibited--or rather concealed--the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion. He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in old time. . . . There was a remarkably good fellow too, of thirty or so, who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he _could not_ compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; and whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll, and made me laugh heartily." At Harrogate he read twice on one day (a Saturday), and had to engage a special engine to take him back that night to York, which, having reached at one o'clock in the morning, he had to leave, because of Sunday restrictions on travel, the same morning at half-past four, to enable him to fulfil a Monday's reading at Scarborough. Such fatigues became matters of course; but their effect, not noted at the time, was grave. "At York I had a most magnificent audience, and might have filled the place for a week. . . . I think the audience possessed of a better knowledge of character than any I have seen. But I recollect Doctor Belcombe to have told me long ago that they first found out Charles Mathews's father, and to the last understood him (he used to say) better than any other people. . . . The let is enormous for next Saturday at Manchester, stalls alone four hundred! I shall soon be able to send you the list of places to the 15th of November, the end. I shall be, O most heartily glad, when that time comes! But I must say that the intelligence and warmth of the audiences are an immense sustainment, and one that always sets me up. Sometimes before I go down to read (especially when it is in the day), I am so oppressed by having to do it that I feel perfectly unequal to the task. But the people lift me out of this directly; and I find that I have quite forgotten everything but them and the book, in a quarter of an hour." The reception that awaited him at Manchester had very special warmth in it, occasioned by an adverse tone taken in the comment of one of the Manchester daily papers on the letter which by a breach of confidence had been then recently printed. "My violated letter" Dickens always called it. "When I came to Manchester on Saturday I found seven hundred stalls taken! When I went into the room at night 2500 people had paid, and more were being turned away from every door. The welcome they gave me was astounding in its affectionate recognition of the late trouble, and fairly for once unmanned me. I never saw such a sight or heard such a sound. When they had thoroughly done it, they settled down to enjoy themselves; and certainly did enjoy themselves most heartily to the last minute." Nor, for the rest of his English tour, in any of the towns that remained, had he reason to complain of any want of hearty greeting. At Sheffield great crowds came in excess of the places. At Leeds the hall overflowed in half an hour. At Hull the vast concourse had to be addressed by Mr. Smith on the gallery stairs, and additional Readings had to be given, day and night, "for the people out of town and for the people in town." The net profit to himself, thus far, had been upwards of three hundred pounds a week;[233] but this was nothing to the success in Scotland, where his profit in a week, with all expenses paid, was five hundred pounds. The pleasure was enhanced, too, by the presence of his two daughters, who had joined him over the Border. At first the look of Edinburgh was not promising. "We began with, for us, a poor room. . . . But the effect of that reading (it was the _Chimes_) was immense; and on the next night, for _Little Dombey_, we had a full room. It is our greatest triumph everywhere. Next night (_Poor Traveller_, _Boots_, and _Gamp_) we turned away hundreds upon hundreds of people; and last night, for the _Carol_, in spite of advertisements in the morning that the tickets were gone, the people had to be got in through such a crowd as rendered it a work of the utmost difficulty to keep an alley into the room. They were seated about me on the platform, put into the doorway of the waiting-room, squeezed into every conceivable place, and a multitude turned away once more. I think I am better pleased with what was done in Edinburgh than with what has been done anywhere, almost. It was so completely taken by storm, and carried in spite of itself. Mary and Katey have been infinitely pleased and interested with Edinburgh. We are just going to sit down to dinner and therefore I cut my missive short. Travelling, dinner, reading, and everything else, come crowding together into this strange life." Then came Dundee: "An odd place," he wrote, "like Wapping with high rugged hills behind it. We had the strangest journey here--bits of sea, and bits of railroad, alternately; which carried my mind back to travelling in America. The room is an immense new one, belonging to Lord Kinnaird, and Lord Panmure, and some others of that sort. It looks something between the Crystal-palace and Westminster-hall (I can't imagine who wants it in this place), and has never been tried yet for speaking in. Quite disinterestedly of course, I hope it will succeed." The people he thought, in respect of taste and intelligence, below any other of his Scotch audiences; but they woke up surprisingly, and the rest of his Caledonian tour was a succession of triumphs. "At Aberdeen we were crammed to the street, twice in one day. At Perth (where I thought when I arrived, there literally could be nobody to come) the gentlefolk came posting in from thirty miles round, and the whole town came besides, and filled an immense hall. They were as full of perception, fire, and enthusiasm as any people I have seen. At Glasgow, where I read three evenings and one morning, we took the prodigiously large sum of six hundred pounds! And this at the Manchester prices, which are lower than St. Martin's Hall. As to the effect--I wish you could have seen them after Lilian died in the _Chimes_, or when Scrooge woke in the _Carol_ and talked to the boy outside the window. And at the end of _Dombey_ yesterday afternoon, in the cold light of day, they all got up, after a short pause, gentle and simple, and thundered and waved their hats with such astonishing heartiness and fondness that, for the first time in all my public career, they took me completely off my legs, and I saw the whole eighteen hundred of them reel to one side as if a shock from without had shaken the hall. Notwithstanding which, I must confess to you, I am very anxious to get to the end of my Readings, and to be at home again, and able to sit down and think in my own study. There has been only one thing quite without alloy. The dear girls have enjoyed themselves immensely, and their trip with me has been a great success." The subjects of his readings during this first circuit were the _Carol_, the _Chimes_, the _Trial in Pickwick_, the chapters containing _Paul Dombey_, _Boots at the Holly Tree Inn_, the _Poor Traveller_ (Captain Doubledick), and _Mrs. Gamp_: to which he continued to restrict himself through the supplementary nights that closed in the autumn of 1859.[234] Of these the most successful in their uniform effect upon his audiences were undoubtedly the _Carol_, the _Pickwick_ scene, _Mrs. Gamp_, and the _Dombey_--the quickness, variety, and completeness of his assumption of character, having greatest scope in these. Here, I think, more than in the pathos or graver level passages, his strength lay; but this is entitled to no weight other than as an individual opinion, and his audiences gave him many reasons for thinking differently.[235] The incidents of the period covered by this chapter that had any general interest in them, claim to be mentioned briefly. At the close of 1857 he presided at the fourth anniversary of the Warehousemen and Clerks' Schools, describing and discriminating, with keenest wit and kindliest fun, the sort of schools he liked and he disliked. To the spring and summer of 1858 belongs the first collection of his writings into a succinct library form, each of the larger novels occupying two volumes. In March he paid warm public tribute to Thackeray (who had been induced to take the chair at the General Theatrical Fund) as one for whose genius he entertained the warmest admiration, who did honour to literature, and in whom literature was honoured. In May he presided at the Artists' Benevolent Fund dinner, and made striking appeal for that excellent charity. In July he took earnest part in the opening efforts on behalf of the Royal Dramatic College, which he supplemented later by a speech for the establishment of schools for actors' children; in which he took occasion to declare his belief that there were no institutions in England so socially liberal as its public schools, and that there was nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank, position, or riches. "A boy, there, is always what his abilities or his personal qualities make him. We may differ about the curriculum and other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit preserved in our public schools, I apprehend there can be no kind of question." In December[236] he was entertained at a public dinner in Coventry on the occasion of receiving, by way of thanks for help rendered to their Institute, a gold repeater of special construction by the watchmakers of the town; as to which he kept faithfully his pledge to the givers, that it should be thenceforward the inseparable companion of his workings and wanderings, and reckon off the future labours of his days until he should have done with the measurement of time. Within a day from this celebration, he presided at the Institutional Association of Lancashire and Cheshire in Manchester Free Trade Hall; gave prizes to candidates from a hundred and fourteen local mechanics' institutes affiliated to the Association; described in his most attractive language the gallant toiling fellows by whom the prizes had been won; and ended with the monition he never failed to couple with his eulogies of Knowledge, that it should follow the teaching of the Saviour, and not satisfy the understanding merely. "Knowledge has a very limited power when it informs the head only; but when it informs the heart as well, it has a power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates the universe." This too was the year when Mr. Frith completed Dickens's portrait, and it appeared upon the walls of the Academy in the following spring. "I wish," said Edwin Landseer as he stood before it, "he looked less eager and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then." There is something in the objection, and he also would be envious at times of what he too surely knew could never be his lot. On the other hand who would willingly have lost the fruits of an activity on the whole so healthy and beneficent? FOOTNOTES: [227] This was the _Carol_ and _Pickwick_. "We are reduced sometimes," he adds, "to a ludicrous state of distress by the quantity of silver we have to carry about. Arthur Smith is always accompanied by an immense black leather-bag full." Mr. Smith had an illness a couple of days later, and Dickens whimsically describes his rapid recovery on discovering the state of their balances. "He is now sitting opposite to me on a bag of £40 of silver. It must be dreadfully hard." [228] A letter to his eldest daughter (23rd of Aug.) makes humorous addition. "The man who drove our jaunting car yesterday hadn't a piece in his coat as big as a penny roll, and had had his hat on (apparently without brushing it) ever since he was grown-up. But he was remarkably intelligent and agreeable, with something to say about everything. For instance, when I asked him what a certain building was, he didn't say 'Courts of Law' and nothing else, but 'Av yer plase Sir, its the foor Coorts o' looyers, where Misther O'Connell stood his trial wunst, as ye'll remimbir sir, afore I till ye ov it.' When we got into the Phoenix Park, he looked round him as if it were his own, and said 'THAT'S a Park sir, av ye plase!' I complimented it, and he said 'Gintlemen tills me as they iv bin, sir, over Europe and never see a Park aqualling ov it. Yander's the Vice-regal Lodge, sir; in thim two corners lives the two Sicretaries, wishing I was thim sir. There's air here sir, av yer plase! There's scenery here sir! There's mountains thim sir! Yer coonsider it a Park sir? It is that sir!'" [229] The Irish girls outdid the American (i. 385) in one particular. He wrote to his sister-in-law: "Every night, by the bye, since I have been in Ireland, the ladies have beguiled John out of the bouquet from my coat; and yesterday morning, as I had showered the leaves from my geranium in reading _Little Dombey_, they mounted the platform after I was gone, and picked them all up as a keepsake." A few days earlier he had written to the same correspondent: "The papers are full of remarks upon my white tie, and describe it as being of enormous size, which is a wonderful delusion; because, as you very well know, it is a small tie. Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter at Cork, wherein he says that although only 46, I look like an old man." [230] "They had offered frantic prices for stalls. Eleven bank-notes were thrust into a paybox at one time for eleven stalls. Our men were flattened against walls and squeezed against beams. Ladies stood all night with their chins against my platform. Other ladies sat all night upon my steps. We turned away people enough to make immense houses for a week." Letter to his eldest daughter. [231] "Shillings get into stalls, and half-crowns get into shillings, and stalls get nowhere, and there is immense confusion." Letter to his daughter. [232] "I was brought very near to what I sometimes dream may be my Fame," he says in a letter of later date to myself from York, "when a lady whose face I had never seen stopped me yesterday in the street, and said to me, _Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends_." October 1858. [233] "That is no doubt immense, our expenses being necessarily large, and the travelling party being always five." Another source of profit was the sale of the copies of the several Readings prepared by himself. "Our people alone sell eight, ten, and twelve dozen a night." A later letter says: "The men with the reading books were sold out, for about the twentieth time, at Manchester. Eleven dozen of the _Poor Traveller_, _Boots_, and _Gamp_ being sold in about ten minutes, they had no more left; and Manchester became green with the little tracts, in every bookshop, outside every omnibus, and passing along every street. The sale of them, apart from us, must be very great." "Did I tell you," he writes in another letter, "that the agents for our tickets who are also booksellers, say very generally that the readings decidedly increase the sale of the books they are taken from? We were first told of this by a Mr. Parke, a wealthy old gentleman in a very large way at Wolverhampton, who did all the business for love, and would not take a farthing. Since then, we have constantly come upon it; and M'Glashin and Gill at Dublin were very strong about it indeed." [234] The last of them were given immediately after his completion of the _Tale of Two Cities_: "I am a little tired; but as little, I suspect, as any man could be with the work of the last four days, and perhaps the change of work was better than subsiding into rest and rust. The Norwich people were a noble audience. There, and at Ipswich and Bury, we had the demonstrativeness of the great working-towns, and a much finer perception."--14th of October 1859. [235] Two pleasing little volumes may here be named as devoted to special descriptions of the several Readings; by his friend Mr. Charles Kent in England (_Charles Dickens as a Reader_), and by Miss Kate Field in America (_Pen Photographs_). [236] Let me subjoin his own note of a less important incident of that month which will show his quick and sure eye for any bit of acting out of the common. The lady has since justified its closing prediction. Describing an early dinner with Chauncy Townshend, he adds (17th of December 1858): "I escaped at half-past seven, and went to the Strand Theatre: having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the _Maid and the Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla Horton, as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which, in the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you _can not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse, and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. It begins at 8, and is over by a quarter-past 9. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl's talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original." CHAPTER X. ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 1859-1861. _All the Year Round_ started--_Household Words_ discontinued--Differences with Mr. Bentley--In Search of a Name for New Periodical--Opening a Story--Success of New Periodical--At Knebworth with Bulwer Lytton--Sale of Christmas Numbers--Commercial Travellers' Schools--Personal References--Remedy for Sleeplessness--"Tramp" Experiences--Reduced Bantams--Bethnal-green Fowls--The Goldfinch and his Friend--Offers from America--Visit of Mr. Fields. IN the interval before the close of the first circuit of readings, painful personal disputes arising out of the occurrences of the previous year were settled by the discontinuance of _Household Words_, and the establishment in its place of _All the Year Round_. The disputes turned upon matters of feeling exclusively, and involved no charge on either side that would render any detailed reference here other than gravely out of place. The question into which the difference ultimately resolved itself was that of the respective rights of the parties as proprietors of _Household Words_; and this, upon a bill filed in Chancery, was settled by a winding-up order, under which the property was sold. It was bought by Dickens, who, even before the sale, exactly fulfilling a previous announcement of the proposed discontinuance of the existing periodical and establishment of another in its place, precisely similar but under a different title, had started _All the Year Round_. It was to be regretted perhaps that he should have thought it necessary to move at all, but he moved strictly within his rights. To the publishers first associated with his great success in literature, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, he now returned for the issue of the remainder of his books; of which he always in future reserved the copyrights, making each the subject of such arrangement as for the time might seem to him desirable. In this he was met by no difficulty; and indeed it will be only proper to add, that, in any points affecting his relations with those concerned in the production of his books, though his resentments were easily and quickly roused, they were never very lasting. The only fair rule therefore was, in a memoir of his life, to confine the mention of such things to what was strictly necessary to explain its narrative. This accordingly has been done; and, in the several disagreements it has been necessary to advert to, I cannot charge myself with having in a single instance overstepped the rule. Objection has been made to my revival of the early differences with Mr. Bentley. But silence respecting them was incompatible with what absolutely required to be said, if the picture of Dickens in his most interesting time, at the outset of his career in letters, was not to be omitted altogether; and, suppressing everything of mere temper that gathered round the dispute, use was made of those letters only containing the young writer's urgent appeal to be absolved, rightly or wrongly, from engagements he had too precipitately entered into. Wrongly, some might say, because the law was undoubtedly on Mr. Bentley's side; but all subsequent reflection has confirmed the view I was led strongly to take at the time, that in the facts there had come to be involved what the law could not afford to overlook, and that the sale of brain-work can never be adjusted by agreement with the same exactness and certainty as that of ordinary goods and chattels. Quitting the subject once for all with this remark, it is not less incumbent on me to say that there was no stage of the dispute in which Mr. Bentley, holding as strongly the other view, might not think it to have sufficient justification; and certainly in later years there was no absence of friendly feeling on the part of Dickens to his old publisher. This already has been mentioned; and on the occasion of Hans Andersen's recent visit to Gadshill, Mr. Bentley was invited to meet the celebrated Dane. Nor should I omit to say, that, in the year to which this narrative has now arrived, his prompt compliance with an intercession made to him for a common friend pleased Dickens greatly. At the opening of 1859, bent upon such a successor to _Household Words_ as should carry on the associations connected with its name, Dickens was deep in search of a title to give expression to them. "My determination to settle the title arises out of my knowledge that I shall never be able to do anything for the work until it has a fixed name; also out of my observation that the same odd feeling affects everybody else." He had proposed to himself a title that, as in _Household Words_, might be capable of illustration by a line from Shakespeare; and alighting upon that wherein poor Henry the Sixth is fain to solace his captivity by the fancy, that, like birds encaged he might soothe himself for loss of liberty "at last by notes of household harmony," he for the time forgot that this might hardly be accepted as a happy comment on the occurrences out of which the supposed necessity had arisen of replacing the old by a new household friend. "Don't you think," he wrote on the 24th of January, "this is a good name and quotation? I have been quite delighted to get hold of it for our title. "HOUSEHOLD HARMONY. "'At last by notes of Household Harmony.'--_Shakespeare._" He was at first reluctant even to admit the objection when stated to him. "I am afraid we must not be too particular about the possibility of personal references and applications: otherwise it is manifest that I never can write another book. I could not invent a story of any sort, it is quite plain, incapable of being twisted into some such nonsensical shape. It would be wholly impossible to turn one through half a dozen chapters." Of course he yielded, nevertheless; and much consideration followed over sundry other titles submitted. Reviving none of those formerly rejected, here were a few of these now rejected in their turn. THE HEARTH. THE FORGE. THE CRUCIBLE. THE ANVIL OF THE TIME. CHARLES DICKENS'S OWN. SEASONABLE LEAVES. EVERGREEN LEAVES. HOME. HOME-MUSIC. CHANGE. TIME AND TIDE. TWOPENCE. ENGLISH BELLS. WEEKLY BELLS. THE ROCKET. GOOD HUMOUR. Still the great want was the line adaptable from Shakespeare, which at last exultingly he sent on the 28th of January. "I am dining early, before reading, and write literally with my mouth full. But I have just hit upon a name that I think really an admirable one--especially with the quotation _before_ it, in the place where our present _H. W._ quotation stands. "'The story of our lives, from year to year.'--_Shakespeare._" "ALL THE YEAR ROUND. "A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens." With the same resolution and energy other things necessary to the adventure were as promptly done. "I have taken the new office," he wrote from Tavistock House on the 21st of February; "have got workmen in; have ordered the paper; settled with the printer; and am getting an immense system of advertising ready. Blow to be struck on the 12th of March. . . . Meantime I cannot please myself with the opening of my story" (the _Tale of Two Cities_, which _All the Year Round_ was to start with), "and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it. . . . I wish you would come and look at what I flatter myself is a rather ingenious account to which I have turned the Stanfield scenery here." He had placed the _Lighthouse_ scene in a single frame; had divided the scene of the _Frozen Deep_ into two subjects, a British man-of-war and an Arctic sea, which he had also framed; and the school-room that had been the theatre was now hung with sea-pieces by a great painter of the sea. To believe them to have been but the amusement of a few mornings was difficult indeed. Seen from the due distance there was nothing wanting to the most masterly and elaborate art. The first number of _All the Year Round_ appeared on the 30th of April, and the result of the first quarter's accounts of the sale will tell everything that needs to be said of a success that went on without intermission to the close. "A word before I go back to Gadshill," he wrote from Tavistock House in July, "which I know you will be glad to receive. So well has _All the Year Round_ gone that it was yesterday able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced for its establishment (paper, print &c. all paid, down to the last number), and yet to leave a good £500 balance at the banker's!" Beside the opening of his _Tale of Two Cities_ its first number had contained another piece of his writing, the "Poor Man and his Beer;" as to which an interesting note has been sent me. The Rev. T. B. Lawes, of Rothamsted, St. Alban's, had been associated upon a sanitary commission with Mr. Henry Austin, Dickens's brother-in-law and counsellor in regard to all such matters in his own houses, or in the houses of the poor; and this connection led to Dickens's knowledge of a club that Mr. Lawes had established at Rothamsted, which he became eager to recommend as an example to other country neighbourhoods. The club had been set on foot[237] to enable the agricultural labourers of the parish to have their beer and pipes independent of the public-house; and the description of it, says Mr. Lawes, "was the occupation of a drive between this place (Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles, Mr. Dickens refusing the offer of a bed, and saying that he could arrange his ideas on the journey. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that the labourers were very jealous of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and others, holding allotment-gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly by paying higher rents to the labourers for a share. This circumstance is not forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number, composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walking about, and which close the mention of his gains with allusion to "A share (concealed) in the poor man's field, Which adds to the poor man's store." The periodical thus established was in all respects, save one, so exactly the counterpart of what it replaced, that a mention of this point of difference is the only description of it called for. Besides his own three-volume stories of _The Tale of Two Cities_ and _Great Expectations_, Dickens admitted into it other stories of the same length by writers of character and name, of which the authorship was avowed. It published tales of varied merit and success by Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. Charles Lever. Mr. Wilkie Collins contributed to it his _Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _Moonstone_, the first of which had a pre-eminent success; Mr. Reade his _Hard Cash_; and Lord Lytton his _Strange Story_. Conferring about the latter Dickens passed a week at Knebworth, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, in the summer of 1861, as soon as he had closed _Great Expectations_; and there met Mr. Arthur Helps, with whom and Lord Orford he visited the so-called "Hermit" near Stevenage, whom he described as Mr. Mopes in _Tom Tiddler's Ground_. With his great brother-artist he thoroughly enjoyed himself, as he invariably did; and reported him as "in better health and spirits than I have seen him in, in all these years,--a little weird occasionally regarding magic and spirits, but always fair and frank under opposition. He was brilliantly talkative, anecdotical, and droll; looked young and well; laughed heartily; and enjoyed with great zest some games we played. In his artist-character and talk, he was full of interest and matter, saying the subtlest and finest things--but that he never fails in. I enjoyed myself immensely, as we all did."[238] In _All the Year Round_, as in its predecessor, the tales for Christmas were of course continued, but with a surprisingly increased popularity; and Dickens never had such sale for any of his writings as for his Christmas pieces in the later periodical. It had reached, before he died, to nearly three hundred thousand. The first was called the _Haunted House_, and had a small mention of a true occurrence in his boyhood which is not included in the bitter record on a former page. "I was taken home, and there was debt at home as well as death, and we had a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a power unknown to me hazily called The Trade, that a brass coal-scuttle, a roasting jack, and a bird cage were obliged to be put into it to make a lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it must have been to sing!" The other subjects will have mention in another chapter. His tales were not his only important work in _All the Year Round_. The detached papers written by him there had a character and completeness derived from their plan, and from the personal tone, as well as frequent individual confessions, by which their interest is enhanced, and which will always make them specially attractive. Their title expressed a personal liking. Of all the societies, charitable or self-assisting, which his tact and eloquence in the "chair" so often helped, none had interested him by the character of its service to its members, and the perfection of its management, so much as that of the Commercial Travellers. His, admiration of their schools introduced him to one who then acted as their treasurer, and whom, of all the men he had known, I think he rated highest for the union of business qualities in an incomparable measure to a nature comprehensive enough to deal with masses of men, however differing in creed or opinion, humanely and justly. He never afterwards wanted support for any good work that he did not think first of Mr. George Moore,[239] and appeal was never made to him in vain. "Integrity, enterprise, public spirit, and benevolence," he told the Commercial Travellers on one occasion, "had their synonym in Mr. Moore's name;" and it was another form of the same liking when he took to himself the character and title of a Traveller _Un_commercial. "I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human-interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London: now about the city streets; now about the country by-roads: seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others." In a few words that was the plan and drift of the papers which he began in 1860, and continued to write from time to time until the last autumn of his life. Many of them, such as "Travelling Abroad," "City Churches," "Dullborough," "Nurses' Stories," and "Birthday Celebrations," have supplied traits, chiefly of his younger days, to portions of this memoir; and parts of his later life receive illustration from others, such as "Tramps," "Night Walks," "Shy Neighbourhoods," "The Italian Prisoner," and "Chatham Dockyard." Indeed hardly any is without its personal interest or illustration. One may learn from them, among other things, what kind of treatment he resorted to for the disorder of sleeplessness from which he had often suffered amid his late anxieties. Experimenting upon it in bed, he found to be too slow and doubtful a process for him; but he very soon defeated his enemy by the brisker treatment, of getting up directly after lying down, going out, and coming home tired at sunrise. "My last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast." One description he did not give in his paper, but I recollect his saying that he had seldom seen anything so striking as the way in which the wonders of an equinoctial dawn (it was the 15th of October 1857) presented themselves during that walk. He had never before happened to see night so completely at odds with morning, "which was which." Another experience of his night ramblings used to be given in vivid sketches of the restlessness of a great city, and the manner in which _it_ also tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep. Nor should anyone curious about his habits and ways omit to accompany him with his Tramps into Gadshill lanes; or to follow him into his Shy Neighbourhoods of the Hackney-road, Waterloo-road, Spitalfields, or Bethnal-green. For delightful observation both of country and town, for the wit that finds analogies between remote and familiar things, and for humorous personal sketches and experience, these are perfect of their kind. "I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps with carts or caravans--the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place; and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass!" It was there he found Dr. Marigold, and Chops the Dwarf, and the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes eating meat-pie with the Giant. So, too, in his Shy Neighbourhoods, when he relates his experiences of the bad company that birds are fond of, and of the effect upon domestic fowls of living in low districts, his method of handling the subject has all the charm of a discovery. "That anything born of an egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls _that_ going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at." One of his illustrations is a reduced Bantam family in the Hackney-road deriving their sole enjoyment from crowding together in a pawnbroker's side-entry; but seeming as if only newly come down in the world, and always in a feeble flutter of fear that they may be found out. He contrasts them with others. "I know a low fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in the morning. . . . But, the family I am best acquainted with, reside in the densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and they salute the Potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as if he were Phoebes in person." For the truth of the personal adventure in the same essay, which he tells in proof of a propensity to bad company in more refined members of the feathered race, I am myself in a position to vouch. Walking by a dirty court in Spitalfields one day, the quick little busy intelligence of a goldfinch, drawing water for himself in his cage, so attracted him that he bought the bird, which had other accomplishments; but not one of them would the little creature show off in his new abode in Doughty-street, and he drew no water but by stealth or under the cloak of night. "After an interval of futile and at length hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to. The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose, like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap, and shorts, and was of the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would 'look round.' He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird; and when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with irrepressible satisfaction." The Uncommercial Traveller papers, his two serial stories, and his Christmas tales, were all the contributions of any importance made by Dickens to _All the Year Round_; but he reprinted in it, on the completion of his first story, a short tale called "Hunted Down," written for a newspaper in America called the _New York Ledger_. Its subject had been taken from the life of a notorious criminal already named, and its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of _Chuzzlewit_ or _Copperfield_, he had received a thousand pounds.[240] It was one of the indications of the eager desire which his entry on the career of a public reader had aroused in America to induce him again to visit that continent; and at the very time he had this magnificent offer from the New York journal, Mr. Fields of Boston, who was then on a visit to Europe, was pressing him so much to go that his resolution was almost shaken. "I am now," he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 9th of July 1859, "getting the _Tale of Two Cities_ into that state that IF I should decide to go to America late in September, I could turn to, at any time, and write on with great vigour. Mr. Fields has been down here for a day, and with the strongest intensity urges that there is no drawback, no commercial excitement or crisis, no political agitation; and that so favourable an opportunity, in all respects, might not occur again for years and years. I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were to go, and yet I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the golden prospect held before me." He yielded nevertheless to other persuasion, and for that time the visit was not to be. In six months more the Civil War began, and America was closed to any such enterprise for nearly five years. FOOTNOTES: [237] It is pleasant to have to state that it was still flourishing when I received Mr. Lawes's letter, on the 18th of December 1871. [238] From the same letter, dated 1st of July 1861, I take what follows. "Poor Lord Campbell's seems to me as easy and good a death as one could desire. There must be a sweep of these men very soon, and one feels as if it must fall out like the breaking of an arch--one stone goes from a prominent place, and then the rest begin to drop. So, one looks, not without satisfaction (in our sadness) at lives so rounded and complete, towards Brougham, and Lyndhurst, and Pollock" . . . Yet, of Dickens's own death, Pollock lived to write to me as the death of "one of the most distinguished and honoured men England has ever produced; in whose loss every man among us feels that he has lost a friend and an instructor." Temple-Hatton, 10th of June 1870. [239] If space were available here, his letters would supply many proofs of his interest in Mr. George Moore's admirable projects; but I can only make exception for his characteristic allusion to an incident that tickled his fancy very much at the time. "I hope" (20th of Aug. 1863) "you have been as much amused as I am by the account of the Bishop of Carlisle at (my very particular friend's) Mr. George Moore's schools? It strikes me as the funniest piece of weakness I ever saw, his addressing those unfortunate children concerning Colenso. I cannot get over the ridiculous image I have erected in my mind, of the shovel-hat and apron holding forth, at that safe distance, to that safe audience. There is nothing so extravagant in Rabelais, or so satirically humorous in Swift or Voltaire." [240] Eight years later he wrote "Holiday Romance" for a Child's Magazine published by Mr. Fields, and "George Silverman's Explanation"--of the same length, and for the same price. There are no other such instances, I suppose, in the history of literature. CHAPTER XI. SECOND SERIES OF READINGS. 1861-1863. Daughter Kate's Marriage--Wedding Party--Sale of Tavistock House--Brother Alfred's Death--Metropolitan Readings--Proposed Provincial Readings--Good of doing Nothing--New Subjects for Readings--Mr. Arthur Smith's Death--Eldest Son's Marriage--Audience at Brighton--Audiences at Canterbury and Dover--Alarming Scene at Newcastle--Impromptu Reading Hall at Berwick-on-Tweed--In Scotland--At Torquay--At Liverpool--Metropolitan Success--Offer from Australia--Writing or Reading not always possible--Arguments for and against going to Australia--Readings in Paris--A Religious Richardson's Show--Exiled Ex-potentate. AT the end of the first year of residence at Gadshill it was the remark of Dickens that nothing had gratified him so much as the confidence with which his poorer neighbours treated him. He had tested generally their worth and good conduct, and they had been encouraged in illness or trouble to resort to him for help. There was pleasant indication of the feeling thus awakened, when, in the summer of 1860, his younger daughter Kate was married to Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist, and younger son of the painter and academician, who might have found, if spared to witness that summer-morning scene, subjects not unworthy of his delightful pencil in many a rustic group near Gadshill. All the villagers had turned out in honour of Dickens, and the carriages could hardly get to and from the little church for the succession of triumphal arches they had to pass through. It was quite unexpected by him; and when the feu de joie of the blacksmith in the lane, whose enthusiasm had smuggled a couple of small cannon into his forge, exploded upon him at the return, I doubt if the shyest of men was ever so taken aback at an ovation. To name the principal persons present that day will indicate the faces that (with addition of Miss Mary Boyle, Miss Marguerite Power, Mr. Fechter, Mr. Charles Kent, Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and members of the family of Mr. Frank Stone, whose sudden death[241] in the preceding year had been a great grief to Dickens) were most familiar at Gadshill in these later years. Mr. Frederic Lehmann was there with his wife, whose sister, Miss Chambers, was one of the bridesmaids; Mr. and Mrs. Wills were there, and Dickens's old fast friend Mr. Thomas Beard; the two nearest country neighbours with whom the family had become very intimate, Mr. Hulkes and Mr. Malleson, with their wives, joined the party; among the others were Henry Chorley, Chauncy Townshend, and Wilkie Collins; and, for friend special to the occasion, the bridegroom had brought his old fellow-student in art, Mr. Holman Hunt. Mr. Charles Collins had himself been bred as a painter, for success in which line he had some rare gifts; but inclination and capacity led him also to literature, and, after much indecision between the two callings, he took finally to letters. His contributions to _All the Year Round_ were among the most charming of its detached papers, and two stories published independently showed strength of wing for higher flights. But his health broke down, and his taste was too fastidious for his failing power. It is possible however that he may live by two small books of description, the _New Sentimental Journey_ and the _Cruize on Wheels_, which have in them unusual delicacy and refinement of humour; and if those volumes should make any readers in another generation curious about the writer, they will learn, if correct reply is given to their inquiries, that no man disappointed so many reasonable hopes with so little fault or failure of his own, that his difficulty always was to please himself, and that an inferior mind would have been more successful in both the arts he followed. He died in 1873 in his forty-fifth year; and until then it was not known, even by those nearest to him, how great must have been the suffering which he had borne, through many trying years, with uncomplaining patience. His daughter's marriage was the chief event that had crossed the even tenor of Dickens's life since his first paid readings closed; and it was followed by the sale of Tavistock House, with the resolve to make his future home at Gadshill. In the brief interval (29th of July) he wrote to me of his brother Alfred's death. "I was telegraphed for to Manchester on Friday night. Arrived there at a quarter past ten, but he had been dead three hours, poor fellow! He is to be buried at Highgate on Wednesday. I brought the poor young widow back with me yesterday." All that this death involved,[242] the troubles of his change of home, and some difficulties in working out his story, gave him more than sufficient occupation till the following spring; and as the time arrived for the new Readings, the change was a not unwelcome one. The first portion of this second series was planned by Mr. Arthur Smith, but he only superintended the six readings in London which opened it. These were the first at St. James's Hall (St. Martin's Hall having been burnt since the last readings there) and were given in March and April 1861. "We are all well here and flourishing," he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 28th of April. "On the 18th I finished the readings as I purposed. We had between seventy and eighty pounds _in the stalls_, which, at four shillings apiece, is something quite unprecedented in these times. . . . The result of the six was, that, after paying a large staff of men and all other charges, and Arthur Smith's ten per cent. on the receipts, and replacing everything destroyed in the fire at St. Martin's Hall (including all our tickets, country-baggage, cheque-boxes, books, and a quantity of gas-fittings and what not), I got upwards of £500. A very great result. We certainly might have gone on through the season, but I am heartily glad to be concentrated on my story." It had been part of his plan that the Provincial Readings should not begin until a certain interval after the close of his story of _Great Expectations_. They were delayed accordingly until the 28th of October, from which date, when they opened at Norwich, they went on with the Christmas intervals to be presently named to the 30th of January 1862, when they closed at Chester. Kept within England and Scotland, they took in the border town of Berwick, and, besides the Scotch cities, comprised the contrasts and varieties of Norwich and Lancaster, Bury St. Edmunds and Cheltenham, Carlisle and Hastings, Plymouth and Birmingham, Canterbury and Torquay, Preston and Ipswich, Manchester and Brighton, Colchester and Dover, Newcastle and Chester. They were followed by ten readings at the St. James's Hall, between the 13th of March and the 27th of June 1862; and by four at Paris in January 1863, given at the Embassy in aid of the British Charitable Fund. The second series had thus in the number of the readings nearly equalled the first, when it closed at London in June 1863 with thirteen readings in the Hanover Square Rooms; and it is exclusively the subject of such illustrations or references as this chapter will supply. On _Great Expectations_ closing in June 1861, Bulwer Lytton, at Dickens's earnest wish, took his place in _All the Year Round_ with the "Strange Story;" and he then indulged himself in idleness for a little while. "The subsidence of those distressing pains in my face the moment I had done my work, made me resolve to do nothing in that way for some time if I could help it."[243] But his "doing nothing" was seldom more than a figure of speech, and what it meant in this case was soon told. "Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings, and (except in my office work) do nothing else. With great pains I have made a continuous narrative out of _Copperfield_, that I think will reward the exertion it is likely to cost me. Unless I am much mistaken, it will be very valuable in London. I have also done _Nicholas Nickleby_ at the Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers, John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from the _Tale of Two Cities_. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers." Only the first two were added to the list for the present circuit. It was in the midst of these active preparations that painful news reached him. An illness under which Mr. Arthur Smith had been some time suffering took unexpectedly a dangerous turn, and there came to be but small chance of his recovery. A distressing interview on the 28th of September gave Dickens little hope. "And yet his wakings and wanderings so perpetually turn on his arrangements for the Readings, and he is so desperately unwilling to relinquish the idea of 'going on with the business' to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, that I had not the heart to press him for the papers. He told me that he believed he had by him '70 or 80 letters unanswered.' You may imagine how anxious it makes me, and at what a deadstop I stand." Another week passed, and with it the time fixed at the places where his work was to have opened; but he could not bring himself to act as if all hope had gone. "With a sick man who has been so zealous and faithful, I feel bound to be very tender and patient. When I told him the other day about my having engaged Headland--'to do all the personally bustling and fatiguing part of your work,' I said--he nodded his heavy head with great satisfaction, and faintly got out of himself the words, 'Of course I pay him, and not you.'" The poor fellow died in October; and on the day after attending the funeral,[244] Dickens heard of the death of his brother-in-law and friend, Mr. Henry Austin, whose abilities and character he respected as much as he liked the man. He lost much in losing the judicious and safe counsel which had guided him on many public questions in which he took lively interest, and it was with a heavy heart he set out at last upon his second circuit. "With what difficulty I get myself back to the readings after all this loss and trouble, or with what unwillingness I work myself up to the mark of looking them in the face, I can hardly say. As for poor Arthur Smith at this time, it is as if my right arm were gone. It is only just now that I am able to open one of the books, and screw the text out of myself in a flat dull way. Enclosed is the list of what I have to do. You will see that I have left ten days in November for the Christmas number, and also a good Christmas margin for our meeting at Gadshill. I shall be very glad to have the money that I expect to get; but it will be earned." That November interval was also the date of the marriage of his eldest son to the daughter of Mr. Evans, so long, in connection with Mr. Bradbury, his publisher and printer. The start of the readings at Norwich was not good, so many changes of vexation having been incident to the opening announcements as to leave some doubt of their fulfilment. But the second night, when trial was made of the _Nickleby_ scenes, "we had a splendid hall, and I think _Nickleby_ will top all the readings. Somehow it seems to have got in it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose; and it went last night, not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and pleasure that I have never seen surpassed."[245] From this night onward, the success was uninterrupted, and here was his report to me from Brighton on the 8th of November. "We turned away half Dover and half Hastings and half Colchester; and, if you can believe such a thing, I may tell you that in round numbers we find 1000 stalls already taken here in Brighton! I left Colchester in a heavy snow-storm. To-day it is so warm here that I can hardly bear the fire, and am writing with the window open down to the ground. Last night I had a most charming audience for _Copperfield_, with a delicacy of perception that really made the work delightful. It is very pretty to see the girls and women generally, in the matter of Dora; and everywhere I have found that peculiar personal relation between my audience and myself on which I counted most when I entered on this enterprise. _Nickleby_ continues to go in the wildest manner." A storm was at this time sweeping round the coast, and while at Dover he had written of it to his sister-in-law (7th of November): "The bad weather has not in the least touched us, and the storm was most magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next the sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious, and the noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds of wreck were washed in; among other things, a very pretty brass-bound chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet, unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night, and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual impression; and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad. The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, is Canterbury" ("an intelligent and delightful response in them," he wrote to his daughter, "like the touch of a beautiful instrument"); "but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the boys' letters, that the contagion extended to me. For, one couldn't hear them without laughing too. . . . So, I am thankful to say, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every way Great." From the opposite quarter of Berwick-on-Tweed he wrote again in the midst of storm. But first his mention of Newcastle, which he had also taken on his way to Edinburgh, reading two nights there, should be given. "At Newcastle, against the very heavy expenses, I made more than a hundred guineas profit. A finer audience there is not in England, and I suppose them to be a specially earnest people; for, while they can laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with what is pathetic or passionate. An extraordinary thing occurred on the second night. The room was tremendously crowded and my gas-apparatus fell down. There was a terrible wave among the people for an instant, and God knows what destruction of life a rush to the stairs would have caused. Fortunately a lady in the front of the stalls ran out towards me, exactly in a place where I knew that the whole hall could see her. So I addressed her, laughing, and half-asked and half-ordered her to sit down again; and, in a moment, it was all over. But the men in attendance had such a fearful sense of what might have happened (besides the real danger of Fire) that they positively shook the boards I stood on, with their trembling, when they came up to put things right. I am proud to record that the gas-man's sentiment, as delivered afterwards, was, 'The more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him.' With which complimentary homage, and with the wind blowing so that I can hardly hear myself write, I conclude."[246] It was still blowing, in shape of a gale from the sea, when, an hour before the reading, he wrote from the King's Arms at Berwick-on-Tweed. "As odd and out of the way a place to be at, it appears to me, as ever was seen! And such a ridiculous room designed for me to read in! An immense Corn Exchange, made of glass and iron, round, dome-topp'd, lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering echoes; with a little lofty crow's nest of a stone gallery, breast high, deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put----_me_! I instantly struck, of course; and said I would either read in a room attached to this house (a very snug one, capable of holding 500 people), or not at all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate, and my men took the primitive accommodation in hand. Ever since, I am alarmed to add, the people (who besought the honour of the visit) have been coming in numbers quite irreconcileable with the appearance of the place, and what is to be the end I do not know. It was poor Arthur Smith's principle that a town on the way paid the expenses of a long through-journey, and therefore I came." The Reading paid more than those expenses. Enthusiastic greeting awaited him in Edinburgh. "We had in the hall exactly double what we had on the first night last time. The success of _Copperfield_ was perfectly unexampled. Four great rounds of applause with a burst of cheering at the end, and every point taken in the finest manner." But this was nothing to what befell on the second night, when, by some mistake of the local agents, the tickets issued were out of proportion to the space available. Writing from Glasgow next day (3rd of December) he described the scene. "Such a pouring of hundreds into a place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such a rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humour on the whole, I never saw the faintest approach to. While I addressed the crowd in the room, G addressed the crowd in the street. Fifty frantic men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made speeches to the walls. The whole B family were borne in on the top of a wave, and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau or gigantic pic-nic--one pretty girl in full dress, lying on her side all night, holding on to one of the legs of my table! It was the most extraordinary sight. And yet, from the moment I began to the moment of my leaving off, they never missed a point, and they ended with a burst of cheers. . . . The expenditure of lungs and spirits was (as you may suppose) rather great; and to sleep well was out of the question. I am therefore rather fagged to-day; and as the hall in which I read to-night is a large one, I must make my letter a short one. . . . My people were torn to ribbons last night. They have not a hat among them--and scarcely a coat." He came home for his Christmas rest by way of Manchester, and thus spoke of the reading there on the 14th of December. "_Copperfield_ in the Free Trade Hall last Saturday was really a grand scene." He was in southern latitudes after Christmas, and on the 8th of January wrote from Torquay: "We are now in the region of small rooms, and therefore this trip will not be as profitable as the long one. I imagine the room here to be very small. Exeter I know, and that is small too. I am very much used up on the whole, for I cannot bear this moist warm climate. It would kill me very soon. And I have now got to the point of taking so much out of myself with _Copperfield_ that I might as well do Richard Wardour. . . . This is a very pretty place--a compound of Hastings, Tunbridge Wells, and little bits of the hills about Naples; but I met four respirators as I came up from the station, and three pale curates without them who seemed in a bad way." They had been not bad omens, however. The success was good, at both Torquay and Exeter; and he closed the month, and this series of the country readings, at the great towns of Liverpool and Chester. "The beautiful St. George's Hall crowded to excess last night" (28th of January 1862) "and numbers turned away. Brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect. You remember that a Liverpool audience is usually dull; but they put me on my mettle last night, for I never saw such an audience--no, not even in Edinburgh! The agents (alone, and of course without any reference to ready money at the doors) had taken for the two readings two hundred pounds." But as the end approached the fatigues had told severely on him. He described himself sleeping horribly, and with head dazed and worn by gas and heat. Rest, before he could resume at the St. James's Hall in March, was become an absolute necessity. Two brief extracts from letters of the dates respectively of the 8th of April[247] and the 28th of June will sufficiently describe the London readings. "The money returns have been quite astounding. Think of £190 a night! The effect of _Copperfield_ exceeds all the expectations which its success in the country led me to form. It seems to take people entirely by surprise. If this is not new to you, I have not a word of news. The rain that raineth every day seems to have washed news away or got it under water." That was in April. In June he wrote: "I finished my readings on Friday night to an enormous hall--nearly £200. The success has been throughout complete. It seems almost suicidal to leave off with the town so full, but I don't like to depart from my public pledge. A man from Australia is in London ready to pay £10,000 for eight months there. If----" It was an If that troubled him for some time, and led to agitating discussion. The civil war having closed America, an increase made upon the just-named offer tempted him to Australia. He tried to familiarize himself with the fancy that he should thus also get new material for observation, and he went so far as to plan an Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down.[248] It is however very doubtful if such a scheme would have been entertained for a moment, but for the unwonted difficulties of invention that were now found to beset a twenty-number story. Such a story had lately been in his mind, and he had just chosen the title for it (_Our Mutual Friend_); but still he halted and hesitated sorely. "If it was not," (he wrote on the 5th of October 1862) "for the hope of a gain that would make me more independent of the worst, I could not look the travel and absence and exertion in the face. I know perfectly well beforehand how unspeakably wretched I should be. But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it, is another question." On the 22nd, still striving hard to find reasons to cope with the all but irresistible arguments against any such adventure, which indeed, with everything that then surrounded him, would have been little short of madness, he thus stated his experience of his two circuits of public reading. "Remember that at home here the thing has never missed fire, but invariably does more the second time than it did the first; and also that I have got so used to it, and have worked so hard at it, as to get out of it more than I ever thought was in it for that purpose. I think all the probabilities for such a country as Australia are immense." The terrible difficulty was that the home argument struck both ways. "If I were to go it would be a penance and a misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express. The domestic life of the Readings is all but intolerable to me when I am away for a few weeks at a time merely, and what would it be----." On the other hand it was also a thought of home, far beyond the mere personal loss or gain of it, that made him willing still to risk even so much misery and penance; and he had a fancy that it might be possible to take his eldest daughter with him. "It is useless and needless for me to say what the conflict in my own mind is. How painfully unwilling I am to go, and yet how painfully sensible that perhaps I ought to go--with all the hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever I look round. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose, you who know the circumstances of the struggler." It closed at once when he clearly saw that to take any of his family with him, and make satisfactory arrangement for the rest during such an absence, would be impossible. By this time also he began to find his way to the new story, and better hopes and spirits had returned. In January 1863 he had taken his daughter and his sister-in-law to Paris, and he read twice at the Embassy in behalf of the British Charitable Fund, the success being such that he consented to read twice again.[249] He passed his birthday of that year (the 7th of the following month) at Arras. "You will remember me to-day, I know. Thanks for it. An odd birthday, but I am as little out of heart as you would have me be--floored now and then, but coming up again at the call of Time. I wanted to see this town, birthplace of our amiable Sea Green" (Robespierre); "and I find a Grande Place so very remarkable and picturesque that it is astonishing how people miss it. Here too I found, in a bye-country place just near, a Fair going on, with a Religious Richardson's in it--THÉATRE RELIGIEUX--'donnant six fois par jour, l'histoire de la Croix en tableaux vivants, depuis la naissance de notre Seigneur jusqu'à son sepulture. Aussi l'immolation d'Isaac, par son père Abraham.' It was just before nightfall when I came upon it; and one of the three wise men was up to his eyes in lamp oil, hanging the moderators. A woman in blue and fleshings (whether an angel or Joseph's wife I don't know) was addressing the crowd through an enormous speaking-trumpet; and a very small boy with a property lamb (I leave you to judge who _he_ was) was standing on his head on a barrel-organ." Returning to England by Boulogne in the same year, as he stepped into the Folkestone boat he encountered a friend, Mr. Charles Manby (for, in recording a trait of character so pleasing and honourable, it is not necessary that I should suppress the name), also passing over to England. "Taking leave of Manby was a shabby man of whom I had some remembrance, but whom I could not get into his place in my mind. Noticing when we stood out of the harbour that he was on the brink of the pier, waving his hat in a desolate manner, I said to Manby, 'Surely I know that man.'--'I should think you did,' said he: 'Hudson!' He is living--just living--at Paris, and Manby had brought him on. He said to Manby at parting, 'I shall not have a good dinner again, till you come back.' I asked Manby why he stuck to him? He said, Because he (Hudson) had so many people in his power, and had held his peace; and because he (Manby) saw so many Notabilities grand with him now, who were always grovelling for 'shares' in the days of his grandeur." Upon Dickens's arrival in London the second series of his readings was brought to a close; and opportunity may be taken, before describing the third, to speak of the manuscript volume found among his papers, containing Memoranda for use in his writings. FOOTNOTES: [241] "You will be grieved," he wrote (Saturday 19th of Nov. 1859) "to hear of poor Stone. On Sunday he was not well. On Monday, went to Dr. Todd, who told him he had aneurism of the heart. On Tuesday, went to Dr. Walsh, who told him he hadn't. On Wednesday I met him in a cab in the Square here, and he got out to talk to me. I walked about with him a little while at a snail's pace, cheering him up; but when I came home, I told them that I thought him much changed, and in danger. Yesterday at 2 o'clock he died of spasm of the heart. I am going up to Highgate to look for a grave for him." [242] He was now hard at work on his story; and a note written from Gadshill after the funeral shows, what so frequently was incident to his pursuits, the hard conditions under which sorrow, and its claim on his exertion, often came to him. "To-morrow I have to work against time and tide and everything else, to fill up a No. keeping open for me, and the stereotype plates of which must go to America on Friday. But indeed the enquiry into poor Alfred's affairs; the necessity of putting the widow and children somewhere; the difficulty of knowing what to do for the best; and the need I feel under of being as composed and deliberate as I can be, and yet of not shirking or putting off the occasion that there is for doing a duty; would have brought me back here to be quiet, under any circumstances." [243] The same letter adds: "The fourth edition of _Great Expectations_ is now going to press; the third being nearly out. Bulwer's story keeps us up bravely. As well as we can make out, we have even risen fifteen hundred." [244] "There was a very touching thing in the Chapel" (at Brompton). "When the body was to be taken up and carried to the grave, there stepped out, instead of the undertaker's men with their hideous paraphernalia, the men who had always been with the two brothers at the Egyptian Hall; and they, in their plain, decent, own mourning clothes, carried the poor fellow away. Also, standing about among the gravestones, dressed in black, I noticed every kind of person who had ever had to do with him--from our own gas man and doorkeepers and billstickers, up to Johnson the printer and that class of man. The father and Albert and he now lie together, and the grave, I suppose, will be no more disturbed I wrote a little inscription for the stone, and it is quite full." [245] Of his former manager he writes in the same letter: "I miss him dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of them are always somewhere, and he was always everywhere." [246] The more detailed account of the scene which he wrote to his daughter is also well worth giving. "A most tremendous hall here last night. Something almost terrible in the cram. A fearful thing might have happened. Suddenly, when they were all very still over Smike, my Gas Batten came down, and it looked as if the room were falling. There were three great galleries crammed to the roof, and a high steep flight of stairs; and a panic must have destroyed numbers of people. A lady in the front row of stalls screamed, and ran out wildly towards me, and for one instant there was a terrible wave in the crowd. I addressed that lady, laughing (for I knew she was in sight of everybody there), and called out as if it happened every night--'There's nothing the matter I assure you; don't be alarmed; pray sit down----' and she sat down directly, and there was a thunder of applause. It took some five minutes to mend, and I looked on with my hands in my pockets; for I think if I had turned my back for a moment, there might still have been a move. My people were dreadfully alarmed--Boycott" (the gas-man) "in particular, who I suppose had some notion that the whole place might have taken fire--'but there stood the master,' he did me the honour to say afterwards, in addressing the rest, 'as cool as ever I see him a lounging at a Railway Station.'" [247] The letter referred also to the death of his American friend Professor Felton. "Your mention of poor Felton's death is a shock of surprise as well as grief to me, for I had not heard a word about it. Mr. Fields told me when he was here that the effect of that hotel disaster of bad drinking water had not passed away; so I suppose, as you do, that he sank under it. Poor dear Felton! It is 20 years since I told you of the delight my first knowledge of him gave me, and it is as strongly upon me to this hour. I wish our ways had crossed a little oftener, but that would not have made it better for us now. Alas! alas! all ways have the same finger-post at the head of them, and at every turning in them." [248] I give the letter in which he put the scheme formally before me, after the renewed and larger offers had been submitted. "If there were reasonable hope and promise, I could make up my mind to go to Australia and get money. I would not accept the Australian people's offer. I would take no money from them; would bind myself to nothing with them; but would merely make them my agents at such and such a per centage, and go and read there. I would take some man of literary pretensions as a secretary (Charles Collins? What think you?) and with his aid" (he afterwards made the proposal to his old friend Mr. Thomas Beard) "would do, for _All the Year Round_ while I was away, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down. If the notion of these speculators be anything like accurate, I should come back rich. I should have seen a great deal of novelty to boot. I should have been very miserable too. . . . Of course one cannot possibly count upon the money to be realized by a six months' absence, but, £12,000 is supposed to be a low estimate. Mr. S. brought me letters from members of the legislature, newspaper editors, and the like, exhorting me to come, saying how much the people talk of me, and dwelling on the kind of reception that would await me. No doubt this is so, and of course a great deal of curious experience for after use would be gained over and above the money. Being my own master too, I could 'work' myself more delicately than if I bound myself for money beforehand. A few years hence, if all other circumstances were the same, I might not be so well fitted for the excessive wear and tear. This is about the whole case. But pray do not suppose that I am in my own mind favourable to going, or that I have any fancy for going." That was late in October. From Paris in November (1862), he wrote: "I mentioned the question to Bulwer when he dined with us here last Sunday, and he was all for going. He said that not only did he think the whole population would go to the Readings, but that the country would strike me in some quite new aspect for a Book; and that wonders might be done with such book in the way of profit, over there as well as here." [249] A person present thus described (1st of February 1863) the second night to Miss Dickens. "No one can imagine the scene of last Friday night at the Embassy . . . a two hours' storm of excitement and pleasure. They actually murmured and applauded right away into their carriages and down the street." CHAPTER XII. HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN. 1855-1865. Book of MS. Memoranda--Home of the Barnacles--Original of Mrs. Clennam--River and Ferryman--Notions for _Little Dorrit_--Original of _Hunted Down_--Titles for _Tale of Two Cities_--Hints for _Mutual Friend_--Reprobate's Notion of Duty--Proposed Opening for a Story--England first seen by an Englishman--Touching Fancy--Story from State Trials--Sentimentalist and her Fate--Female Groups--Children Farming--Subjects for Description--Fancies not worked upon--Available Names--Mr. Brobity's Snuff-box. DICKENS began the Book of Memoranda for possible use in his work, to which occasional reference has been made, in January 1855, six months before the first page of _Little Dorrit_ was written; and I find no allusion leading me to suppose, except in one very doubtful instance, that he had made addition to its entries, or been in the habit of resorting to them, after the date of _Our Mutual Friend_. It seems to comprise that interval of ten years in his life. In it were put down any hints or suggestions that occurred to him. A mere piece of imagery or fancy, it might be at one time; at another the outline of a subject or a character; then a bit of description or dialogue; no order or sequence being observed in any. Titles for stories were set down too, and groups of names for the actors in them; not the least curious of the memoranda belonging to this class. More rarely, entry is made of some oddity of speech; and he has thus preserved in it, _verbatim et literatim_, what he declared to have been as startling a message as he ever received. A confidential servant at Tavistock House, having conferred on some proposed changes in his bed-room with the party that was to do the work, delivered this ultimatum to her master. "The gas-fitter says, sir, that he can't alter the fitting of your gas in your bed-room without taking up almost the ole of your bed-room floor, and pulling your room to pieces. He says, of course you can have it done if you wish, and he'll do it for you and make a good job of it, but he would have to destroy your room first, and go entirely under the jistes."[250] It is very interesting in this book, last legacy as it is of the literary remains of such a writer, to compare the way in which fancies were worked out with their beginnings entered in its pages. Those therefore will first be taken that in some form or other appeared afterwards in his writings, with such reference to the latter as may enable the reader to make comparison for himself. "Our House. Whatever it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it 'a gentlemanly residence.') A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a dark street--but a Duke's Mansion round the corner. The whole house just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the best of times, a kind of Distillation of Mews." He made it the home of the Barnacles in _Little Dorrit_. What originally he meant to express by Mrs. Clennam in the same story has narrower limits, and a character less repellent, in the Memoranda than it assumed in the book. "Bed-ridden (or room-ridden) twenty--five-and-twenty--years; any length of time. As to most things, kept at a standstill all the while. Thinking of altered streets as the old streets--changed things as the unchanged things--the youth or girl I quarrelled with all those years ago, as the same youth or girl now. Brought out of doors by an unexpected exercise of my latent strength of character, and then how strange!" One of the people of the same story who becomes a prominent actor in it, Henry Gowan, a creation on which he prided himself as forcible and new, seems to have risen to his mind in this way. "I affect to believe that I would do anything myself for a ten-pound note, and that anybody else would. I affect to be always book-keeping in every man's case, and posting up a little account of good and evil with every one. Thus the greatest rascal becomes 'the dearest old fellow,' and there is much less difference than you would be inclined to suppose between an honest man and a scoundrel. While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in reality decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is not. Might not a presentation of this far from uncommon class of character, if I could put it strongly enough, be likely to lead some men to reflect, and change a little? I think it has never been done." In _Little Dorrit_ also will be found a picture which seems to live with a more touching effect in his first pleasing fancy of it. "The ferryman on a peaceful river, who has been there from youth, who lives, who grows old, who does well, who does ill, who changes, who dies--the river runs six hours up and six hours down, the current sets off that point, the same allowance must be made for the drifting of the boat, the same tune is always played by the rippling water against the prow." Here was an entry made when the thought occurred to him of the close of old Dorrit's life. "First sign of the father failing and breaking down. Cancels long interval. Begins to talk about the turnkey who first called him the Father of the Marshalsea--as if he were still living. 'Tell Bob I want to speak to him. See if he is on the Lock, my dear.'" And here was the first notion of Clennam's reverse of fortune. "His falling into difficulty, and himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Then she, out of all her wealth and changed station, comes back in her old dress, and devotes herself in the old way." He seems to have designed, for the sketches of society in the same tale, a "Full-length portrait of his lordship, surrounded by worshippers;" of which, beside that brief memorandum, only his first draft of the general outline was worked at. "Sensible men enough, agreeable men enough, independent men enough in a certain way;--but the moment they begin to circle round my lord, and to shine with a borrowed light from his lordship, heaven and earth how mean and subservient! What a competition and outbidding of each other in servility." The last of the Memoranda hints which were used in the story whose difficulties at its opening seem first to have suggested them, ran thus: "The unwieldy ship taken in tow by the snorting little steam tug"--by which was prefigured the patriarch Casby and his agent Panks. In a few lines are the germ of the tale called _Hunted Down_: "Devoted to the Destruction of a man. Revenge built up on love. The secretary in the Wainewright case, who had fallen in love (or supposed he had) with the murdered girl."--The hint on which he worked in his description of the villain of that story, is also in the Memoranda. "The man with his hair parted straight up the front of his head, like an aggravating gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. 'Up here, if you please. Neither to the right nor left. Take me exactly in this direction. Straight up here. Come off the grass--'" His first intention as to the _Tale of Two Cities_ was to write it upon a plan proposed in this manuscript book. "How as to a story in two periods--with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama? Titles for such a notion. TIME! THE LEAVES OF THE FOREST. SCATTERED LEAVES. THE GREAT WHEEL. ROUND AND ROUND. OLD LEAVES. LONG AGO. FAR APART. FALLEN LEAVES. FIVE AND TWENTY YEARS. YEARS AND YEARS. ROLLING YEARS. DAY AFTER DAY. FELLED TREES. MEMORY CARTON. ROLLING STONES. TWO GENERATIONS." That special title of _Memory Carton_ shows that what led to the greatest success of the book as written was always in his mind; and another of the memoranda is this rough hint of the character itself. "The drunken?--dissipated?--What?--LION--and his JACKALL and Primer, stealing down to him at unwonted hours." The studies of Silas Wegg and his patron as they exist in _Our Mutual Friend_, are hardly such good comedy as in the form which the first notion of them seems to have intended. "Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The two characters. One reporting to the other as he reads. Both getting confused as to whether it is not all going on now." In the same story may be traced, more or less clearly, other fancies which had found their first expression in the Memoranda. A touch for Bella Wilfer is here. "Buying poor shabby--FATHER?--a new hat. So incongruous that it makes him like African King Boy, or King George; who is usually full dressed when he has nothing upon him but a cocked hat or a waistcoat." Here undoubtedly is the voice of Podsnap. "I stand by my friends and acquaintances;--not for their sakes, but because they are _my_ friends and acquaintances. _I_ know them, _I_ have licensed them, they have taken out _my_ certificate. Ergo, I champion them as myself." To the same redoubtable person another trait clearly belongs. "And by denying a thing, supposes that he altogether puts it out of existence." A third very perfectly expresses the boy, ready for mischief, who does all the work there is to be done in Eugene Wrayburn's place of business. "The office boy for ever looking out of window, who never has anything to do." The poor wayward purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene himself, is as evidently in this: "If they were great things, I, the untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly--But O No, I wouldn't!" What follows has a more direct reference; being indeed almost literally copied in the story. "As to the question whether I, Eugene, lying ill and sick even unto death, may be consoled by the representation that coming through this illness, I shall begin a new life, and have energy and purpose and all I have yet wanted: 'I _hope_ I should, but I _know_ I shouldn't. Let me die, my dear.'" In connection with the same book, the last in that form which he lived to complete, another fancy may be copied from which, though not otherwise worked out in the tale, the relation of Lizzie Hexam to her brother was taken. "A man, and his wife--or daughter--or niece. The man, a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or girl) with good in her, and with compunctions. He believes nothing, and defies everything; yet has suspicions always, that she is 'praying against' his evil schemes, and making them go wrong. He is very much opposed to this, and is always angrily harping on it. 'If she _must_ pray, why can't she pray in their favour, instead of going against 'em? She's always ruining me--she always is--and calls that, Duty! There's a religious person! Calls it Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go sneaking against me!'" Other fancies preserved in his Memoranda were left wholly unemployed, receiving from him no more permanent form of any kind than that which they have in this touching record; and what most people would probably think the most attractive and original of all the thoughts he had thus set down for future use, are those that were never used. Here were his first rough notes for the opening of a story. "Beginning with the breaking up of a large party of guests at a country house: house left lonely with the shrunken family in it: guests spoken of, and introduced to the reader that way.--OR, beginning with a house abandoned by a family fallen into reduced circumstances. Their old furniture there, and numberless tokens of their old comforts. Inscriptions under the bells downstairs--'Mr. John's Room,' 'Miss Caroline's Room.' Great gardens trimly kept to attract a tenant: but no one in them. A landscape without figures. Billiard room: table covered up, like a body. Great stables without horses, and great coach-houses without carriages. Grass growing in the chinks of the stone-paving, this bright cold winter day. _Downhills._" Another opening had also suggested itself to him. "Open a story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted sets of people, into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of an electric message. Describe the message--_be_ the message--flashing along through space, over the earth, and under the sea."[251] Connected with which in some way would seem to be this other notion, following it in the Memoranda. "Representing London--or Paris, or any other great place--in the new light of being actually unknown to all the people in the story, and only taking the colour of their fears and fancies and opinions. So getting a new aspect, and being unlike itself. An _odd_ unlikeness of itself." The subjects for stories are various, and some are striking. There was one he clung to much, and thought of frequently as in a special degree available for a series of papers in his periodical; but when he came to close quarters with it the difficulties were found to be too great. "English landscape. The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges, everything so neat and orderly--gardens, houses, roads. Where are the people who do all this? There must be a great many of them, to do it. Where are they all? And are _they_, too, so well kept and so fair to see? Suppose the foregoing to be wrought out by an Englishman: say, from China: who knows nothing about his native country." To which may be added a fancy that savours of the same mood of discontent, political and social. "How do I know that I, a man, am to learn from insects--unless it is to learn how little my littlenesses are? All that botheration in the hive about the queen bee, may be, in little, me and the court circular." A domestic story he had met with in the State Trials struck him greatly by its capabilities, and I may preface it by mentioning another subject, not entered in the Memoranda, which for a long time impressed him as capable of attractive treatment. It was after reading one of the witch-trials that this occurred to him; and the heroine was to be a girl who for a special purpose had taken a witch's disguise, and whose trick was not discovered until she was actually at the stake. Here is the State Trials story as told by Dickens. "There is a case in the State Trials, where a certain officer made love to a (supposed) miser's daughter, and ultimately induced her to give her father slow poison, while nursing him in sickness. Her father discovered it, told her so, forgave her, and said 'Be patient my dear--I shall not live long, even if I recover: and then you shall have all my wealth.' Though penitent then, she afterwards poisoned him again (under the same influence), and successfully. Whereupon it appeared that the old man had no money at all, and had lived on a small annuity which died with him, though always feigning to be rich. He had loved this daughter with great affection." A theme touching closely on ground that some might think dangerous, is sketched in the following fancy. "The father (married young) who, in perfect innocence, venerates his son's young wife, as the realization of his ideal of woman. (He not happy in his own choice.) The son slights her, and knows nothing of her worth. The father watches her, protects her, labours for her, endures for her,--is for ever divided between his strong natural affection for his son as his son, and his resentment against him as this young creature's husband." Here is another, less dangerous, which he took from an actual occurrence made known to him when he was at Bonchurch. "The idea of my being brought up by my mother (me the narrator), my father being dead; and growing up in this belief until I find that my father is the gentleman I have sometimes seen, and oftener heard of, who has the handsome young wife, and the dog I once took notice of when I was a little child, and who lives in the great house and drives about." Very admirable is this. "The girl separating herself from the lover who has shewn himself unworthy--loving him still--living single for his sake--but never more renewing their old relations. Coming to him when they are both grown old, and nursing him in his last illness." Nor is the following less so. "Two girls _mis-marrying_ two men. The man who has evil in him, dragging the superior woman down. The man who has good in him, raising the inferior woman up." Dickens would have been at his best in working out both fancies. In some of the most amusing of his sketches of character, women also take the lead. "The lady un peu passée, who is determined to be interesting. No matter how much I love that person--nay, the more so for that very reason--I MUST flatter, and bother, and be weak and apprehensive and nervous, and what not. If I were well and strong, agreeable and self-denying, my friend might forget me." Another not remotely belonging to the same family is as neatly hit off. "The sentimental woman feels that the comic, undesigning, unconscious man, is 'Her Fate.'--I her fate? God bless my soul, it puts me into a cold perspiration to think of it. _I_ her fate? How can _I_ be her fate? I don't mean to be. I don't want to have anything to do with her--Sentimental woman perceives nevertheless that Destiny must be accomplished." Other portions of a female group are as humorously sketched and hardly less entertaining. "The enthusiastically complimentary person, who forgets you in her own flowery prosiness: as--'I have no need to say to a person of your genius and feeling, and wide range of experience'--and then, being shortsighted, puts up her glass to remember who you are."--"Two sisters" (these were real people known to him). "One going in for being generally beloved (which she is not by any means); and the other for being generally hated (which she needn't be)."--"The bequeathed maid-servant, or friend. Left as a legacy. And a devil of a legacy too."--"The woman who is never on any account to hear of anything shocking. For whom the world is to be of barley-sugar."--"The lady who lives on her enthusiasm; and hasn't a jot."--"Bright-eyed creature selling jewels. The stones and the eyes." Much significance is in the last few words. One may see to what uses Dickens would have turned them. A more troubled note is sounded in another of these female characters. "I am a common woman--fallen. Is it devilry in me--is it a wicked comfort--what is it--that induces me to be always tempting other women down, while I hate myself!" This next, with as much truth in it, goes deeper than the last. "The prostitute who will not let one certain youth approach her. 'O let there be some one in the world, who having an inclination towards me has not gratified it, and has not known me in my degradation!' She almost loving him.--Suppose, too, this touch in her could not be believed in by his mother or mistress: by some handsome and proudly virtuous woman, always revolting from her." A more agreeable sketch than either follows, though it would not please M. Taine so well. "The little baby-like married woman--so strange in her new dignity, and talking with tears in her eyes, of her sisters 'and all of them' at home. Never from home before, and never going back again." Another from the same manuscript volume not less attractive, which was sketched in his own home, I gave upon a former page. The female character in its relations with the opposite sex has lively illustration in the Memoranda. "The man who is governed by his wife, and is heartily despised in consequence by all other wives; who still want to govern _their_ husbands, notwithstanding." An alarming family pair follows that. "The playful--and scratching--family. Father and daughter." And here is another. "The agreeable (and wicked) young-mature man, and his devoted sister." What next was set down he had himself partly seen; and, by enquiry at the hospital named, had ascertained the truth of the rest. "The two people in the Incurable Hospital.--The poor incurable girl lying on a water-bed, and the incurable man who has a strange flirtation with her; comes and makes confidences to her; snips and arranges her plants; and rehearses to her the comic songs(!) by writing which he materially helps out his living."[252] Two lighter figures are very pleasantly touched. "Set of circumstances which suddenly bring an easy, airy fellow into near relations with people he knows nothing about, and has never even seen. This, through his being thrown in the way of the innocent young personage of the story. 'Then there is Uncle Sam to be considered,' says she. 'Aye to be sure,' says he, 'so there is! By Jupiter, I forgot Uncle Sam. He's a rock ahead, is Uncle Sam. He must be considered, of course; he must be smoothed down; he must be cleared out of the way. To be sure. I never thought of Uncle Sam.--By the bye, who _is_ Uncle Sam?'" There are several such sketches as that, to set against the groups of women; and some have Dickens's favourite vein of satire in them. "The man whose vista is always stopped up by the image of Himself. Looks down a long walk, and can't see round himself, or over himself, or beyond himself. Is always blocking up his own way. Would be such a good thing for him, if he could knock himself down." Another picture of selfishness is touched with greater delicacy. "'Too good' to be grateful to, or dutiful to, or anything else that ought to be. 'I won't thank you: you are too good.'--'Don't ask me to marry you: you are too good.'--In short, I don't particularly mind ill-using you, and being selfish with you: for you are _so_ good. Virtue its own reward!" A third, which seems to reverse the dial, is but another face of it: frankly avowing faults, which are virtues. "In effect--I admit I am generous, amiable, gentle, magnanimous. Reproach me--I deserve it--I know my faults--I have striven in vain to get the better of them." Dickens would have made much, too, of the working out of the next. "The knowing man in distress, who borrows a round sum of a generous friend. Comes, in depression and tears, dines, gets the money, and gradually cheers up over his wine, as he obviously entertains himself with the reflection that his friend is an egregious fool to have lent it to him, and that _he_ would have known better." And so of this other. "The man who invariably says apposite things (in the way of reproof or sarcasm) THAT HE DON'T MEAN. Astonished when they are explained to him." Here is a fancy that I remember him to have been more than once bent upon making use of: but the opportunity never came. "The two men to be guarded against, as to their revenge. One, whom I openly hold in some serious animosity, whom I am at the pains to wound and defy, and whom I estimate as worth wounding and defying;--the other, whom I treat as a sort of insect, and contemptuously and pleasantly flick aside with my glove. But, it turns out to be the latter who is the really dangerous man; and, when I expect the blow from the other, it comes from _him_." We have the master hand in the following bit of dialogue, which takes wider application than that for which it appears to have been intended. "'There is some virtue in him too.' "'Virtue! Yes. So there is in any grain of seed in a seedsman's shop--but you must put it in the ground, before you can get any good out of it.' "'Do you mean that _he_ must be put in the ground before any good comes of _him_?' "'Indeed I do. You may call it burying him, or you may call it sowing him, as you like. You must set him in the earth, before you get any good of him.'" One of the entries is a list of persons and places meant to have been made subjects for special description, and it will awaken regret that only as to one of them (the Mugby Refreshments) his intention was fulfilled. "A Vestryman. A Briber. A Station Waiting-Room. Refreshments at Mugby. A Physician's Waiting-Room. The Royal Academy. An Antiquary's house. A Sale Room. A Picture Gallery (for sale). A Waste-paper Shop. A Post-Office. A Theatre." All will have been given that have particular interest or value, from this remarkable volume, when the thoughts and fancies I proceed to transcribe have been put before the reader. * * * * * "The man who is incapable of his own happiness. Or who is always in pursuit of happiness. Result, Where is happiness to be found then? Surely not Everywhere? Can that be so, after all? Is _this_ my experience?" * * * * * "The people who persist in defining and analysing their (and everybody else's) moral qualities, motives and what not, at once in the narrowest spirit and the most lumbering manner;--as if one should put up an enormous scaffolding for the building of a pigstye." * * * * * "The house-full of Toadies and Humbugs. They all know and despise one another; but--partly to keep their hands in, and partly to make out their own individual cases--pretend not to detect one another." * * * * * "People realising immense sums of money, imaginatively--speculatively--counting their chickens before hatched. Inflaming each other's imaginations about great gains of money, and entering into a sort of intangible, impossible, competition as to who is the richer." * * * * * "The advertising sage, philosopher, and friend: who educates 'for the bar, the pulpit, or the stage.'" * * * * * "The character of the real refugee--not the conventional; the real." * * * * * "The mysterious character, or characters, interchanging confidences. 'Necessary to be very careful in that direction.'--'In what direction?'--'B'--'You don't say so. What, do you mean that C----?'--'Is aware of D. Exactly.'" "The father and boy, as I dramatically see them. Opening with the wild dance I have in my mind." * * * * * "The old child. That is to say, born of parents advanced in life, and observing the parents of other children to be young. Taking an old tone accordingly." * * * * * "A thoroughly sulky character--perverting everything. Making the good, bad--and the bad, good." * * * * * "The people who lay all their sins negligences and ignorances, on Providence." * * * * * "The man who marries his cook at last, after being so desperately knowing about the sex." * * * * * "The swell establishment, frightfully mean and miserable in all but the 'reception rooms.' Those very showy." * * * * * "B. tells M. what my opinion is of his work, &c. Quoting the man you have once spoken to as if he had talked a life's talk in two minutes." * * * * * "A misplaced and mis-married man; always, as it were, playing hide and seek with the world; and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden when he was born." "Certain women in Africa who have lost children, carry little wooden images of children on their heads, and always put their food to the lips of those images, before tasting it themselves. This is in a part of Africa where the mortality among children (judging from the number of these little memorials) is very great." * * * * * Two more entries are the last which he made. "AVAILABLE NAMES" introduces a wonderful list in the exact following classes and order; as to which the reader may be left to his own memory for selection of such as found their way into the several stories from _Little Dorrit_ to the end. The rest, not lifted into that higher notice by such favour of their creator, must remain like any other undistinguished crowd. But among them may perhaps be detected, by those who have special insight for the physiognomy of a name, some few with so great promise in them of fun and character as will make the "mute inglorious" fate which has befallen them a subject for special regret; and much ingenious speculation will probably wait upon all. Dickens has generally been thought, by the curious, to display not a few of his most characteristic traits in this particular field of invention. First there are titles for books; and from the list subjoined were taken two for Christmas numbers and two for stories, though _Nobody's Fault_ had ultimately to give way to _Little Dorrit_. "THE LUMBER ROOM. SOMEBODY'S LUGGAGE. TO BE LEFT TILL CALLED FOR. SOMETHING WANTED. EXTREMES MEET. NOBODY'S FAULT. THE GRINDSTONE. ROKESMITH'S FORGE. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. THE CINDER HEAP. TWO GENERATIONS. BROKEN CROCKERY. DUST. THE HOME DEPARTMENT. THE YOUNG PERSON. NOW OR NEVER. MY NEIGHBOURS. THE CHILDREN OF THE FATHERS. NO THOROUGHFARE." Then comes a batch of "Christian names": Girls and Boys: which stand thus, with mention of the source from which he obtained them. These therefore can hardly be called pure invention. Some would have been reckoned too extravagant for anything but reality. "_Girls from Privy Council Education lists._ "LELIA. MENELLA. RUBINA. IRIS. REBECCA. ETTY. REBINAH. SEBA. PERSIA. ARAMANDA. DORIS. BALZINA. PLEASANT. GENTILLA. "_Boys from Privy Council Education lists._ "DOCTOR. HOMER. ODEN. BRADLEY. ZERUBBABEL. MAXIMILIAN. URBIN. SAMILIAS. PICKLES. ORANGE. FEATHER. "_Girls and Boys from Ditto._ "AMANDA, ETHLYNIDA; BOETIUS, BOLTIUS." To which he adds supplementary lists that appear to be his own. "_More Boys._ "ROBERT LADLE. JOLY STICK. BILL MARIGOLD. STEPHEN MARQUICK. JONATHAN KNOTWELL. PHILIP BROWNDRESS. HENRY GHOST. GEORGE MUZZLE. WALTER ASHES. ZEPHANIAH FERRY (or FURY). WILLIAM WHY. ROBERT GOSPEL. THOMAS FATHERLY. ROBIN SCUBBAM. "_More Girls._ "SARAH GOLDSACKS. ROSETTA DUST. SUSAN GOLDRING. CATHERINE TWO. MATILDA RAINBIRD. MIRIAM DENIAL. SOPHIA DOOMSDAY. ALICE THORNEYWORK. SALLY GIMBLET. VERITY HAWKYARD. BIRDIE NASH. AMBROSINA EVENTS. APAULINA VERNON. NELTIE ASHFORD." And then come the mass of his "available names," which stand thus, without other introduction or comment: "TOWNDLING. MOOD. GUFF. TREBLE. CHILBY. SPESSIFER. WODDER. WHELPFORD. FENNERCK. GANNERSON. CHINKERBLE. BINTREY. FLEDSON. HIRLL. BRAYLE. MULLENDER. TRESLINGHAM. BRANKLE. SITTERN. DOSTONE. CAY-LON. SLYANT. QUEEDY. BESSELTHUR. MUSTY. GROUT. TERTIUS JOBBER. AMON HEADSTON. STRAYSHOTT. HIGDEN. MORFIT. GOLDSTRAW. BARREL. INGE. JUMP. JIGGINS. BONES. COY. DAWN. TATKIN. DROWVEY. PUDSEY. PEDSEY. DUNCALF. TRICKLEBANK. SAPSEA. READYHUFF. DUFTY. FOGGY. TWINN. BROWNSWORD. PEARTREE. SUDDS. SILVERMAN. KIMBER. LAUGHLEY. LESSOCK. TIPPINS. MINNITT. RADLOWE. PRATCHET. MAWDETT. WOZENHAM. SNOWELL. LOTTRUM. LAMMLE. FROSER. HOLBLACK. MULLEY. REDWORTH. REDFOOT. TARBOX (B). TINKLING. DUDDLE. JEBUS. POWDERHILL. GRIMMER. SKUSE. TITCOOMBE. CRABBLE. SWANNOCK. TUZZEN. TWEMLOW. SQUAB. JACKMAN. SUGG. BREMMIDGE. SILAS BLODGET. MELVIN BEAL. BUTTRICK. EDSON. SANLORN. LIGHTWORD. TITBULL. BANGHAM. KYLE--NYLE. PEMBLE. MAXEY. ROKESMITH. CHIVERY. WABBLER. PEEX--SPEEX. GANNAWAY. MRS. FLINKS. FLINX. JEE. HARDEN. MERDLE. MURDEN. TOPWASH. PORDAGE. DORRET--DORRIT. CARTON. MINIFIE. SLINGO. JOAD. KINCH. MAG. CHELLYSON. BLENNAM--CL. BARDOCK. SNIGSWORTH. SWENTON. CASBY--PEACH. LOWLEIGH--LOWELY. PIGRIN. YERBURY. PLORNISH. MAROON. BANDY-NANDY. STONEBURY. MAGWITCH. MEAGLES. PANCKS. HAGGAGE. PROVIS. STILTINGTON. STILTWALK. STILTINGSTALK. STILTSTALKING. RAVENDER. PODSNAP. CLARRIKER. COMPERY. STRIVER-STRYVER. PUMBLECHOOK. WANGLER. BOFFIN. BANTINCK. DIBTON. WILFER. GLIBBERY. MULVEY. HORLICK. DOOLGE. GANNERY. GARGERY. WILLSHARD. RIDERHOOD. PRATTERSTONE. CHINKIBLE. WOPSELL. WOPSLE. WHELPINGTON. WHELPFORD. GAYVERY. WEGG. HUBBLE. URRY. KIBBLE. SKIFFINS. WODDER. ETSER. AKERSHEM." The last of the Memoranda, and the last words written by Dickens in the blank paper book containing them, are these. "'Then I'll give up snuff.' Brobity.--An alarming sacrifice. Mr. Brobity's snuff-box. The Pawnbroker's account of it?" What was proposed by this must be left to conjecture; but "Brobity" is the name of one of the people in his unfinished story, and the suggestion may have been meant for some incident in it. If so, it is the only passage in the volume which can be in any way connected with the piece of writing on which he was last engaged. Some names were taken for it from the lists, but there is otherwise nothing to recall _Edwin Drood_. FOOTNOTES: [250] From the same authority proceeded, in answer to a casual question one day, a description of the condition of his wardrobe of which he has also made note in the Memoranda. "Well, sir, your clothes is all shabby, and your boots is all burst." [251] The date when this fancy dropped into his Memoranda is fixed by the following passage in a letter to me of the 25th of August 1862. "I am trying to coerce my thoughts into hammering out the Christmas number. And I have an idea of opening a book (not the Christmas number--a book) by bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly contrasted sets of people, with which and with whom the story is to rest, through the agency of an electric message. I think a fine thing might be made of the message itself shooting over the land and under the sea, and it would be a curious way of sounding the key note." [252] Following this in the "Memoranda" is an advertisement cut from the _Times_: of a kind that always expressed to Dickens a child-farming that deserved the gallows quite as much as the worst kind of starving, by way of farming, babies. The fourteen guineas a-year, "tender" age of the "dear" ones, maternal care, and no vacations or extras, to him had only one meaning. EDUCATION FOR LITTLE CHILDREN.--Terms 14 to 18 guineas per annum; no extras or vacations. The system of education embraces the wide range of each useful and ornamental study suited to the tender age of the dear children. Maternal care and kindness may be relied on.--X., Heald's Library, Fulham-road. CHAPTER XIII. THIRD SERIES OF READINGS. 1864-1867. Death of Thackeray--Dickens on Thackeray--Mother's Death--Death of his Second Son--_Our Mutual Friend_--Revising a Play--Sorrowful New Year--Lameness--Fatal Anniversary--New Readings undertaken--Offer of Messrs. Chappell--Relieved from Management--Greater Fatigues involved--A Memorable Evening--Mrs. Carlyle--Offer for more Readings--Result of the Last--Grave Warnings--At Liverpool--At Manchester--At Birmingham--In Scotland--Exertion and its Result--An Old Malady--Audiences at Newcastle--Scene at Tynemouth--In Dublin--At Cambridge--Close of the Third Series--Desire in America to hear Dickens read--Sends Agent to America--Warning unheeded--For and against reading in America--Decision to go--Departure. THE sudden death of Thackeray on the Christmas eve of 1863 was a painful shock to Dickens. It would not become me to speak, when he has himself spoken, of his relations with so great a writer and so old a friend. "I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last,[253] shortly before Christmas, at the Athenæum Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days . . . and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he laughingly described. He was cheerful, and looked very bright. In the night of that day week, he died. The long interval between these two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many occasions when he was extremely humorous, when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with children. . . . No one can be surer than I, of the greatness and goodness of his heart. . . . In no place should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the English language. . . . But before me lies all that he had written of his latest story . . . and the pain I have felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his powers when he worked on this last labour. . . . The last words he corrected in print were 'And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.' God grant that on that Christmas Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and of Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer's rest. He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed, and to all appearance asleep." Other griefs were with Dickens at this time, and close upon them came the too certain evidence that his own health was yielding to the overstrain which had been placed upon it by the occurrences and anxieties of the few preceding years. His mother, whose infirm health had been tending for more than two years to the close, died in September 1863; and on his own birthday in the following February he had tidings of the death of his second son Walter, on the last day of the old year in the officers' hospital at Calcutta; to which he had been sent up invalided from his station, on his way home. He was a lieutenant in the 26th Native Infantry regiment, and had been doing duty with the 42nd Highlanders. In 1853 his father had thus written to the youth's godfather, Walter Savage Landor: "Walter is a very good boy, and comes home from school with honorable commendation and a prize into the bargain. He never gets into trouble, for he is a great favourite with the whole house and one of the most amiable boys in the boy-world. He comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt pin." The pin was a present from Landor; to whom three years later, when the boy had obtained his cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, Dickens wrote again. "Walter has done extremely well at school; has brought home a prize in triumph; and will be eligible to 'go up' for his India examination soon after next Easter. Having a direct appointment he will probably be sent out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life 'up the country' before he well knows he is alive, or what life is--which indeed seems to be rather an advanced state of knowledge." If he had lived another month he would have reached his twenty-third year, and perhaps not then the advanced state of knowledge his father speaks of. But, never forfeiting his claim to those kindly paternal words, he had the goodness and simplicity of boyhood to the last. Dickens had at this time begun his last story in twenty numbers, and my next chapter will show through what unwonted troubles, in this and the following year, he had to fight his way. What otherwise during its progress chiefly interested him, was the enterprise of Mr. Fechter at the Lyceum, of which he had become the lessee; and Dickens was moved to this quite as much by generous sympathy with the difficulties of such a position to an artist who was not an Englishman, as by genuine admiration of Mr. Fechter's acting. He became his helper in disputes, adviser on literary points, referee in matters of management; and for some years no face was more familiar than the French comedian's at Gadshill or in the office of his journal. But theatres and their affairs are things of a season, and even Dickens's whim and humour will not revive for us any interest in these. No bad example, however, of the difficulties in which a French actor may find himself with English playwrights, will appear in a few amusing words from one of his letters about a piece played at the Princess's before the Lyceum management was taken in hand. "I have been cautioning Fechter about the play whereof he gave the plot and scenes to B; and out of which I have struck some enormities, my account of which will (I think) amuse you. It has one of the best first acts I ever saw; but if he can do much with the last two, not to say three, there are resources in his art that _I_ know nothing about. When I went over the play this day week, he was at least 20 minutes, _in a boat, in the last scene_, discussing with another gentleman (also in the boat) whether he should kill him or not; after which the gentleman dived overboard and swam for it. Also, in the most important and dangerous parts of the play, there was a young person of the name of Pickles who was constantly being mentioned by name, in conjunction with the powers of light or darkness; as, 'Great Heaven! Pickles?'--'By Hell, 'tis Pickles!'--'Pickles? a thousand Devils!'--'Distraction! Pickles?'"[254] The old year ended and the new one opened sadly enough. The death of Leech in November affected Dickens very much,[255] and a severe attack of illness in February put a broad mark between his past life and what remained to him of the future. The lameness now began in his left foot which never afterwards wholly left him, which was attended by great suffering, and which baffled experienced physicians. He had persisted in his ordinary exercise during heavy snow-storms, and to the last he had the fancy that his illness was merely local. But that this was an error is now certain; and it is more than probable that if the nervous danger and disturbance it implied had been correctly appreciated at the time, its warning might have been of priceless value to Dickens. Unhappily he never thought of husbanding his strength except for the purpose of making fresh demands upon it, and it was for this he took a brief holiday in France during the summer. "Before I went away," he wrote to his daughter, "I had certainly worked myself into a damaged state. But the moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well. I hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my desk before I want them." At his return he was in the terrible railway accident at Staplehurst, on a day[256] which proved afterwards more fatal to him; and it was with shaken nerves but unsubdued energy he resumed the labour to be presently described. His foot troubled him more or less throughout the autumn;[257] he was beset by nervous apprehensions which the accident had caused to himself, not lessened by his generous anxiety to assuage the severer sufferings inflicted by it on others;[258] and that he should nevertheless have determined, on the close of his book, to undertake a series of readings involving greater strain and fatigue than any hitherto, was a startling circumstance. He had perhaps become conscious, without owning it even to himself, that for exertion of this kind the time left him was short; but, whatever pressed him on, his task of the next three years, self-imposed, was to make the most money in the shortest time without any regard to the physical labour to be undergone. The very letter announcing his new engagement shows how entirely unfit he was to enter upon it. "For some time," he wrote at the end of February 1866, "I have been very unwell. F. B. wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an examination of the heart was absolutely necessary. 'Want of muscular power in the heart,' B said. 'Only remarkable irritability of the heart,' said Doctor Brinton of Brook-street, who had been called in to consultation. I was not disconcerted; for I knew well beforehand that the effect could not possibly be without the one cause at the bottom of it, of some degeneration of some function of the heart. Of course I am not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved without _some_ penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided change in my buoyancy and hopefulness--in other words, in my usual 'tone.' But tonics have already brought me round. So I have accepted an offer, from Chappells of Bond-street, of £50 a night for thirty nights to read 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris;' they undertaking all the business, paying all personal expenses, travelling and otherwise, of myself, John" (his office servant), "and my gasman; and making what they can of it. I begin, I believe, in Liverpool on the Thursday in Easter week, and then come to London. I am going to read at Cheltenham (on my own account) on the 23rd and 24th of this month, staying with Macready of course." The arrangement of this series of Readings differed from those of its predecessors in relieving Dickens from every anxiety except of the reading itself; but, by such rapid and repeated change of nights at distant places as kept him almost wholly in a railway carriage when not at the reading-desk or in bed, it added enormously to the physical fatigue. He would read at St. James's Hall in London one night, and at Bradford the next. He would read in Edinburgh, go on to Glasgow and to Aberdeen, then come back to Glasgow, read again in Edinburgh, strike off to Manchester, come back to St. James's Hall once more, and begin the same round again. It was labour that must in time have broken down the strongest man, and what Dickens was when he assumed it we have seen. He did not himself admit a shadow of misgiving. "As to the readings" (11th of March), "all I have to do is, to take in my book and read, at the appointed place and hour, and come out again. All the business of every kind, is done by Chappells. They take John and my other man, merely for my convenience. I have no more to do with any detail whatever, than you have. They transact all the business at their own cost, and on their own responsibility. I think they are disposed to do it in a very good spirit, because, whereas the original proposition was for thirty readings 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris,' they wrote out their agreement 'in London, the Provinces, or elsewhere, _as you and we may agree_.' For this they pay £1500 in three sums; £500 on beginning, £500 on the fifteenth Reading, £500 at the close. Every charge of every kind, they pay besides. I rely for mere curiosity on _Doctor Marigold_ (I am going to begin with him in Liverpool, and at St. James's Hall). I have got him up with immense pains, and should like to give you a notion what I am going to do with him." The success everywhere went far beyond even the former successes. A single night at Manchester, when eight hundred stalls were let, two thousand five hundred and sixty-five people admitted, and the receipts amounted to more than three hundred pounds, was followed in nearly the same proportion by all the greater towns; and on the 20th of April the outlay for the entire venture was paid, leaving all that remained, to the middle of the month of June, sheer profit. "I came back last Sunday," he wrote on the 30th of May, "with my last country piece of work for this time done. Everywhere the success has been the same. St. James's Hall last night was quite a splendid spectacle. Two more Tuesdays there, and I shall retire into private life. I have only been able to get to Gadshill once since I left it, and that was the day before yesterday." One memorable evening he had passed at my house in the interval, when he saw Mrs. Carlyle for the last time. Her sudden death followed shortly after, and near the close of April he had thus written to me from Liverpool. "It was a terrible shock to me, and poor dear Carlyle has been in my mind ever since. How often I have thought of the unfinished novel. No one now to finish it. None of the writing women come near her at all." This was an allusion to what had passed at their meeting. It was on the second of April, the day when Mr. Carlyle had delivered his inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and a couple of ardent words from Professor Tyndall had told her of the triumph just before dinner. She came to us flourishing the telegram in her hand, and the radiance of her enjoyment of it was upon her all the night. Among other things she gave Dickens the subject for a novel, from what she had herself observed at the outside of a house in her street; of which the various incidents were drawn from the condition of its blinds and curtains, the costumes visible at its windows, the cabs at its door, its visitors admitted or rejected, its articles of furniture delivered or carried away; and the subtle serious humour of it all, the truth in trifling bits of character, and the gradual progress into a half-romantic interest, had enchanted the skilled novelist. She was well into the second volume of her small romance before she left, being as far as her observation then had taken her; but in a few days exciting incidents were expected, the denouement could not be far off, and Dickens was to have it when they met again. Yet it was to something far other than this amusing little fancy his thoughts had carried him, when he wrote of no one being capable to finish what she might have begun. In greater things this was still more true. No one could doubt it who had come within the fascinating influence of that sweet and noble nature. With some of the highest gifts of intellect, and the charm of a most varied knowledge of books and things, there was something "beyond, beyond." No one who knew Mrs. Carlyle could replace her loss when she had passed away. The same letter which told of his uninterrupted success to the last, told me also that he had a heavy cold upon him and was "very tired and depressed." Some weeks before the first batch of readings closed, Messrs. Chappell had already tempted him with an offer for fifty more nights to begin at Christmas, for which he meant, as he then said, to ask them seventy pounds a night. "It would be unreasonable to ask anything now on the ground of the extent of the late success, but I am bound to look to myself for the future. The Chappells are speculators, though of the worthiest and most honourable kind. They make some bad speculations, and have made a very good one in this case, and will set this against those. I told them when we agreed: 'I offer these thirty Readings to you at fifty pounds a night, because I know perfectly well beforehand that no one in your business has the least idea of their real worth, and I wish to prove it.' The sum taken is £4720." The result of the fresh negotiation, though not completed until the beginning of August, may be at once described. "Chappell instantly accepts my proposal of forty nights at sixty pounds a night, and every conceivable and inconceivable expense paid. To make an even sum, I have made it forty-two nights for £2500. So I shall now try to discover a Christmas number" (he means the subject for one), "and shall, please Heaven, be quit of the whole series of readings so as to get to work on a new story for the new series of _All the Year Round_ early in the spring. The readings begin probably with the New Year." These were fair designs, but the fairest are the sport of circumstance, and though the subject for Christmas was found, the new series of _All the Year_ Round never had a new story from its founder. With whatever consequence to himself, the strong tide of the Readings was to sweep on to its full. The American war had ceased, and the first renewed offers from the States had been made and rejected. Hovering over all, too, were other sterner dispositions. "I think," he wrote in September, "there is some strange influence in the atmosphere. Twice last week I was seized in a most distressing manner--apparently in the heart; but, I am persuaded, only in the nervous system." In the midst of his ovations such checks had not been wanting. "The police reported officially," he wrote to his daughter from Liverpool on the 14th of April, "that three thousand people were turned away from the hall last night. . . . Except that I can _not_ sleep, I really think myself in very much better training than I had anticipated. A dozen oysters and a little champagne between the parts every night, seem to constitute the best restorative I have ever yet tried." "Such a prodigious demonstration last night at Manchester," he wrote to the same correspondent twelve days later, "that I was obliged (contrary to my principle in such cases) to go back. I am very tired to-day; for it would be of itself very hard work in that immense place, if there were not to be added eighty miles of railway and late hours to boot." "It has been very heavy work," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 11th of May from Clifton, "getting up at 6.30 each morning after a heavy night, and I am not at all well to-day. We had a tremendous hall at Birmingham last night, £230 odd, 2100 people; and I made a most ridiculous mistake. Had _Nickleby_ on my list to finish with, instead of _Trial_. Read _Nickleby_ with great go, _and the people remained_. Went back again at 10 o'clock, and explained the accident: but said if they liked I would give them the _Trial_. They _did_ like;--and I had another half hour of it, in that enormous place. . . . I have so severe a pain in the ball of my left eye that it makes it hard for me to do anything after 100 miles shaking since breakfast. My cold is no better, nor my hand either." It was his left eye, it will be noted, as it was his left foot and hand; the irritability or faintness of heart was also of course on the left side; and it was on the same left side he felt most of the effect of the railway accident. Everything was done to make easier the labour of travel, but nothing could materially abate either the absolute physical exhaustion, or the nervous strain. "We arrived here," he wrote from Aberdeen (16th of May), "safe and sound between 3 and 4 this morning. There was a compartment for the men, and a charming room for ourselves furnished with sofas and easy chairs. We had also a pantry and washing-stand. This carriage is to go about with us." Two days later he wrote from Glasgow: "We halted at Perth yesterday, and got a lovely walk there. Until then I had been in a condition the reverse of flourishing; half strangled with my cold, and dyspeptically gloomy and dull; but, as I feel much more like myself this morning, we are going to get some fresh air aboard a steamer on the Clyde." The last letter during his country travel was from Portsmouth on the 24th of May, and contained these words: "You need have no fear about America." The readings closed in June. The readings of the new year began with even increased enthusiasm, but not otherwise with happier omen. Here was his first outline of plan: "I start on Wednesday afternoon (the 15th of January) for Liverpool, and then go on to Chester, Derby, Leicester, and Wolverhampton. On Tuesday the 29th I read in London again, and in February I read at Manchester and then go on into Scotland." From Liverpool he wrote on the 21st: "The enthusiasm has been unbounded. On Friday night I quite astonished myself; but I was taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa, at the hall for half an hour. I attribute it to my distressing inability to sleep at night, and to nothing worse. Everything is made as easy to me as it possibly can be. Dolby would do anything to lighten the work, and _does_ everything." The weather was sorely against him. "At Chester," he wrote on the 24th from Birmingham, "we read in a snow-storm and a fall of ice. I think it was the worst weather I ever saw. . . . At Wolverhampton last night the thaw had thoroughly set in, and it rained furiously, and I was again heavily beaten. We came on here after the reading (it is only a ride of forty miles), and it was as much as I could do to hold out the journey. But I was not faint, as at Liverpool. I was only exhausted." Five days later he had returned for his Reading in London, and thus replied to a summons to dine with Macready at my house: "I am very tired; cannot sleep; have been severely shaken on an atrocious railway; read to-night, and have to read at Leeds on Thursday. But I have settled with Dolby to put off our going to Leeds on Wednesday, in the hope of coming to dine with you, and seeing our dear old friend. I say 'in the hope,' because if I should be a little more used-up to-morrow than I am to-day, I should be constrained, in spite of myself, to take to the sofa and stick there." On the 15th of February he wrote to his sister-in-law from Liverpool that they had had "an enormous turnaway" the previous night. "The day has been very fine, and I have turned it to the wholesomest account by walking on the sands at New Brighton all the morning. I am not quite right within, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking. There is no doubt of the fact that, after the Staplehurst experience, it tells more and more (railway shaking, that is) instead of, as one might have expected, less and less." The last remark is a strange one, from a man of his sagacity; but it was part of the too-willing self-deception which he practised, to justify him in his professed belief that these continued excesses of labour and excitement were really doing him no harm. The day after that last letter he pushed on to Scotland, and on the 17th wrote to his daughter from Glasgow. The closing night at Manchester had been enormous. "They cheered to that extent after it was over that I was obliged to huddle on my clothes (for I was undressing to prepare for the journey) and go back again. After so heavy a week, it _was_ rather stiff to start on this long journey at a quarter to two in the morning; but I got more sleep than I ever got in a railway-carriage before. . . . I have, as I had in the last series of readings, a curious feeling of soreness all round the body--which I suppose to arise from the great exertion of voice . . ." Two days later he wrote to his sister-in-law from the Bridge of Allan, which he had reached from Glasgow that morning. "Yesterday I was so unwell with an internal malady that occasionally at long intervals troubles me a little, and it was attended with the sudden loss of so much blood, that I wrote to F. B. from whom I shall doubtless hear to-morrow. . . . I felt it a little more exertion to read, afterwards, and I passed a sleepless night after that again; but otherwise I am in good force and spirits to-day: I may say, in the best force. . . . The quiet of this little place is sure to do me good." He rallied again from this attack, and, though he still complained of sleeplessness, wrote cheerfully from Glasgow on the 21st, describing himself indeed as confined to his room, but only because "in close hiding from a local poet who has christened his infant son in my name, and consequently haunts the building." On getting back to Edinburgh he wrote to me, with intimation that many troubles had beset him; but that the pleasure of his audiences, and the providence and forethought of Messrs. Chappell, had borne him through. "Everything is done for me with the utmost liberality and consideration. Every want I can have on these journeys is anticipated, and not the faintest spark of the tradesman spirit ever peeps out. I have three men in constant attendance on me; besides Dolby, who is an agreeable companion, an excellent manager, and a good fellow." On the 4th of March he wrote from Newcastle: "The readings have made an immense effect in this place, and it is remarkable that although the people are individually rough, collectively they are an unusually tender and sympathetic audience; while their comic perception is quite up to the high London standard. The atmosphere is so very heavy that yesterday we escaped to Tynemouth for a two hours' sea walk. There was a high north wind blowing, and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were being towed in and out over the stormy bar, with prodigious waves breaking on it; and, spanning the restless uproar of the waters, was a quiet rainbow of transcendent beauty. The scene was quite wonderful. We were in the full enjoyment of it when a heavy sea caught us, knocked us over, and in a moment drenched us and filled even our pockets. We had nothing for it but to shake ourselves together (like Dr. Marigold), and dry ourselves as well as we could by hard walking in the wind and sunshine. But we were wet through for all that, when we came back here to dinner after half-an-hour's railway drive. I am wonderfully well, and quite fresh and strong." Three days later he was at Leeds; from which he was to work himself round through the most important neighbouring places to another reading in London, before again visiting Ireland. This was the time of the Fenian excitements; it was with great reluctance he consented to go;[259] and he told us all at his first arrival that he should have a complete breakdown. More than 300 stalls were gone at Belfast two days before the reading, but on the afternoon of the reading in Dublin not 50 were taken. Strange to say however a great crowd pressed in at night, he had a tumultuous greeting, and on the 22nd of March I had this announcement from him: "You will be surprised to be told that we have done WONDERS! Enthusiastic crowds have filled the halls to the roof each night, and hundreds have been turned away. At Belfast the night before last we had £246 5_s._ In Dublin to-night everything is sold out, and people are besieging Dolby to put chairs anywhere, in doorways, on my platform, in any sort of hole or corner. In short the Readings are a perfect rage at a time when everything else is beaten down." He took the Eastern Counties at his return, and this brought the series to a close. "The reception at Cambridge was something to be proud of in such a place. The colleges mustered in full force, from the biggest guns to the smallest; and went beyond even Manchester in the roars of welcome and rounds of cheers. The place was crammed, and all through the reading everything was taken with the utmost heartiness of enjoyment." The temptation of offers from America had meanwhile again been presented to him so strongly, and in such unlucky connection with immediate family claims threatening excess of expenditure even beyond the income he was making, that he was fain to write to his sister-in-law: "I begin to feel myself drawn towards America as Darnay in the _Tale of Two Cities_ was attracted to Paris. It is my Loadstone Rock." Too surely it was to be so; and Dickens was not to be saved from the consequence of yielding to the temptation, by any such sacrifice as had rescued Darnay. The letter which told me of the close of his English readings had in it no word of the farther enterprise, yet it seemed to be in some sort a preparation for it. "Last Monday evening" (14th May) "I finished the 50 Readings with great success. You have no idea how I have worked at them. Feeling it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, I have _learnt them all_, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the situation. Finishing with _Dombey_ (which I had not read for a long time) I learnt that, like the rest; and did it to myself, often twice a day, with exactly the same pains as at night, over and over and over again." . . . Six days later brought his reply to a remark that no degree of excellence to which he might have brought his readings could reconcile me to what there was little doubt would soon be pressed upon him. "It is curious" (20th May) "that you should touch the American subject, because I must confess that my mind is in a most disturbed state about it. That the people there have set themselves on having the readings, there is no question. Every mail brings me proposals, and the number of Americans at St. James's Hall has been surprising. A certain Mr. Grau, who took Ristori out, and is highly responsible, wrote to me by the last mail (for the second time) saying that if I would give him a word of encouragement he would come over immediately and arrange on the boldest terms for any number I chose, and would deposit a large sum of money at Coutts's. Mr. Fields writes to me on behalf of a committee of private gentlemen at Boston who wished for the credit of getting me out, who desired to hear the readings and did not want profit, and would put down as a guarantee £10,000--also to be banked here. Every American speculator who comes to London repairs straight to Dolby, with similar proposals. And, thus excited, Chappells, the moment this last series was over, proposed to treat for America!" Upon the mere question of these various offers he had little difficulty in making up his mind. If he went at all, he would go on his own account, making no compact with any one. Whether he should go at all, was what he had to determine. One thing with his usual sagacity he saw clearly enough. He must make up his mind quickly. "The Presidential election would be in the autumn of next year. They are a people whom a fancy does not hold long. They are bent upon my reading there, and they believe (on no foundation whatever) that I am going to read there. If I ever go, the time would be when the Christmas number goes to press. Early in this next November." Every sort of enquiry he accordingly set on foot; and so far came to the immediate decision, that, if the answers left him no room to doubt that a certain sum might be realized, he would go. "Have no fear that anything will induce me to make the experiment, if I do not see the most forcible reasons for believing that what I could get by it, added to what I have got, would leave me with a sufficient fortune. I should be wretched beyond expression there. My small powers of description cannot describe the state of mind in which I should drag on from day to day." At the end of May he wrote: "Poor dear Stanfield!" (our excellent friend had passed away the week before). "I cannot think even of him, and of our great loss, for this spectre of doubt and indecision that sits at the board with me and stands at the bedside. I am in a tempest-tossed condition, and can hardly believe that I stand at bay at last on the American question. The difficulty of determining amid the variety of statements made to me is enormous, and you have no idea how heavily the anxiety of it sits upon my soul. But the prize looks so large!" One way at last seemed to open by which it was possible to get at some settled opinion. "Dolby sails for America" (2nd of July) "on Saturday the 3rd of August. It is impossible to come to any reasonable conclusion, without sending eyes and ears on the actual ground. He will take out my MS. for the _Children's Magazine_. I hope it is droll, and very child-like; though the joke is a grown-up one besides. You must try to like the pirate story, for I am very fond of it." The allusion is to his pleasant _Holiday Romance_ which he had written for Mr. Fields. Hardly had Mr. Dolby gone when there came that which should have availed to dissuade, far more than any of the arguments which continued to express my objection to the enterprise. "I am laid up," he wrote on the 6th of August, "with another attack in my foot, and was on the sofa all last night in tortures. I cannot bear to have the fomentations taken off for a moment. I was so ill with it on Sunday, and it looked so fierce, that I came up to Henry Thompson. He has gone into the case heartily, and says that there is no doubt the complaint originates in the action of the shoe, in walking, on an enlargement in the nature of a bunion. Erysipelas has supervened upon the injury; and the object is to avoid a gathering, and to stay the erysipelas where it is. Meantime I am on my back, and chafing. . . . I didn't improve my foot by going down to Liverpool to see Dolby off, but I have little doubt of its yielding to treatment, and repose." A few days later he was chafing still; the accomplished physician he consulted having dropped other hints that somewhat troubled him. "I could not walk a quarter of a mile to-night for £500. I make out so many reasons against supposing it to be gouty that I really do not think it is." So momentous in my judgment were the consequences of the American journey to him that it seemed right to preface thus much of the inducements and temptations that led to it. My own part in the discussion was that of steady dissuasion throughout: though this might perhaps have been less persistent if I could have reconciled myself to the belief, which I never at any time did, that Public Readings were a worthy employment for a man of his genius. But it had by this time become clear to me that nothing could stay the enterprise. The result of Mr. Dolby's visit to America--drawn up by Dickens himself in a paper possessing still the interest of having given to the Readings when he crossed the Atlantic much of the form they then assumed[260]--reached me when I was staying at Ross; and upon it was founded my last argument against the scheme. This he received in London on the 28th of September, on which day he thus wrote to his eldest daughter: "As I telegraphed after I saw you, I am off to Ross to consult with Mr. Forster and Dolby together. You shall hear, either on Monday, or by Monday's post from London, how I decide finally." The result he wrote to her three days later: "You will have had my telegram that I go to America. After a long discussion with Forster, and consideration of what is to be said on both sides, I have decided to go through with it. We have telegraphed 'Yes' to Boston." Seven days later he wrote to me: "The Scotia being full, I do not sail until lord mayor's day; for which glorious anniversary I have engaged an officer's cabin on deck in the Cuba. I am not in very brilliant spirits at the prospect before me, and am deeply sensible of your motive and reasons for the line you have taken; but I am not in the least shaken in the conviction that I could never quite have given up the idea." The remaining time was given to preparations; on the 2nd of November there was a Farewell Banquet in the Freemasons' Hall over which Lord Lytton presided; and on the 9th Dickens sailed for Boston. Before he left he had contributed his part to the last of his Christmas Numbers; all the writings he lived to complete were done; and the interval of his voyage may be occupied by a general review of the literary labour of his life. FOOTNOTES: [253] There had been some estrangement between them since the autumn of 1858, hardly now worth mention even in a note. Thackeray, justly indignant at a published description of himself by the member of a club to which both he and Dickens belonged, referred it to the Committee, who decided to expel the writer. Dickens, thinking expulsion too harsh a penalty for an offence thoughtlessly given, and, as far as might be, manfully atoned for by withdrawal and regret, interposed to avert that extremity. Thackeray resented the interference, and Dickens was justly hurt by the manner in which he did so. Neither was wholly right, nor was either altogether in the wrong. [254] As I have thus fallen on theatrical subjects, I may add one or two practical experiences which befell Dickens at theatres in the autumn of 1864, when he sallied forth from his office upon these night wanderings to "cool" a boiling head. "I went the other night" (8th of October) "to see the _Streets of London_ at the Princess's. A piece that is really drawing all the town, and filling the house with nightly overflows. It is the most depressing instance, without exception, of an utterly degraded and debased theatrical taste that has ever come under my writhing notice. For not only do the audiences--of all classes--go, but they are unquestionably delighted. At Astley's there has been much puffing at great cost of a certain Miss Ada Isaacs Menkin, who is to be seen bound on the horse in _Mazeppa_ 'ascending the fearful precipices not as hitherto done by a dummy.' Last night, having a boiling head, I went out from here to cool myself on Waterloo Bridge, and I thought I would go and see this heroine. Applied at the box-door for a stall. 'None left sir.' For a box-ticket. 'Only standing-room sir.' Then the man (busy in counting great heaps of veritable checks) recognizes me and says--'Mr. Smith will be very much concerned when he hears that you went away sir'--'Never mind; I'll come again.' 'You never go behind I think sir, or--?' 'No thank you, I never go behind.' 'Mr. Smith's box, sir--' 'No thank you, I'll come again.' Now who do you think the lady is? If you don't already know, ask that question of the highest Irish mountains that look eternal, and they'll never tell you--_Mrs. Heenan!_" This lady, who turned out to be one of Dickens's greatest admirers, addressed him at great length on hearing of this occurrence, and afterwards dedicated a volume of poems to him! There was a pleasanter close to his letter. "Contrariwise I assisted another night at the Adelphi (where I couldn't, with careful calculation, get the house up to Nine Pounds), and saw quite an admirable performance of Mr. Toole and Mrs. Mellon--she, an old servant, wonderfully like Anne--he, showing a power of passion very unusual indeed in a comic actor, as such things go, and of a quite remarkable kind." [255] Writing to me three months before, he spoke of the death of one whom he had known from his boyhood (_ante_, i. 47-8) and with whom he had fought unsuccessfully for some years against the management of the Literary Fund. "Poor Dilke! I am very sorry that the capital old stout-hearted man is dead." Sorrow may also be expressed that no adequate record should remain of a career which for steadfast purpose, conscientious maintenance of opinion, and pursuit of public objects with disregard of self, was one of very high example. So averse was Mr. Dilke to every kind of display that his name appears to none of the literary investigations which were conducted by him with an acuteness wonderful as his industry, and it was in accordance with his express instructions that the literary journal which his energy and self-denial had established kept silence respecting him at his death. [256] One day before, the 8th of June 1865, his old friend Sir Joseph Paxton had breathed his last. [257] Here are allusions to it at that time. "I have got a boot on to-day,--made on an Otranto scale, but really not very discernible from its ordinary sized companion." After a few days' holiday: "I began to feel my foot stronger the moment I breathed the sea air. Still, during the ten days I have been away, I have never been able to wear a boot after four or five in the afternoon, but have passed all the evenings with the foot up, and nothing on it. I am burnt brown and have walked by the sea perpetually, yet I feel certain that if I wore a boot this evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But I am not posted up in Pustuls, and I do not know as I could bring him along slick through it. But I'll tell you wa'at I can do Marm:--I can send him a draft as will certainly put him into a most etarnal Fit, and I am almighty smart at Fits, and we might git round Old Grisly that way.'" [258] I give one such instance: "The railway people have offered, in the case of the young man whom I got out of the carriage just alive, all the expenses and a thousand pounds down. The father declines to accept the offer. It seems unlikely that the young man, whose destination is India, would ever be passed for the Army now by the Medical Board. The question is, how far will that contingency tell, under Lord Campbell's Act?" [259] He wrote to me on the 15th of March from Dublin: "So profoundly discouraging were the accounts from here in London last Tuesday that I held several councils with Chappell about coming at all; had actually drawn up a bill announcing (indefinitely) the postponement of the readings; and had meant to give him a reading to cover the charges incurred--but yielded at last to his representations the other way. We ran through a snow storm nearly the whole way, and in Wales got snowed up, came to a stoppage, and had to dig the engine out. . . . We got to Dublin at last, found it snowing and raining, and heard that it had been snowing and raining since the first day of the year. . . . As to outward signs of trouble or preparation, they are very few. At Kingstown our boat was waited for by four armed policemen, and some stragglers in various dresses who were clearly detectives. But there was no show of soldiery. My people carry a long heavy box containing gas-fittings. This was immediately laid hold of; but one of the stragglers instantly interposed on seeing my name, and came to me in the carriage and apologised. . . . The worst looking young fellow I ever saw, turned up at Holyhead before we went to bed there, and sat glooming and glowering by the coffee-room fire while we warmed ourselves. He said he had been snowed up with us (which we didn't believe), and was horribly disconcerted by some box of his having gone to Dublin without him. We said to one another 'Fenian:' and certainly he disappeared in the morning, and let his box go where it would." What Dickens heard and saw in Dublin, during this visit, convinced him that Fenianism and disaffection had found their way into several regiments. [260] This renders it worth preservation in a note. He called it "THE CASE IN A NUTSHELL. "1. I think it may be taken as proved, that general enthusiasm and excitement are awakened in America on the subject of the Readings, and that the people are prepared to give me a great reception. _The New York Herald_, indeed, is of opinion that 'Dickens must apologise first'; and where a _New York Herald_ is possible, anything is possible. But the prevailing tone, both of the press and of people of all conditions, is highly favourable. I have an opinion myself that the Irish element in New York is dangerous; for the reason that the Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous Englishman. This is merely an opinion of my own. "2. All our original calculations were based on 100 Readings. But an unexpected result of careful enquiry on the spot, is the discovery that the month of May is generally considered (in the large cities) bad for such a purpose. Admitting that what governs an ordinary case in this wise, governs mine, this reduces the Readings to 80, and consequently at a blow makes a reduction of 20 per cent., in the means of making money within the half year--unless the objection should not apply in my exceptional instance. "3. I dismiss the consideration that the great towns of America could not possibly be exhausted--or even visited--within 6 months, and that a large harvest would be left unreaped. Because I hold a second series of Readings in America is to be set down as out of the question: whether regarded as involving two more voyages across the Atlantic, or a vacation of five months in Canada. "4. The narrowed calculation we have made, is this: What is the largest amount of clear profit derivable, under the most advantageous circumstances possible, as to their public reception, from 80 Readings and no more? In making this calculation, the expenses have been throughout taken on the New York scale--which is the dearest; as much as 20 per cent., has been deducted for management, including Mr. Dolby's commission; and no credit has been taken for any extra payment on reserved seats, though a good deal of money is confidently expected from this source. But on the other hand it is to be observed that four Readings (and a fraction over) are supposed to take place every week, and that the estimate of receipts is based on the assumption that the audiences are, on all occasions, as large as the rooms will reasonably hold. "5. So considering 80 Readings, we bring out the net profit of that number, remaining to me after payment of all charges whatever, as £15,500. "6. But it yet remains to be noted that the calculation assumes New York City, and the State of New York, to be good for a very large proportion of the 80 Readings; and that the calculation also assumes the necessary travelling not to extend beyond Boston and adjacent places, New York City and adjacent places, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore. But, if the calculation should prove too sanguine on this head, and if these places should _not_ be good for so many Readings, then it may prove impracticable to get through 80 within the time: by reason of other places that would come into the list, lying wide asunder, and necessitating long and fatiguing journeys. "7. The loss consequent on the conversion of paper money into gold (with gold at the present ruling premium) is allowed for in the calculation. It counts seven dollars to the pound." CHAPTER XIV. DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. 1836-1870. THE TALE OF TWO CITIES. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. CHRISTMAS SKETCHES. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA. M. Taine's Criticism--What M. Taine overlooks--Anticipatory Reply to M. Taine--Paper by Mr. Lewes--Plea for Objectors to Dickens--Dickens a "Seer of Visions"--Criticised and Critic--An Opinion on Mr. and Mrs. Micawber--Dickens in a Fit of Hallucination--Dickens's Leading Quality--Dickens's Earlier Books--Mastery of Dialogue--Realities of Fiction--Fielding and Dickens--Universality of Micawber Experiences--Dickens's Enjoyment of his Own Humour--Origin of _Tale of Two Cities_--Title-hunting--Success--Method different from his Other Books--Reply to an Objection--Care with which Dickens worked--_Tale of Two Cities_ characterized--Opinion of an American Critic--_Great Expectations_--Another Boy-child for Hero--Groundwork of the Story--Masterly Drawing of Character--Christmas Sketches--_Our Mutual Friend_--Germ of Characters for it--Writing Numbers in Advance--Death of Leech--Holiday in France--In the Staplehurst Accident--On a Tale by Edmund About--Doctor Marigold--Minor Stories--Edwin Drood--Purity of Dickens's Writings--True Province of Humour--Dickens's Death--Effect of the News in America--A Far-Western Admirer of Dickens. WHAT I have to say generally of Dickens's genius as a writer may be made part of the notice, which still remains to be given, of his writings from _The Tale of Two Cities_ to the time at which we have arrived, leaving _Edwin Drood_ for mention in its place; and this will be accompanied, as in former notices of individual stories, by illustrations drawn from his letters and life. His literary work was so intensely one with his nature that he is not separable from it, and the man and the method throw a singular light on each other. But some allusion to what has been said of these books, by writers assuming to speak with authority, will properly precede what has to be offered by me; and I shall preface this part of my task with the hint of Carlyle, that in looking at a man out of the common it is good for common men to make sure that they "see" before they attempt to "oversee" him. Of the French writer, M. Henri Taine, it has before been remarked that his inability to appreciate humour is fatal to his pretensions as a critic of the English novel. But there is much that is noteworthy in his criticism notwithstanding, as well as remarkable in his knowledge of our language; his position entitles him to be heard without a suspicion of partizanship or intentional unfairness; whatever the value of his opinion, the elaboration of its form and expression is itself no common tribute; and what is said in it of Dickens's handling in regard to style and character, embodies temperately objections which have since been taken by some English critics without his impartiality and with less than his ability. As to style M. Taine does not find that the natural or simple prevails sufficiently. The tone is too passionate. The imaginative or poetic side of allusion is so uniformly dwelt on, that the descriptions cease to be subsidiary, and the minute details of pain or pleasure wrought out by them become active agencies in the tale. So vivid and eager is the display of fancy that everything is borne along with it; imaginary objects take the precision of real ones; living thoughts are controlled by inanimate things; the chimes console the poor old ticket-porter; the cricket steadies the rough carrier's doubts; the sea waves soothe the dying boy; clouds, flowers, leaves, play their several parts; hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no silent thing without its voice. Fondling and exaggerating thus what is occasional in the subject of his criticism, into what he has evidently at last persuaded himself is a fixed and universal practice with Dickens, M. Taine proceeds to explain the exuberance by comparing such imagination in its vividness to that of a monomaniac. He fails altogether to apprehend that property in Humour which involves the feeling of subtlest and most affecting analogies, and from which is drawn the rare insight into sympathies between the nature of things and their attributes or opposites, in which Dickens's fancy revelled with such delight. Taking the famous lines which express the lunatic, the lover, and the poet as "of Imagination all compact," in a sense that would have startled not a little the great poet who wrote them, M. Taine places on the same level of creative fancy the phantoms of the lunatic and the personages of the artist. He exhibits Dickens as from time to time, in the several stages of his successive works of fiction, given up to one idea, possessed by it, seeing nothing else, treating it in a hundred forms, exaggerating it, and so dazzling and overpowering his readers with it that escape is impossible. This he maintains to be equally the effect as Mr. Mell the usher plays the flute, as Tom Pinch enjoys or exposes his Pecksniff, as the guard blows his bugle while Tom rides to London, as Ruth Pinch crosses Fountain Court or makes the beefsteak pudding, as Jonas Chuzzlewit commits and returns from the murder, and as the storm which is Steerforth's death-knell beats on the Yarmouth shore. To the same kind of power he attributes the extraordinary clearness with which the commonest objects in all his books, the most ordinary interiors, any old house, a parlour, a boat, a school, fifty things that in the ordinary tale-teller would pass unmarked, are made vividly present and indelible; are brought out with a strength of relief, precision, and force, unapproached in any other writer of prose fiction; with everything minute yet nothing cold, "with all the passion and the patience of the painters of his country." And while excitement in the reader is thus maintained to an extent incompatible with a natural style or simple narrative, M. Taine yet thinks he has discovered, in this very power of awakening a feverish sensibility and moving laughter or tears at the commonest things, the source of Dickens's astonishing popularity. Ordinary people, he says, are so tired of what is always around them, and take in so little of the detail that makes up their lives, that when, all of a sudden, there comes a man to make these things interesting, and turn them into objects of admiration, tenderness, or terror, the effect is enchantment. Without leaving their arm-chairs or their firesides, they find themselves trembling with emotion, their eyes are filled with tears, their cheeks are broad with laughter, and, in the discovery they have thus made that they too can suffer, love, and feel, their very existence seems doubled to them. It had not occurred to M. Taine that to effect so much might seem to leave little not achieved. So far from it, the critic had satisfied himself that such a power of style must be adverse to a just delineation of character. Dickens is not calm enough, he says, to penetrate to the bottom of what he is dealing with. He takes sides with it as friend or enemy, laughs or cries over it, makes it odious or touching, repulsive or attractive, and is too vehement and not enough inquisitive to paint a likeness. His imagination is at once too vivid and not sufficiently large. Its tenacious quality, and the force and concentration with which his thoughts penetrate into the details he desires to apprehend, form limits to his knowledge, confine him to single traits, and prevent his sounding all the depths of a soul. He seizes on one attitude, trick, expression, or grimace; sees nothing else; and keeps it always unchanged. Mercy Pecksniff laughs at every word, Mark Tapley is nothing but jolly, Mrs. Gamp talks incessantly of Mrs. Harris, Mr. Chillip is invariably timid, and Mr. Micawber is never tired of emphasizing his phrases or passing with ludicrous brusqueness from joy to grief. Each is the incarnation of some one vice, virtue, or absurdity; whereof the display is frequent, invariable, and exclusive. The language I am using condenses with strict accuracy what is said by M. Taine, and has been repeated _ad nauseam_ by others, professing admirers as well as open detractors. Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Micawber, who belong to the first rank of humorous creation, are thus without another word dismissed by the French critic; and he shows no consciousness whatever in doing it, of that very fault in himself for which Dickens is condemned, of mistaking lively observation for real insight. He has, however much concession in reserve, being satisfied, by his observation of England, that it is to the people for whom Dickens wrote his deficiencies in art are mainly due. The taste of his nation had prohibited him from representing character in a grand style. The English require too much morality and religion for genuine art. They made him treat love, not as holy and sublime in itself, but as subordinate to marriage; forced him to uphold society and the laws, against nature and enthusiasm; and compelled him to display, in painting such a seduction as in _Copperfield_, not the progress, ardour, and intoxication of passion, but only the misery, remorse, and despair. The result of such surface religion and morality, combined with the trading spirit, M. Taine continues, leads to so many national forms of hypocrisy, and of greed as well as worship for money, as to justify this great writer of the nation in his frequent choice of those vices for illustration in his tales. But his defect of method again comes into play. He does not deal with vices in the manner of a physiologist, feeling a sort of love for them, and delighting in their finer traits as if they were virtues. He gets angry over them. (I do not interrupt M. Taine, but surely, to take one instance illustrative of many, Dickens's enjoyment in dealing with Pecksniff is as manifest as that he never ceases all the time to make him very hateful.) He cannot, like Balzac, leave morality out of account, and treat a passion, however loathsome, as that great tale-teller did, from the only safe ground of belief, that it is a force, and that force of whatever kind is good. It is essential to an artist of that superior grade, M. Taine holds, no matter how vile his subject, to show its education and temptations, the form of brain or habits of mind that have reinforced the natural tendency, to deduce it from its cause, to place its circumstances around it, and to develop its effects to their extremes. In handling such and such a capital miser, hypocrite, debauchee, or what not, he should never trouble himself about the evil consequences of the vices. He should be too much of a philosopher and artist to remember that he is a respectable citizen. But this is what Dickens never forgets, and he renounces all beauties requiring so corrupt a soil. M. Taine's conclusion upon the whole nevertheless is, that though those triumphs of art which become the property of all the earth have not been his, much has yet been achieved by him. Out of his unequalled observation, his satire, and his sensibility, has proceeded a series of original characters existing nowhere but in England, which will exhibit to future generations not the record of his own genius only, but that of his country and his times. Between the judgment thus passed by the distinguished French lecturer, and the later comment to be now given from an English critic, certainly not in arrest of that judgment, may fitly come a passage from one of Dickens's letters saying something of the limitations placed upon the artist in England. It may read like a quasi-confession of one of M. Taine's charges, though it was not written with reference to his own but to one of Scott's later novels. "Similarly" (15th of August 1856) "I have always a fine feeling of the honest state into which we have got, when some smooth gentleman says to me or to some one else when I am by, how odd it is that the hero of an English book is always uninteresting--too good--not natural, &c. I am continually hearing this of Scott from English people here, who pass their lives with Balzac and Sand. But O my smooth friend, what a shining impostor you must think yourself and what an ass you must think me, when you suppose that by putting a brazen face upon it you can blot out of my knowledge the fact that this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those other books and in mine, _must_ be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!" M. Taine's criticism was written three or four years before Dickens's death, and to the same date belong some notices in England which adopted more or less the tone of depreciation; conceding the great effects achieved by the writer, but disputing the quality and value of his art. For it is incident to all such criticism of Dickens to be of necessity accompanied by the admission, that no writer has so completely impressed himself on the time in which he lived, that he has made his characters a part of literature, and that his readers are the world. But, a little more than a year after his death, a paper was published of which the object was to reconcile such seeming inconsistency, to expound the inner meanings of "Dickens in relation to Criticism," and to show that, though he had a splendid genius and a wonderful imagination, yet the objectors were to be excused who called him only a stagy sentimentalist and a clever caricaturist. This critical essay appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February 1872, with the signature of Mr. George Henry Lewes; and the pretentious airs of the performance, with its prodigious professions of candour, force upon me the painful task of stating what it really is. During Dickens's life, especially when any fresh novelist could be found available for strained comparison with him, there were plenty of attempts to write him down: but the trick of studied depreciation was never carried so far or made so odious as in this case, by intolerable assumptions of an indulgent superiority; and to repel it in such a form once for all is due to Dickens's memory. The paper begins by the usual concessions--that he was a writer of vast popularity, that he delighted no end of people, that his admirers were in all classes and all countries, that he stirred the sympathy of masses not easily reached through literature and always to healthy emotion, that he impressed a new direction on popular writing, and modified the literature of his age in its spirit no less than its form. The very splendour of these successes, on the other hand, so deepened the shadow of his failures, that to many there was nothing but darkness. Was it unnatural? Could greatness be properly ascribed, by the fastidious, to a writer whose defects were so glaring, exaggerated, untrue, fantastic, and melodramatic? Might they not fairly insist on such defects as outweighing all positive qualities, and speak of him with condescending patronage or sneering irritation? Why, very often such men, though their talk would be seasoned with quotations from, and allusions to, his writings, and though they would lay aside their most favourite books to bury themselves in his new "number," had been observed by this critic to be as niggardly in their praise of him as they were lavish in their scorn. He actually heard "_a very distinguished man_," on one occasion, express measureless contempt for Dickens, and a few minutes afterwards admit that Dickens had "entered into his life." And so the critic betook himself to the task of reconciling this immense popularity and this critical contempt, which he does after the following manner. He says that Dickens was so great in "fun" (humour he does not concede to him anywhere) that Fielding and Smollett are small in comparison, but that this would only have been a passing amusement for the world if he had not been "gifted with an imagination of marvellous vividness, and an emotional sympathetic nature capable of furnishing that imagination with elements of universal power." To people who think that words should carry some meaning it might seem, that, if only a man could be "gifted" with all this, nothing more need be said. With marvellous imagination, and a nature to endow it with elements of universal power, what secrets of creative art could possibly be closed to him? But this is reckoning without your philosophical critic. The vividness of Dickens's imagination M. Taine found to be simply monomaniacal, and his follower finds it to be merely hallucinative. Not the less he heaps upon it epithet after epithet. He talks of its irradiating splendour; calls it glorious as well as imperial and marvellous; and, to make us quite sure he is not with these fine phrases puffing-off an inferior article, he interposes that such imagination is "common to all great writers." Luckily for great writers in general, however, their creations are of the old, immortal, commonplace sort; whereas Dickens in his creative processes, according to this philosophy of criticism, is tied up hard and fast within hallucinative limits. "He was," we are told, "a seer of visions." Amid silence and darkness, we are assured, he heard voices and saw objects; of which the revived impressions to him had the vividness of sensations, and the images his mind created in explanation of them had the coercive force of realities;[261] so that what he brought into existence in this way, no matter how fantastic and unreal, was (whatever this may mean) universally intelligible. "His types established themselves in the public mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was unnoticed in the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every jovial improvident a Micawber, every stinted serving-wench a Marchioness." The critic, indeed, saw through it all, but he gave his warnings in vain. "In vain critical reflection showed these figures to be merely masks; not characters, but personified characteristics; caricatures and distortions of human nature. The vividness of their presentation triumphed over reflection; their creator managed to communicate to the public his own unhesitating belief." What, however, is the public? Mr Lewes goes on to relate. "Give a child a wooden horse, with hair for mane and tail, and wafer-spots for colouring, he will never be disturbed by the fact that this horse does not move its legs but runs on wheels; and this wooden horse, which he can handle and draw, is believed in more than a pictured horse by a Wouvermanns or an Ansdell(!!) It may be said of Dickens's human figures that they too are wooden, and run on wheels; but these are details which scarcely disturb the belief of admirers. Just as the wooden horse is brought within the range of the child's emotions, and dramatizing tendencies, when he can handle and draw it, so Dickens's figures are brought within the range of the reader's interests, and receive from these interests a sudden illumination, when they are the puppets of a drama every incident of which appeals to the sympathies." _Risum teneatis?_ But the smile is grim that rises to the face of one to whom the relations of the writer and his critic, while both writer and critic lived, are known; and who sees the drift of now scattering such rubbish as this over an established fame. As it fares with the imagination that is imperial, so with the drama every incident of which appeals to the sympathies. The one being explained by hallucination, and the other by the wooden horse, plenty of fine words are to spare by which contempt may receive the show of candour. When the characters in a play are puppets, and the audiences of the theatre fools or children, no wise man forfeits his wisdom by proceeding to admit that the successful playwright, "with a fine felicity of instinct," seized upon situations, for his wooden figures, having "irresistible hold over the domestic affections;" that, through his puppets, he spoke "in the mother-tongue of the heart;" that, with his spotted horses and so forth, he "painted the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity, hunger, misery, and hot punch"--"so that even critical spectators who complained that these broadly painted pictures were artistic daubs could not wholly resist their effective suggestiveness." Since Trinculo and Caliban were under one cloak, there has surely been no such delicate monster with two voices. "His forward voice, now, is to speak well of his friend; his backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract." One other of the foul speeches I may not overlook, since it contains what is alleged to be a personal revelation of Dickens made to the critic himself. "When one thinks of Micawber always presenting himself in the same situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds, always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding, always making punch--and his wife always declaring she will never part from him, always referring to his talents and her family--when one thinks of the 'catchwords' personified as characters, one is reminded of the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes, and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive peculiarity of organic action, that of fluctuating spontaneity." Such was that sheer inability of Dickens, indeed, to comprehend this complexity of the organism, that it quite accounted, in the view of this philosopher, for all his unnaturalness, for the whole of his fantastic people, and for the strained dialogues of which his books are made up, painfully resembling in their incongruity "the absurd and eager expositions which insane patients pour into the listener's ear when detailing their wrongs, or their schemes. Dickens once declared to me," Mr. Lewes continues, "that every word said by his characters was distinctly _heard_ by him; I was at first not a little puzzled to account for the fact that he could hear language so utterly unlike the language of real feeling, and not be aware of its preposterousness; but the surprise vanished when I thought of the phenomena of hallucination." Wonderful sagacity! to unravel easily such a bewildering "puzzle"! And so to the close. Between the uncultivated whom Dickens moved, and the cultivated he failed to move; between the power that so worked in delft as to stir the universal heart, and the commonness that could not meddle with porcelain or aspire to any noble clay; the pitiful see-saw is continued up to the final sentence, where, in the impartial critic's eagerness to discredit even the value of the emotion awakened in such men as Jeffrey by such creations as Little Nell, he reverses all he has been saying about the cultivated and uncultivated, and presents to us a cultivated philosopher, in his ignorance of the stage, applauding an actor whom every uncultivated playgoing apprentice despises as stagey. But the bold stroke just exhibited, of bringing forward Dickens himself in the actual crisis of one of his fits of hallucination, requires an additional word. To establish the hallucinative theory, he is said on one occasion to have declared to the critic that every word uttered by his characters was distinctly _heard_ by him before it was written down. Such an averment, not credible for a moment as thus made, indeed simply untrue to the extent described, may yet be accepted in the limited and quite different sense which a passage in one of Dickens's letters gives to it. All writers of genius to whom their art has become as a second nature, will be found capable of doing upon occasion what the vulgar may think to be "hallucination," but hallucination will never account for. After Scott began the _Bride of Lammermoor_ he had one of his terrible seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated[262] that fine novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained." When Dickens was under the greatest trial of his life, and illness and sorrow were contending for the mastery over him, he thus wrote to me. "Of my distress I will say no more than that it has borne a terrible, frightful, horrible proportion to the quickness of the gifts you remind me of. But may I not be forgiven for thinking it a wonderful testimony to my being made for my art, that when, in the midst of this trouble and pain, I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it--really do not--_but see it_, and write it down. . . . It is only when it all fades away and is gone, that I begin to suspect that its momentary relief has cost me something." Whatever view may be taken of the man who wrote those words, he had the claim to be judged by reference to the highest models in the art which he studied. In the literature of his time, from 1836 to 1870, he held the most conspicuous place, and his claim to the most popular one in the literature of fiction was by common consent admitted. He obtained this rank by the sheer force of his genius, unhelped in any way, and he held it without dispute. As he began he closed. After he had written for only four months, and after he had written incessantly for four and thirty years, he was of all living writers the most widely read. It is of course quite possible that such popularity might imply rather littleness in his contemporaries than greatness in him: but his books are the test to judge by. Each thus far, as it appeared, has had notice in these pages for its illustration of his life, or of his method of work, or of the variety and versatility in the manifestations of his power. But his latest books remain still for notice, and will properly suggest what is farther to be said of his general place in literature. His leading quality was Humour. It has no mention in either of the criticisms cited, but it was his highest faculty; and it accounts for his magnificent successes, as well as for his not infrequent failures, in characteristic delineation. He was conscious of this himself. Five years before he died, a great and generous brother artist, Lord Lytton, amid much ungrudging praise of a work he was then publishing, asked him to consider, as to one part of it, if the modesties of art were not a little overpassed. "I cannot tell you," he replied, "how highly I prize your letter, or with what pride and pleasure it inspires me. Nor do I for a moment question its criticism (if objection so generous and easy may be called by that hard name) otherwise than on this ground--that I work slowly and with great care, and never give way to my invention recklessly, but constantly restrain it; and that I think it is my infirmity to fancy or perceive relations in things which are not apparent generally. Also, I have such an inexpressible enjoyment of what I see in a droll light, that I dare say I pet it as if it were a spoilt child. This is all I have to offer in arrest of judgment." To perceive relations in things which are not apparent generally, is one of those exquisite properties of humour by which are discovered the affinities between the high and the low, the attractive and the repulsive, the rarest things and things of every day, which bring us all upon the level of a common humanity. It is this which gives humour an immortal touch that does not belong of necessity to pictures, even the most exquisite, of mere character or manners; the property which in its highest aspects Carlyle so subtly described as a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting into our affections what is below us as the other draws down into our affections what is above us. But it has a danger which Dickens also hints at, and into which he often fell. All humour has in it, is indeed identical with, what ordinary people are apt to call exaggeration; but there is an excess beyond the allowable even here, and to "pet" or magnify out of proper bounds its sense of what is droll, is to put the merely grotesque in its place. What might have been overlooked in a writer with no uncommon powers of invention, was thrown into overpowering prominence by Dickens's wealth of fancy; and a splendid excess of his genius came to be objected to as its integral and essential quality. It cannot be said to have had any place in his earlier books. His powers were not at their highest and the humour was less fine and subtle, but there was no such objection to be taken. No misgiving interrupted the enjoyment of the wonderful freshness of animal spirits in _Pickwick_; but beneath its fun, laughter, and light-heartedness were indications of power of the first rank in the delineation of character. Some caricature was in the plan; but as the circle of people widened beyond the cockney club, and the delightful oddity of Mr. Pickwick took more of an independent existence, a different method revealed itself, nothing appeared beyond the exaggerations permissible to humorous comedy, and the art was seen which can combine traits vividly true to particular men or women with propensities common to all mankind. This has its highest expression in Fielding: but even the first of Dickens's books showed the same kind of mastery; and, by the side of its life-like middle-class people universally familiar, there was one figure before seen by none but at once knowable by all, delightful for the surprise it gave by its singularity and the pleasure it gave by its truth; and, though short of the highest in this form of art, taking rank with the class in which live everlastingly the dozen unique inventions that have immortalized the English novel. The groups in _Oliver Twist_, Fagin and his pupils, Sikes and Nancy, Mr. Bumble and his parish-boy, belong to the same period; when Dickens also began those pathetic delineations that opened to the neglected, the poor, and the fallen, a world of compassion and tenderness. Yet I think it was not until the third book, _Nickleby_, that he began to have his place as a writer conceded to him; and that he ceased to be regarded as a mere phenomenon or marvel of fortune, who had achieved success by any other means than that of deserving it, and who challenged no criticism better worth the name than such as he has received from the Fortnightly reviewer. It is to be added to what before was said of _Nickleby_, that it established beyond dispute his mastery of dialogue, or that power of making characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves, which belongs only to story-tellers of the first rank. Dickens never excelled the easy handling of the subordinate groups in this novel, and he never repeated its mistakes in the direction of aristocratic or merely polite and dissipated life. It displayed more than before of his humour on the tragic side; and, in close connection with its affecting scenes of starved and deserted childhood, were placed those contrasts of miser and spendthrift, of greed and generosity, of hypocrisy and simple-heartedness, which he handled in later books with greater power and fullness, but of which the first formal expression was here. It was his first general picture, so to speak, of the character and manners of his time, which it was the design more or less of all his books to exhibit; and it suffers by comparison with his later productions, because the humour is not to the same degree enriched by imagination; but it is free from the not infrequent excess into which that supreme gift also tempted its possessor. None of the tales is more attractive throughout, and on the whole it was a step in advance even of the stride previously taken. Nor was the gain lost in the succeeding story of the _Old Curiosity Shop_. The humorous traits of Mrs. Nickleby could hardly be surpassed: but, in Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, there was a subtlety and lightness of touch that led to finer issues; and around Little Nell[263] and her fortunes, surpassingly touching and beautiful, let criticism object what it will, were gathered some small characters that had a deeper intention and more imaginative insight, than anything yet done. Strokes of this kind were also observable in the hunted life of the murderer in _Barnaby Rudge_; and his next book, _Chuzzlewit_, was, as it still remains, one of his greatest achievements. Even so brief a retrospect of the six opening years of Dickens's literary labour will help to a clearer judgment of the work of the twenty-eight more years that remained to him. To the special observations already made on the series of stories which followed the return from America, _Chuzzlewit_, _Dombey_, _Copperfield_, and _Bleak House_, in which attention has been directed to the higher purpose and more imaginative treatment that distinguished them,[264] a general remark is to be added. Though the range of character they traverse is not wide, it is surrounded by a fertility of invention and illustration without example in any previous novelist; and it is represented in these books, so to speak, by a number and variety of existences sufficiently real to have taken places as among the actual people of the world. Could half as many known and universally recognisable men and women be selected out of one story, by any other prose writer of the first rank, as at once rise to the mind from one of the masterpieces of Dickens? So difficult of dispute is this, that as much perhaps will be admitted; but then it will be added, if the reply is by a critic of the school burlesqued by Mr. Lewes, that after all they are not individual or special men and women so much as general impersonations of men and women, abstract types made up of telling catchwords or surface traits, though with such accumulation upon them of a wonderful wealth of humorous illustration, itself filled with minute and accurate knowledge of life, that the real nakedness of the land of character is hidden. Well, what can be rejoined to this, but that the poverty or richness of any territory worth survey will for the most part lie in the kind of observation brought to it. There was no finer observer than Johnson of the manners of his time, and he protested of their greatest delineator that he knew only the shell of life. Another of his remarks, after a fashion followed by the criticizers of Dickens, places Fielding below one of his famous contemporaries; but who will not now be eager to reverse such a comparison, as that Fielding tells you correctly enough what o'clock it is by looking at the face of the dial, but that Richardson shows you how the watch is made? There never was a subtler or a more sagacious observer than Fielding, or who better deserved what is generously said of him by Smollett, that he painted the characters and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength, humour, and propriety. But might it not be said of him, as of Dickens, that his range of character was limited; and that his method of proceeding from a central idea in all his leading people, exposed him equally to the charge of now and then putting human nature itself in place of the individual who should only be a small section of it? This is in fact but another shape of what I have expressed on a former page, that what a character, drawn by a master, will roughly present upon its surface, is frequently such as also to satisfy its more subtle requirements; and that when only the salient points or sharper prominences are thus displayed, the great novelist is using his undoubted privilege of showing the large degree to which human intercourse is carried on, not by men's habits or ways at their commonest, but by the touching of their extremes. A definition of Fielding's genius has been made with some accuracy in the saying, that he shows common propensities in connection with the identical unvarnished adjuncts which are peculiar to the individual, nor could a more exquisite felicity of handling than this be any man's aim or desire; but it would be just as easy, by employment of the critical rules applied to Dickens, to transform it into matter of censure. Partridge, Adams, Trulliber, Squire Western, and the rest, present themselves often enough under the same aspects, and use with sufficient uniformity the same catchwords, to be brought within the charge of mannerism; and though M. Taine cannot fairly say of Fielding as of Dickens, that he suffers from too much morality, he brings against him precisely the charge so strongly put against the later novelist of "looking upon the passions not as simple forces but as objects of approbation or blame." We must keep in mind all this to understand the worth of the starved fancy, that can find in such a delineation as that of Micawber only the man described by Mr. Lewes as always in the same situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds, always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding, always making punch, and his wife always declaring she will never part from him. It is not thus that such creations are to be viewed; but by the light which enables us to see why the country squires, village schoolmasters, and hedge parsons of Fielding became immortal. The later ones will live, as the earlier do, by the subtle quality of genius that makes their doings and sayings part of those general incentives which pervade mankind. Who has not had occasion, however priding himself on his unlikeness to Micawber, to think of Micawber as he reviewed his own experiences? Who has not himself waited, like Micawber, for something to turn up? Who has not at times discovered, in one or other acquaintance or friend, some one or other of that cluster of sagacious hints and fragments of human life and conduct which the kindly fancy of Dickens embodied in this delightful form? If the irrepressible New Zealander ever comes over to achieve his long promised sketch of St. Paul's, who can doubt that it will be no other than our undying Micawber, who had taken to colonisation the last time we saw him, and who will thus again have turned up? There are not many conditions of life or society to which his and his wife's experiences are not applicable; and when, the year after the immortal couple made their first appearance on earth, Protection was in one of its then frequent difficulties, declaring it could not live without something widely different from existing circumstances shortly turning up, and imploring its friends to throw down the gauntlet and boldly challenge society to turn up a majority and rescue it from its embarrassments, a distinguished wit seized upon the likeness to Micawber, showed how closely it was borne out by the jollity and gin-punch of the banquets at which the bewailings were heard, and asked whether Dickens had stolen from the farmer's friends or the farmer's friends had stolen from Dickens. "Corn, said Mr. Micawber, may be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative. . . . I ask myself this question: if corn is not to be relied on, what is? We must live. . . ." Loud as the general laughter was, I think the laughter of Dickens himself was loudest, at this discovery of so exact and unexpected a likeness.[265] A readiness in all forms thus to enjoy his own pleasantry was indeed always observable (it is common to great humourists, nor would it be easier to carry it farther than Sterne did), and his own confession on the point may receive additional illustration before proceeding to the later books. He accounted by it, as we have seen, for occasional even grotesque extravagances. In another of his letters there is this passage: "I can report that I have finished the job I set myself, and that it has in it something--to me at all events--so extraordinarily droll, that though I have been reading it some hundred times in the course of the working, I have never been able to look at it with the least composure, but have always roared in the most unblushing manner. I leave you to find out what it was." It was the encounter of the major and the tax-collector in the second Mrs. Lirriper. Writing previously of the papers in _Household Words_ called The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, after saying that he and Mr. Wilkie Collins had written together a story in the second part, "in which I think you would find it very difficult to say where I leave off and he comes in," he had said of the preceding descriptions: "Some of my own tickle me very much; but that may be in great part because I know the originals, and delight in their fantastic fidelity." "I have been at work with such a will" he writes later of a piece of humour for the holidays, "that I have done the opening and conclusion of the Christmas number. They are done in the character of a waiter, and I think are exceedingly droll. The thread on which the stories are to hang, is spun by this waiter, and is, purposely, very slight; but has, I fancy, a ridiculously comical and unexpected end. The waiter's account of himself includes (I hope) everything you know about waiters, presented humorously." In this last we have a hint of the "fantastic fidelity" with which, when a fancy "tickled" him, he would bring out what Corporal Nym calls the humour of it under so astonishing a variety of conceivable and inconceivable aspects of subtle exaggeration, that nothing was left to the subject but that special individual illustration of it. In this, however, humour was not his servant but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical absurdity as Captain Toby Shandy's. But Dickens was too conscious of these excesses from time to time, not zealously to endeavour to keep the leading characters in his more important stories under some strictness of discipline. To confine exaggeration within legitimate limits was an art he laboriously studied; and, in whatever proportions of failure or success, during the vicissitudes of both that attended his later years, he continued to endeavour to practise it. In regard to mere description, it is true, he let himself loose more frequently, and would sometimes defend it even on the ground of art; nor would it be fair to omit his reply, on one occasion, to some such remonstrance as M. Taine has embodied in his adverse criticism, against the too great imaginative wealth thrown by him into mere narrative.[266] "It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like--to make the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in that way--I have an idea (really founded on the love of what I profess), that the very holding of popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment." THE TALE OF TWO CITIES. Dickens's next story to _Little Dorrit_ was the _Tale of Two Cities_, of which the first notion occurred to him while acting with his friends and his children in the summer of 1857 in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of _The Frozen Deep_. But it was only a vague fancy, and the sadness and trouble of the winter of that year were not favourable to it. Towards the close (27th) of January 1858, talking of improvements at Gadshill in which he took little interest, it was again in his thoughts. "Growing inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort are upon me sometimes to fall to work on a new book. Then I think I had better not worry my worried mind yet awhile. Then I think it would be of no use if I did, for I couldn't settle to one occupation.--And that's all!" "If I can discipline my thoughts," he wrote three days later, "into the channel of a story, I have made up my mind to get to work on one: always supposing that I find myself, on the trial, able to do well. Nothing whatever will do me the least 'good' in the way of shaking the one strong possession of change impending over us that every day makes stronger; but if I could work on with some approach to steadiness, through the summer, the anxious toil of a new book would have its neck well broken before beginning to publish, next October or November. Sometimes, I think I may continue to work; sometimes, I think not. What do you say to the title, ONE OF THESE DAYS?" That title held its ground very briefly. "What do you think," he wrote after six weeks, "of _this_ name for my story--BURIED ALIVE? Does it seem too grim? Or, THE THREAD OF GOLD? Or, THE DOCTOR OF BEAUVAIS?" But not until twelve months later did he fairly buckle himself to the task he had contemplated so long. _All the Year Round_ had taken the place of _Household Words_ in the interval; and the tale was then started to give strength to the new weekly periodical for whose pages it was designed. "This is merely to certify," he wrote on the 11th of March 1859, "that I have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted; exactly what will fit the opening to a T. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Also, that I have struck out a rather original and bold idea. That is, at the end of each month to publish the monthly part in the green cover, with the two illustrations, at the old shilling. This will give _All the Year Round_ always the interest and precedence of a fresh weekly portion during the month; and will give me my old standing with my old public, and the advantage (very necessary in this story) of having numbers of people who read it in no portions smaller than a monthly part. . . . My American ambassador pays a thousand pounds for the first year, for the privilege of republishing in America one day after we publish here. Not bad?" . . . He had to struggle at the opening through a sharp attack of illness, and on the 9th of July progress was thus reported. "I have been getting on in health very slowly and through irksome botheration enough. But I think I am round the corner. This cause--and the heat--has tended to my doing no more than hold my ground, my old month's advance, with the _Tale of Two Cities_. The small portions thereof, drive me frantic; but I think the tale must have taken a strong hold. The run upon our monthly parts is surprising, and last month we sold 35,000 back numbers. A note I have had from Carlyle about it has given me especial pleasure." A letter of the following month expresses the intention he had when he began the story, and in what respect it differs as to method from all his other books. Sending in proof four numbers ahead of the current publication, he adds: "I hope you will like them. Nothing but the interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the difficulty of the form of treatment,--nothing in the way of mere money, I mean,--could else repay the time and trouble of the incessant condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque story_, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway."[267] Another of his letters supplies the last illustration I need to give of the design and meanings in regard to this tale expressed by himself. It was a reply to some objections of which the principal were, a doubt if the feudal cruelties came sufficiently within the date of the action to justify his use of them, and some question as to the manner of disposing of the chief revolutionary agent in the plot. "I had of course full knowledge of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long before the Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant generally at that day was intolerable. No later enquiries or provings by figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living at the time. There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to make out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal dictionary-like minuteness; scattered up and down the pages of which is full authority for my marquis. This is Mercier's _Tableau de Paris_. Rousseau is the authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when he had a bit of meat. The tax-tables are the authority for the wretched creature's impoverishment. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident is inseparable from the passion and action of the character; where it is strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets which she wouldn't have minded, to the dignity of Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things." These are interesting intimations of the care with which Dickens worked; and there is no instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely successful, experiment. With singular dramatic vivacity, much constructive art, and with descriptive passages of a high order everywhere (the dawn of the terrible outbreak in the journey of the marquis from Paris to his country seat, and the London crowd at the funeral of the spy, may be instanced for their power), there was probably never a book by a great humourist, and an artist so prolific in the conception of character, with so little humour and so few rememberable figures. Its merits lie elsewhere. Though there are excellent traits and touches all through the revolutionary scenes, the only full-length that stands out prominently is the picture of the wasted life saved at last by heroic sacrifice. Dickens speaks of his design to make impressive the dignity of Carton's death, and in this he succeeded perhaps even beyond his expectation. Carton suffers himself to be mistaken for another, and gives his life that the girl he loves may be happy with that other; the secret being known only to a poor little girl in the tumbril that takes them to the scaffold, who at the moment has discovered it, and whom it strengthens also to die. The incident is beautifully told; and it is at least only fair to set against verdicts not very favourable as to this effort of his invention, what was said of the particular character and scene, and of the book generally, by an American critic whose literary studies had most familiarized him with the rarest forms of imaginative writing.[268] "Its pourtrayal of the noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modern literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of magnanimity and of charity unsurpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple, that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious works of imagination." I should myself prefer to say that its distinctive merit is less in any of its conceptions of character, even Carton's, than as a specimen of Dickens's power in imaginative story-telling. There is no piece of fiction known to me, in which the domestic life of a few simple private people is in such a manner knitted and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the one seems but part of the other. When made conscious of the first sultry drops of a thunderstorm that fall upon a little group sitting in an obscure English lodging, we are witness to the actual beginning of a tempest which is preparing to sweep away everything in France. And, to the end, the book in this respect is really remarkable. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The _Tale of Two Cities_ was published in 1859; the series of papers collected as the _Uncommercial Traveller_ were occupying Dickens in 1860; and it was while engaged in these, and throwing off in the course of them capital "samples" of fun and enjoyment, he thus replied to a suggestion that he should let himself loose upon some single humorous conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements in that way. "For a little piece I have been writing--or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day--such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before _me_ that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner." This was the germ of Pip and Magwitch, which at first he intended to make the groundwork of a tale in the old twenty-number form, but for reasons perhaps fortunate brought afterwards within the limits of a less elaborate novel. "Last week," he wrote on the 4th of October 1860, "I got to work on the new story. I had previously very carefully considered the state and prospects of _All the Year Round_, and, the more I considered them, the less hope I saw of being able to get back, _now_, to the profit of a separate publication in the old 20 numbers." (A tale, which at the time was appearing in his serial, had disappointed expectation.) "However I worked on, knowing that what I was doing would run into another groove; and I called a council of war at the office on Tuesday. It was perfectly clear that the one thing to be done was, for me to strike in. I have therefore decided to begin the story as of the length of the _Tale of Two Cities_ on the first of December--begin publishing, that is. I must make the most I can out of the book. You shall have the first two or three weekly parts to-morrow. The name is GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I think a good name?" Two days later he wrote: "The sacrifice of _Great Expectations_ is really and truly made for myself. The property of _All the Year Round_ is far too valuable, in every way, to be much endangered. Our fall is not large, but we have a considerable advance in hand of the story we are now publishing, and there is no vitality in it, and no chance whatever of stopping the fall; which on the contrary would be certain to increase. Now, if I went into a twenty-number serial, I should cut off my power of doing anything serial here for two good years--and that would be a most perilous thing. On the other hand, by dashing in now, I come in when most wanted; and if Reade and Wilkie follow me, our course will be shaped out handsomely and hopefully for between two and three years. A thousand pounds are to be paid for early proofs of the story to America." A few more days brought the first instalment of the tale, and explanatory mention of it. "The book will be written in the first person throughout, and during these first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the _Tale of Two Cities_. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too--and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe." It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and mastery with which, in these two books of _Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's childhood, both told in the form of autobiography. A subtle penetration into character marks the unlikeness in the likeness; there is enough at once of resemblance and of difference in the position and surroundings of each to account for the divergences of character that arise; both children are good-hearted, and both have the advantage of association with models of tender simplicity and oddity, perfect in their truth and quite distinct from each other; but a sudden tumble into distress steadies Peggotty's little friend, and as unexpected a stroke of good fortune turns the head of the small protégé of Joe Gargery. What a deal of spoiling nevertheless, a nature that is really good at the bottom of it will stand without permanent damage, is nicely shown in Pip; and the way he reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral example, is part of the shading of a character drawn with extraordinary skill. His greatest trial comes out of his good luck; and the foundations of both are laid at the opening of the tale, in a churchyard down by the Thames, as it winds past desolate marshes twenty miles to the sea, of which a masterly picture in half a dozen lines will give only average example of the descriptive writing that is everywhere one of the charms of the book. It is strange, as I transcribe the words, with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of his story--Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out among the marshes seven miles from Gadshill! "My first most vivid and broad impression . . . on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening . . . was . . . that this bleak place, overgrown with nettles, was the churchyard, and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea. . . . On the edge of the river . . . only two black things in all the prospect seemed to be standing upright . . . one, the beacon by which the sailors steered, like an unhooped cask upon a pole, an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate." Here Magwitch, an escaped convict from Chatham, terrifies the child Pip into stealing for him food and a file; and though recaptured and transported, he carries with him to Australia such a grateful heart for the small creature's service, that on making a fortune there he resolves to make his little friend a gentleman. This requires circumspection; and is so done, through the Old-Bailey attorney who has defended Magwitch at his trial (a character of surprising novelty and truth), that Pip imagines his present gifts and "great expectations" to have come from the supposed rich lady of the story (whose eccentricities are the unattractive part of it, and have yet a weird character that somehow fits in with the kind of wrong she has suffered). When therefore the closing scenes bring back Magwitch himself, who risks his life to gratify his longing to see the gentleman he has made, it is an unspeakable horror to the youth to discover his benefactor in the convicted felon. If any one doubts Dickens's power of so drawing a character as to get to the heart of it, seeing beyond surface peculiarities into the moving springs of the human being himself, let him narrowly examine those scenes. There is not a grain of substitution of mere sentiment, or circumstance, for the inner and absolute reality of the position in which these two creatures find themselves. Pip's loathing of what had built up his fortune, and his horror of the uncouth architect, are apparent in even his most generous efforts to protect him from exposure and sentence. Magwitch's convict habits strangely blend themselves with his wild pride in, and love for, the youth whom his money has turned into a gentleman. He has a craving for his good opinion; dreads to offend him by his "heavy grubbing," or by the oaths he lets fall now and then; and pathetically hopes his Pip, his dear boy, won't think him "low": but, upon a chum of Pip's appearing unexpectedly while they are together, he pulls out a jack-knife by way of hint he can defend himself, and produces afterwards a greasy little clasped black Testament on which the startled new-comer, being found to have no hostile intention, is sworn to secrecy. At the opening of the story there had been an exciting scene of the wretched man's chase and recapture among the marshes, and this has its parallel at the close in his chase and recapture on the river while poor Pip is helping to get him off. To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or nine friends and three or four members of his family were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of May 1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a masterpiece. The characters generally afford the same evidence as those two that Dickens's humour, not less than his creative power, was at its best in this book. The Old-Bailey attorney Jaggers, and his clerk Wemmick (both excellent, and the last one of the oddities that live in everybody's liking for the goodheartedness of its humorous surprises), are as good as his earliest efforts in that line; the Pumblechooks and Wopsles are perfect as bits of _Nickleby_ fresh from the mint; and the scene in which Pip, and Pip's chum Herbert, make up their accounts and schedule their debts and obligations, is original and delightful as Micawber himself. It is the art of living upon nothing and making the best of it, in the most pleasing form. Herbert's intentions to trade east and west, and get himself into business transactions of a magnificent extent and variety, are as perfectly warranted to us, in his way of putting them, by merely "being in a counting-house and looking about you," as Pip's means of paying his debts are lightened and made easy by his method of simply adding them up with a margin. "The time comes," says Herbert, "when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it, and you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made your capital you have nothing to do but employ it." In like manner Pip tells us "Suppose your debts to be one hundred and sixty four pounds four and two-pence, I would say, leave a margin and put them down at two hundred; or suppose them to be four times as much, leave a margin and put them down at seven hundred." He is sufficiently candid to add, that, while he has the highest opinion of the wisdom and prudence of the margin, its dangers are that in the sense of freedom and solvency it imparts there is a tendency to run into new debt. But the satire that thus enforces the old warning against living upon vague hopes, and paying ancient debts by contracting new ones, never presented itself in more amusing or kindly shape. A word should be added of the father of the girl that Herbert marries, Bill Barley, ex-ship's purser, a gouty, bed-ridden, drunken old rascal, who lies on his back in an upper floor on Mill Pond Bank by Chinks's Basin, where he keeps, weighs, and serves out the family stores or provisions, according to old professional practice, with one eye at a telescope which is fitted on his bed for the convenience of sweeping the river. This is one of those sketches, slight in itself but made rich with a wealth of comic observation, in which Dickens's humour took especial delight; and to all this part of the story, there is a quaint riverside flavour that gives it amusing reality and relish. Sending the chapters that contain it, which open the third division of the tale, he wrote thus: "It is a pity that the third portion cannot be read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and the pity is the greater, because the general turn and tone of the working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they conventionally go. But what must be, must be. As to the planning out from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is, without trying. But, as in all such cases, when it is overcome the pleasure is proportionate. Two months more will see me through it, I trust. All the iron is in the fire, and I have 'only' to beat it out." One other letter throws light upon an objection taken not unfairly to the too great speed with which the heroine, after being married, reclaimed, and widowed, is in a page or two again made love to, and remarried by the hero. This summary proceeding was not originally intended. But, over and above its popular acceptance, the book had interested some whose opinions Dickens specially valued (Carlyle among them, I remember);[269] and upon Bulwer Lytton objecting to a close that should leave Pip a solitary man, Dickens substituted what now stands. "You will be surprised" he wrote "to hear that I have changed the end of _Great Expectations_ from and after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there. Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration." This turned out to be the case; but the first ending nevertheless seems to be more consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale, and for this reason it is preserved in a note.[270] CHRISTMAS SKETCHES. Between that fine novel, which was issued in three volumes in the autumn of 1861, and the completion of his next serial story, were interposed three sketches in his happiest vein at which everyone laughed and cried in the Christmas times of 1862, '3, and '4. Of the waiter in _Somebody's Luggage_ Dickens has himself spoken; and if any theme is well treated, when, from the point of view taken, nothing more is left to say about it, that bit of fun is perfect. Call it exaggeration, grotesqueness, or by what hard name you will, laughter will always intercept any graver criticism. Writing from Paris of what he was himself responsible for in the articles left by Somebody with his wonderful Waiter, he said that in one of them he had made the story a camera obscura of certain French places and styles of people; having founded it on something he had noticed in a French soldier. This was the tale of Little Bebelle, which had a small French corporal for its hero, and became highly popular. But the triumph of the Christmas achievements in these days was Mrs. Lirriper. She took her place at once among people known to everybody; and all the world talked of Major Jemmy Jackman, and his friend the poor elderly lodging-house keeper of the Strand, with her miserable cares and rivalries and worries, as if they had both been as long in London and as well known as Norfolk-street itself. A dozen volumes could not have told more than those dozen pages did. The _Legacy_ followed the _Lodgings_ in 1864, and there was no falling off in the fun and laughter. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. The publication of _Our Mutual Friend_, in the form of the earliest stories, extended from May 1864 to November 1865. Four years earlier he had chosen this title as a good one, and he held to it through much objection. Between that time and his actual commencement there is mention, in his letters, of the three leading notions on which he founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book, the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and _being_ dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted, would be a good leading incident for a story;" and this he partly did in Rokesmith. For other actors in the tale, he had thought of "a poor impostor of a man marrying a woman for her money; she marrying _him_ for _his_ money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and entering into a league and covenant against folks in general:" with whom he had proposed to connect some Perfectly New people. "Everything new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if THEY must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages--shining with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." These groups took shape in the Lammles and the Veneerings. "I must use somehow," is the remark of another letter, "the uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles whom Leech and I saw at Chatham;" of which a hint is in Charley Hexam and his father. The benevolent old Jew whom he makes the unconscious agent of a rascal, was meant to wipe out a reproach against his Jew in _Oliver Twist_ as bringing dislike upon the religion of the race he belonged to.[271] Having got his title in '61 it was his hope to have begun in '62. "Alas!" he wrote in the April of that year, "I have hit upon nothing for a story. Again and again I have tried. But this odious little house" (he had at this time for a few weeks exchanged Gadshill for a friend's house near Kensington) "seems to have stifled and darkened my invention." It was not until the autumn of the following year he saw his way to a beginning. "The Christmas number has come round again" (30th of August 1863)--"it seems only yesterday that I did the last--but I am full of notions besides for the new twenty numbers. When I can clear the Christmas stone out of the road, I think I can dash into it on the grander journey." He persevered through much difficulty; which he described six weeks later, with characteristic glance at his own ways when writing, in a letter from the office of his journal. "I came here last night, to evade my usual day in the week--in fact to shirk it--and get back to Gad's for five or six consecutive days. My reason is, that I am exceedingly anxious to begin my book. I am bent upon getting to work at it. I want to prepare it for the spring; but I am determined not to begin to publish with less than five numbers done. I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn; and if I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more." He had written, after four months, very nearly three numbers, when upon a necessary rearrangement of his chapters he had to hit upon a new subject for one of them. "While I was considering" (25th of February) "what it should be, Marcus,[272] who has done an excellent cover, came to tell me of an extraordinary trade he had found out, through one of his painting requirements. I immediately went with him to Saint Giles's to look at the place, and found--what you will see." It was the establishment of Mr. Venus, preserver of animals and birds, and articulator of human bones; and it took the place of the last chapter of No. 2, which was then transferred to the end of No. 3. But a start with three full numbers done, though more than enough to satisfy the hardest self-conditions formerly, did not satisfy him now. With his previous thought given to the story, with his Memoranda to help him, with the people he had in hand to work it with, and ready as he still was to turn his untiring observation to instant use on its behalf, he now moved, with the old large canvas before him, somewhat slowly and painfully. "If I were to lose" (29th of March) "a page of the five numbers I have proposed to myself to be ready by the publication day, I should feel that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy, and write very slowly. And I have so much--not fiction--that _will_ be thought of, when I don't want to think of it, that I am forced to take more care than I once took." The first number was launched at last, on the first of May; and after two days he wrote: "Nothing can be better than _Our Friend_, now in his thirtieth thousand, and orders flowing in fast." But between the first and second number there was a drop of five thousand, strange to say, for the larger number was again reached, and much exceeded, before the book closed. "This leaves me" (10th of June) "going round and round like a carrier-pigeon before swooping on number seven." Thus far he had held his ground; but illness came, with some other anxieties, and on the 29th of July he wrote sadly enough. "Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention, and have fallen back with the book. Looming large before me is the Christmas work, and I can hardly hope to do it without losing a number of _Our Friend_. I have very nearly lost one already, and two would take one half of my whole advance. This week I have been very unwell; am still out of sorts; and, as I know from two days' slow experience, have a very mountain to climb before I shall see the open country of my work." The three following months brought hardly more favourable report. "I have not done my number. This death of poor Leech (I suppose) has put me out woefully. Yesterday and the day before I could do nothing; seemed for the time to have quite lost the power; and am only by slow degrees getting back into the track to-day." He rallied after this, and satisfied himself for a while; but in February 1865 that formidable illness in his foot broke out which, at certain times for the rest of his life, deprived him more or less of his inestimable solace of bodily exercise. In April and May he suffered severely; and after trying the sea went abroad for more complete change. "Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one knows as I know to-day how near to it I have been." That was the day of his leaving for France, and the day of his return brought these few hurried words. "Saturday, tenth of June, 1865. I was in the terrific Staplehurst accident yesterday, and worked for hours among the dying and dead. I was in the carriage that did not go over, but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable manner. No words can describe the scene.[273] I am away to Gads." Though with characteristic energy he resisted the effects upon himself of that terrible ninth of June, they were for some time evident; and, up to the day of his death on its fatal fifth anniversary, were perhaps never wholly absent. But very few complaints fell from him. "I am curiously weak--weak as if I were recovering from a long illness." "I begin to feel it more in my head. I sleep well and eat well; but I write half a dozen notes, and turn faint and sick." "I am getting right, though still low in pulse and very nervous. Driving into Rochester yesterday I felt more shaken than I have since the accident." "I cannot bear railway travelling yet. A perfect conviction, against the senses, that the carriage is down on one side (and generally that is the left, and _not_ the side on which the carriage in the accident really went over), comes upon me with anything like speed, and is inexpressibly distressing." These are passages from his letters up to the close of June. Upon his book the immediate result was that another lost number was added to the losses of the preceding months, and "alas!" he wrote at the opening of July, "for the two numbers you write of! There is only one in existence. I have but just begun the other." "Fancy!" he added next day, "fancy my having under-written number sixteen by two and a half pages--a thing I have not done since _Pickwick_!" He did it once with _Dombey_, and was to do it yet again. The book thus begun and continued under adverse influences, though with fancy in it, descriptive power, and characters well designed, will never rank with his higher efforts. It has some pictures of a rare veracity of soul amid the lowest forms of social degradation, placed beside others of sheer falsehood and pretence amid unimpeachable social correctness, which lifted the writer to his old place; but the judgment of it on the whole must be, that it wants freshness and natural development. This indeed will be most freely admitted by those who feel most strongly that all the old cunning of the master hand is yet in the wayward loving Bella Wilfer, in the vulgar canting Podsnap, and in the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose keen little quaint weird ways, and precocious wit sharpened by trouble, are fitted into a character as original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to the last. A dull coarse web her small life seems made of; but even from its taskwork, which is undertaken for childhood itself, there are glittering threads cast across its woof and warp of care. The unconscious philosophy of her tricks and manners has in it more of the subtler vein of the satire aimed at in the book, than even the voices of society which the tale begins and ends with. In her very kindliness there is the touch of malice that shows a childish playfulness familiar with unnatural privations; this gives a depth as well as tenderness to her humours which entitles them to rank with the writer's happiest things; and though the odd little creature's talk is incessant when she is on the scene, it has the individuality that so seldom tires. It is veritably her own small "trick" and "manner," and is never mistakeable for any one else's. "I have been reading," Dickens wrote to me from France while he was writing the book, "a capital little story by Edmond About--_The Notary's Nose_. I have been trying other books; but so infernally conversational, that I forget who the people are before they have done talking, and don't in the least remember what they talked about before when they begin talking again!" The extreme contrast to his own art could not be defined more exactly; and other examples from this tale will be found in the differing members of the Wilfer family, in the riverside people at the Fellowship Porters, in such marvellous serio-comic scenes as that of Rogue Riderhood's restoration from drowning, and in those short and simple annals of Betty Higden's life and death which might have given saving virtue to a book more likely than this to perish prematurely. It has not the creative power which crowded his earlier page, and transformed into popular realities the shadows of his fancy; but the observation and humour he excelled in are not wanting to it, nor had there been, in his first completed work, more eloquent or generous pleading for the poor and neglected, than this last completed work contains. Betty Higden finishes what Oliver Twist began. DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA. He had scarcely closed that book in September, wearied somewhat with a labour of invention which had not been so free or self-sustaining as in the old facile and fertile days, when his customary contribution to Christmas became due from him; and his fancy, let loose in a narrower field, resumed its old luxury of enjoyment. Here are notices of it from his letters. "If people at large understand a Cheap Jack, my part of the Christmas number will do well. It is wonderfully like the real thing, of course a little refined and humoured." "I do hope that in the beginning and end of this Christmas number you will find something that will strike you as being fresh, forcible, and full of spirits." He described its mode of composition afterwards. "Tired with _Our Mutual_, I sat down to cast about for an idea, with a depressing notion that I was, for the moment, overworked. Suddenly, the little character that you will see, and all belonging to it, came flashing up in the most cheerful manner, and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it." This was _Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions_, one of the most popular of all the pieces selected for his readings, and a splendid example of his humour, pathos, and character. There were three more Christmas pieces before he made his last visit to America: _Barbox Brothers_, _The Boy at Mugby Station_, and _No Thoroughfare_: the last a joint piece of work with Mr. Wilkie Collins, who during Dickens's absence in the States transformed it into a play for Mr. Fechter, with a view to which it had been planned originally. There were also two papers written for first publication in America, _George Silverman's Explanation_, and _Holiday Romance_, containing about the quantity of half a shilling number of his ordinary serials, and paid for at a rate unexampled in literature. They occupied him not many days in the writing, and he received a thousand pounds for them. * * * * * The year after his return, as the reader knows, saw the commencement of the work which death interrupted. The fragment will hereafter be described; and here meanwhile may close my criticism--itself a fragment left for worthier completion by a stronger hand than mine. But at least I may hope that the ground has been cleared by it from those distinctions and comparisons never safely to be applied to an original writer, and which always more or less intercept his fair appreciation. It was long the fashion to set up wide divergences between novels of incident and manners, and novels of character; the narrower range being left to Fielding and Smollett, and the larger to Richardson; yet there are not many now who will accept such classification. Nor is there more truth in other like distinctions alleged between novelists who are assumed to be real, or ideal, in their methods of treatment. To any original novelist of the higher grade there is no meaning in these contrasted phrases. Neither mode can exist at all perfectly without the other. No matter how sensitive the mind to external impressions, or how keen the observation to whatever can be seen, without the rarer seeing of imagination nothing will be arrived at that is real in any genuine artist-sense. Reverse the proposition, and the result is expressed in an excellent remark of Lord Lytton's, that the happiest effort of imagination, however lofty it may be, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the real. I have said that Dickens felt criticism, of whatever kind, with too sharp a relish for the indifference he assumed to it; but the secret was that he believed himself to be entitled to higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving. It was the feeling which suggested a memorable saying of Wordsworth. "I am not at all desirous that any one should write a critique on my poems. If they be from above, they will do their own work in course of time; if not, they will perish as they ought." The something "from above" never seems to be absent from Dickens, even at his worst. When the strain upon his invention became apparent, and he could only work freely in a more confined space than of old, it was still able to assert itself triumphantly; and his influence over his readers was continued by it to the last day of his life. Looking back over the series of his writings, the first reflection that rises to the mind of any thoughtful person, is one of thankfulness that the most popular of writers, who had carried into the lowest scenes and conditions an amount of observation, fun, and humour not approached by any of his contemporaries, should never have sullied that world-wide influence by a hint of impurity or a possibility of harm. Nor is there anything more surprising than the freshness and variety of character which those writings include, within the range of the not numerous types of character that were the limit of their author's genius. For, this also appears, upon any review of them collectively, that the teeming life which is in them is that of the time in which his own life was passed; and that with the purpose of showing vividly its form and pressure, was joined the hope and design to leave it better than he found it. It has been objected that humanity receives from him no addition to its best types; that the burlesque humourist is always stronger in him than the reflective moralist; that the light thrown by his genius into out of the way corners of life never steadily shines in its higher beaten ways; and that beside his pictures of what man is or does, there is no attempt to show, by delineation of an exalted purpose or a great career, what man is able to be or to do. In the charge abstractedly there is truth; but the fair remark upon it is that whatever can be regarded as essential in the want implied by it will be found in other forms in his writings, that the perfect innocence of their laughter and tears has been itself a prodigious blessing, and that it is otherwise incident to so great a humourist to work after the fashion most natural to the genius of humour. What kind of work it has been in his case, the attempt is made in preceding pages to show; and on the whole it can be said with some certainty that the best ideals in this sense are obtained, not by presenting with added comeliness or grace the figures which life is ever eager to present as of its best, but by connecting the singularities and eccentricities, which ordinary life is apt to reject or overlook, with the appreciation that is deepest and the laws of insight that are most universal. It is thus that all things human are happily brought within human sympathy. It was at the heart of everything Dickens wrote. It was the secret of the hope he had that his books might help to make people better; and it so guarded them from evil, that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written which might not be put into the hands of a little child.[274] It made him the intimate of every English household, and a familiar friend wherever the language is spoken whose stores of harmless pleasure he has so largely increased. "The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except Abraham Lincoln alone," said Mr. Horace Greeley, describing the profound and universal grief of America at his death, "has carried mourning into so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the ranks of society." "The terrible news from England," wrote Longfellow to me (Cambridge, Mass. 12th of June 1870), "fills us all with inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are sorrowing for him. . . . I never knew an author's death cause such general mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief . . ." Nor was evidence then wanting, that far beyond the limits of society on that vast continent the English writer's influence had penetrated. Of this, very touching illustration was given in my first volume; and proof even more striking has since been afforded to me, that not merely in wild or rude communities, but in life the most savage and solitary, his genius had helped to while time away. "Like all Americans who read," writes an American gentleman, "and that takes in nearly all our people, I am an admirer and student of Dickens. . . . Its perusal" (that of my second volume) "has recalled an incident which may interest you. Twelve or thirteen years ago I crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains as a Government surveyor under a famous frontiersman and civil engineer--Colonel Lander. We were too early by a month, and became snow-bound just on the very summit. Under these circumstances it was necessary to abandon the wagons for a time, and drive the stock (mules) down the mountains to the valleys where there was pasturage and running water. This was a long and difficult task, occupying several days. On the second day, in a spot where we expected to find nothing more human than a grizzly bear or an elk, we found a little hut, built of pine boughs and a few rough boards clumsily hewn out of small trees with an axe. The hut was covered with snow many feet deep, excepting only the hole in the roof which served for a chimney, and a small pit-like place in front to permit egress. The occupant came forth to hail us and solicit whisky and tobacco. He was dressed in a suit made entirely of flour-sacks, and was curiously labelled on various parts of his person _Best Family Flour_. _Extra._ His head was covered by a wolf's skin drawn from the brute's head--with the ears standing erect in a fierce alert manner. He was a most extraordinary object, and told us he had not seen a human being in four months. He lived on bear and elk meat and flour laid in during his short summer. Emigrants in the season paid him a kind of ferry-toll. I asked him how he passed his time, and he went to a barrel and produced _Nicholas Nickleby_ and _Pickwick_. I found he knew them almost by heart. He did not know, or seem to care, about the author; but he gloried in Sam Weller, despised Squeers, and would probably have taken the latter's scalp with great skill and cheerfulness. For Mr. Winkle he had no feeling but contempt, and in fact regarded a fowling-piece as only a toy for a squaw. He had no Bible; and perhaps if he practised in his rude savage way all Dickens taught, he might less have felt the want even of that companion." FOOTNOTES: [261] I hope my readers will find themselves able to understand that, as well as this which follows: "What seems preposterous, impossible to us, seemed to him simple fact of observation. When he imagined a street, a house, a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way of ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of actual perception, all the salient details obtruding themselves on his attention. He, seeing it thus vividly, made us also see it; and believing in its reality however fantastic, he communicated something of his belief to us. He presented it in such relief that we ceased to think of it as a picture. So definite and insistent was the image, that even while knowing it was false we could not help, for a moment, being affected, as it were, by his hallucination." [262] "Though," John Ballantyne told Lockhart, "he often turned himself on his pillow with a groan of torment, he usually continued the sentence in the same breath. But when dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter--he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and as it were acting the parts." _Lockhart_, vi. 67-8. The statement of James Ballantyne is at p. 89 of the same volume. The original incidents on which Scott had founded the tale he remembered, but "not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of humour, nor anything with which he was connected as the writer of the work." [263] "Do you know _Master Humphrey's Clock_! I admire Nell in the _Old Curiosity Shop_ exceedingly. The whole thing is a good deal borrowed from _Wilhelm Meister_. But little Nell is a far purer, lovelier, more _English_ conception than Mignon, treasonable as the saying would seem to some. No doubt it was suggested by Mignon."--Sara Coleridge to Aubrey de Vere (_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 269-70). Expressing no opinion on this comparison, I may state it as within my knowledge that the book referred to was not then known to Dickens. [264] The distinction I then pointed out was remarked by Sara Coleridge (_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 169) in writing of her children. "They like to talk to me . . . above all about the productions of Dickens, the never-to-be-exhausted fun of _Pickwick_, and the capital new strokes of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. This last work contains, besides all the fun, some very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the evil and odiousness of selfishness are more forcibly brought out, or in a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations, or at least on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these points." [265] All the remarks in my text had been some time in type when Lord Lytton sent me what follows, from one of his father's manuscript (and unpublished) note-books. Substantially it agrees with what I have said; and such unconscious testimony of a brother novelist of so high a rank, careful in the study of his art, is of special value. "The greatest masters of the novel of modern manners have generally availed themselves of Humour for the illustration of manners; and have, with a deep and true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed the humour almost to the verge of caricature. For, as the serious ideal requires a certain exaggeration in the proportions of the natural, so also does the ludicrous. Thus Aristophanes, in painting the humours of his time, resorts to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls the Clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons Frogs and Gods to unite in his satire on Euripides. The Don Quixote of Cervantes never lived, nor, despite the vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain; but the art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the humorous by means of the exaggerated. With more or less qualification, the same may be said of Parson Adams, of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even of the Vicar of Wakefield. . . . It follows therefore that art and correctness are far from identical, and that the one is sometimes proved by the disdain of the other. For the ideal, whether humorous or serious, does not consist in the imitation but in the exaltation of nature. And we must accordingly enquire of art, not how far it resembles what we have seen, so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine." [266] I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting, from the best criticism of Dickens I have seen since his death, remarks very pertinent to what is said in my text. "Dickens possessed an imagination unsurpassed, not only in vividness, but in swiftness. I have intentionally avoided all needless comparisons of his works with those of other writers of his time, some of whom have gone before him to their rest, while others survive to gladden the darkness and relieve the monotony of our daily life. But in the power of his imagination--of this I am convinced--he surpassed them, one and all. That imagination could call up at will those associations which, could we but summon them in their full number, would bind together the human family, and make that expression no longer a name, but a living reality. . . . Such associations sympathy alone can warm into life, and imagination alone can at times discern. The great humourist reveals them to every one of us; and his genius is indeed an inspiration from no human source, in that it enables him to render this service to the brotherhood of mankind. But more than this. So marvellously has this earth become the inheritance of mankind, that there is not a thing upon it, animate or inanimate, with which, or with the likeness of which, man's mind has not come into contact; . . . with which human feelings, aspirations, thoughts, have not acquired an endless variety of single or subtle associations. . . . These also, which we imperfectly divine or carelessly pass by, the imagination of genius distinctly reveals to us, and powerfully impresses upon us. When they appeal directly to the emotions of the heart, it is the power of Pathos which has awakened them; and when the suddenness, the unexpectedness, the apparent oddity of the one by the side of the other, strike the mind with irresistible force, it is the equally divine gift of Humour which has touched the spring of laughter by the side of the spring of tears."--_Charles Dickens. A Lecture by Professor Ward. Delivered in Manchester, 30th November, 1870._ [267] The opening of this letter (25th of August 1859), referring to a conviction for murder, afterwards reversed by a Home Office pardon against the continued and steadily expressed opinion of the judge who tried the case, is much too characteristic of the writer to be lost. "I cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of our brave and excellent friend. . . . I have often had more than half a mind to write and thank that upright judge. I declare to heaven that I believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and courage can render to society. . . . Of course I have been driving the girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man--because a merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory, Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson. [268] Mr. Grant White, whose edition of Shakespeare has been received with much respect in England. [269] A dear friend now gone, used laughingly to relate what outcry there used to be, on the night of the week when a number was due, for "that Pip nonsense!" and what roars of laughter followed, though at first it was entirely put aside as not on any account to have time wasted over it. [270] There was no Chapter xx. as now; but the sentence which opens it ("For eleven years" in the original, altered to "eight years") followed the paragraph about his business partnership with Herbert, and led to Biddy's question whether he is sure he does not fret for Estella ("I am sure and certain, Biddy" as originally written, altered to "O no--I think not, Biddy"): from which point here was the close. "It was two years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune. I was in England again--in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip--when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another. 'I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!' (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be." [271] On this reproach, from a Jewish lady whom he esteemed, he had written two years before. "Fagin, in _Oliver Twist_, is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably _was_ a Jew. But surely no sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe--firstly, that all the rest of the wicked _dramatis personæ_ are Christians; and, secondly, that he is called 'The Jew,' not because of his religion, but because of his race." [272] Mr. Marcus Stone had, upon the separate issue of the _Tale of Two Cities_, taken the place of Mr. Hablot Browne as his illustrator. _Hard Times_ and the first edition of _Great Expectations_ were not illustrated; but when Pip's story appeared in one volume, Mr. Stone contributed designs for it. [273] He thus spoke of it in his "Postscript in lieu of Preface" (dated 2nd of September 1865), which accompanied the last number of the story under notice. "On Friday the ninth of June in the present year, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage--nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn--to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. The same happy result attended Miss Bella Wilfer on her wedding-day, and Mr. Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone's red neckerchief as he lay asleep. I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever, than I was then, until there shall be written against my life the two words with which I have this day closed this book--THE END." [274] I borrow this language from the Bishop of Manchester, who, on the third day after Dickens's death, in the Abbey where he was so soon to be laid, closed a plea for the toleration of differences of opinion where the foundations of religious truth are accepted, with these words. "It will not be out of harmony with the line of thought we have been pursuing--certainly it will be in keeping with the associations of this place, dear to Englishmen, not only as one of the proudest Christian temples, but as containing the memorials of so many who by their genius in arts, or arms, or statesmanship, or literature, have made England what she is--if in the simplest and briefest words I allude to that sad and unexpected death which has robbed English literature of one of its highest living ornaments, and the news of which, two mornings ago, must have made every household in England feel as though they had lost a personal friend. He has been called in one notice an apostle of the people. I suppose it is meant that he had a mission, but in a style and fashion of his own; a gospel, a cheery, joyous, gladsome message, which the people understood, and by which they could hardly help being bettered; for it was the gospel of kindliness, of brotherly love, of sympathy in the widest sense of the word. I am sure I have felt in myself the healthful spirit of his teaching. Possibly we might not have been able to subscribe to the same creed in relation to God, but I think we should have subscribed to the same creed in relation to man. He who has taught us our duty to our fellow men better than we knew it before, who knew so well to weep with them that wept, and to rejoice with them that rejoiced, who has shown forth in all his knowledge of the dark corners of the earth how much sunshine may rest upon the lowliest lot, who had such evident sympathy with suffering, and such a natural instinct of purity that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written which might not be put into the hands of a little child, must be regarded by those who recognise the diversity of the gifts of the spirit as a teacher sent from God. He would have been welcomed as a fellow-labourer in the common interests of humanity by Him who asked the question 'If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?'" CHAPTER XV. AMERICA REVISITED: NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1867. 1867. In Boston--Warmth of the Greeting--Old and New Friends--Changes since 1842--Sale of Tickets in New York--First Boston Reading--Profits--Scene at First New York Sales--A Fire at the Hotel--Increase of New York City--Story of _Black Crook_--Local and General Politics--Railway Travelling--Police of New York--Again in Boston--More Fires--New York Newspapers generally--Cities chosen for Readings--The Webster Murder in 1849--Again at New York--Illness--Mr. Fields's Account of Dickens while in America--Miseries of American Travel. IT is the intention of this and the following chapter to narrate the incidents of the visit to America in Dickens's own language, and in that only. They will consist almost exclusively of extracts from his letters written home, to members of his family and to myself. On the night of Tuesday the 19th of November he arrived at Boston, where he took up his residence at the Parker House hotel; and his first letter (21st) stated that the tickets for the first four Readings, all to that time issued, had been sold immediately on their becoming saleable. "An immense train of people waited in the freezing street for twelve hours, and passed into the office in their turns, as at a French theatre. The receipts already taken for these nights exceed our calculation by more than £250." Up to the last moment, he had not been able to clear off wholly a shade of misgiving that some of the old grudges might make themselves felt; but from the instant of his setting foot in Boston not a vestige of such fear remained. The greeting was to the full as extraordinary as that of twenty-five years before, and was given now, as then, to the man who had made himself the most popular writer in the country. His novels and tales were crowding the shelves of all the dealers in books in all the cities of the Union. In every house, in every car, on every steamboat, in every theatre of America, the characters, the fancies, the phraseology of Dickens were become familiar beyond those of any other writer of books. "Even in England," said one of the New York journals, "Dickens is less known than here; and of the millions here who treasure every word he has written, there are tens of thousands who would make a large sacrifice to see and hear the man who has made happy so many hours. Whatever sensitiveness there once was to adverse or sneering criticism, the lapse of a quarter of a century, and the profound significance of a great war, have modified or removed." The point was more pithily, and as truly, put by Mr. Horace Greeley in the _Tribune_. "The fame as a novelist which Mr. Dickens had already created in America, and which, at the best, has never yielded him anything particularly munificent or substantial, is become his capital stock in the present enterprise." The first Reading was appointed for the second of December, and in the interval he saw some old friends and made some new ones.[275] Boston he was fond of comparing to Edinburgh as Edinburgh was in the days when several dear friends of his own still lived there. Twenty-five years had changed much in the American city; some genial faces were gone, and on ground which he had left a swamp he found now the most princely streets; but there was no abatement of the old warmth of kindness, and, with every attention and consideration shown to him, there was no intrusion. He was not at first completely conscious of the change in this respect, or of the prodigious increase in the size of Boston. But the latter grew upon him from day to day, and then there was impressed along with it a contrast to which it was difficult to reconcile himself. Nothing enchanted him so much as what he again saw of the delightful domestic life of Cambridge, simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate; and it seemed impossible to believe that within half an hour's distance of it should be found what might at any time be witnessed in such hotels as that which he was staying at: crowds of swaggerers, loafers, bar-loungers, and dram-drinkers, that seemed to be making up, from day to day, not the least important-part of the human life of the city. But no great mercantile resort in the States, such as Boston had now become, could be without that drawback; and fortunate should we account any place to be, though even so plague-afflicted, that has yet so near it the healthier influence of the other life which our older world has wellnigh lost altogether. "The city has increased prodigiously in twenty-five years," he wrote to his daughter Mary. "It has grown more mercantile. It is like Leeds mixed with Preston, and flavoured with New Brighton. Only, instead of smoke and fog, there is an exquisitely bright light air." "Cambridge is exactly as I left it," he wrote to me. "Boston more mercantile, and much larger. The hotel I formerly stayed at, and thought a very big one, is now regarded as a very small affair. I do not yet notice--but a day, you know, is not a long time for observation!--any marked change in character or habits. In this immense hotel I live very high up, and have a hot and cold bath in my bed room, with other comforts not in existence in my former day. The cost of living is enormous." "Two of the staff are at New York," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 25th of November, "where we are at our wits' end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators. We have communications from all parts of the country, but we take no offer whatever. The young under-graduates of Cambridge have made a representation to Longfellow that they are 500 strong and cannot get one ticket. I don't know what is to be done, but I suppose I must read there, somehow. We are all in the clouds until I shall have broken ground in New York." The sale of tickets, there, had begun two days before the first reading in Boston. "At the New York barriers," he wrote to his daughter on the first of December, "where the tickets were on sale and the people ranged as at the Paris theatres, speculators went up and down offering twenty dollars for any body's place. The money was in no case accepted. But one man sold two tickets for the second, third, and fourth nights; his payment in exchange being one ticket for the first night, fifty dollars (about £7 10_s._), and a 'brandy-cocktail.'" On Monday the second of December he read for the first time in Boston, his subjects being the _Carol_ and the _Trial from Pickwick_; and his reception, from an audience than which perhaps none more remarkable could have been brought together, went beyond all expectations formed. "It is really impossible," he wrote to me next morning, "to exaggerate the magnificence of the reception or the effect of the reading. The whole city will talk of nothing else and hear of nothing else to-day. Every ticket for those announced here, and in New York, is sold. All are sold at the highest price, for which in our calculation we made no allowance; and it is impossible to keep out speculators who immediately sell at a premium. At the decreased rate of money even, we had above £450 English in the house last night; and the New York hall holds 500 people more. Everything looks brilliant beyond the most sanguine hopes, and I was quite as cool last night as though I were reading at Chatham." The next night he read again; and also on Thursday and Friday; on Wednesday he had rested; and on Saturday he travelled to New York. He had written, the day before he left, that he was making a clear profit of thirteen hundred pounds English a week, even allowing seven dollars to the pound; but words were added having no good omen in them, that the weather was taking a turn of even unusual severity, and that he found the climate, in the suddenness of its changes, "and the wide leaps they take," excessively trying. "The work is of course rather trying too; but the sound position that everything must be subservient to it enables me to keep aloof from invitations. To-morrow," ran the close of the letter, "we move to New York. We cannot beat the speculators in our tickets. We sell no more than six to any one person for the course of four readings; but these speculators, who sell at greatly increased prices and make large profits, will employ any number of men to buy. One of the chief of them--now living in this house, in order that he may move as we move!--can put on 50 people in any place we go to; and thus he gets 300 tickets into his own hands." Almost while Dickens was writing these words an eye-witness was describing to a Philadelphia paper the sale of the New York tickets. The pay-place was to open at nine on a Wednesday morning, and at midnight of Tuesday a long line of speculators were assembled in _queue_; at two in the morning a few honest buyers had begun to arrive; at five there were, of all classes, two lines of not less than 800 each; at eight there were at least 5000 persons in the two lines; at nine each line was more than three-quarters of a mile in length, and neither became sensibly shorter during the whole morning. "The tickets for the course were all sold before noon. Members of families relieved each other in the _queues_; waiters flew across the streets and squares from the neighbouring restaurant, to serve parties who were taking their breakfast in the open December air; while excited men offered five and ten dollars for the mere permission to exchange places with other persons standing nearer the head of the line!" The effect of the reading in New York corresponded with this marvellous preparation, and Dickens characterised his audience as an unexpected support to him; in its appreciation quick and unfailing, and highly demonstrative in its satisfactions. On the 11th of December he wrote to his daughter: "Amazing success. A very fine audience, far better than at Boston. _Carol_ and _Trial_ on first night, great: still greater, _Copperfield_ and _Bob Sawyer_ on second. For the tickets of the four readings of next week there were, at nine o'clock this morning, 3000 people in waiting, and they had begun to assemble in the bitter cold as early as two o'clock in the morning." To myself he wrote on the 15th, adding touches to the curious picture. "Dolby has got into trouble about the manner of issuing the tickets for next week's series. He cannot get four thousand people into a room holding only two thousand, he cannot induce people to pay at the ordinary price for themselves instead of giving thrice as much to speculators, and he is attacked in all directions . . . I don't much like my hall, for it has two large balconies far removed from the platform; but no one ever waylays me as I go into it or come out of it, and it is kept as rigidly quiet as the Français at a rehearsal. We have not yet had in it less than £430 per night, allowing for the depreciated currency! I send £3000 to England by this packet. From all parts of the States, applications and offers continually come in. We go to Boston next Saturday for two more readings, and come back here on Christmas Day for four more. I am not yet bound to go elsewhere, except three times (each time for two nights) to Philadelphia; thinking it wisest to keep free for the largest places. I have had an action brought against me by a man who considered himself injured (and really may have been) in the matter of his tickets. Personal service being necessary, I was politely waited on by a marshal for that purpose; whom I received with the greatest courtesy, apparently very much to his amazement. The action was handsomely withdrawn next day, and the plaintiff paid his own costs. . . . Dolby hopes you are satisfied with the figures so far; the profit each night exceeding the estimated profit by £130 odd. He is anxious I should also tell you that he is the most unpopular and best-abused man in America." Next day a letter to his sister-in-law related an incident too common in American cities to disconcert any but strangers. He had lodged himself, I should have said, at the Westminster Hotel in Irving Place. "Last night I was getting into bed just at 12 o'clock, when Dolby came to my door to inform me that the house was on fire. I got Scott up directly; told him first to pack the books and clothes for the Readings; dressed, and pocketed my jewels and papers; while the manager stuffed himself out with money. Meanwhile the police and firemen were in the house tracing the mischief to its source in a certain fire-grate. By this time the hose was laid all through from a great tank on the roof, and everybody turned out to help. It was the oddest sight, and people had put the strangest things on! After chopping and cutting with axes through stairs, and much handing about of water, the fire was confined to a dining-room in which it had originated; and then everybody talked to everybody else, the ladies being particularly loquacious and cheerful. I may remark that the second landlord (from both, but especially the first, I have had untiring attention) no sooner saw me on this agitating occasion, than, with his property blazing, he insisted on taking me down into a room full of hot smoke, to drink brandy and water with him! And so we got to bed again about 2." Dickens had been a week in New York before he was able to identify the great city which a lapse of twenty-five years had so prodigiously increased. "The only portion that has even now come back to me," he wrote, "is the part of Broadway in which the Carlton Hotel (long since destroyed) used to stand. There is a very fine new park in the outskirts, and the number of grand houses and splendid equipages is quite surprising. There are hotels close here with 500 bedrooms and I don't know how many boarders; but this hotel is quite as quiet as, and not much larger than, Mivart's in Brook Street. My rooms are all en suite, and I come and go by a private door and private staircase communicating with my bed-room. The waiters are French, and one might be living in Paris. One of the two proprietors is also proprietor of Niblo's Theatre, and the greatest care is taken of me. Niblo's great attraction, the _Black Crook_, has now been played every night for 16 months(!), and is the most preposterous peg to hang ballets on that was ever seen. The people who act in it have not the slightest idea of what it is about, and never had; but, after taxing my intellectual powers to the utmost, I fancy that I have discovered Black Crook to be a malignant hunchback leagued with the Powers of Darkness to separate two lovers; and that the Powers of Lightness coming (in no skirts whatever) to the rescue, he is defeated. I am quite serious in saying that I do not suppose there are two pages of _All the Year Round_ in the whole piece (which acts all night); the whole of the rest of it being ballets of all sorts, perfectly unaccountable processions, and the Donkey out of last year's Covent Garden pantomime! At the other theatres, comic operas, melodramas, and domestic dramas prevail all over the city, and my stories play no inconsiderable part in them. I go nowhere, having laid down the rule that to combine visiting with my work would be absolutely impossible. . . . The Fenian explosion at Clerkenwell was telegraphed here in a few hours. I do not think there is any sympathy whatever with the Fenians on the part of the American people, though political adventurers may make capital out of a show of it. But no doubt large sections of the Irish population of this State are themselves Fenian; and the local politics of the place are in a most depraved condition, if half of what is said to me be true. I prefer not to talk of these things, but at odd intervals I look round for myself. Great social improvements in respect of manners and forbearance have come to pass since I was here before, but in public life I see as yet but little change." He had got through half of his first New York readings when a winter storm came on, and from this time until very near his return the severity of the weather was exceptional even for America. When the first snow fell, the railways were closed for some days; and he described New York crowded with sleighs, and the snow piled up in enormous walls the whole length of the streets. "I turned out in a rather gorgeous sleigh yesterday with any quantity of buffalo robes, and made an imposing appearance." "If you were to behold me driving out," he wrote to his daughter, "furred up to the moustache, with an immense white red-and-yellow-striped rug for a covering, you would suppose me to be of Hungarian or Polish nationality." These protections nevertheless availed him little; and when the time came for getting back to Boston, he found himself at the close of his journey with a cold and cough that never again left him until he had quitted the country, and of which the effects became more and more disastrous. For the present there was little allusion to this, his belief at the first being strong that he should overmaster it; but it soon forced itself into all his letters. His railway journey otherwise had not been agreeable. "The railways are truly alarming. Much worse (because more worn I suppose) than when I was here before. We were beaten about yesterday, as if we had been aboard the Cuba. Two rivers have to be crossed, and each time the whole train is banged aboard a big steamer. The steamer rises and falls with the river, which the railroad don't do; and the train is either banged up hill or banged down hill. In coming off the steamer at one of these crossings yesterday, we were banged up such a height that the rope broke, and one carriage rushed back with a run down-hill into the boat again. I whisked out in a moment, and two or three others after me; but nobody else seemed to care about it. The treatment of the luggage is perfectly outrageous. Nearly every case I have is already broken. When we started from Boston yesterday, I beheld, to my unspeakable amazement, Scott, my dresser, leaning a flushed countenance against the wall of the car, and _weeping bitterly_. It was over my smashed writing-desk. Yet the arrangements for luggage are excellent, if the porters would not be beyond description reckless." The same excellence of provision, and flinging away of its advantages, are observed in connection with another subject in the same letter. "The halls are excellent. Imagine one holding two thousand people, seated with exact equality for every one of them, and every one seated separately. I have nowhere, at home or abroad, seen so fine a police as the police of New York; and their bearing in the streets is above all praise. On the other hand, the laws for regulation of public vehicles, clearing of streets, and removal of obstructions, are wildly outraged by the people for whose benefit they are intended. Yet there is undoubtedly improvement in every direction, and I am taking time to make up my mind on things in general. Let me add that I have been tempted out at three in the morning to visit one of the large police station-houses, and was so fascinated by the study of a horrible photograph-book of thieves' portraits that I couldn't shut it up." A letter of the same date (22nd) to his sister-in-law told of personal attentions awaiting him on his return to Boston by which he was greatly touched. He found his rooms garnished with flowers and holly, with real red berries, and with festoons of moss; and the homely Christmas look of the place quite affected him. "There is a certain Captain Dolliver belonging to the Boston custom-house, who came off in the little steamer that brought me ashore from the Cuba; and he took it into his head that he would have a piece of English mistletoe brought out in this week's Cunard, which should be laid upon my breakfast-table. And there it was this morning. In such affectionate touches as this, these New England people are especially amiable. . . . As a general rule you may lay it down that whatever you see about me in the papers is not true; but you may generally lend a more believing ear to the Philadelphia correspondent of the _Times_, a well-informed gentleman. Our hotel in New York was on fire again the other night. But fires in this country are quite matters of course. There was a large one in Boston at four this morning; and I don't think a single night has passed, since I have been under the protection of the Eagle, that I have not heard the Fire Bells dolefully clanging all over both cities." The violent abuse of his manager by portions of the press is the subject of the rest of the letter, and receives farther illustration in one of the same date to me. "A good specimen of the sort of newspaper you and I know something of, came out in Boston here this morning. The editor had applied for our advertisements, saying that 'it was at Mr. D's disposal for paragraphs.' The advertisements were not sent; Dolby did not enrich its columns paragraphically; and among its news to-day is the item that 'this chap calling himself Dolby got drunk down town last night, and was taken to the police station for fighting an Irishman!' I am sorry to say that I don't find anybody to be much shocked by this liveliness." It is right to add what was said to me a few days later. "The _Tribune_ is an excellent paper. Horace Greeley is editor in chief, and a considerable shareholder too. All the people connected with it whom I have seen are of the best class. It is also, a very fine property--but here the _New York Herald_ beats it hollow, hollow, hollow! Another able and well edited paper is the _New York Times_. A most respectable journal too is Bryant's _Evening Post_, excellently written. There is generally a much more responsible and respectable tone than prevailed formerly, however small may be the literary merit, among papers pointed out to me as of large circulation. In much of the writing there is certainly improvement, but it might be more widely spread." The time had now come when the course his Readings were to take independently of the two leading cities must be settled, and the general tour made out. His agent's original plan was that they should be in New York every week. "But I say No. By the 10th of January I shall have read to 35,000 people in that city alone. Put the readings out of the reach of all the people behind them, for the time. It is that one of the popular peculiarities which I most particularly notice, that they must not have a thing too easily. Nothing in the country lasts long; and a thing is prized the more, the less easy it is made. Reflecting therefore that I shall want to close, in April, with farewell readings here and in New York, I am convinced that the crush and pressure upon these necessary to their adequate success is only to be got by absence; and that the best thing I can do is not to give either city as much reading as it wants now, but to be independent of both while both are most enthusiastic. I have therefore resolved presently to announce in New York so many readings (I mean a certain number) as the last that can be given there, before I travel to promised places; and that we select the best places, with the largest halls, on our list. This will include, East here--the two or three best New England towns; South--Baltimore and Washington; West--Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis; and towards Niagara--Cleveland and Buffalo. Philadelphia we are already pledged to, for six nights; and the scheme will pretty easily bring us here again twice before the farewells. I feel convinced that this is the sound policy." (It was afterwards a little modified, as will be seen, by public occurrences and his own condition of health; the West, as well as a promise to Canada, having to be abandoned; but otherwise it was carried out.) "I read here to-morrow and Tuesday; all tickets being sold to the end of the series, even for subjects not announced. I have not read a single time at a lower clear profit per night (all deductions made) than £315. But rely upon it I shall take great care not to read oftener than four times a week--after this next week, when I stand committed to five. The inevitable tendency of the staff, when these great houses excite them, is, in the words of an old friend of ours, to 'hurge the hartist hon;' and a night or two ago I had to cut away five readings from _their_ list." An incident at Boston should have mention before he resumes his readings in New York. In the interval since he was first in America, the Harvard professor of chemistry, Dr. Webster, whom he had at that visit met among the honoured men who held chairs in their Cambridge University, had been hanged for the murder, committed in his laboratory in the college, of a friend who had lent him money, portions of whose body lay concealed under the lid of the lecture-room table where the murderer continued to meet his students. "Being in Cambridge," Dickens wrote to Lord Lytton, "I thought I would go over the Medical School, and see the exact localities where Professor Webster did that amazing murder, and worked so hard to rid himself of the body of the murdered man. (I find there is of course no rational doubt that the Professor was always a secretly cruel man.) They were horribly grim, private, cold, and quiet; the identical furnace smelling fearfully (some anatomical broth in it I suppose) as if the body were still there; jars of pieces of sour mortality standing about, like the forty robbers in _Ali Baba_ after being scalded to death; and bodies near us ready to be carried in to next morning's lecture. At the house where I afterwards dined I heard an amazing and fearful story; told by one who had been at a dinner-party of ten or a dozen, at Webster's, less than a year before the murder. They began rather uncomfortably, in consequence of one of the guests (the victim of an instinctive antipathy) starting up with the sweat pouring down his face, and crying out, 'O Heaven! There's a cat somewhere in the room!' The cat was found and ejected, but they didn't get on very well. Left with their wine, they were getting on a little better; when Webster suddenly told the servants to turn the gas off and bring in that bowl of burning minerals which he had prepared, in order that the company might see how ghastly they looked by its weird light. All this was done, and every man was looking, horror-stricken, at his neighbour; when Webster was seen bending over the bowl with a rope round his neck, holding up the end of the rope, with his head on one side and his tongue lolled out, to represent a hanged man!" Dickens read at Boston on the 23rd and the 24th of December, and on Christmas day travelled back to New York where he was to read on the 26th. The last words written before he left were of illness. "The low action of the heart, or whatever it is, has inconvenienced me greatly this last week. On Monday night, after the reading, I was laid upon a bed, in a very faint and shady state; and on the Tuesday I did not get up till the afternoon." But what in reality was less grave took outwardly the form of a greater distress; and the effects of the cold which had struck him in travelling to Boston, as yet not known to his English friends, appear most to have alarmed those about him. I depart from my rule in this narrative, otherwise strictly observed, in singling out one of those friends for mention by name: but a business connection with the Readings, as well as untiring offices of personal kindness and sympathy, threw Mr. Fields into closer relations with Dickens from arrival to departure, than any other person had; and his description of the condition of health in which Dickens now quitted Boston and went through the rest of the labour he had undertaken, will be a sad though fit prelude to what the following chapter has to tell. "He went from Boston to New York carrying with him a severe catarrh contracted in our climate. He was quite ill from the effects of the disease; but he fought courageously against them. . . . His spirit was wonderful, and, although he lost all appetite and could partake of very little food, he was always cheerful and ready for his work when the evening came round. A dinner was tendered to him by some of his literary friends in Boston; but he was so ill the day before that the banquet had to be given up. The strain upon his strength and nerves was very great during all the months he remained, and only a man of iron will could have accomplished what he did. He was accustomed to talk and write a good deal about eating and drinking, but I have rarely seen a man eat and drink less. He liked to dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but when the punch was ready he drank less of it than any one who might be present. It was the sentiment of the thing and not the thing itself that engaged his attention. I scarcely saw him eat a hearty meal during his whole stay. Both at Parker's hotel in Boston, and at the Westminster in New York, everything was arranged by the proprietors for his comfort, and tempting dishes to pique his invalid appetite were sent up at different hours of the day; but the influenza had seized him with masterful power, and held the strong man down till he left the country." When he arrived in New York on the evening of Christmas Day he found a letter from his daughter. Answering her next day he told her: "I wanted it much, for I had a frightful cold (English colds are nothing to those of this country) and was very miserable. . . . It is a bad country to be unwell and travelling in. You are one of, say, a hundred people in a heated car with a great stove in it, all the little windows being closed; and the bumping and banging about are indescribable, the atmosphere detestable, the ordinary motion all but intolerable." The following day this addition was made to the letter. "I managed to read last night, but it was as much as I could do. To-day I am so very unwell that I have sent for a doctor. He has just been, and is in doubt whether I shall not have to stop reading for a while." His stronger will prevailed, and he went on without stopping. On the last day of the year he announced to us that though he had been very low he was getting right again; that in a couple of days he should have accomplished a fourth of the entire Readings; and that the first month of the new year would see him through Philadelphia and Baltimore, as well as through two more nights in Boston. He also prepared his English friends for the startling intelligence they might shortly expect, of four readings coming off in a church, before an audience of two thousand people accommodated in pews, and with himself emerging from a vestry. FOOTNOTES: [275] Among these I think he was most delighted with the great naturalist and philosopher, Agassiz, whose death is unhappily announced while I write, and as to whom it will no longer be unbecoming to quote his allusion. "Agassiz, who married the last Mrs. Felton's sister, is not only one of the most accomplished but the most natural and jovial of men." Again he says: "I cannot tell you how pleased I was by Agassiz, a most charming fellow, or how I have regretted his seclusion for a while by reason of his mother's death." A valued correspondent, Mr. Grant Wilson, sends me a list of famous Americans who greeted Dickens at his first visit, and in the interval had passed away. "It is melancholy to contemplate the large number of American authors who had, between the first and second visits of Mr. Dickens, 'gone hence, to be no more seen.' The sturdy Cooper, the gentle Irving, his friend and kinsman Paulding, Prescott the historian and Percival the poet, the eloquent Everett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, N. P. Willis, the genial Halleck, and many lesser lights, including Prof. Felton and Geo. P. Morris, had died during the quarter of a century that elapsed between Dickens's visits to this country, leaving a new generation of writers to extend the hand of friendship to him on his second coming."--Let me add to this that Dickens was pleased, at this second visit, to see his old secretary who had travelled so agreeably with him through his first tour of triumph. "He would have known him anywhere." CHAPTER XVI. AMERICA REVISITED: JANUARY TO APRIL 1868. 1868. Speculators and the Public--Republican Self-help--Receipts affected by Speculators--Again at Boston--Hit of _Marigold_ and of _Boots at Holly Tree_--Chapel Readings at Brooklyn--Energy of New York Speculators--At Philadelphia--Irish Element in New York--Improved Social Ways--Result of Thirty-four Readings--Shadow to the Sunshine--Arrangements for Washington--At Baltimore--Success in Philadelphia--Value of a Vote--Objections to Coloured People--At Washington--With Sumner and Stanton--Lincoln's last Cabinet Council--Lincoln's Dream--Interview with President Johnson--Incident at First Reading--One of the Audience--A Day at the Readings--Proposed Walking-match--In his Hotel at Philadelphia--Providence and New Haven--North-west Tour--President's Impeachment--Political Excitement--Boston Audiences--Struggle for Tickets in Remote Places--At Rochester--At Syracuse and Buffalo--American Female Beauty--Suspension Bridge at Niagara--Final Impression of the Falls--At Utica--Reading at Albany--New England Engagements--Again attacked by Lameness--Reading at New Bedford--"Nearly used up"--Farewell Readings--Last Boston Readings--New York Farewells--Receipts throughout--Public Dinner to Dickens. THE Reading on the third of January closed a fourth of the entire series, and on that day Dickens wrote of the trouble brought on them by the "speculators," which to some extent had affected unfavourably the three previous nights in New York. When adventurers buy up the best places, the public resent it by refusing the worst; to prevent it by first helping themselves, being the last thing they ever think of doing. "We try to withhold the best seats from the speculators, but the unaccountable thing is that the great mass of the public buy of them (prefer it), and the rest of the public are injured if we have not got those very seats to sell them. We have now a travelling staff of six men, in spite of which Dolby, who is leaving me to-day to sell tickets in Philadelphia to-morrow morning, will no doubt get into a tempest of difficulties. Of course also, in such a matter, as many obstacles as possible are thrown in an Englishman's way; and he may himself be a little injudicious into the bargain. Last night, for instance, he met one of the 'ushers' (who show people to their seats) coming in with one of our men. It is against orders that any one employed in front should go out during the reading, and he took this man to task in the British manner. Instantly, the free and independent usher put on his hat and walked off. Seeing which, all the other free and independent ushers (some 20 in number) put on _their_ hats and walked off; leaving us absolutely devoid and destitute of a staff for to-night. One has since been improvised: but it was a small matter to raise a stir and ill-will about, especially as one of our men was equally in fault; and really there is little to be done at night. American people are so accustomed to take care of themselves, that one of these immense audiences will fall into their places with an ease amazing to a frequenter of St. James's Hall; and the certainty with which they are all in, before I go on, is a very acceptable mark of respect. Our great labour is outside; and we have been obliged to bring our staff up to six, besides a boy or two, by employment of a regular additional clerk, a Bostonian. The speculators buying the front-seats (we have found instances of this being done by merchants in good position), the public won't have the back seats; return their tickets; write and print volumes on the subject; and deter others from coming. You are not to suppose that this prevails to any great extent, as our lowest house here has been £300; but it does hit us. There is no doubt about it. Fortunately I saw the danger when the trouble began, and changed the list at the right time. . . . You may get an idea of the staff's work, by what is in hand now. They are preparing, numbering, and stamping, 6000 tickets for Philadelphia, and 8000 tickets for Brooklyn. The moment those are done, another 8000 tickets will be wanted for Baltimore, and probably another 6000 for Washington; and all this in addition to the correspondence, advertisements, accounts, travelling, and the nightly business of the Readings four times a week. . . . I cannot get rid of this intolerable cold! My landlord invented for me a drink of brandy, rum, and snow, called it a 'Rocky Mountain Sneezer,' and said it was to put down all less effectual sneezing; but it has not yet had the effect. Did I tell you that the favourite drink before you get up is an Eye-Opener? There has been another fall of snow, succeeded by a heavy thaw." The day after (the 4th) he went back to Boston, and next day wrote to me: "I am to read here on Monday and Tuesday, return to New York on Wednesday, and finish there (except the farewells in April) on Thursday and Friday. The New York reading of _Doctor Marigold_ made really a tremendous hit. The people doubted at first, having evidently not the least idea what could be done with it, and broke out at last into a perfect chorus of delight. At the end they made a great shout, and gave a rush towards the platform as if they were going to carry me off. It puts a strong additional arrow into my quiver. Another extraordinary success has been _Nickleby_ and _Boots at the Holly Tree_ (appreciated here in Boston, by the bye, even more than _Copperfield_); and think of our last New York night bringing £500 English into the house, after making more than the necessary deduction for the present price of gold! The manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion, but is in reality paper-money, and it had risen to the proportions of a sofa on the morning he left for Philadelphia. Well, the work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard: but so far the gain is enormous. My cold steadily refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me greatly at times, though it is always good enough to leave me for the needful two hours. I have tried allopathy, homoeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result. Nothing will touch it." In the same letter, light was thrown on the ecclesiastical mystery. "At Brooklyn I am going to read in Mr. Ward Beecher's chapel: the only building there available for the purpose. You must understand that Brooklyn is a kind of sleeping-place for New York, and is supposed to be a great place in the money way. We let the seats pew by pew! the pulpit is taken down for my screen and gas! and I appear out of the vestry in canonical form! These ecclesiastical entertainments come off on the evenings of the 16th, 17th, 20th, and 21st, of the present month." His first letter after returning to New York (9th of January) made additions to the Brooklyn picture. "Each evening an enormous ferry-boat will convey me and my state-carriage (not to mention half a dozen wagons and any number of people and a few score of horses) across the river to Brooklyn, and will bring me back again. The sale of tickets there was an amazing scene. The noble army of speculators are now furnished (this is literally true, and I am quite serious) each man with a straw mattress, a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whiskey. With this outfit, _they lie down in line on the pavement_ the whole of the night before the tickets are sold: generally taking up their position at about 10. It being severely cold at Brooklyn, they made an immense bonfire in the street--a narrow street of wooden houses--which the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place; from which the people farthest off in the line rushed bleeding when they saw any chance of ousting others nearer the door, put their mattresses in the spots so gained, and held on by the iron rails. At 8 in the morning Dolby appeared with the tickets in a portmanteau. He was immediately saluted with a roar of Halloa! Dolby! So Charley has let you have the carriage, has he, Dolby? How is he, Dolby? Don't drop the tickets, Dolby! Look alive, Dolby! &c. &c. &c. in the midst of which he proceeded to business, and concluded (as usual) by giving universal dissatisfaction. He is now going off upon a little journey to look over the ground and cut back again. This little journey (to Chicago) is twelve hundred miles on end, by railway, besides the back again!" It might tax the Englishman, but was nothing to the native American. It was part of his New York landlord's ordinary life in a week, Dickens told me, to go to Chicago and look at his theatre there on a Monday; to pelt back to Boston and look at his theatre there on a Thursday; and to come rushing to New York on a Friday, to apostrophize his enormous ballet. Three days later, still at New York, he wrote to his sister-in-law. "I am off to Philadelphia this evening for the first of three visits of two nights each, tickets for all being sold. My cold steadily refuses to leave me, but otherwise I am as well as I can hope to be under this heavy work. My New York readings are over (except the farewell nights), and I look forward to the relief of being out of my hardest hall. On Friday I was again dead beat at the end, and was once more laid upon a sofa. But the faintness went off after a little while. We have now cold bright frosty weather, without snow; the best weather for me." Next day from Philadelphia he wrote to his daughter that he was lodged in The Continental, one of the most immense of American hotels, but that he found himself just as quiet as elsewhere. "Everything is very good, my waiter is German, and the greater part of the servants seem to be coloured people. The town is very clean, and the day as blue and bright as a fine Italian day. But it freezes very very hard, and my cold is not improved; for the cars were so intolerably hot that I was often obliged to stand upon the brake outside, and then the frosty air bit me indeed. I find it necessary (so oppressed am I with this American catarrh as they call it) to dine at three o'clock instead of four, that I may have more time to get voice; so that the days are cut short and letter-writing not easy." He nevertheless found time in this city to write to me (14th of January) the most interesting mention he had yet made of such opinions as he had been able to form during his present visit, apart from the pursuit that absorbed him. Of such of those opinions as were given on a former page, it is only necessary to repeat that while the tone of party politics still impressed him unfavourably, he had thus far seen everywhere great changes for the better socially. I will add other points from the same letter. That he was unfortunate in his time of visiting New York, as far as its politics were concerned, what has since happened conclusively shows. "The Irish element is acquiring such enormous influence in New York city, that when I think of it, and see the large Roman Catholic cathedral rising there, it seems unfair to stigmatise as 'American' other monstrous things that one also sees. But the general corruption in respect of the local funds appears to be stupendous, and there is an alarming thing as to some of the courts of law which I am afraid is native-born. A case came under my notice the other day in which it was perfectly plain, from what was said to me by a person interested in resisting an injunction, that his first proceeding had been to 'look up the Judge.'" Of such occasional provincial oddity, harmless in itself but strange in large cities, as he noticed in the sort of half disappointment at the small fuss made by himself about the Readings, and in the newspaper references to "Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure" on the platform, he gives an illustration. "Last night here in Philadelphia (my first night), a very impressible and responsive audience were so astounded by my simply walking in and opening my book that I wondered what was the matter. They evidently thought that there ought to have been a flourish, and Dolby sent in to prepare for me. With them it is the simplicity of the operation that raises wonder. With the newspapers 'Mr. Dickens's extraordinary composure' is not reasoned out as being necessary to the art of the thing, but is sensitively watched with a lurking doubt whether it may not imply disparagement of the audience. Both these things strike me as drolly expressive.". . . His testimony as to improved social habits and ways was expressed very decidedly. "I think it reasonable to expect that as I go westward, I shall find the old manners going on before me, and may tread upon their skirts mayhap. But so far, I have had no more intrusion or boredom than I have when I lead the same life in England. I write this in an immense hotel, but I am as much at peace in my own rooms, and am left as wholly undisturbed, as if I were at the Station Hotel in York. I have now read in New York city to 40,000 people, and am quite as well known in the streets there as I am in London. People will turn back, turn again and face me, and have a look at me, or will say to one another 'Look here! Dickens coming!' But no one ever stops me or addresses me. Sitting reading in the carriage outside the New York post-office while one of the staff was stamping the letters inside, I became conscious that a few people who had been looking at the turn-out had discovered me within. On my peeping out good-humouredly, one of them (I should say a merchant's book-keeper) stepped up to the door, took off his hat, and said in a frank way: 'Mr. Dickens, I should very much like to have the honour of shaking hands with you'--and, that done, presented two others. Nothing could be more quiet or less intrusive. In the railway cars, if I see anybody who clearly wants to speak to me, I usually anticipate the wish by speaking myself. If I am standing on the brake outside (to avoid the intolerable stove), people getting down will say with a smile: 'As I am taking my departure, Mr. Dickens, and can't trouble you for more than a moment, I should like to take you by the hand sir.' And so we shake hands and go our ways. . . . Of course many of my impressions come through the readings. Thus I find the people lighter and more humorous than formerly; and there must be a great deal of innocent imagination among every class, or they never could pet with such extraordinary pleasure as they do, the Boots' story of the elopement of the two little children. They seem to see the children; and the women set up a shrill undercurrent of half-pity and half-pleasure that is quite affecting. To-night's reading is my 26th; but as all the Philadelphia tickets for four more are sold, as well as four at Brooklyn, you must assume that I am at--say--my 35th reading. I have remitted to Coutts's in English gold £10,000 odd; and I roughly calculate that on this number Dolby will have another thousand pounds profit to pay me. These figures are of course between ourselves, at present; but are they not magnificent? The expenses, always recollect, are enormous. On the other hand we never have occasion to print a bill of any sort (bill-printing and posting are great charges at home); and have just now sold off £90 worth of bill-paper, provided beforehand, as a wholly useless incumbrance." Then came, as ever, the constant shadow that still attended him, the slave in the chariot of his triumph. "The work is very severe. There is now no chance of my being rid of this American catarrh until I embark for England. It is very distressing. It likewise happens, not seldom, that I am so dead beat when I come off that they lay me down on a sofa after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour. In that time I rally and come right." One week later from New York, where he had become due on the 16th for the first of his four Brooklyn readings, he wrote to his sister-in-law. "My cold sticks to me, and I can scarcely exaggerate what I undergo from sleeplessness. I rarely take any breakfast but an egg and a cup of tea--not even toast or bread and butter. My small dinner at 3, and a little quail or some such light thing when I come home at night, is my daily fare; and at the hall I have established the custom of taking an egg beaten up in sherry before going in, and another between the parts, which I think pulls me up. . . . It is snowing hard now, and I begin to move to-morrow. There is so much floating ice in the river, that we are obliged to have a pretty wide margin of time for getting over the ferry to read." The last of the readings over the ferry was on the day when this letter was written. "I finished at my church to-night. It is Mrs. Stowe's brother's, and a most wonderful place to speak in. We had it enormously full last night (_Marigold_ and _Trial_), but it scarcely required an effort. Mr. Ward Beecher being present in his pew, I sent to invite him to come round before he left. I found him to be an unostentatious, evidently able, straightforward, and agreeable man; extremely well-informed, and with a good knowledge of art." Baltimore and Washington were the cities in which he was now, on quitting New York, to read for the first time; and as to the latter some doubts arose. The exceptional course had been taken in regard to it, of selecting a hall with space for not more than 700 and charging everybody five dollars; to which Dickens, at first greatly opposed, had yielded upon use of the argument, "you have more people at New York, thanks to the speculators, paying more than five dollars every night." But now other suggestions came. "Horace Greeley dined with me last Saturday," he wrote on the 20th, "and didn't like my going to Washington, now full of the greatest rowdies and worst kind of people in the States. Last night at eleven came B. expressing like doubts; and though they may be absurd I thought them worth attention, B. coming so close on Greeley." Mr. Dolby was in consequence sent express to Washington with power to withdraw or go on, as enquiry on the spot might dictate; and Dickens took the additional resolve so far to modify the last arrangements of his tour as to avoid the distances of Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, to content himself with smaller places and profits, and thereby to get home nearly a month earlier. He was at Philadelphia on the 23rd of January, when he announced this intention. "The worst of it is, that everybody one advises with has a monomania respecting Chicago. 'Good heavens sir,' the great Philadelphia authority said to me this morning, 'if you don't read in Chicago the people will go into fits!' Well, I answered, I would rather they went into fits than I did. But he didn't seem to see it at all." From Baltimore he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th, in the hour's interval he had to spare before going back to Philadelphia. "It has been snowing hard for four and twenty hours--though this place is as far south as Valentia in Spain; and my manager, being on his way to New York, has a good chance of being snowed up somewhere. This is one of the places where Butler carried it with a high hand during the war, and where the ladies used to spit when they passed a Northern soldier. They are very handsome women, with an Eastern touch in them, and dress brilliantly. I have rarely seen so many fine faces in an audience. They are a bright responsive people likewise, and very pleasant to read to. My hall is a charming little opera house built by a society of Germans; quite a delightful place for the purpose. I stand on the stage, with the drop curtain down, and my screen before it. The whole scene is very pretty and complete, and the audience have a 'ring' in them that sounds deeper than the ear. I go from here to Philadelphia, to read to-morrow night and Friday; come through here again on Saturday on my way back to Washington; come back here on Saturday week for two finishing nights; then go to Philadelphia for two farewells--and so turn my back on the southern part of the country. Our new plan will give 82 readings in all." (The real number was 76, six having been dropped on subsequent political excitements.) "Of course I afterwards discovered that we had finally settled the list on a Friday. I shall be halfway through it at Washington; of course on a Friday also, and my birthday." To myself he wrote on the following day from Philadelphia, beginning with a thank Heaven that he had struck off Canada and the West, for he found the wear and tear "enormous." "Dolby decided that the croakers were wrong about Washington, and went on; the rather as his raised prices, which he put finally at three dollars each, gave satisfaction. Fields is so confident about Boston, that my remaining list includes, in all, 14 more readings there. I don't know how many more we might not have had here (where I have had attentions otherwise that have been very grateful to me), if we had chosen. Tickets are now being resold at ten dollars each. At Baltimore I had a charming little theatre, and a very apprehensive impulsive audience. It is remarkable to see how the Ghost of Slavery haunts the town; and how the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing Irrepressible proceeds about his free work, going round and round it, instead of at it. The melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes, at any rate at present, would glare at one out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads, if one did not see (as one cannot help seeing in the country) that their enfranchisement is a mere party trick to get votes. Being at the Penitentiary the other day (this, while we mention votes), and looking over the books, I noticed that almost every man had been 'pardoned' a day or two before his time was up. Why? Because, if he had served his time out, he would have been _ipso facto_ disfranchised. So, this form of pardon is gone through to save his vote; and as every officer of the prison holds his place only in right of his party, of course his hopeful clients vote for the party that has let them out! When I read in Mr. Beecher's church at Brooklyn, we found the trustees had suppressed the fact that a certain upper gallery holding 150 was 'the Coloured Gallery,' On the first night not a soul could be induced to enter it; and it was not until it became known next day that I was certainly not going to read there more than four times, that we managed to fill it. One night at New York, on our second or third row, there were two well-dressed women with a tinge of colour--I should say, not even quadroons. But the holder of one ticket who found his seat to be next them, demanded of Dolby 'what he meant by fixing him next to those two Gord darmed cusses of niggers?' and insisted on being supplied with another good place. Dolby firmly replied that he was perfectly certain Mr. Dickens would not recognize such an objection on any account, but he could have his money back, if he chose. Which, after some squabbling, he had. In a comic scene in the New York Circus one night, when I was looking on, four white people sat down upon a form in a barber's shop to be shaved. A coloured man came as the fifth customer, and the four immediately ran away. This was much laughed at and applauded. In the Baltimore Penitentiary, the white prisoners dine on one side of the room, the coloured prisoners on the other; and no one has the slightest idea of mixing them. But it is indubitably the fact that exhalations not the most agreeable arise from a number of coloured people got together, and I was obliged to beat a quick retreat from their dormitory. I strongly believe that they will die out of this country fast. It seems, looking at them, so manifestly absurd to suppose it possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty, striving, stronger race." On the fourth of February he wrote from Washington. "You may like to have a line to let you know that it is all right here, and that the croakers were simply ridiculous. I began last night. A charming audience, no dissatisfaction whatever at the raised prices, nothing missed or lost, cheers at the end of the _Carol_, and rounds upon rounds of applause all through. All the foremost men and their families had taken tickets for the series of four. A small place to read in. £300 in it." It will be no violation of the rule of avoiding private detail if the very interesting close of this letter is given. Its anecdote of President Lincoln was repeatedly told by Dickens after his return, and I am under no necessity to withhold from it the authority of Mr. Sumner's name. "I am going to-morrow to see the President, who has sent to me twice. I dined with Charles Sumner last Sunday, against my rule; and as I had stipulated for no party, Mr. Secretary Stanton was the only other guest, besides his own secretary. Stanton is a man with a very remarkable memory, and extraordinarily familiar with my books. . . . He and Sumner having been the first two public men at the dying President's bedside, and having remained with him until he breathed his last, we fell into a very interesting conversation after dinner, when, each of them giving his own narrative separately, the usual discrepancies about details of time were observable. Then Mr. Stanton told me a curious little story which will form the remainder of this short letter. "On the afternoon of the day on which the President was shot, there was a cabinet council at which he presided. Mr. Stanton, being at the time commander-in-chief of the Northern troops that were concentrated about here, arrived rather late. Indeed they were waiting for him, and on his entering the room, the President broke off in something he was saying, and remarked: 'Let us proceed to business, gentlemen.' Mr. Stanton then noticed, with great surprise, that the President sat with an air of dignity in his chair instead of lolling about it in the most ungainly attitudes, as his invariable custom was; and that instead of telling irrelevant or questionable stories, he was grave and calm, and quite a different man. Mr. Stanton, on leaving the council with the Attorney-General, said to him, 'That is the most satisfactory cabinet meeting I have attended for many a long day! What an extraordinary change in Mr. Lincoln!' The Attorney-General replied, 'We all saw it, before you came in. While we were waiting for you, he said, with his chin down on his breast, "Gentlemen, something very extraordinary is going to happen, and that very soon."' To which the Attorney-General had observed, 'Something good, sir, I hope?' when the President answered very gravely: 'I don't know; I don't know. But it will happen, and shortly too!' As they were all impressed by his manner, the Attorney-General took him up again: 'Have you received any information, sir, not yet disclosed to us?' 'No,' answered the President: 'but I have had a dream. And I have now had the same dream three times. Once, on the night preceding the Battle of Bull Run. Once, on the night preceding' such another (naming a battle also not favourable to the North). His chin sank on his breast again, and he sat reflecting. 'Might one ask the nature of this dream, sir?' said the Attorney-General. 'Well,' replied the President, without lifting his head or changing his attitude, 'I am on a great broad rolling river--and I am in a boat--and I drift--and I drift!--But this is not business--' suddenly raising his face and looking round the table as Mr. Stanton entered, 'let us proceed to business, gentlemen.' Mr. Stanton and the Attorney-General said, as they walked on together, it would be curious to notice whether anything ensued on this; and they agreed to notice. He was shot that night." On his birthday, the seventh of February, Dickens had his interview with President Andrew Johnson. "This scrambling scribblement is resumed this morning, because I have just seen the President: who had sent to me very courteously asking me to make my own appointment. He is a man with a remarkable face, indicating courage, watchfulness, and certainly strength of purpose. It is a face of the Webster type, but without the 'bounce' of Webster's face. I would have picked him out anywhere as a character of mark. Figure, rather stoutish for an American; a trifle under the middle size; hands clasped in front of him; manner, suppressed, guarded, anxious. Each of us looked at the other very hard. . . . It was in his own cabinet that I saw him. As I came away, Thornton drove up in a sleigh--turned out for a state occasion--to deliver his credentials. There was to be a cabinet council at 12. The room was very like a London club's ante-drawing room. On the walls, two engravings only: one, of his own portrait; one, of Lincoln's. . . . In the outer room was sitting a certain sunburnt General Blair, with many evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and then I found that he had been out on the Prairie with me five-and-twenty years ago. . . . The papers having referred to my birthday's falling to-day, my room is filled with most exquisite flowers.[276] They came pouring in from all sorts of people at breakfast time. The audiences here are really very fine. So ready to laugh or cry, and doing both so freely, that you would suppose them to be Manchester shillings rather than Washington half-sovereigns. Alas! alas! my cold worse than ever." So he had written too at the opening of his letter. The first reading had been four days earlier, and was described to his daughter in a letter on the 4th, with a comical incident that occurred in the course of it. "The gas was very defective indeed last night, and I began with a small speech to the effect that I must trust to the brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine. This was taken greatly. In the _Carol_ a most ridiculous incident occurred. All of a sudden, I saw a dog leap out from among the seats in the centre aisle, and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I don't think anybody saw this dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him. He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle again, in an entirely new place, and (still looking intently at me) tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a paroxysm of laughter that it communicated itself to the audience, and we roared at one another, loud and long." Three days later the sequel came, in a letter to his sister-in-law. "I mentioned the dog on the first night here? Next night, I thought I heard (in _Copperfield_) a suddenly-suppressed bark. It happened in this wise:--One of our people, standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down beheld the dog, staring intently at me, and evidently just about to bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands, and threw him over his own head, out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last night he came again, _with another dog_; but our people were so sharply on the look-out for him that he didn't get in. He had evidently promised to pass the other dog, free." What is expressed in these letters, of a still active, hopeful, enjoying, energetic spirit, able to assert itself against illness of the body and in some sort to overmaster it, was also so strongly impressed upon those who were with him, that, seeing his sufferings as they did, they yet found it difficult to understand the extent of them. The sadness thus ever underlying his triumph makes it all very tragical. "That afternoon of my birthday," he wrote from Baltimore on the 11th, "my catarrh was in such a state that Charles Sumner, coming in at five o'clock, and finding me covered with mustard poultice, and apparently voiceless, turned to Dolby and said: 'Surely, Mr. Dolby, it is impossible that he can read to-night!' Says Dolby: 'Sir, I have told Mr. Dickens so, four times to-day, and I have been very anxious. But you have no idea how he will change, when he gets to the little table.' After five minutes of the little table I was not (for the time) even hoarse. The frequent experience of this return of force when it is wanted, saves me a vast amount of anxiety; but I am not at times without the nervous dread that I may some day sink altogether." To the same effect in another letter he adds: "Dolby and Osgood" (the latter represented the publishing firm of Mr. Fields and was one of the travelling staff), "who do the most ridiculous things to keep me in spirits[277] (I am often very heavy, and rarely sleep much), are determined to have a walking match at Boston on the last day of February to celebrate the arrival of the day when I can say '_next_ month!' for home." The match ended in the Englishman's defeat; which Dickens doubly commemorated, by a narrative of the American victory in sporting-newspaper style, and by a dinner in Boston to a party of dear friends there. After Baltimore he was reading again at Philadelphia, from which he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 13th as to a characteristic trait observed in both places. "Nothing will induce the people to believe in the farewells. At Baltimore on Tuesday night (a very brilliant night indeed), they asked as they came out: 'When will Mr. Dickens read here again?' 'Never.' 'Nonsense! Not come back, after such houses as these? Come. Say when he'll read again.' Just the same here. We could as soon persuade them that I am the President, as that to-morrow night I am going to read here for the last time. . . . There is a child in this house--a little girl--to whom I presented a black doll when I was here last; and as I have just seen her eye at the keyhole since I began writing this, I think she and the doll must be outside still. 'When you sent it up to me by the coloured boy,' she said after receiving it (coloured boy is the term for black waiter), 'I gave such a cream that Ma come running in and creamed too, 'cos she fort I'd hurt myself. But I creamed a cream of joy.' She had a friend to play with her that day, and brought the friend with her--to my infinite confusion. A friend all stockings and much too tall, who sat on the sofa very far back with her stockings sticking stiffly out in front of her, and glared at me, and never spake a word. Dolby found us confronted in a sort of fascination, like serpent and bird." On the 15th he was again at New York, in the thick of more troubles with the speculators. They involved even charges of fraud in ticket-sales at Newhaven and Providence; indignation meetings having been held by the Mayors, and unavailing attempts made by his manager to turn the wrath aside. "I expect him back here presently half bereft of his senses, and I should be wholly bereft of mine if the situation were not comical as well as disagreeable. We can sell at our own box-office to any extent; but we cannot buy back of the speculators, because we have informed the public that all the tickets are gone; and even if we made the sacrifice of buying at their price and selling at ours, we should be accused of treating with them and of making money by it." It ended in Providence by his going himself to the town and making a speech; and in Newhaven it ended by his sending back the money taken, with intimation that he would not read until there had been a new distribution of the tickets approved by all the town. Fresh disturbance broke out upon this; but he stuck to his determination to delay the reading until the heats had cooled down, and what should have been given in the middle of February he did not give until the close of March. The Readings he had promised at the smaller outlying places by the Canadian frontier and Niagara district, including Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, were appointed for that same March month which was to be the interval between the close of the ordinary readings and the farewells in the two leading cities. All that had been promised in New York were closed when he returned to Boston on the 23rd of February, ready for the increase he had promised there; but the check of a sudden political excitement came. It was the month when the vote was taken for impeachment of President Johnson. "It is well" (25th of February) "that the money has flowed in hitherto so fast, for I have a misgiving that the great excitement about the President's impeachment will damage our receipts. . . . The vote was taken at 5 last night. At 7 the three large theatres here, all in a rush of good business, were stricken with paralysis. At 8 our long line of outsiders waiting for unoccupied places, was nowhere. To-day you hear all the people in the streets talking of only one thing. I shall suppress my next week's promised readings (by good fortune, not yet announced), and watch the course of events. Nothing in this country, as I before said, lasts long; and I think it likely that the public may be heartily tired of the President's name by the 9th of March, when I read at a considerable distance from here. So behold me with a whole week's holiday in view!" Two days later he wrote pleasantly to his sister-in-law of his audiences. "They have come to regard the Readings and the Reader as their peculiar property; and you would be both amused and pleased if you could see the curious way in which they show this increased interest in both. Whenever they laugh or cry, they have taken to applauding as well; and the result is very inspiriting. I shall remain here until Saturday the 7th; but after to-morrow night shall not read here until the 1st of April, when I begin my farewells--six in number." On the 28th he wrote: "To-morrow fortnight we purpose being at the Falls of Niagara, and then we shall come back and really begin to wind up. I have got to know the _Carol_ so well that I can't remember it, and occasionally go dodging about in the wildest manner, to pick up lost pieces. They took it so tremendously last night that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor young girl in mourning burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim, and was taken out. We had a fine house, and, in the interval while I was out, they covered the little table with flowers. The cough has taken a fresh start as if it were a novelty, and is even worse than ever to-day. There is a lull in the excitement about the President: but the articles of impeachment are to be produced this afternoon, and then it may set in again. Osgood came into camp last night from selling in remote places, and reports that at Rochester and Buffalo (both places near the frontier), tickets were bought by Canada people, who had struggled across the frozen river and clambered over all sorts of obstructions to get them. Some of those distant halls turn out to be smaller than represented; but I have no doubt--to use an American expression--that we shall 'get along.' The second half of the receipts cannot reasonably be expected to come up to the first; political circumstances, and all other surroundings, considered." His old ill luck in travel pursued him. On the day his letter was written a snow-storm began, with a heavy gale of wind; and "after all the hard weather gone through," he wrote on the 2nd of March, "this is the worst day we have seen. It is telegraphed that the storm prevails over an immense extent of country, and is just the same at Chicago as here. I hope it may prove a wind up. We are getting sick of the very sound of sleigh-bells even." The roads were so bad and the trains so much out of time, that he had to start a day earlier; and on the 6th of March his tour north-west began, with the gale still blowing and the snow falling heavily. On the 13th he wrote to me from Buffalo. "We go to the Falls of Niagara to-morrow for our own pleasure; and I take all the men, as a treat. We found Rochester last Tuesday in a very curious state. Perhaps you know that the Great Falls of the Genessee River (really very fine, even so near Niagara) are at that place. In the height of a sudden thaw, an immense bank of ice above the rapids refused to yield; so that the town was threatened (for the second time in four years) with submersion. Boats were ready in the streets, all the people were up all night, and none but the children slept. In the dead of the night a thundering noise was heard, the ice gave way, the swollen river came raging and roaring down the Falls, and the town was safe. Very picturesque! but 'not very good for business,' as the manager says. Especially as the hall stands in the centre of danger, and had ten feet of water in it on the last occasion of flood. But I think we had above £200 English. On the previous night at Syracuse--a most out of the way and unintelligible-looking place, with apparently no people in it--we had £375 odd. Here, we had last night, and shall have to-night, whatever we can cram into the hall. "This Buffalo has become a large and important town, with numbers of German and Irish in it. But it is very curious to notice, as we touch the frontier, that the American female beauty dies out; and a woman's face clumsily compounded of German, Irish, Western America, and Canadian, not yet fused together, and not yet moulded, obtains instead. Our show of Beauty at night is, generally, remarkable; but we had not a dozen pretty women in the whole throng last night, and the faces were all blunt. I have just been walking about, and observing the same thing in the streets. . . . The winter has been so severe, that the hotel on the English side at Niagara (which has the best view of the Falls, and is for that reason very preferable) is not yet open. So we go, perforce, to the American: which telegraphs back to our telegram: 'all Mr. Dickens's requirements perfectly understood.' I have not yet been in more than two _very bad_ inns. I have been in some, where a good deal of what is popularly called 'slopping round' has prevailed; but have been able to get on very well. 'Slopping round,' so used, means untidyness and disorder. It is a comically expressive phrase, and has many meanings. Fields was asking the price of a quarter-cask of sherry the other day. 'Wa'al Mussr Fields,' the merchant replies, 'that varies according to quality, as is but nay'tral. If yer wa'ant a sherry just to slop round with it, I can fix you some at a very low figger.'" His letter was resumed at Rochester on the 18th. "After two most brilliant days at the Falls of Niagara, we got back here last night. To-morrow morning we turn out at 6 for a long railway journey back to Albany. But it is nearly all 'back' now, thank God! I don't know how long, though, before turning, we might have gone on at Buffalo. . . . We went everywhere at the Falls, and saw them in every aspect. There is a suspension bridge across, now, some two miles or more from the Horse Shoe; and another, half a mile nearer, is to be opened in July. They are very fine but very ticklish, hanging aloft there, in the continual vibration of the thundering water: nor is one greatly reassured by the printed notice that troops must not cross them at step, that bands of music must not play in crossing, and the like. I shall never forget the last aspect in which we saw Niagara yesterday. We had been everywhere, when I thought of struggling (in an open carriage) up some very difficult ground for a good distance, and getting where we could stand above the river, and see it, as it rushes forward to its tremendous leap, coming for miles and miles. All away to the horizon on our right was a wonderful confusion of bright green and white water. As we stood watching it with our faces to the top of the Falls, our backs were towards the sun. The majestic valley below the Falls, so seen through the vast cloud of spray, was made of rainbow. The high banks, the riven rocks, the forests, the bridge, the buildings, the air, the sky, were all made of rainbow. Nothing in Turner's finest water-colour drawings, done in his greatest day, is so ethereal, so imaginative, so gorgeous in colour, as what I then beheld. I seemed to be lifted from the earth and to be looking into Heaven. What I once said to you, as I witnessed the scene five and twenty years ago, all came back at this most affecting and sublime sight. The 'muddy vesture of our clay' falls from us as we look. . . . I chartered a separate carriage for our men, so that they might see all in their own way, and at their own time. "There is a great deal of water out between Rochester and New York, and travelling is very uncertain, as I fear we may find to-morrow. There is again some little alarm here on account of the river rising too fast. But our to-night's house is far ahead of the first. Most charming halls in these places; excellent for sight and sound. Almost invariably built as theatres, with stage, scenery, and good dressing-rooms. Audience seated to perfection (every seat always separate), excellent doorways and passages, and brilliant light. My screen and gas are set up in front of the drop-curtain, and the most delicate touches will tell anywhere. No creature but my own men ever near me." His anticipation of the uncertainty that might beset his travel back had dismal fulfilment. It is described in a letter written on the 21st from Springfield to his valued friend, Mr. Frederic Ouvry, having much interest of its own, and making lively addition to the picture which these chapters give. The unflagging spirit that bears up under all disadvantages is again marvellously shown. "You can hardly imagine what my life is with its present conditions--how hard the work is, and how little time I seem to have at my disposal. It is necessary to the daily recovery of my voice that I should dine at 3 when not travelling; I begin to prepare for the evening at 6; and I get back to my hotel, pretty well knocked up, at half-past 10. Add to all this, perpetual railway travelling in one of the severest winters ever known; and you will descry a reason or two for my being an indifferent correspondent. Last Sunday evening I left the Falls of Niagara for this and two intervening places. As there was a great thaw, and the melted snow was swelling all the rivers, the whole country for three hundred miles was flooded. On the Tuesday afternoon (I had read on the Monday) the train gave in, as under circumstances utterly hopeless, and stopped at a place called Utica; the greater part of which was under water, while the high and dry part could produce nothing particular to eat. Here, some of the wretched passengers passed the night in the train, while others stormed the hotel. I was fortunate enough to get a bed-room, and garnished it with an enormous jug of gin-punch; over which I and the manager played a double-dummy rubber. At six in the morning we were knocked up: 'to come aboard and try it.' At half-past six we were knocked up again with the tidings 'that it was of no use coming aboard or trying it.' At eight all the bells in the town were set agoing, to summon us to 'come aboard' instantly. And so we started, through the water, at four or five miles an hour; seeing nothing but drowned farms, barns adrift like Noah's arks, deserted villages, broken bridges, and all manner of ruin. I was to read at Albany that night, and all the tickets were sold. A very active superintendent of works assured me that if I could be 'got along' he was the man to get me along: and that if I couldn't be got along, I might conclude that it couldn't possibly be fixed. He then turned on a hundred men in seven-league boots, who went ahead of the train, each armed with a long pole and pushing the blocks of ice away. Following this cavalcade, we got to land at last, and arrived in time for me to read the _Carol_ and _Trial_ triumphantly. My people (I had five of the staff with me) turned to at their work with a will, and did a day's labour in a couple of hours. If we had not come in as we did, I should have lost £350, and Albany would have gone distracted. You may conceive what the flood was, when I hint at the two most notable incidents of our journey:--1, We took the passengers out of two trains, who had been in the water, immovable all night and all the previous day. 2, We released a large quantity of sheep and cattle from trucks that had been in the water I don't know how long, but so long that the creatures in them had begun to eat each other, and presented a most horrible spectacle."[278] Beside Springfield, he had engagements at Portland, New Bedford, and other places in Massachusetts, before the Boston farewells began; and there wanted but two days to bring him to that time, when he thus described to his daughter the labour which was to occupy them. His letter was from Portland on the 29th of March, and it will be observed that he no longer compromises or glozes over what he was and had been suffering. During his terrible travel to Albany his cough had somewhat spared him, but the old illness had broken out in his foot; and, though he persisted in ascribing it to the former supposed origin ("having been lately again wet, from walking in melted snow, which I suppose to be the occasion of its swelling in the old way"), it troubled him sorely, extended now at intervals to the right foot also, and lamed him for all the time he remained in the States. "I should have written to you by the last mail, but I really was too unwell to do it. The writing day was last Friday, when I ought to have left Boston for New Bedford (55 miles) before eleven in the morning. But I was so exhausted that I could not be got up, and had to take my chance of an evening train's producing me in time to read--which it just did. With the return of snow, nine days ago, my cough became as bad as ever. I have coughed every morning from two or three till five or six, and have been absolutely sleepless. I have had no appetite besides, and no taste.[279] Last night here, I took some laudanum; and it is the only thing that has done me good, though it made me sick this morning. But the life, in this climate, is so very hard! When I did manage to get to New Bedford, I read with my utmost force and vigour. Next morning, well or ill, I must turn out at seven, to get back to Boston on my way here. I dined at Boston at three, and at five had to come on here (a hundred and thirty miles or so) for to-morrow night: there being no Sunday train. To-morrow night I read here in a very large place; and Tuesday morning at six I must again start, to get back to Boston once more. But after to-morrow night I have only the farewells, thank God! Even as it is, however, I have had to write to Dolby (who is in New York) to see my doctor there, and ask him to send me some composing medicine that I can take at night, inasmuch as without sleep I cannot get through. However sympathetic and devoted the people are about one, they CAN NOT be got to comprehend, seeing me able to do the two hours when the time comes round, that it may also involve much misery." To myself on the 30th he wrote from the same place, making like confession. No comment could deepen the sadness of the story of suffering, revealed in his own simple language. "I write in a town three parts of which were burnt down in a tremendous fire three years ago. The people lived in tents while their city was rebuilding. The charred trunks of the trees with which the streets of the old city were planted, yet stand here and there in the new thoroughfares like black spectres. The rebuilding is still in progress everywhere. Yet such is the astonishing energy of the people that the large hall in which I am to read to-night (its predecessor was burnt) would compare very favourably with the Free Trade Hall at Manchester! . . . I am nearly used up. Climate, distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work, have begun (I may say so, now they are nearly all over) to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness besets me; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down. It was well that I cut off the Far West and Canada when I did. There would else have been a sad complication. It is impossible to make the people about one understand, however zealous and devoted (it is impossible even to make Dolby understand until the pinch comes), that the power of coming up to the mark every night, with spirits and spirit, may coexist with the nearest approach to sinking under it. When I got back to Boston on Thursday, after a very hard three weeks, I saw that Fields was very grave about my going on to New Bedford (55 miles) next day, and then coming on here (180 miles) _next_ day. But the stress is over, and so I can afford to look back upon it, and think about it, and write about it." On the 31st he closed his letter at Boston, and he was at home when I heard of him again. "The latest intelligence, my dear old fellow, is, that I have arrived here safely, and that I am certainly better. I consider my work virtually over, now. My impression is, that the political crisis will damage the farewells by about one half. I cannot yet speak by the card; but my predictions here, as to our proceedings, have thus far been invariably right. We took last night at Portland, £360 English; where a costly Italian troupe, using the same hall to-night, had not booked £14! It is the same all over the country, and the worst is not seen yet. Everything is becoming absorbed in the Presidential impeachment, helped by the next Presidential election. Connecticut is particularly excited. The night after I read at Hartford this last week, there were two political meetings in the town; meetings of two parties; and the hotel was full of speakers coming in from outlying places. So at Newhaven: the moment I had finished, carpenters came in to prepare for next night's politics. So at Buffalo. So everywhere very soon." In the same tone he wrote his last letter to his sister-in-law from Boston. "My notion of the farewells is pretty certain now to turn out right. We had £300 English here last night. To-day is a Fast Day, and to-night we shall probably take much less. Then it is likely that we shall pull up again, and strike a good reasonable average; but it is not at all probable that we shall do anything enormous. Every pulpit in Massachusetts will resound with violent politics to-day and to-night." That was on the second of April, and a postscript was added. "Friday afternoon the 3rd. Catarrh worse than ever! and we don't know (at four o'clock) whether I can read to-night or must stop. Otherwise, all well." Dickens's last letter from America was written to his daughter Mary from Boston on the 9th of April, the day before his sixth and last farewell night. "I not only read last Friday when I was doubtful of being able to do so, but read as I never did before, and astonished the audience quite as much as myself. You never saw or heard such a scene of excitement. Longfellow and all the Cambridge men have urged me to give in. I have been very near doing so, but feel stronger to-day. I cannot tell whether the catarrh may have done me any lasting injury in the lungs or other breathing organs, until I shall have rested and got home. I hope and believe not. Consider the weather! There have been two snow storms since I wrote last, and to-day the town is blotted out in a ceaseless whirl of snow and wind. Dolby is as tender as a woman, and as watchful as a doctor. He never leaves me during the reading, now, but sits at the side of the platform, and keeps his eye upon me all the time. Ditto George the gasman, steadiest and most reliable man I ever employed. I have _Dombey_ to do to-night, and must go through it carefully; so here ends my report. The personal affection of the people in this place is charming to the last. Did I tell you that the New York Press are going to give me a public dinner on Saturday the 18th?" In New York, where there were five farewell nights, three thousand two hundred and ninety-eight dollars were the receipts of the last, on the 20th of April; those of the last at Boston, on the 8th, having been three thousand four hundred and fifty-six dollars. But on earlier nights in the same cities respectively, these sums also had been reached; and indeed, making allowance for an exceptional night here and there, the receipts varied so wonderfully little, that a mention of the highest average returns from other places will give no exaggerated impression of the ordinary receipts throughout. Excluding fractions of dollars, the lowest were New Bedford ($1640), Rochester ($1906), Springfield ($1970), and Providence ($2140). Albany and Worcester averaged something less than $2400; while Hartford, Buffalo, Baltimore, Syracuse, Newhaven, and Portland rose to $2600. Washington's last night was $2610, no night there having less than $2500. Philadelphia exceeded Washington by $300, and Brooklyn went ahead of Philadelphia by $200. The amount taken at the four Brooklyn readings was 11,128 dollars. The New York public dinner was given at Delmonico's, the hosts were more than two hundred, and the chair was taken by Mr. Horace Greeley. Dickens attended with great difficulty,[280] and spoke in pain. But he used the occasion to bear his testimony to the changes of twenty-five years; the rise of vast new cities; growth in the graces and amenities of life; much improvement in the press, essential to every other advance; and changes in himself leading to opinions more deliberately formed. He promised his kindly entertainers that no copy of his _Notes_, or his _Chuzzlewit_, should in future be issued by him without accompanying mention of the changes to which he had referred that night; of the politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, and consideration in all ways for which he had to thank them; and of his gratitude for the respect shown, during all his visit, to the privacy enforced upon him by the nature of his work and the condition of his health. He had to leave the room before the proceedings were over. On the following Monday he read to his last American audience, telling them at the close that he hoped often to recall them, equally by his winter fire and in the green summer weather, and never as a mere public audience but as a host of personal friends. He sailed two days later in the "Russia," and reached England in the first week of May 1868. FOOTNOTES: [276] few days later he described it to his daughter. "I couldn't help laughing at myself on my birthday at Washington; it was observed so much as though I were a little boy. Flowers and garlands of the most exquisite kind, arranged in all manner of green baskets, bloomed over the room; letters radiant with good wishes poured in; a shirt pin, a handsome silver travelling bottle, a set of gold shirt studs, and a set of gold sleeve links, were on the dinner table. Also, by hands unknown, the hall at night was decorated; and after _Boots at the Holly Tree_, the whole audience rose and remained, great people and all, standing and cheering, until I went back to the table and made them a little speech." [277] Mr. Dolby unconsciously contributed at this time to the same happy result by sending out some advertisements in these exact words: "The Reading will be comprised within _two minutes_, and the audience are earnestly entreated to be seated _ten hours_ before its commencement." He had transposed the minutes and the hours. [278] What follows is from the close of the letter. "On my return, I have arranged with Chappell to take my leave of reading for good and all, in a hundred autumnal and winter Farewells _for ever_. I return by the Cunard steam-ship 'Russia.' I had the second officer's cabin on deck, when I came out; and I am to have the chief steward's going home. Cunard was so considerate as to remember that it will be on the sunny side of the vessel." [279] Here was his account of his mode of living for his last ten weeks in America. "I cannot eat (to anything like the necessary extent) and have established this system. At 7 in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At 12, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At 3 (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to 8, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts, the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past 10, soup, and any little thing to drink that I can fancy. I do not eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours, if so much." [280] Here is the newspaper account: "At about five o'clock on Saturday the hosts began to assemble, but at 5.30 news was received that the expected guest had succumbed to a painful affection of the foot. In a short time, however, another bulletin announced Mr. Dickens's intention to attend the dinner at all hazards. At a little after six, having been assisted up the stairs, he was joined by Mr. Greeley, and the hosts forming in two lines silently permitted the distinguished gentlemen to pass through. Mr. Dickens limped perceptibly; his right foot was swathed, and he leaned heavily on the arm of Mr. Greeley. He evidently suffered great pain." CHAPTER XVII. LAST READINGS. 1868-1870. At Home--Project for Last Readings--What the Readings did and undid--Profit from all the Readings--Noticeable Changes--Proposed Reading from _Oliver Twist_--Parting from his Youngest Son--Death of his Brother Frederick--Old Friends--_Sikes and Nancy_ Reading--Reading stopped--Mr. Syme's Opinion of the Lameness--Emerson Tennent's Funeral--Public Dinner in Liverpool--His Description of his Illness--Brought to Town--Sir Thomas Watson's Note of the Case--Close of Career as Public Reader. FAVOURABLE weather helped him pleasantly home. He had profited greatly by the sea voyage, perhaps greatly more by its repose; and on the 25th of May he described himself to his Boston friends as brown beyond belief, and causing the greatest disappointment in all quarters by looking so well. "My doctor was quite broken down in spirits on seeing me for the first time last Saturday. _Good Lord! seven years younger!_ said the doctor, recoiling." That he gave all the credit to "those fine days at sea," and none to the rest from such labours as he had passed through, the close of the letter too sadly showed. "We are already settling--think of this!--the details of my farewell course of readings." Even on his way out to America that enterprise was in hand. From Halifax he had written to me. "I told the Chappells that when I got back to England, I would have a series of farewell readings in town and country; and then read No More. They at once offer in writing to pay all expenses whatever, to pay the ten per cent. for management, and to pay me, for a series of 75, six thousand pounds." The terms were raised and settled before the first Boston readings closed. The number was to be a hundred; and the payment, over and above expenses and per centage, eight thousand pounds. Such a temptation undoubtedly was great; and though it was a fatal mistake which Dickens committed in yielding to it, it was not an ignoble one. He did it under no excitement from the American gains, of which he knew nothing when he pledged himself to the enterprise. No man could care essentially less for mere money than he did. But the necessary provision for many sons was a constant anxiety; he was proud of what the Readings had done to abridge this care; and the very strain of them under which it seems certain that his health had first given way, and which he always steadily refused to connect especially with them, had also broken the old confidence of being at all times available for his higher pursuit. What affected his health only he would not regard as part of the question either way. That was to be borne as the lot more or less of all men; and the more thorough he could make his feeling of independence, and of ability to rest, by what was now in hand, the better his final chances of a perfect recovery would be. That was the spirit in which he entered on this last engagement. It was an opportunity offered for making a particular work really complete before he should abandon it for ever. Something of it will not be indiscernible even in the summary of his past acquisitions, which with a pardonable exultation he now sent me. "We had great difficulty in getting our American accounts squared to the point of ascertaining what Dolby's commission amounted to in English money. After all, we were obliged to call in the aid of a money-changer, to determine what he should pay as his share of the average loss of conversion into gold. With this deduction made, I think his commission (I have not the figures at hand) was £2,888; Ticknor and Fields had a commission of £1,000, besides 5 per cent. on all Boston receipts. The expenses in America to the day of our sailing were 38,948 dollars;--roughly 39,000 dollars, or £13,000. The preliminary expenses were £614. The average price of gold was nearly 40 per cent., and yet my profit was within a hundred or so of £20,000. Supposing me to have got through the present engagement in good health, I shall have made by the Readings, _in two years_, £33,000: that is to say, £13,000 received from the Chappells, and £20,000 from America. What I had made by them before, I could only ascertain by a long examination of Coutts's books. I should say, certainly not less than £10,000: for I remember that I made half that money in the first town and country campaign with poor Arthur Smith. These figures are of course between ourselves; but don't you think them rather remarkable? The Chappell bargain began with £50 a night and everything paid; then became £60; and now rises to £80." The last readings were appointed to begin with October; and at the request of an old friend, Chauncy Hare Townshend, who died during his absence in the States, he had accepted the trust, which occupied him some part of the summer, of examining and selecting for publication a bequest of some papers on matters of religious belief, which were issued in a small volume the following year. There came also in June a visit from Longfellow and his daughters, with later summer visits from the Eliot Nortons; and at the arrival of friends whom he loved and honoured as he did these, from the great country to which he owed so much, infinite were the rejoicings of Gadshill. Nothing could quench his old spirit in this way. But in the intervals of my official work I saw him frequently that summer, and never without the impression that America had told heavily upon him. There was manifest abatement of his natural force, the elasticity of bearing was impaired, and the wonderful brightness of eye was dimmed at times. One day, too, as he walked from his office with Miss Hogarth to dine at our house, he could read only the halves of the letters over the shop doors that were on his right as he looked. He attributed it to medicine. It was an additional unfavourable symptom that his right foot had become affected as well as the left, though not to anything like the same extent, during the journey from the Canada frontier to Boston. But all this disappeared, upon any special cause for exertion; and he was never unprepared to lavish freely for others the reserved strength that should have been kept for himself. This indeed was the great danger, for it dulled the apprehension of us all to the fact that absolute and pressing danger did positively exist. He had scarcely begun these last readings than he was beset by a misgiving, that, for a success large enough to repay Messrs. Chappell's liberality, the enterprise would require a new excitement to carry him over the old ground; and it was while engaged in Manchester and Liverpool at the outset of October that this announcement came. "I have made a short reading of the murder in _Oliver Twist_. I cannot make up my mind, however, whether to do it or not. I have no doubt that I could perfectly petrify an audience by carrying out the notion I have of the way of rendering it. But whether the impression would not be so horrible as to keep them away another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon. What do you think? It is in three short parts: 1, Where Fagin sets Noah Claypole on to watch Nancy. 2, The scene on London Bridge. 3, Where Fagin rouses Claypole from his sleep, to tell his perverted story to Sikes. And the Murder, and the Murderer's sense of being haunted. I have adapted and cut about the text with great care, and it is very powerful. I have to-day referred the book and the question to the Chappells as so largely interested." I had a strong dislike to this proposal, less perhaps on the ground which ought to have been taken of the physical exertion it would involve, than because such a subject seemed to be altogether out of the province of reading; and it was resolved, that, before doing it, trial should be made to a limited private audience in St. James's Hall. The note announcing this, from Liverpool on the 25th of October, is for other reasons worth printing. "I give you earliest notice that the Chappells suggest to me the 18th of November" (the 14th was chosen) "for trial of the _Oliver Twist_ murder, when everything in use for the previous day's reading can be made available. I hope this may suit you? We have been doing well here; and how it was arranged, nobody knows, but we had £410 at St. James's Hall last Tuesday, having advanced from our previous £360. The expenses are such, however, on the princely scale of the Chappells, that we never begin at a smaller, often at a larger, cost than £180. . . . I have not been well, and have been heavily tired. However, I have little to complain of--nothing, nothing; though, like Mariana, I am aweary. But think of this. If all go well, and (like Mr. Dennis) I 'work off' this series triumphantly, I shall have made of these readings £28,000 in a year and a half." This did not better reconcile me to what had been too clearly forced upon him by the supposed necessity of some new excitement to ensure a triumphant result; and even the private rehearsal only led to a painful correspondence between us, of which a few words are all that need now be preserved. "We might have agreed," he wrote, "to differ about it very well, because we only wanted to find out the truth if we could, and because it was quite understood that I wanted to leave behind me the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic, done with simple means, if the art would justify the theme." Apart from mere personal considerations, the whole question lay in these last words. It was impossible for me to admit that the effect to be produced was legitimate, or such as it was desirable to associate with the recollection of his readings. Mention should not be omitted of two sorrows which affected him at this time. At the close of the month before the readings began his youngest son went forth from home to join an elder brother in Australia. "These partings are hard hard things" (26th of September), "but they are the lot of us all, and might have to be done without means or influence, and then would be far harder. God bless him!" Hardly a month later, the last of his surviving brothers, Frederick, the next to himself, died at Darlington. "He had been tended" (24th of October) "with the greatest care and affection by some local friends. It was a wasted life, but God forbid that one should be hard upon it, or upon anything in this world that is not deliberately and coldly wrong." Before October closed the renewal of his labour had begun to tell upon him. He wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th of sickness and sleepless nights, and of its having become necessary, when he had to read, that he should lie on the sofa all day. After arrival at Edinburgh in December he had been making a calculation that the railway travelling over such a distance involved something more than thirty thousand shocks to the nerves; but he went on to Christmas, alternating these far-off places with nights regularly intervening in London, without much more complaint than of an inability to sleep. Trade reverses at Glasgow had checked the success there,[281] but Edinburgh made compensation. "The affectionate regard of the people exceeds all bounds and is shown in every way. The audiences do everything but embrace me, and take as much pains with the readings as I do. . . . The keeper of the Edinburgh hall, a fine old soldier, presented me on Friday night with the most superb red camellia for my button-hole that ever was seen. Nobody can imagine how he came by it, as the florists had had a considerable demand for that colour, from ladies in the stalls, and could get no such thing." The second portion of the enterprise opened with the New Year, and the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes, everywhere his prominent subject, exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him. In January he was at Clifton, where he had given, he told his sister-in-law, "by far the best Murder yet done;" while at the same date he wrote to his daughter: "At Clifton on Monday night we had a contagion of fainting; and yet the place was not hot. I should think we had from a dozen to twenty ladies taken out stiff and rigid, at various times! It became quite ridiculous." He was afterwards at Cheltenham. "Macready is of opinion that the Murder is two Macbeths. He declares that he heard every word of the reading, but I doubt it. Alas! he is sadly infirm." On the 27th he wrote to his daughter from Torquay that the place into which they had put him to read, and where a pantomime had been played the night before, was something between a Methodist chapel, a theatre, a circus, a riding-school, and a cow-house. That day he wrote to me from Bath: "Landor's ghost goes along the silent streets here before me. . . . The place looks to me like a cemetery which the Dead have succeeded in rising and taking. Having built streets, of their old gravestones, they wander about scantly trying to 'look alive.' A dead failure." In the second week of February he was in London, under engagement to return to Scotland (which he had just left) after the usual weekly reading at St. James's Hall, when there was a sudden interruption. "My foot has turned lame again!" was his announcement to me on the 15th, followed next day by this letter. "Henry Thompson will not let me read to-night, and will not let me go to Scotland to-morrow. Tremendous house here, and also in Edinburgh. Here is the certificate he drew up for himself and Beard to sign. 'We the undersigned hereby certify that Mr. C. D. is suffering from inflammation of the foot (caused by over-exertion), and that we have forbidden his appearance on the platform this evening, as he must keep his room for a day or two.' I have sent up to the Great Western Hotel for apartments, and, if I can get them, shall move there this evening. Heaven knows what engagements this may involve in April! It throws us all back, and will cost me some five hundred pounds." A few days' rest again brought so much relief, that, against the urgent entreaties of members of his family as well as other friends, he was in the railway carriage bound for Edinburgh on the morning of the 20th of February, accompanied by Mr. Chappell himself. "I came down lazily on a sofa," he wrote to me from Edinburgh next day, "hardly changing my position the whole way. The railway authorities had done all sorts of things, and I was more comfortable than on the sofa at the hotel. The foot gave me no uneasiness, and has been quiet and steady all night."[282] He was nevertheless under the necessity, two days later, of consulting Mr. Syme; and he told his daughter that this great authority had warned him against over-fatigue in the readings, and given him some slight remedies, but otherwise reported him in "joost pairfactly splendid condition." With care he thought the pain might be got rid of. "'Wa'at mad' Thompson think it was goot?' he said often, and seemed to take that opinion extremely ill." Again before leaving Scotland he saw Mr. Syme, and wrote to me on the second of March of the indignation with which he again treated the gout diagnosis, declaring the disorder to be an affection of the delicate nerves and muscles originating in cold. "I told him that it had shewn itself in America in the other foot as well. 'Noo I'll joost swear,' said he, 'that ayond the fatigue o' the readings ye'd been tramping i' th' snaw, within twa or three days.' I certainly had. 'Wa'al,' said he triumphantly, 'and hoo did it first begin? I' th' snaw. Goot! Bah!--Thompson knew no other name for it, and just ca'd it Goot--Boh!' For which he took two guineas." Yet the famous pupil, Sir Henry Thompson, went certainly nearer the mark than the distinguished master, Mr. Syme, in giving to it a more than local character. The whole of that March month he went on with the scenes from _Oliver Twist_. "The foot goes famously," he wrote to his daughter. "I feel the fatigue in it (four Murders in one week[283]) but not overmuch. It merely aches at night; and so does the other, sympathetically I suppose." At Hull on the 8th he heard of the death of the old and dear friend, Emerson Tennent, to whom he had inscribed his last book; and on the morning of the 12th I met him at the funeral. He had read the _Oliver Twist_ scenes the night before at York; had just been able to get to the express train, after shortening the pauses in the reading, by a violent rush when it was over; and had travelled through the night. He appeared to, me "dazed" and worn. No man could well look more so than he did, that sorrowful morning. The end was near. A public dinner, which will have mention on a later page, had been given him in Liverpool on the 10th of April, with Lord Dufferin in the chair, and a reading was due from him in Preston on the 22nd of that month. But on Sunday the 18th we had ill report of him from Chester, and on the 21st he wrote from Blackpool to his sister-in-law. "I have come to this Sea-Beach Hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am much better than I was on Sunday; but shall want careful looking to, to get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all on the left side; and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank Beard, who says that I have given him indisputable evidences of overwork which he could wish to treat immediately; and so I have telegraphed for him. I have had a delicious walk by the sea to-day, and I sleep soundly, and have picked up amazingly in appetite. My foot is greatly better too, and I wear my own boot." Next day was appointed for the reading at Preston; and from that place he wrote to me, while waiting the arrival of Mr. Beard. "Don't say anything about it, but the tremendously severe nature of this work is a little shaking me. At Chester last Sunday I found myself extremely giddy, and extremely uncertain of my sense of touch, both in the left leg and the left hand and arms. I had been taking some slight medicine of Beard's; and immediately wrote to him describing exactly what I felt, and asking him whether those feelings _could be_ referable to the medicine? He promptly replied: 'There can be no mistaking them from your exact account. The medicine cannot possibly have caused them. I recognise indisputable symptoms of overwork, and I wish to take you in hand without any loss of time.' They have greatly modified since, but he is coming down here this afternoon. To-morrow night at Warrington I shall have but 25 more nights to work through. If he can coach me up for them, I do not doubt that I shall get all right again--as I did when I became free in America. The foot has given me very little trouble. Yet it is remarkable that it is _the left foot too_; and that I told Henry Thompson (before I saw his old master Syme) that I had an inward conviction that whatever it was, it was not gout. I also told Beard, a year after the Staplehurst accident, that I was certain that my heart had been fluttered, and wanted a little helping. This the stethoscope confirmed; and considering the immense exertion I am undergoing, and the constant jarring of express trains, the case seems to me quite intelligible. Don't say anything in the Gad's direction about my being a little out of sorts. I have broached the matter of course; but very lightly. Indeed there is no reason for broaching it otherwise." Even to the close of that letter he had buoyed himself up with the hope that he might yet be "coached" and that the readings need not be discontinued. But Mr. Beard stopped them at once, and brought his patient to London. On Friday morning the 23rd, the same envelope brought me a note from himself to say that he was well enough, but tired; in perfectly good spirits, not at all uneasy, and writing this himself that I should have it under his own hand; with a note from his eldest son to say that his father appeared to him to be very ill, and that a consultation had been appointed with Sir Thomas Watson. The statement of that distinguished physician, sent to myself in June 1872, completes for the present the sorrowful narrative. "It was, I think, on the 23rd of April 1869 that I was asked to see Charles Dickens, in consultation with Mr. Carr Beard. After I got home I jotted down, from their joint account, what follows. "After unusual irritability, C. D. found himself, last Saturday or Sunday, giddy, with a tendency to go backwards, and to turn round. Afterwards, desiring to put something on a small table, he pushed it and the table forwards, undesignedly. He had some odd feeling of insecurity about his left leg, as if there was something unnatural about his heel; but he could lift, and he did not drag, his leg. Also he spoke of some strangeness of his left hand and arm; missed the spot on which he wished to lay that hand, unless he carefully looked at it; felt an unreadiness to lift his hands towards his head, especially his left hand--when, for instance, he was brushing his hair. "He had written thus to Mr. Carr Beard. "'Is it possible that anything in my medicine can have made me extremely giddy, extremely uncertain of my footing, especially on the left side, and extremely indisposed to raise my hands to my head. These symptoms made me very uncomfortable on Saturday (qy. Sunday?) night, and all yesterday, &c.' "The state thus described showed plainly that C. D. had been on the brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of apoplexy. It was, no doubt, the result of extreme hurry, overwork, and excitement, incidental to his Readings. "On hearing from him Mr. Carr Beard had gone at once to Preston, or Blackburn (I am not sure which), had forbidden his reading that same evening, and had brought him to London. "When I saw him he _appeared_ to be well. His mind was unclouded, his pulse quiet. His heart was beating with some slight excess of the natural impulse. He told me he had of late sometimes, but rarely, lost or misused a word; that he forgot names, and numbers, but had always done that; and he promised implicit obedience to our injunctions. "We gave him the following certificate. "'The undersigned certify that Mr. Charles Dickens has been seriously unwell, through great exhaustion and fatigue of body and mind consequent upon his public Readings and long and frequent railway journeys. In our judgment Mr. Dickens will not be able with safety to himself to resume his Readings for several months to come. "'THOS. WATSON, M.D. "'F. CARR BEARD.' "However, after some weeks, he expressed a wish for my sanction to his endeavours to redeem, in a careful and moderate way, some of the reading engagements to which he had been pledged before those threatenings of brain-mischief in the North of England. "As he had continued uniformly to seem and to feel perfectly well, I did not think myself warranted to refuse that sanction: and in writing to enforce great caution in the trials, I expressed some apprehension that he might fancy we had been too peremptory in our injunctions of mental and bodily repose in April; and I quoted the following remark, which occurs somewhere in one of Captain Cook's Voyages. 'Preventive measures are always invidious, for when most successful, the necessity for them is the least apparent.' "I mention this to explain the letter which I send herewith,[284] and which I must beg you to return to me, as a precious remembrance of the writer with whom I had long enjoyed very friendly and much valued relations. "I scarcely need say that if what I have now written can, _in any way_, be of use to you, it is entirely at your service and disposal--nor need I say with how much interest I have read the first volume of your late friend's Life. I cannot help regretting that a great pressure of professional work at the time, prevented my making a fuller record of a case so interesting." The twelve readings to which Sir Thomas Watson consented, with the condition that railway travel was not to accompany them, were farther to be delayed until the opening months of 1870. They were an offering from Dickens by way of small compensation to Messrs. Chappell for the breakdown of the enterprise on which they had staked so much. But here practically he finished his career as a public reader, and what remains will come with the end of what is yet to be told. One effort only intervened, by which he hoped to get happily back to his old pursuits; but to this, as to that which preceded it, sterner Fate said also No, and his Last Book, like his Last Readings, prematurely closed. FOOTNOTES: [281] "I think I shall be pretty correct in both places as to the run being on the Final readings. We had an immense house here" (Edinburgh, 12th of December) "last night, and a very large turnaway. But Glasgow being shady and the charges very great, it will be the most we can do, I fancy, on these first Scotch readings, to bring the Chappells safely home (as to them) without loss." [282] The close of the letter has an amusing picture which I may be excused for printing in a note. "The only news that will interest you is that the good-natured Reverdy Johnson, being at an Art Dinner in Glasgow the other night, and falling asleep over the post-prandial speeches (only too naturally), woke suddenly on hearing the name of 'Johnson' in a list of Scotch painters which one of the orators was enumerating; at once plunged up, under the impression that somebody was drinking his health; and immediately, and with overflowing amiability, began returning thanks. The spectacle was then presented to the astonished company, of the American Eagle being restrained by the coat tails from swooping at the moon, while the smaller birds endeavoured to explain to it how the case stood, and the cock robin in possession of the chairman's eye twittered away as hard as he could split. I am told that it was wonderfully droll." [283] I take from the letter a mention of the effect on a friend. "The night before last, unable to get in, B. had a seat behind the screen, and was nearly frightened off it, by the Murder. Every vestige of colour had left his face when I came off, and he sat staring over a glass of champagne in the wildest way." [284] In this letter Dickens wrote: "I thank you heartily" (23rd of June 1869) "for your great kindness and interest. It would really pain me if I thought you could seriously doubt my implicit reliance on your professional skill and advice. I feel as certain now as I felt when you came to see me on my breaking down through over fatigue, that the injunction you laid upon me to stop in my course of Readings was necessary and wise. And to its firmness I refer (humanly speaking) my speedy recovery from that moment. I would on no account have resumed, even on the turn of this year, without your sanction. Your friendly aid will never be forgotten by me; and again I thank you for it with all my heart." CHAPTER XVIII. LAST BOOK. 1869-1870. First Fancy for _Edwin Drood_--Story as planned in his Mind--Nothing written of his Intentions--Merits of the Fragment--Comparison of his Early and his Late MSS.--Discovery of Unpublished Scene--Probable Reason for writing it in Advance--How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a Member of the Eight Club. THE last book undertaken by Dickens was to be published, in illustrated monthly numbers, of the old form, but to close with the twelfth.[285] It closed, unfinished, with the sixth number, which was itself underwritten by two pages. His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?--Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years--at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. I first heard of the later design in a letter dated "Friday the 6th of August 1869," in which after speaking, with the usual unstinted praise he bestowed always on what moved him in others, of a little tale he had received for his journal,[286] he spoke of the change that had occurred to him for the new tale by himself. "I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it.[287] So much was told to me before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer. Nothing had been written, however, of the main parts of the design excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance; and there remained not even what he had himself so sadly written of the book by Thackeray also interrupted by death. The evidence of matured designs never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank. Enough had been completed nevertheless to give promise of a much greater book than its immediate predecessor. "I hope his book is finished," wrote Longfellow when the news of his death was flashed to America. "It is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all. It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand, and left it incomplete." Some of its characters were touched with subtlety, and in its descriptions his imaginative power was at its best. Not a line was wanting to the reality, in the most minute local detail, of places the most widely contrasted; and we saw with equal vividness the lazy cathedral town and the lurid opium-eater's den.[288] Something like the old lightness and buoyancy of animal spirits gave a new freshness to the humour; the scenes of the child-heroine and her luckless betrothed had both novelty and nicety of character in them; and Mr. Grewgious in chambers with his clerk and the two waiters, the conceited fool Sapsea, and the blustering philanthropist Honeythunder, were first-rate comedy. Miss Twinkleton was of the family of Miss La Creevy; and the lodging-house keeper, Miss Billickin, though she gave Miss Twinkleton but a sorry account of her blood, had that of Mrs. Todgers in her veins. "I was put in life to a very genteel boarding-school, the mistress being no less a lady than yourself, of about your own age, or it may be, some years younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table which has run through my life." Was ever anything better said of a school-fare of starved gentility? The last page of _Edwin Drood_ was written in the Châlet in the afternoon of his last day of consciousness; and I have thought there might be some interest in a facsimile of the greater part of this final page of manuscript that ever came from his hand, at which he had worked unusually late in order to finish the chapter. It has very much the character, in its excessive care of correction and interlineation, of all his later manuscripts; and in order that comparison may be made with his earlier and easier method, I place beside it a portion of a page of the original of _Oliver Twist_. His greater pains and elaboration of writing, it may be mentioned, become first very obvious in the later parts of _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but not the least remarkable feature in all his manuscripts, is the accuracy with which the portions of each representing the several numbers are exactly adjusted to the space the printer had to fill. Whether without erasure or so interlined as to be illegible, nothing is wanting, and there is nothing in excess. So assured was the habit, that he has himself remarked upon an instance the other way, in _Our Mutual Friend_, as not having happened to him for thirty years. But _Edwin Drood_ more startlingly showed him how unsettled the habit he most prized had become, in the clashing of old and new pursuits. "When I had written" (22nd of December 1869) "and, as I thought, disposed of the first two Numbers of my story, Clowes informed me to my horror that they were, together, _twelve printed pages too short_!!! Consequently I had to transpose a chapter from number two to number one, and remodel number two altogether! This was the more unlucky, that it came upon me at the time when I was obliged to leave the book, in order to get up the Readings" (the additional twelve for which Sir Thomas Watson's consent had been obtained), "quite gone out of my mind since I left them off. However, I turned to it and got it done, and both numbers are now in type. Charles Collins has designed an excellent cover." It was his wish that his son-in-law should have illustrated the story; but, this not being practicable, upon an opinion expressed by Mr. Millais which the result thoroughly justified, choice was made of Mr. S. L. Fildes. * * * * * [Illustration: Handwritten Notes] [Illustration: Handwritten Notes] This reference to the last effort of Dickens's genius had been written as it thus stands, when a discovery of some interest was made by the writer. Within the leaves of one of Dickens's other manuscripts were found some detached slips of his writing, on paper only half the size of that used for the tale, so cramped, interlined, and blotted as to be nearly illegible, which on close inspection proved to be a scene in which Sapsea the auctioneer is introduced as the principal figure, among a group of characters new to the story. The explanation of it perhaps is, that, having become a little nervous about the course of the tale, from a fear that he might have plunged too soon into the incidents leading on to the catastrophe, such as the Datchery assumption in the fifth number (a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his sister-in-law), it had occurred to him to open some fresh veins of character incidental to the interest, though not directly part of it, and so to handle them in connection with Sapsea as a little to suspend the final development even while assisting to strengthen it. Before beginning any number of a serial he used, as we have seen in former instances, to plan briefly what he intended to put into it chapter by chapter; and his first number-plan of _Drood_ had the following: "Mr. Sapsea. Old Tory jackass. Connect Jasper with him. (He will want a solemn donkey by and by):" which was effected by bringing together both Durdles and Jasper, for connection with Sapsea, in the matter of the epitaph for Mrs. Sapsea's tomb. The scene now discovered might in this view have been designed to strengthen and carry forward that element in the tale; and otherwise it very sufficiently expresses itself. It would supply an answer, if such were needed, to those who have asserted that the hopeless decadence of Dickens as a writer had set in before his death. Among the lines last written by him, these are the very last we can ever hope to receive; and they seem to me a delightful specimen of the power possessed by him in his prime, and the rarest which any novelist can have, of revealing a character by a touch. Here are a couple of people, Kimber and Peartree, not known to us before, whom we read off thoroughly in a dozen words; and as to Sapsea himself, auctioneer and mayor of Cloisterham, we are face to face with what before we only dimly realised, and we see the solemn jackass, in his business pulpit, playing off the airs of Mr. Dean in his Cathedral pulpit, with Cloisterham laughing at the impostor. "HOW MR. SAPSEA CEASED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE EIGHT CLUB. "TOLD BY HIMSELF. "Wishing to take the air, I proceeded by a circuitous route to the Club, it being our weekly night of meeting. I found that we mustered our full strength. We were enrolled under the denomination of the Eight Club. We were eight in number; we met at eight o'clock during eight months of the year; we played eight games of four-handed cribbage, at eightpence the game; our frugal supper was composed of eight rolls, eight mutton chops, eight pork sausages, eight baked potatoes, eight marrow-bones, with eight toasts, and eight bottles of ale. There may, or may not, be a certain harmony of colour in the ruling idea of this (to adopt a phrase of our lively neighbours) reunion. It was a little idea of mine. "A somewhat popular member of the Eight Club, was a member by the name of Kimber. By profession, a dancing-master. A commonplace, hopeful sort of man, wholly destitute of dignity or knowledge of the world. "As I entered the Club-room, Kimber was making the remark: 'And he still half-believes him to be very high in the Church.' "In the act of hanging up my hat on the eighth peg by the door, I caught Kimber's visual ray. He lowered it, and passed a remark on the next change of the moon. I did not take particular notice of this at the moment, because the world was often pleased to be a little shy of ecclesiastical topics in my presence. For I felt that I was picked out (though perhaps only through a coincidence) to a certain extent to represent what I call our glorious constitution in Church and State. The phrase may be objected to by captious minds; but I own to it as mine. I threw it off in argument some little time back. I said: 'OUR GLORIOUS CONSTITUTION in CHURCH and STATE.' "Another member of the Eight Club was Peartree; also member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Mr. Peartree is not accountable to me for his opinions, and I say no more of them here than that he attends the poor gratis whenever they want him, and is not the parish doctor. Mr. Peartree may justify it to the grasp of _his_ mind thus to do his republican utmost to bring an appointed officer into contempt. Suffice it that Mr. Peartree can never justify it to the grasp of _mine_. "Between Peartree and Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded alliance. It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by auction. (Goods taken in execution). He was a widower in a white under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not ill-looking. Indeed the reverse. Both daughters taught dancing in scholastic establishments for Young Ladies--had done so at Mrs. Sapsea's; nay, Twinkleton's--and both, in giving lessons, presented the unwomanly spectacle of having little fiddles tucked under their chins. In spite of which, the younger one might, if I am correctly informed--I will raise the veil so far as to say I KNOW she might--have soared for life from this degrading taint, but for having the class of mind allotted to what I call the common herd, and being so incredibly devoid of veneration as to become painfully ludicrous. "When I sold off Kimber without reserve, Peartree (as poor as he can hold together) had several prime household lots knocked down to him. I am not to be blinded; and of course it was as plain to me what he was going to do with them, as it was that he was a brown hulking sort of revolutionary subject who had been in India with the soldiers, and ought (for the sake of society) to have his neck broke. I saw the lots shortly afterwards in Kimber's lodgings--through the window--and I easily made out that there had been a sneaking pretence of lending them till better times. A man with a smaller knowledge of the world than myself might have been led to suspect that Kimber had held back money from his creditors, and fraudulently bought the goods. But, besides that I knew for certain he had no money, I knew that this would involve a species of forethought not to be made compatible with the frivolity of a caperer, inoculating other people with capering, for his bread. "As it was the first time I had seen either of those two since the sale, I kept myself in what I call Abeyance. When selling him up, I had delivered a few remarks--shall I say a little homely?--concerning Kimber, which the world did regard as more than usually worth notice. I had come up into my pulpit;, it was said, uncommonly like--and a murmur of recognition had repeated his (I will not name whose) title, before I spoke. I had then gone on to say that all present would find, in the first page of the catalogue that was lying before them, in the last paragraph before the first lot, the following words: 'Sold in pursuance of a writ of execution issued by a creditor.' I had then proceeded to remind my friends, that however frivolous, not to say contemptible, the business by which a man got his goods together, still his goods were as dear to him, and as cheap to society (if sold without reserve), as though his pursuits had been of a character that would bear serious contemplation. I had then divided my text (if I may be allowed so to call it) into three heads: firstly, Sold; secondly, In pursuance of a writ of execution; thirdly, Issued by a creditor; with a few moral reflections on each, and winding up with, 'Now to the first lot' in a manner that was complimented when I afterwards mingled with my hearers. "So, not being certain on what terms I and Kimber stood, I was grave, I was chilling. Kimber, however, moving to me, I moved to Kimber. (I was the creditor who had issued the writ. Not that it matters.) "'I was alluding, Mr. Sapsea,' said Kimber, 'to a stranger who entered into conversation with me in the street as I came to the Club. He had been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and though you had told him who you were, I could hardly persuade him that you were not high in the Church.' "'Idiot!' said Peartree. "'Ass!' said Kimber. "'Idiot and Ass!" said the other five members. "'Idiot and Ass, gentlemen,' I remonstrated, looking around me, 'are strong expressions to apply to a young man of good appearance and address.' My generosity was roused; I own it. "'You'll admit that he must be a Fool,' said Peartree. "'You can't deny that he must be a Blockhead, said Kimber. "Their tone of disgust amounted to being offensive. Why should the young man be so calumniated? What had he done? He had only made an innocent and natural mistake. I controlled my generous indignation, and said so. "'Natural?' repeated Kimber; '_He's_ a Natural!' "The remaining six members of the Eight Club laughed unanimously. It stung me. It was a scornful laugh. My anger was roused in behalf of an absent, friendless stranger. I rose (for I had been sitting down). "'Gentlemen,' I said with dignity, 'I will not remain one of this Club allowing opprobrium to be cast on an unoffending person in his absence. I will not so violate what I call the sacred rites of hospitality. Gentlemen, until you know how to behave yourselves better, I leave you. Gentlemen, until then I withdraw, from this place of meeting, whatever personal qualifications I may have brought into it. Gentlemen, until then you cease to be the Eight Club, and must make the best you can of becoming the Seven.' "I put on my hat and retired. As I went down stairs I distinctly heard them give a suppressed cheer. Such is the power of demeanour and knowledge of mankind. I had forced it out of them. "II. "Whom should I meet in the street, within a few yards of the door of the inn where the Club was held, but the self-same young man whose cause I had felt it my duty so warmly--and I will add so disinterestedly--to take up. "Is it Mr. Sapsea,' he said doubtfully, 'or is it----' "'It is Mr. Sapsea,' I replied. "'Pardon me, Mr. Sapsea; you appear warm, sir,' "'I have been warm,' I said, 'and on your account.' Having stated the circumstances at some length (my generosity almost overpowered him), I asked him his name. "'Mr. Sapsea,' he answered, looking down, 'your penetration is so acute, your glance into the souls of your fellow men is so penetrating, that if I was hardy enough to deny that my name is Poker, what would it avail me?' "I don't know that I had quite exactly made out to a fraction that his name _was_ Poker, but I daresay I had been pretty near doing it. "'Well, well,' said I, trying to put him at his ease by nodding my head in a soothing way. 'Your name is Poker, and there is no harm in being named Poker.' "'Oh Mr. Sapsea!' cried the young man, in a very well-behaved manner. 'Bless you for those words!' He then, as if ashamed of having given way to his feelings, looked down again. "'Come, Poker,' said I, 'let me hear more about you. Tell me. Where are you going to, Poker? and where do you come from?' "'Ah Mr. Sapsea!' exclaimed the young man. 'Disguise from you is impossible. You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going somewhere else. If I was to deny it, what would it avail me?' "'Then don't deny it,' was my remark. "'Or,' pursued Poker, in a kind of despondent rapture, 'or if I was to deny that I came to this town to see and hear you sir, what would it avail me? Or if I was to deny----'" The fragment ends there, and the hand that could alone have completed it is at rest for ever. * * * * * Some personal characteristics remain for illustration before the end is briefly told. FOOTNOTES: [285] In drawing the agreement for the publication, Mr. Ouvry had, by Dickens's wish, inserted a clause thought to be altogether needless, but found to be sadly pertinent. It was the first time such a clause had been inserted in one of his agreements. "That if the said Charles Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of the _Mystery of Edwin Drood_, or shall otherwise become incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators, to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so much of the said work as shall not have been completed for publication." The sum to be paid at once for 25,000 copies was £7500; publisher and author sharing equally in the profit of all sales beyond that impression; and the number reached, while the author yet lived, was 50,000. The sum paid for early sheets to America was £1000; and Baron Tauchnitz paid liberally, as he always did, for his Leipzig reprint. "All Mr. Dickens's works," M. Tauchnitz writes to me, "have been published under agreement by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of March 1870. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my asking him his terms for _Edwin Drood_, he replied 'Your terms shall be mine.'" [286] "I have a very remarkable story indeed for you to read. It is in only two chapters. A thing never to melt into other stories in the mind, but always to keep itself apart." The story was published in the 37th number of the new series of _All the Year Round_, with the title of "An Experience." The "new series" had been started to break up the too great length of volumes in sequence, and the only change it announced was the discontinuance of Christmas Numbers. He had tired of them himself; and, observing the extent to which they were now copied in all directions (as usual with other examples set by him), he supposed them likely to become tiresome to the public. [287] The reader curious in such matters will be helped to the clue for much of this portion of the plot by reference to pp. 90, 103, and 109, in Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV. [288] I subjoin what has been written to me by an American correspondent. "I went lately with the same inspector who accompanied Dickens to see the room of the opium-smokers, old Eliza and her Lascar or Bengalee friend. There a fancy seized me to buy the bedstead which figures so accurately in _Edwin Drood_, in narrative and picture. I gave the old woman a pound for it, and have it now packed and ready for shipment to New York. Another American bought a pipe. So you see we have heartily forgiven the novelist his pleasantries at our expense. Many military men who came to England from America refuse to register their titles, especially if they be Colonels; all the result of the basting we got on that score in _Martin Chuzzlewit_." CHAPTER XIX. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 1836-1870. Dickens not a Bookish Man--Character of his Talk--Dickens made to tell his Own Story--Lord Russell on Dickens's Letters--No Self-conceit in Dickens--Letter to his Youngest Son--Personal Prayer--Hymn in a Christmas Tale--Objection to Posthumous Honours--Source of Quarrel with Literary Fund--Small Poets--On "Royalty" Bargains--Editorship--Relations with Contributors--Foreign Views of English People--Editorial Pleasures--Adverse Influences of Periodical Writing--Anger and Satire--No desire to enter the House of Commons--Reforms he took most Interest in--The Liverpool Dinner in 1869--Tribute to Lord Russell--The People governing and the People governed--Tone of Last Book--Alleged Offers from the Queen--The Queen's Desire to see Dickens act--Her Majesty's Wish to hear Dickens read--Interview with the Queen--Dickens's Grateful Impression from it--"In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps--Rural Enjoyments--A Winner in the Games--Dickens's Habits of Life everywhere--Centre and Soul of his Home--Daily Habits--London Haunts--First Attack of Lameness--How it affected his Large Dogs--His Hatred of Indifference--At Social Meetings--Agreeable Pleasantries--Ghost Stories--Marvels of Coincidence--Predominant Impression of his Life--Effects on his Career. OBJECTION has been taken to this biography as likely to disappoint its readers in not making them "talk to Dickens as Boswell makes them talk to Johnson." But where will the blame lie if a man takes up _Pickwick_ and is disappointed to find that he is not reading _Rasselas_? A book must be judged for what it aims to be, and not for what it cannot by possibility be. I suppose so remarkable an author as Dickens hardly ever lived who carried so little of authorship into ordinary social intercourse. Potent as the sway of his writings was over him, it expressed itself in other ways. Traces or triumphs of literary labour, displays of conversational or other personal predominance, were no part of the influence he exerted over friends. To them he was only the pleasantest of companions, with whom they forgot that he had ever written anything, and felt only the charm which a nature of such capacity for supreme enjoyment causes every one around it to enjoy. His talk was unaffected and natural, never bookish in the smallest degree. He was quite up to the average of well read men, but as there was no ostentation of it in his writing, so neither was there in his conversation. This was so attractive because so keenly observant, and lighted up with so many touches of humorous fancy; but, with every possible thing to give relish to it, there were not many things to bring away. Of course a book must stand or fall by its contents. Macaulay said very truly that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them. I offer no complaint of any remark made upon these volumes, but there have been some misapprehensions. Though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which essentially constituted the man; and as in this respect he was actually, I have thought that his biography should endeavour to present him. The story of his books, therefore, at all stages of their progress, and of the hopes or designs connected with them, was my first care. With that view, and to give also to the memoir what was attainable of the value of autobiography, letters to myself, such as were never addressed to any other of his correspondents, and covering all the important incidents in the life to be retraced, were used with few exceptions exclusively; and though the exceptions are much more numerous in the present volume, this general plan has guided me to the end. Such were my limits indeed, that half even of those letters had to be put aside; and to have added all such others as were open to me would have doubled the size of my book, not contributed to it a new fact of life or character, and altered materially its design. It would have been so much lively illustration added to the subject, but out of place here. The purpose here was to make Dickens the sole central figure in the scenes revived, narrator as well as principal actor; and only by the means employed could consistency or unity be given to the self-revelation, and the picture made definite and clear. It is the peculiarity of few men to be to their most intimate friend neither more nor less than they are to themselves, but this was true of Dickens; and what kind or quality of nature such intercourse expressed in him, of what strength, tenderness, and delicacy susceptible, of what steady level warmth, of what daily unresting activity of intellect, of what unbroken continuity of kindly impulse through the change and vicissitude of three-and-thirty years, the letters to myself given in these volumes could alone express. Gathered from various and differing sources, their interest could not have been as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the successive stages of a most attractive career is written with unexampled candour and truthfulness, and set forth in definite pictures of what he saw and stood in the midst of, unblurred by vagueness or reserve. Of the charge of obtruding myself to which their publication has exposed me, I can only say that I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own personality, and have to regret my ill success where I supposed I had even too perfectly succeeded. But we have all of us frequent occasion to say, parodying Mrs. Peachem's remark, that we are bitter bad judges of ourselves. The other properties of these letters are quite subordinate to this main fact that the man who wrote them is thus perfectly seen in them. But they do not lessen the estimate of his genius. Admiration rises higher at the writer's mental forces, who, putting so much of himself into his work for the public, had still so much overflowing for such private intercourse. The sunny health of nature in them is manifest; its largeness, spontaneity, and manliness; but they have also that which highest intellects appreciate best. "I have read them," Lord Russell wrote to me, "with delight and pain. His heart, his imagination, his qualities of painting what is noble, and finding diamonds hidden far away, are greater here than even his works convey to me. How I lament he was not spared to us longer. I shall have a fresh grief when he dies in your volumes." Shallower people are more apt to find other things. If the bonhommie of a man's genius is obvious to all the world, there are plenty of knowing ones ready to take the shine out of the genius, to discover that after all it is not so wonderful, that what is grave in it wants depth, and the humour has something mechanical. But it will be difficult even for these to look over letters so marvellous in the art of reproducing to the sight what has once been seen, so natural and unstudied in their wit and fun, and with such a constant well-spring of sprightly runnings of speech in them, point of epigram, ingenuity of quaint expression, absolute freedom from every touch of affectation, and to believe that the source of this man's humour, or of whatever gave wealth to his genius, was other than habitual, unbounded, and resistless. There is another consideration of some importance. Sterne did not more incessantly fall back from his works upon himself than Dickens did, and undoubtedly one of the impressions left by the letters is that of the intensity and tenacity with which he recognized, realized, contemplated, cultivated, and thoroughly enjoyed, his own individuality in even its most trivial manifestations. But if any one is led to ascribe this to self-esteem, to a narrow exclusiveness, or to any other invidious form of egotism, let him correct the impression by observing how Dickens bore himself amid the universal blazing-up of America, at the beginning and at the end of his career. Of his hearty, undisguised, and unmistakeable enjoyment of his astonishing and indeed quite bewildering popularity, there can be as little doubt as that there is not a particle of vanity in it, any more than of false modesty or grimace.[289] While realizing fully the fact of it, and the worth of the fact, there is not in his whole being a fibre that answers falsely to the charmer's voice. Few men in the world, one fancies, could have gone through such grand displays of fireworks, not merely with so marvellous an absence of what the French call _pose_, but unsoiled by the smoke of a cracker. No man's strong individuality was ever so free from conceit. Other personal incidents and habits, and especially some matters of opinion of grave importance, will help to make his character better known. Much questioning followed a brief former reference to his religious belief, but, inconsistent or illogical as the conduct described may be, there is nothing to correct or to modify in my statement of it;[290] and, to what otherwise appeared to be in doubt, explicit answer will be afforded by a letter, written upon the youngest of his children leaving home in September 1868 to join his brother in Australia, than which none worthier appears in his story. "I write this note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind, and because I want you to have a few parting words from me, to think of now and then at quiet times. I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne. It is my comfort and my sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than any experiment in a study or office would have been; and without that training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation. What you have always wanted until now, has been a set, steady, constant purpose. I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do whatever you have to do, as well as you can do it. I was not so old as you are now, when I first had to win my food, and to do it out of this determination; and I have never slackened in it since. Never take a mean advantage of any one in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by Our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the world; and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature, who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this Book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of Man. You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. I hope you will always be able to say in after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty." They who most intimately knew Dickens will know best that every word there is written from his heart, and is radiant with the truth of his nature. To the same effect, in the leading matter, he expressed himself twelve years before, and again the day before his death; replying in both cases to correspondents who had addressed him as a public writer. A clergyman, the Rev. R. H. Davies, had been struck by the hymn in the Christmas tale of the Wreck of the Golden Mary (_Household Words_, 1856). "I beg to thank you" Dickens answered (Christmas Eve, 1856) "for your very acceptable letter--not the less gratifying to me because I am myself the writer you refer to. . . . There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a more humble veneration for the New Testament, or a more profound conviction of its all-sufficiency, than I have. If I am ever (as you tell me I am) mistaken on this subject, it is because I discountenance all obtrusive professions of and tradings in religion, as one of the main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world; and because my observation of life induces me to hold in unspeakable dread and horror, those unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands." In precisely similar tone, to a reader of _Edwin Drood_ (Mr. J. M. Makeham), who had pointed out to him that his employment as a figure of speech of a line from Holy Writ in his tenth chapter might be subject to misconstruction, he wrote from Gadshill on Wednesday the eighth of June, 1870. "It would be quite inconceivable to me, but for your letter, that any reasonable reader could possibly attach a scriptural reference to that passage. . . . I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake. I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour; because I feel it; and because I re-wrote that history for my children--every one of whom knew it, from having it repeated to them, long before they could read, and almost as soon as they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the house tops."[291] A dislike of all display was rooted in him; and his objection to posthumous honours, illustrated by the instructions in his will, was very strikingly expressed two years before his death, when Mr. Thomas Fairbairn asked his help to a proposed recognition of Rajah Brooke's services by a memorial in Westminster Abbey. "I am very strongly impelled" (24th of June 1868) "to comply with any request of yours. But these posthumous honours of committee, subscriptions, and Westminster Abbey are so profoundly unsatisfactory in my eyes that--plainly--I would rather have nothing to do with them in any case. My daughter and her aunt unite with me in kindest regards to Mrs. Fairbairn, and I hope you will believe in the possession of mine until I am quietly buried without any memorial but such as I have set up in my lifetime." Asked a year later (August 1869) to say something on the inauguration of Leigh Hunt's bust at his grave in Kensal-green, he told the committee that he had a very strong objection to speech-making beside graves. "I do not expect or wish my feelings in this wise to guide other men; still, it is so serious with me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I must decline to officiate." His aversion to every form of what is called patronage of literature[292] was part of the same feeling. A few months earlier a Manchester gentleman[293] wrote for his support to such a scheme. "I beg to be excused," was his reply, "from complying with the request you do me the honour to prefer, simply because I hold the opinion that there is a great deal too much patronage in England. The better the design, the less (as I think) should it seek such adventitious aid, and the more composedly should it rest on its own merits." This was the belief Southey held; it extended to the support by way of patronage given by such societies as the Literary Fund, which Southey also strongly resisted; and it survived the failure of the Guild whereby it was hoped to establish a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give. Though there was no project of his life into which he flung himself with greater eagerness than the Guild, it was not taken up by the class it was meant to benefit, and every renewed exertion more largely added to the failure. There is no room in these pages for the story, which will add its chapter some day to the vanity of human wishes; but a passage from a letter to Bulwer Lytton at its outset will be some measure of the height from which the writer fell, when all hope for what he had so set his heart upon ceased. "I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried by the support which I trust will be given to it, will change the status of the literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have implicit confidence in the scheme--so splendidly begun--if we carry it out with a stedfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come, and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring benefactor. . . . Oh what a procession of new years may walk out of all this for the class we belong to, after we are dust." These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the clamour with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously small. "You read that life of Clare?" he wrote (15th of August 1865). "Did you ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isn't it expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as _the Poet_? So another Incompetent used to write to the Literary Fund when I was on the committee: 'This leaves the Poet at his divine mission in a corner of the single room. The Poet's father is wiping his spectacles. The Poet's mother is weaving'--Yah!'" He was equally intolerant of every magnificent proposal that should render the literary man independent of the bookseller, and he sharply criticized even a compromise to replace the half-profits system by one of royalties on copies sold. "What does it come to?" he remarked of an ably-written pamphlet in which this was urged (10th of November 1866): "what is the worth of the remedy after all? You and I know very well that in nine cases out of ten the author is at a disadvantage with the publisher because the publisher has capital and the author has not. We know perfectly well that in nine cases out of ten money is advanced by the publisher before the book is producible--often, long before. No young or unsuccessful author (unless he were an amateur and an independent gentleman) would make a bargain for having that royalty, to-morrow, if he could have a certain sum of money, or an advance of money. The author who could command that bargain, could command it to-morrow, or command anything else. For the less fortunate or the less able, I make bold to say--with some knowledge of the subject, as a writer who made a publisher's fortune long before he began to share in the real profits of his books--that if the publishers met next week, and resolved henceforth to make this royalty bargain and no other, it would be an enormous hardship and misfortune because the authors could not live while they wrote. The pamphlet seems to me just another example of the old philosophical chess-playing, with human beings for pieces. 'Don't want money.' 'Be careful to be born with means, and have a banker's account.' 'Your publisher will settle with you, at such and such long periods according to the custom of his trade, and you will settle with your butcher and baker weekly, in the meantime, by drawing cheques as I do.' 'You must be sure not to want money, and then I have worked it out for you splendidly.'" Less has been said in this work than might perhaps have been wished, of the way in which his editorship of _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_ was discharged. It was distinguished above all by liberality; and a scrupulous consideration and delicacy, evinced by him to all his contributors, was part of the esteem in which he held literature itself. It was said in a newspaper after his death, evidently by one of his contributors, that he always brought the best out of a man by encouragement and appreciation; that he liked his writers to feel unfettered; and that his last reply to a proposition for a series of articles had been: "Whatever you see your way to, I will see mine to, and we know and understand each other well enough to make the best of these conditions." Yet the strong feeling of personal responsibility was always present in his conduct of both journals; and varied as the contents of a number might be, and widely apart the writers, a certain individuality of his own was never absent. He took immense pains (as indeed was his habit about everything) with numbers in which he had written nothing; would often accept a paper from a young or unhandy contributor, because of some single notion in it which he thought it worth rewriting for; and in this way, or by helping generally to give strength and attractiveness to the work of others, he grudged no trouble.[294] "I have had a story" he wrote (22nd of June 1856) "to hack and hew into some form for _Household Words_ this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention. And I am perfectly addled by its horrible want of continuity after all, and the dreadful spectacle I have made of the proofs--which look like an inky fishing-net." A few lines from another letter will show the difficulties in which he was often involved by the plan he adopted for Christmas numbers, of putting within a framework by himself a number of stories by separate writers to whom the leading notion had before been severally sent. "As yet" (25th of November 1859), "not a story has come to me in the least belonging to the idea (the simplest in the world; which I myself described in writing, in the most elaborate manner); and everyone of them turns, by a strange fatality, on a criminal trial!" It had all to be set right by him, and editorship on such terms was not a sinecure. It had its pleasures as well as pains, however, and the greatest was when he fancied he could descry unusual merit in any writer. A letter will give one instance for illustration of many; the lady to whom it was addressed, admired under her assumed name of Holme Lee, having placed it at my disposal. (Folkestone: 14th of August 1855.) "I read your tale with the strongest emotion, and with a very exalted admiration of the great power displayed in it. Both in severity and tenderness I thought it masterly. It moved me more than I can express to you. I wrote to Mr. Wills that it had completely unsettled me for the day, and that by whomsoever it was written, I felt the highest respect for the mind that had produced it. It so happened that I had been for some days at work upon a character externally like the Aunt. And it was very strange to me indeed to observe how the two people seemed to be near to one another at first, and then turned off on their own ways so wide asunder. I told Mr. Wills that I was not sure whether I could have prevailed upon myself to present to a large audience the terrible consideration of hereditary madness, when it was reasonably probable that there must be many--or some--among them whom it would awfully, because personally, address. But I was not obliged to ask myself the question, inasmuch as the length of the story rendered it unavailable for _Household Words_. I speak of its length in reference to that publication only; relatively to what is told in it, I would not spare a page of your manuscript. Experience shows me that a story in four portions is best suited to the peculiar requirements of such a journal, and I assure you it will be an uncommon satisfaction to me if this correspondence should lead to your enrolment among its contributors. But my strong and sincere conviction of the vigour and pathos of this beautiful tale, is quite apart from, and not to be influenced by, any ulterior results. You had no existence to me when I read it. The actions and sufferings of the characters affected me by their own force and truth, and left a profound impression on me."[295] The experience there mentioned did not prevent him from admitting into his later periodical, _All the Year Round_, longer serial stories published with the names of known writers; and to his own interference with these he properly placed limits. "When one of my literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task, I hold that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the sustainment of his own reputation; and I do not consider myself at liberty to exercise that control over his text which I claim as to other contributions." Nor had he any greater pleasure, even in these cases, than to help younger novelists to popularity. "You asked me about new writers last night. If you will read _Kissing the Rod_, a book I have read to-day, you will not find it hard to take an interest in the author of such a book." That was Mr. Edmund Yates, in whose literary successes he took the greatest interest himself, and with whom he continued to the last an intimate personal intercourse which had dated from kindness shown at a very trying time. "I think" he wrote of another of his contributors, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, for whom he had also much personal liking, and of whose powers he thought highly, "you will find _Fatal Zero_ a very curious bit of mental development, deepening as the story goes on into a picture not more startling than true." My mention of these pleasures of editorship shall close with what I think to him was the greatest. He gave to the world, while yet the name of the writer was unknown to him, the pure and pathetic verse of Adelaide Procter. "In the spring of the year 1853 I observed a short poem among the proffered contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical."[296] The contributions had been large and frequent under an assumed name, when at Christmas 1854 he discovered that Miss Mary Berwick was the daughter of his old and dear friend Barry Cornwall. But periodical writing is not without its drawbacks, and its effect on Dickens, who engaged in it largely from time to time, was observable in the increased impatience of allusion to national institutions and conventional distinctions to be found in his later books. Party divisions he cared for less and less as life moved on; but the decisive, peremptory, dogmatic style, into which a habit of rapid remark on topics of the day will betray the most candid and considerate commentator, displayed its influence, perhaps not always consciously to himself, in the underlying tone of bitterness that runs through the books which followed _Copperfield_. The resentment against remediable wrongs is as praiseworthy in them as in the earlier tales; but the exposure of Chancery abuses, administrative incompetence, politico-economic shortcomings, and social flunkeyism, in _Bleak House_, _Little Dorrit_, _Hard Times_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, would not have been made less odious by the cheerier tone that had struck with much sharper effect at prison abuses, parish wrongs, Yorkshire schools, and hypocritical humbug, in _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and _Chuzzlewit_. It will be remembered of him always that he desired to set right what was wrong, that he held no abuse to be unimprovable, that he left none of the evils named exactly as he found them, and that to influences drawn from his writings were due not a few of the salutary changes which marked the age in which he lived; but anger does not improve satire, and it gave latterly, from the causes named, too aggressive a form to what, after all, was but a very wholesome hatred of the cant that everything English is perfect, and that to call a thing _un_English is to doom it to abhorred extinction. "I have got an idea for occasional papers in _Household Words_ called the Member for Nowhere. They will contain an account of his views, votes, and speeches; and I think of starting with his speeches on the Sunday question. He is a member of the Government of course. The moment they found such a member in the House, they felt that he must be dragged (by force, if necessary) into the Cabinet." "I give it up reluctantly," he wrote afterwards, "and with it my hope to have made every man in England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I have. We shall never begin to do anything until the sentiment is universal." That was in August 1854; and the break-down in the Crimea that winter much embittered his radicalism. "I am hourly strengthened in my old belief," he wrote (3rd of February 1855) "that our political aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England. In all this business I don't see a gleam of hope. As to the popular spirit, it has come to be so entirely separated from the Parliament and Government, and so perfectly apathetic about them both, that I seriously think it a most portentous sign." A couple of months later: "I have rather a bright idea, I think, for _Household Words_ this morning: a fine little bit of satire: an account of an Arabic MS. lately discovered very like the _Arabian Nights_--called the Thousand and One Humbugs. With new versions of the best known stories." This also had to be given up, and is only mentioned as another illustration of his political discontents and of their connection with his journal-work. The influences from his early life which unconsciously strengthened them in certain social directions has been hinted at, and of his absolute sincerity in the matter there can be no doubt. The mistakes of Dickens were never such as to cast a shade on his integrity. What he said with too much bitterness, in his heart he believed; and had, alas! too much ground for believing. "A country," he wrote (27th of April 1855) "which is discovered to be in this tremendous condition as to its war affairs; with an enormous black cloud of poverty in every town which is spreading and deepening every hour, and not one man in two thousand knowing anything about, or even believing in, its existence; with a non-working aristocracy, and a silent parliament, and everybody for himself and nobody for the rest; this is the prospect, and I think it a very deplorable one." Admirably did he say, of a notorious enquiry at that time: "O what a fine aspect of political economy it is, that the noble professors of the science on the adulteration committee should have tried to make Adulteration a question of Supply and Demand! We shall never get to the Millennium, sir, by the rounds of that ladder; and I, for one, won't hold by the skirts of that Great Mogul of impostors, Master M'Culloch!" Again he wrote (30th of September 1855): "I really am serious in thinking--and I have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with children to live and suffer after him can honestly give to it--that representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down since that great seventeenth-century time, and has no hope in it." With the good sense that still overruled all his farthest extremes of opinion he yet never thought of parliament for himself. He could not mend matters, and for him it would have been a false position. The people of the town of Reading and others applied to him during the first half of his life, and in the last half some of the Metropolitan constituencies. To one of the latter a reply is before me in which he says: "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming earth, it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever bothered this much-bothered world." To a private enquiry of apparently about the same date he replied: "I have thoroughly satisfied myself, having often had occasion to consider the question, that I can be far more usefully and independently employed in my chosen sphere of action than I could hope to be in the House of Commons; and I believe that no consideration would induce me to become a member of that extraordinary assembly." Finally, upon a reported discussion in Finsbury whether or not he should be invited to sit for that borough, he promptly wrote (November 1861): "It may save some trouble if you will kindly confirm a sensible gentleman who doubted at that meeting whether I was quite the man for Finsbury. I am not at all the sort of man; for I believe nothing would induce me to offer myself as a parliamentary representative of that place, or of any other under the sun." The only direct attempt to join a political agitation was his speech at Drury-lane for administrative reform, and he never repeated it. But every movement for practical social reforms, to obtain more efficient sanitary legislation, to get the best compulsory education practicable for the poor, and to better the condition of labouring people, he assisted earnestly to his last hour; and the readiness with which he took the chair at meetings having such objects in view, the help he gave to important societies working in beneficent ways for themselves or the community, and the power and attractiveness of his oratory, made him one of the forces of the time. His speeches derived singular charm from the buoyancy of his perfect self-possession, and to this he added the advantages of a person and manner which had become as familiar and as popular as his books. The most miscellaneous assemblages listened to him as to a personal friend. Two incidents at the close of his life will show what upon these matters his latest opinions were. At the great Liverpool dinner after his country readings in 1869, over which Lord Dufferin eloquently presided, he replied to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his objection to entering public life,[297] that when he took literature for his profession he intended it to be his sole profession; that at that time it did not appear to him to be so well understood in England, as in some other countries, that literature was a dignified profession by which any man might stand or fall; and he resolved that in his person at least it should stand "by itself, of itself, and for itself;" a bargain which "no consideration on earth would now induce him to break." Here however he probably failed to see the entire meaning of Lord Houghton's regret, which would seem to have been meant to say, in more polite form, that to have taken some part in public affairs might have shown him the difficulty in a free state of providing remedies very swiftly for evils of long growth. A half reproach from the same quarter for alleged unkindly sentiments to the House of Lords, he repelled with vehement warmth; insisting on his great regard for individual members, and declaring that there was no man in England he respected more in his public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature, than Lord Russell.[298] In Birmingham shortly after, discoursing on education to the members of the Midland Institute, he told them they should value self-improvement not because it led to fortune but because it was good and right in itself; counselled them in regard to it that Genius was not worth half so much as Attention, or the art of taking an immense deal of pains, which he declared to be, in every study and pursuit, the one sole, safe, certain, remunerative quality; and summed up briefly his political belief.--"My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable." This he afterwards (January 1870) explained to mean that he had very little confidence in the people who govern us ("with a small p"), and very great confidence in the People whom they govern ("with a large P"). "My confession being shortly and elliptically stated, was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some quarters inversely explained." He added that his political opinions had already been not obscurely stated in an "idle book or two"; and he reminded his hearers that he was the inventor "of a certain fiction called the Circumlocution Office, said to be very extravagant, but which I _do_ see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at the bottom of it." It may nevertheless be suspected, with some confidence, that the construction of his real meaning was not far wrong which assumed it as the condition precedent to his illimitable faith, that the people, even with the big P, should be "governed." It was his constant complaint that, being much in want of government, they had only sham governors; and he had returned from his second American visit, as he came back from his first, indisposed to believe that the political problem had been solved in the land of the free. From the pages of his last book, the bitterness of allusion so frequent in the books just named was absent altogether; and his old unaltered wish to better what was bad in English institutions, carried with it no desire to replace them by new ones. In a memoir published shortly after his death there appeared this statement. "For many years past Her Majesty the Queen has taken the liveliest interest in Mr. Dickens's literary labours, and has frequently expressed a desire for an interview with him. . . . This interview took place on the 9th of April, when he received her commands to attend her at Buckingham Palace, and was introduced by his friend Mr. Arthur Helps, the clerk of the Privy Council. . . . Since our author's decease the journal with which he was formerly connected has said: 'The Queen was ready to confer any distinction which Mr. Dickens's known views and tastes would permit him to accept, and after more than one title of honour had been declined, Her Majesty desired that he would, at least, accept a place in her Privy Council.'" As nothing is too absurd[299] for belief, it will not be superfluous to say that Dickens knew of no such desire on her Majesty's part; and though all the probabilities are on the side of his unwillingness to accept any title or place of honour, certainly none was offered to him. It had been hoped to obtain her Majesty's name for the Jerrold performances in 1857, but, being a public effort in behalf of an individual, assent would have involved "either perpetual compliance or the giving of perpetual offence." Her Majesty however then sent, through Colonel Phipps, a request to Dickens that he would select a room in the palace, do what he would with it, and let her see the play there. "I said to Col. Phipps thereupon" (21st of June 1857) "that the idea was not quite new to me; that I did not feel easy as to the social position of my daughters, &c. at a Court under those circumstances; and that I would beg her Majesty to excuse me, if any other way of her seeing the play could be devised. To this Phipps said he had not thought of the objection, but had not the slightest doubt I was right. I then proposed that the Queen should come to the Gallery of Illustration a week before the subscription night, and should have the room entirely at her own disposal, and should invite her own company. This, with the good sense that seems to accompany her good nature on all occasions, she resolved within a few hours to do." The effect of the performance was a great gratification. "My gracious sovereign" (5th of July 1857) "was so pleased that she sent round begging me to go and see her and accept her thanks. I replied that I was in my Farce dress, and must beg to be excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress 'could not be so ridiculous as that,' and repeating the request. I sent my duty in reply, but again hoped her Majesty would have the kindness to excuse my presenting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own. I was mighty glad to think, when I woke this morning, that I had carried the point." The opportunity of presenting himself in his own costume did not arrive till the year of his death, another effort meanwhile made having proved also unsuccessful. "I was put into a state of much perplexity on Sunday" (30th of March 1858). "I don't know who had spoken to my informant, but it seems that the Queen is bent upon hearing the _Carol_ read, and has expressed her desire to bring it about without offence; hesitating about the manner of it, in consequence of my having begged to be excused from going to her when she sent for me after the _Frozen Deep_. I parried the thing as well as I could; but being asked to be prepared with a considerate and obliging answer, as it was known the request would be preferred, I said, 'Well! I supposed Col. Phipps would speak to me about it, and if it were he who did so, I should assure him of my desire to meet any wish of her Majesty's, and should express my hope that she would indulge me by making one of some audience or other--for I thought an audience necessary to the effect.' Thus it stands: but it bothers me." The difficulty was not surmounted, but her Majesty's continued interest in the _Carol_ was shown by her purchase of a copy of it with Dickens's autograph at Thackeray's sale;[300] and at last there came, in the year of his death, the interview with the author whose popularity dated from her accession, whose books had entertained larger numbers of her subjects than those of any other contemporary writer, and whose genius will be counted among the glories of her reign. Accident led to it. Dickens had brought with him from America some large and striking photographs of the Battle Fields of the Civil War, which the Queen, having heard of them through Mr. Helps, expressed a wish to look at. Dickens sent them at once; and went afterwards to Buckingham Palace with Mr. Helps, at her Majesty's request, that she might see and thank him in person. It was in the middle of March, not April. "Come now sir, this is an interesting matter, do favour us with it," was the cry of Johnson's friends after his conversation with George the Third; and again and again the story was told to listeners ready to make marvels of its commonplaces. But the romance even of the eighteenth century in such a matter is clean gone out of the nineteenth. Suffice it that the Queen's kindness left a strong impression on Dickens. Upon her Majesty's regret not to have heard his Readings, Dickens intimated that they were become now a thing of the past, while he acknowledged gratefully her Majesty's compliment in regard to them. She spoke to him of the impression made upon her by his acting in the _Frozen Deep_; and on his stating, in reply to her enquiry, that the little play had not been very successful on the public stage, said this did not surprise her, since it no longer had the advantage of his performance in it. Then arose a mention of some alleged discourtesy shown to Prince Arthur in New York, and he begged her Majesty not to confound the true Americans of that city with the Fenian portion of its Irish population; on which she made the quiet comment that she was convinced the people about the Prince had made too much of the affair. He related to her the story of President Lincoln's dream on the night before his murder. She asked him to give her his writings, and could she have them that afternoon? but he begged to be allowed to send a bound copy. Her Majesty then took from a table her own book upon the Highlands, with an autograph inscription "to Charles Dickens"; and, saying that "the humblest" of writers would be ashamed to offer it to "one of the greatest" but that Mr. Helps, being asked to give it, had remarked that it would be valued most from herself, closed the interview by placing it in his hands. "Sir," said Johnson, "they may say what they like of the young King, but Louis the Fourteenth could not have shown a more refined courtliness"; and Dickens was not disposed to say less of the young King's granddaughter. That the grateful impression sufficed to carry him into new ways, I had immediate proof, coupled with intimation of the still surviving strength of old memories. "As my sovereign desires" (26th of March 1870) "that I should attend the next levee, don't faint with amazement if you see my name in that unwonted connexion. I have scrupulously kept myself free for the second of April, in case you should be accessible." The name appeared at the levee accordingly, his daughter was at the drawing-room that followed, and Lady Houghton writes to me "I never saw Mr. Dickens more agreeable than at a dinner at our house about a fortnight before his death, when he met the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales at the special desire of the latter." Up to nearly the hour of dinner, it was doubtful if he could go. He was suffering from the distress in his foot; and on arrival at the house, being unable to ascend the stairs, had to be assisted at once into the dining-room. The friend who had accompanied Dickens to Buckingham Palace, writing of him[301] after his death, briefly but with admirable knowledge and taste, said that he ardently desired, and confidently looked forward to, a time when there would be a more intimate union than exists at present between the different classes in the state, a union that should embrace alike the highest and the lowest. This perhaps expresses, as well as a few words could, what certainly was always at his heart; and he might have come to think it, when his life was closing, more possible of realisation some day than he ever thought it before. The hope of it was on his friend Talfourd's lips when he died, and his own most jarring opinions might at last have joined in the effort to bring about such reconcilement. More on this head it needs not to say. Whatever may be the objection to special views held by him, he would, wanting even the most objectionable, have been less himself. It was by something of the despot seldom separable from genius, joined to a truthfulness of nature belonging to the highest characters, that men themselves of a rare faculty were attracted to find in Dickens what Sir Arthur Helps has described, "a man to confide in, and look up to as a leader, in the midst of any great peril." Mr. Layard also held that opinion of him. He was at Gadshill during the Christmas before Dickens went for the last time to America, and witnessed one of those scenes, not infrequent there, in which the master of the house was pre-eminently at home. They took generally the form of cricket matches; but this was, to use the phrase of his friend Bobadil, more popular and diffused; and of course he rose with the occasion. "The more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him," said the gasman employed about his readings. "Foot-races for the villagers," he wrote on Christmas Day, "come off in my field to-morrow. We have been all hard at work all day, building a course, making countless flags, and I don't know what else. Layard is chief commissioner of the domestic police. The country police predict an immense crowd." There were between two and three thousand people; and somehow, by a magical kind of influence, said Layard, Dickens seemed to have bound every creature present, upon what honour the creature had, to keep order. What was the special means used, or the art employed, it might have been difficult to say; but that was the result. Writing on New Year's Day, Dickens himself described it to me. "We had made a very pretty course, and taken great pains. Encouraged by the cricket matches experience, I allowed the landlord of the Falstaff to have a drinking-booth on the ground. Not to seem to dictate or distrust, I gave all the prizes (about ten pounds in the aggregate) in money. The great mass of the crowd were labouring men of all kinds, soldiers, sailors, and navvies. They did not, between half-past ten, when we began, and sunset, displace a rope or a stake; and they left every barrier and flag as neat as they found it. There was not a dispute, and there was no drunkenness whatever. I made them a little speech from the lawn, at the end of the games, saying that please God we would do it again next year. They cheered most lustily and dispersed. The road between this and Chatham was like a Fair all day; and surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a reckless seaport town. Among other oddities we had a Hurdle Race for Strangers. One man (he came in second) ran 120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles, in twenty seconds, _with a pipe in his mouth, and smoking it all the time_. 'If it hadn't been for your pipe,' I said to him at the winning-post, 'you would have been first.' 'I beg your pardon, sir,' he answered, 'but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been nowhere.'" The close of the letter had this rather memorable announcement. "The sale of the Christmas number was, yesterday evening, 255,380." Would it be absurd to say that there is something in such a vast popularity in itself electrical, and, though founded on books, felt where books never reach? It is also very noticeable that what would have constituted the strength of Dickens if he had entered public life, the attractive as well as the commanding side of his nature, was that which kept him most within the circle of home pursuits and enjoyments. This "better part" of him had now long survived that sorrowful period of 1857-8, when, for reasons which I have not thought myself free to suppress, a vaguely disturbed feeling for the time took possession of him, and occurrences led to his adoption of other pursuits than those to which till then he had given himself exclusively. It was a sad interval in his life; but, though changes incident to the new occupation then taken up remained, and with them many adverse influences which brought his life prematurely to a close, it was, with any reference to that feeling, an interval only; and the dominant impression of the later years, as of the earlier, takes the marvellously domestic home-loving shape in which also the strength of his genius is found. It will not do to draw round any part of such a man too hard a line, and the writer must not be charged with inconsistency who says that Dickens's childish sufferings,[302] and the sense they burnt into him of the misery of loneliness and a craving for joys of home, though they led to what was weakest in him, led also to what was greatest. It was his defect as well as his merit in maturer life not to be able to live alone. When the fancies of his novels were upon him and he was under their restless influence, though he often talked of shutting himself up in out of the way solitary places, he never went anywhere unaccompanied by members of his family. His habits of daily life he carried with him wherever he went. In Albaro and Genoa, at Lausanne and Geneva, in Paris and Boulogne, his ways were as entirely those of home as in London and Broadstairs. If it is the property of a domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the smallest as the greatest, of the four walls within which one lives, then no man had it so essentially as Dickens. No man was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns. Even the kind of interest in a house which is commonly confined to women, he was full of. Not to speak of changes of importance, there was not an additional hook put up wherever he inhabited, without his knowledge, or otherwise than as part of some small ingenuity of his own. Nothing was too minute for his personal superintendence. Whatever might be in hand, theatricals for the little children, entertainments for those of larger growth, cricket matches, dinners, field sports, from the first new year's eve dance in Doughty Street to the last musical party in Hyde Park Place, he was the centre and soul of it. He did not care to take measure of its greater or less importance. It was enough that a thing was to do, to be worth his while to do it as if there was nothing else to be done in the world. The cry of Laud and Wentworth was his, alike in small and great things; and to no man was more applicable the German "Echt," which expresses reality as well as thoroughness. The usual result followed, in all his homes, of an absolute reliance on him for everything. Under every difficulty, and in every emergency, his was the encouraging influence, the bright and ready help. In illness, whether of the children or any of the servants, he was better than a doctor. He was so full of resource, for which every one eagerly turned to him, that his mere presence in the sick-room was a healing influence, as if nothing could fail if he were only there. So that at last, when, all through the awful night which preceded his departure, he lay senseless in the room where he had fallen, the stricken and bewildered ones who tended him found it impossible to believe that what they saw before them alone was left, or to shut out wholly the strange wild hope that he might again be suddenly among them _like_ himself, and revive what they could not connect, even then, with death's despairing helplessness. It was not a feeling confined to the relatives whom he had thus taught to have such exclusive dependence on him. Among the consolations addressed to those mourners came words from one whom in life he had most honoured, and who also found it difficult to connect him with death, or to think that he should never see that blithe face anymore. "It is almost thirty years," Mr. Carlyle wrote, "since my acquaintance with him began; and on my side, I may say, every new meeting ripened it into more and more clear discernment of his rare and great worth as a brother man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just and loving man: till at length he had grown to such a recognition with me as I have rarely had for any man of my time. This I can tell you three, for it is true and will be welcome to you: to others less concerned I had as soon _not_ speak on such a subject." "I am profoundly sorry, for _you_," Mr. Carlyle at the same time wrote to me; "and indeed for myself and for us all. It is an event world-wide; a _unique_ of talents suddenly extinct; and has 'eclipsed,' we too may say, 'the harmless gaiety of nations.' No death since 1866 has fallen on me with such a stroke. No literary man's hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,--every inch of him an Honest Man." Of his ordinary habits of activity I have spoken, and they were doubtless carried too far. In youth it was all well, but he did not make allowance for years. This has had abundant illustration, but will admit of a few words more. To all men who do much, rule and order are essential; method in everything was Dickens's peculiarity; and between breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions, was his time of work. But his daily walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and necessity. In the midst of his writing they were indispensable, and especially, as it has often been shown, at night. Mr. Sala is an authority on London streets, and, in the eloquent and generous tribute he was among the first to offer to his memory, has described himself encountering Dickens in the oddest places and most inclement weather, in Ratcliffe-highway, on Haverstock-hill, on Camberwell-green, in Gray's-inn-lane, in the Wandsworth-road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New Town. "A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way up the Vauxhall-bridge-road." But he was equally at home in the intricate byways of narrow streets and in the lengthy thoroughfares. Wherever there was "matter to be heard and learned," in back streets behind Holborn, in Borough courts and passages, in city wharfs or alleys, about the poorer lodging-houses, in prisons, workhouses, ragged-schools, police-courts, rag-shops, chandlers' shops, and all sorts of markets for the poor, he carried his keen observation and untiring study. "I was among the Italian Boys from 12 to 2 this morning," says one of his letters. "I am going out to-night in their boat with the Thames Police," says another. It was the same when he was in Italy or Switzerland, as we have seen; and when, in later life, he was in French provincial places. "I walk miles away into the country, and you can scarcely imagine by what deserted ramparts and silent little cathedral closes, or how I pass over rusty drawbridges and stagnant ditches out of and into the decaying town." For several consecutive years I accompanied him every Christmas Eve to see the marketings for Christmas down the road from Aldgate to Bow; and he had a surprising fondness for wandering about in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas-day, past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, and watching the dinners preparing or coming in. But the temptations of his country life led him on to excesses in walking. "Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill, "after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything." Again, two years later: "A south-easter blowing, enough to cut one's throat. I am keeping the house for my cold, as I did yesterday. But the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of treatment fails to-day, I shall try that to-morrow." He tried it perhaps too often. In the winter of 1865 he first had the attack in his left foot which materially disabled his walking-power for the rest of his life. He supposed its cause to be overwalking in the snow, and that this had aggravated the suffering is very likely; but, read by the light of what followed, it may now be presumed to have had more serious origin. It recurred at intervals, before America, without any such provocation; in America it came back, not when he had most been walking in the snow, but when nervous exhaustion was at its worst with him; after America, it became prominent on the eve of the occurrence at Preston which first revealed the progress that disease had been making in the vessels of the brain; and in the last year of his life, as will immediately be seen, it was a constant trouble and most intense suffering, extending then gravely to his left hand also, which had before been only slightly affected. It was from a letter of the 21st of February 1865 I first learnt that he was suffering tortures from a "frost-bitten" foot, and ten days later brought more detailed account. "I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet, took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by-the-bye, of the two big dogs." The dogs were Turk and Linda. Boisterous companions as they always were, the sudden change in him brought them to a stand-still; and for the rest of the journey they crept by the side of their master as slowly as he did, never turning from him. He was greatly moved by the circumstance, and often referred to it. Turk's look upward to his face was one of sympathy as well as fear, he said; but Linda was wholly struck down. The saying in his letter to his youngest son that he was to do to others what he would that they should do to him, without being discouraged if they did not do it; and his saying to the Birmingham people that they were to attend to self-improvement not because it led to fortune, but because it was right; express a principle that at all times guided himself. Capable of strong attachments, he was not what is called an effusive man; but he had no half-heartedness in any of his likings. The one thing entirely hateful to him, was indifference. "I give my heart to very few people; but I would sooner love the most implacable man in the world than a careless one, who, if my place were empty to-morrow, would rub on and never miss me." There was nothing he more repeatedly told his children than that they were not to let indifference in others appear to justify it in themselves. "All kind things," he wrote, "must be done on their own account, and for their own sake, and without the least reference to any gratitude." Again he laid it down, while he was making some exertion for the sake of a dead friend that did not seem likely to win proper appreciation from those it was to serve. "As to gratitude from the family--as I have often remarked to you, one does a generous thing because it is right and pleasant, and not for any response it is to awaken in others." The rule in another form frequently appears in his letters; and it was enforced in many ways upon all who were dear to him. It is worth while to add his comment on a regret of a member of his family at an act of self-devotion supposed to have been thrown away: "Nothing of what is nobly done can ever be lost." It is also to be noted as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he wrote from Paris in 1856. "Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think Richardson's manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes one's heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy." (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of Franklin's first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted emotion.) It was for something higher than mere literature he valued the most original writer and powerful teacher of the age. "I would go at all times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive." Of his attractive points in society and conversation I have particularized little, because in truth they were himself. Such as they were, they were never absent from him. His acute sense of enjoyment gave such relish to his social qualities that probably no man, not a great wit or a professed talker, ever left, in leaving any social gathering, a blank so impossible to fill up. In quick and varied sympathy, in ready adaptation to every whim or humour, in help to any mirth or game, he stood for a dozen men. If one may say such a thing, he seemed to be always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting off his personality. His versatility made him unique. What he said once of his own love of acting, applied to him equally when at his happiest among friends he loved; sketching a character, telling a story, acting a charade, taking part in a game; turning into comedy an incident of the day, describing the last good or bad thing he had seen, reproducing in quaint, tragical, or humorous form and figure, some part of the passionate life with which all his being overflowed. "Assumption has charms for me so delightful--I hardly know for how many wild reasons--that I feel a loss of Oh I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like myself." How it was, that, from one of such boundless resource in contributing to the pleasure of his friends, there was yet, as I have said, so comparatively little to bring away, may be thus explained. But it has been also seen that no one at times said better things, and to happy examples formerly given I will add one or two of a kind he more rarely indulged. "He is below par on the Exchange," a friend remarked of a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise, "the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't know," remarked Dickens, "about his getting his sea-legs on; but if I may judge from his writing, he certainly has not got his A B C legs on." Other agreeable pleasantries might be largely cited from his letters. "An old priest" (he wrote from France in 1862), "the express image of Frederic Lemaitre got up for the part, and very cross with the toothache, told me in a railway carriage the other day, that we had no antiquities in heretical England. 'None at all?' I said. 'You have some ships however.' 'Yes; a few.' 'Are they strong?' 'Well,' said I, 'your trade is spiritual, my father: ask the ghost of Nelson.' A French captain who was in the carriage, was immensely delighted with this small joke. I met him at Calais yesterday going somewhere with a detachment; and he said--Pardon! But he had been so limited as to suppose an Englishman incapable of that bonhommie!" In humouring a joke he was excellent, both in letters and talk; and for this kind of enjoyment his least important little notes are often worth preserving. Take one small instance. So freely had he admired a tale told by his friend and solicitor Mr. Frederic Ouvry, that he had to reply to a humorous proposal for publication of it, in his own manner, in his own periodical. "Your modesty is equal to your merit. . . . I think your way of describing that rustic courtship in middle life, quite matchless. . . . A cheque for £1000 is lying with the publisher. We would willingly make it more, but that we find our law charges so exceedingly heavy." His letters have also examples now and then of what he called his conversational triumphs. "I have distinguished myself" (28th of April 1861) "in two respects lately. I took a young lady, unknown, down to dinner, and, talking to her about the Bishop of Durham's nepotism in the matter of Mr. Cheese, I found she was Mrs. Cheese. And I expatiated to the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy, generally conceiving him to be an Irish member, on the contemptible character of the Marylebone constituency and Marylebone representation." Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his briefer pieces will know; and such was his interest generally in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was, the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of natural coincidence; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency to believe in any such, "well-authenticated," as made perfect his manner of telling one. Such a story is related in the 125th number of _All the Year Round_, which before its publication both Mr. Layard and myself saw at Gadshill, and identified as one related by Lord Lytton. It was published in September, and in a day or two led to what Dickens will relate. "The artist himself who is the hero of that story" (to Lord Lytton, 15th of September 1861) "has sent me in black and white his own account of the whole experience, so very original, so very extraordinary, so very far beyond the version I have published, that all other like stories turn pale before it." The ghost thus reinforced came out in the number published on the 5th of October; and the reader who cares to turn to it, and compare what Dickens in the interval (17th of September) wrote to myself, will have some measure of his readiness to believe in such things. "Upon the publication of the ghost story, up has started the portrait-painter who saw the phantoms! His own written story is out of all distance the most extraordinary that ever was produced; and is as far beyond my version or Bulwer's, as Scott is beyond James. Everything connected with it is amazing; but conceive this--the portrait-painter had been engaged to write it elsewhere as a story for next Christmas, and not unnaturally supposed, when he saw himself anticipated in _All the Year Round_, that there had been treachery at his printer's. 'In particular,' says he, 'how else was it possible that the date, the 13th of September, could have been got at? For I never told the date, until I wrote it.' Now, _my_ story had NO DATE; but seeing, when I looked over the proof, the great importance of having _a_ date, I (C. D.) wrote in, unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of the proof!" The reader will remember the Doncaster race story; and to other like illustrations of the subject already given, may be added this dream. "Here is a curious case at first-hand" (30th of May 1863). "On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she said 'I am Miss Napier.' All the time I was dressing next morning, I thought--What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and _the_ Lady in the red shawl whom they present as 'Miss Napier!' These are all the circumstances, exactly told." Another kind of dream has had previous record, with no superstition to build itself upon but the loving devotion to one tender memory. With longer or shorter intervals this was with him all his days. Never from his waking thoughts was the recollection altogether absent; and though the dream would leave him for a time, it unfailingly came back. It was the feeling of his life that always had a mastery over him. What he said on the sixth anniversary of the death of his sister-in-law, that friend of his youth whom he had made his ideal of all moral excellence, he might have said as truly after twenty-six years more. In the very year before he died, the influence was potently upon him. "She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is." Through later troubled years, whatever was worthiest in him found in this an ark of safety; and it was the nobler part of his being which had thus become also the essential. It gave to success what success by itself had no power to give; and nothing could consist with it, for any length of time, that was not of good report and pure. What more could I say that was not better said from the pulpit of the Abbey where he rests? "He whom we mourn was the friend of mankind, a philanthropist in the true sense; the friend of youth, the friend of the poor, the enemy of every form of meanness and oppression. I am not going to attempt to draw a portrait of him. Men of genius are different from what we suppose them to be. They have greater pleasures and greater pains, greater affections and greater temptations, than the generality of mankind, and they can never be altogether understood by their fellow men. . . . But we feel that a light has gone out, that the world is darker to us, when they depart. There are so very few of them that we cannot afford to lose them one by one, and we look vainly round for others who may supply their places. He whose loss we now mourn occupied a greater space than any other writer in the minds of Englishmen during the last thirty-three years. We read him, talked about him, acted him; we laughed with him; we were roused by him to a consciousness of the misery of others, and to a pathetic interest in human life. Works of fiction, indirectly, are great instructors of this world; and we can hardly exaggerate the debt of gratitude which is due to a writer who has led us to sympathize with these good, true, sincere, honest English characters of ordinary life, and to laugh at the egotism, the hypocrisy, the false respectability of religious professors and others. To another great humourist who lies in this Church the words have been applied that his death eclipsed the gaiety of nations. But of him who has been recently taken I would rather say, in humbler language, that no one was ever so much beloved or so much mourned." FOOTNOTES: [289] Mr. Grant Wilson has sent me an extract from a letter by Fitz-Greene Halleck (author of one of the most delightful poems ever written about Burns) which exactly expresses Dickens as he was, not only in 1842, but, as far as the sense of authorship went, all his life. It was addressed to Mrs. Rush of Philadelphia, and is dated the 8th of March 1842. "You ask me about Mr. Boz. I am quite delighted with him. He is a thorough good fellow, with nothing of the author about him but the reputation, and goes through his task as Lion with exemplary grace, patience, and good nature. He has the brilliant face of a man of genius. . . . His writings you know. I wish you had listened to his eloquence at the dinner here. It was the only real specimen of eloquence I have ever witnessed. Its charm was not in its words, but in the manner of saying them." [290] In a volume called _Home and Abroad_, by Mr. David Macrae, is printed a correspondence with Dickens on matters alluded to in the text, held in 1861, which will be found to confirm all that is here said. [291] This letter is facsimile'd in _A Christmas Memorial of Charles Dickens by A. B. Hume_ (1870), containing an Ode to his Memory written with feeling and spirit. [292] I may quote here from a letter (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 5th Sept. 1858) sent me by the editor of the _Northern Express_. "The view you take of the literary character in the abstract, or of what it might and ought to be, expresses what I have striven for all through my literary life--never to allow it to be patronized, or tolerated, or treated like a good or a bad child. I am always animated by the hope of leaving it a little better understood by the thoughtless than I found it."--To James B. Manson, Esq. [293] Henry Ryder-Taylor, Esq. Ph.D. 8th Sept. 1868. [294] By way of instance I subjoin an amusing insertion made by him in an otherwise indifferently written paper descriptive of the typical Englishman on the foreign stage, which gives in more comic detail experiences of his own already partly submitted to the reader (ii. 127). "In a pretty piece at the Gymnase in Paris, where the prime minister of England unfortunately ruined himself by speculating in railway shares, a thorough-going English servant appeared under that thorough-going English name Tom Bob--the honest fellow having been christened Tom, and born the lawful son of Mr. and Mrs. Bob. In an Italian adaptation of DUMAS' preposterous play of KEAN, which we once saw at the great theatre of Genoa, the curtain rose upon that celebrated tragedian, drunk and fast asleep in a chair, attired in a dark blue blouse fastened round the waist with a broad belt and a most prodigious buckle, and wearing a dark red hat of the sugar-loaf shape, nearly three feet high. He bore in his hand a champagne-bottle, with the label RHUM, in large capital letters, carefully turned towards the audience; and two or three dozen of the same popular liquor, which we are nationally accustomed to drink neat as imported, by the half gallon, ornamented the floor of the apartment. Every frequenter of the Coal Hole tavern in the Strand, on that occasion, wore a sword and a beard. Every English lady, presented on the stage in Italy, wears a green veil; and almost every such specimen of our fair countrywomen carries a bright red reticule, made in the form of a monstrous heart. We do not remember to have ever seen an Englishman on the Italian stage, or in the Italian circus, without a stomach like Daniel Lambert, an immense shirt-frill, and a bunch of watch-seals each several times larger than his watch, though the watch itself was an impossible engine. And we have rarely beheld this mimic Englishman, without seeing present, then and there, a score of real Englishmen sufficiently characteristic and unlike the rest of the audience, to whom he bore no shadow of resemblance." These views as to English people and society, of which Count d'Orsay used always to say that an average Frenchman knew about as much as he knew of the inhabitants of the moon, may receive amusing addition from one of Dickens's letters during his last visit to France; which enclosed a cleverly written Paris journal containing essays on English manners. In one of these the writer remarked that he had heard of the venality of English politicians, but could not have supposed it to be so shameless as it is, for, when he went to the House of Commons, he heard them call out "Places! Places!" "Give us Places!" when the Minister entered. [295] The letter is addressed to Miss Harriet Parr, whose book called _Gilbert Massenger_ is the tale referred to. [296] See the introductory memoir from his pen now prefixed to every edition of the popular and delightful _Legends and Lyrics_. [297] On this remonstrance and Dickens's reply the _Times_ had a leading article of which the closing sentences find fitting place in his biography. "If there be anything in Lord Russell's theory that Life Peerages are wanted specially to represent those forms of national eminence which cannot otherwise find fitting representation, it might be urged, for the reasons we have before mentioned, that a Life Peerage is due to the most truly national representative of one important department of modern English literature. Something may no doubt be said in favour of this view, but we are inclined to doubt if Mr. Dickens himself would gain anything by a Life Peerage. Mr. Dickens is pre-eminently a writer of the people and for the people. To our thinking, he is far better suited for the part of the 'Great Commoner' of English fiction than for even a Life Peerage. To turn Charles Dickens into Lord Dickens would be much the same mistake in literature that it was in politics to turn William Pitt into Lord Chatham." [298] One of the many repetitions of the same opinion in his letters may be given. "Lord John's note" (September 1853) "confirms me in an old impression that he is worth a score of official men; and has more generosity in his little finger than a Government usually has in its whole corporation." In another of his public allusions, Dickens described him as a statesman of whom opponents and friends alike felt sure that he would rise to the level of every occasion, however exalted; and compared him to the seal of Solomon in the old Arabian story inclosing in a not very large casket the soul of a giant. [299] In a memoir by Dr. Shelton McKenzie which has had circulation in America, there is given the following statement, taken doubtless from publications at the time, of which it will be strictly accurate to say, that, excepting the part of its closing averment which describes Dickens sending a copy of his works to her Majesty by her own desire, _there is in it not a single word of truth_. "Early in 1870 the Queen presented a copy of her book upon the Highlands to Mr. Dickens, with the modest autographic inscription, 'from the humblest to the most distinguished author of England.' This was meant to be complimentary, and was accepted as such by Mr. Dickens, who acknowledged it in a manly, courteous letter. Soon after, Queen Victoria wrote to him, requesting that he would do her the favour of paying her a visit at Windsor. He accepted, and passed a day, very pleasantly, in his Sovereign's society. It is said that they were mutually pleased, that Mr. Dickens caught the royal lady's particular humour, that they chatted together in a very friendly manner, that the Queen was never tired of asking questions about certain characters in his books, that they had almost a _tête-à-tête_ luncheon, and that, ere he departed, the Queen pressed him to accept a baronetcy (a title which descends to the eldest son), and that, on his declining, she said, 'At least, Mr. Dickens, let me have the gratification of making you one of my Privy Council.' This, which gives the personal title of 'Right Honourable,' he also declined--nor, indeed, did Charles Dickens require a title to give him celebrity. The Queen and the author parted, well pleased with each other. The newspapers reported that a peerage had been offered and declined--_but even newspapers are not invariably correct_. Mr. Dickens presented his Royal Mistress with a handsome set of all his works, and, on the very morning of his death, a letter reached Gad's Hill, written by Mr. Arthur Helps, by her desire, acknowledging the present, and describing the exact position the books occupied at Balmoral--so placed that she could see them before her when occupying the usual seat in her sitting-room. When this letter arrived, Mr. Dickens was still alive, but wholly unconscious. What to him, at that time, was the courtesy of an earthly sovereign?" I repeat that the only morsel of truth in all this rigmarole is that the books were sent by Dickens, and acknowledged by Mr. Helps at the Queen's desire. The letter did not arrive on the day of his death, the 9th of June, but was dated from Balmoral on that day. [300] The book was thus entered in the catalogue. "DICKENS (C.), A CHRISTMAS CAROL, in prose, 1843; _Presentation Copy_, inscribed '_W. M. Thackeray, from Charles Dickens (whom he made very happy once a long way from home_).'" Some pleasant verses by his friend had affected him much while abroad. I quote the Life of Dickens published by Mr. Hotten. "Her Majesty expressed the strongest desire to possess this presentation copy, and sent an unlimited commission to buy it. The original published price of the book was 5_s._ It became Her Majesty's property for £25 10_s._, and was at once taken to the palace." [301] "In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps, in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for July 1870. [302] An entry, under the date of July 1833, from a printed but unpublished Diary by Mr. Payne Collier, appeared lately in the _Athenæum_, having reference to Dickens at the time when he first obtained employment as a reporter, and connecting itself with what my opening volume had related of those childish sufferings. "Soon afterwards I observed a great difference in C. D.'s dress, for he had bought a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, which he threw over his shoulder _à l' Espagnole_. . . . We walked together through Hungerford Market, where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his little rosy but grimy child looking over his shoulder; and C. D. bought a halfpenny-worth of cherries, and as we went along he gave them one by one to the little fellow without the knowledge of the father. . . . He informed me as we walked through it that he knew Hungerford Market well. . . . He did not affect to conceal the difficulties he and his family had had to contend against." CHAPTER XX. THE END. 1869-1870. Visit from Mr. and Mrs. Fields--Places shown to Visitor--Last Paper in _All the Year Round_--Son Henry's Scholarship--A Reading of _Edwin Drood_--Medical Attendance at Readings--Excitement after _Oliver Twist_ Scenes--Farewell Address--Results of Over Excitement--Last Appearances in Public--Death of Daniel Maclise--Temptations of London--Another Attack in the Foot--Noteworthy Incident--Tribute of Gratitude for his Books--Last Letter from him--Last Days--Thoughts on his Last Day of Consciousness--The Close--General Mourning--Wish to bury him in the Abbey--His Own Wish--The Burial--Unbidden Mourners--The Grave. THE summer and autumn of 1869 were passed quietly at Gadshill. He received there, in June, the American friends to whom he had been most indebted for unwearying domestic kindness at his most trying time in the States. In August, he was at the dinner of the International boat-race; and, in a speech that might have gone far to reconcile the victors to changing places with the vanquished, gave the healths of the Harvard and the Oxford crews. He went to Birmingham, in September, to fulfil a promise that he would open the session of the Institute; and there, after telling his audience that his invention, such as it was, never would have served him as it had done, but for the habit of commonplace, patient, drudging attention, he declared his political creed to be infinitesimal faith in the people governing and illimitable faith in the People governed. In such engagements as these, with nothing of the kind of strain he had most to dread, there was hardly more movement or change than was necessary to his enjoyment of rest. He had been able to show Mr. Fields something of the interest of London as well as of his Kentish home. He went over its "general post-office" with him, took him among its cheap theatres and poor lodging-houses, and piloted him by night through its most notorious thieves' quarter. Its localities that are pleasantest to a lover of books, such as Johnson's Bolt-court and Goldsmith's Temple-chambers, he explored with him; and, at his visitor's special request, mounted a staircase he had not ascended for more than thirty years, to show the chambers in Furnival's Inn where the first page of _Pickwick_ was written. One more book, unfinished, was to close what that famous book began; and the original of the scene of its opening chapter, the opium-eater's den, was the last place visited. "In a miserable court at night," says Mr. Fields, "we found a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old ink-bottle; and the words which Dickens puts into the mouth of this wretched creature in _Edwin Drood_, we heard her croon as we leaned over the tattered bed in which she was lying." Before beginning his novel he had written his last paper for his weekly publication. It was a notice of my _Life of Landor_, and contained some interesting recollections of that remarkable man. His memory at this time dwelt much, as was only natural, with past pleasant time, as he saw familiar faces leaving us or likely to leave; and, on the death of one of the comedians associated with the old bright days of Covent Garden, I had intimation of a fancy that had never quitted him since the Cheltenham reading. "I see in the paper to-day that Meadows is dead. I had a talk with him at Coutts's a week or two ago, when he said he was seventy-five, and very weak. Except for having a tearful eye, he looked just the same as ever. My mind still constantly misgives me concerning Macready. Curiously, I don't think he has been ever, for ten minutes together, out of my thoughts since I talked with Meadows last. Well, the year that brings trouble brings comfort too: I have a great success in the boy-line to announce to you. Harry has won the second scholarship at Trinity Hall, which gives him £50 a year as long as he stays there; and I begin to hope that he will get a fellowship." I doubt if anything ever more truly pleased him than this little success of his son Henry at Cambridge. Henry missed the fellowship, but was twenty-ninth wrangler in a fair year, when the wranglers were over forty. He finished his first number of _Edwin Drood_ in the third week of October, and on the 26th read it at my house with great spirit. A few nights before we had seen together at the Olympic a little drama taken from his _Copperfield_, which he sat out with more than patience, even with something of enjoyment; and another pleasure was given him that night by its author, Mr. Halliday, who brought into the box another dramatist, Mr. Robertson, to whom Dickens, who then first saw him, said that to himself the charm of his little comedies was "their unassuming form," which had so happily shown that "real wit could afford to put off any airs of pretension to it." He was at Gadshill till the close of the year; coming up for a few special occasions, such as Procter's eighty-second birthday; and at my house on new-year's eve he read to us, again aloud, a fresh number of his book. Yet these very last days of December had not been without a reminder of the grave warnings of April. The pains in somewhat modified form had returned in both his left hand and his left foot a few days before we met; and they were troubling him still on that day. But he made so light of them himself; so little thought of connecting them with the uncertainties of touch and tread of which they were really part; and read with such an overflow of humour Mr. Honeythunder's boisterous philanthropy; that there was no room, then, for anything but enjoyment. His only allusion to an effect from his illness was his mention of a now invincible dislike which he had to railway travel. This had decided him to take a London house for the twelve last readings in the early months of 1870, and he had become Mr. Milner-Gibson's tenant at 5, Hyde Park Place. St. James's Hall was to be the scene of these Readings, and they were to occupy the interval from the 11th of January to the 15th of March; two being given in each week to the close of January, and the remaining eight on each of the eight Tuesdays following. Nothing was said of any kind of apprehension as the time approached; but, with a curious absence of the sense of danger, there was certainly both distrust and fear. Sufficient precaution was supposed to have been taken[303] by arrangement for the presence, at each reading, of his friend and medical attendant, Mr. Carr Beard; but this resolved itself, not into any measure of safety, the case admitting of none short of stopping the reading altogether, but simply into ascertainment of the exact amount of strain and pressure, which, with every fresh exertion, he was placing on those vessels of the brain where the Preston trouble too surely had revealed that danger lay. No supposed force in reserve, no dominant strength of will, can turn aside the penalties sternly exacted for disregard of such laws of life as were here plainly overlooked; and though no one may say that it was not already too late for any but the fatal issue, there will be no presumption in believing that life might yet have been for some time prolonged if these readings could have been stopped. "I am a little shaken," he wrote on the 9th of January, "by my journey to Birmingham to give away the Institution's prizes on Twelfth Night, but I am in good heart; and, notwithstanding Lowe's worrying scheme for collecting a year's taxes in a lump, which they tell me is damaging books, pictures, music, and theatres beyond precedent, our 'let' at St. James's Hall is enormous." He opened with _Copperfield_ and the _Pickwick Trial_; and I may briefly mention, from the notes taken by Mr. Beard and placed at my disposal, at what cost of exertion to himself he gratified the crowded audiences that then and to the close made these evenings memorable. His ordinary pulse on the first night was at 72; but never on any subsequent night was lower than 82, and had risen on the later nights to more than 100. After _Copperfield_ on the first night it went up to 96, and after _Marigold_ on the second to 99; but on the first night of the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes (Friday the 21st of January) it went from 80 to 112, and on the second night (the 1st of February) to 118. From this, through the six remaining nights, it never was lower than 110 after the first piece read; and after the third and fourth readings of the _Oliver Twist_ scenes it rose, from 90 to 124 on the 15th of February, and from 94 to 120 on the 8th of March; on the former occasion, after twenty minutes' rest, falling to 98, and on the latter, after fifteen minutes' rest, falling to 82. His ordinary pulse on entering the room, during these last six nights, was more than once over 100, and never lower than 84; from which it rose, after _Nickleby_ on the 22nd of February, to 112. On the 8th of February, when he read _Dombey_, it had risen from 91 to 114; on the 1st of March, after _Copperfield_, it rose from 100 to 124; and when he entered the room on the last night it was at 108, having risen only two beats more when the reading was done. The pieces on this occasion were the _Christmas Carol_, followed by the _Pickwick Trial_; and probably in all his life he never read so well. On his return from the States, where he had to address his effects to audiences composed of immense numbers of people, a certain loss of refinement had been observable; but the old delicacy was now again delightfully manifest, and a subdued tone, as well in the humorous as the serious portions, gave something to all the reading as of a quiet sadness of farewell. The charm of this was at its height when he shut the volume of _Pickwick_ and spoke in his own person. He said that for fifteen years he had been reading his own books to audiences whose sensitive and kindly recognition of them had given him instruction and enjoyment in his art such as few men could have had; but that he nevertheless thought it well now to retire upon older associations, and in future to devote himself exclusively to the calling which had first made him known. "In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell." The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any present. Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed pain and sorrow. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement shown by the notes of Mr. Beard. On the 23rd of January, when for the last time he met Carlyle, he came to us with his left hand in a sling; on the 7th of February, when he passed with us his last birthday, and on the 25th, when he read the third number of his novel, the hand was still swollen and painful; and on the 21st of March, when he read admirably his fourth number, he told us that as he came along, walking up the length of Oxford-street, the same incident had recurred as on the day of a former dinner with us, and he had not been able to read, all the way, more than the right-hand half of the names over the shops. Yet he had the old fixed persuasion that this was rather the effect of a medicine he had been taking than of any grave cause, and he still strongly believed his other troubles to be exclusively local. Eight days later he wrote: "My uneasiness and hemorrhage, after having quite left me, as I supposed, has come back with an aggravated irritability that it has not yet displayed. You have no idea what a state I am in to-day from a sudden violent rush of it; and yet it has not the slightest effect on my general health that I know of." This was a disorder which troubled him in his earlier life; and during the last five years, in his intervals of suffering from other causes, it had from time to time taken aggravated form. His last public appearances were in April. On the 5th he took the chair for the Newsvendors, whom he helped with a genial address in which even his apology for little speaking overflowed with irrepressible humour. He would try, he said, like Falstaff, "but with a modification almost as large as himself," less to speak himself than to be the cause of speaking in others. "Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a snuff-shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand, who, apparently having taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line." On the 30th of the same month he returned thanks for "Literature" at the Royal Academy dinner, and I may preface my allusion to what he then said with what he had written to me the day before. Three days earlier Daniel Maclise had passed away. "Like you at Ely, so I at Higham, had the shock of first reading at a railway station of the death of our old dear friend and companion. What the shock would be, you know too well. It has been only after great difficulty, and after hardening and steeling myself to the subject by at once thinking of it and avoiding it in a strange way, that I have been able to get any command over it or over myself. If I feel at the time that I can be sure of the necessary composure, I shall make a little reference to it at the Academy to-morrow. I suppose you won't be there."[304] The reference made was most touching and manly. He told those who listened that since he first entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it had been his constant fortune to number among his nearest and dearest friends members of that Academy who had been its pride; and who had now, one by one, so dropped from his side that he was grown to believe, with the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie spoke, that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved, and all the moving life but a shadow and a dream. "For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and most constant companions of Mr. Maclise, to whose death the Prince of Wales has made allusion, and the President has referred with the eloquence of genuine feeling. Of his genius in his chosen art, I will venture to say nothing here; but of his fertility of mind and wealth of intellect I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants and the frankest and largest hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, 'in wit a man, simplicity a child,'--no artist of whatsoever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the art-goddess whom he worshipped." These were the last public words of Dickens, and he could not have spoken any worthier. Upon his appearance at the dinner of the Academy had followed some invitations he was led to accept; greatly to his own regret, he told me on the night (7th of May) when he read to us the fifth number of _Edwin Drood_; for he was now very eager to get back to the quiet of Gadshill. He dined with Mr. Motley, then American minister; had met Mr. Disraeli at a dinner at Lord Stanhope's; had breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone; and on the 17th was to attend the Queen's ball with his daughter. But she had to go there without him; for on the 16th I had intimation of a sudden disablement. "I am sorry to report, that, in the old preposterous endeavour to dine at preposterous hours and preposterous places, I have been pulled up by a sharp attack in my foot. And serve me right. I hope to get the better of it soon, but I fear I must not think of dining with you on Friday. I have cancelled everything in the dining way for this week, and that is a very small precaution after the horrible pain I have had and the remedies I have taken." He had to excuse himself also from the General Theatrical Fund dinner, where the Prince of Wales was to preside; but at another dinner a week later, where the King of the Belgians and the Prince were to be present, so much pressure was put upon him that he went, still suffering as he was, to dine with Lord Houghton. We met for the last time on Sunday the 22nd of May, when I dined with him in Hyde Park Place. The death of Mr. Lemon, of which he heard that day, had led his thoughts to the crowd of friendly companions in letters and art who had so fallen from the ranks since we played Ben Jonson together that we were left almost alone. "And none beyond his sixtieth year," he said, "very few even fifty." It is no good to talk of it, I suggested. "We shall not think of it the less" was his reply; and an illustration much to the point was before us, afforded by an incident deserving remembrance in his story. Not many weeks before, a correspondent had written to him from Liverpool describing himself as a self-raised man, attributing his prosperous career to what Dickens's writings had taught him at its outset of the wisdom of kindness, and sympathy for others; and asking pardon for the liberty he took in hoping that he might be permitted to offer some acknowledgment of what not only had cheered and stimulated him through all his life, but had contributed so much to the success of it. The letter enclosed £500. Dickens was greatly touched by this; and told the writer, in sending back his cheque, that he would certainly have taken it if he had not been, though not a man of fortune, a prosperous man himself; but that the letter, and the spirit of its offer, had so gratified him, that if the writer pleased to send him any small memorial of it in another form he would gladly receive it. The memorial soon came. A richly worked basket of silver, inscribed "from one who has been cheered and stimulated by Mr. Dickens's writings, and held the author among his first remembrances when he became prosperous," was accompanied by an extremely handsome silver centrepiece for the table, of which the design was four figures representing the Seasons. But the kindly donor shrank from sending Winter to one whom he would fain connect with none but the brighter and milder days, and he had struck the fourth figure from the design. "I never look at it," said Dickens, "that I don't think most of the Winter." A matter discussed that day with Mr. Ouvry was briefly resumed in a note of the 29th of May, the last I ever received from him; which followed me to Exeter, and closed thus. "You and I can speak of it at Gads by and by. Foot no worse. But no better." The old trouble was upon him when we parted, and this must have been nearly the last note written before he quitted London. He was at Gadshill on the 30th of May; and I heard no more until the telegram reached me at Launceston on the night of the 9th of June, which told me that the "by and by" was not to come in this world. The few days at Gadshill had been given wholly to work on his novel. He had been easier in his foot and hand; and, though he was suffering severely from the local hemorrhage before named, he made no complaint of illness. But there was observed in him a very unusual appearance of fatigue. "He seemed very weary." He was out with his dogs for the last time on Monday the 6th of June, when he walked with his letters into Rochester. On Tuesday the 7th, after his daughter Mary had left on a visit to her sister Kate, not finding himself equal to much fatigue, he drove to Cobhamwood with his sister-in-law, there dismissed the carriage, and walked round the park and back. He returned in time to put up in his new conservatory some Chinese lanterns sent from London that afternoon; and, the whole of the evening, he sat with Miss Hogarth in the dining-room that he might see their effect when lighted. More than once he then expressed his satisfaction at having finally abandoned all intention of exchanging Gadshill for London; and this he had done more impressively some days before. While he lived, he said, he should like his name to be more and more associated with the place; and he had a notion that when he died he should like to lie in the little graveyard belonging to the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall. On the 8th of June he passed all the day writing in the Châlet. He came over for luncheon; and, much against his usual custom, returned to his desk. Of the sentences he was then writing, the last of his long life of literature, a portion has been given in facsimile on a previous page; and the reader will observe with a painful interest, not alone its evidence of minute labour at this fast-closing hour of time with him, but the direction his thoughts had taken. He imagines such a brilliant morning as had risen with that eighth of June shining on the old city of Rochester. He sees in surpassing beauty, with the lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air, its antiquities and its ruins; its Cathedral and Castle. But his fancy, then, is not with the stern dead forms of either; but with that which makes warm the cold stone tombs of centuries, and lights them up with flecks of brightness, "fluttering there like wings." To him, on that sunny summer morning, the changes of glorious light from moving boughs, the songs of birds, the scents from garden, woods, and fields, have penetrated into the Cathedral, have subdued its earthy odour, and are preaching the Resurrection and the Life. * * * * * He was late in leaving the Châlet; but before dinner, which was ordered at six o'clock with the intention of walking afterwards in the lanes, he wrote some letters, among them one to his friend Mr. Charles Kent appointing to see him in London next day; and dinner was begun before Miss Hogarth saw, with alarm, a singular expression of trouble and pain in his face. "For an hour," he then told her, "he had been very ill;" but he wished dinner to go on. These were the only really coherent words uttered by him. They were followed by some, that fell from him disconnectedly, of quite other matters; of an approaching sale at a neighbour's house, of whether Macready's son was with his father at Cheltenham, and of his own intention to go immediately to London; but at these latter he had risen, and his sister-in-law's help alone prevented him from falling where he stood. Her effort then was to get him on the sofa, but after a slight struggle he sank heavily on his left side. "On the ground" were the last words he spoke. It was now a little over ten minutes past six o'clock. His two daughters came that night with Mr. Beard, who had also been telegraphed for, and whom they met at the station. His eldest son arrived early next morning, and was joined in the evening (too late) by his younger son from Cambridge. All possible medical aid had been summoned. The surgeon of the neighbourhood was there from the first, and a physician from London was in attendance as well as Mr. Beard. But all human help was unavailing. There was effusion on the brain; and though stertorous breathing continued all night, and until ten minutes past six o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 9th of June, there had never been a gleam of hope during the twenty-four hours. He had lived four months beyond his 58th year. * * * * * The excitement and sorrow at his death are within the memory of all. Before the news of it even reached the remoter parts of England, it had been flashed across Europe; was known in the distant continents of India, Australia, and America; and not in English-speaking communities only, but in every country of the civilised earth, had awakened grief and sympathy. In his own land it was as if a personal bereavement had befallen every one. Her Majesty the Queen telegraphed from Balmoral "her deepest regret at the sad news of Charles Dickens's death;" and this was the sentiment alike of all classes of her people. There was not an English journal that did not give it touching and noble utterance; and the _Times_ took the lead in suggesting[305] that the only fit resting-place for the remains of a man so dear to England was the Abbey in which the most illustrious Englishmen are laid. With the expression thus given to a general wish, the Dean of Westminster lost no time in showing ready compliance; and on the morning of the day when it appeared was in communication with the family and representatives. The public homage of a burial in the Abbey had to be reconciled with his own instructions to be privately buried without previous announcement of time or place, and without monument or memorial. He would himself have preferred to lie in the small graveyard under Rochester Castle wall, or in the little churches of Cobham or Shorne; but all these were found to be closed; and the desire of the Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay him in their Cathedral had been entertained, when the Dean of Westminster's request, and the considerate kindness of his generous assurance that there should be only such ceremonial as would strictly obey all injunctions of privacy, made it a grateful duty to accept that offer. The spot already had been chosen by the Dean; and before mid-day on the following morning, Tuesday the 14th of June, with knowledge of those only who took part in the burial, all was done. The solemnity had not lost by the simplicity. Nothing so grand or so touching could have accompanied it, as the stillness and the silence of the vast Cathedral. Then, later in the day and all the following day, came unbidden mourners in such crowds, that the Dean had to request permission to keep open the grave until Thursday; but after it was closed they did not cease to come, and "all day long," Doctor Stanley wrote on the 17th, "there was a constant pressure to the spot, and many flowers were strewn upon it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes." He alluded to this in the impressive funeral discourse delivered by him in the Abbey on the morning of Sunday the 19th, pointing to the fresh flowers that then had been newly thrown (as they still are thrown, in this fourth year after the death), and saying that "the spot would thenceforward be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of the literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue." The stone placed upon it is inscribed CHARLES DICKENS. BORN FEBRUARY THE SEVENTH 1812. DIED JUNE THE NINTH 1870. [Illustration] The highest associations of both the arts he loved surround him where he lies. Next to him is RICHARD CUMBERLAND. Mrs. PRITCHARD'S monument looks down upon him, and immediately behind is DAVID GARRICK'S. Nor is the actor's delightful art more worthily represented than the nobler genius of the author. Facing the grave, and on its left and right, are the monuments of CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, and DRYDEN, the three immortals who did most to create and settle the language to which CHARLES DICKENS has given another undying name. FINIS. FOOTNOTES: [303] I desire to guard myself against any possible supposition that I think these Readings might have been stopped by the exercise of medical authority. I am convinced of the contrary. Dickens had pledged himself to them; and the fact that others' interests were engaged rather than his own supplied him with an overpowering motive for being determinedly set on going through with them. At the sorrowful time in the preceding year, when, yielding to the stern sentence passed by Sir Thomas Watson, he had dismissed finally the staff employed on his country readings, he had thus written to me. "I do believe" (3rd of May 1869) "that such people as the Chappells are very rarely to be found in human affairs. To say nothing of their noble and munificent manner of sweeping away into space all the charges incurred uselessly, and all the immense inconvenience and profitless work thrown upon their establishment, comes a note this morning from the senior partner, to the effect that they feel that my overwork has been 'indirectly caused by them, and by my great and kind exertions to make their venture successful to the extreme.' There is something so delicate and fine in this, that I feel it deeply." That feeling led to his resolve to make the additional exertion of these twelve last readings, and nothing would have turned him from it as long as he could stand at the desk. [304] I preserve also the closing words of the letter. "It is very strange--you remember I suppose?--that the last time we spoke of him together, you said that we should one day hear that the wayward life into which he had fallen was over, and there an end of our knowledge of it." The waywardness, which was merely the having latterly withdrawn himself too much from old friendly intercourse, had its real origin in disappointments connected with the public work on which he was engaged in those later years, and to which he sacrificed every private interest of his own. His was only the common fate of Englishmen, so engaged, who do this; and when the real story of the "Fresco-painting for the Houses of Parliament" comes to be written, it will be another chapter added to our national misadventures and reproaches in everything connected with Art and its hapless cultivators. [305] It is a duty to quote these eloquent words. "Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Dickens. They may have earned the esteem of mankind; their days may have been passed in power, honour, and prosperity; they may have been surrounded by troops of friends; but, however pre-eminent in station, ability, or public services, they will not have been, like our great and genial novelist, the intimate of every household. Indeed, such a position is attained not even by one man in an age. It needs an extraordinary combination of intellectual and moral qualities . . . before the world will thus consent to enthrone a man as their unassailable and enduring favourite. This is the position which Mr. Dickens has occupied with the English and also with the American public for the third of a century. . . . Westminster Abbey is the peculiar resting-place of English literary genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with more honour as time passes and his greatness grows upon us." APPENDIX. I. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 1835. SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. (The detached papers collected under this title were in course of publication during this year, in the pages of the _Monthly Magazine_ and the columns of the _Morning_ and the _Evening Chronicle_.) i. 97; 104, 105; 107; 113, 114. 1836. SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. Two volumes: Illustrations by George Cruikshank. (Preface dated from Furnival's Inn, February 1836.) John Macrone. THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB. Edited by Boz. With Illustrations by R. Seymour and Phiz (Hablot Browne). (Nine numbers published monthly from April to December.) Chapman and Hall. SUNDAY UNDER THREE HEADS. As it is; as Sabbath Bills would make it; as it might be made. By Timothy Sparks. Illustrated by H. K. B. (Hablot Browne). Dedicated (June 1836) to the Bishop of London. Chapman & Hall. i. 149. THE STRANGE GENTLEMAN. A Comic Burletta, in two acts. By "Boz." (Performed at the St. James's Theatre, 29th of September 1836, and published with the imprint of 1837.) Chapman & Hall. i. 116. THE VILLAGE COQUETTES. A Comic Opera, in two acts. By Charles Dickens. The Music by John Hullah. (Dedication to Mr. Braham is dated from Furnival's Inn, 15th of December 1836.) Richard Bentley. i. 116. SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. Second Series. One volume. (Preface dated from Furnival's Inn, 17th of December 1836.) John Macrone. 1837. THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB. Edited by Boz. (Eleven numbers, the last being a double number, published monthly from January to November. Issued complete in the latter month, with Dedication to Mr. Serjeant Talfourd dated from Doughty-street, 27th of September, as _The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. By Charles Dickens._) Chapman & Hall. i. 108-113; 125-132. iii. 343. OLIVER TWIST; OR THE PARISH BOY'S PROGRESS. By Boz. Begun in _Bentley's Miscellany_ for January, and continued throughout the year. Richard Bentley. 1838. OLIVER TWIST. By Charles Dickens, Author of the Pickwick Papers. With Illustrations by George Cruikshank. Three volumes. (Had appeared in monthly portions, in the numbers of _Bentley's Miscellany_ for 1837 and 1838, with the title of _Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy's Progress_. By Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. The Third Edition, with Preface dated Devonshire-terrace, March 1841, published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall.) Richard Bentley. i. 121; 124-126; 152-164. iii. 24, 25; 343. MEMOIRS OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI. Edited by "Boz." Illustrated by George Cruikshank. Two volumes. (For Dickens's small share in the composition of this work, his preface to which is dated from Doughty-street, February 1838, see i. 141-143.) Richard Bentley. SKETCHES OF YOUNG GENTLEMEN. Illustrated by Phiz. Chapman & Hall. i. 149. LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Phiz (Hablot Browne). (Nine numbers published monthly from April to December.) Chapman & Hall. 1839. LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. (Eleven numbers, the last being a double number, published monthly from January to October. Issued complete in the latter month, with dedication to William Charles Macready.) Chapman & Hall. i. 145; 165-179. ii. 99, 100; 102. iii. 344. SKETCHES BY BOZ. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. With forty Illustrations by George Cruikshank. (The first complete edition, issued in monthly parts uniform with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, from November 1837 to June 1839, with preface dated 15th of May 1839.) Chapman & Hall. i. 121-124. 1840. SKETCHES OF YOUNG COUPLES; with an urgent Remonstrance to the Gentlemen of England, being Bachelors or Widowers, at the present alarming crisis. By the Author of Sketches of Young Gentlemen. Illustrated by Phiz. Chapman & Hall, i. 149. 1840-1841. MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by George Cattermole and Hablot Browne. Three volumes. (First and second volume, each 306 pp.; third, 426 pp.) For the account of this work, published in 88 weekly numbers, extending over the greater part of these two years, see i. 191-203; 240; 281, 282. In addition to occasional detached papers and a series of sketches entitled MR. WELLER'S WATCH, occupying altogether about 90 pages of the first volume, 4 pages of the second, and 5 pages of the third, which have not yet appeared in any other collected form, this serial comprised the stories of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; each ultimately sold separately in a single volume, from which the pages of the _Clock_ were detached. Chapman and Hall. I. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (1840). Began at p. 37 of vol. i.; resumed at intervals up to the appearance of the ninth chapter; from the ninth chapter at p. 133, continued without interruption to the close of the volume (then issued with dedication to Samuel Rogers and preface from Devonshire-terrace, dated September 1840); resumed in the second volume, and carried on to the close of the tale at p. 223. i. 200-216, iii. 344, 345. II. BARNABY RUDGE (1841). Introduced by brief paper from Master Humphrey (pp. 224-8), and carried to end of Chapter XII. in the closing 78 pages of volume ii., which was issued with a preface dated in March 1841. Chapter XIII. began the third volume, and the story closed with its 82nd chapter at p. 420; a closing paper from Master Humphrey (pp. 421--426) then winding up the Clock, of which the concluding volume was published with a preface dated November 1841. i. 134, 135; 147-149; 161-163; 223-225; 232-248. 1841. THE PIC-NIC PAPERS by Various Hands. Edited by Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, &c. Three volumes. (To this Book, edited for the benefit of Mrs. Macrone, widow of his old publisher, Dickens contributed a preface and the opening story, the _Lamplighter_.) Henry Colburn. i. 124; 183; 240, 241. 1842. AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION. By Charles Dickens. Two volumes. Chapman and Hall. ii. 21-39; 50. 1843. THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Begun in January, and, up to the close of the year, twelve monthly numbers published). Chapman & Hall. A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by John Leech. (Preface dated December 1843.) Chapman & Hall. ii. 60, 61; 71, 72; 84-92. 1844. THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Eight monthly numbers issued; the last being a double number, between January and July; in which latter month the completed work was published, with dedication to Miss Burdett Coutts, and Preface dated 25th of June.) Chapman & Hall. ii. 44-46; 50, 51; 63-65; 74-84; 99-103. iii. 345. EVENINGS OF A WORKING MAN. By John Overs. With a Preface relative to the Author, by Charles Dickens. (Dedication to Doctor Elliotson, and Preface dated in June.) T. C. Newby. ii. 109, 110. THE CHIMES: a Goblin Story of some Bells that Rang an Old Year out and a New Year in. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Maclise R.A., Stanfield R.A., Richard Doyle, and John Leech. Chapman & Hall. ii. 143-147; 151-157; 160-162; 174, 175; 179. 1845. THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. A Fairy Tale of Home. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Maclise R.A., Stanfield R.A., Edwin Landseer R.A., Richard Doyle, and John Leech. (Dedication to Lord Jeffrey dated in December 1845.) Bradbury & Evans (for the Author). ii. 202-204; 215; 445. 1846. PICTURES FROM ITALY. By Charles Dickens. (Published originally in the _Daily News_ from January to March 1846, with the title of "Travelling Letters written on the Road.") Bradbury & Evans (for the Author). ii. 88; 105; 163-167; 191; 219, 220. DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY AND SON, WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR EXPORTATION. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Three monthly numbers published, from October to the close of the year.) Bradbury & Evans. (During this year Messrs. Bradbury & Evans published "for the Author," in numbers uniform with the other serials, and afterwards in a single volume, _The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress_. By Charles Dickens. With 24 Illustrations by George Cruikshank. A new Edition, revised and corrected.). THE BATTLE OF LIFE. A Love Story. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Maclise R.A., Stanfield R.A., Richard Doyle, and John Leech. (Dedicated to his "English Friends in Switzerland.") Bradbury & Evans (for the Author). ii. 230; 241, 242; 279, 280; 284, 285; 286-289; 293-297; 303-311. 1847. DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY AND SON. (Twelve numbers published monthly during the year.) Bradbury & Evans. FIRST CHEAP ISSUE OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. An Edition, printed in double columns, and issued in weekly three-halfpenny numbers. The first number, being the first of _Pickwick_, was issued in April 1847; and the volume containing that book, with preface dated September 1847, was published in October. New prefaces were for the most part prefixed to each story, and each volume had a frontispiece. The first series (issued by Messrs. Chapman and Hall, and closing in September 1852) comprised Pickwick, Nickleby, Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Chuzzlewit, Oliver Twist, American Notes, Sketches by Boz, and Christmas Books. The second (issued by Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, and closing in 1861) contained Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit. The third, issued by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, has since included Great Expectations (1863), Tale of Two Cities (1864), Hard Times and Pictures from Italy (1865), Uncommercial Traveller (1865), and Our Mutual Friend (1867). Among the Illustrators employed for the Frontispieces were Leslie R.A., Webster R.A., Stanfield R.A., George Cattermole, George Cruikshank, Frank Stone A.R.A., John Leech, Marcus Stone, and Hablot Browne. See ii. 326 and 388. 1848. DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM OF DOMBEY & SON: WHOLESALE, RETAIL, AND FOR EXPORTATION. (Five numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to April; in which latter month the complete work was published with dedication to Lady Normanby and preface dated Devonshire-terrace, 24th of March.) Bradbury & Evans, ii. 102; 107; 219; 220; 230; 241; 265; 278; 280-282; 334-336; 337-367. iii. 345. THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST'S BARGAIN. A Fancy for Christmas Time. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Stanfield R.A., John Tenniel, Frank Stone A.R.A., and John Leech. Bradbury & Evans, ii. 280; 388-390; 419; 442-447; 468. 1849. THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Eight parts issued monthly from May to December.) Bradbury & Evans. 1850. THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Twelve numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to November; in which latter month the completed work was published, with inscription to Mr. and Mrs. Watson of Rockingham, and preface dated October.) Bradbury & Evans. ii. 102; 422, 423; 434, 435; 438; 447; 462-466; 484-487; 494. iii. 21-40; 348, 349. HOUSEHOLD WORDS. On Saturday the 30th of March in this year the weekly serial of HOUSEHOLD WORDS was begun, and was carried on uninterruptedly to the 28th of May 1859, when, its place having been meanwhile taken by the serial in the same form still existing, HOUSEHOLD WORDS was discontinued. ii. 201-203; 449-456. iii. 239; 490-498. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. CHRISTMAS. To this Dickens contributed A CHRISTMAS TREE. 1851. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. WHAT CHRISTMAS IS. To this Dickens contributed WHAT CHRISTMAS IS AS WE GROW OLDER. 1852. BLEAK HOUSE. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Hablot Browne. (Ten numbers, issued monthly, from March to December.) Bradbury & Evans. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS. To this Dickens contributed THE POOR RELATION'S STORY, and THE CHILD'S STORY. 1853. BLEAK HOUSE. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Ten numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to September, in which latter month, with dedication to his "Companions in the Guild of Literature and Art," and preface dated in August, the completed book was published.) Bradbury & Evans, ii. 342; 441. iii. 25-29; 40-54; 57-59; 345. A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By Charles Dickens. Three vols. With frontispieces from designs by F. W. Topham. Reprinted from _Household Words_, where it appeared between the dates of the 25th of January 1851 and the 10th of December 1853. (It was published first in a complete form with dedication to his own children in 1854.) Bradbury & Evans, iii. 58. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. CHRISTMAS STORIES. To this Dickens contributed THE SCHOOL BOY'S STORY, and NOBODY'S STORY. 1854. HARD TIMES. FOR THESE TIMES. By Charles Dickens. (This tale appeared in weekly portions in _Household Words_, between the dates of the 1st of April and the 12th of August 1854; in which latter month it was published complete, with inscription to Thomas Carlyle.) Bradbury & Evans, iii. 65-70. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_: THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS. To this Dickens contributed three chapters. I. IN THE OLD CITY OF ROCHESTER; II. THE STORY OF RICHARD DOUBLEDICK; III. THE ROAD. iii. 154. 1855. LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. The first number published in December. Bradbury & Evans. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE HOLLY-TREE. To this Dickens contributed three branches. I. MYSELF; II. THE BOOTS; III. THE BILL. iii. 154; 415. 1856. LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Twelve numbers issued monthly, between January and December.) Bradbury & Evans. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY. To this Dickens contributed the leading chapter: THE WRECK. iii. 485. 1857. LITTLE DORRIT. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. (Seven numbers issued monthly, the last being a double number, from January to June, in which latter month the tale was published complete, with preface, and dedication to Clarkson Stanfield.) Bradbury & Evans, iii. 72; 75; 96; 115; 154-164; 276-278. THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO IDLE APPRENTICES, in _Household Words_ for October. To the first part of these papers Dickens contributed all up to the top of the second column of page 316; to the second part, all up to the white line in the second column of page 340; to the third part, all except the reflections of Mr. Idle (363-5); and the whole of the fourth part. All the rest was by Mr. Wilkie Collins, iii. 170-176; 351. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. THE PERILS OF CERTAIN ENGLISH PRISONERS. To this Dickens contributed the chapters entitled THE ISLAND OF SILVER-STORE, and THE RAFTS ON THE RIVER. THE FIRST LIBRARY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. The first volume, with dedication to John Forster, was issued in December 1857, and the volumes appeared monthly up to the 24th, issued in November 1859. The later books and writings have been added in subsequent volumes, and an addition has also been issued with the illustrations. To the second volume of the Old Curiosity Shop, as issued in this edition, were added 31 "REPRINTED PIECES" taken from Dickens's papers in _Household Words_; which have since appeared also in other collected editions. Chapman & Hall. iii. 236. AUTHORIZED FRENCH TRANSLATION OF THE WORKS OF DICKENS. Translations of Dickens exist in every European language; but the only version of his writings in a foreign tongue authorized by him, or for which he received anything, was undertaken in Paris. Nickleby was the first story published, and to it was prefixed an address from Dickens to the French public dated from Tavistock-house the 17th January 1857. Hachette. iii. 121; 125. 1858. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _Household Words_. A HOUSE TO LET. To this Dickens contributed the chapter entitled "GOING INTO SOCIETY." iii. 250; 260. 1859. ALL THE YEAR ROUND, the weekly serial which took the place of HOUSEHOLD WORDS. Began on the 30th of April in this year, went on uninterruptedly until Dickens's death, and is continued under the management of his son. iii. 239-254; 462; 490-499. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. By Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Hablot Browne. This tale was printed in weekly portions in _All the Year Round_, between the dates of the 30th of April and the 26th of November 1859; appearing also concurrently in monthly numbers with illustrations, from June to December; when it was published complete with dedication to Lord John Russell, iii. 243; 279; 353-360. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. THE HAUNTED HOUSE. To which Dickens contributed two chapters. I. THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE. II. THE GHOST IN MASTER B'S ROOM. iii. 246. 1860. HUNTED DOWN. A Story in two Portions. (Written for an American newspaper, and reprinted in the numbers of _All the Year Round_ for the 4th and the 11th of August. iii. 253; 279.) THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER. By Charles Dickens. (Seventeen papers, which had appeared under this title between the dates of 28th of January and 13th of October 1860 in _All the Year Round_, were published at the close of the year, in a volume, with preface dated December. A later impression was issued in 1868, as a volume of what was called the Charles Dickens Edition; when eleven fresh papers, written in the interval, were added; and promise was given, in a preface dated December 1868, of the Uncommercial Traveller's intention "to take to the road again before another winter sets in." Between that date and the autumn of 1869, when the last of his detached papers were written, _All the Year Round_ published seven "New Uncommercial Samples" which have not yet been collected. Their title's were, i. Aboard ship (which opened, on the 5th of December 1868, the New Series of _All the Year Round_); ii. A Small Star in the East; iii. A Little Dinner in an Hour; iv. Mr. Barlow; v. On an Amateur Beat; vi. A Fly-Leaf in a Life; vii. A Plea for Total Abstinence. The date of the last was the 5th of June 1869; and on the 24th of July appeared his last piece of writing for the serial he had so long conducted, a paper entitled _Landor's Life_.) iii. 247-252; 528. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. To which Dickens contributed nearly all the first, and the whole of the second and the last chapter: THE VILLAGE, THE MONEY, and THE RESTITUTION; the two intervening chapters, though also with insertions from his hand, not being his. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Begun in _All the Year Round_ on the 1st of December, and continued weekly to the close of that year. 1861. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. By Charles Dickens. Resumed on the 5th of January and issued in weekly portions, closing on the 3rd of August, when the complete story was published in three volumes and inscribed to Chauncy Hare Townshend. In the following year it was published in a single volume, illustrated by Mr. Marcus Stone. Chapman & Hall. iii. 245; 259; 260 (the words there used "on Great Expectations closing in June 1861" refer to the time when the Writing of it was closed: it did not close in the Publication until August, as above stated); 360-369. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_, TOM TIDDLER'S GROUND. To which Dickens contributed three of the seven chapters. I. PICKING UP SOOT AND CINDERS; II. PICKING UP MISS KIMMEENS; III. PICKING UP THE TINKER. iii. 245. 1862. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. SOMEBODY'S LUGGAGE. To which Dickens contributed four chapters. I. HIS LEAVING IT TILL CALLED FOR; II. HIS BOOTS; III. HIS BROWN-PAPER PARCEL; IV. HIS WONDERFUL END. To the chapter of His Umbrella he also contributed a portion. iii. 351; 370. 1863. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS. To which Dickens contributed the first and the last chapter. I. HOW MRS. LIRRIPER CARRIED ON THE BUSINESS; II. HOW THE PARLOURS ADDED A FEW WORDS. iii. 370, 371. 1864. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Marcus Stone. Eight numbers issued monthly between May and December. Chapman & Hall. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_: MRS. LIRRIPER'S LEGACY: to which Dickens contributed the first and the last chapter. I. MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES HOW SHE WENT ON, AND WENT OVER; II. MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES HOW JEMMY TOPPED UP. iii. 371. 1865. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. By Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by Marcus Stone. In Two Volumes. (Two more numbers issued in January and February, when the first volume was published, with dedication to Sir James Emerson Tennent. The remaining ten numbers, the last being a double number, were issued between March and November, when the complete work was published in two volumes.) Chapman & Hall. iii. 271; 280, 281; 301. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S PRESCRIPTIONS. To this Dickens contributed three portions. I. TO BE TAKEN IMMEDIATELY. II. TO BE TAKEN FOR LIFE; III. The portion with the title of TO BE TAKEN WITH A GRAIN OF SALT, describing a Trial for Murder, was also his. iii. 379. 1866. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. MUGBY JUNCTION. To this Dickens contributed four papers. I. BARBOX BROTHERS; II. BARBOX BROTHERS AND CO.; III. MAIN LINE--THE BOY AT MUGBY. IV. NO. I BRANCH LINE--THE SIGNAL-MAN. iii. 379 (where a slight error is made in not treating _Barbox_ and the _Mugby Boy_ as parts of one Christmas piece). 1867. THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION. This collected edition, which had originated with the American publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields, was issued here between the dates of 1868 and 1870, with dedication to John Forster, beginning with Pickwick in May 1868, and closing with the Child's History in July 1870. The REPRINTED PIECES were with the volume of AMERICAN NOTES, and the PICTURES FROM ITALY closed the volume containing HARD TIMES. Chapman & Hall. CHRISTMAS NUMBER of _All the Year Round_. NO THOROUGHFARE. To this Dickens contributed, with Mr. Wilkie Collins, in nearly equal portions. With the new series of _All the Year Round_, which began on the 5th of December 1868, Dickens discontinued the issue of Christmas Numbers. iii. 462 note. 1868. A HOLIDAY ROMANCE. GEORGE SILVERMAN'S EXPLANATION. Written respectively for a Child's Magazine, and for the Atlantic Monthly, published in America by Messrs. Ticknor and Fields. Republished in _All the Year Round_ on the 25th of January and the 1st and 8th of February 1868. iii. 321, 380. 1870. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. By Charles Dickens, with twelve illustrations by S. L. Fildes. (Meant to have comprised twelve monthly numbers, but prematurely closed by the writer's death in June.) Issued in six monthly numbers, between April and September. Chapman & Hall. iii. 461-477. II. THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS. "I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham in the county of Kent, hereby revoke all my former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my last Will and Testament. I give the sum of £1000 free of legacy duty to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex. I GIVE the sum of £19 19 0 to my faithful servant Mrs. Anne Cornelius. I GIVE the sum of £19 19 0 to the daughter and only child of the said Mrs. Anne Cornelius. I GIVE the sum of £19 19 0 to each and every domestic servant, male and female, who shall be in my employment at the time of my decease, and shall have been in my employment for a not less period of time than one year. I GIVE the sum of £1000 free of legacy duty to my daughter Mary Dickens. I also give to my said daughter an annuity of £300 a year, during her life, if she shall so long continue unmarried; such annuity to be considered as accruing from day to day, but to be payable half yearly, the first of such half-yearly payments to be made at the expiration of six months next after my decease. If my said daughter Mary shall marry, such annuity shall cease; and in that case, but in that case only, my said daughter shall share with my other children in the provision hereinafter made for them. I GIVE to my dear sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth the sum of £8000 free of legacy duty. I also give to the said Georgina Hogarth all my personal jewellery not hereinafter mentioned, and all the little familiar objects from my writing-table and my room, and she will know what to do with those things. I ALSO GIVE to the said Georgina Hogarth all my private papers whatsoever and wheresoever, and I leave her my grateful blessing as the best and truest friend man ever had. I GIVE to my eldest son Charles my library of printed books, and my engravings and prints; and I also give to my son Charles the silver salver presented to me at Birmingham, and the silver cup presented to me at Edinburgh, and my shirt studs, shirt pins, and sleeve buttons. AND I BEQUEATH unto my said son Charles and my son Henry Fielding Dickens, the sum of £8000 upon trust to invest the same, and from time to time to vary the investments thereof, and to pay the annual income thereof to my wife during her life, and after her decease the said sum of £8000 and the investments thereof shall be in trust for my children (but subject as to my daughter Mary to the proviso hereinbefore contained) who being a son or sons shall have attained or shall attain the age of twenty-one years or being a daughter or daughters shall have attained or shall attain that age or be previously married, in equal shares if more than one. I GIVE my watch (the gold repeater presented to me at Coventry), and I give the chains and seals and all appendages I have worn with it, to my dear and trusty friend John Forster, of Palace Gate House, Kensington, in the county of Middlesex aforesaid; and I also give to the said John Forster such manuscripts of my published works as may be in my possession at the time of my decease. AND I DEVISE AND BEQUEATH all my real and personal estate (except such as is vested in me as a trustee or mortgagee) unto the said Georgina Hogarth and the said John Forster, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns respectively, upon trust that they the said Georgina Hogarth and John Forster, or the survivor of them or the executors or administrators of such survivor, do and shall, at their, his, or her uncontrolled and irresponsible direction, either proceed to an immediate sale or conversion into money of the said real and personal estate (including my copyrights), or defer and postpone any sale or conversion into money, till such time or times as they, he, or she shall think fit, and in the meantime may manage and let the said real and personal estate (including my copyrights), in such manner in all respects as I myself could do, if I were living and acting therein; it being my intention that the trustees or trustee for the time being of this my Will shall have the fullest power over the said real and personal estate which I can give to them, him, or her. AND I DECLARE that, until the said real and personal estate shall be sold and converted into money, the rents and annual income thereof respectively shall be paid and applied to the person or persons in the manner and for the purposes to whom and for which the annual income of the monies to arise from the sale or conversion thereof into money would be payable or applicable under this my Will in case the same were sold or converted into money. AND I DECLARE that my real estate shall for the purposes of this my Will be considered as converted into personalty upon my decease. AND I DECLARE that the said trustees or trustee for the time being, do and shall, with and out of the monies which shall come to their, his, or her hands, under or by virtue of this my Will and the trusts thereof, pay my just debts, funeral and testamentary expenses, and legacies. AND I DECLARE that the said trust funds or so much thereof as shall remain after answering the purposes aforesaid, and the annual income thereof, shall be in trust for all my children (but subject as to my daughter Mary to the proviso hereinbefore contained), who being a son or sons shall have attained or shall attain the age of twenty-one years, and being a daughter or daughters shall have attained or shall attain that age or be previously married, in equal shares if more than one. PROVIDED ALWAYS, that, as regards my copyrights and the produce and profits thereof, my said daughter Mary, notwithstanding the proviso hereinbefore contained with reference to her, shall share with my other children therein whether she be married or not. AND I DEVISE the estates vested in me at my decease as a trustee or mortgagee unto the use of the said Georgina Hogarth and John Forster, their heirs and assigns, upon the trusts and subject to the equities affecting the same respectively. AND I APPOINT the said GEORGINA HOGARTH and JOHN FORSTER executrix and executor of this my Will, and GUARDIANS of the persons of my children during their respective minorities. AND LASTLY, as I have now set down the form of words which my legal advisers assure me are necessary to the plain objects of this my Will, I solemnly enjoin my dear children always to remember how much they owe to the said Georgina Hogarth, and never to be wanting in a grateful and affectionate attachment to her, for they know well that she has been, through all the stages of their growth and progress, their ever useful self-denying and devoted friend. AND I DESIRE here simply to record the fact that my wife, since our separation by consent, has been in the receipt from me of an annual income of £600, while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have devolved wholly upon myself. I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. I DIRECT that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb, without the addition of 'Mr.' or 'Esquire.' I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there. IN WITNESS whereof I the said Charles Dickens, the testator, have to this my last Will and Testament set my hand this 12th day of May in the year of our Lord 1869. "Signed published and declared by } the above-named Charles Dickens the } testator as and for his last Will and Testament } in the presence of us (present together } CHARLES DICKENS. at the same time) who in his presence } at his request and in the presence of } each other have hereunto subscribed our } names as witnesses. } "G. HOLSWORTH, "26 Wellington Street, Strand. "HENRY WALKER, "26 Wellington Street, Strand. "I, Charles Dickens of Gadshill Place near Rochester in the county of Kent Esquire declare this to be a Codicil to my last Will and Testament which Will bears date the 12th day of May 1869. I GIVE to my son Charles Dickens the younger all my share and interest in the weekly journal called 'All the Year Round,' which is now conducted under Articles of Partnership made between me and William Henry Wills and the said Charles Dickens the younger, and all my share and interest in the stereotypes stock and other effects belonging to the said partnership, he defraying my share of all debts and liabilities of the said partnership which may be outstanding at the time of my decease, and in all other respects I confirm my said Will. IN WITNESS whereof I have hereunto set my hand the 2nd day of June in the year of our Lord 1870. "Signed and declared by the said } CHARLES DICKENS, the testator as and } for a Codicil to his Will in the presence } of us present at the same time who at } CHARLES DICKENS. his request in his presence and in the } presence of each other hereunto subscribe } our names as witnesses. } "G. HOLSWORTH, "26 Wellington Street, Strand. "HENRY WALKER, "26 Wellington Street, Strand. * * * * * The real and personal estate,--taking the property bequeathed by the last codicil at a valuation of something less than two years' purchase; and of course before payment of the legacies, the (inconsiderable) debts, and the testamentary and other expenses,--amounted, as nearly as may be calculated, to, £93,000. III. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. I regret to have had no opportunity until now (May, 1873) of making the corrections which appear in this impression of my second volume. All the early reprints having been called for before the close of 1872, the only change I at that time found possible was amendment of an error at p. 397, as to the date of the first performance at Devonshire House, and of a few others of small importance at pp. 262, 291, 320, 360, 444, and 446. Premising that additional corrections, also unimportant, are now made at pp. 57, 135, 136, 142, 301, 329, 405, and 483, I proceed to indicate what may seem to require more detailed mention. P. 50. "Covent-garden" is substituted for "Drury-lane." The _Chronicle_ atoned for its present silence by a severe notice of the man's subsequent appearance at the Haymarket; and of this I am glad to be reminded by Mr. Gruneisen, who wrote the criticism. 50. The son of the publican referred to (Mr. Whelpdale of Streatham), pointing out my error in not having made the Duke of Brunswick the defendant, says he was himself a witness in the case, and has had pride in repeating to his own children what the Chief Justice said of his father. 117. The "limpet on the rock" and the "green boots" refer to a wonderful piece by Turner in the previous year's Academy, exhibiting a rock overhanging a magnificent sea, a booted figure appearing on the rock, and at its feet a blotch to represent a limpet: the subject being Napoleon at St. Helena. 168. "Assumption" is substituted for "Transfiguration." 182. Six words are added to the first note. 193, 194. An error in my former statement of the circumstances of Mr. Fletcher's death, which I much regret to have made, is now corrected. 195. The proper names of the ship and her captain are here given, as the Fantôme, commanded by Sir Frederick (now Vice-Admiral) Nicolson. 229. A correspondent familiar with Lausanne informs me that the Castle of Chillon is not visible from Rosemont, and that Dickens in these first days must have mistaken some other object for it. "A long mass of mountain hides Chillon from view, and it only becomes visible when you get about six miles from Lausanne on the Vevay road, when a curve in the road or lake shows it visible behind the bank of mountains." The error at p. 257, now corrected, was mine. 247. "Clinking," the right word, replaces "drinking." 263. A passage which stood in the early editions is removed, the portrait which it referred to having been not that of the lady mentioned, but of a relative bearing the same name. 267, 268. I quote a letter to myself from one of the baronet's family present at the outbreak goodnaturedly exaggerated in Mr. Cerjat's account to Dickens. "I well remember the dinner at Mr. Cerjat's alluded to in one of the letters from Lausanne in your Life of Dickens. It was not however our first acquaintance with the 'distinguished writer,' as he came with his family to stay at a Pension on the border of the Lake of Geneva where my father and his family were then living, and notwithstanding the gallant captain's 'habit' the families subsequently became very intimate." 270. Lord Vernon is more correctly described as the fifth Baron, who succeeded to the title in 1835 and died in 1866 in his 64th year. 283. The distance of Mont Blanc from the Neuchâtel road is now properly given as sixty not six miles. 341, second line from bottom. Not "subsequent" but "modified" is the proper word. 398. In mentioning the painters who took an interest in the Guild scheme I omitted the distinguished name of Mr. E. M. Ward, R.A., by whom an admirable design, taken from Defoe's life, was drawn for the card of membership. 455, 456. In supposing that the Child's Dream of a Star was not among Dickens's Reprinted Pieces, I fell into an error, which is here corrected. 468. I did not mean to imply that Lady Graham was herself a Sheridan. She was only connected with the family she so well "represented" by being the sister of the lady whom Tom Sheridan married. * * * * * The incident at Mr. Hone's funeral quoted at pp. 31-33 from a letter to Mr. Felton written by Dickens shortly after the occurrence (2nd of March, 1843), and published, a year before my volume, in Mr. Field's _Yesterdays with Authors_ (pp. 146-8), has elicited from the "Independent clergyman" referred to a counter statement of the alleged facts, of which I here present an abridgement, omitting nothing that is in any way material. "Though it is thirty years since . . . several who were present survive to this day, and have a distinct recollection of all that occurred. One of these is the writer of this article--another, the Rev. Joshua Harrison. . . . The Independent clergyman never wore bands, and had no Bible under his arm. . . . An account of Mr. Hone had appeared in some of the newspapers, containing an offensive paragraph to the effect that one 'speculation' having failed, Mr. Hone was disposed, and persuaded by the Independent clergyman, to try another, that other being 'to try his powers in the pulpit.' This was felt by the family to be an insult alike to the living and the dead. . . . Mr. Harrison's account is, that the Independent clergyman was observed speaking to Miss Hone about something apparently annoying to both, and that, turning to Mr. Cruikshank, he said 'Have you seen the sketch of Mr. Hone's life in the _Herald_?' Mr. C. replied 'Yes.' 'Don't you think it very discreditable? It is a gross reflection on our poor friend, as if he would use the most sacred things merely for a piece of bread; and it is a libel on me and the denomination I belong to, as if we could be parties to such a proceeding.' Mr. C. said in reply, 'I know something of the article, but what you complain of was not in it originally--it was an addition by another hand.' Mr. C. afterwards stated that he wrote the article, 'but _not_ the offensive paragraph.' The vulgar nonsense put into the mouth of the clergyman by Mr. Dickens was wound up, it is said, by 'Let us pray' . . . but this _cannot_ be true; and for this reason, the conversation with Mr. Cruikshank took place before the domestic service, and that service, according to Nonconformist custom, is always begun by reading an appropriate passage of Scripture. . . . Mr. Dickens says that while they were kneeling at prayer Mr. Cruikshank whispered to him what he relates. Mr. C. denies it; and I believe him. . . . In addition to the improbability, one of the company remembers that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Cruikshank did not sit together, and could not have knelt side by side." The reader must be left to judge between what is said of the incident in the text and these recollections of it after thirty years. * * * * * At the close of the corrections to the first volume, prefixed to the second, the intention was expressed to advert at the end of the work to information, not in correction but in illustration of my text, forwarded by obliging correspondents who had been scholars at the Wellington House Academy (i. 74). But inexorable limits of space prevent, for the present, a fulfilment of this intention. J. F. PALACE GATE HOUSE, KENSINGTON, _22nd of January 1874_. INDEX. A'BECKETT (GILBERT), at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210; death of, iii. 119. Aberdeen, reading at, iii. 234. Actors and acting, i. 174, 175, 260, ii. 96, 103, 126-128, 176, 399, 401; at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210; French, iii. 127-134. Adams (John Quincey), i. 214, 349. Adelphi theatre, _Carol_ dramatized at the, ii. 96. Africa, memorials of dead children in, iii. 293. Agassiz (M.), iii. 389 note. Agreements, literary, ii. 87, 88, iii. 240. Ainsworth (Harrison), i. 118, 163, 181. Alamode beef-house (Johnson's), i. 54. Albany (U. S.), reading at, iii. 436 (and see 441). Albaro, Villa Bagnerello at, ii. 113, 120; the sirocco at, ii. 114; Angus Fletcher's sketch of the villa, ii. 121; English servants at, ii. 123; tradespeople at, ii. 124, 125; dinner at French consul's, ii. 130-132; reception at the Marquis di Negri's, ii. 132. Albert (Prince), i. 322 note; at Boulogne, iii. 108. Alison (Dr.), i. 258, 260. Alison (Sheriff), ii. 391. _All the Year Round_, titles suggested for, iii. 241-243; first number of, iii. 244; success of, iii. 244; difference between _Household Words_ and, iii. 245; tales in, by eminent writers, iii. 245; sale of Christmas numbers of, iii. 246; Dickens's detached papers in, iii. 247-249, 528; Charles Collins's papers in, iii. 257; projected story for, iii. 310, 462; new series of, iii. 462 note; change of plan in, iii. 462 note; Dickens's last paper in, iii. 528. Allan (Sir William), i. 258, 260; ii. 475. Allonby (Cumberland), iii. 173; landlady of inn at, iii. 173. Allston (Washington), i. 331. Amateur theatricals, i. 413-417; ii. 481; iii. 62-64. Ambigu (Paris), _Paradise Lost_ at the, iii. 130, 131. America, visit to, contemplated by Dickens, i. 195; wide-spread knowledge of Dickens's writings in, i. 215, 216, iii. 384-386; eve of visit to, i. 284-291; visit to, decided, i. 285; proposed book about, i. 286; arrangements for journey, 286; rough passage to, i. 292-298; first impressions of, i. 299-309; hotels in, i. 304, iii. 390, 396, 412, 435; inns in, i. 344, 366 note, 393, 395, 400, 401, iii. 432; Dickens's popularity in, i. 307, iii. 388; second impressions of, i. 310-334; levees in, i. 312, 347, 365, 373, 386, 397; outcry against Dickens in, i. 319; slavery in, i. 327, 352-354, 395, ii. 103; international copyright agitation in, i. 329, 351, 408, 409; railway travelling in, i. 336, 368, iii. 398, 405, 435, 436; trying climate of, i. 347; "located" Englishmen in, i. 350; Dickens's dislike of, i. 351; canal-boat journeys in, i. 358-380; Dickens's real compliment to, i. 361; deference paid to ladies in, i. 374; duelling in, i. 396; Dickens's opinion of country and people of, in 1842, i. 350, 351 (and see 401, 402); in 1868, ii. 38, iii. 413-416; effect of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in, ii. 76, 77; desire in, to hear Dickens read, iii. 319; Mr. Dolby sent to, iii, 320; result of Dolby's visit, iii. 322, 323 note; revisited by Dickens, iii. 387-443; old and new friends in, iii. 389; profits of readings in, iii. 392; Fenianism in, iii. 397; newspapers in, iii. 400; planning the readings in, iii. 401; nothing lasts long in, iii. 401, 429; work of Dickens's staff in, iii. 410; the result of 34 readings in, iii. 415; Dickens's way of life in, iii. 416, 434, 437 note; value of a vote in, iii. 420; objection to coloured people in, iii. 420; female beauty in, iii. 432; total expenses of reading tour, and profits from readings, iii. 446 (and see 441, 442); Dickens's departure from, iii. 443; effect of Dickens's death in, iii. 384. Americanisms, i. 303, 327, 370, 387, 410, 414, 415. _American Notes_, choicest passages of, i. 362, 363; less satisfactory than Dickens's letters, i. 358, 359; in preparation, ii. 23, 24; proposed dedication of, ii. 27; rejected motto for, ii. 30; suppressed introductory chapter to, ii. 34-37; Jeffrey's opinion of, ii. 38; large sale of, 37, 38. Americans, friendly, ii. 177; deaths of famous, since 1842, iii. 389 note; homage to Dickens by, iii. 465 note; French contrasted with, ii. 322. Andersen (Hans), iii. 167. Anniversary, a birthday, i. 113, 150, iii. 308, 508; a fatal, iii. 304, 376, 384. Arnold (Dr.), Dickens's reverence for, ii. 150. Arras (France), a religious Richardson's show at, iii. 273. Art, conventionalities of, ii. 169; limitations of, in England, iii. 331; inferiority of English to French, iii. 146, 147. Artists' Benevolent Fund dinner, iii. 236. Ashburton (Lord), i. 329, 387. Ashley (Lord) and ragged schools, i. 283; ii. 58, 493, 494. Astley's, a visit from, iii. 164, 165; _Mazeppa_ at, iii. 302 note. _As You Like It_, French version of, iii. 132. Atlantic, card-playing on the, i. 295, 296. Auber and Queen Victoria, iii. 135. Austin (Henry), i. 182; iii. 244; secretary to the Sanitary Commission, ii. 385; death of, iii. 261, 262. Australia, idea of settling in, entertained by Dickens, iii. 185; scheme for readings in, iii. 270 note (idea abandoned, iii. 272). Austrian police, the, iii. 94, 95. Authors, American, i. 319. Authorship, disquietudes of, ii. 288, 289. BABBAGE (CHARLES) ii. 108. Bagot (Sir Charles), i. 412. Balloon Club at Twickenham, i. 182 note. Baltimore (U. S.), women of, iii. 418; readings at, iii. 418, 419, 427 (and see 441); white and coloured prisoners in Penitentiary at, iii. 419. Bancroft (George), i. 305, ii. 467. Banquets, Emile de Girardin's superb, iii. 139-141. Bantams, reduced, iii. 251. Barham (Rev. Mr.), ii. 175, 476. _Barnaby Rudge_, agreement to write, i. 135 (and see 147, 148, 161-163, 177, 225); Dickens at work on, i. 186, 232-234, 239-244; agreement for, transferred to Chapman and Hall, i. 223-226; the raven in, i. 233-240; constraints of weekly publication, i. 243; close of, i. 244; the story characterised, i. 244-248. Bartlett (Dr.) on slavery in America, i. 389. Bath, a fancy about, iii. 451, 452. Bathing, sea, Dickens's love of, ii. 28, 56, 138. _Battle of Life_ title suggested for the, ii. 251 (and see 295); contemplated abandonment of, ii. 289; writing of, resumed, ii. 293; finished, ii. 295; points in the story, 296; Jeffrey's opinion of the, ii. 303, 304; sketch of the story, ii. 304, 305; Dickens's own comments on, ii. 306; date of the story, 306; reply to criticism on, ii. 308; doubts as to third part of, ii. 309; dedication of, ii. 309; illustrated by Stanfield and Leech, 310; grave mistake made by Leech, ii. 311; dramatized, ii. 323. Bayham-street, Camden town, Dickens's early life in, i. 30-42. Beale (Mr.), a proposal from, iii. 196. Beard (Mr. Carr), ii. 476; on Dickens's lameness, iii. 455; readings stopped by, iii. 456; in constant attendance on Dickens at his last readings, iii. 531 (and see 541). Beard (Thos.), i. 92. 101, 102, iii. 256. Beaucourt (M.), described by Dickens, iii. 99-102; his "Property," iii. 100; among the Putney market-gardeners, iii. 102; goodness of, iii. 120 note. Bedrooms, American, i. 304, 313. Beecher (Ward), iii. 410; readings in his church at Brooklyn, iii. 417. Beer, a dog's fancy for, iii. 217 note. Beggars, Italian, ii. 183, 184. Begging-letter writers, i. 228, ii. 106, 107; in Paris, ii. 327. Belfast, reading at, iii. 229. Benedict (Jules), illness of, ii. 466. Bentley (Mr.), Dickens's early relations with, i. 134, 135, 141, 147, 148, 161, 163, 224, iii. 240; friendly feeling of Dickens to, in after life, ii 481, iii. 241. _Bentley's Miscellany_, Dickens editor of, i. 121; proposal to write _Barnaby Rudge_ in, i. 148; editorship of, transferred to Mr. Ainsworth, i. 163, 164. Berwick, Mary (Adelaide Procter), iii. 495 Berwick-on-Tweed, reading at, iii. 266. Betting-men at Doncaster, iii. 174-176. Beverley (William), at Wellington-house academy, i. 84. Birds and low company, iii. 251, 252. Birmingham, Dickens's promise to read at, iii. 56; promise fulfilled (first public readings), iii. 59; another reading at, iii. 311; Dickens's speeches at Institute at, ii. 94, 95, iii. 527. Birthday associations, i. 113, 150, iii. 308, 508. Black (Adam), i. 259. Black (Charles), ii. 476. Black (John), i. 100, ii. 104; early appreciation by, of Dickens, i. 106; dinner to, ii. 53. Blacking-warehouse (at Hungerford Stairs), Dickens employed at, i. 50; described, i. 51 (and see iii. 512 note); associates of Dickens at, i. 52; removed to Chandos-street, Covent-garden, i. 67; Dickens leaves, i. 68; what became of the business, i. 70. Blackmore (Edward), Dickens employed as clerk by, i. 87; his recollections of Dickens, i. 87. Blackpool, Dickens at, iii. 455. _Blackwood's Magazine and Little Dorrit_, iii. 163. Blair (General), iii. 424. Blanchard (Laman). ii. 162, 175 (and see 187); a Literary Fund dinner described by, i. 322 note. _Bleak House_ begun, ii. 441; originals of Boythorn and Skimpole in, iii. 25-28; inferior to _Copperfield_, iii. 32; handling of character in, iii. 40-50; defects of, iii. 44; Dean Ramsay on, iii. 47; originals of Chancery abuses in, iii. 50; proposed titles for, iii. 52 note; completion of, iii. 51; sale of, iii. 53. Blessington (Lady), lines written for, ii. 52 note (and see 93). Blind Institution at Lausanne, inmates of, ii. 235, 240, iii. 78. Bonchurch, Dickens at, ii. 425-436; effect of climate of, ii. 431-433; entertainment at, iii. 111, 112 note. Books, written and unwritten, hints for, iii. 275-297; suggested titles in Memoranda for new, iii. 293, 294; a complete list of Dickens's, iii. 547-560. Booksellers, invitation to, ii. 100 note. Boots, absurdity of, i. 314. Boots, a gentlemanly, at Calais, i. 136; a patriotic Irish, iii. 227. _Boots at the Holly-tree Inn_, iii. 154; reading of, at Boston (U. S.), iii. 410. Bores, American, i. 375, 376, 383, 384, 385. Boston (U. S.), first visit to, i. 300-309; enthusiastic reception at, i. 301; dinner at, i. 312; changes in, since 1842, iii. 390; first reading in, iii. 391; a remembrance of Christmas at, iii. 399; walking-match at, iii. 427; audiences at, iii. 429; last readings at, iii. 440. _Bottle_ (Cruikshank's), Dickens's opinion of, ii. 384, 411. Boulogne, an imaginary dialogue at, ii. 328, 329; Dickens at, iii. 55, 56, 59, 96-120; the Pier at, iii. 115; Dickens's liking for, iii. 56; M. Beaucourt's "Property" at, iii. 97-106, 115-120; sketch of M. Beaucourt, iii. 99-103; prices of provisions at, iii. 102 note; Shakespearian performance at, iii. 103; pig-market at, iii. 104; Thackeray at, iii. 105 note; camp at, iii. 106, 107, 116; Prince Albert at, iii. 107, 108; illuminations at, iii. 109; epidemic at, iii. 119. _Boulogne Jest Book_, iii. 65 note. Bouquets, serviceable, iii. 137. Bourse, victims of the, iii. 142. Boxall (William), ii. 475, iii. 126. Boxing-match, a, ii. 224. Boyle (Mary), ii. 481, iii. 524. Boys, a list of Christian names of, iii. 294, 295. Boz, origin of the word, i. 104; facsimile of autograph signature, i. 276. Bradbury & Evans (Messrs.), ii. 66, 67, 68, 105, 250; a suggestion by, ii. 71; Dickens's agreements with, ii. 88 (and see 289), iii. 56. Bradford, Dickens asked to read at, iii. 61 note. Brighton, Dickens's first visit to, i. 138; other visits, ii. 421, 422, 455; theatre at, i. 138; reading at, iii. 263. _Bride of Lammermoor_ (Scott's), composition of the, iii. 339, 340. British Museum reading-room, frequented by Dickens, i. 90. Broadstairs, Dickens at, i. 136, 137, 176, 204, 277-283, ii. 55, 214 note, 387-389, 405-421, 422-424, 436-441; _Nickleby_ completed at, i. 176; Dickens's house at, i. 205; writing _American Notes_ at, ii. 23; pony-chaise accident, ii. 418, 419; smuggling at, ii. 439. Brobity's (Mr.) snuff-box, iii. 297. Brooklyn (New York), scene at, iii. 411; readings in Mr. Ward Beecher's chapel, iii. 417. Brougham (Lord), in Paris, ii. 316, 317; the "_Punch_ people" and, ii. 469. Browne (H. K.) chosen to illustrate _Pickwick_, i. 115; accompanies Dickens and his wife to Flanders, i. 135; failure of, in a _Dombey_ illustration, ii. 354, 355 (but see 348, 349); sketch by, for Micawber, ii. 435; his sketch of Skimpole, iii. 53. Browning's (R. B.) _Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, Dickens's opinion of, ii. 46. Bruce (Knight), ii. 97. Brunel (Isambard), ii. 469. Buckingham Palace, Dickens at, iii. 508. Buffalo (U. S.), reading at, iii. 432. Buller (Charles), ii. 53. Burdett (Sir Francis), advocacy of the poor, i. 250. Burns festival, Prof. Wilson's speech at the, ii. 136. Buss (Mr.), _Pickwick_ illustrations by, i. 115. Byron's (Lord) Ada, ii. 469. ÇA IRA, the revolutionary tune of, iii. 129. Cambridge, reading at, iii. 317. Cambridge (U. S.) and Boston contrasted, iii. 390; the Webster murder at, iii. 402, 403. Camden-town, Dickens with Mrs. Roylance at, i. 55. Campbell (Lord), i. 322 note; on the writings of Dickens, iii. 72 and note; death of, iii. 247 note. Canada, emigrants in, ii. 28, 29. Canal-boat journeys in America, i. 358-380; a day's routine on, i. 366, 367; disagreeables of, i. 367; a pretty scene on board, i. 390-392. Cannibalism, an approach to, ii. 326. Cannon-row, Westminster, incident at public-house in, i. 63. Canterbury, reading at, iii. 264. Car-driver, an Irish, iii. 225, 226 note. Carlyle (Lord), ii. 469. Carlisle (Bishop of) and Colenso, iii. 248 note. Carlyle (Thomas), ii. 110, 135, 160, 162, 174; a strange profane story, i. 130; on international copyright, i. 332-334; Dickens's admiration of, i. 334 (and see ii. 470); a correction for, ii. 440; on Dickens's acting, iii. 72; grand teaching of, iii. 204; inaugural address of, at Edinburgh University, iii. 308; hint by, to common men, iii. 326; on humour, iii. 342; a hero to Dickens, iii. 520; on Dickens's death, iii. 514, 515 (and see ii. 110). Carlyle (Mrs.), on the expression in Dickens's face, i. 119; death of, iii. 308; Dickens's last meeting, iii. 309. Carriage, an unaccommodating, ii. 232; a wonderful, ii. 270. Carrick Fell (Cumberland), ascent of, iii. 170, 171; accident on, iii. 171. _Castle Spectre_, a judicious "tag" to the, ii. 471. Catholicism, Roman, the true objection to, ii. 299. Cattermole (George), i. 181, 197, ii. 113 note; imitation of a cabstand waterman by, ii. 423 note. _Caudle Lectures_, a suggestion for the, ii. 136 note. Cerjat (Mr.), ii. 232 (and see iii. 567), 252. Chalk (Kent), Dickens's honeymoon spent at, i. 108; revisited, i. 119. Chambers, contemplated chapters on, i. 194. Chamounix, Dickens's trip to, ii. 253-256; revisited, iii. 76, 77; narrow escape of Egg at, iii. 77. Chancery, Dickens's experience of a suit in, ii. 97-99; originals of the abuses exposed in _Bleak House_, iii. 49, 50. Channing (Dr.) on Dickens, i. 302, 308, 309. Chapman and Hall, overtures to Dickens by, i. 109; advise purchase of the _Sketches_ copyright from Mr. Macrone, i. 124; early relations of Dickens with, i. 144, 145; share of copyright in _Pickwick_ conceded by, i. 145; payments by, for _Pickwick_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 145; outline of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ submitted to, i. 192-197; purchase of _Barnaby Rudge_ by, i. 225; Dickens's earliest and latest publishers, iii. 240. Chapman (Mr. Thomas), not the original of Mr. Dombey, ii. 107 (and see 108). Chappell (Messrs.), agreements with, iii. 306, 309, 310; arrangement with, for course of final readings, iii. 437 note (and see 445); amount received from, on account of readings, iii. 446; Dickens's tribute to, iii. 531 note (and see 315). _Charles Dickens as a Reader_ (Charles Kent's), iii. 236 note. Chatham, Dickens's early impressions of, i. 23, 34; day-school in Rome-lane, i. 27 note; Mr. Giles's school at, i. 32, 33. Cheeryble (Brothers) in _Nickleby_, originals of, i. 181. Chester, readings at, iii. 268, 313. Chesterton (Mr.), i. 280, ii. 23. Chicago (U. S.), monomania respecting, iii. 418. Chigwell, inn at, i. 239. Children, powers of observation in, i. 23, 27; mortality of young, in London, iii. 192 note, 293; old, iii. 292. Children-farming, Dickens on, iii. 287, 288 note. _Child's History_, the, finished, iii. 59. Child's night-lights, wonders of, iii. 172. Chillon, Castle of, ii. 229, 257, 258. _Chimes_, a title found for the, ii. 143; design for, ii. 144; Dickens hard at work on, ii. 150; first outline of the, ii. 152-155; effect of, on Dickens's health, ii. 156, 157; objections to, ii. 160; finished, ii. 161; private readings of, at Lincoln's-inn fields, ii. 162, 174, 175; Jeffrey's opinion of the, ii. 179. Chimneys, the smoky, i. 221. Chinese Junk, ii. 405-408. Chorley (Henry), iii. 256. Christmas, Dickens's identity with, ii. 90. Christmas-eve and day, Dickens's accustomed walk on, iii. 517. _Christmas Carol_, origin of, ii. 60; preparation of, ii. 71, 72; sale and accounts of, ii. 85-87; Jeffrey and Thackeray on, ii. 89; message of the, ii. 89; the story characterized, ii. 91; dramatized at the Adelphi, ii. 96; reading of, for the Hospital for Sick Children, iii. 200; reading of, in Boston (U. S.), iii. 429, 430; Thackeray's copy of, purchased by her Majesty, iii. 506 note. _Christmas Sketches_, Dickens's, iii. 370, 371. Christmas sports, ii. 47 note. Cicala, the, ii. 118. Cincinnati (U. S.), i. 378; described, i. 379, 380; temperance festival at, i. 383; bores at, i. 385. Circumlocution Office, the, iii. 159. Clay (Henry), i. 348, 349; on international copyright, i. 323. Clennam (Mrs.), in _Little Dorrit_, original of, iii. 277. Cleveland (U. S.), rude reception of mayor of, i. 403. Coachman, a Paris, ii. 332 note. Cobham-park, i. 224, 288; Dickens's last walk in, iii. 540. Cockburn (Sir Alexander), iii. 126. Coffee-shops frequented by Dickens, i. 56. Cogswell (Mr.), ii. 476, 477. Coincidence, marvels of, iii. 174, 175, 524. Col de Balme Pass, ii. 253. Colden (David), i. 315, 316, ii. 192 note, 476. Colenso (Bishop) and the Bishop of Carlisle, iii. 248 note. Coleridge (Sara) on Little Nell, iii. 345 note; on _Chuzzlewit_, iii. 345 note. Collier (Payne) and Dickens in Hungerford Market, iii. 512 note. Collins (Charles Alston), marriage of, to Kate Dickens, iii. 255; books by, iii. 257; on Dickens's accompaniments of work, iii. 211 note; cover designed by, for _Edwin Drood_, iii. 466; death of, iii. 258. Collins (Wilkie), Dickens's regard for, ii. 402; holiday trip of, with Dickens and Egg, iii. 76-95; at Boulogne, iii. 106; in Paris, iii. 126; in Cumberland, iii. 170-173; accident to, on Carrick Fell, iii. 171; tales by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245; at his brother's wedding, iii. 256. Colquhoun (Mr.), i. 258. Columbus (U. S.), levee at, i. 398. Commercial Travellers' schools, admired by Dickens, iii. 247. Commons, House of, Dickens's opinion of, i. 103, iii. 499. Conjuror, a French, iii. 110-115. Consumption, hops a supposed cure for, iii. 208. Conversion, a wonderful, ii. 180 note. Cooke, Mr. (of Astley's), iii. 164, 165. Cooling Castle, ruins of, iii. 206, 220. Cooling churchyard, Dickens's partiality for, iii. 221. Copyright, international, Dickens's views on, i. 311, 318, 322, 332, 349, 360, ii. 50; Henry Clay on, i. 323; petition to American Congress on, i. 328, 351; Carlyle on, i. 332-334; two obstacles to, i. 408, 409 (and see ii. 26); result of agitation, i. 322. Corduroy-road, a, i. 398, 399. Cornwall (Barry), ii. 187, iii. 27 (and see 495, 530). Cornwall, Dickens's trip to, ii. 40-43. Costello (Dudley), fancy sketch of, ii. 383. Coutts, Miss (Baroness Burdett-Coutts), great regard for, ii. 58; true friendship of, ii. 323; generosity of, ii. 109 note, 488, iii. 300 (and see ii. 179). Covent-garden theatre, Macready at, i. 140, 185; farce written by Dickens for, i. 183; dinner at the close of Mr. Macready's management, i. 185; the editor of the _Satirist_ hissed from stage of, ii. 50; Dickens applies for an engagement at, ii. 206. Coventry, gold repeater presented to Dickens by watchmakers of, iii. 237 (and see 562). Crawford (Sir George), ii. 172. _Cricket on the Hearth_, origin of the, ii. 201-204; Dickens busy on, ii. 215; reading of, in Ary Scheffer's studio, iii. 148. Crimean war, unpopular in France, iii. 110, 127, 143. Cruikshank (George), illustrations by, to _Sketches_, i. 113; claim by, to the origination of _Oliver Twist_, i. 154-156, ii. 347, 348, 350, 351 note (and see autograph letter of Dickens, ii. 349, 350, and p. vii. of vol. ii.); fancy sketch of, ii. 379, 381; Dickens's opinion of his _Bottle_ and _Drunkard's Children_, ii. 384, 410, 411. _Cruize on Wheels_ (Charles Collins's), iii, 257. Cumberland, Dickens's trip in, iii. 170-173. Cunningham, Peter, character and life, iii. 73, 74. Curry (Mr.), ii. 125, 158, 172. Custom-house-officers (continental), ii. 172, 173, 315. _Daily News_ projected, ii. 203; misgiving as to, ii. 215-217; first number of, ii. 218; Dickens's short editorship, ii. 215-219; succeeded by author of this book, ii. 220, 302, 303. Dana (R. H.), i. 304. Danson (Dr. Henry), recollections by, of Dickens at school, i. 81-85; letter from Dickens to, i. 85 note. Dansons (the), at work, iii. 166. _David Copperfield_, identity of Dickens with hero of, i. 50-69; iii. 33-36; characters and incidents in, iii. 21-40; original of Dora in, i. 93; name found for, ii. 422; dinners in celebration of, ii. 438, 439, 470; sale of, ii. 447; titles proposed for, ii. 463-465; progress of, ii. 483-487; Lord Lytton on, iii. 21; popularity of, iii. 22; original of Miss Moucher in, iii. 23; original of Mr. Micawber in, iii. 30-32; _Bleak House_ inferior to, iii. 32; a proposed opening of, iii. 155; fac-simile of plan prepared for first number of, iii. 157. De Foe (Daniel), Dickens's opinion of, iii. 135 note; his _History of the Devil_, i. 139. Delane (John), ii. 469. Denman (Lord), ii. 108. Devonshire (Duke of) and the Guild of Literature and Art, ii. 397. Devonshire-terrace, Dickens removes from Doughty-street into, i. 186; Maclise's sketch of Dickens's house in, iii. 41. Dick, a favourite canary, iii. 117. Dickens (John), family of, i. 22; small but good library of, i. 29; money embarrassments of, i. 36, 42; character of, described by his son, i. 37; arrested for debt, i. 43; legacy to, i. 64; leaves the Marshalsea, i. 66; on the education of his son, i. 89; becomes a reporter, i. 90; Devonshire home of, described, i. 186-189; death of, ii. 489; his grave at Highgate, ii. 490; sayings of, iii. 31, 32; respect entertained by his son for, iii. 31. Dickens (Fanny), ii. 206, 456, 459; elected a pupil to the Royal Academy of Music, i. 39; obtains a prize thereat, i. 66; illness of, ii. 319, 320; death of, ii. 460; her funeral, i. 67. Dickens (Alfred), i. 223, 288; death of, iii. 258. Dickens, Augustus, (died in America), ii. 385. Dickens (Frederick), i. 182, 261, 288 (and see ii. 476); narrow escape from drowning in the bay at Genoa, ii. 137; death of, iii. 450. DICKENS, CHARLES, birth of, at Portsea, i. 21. reminiscences of childhood at Chatham, i. 23-36. relation of David Copperfield to, i. 28, 48, 92; iii. 33-35. his wish that his biography should be written by the author of this book, i. 40 note. first efforts at description, i. 42. account by himself of his boyhood, i. 50-69 (and see ii. 205-207; iii. 247). illnesses of, i. 60, 130, 244, 288; ii. 216, 297, 312 note; iii. 304, 305, 306, 311, 312, 313, 315, 321, 355, 375, 404, 410, 412, 416, 426, 427, 437, 441, 450. clerk in an attorney's office, i. 87. hopeless love of, i. 92, 93. employed as a parliamentary reporter, i. 96 (and see iii. 512 note). his first attempts in literature, i. 97. his marriage, i. 108. writes for the stage, i. 116 (and see 140, 183). predominant impression of his life, i. 120, 405; ii. 147-150; iii. 524, 525. personal habits of, i. 132, 133, 224, 368, 376, 377, 400; ii. 216, 225, 324; iii. 215-218, 513. relations of, with his illustrators, i. 154-156; ii. 347, 348. portraits of, i. 178 note; iii. 148-150, 238. curious epithets given by, to his children, i. 182 note; ii. 248 note, 266 note, 314, 315, 324 note; iii. 100 (and see i. 261, 306, 331, 356, 418). his ravens, i. 233-239; ii. 215. adventures in the Highlands, i. 263-276. first visit to the United States, i. 284. domestic griefs of, i. 289. an old malady of, i. 288; iii. 314, 534. an admirable stage manager, i. 414-417; ii. 210, 212-214, 370, 371, 393 note, 400, 401. his dogs, ii. 24, 25, 134 note; iii. 144 note, 217-220, 222. his Will, ii. 59, 60 (and see iii. 561). his accompaniments of work, ii. 48, 121, 240; iii. 211, 212 note. religious views of, ii. 59, 60, 147-150; iii. 484-486. turning-point of his career, ii. 72. writing in the _Chronicle_, ii. 105. fancy sketch of his biographer, ii. 383. sea-side holidays of, ii. 403-441; iii. 96-120. Italian travels, ii. 111-200; iii. 78-95. craving for crowded streets, ii. 144, 151, 277, 281, 313. political opinions of, ii. 146; iii. 498-503 (and see 528). wish to become an actor, ii. 205. his long walks, ii. 158, 230 note, 312 note; iii. 249, 515-517. first desire to become a public reader, ii. 174, 284; iii. 60, 61. edits the _Daily News_, ii. 218. his home in Switzerland, ii. 225, 226. residence in Paris, ii. 316-336, iii. 121-153. underwriting numbers, ii. 335 note, 362; iii. 377, 466. overwriting numbers, ii. 342, 343, 356. first public readings, iii. 60. revisits Switzerland and Italy, iii. 76-95. his birds, iii. 117, 118. home disappointments, iii. 177-201 (and see 512). separation from his wife, iii. 200. purchases Gadshill-place, iii. 205. first paid Readings, iii. 223-238. second series of Readings, iii. 255-274. third series of Readings, iii. 298-324. revisits America, iii. 387-443. memoranda for stories first jotted down by, iii. 180 (and see 275-297). his "violated letter," iii. 201, 231. favourite walks of, iii. 209, 220-222. his mother's death, iii. 300. his first attack of lameness, iii. 304 (and see 312, 321, 376, 437, 442 note, 453, 455, 456, 509, 514, 530, 537). general review of his literary labours, iii. 325-386, 380-386. effect of his death in America, iii. 384. last readings of, iii. 444-460. noticeable changes in, iii. 447, 455, 534. comparison of his early and his late MSS., iii. 466, 468, 469. personal characteristics of, iii. 478-526. his interview with the Queen, iii. 507, 508. strain and excitement at the final readings at St. James's Hall, iii. 532. last days at Gadshill, iii. 539, 543. a tribute of gratitude to, for his books, iii. 538, 539. general mourning for, iii. 542. burial in Westminster Abbey, iii. 544. unbidden mourners at grave, iii. 544. Dickens (Mrs.), i. 108, 135, 252, 264, 273, 287, 290, 294, 299, 304, 313, 318, 336, 344, 348, 349, 373, 375, 387, 397, 403, 404, 411, 413-415, ii. 140, 149, 163, 165, iii. 113; reluctance to leave England, i. 287; an admirable traveller, i. 397; Maclise's portrait of, ii. 44; the separation, iii. 200 (and see 562, 564.) Dickens (Charles, jun.), i. 257, 331, ii. 179; birth of, i. 119; illness of, ii. 335; education of, ii. 323, iii. 57 note; marriage of, iii. 262. Dickens (Mary), birth of, i. 149 (and see ii. 471, iii. 561). Dickens (Kate), birth of, i. 186 (and see ii. 470); illness of, ii. 122; marriage of, iii. 255. Dickens (Walter Landor), death of, i. 250 (and see iii. 300, 301). Dickens (Francis Jeffrey), birth of, ii. 61. Dickens (Alfred Tennyson), ii. 215. Dickens (Lieut. Sydney), death of, at sea, ii. 369 note. Dickens (Henry Fielding), birth of, ii. 462; acting of, iii. 63; scholarship at Cambridge won by, iii. 529 (and see iii. 562). Dickens (Edward Bulwer Lytton), birth of, iii. 54. Dickens (Dora Annie), birth of, ii. 487; death of, ii. 492; her grave at Highgate, ii. 493, iii. 52. _Dickens in Camp_ (Bret Harte's), i. 215, 216. Dilke (Charles Wentworth), i. 47, 48; death of, iii. 303 note. Dilke (Sir Charles), ii. 437. Disraeli (Mr.), iii. 537. Doctors, Dickens's distrust of, ii. 433. Doctors' Commons, Dickens reporting in, i. 92 (and see ii. 219, iii. 39). _Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions_, large sale of, ii. 87 note; Dickens's faith in, iii. 307; how written, iii. 379; success of the reading of, at New York, iii. 409, 410. Dogs, Dickens's, ii. 24, 25, 134 note, iii. 144 note, 217-220, 222; effect of his sudden lameness upon, iii. 518. Dolby (Miss), ii. 475. Dolby, Mr. (Dickens's manager) sent to America, iii. 320; troubles of, iii. 394, 400, 408, 411, 412; the most unpopular man in America, iii. 394; care and kindness of, iii. 441; commission received by, iii. 446. _Dombey and Son_, original of Mrs. Pipchin in, i. 55, ii. 355; begun at Rosemont, ii. 241; Dickens at work on, ii. 249, 250, 266, 297, 314; general idea for, ii. 250; hints to artist, ii. 250; a reading of first number of, ii. 283; large sale of, ii. 296, 353 (and see 447); a number under written, ii. 335 note; charwoman's opinion of, ii. 335, 336; plan of, ii. 337-341; progress of, ii. 341-367; artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey, ii. 345, 346; passage of original MS. omitted, ii. 343, 344 note; a reading of second number of, ii. 353 (and see 257, 281); Jeffrey on, ii. 358, 359 and note, 358; characters in, and supposed originals of, ii. 362-367 (and see 107); profits of, ii. 384; translated into Russian, ii. 448. Doncaster, the race-week at, iii. 174-176; a "groaning phantom" at, iii. 174. Dora, a real, i. 92, 93; changed to Flora in _Little Dorrit_, i. 94. D'Orsay (Count) and Roche the courier, ii. 204 note; death of, iii. 55. Doughty-street, Dickens removes to, i. 119; incident of, iii. 252. Dover, Dickens at, iii. 54, 55; reading at, iii. 264; storm at, iii. 264. Dowling (Vincent), i. 101. Dramatic College, Royal, Dickens's interest in the, iii. 236. Dream, a vision in a, ii. 148-150 (and see iii. 522-524); President Lincoln's, iii. 423. _Drunkard's Children_ (Cruikshank's), Dickens's opinion of, ii. 410, 411. Drury-lane theatre, opening of, ii. 30. Dublin, Dickens's first impressions of, iii. 225; humorous colloquies at Morrison's hotel in, iii. 227, 228; reading in, iii. 317 (and see 226 note, 228). Duelling in America, i. 396. Dumas (Alexandre), tragedy of _Kean_ by, ii. 127 (and see iii. 491 note); his _Christine_, ii. 176; a supper with, ii. 331. Dundee, reading at, iii. 233. Du Plessis (Marie), death of, ii. 333. Dyce (Alexander), ii. 473. EDEN in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, original of, i. 363, 369; a worse swamp than, ii. 77. Edinburgh, public dinner in, to Dickens, i. 249-262; presentation of freedom of, i. 257 (and see iii. 197); wassail-bowl presented after _Carol_ reading, iii. 197; readings at, iii. 233, 267, 451, and 450 note; Scott monument at, ii. 392. Editorial troubles and pleasures, iii. 493. Editors, American, incursion of, i. 300. Education, two kinds of, i. 89; Dickens's speeches on, ii. 95. _Edwin Drood_, clause inserted in agreement for, iii. 461 note; sale of, iii. 461 note; amount paid for, iii. 461 note; first fancy for, iii. 462; the story as planned in Dickens's mind, iii. 463, 464; Longfellow on, iii. 464; merits of, iii. 464, 465; facsimile of portion of final page of, iii. 466 (and see 468); an unpublished scene for, iii. 467-476; original of the opium-eater in, iii. 528; a reading of a number of, iii. 530. Egg (Augustus), fancy sketch of, ii. 383; holiday trip of, with Dickens and Wilkie Collins, iii. 76-95; narrow escape at Chamounix, iii. 77. Electric message, uses for an, iii. 282. Eliot (George), Dickens's opinion of her first book, ii. 47. Elliotson (Dr.), i. 270, ii. 109, 313. Elton (Mr.), Dickens's exertions for family of, ii. 55. Elwin (Rev. Whitwell), allusion to, ii. 462. Emerson (Ralph Waldo), ii. 476. Emigrants in Canada, ii. 28, 29. Emigration schemes, Dickens's belief in, ii. 262. Emmanuel (Victor), visit of, to Paris, iii. 127. Englishmen abroad, ii. 223, 252, 266-271. Engravings, Dickens on, ii. 167, 168 note. _Evening Chronicle_, sketches contributed by Dickens to, i. 105. _Evenings of a Working-man_ (John Overs'), ii. 109. _Every Man in his Humour_, private performances of, at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 209, 211 (and see iii. 537). _Examiner_, articles by Dickens in the, i. 185. Executions, public, letter against, ii. 479. Exeter, reading at, iii. 224. Eye-openers, iii. 409. FACSIMILES: of letter written in boyhood by Dickens, i. 79; of the autograph signature "Boz," i. 276; of New York invitations to Dickens, i. 308-309; of letter to George Cruikshank, ii. 349, 350; of plan prepared for first numbers of _Copperfield_ and _Little Dorrit_, iii. 157, 158; of portion of last page of _Edwin Drood_, iii. 468 (and see 488); of _Oliver Twist_, iii. 469. Fairbairn (Thomas), letter of Dickens to, on posthumous honours, iii. 487. _Fatal Zero_ (Percy Fitzgerald's), iii. 495. Faucit (Helen), ii. 475. Fechter (Mr.), châlet presented by, to Dickens, iii. 211, 212; Dickens's friendly relations with, iii. 302. Feline foes, iii. 117, 118. Felton (Cornelius C.), i. 304, 315, 320, ii. 192 note; death of, iii. 269 note. Fenianism in Ireland, iii. 316, 317 note; in America, iii. 397 (and see 508). Fermoy (Lord), iii. 522. Fêtes at Lausanne, ii. 246, 258. Fiction, realities of, iii. 346-363. Field (Kate), _Pen Photographs_ by, iii. 236 note. Fielding (Henry), real people in novels of, iii. 22; episodes introduced by, in his novels, iii. 161; Dr. Johnson's opinion of, iii. 346; M. Taine's opinion of, iii. 348. Fields (James T.), _Yesterdays with Authors_ by, ii. 42 note; on Dickens's health in America, iii. 404, 405; at Gadshill, iii. 527, 528. Fiesole, Landor's villa at, ii. 189 note. Fildes (S. L.), chosen to illustrate _Edwin Drood_, iii. 467. Finality, a type of, ii. 408. Finchley, cottage at, rented by Dickens, ii. 51. _Fine Old English Gentleman_, political squib by Dickens, i. 278, 279. Fireflies in Italy, ii. 196, and note. Fires in America, frequency of, iii. 399, 400. Fitzgerald (Percy), iii. 218; a contributor in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245; personal liking of Dickens for, iii. 495. "Fix," a useful word in America, i. 370. Flanders, Dickens's trip to, i. 135. Fletcher, (Angus), i. 254, 263, 274; stay of, with Dickens at Broadstairs, i. 228; anecdotes of, i. 262, 263, 264 note, 269 (and see ii. 113, 120, 144, 182, 193, 194 note); pencil sketch by, of the Villa Bagnerello at Albaro, ii. 121; death of, ii. 194 note. Flies, plague of, at Lausanne, ii. 244, 245 note. Fonblanque (Albany), i. 113, ii. 53, 162; wit of, ii. 175, 467, iii. 349. Footman, a meek, ii. 194. Fortescue (Miss), ii. 96. _Fortnightly Review_, Mr. Lewes's critical essay on Dickens in, iii. 332-338. Fowls, eccentric, iii. 251, 252. Fox (William Johnson), ii. 53. Fox-under-the-hill (Strand), reminiscence of, i. 62. Franklin (Lady), iii. 519. Fraser (Peter), ii. 475. Freemasons' Hall, banquet to Dickens at, iii. 324. Freemasons' secret, a, ii. 440. Free-trade, Lord "Gobden" and, ii. 312. French and Americans contrasted, ii. 322. Frescoes, perishing, ii. 119; at the Palazzo Peschiere, ii. 140 note, 141; Maclise's, for the Houses of Parliament, iii. 536 note. Friday, important incidents of Dickens's life connected with, ii. 441, iii. 205, 419, &c. Frith (W. P.), portrait of Dickens by, iii. 238. Funeral, scene at a, ii. 31-33; an English, in Italy, ii. 193. Furnival's inn, room in, where the first page of _Pickwick_ was written, iii, 528. GADSHILL PLACE, a vision of boyhood at, i. 24 (and see iii. 204); Dick's tomb at, iii. 117 note; first description of, iii. 202; sketch of porch at, iii. 204; purchase of, iii. 205; antecedents of, iii. 207; improvements and additions at, iii. 208-215; sketch of Châlet at, iii. 212; nightingales at, iii. 212; Dickens's daily life at, iii. 215-222; sketch of house and conservatory, iii. 216; Study at, iii. 222; games at, for the villagers, iii. 510, 511; Dickens's last days at, iii. 539-542. _Gambler's Life_, Lemaitre's acting in the, iii. 122-124. Gamp (Mrs.), original of, ii. 51; a masterpiece of English humour, ii. 83, 84; with the Strollers, ii. 376-384. Gaskell (Mrs.), ii. 454, 470, iii. 54. Gasman's compliment to Dickens, iii. 265 (and see 441). Gautier (Théophile), ii. 331. Geneva, Dickens at, ii. 288; revolution at, ii. 298-301; aristocracy of, ii. 299. Genoa described, ii. 125-128; theatres at, ii. 127, 128 (and see iii. 491 note); religious houses at, ii. 128; rooms in the Palazzo Peschiere hired by Dickens, ii. 129; view over, ii. 141; Governor's levee at, ii. 144; an English funeral at, ii. 193; nautical incident at, ii. 195; revisited by Dickens, iii. 78-80. _George Silverman's Explanation_, iii. 380 (and see 253 note). Gibson (Milner), ii. 468. _Gilbert Massenger_ (Holme Lee's) remarks of Dickens on, iii. 493, 494. Giles (William), i. 23; Dickens at the school kept by, i. 32, 33; snuff box presented to "Boz" by, i. 33. Gipsy tracks, iii. 250. Girardin (Emile de), iii. 142; banquets given by, in honour of Dickens, iii. 139-141. Girls, American, i. 384, 385 note; Irish, iii. 226 note; list of Christian names of, iii. 294, 295. Gladstone (Mr.), and Dickens, i. 103, iii. 537. Glasgow, proposed dinner to Dickens at, i. 276; reading at, iii. 234; Dickens at meeting of Athenæum, ii. 390. Glencoe, Pass of, i. 268, 271; effect of, on Dickens, i. 270. Goldfinch, the, and his friend, iii. 252. Gondoliers at Venice, habits of, iii. 90. Gordon (Lord George), character of, i. 241. Gordon (Sheriff), ii. 475. Gore-house, a party at, ii. 334 note. Gower-street-north, school in, opened by Dickens's mother, i. 43; a dreary home, i. 45, iii. 218; home broken up, i. 54. Graham (Sir James), ii. 109. Graham (Lady), ii. 468. Grant (James), recollections of Dickens by, i. 101 (and see 108). Graves, town, iii. 49, 52 note; Dickens's dislike to speech-making at, iii. 488. _Great Expectations_, original of Satis-house in, iii. 220; germ of, iii. 361; the story characterized, iii. 362-369; close of, changed at Bulwer Lytton's suggestion, iii. 369, and note. Great Malvern, cold-waterers at, ii. 487. Greek war-ship, a, iii. 82. Greeley (Horace), iii. 400, 442; on the effect in America of Dickens's death, iii. 384; on Dickens's fame as a novelist, iii. 388; a suggestion from, iii. 417. Grey (Lord), recollection of, ii. 264, 265. _Grimaldi, Life of_, edited by Dickens, i. 142; the editor's modest estimate of it, i. 142; criticisms on, i. 142, 143. Grip, Dickens's raven, i. 220; death of, i. 234, 235; apotheosis, by Maclise, i. 237; a second Grip, i. 239. Grisi (Madame), ii. 176. Guild of Literature and Art, origin of, ii. 395; princely help of the Duke of Devonshire to, ii. 397 (and see iii. 488, 489). HACHETTE (MM.), agreement with, for French translation of Dickens's works, iii. 125 note. Haghe (Louis), iii. 85. Haldimand (Mr.), seat of, at Lausanne, ii, 232. Halévy (M.), dinner to, ii. 469. Halifax, the "Britannia" aground off, i. 297; the house of assembly at, i. 299. Hall (Mr. and Mrs. S. C.), ii. 475. Hall (William), funeral of, ii. 369. Hallam (Henry), loquacity of, ii. 251. Halleck (Fitz-Greene) on Dickens, iii. 482 note. Halliday (Andrew), iii. 529. _Hamlet_, an emendation for, ii. 389; performance of, at Preston, iii. 70. Hampstead Heath, Dickens's partiality for, i. 133, ii. 101. Hampstead-road, Mr. Jones's school in the, i. 74. Hansard (Mr.), letter from, concerning Mr. Macrone, ii. 442, 443 note. Hardwick (John), ii. 468. _Hard Times_, proposed names for, iii. 65, and note; title chosen, iii. 65; written for _Household Words_, iii. 66; Ruskin's opinion of, iii. 66, 67. Harley (Mr.), ii. 475. Harness (Rev. Wm.), ii. 162, 175, 473. Harrogate, reading at, iii. 230. Harte (Bret), Dickens on, i. 214; tribute by, to Dickens, i. 215, 216. Hartford (U. S.) levee at, i. 313. Harvard and Oxford crews, the, iii. 527. Hastings, reading at, iii. 264. Hatton-garden, Dickens at, iii. 25. _Haunted Man_, first idea of, ii. 280; large sale of, ii. 443; dramatized, ii. 443; teachings and moral of the story, ii. 443-446; the christening dinner, ii. 468. Hawthorne (N.), Dickens on, ii. 440. Hayes (Catherine), ii. 468. Heaven, ambition to see into, ii. 477. Helps (Arthur), iii. 245; _In Memoriam_ by, iii. 509. Hereditary transmission, iii. 179 note (and see 493). Highgate, Dora's grave at, ii. 493, iii. 52. Highlands, Dickens's adventures in the, i. 263-276. Hogarth, Dickens on, ii. 413, 414. Hogarth (George), i. 105; Dickens marries eldest daughter of, i. 108. Hogarth (Georgina), ii. 120, iii. 540, 541, 561, 563; sketch taken from, ii. 48, iii. 287; Maclise's portrait of, ii. 48, 49. Hogarth (Mary), death of, i. 120; epitaph on tomb of, i. 120 note (and see ii. 458); Dickens's loving memory of, i. 120, 144, 289, 405, ii. 147-150, 458, iii. 525. _Holiday Romance and George Silverman's Explanation_, high price paid for, iii. 380 (and see 253 note, and 321). Holland (Lady), a remembrance of, ii. 194. Holland (Lord), ii. 190. Holland (Captain), the _Monthly Magazine_ conducted by, i. 104. Holyhead, a Fenian at, iii. 316 note. Hone of the _Every Day Book_, scene at funeral of, ii. 31-33 (but see iii. 568, 569). Honesty under a cloud, ii. 112. Hood (Thomas), ii. 190; his _Tylney Hall_, ii. 264. Hop-pickers, iii. 208. Horne (R. H.), ii. 475. Hospital for Sick Children, Dickens's exertions on behalf of, iii. 192-200; a small patient at, iii. 194; _Carol_ reading for, iii. 200. Hotels American, i. 304, iii. 390, 395, 412, 435; extortion at, i. 331, 344. Houghton (Lord), ii. 472, iii. 509, 538. _Household Words_ in contemplation, ii. 449-453; title selected for, ii. 454; names proposed for, ii. 453; first number of, ii. 454; early contributors to, ii. 454; Mrs. Gaskell's story in, iii. 54; unwise printed statement in, iii. 200; discontinued, iii. 239 (and see 37). Hudson (George), glimpse of, in exile, iii. 274. Hugo (Victor), an evening with, ii. 331, 332. Hulkes (Mr.), iii. 206 note, 256. Hull, reading at, iii. 232. Humour, Americans destitute of i. 401; a favourite bit of, ii. 102; the leading quality of Dickens, iii. 341, 342; Lord Lytton on the employment of, by novelists, iii. 350 note; Dickens's enjoyment of his own, iii. 350-352; the true province of, iii. 382. Hungerford-market, i. 50 (and see iii. 512 note). Hunt (Holman), iii. 257. Hunt (Leigh), saying of, i. 119; on _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 169; Civil-list pension given to, ii. 369; theatrical benefit for, ii. 369-373; result of performances, ii. 373; last glimpse of, iii. 26 note; letter of Dickens to, in self-defence, iii. 28; the original of Harold Skimpole in _Bleak House_, iii. 26-29; inauguration of bust of, at Kensal-green, iii. 487. _Hunted Down_, high price paid for, iii. 253; original of, iii. 279. IMAGINATIVE life, tenure of, iii. 187. Improprieties of speech, ii. 269. Incurable Hospital, patients in the, iii. 287. Inimitable, as applied to Dickens, origin of the term, i. 33. Inn, a log-house, i. 400. Innkeeper, a model, i. 365. Inns, American, Miss Martineau on, i. 344 (and see 366 note, 393, 395, 400, iii. 432); Highland, i. 265, 267, 275; Italian, ii. 158, 170, 171, 181. International boat-race dinner, Dickens at, iii. 527. Ireland, a timely word on, ii. 260. Irving (Washington), i. 287, 315, 330, 351, 352, 357 note; letter from Dickens to, i. 284; a bad public speaker, i. 320-322; at Literary Fund dinner in London, i. 321; at Richmond (U. S.), i. 351. Italians hard at work, ii. 197. Italy, art and pictures in, ii. 167-169, iii. 91, 92; private galleries in, ii. 168 note; cruelty to brutes in, ii. 187 note; wayside memorials in, ii. 188, 189 note; best season in, ii. 191; fire-flies in, ii. 195; Dickens's trip to, iii. 76-95; the noblest men of, in exile, iii. 93. JACK STRAW'S-CASTLE (Hampstead-heath), i. 133, 299, 346, ii. 101, 117. Jackson (Sir Richard), i. 413. Jeffrey (Lord), i. 260; praise of Little Nell by, i. 251; presides at Edinburgh dinner to Dickens, i. 252; on the _American Notes_, ii. 38; praise by, of the _Carol_, ii. 88; on the _Chimes_, ii. 179; his opinion of the _Battle of Life_, ii. 303, 304; forecaste of _Dombey_ by, ii. 358 note; on Paul's death, ii. 361 note; on the character of Edith in Dombey, ii. 362-364; James Sheridan Knowles and, ii. 392; touching letter from, ii. 428; death of, ii. 483. Jerrold (Douglas), ii. 136, 162, 175, 200; at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 209, 210; fancy sketch of, ii. 282, iii. 63 note; last meeting with Dickens, iii. 167; death of, iii. 168; proposed memorial tribute to, and result, iii. 168. Jesuits at Geneva, rising against the, ii. 297-301 (and see 179-180). Johnson (President), interview of Dickens with, iii. 423; impeachment of, iii. 429. Johnson (Reverdy), at Glasgow art-dinner, iii. 453 note. Jonson (Ben), an experience of, ii. 352. Jowett (Dr.), on Dickens, iii. 525, 526. KARR (ALPHONSE), ii. 331. Keeley (Mrs.), ii. 475; in _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 175, ii. 96. Kelly (Fanny), theatre of, in Dean-street, Soho, ii. 208-214; whims and fancies of, ii. 209. Kemble (Charles) and his daughters, ii. 473. Kemble (John), ii. 473. Kensal-green, Mary Hogarth's tomb at, i. 120 note, ii. 458 note. Kent (Charles), _Charles Dickens as a Reader_ by, iii. 235 note; letter to, iii. 541. _Kissing the Rod_ (Edmund Yates'), iii. 495. Knebworth, private performances at, ii. 396, 397; Dickens at, iii. 245, 246. Knight (Charles), ii. 475. Knowles (James Sheridan), bankruptcy of, ii. 392; civil-list pension granted to, ii. 393; performances in aid of, ii. 394, 395. LADIES, American, i. 327; eccentric, ii. 291-293. Laing (Mr.), of Hatton Garden, iii. 25. Lamartine (A., de), ii. 331, iii. 135. Lameness, strange remedy for, i. 22. Lamert (James), private theatricals got up by, i. 31; takes young Dickens to the theatre, i. 32; employs Dickens at the blacking-warehouse, i. 51; quarrel of John Dickens with, i. 68 (and see 228). _Lamplighter_, Dickens's farce of the, i. 183, ii. 207; turned into a tale for the benefit of Mrs. Macrone, i. 241. Landor (Walter Savage), Dickens's visit to, at Bath, i. 200; mystification of, i. 218; villa at Fiesole, ii. 189, 190 (and see 486 note); the original of Boythorn in _Bleak House_, iii. 26; a fancy respecting, iii. 451; Forster's _Life_ of, ii. 189 note, iii. 528. Landport (Portsea), birth of Dickens at, i. 21. Landseer (Charles), ii. 475. Landseer (Edwin), i. 181, ii. 162, 470, 475, iii. 63 note, 126; and Napoleon III., iii. 147 note (and see iii. 238). Land's-end, a sunset at, ii. 40. Lankester (Dr.), ii. 430. Lant-street, Borough, Dickens's lodgings in, i. 59; the landlord's family reproduced in the Garlands in _Old Curiosity Shop_, i. 60. Lausanne, Dickens's home at, ii. 225, 226; booksellers' shops at, ii. 227; the town described, ii. 227; view of Rosemont, ii. 229; girl drowned in lake at, ii. 232, 233; theatre at, ii. 233, 234 note; fêtes at, ii. 246, 247, 258, 259; marriage at, ii. 248; revolution at, ii. 259; prison at, ii. 234, 235; Blind Institution at, ii. 236-240, iii. 78; English colony at, ii. 242 note; plague of flies at, ii. 244, 245 note; earthquake at, ii. 283 note; feminine smoking party, ii. 292; the town revisited, iii. 77, 78. Lawes (Rev. T. B.), club established by, at Rothamsted, iii. 244. Layard (A. H.), iii. 83; at Gadshill, iii. 510, 523. Lazy Tour projected, iii. 170 (and see 351). Lazzaroni, what they really are, ii. 187. Leech (John) at Miss Kelly's theatre, ii. 210; grave mistake by, in _Battle of Life_ illustration, ii. 310, 311; fancy sketch of, ii. 381; Dickens's opinion of his _Rising Generation_, ii. 414-418; what he will be remembered for, ii. 417; accident to, at Bonchurch, ii. 435; at Boulogne, iii. 105; death of, iii. 303 (and see 375). Leeds, reading at, iii. 232. Leeds Mechanics' Society, Dickens at meeting of the, ii. 390, 391. _Legends and Lyrics_ (Adelaide Procter's), iii. 495 note. Legerdemain in perfection, iii. 112-114 (and see 111, 112 note). Leghorn, Dickens at, iii. 80, 81. Legislatures, local, i. 365. Lehmann (Frederic), iii. 218, 256. Leigh (Percival), ii. 210. Lemaitre (Frédéric), acting of, iii. 122-124 (and see 521). Lemon (Mark), ii. 210, 211, 263; fancy sketch of, ii. 382; acting with children, iii. 62; death of, iii. 538. Lemon (Mrs.), ii. 263. Leslie (Charles Robert), iii. 126. Letter-opening at the General Post-Office, ii. 108, 109. Levees in the United States, i. 313, 347, 365, 373, 386, 398; queer customers at, i. 373; what they are like, i. 398. Lever (Charles), tale by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245. Lewes (George Henry), Dickens's regard for, ii. 475; critical essay on Dickens, in the _Fortnightly Review_, noticed, iii. 333-339. Library, a gigantic, ii. 272, 273. _Life of Christ_, written by Dickens for his children, ii. 241 note. Life-preservers, i. 376. _Lighthouse_, Carlyle on Dickens's acting in the, iii. 72. Lincoln (President), curious story respecting, iii. 422, 423 (and see 508). Lincoln's-inn-fields, a reading of the _Chimes_ in, ii. 162, 174, 175. Linda, Dickens's dog, iii. 218, 219; burial-place of, iii. 222. Liston (Robert), ii. 475. Literary Fund dinner, i. 321 (and see iii. 488). Literature, too much "patronage" of, in England, iii. 488. Littérateur, a fellow, ii. 325. _Little Dorrit_, fac-simile of plan prepared for first number of, iii. 158; sale of, iii. 159; general design of, iii. 159; weak points in, iii. 160, 161; Von Moltke and, iii. 164; original of Mrs. Clennam in, iii. 277; notions for, iii. 278. Little Nell, Florence Dombey and, ii. 362; Sara Coleridge on, iii. 345 note. Liverpool, readings at, iii. 225, 268, 311, 313; Dickens's speech at Mechanics' Institution at, ii. 94, 95; Leigh Hunt's benefit at, ii. 372, 373; public dinner to Dickens, iii. 454, 500, 501. Loch-earn-head, postal service at, i. 269. Locock (Dr.), ii. 468. Lodi, Dickens at, ii. 166-173. Logan Stone, Stanfield's sketch of, ii. 42. London, pictures of, in Dickens's books, i. 171; readings in, iii. 223, 235, 258, 269. Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth), i. 304, 331, iii. 447; among London thieves and tramps, ii. 22 (and see 57); at Gadshill, iii. 216; on Dickens's death, iii. 384. Longman (Thomas), ii. 469. Louis Philippe, a glimpse of, ii. 320; dethronement of, ii. 403. Lovelace (Lord), ii. 468. Lowther, Mr. (chargé d'affaires at Naples), difficulty in finding house of, iii. 83-85. Lytton (Lord), ii. 188 (and see iii. 246); prologue written by, for Ben Jonson's play, ii. 372, 373 note; Dickens's admiration for, ii. 472, 488; his opinion of _Copperfield_, iii. 21, 22; _Strange Story_ contributed to _All the Year Round_, iii. 245; Dickens's reply to remonstrance from, iii. 341, 342; defence by, of humourists, iii. 350 note; suggestion as to close of _Great Expectations_, iii. 369; letter of Dickens to, from Cambridge (U. S.), iii. 402, 403. Lytton (Robert), iii. 127. MACKENZIE (Dr. SHELTON) and Cruikshank's illustrations to _Oliver Twist_, i. 155 note; rigmarole by, concerning Dickens and Her Majesty, iii. 503, 504 note. Maclise (Daniel), i. 261, ii. 160, 175, 200; portrait of Dickens by, i. 178 note; social charm of, i. 180, 181; his apotheosis of Grip, i. 237; his play-scene in _Hamlet_, i. 355; among London tramps, ii. 23; sketches in Cornwall by, ii. 42, 43; letter from, on the Cornwall trip, 42, 43; his "Girl at the Waterfall," ii, 43; paints Mrs. Dickens's portrait, ii. 44; pencil drawing of Charles Dickens, his wife, and her sister, ii. 49; Dickens's address to, ii. 116-119; sketch of the private reading in Lincoln's-inn-fields, ii. 174; house in Devonshire-terrace sketched by, iii. 41; death of, iii. 535; tribute of Dickens to, iii. 536. _Macmillan's Magazine_, paper in, on Dickens's amateur theatricals, iii. 63 note. Macrae (David), _Home and Abroad_ by, iii. 483 note. Macready (William Charles), i. 261, 287, 288, ii. 160, 177; at Covent-garden, i. 140; dinner to, on his retirement from management, i. 185; dinner to, prior to American visit, ii. 53, 54; an apprehended disservice to, ii. 54; in New Orleans, ii. 103; in Paris, ii. 176, 177, iii. 126; strange news for, ii. 207; anecdote of, ii. 372, 373 note; Dickens's affection for, ii. 467; farewell dinner to, ii. 488; at Sherborne, iii. 185; his opinion of the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes, iii. 451; misgiving of Dickens respecting, iii. 481, 529. Macready (Mrs.), death of, iii. 55. Macrone (Mr.), copyright of _Sketches by Boz_ sold to, i. 107; scheme to reissue _Sketches_, i. 122; exorbitant demand by, i. 124, ii. 442, 443 note; close of dealings with, i. 125; a friendly plea for, ii. 443 note. Magnetic experiments, i. 375, 376. Malleson (Mr.), iii. 256. Malthus philosophy, ii. 262. Managerial troubles, ii. 210, 370, 400-402. Manby (Charles), pleasing trait of, iii. 273. Manchester, Dickens's speech at opening of Athenæum, ii. 56 (and see iii. 237); Leigh Hunt's benefit at, ii. 372; Guild dinner at, ii. 401; readings at, iii. 231, 268, 307, 311, 314. Manchester (Bishop of) on Dickens's writings, iii. 383, 384 note. Manin (Daniel), iii. 126. Mannings, execution of the, ii. 479. _Manon Lescaut_, Auber's opera of, iii. 136. Mansion-house dinner to "literature and art," ii. 477; doubtful compliment at, ii. 478; suppressed letter of Dickens respecting, ii. 478. Marcet (Mrs.), ii. 231, 252. Margate theatre, burlesque of classic tragedy at, ii. 26 (and see ii. 387). Mario (Signor), ii. 176. Marryat (Captain) on the effect in America of the _Nickleby_ dedication, ii. 54; fondness of, for children, ii. 472 (and see ii. 268, iii. 567). Marshalsea prison, Dickens's first and last visits to the, i. 44, 45, iii. 162; an incident in, described by Dickens, i. 64-66 (and see iii. 163). Marston's (Mr. Westland) _Patrician's Daughter_, prologue to, ii. 45. Martineau (Harriet) on American inns, i. 344, 366 note. _Martin Chuzzlewit_, agreement for, i. 282 (and see ii. 24, 65); original of Eden in, i. 362, 370; fancy for opening of, ii. 24 (and see i. 282, 283); first year of, ii. 40-62; names first given to, ii. 44; Sydney Smith's opinion of first number of, ii. 45; origin of, ii. 45; original of Mrs. Gamp in, ii. 51; sale of, less than former books, ii. 63, 64 (and see 447); unlucky clause in agreement for, ii. 65; Dickens's own opinion of, ii. 69, 70; the story characterized, ii. 74-84; Thackeray's favourite scene in, ii. 79; intended motto for, ii. 81; M. Taine on, ii. 78; christening dinner, ii. 109; Sara Coleridge on, iii. 345 note. _Master Humphrey's Clock_, projected, i. 193-199; first sale of, i. 202; first number published, i. 222; original plan abandoned, i. 223; dinner in celebration of, i. 240; _Clock_ discontents, i. 281. Mazzini (Joseph), Dickens's interest in his school, ii. 474. Mediterranean, sunset on the, ii. 117. _Mémoires du Diable_, a pretty tag to, iii. 133, 134. Memoranda, extracts from Dickens's book of, iii. 275-297; available names in, iii. 293-296. Mendicity Society, the, ii. 106. Mesmerism, Dickens's interest in, i. 279, 280, 375, ii. 436. Micawber (Mr.), in _David Copperfield_, original of, iii. 30-32; comparison between Harold Skimpole and, iii. 32; Mr. G. H. Lewes on, iii. 338, 348; on corn, iii. 349. Middle Temple, Dickens entered at, i. 183, 186. _Midsummer Night's Dream_ at the Opera Comique, Boulogne, iii. 103. Milnes (Monckton), ii. 472. _Mirror of Parliament_, Dickens reporting for, i. 97. Mississippi, the, i. 386. Mitton (Thomas), i. 182, ii. 476. Moltke (Von) and _Little Dorrit_, iii. 164. _Money_ (Lord Lytton's), a performance of, at Doncaster, iii. 175 note. Mont Blanc, effect of, on Dickens, ii. 254. Montreal, private theatricals in, i. 414, 417; facsimile of play-bill at, i. 415. Moore (George), business qualities and benevolence, iii. 248. Moore (Thomas), i. 251, 321. Morgue at Paris, ii. 321; a tenant of the, ii. 327. _Morning Chronicle_, Dickens a reporter for the, i. 97; liberality of proprietors, i. 98; change of editorship of, ii. 53, 104; articles by Dickens in the, ii. 104, 105. Morris (Mowbray), ii. 468. Moulineaux, Villa des, iii. 97-105, 115-119. Mountain travelling, ii. 253. _Mr. Nightingale's Diary_, the Guild farce of, ii. 397, iii. 72. _Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings_, iii. 370. _Mugby Junction_, germ of, in Memoranda, iii. 290. Mule-travelling in Switzerland, ii. 253. Mulgrave (Lord), i. 297, 300, 305, 413, ii. 469. Mumbo Jumbo, ii. 440. Murray (Lord), i. 260, ii. 475. Music, effect of, on a deaf, dumb, and blind girl, ii. 239; vagrant, ii. 387, 438. NAMES, available, iii. 295, 296. Naples, burial place at, ii. 186 note; filth of, ii. 186 (and see iii. 95); Dickens at, iii. 83-85. Napoleon III. at Gore-house, ii. 334 note; at Boulogne, iii. 108; at Paris, iii. 108 note; Edwin Landseer and, iii. 147 note. Nautical incident at Genoa, ii. 195. Neaves (Mr.), i. 258. Negri (Marquis di), ii. 130-132. New Bedford (U.S.), reading at, iii. 437. Newcastle, readings at, iii. 264, 315; alarming scene at, iii. 265. Newhaven (U. S.), levee at, i. 313. _New Sentimental Journey_ (Collins's), iii. 257. Newspaper express, a, i. 101. Newspapers, American, iii. 400. Newsvendors' dinner, Dickens at, iii. 535. New-year's day in Paris, iii. 145. New York, fac-similes of invitations to Dickens, i. 308, 309; the Carlton hotel in, i. 315 (and see iii. 361); ball at, i. 316-318; life in, i. 324; hotel bills in, i. 331 (and see 345); public institutions ill-managed at, i. 339; prisons in, i. 339-344; capital punishment in, i. 342; sale of tickets for the readings, iii. 391, 392-394; first reading in, iii. 393; fire at the Westminster-hotel, iii. 395, 399; prodigious increase since Dickens's former visit, iii. 395; Niblo's theatre at, iii. 396; sleigh-driving at, iii. 397; police of, iii. 398 (and see i. 339); the Irish element in, iii. 413; farewell readings in, iii. 441; public dinner to Dickens at, iii. 442. _New York Herald_, i. 320, iii. 400. _New York Ledger_, high price paid for tale by Dickens in, iii. 253. _New York Tribune_, Dickens's "violated letter" in the, iii. 201, 231. Niagara Falls, effect of, on Dickens, i. 404, 405 (and see iii. 433). _Nicholas Nickleby_, agreement for, i. 145; first number of, i. 150, 165; sale of, i. 150; the _Saturday Review_ on, i. 166; characters in, i. 167-171; opinions of Sydney Smith and Leigh Hunt on, i. 168, 169; Dickens at work on, i. 172-176; dinner-celebration of, i. 177, 178; originals of the Brothers Cheeryble in, i. 181; proclamation on the eve of publication, ii. 99, 100 note; effect of, in establishing Dickens, iii. 344 (and see 386). Nicolson (Sir Frederick), ii. 194. Nightingales at Gadshill, iii. 212. _Nobody's Fault_, the title first chosen for _Little Dorrit_, iii. 155. No-Popery riots, description of the, i. 246. Normanby (Lord), ii. 108, 109, 320. Norton (Charles Eliot), iii. 215, 447. Norwich, reading at, iii. 262. _No Thoroughfare_, i. 140. Novels, real people in, iii. 22-33; episodes in, iii. 161. Novelists, old, design for cheap edition of, ii. 385. Nugent (Lord), ii. 473. "OCEAN SPECTRE," the, ii. 369 note. O'Connell (Daniel), ii. 135. Odéon (Paris), Dickens at the, iii. 128, 129. Ohio, on the, i. 377. _Old Curiosity Shop_, original of the Marchioness in, i. 59; originals of the Garland family, i. 60; original of the poet in Jarley's wax-work, i. 70; the story commenced, i. 200; disadvantages of weekly publication, i. 203; changes in proofs, i. 206; Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness, i. 207; effect of story upon the writer, i. 208; death of Little Nell, i. 210; close of the tale, i. 210; success of, i. 211; characterized, i. 212-214; a tribute by Bret Harte, i. 215, 216; characters in, iii. 345. _Old Monthly Magazine_, Dickens's first published piece in, i. 97; other sketches in, i. 104. _Oliver Twist_, commenced in _Bentley's Miscellany_, i. 121; characters in, real to Dickens, i. 125, 139; the story characterized, i. 146, 147, 158, 160; Dickens at work on, i. 149; the last chapter of, i. 153; the Cruikshank illustrations to, 154-157; reputation of, i. 156; reply to attacks against, i. 160-162; teaching of, i. 161; "adapted" for the stage, i. 174, 175; noticed in the _Quarterly Review_, i. 184; copyright of, repurchased, i. 224; original of Mr. Fang, iii. 25; character-drawing in, iii. 343; proposed reading from, iii. 448; facsimile of portion of MS. of, iii. 469. Opium-den, an, iii. 528 (and see 464 note). Osnaburgh-terrace, Dickens in, ii. 106. _Our Mutual Friend_, title chosen for, iii. 271; hints for, in Memoranda, iii. 280, 281; first notion for, iii. 371; original of Mr. Venus in, iii. 374; Marcus Stone chosen as illustrator, iii. 373; the story reviewed, iii. 377-379. Ouvry (Frederic), iii. 434, 539; clause inserted by, in agreement for _Edwin Drood_, iii. 461 note; humorous letter of Dickens to, iii. 522. Overs (John), Dickens's interest in, ii. 109; death of, ii. 109 note. Over-work, remains of, ii. 297. Owen (Prof.), ii. 477. PAINTINGS, Dickens on, ii. 167-169. _Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu, Paris, iii. 130, 131. Paris, Dickens's first day in, ii. 316; Sunday in, ii. 317; Dickens's house in, described, ii. 317-319; unhealthy political symptoms at, ii. 321, 334; the Morgue at, ii. 321; incident in streets of, ii. 321; hard frost at, ii. 324; Dickens's alarming neighbour, ii. 325; begging-letter writers in, ii. 327; sight-seeing at, ii. 330; theatres at, ii. 331; Bibliothèque Royale, ii. 333; the Praslin tragedy in, ii. 386; Dickens's life in, iii. 121-153; Dickens's house in, iii. 124; personal attentions to Dickens, iii. 124; theatres of, iii. 126-134; illumination of, iii. 144; New-year's day in, iii. 144, 145; results of imperial improvement in, iii. 145 note; Art Exposition at, iii. 146-148; a Duchess murdered in, iii. 150, 151. Parliament, old Houses of, inconvenience of the, i. 100. Parr (Harriet), iii. 494 note. Parry (John), ii. 475. Pawnbrokers, Dickens's early experience of, i. 46. Peel (Sir Robert) and his party, i. 277; Lord Ashley and, i. 283; the Whigs and, ii. 261. _Pen Photographs_ (Miss Field's) iii. 235 note. Perth, reading at, iii. 234. Peschiere, Palazzo (Genoa), rooms in the, hired by Dickens, ii. 129; a fellow-tenant in, ii. 129; described, ii. 139-142; view of the, ii. 141; revisited, iii. 79; dinner-party at, ii. 172; owner of the, iii. 79. Petersham, athletic sports at, i. 183. Phelps (Mr.), ii. 475. Philadelphia, Dickens at, i. 335-344; penitentiary at, i. 345-347; letters from, iii. 413-415 (and see ii. 38, 39). _Pickwick Papers_, materials for, i. 66; first number of, i. 108; origin of, i. 110; Seymour's illustrations to, i. 111 note; Thackeray's offer to illustrate, i. 115, 116; the debtor's prison in, i. 128, 129; popularity of, i. 129 (and see iii. 385, 386); reality of characters in, i. 130, 131; inferior to later books, i. 131; Mr. Pickwick an undying character, i. 131 (and see 112); piracies of, i. 137; completion of, i. 143; payments for, i. 145; a holy brother of St. Bernard and, ii. 276; characters in, iii. 343; where it was begun, iii. 528. _Pictures from Italy_, original of the courier in, ii. 171-173; publication commenced in the _Daily News_, ii. 219. _Pic Nic Papers_ published, i. 241. "Piljians Projiss," a new, ii. 376-384. Pig-market at Boulogne, iii. 104. Pipchin (Mrs.) in _Dombey_, original of, i. 55, ii. 355, 356; various names proposed for, ii. 355 note. Pirates, literary, ii. 97; proceedings in Chancery against, ii. 97-99; warning to, ii. 100 note. Pisa, a jaunt to, iii, 81. Pittsburg (U. S.), description of, i. 373; solitary prison at, i. 378. Poets, small, iii. 489. Pollock (Chief Baron) on the death of Dickens, iii. 247 note. Poole (John), aid rendered to, by Dickens, ii. 370; civil-list pension granted to, ii. 393. Poor, Dickens's sympathy with the, i. 167, 168 (and see 250), ii. 146, 147, 240. Popularity, distresses of, i. 324. Porte St. Martin (Paris), Dickens at the, iii. 129. Portland (U. S.) burnt and rebuilt, iii. 438. Portrait painter, story of a, iii. 523. Portsea, birth of Dickens at, i. 21. Prairie, an American, i. 393, 394; pronunciations of the word, i. 396. Praslin tragedy in Paris, ii. 386. Prayer, Dickens on personal, iii. 485. Preston, a strike at, iii. 69, 70; _Hamlet_ at, iii. 70. Primrose (Mr.), i. 258. Printers' Pension fund dinner, presided over by Dickens, ii. 55. Prisons, London, visits to, i. 280; American, i. 339-344, 345-347, 378; comparison of systems pursued in, ii. 234. Procter (Bryan Waller), iii. 27, 28; Dickens's affection for, ii. 467. Procter (Adelaide), Dickens's appreciation of poems by, iii. 495. Publishers, hasty compacts with, i. 121; Dickens's agreements with, ii. 88, iii. 56 (and see 240-243). Publishers, authors and, ii. 64, 72, iii. 489, 490. Puddings, a choice of, i. 55, 56. "_Punch_ people," Lord Brougham and the, ii. 469; at Mansion-house dinner, ii. 477. Q, Dickens's secretary in the United States, i. 303, 315, 322, 328, 344, 348, 366, 370, 374, 375, 393, 397, 400, 411; described, i. 410-412 (and see iii. 389 note). _Quarterly Review_, prophecy in not fulfilled, i. 139 note; notice of _Oliver Twist_ in, i. 184; on Cruikshank and Leech, ii. 418. Queen (Her Majesty the) and Auber, iii. 134, 135; alleged offers to Dickens, iii. 503, and 503, 504 note; desire of, to see Dickens act, iii. 506; Thackeray's copy of the _Carol_ purchased by, iii. 506, 507 note; Dickens's interview with, iii. 507, 508; grief at Dickens's death, iii. 542. RACHEL (Madame), caprice of, iii. 137. Ragged schools, Dickens's interest in, ii. 57; results of, ii. 57 note (and see ii. 494); proposed paper on, by Dickens, declined by _Edinburgh Review_, ii. 58. Railroads, American, ladies' cars on, i. 338. Railway travelling, effect on Dickens, iii. 450; in America, i. 336-338, 368, iii. 398, 405, 435, 436. Ramsay (Dean) on _Bleak House_ and Jo, iii. 47, 48. Ramsgate, entertainments at, ii. 214 note. Raven, death of Dickens's first, i. 235-239; of second, ii. 215. Raymond (George), ii. 476. Reade (Charles), _Hard Cash_ contributed by, to _All the Year Round_, iii. 245. Readings, gratuitous, iii. 61 note; private, in Scheffer's atelier, iii. 148; in Lincoln's-inn-fields, ii. 162, 174, 175. public, Dickens's first thoughts of, ii. 174, 284, iii. 60; argument against paid, iii. 61, 189; idea of, revived, iii. 189; opinions as to, asked and given, iii. 189, 190 note; disadvantages of, iii. 191; proposal from Mr. Beale respecting, iii. 196; first rough notes as to, iii. 198, 199 note; various managers employed by Dickens, iii. 223; hard work involved by, iii. 224, 445; study given to, iii. 318. first series of, iii. 223-238; sale of books of, iii. 232 note; subjects of, iii. 235. second series of, iii. 255-274; what it comprised, iii. 259; new subjects for, iii. 260. third series of, iii. 298-324; Messrs. Chappell's connection with, iii. 306-310. American, iii. 388-443; result of, iii. 415, 441. Readings given by Dickens: Australian, contemplated, iii. 270 note (but see 272); Bulwer's opinion of, iii. 271 note. last series of, iii. 444-460 (and see 437 note). Readings (alphabetical list of): Aberdeen, iii. 234. Albany (U. S.), iii. 435; receipts at, iii. 441. Baltimore (U. S.), iii. 418, 419, 427; receipts at, iii. 441. Belfast, iii. 229. Berwick-on-Tweed, iii. 266. Birmingham, iii. 311. Boston (U. S.), iii. 391, 403, 440; receipts at, iii. 441. Brighton, iii. 263. Brooklyn (New York), iii. 416; receipts at, iii. 442. Buffalo (U. S.), iii. 431; receipts at, iii. 441. Cambridge, iii. 317. Canterbury, iii. 264. Chester, iii. 268, 313. Dover, iii. 264. Dublin, iii. 220-228, 317. Dundee, iii. 233. Edinburgh, iii. 233, 267, 451, and 450 note. Exeter, iii. 224, 268. Glasgow, iii. 234. Harrogate, iii. 230. Hartford (U. S.), iii. 441. Liverpool, iii. 225, 268, 311, 313, 314. London, iii. 223, 234, 258, 269. Manchester, iii. 232, 268, 308, 311, 314. New Bedford (U. S.), iii. 437; receipts at, iii. 441. Newcastle, iii. 265, 315. Newhaven (U. S.), iii. 428; receipts at, iii. 441. New York, iii. 393, 410, 441; receipts at, iii. 441. Norwich, iii. 262. Paris, iii. 272. Perth, iii. 234. Philadelphia (U. S.), iii. 414, 418, 427; receipts at, iii. 441. Portland (U. S.), iii. 438; receipts at, iii. 441. Providence (U. S.), iii. 428; receipts at, iii. 441. Rochester (U. S.), iii. 431; receipts at, iii. 441. Springfield (U. S.), iii. 441. Syracuse (U. S.), iii. 431; receipts at, iii. 441. Torquay, iii. 268, 451. Washington (U. S.), iii. 421, 425, 426; receipts at, iii. 441. Worcester (U. S.), iii. 441. York, iii. 231, 454. Reeves (Sims), ii, 475. Reformers, administrative, iii. 70, 71 note. Regiments in the streets of Paris, iii. 143 note. Regnier (M.) of the Français, ii. 330, 429, iii. 127, 137. Rehearsals, troubles at, ii. 371. Religion, what is the true, ii. 149. Reporters' gallery, Dickens enters the, i. 96; ceases connection with, i. 116. Reporter's life, Dickens's own experience of a, i. 99-101 (and see ii. 265). Revolution at Geneva, ii. 298-301; traces left by, ii. 300; abettors of, ii. 301. Rhine, Dickens on the, ii. 222, 223; travelling Englishmen on the, ii. 223. _Richard Doubledick, story of_, iii. 154. Richardson (Sir John), iii. 519. Richardson's show, a religious, iii. 273. Richmond (U. S.), levees at, i. 354. Rifle-shooting, Lord Vernon's passion for, ii. 270; at Lausanne, ii. 247, 298, 299. _Rising Generation_ (Leech's), Dickens on, ii. 414-418. Ristori (Mad.) in _Medea_, iii. 137. Roberts (David), iii. 85. Robertson (Peter), i. 259, ii. 135, 475; sketch of, i. 253, 254. Robertson (T. W.), iii. 530, 531. _Robinson Crusoe_, Dickens's opinion of, iii. 135 note (and see i. 264 note). Roche (Louis), employed by Dickens as his courier in Italy, ii. 106; resources of, ii. 172, 196, 199 (and see 111, 325); Count d'Orsay and, ii. 204 note; illness of, ii. 421; death of, ii. 255 note. Rochester, early impressions of, i. 28 (and see iii. 213); Watts's Charity at, iii. 154 note. Rochester Castle, adventure at, ii. 22. Rochester Cathedral, brass tablet in, to Dickens's memory, iii. 154 note. Rochester (U. S.), alarming incident at, iii. 431. Rockingham-castle, Dickens's visit to, ii. 481-483; private theatricals at, ii. 481, iii. 83. Rocky Mountain Sneezer, a, iii. 409. Rogers (Samuel), i. 251, ii. 190; sudden illness of, ii. 466 (and see 486 note). Rome, Dickens's first impressions of, ii. 185; Dickens at, iii. 85-89; a "scattering" party at Opera at, iii. 86, 87; marionetti at, iii. 87, 88; malaria at, iii. 88, 89. Rosemont (Lausanne), taken by Dickens, ii. 225; view of, ii. 229; Dickens's neighbours at, ii. 231, 242 note, 252; _Dombey_ begun at, ii. 241; the landlord of, ii. 246 note. Rothamsted, Rev. Mr. Lawes's club at, iii. 244. Royal Academy dinner, Dickens's last public words spoken at, iii. 537. Roylance (Mrs.), the original of Mrs. Pipchin in _Dombey_, i. 55, ii. 355. Ruskin (Mr.) on _Hard Times_, iii. 66, 67. Russell (Lord J.), a friend of letters, ii. 369, 393; on Dickens's letters, iii. 481; dinner with, ii. 483; Dickens's tribute to, iii. 501, and note. Ryland (Arthur), letter of Dickens to, iii. 56 note. SALA (G. A.), Dickens's opinion of, ii. 454 note; tribute by, to Dickens's memory, iii. 516. Salisbury Plain, superiority of, to an American prairie, i. 394; a ride over, ii. 461. Sand (Georges), iii. 138, 139. Sandusky (U. S.), discomforts of inn at, i. 400. Sardinians, Dickens's liking for, iii. 92. _Satirist_, editor of, hissed from the Covent-garden stage, ii. 50. _Saturday Review_ on the realities of Dickens's characters, i. 166. Scene-painting, iii. 166. Scheffer (Ary), portrait of Dickens by, iii. 148, 149; reading of _Cricket on the Hearth_ in atelier of, iii. 149. Scheffer (Henri), iii. 150. Schools, public, Dickens on, iii. 236. Scotland, readings in, iii. 232-235. Scott (Sir W.), real people in novels of, iii. 22, 29. Scott monument at Edinburgh, ii. 392. Scribe (M.), dinner to, ii. 469; social intercourse of Dickens with, iii. 134, 135; author-anxieties of, iii. 136; a fine actor lost in, iii. 138. Scribe (Madame), iii. 136. Sea-bathing and authorship, ii. 28. Seaside holidays, Dickens's, ii. 403-441, iii. 97-120. Sebastopol, reception in France of supposed fall of, iii. 110. Serenades at Hartford and Newhaven (U. S.), i. 314. Servants, Swiss, excellence of, ii. 246. Seven Dials, ballad literature of, i. 230. Seymour (Mr.) and the _Pickwick Papers_, i. 111 note; death of, i. 115. Shaftesbury (Lord) and ragged schools, i. 283, ii. 57, 58 note, 493, 494 (and see 494). Shakespeare Society, the, i. 185. Shakespeare on the actor's calling, iii. 191. Shakespeare's house, purchase of, ii. 392. Sheffield, reading at, iii. 232. Sheil (Richard Lalor), ii. 53. Shepherd's-bush, the home for fallen women at, ii. 488. Sheridans (the), ii. 468. Ship news, i. 296. Short-hand, difficulties of, i. 91. Shows, Saturday-night, i. 61. Siddons (Mrs.), genius of, ii. 473, 474. Sierra Nevada, strange encounter on the, iii. 385, 386. _Sikes and Nancy_ reading, proposed, iii. 448; at Clifton, iii. 451; Macready on the, iii. 451; at York, iii. 454, and note; Dickens's pulse after, iii. 532. Simplon, passing the, ii. 174. "Six," Bachelor, iii. 124. _Sketches by Boz_, first collected and published, i. 113; characterized, i. 114. Slavery in America, i. 327, 352-354, 388-390; the ghost of, iii. 419. Slaves, runaway, i. 389. Sleeplessness, Dickens's remedy for, iii. 249. Sleighs in New York, iii. 397. "Slopping round," iii. 432. "Smallness of the world," i. 372, ii. 222, iii. 204. Small-pox, American story concerning, iii. 305 note. Smith (Albert), _Battle of Life_ dramatized by, ii. 323. Smith (Arthur), iii. 168; first series of Dickens's readings under management of, iii. 199, 200 (and see 263 note); distresses of, iii. 225 note; first portion of second series planned by, iii. 258; serious illness of, iii. 260, 261; death of, iii. 261; touching incident at funeral, iii. 261 note. Smith (Bobus), ii. 190. Smith (O.), acting of, i. 174, ii. 96. Smith (Porter), ii. 476. Smith (Southwood), ii. 53, 108. Smith (Sydney), i. 311, ii. 108; on _Nicholas Nickleby_, i. 168, 176 note; death of, ii. 190. Smithson (Mr.), i. 182; death of, ii. 93. Smoking party, a feminine, ii. 292, 293. Smollett (Tobias), a recollection of, i. 128; real people in novels of, iii. 22. Snuff-shop readings, ii. 336. Solitary confinement, effects of, i. 345, 346, ii. 234, 235. _Somebody's Luggage_, the Waiter in, iii. 351, 370. Sortes Shandyanæ, ii. 242. Sparks (Jared), i. 304. Speculators, American, iii. 391, 393, 408, 409, 411, 428. Spiritual tyranny, ii. 231 note. Spittoons in America, i. 338. _Squib Annual_, the, i. 109, 110. St. Bernard, Great, proposed trip to, ii. 271; ascent of the mountain, ii. 274; the convent, ii. 274; scene at the top, ii. 274, 275; bodies found in the snow, ii. 275; the convent a tavern in all but sign, ii. 276; Dickens's fancy of writing a book about the, iii. 184. St. George (Madame), ii. 176. St. Giles's, Dickens's early attraction of repulsion to, i. 39; original of Mr. Venus found in, iii. 374. St. Gothard, dangers of the, ii. 198, 199. St. James's Hall, Dickens's final readings at, iii. 532, 533. St. Leger, Dickens's prophecy at the, iii. 175. St. Louis (U. S.), levee at, i. 386; slavery at, i. 388; pretty scene at, i. 390, 392; duelling in, i. 396. Stage-coach, queer American, i. 363, 364. Stage, training for the, ii. 213, 214, (and see iii. 191). Stanfield (Clarkson), i. 181, ii. 47 note, 160, 162, 175, iii. 521; sketches in Cornwall by, ii. 42; illustrations by, to _Battle of Life_, ii. 310; price realized at the Dickens sale for the Lighthouse scenes, iii. 71 note (and see ii. 296, iii. 164, 243); at work, iii. 166; death of, iii. 320. Stanfield Hall, Dickens at, ii. 462 Stanley (Dr. A. P.), Dean of Westminster, compliance with general wish, iii. 543; letter and sermon iii. 544. Stanton (Secretary), curious story told by, iii. 422, 423 (and see 508). Staplehurst accident, iii. 304; effect on Dickens, iii. 376. Staples (J. V.), letter from Dickens to, ii. 90 note. Statesmen, leading American, i. 349, 350. State Trials, story from the, iii. 283, 284. Stealing, Carlyle's argument against, i. 333. Steamers, perils of, i. 293, 305, 326, 331 (and see iii. 80-83). Stevenage, visit to the hermit near, iii. 246. Stirling (Mr.), a theatrical adapter, i. 174. Stone (Frank), ii. 385. iii. 105; sketch of Sydney Dickens by, ii. 368, 369 note; fancy sketch of, ii. 383; death of, iii. 256 note. Stone (Marcus), designs supplied by, to _Our Mutual Friend_, iii. 373 note. Streets, Dickens's craving for crowded, ii. 144, 151, 277, 281, 282, 283, 287, iii. 515. _Strange Gentleman_, a farce written by Dickens, i. 116. Stuart (Lord Dudley), ii. 472. Sue (Eugène), ii. 331. Sumner (Charles), i. 305, iii. 421, 426. Sunday, a French, ii. 317, 485 note. Swinburne (Algernon), ii. 428. Switzerland; splendid scenery of, ii. 198; villages in, ii. 199; Dickens resolves to write new book in, ii. 220; early impressions of, ii. 226, 227; climate of, ii. 244 note; the people of, ii. 245, 246, 259; mule-travelling in, ii. 253; Protestant and Catholic cantons in, ii. 260; Dickens's last days in, ii. 311-315; pleasures of autumn in, ii. 313; revisited, iii. 76-95. Syme (Mr.), opinion of, as to Dickens's lameness, iii. 453, 454. Syracuse (U. S.), reading at, iii. 431. TAGART (EDWARD), ii. 59, 470. Taine (M.), on _Martin Chuzzlewit_, ii. 78; criticisms by, on Dickens, ii. 102 (and see 251 note, iii. 326-331); a hint for, ii. 419; on Hard Times, iii. 67 note; Fielding criticized by, iii. 348. _Tale of Two Cities_, titles suggested for, iii. 279; first germ of Carton in, iii. 280 (and see 360); origin of, iii. 354; the story reviewed, iii. 354-360; titles suggested for, iii. 354, 355. Talfourd (Judge), i. 180, ii. 97, 98, 293, 294, 427, 470 (and see iii. 509); Dickens's affection for, ii. 427. _Tatler_ (Hunt's), sayings from, iii. 26 note. Tauchnitz (Baron), letter from, iii. 57 note; intercourse of, with Dickens, iii. 462 note (and see 125 note). Tavistock-house, sketch of, iii. 54; a scene outside, iii. 165; Stanfield scenes at, iii. 243; sale of, iii. 257; startling message from servant at, iii. 276. Taylor (Tom), ii. 472. Taylor (the Ladies), ii. 271. Telbin (William), at work, iii. 166. Temperance agitation, Dickens on the, ii. 409, 410. Temperature, sudden changes of, in America, i. 347. Temple (Hon. Mr.), ii. 190. Tennent (Sir Emerson), ii. 476, iii. 80; death and funeral of, iii. 454. Tennyson (Alfred), Dickens's allegiance to, ii. 25, 136, 472, iii. 357 note. Ternan (Ellen Lawless), iii. 561. Tête Noire Pass, ii. 255; accident in, ii. 256, 257. Thackeray (W. M.), ii. 188; offers to illustrate _Pickwick_, i. 115, 116; on Maclise's portrait of Dickens, i. 178 note; on the _Carol_, ii. 89 (and see ii. 53, 470); dinner to, iii. 73; at Boulogne, iii. 105 note; in Paris, iii. 126; tribute to, by Dickens, iii. 236; death of, iii. 298-300; estrangement between Dickens and, iii. 298 note. Thanet races, Dickens at the, ii. 24. Théâtre Français (Paris), conventionalities of the, iii. 128. Theatres, Italian, ii. 182; French, ii. 330, 331. Theatrical Fund dinner, Dickens's speech at, ii. 491, 492 (and see 221, iii. 537). Theatricals, private, at Montreal, i. 413-415; at Rockingham, ii. 481; at Tavistock House, iii. 62-64 (and see ii. 108). Thomas (Owen P.), recollections of Dickens at school, i. 76-81. Thompson (Mr. T. I.), ii. 476. Thompson (Sir Henry), consulted by Dickens, iii. 321; a reading of Dickens's stopped by, iii. 452; opinion as to Dickens's lameness, iii. 453, 454. Ticknor (George), i. 304, 308. Ticknor & Fields (Messrs.), commission received by, on the American readings, iii. 446. Timber Doodle (Dickens's dog), ii. 24, 25, 28, ii. 134 note; death of, iii. 144 note. _Times_, the, on Dickens's death, iii. 542, 543 note. Tintoretto, Dickens on the works of, ii. 168, iii. 92. Titian's Assumption, effect of, on Dickens, ii. 168. Tobin (Daniel), a schoolfellow of Dickens, i. 76; assists Dickens as amanuensis, but finally discarded, i. 81. Toole (J. L.), encouragement given to in early life, by Dickens, iii. 54 (and see iii. 302 note). Topping (Groom), i. 220, 221, 234, 235, 413. Toronto, toryism of, i. 412. Torquay, readings at, iii. 268, 451. Torrens (Mrs.), ii. 476. _Tour in Italy_ (Simond's), ii. 116 note. Townshend (Chauncy Hare), iii. 256; death and bequest of, iii. 417. Tracey (Lieut.), i. 280, ii. 23. Tramps, ways of, iii. 210 note, 249, 250. Tremont House (Boston, U. S.), Dickens at, i. 300. Trossachs, Dickens in the, i. 264. _True Sun_, Dickens reporting for the, i. 96. Turin, Dickens at, iii. 92, 93. Turner (J. M. W.), ii. 110. Tuscany, wayside memorials in, ii. 188 note. Twickenham, cottage at, occupied by Dickens, i. 180-182; visitors at, i. 180-182; childish enjoyments at, i. 182 note. Twiss (Horace), ii. 468. Tyler (President), i. 350. Tynemouth, scene at, iii. 315, 316. _Uncommercial Traveller_, Dickens's, iii. 247-253. _Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down_, contemplated, iii. 270. Undercliff (Isle of Wight), Dickens's first impressions of, ii. 426; depressing effect of climate of, ii. 431-433. Unitarianism adopted by Dickens for a short time, ii. 59. Upholsterer, visit to an, i. 189; visit from an, i. 190. _Up the Rhine_ (Hood's), Dickens on, i. 185. Utica (U. S.), hotel at, iii. 435. VAUXHALL, the Duke and party at, ii. 470. Venice, Dickens's impressions of, ii. 163-166, iii. 90; habits of gondoliers at, iii. 90; theatre at, iii. 91. Verdeil (M.), ii. 233. Vernet (Horace), iii. 147 note. Vernon (Lord), eccentricities of, ii. 270, 271, 298. Vesuvius, Mount, iii. 83. Viardot (Madame) in _Orphée_, iii. 138 note. _Village Coquettes_, the story and songs for, written by Dickens, i. 116. Vote, value of a, in America, iii. 420. WALES, Prince of, and Dickens, iii. 509. Wainewright (the murderer), recognized by Macready in Newgate, i. 184 (and see ii. 334 note); made the subject of a tale in the _New York Ledger_, iii. 253; portrait of a girl by, ii. 334 note (and see ii. 468, iii. 279). Wales, North, tour in, i. 184. Ward (Professor) on Dickens, iii. 352, 353 note. Washington (U. S.), hotel extortion at, i. 345; climate of, i. 347; Congress and Senate at, i. 349; a comical dog at reading at, iii. 425; readings at, iii. 424, 425. Wassail-bowl presented to Dickens at Edinburgh, iii. 197. _Waterloo, Battle of_, at Vauxhall, ii. 470. Watson, Mr. (of Rockingham), ii. 231, 264, 479; death of, iii. 55. Watson (Sir Thomas), note by, of Dickens's illness in April, 1869, iii. 457-459; readings stopped by, iii. 458; guarded sanction given to additional readings, iii. 458 (and see 466, 531 note); Dickens's letter to, iii. 459 note. Watts's Charity at Rochester, iii. 154 note. Webster (Daniel), Dickens on, i. 308. Webster (Mr.), ii. 475. Webster murder at Cambridge (U. S.), iii. 402, 403. Well-boring at Gadshill, iii. 209. Weller (Sam) a pre-eminent achievement in literature, i. 131. Wellington, Duke of, fine trait of, ii. 264. Wellington House Academy (Hampstead-road), Dickens a day-scholar at, i. 74-84; described in _Household Words_, i. 75; Dickens's schoolfellows at, i. 76-84; Beverley painting scenes at, i. 84; revisited after five-and-twenty years, i. 76. Weyer (M. Van de), ii. 477. Whig jealousies, i. 250 (and see ii. 261). Whitechapel workhouse, incident at, iii. 75. White-conduit-house, reminiscence of, ii. 132. Whitefriars, a small revolution in, ii. 302. White (Rev. James), character of, ii. 424-426 (and see ii. 426, iii. 126). White (Grant) on the character of Carton in the _Tale of Two Cities_, iii. 359, 360. Whitehead (Charles), i. 109. Whitworth (Mr.), ii. 475. Wieland the clown, death of, iii. 166 note. Wig experiences, ii. 380. Wilkie (Sir David), on the genius of Dickens, i. 178; death of, i. 252. Willis (N. P.), fanciful description of Dickens by, i. 107 note. Wills (W. H.), ii. 453, iii. 256, 493. Wilson (Professor), i. 259; sketch of, i. 253, 254; speeches of, i. 255 note, ii. 136. Wilson (Mr.) the hair-dresser, fancy sketch of, ii. 379-383. Wilton (Marie) as Pippo in the _Maid and Magpie_, iii. 236, 237 note. Women, home for fallen, ii. 488 (and see iii. 286). Wordsworth, memorable saying of, iii. 381. Worms, the city of, ii. 223. YARMOUTH first seen by Dickens, ii. 462. Yates (Edmund), tales by, in _All the Year Round_, iii. 245; Dickens's interest in, iii. 495. Yates (Mr.), acting of, i. 174, ii. 96. _Yesterdays with Authors_ (Fields'), ii. 42 note. York, readings at, iii. 231, 454. Yorkshire, materials gathered in, for _Nickleby_, i. 172. _Young Gentlemen_ and _Young Couples_, sketches written by Dickens for Chapman & Hall, i. 149 note. ZOOLOGICAL Gardens, feeding the serpents at, iii. 169 note. Zouaves, Dickens's opinion of the, iii. 143, 144. * * * * * Volume III Page xi, "a" changed to "at" (Scene at Tynemouth) Page 46, "inpressed" changed to "impressed" (impressed on the better) Page 108, "Gore-House" changed to "Gore-house" to match rest of usage (often at Gore-house) Page 129, "Ca" changed to "Ça" (the Ça Ira!) Page 130, "Ca" changed to "Ça" (memory--Ça Ira) Page 137, "entertaiments" changed to "entertainments" (the day entertainments) Page 141, "diner" changed to "dîner" (Le dîner que) Page 166, "hereon" changed to "thereon" (thereon may be beheld) Page 166, "under aking" changed to "undertaking" (of the little undertaking) Page 175, "Th" changed to "The" (The landlord came up) Page 214, "chesnuts" changed to "chestnuts" (limes and chestnuts) Footnote 224, "chalet" changed to "châlet" ("The châlet," he wrote) Page 241, "cap ble" changed to "capable" (might be capable) Page 241, "Sha espeare" changed to "Shakespeare" (a line from Shakespeare) Page 245, "alled" changed to "called" (it called for) Illustration entitled THE CHÂLET, "CHALÊT" changed to "CHÂLET". Page 324, "hi" changed to "his" (interval of his) Footnote 259, "counils" changed to "councils" (held several councils) Footnote 260, "nett" changed to "net" (out the net profit) Page 339, "delf" changed to "delft" (worked in delft) Page 404, "diner" changed to "dîner" (dîner à tout) Page 539, "for" changed to "four" (four figures representing) Page 581, "iii." inserted into text (storm at, iii. 264.) Page 581, "Duplessis" changed to "Du Plessis" (Du Plessis (Marie)) Page 581, "iii." inserted into text (amount paid for, iii. 461 note) Page 582, "chalet" changed to "châlet" (châlet presented by) Page 583, "Hill" changed to "hill" (Fox-under-the-hill) Page 583, "Chalet" changed to "Châlet" (sketch of Châlet at) Page 583, "christian" changed to "Christian" (list of Christian) Page 584, "Halevy" changed to "Halévy" (Halévy (M.)) The volume number was added to the following entries in the index: the editor's modest estimate of it, i. 142 death of, i. 234, 235; To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations, capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained. For example: Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained. 
5978	----	and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by ANTHONY TROLLOPE CONTENTS PREFACE. I. MY EDUCATION, 1815-1834. II. MY MOTHER. III. THE GENERAL POST OFFICE, 1834-1841. IV. IRELAND--MY FIRST TWO NOVELS, 1841-1848. V. MY FIRST SUCCESS, 1849-1855. VI. _BARCHESTER TOWERS_ AND _THE THREE CLERKS_, 1855-1858. VII. _DOCTOR THORNE_--_THE BERTRAMS_--_THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH MAIN_. VIII. THE _CORNHILL MAGAZINE_ AND _FRAMLEY PARSONAGE_. IX. _CASTLE RICHMOND_--_BROWN, JONES, AND ROBINSON_--_NORTH AMERICA_--_ORLEY FARM_. X. _THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON_--_CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?_--_RACHEL RAY_--AND THE _FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW_. XI. _THE CLAVERINGS_--THE _PALL MALL GAZETTE_--_NINA BALATKA_--AND _LINDA TRESSEL_. XII. ON NOVELS AND THE ART OF WRITING THEM. XIII. ON ENGLISH NOVELISTS OF THE PRESENT DAY. XIV. ON CRITICISM. XV. _THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET_--LEAVING THE POST OFFICE--_ST. PAUL'S MAGAZINE_. XVI. BEVERLEY. XVII. THE AMERICAN POSTAL TREATY--THE QUESTION OF COPYRIGHT WITH AMERICA--FOUR MORE NOVELS. XVIII. _THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON_--_SIR HARRY HOTSPUR_--_AN EDITOR'S TALES_--_CÆSAR_. XIX. _RALPH THE HEIR_--_THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS_--_LADY ANNA_--_AUSTRALIA_. XX. _THE WAY WE LIVE NOW_ AND _THE PRIME MINISTER_--CONCLUSION. PREFACE. It may be well that I should put a short preface to this book. In the summer of 1878 my father told me that he had written a memoir of his own life. He did not speak about it at length, but said that he had written me a letter, not to be opened until after his death, containing instructions for publication. This letter was dated 30th April, 1876. I will give here as much of it as concerns the public: "I wish you to accept as a gift from me, given you now, the accompanying pages which contain a memoir of my life. My intention is that they shall be published after my death, and be edited by you. But I leave it altogether to your discretion whether to publish or to suppress the work;--and also to your discretion whether any part or what part shall be omitted. But I would not wish that anything should be added to the memoir. If you wish to say any word as from yourself, let it be done in the shape of a preface or introductory chapter." At the end there is a postscript: "The publication, if made at all, should be effected as soon as possible after my death." My father died on the 6th of December, 1882. It will be seen, therefore, that my duty has been merely to pass the book through the press conformably to the above instructions. I have placed headings to the right-hand pages throughout the book, and I do not conceive that I was precluded from so doing. Additions of any other sort there have been none; the few footnotes are my father's own additions or corrections. And I have made no alterations. I have suppressed some few passages, but not more than would amount to two printed pages has been omitted. My father has not given any of his own letters, nor was it his wish that any should be published. I see from my father's manuscript, and from his papers, that the first two chapters of this memoir were written in the latter part of 1875, that he began the third chapter early in January, 1876, and that he finished the record before the middle of April in that year. I state this, though there are indications in the book by which it might be seen at what time the memoir was being written. So much I would say by way of preface. And I think I may also give in a few words the main incidents in my father's life after he completed his autobiography. He has said that he had given up hunting; but he still kept two horses for such riding as may be had in or about the immediate neighbourhood of London. He continued to ride to the end of his life: he liked the exercise, and I think it would have distressed him not to have had a horse in his stable. But he never spoke willingly on hunting matters. He had at last resolved to give up his favourite amusement, and that as far as he was concerned there should be an end of it. In the spring of 1877 he went to South Africa, and returned early in the following year with a book on the colony already written. In the summer of 1878, he was one of a party of ladies and gentlemen who made an expedition to Iceland in the "Mastiff," one of Mr. John Burns' steam-ships. The journey lasted altogether sixteen days, and during that time Mr. and Mrs. Burns were the hospitable entertainers. When my father returned, he wrote a short account of _How the "Mastiffs" went to Iceland_. The book was printed, but was intended only for private circulation. Every day, until his last illness, my father continued his work. He would not otherwise have been happy. He demanded from himself less than he had done ten years previously, but his daily task was always done. I will mention now the titles of his books that were published after the last included in the list which he himself has given at the end of the second volume:-- An Eye for an Eye, 1879 Cousin Henry, 1879 Thackeray, 1879 The Duke's Children, 1880 Life of Cicero, 1880 Ayala's Angel, 1881 Doctor Wortle's School, 1881 Frau Frohmann and other Stories, 1882 Lord Palmerston, 1882 The Fixed Period, 1882 Kept in the Dark, 1882 Marion Fay, 1882 Mr. Scarborough's Family, 1883 At the time of his death he had written four-fifths of an Irish story, called _The Landleaguers_, shortly about to be published; and he left in manuscript a completed novel, called _An Old Man's Love_, which will be published by Messrs. Blackwood & Sons in 1884. In the summer of 1880 my father left London, and went to live at Harting, a village in Sussex, but on the confines of Hampshire. I think he chose that spot because he found there a house that suited him, and because of the prettiness of the neighbourhood. His last long journey was a trip to Italy in the late winter and spring of 1881; but he went to Ireland twice in 1882. He went there in May of that year, and was then absent nearly a month. This journey did him much good, for he found that the softer atmosphere relieved his asthma, from which he had been suffering for nearly eighteen months. In August following he made another trip to Ireland, but from this journey he derived less benefit. He was much interested in, and was very much distressed by, the unhappy condition of the country. Few men knew Ireland better than he did. He had lived there for sixteen years, and his Post Office work had taken him into every part of the island. In the summer of 1882 he began his last novel, _The Landleaguers_, which, as stated above, was unfinished when he died. This book was a cause of anxiety to him. He could not rid his mind of the fact that he had a story already in the course of publication, but which he had not yet completed. In no other case, except _Framley Parsonage_, did my father publish even the first number of any novel before he had fully completed the whole tale. On the evening of the 3d of November, 1882, he was seized with paralysis on the right side, accompanied by loss of speech. His mind also had failed, though at intervals his thoughts would return to him. After the first three weeks these lucid intervals became rarer, but it was always very difficult to tell how far his mind was sound or how far astray. He died on the evening of the 6th of December following, nearly five weeks from the night of his attack. I have been led to say these few words, not at all from a desire to supplement my father's biography of himself, but to mention the main incidents in his life after he had finished his own record. In what I have here said I do not think I have exceeded his instructions. HENRY M. TROLLOPE. September, 1883. CHAPTER I. MY EDUCATION. 1815-1834. In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man's mind to recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say something of myself;--nor, without doing so, should I know how to throw my matter into any recognised and intelligible form. That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible. Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there that has done none? But this I protest;--that nothing that I say shall be untrue. I will set down naught in malice; nor will I give to myself, or others, honour which I do not believe to have been fairly won. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be, my misfortunes arising from a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an utter want on my own part of that juvenile manhood which enables some boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such a position is sure to produce. I was born in 1815, in Keppel Street, Russell Square; and while a baby, was carried down to Harrow, where my father had built a house on a large farm which, in an evil hour he took on a long lease from Lord Northwick. That farm was the grave of all my father's hopes, ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother's sufferings, and of those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny and of ours. My father had been a Wykamist and a fellow of New College, and Winchester was the destination of my brothers and myself; but as he had friends among the masters at Harrow, and as the school offered an education almost gratuitous to children living in the parish, he, with a certain aptitude to do things differently from others, which accompanied him throughout his life, determined to use that august seminary as a "t'other school" for Winchester, and sent three of us there, one after the other, at the age of seven. My father at this time was a Chancery barrister practising in London, occupying dingy, almost suicidal chambers, at No. 23 Old Square, Lincoln's Inn,--chambers which on one melancholy occasion did become absolutely suicidal.[1] He was, as I have been informed by those quite competent to know, an excellent and most conscientious lawyer, but plagued with so bad a temper, that he drove the attorneys from him. In his early days he was a man of some small fortune and of higher hopes. These stood so high at the time of my birth, that he was felt to be entitled to a country house, as well as to that in Keppel Street; and in order that he might build such a residence, he took the farm. This place he called Julians, and the land runs up to the foot of the hill on which the school and church stand,--on the side towards London. Things there went much against him; the farm was ruinous, and I remember that we all regarded the Lord Northwick of those days as a cormorant who was eating us up. My father's clients deserted him. He purchased various dark gloomy chambers in and about Chancery Lane, and his purchases always went wrong. Then, as a final crushing blow, an old uncle, whose heir he was to have been, married and had a family! The house in London was let; and also the house he built at Harrow, from which he descended to a farmhouse on the land, which I have endeavoured to make known to some readers under the name of Orley Farm. This place, just as it was when we lived there, is to be seen in the frontispiece to the first edition of that novel, having had the good fortune to be delineated by no less a pencil than that of John Millais. [Footnote 1: A pupil of his destroyed himself in the rooms.] My two elder brothers had been sent as day-boarders to Harrow School from the bigger house, and may probably have been received among the aristocratic crowd,--not on equal terms, because a day-boarder at Harrow in those days was never so received,--but at any rate as other day-boarders. I do not suppose that they were well treated, but I doubt whether they were subjected to the ignominy which I endured. I was only seven, and I think that boys at seven are now spared among their more considerate seniors. I was never spared; and was not even allowed to run to and fro between our house and the school without a daily purgatory. No doubt my appearance was against me. I remember well, when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler, the head-master, stopping me in the street, and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and all the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow School was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I! Oh, what I felt at that moment! But I could not look my feelings. I do not doubt that I was dirty;--but I think that he was cruel. He must have known me had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognise me by my face. At this time I was three years at Harrow; and, as far as I can remember, I was the junior boy in the school when I left it. Then I was sent to a private school at Sunbury, kept by Arthur Drury. This, I think, must have been done in accordance with the advice of Henry Drury, who was my tutor at Harrow School, and my father's friend, and who may probably have expressed an opinion that my juvenile career was not proceeding in a satisfactory manner at Harrow. To Sunbury I went, and during the two years I was there, though I never had any pocket-money, and seldom had much in the way of clothes, I lived more nearly on terms of equality with other boys than at any other period during my very prolonged school-days. Even here, I was always in disgrace. I remember well how, on one occasion, four boys were selected as having been the perpetrators of some nameless horror. What it was, to this day I cannot even guess; but I was one of the four, innocent as a babe, but adjudged to have been the guiltiest of the guilty. We each had to write out a sermon, and my sermon was the longest of the four. During the whole of one term-time we were helped last at every meal. We were not allowed to visit the playground till the sermon was finished. Mine was only done a day or two before the holidays. Mrs. Drury, when she saw us, shook her head with pitying horror. There were ever so many other punishments accumulated on our heads. It broke my heart, knowing myself to be innocent, and suffering also under the almost equally painful feeling that the other three--no doubt wicked boys--were the curled darlings of the school, who would never have selected me to share their wickedness with them. I contrived to learn, from words that fell from Mr. Drury, that he condemned me because I, having come from a public school, might be supposed to be the leader of wickedness! On the first day of the next term he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong. With all a stupid boy's slowness, I said nothing; and he had not the courage to carry reparation further. All that was fifty years ago, and it burns me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered curs those boys must have been not to have told the truth!--at any rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well, and almost wish to write them here. When I was twelve there came the vacancy at Winchester College which I was destined to fill. My two elder brothers had gone there, and the younger had been taken away, being already supposed to have lost his chance of New College. It had been one of the great ambitions of my father's life that his three sons, who lived to go to Winchester, should all become fellows of New College. But that suffering man was never destined to have an ambition gratified. We all lost the prize which he struggled with infinite labour to put within our reach. My eldest brother all but achieved it, and afterwards went to Oxford, taking three exhibitions from the school, though he lost the great glory of a Wykamist. He has since made himself well known to the public as a writer in connection with all Italian subjects. He is still living as I now write. But my other brother died early. While I was at Winchester my father's affairs went from bad to worse. He gave up his practice at the bar, and, unfortunate that he was, took another farm. It is odd that a man should conceive,--and in this case a highly educated and a very clever man,--that farming should be a business in which he might make money without any special education or apprenticeship. Perhaps of all trades it is the one in which an accurate knowledge of what things should be done, and the best manner of doing them, is most necessary. And it is one also for success in which a sufficient capital is indispensable. He had no knowledge, and, when he took this second farm, no capital. This was the last step preparatory to his final ruin. Soon after I had been sent to Winchester, my mother went to America, taking with her my brother Henry and my two sisters, who were then no more than children. This was, I think, in 1827. I have no clear knowledge of her object, or of my father's; but I believe that he had an idea that money might be made by sending goods,--little goods, such as pin-cushions, pepper-boxes, and pocket-knives,--out to the still unfurnished States; and that she conceived that an opening might be made for my brother Henry by erecting some bazaar or extended shop in one of the Western cities. Whence the money came I do not know, but the pocket-knives and the pepper-boxes were bought, and the bazaar built. I have seen it since in the town of Cincinnati,--a sorry building! But I have been told that in those days it was an imposing edifice. My mother went first, with my sisters and second brother. Then my father followed them, taking my elder brother before he went to Oxford. But there was an interval of some year and a half during which he and I were at Winchester together. Over a period of forty years, since I began my manhood at a desk in the Post Office, I and my brother, Thomas Adolphus, have been fast friends. There have been hot words between us, for perfect friendship bears and allows hot words. Few brothers have had more of brotherhood. But in those school-days he was, of all my foes, the worst. In accordance with the practice of the college, which submits, or did then submit, much of the tuition of the younger boys from the elder, he was my tutor; and in his capacity of teacher and ruler, he had studied the theories of Draco. I remember well how he used to exact obedience after the manner of that lawgiver. Hang a little boy for stealing apples, he used to say, and other little boys will not steal apples. The doctrine was already exploded elsewhere, but he stuck to it with conservative energy. The result was that, as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big stick. That such thrashings should have been possible at a school as a continual part of one's daily life, seems to me to argue a very ill condition of school discipline. At this period I remember to have passed one set of holidays--the midsummer holidays--in my father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. There was often a difficulty about the holidays,--as to what should be done with me. On this occasion my amusement consisted in wandering about among those old deserted buildings, and in reading Shakespeare out of a bi-columned edition, which is still among my books. It was not that I had chosen Shakespeare, but that there was nothing else to read. After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father to America. Then another and a different horror fell to my fate. My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which, with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course knew that it was so, and I became a Pariah. It is the nature of boys to be cruel. I have sometimes doubted whether among each other they do usually suffer much, one from the other's cruelty; but I suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything? And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money, which we called battels, and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master. On one awful day the second master announced to me that my battels would be stopped. He told me the reason,--the battels for the last half-year had not been repaid; and he urged his own unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a shilling a week would not have been much,--even though pocket-money from other sources never reached me,--but that the other boys all knew it! Every now and again, perhaps three or four times in a half-year, these weekly shillings were given to certain servants of the college, in payment, it may be presumed, for some extra services. And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy, and the cause of the defalcation was explained to him. I never saw one of those servants without feeling that I had picked his pocket. When I had been at Winchester something over three years, my father returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because of the expense, or because my chance of New College was supposed to have passed away, I do not know. As a fact, I should, I believe, have gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional number of vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there would have been no funds for my maintenance at the University till I should have entered in upon the fruition of the founder's endowment, and my career at Oxford must have been unfortunate. When I left Winchester, I had three more years of school before me, having as yet endured nine. My father at this time having left my mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself to live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm he had hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three miles from Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from this house I was again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual appurtenances of a boy at such a school, consider what must have been my condition among them, with a daily walk of twelve miles through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labours of a school life! Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition, walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dung-heaps, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended! There was a parlour in which my father lived, shut up among big books; but I passed my most jocund hours in the kitchen, making innocent love to the bailiff's daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening, when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still, next to the sons of big tradesmen who had made their ten thousand a-year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense, except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject, was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion, and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed, I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my school-days, I am not making a false boast. I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative, though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford. My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal incentives were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hay-field on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to the moment of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions. Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference, with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear, unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts. And my father, though he would try, as it were by a side wind, to get a useful spurt of work out of me, either in the garden or in the hay-field, had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement. From my very babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to take my place alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the morning, and say my early rules from the Latin Grammar, or repeat the Greek alphabet; and was obliged at these early lessons to hold my head inclined towards him, so that in the event of guilty fault, he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his shaving-brush. No father was ever more anxious for the education of his children, though I think none ever knew less how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as I can remember, he never recognised the need. He allowed himself no distraction, and did not seem to think it was necessary to a child. I cannot bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make any sacrifice. At this time, in the farmhouse at Harrow Weald, he could not give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was not in the fields was devoted to his monks and nuns; but he would require me to sit at a table with Lexicon and Gradus before me. As I look back on my resolute idleness and fixed determination to make no use whatever of the books thus thrust upon me, or of the hours, and as I bear in mind the consciousness of great energy in after-life, I am in doubt whether my nature is wholly altered, or whether his plan was wholly bad. In those days he never punished me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness; but in passion he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great folio Bible which he always used. In the old house were the two first volumes of Cooper's novel, called _The Prairie_, a relic--probably a dishonest relic--of some subscription to Hookham's library. Other books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many dozen times I read those two first volumes. It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet, as a walk along an English lane, when the air is sweet and the weather fine, and when there is a charm in walking? But here were the same lanes four times a-day, in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with all the accompanying mud and dust, and with disordered clothes. I might have been known among all the boys at a hundred yards' distance by my boots and trousers,--and was conscious at all times that I was so known. I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler when I was a little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have said the same thing any day,--only that Dr. Longley never in his life was able to say an ill-natured word. Dr. Butler only became Dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be Archbishop of Canterbury. I think it was in the autumn of 1831 that my mother, with the rest of the family, returned from America. She lived at first at the farmhouse, but it was only for a short time. She came back with a book written about the United States, and the immediate pecuniary success which that work obtained enabled her to take us all back to the house at Harrow,--not to the first house, which would still have been beyond her means, but to that which has since been called Orley Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at Harrow Weald. Here my schooling went on under somewhat improved circumstances. The three miles became half a mile, and probably some salutary changes were made in my wardrobe. My mother and my sisters, too, were there. And a great element of happiness was added to us all in the affectionate and life-enduring friendship of the family of our close neighbour, Colonel Grant. But I was never able to overcome--or even to attempt to overcome--the absolute isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground or racket-court I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a covetousness that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all through life. Not that I have ever shunned to speak of them as openly as I am writing now, but that when I have been claimed as schoolfellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in estrangement. Through all my father's troubles he still desired to send me either to Oxford or Cambridge. My elder brother went to Oxford, and Henry to Cambridge. It all depended on my ability to get some scholarship that would help me to live at the University. I had many chances. There were exhibitions from Harrow--which I never got. Twice I tried for a sizarship at Clare Hall,--but in vain. Once I made a futile attempt for a scholarship at Trinity, Oxford,--but failed again. Then the idea of a university career was abandoned. And very fortunate it was that I did not succeed, for my career with such assistance only as a scholarship would have given me, would have ended in debt and ignominy. When I left Harrow I was all but nineteen, and I had at first gone there at seven. During the whole of those twelve years no attempt had been made to teach me anything but Latin and Greek, and very little attempt to teach me those languages. I do not remember any lessons either in writing or arithmetic. French and German I certainly was not taught. The assertion will scarcely be credited, but I do assert that I have no recollection of other tuition except that in the dead languages. At the school at Sunbury there was certainly a writing master and a French master. The latter was an extra, and I never had extras. I suppose I must have been in the writing master's class, but though I can call to mind the man, I cannot call to mind his ferule. It was by their ferules that I always knew them, and they me. I feel convinced in my mind that I have been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all. Looking back over half a century, I am not quite sure whether the boast is true; but if I did not, nobody ever did. And yet when I think how little I knew of Latin or Greek on leaving Harrow at nineteen, I am astonished at the possibility of such waste of time. I am now a fair Latin scholar,--that is to say, I read and enjoy the Latin classics, and could probably make myself understood in Latin prose. But the knowledge which I have, I have acquired since I left school,--no doubt aided much by that groundwork of the language which will in the process of years make its way slowly, even through the skin. There were twelve years of tuition in which I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson! When I left Harrow I was nearly at the top of the school, being a monitor, and, I think, the seventh boy. This position I achieved by gravitation upwards. I bear in mind well with how prodigal a hand prizes used to be showered about; but I never got a prize. From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career,--except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be taken home to be cured. CHAPTER II. MY MOTHER. Though I do not wish in these pages to go back to the origin of all the Trollopes, I must say a few words of my mother,--partly because filial duty will not allow me to be silent as to a parent who made for herself a considerable name in the literature of her day, and partly because there were circumstances in her career well worthy of notice. She was the daughter of the Rev. William Milton, vicar of Heckfield, who, as well as my father, had been a fellow of New College. She was nearly thirty when, in 1809, she married my father. Six or seven years ago a bundle of love-letters from her to him fell into my hand in a very singular way, having been found in the house of a stranger, who, with much courtesy, sent them to me. They were then about sixty years old, and had been written some before and some after her marriage, over the space of perhaps a year. In no novel of Richardson's or Miss Burney's have I seen a correspondence at the same time so sweet, so graceful, and so well expressed. But the marvel of these letters was in the strange difference they bore to the love-letters of the present day. They are, all of them, on square paper, folded and sealed, and addressed to my father on circuit; but the language in each, though it almost borders on the romantic, is beautifully chosen, and fit, without change of a syllable, for the most critical eye. What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction? She dearly likes a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire familiarity with a new and strange being. There is something in that, too, pleasant to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not conduce to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her to the last. In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages. My elder sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives; but she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to her,--with the destiny before us three of writing more books than were probably ever before produced by a single family.[2] My married sister added to the number by one little anonymous high church story, called _Chollerton_. [Footnote 2: The family of Estienne, the great French printers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of whom there were at least nine or ten, did more perhaps for the production of literature than any other family. But they, though they edited, and not unfrequently translated the works which they published, were not authors in the ordinary sense.] From the date of their marriage up to 1827, when my mother went to America, my father's affairs had always been going down in the world. She had loved society, affecting a somewhat liberal _rôle_, and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of patriot exiles. An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second shirt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to exterminate, or a French _prolétaire_ with distant ideas of sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome to the modest hospitality of her house. In after years, when marquises of another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and thought that archduchesses were sweet. But with her politics were always an affair of the heart,--as, indeed, were all her convictions. Of reasoning from causes, I think that she knew nothing. Her heart was in every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic; but it must be acknowledged that she was emotional. I can remember now her books, and can see her at her pursuits. The poets she loved best were Dante and Spenser. But she raved also of him of whom all such ladies were raving then, and rejoiced in the popularity and wept over the persecution of Lord Byron. She was among those who seized with avidity on the novels, as they came out, of the then unknown Scott, and who could still talk of the triumphs of Miss Edgeworth. With the literature of the day she was familiar, and with the poets of the past. Of other reading I do not think she had mastered much. Her life, I take it, though latterly clouded by many troubles, was easy, luxurious, and idle, till my father's affairs and her own aspirations sent her to America. She had dear friends among literary people, of whom I remember Mathias, Henry Milman, and Miss Landon; but till long after middle life she never herself wrote a line for publication. In 1827 she went to America, having been partly instigated by the social and communistic ideas of a lady whom I well remember,--a certain Miss Wright,--who was, I think, the first of the American female lecturers. Her chief desire, however, was to establish my brother Henry; and perhaps joined with that was the additional object of breaking up her English home without pleading broken fortunes to all the world. At Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio, she built a bazaar, and I fancy lost all the money which may have been embarked in that speculation. It could not have been much, and I think that others also must have suffered. But she looked about her, at her American cousins, and resolved to write a book about them. This book she brought back with her in 1831, and published it early in 1832. When she did this she was already fifty. When doing this she was aware that unless she could so succeed in making money, there was no money for any of the family. She had never before earned a shilling. She almost immediately received a considerable sum from the publishers,--if I remember rightly, amounting to two sums of £400 each within a few months; and from that moment till nearly the time of her death, at any rate for more than twenty years, she was in the receipt of a considerable income from her writings. It was a late age at which to begin such a career. _The Domestic Manners of the Americans_ was the first of a series of books of travels, of which it was probably the best, and was certainly the best known. It will not be too much to say of it that it had a material effect upon the manners of the Americans of the day, and that that effect has been fully appreciated by them. No observer was certainly ever less qualified to judge of the prospects or even of the happiness of a young people. No one could have been worse adapted by nature for the task of learning whether a nation was in a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she judged, as most women do, from her own standing-point. If a thing were ugly to her eyes, it ought to be ugly to all eyes,--and if ugly, it must be bad. What though people had plenty to eat and clothes to wear, if they put their feet upon the tables and did not reverence their betters? The Americans were to her rough, uncouth, and vulgar,--and she told them so. Those communistic and social ideas, which had been so pretty in a drawing-room, were scattered to the winds. Her volumes were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin. Book followed book immediately,--first two novels, and then a book on Belgium and Western Germany. She refurnished the house which I have called Orley Farm, and surrounded us again with moderate comforts. Of the mixture of joviality and industry which formed her character, it is almost impossible to speak with exaggeration. The industry was a thing apart, kept to herself. It was not necessary that any one who lived with her should see it. She was at her table at four in the morning, and had finished her work before the world had begun to be aroused. But the joviality was all for others. She could dance with other people's legs, eat and drink with other people's palates, be proud with the lustre of other people's finery. Every mother can do that for her own daughters; but she could do it for any girl whose look, and voice, and manners pleased her. Even when she was at work, the laughter of those she loved was a pleasure to her. She had much, very much, to suffer. Work sometimes came hard to her, so much being required,--for she was extravagant, and liked to have money to spend; but of all people I have known she was the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy. We continued this renewed life at Harrow for nearly two years, during which I was still at the school, and at the end of which I was nearly nineteen. Then there came a great catastrophe. My father, who, when he was well, lived a sad life among his monks and nuns, still kept a horse and gig. One day in March, 1834, just as it had been decided that I should leave the school then, instead of remaining, as had been intended, till midsummer, I was summoned very early in the morning, to drive him up to London. He had been ill, and must still have been very ill indeed when he submitted to be driven by any one. It was not till we had started that he told me that I was to put him on board the Ostend boat. This I did, driving him through the city down to the docks. It was not within his nature to be communicative, and to the last he never told me why he was going to Ostend. Something of a general flitting abroad I had heard before, but why he should have flown the first, and flown so suddenly, I did not in the least know till I returned. When I got back with the gig, the house and furniture were all in the charge of the sheriff's officers. The gardener who had been with us in former days stopped me as I drove up the road, and with gestures, signs, and whispered words, gave me to understand that the whole affair--horse, gig, and harness--would be made prize of if I went but a few yards farther. Why they should not have been made prize of I do not know. The little piece of dishonest business which I at once took in hand and carried through successfully was of no special service to any of us. I drove the gig into the village, and sold the entire equipage to the ironmonger for £17, the exact sum which he claimed as being due to himself. I was much complimented by the gardener, who seemed to think that so much had been rescued out of the fire. I fancy that the ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness. When I got back to the house a scene of devastation was in progress, which still was not without its amusement. My mother, through her various troubles, had contrived to keep a certain number of pretty-pretties which were dear to her heart. They were not much, for in those days the ornamentation of houses was not lavish as it is now; but there was some china, and a little glass, a few books, and a very moderate supply of household silver. These things, and things like them, were being carried down surreptitiously, through a gap between the two gardens, on to the premises of our friend Colonel Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the Grant girls, who were just younger, were the chief marauders. To such forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise, and between us we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers, amidst the anathemas, but good-humoured abstinence from personal violence, of the men in charge of the property. I still own a few books that were thus purloined. For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel's hospitable roof, cared for and comforted by that dearest of all women, his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium, and established ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of Bruges. At this time, and till my father's death, everything was done with money earned by my mother. She now again furnished the house,--this being the third that she had put in order since she came back from America two years and a half ago. There were six of us went into this new banishment. My brother Henry had left Cambridge and was ill. My younger sister was ill. And though as yet we hardly told each other that it was so, we began to feel that that desolating fiend, consumption, was among us. My father was broken-hearted as well as ill, but whenever he could sit at his table he still worked at his ecclesiastical records. My elder sister and I were in good health, but I was an idle, desolate hanger-on, that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy of nineteen, without any idea of a career, or a profession, or a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy, for there were pretty girls at Bruges with whom I could fancy that I was in love; and I had been removed from the real misery of school. But as to my future life I had not even an aspiration. Now and again there would arise a feeling that it was hard upon my mother that she should have to do so much for us, that we should be idle while she was forced to work so constantly; but we should probably have thought more of that had she not taken to work as though it were the recognised condition of life for an old lady of fifty-five. Then, by degrees, an established sorrow was at home among us. My brother was an invalid, and the horrid word, which of all words were for some years after the most dreadful to us, had been pronounced. It was no longer a delicate chest, and some temporary necessity for peculiar care,--but consumption! The Bruges doctor had said so, and we knew that he was right. From that time forth my mother's most visible occupation was that of nursing. There were two sick men in the house, and hers were the hands that tended them. The novels went on, of course. We had already learned to know that they would be forthcoming at stated intervals,--and they always were forthcoming. The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle held equal places in my mother's rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances; but I doubt much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself clear from the troubles of the world, and fit for the duty it had to do, I never saw equalled. I do not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do; but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott. My mother went through it unscathed in strength, though she performed all the work of day-nurse and night-nurse to a sick household;--for there were soon three of them dying. At this time there came from some quarter an offer to me of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and so it was apparently my destiny to be a soldier. But I must first learn German and French, of which languages I knew almost nothing. For this a year was allowed me, and in order that it might be accomplished without expense, I undertook the duties of a classical usher to a school then kept by William Drury at Brussels. Mr. Drury had been one of the masters at Harrow when I went there at seven years old, and is now, after an interval of fifty-three years, even yet officiating as clergyman at that place.[3] To Brussels I went, and my heart still sinks within me as I reflect that any one should have intrusted to me the tuition of thirty boys. I can only hope that those boys went there to learn French, and that their parents were not particular as to their classical acquirements. I remember that on two occasions I was sent to take the school out for a walk; but that after the second attempt Mrs. Drury declared that the boys' clothes would not stand any further experiments of that kind. I cannot call to mind any learning by me of other languages; but as I only remained in that position for six weeks, perhaps the return lessons had not been as yet commenced. At the end of the six weeks a letter reached me, offering me a clerkship in the General Post Office, and I accepted it. Among my mother's dearest friends she reckoned Mrs. Freeling, the wife of Clayton Freeling, whose father, Sir Francis Freeling, then ruled the Post Office. She had heard of my desolate position, and had begged from her father-in-law the offer of a berth in his own office. [Footnote 3: He died two years after these words were written.] I hurried back from Brussels to Bruges on my way to London, and found that the number of invalids had been increased. My younger sister, Emily, who, when I had left the house, was trembling on the balance,--who had been pronounced to be delicate, but with that false-tongued hope which knows the truth, but will lie lest the heart should faint, had been called delicate, but only delicate,--was now ill. Of course she was doomed. I knew it of both of them, though I had never heard the word spoken, or had spoken it to any one. And my father was very ill,--ill to dying, though I did not know it. And my mother had decreed to send my elder sister away to England, thinking that the vicinity of so much sickness might be injurious to her. All this happened late in the autumn of 1834, in the spring of which year we had come to Bruges; and then my mother was left alone in a big house outside the town, with two Belgian women-servants, to nurse these dying patients--the patients being her husband and children--and to write novels for the sustenance of the family! It was about this period of her career that her best novels were written. To my own initiation at the Post Office I will return in the next chapter. Just before Christmas my brother died, and was buried at Bruges. In the following February my father died, and was buried alongside of him,--and with him died that tedious task of his, which I can only hope may have solaced many of his latter hours. I sometimes look back, meditating for hours together, on his adverse fate. He was a man, finely educated, of great parts, with immense capacity for work, physically strong very much beyond the average of men, addicted to no vices, carried off by no pleasures, affectionate by nature, most anxious for the welfare of his children, born to fair fortunes,--who, when he started in the world, may be said to have had everything at his feet. But everything went wrong with him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure. He embarked in one hopeless enterprise after another, spending on each all the money he could at the time command. But the worse curse to him of all was a temper so irritable that even those whom he loved the best could not endure it. We were all estranged from him, and yet I believe that he would have given his heart's blood for any of us. His life as I knew it was one long tragedy. After his death my mother moved to England, and took and furnished a small house at Hadley, near Barnet. I was then a clerk in the London Post Office, and I remember well how gay she made the place with little dinners, little dances, and little picnics, while she herself was at work every morning long before others had left their beds. But she did not stay at Hadley much above a year. She went up to London, where she again took and furnished a house, from which my remaining sister was married and carried away into Cumberland. My mother soon followed her, and on this occasion did more than take a house. She bought a bit of land,--a field of three acres near the town,--and built a residence for herself. This, I think, was in 1841, and she had thus established and re-established herself six times in ten years. But in Cumberland she found the climate too severe, and in 1844 she moved herself to Florence, where she remained till her death in 1863. She continued writing up to 1856, when she was seventy-six years old,--and had at that time produced 114 volumes, of which the first was not written till she was fifty. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence. She was an unselfish, affectionate, and most industrious woman, with great capacity for enjoyment and high physical gifts. She was endowed too, with much creative power, with considerable humour, and a genuine feeling for romance. But she was neither clear-sighted nor accurate; and in her attempts to describe morals, manners, and even facts, was unable to avoid the pitfalls of exaggeration. CHAPTER III. THE GENERAL POST OFFICE. 1834-1841. While I was still learning my duty as an usher at Mr. Drury's school at Brussels, I was summoned to my clerkship in the London Post Office, and on my way passed through Bruges. I then saw my father and my brother Henry for the last time. A sadder household never was held together. They were all dying; except my mother, who would sit up night after night nursing the dying ones and writing novels the while,--so that there might be a decent roof for them to die under. Had she failed to write the novels, I do not know where the roof would have been found. It is now more than forty years ago, and looking back over so long a lapse of time I can tell the story, though it be the story of my own father and mother, of my own brother and sister, almost as coldly as I have often done some scene of intended pathos in fiction; but that scene was indeed full of pathos. I was then becoming alive to the blighted ambition of my father's life, and becoming alive also to the violence of the strain which my mother was enduring. But I could do nothing but go and leave them. There was something that comforted me in the idea that I need no longer be a burden,--a fallacious idea, as it soon proved. My salary was to be £90 a year, and on that I was to live in London, keep up my character as a gentleman, and be happy. That I should have thought this possible at the age of nineteen, and should have been delighted at being able to make the attempt, does not surprise me now; but that others should have thought it possible, friends who knew something of the world, does astonish me. A lad might have done so, no doubt, or might do so even in these days, who was properly looked after and kept under control,--on whose behalf some law of life had been laid down. Let him pay so much a week for his board and lodging, so much for his clothes, so much for his washing, and then let him understand that he has--shall we say?--sixpence a day left for pocket-money and omnibuses. Any one making the calculation will find the sixpence far too much. No such calculation was made for me or by me. It was supposed that a sufficient income had been secured to me, and that I should live upon it as other clerks lived. But as yet the £90 a year was not secured to me. On reaching London I went to my friend Clayton Freeling, who was then secretary at the Stamp Office, and was taken by him to the scene of my future labours in St. Martin's le Grand. Sir Francis Freeling was the secretary, but he was greatly too high an official to be seen at first by a new junior clerk. I was taken, therefore, to his eldest son Henry Freeling, who was the assistant secretary, and by him I was examined as to my fitness. The story of that examination is given accurately in one of the opening chapters of a novel written by me, called _The Three Clerks_. If any reader of this memoir would refer to that chapter and see how Charley Tudor was supposed to have been admitted into the Internal Navigation Office, that reader will learn how Anthony Trollope was actually admitted into the Secretary's office of the General Post Office in 1834. I was asked to copy some lines from the _Times_ newspaper with an old quill pen, and at once made a series of blots and false spellings. "That won't do, you know," said Henry Freeling to his brother Clayton. Clayton, who was my friend, urged that I was nervous, and asked that I might be allowed to do a bit of writing at home and bring it as a sample on the next day. I was then asked whether I was a proficient in arithmetic. What could I say? I had never learned the multiplication table, and had no more idea of the rule of three than of conic sections. "I know a little of it," I said humbly, whereupon I was sternly assured that on the morrow, should I succeed in showing that my handwriting was all that it ought to be, I should be examined as to that little of arithmetic. If that little should not be found to comprise a thorough knowledge of all the ordinary rules, together with practised and quick skill, my career in life could not be made at the Post Office. Going down the main stairs of the building,--stairs which have I believe been now pulled down to make room for sorters and stampers,--Clayton Freeling told me not to be too downhearted. I was myself inclined to think that I had better go back to the school in Brussels. But nevertheless I went to work, and under the surveillance of my elder brother made a beautiful transcript of four or five pages of Gibbon. With a faltering heart I took these on the next day to the office. With my caligraphy I was contented, but was certain that I should come to the ground among the figures. But when I got to "The Grand," as we used to call our office in those days, from its site in St. Martin's le Grand, I was seated at a desk without any further reference to my competency. No one condescended even to look at my beautiful penmanship. That was the way in which candidates for the Civil Service were examined in my young days. It was at any rate the way in which I was examined. Since that time there has been a very great change indeed;--and in some respects a great improvement. But in regard to the absolute fitness of the young men selected for the public service, I doubt whether more harm has not been done than good. And I think that good might have been done without the harm. The rule of the present day is, that every place shall be open to public competition, and that it shall be given to the best among the comers. I object to this, that at present there exists no known mode of learning who is best, and that the method employed has no tendency to elicit the best. That method pretends only to decide who among a certain number of lads will best answer a string of questions, for the answering of which they are prepared by tutors, who have sprung up for the purpose since this fashion of election has been adopted. When it is decided in a family that a boy shall "try the Civil Service," he is made to undergo a certain amount of cramming. But such treatment has, I maintain, no connection whatever with education. The lad is no better fitted after it than he was before for the future work of his life. But his very success fills him with false ideas of his own educational standing, and so far unfits him. And, by the plan now in vogue, it has come to pass that no one is in truth responsible either for the conduct, the manners, or even for the character of the youth. The responsibility was perhaps slight before; but existed, and was on the increase. There might have been,--in some future time of still increased wisdom, there yet may be,--a department established to test the fitness of acolytes without recourse to the dangerous optimism of competitive choice. I will not say but that there should have been some one to reject me,--though I will have the hardihood to say that, had I been so rejected, the Civil Service would have lost a valuable public servant. This is a statement that will not, I think, be denied by those who, after I am gone, may remember anything of my work. Lads, no doubt, should not be admitted who have none of the small acquirements that are wanted. Our offices should not be schools in which writing and early lessons in geography, arithmetic, or French should be learned. But all that could be ascertained without the perils of competitive examination. The desire to insure the efficiency of the young men selected, has not been the only object--perhaps not the chief object--of those who have yielded in this matter to the arguments of the reformers. There had arisen in England a system of patronage, under which it had become gradually necessary for politicians to use their influence for the purchase of political support. A member of the House of Commons, holding office, who might chance to have five clerkships to give away in a year, found himself compelled to distribute them among those who sent him to the House. In this there was nothing pleasant to the distributer of patronage. Do away with the system altogether, and he would have as much chance of support as another. He bartered his patronage only because another did so also. The beggings, the refusings, the jealousies, the correspondence, were simply troublesome. Gentlemen in office were not therefore indisposed to rid themselves of the care of patronage. I have no doubt their hands are the cleaner and their hearts are the lighter; but I do doubt whether the offices are on the whole better manned. As what I now write will certainly never be read till I am dead, I may dare to say what no one now does dare to say in print,--though some of us whisper it occasionally into our friends' ears. There are places in life which can hardly be well filled except by "Gentlemen." The word is one the use of which almost subjects one to ignominy. If I say that a judge should be a gentleman, or a bishop, I am met with a scornful allusion to "Nature's Gentlemen." Were I to make such an assertion with reference to the House of Commons, nothing that I ever said again would receive the slightest attention. A man in public life could not do himself a greater injury than by saying in public that the commissions in the army or navy, or berths in the Civil Service, should be given exclusively to gentlemen. He would be defied to define the term,--and would fail should he attempt to do so. But he would know what he meant, and so very probably would they who defied him. It may be that the son of the butcher of the village shall become as well fitted for employments requiring gentle culture as the son of the parson. Such is often the case. When such is the case, no one has been more prone to give the butcher's son all the welcome he has merited than I myself; but the chances are greatly in favour of the parson's son. The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to the one class nor to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference. The system of competitive examination is, I think, based on a supposition that there is no difference. I got into my place without any examining. Looking back now, I think I can see with accuracy what was then the condition of my own mind and intelligence. Of things to be learned by lessons I knew almost less than could be supposed possible after the amount of schooling I had received. I could read neither French, Latin, nor Greek. I could speak no foreign language,--and I may as well say here as elsewhere that I never acquired the power of really talking French. I have been able to order my dinner and take a railway ticket, but never got much beyond that. Of the merest rudiments of the sciences I was completely ignorant. My handwriting was in truth wretched. My spelling was imperfect. There was no subject as to which examination would have been possible on which I could have gone through an examination otherwise than disgracefully. And yet I think I knew more than the average of young men of the same rank who began life at nineteen. I could have given a fuller list of the names of the poets of all countries, with their subjects and periods,--and probably of historians,--than many others; and had, perhaps, a more accurate idea of the manner in which my own country was governed. I knew the names of all the Bishops, all the Judges, all the Heads of Colleges, and all the Cabinet Ministers,--not a very useful knowledge indeed, but one that had not been acquired without other matter which was more useful. I had read Shakespeare and Byron and Scott, and could talk about them. The music of the Miltonic line was familiar to me. I had already made up my mind that _Pride and Prejudice_ was the best novel in the English language,--a palm which I only partially withdrew after a second reading of _Ivanhoe_, and did not completely bestow elsewhere till _Esmond_ was written. And though I would occasionally break down in my spelling, I could write a letter. If I had a thing to say, I could so say it in written words that the readers should know what I meant,--a power which is by no means at the command of all those who come out from these competitive examinations with triumph. Early in life, at the age of fifteen, I had commenced the dangerous habit of keeping a journal, and this I maintained for ten years. The volumes remained in my possession unregarded--never looked at--till 1870, when I examined them, and, with many blushes, destroyed them. They convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, extravagance, and conceit. But they had habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility. I will mention here another habit which had grown upon me from still earlier years,--which I myself often regarded with dismay when I thought of the hours devoted to it, but which, I suppose, must have tended to make me what I have been. As a boy, even as a child, I was thrown much upon myself. I have explained, when speaking of my school-days, how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone, and had to form my plays within myself. Play of some kind was necessary to me then, as it has always been. Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced,--nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke,--much less when my height and personal appearance were fixed could I be an Antinous, or six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart, and open of hand, and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since. This had been the occupation of my life for six or seven years before I went to the Post Office, and was by no means abandoned when I commenced my work. There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life. In after years I have done the same,--with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside. I must certainly acknowledge that the first seven years of my official life were neither creditable to myself nor useful to the public service. These seven years were passed in London, and during this period of my life it was my duty to be present every morning at the office punctually at 10 A.M. I think I commenced my quarrels with the authorities there by having in my possession a watch which was always ten minutes late. I know that I very soon achieved a character for irregularity, and came to be regarded as a black sheep by men around me who were not themselves, I think, very good public servants. From time to time rumours reached me that if I did not take care I should be dismissed; especially one rumour in my early days, through my dearly beloved friend Mrs. Clayton Freeling,--who, as I write this, is still living, and who, with tears in her eyes, besought me to think of my mother. That was during the life of Sir Francis Freeling, who died,--still in harness,--a little more than twelve months after I joined the office. And yet the old man showed me signs of almost affectionate kindness, writing to me with his own hand more than once from his death-bed. Sir Francis Freeling was followed at the Post Office by Colonel Maberly, who certainly was not my friend. I do not know that I deserved to find a friend in my new master, but I think that a man with better judgment would not have formed so low an opinion of me as he did. Years have gone by, and I can write now, and almost feel, without anger; but I can remember well the keenness of my anguish when I was treated as though I were unfit for any useful work. I did struggle--not to do the work, for there was nothing which was not easy without any struggling--but to show that I was willing to do it. My bad character nevertheless stuck to me, and was not to be got rid of by any efforts within my power. I do admit that I was irregular. It was not considered to be much in my favour that I could write letters--which was mainly the work of our office--rapidly, correctly, and to the purpose. The man who came at ten, and who was always still at his desk at half-past four, was preferred before me, though when at his desk he might be less efficient. Such preference was no doubt proper; but, with a little encouragement, I also would have been punctual. I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. As it was, the conduct of some of us was very bad. There was a comfortable sitting-room up-stairs, devoted to the use of some one of our number who in turn was required to remain in the place all night. Hither one or two of us would adjourn after lunch, and play _écarté_ for an hour or two. I do not know whether such ways are possible now in our public offices. And here we used to have suppers and card-parties at night--great symposiums, with much smoking of tobacco; for in our part of the building there lived a whole bevy of clerks. These were gentlemen whose duty it then was to make up and receive the foreign mails. I do not remember that they worked later or earlier than the other sorting-clerks; but there was supposed to be something special in foreign letters, which required that the men who handled them should have minds undistracted by the outer world. Their salaries, too, were higher than those of their more homely brethren; and they paid nothing for their lodgings. Consequently there was a somewhat fast set in those apartments, given to cards and to tobacco, who drank spirits and water in preference to tea. I was not one of them, but was a good deal with them. I do not know that I should interest my readers by saying much of my Post Office experiences in those days. I was always on the eve of being dismissed, and yet was always striving to show how good a public servant I could become, if only a chance were given me. But the chance went the wrong way. On one occasion, in the performance of my duty, I had to put a private letter containing bank-notes on the secretary's table,--which letter I had duly opened, as it was not marked private. The letter was seen by the Colonel, but had not been moved by him when he left the room. On his return it was gone. In the meantime I had returned to the room, again in the performance of some duty. When the letter was missed I was sent for, and there I found the Colonel much moved about his letter, and a certain chief clerk, who, with a long face, was making suggestions as to the probable fate of the money. "The letter has been taken," said the Colonel, turning to me angrily, "and, by G----! there has been nobody in the room but you and I." As he spoke, he thundered his fist down upon the table. "Then," said I, "by G----! you have taken it." And I also thundered my fist down;--but, accidentally, not upon the table. There was there a standing movable desk, at which, I presume, it was the Colonel's habit to write, and on this movable desk was a large bottle full of ink. My fist unfortunately came on the desk, and the ink at once flew up, covering the Colonel's face and shirt-front. Then it was a sight to see that senior clerk, as he seized a quire of blotting-paper, and rushed to the aid of his superior officer, striving to mop up the ink; and a sight also to see the Colonel, in his agony, hit right out through the blotting-paper at that senior clerk's unoffending stomach. At that moment there came in the Colonel's private secretary, with the letter and the money, and I was desired to go back to my own room. This was an incident not much in my favour, though I do not know that it did me special harm. I was always in trouble. A young woman down in the country had taken it into her head that she would like to marry me,--and a very foolish young woman she must have been to entertain such a wish. I need not tell that part of the story more at length, otherwise than by protesting that no young man in such a position was ever much less to blame than I had been in this. The invitation had come from her, and I had lacked the pluck to give it a decided negative; but I had left the house within half an hour, going away without my dinner, and had never returned to it. Then there was a correspondence,--if that can be called a correspondence in which all the letters came from one side. At last the mother appeared at the Post Office. My hair almost stands on my head now as I remember the figure of the woman walking into the big room in which I sat with six or seven other clerks, having a large basket on her arm and an immense bonnet on her head. The messenger had vainly endeavoured to persuade her to remain in the ante-room. She followed the man in, and walking up the centre of the room, addressed me in a loud voice: "Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?" We have all had our worst moments, and that was one of my worst. I lived through it, however, and did not marry the young lady. These little incidents were all against me in the office. And then a certain other phase of my private life crept into official view, and did me a damage. As I shall explain just now, I rarely at this time had any money wherewith to pay my bills. In this state of things a certain tailor had taken from me an acceptance for, I think, £12, which found its way into the hands of a money-lender. With that man, who lived in a little street near Mecklenburgh Square, I formed a most heart-rending but a most intimate acquaintance. In cash I once received from him £4. For that and for the original amount of the tailor's bill, which grew monstrously under repeated renewals, I paid ultimately something over £200. That is so common a story as to be hardly worth the telling; but the peculiarity of this man was that he became so attached to me as to visit me every day at my office. For a long period he found it to be worth his while to walk up those stone steps daily, and come and stand behind my chair, whispering to me always the same words: "Now I wish you would be punctual. If you only would be punctual, I should like you to have anything you want." He was a little, clean, old man, who always wore a high starched white cravat, inside which he had a habit of twisting his chin as he uttered his caution. When I remember the constant persistency of his visits, I cannot but feel that he was paid very badly for his time and trouble. Those visits were very terrible, and can have hardly been of service to me in the office. Of one other misfortune which happened to me in those days I must tell the tale. A junior clerk in the secretary's office was always told off to sleep upon the premises, and he was supposed to be the presiding genius of the establishment when the other members of the Secretary's department had left the building. On an occasion when I was still little more than a lad,--perhaps one-and-twenty years old,--I was filling this responsible position. At about seven in the evening word was brought to me that the Queen of,--I think Saxony, but I am sure it was a Queen,--wanted to see the night mails sent out. At this time, when there were many mail-coaches, this was a show, and august visitors would sometimes come to see it. But preparation was generally made beforehand, and some pundit of the office would be at hand to do the honours. On this occasion we were taken by surprise, and there was no pundit. I therefore gave the orders, and accompanied her Majesty around the building, walking backwards, as I conceived to be proper, and often in great peril as I did so, up and down the stairs. I was, however, quite satisfied with my own manner of performing an unaccustomed and most important duty. There were two old gentlemen with her Majesty, who, no doubt, were German barons, and an ancient baroness also. They had come and, when they had seen the sights, took their departure in two glass coaches. As they were preparing to go, I saw the two barons consulting together in deep whispers, and then as the result of that conversation one of them handed me half-a-crown! That also was a bad moment. I came up to town, as I said before, purporting to live a jolly life upon £90 per annum. I remained seven years in the General Post Office, and when I left it my income was £140. During the whole of this time I was hopelessly in debt. There were two intervals, amounting together to nearly two years, in which I lived with my mother, and therefore lived in comfort,--but even then I was overwhelmed with debt. She paid much for me,--paid all that I asked her to pay, and all that she could find out that I owed. But who in such a condition ever tells all and makes a clean breast of it? The debts, of course, were not large, but I cannot think now how I could have lived, and sometimes have enjoyed life, with such a burden of duns as I endured. Sheriff's officers with uncanny documents, of which I never understood anything, were common attendants on me. And yet I do not remember that I was ever locked up, though I think I was twice a prisoner. In such emergencies some one paid for me. And now, looking back at it, I have to ask myself whether my youth was very wicked. I did no good in it; but was there fair ground for expecting good from me? When I reached London no mode of life was prepared for me,--no advice even given to me. I went into lodgings, and then had to dispose of my time. I belonged to no club, and knew very few friends who would receive me into their houses. In such a condition of life a young man should no doubt go home after his work, and spend the long hours of the evening in reading good books and drinking tea. A lad brought up by strict parents, and without having had even a view of gayer things, might perhaps do so. I had passed all my life at public schools, where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. Towards the good books and tea no training had been given me. There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice. No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man. Of course if the mind be strong enough, and the general stuff knitted together of sufficiently stern material, the temptations will not prevail. But such minds and such material are, I think, uncommon. The temptation at any rate prevailed with me. I wonder how many young men fall utterly to pieces from being turned loose into London after the same fashion. Mine was, I think, of all phases of such life the most dangerous. The lad who is sent to mechanical work has longer hours, during which he is kept from danger, and has not generally been taught in his boyhood to anticipate pleasure. He looks for hard work and grinding circumstances. I certainly had enjoyed but little pleasure, but I had been among those who did enjoy it and were taught to expect it. And I had filled my mind with the ideas of such joys. And now, except during official hours, I was entirely without control,--without the influences of any decent household around me. I have said something of the comedy of such life, but it certainly had its tragic aspect. Turning it all over in my own mind, as I have constantly done in after years, the tragedy has always been uppermost. And so it was as the time was passing. Could there be any escape from such dirt? I would ask myself; and I always answered that there was no escape. The mode of life was itself wretched. I hated the office. I hated my work. More than all I hated my idleness. I had often told myself since I left school that the only career in life within my reach was that of an author, and the only mode of authorship open to me that of a writer of novels. In the journal which I read and destroyed a few years since, I found the matter argued out before I had been in the Post Office two years. Parliament was out of the question. I had not means to go to the Bar. In official life, such as that to which I had been introduced, there did not seem to be any opening for real success. Pens and paper I could command. Poetry I did not believe to be within my grasp. The drama, too, which I would fain have chosen, I believed to be above me. For history, biography, or essay writing I had not sufficient erudition. But I thought it possible that I might write a novel. I had resolved very early that in that shape must the attempt be made. But the months and years ran on, and no attempt was made. And yet no day was passed without thoughts of attempting, and a mental acknowledgment of the disgrace of postponing it. What reader will not understand the agony of remorse produced by such a condition of mind? The gentleman from Mecklenburgh Square was always with me in the morning,--always angering me by his hateful presence,--but when the evening came I could make no struggle towards getting rid of him. In those days I read a little, and did learn to read French and Latin. I made myself familiar with Horace, and became acquainted with the works of our own greatest poets. I had my strong enthusiasms, and remember throwing out of the window in Northumberland Street, where I lived, a volume of Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_, because he spoke sneeringly of _Lycidas_. That was Northumberland Street by the Marylebone Workhouse, on to the back-door of which establishment my room looked out--a most dreary abode, at which I fancy I must have almost ruined the good-natured lodging-house keeper by my constant inability to pay her what I owed. How I got my daily bread I can hardly remember. But I do remember that I was often unable to get myself a dinner. Young men generally now have their meals provided for them. I kept house, as it were. Every day I had to find myself with the day's food. For my breakfast I could get some credit at the lodgings, though that credit would frequently come to an end. But for all that I had often breakfast to pay day by day; and at your eating-house credit is not given. I had no friends on whom I could sponge regularly. Out on the Fulham Road I had an uncle, but his house was four miles from the Post Office, and almost as far from my own lodgings. Then came borrowings of money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery. Before I tell how it came about that I left this wretched life, I must say a word or two of the friendships which lessened its misfortunes. My earliest friend in life was John Merivale, with whom I had been at school at Sunbury and Harrow, and who was a nephew of my tutor, Harry Drury. Herman Merivale, who afterwards became my friend, was his brother, as is also Charles Merivale, the historian and Dean of Ely. I knew John when I was ten years old, and am happy to be able to say that he is going to dine with me one day this week. I hope I may not injure his character by stating that in those days I lived very much with him. He, too, was impecunious, but he had a home in London, and knew but little of the sort of penury which I endured. For more than fifty years he and I have been close friends. And then there was one W---- A----, whose misfortunes in life will not permit me to give his full name, but whom I dearly loved. He had been at Winchester and at Oxford, and at both places had fallen into trouble. He then became a schoolmaster,--or perhaps I had better say usher,--and finally he took orders. But he was unfortunate in all things, and died some years ago in poverty. He was most perverse; bashful to very fear of a lady's dress; unable to restrain himself in anything, but yet with a conscience that was always stinging him; a loving friend, though very quarrelsome; and, perhaps, of all men I have known, the most humorous. And he was entirely unconscious of his own humour. He did not know that he could so handle all matters as to create infinite amusement out of them. Poor W---- A----! To him there came no happy turning-point at which life loomed seriously on him, and then became prosperous. W---- A----, Merivale, and I formed a little club, which we called the Tramp Society, and subjected to certain rules, in obedience to which we wandered on foot about the counties adjacent to London. Southampton was the furthest point we ever reached; but Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire were more dear to us. These were the happiest hours of my then life--and perhaps not the least innocent, although we were frequently in peril from the village authorities whom we outraged. Not to pay for any conveyance, never to spend above five shillings a day, to obey all orders from the elected ruler of the hour (this enforced under heavy fines), were among our statutes. I would fain tell here some of our adventures:--how A---- enacted an escaped madman and we his pursuing keepers, and so got ourselves a lift in a cart, from which we ran away as we approached the lunatic asylum; how we were turned out of a little town at night, the townsfolk frightened by the loudness of our mirth; and how we once crept into a hayloft and were wakened in the dark morning by a pitchfork,--and how the juvenile owner of that pitchfork fled through the window when he heard the complaints of the wounded man! But the fun was the fun of W---- A----, and would cease to be fun as told by me. It was during these years that John Tilley, who has now been for many years the permanent senior officer of the Post Office, married my sister, whom he took with him into Cumberland, where he was stationed as one of our surveyors. He has been my friend for more than forty years; as has also Peregrine Birch, a clerk in the House of Lords, who married one of those daughters of Colonel Grant who assisted us in the raid we made on the goods which had been seized by the Sheriff's officer at Harrow. These have been the oldest and dearest friends of my life; and I can thank God that three of them are still alive. When I had been nearly seven years in the Secretary's office of the Post Office, always hating my position there, and yet always fearing that I should be dismissed from it, there came a way of escape. There had latterly been created in the service a new body of officers called surveyors' clerks. There were at that time seven surveyors in England, two in Scotland, and three in Ireland. To each of these officers a clerk had been lately attached, whose duty it was to travel about the country under the surveyor's orders. There had been much doubt among the young men in the office whether they should or should not apply for these places. The emoluments were good and the work alluring; but there was at first supposed to be something derogatory in the position. There was a rumour that the first surveyor who got a clerk sent the clerk out to fetch his beer; and that another had called upon his clerk to send the linen to the wash. There was, however, a conviction that nothing could be worse than the berth of a surveyor's clerk in Ireland. The clerks were all appointed, however. To me it had not occurred to ask for anything, nor would anything have been given me. But after a while there came a report from the far west of Ireland that the man sent there was absurdly incapable. It was probably thought then that none but a man absurdly incapable would go on such a mission to the west of Ireland. When the report reached the London office I was the first to read it. I was at that time in dire trouble, having debts on my head and quarrels with our Secretary-Colonel, and a full conviction that my life was taking me downwards to the lowest pits. So I went to the Colonel boldly, and volunteered for Ireland if he would send me. He was glad to be so rid of me, and I went. This happened in August, 1841, when I was twenty-six years old. My salary in Ireland was to be but £100 a year; but I was to receive fifteen shillings a day for every day that I was away from home, and sixpence for every mile that I travelled. The same allowances were made in England; but at that time travelling in Ireland was done at half the English prices. My income in Ireland, after paying my expenses, became at once £400. This was the first good fortune of my life. CHAPTER IV. IRELAND--MY FIRST TWO NOVELS. 1841-1848. In the preceding pages I have given a short record of the first twenty-six years of my life,--years of suffering, disgrace, and inward remorse. I fear that my mode of telling will have left an idea simply of their absurdities; but in truth I was wretched,--sometimes almost unto death, and have often cursed the hour in which I was born. There had clung to me a feeling that I had been looked upon always as an evil, an encumbrance, a useless thing,--as a creature of whom those connected with him had to be ashamed. And I feel certain now that in my young days I was so regarded. Even my few friends who had found with me a certain capacity for enjoyment were half afraid of me. I acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved,--of a strong wish to be popular with my associates. No child, no boy, no lad, no young man, had ever been less so. And I had been so poor; and so little able to bear poverty. But from the day on which I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me. Since that time who has had a happier life than mine? Looking round upon all those I know, I cannot put my hand upon one. But all is not over yet. And, mindful of that, remembering how great is the agony of adversity, how crushing the despondency of degradation, how susceptible I am myself to the misery coming from contempt,--remembering also how quickly good things may go and evil things come,--I am often again tempted to hope, almost to pray, that the end may be near. Things may be going well now-- "Sin aliquem infandum casum, Fortuna, minaris; Nunc, o nunc liceat crudelem abrumpere vitam." There is unhappiness so great that the very fear of it is an alloy to happiness. I had then lost my father, and sister, and brother,--have since lost another sister and my mother;--but I have never as yet lost a wife or a child. When I told my friends that I was going on this mission to Ireland they shook their heads, but said nothing to dissuade me. I think it must have been evident to all who were my friends that my life in London was not a success. My mother and elder brother were at this time abroad, and were not consulted;--did not even know my intention in time to protest against it. Indeed, I consulted no one, except a dear old cousin, our family lawyer, from whom I borrowed £200 to help me out of England. He lent me the money, and looked upon me with pitying eyes,--shaking his head. "After all you were right to go," he said to me when I paid him the money a few years afterwards. But nobody then thought I was right to go. To become clerk to an Irish surveyor, in Connaught, with a salary of £100 a year, at twenty-six years of age! I did not think it right even myself,--except that anything was right which would take me away from the General Post Office and from London. My ideas of the duties I was to perform were very vague, as were also my ideas of Ireland generally. Hitherto I had passed my time, seated at a desk, either writing letters myself, or copying into books those which others had written. I had never been called upon to do anything I was unable or unfitted to do. I now understood that in Ireland I was to be a deputy-inspector of country post offices, and that among other things to be inspected would be the postmasters' accounts! But as no other person asked a question as to my fitness for this work, it seemed unnecessary for me to do so. On the 15th of September, 1841, I landed in Dublin, without an acquaintance in the country, and with only two or three letters of introduction from a brother clerk in the Post Office. I had learned to think that Ireland was a land flowing with fun and whisky, in which irregularity was the rule of life, and where broken heads were looked upon as honourable badges. I was to live at a place called Banagher, on the Shannon, which I had heard of because of its having once been conquered, though it had heretofore conquered everything, including the devil. And from Banagher my inspecting tours were to be made, chiefly into Connaught, but also over a strip of country eastwards, which would enable me occasionally to run up to Dublin. I went to a hotel which was very dirty, and after dinner I ordered some whisky punch. There was an excitement in this, but when the punch was gone I was very dull. It seemed so strange to be in a country in which there was not a single individual whom I had ever spoken to or ever seen. And it was to be my destiny to go down into Connaught and adjust accounts,--the destiny of me who had never learned the multiplication table, or done a sum in long division! On the next morning I called on the Secretary of the Irish Post Office, and learned from him that Colonel Maberly had sent a very bad character with me. He could not have sent a very good one; but I felt a little hurt when I was informed by this new master that he had been informed that I was worthless, and must in all probability be dismissed. "But," said the new master, "I shall judge you by your own merits." From that time to the day on which I left the service, I never heard a word of censure, nor had many months passed before I found that my services were valued. Before a year was over, I had acquired the character of a thoroughly good public servant. The time went very pleasantly. Some adventures I had;--two of which I told in the _Tales of All Countries_, under the names of _The O'Conors of Castle Conor_, and _Father Giles of Ballymoy_. I will not swear to every detail in these stories, but the main purport of each is true. I could tell many others of the same nature, were this the place for them. I found that the surveyor to whom I had been sent kept a pack of hounds, and therefore I bought a hunter. I do not think he liked it, but he could not well complain. He never rode to hounds himself, but I did; and then and thus began one of the great joys of my life. I have ever since been constant to the sport, having learned to love it with an affection which I cannot myself fathom or understand. Surely no man has laboured at it as I have done, or hunted under such drawbacks as to distances, money, and natural disadvantages. I am very heavy, very blind, have been--in reference to hunting--a poor man, and am now an old man. I have often had to travel all night outside a mail-coach, in order that I might hunt the next day. Nor have I ever been in truth a good horseman. And I have passed the greater part of my hunting life under the discipline of the Civil Service. But it has been for more than thirty years a duty to me to ride to hounds; and I have performed that duty with a persistent energy. Nothing has ever been allowed to stand in the way of hunting,--neither the writing of books, nor the work of the Post Office, nor other pleasures. As regarded the Post Office, it soon seemed to be understood that I was to hunt; and when my services were re-transferred to England, no word of difficulty ever reached me about it. I have written on very many subjects, and on most of them with pleasure; but on no subject with such delight as that on hunting. I have dragged it into many novels,--into too many no doubt,--but I have always felt myself deprived of a legitimate joy when the nature of the tale has not allowed me a hunting chapter. Perhaps that which gave me the greatest delight was the description of a run on a horse accidentally taken from another sportsman,--a circumstance which occurred to my dear friend Charles Buxton, who will be remembered as one of the members for Surrey. It was altogether a very jolly life that I led in Ireland. I was always moving about, and soon found myself to be in pecuniary circumstances which were opulent in comparison with those of my past life. The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever--the working classes very much more intelligent than those of England--economical, and hospitable. We hear much of their spendthrift nature; but extravagance is not the nature of an Irishman. He will count the shillings in a pound much more accurately than an Englishman, and will with much more certainty get twelve pennyworth from each. But they are perverse, irrational, and but little bound by the love of truth. I lived for many years among them--not finally leaving the country until 1859, and I had the means of studying their character. I had not been a fortnight in Ireland before I was sent down to a little town in the far west of county Galway, to balance a defaulting postmaster's accounts, find out how much he owed, and report upon his capacity to pay. In these days such accounts are very simple. They adjust themselves from day to day, and a Post Office surveyor has nothing to do with them. At that time, though the sums dealt with were small, the forms of dealing with them were very intricate. I went to work, however, and made that defaulting postmaster teach me the use of those forms. I then succeeded in balancing the account, and had no difficulty whatever in reporting that he was altogether unable to pay his debt. Of course he was dismissed;--but he had been a very useful man to me. I never had any further difficulty in the matter. But my chief work was the investigating of complaints made by the public as to postal matters. The practice of the office was and is to send one of its servants to the spot to see the complainant and to inquire into the facts, when the complainant is sufficiently energetic or sufficiently big to make himself well heard. A great expense is often incurred for a very small object; but the system works well on the whole as confidence is engendered, and a feeling is produced in the country that the department has eyes of its own and does keep them open. This employment was very pleasant, and to me always easy, as it required at its close no more than the writing of a report. There were no accounts in this business, no keeping of books, no necessary manipulation of multitudinous forms. I must tell of one such complaint and inquiry, because in its result I think it was emblematic of many. A gentleman in county Cavan had complained most bitterly of the injury done to him by some arrangement of the Post Office. The nature of his grievance has no present significance; but it was so unendurable that he had written many letters, couched in the strongest language. He was most irate, and indulged himself in that scorn which is so easy to an angry mind. The place was not in my district, but I was borrowed, being young and strong, that I might remember the edge of his personal wrath. It was mid-winter, and I drove up to his house, a squire's country seat, in the middle of a snow-storm, just as it was becoming dark. I was on an open jaunting-car, and was on my way from one little town to another, the cause of his complaint having reference to some mail conveyance between the two. I was certainly very cold, and very wet, and very uncomfortable when I entered his house. I was admitted by a butler, but the gentleman himself hurried into the hall. I at once began to explain my business. "God bless me!" he said, "you are wet through. John, get Mr. Trollope some brandy and water,--very hot." I was beginning my story about the post again when he himself took off my greatcoat, and suggested that I should go up to my bedroom before I troubled myself with business. "Bedroom!" I exclaimed. Then he assured me that he would not turn a dog out on such a night as that, and into a bedroom I was shown, having first drank the brandy and water standing at the drawing-room fire. When I came down I was introduced to his daughter, and the three of us went in to dinner. I shall never forget his righteous indignation when I again brought up the postal question on the departure of the young lady. Was I such a Goth as to contaminate wine with business? So I drank my wine, and then heard the young lady sing while her father slept in his arm-chair. I spent a very pleasant evening, but my host was too sleepy to hear anything about the Post Office that night. It was absolutely necessary that I should go away the next morning after breakfast, and I explained that the matter must be discussed then. He shook his head and wrung his hands in unmistakable disgust,--almost in despair. "But what am I to say in my report?" I asked. "Anything you please," he said. "Don't spare me, if you want an excuse for yourself. Here I sit all the day,--with nothing to do; and I like writing letters." I did report that Mr. ---- was now quite satisfied with the postal arrangement of his district; and I felt a soft regret that I should have robbed my friend of his occupation. Perhaps he was able to take up the Poor Law Board, or to attack the Excise. At the Post Office nothing more was heard from him. I went on with the hunting surveyor at Banagher for three years, during which, at Kingstown, the watering-place near Dublin, I met Rose Heseltine, the lady who has since become my wife. The engagement took place when I had been just one year in Ireland; but there was still a delay of two years before we could be married. She had no fortune, nor had I any income beyond that which came from the Post Office; and there were still a few debts, which would have been paid off no doubt sooner, but for that purchase of the horse. When I had been nearly three years in Ireland we were married on the 11th of June, 1844;--and perhaps I ought to name that happy day as the commencement of my better life, rather than the day on which I first landed in Ireland. For though during these three years I had been jolly enough, I had not been altogether happy. The hunting, the whisky punch, the rattling Irish life,--of which I could write a volume of stories were this the place to tell them,--were continually driving from my mind the still cherished determination to become a writer of novels. When I reached Ireland I had never put pen to paper; nor had I done so when I became engaged. And when I was married, being then twenty-nine, I had only written the first volume of my first work. This constant putting off of the day of work was a great sorrow to me. I certainly had not been idle in my new berth. I had learned my work, so that every one concerned knew that it was safe in my hands; and I held a position altogether the reverse of that in which I was always trembling while I remained in London. But that did not suffice,--did not nearly suffice. I still felt that there might be a career before me, if I could only bring myself to begin the work. I do not think I much doubted my own intellectual sufficiency for the writing of a readable novel. What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of the market. The vigour necessary to prosecute two professions at the same time is not given to every one, and it was only lately that I had found the vigour necessary for one. There must be early hours, and I had not as yet learned to love early hours. I was still, indeed, a young man; but hardly young enough to trust myself to find the power to alter the habits of my life. And I had heard of the difficulties of publishing,--a subject of which I shall have to say much should I ever bring this memoir to a close. I had dealt already with publishers on my mother's behalf, and knew that many a tyro who could fill a manuscript lacked the power to put his matter before the public;--and I knew, too, that when the matter was printed, how little had then been done towards the winning of the battle! I had already learned that many a book--many a good book-- "is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air." But still the purpose was strong within me, and the first effort was made after the following fashion. I was located at a little town called Drumsna, or rather village, in the county Leitrim, where the postmaster had come to some sorrow about his money; and my friend John Merivale was staying with me for a day or two. As we were taking a walk in that most uninteresting country, we turned up through a deserted gateway, along a weedy, grass-grown avenue, till we came to the modern ruins of a country house. It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited. I will not describe it here, because I have done so in the first chapter of my first novel. We wandered about the place, suggesting to each other causes for the misery we saw there, and while I was still among the ruined walls and decayed beams I fabricated the plot of _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_. As to the plot itself, I do not know that I ever made one so good,--or, at any rate, one so susceptible of pathos. I am aware that I broke down in the telling, not having yet studied the art. Nevertheless, _The Macdermots_ is a good novel, and worth reading by any one who wishes to understand what Irish life was before the potato disease, the famine, and the Encumbered Estates Bill. When my friend left me, I set to work and wrote the first chapter or two. Up to this time I had continued that practice of castle-building of which I have spoken; but now the castle I built was among the ruins of that old house. The book, however, hung with me. It was only now and then that I found either time or energy for a few pages. I commenced the book in September, 1843, and had only written a volume when I was married in June, 1844. My marriage was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to any one except my wife and me. It took place at Rotherham in Yorkshire, where her father was the manager of a bank. We were not very rich, having about £400 a year on which to live. Many people would say that we were two fools to encounter such poverty together. I can only reply that since that day I have never been without money in my pocket, and that I soon acquired the means of paying what I owed. Nevertheless, more than twelve years had to pass over our heads before I received any payment for any literary work which afforded an appreciable increase to our income. Immediately after our marriage, I left the west of Ireland and the hunting surveyor, and joined another in the south. It was a better district, and I was enabled to live at Clonmel, a town of some importance, instead of at Banagher, which is little more than a village. I had not felt myself to be comfortable in my old residence as a married man. On my arrival there as a bachelor I had been received most kindly, but when I brought my English wife I fancied that there was a feeling that I had behaved badly to Ireland generally. When a young man has been received hospitably in an Irish circle, I will not say that it is expected of him that he should marry some young lady in that society;--but it certainly is expected of him that he shall not marry any young lady out of it. I had given offence, and I was made to feel it. There has taken place a great change in Ireland since the days in which I lived at Banagher, and a change so much for the better, that I have sometimes wondered at the obduracy with which people have spoken of the permanent ill condition of the country. Wages are now nearly double what they were then. The Post Office at any rate is paying almost double for its rural labour,--9s. a week when it used to pay 5s., and 12s. a week when it used to pay 7s. Banks have sprung up in almost every village. Rents are paid with more than English punctuality. And the religious enmity between the classes, though it is not yet dead, is dying out. Soon after I reached Banagher in 1841, I dined one evening with a Roman Catholic. I was informed next day by a Protestant gentleman who had been very hospitable to me that I must choose my party. I could not sit both at Protestant and Catholic tables. Such a caution would now be impossible in any part of Ireland. Home-rule no doubt is a nuisance,--and especially a nuisance because the professors of the doctrine do not at all believe it themselves. There are probably no other twenty men in England or Ireland who would be so utterly dumfounded and prostrated were Home-rule to have its way as the twenty Irish members who profess to support it in the House of Commons. But it is not to be expected that nuisances such as these should be abolished at a blow. Home-rule is at any rate better and more easily managed than the rebellion at the close of the last century; it is better than the treachery of the Union; less troublesome than O'Connell's monster meetings; less dangerous than Smith O'Brien and the battle of the cabbage-garden at Ballingary; and very much less bloody than Fenianism. The descent from O'Connell to Mr. Butt has been the natural declension of a political disease, which we had no right to hope would be cured by any one remedy. When I had been married a year my first novel was finished. In July, 1845, I took it with me to the north of England, and intrusted the MS. to my mother to do with it the best she could among the publishers in London. No one had read it but my wife; nor, as far as I am aware, has any other friend of mine ever read a word of my writing before it was printed. She, I think, has so read almost everything, to my very great advantage in matters of taste. I am sure I have never asked a friend to read a line; nor have I ever read a word of my own writing aloud,--even to her. With one exception,--which shall be mentioned as I come to it,--I have never consulted a friend as to a plot, or spoken to any one of the work I have been doing. My first manuscript I gave up to my mother, agreeing with her that it would be as well that she should not look at it before she gave it to a publisher. I knew that she did not give me credit for the sort of cleverness necessary for such work. I could see in the faces and hear in the voices of those of my friends who were around me at the house in Cumberland--my mother, my sister, my brother-in-law, and, I think, my brother--that they had not expected me to come out as one of the family authors. There were three or four in the field before me, and it seemed to be almost absurd that another should wish to add himself to the number. My father had written much--those long ecclesiastical descriptions--quite unsuccessfully. My mother had become one of the popular authors of the day. My brother had commenced, and had been fairly well paid for his work. My sister, Mrs. Tilley, had also written a novel, which was at the time in manuscript--which was published afterwards without her name, and was called _Chollerton_. I could perceive that this attempt of mine was felt to be an unfortunate aggravation of the disease. My mother however did the best she could for me, and soon reported that Mr. Newby of Mortimer Street was to publish the book. It was to be printed at his expense, and he was to give me half the profits. Half the profits! Many a young author expects much from such an undertaking. I can with truth declare that I expected nothing. And I got nothing. Nor did I expect fame, or even acknowledgment. I was sure that the book would fail, and it did fail most absolutely. I never heard of a person reading it in those days. If there was any notice taken of it by any critic of the day, I did not see it. I never asked any questions about it, or wrote a single letter on the subject to the publisher. I have Mr. Newby's agreement with me, in duplicate, and one or two preliminary notes; but beyond that I did not have a word from Mr. Newby. I am sure that he did not wrong me in that he paid me nothing. It is probable that he did not sell fifty copies of the work;--but of what he did sell he gave me no account. I do not remember that I felt in any way disappointed or hurt. I am quite sure that no word of complaint passed my lips. I think I may say that after the publication I never said a word about the book, even to my wife. The fact that I had written and published it, and that I was writing another, did not in the least interfere with my life or with my determination to make the best I could of the Post Office. In Ireland, I think that no one knew that I had written a novel. But I went on writing. _The Macdermots_ was published in 1847, and _The Kellys and the O'Kellys_ followed in 1848. I changed my publisher, but did not change my fortune. This second Irish story was sent into the world by Mr. Colburn, who had long been my mother's publisher, who reigned in Great Marlborough Street, and I believe created the business which is now carried on by Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. He had previously been in partnership with Mr. Bentley in New Burlington Street. I made the same agreement as before as to half profits, and with precisely the same results. The book was not only not read, but was never heard of,--at any rate in Ireland. And yet it is a good Irish story, much inferior to _The Macdermots_ as to plot, but superior in the mode of telling. Again I held my tongue, and not only said nothing but felt nothing. Any success would, I think, have carried me off my legs, but I was altogether prepared for failure. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the writing of these books, I did not imagine, when the time came for publishing them, that any one would condescend to read them. But in reference to _The O'Kellys_ there arose a circumstance which set my mind to work on a subject which has exercised it much ever since. I made my first acquaintance with criticism. A dear friend of mine to whom the book had been sent--as have all my books--wrote me word to Ireland that he had been dining at some club with a man high in authority among the gods of the _Times_ newspaper, and that this special god had almost promised that _The O'Kellys_ should be noticed in that most influential of "organs." The information moved me very much; but it set me thinking whether the notice, should it ever appear, would not have been more valuable, at any rate more honest, if it had been produced by other means;--if for instance the writer of the notice had been instigated by the merits or demerits of the book instead of by the friendship of a friend. And I made up my mind then that, should I continue this trade of authorship, I would have no dealings with any critic on my own behalf. I would neither ask for nor deplore criticism, nor would I ever thank a critic for praise, or quarrel with him, even in my own heart, for censure. To this rule I have adhered with absolute strictness, and this rule I would recommend to all young authors. What can be got by touting among the critics is never worth the ignominy. The same may of course be said of all things acquired by ignominious means. But in this matter it is so easy to fall into the dirt. _Facilis descensus Averni._ There seems to be but little fault in suggesting to a friend that a few words in this or that journal would be of service. But any praise so obtained must be an injustice to the public, for whose instruction, and not for the sustentation of the author, such notices are intended. And from such mild suggestion the descent to crawling at the critic's feet, to the sending of presents, and at last to a mutual understanding between critics and criticised, is only too easy. Other evils follow, for the denouncing of which this is hardly the place;--though I trust I may find such place before my work is finished. I took no notice of my friend's letter, but I was not the less careful in watching _The Times_. At last the review came,--a real review in _The Times_. I learned it by heart, and can now give, if not the words, the exact purport. "Of _The Kellys and the O'Kellys_ we may say what the master said to his footman, when the man complained of the constant supply of legs of mutton on the kitchen table. 'Well, John, legs of mutton are good substantial food;' and we may say also what John replied: 'Substantial, sir;--yes, they are substantial, but a little coarse.'" That was the review, and even that did not sell the book! From Mr. Colburn I did receive an account, showing that 375 copies of the book had been printed, that 140 had been sold,--to those, I presume, who liked substantial food though it was coarse,--and that he had incurred a loss of £63, 10s. 1½d. The truth of the account I never for a moment doubted; nor did I doubt the wisdom of the advice given to me in the following letter, though I never thought of obeying it-- Great Marlborough Street, November 11, 1848. MY DEAR SIR.--I am sorry to say that absence from town and other circumstances have prevented me from earlier inquiring into the results of the sale of _The Kellys and the O'Kellys_, with which the greatest efforts have been used, but in vain. The sale has been, I regret to say, so small that the loss upon the publication is very considerable; and it appears clear to me that, although in consequence of the great number of novels that are published, the sale of each, with some few exceptions, must be small, yet it is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others. Thus you will perceive it is impossible for me to give any encouragement to you to proceed in novel-writing. As, however, I understand you have nearly finished the novel _La Vendée_, perhaps you will favour me with a sight of it when convenient.--I remain, &c. &c. H. COLBURN. This, though not strictly logical, was a rational letter, telling a plain truth plainly. I did not like the assurance that "the greatest efforts had been used," thinking that any efforts which might be made for the popularity of a book ought to have come from the author;--but I took in good part Mr. Colburn's assurance that he could not encourage me in the career I had commenced. I would have bet twenty to one against my own success. But by continuing I could lose only pen and paper; and if the one chance in twenty did turn up in my favour, then how much might I win! CHAPTER V. MY FIRST SUCCESS. 1849-1855. I had at once gone to work on a third novel, and had nearly completed it, when I was informed of the absolute failure of the former. I find however that the agreement for its publication was not made till 1850, by which time I imagine that Mr. Colburn must have forgotten the disastrous result of _The O'Kellys_, as he thereby agrees to give me £20 down for my "new historical novel, to be called _La Vendée_." He agreed also to pay me £30 more when he had sold 350 copies, and £50 more should he sell 450 within six months. I got my £20, and then heard no more of _La Vendée_, not even receiving any account. Perhaps the historical title had appeared more alluring to him than an Irish subject; though it was not long afterwards that I received a warning from the very same house of business against historical novels,--as I will tell at length when the proper time comes. I have no doubt that the result of the sale of this story was no better than that of the two that had gone before. I asked no questions, however, and to this day have received no information. The story is certainly inferior to those which had gone before;--chiefly because I knew accurately the life of the people in Ireland, and knew, in truth, nothing of life in the La Vendée country, and also because the facts of the present time came more within the limits of my powers of story-telling than those of past years. But I read the book the other day, and am not ashamed of it. The conception as to the feeling of the people is, I think, true; the characters are distinct; and the tale is not dull. As far as I can remember, this morsel of criticism is the only one that was ever written on the book. I had, however, received £20. Alas! alas! years were to roll by before I should earn by my pen another shilling. And, indeed, I was well aware that I had not earned that; but that the money had been "talked out of" the worthy publisher by the earnestness of my brother, who made the bargain for me. I have known very much of publishers and have been surprised by much in their mode of business,--by the apparent lavishness and by the apparent hardness to authors in the same men;--but by nothing so much as by the ease with which they can occasionally be persuaded to throw away small sums of money. If you will only make the payment future instead of present, you may generally twist a few pounds in your own or your client's favour. "You might as well promise her £20. This day six months will do very well." The publisher, though he knows that the money will never come back to him, thinks it worth his while to rid himself of your importunity at so cheap a price. But while I was writing _La Vendée_ I made a literary attempt in another direction. In 1847 and 1848 there had come upon Ireland the desolation and destruction, first of the famine, and then of the pestilence which succeeded the famine. It was my duty at that time to be travelling constantly in those parts of Ireland in which the misery and troubles thence arising were, perhaps, at their worst. The western parts of Cork, Kerry, and Clare were pre-eminently unfortunate. The efforts--I may say the successful efforts--made by the Government to stay the hands of death will still be in the remembrance of many:--how Sir Robert Peel was instigated to repeal the Corn Laws; and how, subsequently, Lord John Russell took measures for employing the people, and supplying the country with Indian corn. The expediency of these latter measures was questioned by many. The people themselves wished of course to be fed without working; and the gentry, who were mainly responsible for the rates, were disposed to think that the management of affairs was taken too much out of their own hands. My mind at the time was busy with the matter, and, thinking that the Government was right, I was inclined to defend them as far as my small powers went. S. G. O. (Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne) was at that time denouncing the Irish scheme of the Administration in the _Times_, using very strong language,--as those who remember his style will know. I fancied then--as I still think--that I understood the country much better than he did; and I was anxious to show that the steps taken for mitigating the terrible evil of the times were the best which the Minister of the day could have adopted. In 1848 I was in London, and, full of my purpose, I presented myself to Mr. John Forster--who has since been an intimate and valued friend--but who was at that time the editor of the _Examiner_. I think that that portion of the literary world which understands the fabrication of newspapers will admit that neither before his time, nor since, has there been a more capable editor of a weekly newspaper. As a literary man, he was not without his faults. That which the cabman is reported to have said of him before the magistrate is quite true. He was always "an arbitrary cove." As a critic, he belonged to the school of Bentley and Gifford,--who would always bray in a literary mortar all critics who disagreed from them, as though such disagreement were a personal offence requiring personal castigation. But that very eagerness made him a good editor. Into whatever he did he put his very heart and soul. During his time the _Examiner_ was almost all that a Liberal weekly paper should be. So to John Forster I went, and was shown into that room in Lincoln's Inn Fields in which, some three or four years earlier, Dickens had given that reading of which there is an illustration with portraits in the second volume of his life. At this time I knew no literary men. A few I had met when living with my mother, but that had been now so long ago that all such acquaintance had died out. I knew who they were as far as a man could get such knowledge from the papers of the day, and felt myself as in part belonging to the guild, through my mother, and in some degree by my own unsuccessful efforts. But it was not probable that any one would admit my claim;--nor on this occasion did I make any claim. I stated my name and official position, and the fact that opportunities had been given me of seeing the poor-houses in Ireland, and of making myself acquainted with the circumstances of the time. Would a series of letters on the subject be accepted by the _Examiner_? The great man, who loomed very large to me, was pleased to say that if the letters should recommend themselves by their style and matter, if they were not too long, and if--every reader will know how on such occasions an editor will guard himself--if this and if that, they should be favourably entertained. They were favourably entertained,--if printing and publication be favourable entertainment. But I heard no more of them. The world in Ireland did not declare that the Government had at last been adequately defended, nor did the treasurer of the _Examiner_ send me a cheque in return. Whether there ought to have been a cheque I do not even yet know. A man who writes a single letter to a newspaper of course is not paid for it,--nor for any number of letters on some point personal to himself. I have since written sets of letters to newspapers, and have been paid for them; but then I have bargained for a price. On this occasion I had hopes; but they never ran high, and I was not much disappointed. I have no copy now of those letters, and could not refer to them without much trouble; nor do I remember what I said. But I know that I did my best in writing them. When my historical novel failed, as completely as had its predecessors, the two Irish novels, I began to ask myself whether, after all, that was my proper line. I had never thought of questioning the justice of the verdict expressed against me. The idea that I was the unfortunate owner of unappreciated genius never troubled me. I did not look at the books after they were published, feeling sure that they had been, as it were, damned with good reason. But still I was clear in my mind that I would not lay down my pen. Then and therefore I determined to change my hand, and to attempt a play. I did attempt the play, and in 1850 I wrote a comedy, partly in blank verse, and partly in prose, called _The Noble Jilt_. The plot I afterwards used in a novel called _Can You Forgive Her?_ I believe that I did give the best of my intellect to the play, and I must own that when it was completed it pleased me much. I copied it, and re-copied it, touching it here and touching it there, and then sent it to my very old friend, George Bartley the actor, who had when I was in London been stage-manager of one of the great theatres, and who would, I thought, for my own sake and for my mother's, give me the full benefit of his professional experience. I have now before me the letter which he wrote to me,--a letter which I have read a score of times. It was altogether condemnatory. "When I commenced," he said, "I had great hopes of your production. I did not think it opened dramatically, but that might have been remedied." I knew then that it was all over. But, as my old friend warmed to the subject, the criticism became stronger and stronger, till my ears tingled. At last came the fatal blow. "As to the character of your heroine, I felt at a loss how to describe it, but you have done it for me in the last speech of Madame Brudo." Madame Brudo was the heroine's aunt. "'Margaret, my child, never play the jilt again; 'tis a most unbecoming character. Play it with what skill you will, it meets but little sympathy.' And this, be assured, would be its effect upon an audience. So that I must reluctantly add that, had I been still a manager, _The Noble Jilt_ is not a play I could have recommended for production." This was a blow that I did feel. The neglect of a book is a disagreeable fact which grows upon an author by degrees. There is no special moment of agony,--no stunning violence of condemnation. But a piece of criticism such as this, from a friend, and from a man undoubtedly capable of forming an opinion, was a blow in the face! But I accepted the judgment loyally, and said not a word on the subject to any one. I merely showed the letter to my wife, declaring my conviction, that it must be taken as gospel. And as critical gospel it has since been accepted. In later days I have more than once read the play, and I know that he was right. The dialogue, however, I think to be good, and I doubt whether some of the scenes be not the brightest and best work I ever did. Just at this time another literary project loomed before my eyes, and for six or eight months had considerable size. I was introduced to Mr. John Murray, and proposed to him to write a handbook for Ireland. I explained to him that I knew the country better than most other people, perhaps better than any other person, and could do it well. He asked me to make a trial of my skill, and to send him a certain number of pages, undertaking to give me an answer within a fortnight after he should have received my work. I came back to Ireland, and for some weeks I laboured very hard. I "did" the city of Dublin, and the county of Kerry, in which lies the lake scenery of Killarney; and I "did" the route from Dublin to Killarney, altogether completing nearly a quarter of the proposed volume. The roll of MS. was sent to Albemarle Street,--but was never opened. At the expiration of nine months from the date on which it reached that time-honoured spot it was returned without a word, in answer to a very angry letter from myself. I insisted on having back my property,--and got it. I need hardly say that my property has never been of the slightest use to me. In all honesty I think that had he been less dilatory, John Murray would have got a very good Irish Guide at a cheap rate. Early in 1851 I was sent upon a job of special official work, which for two years so completely absorbed my time that I was able to write nothing. A plan was formed for extending the rural delivery of letters, and for adjusting the work, which up to that time had been done in a very irregular manner. A country letter-carrier would be sent in one direction in which there were but few letters to be delivered, the arrangement having originated probably at the request of some influential person, while in another direction there was no letter-carrier because no influential person had exerted himself. It was intended to set this right throughout England, Ireland, and Scotland; and I quickly did the work in the Irish district to which I was attached. I was then invited to do the same in a portion of England, and I spent two of the happiest years of my life at the task. I began in Devonshire; and visited, I think I may say, every nook in that county, in Cornwall, Somersetshire, the greater part of Dorsetshire, the Channel Islands, part of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business after a fashion in which no other official man has worked, at least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired a third horse. I had an Irish groom with me,--an old man, who has now been in my service for thirty-five years; and in this manner I saw almost every house--I think I may say every house of importance--in this large district. The object was to create a postal network which should catch all recipients of letters. In France it was, and I suppose still is, the practice to deliver every letter. Wherever the man may live to whom a letter is addressed, it is the duty of some letter-carrier to take that letter to his house, sooner or later. But this, of course, must be done slowly. With us a delivery much delayed was thought to be worse than none at all. In some places we did establish posts three times a week, and perhaps occasionally twice a week; but such halting arrangements were considered to be objectionable, and we were bound down by a salutary law as to expense, which came from our masters at the Treasury. We were not allowed to establish any messenger's walk on which a sufficient number of letters would not be delivered to pay the man's wages, counted at a halfpenny a letter. But then the counting was in our own hands, and an enterprising official might be sanguine in his figures. I think I was sanguine. I did not prepare false accounts; but I fear that the postmasters and clerks who absolutely had the country to do became aware that I was anxious for good results. It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural letter-carriers. I do not remember that in any case a rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities; but I fear that some of them broke down afterwards as being too poor, or because, in my anxiety to include this house and that, I had sent the men too far afield. Our law was that a man should not be required to walk more than sixteen miles a day. Had the work to be done been all on a measured road, there would have been no need for doubt as to the distances. But my letter-carriers went here and there across the fields. It was my special delight to take them by all short cuts; and as I measured on horseback the short cuts which they would have to make on foot, perhaps I was sometimes a little unjust to them. All this I did on horseback, riding on an average forty miles a day. I was paid sixpence a mile for the distance travelled, and it was necessary that I should at any rate travel enough to pay for my equipage. This I did, and got my hunting out of it also. I have often surprised some small country postmaster, who had never seen or heard of me before, by coming down upon him at nine in the morning, with a red coat and boots and breeches, and interrogating him as to the disposal of every letter which came into his office. And in the same guise I would ride up to farmhouses, or parsonages, or other lone residences about the country, and ask the people how they got their letters, at what hour, and especially whether they were delivered free or at a certain charge. For a habit had crept into use, which came to be, in my eyes, at that time, the one sin for which there was no pardon, in accordance with which these rural letter-carriers used to charge a penny a letter, alleging that the house was out of their beat, and that they must be paid for their extra work. I think that I did stamp out that evil. In all these visits I was, in truth, a beneficent angel to the public, bringing everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery of letters. But not unfrequently the angelic nature of my mission was imperfectly understood. I was perhaps a little in a hurry to get on, and did not allow as much time as was necessary to explain to the wondering mistress of the house, or to an open-mouthed farmer, why it was that a man arrayed for hunting asked so many questions which might be considered impertinent, as applying to his or her private affairs. "Good morning, sir. I have just called to ask a few questions. I am a surveyor of the Post Office. How do you get your letters? As I am a little in a hurry, perhaps you can explain at once." Then I would take out my pencil and notebook, and wait for information. And in fact there was no other way in which the truth could be ascertained. Unless I came down suddenly as a summer's storm upon them, the very people who were robbed by our messengers would not confess the robbery, fearing the ill-will of the men. It was necessary to startle them into the revelations which I required them to make for their own good. And I did startle them. I became thoroughly used to it, and soon lost my native bashfulness;--but sometimes my visits astonished the retiring inhabitants of country houses. I did, however, do my work, and can look back upon what I did with thorough satisfaction. I was altogether in earnest; and I believe that many a farmer now has his letters brought daily to his house free of charge, who but for me would still have had to send to the post-town for them twice a week, or to have paid a man for bringing them irregularly to his door. This work took up my time so completely, and entailed upon me so great an amount of writing, that I was in fact unable to do any literary work. From day to day I thought of it, still purporting to make another effort, and often turning over in my head some fragment of a plot which had occurred to me. But the day did not come in which I could sit down with pen and paper and begin another novel. For, after all, what could it be but a novel? The play had failed more absolutely than the novels, for the novels had attained the honour of print. The cause of this pressure of official work lay, not in the demands of the General Post Office, which more than once expressed itself as astonished by my celerity, but in the necessity which was incumbent on me to travel miles enough to pay for my horses, and upon the amount of correspondence, returns, figures, and reports which such an amount of daily travelling brought with it. I may boast that the work was done very quickly and very thoroughly,--with no fault but an over-eagerness to extend postal arrangements far and wide. In the course of the job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there one midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of _The Warden_,--from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon, was the central site. I may as well declare at once that no one at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to presume himself to be able to write about clergymen. I have been often asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a Close. I never lived in any cathedral city,--except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon, who has been said to be life-like, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent's fond affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness. It was such as that, in my opinion, that an archdeacon should be,--or, at any rate, would be with such advantages as an archdeacon might have; and lo! an archdeacon was produced, who has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon down to the very ground. And yet, as far as I can remember, I had not then even spoken to an archdeacon. I have felt the compliment to be very great. The archdeacon came whole from my brain after this fashion;--but in writing about clergymen generally, I had to pick up as I went whatever I might know or pretend to know about them. But my first idea had no reference to clergymen in general. I had been struck by two opposite evils,--or what seemed to me to be evils,--and with an absence of all art-judgment in such matters, I thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe them, both in one and the same tale. The first evil was the possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered to be the chief sinners in the matter. When a man is appointed to a place, it is natural that he should accept the income allotted to that place without much inquiry. It is seldom that he will be the first to find out that his services are overpaid. Though he be called upon only to look beautiful and to be dignified upon State occasions, he will think £2000 a year little enough for such beauty and dignity as he brings to the task. I felt that there had been some tearing to pieces which might have been spared. But I was altogether wrong in supposing that the two things could be combined. Any writer in advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of an advocate,--or his writing will be ineffective. He should take up one side and cling to that, and then he may be powerful. There should be no scruples of conscience. Such scruples make a man impotent for such work. It was open to me to have described a bloated parson, with a red nose and all other iniquities, openly neglecting every duty required from him, and living riotously on funds purloined from the poor,--defying as he did do so the moderate remonstrances of a virtuous press. Or I might have painted a man as good, as sweet, and as mild as my warden, who should also have been a hard-working, ill-paid minister of God's word, and might have subjected him to the rancorous venom of some daily _Jupiter_, who, without a leg to stand on, without any true case, might have been induced, by personal spite, to tear to rags the poor clergyman with poisonous, anonymous, and ferocious leading articles. But neither of these programmes recommended itself to my honesty. Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed. Caricature may too easily become a slander, and satire a libel. I believed in the existence neither of the red-nosed clerical cormorant, nor in that of the venomous assassin of the journals. I did believe that through want of care and the natural tendency of every class to take care of itself, money had slipped into the pockets of certain clergymen which should have gone elsewhere; and I believed also that through the equally natural propensity of men to be as strong as they know how to be, certain writers of the press had allowed themselves to use language which was cruel, though it was in a good cause. But the two objects should not have been combined--and I now know myself well enough to be aware that I was not the man to have carried out either of them. Nevertheless I thought much about it, and on the 29th of July, 1853,--having been then two years without having made any literary effort,--I began _The Warden_, at Tenbury in Worcestershire. It was then more than twelve months since I had stood for an hour on the little bridge in Salisbury, and had made out to my own satisfaction the spot on which Hiram's hospital should stand. Certainly no work that I ever did took up so much of my thoughts. On this occasion I did no more than write the first chapter, even if so much. I had determined that my official work should be moderated, so as to allow me some time for writing; but then, just at this time, I was sent to take the postal charge of the northern counties in Ireland,--of Ulster, and the counties Meath and Louth. Hitherto in official language I had been a surveyor's clerk,--now I was to be a surveyor. The difference consisted mainly in an increase of income from about £450 to about £800;--for at that time the sum netted still depended on the number of miles travelled. Of course that English work to which I had become so warmly wedded had to be abandoned. Other parts of England were being done by other men, and I had nearly finished the area which had been entrusted to me. I should have liked to ride over the whole country, and to have sent a rural post letter-carrier to every parish, every village, every hamlet, and every grange in England. We were at this time very much unsettled as regards any residence. While we were living at Clonmel two sons had been born, who certainly were important enough to have been mentioned sooner. At Clonmel we had lived in lodgings, and from there had moved to Mallow, a town in the county Cork, where we had taken a house. Mallow was in the centre of a hunting country, and had been very pleasant to me. But our house there had been given up when it was known that I should be detained in England; and then we had wandered about in the western counties, moving our headquarters from one town to another. During this time we had lived at Exeter, at Bristol, at Caermarthen, at Cheltenham, and at Worcester. Now we again moved, and settled ourselves for eighteen months at Belfast. After that we took a house at Donnybrook, the well-known suburb of Dublin. The work of taking up a new district, which requires not only that the man doing it should know the nature of the postal arrangements, but also the characters and the peculiarities of the postmasters and their clerks, was too heavy to allow of my going on with my book at once. It was not till the end of 1852 that I recommenced it, and it was in the autumn of 1853 that I finished the work. It was only one small volume, and in later days would have been completed in six weeks,--or in two months at the longest, if other work had pressed. On looking at the title-page, I find it was not published till 1855. I had made acquaintance, through my friend John Merivale, with William Longman the publisher, and had received from him an assurance that the manuscript should be "looked at." It was "looked at," and Messrs. Longman made me an offer to publish it at half profits. I had no reason to love "half profits," but I was very anxious to have my book published, and I acceded. It was now more than ten years since I had commenced writing _The Macdermots_, and I thought that if any success was to be achieved, the time surely had come. I had not been impatient; but, if there was to be a time, surely it had come. The novel-reading world did not go mad about _The Warden_; but I soon felt that it had not failed as the others had failed. There were notices of it in the press, and I could discover that people around me knew that I had written a book. Mr. Longman was complimentary, and after a while informed me that there would be profits to divide. At the end of 1855 I received a cheque for £9, 8s. 8d., which was the first money I had ever earned by literary work;--that £20 which poor Mr. Colburn had been made to pay certainly never having been earned at all. At the end of 1856 I received another sum of £10, 15s. 1d. The pecuniary success was not great. Indeed, as regarded remuneration for the time, stone-breaking would have done better. A thousand copies were printed, of which, after a lapse of five or six years, about 300 had to be converted into another form, and sold as belonging to a cheap edition. In its original form _The Warden_ never reached the essential honour of a second edition. I have already said of the work that it failed altogether in the purport for which it was intended. But it has a merit of its own,--a merit by my own perception of which I was enabled to see wherein lay whatever strength I did possess. The characters of the bishop, of the archdeacon, of the archdeacon's wife, and especially of the warden, are all well and clearly drawn. I had realised to myself a series of portraits, and had been able so to put them on the canvas that my readers should see that which I meant them to see. There is no gift which an author can have more useful to him than this. And the style of the English was good, though from most unpardonable carelessness the grammar was not unfrequently faulty. With such results I had no doubt but that I would at once begin another novel. I will here say one word as a long-deferred answer to an item of criticism which appeared in the _Times_ newspaper as to _The Warden_. In an article--if I remember rightly, on _The Warden_ and _Barchester Towers_ combined--which I would call good-natured, but that I take it for granted that the critics of the _Times_ are actuated by higher motives than good-nature, that little book and its sequel are spoken of in terms which were very pleasant to the author. But there was added to this a gentle word of rebuke at the morbid condition of the author's mind which had prompted him to indulge in personalities,--the personalities in question having reference to some editor or manager of the _Times_ newspaper. For I had introduced one Tom Towers as being potent among the contributors to the _Jupiter_, under which name I certainly did allude to the _Times_. But at that time, living away in Ireland, I had not even heard the name of any gentleman connected with the _Times_ newspaper, and could not have intended to represent any individual by Tom Towers. As I had created an archdeacon, so had I created a journalist, and the one creation was no more personal or indicative of morbid tendencies than the other. If Tom Towers was at all like any gentleman then connected with the _Times_, my moral consciousness must again have been very powerful. CHAPTER VI. _BARCHESTER TOWERS_ AND _THE THREE CLERKS_. 1855-1858. It was, I think, before I started on my English tours among the rural posts that I made my first attempt at writing for a magazine. I had read, soon after they came out, the two first volumes of Charles Merivale's _History of the Romans under the Empire_, and had got into some correspondence with the author's brother as to the author's views about Cæsar. Hence arose in my mind a tendency to investigate the character of probably the greatest man who ever lived, which tendency in after years produced a little book of which I shall have to speak when its time comes,--and also a taste generally for Latin literature, which has been one of the chief delights of my later life. And I may say that I became at this time as anxious about Cæsar, and as desirous of reaching the truth as to his character, as we have all been in regard to Bismarck in these latter days. I lived in Cæsar, and debated with myself constantly whether he crossed the Rubicon as a tyrant or as a patriot. In order that I might review Mr. Merivale's book without feeling that I was dealing unwarrantably with a subject beyond me, I studied the Commentaries thoroughly, and went through a mass of other reading which the object of a magazine article hardly justified,--but which has thoroughly justified itself in the subsequent pursuits of my life. I did write two articles, the first mainly on Julius Cæsar, and the second on Augustus, which appeared in the _Dublin University Magazine_. They were the result of very much labour, but there came from them no pecuniary product. I had been very modest when I sent them to the editor, as I had been when I called on John Forster, not venturing to suggest the subject of money. After a while I did call upon the proprietor of the magazine in Dublin, and was told by him that such articles were generally written to oblige friends, and that articles written to oblige friends were not usually paid for. The Dean of Ely, as the author of the work in question now is, was my friend; but I think I was wronged, as I certainly had no intention of obliging him by my criticism. Afterwards, when I returned to Ireland, I wrote other articles for the same magazine, one of which, intended to be very savage in its denunciation, was on an official blue-book just then brought out, preparatory to the introduction of competitive examinations for the Civil Service. For that and some other article, I now forget what, I was paid. Up to the end of 1857 I had received £55 for the hard work of ten years. It was while I was engaged on _Barchester Towers_ that I adopted a system of writing which, for some years afterwards, I found to be very serviceable to me. My time was greatly occupied in travelling, and the nature of my travelling was now changed. I could not any longer do it on horseback. Railroads afforded me my means of conveyance, and I found that I passed in railway-carriages very many hours of my existence. Like others, I used to read,--though Carlyle has since told me that a man when travelling should not read, but "sit still and label his thoughts." But if I intended to make a profitable business out of my writing, and, at the same time, to do my best for the Post Office, I must turn these hours to more account than I could do even by reading. I made for myself therefore a little tablet, and found after a few days' exercise that I could write as quickly in a railway-carriage as I could at my desk. I worked with a pencil, and what I wrote my wife copied afterwards. In this way was composed the greater part of _Barchester Towers_ and of the novel which succeeded it, and much also of others subsequent to them. My only objection to the practice came from the appearance of literary ostentation, to which I felt myself to be subject when going to work before four or five fellow-passengers. But I got used to it, as I had done to the amazement of the west country farmers' wives when asking them after their letters. In the writing of _Barchester Towers_ I took great delight. The bishop and Mrs. Proudie were very real to me, as were also the troubles of the archdeacon and the loves of Mr. Slope. When it was done, Mr. W. Longman required that it should be subjected to his reader; and he returned the MS. to me, with a most laborious and voluminous criticism,--coming from whom I never knew. This was accompanied by an offer to print the novel on the half-profit system, with a payment of £100 in advance out of my half-profits,--on condition that I would comply with the suggestions made by his critic. One of these suggestions required that I should cut the novel down to two volumes. In my reply, I went through the criticisms, rejecting one and accepting another, almost alternately, but declaring at last that no consideration should induce me to cut out a third of my work. I am at a loss to know how such a task could be performed. I could burn the MS., no doubt, and write another book on the same story; but how two words out of six are to be withdrawn from a written novel, I cannot conceive. I believe such tasks have been attempted--perhaps performed; but I refused to make even the attempt. Mr. Longman was too gracious to insist on his critic's terms; and the book was published, certainly none the worse, and I do not think much the better, for the care that had been taken with it. The work succeeded just as _The Warden_ had succeeded. It achieved no great reputation, but it was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read. Perhaps I may be assuming upon myself more than I have a right to do in saying now that _Barchester Towers_ has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century; but if that be so, its life has been so far prolonged by the vitality of some of its younger brothers. _Barchester Towers_ would hardly be so well known as it is had there been no _Framley Parsonage_ and no _Last Chronicle of Barset_. I received my £100, in advance, with profound delight. It was a positive and most welcome increase to my income, and might probably be regarded as a first real step on the road to substantial success. I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his authorship should not regard money,--nor a painter, or sculptor, or composer in his art. I do not know that this unnatural self-sacrifice is supposed to extend itself further. A barrister, a clergyman, a doctor, an engineer, and even actors and architects, may without disgrace follow the bent of human nature, and endeavour to fill their bellies and clothe their backs, and also those of their wives and children, as comfortably as they can by the exercise of their abilities and their crafts. They may be as rationally realistic, as may the butchers and the bakers; but the artist and the author forget the high glories of their calling if they condescend to make a money return a first object. They who preach this doctrine will be much offended by my theory, and by this book of mine, if my theory and my book come beneath their notice. They require the practice of a so-called virtue which is contrary to nature, and which, in my eyes, would be no virtue if it were practised. They are like clergymen who preach sermons against the love of money, but who know that the love of money is so distinctive a characteristic of humanity that such sermons are mere platitudes called for by customary but unintelligent piety. All material progress has come from man's desire to do the best he can for himself and those about him, and civilisation and Christianity itself have been made possible by such progress. Though we do not all of us argue this matter out within our breasts, we do all feel it; and we know that the more a man earns the more useful he is to his fellow-men. The most useful lawyers, as a rule, have been those who have made the greatest incomes,--and it is the same with the doctors. It would be the same in the Church if they who have the choosing of bishops always chose the best man. And it has in truth been so too in art and authorship. Did Titian or Rubens disregard their pecuniary rewards? As far as we know, Shakespeare worked always for money, giving the best of his intellect to support his trade as an actor. In our own century what literary names stand higher than those of Byron, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle? And I think I may say that none of those great men neglected the pecuniary result of their labours. Now and then a man may arise among us who in any calling, whether it be in law, in physic, in religious teaching, in art, or literature, may in his professional enthusiasm utterly disregard money. All will honour his enthusiasm, and if he be wifeless and childless, his disregard of the great object of men's work will be blameless. But it is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money. Few do so, and those few in doing so suffer a defeat. Who does not desire to be hospitable to his friends, generous to the poor, liberal to all, munificent to his children, and to be himself free from the carking fear which poverty creates? The subject will not stand an argument;--and yet authors are told that they should disregard payment for their work, and be content to devote their unbought brains to the welfare of the public. Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much. Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors. I say this here, because it is my purpose as I go on to state what to me has been the result of my profession in the ordinary way in which professions are regarded, so that by my example may be seen what prospect there is that a man devoting himself to literature with industry, perseverance, certain necessary aptitudes, and fair average talents, may succeed in gaining a livelihood, as another man does in another profession. The result with me has been comfortable but not splendid, as I think was to have been expected from the combination of such gifts. I have certainly always had also before my eyes the charms of reputation. Over and above the money view of the question, I wished from the beginning to be something more than a clerk in the Post Office. To be known as somebody,--to be Anthony Trollope if it be no more,--is to me much. The feeling is a very general one, and I think beneficent. It is that which has been called the "last infirmity of noble mind." The infirmity is so human that the man who lacks it is either above or below humanity. I own to the infirmity. But I confess that my first object in taking to literature as a profession was that which is common to the barrister when he goes to the Bar, and to the baker when he sets up his oven. I wished to make an income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort. If indeed a man writes his books badly, or paints his pictures badly, because he can make his money faster in that fashion than by doing them well, and at the same time proclaims them to be the best he can do,--if in fact he sells shoddy for broadcloth,--he is dishonest, as is any other fraudulent dealer. So may be the barrister who takes money that he does not earn, or the clergyman who is content to live on a sinecure. No doubt the artist or the author may have a difficulty which will not occur to the seller of cloth, in settling within himself what is good work and what is bad,--when labour enough has been given, and when the task has been scamped. It is a danger as to which he is bound to be severe with himself--in which he should feel that his conscience should be set fairly in the balance against the natural bias of his interest. If he do not do so, sooner or later his dishonesty will be discovered, and will be estimated accordingly. But in this he is to be governed only by the plain rules of honesty which should govern us all. Having said so much, I shall not scruple as I go on to attribute to the pecuniary result of my labours all the importance which I felt them to have at the time. _Barchester Towers_, for which I had received £100 in advance, sold well enough to bring me further payments--moderate payments--from the publishers. From that day up to this very time in which I am writing, that book and _The Warden_ together have given me almost every year some small income. I get the accounts very regularly, and I find that I have received £727, 11s. 3d. for the two. It is more than I got for the three or four works that came afterwards, but the payments have been spread over twenty years. When I went to Mr. Longman with my next novel, _The Three Clerks_, in my hand, I could not induce him to understand that a lump sum down was more pleasant than a deferred annuity. I wished him to buy it from me at a price which he might think to be a fair value, and I argued with him that as soon as an author has put himself into a position which insures a sufficient sale of his works to give a profit, the publisher is not entitled to expect the half of such proceeds. While there is a pecuniary risk, the whole of which must be borne by the publisher, such division is fair enough; but such a demand on the part of the publisher is monstrous as soon as the article produced is known to be a marketable commodity. I thought that I had now reached that point, but Mr. Longman did not agree with me. And he endeavoured to convince me that I might lose more than I gained, even though I should get more money by going elsewhere. "It is for you," said he, "to think whether our names on your title-page are not worth more to you than the increased payment." This seemed to me to savour of that high-flown doctrine of the contempt of money which I have never admired. I did think much of Messrs. Longman's name, but I liked it best at the bottom of a cheque. I was also scared from the august columns of Paternoster Row by a remark made to myself by one of the firm, which seemed to imply that they did not much care for works of fiction. Speaking of a fertile writer of tales who was not then dead, he declared that ---- (naming the author in question) had spawned upon them (the publishers) three novels a year! Such language is perhaps justifiable in regard to a man who shows so much of the fecundity of the herring; but I did not know how fruitful might be my own muse, and I thought that I had better go elsewhere. I had then written _The Three Clerks_, which, when I could not sell it to Messrs. Longman, I took in the first instance to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett, who had become successors to Mr. Colburn. I had made an appointment with one of the firm, which, however, that gentleman was unable to keep. I was on my way from Ireland to Italy, and had but one day in London in which to dispose of my manuscript. I sat for an hour in Great Marlborough Street, expecting the return of the peccant publisher who had broken his tryst, and I was about to depart with my bundle under my arm when the foreman of the house came to me. He seemed to think it a pity that I should go, and wished me to leave my work with him. This, however, I would not do, unless he would undertake to buy it then and there. Perhaps he lacked authority. Perhaps his judgment was against such purchase. But while we debated the matter, he gave me some advice. "I hope it's not historical, Mr. Trollope?" he said. "Whatever you do, don't be historical; your historical novel is not worth a damn." Thence I took _The Three Clerks_ to Mr. Bentley; and on the same afternoon succeeded in selling it to him for £250. His son still possesses it, and the firm has, I believe, done very well with the purchase. It was certainly the best novel I had as yet written. The plot is not so good as that of the _Macdermots_; nor are there any characters in the book equal to those of Mrs. Proudie and the Warden; but the work has a more continued interest, and contains the first well-described love-scene that I ever wrote. The passage in which Kate Woodward, thinking that she will die, tries to take leave of the lad she loves, still brings tears to my eyes when I read it. I had not the heart to kill her. I never could do that. And I do not doubt but that they are living happily together to this day. The lawyer Chaffanbrass made his first appearance in this novel, and I do not think that I have cause to be ashamed of him. But this novel now is chiefly noticeable to me from the fact that in it I introduced a character under the name of Sir Gregory Hardlines, by which I intended to lean very heavily on that much loathed scheme of competitive examination, of which at that time Sir Charles Trevelyan was the great apostle. Sir Gregory Hardlines was intended for Sir Charles Trevelyan,--as any one at the time would know who had taken an interest in the Civil Service. "We always call him Sir Gregory," Lady Trevelyan said to me afterwards, when I came to know her and her husband. I never learned to love competitive examination; but I became, and am, very fond of Sir Charles Trevelyan. Sir Stafford Northcote, who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer, was then leagued with his friend Sir Charles, and he too appears in _The Three Clerks_ under the feebly facetious name of Sir Warwick West End. But for all that _The Three Clerks_ was a good novel. When that sale was made I was on my way to Italy with my wife, paying a third visit there to my mother and brother. This was in 1857, and she had then given up her pen. It was the first year in which she had not written, and she expressed to me her delight that her labours should be at an end, and that mine should be beginning in the same field. In truth they had already been continued for a dozen years, but a man's career will generally be held to date itself from the commencement of his success. On those foreign tours I always encountered adventures, which, as I look back upon them now, tempt me almost to write a little book of my long past Continental travels. On this occasion, as we made our way slowly through Switzerland and over the Alps, we encountered again and again a poor forlorn Englishman, who had no friend and no aptitude for travelling. He was always losing his way, and finding himself with no seat in the coaches and no bed at the inns. On one occasion I found him at Coire seated at 5 A.M. in the _coupé_ of a diligence which was intended to start at noon for the Engadine, while it was his purpose to go over the Alps in another which was to leave at 5.30, and which was already crowded with passengers. "Ah!" he said, "I am in time now, and nobody shall turn me out of this seat," alluding to former little misfortunes of which I had been a witness. When I explained to him his position, he was as one to whom life was too bitter to be borne. But he made his way into Italy, and encountered me again at the Pitti Palace in Florence. "Can you tell me something?" he said to me in a whisper, having touched my shoulder. "The people are so ill-natured I don't like to ask them. Where is it they keep the Medical Venus?" I sent him to the Uffizzi, but I fear he was disappointed. We ourselves, however, on entering Milan had been in quite as much distress as any that he suffered. We had not written for beds, and on driving up to a hotel at ten in the evening found it full. Thence we went from one hotel to another, finding them all full. The misery is one well known to travellers, but I never heard of another case in which a man and his wife were told at midnight to get out of the conveyance into the middle of the street because the horse could not be made to go any further. Such was our condition. I induced the driver, however, to go again to the hotel which was nearest to him, and which was kept by a German. Then I bribed the porter to get the master to come down to me; and, though my French is ordinarily very defective, I spoke with such eloquence to that German innkeeper that he, throwing his arms round my neck in a transport of compassion, swore that he would never leave me nor my wife till he had put us to bed. And he did so; but, ah! there were so many in those beds! It is such an experience as this which teaches a travelling foreigner how different on the Continent is the accommodation provided for him, from that which is supplied for the inhabitants of the country. It was on a previous visit to Milan, when the telegraph-wires were only just opened to the public by the Austrian authorities, that we had decided one day at dinner that we would go to Verona that night. There was a train at six, reaching Verona at midnight, and we asked some servant of the hotel to telegraph for us, ordering supper and beds. The demand seemed to create some surprise; but we persisted, and were only mildly grieved when we found ourselves charged twenty zwanzigers for the message. Telegraphy was new at Milan, and the prices were intended to be almost prohibitory. We paid our twenty zwanzigers and went on, consoling ourselves with the thought of our ready supper and our assured beds. When we reached Verona, there arose a great cry along the platform for Signor Trollope. I put out my head and declared my identity, when I was waited upon by a glorious personage dressed like a beau for a ball, with half-a-dozen others almost as glorious behind him, who informed me, with his hat in his hand, that he was the landlord of the "Due Torre." It was a heating moment, but it became more hot when he asked me after my people,--"mes gens." I could only turn round, and point to my wife and brother-in-law. I had no other "people." There were three carriages provided for us, each with a pair of grey horses. When we reached the house it was all lit up. We were not allowed to move without an attendant with a lighted candle. It was only gradually that the mistake came to be understood. On us there was still the horror of the bill, the extent of which could not be known till the hour of departure had come. The landlord, however, had acknowledged to himself that his inductions had been ill-founded, and he treated us with clemency. He had never before received a telegram. I apologise for these tales, which are certainly outside my purpose, and will endeavour to tell no more that shall not have a closer relation to my story. I had finished _The Three Clerks_ just before I left England, and when in Florence was cudgelling my brain for a new plot. Being then with my brother, I asked him to sketch me a plot, and he drew out that of my next novel, called _Doctor Thorne_. I mention this particularly, because it was the only occasion in which I have had recourse to some other source than my own brains for the thread of a story. How far I may unconsciously have adopted incidents from what I have read,--either from history or from works of imagination,--I do not know. It is beyond question that a man employed as I have been must do so. But when doing it I have not been aware that I have done it. I have never taken another man's work, and deliberately framed my work upon it. I am far from censuring this practice in others. Our greatest masters in works of imagination have obtained such aid for themselves. Shakespeare dug out of such quarries wherever he could find them. Ben Jonson, with heavier hand, built up his structures on his studies of the classics, not thinking it beneath him to give, without direct acknowledgment, whole pieces translated both from poets and historians. But in those days no such acknowledgment was usual. Plagiary existed, and was very common, but was not known as a sin. It is different now; and I think that an author, when he uses either the words or the plot of another, should own as much, demanding to be credited with no more of the work than he has himself produced. I may say also that I have never printed as my own a word that has been written by others.[4] It might probably have been better for my readers had I done so, as I am informed that _Doctor Thorne_, the novel of which I am now speaking, has a larger sale than any other book of mine. [Footnote 4: I must make one exception to this declaration. The legal opinion as to heirlooms in _The Eustace Diamonds_ was written for me by Charles Merewether, the present Member for Northampton. I am told that it has become the ruling authority on the subject.] Early in 1858, while I was writing _Doctor Thorne_, I was asked by the great men at the General Post Office to go to Egypt to make a treaty with the Pasha for the conveyance of our mails through that country by railway. There was a treaty in existence, but that had reference to the carriage of bags and boxes by camels from Alexandria to Suez. Since its date the railway had grown, and was now nearly completed, and a new treaty was wanted. So I came over from Dublin to London, on my road, and again went to work among the publishers. The other novel was not finished; but I thought I had now progressed far enough to arrange a sale while the work was still on the stocks. I went to Mr. Bentley and demanded £400,--for the copyright. He acceded, but came to me the next morning at the General Post Office to say that it could not be. He had gone to work at his figures after I had left him, and had found that £300 would be the outside value of the novel. I was intent upon the larger sum; and in furious haste,--for I had but an hour at my disposal,--I rushed to Chapman & Hall in Piccadilly, and said what I had to say to Mr. Edward Chapman in a quick torrent of words. They were the first of a great many words which have since been spoken by me in that back-shop. Looking at me as he might have done at a highway robber who had stopped him on Hounslow Heath, he said that he supposed he might as well do as I desired. I considered this to be a sale, and it was a sale. I remember that he held the poker in his hand all the time that I was with him;--but in truth, even though he had declined to buy the book, there would have been no danger. CHAPTER VII. _DOCTOR THORNE_--_THE BERTRAMS_--_THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH MAIN_. As I journeyed across France to Marseilles, and made thence a terribly rough voyage to Alexandria, I wrote my allotted number of pages every day. On this occasion more than once I left my paper on the cabin table, rushing away to be sick in the privacy of my state room. It was February, and the weather was miserable; but still I did my work. _Labor omnia vincit improbus_. I do not say that to all men has been given physical strength sufficient for such exertion as this, but I do believe that real exertion will enable most men to work at almost any season. I had previously to this arranged a system of task-work for myself, which I would strongly recommend to those who feel as I have felt, that labour, when not made absolutely obligatory by the circumstances of the hour, should never be allowed to become spasmodic. There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office. I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession, I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws. When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. According to the circumstances of the time,--whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,--I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went. In the bargains I have made with publishers I have,--not, of course, with their knowledge, but in my own mind,--undertaken always to supply them with so many words, and I have never put a book out of hand short of the number by a single word. I may also say that the excess has been very small. I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially in completing it within the proposed time,--and I have always done so. There has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart. I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius, but had I been so I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels. Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water-drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always catches the hare. The hare has no chance. He loses more time in glorifying himself for a quick spurt than suffices for the tortoise to make half his journey. I have known authors whose lives have always been troublesome and painful because their tasks have never been done in time. They have ever been as boys struggling to learn their lesson as they entered the school gates. Publishers have distrusted them, and they have failed to write their best because they have seldom written at ease. I have done double their work,--though burdened with another profession,--and have done it almost without an effort. I have not once, through all my literary career, felt myself even in danger of being late with my task. I have known no anxiety as to "copy." The needed pages far ahead--very far ahead--have almost always been in the drawer beside me. And that little diary, with its dates and ruled spaces, its record that must be seen, its daily, weekly demand upon my industry, has done all that for me. There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till--inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting. If the man whose business it is to write has eaten too many good things, or has drunk too much, or smoked too many cigars,--as men who write sometimes will do,--then his condition may be unfavourable for work; but so will be the condition of a shoemaker who has been similarly imprudent. I have sometimes thought that the inspiration wanted has been the remedy which time will give to the evil results of such imprudence.--_Mens sana in corpore sano_. The author wants that as does every other workman,--that and a habit of industry. I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler's wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler's wax much more than the inspiration. It will be said, perhaps, that a man whose work has risen to no higher pitch than mine has attained, has no right to speak of the strains and impulses to which real genius is exposed. I am ready to admit the great variations in brain power which are exhibited by the products of different men, and am not disposed to rank my own very high; but my own experience tells me that a man can always do the work for which his brain is fitted if he will give himself the habit of regarding his work as a normal condition of his life. I therefore venture to advise young men who look forward to authorship as the business of their lives, even when they propose that that authorship be of the highest class known, to avoid enthusiastic rushes with their pens, and to seat themselves at their desks day by day as though they were lawyers' clerks;--and so let them sit until the allotted task shall be accomplished. While I was in Egypt, I finished _Doctor Thorne_, and on the following day began _The Bertrams_. I was moved now by a determination to excel, if not in quality, at any rate in quantity. An ignoble ambition for an author, my readers will no doubt say. But not, I think, altogether ignoble, if an author can bring himself to look at his work as does any other workman. This had become my task, this was the furrow in which my plough was set, this was the thing the doing of which had fallen into my hands, and I was minded to work at it with a will. It is not on my conscience that I have ever scamped my work. My novels, whether good or bad, have been as good as I could make them. Had I taken three months of idleness between each they would have been no better. Feeling convinced of that, I finished _Doctor Thorne_ on one day, and began _The Bertrams_ on the next. I had then been nearly two months in Egypt, and had at last succeeded in settling the terms of a postal treaty. Nearly twenty years have passed since that time, and other years may yet run on before these pages are printed. I trust I may commit no official sin by describing here the nature of the difficulty which met me. I found, on my arrival, that I was to communicate with an officer of the Pasha, who was then called Nubar Bey. I presume him to have been the gentleman who has lately dealt with our Government as to the Suez Canal shares, and who is now well known to the political world as Nubar Pasha. I found him a most courteous gentleman, an Armenian. I never went to his office, nor do I know that he had an office. Every other day he would come to me at my hotel, and bring with him servants, and pipes, and coffee. I enjoyed his coming greatly; but there was one point on which we could not agree. As to money and other details, it seemed as though he could hardly accede fast enough to the wishes of the Postmaster-General; but on one point he was firmly opposed to me. I was desirous that the mails should be carried through Egypt in twenty-four hours, and he thought that forty-eight hours should be allowed. I was obstinate, and he was obstinate; and for a long time we could come to no agreement. At last his oriental tranquillity seemed to desert him, and he took upon himself to assure me, with almost more than British energy, that, if I insisted on the quick transit, a terrible responsibility would rest on my head. I made this mistake, he said,--that I supposed that a rate of travelling which would be easy and secure in England could be attained with safety in Egypt. "The Pasha, his master, would," he said, "no doubt accede to any terms demanded by the British Post Office, so great was his reverence for everything British. In that case he, Nubar, would at once resign his position, and retire into obscurity. He would be ruined; but the loss of life and bloodshed which would certainly follow so rash an attempt should not be on his head." I smoked my pipe, or rather his, and drank his coffee, with oriental quiescence but British firmness. Every now and again, through three or four visits, I renewed the expression of my opinion that the transit could easily be made in twenty-four hours. At last he gave way,--and astonished me by the cordiality of his greeting. There was no longer any question of bloodshed or of resignation of office, and he assured me, with energetic complaisance, that it should be his care to see that the time was punctually kept. It was punctually kept, and, I believe, is so still. I must confess, however, that my persistency was not the result of any courage specially personal to myself. While the matter was being debated, it had been whispered to me that the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company had conceived that forty-eight hours would suit the purposes of their traffic better than twenty-four, and that, as they were the great paymasters on the railway, the Minister of the Egyptian State, who managed the railway, might probably wish to accommodate them. I often wondered who originated that frightful picture of blood and desolation. That it came from an English heart and an English hand I was always sure. From Egypt I visited the Holy Land, and on my way inspected the Post Offices at Malta and Gibraltar. I could fill a volume with true tales of my adventures. The _Tales of All Countries_ have, most of them, some foundation in such occurrences. There is one called _John Bull on the Guadalquivir_, the chief incident in which occurred to me and a friend of mine on our way up that river to Seville. We both of us handled the gold ornaments of a man whom we believed to be a bullfighter, but who turned out to be a duke,--and a duke, too, who could speak English! How gracious he was to us, and yet how thoroughly he covered us with ridicule! On my return home I received £400 from Messrs. Chapman & Hall for _Doctor Thorne_, and agreed to sell them _The Bertrams_ for the same sum. This latter novel was written under very vagrant circumstances,--at Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, Glasgow, then at sea, and at last finished in Jamaica. Of my journey to the West Indies I will say a few words presently, but I may as well speak of these two novels here. _Doctor Thorne_ has, I believe, been the most popular book that I have written,--if I may take the sale as a proof of comparative popularity. _The Bertrams_ has had quite an opposite fortune. I do not know that I have ever heard it well spoken of even by my friends, and I cannot remember that there is any character in it that has dwelt in the minds of novel-readers. I myself think that they are of about equal merit, but that neither of them is good. They fall away very much from _The Three Clerks_, both in pathos and humour. There is no personage in either of them comparable to Chaffanbrass the lawyer. The plot of _Doctor Thorne_ is good, and I am led therefore to suppose that a good plot,--which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale,--is that which will most raise it or most condemn it in the public judgment. The plots of _Tom Jones_ and of _Ivanhoe_ are almost perfect, and they are probably the most popular novels of the schools of the last and of this century; but to me the delicacy of Amelia, and the rugged strength of Burley and Meg Merrilies, say more for the power of those great novelists than the gift of construction shown in the two works I have named. A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention, the canvas should be crowded with real portraits, not of individuals known to the world or to the author, but of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the vehicle for all this; and when you have the vehicle without the passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show. There must, however, be a story. You must provide a vehicle of some sort. That of _The Bertrams_ was more than ordinarily bad; and as the book was relieved by no special character, it failed. Its failure never surprised me; but I have been surprised by the success of _Doctor Thorne_. At this time there was nothing in the success of the one or the failure of the other to affect me very greatly. The immediate sale, and the notices elicited from the critics, and the feeling which had now come to me of a confident standing with the publishers, all made me know that I had achieved my object. If I wrote a novel, I could certainly sell it. And if I could publish three in two years,--confining myself to half the fecundity of that terrible author of whom the publisher in Paternoster Row had complained to me,--I might add £600 a-year to my official income. I was still living in Ireland, and could keep a good house over my head, insure my life, educate my two boys, and hunt perhaps twice a-week, on £1400 a-year. If more should come, it would be well;--but £600 a-year I was prepared to reckon as success. It had been slow in coming, but was very pleasant when it came. On my return from Egypt I was sent down to Scotland to revise the Glasgow Post Office. I almost forget now what it was that I had to do there, but I know that I walked all over the city with the letter-carriers, going up to the top flats of the houses, as the men would have declared me incompetent to judge the extent of their labours had I not trudged every step with them. It was midsummer, and wearier work I never performed. The men would grumble, and then I would think how it would be with them if they had to go home afterwards and write a love-scene. But the love-scenes written in Glasgow, all belonging to _The Bertrams_, are not good. Then in the autumn of that year, 1858, I was asked to go to the West Indies, and cleanse the Augean stables of our Post Office system there. Up to that time, and at that time, our Colonial Post Offices generally were managed from home, and were subject to the British Postmaster-General. Gentlemen were sent out from England to be postmasters, surveyors, and what not; and as our West Indian islands have never been regarded as being of themselves happily situated for residence, the gentlemen so sent were sometimes more conspicuous for want of income than for official zeal and ability. Hence the stables had become Augean. I was also instructed to carry out in some of the islands a plan for giving up this postal authority to the island Governor, and in others to propose some such plan. I was then to go on to Cuba, to make a postal treaty with the Spanish authorities, and to Panama for the same purpose with the Government of New Grenada. All this work I performed to my satisfaction, and I hope to that of my masters in St. Martin's le Grand. But the trip is at the present moment of importance to my subject, as having enabled me to write that which, on the whole, I regard as the best book that has come from my pen. It is short, and, I think I may venture to say, amusing, useful, and true. As soon as I had learned from the secretary at the General Post Office that this journey would be required, I proposed the book to Messrs. Chapman & Hall, demanding £250 for a single volume. The contract was made without any difficulty, and when I returned home the work was complete in my desk. I began it on board the ship in which I left Kingston, Jamaica, for Cuba,--and from week to week I carried it on as I went. From Cuba I made my way to St. Thomas, and through the island down to Demerara, then back to St. Thomas,--which is the starting-point for all places in that part of the globe,--to Santa Martha, Carthagena, Aspinwall, over the Isthmus to Panama, up the Pacific to a little harbour on the coast of Costa Rica, thence across Central America, through Costa Rica, and down the Nicaragua river to the Mosquito coast, and after that home by Bermuda and New York. Should any one want further details of the voyage, are they not written in my book? The fact memorable to me now is that I never made a single note while writing or preparing it. Preparation, indeed, there was none. The descriptions and opinions came hot on to the paper from their causes. I will not say that this is the best way of writing a book intended to give accurate information. But it is the best way of producing to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard. There are two kinds of confidence which a reader may have in his author,--which two kinds the reader who wishes to use his reading well should carefully discriminate. There is a confidence in facts and a confidence in vision. The one man tells you accurately what has been. The other suggests to you what may, or perhaps what must have been, or what ought to have been. The former requires simple faith. The latter calls upon you to judge for yourself, and form your own conclusions. The former does not intend to be prescient, nor the latter accurate. Research is the weapon used by the former; observation by the latter. Either may be false,--wilfully false; as also may either be steadfastly true. As to that, the reader must judge for himself. But the man who writes _currente calamo_, who works with a rapidity which will not admit of accuracy, may be as true, and in one sense as trustworthy, as he who bases every word upon a rock of facts. I have written very much as I have travelled about; and though I have been very inaccurate, I have always written the exact truth as I saw it;--and I have, I think, drawn my pictures correctly. The view I took of the relative position in the West Indies of black men and white men was the view of the _Times_ newspaper at that period; and there appeared three articles in that journal, one closely after another, which made the fortune of the book. Had it been very bad, I suppose its fortune could not have been made for it even by the _Times_ newspaper. I afterwards became acquainted with the writer of those articles, the contributor himself informing me that he had written them. I told him that he had done me a greater service than can often be done by one man to another, but that I was under no obligation to him. I do not think that he saw the matter quite in the same light. I am aware that by that criticism I was much raised in my position as an author. Whether such lifting up by such means is good or bad for literature is a question which I hope to discuss in a future chapter. But the result was immediate to me, for I at once went to Chapman & Hall and successfully demanded £600 for my next novel. CHAPTER VIII. THE _CORNHILL MAGAZINE_ AND _FRAMLEY PARSONAGE_. Soon after my return from the West Indies I was enabled to change my district in Ireland for one in England. For some time past my official work had been of a special nature, taking me out of my own district; but through all that, Dublin had been my home, and there my wife and children had lived. I had often sighed to return to England,--with a silly longing. My life in England for twenty-six years from the time of my birth to the day on which I left it, had been wretched. I had been poor, friendless, and joyless. In Ireland it had constantly been happy. I had achieved the respect of all with whom I was concerned, I had made for myself a comfortable home, and I had enjoyed many pleasures. Hunting itself was a great delight to me; and now, as I contemplated a move to England, and a house in the neighbourhood of London, I felt that hunting must be abandoned.[5] Nevertheless I thought that a man who could write books ought not to live in Ireland,--ought to live within the reach of the publishers, the clubs, and the dinner-parties of the metropolis. So I made my request at headquarters, and with some little difficulty got myself appointed to the Eastern District of England,--which comprised Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and the greater part of Hertfordshire. [Footnote 5: It was not abandoned till sixteen more years had passed away.] At this time I did not stand very well with the dominant interest at the General Post Office. My old friend Colonel Maberly had been, some time since, squeezed into, and his place was filled by Mr. Rowland Hill, the originator of the penny post. With him I never had any sympathy, nor he with me. In figures and facts he was most accurate, but I never came across any one who so little understood the ways of men,--unless it was his brother Frederic. To the two brothers the servants of the Post Office,--men numerous enough to have formed a large army in old days,--were so many machines who could be counted on for their exact work without deviation, as wheels may be counted on, which are kept going always at the same pace and always by the same power. Rowland Hill was an industrious public servant, anxious for the good of his country; but he was a hard taskmaster, and one who would, I think, have put the great department with which he was concerned altogether out of gear by his hardness, had he not been at last controlled. He was the Chief Secretary, my brother-in-law--who afterwards succeeded him--came next to him, and Mr. Hill's brother was the Junior Secretary. In the natural course of things, I had not, from my position, anything to do with the management of affairs;--but from time to time I found myself more or less mixed up in it. I was known to be a thoroughly efficient public servant; I am sure I may say so much of myself without fear of contradiction from any one who has known the Post Office;--I was very fond of the department, and when matters came to be considered, I generally had an opinion of my own. I have no doubt that I often made myself very disagreeable. I know that I sometimes tried to do so. But I could hold my own because I knew my business and was useful. I had given official offence by the publication of _The Three Clerks_. I afterwards gave greater offence by a lecture on The Civil Service which I delivered in one of the large rooms at the General Post Office to the clerks there. On this occasion, the Postmaster-General, with whom personally I enjoyed friendly terms, sent for me and told me that Mr. Hill had told him that I ought to be dismissed. When I asked his lordship whether he was prepared to dismiss me, he only laughed. The threat was no threat to me, as I knew myself to be too good to be treated in that fashion. The lecture had been permitted, and I had disobeyed no order. In the lecture which I delivered, there was nothing to bring me to shame,--but it advocated the doctrine that a civil servant is only a servant as far as his contract goes, and that he is beyond that entitled to be as free a man in politics, as free in his general pursuits, and as free in opinion, as those who are in open professions and open trades. All this is very nearly admitted now, but it certainly was not admitted then. At that time no one in the Post Office could even vote for a Member of Parliament. Through my whole official life I did my best to improve the style of official writing. I have written, I should think, some thousands of reports,--many of them necessarily very long; some of them dealing with subjects so absurd as to allow a touch of burlesque; some few in which a spark of indignation or a slight glow of pathos might find an entrance. I have taken infinite pains with these reports, habituating myself always to write them in the form in which they should be sent,--without a copy. It is by writing thus that a man can throw on to his paper the exact feeling with which his mind is impressed at the moment. A rough copy, or that which is called a draft, is written in order that it may be touched and altered and put upon stilts. The waste of time, moreover, in such an operation, is terrible. If a man knows his craft with his pen, he will have learned to write without the necessity of changing his words or the form of his sentences. I had learned so to write my reports that they who read them should know what it was that I meant them to understand. But I do not think that they were regarded with favour. I have heard horror expressed because the old forms were disregarded and language used which had no savour of red-tape. During the whole of this work in the Post Office it was my principle always to obey authority in everything instantly, but never to allow my mouth to be closed as to the expression of my opinion. They who had the ordering of me very often did not know the work as I knew it,--could not tell as I could what would be the effect of this or that change. When carrying out instructions which I knew should not have been given, I never scrupled to point out the fatuity of the improper order in the strongest language that I could decently employ. I have revelled in these official correspondences, and look back to some of them as the greatest delights of my life. But I am not sure that they were so delightful to others. I succeeded, however, in getting the English district,--which could hardly have been refused to me,--and prepared to change our residence towards the end of 1859. At the time I was writing _Castle Richmond_, the novel which I had sold to Messrs. Chapman & Hall for £600. But there arose at this time a certain literary project which probably had a great effect upon my career. Whilst travelling on postal service abroad, or riding over the rural districts in England, or arranging the mails in Ireland,--and such for the last eighteen years had now been my life,--I had no opportunity of becoming acquainted with literary life in London. It was probably some feeling of this which had made me anxious to move my penates back to England. But even in Ireland, where I was still living in October, 1859, I had heard of the _Cornhill Magazine_, which was to come out on the 1st of January, 1860, under the editorship of Thackeray. I had at this time written from time to time certain short stories, which had been published in different periodicals, and which in due time were republished under the name of _Tales of All Countries_. On the 23d of October, 1859, I wrote to Thackeray, whom I had, I think, never then seen, offering to send him for the magazine certain of these stories. In reply to this I received two letters,--one from Messrs. Smith & Elder, the proprietors of the _Cornhill_, dated 26th of October, and the other from the editor, written two days later. That from Mr. Thackeray was as follows:-- 36 Onslow Square, S.W., October 28th. MY DEAR MR. TROLLOPE,--Smith & Elder have sent you their proposals; and the business part done, let me come to the pleasure, and say how very glad indeed I shall be to have you as a co-operator in our new magazine. And looking over the annexed programme, you will see whether you can't help us in many other ways besides tale-telling. Whatever a man knows about life and its doings, that let us hear about. You must have tossed a good deal about the world, and have countless sketches in your memory and your portfolio. Please to think if you can furbish up any of these besides a novel. When events occur, and you have a good lively tale, bear us in mind. One of our chief objects in this magazine is the getting out of novel spinning, and back into the world. Don't understand me to disparage our craft, especially _your_ wares. I often say I am like the pastrycook, and don't care for tarts, but prefer bread and cheese; but the public love the tarts (luckily for us), and we must bake and sell them. There was quite an excitement in my family one evening when Paterfamilias (who goes to sleep on a novel almost always when he tries it after dinner) came up-stairs into the drawing-room wide awake and calling for the second volume of _The Three Clerks_. I hope the _Cornhill Magazine_ will have as pleasant a story. And the Chapmans, if they are the honest men I take them to be, I've no doubt have told you with what sincere liking your works have been read by yours very faithfully, W. M. THACKERAY. This was very pleasant, and so was the letter from Smith & Elder offering me £1000 for the copyright of a three-volume novel, to come out in the new magazine,--on condition that the first portion of it should be in their hands by December 12th. There was much in all this that astonished me;--in the first place the price, which was more than double what I had yet received, and nearly double that which I was about to receive from Messrs. Chapman & Hall. Then there was the suddenness of the call. It was already the end of October, and a portion of the work was required to be in the printer's hands within six weeks. _Castle Richmond_ was indeed half written, but that was sold to Chapman. And it had already been a principle with me in my art, that no part of a novel should be published till the entire story was completed. I knew, from what I read from month to month, that this hurried publication of incompleted work was frequently, I might perhaps say always, adopted by the leading novelists of the day. That such has been the case, is proved by the fact that Dickens, Thackeray, and Mrs. Gaskell died with unfinished novels, of which portions had been already published. I had not yet entered upon the system of publishing novels in parts, and therefore had never been tempted. But I was aware that an artist should keep in his hand the power of fitting the beginning of his work to the end. No doubt it is his first duty to fit the end to the beginning, and he will endeavour to do so. But he should still keep in his hands the power of remedying any defect in this respect. "Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit," should be kept in view as to every character and every string of action. Your Achilles should all through, from beginning to end, be "impatient, fiery, ruthless, keen." Your Achilles, such as he is, will probably keep up his character. But your Davus also should be always Davus, and that is more difficult. The rustic driving his pigs to market cannot always make them travel by the exact path which he has intended for them. When some young lady at the end of a story cannot be made quite perfect in her conduct, that vivid description of angelic purity with which you laid the first lines of her portrait should be slightly toned down. I had felt that the rushing mode of publication to which the system of serial stories had given rise, and by which small parts as they were written were sent hot to the press, was injurious to the work done. If I now complied with the proposition made to me, I must act against my own principle. But such a principle becomes a tyrant if it cannot be superseded on a just occasion. If the reason be "tanti," the principle should for the occasion be put in abeyance. I sat as judge, and decreed that the present reason was "tanti." On this my first attempt at a serial story, I thought it fit to break my own rule. I can say, however, that I have never broken it since. But what astonished me most was the fact that at so late a day this new _Cornhill Magazine_ should be in want of a novel! Perhaps some of my future readers will be able to remember the great expectations which were raised as to this periodical. Thackeray's was a good name with which to conjure. The proprietors, Messrs. Smith & Elder, were most liberal in their manner of initiating the work, and were able to make an expectant world of readers believe that something was to be given them for a shilling very much in excess of anything they had ever received for that or double the money. Whether these hopes were or were not fulfilled it is not for me to say, as, for the first few years of the magazine's existence, I wrote for it more than any other one person. But such was certainly the prospect;--and how had it come to pass that, with such promises made, the editor and the proprietors were, at the end of October, without anything fixed as to what must be regarded as the chief dish in the banquet to be provided? I fear that the answer to this question must be found in the habits of procrastination which had at that time grown upon the editor. He had, I imagine, undertaken the work himself, and had postponed its commencement till there was left to him no time for commencing. There was still, it may be said, as much time for him as for me. I think there was,--for though he had his magazine to look after, I had the Post Office. But he thought, when unable to trust his own energy, that he might rely upon that of a new recruit. He was but four years my senior in life, but he was at the top of the tree, while I was still at the bottom. Having made up my mind to break my principle, I started at once from Dublin to London. I arrived there on the morning of Thursday, 3d of November, and left it on the evening of Friday. In the meantime I had made my agreement with Messrs. Smith & Elder, and had arranged my plot. But when in London, I first went to Edward Chapman, at 193 Piccadilly. If the novel I was then writing for him would suit the _Cornhill_, might I consider my arrangement with him to be at an end? Yes; I might. But if that story would not suit the _Cornhill_, was I to consider my arrangement with him as still standing,--that agreement requiring that my MS. should be in his hands in the following March? As to that, I might do as I pleased. In our dealings together Mr. Edward Chapman always acceded to every suggestion made to him. He never refused a book, and never haggled at a price. Then I hurried into the City, and had my first interview with Mr. George Smith. When he heard that _Castle Richmond_ was an Irish story, he begged that I would endeavour to frame some other for his magazine. He was sure that an Irish story would not do for a commencement;--and he suggested the Church, as though it were my peculiar subject. I told him that _Castle Richmond_ would have to "come out" while any other novel that I might write for him would be running through the magazine;--but to that he expressed himself altogether indifferent. He wanted an English tale, on English life, with a clerical flavour. On these orders I went to work, and framed what I suppose I must call the plot of _Framley Parsonage_. On my journey back to Ireland, in the railway carriage, I wrote the first few pages of that story. I had got into my head an idea of what I meant to write,--a morsel of the biography of an English clergyman who should not be a bad man, but one led into temptation by his own youth and by the unclerical accidents of the life of those around him. The love of his sister for the young lord was an adjunct necessary, because there must be love in a novel. And then by placing Framley Parsonage near Barchester, I was able to fall back upon my old friends Mrs. Proudie and the archdeacon. Out of these slight elements I fabricated a hodge-podge in which the real plot consisted at last simply of a girl refusing to marry the man she loved till the man's friends agreed to accept her lovingly. Nothing could be less efficient or artistic. But the characters were so well handled, that the work from the first to the last was popular,--and was received as it went on with still increasing favour by both editor and proprietor of the magazine. The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more love-making. And it was downright honest love,--in which there was no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so. Consequently they in England who were living, or had lived, the same sort of life, liked _Framley Parsonage._ I think myself that Lucy Robarts is perhaps the most natural English girl that I ever drew,--the most natural, at any rate, of those who have been good girls. She was not as dear to me as Kate Woodward in _The Three Clerks_, but I think she is more like real human life. Indeed I doubt whether such a character could be made more lifelike than Lucy Robarts. And I will say also that in this novel there is no very weak part,--no long succession of dull pages. The production of novels in serial form forces upon the author the conviction that he should not allow himself to be tedious in any single part. I hope no reader will misunderstand me. In spite of that conviction, the writer of stories in parts will often be tedious. That I have been so myself is a fault that will lie heavy on my tombstone. But the writer when he embarks in such a business should feel that he cannot afford to have many pages skipped out of the few which are to meet the reader's eye at the same time. Who can imagine the first half of the first volume of _Waverley_ coming out in shilling numbers? I had realised this when I was writing _Framley Parsonage_; and working on the conviction which had thus come home to me, I fell into no bathos of dulness. I subsequently came across a piece of criticism which was written on me as a novelist by a brother novelist very much greater than myself, and whose brilliant intellect and warm imagination led him to a kind of work the very opposite of mine. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American, whom I did not then know, but whose works I knew. Though it praises myself highly, I will insert it here, because it certainly is true in its nature: "It is odd enough," he says, "that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write. If I were to meet with such books as mine by another writer, I don't believe I should be able to get through them. Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,--solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as a beef-steak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should think that human nature would give them success anywhere." This was dated early in 1860, and could have had no reference to _Framley Parsonage_; but it was as true of that work as of any that I have written. And the criticism, whether just or unjust, describes with wonderful accuracy the purport that I have ever had in view in my writing. I have always desired to "hew out some lump of the earth," and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,--with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness,--so that my readers might recognise human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure, and sweet, and unselfish; that a man will be honoured as he is true, and honest, and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. I do not say that lessons such as these may not be more grandly taught by higher flights than mine. Such lessons come to us from our greatest poets. But there are so many who will read novels and understand them, who either do not read the works of our great poets, or reading them miss the lesson! And even in prose fiction the character whom the fervid imagination of the writer has lifted somewhat into the clouds, will hardly give so plain an example to the hasty normal reader as the humbler personage whom that reader unconsciously feels to resemble himself or herself. I do think that a girl would more probably dress her own mind after Lucy Robarts than after Flora Macdonald. There are many who would laugh at the idea of a novelist teaching either virtue or nobility,--those, for instance, who regard the reading of novels as a sin, and those also who think it to be simply an idle pastime. They look upon the tellers of stories as among the tribe of those who pander to the wicked pleasures of a wicked world. I have regarded my art from so different a point of view that I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience. I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some may have learned from them that modesty is a charm well worth preserving. I think that no youth has been taught that in falseness and flashness is to be found the road to manliness; but some may perhaps have learned from me that it is to be found in truth and a high but gentle spirit. Such are the lessons I have striven to teach; and I have thought it might best be done by representing to my readers characters like themselves,--or to which they might liken themselves. _Framley Parsonage_--or, rather, my connection with the _Cornhill_--was the means of introducing me very quickly to that literary world from which I had hitherto been severed by the fact of my residence in Ireland. In December, 1859, while I was still very hard at work on my novel, I came over to take charge of the Eastern District, and settled myself at a residence about twelve miles from London, in Hertfordshire, but on the borders both of Essex and Middlesex,--which was somewhat too grandly called Waltham House. This I took on lease, and subsequently bought after I had spent about £1000 on improvements. From hence I was able to make myself frequent both in Cornhill and Piccadilly, and to live, when the opportunity came, among men of my own pursuit. It was in January, 1860, that Mr. George Smith--to whose enterprise we owe not only the _Cornhill Magazine_ but the _Pall Mall Gazette_--gave a sumptuous dinner to his contributors. It was a memorable banquet in many ways, but chiefly so to me because on that occasion I first met many men who afterwards became my most intimate associates. It can rarely happen that one such occasion can be the first starting-point of so many friendships. It was at that table, and on that day, that I first saw Thackeray, Charles Taylor (Sir)--than whom in latter life I have loved no man better,--Robert Bell, G. H. Lewes, and John Everett Millais. With all these men I afterwards lived on affectionate terms;--but I will here speak specially of the last, because from that time he was joined with me in so much of the work that I did. Mr. Millais was engaged to illustrate _Framley Parsonage_, but this was not the first work he did for the magazine. In the second number there is a picture of his accompanying Monckton Milne's _Unspoken Dialogue_. The first drawing he did for _Framley Parsonage_ did not appear till after the dinner of which I have spoken, and I do not think that I knew at the time that he was engaged on my novel. When I did know it, it made me very proud. He afterwards illustrated _Orley Farm_, _The Small House at Allington_, _Rachel Ray_, and _Phineas Finn_. Altogether he drew from my tales eighty-seven drawings, and I do not think that more conscientious work was ever done by man. Writers of novels know well--and so ought readers of novels to have learned--that there are two modes of illustrating, either of which may be adopted equally by a bad and by a good artist. To which class Mr. Millais belongs I need not say; but, as a good artist, it was open to him simply to make a pretty picture, or to study the work of the author from whose writing he was bound to take his subject. I have too often found that the former alternative has been thought to be the better, as it certainly is the easier method. An artist will frequently dislike to subordinate his ideas to those of an author, and will sometimes be too idle to find out what those ideas are. But this artist was neither proud nor idle. In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so. I have carried on some of those characters from book to book, and have had my own early ideas impressed indelibly on my memory by the excellence of his delineations. Those illustrations were commenced fifteen years ago, and from that time up to this day my affection for the man of whom I am speaking has increased. To see him has always been a pleasure. His voice has been a sweet sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard,--as one living man never tells another. Sir Charles Taylor, who carried me home in his brougham that evening, and thus commenced an intimacy which has since been very close, was born to wealth, and was therefore not compelled by the necessities of a profession to enter the lists as an author. But he lived much with those who did so,--and could have done it himself had want or ambition stirred him. He was our king at the Garrick Club, to which, however, I did not yet belong. He gave the best dinners of my time, and was,--happily I may say is,[6]--the best giver of dinners. A man rough of tongue, brusque in his manners, odious to those who dislike him, somewhat inclined to tyranny, he is the prince of friends, honest as the sun, and as open-handed as Charity itself. [Footnote 6: Alas! within a year of the writing of this he went from us.] Robert Bell has now been dead nearly ten years. As I look back over the interval and remember how intimate we were, it seems odd to me that we should have known each other for no more than six years. He was a man who had lived by his pen from his very youth; and was so far successful that I do not think that want ever came near him. But he never made that mark which his industry and talents would have seemed to ensure. He was a man well known to literary men, but not known to readers. As a journalist he was useful and conscientious, but his plays and novels never made themselves popular. He wrote a life of Canning, and he brought out an annotated edition of the British poets; but he achieved no great success. I have known no man better read in English literature. Hence his conversation had a peculiar charm, but he was not equally happy with his pen. He will long be remembered at the Literary Fund Committees, of which he was a staunch and most trusted supporter. I think it was he who first introduced me to that board. It has often been said that literary men are peculiarly apt to think that they are slighted and unappreciated. Robert Bell certainly never achieved the position in literature which he once aspired to fill, and which he was justified in thinking that he could earn for himself. I have frequently discussed these subjects with him, but I never heard from his mouth a word of complaint as to his own literary fate. He liked to hear the chimes go at midnight, and he loved to have ginger hot in his mouth. On such occasions no sound ever came out of a man's lips sweeter than his wit and gentle revelry. George Lewes,--with his wife, whom all the world knows as George Eliot,--has also been and still is one of my dearest friends. He is, I think, the acutest critic I know,--and the severest. His severity, however, is a fault. His intention to be honest, even when honesty may give pain, has caused him to give pain when honesty has not required it. He is essentially a doubter, and has encouraged himself to doubt till the faculty of trusting has almost left him. I am not speaking of the personal trust which one man feels in another, but of that confidence in literary excellence, which is, I think, necessary for the full enjoyment of literature. In one modern writer he did believe thoroughly. Nothing can be more charming than the unstinted admiration which he has accorded to everything that comes from the pen of the wonderful woman to whom his lot has been united. To her name I shall recur again when speaking of the novelists of the present day. Of "Billy Russell," as we always used to call him, I may say that I never knew but one man equal to him in the quickness and continuance of witty speech. That one man was Charles Lever--also an Irishman--whom I had known from an earlier date, and also with close intimacy. Of the two, I think that Lever was perhaps the more astounding producer of good things. His manner was perhaps a little the happier, and his turns more sharp and unexpected. But "Billy" also was marvellous. Whether abroad as special correspondent, or at home amidst the flurry of his newspaper work, he was a charming companion; his ready wit always gave him the last word. Of Thackeray I will speak again when I record his death. There were many others whom I met for the first time at George Smith's table. Albert Smith, for the first, and indeed for the last time, as he died soon after; Higgins, whom all the world knew as Jacob Omnium, a man I greatly regarded; Dallas, who for a time was literary critic to the _Times_, and who certainly in that capacity did better work than has appeared since in the same department; George Augustus Sala, who, had he given himself fair play, would have risen to higher eminence than that of being the best writer in his day of sensational leading articles; and Fitz-James Stephen, a man of very different calibre, who has not yet culminated, but who, no doubt, will culminate among our judges. There were many others;--but I cannot now recall their various names as identified with those banquets. Of _Framley Parsonage_ I need only further say, that as I wrote it I became more closely than ever acquainted with the new shire which I had added to the English counties. I had it all in my mind,--its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there. CHAPTER IX. _CASTLE RICHMOND_--_BROWN, JONES, AND ROBINSON_--_NORTH AMERICA_--_ORLEY FARM_. When I had half-finished _Framley Parsonage_, I went back to my other story, _Castle Richmond_, which I was writing for Messrs. Chapman & Hall, and completed that. I think that this was the only occasion on which I have had two different novels in my mind at the same time. This, however, did not create either difficulty or confusion. Many of us live in different circles; and when we go from our friends in the town to our friends in the country, we do not usually fail to remember the little details of the one life or the other. The parson at Rusticum, with his wife and his wife's mother, and all his belongings; and our old friend, the Squire, with his family history; and Farmer Mudge, who has been cross with us, because we rode so unnecessarily over his barley; and that rascally poacher, once a gamekeeper, who now traps all the foxes; and pretty Mary Cann, whose marriage with the wheelwright we did something to expedite;--though we are alive to them all, do not drive out of our brain the club gossip, or the memories of last season's dinners, or any incident of our London intimacies. In our lives we are always weaving novels, and we manage to keep the different tales distinct. A man does, in truth, remember that which it interests him to remember; and when we hear that memory has gone as age has come on, we should understand that the capacity for interest in the matter concerned has perished. A man will be generally very old and feeble before he forgets how much money he has in the funds. There is a good deal to be learned by any one who wishes to write a novel well; but when the art has been acquired, I do not see why two or three should not be well written at the same time. I have never found myself thinking much about the work that I had to do till I was doing it. I have indeed for many years almost abandoned the effort to think, trusting myself, with the narrowest thread of a plot, to work the matter out when the pen is in my hand. But my mind is constantly employing itself on the work I have done. Had I left either _Framley Parsonage_ or _Castle Richmond_ half-finished fifteen years ago, I think I could complete the tales now with very little trouble. I have not looked at _Castle Richmond_ since it was published; and poor as the work is, I remember all the incidents. _Castle Richmond_ certainly was not a success,--though the plot is a fairly good plot, and is much more of a plot than I have generally been able to find. The scene is laid in Ireland, during the famine; and I am well aware now that English readers no longer like Irish stories. I cannot understand why it should be so, as the Irish character is peculiarly well fitted for romance. But Irish subjects generally have become distasteful. This novel, however, is of itself a weak production. The characters do not excite sympathy. The heroine has two lovers, one of whom is a scamp and the other a prig. As regards the scamp, the girl's mother is her own rival. Rivalry of the same nature has been admirably depicted by Thackeray in his _Esmond_; but there the mother's love seems to be justified by the girl's indifference. In _Castle Richmond_ the mother strives to rob her daughter of the man's love. The girl herself has no character; and the mother, who is strong enough, is almost revolting. The dialogue is often lively, and some of the incidents are well told; but the story as a whole was a failure. I cannot remember, however, that it was roughly handled by the critics when it came out; and I much doubt whether anything so hard was said of it then as that which I have said here. I was now settled at Waltham Cross, in a house in which I could entertain a few friends modestly, where we grew our cabbages and strawberries, made our own butter, and killed our own pigs. I occupied it for twelve years, and they were years to me of great prosperity. In 1861 I became a member of the Garrick Club, with which institution I have since been much identified. I had belonged to it about two years, when, on Thackeray's death, I was invited to fill his place on the Committee, and I have been one of that august body ever since. Having up to that time lived very little among men, having known hitherto nothing of clubs, having even as a boy been banished from social gatherings, I enjoyed infinitely at first the gaiety of the Garrick. It was a festival to me to dine there--which I did indeed but seldom; and a great delight to play a rubber in the little room up-stairs of an afternoon. I am speaking now of the old club in King Street. This playing of whist before dinner has since that become a habit with me, so that unless there be something else special to do--unless there be hunting, or I am wanted to ride in the park by the young tyrant of my household--it is "my custom always in the afternoon." I have sometimes felt sore with myself for this persistency, feeling that I was making myself a slave to an amusement which has not after all very much to recommend it. I have often thought that I would break myself away from it, and "swear off," as Rip Van Winkle says. But my swearing off has been like that of Rip Van Winkle. And now, as I think of it coolly, I do not know but that I have been right to cling to it. As a man grows old he wants amusement, more even than when he is young; and then it becomes so difficult to find amusement. Reading should, no doubt, be the delight of men's leisure hours. Had I to choose between books and cards, I should no doubt take the books. But I find that I can seldom read with pleasure for above an hour and a half at a time, or more than three hours a day. As I write this I am aware that hunting must soon be abandoned. After sixty it is given but to few men to ride straight across country, and I cannot bring myself to adopt any other mode of riding. I think that without cards I should now be much at a loss. When I began to play at the Garrick, I did so simply because I liked the society of the men who played. I think that I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have long been aware of a certain weakness in my own character, which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me,--a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my school-days no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys. They seemed to me to live in a social paradise, while the desolation of my pandemonium was complete. And afterwards, when I was in London as a young man, I had but few friends. Among the clerks in the Post Office I held my own fairly for the first two or three years; but even then I regarded myself as something of a pariah. My Irish life had been much better. I had had my wife and children, and had been sustained by a feeling of general respect. But even in Ireland I had in truth lived but little in society. Our means had been sufficient for our wants, but insufficient for entertaining others. It was not till we had settled ourselves at Waltham that I really began to live much with others. The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular. I soon became a member of other clubs. There was the Arts Club in Hanover Square, of which I saw the opening, but from which, after three or four years, I withdrew my name, having found that during these three or four years I had not once entered the building. Then I was one of the originators of the Civil Service Club--not from judgment, but instigated to do so by others. That also I left for the same reason. In 1864 I received the honour of being elected by the Committee at the Athenæum. For this I was indebted to the kindness of Lord Stanhope; and I never was more surprised than when I was informed of the fact. About the same time I became a member of the Cosmopolitan, a little club that meets twice a week in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, and supplies to all its members, and its members' friends, tea and brandy and water without charge! The gatherings there I used to think very delightful. One met Jacob Omnium, Monckton Milnes, Tom Hughes, William Stirling, Henry Reeve, Arthur Russell, Tom Taylor, and such like; and generally a strong political element, thoroughly well mixed, gave a certain spirit to the place. Lord Ripon, Lord Stanley, William Forster, Lord Enfield, Lord Kimberley, George Bentinck, Vernon Harcourt, Bromley Davenport, Knatchbull Huguessen, with many others, used to whisper the secrets of Parliament with free tongues. Afterwards I became a member of the Turf, which I found to be serviceable--or the reverse--only for the playing of whist at high points. In August, 1861, I wrote another novel for the _Cornhill Magazine_. It was a short story, about one volume in length, and was called _The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson_. In this I attempted a style for which I certainly was not qualified, and to which I never had again recourse. It was meant to be funny, was full of slang, and was intended as a satire on the ways of trade. Still I think that there is some good fun in it, but I have heard no one else express such an opinion. I do not know that I ever heard any opinion expressed on it, except by the publisher, who kindly remarked that he did not think it was equal to my usual work. Though he had purchased the copyright, he did not republish the story in a book form till 1870, and then it passed into the world of letters _sub silentio_. I do not know that it was ever criticised or ever read. I received £600 for it. From that time to this I have been paid at about that rate for my work--£600 for the quantity contained in an ordinary novel volume, or £3000 for a long tale published in twenty parts, which is equal in length to five such volumes. I have occasionally, I think, received something more than this, never I think less for any tale, except when I have published my work anonymously.[7] Having said so much, I need not further specify the prices as I mention the books as they were written. I will, however, when I am completing this memoir, give a list of all the sums I have received for my literary labours. I think that _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ was the hardest bargain I ever sold to a publisher. [Footnote 7: Since the date at which this was written I have encountered a diminution in price.] In 1861 the War of Secession had broken out in America, and from the first I interested myself much in the question. My mother had thirty years previously written a very popular, but, as I had thought, a somewhat unjust book about our cousins over the water. She had seen what was distasteful in the manners of a young people, but had hardly recognised their energy. I had entertained for many years an ambition to follow her footsteps there, and to write another book. I had already paid a short visit to New York City and State on my way home from the West Indies, but had not seen enough then to justify me in the expression of any opinion. The breaking out of the war did not make me think that the time was peculiarly fit for such inquiry as I wished to make, but it did represent itself as an occasion on which a book might be popular. I consequently consulted the two great powers with whom I was concerned. Messrs. Chapman & Hall, the publishers, were one power, and I had no difficulty in arranging my affairs with them. They agreed to publish the book on my terms, and bade me God-speed on my journey. The other power was the Postmaster-General and Mr. Rowland Hill, the Secretary of the Post Office. I wanted leave of absence for the unusual period of nine months, and fearing that I should not get it by the ordinary process of asking the Secretary, I went direct to his lordship. "Is it on the plea of ill-health?" he asked, looking into my face, which was then that of a very robust man. His lordship knew the Civil Service as well as any one living, and must have seen much of falseness and fraudulent pretence, or he could not have asked that question. I told him that I was very well, but that I wanted to write a book. "Had I any special ground to go upon in asking for such indulgence?" I had, I said, done my duty well by the service. There was a good deal of demurring, but I got my leave for nine months,--and I knew that I had earned it. Mr. Hill attached to the minute granting me the leave an intimation that it was to be considered as a full equivalent for the special services rendered by me to the department. I declined, however, to accept the grace with such a stipulation, and it was withdrawn by the directions of the Postmaster-General.[8] [Footnpte 8: During the period of my service in the Post Office I did very much special work for which I never asked any remuneration,--and never received any, though payments for special services were common in the department at that time. But if there was to be a question of such remuneration, I did not choose that my work should be valued at the price put upon it by Mr. Hill.] I started for the States in August and returned in the following May. The war was raging during the time that I was there, and the country was full of soldiers. A part of the time I spent in Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, among the troops, along the line of attack. I visited all the States (excepting California) which had not then seceded,--failing to make my way into the seceding States unless I was prepared to visit them with an amount of discomfort I did not choose to endure. I worked very hard at the task I had assigned to myself, and did, I think, see much of the manners and institutions of the people. Nothing struck me more than their persistence in the ordinary pursuits of life in spite of the war which was around them. Neither industry nor amusement seemed to meet with any check. Schools, hospitals, and institutes were by no means neglected because new regiments were daily required. The truth, I take it, is that we, all of us, soon adapt ourselves to the circumstances around us. Though three parts of London were in flames I should no doubt expect to have my dinner served to me if I lived in the quarter which was free from fire. The book I wrote was very much longer than that on the West Indies, but was also written almost without a note. It contained much information, and, with many inaccuracies, was a true book. But it was not well done. It is tedious and confused, and will hardly, I think, be of future value to those who wish to make themselves acquainted with the United States. It was published about the middle of the war,--just at the time in which the hopes of those who loved the South were most buoyant, and the fears of those who stood by the North were the strongest. But it expressed an assured confidence--which never quavered in a page or in a line--that the North would win. This assurance was based on the merits of the Northern cause, on the superior strength of the Northern party, and on a conviction that England would never recognise the South, and that France would be guided in her policy by England. I was right in my prophecies, and right, I think, on the grounds on which they were made. The Southern cause was bad. The South had provoked the quarrel because its political supremacy was checked by the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency. It had to fight as a little man against a big man, and fought gallantly. That gallantry,--and a feeling based on a misconception as to American character that the Southerners are better gentlemen than their Northern brethren,--did create great sympathy here; but I believe that the country was too just to be led into political action by a spirit of romance, and I was warranted in that belief. There was a moment in which the Northern cause was in danger, and the danger lay certainly in the prospect of British interference. Messrs. Slidell and Mason,--two men insignificant in themselves,--had been sent to Europe by the Southern party, and had managed to get on board the British mail steamer called "The Trent," at the Havannah. A most undue importance was attached to this mission by Mr. Lincoln's government, and efforts were made to stop them. A certain Commodore Wilkes, doing duty as policeman on the seas, did stop the "Trent," and took the men out. They were carried, one to Boston and one to New York, and were incarcerated, amidst the triumph of the nation. Commodore Wilkes, who had done nothing in which a brave man could take glory, was made a hero and received a prize sword. England of course demanded her passengers back, and the States for a while refused to surrender them. But Mr. Seward was at that time the Secretary of State, and Mr. Seward, with many political faults, was a wise man. I was at Washington at the time, and it was known there that the contest among the leading Northerners was very sharp on the matter. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Seward were, under Mr. Lincoln, the two chiefs of the party. It was understood that Mr. Sumner was opposed to the rendition of the men, and Mr. Seward in favour of it. Mr. Seward's counsels at last prevailed with the President, and England's declaration of war was prevented. I dined with Mr. Seward on the day of the decision, meeting Mr. Sumner at his house, and was told as I left the dining-room what the decision had been. During the afternoon I and others had received intimation through the embassy that we might probably have to leave Washington at an hour's notice. This, I think, was the severest danger that the Northern cause encountered during the war. But my book, though it was right in its views on this subject,--and wrong in none other as far as I know,--was not a good book. I can recommend no one to read it now in order that he may be either instructed or amused,--as I can do that on the West Indies. It served its purpose at the time, and was well received by the public and by the critics. Before starting to America I had completed _Orley Farm_, a novel which appeared in shilling numbers,--after the manner in which _Pickwick_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, and many others had been published. Most of those among my friends who talk to me now about my novels, and are competent to form an opinion on the subject, say that this is the best I have written. In this opinion I do not coincide. I think that the highest merit which a novel can have consists in perfect delineation of character, rather than in plot, or humour, or pathos, and I shall before long mention a subsequent work in which I think the main character of the story is so well developed as to justify me in asserting its claim above the others. The plot of _Orley Farm_ is probably the best I have ever made; but it has the fault of declaring itself, and thus coming to an end too early in the book. When Lady Mason tells her ancient lover that she did forge the will, the plot of _Orley Farm_ has unravelled itself;--and this she does in the middle of the tale. Independently, however, of this the novel is good. Sir Peregrine Orme, his grandson, Madeline Stavely, Mr. Furnival, Mr. Chaffanbrass, and the commercial gentlemen, are all good. The hunting is good. The lawyer's talk is good. Mr. Moulder carves his turkey admirably, and Mr. Kantwise sells his tables and chairs with spirit. I do not know that there is a dull page in the book. I am fond of _Orley Farm_;--and am especially fond of its illustrations by Millais, which are the best I have seen in any novel in any language. I now felt that I had gained my object. In 1862 I had achieved that which I contemplated when I went to London in 1834, and towards which I made my first attempt when I began the _Macdermots_ in 1843. I had created for myself a position among literary men, and had secured to myself an income on which I might live in ease and comfort,--which ease and comfort have been made to include many luxuries. From this time for a period of twelve years my income averaged £4500 a year. Of this I spent about two-thirds, and put by one. I ought perhaps to have done better,--to have spent one-third, and put by two; but I have ever been too well inclined to spend freely that which has come easily. This, however, has been so exactly the life which my thoughts and aspirations had marked out,--thoughts and aspirations which used to cause me to blush with shame because I was so slow in forcing myself to the work which they demanded,--that I have felt some pride in having attained it. I have before said how entirely I fail to reach the altitude of those who think that a man devoted to letters should be indifferent to the pecuniary results for which work is generally done. An easy income has always been regarded by me as a great blessing. Not to have to think of sixpences, or very much of shillings; not to be unhappy because the coals have been burned too quickly, and the house linen wants renewing; not to be debarred by the rigour of necessity from opening one's hands, perhaps foolishly, to one's friends;--all this to me has been essential to the comfort of life. I have enjoyed the comfort for I may almost say the last twenty years, though no man in his youth had less prospect of doing so, or would have been less likely at twenty-five to have had such luxuries foretold to him by his friends. But though the money has been sweet, the respect, the friendships, and the mode of life which has been achieved, have been much sweeter. In my boyhood, when I would be crawling up to school with dirty boots and trousers through the muddy lanes, I was always telling myself that the misery of the hour was not the worst of it, but that the mud and solitude and poverty of the time would insure me mud and solitude and poverty through my life. Those lads about me would go into Parliament, or become rectors and deans, or squires of parishes, or advocates thundering at the Bar. They would not live with me now,--but neither should I be able to live with them in after years. Nevertheless I have lived with them. When, at the age in which others go to the universities, I became a clerk in the Post Office, I felt that my old visions were being realised. I did not think it a high calling. I did not know then how very much good work may be done by a member of the Civil Service who will show himself capable of doing it. The Post Office at last grew upon me and forced itself into my affections. I became intensely anxious that people should have their letters delivered to them punctually. But my hope to rise had always been built on the writing of novels, and at last by the writing of novels I had risen. I do not think that I ever toadied any one, or that I have acquired the character of a tuft-hunter. But here I do not scruple to say that I prefer the society of distinguished people, and that even the distinction of wealth confers many advantages. The best education is to be had at a price as well as the best broadcloth. The son of a peer is more likely to rub his shoulders against well-informed men than the son of a tradesman. The graces come easier to the wife of him who has had great-grandfathers than they do to her whose husband has been less,--or more fortunate, as he may think it. The discerning man will recognise the information and the graces when they are achieved without such assistance, and will honour the owners of them the more because of the difficulties they have overcome;--but the fact remains that the society of the well-born and of the wealthy will as a rule be worth seeking. I say this now, because these are the rules by which I have lived, and these are the causes which have instigated me to work. I have heard the question argued--On what terms should a man of inferior rank live with those who are manifestly superior to him? If a marquis or an earl honour me, who have no rank, with his intimacy, am I in my intercourse with him to remember our close acquaintance or his high rank? I have always said that where the difference in position is quite marked, the overtures to intimacy should always come from the higher rank; but if the intimacy be ever fixed, then that rank should be held of no account. It seems to me that intimate friendship admits of no standing but that of equality. I cannot be the Sovereign's friend, nor probably the friend of many very much beneath the Sovereign, because such equality is impossible. When I first came to Waltham Cross in the winter of 1859-1860, I had almost made up my mind that my hunting was over. I could not then count upon an income which would enable me to carry on an amusement which I should doubtless find much more expensive in England than in Ireland. I brought with me out of Ireland one mare, but she was too light for me to ride in the hunting-field. As, however, the money came in, I very quickly fell back into my old habits. First one horse was bought, then another, and then a third, till it became established as a fixed rule that I should not have less than four hunters in the stable. Sometimes when my boys have been at home I have had as many as six. Essex was the chief scene of my sport, and gradually I became known there almost as well as though I had been an Essex squire, to the manner born. Few have investigated more closely than I have done the depth, and breadth, and water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch. It will, I think, be accorded to me by Essex men generally that I have ridden hard. The cause of my delight in the amusement I have never been able to analyse to my own satisfaction. In the first place, even now, I know very little about hunting,--though I know very much of the accessories of the field. I am too blind to see hounds turning, and cannot therefore tell whether the fox has gone this way or that. Indeed all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them. My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy, and have never ridden expensive horses. I am also now old for such work, being so stiff that I cannot get on to my horse without the aid of a block or a bank. But I ride still after the same fashion, with a boy's energy, determined to get ahead if it may possibly be done, hating the roads, despising young men who ride them, and with a feeling that life can not, with all her riches, have given me anything better than when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of glory, but of credit, among my juniors. CHAPTER X. _THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON_--_CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?_--_RACHEL RAY_--AND THE _FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW_. During the early months of 1862 _Orley Farm_ was still being brought out in numbers, and at the same time _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ was appearing in the _Cornhill Magazine_. In September, 1862, the _Small House at Allington_ began its career in the same periodical. The work on North America had also come out in 1862. In August, 1863, the first number of _Can You Forgive Her?_ was published as a separate serial, and was continued through 1864. In 1863 a short novel was produced in the ordinary volume form, called _Rachel Ray_. In addition to these I published during the time two volumes of stories called _The Tales of All Countries_. In the early spring of 1865 _Miss Mackenzie_ was issued in the same form as _Rachel Ray_; and in May of the same year _The Belton Estate_ was commenced with the commencement of the _Fortnightly Review_, of which periodical I will say a few words in this chapter. I quite admit that I crowded my wares into the market too quickly,--because the reading world could not want such a quantity of matter from the hands of one author in so short a space of time. I had not been quite so fertile as the unfortunate gentleman who disgusted the publisher in Paternoster Row,--in the story of whose productiveness I have always thought there was a touch of romance,--but I had probably done enough to make both publishers and readers think that I was coming too often beneath their notice. Of publishers, however, I must speak collectively, as my sins were, I think, chiefly due to the encouragement which I received from them individually. What I wrote for the _Cornhill Magazine_, I always wrote at the instigation of Mr. Smith. My other works were published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in compliance with contracts made by me with them, and always made with their good-will. Could I have been two separate persons at one and the same time, of whom one might have been devoted to Cornhill and the other to the interests of the firm in Piccadilly, it might have been very well;--but as I preserved my identity in both places, I myself became aware that my name was too frequent on title-pages. Critics, if they ever trouble themselves with these pages, will, of course, say that in what I have now said I have ignored altogether the one great evil of rapid production,--namely, that of inferior work. And of course if the work was inferior because of the too great rapidity of production, the critics would be right. Giving to the subject the best of my critical abilities, and judging of my own work as nearly as possible as I would that of another, I believe that the work which has been done quickest has been done the best. I have composed better stories--that is, have created better plots--than those of _The Small House at Allington_ and _Can You Forgive Her?_ and I have portrayed two or three better characters than are to be found in the pages of either of them; but taking these books all through, I do not think that I have ever done better work. Nor would these have been improved by any effort in the art of story telling, had each of these been the isolated labour of a couple of years. How short is the time devoted to the manipulation of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays and novels;--I may say also, how very little time the brain is able to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonising doubt, almost of despair,--so at least it has been with me,--or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling anything, but with a most distinct conception of some character or characters, I have rushed at the work as a rider rushes at a fence which he does not see. Sometimes I have encountered what, in hunting language, we call a cropper. I had such a fall in two novels of mine, of which I have already spoken--_The Bertrams_ and _Castle Richmond_. I shall have to speak of other such troubles. But these failures have not arisen from over-hurried work. When my work has been quicker done,--and it has sometimes been done very quickly--the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in the conception, but in the telling of the story. Instead of writing eight pages a day, I have written sixteen; instead of working five days a week, I have worked seven. I have trebled my usual average, and have done so in circumstances which have enabled me to give up all my thoughts for the time to the book I have been writing. This has generally been done at some quiet spot among the mountains,--where there has been no society, no hunting, no whist, no ordinary household duties. And I am sure that the work so done has had in it the best truth and the highest spirit that I have been able to produce. At such times I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel. The critics will again say that all this may be very well as to the rough work of the author's own brain, but it will be very far from well in reference to the style in which that work has been given to the public. After all, the vehicle which a writer uses for conveying his thoughts to the public should not be less important to him than the thoughts themselves. An author can hardly hope to be popular unless he can use popular language. That is quite true; but then comes the question of achieving a popular--in other words, I may say, a good and lucid style. How may an author best acquire a mode of writing which shall be agreeable and easily intelligible to the reader? He must be correct, because without correctness he can be neither agreeable nor intelligible. Readers will expect him to obey those rules which they, consciously or unconsciously, have been taught to regard as binding on language; and unless he does obey them, he will disgust. Without much labour, no writer will achieve such a style. He has very much to learn; and, when he has learned that much, he has to acquire the habit of using what he has learned with ease. But all this must be learned and acquired,--not while he is writing that which shall please, but long before. His language must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of the great performer's fingers; as words come from the mouth of the indignant orator; as letters fly from the fingers of the trained compositor; as the syllables tinkled out by little bells form themselves to the ear of the telegraphist. A man who thinks much of his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him work that smells of oil. I speak here, of course, of prose; for in poetry we know what care is necessary, and we form our taste accordingly. Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy,--chiefly because the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will forget the nature of the composition with which it was commenced. A singular nominative will be disgraced by a plural verb, because other pluralities have intervened and have tempted the ear into plural tendencies. Tautologies will occur, because the ear, in demanding fresh emphasis, has forgotten that the desired force has been already expressed. I need not multiply these causes of error, which must have been stumbling-blocks indeed when men wrote in the long sentences of Gibbon, but which Macaulay, with his multiplicity of divisions, has done so much to enable us to avoid. A rapid writer will hardly avoid these errors altogether. Speaking of myself, I am ready to declare that, with much training, I have been unable to avoid them. But the writer for the press is rarely called upon--a writer of books should never be called upon--to send his manuscript hot from his hand to the printer. It has been my practice to read everything four times at least--thrice in manuscript and once in print. Very much of my work I have read twice in print. In spite of this I know that inaccuracies have crept through,--not single spies, but in battalions. From this I gather that the supervision has been insufficient, not that the work itself has been done too fast. I am quite sure that those passages which have been written with the greatest stress of labour, and consequently with the greatest haste, have been the most effective and by no means the most inaccurate. _The Small House at Allington_ redeemed my reputation with the spirited proprietor of the _Cornhill_, which must, I should think, have been damaged by _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_. In it appeared Lily Dale, one of the characters which readers of my novels have liked the best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a French prig. She became first engaged to a snob, who jilted her; and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made her way into the hearts of many readers, both young and old; so that, from that time to this, I have been continually honoured with letters, the purport of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the author concerning her fate. It was because she could not get over her troubles that they loved her. Outside Lily Dale and the chief interest of the novel, _The Small House at Allington_ is, I think, good. The De Courcy family are alive, as is also Sir Raffle Buffle, who is a hero of the Civil Service. Sir Raffle was intended to represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon chosen, and I was often assured that the portrait was very like. I have never seen the gentleman with whom I am supposed to have taken the liberty. There is also an old squire down at Allington, whose life as a country gentleman with rather straitened means is, I think, well described. Of _Can You Forgive Her?_ I cannot speak with too great affection, though I do not know that of itself it did very much to increase my reputation. As regards the story, it was formed chiefly on that of the play which my friend Mr. Bartley had rejected long since, the circumstances of which the reader may perhaps remember. The play had been called _The Noble Jilt_; but I was afraid of the name for a novel, lest the critics might throw a doubt on the nobility. There was more of tentative humility in that which I at last adopted. The character of the girl is carried through with considerable strength, but is not attractive. The humorous characters, which are also taken from the play,--a buxom widow who with her eyes open chooses the most scampish of two selfish suitors because he is the better looking,--are well done. Mrs. Greenow, between Captain Bellfield and Mr. Cheeseacre, is very good fun--as far as the fun of novels is. But that which endears the book to me is the first presentation which I made in it of Plantagenet Palliser, with his wife, Lady Glencora. By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters with their belongings have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently I have used them for the expression of my political or social convictions. They have been as real to me as free trade was to Mr. Cobden, or the dominion of a party to Mr. Disraeli; and as I have not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons, or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer, they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul. Mr. Plantagenet Palliser had appeared in _The Small House at Allington_, but his birth had not been accompanied by many hopes. In the last pages of that novel he is made to seek a remedy for a foolish false step in life by marrying the grand heiress of the day;--but the personage of the great heiress does not appear till she comes on the scene as a married woman in _Can You Forgive Her?_ He is the nephew and heir to a duke--the Duke of Omnium--who was first introduced in _Doctor Thorne_, and afterwards in _Framley Parsonage_, and who is one of the belongings of whom I have spoken. In these personages and their friends, political and social, I have endeavoured to depict the faults and frailties and vices,--as also the virtues, the graces, and the strength of our highest classes; and if I have not made the strength and virtues predominant over the faults and vices, I have not painted the picture as I intended. Plantagenet Palliser I think to be a very noble gentleman,--such a one as justifies to the nation the seeming anomaly of an hereditary peerage and of primogeniture. His wife is in all respects very inferior to him; but she, too, has, or has been intended to have, beneath the thin stratum of her follies a basis of good principle, which enabled her to live down the conviction of the original wrong which was done to her, and taught her to endeavour to do her duty in the position to which she was called. She had received a great wrong,--having been made, when little more than a child, to marry a man for whom she cared nothing;--when, however, though she was little more than a child, her love had been given elsewhere. She had very heavy troubles, but they did not overcome her. As to the heaviest of these troubles, I will say a word in vindication of myself and of the way I handled it in my work. In the pages of _Can You Forgive Her?_ the girl's first love is introduced,--beautiful, well-born, and utterly worthless. To save a girl from wasting herself, and an heiress from wasting her property on such a scamp, was certainly the duty of the girl's friends. But it must ever be wrong to force a girl into a marriage with a man she does not love,--and certainly the more so when there is another whom she does love. In my endeavour to teach this lesson I subjected the young wife to the terrible danger of overtures from the man to whom her heart had been given. I was walking no doubt on ticklish ground, leaving for a while a doubt on the question whether the lover might or might not succeed. Then there came to me a letter from a distinguished dignitary of our Church, a man whom all men honoured, treating me with severity for what I was doing. It had been one of the innocent joys of his life, said the clergyman, to have my novels read to him by his daughters. But now I was writing a book which caused him to bid them close it! Must I also turn away to vicious sensation such as this? Did I think that a wife contemplating adultery was a character fit for my pages? I asked him in return, whether from his pulpit, or at any rate from his communion-table, he did not denounce adultery to his audience; and if so, why should it not be open to me to preach the same doctrine to mine. I made known nothing which the purest girl could not but have learned, and ought not to have learned, elsewhere, and I certainly lent no attraction to the sin which I indicated. His rejoinder was full of grace, and enabled him to avoid the annoyance of argumentation without abandoning his cause. He said that the subject was so much too long for letters; that he hoped I would go and stay a week with him in the country,--so that we might have it out. That opportunity, however, has never yet arrived. Lady Glencora overcomes that trouble, and is brought, partly by her own sense of right and wrong, and partly by the genuine nobility of her husband's conduct, to attach herself to him after a certain fashion. The romance of her life is gone, but there remains a rich reality of which she is fully able to taste the flavour. She loves her rank and becomes ambitious, first of social, and then of political ascendancy. He is thoroughly true to her, after his thorough nature, and she, after her less perfect nature, is imperfectly true to him. In conducting these characters from one story to another I realised the necessity, not only of consistency,--which, had it been maintained by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature,--but also of those changes which time always produces. There are, perhaps, but few of us who, after the lapse of ten years, will be found to have changed our chief characteristics. The selfish man will still be selfish, and the false man false. But our manner of showing or of hiding these characteristics will be changed,--as also our power of adding to or diminishing their intensity. It was my study that these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes which come upon us all; and I think that I have succeeded. The Duchess of Omnium, when she is playing the part of Prime Minister's wife, is the same woman as that Lady Glencora who almost longs to go off with Burgo Fitzgerald, but yet knows that she will never do so; and the Prime Minister Duke, with his wounded pride and sore spirit, is he who, for his wife's sake, left power and place when they were first offered to him;--but they have undergone the changes which a life so stirring as theirs would naturally produce. To do all this thoroughly was in my heart from first to last; but I do not know that the game has been worth the candle. To carry out my scheme I have had to spread my picture over so wide a canvas that I cannot expect that any lover of such art should trouble himself to look at it as a whole. Who will read _Can You Forgive Her?_, _Phineas Finn_, _Phineas Redux_, and _The Prime Minister_ consecutively, in order that they may understand the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora? Who will ever know that they should be so read? But in the performance of the work I had much gratification, and was enabled from time to time to have in this way that fling at the political doings of the day which every man likes to take, if not in one fashion then in another. I look upon this string of characters,--carried sometimes into other novels than those just named,--as the best work of my life. Taking him altogether, I think that Plantagenet Palliser stands more firmly on the ground than any other personage I have created. On Christmas day, 1863, we were startled by the news of Thackeray's death. He had then for many months given up the editorship of the _Cornhill Magazine_,--a position for which he was hardly fitted either by his habits or temperament,--but was still employed in writing for its pages. I had known him only for four years, but had grown into much intimacy with him and his family. I regard him as one of the most tender-hearted human beings I ever knew, who, with an exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the world at large, would entertain an almost equally exaggerated sympathy with the joys and troubles of individuals around him. He had been unfortunate in early life--unfortunate in regard to money--unfortunate with an afflicted wife--unfortunate in having his home broken up before his children were fit to be his companions. This threw him too much upon clubs, and taught him to dislike general society. But it never affected his heart, or clouded his imagination. He could still revel in the pangs and joys of fictitious life, and could still feel--as he did to the very last--the duty of showing to his readers the evil consequences of evil conduct. It was perhaps his chief fault as a writer that he could never abstain from that dash of satire which he felt to be demanded by the weaknesses which he saw around him. The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little,--or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. I myself regard _Esmond_ as the greatest novel in the English language, basing that judgment upon the excellence of its language, on the clear individuality of the characters, on the truth of its delineations in regard to the time selected, and on its great pathos. There are also in it a few scenes so told that even Scott has never equalled the telling. Let any one who doubts this read the passage in which Lady Castlewood induces the Duke of Hamilton to think that his nuptials with Beatrice will be honoured if Colonel Esmond will give away the bride. When he went from us he left behind living novelists with great names; but I think that they who best understood the matter felt that the greatest master of fiction of this age had gone. _Rachel Ray_ underwent a fate which no other novel of mine has encountered. Some years before this a periodical called _Good Words_ had been established under the editorship of my friend Dr. Norman Macleod, a well-known Presbyterian pastor in Glasgow. In 1863 he asked me to write a novel for his magazine, explaining to me that his principles did not teach him to confine his matter to religious subjects, and paying me the compliment of saying that he would feel himself quite safe in my hands. In reply I told him I thought he was wrong in his choice; that though he might wish to give a novel to the readers of _Good Words_, a novel from me would hardly be what he wanted, and that I could not undertake to write either with any specially religious tendency, or in any fashion different from that which was usual to me. As worldly and--if any one thought me wicked--as wicked as I had heretofore been, I must still be, should I write for _Good Words_. He persisted in his request, and I came to terms as to a story for the periodical. I wrote it and sent it to him, and shortly afterwards received it back--a considerable portion having been printed--with an intimation that it would not do. A letter more full of wailing and repentance no man ever wrote. It was, he said, all his own fault. He should have taken my advice. He should have known better. But the story, such as it was, he could not give to his readers in the pages of _Good Words_. Would I forgive him? Any pecuniary loss to which his decision might subject me the owner of the publication would willingly make good. There was some loss--or rather would have been--and that money I exacted, feeling that the fault had in truth been with the editor. There is the tale now to speak for itself. It is not brilliant, nor in any way very excellent; but it certainly is not very wicked. There is some dancing in one of the early chapters, described, no doubt, with that approval of the amusement which I have always entertained; and it was this to which my friend demurred. It is more true of novels than perhaps of anything else, that one man's food is another man's poison. _Miss Mackenzie_ was written with a desire to prove that a novel may be produced without any love; but even in this attempt it breaks down before the conclusion. In order that I might be strong in my purpose, I took for my heroine a very unattractive old maid, who was overwhelmed with money troubles; but even she was in love before the end of the book, and made a romantic marriage with an old man. There is in this story an attack upon charitable bazaars, made with a violence which will, I think, convince any reader that such attempts at raising money were at the time very odious to me. I beg to say that since that I have had no occasion to alter my opinion. _Miss Mackenzie_ was published in the early spring of 1865. At the same time I was engaged with others in establishing a periodical Review, in which some of us trusted much, and from which we expected great things. There was, however, in truth so little combination of idea among us, that we were not justified in our trust or in our expectations. And yet we were honest in our purpose, and have, I think, done some good by our honesty. The matter on which we were all agreed was freedom of speech, combined with personal responsibility. We would be neither conservative nor liberal, neither religious nor free-thinking, neither popular nor exclusive;--but we would let any man who had a thing to say, and knew how to say it, speak freely. But he should always speak with the responsibility of his name attached. In the very beginning I militated against this impossible negation of principles,--and did so most irrationally, seeing that I had agreed to the negation of principles,--by declaring that nothing should appear denying or questioning the divinity of Christ. It was a most preposterous claim to make for such a publication as we proposed, and it at once drove from us one or two who had proposed to join us. But we went on, and our company--limited--was formed. We subscribed, I think, £1250 each. I at least subscribed that amount, and--having agreed to bring out our publication every fortnight, after the manner of the well-known French publication,--we called it _The Fortnightly_. We secured the services of G. H. Lewes as our editor. We agreed to manage our finances by a Board, which was to meet once a fortnight, and of which I was the Chairman. And we determined that the payments for our literature should be made on a liberal and strictly ready-money system. We carried out our principles till our money was all gone, and then we sold the copyright to Messrs. Chapman & Hall for a trifle. But before we parted with our property we found that a fortnightly issue was not popular with the trade through whose hands the work must reach the public; and, as our periodical had not become sufficiently popular itself to bear down such opposition, we succumbed, and brought it out once a month. Still it was _The Fortnightly_, and still it is _The Fortnightly_. Of all the serial publications of the day, it probably is the most serious, the most earnest, the least devoted to amusement, the least flippant, the least jocose,--and yet it has the face to show itself month after month to the world, with so absurd a misnomer! It is, as all who know the laws of modern literature are aware, a very serious thing to change the name of a periodical. By doing so you begin an altogether new enterprise. Therefore should the name be well chosen;--whereas this was very ill chosen, a fault for which I alone was responsible. That theory of eclecticism was altogether impracticable. It was as though a gentleman should go into the House of Commons determined to support no party, but to serve his country by individual utterances. Such gentlemen have gone into the House of Commons, but they have not served their country much. Of course the project broke down. Liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry will never object to appear in company with their opposites, because they have the conceit to think that they can quell those opposites; but the opposites will not appear in conjunction with liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. As a natural consequence, our new publication became an organ of liberalism, free-thinking, and open inquiry. The result has been good; and though there is much in the now established principles of _The Fortnightly_ with which I do not myself agree, I may safely say that the publication has assured an individuality, and asserted for itself a position in our periodical literature, which is well understood and highly respected. As to myself and my own hopes in the matter,--I was craving after some increase in literary honesty, which I think is still desirable, but which is hardly to be attained by the means which then recommended themselves to me. In one of the early numbers I wrote a paper advocating the signature of the authors to periodical writing, admitting that the system should not be extended to journalistic articles on political subjects. I think that I made the best of my case; but further consideration has caused me to doubt whether the reasons which induced me to make an exception in favour of political writing do not extend themselves also to writing on other subjects. Much of the literary criticism which we now have is very bad indeed;--so bad as to be open to the charge both of dishonesty and incapacity. Books are criticised without being read,--are criticised by favour,--and are trusted by editors to the criticism of the incompetent. If the names of the critics were demanded, editors would be more careful. But I fear the effect would be that we should get but little criticism, and that the public would put but little trust in that little. An ordinary reader would not care to have his books recommended to him by Jones; but the recommendation of the great unknown comes to him with all the weight of the _Times_, the _Spectator_, or the _Saturday_. Though I admit so much, I am not a recreant from the doctrine I then preached. I think that the name of the author does tend to honesty, and that the knowledge that it will be inserted adds much to the author's industry and care. It debars him also from illegitimate license and dishonest assertions. A man should never be ashamed to acknowledge that which he is not ashamed to publish. In _The Fortnightly_ everything has been signed, and in this way good has, I think, been done. Signatures to articles in other periodicals have become much more common since _The Fortnightly_ was commenced. After a time Mr. Lewes retired from the editorship, feeling that the work pressed too severely on his moderate strength. Our loss in him was very great, and there was considerable difficulty in finding a successor. I must say that the present proprietor has been fortunate in the choice he did make. Mr. John Morley has done the work with admirable patience, zeal, and capacity. Of course he has got around him a set of contributors whose modes of thought are what we may call much advanced; he being "much advanced" himself, would not work with other aids. The periodical has a peculiar tone of its own; but it holds its own with ability, and though there are many who perhaps hate it, there are none who despise it. When the company sold it, having spent about £9000 on it, it was worth little or nothing. Now I believe it to be a good property. My own last personal concern with it was on a matter of fox-hunting.[9] There came out in it an article from the pen of Mr. Freeman the historian, condemning the amusement, which I love, on the grounds of cruelty and general brutality. Was it possible, asked Mr. Freeman, quoting from Cicero, that any educated man should find delight in so coarse a pursuit? Always bearing in mind my own connection with _The Fortnightly_, I regarded this almost as a rising of a child against the father. I felt at any rate bound to answer Mr. Freeman in the same columns, and I obtained Mr. Morley's permission to do so. I wrote my defence of fox-hunting, and there it is. In regard to the charge of cruelty, Mr. Freeman seems to assert that nothing unpleasant should be done to any of God's creatures except for a useful purpose. The protection of a lady's shoulders from the cold is a useful purpose; and therefore a dozen fur-bearing animals may be snared in the snow and left to starve to death in the wires, in order that the lady may have the tippet,--though a tippet of wool would serve the purpose as well as a tippet of fur. But the congregation and healthful amusement of one or two hundred persons, on whose behalf a single fox may or may not be killed, is not a useful purpose. I think that Mr. Freeman has failed to perceive that amusement is as needful and almost as necessary as food and raiment. The absurdity of the further charge as to the general brutality of the pursuit, and its consequent unfitness for an educated man, is to be attributed to Mr. Freeman's ignorance of what is really done and said in the hunting-field,--perhaps to his misunderstanding of Cicero's words. There was a rejoinder to my answer, and I asked for space for further remarks. I could have it, the editor said, if I much wished it; but he preferred that the subject should be closed. Of course I was silent. His sympathies were all with Mr. Freeman,--and against the foxes, who, but for fox-hunting, would cease to exist in England. And I felt that _The Fortnightly_ was hardly the place for the defence of the sport. Afterwards Mr. Freeman kindly suggested to me that he would be glad to publish my article in a little book to be put out by him condemnatory of fox-hunting generally. He was to have the last word and the first word, and that power of picking to pieces which he is known to use in so masterly a manner, without any reply from me! This I was obliged to decline. If he would give me the last word, as he would have the first, then, I told him, I should be proud to join him in the book. This offer did not however meet his views. [Footnote 9: I have written various articles for it since, especially two on Cicero, to which I devoted great labour.] It had been decided by the Board of Management, somewhat in opposition to my own ideas on the subject, that the _Fortnightly Review_ should always contain a novel. It was of course natural that I should write the first novel, and I wrote _The Belton Estate_. It is similar in its attributes to _Rachel Ray_ and to _Miss Mackenzie_. It is readable, and contains scenes which are true to life; but it has no peculiar merits, and will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist. I have not looked at it since it was published; and now turning back to it in my memory, I seem to remember almost less of it than of any book that I have written. CHAPTER XI. _THE CLAVERINGS_--THE _PALL MALL GAZETTE_--_NINA BALATKA_--AND _LINDA TRESSEL_. _The Claverings_, which came out in 1866 and 1867, was the last novel which I wrote for the _Cornhill_; and it was for this that I received the highest rate of pay that was ever accorded to me. It was the same length as _Framley Parsonage_, and the price was £2800. Whether much or little, it was offered by the proprietor of the magazine, and was paid in a single cheque. In _The Claverings_ I did not follow the habit which had now become very common to me, of introducing personages whose names are already known to the readers of novels, and whose characters were familiar to myself. If I remember rightly, no one appears here who had appeared before or who has been allowed to appear since. I consider the story as a whole to be good, though I am not aware that the public has ever corroborated that verdict. The chief character is that of a young woman who has married manifestly for money and rank,--so manifestly that she does not herself pretend, even while she is making the marriage, that she has any other reason. The man is old, disreputable, and a worn-out debauchee. Then comes the punishment natural to the offence. When she is free, the man whom she had loved, and who had loved her, is engaged to another woman. He vacillates and is weak,--in which weakness is the fault of the book, as he plays the part of hero. But she is strong--strong in her purpose, strong in her desires, and strong in her consciousness that the punishment which comes upon her has been deserved. But the chief merit of _The Claverings_ is in the genuine fun of some of the scenes. Humour has not been my forte, but I am inclined to think that the characters of Captain Boodle, Archie Clavering, and Sophie Gordeloup are humorous. Count Pateroff, the brother of Sophie, is also good, and disposes of the young hero's interference in a somewhat masterly manner. In _The Claverings_, too, there is a wife whose husband is a brute to her, who loses an only child--his heir--and who is rebuked by her lord because the boy dies. Her sorrow is, I think, pathetic. From beginning to end the story is well told. But I doubt now whether any one reads _The Claverings_. When I remember how many novels I have written, I have no right to expect that above a few of them shall endure even to the second year beyond publication. This story closed my connection with the _Cornhill Magazine_;--but not with its owner, Mr. George Smith, who subsequently brought out a further novel of mine in a separate form, and who about this time established the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to which paper I was for some years a contributor. It was in 1865 that the _Pall Mall Gazette_ was commenced, the name having been taken from a fictitious periodical, which was the offspring of Thackeray's brain. It was set on foot by the unassisted energy and resources of George Smith, who had succeeded by means of his magazine and his publishing connection in getting around him a society of literary men who sufficed, as far as literary ability went, to float the paper at once under favourable auspices. His two strongest staffs probably were "Jacob Omnium," whom I regard as the most forcible newspaper writer of my days, and Fitz-James Stephen, the most conscientious and industrious. To them the _Pall Mall Gazette_ owed very much of its early success,--and to the untiring energy and general ability of its proprietor. Among its other contributors were George Lewes, Hannay,--who, I think, came up from Edinburgh for employment on its columns,--Lord Houghton, Lord Strangford, Charles Merivale, Greenwood the present editor, Greg, myself, and very many others;--so many others, that I have met at a Pall Mall dinner a crowd of guests who would have filled the House of Commons more respectably than I have seen it filled even on important occasions. There are many who now remember--and no doubt when this is published there will be left some to remember--the great stroke of business which was done by the revelations of a visitor to one of the casual wards in London. A person had to be selected who would undergo the misery of a night among the usual occupants of a casual ward in a London poor-house, and who should at the same time be able to record what he felt and saw. The choice fell upon Mr. Greenwood's brother, who certainly possessed the courage and the powers of endurance. The description, which was very well given, was, I think, chiefly written by the brother of the Casual himself. It had a great effect, which was increased by secrecy as to the person who encountered all the horrors of that night. I was more than once assured that Lord Houghton was the man. I heard it asserted also that I myself had been the hero. At last the unknown one could no longer endure that his honours should be hidden, and revealed the truth,--in opposition, I fear, to promises to the contrary, and instigated by a conviction that if known he could turn his honours to account. In the meantime, however, that record of a night passed in a workhouse had done more to establish the sale of the journal than all the legal lore of Stephen, or the polemical power of Higgins, or the critical acumen of Lewes. My work was very various. I wrote much on the subject of the American War, on which my feelings were at the time very keen,--subscribing, if I remember right, my name to all that I wrote. I contributed also some sets of sketches, of which those concerning hunting found favour with the public. They were republished afterwards, and had a considerable sale, and may, I think, still be recommended to those who are fond of hunting, as being accurate in their description of the different classes of people who are to be met in the hunting-field. There was also a set of clerical sketches, which was considered to be of sufficient importance to bring down upon my head the critical wrath of a great dean of that period. The most ill-natured review that was ever written upon any work of mine appeared in the _Contemporary Review_ with reference to these Clerical Sketches. The critic told me that I did not understand Greek. That charge has been made not unfrequently by those who have felt themselves strong in that pride-producing language. It is much to read Greek with ease, but it is not disgraceful to be unable to do so. To pretend to read it without being able,--that is disgraceful. The critic, however, had been driven to wrath by my saying that Deans of the Church of England loved to revisit the glimpses of the metropolitan moon. I also did some critical work for the _Pall Mall_,--as I did also for _The Fortnightly_. It was not to my taste, but was done in conformity with strict conscientious scruples. I read what I took in hand, and said what I believed to be true,--always giving to the matter time altogether incommensurate with the pecuniary result to myself. In doing this for the _Pall Mall_, I fell into great sorrow. A gentleman, whose wife was dear to me as if she were my own sister, was in some trouble as to his conduct in the public service. He had been blamed, as he thought unjustly, and vindicated himself in a pamphlet. This he handed to me one day, asking me to read it, and express my opinion about it if I found that I had an opinion. I thought the request injudicious, and I did not read the pamphlet. He met me again, and, handing me a second pamphlet, pressed me very hard. I promised him that I would read it, and that if I found myself able I would express myself;--but that I must say not what I wished to think, but what I did think. To this of course he assented. I then went very much out of my way to study the subject,--which was one requiring study. I found, or thought that I found, that the conduct of the gentleman in his office had been indiscreet; but that charges made against himself affecting his honour were baseless. This I said, emphasising much more strongly than was necessary the opinion which I had formed of his indiscretion,--as will so often be the case when a man has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or a sledge-hammer,--in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives. Of course there was offence,--and a breaking off of intercourse between loving friends,--and a sense of wrong received, and I must own, too, of wrong done. It certainly was not open to me to whitewash with honesty him whom I did not find to be white; but there was no duty incumbent on me to declare what was his colour in my eyes,--no duty even to ascertain. But I had been ruffled by the persistency of the gentleman's request,--which should not have been made,--and I punished him for his wrong-doing by doing a wrong myself. I must add, that before he died his wife succeeded in bringing us together. In the early days of the paper, the proprietor, who at that time acted also as chief editor, asked me to undertake a duty,--of which the agony would indeed at no one moment have been so sharp as that endured in the casual ward, but might have been prolonged until human nature sank under it. He suggested to me that I should during an entire season attend the May meetings in Exeter Hall, and give a graphic and, if possible, amusing description of the proceedings. I did attend one,--which lasted three hours,--and wrote a paper which I think was called _A Zulu in Search of a Religion_. But when the meeting was over I went to that spirited proprietor, and begged him to impose upon me some task more equal to my strength. Not even on behalf of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, which was very dear to me, could I go through a second May meeting,--much less endure a season of such martyrdom. I have to acknowledge that I found myself unfit for work on a newspaper. I had not taken to it early enough in life to learn its ways and bear its trammels. I was fidgety when any word was altered in accordance with the judgment of the editor, who, of course, was responsible for what appeared. I wanted to select my own subjects,--not to have them selected for me; to write when I pleased,--and not when it suited others. As a permanent member of a staff I was no use, and after two or three years I dropped out of the work. From the commencement of my success as a writer, which I date from the beginning of the _Cornhill Magazine_, I had always felt an injustice in literary affairs which had never afflicted me or even suggested itself to me while I was unsuccessful. It seemed to me that a name once earned carried with it too much favour. I indeed had never reached a height to which praise was awarded as a matter of course; but there were others who sat on higher seats to whom the critics brought unmeasured incense and adulation, even when they wrote, as they sometimes did write, trash which from a beginner would not have been thought worthy of the slightest notice. I hope no one will think that in saying this I am actuated by jealousy of others. Though I never reached that height, still I had so far progressed that that which I wrote was received with too much favour. The injustice which struck me did not consist in that which was withheld from me, but in that which was given to me. I felt that aspirants coming up below me might do work as good as mine, and probably much better work, and yet fail to have it appreciated. In order to test this, I determined to be such an aspirant myself, and to begin a course of novels anonymously, in order that I might see whether I could obtain a second identity,--whether as I had made one mark by such literary ability as I possessed, I might succeed in doing so again. In 1865 I began a short tale called _Nina Balatka_, which in 1866 was published anonymously in _Blackwood's Magazine_. In 1867 this was followed by another of the same length, called _Linda Tressel_. I will speak of them together, as they are of the same nature and of nearly equal merit. Mr. Blackwood, who himself read the MS. of _Nina Balatka_, expressed an opinion that it would not from its style be discovered to have been written by me;--but it was discovered by Mr. Hutton of the _Spectator_, who found the repeated use of some special phrase which had rested upon his ear too frequently when reading for the purpose of criticism other works of mine. He declared in his paper that _Nina Balatka_ was by me, showing I think more sagacity than good nature. I ought not, however, to complain of him, as of all the critics of my work he has been the most observant, and generally the most eulogistic. _Nina Balatka_ never rose sufficiently high in reputation to make its detection a matter of any importance. Once or twice I heard the story mentioned by readers who did not know me to be the author, and always with praise; but it had no real success. The same may be said of _Linda Tressel_. Blackwood, who of course knew the author, was willing to publish them, trusting that works by an experienced writer would make their way, even without the writer's name, and he was willing to pay me for them, perhaps half what they would have fetched with my name. But he did not find the speculation answer, and declined a third attempt, though a third such tale was written for him. Nevertheless I am sure that the two stories are good. Perhaps the first is somewhat the better, as being the less lachrymose. They were both written very quickly, but with a considerable amount of labour; and both were written immediately after visits to the towns in which the scenes are laid,--Prague, mainly, and Nuremberg. Of course I had endeavoured to change not only my manner of language, but my manner of story-telling also; and in this, _pace_ Mr. Hutton, I think that I was successful. English life in them there was none. There was more of romance proper than had been usual with me. And I made an attempt at local colouring, at descriptions of scenes and places, which has not been usual with me. In all this I am confident that I was in a measure successful. In the loves, and fears, and hatreds, both of Nina and of Linda, there is much that is pathetic. Prague is Prague, and Nuremberg is Nuremberg. I know that the stories are good, but they missed the object with which they had been written. Of course there is not in this any evidence that I might not have succeeded a second time as I succeeded before, had I gone on with the same dogged perseverance. Mr. Blackwood, had I still further reduced my price, would probably have continued the experiment. Another ten years of unpaid unflagging labour might have built up a second reputation. But this at any rate did seem clear to me, that with all the increased advantages which practice in my art must have given me, I could not at once induce English readers to read what I gave to them, unless I gave it with my name. I do not wish to have it supposed from this that I quarrel with public judgment in affairs of literature. It is a matter of course that in all things the public should trust to established reputation. It is as natural that a novel reader wanting novels should send to a library for those by George Eliot or Wilkie Collins, as that a lady when she wants a pie for a picnic should go to Fortnum & Mason. Fortnum & Mason can only make themselves Fortnum & Mason by dint of time and good pies combined. If Titian were to send us a portrait from the other world, as certain dead poets send their poetry, by means of a medium, it would be some time before the art critic of the _Times_ would discover its value. We may sneer at the want of judgment thus displayed, but such slowness of judgment is human and has always existed. I say all this here because my thoughts on the matter have forced upon me the conviction that very much consideration is due to the bitter feelings of disappointed authors. We who have succeeded are so apt to tell new aspirants not to aspire, because the thing to be done may probably be beyond their reach. "My dear young lady, had you not better stay at home and darn your stockings?" "As, sir, you have asked for my candid opinion, I can only counsel you to try some other work of life which may be better suited to your abilities." What old-established successful author has not said such words as these to humble aspirants for critical advice, till they have become almost formulas? No doubt there is cruelty in such answers; but the man who makes them has considered the matter within himself, and has resolved that such cruelty is the best mercy. No doubt the chances against literary aspirants are very great. It is so easy to aspire,--and to begin! A man cannot make a watch or a shoe without a variety of tools and many materials. He must also have learned much. But any young lady can write a book who has a sufficiency of pens and paper. It can be done anywhere; in any clothes--which is a great thing; at any hours--to which happy accident in literature I owe my success. And the success, when achieved, is so pleasant! The aspirants, of course, are very many; and the experienced councillor, when asked for his candid judgment as to this or that effort, knows that among every hundred efforts there will be ninety-nine failures. Then the answer is so ready: "My dear young lady, do darn your stockings; it will be for the best." Or perhaps, less tenderly, to the male aspirant: "You must earn some money, you say. Don't you think that a stool in a counting-house might be better?" The advice will probably be good advice,--probably, no doubt, as may be proved by the terrible majority of failures. But who is to be sure that he is not expelling an angel from the heaven to which, if less roughly treated, he would soar,--that he is not dooming some Milton to be mute and inglorious, who, but for such cruel ill-judgment, would become vocal to all ages? The answer to all this seems to be ready enough. The judgment, whether cruel or tender, should not be ill-judgment. He who consents to sit as judge should have capacity for judging. But in this matter no accuracy of judgment is possible. It may be that the matter subjected to the critic is so bad or so good as to make an assured answer possible. "You, at any rate, cannot make this your vocation;" or "You, at any rate, can succeed, if you will try." But cases as to which such certainty can be expressed are rare. The critic who wrote the article on the early verses of Lord Byron, which produced the _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, was justified in his criticism by the merits of the _Hours of Idleness_. The lines had nevertheless been written by that Lord Byron who became our Byron. In a little satire called _The Biliad_, which, I think, nobody knows, are the following well-expressed lines:-- "When Payne Knight's _Taste_ was issued to the town, A few Greek verses in the text set down Were torn to pieces, mangled into hash, Doomed to the flames as execrable trash,-- In short, were butchered rather than dissected, And several false quantities detected,-- Till, when the smoke had vanished from the cinders, 'Twas just discovered that--_the lines were Pindar's!_" There can be no assurance against cases such as these; and yet we are so free with our advice, always bidding the young aspirant to desist. There is perhaps no career of life so charming as that of a successful man of letters. Those little unthought of advantages which I just now named are in themselves attractive. If you like the town, live in the town, and do your work there; if you like the country, choose the country. It may be done on the top of a mountain or in the bottom of a pit. It is compatible with the rolling of the sea and the motion of a railway. The clergyman, the lawyer, the doctor, the member of Parliament, the clerk in a public office, the tradesman, and even his assistant in the shop, must dress in accordance with certain fixed laws; but the author need sacrifice to no grace, hardly even to Propriety. He is subject to no bonds such as those which bind other men. Who else is free from all shackle as to hours? The judge must sit at ten, and the attorney-general, who is making his £20,000 a year, must be there with his bag. The Prime Minister must be in his place on that weary front bench shortly after prayers, and must sit there, either asleep or awake, even though ---- or ---- should be addressing the House. During all that Sunday which he maintains should be a day of rest, the active clergyman toils like a galley-slave. The actor, when eight o'clock comes, is bound to his footlights. The Civil Service clerk must sit there from ten till four,--unless his office be fashionable, when twelve to six is just as heavy on him. The author may do his work at five in the morning when he is fresh from his bed, or at three in the morning before he goes there. And the author wants no capital, and encounters no risks. When once he is afloat, the publisher finds all that;--and indeed, unless he be rash, finds it whether he be afloat or not. But it is in the consideration which he enjoys that the successful author finds his richest reward. He is, if not of equal rank, yet of equal standing with the highest; and if he be open to the amenities of society, may choose his own circles. He without money can enter doors which are closed against almost all but him and the wealthy. I have often heard it said that in this country the man of letters is not recognised. I believe the meaning of this to be that men of letters are not often invited to be knights and baronets. I do not think that they wish it;--and if they had it they would, as a body, lose much more than they would gain. I do not at all desire to have letters put after my name, or to be called Sir Anthony, but if my friends Tom Hughes and Charles Reade became Sir Thomas and Sir Charles, I do not know how I might feel,--or how my wife might feel, if we were left unbedecked. As it is, the man of letters who would be selected for titular honour, if such bestowal of honours were customary, receives from the general respect of those around him a much more pleasant recognition of his worth. If this be so,--if it be true that the career of the successful literary man be thus pleasant,--it is not wonderful that many should attempt to win the prize. But how is a man to know whether or not he has within him the qualities necessary for such a career? He makes an attempt, and fails; repeats his attempt, and fails again! So many have succeeded at last who have failed more than once or twice! Who will tell him the truth as to himself? Who has power to find out that truth? The hard man sends him off without a scruple to that office-stool; the soft man assures him that there is much merit in his MS. Oh, my young aspirant,--if ever such a one should read these pages,--be sure that no one can tell you! To do so it would be necessary not only to know what there is now within you, but also to foresee what time will produce there. This, however, I think may be said to you, without any doubt as to the wisdom of the counsel given, that if it be necessary for you to live by your work, do not begin by trusting to literature. Take the stool in the office as recommended to you by the hard man; and then, in such leisure hours as may belong to you, let the praise which has come from the lips of that soft man induce you to persevere in your literary attempts. Should you fail, then your failure will not be fatal,--and what better could you have done with the leisure hours had you not so failed? Such double toil, you will say, is severe. Yes; but if you want this thing, you must submit to severe toil. Sometime before this I had become one of the Committee appointed for the distribution of the moneys of the Royal Literary Fund, and in that capacity I heard and saw much of the sufferings of authors. I may in a future chapter speak further of this Institution, which I regard with great affection, and in reference to which I should be glad to record certain convictions of my own; but I allude to it now, because the experience I have acquired in being active in its cause forbids me to advise any young man or woman to enter boldly on a literary career in search of bread. I know how utterly I should have failed myself had my bread not been earned elsewhere while I was making my efforts. During ten years of work, which I commenced with some aid from the fact that others of my family were in the same profession, I did not earn enough to buy me the pens, ink, and paper which I was using; and then when, with all my experience in my art, I began again as from a new springing point, I should have failed again unless again I could have given years to the task. Of course there have been many who have done better than I,--many whose powers have been infinitely greater. But then, too, I have seen the failure of many who were greater. The career, when success has been achieved, is certainly very pleasant; but the agonies which are endured in the search for that success are often terrible. And the author's poverty is, I think, harder to be borne than any other poverty. The man, whether rightly or wrongly, feels that the world is using him with extreme injustice. The more absolutely he fails, the higher, it is probable, he will reckon his own merits; and the keener will be the sense of injury in that he whose work is of so high a nature cannot get bread, while they whose tasks are mean are lapped in luxury. "I, with my well-filled mind, with my clear intellect, with all my gifts, cannot earn a poor crown a day, while that fool, who simpers in a little room behind a shop, makes his thousands every year." The very charity, to which he too often is driven, is bitterer to him than to others. While he takes it he almost spurns the hand that gives it to him, and every fibre of his heart within him is bleeding with a sense of injury. The career, when successful, is pleasant enough certainly; but when unsuccessful, it is of all careers the most agonising. CHAPTER XII. ON NOVELS AND THE ART OF WRITING THEM. It is nearly twenty years since I proposed to myself to write a history of English prose fiction. I shall never do it now, but the subject is so good a one that I recommend it heartily to some man of letters, who shall at the same time be indefatigable and light-handed. I acknowledge that I broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours of my life. Though the book might be charming, the work was very much the reverse. It came to have a terrible aspect to me, as did that proposition that I should sit out all the May meetings of a season. According to my plan of such a history it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels, and not only to read them, but so to read them as to point out the excellences of those which are most excellent, and to explain the defects of those which, though defective, had still reached sufficient reputation to make them worthy of notice. I did read many after this fashion,--and here and there I have the criticisms which I wrote. In regard to many, they were written on some blank page within the book. I have not, however, even a list of the books so criticised. I think that the _Arcadia_ was the first, and _Ivanhoe_ the last. My plan, as I settled it at last, had been to begin with _Robinson Crusoe_, which is the earliest really popular novel which we have in our language, and to continue the review so as to include the works of all English novelists of reputation, except those who might still be living when my task should be completed. But when Dickens and Bulwer died, my spirit flagged, and that which I had already found to be very difficult had become almost impossible to me at my then period of life. I began my own studies on the subject with works much earlier than _Robinson Crusoe_, and made my way through a variety of novels which were necessary for my purpose, but which in the reading gave me no pleasure whatever. I never worked harder than at the _Arcadia_, or read more detestable trash than the stories written by Mrs. Aphra Behn; but these two were necessary to my purpose, which was not only to give an estimate of the novels as I found them, but to describe how it had come to pass that the English novels of the present day have become what they are, to point out the effects which they have produced, and to inquire whether their great popularity has on the whole done good or evil to the people who read them. I still think that the book is one well worthy to be written. I intended to write that book to vindicate my own profession as a novelist, and also to vindicate that public taste in literature which has created and nourished the profession which I follow. And I was stirred up to make such an attempt by a conviction that there still exists among us Englishmen a prejudice in respect to novels which might, perhaps, be lessened by such a work. This prejudice is not against the reading of novels, as is proved by their general acceptance among us. But it exists strongly in reference to the appreciation in which they are professed to be held; and it robs them of much of that high character which they may claim to have earned by their grace, their honesty, and good teaching. No man can work long at any trade without being brought to consider much whether that which he is daily doing tends to evil or to good. I have written many novels, and have known many writers of novels, and I can assert that such thoughts have been strong with them and with myself. But in acknowledging that these writers have received from the public a full measure of credit for such genius, ingenuity, or perseverance as each may have displayed, I feel that there is still wanting to them a just appreciation of the excellence of their calling, and a general understanding of the high nature of the work which they perform. By the common consent of all mankind who have read, poetry takes the highest place in literature. That nobility of expression, and all but divine grace of words, which she is bound to attain before she can make her footing good, is not compatible with prose. Indeed it is that which turns prose into poetry. When that has been in truth achieved, the reader knows that the writer has soared above the earth, and can teach his lessons somewhat as a god might teach. He who sits down to write his tale in prose makes no such attempt, nor does he dream that the poet's honour is within his reach;--but his teaching is of the same nature, and his lessons all tend to the same end. By either, false sentiments may be fostered; false notions of humanity may be engendered; false honour, false love, false worship may be created; by either, vice instead of virtue may be taught. But by each, equally, may true honour, true love, true worship, and true humanity be inculcated; and that will be the greatest teacher who will spread such truth the widest. But at present, much as novels, as novels, are bought and read, there exists still an idea, a feeling which is very prevalent, that novels at their best are but innocent. Young men and women,--and old men and women too,--read more of them than of poetry, because such reading is easier than the reading of poetry; but they read them,--as men eat pastry after dinner,--not without some inward conviction that the taste is vain if not vicious. I take upon myself to say that it is neither vicious nor vain. But all writers of fiction who have desired to think well of their own work, will probably have had doubts on their minds before they have arrived at this conclusion. Thinking much of my own daily labour and of its nature, I felt myself at first to be much afflicted and then to be deeply grieved by the opinion expressed by wise and thinking men as to the work done by novelists. But when, by degrees, I dared to examine and sift the sayings of such men, I found them to be sometimes silly and often arrogant. I began to inquire what had been the nature of English novels since they first became common in our own language, and to be desirous of ascertaining whether they had done harm or good. I could well remember that, in my own young days, they had not taken that undisputed possession of drawing-rooms which they now hold. Fifty years ago, when George IV. was king, they were not indeed treated as Lydia had been forced to treat them in the preceding reign, when, on the approach of elders, _Peregrine Pickle_ was hidden beneath the bolster, and _Lord Ainsworth_ put away under the sofa. But the families in which an unrestricted permission was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo was laid upon novel-reading as a pursuit, which was to the novelist a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I now complain. There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that people of an age to read have got too much power into their own hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old lawyers and by young students. It has not only come to pass that a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that the provision so made must now include books which a few years since the godly would have thought to be profane. It was this necessity which, a few years since, induced the editor of _Good Words_ to apply to me for a novel,--which, indeed, when supplied was rejected, but which now, probably, owing to further change in the same direction, would have been accepted. If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day,--greater probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves,--comes from these books, which are in the hands of all readers. It is from them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms of love,--though I fancy that few young men will think so little of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times, when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently assaulted by the ambition to be great; in which riches are the easiest road to greatness; when the temptations to which men are subjected dulls their eyes to the perfected iniquities of others; when it is so hard for a man to decide vigorously that the pitch, which so many are handling, will defile him if it be touched;--men's conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day depicted to them as leading to glorious or inglorious results. The woman who is described as having obtained all that the world holds to be precious, by lavishing her charms and her caresses unworthily and heartlessly, will induce other women to do the same with theirs,--as will she who is made interesting by exhibitions of bold passion teach others to be spuriously passionate. The young man who in a novel becomes a hero, perhaps a Member of Parliament, and almost a Prime Minister, by trickery, falsehood, and flash cleverness, will have many followers, whose attempts to rise in the world ought to lie heavily on the conscience of the novelists who create fictitious Cagliostros. There are Jack Sheppards other than those who break into houses and out of prisons,--Macheaths, who deserve the gallows more than Gay's hero. Thinking of all this, as a novelist surely must do,--as I certainly have done through my whole career,--it becomes to him a matter of deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words and doings he hopes to interest his readers. It will very frequently be the case that he will be tempted to sacrifice something for effect, to say a word or two here, or to draw a picture there, for which he feels that he has the power, and which when spoken or drawn would be alluring. The regions of absolute vice are foul and odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and the nose, is disgusting. In these he will hardly tread. But there are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers seem to grow, and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing! The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to his readers? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics. If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them, then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he be or not the most foolish of existing mortals. I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a class that such has been the general result of our own work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one by search through the works of the six great English novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have they not ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say, baldly and simply: "Because you lied here, or were heartless there, because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home, or you Earl Leicester were false through your ambition, or you Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall be scourged with scourges either in this world or in the next;" but it is for him to show, as he carries on his tale, that his Lydia, or his Leicester, or his Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever, beautiful, attractive,--so as to make men love her, and women almost envy her,--and let her be made also heartless, unfeminine, and ambitious of evil grandeur, as was Beatrix, what a danger is there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it, what peril of doing harm! But if at last it have been so handled that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say: "Oh! not like that;--let me not be like that!" and that every youth shall say: "Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom, anything rather than that!"--then will not the novelist have preached his sermon as perhaps no clergyman can preach it? Very much of a novelist's work must appertain to the intercourse between young men and young women. It is admitted that a novel can hardly be made interesting or successful without love. Some few might be named, but even in those the attempt breaks down, and the softness of love is found to be necessary to complete the story. _Pickwick_ has been named as an exception to the rule, but even in _Pickwick_ there are three or four sets of lovers, whose little amatory longings give a softness to the work. I tried it once with _Miss Mackenzie_, but I had to make her fall in love at last. In this frequent allusion to the passion which most stirs the imagination of the young, there must be danger. Of that the writer of fiction is probably well aware. Then the question has to be asked, whether the danger may not be so averted that good may be the result,--and to be answered. In one respect the necessity of dealing with love is advantageous,--advantageous from the very circumstance which has made love necessary to all novelists. It is necessary because the passion is one which interests or has interested all. Every one feels it, has felt it, or expects to feel it,--or else rejects it with an eagerness which still perpetuates the interest. If the novelist, therefore, can so handle the subject as to do good by his handling, as to teach wholesome lessons in regard to love, the good which he does will be very wide. If I can teach politicians that they can do their business better by truth than by falsehood, I do a great service; but it is done to a limited number of persons. But if I can make young men and women believe that truth in love will make them happy, then, if my writings be popular, I shall have a very large class of pupils. No doubt the cause for that fear which did exist as to novels arose from an idea that the matter of love would be treated in an inflammatory and generally unwholesome manner. "Madam," says Sir Anthony in the play, "a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the year; and depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last." Sir Anthony was no doubt right. But he takes it for granted that the longing for the fruit is an evil. The novelist who writes of love thinks differently, and thinks that the honest love of an honest man is a treasure which a good girl may fairly hope to win,--and that if she can be taught to wish only for that, she will have been taught to entertain only wholesome wishes. I can easily believe that a girl should be taught to wish to love by reading how Laura Bell loved Pendennis. Pendennis was not in truth a very worthy man, nor did he make a very good husband; but the girl's love was so beautiful, and the wife's love when she became a wife so womanlike, and at the same time so sweet, so unselfish, so wifely, so worshipful,--in the sense in which wives are told that they ought to worship their husbands,--that I cannot believe that any girl can be injured, or even not benefited, by reading of Laura's love. There once used to be many who thought, and probably there still are some, even here in England, who think that a girl should hear nothing of love till the time come in which she is to be married. That, no doubt, was the opinion of Sir Anthony Absolute and of Mrs. Malaprop. But I am hardly disposed to believe that the old system was more favourable than ours to the purity of manners. Lydia Languish, though she was constrained by fear of her aunt to hide the book, yet had _Peregrine Pickle_ in her collection. While human nature talks of love so forcibly it can hardly serve our turn to be silent on the subject. "Naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret." There are countries in which it has been in accordance with the manners of the upper classes that the girl should be brought to marry the man almost out of the nursery--or rather perhaps out of the convent--without having enjoyed that freedom of thought which the reading of novels and of poetry will certainly produce; but I do not know that the marriages so made have been thought to be happier than our own. Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational, sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. Those who hold by the other are charmed by the continuation and gradual development of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake,--which mistake arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree. If a novel fail in either, there is a failure in art. Let those readers who believe that they do not like sensational scenes in novels think of some of those passages from our great novelists which have charmed them most:--of Rebecca in the castle with Ivanhoe; of Burley in the cave with Morton; of the mad lady tearing the veil of the expectant bride, in _Jane Eyre_; of Lady Castlewood as, in her indignation, she explains to the Duke of Hamilton Henry Esmond's right to be present at the marriage of his Grace with Beatrix;--may I add, of Lady Mason, as she makes her confession at the feet of Sir Peregrine Orme? Will any one say that the authors of these passages have sinned in being over-sensational? No doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth in detail, and told as affecting personages without character,--wooden blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men and women,--does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person, are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. And such would-be tragic elements of a story may be increased without end, and without difficulty. I may tell you of a woman murdered,--murdered in the same street with you, in the next house,--that she was a wife murdered by her husband,--a bride not yet a week a wife. I may add to it for ever. I may say that the murderer roasted her alive. There is no end to it. I may declare that a former wife was treated with equal barbarity; and may assert that, as the murderer was led away to execution, he declared his only sorrow, his only regret to be, that he could not live to treat a third wife after the same fashion. There is nothing so easy as the creation and the cumulation of fearful incidents after this fashion. If such creation and cumulation be the beginning and the end of the novelist's work,--and novels have been written which seem to be without other attractions,--nothing can be more dull or more useless. But not on that account are we averse to tragedy in prose fiction. As in poetry, so in prose, he who can deal adequately with tragic elements is a greater artist and reaches a higher aim than the writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life. The _Bride of Lammermoor_ is a tragedy throughout, in spite of its comic elements. The life of Lady Castlewood, of whom I have spoken, is a tragedy. Rochester's wretched thraldom to his mad wife, in _Jane Eyre_, is a tragedy. But these stories charm us not simply because they are tragic, but because we feel that men and women with flesh and blood, creatures with whom we can sympathise, are struggling amidst their woes. It all lies in that. No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader's heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be,--truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational. I did intend when I meditated that history of English fiction to include within its pages some rules for the writing of novels;--or I might perhaps say, with more modesty, to offer some advice on the art to such tyros in it as might be willing to take advantage of the experience of an old hand. But the matter would, I fear, be too long for this episode, and I am not sure that I have as yet got the rules quite settled in my own mind. I will, however, say a few words on one or two points which my own practice has pointed out to me. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause. Some series of events, or some development of character, will have presented itself to his imagination,--and this he feels so strongly that he thinks he can present his picture in strong and agreeable language to others. He sits down and tells his story because he has a story to tell; as you, my friend, when you have heard something which has at once tickled your fancy or moved your pathos, will hurry to tell it to the first person you meet. But when that first novel has been received graciously by the public and has made for itself a success, then the writer, naturally feeling that the writing of novels is within his grasp, looks about for something to tell in another. He cudgels his brains, not always successfully, and sits down to write, not because he has something which he burns to tell, but because he feels it to be incumbent on him to be telling something. As you, my friend, if you are very successful in the telling of that first story, will become ambitious of further story-telling, and will look out for anecdotes,--in the narration of which you will not improbably sometimes distress your audience. So it has been with many novelists, who, after some good work, perhaps after very much good work, have distressed their audience because they have gone on with their work till their work has become simply a trade with them. Need I make a list of such, seeing that it would contain the names of those who have been greatest in the art of British novel-writing? They have at last become weary of that portion of a novelist's work which is of all the most essential to success. That a man as he grows old should feel the labour of writing to be a fatigue is natural enough. But a man to whom writing has become a habit may write well though he be fatigued. But the weary novelist refuses any longer to give his mind to that work of observation and reception from which has come his power, without which work his power cannot be continued,--which work should be going on not only when he is at his desk, but in all his walks abroad, in all his movements through the world, in all his intercourse with his fellow-creatures. He has become a novelist, as another has become a poet, because he has in those walks abroad, unconsciously for the most part, been drawing in matter from all that he has seen and heard. But this has not been done without labour, even when the labour has been unconscious. Then there comes a time when he shuts his eyes and shuts his ears. When we talk of memory fading as age comes on, it is such shutting of eyes and ears that we mean. The things around cease to interest us, and we cannot exercise our minds upon them. To the novelist thus wearied there comes the demand for further novels. He does not know his own defect, and even if he did he does not wish to abandon his own profession. He still writes; but he writes because he has to tell a story, not because he has a story to tell. What reader of novels has not felt the "woodenness" of this mode of telling? The characters do not live and move, but are cut out of blocks and are propped against the wall. The incidents are arranged in certain lines--the arrangement being as palpable to the reader as it has been to the writer--but do not follow each other as results naturally demanded by previous action. The reader can never feel--as he ought to feel--that only for that flame of the eye, only for that angry word, only for that moment of weakness, all might have been different. The course of the tale is one piece of stiff mechanism, in which there is no room for a doubt. These, it may be said, are reflections which I, being an old novelist, might make useful to myself for discontinuing my work, but can hardly be needed by those tyros of whom I have spoken. That they are applicable to myself I readily admit, but I also find that they apply to many beginners. Some of us who are old fail at last because we are old. It would be well that each of us should say to himself, "Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne Peccet ad extremum ridendus." But many young fail also, because they endeavour to tell stories when they have none to tell. And this comes from idleness rather than from innate incapacity. The mind has not been sufficiently at work when the tale has been commenced, nor is it kept sufficiently at work as the tale is continued. I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots, and am not now insisting specially on thoroughness in a branch of work in which I myself have not been very thorough. I am not sure that the construction of a perfected plot has been at any period within my power. But the novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures. This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change,--become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,--so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him. On the last day of each month recorded, every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first. If the would-be novelist have aptitudes that way, all this will come to him without much struggling;--but if it do not come, I think he can only make novels of wood. It is so that I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained. There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned. When I shall feel that this intimacy ceases, then I shall know that the old horse should be turned out to grass. That I shall feel it when I ought to feel it, I will by no means say. I do not know that I am at all wiser than Gil Blas' canon; but I do know that the power indicated is one without which the teller of tales cannot tell them to any good effect. The language in which the novelist is to put forth his story, the colours with which he is to paint his picture, must of course be to him matter of much consideration. Let him have all other possible gifts,--imagination, observation, erudition, and industry,--they will avail him nothing for his purpose, unless he can put forth his work in pleasant words. If he be confused, tedious, harsh, or unharmonious, readers will certainly reject him. The reading of a volume of history or on science may represent itself as a duty; and though the duty may by a bad style be made very disagreeable, the conscientious reader will perhaps perform it. But the novelist will be assisted by no such feeling. Any reader may reject his work without the burden of a sin. It is the first necessity of his position that he make himself pleasant. To do this, much more is necessary than to write correctly. He may indeed be pleasant without being correct,--as I think can be proved by the works of more than one distinguished novelist. But he must be intelligible,--intelligible without trouble; and he must be harmonious. Any writer who has read even a little will know what is meant by the word intelligible. It is not sufficient that there be a meaning that may be hammered out of the sentence, but that the language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader;--and not only some proposition of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no less, which the writer has intended to put into his words. What Macaulay says should be remembered by all writers: "How little the all-important art of making meaning pellucid is studied now! Hardly any popular author except myself thinks of it." The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as is the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery. In all written matter the spark should carry everything; but in matters recondite the recipient will search to see that he misses nothing, and that he takes nothing away too much. The novelist cannot expect that any such search will be made. A young writer, who will acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, will often feel himself tempted by the difficulties of language to tell himself that some one little doubtful passage, some single collocation of words, which is not quite what it ought to be, will not matter. I know well what a stumbling-block such a passage may be. But he should leave none such behind him as he goes on. The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself. As to that harmonious expression which I think is required, I shall find it more difficult to express my meaning. It will be granted, I think, by readers that a style may be rough, and yet both forcible and intelligible; but it will seldom come to pass that a novel written in a rough style will be popular,--and less often that a novelist who habitually uses such a style will become so. The harmony which is required must come from the practice of the ear. There are few ears naturally so dull that they cannot, if time be allowed to them, decide whether a sentence, when read, be or be not harmonious. And the sense of such harmony grows on the ear, when the intelligence has once informed itself as to what is, and what is not harmonious. The boy, for instance, who learns with accuracy the prosody of a Sapphic stanza, and has received through his intelligence a knowledge of its parts, will soon tell by his ear whether a Sapphic stanza be or be not correct. Take a girl, endowed with gifts of music, well instructed in her art, with perfect ear, and read to her such a stanza with two words transposed, as, for instance-- Mercuri, nam te docilis magistro Movit Amphion _canendo lapides_, Tuque testudo resonare septem Callida nervis-- and she will find no halt in the rhythm. But a schoolboy with none of her musical acquirements or capacities, who has, however, become familiar with the metres of the poet, will at once discover the fault. And so will the writer become familiar with what is harmonious in prose. But in order that familiarity may serve him in his business, he must so train his ear that he shall be able to weigh the rhythm of every word as it falls from his pen. This, when it has been done for a time, even for a short time, will become so habitual to him that he will have appreciated the metrical duration of every syllable before it shall have dared to show itself upon paper. The art of the orator is the same. He knows beforehand how each sound which he is about to utter will affect the force of his climax. If a writer will do so he will charm his readers, though his readers will probably not know how they have been charmed. In writing a novel the author soon becomes aware that a burden of many pages is before him. Circumstances require that he should cover a certain and generally not a very confined space. Short novels are not popular with readers generally. Critics often complain of the ordinary length of novels,--of the three volumes to which they are subjected; but few novels which have attained great success in England have been told in fewer pages. The novel-writer who sticks to novel-writing as his profession will certainly find that this burden of length is incumbent on him. How shall he carry his burden to the end? How shall he cover his space? Many great artists have by their practice opposed the doctrine which I now propose to preach;--but they have succeeded I think in spite of their fault and by dint of their greatness. There should be no episodes in a novel. Every sentence, every word, through all those pages, should tend to the telling of the story. Such episodes distract the attention of the reader, and always do so disagreeably. Who has not felt this to be the case even with _The Curious Impertinent_ and with the _History of the Man of the Hill_. And if it be so with Cervantes and Fielding, who can hope to succeed? Though the novel which you have to write must be long, let it be all one. And this exclusion of episodes should be carried down into the smallest details. Every sentence and every word used should tend to the telling of the story. "But," the young novelist will say, "with so many pages before me to be filled, how shall I succeed if I thus confine myself;--how am I to know beforehand what space this story of mine will require? There must be the three volumes, or the certain number of magazine pages which I have contracted to supply. If I may not be discursive should occasion require, how shall I complete my task? The painter suits the size of his canvas to his subject, and must I in my art stretch my subject to my canvas?" This undoubtedly must be done by the novelist; and if he will learn his business, may be done without injury to his effect. He may not paint different pictures on the same canvas, which he will do if he allow himself to wander away to matters outside his own story; but by studying proportion in his work, he may teach himself so to tell his story that it shall naturally fall into the required length. Though his story should be all one, yet it may have many parts. Though the plot itself may require but few characters, it may be so enlarged as to find its full development in many. There may be subsidiary plots, which shall all tend to the elucidation of the main story, and which will take their places as part of one and the same work,--as there may be many figures on a canvas which shall not to the spectator seem to form themselves into separate pictures. There is no portion of a novelist's work in which this fault of episodes is so common as in the dialogue. It is so easy to make any two persons talk on any casual subject with which the writer presumes himself to be conversant! Literature, philosophy, politics, or sport, may thus be handled in a loosely discursive style; and the writer, while indulging himself and filling his pages, is apt to think that he is pleasing his reader. I think he can make no greater mistake. The dialogue is generally the most agreeable part of a novel; but it is only so as long as it tends in some way to the telling of the main story. It need not seem to be confined to that, but it should always have a tendency in that direction. The unconscious critical acumen of a reader is both just and severe. When a long dialogue on extraneous matter reaches his mind, he at once feels that he is being cheated into taking something which he did not bargain to accept when he took up that novel. He does not at that moment require politics or philosophy, but he wants his story. He will not perhaps be able to say in so many words that at some certain point the dialogue has deviated from the story; but when it does so he will feel it, and the feeling will be unpleasant. Let the intending novel-writer, if he doubt this, read one of Bulwer's novels,--in which there is very much to charm,--and then ask himself whether he has not been offended by devious conversations. And the dialogue, on which the modern novelist in consulting the taste of his probable readers must depend most, has to be constrained also by other rules. The writer may tell much of his story in conversations, but he may only do so by putting such words into the mouths of his personages as persons so situated would probably use. He is not allowed for the sake of his tale to make his characters give utterance to long speeches, such as are not customarily heard from men and women. The ordinary talk of ordinary people is carried on in short sharp expressive sentences, which very frequently are never completed,--the language of which even among educated people is often incorrect. The novel-writer in constructing his dialogue must so steer between absolute accuracy of language--which would give to his conversation an air of pedantry, and the slovenly inaccuracy of ordinary talkers, which if closely followed would offend by an appearance of grimace--as to produce upon the ear of his readers a sense of reality. If he be quite real he will seem to attempt to be funny. If he be quite correct he will seem to be unreal. And above all, let the speeches be short. No character should utter much above a dozen words at a breath,--unless the writer can justify to himself a longer flood of speech by the speciality of the occasion. In all this human nature must be the novel-writer's guide. No doubt effective novels have been written in which human nature has been set at defiance. I might name _Caleb Williams_ as one and _Adam Blair_ as another. But the exceptions are not more than enough to prove the rule. But in following human nature he must remember that he does so with a pen in his hand, and that the reader who will appreciate human nature will also demand artistic ability and literary aptitude. The young novelist will probably ask, or more probably bethink himself how he is to acquire that knowledge of human nature which will tell him with accuracy what men and women would say in this or that position. He must acquire it as the compositor, who is to print his words, has learned the art of distributing his type--by constant and intelligent practice. Unless it be given to him to listen and to observe,--so to carry away, as it were, the manners of people in his memory, as to be able to say to himself with assurance that these words might have been said in a given position, and that those other words could not have been said,--I do not think that in these days he can succeed as a novelist. And then let him beware of creating tedium! Who has not felt the charm of a spoken story up to a certain point, and then suddenly become aware that it has become too long and is the reverse of charming. It is not only that the entire book may have this fault, but that this fault may occur in chapters, in passages, in pages, in paragraphs. I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the sense that the thing is becoming long has grown upon him, he may be sure that it will grow upon his readers. I see the smile of some who will declare to themselves that the words of a writer will never be tedious to himself. Of the writer of whom this may be truly said, it may be said with equal truth that he will always be tedious to his readers. CHAPTER XIII. ON ENGLISH NOVELISTS OF THE PRESENT DAY. In this chapter I will venture to name a few successful novelists of my own time, with whose works I am acquainted; and will endeavour to point whence their success has come, and why they have failed when there has been failure. I do not hesitate to name Thackeray the first. His knowledge of human nature was supreme, and his characters stand out as human beings, with a force and a truth which has not, I think, been within the reach of any other English novelist in any period. I know no character in fiction, unless it be Don Quixote, with whom the reader becomes so intimately acquainted as with Colonel Newcombe. How great a thing it is to be a gentleman at all parts! How we admire the man of whom so much may be said with truth! Is there any one of whom we feel more sure in this respect than of Colonel Newcombe? It is not because Colonel Newcombe is a perfect gentleman that we think Thackeray's work to have been so excellent, but because he has had the power to describe him as such, and to force us to love him, a weak and silly old man, on account of this grace of character. It is evident from all Thackeray's best work that he lived with the characters he was creating. He had always a story to tell until quite late in life; and he shows us that this was so, not by the interest which he had in his own plots,--for I doubt whether his plots did occupy much of his mind,--but by convincing us that his characters were alive to himself. With Becky Sharpe, with Lady Castlewood and her daughter, and with Esmond, with Warrington, Pendennis, and the Major, with Colonel Newcombe, and with Barry Lyndon, he must have lived in perpetual intercourse. Therefore he has made these personages real to us. Among all our novelists his style is the purest, as to my ear it is also the most harmonious. Sometimes it is disfigured by a slight touch of affectation, by little conceits which smell of the oil;--but the language is always lucid. The reader, without labour, knows what he means, and knows all that he means. As well as I can remember, he deals with no episodes. I think that any critic, examining his work minutely, would find that every scene, and every part of every scene, adds something to the clearness with which the story is told. Among all his stories there is not one which does not leave on the mind a feeling of distress that women should ever be immodest or men dishonest,--and of joy that women should be so devoted and men so honest. How we hate the idle selfishness of Pendennis, the worldliness of Beatrix, the craft of Becky Sharpe!--how we love the honesty of Colonel Newcombe, the nobility of Esmond, and the devoted affection of Mrs. Pendennis! The hatred of evil and love of good can hardly have come upon so many readers without doing much good. Late in Thackeray's life,--he never was an old man, but towards the end of his career,--he failed in his power of charming, because he allowed his mind to become idle. In the plots which he conceived, and in the language which he used, I do not know that there is any perceptible change; but in _The Virginians_ and in _Philip_ the reader is introduced to no character with which he makes a close and undying acquaintance. And this, I have no doubt, is so because Thackeray himself had no such intimacy. His mind had come to be weary of that fictitious life which is always demanding the labour of new creation, and he troubled himself with his two Virginians and his Philip only when he was seated at his desk. At the present moment George Eliot is the first of English novelists, and I am disposed to place her second of those of my time. She is best known to the literary world as a writer of prose fiction, and not improbably whatever of permanent fame she may acquire will come from her novels. But the nature of her intellect is very far removed indeed from that which is common to the tellers of stories. Her imagination is no doubt strong, but it acts in analysing rather than in creating. Everything that comes before her is pulled to pieces so that the inside of it shall be seen, and be seen if possible by her readers as clearly as by herself. This searching analysis is carried so far that, in studying her latter writings, one feels oneself to be in company with some philosopher rather than with a novelist. I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either _Felix Holt_, _Middlemarch_, or _Daniel Deronda_. I know that they are very difficult to many that are not young. Her personifications of character have been singularly terse and graphic, and from them has come her great hold on the public,--though by no means the greatest effect which she has produced. The lessons which she teaches remain, though it is not for the sake of the lessons that her pages are read. Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, old Silas Marner, and, much above all, Tito, in _Romola_, are characters which, when once known, can never be forgotten. I cannot say quite so much for any of those in her later works, because in them the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait-painter, that, in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to have been forgotten. In her, as yet, there is no symptom whatever of that weariness of mind which, when felt by the reader, induces him to declare that the author has written himself out. It is not from decadence that we do not have another Mrs. Poyser, but because the author soars to things which seem to her to be higher than Mrs. Poyser. It is, I think, the defect of George Eliot that she struggles too hard to do work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly the signs of this have been conspicuous in her style, which has always been and is singularly correct, but which has become occasionally obscure from her too great desire to be pungent. It is impossible not to feel the struggle, and that feeling begets a flavour of affectation. In _Daniel Deronda_, of which at this moment only a portion has been published, there are sentences which I have found myself compelled to read three times before I have been able to take home to myself all that the writer has intended. Perhaps I may be permitted here to say, that this gifted woman was among my dearest and most intimate friends. As I am speaking here of novelists, I will not attempt to speak of George Eliot's merit as a poet. There can be no doubt that the most popular novelist of my time--probably the most popular English novelist of any time--has been Charles Dickens. He has now been dead nearly six years, and the sale of his books goes on as it did during his life. The certainty with which his novels are found in every house--the familiarity of his name in all English-speaking countries--the popularity of such characters as Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, and Pecksniff, and many others whose names have entered into the English language and become well-known words--the grief of the country at his death, and the honours paid to him at his funeral,--all testify to his popularity. Since the last book he wrote himself, I doubt whether any book has been so popular as his biography by John Forster. There is no withstanding such testimony as this. Such evidence of popular appreciation should go for very much, almost for everything, in criticism on the work of a novelist. The primary object of a novelist is to please; and this man's novels have been found more pleasant than those of any other writer. It might of course be objected to this, that though the books have pleased they have been injurious, that their tendency has been immoral and their teaching vicious; but it is almost needless to say that no such charge has ever been made against Dickens. His teaching has ever been good. From all which, there arises to the critic a question whether, with such evidence against him as to the excellence of this writer, he should not subordinate his own opinion to the collected opinion of the world of readers. To me it almost seems that I must be wrong to place Dickens after Thackeray and George Eliot, knowing as I do that so great a majority put him above those authors. My own peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter forbids me to do so. I do acknowledge that Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household words in every house, as though they were human beings; but to my judgment they are not human beings, nor are any of the characters human which Dickens has portrayed. It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature. There is a drollery about them, in my estimation, very much below the humour of Thackeray, but which has reached the intellect of all; while Thackeray's humour has escaped the intellect of many. Nor is the pathos of Dickens human. It is stagey and melodramatic. But it is so expressed that it touches every heart a little. There is no real life in Smike. His misery, his idiotcy, his devotion for Nicholas, his love for Kate, are all overdone and incompatible with each other. But still the reader sheds a tear. Every reader can find a tear for Smike. Dickens's novels are like Boucicault's plays. He has known how to draw his lines broadly, so that all should see the colour. He, too, in his best days, always lived with his characters;--and he, too, as he gradually ceased to have the power of doing so, ceased to charm. Though they are not human beings, we all remember Mrs. Gamp and Pickwick. The Boffins and Veneerings do not, I think, dwell in the minds of so many. Of Dickens's style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules--almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness of his criticism, when he acknowledges to himself--as he is compelled in all honesty to do--that with the language, such as it is, the writer has satisfied the great mass of the readers of his country. Both these great writers have satisfied the readers of their own pages; but both have done infinite harm by creating a school of imitators. No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens. If such a one wants a model for his language, let him take Thackeray. Bulwer, or Lord Lytton,--but I think that he is still better known by his earlier name,--was a man of very great parts. Better educated than either of those I have named before him, he was always able to use his erudition, and he thus produced novels from which very much not only may be but must be learned by his readers. He thoroughly understood the political status of his own country, a subject on which, I think, Dickens was marvellously ignorant, and which Thackeray had never studied. He had read extensively, and was always apt to give his readers the benefit of what he knew. The result has been that very much more than amusement may be obtained from Bulwer's novels. There is also a brightness about them--the result rather of thought than of imagination, of study and of care, than of mere intellect--which has made many of them excellent in their way. It is perhaps improper to class all his novels together, as he wrote in varied manners, making in his earlier works, such as _Pelham_ and _Ernest Maltravers_, pictures of a fictitious life, and afterwards pictures of life as he believed it to be, as in _My Novel_ and _The Caxtons_. But from all of them there comes the same flavour of an effort to produce effect. The effects are produced, but it would have been better if the flavour had not been there. I cannot say of Bulwer as I have of the other novelists whom I have named that he lived with his characters. He lived with his work, with the doctrines which at the time he wished to preach, thinking always of the effects which he wished to produce; but I do not think he ever knew his own personages,--and therefore neither do we know them. Even Pelham and Eugene Aram are not human beings to us, as are Pickwick, and Colonel Newcombe, and Mrs. Poyser. In his plots Bulwer has generally been simple, facile, and successful. The reader never feels with him, as he does with Wilkie Collins, that it is all plot, or, as with George Eliot, that there is no plot. The story comes naturally without calling for too much attention, and is thus proof of the completeness of the man's intellect. His language is clear, good, intelligible English, but it is defaced by mannerism. In all that he did, affectation was his fault. How shall I speak of my dear old friend Charles Lever, and his rattling, jolly, joyous, swearing Irishmen. Surely never did a sense of vitality come so constantly from a man's pen, nor from man's voice, as from his! I knew him well for many years, and whether in sickness or in health, I have never come across him without finding him to be running over with wit and fun. Of all the men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would sometimes fail;--but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake. And yet he never monopolised the talk, was never a bore. He would take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier novels--the later I have not read--are just like his conversation. The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never tedious. As to character he can hardly be said to have produced it. Corney Delaney, the old man-servant, may perhaps be named as an exception. Lever's novels will not live long,--even if they may be said to be alive now,--because it is so. What was his manner of working I do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was seated with a pen in his hand. Charlotte Brontë was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work, I should be inclined to put Miss Brontë very high indeed. I know no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the second volume of _Jane Eyre_. She lived with those characters, and felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that _Jane Eyre_ will be read among English novels when many whose names are now better known shall have been forgotten. _Jane Eyre_, and _Esmond_, and _Adam Bede_ will be in the hands of our grandchildren, when _Pickwick_, and _Pelham_, and _Harry Lorrequer_ are forgotten; because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations, human in their sympathies, and human in their actions. In _Villette_, too, and in _Shirley_, there is to be found human life as natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest as those told in _Jane Eyre_. The character of Paul in the former of the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing. There is no writer of the present day who has so much puzzled me by his eccentricities, impracticabilities, and capabilities as Charles Reade. I look upon him as endowed almost with genius, but as one who has not been gifted by nature with ordinary powers of reasoning. He can see what is grandly noble and admire it with all his heart. He can see, too, what is foully vicious and hate it with equal ardour. But in the common affairs of life he cannot see what is right or wrong; and as he is altogether unwilling to be guided by the opinion of others, he is constantly making mistakes in his literary career, and subjecting himself to reproach which he hardly deserves. He means to be honest. He means to be especially honest,--more honest than other people. He has written a book called _The Eighth Commandment_ on behalf of honesty in literary transactions,--a wonderful work, which has I believe been read by a very few. I never saw a copy except that in my own library, or heard of any one who knew the book. Nevertheless it is a volume that must have taken very great labour, and have been written,--as indeed he declares that it was written,--without the hope of pecuniary reward. He makes an appeal to the British Parliament and British people on behalf of literary honesty, declaring that should he fail--"I shall have to go on blushing for the people I was born among." And yet of all the writers of my day he has seemed to me to understand literary honesty the least. On one occasion, as he tells us in this book, he bought for a certain sum from a French author the right of using a plot taken from a play,--which he probably might have used without such purchase, and also without infringing any international copyright act. The French author not unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he is "un vrai gentleman." The plot was used by Reade in a novel; and a critic discovering the adaptation, made known his discovery to the public. Whereupon the novelist became angry, called his critic a pseudonymuncle, and defended himself by stating the fact of his own purchase. In all this he seems to me to ignore what we all mean when we talk of literary plagiarism and literary honesty. The sin of which the author is accused is not that of taking another man's property, but of passing off as his own creation that which he does not himself create. When an author puts his name to a book he claims to have written all that there is therein, unless he makes direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently there arose another similar question, in which Mr. Reade's opinion was declared even more plainly, and certainly very much more publicly. In a tale which he wrote he inserted a dialogue which he took from Swift, and took without any acknowledgment. As might have been expected, one of the critics of the day fell foul of him for this barefaced plagiarism. The author, however, defended himself, with much abuse of the critic, by asserting, that whereas Swift had found the jewel he had supplied the setting;--an argument in which there was some little wit, and would have been much excellent truth, had he given the words as belonging to Swift and not to himself. The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves be very strange,--and they are strange. It has generally been his object to write down some abuse with which he has been particularly struck,--the harshness, for instance, with which paupers or lunatics are treated, or the wickedness of certain classes,--and he always, I think, leaves upon his readers an idea of great earnestness of purpose. But he has always left at the same time on my mind so strong a conviction that he has not really understood his subject, that I have ever found myself taking the part of those whom he has accused. So good a heart, and so wrong a head, surely no novelist ever before had combined! In story-telling he has occasionally been almost great. Among his novels I would especially recommend _The Cloister and the Hearth_. I do not know that in this work, or in any, that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be a pleasure. Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-stone. One is constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing, however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect. There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work, and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages. Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however, does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast. There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live to overcome her fault in this direction. There is one other name, without which the list of the best known English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete, and that is the name of the present Prime Minister of England. Mr. Disraeli has written so many novels, and has been so popular as a novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled to speak of him. He began his career as an author early in life, publishing _Vivian Grey_ when he was twenty-three years old. He was very young for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the excuse that he makes in his own preface, that it is a book written by a boy. Dickens was, I think, younger when he wrote his _Sketches by Boz_, and as young when he was writing the _Pickwick Papers_. It was hardly longer ago than the other day when Mr. Disraeli brought out _Lothair_, and between the two there were eight or ten others. To me they have all had the same flavour of paint and unreality. In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand. Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious conjurer has generally been his hero,--some youth who, by wonderful cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties, a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors, and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general accompaniment of paste diamonds. I can understand that Mr. Disraeli should by his novels have instigated many a young man and many a young woman on their way in life, but I cannot understand that he should have instigated any one to good. Vivian Grey has had probably as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and has led his followers in the same direction. _Lothair_, which is as yet Mr. Disraeli's last work, and, I think, undoubtedly his worst, has been defended on a plea somewhat similar to that by which he has defended _Vivian Grey_. As that was written when he was too young, so was the other when he was too old,--too old for work of that nature, though not too old to be Prime Minister. If his mind were so occupied with greater things as to allow him to write such a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce him to destroy it when written. Here that flavour of hair-oil, that flavour of false jewels, that remembrance of tailors, comes out stronger than in all the others. Lothair is falser even than Vivian Grey, and Lady Corisande, the daughter of the Duchess, more inane and unwomanlike than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the very bathos of story-telling. I have often lamented, and have as often excused to myself, that lack of public judgment which enables readers to put up with bad work because it comes from good or from lofty hands. I never felt the feeling so strongly, or was so little able to excuse it, as when a portion of the reading public received _Lothair_ with satisfaction. CHAPTER XIV. ON CRITICISM. Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,--but it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving that certain literary work is good and other literary work is bad, in accordance with rules which the critic is able to define. English criticism at present rarely even pretends to go so far as this. It attempts, in the first place, to tell the public whether a book be or be not worth public attention; and, in the second place, so to describe the purport of the work as to enable those who have not time or inclination for reading it to feel that by a short cut they can become acquainted with its contents. Both these objects, if fairly well carried out, are salutary. Though the critic may not be a profound judge himself; though not unfrequently he be a young man making his first literary attempts, with tastes and judgment still unfixed, yet he probably has a conscience in the matter, and would not have been selected for that work had he not shown some aptitude for it. Though he may be not the best possible guide to the undiscerning, he will be better than no guide at all. Real substantial criticism must, from its nature, be costly, and that which the public wants should at any rate be cheap. Advice is given to many thousands, which, though it may not be the best advice possible, is better than no advice at all. Then that description of the work criticised, that compressing of the much into very little,--which is the work of many modern critics or reviewers,--does enable many to know something of what is being said, who without it would know nothing. I do not think it is incumbent on me at present to name periodicals in which this work is well done, and to make complaints of others by which it is scamped. I should give offence, and might probably be unjust. But I think I may certainly say that as some of these periodicals are certainly entitled to great praise for the manner in which the work is done generally, so are others open to very severe censure,--and that the praise and that the censure are chiefly due on behalf of one virtue and its opposite vice. It is not critical ability that we have a right to demand, or its absence that we are bound to deplore. Critical ability for the price we pay is not attainable. It is a faculty not peculiar to Englishmen, and when displayed is very frequently not appreciated. But that critics should be honest we have a right to demand, and critical dishonesty we are bound to expose. If the writer will tell us what he thinks, though his thoughts be absolutely vague and useless, we can forgive him; but when he tells us what he does not think, actuated either by friendship or by animosity, then there should be no pardon for him. This is the sin in modern English criticism of which there is most reason to complain. It is a lamentable fact that men and women lend themselves to this practice who are neither vindictive nor ordinarily dishonest. It has become "the custom of the trade," under the veil of which excuse so many tradesmen justify their malpractices! When a struggling author learns that so much has been done for A by the _Barsetshire Gazette_, so much for B by the _Dillsborough Herald_, and, again, so much for C by that powerful metropolitan organ the _Evening Pulpit_, and is told also that A and B and C have been favoured through personal interest, he also goes to work among the editors, or the editors' wives,--or perhaps, if he cannot reach their wives, with their wives' first or second cousins. When once the feeling has come upon an editor or a critic that he may allow himself to be influenced by other considerations than the duty he owes to the public, all sense of critical or of editorial honesty falls from him at once. _Facilis descensus Averni_. In a very short time that editorial honesty becomes ridiculous to himself. It is for other purpose that he wields the power; and when he is told what is his duty, and what should be his conduct, the preacher of such doctrine seems to him to be quixotic. "Where have you lived, my friend, for the last twenty years," he says in spirit, if not in word, "that you come out now with such stuff as old-fashioned as this?" And thus dishonesty begets dishonesty, till dishonesty seems to be beautiful. How nice to be good-natured! How glorious to assist struggling young authors, especially if the young author be also a pretty woman! How gracious to oblige a friend! Then the motive, though still pleasing, departs further from the border of what is good. In what way can the critic better repay the hospitality of his wealthy literary friend than by good-natured criticism,--or more certainly ensure for himself a continuation of hospitable favours? Some years since a critic of the day, a gentleman well known then in literary circles, showed me the manuscript of a book recently published,--the work of a popular author. It was handsomely bound, and was a valuable and desirable possession. It had just been given to him by the author as an acknowledgment for a laudatory review in one of the leading journals of the day. As I was expressly asked whether I did not regard such a token as a sign of grace both in the giver and in the receiver, I said that I thought it should neither have been given nor have been taken. My theory was repudiated with scorn, and I was told that I was strait-laced, visionary, and impracticable! In all that the damage did not lie in the fact of that one present, but in the feeling on the part of the critic that his office was not debased by the acceptance of presents from those whom he criticised. This man was a professional critic, bound by his contract with certain employers to review such books as were sent to him. How could he, when he had received a valuable present for praising one book, censure another by the same author? While I write this I well know that what I say, if it be ever noticed at all, will be taken as a straining at gnats, as a pretence of honesty, or at any rate as an exaggeration of scruples. I have said the same thing before, and have been ridiculed for saying it. But none the less am I sure that English literature generally is suffering much under this evil. All those who are struggling for success have forced upon them the idea that their strongest efforts should be made in touting for praise. Those who are not familiar with the lives of authors will hardly believe how low will be the forms which their struggles will take:--how little presents will be sent to men who write little articles; how much flattery may be expended even on the keeper of a circulating library; with what profuse and distant genuflexions approaches are made to the outside railing of the temple which contains within it the great thunderer of some metropolitan periodical publication! The evil here is not only that done to the public when interested counsel is given to them, but extends to the debasement of those who have at any rate considered themselves fit to provide literature for the public. I am satisfied that the remedy for this evil must lie in the conscience and deportment of authors themselves. If once the feeling could be produced that it is disgraceful for an author to ask for praise,--and demands for praise are, I think, disgraceful in every walk of life,--the practice would gradually fall into the hands only of the lowest, and that which is done only by the lowest soon becomes despicable even to them. The sin, when perpetuated with unflagging labour, brings with it at best very poor reward. That work of running after critics, editors, publishers, the keepers of circulating libraries, and their clerks, is very hard, and must be very disagreeable. He who does it must feel himself to be dishonoured,--or she. It may perhaps help to sell an edition, but can never make an author successful. I think it may be laid down as a golden rule in literature that there should be no intercourse at all between an author and his critic. The critic, as critic, should not know his author, nor the author, as author, his critic. As censure should beget no anger, so should praise beget no gratitude. The young author should feel that criticisms fall upon him as dew or hail from heaven,--which, as coming from heaven, man accepts as fate. Praise let the author try to obtain by wholesome effort; censure let him avoid, if possible, by care and industry. But when they come, let him take them as coming from some source which he cannot influence, and with which he should not meddle. I know no more disagreeable trouble into which an author may plunge himself than of a quarrel with his critics, or any more useless labour than that of answering them. It is wise to presume, at any rate, that the reviewer has simply done his duty, and has spoken of the book according to the dictates of his conscience. Nothing can be gained by combating the reviewer's opinion. If the book which he has disparaged be good, his judgment will be condemned by the praise of others; if bad, his judgment will be confirmed by others. Or if, unfortunately, the criticism of the day be in so evil a condition generally that such ultimate truth cannot be expected, the author may be sure that his efforts made on behalf of his own book will not set matters right. If injustice be done him, let him bear it. To do so is consonant with the dignity of the position which he ought to assume. To shriek, and scream, and sputter, to threaten actions, and to swear about the town that he has been belied and defamed in that he has been accused of bad grammar or a false metaphor, of a dull chapter, or even of a borrowed heroine, will leave on the minds of the public nothing but a sense of irritated impotence. If, indeed, there should spring from an author's work any assertion by a critic injurious to the author's honour, if the author be accused of falsehood or of personal motives which are discreditable to him, then, indeed, he may be bound to answer the charge. It is hoped, however, that he may be able to do so with clean hands, or he will so stir the mud in the pool as to come forth dirtier than he went into it. I have lived much among men by whom the English criticism of the day has been vehemently abused. I have heard it said that to the public it is a false guide, and that to authors it is never a trustworthy Mentor. I do not concur in this wholesale censure. There is, of course, criticism and criticism. There are at this moment one or two periodicals to which both public and authors may safely look for guidance, though there are many others from which no spark of literary advantage may be obtained. But it is well that both public and authors should know what is the advantage which they have a right to expect. There have been critics,--and there probably will be again, though the circumstances of English literature do not tend to produce them,--with power sufficient to entitle them to speak with authority. These great men have declared, _tanquam ex cathedra_, that such a book has been so far good and so far bad, or that it has been altogether good or altogether bad;--and the world has believed them. When making such assertions they have given their reasons, explained their causes, and have carried conviction. Very great reputations have been achieved by such critics, but not without infinite study and the labour of many years. Such are not the critics of the day, of whom we are now speaking. In the literary world as it lives at present some writer is selected for the place of critic to a newspaper, generally some young writer, who for so many shillings a column shall review whatever book is sent to him and express an opinion,--reading the book through for the purpose, if the amount of honorarium as measured with the amount of labour will enable him to do so. A labourer must measure his work by his pay or he cannot live. From criticism such as this must for the most part be, the general reader has no right to expect philosophical analysis, or literary judgment on which confidence may be placed. But he probably may believe that the books praised will be better than the books censured, and that those which are praised by periodicals which never censure are better worth his attention than those which are not noticed. And readers will also find that by devoting an hour or two on Saturday to the criticisms of the week, they will enable themselves to have an opinion about the books of the day. The knowledge so acquired will not be great, nor will that little be lasting; but it adds something to the pleasure of life to be able to talk on subjects of which others are speaking; and the man who has sedulously gone through the literary notices in the _Spectator_ and the _Saturday_ may perhaps be justified in thinking himself as well able to talk about the new book as his friend who has brought that new book on the _tapis_, and who, not improbably, obtained his information from the same source. As an author, I have paid careful attention to the reviews which have been written on my own work; and I think that now I well know where I may look for a little instruction, where I may expect only greasy adulation, where I shall be cut up into mince-meat for the delight of those who love sharp invective, and where I shall find an equal mixture of praise and censure so adjusted, without much judgment, as to exhibit the impartiality of the newspaper and its staff. Among it all there is much chaff, which I have learned how to throw to the winds, with equal disregard whether it praises or blames;--but I have also found some corn, on which I have fed and nourished myself, and for which I have been thankful. CHAPTER XV. _THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET_--LEAVING THE POST OFFICE--_ST. PAUL'S MAGAZINE_. I will now go back to the year 1867, in which I was still living at Waltham Cross. I had some time since bought the house there which I had at first hired, and added rooms to it, and made it for our purposes very comfortable. It was, however, a rickety old place, requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weather-tight as it should be. We had a domain there sufficient for the cows, and for the making of our butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green peas, out-of-door peaches, for roses especially, and such everyday luxuries, no place was ever more excellent. It was only twelve miles from London, and admitted therefore of frequent intercourse with the metropolis. It was also near enough to the Roothing country for hunting purposes. No doubt the Shoreditch Station, by which it had to be reached, had its drawbacks. My average distance also to the Essex meets was twenty miles. But the place combined as much or more than I had a right to expect. It was within my own postal district, and had, upon the whole, been well chosen. The work I did during the twelve years that I remained there, from 1859 to 1871, was certainly very great. I feel confident that in amount no other writer contributed so much during that time to English literature. Over and above my novels, I wrote political articles, critical, social, and sporting articles, for periodicals, without number. I did the work of a surveyor of the General Post Office, and so did it as to give the authorities of the department no slightest pretext for fault-finding. I hunted always at least twice a week. I was frequent in the whist-room at the Garrick. I lived much in society in London, and was made happy by the presence of many friends at Waltham Cross. In addition to this we always spent six weeks at least out of England. Few men, I think, ever lived a fuller life. And I attribute the power of doing this altogether to the virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast. All those I think who have lived as literary men,--working daily as literary labourers,--will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,--so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,--and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,--to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases. I would strongly recommend this practice to all tyros in writing. That their work should be read after it has been written is a matter of course,--that it should be read twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be a matter of course. But by reading what he has last written, just before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming to be unlike himself. This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year;--the precise amount which so greatly acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man. I have never written three novels in a year, but by following the plan above described I have written more than as much as three volumes; and by adhering to it over a course of years, I have been enabled to have always on hand,--for some time back now,--one or two or even three unpublished novels in my desk beside me. Were I to die now there are three such besides _The Prime Minister_, half of which has only yet been issued. One of these has been six years finished, and has never seen the light since it was first tied up in the wrapper which now contains it. I look forward with some grim pleasantry to its publication after another period of six years, and to the declaration of the critics that it has been the work of a period of life at which the power of writing novels had passed from me. Not improbably, however, these pages may be printed first. In 1866 and 1867 _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ was brought out by George Smith in sixpenny monthly numbers. I do not know that this mode of publication had been tried before, or that it answered very well on this occasion. Indeed the shilling magazines had interfered greatly with the success of novels published in numbers without other accompanying matter. The public finding that so much might be had for a shilling, in which a portion of one or more novels was always included, were unwilling to spend their money on the novel alone. Feeling that this certainly had become the case in reference to novels published in shilling numbers, Mr. Smith and I determined to make the experiment with sixpenny parts. As he paid me £3000 for the use of my MS., the loss, if any, did not fall upon me. If I remember right, the enterprise was not altogether successful. Taking it as a whole, I regard this as the best novel I have written. I was never quite satisfied with the development of the plot, which consisted in the loss of a cheque, of a charge made against a clergyman for stealing it, and of absolute uncertainty on the part of the clergyman himself as to the manner in which the cheque had found its way into his hands. I cannot quite make myself believe that even such a man as Mr. Crawley could have forgotten how he got it; nor would the generous friend who was anxious to supply his wants have supplied them by tendering the cheque of a third person. Such fault I acknowledge,--acknowledging at the same time that I have never been capable of constructing with complete success the intricacies of a plot that required to be unravelled. But while confessing so much, I claim to have portrayed the mind of the unfortunate man with great accuracy and great delicacy. The pride, the humility, the manliness, the weakness, the conscientious rectitude and bitter prejudices of Mr. Crawley were, I feel, true to nature and well described. The surroundings too are good. Mrs. Proudie at the palace is a real woman; and the poor old warden dying at the deanery is also real. The archdeacon in his victory is very real. There is a true savour of English country life all through the book. It was with many misgivings that I killed my old friend Mrs. Proudie. I could not, I think, have done it, but for a resolution taken and declared under circumstances of great momentary pressure. It was thus that it came about. I was sitting one morning at work upon the novel at the end of the long drawing-room of the Athenæum Club,--as was then my wont when I had slept the previous night in London. As I was there, two clergymen, each with a magazine in his hand, seated themselves, one on one side of the fire and one on the other, close to me. They soon began to abuse what they were reading, and each was reading some part of some novel of mine. The gravamen of their complaint lay in the fact that I reintroduced the same characters so often! "Here," said one, "is that archdeacon whom we have had in every novel he has ever written." "And here," said the other, "is the old duke whom he has talked about till everybody is tired of him. If I could not invent new characters, I would not write novels at all." Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was impossible for me not to hear their words, and almost impossible to hear them and be quiet. I got up, and standing between them, I acknowledged myself to be the culprit. "As to Mrs. Proudie," I said, "I will go home and kill her before the week is over." And so I did. The two gentlemen were utterly confounded, and one of them begged me to forget his frivolous observations. I have sometimes regretted the deed, so great was my delight in writing about Mrs. Proudie, so thorough was my knowledge of all the little shades of her character. It was not only that she was a tyrant, a bully, a would-be priestess, a very vulgar woman, and one who would send headlong to the nethermost pit all who disagreed with her; but that at the same time she was conscientious, by no means a hypocrite, really believing in the brimstone which she threatened, and anxious to save the souls around her from its horrors. And as her tyranny increased so did the bitterness of the moments of her repentance increase, in that she knew herself to be a tyrant,--till that bitterness killed her. Since her time others have grown up equally dear to me,--Lady Glencora and her husband, for instance; but I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie, and still live much in company with her ghost. I have in a previous chapter said how I wrote _Can You Forgive Her?_ after the plot of a play which had been rejected,--which play had been called _The Noble Jilt_. Some year or two after the completion of _The Last Chronicle_, I was asked by the manager of a theatre to prepare a piece for his stage, and I did so, taking the plot of this novel. I called the comedy _Did He Steal It?_ But my friend the manager did not approve of my attempt. My mind at this time was less attentive to such a matter than when dear old George Bartley nearly crushed me by his criticism,--so that I forget the reason given. I have little doubt but that the manager was right. That he intended to express a true opinion, and would have been glad to have taken the piece had he thought it suitable, I am quite sure. I have sometimes wished to see during my lifetime a combined republication of those tales which are occupied with the fictitious county of Barsetshire. These would be _The Warden_, _Barchester Towers_, _Doctor Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_, and _The Last Chronicle of Barset_. But I have hitherto failed. The copyrights are in the hands of four different persons, including myself, and with one of the four I have not been able to prevail to act in concert with the others.[10] [Footnote 10: Since this was written I have made arrangements for doing as I have wished, and the first volume of the series will now very shortly be published.] In 1867 I made up my mind to take a step in life which was not unattended with peril, which many would call rash, and which, when taken, I should be sure at some period to regret. This step was the resignation of my place in the Post Office. I have described how it was that I contrived to combine the performance of its duties with my other avocations in life. I got up always very early; but even this did not suffice. I worked always on Sundays,--as to which no scruple of religion made me unhappy,--and not unfrequently I was driven to work at night. In the winter when hunting was going on, I had to keep myself very much on the alert. And during the London season, when I was generally two or three days of the week in town, I found the official work to be a burden. I had determined some years previously, after due consideration with my wife, to abandon the Post Office when I had put by an income equal to the pension to which I should be entitled if I remained in the department till I was sixty. That I had now done, and I sighed for liberty. The exact time chosen, the autumn of 1867, was selected because I was then about to undertake other literary work in editing a new magazine,--of which I shall speak very shortly. But in addition to these reasons there was another, which was, I think, at last the actuating cause. When Sir Rowland Hill left the Post Office, and my brother-in-law, Mr. Tilley, became Secretary in his place, I applied for the vacant office of Under-Secretary. Had I obtained this I should have given up my hunting, have given up much of my literary work,--at any rate would have edited no magazine,--and would have returned to the habit of my youth in going daily to the General Post Office. There was very much against such a change in life. The increase of salary would not have amounted to above £400 a year, and I should have lost much more than that in literary remuneration. I should have felt bitterly the slavery of attendance at an office, from which I had then been exempt for five-and-twenty years. I should, too, have greatly missed the sport which I loved. But I was attached to the department, had imbued myself with a thorough love of letters,--I mean the letters which are carried by the post,--and was anxious for their welfare as though they were all my own. In short, I wished to continue the connection. I did not wish, moreover, that any younger officer should again pass over my head. I believed that I had been a valuable public servant, and I will own to a feeling existing at that time that I had not altogether been well treated. I was probably wrong in this. I had been allowed to hunt,--and to do as I pleased, and to say what I liked, and had in that way received my reward. I applied for the office, but Mr. Scudamore was appointed to it. He no doubt was possessed of gifts which I did not possess. He understood the manipulation of money and the use of figures, and was a great accountant. I think that I might have been more useful in regard to the labours and wages of the immense body of men employed by the Post Office. However, Mr. Scudamore was appointed; and I made up my mind that I would fall back upon my old intention, and leave the department. I think I allowed two years to pass before I took the step; and the day on which I sent the letter was to me most melancholy. The rule of the service in regard to pensions is very just. A man shall serve till he is sixty before he is entitled to a pension,--unless his health fail him. At that age he is entitled to one-sixtieth of his salary for every year he has served up to forty years. If his health do fail him so that he is unfit for further work before the age named, then he may go with a pension amounting to one-sixtieth for every year he has served. I could not say that my health had failed me, and therefore I went without any pension. I have since felt occasionally that it has been supposed that I left the Post Office under pressure,--because I attended to hunting and to my literary work rather than to postal matters. As it had for many years been my ambition to be a thoroughly good servant to the public, and to give to the public much more than I took in the shape of salary, this feeling has sometimes annoyed me. And as I am still a little sore on the subject, and as I would not have it imagined after my death that I had slighted the public service to which I belonged, I will venture here to give the reply which was sent to the letter containing my resignation. General Post Office, October 9th, 1867. SIR,--I have received your letter of the 3d inst., in which you tender your resignation as Surveyor in the Post Office service, and state as your reason for this step that you have adopted another profession, the exigencies of which are so great as to make you feel you cannot give to the duties of the Post Office that amount of attention which you consider the Postmaster-General has a right to expect. You have for many years ranked among the most conspicuous members of the Post Office, which, on several occasions when you have been employed on large and difficult matters, has reaped much benefit from the great abilities which you have been able to place at its disposal; and in mentioning this, I have been especially glad to record that, notwithstanding the many calls upon your time, you have never permitted your other avocations to interfere with your Post Office work, which has been faithfully and indeed energetically performed. There was a touch of irony in this word "energetically," but still it did not displease me. In accepting your resignation, which he does with much regret, the Duke of Montrose desires me to convey to you his own sense of the value of your services, and to state how alive he is to the loss which will be sustained by the department in which you have long been an ornament, and where your place will with difficulty be replaced. (Signed) J. TILLEY. Readers will no doubt think that this is official flummery; and so in fact it is. I do not at all imagine that I was an ornament to the Post Office, and have no doubt that the secretaries and assistant-secretaries very often would have been glad to be rid of me; but the letter may be taken as evidence that I did not allow my literary enterprises to interfere with my official work. A man who takes public money without earning it is to me so odious that I can find no pardon for him in my heart. I have known many such, and some who have craved the power to do so. Nothing would annoy me more than to think that I should even be supposed to have been among the number. And so my connection was dissolved with the department to which I had applied the thirty-three best years of my life;--I must not say devoted, for devotion implies an entire surrender, and I certainly had found time for other occupations. It is however absolutely true that during all those years I had thought very much more about the Post Office than I had of my literary work, and had given to it a more unflagging attention. Up to this time I had never been angry, never felt myself injured or unappreciated in that my literary efforts were slighted. But I had suffered very much bitterness on that score in reference to the Post Office; and I had suffered not only on my own personal behalf, but also and more bitterly when I could not promise to be done the things which I thought ought to be done for the benefit of others. That the public in little villages should be enabled to buy postage stamps; that they should have their letters delivered free and at an early hour; that pillar letter-boxes should be put up for them (of which accommodation in the streets and ways of England I was the originator, having, however, got the authority for the erection of the first at St. Heliers in Jersey); that the letter-carriers and sorters should not be overworked; that they should be adequately paid, and have some hours to themselves, especially on Sundays; above all, that they should be made to earn their wages; and latterly that they should not be crushed by what I thought to be the damnable system of so-called merit;--these were the matters by which I was stirred to what the secretary was pleased to call energetic performance of my duties. How I loved, when I was contradicted,--as I was very often and no doubt very properly,--to do instantly as I was bid, and then to prove that what I was doing was fatuous, dishonest, expensive, and impracticable! And then there were feuds,--such delicious feuds! I was always an anti-Hillite, acknowledging, indeed, the great thing which Sir Rowland Hill had done for the country, but believing him to be entirely unfit to manage men or to arrange labour. It was a pleasure to me to differ from him on all occasions;--and looking back now, I think that in all such differences I was right. Having so steeped myself, as it were, in postal waters, I could not go out from them without a regret. I wonder whether I did anything to improve the style of writing in official reports! I strove to do so gallantly, never being contented with the language of my own reports unless it seemed to have been so written as to be pleasant to be read. I took extreme delight in writing them, not allowing myself to re-copy them, never having them re-copied by others, but sending them up with their original blots and erasures,--if blots and erasures there were. It is hardly manly, I think, that a man should search after a fine neatness at the expense of so much waste labour; or that he should not be able to exact from himself the necessity of writing words in the form in which they should be read. If a copy be required, let it be taken afterwards,--by hand or by machine, as may be. But the writer of a letter, if he wish his words to prevail with the reader, should send them out as written by himself, by his own hand, with his own marks, his own punctuation, correct or incorrect, with the evidence upon them that they have come out from his own mind. And so the cord was cut, and I was a free man to run about the world where I would. A little before the date of my resignation, Mr. James Virtue, the printer and publisher, had asked me to edit a new magazine for him, and had offered me a salary of £1000 a year for the work, over and above what might be due to me for my own contributions. I had known something of magazines, and did not believe that they were generally very lucrative. They were, I thought, useful to some publishers as bringing grist to the mill; but as Mr. Virtue's business was chiefly that of a printer, in which he was very successful, this consideration could hardly have had much weight with him. I very strongly advised him to abandon the project, pointing out to him that a large expenditure would be necessary to carry on the magazine in accordance with my views,--that I could not be concerned in it on any other understanding, and that the chances of an adequate return to him of his money were very small. He came down to Waltham, listened to my arguments with great patience, and then told me that if I would not do the work he would find some other editor. Upon this I consented to undertake the duty. My terms as to salary were those which he had himself proposed. The special stipulations which I demanded were: firstly, that I should put whatever I pleased into the magazine, or keep whatever I pleased out of it, without interference; secondly, that I should from month to month give in to him a list of payments to be made to contributors, and that he should pay them, allowing me to fix the amounts; and thirdly, that the arrangement should remain in force at any rate for two years. To all this he made no objection; and during the time that he and I were thus bound together, he not only complied with these stipulations, but also with every suggestion respecting the magazine that I made to him. If the use of large capital, combined with wide liberality and absolute confidence on the part of the proprietor, and perpetual good humour, would have produced success, our magazine certainly would have succeeded. In all such enterprises the name is the first great difficulty. There is the name which has a meaning and the name which has none,--of which two the name that has none is certainly the better, as it never belies itself. _The Liberal_ may cease to be liberal, or _The Fortnightly_, alas! to come out once a fortnight. But _The Cornhill_ and _The Argosy_ are under any set of circumstances as well adapted to these names as under any other. Then there is the proprietary name, or possibly the editorial name, which is only amiss because the publication may change hands. _Blackwood's_ has indeed always remained _Blackwood's_, and _Fraser's_, though it has been bought and sold, still does not sound amiss. Mr. Virtue, fearing the too attractive qualities of his own name, wished the magazine to be called _Anthony Trollope's_. But to this I objected eagerly. There were then about the town--still are about the town--two or three literary gentlemen, by whom to have had myself editored would have driven me an exile from my country. After much discussion, we settled on _St. Paul's_ as the name for our bantling,--not as being in any way new, but as enabling it to fall easily into the ranks with many others. If we were to make ourselves in any way peculiar, it was not by our name that we were desirous of doing so. I do not think that we did make ourselves in any way peculiar,--and yet there was a great struggle made. On the part of the proprietor, I may say that money was spent very freely. On my own part, I may declare that I omitted nothing which I thought might tend to success. I read all manuscripts sent to me, and endeavoured to judge impartially. I succeeded in obtaining the services of an excellent literary corps. During the three years and a half of my editorship I was assisted by Mr. Goschen, Captain Brackenbury, Edward Dicey, Percy Fitzgerald, H. A. Layard, Allingham, Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Lynn Linton, my brother, T. A. Trollope, and his wife, Charles Lever, E. Arnold, Austin Dobson, R. A. Proctor, Lady Pollock, G. H. Lewes, C. Mackay, Hardman (of the _Times_), George Macdonald, W. R. Greg, Mrs. Oliphant, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Leoni Levi, Dutton Cook,--and others, whose names would make the list too long. It might have been thought that with such aid the _St. Paul's_ would have succeeded. I do not think that the failure--for it did fail--arose from bad editing. Perhaps too much editing might have been the fault. I was too anxious to be good, and did not enough think of what might be lucrative. It did fail, for it never paid its way. It reached, if I remember right, a circulation of nearly 10,000--perhaps on one or two occasions may have gone beyond that. But the enterprise had been set on foot on a system too expensive to be made lucrative by anything short of a very large circulation. Literary merit will hardly set a magazine afloat, though when afloat it will sustain it. Time is wanted,--or the hubbub, and flurry, and excitement created by ubiquitous sesquipedalian advertisement. Merit and time together may be effective, but they must be backed by economy and patience. I think, upon the whole, that publishers themselves have been the best editors of magazines, when they have been able to give time and intelligence to the work. Nothing certainly has ever been done better than _Blackwood's_. The _Cornhill_, too, after Thackeray had left it and before Leslie Stephen had taken it, seemed to be in quite efficient hands,--those hands being the hands of proprietor and publisher. The proprietor, at any rate, knows what he wants and what he can afford, and is not so frequently tempted to fall into that worst of literary quicksands, the publishing of matter not for the sake of the readers, but for that of the writer. I did not so sin very often, but often enough to feel that I was a coward. "My dear friend, my dear friend, this is trash!" It is so hard to speak thus,--but so necessary for an editor! We all remember the thorn in his pillow of which Thackeray complained. Occasionally I know that I did give way on behalf of some literary aspirant whose work did not represent itself to me as being good; and as often as I did so, I broke my trust to those who employed me. Now, I think that such editors as Thackeray and myself--if I may for the moment be allowed to couple men so unequal--will always be liable to commit such faults, but that the natures of publishers and proprietors will be less soft. Nor do I know why the pages of a magazine should be considered to be open to any aspirant who thinks that he can write an article, or why the manager of a magazine should be doomed to read all that may be sent to him. The object of the proprietor is to produce a periodical that shall satisfy the public, which he may probably best do by securing the services of writers of acknowledged ability. CHAPTER XVI. BEVERLEY. Very early in life, very soon after I had become a clerk in St. Martin's le Grand, when I was utterly impecunious and beginning to fall grievously into debt, I was asked by an uncle of mine, who was himself a clerk in the War Office, what destination I should like best for my future life. He probably meant to inquire whether I wished to live married or single, whether to remain in the Post Office or to leave it, whether I should prefer the town or the country. I replied that I should like to be a Member of Parliament. My uncle, who was given to sarcasm, rejoined that, as far as he knew, few clerks in the Post Office did become Members of Parliament. I think it was the remembrance of this jeer which stirred me up to look for a seat as soon as I had made myself capable of holding one by leaving the public service. My uncle was dead, but if I could get a seat, the knowledge that I had done so might travel to that bourne from whence he was not likely to return, and he might there feel that he had done me wrong. Independently of this, I have always thought that to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman. I do not by this mean to suggest that every educated Englishman should set before himself a seat in Parliament as a probable or even a possible career; but that the man in Parliament has reached a higher position than the man out,--that to serve one's country without pay is the grandest work that a man can do,--that of all studies the study of politics is the one in which a man may make himself most useful to his fellow-creatures,--and that of all lives, public political lives are capable of the highest efforts. So thinking,--though I was aware that fifty-three was too late an age at which to commence a new career,--I resolved with much hesitation that I would make the attempt. Writing now at an age beyond sixty, I can say that my political feelings and convictions have never undergone any change. They are now what they became when I first began to have political feelings and convictions. Nor do I find in myself any tendency to modify them as I have found generally in men as they grow old. I consider myself to be an advanced, but still a Conservative-Liberal, which I regard not only as a possible but as a rational and consistent phase of political existence. I can, I believe, in a very few words, make known my political theory; and as I am anxious that any who know aught of me should know that, I will endeavour to do so. It must, I think, be painful to all men to feel inferiority. It should, I think, be a matter of some pain to all men to feel superiority, unless when it has been won by their own efforts. We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom, and are therefore unable to tell the causes of the terrible inequalities that we see,--why some, why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand. We acknowledge the hand of God and His wisdom, but still we are struck with awe and horror at the misery of many of our brethren. We who have been born to the superior condition,--for in this matter I consider myself to be standing on a platform with dukes and princes, and all others to whom plenty and education and liberty have been given,--cannot, I think, look upon the inane, unintellectual, and tost-bound life of those who cannot even feed themselves sufficiently by their sweat, without some feeling of injustice, some feeling of pain. This consciousness of wrong has induced in many enthusiastic but unbalanced minds a desire to set all things right by a proclaimed equality. In their efforts such men have shown how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator. For the mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awestruck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow. The so-called Conservative, the conscientious philanthropic Conservative, seeing this, and being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them. He thinks that the preservation of the welfare of the world depends on the maintenance of those distances between the prince and the peasant by which he finds himself to be surrounded;--and perhaps, I may add, that the duty is not unpleasant, as he feels himself to be one of the princes. But this man, though he sees something, and sees that very clearly, sees only a little. The divine inequality is apparent to him, but not the equally divine diminution of that inequality. That such diminution is taking place on all sides is apparent enough; but it is apparent to him as an evil, the consummation of which it is his duty to retard. He cannot prevent it; and therefore the society to which he belongs is, in his eyes, retrograding. He will even, at times, assist it; and will do so conscientiously, feeling that, under the gentle pressure supplied by him, and with the drags and holdfasts which he may add, the movement would be slower than it would become if subjected to his proclaimed and absolute opponents. Such, I think, are Conservatives;--and I speak of men who, with the fear of God before their eyes and the love of their neighbours warm in their hearts, endeavour to do their duty to the best of their ability. Using the term which is now common, and which will be best understood, I will endeavour to explain how the equally conscientious Liberal is opposed to the Conservative. He is equally aware that these distances are of divine origin, equally averse to any sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness;--but he is alive to the fact that these distances are day by day becoming less, and he regards this continual diminution as a series of steps towards that human millennium of which he dreams. He is even willing to help the many to ascend the ladder a little, though he knows, as they come up towards him, he must go down to meet them. What is really in his mind is,--I will not say equality, for the word is offensive, and presents to the imaginations of men ideas of communism, of ruin, and insane democracy,--but a tendency towards equality. In following that, however, he knows that he must be hemmed in by safeguards, lest he be tempted to travel too quickly; and therefore he is glad to be accompanied on his way by the repressive action of a Conservative opponent. Holding such views, I think I am guilty of no absurdity in calling myself an advanced Conservative-Liberal. A man who entertains in his mind any political doctrine, except as a means of improving the condition of his fellows, I regard as a political intriguer, a charlatan, and a conjurer,--as one who thinks that, by a certain amount of wary wire-pulling, he may raise himself in the estimation of the world. I am aware that this theory of politics will seem to many to be stilted, overstrained, and, as the Americans would say, high-faluten. Many will declare that the majority even of those who call themselves politicians,--perhaps even of those who take an active part in politics,--are stirred by no such feelings as these, and acknowledge no such motives. Men become Tories or Whigs, Liberals or Conservatives, partly by education,--following their fathers,--partly by chance, partly as openings come, partly in accordance with the bent of their minds, but still without any far-fetched reasonings as to distances and the diminution of distances. No doubt it is so;--and in the battle of politics, as it goes, men are led further and further away from first causes, till at last a measure is opposed by one simply because it is advocated by another, and members of Parliament swarm into lobbies, following the dictation of their leaders, and not their own individual judgments. But the principle is at work throughout. To many, though hardly acknowledged, it is still apparent. On almost all it has its effect; though there are the intriguers, the clever conjurers, to whom politics is simply such a game as is billiards or rackets, only played with greater results. To the minds that create and lead and sway political opinion, some such theory is, I think, ever present. The truth of all this I had long since taken home to myself. I had now been thinking of it for thirty years, and had never doubted. But I had always been aware of a certain visionary weakness about myself in regard to politics. A man, to be useful in Parliament, must be able to confine himself and conform himself, to be satisfied with doing a little bit of a little thing at a time. He must patiently get up everything connected with the duty on mushrooms, and then be satisfied with himself when at last he has induced a Chancellor of the Exchequer to say that he will consider the impost at the first opportunity. He must be content to be beaten six times in order that, on a seventh, his work may be found to be of assistance to some one else. He must remember that he is one out of 650, and be content with 1-650th part of the attention of the nation. If he have grand ideas, he must keep them to himself, unless by chance he can work his way up to the top of the tree. In short, he must be a practical man. Now I knew that in politics I could never become a practical man. I should never be satisfied with a soft word from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but would always be flinging my over-taxed ketchup in his face. Nor did it seem to me to be possible that I should ever become a good speaker. I had no special gifts that way, and had not studied the art early enough in life to overcome natural difficulties. I had found that, with infinite labour, I could learn a few sentences by heart, and deliver them, monotonously indeed, but clearly. Or, again, if there were something special to be said, I could say it in a commonplace fashion,--but always as though I were in a hurry, and with the fear before me of being thought to be prolix. But I had no power of combining, as a public speaker should always do, that which I had studied with that which occurred to me at the moment. It must be all lesson,--which I found to be best; or else all impromptu,--which was very bad indeed, unless I had something special on my mind. I was thus aware that I could do no good by going into Parliament,--that the time for it, if there could have been a time, had gone by. But still I had an almost insane desire to sit there, and be able to assure myself that my uncle's scorn had not been deserved. In 1867 it had been suggested to me that, in the event of a dissolution, I should stand for one division of the county of Essex; and I had promised that I would do so, though the promise at that time was as rash a one as a man could make. I was instigated to this by the late Charles Buxton, a man whom I greatly loved, and who was very anxious that the county for which his brother had sat, and with which the family were connected, should be relieved from what he regarded as the thraldom of Toryism. But there was no dissolution then. Mr. Disraeli passed his Reform Bill, by the help of the Liberal member for Newark, and the summoning of a new Parliament was postponed till the next year. By this new Reform Bill Essex was portioned out into three instead of two electoral divisions, one of which--that adjacent to London--would, it was thought, be altogether Liberal. After the promise which I had given, the performance of which would have cost me a large sum of money absolutely in vain, it was felt by some that I should be selected as one of the candidates for the new division,--and as such I was proposed by Mr. Charles Buxton. But another gentleman, who would have been bound by previous pledges to support me, was put forward by what I believe to have been the defeating interest, and I had to give way. At the election this gentleman, with another Liberal, who had often stood for the county, were returned without a contest. Alas! alas! They were both unseated at the next election, when the great Conservative reaction took place. In the spring of 1868 I was sent to the United States on a postal mission, of which I will speak presently. While I was absent the dissolution took place. On my return I was somewhat too late to look out for a seat, but I had friends who knew the weakness of my ambition; and it was not likely, therefore, that I should escape the peril of being put forward for some impossible borough as to which the Liberal party would not choose that it should go to the Conservatives without a struggle. At last, after one or two others, Beverley was proposed to me, and to Beverley I went. I must, however, exculpate the gentleman who acted as my agent, from undue persuasion exercised towards me. He was a man who thoroughly understood Parliament, having sat there himself,--and he sits there now at this moment. He understood Yorkshire,--or at least the East Riding of Yorkshire, in which Beverley is situated,--certainly better than any one alive. He understood all the mysteries of canvassing, and he knew well the traditions, the condition, and the prospect of the Liberal party. I will not give his name, but they who knew Yorkshire in 1868 will not be at a loss to find it. "So," said he, "you are going to stand for Beverley?" I replied gravely that I was thinking of doing so. "You don't expect to get in?" he said. Again I was grave. I would not, I said, be sanguine, but nevertheless I was disposed to hope for the best. "Oh no!" continued he, with good-humoured raillery, "you won't get in. I don't suppose you really expect it. But there is a fine career open to you. You will spend £1000, and lose the election. Then you will petition, and spend another £1000. You will throw out the elected members. There will be a commission, and the borough will be disfranchised. For a beginner such as you are, that will be a great success." And yet, in the teeth of this, from a man who knew all about it, I persisted in going to Beverley! The borough, which returned two members, had long been represented by Sir Henry Edwards, of whom, I think, I am justified in saying that he had contracted a close intimacy with it for the sake of the seat. There had been many contests, many petitions, many void elections, many members, but, through it all, Sir Henry had kept his seat, if not with permanence, yet with a fixity of tenure next door to permanence. I fancy that with a little management between the parties the borough might at this time have returned a member of each colour quietly;--but there were spirits there who did not love political quietude, and it was at last decided that there should be two Liberal and two Conservative candidates. Sir Henry was joined by a young man of fortune in quest of a seat, and I was grouped with Mr. Maxwell, the eldest son of Lord Herries, a Scotch Roman Catholic peer who lives in the neighbourhood. When the time came I went down to canvass, and spent, I think, the most wretched fortnight of my manhood. In the first place, I was subject to a bitter tyranny from grinding vulgar tyrants. They were doing what they could, or said that they were doing so, to secure me a seat in Parliament, and I was to be in their hands for at any rate the period of my candidature. On one day both of us, Mr. Maxwell and I, wanted to go out hunting. We proposed to ourselves but the one holiday during this period of intense labour; but I was assured, as was he also, by a publican who was working for us, that if we committed such a crime he and all Beverley would desert us. From morning to evening every day I was taken round the lanes and by-ways of that uninteresting town, canvassing every voter, exposed to the rain, up to my knees in slush, and utterly unable to assume that air of triumphant joy with which a jolly, successful candidate should be invested. At night, every night I had to speak somewhere,--which was bad; and to listen to the speaking of others,--which was much worse. When, on one Sunday, I proposed to go to the Minster Church, I was told that was quite useless, as the Church party were all certain to support Sir Henry! "Indeed," said the publican, my tyrant, "he goes there in a kind of official profession, and you had better not allow yourself to be seen in the same place." So I stayed away and omitted my prayers. No Church of England church in Beverley would on such an occasion have welcomed a Liberal candidate. I felt myself to be a kind of pariah in the borough, to whom was opposed all that was pretty, and all that was nice, and all that was--ostensibly--good. But perhaps my strongest sense of discomfort arose from the conviction that my political ideas were all leather and prunella to the men whose votes I was soliciting. They cared nothing for my doctrines, and could not be made to understand that I should have any. I had been brought to Beverley either to beat Sir Henry Edwards,--which, however, no one probably thought to be feasible,--or to cause him the greatest possible amount of trouble, inconvenience, and expense. There were, indeed, two points on which a portion of my wished-for supporters seemed to have opinions, and on both these two points I was driven by my opinions to oppose them. Some were anxious for the Ballot,--which had not then become law,--and some desired the Permissive Bill. I hated, and do hate, both these measures, thinking it to be unworthy of a great people to free itself from the evil results of vicious conduct by unmanly restraints. Undue influence on voters is a great evil from which this country had already done much to emancipate itself by extended electoral divisions and by an increase of independent feeling. These, I thought, and not secret voting, were the weapons by which electoral intimidation should be overcome. And as for drink, I believe in no Parliamentary restraint; but I do believe in the gradual effect of moral teaching and education. But a Liberal, to do any good at Beverley, should have been able to swallow such gnats as those. I would swallow nothing, and was altogether the wrong man. I knew, from the commencement of my candidature, how it would be. Of course that well-trained gentleman who condescended to act as my agent, had understood the case, and I ought to have taken his thoroughly kind advice. He had seen it all, and had told himself that it was wrong that one so innocent in such ways as I, so utterly unable to fight such a battle, should be carried down into Yorkshire merely to spend money and to be annoyed. He could not have said more than he did say, and I suffered for my obstinacy. Of course I was not elected. Sir Henry Edwards and his comrade became members for Beverley, and I was at the bottom of the poll. I paid £400 for my expenses, and then returned to London. My friendly agent in his raillery had of course exaggerated the cost. He had, when I arrived at Beverley, asked me for a cheque for £400, and told me that that sum would suffice. It did suffice. How it came to pass that exactly that sum should be required I never knew, but such was the case. Then there came a petition,--not from me, but from the town. The inquiry was made, the two gentlemen were unseated, the borough was disfranchised, Sir Henry Edwards was put on his trial for some kind of Parliamentary offence and was acquitted. In this way Beverley's privilege as a borough and my Parliamentary ambition were brought to an end at the same time. When I knew the result I did not altogether regret it. It may be that Beverley might have been brought to political confusion and Sir Henry Edwards relegated to private life without the expenditure of my hard-earned money, and without that fortnight of misery; but connecting the things together, as it was natural that I should do, I did flatter myself that I had done some good. It had seemed to me that nothing could be worse, nothing more unpatriotic, nothing more absolutely opposed to the system of representative government, than the time-honoured practices of the borough of Beverley. It had come to pass that political cleanliness was odious to the citizens. There was something grand in the scorn with which a leading Liberal there turned up his nose at me when I told him that there should be no bribery, no treating, not even a pot of beer on one side. It was a matter for study to see how at Beverley politics were appreciated because they might subserve electoral purposes, and how little it was understood that electoral purposes, which are in themselves a nuisance, should be endured in order that they may subserve politics. And then the time, the money, the mental energy, which had been expended in making the borough a secure seat for a gentleman who had realised the idea that it would become him to be a member of Parliament! This use of the borough seemed to be realised and approved in the borough generally. The inhabitants had taught themselves to think that it was for such purposes that boroughs were intended! To have assisted in putting an end to this, even in one town, was to a certain extent a satisfaction. CHAPTER XVII. THE AMERICAN POSTAL TREATY--THE QUESTION OF COPYRIGHT WITH AMERICA--FOUR MORE NOVELS. In the spring of 1868,--before the affair of Beverley, which, as being the first direct result of my resignation of office, has been brought in a little out of its turn,--I was requested to go over to the United States and make a postal treaty at Washington. This, as I had left the service, I regarded as a compliment, and of course I went. It was my third visit to America, and I have made two since. As far as the Post Office work was concerned, it was very far from being agreeable. I found myself located at Washington, a place I do not love, and was harassed by delays, annoyed by incompetence, and opposed by what I felt to be personal and not national views. I had to deal with two men,--with one who was a working officer of the American Post Office, than whom I have never met a more zealous, or, as far as I could judge, a more honest public servant. He had his views and I had mine, each of us having at heart the welfare of the service in regard to his own country,--each of us also having certain orders which we were bound to obey. But the other gentleman, who was in rank the superior,--whose executive position was dependent on his official status, as is the case with our own Ministers,--did not recommend himself to me equally. He would make appointments with me and then not keep them, which at last offended me so grievously, that I declared at the Washington Post Office that if this treatment were continued, I would write home to say that any further action on my part was impossible. I think I should have done so had it not occurred to me that I might in this way serve his purpose rather than my own, or the purposes of those who had sent me. The treaty, however, was at last made,--the purport of which was, that everything possible should be done, at a heavy expenditure on the part of England, to expedite the mails from England to America, and that nothing should be done by America to expedite the mails from thence to us. The expedition I believe to be now equal both ways; but it could not be maintained as it is without the payment of a heavy subsidy from Great Britain, whereas no subsidy is paid by the States.[11] [Footnote 11: This was a state of things which may probably have appeared to American politicians to be exactly that which they should try to obtain. The whole arrangement has again been altered since the time of which I have spoken.] I had also a commission from the Foreign Office, for which I had asked, to make an effort on behalf of an international copyright between the United States and Great Britain,--the want of which is the one great impediment to pecuniary success which still stands in the way of successful English authors. I cannot say that I have never had a shilling of American money on behalf of reprints of my work; but I have been conscious of no such payment. Having found many years ago--in 1861, when I made a struggle on the subject, being then in the States, the details of which are sufficiently amusing[12]--that I could not myself succeed in dealing with American booksellers, I have sold all foreign right to the English publishers; and though I do not know that I have raised my price against them on that score, I may in this way have had some indirect advantage from the American market. But I do know that what the publishers have received here is very trifling. I doubt whether Messrs. Chapman & Hall, my present publishers, get for early sheets sent to the States as much as 5 per cent on the price they pay me for my manuscript. But the American readers are more numerous than the English, and taking them all through, are probably more wealthy. If I can get £1000 for a book here (exclusive of their market), I ought to be able to get as much there. If a man supply 600 customers with shoes in place of 300, there is no question as to such result. Why not, then, if I can supply 60,000 readers instead of 30,000? [Footnote 12: In answer to a question from myself, a certain American publisher--he who usually reprinted my works--promised me that if any other American publisher republished my work on America before he had done so, he would not bring out a competing edition, though there would be no law to hinder him. I then entered into an agreement with another American publisher, stipulating to supply him with early sheets; and he stipulating to supply me a certain royalty on his sales, and to supply me with accounts half-yearly. I sent the sheets with energetic punctuality, and the work was brought out with equal energy and precision--by my old American publishers. The gentleman who made the promise had not broken his word. No other American edition had come out before his. I never got any account, and, of course, never received a dollar.] I fancied that I knew that the opposition to an international copyright was by no means an American feeling, but was confined to the bosoms of a few interested Americans. All that I did and heard in reference to the subject on this further visit,--and having a certain authority from the British Secretary of State with me I could hear and do something,--altogether confirmed me in this view. I have no doubt that if I could poll American readers, or American senators,--or even American representatives, if the polling could be unbiassed,--or American booksellers,[13] that an assent to an international copyright would be the result. The state of things as it is is crushing to American authors, as the publishers will not pay them on a liberal scale, knowing that they can supply their customers with modern English literature without paying for it. The English amount of production so much exceeds the American, that the rate at which the former can be published rules the market. It is equally injurious to American booksellers,--except to two or three of the greatest houses. No small man can now acquire the exclusive right of printing and selling an English book. If such a one attempt it, the work is printed instantly by one of the leviathans,--who alone are the gainers. The argument of course is, that the American readers are the gainers,--that as they can get for nothing the use of certain property, they would be cutting their own throats were they to pass a law debarring themselves from the power of such appropriation. In this argument all idea of honesty is thrown to the winds. It is not that they do not approve of a system of copyright,--as many great men have disapproved,--for their own law of copyright is as stringent as is ours. A bold assertion is made that they like to appropriate the goods of other people; and that, as in this case, they can do so with impunity, they will continue to do so. But the argument, as far as I have been able to judge, comes not from the people, but from the bookselling leviathans, and from those politicians whom the leviathans are able to attach to their interests. The ordinary American purchaser is not much affected by slight variations in price. He is at any rate too high-hearted to be affected by the prospect of such variation. It is the man who wants to make money, not he who fears that he may be called upon to spend it, who controls such matters as this in the United States. It is the large speculator who becomes powerful in the lobbies of the House, and understands how wise it may be to incur a great expenditure either in the creation of a great business, or in protecting that which he has created from competition. Nothing was done in 1868,--and nothing has been done since (up to 1876). A Royal Commission on the law of copyright is now about to sit in this country, of which I have consented to be a member; and the question must then be handled, though nothing done by a Royal Commission here can affect American legislators. But I do believe that if the measure be consistently and judiciously urged, the enemies to it in the States will gradually be overcome. Some years since we had some _quasi_ private meetings, under the presidency of Lord Stanhope, in Mr. John Murray's dining-room, on the subject of international copyright. At one of these I discussed this matter of American international copyright with Charles Dickens, who strongly declared his conviction that nothing would induce an American to give up the power he possesses of pirating British literature. But he was a man who, seeing clearly what was before him, would not realise the possibility of shifting views. Because in this matter the American decision had been, according to his thinking, dishonest, therefore no other than dishonest decision was to be expected from Americans. Against that idea I protested, and now protest. American dishonesty is rampant; but it is rampant only among a few. It is the great misfortune of the community that those few have been able to dominate so large a portion of the population among which all men can vote, but so few can understand for what they are voting. [Footneote 13: I might also say American publishers, if I might count them by the number of heads, and not by the amount of work done by the firms.] Since this was written the Commission on the law of copyright has sat and made its report. With the great body of it I agree, and could serve no reader by alluding here at length to matters which are discussed there. But in regard to this question of international copyright with the United States, I think that we were incorrect in the expression of an opinion that fair justice,--or justice approaching to fairness,--is now done by American publishers to English authors by payments made by them for early sheets. I have just found that £20 was paid to my publisher in England for the use of the early sheets of a novel for which I received £1600 in England. When asked why he accepted so little, he assured me that the firm with whom he dealt would not give more. "Why not go to another firm?" I asked. No other firm would give a dollar, because no other firm would care to run counter to that great firm which had assumed to itself the right of publishing my books. I soon after received a copy of my own novel in the American form, and found that it was published for 7½d. That a great sale was expected can be argued from the fact that without a great sale the paper and printing necessary for the republication of a three-volume novel could not be supplied. Many thousand copies must have been sold. But from these the author received not one shilling. I need hardly point out that the sum of £20 would not do more than compensate the publisher for his trouble in making the bargain. The publisher here no doubt might have refused to supply the early sheets, but he had no means of exacting a higher price than that offered. I mention the circumstance here because it has been boasted, on behalf of the American publishers, that though there is no international copyright, they deal so liberally with English authors as to make it unnecessary that the English author should be so protected. With the fact of the £20 just brought to my knowledge, and with the copy of my book published at 7½d. now in my hands, I feel that an international copyright is very necessary for my protection. They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United States, have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language in denouncing the sins of Americans. Who can but love their personal generosity, their active and far-seeking philanthropy, their love of education, their hatred of ignorance, the general convictions in the minds of all of them that a man should be enabled to walk upright, fearing no one and conscious that he is responsible for his own actions? In what country have grander efforts been made by private munificence to relieve the sufferings of humanity? Where can the English traveller find any more anxious to assist him than the normal American, when once the American shall have found the Englishman to be neither sullen nor fastidious? Who, lastly, is so much an object of heart-felt admiration of the American man and the American woman as the well-mannered and well-educated Englishwoman or Englishman? These are the ideas which I say spring uppermost in the minds of the unprejudiced English traveller as he makes acquaintance with these near relatives. Then he becomes cognisant of their official doings, of their politics, of their municipal scandals, of their great ring-robberies, of their lobbyings and briberies, and the infinite baseness of their public life. There at the top of everything he finds the very men who are the least fit to occupy high places. American public dishonesty is so glaring that the very friends he has made in the country are not slow to acknowledge it,--speaking of public life as a thing-apart from their own existence, as a state of dirt in which it would be an insult to suppose that they are concerned! In the midst of it all the stranger, who sees so much that he hates and so much that he loves, hardly knows how to express himself. "It is not enough that you are personally clean," he says, with what energy and courage he can command,--"not enough though the clean outnumber the foul as greatly as those gifted with eyesight outnumber the blind, if you that can see allow the blind to lead you. It is not by the private lives of the millions that the outside world will judge you, but by the public career of those units whose venality is allowed to debase the name of your country. There never was plainer proof given than is given here, that it is the duty of every honest citizen to look after the honour of his State." Personally, I have to own that I have met Americans,--men, but more frequently women,--who have in all respects come up to my ideas of what men and women should be: energetic, having opinions of their own, quick in speech, with some dash of sarcasm at their command, always intelligent, sweet to look at (I speak of the women), fond of pleasure, and each with a personality of his or her own which makes no effort necessary on my own part in remembering the difference between Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Green, or between Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson. They have faults. They are self-conscious, and are too prone to prove by ill-concealed struggles that they are as good as you,--whereas you perhaps have been long acknowledging to yourself that they are much better. And there is sometimes a pretence at personal dignity among those who think themselves to have risen high in the world which is deliciously ludicrous. I remember two old gentlemen,--the owners of names which stand deservedly high in public estimation,--whose deportment at a public funeral turned the occasion into one for irresistible comedy. They are suspicious at first, and fearful of themselves. They lack that simplicity of manners which with us has become a habit from our childhood. But they are never fools, and I think that they are seldom ill-natured. There is a woman, of whom not to speak in a work purporting to be a memoir of my own life would be to omit all allusion to one of the chief pleasures which has graced my later years. In the last fifteen years she has been, out of my family, my most chosen friend. She is a ray of light to me, from which I can always strike a spark by thinking of her. I do not know that I should please her or do any good by naming her. But not to allude to her in these pages would amount almost to a falsehood. I could not write truly of myself without saying that such a friend had been vouchsafed to me. I trust she may live to read the words I have now written, and to wipe away a tear as she thinks of my feeling while I write them. I was absent on this occasion something over three months, and on my return I went back with energy to my work at the _St. Paul's Magazine_. The first novel in it from my own pen was called _Phineas Finn_, in which I commenced a series of semi-political tales. As I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons, I took this method of declaring myself. And as I could not take my seat on those benches where I might possibly have been shone upon by the Speaker's eye, I had humbly to crave his permission for a seat in the gallery, so that I might thus become conversant with the ways and doings of the House in which some of my scenes were to be placed. The Speaker was very gracious, and gave me a running order for, I think, a couple of months. It was enough, at any rate, to enable me often to be very tired,--and, as I have been assured by members, to talk of the proceedings almost as well as though Fortune had enabled me to fall asleep within the House itself. In writing _Phineas Finn_, and also some other novels which followed it, I was conscious that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly, or perhaps in any part, by politics. If I write politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the benefit of my readers. In this way I think I made my political hero interesting. It was certainly a blunder to take him from Ireland--into which I was led by the circumstance that I created the scheme of the book during a visit to Ireland. There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded. It was not a brilliant success,--because men and women not conversant with political matters could not care much for a hero who spent so much of his time either in the House of Commons or in a public office. But the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish read it also. As this was what I had intended, I was contented. It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return. When he did return I had no alternative but to kill the simple pretty Irish girl, which was an unpleasant and awkward necessity. In writing _Phineas Finn_ I had constantly before me the necessity of progression in character,--of marking the changes in men and women which would naturally be produced by the lapse of years. In most novels the writer can have no such duty, as the period occupied is not long enough to allow of the change of which I speak. In _Ivanhoe_, all the incidents of which are included in less than a month, the characters should be, as they are, consistent throughout. Novelists who have undertaken to write the life of a hero or heroine have generally considered their work completed at the interesting period of marriage, and have contented themselves with the advance in taste and manners which are common to all boys and girls as they become men and women. Fielding, no doubt, did more than this in _Tom Jones_, which is one of the greatest novels in the English language, for there he has shown how a noble and sanguine nature may fall away under temptation and be again strengthened and made to stand upright. But I do not think that novelists have often set before themselves the state of progressive change,--nor should I have done it, had I not found myself so frequently allured back to my old friends. So much of my inner life was passed in their company, that I was continually asking myself how this woman would act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that man would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or his manhood declined to old age. It was in regard to the old Duke of Omnium, of his nephew and heir, and of his heir's wife, Lady Glencora, that I was anxious to carry out this idea; but others added themselves to my mind as I went on, and I got round me a circle of persons as to whom I knew not only their present characters, but how those characters were to be affected by years and circumstances. The happy motherly life of Violet Effingham, which was due to the girl's honest but long-restrained love; the tragic misery of Lady Laura, which was equally due to the sale she made of herself in her wretched marriage; and the long suffering but final success of the hero, of which he had deserved the first by his vanity, and the last by his constant honesty, had been foreshadowed to me from the first. As to the incidents of the story, the circumstances by which these personages were to be affected, I knew nothing. They were created for the most part as they were described. I never could arrange a set of events before me. But the evil and the good of my puppets, and how the evil would always lead to evil, and the good produce good,--that was clear to me as the stars on a summer night. Lady Laura Standish is the best character in _Phineas Finn_ and its sequel _Phineas Redux_,--of which I will speak here together. They are, in fact, but one novel, though they were brought out at a considerable interval of time and in different form. The first was commenced in the _St. Paul's Magazine_ in 1867, and the other was brought out in the _Graphic_ in 1873. In this there was much bad arrangement, as I had no right to expect that novel-readers would remember the characters of a story after an interval of six years, or that any little interest which might have been taken in the career of my hero could then have been renewed. I do not know that such interest was renewed. But I found that the sequel enjoyed the same popularity as the former part, and among the same class of readers. Phineas, and Lady Laura, and Lady Chiltern--as Violet had become--and the old duke,--whom I killed gracefully, and the new duke, and the young duchess, either kept their old friends or made new friends for themselves. _Phineas Finn_, I certainly think, was successful from first to last. I am aware, however, that there was nothing in it to touch the heart like the abasement of Lady Mason when confessing her guilt to her old lover, or any approach in delicacy of delineation to the character of Mr. Crawley. _Phineas Finn_, the first part of the story, was completed in May, 1867. In June and July I wrote _Linda Tressel_ for _Blackwood's Magazine_, of which I have already spoken. In September and October I wrote a short novel, called _The Golden Lion of Granpère_, which was intended also for _Blackwood_,--with a view of being published anonymously; but Mr. Blackwood did not find the arrangement to be profitable, and the story remained on my hands, unread and unthought of, for a few years. It appeared subsequently in _Good Words_. It was written on the model of _Nina Balatka_ and _Linda Tressel_, but is very inferior to either of them. In November of the same year, 1867, I began a very long novel, which I called _He Knew He Was Right_, and which was brought out by Mr. Virtue, the proprietor of the _St. Paul's Magazine_, in sixpenny numbers, every week. I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate enough, and the evil which he does is apparent. So far I did not fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter. But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot, in truth, be redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters. This work was finished while I was at Washington in the spring of 1868, and on the day after I finished it, I commenced _The Vicar of Bullhampton_, a novel which I wrote for Messrs. Bradbury & Evans. This I completed in November, 1868, and at once began _Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite_, a story which I was still writing at the close of the year. I look upon these two years, 1867 and 1868, of which I have given a somewhat confused account in this and the two preceding chapters, as the busiest in my life. I had indeed left the Post Office, but though I had left it I had been employed by it during a considerable portion of the time. I had established the _St. Paul's Magazine_, in reference to which I had read an enormous amount of manuscript, and for which, independently of my novels, I had written articles almost monthly. I had stood for Beverley and had made many speeches. I had also written five novels, and had hunted three times a week during each of the winters. And how happy I was with it all! I had suffered at Beverley, but I had suffered as a part of the work which I was desirous of doing, and I had gained my experience. I had suffered at Washington with that wretched American Postmaster, and with the mosquitoes, not having been able to escape from that capital till July; but all that had added to the activity of my life. I had often groaned over those manuscripts; but I had read them, considering it--perhaps foolishly--to be a part of my duty as editor. And though in the quick production of my novels I had always ringing in my ears that terrible condemnation and scorn produced by the great man in Paternoster Row, I was nevertheless proud of having done so much. I always had a pen in my hand. Whether crossing the seas, or fighting with American officials, or tramping about the streets of Beverley, I could do a little, and generally more than a little. I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labour similar to those which an artisan or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction. "There is my pair of shoes finished at last! What a pair of shoes it is!" The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books. An author may of course want time to study a new subject. He will at any rate assure himself that there is some such good reason why he should pause. He does pause, and will be idle for a month or two while he tells himself how beautiful is that last pair of shoes which he has finished! Having thought much of all this, and having made up my mind that I could be really happy only when I was at work, I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands. CHAPTER XVIII. _THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON_--_SIR HARRY HOTSPUR_--_AN EDITOR'S TALES_--_CÆSAR_. In 1869 I was called on to decide, in council with my two boys and their mother, what should be their destination in life. In June of that year the elder, who was then twenty-three, was called to the Bar; and as he had gone through the regular courses of lecturing tuition and study, it might be supposed that his course was already decided. But, just as he was called, there seemed to be an opening for him in another direction; and this, joined to the terrible uncertainty of the Bar, the terror of which was not in his case lessened by any peculiar forensic aptitudes, induced us to sacrifice dignity in quest of success. Mr. Frederic Chapman, who was then the sole representative of the publishing house known as Messrs. Chapman & Hall, wanted a partner, and my son Henry went into the firm. He remained there three years and a half; but he did not like it, nor do I think he made a very good publisher. At any rate he left the business with perhaps more pecuniary success than might have been expected from the short period of his labours, and has since taken himself to literature as a profession. Whether he will work at it so hard as his father, and write as many books, may be doubted. My second son, Frederic, had very early in life gone out to Australia, having resolved on a colonial career when he found that boys who did not grow so fast as he did got above him at school. This departure was a great pang to his mother and me; but it was permitted on the understanding that he was to come back when he was twenty-one, and then decide whether he would remain in England or return to the Colonies. In the winter of 1868 he did come to England, and had a season's hunting in the old country; but there was no doubt in his own mind as to his settling in Australia. His purpose was fixed, and in the spring of 1869 he made his second journey out. As I have since that date made two journeys to see him,--of one of which at any rate I shall have to speak, as I wrote a long book on the Australasian Colonies,--I will have an opportunity of saying a word or two further on of him and his doings. _The Vicar of Bullhampton_ was written in 1868 for publication in _Once a Week_, a periodical then belonging to Messrs. Bradbury & Evans. It was not to come out till 1869, and I, as was my wont, had made my terms long previously to the proposed date. I had made my terms and written my story and sent it to the publisher long before it was wanted; and so far my mind was at rest. The date fixed was the first of July, which date had been named in accordance with the exigencies of the editor of the periodical. An author who writes for these publications is bound to suit himself to these exigencies, and can generally do so without personal loss or inconvenience, if he will only take time by the forelock. With all the pages that I have written for magazines I have never been a day late, nor have I ever caused inconvenience by sending less or more matter than I had stipulated to supply. But I have sometimes found myself compelled to suffer by the irregularity of others. I have endeavoured to console myself by reflecting that such must ever be the fate of virtue. The industrious must feed the idle. The honest and simple will always be the prey of the cunning and fraudulent. The punctual, who keep none waiting for them, are doomed to wait perpetually for the unpunctual. But these earthly sufferers know that they are making their way heavenwards,--and their oppressors their way elsewards. If the former reflection does not suffice for consolation, the deficiency is made up by the second. I was terribly aggrieved on the matter of the publication of my new Vicar, and had to think very much of the ultimate rewards of punctuality and its opposite. About the end of March, 1869, I got a dolorous letter from the editor. All the _Once a Week_ people were in a terrible trouble. They had bought the right of translating one of Victor Hugo's modern novels, _L'Homme Qui Rit_; they had fixed a date, relying on positive pledges from the French publishers; and now the great French author had postponed his work from week to week and from month to month, and it had so come to pass that the Frenchman's grinning hero would have to appear exactly at the same time as my clergyman. Was it not quite apparent to me, the editor asked, that _Once a Week_ could not hold the two? Would I allow my clergyman to make his appearance in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ instead? My disgust at this proposition was, I think, chiefly due to Victor Hugo's latter novels, which I regard as pretentious and untrue to nature. To this perhaps was added some feeling of indignation that I should be asked to give way to a Frenchman. The Frenchman had broken his engagement. He had failed to have his work finished by the stipulated time. From week to week and from month to month he had put off the fulfilment of his duty. And because of these laches on his part,--on the part of this sententious French Radical,--I was to be thrown over! Virtue sometimes finds it difficult to console herself even with the double comfort. I would not come out in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and as the Grinning Man could not be got out of the way, my novel was published in separate numbers. The same thing has occurred to me more than once since. "You no doubt are regular," a publisher has said to me, "but Mr. ---- is irregular. He has thrown me out, and I cannot be ready for you till three months after the time named." In these emergencies I have given perhaps half what was wanted, and have refused to give the other half. I have endeavoured to fight my own battle fairly, and at the same time not to make myself unnecessarily obstinate. But the circumstances have impressed on my mind the great need there is that men engaged in literature should feel themselves to be bound to their industry as men know that they are bound in other callings. There does exist, I fear, a feeling that authors, because they are authors, are relieved from the necessity of paying attention to everyday rules. A writer, if he be making £800 a year, does not think himself bound to live modestly on £600, and put by the remainder for his wife and children. He does not understand that he should sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to the letter;--but that he, as a brain-worker, and conscious of the subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from bonds when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration which will not always come,--especially will not come if wine-cups overnight have been too deep. All this has ever been odious to me, as being unmanly. A man may be frail in health, and therefore unable to do as he has contracted in whatever grade of life. He who has been blessed with physical strength to work day by day, year by year--as has been my case--should pardon deficiencies caused by sickness or infirmity. I may in this respect have been a little hard on others,--and, if so, I here record my repentance. But I think that no allowance should be given to claims for exemption from punctuality, made if not absolutely on the score still with the conviction of intellectual superiority. The _Vicar of Bullhampton_ was written chiefly with the object of exciting not only pity but sympathy for a fallen woman, and of raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be a second-rate personage in the tale;--but it was with reference to her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a preface,--in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old-established principle. I do not know that any one read it; but as I wish to have it read, I will insert it here again:-- I have introduced in the _Vicar of Bullhampton_ the character of a girl whom I will call,--for want of a truer word that shall not in its truth be offensive,--a castaway. I have endeavoured to endow her with qualities that may create sympathy, and I have brought her back at last from degradation, at least to decency. I have not married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavoured to explain that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still things could not be with her as they would have been had she not fallen. There arises, of course, the question whether a novelist, who professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes, should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as that of Carry Brattle. It is not long since,--it is well within the memory of the author,--that the very existence of such a condition of life as was hers, was supposed to be unknown to our sisters and daughters, and was, in truth, unknown to many of them. Whether that ignorance was good may be questioned; but that it exists no longer is beyond question. Then arises the further question,--how far the conditions of such unfortunates should be made a matter of concern to the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us. Cannot women, who are good, pity the sufferings of the vicious, and do something perhaps to mitigate and shorten them without contamination from the vice? It will be admitted probably by most men who have thought upon the subject that no fault among us is punished so heavily as that fault, often so light in itself but so terrible in its consequences to the less faulty of the two offenders, by which a woman falls. All her own sex is against her, and all those of the other sex in whose veins runs the blood which she is thought to have contaminated, and who, of nature, would befriend her, were her trouble any other than it is. She is what she is, and she remains in her abject, pitiless, unutterable misery, because this sentence of the world has placed her beyond the helping hand of Love and Friendship. It may be said, no doubt, that the severity of this judgment acts as a protection to female virtue,--deterring, as all known punishments do deter, from vice. But this punishment, which is horrible beyond the conception of those who have not regarded it closely, is not known beforehand. Instead of the punishment, there is seen a false glitter of gaudy life,--a glitter which is damnably false,--and which, alas! has been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of young girls, than have those horrors which ought to deter, with the dark shadowings which belong to them. To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex, as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life is happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be handled with truth to life, some girl, who would have been thoughtless, may be made thoughtful, or some parent's heart may be softened. Those were my ideas when I conceived the story, and with that feeling I described the characters of Carry Brattle and of her family. I have not introduced her lover on the scene, nor have I presented her to the reader in the temporary enjoyment of any of those fallacious luxuries, the longing for which is sometimes more seductive to evil than love itself. She is introduced as a poor abased creature, who hardly knows how false were her dreams, with very little of the Magdalene about her--because though there may be Magdalenes they are not often found--but with an intense horror of the sufferings of her position. Such being her condition, will they who naturally are her friends protect her? The vicar who has taken her by the hand endeavours to excite them to charity; but father, and brother, and sister are alike hard-hearted. It had been my purpose at first that the hand of every Brattle should be against her; but my own heart was too soft to enable me to make the mother cruel,--or the unmarried sister who had been the early companion of the forlorn one. As regards all the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told. The characters are true, and the scenes at the mill are in keeping with human nature. For the rest of the book I have little to say. It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very good. As I have myself forgotten what the heroine does and says--except that she tumbles into a ditch--I cannot expect that any one else should remember her. But I have forgotten nothing that was done or said by any of the Brattles. The question brought in argument is one of fearful importance. As to the view to be taken first, there can, I think, be no doubt. In regard to a sin common to the two sexes, almost all the punishment and all the disgrace is heaped upon the one who in nine cases out of ten has been the least sinful. And the punishment inflicted is of such a nature that it hardly allows room for repentance. How is the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened? Then comes the answer: It is to the severity of the punishment alone that we can trust to keep women from falling. Such is the argument used in favour of the existing practice, and such the excuse given for their severity by women who will relax nothing of their harshness. But in truth the severity of the punishment is not known beforehand; it is not in the least understood by women in general, except by those who suffer it. The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty, the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all good things, the banishment from honest labour, the being compassed round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant,--and then the quick depreciation of that one ware of beauty, the substituted paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres, hunger, thirst, and strong drink, life without a hope, without the certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease, starvation, and a quivering fear of that coming hell which still can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here! This is the life to which we doom our erring daughters, when because of their error we close our door upon them! But for our erring sons we find pardon easily enough. Of course there are houses of refuge, from which it has been thought expedient to banish everything pleasant, as though the only repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily be one of sackcloth and ashes. It is hardly thus that we can hope to recall those to decency who, if they are to be recalled at all, must be induced to obey the summons before they have reached the last stage of that misery which I have attempted to describe. To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this,--that the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind if possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed, and that this ferocity comes not only from hatred of the sin, but in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with it. Very low as is the degradation to which a girl is brought when she falls through love or vanity, or perhaps from a longing for luxurious ease, still much lower is that to which she must descend perforce when, through the hardness of the world around her, she converts that sin into a trade. Mothers and sisters, when the misfortune comes upon them of a fallen female from among their number, should remember this, and not fear contamination so strongly as did Carry Brattle's married sister and sister-in-law. In 1870 I brought out three books,--or rather of the latter of the three I must say that it was brought out by others, for I had nothing to do with it except to write it. These were _Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite_, _An Editors Tales_, and a little volume on Julius Cæsar. _Sir Harry Hotspur_ was written on the same plan as _Nina Balatka_ and _Linda Tressel_, and had for its object the telling of some pathetic incident in life rather than the portraiture of a number of human beings. _Nina_ and _Linda Tressel_ and _The Golden Lion_ had been placed in foreign countries, and this was an English story. In other respects it is of the same nature, and was not, I think, by any means a failure. There is much of pathos in the love of the girl, and of paternal dignity and affection in the father. It was published first in _Macmillan's Magazine_, by the intelligent proprietor of which I have since been told that it did not make either his fortune or that of his magazine. I am sorry that it should have been so; but I fear that the same thing may be said of a good many of my novels. When it had passed through the magazine, the subsequent use of it was sold to other publishers by Mr. Macmillan, and then I learned that it was to be brought out by them as a novel in two volumes. Now it had been sold by me as a novel in one volume, and hence there arose a correspondence. I found it very hard to make the purchasers understand that I had reasonable ground for objection to the process. What was it to me? How could it injure me if they stretched my pages by means of lead and margin into double the number I had intended. I have heard the same argument on other occasions. When I have pointed out that in this way the public would have to suffer, seeing that they would have to pay Mudie for the use of two volumes in reading that which ought to have been given to them in one, I have been assured that the public are pleased with literary short measure, that it is the object of novel-readers to get through novels as fast as they can, and that the shorter each volume is the better! Even this, however, did not overcome me, and I stood to my guns. _Sir Harry_ was published in one volume, containing something over the normal 300 pages, with an average of 220 words to a page,--which I had settled with my conscience to be the proper length of a novel volume. I may here mention that on one occasion, and on one occasion only, a publisher got the better of me in a matter of volumes. He had a two-volume novel of mine running through a certain magazine, and had it printed complete in three volumes before I knew where I was,--before I had seen a sheet of the letterpress. I stormed for a while, but I had not the heart to make him break up the type. The _Editor's Tales_ was a volume republished from the _St. Paul's Magazine_, and professed to give an editor's experience of his dealings with contributors. I do not think that there is a single incident in the book which could bring back to any one concerned the memory of a past event. And yet there is not an incident in it the outline of which was not presented to my mind by the remembrance of some fact:--how an ingenious gentleman got into conversation with me, I not knowing that he knew me to be an editor, and pressed his little article on my notice; how I was addressed by a lady with a becoming pseudonym and with much equally becoming audacity; how I was appealed to by the dearest of little women whom here I have called Mary Gresley; how in my own early days there was a struggle over an abortive periodical which was intended to be the best thing ever done; how terrible was the tragedy of a poor drunkard, who with infinite learning at his command made one sad final effort to reclaim himself, and perished while he was making it; and lastly how a poor weak editor was driven nearly to madness by threatened litigation from a rejected contributor. Of these stories _The Spotted Dog_, with the struggles of the drunkard scholar, is the best. I know now, however, that when the things were good they came out too quick one upon another to gain much attention;--and so also, luckily, when they were bad. The _Cæsar_ was a thing of itself. My friend John Blackwood had set on foot a series of small volumes called _Ancient Classics for English Readers_, and had placed the editing of them, and the compiling of many of them, in the hands of William Lucas Collins, a clergyman who, from my connection with the series, became a most intimate friend. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ had already come out when I was at Edinburgh with John Blackwood, and, on my expressing my very strong admiration for those two little volumes,--which I here recommend to all young ladies as the most charming tales they can read,--he asked me whether I would not undertake one myself. _Herodotus_ was in the press, but, if I could get it ready, mine should be next. Whereupon I offered to say what might be said to the readers of English on _The Commentaries of Julius Cæsar_. I at once went to work, and in three months from that day the little book had been written. I began by reading through the Commentaries twice, which I did without any assistance either by translation or English notes. Latin was not so familiar to me then as it has since become,--for from that date I have almost daily spent an hour with some Latin author, and on many days many hours. After the reading what my author had left behind him, I fell into the reading of what others had written about him, in Latin, in English, and even in French,--for I went through much of that most futile book by the late Emperor of the French. I do not know that for a short period I ever worked harder. The amount I had to write was nothing. Three weeks would have done it easily. But I was most anxious, in this soaring out of my own peculiar line, not to disgrace myself. I do not think that I did disgrace myself. Perhaps I was anxious for something more. If so, I was disappointed. The book I think to be a good little book. It is readable by all, old and young, and it gives, I believe accurately, both an account of Cæsar's Commentaries,--which of course was the primary intention,--and the chief circumstances of the great Roman's life. A well-educated girl who had read it and remembered it would perhaps know as much about Cæsar and his writings as she need know. Beyond the consolation of thinking as I do about it, I got very little gratification from the work. Nobody praised it. One very old and very learned friend to whom I sent it thanked me for my "comic Cæsar," but said no more. I do not suppose that he intended to run a dagger into me. Of any suffering from such wounds, I think, while living, I never showed a sign; but still I have suffered occasionally. There was, however, probably present to my friend's mind, and to that of others, a feeling that a man who had spent his life in writing English novels could not be fit to write about Cæsar. It was as when an amateur gets a picture hung on the walls of the Academy. What business had I there? _Ne sutor ultra crepidam_. In the press it was most faintly damned by most faint praise. Nevertheless, having read the book again within the last month or two, I make bold to say that it is a good book. The series, I believe, has done very well. I am sure that it ought to do well in years to come, for, putting aside Cæsar, the work has been done with infinite scholarship, and very generally with a light hand. With the leave of my sententious and sonorous friend, who had not endured that subjects which had been grave to him should be treated irreverently, I will say that such a work, unless it be light, cannot answer the purpose for which it is intended. It was not exactly a school-book that was wanted, but something that would carry the purposes of the school-room even into the leisure hours of adult pupils. Nothing was ever better suited for such a purpose than the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, as done by Mr. Collins. The _Virgil_, also done by him, is very good; and so is the _Aristophanes_ by the same hand. CHAPTER XIX. _RALPH THE HEIR_--_THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS_--_LADY ANNA_--_AUSTRALIA_. In the spring of 1871 we,--I and my wife,--had decided that we would go to Australia to visit our shepherd son. Of course before doing so I made a contract with a publisher for a book about the Colonies. For such a work as this I had always been aware that I could not fairly demand more than half the price that would be given for the same amount of fiction; and as such books have an indomitable tendency to stretch themselves, so that more is given than what is sold, and as the cost of travelling is heavy, the writing of them is not remunerative. This tendency to stretch comes not, I think, generally from the ambition of the writer, but from his inability to comprise the different parts in their allotted spaces. If you have to deal with a country, a colony, a city, a trade, or a political opinion, it is so much easier to deal with it in twenty than in twelve pages! I also made an engagement with the editor of a London daily paper to supply him with a series of articles,--which were duly written, duly published, and duly paid for. But with all this, travelling with the object of writing is not a good trade. If the travelling author can pay his bills, he must be a good manager on the road. Before starting there came upon us the terrible necessity of coming to some resolution about our house at Waltham. It had been first hired, and then bought, primarily because it suited my Post Office avocations. To this reason had been added other attractions,--in the shape of hunting, gardening, and suburban hospitalities. Altogether the house had been a success, and the scene of much happiness. But there arose questions as to expense. Would not a house in London be cheaper? There could be no doubt that my income would decrease, and was decreasing. I had thrown the Post Office, as it were, away, and the writing of novels could not go on for ever. Some of my friends told me already that at fifty-five I ought to give up the fabrication of love-stories. The hunting, I thought, must soon go, and I would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then, why should I live at Waltham Cross now, seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the Post Office? It was therefore determined that we would flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months, we determined also to sell our furniture. So there was a packing up, with many tears, and consultations as to what should be saved out of the things we loved. As must take place on such an occasion, there was some heart-felt grief. But the thing was done, and orders were given for the letting or sale of the house. I may as well say here that it never was let, and that it remained unoccupied for two years before it was sold. I lost by the transaction about £800. As I continually hear that other men make money by buying and selling houses, I presume I am not well adapted for transactions of that sort. I have never made money by selling anything except a manuscript. In matters of horseflesh I am so inefficient that I have generally given away horses that I have not wanted. When we started from Liverpool, in May 1871, _Ralph the Heir_ was running through the _St. Paul's_. This was the novel of which Charles Reade afterwards took the plot and made on it a play. I have always thought it to be one of the worst novels I have written, and almost to have justified that dictum that a novelist after fifty should not write love-stories. It was in part a political novel; and that part which appertains to politics, and which recounts the electioneering experiences of the candidates at Percycross, is well enough. Percycross and Beverley were, of course, one and the same place. Neefit, the breeches-maker, and his daughter, are also good in their way,--and Moggs, the daughter's lover, who was not only lover, but also one of the candidates at Percycross as well. But the main thread of the story,--that which tells of the doings of the young gentlemen and young ladies,--the heroes and the heroines,--is not good. Ralph the heir has not much life about him; while Ralph who is not the heir, but is intended to be the real hero, has none. The same may be said of the young ladies,--of whom one, she who was meant to be the chief, has passed utterly out of my mind, without leaving a trace of remembrance behind. I also left in the hands of the editor of _The Fortnightly_, ready for production on the 1st of July following, a story called _The Eustace Diamonds_. In that I think that my friend's dictum was disproved. There is not much love in it; but what there is, is good. The character of Lucy Morris is pretty; and her love is as genuine and as well told as that of Lucy Robarts or Lily Dale. But _The Eustace Diamonds_ achieved the success which it certainly did attain, not as a love-story, but as a record of a cunning little woman of pseudo-fashion, to whom, in her cunning, there came a series of adventures, unpleasant enough in themselves, but pleasant to the reader. As I wrote the book, the idea constantly presented itself to me that Lizzie Eustace was but a second Becky Sharpe; but in planning the character I had not thought of this, and I believe that Lizzie would have been just as she is though Becky Sharpe had never been described. The plot of the diamond necklace is, I think, well arranged, though it produced itself without any forethought. I had no idea of setting thieves after the bauble till I had got my heroine to bed in the inn at Carlisle; nor of the disappointment of the thieves, till Lizzie had been wakened in the morning with the news that her door had been broken open. All these things, and many more, Wilkie Collins would have arranged before with infinite labour, preparing things present so that they should fit in with things to come. I have gone on the very much easier plan of making everything as it comes fit in with what has gone before. At any rate, the book was a success, and did much to repair the injury which I felt had come to my reputation in the novel-market by the works of the last few years. I doubt whether I had written anything so successful as _The Eustace Diamonds_ since _The Small House at Allington_. I had written what was much better,--as, for instance, _Phineas Finn_ and _Nina Balatka_; but that is by no means the same thing. I also left behind, in a strong box, the manuscript of _Phineas Redux_, a novel of which I have already spoken, and which I subsequently sold to the proprietors of the _Graphic_ newspaper. The editor of that paper greatly disliked the title, assuring me that the public would take Redux for the gentleman's surname,--and was dissatisfied with me when I replied that I had no objection to them doing so. The introduction of a Latin word, or of a word from any other language, into the title of an English novel is undoubtedly in bad taste; but after turning the matter much over in my own mind, I could find no other suitable name. I also left behind me, in the same strong box, another novel, called _An Eye for an Eye_, which then had been some time written, and of which, as it has not even yet been published, I will not further speak. It will probably be published some day, though, looking forward, I can see no room for it, at any rate, for the next two years. If therefore the Great Britain, in which we sailed for Melbourne, had gone to the bottom, I had so provided that there would be new novels ready to come out under my name for some years to come. This consideration, however, did not keep me idle while I was at sea. When making long journeys, I have always succeeded in getting a desk put up in my cabin, and this was done ready for me in the Great Britain, so that I could go to work the day after we left Liverpool. This I did; and before I reached Melbourne I had finished a story called _Lady Anna_. Every word of this was written at sea, during the two months required for our voyage, and was done day by day--with the intermission of one day's illness--for eight weeks, at the rate of 66 pages of manuscript in each week, every page of manuscript containing 250 words. Every word was counted. I have seen work come back to an author from the press with terrible deficiencies as to the amount supplied. Thirty-two pages have perhaps been wanted for a number, and the printers with all their art could not stretch the matter to more than twenty-eight or -nine! The work of filling up must be very dreadful. I have sometimes been ridiculed for the methodical details of my business. But by these contrivances I have been preserved from many troubles; and I have saved others with whom I have worked--editors, publishers, and printers--from much trouble also. A month or two after my return home, _Lady Anna_ appeared in _The Fortnightly_, following _The Eustace Diamonds_. In it a young girl, who is really a lady of high rank and great wealth, though in her youth she enjoyed none of the privileges of wealth or rank, marries a tailor who had been good to her, and whom she had loved when she was poor and neglected. A fine young noble lover is provided for her, and all the charms of sweet living with nice people are thrown in her way, in order that she may be made to give up the tailor. And the charms are very powerful with her. But the feeling that she is bound by her troth to the man who had always been true to her overcomes everything,--and she marries the tailor. It was my wish of course to justify her in doing so, and to carry my readers along with me in my sympathy with her. But everybody found fault with me for marrying her to the tailor. What would they have said if I had allowed her to jilt the tailor and marry the good-looking young lord? How much louder, then, would have been the censure! The book was read, and I was satisfied. If I had not told my story well, there would have been no feeling in favour of the young lord. The horror which was expressed to me at the evil thing I had done, in giving the girl to the tailor, was the strongest testimony I could receive of the merits of the story. I went to Australia chiefly in order that I might see my son among his sheep. I did see him among his sheep, and remained with him for four or five very happy weeks. He was not making money, nor has he made money since. I grieve to say that several thousands of pounds which I had squeezed out of the pockets of perhaps too liberal publishers have been lost on the venture. But I rejoice to say that this has been in no way due to any fault of his. I never knew a man work with more persistent honesty at his trade than he has done. I had, however, the further intentions of writing a book about the entire group of Australasian Colonies; and in order that I might be enabled to do that with sufficient information, I visited them all. Making my head-quarters at Melbourne, I went to Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania, then to the very little known territory of Western Australia, and then, last of all, to New Zealand. I was absent in all eighteen months, and think that I did succeed in learning much of the political, social, and material condition of these countries. I wrote my book as I was travelling, and brought it back with me to England all but completed in December, 1872. It was a better book than that which I had written eleven years before on the American States, but not so good as that on the West Indies in 1859. As regards the information given, there was much more to be said about Australia than the West Indies. Very much more is said,--and very much more may be learned from the latter than from the former book. I am sure that any one who will take the trouble to read the book on Australia, will learn much from it. But the West Indian volume was readable. I am not sure that either of the other works are, in the proper sense of that word. When I go back to them I find that the pages drag with me;--and if so with me, how must it be with others who have none of that love which a father feels even for his ill-favoured offspring. Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable. Feeling that these volumes on Australia were dull and long, I was surprised to find that they had an extensive sale. There were, I think, 2000 copies circulated of the first expensive edition; and then the book was divided into four little volumes, which were published separately, and which again had a considerable circulation. That some facts were stated inaccurately, I do not doubt; that many opinions were crude, I am quite sure; that I had failed to understand much which I attempted to explain, is possible. But with all these faults the book was a thoroughly honest book, and was the result of unflagging labour for a period of fifteen months. I spared myself no trouble in inquiry, no trouble in seeing, and no trouble in listening. I thoroughly imbued my mind with the subject, and wrote with the simple intention of giving trustworthy information on the state of the Colonies. Though there be inaccuracies,--those inaccuracies to which work quickly done must always be subject,--I think I did give much valuable information. I came home across America from San Francisco to New York, visiting Utah and Brigham Young on the way. I did not achieve great intimacy with the great polygamist of the Salt Lake City. I called upon him, sending to him my card, apologising for doing so without an introduction, and excusing myself by saying that I did not like to pass through the territory without seeing a man of whom I had heard so much. He received me in his doorway, not asking me to enter, and inquired whether I were not a miner. When I told him that I was not a miner, he asked me whether I earned my bread. I told him I did. "I guess you're a miner," said he. I again assured him that I was not. "Then how do you earn your bread?" I told him that I did so by writing books. "I'm sure you're a miner," said he. Then he turned upon his heel, went back into the house, and closed the door. I was properly punished, as I was vain enough to conceive that he would have heard my name. I got home in December, 1872, and in spite of any resolution made to the contrary, my mind was full of hunting as I came back. No real resolutions had in truth been made, for out of a stud of four horses I kept three, two of which were absolutely idle through the two summers and winter of my absence. Immediately on my arrival I bought another, and settled myself down to hunting from London three days a week. At first I went back to Essex, my old country, but finding that to be inconvenient, I took my horses to Leighton Buzzard, and became one of that numerous herd of sportsmen who rode with the "Baron" and Mr. Selby Lowndes. In those days Baron Meyer was alive, and the riding with his hounds was very good. I did not care so much for Mr. Lowndes. During the winters of 1873, 1874, and 1875, I had my horses back in Essex, and went on with my hunting, always trying to resolve that I would give it up. But still I bought fresh horses, and, as I did not give it up, I hunted more than ever. Three times a week the cab has been at my door in London very punctually, and not unfrequently before seven in the morning. In order to secure this attendance, the man has always been invited to have his breakfast in the hall. I have gone to the Great Eastern Railway,--ah! so often with the fear that frost would make all my exertions useless, and so often too with that result! And then, from one station or another station, have travelled on wheels at least a dozen miles. After the day's sport, the same toil has been necessary to bring me home to dinner at eight. This has been work for a young man and a rich man, but I have done it as an old man and comparatively a poor man. Now at last, in April, 1876, I do think that my resolution has been taken. I am giving away my old horses, and anybody is welcome to my saddles and horse-furniture. "Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes; Eripuere jocos, venerem, convivia, ludum; Tendunt extorquere poëmata." "Our years keep taking toll as they move on; My feasts, my frolics, are already gone, And now, it seems, my verses must go too." This is Conington's translation, but it seems to me to be a little flat. "Years as they roll cut all our pleasures short; Our pleasant mirth, our loves, our wine, our sport. And then they stretch their power, and crush at last Even the power of singing of the past." I think that I may say with truth that I rode hard to my end. "Vixi puellis nuper idoneus, Et militavi non sine gloria; Nunc arma defunctumque bello Barbiton hic paries habebit." "I've lived about the covert side, I've ridden straight, and ridden fast; Now breeches, boots, and scarlet pride Are but mementoes of the past." CHAPTER XX. _THE WAY WE LIVE NOW_ AND _THE PRIME MINISTER_--CONCLUSION. In what I have said at the end of the last chapter about my hunting, I have been carried a little in advance of the date at which I had arrived. We returned from Australia in the winter of 1872, and early in 1873 I took a house in Montagu Square,--in which I hope to live and hope to die. Our first work in settling there was to place upon new shelves the books which I had collected round myself at Waltham. And this work, which was in itself great, entailed also the labour of a new catalogue. As all who use libraries know, a catalogue is nothing unless it show the spot on which every book is to be found,--information which every volume also ought to give as to itself. Only those who have done it know how great is the labour of moving and arranging a few thousand volumes. At the present moment I own about 5000 volumes, and they are dearer to me even than the horses which are going, or than the wine in the cellar, which is very apt to go, and upon which I also pride myself. When this was done, and the new furniture had got into its place, and my little book-room was settled sufficiently for work, I began a novel, to the writing of which I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age. Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on, is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt;--but have they become less honest? If so, can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress? We know the opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr. Carlyle. If he be right, we are all going straight away to darkness and the dogs. But then we do not put very much faith in Mr. Carlyle,--nor in Mr. Ruskin and his other followers. The loudness and extravagance of their lamentations, the wailing and gnashing of teeth which comes from them, over a world which is supposed to have gone altogether shoddy-wards, are so contrary to the convictions of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased, how health has been improved, and education extended,--that the general effect of their teaching is the opposite of what they have intended. It is regarded simply as Carlylism to say that the English-speaking world is growing worse from day to day. And it is Carlylism to opine that the general grand result of increased intelligence is a tendency to deterioration. Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write _The Way We Live Now_. And as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist into my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody, and made an onslaught also on other vices,--on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes. The book has the fault which is to be attributed to almost all satires, whether in prose or verse. The accusations are exaggerated. The vices are coloured, so as to make effect rather than to represent truth. Who, when the lash of objurgation is in his hands, can so moderate his arm as never to strike harder than justice would require? The spirit which produces the satire is honest enough, but the very desire which moves the satirist to do his work energetically makes him dishonest. In other respects _The Way We Live Now_ was, as a satire, powerful and good. The character of Melmotte is well maintained. The Beargarden is amusing,--and not untrue. The Longestaffe girls and their friend, Lady Monogram, are amusing,--but exaggerated. Dolly Longestaffe, is, I think, very good. And Lady Carbury's literary efforts are, I am sorry to say, such as are too frequently made. But here again the young lady with her two lovers is weak and vapid. I almost doubt whether it be not impossible to have two absolutely distinct parts in a novel, and to imbue them both with interest. If they be distinct, the one will seem to be no more than padding to the other. And so it was in _The Way We Live Now_. The interest of the story lies among the wicked and foolish people,--with Melmotte and his daughter, with Dolly and his family, with the American woman, Mrs. Hurtle, and with John Crumb and the girl of his heart. But Roger Carbury, Paul Montague, and Henrietta Carbury are uninteresting. Upon the whole, I by no means look upon the book as one of my failures; nor was it taken as a failure by the public or the press. While I was writing _The Way We Live Now_, I was called upon by the proprietors of the _Graphic_ for a Christmas story. I feel, with regard to literature, somewhat as I suppose an upholsterer and undertaker feels when he is called upon to supply a funeral. He has to supply it, however distasteful it may be. It is his business, and he will starve if he neglect it. So have I felt that, when anything in the shape of a novel was required, I was bound to produce it. Nothing can be more distasteful to me than to have to give a relish of Christmas to what I write. I feel the humbug implied by the nature of the order. A Christmas story, in the proper sense, should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought, or Christmas festivities,--or, better still, with Christmas charity. Such was the case with Dickens when he wrote his two first Christmas stories. But since that the things written annually--all of which have been fixed to Christmas like children's toys to a Christmas tree--have had no real savour of Christmas about them. I had done two or three before. Alas! at this very moment I have one to write, which I have promised to supply within three weeks of this time,--the picture-makers always require a long interval,--as to which I have in vain been cudgelling my brain for the last month. I can't send away the order to another shop, but I do not know how I shall ever get the coffin made. For the _Graphic_, in 1873, I wrote a little story about Australia. Christmas at the antipodes is of course midsummer, and I was not loth to describe the troubles to which my own son had been subjected, by the mingled accidents of heat and bad neighbours, on his station in the bush. So I wrote _Harry Heathcote of Gangoil_, and was well through my labour on that occasion. I only wish I may have no worse success in that which now hangs over my head. When _Harry Heathcote_ was over, I returned with a full heart to Lady Glencora and her husband. I had never yet drawn the completed picture of such a statesman as my imagination had conceived. The personages with whose names my pages had been familiar, and perhaps even the minds of some of my readers--the Brocks, De Terriers, Monks, Greshams, and Daubeneys--had been more or less portraits, not of living men, but of living political characters. The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the Government or of the Opposition, had been very easy to describe, and had required no imagination to conceive. The character reproduces itself from generation to generation; and as it does so, becomes shorn in a wonderful way of those little touches of humanity which would be destructive of its purposes. Now and again there comes a burst of human nature, as in the quarrel between Burke and Fox; but, as a rule, the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools, which are used either for building up or pulling down, and can generally bear to be changed from this box into the other, without, at any rate, the appearance of much personal suffering. Four-and-twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole, and work for one purpose, having each of them to set aside his own idiosyncrasy, and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve either their country or their own ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply,--as to whom I have never ceased to wonder that stones of such strong calibre should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles. Such have been to me the Brocks and the Mildmays, about whom I have written with great pleasure, having had my mind much exercised in watching them. But I had also conceived the character of a statesman of a different nature--of a man who should be in something perhaps superior, but in very much inferior, to these men--of one who could not become a pebble, having too strong an identity of his own. To rid one's self of fine scruples--to fall into the traditions of a party--to feel the need of subservience, not only in acting but also even in thinking--to be able to be a bit, and at first only a very little bit,--these are the necessities of the growing statesman. The time may come, the glorious time when some great self action shall be possible, and shall be even demanded, as when Peel gave up the Corn Laws; but the rising man, as he puts on his harness, should not allow himself to dream of this. To become a good, round, smooth, hard, useful pebble is his duty, and to achieve this he must harden his skin and swallow his scruples. But every now and again we see the attempt made by men who cannot get their skins to be hard--who after a little while generally fall out of the ranks. The statesman of whom I was thinking--of whom I had long thought--was one who did not fall out of the ranks, even though his skin would not become hard. He should have rank, and intellect, and parliamentary habits, by which to bind him to the service of his country; and he should also have unblemished, unextinguishable, inexhaustible love of country. That virtue I attribute to our statesmen generally. They who are without it are, I think, mean indeed. This man should have it as the ruling principle of his life; and it should so rule him that all other things should be made to give way to it. But he should be scrupulous, and, being scrupulous, weak. When called to the highest place in the council of his Sovereign, he should feel with true modesty his own insufficiency; but not the less should the greed of power grow upon him when he had once allowed himself to taste and enjoy it. Such was the character I endeavoured to depict in describing the triumph, the troubles, and the failure of my Prime Minister. And I think that I have succeeded. What the public may think, or what the press may say, I do not yet know, the work having as yet run but half its course.[14] [Footnote 14: Writing this note in 1878, after a lapse of nearly three years, I am obliged to say that, as regards the public, _The Prime Minister_ was a failure. It was worse spoken of by the press than any novel I had written. I was specially hurt by a criticism on it in the _Spectator_. The critic who wrote the article I know to be a good critic, inclined to be more than fair to me; but in this case I could not agree with him, so much do I love the man whose character I had endeavoured to portray.] That the man's character should be understood as I understand it--or that of his wife's, the delineation of which has also been a matter of much happy care to me--I have no right to expect, seeing that the operation of describing has not been confined to one novel, which might perhaps be read through by the majority of those who commenced it. It has been carried on through three or four, each of which will be forgotten even by the most zealous reader almost as soon as read. In _The Prime Minister_, my Prime Minister will not allow his wife to take office among, or even over, those ladies who are attached by office to the Queen's court. "I should not choose," he says to her, "that my wife should have any duties unconnected with our joint family and home." Who will remember in reading those words that, in a former story, published some years before, he tells his wife, when she has twitted him with his willingness to clean the Premier's shoes, that he would even allow her to clean them if it were for the good of the country? And yet it is by such details as these that I have, for many years past, been manufacturing within my own mind the characters of the man and his wife. I think that Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, is a perfect gentleman. If he be not, then am I unable to describe a gentleman. She is by no means a perfect lady; but if she be not all over a woman, then am I not able to describe a woman. I do not think it probable that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction;--but if it does, that permanence of success will probably rest on the character of Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and the Rev. Mr. Crawley. I have now come to the end of that long series of books written by myself, with which the public is already acquainted. Of those which I may hereafter be able to add to them I cannot speak; though I have an idea that I shall even yet once more have recourse to my political hero as the mainstay of another story. When _The Prime Minister_ was finished, I at once began another novel, which is now completed in three volumes, and which is called _Is He Popenjoy?_ There are two Popenjoys in the book, one succeeding to the title held by the other; but as they are both babies, and do not in the course of the story progress beyond babyhood, the future readers, should the tale ever be published, will not be much interested in them. Nevertheless the story, as a story, is not, I think, amiss. Since that I have written still another three-volume novel, to which, very much in opposition to my publisher, I have given the name of _The American Senator_.[15] It is to appear in _Temple Bar_, and is to commence its appearance on the first of next month. Such being its circumstances, I do not know that I can say anything else about it here. [Footnote 15: _The American Senator_ and _Popenjoy_ have appeared, each with fair success. Neither of them has encountered that reproach which, in regard to _The Prime Minister_, seemed to tell me that my work as a novelist should be brought to a close. And yet I feel assured that they are very inferior to _The Prime Minister_.] And so I end the record of my literary performances,--which I think are more in amount than the works of any other living English author. If any English authors not living have written more--as may probably have been the case--I do not know who they are. I find that, taking the books which have appeared under our names, I have published much more than twice as much as Carlyle. I have also published considerably more than Voltaire, even including his letters. We are told that Varro, at the age of eighty, had written 480 volumes, and that he went on writing for eight years longer. I wish I knew what was the length of Varro's volumes; I comfort myself by reflecting that the amount of manuscript described as a book in Varro's time was not much. Varro, too, is dead, and Voltaire; whereas I am still living, and may add to the pile. The following is a list of the books I have written, with the dates of publication and the sums I have received for them. The dates given are the years in which the works were published as a whole, most of them having appeared before in some serial form. Date of Total Sums Names of Works. Publication. Received. --------------- ------------ ----------- The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 1847 £48 6 9 The Kellys and the O'Kellys, 1848 123 19 5 La Vendée, 1850 20 0 0 The Warden, 1855 \ / Barchester Towers, 1857 / \ 727 11 3 The Three Clerks, 1858 250 0 0 Doctor Thorne, 1858 400 0 0 The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 1859 250 0 0 The Bertrams, 1859 400 0 0 Castle Richmond, 1860 600 0 0 Framley Parsonage, 1861 1000 0 0 Tales of All Countries--1st Series, 1861 \ 2d " 1863 } 1830 0 0 3d " 1870 / Orley Farm, 1862 3135 0 0 North America, 1862 1250 0 0 Rachel Ray, 1863 1645 0 0 The Small House at Allington, 1864 3000 0 0 Can You Forgive Her? 1864 3525 0 0 Miss Mackenzie, 1865 1300 0 0 The Belton Estate, 1866 1757 0 0 The Claverings, 1867 2800 0 0 The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867 3000 0 0 Nina Balatka, 1867 450 0 0 Linda Tressel, 1868 450 0 0 Phineas Finn, 1869 3200 0 0 He Knew He Was Right, 1869 3200 0 0 Brown, Jones, and Robinson, 1870 600 0 0 The Vicar of Bullhampton, 1870 2500 0 0 An Editor's Tales, l870 378 0 0 Cæsar (Ancient Classics),[16] 1870 0 0 0 Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, 1871 750 0 0 Ralph the Heir, 1871 2500 0 0 The Golden Lion of Granpère, 1872 550 0 0 The Eustace Diamonds, 1873 2500 0 0 Australia and New Zealand, 1873 1300 0 0 Phineas Redux, 1874 2500 0 0 Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, 1874 450 0 0 Lady Anna, 1874 1200 0 0 The Way We Live Now, 1875 3000 0 0 The Prime Minister, 1876 2500 0 0 The American Senator, 1877 1800 0 0 Is He Popenjoy? 1878 1600 0 0 South Africa, 1878 850 0 0 John Caldigate, 1879 1800 0 0 Sundries, 7800 0 0 -------------- £68,939 17 5 [Footnote 16: This was given by me as a present to my friend John Blackwood.] It will not, I am sure, be thought that, in making my boast as to quantity, I have endeavoured to lay claim to any literary excellence. That, in the writing of books, quantity without quality is a vice and a misfortune, has been too manifestly settled to leave a doubt on such a matter. But I do lay claim to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession. And I make the claim, not with a view to my own glory, but for the benefit of those who may read these pages, and when young may intend to follow the same career. _Nulla dies sine lineâ._ Let that be their motto. And let their work be to them as is his common work to the common labourer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,--as men have sat, or said that they have sat. More than nine-tenths of my literary work has been done in the last twenty years, and during twelve of those years I followed another profession. I have never been a slave to this work, giving due time, if not more than due time, to the amusements I have loved. But I have been constant,--and constancy in labour will conquer all difficulties. _Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed sæpe cadendo._ It may interest some if I state that during the last twenty years I have made by literature something near £70,000. As I have said before in these pages, I look upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid. It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this so-called autobiography to give a record of my inner life. No man ever did so truly,--and no man ever will. Rousseau probably attempted it, but who doubts but that Rousseau has confessed in much the thoughts and convictions rather than the facts of his life? If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an earthly paradise; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a £5 note over a card-table;--of what matter is that to any reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to no sorrow. It has been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects,--to have the sweet, and leave the bitter untasted,--that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger,--but I carry no ugly wounds. For what remains to me of life I trust for my happiness still chiefly to my work--hoping that when the power of work be over with me, God may be pleased to take me from a world in which, according to my view, there can be no joy; secondly, to the love of those who love me; and then to my books. That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I remember, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left,--something dim and inaccurate,--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers. Of late years, putting aside the Latin classics, I have found my greatest pleasure in our old English dramatists,--not from any excessive love of their work, which often irritates me by its want of truth to nature, even while it shames me by its language,--but from curiosity in searching their plots and examining their character. If I live a few years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my copies of these dramatists, down to the close of James I., written criticisms on every play. No one who has not looked closely into it knows how many there are. Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written.